1. Introduction to the data of Old and New Testament
The evangelical doctrine of the church is essentially very simple: God has always purposed and acted in history to gather a people around himself, a group who confess that Jesus is Lord and sit under his word. The church is the living group around Christ created by the gospel.
At key points of biblical revelation where foundational statements are made about the purposes of God in history, it is hard to escape the strong impression that God's immediate and ultimate goal for humanity is friendship with each other and with him. So for example, see Genesis 1 to 3, 12:1-3, and the Prologue of John's Gospel which not only summarizes salvation history to that point, but opens up its consummation with the advent of Jesus Christ. A striking feature in these biblical descriptions is the language of kinship and sociality. Adam and Eve, who as the image of God answer to the deliberative plural within God (Gn 1:26 & 27), delight in each other's company (Gn 2:20b-25) as man and wife, and are in a natural friendship with the God who seeks them out in the garden in the cool of the day (Gn 3:8).
On the other side of the fall, at the beginning of history as we experience it, when God reiterates his original purposes he calls an individual (Gn 12:1-3), Abraham, who will be know as 'the friend of God', and will found a nation which will be called 'God's delight' (Is 62:4), 'his portion' (Deut 32:9), God's son' (Ex 4:23), his people.
Seen against the full flow of the biblical witness, these people are God's people because they live in his land and he lives in their midst. The Old Testament motifs of land, people, temple, worship and exile show that what makes Israel 'the people of God' is the fact that they are physically gathered or assembled around him and he is in their midst; he rules them and they respond with faith. The theme of 'gathering and scattering' which is so central to the exilic theology of judgement, points up the foundational nature of this intimate gathering. Remove the people from the land or God from the midst of these people and they become, 'not, my people' (Hos 1:9).
Ezekiel's message to the dispossessed Israelites in Babylon forcefully bears this out. Although now removed from the land and the temple, and thus rightly in their own eyes 'no people', they still to some extent retain their status as 'my people', because Yahweh himself has come and set up sanctuary amongst them:
Therefore say: 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone.'
Therefore say: 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered; and I will give you back the land of Israel again ... They will be my people and I will be their God.' (Ez 11.15-20, see also 37.24-8).
We note that this provision for Israel in Babylon is temporary, even proleptic, for it looks forward to the return from the exile to the land and the temple, and thus the real national gathering around Yahweh, and consequently the clear delineation once again of Israel as the people of God.
What is of great importance to the relationship between 'the people of God' in the Old Testament and 'the church' in the New, is that the New Testament begins from the perspective that Israel has not yet really returned from its exile! Check out the provenance and the content of the Old Testament quotations in the Gospels and the epistles; they are overwhelmingly looking forward to the return, not commenting on its present existence. It is only in Jesus Christ and his heavenly kingdom that the people have really returned to the 'land' and the 'temple', the presence of God, and thus are the true commonwealth (eg. see Heb 12.14-29, Eph 1.17-23, 2.6-22).
It is of course the New Testament which gives the evangelical doctrine of the church its definitive shape.
The prologue to John's Gospel runs back over the purposes of God since creation, since Abraham, and focuses them in Jesus Christ. In this magnificent rehearsal of past events and future prospects, the God who engages in these salvific purposes is the 'Father', who sends 'from his bosom' 'his only begotten Son', and makes us through faith 'children of God, born not of natural descent, nor of human decision, but born of God'. God's purposes in the world then, are for a group of people to live in a most intimate friendship with him and each other. The most usual description of this group in the New Testament is 'the church'.
As you are no doubt well aware, the New Testament often uses the word 'ekklesia' (which in contemporary Greek literature is just an ordinary word meaning 'gathering' (cf Acts 19:32,29,41)) to address groups of Christians. In the epistles, the word is very often used in the singular to address actual assemblies in cities and in homes. The plural 'churches' is used for greater than one city or region. Further, each of these individual assemblies are addressed as if they are true or complete churches. That is, their theological legitimacy does not depend on membership of some other earthly entity.
Quite rightly, this pattern of address is taken to indicate that fundamental to the New Testament's presentation of church is 'assembly', and moreover, 'local assembly'. There are also, to my knowledge, a few possible exceptions to this pattern, where either the singular is used to indicate an area (Act 9:31)1 or the writer qualifies 'church' by the adjective 'whole' which could indicate, depending on the exegetical strength of the argument, that the local church exists generally apart from its meeting (1 Cor 14:23,2 Rom 16:23, Acts 5:11). If this be accepted, then it could signal the beginning of the semantic shift in 'church' from 'gathered entity' to its later meaning, 'earthly group you belong to when it is not actually meeting.' Still, fundamental in these references is the notion of 'community', or 'sharing in something'.
Thus from this all too brief overview of the raw data from the Old and New Testaments, we must conclude that the notion of the 'people of God' and the 'church' are essentially the same. Intrinsic to both is being gathered or assembled around God, sharing in God's presence and rule. 'People of God' and 'church' are two metaphors, often physical metaphors, testifying to the same reality, a holy corporation living in the immediate presence of God.
