One Lord, One Faith, Second Edition: A Theology for Cross-Denominational Renewal

One Lord, One Faith

A Theology for Cross-Denominational Renewal

Rex A. Koivisto

Second Edition

One Lord, One Faith

A Theology for Cross-Denominational Renewal

Copyright © 2009 Rex A. Koivisto. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. Other quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), ©1989 by the Directors of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in Scripture quotations and quoted sources are the author’s.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: The Church at the Start

Chapter 2: The Church in History

Chapter 3: Denominationalism and Catholicity

Chapter 4: Catholicity and Tradition or, Do Protestants have Tradition?

Chapter 5: Biblical Hermeneutics as the Key to Tradition and Catholicity

Chapter 6: The Search for a Core Orthodoxy for Catholicity

Chapter 7: Developing a Personal Catholicity Today

Excursus One: Detecting Denominational Traditions, Part 1

Excursus Two: Detecting Denominational Traditions, Part 2

Appendix A: Ancient Creeds and Formulations of the Church

Appendix B: The Chicago Call

Appendix C: Articles Appearing in The Fundamentals (1910–15)

Appendix D: Interdenominational Evangelical Statements of Faith

Appendix E: How One Brethren Assembly Situates Itself in Relation to the Rest of the Church

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

For my family:

Joan, my companion and support for over thirty years,

And the Triple K Klub (all grown up now!)—

Kristin

Kristopher (Kris!)

Karrson

And the Double M Club (newer to the family!)—

Michael Jon III

Madeline Ruth

Foreword to the First Edition

One of the most arresting and promising developments of modern evangelicals is the desire among many to return to catholicity. This is not only a phenomenon among evangelicals, but one that is happening among mainline denominations and among Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic bodies as well. The return to catholicity is a surprising development given the sectarian outlook that has dominated evangelical Christianity during the twentieth century.

But no one should be surprised that evangelicals are returning to catholicity because evangelicalism in its main tenets has always been truly catholic. That is, evangelicalism at its best is committed to the Gospel, to the Apostolic interpretation of the faith, and to the core of Orthodox teaching that was developed in the first six centuries of the church.

What One Lord, One Faith accomplishes is a clear and insightful recovery of the ancient evangelical and catholic outlook. Consequently this book will address the sectarians among us who have led us astray by teaching and practicing an exclusive ecclesiology and a limited theology; it will lead us into an understanding of the catholic fullness of the faith; and it will help us recover a sense of belonging to the whole church.

Rex Koivisto’s brilliant analysis of Protestant sectarianism and his lucid call to a fullness of catholicity charts a future direction for American evangelical Christianity. We will all be spiritually healthier and considerably more effective in ministry if we allow the teachings of the early church to set our agenda for the future. For this reason I hail the publication of this work and trust it will receive the wide attention it deserves.

—Robert E. Webber, PhD¹

Wheaton College

1. Robert E. Webber was an enthusiastic supporter of the first edition of this book. It is regretful that he passed away in April of 2007, before the release of this second edition. Dr. Webber retired from Wheaton College in 2000 and subsequently took a position at Northern Seminary before his passing. He was still at Wheaton College when he wrote this foreword to the first edition.

Preface to the Second Edition

²

In the past fifteen years I have been gratified by the reception of this book. I have heard, and continue to hear, from Christian leaders in places I had never expected—in North and South America, Canada, Europe, and Asia. I have heard from Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Free-Church Protestants, and even Roman Catholics ³ how their perception of the church has been greatly enlarged through encountering my book. In addition, two books in particular, have made positive practical use of my ideas to implement a broadening of the church’s perspective and ministry: Jack Dennison’s City Reaching: On the Road to Community Transformation ⁴ and Aubrey Malphurs’ Doing Church: A Biblical Guide for Leading Ministries Through Change. ⁵ These are all deeply gratifying.

Yet much more has transpired in the fifteen years since my book first came out in terms of the development of catholicity within evangelicalism. These include important books, as well as important movements.

In 1992, while the first edition of One Lord, One Faith was at the press, Chuck Colson’s book The Body was released.⁶ Had it been available during the time of the initial writing of my own book, I certainly would have benefitted from it. Colson does not develop any particular theological basis for broad-based catholicity as I attempt to do in my book. Instead, his book is largely a series of stories of Christian faith at work beyond the confines of a specific traditional evangelical subculture. As such, it illustrates in most vivid terms how the true Body of Christ, the community of those who share genuine faith in the living Christ does in fact transcend some surprising denominational boundaries. It is certainly well worth the read.

