Editorial
July/August 1994
Volume 29, Number 4
The key issues in the church in former years often centered on curriculum content, the nature of missions, and the topic of human sexuality. The real issues in the church now are centering on the authority of Scripture, the nature of God, the deity of Christ, and the means of redemption.
The Church of the Brethren has never put forth an official statement of doctrine, claiming instead the entire New Testament as its creed. At the same time, it must be emphasized repeatedly that the Brethren have from the very beginning accepted and taught the basic doctrines held commonly by the Protestant churches. These included the teachings about God, man, sin, Christ, salvation, the church, the Holy Spirit, and so forth. H. C. Early was a highly respected elder in the Church of the Brethren. In his address delivered before the Annual Conference at Des Moines, Iowa in 1908, he expounded upon the distinctive beliefs of the Brethren, but before he set forth the explanation of the distinctive doctrines, he said, “Let it be understood that the Protestant churches, for the most part, agree on the large and fundamental doctrines of the New Testament…the existence of God; the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures; the divinity of Jesus his death in which atonement was made for all…these are the great doctrines believed and taught by them all, and the Church of the Brethren…believes and teaches them with all her heart. For them she contends as of fundamental importance” (Two Centuries of the Church of the Brethren: Bicentennial Addresses, Brethren Publishing House, pages 133-134).
Even though the Brethren have held distinctive beliefs, it is important to stress that historically the Brethren have always given a persevering devotion to the common beliefs expressed by the larger Christian Church and described in the confessions and creeds that spoke clearly about the nature of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The key to Brother Timothy Snell’s essay in this issue of the BRF Witness lies in this fact:
The early Brethren opposed empty and powerless creedalism, but they never rejected the tenets of faith contained in the classical creeds. Emmert Bittinger says it well, when he writes, To be Brethren does not mean only to be distinctive and unique. To be Brethren means to be Christian and to be Protestant as well” (Heritage and Promise, 1983 edition, pages 77-78).
No subject in the Bible is more important than its teaching about the person and work of Jesus Christ. If we go wrong here, we go wrong on almost everything else. The Christian church has always struggled to find the right words when speaking about the Lord Jesus Christ. Clear words need to be used in order to defend the faith against error.
Christians declare that Jesus is fully God. Jesus participated in creating the universe (John 1:1-3), and He participates in keeping it on course (Colossians 1:15-20). He is the exact expression of the heavenly Father’s moral character and personality (Hebrews 1:3). Every attribute and trait which characterizes God the Father is true of Jesus likewise. When Jesus came to earth He temporarily gave up His infinity and some of the other attributes.
Christians declare that Jesus is fully human. Jesus took on every physical, emotional, and mental human trait–but His body, mind, will, and emotions were not corrupted by sin. He worked miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:28). He resisted Satan by the strength of the Spirit and the commitment of His human will. He suffered what we suffer, and used only the power that is available to us, so that He could understand and help us in our temptations (Hebrews 4:15; 2:18).
The radical theologians and New Age advocates today are teaching that deity is bound up with all creation, and flows through everything that is. Deity is the life-force that brings forth and inhabits all things and all persons. One feminist theologian says, “I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely,” (page 16, Theological Digest and Outlook, January, 1994, Burlington, Ontario, Canada). Radical theologians are in the process of re-defining God and denigrating the work of Jesus Christ; all this is the result of the mushy theology that has grown out of modernism.
During the past two years, a number of events in the Church of the Brethren indicate an increasing breakdown of belief in the full deity and the full humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Pacific Southwest District has ordained a person to the ministry who says that Jesus is not exclusively the only way, truth, and life, and that to believe that Jesus atoned for humanity’s sins seems to glorify suffering as good. A professor at Bethany Seminary taught a course on “Women’s Spiritualities” and used Chung Hyun Kyung’s Struggle to be the Sun Again as one of the basic textbooks; Kyung is a pantheist. More than twenty Brethren leaders attended the ReImagining Conference in Minneapolis where women claimed they were starting a Second Reformation, and tried to construct a god from their own human experience. The writer in a recent issue of Messenger declares that it is “egotistical” to say that humanity can become reconciled to God only through Jesus Christ (page 23, April, 1994 issue).
Vernard Eller, in one of his essays, says in essence that there have always been a few individuals who held strange and unorthodox ideas about God, man, sin, and salvation, but for the most part, Eller says, “They kept their deviant ideas to themselves. What seems different now, is that the modernists have organized themselves and gone public with their causes (feminist spirituality with its Goddess talk, same sex marriages, the Re-imagining Conference, and what all–stuff that isn’t even concerned with being biblically faithful).” This, Eller says, is frightening many Brethren and causing them to wonder what is happening to their Church.
