Monthly Archives: May 2008 - Page 2

Jesus for President?

Posted by on May 12, 2008 29 comments

Don’t get me wrong, I think Shane Caliborne is probably a really, really great guy with a lot of good stuff to say.  Even though he sports dreds and probably eats far less meat than I do, I know we have a very great deal in common.  Not the least of which are things like living in New Monastic communities and wanting to learn how to work for a radically Christian political ethic in the context of late modern capitalism, especially in its American incarnation. 

That said, I can’t get over feeling a bit troubled by his latest book, Jesus for President.  I realize (of course) that this title is designed to shock American evangelicals into thinking about the Lordship of Christ in political terms; something that is desperately needed ineed.  However I remain sceptical of using the rubrics and nomenclature of American poltitical discourse to discuss the nature of the Lordship of Christ.  If there is one thing that Jesus needs, it sure as hell isn’t my vote.  The Lordship of Christ nothing if not fundamentally undemocratic.  I realize of course that Claiborne and his compatriots are not trying to draw these analogies, but I just fear that this kind of imprecision and sensationalistic rhetoric may only serve to polarize and piss off rather than convict and persuade (not that I am opposed to pissing people off of course!).  I fear also that this book, the stated purpose of which is to “provoke the Christian political imagination” will ultimately fail to make the kind of meta-level political and theological claims that are necessary to truly fostering a theopolitical imagination.  In other words, what we need to do as Christians is to challenge the very foundations of the working political assumptions in our world.  I’m just not quite sure if this book does that.

Against a Pneumatology of the Gaps

Posted by on May 12, 2008 3 comments

Most of the church throughout the world has just finished the celebration of the day of Pentecost (Assuming, of course that we all did celebrate Pentecost — for those of you that observed Mother’s Day instead, please remember that your salvation is in doubt.)  In light of this celebration, and throughout my congregations’ liturgy, feast, and fellowship for this holy day, I found myself reflecting on the work of the Spirit in the economy of salvation.  Part of our gathered worship involved several people in the congregation reading stories of the Spirit’s work in the world.  Stories included tales of missionaries to aboriginal tribes, the life story of a Muslim man-turned violently persecuted Christian evangelist, and an amazing account of the lives of various people on different sides of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland who were reconciled and became sources of Christian hope and presence to one another (across Catholic-Protestant lines) in situations of extremee violence and tragedy.

What struck me throughout the liturgy and in reflection on my own life and the stories that were brought involved the shape of how we are to understand the Spirit’s work in the economy of salvation.  I found my thoughts constantly referring back to the stories of former radical IRA members and former British soldiers embracing one another and becoming networks of solidarity across lines that were once drawn in blood.  The thought that continued to play in my mind throughout the day of Pentecost was that these things are not unlikely, these things are impossible.  It simply is not possible, under the tyranny of human history that the people in these stories could have come to see themselves as siblings in the same divine family.  The reconciliation of enemies is something that is simply not possible in this world.  Jew and Gentile sitting at table together as full members of one another in the people of God was not just unlikely, it was impossible.  And yet, that is what the church became when the Spirit was poured out of the bosom of the Father.

The point of all this is to help us give praise to the Spirit in a manner that is fitting.  Too often I fear that the Spirit functions in much the same way as Bonhoeffer’s rightly critiqued God of the gaps.  The deus ex machina, the prop-god wheeled out onto the stage of Greek tragedy to give closure to the narrative will forever be the enemy of the Christian doctrine of God.  With Bonhoeffer, we must look, not to some gap, some aspect of our experience which we cannot assimilate and then posit God as the entity to fill that gap; rather we must look for God at the center, in the fullness of the reality of life.  The Spirit, however is almost always looked at as one who fills the gaps.  We only invoke or assume the Spirit’s work when we have run out of natural explanations for how something unlikely happened.  The Spirit is the final piece in an unlikely puzzle.  This mindset lands us in the perilous orbit of idolatry.

The Spirit does not complete the picture, the Spirit is not the final building block.  There can be no Spirit of the gaps any more than a God of the gaps.  For it is the work of the Spirit, not to make really, really difficult things work out, but rather the make the impossible into reality.  The work of the Spirit does not complete, integrate, or solidify any human project.  The work of the Spirit is that of disintegration and receation.  The Spirit renders the impossibilities, not as hopes or possibilities, but as realities to be experienced in Christ.  It is impossible that people bred to despise one another for hundreds of years should become brothers.  It is impossible that people should speak to foreigners in their own languages that they have never heard before.  It is impossible that the blind should be made to see.  It is impossible that a dead man should live again. 