In terms of practical catholicity that enriches the Christian community across denominational boundaries, I ran across a fascinating prayer book. Although coming from a non-liturgical context, I have come to appreciate some of the fresh dimensions more liturgical wings of the Christian community had been experiencing. However, many of these liturgical works (such as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) were very denominational-centric and did not, in themselves, express a perception that there were and are true believers broadly across denominational boundaries. Then in 2000, I came across Robert Benson’s Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer.⁷

For the first time, I saw a useful prayer book that did not employ specific denominational jargon, and that respected believers throughout the entire church: free-church evangelicals, historic Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. For example, the Days of Remembrance express prayers of gratitude to God not only for specifically Roman Catholic believers, but also for the likes of John and Charles Wesley (Day 3 Remembrances for Mar) Martin Luther King, Jr (Day 4 Apr) Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Day 9 Apr) George Fox (Day 14 for Jan), Evelyn Underhill (Day 15 Jun), Martin Luther (Day 18 Feb), Jonathan Edwards (Day 22 March), and Isaac Watts (Day 25 Nov). This book is not designed as a read-through so much as a personal guide to daily prayer in concert with the liturgical prayer traditions of a large portion of the historic church, and one that retains a broad view of the church that includes evangelicals.

Another useful work which arrived in 1998 accomplishes a similar thrust, but does so from a more devotional yet historical standpoint is Richard Foster’s Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith.⁸ For Foster, the church is made up of six strands that produce legitimate (and important) emphases that the entire church would do well of to embrace. These strands include the Contemplative Tradition (with emphases on prayer), the Holiness Tradition (with emphasis on lifestyle issues), the Charismatic Tradition (Spirit-empowerment), the Social Justice Tradition (stressing Christian compassion), the Evangelical Tradition (Scripture-centricity), and the Incarnational Tradition (a sacramental focus). Historically, some belivers within these strands had viewed the other strands with suspicion if not outright rejection. Foster does an excellent job of stressing the importance of each of these strands to the whole: affirming their importance without exaggerating their individual role. A very good read indeed.

In 2004, J. I. Packer and Thomas Oden attempted to address one of the key issues in my book, namely, the issue of a core of orthodoxy around which all genuine believers may unite. Their book, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus,⁹ Packer and Oden go down a different road in looking for that core than I did. I argued that the core of orthodoxy is actually the Gospel, with its NT presuppositions and implications. Packer and Oden use a more traditional approach of surveying a series of six broad evangelical statements of faith produced since 1950 looking for commonalities. These commonalities they identify under sixteen categories of theology, which include, among others, The Good News, The Bible, The one True God, Jesus Christ, Justification by Grace through Faith, and many others. While this is an excellent interaction on views in an attempt to find commonality, I have already argued that this is not necessarily the most productive road to travel. I would still argue that the key is the Gospel, as the means by which people enter the church.

I would, moreover, elaborate on my own theme by arguing that there is a core of the core that rises above all others as the key to the core of orthodoxy. The centrality of Christology within the Gospel is what I would call the core of the core of orthodoxy. Without a correct understanding of the God-man as the one who is fully able to save, one cannot express saving faith in Him. Thus, a group that has the core of the core rightly stated, always has greater potential for its members to come to saving faith (despite other aberrations on soteriological issues) than a group that does not. In this sense, official Roman Catholic teaching has the core of the core right, even though they may err on issues of justification in my distinctly Protestant opinion. On the other hand, the official teaching of Mormonism or of Jehovah’s witnesses do not have the core of the core right. Therefore, it is much more likely that a Roman Catholic may find the saving Christ in the official teaching of the Church than a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness. That does not mean, of course, that all Roman Catholics are therefore saved. If a Roman Catholic comes to saving faith it is due to their having a clear understanding of the saving Christ, but in spite of their having an unsatisfactory (the Protestant speaking here again) view of justification.

In March of 1994, after a year and a half of discussion, a group of independent evangelical Protestants and independent lay and clergy Roman Catholics from North America, led by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus produced and signed a document called Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.¹⁰ In this document, these individuals sought to find a commonality in their faith that enabled them to link hands to face together the cultural decay as a result of the rising danger of postmodern Western culture.

Although this was in no way a church merger between evangelical churches and the Roman Catholic Church, nor was it an official document signed by authoritative leaders representing their respective church bodies, there was quite an outcry particularly by certain evangelical groups that this was some sort of compromise.

On October 7, 1997, the group met again in New York City and produced a follow-up document entitled The Gift of Salvation.¹¹ Once again, as Timothy George pointed out: Unlike the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification issued earlier this year, this statement is not the result of an officially sponsored dialogue, but the collaborative work of individuals who speak from and to, but not for, our several communities. Although I find these documents lacking at times in true depth of discussion, and weak on some key areas important to Protestants, the importance of these discussions to true catholicity cannot be stressed too much. Coming from heartfelt faith in individuals within the Roman Catholics and various evangelical denominations, these are in fact searches for commonality and cooperation rather than attempts at official structural merger (which I would deeply oppose based on my view of true Christian unity). Their third Statement, addressing the relationship of Scripture and Tradition, Your Word is Truth, was produced in 2002.¹² The group met yet again and recently produced a document in March of 2005 entitled A Distinctive People.¹³ The focus of this document is a call for counter-cultural holiness.

