149 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

Church and Theology: From Here To Where?
By J. A. T. Robinson

"Corresponding to what I called the theistic container, which has shaped divinity into a God existing over against the world, is the religious organization, which has shaped the church into a community existing over against the secular order... I believe in fact that what is dissolving is the casing of the church, and that this process could be one of release and liberation. Just as, in the God-debate, 'the end of theism' meant the end not of God but of one way of expressing the divine reality, so I believe that the decay of the religious organization is the decay of one body in which the church has hitherto lived and whose demise may be necessary for its resurrection."

HOW do we remain theologians after "the death of God"? How do we remain Christians after "the death of the church"? These, I believe, are the two questions that will underly most of the discussion of the days and years immediately ahead of us. It does not, I suggest, matter precisely in what sense we think God or the church to have died. I do not myself subscribe to the more literal or final views of their demise. And yet I believe that something has happened to each that cannot simply be reversed and to which the biblical metaphor can be applied: the corn has fallen into the earth, and the casing has begun to disintegrate. From one point of view this is death, from another point of view it is release and life. I do not want to argue about terminology. I want to explore what, if this is the situation, we do next.

This essay was first delivered as the initial lecture in the Gallahue Conference on Theology, Princeton, N. J., April 17, 1968, at which time it carried the title: "The Next Frontiers for Theology and the Church." J. A. T. Robinson is the Bishop of Woolwich, England, and the author of Honest to God (1963), The New Reformation? (1965), Exploration into God (1967), and In the End God (1950, 1968).

150 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

I

One of the significant things about the death of God theologians is that they go on calling themselves theologians. God may be dead, but one must still theologize. Now I should like to set that alongside some sentences from the latest revision of Sir Julian Huxley's Religion without Revelation. In an opening chapter, entitled "the New Divinity," he writes this:

Though gods and God in any meaningful sense seem destined to disappear, the stuff of divinity out of which they have grown and developed remains. This religious raw material consists of those aspects of nature and those experiences which are usually described as divine. Let me remind my readers that the term divine did not originally imply the existence of gods: on the contrary, gods were constructed to interpret man's experiences of this quality. . . .
A humanist evolution-centered religion too needs divinity, but divinity without God. It must strip the divine of the theistic qualities which man has anthropomorphically projected into it, search for its habitations in every aspect of existence, elicit it, and establish fruitful contact with its manifestations. Divinity is the chief raw material out of which gods have been fashioned. Today we must melt down the gods and refashion the material into new and effective organs of religion, enabling man to exist freely and fully on the spiritual level as well as on the material.¹

In other words, that dimension of reality which caused men to create gods remains valid. But the theistic mold has been shattered. The shaping of the stuff of that experience into gods existing as beings, or into a God existing as a Being, in another realm above or beyond this one, is no longer credible. Nevertheless the matter of divinity is not thereby destroyed; human life is constantly summoned to self-transcendence. And Huxley ends his book with the credo: "I believe in transhumanism."²

Another British humanist, James Hemming, has expressed a similar view in this way:

Both scientific and religious viewpoints are, today, humanisms. But neither is only a humanism because each accepts that existence itself is shrouded in mystery. Each may wish to put something different into that mystery. One group may put a personal God there; the other a question mark; but each will agree that the ground of man's being is humanism within a mystery. This is the new starting-point.

¹ Watts, London, 1967, pp. 4-5.
² Op. cit., p. 195.

151 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

It provides a vast unifying common ground in terms of human involvement and purpose.³

Finally, let me cite the French Marxist, Roger Garaudy:

What makes us atheists is not our sufficiency, our satisfaction with ourselves and with the earth, with some sort of limitation on our project. The reason is that we, from our experience, similar to the Christian's, of the inadequacy of all relative and partial being, do not conclude to a presence, that of the "one necessary," which answers to our anguish and impatience.
If we reject the very name of God, it is because the name implies a presence, a reality, whereas it is only an exigency which we live, a never-satisfied exigency of totality and absoluteness, of omnipotence as to nature and of perfect loving reciprocity of consciousness.
We can live this exigency, and we can act it out, but we cannot conceive it, name it or expect it. Even less can we hypostasize it under the name of transcendence. Regarding this totality, this absolute, I can say everything except: It is. For what it is is always deferred, and always growing, like man himself.
If we want to give it a name, the name will not be that of God, for it is impossible to conceive of a God who is always in process of making himself, in process of being born. The most beautiful and the most exalted name which can be given to this exigency is the name of man. To refuse it to him is to strip him of one of his dimensions, and his essential, specific dimension, for man is precisely he who is not. This exigency in man is, I think, the flesh of your God.⁴

