The True Church is not Electronic

In 1987, Augsburg Publishing House, the publishing arm of the American Lutheran Church which the following year would join with Fortress Press, the publisher of the Lutheran Church in America as part of the merger of the Lutheran bodies into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published a book entitled Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values and Culture.   The release of such a book could hardly have been more timely – it went to print just as the various scandals surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were breaking.   The author of the book was the Reverend William F. Fore, who was the acknowledged expert at the time on the matter of religious broadcasting.    For the next couple of years he was a guest on pretty much every major radio and television talk show discussing the scandal and his book.  Rev. Fore, who passed away last July, was a minister of the United Methodist Church, and served as the Executive Director of the Communications Department of the National Council of Churches in Christ for a quarter of a century, retiring from this position shortly after his aforementioned book came out.   The fifth and sixth chapters of the book address the message and audience respectively of what he called “the electronic church”.    He had already been sounding the alarm about this “electronic church” for over a decade.

 

Indeed, in August of 1978 Fore gave an address by that very title – “The Electronic Church” – to a meeting of the Seventh Day Adventist Broadcasters Council in Oxnard, California, which was published in that denomination’s Ministry Magazine in its January, 1979 issue.   In that address he noted some interesting statistics.   Gallup had just conducted a survey of the religious views of both the “churched” and the “unchurched” in the United States.   “Surprisingly”, Fore commented, “religious beliefs and practices have undergone remarkably little change during the past 25 years.”   What made these findings surprising was that while beliefs in doctrines like the deity of Jesus Christ and practices such as daily prayer did not appear to be declining among Americans, even among the “unchurched”, the self-evaluated importance of organized religion in their lives was.   Fore suggested that the incongruity between these two things could be, at least partly, explained by the growth of religious broadcasting and that this was cause for concern.   He said:

 

What worries me is whether this electronic church is in fact pulling people away from the local church.  Is it substituting an anonymous (and therefore undemanding) commitment for the kind of person-to-person involvement and group commitment that is the essence of the local church?

 

As we shall shortly see, this was a legitimate concern and there is far more cause for alarm on this front today than there was back then.   First, it needs to be noted that there was another, far more obvious, reason why steady belief in such basic Christian truths as the deity of Jesus Christ might coincide with a decline in confidence in organized religion – and a decline in church attendance, for when Fore was speaking and writing about the danger of “the electronic church” we were already several decades into a period of drastic decline in church attendance, one which began shortly after the Second World War and which continues to this day.  

 

That reason was simply this – that in this same period of time, a great many of the churches had stopped preaching and teaching the basic Christian truths.   For everyone who could still truthfully recite everything in the Apostles’ Creed from “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” to “The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen”, churches whose ministers taught that Jesus was God’s Son only in the sense that He exemplified the way in which we are all children of God and that He rose again from the dead only in the sense that He lived on in the memory of His disciples, and who similarly explained away everything else in the Creed so as to make its opening “I believe” into an “I don’t believe”, were rapidly losing their appeal.   Nor did they have much of an appeal to anybody else.  Anybody out there who actually wanted to hear a lecture every week about racial and gender equity, recycling and reducing our carbon footprint, and other such trendy codswallop had plenty of opportunity to do so that did not involve getting up early on Sunday morning.   Others have certainly noticed the contribution of this factor to the decline in church attendance and affiliation.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, where the decline had been much larger than in the United States, two Anglican priests, George R. Eves, Two Religions: One Church (1998) and Marney Patterson, Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada (1999), attempted, to little avail, at least with regards to the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to warn the Anglican Church of Canada that this kind of liberalism was killing the church.   Others, such as the eminent Canadian sociologist of religion Reginald W. Bibby, have addressed this factor in a more detached manner.    Now, the United Methodist Church and the NCCC were both noted bastions of liberalism.   The late Dr. Thomas C. Oden had been well within the mainstream of the United Methodist Church  prior to his journey back from theological liberalism and political radicalism to “paleo-orthodoxy” through a study of the great theologians of the Christian tradition beginning with the Church Fathers prompted by a challenge from his Drew University colleague, Will Herberg, who had had to make a similar return to the roots of his own Jewish tradition in the Talmud and Midrash after his own break with his early radicalism.  The National Council of Churches in Christ is the American organized expression of ecumenism which, as Joseph Pearce has recently observed, “appears to be the willingness to dilute or delete doctrine in pursuit of a perceived unity among disparate groups of believers (irrespective of what they actually believe)” and thus the opposite of what it originally meant when applied in the early centuries to the General Councils that defined orthodoxy and excluded heresy for the entire church throughout the “whole inhabited world”.    My point in bringing this up is not to cast aspersions on the personal orthodoxy of the late William F. Fore but to show that for someone in his position, unless he wished to make waves, he had strong personal reasons to turn a blind eye to the connection between liberalism and declining church attendance and to tie the latter to religious broadcasters who, whatever else they might be legitimately accused of -  aggressive and dishonest fundraising, the sacrilege of reducing religion to popular entertainment, etc. – were seldom if ever liberals.

