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Signs
of the Church's Identity
[This essay was written for the Commission on Theology of the Council
of Christian Unity of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1993
and published in Mid-Stream, Vol. 33, No. 4 (October 1994) pp.
377-389. While my definition of the church, in its earliest forms, goes
back to my teaching in the early 70’s, this essay expresses much
of the final version of ecclesiology represented in my Grammar, chapter
11. Version here is edited.]
Presupposing the traditional marks of the church, there is also a theological
need today to think more concretely and complexly about the signs of the
church's identity. To facilitate this discussion, I propose the following
working, normative, theological 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.
When we ask about the signs of the church's identity, we are asking a
distinctively theological question. It is always the
case that wherever the church truly exists it exists as some concrete,
empirical, historic group of persons in some social location and world.
Yet we are confronted with the fact that the term 'church' is not just
something the church of Jesus Christ has under its control. It is also
part of the nomenclature of cultures, and therewith is under the control
of cultures. The powers of the world are always ready to identify what
they call 'church' according to their interests. Legislatures, law courts,
tax codes, news media, telephone directories, and many other principalities
and powers name some empirical groups 'church' and allocate them a designated
place among other social institutions. Hence, the theological definition
of the church aims at being normative and in contrast to much of the contemporary
culture-bound and culture conferred identifications of church. Theologically,
it is an ineradicable question whether any empirical group called 'church'
by whomever is truly the church of Jesus Christ.
In asking now about the signs of identity of the true church,
we are seeking those characteristics that are theologically essential
to some community of persons actually being the church. Our working
definition of the church has already made it clear that the church is
essentially a liberative and redemptive community of persons that is called
into being by the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. It
is the type of community or koinonia that is called into life
and given definition by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This being
called out and assembled (ecc1esia) by God's work in Jesus of
Nazareth is foundational for the church. Empirical churches of even noble
demeanor are continually tempted to be called out, identified, sanctioned,
and justified by the various reigning spirits of the world and hence to
serve other lords than Jesus Christ. Being called by the self-revealing,
gracious and reconciling presence of God in Jesus Christ through the movement
of the Holy Spirit is the constitutive or foundational sign of the church's
true identity. Where this call is not heard and heeded there is no church.
Our definition goes on to say that the church is given a primary or defining
mission: to witness in word and deed to the living triune God.
This mission of witness is the most comprehensive context in which to
characterize and understand the other signs or traits of the church. Everywhere
in the New Testament the sense of being called to give witness to the
wondrous and gracious mystery of God's self-communicating and redemptive
acts in the history of Israel and in Jesus of Nazareth is either explicit
or presupposed. Where this witness is absent today there is no church
of Jesus Christ.
To explicate fully the witness of the church requires an understanding
of the trinitarian essence and actuality of God, emphasizing that God
is self-identifying in the history of Israel, in Jesus Christ,
and in the calling of the church. In this history of acts God discloses
God's own actuality, and the church witnesses to God on the basis of these
self-disclosures. Hence, God's being or reality is not hidden behind these
acts but is revealed in them. We can say that God has God's own
living actuality precisely in the triune being-in-acts as Creator, Reconciler,
and Redeemer of the world.
So too the church is only truly the church when it is engaged
in the concrete being-in-acts of witnessing to the full actuality of God's
triune life. Where these being-in-acts of witness do not exist
there is no actual church; the church has its actuality, its real life,
only in the complex richness of its life of witness. So, where these being-in-acts
happen, which are only possible as empowered by and in conformity with
the being-in-acts of the triune God, there the church truly exists. The
fundamental signs of the church's identity will be found in the characteristic
being-in-acts of the church as witness to God.
Before moving on to further specifications of the appropriate signs of
the church's living witness, we should note plainly that the church exists
and witnesses to God for the benefit of the world. It
is this contemporary world and its future that God loves with an unfathomably
gracious love and intends to redeem. Therefore, the church does not exist
simply for itself or as an end in itself; it exists for and moves towards
the world as witness to God's loving life for the world.
