The First Social Task of the Church

Introduction

The argument of Stanley Hauerwas that the “first social task of the church is to be the church” typifies the theology of postliberalism. This movement privileged a “cultural-linguistic” framing of the role doctrine, advocated the view of church as culture, and, while emerging out of a Yale in the 1980s, finds its place in the broader ‘turn to the church’ that marked the theological landscape of the latter half of the Twentieth Century.[1] This paper provides a critical assessment of the opening quote from Hauerwas and the broader theological method and ecclesial commitments that undergird it. It does so by exposing them to questions of the mission Dei, the existence of World Christianity, and the apocalyptic in-breaking of the kerygma. In its place a constructive offer is made that the first social task of the church is to echo the Christ’s mission of proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God and embodying solidarity with the world.

The Church is a Social Ethic: Hauerwas’ Claim in Context

Hauerwas’ claim that “the first social task of the church is to be the church” emerges out of his challenge to the view that “Christian social ethics is primarily an attempt to make the world more peaceable or just.”[2] That is, out of his challenge to theological liberalism. Rather than allowing the world to set the agenda for the church, the church must set its own agenda as it goes about being a “faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world.”[3] Hauerwas wishes to wrestle the church away from being instruments for the politics of the day (whether Right or Left) and establish what it is that makes the church unique.[4] This focus on the church as locus of Christian maturity and identity formation is emblematic of the cultural-linguistic ground from which his work develops, and fits his view of Christianity as “an extended set of skills learned through imitating others, an imitation that is meant to help us make our baptisms our own over a lifetime.”[5]  If the church can tell its story and cultivate its identity it will come to understand its role is “not to make the world the kingdom, but to be faithful to the kingdom by showing to the world what it means to be a community of peace.”[6]

The primary concerns with this framing of the church and its mission are here summarised: approaches to church which centre continuity in cultivation inevitably replicate colonial approaches to mission, faithfulness framed as maturation within structure obfuscate the way in which Jesus was faithful to God through obedience to his mission, the church is constituted not by historical-cultural continuity but in the encounter with the judgment of God and the in-breaking of the kerygma.

Critiquing Church as Culture

In his study of apostolicity, John Flett approaches the question of the ecumenism and the continuity of the church in a world Christian perspective. He finds in much ecclesiology an “assumed division of the cultivation from the proclamation of the faith.” This division “includes a relative ordering” where “cultivation is considered basic for, and thus prior to, the act of communication.” In many cases mission is eschewed or viewed as suspicious because “it draws cultural difference into the church, [intruding] on the range of institutions, structures, artefacts, symbols, and gestures considered basic to Christian koinonia, to the cultivation of community and to its visible community.”[7] If the primary task of the church is to cultivate a culture then, as David Congdon observes, this necessarily puts limitations on enculturation, and the mission of the church “can only take one of two forms: colonialism or separatism.”[8]

Rather than shaping itself after the divine act of translation of the Word becoming flesh, the postliberal theological framework is “an untranslatable worldview that seeks to circumscribe everything within the bounds of the church. The end of this path lies in the return of Christendom and the establishment of the church as the arbiter of social and political power.”[9] W. Travis McMaken supports this view arguing that when the church’s being “resides in the persistence of its earthly-historical form”, then “the expansion of the church can only be thought in terms of the expansion of that form.”[10] Flett follows the logic of the church as culture through to its end and poses a striking question:

“With Christian identity understood as growth in culture, the convert is discipled through an enculturating participation in the culture. Mission is then understood as the secondary and external extension of this primary and internal witness, meaning that cross-cultural missionary transmission must take place in accordance with the principles governing historical transmission. In other words, if the apostolic church is a culture and if missionary transmission amounts to the replication and local appropriation of this culture, then what is the theological problem with colonisation?”[11]

While the shift in mission brought on by the end of the Second World War and the rise of the ecumenical movement sought to disentangle mission from colonial, national interests, the postliberal alternative replaced “mission-as-civilisation” with “mission-as-churchification” – where one is converted not into a national culture but an “ecclesial culture.”[12] This culture and the aesthetics, polity, and structures considered basic to its visibility are, as is observed continually from those outside the West, Western.[13] Initiation into the culture of the church is an assimilationist posture, privileging established Western structures and artefacts as basic, normative, and determinative.[14] The underlying theological method behind the conviction that the church should be the church, is, in light of the cross-cultural movement, found to replicate colonial patterns. To avoid this, the first social task of the church must be stated in a way not centred on cultivation through continuity.

