Rethinking Church #6: The Church is Also the People

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The human dimension is an essential feature of the church. The church is a gathering of people. It is not simply a divine idea or the divine dimension by itself. The church exists only as the divine and human are united in one community. In the New Testament, the ekklesia or church is called an assembly, a people, a nation (1 Pet 2:9), and a family (Gal. 6:10), each denoting human beings in community. The church, then, becomes visible in the world in a community of living human beings.

There are many kinds of assemblies and communities. The church is a people called together by the Spirit of God to live in Christ for the praise and service of God. But the church could not exist apart from a human response to that call. The most basic response is faith. Apart from a believing embrace of the message of Christ, repentance, baptism, and other churchly activities make no sense. Faith moves us to turn away from our old lives and mark that transition by receiving baptism, which is pictured in the New Testament as a spiritual washing (Acts 22:16) or a death, burial, and resurrection with Christ (Rom 6:1-7).

The transition from nonbelief to belief and its symbolic enactment in baptism is at once a transition from not being a Christian to being one and from not being a member of the church (or family or people) of God to being including in this people. Becoming a member of the church is not an add-on to becoming a Christian but happens simultaneously and is co-essential. It makes no sense to think one could be “in Christ” but not part of the body of Christ, a child of God but not a member of God’s family.

What is the Church?

Until this point in the series I have used the term “church” without defining it. For until we uncover the essential features of the church—that is, those factors that determine the difference between its existence and nonexistence—we cannot define it with precision. What, then, is the church? The church consists of those people who in obedient faith and by baptism have been incorporated into Christ through the work of Holy Spirit and so have become one body, one people, one family.

Wherever these factors are present, the church in its fullness exists. Once the church exists and begins to act, other factors come into play. Some means will be chosen to organize its life and work. Language and culture, too, will place their stamp on the outward forms of church life. But it is important not allow the historical and contemporary forms the church to hide the simple essence of the church. List any factor you please—clergy, systems of organization, property, employees, legal recognition, social visibility, tax exempt status—none are essential. Sweep them all away and the church exists still. The church is simple in essence and, hence, very adaptable in form.

The Individual Christian and the Church

Since New Testament language about the church envisions a community that gathers and acts as one at least on occasion, certain questions naturally arise in our individualistic culture: (1) does the church exist in each individual? (2) Or, does the church exist only when formally and intentionally gathered “as the assembly”? (3) If you were the only Christian left alive in a nation or in the whole world, would the church still exist? (4) Lastly, assuming the church exists even when not gathered formally, must an individual Christian gather regularly with other Christians as the church?

The answers to these four questions are implicit in the definition of the church: (1) Yes, the church exists in each individual believer. Each believer is called by God, lives in Christ, and participates in the life of the Spirit. The divine and human dimensions are united even in an individual Christian. (2) No, the church does not cease to exist when not assembled as a group to act corporately. Christ and the Spirit are not divided by distance. (3) Yes. The church would exist if you were the only Christian in the world. (4) Yes. Though individual Christians can act as members of God’s special people even when not with other believers—in prayer, praise, study, and service—the love of God poured into their hearts by the Spirit (Rom 5:5) will drive them into fellowship with others who share that same compelling love. The gathering is a manifestation in the present of the unity of all things in Christ “when the times reach their fulfillment” (Eph 1:10). And it can be so beautiful!

Next Time: We have not yet addressed the church’s divinely assigned work and purpose. In these areas, too, we will distinguish between essential and accidental features. What is the essential work and purpose of the church? Hint: it, too, is very simple.

Rethinking Church #5: The Holy Spirit and the Divine Dimension of the Church

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The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is a third essential feature of the church. In the New Testament, especially as seen in Acts and the letters of Paul, the Holy Spirit acts to make God present and effective within the human sphere. The Spirit empowers, leads, purifies, renews, and encourages believers. He gathers, creates, unites, and enlightens the church. He gives life, transforms, liberates, bestows love, and perfects those God has chosen. The Spirit is God’s real personal presence elevating human beings above mere human possibility, uniting them with Christ, and making them into God’s children. He is the active presence of the future resurrection, the guarantee of the future inheritance. Apart from the Holy Spirit there is no church.

