by Delwin Brown
We speak of an end to racism without knowing exactly what that might mean in America or how, exactly, to bring it about. The goal is not precise, but it is clear enough to enable us to consider next steps and tentatively to anticipate those that might follow, and to pursue these steps together. We hope for a more humane economic order without knowing exactly how the respective strengths of capitalism and socialism might best he combined and their weaknesses overcome. The goal is not clear, but we know enough to begin to take steps that might bring about real-if still not fully adequate-change in American society. We do not "name the animals" by connecting dots on a page. We create more humane forms of order when the successes and failures of past ones are transformed into better visions-tentative, imperfect, vague, but better guiding visions.
'theological talk of salvation, too, is visionary; it, too, rests on metaphors, such as the "reign of God" and "eternal life." 'These and other characterizations of salvation are not literal descriptions. 'they are symbols; for us they seem to be givens, not sheer inventions, that reach into, and come from, the impenetrable depths of reality. In the cluster of these symbols we find intuitions of a better world that we mine like rich ore deep within the earth.
What we mine, however, is ore, not precise, finished products. We are never sure what the metals we mine can or will become. We take them out of the earth, examine them, imagine their possibilities, and work with them. We shape them into beautiful and valued guides to action for the time being. But these metals pre-existed our discovery of them by millions of years. They will live beyond the forms we give them, someday to become other, better guides-guides to the vision of an "entire created order" being set free from its bondage to sin, and more fully opened to the love of the incarnate God.
POINTS FOR REFLECTION
• Religions say that however good life may be, still something fundamental is "out of joint" It may not be too simplistic to say that religion is about God, God is about salvation, and salvation is about the most basic form of health.
• If Christology is the clue to our concept of God, it is also the clue to the salvation that God makes possible. 'The God at home in the world saves the world through processes that are part and parcel of this world.
• Two biblical metaphors are instructive for an understanding of salvation. One is the idea of the "reign of God." The other is the image of "eternal life."
• The reign of God is fullness of health throughout the whole web of life. It is already breaking in upon us through the processes of nature, history, interpersonal relationships, and through our individual lives.
• Eternal life is the quality of a life that is lived in the belief that our world and our individual lives have been "assumed" into the life of God. It is living in the incarnate reality of God.
• In a nonliteral but disturbing sense, there is hell as well as heaven. Heaven is the permanence of our every achievement on behalf of love in the everlasting life of God. Hell is the permanence in God's experience of our every failure to love.
• Christian talk of the "reign of God" and "eternal life" is fragmentary, intuitive, metaphorical. These are guides to the vision of an "entire created order" being set free from sin and more open to the love of the incarnate God.
Chapter 8
Church:
Serving and Being Served
rogressive Christians join their liberal and conservative Christian friends in rejecting the agenda of the religious right as a poisonous departure from any credible interpretation of the gospel. Progressives will continue with liberals and authentic conservatives to name this poison for what it is-a repressive political ideology disguised in Christian trappings. However, without in the least diminishing the great value of liberalism and conservatism, progressive Christianity charts a different course. It is a course that takes the substantive importance of the biblical heritage much more seriously than has recent liberalism, and the substantive diversity of that heritage far more seriously than has conservatism.
"Ibis volume has presented one progressive Christian understanding of the Good News grounded in Jesus Christ. If it is acceptable, it provides a framework for articulating the Church's witness in the world, as well as a foundation for understanding the Church itself. Zhe basic themes of this progressive perspective can be summarized in seven points.
A Progressive Christian Witness
1. Progressive Christians are people formed by the tradition grounded in Jesus Christ. Among the many religions that guide humanity, this tradition's heritage of myths, symbols, analyses, and convictions continuously nourishes our Christian understandings. The assertion of absolute truth for this tradition, or any interpretation of it, is contrary to Christianity's own best insights, as well as to the demonstrable fallibility of all human claims to truth. But we believe Christianity's historic resources offer vital criticisms, values, and visions that can provide insight, hope, and transformation today to the entire human family.
2. The Bible is our foundational resource. Its varied interpretations of Jesus Christ and the gospel "author" our identity as Christians. 'The diversity of these interpretations compels us to honor differences among Christians today. "Their engagement with each other inspires us to engage our own differences, candidly but respectfully. The manifold voices within our scriptural foundation invite us into their dialog, criticize our limited understandings, teach us to think faithfully for ourselves, and empower us to come to views of our own about the meaning of Christian responsibility in today's world.
3. Jesus Christ discloses to us the oneness of God with the world and the manner of God's working in it. We share St. Paul's conviction that God seeks the salvation of the entire created order, and we share the conviction of the ancient Church that salvation is made possible by the power of God's presence. Consequently we affirm the incarnation of God in the entire creation, not just humanity-fully God, fully at one with the full creation. Believing in Christ means believing that God is at home in the world, works through its processes, and is committed without reserve to its fulfillment.