Critiquing Ecclesiocentrism

The call for the church to be the church creates a closed circle. The cultural-linguistic framework, by seeking to primarily attend to the cultivation of a culture and establishing of “a linguistic world distinct from other linguistic worlds”,[15] treats Christianity as a worldview which downplays the eschatological horizon, and closes the church off to the confrontation of God.[16] Christine Helmer is instructive in analysing the postliberal framing of “doctrine as worldview”. She writes,

“Once God has revealed these beliefs in a way that constitutes the community’s identity, then the community has the norms in linguistically articulated propositions. The church no longer needs God then, for the regula fidei is in the church’s possession, and to the regula fidei is assigned the epistemic function of the Christian worldview… Normativity is secured by assigning it to the church-creed analytic that has been cut off from any divine transcend reality. Doctrine has lost its witnessing capacity to the God who might call doctrine into question.”

The Church becomes a body with no relation to its head, which as Matthew 25 would alert us, is found incognito amidst the world and its need. To counter this approach, David Congdon draws on Johannes Hoekendijk in configuring the church as apostolate, where the “apostolate is the site where the kingdom and world intersect.” This means talk of the church should be “nothing other than talk of the apocalyptic event of the kerygma, the existential encounter with God’s word of revelation.” Because of this, the apostolate “has no independent existence, its raison d’être resides wholly outside of itself in the inbreaking event of the kerygma.”[17] The church cannot be anything in isolation from the encounter of God, which “calls the church together, constitutes it, and forms its very being… far from being fundamentally cultural-linguistic or sacramental-institutional, ‘the church is an event.’” Under this schema is it more appropriate to say that the church occurs, rather than exists.[18] This provides a direct challenge to doctrines of the church built on the continuity of a visible structure, and instead establishes the church as an eschatological community, an apocalyptic event. As Congdon summarises, “the genuine church of Jesus Christ only exist where the world confronts the invasive reign of God… there is no church prior or subsequent to this confrontation, no inward substance that persists independently of the event itself.”[19] The church cannot be the church by attending to its own being, it can only occur when the church acts as messenger of God’s interrupting word, in short, the “church-as-apostolate happens where the kerygma takes worldly form.”[20]

Ecclesiocentrism not only risks closing the church off to the eschatological horizon, as we have just argued, or to the replication of colonialist mindsets, as was outlined in the previous section; it risks isolating churches from the other, from the neighbour who is different. This is a danger particularly faced by Christians of social privilege, for whom inculcation into a particular expression of church risks conflating what society considers normative with what is normative for Christianity. Traci West, in her work Disruptive Christian Ethics, explores how the habits and practices of the church can reinforce cultural norms of our society.[21] Taking the US context, she demonstrates that when society continually treats whites “as the normal group of human beings that do not need to be racially classified, this status comes to be taken for granted. It seems like something to which whites are naturally entitled. This entitlement aspect of white privilege could be communicated or inculcated in predominately white worship services, especially among those with socioeconomic advantages.” An example of this is announcements about mission activities that create an us and them dichotomy; between those who have (in the church) and those who are ‘less fortunate’ (outside the church). West continues, “these practices exemplify ritualised responses to local communities and global needs, and teach the congregation to recognise its distinctive Christian identity on a weekly basis. They also link Christian identity to a sense of privilege that easily merges with racial messages about privilege in the broader culture.” This can extend to the giving of thanks, which fail to acknowledge that much of what the church has to be thankful for is the result of a colonial project and radicalised economy - not the grace of God. As West asks, “how do [white, privileged Christians] learn to distinguish between privileges they receive from the racist cultural elevation of their racial group and the ‘blessings’ they receive as the children of God.”[22] Prioritising attention to the church’s own identity risks avoiding the critique of those outside the community who might alert the church to the conflation of cultural familiarity and ill-gained privileges with the will of God. This means it is the cross-cultural movement that “unveils how a particular community domesticates the gospel, how a community considers her necessary particular expression to be normative for the whole.”[23] Far from existing in and for itself, the church’s first social task needs to be one which opens itself to the eye of the other, the in-breaking of the kerygma, and the existential encounter with God. In other words, the church’s first social task needs to lie beyond the church.

