Does Society Still Need the Parish Church?
Does Society Still Need
the Parish Church?
ell, sisters and brothers, I feel that I am really the most incompetent person to lead this discussion because I am now only
at the end of my life learning the basic things that I ought to have
learned at the beginning about how to be the pastor of a local congregation.
I was ordained in the Church of Scotland for foreign missionary service, and went out, with about eleven years of the old British Raj still to go, as an old-fashioned district missionary, monarch of all I surveyed and telling everybody else what to do, but not yet having learned really to do it myself. And then I became a bishop of a diocese, with twelve years of very exciting experience in seeking to knit together two very different traditions, Anglican and Congregationalist - they put a Presbyterian in to keep the peace between the two! Then I became what I suppose one would call an ecumenical bureaucrat and went back to India to the very different kind of role of being Bishop in Madras, an enormously expanding city.
Now at the very end, as I said, I am beginning to learn what I ought to have learned at the beginning, because I am the minister of a little URC congregation. If you want to visit me, you ask for Winson Green Prison and then look for the building just opposite, which Hitler unfortunately missed, and that is where I try to minister. It is one of these typical inner-city areas where a demolition order was put on the church thirty-five years ago that has neither been withdrawn nor carried out. All the shops and houses around have been knocked down. My congregation points to a field of thistles and says, "That's where I was born and brought up," and the folks who have gradually been brought in are, as the local beat policeman said to me, "all OHMS." I thought he was saying something about the prison and I said, "What exactly do you mean?" And he answered, "Only Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs." So we have this situation of a very, very loyal congregation of aging white people who, not of their own will, have been banished to the suburbs and do not have cars to travel in, trying to minister to a local area where it is not just thistles and tin cans but mostly Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. So that's the sort of background out of which I have to try to speak.
Transcript of a tape of a talk given by Bishop Lesslie Newbigin at a seminar held by the Centre for Explorations in Social Concern, 5 November 1985.
Second, I see the need for clarity about the criteria. Obviously, changing sociological conditions, changing cultural conditions, the enormous and rapid changes that are taking place in our society are relevant to the way that we understand our task. But I do most deeply believe (and I have tried to act on that belief in many different situations) that when we are looking for guidance and renewal, fundamentally we have to go to the Scriptures. We do so not in a sort of unintelligent and stupid way, just picking up odd texts, but with the faith that the Church lives by - that the character and the purpose of God are rendered apparent for us in the Scriptures, and are understood as we read them in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the fellowship of the whole Christian Church in all ages. I think it's important to say this because all of our society, all of our thinking in the last two hundred years, has been dominated by the inductive principle: in trying to find our way we assemble all the facts and then, on the basis of the facts, make some kind of theory about how we ought to go. And the inductive principle, which has been so enormously creative in producing what we call a modern scientific worldview, is a method with strict limited application. The inductive principle is not applicable to the question of our ultimate destiny because we will not have the data about our ultimate destiny until the universe comes to a conclusion. We have to depend upon another kind of reasoning. The Church exists because God has revealed himself in the story of Israel, in the ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we are in the world as the bearers of a revelation of God's purpose for creation. That is the only criterion, ultimately, by which we have to be guided. Obviously we have to have an enormous amount of discussion among ourselves about how we interpret the Scriptures, about how we relate what is given to us in the Scriptures to the new experiences that come to us as the world goes on its way. But we have to be, I think, quite unembarrassed and unambiguous about the fact that we are finding our ultimate criteria in what has been given to us in revelation, which is not available by a process of observation and induction from the human situation as we see it.
Third, I start with the very elementary point that in the New Testament the Church is always and only designated by reference to two realities: one, God in Christ, and the other, the place where the Church is. And when, as we know from the Corinthian letters, the believers are forming themselves into groups involving another name (I belong to Cephas, I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos), Paul is exceedingly tough in his dealing with them. He says, "You are carnal" -that's a very strong word but it is the appropriate word. (1 Cor. 3:4). Paul responds to their divisions by simply presenting to them again the cross of Christ in relation to which every other name is relativized. No other name can take the place that belongs alone to the name of Jesus Christ, and therefore when believers propose to identify themselves with another name than that of the Lord Jesus Christ, they are, as Paul said, "carnal." They are falling back upon the flesh, upon human wisdom, power, spirituality, whatever, and they are therefore falling away from the Spirit, which is simply the life lived through what God has done finally and decisively in Jesus Christ. This is not accidental; it is fundamental.
Here we have to look at the interesting word that the New Testament writers use for the Church: ekklesia Theou. There was an enormous number of words available in the contemporary vocabulary of that Hellenistic world to describe religious groups of people who were drawn together by a common quest for salvation under some kind of name and with some kind of discipline and tradition of learning. There were a lot of Greek words for this, like heranos and thiasos and so on, and opponents of Christianity like Celsus constantly used those words to describe the Church. But in the first five centuries in the Christian Church you never find those words used. The Church never defines itself in the language that was used by these various religious groups composed of people in the quest of salvation. They used only this word ekklesia.
In the Greek Old Testament there are two words used to refer to the congregation of God - synagogue and ekklesia. The New Testament writers could have chosen either of those words. The word synagogue was already used by the Jews in the Diaspora. But they chose the word ekklesia, which is the secular word for the assembly to which every citizen is summoned and expected to attend, in which the business of the city is dealt with. Paul always uses the word, all the New Testament writers use the term ekklesia Theou, the assembly of God - the assembly, in other words, to which all are summoned without exception. And it is summoned not by the town clerk but by God - not by Peter, not by Apollos, not by Paul, but by God. And that is why you have this interesting fact that you can use the words Church and churches interchangeably. You can say "the churches in Asia" or "the Church in Asia" because, in a sense, it is one reality, it is one God who is summoning all people, and therefore, whether it is simply that group that meets in Thessalonica or whether it is the whole reality in the whole world, it is the same reality. It is the catholic Church: the local church is not a branch of something else. The local church is the catholic Church. It is the ekklesia Theou, and Paul uses the most realistic language about it. Even when he has to tell them that they are sinners in all kinds of respects, they are nevertheless the ekklesia Theou, defined simply by the place where they meet, and any other definition is ruled out. And this principle has been carried on in the subsequent history of the Church. The basic units of the Church - the parish, the diocese - were all determined by secular realities. And that is fundamental.2
I remember once a fascinating discussion among a group of bishops about the proper size for a diocese. Some said that the size of the diocese must be determined by the number of people with whom a bishop can have a real pastoral relationship. I remember hearing Ted Wickham3 saying in passionate opposition to that, "No, the size of the diocese must be determined by the size of the human community. The diocese must be that which represents the purpose of God for this human community, and for the pastoral care of its members you have got to make the proper arrangements. But you cannot determine the size of the diocese by the internal needs of the Church. It must be determined by the secular reality for which the Church is there." That has been fundamental right through the history of the Church, that the structural forms of the Church are determined by the secular reality, and not by the internal needs of the Church; and I think that is true to Scripture.
