The Lights that we have Kindled

By Duane Alexander Miller Botero, c 2005

Submitted to the faculty of St Marys University (San Antonio) In partial fulfillment of the Master of Arts in Theology

9102 Brigadoon San Antonio, TX 78254 210-521-3476 720-207-3363 xphilosopherking@yahoo.com

1. Anthropology
Do you think the faith has conquered the World And that lions no longer need keepers? Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be? 1

Eliot poses a good question. When we forget how tenuous the foothold that the church has in this world is, we forget that whatever has beenpaganism, human sacrifice, idolatry, rampant martyrdom and persecution of believersis always ready to enter our midst. We really have nothing new to say in this book; rather we simply wish to collect the observations of several Christians whose minds are much greater than ours. The truth is that the faith is on the defensive in many of its classical strongholds, like the United States of America, and it has been overthrown and exiled in the Old World for the most part. In its own weak and merciful way it perdures in Africa and Latin America, saints are martyred in Asia every day. Asia Minor was once the center of Eastern Christianity, but now the nation of Turkey, pop. 66 million, is about 99% Muslim; Egypt was a majority Christian country for over a millennia but Christians are now a weak minority. The truth is that the faith is not welcomed in the world. Furthermore, much of what was once considered to be a furthering of that faith is now in retrospect seen to be a rather thinly veiled effort at exporting a sick and moribund Western culture. Is it not true that God has chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith, and heirs to the Kingdom that he has promised to them that love him? Because of our love of the faith and the one in whom it was revealed, we offer this useless piece of reflection. A Christian Anthropology It is truly a disgraceful and opprobrious thing that so many churches in this day are investing vast amounts of money and energy in things that are so entirely peripheral to the Churchs mission. But time and time again throughout history the church has focused on one element of her

Eliot 160.

common life to the neglect of another, on one doctrine or practice just to forget another, equally valid and important for the life of the community. Indeed, at most times in history the great shifts in praxis and dogma were reactionary. Whether we are speaking of the various European Reformations (Lutheran, English, Dutch, etc.), the Council of Trent (a stubborn reaction to an ecclesiological and doctrinal reaction to a terrible pastoral situation), Vatican I (a reaction to Modernism), or some other earlier epoch, we always find that the church is more often reactive than active! Some Reformers in reaction to what they consider to be an overly superstitious and magical Eucharistic theology relegate it to an almost insignificant position in their communal worship; fundamentalists react to increasingly liberal Scriptural theology by insisting that the whole Bible is to be interpreted as a purely historical record; Pentecostals condemn Baptists for not being open to the indwelling power of the Spirit, while they themselves are condemned by Baptists for being experientialists and not practicing a faith soundly based on the Scripture. Catholics are charged with idolatry for praying to saints, but then many Catholics insist on a theory of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist that relies on Aristotelian science, which is nowhere else used in the modern world! It is easy at this point to become frustrated with the stubbornness of the various Christian communities across the centuries. But we are hopeful, and remember that Gods YES to humanity outweighs his NO to humanity:
Similarly, in Church history, to point out the sins, faults, and weaknesses of the scholastics and the mystics, Reformers and Papists, Lutherans and Reformed, rationalists and pietists, orthodox and liberalseven though these failings certainly dare not be overlooked or left unmentionedcannot become a more urgent task than seeing and understanding them all in the light of the forgiveness of sins that is necessary and promised to us all.2

Taking this truth to heart, and looking for a way forward, we must ask, what would the church look like that is not so heavily influenced by reaction, but is based on a theologically comprehensive and holistic approach? Specifically, what are the checks that will keep the church from sliding into legalism at one time, then into secular liberalism and sterility at another time? And especially significant in this context, what does a missionary church look like? That

is, the church that is actually accomplishing her task, fulfilling her raison detre, and is living for the worldnot her own maintenance. To take into account all the historical evidence and great amount of ecclesiology and present a detailed proposal is beyond the scope of our project here. But we can and will provide a few observations of influential theologians in their respective fields that we believe will be useful to all churches and communities, and that will foster unity in the body of Christ. We must never forget that he prayed that we be would be one, as he and the Father are one. And this was for the sake of the mission; in our unity the world would see that the Father and Jesus are one. And lions still need keepers. And what has been, can still be. Traditions and Communions We wish to distinguish three traditions within the history of Christianity. These traditions are not always affiliated with specific denominations and while they generally have certain theological tendencies, each is better described as a spirituality that informs and influences the ways that people worship and interact with God. They are, in no particular order:
Evangelical Charismatic Sacramental

For example, the traditional Roman Catholic would be more sacramental, while the Pentecostal would be more charismatic, and the average non-denominational Christian from a Bible church would be evangelical. That having been said, there is nothing fundamental that bars a Pentecostal from being sacramental or a Catholic from being evangelical3. Our thesis is that the church must combine all three of these traditions in personal and communal devotion. In doing this, the church will maintain a sure footing in the midst of this world of shadows and darkness, and will be better equipped to fulfill her apostolic and missionary destiny.

Barth 94.

Anthropology All the great world religions4 make (at least) two powerful claims. One is regarding the nature of absolute reality, whether we call that a personal God or not. Equally significant is the fact that every religion necessarily offers a theory of what it means to be human as well. Karl Barth says this:
A God who confronted man simply as exalted, distant and strange, that is, a divinity without humanity, could only be the God of a dysangelion, of a bad news instead of the good news. [] In evangelical theology, man is absolutely not something that must be overcome. 5

This is an indication that it is impossible to speak about God without at the same time saying something about man, or as Chauvet puts it, The anthropological is the place of every possible theological (152)6. In one ancient form of Buddhism the ultimate reality is the One, the one wherein there is no division. If man is to re-merge with the One then he must abandon desire and striving (the source of all suffering), following a path of purification, whereby he will be able to overcome the illusion of his personal existence. In this example the ultimate reality which is not personal and is truly pan-theistic leads us to a clear ultimatum for humans to either choose to continue deluding themselves in indulging their illusory existence and desires, or to disengage their false sense of individuality and strive for a return to the pure form wherein that individuality is snuffed out like a flame (thus the etymology of the word nirvana). In the case of the Buddha, it was the observation about human suffering and desire that came first and then led to the conclusion about God.
3

That having been said, there have always been theological differences in general between the groups. Some areas of difficulty include baptism of children, apostolic succession, validity of sacraments, hierarchical authority, liturgy, and so on. 4 We recognize the slipperiness of defining the term religion, and so we do not. By great we mean simply that they have become very prevalent in terms of the number of adherents. 5 Barth 12. 6 Barth also points out, wisely, that we must avoid forming God in our image, as opposed to understanding ourselves in the light of Gods self-revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.

Another example from Greek philosophy with which we still come into conflict is the idea that God is entirely impassible and unchanging; therefore God feels no emotions, for that would be a change and thus an imperfection. (Later we will examine more in detail the theology of Louis Marie Chauvet and investigate his proposal to overcome this way of thinking.) If God is all knowing and not feeling at all, then that has clear implications for man and what it means to live a holy life. Knowledge would become the greatest good and material being (that is, the human body) could easily become disvalued. We offer these merely as examples of how what Barth and Chauvet say above is universally applicable. Barth goes on to develop the idea of God as God with us. In other religions it may be possible to keep God more at arms length, but in Christianity since the most perfect and complete revelation of God, the reflection of his glory, the icon of God, is revealed, we are confronted with a God that is always close to us. (The reference is absolutely not to the Bible.) If what Jesus says is true, If you have seen me, then you have seen the Father, then our Gospelbased (evangelical) theology will be forever tied to our anthropology. We cannot utter a Godword without also already having uttered a Human-word, nor can we utter a Human-word without already having uttered a God-word. As Pope John Paul II often pointed out, Jesus reveals not only God to man, but man to man. The Pillar of Truth To call something the pillar of truth is no doubt to make a rather outrageous claim, but Paul does not hesitate to use this sort of lofty language in reference to what we now call the Church. We have mentioned above some of the many divisions within this so-called pillar of truth, and one could fill entire volumes if one wished to with such a history. Consequently, at sundry times various theologies regarding what the church should or should not be have emerged. Some of the details are dogmatic (what the church must or must not believe, where the church may have different opinions), historical (which church-communion is the successor of the Apostolic churcha claim that every church in the world now makes to some degree), Scriptural (what is the cannon that the church should use in its worship, study, and preaching), and so on. What we

seek to do here is offer a picture of what a church might look like that honors and recognizes one kind of Christian anthropologyan anthropology found and used fruitfully in the Bible. Some in postmodern times invoke a disjuncture between n the Scripture and the church; if we are not willing to allow this claim to vitiate our thesis we must establish the nature of the link between the Scripture and the universal Church today. A model has been offered wherein the theologos and the anthropologos are in separable, but Barth is willing to take us a step further in asserting that Gods revelatory acts in historyspecifically in the history of Israel and Israels messiahare inexorably intertwined with the existence of both the Scripture and the existence of this pillar of truth we call the church:
There is a definitive group of men, the biblical prophets and apostles, who directly heard the Word of that history. They were called by it to become its authentic and authoritative witnesses to the people of all times and places. A whole group of men arose as secondary witnesses through the power of the Word spoken and entrusted to those earlier, primary witnesses. A community arose, the Church, destined and commissioned to proclaim the work and word of God in the world. What an extraordinary commission for a group of men!7

With this insight we have the final link that connects together all the elements whereupon we can begin to construct a robust theo-anthropology of the church and her mission. In essence, what we are saying is that since the church is composed of humans-in-community (secondary witnesses), then Gods revelation of who he is (the Word of God), and thus of what man is, is a better and more authoritative place to start than in the variegated and often intractable historical conflicts that have erupted from time to time. Thus we do not view the most beneficial starting place for ecumenical dialogue (and I mean here the reunification of all Christians into one functioning body, whether or not it is united in one ecclesiastical hierarchy) as discussing analytical theology, but more in the area of liturgy or what we might call pastoral-liturgical theology. By pastoral-liturgical theology we mean the thinking and speaking about God that is most immediate and influential in determining how our community lives and worships, or what the liberation theologians have called praxis. Central to
7

Barth 49.

our thought will be a necessary blurring of the any line that has been drawn between liturgy and pastoral ministry; we submit that the liturgy that is simply confined to the church walls is not liturgy at all because it cannot be missionary. If it cannot be missionary or missional then it cannot be honestly called Christian. Liturgy is simply a word that means the work of the people (something we will revisit in the theology of Schmemann); we use the word in its most etymological sense. All Christian communities have a liturgy, whether they write it down or not, whether they read from a page or act from memory alone, whether they have a designated leader or not. Liturgy is simply the order of worship and prayer. What we propose then is beginning to discern a liturgy based on what it means to be truly human. The liturgy that respects and understands and addresses what it means for humans to be human will, we think, be a beginning towards the unity that Jesus desired for us. We will thus be able to better witness to the Word that God spoke, speaks, and will speak in the midst of all men (Barth 18). We do not propose that all churches should have one liturgy, though that would be a rather stunning achievement. Nor do we propose a system of any kind. We said that not only should it be understood to be liturgical, but pastoral. Pastoral in that if this approach to understanding man and God is really fruitful, it will help the various church servants (whether ordained or lay) in counseling, discipleship, teaching, spiritual direction and above all in mobilizing apostolic missionaries. The possibility of addressing the whole human being will, we hope, assist them in this vocation. What we suggest then, in short, is the old Greek anthropology, that man is to approached as having or reflecting a mind-heart (nous, psyche, kardia), body (soma), and spirit (pneuma). We further suggest that the above-mentioned spiritual traditions roughly correspond to these three facets of what it means to be human: Mind-heart:evangelical :: body:sacramental :: spirit:charismatic.

We do not believe that we have here identified the essence or definition of what it means to be a human being. Nor do we insist that these three words are somehow monumental and essential to an understanding of the Christian church and Mission. Rather, as time has gone on God has worked through broken people in a broken world, and at different times things have been lost and recovered. We simply propose that an incorporation of the best elements (and thus missional/missionary) into the life of an assembly will most adequately guide them and their servant-leaders into the fulfillment of the Mission of Christ. Scripture Paul, in vindicating his apostolic authority, appeals to his own body:
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scriptureI believed, and so I spokewe also believe, and so we speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

In this entire passage we see Pauls understanding of the human being manifested quite well. Note how odd Pauls repetition of terms like body and flesh sound to us today. It is an indication of the centrality of the body that Paul does not start out with spiritual or emotional distress only, but uses dramatic language to identify his solidarity with Jesus in suffering bodily harm. That Paul is still alive is a testimony to the fact that Jesus Christ really was raised from the dead, so he can say the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. In face of this threat and peril, what is his attitude? He is bold and follows the example of the psalmist who explains that belief leads to proclamation; the inspiration for this is his confidence in the resurrection on the last day. Paul is certain of this eternal glory because Christ was raised. He says he has the spirit of faith. The spirit is what makes a person alive, like God breathing life into man and making him a living being in Genesis. Paul has the spirit of faith, not

doubt, therefore he can look beyond the transitory, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. The purpose of all this suffering is for the advance of the Gospel. In the anthropology that Paul uses there is not a clear division between the heart and the mind; feeling and thinking are related to each other. A person with wholesome thoughts will have wholesome emotions. A person that is emotionally corrupt will inevitably devolve into degenerate thinking as well. This in turn is always related to a corrupt use of the body. Sometimes corrupt use of the body will cause the degeneration of the mind-heart, and sometimes it will be the other way around. This is what is described in Romans 1 as Paul describes the progression of degeneration of humanity, or perhaps more specifically, the Roman Empire. First people refused to thank God or glorify him, even though they knew of his great power and divinity simply by virtue of Creation: they knew God and yet they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but their arguments became futile and their uncomprehending minds were darkened. The end result was the corrupt use of their bodies: That is why God abandoned them in their inmost cravings to filthy practices of dishonouring their own bodies because they exchanged Gods truth for a lie and have worshipped and served the creature instead of the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.8 As interrelated as these elementsthanklessness, futile though, misuse of the bodyare in the human being, we are all dead in sin. So then how can we be redeemed? If Romans 1 is true and our minds have been darkened and our bodies given over to depravation, then we are spiritually dead. How can God begin to redeem us? It is through the Holy Spirit, which he has given to us. His Spirit works together with our spirits to bring us life. The Spirit is called the mind of Christ and therefore we are able to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to God.
But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. (Rom 8:9-11)

It is the Spirit of God within us that is a pledge and assurance that in spite of our mortal bodies that are given to temptation we will be resurrected at the end. Paul goes on to say that it is through the Spirit that lives in us that we are now able to put to death the deeds of the body. None of this is to be understood as the body being evil. Rather, because we are fallen creatures our bodies are not yet completely redeemed. The resurrection is clearly at the center of

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Pauls understanding of the human being and his own vocation, and he looks forward to the day when we receive bodies that are incorruptible and without the stain of Adams sin. Rather the teaching we should take note of here is that when we are united to Christ in our conversion, we receive the Holy Spirit and are enabled to be pleasing to God. For a deeper understanding of how Paul views the action of Gods Spirit we must examine 1 Cor. 2. In this important passage Paul is correcting the Corinthians misunderstanding of philosophy and wisdom. He starts by reminding them that his preaching relied on the power of the Spirit rather than convincing arguments based on human philosophy. That does not mean that there is no wisdom for the Christian. It is a hidden wisdom which God did not reveal until the advent of Messiah. Nobody had perceived that this would be so, but God has poured out his Spirit on many people. So the true wisdom is the spiritual wisdom, that was hidden until recently. What is the relation of this hidden wisdom to the Spirit? Just as no other person knows your thoughts, so know one can know the thoughts of God. As a living being your spirit knows your thoughts only. In such a way, only Gods Spirit knows his thoughts. Due to our heavy Trinitarian tendencies it is difficult for us to grasp the import of what he is saying; we are so used to thinking of the Spirit as an entirely separate center of consciousness from that of God (the Father). That betrays an erroneous understanding of the Trinity, and will keep us from understanding this passage as well. Just as you and your spirit share the same substance, so Gods spirit is an aspect of God and knows Gods thoughts:
For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly Gods except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. 13 And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

The Spirit that comes from God enables us to move beyond our own spiritual corruption into Gods mind, and in a striking claim for Christs equality with God, the mind of Christ. The passage above is not a refutation of human learning or philosophy as some have supposed. Rather it is a bold claim that God has shared his Spirit with us, he is living in us, giving us access to Gods thinking and plans. These plans do not operate as do those of the

Quotes from Romans are from the New Jerusalem Bible.

