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Excerpt
on Church, Politics, War, and Pacifism
from the Introduction to
On Being the Church of Jesus Christ in Tumultuous
Times [2005]
pp. xiii-xxiv
Even a casual acquaintance with the history of the church will disabuse
us of the nostalgic notion that the church of the past lived in virtually
non-tumultuous times, utterly unmarked by violence, conflict, and disagreement.
Instead we know that worldly and churchly turbulence has been with the
church throughout the centuries.
This is a collection of essays, sermons, and prayers that have been composed
across almost four decades of dramatic conflicts both within the church
and between the church and its various American cultures. As I look back
over thirty-five years of teaching theology and ethics in universities
and seminaries, it appears to me that all of it has been in the midst
of severe seismic shifts in church life and in the larger culture. I hope
that bringing together the writings in this book will at least provide
some evidence as to how one passionate professor and rather minor author
struggled with being a theologian for the church during tumultuous times,
persisting even into this century.
Believing that the church is the Body of Christ in the world, we must
remember that it is also an “earthen vessel,” ever in need
of grace, reform, and renewal. Precisely as the Body of Christ, comprised
of many members, the church must be the sort of community that sustains
a vigorous and continuing conversation within itself as to who has called
it into being, to whom it is responsible, and what it is called to be
and to do.
In the midst of uncertainties and troubling divisions within itself, the
church is tempted either to look to the world for some clues as to what
the world—or the elites of the world—finds credible and worthy
of the church’s being and doing or to turn in upon itself in simple
opposition to the world. Neither option will work well for the church.
The church has been much too tempted in the last century to discern its
calling and defining self-understanding from the voices of the world.
Yet, even though it must recover its most basic calling from its founding
Scriptures and profound traditions, the church cannot simply be in opposition
to the world.
Even though the church—as an earthen vessel—is often also
a broken body, it must strive, in the midst of its brokenness in tumultuous
times, to remember its calling and mission as an alternative community
living an alternative way of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.[1]
This collection of writings is bound together by the pursuit of what it
means to be such an alternative community in any and all worldly times.
Being so bound together, this collection contains some work from the late
1970s, but most of the writings have come to life since 1988, at which
time I began teaching at Christian Theological Seminary. Much of my academic
activity as a systematic theologian came to fruition in the publication
in 2002 of A Grammar of Christian Faith: Systematic Explorations in
Christian Life and Doctrine.[2] While I had done considerable writing
before this publication, not much of it was well known nor widely read.
To some it appeared that the systematic theology had sprung to life out
of nowhere. In the interest of showing the seeds from which the work sprang,
I am including some of the earlier essays, as well as a host of writings
from the 1990s. The sermons and prayers included in this collection all
date from the twenty-first century.[3]
It is my hope that the writings are also able to stand on their own, whether
or not they illuminate the ruminations that led into and out from A
Grammar of Christian Faith. In that respect, the collection’s
availability does not depend on the reader having read the systematic
theology.
Church Discourses and Practices
An important early essay was published in 1977, “Some
Remarks on Authority and Revelation in Kierkegaard.”[4] I had
been working on the essay for several years while the concepts in it were
brewing steadily. It should be evident that, not only was I working through
objections then current to theological discussions of Christian revelation-talk,
I was also reaching for a method of writing and thinking that relies heavily
on the analysis of language in living, concrete use
.
The next early piece is “Christian
Illiteracy and Christian Education,” given as an address to
the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in
October 1977.[5] As the title itself suggests, my concern was the incapacity
of my own tradition, and by extension most other mainline traditions,
to teach the faith with clarity and passion. While much theology being
done during these years was emphasizing the need to change Christian language
and concepts to fit modern conditions of relevance and intelligibility,
my emphasis was that the distinctive language of the church itself must
be recovered in order to form the lives of folk otherwise confused about
what it means to be a member of the church as the Body of Christ and thereby
to be a Christian.
