Congregations

For years I stayed put. As I like to tell the story, River Terrace Church, the congregation I served for 31 years, gave me an office—a great corner office facing the campus of Michigan State University—and I didn’t want leave. All I needed was that office. A salary in addition was more than anyone had the right to expect. When, 31 years later, I left, I left only because it was time for me to retire and for the congregation to move on to someone new as their pastor. For all those years, the remarkable River Terrace community anchored me. In some ways, it still does.

Once I left, I kept on moving, first to Washington State, where I had grown up, and we still have family. There I discovered new delights: congregations up and down the coast from Washington to California that needed interim help. In each place I discovered a congregation with its own history and its own way of doing things, a community of people who loved Jesus and loved each other (mostly). For the time that I spent in each church, I was included in the life of the community. I preached, led worship, talked to people in formal and informal settings, attended council meetings, attended classis meetings (ugh), spent time in homes, and was graciously embraced as part of their life together. I never took it for granted. Each church was singular, each was filled with grace, and in each I felt the presence of the Spirit of God. I learned from each community. Each community in its own way represented Christ.

It’s not that we agreed on everything. We didn’t. They, the members of these congregations, didn’t agree with each other. These congregations were made of up of people who differed in their theologies and approaches to life. There were progressives, conservatives, moderates, every kind of theological disposition. There were people who knew why they were there, people didn’t know why they were there, people who were new, and people who had always been there. Healthy church communities are like that. People come for various reasons: because they like a certain pastor, because they grew up in a certain denomination, because they happen to live in the neighborhood, because their friends go there, because they like the church’s programs for children or for youth or both, because the church sings the right songs, because the church doesn’t sing the wrong songs, because the church teaches the right things, because the church doesn’t teach the wrong things, because they couldn’t find anything better, because they just left something worse, because the first time they walked in someone invited them for lunch—the list goes on. 

When a new preacher comes, someone like me in my interim role, say, what matters is not that we agree on everything but that we are able to love each other. Or, at least, like each other and forgive each other.  If I say something from the pulpit that to them seems to them, well, just wrong, as I have often done, they are able to say, “That’s just Clay,” and they move on.  The community is more important than agreement on all the issues.

Two Ideas about Church

Implicit in this is a way of thinking about church—an ecclesiology. Let me contrast two ideas about church, two ecclesiologies. The first begins with agreement on a set of theological and other issues. In this notion of church, we draw up statements of our beliefs, and we say to those who come, if you want to be part of our group, you must agree with these statements. We are the church of one mind. 

The other ecclesiology—the one I’ve been describing—begins with who we are as a congregation: a people God has gathered for God’s own purposes and, it often seems, with God’s own sense of humor, whose task it is to love Jesus and to love each other as best we can. We don’t entirely know at the outset (or often along the way) what this might mean, but we know that for this time we belong together. We need to find a way to unity. If the first of these ecclesiologies is the church of one mind, this second is the church as one body. 

It’s not that simple, of course. One body churches need a base of agreement. There are limits beyond which the community cannot stretch. And one mind churches need a degree of tolerance: not everyone will agree on absolutely everything. Nor does this exhaust the ecclesiological possibilities. There are other ideas about church, one of which I’ll come to presently. But these two ideas of church, one based in theological agreement and the other in the life of the community, each have deep roots in the Protestant Reformation.

To understand this, we need to consider one of the most important issues facing the Reformers, an issue that in our time has once again become important: what makes a given church a church—the body of Christ? For people at the time of the Reformation, the answer was obvious. The church wasn’t hard to see. There were priests and bishops, all the way to one in charge of it all, the pope in Rome. There were buildings and lands galore. There were weekly gatherings for worship. Everyone knew what church looked like. But what if what looked like church, what claimed to be church, was not actually church? What if the church had strayed so far off the path that it wasn’t really church anymore? It was something like this that the Reformers thought had happened. And if that’s true, then you are faced with a problem: how can you distinguish true church from its imitators? How can you tell when you have church and not something else? This is a question we should still be asking. Much of what claims to be church these days seems far from anything resembling the body of Christ.

To answer that question, the Reformers early on (as early as the Confession of Augsburg in 1530) developed a test: you have church when you have true preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. We might quote Calvin in the Institutes on this:

Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.1.9, edited by John T. McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles, 1960).