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world, for as we read in the 1st chapter of this same epistle, God chose what was foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. So our bodies are destined for glorious resurrection and we know this because we have been given the Spirit from God, even though we struggle now with the weakness of the flesh, redemption is certain. God raised Christ as a first fruits, a pledge and guarantee of the resurrection of the righteous that will come at the end. Our minds are also corrupt because of our sinfulness, we do not think correctly or desire rightly and the wisdom available apart from God is of no avail in understanding or knowing his plan for our lives or Creation. God has given us his Spirit though and makes available to us the secret wisdom that until these last days had been hidden. This knowledge helps us in living according to his good plan for us which we are able to understand now. Our spirits were dead as well, but God has sent the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, to make our spirits alive as well. So it is through the Holy Spirit, as he speaks and works within us through the sacraments, the Gospel, and his gifts, that we are enabled to live as true and living human beings, being regenerated substantially in our bodies, minds and hearts, and spirits.

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2.

Sacramental
Why is it our position that the somatic element of Christian (Pauline) anthropology corresponds to the sacraments? It is perhaps the most difficult case to make, but in general the sacramental tradition (in its better moments) has found itself in the wide open field of Gods grace wherein the goodness of Creation is affirmed, providing a bulwark against Gnostic tendencies and intellectual legalism. Christianity has always been tempted by knowledge, gnosis. The idea that obtaining certain knowledge will enable one to draw closer to God has always been attractive to us for various reasons. This holds true for the old Gnostics for whom certain recondite rites and rituals and secret phrases and words were seen as a means to spiritual or religious power. It also holds true for the less obvious (and less interesting) semi-Gnosticism of the present, wherein knowledge of theology or Scripture may be mistakenly equated with Christian maturity. We hold that the sacramental tradition counteracts this tendency and holds us in check when we would glorify our own knowledge and perhaps ignore the centrality to humanity of the body. As Eliot says, You must not deny the body.9 In examining the sacramental tradition of Christianity we will be primarily using the theologies laid out by Fr. Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest and theologian who teaches in the United States, and Fr. Louis-Marie Chauvet, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian teaching in Paris. Historical Junctures One thing that is clear in both authors is that they believe that something went wrong with the way we were discussing (theologizing) the sacraments. Schmemann traces the problem all the way back to the first Lateran Council:
9

Eliot 168.

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At the end of the twelfth century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in Eucharistic elements is mystical or symbolic, it is not real. The Lateran Council which condemned himand here for me is the crux of the mattersimply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christs presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not mystical. What is truly decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice, the acceptance, on both side, that they are mutually exclusive.10

He later goes on to say that what was lost was in fact, the fundamental Christian mysterion, the antinomical holding together of the reality of the symbol, and of the symbolism of reality (129). Based on this observation Schmemann makes two related moves. One, he derides the division between natural and supernatural as artificial. On the other hand, he finds it unfortunate that for so long sacramental theology devoted itself to questions of details about the epiclesis and the nature of certain gestures: What disappeared was the Eucharist as one organic, all-embracing, and all-transforming act of the whole Church (34). The ultimate effect being that one can read a theology of Baptism without actually knowing what it looks like when the average parish church celebrates a baptism of a convert or a child, for example!
The Western Christian is primarily interested in certain very formal questions regarding the sacraments: their number, their validity, their institution, etc. Our purpose is to show that there exists and always existed a different perspective, a different approach to sacrament, and that this approach may be of crucial important precisely for the whole burning issue of mission, of our witness to Christ in the world. 11

Thus having laid a foundation for overcoming the lethal and artificial separation of symbol and reality, Schmemann is ready to offer us valuable reflections on the nature of what the sacramental tradition can offer to the Church and the world. Heidegger and Aquinas

10 11

Schmemann 128-9. Ibid 21.

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Chauvet arrives at a similar place but by quite a different route. He begins his compendious book by asking a basic question: why did Aquinas feel he needed to use language of causality in discussing the sacraments? In Chauvets eyes this was a misstep, but ultimately he says that the Thomistic theology of the sacraments was the best Aquinas could do with the language he had at the time. (In a connected note, Chauvet would probably say that the theory of transsubstantiation is not wrong, it is simply a theory that belongs to a kind of language [Aristotelian science] that no one really uses anymore. Thus it is good now to discuss a different way forward.) Chauvet dislikes talk of causation because it ultimately leads to a sense of instrumentality, which does not describe grace adequately:
in Scholastic discourse, the category of causality is always tied to the idea of production or augmentation; thus it always presupposes an explanatory model implying production, sometimes of a technical, sometimes of a biological variety , a model in which the idea of instrumentality plays a pivotal role. Clearly, there is an (apparently fundamental) heterogeneity between the language of grace and the instrumental and productionist language of causality. 12

And is this not the primary objection of Protestants to the Roman Catholic use of the language of grace? If God is obliged to give us grace when we observe the ritual properly effectuated, then we are causing Godcoercing him one might sayto give us his grace. Chauvet is clearly concerned with the use of this sort of language regarding grace, and will address it thoroughly. Chauvet then devotes considerable space to an explanation of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. If Shmemann traces the problem back to Lateran I, Chauvet with Heidegger trace it back to Aristotle and Plato13. It was at that point in history that man began to forget the difference between being (sein) and being (da sein). We are not able in this short space to go too far into Heidegger, but we must make a few points to adequately portray how radically far from Aquinas Chauvet ultimately ends up.
12 13

Chauvet 7, italics are mine. It should be noted that Chauvet is certainly aware of the signifcance of the Lateran Council debacle and he devotes significant space to its discussion; for more details refer to Ch. 8 of his book. Nevertheless the wound goes deeper than that.

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Chauvet derides the Socratic idea that the good is the complete. Instead he prefers using language of becoming (like Kierkegaard) and being on the way. He points out that, for example, love and happiness to do not come to a complete end or culmination, they simply happen and we enjoy them while they are present. Also important is the concept that language is not an instrument; indeed the idea that language is simply an instrument we use to communicate and label things is absurd. Language in truth is what gives us our reality, it is the house of being. Mans desire to conquer all things and subjugate them to his will and power is ultimately a consequence of our conception that language is nothing more than an instrument or a tool. As of late we have seen a real culmination in this process that begun with the so-called Scientific Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking was at its core an attempt to make man his own God by means of Reason, whereby humans would no longer be constrained to the traditions and religious ideas that had been handed down through generations. Modernism suffered a fatal blow with WW II, wherein the best-educated nation in the world did what was utterly inhumane. Also, the best technology in the world resulted in death and destruction, the likes of which history had never seen. We will revisit all of this later. Part of our desire to understand and master all things, to label all things and live without mystery, is the construction of a faulty hierarchy of things (matter, souls, God) with the ultimate thing being given the name God. This is what he calls the onto-theo-logical, and he soundly rejects the idea. Basically he says that once we start down that metaphysical road we have already presupposed that there must be a foundational being (which all men call God) upon which all other being stands. As a consequence of the status of language and faultiness of the Platonic and Aristotelian (and Thomistic14) models wherein the reality of the thing was somewhere other than in the language we use, Chauvet claims that symbol is the deepest expression of reality. It is not in the form or

14

We should note that Chauvet acknowledges that Aquinas in theory tries to maintain that theology is analogous, but he clearly states that Aquinas uses language in a way that ultimately treats grace as being instrumental.

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in the essence, in fact, the person who starts speaking that way has already failed to grasp what language is, and thus what it means to be fully human in the first place. Sacraments in the Church and in the World Thus both of our theologians, going down considerably different roads, arrive at a (somewhat) similar place. Both hold that speaking of sacraments as symbols is in fact to honor and revere their reality and role in our life to the highest degree. Sacraments are very real because they are symbolic, not in spite of it: He is our breadbecause from the very beginning all our hunger was our hunger for Him and all our bread was but a symbol of Him, a symbol that had to become reality.15 In Chauvet and Schmemann we find an interpretation of the sacraments as the place where we as Christians begin to apprehend the symbols that make sense of all other symbols. Central to Chauvets thought is the resistance to the utilitarian (which will resurface in our discussion of the charismatic tradition), which he connects with the sign-pole of language and the market economy wherein everything has a price. The symbolic pole of language, on the other hand, is linked to the realm of symbolic exchange, which is not based on price, but on relationship, social and cultural background, and so on:
This symbolic order designates the system of connections between the different levels of a culture [], a system forming a coherent whole that allows the social group and individuals to orient themselves in space, find their place in time, and in general situate themselves in the world in a significant wayin short, to find their identity in world that makes sense 16

The sacraments are thus the symbols that situate Christians in the world in relation to other people, their community (especially the church), and God. Underlying this differentiation between the symbol-sign and the symbolic-market systems is an argument for a sense of grace and gratuitousness in the sacraments, as well as a sense of obligatory continuation of the giving. Indeed, the sacraments lose their meaning when they are not conceived as intermediate point of
15 16

Schmemann 43. Chauvet 84, 85.

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passage between the Scripture and the Ethic. He illustrates this central thesis of his to great length by discussing Eucharistic prayers and the Hebrew offering of first fruits. God has given us his Son in the past (in fulfillment of the Scriptures), and we are remembering-proclaiming this in the now (in this Sacrament), and because we have received this gift we offer to Christ the only thing that he wants from us: a (righteous, and thus ethical) body here in the midst of the world. The return gift is not like paying a bill or buying Gods grace at all. The return gift to Christ of a body here (in the church and in our own personal bodies) is in fact a gift that belongs to an entirely different order of thing. It is our reasonable sacrifice and it is all we have left to give. This body that we give to Christ in the Spirit here will culminate in the giving of thanks (that is, in the eucharist-ing) of many who become captured by this gracious and gratuitous Christcommunity. This gracious exchange, we insist, is unlike the market transaction, which once accomplished, is entirely terminated. Once the transaction of currency for good/service is complete there is no further action required of either party. On the other hand, in the gratuitous sense of symbolic exchange as exemplified by the giving of gifts, something is always required in response, though the appropriateness of that response is not to be determined by the sign value of currency. Thus an extremely luxurious gift could adequately be responded to by a thank you, this would accompany probably some sort of solidarity between the parties involved, and thus open a new range of gracious possibilities in their future interactions. This may all seem very elementary, but when we begin to examine sacramental gifts (and thus instances of grace and kindness) in this light new insights abound. Before we move on to some specific examples given by Chauvet we must turn again to Schmemann. Schmemann again uses significantly different language, and without all the Heidegerrian philosophy that Chauvet espouses. Still, he arrives at a very similar conclusion:
[T]he proper function of the letiourgia has always been to bring together, within one symbol, the three levels of the Christian faith and life: the Church, the world, and the Kingdom; that the church herself is thus the sacrament in which the broken, yet still symbolical, life of this world is brought, in Christ and by

18

Christ, into the dimension of the Kingdom of God, becoming itself the sacrament of the world to come, or that which God has prepared for those who love Him 17

Schmemann has the benefit of using Biblical language (church, kingdom, world) that any Biblically-literate Christian will understand. If this synopsis of his sacramental theology seems essentially different from Chuavets it is for this reason. Chauvets system of symbolic exchange, which orders relations (and reality) within community and culture, is not essentially different from Schmemanns biblical Kingdom-Church-World triad. The Church is Christs representation to the World, his community which is for the life of the World. This thought it put well by the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who was possibly the most influential Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th Century:
[T]he Church is not a mere eternal welfare institute, but the continuation, the perpetual presence of the task and function of Christ in the economy of redemption, his contemporaneous presence in history, his life, the Church in the full and proper sense. Christ is the historically real and actual presence of the eschatologically victorious mercy of God.18

Also, note that both authors, with Rahner, emphasize the eschatological role of the sacraments. Schmemann says that they are the bringing together in Christ and in his body (the Church) of the Kingdom and the world. Thus Schmemann agrees that it is in the sacraments that the true and ultimate reality of everything is revealed. While Chauvet is on the guard against the encroachment of market-exchange within the church, Schmemann bemoans the fact that much of Christianity has become therapeutic today, where decisions are made in terms of function and usefulness. In his discussion of the liturgy of the Eucharist he says this: And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love.19

17 18

Schmemann 151. Rahner 13, 14. 19 30.

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The adequate response to this unhealthy proliferation of individualism in the Church is also addressed somewhat by Chauvet and his teaching that the sacraments always deepen our gracious and gratuitous obligations to our community, but Schmemann also offers insights into the nature of joy that are useful for overcoming this deficiency. Most significant for our investigation here is the link he notices between the sacrament and joy20:
Yet, on the other hand Christianity was the revelation of the gift of joy, and thus the gift of genuine feast [.] This joy is pure joy because it does not depend on anything in this world, and is not the reward of anything in us. It is totally and absolutely a gift, the charis, the grace. And being pure gift, this joy has a transforming power, the only real transforming power in the world.21

Thus the author ties together several concepts that we have discussed to this point, and offers a correction to our contemporary pastoral and homiletic practices. It is true that ultimately the purpose of the church is not to make people feel good about themselves. Indeed, inasmuch as this could well lead to the covering up of sinfulness, thus blocking a genuine conversion, this is something the church must avoid. And the church that embraces the sacramental gospel of joy revealed in these last days is much better equipped to preach and practice and communicate the gift that is Christa gift given for the life of the world. Body and Sacrament Returning to our original question about the connection between the sacraments and the body it should be clear by now that said connection is essential and indispensable:
Our approach of returning human beings to the field of language [and therefore symbol] is accompanied end to end by the body, the body-being. This approach has repeatedly sent us back to the contingent mediation of a language, a culture, a history as the very place where the subject comes to its truth. The sacraments accordingly teach us that the truest things in our faith occur in no other way than through the concreteness of the body.22

20 21

We will see later that Suurmond links the gifts of the Spirit with joy as well. Schmemann 55. 22 Chauvet 141.

20

As we noted at first, Christianity has always been tempted by knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. A certain degree of this must be part of the Christian faith and is in the best Biblical tradition, but the struggle that Paul so vividly describes of the flesh and the spirit so easily lapses into a sort of Platonic flirting with a dualism that ultimately moves the body from being a thing that God created and is very good to being something that is a hindrance and merits only our ascetic punishment. Our sacramental worship can help us to resist this temptation though:
The sacraments allow us to see what is said in the letter of the Scriptures, to live what is said because they leave on the social body of the Church, and on the body of each person, a mark that becomes a command to make what is said real in every day life. Thus, they are symbols of the integration of the writing into life, the transit of the letter toward the body. Only on this condition can the letter be vivified by the Spirit; only on this condition does it emerge as Word.23

We hope that this teaching will assuage anyone who is concerned that we are invoking ritualism or sacramentalism for their own sake. Rather we are invoking and professing a sacramental Christianity that complements and completes the Scripture and the Spirit. Indeed, our interpretation of sacramental Christianity makes absolutely no sense when it is not placed in this context of Word and Spirit. When these are obscured or removed our sacramental worship falls apart like a necklace of beads when the string holding them together is pulled out. Related to our discussion of the Gnostic pitfalls: in the Christian traditions where a heavy emphasis is placed on analytical theology it is easy to become inflated with knowledge of the Scripture and the ability to teach and preach, and thus to assume that one is close to God. Again, Paul calls us into account: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If we remember that we are born in language, that we did not sit down and by convention create it, but that it has a power over us that we in all our books and conferences can never begin to shakeif we remember this then we are left with our bodies in the world, and a sense of wonder at the greatness of it all. Within the charismatic tradition also there is a real weakness that is brought to light here. One is tempted to forget the worth of the simple bodily acts of quotidian life and language when

21

confronted with spectacular manifestations of the power of Gods Spirit. The sacraments remind us that the most Holy and Exalted in our lives is in fact the symbolic rituals which simply help us to situate ourselves within Gods order, finding ourselves for who we really are in relation to the Church, the Kingdom, and the world. It is our bodies that interact with the wine, the bread, the water, the oil, the hands of those who confirm and ordain us. And it is with our voices that we make simple and profound statements that forever alter the paths of our lives and those of others: I baptize you; I proclaim you man and wife; I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord; and so on. In the first chapter we stated that the New Testament contains within it an adaptation of a Greek anthropology, wherein the human being as a whole is understood in terms a heart/mind, a body, and a sprit. Again, these are not three independent and separate elements, but are all tied together inextricably in Gods providence. Therefore, it is the sacramental tradition of Christianity that most helps us to understand what it looks like for us, the Church, to honor, worship, and submit to God, in our bodies. As we have pointed out above, it also acts as a balance and an anchor when we are tempted to indulge too much in the pleasure of knowledge, or the power of the Spirit. Sacramental Mission and the Missionary Sacraments In these last two centuries it has been the evangelical and charismatic churches that have really exploded as far as the churchs mission to the world is concerned. The Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest representative of the sacramental tradition, has had a growth rate that is slower than the world population growth rate. While it is certainly interesting and important to discuss why this is the case, an exhaustive investigation of this question is well beyond the scope of this work. Some of the reasons may be that laity are seldom taught how to evangelize, that parishlife has become clergy-centered, that traditional theologies of sacramental grace have deemphasized the significance of a personal decision to convert, or that the work of the Holy Spirit has been perceived to have been confined to sacramental liturgies.

