it’s official

From the New York Times, the implosion of the Episcopal Church.

Some analysis via Rod Dreher.

Obviously, I’m not an Episcopalian and have no dog in this fight, but it’s hard not to feel some sadness in this.

just one

My wife and girls are gone to see my in-laws this week.  I’m staying busy with work and reading.

Links for today:

Chris Hedges on the funeral of Michael Jackson and celebrity culture.  This is all I’m going to say about this.

Bill Kauffman on “Charlotte USA.” I love Bill Kauffman.

Lastly, Glenn Greenwald puts the pieces together regarding Goldman Sachs’ record profits.

And that’s enough MSM/celebrity/politics blogging for several weeks.  See you later.

too big to fail?

An article in the July Christian Chronicle looks at tenuous condition of three mainline CofC colleges.  (Some Disciples schools are going through the same thing.)

An excerpt:

But Shelly said the list sends a message to Christians in the wake of the recent closing of Church of Christ-associated Cascade College in Portland, Ore.

“All of us know the value that Christian colleges have added to the evangelistic outreach of Churches of Christ in different parts of the country where they are known,” Shelly said. “We just can’t let any more of them collapse.”

Now, obviously, all of these colleges are tiny in terms of undergraduate enrollment — none of them top a thousand, none of them are really even close.  But Shelly’s lament doesn’t seem to be directed toward the fortunes of his particular school (and, really, the specific financial state of these particular schools is not what interests me about this article), so much as toward the entire dream/mindset/whatever behind the parachurch superstructure that has grown up in mainline Churches of Christ and, now, apparently, must be supported.  (Visions of AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers are dancing in my head.)

The grand, triumphalistic (and ironically parochial) dream that sustained the establishment of these schools, and the supply of ready congregational cash that supported them, in the mid-twentieth century, has dried up — or so it would seem — at the dawn of the twenty-first century.  What if, in the midst of an economy that is not recovering, and a shrinking donor pool to support these schools, mainline churches are forced to give up on institutional maintenance and look to other, more primitive ways of educating their children?  It’s obviously not to the immediate benefit of college presidents like Shelly — and others stuck in the institutional maintenance mindset — to do this kind of imagining.  But it may be forced upon them.

of interest today

An article in the Wednesday edition of Slate on how the prosperity gospel is faring in the midst of a severe economic contraction.  A couple of excerpts to whet your appetite:

But reality, in the form of a housing-crisis fallout, is full of victims who ought to be a clarion call for Prosperity’s out-of-touch-ness. Its territory—locus of the lower-middle-class and minority neighborhoods from which most followers are culled, like modest exurban areas in California’s Southland and the edges of greater Atlanta—has some particularly high foreclosure rates. The number since 2007 in the greater Atlanta counties of Henry, Newton, Paulding, and Clayton (home of Creflo Dollar’s World Changers Ministries) is two to three times higher than the already-high statewide average, according to data from Foreclosures.com. The disparity jumps even higher outside Los Angeles, but inside the vast, gilded auditoriums, it’s Prosperity business as usual. “Where are these preachers as parishioners’ mortgages continue to default?” University of California-Riverside religion professor Jonathan Walton asked last September as the government took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. “One need look no further than the same congregations and networks where they have always resided. Same theology, same sermons, and same results.”

And again:

Detractors wonder how this neo-Pentecostal offshoot became evangelical kudzu, snaking its way even into Baptist churches. When did Max Lucado and Pat Robertson, two mainstream evangelicals, start producing fawning blurbs for Your Best Life Now? And of the top 15 spots on Outreach magazine’s largest megachurches, how did Team Prosperity get to control No. 1, No. 6, No. 10, and No. 14? Assemblies of God church leaders, whose Pentecostalism some tag as Prosperity ground zero, tried uprooting the theology, even resurrecting a 1980 position paper, but this has been ineffectively and self-destructively like using prescribed burning to eradicate kudzu that’s already taken over the yard.

