We are Theologians

by Fredrica Harris Thompsett

Overview

All of us are natural theologians, willing and able to think through questions of belief and relate the insights of theologians to our public and personal lives. In this clear and engaging introduction, Thompsett gives us the tools to think theologically by grounding us in the history, theology, spirituality, and biblical foundations of Anglican belief, particularly that of the Episcopal church.

Beginning with the Bible and what it reveals to us about the distinct calling of the People of God, Thompsett goes on to consider the insights of the Reformation regarding the importance of the laity and the contribution of lay people, particularly women, to the expansive mission of the nineteenth century in education and social work. She then explores different aspects of Anglican identity, and lay movements of liberation in the global South.

Aimed primarily at a lay and non-specialist audience, this book introduces key facets of Anglicanism and aspects of contemporary theolgy. It is an excellent parish educational resource, especially for adult forums and group study.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596280007
Publisher:	Church Publishing, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/28/2004
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.78(h) x 0.34(d)

Read an Excerpt

WE ARE THEOLOGIANS

Strengthening the People of God

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By FREDRICA HARRIS THOMPSETT

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2004 Fredrica Harris Thompsett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59628-000-7

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CHAPTER 1

GOD'S WORK —AND OURS

A Voyage of Discovery

There is an excitement to exploration, a rush of adrenaline that comes from starting out on a journey, an energy that comes from discovering that we are on the right path, and an expectation that despite the risks we shall return wiser than we left. Yet humility is essential. Knowledge often turns us toward our roots, our earliest understandings. This is especially true for Christians. Our voyages of discovery have a way of sending us homeward, raising basic questions about our inheritance, our identity, our purpose. These lines from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets set a clear direction for those in search of understanding:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

With our hearts and minds open to receive surprises, new learnings, old truths, and timeless meanings, Christian pilgrims are not so much inventors but explorers, discoverers of what has been there all along.

This is a hopeful way to begin asking the question, "What does it mean to be Christians today?" The question is a complex one, but our responses need not be complicated. The sources for exploring Christian identity are familiar ones that have guided faithful people throughout the ages: the Bible, various cultural histories, and theological inheritances. Still, questions proliferate when we set out to discover our mission. What is our mission as members of a local congregation, as participants in a Christian denomination, as part of Christianity worldwide? What do we believe is the nature and purpose of the church? What is our theology, our doctrine about membership in a church? What images of the church inspire us, and what images oppress us? What have laity to do with shaping the work of the church? What hopes do we have for the mission, the ethical character, of the church in a new decade, indeed, of all Christians in a new millennium?

These are all questions about ecclesiology, the formal theological term for understanding the church. They are also questions about the fundamental nature of Christian life, foundational questions for all baptized persons. Whether implicit or explicit, our theology of the church, our ecclesiology, shapes expectations for the church's work in the world.

This is particularly true for laity. In this technological society, ordained ministers and other religious professionals are usually defined functionally. Such definitions may not be adequate, but in an increasingly secular society we are in danger of identifying what the church is with what the ordained do. I am not at all worried about clarifying the role and purpose of ordination; there is a seemingly endless bibliography on this subject dating from the second century, and clergy today continue to address this question. Yet I am worried that the church will become a clerical reservation, a preserve that can only be fully understood and embodied by clergy. If we wish to embrace the image and reality of an engaged, expansive church, then our theology of the church both depends upon, and must be convincing to, lay people. Despite rhetorical flourishes about valuing and enabling "lay ministry" (a redundant and awkward phrase), practical, effective definitions of the church as all the people of God, 99 percent of whom are laity, are beginning to disappear.

Laity have already disappeared from much conventional theology, ecclesiastical history, and even popular biblical imagery. In his pioneering book, A Theology of the Laity, Hendrik Kraemer pointed to the "amazing fact" that the laity have not been "theologically relevant in the Church's thinking about itself." Kraemer insists that the critical significance of the laity demands a new, whole ecclesiology. Entire histories of the church have been written that dwell on scenes of clerical life as if laity were not crucial contributors and leaders. More recently historians have begun to pay attention to the common folk, to what has been described as "popular religion." Critical scholars are rejecting the implicit two-tiered "producer/ consumer" model of supposedly articulate clergy developing doctrine for presumably inarticulate laity. Yet even well-intentioned modern authors have suggested that lay initiatives were usually suppressed by the institutional church and thus laity were not makers and shakers of religious life. Those who seek to liberate laity by telling only the "bad news" of how laity have been oppressed and by denying the record of lay achievements err doubly. One of the themes of this book that will recur over and over is that memory is essential to liberation. Generations of Christians cannot be counted as sheep. Common sense and historical data suggest otherwise. Many devotional books also promote erroneous interpretations by emphasizing individual saints, rather than the central story of God's covenant with the people. One precocious preacher's child explained to me that the halos over the heads of Peter and Paul meant they were ordained. Our images of the church as the whole people of God biblically, historically, and theologically, as well as practically and ethically, are in need of revision, renewal, and expansion. We have settled for a church that is too small.

