Conclusion
9
What Does It Mean for a Congregation to Be a Hermeneutic?
John G. Flett
For all its epigrammatic force, Newbigin’s phrase “the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel” is odd. With “congregation,” his focus falls not on the church catholic and the institutions associated with such but on the local and concrete body of people gathered in a certain place. Nor is this body an “interpretation,” a translation of the message into local idiom. Though perhaps the more common term, Newbigin avoids it, one might suggest, due to its potential alignment with a federal model of Christian unity—a model he describes as in “vain” because it leaves “each sect free to enjoy its own particular sort of spirituality, merely tying them all together at the center in a bond which does not vitally and costingly involve every member in every part of his [or her] daily life.” It leaves untouched “the heart of the problem—which is the daily life of men and women in their neighborhood.”1 In other words, while his point of concentration is this local and particular body, precisely due to its locality and particularity this body is one, and this determines also its local behaviors.
The congregation is not then an interpretation, but the “only” hermeneutic of the gospel.2 A hermeneutic, simply stated, is a set of rules that assist the faithful interpretation of a text. Hermeneutics examines how human beings communicate, investigates the conditions of symbolic interaction, observes the ground of all thought within a cultural and historical context, and recognizes the effect social structures, political institutions and economic order have on the reading of a text. As a hermeneutic, in other words, the congregation is the method of the gospel’s interpretation. What Newbigin means by this is the subject of this essay.
We begin by examining the problem Newbigin develops in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society for which the congregation as hermeneutic is the solution, namely, how in a post-Christendom context can the gospel be seen as it is: public truth. Following this is an interpretation of Newbigin’s position using the language of visibility, and so through the ecclesial lens of word, sacrament and office. While this approach has much to commend it, especially given the focus on the local and the concrete, it reduces an external mission to a secondary action contingent on the church as a settled body. The argument advances by using Karl Barth’s description of the church’s “special visibility” as a way of summarizing the relationship Newbigin forms between the cross and the resurrection. The cross is a historical event visible to all. The resurrection is and remains an act of God because knowledge of the resurrection constitutes knowledge of God himself. Newbigin, in other words, develops the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel in this dialectic of visibility and invisibility. Newbigin accomplishes this, the penultimate section argues, because he defines mission in terms of history, not geography. Jesus Christ is the center of history, and the church exists only as it is participant in this history, in the new reality of the coming kingdom. This gives mission its congregational shape, while locating the identity of that community beyond itself and in the pressing to visibility of the kingdom. The final section applies this logic to the six characteristics of the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel developed by Newbigin.
The Background Problem
Though theologically normative in Newbigin’s thinking, the chapter on “the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel” concludes an extended discourse concerning the form of pluralism characterizing secular Western culture. This discourse establishes a problem, namely, the Christian gospel becomes “one element in a society which has pluralism as its reigning ideology.”3 The gospel becomes a personal value, and discipleship is reduced to the private and the domestic. To follow this path, Newbigin argues, constitutes a fundamental betrayal of the message of Jesus Christ, of him crucified and raised, and of the coming kingdom.
Newbigin counters by first questioning the notion of neutrality. The secular state is not without ideological intent. A public truth exists, one that shapes public debate, and this “is either in conformity with the truth as it is given in Jesus Christ, or it is not.” It is the responsibility of Christians and the church to refuse the space consigned to the gospel within secular liberal democracy and to “claim the high ground of public truth.”4 The old forms by which the gospel was seen to be public, those of a “pre-Constantinian innocence” or of “Constantinian authority,” cannot today accomplish this. So the question occupying Newbigin is “How is it possible that the one who was nailed to a cross should be seen by society as the ultimate source of power?”5
The first part of the answer denies that this can be a human work. No evangelistic technique will assure success; the conversion of the world is not a human achievement.6 Newbigin turns to the story of Jesus feeding the multitude in John 6 and his refusal to follow the urging of the crowd. Only the Father draws people to the bread of life. Potential followers leave as a result of this message, and the whole pericope ends with a warning of treachery even among his closest disciples. This story, for Newbigin, combines both “tender compassion and awesome sovereignty.”7 The gospel serves the world, but does so by fixing its attention on God and his kingdom, by recognizing that such service is only an act of God. In terms of the church representing the kingdom of God to society, it excludes, first, the way of political power and coercion; second, the way of reflecting in the church the popular aspiration of the people; and third, conceiving “the Church in the style of a commercial firm using modern techniques of promotion to attract members.”8 This last caution needs to be taken seriously because it goes to the heart of Newbigin’s concern. The church represents God’s reign not because it has a technique but because it is a body of people shaped by the gospel.