The Divine Dimension

A gathering of people is the “church” only as it is united to God through Christ and the Spirit. Only as it exists in Christ as the body of Christ empowered by God’s own Spirit is a “people” the people of God. The church is a divine/human reality. The divine dimension is not a separable aspect, located in heaven, acting only intermittently. The divine permeates the human aspect and draws the human into the divine life. God’s presence and activity in the church is not only essential, it is primary. The church exists because of the divine presence, it acts in divine power, and it moves as directed by divine wisdom. Christ is the head, the Spirit leads, and God is all in all.

The Human Dimension

I want to issue caution at this point. The church indeed has a divine dimension as the foundation of its constitution, but this truth should never be used—as it has been too often—by some to bolster their claims to have coercive authority over others. Christ and the Spirit are fully capable of governing and leading God’s church, and they do not delegate their divine authority to anyone. Human beings have “authority” only in so far as their lives embody the cross-shaped life of Jesus, and only through their faithful persuasion and obedient wisdom do they have a right to instruct others. A “church” that claims to be a divine institution but does not actually seek God’s will and submit to God’s authority is not acting as the church.

Next Time: The presence and working of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are essential to the church. Apart from this working there can be no church. Next we ask about the essential human features that constitute the church. The church consists of human beings who have responded to the divine call and working with faith in Jesus and baptism.

Rethinking Church #4: The Body of Christ

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In the previous essay (#3) I argued that the origin and continued existence of the church is God’s act. This aspect of the church is an essential feature apart from which there is no church. Now we will consider a second essential feature: the church exists as a reality in the world only “in Christ” (Rom 8:1, 10; Eph 2:6-7, 10) as “his body” (Eph 1:23; Col 1:24). Apart from and outside of Jesus Christ there is no church. Christ is the sphere within which the church lives and the form that gives it identity. The church is visible within the world only as his body. Now let’s explore the implications of this dense statement.

Reconciliation in Christ

Jesus Christ is the place within the world where “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) and “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). The events of incarnation and reconciliation unite creation to God in a way more intimate than does the act of creating and sustaining the creatures. In Jesus Christ, God takes one human being through life and death into eternal life through the resurrection. Jesus is both the first truly saved and glorified human being and the Savior of all who follow. Paul speaks of the resurrected Christ as the “last Adam” who has become a “life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45). Just as in Adam we inherit mortal life, in Christ we inherit eternal life. As Paul puts it, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Or again, “And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man” (15:49).

The Church Exists in Christ

Christ who now lives as the life-giving spirit is the sphere within which God is reconciling the world to himself and transforming human beings into images of Christ. To be “in Christ” is to be in communion with him, empowered by him, protected by him, directed by him, and transformed by him. By establishing this spiritual space and gathering people into it, Christ establishes and maintains the thing the New Testament calls “church.”

The Church Exists as the Body of Christ

The New Testament uses the term “body” in reference to the church in more than one way. In 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Paul uses the unity and diversity within the human body as a metaphor for the unity and diversity within the Church. Ephesians 1:23 and Colossians 1:24 speak of the church as the “body of Christ,” a body that functions in a way similar to how our bodies function as visible expressions of our persons. Christ manifests himself, speaks, and works visibly, audibly, and palpably in the world through the church. Christ is the head—that is, the governing principle—and life of the body. Apart from the governing principle, the body has no unity or direction. Apart from the life principle, the body has no power to accomplish anything.

“In Christ” is an Essential Feature

An institution where God is not or is no longer reconciling the world to himself in Christ is not the church whatever else it may be. A group through which Jesus does not or no longer manifests himself in a visible, audible, palpable way within the world is not the church. And a “gathering” that does not or no longer understands itself as existing in Christ and drawing its life from him has forgotten its essence.

