The real way to be biblical and to respect biblical authority is to do what biblical people did and in the way that they did it. It is not to quote biblical sources or uncover the deep and secret meanings of biblical texts. The authority of words, even inspired words, must somehow be based in the de facto authority of accomplished deeds, redeemed peoples, and living bodies. In other words, it has to have worked somewhere, sometime, with someone, or it is an idealized abstraction. I find that a great many people who put themselves under the cope of religion are, in fact, people who enjoy ideology and abstraction as an escape from real commitment and real conversion.
A salvation history is the beginning and the basis of Christian and Jewish theology. Historical events gave authority to the words and allowed them to be written down with inspiration. Moses did not give endless teachings about Abrahamic faith; he led people out of slavery, through a desert, and into a whole new place. He created a new people who could begin to hear God.
The prophets did not give weekly sermons on Moses and timely tips from Leviticus; they read the signs of the times, saw God acting, deposed kings, and shook nations. The prophets purified the people that Moses had created when they had grown tired of paying the price of peoplehood.
Jesus himself did not find his authority in words or traditions; he taught with living authority "and not like the scribes" (Mark 1:22). With the apostles and disciples he again created a new people, a spiritual family. And he did this most simply and profoundly by telling this family about their Father and the full nature of his love.
This had the frightening effect of establishing totally new love bonds and re-aligning family relationships into what we would eventually call "church." "'And who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking around at those sitting in a circle about him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of my Father, that person is my brother and sister and mother'" (Mark 3:34).
I don't think we have begun to plumb the depths of Jesus' radical response. Only those who had first heard the Baptist's call to fill valleys and level mountains (Luke 3:5) would be ready for Jesus. The rest of us continue to avoid forming God's new family in favor of some form of spiritualism, legalism, biblicism, or rationalism.
But God creates around each of his chosen ones a network of committed relationships. In these faithful and suffering relationships, God can be rightly known. Outside of them, God and his good news are continually used, abused, and distorted. He remains word, instead of Word-become-flesh. He is argued about, instead of loved. He is proven, instead of shared. He is religion, instead of life.
God is telling us that he takes human life seriously. What we have to do to come into this world -- discover ourselves as either son, daughter, brother, sister, mother, or father -- is not just a time-consuming preliminary. It is, in fact, the whole of the process. The end is summed up in the beginning.
Baptism, our initiation into the new family of God, is everything-all-at-once, symbolized and celebrated. It takes the rest of our life to understand it, to suffer it, and to appropriate it. The reality precedes the word and gives authority to the word. The reality must be lived first and only then spoken about. The Christian life is a matter of becoming who we already are.
Shared Life
The reality is Trinity; God is shared life, life in relationship. Church is the communion of saints; family is both the beginning and the end. Only in that context can Bible and sacraments be fittingly interpreted and understood.
In the experience of the natural and spiritual family the word becomes teachable, powerful, and enduring enough to be written down with authority. In any other context, it becomes another head trip: "So you, my friends, have died to the law by becoming identified with the body of Christ, and accordingly you have found another husband in him ... but we are discharged from the law, to serve God in a new way, the way of the Spirit, in contrast to the old way, the way of a written word" (Romans 7:4, 6).
I say this not to discredit the scriptures. They are spirit and life for me. But we must find the true basis for a working scriptural authority, which is now all but lost to our critical world. Our formula during the last individualistic centuries has been something like this:
God's basic building block for his self-communication is not the "saved" individual, or the rightly informed believer, or even personal careers in ministry, but precisely the journey and bonding process that God initiates in marriages, families, tribes, nations, peoples, and churches who are seeking to involve themselves in his love.
The body of Christ, the spiritual family, is God's strategy. It is both medium and message. It is both beginning and end: "May they all be one ... so that the world may believe it was you who sent me ... that they may be one as we are one, with me in them and you in me" (John 17:21, 23).
There is no other form for the Christian life except a common one. This means even a cultural one, if culture refers to something which is shared and passed on. In this sense, I am wondering if there is any other kind of Christianity except "cultural Christianity."
Until and unless Christ is someone happening between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until he is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness, through bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on at all.
We are now paying the price for centuries of a faith tradition continuously narrowed from a full vision of peoplehood and Christendom to an almost total preoccupation with private persons and their devotional needs. But history has shown that individuals who are confirmed in their individualism by the very character of our evangelism will never create church, except after the model of a service station: they will use it as a commodity like everything else.
