I
At every period the church has a duty to be clear about its commission, its situation and its goal. But what is to determine its guiding lines? The theological doctrine of the church takes the church at its word.
The church is the people of God and will give an account of itself at all times to the God who has called it into being, liberated it and gathered it. It is therefore before the divine forum that it will reflect upon its life and the forms that life takes, what it says and what it does not say, what it does and what it neglects to do.
But the church is at the same time under obligation to men (Rom. 1:14). Consequently it will at all times render an account to men about the commission implicit in its faith and the way it is fulfilling that commission. It will reflect on its life and the expression of its life in the forum of the world.
In the community of the incarnate God and the exalted man Jesus Christ there can be no division here. The church will always have to present itself both in the forum of God and in the forum of the world. For it stands for God to the world, and it stands for the world before God. It confronts the world in critical liberty and is bound to give it the authentic revelation of the new life. At the same time it stands before God in fellowship and solidarity with all men and is bound to send up to him out of the depths the common cry for life and liberty.
The church is on the move in free solidarity and critical fellowship, together with the world, people and peoples, nations and societies. It is called the wayfaring people of God. Because of that it will present itself and its relationship to the people and the peoples, to Israel and to the nations, in the forum of the future of God and the world. It will comprehend the meaning of its commission in the light of its hope and it will interpret the sufferings of the time in the light of the coming kingdom. It will comprehend the meaning of its divine commission in world history and at the same time will understand the world in the context of God’s history.
The theological doctrine of the church will observe these three dimensions—before God, before men and before the future—when it depicts the living nature of the church. For the church of Christ is an ‘open’ church. It is open for God, open for men and open for the future of both God and men. The church atrophies when it surrenders any one of these opennesses and closes itself up against God, men or the future.
In peaceful times the church could affirm itself by demonstrating the unbroken and unaltered continuance of its tradition and traditions. People appealed to these things, trusting in the permanent element in time’s changes, and in what is repeatable in the accidents of history. In times of unrest this is no longer convincing. For the swift revolution in social conditions always spreads to the whole visible form of the church as well. Today we are living in a time of transition whose future we can as yet hardly perceive. Many people are painfully conscious that what was valid once no longer holds good. But what is going to be and what is capable of enduring we do not know. This causes an unrest which also affects Christianity and the church all over the world. Today tensions and conflicts between conservatives and the people who imagine they are conservative, progressives and the people who think they are conservative, and progressives and the people who suppose they are progressive, set their stamp on the sufferings of the church—and for many people, suffering over the church. At a time like this the church is challenged to think radically about its origins, to lay hold decisively on its charge, and to return to Christ’s future from its now flawed and dying form. In a situation like this the theological doctrine of the church cannot simply be expressed in abstract terms about the church’s timeless nature. It will have to provide points of departure for reforming the church, for giving it a more authentic form.
It is true that there are churches which particularly stress the permanent and repeatable elements in their traditions at times when everything is in a state of flux. Not every church is a ‘Reformation’ church in the sense that it expresses its vitality through continual reforms. But when ‘traditional’ and ‘Reformation’ churches think together about the one authentic Christian tradition, then they can discover the element of movement in what is permanent, and what continues to have essential validity in the reforms. The tradition to which the church appeals, and which it proclaims whenever it calls itself Christ’s church and speaks in Christ’s name, is the tradition of the messianic liberation and eschatological renewal of the world. It is impossible to rest on this tradition. It is a tradition that changes men and from which they are born again. It is like the following wind that drives us to new shores. Anyone who enters into this messianic tradition accepts the adventure of the Spirit, the experience of liberation, the call to repentance, and common work for the coming kingdom. Tradition and reformation, what abides and what changes, faithfulness and the fresh start are not antitheses in the history of the Spirit. For the Spirit leads to the fellowship of Christ and consummates the messianic kingdom.
