De-geographicalization.

The geographicalization of the church was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325.  Each city or region was to have a single bishop and ecclesiastical jurisdiction.  There were to be no free-lance ministers, or meddling by one bishop in the affairs of another.  At the time, this policy was part of the imperialization of the church.  As with government authority, it was assumed that there could be only one church authority in each geographical district.  The fact that the church felt it necessary to make such a rule indicates that prior to the Council there were in fact multiple overlapping jurisdictions.
This system functioned for at least 1500 years.  Though there were competing forms of Christianity in some cities, there was only supposed to be one Catholic jurisdiction in each geographical region.  Even in the Reformation this principle was largely maintained.  Whole countries might stay Roman Catholic, or become Lutheran or Reformed, but other forms of Christianity in each country were repressed, sometimes violently.  There was still only one official church in each country.
After the 17th century, the established State-church system started breaking down in many places.  It was replaced by the system we have today: denominationalism.  Today we are used to having multiple ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the same geographical area.  Only extremist and eccentric groups still claim that their church is the only legitimate one.  It doesn’t even occur to us that there is anything particularly unusual about the fact that a single town will have many different churches: Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and so on.  Even among the Orthodox, for whom it is specifically forbidden, differences in language and ethnic origin have led to different overlapping jurisdictions in America: Greek, Russian, Serbian, Antiochian, Ukrainian, etc.  So, like it or not, the wider church has in fact been de-geographicalized for many decades.
But within particular denominations, the pretense of being the only legitimate ecclesiastical presence in a given region has been maintained.  Each denomination is structured so that there is only one jurisdiction in each geographical area.  While there are a few exceptions to this rule, usually for ethnic and linguistic minorities, for instance, within each denomination there are no overlapping dioceses, presbyteries, conferences, classes, etc.  (Though this doesn’t usually hold at the local parish level.)  These jurisdictions have actual “boundaries.”
Now we are finding pressure building to undermine even this last vestige of the geographical framework.  It started, as I said, as theoretically temporary arrangements with ethnic and linguistic communities within the denominations.  But as denominations buckle under the growing strain of ideological and theological differences within their ranks, some would like to establish non-geographical jurisdictions based on theological commitments.  In other words, some Presbyterians (and I would guess this is true for other denominations) find they have more in common with like-minded sub-groups within the denomination, than they have with the broader denomination itself.  Rather than continue to try and work together with other Presbyterians with whom they have disagreements, some are expressing the desire to have their own non-geographical presbyteries, based on their common views.  (This would avoid the trauma of actually pulling out of the denomination altogether and forming their own ecclesiastical jurisdiction.)
The practice of wedding ecclesiastical jurisdictions to geographical areas has positive and negative effects.  The obvious downside is that it tends to enforce unity from above and stamp out variations.  This was the point when this system was established in the 4th century: one Empire in one geographical area required one religious authority.  This understanding still rules in our polity, and majorities in some presbyteries can and do attempt to enforce unity by keeping out ministers who hold divergent views.  
But in our context the geographical church also has the value of encouraging if not compelling conversation and negotiation between the different groups that happen to occupy the same geography.  This has often meant that the denominational structure in a given area was more balanced by the influence of minority views.  The minority might not have many victories, but their voices were heard and their influence felt.  Possibly the will of the majority was modified by their presence.
One problem with non-geographicality is that it can creates ghettos or silos of like-minded people.  It becomes easier to veer into eccentric theologies and practices, not having any counterweight to their views in the regional system.  Furthermore, like denominationalism itself, unmooring the church from geography can also lead to ever more specific and arcane differences being emphasized, and ever more specialized non-geographical entities.  While it may seem beneficial at first to divide into conservative and liberal non-geographical presbyteries, how long will it be before we have different kinds of liberals and conservatives breaking off again.
Another difficulty with moving to non-geographicality is that the divisions within denominations are not always so absolutely drawn.  Thus there are evangelicals who also believe in social justice, liberals who adopt contemporary worship, and so on.  The idea that having a non-geographical presbytery is going to alleviate the tension between different views is probably unfounded.
And finally we also find that congregations themselves are not theologically or otherwise monolithic.  If a majority pulls the congregation into a non-geographical presbytery based on their own commitments, what happens to the minority that was happy to be in the geographical presbytery where there were more people who shared their views?
All that being said, I do see the attraction to a non-geographical arrangement.  I have worked with presbyteries.  I know them often to be often clueless, incompetent, crippled by inertia, hamstrung by vested interested and cliques, and paralyzed by the sense of having to please, include, or get the approval of every faction and squeaky-wheel personality before anything can be done.  It is very tempting for a group of churches to detach from this mess and be free to do mission according to their own gifts and energy.  Frankly, I sometimes fantasize about an “emergent” presbytery where we could move beyond the turf wars and the conventional definitions of “conservative” and “liberal” and organize to do mission in innovative and imaginative ways.
But in the end I think a better solution is to develop more permission-giving structures, give local churches more autonomy, establish more lateral connections between churches instead of the centralized, top-down model, and nurture a polity that not only gets out of the way of local churches, but actually supports them in their mission.
Of course, if we retain the imperialist view that says we can only work with and even tolerate people who think exactly as we do, then we still have a problem.  In the end, that perspective will lead either to each person being their own private denomination, or the tyranny of majorities that try to impose their view on the rest of the body.
Perhaps the ultimate question in all this is: “Where do we find our unity?”  In the end, all Christians share the same geography: planet Earth.  And we share the same Lord: Jesus Christ.  Within those two constants, we are going to have to deal with, and even celebrate, a broad diversity of opinion and practice.  I know this is a benefit for the survival and spread of Jesus’ Way.  
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Response to Brat.

