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The Realization of the Church
By Joseph Haroutunian

"NOW therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my possession among all peoples: for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel" (Exodus 19: 5-6, RSV).

"But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. . . .

"So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundations of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit" (Eph. 2: 13, 19-22, RSV).

When a Christian reads the above in the Scriptures, and other like passages, he is strangely comforted, edified, humbled, given hope, and otherwise filled with joy. When he, on the other hand, reads the following typical statements about the Church, from current ecclesiastical literature, he hardly knows what to make of them.

"The biblical view of the Church is most comprehensively expressed in the formula: the Body of Christ, σώμα Χριστού. When the Church is called the Body of Christ, that means first of all that Christ and the Church belong together as an inseparable unity. . . . Where Christ is, there is also his Church: and where the Church is, there

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Christ is found also. Communion with Christ is a communion in and through the Church. Christ is incarnate in his Church. The Church, while subject to the conditions of this earth and this time, is the revelation of the living and active Christ. Here He meets us and works with us."¹

"The Church exists only in dependence on Christ as the source and object of that memory, faith and hope, which shapes the reality of the community and makes it to be. Through the act of God in Christ come the cleansing and reconciliation whereby the company of sinners is made to be one people. . . . Therefore, the Church attributes everything to him, is content to belong to him, to live below him and to follow after him, to confess that all wisdom, holiness, power and glory are his. . . .

"That the Church is subject to Christ as the head means also that the Church is governed by him through the Spirit, that all decisions, acts and words in the Church are subordinated to his decision, act and word, that he is ever free to dispose as he will of the ways and forms of the Church, that infallibility and impeccability can never be claimed for them...

"The witness to the revelation and redemption in Christ which took place in the body, occurs in the body of those united with him. The Church is sent, as he was sent. Christ ministers in the ministry of the Church, as the Church shares in his sacrificial suffering for mankind and in the power of his risen life. The Church is the instrument of God's action in history. It is salt, yeast, a light, a way; and its members are confessors, disciples, ministers, stewards, ambassadors, servants, slaves of God and of Christ, in Whom and through whom the Spirit works by many gifts, God making his appeal to mankind."²

There is much more like these, not only in the books from which we have quoted, but also in other writings of Biblical and dogmatic theologians who are very well known, widely read, and apparently approved by "the articulate leadership" of the Churches in our day.

Why is it that the words of Scripture quicken us, whereas the words of ecclesiastical writers often embarrass us even where they are impeccably Biblical and logical?

¹ Gustav Aulén, in The Universal Church in God's Design, The Amsterdam Assembly Series, Vol. 1, New York, Harper & Brothers, p. 19.
² Claude Welch, The Reality of the Church, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959, pp. 176, 177, 180.

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1. The Bible is addressed to ecclesia pressa. Israel and Church alike, as we find them in the Bible, are a people hard-pressed by their enemies. They are a little people, a poor and weak people, a people harassed and in peril, having no abiding place in this world. They are a people derided, persecuted and pursued, without recourse to earthly power for redress against wrong and for escape from oppression. When such people are called a "royal nation" or "God's possession," there is a dignity and aptness to the language used, and a man is amazed and encouraged in hearing it.

But when the same language is used for the ears and eyes of people whose resemblance to the Israel and Church of the Bible is both remote and blurred, its effect is neither edifying nor joy-giving. It is on the contrary embarrassing, as though it were false. What are people, Christians, in lands where the Churches are accepted and respectable social institutions, integrated into the culture and ethos of the societies in which they exist and prosper-what are these Christians to understand when they are called a "royal nation" or the "Body of Christ, crucified and risen"? How are Christians who have the powers of their world on their side to receive and understand the characterization of the Church as "God's possession"? Surely, when Christians who occupy a favored position in the world, economically, politically, socially, hear that they are God's special treasure, having the Law and the Gospel, the ministry and the sacraments, yea the very Trinity, they do not so much hope and rejoice as are either puffed up or confused, or both. In short, there is a profound inappropriateness to present day ecclesiology where the Churches are not ecclesia pressa.

2. When Scripture calls the Church "the body of Christ," "the communion of the Spirit," "people of God," it speaks in encouragement and for hope. When a man reads the wonderful characterizations of Israel and the Church in Scripture, he is at once quickened and humbled, because he knows that he is and he is not a Christian, and that the same is true of his fellow Christians. Scripture makes it plain that indeed he is a member of the Body of Christ and that he indeed belongs to the Household of God. But this faith or knowledge is part and parcel of faith or knowledge of himself as a man who rejects the very reality of the new being which is in Christ Jesus. The indicative statements of Scripture about the Church are imperative statements, and knowledge and obedience

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are inseparable one from the other. There is no word of God which is not a demand made of us. There is no "ontology" of the Church which is not a statement of what we are to do as Christians. We know "the mighty acts of God" only in that we hear his word to do it. We know we are the Body of Christ while we know that we do not act as such; for which reason, because we do not act as such, we are exhorted to love one another as God in Christ has loved us. In short, we are the Body of Christ, the Redeemed Community, the Communion of Saints, in that we may be such. The Church is and is not the Church, because the Church may be the Church, or we may be Christians. It is exhilarating to read Scripture about the Church because in it is and is not are subsumed under now in Christ and in the Spirit you may. Thus it is that the Gospel and the Law are bound together, and a man reads Scripture not for embarrassment but for hope.