In her book entitled The Authority of the Laity, Verna Dozier depicts the church as a "sleeping giant," a large corporate body that only needs to awaken to its full potential, its God-given mission. If we wish to awaken the sleeping giant, the people of God, the Bible has for centuries been the place to start. It yields basic, abundant testimony for a whole ecclesiology. It reveals images and tells stories of God's chosen people as they journey in the wilderness. It prompts us to "remember the past" accurately. Of course we know this. We've heard many, if not most, of the biblical stories before. As one little girl wrote in a letter addressed to God, "Could you write more stories? We have already read all the ones you have and begin again."

Perhaps, to quote T. S. Eliot, "We had the experience but missed the meaning."

If our vision of the church is meager or even modest, we have missed the mighty acts of God. If we think of Christians as hopelessly embattled, we have lost our ancestors' experience of the expansion of God's reign. If we reject biblical wisdom because we see the Bible used as a tool for legalistic oppression, we have forgotten the gospel's response to Pharisees, the way in which Jesus' liberating ministry threatened the religious establishment of his own day. If we think religious complacency and indifference are modern habits, we have overlooked the complaints of the biblical prophets. And if we think the question "What does the Bible have to do with my life?" sheds more light on heaven than on our work on earth, we have lost the creative essence of God's work.

This book concentrates on the work of the laity in biblical, historical, theological, contemporary, and future perspectives. This viewpoint is not intended to exclude clergy; they are obviously members of the great laos tou theou, the Greek phrase for the chosen people of God. Stories of clerical life will continue to be told in other volumes. My panorama is larger, more akin to the biblical landscape. I prefer to review images and episodes in the lives of God's ordinary people. I want to pursue insights that contribute to a whole ecclesiology. I aim to create snapshots, "revisions" of basic Christian stories, whose meanings are accessible to clergy and laity. My quest is for familiar and contemporary resources; my desire is to seek out and explore what it means to be members of the Christian church today.

Standing the Bible on Its Feet

In that most topsy-turvy of tales, Alice in Wonderland, the heroine tries to regain her perspective: from upside down to right side up, from too tall or too short to "just right." It's a complicated journey and Alice is repeatedly perplexed by those she meets along the way, those who inquire about her identity:

"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly, "I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."

As their conversation became more puzzling, Alice tried to get a grip on reality by remembering the stanzas:

"You are old, Father William," the young man said, "And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head Do you think, at your age, it is right?" "In my youth," Father William replied to his son, "I feared it might injure the brain; But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why I do it again and again."

The Caterpillar pronounces Alice's recital "wrong from beginning to end."

I am not about to compare the Bible to this famous adventure for children and adults, yet I do think we resemble Alice when it comes to finding the right perspective on the Bible. I think we are more inclined to stand the Bible, like Father William, on its head with the inevitable result that it does not make much sense either. We may not be entirely wrong from beginning to end, yet we have to stand the Bible on its feet, to look at its entire witness, before we can discern meaning from chapters and verses.

This is easier said than done. We are not accustomed to thinking about the biblical story in its totality. Readers of modern lectionaries, television evangelists, preachers, poets, and many other people are inclined to "dip into" the Bible to find a chapter, verse, line, or phrase that will open up truth, like a rabbit jumping out of a magicians hat. It is of course possible to discover ancient and abiding wisdom even from random biblical selections, but only if we are reading the book right side up.

I have three reversals in mind that pertain to ecclesiology, three ways of correcting my vision of the Bible's overall testimony about the church.

Verna Dozier first taught me that our contemporary perspective on the church is upside down. "A funny thing happened on the way to the Kingdom. The Church, the people of God, became the Church, the institution." To put this another way, we have become accustomed to interpreting the Bible as a guidebook for the religious establishment. Instead, the Bible is first of all the story of God 's work and our response. It is a covenant story about the relationship between God and those chosen by God. The normative scriptural understanding of the church is as the people of God, not as an institution. In fact the Bible reveals that human inventions are secondary to the relational commandment to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. I have nothing against religious institutions per se; they are necessary, but their value depends on those they serve. Parishes, denominations, chaplaincies, religious orders, seminaries, church schools—these and other religious institutions are the means, not the ends, of the gospel message. I still find truthfulness in the children's hand game, "Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the door and see all the people!" We need to stand the church upright on human feet, envisioning her first of all as God's people, and only secondarily as the institutional, earthen vessel that conveys us along the way. This is the biblically formative definition of ecclesiology. In the biblical narrative God's people are the essence, the formative agents of the church, not objects of religious care. To paraphrase that Walt Kelley's cartoon sage, Pogo, "We have met the church, and she is us!"

