Category Archives: church authority

The Problem of Church Squatters (Part Two)

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Today I’d like to share with you my reply to the distressed lady whose letter I posted in part one of this series on the problem of church squatters. If you have not read the previous post, please take a look at it before you read my reply.

Reply to a Distressed Lady

Dear Sister:

Forgive my delay in replying. I wanted to think carefully about what to say. I am not facing the problem you describe, and as you pointed out, I cannot simply tell you what to do. But I offer my thoughts in hope that they will help you discern the Lord’s will.

First, I want to write about my reactions as I read your letter.

Sadness, Anger, and Joy

I read your letter with a mixture of sadness, anger, and joy. I was overjoyed that you have not been deceived by clever arguments or intimidated by the self-confident majority into giving up Scripture’s clear teaching and the church’s traditional doctrine on marriage, family, and sex. You do not need me to teach you anything on this subject. I will simply say: Be confident. You are right.

I was saddened to hear that your church home has been invaded and occupied by squatters and deceived into abandoning clear apostolic teaching. Many believers know that affirming and celebrating LGBTQ+ relationships is wrong, but I’m not sure everyone realizes how wide it opens the doors to other evils. It rejects the created order and, therefore, denies the wisdom of the Creator (Romans 1:18-32). The distinction and complementarity of male and female are so obvious and basic that to erase them you must deny the very existence of a divinely intended created order. Created human nature becomes a realm of raw material to be reshaped according to human desires. The heavens can no longer declare the glory of God. The moral law possesses no authority to forbid idolatry, lying, murder, adultery, and theft. Not only must affirming- and celebrating-churches ignore the natural moral law, they must ignore Scripture’s moral teaching; for Scripture affirms all the elements of the moral law, intensifies them, and sets them into relation to Jesus Christ (On this theme, see J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide.) For these new Gnostics, God becomes utterly irrelevant to the moral life. They substitute human subjectivity and autonomy in the place of natural and divine law. The inner self becomes an idol and the true object of worship.

I am angered by your elders’ and pastors’ efforts to justify this decision from Scripture, thereby compounding immorality with heresy. Their interpretations of Scripture are so implausible that I find it difficult to accept that they believe them. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone offer these new interpretations in what seemed to me a sincere spirit of obedience (For my analysis of these arguments, see my book The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living). It’s always part of an effort to evade the force of Scripture’s teaching. Squatters by their actions show themselves to be thieves and liars. And that makes me angry.

What to Do?

Churches are always mixed bodies of saints and sinners. In almost any church you visit, it is likely that there are secret unbelievers and immoral people sitting in the audience. Those traditions that attempt to purge the church of every sinner tend to do more harm than good by their heavy-handed interrogations. They forget Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30). If you attempt to pull up all the weeds you will damage the wheat. Wait until the end and the Lord will separate the two. You don’t need to leave a church just because it contains secret fornicators, idolaters, and doubters. There are no pure churches.

No church possesses and teaches perfect doctrine. For 2,000 years, the church has conducted internal debates about worship, food, predestination, the atonement, the sacraments, church offices, and many others. You don’t need to separate from a church with which you disagree on a point of doctrine as long as that doctrine does not contradict the gospel or the Christian way of life. Scripture is unambiguous about many things but not all. How do the sacraments work? What does Scripture mean by election and predestination? Should the church organize itself in a presbyterian or episcopal or congregational way? Churches that claim to teach the whole doctrinal truth and nothing but the truth often engage in fights, purges, and divisions. You must follow your conscience.

However, when a local church or a denomination comes to be led by people who teach heresy, things become more complicated. Though your church affirms and celebrates LGBTQ+ relationships, apparently it tolerates you and others who disagree. So, you are not being forced to choose between violating your conscience or giving up your membership. You will have to examine your conscience before God.

In examining your conscience, I don’t think there is one set of questions you should ask. Our consciences have a way of speaking to us even when we don’t ask questions of them. They can warn us not to rationalize our lack of courage or ignore our hypocrisy or justify our sloth. They can counsel us against being used by the heretics to minimize the seriousness of their errors.

Another often overlooked factor comes to mind. If you are not a leader, a teacher of the faith, or in contemporary terms, an influencer, you may have less of a responsibility to break from your church even if it teaches a heretical doctrine, that is if there are some redeeming aspects to the church. Remember Abraham’s discussion with God about how many good people it would take to save Sodom from destruction (Genesis 18). If by staying you do not contribute to the spiritual downfall of others, you may not bear the guilt of the false doctrine taught by your church. You have to think about that.

For me, however, things are very different. I could not remain in attendance and fellowship with the church you describe. Because I have a responsibility to be a teacher of God’s people and have done so for over 50 years, my continued presence would tend to minimize the seriousness of its heresy. Perhaps my silence could even be used to justify it.

I have not told you what you should do. But I hope these thoughts will help you gain perspective. Above all, examine your conscience in prayer before God. May God give you courage to do what is right and the peace to live with your decision.

