COMPARATIVE PATTERNS OF CHURCH HISTORIOGRAPHY:
NORTH AMERICA AND SOUTHERN AFRICA
by
David P. Whitelaw
The thesis of this paper is that the two-party paradigm of church history on the North American continent offers a useful reference point for historiography of the church in Southern Africa. Presented here is a pastoral-practical (inter-relational) model of church historiography which bridges presbyterian (rational) and pentecostal (experiential) models. The point of entry and perspective is that of the Wesleyan theological tradition with its wellsprings of resource to inform and undergird this proposal.
This metanoic model of repentance and corporate redefinition in terms of the kingdom of God moves beyond christological or pneumatological readings of Christian history to overcome individualistic personalism and ecclesiastical institutionalism by its focus on trinitarian community. It requires both cognitive and intuitive elements; it goes beyond objective scientific reporting on the church as structure to subjective, compassionate exploring of human relatedness in living community. There is a shift in focus from the eucharistic community in the church to attend to “nascent covenant communities” in neighborhoods. It requires repentance (a metanoic mind change) from preoccupation with mainstream concerns and sectional/individualistic modes of thought and practice in order to notice the transformation of persons in community relationships, particularly on the margins.
Patterns of church historiography in North America will be described first, followed by patterns and models of the writing of histories of the churches in Southern Africa. The story of the first has been described as a lively experiment. The second has been characterized by the symbol of a bitter almond hedge. Trends which are apparent in each, and threads in these tapestries which are less noticed, will be identified as a basis for a Wesleyan/Holiness reading and writing of church history where scientific historical objectivity is more intentionally supplemented by compassionate subjectivity, allowing voices of the marginalized to become more important. This model will take account of oral and poetic sources as well as written prose or narrative. It may be described as a pastoral-practical model of church historiography. It attempts to take human concerns seriously by paying more attention to intuitive awareness of what is emerging in the story of the people of God. Scientific strategy and skill in learning to recover the lost memory of the future reign of God are required.
Trajectories and Patterns of
Church Historiography--America
R. Larry Shelton (1986) and Randy L. Maddox (1994) draw attention of the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition to the defining trajectories and orienting concerns which give shape and direction to the tradition.[1] David Bundy (1995:69) notes that this tradition is usually relegated to the “sidelines of the historical trajectories.” This is a significant defining mark of the tradition, which has important bearing on its role in the transformation of society. What are the broader lines of development to be discerned in the religious and church historiography of the North American continent?
Mark Noll (1992:1) says: “Fresh attention (is) being paid to the experiences of women, non-whites, the ‘ordinary’ people who did not leave extensive written records.” He signals dominant trends and his own counter initiative when he claims: “This volume swims deliberately against the tide of recent scholarship. It is a history of Christianity, not a history of religion.” Christianity should be studied on its own terms. The plot of his text centers on the rise and decline of Protestant dominance in the United States. He refuses, however, to identify the story of Christianity in America with the story of the United States, so he also can include citizens in the United States and Canada in “the worldwide story that had its origins in the era of the New Testament.”[2]
John Wilson's thesis is important: Religion lies at the core of American culture. It is a means for understanding continuity and change on the continent. His claim is that church historians like Robert Handy have recognized the scope and sweep of dramatic changes but have been less attentive to the continuities. “Is there a core or focal point at the center of our culture?” Yes, “religion may be seen as the social location where the presuppositions of the common life are worked through, codified and transmitted” (1989:362-76).
American society and culture retain from Christian Europe the assumptions that the world is one, coherent, and ordered. Collingwood notes in American culture an emphasis on the Holy Spirit (in addition to the logos or Christ figure) as a “means of symbolizing the significance of change in relationship to structure, or of spirit in relationship to logos.” Richard Niebuhr extends this by claiming that millenarianism is critical to understanding America's development as a society (quoted by Wilson, 370-72).[3]
Wilson wants the question turned around. “Does the manifest preoccupation in America with the reign of God represent a working out of a set of metaphysical assumptions distinctive to that culture, in part expressed by that symbol?” He concludes that the first principles of American society and culture represent a projection, by an emerging people, of a particular relationship between order and movement, form and flux, or continuity and change. This is specially evident in the increased emphasis placed upon the Holy Spirit (and the reduced scope of religious action identified exclusively with Christ).