Next Time: The church is by definition Spirit filled and Spirit led.

In Search of Rationality—A Lament for Reason (R.I.P.)

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In the kingdom of humanity, reason was born to rule. Reason is the power by which we see what is, what can be, what should be, and what may be. It is the power by which we bring under control and direct all the irrational elements and impulses in the world and in our lower nature toward higher ends. Reason is light in darkness, order in chaos, stillness in the storm. Apart from it, such chaotic passions as anger, hatred, lust, greed, jealousy, and envy struggle with each other for control. War breaks out within the soul, floods over into the community, and engulfs the whole world. When passion rules, reason becomes an instrument of evil. Human beings are reduced to clever animals—dangerous ones too!

I am and always have been a champion of reason and rationality. I find my Christian faith in God illuminated by reason and my reason awakened by faith.  Reason is the created light by which we see the uncreated light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6). Reason is to invisible light what eyes are to visible light. It is to spiritual reality what hands are to physical reality. To suborn reason to passion is to suborn God to creation. Passion seeks its good in temporal things alone. Reason drives us upward toward the eternal. To depose reason from the throne of the soul is to depose God from the throne of the world. For God rules the world by setting truth and goodness before the eye of reason.

There never was an age of reason. It has always been the age of passion. It has always been what Jesus called “the world,” that is, the order that is ordered by disorder (John 15). It is temporary, evanescent, unreliable, and we are not supposed to love it in the least (1 John 2:15-17). We are supposed to love the Father. Everything depends on getting things in the right order. For good things wrongly ordered is evil. And this is why evil is so deceptive. It deceives us into doing evil in pursuit of a good cause.

A distinguishing mark of the age of passion is confusion in the order of goods. Passion is by definition chaotic. It creates an array of ever-shifting of mutually exclusive trends, fads, styles, causes, images, movements, perceptions, memes, and so on. Each has its day, and for that day seems to carry the weight of heaven on its shoulders. Our passion-driven culture justifies these changing values not with reason subservient to truth but with confused ideologies constructed of ideas, maxims, tropes, symbols, and assertions taken from different spheres, mixed together, and directed by a practical goal.

The book of Proverbs laments the scarcity of faithful people (20:6) and people of “noble character” (31:10). Sometimes I ask in the same spirit of despair, “A rational person, who can find?” If you find a friend whose soul is ruled by reason, you are blessed indeed.

Rethinking Church #3: The Church is God’s Act

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What are the essential features of the thing we call “church”? Of course, most of us already have an idea of what “church” means—from the Bible, history, and our own experience. However at this point in the series I am asking everyone to place all those images aside to join me in rethinking the concept from the foundation up. How shall we proceed? Where shall we look to find the essential features of the church?

To get us started, let me make an assertion that I may need to modify later: we will find the essence of the church in its origin as documented in the New Testament. Perhaps we can learn more about the full implications of those essential features as the church takes different forms in different cultures and historical eras, but I am working with the assumption that its essence existed from the beginning and has not changed.

The most basic essential feature of the church is its origin in God. In Ephesians 1, we read about the grand story of salvation in Christ, from the depths of eternity (1:4, 11) to the gathering into unity of all things in Christ (1:10). At first, Paul speaks of the objects of God’s great love as “we” and “us” (1:3-10), but soon he begins to include those whom he calls “you” (1:11-18). Toward the end of the chapter Paul combines the “we” and “you” into a new “us” (1:19) that he calls “God’s holy people” (1:18) and “the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (1:22-23).

The church is God’s idea, God’s choice, and God’s act. God created it to achieve his purpose according to his plan. The church—whatever else it is—is the divine act of gathering all the scattered pieces of creation into unity in Christ by the power of the Spirit (Eph 1:13). We need to think of the word “church,” then, not merely as a noun designating an entity but as a verb describing an action. God is churching the broken, mutually hostile, and fragmented world. It will make clearer sense if we ignore the English word “church,” with its accumulated connotations, for a moment and think of the Greek word ekklesia, which means a gathering of people, an assembly. A gathering must be gathered by someone for some purpose. In reference to the church, God is the subject of the verb “gathering” and the gathering (the church) is the object.

In rethinking church, then, we must rid ourselves of any view of the church that in theory or practice displaces God as the primary actor and replaces him with human actors. The “gathering,” the “uniting” of all things in Christ that we call the “church” is God’s decision, choice, plan, and work. God is churching (reconciling) the world in Christ (2 Cor 5:19). The church is not our plan or project. It’s not for us to determine its purpose or measure its success. And its purpose is way beyond our power to make happen.

If we forget this essential feature of the church and try to “make it happen” by our own power, we may indeed achieve great things measured by human standards. We may build huge, wealthy, and influential institutions. We may entice crowds of people to say the right words. But only God can gather the scattered pieces of creation into unity in Christ. Our task is to let ourselves be churched by God. It is to believe, speak, and act only in harmony with the crucified and risen Christ empowered by God’s Spirit. Do we believe God can do this? Do we have the courage to let God be the primary actor is this event we call “church”? Can we be satisfied with what God does and the way he does it?

Next Time: the church is Christomorphic in form and Cruciform in action.

Rethinking Church #2 Where to Begin?

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I like to get to the bottom of things. I am not satisfied until I see how a claim is properly derived from a foundation that cannot be further analyzed. I know I am not alone in this desire, but I’ve been told that I am more obsessed with it than many others. So, let’s methodically clarify the essence of the thing we call church.

When something provokes us to take an interest in a thing and seek greater understanding, our minds begin sorting things, making distinctions, and seeing relationships we had not noticed before. One such distinction turns on the difference between the essential features of a thing and its accidental features. Conceptually, there is a very clear distinction between the two even if it’s difficult to apply to a real thing with precision. If you add or remove an accidental feature of a car, flower, or human being, these things still exist. But if you destroy an essential feature of a thing, it no longer exists. Aristotle said that a human being is essentially a “rational animal.” A human being can be short or tall, male or female, and brown or white. But if you remove life or rationality from a thing, it ceases to be a human being. Likewise distinguishing between the essential and the accidental properties of the church is one way to begin rethinking church.

Adding or subtracting accidental features from a church does not cause it to cease being the church. However removing an essential feature would destroy its churchly existence completely. What is left is not the church at all. As an example, let’s pick something uncontroversial. Whether a church meets in a public building, a private dwelling, or in a cave, makes no difference to its existence as a church. However, a “church” without faith in Jesus Christ is not a church at all. It is something else.

We need to exercise great care and humility in applying the essence/accident distinction to the real world church. Reading church history and observing the contemporary church demonstrates the great diversity in how this distinction has been applied. Many controversies, some of them bitter, find their origin in this diversity of application:

1. For it is possible to mistake an accidental feature for an essential one, expanding greatly the number of “essential” features.

2. Or at the opposite extreme, essential features can be treated as optional.

3. Or in a third possibility, one may burden the church with so many and such extraneous accidental features that it makes it almost impossible to live out its essence.

4. Or again, perhaps one could be so insistent that the church refrain from adding any accidental features that it cannot adapt to circumstances and can carry out its mission effectively in the real world.

Numbers 1, 3, and 4 retain the essential features of the church despite their excesses, deficiencies, and misplaced priorities. Only number 2 ceases to be the church at all. Given the possibilities for mistakes and the absence of the perfect alternative, you can see why I want to approach the question of the essence of the church cautiously, methodically, and with humility.

Next Time: The first and most fundamental essential feature of the church is its divine origin.

Rethinking Church: Introducing A New Series

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All writing is to some extent autobiography. The series I begin today is especially so. It arises out of my own struggle to understand the nature and place of the church in the world and my relationship to it. I write to articulate my feelings and clarify my thinking on this subject and perhaps to help others to a similar clarity. I don’t know in advance what I will say or at what destination I will arrive.