The point is christological and stems from the simple observation that Jesus “did not write a book but formed a community.” This community is gathered with Jesus Christ at its center and takes its character from him. Basic is the “remembering and rehearsing of his words and deeds, and the sacraments given by him through which it is enabled both to engraft new members into its life and to renew this life again and again through sharing in his risen life through the body broken and the lifeblood poured out.” What this short formulation means for Newbigin is a question we will ponder. Nevertheless, when this community is “true to its calling, it becomes the place where men and women and children find that the gospel gives them the framework of understanding, the ‘lenses’ through which they are able to understand and cope with the world.”9 Notable here is the direction of the hermeneutic: living in the gospel, the congregation develops a way of interpreting the world. The gospel interprets creation and history for the people of God.
As soon as he makes this point, however, Newbigin inverts the direction: in answer to the question of how the church might claim the gospel as public truth, how “it is possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross,” he states that “the only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”10 With this direction, the acting subject is not first the gospel but the congregation. It is this group of people gathered and formed by the gospel who embody the gospel for the world. As hermeneutic of the gospel, the congregation is the “central reality” by which the gospel might become “credible,” might claim to be public truth.
Hermeneutic as Visibility
How might one interpret this position? One way, following Murray Rae, is to use the language of visibility. Given the ecumenical significance accompanying this term, the choice is an interesting one. Rae reads Newbigin through an established ecclesial lens, conceiving the church as hermeneutic of the gospel in terms of word, sacrament and office.
Rae begins his exposition with Newbigin’s The Household of God. As a methodological move it is interesting, for it trades on a continuity through Newbigin’s corpus, using a more ecclesial argument found elsewhere to buttress what is not so strongly stated in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. To quote from The Household of God, “The divinely willed form of the Church’s unity is at least this, a visible company in every place of all who confess Jesus as Lord, abiding together in the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers. Its foci are the word, the sacraments, and the apostolic ministry.”11 The church is this “visible fellowship,” it is “humanity in every place re-created in Christ.”12 Via the term visible, Newbigin links word, sacrament and office to the re-creation of humanity. By implication, this re-creation constitutes the congregation as hermeneutic.
Visibility concentrates on the body of people shaped by this order. Word, sacrament and office supply the template. As a consequence of this, Rae argues, that visibility refers to the church as a concrete body in a particular place and time. Second, because the gospel is the good news of human reconciliation with God and so with one another, a reconciled community is “simply the content of the gospel.”13 The community shaped by this gospel becomes a “new order.”14 Third, it is the form of Newbigin’s “mission imperative,” because “the visibility of the community is the means of God’s self-presentation.”15 In this people “God makes himself available.”16 The first two elements, I suggest, are indeed central to what Newbigin means by the congregation as hermeneutic. The third is an issue to which we shall return.
As his argument progresses, Rae turns to the shape of this new order, to what it looks like after Christendom. In Christendom, the church allied with state power and assumed a type of privilege that reflected the “faults and failings of the old order.”17 It was “often visible in the wrong way,” taking the “form of political power and privilege, accumulated wealth, and the availability of its ministers sometimes to bless the sinful institutions and endeavors of a fallen world.”18 After Christendom, by contrast, this new order constitutive of the church’s visibility is cruciform. In defining the problem of Christendom as primarily a problem of power, the solution lies in shifting the church’s focus from power located in state institutions to the power located in the cross. This, in Rae’s estimation, strengthens the case for defining visibility in terms of the church’s institutions.
Citing Newbigin’s 1967 Honest Religion for Secular Man, Rae confirms the central thrust of his argument. In the local congregation, the word is preached, the Eucharist is celebrated, and a new social order develops.19 Preaching the word and administering the sacraments is, in Rae’s estimation, “more public” than other activities of the church (such as small groups reading the Bible together), and the “life of the church depends on their faithful execution by ministers of word and sacrament.”20 From this point, the final sections of his text serve as an apology for a traditional church order. The church becomes “visible only in and through the formation of a differently ordered community,”21 and it is the liturgy that so forms this people, because through the order of word and sacrament the community takes “to heart the pattern of death and new life.”22
As to mission, this is
grounded in a particular set of practices—the practice of worship, the practice of faithful transmission of that which has been received, the practice of participation in a community brought into being by the redemptive and liberating work of God. Participation in these practices week by week, in answer to God’s call upon us, is the necessary antecedent condition of our being able to tell truthfully in mission the story that Scripture tells.23
Mission, by this definition, is essentially internal to the church’s order, and the regular occurrence of this constitutes the “necessary antecedent condition” of any external movement because it is basic to our being able to tell the story. Or, the externality of the gospel lies in the visibility of the congregation constituted by word, sacrament and office.