Out of these early works and my teaching during the 1960s and 1970s, three
patterns of concepts emerged for me. First, all attempts to elucidate
Christian faith require focusing on what I came to call the discourses
and practices of the church. It is in the language of church—and
its grounding in particular practices—that we learn how to engage
in an enlivening and nurturing conversation about Christian faith. We
must strive to identify and explain the distinctive themes and teachings
of the church and identify and describe the distinctive practices that
are congruent with those themes and teachings.
Second, from these early years of teaching, a definition of the church
was beginning to emerge and eventually took the following shape, which
will reappear often in the writings in this book:[6]
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.
It is unlikely that the church will ever have a vivid and intellectually
cohesive life if there is continual disarray in its own self-understanding
about who it is and what its mission is. My definition is offered as an
orienting conversation-starter about what it means to be the church of
Jesus Christ. By emphasizing that the mission of the church is “to
witness in word and deed to the reality of the triune God,” I place
witnessing to God as central to the life of the church.
The issues of revelation and Christian doctrines that are explored in
the Kierkegaard article are only meaningful in the context of the life
of the church with its distinctive discourses and practices.
Third, if the church is that sort of community of persons that is called
into being by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then obviously it is decisively
important to have some agreement about that Gospel. Given my already muscular
insistence on an incarnational understanding of Jesus and a trinitarian
understanding of the reality of God, the following definition
of the Gospel has long held an anchoring function for my theological
work:
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.
Among many matters of note in these two proposed definitions, I hope it
is apparent that the theological center is in a high christology that
is simultaneously incarnationally kenotic[7] in character and
therefore demanding a trinitarian explication. When a high kenotic christology
stands at the center, it requires a reconstructed trinitarian doctrine
of a God who is complex and tri-moded.[8] It is not so much that every
Christian and all of the church must understand the nuances and fine points
of trinitarian doctrine; rather, the need is to understand that God has
become human in Jesus of Nazareth without ceasing to be God and that this
becoming human is for the salvation of the world. It also follows that
if God has become incarnate in a human being, then God must in some sense
be conceived as having the power of temporal agency and movement and the
power of being-acted-upon by creatures. Most of traditional theology wanted
to be incarnational without being kenotic, without having a complex, interrelated
God, and without having God subject to being-acted-upon.[9]
These considerations are important for the life of the church, for a church
is completely lost if there is not some common understanding in answering
these critical questions: 1) Who is God?—or, how is God to be identified?
2) Who are we humans and how are we to live? 3) What is our destiny and
for what may humans hope? As will come to the fore repeatedly through
this collection of writings, the character and content of the discourses
and practices of the church matter greatly to the self-understanding and
life of the church.
There is a strong inclination among church folk in our time to suppose
that ‘beliefs do not really matter; what matters are our actions
and feelings.’ It is sometimes said ‘belief in the divinity
of Jesus does not matter; what matters is following Jesus.’ Such
language presupposes that it is intelligible to believe
in the divinity of Jesus and not follow Jesus. On the contrary, I argue
that such is not intelligible in Christian terms. To believe in the divinity
of Jesus is impossible—even unintelligible—without following
Jesus’ pattern of teaching and living. To be sure, some person may
say ‘I believe in the divinity of Jesus’ without in any actual
way living according to Jesus’ pattern. But let us call this what
it is: lip-service-chatter disconnected from any discipleship
to Jesus. People, even people within the church, often speak shallowly
and live superficially. It takes passion and commitment to say
and mean ‘I confess Jesus as Lord and Savior.’[10]
Of course, one might ‘follow after Jesus’ in some ways and
not believe in Jesus’ divinity, but it would be a Jesus detached
from the incarnate life of God graciously enacting the reconciliation
of the world. Remember, folk have to learn how to call
Jesus divine, and that cannot be done in separation from following after
him. I worry that there are too many earnest folk who suppose the divinity
of Jesus is dispensable for Christian speaking and living. Further, this
emphasis on a non-divine Jesus fails, in my judgment, to grasp how radically
Jesus—as incarnate God—alters and intensifies our understanding
of the reality of God. Yet, there is much confusion and discord about
what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ.
This theme will be constant in this collection of writings: the
church is the necessary context for becoming and being a Christian.
