There is today a tremendous ferment in the church regarding the very nature of the church itself. New questions are being raised about the place of the professional clergy, and one sign of church renewal is the revival of lay participation and leadership in the life of the church. Not only in the charismatic movement but throughout the church there is a renewed interest in the subject of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and how the Spirit works through individual members of the body to build it up and to prepare it for its ministry in the world.
Everywhere there are signs of new life bursting the old wineskins of ecclesiastical tradition. There are experimental forms of worship, small groups for Bible study, prayer, and personal sharing, informal house churches, and total spiritual-economic communities reminiscent of the communal life of the first church at Jerusalem.
What is most significant in all of this ferment, study, and experimentation is the growing realization that the church is an alternative society set up in the world to demonstrate to it the political relevance of the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ. We are beginning to realize that the church is not merely a spiritual Band-Aid patched on a diseased world. Rather it is the place in which God has already grafted onto the world a new source of life, not merely spiritual life in the sense of the inward, pious discipline of prayer and personal purity, but life in the sense of a new people, a new political phenomenon, which holds up before the world a model for human community based on service instead of self, life instead of death, peace instead of war, and reconciliation instead of social, national, and racial alienation. It is my intent now to explore the biblical basis for this community and to delineate some of the political dimensions of the church's existence.
According to the Bible the possibility of a truly human community rests upon the initiative of God who establishes such a community by means of the covenant which he makes with Abraham, Israel, and in Jesus Christ with the whole world. The Old Testament is simply the account of how God established his covenant with Abraham, fulfilled it in the Exodus, and by it called into existence a people who formerly were no people. In at least two ways the Old Testament concept of the divine covenant is crucial to our understanding of human community. In the first place the covenant is based solely on the gracious initiative of God. There is a peculiar one-sidedness to the divine covenant: God alone establishes the terms of the covenant. In this sense the covenant is a will or testament, rather than a contract. The love of God expressed in the covenant has no other cause than the gracious purpose of God to create a people for his own possession (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). By the same token, the relationship among members of the covenant community can have no basis other than the fact that God has called them together. This destroys all human criteria for community, whether they are based on wealth, status, race, nationality, or whatever.
In the second place God's covenant, while it rests solely on the gracious initiative of God, nevertheless demands a response appropriate to the grace which is received in the covenant. Because the covenant is rooted in the personal initiative of God and because in it God addresses us personally, we are called to respond. And since the covenant is based essentially on the promise of God, the appropriate response is faith. God promises; we believe (Genesis 15:1-6). But faith is not merely intellectual assent but also commitment to the God who addresses us. Faith is grateful dependence upon God for the relationship he has established and for all the benefits which flow to us because of this covenant bond.
Such faith takes concrete form in political and social justice. Since the believer is justified by faith, that faith is inevitably expressed in and through justice. To hear God, to believe in him alone who is just and who justifies the ungodly is at the same moment to discover the basis of political justice. To be justified means to share in Christ's death and resurrection, which creates reconciliation where before there had been alienation: Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. As Markus Barth has argued, justification is a social as well as personal event:
The new man is present in actuality where two alien and hostile men come together before God. Justification in Christ is thus not an individual miracle happening to this person or that person, which each may seek or possess for himself. Rather, justification by grace is a joining together of this person and that person, of the near and far ... it is a social event" ("Jews and Gentiles: The Social Character of Justification in Paul," Journal of Ecumenical Studies).
Although Barth is speaking specifically about the social implications of the new covenant established in Christ, the thrust of his comment is applicable also to the Old Testament covenants. Israel's attitude toward the socially dispossessed was to be determined by their own experience of the righteousness of God revealed in his liberation of the despised Hebrews. "A sojourner shall you not wrong, neither shall you oppress him: for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan" (Exodus 22:21-22). In the Exodus, God deliberately identifies himself with the cause of the poor of the earth. The election of Israel demonstrates God's identification with the "have-nots" of history. To become a part of the covenant community created by this election is to become identified with, to sense one's solidarity with, the slave, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the illiterate, the homeless, the hungry, the sick, and the prisoner.