What to make of this position? Newbigin, without doubt, stresses the importance of church order through his corpus. He can affirm that the “first priority . . . is the cherishing and nourishing of such a congregation in a life of worship, of teaching and mutual pastoral care so that the new life in Christ becomes more and more for them the great and controlling reality.”24 In The Household of God, Newbigin rejects Johannes Hoekendijk’s apparent reduction of the church as a body to a mobile missionary unit. In opposition, he describes the church as both “a means and an end,” because the nature of salvation determines the form of mission: as salvation is a “healing of all things in Christ,” so the church can undertake this task only “insofar as she is herself living in Christ, a reconciled fellowship in Him.”25 Within The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin takes clues from Alasdair MacIntyre concerning the socially embodied nature of rationality,26 and talks of the community as “visible embodiment” of the “new reality” in the Spirit, of which the “visible center as a continuing social entity is that weekly repeated event in which believers share bread and wine as Jesus commanded.”27 He conceives mission as an activity of “response to questions asked by others, questions prompted by the presence of something which calls for explanation. . . . Where the Church is faithful to its Lord, there the powers of the kingdom are present and people begin to ask the question to which the gospel is the answer.”28 There is much to commend in Rae’s reading. I suspect, however, that it is not quite full enough.
Given that Newbigin does, time and again, return to the themes of word, sacrament and structure, why do these not take center stage when he defines the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel? His concluding chapter, “Ministerial Leadership for a Missionary Congregation,” illustrates that ministry is central to Newbigin’s thinking, but it includes the critical observation that “we have lived for so many centuries in the ‘Christendom’ situation that ministerial training is almost entirely conceived in terms of the pastoral care of existing congregations.”29 One should include here Newbigin’s own critical reference to congregational life as hindering the church’s mission, his concern that established patterns were so steeped in a Christendom mentality that the church found it difficult to move beyond itself. One could refer to the distinction Newbigin draws between mobile and settled ministries, and his lament concerning the disappearance of the former.30 In positive terms, Newbigin conceives the sacrament of baptism as incorporation “into the dying of Jesus so as to become a participant in his risen life, and so to share his ongoing mission to the world. It is to be baptized into his mission.”31 Likewise, in The Household of God Newbigin states that the church should “understand that participation in Christ means participation in His mission to the world, and that therefore true pastoral care, true training in Christian life, and true means of grace will precisely be in and for the discharge of this missionary task.” That is, mission is not first participation in certain practices as a necessary antecedent condition for telling the story: “A newly baptized congregation will not be trained first in churchmanship and then in missionary responsibility to neighbouring villages. It will receive its training in churchmanship precisely in the discharge of its missionary responsibility.”32 The congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel is called to be visible, a concrete and historically continuous society, but this visibility does not rest in a simple repetition of what already belongs to the church. Newbigin is at once critical of its received Christendom shape, while consistently locating word, sacrament and office in the church’s movement beyond itself.
Rae’s point regarding reconciliation as the content of the gospel, and the visibility of a reconciled community as basic to Christian witness, is correct. However, while Newbigin does regard the presence of the new reality in the Spirit, the new reality by which the body of Christ lives as the “locus of witness,” one doubts that his “mission imperative” can be identified with “the visibility of the community [as] the means of God’s self-presentation.”33 The difficulty with this position lies in the failure to include the movement of reconciling, the movement toward those “far off” (Eph 2:13), as itself belonging to being reconciled, the necessary human response to God’s act of grace. Missing in Rae’s reading, in other words, is the missionary externality that Newbigin ties to the cross and so to the new order determinative of the church’s cruciform life. Newbigin maintains an important tension between valuing the church as something in and for itself and affirming that the church’s identity lies beyond it—that the church witnesses to, that is, engages in movement toward, something beyond it, but something which nonetheless determines its life now.