It should be helpful here to note and distinguish three different but
interrelated meanings of the term 'world' in the church's
discourse:
1. the world as the cosmos created by God;
2. the world as any human culture with its structures, relations and relationships,
powers, values, meanings, and languages;
3. the world as human culture infected and skewed by human sin.
The church exists for the world in all three senses of the word.
And the church itself is always some empirically locatable community of
persons in some world in all three senses. In these senses, then, the
world is in the church and the church is in the world. This means that
the church is irremovably an earthen vessel, a worldly
reality in all three senses of 'world', and therefore is itself always
in need of reform, renewal, and God's grace. The critical
and enduring question is how the church exists in the
world without losing itself, without losing its fundamental identity.
How does the church have a distinctive identity in the world, such that
it is in the world but not of the world? The church only embodies its
distinctive identity when it actually becomes a living witness to God
for the benefit of the world in which it lives. The church is that liberative
and redemptive community which lives for the transformation and redeeming
of the world by the triune God.
It is now in the witnessing of the church that we seek those further signs
of the church's authentic identity. The church witnesses in word
and deed. While we cannot separate word and deed, and while we
must even say that the witness in word is also a doing, an activity, a
deed, we can distinguish between the linguistic and nonlinguistic practices
of the church's witness. To be sure, word separated from deed is hypocritical,
vain, deadly, and a lie, and deed separated from word loses its defining
context, intention, and luminosity. But by calling these being-in-acts
of witness practices, we draw attention to their concreteness as human
acts and their historical and communal traditions and locations. It is
in the distinctive practices of the church as a liberative community of
witness that we find the further identifying signs of the church's essential
reality.
To unfold these signs in an orderly fashion, we should also distinguish
between the nurturing practices and the outreach
practices of the church. The nurturing practices are those activities
of the church that primarily focus on the nurturance of the community
of faith itself. The outreach practices are those activities of the church
that aim toward the transformation of the world. Clearly the distinguishing
of these practices does not imply any sharp boundaries between them. Many
concrete practices have dual faces: one toward the community of faith
and the other toward the world. The church lives in the dynamic interaction
between nurturing itself for witness and engaging the world in the concrete
works of love for the benefit of the world. Put simply, in its nurturing
practices the church is as such an important symbol of witness to the
world, and in its outreach practices the church finds itself nurtured
by the Spirit.
Looking now at the nurturing practices of the church,
we can discern the spheres of inner-church life in worship, in
education, in communal care, and in administration. These spheres
cannot be segmented and separated sharply, but we can speak of them as
overlapping moments in the life of the church. And these spheres of practice
lead continually to and are shaped by the outreach practices of the church
and of the individual Christian in and for the world.
In describing the signs of worship, we see vividly how
word and deed are intertwined in the life of the church. The community
called into life by the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a community of peculiar
and distinctive discourse and self-understanding. The call it hears is
a call of the Word of God, of God self-communicating with the church in
the history of Israel and in Jesus Christ. The call of the Gospel is inseparable
from the narratives of Israel, of the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ, and of the Spirit's call to the early church embodied in
the Old and New Testaments. From these narratives and teachings the church
is given a distinctive language of concepts, images, beliefs, and practices
which both engender and critique the church's own life in word and deed.
Therefore, among the distinctive identifying signs of the church are the
multiplex practices of listening to Scripture as the Word of God and being
called, authorized, shaped, and critiqued by this listening.
It is around the Scriptural witness that the church's worship is crucially
formed. Fundamentally worship is the act or activity of praising
God as the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer of the human world and the
creation. In communal worship the church enacts further identifying
signs of its reality: it proclaims the Word heard in Scripture, it confesses
its sin and embraces the forgiving grace of God, it celebrates God's gracious
life in sacramental acts of Baptism and Holy Communion, and it communicates
in prayer with the self-communicating life of God. In essence worship
is the multi-dimensional practices of praising and conforming to the triune
life God.
