Communion through the Confession of Christ Crucified: On Inclusive Orthodoxy

A response to Ed Watson

A month ago, Yale PhD student Ed Watson published a piece for God Here & Now, the Princeton Barth Center’s Substack, called “The Fissures of Inclusive Orthodoxy.” In the piece, Watson evinces sympathy with the fundamental claim of what is loosely called ‘inclusive orthodoxy’: the claim that is possible to hold the Creeds and be rooted, broadly speaking, in the Christian theological tradition while also being supportive of, say, the ordination of women, the affirmation of trans people, or the marriage of two people of the same gender. Watson describes this in terms of holding doctrinal faith on one hand and supporting critical thought and social justice on the other. But he also sharply criticizes any deployment of inclusive orthodoxy that would seek to determine the limits of proper Christian belief, that would argue not only that credal belief is possible but that it should be normative for Christians today. Such a deployment, in Watson’s construal, would foreclose the sort of communion into which Christianity should invite us.

As we begin the Easter season of rejoicing in (and thinking about) the resurrection of Christ – a doctrine which has been at the heart of many of the online debates around inclusive orthodoxy that Watson references – I want to reflect a little bit on Watson’s piece. I think there are some things it does very well, and I’ll begin by talking about them. But these achievements notwithstanding, I am strongly unconvinced by Watson’s argument.

Before we get to the critique, I want to first highlight my significant areas of agreement with Watson. Both of us hold that Christ really did rise bodily from the dead. And we also hold that the affirmation of traditional commitments about God or Christ need not prevent the church from - and may even lead the church to - ordaining women or conducting same-gender marriages or affirming trans people. That is, it seems as though we both hold the material content associated with ‘inclusive orthodoxy,’ even if we disagree about how that content should function in the life of the church.

Further, in his piece, Watson introduces a distinction I think is helpful between what he calls the “sociological function” and “theological content” of orthodoxy, and rightly calls for the centrality of the latter. In short, as Watson construes it, orthodoxy’s sociological function is its use to norm belief for a Christian community. If someone says, “true Christianity requires confessing Christ’s bodily resurrection,” this is the sociological function at work. Understood this way, orthodoxy is the Christian version of a generic feature of social life: that particular groups or communities tend to have boundaries of one form or another. But, Watson says, we can also think about orthodoxy in terms of its theological content, orthodoxy “as primarily connoting the theological content of those beliefs which have emerged from credal and conciliar reflection.” In this sense, orthodoxy refers to historic Christian claims about Jesus, the Trinity, creation, atonement, or salvation. It is not the Christian version of a generic fact of human social life; it is the content of classical Christian belief.

I think Watson is right to argue that of these two, the theological content must always be primary, that what is most important about Christian orthodoxy is what it teaches us about God, Christ, humanity, and salvation – not its use to set boundaries. Such boundary-setting may be necessary (I think it is!), but it is secondary to and entirely dependent upon orthodoxy’s articulation of the saving work of the triune God in Christ Jesus. Luther draws upon Isaiah to talk about God’s ‘proper’ and ‘alien’ work or way of relating to us: God’s alien relation to us is in the condemnation of sin via the Law; God’s proper relation to us is his free acceptance of us in the Gospel. Both, for Luther, truly are God’s words to us – but the Gospel more perfectly represents the fullness of who God is. In much the same way, we might say that orthodoxy’s proclamation of what Barth calls the “strange new world of the Bible,” inviting us to receive and believe the good news of God in Jesus Christ, is its proper work; its use to exclude those who do not receive and believe those good news from certain forms of participation in Christian community, then, might be construed as its alien work. If what is most exciting about Christian orthodoxy is that it enables us to police the boundaries of our community – rather than its actual theological content – something has clearly gone awry! I’m not convinced that this is much of a risk in the contemporary mainline at present, but where it exists it is a genuine problem. Thus far Watson and I are in agreement.

But in the end, I don’t think that Watson is just expressing a concern about the danger of finding orthodoxy more exciting for its potential to determine who’s in and who’s out than for its actual substantive theological content. No: he goes significantly further. He is not just arguing that orthodoxy’s sociological function is derivative of and in some sense less important than its theological content. Rather – if I’m reading him right – he is arguing that it is both “unworkable” and “undesirable” to argue that “that Christians should hold these [orthodox] doctrines in these [orthodox] ways.” He seems to be arguing for a view of orthodoxy solely as non-normative theological content, and for rejecting any sociological function of orthodoxy, ‘inclusive’ or otherwise, in norming the life of Christian communities. For the use of orthodoxy as a boundary-setting sociological function, Watson thinks, inhibits the possibility of genuine communion among Christians with different sorts of commitments and places the ‘orthodox’ in the position of “claiming power…over my neighbor’s freedom” in relating to God.