“Special Visibility” and the Question of History
Nor is this missionary absence theologically benign. Though one might welcome the community emphasis (as opposed to individual effort or successful technique), a danger lies in linking the credibility of the gospel with the faithful action of the congregation. Such action comes to rest fully in “remembering and rehearsing” in the repetition of socializing practices and institutions that produce a habitus, an ingrained way of reading and responding to the world. While God may be considered basic, the process itself follows quite natural anthropological rules of maturation within a culture. The congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel becomes a wholly human act.
The problem with this should be clear. Because true knowledge of the gospel is knowledge of God himself, nothing can make the gospel credible except God acting to reveal himself. Newbigin makes a similar type of point when referring to the New Testament’s use of Isaiah 6:9-10, “Go and say to this people: ‘Hear and hear but do not understand; see and see but do not perceive.’” Newbigin’s conclusion: “The conversion of the nations is, and can only be, the supernatural work of God.”34 This leaves us with a twofold concern. First, the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel is a concrete and ordered body of people who indwell the story of the gospel. But, second, Newbigin affirms that the community as this visible reality is not known for what it is as a general datum of history.
Karl Barth proves instructive here. As part of his discussion on the Holy Spirit and the active participation of the human in the divine act of reconciliation, Barth states that it is essential to the church to be visible because “the work of the Holy Spirit to which it owes its existence is something which is produced concretely and historically in this world.”35 The church as the creature of the Spirit is a matter of historical human actions, including ecclesial order, institution, cultus, teaching, theology, hospitality and so on. Nor is it possible to look through this form to find a real church behind it.36 Barth rejects any form of “ecclesiastical Docetism.” The church is a “definite human fellowship; in concrete form, therefore, and visible to everyone.”37
However, and this is the important point, the visibility of the church cannot be other than that which is true now of Jesus Christ himself. It corresponds to the manner in which “the glory of the humanity justified in Him is concealed.”38 Or, Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead, though a historical fact—indeed, the center of history—is not visible to everyone. The visibility of the resurrection, the visibility of Jesus Christ as the Lord of all creation, is and remains an act of God. The cross, by comparison, is generally visible. For the church to live in the resurrection, to be visible as participant in the new reality inaugurated by Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit, is to be seen in history as the people of the cross. It is only because of the resurrection that the church can have this cruciform visibility—the cross is not the end. For this reason, even while stressing the essential visibility of the church and the imperative of the visible attesting the invisible, Barth describes the truth of the Christian community’s earthly historical existence as “not a matter of a general but a very special visibility.”39 The church is visible for what it is only as an act of God. Barth’s position is interesting here because in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society Newbigin articulates an identical position.
In his discussion “Christ, the Clue to History,” Newbigin conceives the church in terms of Jesus Christ’s own earthly ministry. The church lives now after the cross but before the final revelation of Jesus Christ in his glory. This time, Newbigin argues, is “marked by suffering, and by the presence of the signs of the kingdom.”40 This “double character,” which forms the “substance of the mission to the nations,” is related “in the same way as cross and resurrection were related to each other in the ministry of Jesus (cf. 2 Cor. 4:10). The cross was a public execution visible to all—believers and unbelievers alike. The resurrection was as much a fact of history as the crucifixion, but it was made known only to the chosen few who were called to be the witnesses of the hidden kingdom.”41 This dialectic of cross and resurrection, of the church’s special visibility, is central to Newbigin’s understanding of the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel.
In terms of suffering as the first element in this “double character,” as “Jesus in his earthly ministry unmasked the powers and so drew their hostility on himself, so the Spirit working through the life and witness of the missionary Church will overturn the world’s most fundamental beliefs, proving the world wrong in respect of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment (John 16:8).”42 The context is important. Suffering is not its own good. “Once the gospel is preached and there is a community which lives by the gospel, then the question of the ultimate meaning of history is posed and other messiahs appear.”43 The church encounters the cross as it exposes the false claims made by the principalities and powers. The church encounters the cross as part of its missionary witness.
In terms of the signs of the kingdom, as Jesus’ ministry was “marked by mighty works which, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, were signs of the presence of the kingdom of God in power, so in the life of the Church there will be mighty works which have the same function.”44 The church should expect these mighty works within its own life because the signs of the kingdom accompany the preaching of the kingdom. Herein lies the problem of Christendom. “When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom.”45 In claiming power for itself, it mistakes its visibility for the truth of the gospel.
