Cooperative Baptists and trans-local Eucharists

CBF General Assembly 2008

A version of this post previously appeared on the ABPnews Blog.

Cooperative Baptists are Baptists who “do this” when they get together. They “do this” not only in their local churches but also in their assemblies and in the institutions of theological education with which they partner.

I’m talking about the fact that when Baptists who identify with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship gather in settings beyond their local churches, they often follow the Lord’s admonition to “do this in remembrance of me” by celebrating the Eucharist. That’s what I found myself contemplating last week after receiving the Eucharist at the 2012 CBF General Assembly—and at the associated gathering of Baptist Women in Ministry two days prior.

That’s something entirely different from my experience as a Southern Baptist from the “cradle roll” through seminary. To be sure, we observed the Lord’s Supper in our local churches (though rarely more frequently than four times a year). But to share in the Lord’s Supper in a worship service at an associational meeting, a state convention, a Southern Baptist Convention meeting, or a seminary chapel service would have been unthinkable—maybe even heretical. That was something only local churches did.

Cooperative Baptists have evidently not felt bound by that aspect of their heritage. It bears reflection that when those who now identify with the CBF have had the freedom to do something other than what they did as Southern Baptists, they have chosen to celebrate the Eucharist in gatherings that, while not baptizing communities, are communities of the baptized.

That Cooperative Baptists “do this” means at the very least that, despite a post-General Assembly Fort Worth Star-Telegram article that characterized the CBF as an organization that “has no doctrine,” they have at least one first-order practice that embodies a first-order conviction. (To be sure, there are others.) Cooperative Baptists seem to be convinced that it is important enough to “do this” that they rarely gather beyond their local churches without doing it.

This calls for some second-order theological reflection. What does the celebration of the Eucharist beyond the local church imply about the ecclesiology (a doctrine!) of Cooperative Baptists that distinguishes it from the ecclesiology of its parent Baptist communion?

The late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder wrote in an essay published in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Herald Press, 1994): “The ‘high’ views of ordered churchdom can legitimate the worship of a General Assembly or a study conference only by stretching the rules, for its rules do not foresee ad hoc ‘churches’; only thoroughgoing congregationalism fulfills its hopes and definities whenever and wherever it sees ‘church’ happen” (p. 236).

Do Cooperative Baptist thoroughgoing congregationalists likewise see ‘church’ happening in their General Assemblies? Their eucharistic practice points in that direction.

Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Neville Callam has insisted that global Baptists need to do serious theological reflection on the ecclesial status of the BWA. I wonder—might this be the time for us to do serious theological reflection on the ecclesial status of the CBF as well in light of our eucharistic practice?

If Cooperative Baptists believe there is sufficient ecclesiological warrant for them to “do this” when they gather, they are granting some degree of ecclesiality—characteristics of church—to their trans-local gatherings. And if that’s the case, might there be ecclesiological warrant for Cooperative Baptists to do as a gathered community of the baptized other things that reflect this ecclesiality? What might those other things be?

If we are enough of a eucharistic community that we believe we ought to “do this” when we gather beyond our local churches, we need to make sure that there is a corresponding practiced conviction in the local churches from which we gather. There’s something not quite right locally when, if I belonged to a congregation that celebrated communion only four times a year, I would receive the Eucharist more times at the national and state General Assemblies of the CBF, the national and state gatherings of Baptist Women in Ministry, and occasional divinity school chapel services combined than I would in such a local Baptist congregation.

Celebration of the Eucharist beyond the local church is already a distinguishing practice of Cooperative Baptists that sets them apart from some other sorts of Baptists. Let’s give this fact, its implications for the ecclesial status of the CBF, and its relation to the practices of our local congregations the theological reflection these matters deserve.


A version of this post previously appeared on the ABPnews Blog.

Baptists who "do this"

My post "Baptists who 'do this'" appears today on the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog (click on hyperlinked title). I'll be able to post the full text here on Ecclesial Theology later this week. In the meantime, here's a snippet from the opening:


Cooperative Baptists are Baptists who “do this” when they get together. They “do this” not only in their local churches but also in their assemblies and in the institutions of theological education with which they partner....That’s something entirely different from my experience as a Southern Baptist from the “cradle roll” through seminary.... (read the full post on ABPnews Blog)

The formation and reception of believer-theologians

Karl Barth

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

But on the other hand….