From this it becomes finally clear that it can by no means be merely the unrest of our time which causes the unrest of the church. Nor can it merely be the present revolutionary situation which makes it essential for the church and its teaching to find new bearings. Of course the church must take changes in society into account in its language, its services and the forms of its life and organization. It has to accept these changed times. How else could it fulfil its charge before God, men and the future? But basically its ‘unrest’ is implicit in itself, in the crucified Christ to whom it appeals and in the Spirit which is its driving power. The unrest of the times points it to this inner unrest of its own. The social and cultural upheavals of the present draw its attention to that great upheaval which it itself describes as ‘new creation’, as the ‘new people of God’, when it testifies to the world concerning the future of ‘the new heaven and the new earth’. What is required today is not adroit adaptation to changed social conditions, but the inner renewal of the church by the spirit of Christ, the power of the coming kingdom. The theological doctrine of the church will consequently allow itself to be guided by the inner unrest which is agitating the church. This inner unrest must be discernible when we talk theologically about ‘the church of Jesus Christ’, ‘the church of the kingdom of God’, and ‘the church in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit’.
It used to be accepted without dispute that the doctrine of the church was bound to be a theological one, which in dogmatics had to be treated after christology and before eschatology. This is no longer a matter of course, for the paths leading to a theory of the church and its practice differ widely.
We can start from experience and describe the church phenomenologically. Then we obtain a picture of the church in the framework of the culture in which it lives. We can investigate the church sociologically, thus acquiring a picture of its organization in the framework of a given social system. We can depict the church historically, and gain insight into its historical movements and the way it has changed. We can examine it in the light of the history of religions, comparing it with other religions.
A theory of the church, in whatever way it is acquired, can also be determined by different spheres of interest. It can be drawn up in aid of the church’s self-understanding; or to ward off heresy; or in order to compare one church with another, or as a defence against attacks from outside; or as a criticism of the church’s present condition. Finally, a theory of the church can be claimed by different ‘subjects’. Whose picture of the church does it represent and who is to profit by it? Is it the picture of pastor, priest and theologian? Or is it the notion held by laymen, whether outsiders or insiders? Is it a theory about church action drawn up for the church’s leaders, or a theory about the needs of the people who are at the receiving end of that action? It is understandable that different ‘subjects’ inside or outside the church should have different pictures of the church, which can be conceptually depicted in different theories about the church. It is also understandable that the different theories about the church should reflect different pictures of the church and different interests within it. Every theory of the church must therefore raise the question, and allow it to be raised: whom is it intended to benefit, and for whom and in whose interest is it designed?
Whatever the church is or ought to be in other respects, the theological concept of the church must take the church and its own claim seriously, testing it against the one to whom it appeals. The theological doctrine of the church talks about the church of Christ. It therefore seeks to discern the subject of the church as clearly as possible and to give effect to it in the church’s life and form. If the church does everything in the name of the triune God, then theological doctrine will see the church in the trinitarian history of God’s dealings with the world. In this way it does not only serve the theological justification of the church’s actions; it also serves the theological criticism of those actions.
But Christ is his church’s foundation, its power and its hope. As the Reformed confessional writings show, that is the reason why the Reformation subjected all human rules and statutes in religion and the church to the yardstick of the gospel of Christ. The Confessing Church, therefore (as Thesis 1 of the Barmen Theological Declaration of 1934 makes clear), condemned all state claims to dominance over the church that are designed to reduce the church to dependence. It is only where Christ alone rules, and the church listens to his voice only, that the church arrives at its truth and becomes free and a liberating power in the world. The theological concept of the church belongs to this specific tradition of the church’s liberation through the lordship of Christ, and it knows that it is committed to that tradition. It does not talk about the church in the ideal sense; so it cannot be interpreted as one dimension of the church among others (the religious one perhaps). Acknowledgment of the sole lordship of Christ in his church makes it impossible to recognize any other ‘sources of the proclamation apart from or in addition to this sole Word of God’. It cannot admit that there are any ‘sectors of our lives in which we belong, not to Jesus Christ, but to other masters.’ It must condemn the doctrine ‘that it could be permissible for the church to leave the form of her message and her order to her own convenience or the fluctuation of the philosophical and political convictions in force at any given time’. What the Confessing Church declared with these words, in opposing the state’s claim to lordship, must also be said today in opposing the claim to domination asserted by unjust and inhuman social systems; and it must be said through the theological conception of the church. The theological conception of Christ’s church is therefore always at the same time a political and social concept of the church. The lordship of Christ is the church’s sole, and hence all-embracing, determining factor. It can neither be shared nor restricted. That is why Christianity’s obedience to this liberating lordship is all-embracing and undivided. It too cannot be limited, either by the church or by the state. A consistent theological doctrine of the church is by its very nature an eminently political and social doctrine of the church as well. It will link up the theological interpretation of the church (doctrine de ecclesia) with the church’s politics (politia ecclesiastica), so that the conflicts become evident and the need to alter the church’s politics in the light of the lordship of Christ can no longer be ignored.