I believe that these statements point to a new and exciting situation. What they indicate is not that those who used to be distinguished as theists and atheists are now saying the same thing. That, as Garaudy insists, is seriously to over-simplify, and would be repudiated from both sides. What they indicate is that the theistic container has been shattered that clearly marked off one position from the other. The casing has been breached and the situation is thoroughly fluid. The frontier is open, and the difference between the positions is to be determined more by their centers than by their edges. The centers are indeed different. Feuerbach and Teilhard de Chardin, for instance, occupy quite distinct positions, the one requiring for its essential expression what has traditionally been "man" language, the other what has traditionally been "God" language. Yet each author is freely and gratefully drawn upon by proponents of the other side. Similarly, Roger Garaudy and Leslie Dewart speak

³ "Moral Education in Chaos," New Society, September 5, 1963.
⁴ From Anathema to Dialogue, English translation, Collins, London, 1967, pp. 82-3.

152 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

from different centers, yet they have more in common than either has with the "old theology" of his own camp.

II

Before going further I should like to try to indicate-though certainly not to define-what I believe the two "centers" are. Each side is concerned to do justice to what it recognizes as a real dimension of transcendence, of openness, of "exigency," of "mystery," which makes a closed or static humanism equally uninviting to both. But each attempts to catch the mystery of this reality from a different aspect.

Here, for instance, to balance the earlier quotations from the humanists, is an attempt to describe the transcendental qualities of experience from within a way of speaking and thinking that works with "God" language. It comes from a book written during World War II by a Russian Orthodox contemporary of Nicholas Berdyaev's, S. L. Frank's God with Us.⁵ I confess that I had ignored it completely until it was drawn to my attention in a review as anticipating in a remarkable way some of the things I had said in my own recent book, Exploration into God. The similarities are indeed fascinating, and in his chapter "Faith in a Personal God," he argues for the same utterly personal "panentheism" (including the term itself) with which I sought to replace classical theism. But here is his description of what he calls "experience of the transcendental" which he takes to be valid of all experience but preeminently of what we call religious experience.

The gist of the matter is that religious experience-like every other-has the dimension of depth or of distance. In ordinary visual perception we see not only that which is quite close to us, but also discern more or less clearly what lies in the far distance and is scarcely visible. In tactile perception we not only apprehend the open surface of things but can also vaguely feel that which lies underneath; tapping, touching, etc. plays an important part in the medical examination of bodily organs concealed from the eye. In a somewhat similar fashion in religious experience we vaguely-as it were in darkness and in the distance-discern or "feel" at any rate the fundamental and essential aspects of the reality it contains. But of course this analogy too is inadequate. In religious experience we have a peculiar and clear combination of intimate nearness with remote-

⁵ English translation, Jonathan Cape, London, 1946.

153 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

ness, or, in philosophical language, of the greatest immanence (which in this case is actual possession, a mergence of the object of experience and ourself) with transcendence. It is the very nature of religious experience that in it our soul inwardly senses, is in immediate contact with, and penetrated by, something which is recognized as coming from an unfathomable depth and infinite distance. As St. Augustine puts it with characteristic force and brevity: "Thou criedst to me from afar . . . and I heard as the heart heareth."⁶

It is characteristic of this approach that it sees experience as response to a "Thou," to a cry, to a call. The other approach pushes out from the infinitely open possibilities of man himself. Roger Garaudy goes on:

We are undoubtedly living, Christians and Marxists alike, the exigency of the same infinite, but yours is presence while ours is absence.
Is it to impoverish man, to tell him that he lives as the incomplete being, that everything depends upon him, that the whole of our history and its significance is played out within man's intelligence, heart and will, and nowhere else, that we bear full responsibility for this; that we must assume the risk, every step of the way, since, for us atheists, nothing is promised and no one is waiting?⁷

The difference is clear. Yet I deeply believe that the two approaches are complementary rather than exclusive. "The exigency in man," says Garaudy, "is . . . . the flesh of your God." Hoc est corpus meum: "This (of yours) is my body." The est is not the identity of metaphysical substance; it is an affirmation of faith-the Christological faith that the two sets of languages, the man-talk and the God-talk, do coincide. Indeed I suspect that we shall have to restate the problem of Christology not in terms of two natures in one person but of two sets of language about one nature. And the Christological act of trust is that it does not in the last resort matter from which set one starts, since ultimately there is a convergence. It also means accepting in trust that the truth is to be found by pushing out from each center to the limit, not by trying to qualify one set of language by the other. For the Christian faith is that the mystery at the heart of reality can be described wholly in terms of the "Son of Man" or wholly in terms of the "Son of God." In fact it stands for the conviction that it must be described in terms both of the Son of Man and of the Son of God. But it is insistent that one does not arrive

⁶ Op. cit., pp. 59-60.
⁷ Op. cit., p. 83.