I wrote this letter to the journal, Interpretation, in response to an article by David Brat.  The theme of the issue was "usury."  You can probably figure out what his point was by my response, even if you haven't read the actual article in Interpretation.

Dear Editors of Interpretation,

            David Brat succeeds in being both sophomoric and patronizingly condescending in his article, which is far beneath Interpretation’s usual standards.  His self-righteous complacent triumphalism about Capitalism is the same sort of pompous prattle that every empire declaims about itself before it falls.  No empire is ever “here to stay,” and this one will collapse as well, either by the revolt of the billions of people who are routinely ground under its wheels, or by the very planet it has made a virtue out of degrading.  He writes: “We spend more time on market activity than God activity.  Thus Calvinism.”  What does that even mean?

            His early paragraph attempting to show Capitalism’s benefits fails to reveal the wildly uneven distribution of those benefits.  We are led to believe that Capitalism’s rising tide of prosperity in places like China and India has raised all boats, when actually the lion’s share of the benefits have been devoured by the people at the very top (though the “averages” still look wonderful).

            Brat’s reduction of morality to the merely individual level, while he claims it is inherent to our Reformed tradition, would have attracted Calvin’s ire.  The libertarianism Brat is trying to squeeze out of the Bible and Calvin is antithetical to the teachings of both.  The Bible, Jesus, Paul, and the whole Christian tradition, including Calvin, are about the formation of healthy and blessed communities. 

            What Brat derisively frames as “forcing some to pay for the benefits of others” is actually the whole point of Capitalism, which deliberately jiggers the economic system for the increasing enrichment of the wealthy.  But when it is reversed to benefit the poor, that statement becomes the centerpiece of biblical morality.  Does Brat’s Bible not include Exodus 23:11, Leviticus 19:9, Leviticus 25, or Deuternomy 14:26, just to name a few that spring immediately to mind?