23

Chauvet 226, 7.

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This having been said, we find powerful tools that are ready to be used by missionaries and nascent Christian communities in sacramental worship based on the sacramental theologies of Schmemann and Chauvet. Accordingly, we will end this section on the sacramental tradition with a few observations regarding the sacramental tradition and the Mission of the church. J. E. Lesslie Newbigin, who for decades was a bishop of the Church of South India, in his extensive theological reflections on the Mission of the church can be described as being postmodern before postmodernism had a name. Along with Chauvet he rejects that there is any one thing or system of thought whereby one could argue another person to the truth. Regarding the Mission, this is especially true across cultural divides. In discussing what could well be the bertheme of postmodernisma preoccupation with violence and the will to powerNewbigin agrees that claims to truth are exercises of power over others. He describes the postmodern reaction to any claim as Whose interest is served by this? and not, Is this true? Newbigin defends the preaching of the Gospel because, he says, it is not an exercise of our own power. Rather it is an acknowledgement that we are the powerless ones caught up in the story of the Christ:
Here is the heart of the matter. A kind of indubitable certainty which claims to possess knowledge is all part of our alienation from God. The reality is a gracious God who leads us into a gracious knowledge of Him by a love which calls forth commitment off faith. Faith [is a] total personal commitment to the One who is able to lead us into truth in its fullness. 24

Based on this narrative theology of the Gospel, whereby conversion is the incorporation of ones self into the story of the Gospel, Newbigin surmises that the best way of preaching the Gospel and effectuating conversions is by incorporating people into a community whereby their language andas Chauvet might saytheir system of symbolic exchange can be re-oriented or perhaps totally transformed. Here the point of this somewhat lengthy detour should become clear. If what Newbigin says is true about the hermeneutical role of the local Christian community, and if, as Schmemann and

23

Chauvet insist, these communities find their identities and differentiation in the Sacraments and their sacramental rituals, then the triple commission to make disciples/baptize/teach are all inseparable from a healthy understanding and appreciation of sacramental life for the person-incommunity. Additionally, as Chauvet and Schmemann both rigorously insist, if it is true that in no way, shape, or form, can the sacrament and the Scripture be divorced from each other, then we have an opening for a way forward towards a dialogue between evangelical and sacramental missionaries. One might say that the sacraments are never more sacramental than when they are evangelical. Essentially, the missiological significance is this: if we want people to convert to Christianity from other religions (including secularism) then one of the essential elements must be their incorporation into a church community wherein they can learn how, in response to Gods grace, they can correctly order their lives in reference to God, their family, the world, and so on. Returning to Schmemanns terms, they begin to perceive and respond to reality in terms of the Kingdom, the Church, and the world. This is when, as Newbigin describes it, the person is inside looking outwards. Inside the Gospel, understanding her life and work as a continuation of the preaching, teaching, and miracles of Jesus Christ. This is the mission of the church, and sacramental worship, when taking place within a community that values the Scriptures and has a heartfelt and sincere desire to please God with upright lives, is certainly a powerful catalyst for the growth of the Kingdom of God.

24

Qtd. Weston 4.

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3. Evangelical
Our primary sources in discussing evangelical spirituality are Karl Barth, the very influential Swiss Reformed theologian, and Alistair McGrath, a contemporary Anglican theologian. The primary works we have researched are appropriately works that are apologetic. That is, they seek to defend or justify their spirituality. Barths Evangelical Theology: An Introduction counters many points that arose from Modernist thinking as characterized in its influential days of the mid 20th century. McGraths A Passion for Truth attempts to outline the heart of evangelical theology and offer a critiques of postmodernity, post-liberalism, and pluralism. Also, we should point out that the missiology of Lesslie Newbigin which we have referred to can also be considered to be within the evangelical tradition, though we must mention again that much of his theological development occurred during the four decades or so that he was in India, and is thus responding to different cultural struggles and issues. The reason we say that these apologetic sources are appropriate has to do with our undefended claim that this tradition corresponds to the mind/heart of man in Christian anthropology. We hope that the correspondence becomes obvious as we outline central tenets of their thinking in the coming pages. Before beginning it might be good to point out that, at least in America, evangelicalism has been associated with fundamentalism. This association is pass, and does not adequately describe the current situation; moreover it never described the European picture wherein evangelicalism never withdrew into that cocoon. The truth is that any tradition can fall into fundamentalism, and the word has been so far removed from its original context and has become so pejorative and loaded that any honest scholar should be wary of its use. Theology in Community When evangelicals speak of theology they do not mean an academic pursuit only for professors at their universities and seminaries. Integral to this approach is the communal aspect of theology, as well as the realization that theology must always be done for the community of the theologian, the theologian himself must always be existentially involved and invested in this 25

speaking of God. Barth therefore describes theology as a pattern which is a spring of life and wonderment, not a system of sterile dialectic at home only in the classroom or the library shelf. This beginning point addresses the relation of the community and the theologian. McGrath also addresses this in discussing the traditionally perceived animosity towards theology in the evangelical tradition. It is significant that writing decades after Barth he makes a very similar point:
Theology is the servant of the church. Evangelicalism has always seen theology as part of a greater whole, rather than as a professionalized department which is isolated from the life of the church as whole. The theologian is not someone who stands above the community of faith, but someone who is deeply involved in its life of worship, prayer, adoration and evangelism. 25

Having said this it is key to understand the organic unity of theology and ministry that is present in the best of all theology, but is especially a hallmark of evangelical Christianity. There are few observations that are more timely for the Christian churches in the West. Our seminaries are filled with people who bow down before the idols of tenure and peer approval, these people are radically out of touch with the common life, the common prayer, and the common devotion of their communities. Of course we have the Scriptural promise that those who teach will be judged more severely, for this reason we are very concerned for their souls. Ultimately this is a meta-theology. It lays the foundation for how we must live if we are to be fruitful theologians. It has certainly informed this writing and much of the decline of the mainline Protestant churches in the west can be traced backin part at leastto professors of theology who loved the approbation of the world more than the humiliating way of the cross. Tradition and the Evangelium We quoted from Barth above regarding his specification that evangelical theology in general recalls the Gospel, specifically as it was interpreted and taught by the 16th century reformers. We must supplement this intentionally vague description with some more detail; if Barth

26

describes the origin of this theology, then McGrath offers a working definition of evangelicalism:
1. 2. 3. 4. A focus, both devotional and theological, on the person of Jesus Christ, especially his death on the cross; The identification of Scripture as the ultimate authority in matters of spirituality, doctrine and ethics; An emphasis upon conversion or a new birth as a life-changing religious experience; A concern for sharing the faith, especially through evangelism. 26

We regard all of the points above as the strengths of evangelical spirituality and will proceed to describe briefly why Barth and McGrath, in their different ways, both place these characteristics at the heart of the evangelical tradition. Though evangelicalism in its current form came largely out of the Reformed churches (as Barth noted), there are strong hints of this ethos in the writings of the Fathers. Indeed, certain writings of the Fathers were central to the theological developments of the Reformation. Above we mentioned several strengths of evangelicalism, but what are its weaknesses? Because so much attention is focused on making the Scripture come alive today, and certain aspects of its Reformation heritage, some of the deficiencies are as follows:
History-less-ness o o A general lack of awareness of all history between Acts and today Due to a lack of historical rigor evangelicals almost always lack an accurate understanding of the actual doctrines of the Roman Catholic tradition. This is especially tragic since it hinders the Mission of the Church. Deficient ecclesiology o Due to focus on Scripture and lack of historical education, there is a lack of understanding that the Church preceded the Bible, that the church (in a certain way) produced the NT, and that the Scripture is, humanly speaking, part of the tradition of the Church. o Lacking an international, multi-cultural episcopate (with few exceptions, i.e. the Anglican evangelicals.)

25 26

McGrath 18. McGrath 22.

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It is ironic that the strengths of evangelicalism are related to its deficiencies. It is a strength that there is a focus on preaching that addresses the real life of the congregation, or as McGrath says, evangelicalism is a strongly populist movement with a genuine heartfelt concern for the issues which are of importance to ordinary Christian believers (McGrath 18). It is a deficiency that this is often carried to the point where no attention at all is paid to the many generations of martyrs, mystics, and saints that prepared the way for the church today. Especially in North America, where the evangelical churches tend to be so well-tuned to the trends and customs of the times, it can be easy to succumb to cultural trends. Evangelicals tend to use recently-written worship music, sermons often contain clips from recent movies or songs (with the effort at being relevant), and methods of ministry come in and out of style very quickly (and so it is that few Methodists still use Wesleys method for which they are named!). It can be alarmingly difficult to separate the genuine movements of the Spirit from mere fads. (Examples are the What Would Jesus Do? products, or the much celebrated popular devotion surrounding the Prayer of Jabez book.) Being the church of today is evangelicalisms great strength and at times its great weakness. Has evangelicalism become unable to dialogue with the voice of the past? Is there an evangelical response to this charge? McGrath presents a vigorous defense in a section of his book wherein he is describing why Scripture has a unique authority in relation to reason, experience, culture and tradition. It is significant that he invests ample effort in refuting a scenario wherein reason, culture, or experience dictate a hermeneutic which takes the theologian outside of the Biblical hermeneutic into a place where he is able to wield an ideology (modernism, liberalism, feminism, etc.) to control the meaning of Scripture. In the very brief section on tradition he makes the following statements to vindicate evangelicalism:
The critical appraisal of tradition was an integral element of the Reformation, and was based on the foundational belief that tradition was ultimately an interpretation of Scripture which had to be justified with reference to that same authoritative source. [] Yet the idea of tradition is of importance to modern evangelicalism. Evangelicals have always been prone to read Scripture as if they were the first to do so. [] This process of receiving the Scriptural revelation is traditionnot a source of revelation in addition

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to Scripture, but a particular way of understanding Scripture which the Christian church has recognized as responsible and reliable. Scripture and tradition are thus not to be seen as two alternative sources of revelation; rather they are coinherent.27

Then, to clearly drive the point home he quotes from the influential evangelical theologian J.I. Packer: To treat the principal of Biblical authority as a prohibition of reading and learning from the book of church history is not an evangelical, but an Anabaptist mistake (ibid). Thus McGrath defends evangelicalism by making the clarification that while Scripture is always authoritative, it is never to be divorced from a careful reading of the tradition. Note how this is a natural outcome of the communal nature of evangelical theology that both of our authors supported above. Indeed, to correctly understand the Reformation it is essential to understand that Luther, Calvin, and Cranmerto name a fewnever viewed their interpretation of Scripture as novel, but rather as a recovery of something that had been obscured with the passage of time. In fact, the very nature of the Book is communal. Chauvet reminds us that the Bible contains within itself a hermeneutical bias in favor of communal worship. The books in the Book were selected and perdured in the communities lives of common prayer (whether for the Hebrews or the Way) precisely because they were kept alive by being used in that common prayer. Thus something like Philemon, a brief personal note to a friend, was transformed by the community that read its own life in that letter, and wrote the words of that letter onto their community. The Word of the Lord is never more the evangelical Word than when read in the church. Based on this, we would suggest that another way to make sure that evangelical Christianity be able to stay in dialogue with tradition and other Christians would be to incorporate certain elements of the sacramental tradition. The sacramental tradition by its very nature tends to incorporate a community for its existence. Indeed, even when a priest celebrates the Eucharist in solitude the assumption is that he is united to the mystical body of Christ, with angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven, as one of the traditional liturgies puts it.

27

McGrath 95.

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The point is made masterfully by the very anglo-catholic poet T.S. Eliot in what is more or less a theology of the church in history, The Rock:
What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community, And no community not lived in praise of God. Even the anchorite who meditates alone, For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God, Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate. 28

In further conjecture, though it is not a sure connection, we wonder if the point of departure from what evangelicals consider to be the heart of true Apostolic tradition (ie, the preaching of justification through faith) has anything to do with either of the points of departure from a robust and healthy system of sacramental theology that Chauvet and Schmemann promulgated. In any case, we wonder if here there is an opening for Roman Catholics and evangelicals. The Council of Trent stated in 1546 the following:
[T]his Synod receives and venerates, with equal pious affection and reverence, all the books both of the New and Old Testaments, since one God is the author of both, together with the said Traditions, as well as those pertaining to faith as those pertaining to morals, as having been given either from the lips of Christ or the dictation of the Holy Spirit and preserved by unbroken succession in the Catholic Church. 29

While we by no means wish to minimize the very significant differences of dogma between the Reformers and the Roman Catholic church of the time, perhaps there is a way forward, together, by contemplating the possibility that the evangelical position and a liberal reading of the Tridentine documents in this matter are at least not diametrically opposed. If we accept that the Scripture and the Tradition are both the highest sources of authority, but in different categories, we may then say that we venerate them both equally without departing from our evangelical ethos. Key to this possibility is McGraths emphasis on co-inherence. If Scripture belongs to the category of authoritative and unique witness to Gods Word (in the Barthian sense), and
28 29

Eliot 154. Bettenson 262.

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Tradition is viewed as the highest authority in terms of determining direction and limits on the interpretation and application of that Scripture, then we may truly say that in an evangelical catholic sense, Scripture and Tradition both have God as their author and source. In fact, we view the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed as examples of Tradition which are exemplary to this theology of Scripture. These two creeds were never formulated with the end of innovating, but rather with the end of safeguarding the content of Scripture. Given the change from a largely Semitic milieu to one wherein the Greco-Roman models of thought and speech had become central, it was necessary, for the preservation of the Scriptural message to place a limit on how the new language could be applied to the Scripture. The Nicene Creed stipulates, among other things, that when using the Greco-Roman philosophical language to interpret the person of Jesus that it was not permissible to say, for example, that he was created. Rather, he is begotten, not made. This clearly does not solve all problems, and there will doubtless be people on both ends of the spectrum that reject this approach, but I advance it because I suspect that it incorporates the best of the evangelical and catholic traditions. Nevertheless, this all gives rise to the subsequent question, what is the Tradition, and who determines it? Is tradition what all Christians, at all times, in all places have believed? Or is it the body of episcopal declarations of various sorts issued by Roman Catholic church councils and popes? These are questions that we cannot address here. Do the Work of an Evangelist The sense of the church as a body of evangelists is a hallmark of the evangelical tradition, and is one of its great strengths. This flows from several of the points McGrath mentioned: the centrality of Christ, obligation of each believer to share his or her faith, and a deliberate emphasis on explicit conversion. Perhaps this is why evangelical/charismatic Christianity is the fastest growing faith in Europe, after Islam30. The sense of ownership that this conveys to the
30

The rapid Islamization of Europe is helped by factors such as high birth rate and massive immigration from superSaharan Africa and the Middle East. The growth of evangelical and charismatic Christianity does not enjoy these benefitsat least not to the same extent.

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Christian is hard to describe, but one can imagine the significance for the laity of being able to preach Christ crucified as the Apostles did, even if they are not permitted to or capable of administering the various sacraments that identify the faith community. (The empowerment of the laity will become complete when we incorporate the universality of charisms in our discussion of charismatic Christianity.) In evangelicalism, the Gospel is a matter of concern to everyone, everywhere, and Barth devotes an entire chapter of his book to this question:
This Word concerns mankind in all times and places, the theologian in his own time and place, and the world in its occupation with the routine problems of the everyday. This Word challenges the world in which X, Y, and Z appearwith their own big wordsto have the say and to determine the lot of all men as well as the lot of all things.31

It is a strength that each Christian is expected to be an evangelist and actively seek conversion of those around them; it is a deficiency that the various ways of talking about salvation tend to be neglected with the sole exception of that explained in Romans: that sin separates us from God, there is nothing we can do about it, but Jesus died for us, so in faith and not by deeds we accept Gods mercy and are made just before God (forgiven). Obviously nothing is wrong with this, and it has the benefit that it is very easy to remember and communicate to others. It also has the benefit that it makes sense to a diverse group of people. To build on this strength though it is necessary to make clear that while there is only one Gospel and one Christ, that there are different ways of communicating how Christ reconciles us to God. (Neither Barth nor McGrath reject this statement, rather they do not address it directly in these works; clearly evangelicals are partial to Reformation soteriologies.) One example from Acts is Pauls sermon to the Athenians, wherein he proclaims that God has always had power over the nations of the earth, though he was unknown to them in the past. Nevertheless, Gods judgment is coming soon, and he has verified the truth of this message by

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Barth 78. Note here how Barth is similar to Newbigin in that both teach the Gospel is the criterion whereby we judge the culture that surrounds us. Upon entering the community of the Gospel we become able to understand and critique the community we used to be part of. In this way the Gospel frees our mind to be see and judge things as they really are, as Paul says, the spiritual man judges all things.