If, for the church of Christ, Christ is the ‘subject’ of the church, then in the doctrine of the church christology will become the dominant theme of ecclesiology. Every statement about the church will be a statement about Christ. Every statement about Christ also implies a statement about the church; yet the statement about Christ is not exhausted by the statement about the church because it also goes further, being directed towards the messianic kingdom which the church serves. The theological doctrine of the church can therefore by no means represent the theologians’ view of the church, although it often enough gives the impression of doing just that, because of its language, mode of expression and interest. Like every theory about the church, the theological doctrine is claimed by different subjects and different interests, whether they be conscious or unconscious. But it is the task of theology to give effect to ‘Christ’s interest’ in his church, while remaining self-critical and also critical towards other interests. It is in the interest of everyone who calls on the name of Christ to subordinate his own particular interests to ‘Christ’s interest’ and hence, as Paul says, to ‘live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised’ (2 Cor. 5:15); and consequently the theological concept of the church serves Christianity as a whole and not only the theologians in the church. In this respect every Christian is a theologian. The theological interpretation of the church does not divide; it is a bond that holds everything together in the all-embracing interest of Christ which is common to all. The experience that ‘doctrine divides but service unites’ is not a contradiction, for ‘Christ’s interest’ applies to both doctrine and service. It knows nothing of a division between theory and practice. In the traditions we have mentioned where the church has been freed through the word and spirit of Christ—in the Reformation, the Confessing Church and the persecuted ‘churches under the cross’ today—the unity between theology and the congregation, doctrine and practical resistance, clergy and laymen was and is impressively experienced. The theological concept of the church under the lordship of Christ grows out of experiences like this and aims at practice that is in accordance with them. Theology is one function of Christ’s church. Or, to be more precise, it is one function of Christ with regard to his church. Since the church emerged from Europe’s ‘Christian society’ in the nineteenth century, this first statement has been endorsed by many theologians: ‘theology is a function of the church’. This statement rightly brings theology into the church’s fellowship and commission; but the second statement must be stressed equally, if we are to express the freedom of theology towards the church in its existing form. When theology reflects the historical form of the church in the framework of Christ’s ‘interests’ and lordship, then it is interpreting itself first of all as a function of Christ’s lordship, and only secondarily as a function of his church. If this were not so, theologians could easily become ‘functionaries’ of the church in the form in which it exists at any given time. Theology is a ‘Christian’ and a ‘spiritual’ affair, and it is only as such that it is one of the church’s tasks. Fundamentally there is no distinction here, but differences emerge often enough empirically. Just because theology is one function of the church of Christ, it belongs critically—like faith—in the fellowship of the church as it actually exists. If theology were to lose its freedom to criticize, it would turn into the ideology of the church in its existing form. If it were to lose the fellowship of the church, it would stop being Christian theology and turn into a kind of science of religion. As Christian theology, theology has to remind the church of the lordship of Christ and has to insist that the church’s form be an authentic one. As the Christian church, the church must remind theology of God’s people and insist on a theology which has relevance for that people.