            Brat implies that what Jesus demands from us as his followers is not to be extended into our responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.  “Do we have the right to coerce our fellow citizens to act in ways that follow our Christian ethical beliefs?”  Yes.  It’s called democracy.  Within constitutional limits, the majority always “coerces” the minority to participate in its vision and agenda.  Are Christians supposed to withdraw from the polity?  Brat’s mistrust of democracy reflects the attitude of the rich and powerful of every age.  They are generally the ones so afraid of coercion since they have the most to lose.  In real life, Capitalism resists democracy at every turn, preferring to give power to capital and rights to people with capital.  He ignores the inherent coercion involved in transactions between people with unequal resources.  The fantasy that “all voluntary trades are beneficial to both parties and the easiest way to see this is that if one were not better off, one would not partake in such a trade” may work in the fairy-land of Friedmanian academia.  But where the rest of us live such a statement is absolute nonsense.

            Brat’s analysis of the current economic crisis, as: “we wanted to force low-interest loans on the banks so that the poor could magically afford houses” is so breathtakingly self-serving, cruel, and stupid, that the only other people I have heard this from are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.  Great authorities.  Presumably our hearts are supposed to bleed for the banks.

            It may have been fruitful for the church to synthesize Christianity with other philosophies.  But none of these is a godless ideology that renames sins as virtues for the purpose of enriching the wealthy by means of the wanton rape of planet and people.  No synthesis between Christianity and such an ideology is possible.

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Ehrman's Forgeries.

Bart Ehrman’s latest book is apparently another attack on the integrity of the New Testament.  At one time, Bart was a fine scholar.  Now his work has deteriorated to where it is close to hate speech.  If he made the same claims about the foundational documents of Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism, as he does about Christianity, he would rightly be dismissed as a bigot.

All of us who attended a respectable seminary in the last 150 years have known about pseudonymous authorship.  According to the mainstream of scholarship, many of the books of the New Testament were not authored by the figures to whom they are attributed.  This was a common practice in the ancient world.  But when Christians who were raised on literalist and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible learn this, it can shake their faith.  This seems to be what happened to Ehrman.  He came out of an extremely conservative church background, and when he attended seminary and started learning about things like pseudonymous authorship, he felt a great sense of liberation.

Bart apparently wanted to share his sense of liberation by becoming a teacher and bringing his students to appreciate what he had discovered about the text of the New Testament.  This is fine.  I am of the opinion that seminary graduates have been criminally negligent in not bringing this data to the church; instead they cave in to whatever sentimental, mindless prejudice they find among their church members; as a matter of self-preservation, no doubt.  If you are a young minister, right out of seminary, and the people who pay your salary get much of their biblical information during the week from radio dingbats like Harold Camping, you have a lot of incentive to keep ideas like pseudonymous authorship to yourself.

So along with having to deal with nasty, self-righteous, violent, judgmental fundamentalists, the church also has to endure the backlash of people like Ehrman who were abused by those fundamentalists, and who now relish exacting their revenge by attacking Christianity.  I realize there is a great deal about historical, institutional Christianity that deserves critique and even condemnation.  But inventing bad motives and applying modern publishing standards to people writing 2000 years ago is idiotic.  

I grew up in the mainline church.  My pastor father would talk about pseudonymous authorship, or the documentary hypothesis (the theory that there were four distinct writers of the Penteteuch), at the dinner table.  This only made the Bible more interesting and exciting for me.  We had no ideological blinders that said if you didn’t take the whole Bible literally you were saying it was all a lie.  So I had trouble relating to my fellow students at seminary whose very faith in God was shaken by the suggestion that there might actually have been two or three authors of the Book of Isaiah, or that the same person who wrote Romans probably did not write Titus.

Pseudonymous authorship is the tip of the iceberg.  There are other problems as well.  The text of the New Testament in Greek has thousands of variants.  (Ehrman worte a book about this, too, trumpeting the “unreliability” of the whole New Testament.)  When scholars study the oldest texts we have – and new shreds of papyrus are being found all the time – they compare them against each other.  It turns out that there are a great many differences between these texts.  Most of them are not very significant.  Others involve major alternative readings, changing or omitting close to whole chapters!  Finding this out can be a threat to people who imagine there is one, reliable, steadfast, original text of the New Testament.  In reality, every translation committee has to use its judgment and philosophy to decide which readings to emphasize, and which get relegated to the footnotes or excluded altogether.

