Readers of Ecclesial Theology may be interested in a recent post by Methodist blogger Brad Bunn, "A Methodist Chats About Catholic Baptists: Sacramental Theology on the Rise." Brad makes connections (rightly, I think) between the broader interest in the "New Monasticism," the Baptist theological trajectory I explored in my essay "Catholic Baptists and the New Horizon of Tradition in Baptist Theology" (published initially as a chapter in New Horizons in Theology, ed. Terrence W. Tilley [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2005] and later in revised form as the first chapter in my book Towards Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision [Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2006]), and Brad's own pilgrimage as a Methodist convinced that God acts powerfully to make brothers and sisters in Christ out of strangers as they gather around the table in Eucharistic celebration. Here's a quote from Brad's blog post (Brad is in turn quoting from Re-Envisioning Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America):It is within the affirmations of such patristic traditions that Catholic Baptists are able to affirm the following in terms of sacramental theology: “We affirm baptism, preaching, and the Lord’s table as powerful signs that seal God’s faithfulness in Christ and express our response of awed gratitude rather than as mechanical rituals or mere symbols.” It is within those powerful signs that change is evoked. Methodists, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans should be waving on our Baptist brethren as they tentatively try to leave their sacramental closets and join the rest of us who hold to the notion that God does something to us in such a way that we're changed forever.
One sentence in Brad's post that I'd want to put a little differently is this: "Methodists, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans should be waving on our Baptist brethren as they tentatively try to leave their sacramental closets and join the rest of us who hold to the notion that God does something to us in such a way that we're changed forever." In my opinion, it's not a matter of catching up to our sisters and brothers in these other traditions--there are precedents in our own Baptist tradition that are rich in possibilities for retrieval and further development as Baptists embrace the whole church that has always belonged to Baptists.
ReplyDeleteI'm also not entirely satisfied with either "Catholic Baptist" or "Bapto-Catholic" as a descriptor of this trajectory in Baptist faith and practice, partly because the polemical use of those labels tends to tar-and-feather them with things that are really extraneous to this approach to articulating Baptist identity. I've taken to offering this maxim to explain my convictions about Baptist identity: "Baptists belong to the whole church, and the whole church belongs to Baptists."