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Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Joseph L. Mangina
Joseph L. Mangina
Affiliation:
Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology5 Hoskin Avenue Toronto, ON M5S 1H7Canada
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Extract

In Book IV of Calvin's Institutes, the ‘external means …by which God invites us into the society of Christ and holds us therein’ consists chiefly in ‘the true church, with which as mother of all the godly we must keep unity’. Like Luther, Calvin could speak of mater ecclesia with an unembarrassed reference to the visible, historical community of God's people. The rhetoric of ‘mother church’ did not long remain a part of Protestant sensibility. The Reformation principle of ‘Christ alone’ has often tended to undermine strong claims for the church; conversely, the critique of institutions has played a key role in the shaping of Protestant identity, at times seeming to be the very point of the Reformation. The distinction assumes classic form in Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith. Protestant Christianity, Schleiermacher writes, ‘makes the individual's relation to the church dependent on his relation to Christ’, whereas Catholicism ‘makes the individual's relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the church’. This intuition would seem to be confirmed by recent ecumenical dialogue, which has fastened on the church's role in salvation as the most likely candidate for a ‘basic difference’ between Catholicism and Protestantism. At the same time, important voices on both sides have been asking whether such a sharp distinction can or should be sustained.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 1999 , pp. 269 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1999

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References

page 269 note 1 Calvin, , Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Book IV, I, 1Google Scholar; see the entire discussion that runs through IV, 1, 1–4. For Luther, see the references given by Jüngel, Eberhard in ‘Die Kirche als Sakrament?’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 80 (1983): 450–456Google Scholar.

page 269 note 2 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith, trans. Mackintosh, H.R. and Stewart, J. S. (Edinburgh: T.&. T. Clark, 1928), 103Google Scholar.

page 269 note 3 See the treatments in Birmelé, André, Le salut en Jésus Christ dans les dialogues oecuméniques (Paris: Cerf, 1986)Google Scholar, and Jenson, Robert, Unbaptized God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

page 270 note 4 On the uses and misuses of the term ‘political theology’, see O'Donovan, Oliver, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4Google Scholar.

page 270 note 5 See Character and the Christian Life (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, which contains a critique of modern Protestant understandings of the self (Bultmann, Barth), and draws on resources such as St. Thomas, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards for a constructive account of sanctification.

page 272 note 6 II/2, 197, translation modified. All citations from Barth refer to the ET.

page 273 note 7 To be sure, many critics have found in Barth's ontology of the church a problematic overdetermination of the church's identity. If the church is a predicate of Christ's being, how can it be the sinful church? And if its realization of its essence is an unpredictable ‘event’, how can we affirm that the church's empirical aspects have any theological significance whatsoever? See the excellent discussion of these issues in Healey, Nicholas M., ‘The Logic of Karl Barth's Ecclesiology: Analysis, Assessment, and Proposed Modifications’, Modern Theology (10: 3), July 1994Google Scholar.

page 274 note 8 Hunsinger, George, How To Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 109–110Google Scholar.

page 275 note 9 Consider the following from CD. IV/1: ‘If God in Jesus Christ has reconciled the world with himself this also means that in him he has made an end, a radical end, of the world which contradicts and opposes him, that an old aeon, our world-time (the one we know and have of ourselves) with all that counts and is great in it, has been brought to an end. The humility in which God willed to make himself like us, the obedience of Jesus Christ in which this self-humiliation of God and in it the demonstration of his divine majesty became a temporal event, does mean, in fact, that our hour has struck, our time has run its course, and it is all up with us’ (IV/1, 294).

page 275 note 10 See, for example, Moltmann, Jūrgen, The Way of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993), 230–231Google Scholar; Soulen, Kendall, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1996), 89–94Google Scholar.

page 276 note 11 IV/1, 308.

page 276 note 12 IV/1, 306. See also Barth's comments in the section titled ‘The Time of the Community’, especially the comments on 734.

page 277 note 13 To be fair, Barth supplements ‘The Verdict of the Father’ with two parallel discourses, ‘The Direction of the Son’ in IV/2 and ‘The Promise of the Spirit’ in IV/3. The point is not that he fails to use pneumatological language, often in powerful and insightful ways, but that he systematically undercuts its significance by conceiving of reconciliation in binitarian terms.

page 277 note 14 Two works from the 1960's may be cited: Jūrgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope, and Robert Jenson's Alpha and Omega (the latter a study of time and eternity in Barth).

page 277 note 15 In addition to Soulen's book noted above, see Sonderegger's, KatherineThat jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth's ‘Doctrine of Israel’ (Penn State University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

page 277 note 16 The similarity to which I am calling attention is purely formal. I do not mean to suggest that Barth's devaluing of the church, if that is what it is, is anywhere near as problematic as his treatment of Israel.

page 278 note 17 See Healey, , ‘The Logic of Karl Barth's Ecclesiology’, 264–265Google Scholar.

page 278 note 18 IV/1, 714.

page 279 note 19 IV/1, 720.