154 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

at this conviction by setting up one over against the other, or by limiting one by the other, as if one account could ever be valid at the expense of the other. As John Oman insisted in his classic book, Grace and Personality,⁸ all is of God (and can so be described) and all is of man (and can so be described).

III

The future of Christian theology is tied up, therefore, in my judgment, with taking seriously the heart of its Christological faith (and I predict that Christology will be the next focus of debate). This involves the acceptance on both sides that we are free to talk man-language or to talk God-language completely, respecting the fact that any one person or set of people may not be able to use the other, and at the same time respecting the right and freedom of others to do so even if we cannot. Furthermore, I am persuaded that we shaIl make progress in theology to the extent that we avoid the ancient pitfalls and do not seek: (1) to preclude one set of terms by a monophysite insistence that only one (this time man-language) can be valid, or (2) by "confusion of natures," to transform one into the other (saying that all God-language is really man-language), or (3) to retain the God-language by finding place for it in the gaps or inadequacies of the man-language. We must maintain both the validity and the adequacy of each.

But, having said this, I do not believe that we can go on talking of God and man (or the world) in the way that we have tended to do in our theistic past, as though these were two separate entities. When we could think of God as a Being, who had a world, then we could speak as if the distinctive subject-matter of theology was God (in contrast with worldly knowledge) and then sub-divide this into doctrines of the three Persons of the Trinity. But I do not believe we can simply say any longer that theology is "about" God, or Christology "about" Christ, or pneumatology "about" the Holy Spirit. For the answer to Bonhoeffer's question, "How do we speak of God in a worldly fashion?", is not to be confined to the realm of language or to the viability of the word "God" in a secular age. It means posing the question of God afresh as a question about the world. It means understanding the world theologically-that is, as absolutely "open" to the Beyond in the midst. It is what I take it Hans Rudi Weber

⁸ Cambridge University Press, 1917.

155 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

of the World Council of Churches intends when he insists (in what I assume to be a good Barthian statement) that the Bible is fundamentally anthropology from the point of view of God, not theology from the point of view of man. It is what V. A. van Peursen, the Dutch philosopher, seeks to draw out in his fascinating set of lectures called "Him Again" reproduced in a recent number of Risk⁹--that the word "God" acquires identity only as a constantly re-encountered dimension of the ordinary events of nature and history. It is what, if I understand him aright, Leslie Dewart is attempting in redefining omnipotence, for instance, as an attribute not of a heavenly Being but of "a world totally open to future creation by man." "In God," he puts it, "nature can do anything;" "with God . . . all things, all history, is possible to man."¹⁰ The frontier here between Dewart and Garaudy is very thin.

In the same way, we must insist that the subject-matter of Christology is not just "the Person of Christ"-whether primarily conceived as the historical Jesus or as a meta-historical divine Being. For Christology is not about a being simply, it is about being, all things, recapitulated in the Word made flesh. It is about the universe as fulfilled, or destined to be fulfilled, in Christ. Henceforth one must talk Christologically about all things. Of everything one may ultimately say that, whether one uses man-language or God-language, it comes to the same thing in the end. In the last analysis, the two coincide; for all things have been "reconciled" in Christ-even though historically there may only be one place to which one can point for their convergence. This means that we must be able to translate the traditional language of the cosmic Christ; existing supernaturally as a metaphysical Being, into the worldly language of a Christic cosmos. It is because Teilhard de Chardin has pursued this translation most thoroughly in our generation that he is able to speak not only to those who use the language of "God" but also to those, like Huxley and Garaudy, who can only use the language of human potentialities.

It is also only by this translation, I suspect, that we shall be able to restate for men and women today the proclamation of the living Christ, and therefore of the Resurrection. To say "Jesus lives" is for most people today literally unimaginable. (How far our church language is from ordinary parlance is illustrated by the story of the

⁹ III, 4, World Council of Churches, Geneva, 1967.
¹⁰ Op. cit., pp. 193, 197.

156 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

man who was asked what he thought of the death of Christ: "Oh, I'm sorry to hear of that, I didn't even know he'd been ill"). To say that Jesus is alive today suggests either that he must have physically resuscitated or that he is somewhere around the universe as an invisible metaphysical Being-both of which are to most people merely fantastic. The only way now, I suggest, of beginning to make intelligible this central Christian affirmation is to see the Resurrection, as indeed the New Testament does, cosmically,-that is, primarily as a statement about the world. It is not just a truth about a man or a Being, but about the renewal and transformation of the entire body of history. The gospel of the Resurrection is the gospel of a new world, a new order of creation, a new possibility of human existence, at the level of spirit, the spirit disclosed and released in and through Jesus Christ. Just as from the beginning of the evolutionary process the Fourth Gospel sees everything as "alive with his life," so the Epistle to the Ephesians sees all things "filled" with Christ. "The second Adam," says St. Paul, "is a life-giving spirit"-"man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature." The words are Julian Huxley's definition of "transhumanism."¹¹ The Christian sees these new powers, what the author to the Hebrews styles "the powers of the age to come," as released not simply in science, which at the profoundest level can "change" nothing, but in the transformation of man and his relationships through the spirit of Christ "from one degree of glory to another."