The outcome is that, as in no other society, the “Holy Spirit, or its cultural equivalent, has become the animating principle of American corporate activity.” Change (movement) is accorded primacy over form (order) as the foundation of life in this world. From its beginnings, Christianity in America has had a very particular texture or tonality that has set it apart from the great churchly European versions of Christianity. Preoccupied with the Spirit, it is able to make a relentless affirmation of change and a cultural embrace of unceasing movement.
How valid is Wilson's assumption that there has been such a pneumatological shift in the self-perception of American Christianity? For those in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition an intriguing on-going debate between George Marsden and Donald Dayton highlights the possibility of dominant models of historiography in North American Protestantism, identified as presbyterian and pentecostal respectively.[4] This debate highlights the christological and the pneumatological components of these paradigms.
Marsden sees the origins of contemporary evangelicalism in the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, with its roots in Old Princeton theology. Dayton in turn proposes a pentecostal paradigm (the roots of evangelicalism lie in the revivalism, social reform, and pentecostal/holiness movements of the nineteenth century). He identifies Marsden's model as a presbyterian paradigm.[5]
Dayton works with Sandeen's primary thesis (that the intellectual task of Carl Henry's generation was the repudiation of dispensationalism as a theological framework). He claims that the pentecostal paradigm highlights different dimensions in the development of evangelical institutions (for example, Fuller Seminary) in North America. Dayton's patterns involve seeing the evangelical currents “centrifugally move down the social ladder and toward the margins of society and then move centripetally back toward the center.”
Other commentators suggest that evangelicalism is a complex movement which cannot be captured by any one interpretative model and that, rather than making a choice between these two interpretations, there is a dialectic between Reformed and Holiness models which need to be resolved into a “synthesis which transcends both” (Sweeney reply in Dayton, 1993:52).[6]
Jacobsen and Trollinger (1993:4-15) advance a related thesis. A two-party model of twentieth-century Protestantism has emerged since 1970 in academic circles in North American religious historiography. The names of these parties have changed over the years (e.g., fundamentalist-modernist; evangelical-mainline; conservative-liberal), but a dualistic picture of religious identity has helped “polarize the religious landscape and erode the viability of the middle ground where so many Protestants live out their faith.” These writers trace the pathway by which the two-party paradigm came to prominence and then propose ways of moving beyond this. Like Dayton (moving beyond the solipsism of self-centered models of interpretation), Jacobsen and Trollinger suggest that one begin by recognizing one's own partiality and incompleteness to be free to concentrate on the constructive, multifaceted development of Christian faith in America.
Significantly, they commend the work of Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya in this regard. These writers describe The Black Church in African American Experience (1990:11-15) as involved in a constant series of dialectical tensions. The dialectic holds polar opposites in a constantly shifting tension between the polarities. There is no Hegelian synthesis or ultimate resolution of the dialectic. They work with a complex, multi-layered sextuplet of polarities.
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow identifies the primary challenges for Christianity in the 21st century (1993, 1994). The critical question is, “Can the church sustain community?” The answer lies in the direction of exploring the possibilities of faith for constructing personal lives. Christianity has to contend with conflict in the public realm, and with pluralism, polarity, and the character of belief in the ecclesiastical and doctrinal arena.
Finally, a new approach to American religious history has recently emerged. Roger Fink and Rodney Stark (1992:4,18) claim: “The most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth--or what we call the churching of America...accomplished by aggressive churches committed to other-worldliness.” They analyze American religious history through a market-oriented lens which seems to result in a more orderly religious landscape (not skewed by the glaring systematic biases of generally received conclusions of religious historical studies). A dynamic, interpretative model is presented, one designed to explain rather than describe the history of American religion. American religion is market driven. Other-worldly needs of “customers” are met in culturally conditioned modes and strategies.
