The PCA We Envision for Christ’s Purposes - Part 4
By Michael Allen. The following was originally presented at the 48th PCA General Assembly as a part of the assembly-wide seminar “The Future Glory of the Church: The PCA We Envision for Christ’s Purposes.” Click these links to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.
Reformed Catholicity and the Future of the PCA
I’m honored to be with the assembly and to stand alongside these other brothers on the panel. We have been through much since we last met. Tom Brady won another Super Bowl ring … playing for a team in Florida. I’m encouraged, therefore, that our stated clerk pro temp wanted us to think together about the future. We’re not simply trying to strategize back to normal but to discern what would be Christ’s calling on us for days ahead. And I’ve been asked to speak about the place of Reformed catholicity in the future of the PCA.
Why think about catholicity or about tradition? The answer cannot be a hesitant resistance to face the present nor a knee-jerk reversion toward the past. Such postures manifest fear, not faith. If we are going to lean upon the resources of the past, we need specifically theological reasons and means for doing so. I want to focus briefly on our Christology, for the prompt for this panel addresses Christ and the church in its title. After all, Paul summons us, that “you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17-19). Here we see the key terms of catholicity addressed: comprehensiveness of knowledge, the communion found together with all the saints, and being filled with “all the fullness of God.” Let’s consider bit by bit how turning to know all of Jesus for all of his blessings involves all his children.
First, this is not my church, and it’s not yours. It is the church of Jesus Christ. We begin always and everywhere by saying that “Jesus Christ is Lord of the church.” That’s not a mere statement of its inception, like a plaque acknowledging a founder or benefactor. That’s a present tense statement about its persistence and its polity. Jesus is Lord of this church today. My favorite line from the whole sixteenth century is found in the oft forgotten Ten Theses of Berne. It doesn’t get the love that the Heidelberg does, and we don’t catechize with it like we do with Westminster, but it starts strong. “The holy, Christian church, whose only head is Christ, is born of the Word of God, abides in the same, and does not listen to the voice of a stranger.” If only it were that simple. We are tempted by strange voices, and all of us have been malformed to speak in alien tongues. So we are called toward renewal and discipleship, to mortification and vivification. And that process of change is born and sustained by the word of God in Christ, just as much in its journey as at its inception. Jesus Christ speaks to his church today.
Second, Hebrews 13 tells us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” That’s a line that bears remarkable christological significance. Not only does he behave in a faithful manner, but he does so because he is consistent, unchanging in his very being. What metaphysical mystery! But there’s a very practical reason the author says that right here. “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:6, 7). We glean from the past because the same Christ rules over them as over us. We remember them and imitate their faith (note: not their every idiosyncrasy and surely not their sin or misjudgment) for the same Lord exists then and now. We learn from their teaching and their way of life (which is complete and thus can be proven) as their Master remains our redeemer too. We “run the race set before us” rather than trying to participate in some past lap, but we engage that present calling mindful of that “great cloud of witnesses,” “looking always and only to Jesus,” and “remembering even our unnamed leaders” from whom we can learn and by whom we ought to be challenged to hear and herald God afresh. Catholicity is all about Christology.
And here’s the thing. All of us need all of his fullness for every nook and cranny of our lives. We need to be changed and transformed, because we’re too often schooled in those voices of strangers. And, therefore, we do well to listen to the men and women who’ve prayed before us, to the preachers and the martyrs who’ve witnessed ahead of us, to the evangelists and the parents who’ve passed on the faith before we were a twinkle in mother church’s eye. Looking to the past isn’t sentimental and it’s sure not a pathway to avoiding criticism or to justifying the status quo. It resources and roots us but it also sets us up for the astonishment of God’s life-giving Word.
Christians in our circles have many theological riches and much to offer the wider kingdom, but we have also needed prompts from the wider catholic witness in recent years regarding what is even our single most important doctrine: the triune God. That many evangelical and even Presbyterian voices spoke against creedal theology (such as the eternal generation of the Son) or against biblical teaching (in endorsing eternal functional subordinationism) represents an area where we’ve been helped by returning to our roots and unlearning some of our eccentricities. We have contributions to offer the wider church, but we have needed to learn anew from the wider communion of saints too.
