The Authority Of The Believer John MacMillan - ...
John MacMillan (1873-1956) was a Canadian Presbyterian businessman who became actively involved with ministry to Chinese and Jewish people in Toronto.3 At the age of 41 he married Isabel Robson, who had been a missionary to China with China Inland Mission from 1895 to1906 and a personal nurse to J. Hudson Taylor. Ordained in 1923 at the age of 49, MacMillan and his wife went to China as missionaries with The Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). He then became field director of the floundering C&MA mission work in the Philippines. Following the death of his first wife in 1928, he returned to North America to do pastoral and itinerant ministry. Subsequently, he became Associate Editor of The Alliance Weekly magazine, a member of the Board of Managers of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, and a professor at Missionary Training Institute in Nyack, New York, now known as Nyack College. In 1932 after nine years of many dramatic experiences with spiritual warfare, he wrote a series of articles in The Alliance Weekly, the periodical of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, entitled "The Authority of the Believer."4 Eventually they were published in book form, distributed widely and also republished in other periodicals. MacMillan had a remarkable and extensive ministry in the exercise of the authority of the believer and spiritual warfare spanning more than thirty years.
The Authority of the Believer John MacMillan - ...
Fuller Theological Seminary professor Charles Kraft includes a chapter on the authority of the believer in his book Defeating the Dark Angels, but again like Murphy, does not cite MacMillan, though he makes several references to Unger. Charles Kraft, Defeating the Dark Angels (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publishing, 1992), 79-98.
Our days of complacency and ignoring the Word on this subject are over. The time has come that the Church step up and be who the Word says we are and exercise the authority the Word says we have. The authority of the believer is a heavenly ministry to which we have all been called.
Applying principles of the authority of the believer, MacMillan took authority over the spirits of evil operating in the mission. Within four years, the mission re- covered and revival broke out. The Alliance in the Philippines is now one of the largest in the world.
Perhaps the single greatest scholar whose work potentially shares an affinity with an up-dated Catholic neo-orthodoxy is that of the Catholic theologian, Avery Dulles, S.J. Throughout his vast published intellectual corpus, Dulles provides fascinating historically grounded and comparative typologies of the various elements of the Church and forms by which it — defined most inclusively to include Protestantism but with a major focus on Catholicism — has manifested itself throughout the ages. On the one hand, the scholarship of Dulles is consistent with an up-dated neo-orthodoxy in that it makes excellent use of, in an interdisciplinary way, the various secular intellectual disciplines to understand and promote the Catholic tradition. On the other hand, Dulles is only "potentially" a neo-orthodox thinker given certain criticisms of his work. Most importantly, Dulles fails to place the "institutional" model of the Catholic Church in a superordinate position vis-a-vis other possible ways of understanding the Church. Simply put, Dulles goes too far in acknowledging the limitations of the institutional Church and its anchor and focal point, the Magisterium or, conversely put, he does not go far enough in acknowledging the significantly greater limitations of any single individual non-Magisterial interpretation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. On the one hand, Dulles is correct in acknowledging 1) that the Roman Catholic Church does not exhaust the meaning of the Church of Christ and 2) that the Church of Christ is, in part, an "invisible" reality incapable of being completely conceptualized and totally understood by mankind. Put another way, one can accept a kind of "concentric zone" theory that logically argues that 1) there is the ultimate Truth which is Jesus Christ; 2) there is the Church of Christ; 3) there is the fullest expression of the Church of Christ which is the Roman Catholic Church; and 4) there is the most accurate interpreter and guardian of Roman Catholicism in the form of its Magisterium. For Dulles, furthermore, the net difference between the "invisible" Truth of Christ incapable of being assimilated by a finite mankind and the "visible" Truth of Christ as captured and concretized by the Magisterium is seen, following the terminology of Vatican II, as "mystery." Similarly, Richard J. Neuhaus, following his own Lutheran "two kingdoms" model, would refer to the "mysterious" by another label, that of the "paradoxical." Given that no human agency, even that of the Magisterium in a special relationship with the