To be a member of the covenant community is to accept the unity which God creates with the social outsider. Action, of course, will ensue, but not action on behalf of those people we perceive to be on the other side of the tracks. It will not be paternalistic charity on behalf of people who are not "our kind." Rather, it will be action with and for those who are one with us before God in their poverty and need. It will be action which springs from the fact of reconciliation, not an action which presupposes and perpetrates alienation. Black theology reminds us that our modern Egypt is the black ghetto. If we wish to follow Christ in exile into Egypt we modern Americans will inevitably be led toward the inner city. As James Cone puts it (Black Theology and Black Power), "reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto)." Of course, this is not literally a question of color. Justice has nothing per se to do with pigmentation. It is a question of understanding the significance of the divine covenant, a question of identification. Cone continues: "To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are."
The existence of a covenant community in ancient Israel already had definite eschatological implications. God's covenant with Israel had opened before them a future and given them a sense of movement and direction that no other people had ever experienced. But Israel's exile and the loss, both of her national sovereignty and the central cult at Jerusalem, raised some acute theological questions about their future. What had become of the covenant? Was it still in effect? Was it possible for God to receive again unfaithful Israel whom he had apparently divorced? If one took into account only the potential for renewal which remained visible to the natural eye, the answer to all these questions would have been "no." But the love of God, Israel learned, far surpasses their own faithlessness and even in judgment God's heart recoiled at the very thought of totally giving up the people he had nurtured for so long.
Praise be to God that God's faithfulness is not measured by the fickleness of human bonds. But Israel's failure was transformed by the covenant faithfulness of God into the promise of a new beginning, a new covenant, a new people with a new spirit (Jeremiah 31:31 ff.; Ezekiel 36:26-27). The earliest disciples of Jesus saw in him and in the community gathered in his name the beginning of the fulfillment of the prophetic vision of covenant, of forgiveness, of life, of community -- of shalom in its multifaceted meaning of security, welfare, friendship, and righteousness.
The Church as Fulfillment and Foretaste
The church is clearly perceived in the New Testament as an eschatological phenomenon, as the community in which the ancient prophetic promises were at long last being realized. In the first place, the church owed its existence to the establishment of a new covenant ratified by the blood of Christ himself. The regular Eucharistic observance of the early Christians testifies to their consciousness that in Jesus Christ God had drawn them together and that their fellowship was an anticipation of the reconciliation of the whole cosmos.
In the second place, the forgiveness of sins granted by Jesus both in his ministry and later in the apostolic proclamation of the cross is clearly an anticipation of the last judgment. To meet Jesus is to pass already before the judgment bar of God (John 5:24). And to be justified by faith is to experience already the verdict of the last judgment. In the coming of Jesus Christ, God ended the old course of the world and introduced the new age. For "when the time had fully come, God sent forth his son" (Galatians 4:4); so now "the old has passed away" and "the new has come" and whoever is "in Christ" is a "new creature" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
In the third place, the church exists as an eschatological community through the Holy Spirit which the exalted Christ has poured out upon it and in which he has baptized it. It is of greatest significance that John the Baptist distinguishes the ministry of the Messiah from his own ministry because only the Messiah will baptize in the Holy Spirit whereas John's baptism was limited to a baptism in water (Mark 1:8). Peter interprets the Pentecost experience as the fulfillment of the prophetic promise of the Holy Spirit (Joel 2:28-29; Ezekiel 36:26; Isaiah 44:3). And Paul's understanding of the Spirit as the guarantee of our inheritance emphasizes the presence of the Spirit as an eschatological foretaste of the kingdom (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:14). In other words, the very life of the church, the presence of the risen Christ in her by the Holy Spirit (John 14:16 f.; 16:12-15), demonstrates that God is gathering together in the church a people who may demonstrate to the world the riches of his grace and the potentiality of the new life generated by his personal presence with them.
