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The Identity and Purpose of the Church
By Paul D. Hanson

"The church's purpose is not its own. The church is present in the world on behalf of the God by whose grace it has been called into existence. Thus, at the heart of the church's act of self definition is a basic theological question: What is the nature of Gods presence in the world?"

THEODORE DREISER, in Sister Carrie, was perhaps the first American novelist to give an uncompromising portrait of the world of self-indulgent materialism into which a young, headstrong nation was flinging itself at the turn of the century. It was a world in which there was no past, no lasting relationships, no abiding values. Carrie leaves her small hometown in Indiana and is immediately so dazzled by the luxury of Chicago that she breaks off all connections with her roots; she never writes home. First her sister, then Drouet, and finally, Hurstwood are only way stations on her never ending quest for conquest. Her restless soul does not allow her to establish relationships; she has no desire save satisfying her own insatiable cravings for more fame and luxury.

Large segments of our society still remain dazzled by Sister Carrie's glittering world of self-indulgent pleasure and material luxury. And to such people, one of the least attractive disciplines is reflecting seriously on the past. Each generations supreme challenge is to surpass ancestral accomplishments, to move beyond the tried and the familiar to new adventures and thrills. Powerful commercial interests add impetus to this mentality. Best selling novels and box office hits often portray modern versions of Sister Carrie which outstrip her in daring and success. Major moral issues are treated with such crudity and violence as to degrade the moral sensitivities of youthful consumers. Popular videos, which are just a finger touch away from the youngest, most impressionable minds, revel in the sordid and the satanic. Impermanence, violence, and irreverence have thus become habits of mind. And even as a whole economy has come to be based upon the principle of built-in obsolescence,

Paul D. Hanson is Professor of Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School. His principal publications are The Dawn of Apocalyptic (1975), Dynamic Transcendence (1978), The Diversity of Scripture (1982), and the forthcoming The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible.

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we tend to treat the realm of beliefs and morals with a corresponding impatience.

It would be naive to deny that this progressive orientation has produced notable results. One need only think about the areas of food production and disease control to realize how modern technology has improved our quality of life. But one is struck much more by the potential contribution that modern science and technology have to make than by actual accomplishments, an impression reinforced by the many examples of scientific discoveries being developed into devices that are either of questionable value or outright destructive of life.

Especially as we have awakened to the most recent legacy of modern science, a nuclear arsenal capable of terminating the human race and obliterating all of its accomplishments and dreams for ever, we are forced to take up anew the question of the relationship between traditional values and new discoveries. To do so is not to deny the significance and potential benefit of the latter, but to realize that scientific discoveries tend in themselves to be neutral as to value. How they are applied must be guided by considerations going beyond intellectual curiosity.

I

In the past history of the Western world, the church has assumed a major role in preserving and interpreting the beliefs and values that cultivate moral consciousness. Needless to say, the church's record is a mixed one in this regard, ranging from courageous advocacy of compassion and justice, often at the cost of considerable sacrifice, to narrow self-interest and even collaboration with evil civil regimes. History bears witness to churches so adamant in their preservation of traditional values against change as to make them impotent in the face of revolutionary movements which simply swept them aside. It also records instances of progressive movements within the church that have obliterated all differences between church and culture.

What is to enable the church to be both progressive enough to assess the positive potential of modern scientific discoveries and social movements, and prophetic enough to exercise the kind of long-range critique which can warn against the myriad misapplications to which the most exciting of human achievements can be put? The beginning of a satisfactory answer to this question must be worked out in relation to the church's confessional heritage. Here we shall consider the foundational phase of that heritage, found in the writings of the Bible.¹

An interesting starting point would be a questionnaire requesting church bodies, both local and national, to describe their sense of identity and purpose. For this could then be compared with the notion of community which we can trace developing within the writings of

¹ For a full treatment of this topic see P. D. Hanson. The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible (New York: Harper and Row, forthcoming).

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Scripture. Though such a questionnaire is beyond the scope of this article, we can be quite certain that answers would range widely, including conceptions of the church as an educational institution supplementing the public school system by teaching moral values to the young, or as a place of fellowship for people subscribing to similar beliefs, or as the mediator of forgiveness and salvation. What is common to all such conceptions is that they tend to grasp aspects of what the church is without relating them to the heart of the community of faith as it develops in the Bible. What is lacking, to use a technical term, is a clear understanding of the ontology of the church.

II

For gaining a clearer grasp of this ontology, the Bible is simply indispensable. For while the picture it gives is multifaceted, including the above concepts and many more, it delves more deeply in laying bare the essential nature of the community of faith in an ongoing divine initiative which encompasses all of reality and a human response which makes the faithful a part of God's plan for creation. Whatever else the community of faith is in the Bible, it is in the first instance a people gathered together by God for a purpose which encompasses both itself and all others. That it belongs solely to God is established by its primal experience of being delivered from bondage by an act of divine mercy.