My college philosophy professor Wallace Roark taught me that cultivating the capacity to “think on the other hand”—to Think Like an Octopus—is the key to becoming a good thinker.

“But on the other hand” is also the necessary segue from my previous ABPnews Blog post on “The theologian-hood of all believers,” which concluded with this paragraph:

That sort of life together happens most fully when congregations promote and embrace the theologian-hood of all believers. Churches do that by forming all believers in the convictions and practices of Christian faithfulness they need if they are to fulfill their vocation as the church’s theologians, and churches do that by being willing to listen to the voices of all believers whenever they speak as the church’s theologians.

It is true that, as Karl Barth observed, “In the Church there really are no non-theologians.”

But on the other hand, believer-theologians must be formed. Birth in the baptismal waters does not automatically confer upon a believer the status of doctor ecclesiae, “teacher of the church.” Believer-theologians must be formed, and their formation is the responsibility of the church in which Christ is present as Teacher.

It is true that Matthew 13:51-52 in context compares disciples to theological teachers.

But on the other hand, they are like scribes “trained for the kingdom of heaven” through a process of rabbinical-style traditioning by Jesus that eventually, but not immediately, prepares them for their commissioning as authoritative teachers by the end of the Gospel of Matthew.

It is true that, as the framers of the “Re-envisioning Baptist Identity” statement trust, “When all exercise their gifts and callings, when every voice is heard and weighed, when no one is silenced or privileged, the Spirit leads communities to read wisely and to practice faithfully the direction of the gospel.”

But on the other hand, the voices of believer-theologians must be received with discernment, weighed in accordance with their formation and their particular role in the church.

Barth wrote of the ecclesial formation of believer-theologians in a section on “Authority under the Word” in his Church Dogmatics:

But it is obvious that before I myself make a confession I must myself have heard the confession of the Church, i.e., the confession of the rest of the Church. In my hearing and receiving of the Word of God I cannot separate myself from the Church to which it is addressed. I cannot thrust myself into the debate about a right faith which goes on in the Church without first having listened….If I am to confess my faith generally with the whole Church and in that confession be certain that my faith is the right faith, then I must begin with the community of faith and therefore hear the Church’s confession of faith as it comes to me from other members of the Church. And for that very reason I recognise an authority, a superiority in the Church: namely, that the confession of others who were before me in the Church and are beside me in the Church is superior to my confession if this really is an accounting and responding in relation to my hearing and receiving of the Word of God, if it really is my confession as that of a member of the body of Christ (CD I/2, p. 589).

All members of the community have voices that must be heard and not silenced, but not all members have first fully heard the confession of those who are before them and beside them in the church. Someone might regard the distinctively Christian doctrine of God as Trinity, for example, as optional or maybe even as necessarily rejected because it supposedly reflects the coercive imposition of arbitrary ecclesial authority backed by imperial power. But such a voice has not been fully formed by the church’s Trinitarian confession, and his or her voice must be weighed accordingly.

This is the point at which there is a proper distinction between the theologian-hood of all believers and the role of those who have distinctive vocations as the church’s theologians: pastors, whose charge includes serving as theologians-in-residence for the congregations they serve by “watching over” the integrity of their telling of the Christian story, and theological educators, whose charge includes the theological formation of these pastors.

The voices of those who have distinctive vocations as the church’s theologians are not infallible. Indeed, they can lead astray (as they sometimes have). But they carry distinctive weight, and must be weighed accordingly.

But on the other hand, doesn’t allowing for the possibility that some voices may be weightier than others raise the troubling question of who ultimately decides what represents integrity in the telling of the Christian story?

My forthcoming book on the Baptist vision and the ecumenical future includes a chapter on “magisterium,” which has to do with the configuration of teaching authority in the church. It is not only the Catholic Church that has magisterium. All churches, including Baptist ones, depend upon magisterium for the integrity of their telling of the Christian story.

