The Truth About Reformed Catholicity

Part of what I suppose is the challenge of an extended writing project like a dissertation is that it really is a process of discovery and finding the courage to say what one intends to say.  The difficulty for me is to convince myself (or to simply just force myself, whether I liked it or not) that I am qualified to say what I intend to say.  That, yes, I don't have a Ph.D. that might validate what I want to say, but if I don't say it now, that Ph.D. won't be coming.  And this takes a long while perhaps to get through, and maybe may not come through until somewhere into the process.

Recently, Michael Allen and Scott Swain have been hard at work reconstructing a Reformed catholicity.  That is to say, it is a Reformed attempt at retrieving the theological resources from ancient confessions and wisdom as a lens for biblical hermeneutics.  That is to say, to read the Scriptures not as individuals, but to read it in the church and, I would add, for the church.  I don't wish to deny the importance of their work, but this is a project that has been worked on by previous theologians.  Karl Barth, of course, is a familiar name.  But less known, although not less important, is Herman Bavinck.  In resourcing the church's apostolic traditions, these Reformed theologians have been arguing that Reformed catholicity is not an oxymoron.  One can be catholic and Reformed at the same time.

I have only one technical issue with Reformed catholicity, which is, that it seems to me what they are referring to is not so much catholicity but apostolicity.  Now, catholicity and apostolicity are connected, but they are not to be conflated.  The church must be apostolic because traditionally, this is how we ensure that the gospel we have received is indeed the gospel.  Now, I for one am not of the opinion that we must slavishly accept all apostolic teachings.  Within the Reformed tradition included racist and apartheid theologians.  So apostolicity must be subject to biblical authority, because human sin can misrepresent what is truly apostolic.

The catholicity I'm interested in is a structural catholicity.  By that, I am looking for a way for Reformed churches to hold together visibly in the midst of irreconcilable disagreements on apostolic matters.  How should the church respond, for instance, to homosexuality?  How should the church respond to hate in the form of xenophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy?  (I had hoped the answer would be obvious, but in 2016, I was sadly proven wrong, fortunately not by my own church.)

I think in the end, what I'm putting forward is that that Reformed catholicity has been largely an abstract and spiritual concept.  Reformed Christians have been timid, I would say, about putting structural form to Reformed catholicity.  And that is perhaps a key stumbling block for ecumenical relations, because Reformed thought pervades through Christian traditions outside of Presbyterian churches.  Its permeation into Baptist and Episcopal traditions have generate significant dissenting fault lines within those traditions themselves.  There is a historical reason for this.  Reformed thought has been suspicious about locking catholicity into one form of gospel expression.  Reformed Christians value the sovereign power of God, as well as God's diverse expressions in different contexts, for all people are created in God's image, and these various imago Dei contribute to the varied and rich tapestry of God's embracive catholicity.  

What often results, then, is that Christians simply assume an ecclesiology.  That is to say, because "we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord...," we can simply hold our hands together, get up a hill, and sing kum ba ya.  This is a very loose and fragile ecclesiology, for all it takes is for one person to shatter the idealism of this assumed ecclesiology.  Many survivors of church schisms know what it looks like, and it does not have to pertain to weighty theological matters.  All it takes is for one vocal person to think that reducing the missions budget is a dereliction of the biblical Great Commission, or one pastor to think the other pastor's a total prick, or a group of young Asian Americans who think their seniors are too ethnocentric and non-inclusive, etc.  We've all been there before.  Kum Ba Ya ecclesiologies do not exist.  Church often hurts, and church often frustrates.  We love the gospel to work out perfectly, for everyone to just open their eyes, see the light, and boom! "We are one in the Spirit... we are one in the Lord..."  

This became clearer as I worked through the history of the term catholicity and noticed that the emphasis is heavily Christological.  Again, nothing wrong per se with such a method.  It is a very apostolic method, starting from 110 CE with St. Ignatius of Antioch.  But the fact that the church the Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ, does not dissuade others from engaging in divorce or dismemberment.  The problem is that Jesus Christ refuses to be boxed in.  He was a problem in life, a problem in death, and a problem in resurrection.  But we love to box Jesus in, and make him manageable.  A foolish task, of course; how can the One who was the Word be forced to do the Golden Calf?  Yet this problem fools us all.  The inclusive Jesus does not jive well with the orthodox Jesus, who does not jive well with the Jesus who liberates, who gets along poorly with the Jesus who demands us to give our lives - oh wait, Jesus couldn't have meant that!

See what I mean?  We all have our dangerous memories.  

We detest them.  Robert Boyd Munger, the youth pastor, wrote a simple story entitled My Heart, Christ's Home.  I know, I got suckered in too... it is pretty sappy, but it is a gift from my youth pastor.  But the thing is that in that small story, Jesus goes into our heart and starts being the weird guest.  We give him a house tour - so American, isn't it? - but Jesus ain't impressed.  In fact, he is this rude guest who interrupts our normal lives to expose those skeletons behind that closet!  

The story ends well, but in real life, we fight Jesus.  We find a way out.  So we retreat to abstractions, to conventions, to "the good old days."  We do the Spivak, do the Butler, and do it with half their intellectual prowess.  (In other words, we do a crap job of it.)  We claim maturity, exclaiming how we don't need people to tell us about our racisms, our privileges, and all.  Dammit God, can't you see?  I don't need you to tell me what to do!  I got it all together!  All this to avoid reckoning with a Jesus that calls us to dangerous discipleship, a discipleship that requires us to look into the shadowy corners of our house, or under the nice Orientalist rugs where the garbage of colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism have been swept underneath.    

Good news, though - we're not alone.  So what we do is to trend towards a bunch of catholicities, each aligned with certain Christologies, none of which look into dirty closets.  Or, like a dictatorship, we allow Jesus only to look into certain closets; the others are for official business only.  And now, our supreme catholicity assured, we defend it by tearing down other catholicities.  And that is why so many ecclesial fissions occur; because the Other's Christology is deficient to mine, therefore, they are the heretic, and I am the orthodox; they're anti-catholic, I am truly catholic.  Because the Other reduced their missions budget, so I am faithful, for I took the Great Commission most seriously.  Our strategic theological obfuscations, our self-constructed catholicities, aim to maintain our illusion that we've got it.  We got what it takes to be the Jesus folk.  And if others took Jesus seriously, they'd be like us.

This is, of course, the opposite of the catholicity the church is called to embody.  The catholicity I am aiming for is one that lays down our catholicities of certainty, in the interests of embodying a catholicity that practices true discipleship.  That is to say, I am interested in a catholicity of discipleship - and not just any half-baked discipleship, but costly discipleship.  It is a catholicity that is not just ideal or spiritual, but concrete.  It has a form, it looks like something.  When I look at it, I can see - hey!  That church is catholic.  My dissertation, then, aims to investigate what it means for catholicity if we allow Jesus Christ, our dangerous memory, to interrupt us.  If all goes well, I will argue that Reformed catholicity is a confessional catholicity.  In confessing, we are not only admitting our shortcomings and the fact that we do love our skeletal closets and Orientalist rugs, but also at the same time committing ourselves to the doing of the truth, inspired by what God has revealed to us in Scripture in light of our contextual challenges.  This impulse undergirds the practice of Reformed confessions.  Together, these confessions outline what a catholic church looks like.