To summarize the logic in opposition to the prevailing position, Christendom is the cross without the resurrection. That is, it is a disruption of the necessary relationship between the two with a consolidation of the invisible, that which is and remains God’s own act, into the visible.46 By contrast, when the church moves beyond itself, impelled by the Spirit to participate in Jesus Christ’s own mission to the world, when it unmasks and challenges “the powers of darkness and bearing in its own life the cost of their onslaught, then there are given to the Church signs of the kingdom, powers of healing and blessing which, to eyes of faith, are recognizable as true signs that Jesus reigns.”47 Such missionary movement defines the nature of the church’s visibility, its being a hermeneutic of the gospel.
History and Mission
As one rather radical consequence of this dialectic of cross and resurrection, history, not geography, becomes the defining category for mission. A number of consequences follow, the most basic of which recognizes that mission is Jesus Christ’s own. Mission is the unfolding of the history at which Jesus Christ is the center, the unfolding of his own history. By way of illustration, Newbigin describes Romans 9–11 as Paul’s “most fully developed theology of mission.”48 One finds here an eschatological vision of the gathering of the Gentiles and the salvation of Israel. Paul, Newbigin notes, “is not thinking in terms of the individual but in terms of the interpretation of universal history. The center of the picture is the eschatological event in which the fathomless depths of God’s wisdom and grace will be revealed.”49 It is a vision of mission set under the majesty of God, one in which the church is and remains its object and not subject.
It means that history, in Jesus Christ, has a goal. This is not immanent within history, an end result of natural forces. The goal of history takes place within history but is itself external to it. It lies in the promise of the Father to reconcile all things to himself. It is this goal, Newbigin argues, that “makes possible responsible action in history” and “heals the dichotomy between the private and the public worlds which death creates.”50 Because Jesus Christ is the clue to history, Newbigin develops no fast border between the Christian community and the world, one that demands complex rules for crossing. Quite the contrary, those who reject the gospel rebuild the walls God in Christ Jesus has already destroyed. For this reason all forms of racism, cultural imperialism, gender or economic inequality are inimical to the gospel, and especially so when they assume the guise of preaching the kingdom of God.
With this ground in history, mission, Newbigin observes, “is rooted in the gospel itself.”51 It is so because “the truth about the human story has been disclosed in the events which form the substance of the gospel. . . . These events are the real clue to the story of every person, for every human life is part of the whole human story and cannot be understood apart from that story.”52 The “logic of mission,” by extension, derives from this disclosure of the “true meaning of the human story.”53 Newbigin contrasts this with the “long tradition” that conceived mission as “obedience to a command” or a “mandate given to the Church.”54 This ground, in his estimation, “misses the point” because it makes mission “part of the law rather than part of the gospel.”55 The church does not bear a mission. The image Newbigin prefers is that of “the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving,”56 “the radioactive fallout from an explosion of joy. . . . Mission is an acted out doxology.”57 It, as such, belongs to the essence of Christian life and spirituality.
One sees again the dialectic shaping Newbigin’s thinking. As the act of God, the church has no mastery of this history. It is gathered and exists in the presence of that new reality. It follows that its form is necessarily that of a community “indwelling” the story, to use Newbigin’s favored phrase from Michael Polanyi. It means the repeated hearing and reenactment of that story, the repeated return to the event of the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. Indwelling this story, the community claims no control over history, but witnesses to its “real meaning and goal.”58 Following 2 Corinthians 4:10, the community is called to bear the dying of Jesus Christ so that his risen life might be “made available for others.”59 Newbigin, however, does not stop with this having, with a simple celebration of what is given to the church in its constitution. “It is this indissoluble unity of having and hoping, this presence now of something which is a pledge of the future, this arrabon which is both a reality now and at the same time a pledge of something far greater to come, it is this which constitutes the Church as witness.”60 The hoping in what is real now means that the church is called beyond itself to participate in the history of Jesus Christ.
The church, as Newbigin often states, is “not so much the agent of the mission as the locus of the mission.”61 As a locus, the church becomes the place of God’s mission, meaning that the church is itself the entity being converted. Conversion, Newbigin argues, is no simple turning from sins. If this were Jesus’ call, he would have been “merely a preacher of revival.”62 His call is to “something much more radical, a conversion of the mind which leads to a totally new view of life.”63 Such participation in the history of Jesus Christ means that the church is the locus of mission in a second sense. It is a “company of travelers” who have the “first rays of the morning sun shining” on their faces.64 As others see this reflected light, they too turn to face the morning sun. In both these senses, Newbigin maintains the beyondness of the church’s identity and links this to its necessary missionary form.
