Baptists and the saints

Icon of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some previous posts on Ecclesial Theology (especially this one) have encouraged Baptists to cultivate a more intentional practice of commemorating the lives of exemplary Christians who might help us learn what it means to embody the Christian life faithfully. Andy Goodliff, pastor of Belle Vue Baptist Church in Southchurch, Southend on Sea, Essex, U.K., announced today on his blog that the May 2013 issue of the Journal of European Baptist Studies includes an article by Goodliff exploring the possibility of creating a Baptist sanctoral (a calendar of feast days for saints). Goodliff also calls attention to a forthcoming Baylor University Press book by Paul Fiddes, Brian Haymes and Richard Kidd on the theme of Baptists and the communion of saints. I'm encouraged to know of the article and forthcoming book, and I'm looking forward to reading both of them.

Related posts:

More on Baptist commemoration of the saints

Towards a Baptist commemoration of the saints

The Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin

A Baptist commemoration of the saints

The Pilgrim Church and the Ecumenical Future--lecture texts now online

Last month I delivered lectures on the theme "The Pilgrim Church and the Ecumenical Future" as the 2013 Robert K. Campbell Memorial Lectures on Christian Unity sponsored by the Lehigh County Conference of Churches and held on the campus of DeSales University near Allentown, Pennsylvania. The texts of these lectures are now available online (click on hyperlinked text). Lecture 1 is "A Pilgrim Church Theology, Discovered through Dialogue," and Lecture 2 is "Embodying the Story of Jesus: The Pilgrim Identity of the Body of Christ." The Campbell Lectures Archive on the Lehigh County Conference of Churches site includes texts of some of the other lectures delivered since 2001, though the lectures have been held annually since 1993.

Baptists and liturgy, women, popes, and monasticism

The current issue of the magazine Baptist World published by the Baptist World Alliance (vol. 60, no. 2 [April-June 2013]) includes several articles related to themes of interest to readers of Ecclesial Theology--in particular, articles on "The Importance of a Fixed Liturgy" (pp. 8 and 10-11), a BWA-sponsored forum on violence against women held in conjunction with a session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (p. 26), women serving in leadership roles in national and international denominational life (p. 27), BWA responses to the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis (p. 28), and a notice of a book by Baptist historian Paul Dekar on the Community of the Transfiguration, a monastic community in Australia connected with the Baptist Union of Victoria (p. 28). Yes, there are Baptist monks, and nuns, too--in addition to the Community of the Transfiguration, the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia (in Eastern Europe) has a women's monastic order, the Order of St. Nino, along with the New Desert Brothers order for men.

Trinitarian Soundings on the Triduum

Many thanks to Molly T. Marshall, President and Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kansas, for the kind mention of my musings on the theological significance of Holy Saturday posted here on Ecclesial Theology in her April 1 post titled "Resting Well" on her blog Trinitarian Soundings.

Baptist World Alliance General Secretary on Baptists and patristic biblical interpretation

The April 2013 issue of the Baptist World Alliance electronic publication BWA Connect includes a column by Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Neville Callam in which he reflects on the Baptist tendency to ignore the tradition of biblical interpretation when interpreting the Bible, notes a Baptist project dedicated to the recovery of the tradition of Baptist biblical interpretation, and commends the extension of this tradition beyond Baptist beginnings to include patristic biblical interpretation. Callam points to a new resource published by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches that provides access to the riches of patristic interpretation of the four Gospels as an example of how the earliest interpretations of Scripture after the New Testament serve as important resources for communities that seek to interpret and perform Scripture today. Since I devoted a chapter of my book Towards Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision to how Baptists might make use of patristic biblical interpretation in their contemporary readings of Scripture, I was gratified to see the BWA General Secretary commend this practice. Callam's BWA Connect column appears below.

