James McClendon begins his three-volume Systematic Theology with a short, simple, yet profound sentence: “Theology is struggle.” The struggle to think and live out the truth of God's gospel involves the temptation for the church to deny her esse as ecclesia and to craft a story on the world's terms. This theological struggle is intensified by the historical fact of a divided Christianity.Footnote ²⁴ Curtis Freeman's Contesting Catholicity embodies McClendon's conviction that theology is struggle. Contesting Catholicity is the result of Freeman's personal odyssey to retrieve, negotiate, and proffer a distinctively Baptist theology for the present moment by listening to diverse Baptist voices as well as “the holy imperfection and medley of difference” that is the great company of the saints.Footnote ²⁵ The book is his lucid (and critical) attempt to follow the vector of McClendon's Baptist vision, and an ecumenical announcement that Baptist theology has indeed “come of age.”Footnote ²⁶

1. The spirit of resurrection. Freeman's struggle is manifest in the two uneven parts of his book. To engage the first part, let me first turn to a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. As Caitlin Washburn explains, “Hopkins offers a stunning depiction of what the Resurrection really means and what it really does” in his poem “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”Footnote ²⁷ The natural world that Hopkins shows us in the poem is wild, fantastic, and beautiful in an unbounded state of continuous motion, flux, and change. Humanity is caught up in the dynamism of “nature's bonfire,” which “burns on” in perpetuity. Humanity is but a small part of nature, and appears destined to vanish into the ashes of the Heraclitean fire. In a matter of a few lines the poem descends from celebrating the winsome character of cloud and sky “into an entropic spiral downwards towards humanity's end,” as Washburn puts it.Footnote ²⁸ But then, very abruptly, Hopkins stops the descent. With one word—“Enough!”—the poem pivots. Resurrection, Washburn says, “intrudes on humanity's slippery slope towards nothingness and puts an end to it, with a cry of ‘Enough!’”Footnote ²⁹ This sharp movement, in the midst of a poetic line, expresses Hopkins’ insight that the comfort of the Resurrection is rooted in its “shattering all the patterns” and transforming the cosmos.Footnote ³⁰

The first part of Freeman's book is his cry of “Enough!” In one sense, his “Enough!” is connected to his evocative self-image, found in the book's preface, of an addict recovering from the disease of liberalism. Freeman's understanding of liberalism I take as similar to what Charles Taylor calls the “inside/outside” picture of knowledge and truth, or what George Lindbeck identified as the experiential-expressive model of doctrine. Knowledge and truth are the exterior expression of an inward experience; or doctrines “are merely feeble and fickle ‘expressions’ that attempt to ‘put into words’ an inward religious experience that is universal.”Footnote ³¹ As many commentators have pointed out, this experiential-expressive approach characterizes not only liberal Christianity but also much of conservative Christianity as well. Freeman would agree with Jamie Smith's assessment: whether in a liberal or fundamentalist mode, “by fixating on an inward experience and functionally excluding essential communal practices from ‘religion,’ the experiential-expressive (‘liberal’) model is all the more easily absorbed by other regnant visions and ideologies, blown about by every wind in the name of ‘relevance.’”Footnote ³² The deeply ingrained habits of liberalism that have produced an interiorized and de-practiced form of Christianity do not possess sufficient resources for Baptists to negotiate the transition beyond modernity in vibrant, constructive theological ways (87). Even more, Baptist theology, especially since the nineteenth century, must take some of the blame for portions of its own enervation and exhaustion. To avoid modernity's “sickness unto death” that has so seduced Baptist theology, Freeman's loud shout of “Enough!” has to be made every day in order to be sober about one's present condition and to move forward, day by day, in hope.

In another sense Freeman's “Enough!” is for a third way that is a radical alternative, a “cure” for the sickness diagnosed in part 1 of the book. Perhaps it was serendipitous that I read part 1 of Freeman's book in the last couple of weeks of Lent and part 2 during Eastertide. There is a spirit of confidence and hope that characterizes the book, especially its second part. Freeman's “alternative account that re-narrates the Baptist story as a community of contested convictions within the catholic church” is as much a future story of Baptist churches as their past (10). Performing a faithful improvisation of the Baptist story is not merely a faithful remembering of the past but also a faithful creating of the present and the future. To borrow and slightly alter a phrase from Orlando Espín, Freeman is “futuring [the Baptist] past.”Footnote ³³ “Futuring our past” is resurrection work.