page 279 note 20 David Demson has recently drawn attention to the key role of the apostles in Barth's overall construal of Christ's presence. See Demson, , Hans Frei and Karl Barth: Different Ways of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997)Google Scholar.

page 279 note 21 IV/1, 722.

page 280 note 22 And, we should add, the prophets. Barth carefully reminds us that the apostles represent Israel and point to the Old Testament as well as the New.

page 280 note 23 See the discussion of the Chalcedonian pattern in Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth.

page 280 note 24 Or die Schriftprinzip, as Barth calls it (IV/1, 721).

page 280 note 25 It is important to realize that to say this is not necessarily to retreat into merely empirical or sociological descriptions. On the contrary, reclaiming the visible people of God as a theological category is a way of rescuing the church from its sociological captivity. It is exceedingly odd when theology can only refer to noumenal entities, thereby relegating everything ‘empirical’ to the realm of social science. This is part of the burden of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory. On the eclipse of ‘denotative’ accounts of the church in modernity, see Lindbeck, George, ‘The Church’, in Keeping the Faith: Essays on the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. Wainwright, Geoffrey (London: SPCK, 1988)Google Scholar.

page 281 note 26 I.e. after the immediacy of presence that characterized the Forty Days of the resurrection appearances. One might note in passing that everything I am saying here about the church applies doubly to Israel, whose existence is not only in ‘ordinary time’ but has the added disadvantage of witnessing to the negative fact of divine judgment.

page 281 note 27 See Reinhard Hutter's trenchant comments in ‘The Church as Public: Dogma, Practice, and the Holy Spirit’, Pro Ecclesia, Summer 1995Google Scholar.

page 281 note 28 C.D. IV/3, 826.

page 283 note 29 See Barth's 1930 essay ‘Fate and Idea in Theology’, in which he explores the relation between theology and philosophy. For an illuminating discussion of ‘the concrete’ as a category in Barth, see von Balthasar, Hans Urs, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Oakes, Edward T., S.J., (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992) esp. 233 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 283 note 30 The point can be stated in terms of Barth's philosophical rooting in German Idealism, and specifically the thought of Hegel. While Barth agrees with Hegel that history in its contingent givenness cannot be trusted as a guide to truth, he locates the prius of history not in the Concept but in Jesus Christ.

page 284 note 31 Hauerwas's famous claim is thus analogous to Søren Kierkegaard's even more famous ‘truth is subjectivity’. A Wittgensteinian reading of Kierkegaard would interpret him not as offering a theory of truth, but as provoking his reader toward genuine and passionate living. Likewise, the claim ‘the church is a social ethic’ is not a denial of the theological/credal church, but a summons for us to ‘be church’.

page 286 note 32 For Barth's use of the conception, see C.D. II/2, 177; IV/2, 198, 656. See the critical comments on Barth's usage in Pannenberg, , Systematische Theologie, Bd. III (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 59 n. 152Google Scholar.

page 288 note 33 See Hütter, Reinhard, Evangelische Ethik als Kirchliches Zeugnis (Neukirchner Verlag, 1993)Google Scholar, for an excellent overview of Hauerwas's thought on the church. As Hütter points out, there is no single work that one might refer to as containing ‘Hauerwas's ecclesiology’. Rather, his preference for expressing himself in essay form reflects a conviction that ecclesiology (like Christian theology and ethics generally) is by nature a local affair, which does not readily yield to ‘systematic’ treatment.

page 288 note 34 The Peaceable Kingdom, 87.

page 289 note 35 Hauerwas, , Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living In Between (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth Press, 1988), 106Google Scholar.

page 290 note 36 A point more easily grasped in strongly rhetorical traditions of preaching, whether pre-modern or modern? No listener to Luther, Donne, or Martin Luther King, Jr. could doubt that preaching is discourse that effects what it signifies.

page 290 note 37 See Steinmetz's, David comments in his Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 82–83Google Scholar.

page 290 note 38 The title of the section from ‘Gesture of a Truthful Story’ from which the above quotation is taken.

page 291 note 39 A theme that surfaced early in Hauerwas's work, as he criticized the dominant modern traditions of thinking about ethics. See e.g. his first collection of essays, Vision and Virtue (Notre Dame, 1974)Google Scholar.

page 291 note 40 Hauerwas, , ‘The Gesture of a Truthful Story’, 107Google Scholar.

page 292 note 41 Here I would want to distinguish between an ad hocor tactical critique of liberalism, fully mandated in our present circumstances, and a strategic or global critique of liberalism. The latterwould confuse polemic against modernity with genuinely theological construction; the world still sets the agenda, albeit in a negative sense.

page 293 note 42 Jenson, , Unbaptized God, 97Google Scholar.

page 293 note 43 See Hūtter, , Evangelische Ethik, 60–62Google Scholar.

page 294 note 44 Birmelé, André, Le salut en Jésus Christ, 250Google Scholar. I was directed to the passage by Jenson, , Unbaptized God, 92Google Scholar.

