VI
When it listens to the language of the messianic era and celebrates the signs of dawn and hope in baptism and the Lord’s supper, the church sees itself in the presence of the Holy Spirit as the messianic people destined for the coming kingdom. In the messianic feast it becomes conscious of its freedom and its charge. In the power of the Holy Spirit the church experiences itself as the messianic fellowship of service for the kingdom of God in the world. Having considered the ‘sacraments’ of the church in chapter V, we shall now turn to the church’s ministries and functions, its gifts and the tasks assigned to it. When we considered the sacraments, we did not see the Spirit in the sacraments, but the sacraments in the movement and the presence of the Spirit; and here too the Spirit is not to be apprehended in the ministries of the church, but the church, with its manifold ministries and tasks, is to be conceived in the movement and presence of the Spirit. There is no ‘Spirit of the sacraments’ and no ‘Spirit of the ministry’, there are sacraments and ministries of the Spirit. In this context we are calling the church a ‘congregation’, because we are thinking of the definite and specific event of its gathering together and its mission in the world.
Discussion about the relationships between ‘ministry and the community’ or ‘ministry and charisma’ often suffer from being pursued along too narrow lines, because the participants in the discussion do not see the wider context—the manifestations of the church’s life in the eschatological history of Christ and the trinitarian history of God. If these are ignored the church’s determining conditions are easily reduced to the dignities and functions of the church’s office bearers. Ecclesiology becomes hierarchology if we do not start from the fact that every believer, whether he be an office-bearer or not, is a member of the messianic people of God. The ministry is turned into an insipid—a ‘spiritless’—kind of civil service, and the charisma becomes a cult of the religious genius, if we do not make the one charismatically living community our point of departure. Many problems can be solved if ministry and congregation, ministry and charisma are understood in the eschatological history of God with the world. We then no longer proceed from the state of the church but from its future, as that is opened up by the history of Christ. The question of which came first, the ministry or the community, and which of them has priority, and the question whether ministry or free charisma has priority, can be answered out of this wider context.
It is necessary to reflect theologically on the mission of the community and every individual Christian, and on the congregation’s order and special ministry; for before anyone actually speaks and acts in the church or in its name, the church has already spoken and acted through its very existence, its visible organization and its public functions. The forms of its fellowship and public functions, and the shape of its order and its ministries, are not merely externals and inessentials; they are no less important than the word and the sacraments. The church’s institutions and its traditional congregational forms can become a stumbling block for many people, even if—and especially if—they do not thereby make the things of Christianity itself a stumbling block. People demand ‘the witness of existence’—and rightly so. Through its order, its ministries and its organizations the church either confesses or denies the thing that it has to represent. So it cannot leave its visible form to the power of the state or the requirements of its particular social order, if it wants to be recognizable as the church of Christ and as the people of the coming kingdom. It is of course true that every historical form the church takes also bears the stamp of its particular environment. But that is not a reason for accepting that stamp passively and for leaving it to external influences. As the church of Christ, the congregation with all its own powers has to realize the social, political and cultural potentialities of a particular period in a way that is in accordance with the cause it maintains; so that through its physical and public profile as well people will be confronted with the freedom of Christ and will be invited to the messianic kingdom. When bourgeois liberals separate Spirit from law, this makes the Spirit lawless and the law spiritless, just as it also makes love lawless and law loveless. The division between theology and church organization makes the public life of the church schizophrenic. The interpretation of the church in the process of the Spirit cannot be merely spiritualistic or lead to a despising of the public form of its life. In church history the ecclesiastical differences and disputes did not only belong to the sphere of dogma; disputes in the field of church order, church leadership and the ministry were just as frequent and just as important, as the names of the various historical movements and denominations show: papalism, episcopalianism, presbyterianism, synodicalism, conciliarism, Congregationalism, independency, and the rest. Church unions do not come about in this sphere through joint doctrinal formulas but through new fellowship, in the mutual recognition of ministries and through the uniting of the church’s leadership in the field of organization. These so-called ‘institutional questions’ are questions of faith and are of the greatest theological importance. They cannot be solved pragmatically. For they are not inessentials; they are matters of our actual and present profession of faith. This makes church law ‘confessing church law’ and church order part of the church’s living witness.
(i) God is not a God of ‘disorder’, but of peace (1 Cor. 14:33). In the New Testament peace does not mean bringing order out of chaos in specific cases, nor is it merely the elimination of conflict. It is the eschatological ‘new order of all things’; and consequently the eschatological salvation of the new creation. The community’s life and actions are to correspond to the peace of God in this world of conflict (1 Cor. 7:15) and anticipate them (Eph. 4:3) because the community lives from the peace of God through the lordship of Christ (Rom. 5:1). The life-style and the actions of the community do not therefore follow the general principles of order which obtain in its particular constitution but conform to the ‘principles’ of this divine peace. The ecclesiastical orders of Christ’s church are historical portrayals of God’s eschatological order of peace. What follows from this as far as state and society is concerned (as well as man’s will to power in state and society) is the form taken by the contrast and alternative: ‘You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:42–45). Through Christ’s self-giving, the rule of violence and oppression has been repealed in his fellowship. The coming peace of the kingdom will be lived in the discipleship of Christ and in mutual service for freedom. The community’s order of freedom will in this way become the sign and point of departure for the conquest of godless and inhuman conditions of rule and oppression in society.
(ii) The community is to stand fast in the freedom for which ‘Christ has set us free’ (Gal. 5:1). It is the fellowship of the free. In its order eschatological freedom is to acquire stability. The order of Christ’s church must therefore be an order of freedom, already showing man’s redemption from sin, law and death. In the fellowship of Christ, people are freed from the oppression which separates them from others—freed for free fellowship with one another. That is why it can be stated that there is here ‘neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28). Man’s eschatological destiny to be heir of the kingdom and his destiny to be free here on earth comes into play, surmounting the lack of freedom which the historical struggle for power brings with it. The justification of sinners places believers in the eschatological heritage of the divine future, which also means the heritage of their own freedom. ‘The new man’ becomes manifest, not merely inwardly but outwardly too, so that we can say: ‘Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all’ (Col. 3:11). In Christ a person appears as God’s person, not as a Greek, a Scythian, a slave or a freeman. The social, historical and natural identifications recede and decay. The constitution of Christ’s community ought to represent this eschatological divine right of true man. In so doing it will abolish unjust constitutions and the privileges of absolute supremacy in the church. The constitution of Christ’s community is the constitution of new life in the midst of the old, of true life in the midst of what is false. ‘Because Jesus Christ is present in the community in the Holy Spirit, the new thing which he brings about for the world is already visible there.’
(iii) If the community is the sign, the instrument and the breaking-in of Christ’s lordship, and therefore the sign, instrument and breaking-in of ‘the new order of all things’, then it will direct its life and actions towards these things. The community lives from the kingdom of Christ. It lives from it as from the one who is to come. All rule in the church is only legitimated by its correspondence to the rule of Christ; but through this it is also truly legitimated. But what is ‘the rule of Christ’? Is it a theocracy, which legitimates a hierarchy, or the authority of a value confined to religion and the inner life of the soul? The charismatic rule of Christ in the community is essentially liberation from the violence and pressure of ‘the powers of this world’. Ephesians 4 makes this connection clear: by virtue of his resurrection, Christ ‘led a host of captives and gave gifts to men’ (4:8). The community’s gifts and tasks are the powers of the victorious Christ who went through hell and heaven to save all things. As the cosmocrator, he fulfils all things, ‘and his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ’ (4:10–12). The gifts and tasks which the exalted Christ gives and appoints are the powers of the life liberated from prison. The risen Christ has taken away power from the ‘elemental spirits of the universe’ (Gal. 4:3). He has not merely led believers out of prison subjectively, but has also broken down the prison in the objective sense. He has not merely snatched individuals from the grasp of the pernicious forces of the universe, but has dethroned these forces themselves. The community which is filled with different energies of Christ’s liberating power is therefore not an exclusive community of the saved, but the initial and inclusive materialization of the world freed by the risen Christ. If the prison has been stormed, if the powers have had their power taken from them, then the world has become different. This is perceived first of all in the fellowship of Christ through faith and hope, discipleship and new fellowship; but it affects the whole world and puts Christ’s church at the service of the manifestations of the world freed by Christ.
Christ’s ‘church government’ belongs within the framework of his rule over the world. All the gifts and powers of his liberating Spirit in the church are directed towards the world freed from the ‘elemental spirits’. The church is therefore not a restricted religious community; if it were, the risen Christ would be merely the Lord of its cult. Nor is it a fellowship of like-minded people; in that case the Lord would only be there to give value to its mental attitude. The church, with its cult and its attitude, is the earthly form of Christ’s lordship, which overcomes the world, and the instrument of his liberation of that world. This can be called ‘theocracy’ if the nature of the rule is entirely and solely identified from the way in which Christ freed men through his self-giving. In that case, however, this Christocracy cannot be represented by a hierarchy separated from the people, but only through the brotherly order of a charismatic community. Its purport and its promise is Christ’s redeeming pantocracy.
(iv) For Paul the congregation is the place where the Spirit manifests itself (1 Cor. 14) in an overflowing wealth of spiritual powers (charismata). According to Old Testament prophecy the spirit counts as being the gift of the last days (Isa. 44:3; 63:14; Ezek. 36:27; Zech. 4:6). In the messianic era not only the chosen prophets and kings but the whole people of God will be filled by the living force and newly creating power of God. According to Joel 2:28f., this is the beginning of the outpouring of the Spirit of God ‘on all flesh’. That means the new creation of all things for the eternal life of the kingdom, and it means at the same time the glorifying of God; for God himself is present in the Spirit. By virtue of the Spirit God himself takes up his dwelling in his creation. Early Christianity understood its experiences with the appearances of the risen Christ and his presence as being experiences in this messianic Spirit. The promise of Joel is fulfilled in what happened at Pentecost (Acts 2:14–21). The Spirit of the last days and the eschatological community of the saved belong together. The new people of God see themselves in their existence and form as being ‘the creation of the Spirit’, and therefore as the initial fulfilment of the new creation of all things and the glorification of God. The Spirit calls them into life; the Spirit gives the community the authority for its mission; the Spirit makes its living powers and the ministries that spring from them effective; the Spirit unites, orders and preserves it. It therefore sees itself and its powers and tasks as deriving from and existing in the eschatological history of the Spirit. In this it experiences not only what it itself is, but also where it belongs. It discovers the redeeming future of the world in the overriding span of the Spirit’s history.
