A Confessional Church in a Pluralistic World
Playing Ball on a Field Without Boundaries
by James R. Edwards
Perhaps the most fundamental issue before American Christianity—both liberal and conservative—is what it means to be a confessional church in a pluralistic world. Christianity is by nature confessional. American democracy is by necessity pluralistic. The Church—at least, the Church militant—never exists apart from a cultural context. The longstanding alliance between Protestantism and American democracy makes the Church particularly vulnerable to a confusion of creed and context, of confessional status and pluralistic environment. Our quandary over the confession by which we live and the pluralistic culture in which we live is sometimes like trying to play football on a field without sidelines and end zones.
Pluralism: From a Political Means to an Ideological End
Pluralism, as I use it here, might be defined as a commitment to diversity that serves the political goal of inclusiveness and human rights, as well as the technological goal of specialization, with an attendant increase in individualization and privatization. Its purpose is expressed in a motto of much currency in America, E Pluribus Unum, unity from diversity. That may not be the way pluralism always works, but that seems to be the way it is supposed to work. Pluralism of the above stripe has also been adopted by mainline denominations as a way of maintaining unity within increasingly divergent memberships.
The postwar years have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of pluralism in American society. Pluralism has come of age, graduating from its subservience to the goals of human rights and technological specialization to an end in itself. This change has not left the Church unaffected. The apotheosis of subservient pluralism to total pluralism has resulted in a collage of quasi-values promoted by assertion and unchallenged by reason or faith. If total relativism asserts that nothing is true, total pluralism asserts that all things are equally true. To say that all things are true is, of course, to say that nothing is true, and even reasonable efforts to critique or discriminate between competing claims are labeled as elitist, patriarchal, or oppressive. If total relativism leads to radical skepticism, total pluralism leads to anomie, a state of disorientation or confusion in which normative standards and ultimate truths either become forbidden or meaningless.
The state of disorientation or confusion, of course, tends to be an impermanent state. Churches, like political entities and social organizations, are no more tolerant of anomie than is nature of a vacuum. Factionalism results, and since there can be no truth by which to judge one faction better than another, the rule of the smoking gun takes over: control falls to the groups that know how to amass and control the means of power.
Pluralism as a Historical Challenge to the Church
How accurately the foregoing describes the current state of affairs each reader must judge, but from a historical perspective it cannot be questioned that the current interface with pluralism is nothing new. In one form or another, for better or worse, pluralism has influenced the Church throughout its history. We may be experiencing it in fuller force today, but the Church has never existed (nor will it ever exist) apart from a social, political, and ideological context that in varying degrees poses a challenge to its existence and proclamation. I mention but three examples.
The Early Church: A Clarion Gospel in a Disintegrating World
The world into which Christianity was born was in many respects a world akin to ours. In classical Greek the word cosmos meant “order” or “discipline” or “decorum”—in all things from households to the universe. Human life was intended as “a cosmos in miniature,” i.e., an ordered microcosm within an ordered macrocosm. Plato’s world was one in which eternal forms or ideals revealed the meaning of ultimate values, including justice, goodness, beauty, and truth. The epitome of the ordered universe was the polis, the city-state where life (for the upper class at least) attained its optimum expression.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
on How Bodily Resurrection Informs Social Justice by W. Ross Blackburn
18.2—March 2005
On Conservatism as Vexation, Vanity & Near Impossibility by Graeme Hunter
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