In Christ,

Ron Highfield

A Time for Orthodoxy (Part Three)

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In the previous two essays I argued that anti-creedal traditions such as the Stone-Campbell Movement (S-CM) need to rethink their opposition to creeds. We no longer live in a culture that reveres the Bible and believes in objective facts and clear truths. In today’s context, the anti-creed stance will inevitably be assimilated to postmodern relativism wherein each individual has the right to construct their own creed. The unity of the church dissolves into anarchy and its identity is obscured to the point of vacuity. I recommended that churches and Christian colleges and other parachurch institutions state clearly the beliefs and practices for which they stand and prepare to enforce them. Call them what you will, creeds, statements of faith or confessions of faith.

A Little History

Despite the rhetoric of the anti-creedal traditions, there has never been a church without a creed, written or merely understood. From the New Testament era forward, every church has had three elements of authority that worked together to preserve its unity and identity: scripture, tradition, and office.

Scripture

The New Testament scriptures embody the apostolic witness to the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, the earliest explanation of the meaning of what happened in Jesus Christ, and the apostolic instructions about how to live in response to it. The NT possesses prime authority for identifying true Christian faith and practice. No other document or person or tradition should be allowed to define Christian faith and practice in contradiction to the scriptures. Because Scripture possesses such unique authority it is tempting to conclude that no other authorities are needed. But historical experience demonstrates that this is not true. We find many instances wherein the scriptures have been distorted, twisted, and interpreted contrary to their original meaning.

Tradition

The NT scriptures record events and teaching set in first-century Judea, Galilee, and the Mediterranean world. By the late first- and early second-centuries the church had become largely composed of gentiles many of whom were steeped in pagan religion and philosophy. They brought many of their pagan views of divinity, humanity, and salvation with them and they read some of these ideas into the scriptures. In this way they constructed such hybrid forms of Christianity as Gnosticism in which Christian words were ripped from their historical context and filled with mythological and mystical meanings drawn from pagan speculations. Thus arose the question of the “true” interpretation of the scriptures. The gnostic churches taught one thing and the orthodox churches taught another. Which is correct?

Irenaeus of Lyon (b. 130) argued against Gnostic Christianity that the true meaning of the scriptures is preserved in the “rule of faith,” which has been taught, believed, and preserved from apostolic times in the oldest churches, especially Rome. The rule of faith is a short summary of the heart of the Christian faith often memorized by new converts and incorporated into worship.*

Irenaeus argued that gnostic Christianity was a recent invention that contradicted the earliest traditions embodied in the rule of faith. In this way the continuity of belief represented in the rule of faith preserved the true interpretation of the scriptures and disproved the gnostic interpretation. Throughout the history of the church, tradition has functioned as a check on interpretations that read alien ideas into the scriptures contrary to their original meaning.

Office

But how is the rule of faith enforced? Who says, “This is what we believe. No gnostic, no progressive, no liberal teaching will be allowed. And you (supply name here) are guilty of error. false teaching or heresy.” Apart from a living voice the “rule of faith” itself is subject to distortion and reinterpretation! For Scripture and tradition are written texts, and written texts can be manipulated by unscrupulous or ignorant interpreters.

In practice, every church has always recognized the necessity of leaders—apostles, bishops, elders, shepherds—to make decisions for the community to preserve its identity and unity. This is true in all Christian traditions from Roman Catholic and Orthodox to the most extreme Protestant and from the first- to the twenty-first century. When the identity of the community is threatened, an authoritative voice must be ready to assert “This is who we are, this is what we believe and teach.”

Different churches seek leaders with different qualities, but all of them recognize that their leaders should be very well versed in the scriptures and the traditions. They must be mature and known by the community to live exemplary lives.

The Three-Legged Stool

Scripture, tradition and office provide mutual support and together are often called “the three-legged stool.” All three of these authorities are necessary for preserving the identity and unity of the Church, the Christian college and other parachurch institutions. Church leaders would be completely powerless to make and enforce decisions if they could not appeal to Scripture as the prime authority to give divine sanction to their decisions. And if tradition has no recognized authority for the community, leaders cannot convincingly assert their interpretation of Scripture as the true one!

Three is the minimum number of legs for a stable stool. Indeed, a three-legged stool is more stable on uneven ground than one with four legs! Balancing scripture, tradition, and office is the best way to insure the identity and unity of the church. Of course, even conscientious leaders who listen carefully to Scripture and tradition can make mistakes. But like all decision makers, church leaders must take that risk. The alternatives are far worse: an ecclesiastical wild west where everyone claims to be their own Pope, a democracy in which the illiterate and unwashed vote their whimsical opinions, or an aristocracy who think they can edit Scripture and reject tradition because they can feel the Spirit’s new wind.

*See Everett Ferguson, The Rule of Faith: A Guide (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015). Ferguson is an internationally recognized church historian from the Stone-Campbell Movement.

Next Time: How creeds, confessions, and statements of belief work.