360 - Piepkorn's 'Profiles in Belief'

Piepkorn's 'Profiles in Belief'
By Henry Warner Bowden

THIS multi-volume set culminates a project covering several decades, representing the last efforts of a distinguished theologian, historian, and ecumenist. It provides mature thought from a scholar whose last years did not afford enough tranquility for realizing all his early intentions. When officials in the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) eviscerated Concordia Seminary because of doctrinal differences and the limits of intellectual inquiry, Arthur Carl Piepkorn continued his endeavor in academic exile. His death in 1973 left the work uncompleted, but several colleagues finished important chapters with the aid of their departed friend's notes. Their efforts match the style and treatment of Piepkorn's completed sections while bringing statistics up to date at the time of printing.

The collaborative result is an impressive achievement that covers all important churches in this country and Canada. If the original announcements about a planned eight volumes are still accurate, the set is only half finished. But a review at this time is appropriate because the currently available books (4 volumes, 3 books) already cover America's major religious groups.

As the general title implies, Piepkorn concentrates on ideas. He and his successors, who worked on these pages as a labor of love, stress belief systems as the central element that holds religious institutions together. These essays depict well over 500 separate churches, and in addition to central beliefs, each discussion treats their respective organizational patterns and present membership strength. We find analyses of distinctive doctrines and commonly held ones, descriptions of worship practices and holy days, explanations of differing polities, plus a telescoped historical narrative that sets forth each church's particular experiences.

Sections also contain immensely helpful bibliographies that reflect selectivity in their final listings. The reference notes are not just so

Henry Warner Bowden is Professor of Religion at Douglass College, Rutgers University. He is the author of American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (1981), The Dictionary of American Religious Biography (1977), and Church History in an Age of Science (1971), as well as many articles and reviews in the area of American church history. He is here reviewing Profiles in Belief: The Religious Bodies of the United States and Canada, by Arthur Carl Piepkorn, edited by John H. Tietjen (New York: Harper and Row, 1977-79; four volumes in three). Volume I: Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Eastern Orthodox. Introduction by Harry J. McSorley. Pp. xix, 324. $15.95. Volume 2: Protestant Denominations. Introduction by Robert T. Handy. Pp. xx, 721. $29.95. Volume 3: Holiness and Pentecostal. Introduction by Vinson Synan. Pp. xviii, 212; and Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Other Christian Bodies. introduction by Richard Quebedeaux. Pp. xviii, 191. $23.95.

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much padding but show a careful sifting of materials and sustained familiarity with available data.

The volumes afford us a broad panorama of factual information presented in compact, economical language, summarizing a wide vari ety of beliefs in the Christian spectrum. The four studies offer an invaluable guide to the confessional liturgical aspects of churches in English-speaking North America. Their accuracy and pertinence will make the whole work endure as a reliable reference tool for the rest of this century.

I

Yet Piepkorn's approach has limitations, and historians at least will regard the work with reservations. While admitting that beliefs are always important to different churches, historians wonder what additional factors contribute to the vitality of religious groups. Are ideas always the basic causal element when new churches are formed? What about cultural circumstances such as political necessity, social pres sures, or ethnic pride? In American history, where independence movements and overlapping waves of immigration are so important, the cultural setting of emergent churches appears to be ignored. Beliefs seem to receive too much exclusive attention as the first cause. Even if doctrine (with differences left unaccounted for) plays a significant role in creating new religious groups, does it retain that priority over centuries of ecclesiastical identity? The original reasons for a church's existence usually change over time, either giving way to substantially different forms of thought or fading away entirely to be replaced by new emphases that might have little to do with creedal systems. Can a single doctrinal breakdown ever "explain" a church?

Another question historians would raise concerns Piepkorn's appar ent assumption that doctrinal statements are universally supported in denominations because they are authoritative. Can we really work on the presupposition conveyed in these pages that the confessions of respective churches accurately reflect the beliefs of all their adherents at any given time? Even if that questionable hypothesis were true in a given era, could anyone expect it still to hold several generations thereafter? It is useful to single out beliefs as one element in distinguishing one church from another, but historians would insist that giving theology too much priority eclipses other relevant factors and prevents a more general understanding of denominational origins as well as their utmost concerns at varying times.

An old saw worth repeating is that people's actions are more revealing than their words. This does not mean that belief systems are totally irrelevant, but many historians would find Piepkorn deficient in explaining why people in the same church actually behave differently- in a single epoch and over generations. After reading doctrinal descrip tions of churches in these volumes, I am not at all convinced that I know why different people belong to particular churches or if membership

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makes much difference in the way they act. Are formal beliefs a determinative factor in shaping personal identities or in establishing behavior patterns? Surely they have some bearing, but I would argue that creedal commitment is not the most important factor in persons' choosing one association over another or in making practical decisions from day to day.