 

All of that having been said, Fore’s concern that for many people “the electronic church” was taking the place of local churches was a legitimate and valid one.   In his address to the Seventh Day Adventists in 1978 he said the following:

 

Radio and TV – especially TV – tend to produce a substitute for reality that eventually can begin to take the place of reality itself.

 

He illustrated this point by referring to an article in Broadcasting Magazine that described a television program entitled “Summer Camp” that purported to give kids the “summer camp” experience “without leaving home”, a particularly poignant example as it is difficult to conceive of an experience further removed from that of watching television than summer camp or a greater exercise in missing the point than trying to translate that experience into the television medium.   He went on to say:

 

My point is that exposure to the media tends to separate us from the world of reality, creating for us, in fact, a new reality…The situation, I predict, is going to get worse.

 

Before we take a look at just how true that prediction has become, let us consider the contrast he drew between the local and the electronic church.   He said:

 

[The purveyors of the electronic church] are building huge audiences that bring them fame, wealth, and power, but which in doing so substitute a phantom, a non-people, an electronic church, for the church of real people, with real needs and real gospel to share in the midst of their real lives.

 

It is no accident that the local church, the koinonia or community of believers, is such a central part of our Christian faith and life.  This is where we find Christ; this is where we confess our sins and find forgiveness and regeneration; this is where we act out our faith and where we shore up one another when we slide back in the faith.

 

The years since 1978 and now have seen an explosion in the development of electronic communications technology.   Personal computers and cellular phones have become more compact and affordable and therefore ubiquitous and, indeed, have now merged into smart phones that place the internet, which itself has evolved rapidly and exponentially in this period, at one’s fingertips wherever one happens to be.   The “electronic church” has evolved along with these media and in 2021 the “online church” – services viewed over the internet either while they are occurring through livestream or later if, as is usually the case, recordings of the stream remain available – has become a much larger part of it than the services broadcast on radio and television forty years ago.   Indeed, for almost a year now, the “online church” has been the only “church” available throughout most of the world as governments everywhere have used the pretext of the spread of a coronavirus notable more for its novelty than its severity to throw off the shackles of constitutional restraints and protected rights and liberties and conduct an insane social experiment in which they forbade in-person social interaction in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to contain the spread of the virus.   The leaders of the churches have, for the most part, opted to obey man rather than God and support this vile experiment by closing their doors and making services available to their parishioners only via the internet.   Thus, for the last year, the “electronic church” has more fully and completely replaced the real church, than Rev. Fore would have imagined possible in his worst nightmares back in the eighties.  

 

What is most troubling about this, apart from the whole submitting to godless totalitarianism aspect of it, is that whereas forty years ago, church leaders whether orthodox or liberal, would have largely shared Fore’s concern that for many people the “electronic church” was becoming a substitute for actual churches in which real people meet and worship and fellowship together and would have agreed with him that this was not a good thing, today, the church leaders who are saying “Amen” to the government officials who insist that we must sacrifice the mental and social wellbeing of all members of our communities, and the economic wellbeing of all except the most wealthy, in order to prevent people who are already at the end of their natural lifespans from dying a natural death a very short time earlier than would otherwise be the case, are now developing theological arguments for why the “electronic church” is a real church after all.    While the idea of a spiritual fellowship existing between all believers in different places is neither new nor unsound – this is a part of the meaning of “the communion of the saints” in the Creed – it is a different matter entirely to treat the act of praying and singing along, from your own home, while you watch a service that is taking place elsewhere through your computer screen, as if you and those actually participating in the service were somehow together in some virtual “place” that the internet has generated.   Doing the latter is far closer to living in the kind of artificial “reality” from which in the movies a “red pill” is required in order to escape than it is to the orthodox doctrine of the “communion of the saints”.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia a year after the Bolsheviks, a murderous gang of criminal revolutionaries, fanatically devoted to building what they believed would be an ideal society based upon collective ownership, materialism, science, and atheism regardless of whatever cost in human lives and suffering had to be paid in order to bring this about, seized control of that country, murdered the Tsar and the rest of the royal family, and began its long, but mercifully unsuccessful, war of extirpation against the Russian Orthodox Church.   His mother raised him, as best she could, in the Orthodox faith, while the Bolshevik state did its worst to indoctrinate him in its ideology.   Ultimately, after Solzhenistyn was arrested while serving in the Red Army in World War II for criticism of Stalin, and sentenced by a secret tribunal of the NKVD to the work camps administered by GULAG, his Orthodox rearing won out, and in his writings he became a fierce critic of the oppression of the Soviet system.   While his writings were initially well-received in his home country while Khrushchev was repudiating the legacy of Stalin, when he turned his pen against the Communist system and underlying ideology as a whole, he became persona non grata, and soon his writings had to be published by samizdat in Russian, or smuggled out and published in translation in the West where they helped remove the blinders from the eyes of many who still thought of the Soviet experiment in romantic, idealistic, terms.   Eventually, the Soviet regime tired of him and on the twelfth of February, 1974, he was arrested again and sent into exile.

 

On the day of his arrest he released a notable essay, advising that in the face of a violent, oppressive, totalitarian ideology such as that which then ruled in Russia, the least that people could do was refuse to participate in the lies by which the totalitarian ideology of the state covered its violence.

 

“And this is the way”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies.   For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist”.

 

The title of Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Live not by Lies”, was borrowed last year by Rod Dreher, for a book advising Christians about how to live in the face of a new soft totalitarianism.   While Dreher admirably strained out many of the totalitarian gnats of “woke” ideology, he swallowed in its entirety the camel of masks and lockdowns and public health orders.

 

We can and must do better than that.

 

Sadly, I expect that very few of our church leaders will be willing to show the same faith and obedience to God rather than man as Pastor James Coates of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, who was arrested by the RCMP last week for holding regular church services and remains in police custody as of the time of this writing, or Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary, who held a service last weekend in solidarity with Pastor Coates.   While Coates’ arrest demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that I have been right in everything I have been saying since last March about how these public health orders are the latest manifestation of the anti-Christian, anti-freedom, atheistic and materialistic, spirit of Communist oppression and are utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm in which the basic rights and freedoms these orders treat as inconsequential are supposed to be the guaranteed Common Law property of citizens as Her Majesty's free subjects, this is not really my point here.   If most Christian leaders can’t find the balls to do what Pastors Coates and Stephens have done, a rather predictable consequence of the widespread ordination of women due to a previous generation’s departure from the clear teachings of the Scriptures and church tradition on that subject, then the least they can do, to borrow Solzhenitsyn’s language, is to refuse to participate in the lies covering up the totalitarian violence and oppression of the lockdown measures.   Specifically, they can reject the lie that the “electronic church” of today is somehow different and better than the “electronic church” of forty years ago, because it is online rather than on television.   This lie rests upon the underlying notion that the internet is an actual space where people can really meet and actively participate in something together rather than the mere passive viewing which is all that the voyeurism of television makes available.   I am inclined to say that this notion, too, is a lie, although it contains the element of truth that the internet has an interactional element that was not there in television.   Along with that element of truth, however, it contains the assumption that this is an improvement rather than something that moves us closer to the dystopia of the Matrix.   That assumption, I would say, is at the very least, highly dubious. 

 

Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One - Orthodoxy

Words often undergo changes in meaning over time. The changes can be slight or tremendous, ranging from a subtle alteration in nuance to a radical reversal in which a word evolves into its own antonym. This does not occur with every word, of course, and there are words whose meaning has remained stable, enduring the wear of centuries, millennia, and even the leap from one language to another.

Semantic shift has affected dogmatic or theological words as much as any other. There are several instances in which these changes have served as indicators of the weakening of orthodoxy. The word orthodoxy itself is an interesting example of this.

Within the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation orthodoxy used to refer to the essential Christian kerygma, stated dogmatically, and was understood to come in two tiers. First, and most important, was Catholic orthodoxy – the truths defined as orthodox in the Creeds of the early, undivided, Church. The second tier was Confessional orthodoxy, that is to say the truths defined as orthodoxy by the Confessions of the Protestant Churches – the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, the Augsburg Confession, Smalcald Articles and Formula of Concord of the Lutheran Church, and the Belgic and Helvetic Confessions and Heidelberg Catechism of the Reformed Church. Note that the degree of orthodoxy varies between these Confessions, as must inevitably be the case between Confessions that are not completely in agreement, and I have organized them in order from most orthodox to least. Note also that although the Canons of Dort are traditionally considered one of the Three Forms of Unity of the Reformed Church, they are not included because they only pertain to doctrines that have to do with the Reformed Church’s distinct view of predestination. Finally note that the Westminster Confession of Faith and all the other Confessions that have been modified from it are not included. The Confessions of seditious, regicidal, schismatics, however much truth they may contain and however well they might be worded, must never be regarded as orthodox.

In the last century there arose a “neo-orthodoxy” in the writings of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, a “paleo-orthodoxy” associated primarily with United Methodist theologian and Drew University Professor Thomas C. Oden’s project of recovering the consensus of the pre-Schism Patristic Church, a “Radical Orthodoxy”, a movement founded by High Anglican theologian and University of Nottingham Professor John Milbank, and a “Generous Orthodoxy” associated with Brian McLaren and the Emergent Church movement.

The first two of these were the efforts of former theological liberals to return to the orthodoxy that liberalism had abandoned. Barth notoriously failed at this – his “neo-orthodoxy” was an attempt to dress up existentialist philosophy in the language of Christian orthodoxy, but it fell short of the historical, orthodox, Catholic consensus on a number of points of doctrine, including the very foundation of the orthodox view of Scriptural authority, the doctrine of verbal inspiration, id est, that the very words of Scripture were inspired in the sense of being given to us or “breathed out” by God. Oden may have succeeded where Barth failed. In his last book Francis Schaeffer expressed a cautious optimism towards Oden’s project which was then in its infancy stage. Almost twenty years later Oden published his The Rebirth of Orthodoxy which would seem to have justified this optimism.

With regards to Radical Orthodoxy, it strikes me as being vulnerable to the same criticism Margaret Thatcher once made of Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatism, i.e., that there is too much stress on the adjective and not enough on the noun. Radical Orthodoxy began with Milbank’s rejection of the sacred-secular divide in Theology and Social Theory (1990), a promising start, and grew into a more thorough critique of modern thought and thinking. It borrowed heavily, however, from the other critiques of modernity that are collectively known as “post-modern”, including the obnoxious and barbaric methodology of writing largely in overly technical neologism. This methodology was, of course, designed for the purpose of subverting language itself, since language is seen by the post-modern mind as an unjust tool of oppression which needs to be deconstructed. This idea cannot be reconciled with true Christian orthodoxy which requires fidelity to Him Who was introduced by St. John with the words Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Post-modernism, for all of its claims of skepticism towards the metanarratives of modernity, has demonstrated no ability to think outside of the box of modernity and has been interpreted as being merely one of the elements of modernity taken to extremes and turned on modernity itself.

While this is not entirely true of Radical Orthodoxy, the leading figures of which have drawn heavily from such pre-modern wells as Platonic philosophy, Augustinian and Medieval Theology, and the Patristic writings, especially of the East, its inability to escape the modern box is quite evident when one considers, as one is not supposed to in theological discussions but which convention I have little respect for, how its ideas are applied in the realm of the political. Although this school of thought began among High Anglicans it is hard to imagine any of them, transported to the seventeenth century, taking up arms on behalf of King Charles I. They would be far more likely to side with the Levellers, the Puritan fanatics who were too extreme even for Cromwell. Consider Milbank’s tweet when Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

If, however, you want a theological example, there is the book advocating universalism published by Yale last year and written by David Bentley Hart, a disciple of Milbank’s who converted from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. While some Westerners convert to Eastern Orthodoxy out of a sincere conviction that the Greek Church was in the right in 1054 AD and that all the Western Churches are schismatic there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church. I am not saying that all of those drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy out of Radical Orthodoxy are of the latter type but read Hart’s book – it is entitled That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation – and draw your own conclusion.

If Radical Orthodoxy has borrowed certain ideas and methodology from secular postmodernism, the Emergent Church has embraced the latter with both arms. The very expression “Emergent Church” points to the movement’s understanding of the Church, not as an institution founded almost two thousand years ago, which we of the present have inherited from the past, but of something yet to be, which is now in the process of becoming. This distinction does not correspond to the traditional distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the ecumenical movement arose, the name of which pointed back to the unity of the early centuries prior to the schisms, and which had as its stated goal the restoration of this primitive unity. This movement, however, was extremely vulnerable to the criticism that its approach to Christian unity was the exact opposite of the Fathers of the earlier era. Whereas the latter promoted the unity of the Church by drawing up the ecumenical Creeds, so as to define orthodoxy and exclude heresy, which latter was the mother of schism, the ecumenical movement of recent years seeks an artificial sort of unity through a lowest-common denominator approach which avoids divisive and contentious doctrines however essential to historical orthodoxy they may be. The Emergent Church, in looking forward to the “Church” that is becoming in the post-modern age, has taken this ecumenism to the next level. Thus, McLaren’s “Generous Orthodoxy”, is not orthodoxy at all, that is to say, a canon of sound doctrine that identifies and excludes heresy, but something that seeks the exact opposite of this, the inclusion of as many, radically diverse, viewpoints as possible. It is the theological equivalent of multiculturalism and the cult of diversity.

To summarize, when “Orthodoxy” is qualified by “Neo”, “Radical” or “Generous” it is to one degree or another, a significant departure from historical and traditional orthodoxy, both the orthodoxy of the early Catholic Creeds and the orthodoxy of the Magisterial Protestant Confessions. Clearly the “orthodoxy” in the names of these movements means something different from what “orthodoxy” was understood to mean until the early twentieth century. This change in the meaning of the word is indicative of how the movements themselves have departed from historical and traditional orthodoxy. In the case of “paleo-orthodoxy”, “orthodoxy” appears to have retained its original meaning and is indicative of a movement that is trying to be genuinely orthodox.

Orthodoxy is not the only word that has undergone this kind of semantic shift. In the next entry in this series we shall, Deus Vult, consider how the meaning of the word “evangelical” has changed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and how this change indicates a departure from orthodoxy. We shall look at how in the eighteenth century this word came to indicate a highly individualistic, experience-based, approach to Christianity that is in many ways similar to a form of religious fanaticism that was condemned as heresy by Catholic orthodoxy in the Patristic era and which was strongly opposed by the orthodox Reformers. We shall also look at how the word “Catholic” has undergone a change in meaning in Protestant usage from the sixteenth century to the present. In the century of the Reformation, the orthodox Reformers – Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed – when speaking of the abuses they condemned, used such epithets as “Romish” and “popish”, but never condemned that which was truly “Catholic”, that is, belonging to whole Church, everywhere and in all ages, since Apostolic times. They rejected the papacy’s claim to be the locus of Catholicity and refused to use this ancient, Creedal, word as an exclusive description of the Roman communion. Today, Protestants, whether they be neo-evangelicals who have grown soft on the truths of the Reformation or fundamentalists blasting the errors of what they regard as the whore of Babylon, both tend to use the word Catholic in the way the Roman communion uses it, as an exclusive description of their communion. We shall consider how this is related to the change in meaning of evangelical, for they are related, and how both changes indicate a shift in evangelicalism to an extremely unsound view of Church history, one which is directly responsible for the revival of virtually every ancient heresy in the last two centuries.

In a third entry we shall, again DV, look at how the word fundamentalist has changed its meaning very quickly in the century since it was coined, moving from its original meaning of a sort of alternative, conservative, ecumenism to now denote a kind of radical separatism. We shall see how this change in meaning serves the purposes of those who wish to deny the obvious truth – that the view of Scriptural authority now associated with the word “fundamentalist”, that of verbal inspiration – has been Catholic orthodoxy since Patristic times. In relation to this we shall consider a different sort of semantic change – how, in the middle of the last century, we stopped referring to the English Vulgate – not an English translation of the Latin Vulgate but the English version produced by the English Church and adopted as its version of the Bible for over three centuries - by its proper name – the Authorized Version – and began calling it the King James Version in order to lower it, in people’s estimation, to the level of the myriad of inferior translations that have now glutted the market, none of which can ever achieve the status it once held, and how at best, even the best of them can only ever be a helpful secondary resource in the study of what shall ever be the true English Bible. We shall see how this belongs to a series of steps, beginning with eighteenth century evangelicalism’s departure from the evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformers, by which faith in Scriptural authority was gradually undermined from within.

Back to the Church Fathers

The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity by Thomas C. Oden, San Fransisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 2003, 212 pages, US $24.95, CAN $38.95

Orthodoxy, that is to say the doctrines that were taught and defended as sound by the Apostolic and Patristic Church in its early, undivided, state, and which have continued to be held by the various branches which have sprung from the single trunk stem of that Church down through the centuries, has been under attack in Protestantism for the last two centuries. As modernity brought a wave of secularism into Western philosophy and science, turning the efforts of these disciplines towards the finding of naturalistic and materialistic explanations of the universe that excluded the need for divine revelation from God, a growing segment of Protestantism responded with attempts to accommodate this modern way of thinking in Christianity.

It began in the seminaries, in which the academic study of the Bible ceased to be training for the expository preaching of authoritative texts and became instead the source of imaginative theories that explained away the text, and undermined its authority. The source criticism of the Graf-Wellhaussen documentary hypothesis, which tried to isolate the hypothetical original documents that the Torah was supposedly patched together from by a post-Exilic redactor, was followed by various forms of form criticism that sought to reconstruct the oral tradition that preceded the written canon. From the latter came such pursuits as the “quest for the historical Jesus”, based upon the neo-Gnostic assumption that the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith could be distinguished from each other, and “demythologizing”, which tried to distill the kerygma, the basic message of the Gospels, from the “myths” in which it was contained. (1)

While this was going on, in the theological departments of the seminaries, men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl were developing a new theology in which the doctrines which historically, traditionally, and Scripturally, were the central defining content of the Christian faith – the Trinity of One God in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, united in One Person in the Incarnation, His death as the Atoning sacrifice for the sins of humanity, His Exaltation, beginning with His triumphant Resurrection from the dead and continuing through His Ascension into Heaven, His sitting at the right hand of the Father, to culminate at the end of time with His return to judge both the living and the dead – were redefined or jettisoned altogether as being peripheral. This new “modernist” or “liberal” theology tended to reduce Christian theology proper to a vague concept of God as loving Father of all, Christian soteriology to a simple universalism, Christian eschatology to the idea that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth through leftist social and political action (2) and Christian ethics to the bland idea that we should be nice to each other.

The result of all of this was the advent of the Modern Churchman, brilliantly spoofed by Evelyn Waugh in his first novel Decline and Fall, who “who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.”

These developments provoked a number of responses. One of the earliest was that of Danish Lutheran theologian and existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who responded by denouncing the rationalism that the liberal theologians were seeking to accommodate and insisting that Christianity was not to be based upon reasoned argument but to be entered by a leap of faith.

The first organized response, however, was that of fundamentalism. Influenced heavily by 18th-19th Century evangelical revivalism and the 19th Century theology of dispensational premillenialism that had begun in the Plymouth Brethren and spread among other Protestant denominations through the Scofield Reference Bible, fundamentalism was an inter-denominational movement that sought to define the fundamentals of the faith (3) and to aggressively defend them against liberal or modernist attacks.

The next major response to theological liberalism was that of neo-orthodoxy. Neo-orthodoxy began in Switzerland with Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and was spread in the United States by the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and Richard, and by Paul Tillich. (4) Neo-orthodoxy rejected the liberal project of adapting Christianity to Enlightenment rationalism and insisted that Christian truth was a revelation from God. Unlike fundamentalism, however, it did not identify that revelation with the words of Holy Scripture but with the believer’s personal encounter with God in the reading of the Scriptures. It was always questionable therefore, whether neo-orthodoxy was a return to orthodoxy from the heterodoxy of liberalism or an attempt to replace the old orthodoxy with a new, different one.

A similar question has been asked on the American political and cultural right, over the last thirty years, about a group of thinkers who had started out on the left as part of the “New York Intellectuals”, become Cold War liberals after World War II, and then re-aligned themselves with the conservative movement after the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. The members of this group are commonly known as the neo-conservatives and those, who have called the authenticity of their conservative conversion into question, and re-asserted the canons of classical Burkean conservative thought in the distinctly American form it was given by Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver decades ago, are known as the paleoconservatives.

Is there also a paleo-orthodoxy in Christian theology?

Yes, as a matter of fact there is and the man who is its leader is Thomas Clark Oden, a United Methodist minister and the professor of theology and ethics at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Like the neo-orthodox, Oden started out as a liberal. Indeed, as we shall see momentarily, that is something of an understatement. He grew disillusioned with liberalism, and, after rejecting the modern assumptions it is based upon, turned to the doctrines that have been considered orthodox by Christians since the early centuries of Christianity. In his 2003 book, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, he writes:

Since 1979 I have used the term paleo-orthodoxy for the orthodoxy that holds steadfast to classic consensual teaching, in order to make it clear that the ancient consensus of faith is starkly distinguished from neo-orthodoxy. The “paleo” stratum of orthodoxy is its oldest layer. For Christians this means that which is apostolic and patristic. For Jews it means that which is rabbinic and midrashic. These two branches of the “paleo” stratum developed side by side during the same timeframe and within the same language world. (p. 34, bold indicates italics in original)

The Rebirth of Orthodoxy is the story of how, in the late 20th Century, Christianity and Judaism both experienced a renewal of interest in the ancient teachings of their respective faiths. As a Christian theologian, he focuses on this renewal within Christianity, but points out certain parallels with what is happening in Judaism. Ironically, the writings of each faith in the period he has in mind, treats the other faith with invective that would make that used by the Reformers against the Reformers against the papacy and vice-versa seem relatively mild in comparison, but that never comes up. Perhaps that is just as well.

Oden begins his story by setting the stage with an account of the death of modernity. The idea of the modern age, as the third age of Western civilization to follow classical antiquity and medieval Christendom, goes back to the Renaissance which is usually thought of as the beginning of that age. In the second half of the 20th Century it became widely accepted that the modern age was ending or had come to an end, some even arguing that it had ended as early as the Second World War. Oden concurs with this, although the modern age of which he writes is an abridged version that begins with the French Revolution and ends with the collapse of Communism in 1989. It was in this period that Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud introduced their destructive ideas and by the end of this period these ideas and ideologies had been largely discredited. In discussing the collapse of modernity and its ideologies Oden helpfully identifies the arrogant attitude which characterizes so much modern thought. This attitude, which he calls modern chauvinism, assumes “the intrinsic inferiority of all premodern ideas and texts, and the intrinsic superiority of all modern methods of investigation” (p. 8).