2. What lies behind this?
What then lies behind this use of the terms 'people of God' and 'ekklesia'? A careful examination of the New Testament, I believe, yields 4 ground reasons or foundations which account for the New Testament, in the earthly sphere, strongly presenting church in terms of 'congregation' and 'community'. It is these 4 foundations, and 4 corollaries, which define the evangelical doctrine of the church.
In the context of the brief you have given me for this talk, I will not only seek to outline the theological nature of these foundations but also reflect on what they may have to say to Sydney Diocese as we move into the new millennium. For our purposes tonight, I will major on the letter to the Ephesians, which has at its very focus as the apex of the work of Christ in the purposes of God, at the end of that grand sweep in chapter 1, the church: "which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way (1:22-23)". As we know, the recurring theme of the church dominates chapters 1 to 4; let me read to you an important centre section which can assist us in our reflections tonight, 2:11-22:
Ephesians 2
11 Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called "uncircumcised" by those who call themselves "the circumcision" (that done in the body by the hands of men)
12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. Ephesians
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,
15 by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace,
16 and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.
18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household,
20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.
22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Holy Scripture highlights for us 4 theological foundations against which we must do our thinking on the evangelical church.
1. the foundation of the apostles and the prophets
2:20 points us to the fact that the foundation of the church is the teaching of the apostles and the prophets, that teaching which was given to them by revelation and mandate by the chief corner stone, Jesus Christ. That immediately tells us that if we wish to be the Church of Jesus Christ we must be a doctrinal church. That is, we must be a church which struggles with every sinew of mind and body to understand, confess and teach the deposit of faith which our Lord has given his church in the Old and New Testament.
Nor is this just a mere starting point, but is a foundation, that which ought determine and control everything else which we do. Further, coming to understand the teaching of the Bible accurately and in prayer is not a pedanticism, but is a saving activity, for in our confession of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done for us, that is, the gospel, God saves us and our hearers (Rom 10:9, 17). Why? Because God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is personally present to us in all his power and glory and grace, by his word. As Joshua was promised as he stood trembling on the edge of the promised land (Joshua 1:5-9). To 'do doctrine', is not merely a fringe activity, nor is it the property of any one special group in the church, nor is just a way of defining ourselves in some sort of post-modernist group relativism, nor is it 'playing at church'; no, 'doing doctrine', confessing Christ, is evangelism, which saves ourselves as well as our hearers. Formulating, confessing and teaching doctrine in all our church activities is evangelism. Finally, and not unexpectedly 'living by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God', is doxological; it gives God the glory and praise and honour which is his due.
These insights are what drove the early church to struggle against the inroads of their pagan culture and thinking. In confessing Jesus Christ, truly God and truly Man, they knew that they were expressing the teaching of the Bible on God's terms, not on the terms of their culture, and that the very existence of the church, and its conformity to God's mission in the world, depended on this teaching. True faith and true godliness, prayer and precision in knowledge of God, went inextricably together. Athanasius, the great defender of the Nicean creed, summed up the achievement of the Council of Nicea in terms of it being essentially a devout or godly act of faith, made by the whole Council, 'as in the presence of God.'3 These early fathers also knew that faith denounces. Affirmation of the truth must reject other affirmations as false. To not engage in the negative task of Christian theology is to have 'other God's besides me.' It is a most serious breech of the first commandment. For Irenaeus, knowledge of the truth of God or the truth of the gospel is not abstract or detached, so long as it is embodied in the church, that is in its confession, liturgies and teaching. Why, because the church is the body of Christ. Theology is a corporate activity, in which God is truly present. In this way, the very being of the church is brought into earthly existence, protected and nourished, and its unity established and guaranteed. As Athanasius stressed, the 'church is truly church in so far as it dwells in the Holy Trinity and embodies the truth of the gospel in its empirical life and worship.'4 The church is only 'catholic' and 'one', if it is 'one' in the truth. Outside of this, in a very real sense, the church ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ.
When the evangelical Reformers re-discovered the New Testaments teachings about the nature of salvation, they too knew that the church must stand and fall by the truthfulness and clarity of its teachings. Against the Christian humanist, Erasmus, who sought peace in the church by demanding doctrinal ambiguity, Luther penned his famous reply:
For it is not a mark of a Christian mind to take no delight in assertions; on the contrary, a man must delight in assertions or he will be no Christian. And by assertion - in order that we nay not be misled by words - I mean a constant adhering, affirming, confessing, maintaining, and an invincible persevering; ... I am speaking, moreover, about the assertion of those things which have been divinely transmitted to us in the sacred writings. . .