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resurrecting the man Jesus. Therefore, they should repent and prepare themselves for the coming Day of Judgment:
Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. 32

No mention of the crucifixion, notice. No mention that Christ is sacrificed on our behalf, or that we are covered by his blood, or that he has appropriated/atoned for our sins, or that we have inherited his righteousness. Not to say that these are invalid images or expressions of Christs work, but certainly we should understand that different audiences will understand us in different ways, and that we are bound to select from the panoply of analogies set before us the one that will be most effective, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, and the joints and the marrow. As You and I are One: the Church as a Pan-ethnic Community If evangelicalism at its best is able to address those who are concerned about individualism, the story may be different inasmuch as questions of ethnic accountability are concerned. In other words, since we are always bound in our culture, formed in the womb of its language it is essential that our leadership include persons from the many different cultural backgrounds throughout the world. In this way, when the leaders of one nations churches go astray because they have lost their center, the leaders from other backgrounds who do not have the same blind spots can correct them. We regard this as an essential and very useful use of the biblical position of the Overseer (English), Supervisor (English cognate of Latin by way of Greek), or Bishop (corrupted English cognate of the Greek). An excellent example of this was Lambeth 199833:
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this two-sided trend [of Western Christianity versus emerging thirdworld Christianity] is Lambeth 1998, when Anglican bishops from all over the world met together. The

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Acts 17:30, 31, NAS, 1995 edition. Lambeth is the name of the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion. Every ten years a conference is held at Lambeth.

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burning issue was whether homosexuality is an acceptable Christian moral alternative. In the end, this was overwhelmingly rejected because almost all the African and Asia bishops opposed it. [] Lambeth 1998 may well mark a watershed in global Christianity. It was probably the first time in modern history at a Christian gathering of international significance, that an agenda strongly driven by Western churches was decisively rejected by the whole body under the influence of non-Western leadership.34

This is clearly an example of the third-world bishops holding the Western bishops to a position of faithfulness to Scripture and the catholic tradition of the Church. Another example is given in the autobiographical account of the K.P. Yohannan of the usefulness of pan-cultural accountability:
Because Oriental culture and religion are a mystery, many people in the West are fascinated by it without knowing the power of these demons to blind and enslave their followers. What routinely follows the mystery religions of Babylon is degradation, humiliation, poverty and sufferingeven death. [] Asia makes up the vast majority of 3.8 billion hidden peoples who are being missed by traditional missionary efforts and mass media evangelism. They are the most lost of the losttrapped in utter spiritual darkness.35

Another benefit of cross-cultural leadership is the greater exploration of Christian language. It is one thing to speak to Americans influenced heavily by the Enlightenment and the subsequent (and current) decline into post-modernism about what it means to say that Jesus Christ is deo de deum, lumen de lumine, deo vero de deum verum, and quite a different thing to communicate it to a tribal African. Alternately, a Westerner may have a hard time wrapping her individualistic heritage (if that is not an oxymoron) around the idea that salvation is not only personal but also communal. The example from Yohannan above is significant; many of our seminarians today simply do not have a vocabulary or a mind-frame capable of critiquing Eastern religions adequately. Yohannan is clearly not interested in interfaith dialogue, but in seeking and saving the lost! Our pluralism is a Western aberration and innovation of recent vintage, and the West needs Latin America, Asia, and Africa to hold us in check.

34

Yung, Hwa. Strategic Isssues in Asian MissionAn Asian Perspective 27-28. Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan. `04)

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Chauvet and McGrath would both agree that the language we grow up with forms heavily our perception of reality, our manner of grasping concepts, communication, and so on. In the Christian church we gather around a set of sacramental symbols36 which open themselves up to people from all cultures, communicating a message that offers life and hope. The church that has Overseers from around the world will benefit because each pastor will be able to bring a unique insight to the discussion. Alternately, that pastor will then be able to mediate and interpret for his flock the meaning of the hermeneutical and moral boundaries set by the church. These boundaries were set in other places and at other times, thus requiring spiritual and scholarly acumen for the sake of their interpretation. When properly interpreted they will open up before them a new personal-communal life for that particular church. This we consider to be a concrete insight of the sacramental tradition that complements the evangelical tradition. Christ the Liberator This title for the Lord Jesus might instantly remind us of liberation theology, but it is especially appropriate for the evangelical tradition. Since evangelicalism is willing to base its theological reflection primarily on the Gospel of Christ, and the apostolic and prophetic witness, it is free to be itself. The quick example of the decay and late implosion of liberal theology drives this point home very well. Barth in his day vigorously fought against liberal theology, and it is not coincidence that evangelical Christianity has been more fruitful of late than the detritus of this once-proud school of thought. Liberal theology sought, in general, to discuss Christianity in terms of universals like culture, values, moral impressions, and so on. Eliot again describes the ironic ascent of modernism well:
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

35 36

Yohanna, K.P. Revolution in World Missions.1986, revised 2003. GFA Books: Carrollton, Texas. Sacraments are symbols, and as far as evangelicalism is concerned we might mention that other symbols may be sacramental. Our Christian symbols are multiple and include, among other things, the Bible, the cross, the crucifix, Baptism, Eucharist, anointing with oil, laying on of hands, washing of feet, the Nicene and Apostles Creeds, and so on.

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Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards? 37

Thus it was that the sense of love and justice which grew out of the Christian gospel and the common life of the Church emerged toin the hands of the liberal theologiansbecome the judge of that common life. Evangelical theologians decried this and resisted it because evangelicalism must always appeal to the framework of the witness in Scripture for its final authority:
The Sola Scriptura principle is ultimately an assertion of the primacy of the foundational Scriptural narrative over any framework of conceptualities which it may generate. In the end, Christian doctrine stands or falls in relation to Scripture, not any particular set of concepts. 38

This is the ultimate reason that we have argued that the evangelical tradition of Christianity ultimately corresponds to the mind of man, to the faculty of reason. Not because it is rationalistic or derived from the Enlightenment39; rather because it frees the mind of the theological person/community, it cannot submit to the Enlightenment anomalies. Barth said as much in the 60s (Liberalisms apogee) as he was combating the Liberal fallacy:
Once and for all, theology has, fourthly, its position beneath that of biblical scriptures. While it is aware of all their human and conditioned character, it still knows and considers that the writings with which it deals

37 38

Eliot 163-4. McGrath 114-5. 39 It should be noted that American evangelicalism has indeed flirted with Rationalism, but that is to be understood as an aberration within the tradition. McGrath discusses the reasons for this aberration extensively in his chapter on Modernism, and we commend it to anyone who wishes to delve more into the specifics of that history.

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are holy writings. the biblical witnesses are better informed than are the theologians. For this reason theology must agree to let them look over its shoulder and correct its notebooks. 40

An application of this principles would be in relation to the theology of sexuality, and specifically, homosexuality. Our hermeneutical principle clearly bars us from interpreting Scripture in a way that allows us to consider sexual acts outside of marriage as anything other than sinful. Therefore, prima facie, we must reject from the outset the apologias claiming that Paul was talking about straight men having sex with each other as being sinful, for example, while gay men having sex is indeed natural, and that therefore Pauls condemnation of same-sex acts do not apply to people who by their nature are gay. The fact that this interpretation of Scripture has no proponents among the Fathers, the medievals, or the Reformers compels us to reject iteven if we believe the traditional interpretation to be perverse or unjust. Moreover, if our anthropology and evangelicalism are indeed Christian then we would expect the an who perceives himself to be gay but who is nevertheless living celibately to experience freedom of mind and heart, or nous and kardia. It is paradoxical then, the one who subjugates his desires would be ultimately fulfilled, even outside of any act that is carnally and sexually gratifying. A common objection (or at least concern) with this strict approach to subjugation to Scripture is that of legalism. Just like sacramental Christianity can degenerate into magicalism or ritualism, evangelicalism can degenerate into a sort of biblical rationalism. Hand in hand with this path is that of exaltation of the Bible to a place that is ultimately unhealthy, andin certain cases idolatrous. This is certainly a point that our authors are aware of. One of the ways that Barth addresses this is, as we saw above, by distinguish the Word of God from the Bible. Properly speaking, for Barth the Word of God is the revelation proper and the Bible is an authoritative (apostolic and prophetic) witness to that Word. We are in turn secondary witnesses to that primary witness which for us is authoritative. This might sounds like a belittling of the role of Scripture, which seems strange coming from a Reformed evangelical like Barth. Far from belittling Scripture though this helps us to remember that the Word, which is THE Revelation, is always the narrative that the witness of Scripture is pointing us towards,

40

Barth 32.

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much like in the ancient icons of Mary with Child, she is always gesturing with her hand to the baby Jesus, pointing us towards the one who is of one substance with the Father. McGrath stipulated that Christ is the center of evangelical life. Since he came that we should have life and have it more fully, and since the Spirit that was sent was to lead us into all truth, it is a good and pleasing thing that in placing the life and teaching of Christ above all our minds should be freed to explore more deeply the truth that he came to reveal. Conclusion Our purpose here was not to present an exhaustive diagnostic of evangelicalism as it exists in its various forms. We do desire, however, to point out that it has its strengths and weaknesses. There is no magical cure for its weaknesses; some of them are based on its genesis, some on its current environment. What we are advocating is incorporating evangelicalism into a robust and catholic worship that will offset its weaknesses and keep it anchored in a sacramental, charismatic community that is historically conscious. That which is ancient must never be passed by lightly. Thus having examined the sacramental tradition which contains in its bosom a healthy affirmation of the body of the person-in-community, and evangelicalism, which frees the mind to share in the mind of Christ by centering us on the Word of God and its primary witness in the Bible, we are ready to discuss the charismatic tradition of Christianity.

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4. Charismatic
The word charismatic come from the Greek charismata denoting gifts of grace. By gifts of grace we understand in general terms an intervention of God in our lives, an enabling, an equipping, for gracious and gratuitous work or ministry. Neatly defined lists of the gifts in Scripture are not meant to be exhaustive, but exemplary. These gifts are given by God through his Holy Spirit for the building up of Christs body, and the churchs mission is ultimately to plant an indigenous congregation (church, ekklesia) in each ethnic group in the world, or as Jesus put it in the Matthean apocalypse, This Gospel of the Kingdom must be preached to all peoples, and then the end will come. So first of all we see that the charisms are essentially and unequivocally apostolic, in the etymological sense of the wordthat is, having to do with sending out. In the ancient sense of the word, those who share in the apostolic ministry are the missionaries who have gone out for the sake of the Name, though as time went on, the various bishops in the church came to be identified as the successors of the apostles inasmuch as these overseers were understood to exercise in some way the authority of the dominical Apostles (those sent out personally by Jesus himself). Our bias should be obvious by now, and it is a bias that we invite all to share in: if we are concerned with questions of authority, structure, and power, then bishops wear the mantle of apostolicity. But if we are concerned with love, the Kingdom of God, and the Gospel, then it is the humble missionary, who has crossed ethnic and geographical lines, that is the true inheritor of apostolicity. It matters not whether that person is a mendicant monk who has begged his way to Morocco, or a successful Western entrepreneur who is living out of his wealth in Arabia. Our purpose here is not to juxtapose the two senses of apostolicity as if they were mutually exclusive, for they need not be. Rather, it is we who have made them so by not paying careful attention to the Great Commission. As a result of this, if our exercise of charisms becomes introverted and self-contained then we have lost the charismatic and Spiritual aspect of their exercise. This is true whether we are speaking of more unique charisms such as the working of miracles, raising the dead, or prophecy, or the more vocationally-oriented charisms such as teaching, preaching, or 39

administration. This is what Paul has in mind when he says, If I have the faith to move mountains, and have not love, then I am a resounding gong, or a clanging cymbal. Suurmond, who will be our main source in discussing charismatic Christianity, says this:
Love is the encounter of the other as a you, an encounter which transcends boundaries. This is the nature of a charism. Hence the discussions of gifts in the New Testament always end up in practical applications to live in love. Paul write to the Romans that [he] is longing to see them, that I may impart to you some charism to strengthen you, that is, that we might be mutually encouraged by each others faith, both yours and mine (1:11-12).41

And Montague puts it simply, saying that, the baptism of the Spirit does not terminate at personal regeneration and renewal, but is aimed at building up the Christian community (73). Again, we would apply this criterion to personal gifts that have their primary manifestation in the exercise of one person for the many (as in the example above of Paul), as well as to communal gifts that have been given to communities. We are thinking here of religious orders which have charisms of evangelism or teaching, for example. But we might also identify here certain congregations that God has gifted at different times with communal charisms. We should also point out that we are referring to doctrinal charismatic Christianity. That is, we are describing what we perceive to be the teaching that should be presented. We are not wishing to offernor are we capable of offeringa prescription for what charismatic worship must look like in the life of a congregation. We do submit that the Holy Spirit is alive and active in all Christians, and that all of the charisms or spiritual gifts described in the Scripture are given by God the Spirit to different people and congregations, at different times and in different places, according to his will, for the furthering of the Mission. Thus we would reject any doctrine that claims that certain gifts of the Spirit have ceased completely and universally at a given time in history. First of all we find no Scriptural warrant for that position, secondly we view it as a constriction of the power of the Spirit who is the Lord, thirdly we find that it clearly contradicts the experience of the majority of Christians around the world who have witnessed these charisms in action. Lastly, and most tragically, it limits missionaries in their apostolic ministry. One need
41

180-1.

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only take a look at the Acts of the Apostles to see how inseparably the charisms are linked to the heart of the mission, which is the foundation of new congregations of new converts in people groups (or ethnic groups) where there is no witness. Just as we rejected the constriction of the free will of God by saying that certain gifts are never present, we must also reject that constriction of Gods creative and unpredictable will by saying that certain gifts must always be present, or must always be present in a certain way. Thus the identification of baptism in the Holy Spirit with glossolalia is to be rejected. The Spirit is the Lord of the Mission, he guides us into truth and empowers us to proclaim boldly that there is no other name than that of Jesus whereby we must be saved. In seeking words to delve into charismatic Christianity we will employ the theology of JeanJacques Suurmond, as delineated in his book Word & Spirit at Play. Then we will examine some of the Biblical bases for the baptism in the Holy Spirit, a cornerstone of Charismatic Christianity, by examining the exegetical work of George Montague in Christian Initiation and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Of Word and Spirit Suurmond follows the traditional dictum of lex orandi lex credendi nicely. Though there are countless ways of phrasing the old rule in English, we might rather strictly render it the rule of prayer is the rule of belief. Meaning (among other things) that it is in fact the congregational and personal life of worship and prayer that leads to and thus precedes the formulation of doctrinal and creedal formulations of belief. Suurmond is essentially trying to explicate what he considers to be the better aspects of charismatic (especially Pentecostal) spirituality using concepts from various contemporary philosophers and scholars. It is interesting to read such a well-versed theologian transitioning from Latin American liberation theology to the ethics of Martin Buber to Sren Kierkegaard, all of this in a commentary on the gift of glossolalia.

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The heart of Suurmonds theology is very well summarized in the title of his book, so we must take a look at his philosophy of word and spirit at play. Perhaps the best way to introduce these two sides of human life is by commenting on its closeness to Chauvets above-mentioned systems of gratuitous and symbolic exchange, compared to the system of market exchange. Suurmond attaches to the realm of Word structures of order and knowledge. The world of Word is static (like the hypostatic union), not dynamic, not narrative, one might say it tends towards logo-centrism and onto-theology. Spirit on the other hand is dynamic, gracious, gratuitous, unpredictable, it defies utility. In Chauvet the market exchange gets something of a bad wrap, but in Suurmond the world of Word is not in itself bad, but it becomes corrupt if it is not playfully balanced with a sense of openness towards the world of Spirit:
Order and indeterminacy or self-confirmation and dynamic interactionin short, the Word and the Spirit are, in a telling remark of Iranaeuss, the two creative hands of God. Here the creation shows a gratuitous surplus which seems to far surpass what is required by the purposeful existence and continuation of the species. The Dutch philosopher Buytendikjk made a famous remark, that the birds sing far more than Darwin allows them to. Word and Spirit are present at every level of creation, and work towards the eternal Sabbath which has already become visible in a unique way in a man from Nazareth. 42

Suurmond sees the duality of Spirit and Word throughout the entire Scripture and the history of the church. They are tendencies, both of them are good when balanced correctly and playfully, in a manner that is not utilitarian and allows for the Sabbath play of which the church is what Schmemann (or Rahner) might call a sacrament. And so we move on to a charismatic critique of the church, which Suurmond properly calls a liberated community. Since we have been promulgating sacramental worship which has always involved some sense of ritual and written liturgy, we must defend ourselves from the charge that one is either charismatic or ritually liturgical. That is, there has been an opposition set up by certain Christians that implies that that there is something essential in ritual that defies the freedom expressed in charismatic ritual. Chauvet and Suurmond both vigorously deny this idea:

42

41.