IV

This leads into how we can do our theology today of the third Person of the Trinity. As long as we go on speaking of the Spirit as a separate metaphysical entity or "Person" I doubt whether we shaIl ever begin to communicate. Indeed I wonder whether in English, as opposed to Greek, the very article "the" is not misleading and distorting. It is just as characteristic of biblical usage to speak of "spirit" in an anarthrous way, without an article. Thus, it says, "God is spirit" (not as in the King James Version, "a spirit"), or it talks of "fellowship (or participation) in holy spirit." One of the contributions, I believe, to modern theology is the way in which Berdyaev speaks about "spirit," especially in his books Spirit and

¹¹ Op. cit., p. 195.

157 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

Reality (1939) and Freedom and the Spirit (1935). Marghanita Laski, at the end of her important study, Ecstasy, deplores the lack of vocabulary in which to speak of that open frontier with which we are here concerned:

It is, I think, significant that we have no neutral adjective to distinguish the range of emotions, values, moral compulsions, felt truths that arise from ecstatic experience. Spiritual implies acceptance of presuppositions rejected by rationalists, and those who reject such presuppositions have sought rather to deny importance to ecstatic experiences than to examine them on the basis of their own presuppositions and to supply a vocabulary in which such examinations could be made.¹²

Yet, for all her doubts, I suspect that "spirit" and "spiritual" (in contrast to "religious" which is sometimes used in this way, e.g., "the religious dimension in art") is the vocabulary we have to redeem. "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord" was a text beloved by Benjamin Whichcote, the Cambridge Platonist, and by other Christion humanists. It stands for the truth reiterated in the New Testament (and especially in St. Paul's great passage in the eighth chapter of Romans¹³) that spirit is on both sides of the relationship, that it is at home as much in the world of man-language as of God-language. It is where the depths of God and the depths of man meet.¹⁴ Sophia and logos have also in the history of Jewish and Christian theology performed a similar function, and it is significant that Marghanita Laski, for whom the ecstatic is to be described wholly in human terms, should be "content and happy to believe," in her closing words, "that the god [whom men] sometimes believed they had perceived in these experiences was indeed the logos."¹⁵ But, whatever our words-or probable lack of them on this boundary, on which Bonhoeffer urged upon us the wisdom of silence-we must learn to speak of spirit in a worldly way. Indeed after being the Cinderella of theology for so long, it may well be the way into it today, when "God" and "Christ" have lost their cash value in the coinage system of man-language (despite Jesus' own preference of "the Son of man").

Perhaps I could sum up the first half of this discussion and lead into the second half on the future for the church by relating what

¹² Cresset Press, London, 1961, p. 373.
¹³ Verses 14-28, particularly in the New English Bible.
¹⁴ I Cor. 2: 10-11.
¹⁵ Op. cit., p. 374.

158 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

I have said to the category which in the Bible forms the link between God and the church, but which has been strangely neglected as the keystone of Christian theology, namely, the Kingdom. Here, alas, is a word that is probably unusable in secular circles today, if only because kingdoms are even more "dead" than gods or churches. But what it stands for is, I believe, decisive for our task of rethinking. For if the subject-matter of theology is not God who has a world but the world-in-God, then the biblical term for the world-in-God is the Kingdom.

Let me come back at this point to S. L. Frank. The purpose of his book God with Us, as the title indicates, is to emphasize the fact that the subject-matter of theology is not the existence of God as a Being but what in Exploration into God I called "the divine field," or Teilhard spoke of as the milieu divin. It is the area of God's presence "the kingdom of his love," so that one can say that to "dwell" in love is to dwell in God; for God is love. And this is Frank's comment:

All these expressions symbolically reveal one fundamental fact: God is not a self-contained entity; He is like the sun, the very being of which consists in radiating light and warmth, and therefore from the very first must be thought of as the center of a bright and life-giving realm of being distinct from but directly related to Him. In theological thought, i.e. on the plane of the logical categories of ground and consequence, that realm of "heavenly being" is derivative from the being of God, and faith in it depends upon faith in God. But we must have the spiritual courage and insight to recognize that in living religious experience, in the actual spiritual act of faith, it is, in a sense, the contrary relation that holds. A simile of it may be found in our apprehension of the difference between night and day. In our ordinary experience, that difference consists not in the fact that at night we do not see the sun and in the daytime we do (for that matter we never see the sun clearly, at any rate, not in its full brilliance) but simply in the alternation between light and darkness, between being in an environment in which the outlines of objects are clearly seen, and being plunged into a kind of dark abyss in which we helplessly grope about like the blind. In a somewhat similar fashion the basic, decisive difference between a believer and an unbeliever consists not in the fact that one "recognizes" God's existence and the other does not. The real criterion is whether a man's spirit is in touch with the treasure of God's kingdom, with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, whether the rays of divine love give it warmth and light. To dwell in the life-giving rays of the sun and to feel its light and