The relation between the Church in a "place" and the secular reality of that "place" is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It's not just that it happens to be located in that spot on the map. It is the Church of God for that place, and that is because the Church does not exist for itself but for God and for the world that Jesus came to save.
One possible definition of the Church that I think is worth thinking about is that the Church is the "provisional incorporation of humankind into Jesus Christ." All humankind is incorporated in Adam. We are all part of this natural human world. Jesus Christ is the last Adam, and the Church is the provisional incorporation of humankind into Christ. It is provisional in two senses: in the sense that not all humankind is so incorporated, and in the sense that those who are so incorporated are not yet fully conformed to the image of Christ. So the Church is a provisional body; it looks forward. It is its very nature to look forward, but it looks forward in two ways -and both must be equally stressed - one, to the full formation of Christ in all its members, to the growth of its members in holiness to the stature of Jesus Christ; and two, to the incorporation of all of humanity.
But in talking about the world you have to talk about that segment of the world in which you are placed, and the Church has to be recognizable as for that place. Now, I'll say later that the geographical definition of that segment may not be the only one that is relevant, although I think it is the fundamental one. There can be other possible definitions of the "place," but it is of the very essence of the Church that it is for that place, for that section of the world for which it has been made responsible. And the "for" has to be defined christologically. In other words, the Church is for that place in a sense that is determined by the sense in which Christ is for the world. Now, one could go into a whole theology of the atonement if one were to develop this, but obviously Christ on his cross is in one sense totally identified with the world, but in another sense totally separated from the world. The cross is the total identification of Jesus with the world in all its sin, but in that identification the cross is the judgment of the world, that which shows the gulf between God and his world. We must always, it seems to me, in every situation, be wrestling with both sides of this reality: that the Church is for the world against the world. The Church is against the world for the world. The Church is for the human community in that place, that village, that city, that nation, in the sense that Christ is for the world. And that must be the determining criterion at every point.
And so I took as a basic text, and this is really the heart of what I want to say, the Johannine version of the Great Commission. I think that missionary thinking has often been a little distorted by the fact that when people say "the Great Commission," they always mean Matthew 28:18-20. "And Jesus came and said to them, `All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age."' An interesting fact is that this text was never used as a basis for mission until William Carey (1791). There are three basic forms of the Great Commission given to us. This Matthaean form is one. There is the Lukan form in Acts 1:6-8, "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses." Here the mission of the Church is seen as a kind of overflow of Pentecost, not as a command laid upon us but as a gift given to us. Then there is the Johannine version (John 20:19-2 3), which I would like to take as a basic paradigm for our understanding because we have got to understand the sense in which the Church is for the place christologically, spelled out here in the greatest detail. The disciples are huddled together in a room withdrawing themselves from the world in fear of the world, and then, as he had promised, Jesus is present in their midst ("Where two or three have gathered together there am I.") And immediately his command is "Open the doors, go out into the world. As the Father sent me, so I send you." And that is the launching of the Church. The Church is a movement launched into the world in the same way Jesus is sent into the world by the Father.
I have always been terribly grateful for the fact that in my first diocese, which was a largely rural diocese, about half of our congregations had no buildings whatsoever. And so for my first twelve years as a bishop I was normally conducting worship in the open streetall the services of the Church without exception. My picture of the Church formed in those years is deeply etched in my mind, the picture of a group of people sitting on the ground, with a larger crowd of Hindus and Muslims and others standing around listening, watching, discussing; and, thank God, when I would come back a few months later, some of those would be in the group in the front. So I got the sense of the Church not as something drawn out of the world into a building, but as something sent out into the world. And the operative word in our text is the word "as" in the sentence "As the Father sent me, so I send you."
Now that "as" contains the whole crux of our question for today, doesn't it? I honestly think the question is not "Does society need the parish church?" but "Does God need the parish church?" That's really the question we're wrestling with. And this "as" contains the heart of the matter. How did the Father send the Son? Well, one could go back to that basic text in Mark 1:14 where Jesus comes into Galilee preaching the gospel of God, the Good News of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel - believe the good news that I'm telling you." Now, that is the announcement of a fact. It is news in the strictest sense of the word.
I used to get awfully tired when I was working as a bishop in Madras. My house was halfway between the airport and the city, so it was a wonderful place for ecumenical travelers to stop off and have lunch. After lunch I always got the question, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the church in India?" to which I developed the standard reply, "I believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and therefore the question doesn't arise." In regard to a fact, one is not optimistic or pessimistic. One is believing or unbelieving. But in regard to a program, you can be optimistic or pessimistic. We are conned by the media, who constantly suggest to us that the Church is a kind of good cause we have to support, and if we don't support it, it's going to collapse. Yes, if it's a program, then one can be optimistic or pessimistic. But about a "fact," these are not the appropriate words. The question is "Do you believe or do you not?" Here is a fact, and of course it is not a religious fact. It doesn't belong to that little slot in Time magazine between drama and sports where religion is kept. It belongs to the opening section on world affairs. The Kingdom of God is at hand. The reign of God is at hand. In what sense is that news? It's not news to the Jews that God reigns. They've known that for generations. What is new is that the reign of God is now a present reality that they have to come to terms with. It is no longer a theological idea, no longer a vision in Heaven, no longer something in the distant future. It is a reality they have to come to terms with. But one can't see it when one is facing the wrong way, looking in the wrong direction. Hence the call to repentliterally to turn round.
I remember once an occasion when I had to visit a village in the Madras diocese that like many of the villages was miles from any road. In order to get to this village you had to cross a river, and you could cross either at the north end or at the south end. In their wisdom the congregation had decided that I was coming in at the south end. So they had a magnificent reception prepared such as only a village congregation in India can prepare, with trumpets and drums and fireworks and garlands and fruit and everything you can think of. I came in at the other end and found a totally deserted village, which created a great crisis. I had to withdraw into the jungle and the whole village had to reorganize itself and face the other way, and then I appeared. Well, that is what the word repent means. It's a total U-turn of the mind. You are expecting something quite different from the reality that is coming upon you, and so you cannot see it. There has got to be a total U-turn of the mind. When you have done the U-turn, it becomes possible to believe. And so there comes the call: "Follow me," and Jesus calls Peter and Andrew and James and John. But the Kingdom isn't obvious. There is the complaint: "We don't see it. Where is it?" And so there are the parables and the "mighty words" - the miracles.
But finally, there is the final parable and the final miracle, which is the cross. Ultimately the reign of God is present in the cross. And only to those who have been called as witnesses is the secret given that the cross is in fact not defeat but victory, that it is the victory of God over all the powers of this world. And therefore when Jesus says to them, "As the Father sent me, so send I you," he shows them his hands and his side. In other words, the Church will be recognizable as the bearer of this mission on which the Father sent the Son and on which the Son sent the Church insofar as the scars of the Passion are recognizable in its body. So you have in St. Paul's letters that classic definition of mission, which has been so much ignored, as "bearing in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus might be made manifest in our body" (2 Cor. 4:10).
I think we have often missed something by concentrating entirely on that Matthean version, which can produce a kind of triumphalist picture of the mission of the Church. Here, however, the Church is recognizable as the bearer of the Kingdom, the presence of the Kingdom, insofar as it is marked by the scars of the Passion. And the Passion of Jesus is not passive submission to evil but the price paid for an active challenge to evil. The Passion is what theologians call the Messianic tribulations. It is what occurs at the frontier where the reign of God challenges the rulers of this world. That frontier runs right through the whole of human life, and it is when the Church is at that frontier that it bears in its body both the marks of the Passion and the power of the risen life of the Lord. And so then Jesus immediately says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." He gives them the power of his risen life so that they may be the bearers of his reconciling work. "Whosoever's sins you remit they are remitted, whosoever's sins you retain, they are retained." The Church bears in its body the reconciling power of the atonement insofar as it is marked by the scars of the Passion, and it is therefore the bearer of the risen life. If you see the mission of the Church in that sense, then all the futile discussion between evangelism and social action disappears. It is an irrelevant discussion. It is meaningless when you see the mission of the Church in the terms that this Johannine passage offers.
I suggest that this Johannine version of the Great Commission rules out three wrong ways of looking at the local church.
Now there, of course, you get the associational model neat. When you ask what is the purpose of making converts, the answer is, so they can make more converts, and when you ask what is the purpose of those further converts, it is so they can make more converts. There is, in other words, an infinite regress. And, as we know from the medical analogy, the multiplication of cells unrelated to the purpose of the body is what we call cancer. That's a very hard thing to say, and I don't want to suggest that the folks who are in the Church Growth school are blind to these points. But I do think that a very sharp criticism needs to be made against the idea that the Church exists simply to make more members, irrespective of the purpose for which the Father sent the Son into the world, which is that the presence of the reign of God might be a reality now.
Second, I think John's Great Commission also rules out seeing the local church as simply the religious aspect of the local community, providing a focus for folk religion but failing to confront people with the sharp word that calls for radical conversion. I think perhaps this is more a temptation for the established Church. Remember, my background is Scotland, and I think the established Church in Scotland is inclined to yield to that temptation even more than the established Church in England. But it is the temptation for the established Church. And one understands the power of it, the tremendously deep attachment that people have to their parish church even though they would never under any circumstances go into it until the day of their funeral. This concept of folk religion is one the Grubb Institute has been interested in. But I think it needs a good deal of analysis. Having lived most of my life in India, I am bound to say that an awful lot of what passes for religion is what in an Indian village we would call heathenism. But I think it is also mixed up with a lot of vestigial remains of Christianity. It is a very complex mixture, this thing called folk religion. One should certainly never be contemptuous of it or despise it. One should always be on the lookout for the signals that it gives of realities beyond the visible world. But the New Testament is very clear that a radical repentance, a radical conversion, is required if one is to see the Kingdom of God.
Now, in saying that, I want to say very strongly that conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit. Conversion is not something that can be programmed or accomplished or manipulated, even by the most expert evangelist. If there is one thing I have learned as a missionary, it is that though I was in a situation where, thank God, a great many people were being brought to Christ and to conversion, baptism, and church membership, the more I investigated the ways that had happened, the less I seemed to have to do with it. I think God works in a mysterious way. I have talked with scores of people who have come to the Christian faith from Hindu or Muslim or Marxist or secular humanist background, and I am always impressed by the fact that the conversion of any person to Christ is a very mysterious thing in which there are many different elements, but the strategy is always in the hand of the Holy Spirit. The folk religion concept tends to side-step the need of radical conversion, but any sort of manipulative evangelism will not do either. I do believe that the Holy Spirit himself, and he alone, is the agent of conversion.
Third, I think the Johannine Great Commission rules out the conception of the Church in purely functional terms. In the kind of circles that I move in (probably very peculiar circles), I constantly hear people talking about Kingdom issues versus Church issues. "Forget about the Church, all this ecclesiastical stuff that has nothing to do with God's will. On the last day when the sheep and the goats are finally separated, they are not going to be asked what their view of episcopacy was. These are all irrelevant questions. The important things are the Kingdom issues of justice, peace, liberation." This has a certain element of truth in it. But if it is taken by itself, then the Church just becomes one of the less effective pressure groups in our society. The Church, instead of being a bearer of liberation, becomes a crusader for liberation, which is a very different thing. I want to say that the Church cannot fulfill the Kingdom purpose that is entrusted to it if it sees its role in merely functional terms. And that leads me on to my last point, where I want to think of the Church as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God's reign for that place and that segment of the total fabric of humanity for which it is responsible - a sign, instrument, and foretaste for that place with its particular character.
And I start with foretaste-the great New Testament word arrabon, which is such a wonderful word if you think about it. I was once making an elaborate explanation of this word arrabon in a class in the Selly Oak colleges and explaining how scholars used to be puzzled by it because it is not a classical Greek word. Then they dug up a lot of parchments in the sands of Egypt and found that they were shopkeepers' accounts, and that arrabon was just the word that the shopkeepers all used for cash on deposit, a pledge for a bill that you would pay at the end. And an Egyptian student in my class got up and said, "Well, we still use the same word in Cairo"-apparently the Arabic word arbon is still the operative word. If you want to buy a suit in Cairo you dicker about the cloth and the style and all that, but before the tailor will start making it he'll ask you to put down some cash. This is spendable cash, not just an IOU-he can go and have a drink with it. But the point of that cash is that it is a pledge that the full bill is going to be paid. And this is the word that St. Paul uses over and over again for the Holy Spirit.
To use an analogy closer to home, think of one of these very posh dinner parties where you are kept standing for ages and ages and wonder whether there's ever going to be anything to drink. Then a trolley is brought out and there is a tinkle of glasses, and you are extremely glad to get a drink, not only because you're getting very thirsty but, more importantly, because that trolley is a sign that some thing is cooking in the kitchen. Now, the Holy Spirit is the aperitif for the messianic banquet. It is something you enjoy now, and that's the great thing in the charismatic movement. You enjoy it. There is something really to enjoy and celebrate now. It's not just an IOU, a promissory note. But the whole point of it is that it is a foretaste, that it assures you of a greater reality still to come. And in that sense the Church is a foretaste of the Kingdom.
And here I think the Orthodox have something to teach us. The Orthodox often criticize us in the Western Church for having a too functional view of the Church, and I think they are right. Maybe they need a bit of correction the other way. But the Orthodox have always stressed the point that the Church is first of all a communion in the Holy Spirit in the life of the triune God, so that you must define the Church in ontological terms and not just in functional terms. The Church is defined by what it is. It is already a sharing in the life of God. I think we do need to emphasize that point. I felt that tremendously on the occasions when I have participated in the Orthodox worship in Moscow, where the Church, in functional terms, is almost powerless; it's not allowed to do anything. It's not allowed to preach. It's not allowed to do social work, nor to publish anything. But the Church there continues to draw converts, and it's just because when you step out of a Moscow street into an Orthodox Church and find yourself in the middle of the Orthodox liturgy, you know that you have stepped out from under one jurisdiction into another jurisdiction. There is another reality there, which just by being what it is challenges the world outside and draws us because we are made for God and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. The Church is a foretaste, and that means it will be different from the world. If it isn't, it's no good. Let us not be afraid of the fact that the Church is different from the world, that the reality that we celebrate, that we share, that we rejoice in in our worship, is a reality that the world treats as an illusion. But that's the whole point. It is the foretaste of another reality. I think we need to not evade that or try to slide over it or make it seem less sharp.
But insofar as the Church is a foretaste, it can also be an instrument. It can be an instrument through which God's will for justice and peace and freedom is done in the world. And that takes the Church out into the secular world with whatever is relevant to the real needs of that world. If that is not happening, how is the world going to know that the reality we talk about is true? I have recently been very struck by the fact that in what is often called the mission charge in Matthew 10, the beginning says nothing about preaching at all. It simply says that Jesus chose these disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every disease and every infirmity. Nothing about preaching there. Then the names of the twelve disciples are given. And only then does he say, "As you go, preach. And say the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." If you look at it that way, you can see that the preaching is the explanation of what is happening. If there is nothing happening there is nothing to explain. But the preaching is the explaining. Other people were healers also. Other people cast out devils in the time of Jesus. But if you asked why devils were being cast out, why people were being healed, the answer would be, the reign of God is upon you. The preaching explains the happenings.
I used to think about this often in my first charge. I was in a very, very sacred Hindu city (Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu). It has almost less Western influence than any other city in India. It is the ancient capital of the Pallava Empire, with a thousand temples and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who come there every year. And I used to do a lot of street preaching. I often thought to myself, "Now, does this do any good? Is this just words?" And I would reflect that the people there know that we who are standing up are also teaching their boys and girls in the schools, and are helping their village people to do something about their desperate poverty, and are involved in attempts to make a more just society. It is because they know this that the words will have some meaning.5 In other words, the words without the deeds lack authority! The deeds without the words are mute, they lack meaning. The two go together. And the Church, insofar as it is a foretaste of the reign of God, can also be an instrument of the reign of God, an instrument by which its justice is done. Not the only instrument, of course. God has other instruments-the state is an instrument for God doing justice in the world. I think we have often neglected to remember this, that God has other instruments for the doing of his will in the world. But only the Church can be the foretaste, the arrabon of the Kingdom.
And, third, the Church is a sign. A sign is supposed to point to something not yet visible. If you want to direct people to Winson Green you don't put a sign up in Winson Green; you have a sign in Handsworth or Edgbaston or somewhere that says "Winson Green." The point of a sign is to point to something that is real but not yet visible. The thing is invisible not because it doesn't exist but because it is over the horizon. Now the Church is a sign of the Kingdom insofar as it is a foretaste. The Church is a sign that points people to a reality beyond what we can see. And the necessary "otherworldliness" of the Church seems to me something that has to be absolutely held on to. We do not offer, nor do we compete with all the other agencies in the world that are offering, solutions to human problems here and now. We are not offering utopian illusions. We are pointing people to a reality that lies beyond history, beyond death. But we are erecting in this world, here and now, signs-credible signs-that make it possible for people to believe that that is the great reality and to join us in going that way. Now, in all this I've been stressing the parish model, and I believe the parish model is the right one. And I think that my last point may be raising a lot of big issues that we ought not perhaps to go into.
I have only recently, through doing a bit of reading among the sociologists of religion like Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger and so on, as well as a little bit of American history, come to realize how much the "denomination" has become the model by which we think of the Church, and how very recent a thing the denomination is. We are all tending to think of the churches as various denominations. And the sociologists of religion point out that a denomination is something new in Church history. It is not a schism, it is not a sect, it doesn't regard itself as the Church in contrast to the false churches. Most of our denominations don't. But it regards itself as one optional form for the Church, which is in a sense invisible. It does not apply to itself the language that Paul applies to the church in Corinth, which is the Church of God, period. It's not an expression of it, or a version of it; these people in Corinth are the Church of God, sinners as they are. And my impression is that through the enormous power of the American model, which tends to dominate the rest of the world, all of our churches are being drawn into this denominational pattern. And I fear that one of the results of Vatican II might be that the Roman Catholic church allows itself to be drawn into that model too.