I’m tempted to flesh out that assertion in my next ABPnews Blog post. But on the other hand, I think I’ll leave the explanation of that one to the book.

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

The formation and reception of believer-theologians

Today my blog post "The formation and reception of believer-theologians" appeared on the ABPnews Blog published by Associated Baptist Press (click on hyperlinked title). I'll be able to post the full text here on Ecclesial Theology later this week; in the meantime, here's a snippet:

But on the other hand….

My college philosophy professor Wallace Roark taught me that cultivating the capacity to “think on the other hand”—to Think Like an Octopus—is the key to becoming a good thinker.

“But on the other hand” is also the necessary segue from my previous ABPnews Blog post on “The Theologian-hood of all believers,” which concluded with this paragraph:

That sort of life together happens most fully when congregations promote and embrace the theologian-hood of all believers. Churches do that by forming all believers in the convictions and practices of Christian faithfulness they need if they are to fulfill their vocation as the church’s theologians, and churches do that by being willing to listen to the voices of all believers whenever they speak as the church’s theologians.

It is true that, as Karl Barth observed, “In the Church there really are no non-theologians.”

But on the other hand.... (read the rest of the blog post on the ABPnews Blog).

Baptists, history, and theology

W. Glenn Jonas, Jr.,
Nurturing the Vision

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in the annual conference of the Baptist History and Heritage Society held at First Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina in conjunction with the celebration of the 200th anniversary of that congregation's founding. This year's theme (and primary reason for my participation) was "Baptists and Theology."

Three plenary speakers addressed the conference theme and location. W. Glenn Jonas, Jr., Charles B. Howard Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, drew on research for his book Nurturing the Vision: First Baptist Church, Raleigh , 1812-2012 (Mercer University Press, 2012) in his opening presentation "Nurturing the Vision: Highlights from the History of a 200-Year-Old Baptist Church in Raleigh." Bill Leonard, Dunn Chair of Baptist Studies at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, delivered the address "Conviction and Contradiction: Reassessing Theological Formation in Baptist Identity," and Fisher Humphreys, retired Professor of Divinity at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, presented the concluding address "To Go Forward We Must Go Back: Baptist Theology Since 1950."

The interest of veteran and emerging Baptist historians and theologians in the conference theme was evident in the response to an open call for papers, which yielded a breakout session program of twenty-four papers presented in concurrent sessions. I was able to hear the following papers: "East, West, and Baptist: Finding the Body of Christ at the Lord's Supper" by Welford Orrock of Second Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia; "Baptists and Sacramentalism: Engaging Recent Work in Baptist Sacramental Theology" By Tracey Stout of Bluefield College in Bluefield, Virginia; "Discovering and Debating the True Church: The Ecclesiology of Hanserd Knollys in 1645" by Bill Pitts of Baylor University in Waco, Texas; "A Cure for the Cankering Error" by Curtis Freeman of Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina; "Baptist Theology: Is There Another Way?" by Jay Smith of Yellowstone Theological Institute in Bozeman, Montana; and "Locating Baptist Dogmatics: Defining and Defending Identity in the Absence of a Normative Theology" by Philip Thompson of Sioux Falls Seminary in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I presented a paper on "Baptist Theology in Dialogue: Reports of International Bilateral Conversations with Baptist World Alliance Participation as Expressions of Baptist Constructive Theology," which reflected a portion of a chapter in my forthcoming book tentatively titled The Baptist Vision and the Ecumenical Future: Radicially Biblical, Radically Catholic, Relentlessly Orthodox under contract with Baylor University Press.

I'm grateful to the Baptist History and Heritage Society for providing this opportunity for Baptist historians and Baptist theologians to have a mutually enriching dialogue regarding our common object of academic inquiry--the Baptist tradition.

The theologian-hood of all believers

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

Karl Barth (1886-1968), the most significant theologian of the twentieth century, wasn’t a Baptist (he was Swiss Reformed). Yet over the past sixty years Barth has arguably had at least as much influence on theologically-educated Baptists as any Baptist theologian during the same period.