This movement is, if anything, durable. Neither incredulity of its methods nor bad publicity, like the cadre of TBN televangelists under Senate investigation for their Robin Leach-voice-over-worthy lifestyles, affects its salability. After all, Osteen’s sunny view is that his message has “increased relevancy in a time of economic uncertainty.” His church Lakewood generated $76 million last year, the most in the United States. He says attendance is up since the economy tanked. Hard-on-their-luck audiences are more likely to buy in to the message’s fire-insurance appeal—the very “too big to fail” clout that attracted traders to AIG or Lehman Bros. until they failed them, too. For evangelicals, the culture wars trump self-policing; attempts to intellectually defrock Prosperity preachers come episodically from jailbird Jim Bakker, too-nice Rick Warren, or little-known leaders like Frederick Price of the National Baptist Convention, who compared Prosperity boosters to pimps. The signs do not point to a denouement.

Also, for today, Adbusters on human cyborgs:  “The human and the machine-human cannot peacefully co-exist.”

a review

I am undertaking in this brief essay to review John Mark Hicks’ “The Struggle for the Soul of Churches of Christ (1897-1907): Hoosiers, Volunteers and Longhorns,” published in the new memorial volume for Michael Casey titled And the WORD Became Flesh: Studies in History, Communication, and Scripture in Memory of Michael W. Casey (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009).  (The essay can be found here).  It is a well-done collection and I look forward to reading and profiting from a number of the essays included.

At the outset of this review I acknowledge that a typical review would address the book in its entirety.  I simply don’t have the time or the expertise in communications and rhetoric (the focus of almost half of the essays) to pull that off in an interesting or useful way.  Thus, I’ll limit myself to what I know.  After a discussion of the contents of “The Struggle,” I will turn to an assessment.

Contents of the Essay

Obviously, don’t rely on this summary.  Go read the essay in its entirety!  Anyway…

The group of conservative Disciples that gradually separated from the mainstream of the Stone-Campbell Movement in the late 19th century to become the Churches of Christ was never a monolithic group.  Hicks describes three camps within Churches of Christ at the turn of the twentieth century, arguing that they can be (somewhat loosely) identified by geography and (more definitely) identified by their differing theological emphases.

First, there is the Tennessee Tradition, represented editorially by the Gospel Advocate, edited during these years by David Lipscomb and E.G. Sewell.  Theologically, “Tennessee embraced dynamic divine action in the world as the in-breaking kingdom of God…[and] as the Tennessee Tradition stressed ‘divine dynamics’ rather than ‘human mechanics,’ in the language of the Nashville Bible School graduate R. C. Bell, this central ‘apocalyptic’ vision shaped how almost every theological concept was appropriated” (Hicks, 9).**

Second is the Texas Tradition, represented editorially by the Firm Foundation, edited during these years by Austin McGary, George Savage and N.L. Clark.  In contrast to the Tennessee Tradition, Texas “rejected any semblance of dynamic divine action other than a cognitive understanding of the Bible” (Hicks, 9).  Put another way, it “embraced human cognition and ability as the critical factor in humanity’s relationship with God” (ibid.).

Third is the Sommer Tradition (which might also be referred to, I suppose, as the Indiana Tradition, in keeping with the geographical descriptors given to the other traditions), represented editorially by the Octographic Review, edited during these years by Daniel Sommer and L.F. Bittle.  The Indiana tradition, according to Hicks, “stressed the non-institutional and anti-worldly character of [the] kingdom [of God]…[and it] stressed non-institutional ecclesiology and opposition to worldly wisdom, wealth and power as the centerpiece of its agenda” (Hicks, 9).  While Hicks sees some important differences between Indiana and Tennessee, he also sees some overlap, noting that on a number of issues Tennessee and Indiana are aligned against Texas.  One might quibble here with Hicks’ slightly anachronistic (and potentially misleading, see below) use of “non-institutional,” but his point is taken.

He begins by describing what these groups had in common, namely their agreement on the need to separate from the Christian Church and their shared hermeneutic (succinctly summarized by L.F. Bittle in 1904  as “an immediate return to New Testament faith and practice in which nothing shall be taught that has not the apostolic sanction, and no expedient allowed that is not necessary to carry out the Lord’s commands,” Hicks 4).