Marilynne Robinson recently commented: “We're living in a period where people have very little conscious historical memory. . . .There's a thinness in what you would call ‘contemporary consciousness.’”Footnote ³⁴ Standing in company with Steve Harmon, Philip Thompson, Stephen Holmes, and others, Freeman's “futuring the Baptist past” is motivated by a desire to listen attentively to voices not mired in our intellectual and ideological ruts, to attend to as well as to listen anew to familiar and not-so-familiar Baptist voices. Sensing the “thinness” Robinson names, Freeman calls upon Baptists to receive and live with and in and out of the catholic heritage of the Christian faith while also remaining ever receptive to the Spirit's generative agency to initiate fresh performances of the faith as a community of contestation within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

If Baptists are a small river that feeds into a larger river of Free Churches, and that river feeds into the much larger river of Protestantism, which feeds into the ocean of Christianity, Freeman's diagnosis in part 1 of Contesting Catholicity is that the Baptist river is choked by the silt of modernity as expressed in fundamentalism and liberalism. What he seeks to do is to remove this life-threatening silt so as to renew the “glad river” of Baptist identity, theology, and life so that this living waterway can become healthy and flourish anew by exhibiting the marks of “confessional faith, regulative guidance, ecclesial Christianity, ecumenical communion, and discerning belief” (96).

2. A Free Church stonemason. Prior to becoming Roman Catholic several years ago, theologian and First Things editor Rusty Reno employed the image of staying within the ruins as he wrote about his personal and theological struggles to remain Episcopalian. Through a figural reading of Nehemiah, Reno found a pattern, at the time, that urged him toward an embrace of a ruined Episcopal church:

Many Other Baptists, including myself, have been tempted to flee the ecclesial home of our Christian nurture, yet we have stayed amid its ruins. Perhaps Other Baptists have too long persisted in a state of mourning while surviving in our ecclesial home, believing that “we must suffer its ruins,” as Reno says. Perhaps we have not sufficiently listened to the last part of Reno's sentence: “rebuild the walls.” It's time to rebuild the walls.

Since 2007 I have lived in Georgetown, Kentucky. Georgetown is part of the northern Bluegrass region of the state. Often noted for bourbon whiskey production and its numerous horse farms, the area is also known for its dry stone fences. These fences, many of which date from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, line parts of state and country roads around Georgetown and surrounding cities and counties. There is an art to building and repairing these stone fences.Footnote ³⁶ If a section of a stone fence has collapsed, or if it is leaning, the mason takes that section of the fence down to the ground in order to make the repair.

In the second, longer part of the book, Freeman is rebuilding the fence. He acts like a mason of a dry stone fence, taking Baptist theology down to the ground in order to build it strongly again in and through a memory that puts the Baptist story and Christian tradition to reparative work. This work of a stonemason is evident, for example, in the chapter on believer priesthood. Freeman takes down the weak and failing stones of “a scaled-down version of the unencumbered self of American democratic liberalism” that has been the foundation and footing of modern Baptist interpretations of believer priesthood (195). To rebuild this concept Freeman listens to Dixieland liberal pastor Carlyle Marney, one of his heroes. Like Marney, Freeman recovers the Christological center of faith, building an understanding of believer priesthood, and its implications for conceptualizing ministry, on the solid foundation rock of the Christology of Irenaeus (and Athanasius) and its anthropological and soteriological implications. To this foundation rock Freeman adds as footings the Reformed understanding of Christ's threefold ministry as prophet, priest, and king.

One of the techniques Freeman uses in his reparative work is an understanding of tradition similar to John Thiel's senses of tradition, especially Thiel's understanding of tradition's literal sense and development-in-continuity understood retrospectively.Footnote ³⁷ Freeman does not envision Baptist identity as some fixed set of distinctives, dynamics, or principles independent of the community of believers. Nor does he seek some Baptist ideal or a mere rephrasing of some primordial deposit. Rather, his understanding of tradition and his hermeneutical vision understand a given, literal sense of identity as negotiated as the ecclesia learns to follow a historical pattern embodied in various ecclesial practices. Retrospectively, then, identity is an ever-redefined variation of its literal sense. Baptist identity is not understood as some ossified given; development is not conceived as a betrayal of identity but a condition of its existence. In other words, it is from the present moment that Baptists should look back to their past for a continuity that cannot be surveyed across a finished past but is instead glimpsed in and as identity is practiced. The openness of not only present to past but also future to present marks the ebb and flow of identity's continuity and renewal as expressed by Freeman's vision of Baptists as a pilgrim people of God who participate in God's theodrama and venture toward God's eschatological consummation.

3. Pushing beyond: catholicity, multiplicity, and inclusivity. In chapter 3, Freeman develops what he calls a “generous liberal orthodoxy.” Generous liberal orthodoxy is a theology centered on “a broad consensus within the inclusive parameters that found expression in the ancient ecumenical creeds and focused on the Christological and Trinitarian center of Christian faith” (5). Confessional faith, regulative guidance, ecclesial Christianity, ecumenical communion, and discerning belief, the five dimensions of generous liberal orthodoxy, are signs of contesting catholicity.