The sociologists of religion have pointed out to us that the denomination is precisely the visible form that the Church takes when a secularized society privatizes religion. The most striking fact about our culture is that we have a dichotomy between the private and the public worlds, a dichotomy that doesn't exist in premodern society. We have a private world of what we call values, where everyone is free to choose his or her own values, and we do not say about them that they are true or false. We glory in our pluralism. We say that in the realm of values (and religious beliefs are included in that realm), everyone must be free to have his own faith or her own faith. Pluralism reigns. But we have a public world of what we call facts where pluralism does not reign, where things are either true or false; and religion does not belong to that field. It does not belong to the public world. The denomination is the visible form that the Church takes in a society that has accepted the secularization of public life and the privatization of religion, so that the variety of denominations corresponds, if you like, to the variety of brands available on the shelves of the supermarket. Everyone is free to take his or her choice.
Now, the denomination cannot be the bearer of the challenge of the gospel to our society, because it is itself the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of that society. If, therefore, we are to recover the sense that the local church is the holy catholic Church for that bit of the world in which God has set it (which is the parish principle), then we have to challenge this whole acceptance of the denominational principle as the normal form in which Church life is expressed. I find this both a necessary thought and a frightening thought. I cannot avoid it if I try to be faithful to the Scripture, but I find it terribly challenging.
I told you before about my own personal situation. I'm the minister of a very small URC congregation in Winson Green. How do I try to carry out these ideas there? We have the parish church, we have a Pentecostal church, we have another URC church, we have a black church called the Church of the Firstborn, and we, without being a formal local ecumenical project (because I don't think our higher authorities would allow it), simply act together as clergy. We meet together constantly. We pray together constantly. We plan together constantly. We try to ask what, in spite of our divisions, our unity in Christ has to mean for the life of this community in Winson Green. And it seems to me, as I understand our local situation, that the development of that kind of local accepting of one another in spite of our divisions and our misunderstandings is the catholic Church in that place seeking to erect the signs of the Kingdom for that place. These two things are mutually involved. I don't think we will recover the true form of the parish until we recover a truly missionary approach to our culture. I don't think we will achieve a truly missionary encounter with our culture without recovering the true form of the parish. These two tasks are reciprocally related to each other, and we have to work together on them both.
7
A lecture given on 3 October 1994 to members of the Evangelische Missions- werke organisation in Stuttgart, Germany, in connection with the publication of his book The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches.
,welve years ago, at the Bangkok Conference on "Salvation Today,"1 I was sitting in a plenary session next to General Simatoupong. Simatoupong was the general who commanded the Indonesian forces that threw the Dutch out of Indonesia, and when there was no more fighting to be done, he naturally took up theology. We were discussing the global missionary situation, and Simatoupong had just made an intervention in the debate. And as he returned to his seat beside me, I heard him say sotto voce, "Of course the number one question is: Can the West be converted?" I have often thought of that since. I am sure he was right. What we call the modern Western
scientific worldview, the post-Enlightenment cultural world, is the
most powerful and persuasive ideology in the world today. As we
know, it operates in two forms, Eastern and Western, which are in
many ways mirror images of each other. Everywhere in the world it
penetrates and disrupts the ancient religious systems with "the acids
of modernity." The Christian gospel continues to find new victories
among the non-Western, premodern cultures of the world, but in the
face of this modern Western culture the Church is everywhere in
retreat. Can there be a more challenging frontier for the Church than
this?
Simatoupong's question has reverberated in my mind ever since. Most of my life has been spent as a "foreign missionary," and my thinking has been shaped by this experience. Now I am a pastor, along with an Indian colleague, of an inner-city congregation in Birmingham, and I find myself, as my Indian colleague also finds himself, faced with a kind of paganism much more resistant to the gospel than anything that one can find in India. And so the question becomes a burning one: Can the West be converted?
Everyone with experience of cross-cultural mission knows that there are always two opposite dangers, the Scylla and Charybdis, between which one must steer. On the one side there is the danger that one finds no point of contact for the message as the missionary preaches it, to the people of the local culture the message appears irrelevant and meaningless. On the other side is the danger that the point of contact determines entirely the way that the message is received, and the result is syncretism. Every missionary path has to find the way between these two dangers: irrelevance and syncretism. And if one is more afraid of one danger than the other, one will certainly fall into its opposite.
Since I came to live in England after a lifetime as a foreign missionary, I have had the unhappy feeling that most English theology is falling into the second danger-syncretism. Ours is an advanced case of syncretism. In other words, instead of confronting our culture with the gospel, we are perpetually trying to fit the gospel into our culture. In our effort to communicate, we interpret the gospel by the categories of our culture. But how can we avoid this? How can we, who are part of this culture, find a standpoint from which we can address a word, the word of the gospel, to our culture? Archimedes said: Give me a point outside of the earth and with a lever I will move the earth. Where is the Archimedean point from which we can challenge the culture of which we are ourselves a part? Can the experience of cross-cultural mission help us in this task?
When I went as a young missionary to India, I could find the elements of syncretism in Indian Christianity. I saw how, inevitably, the meaning of sentences spoken by my Christian friends was shaped by the Hindu background of the language. The words used, the only available words for God, sin, salvation, and so on, are words that have received their entire content from the Hindu religious tradition. I thought that I was in a position to correct this syncretism. Only slowly did I come to see that my own Christianity was also profoundly syncretistic. Many times I sat with groups of Indian pastors and evangelists to study together a passage of Scripture. Over and over again their interpretation of the text, as it spoke to them in their language, called my interpretation into question. And it was not always clear that my interpretation was in fact more faithful to the text. Many times I had to confess that my reading of the text, which I had hitherto taken for granted, was wholly shaped by my own intellectual formation in what we call the modern scientific worldview. My Christianity was syncretistic, but so was theirs. Yet neither of us could discover that without the challenge of the other. Such is the situation in crosscultural mission. The gospel comes to the Hindu embodied in the form given to it by the culture of the missionary. That form is both a way of thinking and a way of living. It challenges the traditional Hindu form. The first converts will naturally accept it in the form in which it came from the missionaries, and the form and content cannot be immediately distinguished. But as the second and third and later generations of Christians make their own explorations in Scripture, they will begin to test the Christianity of the missionaries in the light of their own reading of the Scripture. So the missionary, if he is at all awake, finds himself, as I did, in a new situation. He becomes, as a bearer of the gospel, a critic of his own culture. He finds there the Archimedean point. He sees his own culture with the Christian eyes of a foreigner, and the foreigner can see what the native cannot see. We do not see the lenses of our spectacles; we see through them, and it is another who has to say to us, "Friend, you need a new pair of spectacles." The question therefore is this: How can the European churches, whose life and thought is shaped so completely by this post-Enlightenment culture, become bearers of a mission to that culture?
