The Church's Prophetic Witness

As an extension of my questions about the gospel's relationship to culture and my deference to Newbigin's "delicate balance," I would emphasize the necessity of "prophetic integrity" for the witness of the Church in the culture of our day.

The Church must now recognize some fundamental concerns about the nature of a meaningful prophetic witness: (1) Asserting Itself as a righteous portrayal of Christ to the "surrounding" culture and a standard by which to judge is not beneficial to the Church's mission; (2) On the other hand, accomodating to the flavors and climate of culture as a means of witness is neither necessary nor necessarily productive; (3) Whereas whenever the Church envisions and embodies the spiritual characteristics of Christ, being simultaneously embedded in a cultural context, the witness of Christ becomes both illuminating and effective in that culture.

Representatives of the Church have too often deferred either to a standard of morality or a standard of ethics as their "summa theologica" of Christian witness; the Church would do well in Its tenuous relationship with the culture to recognize that Its prophetic voice and witness is most illuminating and redemptive when the only deference It makes is to the Incarnation of Christ. This is a message to both sides of the aisle: that the Truth found in the story and community of the Church can by no means be propositioned; It is a Truth that has no ground but that of existence, and It is a reality that is of little use when it is encoded in legal or economic fashion (or otherwise the bedfellow of cultural fashion).

The Church is not a righteous judge, and neither is It a sibling of culture. It is called to be the hands and feet of Christ present to a dying world. It is called to be the present flesh of the resurrected Christ, enfolding sinners not into a pristine village of elitist privilege but a redemptive community of merciful grace. Salvation is to come not in It but through It. Truly, the Church, while being not Christ Himself, is His embodiment. And because saving Truth must be both embodied and spiritually redemptive, the Church's prophetic witness to culture must be both a unified mystical vision for Christ and His literal handiwork.