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The Church as
Ark of Salvation
by
Joe R. Jones
[This essay is written for a seminar on this topic at Community
Christian Church in Richardson, Texas on February 22, 2004. Posted here
on 1/24/04. Numbered endnotes in separate
document.]
This paper is guided by two undergirding presuppositions.
The first presupposition is that the right context for Christian theology
is the church itself, with its given discourses and practices. It is here
that Christian theological reflection has its anchor and defining context.
This means that ecclesiology—the doctrine of the church—is
itself fundamental to any theological project. I propose the following
theological definition of the church as a guide to our further reflections
in this paper:
The church is that liberative and redemptive
community of persons
called into being
by the Gospel of Jesus Christ
through the Holy Spirit
to witness in word and deed
to the living triune God
for the benefit of the world
to the glory of God (1)
The second presupposition of this paper is that the church itself, in
its discourses and practices, is in wild disarray today in North America
concerning what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ. Not only is
my definition of the church intended to guide us through the morass of
confusion about the church today, but the whole of this paper will hopefully
clarify some of the issues surrounding the identity and necessity of the
church for the living of the Christian life. It is not uncommon in our
American culture these days to say, both from within the church and beyond
the church, that a person can be a good Christian, or at least authentically
‘religious,’ without any involvement in the life of the church.
That conviction can be quite misleading about the connection between the
church and the Christian life, and I intend to critique and dismantle
that conviction.
Here at the outset of this paper, I propose that we should not assume
that every group that calls itself the church of Jesus Christ is in actuality
the church that is embodied in the definition I have just stated. While
admitting that the church itself often lives amidst brokenness and disagreement
within itself, I am weary of being called upon to defend—or even
interpret—the discourses and practices of some groups that claim
to be the church. Some groups are so profoundly antithetical to what I
understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be and how the church is called
into being by that Gospel, that I am ready to raise the question of their
heretical status. I will not directly address the question of how we decide
matters of orthodoxy and heresy, but I do contend that any ecclesiology
that is incapacitated from discussing these matters is hardly an ecclesiology
that could be called ‘Christian.’ [See GCF, 33-42, 645-58]
I am more than a little worried that the tradition in which I stand—the
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—is so wishy-washy on issues
of heresy that it allows its discourses and practices to be skewed by
theological commitments that are deleterious to a faithful and truthful
witness to the Gospel. Sometimes it seems that the real center of its
‘theology’ is the dogma that we are a church in which anyone
can believe anything he or she pleases and that any diversity is a welcome
participant in the church’s life and witness. For a church tradition
that seems hesitant about ‘doctrine,’ that dogma of free belief
and diversity is rather paradoxical in its occupying so central a place
in the discourses and practices of Disciples. (2)
I am proposing, then, that by discussing the topic of the church as ark
of salvation we will be plunging into and hopefully clarifying some aspects
of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ and how such a church
might talk about human salvation. I will proceed according to this outline.
First, I will construct a traditional model of the church as the ark of
salvation, outside of which there is no salvation. Second, I will construct
a model of the liberal church, that thinks of itself as in serious disagreement
with the traditional model. Third, I will then construct a revised model
of the church as ark of salvation that critiques some aspects of both
the traditional model and the liberal model. It is this revised model
that I am proposing to the church as a way of reclaiming its distinctive
identity and mission.
A Traditional Model of the Church as Ark of Salvation
It was a common conviction of the church in its first centuries that there
was no salvation outside the church: extra ecclesiam nulla salus.(3)
This is vividly expressed in the image of the church as the ark of salvation,
harkening back to Noah’s ark. Relative to Noah’s ark, we find
a reference joining the ark to salvation in 1 Peter 3.18-21:
"For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for
the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in
the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which he also went and made
proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey,
when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of
the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.
And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you…through the resurrection
of Jesus Christ…"
Just as Noah’s ark saved the eight persons from drowning and death
during the flood, so too baptism by the church saves one from the perils
and destiny of sin. Cyprian, a third century bishop, citing this passage
in First Peter, said: “In saying this, he [viz. Peter] proves with
his testimony that the one ark of Noah was a type of the one church.”(4)
This facilitates Cyprian saying later, “…there is no salvation
outside the Church…” [salus extra ecclesiam non est].(5)
The clear implication of this interpretation of the church is that only
the members of the church are or will be saved, wherein one becomes a
member of the church, as the body of Christ, through baptism.
This image of the church as ark of salvation retains a firm grip on the
doctrines of ecclesiology and soteriology—the doctrine of salvation—throughout
much of the church’s history. It plays into what Avery Dulles calls
the “institutional” model of the church in which the emphasis
falls on the priesthood and episcopacy and definitive sacramental practices
that determine what counts as church and how one comes to be a member
of the church and by virtue of that becomes a recipient of salvation.(6)
As an institutional society, it is important that the church is an identifiable
and distinct society in the midst of the many other societies, both large
and small, that make up the human world. There should be no obscurity
as to whether some group is truly the church of Jesus Christ, for if there
is, then persons will be confused as to the group to which they must belong
in order to enjoy the gracious and saving benefits of Christ’s life,
death, and resurrection. Not every group that might claim to be the church
of Jesus Christ is in fact that church that is the ark of salvation. Hence,
the visibility of the church becomes the focus of this
model. The church-visible exists where certain identifiable discourses
and practices take place in public view.
The Roman Catholic Church has been most insistent on an ecclesiology that
pivots around this institutional model. In its harshest moments, we can
see that there really is no salvation outside of the church: the church
is itself the necessary means of grace by virtue of which salvation is
conferred. Hence, outside the church these means of grace—such
as baptism, Eucharist, truthful teachings based on God’s revelation—are
simply not available. Those who are without these means are thereby also
without the saving grace of God. Indeed at Vatican I Council in 1870 it
was declared that “It is an article of faith that outside the Church
no one can be saved…Who is not in this ark will perish in the flood.”(7)
There are ways to soften this understanding of the church, and Vatican
II strives mightily to open possibilities of salvation to those who are
visibly outside the boundaries of the church.(8) One can, for example,
distinguish with Augustine between the church-visible and the church-invisible.
While the church, even at least in its invisibility, is necessary for
salvation and outside of which no salvation occurs, membership in the
church-visible does not guarantee ultimate salvation. The visible church
can include both wheat and tares, a mixture of the good and the bad, which
will be sorted out in God’s consummating and ultimate judgment.
The difficult question is whether the invisible church includes more than
those who are members of the visible church. If it does not so include
others, then the visible church is a necessary means of salvation, even
if it is not a sufficient means. If it does include others outside the
visible church, then membership in the visible church is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition for being saved.(9)
At the heart of this traditional understanding of the church as ark of
salvation stand some basic theological convictions that should be noted.
First, the church itself is founded in and by God’s self-revelation
in Israel and in Jesus Christ. It is in the church that humans are taught
who God is. This leads to the second conviction, namely, that God is triune
as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Third, it is in the church that humans
learn about the depths of their sin and the grace of God to overcome that
sin. Without God’s revelation humans might not know that they are
sinful and will not know how that sin can be defeated. Fourth, the church
is the bearer of the knowledge of God as triune, the knowledge of human
creatureliness and sin, and knowledge of the means of grace to overcome
sin and its destiny-determining consequences.
