Romans: A House Church Manifesto?
by Herbert Drake
II. The One Family of God
(Continued)
B. The One Family of God in Shaping Convictions
Paul's solution to the breakdown among the churches of Rome was to
call both the Gentile and Jewish elements into a single, one family of
God. This is not to say, as does Alan Segal, that he was trying to force
them into a single community. Nor is it to say, with Wiefel, that
he was attempting to have them join a single congregation. Aageson
is probably closer, saying that Paul was trying to "inspire an
attitude." But it is even better to say that Paul was attempting to
shape the convictions of his listeners--that it is
absolutely essential for the right functioning of the churches of Rome
that they have a basis of convictions that are rooted in their adoption
into the one family of God. A church comprised of members who share
convictions is a church of committed believers--a "believers'," or
house, church.
As James McClendon points out, convictions are not mere opinions.
They are not easily acquired, and are not readily removed. Unlike
opinions, convictions are associated with commitment. They tend to be
closely tied with the way one approaches and lives one's life, and thus
gradually result from what may start as mere opinion but grow to become
convictions only after the trial and error of experience has given them
some validation. For this reason McClendon prefers to use the word
"shape" to describe the formation of a conviction. As a person's
convictions are shaped, that person's life is shaped as well.
One can rightly ask how the reading of one letter, no matter how
brilliantly composed, can thus shape the convictions--the lives--of its
recipients. Perhaps the letter can induce discussion, validate some
experiences and opinions, invalidate other experiences and
opinions--perhaps not. Maybe that is why Paul "longed" to make a
personal visit and to "share a spiritual gift" (Rom. 1:11). We can't
know, of course, whether the letter actually had a significant effect on
shaping the convictions of the saints in Rome, but we can know this: the
fact that circumstances caused Paul to respond to the problem with a the
letter--the Book of Romans--has helped shape the convictions of many
legions of Christians over the centuries.
The present writer has said that Paul intended to shape a conviction
on the meaning and importance of the one family of God. The one family
of God is not to be understood as a gathering of a large number of
believers into a single fellowship-- something that clearly became
impossible even when the church came into existence in Acts 2, where we
are told that the number of believers suddenly grew by 3000. According
to Lyle Schaller, churches larger than about 40 simply can't function
with the necessary intimacy to embody the two greatest commandments:
loving the Lord and one another. The idea of a large church,
together with a hierarchical structure that made it an "institution,"
came in with Constantine and still affects our thinking today. Paul did
not know the church as an institution; the church he knew was a cluster
of small fellowships.
In his book The House Church, historian Del Birkey makes it clear
that the house church was absolutely normative in the worship of early
Christians. He documents the presence of these fellowships in Jerusalem,
Phillipi, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Colossae, Laodicea, and Troas.
Nowhere in Romans can one find Paul attacking the house church
system--that is not the target of his quest for Jewish/Gentile unity;
Romans 16 simply recognizes the clustered groups of believers and
addresses the letter accordingly. That it does this actually puts it
apart from other letters, where Paul tends to use the singular "church"
to refer to the clustered fellowships in the city to which his letter is
addressed.
Every believer in each fellowship was a part of a large structure
only in the sense that all believers are members of the one family of
God. As in any other family, that family is to be comprised of right
relationships. Roman churches were certainly practicing baptism, for
example--but were they practicing it with a true appreciation of its
prophetic importance? Paul needed to shape the convictions
of his listeners; to mold them into proper participants in their various
house churches.
The theological work associated with believers' church is generally
understood as having started during the era of the Protestant
Reformation. Periodic expressions of believers' church thinking may have
punctuated Christian history somewhat earlier, but the modern
rebirth of the small fellowship is traceable to that turbulent time of
history marked by the influence of Luther and Zwingli.