In the Protestant traditions the emphasis has been on the signs of Word
and Sacrament as not only essential to worship but to the whole being
of the church. We too affirm their essential character for the living
church. But there is also a tendency to claim that Word and Sacrament
are the only essential signs of the church. This we do dispute, for this
tends to focus only on the nurturing practices of the church and thereby
minimizing the outreach practices of the church as essential signs of
identity.
Of course, the proclamation of the Word given in Israel, in Jesus Christ,
and in the early church as attested in Holy Scripture, is critical to
the church's life of witness. Yet such proclamation is not only in the
sermon in worship, but also in the myriad ways in which the Scriptural
word shapes the life of the church. Below we will attend to how the witness
in word to the Word is elemental to the educational practices of the church.
Understanding 'sacrament' to mean 'sign', we regard the sacraments
of baptism and the Lord's Supper as visible, regular practices of conforming
the church's life to the gracious life of God. In baptism, the
sign of the free human acknowledgement of God's grace in Jesus Christ
and the human promise to live faithfully from that grace, the church acts
as community to recognize a person's entry into the life of faith as life
of witness in the church for the world. The baptismal act is not the purchasing
of forgiveness of sin but is instead the open, public acknowledgment of
the person's acceptance of forgiveness and justification in Christ. In
baptizing the new believer the church confirms the believer's commitment
to Christ and the church promises to nurture the person in a life of faith.
In the regular celebration of the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion or Eucharist,
the church remembers the specific, historic act of reconciliation of God
in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and it encounters
through the Spirit the living grace of the resurrected Christ. In this
sacrament, as sign of Jesus Christ's prior grace and atonement on behalf
of all humans, the church finds its worshipping center. But this sacrament
neither repeats the sacrifice of Christ nor adds to that sacrifice; it
celebrates what Jesus Christ has already done and his continuing life
in the Spirit for the church. In the common, creaturely realities of the
bread and the fruit of the vine, the church knows itself sustained by
the body and blood of Jesus Christ's eternal life.
That the church prays incessantly is a decisive being-in-act of
the church. Prayer is the individual and communal practice of
intentional communication with God's self-communicating life. Such practice
is undertaken in the name of Jesus Christ and expresses the belief that
God is a living Subject who solicits, hears, is affected by, and responds
to human prayer. In the many moments of praying, the church gives thanks
to God, praises God, confesses its sin, lifts petitions and supplications
to God, seeks God's guidance and Word, makes intercession for the world,
listens silently in reverent openness, cries out in pained lamentation,
and groans in 'sighs too deep for words' (Rom 8.26). In these signs of
prayer the church has its sustaining identity.
Hence, in the practices of worship the church finds its life nurtured
by the triune life of God in all God's concreteness and richness. Without
the practice of reading Scripture and proclaiming the Word heard therein,
the church inevitably becomes ruled and authorized by some other supposedly
life-conferring and life directing 'good news'. Without the confession
of sin and reception of grace, the church is tempted to become presumptuous
and self-righteous in its life. Without the celebration of baptism, the
church forgets how radically renewing and converting the Gospel is and
how it calls persons to a new way of living and self-understanding and
to a resurrecting destiny. Without the regular celebration of the Lord's
Supper, the church becomes forgetful of its being grounded in the reconciling
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son
of God. Without prayer the church pretends to give itself its own guidance
day by day and neglects to live intentionally before the loving Spirit
who calls and directs the church into a redeeming future. In all these
being-in-acts of worship the church truly happens, but it never happens
in isolation from the being-in-acts of the outreach practices in which
the church exists for the world.
The practices of educating and being educated pervade
the life of the church. As a community of persons called into new creation
by the Gospel and sent on a mission of witness, all the members of the
community are called to being conformed in the totality of their lives
to the triune life of God. Such conformity is the conformity of faith.