Finding More Light and Truth

By Neville Callam  

Neville Callam

Some Baptists have claimed to be "a people of the book." Often, this self-designation is meant to highlight the value we place on the Bible. In We Baptists, published by the BWA in 1999, the priority Baptists assign to the Bible is reflected in a number of ways. Take the following affirmation, for example:

Baptists believe that the Bible is both the true record of God's revelation to our world and the supreme written guide for our faith and practice today. Because it leads us to Jesus Christ the living Word, we speak of it as "the Word of God," and believe it was inspired by God's Spirit. [Baptists regard the Bible as] totally sufficient; that is, all teaching must be in harmony with the Scriptures, and all teaching must be tested by the Scriptures only.

What spurred me to consider again the disputable tag "a people of the book" was a fresh look at one of the many books published in 2009 when Baptists were marking their quadricentennial, the 400th anniversary of Baptist witness. In the introduction to The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2009), the editors make a bold claim that should be taken seriously. This is what they say:

Baptists for the most part have shown little interest in recovering Baptist interpretation of Scripture. There are several reasons for this. For one, Baptists have historically spent more time debating the authority of Scripture than engaged in dialogue about what the Bible says, much less what our forebears said it says. For another, Baptists belong to a larger movement of Christians committed to restoring the New Testament church, an endeavor that leaves little room for sustained interest in the intervening and subsequent history of biblical interpretation.

If we believe the accusation is valid -- and it seems that way to me -- we may acknowledge that our churches need to pay more attention to the massive literary output of those who are committed to recovering interpretations of the biblical text, not least those who gave committed service as interpreters of the Bible over the past four centuries of Baptist history -- which is what the Baylor text attempts to do with respect to the Acts of the Apostles. Reading the book, we may be surprised at the wide diversity of hermeneutical approaches used by Baptists and the different conclusions they have drawn from reading a particular section of the Bible.

If we wish to extend this quest beyond Baptist boundaries and go back to the first few centuries of the church's life, much exists to aid this quest. See, for example, a brief and very accessible book, Reading the Gospels with the Early Church: A Guide (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2013), prepared by Tamara Grdzelidze and her colleagues in the Faith and Order movement of the World Council of Churches. In six short sections, passages from the New Testament are accompanied by brief comments offered respectively by John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose of Milan, Ephrem the Syrian, Origen, Pseudo-Macarius and Hippolytus. In each section, the biblical text and commentary are followed by a brief note about the commentators, recommendations for group work and a prayer.

This new guidebook reflects how, during the first 450 years of the church's life, significant biblical interpreters shared the conviction that the biblical text is "a revelation of the truth through the Holy Spirit in the Church." This does not mean, however, that the literary output of these interpreters did not manifest diversity and creativity resulting partly from the interpretive methods employed. While taking the Bible seriously, the interpreters were free to discover horizons of meaning and to develop perspectives on the text of Scripture that provided a rich tapestry that is as diverse as it is enriching.

Perhaps the ancient interpreters of the New Testament model for us how to agree on the essential biblical message while setting forth distinct, though not inconsistent, understandings of particular texts of Scripture. We should be able to do this without having to bear the pejorative labels some contemporary believers love to use to discredit others.

We should reasonably expect that Christians reading the Bible in the context of their communities of faith will continue to search for, and find, "more light and truth" from God's Word!

2013 Baptist World Alliance

Another word on the "feast day" of Franz Bibfeldt

Lest there be any confusion: yesterday's post on the "feast day" of Franz Bibfeldt, coming as it did on April 1, was an April Fool's joke, in continuity with many such April 1 Bibfeldt observances connected with the University of Chicago Divinity School, which one can read about here and here.

I first discovered the Bibfeldt tradition when I happened across a copy of the faux Festschrift for Bibfeldt, The Unrelieved Paradox: Studies in the Theology of Franz Bibfeldt, ed. Martin E. Marty and Jerald C. Brauer (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1994) in a Borders bookstore in Fort Worth, Texas. I found myself laughing aloud in the aisle several times and realized that I likely couldn't begin to explain to anyone else in the store why I found it so hilariously funny. (For what it's worth, my favorite title in the Bibfeldt bibliography is Vielleicht?, Bibfeldt's response to Karl Barth's Nein! to Emil Brunner on the possibility of natural theology, with his book Either/Or and/or Both/And a close second.)

