Theology of Ministry

Extract

Many years of listening-in, and of occasionally contributing, to inter-church discussions of ministry, and of sharing in the shipwreck of endeavours lasting from Lambeth 1920 to the collapse of church unity negotiations in England in 1980 on the rocks of ‘ministry’—all this convinced me that light must come from a different quarter.

It came from fundamental theology in general, and in particular from the theology of revelation and faith. This is an area in which much work was done in the years after Vatican II’s Constitution De divina revelatione and in which I have long had an interest. The gist of the matter, as is well known, is that Christian faith is not ‘propositional’ or having doctrine as its object (‘the teaching of the Church’), but is a personal response to God’s self-gift and disclosure in Christ. In this perspective, ‘beliefs’ are varying expressions, more pictorial or more abstract, of how God is comprehended in the relationship he thus establishes (his act of revealing). From this it follows that all Christian doctrines, i.e. beliefs accepted by and taught in a Christian community, must in the last analysis be about Christ. And one then needs to distinguish ‘faith-statements’ from all more secondary statements of Christian experience and conviction depending on them, which may then be called ‘value-statements’.