Fifth, the church has basic theological convictions about salvation. While
there are many uses of salvation language in the Bible and tradition,
the most fundamental sense is that salvation stands in contrast to the
condition of sin and the consequences of sin. Essentially sin is rebellion
against the rule of God, and its consequences include humans being alienated
from their own created nature, alienated from God, and alienated from
other humans. One consequence of sin is that humans are propelled into
a destiny of conflict and alienation in this life and a destiny of death
and hell in the next life as the just deserts of sin.
Salvation, then, refers to deliverance from these destiny-determining
consequences, and this deliverance is available by the grace of God acting
in Christ and in the founding of the church. Salvation, however, includes
two different but related spheres of actuality: the being saved in this
temporal life and the being saved to eternal life as life-beyond-death.
The church carries the keys to being saved in this life as its discourses
and practices are the means of grace that can transform human life now,
or at least begin the process of transformation.
In this traditional grammar(10), it is assumed that there is an intrinsic
and necessary connection between how life is lived now in the context
of the church and the life-beyond-death. The further assumption is that
there is a dual destiny: a destiny of the saved and a
destiny of the damned. The church is the necessary means of grace by virtue
of which a person gains the destiny of being-saved. For the sake of some
linguistic consistency, I propose that we label the temporal process by
which God’s grace transforms human lives in the church as historic
redemption. The blessed life-beyond-death we will label ultimate
redemption. In this context, then, the model of the church as
ark of salvation asserts that the church is the necessary condition for
achieving both historic redemption and ultimate redemption.
Before leaving this model, I must underscore that this model emphasizes
the respects in which the church is a unique social group, with a distinct
and visible identity in differentiation from other social groups in the
world. Hence, it is important that we are able to identify just what the
marks or criteria are for identifying the church. If this cannot be done,
then Christians and the world will be confused about the unity,
the holiness, the catholicity, and apostolicity
of the church. These are the traditional ‘marks’ of the church,
even though it may not always be clear just which ‘Christian’
group possesses these marks.(11)
While there are many nuances that can be made to this model of church
and salvation, I hope I have identified the grammar of its basic convictions
and practices. We will now examine a modern model of church and salvation
that I will label ‘a liberal model of church and salvation.’
A Liberal Model of Church and Salvation
While I have relied on some Roman Catholic texts to get us started on
a traditional model of the church as ark of salvation, this liberal model
is so widespread and so deep in the habits of mind and heart of Protestant
America that I am not interested in trying to document exhaustively just
who advocates this model. Its advocacy is all around us and perhaps in
us. I surely grant the word ‘liberal’ has many other uses
than the way I am using it here. There are folk in the church who would
call themselves ‘liberal’ but would not concede to all the
points I will attribute to this model. But notice, I am saying “A”
liberal model, and thereby I allow that there might be other models of
church and salvation that might claim the title ‘liberal.’(12)
Before elaborating the particulars of this model, I can specify two of
its basic assumptions. First, it assumes that the traditional model of
the church as the unique ark of salvation is almost completely misleading
about the true nature and mission of the church and the nature of salvation.
Second, it assumes that the church functions best under the conditions
of liberal democratic theoretical discourses and practices. It should
be obvious that this model of church and salvation has arisen primarily
in the West as it has existed under the influence of theories of the function
of religious language and the nature of moral and political discourse
as rational enterprises developed by the Enlightenment philosophies of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Let us look first at the reinterpretation of the primary discourses of
the church. Instead of seeing those discourses pivoting around truth-claims
thought to be grounded in divine revelation, this liberal model sees the
discourses as ‘religious language’ participating in a universal
form of human understanding and practice. George Lindbeck has called this
reinterpretation the “experiential-expressive” understanding
of religious discourse.(13) The proposal is that all religions are rooted
in a common core experience of the divine that is pre-linguistic and comes
to expression in symbolic language. As symbolic language, a particular
religion employs a range of images to express itself in ways conducive
to social cohesion. As symbolic, religious language is not reducible to
literal language. Literal language repeatedly misses the symbolic meaning
of religious language and its deep resonance in the experiential and existential
lives of persons.
It is in this context of understanding that we often hear folk say, “I
do not read the Bible literally.”(14) Apparently they read it symbolically,
and especially when the symbolic rendering matches some of the putative
universal themes of human literature about life and death. The odd point
about this theory of religion is that in practice a religion will spend
much time trying to interpret the symbols of its life, which means translating
the symbols into other nonsymbolic language.(15)
Let us consider a couple of examples of this sort of liberal interpretation
of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The cross, while it happened to
Jesus, is a symbol for Christians of the crucifying powers of the world
that often brutally defeat and kill good and righteous people. The resurrection
of Jesus is not really about something that happened to Jesus himself,
rather it is a symbol of how the divine is always inviting folk to start
over after an apparent defeat, to not give up in the face of one’s
own culpable, destructive living but realize that tomorrow one can turn
around and live differently. In calling these symbols, we are affirming
that the meaning complexes of the symbols are universal in scope, even
if a symbol arises in the context of the life and death of Jesus. The
symbols, in independence of any particular beliefs about Jesus, express
something universally available to any individual, and therein lies the
real religious significance of that sort of language.
Consider also the word “God,’ which we are implored to regard
as a symbol for that which is ultimate, unconditioned, or divine. By appealing
to a common core experience of the divine, this model proposes that in
some sense everyone already has a intuitive sense for what the divine
is and therefore to what the word ‘God’ refers. The various
religions, in their symbolic language about the divine, might have different
and even disagreeable ways of talking, but these differences are not decisive.
We are still entitled to say we all worship the same God, and we will
thereby relativize and diminish the significance of the differences.
As a comprehensive way of understanding Christian discourse and the church
we can appreciate that this model construes the Christian church as one
among many religions of the world but not particularly more truthful or
grounded in a more authoritative revelation than any of the other religions.
Christians just happen to be Christians by historical accident of location
and inheritance—but confirmed by personal decision—and, if
they do not literalize the discourses of the church, can get along just
fine in this modern or postmodern world.
This view fits nicely with the other presupposition of the liberal model,
namely, that liberal democratic political theory and practice are the
contextual givens—even the intrinsic desiderata—of the church’s
life. Before unraveling these, I must admit that contemporary American
political discourse is so rife with disputes about ‘religion and
politics,’ ‘the separation of church and state,’ and
‘keep God out of politics,’ that I cannot hope to sort through
and untangle these conceptual knots in this paper. I can say that I have
admired the work of Stanley Hauerwas, who has over three decades challenged
the easy assumptions and alliances between the mainline churches and liberal
democratic political theory. (16)
When I speak of ‘liberal democratic political theory,’ I do
not mean the Democratic party as liberal in opposition to the Republican
party as conservative. Rather, I am referring to those foundational beliefs
that seem to undergird contemporary political theory and practice, whether
it is Democratic or Republican. The following beliefs are what I have
in mind as this political theory and its associated practices. First,
human beings are autonomous persons equipped with reason in terms of which
they morally should govern their lives by universal ethical principles
grounded in rational self-interest. Only if a person stands in rational
critique of all traditions and authorities will she be able to understand
her rational autonomy and thereby be equipped to deal rationally and morally
with other persons. Second, such autonomous persons’ rational self-interest
compels them to enter into political covenants with other autonomous persons
in which universal moral principles will apply. This rational covenant
will confer rights and responsibilities on all who enter it and maintain
it, and such necessarily will issue into democratic laws and procedures
for the civic body. Third, religion may provide some emotional and cultural
support for the engagement in public politics aimed at governing and ordering
the civic community, but no distinctively religious argument is acceptable
in the arena of public politics. Consequently, religious beliefs are ‘private’
matters, and it is open to each autonomous person to be or not to be religious
in anyway he or she desires. Fourth, no vision of human good and flourishing
is to be allowed to occupy the center of political discourse and practice.