Constructing a Social Task: Faithfulness to the Missio Dei and Solidarity with the World

Earlier we drew upon John Flett’s work on Apostolicity, this section begins with his work on the mission Dei and the nature of Christian community. Flett traces the split in the church’s being and act (where its worship and cultivation of internal identity is seen as primary and mission a second order activity) to a similar breach in the being and act of God: “The problem of the church’s relationship to the world is consequent on treating God’s own mission into the world as a second step alongside who he is in himself. With God’s movement into his economy ancillary to his being, so the church’s own corresponding missionary relationship with the world is ancillary to her being.”[24] In contrast to this Flett argues, “it is because it belongs to God’s own life that mission describes the nature of Christian fellowship… The Christian community is, as such, a missionary community, or she is not a community that lives in fellowship with the triune God as he lives his own proper life.”[25] Because God has turned to the world, the church that fails to turn to the world constitutes a breach in the relationship with God. Faithfulness to God is not expressed by modelling the church after the being of God (as if this exist somewhere behind God’s activity), faithfulness comes through patterning the community after Christ’s own obedience to God’s mission. This is how the church is edified and how faithfulness is exemplified. Flett writes,

“As Jesus Christ’s own obedience is evident in his obedience to his mission, so a lack of outward orientation reveals the disobedience of the community. Active movement into the world edifies the active inner discipleship of the Christian community. The more faithfully the community attests to Jesus Christ’s own activity, the more definitely she grows in the faith, simply because reconciliation and its dynamic is the gift of eternal life. Calling as active participation in Jesus Christ’s prophetic office is the living form of Christian growth.”[26]

Framing the church’s first social task as an act of being the church is made possible by an improper breach in the nature of God. In other words, the problem in postliberal ecclesiology is a problem in their doctrine of God. When God is in and for himself a missionary God, then the church must be a witnessing community, and such a calling must shape its first social task.

How might the first social task of a witnessing community be articulated? Because God exists for the world, and the community of Jesus Christ exists for God, the church has no option but to exist for the world. The church must stand in solidarity with the world, particularly with those in affliction.[27] McMaken draws on the work of Helmut Gollwitzer to argue that faithfulness to the message of the kingdom of God is marked by a “very specific mode of action: solidarity.” Rather than “establishing the church as an alternative community separated from the wider community… mission clearly implies living with those to whom one is sent, living their life with them, speaking their language, sharing in their problems, speaking to them, not from the outside, but as one of their own people.”[28] For Gollwitzer, this commitment to solidarity “requires that the church takes sides”, which is not new to the church, the issue, for Gollwitzer, is that the church continues to take the wrong side.[29]

James H. Cone, the father of Black Theology in the US, would resoundingly agree with Gollwitzer on this last point. Cone’s theological project was determined to show how Christianity - which had, throughout history, rarely stopped, and often propped up, systemic oppression - could be a liberative force in the Black community. Cone, who was adamant that the church could not retreat from the world,[30] proposed a threefold task of the church: First, the church was to proclaim the reality of divine liberation (that is, preach the gospel), “confronting the world with the reality of Christian freedom.”[31] Second, it was to share in the liberation struggles of the world. Though the battle against evil had been won, “old rulers pretend they are still in power.” The church is the community “that lives on the basis of the radical demands of the gospel by making the gospel message a social, economic, and political reality.”[32] Thirdly, the church needs to be “a visible manifestation that the gospel is a reality.” We cannot proclaim that the old powers have been thrown down if we live as if they have the last word.[33] All of these tasks involve direct engagement with the world on the side of the oppressed. They demand that the church be open to what Christ is doing here and now (here and now not necessarily being inside the church[34]). They engender manifold ways of ordering the community. And they all move out in search of the risen Lord “where wounds are being healed and chains are being struck off.”[35] Cone does not propose this because the task of Christian social ethics is to make the world more peaceable or just, it is because “Blacks know that there is only one possible authentic existence in this society, and that is to force a radical revolutionary confrontation with the structures of white power by saying yes to the essence of their blackness.”[36] This “yes” only made possible by God’s act in Christ to reconcile, redeem, and make new.[37] This “yes” is a confession that what God says about the Black individual is true (in doing so it tells the story of Jesus and Israel).[38] And this “yes” requires direct engagement with the dehumanising structures of our day, in order to be faithful to the One who loves us and wants us to be human.[39]

Conclusion

The claim that “the first social task of the church is to be the church” is a typical of postliberal ecclesiology. Our analysis has shown that this claim, like related claims that the church is a culture, and doctrine is a cultural-linguistic system, replicate colonial models in their missionary movement, insulate the church from external critique, and abstract the church from the encounter with God and in-breaking of the kerygma. Consequently, the social task of the church needs to be found beyond itself. This is made possible by understanding the church as a missionary community, who, echoing God’s act for us in Christ, express their faithfulness to the Triune God through solidarity with the world. Engaging the world as participants of God’s rectifying act to make and keep human life human. 

