When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
Surely no one can deny that denominations have been and are powerful, purposeful, and effective agencies of self-propagation. The question that has to be asked is this: How serious is it that the denominational principle requires (as all its defenders agree) the surrender of any claim to be the church in the sense in which that word is used in the New Testament? It is clear that in the Pauline letters the name Ecclesia tou Theou is applied to actual visible bodies of sinful men and women defined simply by the names of the places where they lived—God’s congregation in Corinth, Philippi, or Thessalonica. It is also applied to the whole body of such people in all places, since it is the same God who is assembling them in each place. These assemblies are the church. The exponents of the denominational principle acknowledge that a denomination does not and cannot claim to be a church or the church in any biblical sense. In their view, the church in its true being is invisible: the denomination is a partial manifestation of the church but makes no claim to be the church. It is a voluntary association based on the free personal choice of a number of individuals to cooperate for certain purposes, purposes that in the nineteenth century, when the great development of denominations took place, were described as the advancement of the kingdom.
It is the common observation of sociologists of religion that denominationalism is the religious aspect of secularization. It is the form that religion takes in a culture controlled by the ideology of the Enlightenment. It is the social form in which the privatization of religion is expressed. As Thomas Luckman says, “Once religion is defined as a private affair the individual may choose from the assortment of ultimate meanings as he sees fit.” The denomination provides a shelter for those who have made the same choice. It is thus in principle unable to confront the state and society as a whole with the claim with which Jesus confronted Pilate—the claim of the truth. It is not, in any biblical sense, the church.
It follows that neither a denomination separately nor all the denominations linked together in some kind of federal unity or “reconciled diversity” can be the agents of a missionary confrontation with our culture, for the simple reason that they are themselves the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture. They cannot confront our culture with the witness of the truth since even for themselves they do not claim to be more than associations of individuals who share the same private opinions. A genuinely ecumenical movement, that is to say, a movement seeking to witness to the lordship of Christ over the whole inhabited oikoumene cannot take the form of a federation of denominations. It must patiently seek again what the Reformers sought—“to restore the face of the Catholic Church.” One of the encouraging features of church life in England today is the growing number of “local ecumenical projects” that bring together the denominationally separated churches in one place in order to create a more coherent and credible Christian witness to the whole human community in that place. These are scattered, fragile, and vulnerable enterprises, but they indicate the direction in which the church must go.
5. As the fifth condition for a missionary encounter with our culture, I would list the necessity for help in seeing our own culture through Christian minds shaped by other cultures. Paul says that we need all the saints to comprehend the greatness of Christ (Eph. 3:14ff.). We need the witness of the whole ecumenical family if we are to be authentic witnesses of Christ to our own culture. I referred in an earlier chapter to the impression we receive when we look at the portraits of Jesus painted in different cultures. They make vividly clear how much our vision of Jesus is shaped by our culture. It cannot be otherwise. The fact that Jesus is much more than, much greater than our culture-bound vision of him can only come home to us through the witness of those who see him with other eyes. Asian and African Christians who received the gospel from European and American missionaries and therefore were invited to see Jesus as our culture saw him now struggle through their own study of Scripture and their own obedience in their own time and place to articulate a form of Christian believing and behaving in terms of their own cultures. We need their witness to correct ours, as indeed they need ours to correct theirs. At this moment our need is greater, for they have been far more aware of the dangers of syncretism, of an illegitimate alliance with false elements in their culture, than we have been. But whether it is we or they, we imperatively need one another if we are to be the faithful witnesses of Christ in our many different cultures.
For this reason the churches in the Western world must recognize that they cannot do without the World Council of Churches. When that Council held its second Assembly in Evanston in 1954, it was a great media event. There was immense enthusiasm throughout the nation, and even the secular press and radio were full of it. Today the World Council of Churches is widely regarded with deep suspicion in many parts of the Western world. The reason is obvious.