Every now and then when one of my theology class sessions coincided with April 1, I would give in advance of that class meeting an off-the-syllabus assignment asking my students to do some independent research to see what they could learn about a theologian named Franz Bibfeldt, then debrief their findings during the April 1 session. A few students caught the joke before I revealed it.

The Unrelieved Paradox is now available in an "18th (or Perhaps 19th) Anniversary Revised Edition."

For the feast day of Franz Bibfeldt

Today is celebrated as the feast day of theologian Franz Bibfeldt on the calendars of some Western churches, especially in the environs of Chicago, Illinois in the U.S.A. I remember fondly my delightful discovery of the thought of this theologian previously unknown to me when I stumbled across the Festschrift published in his honor in a Borders bookstore in Fort Worth, Texas sometime in the mid-1990s. In honor of Bibfeldt's feast day and in gratitude for his contributions to the development of Christian theology, I'm posting the collect "Of a Theologian and Teacher" from the Book of Common Prayer:

O God, by your Holy Spirit you give to some the word of wisdom, to others the word of knowledge, and to others the word of faith: We praise your Name for the gifts of grace manifested in your servant Franz, and we pray that your Church may never be destitute of such gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Related Post: Another word of the "feast day" of Franz Bibfeldt

Holy Saturday is one of the "Three Days," too

John Chrysostom (center) in

an icon of "The Three Holy

Hierarchs" given to me by

former student Drew Phillips

Holy Saturday is arguably the most neglected day of the Triduum, the "Three Days" of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday in the Christian calendar. On this Holy Saturday I found myself musing about what we ought to think about in giving attention to this day in public worship (may there be more Holy Saturday services!) and in private devotion. Here are some of these musings.

Today is the day of God's solidarity in Christ with the boundary between earthly life and the life everlasting. Today is the day on which Christ, the prototypical human, offers the paradigm of the experience of being "absent from the body" but "present with the Lord" in the boundary between death and resurrected life. Today is the day on which it seems that evil continues to have its usual upper hand in its violent exercise of power in the present state of things, but in fact in the cosmic drama disclosed in Christ its ultimate undoing has already begun.

The "Catechetical Sermon" of St. John Chrysostom (344-407) is read as part of the liturgy of the Paschal Vigil in Eastern Orthodox churches. In it Chrysostom says this about the cosmic drama of Holy Saturday:

Let no one fear death, for the Savior's death has set us free. He who was held prisoner by death has annihilated it. By descending into death, he made death captive. He angered it when it tasted of his flesh. Isaiah saw this, and he cried: 'Death was angered when it encountered you in the lower regions.' It was angered, for it was defeated. It was angered, for it was mocked. It was angered, for it was abolished. It was angered, for it was overthrown. It was angered, for it was bound in chains. It received a body and it met God face to face. It took earth and encountered heaven. It took that which is seen and fell upon the unseen.
-- in For All the Saints: A Prayer Book For and By the Church, compiled and edited by Frederick J. Schumacher with Dorothy A. Zelenko, vol. 1, Year 1: Advent to the Day of Pentecost (Delhi, New York: American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, 1994), p. 981

While Good Friday is about the cross seen by all and Easter Sunday is about the empty tomb seen by a few, Holy Saturday is about the unseen in the seen reality of death. There's more than meets the eye! May it be so in today's observance of Holy Saturday.

A Latin American Baptist on Pope Francis, Catholic-Evangelical relations

Harold Segura

Many readers of Ecclesial Theology will be interested in the initial reactions to the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis posted by Harold Segura, a Baptist minister and theological educator from Columbia who currently serves as Regional Director for Church Relations and Christianity Identity for World Vision--Latin America and the Caribbean. Segura participated in a "pre-conversation" conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina in December 2001 that paved the way for the second series of international theological conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church held 2006-2010 (the official report from which will be published this summer). During the 2001 Buenos Aires meeting Segura presented a paper offering Baptist responses to a paper presented by Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, on "The Concept of Communio as a Framework Within Which to Discuss Issues of Concern."

