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On Being
the Church of Jesus Christ
Joe R. Jones
[This essay was written for a special issue of Leaven:
A Journal of Christian Ministry on the topic of ecclesiology
as part of a conversation among persons in the Stone-Campbell Movement.
It was written in February 2006 and was published in Leaven,
Vol. 15, No. 1 (First Quarter 2007), pp. 6-11. Numbers in brackets in
the text refer to endnotes found at the end of the essay. Posted here
4/29/07.]
It is indeed a happy occasion for me to be invited to contribute an article
on ecclesiology in collaboration with other brothers and sisters from
the Stone-Campbell Movement, otherwise called the Restoration Movement.
That folk involved in the Movement could identify themselves as part of
a movement presupposes that the Movement had some discourses and practices
that gave definition to the Movement itself. I think the following self-designations
were central to nineteenth century folk’s capacity to speak of a
new and particular movement of restoration.
First, the intent to restore [1]New Testament Christianity expressed
itself in such discourse as “Where the Bible speaks, we speak, and
where the Bible is silent, we are silent.” Of course, that was mainly
understood as “Where the NT speaks…”
Second, implicit—and often quite explicit—in this intention
to restore NT Christianity is the belief that the history of the church
since NT times had been a steady and disastrous decline from and corruption
of the distinctive and normative NT discourses and practices.
Third, not the least of the reasons for restoring NT Christianity was
the desire to recover the real Jesus, uncluttered and obscured by centuries
of creedal statements and controversies. Hence, the slogan, “No
creed but Christ,” served the purpose of putting Jesus at the center
of the faith, and yet now a Jesus apparently detached from any ecclesial
creed.
Fourth, the intent was also to restore the organization of the NT church,
believing earnestly that there was one administrative pattern evident
in the texts. Already imbued with the “Free Church” trajectory
of American individualism and anti-clericalism, the Movement identified
the church as comprised of baptized adult believers who have confessed,
“Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and my personal
Savior and Lord.” Hence, the church is not dependent for its reality
on any ‘apostolic clerical successors,’ who are given the
authority to guide and teach the church and to baptize.
Given that these four passionate trajectories were there in the originating
decades of the Movement, it should be intelligible to us now that some
inevitable perils were lurking therein and would lead to the later fragmentation
of the Movement. The assumptions that the NT discourses and practices
contained one and only one pattern of belief and one and only one pattern
of authoritative church organization were simply unsustainable by increasing
historical scholarship.[2]
However, the emphasis on the church as a voluntary community comprised
of baptized believers was commensurate to the taken-for-granted way in
which the church existed in the first three centuries of its life. It
was only when the church came under the protection and promotion of the
Roman Empire in the fourth century—becoming thereby ‘established’
by the governing authorities—did the possibility even exist that
a person might become or be called a ‘Christian’ as a matter
of governmental geography.
Yet, by discounting later church traditions, including creedal developments,
the Restoration Movement deprived itself of the capacity to deal with
differences within the NT discourses and practices. This became particularly
painful with regard to how to interpret Jesus Christ. Wanting a Jesus
without any creedal identification led to the Movement’s most divisive
issue: in what sense is Jesus divine and in what sense human and in what
sense our Savior? Incapacitated to develop and affirm any common confessional
or creedal statement about Jesus, the Movement was left either to the
dogmatic declarations of individual pastors and professors or to the dogma
that only the individual believer can decide for herself who Jesus is—Jesus
dissolved into the private preferences of the individual believer! Is
it any wonder that a restoration movement of this character would find
itself breaking apart into differing traditions?
It is my hope that this issue of Leaven will lead these differing
wings into a robust and self-critical ecclesiology that might reaffirm
some of the admirable concerns of the Movement’s earlier forebears,
and yet lead to rethinking theologically some of the disagreements that
have plagued our past conversations.
Let me confess at the outset of this essay that I was raised in what is
known as the ‘Disciples’ branch of the originating Movement.
And I spent twenty-five years teaching in and administering two Disciples
institutions of higher education. It seems commonplace these days to refer
to the Disciples as the ‘liberal’ wing of the Movement, and
however problematic that moniker might be, it is the Disciples wing that
has deliberately pursued ecumenical discussions and relationships to other
church traditions. Yet, the state of ecclesiology among Disciples, either
as an explicit theological statement or as actually discussed and practiced
in congregations, regions, and the general manifestation, seems to me
cluttered with confusion and bewilderment.[3] Yet it may be that the roots
of these problems are present even in the Movement’s originating
decades and therefore may be common to all three wings.