Barth’s thought suggested a third way beyond fundamentalism and liberalism that provided a theological haven for many Baptist theologians and their students during the second half of the twentieth century. Late in his career Barth lent weighty ecumenical support to the Baptist emphasis on believer’s baptism as a disciple-making practice, endorsing its normativity from within a tradition that also baptizes infants.

A less well-known connection between Barth and the Baptist vision is a parallel between Baptist ways of emphasizing the priesthood of all believers and Barth’s emphasis on the responsibility of all believers for the church’s theology. Barth put it this way in a lecture delivered to the Free Protestant Theological Faculty in Paris in 1934:

[T]heology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church….But the problem of theology…is set before the whole Church. In the Church there are really no non-theologians. The concept “layman” is one of the worst concepts in religious terminology, a concept that should be eliminated from the Christian vocabulary. So, the [non*]-professors and the [non*]-pastors are co-responsible to see to it that the theology of the professors and pastors be a good one and not a bad one (Karl Barth, God in Action, trans. E. G. Homrighausen and Karl J. Ernst [T. & T. Clark, 1936], pp. 56-57).

We might call Barth’s concept the “theologian-hood of all believers.” Barth insisted that all Christians are together responsible for the church’s task of giving a wholesome account of its convictions regarding God and that with which God is in relationship—the convictions that the church must teach in order to bring its life together ever more fully under the rule of Christ.

The Gospel of Matthew hints at something like the theologian-hood of all believers. It portrays the disciples as theological teachers-in-training who progressively grow in their understanding of Jesus’ teaching until at the conclusion of the Gospel they too are commissioned as teachers. Matthew is structured around five teaching discourses, the middle of which is the series of “parables of the kingdom of heaven” in chapter 13. At their conclusion Jesus asks the disciples,

“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:51-52 NRSV).

Here Jesus compares one of the tasks of the disciple to the role of a scribe. In first-century Judaism, a scribe was not merely a copyist but a specialist in the application of the law—“what is old”—to the changed circumstances of contemporary Jewish life centuries after the writing of the Hebrew Scriptures—“what is new.” They were the theologians of Jesus’ day. If the “Great Commission” at the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel applies to all believers, then so does the parable of the scribe (theologian) trained for the kingdom of heaven. As Barth insisted, “In the Church there are really no non-theologians.”

The theologian-hood of all believers is embodied in what British Baptists call “church meeting.” Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes of Oxford University explains what it means for the church meeting to seek together the mind of Christ:

Upon the whole people in covenant there lies the responsibility of finding a common mind, of coming to an agreement about the way of Christ for them in life, worship and mission. But they cannot do so unless they use the resources that God has given them (Paul S. Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology [Paternoster, 2003], p. 86).

The resources that God has given the church for discerning the way of Christ include the theologians of the church—the theologians that are all believers as well as those who are pastors and professors of theology.

In 1997 a group of Baptist theologians in the United States affirmed the theologian-hood of all believers in relation to the church’s theological task of bringing out of the Scriptures “what is new and what is old”:

We affirm Bible Study in reading communities....We thus affirm an open and orderly process whereby faithful communities deliberate together over the Scriptures with sisters and brothers of the faith, excluding no light from any source. When all exercise their gifts and callings, when every voice is heard and weighed, when no one is silenced or privileged, the Spirit leads communities to read wisely and to practice faithfully the direction of the gospel (“Re-envisioning Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America,” § 1).

That sort of life together happens most fully when congregations promote and embrace the theologian-hood of all believers. Churches do that by forming all believers in the convictions and practices of Christian faithfulness they need if they are to fulfill their vocation as the church’s theologians, and churches do that by being willing to listen to the voices of all believers whenever they speak as the church’s theologians.