Also of interest in these connections is a blog journal posted by Segura while he served as a Baptist observer at the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean in Aparecida, Brazil in May 2007. Segura's journal postings were published  in book form as Crónicas de Aparecida: Un pastor evangélico en la Quinta Conferencia general del Episcopado Latinoamericano y del Caribe by (Ediciones Kairós, 2008). John L. Allen, Jr. published an interview with Segura in the National Catholic Reporter regarding his experiences observing the bishops' conference in Aparecida and his reflections on implications for ecumenical relations in Latin America.

Pope Francis and the Baptists

This post was originally published on the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog.

I don’t think a day has passed since March 13 without a student, colleague, fellow church member, family member, or friend asking what my perspective is on the election of Pope Francis, especially since they know that I was a member of the Baptist World Alliance delegation to our recent five-year dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church and have otherwise written on ecumenical themes. These conversations have helped me have a better idea of what it is that I think!

Much of what I think would merely echo perspectives that have already been widely aired in the media. Here I’ll restrict myself to my initial thoughts regarding what the pontificate of Pope Francis may mean for Baptists.

While I don’t think the pontificate of Benedict XVI should be regarded negatively where Baptist-Catholic relations are concerned, I think Baptists have good reason to be encouraged by the election of Pope Francis.

One encouraging sign is the admiration Pope Francis seems to have for Walter Cardinal Kasper, who played a key role in making possible and encouraging the second series of conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church from 2006 through 2010, the report of which will be officially published this summer. In his first public “Angelus” address in St. Peter’s Square on March 17, Pope Francis said this:

In the past few days I have been reading a book by a Cardinal — Cardinal Kasper, a clever theologian, a good theologian — on mercy. And that book did me a lot of good, but do not think I am promoting my cardinals’ books! Not at all! Yet it has done me so much good, so much good... Cardinal Kasper said that feeling mercy, that this word changes everything. This is the best thing we can feel: it changes the world. A little mercy makes the world less cold and more just. We need to understand properly this mercy of God, this merciful Father who is so patient....

Cardinal Kasper was President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in the years before and during our conversations. When the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the controversial document Dominus Iesus  in 2000 that seemed to say (though there are other more nuanced ways of reading it) that many non-Catholic churches including Baptist churches should not be really regarded as churches, Cardinal Kasper worked behind the scenes to repair the damage. One thing he did toward that end was to encourage the global leadership of the BWA to respond positively to the invitation for dialogue and to promote its desirability within the Vatican. While having an audience with Pope Benedict XVI was certainly a highlight of our five-year series of conversations, in many ways my most cherished memories of the dialogue will remain the lunch in 2007 that we had with Cardinal Kasper and the afternoon dialogue session in 2009 in which he spoke to us at length about his perspectives on ecclesiology and ecumenical relations and then responded at length to our questions. I am greatly encouraged to know of Pope Francis’ theological admiration for this influential theological friend of Baptists within the leadership of the Catholic Church.

Another reason for Baptists to be optimistic about this papacy is the warm and open relationship Pope Francis seems to have had with evangelicals in Argentina. Baptist-Catholic tensions in Latin America belong to a larger pattern of Evangelical-Catholic tensions there and were evident in some opposition among Latin American Baptists to approval of the report of the first series of conversations between the BWA and the Catholic Church (1984-1988) and in some initial resistance to the prospect of a second series of conversations. Francis may succeed in alleviating some of those tensions, and that can be a good thing for Baptists.

Many Baptists may be hoping that Pope Francis may be able to reform the Catholic Church in certain directions. The fact that Pope Francis belongs to the Jesuit order may be encouraging to those who hope for certain new developments, for historically the Jesuits have sometimes been on the outs with the Vatican and have themselves tended to be critical of the Curia.

Yet Baptists should expect the pope to be Catholic, which means that all the changes they might want to see happen within the Catholic Church may not come about during this papacy. But the history of the Catholic Church is one in which change has happened incrementally and symbolically, and there are good reasons to hope for incremental and symbolic changes during the pontificate of Pope Francis.

This post was originally published on the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog.