Section 16
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 and not sought from outside that truth. It can, I think, be given in the form of three statements, a) First, as we have seen earlier, the risen Jesus whose kingship was defined as bearing witness to the truth, warned the church against the temptation to expect immediately the manifestation of the truth in coercive power. It is the will of the Father to provide a space and a time wherein men and women can give their allegiance to the kingdom in the only way it can be given—namely, in freedom. To use the God-given authority of the state to deny that freedom is thus to violate the space God himself has provided and put into the care of earthly governors. b) Second, the church, which is entrusted with the truth, is a body of sinful men and women who falsely identify their grasp of truth with the truth itself. The paradox of grace, that the church is a body of forgiven sinners, both forgiven and sinful, applies to the church’s understanding of the truth. At the very point of his confession of the truth, Peter could become an agent of Satan (Mark 8:29, 33). He grasped the truth but immediately made it an instrument of falsehood. Because sin remains a reality in the life of the forgiven community, the church can and does allow the truth entrusted to her to be turned into an ideological justification of her own human interests, and God constantly has to use his other servants, and especially the state, to bring the church to repentance.
c) This leads to the third statement, for which I turn to the Johannine discourses, in which our Lord is represented as telling his disciples that they still have much to learn of the truth that cannot be told them immediately, and that the Spirit who will be given to them will lead them into all the truth. The context of these sayings is the long account of the missionary experience that lies ahead of the church, its rejection by the world, and the witness the Spirit will give in speaking for the church, in confuting the wisdom of the world, and in glorifying Jesus by taking all that belongs to the Father and showing it to the church as the possession of the Son (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 the end of time, entering into dialogue with new cultures and being itself changed as new things that are part of the Father’s world are brought through the Spirit into Christ’s treasury. 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, and where he is seen more and more for what he is, as new tongues confess him as Lord.
Thus a true understanding of the gospel itself ought to enable Christians to be firm in their allegiance to Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, and also to be ready to enter into a genuinely listening dialogue with those who do not give this allegiance but from whom they know that they have to be ready to learn. The mind that is firmly anchored in Christ—knowing that Christ is much greater than the limited understanding of him each of us has—is at the same time able to enter freely into the kind of missionary dialogue I have described. This is the foundation on which a true tolerance, not indifference to the truth, can be founded. 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.
With such an understanding, we can envision a state (whether or not such a thing is a present political possibility) that acknowledges the Christian faith as true, but deliberately provides full security for those of other views. It would be different from both the Christian states of the past that suppressed dissenting minorities and from the pluralistic states of the present that profess to be guided by no vision of human nature and destiny—but are in fact guided by a very specific ideology, namely, the ideology of the Enlightenment (as, for example, Muslim minorities in Britain are very acutely aware). It would be a state embodying the idea of the proper role of the political order that the Bible seems to suggest.
I suppose that the crucial test of such an idea would lie in its implications for education. There is no area where the issues are more immediate and more difficult than this. Whatever we may say about the religious neutrality of the state, the experience of passing through school and university is shaping the minds of young people in certain directions. It is not and cannot be religiously neutral. The omission of religion from the curriculum is itself a momentous statement about what society believes and expects its children to believe. And when we have, as in Britain today, a Muslim community that constitutes 6 percent of the population and over 80 percent in some of the inner-city schools, we discover that the very idea of treating religion as a subject that can be put into a list alongside physics, history, and literature is itself an assault on the foundations of belief. There are no answers to the questions raised here unless one accepts that human societies have to live through the experience of real conflict between ultimate truth claims. Any idea that one can be neutral is an illusion. I believe that the Christian gospel provides and opens up the possibility of a life—public and personal—that includes both the ability to hold vital convictions that lead to action and also the capacity to preserve for others the freedom to dissent.
The relationship of the Christian understanding of freedom to that which has provided the central thrust of the Enlightenment must necessarily be a critical one. Seen from a biblical perspective, a human being is not and can never be autonomous. Consequently, liberation in the Bible is always seen as a change of regime, or jurisdiction, from the false dominion to the true, from serving Pharaoh to serving Yahweh (Exod. 3:13; 6:6), from serving sin and death to serving God (Rom. 6:20–23). From the point of view of the Enlightenment, the biblical idea of freedom is paradoxical—a freedom of the one who serves the true master. From the point of view of the Bible, the freedom celebrated in the Enlightenment is the freedom offered by the serpent in Eden, the freedom to make one’s own decision about what is good. By accepting that offer, we put ourselves under the domination of powers that lead to destruction. We become, as Paul says, the slaves of sin. True freedom is a gift of grace given by the one who is in fact Lord; that gift, freely given, can only be received in freedom. It follows that the church cannot bear witness to that gift unless there is freedom to refuse it. Yet the church must still bear witness that this is the only true freedom: to belong wholly to the one by whom the space of freedom is created, and whose service is perfect freedom.
3. As the third requirement for a missionary encounter with our culture, I would list what might be called a “declericalized” theology. I can perhaps indicate what I mean by referring to a moving passage in Teilhard de Chardin’s little classic of the spiritual life, Le Milieu Divin. He is speaking of the challenge put to the Christian who is also a scientist by his non-Christian colleague. The latter says something like the following: “We who take our science seriously cannot completely trust you who are a Christian. For, however brilliant your scientific work may be, we know that you are not ultimately serious about it. For you, the ultimately serious matters are in a world beyond science. For you, science is not ultimately important. In the last judgment, as you conceive it, it will not matter whether your conclusions were right or wrong: the only questions asked will be about your sincerity, your devotion to truth, your humility, etc. Really, your science is only a kind of game, a playground in which you can exercise your spiritual muscles. You are not really serious.”
Teilhard acknowledges the force of this. Traditional Christian teaching has been otherworldly in its emphasis. It has had more to say about how to accept failure than about how to succeed, more about suffering than about action. Theology has been the preserve of those who minister as priests and pastors to the inner spiritual life of their people. Consequently, when theologians whose whole work is in this pastoral ministry try to speak about matters of politics and economics, their words do not carry weight. And Christian men and women who are deeply involved in secular affairs view theology as the arcane pursuit of professional clergymen. This withdrawal of theology from the world of secular affairs is made more complete by the work of biblical scholars whose endlessly fascinating exercises have made it appear to the lay Christian that no one untrained in their methods can really understand anything the Bible says. We are in a situation analogous to one about which the great Reformers complained. The Bible has been taken out of the hands of the layperson; it has now become the professional property not of the priesthood but of the scholars. Since the demise of the biblical theology movement, few Christians dare to appeal to the authority of Scripture in making a political decision.
The missionary encounter with our culture for which I am pleading will require the energetic fostering of a declericalized, lay theology. Of course, I am not asking for something previously unheard of. Forty years ago Hendrik Kraemer, W. A. Visser’t Hooft, and Suzanne de Dietrich had this vision and embodied it in the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, where in the succeeding years a stream of laypeople from all over the world have caught a glimpse of it. But this is a small ship to carry a cargo for the whole worldwide church. We need a multitude of places where this kind of lay theology can be nourished. We need much better provision to ensure that when church leaders make pronouncements on ethical, political, and economic questions, their words are informed by a theology that has been wrought out at the coal face, at the place where faith wrestles at personal cost with the hard issues of public life. And we need to create, above all, possibilities in every congregation for laypeople to share with one another the actual experience of their weekday work and to seek illumination from the gospel for their daily secular duty. Only thus shall we begin to bring together what our culture has divided—the private and the public. Only thus will the church fulfill its proper missionary role. For while there are occasions when it is proper for the church, through its synods and hierarchies, to make pronouncements on public issues, it is much more important that all its lay members be prepared and equipped to think out the relationship of their faith to their secular work. Here is where the real missionary encounter takes place.
There is an area here that has been worked over by Dutch theologians but little noticed (as far as I know) by Anglo-Saxon theology. I am thinking of the work of Abraham Kuyper and Hermann Dooyeweerd on what the former called “sphere sovereignty” (souvereiniteit in eigen kring), namely, the doctrine that God had given—as part of the order of creation—a measure of autonomy to each of the major areas of human life, including such areas as art, science, politics, ethics, and faith. This means that the human community that is responsible for the development of each of these spheres is responsible directly to God and not to the community of faith (the church), which has no direct authority over them. “Sphere sovereignty implies that each sphere in society has a God-given task and competence which are limited by the sphere’s own intrinsic nature.” Dooyeweerd’s development of this idea is, in my view, too scholastic and inadequately related to biblical authority, but it seems to me an important line of thinking that avoids both the post-Enlightenment idea of the total autonomy of these spheres and the medieval idea that all these spheres should be under the authority of the church. However, this line of thinking will be fruitful only if the work of scientists, economists, political philosophers, artists, and others is illuminated by insights derived from rigorous theological thinking. For such a declericalized theology, the role of the church will be that of servant, not mistress.
4. The fourth item in this suggested list of requirements for a missionary encounter with our culture is a radical theological critique of the theory and practice of denominationalism. Richard Niebuhr’s dictum, “Denominationalism represents the moral failure of Christianity” has often been quoted; but he wrote that more than fifty-five years ago. Today the defense of denominationalism has become respectable. In a famous essay entitled “Denominationalism as a Basis for Ecumenicity” (1955), Winthrop Hudson defined and defended denominationalism in the following affirmations: no denomination claims to represent the whole church of Christ; none claims that all other churches are false churches; none claims that all members of society should be incorporated in its membership, none claims that society and the state should submit to its ecclesiastical regulation; but all recognize their shared responsibility for society. Negatively, therefore, a denomination is not a sect. Positively, to quote Sidney Mead, a denomination is “a voluntary association of like-hearted and like-minded 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. It is a matter of historical fact that denominationalism as it flourishes in the United States today developed out of the voluntary associations that were formed for missionary purposes. In the essays from which I have quoted, the denomination is celebrated as the great gift of North American Christianity to the universal church. In the words of Karl Hertz, “Denominationalism is the new American way in Christianity.” And in a large part of the world the denomination is seen as the natural form of the church.