Brian Hamilton

Humility and Hierarchy

Douglas Knight recently posted a wonderful piece on Equality, inclusivity, and confusion where he lays out a sharp critique of the liberal gospel’s impulse towards “equal opportunity.” The church, he rightly insists, celebrates plurality by submitting to it, by ordering itself in a way that reflects our dependence on those who go before us rather than by demanding that we all have to experience everything equally. He’s right, I think: a liberal notion of equality does injustice to plurality, for it builds barriers between us exactly to the extent that it denies us the ability to affirm others’ testimony as witnessing to something more than “their own individual experience.” For Knight, this is why the church must maintain its hierarchy. I responded with the following comment:

Could it be, I wonder, that the while Christian community is rightfully and graciously ordered, it never be ordered in a way that is structurally final except to reflect the dependence of all on the guiding presence of Christ? The church is ordered and re-ordered in each moment, always participating in God’s work through the lives of all its members, but with the profound knowledge that this as often throws us on back on the lives of our children as it does on our trained theologians and pastors. It is the mark of our humility that there are no ‘professional’ or ‘expert’ disciples, only all of us together pilgrims on a journey. And yet this does not imply a naive and disembodied ‘equality,’ or else it would also imply a rejection of the truth that the Spirit gives gifts of authority to all its members. And so it does not imply the rejection of a regular order that the church must rely on for regular guidance and strength. It only refuses to institutionalize and absolutize a particular order that God may at any moment interrupt, since all God’s people are charged with the task of leading the faithful through in those moments for which they have been prepared. And this cannot be only an abstract point, since it is also an ecclesiological one about the multiplicity of the gifts of the Spirit.

I’m not sure if this way of putting it quite works; I’m aware of the tension in the trajectories I’m trying to hold together. That may well be, however, a good picture of the (Anabaptist-Mennonite) tradition I’m trying to represent, who at the same time rejects the absolute and untouchable ordering of a church that is fundamentally hierarchical, and still wants to speak in deep appreciation of the necessity of shepherds for guiding the church through the world. Or to illustrate the same thing in a different way: mine is a tradition that has at once maintained that all God’s faithful are saints in the truest sense of the word, yet has insisted on telling stories of the memorably faithful. I find it an incredibly pressing project to articulate an ecclesiology that does not forsake the sort of ordering you are insisting on, but neither absolutizes particular structures of particular people that prohibit structurally the church’s right dependence on, for example, its newly baptized.

God, may the voice of your Spirit guide us, that we would neither suppress your voice from among us nor underestimate the guiding power of the gifts you give.

Update: Knight re-posted my comment with one other, noting that it seems “to hope that intellect yet may serve discipleship.” Thank you for this profound compliment. What better can we hope, we whose calling is to the sustained study and reflection on God?

6 October 2006 |
tags: Ecclesiology