Holy Spirit, can perfectly interpret the Christian message, the question becomes, then, from the logic of Dulles, "who interprets the mystery of paradox?" Given his own Lutheran perspective which exaggerates the amount of mystery and paradox there is in the universe and which is constitutively anti-institutional and antinomian in nature, the locus of authority for Neuhaus is, predictably enough, the "individual." This explains the unsatisfactoriness from an orthodox Catholic perspective of Neuhaus' understanding of the Magisterium and of the need for some supra-individual authority in his otherwise important treatise, The Catholic Moment. On the other hand, however, what is surprising and disappointing is the failure of the Catholic theologian, Dulles, to acknowledge that, for Catholics at least, "when in individual doubt, go with the understanding and interpretation of the Magisterium." The best that Dulles can offer here is a conceptually unclear and vague call for a kind of triangularization in terms of authority between Magisterium, theologians, prophets, and other components of the "people of God." The major criticism here is not so much that Dulles advocates a model with too many chiefs and not enough Indians but a model in which there is no clear ultimate and chief authority. For Dulles to argue as he does that the various components of the people of God dialectically influence each other does not suffice; only a "cybernetic" model can prevent utter chaos from reigning within the Church. The neo-orthodox model offered in this essay does, indeed, allow for many chiefs but only for one ultimate authority, the Pope and those Bishops in loyal communion with him. On the one hand, one can grant to Dulles and Neuhaus that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is always interpreted in a culturally conditioned manner. On the other hand, Roman Catholics should have little trouble in deciding the issue of the ultimate superiority of interpretations of the Gospel, between that of any single individual interpretation — whether it be the Gospel of a Richard John Neuhaus, a Charles Curran, or an Avery Dulles and that of the Magisterium. That the latter is the correct Catholic choice can be defended theologically in light of the special relationship existing between the Holy Spirit and the Bishops as propounded in both Scripture and tradition and social-scientifically on the grounds that the recorded, protected, and developed insights of a 2,000 year old traditional theological vehicle better protects against culturally determined thought vis-a-vis the greater frailty, finiteness, and ethnocentrism of any one individual trapped within a particular moment in time and space. The excessive emphasis on the Church as "mystery," "invisible" reality, and "paradox" and the almost complete obliteration of any distinction between the "sacred" and the "profane" argued for by Dulles that legitimates a de-centralization of authority within the Catholic Church is consistent with what Thomas Sowell would call an "unconstrained" vision of mankind.33 This is a utopian model that posits the possibility of significant progress for both mankind, society, and Church in the future short of the second coming of the Lord and is opposed to a more "constrained" or "classical" understanding that underscores the constant limitations of both mankind and society across time and space and the corresponding need for an eternally vigilant Church authority to set appropriately high and stern religious and moral standards for human thought and conduct. There are other criticisms of the work of Dulles that complicate and compliment the aforementioned major criticism. They all have to deal with the ideal-typical analyses of Dulles. First of all, in Dulles' hands, this mode of analysis has a tendency to produce an almost "formless" or "disembodied" Catholicity.34 In his attempt to provide balance and throw an intellectual rope around an admittedly complex picture, Dulles seemingly submerges the Catholic portrait into the background landscape, religious and otherwise. His position, likewise, that all of his ideal-typical "models" of the Church are dialectically related to each other similarly avoids the necessary question of what is definitive and constitutive of the faith. His "provisionality," in other words, borders on religious paralysis. His attempt to incorporate the more Protestant models of "community," "herald," and "servant" seemingly co-opt the more Catholic models of "institution" and "sacrament." Relatedly, one can question the utility of separating into two types the "institutional" and "sacramental" components of the Catholic Church. This leads to the false, and Protestant, bias which sees institutions as opposed to, by very definition, a vivifying presence of God and exaggerates the degree, conversely, of the authenticity of any individualized and unmediated religiosity. The following brief excursus on Dulles' work starts with his The Dimensions of the Church (1967) published almost immediately after the conclusion of Vatican II.35 Dulles initiates his investigation with a question and then follows with a short and general answer: "Let us ask ourselves what the true dimensions of the Church are. We shall find it a much larger and more inclusive reality than most of us have been accustomed to imagine."36 Dulles downplays the historic role given to reason in the Catholic tradition and sounds almost Lutheran when he states that: "What is most distinctive of the Church, therefore, is not subject to human verification but accessible only to the eyes of faith. We might expect as much if the Church is by nature a mystery."37 Dulles similarly underemphasizes the divine side of the Church when he argues that "the theology of Vatican II is, on the whole, concrete and historical rather than abstract and metaphysical. Accordingly, the Council prefers to speak of the Church not as the bare essence of 'what Christ instituted' but rather as what results when men of flesh and blood gather in such an institution."38 Dulles affirms the asymmetry between the concepts of the "Church of Christ" and the "Roman Catholic Church" as follows: Until Vatican II, most Catholics were content to say that the Church of Christ is the Roman Catholic Church, and that it includes only those who are joined to it by the triple bond of creed, code, and cult specified in Bellarmine's definition. According to this view, no one would be in the Church of Christ unless he professed the Catholic faith, was subject to the Roman pontiff, and had access to the sacraments.39 After approvingly quoting the German exegete, Heinrich Schlier, Dulles offers his own understanding of the almost isomorphic relationship between "sacred" and "profane" and "Church" and "universe": So close are the relations between the Church and the world that it seems hardly possible to make a sharp distinction between their goals. If all mankind were created for salvation, and salvation means an authentic fellowship of men in the Body of Christ, the Church really exists to remind the world of its own nature and to help achieve itself.40 After providing readers with numerous examples of ideas that are heterodox in either their emphasis or lack of subordination to the Magisterium, Dulles typically qualifies himself as follows: It would be fatal to ignore either the institutional Church or the mystical Church, either the human Church or that which is God. It would be disastrous to divide or separate what God has bound together.41 Unfortunately, Avery Dulles, through the artificial distinctions made in his "ideal-typical" analysis, does "divide or separate what God has bound together," with at least partially disastrous results. This reality can be seen clearly in Dulles' next major work, The Survival of Dogma (1971).42 In this work, he argues not only for a pluralization of authentic authorities within the Catholic Church — which in and by itself is acceptable — but refuses to grant the Magisterium any special or privileged status among the various other authorities. On the one hand, Dulles states boldly: "The official Magisterium is only one of the many elements in the total witness of the Church."43 On the other hand, Dulles is clearly correct when he argues that: Christianity recognizes only one absolute authority — that of God himself. This means that all the secondary authorities are subject to criticism and correction. Every created channel that manifests God and brings men to him is capable also of misleading men and turning them away from God.44 For Dulles: In most Christian bodies, several types of authority exist concurrently. On the one hand, there is the juridical and public authority of the highest officers — whether pope, bishops, or ruling bodies, such as assemblies, synods, and councils. These officials make their authority felt, normally by issuing documents, which are regarded as normative for the group. On the other hand, there are private authorities, which in their own way are no less important than the officials. Under this heading one would have to include, first, scholars, who speak on the basis of their research and professional competence. Secondly, there are "charismatic persons" who seem to be endowed with a more than common measure of the true Christian spirit. Like the prophets of old, these charismatics often feel impelled to criticize the officials and scholars, to rebuke them for their infidelity and insensitivity. Finally, there is the authority of consensus. In the Church, public opinion is definitely a force to be reckoned with, especially in the democratic age.45 The benefit of "this plurality of authentic Christian sources," for Dulles, is that it: protects the believer from being crushed by the weight of any single authority; it restrains any one organ from so imposing itself as to eliminate what the others have to say. It provides a margin of liberty within which each individual can feel encouraged to make his own distinctive contribution, to