Let Skeptics and Academics keep well away from us Christians, but let there be among us "assertors" twice as unyielding as the Stoics themselves. How often, I ask you, does the apostle Paul demand that plerophoria 5(as he terms it) - that most sure and unyielding assertion of conscience? In Rom 10:10 he calls it "confession", saying, "with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." And Christ says: "Everyone who confesses me before men, I also will confess before my Father" (Matt 10:32). Peter bids us give a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15). What need is there to dwell on this?
Nothing is better known or more common among Christians than assertion. Take away assertions and you take away Christianity. Why, the Holy Spirit is given them from heaven, that a Christian may glorify Christ and confess him even unto death.'6
Confession, then, is the task of formulating, teaching and applying doctrine, doctrine is confession; and it is mandatory, for it springs from relationship with Jesus Christ, son of David, Son of God.
We cannot be the evangelical church, then, without seeking in all our church activities to as unambiguously and clearly as possible to present to ourselves and to the world: Christ clothed in his gospel, Christ clothed in his promises. That was driving force behind the 16th century revolution in theology which gave us our 39 Articles and our Book of Common Prayer.
So it is with dismay that one noted that during the debate in our Synod over A Prayer Book for Australia, the bishop's bench was silent. Here, in APBA in general, and in its services of Holy Communion in particular, is a collection of liturgies offered as the new bench mark, the contemporary standard, which in brief puts forward two groups of errors which fuzzify and thus deny the gospel.
- The loss of substitutionary atonement in understanding the death of Christ; and quite naturally along with and logically preceding it, the extreme weakening of the strong biblical presentation of the wrath of God.
- The move toward seeing the Holy Communion service as our offering to God of an objective 'eucharistic sacrifice'. In modern Roman Catholic eucharistic liturgies, there are 14 markers which teach that the eucharist is the offering to God of an objective sacrifice. In Second Order APBA, using Thanksgiving 3, nine of these fourteen are present. Even without Thanksgiving 3, 7 are present.
By contrast, in his reformed Prayer Book of 1552 (which except for the addition back of the first sentence in the two sentences used for the administration of the elements is the same as the consecration and communion sections of 1662), Thomas Cranmer removed all but one of these markers of eucharistic sacrifice. The one marker he did not remove, and indeed could not, is the one indicating the modern notion of 'anamnesis' (memorial).
Now, Cranmer could have been wrong, or, we could be wrong in taking Cranmer's work as an appropriate standard for our day. But that not one of the bishops got up and sought to teach us where we, or Cranmer, are in error in our concerns, or indeed, to voice any theological objections which they may have had themselves to APBA, was, I believe, perhaps the lowest moment this diocese has had in 60 years. Wittingly, or unwittingly, they have sent a signal that in the end, doctrine is not of definitive, foundational importance, and that church unity is not unity in the truth. But, perhaps even more corrosively, their silence has endorsed post modern skepticism about the possibility, the nature and the place of true doctrine. A skepticism now shared by many of our evangelical friends outside Sydney.
And there are other disturbing symptoms of this malaise. In recent times a decided and prominent non-evangelical has been appointed to the Doctrine Commission of the Diocese of Sydney. Also, a person has been appointed as a member of the Archbishop's Ordination Selection Panel who has in print scorned the teaching of the 39 Articles and the Prayer Book on the virgin birth of Christ, the body and bones resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the substitutionary nature of the atonement, as 'narrowly conceived doctrines.' This person's integrity is not in question, for he is open about his modernist beliefs; but the selection of candidates for ordination, the deciding of what and who is appropriately Anglican for such ministry, is a foundational responsibility, where on the grounds of Holy Scripture, if God is to be honoured, members ought have firm evangelical doctrinal beliefs.
2. christology
The teaching of the apostles and prophets is, in the language of Ephesians, 'the foundation' of the church, because Christ himself is the chief corner stone. With these words, the New Testament signals the ultimate foundation: Jesus Christ. Why? because all the purposes of God are focussed in Christ; it is in Christ that all the promises of God find their Yes and Amen (2 Cor 1:15-22).
The church is the body of Christ, 'Without which, we may dare to say, he regards himself as incomplete.', John Calvin. The New Testament Anglican scholar, Edwin Huskiness writes:
For the Catholic Christian, Quid obis videtur de Ecclesia, What think ye of the Church?, is not merely as pertinent a question as Quid obis videtur de Christo, What think ye of Christ? : it is the same question differently formulated.7
C. K. Barrett aptly puts it, 'Say Christ, and one way or another, you have implied the existence of church.'8
It is clear from the biblical data that church must be regarded as a function of christology. It is he who creates, defines, and continues the church. It can not be over emphasised that the ontological ground of our knowledge of what the church is, its function, its ministry and the like, is Jesus Christ. For this reason, all ecclesiology must be explicitly grounded, developed and determined from the person and work of Jesus Christ. Detach ecclesiological thinking from Jesus Christ, and then the understanding we attach to words and phrases and concepts, even when they are biblical words, phrases and concepts, will be foreign to the ecclesiology of the New Testament. A little thought about the distortions that have occurred in the history of Christian thought over the following will make the point clear: 'this is my body, this is my blood'; 'worship'; 'edification'; 'unity'; 'holiness'.