How, then, do we get back on track in developing an ecclesiology? Here
I want to make some proposals that might help.
First, I propose that we recognize that any community, but especially
the church, lives and has its practical identity in and through its characteristic
and distinctive discourses and practices. It is within these
discourses that the community identifies itself, acknowledges a common
purpose, and devises procedures and practices—a politics—that
facilitate and even constitute the community as just this community among
many other communities. When those discourses and practices are lacking
in basic agreement and flounder in disarray, we can understand why the
community itself might be suffering profound confusion about itself and
its identity.[4]
Second, I propose we embrace our early Movement’s desire to give
primacy to the NT witness, but I propose that we study the NT as the emerging
discourses and practices of the Jesus movement. And we must understand
these discourses and practices as throughout theological: they
intend to witness to Jesus as the Savior of the world and they intend
thereby to identify him as bound-up-with and/or tethered-to and/or one-with
the reality of the God of Israel. When the post-apostolic church sorted
out the NT texts as authoritative canon, it primarily meant that the discourses
and practices in these texts are authoritative and informative for succeeding
followers of Jesus. Put another way, the witness and conversations manifest
in these texts are the conversation-partners for all future conversation
that should be forming and informing that emerging social reality called
ekklesia—the summoned and assembled and gathered people
of God.[5]
One consequence of this proposal is that we can affirm that the NT discourses
are already theological and therefore we can give up the notion that doing
theology is somehow a misleading practice for the church. If the
NT discourses are to live in the church today, then the church is itself
constituted by its peculiar theological discourses and the peculiar practices
that are both represented in and formed by the NT discourses.
Third, we can now admit that our own contemporary Restoration tradition
could not exist without the discourses and practices of the church in
the succeeding centuries after the NT. We can, therefore, engage these
previous traditions and their contemporary descendants in serious theological
discussion without fear that we are somehow forsaking the NT witness.[6]
Fourth, apparently without sustained consistency and clarity of intention,
the Movement did seem to identify being-the-church with being-disciples-of-Jesus.
In this way it might be possible that discipleship to Jesus would entail
doing church differently as an alternative community
to the ways of other churches and to the ways of the world.
To further this discussion of an ecclesiology in which the church is an
alternative community, I will now propose a theological definition of
the church, which I have been using for over two decades.
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.
What then is the church as a social reality in the world? It is a liberative
and redemptive community of persons. It is a community—a koinonia—in
which persons are being liberated and redeemed from those conditions in
their lives that prohibit and inhibit the love of God and the love of
neighbor. Here we can affirm that the church is throughout its life and
work a soteriological community: responding to God’s salvific
work in and for the world. The church’s distinctive discourses and
practices are themselves the means of grace through which the
church and the world receive and learn how to live under the grace of
God. They are not, however, the means by which we are to earn God’s
grace. The prior grace of God in Jesus Christ empowers the church to be
liberated by grace and to be liberating in communicating that grace and
forgiveness.
But it is a community that is called into being by the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. Clarity about who or what calls a community together is essential,
and the way we have put the call of the church is such as to deny that
the church is called into existence by any other agent or cause than the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the Gospel that summons the church into
existence, and when some church community can no longer agree as to who
calls it or even what the Gospel is, there we have a church community
that has lost both its calling and its purpose.[7]
In the Restoration tradition, there has been continuing agreement, even
in the midst of our disagreements, that there is a Gospel that is rooted
in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It is, however,
my hope that all wings of the Movement might agree that Jesus is the very
reality of God-become-flesh and moving among humans in reconciling patterns
of speaking and living. While the Disciples wing has not been able to
sustain a common trinitarian understanding of God, and the other wings
are hesitant at the prospect, a nontrinitarian understanding will miss
the mark and Jesus will be reduced to a prophet of some importance but
not the incarnate life of God reconciling the world to Godself.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ summons the church into being and through the
continuing activity of the Holy Spirit gives the church its defining
purpose and mission: to witness in word and deed to the living triune
God for the benefit of the world. In all that it is and does, in
its words and deeds, in its discourses and practices, the church is bearing
witness to the reality of God as the One who created the world and covenanted
with Israel, as the One who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth for
the salvation of the world, and as the One who moves within creaturely
life to redeem the world. There is no other God than this triune God,
and the church exists to witness to what this God has done as Creator,
Reconciler, and Redeemer of the world.[8] Hence, the church itself exists
for the benefit of the world— as that creaturely world
God is intent on redeeming.