Such preoccupation with beliefs also diverts attention from moral action among church members, leaving untouched a large sphere of private and social questions in which many people define themselves essentially as Christians. One could also raise similar objections as to whether formal beliefs are a guide to or index of the inner spiritual life cultivated by individuals in various denominations.

So the fundamental perspective of this monumental work creates problems. It implies that beliefs are always dominant causative factors, that members fully endorse a denomination's official pronouncements at given points and over stretches of time, that beliefs out of context determine identity and behavior, and that theology is the key to understanding how Christians actually perceive meaning and purpose in their lives. I suggest looking for additional factors besides theology to understand religious activity in its individual or corporate expressions. Reading Piepkorn's work with that reservation in mind, the volumes before us give useful information about beliefs that can be used alongside other data for an adequate depiction of church life.

II

There are other problems with the work as it presently stands. One has to do with classifying denominations in a comprehensive scheme, a hopeless task since categorizing such a wide spectrum of groups is bound to offend different observers and adherents sooner or later. For example, it seems unnecessarily narrow and misleading for Piepkorn to classify the Roman Catholic Church as a post-Tridentine phenomenon. Most Protestants as well as Catholics accept that church's assertion that its theology is rooted in sources much earlier than the Council of Trent. Historians will also be perturbed to find Puritans classified as part of the Radical Reformation. There are strong grounds for holding that Congregationalist and Baptist churches have much more in common with left-wing Calvinism than with the more extreme forms of continental ferment. Without citing too many other examples, I would argue that these volumes do not always include all the groups which each of us might regard as "Protestant," "Evangelical," "Fundamentalist," or "Pentecostal" churches, or they align them with neighbors not to our liking. This does not even broach the problem of categorizing restorationists who disavow denominational labels altogether.

The work also suffers from a rather heavy-handed editorial policy that is never explained. Groups can be classified according to thematic agreement, shared emphases, or common historical origins; it seems that no single rationale was used throughout. But no single classifica-

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tion system could satisfy everyone, and readers should not despair at finding their topic in an unexpected category. Placement does not mean much in the long run, and reader persistence will be rewarded eventually with a sensitive and accurate report.

III

Despite its bulk, a final drawback to this set is its cryptic quality. Obviously depth has been sacrificed for great breadth, and certainly the scope of each volume is a considerable asset. But this reference guide is really a topical catalogue that leaves readers wanting to know more details. Instead of historical dynamics within each denomination, we find ecclesiastical geneaologies in which one church leader succeeds another without any of the give and take of real life. We learn little of the general contexts in which ideas arose, spread, and either dominated minds or lost their usefulness. Essays on different denominations frequently treat them in a uniform, cookie-cutter fashion that blurs their self-conscious distinctions or fails to recognize important factions within large blocs. In the end, one finishes reading sections of this work with the impression of using a rather bloodless taxonomy, not a portrayal of what actually motivates church members and makes their congregational activities worthwhile.

Proportional attention is another problem related to the general question of giving churches short shrift. Each volume provides material on many obscure groups; few observers know them well or are even aware of their specific orientation, and that kind of coverage is an important feature. But small churches receive as much attention as do large ones, while readers get little help in understanding their relative importance in North American society.

Canada is a case in point. As with many "American" studies these days, Canadian churches are recognized as having a legitimate place on the ecclesiastical map, but they are not integral parts of this work. Piepkorn's volumes include Canadian churches almost as an afterthought, and this marginal treatment does not reflect their true significance in the land north of us. Sadly, there is hardly any appreciation of Roman Catholicism in French-speaking Quebec.

Even in the United States where Catholicism is much stronger and more widespread, we can discern no proportional sense of its strength. I am simply baffled as to why churches with no more than 700 members should receive as much space as one that nurtures over 50,000,000 human beings. Black Baptists have two conventions that outnumber all Lutherans or Episcopalians or Presbyterians with their accumulated institutional litter. But those black bodies get minimal notice. And the proportion question continues within the treatment of black congregations themselves. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has 1.5 million members, but for all its size and pioneering history it rates no more consideration than a group so obscure that Piepkorn's last inquiries were returned by postal clerks with "addressee unknown" notices on

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them. Readers using these pages must be alert to relative importance, distinguish the seminal from the arcane, and assess practical signifi cance by themselves.

After all this is said, however, the volumes remain an impressive and useful work. Granting the authors' doctrinal focus, bias in classifying, and terse even-handedness, we can profit from their labors. Whether refreshing our memory on a well known group or discovering more about one rarely mentioned, these pages contain a wealth of information that will enrich us all.