This is the third of a three part series. You can read part one here and part two here.1This paper expresses where I came to through my early attempts to be a church historian, which occupied much of my time 1960-1975: I did not want to do antiquarian or institutional church history, but rather to practise church history in close relation to theology, missiology and practical theology. I tried to persuade the Ecclesiastical History Society to engage, but after some happy, involved years, I moved to working more through theology to the contemporary making of church history. Our year in Germany 73-74, studying Barth, Bonhoeffer, Vogel and Dibelius in their time, filled this turn out. After that, I taught little church history, but worked at political theologies, and the ‘social responsibility of the local church’ and such things.
So when I had the chance to write something for John Briggs’ festschrift, and given that he had become a leading British Baptist historian and ecumenist, it seemed a paper like this was a good fit.
So far so good. I wrote this paper when I was depressed by church. It was good for me as an historian to write about what I knew from decades of participation, but I could not write in tune with the complacent self-congratulation that was strong in the church. In general terms I think the church is fallible, sins and is lamed by its histories, and I could not see the churches I knew as an exception. Church does not live and do well out of its natural virtue, but by knowing and responding to forgiving grace, which enables living in the truth about what is and what we are called to.
Friendship is not the only category we need to trace the history of the Gospel in the church. No doubt there are many other themes of heuristic utility to be explored. In this discussion, we will consider one more, which has already appeared on the edges of friendship: power.2The question of power in the church is of perennial relevance – for while Pilavachi will pass, the dynamics of churches with their little and big hierarchies and their fan-cultures won’t change while the world lasts. The Gospel is believed to be ‘the power of God unto salvation’. Disciples receive power to be witnesses when the Holy Spirit comes upon them. The church is organised power. Nothing is without some kind of power intrinsic to its existence. All persons in themselves are power: the young have energy, innocence, time, capacity for growth; the old have proven experience, a repertoire of tricks, a fund of earned respect. Friendship is one sort of power – and unfriendliness is another.
Conventionally, histories of the contemporary church are as up-beat as possible, dwelling on what has been achieved and so, on works of power of the sort that serve and realise Gospel. The will to friendship, our desire not to damage the morale of fragile churches, and even our faith in God inhibit us from an unbounded exploration of power in church. We know enough about the church, without doing any research, to fear that to investigate power will open a can of worms – and healthily, we have lost the taste for seeing ourselves as miserable worms. The church historian does not want to be like a muck-raking journalist. Nevertheless the discomfiting truth has to be faced: there cannot be church without power, and yet the powers at work in church often show themselves incompetent to build a plausible church. This truth has to be worked through by the church, in the church, if it is not to be worked over by those outside the church, against the church. The church’s mission is in trouble if the difference between the self-image it cultivates for internal consumption and the way outsiders see it cannot be bridged by honest intelligent conversation with those outside.
The inadequacy of church power to match up to the tasks and standards set by the Gospel unsettles us. In the church we will find examples of authoritarian, self-indulgent abuse of power by those who hold it, as well as their disillusioning incompetence. Where there is power, there will also be exclusion from power: in the church, there are mini-Machiavellis, whose frustrated obsession with power is rooted in the experience of not having it. Those who are spiritual and those who are friendly (two overlapping but not identical types) prefer the church to have an imagined life where there is no power but God’s gentleness. There is damaging collusion between some spiritual people who want a higher life, friendly people who want a quiet life, and visionary people who are impatient for the true living church: they all try to have church without reckoning with the ambiguous realities of power. It is often held to be improper to look at ecumenical relations in terms of power, for the equality of churches is assumed, as though differences in size, wealth and political skills have no effect on their relationships. The resulting untruth breeds alienating scepticism about ecumenism. Some Baptists like to conceive church meetings theocratically, putting them beyond being analysed realistically by analogies with democracy and constitutional politics, or with autocracy or management manipulation. For lack of such analysis, they may be conducted without the ordinary decencies and concern for truth which has been painfully learned in some modern societies through centuries of struggle and experiment. The church is unwise to undervalue the gifts of such modernity.