It is intrinsic to faith to seek in all ways and in all times and ages
to understand God, and therewith also to understand itself and the world,
more deeply and richly. Faith seeks understanding both
in the individual Christian and in the whole community. Hence, the church
cannot live in faith without the multitude of practices in which it teaches
both the what and the how of faith:
What the church most fundamentally believes and understands about
God, human life and destiny, and the world; and How persons live
concretely a sanctified life of understanding and action under the call
of the ethics of grace. The what and the how cannot
be separated in vital faith, but there is no simple recipe as to their
living togetherness. The how is aimless without the what,
and the what is vacuous without the how.
No member of the church is ever beyond the imperative of grace to seek
to learn more profoundly how to live before the Holy Triune God. Therefore,
no member can ever dispense with or vacate the educating practices of
the church. And the church can never assume that educating-in-faith is
ever finished and completed short of the eschaton.
However true it may be that much Christian educating comes indirectly
through loving relationships, it is essential to the identity of the church
that it engage intentionally in explicit practices of teaching
the faith. Such teaching is necessarily theological in character
and is itself a witness to the triune God. From the enlightening
and upbuilding power of preaching in explicating Scripture and engaging
concrete human living to the intentionally designed classes and
conversations to the silent but acute observations of saintly
examples in its midst, the church educates and is educated by the Spirit.
But distinctively Christian education would be rendered impossible without
the church being a community of theological discourse,
of a discourse in which all things are referred to and discerned in the
light of self-communicating life of God. When this discourse becomes vacuous
or vain or unfocused or dissipated by counterfeit substitutes, then the
church loses its capacity to educate persons in the faith that lives from
the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The educative signs of the identity of the church are also evident in
the discursive practices of being critically responsible for the church's
witness. Such responsibility arises from the awareness that the church
is called by the Gospel of Jesus Christ and thereby responsible to God
and even questioned in its witnessing by the life of God. Herein the church
confesses that it is put to ineradicable questioning by God as
to whether its witness in word and deed is:
1) adequate and faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and
2) luminous, truthful, and transformative for the world.
This questioning and answering can never finally be put to rest in the
time of the church. Meanwhile, in the life of the church, this responsible,
theological questioning is a sign that the church is called, sent, disturbed,
and enlivened by the Spirit of the living God.
Worshipping and educating are inseparable from the totality of ways in
which the community is itself a community of mutual love.
Here love is that peculiar openness and self-giving to another, which
wills the good of the other as one's neighbor before God. Christian love,
and the practices of care that go with it, is always loving in particular,
loving this person and that person. Called as it surely is to perform
works of love in and for the world, the church can hardly
intend such works in the absence of works of love within the community.
In loving one another through mutual self-giving and care, the church
is truly a koinonia, a fellowship and communion of mutual upbuilding.
Such loving—empowered as it is by the self-giving Spirit of God—is
what empowers love for the world of neighbors and strangers. This communal
love is never exclusive or restricted, and in being open to the neighbor-in-the-church,
it becomes the school in which one learns how to love the neighbor-in-the-world.
In all these ways this communal love is an ethics of grace made possible
by God's self-giving life in Jesus Christ who calls the church into being
and life. The ethics of grace is Christian living which springs from the
forgiveness of sin and the justification by grace in Jesus Christ and
which lives in freedom for the neighbor and for God.
As a historical social group locatable somewhere, the church cannot avoid
some organizational economy (oikonomia) in the
pursuit of its mission. This administering of the household of the church
is in general necessary, but it is always subordinate to mission. Historically
the churches have disagreed as to the proper administration of church
life. While selecting leaders and assigning duties and functions will
always happen, the church is not constituted as church by any
particular arrangement of offices, officers, or process of selection or
election. Whatever administering relationships and structures
may obtain in the church, they are all subject to the critical criterion
of whether they facilitate concretely the mission of the church in its
various social and historical locations. Organization and administration
are always subordinate to the mission of witness.