There can be a plurality of religious and metaphysical views of human
life, but the fulcrum of democratic politics is the freedom of autonomous
individuals to make up their own minds so long as they do not publicly
subvert the principles of rational morality. It is precisely here that
the liberal church can embrace the notion that America’s public
polity and ethics should remain steadfastly ‘secular’ in distinction
from favoring any particular religious view.
When these principles get transported into the discourses and practices
of Christian churches, and when they are combined with a symbolic understanding
of Christian discourse, we can see why the church becomes a dispensable
community, why persons easily think they can be Christian—if they
want to be—without any affiliation with a Christian community, why
salvation itself gets translated into ‘whatever an individual finds
meaningful for herself,’ and why a traditional understanding of
sin and its consequences gets dropped from the discourse of the church—or
simply interpreted as ‘whatever impedes or frustrates my self-determined
self-fulfillment.’ For this model of church, then, the whole of
Christian faith gets translated into either individual satisfaction or
into what is defensible morally in rational public discourse.
Let us now put the implications—and the actual practices—of
this model of church and salvation in contrast to the model of the church
as ark of salvation. 1) The church is not a unique community, founded
in divine revelation and necessary for salvation. Rather, the church is
itself only one among many religious possibilities. Among religions there
is not much sense to the distinction between the true and the false. 2)
The liberal church is designed for a liberal political society in which
there is a marketplace of religions and ideas, and the autonomous individual
is encouraged to shop around to find that religion that is most suitable
to his predilections. 3) The discourses and practices of any religion
are expected to not violate the universal rational principles of morality
that are the linchpins of a democratic society. 4) The liberal church,
therefore, can minister to those persons who want to be consumers of religion.
However, whatever critique it might undertake of American culture and/or
governmental policies must be in accordance with rationally defensible
moral principles, such as justice. 5) It can now be easily seen that the
liberal church will construct its fundamental mission in terms of underwriting
liberal democracy as the best hope for managing the future of humanity
in rational and just ways. By so underwriting liberal democracy, the church
will protect its own private and preferential symbolic discourses and
practices from government interference. 6) Hence, the ethics of the liberal
church becomes indistinguishable from the ethics of liberal democratic
theory and practice. 7) Furthermore, this model of church neutralizes
the apparent conflict among religions, reducing them all to preferential
and experiential discourses that are humanly helpful and should not lead
to violence or conflict or arrogant claims to possess ‘absolute
truth.’
As should be obvious, this model sharply collides with the model of the
church as ark of salvation. 1) The church is only accidentally unique
as that community that shares certain symbols and practices. It is not
unique as the bearer of salvation, as there are many other communities
and religions that might be bearers of salvation. 2) The church itself
is not necessary to human fulfillment and meaning; anyone can mold together
a personal recipe of diverse religious symbols without being a member
of the church. 3) The primary sense of salvation refers to those processes
in human life and history in which persons are being liberated from social
oppression, whether that oppression is brought about by socio-economic
powers or by personal enslavements and incapacities. Hence, freedom and
self-realization, as being free from unjustified oppression, is the basic
salvific aim of the church’s life. 4) Salvation as ultimate redemption
in life beyond death is a permissible but not an essential belief. It
is in the living moment now that folk either do or do not find life meaningful
and good or at least endurable.
Whether or not anyone of the readers or hearers of this paper would identify
with all the points I have attributed to this model, I propose that the
constellation of ideas and practices that comprise this model are deeply
influential within the actual discourses and practices of the mainline
churches in America.
A Revised Model of Church as Ark of Salvation
The revision of the traditional mode of the church as ark of salvation
that I am proposing is similar to that view sometimes called ‘postliberal.’
The concept of postliberal is generally associated with George Lindbeck
(18) and his colleague at Yale, Hans Frei (19). I deliberately refrained
from using the word ‘postliberal’ to describe the position
I developed in my recent systematic theology. While I have learned much
from Frei and Lindbeck, I am not a whole-hearted follower of either, and
therefore I did not want, in my systematic theology, to be saddled with
having to explicate and defend their positions. It seemed less complicated
to avoid the term and proceed on to discuss theological issues without
the burden of that label. The explication of this revised model is my
own construction, and I do not assume any responsibility for having accurately
interpreted Frei and Lindbeck.
While I develop the concept of ‘grammar of discourses and practices’
a bit differently than Lindbeck, I do agree with his basic point that
Christian faith and the church are more appropriately understood as a
distinct “cultural-linguistic” social reality in the midst
of many other social realities.(20) I affirm that the church only exists
within its own distinctive discourses and practices, and when these are
in disarray or become neglected or are repudiated, then the church itself
falls into brokenness and unfaithfulness.
Further, I am affirming that the church should be moving beyond its liberal
phase, which has dominated much of its intellectual life for two centuries,
into a new phase that avoids some of the pitfalls of the traditional model
of the church and salvation and that positively appreciates some of the
contributions of the liberal model. I am proposing that the church move
beyond liberalism and pursue a revised traditional ecclesiology
that might recover for us the truth of the claim that the church is the
ark of salvation. What I develop in miniature in this section takes two
volumes to develop more fully in my Grammar. However, I am convinced that
the wholeness of those two volumes require an understanding of the church
as ark of salvation, even though I will recommend some emendations in
what we might mean by salvation and how it is conferred.
Consider now the following theses about language that bring together my
discussion of language, as comprised of discourses and practices, in the
Grammar [17-18]:(21)
1. The uses of words and locutions to make sense are embedded in traditions
of usage. We can’t speak language without some community of
users bound together through social conventions and rules of practice.
These communal practices may be stretched, revised, or flouted, but they
cannot be completely omitted and still make sense. Note: making sense
is a communal activity as well as an individual activity.
2. Language has to be learned and such learning involves learning
skills in using words in social settings and communal games. Mastering
signs is learning how to use the requisite words in determinate social
settings, to be able to engage in particular social practices. Mastering
signs is like learning how to use tools for making sense in life, for
working intelligibly in one’s life in the world. Think, for example,
of learning how to sing praises to God.
3. Language provides the structure of our experience, understanding,
and perspectives. We experience the world and have a world in and
through language, through signs, speech acts, and practices. Our discourses
and practices are how we have a world, or worlds.
4. In learning particular language networks, we are learning the discourses
and practices that comprise having the world in that way. Think of
learning the language of physics: one sees and understands the
world differently, and one acquires skills in investigating and explaining
the world. What we are empowered to see, discern, and describe is dependent
on the language we possess.
5. The limits of our language are in some ways the limits of our understanding
and therefore of our world.