If I may illustrate with respect to the nature and importance of 'the foundation of the apostles and prophets, dealt with above. There is a modern tendency, including by some evangelical writers, to split-off the written word of God from the person of Jesus, from his being. So, in this manner of thought, it can be said that the Bible is a sacrament of God's presence in the world, in parallel to say, baptism and the Lord's Supper being sacraments of God's presence, his activity and person. That is, by insisting on an essential detachment of the word about Christ from Christ himself, the Bible and the theological statements which come from the Bible are, as with sacraments in general, signs of signs, not direct significations of the person of Christ, and thus God. The danger in this approach, of course, is that just what is the it that theological statements of Scripture are meant to point to, the it which in turn is supposed to point us to God himself?
A more disciplined christological approach shows that theological statements of Scripture are not signs of signs, but directly and persuasively lead us into knowledge of God as he is in himself. Christ, and Christ clothed with the gospel, are not two separate things. The gospel is Christ's fitting clothing. Why?
In contrast to the Greek idea of the logos as an abstract cosmological principle, and the modern idea that logos or knowledge is split of from being, the New Testament's christology shows us that the Logos inheres in the very being of God, and is identical with the person of the Son. God is never without his Word for the Word and being of God are essentially and eternally one. The Word of God is not one thing and his being another, they coinhere mutually and indivisibly in one another. Far from speech being a foreign or inferior element to God, in his inner being God is intrinsically eloquent, he is speaking being. Therefore, when Christ comes 'clothed with the gospel', 'clothed with his promises', we are not dealing indirectly with God and knowledge of God through the foreign and inferior means of human speech. Rather, through the so called 'foreign' and 'inferior' means of human statements about God in the Bible we are dealing with God directly as he deals with us directly in his Son who is clothed in his gospel. Because the Logos of God is ontological, ie. Word is mode of God's being, the theology which comes from the divine self-revelation of Holy Scripture is both God's real presence to us and our true and real confession of him. God truly and really meets with us in his Word. The Bible is not in itself a sacrament of God's presence in the world, but as it is believed in its attestation to God in Christ it is God's very presence. To use a notion that John Calvin wrestled with, in the gospel we have intuitive (real knowledge of an immediately present object), audative knowledge of God, for God is present by his Word.
3. eschatology
Because the church is primarily a Christological entity, it is also an eschatological entity. The promises given to Abraham were 'heavenly promises' (Heb 11:8-10, 11-22). THE church is the heavenly gathering around Christ which is permanent and to which all believers, past and present belong. It is the outlook of the New Testament that in our humble local gatherings, it is the heavenly church we are in reality assembled in (Heb 12:18-24). Where Christ is, at the right hand of the Father, there we are.
'Heaven' in the New Testament, as seen for example in the Lord's Prayer, mainly functions as a metaphor for the unopposed rule of God. New Testament eschatology, with its structure of 'now, but not yet', assures us that even in our imperfect gatherings we are enjoying the perfected, because we are in Christ. It is these observations that make us conclude that any local gathering is truly church.
Even in the early church, where the pressure of heresy created a need to define a properly constituted assembly in terms of the presence of the bishop, the eschatology and christology of the New Testament still exerted its influence. Ignatius can say: ' wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church (Ep. Smyrneans, 8)'. As the longer version shows, it is the heavenly Christ he has in mind: 'where Christ is, there does all the heavenly host stand by waiting upon him as the Chief Captain of the Lord's might.'
Further, during the rise of monarchical papalism in the 10th and 11th centuries - with its stress on the church being the earthly institution, the notion that the local church in and of itself is a complete and true church continued to be held, as Gerd Tellenbach (emeritus university professor of History, Freiburg im Breisgau) points out in his recent book.9 In its liturgy, the medieval church remained aware that the whole of the church is present in each individual church as a whole, for Christ is with her. In our own day, the Catholic scholar, Yves Congar, has continued to make the same point.10
4. double edification
Most extended New Testament descriptions about the church concern what happens in the church. Ephesians 4:1-16, the 'church is the body of Christ', is foundational. Because the existence of the church is the result of the purposes of God in the world, defined Christologically and eschatologically, the local church is where we must share in the gifts of ministry so that we may
'grow up in every way into him who is the Head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.' (vv14-16).
The context of this statement in Ephesians makes it clear that the use of building language, edification, of 4:12 and 4:16 means not just a 'building up' but also a 'building out'. In Ephesians Paul squarely sets the church in the context of God's purposes in the world, to bring all things under Christ (1:3-10, 1:19-23) by making from the nations of the world (the Jews and the Gentiles), one new humanity (2:14-22). Further, the existence of the one new humanity, the body of Christ, the church, is God's demonstration to all the cosmos of his wisdom (3:7-12). In this context, the body and building language of 4:1-16 has a double edification in view - out and up, 'until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.'