And yet this is precisely what Pentecost proclaims: the impossible has happened!  The inconceivable has come among us!  Unassimilatable newness has shattered the tyranny of the possible in the glory of the Spirit!  For the people of the Spirit all methods of calculation, control, and manipulation are to be rejected, not because such forms of power are too powerful, but rather because they are too weak.  In the luminosity of the Spirit, in which impossibilities become glorious, mysterious realities, the machinations of power and fear are consumed.  The ardor of God’s omnipotent love, poured out into the world in the form of God’s own self, God’s own Spirit has changed everything.  For the mission of the Spirit is to actualize the reality of the resurrection in all things.  And we have confidence that the mission of the Spirit will not be in vain.  The tongues of fire testify to this.  And no less strongly does the fire of infinite love which the Spirit kindles throughout the world.  The love which seats Jews with Gentiles.  The love which makes Loyalists and Republicans into brothers and sisters.  The fire of love has indeed been kindled and they will not cease until all the world has been consumed by them.  Veni Sancte Spiritus!

The Lamb and the Meaning of History

Posted by on May 12, 2008 Comments Off

“‘The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!’  John is here saying, not as an inscrutable paradox but as a meaningful affirmation, that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history.  The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience ([Rev.] 13:10).  The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in human conflict.  The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, not because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys.  The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect, but one of cross and resurrection.”

–John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 232.

The Kenotic Subject

Posted by on May 11, 2008 5 comments

“The kenosis of God creates the possibility of a human subject very different from the consumer self.  The absolute uniqueness of Christ cannot be subsumed under any more general categories of being.  If God is God, then God must always be beyond our comprehension: si comprehendis non est Deus.  We are, nevertheless, invited to participate in the Trinitarian life through Christ and the work of the Spirit.  But in order to do so, we cannot grasp, we can only submit.  We cannot stand back from the world and survey it; we must simply take our role in the drama that God is staging and give ourselves to it.”

–William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 81.

Problematic Words

Posted by on May 11, 2008 21 comments

There are certain key buzz words among evangelicals, particualrly emergey-types that literally make me want to perpetrate extreme violence on anyone I hear saying them.  And sadly, every now and then I find some of them escaping my own lips.  So, if you find me too harsh, just realize that much of what I am about to say is as much self-loathing as others-loathing.

So, here are quintessential evangelical phrases that if you say around me may very well result me suddenly unleashing all my wrath upon your kneecaps:

“I’m just looking for someone to ‘do life’ with me.”

“I’m searching for something real, you know, something raw, authentic, you know?”

“What we really need is authentic community.”

“We need to strive to be more intentionally missional.”

“We’re not Christians, we’re Jesus-followers!”

“Jesus was Green!”

“Everything must change.”

“We totally need to hear each other’s stories…like I need to hear your story and you need to hear my story.  We need to just hear, you know?  Each other’s stories.”

“We’re all about radical discipleship.”

“Our home communities are where the church really happens.”

What else is there?  Come on folks, lets do life and be authentic together as we think of more annoying emergentisms!

Obession over Speed

Posted by on May 10, 2008 2 comments

“We are a nation obsessed.  American culture is nothing more than a pastiche of fixations.  We are obsessed with health.  We are obsessed with pleasure.  We are obsessed with speed.  We are obsessed with efficiency.  In simplest terms, we are obsessed by the desire to accelerate every element of our existence in a futile attempt to expierience as much of life as we can in the shortest possible time.  We have all entered a a race to devour the largest volume of gratification before it kills us.”

–Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (New York: Scribner, 2006), 58.

Who Can Mark Driscoll Worship?

Posted by on May 9, 2008 134 comments

I really shouldn’t have expected anything distinctively sane from a magazine called ‘Relevant‘.  That was a huge mistake, and one that I can assure my faithful readership I will never make again.  The magazine as a whole is committed to pedantically insisting that Christians can, pretty much be cool too, if they just try hard enough.  Personally, I find this idea completely insane.  Out of all the people I’ve ever met I have yet to meet someone who is clearly a Christian who is able to fill out all the aspects of coolness that are demanded by our culture.  But I digress.  My point in all this was merely that I should have expected something as stupid, insipid, and sophomoric as this from Relevant Magazine.