6. Language is thus a human construct and construal. It is produced
by human interactions, agreements, and social practices. Hence, words
do not have eternal and necessary meanings independent of their locations
and usages in human communities and traditions.
7. It is only within some language that we can test our construal
of the world: we cannot completely abandon and step outside all language
and look simply at the world.
8. Our humanity is shaped by our language and the communities of discourses
and practices in which we participate. Our living discourses and
practices shape human self-understanding.
9. The description of the grammar of language is a description of
how language makes sense in its syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions.
The depth grammar of a particular set of linguistic practices
will show how these dimensions of language hang together to make sense.
For example, the depth grammar of trinitarian talk will show how embedded
such talk is in self-involving, communal practices of identifying, praising,
and witnessing to God in the church.
10. Learning how to experience Christian faith is learning how to
construe the world and oneself through the discourses and practices of
the church with its peculiar language, its peculiar ways of being-in-the-world
and having-a-world.
From these theses you can understand why I worry about the church’s
discourses and practices in these times. The American culture, as a culture
that is clearly dependent on many aspects of Christian tradition, uses
many of the words of Christian tradition, such as, ‘church,’
‘sin,’ ‘grace,’ ‘Jesus is Lord and Savior,’
without any sense for the distinctive Christian usage that is intended
to shape human life and understanding. Even some folk ostensibly in the
church no longer use distinctive Christian language to shape their lives.
While mouthing the Christian words on repeated occasions, they are concretely
shaped by the many discourses and practices of their larger culture. Or,
as I have said on other occasions, they do not inhabit
the discourses and practices of Christian faith. This tension between
the discourses and practices of the church and those of the world is inherent
in being the church.(22)
In line with these theses about the inescapability of discourses and practices
in actual human living, the central proposals for my understanding of
the church are: 1) The church is necessarily a distinctive language rooted
in the traditions of usage that go back to the Bible and come over the
centuries through the discourses and practices that are handed on by the
church. 2) To be a Christian is to learn how to be a
Christian by learning how to construe the world in and through the discourses
and practices of the church. 3) Since these discourses and practices do
convey the faith of the church, they are themselves the means
of grace by virtue of which Christian understanding and life
have content and vitality. 4) Outside these discourses and practices a
person simply does not have the means by which to understand himself and
God in ways that are salvific. It is in this sense that the church is
the ark of salvation, outside of which folk simply do not have salvation
because they do not know who God is and what God has done for the salvation
of the world. 5) However, in line with some of the primary doctrines of
the church, I will propose a revised way of understanding salvation. 6)
It is almost as if folk in our time in America have forgotten how to say
and mean, and thereby occupy, the distinctive discourses and practices
of Christian faith.
In short, I will be proposing some normative understandings of Christian
faith, which are surely arguable; but I will not be able in this paper
to display all the justifications that others in the church might require.
I will start with the normative claims by recalling and explicating my
opening definition of the church:
The church is that liberative and redemptive
community of persons
called into being
by the gospel of Jesus Christ
through the Holy spirit
to witness in word and deed
to the living triune God
for the benefit of the world
to the glory of God.
By identifying the church as liberative and redemptive
I am immediately saying the church has to do with human salvation. This,
of course, poses the question of what ‘salvation’ means here.
Earlier in this paper I proposed that most of the salvation language in
the Bible and traditions pivots around a contrast between what
one is saved from and what one is saved to.
At the heart of this contrast is sin: one is saved from sin and its consequences
and is saved to a life and destiny not determined by sin.
The root of all the forms of sin is human unbelief: the
practical refusal to live obediently before God. This primitive unbelief
issues into sin as pride: living a life in which the
self is the center of all valuing and seeks to have life on its own terms;
into sin as sloth: the refusal to be a responsible self
before God and the inclination to permit the powers of the world to tell
us who we are and what we are worth; into sin as concupiscence:
a life of disordered desires driven to and fro by a quest to find fulfillment
and satisfaction, yet not understanding that God should be the supreme
desire of human life; into sin as falsehood and lies:
a life given to lies about others and one’s situation in the world
and to self-deception and its attendant falsehoods.
The consequences of sin are that human life is corrupted and lost, in
alienation from God, from one’s own created nature, and in alienation
from one’s neighbor and enemies. This corruption of life falls into
envy, suspicion, anger, hatred, and much violence, culminating in a dominating
fear of death. These corruptions also corrupt human societies, and they
too suffer from and perpetuate human sinning, resulting in terrible rivalry,
fear of the strange others—the stranger and the enemies—and
perpetual violence. [See GCF, 343-364]
But all this language about sin is unavailable to us without understanding
who God is and who God is in Jesus Christ. [See GCF, 345-352] The judgment
of God—as we shall see in Jesus Christ—is that sin and its
consequences, which include both our sinning and our being sinned against
by others, is that sort of life that cannot of itself achieve human flourishing
and well-being. God says ‘no’ to sin as that which leads only
to the kingdom of death and death-dealing and therefore to no-life. Hence,
left to our own sinful living and therefore to our own devices and stratagems,
human life leads only to alienation, conflict, enmity, defeat, despair,
and death.
The church, therefore, is a community of persons that
is involved in the salvation of human beings from their own sinful living
and its consequences for their destiny. The church is a community of persons,
and this is not some vague social group. It is a community of persons,
living in formative interaction with each other. I cannot emphasize too
much that the church is not an abstract ideal but is a community of persons
who live, think, converse, and act together in the actual formation of
how they live in the world. There is a social physicality and concrete
interaction that is essential to the church. The church is a visible social
body always located somewhere and involving specific persons in interaction
with each other.
But even more importantly, it is a community of persons called
into being by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When we place an emphasis
on the church as called by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we are immediately
denying that the church is primarily a voluntary society of folk who have
similar interests and who get together to pursue those interests. It should
also be obvious that the church is not a community formed by the free
choices of autonomous individuals who regard the church as in their rational
self-interest. Rather, the church is called or summoned into existence
by the Gospel. It is comprised of folk who have heard something from God
in Christ and are pulled into the community in the midst of their sinful
brokenness as a matter of life and death. Persons may indeed saunter in
and take up a place in the community of the church, but they only truly
enter the vitalities of the church through the passion of baptism. Without
the baptism and passionate confession of faith, persons, who may interact
with the community from time to time but in avoidance of baptism, are
tempted to become spectators rather than believers.
Over the years of teaching in seminaries, I have repeatedly asked my students
in theology to tell me in a short form just what they think the Gospel
is. It is a chastening and necessary exercise and experience for the students,
for they have presumably come to seminary because they think there is
an actual Gospel revealed by God. While it is everywhere evident in the
NT that there is some good news that calls the church into existence,
the church sometimes becomes forgetful as to what that good news is. When
that happens, the church forgets what its founding calling is. Similarly,
if the church—in its denominational form or in its particular congregational
form—does not have a shared sense for what the Gospel is, then it
follows logically and practically that the church will find its actual
discourses and practices in disarray. This disarray will result in confusion
about its own identity and mission. Put another way, when the actual discourses
and practices of the church make it conceptually and practically impossible
to determine and discern heretical understandings of the Gospel, then
the church falls easily into allowing whatever whim of the moment to occupy
the center of its life.