It means, finally, that the church is to be a learning community. It learns through what properly belongs to it, but only insofar as this is not “detached from the Church’s missionary journey to all the nations.” The two remain together because the life of the church is “a foretaste of what is promised for the end, namely that the nations shall walk in the light of the Lamb and their kings shall bring their glory into the Holy City (Rev. 21:24).”65 The church’s mission consists not of a type of cultural purification. Instead, the “fulfillment of the mission of the Church . . . requires that the Church itself be changed and learn new things.”66 This is throughout a work of the Spirit. Newbigin finds Peter’s encounter with Cornelius to be representative. In spite of Peter’s own reluctance, the gospel calls even a pagan Roman officer to repentance and conversion, and in this process Peter is also converted. “‘Christianity’ was changed,” Newbigin argues. “One decisive step was taken on the long road from the incarnation of the Word of God as a Jew of the first-century Palestine to summing up of all things in him.”67 It means that “the church cannot lay down in advance for such people what commitment will mean but must . . . learn from them new lessons about its own obedience.”68 The church, while it engages in the conversation, cannot dictate the form conversion takes. The point is axiomatic. Until the final revelation of Jesus Christ as the Lord of all creation, “our confession can only be partial, culture-bound, and thus incomplete.”69
To claim that the church is the locus of mission is, of course, to claim that it shares in and so embodies the center of history. The potential danger with such a position lies in the assumption of privilege. The church becomes the vehicle of God’s redemptive mission to the world; it has the gospel in its possession. One need not read too much of the biblical text nor delve too far into Christian history to discover the reality and consequences (especially for witness) of this temptation. Newbigin deals with this problem through the language of election, the idea that “from the very beginning God chooses, calls, and sends particular people.”70 He begins, in conversation with his experience with the Indian context, by rejecting the basic assumption of spirituality as an individual endeavor. The Bible sets the person’s relationship with God in the context of the relationship between human beings. Such “mutual relatedness, this dependence of one on another,” Newbigin continues, “is not merely part of the journey toward the goal of salvation, but is intrinsic to the goal itself.”71 In Romans 9–11, Newbigin finds both confirmation of the social nature of salvation (“In the end the chosen people, the elect, will have to receive salvation through the nonelect”), and the impossibility of election leading to a “privileged status before God.”72 Election means that knowing God includes the reception of the neighbor, and that there is no salvation apart from this neighbor. So construed in these social terms, priority attaches to the church as a gathered people. In its gathering the church moves beyond itself in meeting the stranger. Newbigin reinforces the point by reference to election’s christological center. “To be elect in Christ Jesus . . . means to be incorporated into his mission to the world.”73 Election receives its shape from Jesus Christ himself, and the church follows in his train.
Six Characteristics of the Church as Hermeneutic of the Gospel
In this discussion of the relationship between mission and history, it may seem that we have traversed far from the congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel. This is not the case. The penultimate chapter in Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, I suggest, is the endpoint to which his argument has been developing. Though it is clear he is describing the church mundane and concrete, the tone is not ecclesiastical. Expected elements, such as overt reference to word, sacrament and office, are absent. Instead, a certain tension is evident in the six characteristics Newbigin develops. Each is marked by an orientation to the community itself and an orientation beyond it. He formulates the church, in other words, through this dialectic between the visibility of the cross and the invisibility of the resurrection.
As hermeneutic of the gospel, the congregation is, first, a community of praise. Newbigin rehabilitates the notion that human freedom, dignity and equality come from standing under someone who is worthy of reverence. Basic to praise is thanksgiving, understanding that we only stand in God’s presence by an act of his grace. Such gratitude is not containable. It expands beyond our own horizons to encompass our neighbor, not “as an object of evangelization,” but as an overflow of the joy experienced by those liberated from bondage.74 Nor is this a first followed by a second move. Without this thanksgiving it is not God before whom we stand.