Comprised of small fellowships entirely made up of confessing
believers covenanting together in mutual accountability and in a common
desire to follow Christ, George H. Williams regarded the believers'
church as one of the products of what he called the "Radical
Reformation." Durnbaugh suggests that one of the clearest
(1526) articulations of a believers' (house) church may be found in an
unexpected place--the writings of Martin Luther:
The third kind of service should be a truly evangelical order and
should not be held in a public place for all sorts of people. But
those who want to be Christians in earnest and who
profess the gospel with hand and mouth should sign their names and
meet alone in a house somewhere to pray, to read, to baptize, to
receive the sacrament, and do other Christian works. According to this
order, those who do not lead Christian lives could be known, reproved,
corrected, cast out, or excommunicated, according to the rule of
Christ, Matthew 18. Here one could also solicit benevolent gifts to be
willingly given and distributed to the poor, according to St. Paul's
example, II Corinthians 9. Here would be no need of much and elaborate
singing. Here one could set out a brief and neat order for baptism and
the sacrament and center everything on the Word, prayer, and love....
While Luther appreciated the value of house church ecclesiology, the
above description betrays a characteristic of Luther's concept that
shows that he had not thought the matter through to its logical
conclusion. He speaks of such a model only for "people who want to be
Christians in earnest." One might speculate that this came from the
Roman tradition in which he had spent many years, but Luther does not
seem to be distinguishing "Christians" from "Christians in earnest" on
the basis of their membership in any kind of priesthood, and one
would hardly expect Luther to admit in sixteenth century Europe that
there were any non-Christians among those who had been baptized as
infants and who populated the magisterial church of his day. But no
matter what Luther had in mind when he made this distinction, the notion
of two "classes" of Christians would never be acceptable to a modern
advocate of believers' church ecclesiology. It is an idea that can have
no place in the one family of God that dominates Romans. Just as
Constantinian Christianity had eclipsed the house churches of the fourth
century Roman Empire, Luther later concluded that his vision of churches
comprised entirely of believers "was an impractical dream, and that to
be realistic, given the mixed multitude, he would have to turn to the
prince in order to get on with the task of securing the Reformation."
Nevertheless, after the carnage of Anabaptist persecutions had passed,
the believers' church had secured many footholds in church history and
had managed to leave a palpable trail through its confessions of faith,
many of which are cited in the present work.
In the modern era, the believers' (house) church has advocates among
a multitude of modern denominations, including Baptists James Wm.
McClendon and Stanley A. Nelson, Methodists Stanley Hauerwas and William
Willimon, and Mennonites John Howard Yoder and Donald F. Durnbaugh.
These modern writers have produced a corpus of writings that reveal a
theology centered on the doctrine of church. They do not all use the
same terminology--McClendon, for example, prefers "community," but the
idea is the same. The house church, above all else, is rooted in the
corporate nature of the cluster of believers--the local, house church.
It is dependent on the idea of "binding and loosing"
in Mt. 18:18-20, a passage which Birkey sees as being rooted in the Old
Testament. While Jesus' words here actually deal with church
discipline, the binding and loosing also refers to "the keys of the
kingdom of heaven" in Mt. 16:19 and are broadened to "anything you ask"
in Mt. 18:19. Included in the concept of "binding and loosing" is the
whole concept of discernment, a
requirement of an obedient Christian in which a corporate context is
vital. Just as all believers are to be a one family of God, these
passages in Matthew demonstrate that God wants his children to learn to
practice corporate, relational Christianity in the very manner of their
worship and mission. This is the stuff of ecclesiology, and the reason
that the doctrine of church is so fundamental to the believers' church.
That one finds the charter of house church eccesliology in Matthew,
and can even see it at work in such places as the proceedings of Acts
15, does not automatically make it a doctrine embraced by Paul and
certainly does not make the book of Romans a "House Church Manifesto."
But the notion that Paul might be calling the Roman house churches into
that which is now called "house (believers') church ecclesiology" in
order to repair the present problem and to equip them to withstand new
problems in the face of a changing culture is the task that the
remainder of this paper will attempt to accomplish.