The New Testament knows no technical term for what we call ‘the church’s ministry’. Paul talks about charismata, meaning the energies of the new life (1 Cor. 12:6, 11), which is to say the powers of the Spirit. These are designations of what is, not of what ought to be. They are the gifts of grace springing from the creative grace of God. When he talks about the use of these new living energies, on the other hand, he evidently avoids all the words expressing conditions of rule. He does not talk about ‘holy rule’ (hierarchy) but chooses the expression diakonia. Creative grace leads to new obedience; and the gifts of grace and the energies of the Spirit lead to ready, courteous service. Claims and privileges cannot be deduced from them. The source of life’s new forces is the new life itself. ‘The charisma of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 6:23). Just as the new life becomes manifest and efficacious in life’s new powers, so the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit also becomes manifest and efficacious in the powers of the Spirit. The charismata can be understood as the crystallization and individuation of the one charis given in Christ. Through the powers of the Spirit, the one Spirit gives every individual his specific share and calling, which is exactly cut out for him, in the process of the new creation. Because the word ‘spirit’ is exposed to traditional misunderstandings, we must remember that for Paul the Spirit is ‘the power of the resurrection’ and thus the divine power of creation and new creation (Rom. 8:11; Rom. 4:17). The Spirit is not an ideal, over against what is physical and mortal, but is God himself, who calls into being the thing that is not, makes the godless righteous, and raises the dead. He is the ‘life-giving’ Spirit, giving life to everything that is mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). The community’s spiritual powers must be correspondingly understood as creative powers endowed with life. As the power of resurrection, the Spirit is the reviving presence of the future of eternal life in the midst of the history of death; he is the presence of the future of the new creation in the midst of the dying life of this world and its evil state. In the Spirit and through the Spirit’s powers the eschatological new thing—‘Behold I make all things new’—becomes the new thing in history, reaching, at least in tendency, over the whole breadth of creation in its present wretchedness. That is why the energies of new life in the Spirit are as manifold and motley as creation itself. Nothing is to be passed over, pushed aside or given up. On the contrary, everything is to be made eternally alive. That is why Paul and the epistle to the Ephesians talk about the charismata with such assurance. They overflow in an abundance whose extent cannot be fixed once and for all.
On the one hand the charismata serve to build up the eschatological community. Here Paul talks about kerygmatic powers, gifts of utterance, to which category apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and comforters or admonishers belong. But inspirations and ecstasies belong to the same category. He also mentions diaconic powers, gifts of service, which move deacons, both men and women, almsgivers and the people who care for the sick. Miraculous healings and the expulsion of demons are included here too. Finally, when he is talking about the leaders of assemblies, the elders and overseers (episkopoi) he mentions cybernetic powers, gifts of rule. But the apostolic experiences of suffering are charismatic as well. It is not merely action that has a charismatic efficacy but suffering too.
The charismata are by no means to be seen merely in the ‘special ministries’ of the gathered community. Every member of the messianic community is a charismatic, not only in the community’s solemn assemblies but every day, when members are scattered and isolated in the world. That is why in 1 Cor. 7:7 Paul also uses charisma for the historical place where a person is called, with his potentialities and powers. The call to the fellowship of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit makes a charisma out of bondage and freedom, marriage and celibacy, manhood and womanhood, Jewish and Gentile existence. For the call puts the person’s particular situation at the service of the new creation. The Spirit makes the whole biological, cultural and religious life history of a person charismatically alive: ‘Let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him’—‘every one in the state in which he was called’ (1 Cor. 7:17, 20, 24). This expansion of the doctrine of the charismata is not merely of interest where it affects the slaves and the free; it is even more so where it touches on the circumcised and the uncircumcised. Everyone is to bring into the church and the process of new creation everything he has, whatever he brings with him and whatever he can do. The foundation and goal of the charismatic enlivening make it clear that this does not mean any justification of existing circumstances and conflicts: ‘You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men’ (1 Cor. 7:23). This is particularly important for the people who are called as slaves. All are to ‘deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it’—that is, use it as though they did not need it—and should not misuse it, ‘for the form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7:31). Our dealings with the particular social, biological, cultural and religious conditions into which we are called are therefore to be free, determined by the eschatological freedom which overcomes this world and makes the new creation obedient. In principle every human potentiality and capacity can become charismatic through a person’s call, if only they are used in Christ. It is not the facticity that decides what a charisma is; it is the modality. And this modality is stamped by the congregation’s organization and by new obedience in the lordship of Christ. It is not the gift itself that is important, but its use.
Paul expresses the universal trend of the eschatological outpouring of the divine Spirit on all flesh when his account of the charismata within the congregation in 1 Cor. 12 flows over into his description of the ‘more excellent way of love’ in 1 Cor. 13, and when he passes from the list of the congregation’s functions in Rom. 12:9ff. to the ‘catalogue of virtues’ for Christians living in the world. The admonitions expressed in his maxims reveal his idea of the new creation in its charismatic life. Everywhere Christians stand face to face with the coming Lord of the world—not merely in their assemblies but in their dispersion as well. This outlook determines not only the life and powers of the apostles, pastors, deacons and congregational leaders, but the ministries performed by Christians in everyday life also.
God gives life to the dead and, through the invasion of grace, sets up his kingdom where before demons and demonic energies held sway; thus, the various lists of charismatic gifts are enumerated as counterblasts to the catalogue of vices.
It follows that
Charisma is no longer the distinguishing mark of elect individuals but that which is the common endowment of all who call upon the name of the Lord, or … a demonstration of the fact that the Spirit of God has been poured out on all flesh.
The unity of all the charismata is fore-given in Christ. What they have in common lies in the one Spirit, the one calling, the one baptism. Their criterion is the lordship of the crucified Jesus. Their measure is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. All the members of the messianic community have the gift of the Spirit and are therefore ‘office-bearers’. There is no division between office bearers and the people. There is no division between the Spirit of the ministry and the free Spirit. There is no essential difference, either, between the different charismatics and the tasks appointed them. The widow who exercises mercy is acting just as charismatically as a ‘bishop’. But there are functional differences, for there is no equality in the sense of uniformity. The powers of the Spirit in the new creation are just as protean as the creation itself. If this were not the case, its charismatic enlivening would be impossible. Consequently freedom, diversity and brotherliness prevail in the community. It is our ‘legal’ equality before God which opens up the varied riches of his pleasure. So we might formulate the principle: to each his own; all for each other; testifying together to the world the saving life of Christ.
If we try to formulate a provisional result, the essential thing is to hear in Paul’s doctrine of the charismata the proclamation which has its foundation in Christ and is still relevant today.
1. Paul’s outline of a charismatic common order is not the only one in the New Testament. Another picture is traced by Luke and in the Pastoral Epistles. There does not seem to be much point in weighing up these concepts against one another or in linking them with the history of the tradition. As a doctrine of the charismata, Paul’s outline is not a law; it is a crystallization of the gospel. We shall therefore have to enquire about correspondences in our own situation if we are looking for the form of the eschatological community of the saved which follows the messianic gospel. But this is the presupposition. The number of ministries in the congregation and their particular character is not left to the personal choice of the congregation itself. Nor can it be extracted as a rule or regulation from the tradition of earlier congregations. It is founded and forged by Christ through the present gathering and sending forth of the messianic community.
2. Paul’s outline is founded on his acknowledgment of the lordship of Christ, is evolved out of his experience of the powers of the Spirit, and is developed in the perspective of the eschatological history of God’s dealings. Wherever the church loses this justification, this experience and this perspective, the diversity of the charismata and the unity of the charismatic community is lost. Then hierarchies and monarchical episcopates grow up on the one hand, and merely passive church members, incapable of independent decision and action, on the other. This is when apathy develops and outbreaks of ‘enthusiasm’ take place. Then the common hope for the kingdom, and common service in preparing its way in the world, give way to institutions designed for the pastoral care of the whole community. The Christian church will be open for the diversity of the Spirit’s gifts (and will have the corresponding experiences) to the degree in which it wins back its original eschatological orientation towards the new creation. The struggles for power in the church—which are, after all, very provisional and secondary—will subside in the degree to which the church is concerned solely about the lordship of the crucified Jesus and his future. These two elements of the Pauline doctrine of the charismata are not historically conditioned. They remain the foundations of the gospel that calls and gathers its people.
3. The Pauline doctrine of the charismata has been called enthusiastic. It is true that an enthusiasm of the Spirit and the assurance of the Spirit’s gifts is implicit in it. But formally Paul was against enthusiasm. The Spirit of the last days is the Spirit of Christ, and Christ is the Christ who was crucified. The assurance of the Spirit does not lead to a dream of worlds beyond this world; it leads ever more deeply into Christ’s sufferings and into earthly discipleship. The crucified Jesus is the measure of the fervency of the charismata. If we want to follow Paul today, we must not make a dogma out of his criticism of the enthusiasts in Corinth in the name of the crucified Jesus; we must be alive to its premises. There are a great many churches and congregations today which are anything but threatened by enthusiasm. On the contrary, they suffer from a quenching of the Spirit. There are churches which by no means suffer from an over-fervent diversity of callings and ministries—too many to co-ordinate—but which, on the contrary, suffer from the usurpation of all offices and tasks by a hierarchy of ‘spiritual office-bearers’ or an aristocracy of pastors. No one will be desirous of surrendering the source of the outpouring of the Spirit in the risen Christ, that is to say the binding of every power to Christ himself. But—in line with Paul’s gospel, even if moving in the reverse direction—ought we not to do away with the quenching of the Spirit in communities of this kind, and discover the free abundance of the Spirit’s gifts? It would be showing lack of faith if we wanted to acquiesce in the romantic historical picture, according which the abundance of the Spirit’s gifts was only present in the first flowering of the apostolic spring, becoming more and more reduced and stunted in the channels of historical evolution. It would be no less romantic if we wanted to wait for ‘a second Pentecost’—as people have done again and again in the church’s history. In the dawn of the messianic era there are no longer any periods devoid of the Spirit. But the Spirit can be ‘grieved’ and ‘quenched’; his powers can be ‘hindered’ and dispersed. This is not what Paul meant.
From what we have said up to now it is clear that in determining the particular callings in a community we have to proceed from the calling of the community as a whole. The various ministries in the church have the church’s single and common ministry as their presupposition and basis. The various forms of service presuppose the general service of the kingdom of God, to which every believer belongs. The various assignments in the community, which can be distinguished from one another, are related to the common charge through Christ, the charge which reaches everyone. The traditional word ‘ministry’ has in some traditions an undertone of hierarchy and bureaucracy and has become open to misunderstanding. The more modern expression, ‘service’, is supposed to exclude claims to rule, though it can of course conceal these. Here, in order to put the actual function above status and person, we have chosen to describe what is meant by both expressions by the terms ‘charge’, ‘commission’ or ‘assignment’. An assignment is always aimed as something particular; it is always specific. It depends on the person who gives the assignment, or it is verified through its carrying out. Before we can talk about the individual, special and distinguishable ‘assignments’ or ‘charges’ in the community and for the community, it is important to remember the one general charge to the community as a whole and every one of its members.