In a multiple-person interview that originally ran in early 2007, Relevant Magazine asked seven questions to various evangelical church leaders about what the most important challenges to the evangelical churches in a America are at this time in history.  The answers vary from the utterly boring, to the sadly uniformed, to the sort of ok, to the downright ridiculous.  Mark Driscoll’s answers however, were in a class of their own.  In response to the question “What do you see as the greatest challenge for young Christians in the next 10 years?” he responded:

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity. [Italics added]

I am of course most interested in Driscoll’s comment that he is unable to worship someone he can beat up.  Strangely enough this would seem that he is unable to worship Jesus.  As John Howard Yoder pointed out in reflection on John 1, the proclamation that the Word became flesh “does not simply mean that God became tangible.  It means he became weak, undignified, vulnerable.  The power behind the creation came among us in such a way that we can hurt him.”  The whole reality of Jesus is as one who makes himself vulnerable, who puts himself at the mercy of the forces of sin and death that we have unleashed upon the world.  Driscoll is almost certainly right, he could indeed beat up Jesus, and if he saw him, I’m afraid he probably would!

The real Jesus, the Jesus who makes himself vulnerable, thereby revealing the nature and reality of God from all eternity as love is not nearly exciting enough for Driscoll.  His Jesus is a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, and a cadre of mixed martial-arts welterweight champions.  If Jesus is not an ass-kicking man’s man who changes his own oil, wins bar fights, and ropes cattle, he certainly is not worthy of Driscoll’s worship.

What is ultimately so revealing about this whole statement is not so much that is shows clearly that Mark Driscoll is insanely insecure about his own male identity – though it certainly shows that with sublime clarity.  What is revealing about this quote is how it shows the bombastically western notion of masculinity that defines large swaths of evangelicalism.  For Driscoll anything less than the assertion that God himself is a gun-slinging son of a bitch makes one into a wuss who deserves nothing more than ridicule.  Driscoll lives in a world of binary oppositions.  You either have to be a cage fighter ready to beat the shit out of anyone who so much as glances at your girlfriend, or you are a pot-smoking hipster pinko who does nothing but surf the net on a Mac all day and drink organic microbrews.

It’s a wonderfully simple world of black and white simplicity that Driscoll lives in.  And what makes it really great is that he gets to live at the very tip top of this world’s power structure (maybe just below his Jesus character, pictured to the left).  He is the last of the true Christians.  In a world of effeminate losers toting Derrida around in their beer-stained man purses, Driscoll is standing in the gap, fighting for truth, justice, and of course, the American way.  It’s a world where everything is stark, everything is simple and God is remade comfortably in Mark Driscoll’s masculine image.  Wallowing in his self-aggrandizement, Driscoll makes certain to let everyone know that he is one of the 25 most powerful people in Seattle according to Seattle Magazine (as advertised on the site for Driscoll’s new book).  Just about everything he says or does seems like a plea: “Goddammit, I’m a man!  Am too!”

What makes the world of Mark Driscoll so fascinating is not just that it insane (which it is), or that is so obviously the product of western culture rather than the Bible or the Christian tradition (which is clear).  What is interesting about it is how utterly obvious it is that this world is a complete fabrication.  I cannot imagine anyone looking for a moment at the stuff that Mark Driscoll spouts and not immediately realizing that this guy is obviously freaked out by the world and is doing everything that he can to construct an alternative reality for himself and other like-minded people to live in.  In Mark Driscoll’s world Jesus actually did come to kick the Romans’ ass (or we wish he had) and he calls us to be iron-pumping, football heroes who slam nerds into lockers and date the hottest girl on the cheerleading squad (without having premarital sex of course).

In other words, Mark Driscoll is Wally Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver. Or, more accuarately, he is Wally after his freshman year of college.  He’s wised up enough to know that he better be able to beat people up, and force his point in order to keep himself above the morass of pagan decadence in this evil world, but hasn’t yet awoken to the fact that his world, which he thinks is divinely ordained, is in fact, a culturally produced schizophrenia.  It is the death throws of a handfull of white western males who are consumed with the terror of the knowledge deep down that they are no longer in control of American culture and history.  And this is precisely why Mark Driscoll is pathetic.  In spite of all his bombast and goofy machismo, he is, in the last analysis a very sad, lonely person.  That’s how you get when you have to construct your whole world.  The very things that could bring him liberation are the very things he sneers at.  Living out of control, embracing vulnerability, allowing oneself to be put into question, these are the very things that he cannot stomach.  They are far too effeminate and girly for a man like him to countenance.  They are marks of the hippie Jesus that Driscoll could never worship.  However they are the very shape of the salvation offered in crucified, murdered Jesus.  Driscoll is rejecting the very things that could set him free in his attempt to make Christianity distinctive.