Power goes astray in several directions. There is the deliberate abuse of excessive or unequally shared power in a community, power which can be tyrannical and manipulative. And there is disillusioning power, promising the enabling service necessary for humanity, but then proving incompetent to deliver the promise. Power is not always what it seems to be: it can be running for cover from its own insecurity. Then it seeks to escape accountability; it looks for freedom to act under cover of darkness. Secrecy expands power. Calling power to account is hard work; often ordinary church members, like ordinary citizens, have apparently better things to do – and so, evil triumphs as good men do nothing. In church, these abuses are further corrupted by being spiritualised. Leaders are surrounded with divine aura (Touch not the Lord’s anointed) and the natural laziness and timidity of good people is justified by false teaching about submission as a virtue.
This incapacity to deal with power is common in the modern Baptist church where charismatic irrational ecstasy and mere administration have quenched the spirit of seventeenth century rebellion and subsequent political creativity in the church. The spiritual flight from organisational formality has undermined church meetings. We have given up learning from worldly politics how to manage power; there is little transfer of practical learning between church and politics. Church often says it wants to be counter-cultural, prophetic, speaking truth to power, but it is ill-equipped to do so, since it cannot recognise or engage with the problems of power in itself. More ecumenical and historical literacy might help us to see that what the liberal Roman Catholic Lord Acton learned from studying the early modern Papacy applies even to little Baptist churches now: All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Did you, John, like me, hear Walter Ullmann’s lectures on medieval political thought? He schematised the conflictual history of cosmic and social order in the western medieval world in two ‘theses’ which it might be useful for the local church historian to reflect on still. According to the ‘descending thesis’ of government, all authority comes from God, flowing downwards through his representatives. So peasants look up to princes, and lay people look up to priests. The ‘ascending thesis’ grew largely out of experience of the corruptions of the church. Those above did not oversee those beneath with reliable pastoral care, let alone humility and willingness to learn; instead they simply looked down on them. Faced with the demand for comprehensive reform ‘in head and members’ the ‘heads’, whether Pope or King, or their successors, offered to reform members, while defending their own immunity from the reforming efforts of the members.
Nevertheless, in some places, those below claimed authority. That involved more than force. They had to replace the apparently God-honouring thesis which put God at the apex from which all authority and power flowed downwards. And that is difficult in churches that love to sing about enthronements. That authority could flow from below, from the people, has often been condemned as essentially secular, a democratic onslaught on the authority of God. But the ascending thesis is not necessarily godless: indeed it may put us on the track of the God who ‘abhors not the Virgin’s womb’, making his dwelling with ordinary people. God creates all, speaks to all, calls all, asks service of all, seeks to bring all to glory. God’s Spirit roves everywhere, freely. In the fellowship of God, his word does not only come from above, from the high-ups; a little child shall lead them and it is the still small voice they listen for. The ascending thesis was articulated within the later medieval Catholic church, especially in the unhappily frustrated Conciliar movement; Baptist churches should not forget their place in this development. It is odd when Baptist churches carry on as though they have no roots and no investment in the ascending thesis, and they need to work practically and theologically with the possibility it opens up, against all the oppressive, dumbing down power of the descending thesis.
Of course, the issue presents itself in a local church today in contemporary idioms. Power in church rests to a significant degree on personal relationships and allegiance, on friendship, fascination, crushes and personality-cults. The pulpit is easily exploited to build the church around the minister. It is doubtful whether this corruption has been prevented by moving to the guitar-laden platform, which has gone along with the switch from Word to Spirit, from thought to feeling, from buttoned-up reticence to pop-culture self-projection, the last enhanced rather than disciplined by post-modern irony. Power in church tends to be personal rather than institutional; it is hidden in life’s goings out and in, rather than made transparently accountable. Sermons and the conduct of worship bolster the power of leaders as they assume a significant, if mostly unconscious, personal identification with the Gospel proclaimed. Such glorification is corrupting enough for the fans, but even worse for the stars. An old ambassador came to Mussolini to report on an international conference about gas-warfare. Well, said the Duce, and what is the most dangerous gas? Incense, the old man said.
