Category: Ecclesiology

Categories
Books Ecclesiology Leadership Stanley Hauerwas

What does Hauerwas’s course have to do with church leadership?

I am taking Stanley’s Hauerwas’s course “Happiness, the Life of Virtue, and Happiness” this semester.  If you are curious why I would take a course like this when the name of my blog is “Church Leadership Conversations,” I can sketch some of the points of connection that I see already. 

  1. How do Christians converse with outsiders?  It may be helpful to explain the goodness of the Christian life (think Mother Teresa) and then move from there to showing how the Christian faith best explains the virtuous life.  Perhaps pastors are smart to do evangelism by explaining 3 ways to have a better marriage or  three ways to manage your money better.  I think of The Marriage Course which is offered by the Alpha course founders at Holy Trinity Brompton in London, UK or Willow Creek’s Good $ense course.
  2. The question Aristotle is asking has to do with how people are formed.  Pastors ask the same thing: how do we make better disciples of Jesus?  I think of USC philosopher and evangelical Dallas Willard’s three book series on spiritual formation: Spirit of the Disciplines, Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart and Willard’s partnership with Richard Foster and his Celebration of Discipline book and Renovare movement.  (For more about Willard, see the bottom of this post).  Another way of saying it is this: Aristotle is concerned with polis (city-state) and Christians are concerned with building a strong healthy church.  But this raises, “what role does human effort play in developing spiritual maturity vs. what God does?”  This is the question that Christians ask when trying to use Aristotle’s insights: see Hauerwas and Pinches, Herdt, Wells, Aquinas and Augustine below. It is around these questions where “political theology” and “ecclesiology” and “church leadership” and “spiritual formation” and “discipleship” and “preaching” and “Christian education” and “pastoring” intersect. 

This is not surprising but I will say it anyway.  I am convinced that a community of Christians trying to orient their lives by the Scriptures is absolutely central.  Though there is a lot of complex discussion in these books, none of it will reverse that and that is what most of my readers are already dedicating their lives to.  In a way, this philosophy, history, and theology merely help us to ask better questions about how this is done.  

About the course:
We had our first class yesterday.   There are 60 in the course.  Hauerwas lectures for 1 to 1 1/2 hours and then we go to discussion groups (“precepts” in Duke Divinity School jargon) led by teaching assistants (“preceptors”) who are Ph.D / Th.D. students not taking the course.  The thirteen Ph.D. and Th.D. students in the course meet with Hauerwas himself.  Of that group, 7 are Th.D. students from Duke Divinity School including me, two political science and one philosophy Ph.D students from Duke Graduate School, one theology Ph.D. from Sweden, one theology Ph.D. student from University of Leuven in the Netherlands, and one theology student from Duke University’s Department of Religion.  The required books are below.

Books for Stanley Hauerwas Course: Happiness, the Life of Virtue, and Friendship

This is probably the most talked about book at Duke Divinity School.  We are supposed to read it for the first class.  I already read this for the Th.D. seminar during the Fall of 2007.  If you are confused why this would be an important book to read at seminary, you might be helped by this comment by Hauerwas, “In a way, MacIntyre is engaged in something we might in other contexts call Christian apologetics” (Christians Among the Virtues, 40). 

There are a number of different translations but this one looks the best to me.  The Irwin translation is the one Hauerwas uses and is in the bookstore but it is a 1999 translation and I read better things about the 2002 Sachs translation.  A book like this shares many of the difficulties of translating the New Testament–textual criticism, consistency, word choice, readability vs. “accuracy”, etc.

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (Translator: Terence Irwin)

This one only the doctoral students are supposed to read. 

This is the “textbook” for the course.  It is a new book and tries to reflect Christianly on the use of the virtues. 

Wells is the Dean of Duke Chapel and wrote his dissertation on Hauerwas.  Wells is a great preacher. 

This book by blogger Nate Kerr is available at Wipf and Stock
at a 40% discount if you enter the coupon code:  “KERR40”.  That puts
the book at about $16.80, which is a significantly lower price.
Great theology blogger Ben Myers calls it the best theology book of 2008
though he is biased as Kerr is his friend.  Hauerwas recommended it to
me yesterday for my interests in ecclesiology and mission.  Hauerwas’s blurb reads,

A rare gift—a critic from whom you
learn. Though I do not agree with all of his criticisms of my work,
Kerr–drawing imaginatively and creatively on the work of Troeltsch and
Barth– has rightly framed the questions central to my and Yoder’s
project. We are in his dept for having done so. In this book, Kerr not
only establishes himself as one of the most able readers of my and
Yoder’s work, but he is clearly a theologian in his own right. We will
have much to learn from him in the future.
Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC

See also the “Symposium” on the book at the the church and postmodern culture: conversation
blog.