Although the first stadium event occurred in 1991, the phenomenon know as Promise Keepers (PK) arose to prominence in the years following 1992, with University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney the original driving force. The movement began primarily to bring men together in rally fashion into sporting arenas so as to develop a clearer focus on their own responsibilities in the church and family. Obviously, since this parachurch movement impacted men from a broad spectrum of the Christian community, church leadership soon needed to be addressed. Therefore, to foster cooperation, Promise Keepers men’s conferences have often been preceded by special sessions for clergy starting as early as 1992. In 1996, Promise Keepers hosted the world’s largest gathering of Christian clergy for a worship and teaching conference in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome. Over 39,000 clergy attended that event. In early 1998, Promise Keepers hosted nine regional clergy conferences, which were attended by more than 30,000 ministers. In February 2003, Promise Keepers hosted a gathering of 10,000 pastors at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Ariz. And the beat goes on. These kinds of interactive sessions that involve such a broad spectrum of denominational evangelical leadership goes far to seeing in reality what cooperation with brothers and sisters from alternate traditions can really mean.¹⁴

The continued impact of what I referred to in the first edition as Northwest Renewal Ministries with its expanding number of Prayer Summits both nationally and internationally, blossomed even further in the later 1990s and beyond. The international scope of the movement caused the leadership to realize that the original name was too restrictive a title for the type of work that they actually had come to be involved with. The name was therefore changed in 1996 to International Renewal Ministries (IRM). Although the driving impetus behind the movement, Joseph C. Aldrich, retired as president of Multnomah in 1997, and the original director, Terry Dirks, died suddenly while in Japan preparing for Prayer Summit there, the organization still continues to be a force for experiencing practical catholicity among Christian leaders. Under the new director, Dennis Fuqua, the organization has now spun off from the auspices of Multnomah University into its own separate entity, with offices at Western Seminary in Portland.¹⁵

The city of Portland continues to have citywide events that enable the entire city-church, across denominational boundaries, to participate and both enrich itself and engage the city. Two newer phenomena have developed since the first edition of this book: The Luis Palau evangelistic team has attracted broad involvement of the churches in the community in its series of CityFest events at Portland’s Waterfont Park. Thousands have jammed the events, which have occurred in 1999, 2000, and now again in 2008. And cultural engagement with the various elements suspicious of typical evangelical cultural detachment and judgmentalism in the greater Portland area have seen several unlikely dialogues of engagement occur between evangelicals and non-evangelicals under the direction of New Wines, New Wineskins: Institute for Theology and Culture, a ministry of Multnomah Biblical Seminary under the direction of Dr. Paul Louis Metzger.¹⁶

Evangelical Catholicity still has a long way to go. There is the fear by some that thinking more broadly of the church will cause them to need to give up doctrines dear to them, or to give up their ecclesiastical independence. As I continue to argue, true catholicity is enhanced by a healthy view of the church that means that the church transcends organizational and denominational boundaries. It is made up of all who truly love Christ and are therefore saved by His grace regardless of their denominational or organizational affiliation. Our unique doctrinal and organizational distinctives are in fact important traditions, distinct from the core of orthodoxy that binds us all, which are in fact inevitable as we seek to do church in a real world. These distinctives need not separate us from brothers and sisters who hold to other distinctives. They should be discussed, debated, evaluated, and occasionally (after careful and prayerful thought) jettisoned as inappropriate. But they should never be used as weapons to separate us from other genuine believers who travel outside our circles. We desperately need each other. We have a powerful and influential Enemy whom we cannot defeat by hiding in our safe little cloisters alienated from the rest of the magnificent Body of Christ. Let us keep striving to achieve true relational unity within that Body, which allows us to maintain our traditional diversity on secondary issues. May God help us.

2. Just as a sidelight, I should make a few comments on the title for this book. I have had several question as to why I truncated Paul’s reference to one Lord, one faith, one baptism in Eph. 4:5. I did so for one main reason: this is a book on Christian catholicity, on genuine Christian unity. And, ironically, one of the issues over which Christians are not unified is baptism itself! Christians differ on who is to be baptized, what baptism accomplishes, how baptism is to administered, and other factors. Had I included that in the title, it would certainly force the issue of this diversity. In my humble opinion, Paul simply meant by one baptism the same baptism we all share, regardless of our own variety of Christian tradition on the matter. That one baptism is Christian baptism (in whatever form it takes). The earliest Christians seemed to have a degree of flexibility on other baptismal matters. So ought we. See The Didache 7.1-4.

