Unlearning Protestantism

W. Schlabach Gerald

Description

In this clearly written and insightful book, Gerald Schlabach addresses the "Protestant dilemma" in ecclesiology: how to build lasting Christian community in a world of individualism and transience. Schlabach, a former Mennonite who is now Catholic, seeks not to encourage readers to abandon Protestant churches but to relearn some of the virtues that all Christian communities need to sustain their communal lives. He offers a vision for the right and faithful roles of authority, stability, and loyal dissent in Christian communal life. The book deals with issues that transcend denominations and will appeal to all readers, both Catholic and Protestant, interested in sustaining Christian tradition and community over time.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441212634
• Langue: English

Extrait

Unlearning
P ROTESTANTISM
Unlearning P ROTESTANTISM
Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age
G ERALD W. S CHLABACH
2010 by Gerald W. Schlabach
Published by Brazos Press a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.brazospress.com
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schlabach, Gerald. Unlearning Protestantism : sustaining Christian community in an unstable age / Gerald W. Schlabach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978-1-58743-111-1 (pbk.) 1. Church controversies. 2. Continuity of the church. 3. Catholic Church-Discipline. 4. Church controversies-Mennonites. I. Title. BV652.9.S278 2010 262.0011-dc22 2009040098
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated with deep and abiding gratitude to three from whom I have learned stability, even amid pilgrim change:
Ivan Kauffman, partner on the bridge
Stanley Hauerwas, loyal beyond bluster
Joetta Handrich Schlabach, wise, pastoral, love of my life
Contents
Introduction
1. The Protestant Dilemma
The Permanent Principle of Reform
The Nagging Dilemma of Undoing
The Puzzle of Protestant Identity
Hauerwas s Hunch
2. The Matter of Continuity
Mennonites amid the Acids of Modernity
Four Strategies: The Debate That Was the Goshen School
Freedom and Discipline: Lessons from an Unruly Synthesis
Continuity Anyway (or, Why Hauerwas Really Is Not Yoder but Nonetheless Is Right about Mennonite Community)
3. The Practice of Stability
Mobility in Question
Stability in the Rule of St. Benedict
Replies to Objections
Stability beyond Monastic Walls
A Not-So-Innovative Postscript
4. Stability Writ Large
Participatory Hierarchy
Toward a Stable Narrative of Vatican II
Stability under the Mantle of Aggiornamento
Authority and Dissent in a Richer Theological Context
Stability Strained but Holding
5. Stability in Hard Times: Loyal Dissent
Obedience and Dissent: Three Archetypal Stories
The Virtue That Catholics Struggle to Name
Five Loyal Dissenters
One More Story
6. Giving the Gift of Stability to a Globalizing World
A Meditation on Globalization and Gaudium et spes
A Long-Deferred Objection-Why Now?
The Rationality of Traditions
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
T HIS BOOK IS not about encouraging people to abandon Protestant churches. It is not a pamphlet to persuade Protestants to become Roman Catholic. Rather, it is about virtues that all Christian communities need to sustain their communal lives, whatever their ecclesial location.
To be sure, I am a Mennonite who has entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. Having sketched out the outline of this book many years before my confirmation as a Roman Catholic at Pentecost 2004, I initially assumed I would have to abandon the project. I feared that it would simply be too difficult to persuade readers that my covert aim would be something other than convincing Protestants to become Catholics. One quick-and-dirty way to describe the project, after all, had always been that the book would be about what Protestants can learn from Catholics about sustaining Christian community. Sometimes I added, by hanging in there with each other and the church itself, even when they disagree. 1 Carrying lessons from a Catholic direction to Protestants would hardly seem triumphalistic as long as I myself was hanging in there with the church community that had formed me. But now?
Protestant friends and colleagues convinced me to write the book anyway. And I would like to think that the way I have become Catholic without burning my bridges to the Mennonite community has demonstrated a way of hanging in there with stability and fidelity. That is for my friends and colleagues to judge, however, and I can hardly prevent the reader from joining them in making a judgment. As I reconsidered this project, what mattered was that Protestant friends and colleagues were disappointed at the prospect that I might abandon it. They wanted the book anyway.
