The
Institutional Church
So where
do I come in on this issue? First of all, let me say I think we can find a lot
of conceptual value in talk of the Holy Spirit legitimizing the church. One way
to say this is that I can only recognize the authority of a church if I feel
called to by The Spirit. You are called to membership in this or that church
organization, and you may be called to membership in none. In the end your God-inspired
conscience must be your guide. I also would like to talk of a distinction
between the institutional church and the 'hidden church', a distinction some
other theologians have made (some talk of the visible and invisible church,
others of the little and the big church), but with the difference that in my
system both have salvific import. The institutional church is a group of people
who come together to perform various functions which facilitate their personal
relationship with God, and who come together in the name of helping along God's
plan of cosmic salvation. This church has concrete duties it must enact in
order to stay true to the role it has perceived it should play in the economics
of salvation. First and foremost, the church must proclaim, and as much as
possible make real for people, the story of the life, death, and resurrection
of Christ Jesus. It must try so much as it can to give people the opportunity
to respond to Christ. It does this by reading the gospel, and through the
Eucharist. The word of God in Christ remains a word beyond simple rational
formulation; it remains a word beyond language. As much as possible, it must be
experienced. One must encounter the suffering God, one must encounter the God
who forgives, one must encounter the sinfulness of oneself. This can only
happen by constant reading of the gospels, reflection upon it in preaching, and
through the rituals that make these stories and their significance real to the
participant. This is how the message of personal salvation gets out. The church
cannot 'save souls', no matter what evangelicals think. Jesus central message
was neither sola scriptura nor sola fides, but 'God alone', and that message
must be preserved. Only God can save souls. The church's job is to proclaim the
reconciliation of man and God in Christ Jesus. To tell of what the Lord has
done.
My view
is that the church's goal must not be primarily the salvation of souls, a job
it could not perform, but the salvation of lives, the salvation of the world,
and the preservation of the truth. The church's second function must be it's
existence as a community of penitents. Niebuhr said, “The church is not a
congregation of people who can pride themselves upon their unique goodness. It
is rather a congregation of people to whom the eternal God has spoken and who
answer the eternal word in terms of Job's contrition: "I have uttered
things too wonderful for me, which I understood not. Wherefore I abhor myself
and repent in dust and ashes." I think this a very true statement. The
church must bear witness, not only to the Word of God in Christ, but also to
the sinfulness of the world, and even more
important its own sinfulness. If it fails to do that it fails to adopt the
central vision of community that Jesus held, and it runs the risk of idolizing
itself and making itself just another route to self-centeredness, rather than a
way for people to respond to God. It must, in other words, maintain within
itself the prophetic experience. A third duty, one I've thought the church has
long failed in, is to train its members in the art of theological dialogue. We
must become educators, both of the content of scripture and its form. I have
argued that one cannot understand one's own revelation from God in abstraction
from the conversations around God's Word that have grown up in the past. This
being the case, we must find ways to talk about those conversations in as broad
a sense as possible. This means, in part, bringing science into the
conversation of the church. Even in fairly liberally minded mainline churches,
the issue of cosmology is sorely lacking. More importantly, we need to talk
about the Bible in all its intricacies, and train our parishioners how to do
the same. The Bible has to play a central organizing role in our lives, or else
we will lack the ability to with any honesty be able to make God real to the
world. Last, but certainly not least, the institutional church must make
attempts to advance the Kingdom
of God in the world. It
must do this by involving itself in the political and moral issues of its day,
and especially by tending to the suffering.
By
identifying itself with the lowest, the weakest, the outcast, the church
prompts recognition of Christ in them, and thus advances the opportunity for
The Spirit to move within us as a response. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the
church is only the church when it exists for 'others', when it shares in
secular problems, and when it proclaims to all people what it means to live in
Christ. That is one of the best summaries of the institutional church I can
think of.
The
Hidden Church
I have
spoken of people's souls being subject to a cosmic rebellion and cancer, to
being subject to a kind of cancer itself, and people as 'heroine addicts’,
which probably strikes many people as rather pessimistic. I plead guilty. I am
rather pessimistic about human's abilities to 'save themselves' to become who
and what they truly are on their own, or find any ultimate fulfillment through
their own moral deeds. Even more, I
doubt our ability to move with much confidence on many moral issues, our
cognitive and especially evaluative faculties being hurt by the disease of sin.