159 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

warmth is in practice far more important and essential than to see the sun itself.¹⁶

I believe that this is an important emphasis when the casing of the divine container, the theistic concept of God as a supreme Being, is in the process of dissolution. Frank puts it in God-language-and I personally am content to follow him. For others for whom the sun is hidden, the environment in which man's life is lived may seem better described without reference to such loaded terms as "the treasure of God's kingdom," "the gifts of the Holy Spirit," "the rays of divine love." But, as Frank says, "the real criterion is whether man's spirit is in touch," whether the stuff of "divinity," to use Huxley's phrase, is indeed a reality in which we "live and move and have our being," or whether there is no openness to the unconditional, no "absolute future," (as Karl Rahner puts it), no "omega point" (in Teilhard's phrase).

V

The category of the Kingdom leads naturally, as I said, into the second question, that of how we remain Christians after "the death of the church." As with "the death of God," I do not believe that this means that the church is finished. But its falling into the earth means a real death to the body in which it has so far existed. And there is, I think, a close parallel here with "the death of God." Corresponding to what I called the theistic container, which has shaped divinity into a God existing over against the world, is the religious organization, which has shaped the church into a community existing over against the secular order. And, like gods, the religious organization is in the process of being melted down, eroded, or cracked open, according to which way one looks at it. This means nothing less than the disintegration of the mold by which throughout its history so far the Christian church has been given form and substance.

One has only to say this to be taken for a prophet of gloom, siding with the enemies of the church. But this is not my intention. I believe in fact that what is dissolving is the casing of the church, and that this process could be one of release and liberation. just as, in the God-debate, "the end of theism" meant the end not of God but of one way of expressing the divine reality, so I believe that the decay of the religious organization is the decay of one body in which the

¹⁶ Op. cit., pp. 73-4.

160 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

church has hitherto lived and whose demise may be necessary for its resurrection.

I do not suggest that this will be a sudden or discontinuous process. The new body is much more likely to be built up within the shell of the old-as well as outside it. Nor is there anything wrong with the religious organization as such, any more than with the theistic projection, if it communicates the reality of God. Where the religious organization serves as the carrier of real, outgoing life I have no wish to see it die. But I suspect that it is reaching the term of its historical usefulness.

An illustration will point to the distinction I am trying to make. There is a poster currently on the bill-boards in Britain for the Salvation Army. It depicts a scene of human dereliction and carries the caption: "For God's sake care. Give us a pound." Imagine that poster put out by the Church of England or indeed by any other religious body, except perhaps the Quakers. "For God's sake care. Give us a pound." The credibility gap is too great. For the ordinary man suspects that of every pound given to the church 95% will go towards keeping itself going. And he is not far wrong. Of the total annual income of the Church of England, 42,750,000 pounds, according to the most recent available figure 40,500,000 pounds is spent on servicing itself at home or abroad, while half of the remainder goes to maintain its own schools and colleges. Similarly, an overwhelming proportion of its ministers' time is absorbed not in washing the world's feet but in servicing a religious organization centered on its own buildings.

Of course the purpose of the organization thus serviced is to be a force for good in the community at large, and such is the devoted, caring, unselfish work carried out by the average parson that his calling is still rated for good in the public opinion polls above even that of a doctor. (It is also true that other studies¹⁷ have revealed churchgoers as more conformist, more prejudiced, more intolerant and more "deterrent-minded" than the average non-churchgoer.) But the point is that, however beneficent the by-product, the amount "given off" by the religious organization is quite disproportionate to what goes in. 'indeed, so self-absorbing is the life of many a local congregation that it would be difficult to say whether they support the

¹⁷ Quoted in P. Berton, The Comfortable Pew, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1965, pp. 32-39.

161 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

church or it supports them. The minister finds himself, whether he likes it or not, the manager of a religious club which it is his prime burden to keep open and flourishing.

This club is what is left of what used to be a much more embracing institution, supplying welfare, education, culture and recreation that could not easily be had elsewhere. Now we are apt to hear, "I'll do anything for you, vicar, except come to church." We have heard that in England, especially from the working-classes, for long enough. The difference is now that we may hear it from the curate.

