The "churchless" future
Paul posts about the means by which your average Joe or Jane Christian will "Primarily" express and experience their spirituality in the near future. (Make sure to check the chart in the post.)
Now I have to admit that hearing about an article entitled A Churchless Faith (which Paul notes, but I have not read) really struck me as an oxymoron. Now I understand that my Pomo friends are working hard to get evangelicals out of the "church is a building" sense of things and this is certainly laudable...but boy it sure hits me as an Orthodox Christian right in gut. The Church being so much a part of our faith. I'll read the article and post about it later...but part of what makes it so difficult for Orthodox and "emerging church" folk to dialogue is our profoundly different understandings of the faith to begin with...case and point being ecclesiology. You cannot be an Orthodox Christian and withdraw from the Orthodox community...I cannot just "do" communion in my home for my family and friends, nor can I expect to grow in the Orthodox faith "on my own" or with a core of "like-minded" folk...because I NEED to have the pot of my heart stirred - through the communal sacraments of the Church.
One thing that struck me about the chart in Paul's post (and I'm not sure how these predictions are being made) is that the key word to be discerned is "primary." Because I think anyone who takes their faith seriously, expresses and eperiences it in ALL of these areas and so I wonder to what extent what is really being predicted here is simply a decline in what is essentially sunday morning attendance - which I might add is not neccesarily indicative of a good thing. After all we in western washington are probably the most unchurched state that is yet chock full of "spirituality."
How is the "alternative faith-based community" REALLY different (save for a lack of a building) than the "local church"? I know this is a big question that even those in such sommunities are wrestling with and I have often asked my close "alternative faith-based community" friends how they are going to stay unique and not fall into the rut which will have them become little more than a passing fad like the communities they are leaving behind.
Part of what makes "local churches" appealing to people is both doctrine and practice. When you move or travel, you seek out the familiarity you will find in a church that bears the same name as the one you attend/ed at home...and there is something to be said for this - if you find doctrine and practice to be important. Who wants to go to an unknown "alternative faith-based community" and have to worry about this weeks rotating facilitator wishing to experiment with THESE prayers and creeds or what's being served in the Kool-Aid. (A joke, yes...but there is some seriousness here too.)
So what is the Orthodox role in this future? I expect we will smile and wave kindly as people pass by...we are not going anywhere. But I pray we bear the label or arrogance humbly for it is one that is difficult for us to avoid in this ever changing world of Christendom. Our beliefs and our practices are ancient, out of date...not at all in keeping with the latest trends. By remaining in the Orthodox Church I cannot help but wrestle with the label of arrogance, exclusivity, and self-righteousness...but in a way, lest we wish to be universalists we all may be labelled such by anyone who denies that Jesus is God. (In itself a pretty arrogant claim).
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--- Bob K.
The ECM would have us believe that God is (again) doing a "new" thing in fact, so new that it's "NU!!!"), but it's plain to see that it's just the same old- same old gnosticism or rather, in Emergentese: Nu-Gnosticism.
See:
Protestantism Then and Now
"Traditional Protestantism lived off of the Catholic elements in its own reality; its bishops stood in historical connection with the bishops of the Catholic age; its liturgical worship kept close to the Roman mass; its confessions reaffirmed the dogmatic truths of the ecumenical councils, and claimed to be teaching nothing new; it emphatically rejected heresies old and new." That was then and this is now, says Carl Braaten, director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology in Northfield, Minnesota.
Writing in Lutheran Forum, Braaten says that Dietrich Bonhoeffer got it right in the 1930s when he observed that Protestantism in America had never experienced the Reformation. "It has been given to Americans less than any other people in the world to achieve the visible unity of the church of God on earth," Bonhoeffer wrote. "It has been given to Americans more than any other people in the world to manifest a pluralism of Christian beliefs and denominations."
"Anything (or almost anything) goes" has long been the motto of American Protestantism, according to Bonhoeffer and Braaten. Harold Bloom got a large part of it right, says Braaten, when he wrote in The American Religion (1992) that the religion of Americans has been historically and is today gnosticism. Against tradition, canon, communal structure, or anything that looks like external authority, the gnostic follows his real or imagined star, believing that "at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God." In the past, says Braaten, the ravages of gnosticism were held in check by denominational institutions and habits that were recognized as being more or less authoritative, plus an engrained sense of accountability to Scripture and historical orthodoxy. Not now. What is to be done? Some, Braaten says, will take the road to Rome or Orthodoxy. Some might try to reconstitute a traditional Protestantism by defining themselves, in the mode of the sixteenth century, in opposition to Catholicism. But after Vatican II, he suggests, that makes no theological sense. Braaten does have a proposal:
"We may look for paths of renewal that move through and across the denominations, working for a common future in which Christians and churches will visibly confess the one apostolic faith in one eucharistic fellowship. We will be wise to look for allies wherever we can find them, and not go fishing only in Lutheran fjords. This is an ecumenical road, and as such not a new one, but one whose plausibility and relevance are seriously being questioned by those taking other roads. Whether one is Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist or something else does not matter much in terms of the current struggle for the basic biblical contents of faith, the authority of dogma and confession, and fidelity to the Gospel in eucharistic fellowship. While the ecclesial substance of the Protestant denominations is dissolving into the poisoned gruel of the American Religion, whether on the fundamentalist right or the progressivist left, there are struggle groups within each dedicated to the renewal of the Evangelical and Catholic elements inherent in the originating impulses of the various Protestant traditions. There may have been some wild reformers who intended to start a Bible church without catholic substance, but Luther, Calvin, and Wesley were not among them. Nevertheless, in all the churches that bear their stamp, there has been a diminution of catholic substance and orthodox doctrine coupled with a syncretistic amalgamation of neo-pagan elements."
