Notes on Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church (1)

Chapter 1: Scripture and the Divided Church

The first thing a non-theologian ought to know before getting into Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West is the definition of “pneumatology.” A pneumatology is something like a theory of the action of the Holy Spirit. That being said, I'll do my best to use common language, even though there's no avoiding "pneumatology" when the book under discussion uses that word in its subtitle.

One of the points of agreement for ecumenically inclined mainline Christians on the one hand and the sort of conservative Christians who rally around "mere Christianity" on the other is the notion that division in the church is to be lamented. Yet we often follow that acknowledgment with an affirmation of one of the many doctrines that sets our particular tradition apart from others. What Ephraim Radner is doing in this book is trying to linger on the problem of disunity. What does it mean to lament our division?

Looking back to the Protestant Reformation, we see that Catholics and Protestants rarely hesitated to label each other's churches false. For example, my edition of the Westminster Confession says: “In no sense can the Pope of Rome be the head of [the church]. Rather, he is that Antichrist, the man of sin, and son of damnation, who glorifies himself as opposed to Christ and everything related to God.” But, for all sorts of reasons, we're not so quick to do this anymore. Many theologically serious evangelical Protestants find comfort in the work of unmistakeably Catholic writers. The mainline ecumenical movement was built on the recognition of saving faith among parties to the dialogue.

So many of us are now in conflict with Reformation-era Catholic or Protestant theology. Reformation Protestants argued that the Holy Spirit acts in the hearts and minds of individual believers as they read scripture; Catholics of the time claimed that the Holy Spirit only comes to individuals through their involvement in the true community of the Church. If we hold to either view of the Holy Spirit, one party must be illegitimate. Radner asks, “If the Spirit works preeminently neither to guide our hearing of Scripture nor to forge the common space for that hearing, what are we to say about the Spirit at all in its relation to Scripture and the Church?” (23)

The ecumenical movement, in Radner's telling, saw this difficulty and tried to get around it, but the results were disheartening. “[T]he ecumenical path for resolving the post-Reformation pneumatological contradiction was to redefine the Holy Spirit's office into that of mediating visible disunity into an invisible unity. … Incoherence … becomes itself a pneumatic virtue” (25). It's a harsh verdict, and Radner offers his alternative.

Turning to Scripture, one finds that the New Testament is not helpful in this particular matter: “How one understands the Church as itself a divided entity is not a topic the New Testament openly broaches” (34). And so we look to the Old Testament, and see the “figure” of Israel divided into two kingdoms just after Solomon's death. The key teaching point is that “partitioned Israel is ‘abandoned’ Israel; and this Israel, separated among its members, is separated too from the Holy Spirit” (37). This is the frightening thesis of Radner's book: in our division, we as Christians are in a position of disobedience, and we, like divided Israel, lack the spiritual fullness that marked an earlier time. Is it possible that our disagreements are so persistent precisely because of the condition of our division?

We already have resources for understanding what Radner means by “abandonment.” Both Protestants and Catholics have thought a great deal about how spiritual deadness functions in the individual life; what is needed now is to consider whether this deadness has a communal analogue. Radner considers St. John of the Cross's mystical writing as well as Puritan perspectives on spiritual “aridity.” Radner suggests that to explore how a negative condition can work to our betterment and God's glory, we should recall Pauline accounts of the “negative function” of the law as described in Romans and 2 Corinthians. Though spiritual deadness isn't discussed in this way, he thinks we can draw the analogy.

What's especially interesting is the model Radner ends up recommending as an alternative to division. Without endorsing any of their doctrinal claims, he points to the Jansenists, who would allow themselves only (as Pierre Nicole put it) a “simple and negative separation, which consists in the refusal of certain acts of community, without however involving positive acts of separation against the community from which one separates” (47). This might have been Luther's original intention; what might have happened had he stuck to it?

All of this would be very depressing if Radner hoped for some institutional process to overcome division. But, observing how divided Israel hoped for the coming Messiah, we must put our hope elsewhere. “Bodies,” Radner says, “especially bodies laid out with the pallor of insensibility, bodies of the dead, await not medical specialists, but Creators” (56).

I don't know if I'm able to endorse Radner's argument here, but I'll be reading with interest and posting my notes from future chapters as I get through them.