This does raise, then, the question of what that Gospel is. Because its
very heart and health are at stake, I believe that every generation of
the church must struggle to identify and state clearly just what it regards
as the Gospel that is basic to the church’s identity and mission.
The church is that community that sustains a continuing conversation within
itself and in relation to Scripture and traditions concerning the Gospel.
It is useless, however, for a congregation to construct a mission statement
when there is no shared consensus as to what the Gospel is that calls
it into existence. Such an exercise in finding a mission will only reveal
the sad extent to which that congregation has lost its identity and is
trying to find some way to pretend its fragile life together is really
meaningful and perhaps Christian.
A critical question that the church must solve in formulating its understanding
of the Gospel is whether a) Jesus is merely the bearer
of the Gospel but is not essential to its content, or b) Jesus is essential
to the content of the Gospel and it cannot be truthfully articulated without
affirming that he is not only the bearer but also the constitutive
heart of the Gospel. I will argue that Jesus is essential to
the Gospel, and I judge that the liberal model of church would contend
that the Gospel is independent of Jesus. Hence, it is important in my
ecclesiology that ‘Gospel’ always means ‘Gospel of Jesus
Christ.’
In my Grammar I propose the following statement of the Gospel:
[See GCF, 27]
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News
that the God of Israel, the Creator of all creatures,
has in freedom and love become incarnate
in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
to enact and reveal God’s gracious reconciliation
of humanity to Godself, and
through the Holy Spirit calls and empowers human beings
to participate in God’s liberative and redemptive work by
acknowledging God’s gracious forgiveness in Jesus,
repenting of human sin,
receiving the gift of freedom, and
embracing authentic community by
loving the neighbor and the enemy,
caring for the whole creation, and
hoping for the final triumph of God’s grace
as the triune Ultimate Companion of all creatures.
Notice that this statement of the Gospel almost has a creedal character
to it as it aims to identify for us just what truly constitutes the essential
good news that calls the church into being from its very beginnings in
time. Further, notice that there are two outstanding and decisive historical
particularities in the statement: Israel and Jesus of Nazareth.
These two particularities, God’s electing and covenanting with the
people of Israel over a period of time in human history and God’s
becoming incarnate in a Palestinian Jew who lived at a particular time
in history, are the pivotal concepts of the Gospel. These particularities
are not accidents of history that provide a mix for good symbols; these
particularities are at the heart of the Gospel, and without them there
is no distinctively Christian Gospel.
It is in this sense that we have a narrative framework
that is essential to the Gospel. It is a large narrative that is rooted
in the biblical testimony in which God identifies Godself to the people
of Israel as the one who covenants with them and therefore is the only
God there is. As such, the God of Israel is the Creator of the whole world.
Hence, we have a distinction between the Creator and all creatures who,
in being creatures, are not-divine.
But human beings created by God and Israel elected by God fall into repeated
rebellion against God and want to be divine themselves and have life on
their own terms. They do not like being creaturely finite, and they do
not like having to live peacefully with other humans. Their fear of others
goads them into violence and wars. It is in this narrative context that
God comes to the rescue of Israel and all humanity in a Jew, Jesus of
Nazareth. The church arises out of Jesus’ life—his proclamation
and enactment of the impinging Kingdom of God—his brutal death on
the cross by the reigning principalities and powers in his historical
world—and his resurrection from the dead as the vindication of his
life and as hope for the world in a redemption that is eternal. Those
who emerge out of these events as followers of Jesus, come to realize
they cannot properly narrate the course and significance of his life without
regarding his life, death, and resurrection as the revelation of the being
and reality of God. Indeed, Jesus is God’s own self-revelation:
the very incarnate presence of God in the events of this man’s life
and death and resurrection from the dead.
The good news about this is that God was in Christ reconciling
the world to Godself and thereby not counting human sins against
them and thereby giving them grace and forgiveness and hope of life and
destiny utterly and completely conferred and sustained by God’s
grace. This forgiving grace comes to live in the lives of the followers
of Jesus through the Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit is not some vague spirit
flitting here and there, but is the very Spirit of the God of Israel and
of Jesus the Son of God. It is this Spirit that provides the empowerment
for folk to acknowledge God’s gracious forgiveness in Jesus
and to repent of their sin and therewith to receive the
gift of freedom to live away from sin.
But this living in a new freedom cannot be done without embracing other
folk and forming authentic community in which agapic love is manifested.
Strangely, this authentic community cannot truly be the community of the
faithful without being open to the stranger and the enemy as persons for
whom Jesus lived and died and was raised.
Hence, the church is called into existence to be the body of Christ
in the world in order that the whole world might hear the Gospel and have
their lives transformed as well. It is here that we can return to our
definition of the church: the church is called into existence
by the Gospel to witness in word and deed to the living triune God for
the benefit of the world. Witnessing to God and God’s gracious
good news is then the purpose and mission of the followers of Jesus. Precisely
in their words or discourses and in their deeds
or practices they are witnessing to God so that the world might
know God, might know themselves as loved and forgiven by God, and might
know themselves as beneficiaries of a hope in life and death that is the
supreme good of human life. In all these respects, then, the life of the
church—precisely in and through its distinctive discourses and practices—bears
and conveys the means of grace by way of which God’s
gracious Gospel becomes good news to the world.
Hence, these narrative particulars are essential to the Christian life
and witness, and while they do have universal significance, the particulars
are not accidental and dispensable. Rather, there is no Gospel message
apart from these particulars. Hauntingly, then, where this Gospel-formed
narrative is tattered or obscured or even subverted, then the life of
the church has lost its vital center and reason for being.
So, in its discourses and practices the church is to witness to the triune
God for the benefit of the world. It is the world, with
all its violence and malevolence and selfishness and greed, that God loves
and has already forgiven and reconciled in Christ. But the world knows
neither Christ nor that reconciling forgiveness, and therefore the world
does not really know how deeply it is riven with sin. The discourses of
the world vacillate between a) that tragic despair in the unhappy and
conflictual nature of human life that is overwhelmed by the fear of death
and suffering and b) that heroic optimism that just one more war or one
more program will make the world safe and hospitable to human flourishing.
The world repeatedly invokes divine authorities to buttress their own
claims to be the decisive agents in history, but these are the no-gods
that perpetuate human enmity and violence under the illusion of pursuing
peace and justice.
But the church cannot witness to that world in words separated from deeds
of faithfulness in living and being the body of Christ in the world. “Word
separated from deed is hypocritical, vain, deadly, and a lie. Deed separated
from word loses its proper context, intentionality, and luminosity.”
[GCF, 164] Hence, the church can only live in faithfulness when it is
shaped and formed by the distinct narrative of God’s life with the
world, which we have been discussing in outline.
The definition of the church speaks of “the triune God”
and it is fair to ask why I refer to God as triune? Of course, the triuneness
of God simply is the language of the ecumenical traditions of the church.
It arises in the grammar of the church as it sorts through what it means
to say “Jesus is Lord,” which is uttered throughout the NT.