Unfortunately, I think this view is wrong. It is evidently motivated by a laudable desire to welcome people abundantly into the Christian life and an equally laudable suspicion about the way the libido dominandi can covertly motivate even pious thoughts and desires. But I think it is wrong all the same, suffering from a deficient account of the church which fails to reckon both with the details of church life and the Scriptural treatment of the church as a community necessarily normed by the proclamation of the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection for us.

As far as I can tell, the question of the Christian church as visible institution is handled in one of two ways in this piece. Particularly in the discussion of the sociological function of orthodoxy, the church is treated as another species of the genus ‘social group’; the norming operation of orthodoxy’s sociological function is treated as an example of the general tendency of any social group to define boundaries or core commitments. Now, I don’t think there is anything wrong with considering the church in such terms. After all, I’m rather fond of comparing the church to a labor union in querying our apparent unwillingness to enforce any sort of doctrinal standards upon our leadership, arguing that a union would never permit a union president to give a speech that seemed agnostic on whether unions were good or not. Particularly at the end, the church is discussed in a more explicitly theological vein. But crucially, it is still discussed very abstractly, as concerned with a sort of general spiritual or theological communion with others. I think that this very abstract treatment of the church as community has real problems for Watson’s argument. As I will argue, it occludes attention to the practical stakes of disputes over the nature of Christian orthodoxy and avoids a Scripturally rooted account of Christian community.

To begin with the practical: left unsaid in Watson’s piece is that the (largely online) disputes over the boundaries of orthodoxy within mainline denominations are primarily about clergy and the church’s public teaching. That is to say, what is at stake in these debates is not so much what a given layperson must believe to be a part of a Christian community as what the public preaching that structures the life of that community should be. After all, Christian communities are typically not perfectly horizontal ones (yes, there are a few Christian or Christian-ish groups without clergy, but they are a minority). Churches have clergy who are set aside to preach and teach, to proclaim the Gospel from the pulpit, to form their people in the Christian faith. It is a position of authority and trust which in most Christian churches – certainly in my own Episcopal Church – is grounded in the clergyperson’s oath to preach and teach the doctrine of that church, doctrine grounded in divine revelation. The minister is particularly constrained in a way that the laity are not (note, for example, that in historic Anglicanism it was the clergy alone who formally subscribed to the Articles of Religion; for the laity it was enough not to publicly disparage them). And this is a good thing, because ministers’ sermons function very differently than, say, laypeople’s expression of their opinions. The minister’s role means that they do articulate a normative vision of Christianity for their people (even if that vision is a rejection of norms or boundaries for Christian belonging). I don’t think it’s possible not to do so! And this is why it is the character of the church’s public proclamation that has been particularly at issue for those (myself among them) who believe that the creeds should norm our churches’ teaching and preaching.

Put another way, the question of “is it a problem if any given Christian does not confess the resurrection?” is an important one. And, for what it’s worth, it is one to which I would answer “yes.” If, for example, someone under my spiritual care were to tell me that they had a confident and long-settled belief that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God but merely a good man, I would counsel them to absent themselves from the Lord’s Supper because they are not rightly discerning the Lord’s body). But the predominant use of orthodoxy-as-sociological-function which I see in inclusive orthodoxy discourse is aimed less at that question and more at the question of “is it a problem if clergy publicly reject the beliefs they swore to uphold?” I am glad that when Watson did not believe in Christ’s bodily resurrection, he was welcomed into Christian community and evidently eventually found himself welcomed into a more credal faith. And certainly I would not argue that those struggling with faith or even those who are pretty sure they disbelieve but desire to be part of a visible church community should have the door barred to them (even if disbelief might affect how they engaged with a given community). But this isn’t really the issue at hand. Rather, the issue at hand is about clergy, who are not members of a given religious community among others but are tasked with leading it. A clergyperson asserting from the pulpit that the resurrection is just a nice story that inspires us to good works is doing something very different than a layperson offering it as their opinion. While it is a problem in both cases, it is a different sort of problem in each, and Watson’s flat, abstract portrayal of Christian community misses that fact.

But I think there is a deeper and more properly theological ecclesiological problem, which connects to another surprising feature of this text: its apparent neglect of Scripture (there are no Scriptural references). The problem is this: while Watson’s implicit ecclesiology of the church as communion across difference (including different beliefs about the person and work of Christ) echoes some key Scriptural themes, it misses that Scripture in its account of the church unites communion with confession: the church is those people brought into communion with each other and with God by their attending to the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen.