Certainly, we must deal with individuals. But I find that these many churched individuals often do not even know what the questions of the gospel life are. As a result, we find ourselves using most of our personnel and institutions to give fairly good answers to completely inappropriate questions that have nothing to do with community life. We are saving souls while God is creating a people.
The very nature of our lifestyle and our church teaching must say from the beginning what the goal is -- the communion of saints, a shared life together as family, the trinitarian life of God, the kingdom. Then we must deal with individuals in the church as they are on the journey toward that goal.
I am absolutely convinced that it is out of this context, and the set of felt needs which arise from it, that the New Testament is written for our instruction. If we are not asking the appropriate questions -- and I dare to say it -- the Bible will do us and those around us more harm than good. It will be a power in the hands of those who do not know what to do with that much power. Thus the sad history of Western Christianity!
The prophet Haggai criticizes the Jews after the exile for individually hurrying to repanel the walls of their own houses, while the common walls of the temple lie in ruins (Haggai 1:4, 9). His prophetic call is now and forever. We still think that we can work with the world's agenda, where career and individual fulfillment are the basic building blocks of society. And we believe that we can build church from those well-educated and well-saved blocks. But God needs "living stones making a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5).
For Jesus, such teachings as forgiveness, healing, and justice are not just a spiritual test course. They are quite simply the necessary requirements for a basic shared life. Peacemaking and reconciliation are not some kind of box seat tickets to heaven. They are the price of peoplehood. They express the truth in the heart of God, the truth that has been shared with us in the Holy Spirit, the union in Jesus who is reconciling all people to himself.
A trinitarian God is a God in relationship. He both knows and is known. He loves and is loved. He believes and is believed in. We come to know who he is through the very same dialogue.
We come to be in this world through a relationship called marriage and family. We come into the kingdom through a set of relationships called church or spiritual family. The same rules for the creation of life, the sharing of life, and the destruction of life apply in both the natural family and the spiritual family, and therefore, in our very relationship with God. It all becomes very real and very simple. The areas in our life where we cannot be shared are the very areas where God cannot touch us. And the areas that we cannot let God touch will never be shared for the good of all.
The natural family and the spiritual family seem to need one another for correct image, focus, and direction. The natural family without the spiritual family becomes isolated, insulated, inbred, and without vision. The spiritual family without the natural family has become cold, ideological, impersonal, task-oriented, and unable to carry out its purposes. All in-depth renewal is somehow a return to family.
My experience is that powerful spiritual growth usually happens in the context of the healing, restoring, and recreating of the original familial relationships. Both Elijah and John the Baptist are seen to have the role of "turning the hearts of fathers toward their children and the hearts of children toward their fathers" (Malachi 3:24, Luke 1:17). Without their precursory work, Jesus cannot do his work.
What the natural family should intuitively know, the spiritual family teaches through the graced dynamic of sin, conversion, and redemption. The spiritual family enables us to reform, renew, and relive the natural family and its relationships. The very practical and mundane needs of the natural family should keep the church from pie-in-the-sky theologizing. It should keep us concerned about a very real and ennobling salvation, about justice, peace, lifestyle, unity, and healing -- the kind of things Jesus concerned himself with in his ministry.
We are saddled and bridled today with a religion that is not sure if it wants to become church. Its adherents' expectations are very set. It is a comfortable and very materialistic religion, which tests its people's commitment on the level of doctrine but is afraid to test that commitment on issues of lifestyle or mature conscience.
We give out bits of advice on marriage and family life, while the very structure of family crumbles all around us. Could it be that our vocation is not to teach about family, but to ourselves become family and to submit to its disciplines? If the world no longer knows how to struggle for unity and maintain commitments at the cost of pain, could it be because the church, the sign of salvation, has not traveled the narrow road first?
In a commodity world we have become a commodity church. We have allowed the gospel to become something we buy and sell to others, something we use for power and good feeling. We have done to God what we do quite comfortably to one another -- we use him!
But family cannot ever be used. It can only be created, waited for, enjoyed, and lost. Family is the last holdout of the non-utilitarian mode. It will not allow you to make it into a commodity. It must teach the church its living word so that the church can teach the world how life is generated, how faith is shared, and how God is love.
The best teachers of Christ are without doubt fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. For in their embrace, faith is not really taught at all. It is caught, almost by accident, as they struggle to remain in union one with another.
"I am writing this because I want you to know how to behave in God's family -- that is, the church of the living God, which upholds the truth and keeps it safe" (1 Timothy 3:14-15).
Richard Rohr, OFM, was pastor of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, and worked for the Catholic Charismatic when this article appeared.
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