4. 'Ihe God revealed in Jesus Christ is the creative power for good at work in all of creation. God judges, heals, and transforms through persuasive love, not absolute power. Just as God makes a difference in the world, so we make a difference in the divine experience. God rejoices in our joys and suffers in our sorrows. We may experience the incarnate God as guide, presence, and mystery, but we can never capture God in our understanding. To claim absolute truth for any concept of God is a corruption of the religious standpoint, an expression of fear and a denial of faith.
5. Humanity is called to work with God in the service of the entire creation. Our responsibility is to use the resources given to us to create physical and social orders that enrich life at all its levels. Our guides are the Two Great Conunandments-to love God and to love others as ourselves. 'Ihe many other injunctions of Christian tradition, including Scripture's diverse and sometimes conflicting views, are instructive as the efforts of past generations to fulfill the commandments to love. 'That historic diversity, like diversity in the Church and world today, is a means by which the incarnate God guides our thinking and restrains our temptation to presume that we possess absolute truth.
6. Sin is thinking of ourselves-individually or collectivelymore highly, or less highly, than we ought to think. Sin is the excessive valuing or disvaluing of any element, group, or portion of the creation in relationship to the rest. Our failure to love properly is sometimes the product of ignorance. More often we know what love requires but pretend otherwise. We deceive ourselves. Our failure to love properly and our self-deception about this failure create structures of inhumanity that continue from generation to generation. These structures-egotism, classism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, consumerism, nationalism, heterosexism, humanocentrism-abide as the environments in which we are formed from birth, and from which we must be set free.
7. Salvation is the activity of God incarnate, working through all
of the processes of the creation to bring it to the fullness and health made possible by love. It is a promise for all dimensions of life-personal and social, physical and spiritual, human and non-human. Like all hopeful expectations, the comprehensive healing affirmed by Christian faith is visionary and thus metaphorical. The principle metaphors that frame the efforts of the progressive Christian are two-fold: the "reign of God"-a vision of this world transformed by justice and love, and "eternal life"-a vision of God incarnate in the world to whose reality our efforts and our lives might somehow contribute everlastingly.
8. The Church is...?
Why the Church?
To explain how the Church fits into a progressive Christian vision it night be useful to begin with common experience, not theology. And it also might be beneficial (though troubling) if the examples from experience that we use show, by implication, the danger of the Church, as well as its importance. 'Ihe examples I could give are numerous, but I will offer only two.
In the first, a former "interrogations" specialist serving with the military in Iraq recently reflected on why he was able to employ harsh techniques for questioning prisoners even though those methods were so clearly at odds with his upbringing and "normal" personal convictions. His explanation had to do with the communal experience of the interrogators themselves. 'I hey lived and worked together, he said, and that experience of community somehow created and sustained in them an acceptance of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that most of them would previously have rejected, and which they again found to be abhorrent when they left their special communal reality.
'Ihe second example concerns a talk I had some years ago with a corporate executive about the extensive religious work he was doing with high school youth. I was particularly interested in the tact that so much emphasis was placed on intellectual formation, which in this case reflected a very conservative Christian perspective. He explained the course of study employed to create and sustain a particular point of view in the thinking and practice of these young people. I asked him whether the curriculum included exposure to alternative points of view. His answer was no. Naively, I asked why. He replied, "Because we want them to have a strong faith." A hit shocked, I pressed further, "But what happens when they go to college and encounter other viewpoints?" He replied that most of the young people will attend colleges that share that particular point of view, on scholarships from organizations that promote it, and for the rest of their lives attend churches in which that way of believing is the only lived reality.
'These examples remind us that we "tend" (that's an understatement!) to become like those with whom we most consistently and closely associate, and we are sustained in those patterns by the continuing association. Or, to put the point more cryptically, we "are" those with whom we associate.
Beliefs and their related values are created and sustained most effectively in and through communal practices. The power of communities, according to theorists, resides in their complex meshing of mind and feeling, cognition and emotion. The intellectual dimension is essential, to be sure, but its capacity to direct and sustain a way of life depends on its integration with an affective dimension as well, particularly as manifest in the ritual life of a community. The rituals may be formal (the electoral process, or a religious liturgy) or informal (a neighborhood party, or coffee hour after worship). Rituals of either type enact-that is, express bodily-the ideas and beliefs central to a particular form of identity.
'The power and sustainability of any worldview, religious or secular, depend first on there being a point of view-a standpoint comprised of specific ideas and beliefs that can be communicated and discussed. But that worldview depends no less (and perhaps even more so) on being rooted in a communal reality where ideas enter into and emerge out of-antiphonally, if you will-the emotional and actional life of the affections.
