Dead Orthopraxy

July 31, 2009 Posted by Aaron SnellcloseAuthor: Aaron Snell Name: Aaron Snell
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Orthodoxy and orthopraxy – right doctrine and right practice – tend to live on the opposite ends of the pendulum swing in the historic life of the church.  A reaction against imbalances and failures in one usually leads to an overreaction and over-commitment to the other.

This has often been the case with orthodoxy.  The term “dead orthodoxy” has been used to describe when a church or group has become so enamoured with doctrinal precision that it makes this its ultimate goal, with no living faith to animate it – as Francis Shaeffer put it, a “dull, dusty, introverted orthodoxy given only to pounding out the well-known clichés.”  It is “dead” because it lacks the vitality of a faith to live out its right teaching.  Granted, the term has become a bit of a catch phrase and can often be used as a straw man to bash the established doctrinal tradition, but it is a valid warning nonetheless to those of us who strive for such doctrinal precision and fidelity.

Of course, the usual reaction to a “dead orthodoxy” misses the real need – doctrine is not the problem, but rather a lack of true understanding (epignosis, as Paul would say) of the doctrine that brings it into practice in the life of the believer and the church.  Orthopraxy is not less important than orthodoxy, but it is downstream of it.  In other words, right practice – doing what is right – flows from right doctrine, and not the other way around.  But if someone feels that their church is obsessed with sound doctrine, yet they don’t feel loved, they seem most likely to de-emphasize or flat out dump the doctrine and focus on the experiential.

This is the pendulum swing I mentioned earlier, and it is wrong.  The liberals did it a century ago, the Jesus movement did as well to some extent in the 60s and 70s, and the emerging church is doing it today.  Church history is littered with examples of this phenomenon, and in all cases, regardless of how well intentioned, the tendency to over-react and swing too far away from orthodoxy, rather that just swing towards orthopraxy, is too great for us to ever really avoid the problem.

This point has been noted by others, and written about at length.  However, there is another facet of the tension that I’d like to bring out.  It’s not often that I coin a term, but I think I’m doing so now:

Dead orthopraxy.

What I mean by that is this: just as orthodoxy is dead without the necessary wholehearted fleshing-out in the lives of the believers, so orthopraxy is dead without a grounding in orthodoxy.  Just as it is a living faith that animates sound doctrine, so it is sound doctrine that gives true life to right living.  An orthopraxy without true doctrine at its core is dead – dead to God, without spiritual life, the works of a people in rebellion that amount to filthy rags.

Once you have left behind orthodoxy in your pursuit of “living in the way of Jesus,” my friends in the “emergent conversation,” you have embraced a dead orthopraxy.  Such a praxis can be just as brittle and lifeless, in its own way, as a dead orthodoxy.  The way to escape “cold doctrine” is to rediscover just how white-hot orthodoxy is.

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Posted in Aaron's Posts, Emerging / Emergent Church, Religion (General)