Discipleship

‘Discipleship’ as it is used in this thesis should be understood as something qualitatively dis- tinct from its commonsense meaning, although this commonsense meaning is itself muddled by a variety of influences. This section will briefly sort through some of the meanings typically ascribed to discipleship, then consider in what way these various meanings find a common core in how discipleship is normally conceived in its relation to theology. Then, in contrast to the core of that normal usage, discipleship as it is intended in this thesis will be defined.

Among pastors and lay leaders, discipleship is a pressing topic of conversation.61 While rarely defining discipleship explicitly, their usage seems to draw from two historical implementations of Christian theology which have become increasingly difficult to separate in current discus- sions. The first historical form which influences current definitions is the monastic tradition

61 _{The discussion which follows in the next few paragraphs about popular definitions of discipleship draws from}

a range of sources. For just a small sample of relatively recent books in which this variety of conceptions of discipleship appears, see David Lowes Watson, Forming Christian Disciples: The Role of Covenant Discipleship and Class Leaders in the Congregation (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1995). Patricia Lamoureux and Paul J. Wadell, The Christian Moral Life: Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010). Greg Ogden, Discipleship Essentials: A Guide to Building Your Life in Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998). Mark Dever, Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016). Bobby William Harrington and Josh Robert Patrick, The Disciple Maker’s Handbook: Seven Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017). Joe Wyrostek, Discipleship Based Churches: How to Create and Maintain a Church of Disciples (Chicago: MPI Publishing, 2012). Bobby Harrington and Alex Absalom, Disci- pleship That Fits: The Five Kinds of Relationships God Uses to Help Us Grow (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016). Bill Hull, The Complete Book of Discipleship: The Handbook to Studying the Bible (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006)

emphasising contemplative and hesychastic practices. For some, discipleship has come to de- scribe an experience of spiritual nearness to God. The obedience of the disciple is found in repeatedly returning to participation in divine presence. The fruit of obedience—and the mark of a disciple—is thus a cognitive, spiritual, and emotional ascent into a purer, more heightened perception of truth.

The second historical form which influences current definitions is what could be called the pietistic tradition in the broadest sense, appearing in diverse forms in 16th century Anabaptism, 17th and 18th century Lutheran pietism, and 19th and 20th century Holiness and Pentecostal movements. With these influences in mind, discipleship for some has come to describe a rig- orous adherence in choice and act to the mandates of divine truth. The obedience of the disciple in these Protestant forms of purification takes a more overtly ethical form, an emphasis on the righteousness of the disciple’s deeds rather than the disciple’s mental or emotional state.

While these two streams are historically distinct, they commonly overlap in much of the current language about discipleship. Christian history has left contemporary usage with a broad defi- nition. The concept is overstuffed. ‘Discipleship’ as it is used today can refer to characteristics of righteousness itself, or to a broad notion of prophetic, incarnational participation, or to pri- vate disciplines for spiritual formation, or to the institutional programs of churches for cate- chetical training and spiritual direction.

For the purposes of this thesis, the current failure to distinguish between various historical influences is noteworthy, but not necessarily problematic. Indeed, the definition of discipleship which will be developed later in this section could be understood as itself a kind of combination of these two streams—a kind of participatory obedience. But the ease with which these two streams are conflated in current discussions is noteworthy because it shows that they have be- come unmoored from some of the specific theological claims with which they were associated, historically. Discipleship is carrying on, even if—from the theologian’s perspective—it is not always anchored as firmly to a theological rationale as the theologian might like.

While discipleship continues to be frequently discussed in churches, it presently carries little weight as a theological term. The place of discipleship in current theological discourse is ac- curately represented by the Dominican theologian Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole in his reflection on Gaudium et Spes. He writes that, “The Christian condition is first of all a gift

received at baptism, but at the same time it is a vocation, a personal work for which no one can substitute for anyone else . . . [it] is both a gift and the great concern of life.”62 Each tradition may well replace baptism with another charism as the inaugural gift of the Christian life, but La Soujeole’s framing represents the assumed epistemological structure of Christian faith, broadly. First, there is the gift—be it revelation, justification, sacramental participation, the baptism of the Spirit—then there is a life lived in response to this gift. Holiness, as La Soujeole points out, is both essential and yet never primary. Discipleship is one facet of sanctification, the progressive unfolding of the Spirit’s work in the Christian’s body. “In remaining faithfully connected to the sources of grace . . . holiness, as a gift of God, begets holiness when accepted, as the human vocation, which is progressively realized.”63