The Church of the Brethren faces the peril of abandoning the Christian faith and thereby becoming disloyal disciples of Jesus Christ. Our churches seem to have lost the will or the ability to teach the essentials of the Christian faith. This issue of the BRF Witness is a call to pastors and leaders and teachers to focus time and energy on reaffirming and proclaiming the basic tenets of the Christian faith.
The Church’s Confessional Choices
By Timothy A. Snell
Any time the church is called upon for renewal, it must take the “re” part of renewal very seriously. This implies a return to the church’s roots, a revival of that which originally animated the church, and a recovery of what many have been lost or cast aside over the years.
With that in mind I would like to reexamine some things from the church’s history. The Church of the Brethren was born, in 1708, out of reaction to and concern for a specific circumstance in the history of the larger church–the alliance of church and state. This marriage between the church and the civil governments in what is now mostly Germany, created a situation whereby church laws and state laws, church boundaries and state boundaries, and church membership and state citizenship were virtually identical. If you were born and lived in a certain province, you were then automatically considered a Christian (either Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed) from birth to death by virtue of your citizenship.
In this environment the tendency was for the church to ask the state powers to enforce uniformity of belief throughout the entire country or province. This gave rise to the situation which confronted the early Brethren: People might give assent to the creedal affirmations of the church because of cultural pressure alone, or with little or no idea of what the creeds meant or pointed to, or with little or no intention of taking seriously the source to which the creeds pointed–the Biblical, New Testament, Apostolic witness. Usually there was little or no evidence of personal acceptance of, or of obedience to, the Person (Jesus) to whom the creeds and the Biblical witness pointed.
So then the early Brethren were undoubtedly opposed to an empty and powerless “creedalism.” However, they never rejected the foundational confessions and tenets of faith of either the Apostolic Church (found in the New Testament) or of the Second and Fourth Century Church (represented by the summaries of the Apostolic teaching and preaching in such affirmations as the Apostles’ Creed and the baptismal confession of Hippolytus, to which they also appealed as early church evidence for trine immersion). They in fact applauded the
‘Reformation of Faith” of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli (which retained and reaffirmed the confessional core of the church), but they wanted to see that Reformation result in a corresponding “Reformation of Life.” They understood that the simple signing or reciting of a creedal statement was no guarantee of any such reformation of life.
However, the early Brethren did hold to a “credo” (Latin for “I believe”), a faith confession, the New Testament itself. There they found confession of faith in Jesus literally all over the place, filling pages of Holy Scripture. See Matthew 1:16; 1:20-21; 1:22-23; 2:1-6; 2:10-11; 2:15; 3:11-12; 3:14; 3:16-17; 4:1-11; 4:13-16; 4:24; 5:17-18; 7:28-29; 8:16-17; 8:27; 8:28-34; 9:2-8; 9:19-22; 9:27-31–and on and on. Associated with almost every healing or exorcism is some kind of faith statement, either having to do with the faith in Jesus manifested by the person healed or delivered, or with Matthew’s own confession, as in 8:17. Later on there are the great confessions of 16:13-17; 17:5; 26:63-64; 27:54; 28:5-7; and 28:16-20. And that is not even all from the Gospel of Matthew! (Look also at John 1, Acts 2, Corinthians 1 and 15, 1 Timothy 3:16, Hebrews 1, and Revelation 1–just for starters!)
Against these confessions of faith found in the New Testament, the early Brethren did,
implicitly and explicitly, measure their own faith. They did not, as did the Inspirationists and others among the more extreme Pietists, base their movement on the subjective authority of individual experience and personal speculation, but rather rooted themselves in the authority of Scripture. Even the decision to “become a church” and proceed with the first baptisms was made ultimately because they found no other way to obey the command of the only Son of God, their risen Savior and Lord, as found in Holy Scripture in Matthew 8:17.
Even though the Brethren were “non-creedal” in the technical, philosophical sense, they were not non-creedal in the Biblical, confessional sense. They refused to speculate beyond the bounds of the New Testament in terms of their confessional witness–their faith and practice. They certainly put an emphasis on obedience to Christ, but they never questioned, reduced, rejected, or added to the basic, orthodox, evangelical New Testament tenets of the faith–especially the common teaching of the whole New Testament regarding the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. They viewed Jesus as the only Son of God, the Lamb of God who by His death on the Cross took away the sins of the world. They accepted Jesus as the only Savior who conquered death and hell by the power of His resurrection, and the only “Ascended Master,” who will someday return to this earth to set all things right again at the end of this age. All these New Testament assumptions and teachings were simply held as foundational by our Brethren ancestors. (See Donald Durnbaugh, European Origins of the Brethren, source material; Donald Durnbaugh, The Brethren in Colonial America, source material; William R. Eberly, The Complete Writings of Alexander Mack; Vernard Eller’s article on “Brethren Beliefs” in The Church of the Brethren Past and Present, and Vernard Eller’s unpublished article, “Faith Confession: The Community’s First Work.”)
