A “Radical CGGC Orthodoxy”

One unfortunate accusation leveled against the Emerging Church is that it rejects truth. The reality is that Emerging Church people sometimes have difficulty embracing truth as their Evangelical friends understand it. For Emerging folks, Evangelical ‘truth’ sometimes bears the brand of modernity to so great a degree that people in Emerging circles suspect that it can’t be biblical. From where I sit, Emerging Church people are at least as concerned with truth as are Evangelicals.

Because I love the CGGC, distrust modernism and yearn for a vibrant outreach to postmoderns, I live with tension.

The root of my tension lies with C. H. Forney.

The fact is that what we say we believe in We Believe, we believe primarily as a result of the influence of C. H. Forney.

For those of you who are a little fuzzy on Forney, here are some of the highlights of his biography. Christian Henry Forney was born in 1839 and was the son of Christian T. Forney, an important lay leader in the early CGGC. Christian Henry sensed a call to ministry in the Church of God early in his life and attended Oberlin College, where revivalist Charles Finney was President. Forney’s father’s early and unexpected death forced him to withdraw from college and return home to Pennsylvania. He entered the ministry in 1860, became the editor of The Church Advocate in 1869 and remained in that position for 40 years. He is, without doubt, the most influential theologian in the history of the CGGC. He is the author of History of the Churches of God in the United States of North America. He also published several works on the ordinances.

And, if you look up the word modernist, in the dictionary, you will see a little sketch of C. H. Forney.

That’s not to say that Forney was theologically liberal. He wasn’t. He was loyal to his CGGC roots. Nevertheless, he brought a spirit of creativity to his defense of Winebrenner’s work that significantly transformed it.

This is what S. G. Yahn said about Forney:

“…Dr. Forney was thoroughly loyal to the old landmarks. He was true to the spirit of Winebrenner, Thomas and other leaders who had preceded him. At the same time he was aggressive. He developed the plans of Winebrenner into wider spheres, and, when wise and necessary, carried them out with new methods, but always with an eye single to the honor of the truth and the prosperity of the churches.”

Yahn is correct on both counts.

Forney sought to preserve Winebrenner on all the major points. But, when Yahn says that Forney was “aggressive” and that he “developed what Winebrenner did in wider spheres” he hits the heart of the matter. Forney boldly took the CGGC where John Winebrenner would have never gone.

Winebrenner and Forney lived in different times. Their eras were separated by the publication of two transformational academic works. In 1859 Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species and in 1876 Julius Wellhausen published The Composition of the Hexateuch, which examined Scripture in the way a biologist would study a fossil and proposed that there were four sources for the authorship of the first five books of the Bible and that Moses was not their author. The era of Forney’s maturity from the 1880s on was one in which science reigned, even in the study of Scripture and in the formulation of doctrine. C. H. Forney was a man of his age. He brought to the defense of CGGC doctrine a scientific precision that would have been incomprehensible to John Winebrenner.

Much of what is accepted as doctrine in the CGGC has its official roots in John Winebrenner, but traces it current form, not to Winebrenner, but to Forney.

The most notable example of the impact of Forney on the CGGC is in the doctrine of Feetwashing (or as Winebrenner spelled it, Feet Washing). Forney’s The Philosophic Basis of the Ordinances is built on the argument that Feetwashing portrays the ‘humiliation’ of Christ (Forney’s term for the incarnation), not the ‘humility’ of Christ. However, Winebrenner in his sermon, “The Ordinance of Feet Washing,” states four reasons why Christ instituted the ordinance. The first of these was “To give His disciples an example of His deep humility.” The third reason was, “To symbolize or represent the two cardinal graces of the Christian character--humility and love.”

Forney’s The Philosophic Basis of the Ordinances is scientific. It is a work of its age. And, it unabashedly distorts and ultimately rejects Winebrenner’s view in an effort to preserve it.

Forney’s reinterpretation of Winebrenner’s teaching on Feetwashing, while the extreme example, is suggestive of the manner in which orthodox CGGC thinking has been modernized since Winebrenner’s death.

I’ve been asking myself for some time now; can a person be a disciple of John Winebrenner and, at the same time, a heretic these days in the CGGC?

I dunno. But, I certainly hope not.

Radical Orthodoxy is a movement that has resonance among some in the Emerging Church. The movement traces its roots to Anglicanism in the 1990s. It is a call for a theology that is based in revelation and eschews modernism’s trust in reason, even to the point that it seeks wisdom in pre-Reformation thought.

I’m not Anglican. I don’t feel the need to diminish the impact of the Reformers. But I am finding the wisdom of the pre-Darwin/pre-Wellhausen era increasingly enticing. The more closely I study him, the better John Winebrenner looks to me. The more carefully I think about it, the more I am convinced that Winebrenner had it just about right.

And, so, I’m just about ready to conclude that it’s time for a move toward a Radical CGGC Orthodoxy--a Winebrennerian critique of what we believe and do--a move to our roots.

Does that make me a Winebrennerian or a heretic?