For one example of this, I’ve been spending some time with 1 John 1 this week, as it is coming up this Sunday in the RCL. And I think the opening verses of 1 John 1 show very well that Christianity aims at communion (between people and God and among people) – and that this communion is in fact normed in a quite determinate set of beliefs about Jesus. In the beginning of the letter, John declares that his letter is the proclamation of “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). The point of this proclamation, John goes on, is “so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). That is to say, the apostolic proclamation is for the purpose of communion – and communion is grounded on the apostolic proclamation! You simply cannot have the one without the other.

This is why the New Testament as a whole is very willing to utilize what Watson calls the “sociological function” of theological claims about God and Christ. 1 John 4, for example, argues that true and false spirits can be distinguished from each other by whether or not they confess that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” 2 John argues that those who reject that Jesus came in the flesh ought not even be received into one’s home! Paul’s entire letter to the Galatians is spurred because of his concern that those who argue that circumcision or Torah-observance is necessary for Christian salvation are overthrowing the Gospel of Christ. In other letters, too, he expresses concern that people are being seduced by false gospels rather than real ones. One sees similar themes in the Gospels. In John’s Gospel, say, Christ argues that believing in him is the work that God commands – and is unembarrassed about preaching difficult things that lead to a diminishment in his number of followers (see John 6). Evidently some sort of vague attachment or association with his person is insufficient. Small surprise then that the question “Who do you say that I am?” is a key one that Jesus poses to his disciples!   

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, I just don’t think that Jesus or his apostles seemed particularly concerned with “a desire to belong with others in spaces of spiritual communion, even apart from assent to what have been normative Christian beliefs.” Yes, Jesus fed and healed abundantly and scandalously – but following him, entering into a more permanent communion with him and those gathered around him, required more. It is certainly true that Christianity seeks to facilitate communion, not just between individuals and their God but between people. But this communion – both vertical and horizontal – is inextricable from the confession that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification, as Paul puts it.

And this is why the view that, say, the resurrection is something we can agree to disagree about is so dangerous – and why the promise of inclusive orthodoxy is so beautiful. For the first part, the danger, we (and especially those of us charged with preaching and teaching) risk giving people pottage for their birthright if instead of seeking to persuade the curious, uncommitted, and doubting to see the truth of the confession that leads to communion, we assure them that they are fine just as they are. We do not need to assert definitively that God cannot or will not save those who believe wrongly to say that God wishes us to believe true things about him, or that such right belief is connected with communion with God. It is our duty and our joy to invite people – gently and lovingly and persuasively! – to, as John Updike’s Easter poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” puts it, “walk through the door.” We get to invite people to believe that God really is who he says he is, that his promises are true.

The promise of inclusive orthodoxy, then, is not merely that we can welcome all sorts of people into a community in some way identified with the person or teachings of Jesus. Nor is it found in the assertion that a credal-but-LGBTQ-affirming Christianity is possible as an option among others. No, the promise of inclusive orthodoxy is that people previously excluded can be welcomed into the communion with other people and with the Triune God grounded in the confession of Christ crucified and raised for us!

One final note, by way of a conclusion: it strikes me that in his argument about the proper function of ‘orthodoxy’ among the inclusive orthodox, Watson sidesteps the question of whether or not credal claims about the Trinity or Jesus are actually true. I don’t doubt that he thinks they are. But it’s not something that he addresses; in his narration of his own faith journey, it is as though Christ’s bodily resurrection is something he happens to believe now after happening to not believe it earlier. But I don’t think the question of truth can be done away with so easily. For if the historic Christian confession about Christ isn’t true, then it is a deep error to make it the boundary for belonging for any community – an error in fact to hold it at all! If it isn’t true, then the working out of theological positions grounded in the conciliar or credal heritage isn’t a fascinating theological endeavor proving the compatibility of modern critical thought with ancient faith but is something akin to blasphemy. But if it is true, then how could we do other than to invite people into new life centered around it, to make it the focus of our proclamation? How could we grant that it’s all the same whether someone believes falsehood or the truth? How could we do other than keep confession and communion united, welcoming people into the glorious truth that our God has saved us from sin and death and given us the gift of new life through Jesus Christ? How could we see it as anything other than life-changing good news that we get to share with others? The ecclesiology that Scripture gives us assumes this truth; our churches are organized with ministers specially set apart to teach and preach it. I have staked my life on the belief that God really is who he showed himself to be in Jesus Christ. I hope that ‘inclusive orthodoxy’ as a movement will do the same.