I know that we are all very enthusiastic about dialogue with people of other faiths and cultures. It is interesting that we use this word dialogue. When I talk with my non-Christian neighbor across the garden fence, I just have a conversation, but when I am really serious, then of course it is a dialogue. And that is good, but the problem is that all this dialogue is conducted exclusively in the languages of Europe - German, English, Spanish. No one is qualified to take part in this kind of dialogue without having a full education in a European language and therefore being fully coopted into the post-Enlightenment worldview. That becomes very explicit in a little aside in Hans Kung's book Christsein, where he says that we cannot have real deepgoing dialogue with the great world religions until they develop "a scientific theology." 2 In other words, the dialogue is only possible within the parameters of the post-Enlightenment worldview. That view remains unchallenged. We do not see it as our ideology. It is just how things are when you are properly educated! The gospel, along with all other religions, is simply coopted as one equal partner within that ideology.
And that brings me to the crux of the matter. In the little pamphlet - a small blast not of the trumpet but of the tin whistle - called The Other Side of 1984,3 I said that it seemed to me that while the Roman Catholic church had attempted to erect barriers against the Enlightenment, the Protestant churches had, in effect, surrendered the public field-politics, education, industry, economics to the, ideology of the Enlightenment and sought refuge in the private world of the home and the soul. This sharp dichotomy between the public and the private world is one of the distinctive features of our culture. Such a dichotomy is not found in traditional premodern cultures. It corresponds to the distinction we draw between "facts" and "values." The public world of our culture is the world of what we call "facts," which do not depend upon the beliefs of the individual; "values" on the other hand are personal beliefs, and in the world of values pluralism reigns. Each one must be free to cherish the values that he or she chooses. No one, no state or church or party, has the right to dictate common beliefs regarding values. Everyone has the right to the pursuit of happiness, and-what is more important- everyone has the right to define happiness as he will. It is to this world of personally chosen values that religion is thought to belong. And Christianity is one among the options offered for personal choice. It has freedom to compete with others, provided it makes no claim to absolute truth. In contrast to this is the public world of what we call facts. Here pluralism emphatically does not reign. Here all are expected to agree. Where there are apparent contradictions between statements of alleged facts, we do not celebrate this as a good example of pluralism. We argue and experiment and test until we arrive at a point where all agree; and for those who cannot agree we have, of course, our mental hospitals. In the school textbook these agreed-upon conclusions will be simply stated as facts without the use of the prefix "I believe" or "we believe." Thus every student will be expected to know that the development of the human person is governed by the program encoded in the DNA molecules. This is a fact. But that every human person is made to glorify God and enjoy him forever is not a fact -it is a belief, one among many possible beliefs. It is not part of the school curricula. And yet, clearly the question of truth is at stake as much in the second matter as in the first. It either is or is not true that every human being must finally appear before the judgment seat of Christ. If it is true, it is universally true, just as the statement about the DNA molecule is true; if it is true at all, it is true for everyone. It belongs to the public sector as much as to the private.
What is the source of this dichotomy between the public world of facts and the private world of beliefs? It is a complex story, and I am not an expert in the history of philosophy. Certain things can, I think, be said with confidence. Ever since Galileo turned his telescope on the heavens and showed that the universe is not what it seems to be, there has been a passionate search for a kind of certainty, a kind of knowledge that does not depend on fallible human beliefs. Descartes sought it in the certainty of his own thought; the new scientists sought it in the precise observation of the data of the senses without reliance on the traditional beliefs of religion and philosophy, and particularly without reliance on the traditional concept of purpose through which the Greeks and the medieval scholars had tried to interpret phenomena. This new observation of the phenomena was held to give knowledge of what Francis Bacon called the facts. And a fact in this sense has no value. A thing can only be called good or bad if it is or is not fitted for the purpose for which it was made. And this purpose is real in the mind of the one who purposes, but it is not yet fully realized in the world of objects. It can, in principle, only be grasped by an act of faith. That faith enables us to understand the world of objects, not as mere facts about which no value judgment can be made, but in relation to the purpose for which they exist. And that gives a different kind of certainty from the certainty our culture seeks. It is not a certainty that relieves me of personal responsibility for my beliefs. It is a personal trust. It relies on grace. It does not claim - in contrast to the search of our culture - the kind of knowledge only God can have. It is the certainty of faith, not of omniscience. John Locke-whose thinking, I suppose, has shaped the Anglo-Saxon world almost more than any other since the Enlightenment-John Locke defined belief as something we fall back on when certain knowledge is unattainable .4 I say "I believe" only when I am not in a position to say "I know." As I heard a philosopher put it wittily the other day, "If I believe, then I don't know." So I know the facts in the physics textbook, but I only believe what the gospel promises. The public world is the world of what we know, and here pluralism is excluded. The private world is the world of what we believe, and here pluralism rules.
But of course, this is profoundly false. Scientists themselves know that science rests on a faith-commitment that cannot be demonstrated, on the faith that the universe is both rational and contingent. If the universe were not rational, science would be impossible. If the universe were not contingent, science would be unnecessary. Faith therefore is not a substitute for knowledge. It is the precondition of knowledge. And the kind of certainty that our post-Enlightenment culture has aspired to is an illusion. The idea that brute facts simply imprint themselves on our minds apart from our deliberate and fallible efforts to grasp them is an illusion. And so also the idea that there is a body of objective value-free facts against which the Christian claims and the claims of all other religions have to be tested is nonsense. The Christian faith in God as creator and sustainer of a world that is both rational and contingent made possible the rise of modern science. Today, if I am not mistaken, our great danger is a total skepticism about any possibility of knowing the truth. I find among young people, and I think I understand and sympathize with them, a profound skepticism about any claim to the truth. Our danger is of a new irrationalism and nihilism. It is the despair that doubts there is anything worth believing and preserving. And even Christians are encouraged to think of their faith as only one among a number of options available for personal choice. We may be convinced that it is a source of comfort, of hope, of inner peace. And when we try to commend it to others, we try to show that it is not incompatible with the modern scientific worldview that controls public life; but we commend it as a responsible and respectable option for the private sector. Am I wrong? Is this a caricature?
