Tuesday, March 11, 2014

More On The Church... From My Book CONVERSATIONAL THEOLOGY



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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