The Kingdom of God as New Order
The preceding discussion of the foundation of the church in God's redemptive covenants and of the eschatological nature of the church are an essential theological basis for the thesis that the church is a political institution. The covenants have a political goal: the establishment of the community called the people of God. The kingdom of God is as political as its name implies, not a purely inward event -- the private, personal submission of one's heart to the rule of God. The redemptive power of God present in the mighty deeds of Jesus and manifest in the church by the Holy Spirit are directed toward the overturning of all the forces of death, including especially the political forces and structures which hold people captive.
God's intention in Jesus Christ is political. Through him he proposes to overcome all the powers that oppress people and to destroy every wall that separates people from one another. This dimension of God's redemptive activity in Jesus Christ is found most fully in Ephesians and Colossians. There the church is revealed as the concrete embodiment in the present age of the reconciliation which negates every form of human alienation, whether it is based upon economic class, race, nationality, or sex. Thereby is established the community which is the highest good of human life. Our humanity is incomplete without our fellow humans and without God himself in whose image we are made.
What I am speaking of is not the retreat of the church from the large, impersonal structures of society into a warm, but socially irrelevant, fellowship. In fact, I have something quite different in view. The church, which is the community that lives out of the experience of the new life in Christ, begins to establish an alternative to the customs, classes, structures, and institutions which are characteristic of the old order. The church is created by Jesus Christ as an institution of life which by its existence and its lifestyle threatens and predicts the eventual overthrow of the old order.
The revolutionary political significance of the church was already visible in the ministry of Jesus who lived his life in a consciousness of the transitoriness of the old ways, and by his every action he negated them. We need only refer in passing to his table fellowship with sinners, his total unconcern for legalistic traditions because of his equally total concern for human pain, or his obliviousness to social convention and traditional racial animosities. Not that Jesus was a violent revolutionary. All such revolutions, as history has demonstrated, merely replace the actors on the stage and occasionally rearrange the props in one of the scenes. But what Jesus did was to come on stage and live out a radically different script while at the same time calling all the actors on stage to enter into the new play, a play whose closing curtain is life instead of death.
Jew and Gentile
As the book of Acts reveals, it was not easy for those who were confronted by Jesus to respond immediately to the full implications of the radical newness in Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The division between Jew and Gentile was to be the first century test of the power of the risen Christ to overcome the alienation presupposed by this world's political institutions. Acts was written to demonstrate that the gospel of Christ has a universal political significance. The church could not be contained within the confines of Judaism because its very nature was to bring together in one body those who were separated from each other. If Peter had not been obedient to his lunchtime vision, or if the elders and apostles at Jerusalem had put the Antioch Gentiles under the burden of the law, or if Paul had failed in his mission to the pagan world, the church would have remained a Judaistic sect and would probably be remembered today by only a few rabbis with a scholarly interest in first century Judaism.
The conquest of all human divisions in Christ is most concisely stated: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). The seriousness of the Jew/Gentile division and how it was overcome is more clearly delineated in the New Testament than either of the other two divisions mentioned here, or, indeed, any of a number of other divisions which are more relevant for us today: black and white, western and eastern, rich and poor, capitalist and worker, Arab and Israeli, etc. The point which must be driven home here is that the unity in Christ overcomes all human divisions, for these are all based on distinctions of superiority/inferiority which are rooted in the fallen world. The purpose of Christ's death and resurrection is to invalidate these distinctions. And the argument of Paul that this is God's purpose relative to the Jewish/Gentile division (Ephesians 2:11-3:13) must be understood as equally applicable to all the other divisions which signal the infection of sin in the world.
