“Our neighbors in the church will in the Kingdom be beyond reproach, so that evil witness will be useless; and we may now regard that as the real truth about them. … We are able to proceed so recklessly because we fear and love God only.”
[Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol 2, 208]
“That said, believer’s baptism has been a decisive point of identity at various periods in history, and so needs to be considered. The classical Baptist account stresses not just the subject of baptism (one who is already a believer), but its mode (full immersion). I have noted already the unfortunate case of Whitsitt, dismissed from his academic post for making a historically correct observation about the late adoption of the practice of immersion by the seventeenth-century English Baptists; this challenged the mythology that the primitive practice of immersion was preserved by true believers at every point in history and was felt by some to be deeply damaging to Baptist identity. In Britain, there was a significant crisis even earlier, when Baptist supporters of the new Bible Society tried to insist that the Greek word baptizo be translated ‘immerse’ or ‘plunge’, rather than ‘baptize’ in Bibles published by the Society. The mod of baptism had become important.
This insistence on immersion highlights a striking feature of historical defences of the Baptist position on baptism: it is far more based on a recovery of biblical praxis than on any reflection on biblical theology. That is, Baptists have tended to argue that the practice of the New Testament church was the immersion of believers only, and so this should be our practice; any consideration of a theology of baptism is seriously subordinated to this demand that New Testament practice be imitated. Baptist writings on baptism rather rarely get beyond this polemical point concerning praxis, arguing far more about the mode (immersion) and subjects (believers only) of baptism than about the meaning and effect of the sacrament/ordinance. Perhaps bizarrely, Baptists have been remarkably poor at developing a theology of baptism over their history, often resting content with developing an account of proper administration of the rite.”
[Stephen Holmes, Baptist Theology, 90]
“There is doubtless a danger of ‘spiritualizing’ the church with such affirmations. It is clearly important that this emphasis on the priority of divine action over the church as an act of human association not be allowed to eclipse the ‘visibility’ of the church. The polemical portrayal of Protestant religion as bare subjectivism without objective social form or endurance is doubtless a caricature, but it nevertheless identifies a potentially disruptive element in the dogmatics we have just outlined. Can a society which is in its essence ‘invisible’ ever be really human—that is, historical, material, bodily? In an evangelical ecclesiology, the gesture—rhetorical and theological—towards invisibility must certainly be made, and its absence from an ecclesiology may be symptomatic of other disorders—a lavishly over-realized eschatology, an eliding of the distinction between the gospel and its human representations, an atrophied sense of the church’s fallibility, above all, perhaps, a routinization of the operations of the Spirit.
Properly defined, the concept of the invisibility of the church is a standing denial of any easy identification of divine and human work. Talk of the church’s invisibility secures the all-important point that ‘[o]nly as creatura verbi divini [creature of the divine word] is the Church an object of faith, because God’s action in establishing and disclosing the true relationship between the creator and his creation that makes faith possible can be confessed as the content of faith’. Yet when this necessary gesture takes over, and is allowed to become the only constitutive moment for ecclesiology, other problems quickly emerge, and a picture of the church is promoted in which the human Christian community is unstable, liminal, and so incapable of sustaining a coherent historical and social trajectory.”
[John Webster, “The Self-Organizing Power of the Gospel of Christ: Episcopacy and Community Formation”, IJST 3:1 2001]
“One can speak here of avowed opposition to every ecclesiological perfectionism, that is, to every over-estimation of the ‘newness’ of life in Christ due to an unreal romanticism that prematurely takes hold of a triumph of grace. But, on the other hand, there is a great danger here of forgetting the destructive character of sin and becoming resigned to it; one can underestimate ‘the dark riddle’ in ecclesiastical relations. … Moreover, one can forget that Christ’s concern for His Church was precisely to bring together in love and reconciliation all the children of God who are scattered abroad. Thus, whoever wants to speak of division as an ‘attribute’ of the real Church, a property that belongs to her between Pentecost and the parousia, actually obliterates the reality of the one Lord, the one Shepherd of the sheep. The reference to continuing sin and to our limitedness may never lead to ecclesiastical quietism and may never explain away the status quo, since the Church owes her reality as Christ’s Church precisely to her being called out of darkness into marvelous light.”
[G. C. Berkouwer, The Church, 34]
“First, evangelicals need an ecclesiology, and the ecclesiology they need is an evangelical ecclesiology, for the gospel is ecclesial. But an ecclesiology has to be a good deal more than a set of inchoate instincts which grab hold of whatever bits of doctrine float in their direction. A properly evangelical ecclesiology has to take its place within the scope of doctrinal affirmations which spell out the Christian confession of God, Christ, the Spirit, election, reconciliation, sanctification, and the rest. Evangelical Christianity is nowadays sometimes tempted to think that the remedy for its instinctive ecclesiological indifference or minimalism is to move upmarket. The evangelical tradition has latterly been alarmingly undiscriminating—in its very open attitude to socially immanent theories of atonement, for example, or in its enthusiasm for the concept of ‘relationally’ as a theological panacea. But the evangelical tradition surely has more to offer to catholic Christianity than a soft-focus version of the contemporary ecclesiological consensus. Is it too much to hope that the evangelical tradition will dig a little deeper into the theology of grace? Bart warned Roman Catholics around the time of Vatican II to beware lest they became liberal Protestants; my worry is that evangelicals will become catholicized Protestants who make the mistake of thinking that the only ecclesiological improvement upon individualism and ‘soul liberty’ is a rather ill-digested theology of the totus Christus.”
“A Christian who stays away from the assembly is a contradiction in terms. The church-community, united by one word, hears this word again and again while assembled; conversely, the word that created the church-community again and again calls it together into concrete assembly. For it is the word preached according to the will of God and of the church-community that is the means through which this will is actualized.”
[Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 227]
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© CHRISTIAN PAUL KUSCH 2013
Le Corbusier Haus Berlin (Flatowallee)
Berlin Charlottenburg