Perhaps their openness owes to the ways that times have changed and Christians are learning from one another in new ways; recognizing both the possibilities and the dilemmas of our new ecumenical age will be the first task of this book (chap. 1). The taproot of the entire book is that for many years Roman Catholics have helped me, in moments of frustration, above all to remain Mennonite. Some were peers and professors I had come to know, from the barrios of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s to the seminar rooms at the University of Notre Dame in the early 1990s. Others were figures such as those whose stories I tell in chapter 5, loyal dissenters from Yves Congar to Joan Chittister. What inspired me in their witness were a doggedness, a long view, and a loyalty to their church that recast questions of conscience and tradition, of prophetic critique and the role of institutions, in subtle yet significant ways.
As I continued to explore the Catholic tradition, my deepest intuition was that I could neither become a Catholic nor remain a Mennonite without finding or helping to build a bridge between the traditions. This seemed possible because I was increasingly working in the company of Christian leaders and theologians who are so ecumenical that they rarely even bother to label themselves as such. I refer especially to the loose affiliation of Christian leaders who bear some affinity to the Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, whose heroes range from the Mennonite John Howard Yoder to the Protestant Karl Barth to Catholic Pope John Paul II. But even beyond that circle, these days most scholars I know simply take for granted that they must know, and may cite unapologetically, the influential thinkers and schools of thought beyond the tradition with which they identify.
If the question is sustaining Christian community, however, it cannot be simply an intellectual question. And so the first formal way by which I bridged the Mennonite tradition that had formed me and the Catholic tradition that I had begun to appropriate was to become a Benedictine oblate in 1997. Benedictine oblates are not monks, yet they join with a particular Benedictine monastery in serving God and neighbor according to the Rule of St. Benedict, insofar as their nonmonastic state in life permits. I tell some of my story of becoming an oblate in chapter 3.
Other Mennonites I knew were finding both historical links and contemporary connections with Catholicism, however, while Catholics I knew were attracted to the Mennonite witness of service and peace. In 1999, twenty-five of us came together to tell our stories, explore what was happening among us, and ask how we might steward our network. We called our meeting a bridging retreat, and when we organized to follow up and extend our circle a few years later, we called ourselves Bridgefolk: a movement of sacramentally minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other s traditions, explore each other s practices, and honor each other s contribution to the mission of Christ s Church. 2 As cofounder and longtime director of Bridge-folk, I am keenly aware that there is no single good way to inhabit a bridge between our traditions. Although a handful of Bridgefolk participants have crossed the bridge (as we say in preference to the term converted ) yet found the pastoral and community support to continue affiliating in some way with the church that first formed them, this is hardly the norm. Far more often and with the blessing of Bridgefolk leaders, participants have used our bridge to practice an exchange of gifts and return to their home churches enriched.
Why I finally did become Roman Catholic would require a memoir to explore, for I have never been able to cite a single reason that would make for a succinct answer. Seeking as a faithful Protestant to live out of and into a biblical worldview, I found myself returning repeatedly to God s covenant-keeping faithfulness even when God s people have gone astray; the biblical history of God s own faithfulness taught me a growing generosity toward Christians whose positions I might once have denounced in the name of prophetic faithfulness. Meanwhile, a long-standing appreciation for the drama of the liturgy slowly grew into a taste (and feel and smell and ear and eye) for sacramentality, which I now recognize as the best way to embrace a robust theology of grace with a full-bodied ethic of community life in the world, centered in God s own nonviolent generosity on the cross and in the Eucharist. Seeking as a faithful Mennonite to witness to this nonviolent love of God-extending even to enemies and reconciling what has been broken by sin-I became convicted that our witness falls short if it becomes the basis for self-definition over against other Christians. Thus we cannot pray Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us if we do not live out this peacemaking vocation vis- -vis the historic church that many who remain Protestant nonetheless recognize as somehow their mother church. Behind much of this, I am sure, has been the epoch-making Second Vatican Council. Living out my Christian faith as a young adult in the 1970s and 1980s, I realized that