Common Roots: The Original Call to an Ancient-Future Faith
By Robert E. Webber and David Neff
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Robert E. Webber
Robert Webber (1933 - 2007) was the William R. and Geraldyn B. Myers professor of ministry at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois, and professor of theology emeritus at Wheaton College. A theologian known for his work on worship and the early church, Webber was founder and president of the Institute for Worship Studies, Orange Park, Florida.
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Common Roots - Robert E. Webber
ZONDERVAN
Common Roots: The Original Call to an Ancient-Future Faith
Copyright © 1978 by Robert E. Webber
Copyright © 2009 by Joanne Webber
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.
ePub Edition August 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-32255-9
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Webber, Robert.
Common roots: the original call to an ancient-future faith / Robert E. Webber. — [Rev. ed.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-310-29185-5 (softcover)
1. Evangelicalism. I. Title.
BR1640.W4 2009
270.8'2 — dc22 2009018437
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked TLB are taken from The Living Bible, copyright© 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
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Interior design by Beth Shagene
FOREWORD
About a year before Zondervan first published Common Roots, Robert Webber and eight friends hosted a conference at a picturesque monastic retreat center about ten minutes’ drive from Wheaton College, where Webber was associate professor of theology.
About forty-five individuals attended the working conference from May 1 to 3, 1977. From their deliberations came the Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals, a document included as an appendix to the original printing of Common Roots.
Although the Chicago Call had many drafters and refiners and Common Roots is the intensely personal work of Robert Webber, the concerns of the Call mirror the themes of this book. Most of those who worked with Webber on the Call and its subsequent book-length expansion into The Orthodox Evangelicals¹ remained ardently evangelical, laboring within evangelicalism for a renewed commitment to the historic roots of evangelical religion. A few notables eventually left the evangelical fold for Roman Catholicism (e.g., Thomas Howard) or Eastern Orthodoxy (e.g., Peter Gillquist). Robert Webber, however, was determined to stay and be an agent for change.
Change agents are not always welcomed. A friend of mine, recently hired by a Chicago corporation to be a change agent, was laid off after a few months. They didn’t really want a change agent,
she quipped. "They wanted me to be more of a nudge agent, I think."
Bob Webber was never a nudge agent. He was a change agent. He was a provocateur.
Evangelicals did not initially welcome the Chicago Call. A news item in the June 3, 1977, issue of Christianity Today used dismissive language. The document’s authors were an ad hoc group of … comparatively unknown Christians … more or less identified with evangelical institutions or views.
Rather than acknowledge the evangelical difficulties the document addressed, the writer resorted to calling its subject matter areas of alleged reductionism.
The document proposed a watered down
version of sacramentalism and was designed to sidestep
evangelical disputes on inerrancy. The newswriter, who had participated in the Chicago Call retreat and was among the first signatories, was nevertheless disappointed in the document.
That was apparently not the case with Christianity Today’s editor, Harold Lindsell. The next issue of the journalistic beacon of evangelicalism took the Chicago Call with far greater seriousness. An editor’s note bearing Lindsell’s signature appeared on the magazine’s table of contents: Be sure to take a close look at ‘The Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals.’ … It appears to be calling for a better appreciation of Christianity’s rootage as over against current existential subjectivism based largely on visceral reaction, hunches, and feelings.
Visceral reactions, hunches, and feelings were at the root of theological liberalism in its classic form. Almost two centuries before, Friedrich Schleiermacher had sent theology down that visceral, subjective path by defining religion and the task of theology in terms of emotion, the feeling of absolute dependence on God. In the twentieth century, theologians had baptized that old liberal subjectivism in the currents of existentialism, and evangelical theologians fought back, upholding the objective nature of truth.
Yet evangelicals were vulnerable to the new forms of subjectivity, because they had their own history of subjectivism. The pietistic soil in which Schleiermacher’s thought had sprouted was also the seedbed from which sprang Moravian Pietism, which in turn shaped the Wesley brothers’ experiential religion. Transplanted to American soil and pruned of its Wesleyan sacramental and theological roots, that experiential religion flowered into revivalism.
Much of American evangelical history is bound up with revivalism, which focused on individual conversion and personal holiness while playing down the importance of doctrinal teaching or well-ordered common worship.
