Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series. An enlarged version of this and the two articles to follow may be found in the booklet, Bearing the Marks of the Church, published by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of Theology and Worship. Also available online at the Re-forming Ministry website: https://www.pcusa.org/re-formingministry/papers/nicene_marks.pdf
The issue that is either openly addressed or subtly at work in all our discussions about a denomination like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is the fact that Christendom is over. “Christendom” is the partnership of church, state, and society initiated in the fourth century under the Emperor Constantine. Wherever one is located on the theological or ecclesial spectrum, the end of Christendom is the common ground that links us together.
How will we, within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), work with this contextual change in which we find ourselves today? Can we understand that the end of Christendom is a way for us to begin to reassess the western theological tradition from the liberating perspective of the actual and unquestioned end of Christendom?
The end of Christendom raises particularly unsettling questions with regard to the theology of the church (ecclesiology). That should not surprise us. Both the institutional and intellectual shape of the Christian movement have obviously been profoundly affected by the position of privilege and protection guaranteed across the centuries of Christendom. As we learn to look at what that project has done to us theologically, we also have to ask what can perhaps now be changed, or needs to be changed, as a result of that learning. Ultimately, this massive paradigm shift confronts us with the most basic of questions: Why is there a church at all?
Church without Mission?
Christendom’s Christianity is defined by pervasive reductionism, especially with regard to our understanding of God’s promised and completed salvation. The gospel of cosmic salvation is reduced to a focus upon the saved-ness of the individual. Salvation of the individual is directly linked to an understanding of the church that centers on administering that salvation to the individual believer.
The telling point for this reductionism is the place and importance of mission in any western theology of the church. The ecclesiology of Christendom is an ecclesiology without mission. It is in direct tension with the biblical understanding of the character and purpose of the church within God’s mission. Based on the New Testament, the fundamental assertion we must make about the church of Jesus Christ is that it is, in the words of Vatican II, “missionary by its very nature.”
The New Testament church was a community called and formed to be Christ’s witnesses. What does it mean to be Christ’s letter to the world (2 Cor. 3:2 — 3)? That’s a missional definition of the purpose of the Corinthian congregation. Luke’s theology of the early church is summarized in the Ascension Day promise to the gathered disciples, You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth, (Acts 1:8). John’s theology of mission as sending reaches its climax in the Easter command of the risen Christ: As my Father has sent me, even so I send you, (John 20:21). The loss of a theology of mission at the heart of ecclesiology is a loss of the very heart of the New Testament’s understanding of the church.
The Path Forward: Reversing the Nicene Creed’s Marks of the Church
Members of the Gospel and Our Culture Network have proposed that we read the Nicene Marks in the reverse order to restore missional purpose to our theology of the church. It is a revolutionary proposal: What if we were to say that the church we confess is apostolic, catholic, holy, and therefore one?
Apostolic. “Apostolic,” does not merely mean “the church descended from the apostles,” important as that is. We mean apostolicity in the active sense of the New Testament verb, meaning “to be sent out,” and the noun “apostle” as the “sent-out one.” The community formed by the Holy Spirit through the initial apostolic witness is called to be sent. Its mission is rooted in its calling, its conversion, its submission to Christ as Savior and Lord, and thus is definitive of its very being.
If we start our Nicene ecclesiology with apostolicity, then we end up defining catholicity and holiness and oneness in different ways–ways closer to the sequence of formation that we find in the biblical documents. Our interpretation commences, biblically, with Pentecost, the event that is the necessary completion of Easter. The Easter story isn’t fully knowable until the Holy Spirit equips the apostolic witnesses to make it known. And at that act of equipping, the apostolicity of the church is furthered defined as “catholic.”
Catholic. The message is to be made known to the ends of the earth, as Jesus commands, and it will be translatable into the life and experience of every ethnicity, as concretely demonstrated at the first Pentecost. Yet this highly diverse, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-organizational extension of the witnessing people of God will take place kat holon, that is, “catholically,” centered on that which is the whole, the common ground of the Gospel. That holon, that center and common ground, is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the event that demonstrates God’s love for and healing of all the world in Christ. It is history that can be translated and continued in every ethnicity (“nation” is not a strong enough translation of ethnos!). Justo Gonzalez has frequently emphasized this very dynamic understanding of catholicity as cultural diversity centered around the holon, as the once-and-for-all gospel event.
From the very beginning, the New Testament churches had to be “catholic” if they were to be truly “apostolic.” They were by God’s intent multi-cultural, but proclaiming always the same Christ in every context. They were multi-organizational, but in common submission to one Lord, rather than to any human hierarchy (there was not any headquarters in the New Testament church!). Lamin Sanneh has constantly pointed out that the gospel is from the very outset fundamentally translatable. Every culture is “destigmatized” by the gospel, so that every culture can become a vessel within which Christ can be confessed, the church can be formed, and witness can be made. But no culture is normative for the church catholic.
Catholicity is shaped by apostolicity, with the result that there is in the New Testament and pre-Constantinian church a centered, focused diversity, expressed in diverse approaches to catechesis, to church organization, and to liturgy and worship. All of the forms of the church’s life were, in some way, related to its basic missional vocation. This understanding and practice of catholicity contrasts with contemporary pluralism, which can be described as parallel tracks that never meet and have no center.
Holy. Catholic apostolicity expresses itself appropriately in the holiness of the church. “Holiness” defines the way in which God’s Spirit equips the church to practice its vocation so that witness can be credibly made in the world. God’s Spirit “sanctifies,” makes holy, in order to create a community that can serve as “Christ’s letter to the world.” Holiness has therefore to do with fitness for service, with usableness for God’s mission.
If we read the New Testament missionally, then among the many questions we ask the text are “how” questions: how shall we witness; how shall we be light, leaven, and salt; how “shall the life of Jesus … be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10)? The calling is to apostolic witness, and to carry it out the community is instructed to lead its entire life in ways appropriate to that calling. If the community is missional by its very nature everything it does, how it lives, how it administers its money, how people relate to each other, how it resolves its disputes, all are potential demonstrations or witnesses to the rule of God in Christ in its midst.
One. Thus we arrive at “oneness.” What would happen to our ecumenical concept of oneness if it emerged out of the apostolicity that is catholic and sanctified? What would the world see if the diverse forms of church presented a coherent and congruent testimony to the one gospel? If “unity” were understood missionally, then the focus would be upon the way that Christians, before a watching world, love one another, (Phil 2:3).
While visible unity is an essential aspect of the church’s obedience to its calling, the way that we understand and practice that unity will be different if we approach it from the perspective of essential apostolicity, expressed in catholicity and holiness, for witness to the world. Are we not really in need of an entirely new definition of Christian unity, which is based on the missional vocation of the church and liberated from the Christendom preoccupation with power and influence? Do we know what such unity, framed in terms of the witness seen and experienced by the world around us, would look like?
Darrell L. Guder is Dean of Academic Affairs and Henry Winters Luce Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary
