I've started a new blog, For Such a Time as This, where I can focus more of my reflections on faith and Christian witness. That will leave this blog more for issues philanthropic. Certainly I believe that faith and philanthropy are related, but the new blog will iterate the faith themes more exclusively.
I'm picking up this thread from the comments running at The Radical Business of Original Sin . Thanks to Tony Woodlief for joining in there. I'm fairly certain that Tony's Sand in the Gears was the first blog I ever looked at, and I still admire the style he uses there. I would like for this space to become more transparently personal... something I'll aspire to!
Anyway, I was asked in a comment to explicate the statement that "the church is the body of Christ." Gerry Gleason is correct in identifying the Pauline origins of this understanding. The classic exposition of this is in Ephesians, where Paul discusses the unity of the church (ch 4) and again in ch 5 where the identification of Christ and the church is posed as a mystery of faith (5:32).
I was discussing this issue today with my pastor, and he confirmed that Christ speaks seldom of His church but very often of His Kingdom. I pulled the concordance out tonight and found only two instances where the term for "church" is used in the Gospels. They are the passage to which Gerry refers us, Matthew 16:18 (...you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church...) as well as Matthew 18:15-20.
However, dismissing the authority of Paul will not get Gerry where he seems to be headed, to the dismissal of most (any?) earthly ecclesiastical authority. If we look contextually at these two passages, it is clear that Christ is acknowledging authority for the church in each instance.
At Matt 18, this authority extends to the disciplining of a sinning brother by the church. The church is here loosely defined as "where two or three have gathered together in My name."
In Matt 16, the authority mentioned is that of the keys of the kingdom (the famous foundation of the Roman Papacy). As a Protestant who denies that the Roman Church stands athwart the gate to salvation, which is truly nothing but the Cross and Christ crucified, I see a different ecclesiology in this passage. This passage as a whole, Matt 16:13-20, is known as Peter's confession of Christ. Christ asks the disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" And Peter answers: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Christ replies that this revelation came to Peter not from the flesh but from the Father. So the "rock" on which Christ will build the church may be seen as Peter's witness, which came from the authority of the Father.
This may raise for some the question about verifiability of such a witness, which points us again to the standard of Matt 18, "by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed." There is little room for solipsism in the Christian life. We are to rely for interpretive help not only on the Word but also on the church--marked not only by our fellowship with our brothers in Christ but by the teaching of the Word by apostles of the church and the administration of the sacraments.
Clearly, what Christ called the disciples to--and empowered them for--was to be his witnesses (not his keepers). Christ's final injunctions all point to the authoritative and missional nature of His call:
"you are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My father upon you..." (Luke 24:48-49)
"Tend my lambs" "Shepherd my sheep" "Tend my sheep" (John21:15-17)
"follow me!"
"you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses..." (Acts 1:8)
The death of Christ on the cross was accompanied by a tearing of the veil of the Temple in two. The significance being that God had left the building, thus supplanting the old covenant with the new covenant, fulfilled in Christ's birth, death, and resurrection and the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost upon the church. So, the church is in this age the body of Christ infused by the Spirit, equipped with the Logos, and the testimony to the kingdom to come.
J I Packer puts it this way: "The task of the church is to make the invisible kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing. The gospel of Christ is still the gospel of the kingdom."
Hope that helps. Ecclesiology is not typical blog fare, I suspect!
What is truly remarkable in the context of conversations about decentralization and the displacement of hierarchy by wirearchy, is that the ecclesiology of the modern church continues to undergo reformation
Just arriving in my mail today were two books pointing in these directions:
Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shape of Things to Come: innovation and mission for the 21st-century church
and Darrell Guder, ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America
I'm looking forward to exploring these texts, and I'll close what has grown to be a very long post with a teaser from Guder:
"This trinitarian point of entry into our theology of the church necessarily shifts all the accents in our ecclesiology. As it leads us to see the church as the instrument of God's mission, it also forces us to recognize the ways in which the Western church has tended to shape and fit the gospel into its cultural context and made the church's institutional extension and survival its priority. As we have used the tools of biblical scholarship carefully, we have begun to learn that the biblical message is more radical, more inclusive, more transforming than we have allowed it to be. In particular, we have begin to see that the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness." (5)
Again I'm dragging my conversation with Gerry up here in a main post. Gerry responds to my previous post thus:
Just to be clear, I don't reject earthly authority per se, but I don't see how it is legitimized. You are free to recognize any authority you choose, but thankfully the first amendment says that the government cannot recognize or constitute such an authority and it remains a matter of choice for each of us.
Yes, exactly. I thrive by not trying to impose my religious belief, nor my scientific views, etc. through any governmental means. But this absence of established religion does not imply that I can recognize no religious authority in my life. In fact, it is the absence of established religion that ALLOWS me to submit myself to religious authority. Exactly the freedom Gerry acknowledges.
I think Michael Polanyi comes close to capturing my view of this submission of will to authority in his chapter "Authority and Conscience" in his slim volume, Science, Faith, and Society.
the creative order of the scientific community is not the resultant of a clash between sheer organized force on the one hand and individuals pursuing their mere personal ends on the other. Scientists must feel under obligation to uphold the ideals of science and be guided by this obligation, both in exercising authority and in submitting to that of their fellows, otherwise science must die. It would thus appear that when the premisses of science are held in common by the scientific community each must subscribe to them by an act of devotion. These premisses form not merely a guide to intuition, but also a guide to conscience; they are not merely indicative, bu also normative.
Polanyi later observes that "processes of creative renewal always imply an appeal from a tradition as it is to a tradition as it ought to be." And again
Scientific opinion, legal theory, Protestant theology are all formed by the consensus of independent individuals, rooted in a common tradition.
It's interesting that Chris Corrigan is blogging something quite similar from his reading of Lewis Hyde over at Parking Lot today!
I was asked in a comment to my post on Public Benefit how on earth I draw a line from Hayek to Christ and back again. I have to confess that it goes right through Polanyi... and that otherwise I have no clue how to live out this strange Christian libertarianism to which I freely subscribe. It is not yet a coherent, consistent worldview. But I strive for integrity and think Polanyi offers more solid grounds for the effort than a Hayek or any other Austrian economist.
I stand with Polanyi on these grounds of human action:
In the wide fields of public argument each participant has to interpret day by day the existing custom in light of his own conscience.
Christ, of course, didn't live in a democratic age, where public argument could speak effectively to temporal powers. But as we see in Paul's speech at the Areopagus, the forms of such public argument were emerging. And I believe that the principles with which Christ left us are necessary and sufficient--and indeed causal--to our own age. Nevertheless, we mustn't tie them too closely with political action, for it was not the market but the state to which Christ referred when he proclaimed that his kingdom was not of this world.
I'm picking up the thread from the comments to the previous post, where Gerry has made some provocative observations. He writes:
There is no "original sin" in any Bible I know of, just a story about a fall from grace. If man's original state is not in grace, then just where did we fall from?
Yes, the Fall was certainly from a state of original grace, and the term "original sin" was Augustine's neologism. But Paul himself says that "In Adam all die" (1 Cor 15:22) The point being that we are all marked by sin and that we are unable to work our way back to the Garden.
I like J. I. Packer's note on this business:
It may be fairly claimed that the Fall narrative gives the only convincing explanation of the perversity of human nature that the world has ever seen. Pascal said that the doctrine of original sin seems an offense to reason, but once accepted it makes total sense of the entire human condition.
We can arrive back in the state of grace only through Grace itself, and interestingly we return not to a garden but to a city. So divine history does entail the working out of how we learn to live well with one another, and in the Christian tradition, Christ is the great magister vitae.
However, the dismissal of all earthly authority, as Gerry seems to endorse, is not possible in the Christian tradition, since the church is itself the Body of Christ. The richness of the Christian faith leaves us here not only with the Spirit of Life to work in and through us, but also through the mystery of the union of Christ and the Church enjoins us to attend to the needs of the body as well. And to unite ourselves in community under One Head. Christians do not agree on the earthly form this One Head takes (pope, presbytery, metropolitan, etc), but we are enjoined to submit ourselves to church authority as well as to the authority of the Holy Spirit. I just bought Bonhoeffer's Life in Community. Will be intersting to see what light it sheds on these matters.
But back to the bottom line: I think the Christian tradition offers us a rich, living, and sufficient religious paradigm. And yet there is work for us to do. I deeply appreciate the following observation of Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy:
What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life. What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.
Willard then goes on to expose the shorcomings of both the right's "atonement as the whole story" gospel and the left's "religion as social ethics" gospel and to diagnose the situation thus:
And so we have the result noted: the resources of God's kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life.
The remainder of the book presents a quite fresh and radical re-reading of the Sermon on the Mount. I highly recommend it.