Then, noting a host of issues on which the traditions disagreed among themselves, he more closely examines four of those points of disagreement: rebaptism, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, “institutionalism,” and the Sunday School.  In brief, Tennessee and Indiana were allies against Texas in the debates over rebaptism and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Hicks, 9-14).  Indiana stood against Tennessee (and apparently Texas) in opposition to “institutionalism” (Hicks, 14-16).  The argument over the propriety and Scripturalness of the Sunday School arose within the Texas Tradition.  Indiana also opposed it, but on different grounds.  Tennessee, on the other hand, was not opposed to the Sunday School (Hicks, 16-18).

Hicks concludes by arguing that the Tennessee Tradition “was the most dominant influence among Churches of Christ” during the period that the essay discusses (Hicks, 18).  He then briefly sketches how, by mid-century, Texas had emerged victorious, with Tennessee relegated to heretical outer darkness and Indiana “lost in the expanse of the Stone-Campbell Movement and overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and influence of southern Churches of Christ” (Hicks, 19).  The essay ends somewhat discursively with a discussion of the transition from Texas to Tennessee made by Oklahoma preacher and writer K.C. Moser.

Assessment

I agree with Michael Casey, who is cited at the outset of the essay, as saying that the notion of multiple traditions in the development of 20th century Churches of Christ is “compelling.”  It explains alot, even if it — like any other hypothesis — is not perfect.  Hicks has been refining this paradigm for a number of years now, beginning with published essays on the life and work of K.C. Moser, whom he describes at the close of “The Struggle” as one of the few leaders in Churches of Christ to make a transition from a Texas perspective to a Tennessee one.  It was given further elucidation in Kingdom Come, written with Bobby Valentine, and in a number of blog posts.

All in all, the return on Hicks’ part to a doctrinal/theological understanding of the Disciples of Christ/Churches of Christ division is a good thing, I think.  It restores balance to the discussion.  While Hicks probably goes too far in saying that the sectional and sociological aspects of the division are “obvious” (Hicks, 4) — they certainly weren’t obvious before Ed Harrell pointed them out in the early 1960s; CofC historians were stuck in a relentlessly doctrinal, and hagiographical, approach to the question prior to that point — Harrell probably went too far in suggesting at one point that the doctrinal issues were interchangeable and ultimately didn’t matter.  Again, balance seems to be the best approach.

Still, though, there are kinks that need to be worked out in Hicks’ approach.  I’ll discuss one minor issue first and a more significant one following that.

At the close of his discussion of “institutionalism,” Hicks makes the following statement: “Though Sommer’s non-institutionalism was eventually shared by some within the [Firm Foundation] orbit such as Tant, it would be another forty years before many would take up Sommer’s aggressive stance toward institutionalism among Churches of Christ” (Hicks, 67, in the print edition of the essay; the online edition diverges at this point).   While it is certainly accurate to say that both Sommer and the first generation NI leaders recognized dangers in the institutional mindset, it must be pointed out that “Sommer’s aggressive stance” toward institutionalism was much more thoroughgoing than that of Cogdill, Tant, Hailey, Lewis or any of the other NI leaders of the late 1940s and 50s.  Put another way: The classic Sommer position on institutionalism is not the NI position of the 1950s. Sommer opposed the concept of church-affiliated colleges; NIs merely opposed congregational support of the colleges, not their very existence or the right of individuals to contribute to them.  For a discussion of this point, see William Wallace, “Bible Teaching in Schools vs. Institutionalism,” Truth Magazine 8.3 (December 1963): 13-16, and the citations from Sommer in Mike Willis, “J.T. Smith and the Re-Birth of Sommerism,” available online here.  It is true to say, and should be pointed out, that the compromise position that Sommer adopts in the 1930s is essentially that of the NI movement in the 1950s, but it is certainly not the position of Sommer ca. 1900.  (Full disclosure: my understanding of Sommer is based upon a close reading of his autobiography — I have read considerably less from the Octographic/American Christian Review.)