His loss.

Incarnational Ministry?

Posted by on May 9, 2008 11 comments

The language of incarnation is everywhere in Christian ministerial settings.  Everywhere ministry needs to be incarnational.  What that means — I think — is that ministry should involve getting really, really involved with those one is ministering to.  This is what incarnational ministry is supposed to mean, getting involved really deeply in the lives and realities of other peoples’ lives, just as the eternal Son of God became a human being in Jesus.

I have a few problems with such notions.  Primarily, talking about ministry as incarnational presupposes that I, the minister, am the one doing the incarnating.  In other words, I am the one in a positionof power condescending to the realities of the mass of persons to whom I seek to minister.  In short, I get to be Jesus and they get to be the needy saps in need of salvation which I am only too happy to provide, being a beneficent minister as I am.

To my mind the language of incarnational ministry often functions as a way of securing a sort of elevated invulnerability on the part of those who style themselves as ministers.  It  establishes them as one acting en persona Christi, and all others merely as passive recipients of the grace they posses.  It rules out the possibility of the intrusion of disruptive difference into one’s life from those for whom one is ministerially responsible.  The incarnational minister is the one who enters into the lives of others, they never become the interruptive Jesus who breaks into his world.  The language of incarnational ministry freights all exchanges to go one way.  Perhaps the worst thing about the language of incarnational ministry is that it constitutes a suppression of the many on the part of the one.

In a bizarre way, the language of incarnation often yields a model of ministry that is the exact opposite of what we see in Jesus.  In place of the Lord who is the Servant of all, we get self-assured, highly capable, impervious leaders for whom the congregation of can never be more than their mission field which they always engage from a position of de facto superiority.

God has the Same Shape as Jesus

Posted by on May 9, 2008 1 comment

“An apostolic report can be forgotten or contested.  A communal memory can grow dim or be reinterpreted or seem strange.  That one event way back there is so specific and so local.  Can we really go on celebrating it as the hinge of history?  It is to this that the authors or the poets behind the high points of the New Testament witness respond when they proclaim that what happened on the cross is a revelation of the shape of what God is, and of what God does, in the total drama of history.  They affirm as a permanent pattern what in Jesus was a particular event.  The eternal Word condescending to put himself at out mercy, the creative power behind the universe emptying itself, pouring out itself into the frail mold of humanity, has the same shape as Jesus.  God has the same shape as Jesus, and he always has had.  The cross is what creation is all about.  What Jesus did was local, of course, because that is how serious and real our history is to God.  But what the cross was locally is universally and always the divine nature.”

–John Howard Yoder, He Came Preaching Peace (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998), 84-85.

An Evangelical Manifesto?

Posted by on May 8, 2008 3 comments

Apparently there is one.  I hope to give it a thorough reading shortly.  A large part of the manifesto seems dedicated to trying to rescue American evangelicalism from political subservience to the religous right, which seems to be a good thing.  However, perhaps the most questionable aspect of the mansucript is the attempt to galvanize and reassert “evangelical identity”, whatever that might be.  Jamie Smith has some good things to say on the topic.

Ascension and Eschatology

Posted by on May 7, 2008 16 comments

One important point about the ascension of Jesus pertains to how we conceptualize the location of Christ in his ascended state.  The question of where Christ is remains a theological problem that introduces all sorts of cosmological difficulty into Christian proclamation.  I suggest that we must always understand the ascension in primarily eschatological rather than spatial terms, if you will.

Jesus has not just gone “up” to some higher level of reality, he has ascended into the reality of God’s future, the eschatological telos of all creation which is the koinonial communion of all created being with the Holy Trinity. The place where Jesus is is God’s future, his location simply is the Father, the very one who is the goal, source, and hope of all created beings.  This location cannot be triangulated spatially because God is not an inhabitant of the universe as Herbert McCabe has so often reminded us.  The universe is rather an inhabitant of God’s triune love.  To say that Jesus has ascended is not to say so much about where we might find him spatially, as to say that he is now to be found everywhere that God apocalyptically breaks into the old age of sin and death.