With that in mind, provided you squint a bit theologically (a skill required for seeing what is going on in theology), you will see that the two ecclesiologies I outlined above, church based in one mind and church based in community life, are reflected in these two marks of true church. The “true preaching of the Word” lines up with the idea of church as the gathering of people who agree on a set of ideas: one mind. The second mark, “the right administration of the sacraments,” lines up with church as a community of the faithful. 

Two tests for true church. Two “marks of the church,” as they became known. Two implicit ideas about what constitutes church. Apparently equal, but in their application in the history of Reformation churches, they have not been equal at all. The second idea about church has almost always been slighted. The emphasis has been on the first of the marks of the church, true preaching of the Word. To take one example, Louis Berkhof, in his Systematic Theology, says that true preaching of the Word is “the most important mark of the Church” (page 492, Kindle Edition). He adds that preaching stands on its own, while the sacraments need preaching: “[sacraments] have no content of their own,” he says, “but derive their content from the Word of God; they are in fact a visible preaching of the Word” (492). In this, the sacraments almost disappear. For Berkhof, they are another form of preaching, something akin to a sermon illustration.

This is not hard to understand. For the Reformers and their followers, the sacraments were a large part of the problem. The sacraments, in their opinion, had been turned into magic. Eat this bread, it was claimed, and you will magically receive the salvation of Christ. It was not so much what the sacraments were that first attracted the attention of the Reformers, but what they weren’t: they weren’t magic.

This emphasis on preaching over the sacraments gave us Protestant worship as we know it. In the churches in which I grew up, the liturgy ended in the sermon. When the sacrament was celebrated—in my home church, only four times a year—it was placed in the middle of the liturgy, not at its end. And it was framed in words, lots and lots of words. We were the church of the word. Or so we thought. We slighted the other things that held us together, the community life, the potlucks, the conversations after the service, the fun and laughter. None of that mattered officially; what mattered were the right words. 

This is a very thin idea of church. It makes for bad ecclesiology. Churches split and split again over the right words. But there is another option. Lurking in the second of the two marks of the church is a different and better ecclesiology. 

You may wish to skip this next section. It’s a bit wonky. Well, maybe more than a bit wonky.  In it I connect the theology of the church as community with a medieval idea about the relationship of the sacrament of the Eucharist and the congregation. Good stuff, I think, but not the main point. 

Novelle Théologie

To explore this second idea, we need to go back before the Reformation into an earlier medieval theology, and with it, the French theologians of the 20^th century who recovered this earlier theology and who brought it to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

I’ll try not to get too far into the weeds here, although my readers will know that I’m always tempted to wander off into the theological weeds. One of my purposes in this essay on the church is to highlight an influential theological movement that, as far as I remember, was never once mentioned in my seminary training and is still totally lost on evangelical churches, a movement known as nouvelle théologie, the “new theology” (named as such not by the nouvelle theologians themselves but by their critics and later owned by them). This movement had two emphases—two emphases that I hope characterize what I’ve been trying to do in my recent blog pieces on retrieving theology. The first is called (in French) ressourcement. It’s the effort to recover the thinking of the early church. This is not so different from what John Calvin was about: to get new, the church has to get old. The second (this time, Italian) is aggiornamento (bringing the church up to date). It’s not enough to go back, the church also needs to go forward. In the creative tension between these two directions, the nouvelle théologie theologians worked out their theology. (On this movement, see especially Hans Boersma, Novelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery, 2009.) 

Part of the project of ressourcement (the return to older sources) was the recovery of a view of the church rooted in liturgy. Henri de Lubac did the early work in this regard (Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages: a historical survey, 2^nd edition, 1949; translated by Gemma Simmonds with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens, 2006). As the title of his book indicates, de Lubac’s argument turns on the idea of the church as the body (corpus) of Christ. Medieval theologians distinguished three senses of the body: Christ’s historical physical (and resurrected) body, the bread and cup of the Eucharist, and the assembled body of the church. What’s crucial are the relationships among these three ways of talking about the body.

In the earlier medieval theology, the true body (the corpus verum) was the historical physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, the body that Doubting Thomas, for example, was so intent to touch. The other two, the sacrament and the assembled community, were body of Christ in an extended, mystical sense (corpus mysticum). I’ll return to this. But beginning with the 10^th century and on into the high Middle Ages, these relationships shifted and with this shift, de Lubac claims, the idea of church shifted profoundly. In this shift both the historical body of Jesus of Nazareth and the elements of the sacrament were thought to be corpus verum (true body). The elements of the sacrament were “transubstantiated” into the true body of Christ. It was his actual flesh that lay on the altar in the guise of bread and wine. The congregation, the gathered body, was bracketed off from the historical Christ and the elements of the Eucharist. It was not the true body (the corpus verum) but the body in the mystical extended sense (the corpus mysticum).