In summary, trends in historiography in North America include: (1) shift from the writing of church history to that of religious history; (2) move from a dominant two-party Protestant paradigm to the reality that religious pluralism and Roman Catholic presence now dominate society; (3) challenge to the historic phenomenon that religion is the defining core of American society; (4) recognition that American churches/religions are market-driven.
Projections and Models of
Historiography--Southern Africa
Nicholas Southey reviews with sharp insight the current status of the disciplines of church history and general history in Southern Africa (1989:5-16). Church history has become increasingly isolated from the mainstream of history because of its preoccupation with theology rather than history. Theologians run the risk of decontextualizing the past and drawing superficial conclusions. A historiographical revolution has occurred in South Africa. History “from below” (focusing on the poor and marginalized, rather than on elite rulers and leaders) has become a major concern. Southey recommends that church history be practiced in an open, integral fashion.[7]
What we find, however, is a highly apologetic, polemical, and partisan (denominational) writing of church history.[8] Polemical, culturally restricted, ethnically bound, and geographically based histories abound. James Cochrane (1987), by contrast, represents a major break from most earlier histories of the denominational church. His study, Servants of Power, seeks to demonstrate the functional dependence of the Anglican and Methodist churches (both in a material and ideological sense) on the capitalist and colonial political economy.
In the final analysis, formal separation of the disciplines of history and church history has led to isolation and stagnation of church history in the Southern African context. The call is to move from exclusion (which leads to the problems of introspection and polemicism) to open interdisciplinary work (without surrendering the church historian's function of testing Christianity's claims against itself). Southey concludes: “The history of the church remains integral to the history of southern Africa, and is best served within the mainstream of history.”
Gerald Pillay deals with the interpretation and reinterpretation of the history of the Black churches in South Africa (1992). Black church history has formed a separate category precisely because it did not fit a white factional scheme. There was not only a black-white separation, but also a special category for “Pentecostal groups” and ethnic churches (like the Zion Christian Church) due to ecclesiastical imperialism which perceived these groups as sectarian and not strictly orthodox. Pentecostal churches were simply not heard. The social consciousness of a people directly influences its historical and hermeneutical activity.
South African church historiography has been too open to ideological influences, leading to innocuous, conservative denominational histories rather than seeing South African Christianity in its ultra-relations and its ecumenical and catholic dimensions. Only with the emergence of Black and African theologies in the 1960s were reinterpretations sought which provided a more authentic historical picture of Christianity. Oral tradition and the need to hear the story told by the people themselves was recognized (Pillay 1992:122-7).[9]
Pillay counters the idea that it is the task of black people only to tell their own story. He also bemoans the fact that no adequate constitutive history writing has been produced in South Africa comparable to a work such as Enrique Dussel's History of the Church in Latin America. A comprehensive and insightful history of Christianity in South Africa cannot be a conglomeration of individual church histories, each self-contained and autonomous, nor can it be racially determined and divided. One prominent figure in South African church history (Andrew Murray) is cited as proving the necessity for a wider vision and more inclusive method. He was a leader with Scottish Reformed roots who influenced directly or indirectly Afrikaans, Dutch Reformed, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Holiness Movements, as well as indigenous African Independent Churches.[10]
Jurie le Roux's concern as a biblical scholar and historian is that South African church historians have by and large not immersed themselves in the theoretical aspects of history writing or the philosophy of history (1993:35-63). He wants historical understanding to be sought not as an addendum or something secondary to theological studies, because history is a way of understanding life.[11] He counters the chronological precedence of synchronic (exegetical reading) over diachronic (historical study) work. The dominant South African model of exegesis has “undermined a historical reading of texts and minimized a (church) historical understanding of life.” The call is to find an all-embracing view of life and an open reading of history, one which offers a way of understanding and giving meaning to life, not one which legitimizes certain doctrines, practices, or lifestyles.
