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Sacrament as Social Process: Christ the Transformer of Culture

By John H. Yoder

...Each of these practices [of the apostolic community] can function as a paradigm for ways in which other social groups might operate.... People who do not share the faith or join the community can learn from them. "Binding and loosing" can provide models for conflict resolution, alternatives to litigation, and alternative perspectives on "corrections. " Sharing bread is a paradigm, not only for soup kitchens and hospitality houses, but also for social security and negative income tax. "Every member of the Body has a gift" is an immediate alternative to vertical "business" models of management. Paul's solidarity models of deliberation correlate with the reasons that the Japanese can make better cars than Detroit.

Ever since Paul Ramsey spoke to the 1979 session of the Society of Christian Ethics on "Liturgy and Ethics,"¹ there has been within the ethicists' guild a rising awareness of the need to think more clearly about the interrelationship of worship and morality. For some it may even have displaced the earlier routine question of the relationship between Scripture and ethics. The connections between worship and ethics have been tested in various directions. Some say that what worship does is to form the character of the person or of the community, and then that character determines the style of moral discernment. For others worship contributes to ethics something less precise but more foundational: love or hope what ordinary usage might call "motivation." What these varied efforts have in common is that they begin with the problem of a qualitative distance between the two realms of liturgy and ethics and maintain that a bridge of some kind needs to be built. With gratitude and great respect for those efforts, but not satisfied by them, I propose to set beside them a simpler account, one that at least complements them and might partially correct them.

John H. Yoder is Professor of Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. He has addressed a wide variety of social ethical issues in his many articles and books, which include The Christian and Capital Punishment (1961), When War is Unjust (1984), The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (1984), and He Came Preaching Peace (1985).

¹Journal of Religious Ethics 7/2 (1979), pp. 139ff.

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I

Observe a commonality underlying five practices described in the New Testament, practices explicated mostly in the Pauline writings, but rooted as well in the gospels and paralleled in the other epistles. What they have in common is that each of them concerns both the internal activities of the gathered Christian congregation and the ways the church interfaces with the world. Thus, each of the five practices described and mandated in the New Testament exemplifies a link between ecclesiastical practice and social ethics that is usually undervalued or ignored.² For each of them, I must dispense with detailed exegesis of the texts' linguistic and contextual dimensions, but not because more attention to the scholars' resources would not be corroborative.

(1) Fraternal Admonition

In a key passage of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that, as they carry out a particular practice under his instructions, they do the activity of God: "What you bind on earth is bound in heaven," he says (Matt. 18:18). A specific human activity is mandated, and its form is prescribed in some detail. The context in Matthew, reinforced by the parallels in Luke and in John, makes it evident that one objective of the procedure is forgiveness, "remitting" an offense-that is, reconciliation, restoring to the community a person who had offended. Jesus' choice of a pair of rabbinic technical terms indicates, however, that more than that is involved: "To bind" is to respond to a question of ethical discernment (we still have the root in our word "obligate"), and to "loose" is to free from obligation (in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus had warned that whoever does that with any commandment will be "the least in the Kingdom").

Into the interlocking of the dialog of reconciliation ("remitting") with the dialog of moral discernment ("binding" and "loosing"), Jesus inserts yet another element of classical due process: the participants who "harmonize" in this process (the verb is symphonein, which we recognize in the noun form "symphony") are described in juridical terms as the "two or three witnesses" who according to Mosaic law³ make a serious deliberation valid.

Paul referred to this process as "the law of Christ" (Gal. 6:2). The Reformers of the sixteenth century (Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, and some of the so-called Anabaptists) called it Regel Christi, "the rule of Christ." They looked to this process to move the Reformation from the

²In grouping them in this way I am pursuing a suggestion made in the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in February 1980 and in my essay "The Kingdom as Social Ethic" in The Priestly Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 93. Earlier versions of this material were presented as lectures at Duke University, Loma Linda University, Boston University, Eden Theological Seminary, and Bangor Theological between February 1986 and February 1988.

³Num. 35:30, Deut. 17:6, 19:15; Jn. 8:17.

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university lecture hall and the scholar's office to the life of the parish and the family.⁴

A process of human interchange combining the mode of reconciling dialogue, the substance of moral discernment, and the authority of divine empowerment deserves to be considered one of the sacramental works of the community. Only a few of the Reformation traditions came near to saying that, and the "Catholic" practices carried on under the rubric of "absolution" or "reconciliation" have long since come to have a much thinner meaning.

(2) The Universality of Charisma

The Paul of Ephesians uses the term "the fullness of Christ" to describe a new mode of group relationships in which every member of a body (it is to him that we owe the currency of the noun "body" to describe a social group) has a distinctly identifiable, divinely validated, and empowered role. The Paul of I Corinthians says literally that every member is the bearer of such a "manifestation of the Spirit for the common good," and he prescribes quite detailed counter-intuitive and counter-traditional guidelines for how this understanding leads to ascribing the greater value to the less honored members. The Paul of Romans instructs his readers about their ability and duty to think of themselves in such a way as to conform to "the grace that had been meted out" to each of them. He saw all this (there is Petrine corroboration which indicates that the entire thought pattern was not original or peculiar to Paul) as a specific working of God the Spirit, present in, with, and under a particular pattern of social process, profoundly different both from contemporarily available social models and from most of what later Christian history has done with the notions of "charisma" and "ministry."⁵

(3) The Spirit's Freedom in the Meeting

In the context of this already described vision of body process, yet distinguishable within it by its narrower focus, Paul instructs the Corinthians about how to hold a meeting in the power of the Spirit. Everyone who has something to say can have the floor, with only a relative priority being given to the mode of prophecy because it speaks "to improve, to encourage, and to console." The others "weigh" what the prophet has said.⁶ The same assumptions were operative behind the narrative of Acts, where a foundational problem of missionary

⁴Cf. my review of the New Testament witness in "Binding and Loosing," pp. 211ff. in John White and Ken Blue, Healing the Wounded, (Downers Grove, II: Inter Varsity Press, 1985). On the sixteenth century place of this practice, see Ervin A. Schlabach, The Rule of Christ among the Early Swiss Anabaptists (Chicago: Chicago Theological Seminary PhD Thesis, 1977) and my "Hermeneutics of the Anabaptists," in W. Swartley (ed.), Essays on Biblical Interpretation (Elkhart, Ind: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1984), pp. 24ff.

⁵The apostolic testimony is summarized in my The Fullness of Christ (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Press, 1987).

⁶Cf. the section on "The Rule of Paul" in Yoder, "Hermeneutics of the Anabaptists."

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strategy yielded to a conversational process of whose conclusions the moderator could say that they had "seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us."

I interrupt the listing to note that I began with these three specimens of apostolically prescribed social process⁷ because they do not fall within what ordinarily is called "worship," even less "liturgy." Yet why should they not be so designated? Each speaks of practices carried out when believers gather, for reasons evidently derived from their faith and capable of being illuminated by doctrinal elaboration. These practices are described as involving both divine and human action and as mandatory. It makes a difference whether they are done rightly or wrongly. Are these not the characteristics of what we ordinarily call "worship?"

What New Testament believers were doing in these several practices-the three listed so far--can be spoken of in social process terms easily translated into nonreligious terms. The multiplicity of gifts is a model for the empowerment of the humble and the end of hierarchy in social process. Dialogue under the Holy Spirit is the ground floor of the notion of democracy. The admonition to bind or loose at the point of offense is the foundation for what now would be called conflict resolution and consciousness-raising.

The social-process meaning of the other two practices to which I now turn, more traditionally called "sacraments," has been less evident until recently. Part of the reason for not looking at them as social practices over the years may well be the special aura cast around them by the word "sacrament." Now, however, there is a veritable wave of writings connecting the eucharist with economics; Orbis Press has several books making such a point. That this juxtaposition is now popular does not prove, of course, that it is exegetically warranted; many fads are not. In this case, though, others had been making this juxtaposition since long before the fad, but it was less noted because it was not in a Catholic frame of reference.⁸

(4) Breaking Bread

Fourth, then, the eucharist is an act of economic ethics. In the passages to which later generations gave the technical label "words of institution," Jesus says, "Whenever you do this, do it in my memory." Do what in his memory? It cannot mean "whenever you celebrate the

⁷I hesitate to use routinely and uniformly the term "practice," for fear that it be taken too technically as having a special meaning defined by ethicists. There are some who do this with the definition offered by Alasdair Maclntyre in his After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 175. There is nothing wrong with Maclntyre's description but some take it as transforming a commonsensical meaning into a recondite one.

⁸See Arthur Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974); Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal: The Ordinance of the Breaking of Bread (New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1898); and William H. Willimon, Sunday Dinner (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1981).

