Truth vs. Beauty at Church

In listening to the May 20, 2012 episode of the wonderful White Horse Inn, entitled “The Worship Experience,” the trajectory of the conversation and some of the comments got me thinking. I completely agree with the substance of the hosts’ ending position: that folks shouldn’t run from the truth of the Reformation doctrine on bigger issues to other traditions that do not hold those doctrines but have very different emphases on Sunday. The below considerations are to be seen only after one finds the true Gospel being preached: what then?

First, the Protestant side of this argument usually employs the general opposition  between experience and doctrine, or aesthetics and theology, or feeling and truth. This episode had some qualifiers but basically used this as well. Don’t get me wrong, I am right on board with many of the WHI critiques of the triviality and shallowness of evangelicalism’s “worship service.” It seems clear that many evangelical church services are much more similar to a large corporate business conference or a pop concert of some sort than they are to anything recognized as “church” from the first 1,800 years of its existence.

All the disclaimers to the contrary, it seems that the opposition still stands. “We’ve got to stop being guided by our emotions…” Horton says. Well, yes, if they overrule the truth of the Gospel being preached we must stop. Yet, thoughtful believers are leaving Protestant churches partly because they are being forced to choose between the two. Rather, the conclusion ought to be: we need to start asking by what theological criteria can we figure out how this whole Protestant church thing looks and feels. 

Second, using the above dichotomy to drive the individual decision of where to go to church. Not that folks shouldn’t be persuaded not to leave Reformation doctrine preaching evangelical churches for Rome or Constantinople—they should. But the persuading argument ought not use the opposition of “truth” to “beauty” (usually indicated by “smells and bells”) to do so. Why not?

Because in doing so one opposes one aspect of the image of God and indeed God himself—truth—against another attribute—beauty. Human beings are made to participate in truth, goodness, and beauty together, not choosing between them all (maybe where truth=Reformed, goodness=Main Line churches, beauty=Rome/Orthodoxy).

In a comment on the WHI episode page, Horton rightly states that “Style is never neutral.” We ought to—but it makes us, in all our American, pragmatic, and postmodern tendencies quite nervous—replace “style” with “beauty” or “aesthetics.” The appearance of your church’s building, the clothes worn by your pastors and congregation, the age/style/volume/instrumentation of your church’s music, the location of said musicians (if any), even the typeface chosen to print the bulletin/order are never neutral. The type of bread and wine (!) used, how each person receives it, the tone and content of any prayers thereabout all say something. We can’t help this; it’s how God’s created world simply is.

Even if one qualifies this discussion by saying, “We’re not talking about choosing between head and heart…it’s about God’s head and heart,” the anti-Rome/East argument still runs on the tracks of Truth, but Truth exclusively. What ought to happen is that the evangelical churches begin to take seriously God’s goodness and God’s beauty, and therefore the goodness and beauty of Christ’s bride because she is composed of image-bearers who have hearts and bodies, not just minds. Our feelings, our experiences of the world, our nearness to and participation in the beautiful, at bottom, simply matter. 

As difficult as it might be to change this ship’s tack, it would greatly benefit our churches to begin to think through this, and to do so theologically, rather than continuing to oppose “our truth” with “their experience.”

Baptists Without a Theology of Baptism

“That said, believer’s baptism has been a decisive point of identity at various periods in history, and so needs to be considered. The classical Baptist account stresses not just the subject of baptism (one who is already a believer), but its mode (full immersion). I have noted already the unfortunate case of Whitsitt, dismissed from his academic post for making a historically correct observation about the late adoption of the practice of immersion by the seventeenth-century English Baptists; this challenged the mythology that the primitive practice of immersion was preserved by true believers at every point in history and was felt by some to be deeply damaging to Baptist identity. In Britain, there was a significant crisis even earlier, when Baptist supporters of the new Bible Society tried to insist that the Greek word baptizo be translated ‘immerse’ or ‘plunge’, rather than ‘baptize’ in Bibles published by the Society. The mod of baptism had become important.

This insistence on immersion highlights a striking feature of historical defences of the Baptist position on baptism: it is far more based on a recovery of biblical praxis than on any reflection on biblical theology. That is, Baptists have tended to argue that the practice of the New Testament church was the immersion of believers only, and so this should be our practice; any consideration of a theology of baptism is seriously subordinated to this demand that New Testament practice be imitated. Baptist writings on baptism rather rarely get beyond this polemical point concerning praxis, arguing far more about the mode (immersion) and subjects (believers only) of baptism than about the meaning and effect of the sacrament/ordinance. Perhaps bizarrely, Baptists have been remarkably poor at developing a theology of baptism over their history, often resting content with developing an account of proper administration of the rite.”

[Stephen Holmes, Baptist Theology, 90]

Denial of Easy Identification of Divine and Human

“There is doubtless a danger of ‘spiritualizing’ the church with such affirmations. It is clearly important that this emphasis on the priority of divine action over the church as an act of human association not be allowed to eclipse the ‘visibility’ of the church. The polemical portrayal of Protestant religion as bare subjectivism without objective social form or endurance is doubtless a caricature, but it nevertheless identifies a potentially disruptive element in the dogmatics we have just outlined. Can a society which is in its essence ‘invisible’ ever be really human—that is, historical, material, bodily? In an evangelical ecclesiology, the gesture—rhetorical and theological—towards invisibility must certainly be made, and its absence from an ecclesiology may be symptomatic of other disorders—a lavishly over-realized eschatology, an eliding of the distinction between the gospel and its human representations, an atrophied sense of the church’s fallibility, above all, perhaps, a routinization of the operations of the Spirit.

