The Third Schism: Reframing the Debate

Photo by Alexander Grey

In 1986, Andrew G. Walker wrote an essay called “The Third Schism: The Great Divide in Christianity Today.” His tone was intentionally polemical as he took aim at modernist forms of Christianity entrenched in the mainline traditions. For Walker, the publication of John A. T. Robinson’s Honest To God (SCM Press) in 1963 was a watershed moment. Robinson’s book was a manifesto for many, particularly among seminary-educated mainline clergy who no longer found the central doctrines of orthodox Christianity believable but wished to remain within the church. Miracles, special divine revelation, and the vision of God given in traditional creedal formulations were relics of days gone by, fine for less sophisticated minds, but unsuited for the intellect formed by modernity. Such views characterized one part of a growing divide in the church. Walker, along with Robin A. Parry, refined and expanded these ideas in their 2014 book Deep Church Rising: The Third Schism and the Recovery of Christian Orthodoxy (Cascade).

Things are a bit more complex now than Walker envisioned. I am familiar with the liberal Protestantism Walker observed. I once heard a pastor deny the doctrine of the incarnation from the pulpit of a large church. Within the last few years, a bishop in my former tradition publicly repudiated the sinlessness of Christ. Most readers will be familiar with the attempt to remake Christianity in the image of modernity by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. In the 1990s and early 2000s, writers like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan were all the rage. Both were beholden to Rudolf Bultmann’s demythologizing project, anticipated much earlier in the work of David Friedrich Strauss. They were asking and answering the question, “How can we follow Jesus in light of the fact that he was not who the church has always claimed him to be?” They tried to replace the mythos of the church with a different one, a mythos suited to what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame”—a functionally materialist worldview.

Nevertheless today I see far less of the kind of revisionism Walker describes. The “anti-supernatural” crowd with which he identified one part of this schism is quietly fading from the scene. Its remaining proponents tend to be older, seminary-educated clergy. This perspective simply has not been able to reproduce itself, and for good reason. Who needs a powerless god who is more of an idea than a Savior, more of a construct than a loving and just Father? The demythologized god cannot sustain us through hardship or answer our cries for help. This god cannot raise us up on the last day, and thus when we grieve, we do indeed grieve as those without hope. Demythologized Christianity is not dead, but it does not take up as much space as it once did within mainline traditions.

The decline of demythologized Christianity, however, does not mean that progressive Christianity has reached its denouement. Rather, it has changed forms. Taking its cues from theologians like Albrecht Ritschl, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, progressive Christianity tends to front ethics—normally framed as “justice”—as the central concern of the church. If we understand orthodoxy as “right belief” or “right praise,” progressive Christianity clearly has an orthodoxy, though a different one than Christians have traditionally confessed. It brackets doctrinal orthodoxy—the set of metaphysical claims expressed in the historic creedal tradition—in favor of an emphasis upon the church’s social witness. In fact, insistence upon a doctrinal orthodoxy can be seen as intolerant, unloving, and demeaning of people of other faith traditions. What matters is that one adopts the right set of ethical and political positions. Adherents of progressive orthodoxy can be every bit as rigid as the most strident conservative fundamentalists. In fact, its most vocal advocates are often former conservative fundamentalists. They have changed their material positions, but not their habits of mind. They are still fundamentalists, though their fundamentalism has a different content. 

Complicating matters is the fact that in many cases today we find admixtures of theological perspectives. Many mainline clergy, for example, assert that they are “fully orthodox,” but “open and affirming” and desirous of a “big tent” denomination that welcomes a wide variety of theological positions. “Fully orthodox” means they can say the Apostles’ Creed and mean it—no finger-crossing required—and even see it as central to the Christian life. They affirm the church’s authority with regard to her historic doctrinal teaching. Yet they are less convinced of her authority regarding ethical teaching. In essence, the claim here is that historic Christianity can teach us about matters related to the doctrine of God and Christology, but its teachings on sex, marriage, gender, and abortion are at best negotiable, at worst incompatible with the heart of the gospel. Or, put differently, the church has been unsuccessful in extrapolating its ethical positions from its doctrines until quite recently. 

Some would call these positions “moderate” or “centrist,” but they are really hybrid positions, blending elements of historic Christian orthodoxy with modern progressivism. Put differently, they draw from two different wells. On the one hand they draw their basic claims about God mainly from the well of the church’s consensual tradition, harkening back to the first five centuries of the faith. On the other hand they draw their ethical practices from the well of modern and late-modern thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Freud, Marcuse, Beauvoir, and Foucault. They may not realize that these thinkers are in the background of their thought, but progressive ideology, and hence progressive theology, is impossible without them. (For more on this, see my review of Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.)