The whole church—as the people (laos) of God—is organizationally
involved in the ministry of witness to the reality of God for the benefit
of the world. For the sake of this whole ministry, and in conformity to
the servanthood of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God calls out particular
persons to functions and tasks of servant leadership. Some of
these servant leaders are formally ordained by the church to provide specific
functions and assume ongoing leadership responsibilities. It is in the
practices of ordaining-by-the-church and the practices of persons providing-servant-leadership
that we see true signs of the identity of the church. But the
signs are in the servant practices and are not static traits
of persons or of persons' occupation of offices.
These ordained leaders, variously called 'pastors', 'elders', 'bishops',
and 'deacons', or simply 'ministers', by Scripture and tradition, are
entrusted by the church with leadership responsibilities that involve
preparatory and continuing theological education, regular disciplines
of spirituality, and bold and timely initiative in and with the people
of the church. As an order of ordained ministry for the whole people of
God, there are no criteria of exclusion by virtue of race, class, or sex.
Called by the Spirit and examined and ordained by the church, these ministers
are typically assigned servant-leadership roles in relation to many of
the essential being-in-acts of the church's witness: leadership in worship,
in education, in pastoral care, and in administering the organized life
of the church.
They lead best by serving—serving first the Lord Jesus Christ and
his Gospel—and then serving the church in its witness to the Gospel.
In this serving, the ministerial leader is responsible also to the whole
laos of the church. But such leaders must always resist the temptation
to regard themselves as the Head of the church and the controller of its
life. They are servants of Jesus Christ who is the Head of the
church and who has the church as his body.
But the formally ordained leaders of the church are not the only leaders
called out and necessary to the administering of the church's life. The
Spirit from time to time calls others of the laos to short-term and long-term
tasks and functions for the sake of the church's witness in nurturing
and outreach practices. These other real leaders in their work and ministry
are signs of the identity of the church as people called to witness. The
distinction between the formally ordained and the non-ordained but called
and selected leaders, should remain fluid, open, and nonhierarchical in
the life of the church. Pragmatic, servant hierarchies may from time to
time serve the interests of the church's mission, but none is necessary
to that mission as such.
The church must remember—as a sign of its theological faithfulness—that
its structures created for mission are not eternal or essential but are
subject to continuous review and reform by reference to their adequacy
to and fitness for witness.
It must always be clear that the internal administering of the life of
the church moves incessantly towards the administering of the church's
outreach practices in the world. Obviously, these practices
are not first the practices of ordained ministers: they must be the practices
of the whole church and every member of the church. Before looking at
the general shape of these practices, we must recall that the church is
a liberative community. This sense of liberation has
two distinct but interrelated meanings. First, the church is the community
that it called by the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ and this liberating
in Christ is rooted in the acknowledgement of God's reconciliation and
justification of the sinners in Christ, which is God's judgment that sin
will not have the last word in determining the meaning and destiny of
humanity. Christians, the church, are the persons who say 'yes' to this
liberation in Christ and who experience by the Spirit the newness of life
and direction: they are free from the slavery of sin and its consequences.
As the church celebrates this gracious liberation of God, it also is called
and sent to take this liberating good news to the world. Hence, in the
second sense of liberation, the church is the bearer of a liberative witness
in word and deed for the world. In all its life the church is engaged
in the ethics of grace: an ethics which lives from God's grace and justification,
which does not seek just reward, and which takes shape as the works of
love on behalf of the neighbor.
What are the general spheres of these outreach works of love on
behalf of the world? The first sphere is that of evangelism.
Evangelism is simply the whole of those activities in which the church
conveys to the world the good news of Jesus Christ and invites the world
to respond to this news with a renewal of life and a change of direction.
While it is appalling that some practices of empirical churches have sullied
and obscured the proper practices of evangelism, it would be an abdication
of responsibility and theological identity if the church were ever to
abandon or renounce the multiple practices of inviting, interpreting,
and applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ on behalf of the world. Evangelism
is not restricted to practices of Gospel declaration but also involves
practices of persuasive interpretation of the Gospel in conversation with
the world. The church dialogues with the world that God loves and calls
into a redemptive relationship with God's own life. At least the church
has to speak a language that the world can understand, even as the church
retains its own peculiar content and message.
