The Paul/Barnabas duo is more apropos to the ethos/logos/pathos layered RCA situation, especially if Barnabas is indeed the author of the letter to the Hebrews.

It’s true that the council of Jerusalem was decisive in that persons need not become Jews to be followers of the Way. However, I fear a bit of moving away from the Jewish roots to the Greek (shades of Harnack here?). That lends itself to the gnosticizing tendencies already too prevelant. It is the Messiah of the Jews, after all, whom we worship (albeit God’s Messiah and hence it breaks out of Judaism).

My second wondering has to do with the romantic history of the early church. Robin Fox and others have shown that Christianity didn’t burst with people those first years. In fact, archeological evidence has shown that the synagogues remained much larger than the churches those early centuries. The explosion in the church came with Constantine. Now isn’t that ironic?

The narratives we carry…

I agree with you about the limits to the usefulness of this Jerusalem-Antioch motif. Yet I am willing (as I think you are) to hear Wes as deploying it for a specific and limited rhetorical purpose. (I think this was his intent.) That purpose entails certain assumptions, some of which I can accept, others which I cannot.

The rhetorical purpose appears to be this: positively, to encourage us to be open to those who want to join us but who are not like us, and, negatively, to stop being so stuck on our constitutional inheritance that we cannot accept the contributions of those who come from outside. The motif is deployed to challenge us to question whether we are making certain requirements peculiar to our tradition of greater importance than the gospel, akin to the question of whether the 1st century Antiochenes must practice the entire Torah, including circumcision.

That, I believe, was the particular rhetorical purpose of Wes’s use of the motif. I hope that I have described it accurately and fairly. As I said, this purpose seems to be based on some assumptions. A few are unobjectionable. We do get stuck, as do those in any tradition, and tend to make more of things than we ought. We sometimes focus on the short term rather than the long story.

Some assumptions I can’t readily accept. The motif and its deployment seem to be based on an expectation that the future of the RCA depends on how we answer this question. That may be true, but my problem is that it isn’t clear to me what that question is!

Another assumption: that there is one tradition of relevance in our relations with the creative, new church leaders coming to us from outside, and that is the tradition of our standards for ministry. But there are many traditions at play in this situation, just as there are many that vie for dominance in the RCA. And those traditions have their blind spots, too.

To put this in a very different way, I believe that other city-dialectics are likewise instructive for elucidating the state of the RCA, and of Christianity in contemporary America. Jerusalem-Athens (faith and reason) is an obvious one. There are some new ones we could describe, such as Emmaus and Demascus (different patterns of coming to faith).

At the few Synods I’ve attended, I have been disappointed when, so often, a recommendation will have little discussion, and nothing offered against the motion, and yet the vote tally will show that some fifty-odd people voted “No.” I find this sad. I wonder what their reasons were for voting as they did, what they had against the recommendation. There is no opportunity for me, and the rest in attendance, to learn from them. Shouldn’t at least one of them have said why they disagreed with the recommendation? A “symbolic stance” has little meaning if no one is told what is symbolized.

James, you and I are known for our willingness to speak at Synod. Some wish we’d shut up. I think most, however, are grateful for our willingness to help the Synod in that fashion.