Ministers and leaders have often suffered from the admiration of people, which they have preferred to the koinonia of critical conversation. While most other forms of monological speech-communication have declined, the sermon in Baptist churches would seem to have remained popular, or at least easily tolerated – in the church I know best, sermons are probably longer than they were fifty years ago. It is therefore sad that institutionally there is virtually no accountability of the pulpit, no monitoring, or in-service training. It is easy for a preacher to promise well at the beginning, but to run to seed as his career progresses. The pulpit has an immunity, which shields it from open discussion, or shared preparation. Preaching, the preachers say, is a very personal matter: the preacher’s responsibility is directly to God, in an unchurchly, individualistic, private fashion. Preachers are not wholly to blame for this situation. The church is unaware that preaching is a function not of the person in the pulpit, but of the whole church. Church meetings never discuss what the quality of the preaching and how it could be improved.
The history of the last fifty years might show a decline, or at least, no increase in, the church’s capacity to understand and manage power. But there is no freedom from power: if we fail to channel and discipline it with understanding, it will not evaporate, but rather explode into destructive and baffling mayhem. Such preventable occurrences are not infrequently part of a local church’s history. I confess that, having seen so much irresponsible and incompetent power in the church, I tend, in discussing how to write its history, to emphasise the need to check and control power. However, the validity of power comes logically before its control. We cannot check what is not there. Power is good, before it is bad. The apparently spiritual temptation, to honour God, by eschewing power, must be resisted. To attempt to live without power is ingratitude to the Creator. It is to mistake the Cross: that God’s weakness is stronger than all other power does not make unqualified weakness or powerlessness a virtue. The history of the church, in the last fifty years, as in any other time, would not be made were it not for power of some sort. Despite and beyond all the church’s sin and falling short of the glory of God, I believe there is still, and want to hear, a history of the Gospel in the church by the abounding grace of God. It must be brought out into the open, not as though it is the only strand in the story, not as though it cancels the story of sin as though it never happened, but as a story of grace, love and hope as the Gospel of God in humanity through Jesus Christ by the Spirit. The real church goes on existing only by being forgiven – and forgiving is always a particular use of power.
In a period when so many have been leaving church, or like the man who hid his talent in the earth, quietly filling up their place in the pew, but doing nothing else, church history must give prominence to telling the story of those who have displayed the power of an active faith, determined to oppose the cultural anti-christian tide, not giving way to the deception that there can be Christian believing without belonging. The positive story of the Gospel in the church is seen in those who give time and money, a bit of heart and even mind to the church, working hard to gather and hold groups for fellowship and teaching and service, and who have proved to be sacrificial (albeit undramatically) in making the most of every opportunity to share Christ. All this takes hard work which is not for the powerless. It involves taking up the Cross, in sorrow and care and love, in the struggle for health and hope in the confusions of people’s lives. There are stories of power here. Influence is sought and won. Dangerous interventions in other people’s affairs are taken, though not necessarily with violence or without consent. The power here is undeniable, however mysteriously human character and divine spirit may have mixed to make it what it is. And this power, which on the human side often does not understand itself, includes the capacity to take risks, to endure hardship, even to take Luther’s advice to sin boldly.
So the church in this half-century has accumulated an ambiguous history of faith, service and sin. Has it lost valuable habits and treasures, or has it been stripped of worn-out baggage? Has it progressed from one renewing movement to another, or has it passed through charismatic renewal to stifling charismatic culture and beyond that, to falling for divisive Toronto blessings? To its credit, it has never given up evangelism, from Billy Graham, through Misselbrook to Alpha. Taking risks for the Gospel, it has gone into church planting and got tangled in building ecclesiastical empires which, like all empires, get out of hand and discredit themselves, show their feet of clay and collapse upon those who live within them. The history of the church, as of humanity, needs to be read and written within the perspective of the christian Gospel of forgiveness, not under the gnostic wish that this world had never been because all its power is evil.
Is the Gospel still there in Church for us?
Considering power brings us into fundamental spiritual and theological crisis. The duty to be active in representing and following the Gospel, seeking to be faithful to it in social form in the present (which is church-making) brings us face to face with impossible tasks and with profound discouragement – like Jeremiah, we did not ask to be chosen to do this work, and do not think it fair when we find we have been chosen only in order to be discredited by immersion in the mess of history-making.