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Mass" because there was then no such thing as a Mass. He might mean "whenever you celebrate the Passover," but that is not what the hearers took him to mean. That would have called for an annual celebration. He must have meant (and the record indicates that they took him to mean) "whenever you have your common meal." The meal He blessed and claimed as his memorial was their ordinary partaking together of food for the body. Only because it was that communal meal of the disciples' fellowship could it provide the occasion for the reorganization of the ministering structures reported in Acts 7.

We commit the hermeneutical sin of anachronism when we look in the New Testament for any light on the much later eucharistic controversies. All of those later controversies were about something of which the apostolic generation had no notion, namely about the detailed theoretical definition of the meaning of specific actions and things ("sacraments") within the special set-apart world of the "religious" in a frame of reference that the later churches took over from paganism when the latter replaced Judaism as their cultural soil. What the New Testament is talking about in "breaking bread" is believers' actually sharing with one another their ordinary day-to-day material substance. It is not the case, as far as understanding the New Testament accounts is concerned, that, in an act of "institution" or symbol-making, God or the church would have said "let bread stand for daily sustenance." It is not even merely that, in many settings, as any cultural historian would have told us, eating together already stands for values of hospitality and community-formation, these values being distinguishable from the signs that refer to them. It is that bread is daily sustenance. Bread eaten together is economic sharing. Not merely symbolically, but in actual fact, it extends to a wider circle the economic solidarity that normally obtained in the family. When, in most of his post-Resurrection appearances, Jesus takes the role of the family head distributing bread (and fish) around his table, he projects into the post-Passion world the common purse of the wandering disciple band whose members had left their prior economic bases to join his movement.

A rationalistic or Zwinglian understanding of symbol says that a symbolic act has a "meaning" distinguishable from the act itself and that, for certain purposes, it is in fact helpful to disentangle the "meaning" from the act. This is in order to define it, to derive from it additional derivative meanings, and perhaps to resymbolize it into other forms in other settings. In this frame of reference, one can say (although no one did for a long time) that breaking bread together means economic solidarity, so that forms of social life that transcend individualism and share with larger communities are preferable to those that name as agents only independent individuals. But such an action of derivation is an intellectual operation, arbitrary and unaccountable. This we might call the "Zwinglian" way of access to an economic meaning of the eucharist.

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At the other end of the scale, what we may call the "sacramentalist" view of a sign says, that by a distinct divine act of definition, a specific set of practices is pulled up out of daily life and given, by gracious decree, a distinctive meaning, one best served by accentuating the distance between the special meaning and the ordinary one. A separate "theology of sacraments" then develops a corpus of dogma about that special realm. The bread no longer looks or tastes like the bread one shares with children and guests or that is owed to cousins and to the beggar. It is not broken nor (classically) even put into the mouth the same way as ordinary real-world food. Its most important meaning is the one that forces us to debate in what sense the bread has now become the body of the Lord and in what sense our eating it mediates to us the grace of salvation. I submit (although this is no place to spread out the argument) there is no direct path from this point to economics. The Roman Catholic authors who establish such a connection have to start over again from somewhere else.⁹

What I propose, for present purposes, to call the sacramental (as distinct from the sacramentalistic) view spares us those abstracted definitions and articulations of how the sign signifies. When the family head feeds you at his table, the bread for which he has given thanks, you are part of the family. The act does not merely mean that you are part of the family. To take the floor in a community dialogue does not mean that you are part of the group; it is operational group membership. To be immersed and to rise from the waters of the mikvah may be said to symbolize death and resurrection, but really it makes you a member of the historical community of the new age. This was the case, not only for Jesus, but also for John and for the other Jewish proselytizers and revivalists who used the baptism of repentance before him. This leads us to the fifth social-ethical ritual.

(5) Induction into the New Humanity

Baptism inducts persons into a new people, and one of the distinguishing marks of this new people is that all prior given or chosen definitions of identity are transcended. When Paul writes "if anyone is in Christ the whole world is new" so that "worldly standards have ceased to count in my estimate of a person" (II Cor. 5:16, 17), the concrete social-functional meaning of these statements is that social definitions based upon class and category are no longer basic. The phrase in Galatians, "neither slave nor free, neither male nor female... you are One in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28), is explicitly a description of what baptism does, parallel to Ephesians 2 ("new humanity") or to II Corinthians 5 ("new creation") in its substance. The fundamental

⁹Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1979) makes the argument most directly. See also Geevarghese Osthathios, Theology of a Classless Society (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1979); Rafael Avila, Worship and Politics (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1981); Joseph A. Grassi, Broken Bread and Broken Bodies (Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1981); and, from another press, Monika Hellwig, The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World (New York: Paulist Press, 1976).