In some Christian liturgical traditions, for example, the Scripture lessons from the Old "Testament and the New Testament epistles are read from the chancel of the church. 'Then, when it is time for the Gospel lesson to be read, the celebrants leave their elevated places, come down to the level of the worshippers, and read the Gospel there, among the people. For those who participate in this ritual enactment over time there can be no more powerful communication, at the level of feeling, of the meaning of the doctrine of the incarnation, the otherwise abstract idea that God has become one with us. When finally it is explained, the meaning of the incarnation of God is not so much learned as it is recovered, lifted out of the vast reservoir of feeling in which it has already found a home.
Like all other worldviews, whatever their focus, Christian concepts are clarified and sustained, as well as criticized and reconstructed, through varied forms of communal reenactment. This communal grounding has a dangerous potential-a point to which we have already alluded and to which we shall return at the end of this chapter-but it is also essential for an effective Christian witness. 'Therefore, the social efficacy of a progressive Christian vision will depend to a very significant degree on its being grounded in the life of a vibrant communal reality where careful thinking, powerful ritual, and strategic action are intertwined.
Ibis, from a sociological standpoint, is what the Church is for-to sustain an effective Christian vision. Ihis is not theologically irrelevant from a progressive perspective centered on the incarnate God. God is at work, too, in social dynamics. But what else is the Church for, or more precisely, what else from a theological standpoint is the purpose of the Church? What should it be doing?
The answer to this question is usually derived from a view of the nature of the Church. What the Church should be, in most theologies, determines what the Church should do. If so, we must ask, what is the nature of the Church? The common answers are often elaborated as "models" or "images" of the Church.
Images of the Church
The earliest Christian communities and the earliest Christian understandings seem to have developed in tandem. Understandings produced communities, and communities produced Christian understandings. There were myriad examples of each, including numerous understandings of the Church. I recall in seminary hearing a professor claim that the New Testament contains as many as one hundred images of the Church. In most Protestant seminary textbooks today, however, the number has been pared down to three, four, or five.
One influential image is of the Church as the "people of God." This is a Christian adaptation of the idea of the Jews as God's chosen people. Progressive Christians will have problems with this image for a number of reasons. It is arrogant and more than a little triumphal-"Jews lost, Christians won, and now we are God's chosen people." We have seen the results of this kind of bias throughout Christian history.
There is a second reason to be suspicious of this image. Progressive Christians gratefully acknowledge God's presence in all of history, in all cultures, in all religions. So, from this perspective, all of us are "people of God," not just Christians. Finally, there is a factual problem with this model of the Church. It suggests that of all people, Christians are the most "of God." What could that mean? Most godly? Most righteous? Unless we simply stipulate that "godly" or "righteous" means "being Christian," which is rather self-serving, it is difficult to substantiate a claim for our superior godliness. "Ihe Church is not the gathering of God's favored ones, from a progressive Christian perspective, nor does it appear to be those who are in fact the most like God.
In a curious way, however, there is a value in the notion of the Church as being special in some way. That value may be expressed in the way that some Jewish thinkers today have recast the notion of "election. Jews are elected, or "chosen;' they say, not to a place of privilege, but to a particular task. The task to which Jews are chosen is to remind all of the world's people of the demands of justice. Election, in this understanding, is a special role, not a special status, and it does not preclude other groups also from having their own particular "vocation" in the world. 'Ibis is an interesting idea, to which w
e shall return.
Another prominent image of the Church is as the "body of Christ." "Ihe organic motif in this image makes it quite attractive. 'Ihe Church is intrinsically connected to the event of Jesus Christ. It does not simply remember that event, or celebrate it, or proclaim its significance, though it does these things, too. The Church somehow "embodies" this event. There are good and bad ways of thinking about embodiment. Positively, the Church is the hearer, in its own being, of an interpretation of the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth. 'That meaning is not a fact of history, it is not something discovered through historical investigation. The meaning of Christ is an interpretation of faith, and that faith interpretation resides in the Church. So the Church is the embodiment-in theology, ritual, and action-of the faith claim that, at the most fundamental level, "Jesus" means "God is truly, wholly, and radically incarnate in the world."
The negative construal of the Church as the "body of Christ" is obvious. Like the "people of God" motif, it is an invitation to think of the Church as somehow embodying a special virtue, in this case "Christ-likeness" It is possible to think this way only if one studiously ignores the messy facts of the actual Church! Even so, there might be something quite instructive about this view, if we were to keep in mind that "Christ" means the claim that God is incarnate in the world. The Church is the concrete location of that claim.
A third influential image is of the Church as the "community of the Spirit." Again, there are positive and negative sides to this image. On its behalf, we should note that it is tied to the understanding of salvation represented in the metaphor of the "reign of God" always coming into this world. The in-breaking of the reign of God was, in the biblical accounts, to be accompanied by the infilling of the Spirit of God. The idea of the Church as the "community of the Spirit" testifies to this hope for salvation "on earth as it is in heaven." But if it is taken to mean that the Church already possesses the Spirit, it is disastrous. It is disastrous because it is manifestly false, and in order to believe something so utterly false one must be more than mistaken, one must be delusional.
