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Eucharistic Discipline (Radner) |
By Ephraim Radner (Editors' Note: The Rev. Canon Dr. Ephraim Radner is Rector of the Church of Ascension, Colorado. He is author of The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). "The Challenge of Eucharistic Discipline" is posted here with his kind permission.) If I voice a concern over increasing worries among conservative Episcopalians and Anglicans with respect to the sharing of the eucharist with liberal bishops and church members, it is not because I believe the worries themselves are irrelevant. They are deeply pertinent, at a time when the very meaning and substance of the Christian faith has been assaulted and torn asunder within the body of our church, and when the godly demand to maintain clear commitments to the Gospel is being inevitably framed in terms of alternative congregational and episcopal subjections. With whom are we "one"? What does "oneness in Christ" mean anymore? But I do have a concern that this worry over sharing the eucharist, however inescapable, should become the primary vessel of our ecclesial decisions over the Communion's teaching and the authority of Scripture. For it is a vessel too weak to carry such a weighty load; the templates we erect ahead of time to determine the standards for communion will collapse, I fear, even before we sort out the proper bases for our common life. At that point, the purpose of eucharistic discipline will slip from our hands, and once cast adrift perhaps sink altogether. Much has been made of the early Church's understanding of the eucharist as a sign and embodiment of union in the true faith; and therefore of the eucharist as the proper place where distancing from error be expressed, through the discipline of excommunication. Applied to the present moment, the precedents of past tradition, we are told, demand the faithful to withdraw from eucharistic fellowship with bishops who voted in favor of consent to Gene Robinson's episcopal election and/or other related resolutions at General Convention, as well as to separate oneself from eucharistic fellowship with those who remain in communion with unfaithful bishops and their supporters. The most prominent scholarly authority cited for this logic is Werner Elert, a German Lutheran theologian whose book Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries, originally appearing in German in the 1950's (in English in the 1960's), was recently reissued in paperback. It is worth taking a moment to consider the character of Elert's outlook, not only in the context of his own concerns, but of the subject matter his work is meant to illuminate. In the first place, Elert was a strong supporter of the Nazis. This fact is not irrelevant to his later writing, though it is fair to point out that the connections can only be inferred. In the midst of National Socialism's rise -- 1933 -- he and other academic theologians defended, on the one hand, the theoretical purging of the German church of Jewish converts, and certainly from German positions of power, of Jews themselves. Elert and Althaus, for instance, were the authors of the infamous "Erlangen Report" that defended, on purportedly theological grounds, the "Aryan clause" as applied to the church. The issue at hand, in Elert's eyes, was the propriety of maintaining the "German" volkisch character of Christianity in that nation, something he believed to be divinely authorized and morally demanded in the face of corrupting Jewish immorality, that had infected Germany like a contagion (Catholics were not far behind in their poisonous potential). On the other hand, Elert was also articulate and vocal in publicly opposing the theological (and political) bases of the Confessional Church movement, supported by Barth and Niemöller. He did so, in part, based on his commitment to a clear and overriding Lutheran confessionalism, that he believed to be subverted by the almost open-ended Scripturalism of people like Barth. It was a view that led him explicitly to see Hitler as God's servant to be obeyed, according to his own sense of Lutheran teaching on the "orders of creation". (Those interested in these matters, including the intellectual environment at Erlangen in which Elert was so active, can consult the book by James Stayer [Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Faculties and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917-1933] and the broader picture of theology "under Hitler" by Robert Ericksen [Theologians Under Hitler].) I realize that we need to be careful in singling out someone like Elert. There were few heroes among German theologians of his generation; and those who were (like Niemöller himself) almost all had dark sides to their Christian commitments (see Theodore Hamover's work on German "resistance"). This should alert all who see themselves in the role of upholders of truth and resisters of error. Nonetheless, Elert's concern with "purity" of race, of confession, and of ecclesial structures cannot simply be broken into disengaged parts, as if theological perception takes place in a realm unconnected to moral apprehension; these parts form a unity of motive in his thinking that was long-standing and consistent. And while his book on eucharistic fellowship comes out of a particular confessional Lutheran context, it is difficult to believe that at least a major part of its informing interest is not entangled with the elements of his deeply-rooted concerns over integralist German Christianity. I point this out with real concern: in driving the present debate within Anglicanism so quickly, and on such bases as Elert's arguments, to the matter of eucharistic fellowship, conservative Anglicans and Christians struggling with maintaining clear teaching over matters of sexual behavior and sexuality will both be misunderstood and themselves may be caught in currents that deform their own thinking and betray their own motives into less welcome hands. We cannot avoid the responsibility of holding our theology accountable to the failures of past precedents, Elert's dismally included. Eucharistic Discipline - pg. 2 | |
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