The sequence of gift and response leaves the theologian with two tasks, akin to Tillich’s “two basic needs” of the church which “a theological system is supposed to satisfy.”64 The first is to guard the integrity of the gift, the sources of grace—be they liturgical, confessional, or other- wise—such that the church’s practice and proclamation of these graces retains its connection to the truth. The second is to continue the investigation of the gift in such a way that the truth is further explicated, thereby providing new insights on how Christians should live in their various contexts. The theologian’s task is therefore necessary for ensuring the link between the gift of God’s gracious self-disclosure and any activity which claims to be done in faithfulness to the Christian God. Theology, in this view, becomes the sine qua non of discipleship.

Discipleship, while it often remains unclearly defined in popular discourse, can at least be given a clearer sense in its relation to theology. The contemporary theologian lives within the rela- tively recent distinction between systematic and practical theology. In this distinction, the as- sumption is that discipleship falls firmly on the latter side of the theory-praxis binary. It is taken as a given, as one Methodist bishop has written, “that beliefs shape behavior and practice”65 and so discipleship is widely assumed to be the application of insights reached in more studious reflection. Discipleship is downstream from theology, it is the implication of truth gained from the sources of grace, it is “the ‘so what’ which necessarily follows from the search” for God.66

62 _{Benoȋt-Dominique La Soujeole, “The Universal Call to Holiness,” in Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, eds.}

Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008): 37-53, on p. 40.

63 _{La Soujeole, “Universal Call,” 41, emphasis in original.}

64 _{Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Three volumes in one (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 5.} 65 _{Kenneth L. Carder, Living Our Beliefs: The United Methodist Way (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1989),}

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Thus, while the literature on discipleship proliferates, it presumes that discipleship is entirely a secondary matter, the result of theology. To ask about discipleship as the grounds of theology would then seem to be less a grave error than mere nonsense.

Discipleship, as it is used in this thesis, must be defined by reference to a different starting point. There can be no question that, as Graham Ward puts it, “the language of discipleship is the language of pedagogy.”67 _{Discipleship is instruction which intends to make the disciple’s} entire disposition of thought, emotion, and action more like the teacher’s. But we cannot thereby take for granted that discipleship can simply borrow modern pedagogical notions and strategies. Admitting that discipleship is a kind of pedagogy does not immediately tell us the ‘what’ or ‘how’ of discipleship’s instruction. The nature of the content and the means by which it is conveyed must be defined for us by the nature of discipleship. Thus, discipleship eludes any definition which attempts to abstract from some relation to the thing itself. The one who speaks of discipleship is either walking in the Christian way or not. If not, then the meaning of the word is obscure. But even if so, the very act of defining is only one transitory moment on the way, and so the definition does not capture the nature of being a disciple, but finds itself already caught up in the pedagogical process which the speaker is undergoing.

This makes discipleship at once simple and yet inherently difficult to define. It is difficult to define because it is not principally a creature known through reflection. Its medium is the act of living itself. This makes a definition difficult to state clearly in advance. The very nature of theology’s media as linguistic enterprise, the very nature of this thesis qua text, is only tangen- tially related to the medium of knowledge which discipleship reveals. Discipleship is a life, a way, a walk, and thus not a description of a life, a way, a walk. A clearer picture of what is entailed in this claim will develop as we read Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer. But the claim of this preliminary definition is that the pedagogical nature of discipleship not only re- veals the methods by which knowledge is gained, but reveals the very medium of knowing, and thus the shape and nature of that which results, that which is deserving of the name, ‘knowledge.’

67 _{Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Aca-}

While difficult to define, discipleship is at the same time simple to understand. It was earlier noted that popular descriptions of discipleship continue to develop even as they have become untethered from their historical, theological underpinnings. This is less a phenomenon to be lamented than one to be marveled at. It suggests that discipleship may depend less on a partic- ular set of theological claims than the theologian might assume. For many Christians, disciple- ship is quite easy to define. It is simply the task of obeying the Father by following the Son with the aid of the Spirit.

