Faithful Presence in Your Society Is Not Enough Without the Truth
Theology always affects how we live. There is no ethics-free theological system. But contrary to Dr. Sproul, this doesn’t mean everybody’s a theologian—most people’s theology is not worked out consistently across all aspects of their life.
Consider the Lutheran preoccupation with the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The basic principle of Christ’s presence in Communion was not seriously debated by most Reformers. Yet the general Lutheran disposition quickly made this a flash point with the more irenic (and sometimes bewildered) Zurich and Geneva writers. By the end of the 1500s, the reactionary Lutheran expression of eucharistic theology and how Jesus fed his people in Holy Communion had become the major point of disagreement with the Calvinists, and became the lens through which most Christological matters were articulated.
This is not isolated to our Lutheran brethren. Neo-calvinism’s points of departure from earlier Reformed Theology–the conscience, the civil authorities, pluralism–became its defining features, to detrimental effect.
Within a couple generations, a few doctrinal or cultural flashpoints can ripple out from the point of conflict and begin reshaping the entire theological or cultural biosphere. The whole social imaginary of a people can be baptized by the point of greatest discontinuity with the past. The aspect of greatest change from the old system takes on an outsized effect that becomes the “norming norm” forming the new identity of the group.
This can also be seen with immigrants from the 13 Colonies to Canada after the American War for Independence. The loyalist colonists intentionally chose the most English and conformist tendencies and bred and cultured themselves so as to inoculate their new home against Americanish outbursts of rebellion, defense of liberty and property, distrust of authority, and individualism.
Which brings us to the “Faithful Presence” cultural strategy. Faithful Presence was a term coined by James Davidson Hunter, a sociologist who argued Evangelicals ought to prefer quiet and steady work within largely secular networks to loud and populist rhetoric (like supporting Pro-Life causes or opposing Sodomizing ones) that expected quick cultural change. By quieting down and focusing on expertise within a given field, Christians would minimize polarization within society and gain enough weight to pull the culture back from secular activists.
While not even claiming to be theology proper, Hunter’s strategy became a prominent point of departure from previous generations of Protestant teaching. Whether Hunter actually founded the movement or not, his influence guaranteed that successful Evangelicals in metropolitan areas with weak culturally Christian identity would be quick in adopting it.
Fifteen years later, it is hard to understand why so many of the “Faith and Work” resources failed to include the standard social responsibilities of Protestant employers such as basic Sabbath keeping and public patronage. Reacting to an oversimplified, low status–guilt inducing?– encouragement to “evangelize more,” Evangelicalism moved even further from historic cultural Protestant norms to stake out a hilariously thin doctrine of “faith and work,” that would have been unrecognizable to Kuyper or Weber, much less Ryle, Hodge, or Calvin.
The Free Church of the East was not lucky enough to have James Davidson Hunter or his very cool influencers on hand for their early fifth century Christological debates, but they had in their chief theologian, Archbishop Nestorius, a prototype of more than a few of Davidson’s self-styled disciples.
Nestorius was a highly charismatic preacher who relied on a mix of common-sense exegesis and elite-whispering to climb from an isolated monastery to the archbishopric of Constantinople, the most celebrated pulpit in the late Roman Empire. Deeply concerned by the growing cult of the Virgin Mary in worship, he used his status to develop a third way between the polarized Christological camps of his day, which might also deflate the ascendant mariology in Egypt. Whatever good he might have accomplished restricting Mariology he squandered by wading into the acute theological crisis of the fifth century without any popular backing or political acumen, and subsequently lost his title and was banished to live in a monastery overseen by his political enemies where he died.
Nonetheless, Nestorius’ errant Christology survived when many of his followers, oppressed by both the other theological factions after their theology was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, moved beyond the borders of Rome.
The chief error of Nestorius was arguing that rather than Christ’s two natures being found in one person, the two natures of God functioned as two separate persons within a singular body. God dwelled within man, but God was not man. The divine nature dwelled in but did not clearly bind to the fleshly man. The material and the divine overlapped in the same space, but there was not a union of the two natures in a single identity, such as God dwelling within the tabernacle without ever being confused with his tabernacle.
This theology, wittingly or not, became the defining feature of the Nestorians in their new homes outside the Roman Empire. Embattled everywhere they went, the Nestorians became known for their scrappy mentality, launching missions into India, Afghanistan, China, and Mongolia. A minority almost everywhere they went, they were most hated and persecuted by their fellow Christians in state-church arrangements. Even so, they played a heavy hand in translating ancient philosophy from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, and were the chief doctors, financiers, architects, and scientists of much of the early medieval times across Asia.
Why haven’t we heard more about these Nestorians? They are clearly heroes of the evangelium, going where none have gone before to disciple the unreached. Yet herein lies their great tragedy.
According to historian Philip Jenkins, despite outnumbering the total number of Christians in Europe in the early Middle Ages, one by one, hostile anti-Christian regimes began cracking down on the Nestorians, who first went underground, and then disappeared, often without a trace. By the 1300s, without protection from any political entity, they shrank down to a couple miniscule groups who held the faith for centuries in what is today northern Iraq and India.
The Nestorian Christians never acquired critical political influence anywhere. In their vocations, they were faithful and diligent Christians, but their Christological innovation—the divine always in but never binding itself to the material order or identifying itself with it—led them to avoid direct political influence. Be faithful at your post, keep your head down, do your duty, let the chips fall where they may. This is a code fitting slaves, children, and soldiers: those truly prohibited from holding political power: but the Nestorians were free tradesmen, bankers and even elites. Alas, they cultivated a public-good theology at the expense of both a strong internal culture and amassing political capital when they had the means.
The “faithful divine presence” Nestorian Christology is condemned by every major Protestant church as simplistic, divisive, and unable to deal with the complexity of the Godhead, Christian Scriptures, and the consensus of the early church fathers. Almost all professing Christians confess Caledonian Christology, wherein Christ’s two natures are combined in one person, full God, fully man.
But this orthodox articulation did not occur in a vacuum. The Chalcedonian formula was adopted within a Christian church that had been closely identified with the Roman Empire for over a century and in a council called by a Roman emperor. Chalcedonian Christology was always present in the Scriptures, but it took the social imaginary of a government identified with, but not identical to the Christian church, for those truths to be adequately articulated.
Without the identification of Christ’s church with the spiritual goods of an empire, a proper knowledge of Christ’s nature was not clearly discerned, and Nestorian Christianity never became the moral authority it needed to bless the nations.
It’s no coincidence orthodox Christology was articulated under a Constantinian settlement. Until the church’s confession is recognized as a Divine authority by the government in civil law and culture, the impact of divine grace upon politics remains unreconciled, and the Incarnation is obscured.
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“The basic principle of Christ’s presence in Communion was not seriously debated by most Reformers…”
What is meant by this? Luther and Zwingli debated this point explicitly in 1529 at Marburg.