3. A missionary friend of mine who was leading home Bible studies in Austria saw a Roman Catholic priest begin to attend his studies with great joy and interest. As time went on the group began to see he was clearly a man of genuine faith. Later, out of gratitude to my friend for leading the fine study, he gave him as a gift a book that had impacted him greatly. On unwrapping the book, my friend was surprised to find One Lord, One Faith in his hands. My friend did not even know my book was available in Austria. I am gratified to hear stories like this.

4. Dennison, City Reaching: On the Road to Community Transformation.

5. Malphurs. Doing Church: A Biblical Guide for Leading Ministries Through Change.

6. Colson, The Body.

7. Benson Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer.

8. Foster Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith.

9. Packer and Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus.

10. Printed in First Things 43, 15-22. See www.firstthings.com.

11. Printed in First Things 79, 20-23. See www.firstthings.com.

12. Printed in First Things 125, 38-42. See www.firstthings.com.

13. Printed in Christianity Today 49:3 (March 2005): 60.

14. Promise Keepers maintains a website at www.promisekeepers.org.

15. IRM maintains a website at www.prayersummits.net.

16. New Wine, New Wineskins maintains their website at www.new-wineskins.org. They also produce a journal titled Cultural Encounters.

Preface

This book is about catholicity. It is not about Roman Catholicism, but rather about catholicity. Catholicity refers to the great universality of the church as the body of Jesus Christ—not just in some mystical sense, but also in all the fullness of its real-time diversity on planet earth. And catholicity presupposes a large-hearted attitude on the part of Christians to perceive the church this way, because by definition it encompasses real believers who do not quite act or talk, or think, or even believe all the same things that I do on areas outside of the central tenets of the Christian faith. I am convinced that this precious quality has been significantly tarnished amidst our sad practice of assigning each other into different Christian cubbyholes—a process that allows for little dialogue or mutual communication, and which tends only to decrease our ability to enjoy all we have in common with each other, across the boundaries, in Christ.

Perhaps you’ve noticed: there is a great deal of diversity today in what passes under the term Christianity, especially in North America. For example, some 85 major Christian denominational families exist in the United States alone, discounting the subdivisions of major groups included within those 85.¹⁷ If these are included, then there are some 224 distinct denominational groupings in the United States.¹⁸ The large majority of these groups are Protestant subgroups, although even Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism offer certain subcategories as well.

So what is the problem with such diversity? One may say that diversity among Christians does not really matter. Well, it does. For one, it impacts the perception others have about claims we have to follow after Christian unity. We often sing, for example, Samuel John Stone’s 1865 hymn, The Church’s One Foundation:

Though, with a scornful wonder,

Men see her sore oppressed,

By schisms rent asunder,

By heresies distressed. . . .

Somehow that seems to be an honest enough depiction of the problem around us. But have you ever sung that famous hymn written by Sabine Baring-Gould in the same year, Onward Christian Soldiers, and missed the little line tucked away toward the end that seems to be out of tune with reality?

We are not divided,

All one body we,

One in hope, in doctrine,

One in charity.

Are we not divided? Are we all one body? Somehow this does not square with today’s level of Christian experience. A more honest version, as Robert McAfee Brown pointed out, would go,

We are all divided,

Not one body we,

One lacks faith, another hope,

And all lack charity.¹⁹

And this dividedness does have an impact on our mission as Christians. Brown gave one sad account of some of the implications of what I would call a lack of Christian catholicity some years back on the mission field:

. . . the leader of the untouchables in India renounced the caste system. He likewise urged his sixty million fellow untouchables to renounce the Hinduism that had been responsible for the caste system. But Christianity had no appeal to the untouchables as a possible alternative to Hinduism. We are united in Hinduism, they said, and we shall become divided in Christianity. The argument was unanswerable.²⁰

But it is all too easy to blame denominationalism as the disease to cure in our lack of unity. I disagree; I will argue that the problem is not the presence of this kind of diversity. Denominationalism, I will try to show, has value when understood as catholic diversity. The problem is the mutual exclusivity that often subsists within, or even spawns this diversity—what may more appropriately be labeled sectarianism. Sectarianism is the posture of believing that my own particular group of Christians has a superior claim to represent the body of Christ, to the exclusion or minimization of other genuinely Christian groups.

The church must have a degree of diversity along with its unity. But sectarianism provokes a diversity without the requisite New Testament relational unity. This kind of mutual exclusivity runs counter to the nature of the church itself, if the New Testament has anything at all to say in the matter. Such exclusiveness is a sectarianism of the worst sort. The Christian community envisioned in the New Testament is one church, a church catholic. And although I will argue that this does not require an organizational unity, it does require a relational unity. That is mandated. And that requires an end to sectarian attitudes.