page 294 note 45 We can state this in terms of sacramental theology. On the strong view of mediation, the church is the signum of God's action, as the Protestant view readily acknowledges; but it is signum in such a way that it also participates in the res. As with any sacramental reality, the church conveys the very thing that it signifies.

page 295 note 46 See the beautiful discussion of faith in IV/1, 740–79.

page 295 note 47 I write ‘little directly to say’ because, as it seems to me, the question of authority consistently hovers in the background of Hauerwas's writing; it is implicit throughout his critique of liberalism. The areas in which he has done his most explicit writing on authority are, interestingly, in relation to the authority of physicians and of parish clergy. See ‘Authority and the Profession of Medicine’ in Suffering Presence and ‘The Pastor as Prophet’ in Christian Existence Today.

page 296 note 48 Peaceable Kingdom, 31.

page 296 note 49 Peaceable Kingdom, 31, emphasis added.

page 297 note 50 Jūngel, , ‘Die Kirche als Sakrament?’, 450–456Google Scholar. See Jenson's, criticisms of Jüngel's reading of Luther on this point in Unbaptized God, 93Google Scholar.

page 297 note 51 Peaceable Kingdom, 46. It is significant that this sentence immediately follows a quotation from MacIntyre on the nature of a ‘tradition’.

page 298 note 52 As another indication of this, Hauerwas's recent work has been marked by a polemic against the church's ‘voluntary’ character. Here a certain distance begins to open up between Hauerwas and Yoder.

page 298 note 53 See the Common Statement (esp. §§ 5–20) in Justification by Faith, vol. 7 of Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue, ed. Anderson, H. George, Murphy, T. Austin, and Burgess, Joseph (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985)Google Scholar.

page 298 note 54 Statements from reports of Methodist-Roman Catholic dialogue, Denver (1971) and Honolulu (1981). Cited in Birmelé, , Le salut en Jésus Christ, 344–345Google Scholar.

page 299 note 55 ‘The Methodist-Catholic convergence on a certain cooperation of the believer in his salvation is, nonetheless, limited to the individual. There is no convergence with respect to a possible translation into ecclesiology …. The question of an active cooperation of the church in the salvation of its members is not raised. It is absent from Methodist preoccupations’ (translation JM). Birmelé, Le salut, 347.

page 301 note 56 I borrow the term ‘concrete pneumatology’ from David Yeago, who uses it to illuminate a particular tendency in Anglican theology. See his ‘Theological Renewal in Communion: What Anglicans and Lutherans Can Learn from One Another’, in Inhabiting Unity: Theological Perspectives on the Proposed Lutheran-Episcopal Concordat, ed. Radner, Ephraim and Reno, R.R. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995)Google Scholar.

page 301 note 57 The proposed Concordat between the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches in the United States would be a good example.

page 301 note 58 Baptism, Eucharist & Ministry (Geneva: Faith and Order Commission, World Council of Churches, 1982), 45Google Scholar.

page 302 note 59 See the essay ‘The Name of Jesus’ in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)Google Scholar.

page 302 note 60 Whereas Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that ‘Jesus has been raised into the kerygma’, Milbank seems to be saying that ‘Jesus has been raised into the church’. A charitable construction could be given to both statements; one would have to judge on the basis of the larger theological proposal. Milbank has taught us much about the church's public character and the story of its loss in modernity. Yet his larger project is weakened by his failure to grasp the central concerns of the Reformation, whose radical Christocentricity was a recovery of catholic tradition.

page 302 note 61 When Milbank writes that the incidents and metaphors of the gospel narratives are ‘essentially formal statements about, and general instructions for, every human life’ (‘The Name of Jesus’, 156), he comes oddly close to David Tracy's correlation of Jesus' identity with a certain ‘way of being in the world’. Yet precisely as a ‘correlation’, one wonders if Tracy's seeming liberalism might not do better justice to the gospel accounts than Milbank's version of catholicism.

page 303 note 62 See Peter, Carl J., ‘Justification by Faith and the Need of Another Critical Principle’, in Justification by Faith, vol. 7 of Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue, ed. Anderson, H. George, Murphy, T.Austin, and Burgess, Joseph (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985)Google Scholar. See also the illuminating exchange between ProfessorPeter, and ProfessorForde, Gerhard in the volume In Search of Christian Unity, ed. Burgess, Joseph A. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1991)Google Scholar.

page 303 note 63 See Jenson's, remarks on an ‘ascetic’ understanding of Christ and the church, Unbaptized God, 100Google Scholar.

page 304 note 64 The theme of the church as polis constituted by a defining body of practices has been brought out with special force by Hauerwas's European interpreters. Besides the works of Reinhard Hütter cited above, see Rasmusson, Arne, The Church as Polis: Political Theology and Theological Politics as Exemplified by Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

page 305 note 65 This article is a greatly revised version of a paper delivered to the Annual Meeting of the Karl Barth Society of North America, Chicago, June 1997. I am greatly indebted to Kendall Soulen for his comments on an earlier draft.