For there is a revolt afoot, especially among the younger clergy and the more radical laity. The church may expect a rapidly increasing brain-drain. For many of the most lively-minded are losing faith in the relevance of the religious casing. The image of the church which has identified it with organized religion is becoming a positive liability. That image will have to go. But many are puzzled or threatened because there seems nothing to put in its place.

VI

By inheritance the church is well equipped for standing over against the secular world as a separate religious organization. It is singularly ill equipped for permeating that world from within as the salt and leaven it is supposed to be. Yet people today are looking for points of meeting and commitment that will not take them out of the world and will bring them together face to face, rather than face to back as in the traditional pew. They respect agencies that do the job directly-like Oxfam or Shelter, Christian Aid or Christion Action (to use the obvious British illustrations)-with the minimum of overhead and openly appointed executives. They do not want static hierarchies and imposing edifices and pulpits six feet above contradiction. They want embodiments of Christian presence where the real, shifting needs of human beings in community can be interpreted and met. Worship, prayer, structure, must be allowed to grow out of these, as form follows function.

The church's greatest assets and its greatest liabilities are its buildings and its manpower. No other voluntary organization political or social, has anything like its wealth of strategically-placed sites, at the heart of every village and urban neighborhood. Yet in the burden of plant it carries, it can only be compared with the cinema circuits or the railroads. Moreover, it is the masonry that largely deter-

162 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

mines the deployment of its personnel. For (in Church of England terms, though it applies everywhere) men are tied to stipends and stipends to benefices and benefices to buildings.

In theory, the church is stupendously well off for manpower. No other voluntary organization has such a network of full-time residential agents, and in many an inner city area or new housing estate the church is the only professional or caring body with a paid representative actually living among the people it serves. Yet the minister's presence is often negated by his lack of organic relation to the secular structures. He is minding a pool of his own rather than helping to direct the mainstream of life. It has been said recently: "No commercial firm has so many employees all doing the same thing to so little effect at so great cost,"¹⁸ and, it could be added, with practically no freedom to sack or deploy them.

Both in plant and personnel the resources of the church must be realigned to serve the Kingdom of God rather than the religious organization. It would be crazy to throw away the advantages of central sites, many of which (to note the British scene again) provide the only opportunity, through housing associations, of breaking the council-list monopoly for the benefit of professional people prepared to live among those for whom they care. There is place still, as Coventry cathedral and Woolwich Parish Church are showing, for big buildings adapted and staffed to modern needs. And in each natural grouping thirty to fifty thousand people one can envisage ecumenical centers focusing the Christian presence and response on a large scale. In between, there remain widely varying opportunities for points of meeting and service geared to more local or functional needs. Then, of course, there can be numerous house-church groups that require no overheads. Especially in the suburbs, there will doubtless still be room for the self-supporting religious organization which is a going concern and can hire its own minister. But such cannot be the main call on the resources of the servant church.

Similarly, the ministry of the church-clerical and lay (if the distinction seriously survives)-must be shaped by the constantly changing priorities of human need and will surely be exercised for the most part through secular employment. There are areas where, except in a coördinating or "episcopal" capacity, full-time ministers paid by the church are a selfish luxury. There are other spheres where the

¹⁸ J. Pellow, The Concrete Village, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1967, p. 167.

163 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

church should be providing sacrificially what society fails to supply, men and women free and available to love and serve and care wherever the need or the action is.

Within the total ministry of all Christian people, ordination is admission to an order. It is not a concealed cheque for so many thousand dollars a year for life. No one should in future be ordained without a secular qualification. Retraining for the many, now equipped to be nothing except ministers of religion, is an urgent priority. Of course some ministers will continue to be required, at different stages of their careers, for full-time ecclesiastical employment, but there is no reason why bishops and other leaders should have to be chosen from these. It might make more sense to recruit them, by advertisement, from pastorally and prophetically minded men already used to executive responsibility in the secular world.

I have illustrated these possibilities not to predict a program but simply to show that the disintegration of the religious organization is far from necessarily negative or depressing. Fr. Thom Janssen, a Dominican from Holland (where the process is viewed most uninhibitedly), has spoken of "the exploding Church."¹⁹ If the casing gives, there is a good deal of radioactive material waiting to get out. In the New Testament analogy again, "unless a grain of wheat fall into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." An eggshell cracked open by pecks from within has after all long been the symbol of the church's Easter message.

VII

A suggestive description of the shape of things to come is the account in The Concrete Village, by John Pellow, of the response of his tiny Congregational church to the "new" Stepney in the east end of London. "What the shape of that new community," he writes, "was going to be we did not then know. The only thing we could attempt was to put ourselves in such a position in that new community that we became subject to those forces as should determine the shape of the community. This is not just so that we might become one of the determining factors, but so that there might be a basic understanding between us and the world, which it is our duty to

¹⁹ See the Interview in Frontier, Summer 1967, pp. 122-4.