My point is that the attitude of sectarianism is far more at the root of the problem of Christian disunity than is the presence of denominational diversity. The dividedness of Christianity is related, not so much in the fact that there are varieties of Christian communities (denominations), but that those communities often make mutually exclusive claims to be the only (or best) representative of the Christian faith. That is, they possess sectarian tendencies. Sectarians who claim to be genuine Christians view others making the same claim (but who are in a different Christian group) as spiritually suspect, at best. In this way the ancient catholicity, the historic unity in diversity is lost. Sectarianism reigns supreme and genuine fellowship and cooperation within the entire body of Christ is lost. So, with this book, I am out to do in sectarian attitudes as the true enemy of catholicity.

This book needs somewhat of an explanation. As you will observe in the text, I have been a part, in youth work, single adult work, Sunday School, camp counseling and speaking, preaching, teaching, and pastoring as an elder of the group known as the (Plymouth) Brethren.²¹ And although this Brethren Movement began in large part with a large dose of catholicity (to be explained later), I know of too many Brethren who maintain a pronounced sectarian posture toward other Christians. They have therefore at times displayed a significantly less than catholic attitude.

But my exposure over the past forty years to the church catholic, the body of Christ, has been far broader than to just my own Brethren Movement. I have had the privilege of speaking at numerous denominational and nondenominational fellowships outside of my typical circles of relationship. I have had the privilege of worshiping with brothers and sisters in historic and free churches; liturgical and non-liturgical; whether congregational, presbyterian, or episcopalian in structure. And in each instance I have found genuine faith and a vibrant Gospel testimony. I have observed in "real time’’ that the body of Christ is far broader than my own denominational context.

Part of this broadening process is the privilege I have had to work alongside men and women of genuine faith in a nondenominationally affiliated Christian college. It is hard to make a sectarian comment with patient and firm brothers and sisters from other traditions around—who also know the Word of God well. Would that more of us had that kind of regular interaction!

So, a word about the design of this volume. The book is intended to take you from a discovery of what catholicity is in the New Testament, through a review of the ebb and flow of its experience in the history of the church, until it finds its current expression in (historic) denominationalism (chaps. 1—3). I then argue (in chap. 4) that the key problem contributing to the development of sectarian attitudes in denominations today is a failure to understand the nature of tradition, especially among Protestants.

Chapter 5 suggests that an application of healthy biblical hermeneutics in a community context is the key for detecting the presence of tradition, which allows one to be able to distinguish it from the core of orthodoxy that unites all true Christians. My next chapter is an attempt to define this core of orthodoxy around which catholicity must hover. In chapter 7, I try to give some practical suggestions for developing a catholic spirit in Christians today.

At the end I have included two Excurses. In them I try to make this all real by introducing you to my own Brethren tradition and applying the principles developed in the earlier chapters to my own group, by way of illustration. This is an example of the kind of painful self-analysis I wish each of you to do with your own Christian grouping. But I guarantee: it will not make you friends within your community. Nevertheless, it is an exercise that you may find incredibly helpful in detecting and managing the presence of tradition and sectarian attitudes in your midst. That, in turn, should help you to be more open to the church operating largely beyond your typical boundaries.

17. The figures are adapted from Mead, Handbook of Denominations in the United States, 7th ed. I prefer the 7th edition to the 8th in some ways, since the 8th obscures the ongoing divisions among my own [Plymouth] Brethren tradition by simply having one descriptive entry for the Brethren. We are not quite that clean of sectarian divisiveness. Excluding groups included in his book which make no claim to being Christian, and groups that have diverged from historic orthodoxy and may be considered Christian cults, Meade lists the following denominations: Adventists (4 subgroups), Baptists (28 subgroups), Brethren/Dunkers (3 subgroups), Plymouth Brethren (8 subgroups), River Brethren (3 subgroups), United Brethren (2 subgroups), Church of God (8 subgroups), Eastern Orthodox Groups (14 subgroups), Episcopal Church (2 subgroups), Friends (3 subgroups), Lutherans (10 subgroups), Mennonites (13 subgroups), Methodists (19 subgroups), Moravians (2 subgroups), Old Catholic Churches (5 subgroups), Pentecostal Groups (13 subgroups), Presbyterians (10 subgroups), Reformed Churches (6 subgroups), and United Church of Christ (4 subgroups). Other sources yield somewhat different numbers. See, for example, Peter Day, Dictionary of Christian Denominations. But Day similarly includes non-Christian religious groups as well as now extinct Christian denominations.

18. The figures are Mead’s. Other figures besides those listed above for the United States are given in 2000 as high as 33,820 organized churches and denominations worldwide. Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia, 1:vi, 1:10. But Barrett does not treat denominations that straddle international bounderies as a single denomination. For example, he counts Roman Catholicism as 236 denominations existing in 238 countries rather than as one denominational entity (see his definition of denomination in 1:27). This is what produces his very high numbers. See also Moberg, "Denominationalism,’’ in DCA: 350–52.

19. Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism, 24.