Thus, we understand Christ’s ecclesial and eucharistic presence in a similarly eschatological way. Christ is present to us in the eucharist and in the gathered people of God as the future — divine-human communion — is realized on earth through the Spirit. The presence of Christ is the reality of the Trinitarian future of the world apocalyptically breaking into the present age.  Because Christ has ascended into God’s future, we have a future indeed.

Types of Ecclesiology

Posted by on May 6, 2008 30 comments

This is intended solely as a descriptive, handout-style breakdown of different sorts of ecclesiology within the broad spectrum of the Christian tradition.  As such it clearly is not accurate on the micro level.  Any and all typologies are, in my opinion extremely dangerous.  However, if they help in facilitating the theological task at points, then perhaps they ought not be done away with.

From my perspective there are two basic polarities which define the shape of a given ecclesiology.  The first is what I term the High-Low polarity, the second I refer to as the Strong-Weak polarity.  Within this framework any given ecclesial body could potentially fall in one of four categories, High-Strong, High-Weak, Low-Strong, and Low-Weak.  Here are my descriptors of these categories and my attending attempt to put various Christian ecclesial bodies in their proper place.  I am sure there will be inaccuracies here based upon my own ecclesial experiences, familiarities and limitations.  So, please correct me if you are so inclined.  It will help greatly my final development of this typology.

Types:

High Church Ecclesiology:  High view of church history and tradition.  Emphasizes the liturgy and above all the Eucharist.  Churches are generally structured episcopally (i.e. through a hierarchy of bishops who stand in communion with each other).  Emphasizes salvation as membership in the church through participation in the sacraments.  Generally holds to infant baptism.  Close connection between baptism and initiation into the broad community of faith.

Low Church Ecclesiology:  Generally suspicious of history and tradition.  Emphasizes the Bible as the church’s ultimate authority and preaching is more central then the Eucharist or the liturgy.  Churches tend to be structured congregationally (i.e. governed by the local congregation itself or through one or more elders appointed by congregations).  Emphasizes salvation as the subjective appropriation and confession of faith in Christ.  Generally holds to believers’ baptism.  Close connection between salvation, baptism, and committed discipleship in community.

Strong Ecclesiology:  Holds a high view of the role of the church in the economy of salvation.  Understands that the church is the means by which God is at work in the world.  A strong view of the church as the ongoing embodied presence of Christ in the world.  The church participates in the mission of God to redeem the world.  Membership in the visible church community is indispensable to Christian life and the shape of Christian salvation.

Weak Ecclesiology:  Holds a humble and limited view of God’s role for the church in his plan of salvation.  The church exists to strengthen and instruct the believer and to witness to God’s work of salvation that takes place solely through God’s action.  The church does not participate in God’s action, but points away from itself to God’s action outside of human effort.  The emphasis is on the invisible church, the universal body of all people who believe in Christ throughout the world.  All Christians are members of this church and that is what is primary.  Membership in a local congregation is for edification and growth, but is not central to salvation.

Examples:

High-Strong: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican Communion, Some Lutherans.

High-Weak: Episcopal Church (USA), Methodists, Independent Catholics, Some Presbyterians, Some Lutherans.

Low-Strong: Anabaptists/Mennonites, Some Baptists (esp. British), New Monasticism, Some Evangelicals, House Churches, African American Churches.

Low-Weak: Most Evangelicals, Most Baptists (esp. USA), Pentecostals, Charismatics, Holiness Movement, Nazarenes.

Evangelicalicious

Posted by on May 6, 2008 13 comments

There are, I think few more contested definitions than those applied to the term ‘evangelical.’  However, attempting to define evangelicalism in a precise or pleasing way is, I think, not all that important.  What is important, however, is to know how people who use the term understand it.  So, with that in mind, let me hear it.  What do you think of when you think of the word ‘evangelical’?  At the lowest level, what does such an epitaph conjure up on your mind?

