2. The People Of God In The New Testament
1. THE ISSUE(S)
Historically the church seems to have fallen into81 a model that eventually developed a sharp distinction between the people themselves (laity) and the professional ministry (clergy), reaching its sharpest expression in the Roman Catholic communion,82 but finding its way into almost every form of Protestantism as well. The net result has been a church in which the clergy all too often exist apart from the people, for whom there is a different set of rules and different expectations, and a church in which the “gifts” and “ministry,” not to mention significance, power structures, and decision-making, are the special province of the professionals. Being “ordained” to this profession, the latter tend to like the aura that it provides, and having such ordained professionals allows the laity to pay them to do the work of the ministry and thus excuse themselves from their biblical calling. The rather universal model, with a few exceptions, looks something like this:
The thesis of this paper is that the biblical model looks something more like the following diagram — without clergy at all, but with identifiable leadership, who were simply part of the whole people of God:
The problem for most moderns, of course, in coming to the biblical texts, is that we tend to presuppose our resultant form of church to be theirs; we therefore carry both different agenda and a different experience of the church back to the documents. But history and tradition have had their innings. Even though it is arguable that we have genuine continuity with the New Testament church in many ways — especially our experience of grace and the Spirit — our experience of the church itself is so far different from theirs that seemingly ne’er the twain shall meet.83
As I see it, the areas of difficulty are four: (1) the tension between individual and corporate life, where western Christians in particular are trained from birth to value the individual above the group, whereas in the New Testament perspective the community is still the primary reality, and the individual finds identity and meaning as part of the community; (2) the tension between eschatological and institutional existence, most moderns knowing only the latter, whereas the New Testament church existed primarily as an experience of the former; (3) the place of structures as they flow out of these two tensions; and (4) the hermeneutical difficulty created by the nature of data, since the New Testament documents, which teem with reflections and insights, have very little directly intentional instruction on these matters. So how do they apply? Do we seek a biblical norm to follow,84 or seek to model what fits our situation best, or try rather to approximate the spirit of the biblical pattern in our already existing structures?
I propose in the rest of this paper to take up some of these issues by first examining the biblical data and then by offering some brief hermeneutical observations in light of those data.