Once again we must grasp the importance of the discourses and practices
of the church: it is in the words of the discourses that the church construes
for itself and for the world who God is, what the Gospel of Jesus Christ
is, what it means to be God’s beloved creature graced and loved
by God, and what the church can hope for in the future before God. Yet,
we must not forget that the discourses live in and through the distinctive
practices of the church.
The ecclesiology that I am unfolding now aims to identify the sort of
communal body the church is as the body of Christ in the world—a
new social reality in the world intending the transformation
of human life and the worlds in which they live as the worlds that God
loves and is intent on redeeming. Herein being the body of Christ centers
on discipleship to Jesus as the one who proclaimed the kingdom of God,
who advocated love of neighbor and enemy, and who commanded a nonviolent
way of life. This is the body of Christ as an alternative community
living an alternative way of life to the ways of the world.
Consider how the witness of the church in discourses and practices can
be understood in three interrelated spheres of the church’s life.
These spheres are what I call the Sphere of Church Nurture, the
Sphere of Church Outreach, and the Sphere of Church Administration.
Let us be clear: the church is witnessing to the triune God in all three
of these spheres and not just in the Outreach sphere. In each of these
spheres there is a host of distinctive practices that are essential to
the church being the sort of community the Gospel of Jesus Christ summons
it to be.
Briefly, in the Sphere of Nurture the church engages
in the distinctive ways of worshipping God, of educating
itself and passing on the faith, and of communal care in the
practices of love that see to the needs of the gathered folk. The church
is that community that practices baptizing persons in the name of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the gracious good news that their
sins have been forgiven and they are called to live a new life of neighbor
love. The church practices the celebration of the Lord’s Supper
as the encounter with the living Jesus Christ as the Lord of History and
hope for the world. The church practices reading the Bible as
Holy Scripture and preaches and teaches the Word known in the Bible. Without
these concrete practices in which the nurture of the church itself takes
place in and through its distinctive language, the church flounders in
its life. Throughout these practices, of course, the church is embodying
a witness to the world, declaring that God is graciously summoning the
people of the world to receive God’s grace and live in peace with
one another.
In the practices of the Sphere of Outreach the church
aims directly to act upon and within the world for the world’s transformation.
Such practices include evangelism, being at the side of the neighbor
as one who needs to hear of God’s reconciling life in Jesus. The
church also engages in the practices of prophecy, intending to
identify those principalities and powers in the world that subjugate human
beings and exclude them from the goods of life that encourage hope and
generosity. In the practices of emancipation the church, often
in cooperation with other similar spirits and groups, seeks to perform
works that seek to emancipate the least powerful of our human brothers
and sisters from those social conditions that enslave them. In the practices
of vocation, in and through individual Christian lives in the
world, they seek to inhabit places of home and neighborhood, of economic
work, of citizenship, and of recreation as places in which God is at work
and summoning them to truth-telling, promise-keeping, and non-violence.
What then are we to make of the Sphere of Administration?
While I think our forebears searched for a simpler organization in the
NT than is actually there, there are some definite beliefs and practices
we in the Free Church tradition can clearly embrace. First, we must acknowledge
that how the church organizes itself, how it has a polity and a politics,
is itself a form of witness to the world. Second, the church can never
forget that any organizing it does within itself is subject to the criterion
of whether it facilitates the mission of witness. In that respect, the
processes and practices of administering the life of the church are not
ends in themselves; they are means to the end of the faithful and truthful
witness of the church in the totality of its life. Thirdly, the Restoration
tradition should refuse to relinquish its belief that the NT church is
not a hierarchically ordered community dependent on its ‘overseers’
for its ongoing identity and legitimacy. Whatever we might make of the
distinction between ordained ministers and laity, we should never construe
it as a hierarchical distinction essential to the life and witness of
the church.
There is not space here to discuss in extenso that the administration
of the church includes trying to understand how the church of Jesus Christ
is one church, one body, wherever it might exist. By
what criteria are we to recognize that the church existed in traditions
prior to and outside of the Restoration Movement? Can any tradition properly
administer its witness to the world if it abstains from the theological,
and therefore the practical, quest for Christian unity? Let us
not suppose that the unity of the church universal will await or even
linger along the byways while the wings of the Restoration Movement worry
how to recognize—how to construe—the living vitality of Christ’s
presence among themselves![9]
In concluding this essay I want to highlight a possibility—I would
even call it a mandate—that the church so understands itself under
the Lordship of Jesus Christ that it feels obliged periodically and publicly
to confess its faith in clear statements. Such confessional statements
must not be understood as infallible and irreformable, but they can be
definite theological statements to the world of what the church itself
regards as the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Unwillingness to
produce such confessional statements, requiring, as they must, vigorous
discussion within the church, is a sure sign that the church is willing
either to suffer chaos in its public witness or to resort to less visible
means of coercing and controlling that public witness.