*Nerd note: The English translation of the German text of Barth’s lecture quoted above has it completely wrong at the points noted by asterisks; I’ve supplied my own translation in brackets (Barth wrote and published the lecture originally in German but delivered it in French). The translation by Homrighausen and Ernst reads [original German inserted in brackets], “So, the false professors [Nicht-Professoren] and the false pastors [Nicht-Pfarrer] are co-responsible to see to it that the theology of the professors and pastors be a good one and not a bad one.” But since two sentences before Barth wrote, “In the Church there are really no non-theologians [Nicht-Theologen],” it’s clear that Nicht-Professoren and Nicht-Pfarrer must be “non-professors” and “non-pastors.” If it weren’t for the 1936 publication date of the English translation by Homrighausen and Ernst, I’d have assumed that they resorted to a free web-based auto-translator. Let those who rely on translations beware! (For the truly nerdy: Barth’s lectures in Paris were originally published as Karl Barth, Offenbarung, Kirche, Theologie [Theologische Existenz Heute, no. 9; Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1934; the material quoted above is from page 43.)

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

Introducing the ABPnews Blog

This week Associated Baptist Press launched the ABPnews Blog, introducing it with this initial post on June 4:

ABP News has added a new blogs section to further serve its readers.

Beginning today, ABP will publish one or more blogs daily, Monday through Friday, submitted by a variety of lay and ordained writers.

Topics will be as varied as the contributors themselves, ranging from social issues and spiritual formation to media and arts reviews, technology and church, politics and theology.

I've been invited to contribute occasional posts on theology, so now and then I'll post links here to my ABPnews Blog posts, beginning with today's post on "The theologian-hood of all believers." According to this arrangement, ABP will retain exclusive rights to posts for 48 hours, after which authors may post them on their own sites with notation that it was originally published on the ABPnews Blog and a link back to the original post. The full text of "The theologian-hood of all believers" accordingly will appear here as well in a couple of days.

On inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and grassroots engagement

Associated Baptist Press has published a story on "The New Face of Interfaith Dialogue" in which I'm quoted. The article is primarily about Christian participation in inter-religious dialogue, but after introducing the proper distinction between that endeavor and ecumenical dialogue as an intra-Christian task, the story turns to the current challenges faced by the ecumenical movement and the need for attention to the grassroots in both interfaith and ecumenical relations. A portion of the middle section of the article follows:

Meanwhile, the progress being made in interfaith work is slowly spilling over into ecumenical outreach, which experts say is a more difficult field. “The closer you get in the family, the more the temperature goes up in the room,” said Chaffee, who’s also on the board of the North American Interfaith Network.

Theologian: Emphasize the grassroots

Baptist theologian and ecumenism advocate Steven Harmon said he’s seen that phenomenon first-hand.

“Just about every observer thinks we are at something of an impasse,” said Harmon, adjunct professor of Christian theology at Gardner-Webb University. “It does not have the kind of excitement or urgency there was a few decades ago.”

Harmon, who last fall was on a Baptist World Alliance team that held exploratory talks with leaders of the Orthodox Church, said to be successful both movements must have more than symbolic and theological meanings.

“Whether it’s ecumenical or interfaith, ultimately there needs to be more emphasis on what happens on the grassroots level,” he said.

As Chaffee put it: “As soon as you start making friends, it changes everything.”

Read the full story.

Incarnational Spirituality

I'm posting from a retreat center in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains, where I'm sharing in the leadership of a retreat for ten Master of Divinity students at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity with a focus on "Incarnational Spirituality." In three plenary lectures and associated small group dialogue sessions, I'm advancing an eightfold thesis regarding the nature of early Christian spirituality (ca. A.D. 100-500) and its retrieval in the service of the church's task of spiritual formation today--namely, early Christian spirituality was:

• A spirituality for everyone (in the sense of the catechetical/liturgical spirituality in which all Christians were formed rather than a monastic spirituality for spiritual elites, though the two expressions of early Christian spirituality are interrelated)
• A doctrinal spirituality
• An embodied spirituality
• A sacramental spirituality
• A Scripture-steeped spirituality
• A Psalter-shaped spirituality
• A narrative spirituality
• A cruciform spirituality

These eight dimensions of early Christian spirituality belonged to its essence and are essential to a vital spirituality today.

Half the students participating in the retreat will be continuing in a Readings in Spiritual Classics course with me during the remainder of the summer term. In that course students will apply the thesis outlined above to their reading of selected primary texts that include the Catechetical Lectures and Mystagogical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom's homilies on wealth and poverty and on marriage and family life, and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers).