League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on October 4, 2009

This is one of a series of posts that will interact with the new book by John Franke, Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth. John Franke is The Lester and Kay Clemens Professor of Missional Theology at Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA. He is the author of several previous books, including Beyond Foundationalism (with Stanley Grenz) and The Character of Theology.

Chapter 3: The Historic Christian Faith?
In this chapter, Franke continues pondering the implications of the great diversity we find in the “historic Christian faith.” He recounts that as a child he was led to affirm Protestant evangelicalism because it was committed to both the Bible and the “historic Christian faith.” However, once he began to study that “historic faith,” he began to think that that category was not as helpful as a unifying device as his early teachers wanted him to believe.

Now at this point some of my readers may be ready to give up on the book, protesting that Franke seems to be chiefly motivated by factors external to the Bible. If evangelical Protestant theology has one overriding dictum, it would probably be “all theology must be derived from and able to be wholly explained by and within the Bible.” Indeed, one of the first comments I received on my first post about Manifold Witness was from someone demanding to see Franke’s “exegetical support” for his plurality of truth thesis.

I trust that support will be forthcoming. However much Franke’s critics fear he has been taken captive by postmodernism or the Emergent Church crowd, Franke remains heart and soul an evangelical Protestant theologian. I trust that he would never develop a theological approach that he did not think he could support biblically. Indeed, one of the upcoming chapters is titled “Scripture as Manifold Witness.” (I’m writing these posts as I read through the book rather than after having completed it. These are my “as it happens” reactions to the book.)

More to the point, though, I have come to strongly disagree with the knee-jerk reaction I observe among so many conservative evangelicals against admitting any extra-biblical evidence–whether from history, science, sociology, psychology, etc.–into the theological discussion. I first encountered this sort of aversion in the debates over Peter Enns’s book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Along with a number of my friends, I was an up close observer of such debates as a student at the seminary where Enns lost his position over the issues. Enns raised again and again a question which (in my opinion) never received a satisfactory answer (and was more often than not just completely ignored): Certain extra-biblical phenomena are there and well-attested; what do we do with them? Ignoring said phenomena with some variation of the old “the Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it” fideism just no longer cut if for those of us who felt that emperor was walking around naked in public.

I remember well a panel discussion over Enns’s book at a national meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. One of the panelists (curiously enough, a colleague from Enns’s own seminary) attacked the thesis of Enns’s book on the basis of its supposed incompatibility with the historic confession upon which their commons seminary was founded. In his response, Enns stood up, raised one outstretched hand and said, “Genesis 1-3.” Holding out the other hand he said, “Enuma Elish.” Then he looked at his colleague and said simply, “Go.” Over the next three years of debate at the seminary, I waited for a real response from Enns’s critics to that challenge. I’m still waiting.

So while Franke seems to promise in Manifold Witness that by the end of the book he will have developed his thesis biblically, he is choosing to formulate a full-orbed theology that takes into account general as well as special revelation. It is simply undeniable that what we call “the historic Christian faith” is in reality “an incredibly diverse set of assumptions, conversations, and disputes that looks like anything but a unified set of beliefs” (p. 22).

To emphasize his point, Franke summarizes a thought experiment by missiologist Andrew Walls. Picture yourself as a “Professor of Comparative Inter-Planetary Religions” from outer space visiting Earth every few centuries to examine the Christian church. What would he file under “historic Christian church”? The very Jewish-looking first century church in Jerusalem? The church of the  very gentile and philosophically-oriented “church fathers” of the Council of Nicea? The aesthetically- and ascetically-oriented monk-dominated church of early Medieval Ireland? The aggressively missionary evangelical church of London in the mid-19th century? The signs-and-miracles-driven church of Nigeria in the 21st century?

Despite the apparent disparity of particular expressions of Christianity throughout time and across geography, Walls believes there are two categories which do indeed tie together a historic Christian church: “historical connection” and “essential continuity.” Historical connection traces the way that each of the expressions mentioned above grew out of and continued influences from the expressions that came before it. They were not spontaneously generated. The essential continuity of the historic church is that in all its diversity of expression, each of these parts of the historic church has in common “one theme which is as unvarying as the language which expresses it is various; that the person of Jesus called the Christ has ultimate significance” (p. 25).

So if the larger church throughout history has historical connection and essential continuity, is there something inherent within Christian faith that accounts for the incredible amount of diversity in expression? Franke believes there is. Still following Walls, Franke discusses what he calls Christianity’s “indiginization principle” and its “transformation principle.” The indiginization principle, briefly stated, draws an analogy to the gospel principle that, in Christ, all are welcomed to reconciliation with God “just as they are.” In similar fashion, Franke says, God welcomes and accommodates to cultures, times and places (cf. Acts 15 Jerusalem Council).

The transformation principle works in a certain tension with the indiginization principle: while God accepts us (and cultures) where we are, he doesn’t leave us (or cultures) where we were. While God in Christ affirms and accommodates to every culture in planting the church therein, once planted the church will find many ways in which “faithfulness to Christ” often puts them “out of step with [their] culture” (p.27). “These principles point to both the complexity and plurality of the  faith as it has been expressed throughout the history of the Christian tradition nad to the calling to take responsibility for this plurality in bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ” (p. 28).

Franke’s concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full:

The ongoing engagement of the gospel with the cultures of the world means that the work of theology is never completed. It results in an ongoing and irreducible plurality that is reflective of the missional nature of the Christian community to take the good news of the love of God proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth and embody it among all peoples and situations for the good of the world. This is the very nature and essence of the historic Christian faith.