From these four foundations, four important corollaries flow which ought shape our ecclesiology.
1. confessing the faith
About this, enough has been said. The evangelical church lives or dies, honours or dishonours Christ by its doctrine.
2. immediacy & completeness
Because of the christological and eschatological determination of church, and because Christ rules his own body directly through his word, each local church is directly and completely church. It does not need bishops or priests or deacons to be a true church. They may be for the good of the church, but they are not of its essence. In a helpful way, a doctrine commission report of the 1980s makes this point after carefully examining the New Testament and the theology of the Anglican Reformers.
Out of all the statements the Anglican Reformers could have made by way of a confessional statement, and for all their continuing with certain aspects of medieval ideas about the church elsewhere, they made this one seminal:
Article 19 of the 39 Articles:
The visible Church of Christ is a congregation [ie. an assembly] of faithful men [ie. believers], in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly administered according to Christ's ordinance . . .
Because the evangelical articles of the 16th century major on the person and work of Christ, nothing more needs to be said, indeed, not much more can be said as to what is needed for the completeness of the visible church.
3. historicity
For all the above reasons, the church is not a static super-historical reality, like the Neoplatonic view of reality which so dominated early and medieval theology. Because of Christ and the Spirit, the empirical church in space and time is the body of Christ.
However, in views of the church which are informed by Greek philosophy, the earthly church as institution was conceived of as but the earthly reflection of the heavenly Kingdom of God. This dualistic way of thinking makes the heavenly or invisible church an ideal which is inherently inaccessible, and reduces the earthly or visible church into something which has no intrinsic relationship with its heavenly anchor. This dualism made the earthly church essentially a-historical, static, and unreformable. Further, as legal and political ways of thinking became dominant, in the western church especially, the earthly church felt free to govern itself in ways which were in direct contradiction to the nature of the church as the body of Christ. So, to cite a famous example, Augustine, having given up on persuasion to solve the problem, turned to the emerging Christian state to use its sword to compel the Donatist schismatics to come back under the rule of the catholic bishops, and rejoiced in his new found success.
But as I have already indicated, in the New Testament 'heaven' is not a metaphor for the place where Plato's eternal forms exist overhanging the material sphere, but a metaphor for the untrammelled rule of God. In the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the eternal has entered radically once and for into our earthly existence, and directly continues in the heavenly session of Christ to rule and renew the earth.
The distinction between the visible and the invisible church needs to be thought of in terms of the eschatological 'now, but not yet', not in terms of the one true church only being heavenly, and its earthly counterpart thus being freed to see itself as a club or denomination which may make up and apply its own rules of association.
If there has been a weakness in the so-called Knox-Robinsonian doctrine of the church it was the failure to see that because Christ himself is the church, embracing it all in himself, the empirical, earthly church in space and time is indeed the body of Christ. That is, the earthly church of our everyday experience is in fact the body of Christ now, and not just the body of Christ by way of heavenly ideal. The earthly church is not appropriately described as a 'club', free to make its own rules for inclusion and exclusion, but is the bride of Christ, his body, over which he is the head, and not any human institution or set of traditions. The sad events of the past in which good and godly ministers were threatened with law courts, the revoking of their licence, consequent removal from their homes and Christian friends, and loss of their superannuation (until the state government changed the rules) because they had broken not the law of Christ, but denominational rules (in order to better serve the congregations with the gospel) sprang from a failure to think and act sufficiently from the well-springs of christology.
As the Reformers so clearly saw in their repudiation of the Neoplatonic view of the church of the Middle Ages, the local church is the expression and focus of God's ongoing historical purposes. The form this direct activity of God in time takes is evangelism which produces a double edification, or in the jargon of our day, church growth!
4. trinitarian fellowship
The Christ who counts us as his body, brings us to the Father. John 17:26 is a good summary of the trinitarian foundation and goal of church:
I made known unto them your name, and will make it known: that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them (Jn 17:26)
Jesus Christ has come from the bosom of the Father to bring us back to the bosom of the Father.
There is a strong and unambiguously stated teaching of the New Testament that we as individuals, and especially corporately as the 'body of Christ', share in the trinitarian being of God. Further, we are to behave as a church, and towards each other in the church, on the basis of who God is, on the basis of his trinitarian being. Thus, in Ephesians 3 Paul prays that we may know the love of God in all its fullness, 'that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.' In Philippians 2 we are urged to do nothing out of selfish ambition, but have the same attitude that Christ had, 'who because11 he was in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but make himself nothing . . .'There were two major ways of understanding true being in the ancient world which carry over to much of our contemporary situation.
"Graded hierarchy"
The first major ontology was from the world of Greek philosophy. Greek thought saw real being or reality as a graded hierarchy. In a way that we now find strange - except in Hinduism and certain New Age beliefs - they saw all of reality in terms of a hierarchical movement down from an impersonal, single divine substance or monod and back up again through the same hierarchy until one's own little, individual drop (so to speak) returned to the impersonal singular ocean of divinity.