The irony of modern chauvinism is that while modern ideologies, such as the ones mentioned, had only a very brief lifespan before they were dated, discredited, and bankrupt, traditional faith communities, such as the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and evangelical forms of Christianity have survived the crisis of modernity and even thrived. The same can not be said for the liberalism that embraced modernity. Wherever it has been adopted it has lead to empty pews, dwindling and aging congregations, and ultimately the closing of parishes.

Oden’s story, however, is not just about how much more persistent and durable traditional, orthodox forms of faith are compared to modern ideas. It is about a rediscovery of ancient orthodoxy that is concurrent with the collapse of modernity and which is taking place not only among Roman Catholics, evangelicals, and others who have remained faithful to their traditional beliefs but also in denominations that have gone liberal.

Indeed, the tenth chapter of the book, entitled “Recentering the Mainline” is all about renewal and confessing movements within the mainline Protestant denominations, i.e., the denominations in which liberalism prevailed for most of the 20th Century. Oden lists and in his endnotes provides contact information for such movements within the Episcopalian (Anglican), Presbyterian, United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, American Baptist, United Church of Canada and Lutheran denominations, as well as a number of organizations that seek to coordinate the confessional movements in various denominations. He encourages the faithful in such denominations with the example of his own denomination, the United Methodist Church, which in its General Conference in 2000 AD affirmed a number of orthodox doctrines, practices, and moral stances that would have been unheard of at previous such assemblies.

The “rebirth of orthodoxy” of which he writes, however, is not just a returning to the traditional roots of a particular denomination. The orthodoxy that is being rediscovered is that of the early centuries of the Church, an orthodoxy which part of the common heritage of all Christian denominations. It is, in other words, an ecumenical orthodoxy.

For much of the 20th Century an ecumenical orthodoxy would have been a contradiction in terms. For the ecumenical movement was anything but orthodoxy. It sought Christian unity at the expense of Christian truth, and by aligning itself with modern ideas and practices and radical and revolutionary causes, generated more division than it did unity. For this reason, Oden calls the ecumenism of the orthodox “the new ecumenism” – this is the title of his fifth chapter – to distinguish it from what he calls the old ecumenism, i.e., the ecumenism of the World and National Councils of Churches. Of course the identification of these ecumenisms as “new” and “old” relative to each other is only valid within the context of recent history – in the larger context of the entire history of the Christian Church, Oden’s “new ecumenism” is much older, for it is based upon the unity in orthodox teaching and practice of the ancient, undivided, Church.

Early in the book, Oden defines orthodoxy as “integrated biblical teaching as interpreted in its most consensual classic period.” (p. 29) If the hallmark of a good definition is that it brings clarity to the meaning of the word being defined, Oden deserves a failing grade for that one. Thankfully, he does not leave it at that but explains what he means. Orthodoxy is a tradition that begins with the Scriptures, a canon of sacred texts accepted as authoritative by the faithful and continues with the interpretation and understanding of those texts, the confession of beliefs drawn from those texts, and the living out of those beliefs in the lives of the faithful, all under the direction of the Holy Spirit. That it takes place under the direction of the Holy Spirit – the Comforter Whom Jesus had promised would guide His Church into all truth – is the most important part of this, because without it, Oden’s repeated, annoying, use of the word consensual would suggest the ludicrous idea that truth is something that is determined by democratic vote.

How truth is determined, is the subject of his eleventh and final chapter. In this chapter, he tells us about St. Vincent, the fifth century monk who after much travelling throughout the Christian world and dialoguing with a broad spectrum of Christian leaders and believers, withdrew to a monastery at Lerins, shortly after the Council of Ephesus, where he wrote his Commonitory. In this work, St. Vincent wrote that in distinguishing the true faith from heresy, recourse must first be taken to the Scriptures, then to the tradition of the Church. In this context he gave his famous rule about what to do when the correct interpretation of Scripture is in dispute: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, that we should hold to whatever is believed everywhere, always, and by all. (5)

This was not, as Oden points out, an invention of St. Vincent, but rather something that was commonly understood among the various Christians he had discussed the matter with during his travels. It put forward three criteria for a doctrine to be considered orthodox – universality, that it was held by the whole Church and not just by those within a certain region; Apostolic antiquity, that it had been taught since the earliest days of the Church, and Conciliar consent, that it had been affirmed by the ecumenical Councils of the Church. If a Council had not determined a doctrinal issue one way or the other, Oden suggests that the writings of the Church fathers, in particular those of the great doctors Sts. Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory the Great, are a guide to the consensus of the ancient Church.

