A Christian Affirmation

Linked above is a document that appeared in the most recent issue of the Christian Chronicle, a news magazine that serves Churches of Christ. It has occasioned quite a bit of discussion (to follow some of that, go here).

First off, take a few minutes to read the Affirmation. It is, to be sure, a clear and eloquent statement of historic cofC theological stances regarding the New Testament as "constitution" (to use Alexander Campbell's phrase) of the Church, baptism, Eucharist, and a cappella singing in corporate worship. These are (to borrow a Baptist buzzword) the distinctives of cofC identity and have been called into question in recent years. Some of this rethinking has been quite healthy and, generally, presented in an irenic tone. Some of it, on the other hand, has not: in the rush to disassociate themselves from ugly expressions of sectarianism, some have abandoned these markers of the faith as well -- attacking them as legalistic requirements that are merely "traditions." Mindful of these varied movements within Churches of Christ, the signers of the Affirmation explicitly reject the legalism and exclusivism that have dogged our fellowship during the 20th century.

A few specific thoughts occurred to me after reading and chewing on it for a while:

• The place of tradition: Jaroslav Pelikan famously said: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition." I think that the signers of the Affirmation recognize this implicitly: there is value in the understandings of our spiritual forebears. For them, cofC understandings of baptism, Communion, etc. are based upon the received wisdom of our ancestors (Stone, Campbell, Scott, etc.) AND sound exegesis of the Holy Scriptures. But, in saying this, they have cut themselves off from one of the foundational impulses of Churches of Christ: distrust and rabid skepticism of tradition. To make myself clear, I doubt that very many of their readers (at any place on the cofC theological spectrum) will even accept the validity of an appeal to tradition. Progressives and conservatives regularly display knee-jerk reactions to the concept of tradition (which is seen as "legalistic," "denominational," or "Catholic"). This is unfortunate in the extreme: the stabilizing force of tradition could, I think, be effective medicine for many of our intramural arguments.
  

More thoughts later. There are other points that I'd like to make about the Affirmation regarding creedalism, unity, and "things of first importance" (1 Cor. 15.3).