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[1] For an overview of the key figures of the Yale School, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, as well as a helpful correction to their conflation, see, Mike Higton, “Frei’s Christology and Lindbeck’s Cultural-Linguistic Theory”, Scottish Journal of Theology 50 (1997) 83-95. For an introduction to the Church as Culture see Robert W. Jenson, Christ as Culture 1: Christ as Polity. International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5: (2003) 323-329. doi:10.1111/1463-1652.00112

[2] Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) 99.

[3] Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 99.

[4] The church is the place “where the stories of Israel and Jesus are told, enacted, and heard.” Peaceable Kingdom, 99.

[5] Stanley Hauerwas, “In Defense of Cultural Christianity,” in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998) 166.

[6] Hauerwas, Peaceable Kingdom, 104

[7] John G. Flett, Apostolicity: The Ecumenical Question in World Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2016) 20.

[8] David W. Congdon, The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016) 175.

[9] Congdon, God Who Saves, 174.

[10] W. Travis McMaken, Our God Loves Justice: An Introduction to Helmut Gollwitzer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017) 154.

[11] Flett, Apostolicity, 164.

[12] Congdon, God Who Saves, 163, 164.

[13] Flett, Apostolicity, 29.

[14] It also fails at Hauerwas’ own goal of maturing Christians through teaching the skills. As Flett observes, “The replication of this particular form in another cultural setting, and legitimating such a mission method through claims for historical continuity, can only produce a superficial and immature Christianity because it ensures cultural distance.” Apostolicity, 285.

[15] McMaken, Our God Loves Justice, 152.

[16] Christine Helmer, Theology and the End of Doctrine (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014) 103.

[17] Congdon, God Who Saves, 182-183. As to a definition of kerygma, Congdon offers: “The kerygma is the eschatological event that ushers in the end of the old age and the birth of the new.” 182

[18] McMaken, Our God Loves Justice, 158.

[19] Congdon, God Who Saves, 184. it is worth including this passage in its entirety: “What these ecclesiocentric thinkers have failed to grasp is that the genuine church of Jesus Christ only exist where the world confront the invasive reign of God. According to the apocalyptic perspective of the New Testament, there is no church prior or subsequent to this confrontation, no inward substance that persists independently of the event itself. This is what differentiates Israel and the New Testament church: Israel has a salvation history and persists as a culture within the world; the church has a salvation eschatology and exists exclusively as an encounter with the coming age…. Mission is not churchification. On the contrary, mission serves to confront people with the reign of God, and this confrontation is the constitutive of the church properly understood. The church does not have an apostolic function, as if “apostle” were an office supporting a larger institution. Instead the church is its apostolicity. If, as Karl Barth says, the church’s ‘act is its being, its dynamic its status, its existence its essence,’ then the church is nothing other than the missionary action of the apostolate. The church “is a function of the apostolate, that is, am instrument of God’s redemptive action in the world… The church is (nothing more, but also nothing less!) a means in God’s hands to establish shalom in this world. The church-as-apostolate is the bearer of the kerygma, the messenger of God’s interruptive word, the proclaimer of the day of the Lord. More accurately the church-as-apostolate happens where the kerygma takes worldly form. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that ‘the church is not a religious community of those who revere Christ, but Christ who has taken form among human being… the church is nothing but that piece of humanity where Christ has really taken form’… The implication of this conception of the church as apostolate is that the Christian community has no permanent place of residence or cultural form.” 184-185

[20] Congdon, God Who Saves, 185.

[21] Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006) 112.

[22] West, Disruptive Christian Ethics, 118-119.

[23] John G. Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2010) 294.

[24] Flett, The Witness of God, 294.

[25] Flett, The Witness of God, 33-34.

[26] Flett, The Witness of God, 277.

[27] Flett, The Witness of God, 273.

[28] McMaken, Our God Loves Justice, 157.

[29] McMaken, Our God Loves Justice, 161.

[30] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986) 132-134.

[31] Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 131.

[32] Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 131.

[33] Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 131, 132.

[34] This idea of the church as a “community that reads the signs of the times, seeing God’s struggle in the struggle of the poor” (Speaking the Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986) vii) largely informs Cone’s focus in his early work, which started with the claim that Black Power is “Christ’s central message to twentieth-century Christian America” Black Theology and Black Power, 20th Anniversary Edition (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989) 1.

[35] Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 134.

[36] Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 15.

[37] Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 149.

[38] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, New Revised Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997) 33.

[39] Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 108-109.