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.

Contextualization: True & False

I recently posed some questions about the "gospel and culture" debate that has so forcefully returned itself to to the table of Christian dialogue in recent years. Perhaps some of the most cogent and broad-minded words on this issue have come from, Lesslie Newbigin, the late British pastoral theologian too often neglected by the knights at the table. The delicate theological balance he presents may serve to woo polarized "fundamentalists" and "emergents" back to a place of mutual appreciation and consideration. In the least, I have been so wooed.

The gospel is addressed to human beings, to their minds and hearts and consciences, and calls for their response. Human beings only exist as members of communities which share a common language, customs, ways of ordering economic and social life, ways of understanding and coping with their world. If the gospel is to be understood, if it is to be received as something which communicates truth about the real human situation, if it is, as we say, to 'make sense,' it has to be communicated in the language of those to whom it is addressed and has to be clothed in symbols which are meaningful to them. And since the gospel does not come as a disembodied message, but as the message of a community which claims to live by it and which invites others to adhere to it, the community's life must be so ordered that it 'makes sense' to those who are so invited. It must, as we say, 'come alive.' Those to whom it is addressed must be able to say, 'Yes, I see. This is true for me, for my situation.' But if the gospel is truly to be communicated, the subject in that sentence is as important as the predicate. What comes home in the heart of the hearer must really be the gospel, and not a product shaped by the mind of the hearer. It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumberable 'lives of Jesus' were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus. But that criticism has much wider application. If one looks at the long history of Christian art one can see that in successive portraits of Jesus the self-portrait of the age-the Byzantine picture of Jesus as the supreme Emperor, the Pantocrator; the medieval picture of the pain-drenched figure on the cross, the blond, fair-haired boy of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal, and the Liberator Christ modeled on Che Guevara. In each case the figure of Jesus has been so painted as to fit the reigning cultural ideal, but what does this gallery of portraits have to do with the real Jesus? How can the gospel 'come alive' in all these different cultural contexts, and still be the same authentic gospel? That is the problem of contextualization.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in Pluralist Society (Ch. 12).

Letter to a Divided Church

Christian brothers and sisters co-existing in broken community will never regain the true spirit of kinship until they begin to mutually and personally come to terms with the present shadow of sin in their very own hearts. The very nature of pride is a short-sighted perspective, a sort of spiritual myopia that clings to what should be let go and bears down on what should be forgiven. And, though this sort of condition of the heart prevails in society, in culture, and in men and women across every possible line of demarcation, this condition, a condition sometimes burdening the very heart of a church, should never be ignored or seen as trivial; in fact, it is of ultimate spiritual significance.

In I Corinthians, Paul wrote about division, unity, and the spirit of reconciliation:

The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don’t need you!' On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we [should] treat with special honor…[and] there should be no division in the body, but…its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (I Cor. 12:21-23, 25-26)

We are truly each members of the Body of Christ, the Church. And to the extent that we fail to live together in a spirit of love, the name of Christ is slandered, and to the extent that we draw unto one another in forgiveness, reconciliation, and through shared faith and hope, Christ is glorified and the world is blessed. Yes, truly, it is through us that Christ works to bring a fallen world into repentance, and it is through one another that we are sanctified; or, in the tone of our Christian Proverb, "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another" (Prov. 27:17).

But what happens when our pride and sin becomes an obstacle to our love for one another? What happens when our mutual pride begins to stomp out the remaining flickers of grace and civility? The sin that so easily entangles us serves to choke out the breath of faith and the gospel of Christ from the life of our church, and there is only one hope for restoration: that He increase, and we decrease (John 3:30).

A Spiritual Commonwealth

As a young convert in the Christian faith, one verse among many served to encourage my sensibilities as to the call of devotion and mission I would be accepting: "Bear one another's burden's and, thus, fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). This made clear to me the nature of my Lord, one of compassion, and of His Kingdom, a commonwealth of grace. It touched the heart of my natural cravings for community and, with beautiful brushstrokes, portrayed the art of a broken world restored, animated by the dance of relationship breathing and pulsing through the motions of integrity, faith, civility, diligence, and love.

Wendell Berry noted,

The Gospels are overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of human life, of life in the human commonwealth. In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practiced, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. ("The Burden of the Gospels," The Christian Century, September 20, 2005).

And so we are spiritually conscious to the extent that we recognize that the righteous requirements of the law have risen out of the necessities of repentance, reconciliation, and restoration (the restoration of this commonwealth) and spiritually mature to the extent that we laud and practice these three in relationship and vocation to the glory of God. Our burden is to serve the downtrodden: the sick, the lowly, the helpless, the widowed, the poor, the diseased, the hungry, the neurotic, and the sinful...and to call and teach them and the prideful and self-seeking of a new way, dying to the domination of the sinful nature and embracing a spirit of grace which is borne into our souls at the point of repentance.

Those who are absent from the Body of Christ miss out on its antibodies but not necessarily the work of Its hands. The Church is the servant of all and all restoration will come from Christ through the Church. For we are to bear one another's burdens and the Church, the world's. And, in bearing the burden of one who is cut off from the spirit and community of God, the Church is to commune with and enfold the least of these into its fellowship and into the blessing of its grace; yes, into Christ Himself.

In the "Credo of the People of God" crafted by Pope Paul VI on June 30, 1968, the following words give some fullness to this sensibility:

We must fulfill the mandate entrusted to Christ by Peter to confirm our brothers in the faith...[making] a profession of faith [and pronouncing] a creed which, without being strictly speaking a dogmatic definition, repeats in substance, with some developments called for by the spiritual condition of our time, the creed of Nicea, the creed of the immortal tradition of the holy Church of God...[which] is therefore holy, though she has sinners in her bosom, because she herself has no other life but that of grace: it is by living by her life that her members are sanctified; it is by removing themselves from her life that they fall into sins and disorders that prevent the radiation of her sanctity.

Because through the Church's collective profession of faith, a new vision of life, of repentance and reconciliation, is borne into the dim shadow of our fallen world; and through the work of Its hands, salvation is borne into the broken spirits and lost souls of the prodigal children of God. Restoration is the tune of its melody, and, in fact, the entire Piece has been written and played by the Master Himself. We are but the strings on the violin and the keys on the piano. But to be joined as a member of such a Body, to have been a part of the sustaining of a pitch or the blending of a harmony, is to have been a worker in the field, for the Music itself has not just the beauty of healing; it is the very Salve.