Against Sociology

In his stimulating book Liturgical Theology, Simon Chan argues that a crucial weakness of Protestant and evangelical theology is that it stops the gospel story with the ascension, and doesn't see that Pentecost and the church are integral to the evangel (as Jesus says in Luke 24 - the Old Testament is not only about the Christ, but about the preaching of repetance to all nations; Acts too recapitulates Israel's history).

Without a pneumatologically driven ecclesiology, Chan says, Protestantism allows sociology to take over:

"If the Spirit is linked to the church in any way, it is to the invisible church, such as in the Spirit's bringing spiritual rebirth to individuals. The visible church is largely defined sociologically, while the 'real' church cannot be identified with anything visible. Such an ecclesiology could only be described as docetic."

If this is true of Protestantism in general, it's been true of certain brands of Reformed theology in spades, for which membership in the visible church is only "external" or "legal" membership in the covenant (that is, purely "sociological"). For this kind of Reformed theology, the Spirit is at work only in that circle within the circle of the church, that invisible circle that circumscribes those who are truly in the real church. He is not operative in the visible church as such.

Chan's proposal is no minor adjustment. Far from it. It messes with the foundations of Western ecclesiology going back far beyond the Reformation, to the time when ecclesiology first began to be framed in terms drawn from Roman law. And it particularly messes with modern secularism's belief that the church might be a "merely social" society, the secular belief that the church's supernatural reality is confined to a private sphere and never permitted to assume public institutional form, the secular belief that a pneumatological society is impossible.

This is another perspective on the Federal Vision: It stands against sociology - more precisely, it stands against any sociology that claims to be anything other than pneumatology and ecclesiology (and stands equally, it must be said, against any pneumatology and ecclesiology that doesn't simultaneously claim to be a sociology).

The Federal Vision is an effort to elaborate the third article of the Nicene Creed.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, June 18, 2007 at 03:19 PM

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