However, it has been common in the America liberal tradition to suppose
that one could be a Christian individually without any connection to the
church. Chapter five, “The
Church as Ark of Salvation,” is largely conceived as a critique
of this supposition. Being Christian and being in the church are inherently
and necessarily bound together. It is in the discourses and practices
of the church that one learns how to be a Christian and to live in Christian
community.
Hence, ecclesiology—the consideration of what sort
of community is the church of Jesus Christ—is present in all my
theologizing efforts. The church, as the context for becoming a Christian,
is also the context for Christian theologizing. In fact, I propose that
all of the church’s distinctive discourses are theological—intending
in a variety of ways to say who God is and what God has done and is doing
andwhat we humans are to become. Theology is not something performed first
or supremely in the academy by professors of theology. Theologizing is
being done any time the people of the church speak in their distinctive
language. It is, of course, another question as to whether the theology
being done, in particular or in general, is faithful and true. But the
church is first and last that place where the conversation about what
is faithful and true to God is carried on and sustained in self-critical
dialogues. There is such a thing as being-learned in
the speaking and enacting of Christian discourse. We should be wary of
supposing that academic professors are always learned
in that peculiar way.[11]
I should also note that I am proposing an understanding of Christian faith
that eventuates in what I call “Universal Redemption.” This
is a long-standing conviction, especially given my radically Reformed
understanding of God’s grace. I stand with Augustine and Calvin
in affirming that no one is saved in any other way than by the grace of
God, thereby denying that any of us save ourselves by our own righteous
living. Unfortunately, Augustine and Calvin both believed that an ultimate
dual destiny is a theological necessity for the church. This belief required
each to ground both salvation and damnation in God’s presumably
eternal pre-destination of folk from the foundations of the creation.[12]
Chapter eight, “Schematic Reflections
on Salvation in Jesus Christ,” was the first published attempt
to bring these convictions about salvation to the light of public scrutiny,
though several earlier versions were present in my courses and in presentations
to the Faculty Colloquium at Christian Theological Seminary. To discuss
salvation issues with clarity requires making some distinctions among
various meanings of the word ‘salvation’ in biblical and traditional
discourses. What are simply labeled “Salvation I,” “Salvation
II,” and “Salvation III” in this schematic discussion,
are later in GCF named respectively “Justification and Reconciliation,”
“Historic Redemption,” and “Ultimate Redemption.”[13]
It is my hope that the nuanced and multi-dimensional analysis being proposed
about God’s ultimate redemption will find its way more explicitly
into the liturgical, prayer, and educational discourses of the church.
By the time a reader has read the whole of this collection of writings,
I hope she will no longer think it odd that a radically orthodox
christology of incarnate grace and a radically orthodox doctrine ofTrinity
imply irrevocably a radically inclusive ultimate redemption by the triune
God who is the merciful Ultimate Companion of all creatures.
Tumultuous Times in Politics, Terror, and War
These present times are tumultuous because we are daily reminded that
a so-called “War on Terror” is the defining movement and cause
around which all other contemporary movements and causes are to be understood
and evaluated. Were the discourses of the church sturdy, lucid, and deep,
we would be empowered to worry whether this ‘war’ has become
an idol undermining Christian construals of—ways of thinking about—God
and neighbors and strangers and enemies. As it is, this war deeply divides
Christians and is wreaking havoc in the world.
On September 24, 2001, following what we have come to refer to simply
as “9/11,” I wrote a letter
to the churches, included here as chapter two, struggling to sort
through the overwhelming feelings and fears that seemed to be stalking
all of us—Americans certainly but even many beyond America. In this
letter I was struggling with a centuries-old dilemma of the church’s
relation to the world in which it lives. That dilemma is especially acute
in the modern world characterized by the rise of nation-states that organize
and provide identity to humans in their various social locations. I did
not want to repudiate all meaningful patriotic feelings for the nation-states
in which persons live, but neither did I want to presume those feelings
should be uncritically and automatically endorsed by the church.
Certainly throughout the church’s life it has been a constant temptation
to Christians to regard their national/cultural identity as more basic
than their Christian identity. Hence, many in the church in our time are
confused about their most basic self-understanding and identity: am I
first and last an American who happens also to be a Christian,
or am I first and last a Christian who happens also to be an American?