20. Ibid, 217.

21. The name (Plymouth) Brethren is the one I will use most frequently to refer to the group. It is not in common use among them. In fact they prefer to have no label (since they ideally do not wish to divide themselves from the rest of the body of Christ by some sort of tag). If they must have one, they do not mind Brethren, since they use that among themselves. But that term can be confusing to the general audience of this book, since it is used of Grace Brethren, Lutheran Brethren, Mennonite Brethren, or any number of other groups as well. Plymouth Brethren is another term that is often used, and it was first applied to them by outsiders, when referring to the influence of one of its earliest groups in Plymouth, England. Christian Brethren is a common term outside North America for this group and is used in an increasing number of reference works. But it will not be used here as some sort of accepted title for the group since, as I said, the only commonly accepted term among them, especially in North America, is Brethren.

Acknowledgments

There are many people who helped make this book a reality and who deserve my thanks. First, thanks belong to Dr. Garry Friesen, my academic dean in 1992, whose flexibility on a time crunch enabled me to be the first to try out a new extended sabbatical program at Multnomah, and who gave valuable criticism of the entire manuscript during his own much-needed vacation time, so I could keep a deadline. Thanks also to Malcolm Miura, my graduate assistant at the time, for his research help. To those who reviewed various parts or chapters of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions, I tip my hat. That group includes Dr. Albert Baylis, Dr. Dan Scalberg, Dr. Ray Lubeck, Dr. Brad Harper, and Dr. Roger Trautman, all of Multnomah, and Dr. Ron Frost, formerly of Multnomah, and Mr. Greg Hicks, then of Mission Portland.

Thanks must also go to former librarian Jim Scott and his staff of Multnomah’s John and Mary Mitchell Library, for their incredible flexibility and helpfulness—and especially to Donna Rodman for her efficient help and cheerfulness on interlibrary loans. And, thanks must also go to Mike Hamel and Bill Conard who, at the time, were with Interest Ministries, for their helpful critique of an early draft. Of course, any mistakes that remain are my sole responsibility.

In the encouragement sector, thanks must go to Mr. David Sanford, of Sanford Communications, Inc., for his enthusiastic support and positive efforts to get this book updated and back into print as a second edition! And thanks must go to all those who prayed for this project over the years from my home assembly in Portland.

Thanks must also go to Bob and MaryLou Matthews, whose generosity granted me two separate, entire weeks at Eventide, the delightful cabin they maintained on the beautiful Oregon coast, so I could be free from distraction while working on this book.

Thanks must go to my parents, Allan and Evelyn Koivisto, who tried to develop a spirit of tolerating diversity in me, their oldest child, as I grew up in their household. And who tolerated my own wandering away from Lutheranism to a different yet equally historic expression of Christian faith!

Thanks also go to my in-laws, Bob and Ruth McNicol, whose lives have been a constant example to me of a genuine spirit of catholicity toward all who love the Lord. Ruth has since gone home to be with the Lord, but her encouragement will not be forgotten.

And, most of all, thanks to my wife, Joanie, to our grown up triple K Klub (Kristin, Kristopher, and Karrson), and to the Double M Club (Michael Jon and Maddie) for their long-suffering to endure far less than a full husband, daddy, and grandpa during this project.

May our Lord grant that this effort will be of benefit to His church—the entire church catholic.

Abbreviations

1

The Church at the Start

Roots in Genuine Catholicity

I therefore know no distinction, but am ready to break the bread and drink the cup of holy joy with all who love the Lord and will not lightly speak evil of His name.

—Anthony Norris Groves

It was 1969. I was an undergraduate student at a university in California during the height of the counterculture movement. Myself: I was a new Christian, come to personal faith just before entering college. The mood on campus was common for the era: anti-anything-that-was-viewed-as-establishment. And it seemed that everyone was at least a touch on the radical edge, from philosophy professors who canceled classes to join in the anti-war demonstrations, to those Jesus Freak types who strode onto campus and preached loudly in the Agora adjoining the cafeteria. And any of us who claimed to really believe in Christ came in for a fair share of scholarly and social ridicule. So I prepared myself for challenges every day as I walked on campus.

One day as I arrived for classes, I recall seeing bright iridescent orange signs posted all over the campus. Approaching the nearest one, I wasn’t very close at all when the message shouted out to me:

My first thoughts were: Oh great! Another blast at Christianity. But I made a mental note to be there and offer my two bits’ worth of apologetics.

I arrived early that Friday. The lecture hall was already packed with people. I was certain the crowd mostly consisted of opponents to the Christian message, who were simply looking for more evidence to chortle at Christianity.

The lecturer was an off-campus unknown. Probably an antiwar, antiestablishment political activist who came over from Berkeley, I thought. He began (as I expected) by lambasting the institutional church as just one more example of establishment oppression. I gritted my teeth. Right On! punctuated the lecture hall from time-to-time. But before long he did an unexpected transition: But check this out: don’t confuse the ‘establishment’ churches with Christianity. The essence of Christianity has always been Christ. Don’t reject Christ because the church is messed up. He then developed a fair Gospel message and apologetic on his own before a bewildered and increasingly hostile audience.

