[The panel is] a
mixture of academics and ministry practitioners who will each be given 15-20
minutes for their presentations. … The
invitation is to reflect on what “Christ Alone” means in our present context –
what are the challenges and strengths of this concept? How is it incorporated
(or not) into the church’s life and the lives of Christians now? How might it
be understood now in ways that the Reformers would find troubling? Are there
contemporary metaphors that help us understand the watchword’s meaning now?
So the following questions: What does
“Christ Alone” mean today? What are the challenges and strengths of the
concept? How is it part of the church’s life today? What would the Reformers
think of the way that we use this concept? Is there a better way to think of it
today?
I think about this from the perspective of
someone within the larger Anabaptist-Mennonite family. I come from the Brethren
in Christ Church, which is a part of the Mennonite World Conference, and now
hold membership in Mennonite Church Canada/MC Manitoba in Steinbach. My
theological training was at the Mennonite Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, and my
missiological training at Asbury Seminary’s School of World Mission, a
Methodist school in Kentucky. So I am a Wesleyan-Anabaptist, and I speak from
within that somewhat unique and unstable synthesis (which also, as it happens,
describes the BICC).
A
Contemporary Metaphor
I leave most of the questions above to the
others here today. Here are some brief answers, before I move on to my
particular interest this afternoon.
·
What does “Christ Alone” mean
today?
It has become
something of a bromide in Christian thinking. I graduated from Messiah College,
whose motto is “Christ pre-eminent”. Providence, where I teach, says that we
are Christ-centred. My home church says that our mission is to follow Christ
faithfully. We all say this, but I doubt that many of us have thought it
through all that much.
·
What are the challenges and
strengths of the concept?
A basic challenge
is precisely the self-evident clarity of the concept: of course we live for
Christ alone! This is so obvious that it loses meaning. A basis strength is
this same clarity. Christ really is the centre of Christian faith. Christ is
the One who sets Christian faith apart from all other paths to God.
·
How is it part of the church’s life
today?
I think that it
functions primarily as a way to allow us to cut free from traditions and
denominational identity. If we are all “of Christ”, we don’t have to listen to
our own founders and past, our own history. We are free to forge our own path
today, which is not necessarily a good thing.
·
What would the Reformers think
of the way that we use this concept?
They would be
bemused—a bit puzzled and perhaps dismayed. In the Mennonite church, for
example, we have made the pursuit of peace (to which I am wholeheartedly
committed) more important than a relationship with God or complete faithfulness
to Scripture—and we have done so in the name of Christ. Conrad Grebel and Menno
Simons would be puzzled and dismayed.
·
Is there a better way to think
of it today?
This is the
question I want to pursue.
Missiological thinking (along with various
other disciplines) has picked up on the mathematical concept of “centred-set
vs. bounded set”. In missiology Paul Hiebert is the one who brought the concept
into our thinking as a way of answering the question: When should we baptize a
new convert? [1] Hiebert asks the question
this way: If a Christian evangelist travelling through North India comes to a
village where the gospel has never been heard before, and preaches the gospel,
and if a villager who has never heard the gospel before responds and seeks to
follow Jesus, how much must that villager learn and accept before we can say he
has been converted?
Although the concept, “Christ Alone”, is a
genuinely centred-set concept, bounded set thinking continued to predominate in
the Reformation. That is, we have a catechism—a list of questions and answers
that one must master in order to be confirmed, which functions as a boundary of
belief separating Christians from non-Christians. In the Mennonite Church we
have a catechism of commitment, in which belief is present, but a willingness
to do is more important. Again, it forms a boundary of action separating
Christians from non-Christians.
Hiebert recommends that we use a
centred-set approach instead. Christians are defined by their orientation to a
common centre—Christ alone—rather than by an external boundary. In the
Reformation the five “alones” remembered over this five year-period can be seen
as a centre, replacing the boundary of the existing Roman Catholic Church. I
suggest that this metaphor of a centred-set church may help us today to move
ahead.
Some
Possible Implications
In the cultural and religious wars of the
contemporary scene, particular beliefs have functioned as boundary markers to
determine who is accepted as genuinely Christian. One camp has boundary markers
such as commitments to the inerrancy of Scripture, to the traditional family,
and to a number of other fundamental beliefs. If one does not give assent to
these boundary markers, those in the camp label one as outside the true faith.
Another camp has a different set of boundary markers—a commitment to social
justice and a consecration of positions held by the Liberal Party of Canada.
Again, if one does not give assent to the boundary markers, one is labelled as
outside the true faith, committed to an individualistic Christianity that is
somehow less than fully Christian. There are other camps inside and outside the
church, Christian and non-Christian in character.
This past weekend I listed to Michael
Enright describe Christians of a particular sort as hypocrites and hardly worth
any respect—primarily on the basis of his own boundary markers for what makes
one a good citizen of Canada or of the world. It is not only Christians who set
out boundary markers to exclude those with whom they disagree.
The Reformers would not much care about
Michael Enright and CBC, for of course they lived in a context still controlled
by the church. Christendom is now dead, and a new reformation impulse within
the church needs also a new metaphor. I suggest that the centred-set, drawn
from mathematics and mediated to missiology through Paul Hiebert, gives us such
a metaphor.
The centred set consists of those elements
with a common centre, as opposed to the bounded sets of those elements within a
specific boundary. The centred set can embrace a greater diversity than can a
bounded set—if the centre is sufficiently strong. In my own formulation of this
idea I have suggested holding Christ, Scripture, and the Lord’s Table as the
centre,[2] but I think that we can
also state it through the common centre of the statements in this series of
celebrations of the Reformation: sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, solus
Christus, and soli Deo Gloria. By grace, through faith, with Scripture as our
only written authority, centred on Christ, and all for God’s glory. The
Reformers themselves did not move fully to this centred set model, but they began
the process; we can complete it.
Sola gratia. Sola
fide. Sola Scriptura. Solus Christus. Soli Deo Gloria.
[1]
See Paul G. Hiebert, “The Category Christian
in the Mission Task”. Originally published in International Review of Missions 72 (1983): 421-427, this essay
appears in fuller form in Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological
Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker,
1994, pp. 107 to 136).
[2]
See “A Missiological Exploration of Church Membership”, paper presented to the
Brethren in Christ Study Conference, “Who’s In? Who’s Out?: Rethinking Church
Membership in the 21st Century”, held October 9-10, 2014, which appeared in Brethren in Christ History and Life, August
2015 (38:2), pp. 285–301.
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