Thirty years ago the ecumenical movement was perceived as the worldwide triumph of our kind of Christianity. The colored and colorful representatives of the Asian and African churches were hailed and photographed as trophies of our missionary success. Today the ecumenical movement is perceived as a threat, and the theologies coming out of the younger churches call our own certainties into question. Of course, a theology is not true just because it comes from Buenos Aires or Jakarta. But we cannot faithfully discharge our missionary responsibility to our own people unless we are willing to listen for what the living God says to us through his servants in other cultures. We need all the saints, and the foreign missionary is not a temporary but an abiding necessity for the life of the church, provided always that the movement of missionaries is multidirectional, all churches both sending and receiving. The word of God is to be spoken in every tongue, but it can never be domesticated in any. The contemporary campaign of abuse directed against the World Council of Churches is certainly predictable and perhaps even to be welcomed as a sign that the sharp sword of the word of God is piercing our complacence and challenging the comfortable syncretism in which our Western Christianity has been living for so long.
6. The sixth requirement I would suggest for a missionary encounter with our culture is simply the courage to hold and to proclaim a belief that cannot be proved to be true in terms of the axioms of our society. This may sound simplistic, but it is not. Our modern scientific culture has pursued the ideal of a completely impersonal knowledge of a world of so-called facts that are simply there, that cannot be doubted by rational minds, and that constitute the real world as contrasted with the opinions, desires, hopes, and fears of human beings, a world in which the words purpose and value have no meaning. This whole way of trying to understand the totality of human experience rests on beliefs that are simply not questioned. For every attempt to understand and cope with experience must rest on some such belief. Every such belief is, of course, open to critical question, but no criticism is possible except by relying on other beliefs that are—in the act of criticizing—exempt from criticism. All understanding of reality involves a commitment, a venture of faith. No belief system can be faulted by the fact that it rests on unproved assumptions; what can and must be faulted is the blindness of its proponents to the fact that this is so.
The gospel is not a set of beliefs that arise, or could arise, from empirical observation of the whole human experience. It is the announcement of a name and a fact that offer the starting point for a new and life-long 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 be turned around to face in a different direction, to be a dissenter, to go against the stream. The church needs to be very humble in acknowledging that it is itself only a learner, and it needs to pay heed to all the variety of human experience in order to learn in practice what it means that Jesus is the King and Head of the human race. But the church also needs to be very bold in bearing witness to him as the one who alone is that King and Head. For the demonstration, the proof, we have to wait for the end. Until then, we have to be bold and steadfast in our witness and patient in our hope. For “we are partakers of Christ if we hold our first confidence firm to the end” (Heb. 3:14).
7. There is one thing more that must be said. This humble boldness and this expectant patience are not the product of some kind of human heroism. They are the spontaneous overflow of a community of praise. They are the radiance of a supernatural reality. That reality is, first of all, the reality of God, the superabundant richness of the being of the Triune God, in whom love is forever given and forever enjoyed in an ever-new exchange. It is secondly the overflow of that love through the presence of the Spirit of God in the life of the community that lives by faith in Christ. It is said of this superabundant glory that it has been given to believers in order that they may be recognizable as a community where the love of God is actually tested and known (John 17:20–23). This is what makes the church a place of joy, of praise, of surprises, and of laughter—a place where there is a foretaste of the endless surprises of heaven.
In my own experience I have been touched by the evidence of two very different communities of faith into which men and women are being drawn out of the grey wastelands of a secularized and disenchanted world: the Pentecostals and the Russian Orthodox. Different as they are from one another, they have this in common: their life is centered in the action of praise—praise that is literally “out of this world” and is by that very fact able to speak to this world. Where this is present, the radiance of that supernatural reality is enough to draw men and women into its circle.
I write these words at the season of Easter, the event that is the despair of a certain kind of rationalism but the starting point for a new rationality. The event of the resurrection, the empty tomb, and the risen Lord breaks every mold that would imprison God in the rationalism of a fallen world. But it is the starting point for a new kind of rationality, for the possibility of living hopefully in a world without hope, for the perpetual praise of God who not only creates order out of chaos but also breaks through fixed orders to create ever-new situations of surprise and joy.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
Then they said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us;
we are glad.
(Psalm 126:1–3)
The church’s witness among the nations is at heart the overflow of a gift. The boldness and the expectancy are the marks of those who have been surprised by joy and know that there are still surprises to come, because God is great.