42

 life, prophetic engagement, sincerity of intention, the urgency of evangelization, all these get high marks of positive approval and gain prestige as signs of authenticity, while the rituals, the priesthood, the institution, and sacramentalization are burdened with all the sins of the worldco-optation, alienation, suspect archaismsSuch an opposition is nave anthropologically and untenable theologically. 43

It is rather the case that good liturgy gives us a framework wherein we are able to allow the play of the Spirit in our lives and congregations. In one place Suurmond speaks of the worshipful work of the people (that is, liturgy) in helping us to still our minds, saying, prayer, meditation and the liturgy generally help us to stop our constantly wandering thoughts and become open to the presence of the other/Other in the now (184). Similarly, Suurmond does not believe that the sacraments are peripheral to the liturgical play:
The minister equips the community for this Sabbath play and can be compared with a trainer or producer. The sacraments are the normative, objective expression of charismatic life and represent as it were the rules of the game.44

Remember that in Suurmond, the play is essential. Thus the idea that the sacraments are the rules of the game is not a criticism. Of course if we forget we are playing an enjoyable and curious game, and only discuss the rules, then we have ignored the surplus of meaning and fun in the game! On the other hand, if we just run around and say that we are playing a game but there are no rules (word, sign, objects) that enable us to really be part of a network of nodes wherein each one is capable of interfacing in the transfer of knowledge (in the broadest sense of the word possible), then there is no possibility for a charism at all. After all, charisms are always related to the Other, individualistic charismata can never exist. (Our words here are intentionally reflective of Lyotards seminal work on The Postmodern Condition.) The Charismatic Congregation It has been our proposition that in combining elements from all three of these Christian traditions we will somehow or another end up with a church that is better equipped to carry out her mission. We praised the evangelicals who make of every Christian an evangelist, and their

43

Chauvet 228.

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striving to never subjugate the centrality of the Gospel to whatever philosophical or political fad may be prevalent that day or century; we praised sacramental worship because it provides a reorientation from value to virtue and priorities whereby we can continually be saved, and also we commended the historical significance of monastic mission to unreached peoples as an effective and worthwhile missionary endeavor. Now, here we must agree with Suurmond that in the play of the Spirit and Word present in charismatic communities there is a space of worship that offers each and every person a chance to receive and contribute:
The powerless thus shed the yoke of anxiety which constricts their freedom and grow in pride and selfesteem. Moreover, the playful character of present-day Pentecostalism is the most powerful reason for its attraction to the poor.45

If we regard this charismatic empowerment of all Christians as a novelty or an anomaly we must examine Scripture:
in the early church there was a widespread, if not universal, expectation that the baptized would manifest their reception of the Spirit charismatically. The letter to the Romans (12:6-8) indicates that this was so not only in the communities Paul founded, but elsewhere as well, in fact, in the capital of the Empire. 46

The plain fact that charismatic Christianity in one form or another accounts for the majority share of the growth of the church in the 20th century compels us to acknowledge that God is behind it. This is an un-academic statement no doubt, and we do not feel compelled to defend it. It is telling that the only religious movement keeping up with the stunning growth rate of Islam in Europe is some variation of charismatic/Pentecostal Christianity. At the same time both Roman Catholicism and denominational Protestantism are declining in terms of active participants at a rapid rate. Suurmond, in trying to interpret the tangled web of church history makes a couple of valid points. First, he is worried about the logo-centric Christology, preferring a wisdom Christology which will better incorporate the playfulness of the Word and the Spirit in the life, death,
44 45

203. 53. 46 Montague 77.

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resurrection of Christ. Secondly, he dislikes the fact that many churches have proffered the evaluation of theological legitimacy to those who are masters of the word. That is, those who have learned to read and write, to discuss and debate these things. (We recall here Barths insistence that the theologian must always have a sense of wonder when doing his or her work.) Thus when we elevate the Word to the neglect of the Spirit we end up with a law that can quickly become oppressive and exclusive. Like Chauvet, Suurmond is concerned that the Holy Spirit and his activity got too tied up in the power of the sacraments, most of which could only be administered by ordained ministers, thus taking the Spirit from the local congregation and the poor, illiterate, and uneducated believers: Thus the Spirit is no longer a critical counter-part and can hardly inspire the practice of the crazy Sabbath game in which each person has his or her right (66). The Reformation was a step forward but it too had its difficulties and did not fully grasp the gratuitous Sabbath that life and ministry are. Though the priesthood of all believers was a valid and useful insight it lacked a realization of the power of the Spirit to work in the life of every Christian, the ultimate result being an imprisoning of the Spirit in the Word. What is proposed is the realization that the Spirit is indeed present in sacramental worship and the liturgy of the Word, but that it is not enough to limit it to these aspects of the Christian life. Where else then are we to encounter the Spirit of God? Suurmond outlines the limitations of viewing people as conduits or channels of Gods grace only. (Significantly, this is related to Chauvets opening question as to why Aquinas discussed sacramental grace as being causala language that Chauvet ultimately regarded as not being optimal.) While it is true that in some sense the power of charisms comes from Gods Spirit to us, a simple vertical relation is insufficient. Drawing on Buber, we encounter God in encountering each other as you instead of it. This was, of course, our purpose in quoting from Pauls famous love passage in the introduction to this chapter, and aligns nicely with Chauvets theory of mediation of Gods presence. There is also a sense of unity with other yous in the Spirit, which binds us together in our conversion, in our baptism, and inasmuch as it is given to all of us as a guarantee or downpayment of the coming resurrection.

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If we return to our theo-anthropological reflections of Chapter One, we will remember that saying something about humans is saying something about God, and indeed saying something about God is to always already have said something about humans. In the same way when we encounter the other person in community as you, a unique and glorious being laden with the weight of glory (see C.S. Lewis brilliant essay-homily by this name), then we are able to encounter the Spirit of God truly and fully. After all, how can we say we love God whom we cannot see if we do not love our neighbor who is right here with us? Part of the opening up of the Kingdom in the charismatic tradition is closely linked to the empowerment of all believers to make a contribution, thus moving away from a heirato-cratic model of ministry. So it is that we are freed from the false animal self, which is tied to anxiety and idolatry. The Kingdom of God the Spirit is primarily one of liberation from these two things that are to be identified with the sinfulness of all humanity. Suurmond knows well as a Reformed theologian that all have sinned, and fall short of Gods glory. Since things like laughter and glossolalia and the raising of hands are essentially non-utilitarian (useless, inefficient, lacking the power to produce anything) we are brought into a space wherein the false self which is bent on selfish self-preservation is put to death:
These foolish expressions help to break through the excessive control of the analytical intellect and to make us open to an encounter with God in the deeper levels of our being. Richard Baer Jr has pointed out that the extended Catholic and Eastern Orthodox liturgy and the silence of the Quaker meeting in principal have this same function.47 The exact opposite of idolatry which leads to division is the life that is liberated in the exodus of Christs death and resurrection and expressed in the drinking of the wine and the eating of the bread: Because there is one bread, we who are many (and different) are one body. 48

We wish to draw here a parallel with what we have argued regarding the evangelical tradition and the liberation of the mind from the predominating structure of plausibility (Newbigin) of the day and culture. The evangelical is able to live a life that is enslaved to the story of the Gospel as opposed to being enslaved to one of the countless networks of premises and assumptions
47 48

79. 211. The quote is of I Cor. 12:17.

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offered by the world. We said that in this evangel world of thought that the mind becomes free, just as Pauls slaves to righteousness are the freest of all people, or as Paul says in another place, the spiritual man judges all things. It goes without saying that the same thing can be said of the sacraments and the body. However, if pastors tried to use these principals in their practice and found them to be wanting and ineffectual (that is, not furthering the Mission of the Church) then we would have to seriously rethink our correlations and constellation of relationships.

In sum, charismatic worship and life free us from anxiety and fear, says Suurmond. We are restored in our relations to one another (Chauvet makes a similar point regarding cultural rituals), and the poor are empowered as the Word-order is playfully and daringly opened to the unpredictable Spirit. The charisms are apostolic, playful, and liberating, bringing us into the IYou world of personal recognition and, not surprisingly, charity.

The Way in Which You are Not

When we are drawn into a charismatic community where the gifts are active in everyone at different times, it is very easy to fall into the Corinthian trap if we are not careful. Recall that in Corinth there was a sense of division between the various groups of followers (of Paul, Apollos, and Jesus). It appears that there was disagreement about the value of certain gifts, and that the exercise of the charisms was actually leading to division rather than the common good. Paul of course extols love as the more excellent way, reminding them that they are all in the one body of Christ, and have received gifts from one Spirit who gives as he pleases (and we cannot make him give a certain gift to a certain person). Because of this charisms must always be approached from the point of view of benefiting others, as we have noted before.

Emotionalism is a kind of legalism that neuters the Holy Spirit. It takes what was meant for mutual edification, and for apostolic ministry, and turns it inwards. Thus the gifts cease to be true gifts because they become like cancers, part of a body that is not operating correctly, that is not permitting itself to be regulated by the rules that safeguard the health of that body. Or, it is like a body that has lost the ability to process its waste and becomes sick and dies. Though there are myriad manifestations of this aberration, and we have touched on the problem before, we

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must go into more depth in suggesting a remedy. Suurmond sees Saint John of the Cross as a charismatic, and we believe that we must incorporate into charismatic spirituality a sense of apophatic devotion and aridity to maintain a healthy balance within the life of the Christian-incommunity.

In his masterpiece, Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Roman Catholic Spanish monk, describes his progression in mysticism. First of all, he places his whole discussion in charismatic terms, for as the wise Spirit of God dwells in these humble souls [those advancing toward God], He moves them and inclines them to keep His treasures secretly within and likewise to cast out from themselves all evil (43). A key illustration is given early on in the work, while he is discussing the dark night of the senses:
wherein He weans them from the breasts of these sweetnesses and pleasures [of Spiritual delight and rapture], gives them pure aridities and inward darkness, takes from them all these irrelevances and puerilities, and by very different means causes them to win the virtues. 49

God is like a mother, then, who desiring us to learn to walk on our own, and feed ourselves, removes us from her breast. At first we feel alone and frightened, sensing the absence of the Parent that so cared for us and nourished us. But we will never grow into men and women if we are not placed on the floor, away from the pleasantries of our Mothers embrace.

We regard this sense of aridity and dryness to be part of the charismatic tradition. Indeed, without it we can only begin to plumb the depths of the gifts of the Spirit that God has for us, and those gifts he has for us are for the sake of the Church, and the Church is for the sake of the World. It is paradoxical in the supreme, but when we follow a man who said, the first will be last, and the last will be first, we should not be surprised. It is difficult for us to try to explicate this kind of language, for the terms do not easily fit in words we know how to manage. Eliot, in his Four Quartets puts it this way:
In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get where you are not,
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60.

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You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.50

Indeed, if we wish to approach the depth of God (what you do not know), we must first surrender to the fact that all of our knowledge is in fact ignorance, and gives us no power or ability in ourselves to reach him. So only when we go on the way of ignorance are we able to begin to approach the knowing of God. Where you are is the place and time when we are in fact existing humanly as humans, like Jesus Christ the New Human. And to arrive at this where you are is to renounce every last right you ever thought you had, every last claim to power, every last claim to authority. It all must be renounced and surrendered; this is where we are united to Christ in his kenosis, or self-emptying, through the Spirit. Only when we are emptied, powerless, and become nothingwhere you are notonly then are we become real and significant and humanwhere you are.

(It is hard for someone who is, as I am, a mere beginner, an absolute beginner indeed, to explain things that are so far above my own experience.)

We are swimming in deep water here, but we suspect that if we incorporate this approach in our devotional life, we will benefit from a sense of humility and an appreciation for the fact that the Spirit cannot be measured by outwardly charismatic activity. This is precisely because the most profound charismatic transformation takes place in a way that is paradoxical and is foolishness to the Gentiles on a way wherein there is no ecstasy. But unto us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

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Baptism in the Fiery Spirit of Judgment The first direct reference to baptism in the Holy Spirit occurs during the preaching of John the Baptist. He is baptizing people in water for the repentance of sins, but one who is greater than him will come and will baptize in spirit and fire. This one who will baptize in the Holy Spirit and fire (Luke 3:16) has his sifting fan in his hand, and he will fully purge the threshing floor. He is the one who will bring the wheat into the barn and burn the chaff with a fire that cannot be put out (Gk, pyri asbesto). It is probable that John is drawing on several different sources and influences in issuing this prophecy:
1. The Qumran community practiced ritual ablutions and believed that they were to be filled with the Holy Spirit (as pictured in the passage from Joel which Peter quotes on the first Pentecost) and prepare a way for the Messiah. Though a concrete link to the Qumran community is difficult to establish, he was, at least, clearly familiar with a closely related tradition. 2. 3. The prophetic tradition (ie, Amos, Malachi) connected fire and judgment. The imagery of God as a consuming fire from the Exodus. Thus relating it to Gods liberating rule in the Hebrew Scriptures.

In any case, Johns preaching about the baptism of the Spirit indicates that it is related to the judgment of those who do not enter the Kingdom. This was key to his ministry that prepared people for the coming of the Kingdom by being baptized in water. It is important here to mention two things. First, Johns image of Jesus coming ministry was, as prophecy often was and still is, not a complete, detailed picture. This would lead after his incarceration to his sending disciples to Jesus to ask if he was indeed the Messiah (Matt 11). Though this might seem to some to demonstrate a lack of faith, a reading of Jesus response to Johns disciples, and his subsequent address to the crowd regarding John clearly shows Jesus great respect for John. In this passage Jesus reminds Johns disciples that messianic signs are being completed. Thus John should continue in his faith without rejecting Jesus simply because his ministry did not entirely match what John had foreseen. Thus the conclusion, blessed is he who does not fall away on my account.
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Eliot 187.

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Secondly, notice that Jesus puts the beginning of the advance of the Reign of God since the days of John the Baptist. In this light it is impossible to simply dismiss Johns interpretation of what this Baptism in fire and Spirit would be. So while it is not the complete picture, we can conclude that the baptism in one sense is related to Jesus judgment of humanity. This judgment is partial now through the Holy Spirit who he will send to convict us of sin and righteousness and judgment, but also in a complete way when he returns to judge the living and the dead. Initiation and the Holy Spirit While Luke included the relation of John the Baptists apocalyptic preaching on the coming Messiah he develops a rich if not tangled message on the relation of initiation (water baptism) and the giving of the Spirit through the rest of Luke-Acts. Specifically, throughout Acts there is no one pattern or order which is normative. Sometimes the gift of the Spirit precedes water Baptism, sometimes water baptism precedes but is accompanied by the giving of the Spirit. Also, there is the difficulty that there are two formulae used for baptism: into the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the name of Jesus Christ. It is difficult to make any concrete and definitive conclusions from the existence of these two formulae, but it is worthwhile to note that they exist. (Perhaps we should be encouraged by acknowledging that even in the Apostolic communities there may well have been debate regarding the nature and method for water baptism.) After a detailed discussion of each instance from Luke-Acts, Montague makes the following conclusions about the theology of these two books:
As the rite of Christian initiation, there is only one baptism, an integral rite that involves water and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The rite of initiation may have varied, and it is not clear that the laying on of hands was always practiced, but when it was, it was part of an initiation rite. A delay in the imposition of hands for the Spirit was not normative practice.51

And this:

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If I may paraphrase Lukes view another way: the Spirit cannot be known to have been poured in unless it somehow pours out. Thus the initiate, receiving the Spirit, through the ministration of the community, ordinarily shares his or her new experience in some way with the community for its upbuilding. 52

Third, he concludes that the initial filling with the Spirit does not preclude subsequent fillings. Now that we have identified these three characteristics of Christian initiation, an important question to raise at this point is this: how authoritative is the practice of the Acts communities? Inasmuch as it is the Bible it is entirely authoritative in what it teaches. But, does Acts teach that the pattern exhibited in the early Christian communities was to be the pattern followed by all other churches in all places at all times? This is a question we have not answered. Also important (and related) is the question of the baptism of children and/or babies. Suffice to say that we have offered our insight elsewhere on this matter53 and that there is, in any case, one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Meaning that in charity we hope that all the traditions will honor the baptismal rites of the other traditions. This would imply that even if a congregation does not practice infant baptism, that they would not insist on re-baptizing adults who enter their Christian congregation after being gone from the church for some time In conclusion, when we baptize converts (the only example given in Acts), we must welcome in them the charismatic presence of the Holy Spirit. What we are saying is that the matrix of conversion-baptism-filling of Spirit, though perhaps not always neat and predictable (thank God!) is most certainly always inseparable. If we have one without the other then we have not come into the fullness of Gods grace and salvation that he is longing to pour out upon us. Or perhaps we might say that we have failed to grasp the meaning of baptism inasmuch as it relates to humans and God. This, then, is our theology of conversion. Viewing the act of conversion as a whole, though having different aspects or facets. The three elements are not discrete parts, or at least in their Christian teleology they are not intended to remain discrete indefinitely. They convert the whole

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39. 40. 53 See our paper, Destroyer, Reminder (2002).