In the fight against both liberal and revivalist subjectivism, tradition (which many Protestants, traditionally speaking, considered an enemy) began to seem like an ally. In both the Chicago Call and Common Roots, Webber and his friends saw the potential in tradition for the renewal and reorientation of evangelicalism. This was not capital T tradition as some fixed authority, but a dynamic history of the Holy Spirit in the church, leading and guiding it (as Jesus had promised) into all truth (John 16:13). That Spirit-led dynamic could ground Christian experience in the history of truth and energize it as well.
GROUNDED SUBJECTIVITY
While other evangelical theologians were fighting subjectivism by reducing theology to rational argument, Robert Webber sought for a grounded subjectivity, a subjectivity anchored in the revelatory experience of the early Christians. In some of his later works, he wrote about how his flight from evangelical rationalism provided the impetus for his exploration of liturgical worship, his adoption of a patristic spirituality, and his recovery of Irenaeus’s theology of recapitulation.
Listen to the emotional tone of Webber’s introductory chapters in Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. In that book Webber recounts the sense of mystery he had growing up as a missionary kid in an African rain forest. Transplanted to modern, technological society in the West, he studied theology, history, and apologetics. The Western way, he discovered, was to subject everything, including religious experience, to reason, logic, and observation. Claims to mystery, to wonder, and to the experience of things too deep to explain were looked upon as primitive, anti-intellectual, and weak-minded.
² Western rationalism colored his formal religious studies. His biblical studies courses sidelined the Pentateuch’s powerful story of God’s saving and covenanting love in order to equip young pastors and theologians to argue for Mosaic authorship and against the faith-threatening hypothesis that multiple editors and writers created the books of Moses as a kind of spiritual scrapbook of Israel’s religious experience.
Everywhere he turned, Webber ran into the same kind of analytical reductionism. Whether he was dealing with the classical arguments for God’s existence or the arguments for the historicity of Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the grave, he found that it left him cold: While I could repeat all the reasons why it was important to believe in the resurrection, I could no longer speak of the meaning of the resurrection in my own life. What was once a mystery that empowered my life was now an objective argument tucked away on a shelf in my brain.
³
Webber eventually came to understand that he was captive to evangelical rationalism.
In his early years of teaching at Wheaton College, he discovered that the rational argumentation he had learned was not moving his students either. At the brink of despair, he wrote, "I simply wanted to know why it was all so cold, so calculated, so rational, so dead."⁴
Then Webber made a U-turn. While preaching a chapel sermon, the preparation of which had been salted with tears and angst, he abandoned his planned discourse on the answers Christians can give to the world’s questions. Instead, he proclaimed, What we need is not answers about God, but God himself.
⁵
THE REFORMATION OF WORSHIP
One way Webber tried to satisfy his deeply felt need for God himself
was through a reformation of worship. He had experienced evangelism masquerading as worship — part of the legacy of American revivalism. And he had experienced doctrinal teaching posing as worship — part of the legacy of Reformational evangelicalism. But something was missing from these approaches to worship, just as something was missing from the apologetic arguments that had crowded out the transforming story of God’s saving actions.
What was missing in the answers to questions
approach was God himself. What was missing in much evangelical worship was God himself. Revivalist worship focused on getting the individual sinner to come to a point of decision. It was all about the worshiper. Similarly, doctrinal, sermon-centered worship focused on instructing the individual, equipping her or him to always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
⁶ Such teaching aims at a noble goal, but it is still about the worshiper.
Webber began reading descriptions of worship in the patristic period. At the urging of a friend in 1972, he attended the Easter Vigil at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Wheaton. He later wrote: I was tired of singing ‘Up from the Grave He Arose’ and pretending I was excited, so I decided to try something new. … And I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.
⁷
The service of Easter Vigil is celebrated the night before Easter Sunday. In biblical time the day begins at sunset. The evening and the night are actually the first part of a day, and thus the ancient practice of beginning the Easter celebration in the dark makes sense. Indeed, the gospel accounts of the resurrection place the disciples’ discovery of the empty tomb at dawn. Jesus’ resurrection must have happened during the dark before sunrise.
Webber’s first experience of the Easter Vigil, much of it celebrated in the dark and illuminated only by candlelight, was emotionally overwhelming. Here is his account. Notice the verbs he uses: feel, sense, experience. For him, the Easter Vigil was visceral.