I can’t help but think that the two areas of greatest pastoral debate today – race and sex – will only be tended well if we pay attention both to our particular confessional tradition and to the wisdom of the wider church. We have a covenant theology that ought to help us confront social and moral challenges regarding race, but our own anthropology has needed to be returned to Scriptural teaching on the image of God too. We have a rich expansion on Augustinian teaching on the doctrine of sin in our confessions and catechisms and our grasp of sanctification as an aspect of inaugurated eschatology holds the promise of real blessing to the wider church, and yet we also need to glean from the ascetical and heavenly-minded emphases of our Christian heritage to be able to call men and women today toward the kind of self-denial needed in a hyper-sexualized culture. Together with all the saints, we can begin to pay attention to the whole counsel of God, living out the rule of faith and rule of love in these areas.
More broadly, the past season has been one wherein my mind has returned again and again to words from Ephesians 4. In describing the church, Paul speaks of those who are “no longer children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 4:14). Sadly, our culture witnesses that kind of herky-jerky reality, and lamentably I hear of congregations being tugged and pulled too. We want to avoid that immaturity and move on to wholeness. I’ve found nothing more life-giving than being returned to Scripture by the wise guidance of Augustine’s City of God, which has so much to teach us about topics from trustingly embracing our creatureliness toward challenging Christian nationalism, from dealing with earth-shattering crises toward what it means to hold one’s happiness always and only in heavenly hope. Even in dealing with fresh challenges like pandemics or critiques that Christianity is what’s wrong with our society, we can be both provoked and prepared by turning to one of the many others times that Christ sustained a witness in hard times.
Exemplified in these and others ways, a healthy PCA will be a denomination eager to share and receive gifts with the wider church of today and of yesteryear, of this and of other lands and peoples in Christ’s church. And it will be desirous of those gifts being shared only because it knows that it needs all of Christ for all of its life and ministry. We do face many challenges, but we have received many gifts and this promise of Christ’s ongoing presence. And Ephesians 4 leaves us not only with a goal but also with a means: “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (4:15-16). If the PCA lives and moves and has its mission as a church marked by that sort of Reformed catholic sensibility, then we too may herald “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (Eph 3:21).
Michael Allen is the John Dyer Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and Academic Dean at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando. He has written several books, including Ephesians in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series. He is a PCA teaching elder who also serves as theologian-in-residence at NewCity Orlando.
For assessment of catholicity, see also Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain, Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015).
“The Church, then, is called catholic because it is spread through the whole world, from one end of the earth to the other, and because it never stops teaching in all its fullness every doctrine that men ought to be brought to know: and that regarding things visible and invisible, in heaven and on earth. It is called catholic also because it brings into religious obedience every sort of men, rulers and ruled, learned and simple, and because it is a universal treatment and cure for every kind of sin whether perpetrated by soul or body, and possesses within it every form of virtue that is named, whether it expressed itself in deeds or words or in spiritual graces of every description” (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 186). Cyril’s words have perhaps been surpassed in recent years by the reference to belief “always, everywhere, and by everywhere” in Vincent of Lérins (which reemerged after a millennium long silence to play a major role in Tridentine theology in the sixteenth century), but Cyril’s depiction of catholicity is by far the more significant in the early church. Cyril’s definition is a more catholic or whole depiction of catholicity or wholeness (whereas Vincent’s sketch is a significantly narrower definition of catholicity): involving all aspects of the faith for all sorts of persons and in all places and times.
A host of examples of retrieval can be listed from the last hundred years. While many come from parts of the churchly world well beyond the PCA (from la nouvelle théologie in the Roman Catholic world to the evangelical Catholicism movement in Lutheranism), the modern hymns movement has been one largely Reformed gift to the wider world.
See John Webster, “Culture: The Shape of Theological Practice,” in The Culture of Theology (ed. Ivor J. Davidson and Alden McCray; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 60-61; and Michael Allen, “Retrieval and the Prophetic Imagination,” in The Fear of the Lord: Essays on Theological Method (London: T & T Clark, forthcoming 2022).Language of “roots” and “astonishment” comes from Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 41.
For introduction and guidance to these trinitarian issues, see now Scott R. Swain, The Trinity: An Introduction (Short Studies in Systematic Theology; Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), esp. chs. 4-6.