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human being, offering the whole man as a new man to God who has sent out his Word made Flesh that whosoever believes in him should be given the power to become a son of God. Christ is one personnot two peoplepossessing two natures. Just as Jesus Christ is not the Incarnate Word without the two natures, conversion is not brought to its glorious culmination until it has incorporated in the convert its completeness of being sacramental, evangelical, and charismatic. And its glorious culmination is in reality a beginning, wherein that person-in-community may now save the world. Our thesis is also supported by the view of baptism found in Paul and Matthew wherein we are baptized into Jesus baptism filling with the Spirit, when he was baptized by John in the Jordan:
At no time in Matthews Gospel does Jesus specifically convey the Holy Spirit to his disciples (as, for example, in John 20:22 or in the pattern of Luke-Acts). Yet the disciples are empowered fully by Jesus Spirit because through baptism they participate in Jesus own inaugural empowerment by the Holy Spirit. Christian baptism is Jesus own baptism. No other empowerment is needed. 54

Paul certainly is eager for his converts to bear the fruit of the Spirit, and to offer their bodies to God as living sacrifice, but we see a similar teaching that Christian initiation is linked to the giving of the Holy Spirit:
In this single letter, then, Paul makes it abundantly clear that the Holy Spirit is given at the moment of Christian initiation, that is, baptisma rite that involves both water and the Spirit. Furthermore, he presents the Spirit thus received as the source of various charisms. 55

This is offered as a commentary specifically on I Corinthians 6:11: You were washed, your were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. It is unlikely that the washed here refers to anything other than water baptism as the only other use of the Greek word in the NT is in Acts 22:16 where it unequivocally refers to water baptism. Fanning the Flame

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Montague 20. Montague 46-7.

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If what we have said is true, that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is related to Gods liberating reign and our exodus from the idolatry and fear, if it is true that water baptism is a sacrament that can always be linked to the giving of charisms by the Spirit and his filling, and if it is true that our surrender to the story of the Gospel and the Christ of the Gospel is inexorably tied to that liberation, then we have not said anything new. We have from the beginning contended that the three are inextricably linked because God made us as humans human. So if our outline of the NT teaching is accurate, then we should be eager for every baptized convert to exhibit and welcome what gifts God will give him or her. And for those who have long since received the sacrament of baptism let them wait upon God to pour out in them his Spirit in a charismatic way so that they will be able to pour into their church that overflow. Our mission is clear: to save the world. With the Spirit of God giving us his power we can advance his Kingdom. And there is no doubt that this will bring him glory. Indeed, the Kingdom and the power and the glory were never ours to begin with.

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5. The Churchs Mission

Summa Up to this point we have argued that the Christian account of what a human being is (the anthropo-logos) is inextricably related to our conception of what God is (the theo-logos). We have argued that the human being is to be understood as the person-in-community, not as the naked and solipsistic individual of modernism and the (dis-)Enlightenment, nor as identity-less communal element found in some tribes, cults, and religious traditions. Just as each person in the Trinity is indeed a prosopon, an hypostasis, so there is one and only one God, one substantia and Being. We have noted that Paul uses in various occasions a Judeo-Christianized variation of the old Greek anthropology, describing the human being in terms of a body, a mind-heart, and a spirit. This is not the only valid way of understanding the human being, but it has several virtues. For one, it is found in the Scripture, permitting dialogue across time and space with Christians outside of our historical period or cultural or denominational milieu who have also attempted to understand and apply these teachings. Secondand this is related to the first benefitit has the virtue of being old. This hopefully insulates us to some degree from the various insipid theological and ecclesiological fadswe might even call them innovationsKyrie eleisonthat have become common in these last few centuries. In sum: if we are to understand the riches of the Church then we must use language the church has used always and everywhere: the words of Scripture. The presence of this anthropological model in the Pauline literature is a matter of observation. In seeking to understand and apply this anthropo-logos, we have argued that three Christian traditions correspond particularly well to the nourishing of these aspects of the human being. The sacramental tradition can help us in resisting Gnostic temptations by grounding us in bodily ritual, reminding us of the truth that Body Am I. The sacrament is the Gospel written on our body, proclaimed from our body, within our body, and is inseparable from the Gospel announced, proclaimed, spoken. The relatively young evangelical tradition has focused on the personal decision of conversion elicited by the Gospel announced in word and body, and in its 55

better moments tempered the sacramental emphasis on the body with a personal devotion for Gods written Word. The charismatic tradition has emphasized the work and presence of Gods Spirit in our lives as persons-in-community. All of this we have argued for the sake of the Church, but missing from this picture is an understanding of what the purpose of the church is: how does she go about this work? What is the origin and goal of the church? Without an understanding of this we will not have a complete picture of the human being. We are Christians, part of Christs body, saved in him who is Gods elect. Just as a right worship (ortho-doxa) of God leads us to right living as Christians-in-theChurch, so does a departure of right worship to another worship (hetero-doxa) lead us to a corrupted life as Christians-in-the-Church. The Church and the Christians are not two different things, so if we are to live correctly as Christians then we must adopt a right understanding of the Church and her mission. From the outset, we must confess that we are disappointed by the misuse of the venerable and noble word mission. On the one hand we wish to prune the word, to clean it, if you will. We will do this by focusing on the Great Commissions in the four Gospels, which give us a solid understanding of the mission that the Apostles received from Jesus; the re-centering of mission we wish to promulgate is, we think, closer to the Scriptural pattern of mission. Missionaries or Apostles? The word apostle comes from the Greek and simply means (one who is) sent out. The prefix apo- indicates a movement away from, and the Greek verb stollein is the Greek verb for send. So at the most basic levela level of meaning which has been largely forgotten, we believean apostle is simply one who has been sent out. Our English word mission is derived from Latin, not Greek, the latter being the language of the New Testament. And so unlike many of our specialized Christian words (priest/presbyter, apostle, bishop/overseer, deacon) we cannot appeal directly to biblical etymology for

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clarification. So first we must establish what we mean when we say mission, and equally as important, what do we not mean? In addition to the specialized meaning of apostle in the NT, that of one who was personally sent by Jesus Christ himself, we also find the more generalized meaning of anyone who has been sent by the local church. This is what is referred to in 3rd John with the words those who have gone out for the sake of the Name, and in the list of vocations or kinds of minister in Ephesians. Curiously, the English words mass and missionary are related to each other, both being derived from a common Latin root, which means to send. The mass is theoretically a sending action in that it empowers and prepares the people of God through word and sacrament to be sent out by the minister to do Gods work in the world, like a celebration before a person leaves for a voyage. Missionary denotes a person who has been sent out to do any specific assignment given by a superior. Historically, the missionary has no special obligation to apostolic ministry, as the Christian Scriptures understand it. While many missionaries have been concerned with making converts and planting churches (apostolic mission), others have been sent out to start or work at schools, hospitals, indigenous businesses, supply any sort of training, including for other missionaries, give theological education, and any number of other goals. What we propose ultimately is that what we call mission must be inextricably tied to that act of sending out apostles as in the Scripture. Other forms of missionary activity are laudable as acts of Christian charity, but generally they are not apostolic. Apostles were sent out to preach the Gospel, and each of the Gospels contains a variation of the great commission. Based on exegesis of the four Great Commission passages we will argue that apostolic mission must be the heart and center of the missionary activity and has pre-eminence over any other sort of missionary activity. We will also argueand this is central to the entire purpose of this bookthat the anthropological model of Christianity that incorporates the three traditions is well suited to carry out the apostolic mission of the Church: to make converts and plant churches among every ethno-linguistic group in the entire world.

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The Great Commissions in Mark and Luke

Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe: in My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick and they will recover. Mark 16:15-18 (NKJ)

The command is to go into all the world. The scope of the mission is universal, and the main task is preaching (keruxate). There are signs that will accompany not only those who have gone (the apostolic missionaries), but also those who believe. Note that here the act of believing and being baptized are connected organically, resisting our Western and unnatural desire to analyze the act of belief and the sacramental act of baptism as if they were two separate things. The charismatic signs that are to accompany the converts and the preachers receive such emphasis that one wonders if this version of the commission has been embarrassing to the church throughout the ages. It is certainly less popular than the elegant, Trinitarian version of Matthew or the simple and easily-remembered Acts 1:9. While Mark does not seem to have the intention of using our anthropological model (borrowed from Paul), the fact that the Markan commission overlaps nicely with the model of ministry that we have outlined is an added benefit. Lacking is any explicit or implicit command to clothe the naked or feed the hungry, not that those things are un-Christian obviously, but they are not the heart of the apostolic mission. This might be a scandalous proposition but it is plain to see for anyone who will look.
This is what is written: the Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached (keruxthenai) in his name to all nations (panta ta ethne), beginning at Jerusalem. You are witness of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high. Luke 24:46-49 (NIV)

The context is one of explaining the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is interesting the extent to which fulfillment of these things is taken. The suffering of the Christ was 58

foreshadowed in several of the psalms and Isaiah, and it is central to this commission. The message is that because of the suffering and resurrection of Gods Chosen One that forgiveness is available to all who repent. Forgiveness and the passion-resurrection of the Christ are inextricably linked, and must always be so linked in our preaching. So forgiveness is not something conferred automatically to all anymore than it is something we earn: it is available in his name. If someone comes to God in her own name, of what virtue is thatshe being an enemy of God? The way that this message is to be spread is by preaching, as in Mark. Much has been made in recent days about incarnational ministry, which is often understood as acting out the Gospel without necessarily resorting to the use of explicit teaching or verbalization of that message. The phrase Preach the Gospel to all creation, and use words if you must, contains a valid insight that is Christian and Biblical to the core. However, the way it is understood and conveyed is basically, Be a nice person and thats enough, dont talk about Jesus because it makes people feel uncomfortable. The phrase should be retired from circulation, not because it is untrue but because the violence done against it has emptied it of Christian meaning. Concerns about Social Mission Jesus obviously teaches us that our inner motives must match our outer actions, and one variation of this point is enunciated well in evangelii nuntiandi 41, It is therefore primarily by her conduct and by her life that the Church will evangelize the world, in other words, by her living witness of fidelity to the Lord Jesusthe witness of poverty and detachment, of freedom in the face of the powers of the world, in short, the witness of sanctity. (Note that the actions listed here are heroic and go far beyond the living witness of the average Christian.) This point of view we agree with entirely, but there is a way of interpreting it that would denigrate or minimize the value of the preaching. Any interpretation of EN or the Scripture itself (EN being of course part of the Tradition that helps us to interpret the Scripture and apply it) that as a rule exalts wordless witness above the spoken witness of preaching is to be rejected.

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Our insistence that apostolic mission (or Biblical mission, if you prefer) does not generally include educational and medical missions will seem unchristian to some. Rather than arguing that the church has no obligation to the poor we are saying that Gods plan for the salvation of the nations is found in his Church. While we can never expect the eradication of poverty or hunger during these last days, we do have an obligation: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world (Jas 1:27 RSV). Rather than neglecting this obligation, we are arguing that the local church is appropriate locus for engaging these challenges. Indeed, in advocating for the poor we are willing to go far beyond many Western Christians, valuing voluntary poverty and seeking to cultivate the charism of giving that some have received. Indeed, is it not true that God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith and inheritors of the Kingdom which he has promised to them that love him? The local church knows how to address the local problems of orphans and widows, poverty and addiction, and so on. In many ways our medical and educational missions are a continuation of the missionary activities during the colonial period. These missions certainly had positive aspects, but enforcing foreign solutions to indigenous problems is not a far cry from simply telling the indigenous population that it is inferior. If you want to feed the children then creating a welfare nation is one way of doing it. A better and much more difficult way is to evangelize the nation. In a Christian nationno matter how poor the people arethe church will see to it that the orphans and widows are cared for, because their religion demands it. And they will often do a better job at a lower cost. The indigenous population will not feel that they have no obligation to tithe since the Westerners provide everything already. In essence the practice can and has in some places led to the squelching of the action of the Holy Spirit, because those who have the divine charism of giving generously are essentially marginalized and their gift is nullified. God save me from the man of good intentions. Western money is often poison to the movement of the Holy Spirit. So far from advocating a reversion to a time when social justice was not valued, we are arguing that social justice and apostolic mission both be given their rightful place. The merger of the two in the form of social mission has led too often to activity that neither promotes justice, nor fulfills the churchs mission.

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A Time to Scatter and a Time to Gather: A Church for Every Ethne The Son is the Word, what God wished to express and communicate about himself and about us. The Word spoken is essential to the life of the church. EN goes on to emphasize the importance and necessity of preaching. The word remains ever relevant, especially when it is the bearer of the power of God. This is why Pauls axiom Faith comes from what is heard, also retains its relevance: it is the word that is heard which leads to belief. The universal presence in the commissions of preach/teach, as well as the above-noted references to Pauls epistles which emphasize preaching and proclaiming, make it very clear that the church that is not devoted to excellence in preaching, taking into account the nuances of the culture and audience, is not obeying the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. This preaching is in imitation of the preaching (euelegisato) of Christ who came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near (Eph. 2:17). The recipient of this preaching is all the people groups of the world, all the tribes and tongues and ethnic groups. Again, we emphasize that nations is not to be understood in the geo-political sense of the term, which would be an anachronistic error. This is important because there are Christians in most every nation-state in the world, but until there are Christians (and churches they administer with their own pastors) in every ethnic group, whether if only consists of 500 people in Afghanistan or 300 people in Los Angeles, California, or 9 million people in Arabia, we have not completed the work Jesus gave us to do. (We are cognizant of the difficulties in defining what is and is not a people group, ie, ethne, but much progress has been made, certainly enough for the Church to realize how shamefully disobedient she has been to this call. By the most generous counts there are still thousands of unreached people groups throughout the world, the plurality of them in Dar al-Islam56.) A proper understanding of the mission of the church is always tied to a proper understanding of the church. One of the key passages in the Christian Scriptures that presents us with a robust theology of the church is Lukes Pentecost narrative. The Pentecost story must be read together
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Dar al-Islam, Arabic, House of Islam, similar to the term Christendom.

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with the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of the peoples over the face of the earth. Luke intentionally parallels the sequence of that story. In the Babel narrative (Genesis 11) we start out with one language, they moved east and they used their technological innovations (And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar) to consolidate their power and authority. They disobeyed Gods command to inhabit all the earth, rather they focused on self-preservation: "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." They set themselves up in direct opposition to Gods plan for humanity, and like Paul says in Romans 1, refused to honor him or give him thanks. Whether or not their intention was simply to build a mighty tower that would make them famous or reach into heaven and so usurp Gods dwelling place is not clear. What is clear is that they were their own center, their own focus. The result was that God scattered them throughout the whole earth. In a way this was an act of judgment for their insolence, but it was also merciful. Perhaps in their weakened state they would seek God and fulfill his commands. Perhaps their inability to maintain peace with other peoples would drive them to God, begging for his mercy and admitting that true peace can come only as a gift from him. In any case, this is the passage that Luke has in mind as he relates the birth of the church at Pentecost in Acts 2. As in the Babel story they were together in one place. But here they begin to speak in other languages by the power of the Holy Spirit. People had come to Jerusalem from every nation under heaven, and they hear them speaking in their native languages. And what are they hearing? we hear them speaking about Gods deeds of power. They are left bewildered, asking the question that Luke wants us to ask: what does this mean? Peter goes on to explain that it is too early for them to be drunk, rather the last day is here and this is the fulfillment of the prophecy that all of Gods people would receive his Spirit and prophecy.