Like many of you, I don’t remember a time when I was not held within the embrace of the church. She was to me a mother, teacher, and guardian. She taught me about creation, Abraham, Daniel, and most of all about Jesus. And I loved her for it. From early childhood I felt a call to ministry in the church. I listened to that call, got the required training, and served churches for ten years in preaching, youth ministry, and college ministries. After I completed my PhD, I began teaching theology at the university level and served in volunteer leadership roles in local churches. Except as a small child, I don’t think I was ever naïve about the weaknesses and sins of the people that comprised the church. But I hoped that with the strong leaders and good teachers these problems could be managed so that more good than harm would be done.

About ten years ago, after many frustrating attempts to simplify church life and bring it more into line with the simple New Testament vision, I began to realize that the structures, ingrained expectations, and traditions that guided the church were able to neutralize and domesticate any effort at systemic reform. I tried to make peace with this situation and resign myself to working within a broken system to achieve some good. However, about five years ago I began to entertain the idea that the traditional ways churches organize themselves is the major obstacle to embodying authentic church life in the world. About three years ago I came to the conclusion that most of the institutions we call “churches” are really parachurch organizations, much of the “church work” we do focuses on making something happen on Sunday morning, and much of the money given goes to pay a staff to keep the parachurch functions running.

So, here I am on birthday (June 01), a child of the church and a theologian of the church, having to rethink everything I ever thought about the nature and place of the church in the world and my relationship to it. I invite you to join me in this project.

Next time: forget everything you have ever thought about the church. Get rid of all images. What is the essential nature of the thing the New Testament calls, “church”?

Science Is Not On Anyone’s Side—Because It Has No Conscience, No Politics, No Religion, No Heart, and No Soul

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Some problems are difficult to solve. So many factors come into play, so many unknowns are…well…unknown. Private interests and preferences exert their influence. Entrenched social identities—class, race, gender, etc.—determine in advance which proposals get a hearing. Interminable arguments ensue with no obvious path to clarity and consensus in sight. Better to stay out of such quarrels.

However, some seemingly difficult problems have very simple solutions. And I want to deal today with one such a problem: Advocates of all sorts of causes claim that science is on their side. People on the other side are anti-scientific. They ignore the “facts,” and don’t follow the path charted by science. The solution to this problem is hiding in plain sight: in title of this essay. Science is not on anyone’s side! Because science has no conscience, no politics, no religion, no heart, and no soul. It supports no causes.

Allow me to use words I wrote a few years ago to explain why science doesn’t care about your causes—or mine:

Natural science seeks to make understandable the relationship of one set of empirical phenomena to another set of empirical phenomena by means of law-like generalization(s) or postulated causal relations or some other theoretical mediation. All of these mediating principles may be reduced to patterns of empirical phenomena. Or, if the theory refers to unobservable entities, these entities are still physical and manifest themselves in observable phenomena. This is the nature and the limit of natural science, whether physics, chemistry, biology, geology, or paleontology. Natural science studies the relationships within the created world among empirical phenomena, that is, the perceptions or sense data received through the five senses (The Faithful Creator, 2015).

Natural science does one thing. It describes and explains the empirical world in empirical terms. It speaks no other language and understands none. It adheres to no morality and supports none. It treasures no policy preferences and cares nothing for ours. It contemplates happiness or sadness, war or peace, and love or hate with equal indifference. Its methods and goals are the same whether studying the effects of poison or medicine. It can produce weapons of mass destruction or seek ways to feed the world’s hungry with equal efficiency. It doesn’t care. Science can count how many people die this year from infectious diseases and explain how, but it does not care in the least. It does matter to science how long you live, how happy you are, or how virtuous you become. Saint or devil, science makes no distinction. Why? Because it doesn’t care about anything! It can’t. Caring is not part of the scientific method. Its goal is to explain, not to heal or kill. comfort or torture.