All the evangelistic practices of the church must continually be critiqued
for their possible infection by the values and causes of a particular,
hegemonic nation, class, race, or sex. Further, it is a healthy reminder
to the church that the practices of evangelism, while often heavily weighted
in linguistic practices, can never be separated from many nonlinguistic
works of love on behalf of the world. However ashamed the church may be
of past and present practices of an infected and distorted evangelism,
the church can never be ashamed of the Gospel itself, and this Gospel
beckons the church to share the news of God's saving grace in Jesus Christ
with the world which God loves. The church confesses and announces the
Good News of Jesus Christ to the world and is not ashamed, and the church
enacts the Good News in humble service to the world.
The second sphere of outreach practice is the ways in which the individual
Christian exists in the world on a daily basis and is called to witness
to the reality of God in word and deed for the particular neighbors met
day by day and for the particular social institutions in which we live
in the world. Here we are talking about particular care for individual
persons through practices of words and practices of caring presence. Here
in the call to these projective practices the Christian is most vulnerable
to being engulfed and dictated to by the practices and norms of the world,
and then the church member is in the world only on the world's terms.
These concrete practices of Christian life in the world are essential
to the church happening for the world. Here the Christian meets every
person in his or her concrete otherness and knows and relates to this
other as one created and loved by God.
The third sphere of outreach practices is those communal and collaborative
practices of pursuing in and for the world the love, justice, and peace
envisaged in the Kingdom of God. These projects of social justice
may not be the leveraging of the Kingdom by human acts. But these projects
are provoked and called forth by the Kingdom as the realization of historical
human well-being before God in which mutuality and openness obtain, which
are the signs of shalom. In collaboration with many others beyond the
church, the church must pursue in its various concrete locations those
projects which feed the hungry and empower the poor for full social participation
in life's goods, which bring to the center of life those who are pushed
to the margins by the principalities and powers of the world, and which
capacitate persons to be nonviolent neighbor-keepers. While these practices
cannot commandeer the Kingdom of God, they are signals of the
God's reign, and they are signs of the identity of the church.
Communities which omit these projective practices are hardly the witnessing
community of Jesus Christ.
It should be clear then that the pitting against each other of nurturing
practices and outreach practices, and of evangelizing practices and social
justice practices, are inimical and confusing to the life of the church.
These are no more mutually excluding alternatives than are witness in
word and witness in deed. Ecclesiology, as the doctrine of the fullness
of the church's life and being, cannot simply be about the nurturing practices
of the church or merely about the administering practices in nurture.
Ecclesiology is about the fullness of the church's life
in the richness and complexity of the being-in-acts in which it witnesses
to the richness of God's love for the world. It would not be misleading
to say that ecclesiology properly comes to include all the other doctrinal
topics of the church's theology and all the practices whereby the church
enacts its witness for the benefit of the world.
Here we can emphasize what has been allowed to remain in the background
in the preceding discussion: namely, the church witnesses to God for the
benefit of the world to the glory of God. In that odd
Christian sense, the world's true benefit, and therefore also its glory,
is first and last prefigured and contained in God's glory. The glory of
God—which the church knows and towards which it moves—is a
glory which includes the glory of the world of sinners reconciled. God's
glory is not God's selfish possession but is a glory shared with the world
by the triune Subject who uniquely creates, reconciles, and redeems all
things. Hence, it is not a glory on the world's terms, nor is it always
a benefit on the world's terms. But God's glory is finally the
only eternal benefit which can save and redeem the world. It
is a sign of the church's identity that it witness to the glory of God
as the reality from which and towards which all things move. In the absence
of such witness the empirical church is drawn to its own transient and
worldly glory or it becomes subservient to the glory of some other creaturely
reality.
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