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But why does Luke intentionally model his narrative of Pentecost around the Babel story? The Scattering story is a continuation of the Fall. After the Fall Adam and Eve are alienated from each other, from God, and from nature. Here groups of people are alienated from each other, Pentecost is Gods answer to that alienation because our personal Jesus must be a communal Jesus as well: at Babel they start with one language but as an act of judgment they end with many; at Pentecost they have many languages, but by the Spirit linguistic differences are nullified. At Babel they exalted themselves; at Pentecost they proclaimed Gods praise. At Babel they started in the same place and they ended up scattered throughout the earth because of their disobedience; at Pentecost they were gathered from the Diaspora, but at Stephens martyrdom they would be scattered because of his obedience to Messiah. The essence of what happened at Babel is the birth of the old humanity, the Adam-humanity, the humanity of the flesh that is disordered in not praising God or obeying him. The essence of Pentecost was the birth of the new humanity through the Holy Spirit. This new humanity is centered on Gods praise and being all together for the sake of Messiah, not our own glory or fame. The new humanity of the Church is Gods plan for the redemption of humanity, not because of her own goodness, but rather because of whose she is, and her message. As Paul says, We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that this power is from God and not from us. Because the Church owes her very existence to the Holy Spirit without whom she could not exist she is uniquely capable of reaching across ethnic and linguistic boundaries. The cultures that developed over the thousands of years between the Scattering and Pentecost no doubt in their own flawed ways reached out to God at certain times in response to his common grace. Now the New Humanity is come to reveal the signs amid the rubble of those cultures, separating light from shadows and presenting the world with the one who is the true Light of the World. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice, and let them say among the nations, The Lord is King! (1 Chronicles 16:31) The Nativity of our Lord and the Mission We argue that Pentecost is essentially a missionary holy day, because it is the founding of the church which is the congregation of our Lord, which was birthed for the sake of completing his

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preaching and teaching regarding the present-but-not-yet-totally-present Kingdom of God. We argue that Easter is likewise divorced from its Scriptural foundation when it is not understood as being a missional mandate. Specifically, that in the resurrection all authority in heaven and earth had been given to the Son, and on this basis his preaching will now reach far beyond the Kingdom of David. In the resurrection God vindicated the one who had been put to death in accordance with the Law, he who was made a curse for us by being hanged on a tree. Such is the scandal of Easter, and such is the scandal of the mission of the Church, inseparable as they are. In Easter the Vindicated One is given all authority, over every religion, every individual, family, tribe, nation state, religious body, and so on. Before that it was like in the book of Judges: there was no king in Israel in those days, and every did what was right in his own eyes. The third holy day of the Christian calendar, in addition to Easter and Pentecost, is of course Christmas, which is also a day and season that sheds profound light on the nature of the church and the mission. Matt. 2:13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him. Matt. 2:14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, Matt. 2:15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, Out of Egypt I have called my son. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in the land of plenty. At the time of the flight it is not clear if they were still in Bethlehem or if they had moved to Nazareth, but the flight is just that: a fleeing for safety, from the oppression of the powers of the world--the king--the same powers that will one day conspire with the religious powers and by their own weakness permit his unjust crucifixion. Because of this flight Joseph becomes, even more than Paul, the archetype for mission in the New Testament. He is like Abraham in that he is leaving the land of his father, but Joseph takes a word greater than the word of Paul, for he takes with him the very Word Incarnate. The weakness and vulnerability of this Word are greater than the weakness and persecutions suffered

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by Paul, for here the very Word is sought for destruction, while with Paul the destruction of the Word is impossible, rather the one taking the word is persecuted. So it is that Joseph, in his midnight flight from the Promised land, back to the land of slavery and oppression, for the sake of the preservation of the Word, illustrates for us the unshakable and immutable truth that to abandon the apostolic mission is to destroy Gods word. The apostolic missionary, like Saint Joseph, is charged not only with avoided the destruction of the Word, but he also is charged with protecting the church, symbolized by Mary, his wife. Mary is the first disciple, blessed and favored by God, properly called Theotokos or the Godbearer (often mistranslated Mother of God). If it were not for Joseph, who is willing to take up the burden of leaving the land of plenty to return to the land of the Plagues and darkness, then in addition to the Word being destroyed by the powers of this age, the church will be left abandoned and childless. Matthew then quotes Hosea 11:1, which we must look at within its larger context: Hos. 11:1 Hos. 11:2 When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols. God is speaking of the Exodus from Egypt and in Hosea the son is clearly Israel as a whole (again, so much for the intentionality of the author), and not the Messiah. Indeed, the passage is a historical recollection, not a prophecy of the future. The Old Israel, in spite of being delivered in great power from Egypt did not remain faithful to his God. The new Israel, in this child named Jesus, is not delivered in great power, but in anonymity and concealment, in weakness and with great sigil he is spirited away to the far off shrine of the pagan land. But in his return he fulfills what the Old Israel did not, here is now one worthy of the name my son, who unlike Old Israel will listen when called and never sacrifice to any God but YHWH.

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Because the Old Israel was unfaithful like Hoseas wife, he says They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to turn to me (11:5). The lesson for us is clear: that unless the word we preach in word and sacrament is carried through this sojourn in the strange land it emerges deformed and malnourished. If the word our churches preach is not taken out first by Joseph, on whose flight depends the life of the Word and the welfare of the Church, into the land of slavery where it can be tempered and taught, where it can learn sorrow and the delicate lesson that love is a crown of thorns, then it cannot return to us healthy. If our word is not taken out, then we like the Old Israel will be destined to burn incense before idols, and Assyria will be our king, and we will be returned to Egypt to make bricks for the same despotic powers that plotted the destruction of the Child at the beginning of his life, and again at the end. If our word is not first taken to Egypt then neither will we be able to pronounce a Gospel in the name of the Son. For it is in the return from Egypt that Jesus is recognized as my son. The son is called out of Egypt, in his coming from Egypt he is thus revealed, and not as Old Israel who did not come when called. Our pastors and preachers, teachers and priests, are so many clanging gongs, making much sound but devoid of meaning regarding what it means to say that Jesus is the one whom God calls my son, much less the even greater claim that he is the only begotten Son, if that proclamation is not made within the context of a community that is sending out and bringing back in men like Joseph, to whom is entrusted the life of the word and whose cloak covers a shivering Mary as they depart on their midnight hejira, then when the word son is said, it is by necessity deformed and incomplete. It is no error that the word used is flight. It is indeed a flight for survival, if the missionary is not sent then the word and the church will surely perish. The word will be slaughtered in its infancy with the innocents, and the church will be left destitute and barren. Such are the thoughts that must fill our mind during the holy season of the Nativity, such are the thoughts that must come to mind when we sing of the dawn of redeeming grace and a new and glorious morn. Retention and Forgiveness of Sins: The Johannine Commission

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If this task of a church for every ethne is ever to be completed, it will be done by the power of the Holy Spirit, by whom the Word Incarnate was conceived in the virgins womb, and whom the Father has sent to us in accordance with the promise of the Son. The commission in Mark of course was very explicit about what this would look like, but for another aspect of the Spirits role in mission we must examine the Johannine Commission:
Again Jesus said, Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. And with that he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven. --John 20:21-23 (NIV)

The verb for sent is based on the same root as the word we have advocated above as the biblical pattern for missionary activity. As the Father has sent me, kathos apostalke me ho pater, this is the pattern and the manner of our being sent in the Johannine commission:
Jesus prayed to his Father: As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world (17:18). He has gone, through his total self gift that makes God known (cf. 17:19), and now he sends them out. They are to be to the world what Jesus has been to the world (cf. 13:20, 17:18). But the reader also recalls Jesus awareness of the frailty of the disciples. Such holiness is only possible through the presence of the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit.57

What has Jesus been to the world? What have been the characteristics of his mission? He has been light to the world, revealing the person of God, God the one and only. Still, this commission in John is troublesome to evangelicals and charismatics. We should be honest in acknowledging that the idea that dominion over who is or is not forgiven is conferred to the disciples makes us rather uncomfortable. Evangelicalism, being historically an Americacentered movement, is also quite individualistic, as are the current models of capitalism and democracy that we practice, therefore the meaning of this passage is difficult for us to assimilate. We generally insist that as soon as the individual confesses a sin to God then they are forgiven, period. While we are not rejecting this statement necessarily, and since Mark 2:7 indicates that

57

Moloney 531.

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only God can forgive sins, we must ask ourselves how this passage contributes to our understanding of mission qua sending. Evangelicals have traditionally interpreted this passage as meaning that since God forgives all who repent, the disciples are to recognize and declare what God has already done or not done. That in itself is quite an extraordinary authority that evangelicals do not really live into. What would it look like if an evangelical elder were to proclaim that according to the quality of a persons life that God had not forgiven their sins. There is really no room in American Christianity for this sort of application of the teaching of Scripture. The traditional Catholic interpretation of this passage has tied it to the sacrament of Reconciliation, commonly called Confession. This is difficult to maintain though as it seems somewhat anachronistic. We recognize the usefulness of confessing sins to God in the presence of a minister of the church, and having the minister assure the penitent that this act of contrition and confession before God leads to forgiveness. This is especially appropriate for grave sins that have deeply damaged the relation of the Christian to God and his neighbor. Nor should it be thought that this is only a Roman Catholic rite, rather it is present to some degree in the Orthodox and Protestant traditions as well. On the other hand, if one wants to tie this authority to forgive or retain sins to what became the juridical and jurisdictional office of the bishop, one has to look somewhere other than John. (We have noted that any Scriptural and integrated doctrine of Apostolic Succession must take into account that Apostles were and must be above all apostolic missionaries. So any claim by a bishop to Apostolic authority is meaningless apart from active and zealous engagement in the apostolic mission.) While a detailed exegesis eludes us, we do wish to point out a couple of things. First, that this ministry is inextricably related to the gift of the Spirit (v. 22), thus whatever the pronunciation is regarding the forgiveness or retention of sins it is given by disciples who have received that Spirit which continues the ministry of Jesus. Second, that the retention of sins seems to be a very real possibility. How exactly this related to us today is a difficult question to resolve for someone like me from such an individualistic culture where autonomy is an idol we worshipeven in church on Sunday. These disciples are leaders of the community, so the barest attempt at

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application would need to involve the possibility for leaders of the church, after prayerful attention to the leading of the Spirit, to declare that certain people are basically reprobate, hopefully opening the way for a sincere act of repentance. This passage is essentially apostolic. It parallels Gods promise to Abraham, who in many ways is the first apostolic missionary. God tells him to get up and leave his land and says whom you bless I will bless, whom you curse I will curse. As Gods sending of Abraham to the Promised Land was the beginning of Gods plan to save the world. The events before the call of Abraham are like a prelude or an introduction. With Abraham God establishes his audacious goal to reconcile humanity to himself through this one man and seed, his seed being the nation of Israel and her messiah. So in this parallel passage we have the apostles acting as the continuation of this original Abrahamic mission, with an explicit acknowledgment from Jesus that the Apostles have inherited his commission. In any case, as evangelicals and charismatics we must acknowledge that this is evangelium, it is part of the Good News, and we should accept Gods charism of discernment and pronunciation by his apostles for his people and for the world. The Commission in Matthew By far the best known variation of the Great Commission is the one found in Matthew, which has become one of the most beloved passages in the Gospels:
When they saw him they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go (poreuthentes) therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:17-20 NRSV)

The verb here translated go is better translated having gone. Thus, the disciples, having gone, will do the three things that Jesus commands: making disciples, baptizing, and teaching obedience. The point is that the great commission here hinges on the going. Without having gone, the three qualifiers become jejune. Having received all authority Jesus is putting into motion the mechanism that will disseminate his Gospel to all nations; his ministry had focused

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on Israel, but now heavenly authority over the earth has been conferred on him and he lights a wildfire that must consume the entire forest. We identify certain core commonalities here with the other variations we have already looked at. Most striking is the presence of the Trinitarian formula. Baptism is essential to the mission, reinforcing the idea that making new converts is at the heart of the mission. The phrase make disciples of all nations is matheutesate panta ta ethne. The word disciple in the context of Jesus ministry denotes one who learns from example, which is what we see Jesus doing with the disciples. Often times they do not have a good understanding of the actual meaning of his parables or sermons, but his actions make a deep and lasting impression that would later help them to understand his teachings. If the order of three elements is intentional, then the discipleship process precedes conversion and initiation (baptism). Only then is the Christian prepared for more detailed instruction regarding the life of obedience to all that Jesus taught them. Here I recall reading a book on spiritual direction wherein the author (a Jesuit priest if I remember correctly) commented that it was not necessary for a person to be a Christian in order to receive spiritual direction (which I would say is one way to make disciples). He said that the only thing needed was that the disciple have had some sort of experience of God or the transcendent, whether at a religious observation or on a mountain top or reading a book of poetry or what have you. We begin with what is there, believing that God has scattered his light throughout the whole earth, and if people have seen a little bit of that light then it is because of Gods grace: The rain falls on the wicked I met an Indian gentleman who came from a Sikh family in Punjab but was living in the USA. We met at a common friends birthday party and since he was new in town I invited him to have a couple of beers one night. He asked why some churches had priests and some had ministers. As I was giving him the quick version of the Reformation he just blurted out, I feel like I need to convert to be a Christian. Only God knows what had happened in his life before that point, but I am fairly sure that my eloquent presentation of Church history was not the thing that moved his heart and spirit to this place. (My wife and I later sponsored them and their two children when they were baptized on Easter Sunday in our church.)

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I relate this story not as a pattern for a new program called beer evangelism, but rather to remember a couple of things. One is the playfulness of God, the playfulness of the Spirit! Another is the spontaneity of discipleship. It can certainly be successfully accommodated to one hour a week or even a month, but ultimately if it only consists of Bible study or praying together then it will lack that somatic element, what Eliot called the enchainment of past and future // Woven in the weakness of the changing body[.]58 I was a disciple of a missionary to Mexico in my teens and more than our study of John or James I remember eating lunch with him and his wife and kids, and seeing how he treated them and spoke to them. It is a question of lifelearning, not book-learning. So this matheutesate, this making of disciples, might be best understood as precisely the method of making converts. This would really be difficult for many Christians though because we tend to lose our non-Christian friends once we get into the church. The walls of the church are high and they keep us in and keep others outside more often than not. Within our walls we develop ways of speaking that make little sense to the world for which Jesus died and was raised again. After becoming a Christian, that is, proclaiming faith in the resurrected Jesus, being baptized in the name of the Trinity, and receiving the Holy Spirit of God (the order of the three things is not important, let us recall), then we move on to teaching. It is difficult to understand what exactly Jesus had in mind when he said this. Other occurrences indicate that Jesus taught in parables (Mk 4:2), Jesus said that his teaching was not his own, but from the Father (Jn 7:16), Jesus called Nicodemus a teacher of Israel (Jn 3:10), the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray (Lk 11:1), and finally Jesus foretold that the Spirit would teach us in his absence (Lk 12:12, Jn 14:26). It seems like instruction is at the heart of this command, though it is instruction with the end of obedience. Teaching is, in the West at least, the element we spend the most time and energy on, in the form of Sunday School, conferences, books, and so on. It is easy to take for granted then how wonderful it is to have access to new insights about the Bible, the life of Jesus, the history of the Church, and so on. More and more Westerners are understanding that when it comes to making disciples and converts the indigenous churches are more capable than we are.
58

178.

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But when it comes to instruction in training, in theology, in history, and in Scripture, in these areas we are able to serve the indigenous church better, because they are resources that they do not have in and of themselves. This complements our approach to founding and enabling new indigenous churches to care for their neighbors. This of course does not mean that we need to impose our cultural patterns (I think of seminary education here, which is certainly extra-biblical and foreign to much of the history of the church). On the other hand sometimes our cultural patterns will be willingly adopted by the indigenous church among a given ethne. Jesus on the Church This interpretation of the Matthean commission is premised on the intentionality of the order of the elements that describe and qualify the going, the having gone. Perhaps the order is not sequential though, perhaps it has something to do with the importance of the roles of those who make disciples (apostles? elders?), who are greater than those who baptize (evangelists?), who in turn are greater than those who teach. Regardless, it is certain that Jesus Christ is immensely preoccupied with our action of going. It is an assumption even, having gone.59 Jesus was, among other things, an apocalyptic prophet whose message was Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand. This Kingdom was certainly one of judgment, and many of the questions about salvation in the Gospels are not related to eternal life (though some are), but to being spared at the time when Gods judgment would come upon the earth. This is related to our commentary on John the Baptists understanding of baptism in fire and the Holy Spirit above. The Kingdoms advent would rip families apart, cause division, would be like fire upon the earth (Lk 12:49). Jesus tells parables about being watchful: Be on the alert then, for you do

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It will bother some people that I treat this passage of Matthew as a reliable source for the actual words of Jesus. The presence of the Trinitarian formula and developed theology of mission presented here lead many scholars to believe that Jesus himself could not have made this statement. In accordance with our hermeneutical principal outlined earlier though we must interpret the Gospels as being reliable and trustworthy reflections of Jesus teachings. Within the last few centuries schools of thought have arisen that lead to a differentiation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This tradition will have to prove itself in the mission field by planting new congregations and converting then unbelievers to the way of the Lord (presumably the Christ of faith, but who knows?) At this point the tradition is so young and as yet fruitless that we cannot do much more than simply acknowledge its existence and cast our lot with the Fathers, the medievals, the Scholastics, the Reformers, or some other tradition that has actually proven itself on the battlefield, so to speak. The battlefield consists of the people groups where the Gospel has never been heard, not universities and seminaries.