Today one of the strongest impulses towards the renewal of the theological concept of the church comes from the theology of mission.
Conditions are being reversed and relationships are taking on a reciprocal character. It is no longer only the ‘younger churches’ in the non-Christian countries which are learning from the older churches in the Christian ones. The more the protective circle shielding Christianity in the Christian countries is secularized, and the more it disintegrates, the more the churches in these countries too are forced to remember the missionary initiative and their own particular missionary charge. They cannot continue to see themselves as the agents of European or American Christianity. They have to discover their missionary calling in their own country, using it to make the special form of the church in their own civilizations apparent. That is basically speaking the challenge of the modern ‘separation between church and state’ in the political constitutions of contemporary Europe. If there is no longer a ‘state church’, then the church has to mould its history by itself. If the ‘national’ or ‘established’ church no longer exists as a living reality, then ‘the people of God’ must present itself to the people in a form of its own. The more the Christian West disintegrates culturally and geographically, the more the church will find its self-understanding in the context of the whole world. It cannot merely conceive itself in the framework of European history any longer. World history is now the frame in which it has to present itself and its charge; and this presentation can only be a missionary one.
Up to now missions have largely been Western missions—one thinks of people in Europe sending out missionaries to Africa and Asia. But the Mexico City Conference in 1963 talked about ‘mission in six continents’, so as no longer to exclude Europe, the home of the traditional missionary bodies. The Bangkok Conference in 1973 announced the end of the unilateral ‘Western mission’ and the beginning of multilateral ‘world mission’. Yet up to now the European churches have found it hard to discover Europe as a missionary field or to see themselves as missionary churches. The historical recollection of the way the Protestant missionary movements began can help to break down these inhibitions.
The Protestant church in Europe started out on its missionary task at precisely the moment when the corpus christianum and the established church confined to a single denomination were decaying. When in the seventeenth century Cardinal Bellarmine reproached the Protestant churches with not being true churches at all because they were not missionary churches, well-known theologians of orthodox early Protestantism were still able to reply: ‘Long ago we were indeed told: “Go ye into all the world”; but now: “Remain in the place where God hath placed thee.” ’ The early Protestant interpretation of the gospel took its bearings from the event of the justification of the sinner, but not, as Paul did, from the event of the calling of Jews and Gentiles. Consequently it rejected any missionary duty.
Since there was at that time no proclamation of the Word outside the church, the call is no doubt seen as something that has already happened, something accomplished by the apostles, from which we still profit today; it is no longer a divine action in the present which we experience too.
Since, according to this view, call and mission are something that have happened once and for all, then the church today calls no longer, it instructs and teaches Christians and baptizes the children of Christians. In this way it remains within the confines of ‘Christian society’, which continually reproduces itself through infant baptism.
It was not until the era of the Enlightenment and the beginning of world-wide trade that pietism and the missionary movement burst the narrow bounds of this Protestant understanding of the church. Pietism discovered ‘the heart’ and infiltrated into the different established churches as well as the class divisions of society. Personal faith made denominations and classes relative. The missionary movements which came into being at the same time discovered ‘the world’ as the horizon of the Christian charge, breaking through the frontiers of the Christian countries.
The new development was that, as the dream of the Christian West faded, the world was accepted as the horizon. The new development was that Christianity was regrouped for its service in this world and that a beginning was made with what we so glibly call today ‘the missionary structure of the congregation’.
The new development was that the layman seized the chance of his call to apostleship as the modern world freed itself from clerical domination and came of age. On the threshold of modern times we find that Christianity’s new answer to the altered situation in the world was: (i) a missionary church; (ii) the will to ecumenical fellowship between the divided churches; (iii) the discovery of the universality of the kingdom of God; and (iv) the lay apostleship. As the corpus christianum was secularized through these answers, the church became ‘secular’, that is, world-open and world-wide. As culture was stripped of clericalism, free communities of mature Christians came into being, together with the lay apostleship. As faith was transferred to the private sphere and the modes of belief in society multiplied, ecumenical movements arose. It is important to see the start of missionary activity in this historical context. It is not merely a Christian answer to the discovery of unknown continents; it is also an answer to the changed situation in Europe itself. Consequently it has significance not merely for the spread of the Christian faith in Africa and Asia; it is also of eminent significance for the reshaping of the churches in Europe.