This origin in God's redemptive act of deliverance precludes every self-serving definition of the community of faith. The church's purpose is not its own. The church is present in the world on behalf of the God by whose grace it has been called into existence. Thus, at the heart of the church's act of self-definition is a basic theological question: What is the nature of God's presence in the world? When one considers the whole sweep of Scripture, the answer seems clear: God's presence is creative and redemptive in nature. Where there is chaos, whether in the natural or social realm, God is present to create harmony. Where there is bondage God is active to redeem the enslaved. Where there are walls dividing humans into privileged and deprived classes, God seeks to remove oppressive divisions through judgment and release. Where there is brokenness, loneliness, and sickness, God is present to heal.

From the creation stories of Genesis, from the exodus account, from the formulations of Torah, and from the prophetic writings, we are able to draw the above picture of God's nature as it relates to human life. To these vivid paradigms of divine presence from the Hebrew Bible the New Testament adds another, which assumes a central position in the church's understanding of God's nature and presence in the world, for it confesses that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God was present with humans in the most personal way possible, true to God's plan of redeeming, healing, and restoring the harmony of creation. This (New paradigm must not be construed as supplanting or rendering obsolete the paradigms of Hebrew Scripture, for the redemptive

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act occurring in Jesus' life was continuous with the divine initiatives recorded throughout Scripture.

This continuity is expressed clearly in Luke 4, where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61 and announces that in his life the Isaianic prophecy was being fulfilled. The specific passage he read, in which the Servant of the Lord describes his call through the Spirit "to preach good news to the poor," "to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed," is a description of the Jubilee ("the acceptable year of the Lord"), which epitomizes the hopes of Hebrew Scripture for God's definitive act of redemption and healing which would restore creation to the harmony intended by God from the beginning, a harmony tragically disrupted by human apostasy and unrighteousness. According to this passage, which is fully consonant with the core of Jesus words found in the parables and the "authentic" sayings, Jesus' life was dedicated to the inauguration of the era of redemption and healing of creation. Given the completeness of that dedication, and the confirmation of Jesus' divine commission associated with his resurrection, it is understandable that the early disciples concluded that God was personally present in Jesus' life "reconciling the world to [God's self]" (II Cor. 5:19).

The New Testament makes explicit the link we described earlier between the perception of God's nature and presence in the world and the identity and purpose of the church. In stories like the "mission of the Seventy" in Luke 10, Jesus commissioned his followers to carry on the same mission to which his life was dedicated: "Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, The kingdom of God has come near to you," (Luke 10:8-9). And when the Seventy returned and reported that-even the demons are subject to us in your name," Jesus replied, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10: 18).

As in his own life, so, too, in the lives of his disciples, God's reign was entering the world, healing wounds, restoring broken relationships, mending torn lives. Though in the popular eschatology of his day the new era of blessing was to come through a dazzling display of divine power in which the cosmos would be thrown into disarray, Jesus pointed out that in everyday human acts of reconciling and healing, the Kingdom of God was "in the midst of you" (Luke 17:21). This same emphasis on the realm of everyday human relationships as the context within which the transformation of creation was occurring is found in the "great judgment"passage in Matthew 25, where once again the pyrotechnics of cosmic signs yield to the mundane matters of feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned.

The Apostle Paul also made explicit the source of the church's identity in its discernment of God's presence in the world, and especially in the life of Jesus Christ, by applying to the church the metaphor of

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"the body of Christ." What is more, in his letter to the Philippians, with the help of what was probably an older hymn, Paul even dared to describe the quality of mind which characterized Christ and which the church accordingly was called to imitate:

Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of [humans]. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8).

According to this biblical understanding of what it meant to be God's people, the church is to be present in the world as God is present in the world, that is, creatively and redemptively, and as an agent of healing. It is in the world for the world, and yet is not of the world, for it has become a part of the reality toward which the fallen world yearns, God's order of peace and justice. This makes it distinct from the world. Nevertheless, by incorporating the mind of Christ, its distinctness does not lead to a sense of privilege, but of patient service, and when necessary, even suffering on behalf of the broken and the unredeemed, for its model is Christ, its role that of a servant.

The biblical emphasis on the servant role of the church is a vitally important one in an era which looks back upon many instances of churches wedded to the interests of great empires. In reply to those who find in the claim that the church is present in the world as an agent of divine will a thinly veiled program of self-aggrandizement, we can only plead for a church which takes on the consciousness of Christ, laying aside all triumphalism and placing not its own needs but the needs of the world at the forefront of its concern. In its servant role, the church must be present for the sake of those in need, in places where it will risk personal loss, prestige, or even life. This kind of servant presence alone manifests what should be the church's distinct grounding, namely, on the purpose of the one God of all. This grounding alone can lead to the quality of self-transcendence in a ministry of justice and mercy which seeks the reconciliation of all hostile parties, the dismantling of all walls of enmity and distrust and fear, and the overcoming of distinctions of nation, race, and gender.

III

For the church to base its ontology firmly upon a biblical foundation implies that the sense of being agents of God's healing will be determinative of all of its policies and actions, whether within the household of faith, within its local community, within the national political arena, or within the area of global issues and crises.