The historian takes two “life contexts” into account, the historian’s own and that of the document. Understanding of the past calls for a fusion of these two “life contexts.” The historian is influenced by the context (particular tradition) in which the historian lives. These provide the prejudices which are a prerequisite for reading historical documents. We extract meaning because we have certain expectations of meaning provided by these prejudices.
In particular, we should be aware of the shift from the “individual” (Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte) to “society” (Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, the French Annales School). A sociological understanding of the past has become a dominant approach, for which most church historians are not ready.
An integral writing of history/church history is needed. No one perspective can provide the whole truth. Interperspectival inter-connectedness is needed. Historical understanding is basically a hermeneutical problem. History is shaped by theories about the past and is determined by questions pertaining to both individuals and their societies.[12] Church historians must experiment with multiple-factor explanations and analyses and relate their work to that of historians in general. All these perspectives on the past must be brought into critical conversation with each other. Only so can denominational, racial, cultural, gender, or national particularities be transcended and something catholic (whole) be achieved (Pillay 1992:146). Church history deals with the human story and requires a human face. A convergence of these concerns in fact has emerged in a major inter-disciplinary event in South Africa in this decade.
The Anthropological Congress held at UNISA, Pretoria, January 21-22, 1991, had as its theme: A Theological Contribution Towards a South African Society with a Human Face. It was a joint effort of the six main theological societies of South and Southern Africa. It was designed to assist South Africans in entering a new phase in its history (Konig 1991). In more than one way this conference marks the current trajectory of the new South Africa: the search for a human face, the quest for humanizing a traumatized and divided society, the long road to healing of torn and broken communities. I quote Lutheran theologian Simon Maimela:
Because for the people of African ancestry the focus in life is on the network of human interrelationships, African theologians should insist that the teaching of the Church should pay great attention to what in the past were referred to in theological circles as venial as opposed to mortal sins. The focus should be on the continuing sinfulness between ourselves and our neighbors. This would force Christians to begin to deal seriously with the wrongs they do to their fellows in society instead of focusing their gaze on the clouds in the sky, brooding about their future security in heaven.... African theologians should insist that the right belief (orthodoxy) and the right doing (orthopraxis) belong together; both are equally important tests of authenticity and integrity of the gospel.[13]
Comparing Two Historiographies
It is now possible to sketch five contrasts and comparisons of the historiography of Christianity on the two continents.
1. In North America the movement has been towards atomistic individualism: in Southern Africa there is awakening to interrelatedness in community.
2. In South Africa church historians are beginning to recognize the need to conduct their work in openness to historians and inter-disciplinary methods (without neglecting their unique function of critiquing the practice and profession of Christianity, see Hofmeyr, 1991, 1994). In America, by contrast, the shift has been to religious pluralism and church historiography is increasingly the writing of religious history (Mark Noll being an exception).
3. South African society is facing the stern task of rebuilding the fabric and fiber of human communities after serious and sustained violence, while American society is entering into an experience of escalating violence and the breakdown of neighborhoods after a century of reconstruction. (See Huber 1991, Villa-Vicencio 1990, Walker 1990).
4. In America the search for identity is expressed in the new quest for community in support groups (Wuthnow, 1994), whereas in South Africa the question is, does Christian identity offer a basis for human community?
5. In America the role of religion providing for a core identity in society, enabling positive response to change and diversity, appears in decline, while in South Africa ideological Christian underpinnings of existing apartheid structures and order have been torn down to make the way for change.
A Distinctive Wesleyan/Holiness Pattern?
My personal journey has called for a shift along three major lines (see, e.g., Whitelaw 1980-1993). This represents a personal model, but it is rooted in the ethos and practices of a Wesleyan/Holiness tradition in living encounter with other traditions. It calls for:
1. Developing a method and language of communication for church historiography which acknowledges first the common ground of our humanity before any other religious, or ecclesiastical, socio-political, or ethnic identities.
2. Adopting a model for church historiography which makes room for nascent covenant--communities of the kingdom as essential in describing and reporting church historical developments in society (Hawthorne & Whitelaw, 1990).