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breakthrough at the point of the Jew-Gentile barrier, which generated these texts, demands and produces congruent breakthroughs where the barrier is slavery, gender, or class.¹⁰

There is of course a sacramentalist understanding of baptism, defining the salvation it mediates in terms of original sin. Egalitarianism or interethnic reconciliation cannot be part of its meaning. There is no clear reason not to do it to a newborn infant. There is no reason it was wrong to do it coercively in the Middle Ages.

Of course, there is also, at the other end of the scale, a Zwinglian understanding of what baptism properly "signifies." This is most widely represented today by Baptists, that is, by radicalized Zwinglians. If baptism signifies the new birth as an inward individual experience, it is obvious why we should disavow administering it coercively or to infants, but there is still no natural access to egalitarianism.

If, on the other hand, we can resurrect a sacramental realism, whereby baptism is the constitution of a new people whose newness and togetherness explicitly relativize prior stratifications and classification, then we need no path to get from there to egalitarianism. We start egalitarian, and the reasons to disavow any nonvoluntary practice of the act are built in.

II

We have now described five social practices, each with an underlying meaning given in the action itself:

(1) There is the interweaving of forgiveness and moral discernment, operative at the point of offense, driven by the intent to forgive, reflecting and also conditioning the reality of divine forgiveness. Jesus' word for this was "binding and loosing"; ours is sometimes reconciliation, " sometimes "discernment."

(2) There is the universalization of giftedness, with every member having his or her charismatic role, whose exercise the community helps define, celebrates, and monitors. It destroys patriarchalism, but not in the interest of anarchy or some other "-archalism." It equalizes, but it is the opposite of levelling. I am not sure we have a word for it. I am not sure we have ever seen it practiced with any approximation of the innovative depth and power that Paul was writing about, though several of our modern forms of social organization, role differentiation, and mutuality provide pale images of it.¹¹

(3) There is decision-making by open dialogue and consensus; everyone can have the floor. Commonsense ground rules assure due

¹⁰I have spelled out further the importance of the interethnic meaning of baptism in my "The Apostle's Apology Revisited" in William Klassen (ed.) The New Way of Jesus (Newton, Kan.: Faith and Life Press, 1980), pp 115-134 and in "The Social Shape of the Gospel" in Wilbert Shenk (ed.), Exploring Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 277-284.

¹¹There are approximations of it in the Friends' rejection of a standard sacerdotal class, or in that of the ("Plymouth") Brethren, but in neither case is the affirmative notion of universal empowerment carried through.

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process and continuity with the rest of the church, past and present. I have described this process most sociologically in my essay "The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood."¹² I would call this "democracy," but with the recognition that that word has other definitions for some people.¹³

(4) There is the sharing of the simple wherewithal of human life, with the table as its instrument, a practice by its nature decentralized, particular, personal. The simplest word for this is family; another is socialism, although for some that has other meanings.

(5) There is status equality, acted out by baptism, defined as relativizing (not denying) social differences, rejecting their discriminatory impact.

My concern here is not to exposit further any one of these functions, either its "inner" meaning in the body of the community or its example for the world. My purpose in looking at the five specimens in parallel was to identify the lessons to be learned from their formal commonality, as they illuminate the way we see social ethics. Quite separate from one another with regard to subject matter, to where they appear in the New Testament, and to their respective agenda, vocabulary, and procedures, these five practices have much in common. The commonalities qualify my grouping them as an authentic induction.

III

What are the implications for ethics of these five practices? Each of them, first of all, is a wholly human, empirically accessible practice- nothing esoteric. Yet each is, according to the apostolic writers, an act of God. God does not merely authorize or command them. God is doing them in, with, and under the human practice: "What you bind on earth is bound in heaven."

Second, all of them are practices that constitute the believing community as a social body. To see them in operation we need to do sociology, not semantics or philosophy. Together (though other dimensions could yet be added) they offer a well-rounded picture of the believing community, that is, of specific datable, nameable, local first century messianic synagogues as a form of human life together

¹²John H. Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 15-36. Reviewing its contribution to the development of democratic forms in the civil order would be a separate study. Specimens of the way "binding and loosing" and "everyone takes the floor" contribute to the origins of democracy would include (a) the way Calvin's vision of society is said to have had its roots in conciliarism; (b) A. D. Lindsay's rooting of the democracy of England and New England in the experience of the Puritan meeting; and (c) the fact that, even though Calvinist theory was at first elitist and in favor of government's repressing dissent, with time Reformed communities contributed in fact to the growth of civil rights, having found themselves in positions not of government but of dissent.