The audience left angry. They felt cheated. Based on the signs that had lured them in, they came expecting a lecture sympathetic with their anti-Christian preferences—and instead they got a dose of fundamentalist Christianity. But the point for all to see was that, to the lecturer, Christianity had little to do with the establishment church. The church was the bad guy. And Christ was not to be confused with the institutional church.

Before long, and not to be outdone, the local Roman Catholic Coalition sponsored a series of lectures on campus in response. Their signs, posted on similarly eye-catching material, retorted:

Few people came to this lecture, however. It was not as if they felt they couldn’t trust these kinds of signs anymore. It was simply a fact recognized by the earlier lecturer: nobody wanted to hear anyone speaking favorably about any institutional organization. The church was too establishment for 1969. The first lecturer at least had that right. The mood of the era was certainly to hell with church! But his antithesis was a problem. Was it really Christ or the church? Or had he got the notion of the church a bit confused?

Two primary indictments of the church on the part of the budding intellectuals there led to a justification of this frustration:

• A disgust over the authoritarian history of the church prior to the Reformation (the rather arrogant and petty papal forcing of a schism into Eastern and Western church, religio-political corruption in Europe, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition).

• Frustration over the church subsequent to the Reformation (the proliferation of denominations and sects with competing and mutually exclusive claims, yielding much in the way of hypocritical strife).

So, the church as an institution was bad.

But suspicion of organizational institutions claiming the name church is not just found among antiestablishment types who survived the sixties. The same is apparent among Protestants, particularly evangelical Protestants, and especially those of the free church tradition,¹ who are fairly quick to look with disdain on the more historic institutional churches claiming some sort of apostolic succession,² such as the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Anglican/Episcopalian churches. Marsden, for example, observes the following:

One of the striking features of much of evangelicalism is its general disregard for the institutional church. Except at the congregational level, the organized church plays a relatively minor role in the movement. Even the local congregation, while extremely important for fellowship purposes, is often regarded as a convenience to the individual. Ultimately, individuals are sovereign and can join or leave churches as they please.³

The alternative to these large institutional structures woven around episcopal succession is, in fact, the highly proliferate patchwork of hundreds and thousands of independent Protestant groups. Although the anti-institutional mode left over from the sixties can support a stance against institutionalization in the church, what of the other criticism, that Protestant Christians are incredibly divided? Do these divisions destroy the unity of the church? That is the problem that must be squarely faced in today’s church, for denominational and sectarian lines continue to exist and have an impact on popular perceptions of the church.⁴

As confusion over the nature of the church persists, just how are we to understand it? Is the church to be conceived of as an external and visible organization, a purely invisible or spiritual organism of some sort, or both? If it is external in any way, is it to be exclusively identified with any of the existing external structures? And how are we to conceive of any notion of one church in view of the multiplicity of external groups, and their often mutually exclusive claims to be the only and original church of Jesus? The historic organizational structures of the church argue toward a unity that is focused around an historic episcopate. The multiple Protestant subgroups more frequently argue toward a doctrinal and moral purity in the church, and that organizational unity must play a second position to that. With all that, where really is the church?

This chapter will begin our examination of these questions by looking at the church in the New Testament (I hope, with some fresh questions). It will also look at the church from the standpoint of the early subapostolic Christianity of the second century. We should find that the church understood itself to be one great community gathered around a core of apostolic teaching and that outside that apostolic core there was, even then, an acceptable diversity on secondary issues. The second century term for this was that the church was a catholic church. Let me explain.

THE CHURCH IN THE FIRST CENTURY: A COMMUNITY OF BELIEVERS IN THE SON OF GOD

We often use the term church today in reference to a structure or building. We say, Meet me in the parking lot of the Baptist church on Third and Oak. We mean, of course, that a building exists there that is used by a group of Christians who identify with Baptist distinctives. At other times, we use the term church as a specific subset of the church at large: a denomination or association of like-minded Christians. We have this meaning when we say, I belong to the Lutheran church. It’s another way of saying, I’m a Lutheran. But both of these uses are derivative rather than foundational, and may mislead us in terms of capturing the flavor of what the church is really about.