Earlier on, I said moral stature cannot be a test of redemption. I stand on the
precipice of cynicism, but I am held back by the knowledge of a God who is so
good He refuses to leave us to our own failure. That being the case, one may
question how I can posit any moral role for the church, how I can believe it
can take part in God's plan of cosmic salvation. I want to put some of this off
until the next chapter. For now let me simply say that I think that the
institutional church can only attempt to advance cosmic salvation, that such an
attempt is a necessary response to knowledge of God in Christ. However, it can
never know if it is actually advancing God's Kingdom. This will become clearer
later on, but for now let me say that cosmic salvation can only be done in and
through the 'hidden church'. The hidden church is simply the community of
people through which God's Plan for worldwide transformation is operating.
Because of sinfulness, we can never point to any of our actions as in
themselves holy.
The Hidden Church
is the Holy Spirit alive within the world, various people and realities
becoming Christ for others because God is moving within them... the
institutional church should operate in the hope and even the belief that the
hidden church is behind the veil there, within that institution, but it can
never know it. If it did, it would violate its call to be a community of penitents
and thus cease to be the church in any form. It must work for the betterment of
the world, never knowing if its deeds are right, but simply making the best
moral insights it can with its own sin-stained processes, and throwing itself
on the mercy of God, confident only that in Christ God saves us from our sins.
If it can do this it can preserve its job, and perhaps do more. There will be, ideally, moments, places,
adventures where the church seen will become a visible sign of invisible grace,
an outward veil of the hidden church, within which God's Kingdom really is
advancing. Individuals may dimly perceive these moments, but the church can
rarely lay claim to them, and then only in hindsight. Here I come in and create
a bridge between the Pauline and Gospel commentaries on the church community.
The church must always work for God's Kingdom, but it can never create it by
its own power. Only God can transform any act into an act of grace, only God
can make the profane Holy. God's call may lead even to proximate defeat and
suffering, the church must accept this defeat confident that in God's hands it
is always a doorway to victory. God often must temporarily be defeated in the
world in order to bring about ultimate victory.
In the same way that Jesus' remnant was more like a supernatural door through which God by
His power would step, rather than some vehicle whose actions would build God's
kingdom itself, the institutional church must do its duties only in the
trembling hope that God will use those duties to make of this old world, a new
world (Martin Luther King, Jr.). Any simplistic progressive formula, or any
deification of the church’s activities, must be roundly rejected. Paul's
emphasis on the individual activity of the Holy Spirit, and his rejection of
the institutional church, gives us an enlightening glimpse into the ways of the
hidden church. The institutional church must be aware of the possibility that
the hidden church, that is, God's continuing salvific activity, may manifest
itself anywhere, at any time, depending on God's abilities and desires.
"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but you cannot
tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of
the Spirit." (John 3:8) The true church may be in the home of a person
watching a televangelist, or in the cup of the homeless man on the street, or
within other religious communities, or in the heart of the atheist. Mindful of
the fact that it can have no confidence of its own holiness, it must continue
to do its duties, and if it does so, in contrition and without the left hand
knowing what the right hand is doing, more
often than not that hidden church will appear within its walls, and many
Sundays will be Pentecost Sundays.
Before we
talk about issues of immortality and eschatology, I want to make one final
comment on the consequences of my 'hidden church/institutional church'
model. One consequence is that on most
moral issues the church can never allow itself to be split. Given the call to
penitence and the nature of the hidden church, individuals can never have a
sure hold on many moral issues, and every one must be held with the attitude
that it is my sin that matters first and foremost; in such an atmosphere moral
disagreements are bound to grow up. Christians must love each other, and seek
penitence together primarily; moral disagreements must take a back seat to
these attitudes. Every person must fight for the right according to their best
moral insight, and dialogue is vitally important. But then all must bow down
and say again 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner'. And always we must be aware
of the possibility that our opponent, not us, is the real route by which God is
advancing His Kingdom. It may be that it is through this attitude, more than any specific moral stance that the hidden
church advances in the world.
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