True Radicality

Posted by on May 6, 2008 Comments Off

“What is truly radical…is not that God rewards those who help the poor; what is truly radical is that Jesus identifies himself with the poor.  The pain of the hungry person is the pain of Christ, and it is thus also the pain of anyone who is a member of the body of Christ.  If we are identified with Christ, who identifies himself with the suffering of all, then what is called for is more than just charity.  The very distinction between what is mine and what is yours breaks down in the body of Christ.  We are not to consider ourselves as absolute owners of our stuff, who then occasionally graciously bestow charity on the less fortunate.  In the body of Christ, your pain is my pain, and my stuff is available to be communicated to you in your need… In the consumption of the Eucharist, we cease to be merely ‘the other’ to each other.  In the Eucharist, Christ is gift, giver, and recipient; we are simultaneously fed and become food for others.”

–William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 56.

The Catholic Luther

Posted by on May 2, 2008 3 comments

In contrast to the standard story, Luther advocated a manifestly high and vibrant ecclesiology, indeed an ecclesiology which is thoroughgoingly catholic and evangelical, being firmly rooted in the great tradition of the church, particularly attuned to patristic sources.

Despite the way in which the later tradition of Protestant modernity came to see the doctrine of justification by faith as elevating the interior religious experience of the individual to the center of the faith, for Luther the doctrine of justification by faith was not understood as relegating salvation to an inner transaction between the individual and God, but rather was Luther’s attempt to recover the reality of the church as that body which purely receives and only subsequently mediates salvation. As such, salvation, for Luther does not consist “only in a spiritual act that occurs in deep solitude and with full mental clarity” as Karl Heim would have it. Rather it consists in being incorporated by the Spirit into the church, the body of Christ, God’s “Christian holy people” (“On the Councils and the Church” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther 1529-1546, ed. by Theodore G. Tappert [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007], 335.) Salvation by grace alone, for Luther was not the flight of the alone to the alone, but rather induction into a people. Christian salvation, for Luther is a distinctly social reality in which participation in the life of the visible church through the Word, the Sacraments and cruciform discipleship is at the very center of the Christian mystery.

What is central here is Luther’s primary depiction of the church as God’s holy people. For Luther’s mature ecclesiology it is the reality of the church as a gathered community of saints who together live under the command of God that is soteriologically important. It is into this reality that Christians are baptized and in and through which they are sanctified (CC, 336). Luther’s emphasis on the holiness of the people of God is a correlate of Luther’s real soteriological concern that drove him throughout his life. As Yeago points out, the notion of the young Luther who suffered egregiously from a troubled conscience, longing for a gracious God is not confirmed by a close reading of Luther’s early writings. “The troubling question that emerges from the preoccupations of the young Luther’s thought is not ‘How can I get a gracious God?’ but ‘Where can I find the real God?’ All the evidence in the texts suggests that it was the threat of idolatry, not a craving for assurance of forgiveness, that troubled Luther’s conscience if anything did.” Such an evaluation accords well with the themes that come from Luther’s earlier treatises in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology and his Heidelberg Disputation in which the reality of the true God over against either the God of Aristotle and the Scholastics or a theology of the cross over against a theology of glory are the central themes.

Thus, the central ecclesiological question for Luther involved how the true church of the true God, his “Christian holy people” might be identified in the world. Luther’s dispute with the Roman hierarchy of his day was not in any sense based on a rejection of a strong notion of the church or catholicity, but rather on the conviction that the church catholic had been betrayed and duped by a corrupt ecclesiastical bureaucracy which had become apostate. The loss of the true God for which the early Luther sought had brought about the loss of the true form of the church as God’s holy people. Luther’s ecclesiology, far from subordinating the church to the individual is in fact a clarion call to return to a radically ecclesial form of life in which the central practices of the church mark and shape the lives of all Christians, for it is in and through these visible practices that, according to Luther, we are sanctified.

This is precisely the ecclesiology that Luther articulates in his treatise On the Councils and the Church. Such an ecclesiology poses a distinctive challenge both to contemporary Roman Catholic ecclesiology (which of course is to be radically distinguished from the Roman Catholic milieu of Luther’s day) and to the Free Church tradition deriving from the Radical Reformation. In engaging Luther’s ecclesiology, such a mutually critical and illuminative dialogue offers great promise to the contemporary ecclesial and ecumenical scene in which fragmentation and polarization seems to be the order of the day. Ironically enough, it may well be that the very Reformer who is alleged to have shattered Christendom into a thousand pieces may be instrumental in fostering the sort of “patient and fraternal dialogue” that is desperately needed in ecumenical discussions, both at a global and local level.

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