I began to feel the resurrection. It was more than evidence that demanded a verdict. It was more than an intellectual proposition proving the empty tomb. I couldn’t put my finger on it completely, but I sensed that there was something different, something deeper about this experience of worship than anything else I had been through. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I was experiencing the resurrection. It was no longer a hard cold fact, but a warm reality. I experienced being in the tomb and walking out of that darkness into the marvelous light, the light that conquers evil, the light that is Jesus Christ.⁸
But Webber didn’t write just in the language of feeling. Notice the two sentences in which he employs the phrase more than
: "It was more than evidence that demanded a verdict. It was more than an intellectual proposition proving the empty tomb" (emphasis added).
Although Bob Webber’s faith caught the fire of experience in the 1970s, the experiences never led him to deny or undermine the propositional truth for which previous generations of evangelical theologians had fought. The experience of resurrection at the Easter Vigil was not less than or other than evidence and propositions. It was more than evidence and propositions.
Webber wrote similarly about the study of the Bible. If his education had reduced theology to apologetics, it had reduced Bible study to the extraction of truth. In The Divine Embrace, he wrote: We were taught to approach the Bible as an object to be analyzed and dissected through the study of its language … , analysis of its cultural setting, and evaluation of its theological ideas. Consequently, classes focused primarily on the use of tools that extracted truth from the text.
⁹
This mining operation did not fail to yield truth, but neither did it nourish spiritual life. Webber’s reminiscence recalls the apostle Paul’s observation that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life
:¹⁰ "This method of reading Scripture, however, resulted in a dry and intellectual view of the faith. The more I employed only [this] method, the more remote God became for me. … I became increasingly dead to Scripture and found my study led to lifeless propositions that I could easily defend."¹¹
Webber knew something was missing. The missing element was, he decided, the very heart of the Bible — the embrace of God expressed in the images that connected the two Testaments and envisioned God restoring the world. I had exchanged the divine embrace for a list of propositions.
¹²
Here Webber retains the vocabulary of feeling (heart
and embrace
), but he has introduced the notion of image as well. When he decided to move beyond the historical-theological mode of reading Scripture, he discovered that the church fathers dealt in pictures (just as the liturgy of the Easter Vigil dealt in pictures). Adam was a picture of Christ. The manna was a divinely drawn picture of the Living Bread come down from heaven. The Israelites’ miraculous rescue march through the Red Sea was a picture of the way we are saved through baptism.
The apostles had already sketched out pictorial correspondences between God’s dealings with the world before the incarnation and his dealings through the incarnation. During Christianity’s early centuries, the church fathers amplified this pictorial way of reading Scripture. Images evoke. The Spirit speaks through them not merely to our intellects, but to our hearts. Once again, it is important to note: when Webber promoted a return to a typological reading of Scripture, it was to advance another more than.
He never wanted to undermine the truths he had learned. But those truths were small truths until they were placed on a larger canvas.
Here is something very important. Harold Lindsell, an iconic figure of the midcentury evangelical movement who was to become Webber’s father-in-law shortly after the publication of Common Roots, saw the content of the Chicago Call (which formed the backbone of this book’s theological reflection) as a defense against the subjectivism of liberal theology. That was the battle that he, Carl F. H. Henry, and others among the charter members of the Fuller Seminary faculty had fought. By contrast, Webber saw the content of the Chicago Call as a way of renewing and reawakening people to the Spirit amid the objectivism of evangelical rationalism.
After his Easter Eve worship experience at St. Michael’s, Webber began to read the church fathers in earnest in order to understand what he had experienced. His was always a faith that sought understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). It was never a faith that tried to substitute feeling for understanding.
The problem, as Webber spoke of it over and over, was reductionism. Some of these reductionist tendencies have already been noted: some streams of evangelicalism reduce revelation to the truths they can extract from the biblical ore; some reduce salvation to a moment of decision. In chapter 7 of this book, Webber applies his critique of reductionism to evangelical theology.
A balanced theology affirms the many parts of Christian teaching in such a way that each facet of truth is taught in a balanced relation to the whole; a theology with perspective sees Christian truth in relation to history. The failure to achieve balance and perspective results in an overemphasis on one or more points of theology, and thus, on the other hand, a reduction of theology from the whole to the part.
