Fleshing this Out...Continued

Christ Over Us: An Example of Submission and Mission

In the context of a new Christendom (inaugurated with the Edict of Milan?), the identity of the church as a community of "exiles and strangers in the world" changed. With the so-called "Constantinian shift," the church took on a new social and political status, which, as many of the radical reformers argued, has since redefined the purpose and nature of the church.

In particular, in so far as the church and state were politically united, the function of the two became mutually commensurate. Namely, the church's purpose was reframed as a bureaucratic mission of increasing membership and overseeing the welfare of its members.

And it's easy to see how this would happen. In Christendom, where everyone is presumably "Christian" by virtue of their familial and national heritage, the identity of the church as "disciples of Jesus" was obscured; and its mission of making new disciples was therefore compromised. The confusion was only exacerbated by the paedobaptisic practice of the Catholic and Reformational churches, in, wittingly and unwittingly, christening the children of unbelievers en masse. This is, of course, the subject of Kierkegaard's insightful, if blistering, Attack on Christendom. But, even practiced evangelically with due caution, when baptizing infants becomes the primary means of discipleship, the Great Commission has been essentially lost.

Two things had deeply challenged the church in its "long and dangerous sleep": 1) the recovery of the gospel in the reformation, and, as a result 2) the realignment of the church along evangelical lines. Nevertheless, even with the evangelical demand for spiritual regeneration, as evidenced by faith and repentance, and an evangelical theology of the sacraments (predicated on sola fide), the ecclesiology of the magesterial reformers was, at best, quasi-evangelical. The church was still understood as a national body of adherents, comprehended within their sociological matrix. Blood and soil. Even in the Westminster Standards, where the "visible church" transcends the soil of the state, it is nevertheless delineated along blood lines (WLC 62). And so, strangely, baptism could be applied and received apart from faith - provided one had "Abraham for our father," Lk.3:8. As a result, an uneasy mixture of flesh and Spirit, of birth and rebirth persisted within the ecclesiology of the reformational churches.

Moreover, the instrumentality of the church as the divine agent of salvation in the world was effectively reduced to the traditionally sacerdotal functions of official teaching and preaching, administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline (see Calvin's Institutes, Book IV). But what of the multifarious gifts and ministries of the broader body? The priesthood of all believers, it would appear, was practically negated in the context of the church's task of making disciples. And so, from the beginning, a new priesthood was engendered within the Protestant clergy.

Perhaps if Calvin had expanded his explanation of 'the discipline of the church' beyond ecclesiastical censure, as Dallas Willard has suggested in The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988, pp.145-146), entailing all that the church does and is as a body of disciples (e.g., Mt.18:6-35; cf. Eph.4:2-5:21), then a more comprehensive understanding of the church's mission and function would have followed. As it was, however, the purpose of the church was effectively limited to the purview of its leadership, and that, primarily, with respect to its role of increasing church membership (typically, the old-fashioned way: making babies...not that there's anything wrong with that!) and overseeing the welfare of its members.

And thus it stands today. The response of many young and frustrated men of zeal has been to break away from the church altogether, in function if not in attendance, in order to pursue the Great Commission, as they understand it. On the one hand, this is understandable, as the lumbering, traditional churches became bogged down in the machinary of their own bureaucracies. On the other hand, however, such a departure represents a profound confusion of the mission itself. The mission cannot be accomplished apart from the church (not in part only, but in its entirety); for that is how God has designed it. The mission is for the church and by the church. FUBU, baby...

As American Christianity moved away from the state church, it also tended to marginalize the church per se in the life of faith. Church participation was expected by the pious, but, practically speaking, hardly necessary. Yet in failing to submit ourselves to the church (not necessarily any particular church, but some particular church!), we fail to submit ourselves to Christ in the accomplishment of his mission. Perhaps we should add to the list of reformational solas: sola ecclesia?