That this task should be at once simple and unclear cuts to the heart of ‘discipleship’ as it is used in this thesis. Something of its super-linguistic undefinability can be understood by refer- ence to its origin in God’s call, in the “lekh lekha,”68 in “Moses! Moses!”69 and “Saul, Saul,”70 in “I knew you,”71 in “Follow me.”72 The disciple follows God once God begins to lead. This is not to place the epistemic weight of discipleship on a sudden flash of illumination, nor, as we shall see in later chapters, to prioritise the experience of encounter, ecstatic or otherwise. It is to suggest that the call of God to obedience initiates a pedagogical work which is utterly unique and cannot be circumvented. Scripture’s encounter narratives are less about the theo- logical weight of human ecstasy and more about the inseparability of the mode and content of instruction. There is no following of God which does not stand in some immediate relation to God, and conversely, there is no knowing of God which is not already in some respect a fol- lowing. There is no speaking about discipleship which is not already in some relation, positive or negative, to walking as a disciple.

By no means, however, should this be read as a claim that everything entailed in discipleship is self-evident. Nor should this be read as an insistence that discipleship has nothing to do with knowledge or language as we understand it, or that it should be unreflective, or that it doesn’t involve growth and cultivation. It is to say that discipleship resists comprehensive accounts precisely because it is more expansive than our definitions, precisely because our defining falls at some point along discipleship’s way, and thus our attempts to define discipleship are not a map, but rather signposts of our own location. There is little room to say that a comprehensive

68 _{Gen. 12:1} 69 _{Exod. 3:4} 70 _{Acts 9:4} 71 _{Jer. 1:5} 72 _{Luke 5:27}

account of discipleship was obvious even to Christ’s disciples. They were disciples, not schol- ars of discipleship, and so whatever assessment they could make of discipleship’s nature ap- pears both incomplete and somewhat besides the point. Their own walk as disciples had to include this inability to master discipleship, to be confounded as to why being a disciple might include the power to cast out demons,73 _{but not the power to destroy enemies,}74 _{that their ser-} vice to Christ might include at times, being served,75 and at other times, not serving at all,76 that it might lead them to sit unapologetically with Gentiles,77 _{but not at Jesus’ right hand.}78 One senses that the disciples struggled to put into mere words the essence of discipleship for their own disciples, finding it better to be physically present with them.79 The attempt to de- scribe, as an abstraction, the life of a disciple of Christ could only be attempted through ever larger lists of attributes to be sought or avoided, each attribute itself abstract.80 The apostle Paul’s advance into the life of discipleship appears as a journey into a theological language ever more urgently profound and yet ever less capaciously systematic, from master of the law81 to slave of Jesus Christ,82 “carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”83

In most theological models, discipleship is defined as the outworking of ethical, moral, rela- tional, or spiritual principles derived from theological reflection. For the purposes of this thesis, discipleship refers to the activity of faithfulness to God already occurring in diverse Christian churches. Theology is thus what arises from theologising, which itself is only one task among many being carried out by Christians. The difficulty for the scholar of conceiving of action as anything other than a product of decision—and thus as a product of intellectual commitment— is the problem which this inquiry hopes to address. Therefore, a clearer understanding of what is meant here by discipleship will only unfold slowly. It cannot serve as a conceptual a priori, because it is not inherently conceptual. This thesis hypothesizes that it can still, however, serve as an a priori, even if the conceptualising which arises thereafter is different from what we

73 _{Luke 10:17} 74 _{Luke 9:54-55} 75 _{John 13:6} 76 _{Luke 10:40} 77 _{Gal. 2:14} 78 _{Mark 10:40} 79 _{Gal. 4:20, 1 Thess. 2:17}

80 _{Gal. 5:22-23, 2 Pet. 1:5-7, 1 Thess. 4:3-6, Col. 3:5-14} 81 _{Phil. 3:5}

82 _{Rom. 1:1} 83 _{2 Cor. 4:10}

typically assume. It cannot be understood as prologue, as a first word, but as prolegomenon, as the ground from which words about the Christian God can be spoken.