Which identity is the most powerful in shaping how one lives and thinks?
I contend that one symptom of the disarray in the church today is that
most of its actual members are more decisively formed and informed by
their national identity than by their identity as disciples of Jesus Christ.
But I propose that the decisive identity for the church—and therefore
for the Christian—is an identity grounded in affirming Jesus Christ
as Lord and Savior. Without some clarity about the priority among our
various socially-conferred and socially-constructed identities, the church—and
therefore the presumed Christian—will be utterly incapacitated to
think pertinently about war and peace, and therefore about this war and
the claim to pursue peace and freedom by means of war. In the absence
of a vigorous self-understanding grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
the church devolves into being no more than a mirror image
of the values—the discourses and practices—that shape the
world in which it lives. Hence, being the church of Jesus Christ in tumultuous
times at least involves understanding what it means simply in all times
and places to be that community that is the Body of Christ in the world.
This problem is most acute for the so-called ‘liberals’ and
the so-called ‘conservatives’ among the church, for both seem
determined to think about the war and terror simply according to the their
liberal or conservative political dispositions. Completely lost in this
is how to think and act, first and foremost, from the perspective of being
a confessing and disciplined member of the Body of Christ in the world.
Put another way: the discourses of the church should be the means by which
Christians come to construe the world of the nation-states, with their
internal and external politics, as the world over which Jesus
Christ reigns.
In this connection, in debt to the writings of John Howard Yoder and Stanley
Hauerwas, I am beginning to think of the discourses and practices of the
church as constructing a politics that is to be distinguished
from the politics of the nation-states.[14] In contrast to the political
theories and practices of the worldly nation-states, the church is that
sort of polis—that sort of visibly identifiable
community—that is summoned into existence by the Gospel of Jesus
Christ and given the salvific task of witnessing in all of its words and
deeds to the redemptive activities of the triune God. Its politics—its
ways of organizing itself and witnessing—has its own construals
of human good and flourishing, even as it disarmingly construes the human
penchant for sinning against God through pride, domination, violence against
others, and unrestrained greed. A person’s decisions and actions
are mostly guided by her powers of construal. When the nation-state and
its attendant cultures are the source of all the basic construals—the
patterns of thinking and valuing—of its inhabitants as to what it
means to be human and to whom we are to be obedient, we see just how seductive
the politics of the state can be for the individual Christian and for
the church. The summons of the Gospel must never be confused with the
summons of the nation-state and its supporting cultures.
To elaborate this notion of the church as polis, I want
to say that the politics of the church is a social ethics construing a
way of life, including life-in-relationship, life-together, and life-in-community.
Politics—all politics—are simply the practices, conversations,
and processes of forming and sustaining a particular community. While
politics as practices are concrete and particular, they are also guided
by a vision—a construal—of what the community
is to be and become. This vision construes those goods the community aims
to achieve and whose goods it aims to serve and how it aims to distribute
those goods. Hence, the church, in its politics, has a vision conformed
to that Kingdom of God that we see in the preaching and action of Jesus
and in the witness of the New Testament to Jesus. But there is no vision
of the Kingdom in separation or detachment from the life—the teachings
and enactments—and the death and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.[15]
In contrast to all nation-states, the church, as the Body of Christ, has
no defining geographic boundaries that it must defend at all costs. It
does have boundaries of Gospel-summons, truth-telling, and faithful-witnessing
that are essential to its political life together and in relation to the
world. This is the fundamental reason the church is catholic
in character and calling: it has no land to defend, it is not bound to
any particular ethnic group over against any other, and it is summoned
to bring reconciliation and peace to the world. Wherever Jesus’
body—the one crucified and raised from the dead—lives in the
world, there the church is a political entity with a distinct theology
and ethics. But the church’s political witness, as indicated in
the definition of the church, is for the benefit of the world.
It is this tumultuous world—and any other world that has gone before
and will yet come to be—that God is determined to reconcile and
redeem.
