Theology Today - Vol 40, No. 1 - April 1983 - ARTICLE - Let The Church Live On The Frontier

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Let The Church Live On The Frontier
By John A. Mackay

THE church's place is the frontier. Its destiny is bound up with a frontier life, for that is the life to which God has called it. When the Christian church belongs too completely to any community or nation, to any civilization or culture, to any generation or era, it ceases to be its true self and fails to fulfill its destiny. When the church is no longer mobile, when the pioneer spirit has left it, when missionary vision no longer inspires it, when a challenge to high adventure under God fails to awaken a response in prophetic words and redemptive deeds, the church is dead. It is dead, even should it be acclaimed as the most venerable institution of which a nation, a culture, or an era can boast. For the church is truly, the church solely in the measure in which, it lives a pilgrim life upon the road of God's unfolding purpose, keeping close to the rugged boundaries of an ever - expanding kingdom.

By the church we do not mean any single visible society, or institution which may make exclusive claim to be called the church. We mean rather the corporate group of those societies called churches which profess allegiance to Jesus Christ as their divine head and regard themselves as members of his body. We are thinking of the church visible and militant, which, in virtue of the fact that its boundaries are now coextensive with the inhabited globe, is entitled to the name "ecumenical."

By the frontier, we understand that place where life is lived most closely to human need and God's purpose. It is the region where issues are clean - cut, where good and evil stand in sharpest contrast, where sunset and sunrise are seen and felt most keenly. In this twilight, revolutionary time, this end of an era in which we live, the Christian church is called afresh to a frontier life. Only upon the frontier, ready to

John A. Mackay is President and Professor of Ecumenics, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary and founder and first Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY AS we begin our fortieth volume, and in anticipation of an anniversary issue next January, we take pride in reproducing an adapted version of an editorial written for the July 1944 issue of Volume I. The literary style. full of images and imperatives, is typical of Dr. Mackay's direct and forceful presentation. But on a deeper level, this editorial, with all its somewhat dated references, speaks to our own time a needed word about the mission and unity of the church. The figure of the frontier suggests the beyond, the unexpected, the risk, but also the goal and destiny of the church. In 1950. Dr. Mackay gathered some of his essays and editorials together into a volume bearing the title, Christianity on the Frontier. The dedication reads: "To my coworkers on THEOLOGY TODAY." With this reprinting. we would dedicate this issue to John A. Mackay.

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trek into the unknown, waiting for the Leader's word at midnight or at noonday, can the church be saved from the fate of institutions that have staked their all upon a human something that time has marked for dissolution.

There are today several frontiers upon which the church must gird itself for special action. There is, to begin with, the political frontier. This frontier has in recent years flamed suddenly into action. For generations, and in some instances for centuries, it had been quiescent, so far as the church was concerned. But now upon the political frontier human destiny is being so radically affected, and the witness of the church in society so basically challenged, that political issues have assumed unwonted importance. For that reason the voice of the church needs to sound, like the ancient voices of Amos and Isaiah, in the high places of the nation. In words plain and forthright, it must be made clear to rulers that neither they nor the state dare usurp the authority that belongs to God alone. Governments are servants to achieve earthly justice. Beneath them are the foundations of moral law upon which legislation must be built; around them is God's providential rule which will ultimately thwart political action that runs counter to righteousness; above them is Jesus Christ the sovereign Lord of that Kingdom whose supremacy all the rulers of earth must acknowledge or perish. The church must also proclaim that in God's world there is no such thing as absolute sovereignty for nations any more than for individuals, that power should no longer express itself in imperialistic lordship, but rather in responsible trusteeship for the good of developing nations; that an international order founded upon the will of all peoples is more enduring than that which rests upon the alliance of a few powerful states.

As regards internal politics, it is the church's duty to sensitize the conscience of a nation, and of all classes and institutions within the nation, so that no group of citizens shall arrogate to themselves perpetual rights and privileges which they deny to others. The Christian church, to be true to its nature and mission in a state or community, must work for an orchestral expression of social life. No person must suffer ostracism or any form of disability because of color of skin, or hard misfortune, but must be permitted to share to the fullest degree in the common life. It is equally part of the church's responsibility to secure, through its public witness and the constitutional pressure of its members, that there shall be rectitude in the administration of public affairs. In a great city of the United States the statement was recently made, "The churches of this city are very strong, but the politics are rotten." If such is the case, the church members in that community should blush for shame.