3. Recognizing a particularity of place as essential for historical and theological work. One's place, embodiedness, and neighborhood roots are important. Here reconstruction may occur in “nascent covenant-communities” towards trinitarian community. It poses a question: Is humane and compassionate historiography possible?
I propose that within the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition dispassionate and scientifically objective church historiography is likely to be impelled towards taking account of our more subjective common human history.
Why should this be so? Historically, the roots of the Holiness Movement have been nourished in a compassionate concern for those disenfranchised by the dominant forces and churchly traditions in society (Smith 1962:111).[14] This has engendered a willingness to become marginalized in dialectical tension with a strong desire to maintain connections with the fullness of the Christian tradition.[15]
There is a shared ethos (rather than a carefully articulated framework of systematic philosophical and theological thought) which pushes towards the acceptance of the intuitive and experiential rootedness of the human condition. When one bridges (by entry into a marginalized ecclesiastical tradition) privileged space (where calm, abstracted reflection can take place) and painful space (where the voice of those who cry in silence is heard), a choice is offered for the selection of “love as an epistemological principle” (Whitelaw 1993:134). This love “enables us to know what otherwise would remain hidden.” Without it an historian is partially blind to the realities and events she observes. Love works by providing a “deeper understanding of concepts, images, and symbols with which one is already familiar--a greater ability to distinguish concepts or see connections between them” (Gaybba, 1988:27-38).
The downside of this is that clarity of historical connections may be obscured if not specifically acknowledged.[16] An historian in this tradition is under greater (not less) accountability to the best historical research and practice. A superb example of such work is that of Jeff Guy (1983) in his life of Anglican bishop-missionary John Colenso (1814-83). Guy speaks as an outsider as far as religion is concerned, but he captures more honestly and sensitively than hagiographers or demonizers of Colenso what lay at the heart of Colenso's theology: “an awareness of man's spiritual existence, of love and brotherhood, of God” which linked all humanity irrespective of race (166-7).
Heiko Oberman, a formidable historian of medieval society and church, comes at this idea from a totally different perspective when he calls for the historian to combine the playsome freedom of homo ludens with the serious discipline of homo quaerens intellectum (see Whitelaw, 1991). The intuitive insight of the playful child who explores the past with delightful surprise at what is found (for a moment at least free of the tyranny of the Zeitgeist) may inform the “dialectics of precision” by which the scientific historian works. In a similar vein Schneidau (1976:19-20, 49) writes “in praise of alienation” and avers that our Western idea of knowledge moved away from the “shaman's vision toward the scientist's.” To be “decentered” is a condition of insight, but the analytic, perspectival mode, tends to devalue this. It leads to a suppression of meaning because it attempts to be “scientific” by ignoring affective relations between observer and observed, and so becomes dehumanized and unfeeling.
Neither Oberman (internal connections) nor Gaybba (external bridges) represents the holiness tradition, but both point to the importance of taking a stance (as interpreters and communicators of society) which recognizes the need to bridge the intuitive (or childlike) and the rational (or scientific) and moves beyond this to discover that “love is the essential bridge linking all human beings.”
Cognitive and non-cognitive factors influence knowledge. Social forces and human interrelationships structure the way we know. I suggest that communities which are willing to accept the stigma of moving on the margins in exploring both past and future may become the catalysts for new “emergent orders of the kingdom”[17] to appear.
What practical implications does this have for church historiography? First, the requirement spelled out by David Lotz[18] will have to be responsibly modified by a shift in focus from the centrality of ecclesiastical institutions and practices to the “marginal neighborhoods” which become incipient “sacramental space” for the generative emergence of new orders of the kingdom. For example, in South African church history, who has listened to the experience of the P L le Roux family in Wakkerstroom in the early part of this century other than Bengt Sundkler? Gerald Pillay poses the question acutely: “Why then a separate category for ‘Pentecostal groups’ when they included both Afrikaans and English, black and white?” (1992:123). Was this unwillingness to hear the story of the Christian tradition within the Wakkerstroom-Pentecostal axis motivated by a form of ecclesiastical imperialism which perceived these groups as sectarian and marginal?[19] How many such instances of not hearing because not seeing fellow human beings occur because they are perceived as “marginal”?