As we turn to the New Testament (the first place the term is used in its typical sense of Christians), we find several dimensions regarding the nature of the church. The earliest use of the term is in fact connected to people: Jesus responds to Peter’s confession and says, "you are Peter and on this rock [alluding to Peter] I will build my church [=community of people]" (Matt 16:18). Jesus was establishing for Himself one great messianic community. The emphasis is primarily on Peter as a prototype of the personal confessor of faith in Jesus and His messianic claims. As such, the idea is that the church is primarily a people, not a structure or organization.⁵

The church is not a building, although it typically needs one in which to meet (especially in wet climates like here in western Oregon!). It is not an institution, although it requires institutional elements of leadership and organization as it grows numerically. It is, instead, fundamentally a people who have come to faith in Christ and therefore gather together on the basis of that shared faith.⁶

With this in mind, as we look at the New Testament, the people of Jesus Christ are seen in three dimensions: as a locally gathering community in a geographical area (typically a city); as a locally gathering community in a home; and as the entire community of believing persons, which may never gather in any way in this life. Let’s look at each of these successively. Each element will help us to understand more effectively the manifestations of the church, as it exists in denominational variety today.

The church as believers gathered locally.

The church⁷ in the majority of its occurrences in the New Testament is conceived of as a concrete phenomenon: a community of persons within the same geographical area who believe in Christ, regularly gathering together to fulfill mutual functions as believers.⁸ Luke, for example, refers to the church in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1, 3; 11:22; 14:27), the church at Antioch (Acts 13:1), the churches in Iconium, Lystra, and Pisidian Antioch (Acts 14:21–23), and the church at Ephesus (Acts 20:17). Each of these is visible, actual, and visitable: a community of believers in Christ who gather together in a specific geographical location. Paul, similarly, writes to the church of God in Corinth (1 Cor 1:2; 2 Cor 1:1), to the churches in Galatia (Gal 1:2), to the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thes 1:1; 2 Thes 1:1), and refers to a church at Cenchrea (Rom 16:1).

The church in these instances can be nothing other than the visible, interrelating, localized communities of Christian believers. From early on they are portrayed as possessing identifiable leadership structures (local elders [NIV, NASB] or bishops [KJV, NRSV] and deacons)⁹ and practicing the cultivation of mutually supportive spiritual gifts (1 Cor 12–14). Even our Lord Jesus Himself used the term church in this localized way when He referred to taking a discipline problem, in the last resort, to the church for judgment (Matt 18:17). In theological discussions of the church, it is common to describe this aspect of the church as the local church.¹⁰ This use of the term church (or churches) may be illustrated as shown in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1: The local or city church in the New Testament

But it is not entirely appropriate to understand this first use of the term church as the strict equivalent of today’s local church (that is, considering that in one city, Filmore Street Baptist Church is one local church, while Metro Presbyterian is another local church). For there is a more fundamental use of the term church that has often been overlooked in the discussions of this local, visible church. That use is for the house churches that made up the local church.

The Church as a Household Gathering of Believers

In Jerusalem, where some 5,000 believers were known to reside in the days following Pentecost, the church really had nowhere to consistently meet as a whole. They could not continue to maintain free access to the increasingly hostile precincts of the temple. They could not rent a stadium or coliseum. Therefore, it is most probable that the regular functions of the church were in fact accomplished in house gatherings (cf. Acts 2:46–47).¹¹ Within larger, citywide congregations, the gatherings in given homes are also referred to by Paul as the church. When they were living at Rome, for example, a church gathered in Aquila and Priscilla’s house (Rom 16:3–5), and it appears Roman house churches were found in other homes clustered around Asyncritus (Rom 16:14) and Philologus (Rom 16:15).¹² Priscilla and Aquila had done this same thing earlier when they lived in Ephesus: they had a church in their home (1 Cor 16:19). Philemon, as a part of the greater church at Colossae, had a church in his home (Phile. 1–2), as did Nympha, who was apparently in that region but nearer the geographical church at Laodicea (Col 4:15).

It becomes very apparent, then, that there were at root at least two levels of the local church in the New Testament era: the general area, or city-church (which gathered infrequently) as well as the particular, or house church (which gathered frequently). Abraham Malherbe appropriately notes the following in this regard:

Although they may have formed separate communities, such [house] groups were not viewed as being separate churches. Luke’s description of the church in Jerusalem is not clear on this point, but it does convey the impression that he thought of it as one church despite the smaller groups that composed it. This is supported by his (and the Pastoral Epistles’) relating presbyters, or bishops, to cities rather than to individual groups (Acts 14:23; 20:17; Titus 1:5). By that time, however, more than one house church would presumably have existed in most localities with which the literature is concerned. More significant is that Paul and his followers, although they knew of separate groups in an area, wrote one letter to the church in that immediate area, apparently on the assumption that it would suffice for all the groups (e.g., Romans). On this understanding, the individual house churches would together have represented the church in any one area.¹³

Due most likely to a lack of adequate physical space to regularly support the entire citywide church (a similar situation would exist today, especially in large cities), Christians met in homes to fulfill the functions as a church community.¹⁴ Only on special occasions did the entire church in a city gather together, and only then when a venue with greater capacity was available to them.¹⁵ This use of the New Testament term church may be illustrated as shown in figure 1.2.