What do the two positions have to teach us? Soul competency, I will contend, is always congregational as in communal accountability, not as in liberal society. It takes on the role of shared discipleship that the Baptist Manifesto writers celebrate. Soul competency needs as a concept an eschatological aspiration and a hope within the community of saints in trinue participation (theosis); It needs koinoia as more than the fellowship of eccentric self-developing individuals, but as the mystical unity of the Body of Christ realized in the gradual sanctification of all the Church. Paul's reflection on the nature of congregational leadership and Christian maturation is worth returning to here:
The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
Competency of the embodied Christian is not a state one is born with, but one that must be matured into, just as personhood should be understood in a manner that accounts for the particular identity of each individual Christian, as well as the intertwined nature of the Church. Competency and priesthood are always interpenetrating in Christ. Perhaps the idea is better understood as "saintly competency"? Saintly competency takes direction from the masters of the faith, but it does not lay aside the creational free will we are given. It cannot be forced, yet it must be submitted to willingly.
Nothing about a community of discipleship or a shared reading of scripture nor a stress on the classical creeds need of necessity be an instrument of oppression or a suppression of truth, though historical cases of all of these can be cited. Certainly, the dangers of triumphalism and group-think are real, and Baptists historically had to resist them to gain a foothold free from even Christian persecution. Certainly, the creeds and confessions of faith have been used not only as summaries of what has been believed by all, but also as instruments of oppression. And certainly, the experience of Baptist Christians under oppressive state regimes is an ever-present reminder of what can happen when any government takes to itself the "right" to regulate its people's beliefs.
Nonetheless, an assumption of competency without a practice in which to find it, nor mentors and teachers to help cultivate those capacities, can fall prey to a tribalism of its own and to an unthinking acceptance of social contract theory's unchristian epistemology. Even if we stress that the Christian’s positive freedom is always bounded by community and scripture, we must be careful that that language does not too easily co-opt the spirit of the age. None of this is meant to deny a solid place for the individual in community practice. As Charles Taylor points out, in the modern world there is still a difference between self-referential manner and matter. The former is the way of life we are all forced to live by up to a point if we wish to participate in any aspect of our modernist cultures. The later, however, is the radical individualism and instrumentalism that we need to reject in our Christian education.
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