If I think of the English church scene, I do not think so. Like others who have returned to the West after a lifetime as a foreign missionary, I am moved to ask, Who will be the missionaries to this culture? Who will confront this culture of ours with the claim of absolute truth, the claim that Jesus Christ is the truth? Who will be bold enough to say, not that the Christian message can be explained in terms of the facts as we know them, but rather that all so-called knowledge must be tested against the supreme reality: God incarnate in Jesus Christ, present yesterday, today, until the end, in the power of the Spirit? What will it mean to call for a missionary confrontation with this culture?
I confess that as I ask these questions I am alarmed. I do not know where they will lead us. I say that in all honesty: I do not know where they will lead us. And yet I am bound to ask these questions. Certainly we cannot expect or desire to return to the Corpus Chris tianum. We cannot reconstruct the total synthesis of Christian belief and public order that finally broke down in the religious wars of the seventeenth century. But equally, I think, and this may be more unpopular, we cannot simply go back to the New Testament and the primitive church. We cannot aspire now, after these nineteen centuries, to a kind of pre-Constantinian innocence. That kind of nostalgia is dangerous. I hear too many Christians saying, in effect, that the Church can have nothing to do with power, that its only function is to protest and demonstrate against all the powers. We cannot do without a theologically grounded Christian doctrine of the state. We must not fall into the error of dividing physical force as bad from soul force (satyagraha) as good. That is the old Manichean heresy. There is no going back. We are in a new and unprecedented situation, a new missionary frontier. How do we approach this task? As I said, I am puzzled and even frightened. I do not know what this will involve. I see dangers on all sides. But so that I may not end with a set of unanswered questions, let me try to make five constructive points:
1. If what I have been saying is true, there is need for what I would call a declericalizing of theology. Theology has been largely the preserve of clergy and academics. What is needed is the cooperative work of Christian laymen and women in specific sectors of public life - industry, politics, medicine, education, local government, welfare, administration, the media, literature, drama, and the arts. In each of these and other sectors of public life there is a need to examine the accepted axioms and assumptions that underlie the contemporary practice, to examine them in the light of the gospel. That will not happen as long as theology is the preserve of the clergy or, what is equally dangerous, simply an enclave within a secular academic community. There is an immense intellectual and pastoral task in which the experience of the foreign missionary movement could, I believe, be of great help to the churches in making this move towards a more truly missionary relationship with our culture.
2. It is obvious that this can only be done by the churches acting together. It can only be done as the Church in each place becomes recognizable as the Church for that place. But what is a denomination? Perhaps I could refer to the somewhat uncomfortable question raised by Ulrich Duchrow in his book Conflict in the Ecumenical Movement.5 This is a question that will not go away. A denomination is not a church, it is not a sect, it does not make the claim to the allegiance of society as a whole. It has been defined by one of its apologists, the American sociologist Sidney Mead, in the following terms: "It is a voluntary association of like-minded and like-hearted individuals who are united on the basis of common beliefs for the purpose of accomplishing tangible and defined objectives. One of the primary objectives is the propagation of its point of view." In that description we recognize the American denominational model, but it is clearly a model that is tending to reproduce itself everywhere, especially through the increasingly powerful operation of the world confessional bodies. And, as the sociologists have pointed out, the denomination is simply the institutional form of privatized religion. It is a voluntary association of individuals. It is - to put it simply - the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture. It follows that, in strict logic, neither the denomination alone nor denominations federated in what is now, I believe, called "reconciled diversity" can become the instrument of a missionary challenge to our culture, because they are themselves the institutional form of a surrender to our culture. They cannot confront our culture as Jesus confronted Pontius Pilate with the witness to the truth, since they do not claim to be more than associations of individuals who hold the same opinion. We do not see clearly what the form of a restored and reunited catholic Church would be. That is our great task in the ecumenical movement. But I believe that it is possible to act effectively in each local situation in such a way that the Christians together in each place begin even now to be recognizable as the Church for that place.
3. If we are to escape from the ideology of the Enlightenment without falling into the errors of the Corpus Christianum, we must recover a doctrine of freedom of thought and conscience that is founded not on the ideology of the Enlightenment but on the gospel. At this point I think I must admit that my use of the word dogma in my little book was perhaps a tactical mistake. It was intended to shock people into recognizing the fact that we all operate with dogmas. The difference is whether we recognize that we do. The freedom of conscience, the freedom of thought that was won for us by the men and women of the Enlightenment against the resistance of the Church, is a gift we cannot surrender. We must remember penitently our past in that respect. But if we now ask that the Christian faith claim the whole public life of the nation, of society in the name of truth, how can we safeguard that freedom?
What we must seek for is a doctrine of freedom based on the gospel and not on the ideology of the Enlightenment. And we must begin by distinguishing tolerance from neutrality or indifference. There is a beautiful description of Roman society in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that I think exactly describes ours. He said that in Roman society all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful. It would be difficult to deny that that is a true account of some modern developed societies. But that kind of neutrality is evidence either of impending collapse or else of the fact that some other ideology has taken the place usually occupied by religion as the overarching "plausibility structure" within which public life is conducted. Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of collapsing into skepticism or fanaticism. Tolerance in respect of what is not important is easy. How is it possible to combine real commitment to the truth in matters of supreme importance with tolerance of falsehood?
Clearly, if we are to be consistent, the answer has to be given from within our commitment to the truth as it is in Jesus, not sought from outside of that truth. It can be given in the form of three statements.
First, let us recall the fact that the risen Jesus, whose kingship was defined as bearing witness to the truth, also warned his Church against the temptation to expect immediately the manifestation of the truth in coercive power. "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?" The answer is: It is not for you to know the times and seasons that the Father has set in his own authority, but you will receive the Spirit, the foretaste, the arrabon of the kingdom and you will be my witnesses (Acts 1:6-7). In other words, it is the will of the Father to provide a space and a time wherein men and women can give their allegiance to the kingship of God in the only way that it can be given, that is, in freedom. To use the God-given authority of the state to deny this freedom is therefore to violate the space that God himself has provided and that he has put into the care - if I understand the New Testament rightly- of earthly governors, of the powers that be.