The situation in which we find ourselves in 1994 in America is in one sense different from the situation of the early Brethren in Eighteenth Century Germany. In our culture and time, we are not dominated by any one state-sponsored church. Our culture is much more “pluralistic” than was 18th century Germany in terms of what people “believe”, especially regarding religious belief. What we now have is an incredible diversity of belief systems in our culture–a growing proliferation of religious expressions under the protection and “tolerance” of a supposedly benign and neutral government.
This situation, however, is not unprecedented in either church history or world history. It is very much like the situation faced by the early church up to the time of Constantine in the Fourth Century. Under both Republican and Imperial Rome a large variety of “religious expressions” were “tolerated,” so long as they were amenable to incorporation and amalgamation into the imperial Roman system–so long as they did not threaten the great Roman peace, the “Pax Romana.”
Judaism was tolerated, unless it was Zionist or Zealot (Jewish nationalist) in nature. Mithraism was a Persian mystery cult especially popular among the soldiers of the empire. Various philosophical schools (Platonist, Epicurean, Stoic) were popular with both Greeks and Romans, and with many Greek-speaking people among the conquered provinces.
Gnosticism and other Hellenistic and Eastern (Persian, Hindi) mystery religions gained large followings all over the empire. Egyptian religious ideas were also influential. And of course watching over and encompassing it all was the great, universalistic pantheon of imperial Rome, borrowed directly from the Creek pantheon of gods and goddesses and enlarged to accommodate all the ‘new” gods and goddesses of the empire.
Into this mix stepped the early disciples of Jesus. They were at first considered a Jewish sect, and thus were tolerated and even afforded protection (see Paul’s appeal in Acts 21:39). They were non-resistant and renounced worldly (political) power, so they were not identified with the Jewish Zealots. However, when they were eventually expelled from the synagogues and disowned by the Jewish communities, they lost their “accepted” status. The Roman authorities finally informed them that they could receive approved status if they did two things–accede to the imperial edicts claiming deity for the Roman emperor, and simply allow their “god” (Crestus, the Latin name for Christ) to go right up there in the pantheon alongside all the other gods and goddesses, including Caesar. Eventually the Romans began demanding an oath of allegiance from their subjects, involving a declaration that “Caesar is Lord.” This translated to “Caesar is (a) god.”
To these demands the early Christians responded curiously. In opposition to the imperial oath (“Caesar is Lord”), the Christians developed what was almost certainly the first Christian “credo” (or confession of faith) outside the New Testament, but a confession which had its origin in the New Testament itself. The confession “Jesus is Lord” or “Christ is Lord” is found in Luke 6:46, John 20:28, Philippians 2:911, and 1 Peter 3:13-16. See also Vernard Eller’s above-mentioned article on “Faith Confession.” To this very peculiar, particular, and exclusive confession they added their refusal to simply place Jesus Christ alongside all the “other” gods and goddesses of the empire. For them, Jesus was unique and preeminent, not to be confused with the gods which “by nature are no gods” (Galatians4:8). See also Acts 17:22-34 and 1 Corinthians 8:4-6.
For this uncompromising stance, deemed complete foolishness by the Romans (who ridiculed Christians for worshipping a crucified and thus absolutely discredited god), thousands of Christians lost their lives in the coliseums of the empire. They were willing to offer up their lives rather than deny (relinquish their confession of faith in) “the Master who bought them” (2 Peter 2:1). This may seem foolish and pointless to some today as well. In fact, the very Cross of Christ itself may seem foolish (meaningless) to many modern-day “Greco-Romans” (1 Corinthians 1:17-25). John 18:33-37 and 1 Timothy 6:13 speak of the Cross of Him who “testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate.
So the church of today, including the Church of the Brethren, is faced with a number of choices. Are we going to force upon ourselves an inclusiveness of all the faith expressions, religious and secular, that are now out there in the tremendously diverse market of ideas and practices which our culture and world have to offer? Or, will we choose to remain within the bounds of the New Testament in our faith–our confessional witness? Will we embrace unitarianism, or universalism, or pantheism, or humanism, or syncretism–choosing to deny or reduce or minimize the deity (and thus the full humanity) of Christ, while at the same time attempting to create some overriding “unity,” some synthesis, which will reject by definition the specific revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus Christ)? Or, will we hold to that irreducible revelation of God in Christ which is the heritage of the historic, Apostolic Church? Will we take as our final authority for faith, the theories of the physical and social sciences, and our own subjective experience? Or, will we measure and judge our experience and theories by the time-tested truths of the New Testament, that which continues to be called our rule (yardstick, plumbline) of faith and practice?
Once again, in a new time and a new historical setting, we are being called upon to be faithful to the Apostolic witness. Even as the early Brethren then called upon the testimony of the New Testament and the early church discipline-so we must now again call upon that testimony (the testimony of the apostles and martyrs) in the matter of the church’s confessional choices.