The theological interpretation of the church today must absorb these germs of a missionary church in the decay of the corpus christianum. What we have to learn from them is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood. The preaching of the gospel does not merely serve to instruct Christians and strengthen their faith; it always serves to call non-Christians at the same time. The whole congregation has ‘spiritual’ and charismatic gifts, not merely its ‘spiritual’ pastors. The whole congregation and every individual in it belong with all their powers and potentialities to the mission of God’s kingdom. In the corpus christianum the different tasks of the community were distributed between state, society, family and church. The church could confine itself to its specifically religious mandate. As the corpus christianum decays, the congregation will again recollect the wealth of its own charismata and thrust forward to the total testimony of salvation which leaves no sphere of life without hope, from faith to politics, and from politics to economics.
To grasp the missionary church theologically in a world-wide context means understanding it in the context of the missio dei. Mission comprehends the whole of the church, not only parts of it, let alone the members it has sent out. To proclaim the gospel of the dawning kingdom is the first and most important element in the mission of Jesus, the mission of the Spirit, and the mission of the church; but it is not the only one. Mission embraces all activities that serve to liberate man from his slavery in the presence of the coming God, slavery which extends from economic necessity to Godforsakenness. Evangelization is mission, but mission is not merely evangelization. In the missionary church the widow who does charitable works belongs to the same mission as the bishop who leads the church, or the preacher of the gospel. The church’s endowment with the spirit of liberty and the powers of liberation knows distinctions, but not divisions. The all-embracing messianic mission of the whole church corresponds to Christ’s messianic mission and to the charismatic sending of the Spirit ‘which shall be poured out on all flesh’. If the church sees itself to be sent in the same framework as the Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit, then it also sees itself in the framework of God’s history with the world and discovers its place and function within this history. Modern Catholic and Protestant missionary theology is therefore right when it talks about the missio dei, a movement from God in which the church has its origin and arrives at its own movement, but which goes beyond the church, finding its goal in the consummation of all creation in God. It follows from this that the church understands its world-wide mission in the trinitarian history of God’s dealings with the world. With all its activities and suffering, it is an element in the history of the kingdom of God. The real point is not to spread the church but to spread the kingdom. The goal is not the glorification of the church but the glorification of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. The missionary concept of the church leads to a church that is open to the world in the divine mission, because it leads to a trinitarian interpretation of the church in the history of God’s dealings with the world.
The ecumenical movement has created new realities just as much as the missionary movement, and the theological concept of the church today has to absorb these. In the ecumenical context Christianity loses its provincial character. The parochial barriers begin to crumble whenever a church recognizes itself in the other churches in the world and sees itself as being a member of the one church of Christ. The ecumenical rapprochement of the divided churches began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it needed the bitter experiences of two European world wars before the churches’ eyes were opened to their imprisonment in national states, separate cultures and social ideologies. Closely bound up as they were with ‘king and country’, they could not even escape from the wartime propaganda of their own particular nations. ‘The triune God had turned into an Olympus of tribal gods engaged in feuds with one another.’ The ecumenical movement seeks the visible unity of Christ’s church. It serves to liberate the churches from their ties with the middle-class and political religions of their societies; and in this way it also serves to give the churches renewed life as Christ’s church. There will be no unification of the divided churches without an inner renewal, and there will be no renewal without liberation. The inner reason for the ecumenical movement is to be found in Christ’s plea ‘that they may all be one’ (John 17:21). The external reason is to be found in the catastrophic world situation, in which Christianity can only document the peace of God to the world through ecumenical fellowship within itself.