Note:
I have put a number of links to audio teaching by Stanley Hauerwas at my blog post here.

More about Dallas Willard:
Do Stanley Hauerwas and Dallas Willard ever cite one another?  Not that I can find so far.  I have looked through Willard’s books except Renovation of the Heart. Here is Dallas Willard’s faculty page at USC’s School of Philosophy. Hauerwas and Willard are on the same page to a great degree.  It is too bad that there is not more cross-polination.

Dallas Willard Trilogy

See also the book by Jim Spiegel, my former professor and colleague at Taylor University on the virtues.  Spiegel also has a website and blog.

How to Be Good in a World Gone Bad by James S. Spiegel (Paperback – Feb 25, 2005)

Categories
Ecclesiology Leadership Journal's Out of Ur blog Megachurches Missiology Missional Sociology

The research behind my post at Out of Ur: Missional vs. Attractional: Debating the Research

See the post I coauthored with the editors of Leadership Journal at the Out of Ur blog:

Missional vs. Attractional: Debating the Research
What do the numbers say? It depends who you ask.

by Url Scaramanga & Andy Rowell

Summary:

In the comments of a recent post, Scot McKnight, David Fitch, Dan Kimball and Alan Hirsch argued about what the church stats say.  They called for evidence.  So in this post, I lay out some quantitative data that is relevant to the discussion.  (See my Following Dan Kimball's Missional vs. Megachurch conversation to get caught up on the chronology of the discussion).  The evidence I present is not decisive for "either side" but it sheds light on what we know and don't know.  My point is merely that we need to be careful about making broad claims about where the church is growing and declining.  I agree that we need to be reasonably informed about sociology but that our direction comes from theology. 

 

Here are the footnotes that they edited out:

Scott Thumma and Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America's Largest Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 124-125.

Stanley Presser and Mark Chaves, "Is Religious Service Attendance Declining?" Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46 (2007): 417.

Rodney Stark, What Americans Really Believe (Waco: Baylor, 2008), 14.

Scott Thumma and Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America's Largest Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 8-9.

Notes about interpreting David Olson's The American Church in Crisis statistics:

As I have noted before, David Olson's research is principally based on statistics from 20 or so denominations.  It tells us something but not necessarily about all churches in the U.S.

The quote in the article from Olson was not suggested by me but by the Leadership Journal editors.  It is from the following piece:

Rebecca Barnes and Lindy Lowry, "The American Church in Crisis", Outreach magazine, May/June 2006.

The claims by Olson are also made in his book:

David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of over 200,000 Churches (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).  

Olson tallies together headcounts from denominations and based on that argues that the attendance number is fairly stable but the American population is growing.  First, I do not think his numbers adequately represent independent churches and smaller denominations.  Second, I know of no other researcher who depends on headcounts as Olson does with so little clarification about establishing a comprehensive methodology.  

D. Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, notes in response to Olson's research:

"Counting heads to estimate weekly worship service attendance is far less reliable than estimates based on survey responses . . . For researchers to generalize head counts to the entire adult population, they must be conducted as an exhaustive consensus or a representative sample."

D. Michael Lindsay, "Gallup's Research Remains More Reliable Than Counting Heads," Rev. Magazine (Mar/Apr 2008): 59.

It should be said that I appreciate Olson's research for what it does tell us and I used it in my previous post "Megachurch Misinformation" at Out of Ur.  For example, one can look at the church planting statistics from 10 denominations.  These stats do not tell us about church planting in America comprehensively but give a nice snapshot. 

Additional notes about young adults:

I do not mean in the Out of Ur post to paint a rosy picture of American Christianity.  As Andy Crouch notes in the comments, there is no room for complacency.

Robert Wuthnow points out that frequent church attendance among young adults is down from 31 percent in the 1970s to 25 percent more recently. 

Wuthnow writes,

Specifically, 6 percent of younger adults [age 21-45] in the recent period [1998, 2000, 2002 GSS] claim that they attend religious services more than once a week, compared with 7 percent in the earlier period [1972-1976], and 14 percent in the in the recent period claim they attend every week down from 19 percent previously.  At the other extreme, 20 percent say they never attend, compared with only 14 percent earlier.  How should we think about these changes?  On the one hand, it is important not to exaggerate their significance.  In many ways, younger adults at the start of the twenty-first century are like younger adults in the early 1970s.  If we count as 'regular' attenders, those who participate nearly every week or more often, only a quarter (25 percent) of younger adults can be considered regular attenders now, and fewer than a third (31 percent) were in the early 1970s.  The majority of younger adults either attend religious service rarely, or if they attend more than that, are hardly regular enough to be the core of any congregation.  On the other hand, the fact that regular attenders now characterize only 25 percent of younger adults, whereas this proportion was 31 percent in the 1970s represents a decline that cannot easily be dismissed.

Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 52-53.

Conclusion:

I love all kinds of churches.  All need to be continually evaluated by good theology. 

As I said in my earlier post Megachurch Misinformation, 

All of us want "more and better disciples of Jesus" (a phrase I first
heard from Brian McLaren). In the Church of England, they are talking
about a "mixed economy" of "fresh expressions" of church being a good
thing–in other words different churches will reach different people. I
am hopeful about both missional and megachurch expressions of church.

Related:

See also my posts:

Weekly U.S.A. Church Attendance: The Sociologists Weigh In

and

Following Dan Kimball's Missional vs. Megachurch conversation

and my posts in the Sociology category. 

Categories
Ecclesiology John Howard Yoder Rowan Williams Theologians

60 Theologians on an Ecclesiological Spectrum

What is a church?  Allow me in this post to introduce you to three phrases:

esse notae ecclesiae (essential marks of the church)

bene notae ecclesiae (good marks of the church)

plene notae ecclesiae (full marks of the church)

My thesis is that there are substantive differences along the ecclesiological spectrum regarding the first category–the esse notae ecclesiae (essential marks of the church) but that there is ecumenical potential–that is their possibility for broad consensus–around the second and third categories.

All Christians believe that a church should be "one holy catholic and apostolic" as the Nicene Creed says.  All Christians believe a community needs a few "essential marks of the church" (esse notae ecclesiae) to be "a church."  Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox require structural identification with what they perceive to be "the Church" that traces its identity back to the apostles through apostolic succession.  The Reformers are famous for calling for two marks: "the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered."  Others suggest "a church" is any group that gathers in the name of Jesus:  "For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them" (Matthew 18:20).  

I have made a list below of lots of theologians and I have guessed where they might fall on the ecclesiological spectrum.  The ones at the top would have more formal requirements for what constitutes "a church."  The ones at the bottom would consider a community to be "a church" with relatively few formal requirements. 

All believe that their version of formal requirements and flexibility best conform to the New Testament parameters.  The ones at the bottom of the list with fewer formal requirements might say that their churches are actually "stricter" in some respects.  Thus, I labeled the list "high church" to "low church" not "very strict" to "less strict."

Though these theologians would disagree strongly about what is essential, they would all agree that "a church" should grow closer to what it is supposed to be–developing more bene notae ecclesiae (good marks of the church) and they all aspire to have the plene notae ecclesiae (the full marks of the church).  Perhaps the latter two areas are where we can find the most ecumenical consensus. 

In my papers on the missional ecclesiologies of Anglican and current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the the Mennonite ethicist (1927-1997) John Howard Yoder, I reflect on the central practices in their ecclesiologies.  For Williams, these are esse notae ecclesiae (essential marks).  Yoder's five practices in Body Politics are bene notae ecclesiae (good marks of the church).

The four practices I draw from Williams are these:

(1) moral discernment oriented by martyrdom (drawn mostly from his book Why Study the Past?)

(2) participation in the sacraments

(3) standing under the authority of Scripture

(4) communicating the Good News drawn from a letter. 

For the latter three practices see, Williams's “Archbishop of Canterbury's Advent Letter,” The Anglican Communion Official Website (14 December 2007). 

Williams hoped that the Anglican Communion would rally around these constitutive practices–esse notae. 

On the other hand, John Howard Yoder describes well the thriving church–bene notae.
(1) Binding and Loosing / reconciling dialogue
(2) Disciples Break Bread Together / Eucharist
(3) Baptism and the New Humanity / Baptism
(4) The Fullness of Christ / Multiplicity of gifts
(5) The Rule of Paul / Open meeting

Yoder does not intend to be comprehensive in his list–he calls these "sample" practices–and therefore, even though they are inspiring, they do not constitute a full ecclesiological foundation (as I argue in my paper).

If you are interested in this topic, you will want to read Miroslav Volf's book After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinity. Volf engages Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and John Zizioulas–both of whom are near the top of the list–over the issue of esse notae.  Volf argues that a community of people is "a church" if they "gather in the name of Jesus" and he adds a few more esse notae.  Thus, he is pretty close to the bottom of the list.  He is arguing that being "at the bottom of the list"–having a free church theology–can be theologically legitimate.

Therefore, as we think about ecclesiological differences with others, I think it is worth reflecting on not only our differences as evident on the spectrum below, but also about the possibility of common purposes in the bene and plene notae.