(i) The charge to the community lies in the calling of believers through Christ to the kingdom of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. This charge is made visible through the sign of baptism. The community of the baptized is the community of those who have been called. There are no differences here. All are called and commissioned for eternal life, the glory of the kingdom and messianic fellowship, charged to live in the messianic presence of this eschatological future and to bear witness to it. That becomes especially clear when we enquire into priesthood in the New Testament. When the New Testament uses the word ‘priest’ it does not mean any special priestly class. According to the Epistle to the Hebrews (which uses priestly terminology) Jesus himself is the one, unique ‘high priest’; through his vicarious surrender of himself on the cross and his continual intercession with the Father he has fulfilled the special priesthood of the old covenant, and has thus abolished and ended it on earth. In his fellowship the separation between priest and people is overcome and discarded. His giving of himself for the reconciliation of the world is the ‘offering’ which is valid once and for all (Heb. 10:10–14). This brings the daily and annual sacrificial cult to an end. He is the messianic mediator (Heb. 8:6) and the single guarantor of the new covenant (Heb. 9:15). No further mediator and guarantor is necessary. Consequently the people of the new covenant no longer remain on profane ground outside the sanctuary. In the fellowship of Christ they have become ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’, so that they ‘may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (1 Peter 2:9ff.). That is to say, the whole people, being imbued with the Spirit, has become ‘spiritual’ and called to the prophetic proclamation of the coming kingdom. It is only in its undivided entirety that it will become the revelation of the Spirit of the last days which descends ‘on all flesh’.
It is the prophetic people which through its life and the style of that life bears witness before the world to God’s promise and its future. Moreover, the whole people lives from the self-giving of Christ and freely gives itself to the will of God. It is therefore only in its undivided entirety that it testifies to the one reconciliation of the world with God. It is the priestly people, which intercedes for others and bears witness before the world to the liberating representation of Christ. The whole people has been finally freed for new life through the lordship of Christ. It is only as an undivided entirety that it can make the entire and total character of the life of the new creation manifest. Because they serve the liberation of the whole in common, and each in his own way, they are the kingly people and participate in the divine rule (Rev. 1:5; 5:10; 20:6). Through fellowship with Christ the whole people becomes the subject of the history of freedom, which takes its stamp from the history of God. Consequently this messianic people is no longer ‘subject’ to special prophets, priests and kings. It has ‘found itself’ and its destiny through the workings of the risen Christ. So it cannot be a dumb and passive crowd. Every individual and all individuals together live from the Spirit in which they experience their identity, finding their place and their charge in the history of God’s kingdom. The ‘service of the kingdom of God’ (ministerium regni dei) gives them all ‘equal rights’ and points them towards their common goal in solidarity. Factually, the presence of Christ in his church precedes his presence in particular assignments. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the one common ground for the experience of his diverse powers. This can be called the ‘general’ or ‘universal’ ‘priesthood of all believers’. This expression is justified if we consider the one priesthood of Christ, which relates to everyone; but it has only limited value if it is merely used to mean the polemical spearhead of Reformation theology, directed against a special priesthood. We should then have to speak with equal emphasis about the general prophetic office and general kingship of all believers. But really it is only the particular offices which ecclesiastical tradition once cut off from the people which are given back to it again through this expression. The phrase does not yet explain the difficult relationship between the common commissioning of all believers and special assignments within the community.
(ii) The various distinguishable assignments within the community only come into being by virtue of the common commissioning of the community itself. As Christ’s messianic community, it passes on these assignments in Christ’s name. But we must note here that its assignments are not assignments made by an existing fellowship but are given by Christ. They are not a matter of the community’s choice and cannot be produced out of the fellowship either. They have nothing to do with any ‘imperative mandate’ belonging to the fellowship, but solely with the conscience which has been liberated by Christ and is therefore bound to him. The special assignments in the church are within and under Christ’s liberty and authority, and are therefore not simply an expression of the ideas of the existing fellowship. They lie within the power of the Holy Spirit and cannot therefore be the uncritical expression of the forces of any particular community spirit. They serve the kingdom of God and not the interests of the existing church and the different human interests contained in it. We cannot say that Christ’s assignments are ‘a sacred rule’ imposed upon the community; but neither can we say either that they spring from the fellowship in any given case. In order properly to understand the relationship of these assignments to the community and of the community to the assignments, we can take our bearings from the simple, visible procedure: the community gathers to hear the proclamation, or for a baptism, for the common meal, for the feast and to talk together. Then one person or more gets up in front of the congregation in order to preach the Gospel, to baptize, to prepare the meal, to arrange the feast, and to make his contribution to the discussion. These people come from the community but come forward in front of it and act in Christ’s name. It is not they as ‘office bearers’ who ‘confront’ the congregation; it is Christ. What they do and say is in the name of the triune God.
How, then, are we to understand the position of these people, with their particular charges or assignments? They come from God’s people, stand up in front of God’s people and act in God’s name. Their commission does not separate them from the people and does not set them above the people either, for it is exercised in fellowship with and by commission of the whole people and in the name of that people’s commissioning. But the thing for which the people are commissioned does not come from them themselves; it comes from their God, in whose name they speak and act. After all, the commissioned and commissioning community does not want to listen to itself and project its own image of itself; it wants to hear Christ’s voice, celebrate his fellowship, and have the assurance of his commission. As the messianic congregation the people of God cannot recognize the sovereignty of a priestly caste or special ministerial class. If it did it would be giving up its own freedom, which Christ has brought about. But as Christ’s church the people cannot ascribe any ‘popular sovereignty’ to itself either; to do so would be to surrender the sovereign rights of its liberator. The common experience of Christ’s sovereignty in his church therefore presents itself in such a way that the people for the special assignments come from the community, but not the content of these assignments themselves—and neither do the rules and directives according to which they are to be carried out. The charismata are the powers of the Spirit from whom they proceed, and the assignments or commissions are determined by the kingdom which they are intended to serve. They are functions of the messianic rule of Christ.
Any member of the community who stands up in front of it is therefore commissioned by it to act in Christ’s name. This means that the community keeps the right to recall him, and to commission someone else. But it has not the right to stop assigning the commisions themselves—to put an end to the preaching of the gospel or to charitable work; to stop baptizing or holding the Lord’s supper; or no longer to meet together. If it did this it would be abandoning its own existence. Nor has it any right to insist that the people who minister to it and to society in Christ’s name act in a way which is in its own interests but is not legitimated by faith and is in contradiction to the Gospel. The member of the community who is called by it is, as one commissioned by Christ, answerable to Christ and to all the people who appeal to him in Christ’s name about the kingdom which he is supposed to serve. But the preacher commissioned by the community is not the ‘spokesman’ of the fellowship. The leader whom the community has commissioned to lead its assemblies is not a ‘chairman’ to express its prevailing opinions. The deacon appointed by the community is not a servant of its dominant interests. If the community understands itself as Christ’s community in the full sense of the word, then there is no difference between the particular assignments and the rank and file, because both stand in the service of the kingdom. But in practice it is advisable to note the inner differentiation between the fellowship, the whole people and the individuals commissioned, as those commissioned by Christ. The interlocking between the commissioned community and the different commissions within the community, which is evident in the visible procedure (out of the community—in front of the community—for the kingdom of God—in Christ’s name) is appropriate to the people as the people of God and to the community as Christ’s messianic community; for it sets the freedom of the people and the freedom of those with particular commissions in the common freedom of Christ.
(iii) The commissioning of the community as a whole and the various distinguishable assignments in the community have a genetic connection with one another. Here there is no temporal priority, and no priority of value. For there is no community without special assignments and no special assignments apart from a community. Community and particular assignments grow up simultaneously, together, and are therefore dependent on one another. Assignments can only be given and carried out in the fellowship of God’s people. It is only at Christ’s charge that the people of God is gathered together. Anyone who fails to recognize this genetic connection destroys the charismatic congregation. For a long time people in the church thought in a quite one-sided way from Christ to the office, and from the office to the Christian fellowship. That led to the separation of the ministry from the people and reduced the people of God to the status of the church’s lay rank and file—people deprived of the right to responsible decision. The monarchical justification of the ministry, which has been usual in the mainstream church since Ignatius of Antioch was: one God, one Christ, one bishop, one church. This may have had pragmatical reasons in its favour in its own time, but theologically it is wrong, and ecclesiologically it led to a false development. This unified hierarchy reflects a clerical monotheism which corresponded to contemporary ‘political monotheism’, but which is in contradiction to the trinitarian understanding of God and his people. The development of the monarchical episcopate led to a quenching of the Spirit and was an impediment to the charismatic church. It is no wonder that at the same time as this hierarchical official church developed, Christian spiritualism grew up parallel to it. It spread, and is spreading still, in the church’s ‘underground’ of sects, movements and brotherhoods. The growth of the monarchical episcopate broke up the genetic relationship between the commissioned church and its special commissions in a way that was totally one-sided. The aristocratic justification of the ministry of a ‘vénérable compagnie des pasteurs’—a group that reproduces itself through co-optation and only recognizes brotherhood on the level of ‘brothers in office’—can hardly be judged as progress, qualitatively speaking. A democratic justification of the ministry is undoubtedly conceivable and would certainly be in accord with people in general, but hardly to the people of God. It would presuppose a kind of pantheism of the Spirit which gives everyone ‘the same’ but not ‘what is his own’. It is only the trinitarian understanding of the commissioned community and the commissions in the community which is in a position to express the dignity, both of the people as a whole, and of its special ministries—and also the genetic connection of the two. Socialization and individuation are two sides of one and the same operation in the history of the Spirit. The Spirit leads men and women into the fellowship of the messianic people, at the same time giving everyone his own place and his particular charge. In messianic history everyone finds his new identity in Christ and the place to which he personally belongs. By socializing, the Spirit individualizes; and by individualizing, he socializes. Here we live both with and for one another. The particular commission strengthens the common commissioning and the common commissioning presents itself in the special commissions, and in no other way. The general ‘priesthood of all believers’ cannot be set up over against the particular commissions, and the particular ‘ministries’ cannot be set up over against the priesthood of all believers, if we take account of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, which is ‘with all’.
