Wilhelm Löhe: “Mission is nothing but the one church of God in its movement—the realization of the one universal, catholic church.”
I don’t know anything about Löhe, but this fits well with one of Stanley Hauerwas’s standard expressions: “The first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world.” *
Here’s one expansion on it from Hauerwas:
Put starkly, the first task of the church when it comes to social ethics is to be the church. Such a claim may well sound self-serving or irrelevant until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. […] The first social task of the church — the people capable of remembering and telling the story of God we find in Jesus — is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as the world. The world, to be sure, is God’s world, God’s good creation, which is all the more distorted by sin because it is still bounded by God’s goodness. The church, therefore, is not anti-world, but rather an attempt to show what the world is meant to be as God’s good creation.
And those pair well with Hans Frei when he strongly suggested that the question of modernizing the church or its language is not a problem but an unecessary “conceptual cramp” that the church needs to be released from.
For me, at least, hovering in the background of all this is something like the peace of, not universalism per se, but a universal hopefulness (e.g. Balthasar) paired with “reverent agnosticism” (e.g. Barth, Hunsinger) and a “holy” or “honorable silence” (e.g. early Greek theologians).
This is not an easy given or a “cheap grace.” You don’t get the true hopefulness without a harsh and joyful seriousness. **
All of which strikes me as the appropriate human stance in regards to desire — for everyone, friends and enemies — and also in knowledge — always limited in scope and justiceability — and therefore also in power.
I don’t necessarily think it requires a universal hopefulness, but it has been increasingly difficult for me to see very well without it. (I also regard it as a practical and on-the-surface liberal but fundamentally and ultimately a conservative impulse. This dynamic is key.)
All this has me thinking about some of those personally essential things — bedrock things that really changed your heart-mind, things you not only come back to over and over but which make up the constantly assumed and relied upon air of any moment.
At some point, I’d like to list and organize some of them.
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* There are many variations of this from Hauerwas. Here are a few from the second chapter of his book Resident Aliens: “The political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world.” “The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.” “The main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”
In fact, the context of that last one is worth quoting:
Sometime ago, when the United States bombed military and civilian targets in Libya, a debate raged concerning the morality of that act. One of us witnessed an informal gathering of students who argued the morality of the bombing of Libya. Some thought it was immoral, others thought it was moral. At one point in the argument, one of the students turned and said, “Well, preacher, what do you think?”
I said that, as a Christian, I could never support bombing, particularly bombing of civilians, as an ethical act.
“That’s just what we expected you to say,” said another. “That’s typical of you Christians. Always on the high moral ground, aren’t you? You get so upset when a terrorist guns down a little girl in an airport, but when President Reagan tries to set things right, you get indignant when a few Libyans get hurt.”
The assumption seems to be that there are only two political options: Either conservative support of the administration, or liberal condemnation of the administration followed by efforts to let the U.N. handle it.
“You know, you have a point,” I said. “What would be a Christian response to this?” Then I answered, right off the top of my head, “A Christian response might be that tomorrow morning The United Methodist Church announces that it is sending a thousand missionaries to Libya. We have discovered that it is fertile field for the gospel. We know how to send missionaries. Here is at least a traditional Christian response.”
“You can’t do that,” said my adversary.
“Why?” I asked. “You tell me why.”
“Because it’s illegal to travel in Libya. President Reagan will not give you a visa to go there.”
“No! That’s not right,” I said. “I’ll admit that we can’t go to Libya, but not because of President Reagan. We can’t go there because we no longer have a church that produces people who can do something this bold. But we once did.”
We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.
** Not surprisingly, Craig L. Nessan describes Löhe’s five dimensions of “ecclesial theology” as: pietism, confessionalism, liturgical renewal, diakonia, and mission. He quotes Löehe’s Three Books About the Church, and his description of the place of the church in history:
Springing up on Pentecost and Calvary, the church flows through the ages like a river, and that same river and no other will flow unchangingly on through the ages until that great day when it will empty completely into the famed sea of eternal blessedness
Nessan adds: “Loehe entertained a vision of the catholic church through the ages and dared to claim that the Lutheran church, with its confessional clarity, was the fullest expression of that church.” I’ve been struggling with Catholicism, but given how central Gilbert Meilaender has been for me, maybe I’m dispositionally… Lutheran?