This notion of true being as a graded hierarchy can be seen in the way the medieval church pictured God's grace being mediated from the Father through Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary and then on downward through saints, angels, the priest, the sacraments till finally it reached the sinner. Prayer was often thought of as a returning upwards along the same route.
But most especially, the hierarchical ontology of pagan Greece dominated church life. The Cyprianic vision of the bishop being the only proper sacrament and representative of Christ in the earthly church, and thus the earthly church only being properly constituted when the bishop was present and ministered to down the chain, bishop, priest and deacon, has been dominant in the Anglican denomination to this day. Both our present and previous Archbishop have spoken in terms of they as Archbishops having the ministry of Sydney, a ministry in which we as priests share as their vicars or representatives. That in justification of this view, Archbishop Robinson appealed to an example in the pre-Reformation Church of England, and to the wording of vows and licences in the Anglocatholic diocese of Western Australia, speaks volumes. The evangelical Reformers of the 16th century repudiated the claim of the pope to be Christ's Vicar on earth in the strongest terms. Why, because Christ rules his church directly, through word and spirit. If the pope's claim to be the vicar of Christ could be viewed in the sixteenth century debates as blasphemous, then the assertion that we are but the vicars of the Archbishop may be said, at least, to be silly. But it is more than silliness, it is pastorally disastrous, and by-passes how Christ operates in that church which is his body.
"Legal-political"
The second major ontology of the pagan world was the gift of Rome, and is legal-political. Real being, as modelled in the self understanding of the Roman state and its empire, is to be rightly related at law within a political institution. In speaking of the church, Cyprian also uses language and images taken from the Roman political system. Thus, the church is said to be like a military camp, a quasi-political empire where constraint must be applied to maintain its unity above all else.12
When the church gained official state recognition with Emperor Constantine in 312, and then gradually state support and validation for all its activities, including rooting-out heretics, the real church comes not to have its true being from the congregating of the faithful, but from its legal relation to a hierarchical head. The notion of proper legal-political relations constituting true being was of course rampant in the medieval period, when the question of the authenticity of any Christian congregation depended on their answer to the question: "What is your legal relationship to Rome and the Pope?"
Being in relation: fellowship
But, the great wonder of the ancient world was, and remains, that a third notion of being, a specifically Christian notion emerged and unmasks the others as false. This specifically Christian ontology came into prominence through christological and trinitarian discussion, and worked at various levels to overthrow the old false gods:
True being is not impersonal, but is personal in perichoretic communion because God's being is. God's being is defined as being in relation, as being in perichoretic communion.
What does "perichoretic" mean? It means the mutual indwelling of the three Persons of the Trinity. Our understanding of God, and especially how it is that the three divine Persons can be one God, comes from Jesus' description of his relationship to the Father: "as you, Father, are in me and I am in you . . (John 16:21). God is, God exists as the one true God of Israel because each member of the Trinity finds his centre of existence in the other. They mutually indwell each other. God in himself is other-person-centred, and it is this which makes him God. Further, and the early church saw that this needed to be stressed: this mutual indwelling is not a static situation like three links in a steel-mesh fence, but is a living and active fellowship. Each Person loves and serves the others, that is, they are in an eternal living communion or fellowship with each other.
Now, as even a quick reading of John chapters 14 to 17 shows, we must apply Christian ontology to all of life, and above all, to life together in the church. True being is not selfishness - 20th century ontology. Nor is true being hierarchical or legal-political - the ontologies of the ancient world. No, true being is fellowship together in Christ.
It is no surprise then, that in describing the nature of Christian ministry, Paul notes that we are co-workers together with him, the apostle, and with God (1 Cor 3:9; 2 Cor 8:23; Phil 2:5). By his word and Spirit, Christ himself continues as the minister in the church, and his ministry is direct, through his coworkers who take the word of the gospel to a needy and dying world. All of us then, whether priest, deacon or bishop, ought see ourselves in our association together as first and foremost, co-workers.
Traditionally, synod has been were we have striven at an institutional level to express our partnership in ministry together. However, we are now in the curious situation where although, after well argued theological debate, the Synod by a strong majority declined to adopt APBA, and instead passed a resolution that the Archbishop permit the use of parts of APBA, "in consultation with the Diocesan Doctrine Commission and the Archbishop's liturgical panel", the Doctrine Commission has hitherto been by-passed. The pre-synod permission to use APBA has been extended universally to next April, with exception of Thanksgiving 3 in Second Order. The Archbishop may well be within his legal rights here, but he does not have a jus liturgicum, a right to determine liturgy, and there is respectable opinion around that any objection by a Doctrine Commission would be enough to rule a particular piece of liturgy out of order. However, it is not the legal situation which may be the real casualty, it is the New Testament's teaching on partnership in ministry, and the nature of synodical government in Sydney Diocese which fairly springs from it.