(iv) Because the different assignments are functions of the messianic liberation of the world, the form they take is historically variable. Their number and form can be fixed neither through the myth of a transfigured past, nor through the ideal of an Utopian future. Nor can any law laying claim to completeness be set up; for the assignments to be fulfilled by a community are dependent on the powers of the Spirit which are livingly present in it, and are determined in accordance with the tasks with which it is confronted. But because the community is itself the messianic people commissioned by Christ, there are essentials without which it cannot properly be what it is designed to be. Churches which put the celebration of the Eucharist at the centre of their life consider serving at the altar (and hence the priestly ministry) to be essential. Churches which put the preaching of God’s word at the centre of their assemblies and their mission consider the preaching ministry essential. There are other Christian fellowships which hold common prayer, or the healing of the sick, or charitable work to be essential; and they gather together round activities of this kind. Wherever a community may find its powers and its tasks to lie, the important thing is always that the charges or commissions that are held to be essential and central should be carried by the whole community; because they are part of the commission of the community itself. It would be perverse for the community to make a virtue of necessity, and deduce all other commissions from the one commission which it holds to be essential; or to lay on the holder of the assignment it considers essential all the other assignments as well. The community would then no longer be considering itself charismatically gifted and alive but would be delegating its own commission to the single holder of the central office. It is therefore not advisable to proceed from the one priestly ministry over against the congregation, and then go on to split this up into a differentiated ordo. Nor is it helpful to proceed from a preaching ministry over against the community, in order to divide this into a series of distinguishable pastoral activities, for which ‘workers’ from the community have to be sought. Again, it does not take us any further if we give priorities and values to the divisions of the ministry and pastoral activities according to their closeness to the centre, whether this centre be the Eucharist or the proclamation. If, on the other hand, we proceed in the reverse direction, from the commissioning of the whole community and the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit, who lays hold on everyone, we then have to ask what special charges assigned by the community and directed towards it are necessary and of essential importance. Here we must name the following, but without order of precedence or value: (i) The charge to proclaim the gospel; (ii) the charge to baptize and celebrate the Lord’s supper; (iii) the charge to lead the community’s assemblies; (iv) the charge to carry out charitable work. What are essential for the community are: kerygma, koinonia and diakonia. For these the congregation needs preachers, presbyters and deacons. The task of proclamation can be distributed between preacher, teacher, pastor, sick-visitor and missionary. The task of leadership in the community can be distributed between elders and other leading members. The charge to carry out charitable work in the congregation and in society can be defined according to the situation. But the church cannot do justice to the mission for which Christ sends it forth without the proclamation of the gospel, without baptism and the Lord’s supper, without gathering together and without charitable work.
In defining these charges the freedom and fullness of the Spirit must be taken into account, as well as the particular situation. The charges we have named can be assumed for a certain time or for life. The difference is not an essential one, for as charges given by God they always claim the whole of existence and total commitment. Even ordination, which takes place once and for all and determines the whole of life, makes no difference here, for the ‘call’ event of baptism is already once and for all and determines the whole of life. Ordination, with its conferring of a particular charge, cannot enter into competition with baptism and cannot outdo it. The person who is commissioned therefore still has liberty to say: ‘If I can no longer preach or no longer want to, then I will join the common group again, will be like the rest of you, and will let someone else preach.’ Where the exercise of a commission comes to an end, the person’s commissioning ends as well, and the difference in the charismata lapses. But the commission itself does not end. It is a gift of the gospel to the whole church and must not therefore be made a law. According to the powers and possibilities available, the charges we have named can be full-time or part-time. They can be carried out by men and women, by the married and the unmarried, by the theologically trained and people without any theological training. They can be exercised by individuals and groups. None of these circumstances and aptitudes amount to a law. The community must continually ask itself how its messianic commission can be fulfilled in its particular situation and with its particular powers. Traditional prejudices must not be allowed to quench the Spirit and hinder the charismatic powers from their service for the kingdom. The specific shaping of the different charges in the community, and in face of it, must take their function into account and must therefore be flexible; but they must always be grounded on the mission of the whole congregation and directed towards the kingdom of God. It is high time for churches where there is a traditional monopoly of the ministry to open themselves to the diversity of the different charges. The traditional fear of a chaos of spiritual gifts is, in the face of their present poverty, without foundation.
(v) The unity of the charismatic community turns on the fellowship of the commissioned community and the specially commissioned individuals. It is first of all the question of the fellowship of ‘all in one place’. The starting assumption is that every person called, whether he be an ordinary member or one with a special commission, has the same dignity and the same rights. But though everyone has his own commission, not everyone has the same one; and consequently it is not the people but the commissions that stand in the forefront. As a result, in the fellowship weight and votes (though not rank and dignity) must be so apportioned that the common cause will be promoted. The general commissioning of the whole congregation will go on to concede a special position and responsibility to the people with special charges, because otherwise the charges cannot be fulfilled. Where the charismata are concerned, the brotherliness of the messianic community does not find expression through uniformity, but through diversity. The one fellowship of the Holy Spirit is expressed in the fellowship of those who are commissioned, which is a fellowship of brothers and colleagues. The demand for a special office and the demand for a ‘democratization’ of the church must continually have in view the foundation on which the church is gathered and the goal of its mission. Democracy and hierarchy, simply as patterns, do not in themselves bring this to expression. If the charismatic community does not present itself in any other way than in and through its special commissions, then it forms this fellowship as it renders these services. It will neither wish to dissolve it completely in what is common to everyone, nor be able to see itself merely in the people who have special charges. If we take our bearings again from the visible activities of the assembled community, then the mutual relationship of this with these commissioned by it will be clear. The people who have been commissioned for special tasks co-operate with the community and with one another. The two areas of co-operation belong together and ought not to be separated. In the parochial church council, elders’ meeting, deacons’ meeting, or whatever it may be called, the people who are specially commissioned ought to form a fellowship of service. Mere dignitaries have no place here. But everyone who exercises a public function in the congregation, before it and on its behalf—the church sister or deaconess as well as the deacon or the youth leader, the teacher or the sick visitor—ought to participate in these practical discussions. This fellowship of special services ought to be led in a ‘brotherly’ or collegial fashion by a president. He should be chosen for his aptitude, but his task is to stand in the service of Christ’s church. The isolation and separation of the fellowship of service from the whole community and its commission can only be overcome if the community meets publicly with equal regularity and keenness. The differentiation can only be one of function, not one of rank. It is of vital importance both for the special services themselves and for the community that the people with special charges and their fellowship of service should have a ‘feed back’ to the people and the whole community. The presbyteral leadership of the congregation cannot be without its synodal fellowship. Here colleagues on different levels cannot be kept separate. Without a permanent relationship to the rank and file the particular commissions and services lose their power. The priest or ‘minister of the word’ can take over the leadership both of the practical discussions and of the congregational meetings, if his commission is assigned particular importance. But the charisma of leadership and responsibility for the fellowship can be found in someone else as well. It can also be carried out by a ‘council of brethren’. The only important thing is that the community should be united and that the leadership of its assemblies should which is directed towards that unity. It is only because the community gathers together for the proclamation of the gospel and for the fellowship of hearing the Word, here finding its unity in Christ, that the commissioned preacher can be charged with further services which will contribute to its unity. And it is in so far as the community celebrates its fellowship with Christ in the Lord’s supper that those commissioned for the table of the Lord can be charged with further services directed towards its unity. The association of the ministry of leadership with the ministries of word and sacrament makes it absolutely clear that the point of the ministries of leadership lies in the unity of the congregation. But this is not a law. The charisma of leadership and the keeping the community together can be carried out by other people as well; and in many congregations is in fact often enough carried out by non-ordained members of the congregation, even though a leading priestly or pastoral office is exercised.
The unity of individual local or ‘gathered’ congregations with other congregations in the neighbourhood and further afield is also part of the unity of the congregation meeting in a particular place. The church of Christ exists in one particular place and also in many places. It must therefore present its unity supra-regionally. Every individual congregation needs here the fellowship and concord with the church as a whole, which ultimately means concord in proclamation, sacraments and brotherhood with the church universal. This can be portrayed through a representative office of unity, whether it is linked with the name of Peter or not. It can also be represented by a presbyteral-synodal structure built up from below, that is, in conciliar form. If the unity of the church is presented through a representative office, this office is judged as it serves the whole of Christianity and functions for the unity of the whole church. To put it in another way: anyone who speaks on behalf of the whole of Christendom is exercising this commission. Here too the road goes from charisma to recognition and commissioning, not the other way round. If the unity of the church is presented through councils, what they say too will have to prove itself against its function for the church’s unity. But when an individual community already exists in its assemblies gathered round the word and the sacraments, when those it has commissioned present its fellowship with one another and with the community in assemblies, the conciliar way of representing the church universal would seem obvious; for concilium comes from con-calare. Just as the latter means ‘calling out’ and ‘calling together’, so concilium means ‘assembly’. The assembling and coming together on the basis of the jointly heard call of God is the church’s fundamental act. It is the assembled people of God. Consequently it will present its unity through assemblies in local, regional and universal spheres. To serve the unity of Christ’s church is, therefore, to serve its assemblies. The service extends as widely as the assemblies themselves do. They are universal and ecumenical, in accordance with the mission of Christ and the tendency of the Spirit’s operations. As a result the community needs these wider ecumenical and conciliar ministries, will discover the charismata for them, and will bestow the appropriate commissions.
(vi) The unity of the charismatic church however, does not only cover everyone in all the various places at a particular period. It also embraces people in different periods of history. The account of the assembled church in space must therefore also be coupled with the temporal portrayal of its unity throughout history. Its fellowship in time with those who have gone before and those who are to come is traditionally expressed in the idea of the apostolic succession and is preserved through the practice of the laying on of hands. This term is often too narrowly defined. What is meant, in the first place, is that the apostles, as the eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, have a unique and fundamental importance for the church at all times and in all places. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. But the call of the first witnesses of the risen Christ and those who were sent out by him first of all is also unrepeatable. To describe what happened quite simply: they saw and believed. But they proclaimed because they believed. The people whom their message reached heard the gospel and believed. The Easter appearances and the visions that called the disciples do not spread beyond themselves and are not communicable. But the gospel is spread and faith in the Word continually repeats itself and is transmitted. The apostles’ role as eyewitnesses is not transferable, but their service for the gospel is passed on to the whole church and every believer. We must therefore distinguish the beginning of the church in those who were called first of all from the permanent missionary charge of the church and every Christian. The apostolic succession can consequently only relate to the apostles’ charge to proclaim; it cannot refer to the Easter appearance through which they were called. The power and the command of apostolic succession belongs ‘to the church as a whole and with it to every individual member for the ministry in which he is placed through the gift of the Spirit’. The expression ‘succession’ is intended to preserve the continuing proclamation and the continuing ministries of the church in faithfulness to the apostolic proclamation and the apostolic ministry; so that the message remains Christ’s message, without falsification, and the ministries are directed towards the kingdom of God, without deviation. Faithfulness to the beginning, however, is nothing other than faithfulness to the origin, for it is only as the church of Christ that the church is an apostolic church. As faithfulness to the beginning and origin, the apostolic succession also means faithfulness to the promise and mission. The church does not already become apostolic simply through remembrance of the first apostles and faithfulness to their message; it only becomes so when it fulfils its own missionary charge. It is only in fulfilling the mission itself that the church can be called apostolic. For the apostolic church is the church of the apostolate of the coming kingdom. In this sense it would be better to talk about the church’s apostolic procession ‘to the end of time’. The apostolic succession is not only a category of the church’s legitimation; it is a category of its commission. It does not only point backwards, but forwards as well.