Second, as a community of truth, the congregation is to be nurtured by the “constant remembering and rehearsing of the true story of human nature and destiny.” This, Newbigin argues, supports a “healthy scepticism” concerning the stories the world tells about itself. In other words, being formed in the “plausibility structure” of the gospel includes this engagement with the world and the exposing of the false claims to power. The gospel itself gives shape to this engagement, meaning that the congregation will speak truth not mirroring the “techniques of modern propaganda,” but in the “modesty, the sobriety, and the realism which are proper to a disciple of Jesus.”75
Third, this community “does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighbourhood.” Newbigin reasserts the importance of the church being local, for the place in which it is. Insofar as its members “are willing to be for the wider community,” it is a church for them too.76 Nor, it must be remembered, is this to be conceived in ideal terms. He has in mind the church mundane. Newbigin warns against the twofold temptation of, first, the church so accommodating to the place that it becomes a religious mirror of the setting and, second, the church so focusing on itself that it ignores its neighbors. Instead, the church is to be “God’s embassy in a specific place,” meaning that it is and remains a foreign presence, but one for this place.
Fourth, this community prepares and sustains its members “in the exercise of the priesthood in the world.”77 As priests, Christians “stand before God on behalf of the people, and stand before people on behalf of God.” To this Newbigin adds a further defining point: priests follow the High Priest as the one who alone fulfills this function, meaning that the “Church is sent into the world to continue that which he came to do, in the power of the same Spirit, reconciling people to God (John 20:19-23).”78 Priesthood is a worldly task. Newbigin understands the church in terms of this commerce between its internal and external aspects. To isolate either in the economy of salvation is to distort both. As such, he expresses concern regarding established theological patterns and forms of ministerial training that are too much concerned with “the pastoral care of the existing congregation, and far too little oriented toward the missionary calling to claim the whole of public life for Christ and his kingdom.”79 Newbigin advocates the recognition of the wider gifts of the body and the different forms of expression such gifts takes. There exists no uniform style of evangelism or of Christian discipleship.80 Only in the diversity of gifts can the body fully exercise its royal priesthood.
Fifth, it will be a community of mutual responsibility, meaning that it will embody first in itself the type of social concerns it will see in wider society. If individualism is a malaise burdening Western societies, one should not find its religious confirmation in the church. The church should be “the foretaste of a different social order” and so manifest “relationships of faithfulness and responsibility toward one another.”81 Again, Newbigin values this image of “overflow.” No secondary point of connection with those outside the church exists because such is given already with the gospel and its superfluity.
Hope is the sixth and final characteristic. Though Newbigin develops this in the Western context, hope, from my experience, is a key theme in both Africa and Asia. Hope, in the terms developed here, is directed to the reality of the resurrection, a reality not yet generally visible, but a present reality nonetheless. Or, we can hope in the eschatological there and then because it is a reality in the eschatological here and now. The church is grounded and exists within this reality, meaning that the congregation as the only hermeneutic of the gospel is the place where this “new creation is present, known, and experienced, and from which men and women will go into every sector of public life to claim it for Christ.”82 Such is possible, Newbigin continues, only when “local congregations renounce an introverted concern for their own life, and recognize that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.”83 This dialectic of the church being something in and for itself because its identity lies beyond it is, and remains, basic.
Conclusion
By describing the congregation as the only hermeneutic of the gospel, Newbigin reminds us that the gospel can only take bodily form. The gospel is no free-floating message, no individual belief system. It creates, shapes and sustains a people, a body. This congregation is a visible entity in history. More than this and as idealistic as it may sound, Newbigin expects the congregation local and mundane, filled with the everyday stumbling Christian, to be a sign of the kingdom—not just called to be so, but given all the necessary gifts in the power of the Spirit. Newbigin includes here, as is clear from his wider corpus, word, sacrament and office. In the liturgy, the community remembers the story within which it lives, moves and has its being.
Alone, however, this paints too flat a picture. Newbigin predicates his discussion of the congregation with an affirmation of God’s acting to reveal himself. God acts in history; he does not give himself over to historical course. The necessary visibility of the congregation becomes defined in terms of the cross and the resurrection. We see the crucifixion; God reveals the resurrection. This dialectic determines the church. The community is something in and for itself because its identity exists beyond it in the history of Jesus Christ. The church does not control this history. It follows in its wake, meaning that the congregation is baptized into the mission of Jesus Christ and for this is given the Holy Spirit. As the only hermeneutic of the gospel, the congregation assumes its necessary missionary form, finding its identity in the event of being gathered, in the event of fellowship with our neighbor.
This picture is, of course, eschatological—eschatological not as something reserved for the future and for which the church now is some form of detour or waiting room, but eschatological as living in the reality of the cosmic Christ where he “is all and in all” (Col 3:11). For this, God has chosen the congregation to be the hermeneutic of his gospel for the world.