3. Summary of the New Testament Foundations
Let me summarise thus far, before I go on to draw out what I see as some pressing concerns for our live together in the diocese in the next millennium.
The evangelical doctrine of the church is essentially very simple: God has always purposed and acted in history to gather a people around himself, a group who confess that Jesus is Lord and sit under his word. The church is the living group around Christ created by the gospel. church is an eschatological trinitarian fellowship.
What lies behind the Bible's use of the terms 'people of God' and 'ekklesia'? A careful examination of the New Testament, I believe, yields 4 ground reasons or foundations, with 4 corollaries which account for the New Testament, in the earthly sphere, strongly presenting church in terms of the local congregation. These 4 foundations and 4 corollaries define the evangelical doctrine of the church. They are:
1. The Foundation of the Apostles and the Prophets
2. Christology
3. Eschatology
4. Double Edification
1. Confessing the Faith
2. Immediacy - the fact that each local church is directly and completely church
3. Historicity
4. Trinitarian Fellowship
4. Towards Sydney 2000
Let me briefly list a number of concerns -
- The archepiscopy ought be able and committed to the unflinching exposition, teaching and application of the doctrine of the New Testament to all aspects of our life together.
Historically, liberalism springs directly from evangelicalism. By and large, liberals do not beget liberals, they beget agnostics. We are the problem. Theological liberalism springs from evangelicalism, either through a well defined evangelical-liberalism, or through an evangelicalism which tolerates it, or through an evangelicalism which no longer believes in the objectivity or perspicuity of the teaching of Scripture. Without the unflinching exposition, teaching and application of the doctrine of the New Testament, uncontrolled by denominational concerns in the opposite direction, evangelicalism has lost its roots and is sunk. We cannot allow two centres of loyalty to define who we are and how we act.
We are naive, I believe, in thinking that the synod can continue to resist a centre which underplays the nature and role of doctrine. Evangelicalism by its very nature is only good for one generation, whereas unbelief is the natural state of all generations.
- The archepiscopacy ought at a fundamental level be committed to 'partnership in ministry', that is, that way of thinking and acting in ministry which is controlled by the nature of reality as we have is in Christ: a sharing, a participation-in-being. The notion of pastor pastorum is not the teaching of the New Testament, where Christ and the Spirit are portrayed as ministering directly through a myriad of coworkers, who in turn, as lay and ordained, share in Christ's ministry and encourage each other in that ministry.
- What are we going to affirm as the limits of denominational ministry? If we restrict our ministry resources to Anglicans and Anglicanism, we have lost the New Testament's view that the gospel is for the world, including the world outside our usual patterns of association, as good and helpful as they may be. The Bible tells me that someone who sets up in ministry beside me is not my competitor, but my partner in Christ. The church which wishes to be evangelical must grasp and support, as they come its way, all opportunities to edify Christ's church, not only upwardly, but outwardly. Are we willing to swallow the pain of growing strong evangelical churches where others are not able to do so?
- In that regard, are we as a diocese to grasp and support a situation that, to my knowledge, is unique anywhere in the world.
In the western world at large, the average age of theological students is over 35, and the numbers are shrinking, especially in Australia. Ministry has become a second, and even third, career path. At Moore College, in the face of this shrinking and aging, the average age of theological students is still as it was 15 years ago 28, and the increase in numbers during that time flies in the face of the trends elsewhere. This is largely due to you, the evangelical ministers and congregations who have given our young people not only a great vision for gospel ministry, but also practical training before they come into college. Those who have come through such schemes, as they come to the age of taking leadership upon themselves, are showing themselves to be not only willingly to shoulder the difficulties of parish ministry in a hostile, secular environment, but also innovative. For example, in the Ministry Training Scheme, which grew out of the chaplaincy work at the University of New South Wales, of the 9 who are now at the six year mark in ordained Anglican ministry, all are working as rectors or as equivalents to rectors.
It is to be regretted that in some quarters this vast pool of young men and women are regarded somewhat askance. And consequently that some of the best candidates are now seeking ministry elsewhere.
Let me suggest something absolutely new to Anglican practice, even in this diocese. By undertaking to pay the tuition fees of all who qualify, we create a pool of theologically trained men and women from these schemes, over and above the numbers needed for maintenance and expansion of our own diocese. We guarantee that we will pay their tuition, but not to employ all of them. Given the hunger for ministry these men and women now show, they will be forced to think more pointedly of creating evangelical ministries elsewhere, and thus look outward from Sydney diocese to building Christ's church in other dioceses, other denominations, and outside any particular denomination. Unlike many other parts of the world, Australian Christianity has never produced any great movements, like, for example, the revival movements which have characterised and defined so much of North American Christianity. Given the right push from our leadership, and from our vast financial resources, the Ministry Training Scheme has the potential to become one of the truly great movements of historical evangelicalism. Or it can be an opportunity lost due to ignorance, fear and even envy.