In an earlier chapter, the seventh, Oden had discussed various scholarly projects underway regarding the earliest interpretation of the Scriptures in both the Christian and Jewish traditions, including the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture that he himself was editing. This return to the texts, tradition, and methodology of classic Christianity is not just an academic exercise. Oden portrays it as being transforming and revitalizing, both for individual believers and for denominations, and uses his own experience as an illustration. As mentioned earlier, he had started out as a liberal. The son of radical parents, he says that he “learned my agnosticism from Nietzsche, my social views from radical Methodists and existentialists, and my theology (God help me, I confess) from Alan Watts.” (p. 84). After pointing out that he and Hillary Rodham Clinton had largely had the same education, early ideals, and influences he writes that when he looks now at her “persistent situational ethics, political messianism, statist social idealism, and pragmatic toughness” he sees “mirrored the self I was a few decades ago”. (p. 85) He credits a mentor and colleague of his at Drew University, Will Herberg (6) for steering him towards orthodoxy. Herberg challenged Oden to study the fathers of the Christian tradition, citing his own experience of studying the early texts of his own faith, the Talmud and Midrashim after his disillusionment with his early Communism, telling him that he “would remain theologically uneducated until I had studied carefully Athanasius, Ambrose, Basil and Cyril of Alexandria” and that until he did he was “not a theologian except in name, even if remunerated as one”. (p. 87)

Herberg’s challenge clearly bore fruit. Oden took him up on his challenge, and through reading the early fathers and conversations with orthodox believers, went from being the kind of person just described to being someone who believes, lives, and teaches the faith once delivered unto the saints.

There were some places where I could not see eye to eye with the author. The largest of these concerns the “fairness revolution”, which is Oden’s general label for the egalitarian movements that have wrought tremendous social changes in living memory. Oden gives the civil rights movement, the so-called women’s movement (feminism), the papal apology for the Crusades, and the struggle over “unconventional lifestyles” in the Boy Scouts, as examples of this fairness revolution. Oden is not blind to the many glaring problems with this revolution, and is particularly critical of its tendency to produce a form of modern chauvinism, in which past generations are condemned for not sharing the current generation’s supposed commitment to fairness. He is also not unaware that the fairness revolution has had some pretty bad consequences:

A dependency population within a welfare state has become a fixed reality. Victimization has become a game. Women suffer more, not less, from divorce and economic instability. Family cohesion has diminished. The children of the fairness revolution are paying an extremely high price in family disorder, adolescent suicide rates, neuroses, and chronic anxiety. (p. 12)

Nevertheless, Oden seems unable to go all the way to the only tenable conclusion about the fairness revolution – that it was from day one, completely worthless and execrable and that it never had any better goal than an insane vision of a society restructured so as to be driven by what is the equivalent of the infantile whine of “it’s not fair, it’s not fair, Johnny’s got a bigger piece of cake than I do, you like Suzie better than you like me, wah, wah, it’s not fair.” Instead, he devotes an entire chapter to arguing that the goals of the fairness revolution are laudable, come from classical Christian orthodoxy, and that the problem with the revolution is its reliance upon secular and governmental agencies to accomplish its ends.

It seems to me that in this part of the book, Oden is confusing, on the basis of a partial surface resemblance, two things that are essentially different and incompatible with each other, classic Christian catholicity in which all people everywhere are welcome to partake of the unity of one Lord, one faith, one baptism one the one hand and late modern ideals of fairness on the other.

That being said, he at least does not treat the fairness revolution with the uncritical adoration it receives from most academics and clergymen. Furthermore that is only one chapter out of eleven, in what is otherwise an excellent, encouraging, and inspirational book. I enjoyed reading it and recommend it for others.



(1) The history of the19th Century “quest for the historical Jesus” was told by famous missionary Albert Schweitzer in his early 20th Century work by that title. Demythologizing is most associated with Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament professor at the University of Marburg. Both men were German Lutherans.

(2) This blend of post-millenialism and socialism was called the “Social Gospel”. Its first major proponent was Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor in New York. Today, the concepts of “Social Gospel” and “social justice” are virtually synonymous and interchangeable. In Rauschenbusch’s day, however, “social justice” was a Roman Catholic concept, that taught by Pope Leo XIII in “Rerum Novarum”, which condemned socialism even more harshly than it did liberalism (capitalism).

(3) The term “fundamentalism” was coined by Baptist Curtis Lee Laws, and was popularized by The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a series of apologetical essays defending the authority of Scripture and the historic doctrines of the faith by conservative theologians of various denominations, that was published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. The movement was by nature and necessity reductionist. The most popular list of fundamentals contained five – the Inerrancy of Scripture and the Deity, Virgin Birth, Substitutionary Death, and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This brought the movement criticism from conservative Protestants that would otherwise have been in sympathy with it.

(4) German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also a noted neo-orthodox theologian.

(5) Within the community of believers, that is.

(6) This is the same Will Herberg who wrote Protestant, Catholic, Jew and was Religion Editor of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. His own experience, of an early Communist radicalism followed by disillusion, a turn to the right, and a rediscovery of traditional faith – in his case Judaism – was not uncommon among Buckley’s early staff.