There is also the cultural frontier. Historically, the Christian church has influenced culture in all its expressions, and at all the social levels,

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more than any other institution. It has created a passion for literacy; it has provided "the inspiration that produced a Bach and a Rembrandt. The history of Western philosophy would have been totally different had the great Greeks known Moses and the Prophets. Yet the church has suffered more in the course of its history from the blandishments of secular culture than from the bludgeonings of political tyrants. It has often succumbed to the temptation to express its own unique truth in terms of some category supplied by a culture which had no place for the transcendent light of Revelation. The gates of Hell have rarely prevailed against the historic church, but, as Hegel boasted, the gates of reason have. The church is in peril, and has abandoned the frontier, when it so infuses its warmth and inspiration into a purely secular culture as to become that culture's soul. Many American politicians and educators would like the church in the United States to assume as its chief function, that of sanctifying values and canonizing objectives which are presented as spiritual ultimates, and so as substitutes for the goal of Christian devotion. The church must as truly live upon the frontier of a democratic culture as upon the frontier of a totalitarian culture.

One of the crucial problems facing the church at the present time is the fact that modern secular thought has largely been emptied of great Christian concepts. It has been exceedingly difficult, in consequence, to communicate Christianity and Christian ideas to our contemporaries. There is, however, one great hope; the march of events has shattered the secularistic world-view. Such categories as "self - realization," "self-expression," "innate goodness," "the autonomy of reason," in which humanistic culture gloried have been "weighed in the balance and found wanting." The great prophetic words, "Cease ye from man," and, "Earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord," have once again taken on new meaning. In the cultural reconstruction which is now under way and which must be as radical and thorough - going as its political and social counterpart, the central categories of the Christian religion have a major part to play. If the church does not lose its insight into the faith to which it is heir, it will have a matchless opportunity to interpret the Christian Gospel, and to make the great verities of the Christian faith burningly real for men and women whose proud cultural palace has been blitzed.

It is perfectly apparent, however, that the church's task in the realm of culture is not going to be easy. The modern theologian has as difficult a problem as the modern poet. The poet's task in our time is, as Archibald MacLeish said, to enter into and to describe the experiences of modern men and women which for them are still inarticulate, in such a way that the poet shall make them see and understand themselves, give them a voice that they may utter things hitherto unutterable, and make vocal their abysmal longings. No modern poet has succeeded more fully in this task than T. S. Eliot. His Wasteland, to use the words of MacLeish, "precipitated the cloud), confusion of an age and made human and tragic what had before been impersonal and intellectual and for the most part unseen."

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III

There is, finally, the missionary frontier. That is where the ultimate problems of the Christian church are today. Knowing what it is, sure of its faith, radiating its light, the Christian church must deal with the supreme question of an adequate missionary approach to the world. Basic to any such approach is Christian unity. This is no time for Christians to retire within their ecclesiastical boundaries and immerse themselves in the contemplation of their denominational glory. It is rather a time when they should move out from the center to the circumference of their corporate witness. Upon their ecclesiastical boundary let them greet Christians who approach them from the other side of the frontier. There let them share with one another the truth and experience which God has taught each group in the course of its history. It is time for Christians of different backgrounds and traditions to listen to one another, to pray with and for one another, to work in causes of common concern. It is time for them, with due loyalty to truth, in the name of Christ, to give, as far as possible, visible, and even organization al, expression to their unity. Any Christian church today which, in the light of the Christian revelation and of history, presumes to be the one and only church, closing its frontier to Christian unity and immersing its members in the exclusive thought of its own greatness, betrays Jesus Christ and is guilty of blasphemy.

The physical unity of the world, and the international character of contemporary problems, make the unity of the Christian church still more imperative. As regards steps toward unity and eventual union, the natural thing is that those churches which have native affinities or have stemmed from a common stock and so belong to the same ancestral tradition, should enter, first of all, into organic relations. But in no case should a church union take place for reasons of pure expediency, nor because the attitude toward doctrine and Christian witness has reached so low an ebb in both that there is no reason why they should stand apart; for they are bound together by the common bond of indifference. Church union becomes real and fruitful only when leaders and people enter upon it for positive Christian reasons, and because they can no longer justify their separate existence to themselves or to the world.

For many, all too many, years, forward movements of one kind or another in the Christian church, have taken place at the inspiration or under the leadership of extremist elements, to the religious right or left. The hour has arrived for the Center to move toward the frontier. The church in the modern world has been like a ship passing though the locks of the Panama Canal, dragged forward by electric engines to the right and left of it, and steadied in the channel by others in the rear. But the moment comes hen the cables are detached fore and aft, and the great liner, now under its own engine power and the guidance of its own

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officers, moves out of the narrow channel, past palm - clad islands, into the ocean highway where the shore is soon lost to view.

Let the church, as from a "peak in Darien," scan the ocean vastness of its true sphere of action: and upon the power generated by a deepened experience of Jesus Christ and a new sense of its destiny, and with the Captain in charge, head for the frontier to which God calls it beyond the horizon of its present vision.