Once the churches have entered the ecumenical movement, the doctrine of the church can no longer be the slave of the self-understanding of our own particular denomination, and its difference from all the others. Traditional controversial theology, with its ‘doctrinal distinctions’, will then give way to a theology of co-operation founded on common ground. This does not lead to the mixing up of the different churches or to theological indifference. But the question of the ‘true church’ moves into the foreground. Just as we seek for the true church in the shape of our own denomination, so we will seek it in the forms of other churches as well; for the true church is one and indivisible.
The way to the ecumenical concept of the church began with the attempt known as comparative ecclesiology. The denominations learnt to know one another in the hope ‘that a better understanding of diverging views about faith and church order would lead to a deepening of the desire for reunification and to corresponding official resolutions on the part of the denominations themselves’. The first result was a kind of ‘negative consensus’. People discovered that the traditional doctrinal distinctions should not really be seen as dividing the churches from one another, for none of them had to be formulated exclusively; all of them could be expressed in an inclusive sense as well. They did not have to be employed as a means of excommunication; they could also be used to build up community. The different traditions as such remained, but they took on a different significance and status, even in the first ecumenical conversations. They were no longer found to provide a reason for separation, although (apart from the brief basic formula of the World Council of Churches) it was not yet possible to define the common ground in positive terms. It was only in Lund in 1952 that a step was taken away from comparative ecclesiology in the direction of christological ecclesiology:
We have seen clearly that we can make no real advance towards unity if we only compare our several conceptions of the nature of the Church and the traditions in which they are embodied. But once again it has been proved true that as we seek to draw closer to Christ we come closer to one another. We need, therefore, to penetrate behind our divisions to a deeper and richer understanding of the mystery of the God-given union of Christ with his Church. We need increasingly to realize that the separate histories of our Churches find their full meaning only if seen in the perspective of God’s dealings with his whole people.
Since then the ‘Commission on Faith and Order’ is at all its conferences engaged in pressing forwards, through all the various traditions, to the tradition which is called by the name of Christ. On the way from the river to the source, from the churches to Christ, the churches are transcending their own forms and traditions. In their christological concentration they are discovering themselves, together with the others, as the one church of Christ. At the same time they are discovering that they are being drawn together into Christ’s messianic mission and are becoming the church of the coming kingdom of God. In the ecumenical encounter the christological concentration has led to recognition of the universality of the eschatological hope. That is why anticipatory eschatology is equally stressed. Since the conference at Uppsala in 1968 the expressions promise, hope, mission and anticipation stamp the ecumenical declarations: ‘We ask you, trusting in God’s renewing power, to join in these anticipations of God’s Kingdom, showing now something of the newness which Christ will complete.’ The Second Vatican Council talked in similar terms in the Constitution on the Church § 48:
The final age of the world has already come upon us (cf. 1 Cor. 10:11). The renovation of the world has been irrevocably decreed and in this age is already anticipated in some real way.
A christologically founded and eschatologically directed doctrine of the church is evidently able to overcome the initial ‘negative consensus’ of comparative ecclesiology which we have mentioned, and to bring about a consensus that is positive. Finally, it must be noted that the ecumenical movement has for a long time made people aware of the so-called ‘non-theological factors’ in the divisions between the churches. From the Edinburgh Conference of 1937 onwards the phrase ‘non-theological factors’ was applied to the economic, political and cultural conflicts which have played a particular role in most of the church’s schisms. Because the expression is not a particularly illuminating one, it was dropped. Political and economic social criticism of the form of the church and the divisions between the churches and ideological criticism of the church’s theology took its place. Once we become conscious of the churches’ imprisonment in particular structures and political constellations, then, if the church is to be helped to find its freedom, there is need of an ecclesiology which is critical of ideology, an ecclesiology which reflects the true setting of the churches in the life of the various societies and states. Just as Luther proceeded from the ‘unfree will’ in order to find the freedom of faith, and from the church’s ‘Babylonian captivity’ in order to discover the true church, so a critical doctrine of the church will start from the church’s lack of freedom in societies and nations, in order to seek the church in the freedom of Christ. This is the justification for a theological adoption of Marxist analysis and ideological criticism in the ecumenical context. But it will be limited by ‘Christ’s interest’ in his church and will therefore be also critically levelled against attempts to bring the churches in the socialist countries into line.