Apostolic succession and procession are the terms used to convey the unique nature of the messianic community as a whole. They therefore affect the unique character of the different charges or commissions in and before the congregation. According to the view we have developed up to now, the apostolic succession of the whole church and the apostolic succession of particular offices cannot be alternatives. But it is true that the reduction of the apostolic succession to only one office appears to be a narrowing down both of the succession of the people, and of its various other ministries. The sequence of the episcopal laying on of hands cannot be the sole condition for the recognition of a church’s apostolic succession. It may be understood as a visible sign of the fellowship of the church in time; but the succession of church baptism, the fellowship of the Lord’s supper and the unbroken proclamation of Christ—‘the same yesterday today and for ever’—are signs too, in at least equal measure. The fellowship of the church in time and through time is before all else an article of faith. The church is preserved in its identity and continuity by Christ’s faithfulness to his promises and through the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is given the assurance that ‘the gates of hell’ will not prevail against it and that it ‘will endure to the end’ through Christ’s self-giving and his continual intercession with the Father (Luke 22:31f.). This perseverance both of God’s faithfulness and of our faith can be realized through signs in the historical fellowship of the church; but whatever its historical continuity may be, it is not the historical continuity that secures the continuity of God’s faithfulness. Even a succession of bishops is no guarantee of the permanent identity of faith, nor of faithfulness to the apostolic gospel. Historically demonstrable continuity is a gift of grace. In face of the wreckage and revolutions of history we should gratefully acknowledge it. The believed and acknowledged continuity of God’s faithfulness is itself the grace from which the messianic community lives and for which it hopes. It is only the basis of its faith in its own preservation through God’s faithfulness that gives the church the ability and the will to strive for historical faithfulness. And here its relationship to its ‘fathers and mothers’ will simply be the same, basically speaking, as its relationship to its ‘sisters and brothers’. It is a free relationship of recognition and criticism in the fellowship of faith. Throughout the whole of time, the church is a charismatic fellowship in which everyone experiences what is ‘his own’ and all are there ‘together’ for the coming kingdom. Traditions, successions and historical continuity are to be seen in this wider context as foretastes, portions bestowed as advance gifts. But they must not narrow down and petrify the all-surrounding framework of the history of the one Spirit, or be used in an exclusive way.
The special stress on ordination and a sacred ministry—to the point of raising it to the rank of sacrament—apparently always crops up when the church goes over to the practice of infant baptism. The baptism of those who are not of age is always in danger of making the community spiritual babes too, for no special value in the sense of a call can be ascribed to infant baptism as such. Just as confirmation must supplement it, so too must ordination (if applicable), as the visible act of the call to a special ministry. But actually confirmation and ordination can only display and emphasize in visible terms what is already implicit in baptism both as a confession of faith and a call. In a congregation of baptized believers, baptism and confirmation coincide, and ordination approaches baptism directly, as the conferring of a special charge. It does not confer any higher dignity than baptism and merely gives specific form to the person’s special call.
When the congregation gathers at the table, understands its own charge and confers special charges on its members, fellowship comes into being. How are we to interpret this new fellowship of believers with one another and for other people? Does it merely grow up by the way, beneath the word and at the sacraments, through the particular ministries? Or are word, sacraments and the special ministries directed towards the life of the new fellowship?
The Apostles’ Creed talks about the ‘communion of saints’ immediately after it has mentioned the church. The communio sanctorum was interpreted in a twofold sense: it can mean, concretely, communion or fellowship in the sacred things, the sacraments. It can also mean, in personal terms, the fellowship of sanctified people, the called and the justified. Whereas in the middle ages the phrase formulated in the neuter meant participation partly in the sacraments and partly in the merits of the saints, Luther understood it in personal terms. The congregatio sanctorum is the ‘assembly’, the ‘congregation’, ‘Christian people’, who live in mutual concern for one another and mutual self-giving. Article VII of the Augsburg Confession therefore translates the expression congregatio sanctorum as ‘the assembly of all believers’; but it defines this assembly solely through the event of the pure preaching of the gospel and the right use of the sacraments. The assembly of believers and the event of the word and the sacraments constitute and interpret one another mutually. The Confession goes on to state that it is enough for the true unity of the church if it agrees in the proclamation of the gospel and the use of the sacraments. It is not necessary for there to be identical ceremonies everywhere, since these are introduced by men. In the context of the conflict between the Reformed churches and the Roman Catholic churches at that time, this must be understood as an offer of unity. But for the closer definition of the fellowship of believers the statement is not sufficient. Word and sacrament certainly constitute the communion or fellowship; but this fellowship itself must be stressed in mutual concern and self-devotion. The terms ‘communion of saints’ and assembly of believers are not enough to express the fellowship of Christians with one another in the spirit of love.
That is why the third article of the Barmen Theological Declaration, while repeating the content of article VII of the Augsburg Confession, said, in place of congregatio sanctorum: ‘The Christian church is the community of brethren’. A ‘community of brethren’ lives in the spirit of brotherliness, showing its fellowship with God’s Son, ‘the first-born among many brethren’ (Rom. 8:29), through a brotherly common life. This goes further than an assembly of believers for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel and partaking in the sacraments (although that is its source) and embraces the whole of life, our dealings with one another, our representation for others and our common actions. The ‘community of brethren’ means the new, visible way of life. In the New Testament this is often contrasted with social conditions in the surrounding world. In the community of brethren there is no more lordship or slavery: ‘It shall not be so among you’ (Matt. 20:26). In the community of brethren the greed for possessions and the claim to personal property come to an end: ‘And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, [they attended] the temple together and [broke] bread in their homes’ (Acts 2:44–46). In the community of brethren social, cultural, racial and sexual privileges lose their validity: ‘You are all one in Christ Jesus … heirs according to promise’ (Gal. 3:28f.). The community of brethren proclaims the kingdom of God through its way of life, which provides an alternative to the life of the world surrounding it.
The expression ‘brotherliness’ surmounts the language of rule and privilege, but it only extends to the male sex, although it is of course designed to reach further, and means the fellowship of all believers, both men and women, and the promised fellowship of all people on earth. For that reason the term friendship seems to be an apter expression for what is meant. Friendship is a free association. Friendship is a new relationship, which goes beyond the social roles of those involved. Friendship is an open relationship which spreads friendliness, because it combines affection with respect. The congregatio sanctorum, the community of brethren, is really the fellowship of friends who live in the friendship of Jesus and spread friendliness in the fellowship, by meeting the forsaken with affection and the despised with respect. Its brothers and sisters cannot choose each other. Brotherliness is not terminable. Brother remains brother, even in conflict. We become friends by our own free decision and we look for our friends ourselves. Humanly speaking, friendship can be terminated. But life in the friendship of Jesus is rooted in the free giving of his life ‘for his friends’. That is why even unfriendliness cannot destroy this friendship of Jesus. Those who belong to him remain in his friendship when they themselves become the friends of other people. The freedom out of which this friendship springs is therefore not a private and arbitrary affair; it is the liberation for new life itself, without which all the other freedoms cannot go on existing. The friendship to which this friendship leads is the ‘practical concept of freedom’ without which all other friendships become powerless. Compared with the concept of the friend, the concept ‘brother’ implies the inescapable destiny to brotherhood—even in conflicts. It makes brotherly love necessary. Compared with the concept of brother, the concept ‘friend’ stresses freedom. Rightly understood, the friend is the person who ‘loves in freedom’. That is why the concept of friendship is the best way of expressing the liberating relationship with God, and the fellowship of men and women in the spirit of freedom.
But how are fellowship and friendship realized in the church? What form have they taken and what form can they take? The church grew up out of Christ’s fellowship. Out of his fellowship it is born anew. The community of the brethren springs from the brotherhood of Christ, and from brotherliness it will acquire a new form. As friends they live from the friendship of Jesus. From the spirit of friendship they will form themselves anew. The church will not overcome its present crisis through reform of the administration of the sacraments, or from the reform of its ministries. It will overcome this crisis through the rebirth of practical fellowship. The reforms of evangelization and the administration of the sacraments, and the inescapable reform of the church’s ministries, will spring from the rebirth of fellowship and friendship among the rank and file. The one certainly cannot take place without the other, but the starting point lies in the congregation and its form as fellowship. Fellowship in word and sacrament, fellowship in the profession of faith, fellowship in the institution and the hierarchy, become lifeless and are petrified into formalities with which people can no longer identify themselves, if fellowship among the congregation’s rank and file is lost, and if friendship is not recovered from the ‘grass-roots’.
Early Christianity began as ‘the Nazarene heresy’ (Acts 24:5, 14; 28:22) and was viewed as a religious school or party belonging to Judaism, like the Pharisees, Sadducees or Essenes. It was only when Christianity went outside the frontiers of the Judaism of the synagogue that it acquired an independent form of its own. Christianity adopted the concept of the ecclesia, which originally meant the popular political assembly of full citizens. It saw itself neither as a Christian synagogue nor as one religious community among the many other cults of the ancient world. By calling itself ecclesia Christianity emerged as a tertium genus between the Jews and the Gentiles, and formed a community of its own. Christians emigrated in spirit and practice, both from the synagogue and from the popular, state and private religions, and formed something new: the church. By doing this they brought on themselves the reproach of sectarianism from the side of the synagogue, and the accusation of atheism from the Gentile side. But the early Jewish-Christian community, and the communities made up of both Jews and Gentiles that followed, soon became the genesis of purely Gentile Christian communities. Mission and the spread of Christianity among the Gentiles therefore quickly led to the fundamental decision which we might call the decision in favour of a church open to the world. Because, apart from border regions, the inhabited world ruled by the Roman empire presented itself as ‘the world’ per se, the transition under Constantine to the church of the Roman empire was not understood as being a dangerous innovation, although the results were serious enough. To such a church, the Roman empire stood open for mission and the spread of Christianity. But for this the church was compelled to take over the role of the public state religion, which was politically necessary for the integration of the different peoples in the Roman empire. The church became the religion of society and as such an integrated element in the social order. In Christianizing the Roman empire the church lost the particular and visible form of Christian society. The Christian community and the civil community coincided. Consequently the church was no longer organized in independent and voluntary fellowships; it was ordered according to regions and territories, sees and parishes, for the care and welfare of the people. The two things are closely connected. According to ancient social doctrine, the highest task of society is to show the gods of the polis the necessary reverence, since the country’s welfare and peace is dependent on their favour. If the Christian church becomes the religious institution of the whole of society, it takes over this function, becoming the cultus publicus and the guardian of society’s public rites. Its organization therefore adapts itself to the social organization. Church districts are ordered according to the residential areas in which people live. Its meetings are a part of public social life. The offices of clergy and bishops become authoritative in character. The faith of the people is then only practised through participation in the church’s public meetings and events. Church fellowship becomes not so much fellowship in the church as fellowship with the church. The sacraments of the messianic fellowship—baptism and the Lord’s supper—recede behind the clerical ministrations of infant baptism, confirmation, the marriage ceremony, and burial; or they are interpreted in the sense of being part of the pastoral care of the people.