¹³I shall return later to the notion that we should eschew the use of words that "might be misunderstood," i.e., that others would use differently. This concern is understandable, but if we took it seriously there would not be many words left. The meaning of incarnation hardly permits avoiding the ambivalence of all particular meanings.

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demonstrating not only far-reaching continuities with earlier history and culture, but also foundational innovations.

Third, each of these practices can function as a paradigm for ways in which other social groups might operate. These forms are derived from and illuminated by reference to specific components of the faith stance of the first century's messianic synagogues, yet they are accessible to the public. People who do not share the faith or join the community can learn from them. "Binding and loosing" can provide models for conflict resolution, alternatives to litigation, and alternative perspectives on "corrections." Sharing bread is a paradigm, not only for soup kitchens and hospitality houses, but also for social security and negative income tax. "Every member of the body has a gift" is an immediate alternative to vertical "business" models of management. Paul's solidarity models of deliberation correlate with the reasons that the Japanese can make better cars than Detroit. It was not by accident or whim that I could use as labels the modern secular handles "egalitarianism," "democracy," and "socialism," although each of these terms needs to be taken in a way different from their secularistic and individualistic usages.

Some have warned me that it is dangerous to borrow such worldly words as "egalitarianism" or "freedom" since those concepts are not only hard to define but are the property of the liberal establishment, which is an oppressive elite. These friends are right in thus warning me. If I were to think that those contemporary terms have a univocal normative meaning, and if I were proposing that they simply be "baptized," I should have sold out. But those warning friends are wrong if they suggest that some other, less liberal words (for example "virtue narrative community") would be safer from abuse. The right corrective is not to seek fail-safe words never yet corrupted, but rather to renew daily the action of pre-empting the extant vocabulary, rendering every creature subject to God's rule in Christ. What is needed is to surface the criteria whereby we can tell whether, in the appropriation of each new language, the meaning of Jesus is authentically reenacted or abandoned.

Fourth, the reason for their paradigmatic accessibility to others and their translatability into other terms is that they are not "religious" or "ritual" activities at bottom. They are by nature "lay" or "public" phenomena. The two, from among the five, that did become "sacraments" in the later "Catholic" synthesis, after the divorce with Judaism and the remarriage with Constantine, had to change their basic meaning for that to be carried through.

Fifth, these practices are enabled and illuminated by Jesus of Nazareth, who is confessed as Messiah and as Lord. They are part of the order of redemption, not of creation. Hereby we loop back to the difference between the New Testament parallels and the standard account of the relations of particular and general truths, or of

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revelation and reason. The standard account of these matters had told us that in order for Christians to be able to speak to others we need to look less to redemption and more to creation, or less to revelation and more to nature and reason. In only slightly different ways, recent Reformed thinkers (for example Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and H. Richard Niebuhr¹⁴) play the Creator/Father off against the Redeemer/Son in such a way that the will of God as Father (known reliably by means of reason) counts for the social realm, as the words and example of the Son do not.

In the practices I am describing (and the thinking underlying them), the apostolic communities did it the other way around. The multiplicity of gifts is described in Ephesians 4 in analogy to the booty generously dispensed by a victorious champion (appropriating the military victory march hymn of Psalm 68). The ascended Lord Christ pours out the gifts. Binding and loosing makes us participants of the reconciling work of God in Christ. Egalitarianism is enabled by the new creation, " which baptism signs and seals.

In other words, all of these social/ethical/sacramental practices are formally rooted in the order of redemption. That by no means makes them less public. It makes them more realistic about sin and more hopeful about reconciliation than those approaches that trust the reason/nature/creation complex to derive our knowledge of what should be from what is.

Sixth, and also in contrast to the standard account, none of these practices makes the individual the pivot of change. The individual is in no way forgotten or relativized; nothing could be more particularly tailored to measure than the notion of every member's possessing (or being possessed by) a distinctive charisma. Nothing empowers more potently than saying that in the meeting everyone can take the floor. But no trust is placed in the individual's changed insights (as liberalism does) or on the believer's changed insides (as does pietism) to change the world. The fulcrum for change and the forum for decision is the moral independence of the believing community as social body. The dignity of the individual is his or her uniqueness as specific member of that body.

