When I think of the classical Nicene marks of the church, I tend to think of four immovable inscriptions pointing to intimidating standards: “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.” Somehow these marks seem very distant and removed from our church life. Pondering these marks we need to be reminded that the life of the church is rooted in the Triune God whose life is not marked by immovable, petrified divinity but by shocking, self-giving, other-embracing grace as revealed through the life, death, and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God does not exist in some kind of divine solitary isolation. The very heart of the divine life is community, the relationship of mutual self-giving love between the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Dynamic images of a dance rather than that of rigid hierarchy better expresses this understanding. The Triune God becomes the model for the life of the church. It, then, ought not be a hierarchical, self-seeking institution, but a community of self-giving and loving people, called, gathered, and shaped by the Triune God.
Coziness and the Cross
But this way of thinking about the Trinity can quite easily generate an impression that the Triune God is having a nice time in eternity and we need only imitate that life to solve the many problems plaguing us. I remember hearing a story told by a Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama, of how his teacher, Kazoh Itamori, demonstrated what theology is like. In front of the class he laid a silk handkerchief on a table and placed an egg on the center of it and then picked up the handkerchief with the egg nestled in it. Kitamori said, “Egg and handkerchief are having a good time. But this is not theology.” Then he laid the handkerchief again on the table and this time he placed a large pair of scissors on it and picked it up, causing the scissors to rip through the handkerchief. He said, “Scissors and handkerchief are not having a good time. This is theology.”
Kitamori reminds us that theology cannot be too neat because at the center of the Christian faith is the cross of Jesus Christ, which rips through our comfortable notions of God, including our understanding of the Trinity. At the heart of the Triune community is the self-giving love for sinners shockingly revealed in the pain, suffering, and death of Jesus on the cross. Without the cross our understanding of the Trinity degenerates into an image of a divine, cozy community “having a good time,” resembling a dream of an American middle class family.
Now to the actual marks of the church:
Unity
With God as the source of its life, the unity of the church is relational, grounded in the triune unity of God that reaches out to reconcile sinners with God and with each other. The unity of the church must move away from, and critique against, institutional systems that perpetuate a sameness and familiarity. They deaden the call for a dynamic, creative, outward unity that gathers and empowers those who have been invalidated, ignored, and dismissed by society and by the church.
The unity of the church means that those in positions of power discern the voices from the margins.
Acts 6:1-6 describes the first major potential conflict that threatened the unity of the early church and gives a biblical example of unifying action between those in power and a minority group. When the Greek community complained to the Hebrews that their widows were being neglected in care, the apostles did not get defensive nor patronize the minority group by doing things for them. They listened, discerned, chose leadership from among those who voiced the concerns, and empowered them to do the needed work, all with appropriate accountability, encouragement, and prayer. The two groups from different cultures and languages united spiritually and communally and the “word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly. …” (Acts 6:7). This is the proper work of a unifying church that welcomes diversity of different ethnic peoples.
The PC(USA) needs to hear these words. The largely white leaders of the PC(USA) need to hear the cries of the most vulnerable members–people whose cultures and languages are different from the majority. They must engage in the process of discernment together, not merely from a standpoint of “political correctness.” This work is particularly relevant in the PC(USA), which is still largely uniform in its ethnicity, falling far short of our nation’s diversity of peoples.
Holiness
God set apart God’s church to do God’s mission in the world. As the Greek word for church, ekklesia, suggests, we are God’s “called out ones.” The holiness of the church, then, is not about the church being the moral guardians, keeping a proper ethical code.
Holiness is rooted in the Triune activity of God. The church, through justification and sanctification by the grace of God through the work of Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, participates in God’s mission in the world–serving the poor and the needy and proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. In order to carry out that mandate faithfully, the church needs to be self-critical, to identify those elements that obscure and debilitate its mission, and reform them.
Catholicity
The catholicity, or the universality, of the church affirms that God’s church exists throughout the world and in all times. The church of the Triune God is everywhere and always, including–but transcending–the local church. What would this mark of the church look like in our Trinitarian interpretation in the light of the theology of the cross, given our present context?
Rather than emphasizing the everywhere-always aspect of the church, catholicity, I believe, must now express the radical inclusive hospitality of the gospel of Jesus Christ as expressed by Paul in Galatians 3:27-28: As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
We need to recast the mark of catholicity in the light of the radical hospitality of the Triune God, who calls the church to demonstrate this characteristic by welcoming strangers who have been either directly or indirectly shunned from the church.
But emphasizing inclusiveness and hospitality does not mean that the church succumbs to an “anything goes” attitude. In the light of the cross of Jesus Christ, “we need to call a thing what it is.” We need to be realistic about sin, and idolatry, which thrive in the guise of good intentions.
Apostolicity
An important Scripture reference concerning the apostolicity of the church comes from Ephesians 2:19-20:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.
Apostolicity, then, means the church’s obedience to Christ Jesus, the cornerstone of our faith in every area of faith and life. Therefore, we need to remember that Apostolicity of the church is not a status that the church possesses but a continual dependence upon the living Christ.
Death and Resurrection for Us?
Our small, provincial understanding of Jesus must give way to the living Christ, who shows that an essential part of living the faith means going through the painful shattering of our images of Jesus, our preconceived notions of the Christian life and the church through obedience to the living Christ. This is a necessary aspect of the Christian life of the cross. Luther called this process “spiritual assault,” Anfechtung. He meant it in an individualistic, existential sense. But given our ecclesial context, we ought not be shocked that the church may go through a corporate spiritual assault/Anfechtung. The Holy Spirit leads us through this desert experience, according to Luther. Anfechtung puts to death those things that get in the way of true discipleship so that a believer can emerge anew.
The Holy Spirit may be leading the PC (USA) through a desert experience to put to death those things that get in the way of true discipleship. But we know through our Lord Jesus Christ that death is not the final word. Through His death, and our participation in it, we will also participate in the new life of Christ’s resurrection.
Kevin Park is pastor of Bethany Church in Bloomfield, N. J.
