Notes on the Sect System
S. M. Hutchens on the Unchristian Maneuvers of the Sectarian Mind
The New Testament canon, arising as a mysterious unity from the experience of the primitive Church, describes its faith with a depth and complexity that defies all attempts at isolation of the germinal religious elements upon which every sect is founded, defined as the sect is by its refusal to recognize in the whole an antidote to the dominance of its elect parts.
The birth of every sect identifying itself as Christian is attended by an error or cluster of errors that can be identified by anyone with an attentive student's knowledge of Scripture. It is the internal dynamic of the sect that binds its adherents and sustains its doctrine, along with the interpretational imperative its life requires, not the Scriptures themselves, which make it easy to avoid sectarian preoccupations by providing the teachings that contradict them.
The eye blinded by these "preoccupations," as J. W. Nevin observed, claims to be biblical, evangelical, catholic, and orthodox, in complete accord with the true teaching of Jesus and the unadulterated traditions of the ancient Church—or at least with the religion of Jesus. It typically sets great stock on the authority of the Bible, to which it believes it has custody and final interpretational access. Attention to the teachings of the sect, however, will show the difficulty it has with strains of biblical thought inimical to its own, and with the passages where they are most clearly present as apostolic doctrine.
No Longer Christian
By this definition we make no difference between liberal and conservative sects, but the first is often consequent to the latter, since one of the easiest ways to eliminate scriptural difficulties is to treat the Bible as unscriptural—something that can be done when the inevitable decline of moral stringency and eschatological seriousness puts this possibility in the air of the conservative sect. The "assured results of modern scholarship" are incrementally imposed on the original convictions of somnolent congregations, and the sect's inherited problems with the Bible disappear. Its distinctive doctrines and practices, and the preaching and teaching of its founders, now generally forgotten, can be comfortably reduced, unread, to an attitude of general benevolence, with a mythical Jesus as chief exemplar.
In that event, the liberal church no longer subjects its members to the impossible task of reconciling its traditional beliefs with Scripture and tradition, but it is no longer Christian either, for the Christ it now claims to honor never existed except in the minds of its apostate teachers.
Among the sect's lower echelons, the teachings that once energized the church by making it different from and superior to the rest, providing its evangelistic imperative, its distinctive manner of life and worship, and the identity of its members as over against other Christians, are now gone. So far as this was, for them, Christianity, they, with their scholars, are now released from it, and may go where they will, which is very often not to church. Why, indeed, bother, unless perhaps it's a place to meet your friends—but there are places to do this that don't moralize at you and don't need nearly as much money. So the liberalized churches, shorn of any good reason to bother with the burden of being Christian at all, shrink and die.
Tortuous Denials
The harder, but more immediately rewarding road of sect preservation is the attempt to reconcile its actual beliefs with the Bible, which, as obnoxious as it may be, is difficult to escape in a church environment. The scholars' denial of the meaning or authority of the difficult passages is predictably tortuous, and they, if they do not wish to lose their places of honor, can be relied upon to do the torturing with all the skill of superior intelligence.
One of the most common methods is to claim that the original grammar of the Bible means something other than the vernacular translations seem to indicate. This serves the invaluable quadruple purpose of denying the evident, discouraging interference by the uncredentialed, enhancing the authority of the sect's magisterium as its preceptors ne plus ultra, and reducing all contrary opinions to the status of mere argumentation.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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