In their article, "Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline" (FT, March 1993), Benton Johnson and colleagues made a compelling case that the heart of the crisis is the failure to transmit the faith in a way that elicits the allegiance of the successor generation. Braaten agrees with the sociological analysis of Johnson et al., but focuses attention on the fact that there is no shared understanding of what is the faith that is to be transmitted.
The crisis of Protestantism is a perennial topic, and it is always in order to caution against crisis-mongering. But from the modernist controversies of the early part of this century, through the analyses of such as H. Richard Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1930s, up to the likes of Bloom and Braaten today, there is a continuum of reflection on a Protestantism that has apparently lost its reason for being. This has been going on for almost a century now. There was a brief break, a resurgence of theological confidence and excitement, represented by Reinhold Niebuhr and, most notably, by Karl Barth. But that was decades ago and now looks like no more than a momentary deviance from the theme of decline and dissolution.
Of course in all the oldline liberal denominations one can find congregations that are enclaves of vibrant faith and life in earnest conversation with orthodox Christianity. Then too, the sundry liberationisms from authority that Braaten and others deplore undoubtedly do provide spiritual excitements for many people. But such a diverse religious marketplace merely confirms Harold Bloom's observations about gnosticism and Bonhoeffer's doleful reflections about degenerate pluralism. To be sure, there are evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants who believe that they are not embroiled in the crisis because the old-time religion is secured by a nineteenth- century Protestant dogma of biblical inerrancy. That way is not available to the communities that chiefly concern Braaten. There is a problem with scriptural authority but, agreeing with New Testament scholar Martin Kahler, Braaten insists that it cannot be resolved without addressing the question of the Church. He writes:
"Another matter of high priority must be the recovery of the authority of Scripture. The teaching of the Bible in theological schools is in the grip of gnosticism, the belief that it is necessary to appeal away from the plain sense of Scripture to a higher knowledge that lies above or behind the text. The aim of biblical studies is to put students 'in the know' so that they will be privy to an esoteric knowledge that even most intelligent and educated folks cannot get from their reading of the Scriptures in Hebrew, Greek, or English. The effect is paralysis on those not privy to this higher knowledge. The newly initiated are in bondage to their masters and cite their authority. Often their opinions stand in stark opposition to the biblical foundations of the classical dogmatics of the church, whether in their witness to the triune God, the Divine-Human Person of Jesus Christ, and so forth.
"The result is an 'ugly broad ditch' (Lessing) between dogmatics that teaches what the church believes (lex orandi lex credendi) and exegesis that is obedient to the 'papacy of sophisticated scholarship' (Martin Kahler). A deep hiatus runs through every seminary curriculum, as every somewhat alert student will discover in short order.
The authority of the Bible is not autonomous. When people cease to believe in the church, they will soon cease to believe in the church's Book.
We can hardly imagine that the huge hiatus between exegesis and dogmatics will give way to a greater unity of theology until the divided churches resolve their differences into a greater unity of the church. For the Bible by itself, as Ernst Kasemann said, can be invoked to support a multiplicity of confessions.
If the Bible as a whole and in all its parts is not also read backwards in light of the Holy Spirit at work in the early catholic church and subsequently, the Bible will have no more authority than any other primitive document from antiquity."
Full-Text Here: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9406/public.html#age
The bait is an alleged return to the catholic substance of the "Great Tradition" or what they call "Ancient-Future Faith" or "Paleo-Orthodoxy", the switch is this glorification and embrace of High Individualism over the ugly institutional "church."
The two EC bloggers that you linked to seemed to find great satisfaction if not justification for their Emergent Gnosticism from Barna's upcoming book.
Throughout history Orthodoxy has been defined AGAINST heterodoxy (embodied in the various gnostic movements). I agree with Paradosis. The Orthodox Church will continue to to stand against the demons of gnosticism and hopefully, prayerfully, She will be seen as a "city on the hill" that stands out in sharp relief against this "American Religion" that these "younger evangelicals" have embraced.