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not know the day, nor the hour (Mt 25:13, after the parable of the Ten Virgins). Watchful for what? For the coming judgment, the victory of God and his Messiah over his foes When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations (panta ta ethne) will be gathered before Him (Mt 25:31, 32 NAS). Jesus does not have much to say about the church. He uses the word ekklesia only twice, both in Matthew, once to teach about excommunication and the other in the famous statement you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it (Mt 16:18). Based on this inattention towards the church it would seem that Jesus did not understand it to be incredibly important or that he had not conceived of its necessity until rather late in his ministry. (YesJesus Christ who is Very God from Very God, in his incarnation, did not have access omni sciencia, as he himself pointed out. Beside how could we say someone is human if they never had the joy of being surprised or disappointed? Is that not at the very core of our being?) In any case, the Kingdom of God was of prime importance, it had been breaking into history since the preaching of the Baptist (Mt 11:12) and it was present in their midst to some extent there, as was testified by the miracles, exorcisms, and teaching of Jesus. Near the beginning of his ministry he probably shared the point of view of his precursor, John, that the Kingdom and judgment were going to happen very soon. As time goes on Jesus comes to understand that there would be a time-in-between his ministry and the coming of the Kingdom in its fullness. The apocalypse in Matthew is an excellent example of this awareness that he would tarry, and he warns his disciples about the tribulations and difficulties that would precede the parousia. Along with this understanding of the time-in-between, perhaps there was also an awareness that the founding of some sort of congregation (ekklesia) to disseminate his teachings and carry forward his work of heralding the Kingdom was needed. Thus the establishment of the church is for the service of the Kingdom, at the service of the apostolic mission, which is to prepare people for the coming judgment. What we are proposing is that the very reason for the founding of the church was for the sake of the mission, for the dissemination of the Gospel of the Kingdom

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which must be preached (keruchthesetai) in the whole world for a witness (marturion) to all the nations (pasi tois ethnesi), and then the end will come (Mt 24:14). Apostolonomy This brings us to the reason of why in a book that is ostensibly about anthropo-theology, that is a theology of the human being, we are devoting so much time to missiology, or apostolonomy, as we might call it. At the beginning of this chapter we advocated a recasting of the word mission, and we have therefore argued that a church that is going to honor God and man must understand what the nature of the human being is. We have said that one anthropological model is used by Paul (among others) who approaches the human being in terms of body, mind/heart, and spirit. We have argued throughout the history of the Church that there have arisen three traditions that address particularly well those facets of the human being. Far from being exclusive from each other, they can be combined and indeed should be combined, for the sake of the world and for the health of the Church universal. This is not really a proposal for an institutional super church, but is more an admonition to Christians to get to know the other traditions, and not just to understand them but to cherish and prize what is good in them. In this chapter we have argued that the heart of the mission is preaching, proclaiming and teaching forgiveness of sins in Jesus name. This preaching is to be done with words, but also to be accompanied by miracles and to be modeled by our lives. Baptism with the Trinitarian formula is the ritual of initiation and necessarily accompanies a proclamation of faith. The Holy Spirit is active in this mission by accompanying us in proclaiming forgiveness of sins and is seen in miracles, healings, and divine protection. If there is any truth in what we have proposed above, that the whole reason for the founding of the church was to continue the ministry of Jesus and his proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom, then the church is teleologically and essentially dependant on the carrying out of this mission to evangelize all the peoples of the earth if she is to exist at all. In sum, the mission is greater than the church. The idea that mission is one of the things that the church is responsible for, in addition to having a Sunday school program, operating a soup kitchen, celebrating the

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Eucharist, and so on, is to be utterly rejected. The mission has primacy over the church in every way; she is a missionary slave. The mission, we have been very clear in arguing, is not accomplished by anything other than evangelism and church planting. A correct understanding of mission and actively engaging in sending apostles to preach the Gospel and make converts, especially among those people groups where there is no Christian witness, is needed before anything else. If a person dedicated his whole life to being evangelical, charismatic, and sacramental, but is self-centered and lacks charity and generosity, then he will never mature as a Christian. Equally, no matter how well-balanced or successful any congregation appears to be, if in the long run it is not actively engaged in the apostolic mission, then it will inevitably stray further and further away from the simple identity of being Christian; it will in the end set its strength against its Lord and end up being an accomplice of the Enemy, as many churches in North America and Europe have already done. When the Roman Catholic church became preoccupied with political power rather than evangelizing those who had not heard the Gospel, God sent Luther to shatter it into many pieces. When the mainline churches in the USA declined in missionary zeal they lost their identity and failed to capture the imaginations of their younger members, and have been largely declining since then. Id rather be a heterodox Nestorian missionary to China in the 5th century than a fat American Christian who is spoon-fed from cradle to grave with therapeutic religion. Practice In this work I have normally not accompanied the theological reflections with specific prescriptions in terms of praxis. Here though there is so much weakness in our churches, and as I have said this recovery of apostolic mission is so central to the life of the church that if it goes wrong then everything else is bound to degenerate into Satanic tares that rob the wheat of nutrition. First of all: absolutely any church, even a five-person home group meeting in secret, has the obligation to be missionary in some way. Some of the questions that should be asked follow:

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 Has your church prayed and discerned one or two or three unreached people groups where your energies can be focused? Has your church ever sent out a family or individual from your congregation to be a longterm missionary? Is at least half of your missions budget going to evangelistic and church-planting missionaries or ministries? How much of your churchs income is going to supporting various missions around the world? Is it at least 10%? These questions are of a very limited scope, but they are useful for initiating discussion. Specifically disappointing is the passive attitude of churches in appointing missionaries. Let the elders come together and pray and discern a couple of individuals or families and tell them that they have discerned that God wants for them to consider going on mission. Let these people pray and be educated and trained in mission, let them visit with other missionaries, and then let them be sent to wherever the elders have envisioned. For all the churches that claim to be New Testament or Bible churches this is the biblical pattern, yet very few follow it. It will be modified according to the congregations history and situation, but it must be seriously considered, nevertheless:
While they were worshipping the Lord [at the church in Antioch] and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus. (Ac 13:2-4 NIV)

The most specific example of the grievous failure of the church in world evangelism is Dar alIslam. Dar al-Islam stretches through all of northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf states, up through Turkey, then to Persia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of China, large parts of India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia. (Southern Spain is still considered to be part of Dar al-Islam because it was formerly the Islamic nation of Al-Andaluz, though it is wrongfully and temporarily occupied by Catholic rulers.)

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Since the Christian churches have largely neglected the mission to Islam God has brought them to us, millions upon millions immigrating to Europe and the USA and Canada, spreading into nations in Africa that have sizeable Christian communities like Nigeria and Kenya. God will not be mocked. Conclusion The word apostolonomy refers to a system of sending, a law (nomos) of sending (stollein) out (apo). The church must be such a system from its outset and regardless of the circumstances:
Responsibility for this task [the missio ad gentes] belongs to the universal Church and to the particular churches, to the whole people of God and to all its missionary forces. Every church, even one made up of recent converts, is missionary by its very nature, and is both evangelized and evangelizing. 60

The variations of the Great Commission make it clear that Jesus intention for his church was to proclaim and spread his teaching about the Kingdom of God. The Church was never an end in itself, but rather a means to an end: that the Gospel of the Kingdom would reach all peoples everywhere. Returning to the anthropological model of the human being, mission is like the active life of the person. Being healthy in mind, spirit, and body is related to right activity. A certain amount of exercise, right diet, fellowship with other people and Godthese things are necessary or the whole person becomes unhealthy. It is the same way with the church: if the church does not do what she was born and created to do then she will become sick and die. There are countless examples historically of this happening, especially with the churches in the lands of Islam and in Western Europe that have become more focused on self-preservation than sacrificial and bold and reckless at timeslove that risks safety and security for the sake of the Kingdom.

60

Missio Redemptoris 49.

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6. Conclusion
Word and Silence First, I have not offered a definition of what it means to be human. There are certainly other models, and that is all I have offered, an interpretation, a bland attempt to try to formulate in words what we all live every day. I have certainly not suggested that the soul and the mind and the body exist in a discrete manner. I have advocated pan-ethnic accountability and have mentioned the words bishop and overseer but have not in doing so endorsed, say, the Anglican model or the Roman Catholic model. Indeed, aside from saying that any given model should respect what precious little Scripture says about the offices of the presbyter and overseer, I do not have any firm opinions. Our lack of insight here is related to the fact that during the period when the Christian Scriptures were being written it seems that that there was no, one episcopal model that was used throughout the whole church. I have not endorsed any form of liturgy. I do believe that for a congregation or church to claim that they worship freely and thus without liturgy is to attempt to deny their own humanitya self-nullifying absurdity. The voice of the ancestor is all around us. It is most certainly in the Bible, in the table of contents, in the names of the books, in their order, all of this is a work of the people, in some sense of the term. If they want to say that they prefer a liturgy that lacks antiphonal response and litanies, that is very well. Perhaps that liturgy will minister best to the congregation. Indeed, as Chauvet points out, the Bible is composed of books that gained their enduring value to the community because they were used during the communal worship, first of the Hebrews, then of the Christians. Is it possible to consider that even so great an epistle as Romans would have even been considered for the canon if it had not been read communally in the worship (that is, liturgy) of the congregations? (None of this detracts from the perfection or inspiration of the various books.)

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Indeed, I wonder if anything novel has been said at all here. I think not. I have not tried to lay down a theological framework for anything at all. Most of all, my desire is to see a church that can finally come into its own and be the church. How long has it been since our Lord sent us into all the world, to make disciples, baptize, and teach? Much too long, and we have failed. We are the poor people in the dung heap that the 113th psalm talks about. Our harps are hung by the rivers of Babylon. But we are not pagans, so we will honor him; we are a people of Eucharist:
We thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled, The light of the altar and the sanctuary; Small lights of those who meditate at midnight And the lights directed through the colored panes of windows And the lights reflected from the polished stone, The gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco. Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward And see the light that fractures through unquiet water. We see the light but see not whence it comes. O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!61

Perhaps someoneif anyone ever reads thiswill notice that this short composition is little more than a torpid meditation on Eliots poems Choruses from The Rock and Four Quartets. But as he himself said:
. . . And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotions. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulatebut there is no competition There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

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For us, there is only the trying. The rest is nor our business. 62

And so there you have it, nothing new has been said, just a pathetic effort has been made to recover something that has been lost. These lights that we have kindled, the sacraments, the submission of the mind to the Story, the openness to the Other in the Spiritthese are little lights we have kindled and they will, I hope, burn brighter if they are placed side by side on the table of worship and communion of this body of Christ. Results As Eliot said, the rest is not our business. If there is any result at all that comes from this effort, I hope it would be pastoral. I mean, I hope that something that has been said here will assist pastors in their daily work. Perhaps this approach of sacramental, evangelical, and charismatic spirituality will help pastors to engage in a ministry that, in its worship and teaching and fellowship, complements the complete human being better. Perhaps during counseling a pastor will think, this person does not understand his bodyperhaps they need to engage in worship that emphasizes the sacraments more. Maybe some youth minister at a traditionally sacramental church will have the insight that a certain young woman does not subject her thoughts to the Gospel. Indeed, that she does not know the Gospel well enough to know what that means. Perhaps he will study the Gospel with her, and encourage her to share her faith with her friends in a simple and generous way, for after all, it is in giving that we receive. Everything has already been discovered, and there is nothing new under the sun. But there is something to be recovered here. Some kind of unity. Some kind of fulfillment. The sacraments are never more sacramental than when they are evangelical and charismatic. The Spirit is never more charismatic than when ushered in by the sacraments and the Word. The Gospel is never lucid and powerful than when it is greeted with signs and wonders and when it is signified by bread and wine, water, oil.

61 62

Eliot 170. Choruses from The Rock, X. Eliot 189. East Coker, V.

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Our gaze is submarine, but yes, the light fractures through the unquiet water. And though we do not see the source of light clearly, its refractions are all around us. So let us shine with the glory of the new covenant which does not fade, led us shine, with unveiled faces. A Step Back And here it is expedient for me to take a step back from the ethos and methodology of research into a more humble and debased rolethat of a silent, simple, human being. A man, or just a boy perhaps. And what have we done? Have we presented a system? Eliot says it well, do we constantly try to escape // From the darkness outside and within // By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good ? (160) Have we finally presented the system that will give the church an answer? No. We cannot offer any system of worship or communal life or common prayer. Derrida refused to define deconstructionism because he knew very well that he would have defiled his household god in doing so. We have no foundation in reason or culture, no foundation in universal notions of good and evil, justice and love, nothing like this have we. Rather we have a story about a man who claimed to be Gods Anointed One, who claimed to teach the true sense of the Law. For various reasons the political and religious leaders of the day conspired to kill him and did so. Defying all the great power of reason he was raised from the deador so his disciples claimed. His ministry of two or three years was cut short, but his teaching has grown into the most powerful movement in the history of humanity. The proclamation has not been changed since those early days of our ekklesia: Repent, confess your sins to God, believe in his Anointed One, worship him in thought, word, and deed, and receive new life. So we have this story, which Christians have called the Good News. We have no inscrutable historical verification for its validity. We have some booksta bibliathat we hold to be in some way inspired by Gods Spirit among us, and thus in some way unique. We have no verification for this, but the members of our community that wrote and redacted themprophets

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and apostles they werewe hold in the highest esteem and so we believe that they are true. We have these rituals that serve no real purpose. They produce nothing. They are useless like our God. Or perhaps we should say they are gratuitous like our God. The choice of the word depends upon the reader. Yet century after century we celebrate them, raising our hearts to God, giving him thanks and praise because it is a good and right thing. So ultimately we have nothing to offer the world. Or rather, we might say that The Way is like an empty vessel // that yet may be drawn from // without ever needing to be filled (Lao Tzu 4). Our only power is derived from the truth that we are the only ones who realize we are powerless. And from our own powerlessness we fill the world with the Life of God. And I have nothing infallible or certain to offer to my community, to my ekklesia. All I have outlined here is a series of reflections which theologians and saints greater than I have produced. I offer these reflections in humility to our ekklesia hoping that in some way or another they will assist our laity and priests and pastors in fulfilling the mission that our Lord gave to us. We recall here a most ancient Christian confession. Indeed, the confession may well predate the existence of the term Christian. And we confess it with you: Jesus Christ is Lord. Because this is true we yield to him what we are, what we have, and how we live. And this confession must reach the ends of the earth. It is what Jesus calls the gospel of the Kingdom, and it must reach all peoples of the earth. Again we have no way of proving this to those outside of our ekklesia, but we believe it because we are not capable of disbelief. We live from inside this story so we do not yield the author-ity, rather, the Kingdom and the power and the glory belong to our Father. No, we live within this story and cannot picture our existence otherwise. All we have is a story. All we have is our brothers and sisters. All we have is a resplendent hope that lies beyond the reach of the usefulness and analysis of this world. It is my hope and prayer that in some small way this meager contribution will assist my ekklesia in announcing the good news that has been entrusted to us. It is my hope that our priests and pastors will gain an insight into what it means to be a pastor or a priest, precisely because the nature of the human being and thus the God of Humanshas been in an ever-so-lightly manner elucidated.

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We have this good news which we are all obliged to proclaim in word and deed. We have these bodies which meet their fulfillment in these rituals that have been handed down from the ancients. We have this Spirit which is madness to the world, but to us it is Christs mind and the Holy Wisdom. This is what we have to offer the world. We should be driven to humility because of the meagerness of our offering. We should also be driven to humility because our offering vastly surpasses anything the world has to offer. It is truly the power of God for the salvation of all who believe. Therefore let us go forth in peace, to love and serve the Lord.

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