While Jesus is undeniably human, it would certainly appear to most Jews
that he could not be Lord, for there is only one Lord and his name is
Yahweh, the God of Israel. But, if Jesus, precisely in his life and in
his death and in his resurrection, is the self-revelation of the God of
Israel, then he is not only the bearer of the Gospel but is himself the
Gospel.(23) He is what God is doing on behalf of human salvation. It is
because Jesus was finally considered to be divine that trinitarian language
emerges in the life of the church’s witness. Were one to believe
that Jesus is not divine and that his divinity is not crucial to understanding
who God is, then trinitarian language becomes symbolically optional and
even negligible and is not essential to the statement of the Gospel. Jesus
may then be the bearer of good news but he is not himself essential to
that news. That I affirm with the ecumenical church that Jesus is divine
and God is triune goes to the marrow of what I regard as heretical in
the liberal model of church I constructed earlier.
I have tried to make the case for the appropriateness of trinitarian language
in the church throughout my Grammar. But rooted in the narrative
I have outlined above, trinitarian grammar intends to say God has three
internally related ways of being one God: as the One who creates all things
and elected Israel—God the ground of all that is; as the One who
became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth for salvation of the world—God
the One who salvificly encounters us in life; as the One who is the Spirit
that endows life and transforms life—God the One who is the dynamism
that works within creaturely life to bring it to redemption. The point:
we cannot adequately speak the narrative and identify God without speaking
in these three different but interrelated ways of God being God.(24)
I want now to propose some distinctions in how we use salvation language.
These distinctions all presuppose the contrast between sin and its consequences
and the grace of God. I affirm that there are three spheres in
the use of salvation language in the church. First, there is
the sphere of salvation in what God has done for humans in Jesus Christ,
which I call the objective sphere of Reconciliation and Justification.
Second, there is the sphere in which persons say ‘yes’ to
what God has done in Jesus Christ, which is what I call the sphere of
Historic Redemption. Third, there is the sphere of salvation
that pertains to the final destiny of persons in relation to death and
to God’s final consummation of all things. I call this the sphere
of Ultimate Redemption. To keep our discussion of salvation
straight it is helpful to remember these distinctions, explore their interconnections,
and to see that we may be asking different questions in each sphere.(25)
This gets us into the interpretation of the first sphere of salvation
as Reconciliation and Justification. I interpret what
happens in Jesus Christ as God acting and being-acted-upon for the salvation
of the world. Apart from Jesus Christ the situation of humanity is life
in sin, suffering those consequences I have enumerated earlier. God’s
wrath is God’s ‘no’ to sin as that which is not intended
by God as part of the good creation, even though it is permitted by God
in conferring finite freedom on humans. But God’s wrath is not something
God externally imposes on human beings. Rather, God’s wrath is God’s
permitting sin and its consequences to unravel and thwart human well-being.
The ways of sin are not the ways to human flourishing. Evil is writ large
and small in the ways in which the world organizes itself and distributes
goods and powers.
These powers of human sinfulness, who pretend they are the real powers
of meaning, life, and death, brutally slay Jesus on a cross of shame.
Little do they realize they are slaying the divine life in the form and
presence of this man Jesus. Jesus the eternal Son of God dies a human
death on the cross. This is God taking the sins of the world upon and
into the divine Life, and thereby disarming the powers of their pretense
that they are in control of human life and death. It is God who is in
charge of human life and destiny, and, in taking these powers of sin and
death into and upon God’s own Life, God is graciously forgiving
humans their sin, reconciling them to Godself, and refusing to treat them
as sinners who are doomed to despair and death.
Further, without the resurrection of Jesus, as something that happened
to Jesus and involves his self-manifestation to others, the powers of
the world might still be apprehended by his followers as the real makers
and rulers of the world. The raising of Jesus is the vindication, through
redemptive and healing power overcoming death, that the life and death
of Jesus is truly the revelation of the Life of God. [See CGF, 458-473
on the resurrection of Jesus]
Hence, in this first meaning of salvation, in Jesus Christ it objectively
happens that God graciously forgives sinners and invites them to new life
without suffering the consequences of sin. In the NT and the traditions
of the church this is variously talked about as atonement, reconciliation,
and justification. God’s wrath is revealed as only a preliminary
word and judgment but not as God’s final judgment. That final judgment
is manifested in the cross as God’s loving humanity with a love
that will not leave us to our devices and self-wrought destiny. In this
first sense of salvation, then, all persons are in Christ, whether they
know it or not, and whether they live it or not. [See CGF, 443-457 on
the cross, and 473- 480 on the salvific benefits of Christ]
Given, then, what God has done in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the
world, we come now to the second sphere of salvation I have called Historic
Redemption. It is, of course, God’s desire that human beings
should know and rejoice in what God has done on their behalf in Christ
Jesus. The church in its simplest and most primitive form is comprised
of those persons who have encountered Christ —living, crucified,
and raised from the dead—and have said ‘yes’ to him
as salvific good news. These are the ones who acknowledge Christ as sheer
grace, who are caught up in the process of living in conformity with Christ,
who are learning how to be loving and forgiving to others, even enemies.
These are the ones who worship God as the One who has come among us as
a human being and has acted on our behalf and who will continue to act
on our behalf. In short, these folk are new creations
and a new community that God has launched into human
history to witness to God and thereby to witness to a new way of being
human and being together with other humans. In other words, these folk
form a new community as an alternative way of life compared
to how they used to live and how the communities of the world actually
live.
The Christian life and the church are thus rooted in what God has already
done in Christ. We can put it this way: what God has done in Jesus Christ
is the indicative foundation of the Christian life, and
it gives rise to those imperatives for living that I characterize as the
ethics of grace. This ethics asks: given what God has
done for us in Israel and in Jesus Christ, how are we called to live?
It is, therefore, not an ethics that seeks the reward of grace and forgiveness.
Rather, it is an ethics that is rooted in forgiveness and empowered by
the grace of the Spirit, and it seeks to conform human life to God’s
life in loving God and loving the neighbor, which now includes the stranger
and the enemy. This ethics, of course, is to be differentiated from that
liberal, presumably rational, ethics that presupposes rational self-interest
and calculates obligations according to a utilitarian, cost/benefit analysis.
[CGF, 511-528]
This life-together in the church can be schematized as liberation,
sanctification, and emancipation. The church is comprised of
those who know they have been given in Jesus Christ liberation or freedom
from sin and its consequences. They are forgiven and now called to live
that freedom. The full living out of that new freedom intrinsically involves
being caught up in the process of sanctification: to live into that holiness
that has been given in Christ and now is appropriated in holy living.(26)
Further, the Christian and the church are the ones who are committed to
the nonviolent emancipation of their neighbors from the domination and
subjugation of the powers of the world. The church cannot live its life
in ignorance or forgetfulness of the consequences of sin that still stalk
life in the world. At the heart of its emancipating works is modeling
peace within itself for the world and working in the world to bring about
peace in nonviolent ways.
Thus far I think I have shown that this historic redemption is unique,
grounded in what God has done in Israel and in Jesus Christ for the whole
world. The narrative that captures these activities of God is not a general
symbol available wherever people might look or whatever tradition they
might live. They need to hear the narrative and learn how to live in the
light of it, and that narrative is available only in the church of Jesus
Christ. Put another way, the church itself only truly exists where
that narrative is recited and lived in the discourses and practices of
a community. That is why the actual discourses and practices
of the church must be continually critiqued lest they fall into disarray
and falsehood. These discourses and practices—in their precious
specificity, faithfulness, and truthfulness—are wonderfully the
means of grace by way of which persons come to know God, have a relationship
with God, and come to know themselves as sinners who have been forgiven
and called to a new way of living. Here is the heart of what it means
to say the church is the ark of salvation, outside of
which these means of grace do not exist
.