Second, the biblical record must be righted. The teaching focus of the Bible is, broadly and clearly, all humankind. By this I mean that the Bible was not intended to present role models for extraordinary saints but for ordinary people. As ethicist Robert McAfee Brown reminds us, God's Word is for "all persons ... no one excepted, everyone accepted." The Bible sings a song described in hymnody as "the saints of God are just folk like me." The Bible was not written to serve as a handbook for ordained ministers and other religious officials, although many seminarians are perplexed and disappointed to find that there is very little functional information on ordained ministries in the Bible. The Bible does not discuss the traditional threefold ministry of bishop, priest, and deacon. The one order named there, the diaconate (1 Tim. 3:8–13), is not described. The Greek word for deacon, diakonos, is applied to all people. Active service, diakonia, includes all those who would follow Jesus. The historical development of ordained ministries in the institutional church is largely a post-biblical story. The modern Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx has described in several recent books on ministry how the early institutional church shifted its understanding of the Holy Spirit's gifts for ministry "from the charisma of many to a specialized charisma of just a few." With this second-century shift away from the biblical understanding of empowerment in the Spirit, early patterns of ordination evolved. The forms and functions we now assign to clergy developed further in the Middle Ages and Reformation.

While the biblical record is not specifically helpful in defining ordained ministries, it does provide formative, evocative, and normative expectations of the church's mission. The Bible is replete with precedents, images, stories, and theological assumptions that are foundational for understanding the church. In other words, the Bible does not speak primarily to ordained ministers—it addresses all humanity. It concentrates on building up communities of faithful people. In the Bible we, the people of God, have a larger and more definitive record than "the man called Peter."

The biblical centrality of the church, understood as God's people at work in the world, provides the context for interpreting individual ministries. Our theology of the church needs to shape our definitions of "ministry." Accordingly in the Episcopal Church's Outline of the Faith (a document traditionally called the catechism and found in the back of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer), the definition of "church" precedes that of "ministry." The church is named "the community of the New Covenant." It is the church that "carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members." Yet despite this charge I am afraid people have been encouraged to find or name their own individual ministries well before they have seriously encountered or thought much about the collective nature, mission, and power of the church at work in the world. Recently, for example, I spoke with a priest who boasted of being confirmed and admitted to postulancy for Holy Orders on the same day. This priest had only limited knowledge of and experience in the Episcopal Church—for him, ministry was ordination. I think an ungrounded, literally "un-churched" theology of ministry encourages misguided aspirations for ordination, and clergy who function as "Lone Rangers" apart from the whole people of God. The Outline of the Faith reminds us that "ministry" (whether ordained or lay) is not our primary identity as people of God; Christianity is.

The people of God as a community points toward the third reversal affirmed in scripture. Biblical language and imagery that evokes the church is usually collective, corporate, expansive, and energetic, rather than individualistic, possessive, or passive. Other names for the "church" include the household of God, the New Israel, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, the pillar and ground of truth, children of God, the Body of Christ, and of course the people of God, the chosen ones. In the Old Testament (which I prefer to call the Hebrew scriptures) people understood themselves as members of a larger family, tribe, and nation. In the New Testament records of the earliest Christian communities there is a formative, egalitarian ecclesiology. Those who lived in the "new creation" following upon Jesus' life, death, and resurrection sought out Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female to give them welcome despite the ingrained hierarchies of the Roman world. There is a collective solidarity to the biblical witness, a liberating power that we can still hear in early testimonies from Corinth and Galatia: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" and "for you were called to freedom" (2 Cor. 3:17 and Gal. 5:13).
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from WE ARE THEOLOGIANS by FREDRICA HARRIS THOMPSETT. Copyright © 2004 Fredrica Harris Thompsett. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

1. God's Work—And Ours....................     1     

2. Looking Backward, Thinking Forward....................     25     

3. All Can Be Theologians....................     55     

4. Seeking Wider Loyalties: Theologies of Liberation....................     85     

5. Ideas to Grow On....................     113     

Sources Quoted....................     137