164 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

serve. . . . We determined to do nothing apart from the new community which could not be done with it."²⁰

In these quotations lies the spirit of tomorrow's church. Its "religious face" in a religionless age will not be very prominent. Least of all will it exist to gather the religious out of the world. Yet everything will continue to center in the making holy of the common, which is worship. And worship, the shaping of God's worth, will no less than before have to be forged, through sacrifice, out of the bread and wine of ordinary human relationships transformed by Christ.

The next five or ten years, I suspect, will tell which way the church must die. Either we shaIl see a bursting of the skin or a hardening of the skin (and the latter could easily be intensified by ecumenical grafts). All the institutional pressures, legal and financial, unless redirected, will be on the side of the second. Those of us who believe that the pains of disintegration are salutary (and they are none the less painful for that) will be accused of abetting gloom and despondency. Indeed, I am certain that things have got to get worse before we can expect a real break. The system must be seen to be unworkable, as it already is in many inner areas. Meanwhile I am convinced that all will depend on there being sufficient people tapping away constructively, both from the inside and from the outside, open and flexible enough to seize the opportunities when they appear.

Within every religious denomination today two churches are struggling for supremacy. One wants to contain things, to preserve the religious club, to stem the process of dissolution. The other (and it consists of many clergy and laity and many who have voted with their feet) longs to release what life there is from a casing that threatens to stifle it. Most of the time there is not a clear either-or, and much of the job of maintenance consists, in fact, of loosening bolts.

Yet it would be an error to see this simply as the dismantling of "organized religion," as if there were something wrong either with organization or with religion as such. Organization, and efficient organization, is essential if the Christian presence is to be related effectively to the principalities and powers of our highly collectivized world, as the examples I have given from the field of Christian ac-

²⁰ Op. cit., pp. 108, 124.

165 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

tion demonstrate. What is to be queried is organization that strengthens the casing which marks off the church as a community from the rest of mankind in Christ; and this is something that affects much more than its religious face. It questions the whole existence of the church as an ecclesia, or gathered fellowship, as radically as the "death of God" theologians have questioned the word "God." Fr. Janssen, whom I quoted earlier, has gone on record as saying: "Perhaps we shall not talk about the "Church" at all in the future. The word "Church" is not very helpful."²¹ Maybe the church too is something that has to be "melted down," like salt in solution, without its power being lost. And, like the demise of gods, this questioning of the gathered community reflects a fundamental change in the culture in which we live. To bring this out, let me cite one of the secular meditations" in Malcolm Boyd's, Free to Live, Free to Die.²²

It used to be easier to speak of community. In fact, in-groups were even accepted as a part of life which wasn't questioned. Community was understood in terms of this group or that one; people doffed their hats in respect and went their own way, away.
But now community has many more complex meanings. Most people have come to realize that community isn't a place but a state of being, fluid and ongoing, marked less by a post-office address than an attitude shared by persons.
Maybe the real secret of community now is that no one can arbitrarily be excluded. A so-called believer (in good cooking, social justice, God, or The New York Times) doesn't want to be shut off from so-called unbelievers. There's a mystical sense of being involved together, and, just as much to the point, wanting to be. Whether one is speaking of fulfillment, salvation, or joy, no one wants it on a private preserve, shut off from others. Persons are claiming each other. Walls are coming down. A person is a signpost to another.
We are beginning to see that no one makes a community; he accepts community, where and as it is.

VIII

Is the job of Christians to make a community or to accept community where and as it is? This seems to me a fundamental question which we are only just beginning to ask seriously. It lies behind the whole notion of "non-church." This, as I understand it, is not inspired by the old-fashioned individualism that wants Christianity

²¹ Op. cit., p. 123.
²² Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1967, pp. 80-81.

166 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

without the church, though this undoubtedly is how it looks to most of its critics. It is concerned with responding to community, accepting the responsibility of community, where it is, in the world, rather than with organizing a community over against the world. I believe that this concern may be much closer to the New Testament than our inherited presuppositions have allowed us to see.

If we ask, "Is the church a community? Is it meant to be a community?", the answer to the first question will probably be "No." The answer to the second question will almost certainly be "Yes." But is this what it is meant to be? Is a community a Christian category?

It is noteworthy that the church is never described in the New Testament as "a community." Koinonia is not a group of persons but a quality of relationship, a sharing, a participation. It is well known among students of the New Testament that the primary reference of koinonia is participation in a divine reality-in God, in Christ, and above all in Holy Spirit. The phrase "the fellowship in (or of) Holy Spirit" refers to participation in this divine reality, not in the first instance to fellowship between Christians (though that, of course, must follow), let alone to the fellowship of Christians. The church is meant to be the embodiment, the carrier, the incarnation of this koinonia of Holy Spirit, as it is of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the love of God. But it is not a fellowship as such (any more than it is a love or a grace).