We can now deal with two important questions often asked by the liberal
church. First, it asks whether the church, even in my revised model, is
presumptuous in thinking it knows God truly. However, notice that this
question presupposes that there might be some other context or some other
concept of deity that will show us just how presumptuous our discourse
about God is. But what is this other context or concept of divinity and
where does it come from and what is its privileged status? I suspect it
is formed from other premises than those that affirm that God has revealed
Godself in the history of Israel and in Jesus Christ and called the church
into existence. While it is intrinsic to the grammar of deity in the church
that God is incomprehensible, this primarily means that God is not simply
characterizable as an object in the world. It does not mean that God is
utterly unknown and that Christians and others alike are just ‘gassing
and guessing’ when they speak of deity. [See CGF, 31-32, 152-54,
178]
I pray that the church will have the courage to recognize that this liberal
critique and my rejoinder represent a clash between two radically different
ways of construing God and the world. And I pray and have written this
paper in the hope that the church will then have the courage to go about
its witness to the God known in the narrative. Either the rough outlines
of the narrative are bedrock for Christians and the church or they are
not. When it becomes apparent that they are not for some folk, then that
church is subverting its biblical and traditional witness. Whatever the
subverting group might claim to be, it is difficult to acknowledge them
as the church of Jesus Christ
.
Second, it asks whether this model of the church implies that folk outside
the church, in other religions or not, simply do not know God and thereby
do not know ‘salvation’ in historic redemption? Isn’t
it arrogant to condemn nonChristians to hell? Well, whatever then does
the word ‘salvation’ mean in this question? Surely we must
admit that, outside the church, folk in the world in other communities
do often perform, for example, acts of kindness, charity, loyalty, justice,
self-giving, and truth-telling. So the question being raised requires
a complex answer that I will give here in a shortened version.
According to the narrative of Christian faith I have proposed, every person,
even those who are not actively engaged in saying ‘yes’ to
God’s grace in Christ, are in theological fact ‘in Christ.’
They are included in those for whom Christ lived and died and was raised.
Hence, before God they stand forgiven and graced. But surely our saying
that, as devout utterances of faith, may make no sense to them. Yet the
point is, from the church’s standpoint, whether that language makes
any sense to those outside the church, it does make sense within the church.
This means immediately that for the church these others beyond the church
are our brothers and sisters before God’s grace and are the ones
we are summoned to love and to whom we are to witness. And because we
believe God has not and will not leave the church to its own devices,
so too we can and should believe that the God who is the Creator, Reconciler,
and Redeemer will not finally forsake those beyond the church. Unfolding
this point will take us into the sphere of ultimate redemption, which
will be forthcoming below.
We can also affirm that intrinsic to trinitarian theology is the belief
is that the three ways of God being God—the three persons of the
Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are dynamically interrelated
such that each way is implicated in what the other ways do. Accordingly,
in the NT it comes to be said that Jesus Christ was there at the beginning
of all things as the Logos that it is at the heart of all things creaturely.
Now if the Logos is Jesus Christ through whom all things creaturely were
made, then the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus must further define
for us just what is at the heart of the creation: namely, suffering and
self-giving love that is the final redemptive Word in all things.(27)
So, we might admit that there are ‘signals’ of this Logos/Christ
in other places and traditions in forms that are now hidden from us. But
having said that, we must also say that Christ could not be revealed in
other places and forms that ‘contradict’ what we know of Jesus
Christ. God is not duplicitous and in self-contradiction to Godself.
Likewise, the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ is at work in the world
wherever redemptive healings and transformations are taking place in the
world. The Spirit’s work—just as is Christ’s work—is
not restricted to the boundaries of the church. Yet, in the construal
power of the its discourses, the church is that specially gifted community
that can discern, name, and rejoice in the Spirit redemptively at work
in the world. In the church, through its ways of talking and understanding,
we are given the grace of conceptual lens through which to identify the
work of Christ and the Spirit, which are paradigmatically at work in the
church. [See CGF, 483-502 on the Spirit]
We come now to discuss the third sphere of salvation I have called Ultimate
Redemption. Under this rubric I especially include those matters
of human ultimate destiny in relation to death and God’s final consummation
of all things. I have spent a laboriously long chapter in my Grammar
trying to develop a way of talking about these matters that is in significant
conflict with many of the ways in which church traditions have talked.
I cannot recapitulate here the fullness of that discussion. [See CGF,
709-748] But there should be no surprises here, given what I have said
to this point.
I have repeatedly emphasized the sovereignty and power of God’s
love and forgiveness as we know them in Jesus Christ. This is about God’s
graciousness to humanity that is not given as the just deserts of humans.
It is not a reward for being and living righteously. Rather, it is given
in spite of the fact that humans deserve condemnation for the sinful ways
in which they live in relation to others and to God, and are thereby destructive
even of their own good. When we are justified in Christ, we are not being
justified as a reward or as what we deserve. We are being justified by
an act of God that is prior to any response of ours, but it is, when we
acknowledge the justification, evocative of our gratitude and repentance.
Put simply: God justifies and forgives us even before we ask for forgiveness.
Among ordinary humans, forgiveness is usually given to another only after
the other has repented, sincerely apologized, and asked for forgiveness.
God works otherwise and by a different logic. [See CGF,513-519]
I propose that this basic and irremovable theme of Christian faith flies
in the face of another traditional theme of the church’s discourses.
That is the theme, expressed at points in the Bible and dominant in the
tradition, that ultimately there must be dual destiny:
a destiny for the saved and a destiny for the damned. When we ask how
this destiny is decided, the church ineluctably has moved to say either
a) persons are saved by their own righteous living or b) persons are saved
by the grace of God.
The first alternative comes dangerously close to saying that we earn
ultimate salvation by how we live. Herein, then, ultimate salvation is
a reward for holy living. Precisely what that holy is
has been hard to pin down in the tradition. But it may look as though
one could say that only those in the church, as the ark of salvation,
are those who will be ultimately saved.(28) But if the community of the
church is comprised of folk who are struggling to learn how to live under
the grace of God in Christ and who may not yet be ‘perfect’
in all of their living, then by what criterion do they earn ultimate salvation.
My point is that reward and just deserts language in any of its
forms is dramatically misleading about the Christian life itself and is
therefore also dramatically misleading about ultimate salvation.
If the church is that unique place in which we learn who God is and how
gracious God is to sinners and how inexhaustibly God is committed to human
redemption, then we ought to talk about ultimate redemption in a way that
keeps its focus on God’s grace and not on human just deserts. Accordingly,
Christians should not be thinking of a life beyond death in which they
will meet God as the kindly bestower of what they have properly earned.