The simple truth is that the growth of the more established evangelical churches, even in Sydney, is not keeping up with the population growth. However, there is evidence which indicates that the evangelical church is growing outside the usual ways and means we are used to. Are we, will we, be really committed as a diocese to supporting the growth of Christ's church wherever God is found to be working through the gospel?
- Will we as a diocese safeguard a good conscience? Will we protect and promote the ministries of good men and women who wish to take the conservative position of St Paul on the question of women preaching and women ordained to parish leadership? Already, there are some who feel that in matters of ordination and preferment they are being discriminated against on such grounds.
- How will we as a diocese deal with a bad conscience? The New Testament offers us two ways: gospel persuasion, and withdrawing of fellowship when there is actual sin and it is notorious.
May I suggest that a more theologically appropriate way to deal with those who write in and ask for permission to use liturgies which cloud the gospel, is not to apply the law and seek to get synod to call what is patently bad, good, but for the archbishop to treat matters of liturgy as he does preaching. That is, neither giving or refusing permission, but being free to say that junk ideas are junk ideas, and seeking to persuade the ignorant and unbelieving to a better state of mind. Yes, we need an evangelical prayer book as a standard, but its 'enforcement' needs be in accord with its evangelical nature, by persuasion. It would mean of course that we would have to judge bishops on their performance as gospel men, not on their application of the law. It is a sad fact that bishop Ryle of Liverpool left no large or lasting evangelical legacy in that diocese, nor is he fondly remembered. He is remembered for his almost incessant court cases against opponents of evangelical ministry, which he won, but to no avail.
Endnotes
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Note: The Greek text in endnote 2 was originally in the SuperGreek font.
1 Acts 9.31 is an exception. Here the singular is used for an area. But this area is exactly co-terminus with the promised land; ie. the assembly of Israel which met three times a year in Jerusalem where they properly 'churched'. The variant reading shows that the scribe thinks the singular is inappropriate. Normally, 'church' is only used to describe a local group, or the heavenly group.
2 In 1 Cor 14:23 we read of the ‘whole church assembled together’. Does ‘whole’ imply there are ‘parts’ which exist separate from the whole, ie. when the whole is not gathered, and that these ‘parts’ could be individuals who although not present still belong to this church? That is, is membership of the local church a possibility outside of the actual gathering? If this is the case, then this would signal the beginning of the semantic shift in ‘church’ from ‘gathered entity’ to its later meaning, ‘group you still belong to when it is not actually meeting’. This could be the case, but I think several considerations make it unlikely:
(i) If ‘whole’ church implies church pieces existing apart from the gathering, then Paul’s strictures on tongue speaking are a nonsense. The strictures would only apply if all the pieces were there. If only one such piece is missing, then a free-for-all without reference to edification may apply!
(ii) Two things give a clue to the significance of oJlh: (a) context - the body metaphor (chapter 12ff), the charismatic controversy, the theology of true expression of charism in the church; (b) ejpi to aujto (‘with the purpose’) is a pleonasm.
(iii) We conclude from the polemical and rhetorical context that oJlh is a rhetorical device, referring back to the different gifted persons, who should see themselves as together complimentary parts of the body, and not as mere (competing) individuals. What is on view in these verses is the meetings at which these gifts are exercised ejpi to aujto. On that occasion, ‘when all these gifted ones are together, forming a ‘whole’, and wound-up to go, then, restrain yourselves!’
(iv) oJlh then refers to the body of Christ idea, and is either an ironical device, meaning ‘perfect’ in the false sense claimed by the Corinthian charismaniacs, or, oJlh refers back to the body concept in the neutral sense of all the gifted ones being present at the meeting in which gifts are exercised. Either way we conclude:
(v) ‘Whole’ vs ‘individual entities as a church outside of the actual gathering’ is not on view. It is a matter of the specially significant presence of ‘all the gifted ones’ as over and against just some of them being there.3 Cited from T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: the evangelical theology of the ancient catholic church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993) 16.
4 Torrance, Trinitarian Faith, 268.
5 Cf Col 2:2; 1 Thess 1:5; Heb 6:11, 10:22.
6 'On the Bondage of the Will', Luther and Erasmus, 105-106.
7 Cited in Barrett, Church 20, from Essays Catholic and Critical, (SPCK 1928).
9 The Church in western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century (Cambridge University Press, 1993) 24.
10 'Never does she deserve her name more than when in a given place the people of God gather around their pastor to celebrate the Eucharist. It is no more than a cell of the whole body, but the body as a whole is virtually present. The Church as a whole is virtually present. The Church is in various places, but there are not diverse Churches.'; cited from Tellenbach, Church in Western Europe, 24, fn 6.
The Rev. Dr. Robert Doyle lectures in Church History and Theology at Moore Theological College, Newtown, Sydney, Australia.
© Robert C. Doyle 1997 and The Anglican Church League
Document placed on the ACL's website (www.acl.asn.au) 19th March 1998