Webber illustrates his point with the early twentieth-century fundamentalist-modernist controversy: A conflict of real depth was gradually reduced to five issues which ultimately became little more than slogans among fundamentalists.
The result, he says, is that the overemphasis on these five points has produced an under-emphasis on other aspects of Christian faith, leaving fundamentalist Christianity less healthy and mature than it could otherwise be.
¹³
Then Webber pleads that the inerrancy crisis
of the latter seventies not be allowed to have the same unhealthy results. The urgent need … is not to create new schisms but to recover the basis of authority as understood by the early church.
Webber uses the words schism and schismatic several times in this passage. He clearly sees fundamentalist-style moves — on the part of historic fundamentalism and of other crusades to protect specific doctrines — as detrimental to the unity (and thus to the health) of the church. Pure doctrine is important, but for Webber, renewing historical consciousness in the contemporary church is the strategy that produces health.
Ironically, Harold Lindsell, whose 1976 book The Battle for the Bible unintentionally exacerbated the divisions over inerrancy, seemed to agree that history is the path to unity. Here are a few key sentences from his 1977 editorial introducing the full text of the Chicago Call to the readers of Christianity Today:
[T]he call is a warning against ignoring or scorning the past. In our culture, the needs of the present and of the future are stressed; ties with the past are played down. … For the Christian, ignoring the past is also an implicit denial of a cardinal truth: there is one body of Christ; all believers, whether now alive on earth or not, are members of that body. Gifted teachers, writers, exegetes, and theologians are God’s gifts to the body for subsequent ages as well as for their own.
A historical sense will not only build unity, it will also undermine individualism. Evangelicalism democratized religion in America. This was not a bad thing, given much of Christendom’s history of hierarchicalism and clericalism. But in its wake, democratization brings atomistic individualism, and that in turn undermines community, including the believing community. Thus Lindsell recognized that the modern Western emphasis on individualism … needs to be kept within biblical guidelines. … [T]he question is not, What suits our culture or temperament? but rather, What does God say, especially through His Word?
BREAKING DOWN THE WALL OF INDIVIDUALISM
The renewal of historical consciousness was for me, as for Robert Webber, the path to experiencing Christian unity. Before taking that path, however, I was possessed by an unbiblical individualism. That individualism was psychologically useful. I used it to build a spiritual and psychic wall between myself and the (at times) oppressively sectarian denomination I belonged to and worked for. As clergy, I felt inner revulsion when church members would ask me, Pastor, what do we believe about [fill in any topic]?
My alienation prevented me from affirming the we
in that question, and so I would answer, "I don’t know what we believe about that, but I’ll be happy to tell you what I believe, and then I’d like to know what you believe." Since I ministered on a college campus, my response fit the liberal arts ethos that valued independent thought and free inquiry. I came to see, however, that it was not a spiritually helpful answer.
After a while I abandoned that individualistic response and tried to encourage historical thinking while still retaining an emphasis on the individual Christian’s responsibility for owning his or her own beliefs. I began to respond to such questions by saying, Let me tell you what the Christian church has classically taught about that.
And then I would note (if there were any) the significant dissenting voices.
This was pastorally more helpful. It moved the discussion away from what just I and one other person believed. It set our discussion into the framework of the larger church (little c catholic) and the history of doctrinal development. It aimed to create a communitarian consciousness. It recognized that churches, like families, do indeed hold certain common values that give them their identity: to belong to this church rather than some other requires critically appropriating its particular historic beliefs and ethos.
There came a point where I could no longer live with the psychic wall I had built. I could no longer tolerate the contradiction of living as a lone individual in a spiritual community. Nor could I fully appropriate the idiosyncratic belief and behavior markers of that community. When I stopped pretending that I was in, I knew that I had to get out.
The search for a believing community led me to change jobs, move halfway across the continent, and visit an Episcopal parish where I immersed myself in the historic liturgy.
Returning from my first visit to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, I went straight to the filing cabinets in my basement. Something had seemed awfully familiar about St. Barnabas and the people I had met that morning. In my clipping files, I found an article I had ripped from the March 1978 issue of Eternity magazine in which Wheaton College historian Mark Noll described a cohort of Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.
I skimmed the article and found the names of several people I had met at church — including that of Robert Webber.