Christians should not be thinking and saying that we are to trust in our
own righteousness as we die and encounter God. Rather, in the church Christians
should learn—as they encounter death in others and as their own
imminent possibility—that they are to trust in the forgiving graciousness
of God rather than their own presumed righteousness. If that is so about
Christians in their extremities of dying and death, then must it not also
be the case that Christians and the church should teach that we trust
and hope in the ultimate triumph of God’s grace as the Ultimate
Redeeming Companion who meets every person in death and transforms
him and her into God’s own eternal companions. [See CGF, 722-24,
724-736]
What about hell, then? Surely hell primarily refers to the ways of human
living in which destruction and retribution and wrath subvert and destroy
human flourishing. Hell and thereby the Devil do indeed occupy the hearts
and minds of the human family when they live adamantly and indifferently
in sin. But hell as an ultimate residence for erstwhile sinners? I think
the church should begin to say that such an ultimate hell is empty, for
it has been emptied as the final and just judgment on any person by the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As the Apostle’s
Creed says of Christ, “he descended into hell” as he suffered
the death-dealing hatred and enmity of his crucifiers. Are we to suppose
that Christ left a fully occupied hell as the just deserts of folks? Or
are we rather to believe that hell, as that place of extreme and horrendous
separation from God, is also a place into which the Son, in his extremities
of dying a brutal and forsaken death, plunged deeply and freely and lovingly
and gathered up its occupants as the ones who are embraced even in their
extremities as persons finally to be redeemed by God?
But if the church does decide to talk and act in the way I have proposed,
then its discourses and practices will modify but not delete
the image of the church as the ark of salvation that contains the saved,
both in historic redemption and in ultimate redemption, outside of which
there is no salvation. We should say, and say joyfully, that it is in
the church that humans are led to encounter God’s gracious ways
with humanity. Outside the church it is certainly not evident that persons
know who God is and how God loves and know therewith how to live as folk
who earnestly trust in the grace of God and earnestly desire to live in
conformity to God’s life. Being in the church, however, is the unique
place in which people learn to be transformed by the grace of God in Christ
Jesus. The uniqueness resides in the narrative definiteness, the truthfulness,
the faithfulness, and the vitality of the church’s distinctive discourses
and practices.
Yet it is not that we are in the church in order to earn
our ultimate salvation. Rather, it is in the church that we find the means
of grace to live in the hope of an ultimate salvation that is also the
hope for the world. The church might then dare to proclaim that hope,
even though it may not be understood and embraced apart from being in
the church and learning profoundly and lovingly that God is ultimately
gracious.
Let me draw these points together about the church and salvation in my
revised model of the church. I am urging that the church is properly the
ark of salvation as the means of grace—in and through its distinctive
discourses and practices—in God’s historic redemption. However,
I am proposing that these very means of grace—as the mediators of
God’s saving grace in discourses and practices—empower the
hope for ultimate salvation that should lead to and ground the hope for
the ultimate salvation of all God’s children. In this sense, then,
the church itself is a living witness to the ultimacy of God’s grace
as we know it in Jesus Christ.
Some Concluding Remarks
I hope I have been able to persuade folk of the necessity and dignity
of the church as the ark of salvation—as that visible community
that teaches and witnesses to a gracious God who has come among us in
Jesus of Nazareth. It should be clear, I hope, that being a Christian
is impossible without being in the church. Being a Christian
is not possible as the lonely person relying on her own powers of discernment
and her own powers of will. Being a Christian is necessarily a matter
of learning how to be a Christian. To pursue that involves
being a member of a community that has characteristic discourses and practices
about the narrative of God’s grace. When the discourses and practices
of the church are alive, vibrant, specific, and Gospel-grounded, then
the church is the body of Christ in and for the world.
Let me now specify more nearly what those practices are that one should
learn in the church.(29) First, there are those practices of nurture.
This is especially evident in the many-sided practices of worship in which
we learn how to identify God and are thereby empowered to praise God.
Not all purported ‘praises of God’ are praises to the triune
God who has come to us in Israel and in Jesus Christ. To praise God depends
on knowing who God is. In gathering for worship, as a defining practice
of the Christian life, we engage in the regular practices of praising
God, praying to God, singing hymns to God, receiving nourishment at God’s
Table of Communion, reading Scripture, listening to Scripture as the Word
of God, and hearing the Gospel proclaimed by wise and saintly persons.
These are all practices that we have to learn how to perform. They are
not innate in us.
Under nurturing practices are also the practices of communal care in which
we learn how to be a community that upbuilds its members in the faith.
These include practices of loving others in the church, of praying for
others, of tending to the care of others in distress, of educating others
in faithful and truthful discourses, of forgiving others, of seeking forgiveness
from others. How can Christians love the neighbors in the world if they
cannot, do not, and perhaps know not how to love the folk who are their
neighbors in the church? When these practices are not occurring regularly
and devoutly in the life of a congregation, then it is difficult to know
the liveliness of the Spirit.
Second, there are the practices of outreach to the world.
If the church is called to witness to the triune God for the benefit of
the world, then the church is always aimed at the salvation of the world.
Briefly, there are a) the practices of evangelization in which the church
invites the world to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, b) the practices
of prophecy in which the church identifies those powers in the world that
are demonic and destructive of human good, c) the practices of emancipating
works of love for the neighbors in the world, and d) practices of vocation
in which the individual Christian lives faithfully in places of home,
of economic work, of citizenship, and of recreation at no other’s
detrimental expense.
Third, there are those constitutive practices of the church in
administration. It is in these practices that the church organizes
itself for its mission in nurture and outreach, and they are profoundly
theological practices. I will refer my reader to my long discussion of
these practices. [CGF, 634-644] But I want briefly to express my worry
when the institutional character of the church becomes dominant, because
it begins emphasizing that the church’s very reality depends on
the offices of an apostolic priesthood and episcopacy. These two offices
then emerge as the critical defining signs of where the church exists.
Rather, I would emphasize that the church only truly exists where its
discourses and practices are in conformity to the Gospel of Jesus Christ
and effectively witness to the triune God for the benefit of the world.
But it nevertheless is the case that the church, in whatever institutional
shape it might exist, will need to have some magisterial authority—that
is, a teaching and decision-making authority about matters of faith—invested
in some communal form. Here I prefer a consensual body, comprised of laity
and ordained ministers, that is prepared to decide urgent matters of orthodoxy
and heresy and to identify areas in which disagreement is permitted and
often needed. But churches with a polity that inhibits such a
magisterial form from emerging are dangerously inclined to being ruled
by the discourses and practices of the larger social worlds in which they
exist.
When these distinctive practices are not alive and well in a congregation,
then we can easily be overwhelmed by the brokenness of the church. The
key, however, to overcoming this brokenness is to repeatedly proclaim
the Gospel in the hope that it might be heard as good news to folk disheartened
and in disarray.
In conclusion, let it be affirmed that, when the church is called and
formed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it will also contain folk who are
having their lives continually transformed by the gracious works of God.
Persons in the world and outside the church need the community of the
church as that place where the Gospel is proclaimed and lived. The world
needs the church as the ark that carries within itself the means
of grace that transform human life and give hope for the world.
Are these means of grace still available when the community is itself
shattered and broken and in conflict? Such brokenness certainly confuses
folk and corrupts the language and undermines the efficacy of the practices.
But there remains hope as the church still reads the Bible in worship
and at least gives lip service to the practice of claiming there is a
Gospel. However empty those practices might be performed from time to
time, the very form of their repetition keeps alive the hope that the
church might once again hear the words of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as
good news for themselves and therewith transformative of how they actually
live in the world.
Click here for endnotes
in separate document.
Copyright©Joe R. Jones |