A humane and compassionate reading of history would discover in otherwise overlooked sources elements essential for the whole story to be told (e.g, the work of the Afrikaans poet and churchman, Totius; Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, 1948; and in black and white African oral history).
Andrew Greeley, Catholic sociologist, argues that it is the poetic elements that touch the human spirit (1995:52). It is the “responsibility of reflective religion to listen closely to imaginative religion” (1990:273). A basic thesis he proposes jointly with David Tracy is that the Catholic imagination is analogical while the Protestant imagination is dialectical (1990:45; 1995:229-255). Here is another dimension to the same proposition: humane and compassionate historiography will recognize the poetic and the scientific, the analogical and the dialectical elements in human descriptions of Christian and religious history. These call for new models.
A Practical-Pastoral Model
for Church Historiography
I am inclined to accept Dayton's pentecostal paradigm as valid for describing the history of North American evangelicalism in many of its features and developments. Evidence suggests that the pneumatological stress is on empirical experience while the presbyterian paradigm of George Marsden works with a christological consciousness which seeks rational categories of expression.[20] The first emphasizes experience, empowerment, the Spirit, and the future. The second stresses classic texts of Scripture, the received tradition of the past, and rational, scientific exegesis.
Jźsto Gonzalez, Methodist church historian, describes the theology of Irenaeus as “eminently pastoral” (1989:31). Irenaeus, who lived as a missionary on the margins between east and west (Lyon, Gaul and Asia Minor, ca 130-200 CE) is a good model for historiography in the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition. His primary concerns were practical and pastoral rather than speculative or esoteric. His emphasis on humanity as a single whole, whose history has been recapitulated in Christ as the second Adam (Eph. 2:10), is a significant antidote for modern individualistic personalism.[21]
In addition, in a rediscovery of the church's future lies a fruitful field for historical research. The tradition which moves on the margins of life, neither isolated, ingrown, nor entrapped in cultural assimilation to the dominant trends of the day may be captured by an ecstatic rationality (reason that is moved, impassioned by a vision of how life may be lived in the light of God’s kingdom). This can happen in neighborhoods which are off-center to ecclesial, institutional structures, where the nourishment of human persons in communion occurs.[22] There is a “forgotten strand of Anglican tradition” (Allchin: 1988, title) which offers its richness here. It holds to a harmonious synthesis between christology and pneumatology. Zizioulas (1975:83) puts it like this:
Truth is the event of communion of persons. It is the Eucharist which brings together communion and community, history and eschatology, Christ and Spirit, institution and event. It is only in the eucharist that we transcend the conflict between history and eschatology. It is the Spirit who brings the eschaton into history. He confronts the process of history with its consummation, with its transformation and transfiguration.... The Church's anamnesis acquires the eucharistic paradox...the memory of the future.
The Orthodox church historian Frank (1994, 69-70) comments: “This community, the Church, is formed by a radical conversion from individualism to personhood.... In the Church humanity is transfigured to become one again.” Focus may be shifted from pre-occupation with the individual, centers of structures and power and the past, to awareness of margins and community and the future. (See Zizioulas 1985, Frank 1992).
Human Connections in Christian
Community--Neighborhood
Here is one important passage from the dramatic life story of Nelson Mandela (Mandela 542):
I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur.... I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity.... Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.
Was the fragile fabric of a new order emerging in his marginalized neighborhood?
Two salient features have come into view: first, the basic importance of the fiber of our common humanity--community--where the real new creation is/is not occurring; second, the vital connection between our religious life and our sense of place and time--the land--where we are nourished at the roots of our being, in a neighborhood.[23] How may our sense of history reflect this?
1. Our historiography may be woven into a rich tapestry using the threads of our human diversity in a narrative that enshrines the humane. In other words, it affirms the dignity of ordinary human people and events, so that dehumanization may be noticed and redemptively touched by our writing.