Bear with me here. I hope I haven’t lost you. This seems like one of those distinctions that matter only to theologians and then only to those who are interested in medieval theology. But for de Lubac, this shift in theology had important consequences for the church. It severed the connection between the gathered community of the church and the sacrament. In the later medieval view, the sacrament became a thing—the actual body of Christ—offered to individual worshipers to secure their individual salvation (heaven, in this way of thinking). But in the older idea, which grouped together the sacrament and the gathered community as the mystical body of Christ (the corpus mysticum), the sacrament was an event. The sacrament happened in worship in sharing of the Eucharist. It’s in the sharing of Christ in the bread (and the cup) that the congregation becomes in a sacramental way the body of Christ and the living presence of Jesus in the world.

Before I leave this and get back to church today, let me briefly outline where this ecclesiology goes. It requires us to think in terms of sacramental relationships. A sacrament in this view both represents and enacts the reality it represents. So Jesus is a sacrament of the Trinity. His relationship to the Father both represents to us and enacts the relation of the Son to the Father. The church in turn is a sacrament of the Risen Lord. It both represents and enacts the living presence of Christ (and through Christ, the presence of the Father). And—this is important—the church thus formed is also in a sacramental relationship to the world—to all people. The church sacramentally brings the world into relationship with Christ, and through Christ, to God. 

This is far too brief. There is much to be worked out in these relationships. But it presents a very different idea of church from the one commonly held by people in Protestant, especially evangelical, churches. 

If you decided to skip the previous section, rejoin me here. We are close to the end.

Sacramental Community

As I mentioned above, one of the projects of the Reformers was getting the magic out of the sacraments. In doing so, the focus fell on the elements themselves. What was happening in the sacrament? In Eucharist, always at the center of these discussions, what happens to the bread and the wine? Do they become the body and blood of Jesus? 

The Reformers developed several answers to that question. In Reformed churches today, especially those of an evangelical persuasion, the answer is mostly that they do not in any sense become body and blood of Jesus; they are merely representative of Jesus’s body and blood, which goes against the words of the institution of the Eucharist, as we have them, for example, in Paul’s 1^st letter to the Corinthians, and against Article 35 of the Belgic Confession. But never mind that. The focus on what happens in the elements of the Eucharist distracts us from what a sacrament is. It’s not, as the earlier medieval church knew, the bread and the wine in themselves. It’s the meal, the eating of the bread and drinking of the cup together in the congregation. A sacrament is not a thing but an act. In eating the bread and drinking the cup, the congregation becomes sacramentally the body and blood of Jesus Christ. What is transubstantiated is not the bread or the wine by themselves but the people. It’s in that moment, sacramentally, that the church becomes body of Christ.

If church begins there, in the sharing of the bread and the wine—and not just these but in the sharing of life together—then theological ideas lose some of their prominence. The community has shared Christ, become in that sacramental way Christ. It’s now the task of the community to work out, with all the resources of scripture and tradition, what that means in practical terms. How should the congregation work out its unity? 

Much of the New Testament is about just that sort of thing: working out what it means to be the community of Christ. In this sense, the two marks of the church are reversed. The sacramental community comes first. The preaching is a way of trying to understand the miracle of what is happening before us, this spiritual community that forms the body of Christ in the world. Preaching is not delivering theological ideas—although theological ideas are important—but trying in the presence of the community to grasp what is going on in our midst.

If this ecclesiology had been present at the recent synods of the Christian Reformed Church, the denomination in which grew up, they (the synods) would have been far less inclined to impose their theological ideas on the congregations, splitting them and splitting them off. Unity would have been far more precious, as it is in the words of Jesus in John 17.

But perhaps we are too late for all that. My purpose here is to say to those churches, some of which I have served, that you are right to put your life together as more important than your agreement on all the issues. In this ecclesiology, in ways I don’t have space for here, the measure of congregational health is not agreement on all matters theological but a unity rooted in love for Jesus and love for each other. This is not some liberal idea imported from the world but deeply biblical and deeply Christian. 

Clay