The writings of Robert Webber, Thomas Howard, Peter Gillquist, and others encouraged me to take a closer look at the patristic and medieval periods, as well as the nineteenth-century Oxford movement, as I moved toward a bigger, more comprehensive faith. When my wife and I were confirmed in the Episcopal Church, Tom Howard said to us, "Welcome to this branch of the catholic church." For us, that remark summed up something important: we had made the transition from defining ourselves by what and who we were not (the fundamentalist and sectarian way of thinking). We were now adopting an identity that helped us see ourselves as part of a larger whole.
In our lives, it was as Webber predicted: an awareness of history fostered a spirit of unity.
This posed for us the question of the Protestant Reformation. How were we to think about that? What were we to make of the strong Reformational accents on Scripture, justifying faith, saving grace, the priesthood of all believers, and the unique role of Jesus that excluded recourse to any other mediator or source of merit?
First, we had to think historically. Nothing exists in a vacuum. These theological and spiritual emphases emerged in a context. They were reactions to other things. The Reformers were in the business of reforming — purging abuses and rebuilding the church. To keep the special emphases of the Reformation from becoming sectarian slogans, we had to try to understand both sides of the historical conflict with some sympathy. This did not compromise the truths of the Reformation, but it restored their dynamic quality. For example, understanding the doctrine of divine election as a counterpoint to clericalism restored for me its character as a doctrine of pastoral comfort: my salvation is not under the control of a clerical elite, but is in the hands of our gracious God.
Second, we came to understand that Protestantism was a renewal movement. It did not aim to destroy the catholicity of the church. It sought to breathe new life into the church by exposing corrupted teachings, practices, and people to the bracing critique of Scripture. To the extent that the broader church had responded to reform, to that extent we could embrace Christian unity. Certainly the markers of renewal were widespread.
Third, we understood that the Reformation critique was not the whole of the Christian faith. It was a vitally important corrective addressed to particular points at which the gospel had been distorted. But in the minds of many, the corrective had become the entire Christian message. Robert Webber wrote about the fundamentalist and evangelical tendency toward reductionism, the tendency to take disputed points and magnify them into the whole. Evangelicals inherited that tendency from exclusivist Protestantism. But where sixteenth-century mutual rejection blocked productive interaction for centuries to come, twentieth-century renewal in liturgy, theology, and personal piety opened doors and windows that allowed for conversation and further renewal.
LEAVING THE LITTLE BRICK HOUSE
Recently, while listening to A Prairie Home Companion on public radio, I thought of Robert Webber’s openness to the little c catholic church. Like Webber, raconteur Garrison Keillor grew up fundamentalist. So it was not surprising to hear him say in his August 30, 2008, News from Lake Wobegon
segment: I used to think that faith was sort of like a building block, and you’d put all these blocks together, and you’d build a house sort of like the little pig built that the wolf could not blow down.
Keillor’s metaphor (the brick house of the three little pigs) is defensive. The brick house is a fortification, a bulwark against big bad wolves.
Webber, too, used defensive language when he described the theological system he picked up in his education and carried with him into his early years of teaching. Here are sentences and fragments from the opening chapter of Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail:
I was being swept away into evangelical rationalism. … Christianity was no longer a power to be experienced but a system to be defended. … My study of the Bible now turned into a defense of its inspired authorship.
… I was asked to teach a class called Christian Doctrine. Here’s my chance, I thought, to give them the goods, to show them how rationally defensible the Christian faith is and how reasonable it is to believe in the Christian system of things.…
I also thought I could rationally defend the Scripture as God’s mind written. … I derived a great deal of security from my system.¹⁴
Keillor and Webber shared a defensive notion of faith as their starting point. The next step for Keillor was surrender: I used to think that faith was sort of like … [the house] the little pig built that the wolf could not blow down. And now I get older, and I feel that faith is a matter of surrender.
Webber recalled his frustration in trying to prepare a chapel sermon for Wheaton College students, one that would deliver the answers Christianity had to offer to the questions of a world in despair. But Webber found that the answers he knew so well were so cold, so calculated, so rational, so dead.
He crumpled up the pages of his sermon manuscript and threw them into the wastebasket. I dropped back into my chair and sobbed for several hours. I had thrown away my answers. I had rid myself of a system in which God was comfortably contained. I had lost my security.
¹⁵
Both Keillor and Webber abandoned their defensive faith and left the security of