467 - The Great Apostolic Blunder Machine

The Great Apostolic Blunder Machine
By John R. Fry
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1978. 183 pp. $4.95.

Investigator John Fry finds three fundamental areas where the church has become a problem to itself. They are not incidental or easily corrected. They go to the root of official-apostolic Christianity.

468 - The Great Apostolic Blunder Machine

The church is up three blind alleys. It has gotten there all by itself. The pity is that it is incapable of backing or walking out. But there is hope in the fact that there are a lot of people, endowed with common sense and integrity, who do not like being up against blank walls at the ends of blind alleys. They show their good sense by walking out of the church which foolishly persists in its blindness.

Before I read the book, the title suggested to me that Fry thinks of the church as an enterprise which simply does the wrong things. He does mean that, but he means much more. For one thing, he means that the church is a machine, like a big city political machine, helping friends and punishing enemies. He also means that the church's message, its self-understanding and the core of its theology, constitute a huge blunder.

As to its message, the church, aided by its captive seminaries, is caught in the dead-end of authority. It uses the New Testament's presentation of the apostle's rendition of their convictions as its authority. Right there the church is caught in a world-view and set of assertions which are as flawed as any. They seal us off from the apostle's actual experience and from any serious attention to our own.

As to its self-understanding, the church is caught in the dead-end of locality. Its assertion that the church is God's creation (Christ's body) really means that this group of people from this local place and making a difference here is God's creation. Right there the church is caught in its own self-interests, in the worst instincts and results of localism, and in sealing itself off from the real experiences and interests which are beyond and over against locale.

In its theology the church is caught in the dead-end of moral arrogance. It declares that God is love and that this love works its way into every situation and event. Right there the church is bound by its rejection of the modern world and of what every man, woman, and child knows happened at Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and My Lai.

By substituting authority, locality, and nihilism for lived experience, the church says goodbye to those who know better.

Throughout the book the reader looks for ways out of Fry's central thesis: by agreeing with it (Fry covers that in his introduction); by rationalizing it (the thesis itself predicts that); or by showing that Fry does not test it thoroughly against the church's history or the world Christian community today (which is to retreat into what Fry says is official Christianity's perennial attempt to protect itself by an appeal to itself). It does not even do much good to expose the thinness of his recurring claim that he is engaged in "investigation." Rather than a rigorous concept, "investigation" turns out to be an impressionistic term, meaning something like "anyone who bothers to take an honest second look will conclude that . . . " or "whoever has cars to hear. . . ." But all of this is consistent with the major alternative which Fry offers to official-apostolic Christianity: "the authority of lived experience."

"Concrete lived experience" is the answer to the sorry plight of the

470 - The Great Apostolic Blunder Machine

church. Here Fry, former denominational staffer, inner city pastor, and seminary professor, and now editor of the frying pan magazine, jumps into the frying pan himself. He is much more compelling in critique than in formulation. While his criticism is within the history of denunciation which goes back to the prophets, his formulation and concluding proposals are exhortatory and (perhaps intentionally) innocent of deep questions of where we are when left only with our lived experience.

Fry sounds a note of uncharacteristic hopefulness about the church on page 119: "The church always has been spinning out more-than church." If that is true, as I believe it is, it means that the church and Fry have jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, where' the living God changes everything. That is hope enough.

G. Daniel Little
General Assembly Mission Council
United Presbyterian Church
New York, New York