This transition from the church open to the world to the imperial church still determines the church’s structure and organization today in what were for long ‘Christian’ countries. It is true that, in opposition to it, the Reformation discovered the congregational principle and was also prepared to drop the expression ‘church’ in favour of ‘congregation’. But the consolidation of the Reformation in Protestant state churches, and the religious wars that followed, led to a different principle: cuius regio, eius religio. Outwardly, this kept the warring confessions apart; but inwardly they became the political religions of their respective territories. The ruler, the state church and the state university determined the confessional allegeance of the unified state. The unity of the Christian community and the civil community remained. The long trail from the church which was a fellowship, open to the world, to the territorially and socially closed church, designed for the care of the whole people, still determines the present condition of Christianity in these countries. In the course of this development the special form of the church as a fellowship was lost, for there can be little talk about fellowship, brotherliness and friendship in this ‘church for the whole people’.
From the very beginning, Christianity, which was itself termed a Jewish heresy, was familiar with heresies in its own domain, as Paul’s letters show. There are frequent warnings about false prophets and teachers in the New Testament. But it was only with the establishment of the church of the empire that forcible measures were taken against heretics with the state’s help. In our present context, the heresies and sects which fought against the imperial church are particularly important. On its way to becoming the church of the empire, Christianity was forced to detach itself more and more from the conditions of its beginnings. That is why reforming sects grew up in the course of this development. These wanted the restoration of the congregation in its pure form and condemned the conformity to the world of the large-scale church in its self-assimilation to emperor and empire. On its way to becoming the church of the empire, Christianity surrendered the passion of its messianic hope. Hope was turned into the inner hope of the soul and its fulfilment was postponed to the next world. That is why the prophetic sects came into being in the course of this development. By virtue of their imminent expectation, these sects called people to resistance and denial of the world. And their criticism of ‘the world’ included the church in the world. Both types of sect cultivated an exceptional life of fellowship. Their members were conscious of themselves as being the elect, and would rather suffer persecution than exclusion from their fellowship.
The reforming sects glorified the golden age of the primitive church and protested against the takeover of the church by the state. In these groups a direct relationship to Jesus through the charismatic experience of the Spirit was lived in a consistent ethic of discipleship. The sermon on the mount, interpreted as ‘the law of Christ’, permitted no compromises with state morality. The objective authority of the priest was challenged on the basis of the inner authority of the Spirit, and the value of the objective means of grace on the basis of personal faith. These fellowships saw the church of the empire not as the bride of Christ, but as the whore of Antichrist. In the dispute between the reforming sects and the mainstream church, the point at issue was ‘the true church’, the true fellowship of Jesus. There has never been an imperial, national or established church without these simultaneous alternatives provided by reforming sects active under the surface.
The prophetic sects did not go back from the decadent forms of Christianity to its pristine beginnings, but claimed to anticipate Christianity’s consummation, beyond its beginnings and its history. The promise of the Spirit, who will finally accomplish the cause of Jesus, led to Christian spiritualism. From Montanus onwards, new prophets continually sprang up as the bearers of the Spirit promised by Christ. The promise of the kingdom of God, in which the church was to come to an end, led to Christian and post-Christian messianism. These sects see themselves as the forerunners of Christianity’s self-realization in the Spirit and hence as the self-dissolution of the church in the kingdom of God. Because Christianity, by virtue of its messianic hope, points beyond itself and the church, prophetic and messianic sects always come to the fore whenever the church surrenders its hope for the coming kingdom. The conflict between the imperial church and the prophetic sects is the conflict about the authentic form of the Christian hope. There has never been an established church without the simultaneous existence of sects under the surface who have formulated this alternative.
The conflict between the mainstream church and the sects was never purely theoretical. In the age before Constantine it broke out in the Christian persecutions. The conflict about the true church, Christian discipleship and faithfulness to the Christian hope was fought out in the different attitudes of the Christians who were persecuted by the state. The conflict also arose in the revolutions of the social structures to which the church had adapted itself. In the eleventh century, during the transition from feudalism to a middle-class society, lay reform movements sprang up in the towns of Lombardy and the south of France. The Cathars, Waldenses and Albigenses set up fellowship churches which, seeking to be consistent disciples of Jesus, rose against the alliance of pope and emperor. In the age of rising absolutism, the reforming and prophetic sects proliferated. With the flowering of bourgeois society from the beginning of the Enlightenment onwards, both types of sect became so common that they have become the hallmark of modern Christianity. Denominational situations, social revolutions and cultural changes are eroding the confidence of the ‘pastoral’ church; and the situation is apparently bringing those Christian fellowships which from the very beginning represented the alternative to mainstream Christianity out of obscurity and into the public eye.
The decision in favour of the universal church and the church of the empire has been a continual matter of dispute in Christianity. There has always been the one or the other alternative. In order to understand Christianity as a whole, therefore, it is useful to read church history and the history of the sects at the same time, and to see both forms of Christianity together. A Christianity that departs from its beginnings in order to adapt itself to the present-day state is bound to evoke the Christianity of reform. A Christianity that surrenders its messianic hope is bound to evoke the Christianity of prophecy. In the schism between the mainstream church and the sects, the church itself becomes sectarian, because it represses fundamental elements of the Christian truth. On the other hand, both the reforming and the prophetic sects, with their criticism of the church’s worldliness, always repress the elements of Christian mission and love which are open to the world. If we see it in this way, however, the conclusion to be drawn cannot lie in a sum of the different elements of truth, but only in the design of a form of Christ’s church as a fellowship which is authentic in the present. The dissolution of the one church of Christ in a multiplicity of sects is no answer to this question, for the major churches and the sects live from their mutual conflict and hinder the development of an authentic fellowship of Christ just because of it.
Early Christianity gathered together as a church under the apostolic proclamation of the gospel. The gospels, however, tell the story of the earthly Jesus, who called his followers to discipleship and a common life, and demanded of them that they break with all other social ties (Matt. 10:3ff.). The call to the new community of the risen Christ and the call to discipleship of the Christ who was crucified, the call to the new people of God and the call to the discipleship of Jesus are heard with equal distinctness in Christ’s proclamation and must be realized in one and the same mode of life. This became more difficult in the degree in which the congregations grew. That is why asceticism and the eremitical form of the Christian life grew up side by side with the decision for the church open to the world. Examples of a discipleship of Jesus demonstrated through renunciation of the world are to be found from the very beginning in the Christian communities. Christianity has always existed in both forms of life: as a world-wide church, and in the consistent discipleship of Jesus. Here the example of the disciples—‘We have left everything and followed you’ (Matt. 19:27)—worked as a critical leaven in the church as a whole. The early wandering ascetics (Didache 11:5ff.) saw themselves as Jesus’ disciples and became the vehicles of mission. In their homelessness they followed the fate of the Son of man. Their celibacy gave them freedom to devote themselves completely to the service of Christ. Taking the sermon on the mount as their rule, they sought absolute righteousness in undivided self-surrender to the mission for which Christ sent them forth.
The Christian hermits left the inhabited world, in accordance with the model of St Antony, in order to take up the fight with the demons, like Jesus ‘in the wilderness’, and to win access to the heavenly world. Their flight from the world was intended as part of this struggle. Pachomius inspired the first forms of the communal life in monasteries. Common worship, common property, common meals, common prayer and work regulated the life of these Christian communes. Although non-Christian ideas deriving from stoicism, gnosticism and Manichaeism were to be found in early Christian monasticism, the essential impulse none the less came from the picture of the fellowship of the disciples as it is depicted in the gospels. The monastic life in complete poverty, complete obedience, complete continence and unceasing worship realized fellowship with Christ more clearly than did mere participation in the public activities of the church by the bulk of its members. In the West the monasteries became the centre of church life and church order. Whereas the itinerant monks carried on the work of Christian mission, the monastic communities worked for the Christianization of the people through instruction, pastoral care and education. This was the great importance of the ‘stability of residence’ required of the monks by Benedict of Nursia in the unquiet times of the barbarian invasions. From the time of the Cluniac reform in the tenth century, the orders also worked for the liberation of the church from the domination of territorial rulers and the Christian emperor. The mediaeval struggle for the freedom of the church was primarily carried on by the monasteries. In this struggle the celibacy of the clergy took on political importance, because it made undivided obedience to church and pope possible. The ‘common life’ of the monasteries also had its effect on the laity. Religious lay brotherhoods grew up which took over the economic form of common property from the monasteries. Other lay brotherhoods devoted themselves to the care of the sick or the poor, burial and other social needs. In the towns ‘the brethren of the common life’ formed cells of Christian communes.
In the eleventh century the demands for evangelical poverty and consistent discipleship were raised by the Cathars and Waldenses to a norm for life in Christian communities; though they were forced to put their ideas into practice outside the structure of the mainstream church and in opposition to the political powers. The mendicant orders then picked up these ideas and put them into practice among the lay members of the church. The ideals of simple discipleship and a common life were introduced among the people as a whole in order to bring the laity into full membership of the church. Thus the call to follow Jesus and the call to full commitment to the common life through the religious orders and monasteries had their effect on the rest of the church too, continually stimulating new reforms of the form of the church as a fellowship. Whatever ideas about an élite group may have been bound up with this ‘more excellent way’ to Christian perfection (compared with the ways of simple believers), as far as the historical development goes, the hermits and coenobites, the wandering ascetics, the monastic communities and the lay brotherhoods must be seen as innovatory groups in the mainstream church. Without them the church open to the world would probably have been transformed without resistance into the religion of a society. But through this consistently lived discipleship, resistance in the name of the Christ crucified by the ruling powers, and hope for the world-transforming kingdom of God, remained alive in it.