So, get clear on this: whoever you are, whatever your cause, however passionate your devotion, science is not on your side. Because science doesn’t take sides! If you want to explain one set of empirical data with reference to another set of empirical date, science can help. But if you have a moral, political, religious, or esthetic question, don’t look to science for answers. It would be like asking a freeway sign whether you ought to vacation in Los Angeles or Miami. It won’t work, because…

Like freeway signs, science has no conscience, no politics, no religion, no heart, and no soul!

Atonement Book–Help Me Choose a Title

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Dear Friends:

I haven’t been writing essays for this blog for a while. That’s because I’ve been trying to finish my latest book. It’s been over 5 years in the making, but I am almost finished! Within a week or two I will turn it over to my publisher, Cascade Press.

I’d like your help in choosing a title.

This book is about how Jesus saves human beings from everything that keeps us from becoming what we were created to be, that is, true images of God. In traditional terms, Jesus saves from sin, death, and the devil. I argue that the traditional and still popular evangelical doctrine of penal substitution—that God punished Jesus instead of us—is wrong and incomprehensible to our contemporaries, church or unchurched The liberal Protestant theory that Jesus “saves” only through the influence of his example is also wrong. That theory is too weak to deal the power of sin, evil, and death that dominates our world. I argue that Paul—and the church fathers Irenaeus and Athanasius—thought differently about the atonement. They see the atonement as recreating humanity and uniting us to God through Jesus’s life, activity, death and resurrection. The traditional theological terms for this way thinking are theosis—a Greek word meaning the process of becoming God or God-like—and recapitulation. That is, Jesus repeated or summed up the history of broken humanity and got it right. He rewrote history so that—to put it in common speech—it has a happy ending. And that happy ending is that we are raise to such glory that the church fathers called it deification. That is, we are given divine qualities like immortality, glory, and incorruptibility, to use Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15.

The titles below reflect my indecision between titles that use the vocabulary of theology and those with more popular appeal.

Titles that appeal to the theologically literate:

  1. The Second Adam: Atonement Theology Beyond Penal Substitution
  2. The New Adam: Atonement Theology Beyond Penal Substitution
  3. The New Adam: Why the Early Church Got the Atonement Right and Evangelicals and Liberals Get it Wrong
  4. The Atonement: Why Paul, Irenaeus, and Athanasius Got it Right and Evangelicals and Liberals Get it Wrong

Titles that appeal also to the non-theologically literate reader:

  1. A New Beginning: How Jesus Rescues Us from Sin, Death, and the Devil
  2. A New Beginning: How Jesus Removes Our Guilt, Heals Our Wounds, Defeats Our Enemies, and Raises Us to Glory

Which of these titles do you think would make someone want to read this book?

Thanks for your help!

RCH

We Do Not Fear Death—For Christ is Risen

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As a child, Athanasius (296–373) lived through the infamous Diocletian persecution, which began in 303 and ended in 313 with the Edict of Milan. With the memories of those dark days etched in his memory, he wrote about the change that has come over the world since the resurrection of Christ:

Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven away the dark.

Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued upon the Savior’s manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples. How can you think otherwise, when you see men naturally weak hastening to death, unafraid at the prospect of corruption, fearless of the descent into Hades, even indeed with eager soul provoking it, not shrinking from tortures, but preferring thus to rush on death for Christ’s sake, rather than to remain in this present life? (Athanasius, Incarnation of the Word 29).

Death use to be powerful and intimidating. We hid our faces from its glance and trembled at its threats. It owned us. We obeyed its every command. But as Athanasius reminds us, the resurrection of Jesus deprived death of its terror and strength. Jesus frees us from its hold: “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body  and after that can do no more” (Luke 12:4).

Fear of death is the root and essence of every other fear. If you fear death, you are the slave of those who hold the power of death. But Jesus exposed death as powerless. It cannot defeat God’s love for us! What, then, is left to fear? Poverty or prison? Frowns or whispers? Pandemic or famine?

Name your fear, my friends, whatever it is. Face it, and say to it, “I do not fear you! For I do not fear death your master! I do not fear death! I do not fear death! For Christ is risen!  He has risen indeed!”