understand the faith in a way proper to himself. And at the same time it provides the Church as a whole with the suppleness it needs to operate in different parts of the globe and in a rapidly changing world.46 What is Dulles' response to the criticism levied here to the effect that a pluralism not controlled from within a cybernetic framework creates chaos and confusion in the Church? It is a far too cheery, optimistic, and naive one: Some, discontented with the intellectual untidiness generated by the recognition of such diverse authorities, seek to reduce everything to unity by arbitrarily exalting one authority above all the others . . . As against all such simplistic solutions, we should prefer to say that the 'word of God' is best heard when one maintains a certain critical distance from any given expression of that word. By holding a multitude of irreducibly distinct articulations in balance, one can best position himself to hear what God may be saying here and now. To recognize the historically conditioned character of every expression of faith is not to succumb to historical relativity, but rather to escape imprisonment within the relativities of any particular time and place. Unless relativity is recognized for what it is, it cannot be transcended.47 Unfortunately, Dulles does not indicate how, in a babble of conflicting and equally legitimate voices, relativity can be transcended nor does he point out the disastrous consequences for the Church of an unnavigated swim in the "fiery brook of relativity." As is typical of Dulles, he carefully hedges his bets, giving ad hoc and after-the-fact legitimacy to the central concept of the Magisterium. Dulles admits, for instance, that: notwithstanding all the merits of pluralism, we must, I think, acknowledge that it has its limits and dangers. If the word of God cannot be totally identified with any particular expression, it by no means follows that every human attitude and expression is consonant with the gospel of Christ . . . Thus it remains an important task of ecclesiastical authority to see to it that . . . the ongoing transformations of Christian life do not undermine the apostolicity and catholic unity essential to the Church.48 Surprisingly, given his previously enunciated logic, Dulles can also simply state that "only the bearers of the official Magisterium can formulate judgements in the authoritative way. They may, of course, accept and approve the work of private theologians, but when they do so it is they — not the theologians — who give official status to the theories they approve."49 Thus can one, occasionally, "tease out of" Dulles a position not far afield from the cybernetic one outlined in this essay. The severe limitations and consequences of Dulles' most obvious understanding of pluralism can be seen through an examination of his next work, the immensely popular and influential, Models of the Church (1974).50 In this work, Dulles argues that the Church has historically presented to the world five major ecclesiastical models: "institutional," "mystical communion," "sacramental," "herald," and "servant." Dulles argues, correctly I think, that a full-bodied and rich Catholicism must utilize all five models. It is clear, however, that Dulles refuses to grant any one of these five models a superordinate position. He states that: The peculiarity of models . . . is that we cannot integrate them into a single synthetic vision on the level of articulate, categorical thought. In order to do justice to the various aspects of the Church, as a complex reality, we must work simultaneously with different models. By a kind of mental juggling act, we have to keep several models in the air at once.51 Dulles admirably analyzes the social context under which any one respective model gains societal plausibility or, conversely, appears as obsolete. He provides, for the most part, a balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each model. This book, as with those previously analyzed, straddles the line, as this reviewer sees it, between a contemporary authentic Catholic neo-orthodox approach and a contemporary heterodox one --albeit an exceedingly sophisticated and nuanced version of the latter. Consistent with the former approach, Dulles is authentically attached to, enormously knowledgeable about, and sympathetic (for the most part) toward the Catholic tradition. Consistent with the former, his approach to defending and propounding the faith has consistently been one that utilizes the best that objective historical, humanistic, social-scientific, and theological perspectives can offer. Yet this work fails to fully fall within the parameters of a Catholic neo-orthodoxy — as defined in this paper — because of its refusal to grant the Magisterium a cybernetically superordinate position in the Catholic tradition. Similar to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's criticism of contemporary biblical exegesis to the effect that it approaches liquidating the reality of