When we feel like this about the church, even as the church, the critical question comes home: is the Gospel still there for us? Can we take any comfort in Gospel if we discover it is preached only in unfriendliness and in the corruptions of power and ambition (Phil. 1.15-18)? The grace given to Paul enabled him to see that, whether out of false motives or true, Christ was proclaimed, and in that he could rejoice. Can we also rejoice? Sometimes it is not easy. There is incessant proclamation, but is Christ proclaimed? It is possible that sometimes the Church blots out the sun, as Stephen Spender suggested was generally the case, the sins of the church making Christ invisible.3Stephen Spender, ‘The Landscape Near an Aerodrome’ in Collected Poems 1928-1985, faber and faber, London, 1985, p 42 [Religion stands, the church blocking the sun] In view of the last fifty years, this is not an issue the church can brush aside, as simply ruled out by the faithfulness of God. Do we not have to do also with the God of the prophets, who dared in agony to tell the chosen people that God’s faithfulness was not to be presumed on, that He could withdraw from them and let them be ‘Not My People’?
It is an interesting question, which goes deep into the heart and mind of the church: How have local churches managed to go on in this time, after the Holocaust, in a century of terrors, rejoicing that despite all imperfections in its proclamation and service, the Gospel is still proclaimed in the world? The history can be searched for answers. Can it be shown that the church has been aware of its precarious spiritual and evangelistic situation? Has it taken the measure of the difficulties of Christian communication in this time? Has it worked to discern and recover the Gospel for itself – even before it preaches to anyone else – so that we can now write a history composed of the successive recoveries of the Gospel, by which the church has been able to rejoice that somehow the Gospel has been, and will be, proclaimed? Does the history of the church have the same pattern as the story of the disciples in the Gospel – God in Christ is not spared being obscured in darkness at the Cross, nor the disciples their scattering, but then there follows, beyond expectation, resurrection to newness of life?
The Gospel does not have a simple continuous history in the church. Old-tyme religion is always passing away, and most of it probably is not to be regretted. If it was useful in its day, it did well enough. It is inhuman to ask for more. Only Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever – and ‘same’ here has a special mysterious sense. The Vincentian Canon is not a good guide: what has been ‘believed everywhere, always and by everyone’ is so minimal as to be a husk without a kernel of life. The Church lives not by the continuity of its possession but by the recurrences of grace. God gives us to rejoice in one, and then another, contextual recovery and re-presentation of the Gospel. Thus the Gospel has to be appreciated historically, in its comings, goings, in its tarrying and its coming again. With modesty and fear, the church may go over its history in search of the Gospel. Acquiring the skill of historical thinking may help it to hear what God is saying now.
This is a slightly revised version of the third part of paper published in the festschrift for John Briggs, Ecumenism and History, edited Anthony R Cross, Paternoster, 2002, pp 208-224.
Read part one of the series here and part two here.
Notes
- 1This paper expresses where I came to through my early attempts to be a church historian, which occupied much of my time 1960-1975: I did not want to do antiquarian or institutional church history, but rather to practise church history in close relation to theology, missiology and practical theology. I tried to persuade the Ecclesiastical History Society to engage, but after some happy, involved years, I moved to working more through theology to the contemporary making of church history. Our year in Germany 73-74, studying Barth, Bonhoeffer, Vogel and Dibelius in their time, filled this turn out. After that, I taught little church history, but worked at political theologies, and the ‘social responsibility of the local church’ and such things.
So when I had the chance to write something for John Briggs’ festschrift, and given that he had become a leading British Baptist historian and ecumenist, it seemed a paper like this was a good fit.
So far so good. I wrote this paper when I was depressed by church. It was good for me as an historian to write about what I knew from decades of participation, but I could not write in tune with the complacent self-congratulation that was strong in the church. In general terms I think the church is fallible, sins and is lamed by its histories, and I could not see the churches I knew as an exception. Church does not live and do well out of its natural virtue, but by knowing and responding to forgiving grace, which enables living in the truth about what is and what we are called to. - 2The question of power in the church is of perennial relevance – for while Pilavachi will pass, the dynamics of churches with their little and big hierarchies and their fan-cultures won’t change while the world lasts.
- 3Stephen Spender, ‘The Landscape Near an Aerodrome’ in Collected Poems 1928-1985, faber and faber, London, 1985, p 42 [Religion stands, the church blocking the sun]