The Reformation brought monasticism and the monastic life to a crisis which in Protestant countries led to its dissolution altogether. The reason for this was not the decay of monastic discipline but the Reformers’ doctrine of justification: every baptized Christian, every believer, is called to the status of a true Christian. Consequently there are not two different ways of Christian existence. Justifying faith puts an end to the difference in status between the laity and the monastic orders. Every Christian receives his calling from his call, alike in worldly affairs and in his tasks in the church. The call to discipleship, to the common life and to special ministries, which the religious orders claimed for themselves, therefore applies to the whole church. The principle of the single Christian community grew up in place of the two ways of Christian life, in the monastery and the world. The rejection of monasticism and the monastic life at the Reformation was not intended to lead to the secularization of Christianity. On the contrary, it saw itself as the sharpest attack on the world. Discipleship, asceticism and brotherhood were to be lived in the midst of the world, not separated from it. Yet the Reformation churches, apart from ‘the churches under the cross’ and refugee communities, have hardly been able to realize the principle of the voluntary congregation. The clear and concerted rejection of monasticism and the cloistered life did not correspond to an equally clear and concerted rejection of the territorial church designed for the care of the whole people. It did not succeed in surmounting the double form of Christian life, or in creating the community as a single, simple way of life. The established Protestant churches, against their will, became more deeply dependent on society and the ruling authorities than before. The alternative to established Christianity, represented by radical discipleship groups, was lacking. It was the Pietist revival movement which first attempted a reforming renewal of the established Protestant churches in Germany.
It follows from this brief historical survey that the more Christianity develops ways of life appropriate to a national or established church, the more it is dependent on the existence and example of radical discipleship groups. In churches which are organized accolding to political territories, a person belongs to the church by virtue of his birth. But discipleship and the common life are a matter for voluntary decision. ‘Establishment’ Christianity can only be lived by making a compromise with family, professional, social and political laws and duties. What is lived in the Christian communes is the attempt at uncompromising self-surrender. In the parishes of the established church it is hard to put Christian brotherhood and friendship into practice, because people hardly know each other and only trust and confide in one another in crises and emergencies. But in communities of a surveyable size, people’s individual potentialities and powers can be released and activated. In the ‘parishes’ and ‘pastorates’ of the church which provides ‘welfare’, those who have no authority are kept in leading strings by means of one-sided communication from ‘the top’; and this is hard to overcome. In ‘fellowships’, discussion between the members and mutual sympathy and participation stands in the forefront.
The world-wide church has always seen itself as a power immanent within the governing system, a power for Christianizing the people and changing the conditions in which it lives; and in this respect it was unable to get along without compromises. In worldwide Christianity this has often enough led to the church’s suspension of the sermon on the mount. If it is impossible to rule a country by means of the sermon on the mount (as Bismarck said) then it is also hard to live by the sermon on the mount in a political state. Churches on a national scale are compelled to make concordats with society and the state if they want to operate publicly. Moreover, they must adapt themselves to the average opinion prevailing among their members. Consequently they are relatively inflexible. The church has always had its ‘heroes’, but there has not often been a ‘heroic church’ (K. Rahner). For its orientation towards Christ and the kingdom of God, the world-wide church needs the example of the groups committed to consistent discipleship, which demonstrate the liberty of Christ more unhesitatingly than church leaders and more radically than the masses. Every power of alteration which is immanent in a given system needs orientation towards an alternative which transcends that system. So as long as large-scale church organizations exist, we have to reckon with alternative forms of the Christian life. They and their criticism must be recognized by the established churches. They must not be pushed into the underground as irregular fringe groups. They are of quite vital importance for the mainstream churches, and must be accepted as ‘pacemakers’. But on the other hand every alternative that transcends the given system—an alternative based on renunciation of the world and on resistance—remains ineffective if it is not related to the forces of alteration immanent in the system itself. Regulated discipleship groups and spontaneous movements for Christian action are putting themselves in a social ghetto of their own accord if they do not want to have a reforming effect on church and society. Without the large-scale churches these groups have no basis in the rank and file. Unless it affects the church which is open to the world, the practice of denying the world loses its relationship to the world altogether. The organizations of the mainstream church should not therefore attempt to bring these groups under their own control. To do so would be to destroy the forces of their own renewal. But these groups must not deny the mainstream church and emigrate from it altogether. To do so would be to rob themselves of their own destiny. The mainstream churches and the discipleship groups remain dependent on one another in a kind of double strategy until the community principle can be realized.
There is nothing new about the fact that the major territorial churches have today arrived at a crisis. The established churches of old do, it is true, still possess a large organization for the care of the people, with trained experts for many different ministries; but they have less and less hold on the people. Indifference towards the church is growing; the silent falling away is spreading. People’s identification with this church is diminishing step by step. Church services are attended less and less. People are leaving the established church, in Germany because of the church tax, or for other really non-essential reasons. The church’s chances of influencing society are visibly lessening. The clergy no longer feel themselves ‘supported’ by their congregations and are often fighting a lonely battle to ‘get at’ people. In many churches the number of new applicants for ordination no longer covers the needs of the parishes and congregations. The population’s mobility in the industrial countries, and mass immigration to the new cities of the developing countries, are making the territorially organized ‘welfare’ church increasingly ineffective. The more people are educated and the more independent they are, the less they can put up with their merely passive role of listener and onlooker in church services. Even in the village the old unity of civil community and Christian community is beginning to break up.
These symptoms of recession in the church would have to be described solely in terms of crisis if corresponding counter-movements were not also becoming evident in Christianity. Although the quantity of the church’s life is less, in many churches we can discover a new and increasing quality in the Christian life. It is true that the number of church-goers is diminishing, but the number of communicants is growing. The number of passive members is decreasing, but the number of active participants in religious seminars, theological courses, spiritual exercises and retreats is on the increase, as well as the number of people who are engaged in charitable activity and liturgical, pastoral, social and political work in their communities. The ‘pastoral’ church is losing its effectiveness and its capacity for influencing and directing the whole of Christian life; but to the same degree processes of growing independence are apparently developing, and many Christians are grasping chances of personal responsibility. The erosion within the established church (which is intended to embrace the whole of the people) is being balanced out by ‘a market of potentialities’ for free and specific Christian commitment in many problematical spheres of life. Is this already the beginning of a therapy for the crisis of the established church? Will this development lead to the replacement of the traditional, national church by a voluntary fellowship church? Does this mean that Christianity is taking the self-chosen path into the social ghetto of ‘the little flock’?
The first attempts to answer the crises of the ‘territorial’ church came through church reform from above. The programmes ‘church for the world’, ‘church for others’ and ‘church for the people’ were intended to open the institutions of the state church for people’s new needs. The intention, indeed, was that the church should be freed from concern about its institutional survival in order to turn without reserve to the needs of men and women. But as the formulas show, those concerned still started from a division between the church and ‘the others’, ‘the world’ and ‘the people’, and then went on to try to overcome this gap. The undertones of ‘the élite’ are clearly audible. The church approached the changed situation with action programmes for mission to the people and charitable work. Pastoral functions were specialized, and specialized pastorates were grouped together. Special pastorates for hospitals, prisons, radio, television, the armed forces, the police, seamen, men, women, young people, mission, the ecumenical movement, charitable work, and so forth, grew up. The presence of the church—that is, the official church—was split up in accordance with the differentiation of modern life. This church reform started from a reform of the church’s ministries, not from the community. If the church is still to be conceived as a church for the care of the people, then these adaptations to people’s differentiated needs are inescapable. But it can hardly be said that these endeavours have brought people back into the church, or have really brought the church to the people. The lethargy of the large number of passive church members has seldom been overcome. It is often even increased, because their own responsibility is taken from them even further by full-time church workers. But on the other hand the very differentiation from above of what the church has to offer has released processes of growing independence on the part of the people who are involved ‘at the bottom’; and these have led to a multiplicity of new groupings.
It is true that the impression of the established churches remains, that the privatization of the Christian life on the one hand and the institutionalization of the national and other large churches on the other mutually condition and strengthen one another, and threaten the real life of the actual individual congregation. But between the individual and the organizations of these large churches (which the individual simply cannot survey as a whole) there is also a wealth of interest, participation and commitment in fields whose extent can be seen and grasped.
Other attempts at entering into the crises of ecclesiastical instituitions come from reform of the community from below. There is a wide diversity of attempts and approaches here, but we will pick out as examples the ‘grass-roots communities’ and community work. In recent years ‘grass-roots communities’ have grown up almost simultaneously in different countries and denominations. Their centre of gravity is Latin America. Brazilian experiments with such communities, which have achieved a lay apostolate for evangelization and adult instruction, were the genesis of a movement that is spreading over the whole continent. There are individual parishes which have more than forty such communities within their area. These communities fill with their own life areas which are merely delimited by the organized church. The second General Assembly of the Latin American episcopate at Medellin in 1968 judged these communities as follows:
The ‘grass-roots’ community is the primary, fundamental core of the church. On its own level it must take responsibility for the riches of faith and for its propagation, as well as for the cult, which brings faith to expression. It is consequently the initial cell of the church’s structure, the focus of evangelization, and at present the main point of departure for man’s improvement and development.
The characteristics of such communities are hard to sum up, because they vary so much. But the following seem to be essential to all of them:
1. The voluntary association of members in a Christian fellowship.
2. The fellowship of a manageable size, in which life in mutual friendship and common devotion to a specific task is possible.
3. The awakening of creative powers in every individual and the surrender of privileges that members bring with them.
4. Autonomy in forming the spiritual life of the community and its life of fellowship.
5. Common concentration on special Christian tasks in society, whether it be in the field of evangelization, or the liberation of the under-privileged and oppressed.
6. The deliberate return to a simple Christo-centricism in the devotional life and to a reflection of new Christian practice in theology.
Many of these communities are led by laymen, occasionally helped by a priest. Most of them are to be found among the poor, a few in the middle-class milieu, and none at all in upper-class areas. They began with common services of worship and preaching, common prayer and mutual help; but now the sacraments are celebrated in these fellowships as well. They seem to be influenced both by the charismatic Pentecostal movements and by cultural, social and political movements existing among the people. In these communities people are the subject of their own Christian fellowship. In place of ‘the church for the people’ we have the beginnings of ‘the church of the people’, which lives, suffers and acts among the people themselves and with them. The Argentinian episcopate has therefore declared in its ‘Medellin Conclusions’:
The church has to examine its liberating, salvation-creating action from the point of view of the people and their interests.… Consequently the action of the church should not merely be directed towards the people but should also, and above all, permit itself to be directed by the people.
These ‘grass-roots’ communities have been called ‘a prophetic leaven’ for the renewal of church and society. People have talked about the ‘bricks for the church of tomorrow’. If they have the chance to be this, then the ‘grass-roots’ must not be put at the service of the organization of the established church; the latter must be put at the service of the former. As long as these communities do not remain in a state of complete flux, or become elitist sects, they really do have the chance to overcome the double form of the Christian life of fellowship as we have described it, and to live the simple ‘communion of saints’—or fellowship of believers—in a convincing way through open friendship among the people. They can avoid the danger of esoteric self-isolation by living down on the people’s level. If they really offer people the common opportunity for friendship free of domination, in which they can find themselves and their own creative potentialities and emerge from their loneliness, helplessness and dependency—then these communities will be letting the people become the subject of their own history in the liberating history of God. In this case they will not be the bricks for a church of an élite; they will be the bricks for a people’s church worthy of the name. Just as in the seventeenth century the Calvinist ‘right to community’ (compared with the state and the state church) provided motive power for the democratic development of the political polity, so the ‘grass-roots’ communities among the people can provide impulses for a fundamental and democratic social reconstruction. So that we may arrive at this point, it is important for these communities to develop a new theological concept of the church and its tasks in the social process. With out a concept of this kind it can easily lose itself in particularist actions and fall a victim to either sectarian or political movements.