I strongly affirm Freeman's concept of generous liberal orthodoxy, and I am sympathetic toward contesting catholicity as an ecclesial mode of being “in which contestation and catholicity are not opposites but are instead complementary and necessary for the church to be the church” (x). Yet I also want to push beyond his understanding of catholicity and generous liberal orthodoxy, particularly in light of Freeman's use of the category of “other” or “otherness.” His “hermeneutical standpoint for contesting catholicity,” especially the manifold openness of its pneumatic register, provides an opening where he could have considered the full embrace of multiplicity and otherness, what has been called polydoxy (309).Footnote ³⁸ And I want to suggest that a generous liberal orthodoxy should be complemented by a generative liberating orthopraxy. I push beyond Freeman on these points because I share his concern that a contesting catholicity is vital to the future of the mission of the church of Jesus Christ.Footnote ³⁹

As a catholic community, the church should be all-embracing in terms of how and to whom it reaches out in its mission, embodying the fullness of the generative effect of Christ's resurrection.Footnote ⁴⁰ Catholicity is a divine gift of freedom for friendship in vulnerability that embraces the otherness of the other. Moreover, in all the diverse ways that “communities of resurrection,” as ecologies of justice and wholeness, strive to embody “the way in which the incalculable variety of human concerns can be ‘at home’ in and with the confession of faith in Jesus,” then the church is both catholic and missionary.Footnote ⁴¹

The vocation to catholicity is the church keeping open and expanding the frontiers and boundaries of the ecclesia as it embodies a generative liberating orthopraxy. A generative liberating orthopraxy is our exultant response to the generous and wounding embrace of humanity by the triune God in the Incarnation, an event that reveals that God's relationality to and with the creature is God choosing a creaturely friend who is different and other. The Incarnation and Pentecost entice the Body of Christ into the complex and shifting planetary entanglements of difference. How we navigate, engage, and attend to such entanglements of difference is a theological and moral concern.

In a world and a church where racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, and many other regimes, practices, and discourses of exclusion are manifestly and subtly operative, the church's vocation to catholicity is to embody imaginatively a reality wherein “all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9) are lavishly welcomed in the friendly household of God where particularity, difference, and variegated giftedness are treasured.Footnote ⁴² Generative liberating orthopraxy employs the logics of “in the round” and of the table, as envisioned by Letty Russell, logics that interrupt the “deafening monotones” of imperialism, empire, and colonialism.Footnote ⁴³ Moved by a Pentecostal imperative to be in the world, the church's vocation of catholicity is an improvisational dynamic of inclusivity, multiplicity, and partisanship invigorated by the foolish wisdom of the enlivening Spirit. The vision of God's friendly, expanding, and transforming embrace of the whole, says Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, is of a “catholicity that speaks with parrhēsia in many tongues and idioms. Consequently it seeks to introduce into hegemonic the*logical discourse the religious experiences and questions of wo/men and other marginalized peoples.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Furthermore, the vocation to catholicity involves the nurture of an ecclesial culture where the status and power of inequalities, gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, and economic, are honestly recognized and prophetically criticized for what they are. “Full catholicity is only possible if and when all without exception have the opportunity to participate in the discourses [and practices] that shape Christian identity and mission.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Hence, I want to suggest that we should envision catholicity as

• • a “theoretical and practical openness” to others that is ecumenical and cosmopolitan;

• • a valorization of “the cultural and religious heritage of the ‘others’ who have been excluded and exploited”; and

• • a solidarity in diversity that is shaped by pneumatological discourses that celebrates the variegated “gifts of divine Wisdom, who creates and sustains global relations” of justice, reconciliation, care, and well-being, and “inspire the realization of a truly cosmopolitan world-church.”Footnote ⁴⁶

All of this should suggest that catholicity is never static but ever dynamic, fluid, constantly being renegotiated; that a generative liberative orthopraxy is a complexifying of and delighting in the capacious catholic imagination of a generous liberal orthodoxy.

Perhaps catholicity can be understood analogously with jazz music. Like jazz, catholicity is a dramatic and musical performance. Like jazz, catholicity exemplifies a dynamic of constraint and possibility. Constrained by the norm of a generous liberal orthodoxy, the church catholic seeks to engage the world creatively as the Body of Christ. In its work and witness, the church catholic also reworks that generous liberal orthodoxy by a generative liberative orthopraxy that takes the one, holy, apostolic, and catholic church in novel and subversive directions, “making new music in new places—together.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In a sense, catholicity is a truth that emerges in praxis; it is produced in concrete, historical struggle.