2. Our historiography may celebrate the graced space/time of ordinary life in the created world when it allows the redemptive sense of the sacred in neighborhood to function in a theology of place. In other words, displacement from one's right and proper place may function methodologically in the way we conceive sacred space and time and in the way we write religious history.
For those in the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition this may call for a conscious commitment to move beyond hagiography (of Wesley, of Bresee, of others like Schmelzenbach) and revisionism (of Wesley, of the nineteenth century Holiness Movement) to what Calvin Cook might call that “grace and truth” (1992:1-7) which counters dehumanization without ignoring it wherever it is found. Wesleyans, no less than others, tend to marginalize others who are different (within and without) even though experiencing marginalization themselves. This historiography may call for the acceptance of voluntary displacement (Van Eck & England 1990: 60-66) from an entrenched denominational position of recognition to intentional functioning as a counter-culture marginal community[24] which is an emergent order of holy living.
A reference point outside both these narratives (that is, North America and South Africa) is provided by Enrique Dussel's Latin American historiography. Dussell's method of historiography may be characterized as one of “ecstatic rationality.”[25] John Wesley has been called a “reasonable enthusiast.”
I contend for three fundamental shifts (metanoic mind changes[26]) needed for a more integral writing of the story of the Christian community. The holiness tradition is peculiarly fitted to make these transitions because it can do so out of the wellsprings of its own being.[27] First, a shift is called for from a focus on persons as individuals in communities of faith to a recognition of human “being in communion” (Frank 1994:66; Zizioulas 1985:15-20).[28] The second shift is from the dominance of ecclesial structures of hierarchy and central power towards supple engagement with humanity at the margins where intimacy and connection in neighborhoods occurs.[29] Thirdly, a shift should occur from preoccupation with the Christian past and present to a new awareness of an emergent history of the future.[30]
Adoption of a trinitarian model of writing church history embodies possibilities for achieving these shifts. Such a model is practical[31] and pastoral.[32] It focuses on the dynamics of human interconnectedness in community more than on pragmatic efficiency or effectiveness in multiplying Christian communities. It is concerned with the results of pastoral function in the well-being of human communities patterned after kenotic service more than with the history and development of doctrine or ecclesiastical structures.
These practical and pastoral outcomes are measured best by observing what happens in terms of accessing both oral and written records (that is, both poetic and prosaic[33]), what occurs in the partnership between women and men in Christian congregations (including ethnographic research), and finally what developments unfold in marginalized communities.[34]
There are real pitfalls in attempting to work with such an approach. One should avoid a meta-historical, ideological, or theological imposition on the sources. This danger may be overcome by intentional efforts to take seriously faith in the transcendent expressed in human practice without making it a category for interpretation itself. Another error is to underestimate the complex multi-layered nature of the model proposed. It is no simple combination of the rational and experiential models previously identified.
I would argue that a pastoral-practical model requires something like “ecstatic rationality” as a mark of Christian worship and community. Here a presbyterian mode of rational “cultural-linguistic” interpretation of Scripture as text functions in dynamic tension with a pentecostal mode of “experiential-expressivist” living encounter with the Spirit in neighborhoods which are hospitable to humanity (Hauerwas & Jones 1989:7).[35]
The first mode may be explained in terms of a christocentric model where center (doctrine), coherence (theology), structure (ecclesiology), and stability (society) are corollaries of such a view of Christian history. In turn, the second may be explained in terms of a pneumatological model where change (radical discontinuity in human experience), spontaneity, and intimacy (rather than structured institutional life), and inward, immediate authentication of the divine are what is considered essential in the writing of Christian history.
A trinitarian communion model would include and transcend both of these. Embedded in the corporate memory of the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition lie strands of Eastern and Western spirituality, of presbyterian and pentecostal ordering of community life, of poetic and prosaic sources of Christian memory. Hope and confidence in the transforming power of grace were hallmarks of the early Church of the Nazarene one hundred years ago. Looking forward, where may one hope to discern signs of emerging communities with the mark of the kingdom of God?
