Clamoring for a King
Roadblocks for Christian Orthodoxy
Edward Todd Shy
January 1, 1995
"When I mean religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England." So utters Mr. Thwackum in Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century novel Tom Jones. Humorous as Thwackum's equation of "religion" with his particular type of religion is, his quip is revealing. In practice, all religion is a specific affair. There is no generic Christianity because nowhere can we find a generic Christian. We are all Protestant or Catholic, liberal or conservative, or whatever.
But can we trace, behind all these streams, a single common source that we can call orthodox? Can we articulate something that defines our unity and establishes consensus? This task has taken on added urgency in the contemporary West, where "culture" has quite clearly ceased to be Christian. For many Christians this shift is lamentable. The ecumenical movement at the turn of this century foreshadowed an awareness of lost hegemony; conservative Christians, Protestant and Catholic, are now seeking an orthodox consensus. Although I am sympathetic to the desire, the quest for orthodox consensus is potentially quixotic.
Questions of orthodoxy amidst Christian pluralism
The criteria for arriving at an orthodox Christian consensus is most famously represented by Vincent of Lerin's tripartition: quod ubique, semper, ab omnibus. That is, that which has been believed "everywhere, always, by all." Orthodox boundaries were thus measured in the fifth and sixth centuries by the rods of "universality, antiquity, and consensus" (see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine).
A millennium and a half later it is doubtful that these measures ...
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