Present day ecclesiology is a different matter. When we read that the Church is the realm of redemption, the Body of Christ, the fellowship of faith, and so on, with one magniloquent phrase after another, we are invited to believe that Church is all these. We are told that the Church is the redeemed community, the servant and slave of God, the society of those who love and forgive one another, the salt and light of the world, Christ incarnate, the hope of the world. We are told that God has already overcome the evil one and Christ is now king. We are told that therefore salvation is come and the Church is established forever. Assuming that the Church is "the Christian Community," it follows that we are Christians, rather than that we may be Christians: that we do follow after Christ, rather than may follow after him. We are told point blank that "the Church is subject to Christ" and that Christians forgive, love, and serve. But this is embarrassing, and very much unlike Scripture which rather humbles us and gives us hope.

3. According to Scripture the existence of Israel and the Church is a gift of God. Israel was brought out of Egypt, and the Church was rescued from the power of sin and death, and both are the work of God by his Word and Spirit. This is true and established by the Word of God.

But Scripture leads us further. The salvation of God was not and is not a "bolt out of the blue," Moses brought Israel out of Egypt and Jesus reconciled us to God. God alone has saved his

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people, but he has saved them by his servants who have heard his call and obeyed it. It is in fact the way of the living God of Scripture that he slays his Goliaths at the hand of his Davids. It was the prophets, priests, and kings of Israel by whose faithfulness God has had a people who have known him and lived under his covenant. It was Jesus his Son, prophet, priest, and king, in whom and by whom God has had a people who have known him and lived under his grace. Without his servants God has not dealt with his people, neither to speak to them nor to save them. God has acted with the perfections of God and his servants have acted with the obedience of man; and in the conjunctions of the two actings, God has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Moreover, God has made his people prophets, priests, and kings, He has made his people his servants to do his will, so that they may be servants and saviours one to another. The same Spirit of God who blessed the labors of prophets, priests, and kings, who came upon Jesus and his apostles, blesses the community of believers, so that even as sinners hear God's call and seek to edify one another, the living God justifies them and makes them whole. The apostolic injunction not to "grieve the Holy Spirit of God" . . to "be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you," is more than a statement of the Christian's duty (Eph. 4: 30, 32, RSV). It is a statement of what Christians may be one to another. It is a characterization not only of the Church as the realm of redemption but also of the manner in which the redemptive act of God is fulfilled in the mutual love and forgiveness of Christians. We are debtors to God and his Son and the apostles. But we are also debtors to our fellowmen, fellow Christians, to whom God has bound us in his household, in the bundle of the life we have in him. In short, all the things that God has done for us mean that we may act toward one another as God's people, to be his people in keeping the covenant of love. This possibility of forgiveness and communion is the reality of the Church at any given moment. The Church is the company of man who, having been met by the Son of God, may love God with all that is in them and their neighbors as themselves.

When we are told that the Church is the ark of salvation and light in the world, we cannot understand this either as a matter of fact or as an "eschatological reality." We cannot say, "Scripture

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says" and believe that the Church is in fact the magnificent things theological clerics have been saying about it. It will not do to browbeat us by saying that we do not see the Church described by dogmatic enthusiasts because we have no faith, or that we do not look at the Church from the inside! It will not even do to say that if we believe in God's grace and power, we must believe that the redeemed community is a fact. The Church is not realized by flattering God and "seeing things." We may celebrate God's omnipotence all we will. He will not oblige us by turning us by some magic into saints. We have no knowledge of God's saving power except in the freedom we have in Jesus Christ to become saviours one to another. We need not be so jealous for God's sovereignty as to deny that he saved his people by the hand of Moses and David, and of his Son Jesus. We do not need to be so fearful for God's honor and his power as to deny that he has made our brother our angel and our neighbor our helper. We do not take anything away from his glory, nay we rather acknowledge it, when we confess that we ourselves may do his will by loving and forgiving and redeeming, after him who loved and forgave and redeemed in Christ Jesus. We do not belittle the Lord Jesus when we acknowledge that he has given us the Spirit of freedom, and in the Spirit given us our brother, as his Spirit and his agent respectively, to fulfill in us this work of love and communion; we rather magnify the Lord Jesus and praise him with our actions. It is no denial of the traditional "means of grace " to insist that we ourselves have been called to be the bearers of God's grace one to another, so that when we refuse to act as we may, we resist the Spirit of God, and turn both preaching and sacrament into vanity. The living God saves us in the Church's institutions and in the Church's communion. The institutions have been with us and must be. The time has come to communicate one with another, to do what we may do, and to encourage and edify one another in doing it.

It is commonly known and admitted that the Church is where two or three are gathered together in Jesus' name. It is known and admitted that the Church's councils and institutional offices are not the Church, and that they cannot function properly unless the Church acts as communions of sinners being saved: unless Christians do what they may do in the company of Jesus Christ. The time has come for the Church's theologians to take this situation seriously

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and to think it through. But it may be more important that the officials of the Churches single-mindedly use their opportunities and skills, in the congregations of the Churches, so to teach and lead and guide the people that the people behave toward one another as free men of Christ and the Spirit, in the midst of the temptations and trials of this world, for the realization of the Church as the realm of redemption, the Body of Christ, and all the rest, in love which goes with faith and hope.

We may argue if the Church is or is not the bearer of the light of the world. But as God is alive, the Church may be the bearer of the light of the world and of the medicine of the Great Physician for the healing of the nations. Let us have less of metaphor and metaphysics about the Church, and more thinking and doing in the Church, in the fear and love of God, in our communion with one another in edifying one another to the glory of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.