Shifting Ecclesial Leadership (Orthodoxy)

Just as the church in modernity may have valued Paul over Jesus, so the church in modernity also valued a proper orthodoxy over a proper orthopraxy. Ortho means “a right sense of” and doxy means “praise”. Literally orthodoxy means a right sense of praise. However, over time, and especially within the movement of the Enlightenment, the definition of orthodoxy has come to deal with a right sense of thought, and has often been used to define one’s thinking as either right or wrong. The either/or nature of orthodoxy fit well within modernity but does not fit well in post modernity. Leadership must become aware of a more balanced understanding of orthodoxy in our current cultural shift. Similar to what we read in the first century church, this balance includes a host of different “orthodoxies” and includes the different orthodoxies at the table of conversation. The next step in equipping leaders will be to encourage this process through a reclaiming of the drama of the gospel.
The first step to coming to a balanced orthodoxy is recapturing the drama of the
Gospel. Van Hoozer quotes Dorothy Sayers in The Drama of Doctrine,

“The gospel is the greatest drama that has ever been staged… A terrifying drama of which God is both the victim and the hero!”


Since the gospel is dramatic, so ought be our orthodoxies that attempt to articulate this gospel. Modernity raped drama from reality, minimizing knowledge, and therefore orthodoxy, to merely information. The modern hope was that scientific progress would lead us to universal agreement through the use of the same reliable methods. Unfortunately this led to universal rationality, which led to propositionalist theology, which was guilty of dedramatizing Scripture. While information, the pursuit of universal agreement and rationality are not bad, to minimize reality to such nonsense is at best bad, and at worst sinful. Leaders must lead the church away from such a narrow understanding of orthodoxy and back into the drama of the story.
What faith seeks to understand is dramatic and needs to be discovered within the context of community. In modernity, it was popular to seek understanding or “orthodoxy” as an individual, often separated from the community. Leadership must encourage the church into a better balance of seeking understanding, and therefore the dramatic in both personal and communal settings. Those whom follow ecclesial leaders should no longer be seen as passive recipients of information, but as co creators of the orthodoxy of drama. This takes imagination, a scary concept for the modern self, especially within the context of community. However, leaders must help this transition of community imagination in order to articulate orthodoxy to happen. But to what end? VanHoozer reminds us that, “the most accurate measure of faith’s understanding (orthodoxy) is how well we participate.” Our measure of orthodoxy then leads us to encourage a proper balance of orthopraxy (right sense of “participation”) with the community’s orthodoxy.