This may appear a somewhat academic distinction; and indeed there has been no great need to distinguish until the meaningfulness of a closed community, a structured fellowship, whether religious or secular, is questioned, as it is questioned by Malcolm Boyd. But the issue has been raised: "Does the witness to holy community (that is, to community with a difference and a depth which the world can neither give nor take away) necessarily mean being involved in creating, keeping going, a community in the sense of a separate religious organization with institutional structures, definitions and boundaries -which a person is either 'in' or 'out' of?" Hitherto our answer has been "Yes." But is this correlation essential? May not "the fellowship" often be a witness against rather than for "community where and as it is"?

To accept community where and as it is, in Christian terms, is to respond to the presence of the Kingdom, wherever it meets one, in

167 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

the midst of life, wherever two or three are gathered. Koinonia is, theologically, the equivalent of the Kingdom, not of the church. The church is meant to be its instrument, its embodiment, its servant. But the church is constantly judged by the Kingdom, by holy community, and can never be equated with it, in the sense that you can say in advance, "Here is where you will find it, but not there." In fact, said Jesus, when men say to you of the Kingdom (or of any sign or aspect of it), "Lo he-re, lo there," go not out-that is, do not be drawn out of the world, out of the secular structures, in order to find or create it; for it is in your midst.

We assume too easily that the ideas of "church" and of "fellowship" coincide in the New Testament. Ideally and ultimately they do, because the church as a group dies to itself in the fellowship of Holy Spirit and is negated and universalized in the Kingdom. But short of that there is in fact a tension, rather than a coincidence, between the two. Church, or ekklesia, is in origin an Old Testament idea, and it means those "called out." It designates those who respond to the summons "Come out from among them" to be separated people, representative of the sacred as opposed to the secular, the body as opposed to the common. But the great fact of the New Age, the koinonia hagion (holy community, holy communion), represents the making common of the holy, and therefore the end of the church as a peculiar people.

This is an eschatological idea, but like all eschatology in the New Testament it is meant to be realized in the here and now and not simply in the future. The New Testament itself continues to regard the church as a "brotherhood" of those within as opposed to those without (this is particularly noticeable in the Johannine and the Pastoral Epistles). This may be necessary and inevitable in the penultimate stage. But "the non-church" movement may be a reminder of something essential to the gospel, which has been overlaid, namely, that the Christian's freedom is to respond to community where and as it is rather than having to create it in an "ecclesial" group. To that extent the non-church may be a perennial minority witness, like, say, that of the absolute pacifist, to an aspect of the gospel which is always judging the institutional church. On the other hand, just as the change that Malcolm Boyd is drawing attention to is a genuinely new factor on the secular scene, so the non-church could represent a break-through in the "coming-of-age" of the

168 - Church and Theology: From Here To Where?

church, part of the "new formation" which Charles Davis has spoken of as struggling to be born.

To ask: "With what body will it come?" is to invite St. Paul's retort, "You silly man!" Our job is not to worry too much about the body of the church, whether the present one or the future one. God may be destroying the church in one body, only to raise up quite another form of his presence in the world. Our only trust as Christians is that there will always be a form, a body, through which the response to God, the Spirit, the Kingdom, can be made. We take the church seriously, as we do not take it too seriously; it is simply the instrument of the Kingdom, dispensable in the hand of God. Our commitment should be marked by a certain divine carelessness. So far from becoming depressed or oppressed by the many signs of the death of the church in our day, we should have that lightness of tread, that resilience of spirit, that marks St. Paul's classic passage in II Corinthians 4: 7-5: 6. And I would like to close by citing from it, keeping in mind the church and not simply the individual Christian.

We are no better than pots of earthenware to contain this treasure, and this proves that such transcendent power does not come from us, but is God's alone. Hard-pressed on every side, we are never hemmed in; bewildered, we are never at our wits' end; hunted, we are never abandoned to our fate; struck down, we are not left to die. Wherever we go we carry death with us in our body, the death that Jesus died, that in this body also life may reveal itself, the life that Jesus lives . . . . No wonder we do not lose heart! Though our outward humanity is in decay, yet day by day we are inwardly renewed . . . For we know that if the earthly frame that houses us today should be demolished, we possess a building which God has provided-a house not made by human hands, eternal, and in heaven. In this present body we do indeed groan . . . we are oppressed because we do not want to have the old body stripped off. Rather our desire is to have the new body put on over it, so that our mortal part may be absorbed into life immortal. God himself has shaped us for this very end; and as a pledge of it he has given us the Spirit. Therefore we never cease to be confident.