The path of the ecumenical movement is, relatively speaking, clear enough: it is already leading from anathema to dialogue. In practical matters it has led further, from dialogue to co-operation. It will lead from co-operation between divided churches to toleration and the arguing-out of differences within the one church. The way leads from co-operation to council. Even if the idea of an ecumenical all-Christian council and the hope that Christianity will speak with one voice at such a council must still be called utopian, yet that Utopia is already shedding its light on the present wherever the divided churches are beginning to live in council with one another. To live in council means consulting with other churches in questions affecting one’s own church, and intervening in the questions of other churches. Living in council is not a life without conflicts, but it is a life which endures the conflicts in itself and tries to solve them. Up to now conflicts were often got out of the way by separating the disputing parties. But that is no solution. Solutions can only really be found for conflicts when one keeps the fellowship going, or picks it up again. If the ecumenical movement leads to life in council between the divided churches in their different places, then it does not make things easier for the churches. It undoubtedly brings difficulties in its wake. For it is then impossible to say that the controversy about papal infallibility is ‘an internal problem for Catholics’ or that the dispute about infant baptism is ‘an internal problem for Protestants’. If the whole church is present in every individual church, then they all participate in problems of this kind. The ecumenical concept of the church leads to an inclusive interpretation of the one church of Christ which will become a critical and liberating force in history in the hope of the coming kingdom of God.
Historically, the church has always had a political dimension. Whether it likes it or not, it represents a political factor. It is hence only a question of how it presents itself as a political factor. As we saw in § 1, from the history of the Reformation, the Confessing Church and the ‘churches under the cross’, the acknowledgment of the sole lordship of Christ plunges the church into political conflict. A logical and consistent Christian discipleship always has logical political consequences. As we saw in § 2, a missionary church cannot be apolitical. If all the congregation’s activities are part of the service of the messianic mission, the political sphere cannot be excluded. Witness to salvation belongs in all life’s dimensions. The ecumenical concept of the church also comes up against the liberation of the church from its political imprisonment, as we saw in § 3. The expression ‘political church’ therefore does not mean a politicizing of the church. On the contrary, it means a Christianization of the church’s politics according to ‘the yardstick and plumbline of Christ’, as Zwingli put it.
The church against world horizons does not only mean ‘mission in six continents’; nor is it confined to the ecumenical unification of scattered and divided churches. The church against world horizons also means: the church’s existence against the background of the world’s increasing interdependence and its growing tension, the struggle for world domination and the fight against exploitation and oppression.
Modern political theology has pointed to the fact that ‘the world’ today can no longer be understood merely as cosmos, or only as ‘worldliness’ in the personal sense; the word now quite specifically and practically means ‘a societal reality viewed in its historical becoming’. Christianity lives in this social process. But how does it live, and what does it opt for in that process? Since the time of the political and social revolutions in Europe, the Protestant and Catholic churches have consistently made a conservative choice, presenting themselves in the social process as the power of order against enlightenment, emancipation and revolution. Since the French Revolution, a multiplicity of political ecclesiologies have grown up in both the Protestant and the Catholic camps, all of which, anti-revolutionary, anti-rationalist and anti-democratic as they were, wanted to hold in check ‘the apocalyptic beast from the abyss’ and mobilized the church for this purpose. In the age of the restoration in Europe, the churches, consciously or unconsciously, made that basic conservative choice which determines their public statements even today. It is the intention of modern political theology to make people conscious of this basic conservative choice made by the European churches, and to put an end to it, so giving back to the church its political liberty. The church ‘is an institution within [this world], having a critical liberating task in regard to it’. It is only when the church’s fixation on that basic choice in world politics is ended that Christianity can hopefully discover the political sphere as the place where responsibility for faith and life is accepted; and it is only then that it can decide freely, and for freedom, without that particular prejudice. Modern political theology, unlike its earlier equivalent, is not an ideology of political religions, to which the church has often enough surrendered. It is the critical ending of these unholy alliances made by the church.
