Beyond Liberal and Conservative: A Third Way to be Christian?

If memory serves, it was about 20 years ago that I first began to ponder whether our current concepts of orthodoxy were sufficiently encompassing of the reality they were meant to convey. I was in seminary at the time, faced with choosing a topic for a thesis. As a Christian of Jewish origins, I was curious how within a few centuries the Church had been transformed from its beginnings as an entirely Jewish movement into an entirely Gentile institution – one which by the end of the fourth century had excommunicated the last of those whom they called Jewish Christian heretics. My curiosity lead to an amazing discovery. I was able to determine that at least one of groups that had been excommunicated – those who called themselves Nazarenes – had been as orthodox in their beliefs as those who had pronounced their excommunication. They were cast out not on the basis of belief, but practice: because they insisted that they be allowed to worship Jesus Christ in a Jewish fashion (not because they thought it would endure their salvation but simply to be imitators of Jesus [Y’shua], who himself worshipped in this way). In the end, they were given a choice, abandon their practice of celebrating Pasha (Easter) on the date of the Jewish Pesach (Passover), or face excommunication. The rest, as they say, is history: church history, to be exact.

It became clear to me at that time that neither orthodoxy based on belief, nor orthodoxy based on practice was sufficient. Unless the Church could discover some sort of middle way that both transcended and encompassed both belief-based orthodoxy and practice-based orthodoxy, it would be doomed to repeat this kind of tragic mistake throughout its history. But it took two decades of pastoring congregations before I was able to put this conceptual epiphany into practical words.

By that time, the Church would be entering what Phyllis Tickle would call the Great Emergence.

Commenting on her recently-published book by the same name – The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why – Phyllis offered a prognosis about Western institutional Christianity that soon became known as the “18-Month Window.” Western churches had about a year and a half in which to determine whether they were ready, willing, and able to take the risks and make the changes necessary to participate in what the Holy Spirit was bringing forth from the body of Christ. Failure to engage this window of opportunity would be a de facto decision in favor of irrelevance, stagnation and death.

For obvious reasons Tickle’s observation immediately caught my attention. In addition to my earlier research in early Church history, subsequent research on social impact of major paradigms shifts led me to believe that Christianity is accelerating rapidly into a vast religious realignment. Multiple paradigms that had guided the Church for centuries were collapsing: theological concepts of Christian unity and community grounded in certainty, uniformity, and the security of organizational preservation (i.e., religion). Once begun, such epochal shifts are like a great wave moving toward the shore. We don’t know exactly when it will break or exactly what it will look like when it does. Yet break it will. Ignoring it will not make it go away, nor will fighting it stop its advance. Our hope lies in readying ourselves for its arrival, so that when the moment arrives we will be position to ride it. To put it another way, the church as we know it is beyond repair, though not beyond re-paradigming.

Yet even re-paradigming is a task easier said than done, because it is possible only if we are prepared to allow our familiar paradigms of church to undergo death and resurrection, which is itself a turbulent experience at best. Yet there may be hidden blessings in the turbulence of such transitions. Even such reputedly change-accepting communities of practice like science react to paradigm shifts with anxiety and reactivity, forming into conservative and liberal camps to fight or advanced the perceived changes. Knowing this may allow us to recognize these tendencies in ourselves and understand them in each other. And we may be a little less fearful of the emerging paradigm, and those who oppose how we feel about it, if we recognize that such paradigms have never been exactly what conservatives have feared nor what liberals have longed for.

The question is: When the emerging is all said and done, what will have emerged? Is there an as yet undiscovered country – a place in which conservative and liberal Christians can co-exist as brothers and sisters in one family – one body of Christ? And if there is, how might we map out its boundaries? I believe there is such a place. But to find it we have sail beyond the shores of our familiar concepts of orthodoxy.

In the late 19th century, William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, when asked the difference between “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” replied, “Orthodoxy is my doxy—heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.”

The term “orthodox” has lost its clarity of meaning, having been appropriated by various groups to mean different things. The public tends to think of “orthodoxy” as the generally accepted way of thinking or acting. Eastern Christians use it as a term to refer to any member church of the branch of churches of which they are a part.

In Western Christianity, conservative Christians tend to use the term to describe a broad spectrum of doctrines that they consider to be the traditionally accepted views of the church, and to describe those who share their particular constellation of doctrines and teachings. Liberal Christians generally shy away from using the term to describe themselves, yet the vast majority believes their theology to be within the borders of the Nicene Creed and certainly not heretical. To (over)simplify, the conservative definition of orthodoxy would be “right doctrine,” while the liberal definition of orthodoxy would be “right action.” For the sake of discussion – and to treat them with equal respect – let’s call the conservative approach Doctrinal-Propositional Orthodoxy (or Orthoproxy) and the liberal approach call Ethical-Practical Orthodoxy (or Orthopraxy). Yet the ancient and literal definition of orthodoxy was actually “right praise” or less literally, “appropriate praise in response to God.” And I believe that herein lies the key to unlocking the emerging paradigm, one which I have called Incarnational-Relational Orthodoxy (or Paradoxy).

There are many ways in which we could compare these approaches (which I have described in greater detail in my new book, Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us and Them). But given the limited space of a blog post, suffice it to say that the difference lies in the last three words of the title. In creating Christian community, neither Orthoproxy nor Orthopraxy can avoid creating an “Us” and a “Them,” because neither can conceive of Christian unity without some kind of uniformity. Orthoproxy seeks unity in uniformity of doctrine. Orthopraxy seeks unity in uniformity of practice.

To put it in logical, mathematical terms, community in both Orthoproxy and Orthopraxy is defined as a “bounded set.” Both describe an outer boundary of U.S., outside of which lies THEM. The difference between the two lies in what constitutes the boundary. Orthoproxy locates the boundary in common doctrine; Orthopraxy in common practice. But Paradoxy defines community in a way that doesn’t depend on boundaries, and so doesn’t require an US and a THEM. As a “centered set,” it finds its unity in the extent to which the people which make up the set are oriented with respect to that which (or rather he who) lies at the center of the set – Jesus Christ – and the extent to which they are in relationship with the One at the center.

This is not to say that Orthoproxy and Orthopraxy do not have Christ at the center, or that communities practicing Paradoxy can totally avoid the human (and fallen) tendency toward thinking in terms of boundaries. It is to say that for communities practicing Incarnational Orthodoxy – or Paradoxy – it is relationship with the incarnate Center is considered the primary source of unity.

Paradoxy comes from the Greek word paradoxos, a near-literal translation of which would be “things which, placed in relationship to each other, inspire awe and praise.” Paradoxy, then, represents an approach to orthodoxy that comes closer to the literal meaning of the word than either the conservative or liberal approach. It means embracing and celebrating relationship with Jesus Christ, realizing and accepting that the incarnate Truth will always be greater than we can understand or imagine. It is centered on being in right relationship with Christ and celebrating, embracing, and living into the power of the paradoxical reality of the Incarnation and all its implications.

It is a tricky business exploring the boundaries of an emerging paradigm. In large part, the difficulty arises from the fact that we are still operating within the boundaries of the prevailing paradigms which, while they are failing, still force us to look through mental spectacles whose lenses cannot focus outside their rims. It is also complicated by the fact that we are trying to see into our own future, and the future of people and institution we hold dear. As Master Yoda said with such great wisdom in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, “Hard it is to see the future…so much emotion there is.”

Yet look we must. As if our very existence depended upon it…