Gary Frank (1994:66, 68), Orthodox church historian in South Africa, stresses that ecclesial experience rather than systematic reflection gave rise to the early creedal formulations (e.g., the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). He focuses on the interconnectedness between the trinitarian life of God and the Church in the “neo-patristic synthesis” which has been occurring in Orthodox theology.
The significance of this for the holiness tradition is that both Orthodox and holiness traditions consider living faith central to Christian identity. Each contends with Western secularism, individualism and materialism. Both have to deal with post-Enlightenment Christianity and a fractured world-view where “spiritual” and “material” are dichotomized. Frank claims that the category of “communion” is beginning to be applied fruitfully to issues that have historically divided Christians. Zizioulas documents a convergence of Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox theology where koinonia (in eucharistic communities) is becoming central in ecumenical discussion (quoted by Frank: 92).
It will be no easy task to generate a new consciousness and practice of eucharistic communion in Holiness churches. The key issue is the acceptance of the fact that transforming grace is both mediated and immediately accessible (both structured and spontaneous). Grace is not simply accessed by private religious encounter.[36] Churches in the Holiness tradition should approach this issue from the standpoint of marginalized communities rather than mainstream churches. Love to God and neighbor was historically expressed in the impulse to take the gospel to those neglected and sidelined by society. Therefore a recovery of trinitarian communion and eucharistic ecclesiology will probably come along the lines of a passionate thrust of evangelism which is the outflow of trinitarian worship of the Creator-Redeemer among those less visible as “target markets”.[37]
Finally, a beloved colleague now deceased, David Bosch (in Louw Alberts, Frank Chikane, eds, 1991:129-39), has articulated a Reformed response to indicate how his tradition might help shape a new South Africa:
If Liberation Theology concentrates on the incarnation of Christ, Catholics on the significance of Christ's vicarious death on the Cross, the Eastern Orthodox on the glory of Christ's resurrection, Pentecostals on the coming of the Holy Spirit, and Adventists on the expected return of Christ, it could be said that Christ's ascension is of particular significance to Calvinists. The Ascension... (as) ...the symbol of the enthronement of Christ, of His lordship over all life and reality.
I suggest that the distinctive focus of the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition is that of holy living (heartfelt religion expressed in Christlike character in community) embodied in the supple simplicity, spontaneity, and immediacy of a sacramental practice (mediated grace) which is encountered by ordinary people in daily life where women and men are full partners in the human enterprise. Where do I see this? By recovering a memory of the future. This is what we are called to be. This is the name of our becoming.
Like Calvinists, believers within the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition need to recognize and identify non-negotiable options if they wish to remain true to their own calling and history. In our case, I suggest that the option not open is that of surrendering a view of the optimism of responsible, transforming (as well as redeeming) grace where the courageous confidence exists of being made so far perfect as to do the known will of God, through voluntary obedience, now. This calls for the recognition that the tapestry and trajectory of human life unfolds in an intimate interconnectedness of humanity, caught up in worship and obedience.
Observe this act “on the margins” of apartheid South Africa in the 1960s. A white guard urinates on a helpless prisoner and forces him to eat and drink human excrement. By and large, white hands administer white wafers and red wine to white worshipers in mainstream South African churches. A guard who observes, and pays attention, James Gregory, undergoes a profound human transformation. He is to sit beside the prisoner in years to come, as he, Nelson Mandela, is inducted to the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa. Which event signals an emerging new order? What grace made this possible? The prisoner's openness to the horizons of a common humanity? The prisoner's roots in a religion of transforming grace?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations:
CSR =Christian Scholar's Review (Huntington College, Huntington, IN, USA).
JTSA =Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (Department of Religious
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SHE =Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae (Journal of the Church History Society of Southern Africa, University of South Africa, Pretoria).
WTJ =Wesleyan Theological Journal (Journal of the Wesleyan Theological Society, Wilmore, KY, USA).
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