Seventh, none of these five practices was revealed from above or created from scratch; each was derived from already existent cultural models. Table fellowship, baptism, and the open meeting were not new ideas, yet in the gospel setting they have taken on new meanings and a new empowerment.

Eighth, it is hard to link this picture with our guild's standard meta-ethical discussions of consistent moral discourse. Some ethicists believe that the most important, and the procedurally prior, task of the

¹⁴H. R. Niebuhr, "The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Unity of the Church," one of the few texts to be published twice in THEOLOGY TODAY, in October, 1946 and in July, 1983. According to this modalistic trinitarianism, God the Father is more competent for ethical guidance in the realm of "culture" than is the Son.

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ethicist is to disentangle the varieties of modes of moral argument, and to argue that one of them is right. Do these apostolic models of social-ethical creativity reason consequentially or deontologically? Do they prefer the modes of story or of virtue? As far as I can tell, the questions are impertinent.¹⁵ Not only would the apostolic writers not have understood what these questions mean, had they understood them, they would have refused to answer. They would have seen no reason to choose among those incommensurate kinds of resources; why not use them all? The originality and the specificity of their stance lies elsewhere than within the reach of that traditional but abstract methodology debate. Methodological analysis is helpful to illuminate problems of structure, but it is not the prerequisite for the community's right or capacity to reason morally.

Ninth, the apostolic model transcends some other dichotomies as well. It clearly assumes rootage in the normative events that some epistemological analysis calls "revelation," yet without selling reason short, contrary to those who play the orders of "redemption" and "reason" off against one another. Nothing could be more reasonable than the dialogue modes described in Acts 15 and I Corinthians 14. Were we to try to lay over it the Catholic/Protestant typological grid of James Gustafson, or the fivefold typology of his mentor H. Richard Niebuhr, it would fit nowhere. The apostolic model trusts a living magisterium more than does Rome and needs no special theories about the epistemological status of its sources. In that way it is not "Protestant." It places little trust in non-congregational or supra congregational office-bearers, and it has no place to locate the notion that there would be a body of "general" moral knowledge accessible without dialogue or context by means of "reason" or "nature." In that way it is not "Catholic." This is analogous to the way that, as I said, some have warned me of the danger of borrowing such worldly words as "egalitarianism" or "freedom" because those concepts are the property of the liberal establishment. The early communities do not let themselves be held at a distance by hermeneutic grids like "Protestant/ Catholic" or "radical/liberal."

IV

The last few of these inductive observations have been polemic. I have identified some currently popular analytical perspectives that, while helpful for other purposes, cannot box in the apostolic experience. I also maintain that the apostolic model is "evangelical" in the functional sense. For some the label "evangelical" points to a checklist of traditional doctrines and for others to a key inner experience. I mean neither.

For a practice to qualify as "evangelical" in the functional sense means first of all that it communicates news. It says something

¹⁵My doubts about the standard methodological disjunctions were already stated in my Priestly Kingdom, pp. 113ff.

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particular that would not be known and could not be believed, were it not said. Second, it must mean functionally that this "news" is attested as good; it comes across to those whom it addresses as helping, as saving, and as shalom. It must be public, not esoteric, but the way for it to be public is not an a priori logical move that subtracts the particular. It is an a posteriori political practice that tells the world something it did not know and could not believe before. It tells the world what is the world's own calling and destiny, not by announcing either a utopian or a realistic goal to be imposed on the whole society, but by pioneering a paradigmatic demonstration of both the power and the practices that define the shape of restored humanity. The confessing people of God is the new world on its way.

If the good is new, it will have to be said in new contexts, where there is no adequate language for it, until that language is crafted.¹⁶ Since the new is good, it will have to be said in such a creative, loving, and pertinent way that the hearers' acceptance of it is not obligatory, but the product of the fit between the news and the hearers' awareness of their lostness.

On the other hand, the search for a general language that people should have to believe does not want to have to depend upon faith or to avow lostness. Its wanting to avoid the risk of deniability is psychically coercive in intent. The credibility of that which is both "good" and "news" consists precisely in its vulnerability, its refusability. That weakness marks all five of the incarnational processes I have been describing. They are not ways to administer the world; they are modes of vulnerable, but also provocative, creative presence in its midst. That is the primordial way in which they transform culture.

¹⁶"To craft" is the fitting verb. We are not concerned with creation ex nihilo; language is not created that way. A craft works out of living familiarity with the material it transforms.