The theology of revolution which comes to us from Latin America demands from Christianity the new fundamental choice for socialism in the world-wide class struggle to liberate the oppressed and exploited people. But the supporters of this decision did not simply take it over from one particular party in the present conflict. Generally speaking, the theology of revolution understands ‘revolution’ as the outward correspondence of man’s inner repentance—that is to say, along the lines of regeneratio, reformatio and renovatio mundi. The theology of revolution has always interpreted the concept of revolution theologically, understanding it in the light of Christianity’s messianic traditions. Consequently it has also laid bare repressed recollections of the biblical traditions and developed a political interpretation of scripture. Reading the Bible with the eyes of the poor is a different thing from reading it with the eyes of the man with a full belly. If it is read in the light of the experiences and hopes of the oppressed, the Bible’s revolutionary themes—promise, exodus, resurrection and Spirit—come alive. The way in which the history of Israel and the history of Christ blend with that of the hungry and oppressed is quite different from the way in which they have often been linked with the history of the mighty and rich. However the theology of revolution may be criticized, it has made it patently clear that the political responsibility of Christianity in the present conflicts must definitely take specific form in the people, with the people and for the liberation of the people. In addition, it has set the word ‘revolution’ in the context of man’s rebirth and the new creation of the world—the context to which it has always belonged in the history of the European revolutions. It has at last led to the practical political interpretation of the Bible in the field of experience shared by the hungry and oppressed.
The new theology of liberation picks up insights from political theology and the theology of revolution, but takes them a stage further with the appropriate concept of liberation. ‘Liberation’ is an ‘open concept’ which permeates and embraces the different dimensions of suffering. It runs from the economic abolition of the exploitation which results from the rule of particular classes, or the political vanquishing of oppression and dictatorship and the cultural elimination of racialism, down to faith’s experience of liberation from the compulsion of sin and the eschatological hope of liberation from the power of death. The chains which liberation has to strike off differ in every situation. But the freedom that is sought can only be a single and a common freedom. It is the freedom for fellowship with God, man and nature. The open concept of liberation is thus more comprehensive than the limited concept of political liberation or the fixed concept of revolution. Liberation includes economics and religion, the present and the future, experience and hope, because it is the concept of a commencing but incomplete process. Working for liberation means taking sides with the oppressed and humiliated. But these efforts are directed equally to the free and human future of the oppressor. The theology of liberation involves itself in a realistic analysis of the situation of unfreedom, but it also presses towards the projected goal of its defeat. Potentially this theology can overcome both the particularist thinking which divides and dominates mankind, and the narrow-minded and fanatical thinking which appears in every conflict.
The theological outlines which I have only briefly indicated here are to be seen as first attempts and tentative experiments on the road to a politically responsible church of Christ. Criticism of them cannot drop back into the illusion of a ‘non-political church’; it must enquire about still closer political correspondences to the lordship of Christ, to the messianic mission and to the church’s existence in a world-wide context. Its ties with ideologies, groups, nations, classes, races and particular interests damage the church’s claim to authenticity in the world. The politically responsible concept of the church, on the other hand, leads to the church that suffers and fights within the people and with peoples, and to an interpretation of this people’s church in the framework of the divine history of liberation, whose goal is the new creation in peace and righteousness.
All the different chapters of a doctrine of the church today will take account of at least these four dimensions of the church—the church of Christ, the missionary church, the ecumenical church and the political church. By so doing it picks up the church’s experiences in our own century, experiences which did not always determine the doctrine of the church earlier, or not to the same degree. Every doctrine of the church starts from experiences in the church and with the church in the world. By enumerating our experiences in this first chapter, we have also marked out our specific place in history.