Second, the Church, which is entrusted with the truth, is also a body of sinful men and women who falsely identify their grasp of truth with the truth itself. Here we have that paradox of grace that the Church is a body of forgiven sinners, which applies equally to the Church's understanding of the truth. That is brought out with brilliant clarity in that incident in the Gospel where Jesus has to say to Peter, "You are the rock and on this rock I will build my church," and in the next breath, "Get behind me, Satan" (Matt. 16:18, 23). This deep fundamental paradox of the Church is real because sin remains a reality in the life of the forgiven community. The Church can and does allow the truth that is entrusted to her to become an ideological justification of her own human interest. And God consequently has to use his other servants, and especially the state, to bring the Church to repentance and renewal.
Third, I return to the Johannine discourses in which our Lord tells his disciples that they have yet much to learn of the truth that cannot be told them immediately, and that it is the Spirit who will be given to them who will lead them into the truth. The context of that saying is of course the long account of the missionary experience that lies ahead of the Church, its rejection by the world, and the witness that the Spirit will give in speaking for the Church, in confusing the wisdom of the world, and in glorifying Jesus by taking what belongs to the Father and showing it to the Church (John 15:18-16:15). This promise is being fulfilled as the Church goes on its missionary journey to the ends of the earth and to the end of time, entering into dialogue with new cultures and being itself changed, as parts of the Father's world are brought through the Spirit into the Church's treasury of truth. In this missionary dialogue the Church both learns new things and provides the place where witness is borne to Christ as head of the human race -Christ, who is so much more than any of us can yet grasp or state, who is seen more and more through the missionary experience of the Church as he truly is, but who will only be seen in his fullness when every tongue confesses that he is Lord.
Thus, if I am right, a true understanding of the gospel itself ought to enable Christians both to be firm in their allegiance to Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, and also to be ready to hear and enter into dialogue with those who do not give that allegiance but from whom the Church has still to learn of all that belongs to the Father. The mind that is firmly anchored in Christ, knowing that Christ is much greater than the limited understanding that each of us has of him, is at the same time able to enter freely into the kind of missionary dialogue I have described. This is the foundation for a true tolerance, not indifference to the truth. True dialogue is as far as possible from neutrality or indifference. Its basis is the shared conviction that there is truth to be known and that we must both bear witness to the truth given to us and also listen to the witness of others.
4. 1 want to make a strictly theological point. There can be no missionary encounter with our culture without a biblically grounded eschatology, without a recovering of a true apocalyptic. The dichotomy that runs through our culture between the private and the public worlds is reflected in the dissolution of the biblical vision of the last things into two separate and unrelated forms of hope. One is the public hope for a better world in the future, the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century French philosophers, the utopia of the evolutionary social planners, or the classless society of the revolutionary sociologists. The other is the private hope for personal immortality in a blessed world beyond this one. This dissolution is tragic. It destroys the integrity of the human person. If I pin my hope to a perfect world that is to be prepared for some future generations, I know that I and my contemporaries will never live to see it, and therefore that those now living can be-and if necessary must be- sacrificed in the interests of those as yet unborn; and so the way is open for the ruthless logic of totalitarian planners and social engineers. If on the other hand I place all my hope in a personal future, I am tempted to wash my hands of responsibility for the public life of the world and to turn inwards towards a purely private spirituality.
That tragic split runs right through our lives and our society, and only the biblical understanding of the last things can heal that dichotomy. The apocalyptic teaching that forms such an important part of the New Testament has generally in our culture been pushed to the margins of Christian thought. It has been treasured, of course, by small oppressed groups on the margins of our society, but it has been generally silenced in the mainstream of our established Christianity. Essentially this says to us: If I ask what in all my active life is the horizon of my expectations, the thing to which I look forward, the answer, it seems to me, cannot be some social utopia in the future and cannot be some personal bliss for myself, it can only be, quite simply, the coming of Jesus to complete his Father's will. He shall come again. He is the horizon of my expectations. Everything from my side, whether prayer or action, private or public, is done to him and for him. It is simply offered for his use. In the words of Schweitzer, it is an "acted prayer for His coming." He will make of it what he will. My most vigorous and righteous actions do not build the holy city. They are too shot through with sin for that. But they are acted prayers that he will give the holy city. And that embraces both the public and the private world. The holy city, as its name indicates, is on the one hand the crown and perfection of all that we call civilization. Into it the kings of the nations bring their cultural treasures. But it is also the place where every tear is wiped from our eyes and we are the beloved children of God who see him face to face. Only in that vision and hope is the tragic dichotomy of our culture healed.
5. Finally, I want to argue the need for a certain boldness that was evidently a characteristic mark of the first apostles. Some time ago I happened to have the privilege of sitting next to Cardinal Suenens at a conference, and he asked me what I thought of contemporary English theology. I replied "timid syncretism." Perhaps that was unfair. I am sure it cannot be true of German theology. What I am pleading for is the courage to hold and proclaim a belief that cannot be proved to be true in terms of the accepted axioms of our society, that can be doubted by rational minds, but that we nevertheless hold as the truth. It may sound simplistic to say that. Our modern scientific culture has pursued the ideal of a completely impersonal knowledge of a world of so-called facts that are simply there and cannot be doubted by rational minds, facts that constitute the real world as distinct from the opinions, desires, hopes, and beliefs of human beings. Now, this whole way of trying to understand the world rests upon beliefs that are simply not questioned. Every attempt to understand and cope with experience has to begin with some act of faith. Every such belief is of course open to critical question, but no criticism is possible except by relying on beliefs that in the act of criticism are not criticized. All understanding of reality involves a venture of faith. No belief system can be faulted by the fact that it rests upon unproved assumptions. What can and must be faulted is a blindness to the assumptions one is relying upon. The gospel is not a set of beliefs that arise or could arise from empirical observation of the whole human experience. It cannot be based upon inductive reasoning. It is the announcement of a name and a fact that offer the starting point for the whole lifelong enterprise of understanding and coping with experience. It is a new starting point. To accept it means a new beginning, a radical conversion. We cannot side-step that necessity. It has always been the case that to believe means to turn around and face in a different direction, to be a dissident, to swim against the stream. The Church, it seems to me, needs to be very humble in acknowledging that it is itself only a learner, needing to pay heed to all the variety of human experience in order to learn in practice what it means thatJesus is King and Head of the human race. But the Church also needs to be very bold, bold in bearing witness to him as the one who alone is that King and Head. For the demonstration of the truth we have to wait for the end. Till then we have to be bold and steadfast in our witness and patient in our home, for, to quote the letter to the Hebrews, we are partakers of Christ if we hold our first confidence firm to the end (Heb. 3:14).