Properly defined, the concept of the invisibility of the church is a standing denial of any easy identification of divine and human work. Talk of the church’s invisibility secures the all-important point that ‘[o]nly as creatura verbi divini [creature of the divine word] is the Church an object of faith, because God’s action in establishing and disclosing the true relationship between the creator and his creation that makes faith possible can be confessed as the content of faith’. Yet when this necessary gesture takes over, and is allowed to become the only constitutive moment for ecclesiology, other problems quickly emerge, and a picture of the church is promoted in which the human Christian community is unstable, liminal, and so incapable of sustaining a coherent historical and social trajectory.”

[John Webster, “The Self-Organizing Power of the Gospel of Christ: Episcopacy and Community Formation”, IJST 3:1 2001]

Obliterating the Reality

“One can speak here of avowed opposition to every ecclesiological perfectionism, that is, to every over-estimation of the ‘newness’ of life in Christ due to an unreal romanticism that prematurely takes hold of a triumph of grace. But, on the other hand, there is a great danger here of forgetting the destructive character of sin and becoming resigned to it; one can underestimate ‘the dark riddle’ in ecclesiastical relations. … Moreover, one can forget that Christ’s concern for His Church was precisely to bring together in love and reconciliation all the children of God who are scattered abroad. Thus, whoever wants to speak of division as an ‘attribute’ of the real Church, a property that belongs to her between Pentecost and the parousia, actually obliterates the reality of the one Lord, the one Shepherd of the sheep. The reference to continuing sin and to our limitedness may never lead to ecclesiastical quietism and may never explain away the status quo, since the Church owes her reality as Christ’s Church precisely to her being called out of darkness into marvelous light.”

[G. C. Berkouwer, The Church, 34]

Genuine Questions of Church Proclamation

“Just as the reality of the Word of God in Jesus Christ bears its possibility within itself, as does also the reality of the Holy Spirit, by whom the Word of God comes to man, so too the possibility of the knowledge of God and therefore the knowability of God cannot be questioned in vacuo, or by means of a general criterion of knowledge delimiting the knowledge of God from without, but only from within this real knowledge itself. Therefore it is quite impossible to ask whether God is knowable, because this question is already decided by the only legitimate and meaningful questioning which arises in this connexion. 

The only legitimate and meaningful questions in this context are: how far is God known? and how far is God knowable? These questions are legitimate and meaningful because they are genuine questions of Church proclamation, and therefore also genuine questions of dogmatics—genuine objects of its formal and material task.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 6]

Ends in Themselves

“I suggest that these analogies [church as fill-up station or as football huddle] are radically insufficient and misleading. … Athletes do not play football in order to huddle and fans do not attend games in order to watch the huddles—what athletes and fans really care about are the plays executed whne the ball is snapped. People do not go on road trips in order to stop for gas—drivers and passengers set out to enjoy the scenery and to arrive at their destination. Huddles and gas stations are means to an end. The life and ministry of the church are not means to an end. They do not exist to recharge our batteries or to give us a strategy for facing the week ahead. The church’s worship and fellowship are ends in themselves. Nothing that we do in this world is more important than participating in these activities. Participation in the life of the church, not participation in the cultural activities of the broader world, is central for the Christian life.”

[David Van Drunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, 133]

There Are No Ordinary Christians

More from the Webster interview:

Why should ordinary Christians care about such seemingly recondite matters as how to articulate the immanent being of the Trinity?

There aren’t any “ordinary” Christians; there are saints, a few of whom are appointed to the task of thinking hard about and trying to articulate the common faith of the church. We don’t usually need to use formal theological language and concepts in the everyday life of the church in prayer, preaching and service.

But like any other important human activity, faith has to achieve a measure of conceptual clarity if it is to understand and express itself, and part of that process is the development of abstract concepts like Trinity, incarnation and substance. What’s important is that we don’t treat such concepts as if they were improvements on the ordinary ways in which the saints express the faith; they are simply shorthand terms, a tool kit which helps us keep certain crucial aspects of the gospel alive in the mind and worship of the church. Theology and theological abstractions matter because the gospel matters, because the gospel concerns truth, and because living in and from the truth involves the discipleship of reason.

A Contradiction in Terms

“A Christian who stays away from the assembly is a contradiction in terms. The church-community, united by one word, hears this word again and again while assembled; conversely, the word that created the church-community again and again calls it together into concrete assembly. For it is the word preached according to the will of God and of the church-community that is the means through which this will is actualized.”

[Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 227]

I Am Never Not Instructed

“By the standards of my generation, all my life I have gone to church with a kind of persistence, as I do to this day. Once recently I found myself traveling all night to be home in time for church, and it occurred to me to consider in what spirit or out of what need I would do such a thing. My tradition does not encourage the idea that God would find any merit in it. I go to church for my own gratification, which is intense, though it had never occurred to me before to try to describe it myself.

The essence of it, certainly, is the Bible, toward which I do not feel in any degree proprietary, with which after long and sometimes assiduous attention I am not familiar. I believe the entire hypertrophic bookishness of my life arose directly out of my exposure, amongst modest Protestant solemnities of music and flowers, to the language of Scripture. Therefore, I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them—even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed.”

[Marilynne Robinson, “Psalm Eight”, in The Death of Adam, 230]