The community work which was originally developed in American and English slums as ways of community organization shows parallels to the ‘grass-roots’ communities in the social and political sphere, and can also be drawn on as an aid in reforming the church from below. Its activity has led to the citizens’ action groups which have become popular in Germany, though the two things are not identical. ‘The concept of community work is the term for a process, in the course of which a community determines its needs and goals, orders them, or brings them into a sequence of priorities; develops the confidence and the will to do something about them; mobilizes inward and outward resources in order to satisfy the needs facing it—is, in fact, active, in this direction and in this way encourages the attitudes of co-operation and common endeavour, arid their actual practice.’ Community work aims to put people in a position where they can shape their fortunes for themselves, through initiatives for self-help, in the local sphere, and where they can acquire influence on the wider processes of planning and decision. In this way, in manageable areas and problems of limited extent, people will cease to be an object of planning and administration and will become the subject of their own lives. Community work does not aim to be a new form of welfare work. It wants to be a help to self-help. Its actions reach from the organization of new residential areas, measures to improve the living conditions of the homeless, actions in the educational field (kindergartens, schools and adult education), down to consumer boycotts, rent strikes, electoral initiatives and protests against the building of nuclear power stations. Wherever a community begins to determine its fortunes for itself, a new consciousness of their own dignity and their own strength grows up among the people involved. The passive, subservient attitude towards ‘the people at the top’ gives way to an independent sense of freedom and responsibility. Community work might therefore be formally defined as ‘the technique of activation and participation’. But a definition of this kind remains an abstraction. In the case of every action we have to ask who is exerting his energies for whom and for what. Civil initiatives can act progressively for more freedom and personal initiative, and they can also be reactionary and minister to the egoistical personal interests of property-owners and the well-to-do. They can be mobilized in favour of the homeless, and against them; in favour of the handicapped, and against them. Consequently, though in the citizen action groups people are discovering their own power and dignity (which is essential for man’s humanity) and are finding fulfilment of life’s meaning, in a local and limited but none the less specific way, these things must be set in the wider context of the conflicts and hopes of society as a whole. Spontaneity and self-realization, as they are experienced here, only anticipate a more human society if they are won, not in the face of other people but with others and for them. Here conflict among the rank and file must be expected. Without a total social perspective community work loses itself in pragmatism, and citizens’ action groups remain ambivalent. But without the initiatives in the local, direct sphere these perspectives remain abstract and empty.
In the field of community work it is important, if the situation permits, for the church’s congregations to accept and participate in the specific actions of community work as their own. The concept of the charismatic community leads in this direction, for there everyone finds his assignments, and no sphere of life is left without the practical witness of liberating action. On the other hand community workers in the church of Christ will see their own challenging activities in the context of the gospel and hope for the kingdom. Community work helps the church that understands itself as a community to commit itself as community on behalf of the people and among them. It can preserve the local church from threatening self-isolation and remind it of its practical apostolate.
The different approaches of church reform from above and from below are often combined at the congregational level in a kind of double strategy. Through a deepened growth of faith and through the growth of fellowship and social practice, core groups are built up in the parishes. Unlike the people on the fringe of the church, they are prepared to identify themselves strongly with the church. These core communities and core groups are expected to give new life to the congregations of the established church and at the same time to strike out new paths linking the church to society as a whole. But at the same time the established church of old days is preserved because it is open to the whole people and also includes passive members, fringe members, and the Christians who only go to church on major festivals. The established church seems to keep the threshold of entry low because—by virtue of infant baptism and the Christian cultural tradition—it reckons with almost all members of society. If Christianity were to tie itself down to the congregation in a one-sided way the church’s openness to the world would be threatened. The voluntary church, with its willing members, would almost inevitably involve the condemnation of the unwilling. But if one is prepared for this form of double strategy, it is almost impossible to do justice to either of the two forms of Christianity’s life. Wherever the activities of the core groups are at all unusual, they will be hindered by the silent majority in the established church. On the other hand, a parish will see new hierarchical groupings of laymen springing up from the core to the fringe, according to the measure of these people’s identification with the church. And if in this way we make identification with the church the classifying criterion, we are really back in the old official church pattern, in which the priest or pastor comes to stand at the innermost core of Christianity. Identification with the church then becomes graduated participation in the functions of the particular ministry which represents the church’s identity. When we talk about a double strategy we must ultimately ask about the direction the strategy is to take. Is the activation of the congregation to serve the traditional church organizations, or vice versa?
On the theological level the double strategy is popularly formulated in the double ecclesiological concept of ‘the church as an institution’ and ‘the church as an event’. But the two are related to one another with the help of the notion of complementarity. ‘The church as an event’, as fellowship and action, needs the church as an institution, because of its historical continuity and the extra-territorial solidarity of its groups. On the other hand ‘the church as an institution’ needs ‘the church as an event’ because of its practical vitality. Of course this is merely a notional and typical allocation of characteristics. The concepts which are reconciled with one another in this complementary way (such as institution and event) do not coincide with any reality. There are no institutions without events and no events without institutions. One might as well try first to divide the static and the dynamic from one another, and then to relate them to each other again, as being complementary. Like other social institutions, the church is a living process. Basically this theological and conceptual terminology merely reflects the problematical situation of the traditional, national churches. To use these terms really means to enquire about the building up of independent communities capable of acting independently under the conditions and continued maintainance of the territorial church. For communities that live under the conditions of non-Christian national and state religions, this question does not arise. The double ecclesiology—the church as an institution and an event—corresponds to the double strategy practised. It partakes of the indecisiveness of the double strategy we have mentioned, because the complementarity striven for lacks direction, intention and definite trend. In this question the decision cannot be a pragmatic one. It must be a theological decision, which can be put into practice under the given historical conditions of what is possible.
The present crises of the territorial churches and the therapy from below which is just beginning point to their initial lack: lack of cultivated fellowship. But the ecclesia is, by definition and nature, the community that gathers together. ‘The visible coming together of visible people in a special place to do something particular’ stands at the centre of the church. Without the actual, visible procedure of meeting together there is no church. That is why everything in the church is concentrated on this procedure. Where the community gathers round the gospel and the Lord’s table, it becomes recognizable in the world and unmistakably the people of Christ, the messianic community of the coming kingdom. In and through its actual assemblies it is free from those political powers and laws which the Barmen Declaration, article II, assigned to ‘the godless ties of this world’. In the fellowship of Christ it becomes a community capable of action. The facts are simple enough: without assembly no fellowship, without fellowship no freedom, without freedom no capacity for action. Because the invitation of the gospel and the invitation to the messianic banquet are open, and reach further than the group of those who are assembled, this group can never form a closed circle. It is open, and will practise this openness for other people through evangelization and practical acts of liberation. If the assembled community were not to be an ‘open church’ it would neither be the church of Christ nor the people of the coming kingdom. But if its openness to the world meant that it no longer gathered together, then it would not be a community or a people. There is no need for the institution of a general, established church in order to practise the openness of the gospel and of love. Its unqualified openness for everyone has only a remote connection with the qualified openness of Christ and the kingdom of God. Nor is it as such the institutional form of God’s prevenient grace or the visible expression of the forgiveness of the sins of the whole people. The congregation, on the other hand, is very well able to avoid seeing itself as the elect company of ‘the children of light’ which condemns ‘the children of darkness’ and cuts itself off from them. It is certainly able to turn to others, and especially the underprivileged and rejected, in evangelically defined openness. The problematical conditions of the established church can hardly be justified by pointing to the dangers of an élitist or voluntary church. A congregation must by no means exclude the passive, fringe members or degrade them to the level of mere ‘fellow-travellers’. The principle of the committed congregation seems to me, not an easy but perhaps a hopeful solution, as a direction for the double strategy and double ecclesiologies, which today, and in Germany, are unavoidable. Church reforms and church reconstruction will begin at the point where people in congregations of manageable size hear, discuss and profess the gospel; where, at the Lord’s table, they become friends and perform their tasks in mutual sympathy and co-operation. Of course conflicts will arise here too, but then they are conflicts in the proper place. The restriction of faith to private life leads to the powerlessness of the individual’s faith and is a continual source of doubt. Church organizations above the local level deprive the individual congregations of their independence, and often of their own responsibility. They lead to an abstract unity which, when it actually comes to the point, cannot put up any resistance. Individuals and church organizations can really only find themselves in one place: in the committed congregation. It is only in the committed congregation that Christianity becomes capable of action and resistance. That is a matter of experience. The committed congregation is not an ‘event’ without an ‘institution’, any more than it is an ‘institution’ without an ‘event’. It lives both in tradition with the church at all times and in communication with the church at all places. Not the isolated Christian and not the huge, lavish ‘pastoral’ church, but the congregation gathered together in the openness of Christ, which everyone can see as his own affair: this is the living hope in the conflicts of society today—living hope, because it is also lived and enlivening hope.
1. Church reform from above, which begins with the church’s ministries, can serve the committed congregation if it relates these ministries to the one common ministry of the congregation. It will make the build-up of the living congregational church its priority, not the extension of supra-regional offices.
2. The ‘grass-roots’ communities and community work supplement one another mutually in the committed congregation, which is conscious of the fullness of its creative powers for the kingdom of God. They would be surrendering their own best intentions if they did not make use of Christianity’s right to community. They are to be seen as a stimulus, not as a substitute for the gathered congregation.
3. Whether the double strategies and the double ecclesiologies will one day dissolve in favour of the one, common form of Christian life in the committed congregation, depends ultimately, not merely on what Christianity wants, but also on the state of the society in which Christianity is involved. In a ‘closed society’ the reforming forces and the forces of mystical negation in Christianity will present themselves in twofold form. In an open society, the committed congregation can live its life without double strategies of this kind. We shall therefore only be able to realize the right to the committed congregation if we press for an ‘open society’ at the same time. The goal of all strategies is the building up of mature responsible congregation.
4. If the trends within the church take their bearings from the committed congregation, then there will be an ecumenical convergence between the churches in ‘Christian’ countries and the churches in ‘non-Christian’ countries. The conditions under which the congregation becomes effective are different, but the direction of this practical effect will then be the same. That is of considerable importance for what goes on ecumenically and in the church all over the world.