Having an ecclesiology is simply to have a set of discourses and practices
that identify what sort of community the church intends to be. The Restoration
Movement’s uneasiness about doctrine and creeds
has unhappily obscured from itself that it does have—and must of
practical necessity have—definite teachings. In linguistic
fact, it would be an oxymoron to suppose that any community could claim
to be the church of Jesus Christ in the absence of any particular teachings
about who Jesus Christ is and what he does that is salvific for humankind,
teachings about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and therefore
some teachings about how such disciples live together and the purpose
of their living and working together, and teachings about the purpose
of their community they call ‘church.’ Let it thereby be clearly
declared: no community can be the church of Jesus Christ in the absence
of definite teachings embodied in distinct discourses and practices that
are constitutive of its communal life and purpose.
So, abandoning the excuse that we have no doctrines, let us get on with
the arduous but joyful task of identifying, critiquing, and testing the
actual ecclesiology that already exists in the lives of the churches of
the Restoration Movement and thereby assume responsibility for what we
believe, teach, and do in our intention to be the church of Jesus Christ.[10]
Endnotes
[1] The reader should be aware that I use italicized words to emphasize
points and to draw attention to that particular use of the word or words.
Also, I will use single and double quotes in special ways. Single quote
marks [‘ . . . . ’] are used to indicate one of three signals.
(1) It can signal that we are talking about a word or sign, as in the
sentence ‘The word ‘language’ is used to refer to the
natural languages of persons.’ (2) It can signal that we are highlighting
a special use of a word or locution, as in ‘The actions of ‘perichoresis’
are crucial to church life.’ (3) It can signal that we are talking
about the meaning of the sentence itself that is included within the single
quotes, as in the two sentences used above. Functions one and two of the
single quotes can also be accomplished by use of italic type. Double quote
marks [“ . . . ”] are used when I am actually quoting from
another text or some person’s actual speech. These writing practices
may seem peculiar, but they are ways in which I am intending to remind
the reader that words having varying uses that are often unnoticed in
ordinary styles of writing.
[2] For an insightful discussion of the variety among the churches in
NT times, see Raymond E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind
(New York: Paulist Press, 1984).
[3] The Commission on Theology of the Council on Christian Unity of the
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), on which I served for more than
two decades, completed a long-term study on ecclesiology in a report to
the General Assembly in 1997. This final report and previous reports are
contained in The Church for the Disciples of Christ: Seeking to be
Truly Church Today, eds. Paul A. Crow Jr. and James O. Duke (St.
Louis: Christian Board of Publication, 1998). That the report fell promptly
into oblivion and neglect is but an understatement of the problems in
current Disciples theological self-understanding. My recent book, On
Being the Church of Jesus Christ in Tumultuous Times (Eugene, Oregon:
Cascade Books, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005), contains a wide range
of reflections on the present state of Disciples; see especially the Introduction
and chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, and 14.
[4] In my systematic theology, A Grammar of Christian Faith: Systematic
Explorations in Christian Life and Doctrine, 2 vols. (Lanham, Maryland:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), I discuss the importance of language
to the life of the church (pages 1-19); see especially the ten theses
on language on pages 17-18.
[5] In my Grammar book, chapter 11 is on the Doctrine of the
Church. Pages 596-602 contain an account of the rich variety of images
of the church in the NT, which I based on the work of Paul Minear.
[6] See Grammar, pp. 111-148, for a discussion of the authority
of the Bible in relation to church traditions.
[7] It seems to me that every church must continually be asking itself
just what the Gospel is. For my statement of the Gospel, see Grammar,
pp. 7, 112-14.
[8] See my Grammar, pp. 166-198 for an extended argument for
the inescapability of trinitarian belief for any church that believes
Jesus is divine and human.
[9] I sustain a consistently free-church theological perspective on administering
the church in Grammar, pp. 634-48.
[10] Readers of this article might enjoy visiting my Web site: www.grammaroffaith.com.
Copyright©Leaven 2007
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