Thus while the fault lines are not quite what Walker anticipated, there is a schism happening across much of the Christian world today. Perhaps 85% of the Anglican Communion has recently rejected the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Roman Catholic bishops in Germany are at war with the church’s teaching on homosexuality. It is reasonable to envision parts of the Roman Catholic Church breaking off to form their own communions. The ongoing division of the UMC is no aberration. It is part of a larger divide affecting huge segments of the church across the globe. In fact, as far as denominations in the U.S. go, the UMC is late to the party. Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, for example, have already undergone multiple divisions. I anticipate the same for some of the Wesleyan Holiness and Methodist African American denominations in the years ahead. 

Simple appeals to Scripture cannot resolve matters. Scripture is not, as the Reformers claimed, “autopistic,” or self-interpreting. Whether we admit it or not, we interpret Scripture according to various theological principles and background beliefs. Billy Abraham argued in his first book that we should distinguish between inspiration and divine revelation. He understood divine revelation as follows: “There are the acts of God in the history of Israel, especially his delivery of the Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt. Then there are the speech-acts of God in which he reveals his saving intentions and purposes to chosen prophets and apostles. Finally there are his unique and climactic acts in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth” (The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture, 66). Inspiration has occurred, he wrote, in various degrees and across the history of the church. We may think of the church’s doctrinal and ethical witness as inspired reflection, or sanctified reason, engaging divine revelation as defined above. 

Abraham’s schema is helpful in pointing us to the fact that our disputes in the church are often disputes about revelation and inspiration. Proponents of plenary verbal inspiration see the entire canon of Scripture as special divine revelation and thus binding and authoritative. Abraham disagreed with this perspective, holding instead that Scripture mediates to us special divine revelation that has been disclosed in history through Israel, the prophets and apostles, and Jesus Christ. By contrast, progressive Christians are more likely to locate revealed truth within the self. According to Gary Dorrien, the liberal tradition of Christianity bases theology in reason and experience rather than in some external authority. “In liberal theology,” he writes, “the Bible remains an authority for faith, but its authority operates within Christian experience, not as an outside force that establishes or compels belief” (“The Crisis and Necessity of Liberal Theology,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 30.1 [January 2009]: 3). Dorrien’s distinction is helpful, though I believe he underestimates the extent to which personal experience is determined by external authorities that are often unacknowledged. 

In our ecclesiastical debates we often talk past one another, but why? Perhaps the reason is that we fail to identify the underlying and causal points of disagreement. Yes, we can identify material issues such as miracles, the nature of God, homosexuality, and gender identity, but what is the root of these material differences? I believe they come from different conceptions of divine revelation, the ongoing interpretive authority of the church, and the authority of individual experience. Traditionalists tend to think of divine revelation, both general and special, as something that has already occurred. God has revealed himself through creation and in history, and the definitive revelation of God is in Jesus Christ. Since the apostolic period we have sought the guidance of the Holy Spirit to teach us about the meaning of God’s self-revelation and thus to shape our corporate life. Progressives, by contrast, tend to see revelation as ongoing. God is continually doing a “new thing,” they often say. Revelation commonly takes place through individual experience, and such experience is as authoritative as any revelation that has taken place in the past. What we have then, are deep epistemological differences that shape our conception of a properly Christian life. Put differently, we differ in how we identify what is right or wrong, what is true or false.   

Endless ecclesiastical warfare covers us in shame. If we recognize where the real differences are, perhaps this will not be our fate. Having identified the root of our differences, it would be possible for us to move forward realistically and productively. The disagreements dividing the church are deep and will often necessitate distinct denominational communions. They cannot be smoothed over by political or legal maneuvering. They cannot be pushed aside with platitudes touting the virtue of unity, when unity means that we try to hold together incompatible visions of the Christian life. What is necessary at this point is a frank and realistic acknowledgement of our differences and the unlikelihood that we will come to agree on these matters in the foreseeable future. The calling of the church is not to internecine conflict, but to make disciples, to baptize people of all nations and teach them to obey all Jesus commanded. We need to be realistic about the depth of our disagreements, try to love one another in spite of them, and get on with the real work of the church.

David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.