This account of the church as polis clearly
means that the church’s political skills and practices must be vital
and available as the church and the individual Christian engage the politics
of the world. A church whose members are largely illiterate about the
patterns of language and practices of a Christ-centered faith is a church
that will repeatedly be overwhelmed and held hostage by the nation-state
and its political discourses and practices.
While many of the writings in this collection are appropriate for other
times of being the church, some of the writings and prayers are preoccupied
with being the church in these tumultuous times of war and terror. I do
not have any easy answers to how to live in these days, though it will
become evident in this book that I am a confessing pacifist,
with many questions about how to be a pacifist.[16] But
I am not a pacifist because I think there are better ways to settle disputes
than by war—though I do believe that as well—rather I am a
pacifist because I think that pattern of life is how Christians are summoned
to think and to live in conformity to the God we know in Jesus Christ
and in expression of the hope we have in the triune God.[17]
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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] 2 vols., Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Hereinafter referred
to as GCF.
[3] All of these writings have previously been posted on my web site,
www.grammaroffaith.com.
[4] The Journal of Religion, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 232-251. Included
here as chapter six.
[5] Not previously published, but included here as chapter three. In a
similar vein and presented about this time, see “On Doing Church
Theology Today,” Encounter, vol. 41, no. 3 (Summer, 1980),
pp. 279-286.
[6] See in particular chapters 2, 4, and 5 for extended discussions of
this definition of the church.
[7] The Greek word kenosis comes into Christian discourse largely
through it use in Paul’s rightly surprising use in Philippians 2.5-8:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied [ekenosen] himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born of a slave.
being born in human likeness,
and being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Jesus, then, is the self-emptying of God-coming-in-human-form, indeed
in the form of a slave eventually encountering death on the cross.
[8] The further rationale for understanding God as triune is explored
in some detail in chapters five and nine.
[9] These are difficult notions, I must admit, but their implications
are astonishingly important because Christian theology pivots around a
divine/human Jesus and a triune God. The full explication of these concepts
takes up much of the space in GCF, but pages 149-232 can be consulted.
[10] Paul Holmer, a former professor and mentor of mine, made a similar
point when he said in class one day that an old man had once confessed
to Holmer that it had taken him years “to know how to say and mean
‘I know my Redeemer liveth.’” That is what I call the
‘depth grammar’ of Christian discourse.
[11] As an academic professor of theology and ethics, I have myself often
been called up short by my continual readings in the works of Søren
Kierkegaard. Chapter twelve, “Kierkegaard: Spy, Judge, and Friend,”
contains some relevant musings on the perils of professorship.
[12] The concept of dual destiny is rigorously examined in GCF, 709-724.
[13] See further discussion of salvation concepts in GCF, 503-509, 712-717,
741-748.
[14] John Howard Yoder’s book, The Politics of Jesus, 2d
ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), with original edition appearing
in 1972, can be seen as the principal text initiating a new understanding
of the church as a political community. See Stanley Hauerwas, In Good
Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1995) for a felicitous statement of these concerns. An excellent
study of Hauerwas and the understanding of the church as polis, see Arne
Rasmusson, The Church as Polis: From Political Theology to Theological
Politics as Exemplified by Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
[15] Especially helpful in formulating this statement has been Stanley
Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 19830, esp. pp. 96-115.
There are complexities to this vision of the church as a polis
that yet elude my clear grasp and discernment, as well as elude my practical
living. It is my hope that I will be able in the future to bring something
fuller to print about The Church as Polis in Dialectic with the
World as Polis. The foretaste of that project is everywhere evident
in this collection of writings and in GCF, 47-52, 648-653.
[16] The writings of Yoder and Hauerwas have been nudging me toward pacifism
for the past twenty years. It has been a difficult path to follow, as
in my earlier years of teaching I seem to fall naturally into that sort
of politics and thereby ethics that calls itself “political realism”
under the guidance of the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. That is a hard
and powerful menu of ideas to relinquish in a time when one is engulfed
in the unexamined givenness of the practices of being a liberal Democrat.
[17] In addition to “A Letter to the Churches After 9/11,”
I am wrestling with these issues in chapter thirteen, “Is Jesus
Lord in Time of War?” and in many of the other chapters including
the sermons and prayers.
Copyright©Joe R. Jones
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