 

Disclaimer: I have not read books by all of these people and do not know all of their ecclesiologies that well.  I was just trying to sketch out what I was thinking.  I thought my readers could help me fix the list.

I have put a little bit more about notae (marks) below the list.

60 Theologians on an Ecclesiological Spectrum (from high church to low church)

High church: significant formal requirement for what constitutes "a church"

  1. Council of Trent
  2. Thomas Aquinas
  3. Pope Benedict XVI – Roman Catholic
  4. Henri de Lubac – RC
  5. William T. Cavanaugh – author of Torture and Eucharist
  6. Vincent J. Miller – Roman Catholic and author of Consuming Religion
  7. Pope John Paul II – RC
  8. Hans Urs von Balthasar
  9. Hans Küng – RC
  10. John Zizoulas – Eastern Orthodox
  11. Augustine
  12. Martin Luther
  13. John Calvin
  14. John Milbank – Anglo-Catholic
  15. John Wesley
  16. Oliver O'Donovan – Anglican
  17. N.T Wright – Anglican
  18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Lutheran
  19. Stanley Hauerwas – United Methodist
  20. Rowan Williams – Anglican
  21. Craig Van Gelder – Lutheran
  22. Patrick Keifert – Lutheran
  23. Søren Kierkegaard – Reformed
  24. Eugene Peterson – PCUSA
  25. Lesslie Newbigin – Reformed
  26. Karl Barth – Reformed
  27. Mark Driscoll – conservative Reformed
  28. Jürgen Moltmann – Reformed
  29. T.F. Torrance – Reformed
  30. Walter Brueggemann – Reformed
  31. Tim Keller – PCA
  32. Darrell Guder – Reformed
  33. John Piper – Reformed Baptist
  34. Reinhold Niebuhr – Congregational
  35. H. Richard Niebuhr – Congregational
  36. David Bosch – Reformed
  37. Wolfhart Pannenberg
  38. Richard Hays – UM
  39. Len Sweet – United Methodist
  40. James Dunn – UM
  41. Miroslav Volf – Episcopal and Pentecostal, author of After Our Likeness
  42. Scot McKnight – Evangelical Covenant
  43. Andrew Jones – Tall Skinny Kiwi
  44. Stan Grenz – Baptist
  45. Rick Warren – SBC
  46. Ed Stetzer – SBC
  47. Dan Kimball
  48. Menno Simons
  49. John Howard Yoder – Mennonite
  50. FF Bruce – Plymouth Brethren
  51. Bill Hybels – evangelical
  52. Andy Stanley – evangelical
  53. Rob Bell – evangelical
  54. David Fitch – author of The Great Giveaway
  55. Tony Jones
  56. Doug Pagitt
  57. Ryan Bolger – author of Emerging Churches
  58. Eddie Gibbs
  59. John Wimber – Vineyard founder
  60. Peter Rollins
  61. Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost – authors of The Shaping of Things to Come.
  62. Frank Viola – author of Reimaging Church
  63. Donald McGavran and Peter C. Wagner – founders of the "Church Growth Movement."
  64. George Barna – author of Revolution
  65. George Fox – Quaker, Society of Friends

Low church: fewer formal marks of what is needed to be called "a church"

The language of notae (marks) which I have used here is used differently by different theologians.  Some believe "a church" has certain beliefs, others believe a church has certain traits, others believe a church has a certain structure, others believe it has certain practices.   

The notae ecclesiae can be traced at least back to the Lutheran Church’s Augsburg Confession (1530) written by Philipp Melanchthon and Martin Luther.

The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered. And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments.[1]

A revised version of the Augsburg Confession called the Variata, was later signed by John Calvin in 1540. Calvin’s words in The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536, 1559) are quite similar to the Lutheran document.

The marks of the church and our application of them to judgment: Hence the form of the Church appears and stands forth conspicuous to our view. Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence.[2]

Both name the proper preaching of the word and the proper administration of the sacraments as the crucial characteristics of a church.

John Howard Yoder develops four additional marks suggested by Menno Simons in the 1540’s: (1) holy living, (2) brotherly love, (3) unreserved testimony, and (4) suffering.[3]

 

[1] The Augsburg Confession, article 7 (The Book of Concord). Cited 9 July 2008. Online: http://www.bookofconcord.org/augsburgconfession.html#article7

[2] John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; LCC; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), IV, 1, 9. Cited 9 July 2008. Online: http://www.reformed.org/books/institutes/books/book4/bk4ch01.html#nine.htm

[3] John Howard Yoder, “A People in the World,” The Royal Priesthood, 77-89.