Another challenge is the unearthing of many long-lost books with subject matter similar to that of the New Testament.  These books were rejected from the canon of the New Testament for various reasons.  One main justification for this non-inclusion had to do with the fact that they had a weak claim to apostolic authorship.  (Although the New Testament books Ehrman labels as “forgeries” are far older and have much stronger claims than the later books also attributed to the apostles.  Ehrman doesn’t seem to dismiss these later books as “forgeries,” however.  He has written and spoken widely bemoaning their exclusion.)  Many of these books were left out because they were not accepted by a broad consensus of the church, or because they emitted doctrines at a great variance with what was already accepted.  (And I mean a great variance.  There are a wide range of theologies in the New Testament as it is.)  Some are just plain bizarre.  But Ehrman and others have used this as an opportunity to vilify the leadership of the early church as a closed-minded, dogmatic Gestapo for not opening the canon to these books, many of which are weird, repulsive, incomprehensible, and/or impossible to harmonize with Jesus’ accepted teachings.  But then, anachronistically applying modern categories and standards to people and documents from the ancient world is Ehrman’s standard MO.     

In the case of Ehrman, he has been getting a wildly positive response from the media for his “exposés” of the many “discrepancies” and “forgeries” in the New Testament, and for his bringing to light many “repressed” documents of the early church.  He is a regular fixture on cable TV and public radio; his lectures are sold as CD sets; his books sell well.  I have no doubt he has become more wealthy than is customary for a New Testament scholar.  This appears to suit him.

A few years ago Ehrman renounced whatever was left of his faith in Jesus, and devoted himself full-time to the remunerative task of repackaging modern biblical scholarship, framing it in the most negative way possible, and selling it to audiences eager to swallow anything condemning of Christianity.     

So: “pseudonymous authorship” or “forgery”?

If scholars decided that Hamlet was not written by Shakespeare, but by a friend and admirer of Shakespeare, would that make the play any less powerful or meaningful?  Why then does the Letter to the Ephesians become vilified as a “forgery” when some scholars suggest it was not written by Paul, but maybe by a younger associate of his? 

Is Moby Dick any less of a novel because it was not written by a Native American named Ishmael, as is clearly claimed on the first page?  Is this a forgery?  Is Melville lying?  

When the Bible attributes some Psalms to King David, even though scholarship tells us it is very unlikely that the historical David actually wrote many, if any, of them, are these beautiful, abiding, powerful, and profound religious poems now to be dismissed as “forgeries”?    

When a female novelist, like “George Eliot,” writes under a male pseudonym so as to obtain a better hearing in her patriarchal culture, is that “forgery”?  Is she cynically lying in order to bamboozle book buyers?  Should we now stop reading Middlemarch?

I could go on like this. 

What about the value of these writings as literature, no matter who wrote them?  What about the centuries of spiritual nourishment the books of the New Testament have given to people?  At this point their actual authorship is immaterial, even if we could know, which we can’t.

Ehrman has degenerated into a shrill, pathetic, mercenary voice, barely worth responding to, were it not for the fact that the uninformed seem to be listening to him.  He appears to have imputed some of his own motives to the writers of many New Testament books: they are only out to make a buck and push their personal agenda.

In the end, the Holy Spirit has always used figures like Ehrman to strengthen the church while transforming it.  At least now this information is no longer a secret maintained by specialized academics.  And now we are also freed from the ecclesiastical party-line about things like authorship.  This means we can focus with greater intensity on the words themselves, in all their diversity and tension, and come to a better understanding of the Word to whom they witness, and, most importantly, what it means to follow him.