My second point has to do with the larger issue of how the NI movement — and all of the other subgroups  that lie outside the bounds of ‘mainstream’ Churches of Christ — is interpreted by ‘mainstream’ historians.  By this point, anyone familiar with the Tennessee-Texas paradigm articulated in this essay will understand the equation involved: Tennessee=good; Texas=bad.  Less certain is the position of Indiana in Hicks’ schema.  On many of the points discussed by Hicks (rebaptism, the Holy Spirit, the apocalyptic worldview), I find myself in agreement with him.  All of this makes the discussion of the NI movement in Hicks’ conclusion somewhat problematic.  In a comment on this blog, he issued the caveat that he was focused on the period 1897-1907.  Fair enough.  Even so, the entire NI movement of the 1950s (in what, then, must be a digression) is placed in the Texas column (it is a “Texas ‘Sommerism’” [Hicks, 19] to be precise), a value judgment that cries out for nuance and further explanation.

I would agree with his statement that the “anti-worldly stance [of the NI churches] was overshadowed by the mechanical nature [of] hermeneutical debates over legal technicalities.”  Simply put, the loudest voices in the NI movement and in the ‘mainstream’ (Roy Cogdill and Guy N. Woods) got the most attention and framed the debate during that period in terms of hermeneutics.  I would even go so far as to say that this was a tactical mistake on the part of the fathers of the NI movement in the 1950s to press the hermeneutical issues in the debate over the other issues.  To the degree that these loud voices won out in the battle to frame the issue, the NI movement could be described as a “Texas ‘Sommerism.’”  But this oversimplification ignores (or unfairly downplays) other signficant layers of the NI argument: the sociological argument, the apocalyptic/countercultural one — in short, the “Tennessee” elements of the NI position.  Granted, these arguments were being articulated by people who were not on the debating circuit in the way that Roy Cogdill was, but that shouldn’t negate the importance of their position.

Hicks, though, isn’t the first mainstream historian to do this.  Ed Harrell, in a review of Richard Hughes’ Reviving the Ancient Faith in Restoration Quarterly 38.1 (1996), points out that Hughes’ analysis of the NI movement likewise lacks this important nuance.  (I’m not necessarily blaming Hicks or Hughes for this — arguably, Hughes does a better job than any previous mainstream historian in his analysis of the NI movement.)  More nuance is generally needed in the work of every mainstream CofC historian and journalist who attempts to discuss the various Church of Christ subgroups or wings — whether NI, premillennial, mutual edification, one cup, non-class, or African-American.  Generations  of ingrown and often unrecognized prejudices show themselves repeatedly in their work.  One might even say that there is a kind of paternalism at work as well (even if unconsciously, which I think is the case most often).  To investigate NI churches or one cup churches is to go into the depths of darkest Africa, a primitive world where the people speak a different language and are concerned with matters that are alien to the ‘mainstream’ mind.  It can be a scary place for a stranger.

But having said that, I’ll get down from my soapbox now

One final observation and I’ll close.  The concept of separate traditions has wide application, I think.  It seems to me that in none of the major splits in the Stone-Campbell Movement have the dissenting minorities been monolithic.  This recognition alone on Hicks’ part makes this essay worthwhile reading.  I’m going to go a step further here and say that the truth that not everyone disagreed with the missionary society, organ and located minister for the same reasons works just as well in the NI controversy of the 1950s.  Not everyone disagreed with the marquee issues of the institutional split (e.g. the sponsoring church, congregational support of colleges and orphan homes, etc.) for the same reasons.  This is a truth that has been making itself felt in NI circles over the past twenty years — we’re learning that our mutual opposition to the collectivist practices and boosterism of the 1950s doesn’t mean that we are in agreement on every other issue, whether that be MDR, fellowship, even the nature of institutionalism.  This is still at the level of working hypothesis for me, but I think that the Tennessee-Texas paradigm can be applied to the theological history of the NI movement.

****

In sum, there is much of value in this piece and it serves very nicely as a concise introduction to Hicks’ Tennessee-Texas (and now also Indiana) paradigm, an interpretive device that must be reckoned with by every scholar of the history of Churches of Christ and of the Stone-Campbell Movement generally.

Happy reading!

_____________________________________

**Wherever possible, page numbers refer to the online version of the paper,which is available here, not to the page numbers in the book itself.  Any divergences from this will be noted.

wednesday

Bruce Metzger, via Scot McKnight: “Stay married.”

On “going aside,” via Michael Gilleland.

tuesday

I’ll be back in a couple of days with a more substantive post.  There is an almost complete review percolating in my drafts folder.  In the meantime, here’s a thought for the day:

Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word.

–Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate 3