For example, although the practice of slavery is not condemned in the New Testament, Paul's letter to Philemon demonstrates that the revolutionary principle introduced into the master-slave relationship by Christ must ultimately destroy slavery as a social institution. For when Paul tells Philemon that the recovery of his runaway slave, Onesimus, means that he receives him back "no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother ..." (Philemon 16), he is in effect saying that in Jesus Christ slavery does not count. And if Philemon took seriously what it meant for him and Onesimus to be reconciled as brothers in Christ, it would be nonsense to speak any longer of a master-slave relationship between these men.
The problem of sexism is treated in a similar manner in the New Testament. That is, while there is no organized attempt to destroy every manifestation of sexist superiority in first century culture, nevertheless, there are evidences of attempts to actualize the oneness given in Jesus Christ. However, I personally take such apparently sexist passages as 1 Timothy 2:9-15 as indications that the early church experienced tremendous tension at the point of female-male relations because of deeply rooted social conventions which were extremely difficult to harmonize with the redeemed brother-sister relationship established in Christ. This tension is certainly in the background of Paul's discussion of the matter in 1 Corinthians. And we must be very careful of absolutizing a particular bit of first century apostolic advice which might today clearly compromise the new relationship effected in Christ.
Usually when conservatives and liberals speak of the involvement of the church in social action they both are discussing whether, when, and how the church should speak to the world and attempt a reformation of unjust social structures outside the church. The possibility of social action is always perceived as action by the church directed toward the redemption of evil in the world. In a word, social action is the church telling the world how to solve its problems.
There are two things wrong with this approach. First, it assumes that the church knows what the world needs when in fact it is all too often apparent that the church has not put its own house in order. Social pronouncements issued by ecclesiastical courts to the world all too often remind us of the old log-in-the-eye problem that Jesus warned us about. In the second place, this kind of "social action" has missed the eschatological political relevance of the church. The church when viewed as a religious institution, the conscience of the nation, is no longer perceived as the place where God is building a political institution which in itself serves as a model to demonstrate to a sick world the potentiality for the healing of our social diseases in Jesus Christ.
The church's greatest hindrance to social relevance is the fact that it is so hard to find. As William Stringfellow points out, there is little hindrance in locating Babylon. But when we search for Jerusalem, the city of God, which has refused to prostitute itself to the world, we are often perplexed and embarrassed. American churches, Stringfellow says, "are vainglorious about reputation, status, prosperity, success; they are eager to conform, solicitous of patronage from the political regime, derisive of the biblical witness, accommodated to American culture" (An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land).
The great need of the church, ethically speaking, is not to analyze all of the world's problems or to tell the world what is wrong with it or to devise a program of social and economic reform. Such things may be needed, but they are not first on our list of priorities. What is needed most of all is a new style of life. The power of a doctrine to convince others depends upon the extent to which it can create a new style of life.
There are a number of hopeful attempts to express the fullness, socially and economically, of the newness created by Christ Jesus in his church. However, we have hardly begun to appreciate the radical political significance of the church. To say the least, if the church intends to be politically relevant it must first become politically real. It must begin to demonstrate in its mutual concern and submission what the Lordship of service means (Mark 10:43-45). God intends that the church should demonstrate to the powers of this world the riches of Christ and the wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:7-10). To become what God intends it to be, to demonstrate what Christ is doing in it, is to be socially relevant. The church is in its very being social action. As Yoder says :
It is in itself a proclamation of the Lordship of Christ to the powers from whose dominion the church has begun to be liberated. The church does not attack the powers; this Christ has done. The church concentrates upon not being seduced by them. By her existence she demonstrated that their rebellion has been vanquished.
One closing word: the search for the political relevance of the church is intrinsically a search of the entire body. By the very nature of the task, it is impossible for isolated Christians to achieve the goal. We need each other, and this is nowhere more obvious than in our attempt to exist in the world as a redemptive, healing model of human community.
J. Robert Ross was campus minister at Eastern Illinois University and part-time lecturer on ethics and theology at Lincoln Christian Seminary when this article, which was originally given as the 1975 Alumni Lecture at the Emmanuel School of Religion, appeared.
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