We cannot spell out all the implications of this principle, but the church's attitude cannot be "business as usual" while some of its own members are plagued by chronic illnesses, contemplating suicide,

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caught in dehumanizing materialistic goals; while families in its own locality are denied equal access to education and employment, while national priorities often place economic privilege ahead of global justice and equality; while the threat of nuclear war infects the consciousness of people of all nations and ages. To have the mind of Christ is to awaken every morning with the question which Krister Stendahl once suggested is God's first thought each day, "What mending is occurring in my creation today?" If Gods people make this question their own, they will look upon the events around them not as a hopeless morass of human misery, but as the birth pangs of a new creation, beckoning them to participate on Gods side in the mending of God's creation.

Objections will always be raised that we cannot know the nature of God's plan, and hence decisive action in a concrete area such as distribution of the earths resources cannot be treated as a religious matter. We would argue, however, that a careful reading of Scripture gives very clear indications of God's plan for the use of the earth by humans. Such indications come in the form of paradigms, that is, stories which have been preserved by the community of faith as particularly clear signs of the order that God intends for the human family. To take just one example, I Kings 21 tells the story of Ahab's reprehensible seizure of Naboth's vineyard. The background of the story is the law of the nahalah (inheritance) developed by the Yahwistic cornmunity as an expression of God's will to safeguard the economic viability of every family. As God was the sole Sovereign over all who alone could claim title to the land, each family held its inheritance of the land in trust from God in perpetuity. It was not to be sold, nor could it be confiscated. The law of the nahalah gave expression to God's will that all should benefit equally from the good earth. One of the cardinal enactments of the Jubilee was to be the restoration of all plots of land that had been lost to their rightful claimants (Lev. 25).

This is a typical instance in which the argument of irrelevance to our contemporary situation is commonly invoked. Naturally, the application of such a law today would create enormous problems. But does this invalidate the principle underlying the law, namely, that God is the righteous, compassionate advocate of equal opportunity for all members of the human family? I believe that this paradigmatic story, together with the many other expressions of the restoration theme in the Bible, must keep alive the alternative vision of a healed earth in which the division of humanity into the privileged and the deprived no longer exists. Specifically in relation to the much abused area of land possession and use, Scripture must influence the way we think, express opinion, act, and vote. The alternative vision thus kept alive within the consciousness of individuals and within the community of faith may be contradicted By many of our own attitudes and actions. but the contradiction is at least an indication that we have not succumbed entirely to the amoral ideology of privilege which is so dominant in our world. The notion of the

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nahalah is but one example of letting the mind be in us "which was in Christ" and of no longer seeing "things from a human point of view," but from the point of view of the New Creation.

The effect that a church bearing this consciousness might have on the world is hard to imagine, though we occasionally receive a glimpse. Such was my experience at the first week of the 1985 Montreat Youth Conference, where a week of struggling with major local, national, and global issues through a simulation called "Power Play," written by James E. Collie, Pastor of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas, culminated in two unforgettable worship services. At one of them, the young conferees, many of them as the result of having cut their food budgets in half, brought forth a surprisingly large offering to fight world hunger, and then formed a chain with a thousand human links to sing "We Are the World." At another service, these same young people gathered in their last celebration together around the Lord's Table and prayed for the transformation of the world by the power of God's righteousness and compassion. I felt a profound sense of hope as I looked out over these remarkable youth and realized that in a few years they would be making the decisions which guide our church, our communities, and our world.

But what will safeguard their high ideals in the face of the lure of the other sorts of power to which Sister Carrie, and her younger sisters and brothers down to our own time, fall prey, namely, luxury, self-indulgent thrills, personal fame, or a distorted sense of priorities. The obstacles in the way of being God's people are indeed formidable. If our security does not rest solely upon trust in God's grace, we begin to work for our own self-preservation as communities rather than for God's universal purpose. Our definition becomes self-serving, with the resulting loss of openness to God's will.

Inattention to our roots in our confessional heritage also clouds our vision of God's order of justice and compassion. We begin to accept the agenda of the world and purchase into power plans that have little to do with true faith. Our "antennae" become oriented toward penultimate orders like ecclesiastical institutions, political parties, and national governments. In such ways, the church gets drawn into ideologies alien to its divine charter, with the resulting loss of its sense of mission as God's agents in the world.

Unfortunately, the results of all such forms of idolatry are well documented both in the Bible and in subsequent history: "The earth mourns and withers .... the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt, therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few are left" (Isa. 24:4-6). Though this prophecy was written 2500 years ago, it describes the consequences of human apostasy, in terms still frighteningly applicable to the Age of the Bomb.

Though the theme of judgment is too ubiquitous in our religious

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heritage to take the warnings of contemporary prophets lightly, the central themes of Scripture commission the church to be an agent of hope in the world. Even where God's presence is discerned in acts of judgment, the community of faith looks beyond tragedy to God's ultimate purpose: "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?" (Ezek. 33:11)

IV

What are some of the guidelines to be drawn from Scripture to aid the church in remaining faithful to its calling to be God's people in the world? First, it is essential that it remain diligent in its study of Scripture and its confessions in order to keep in sharp focus its vision of being an agent of God's creative, redemptive purpose in the world. Though the temptation will often be great to reduce that vision to the scale of human possibilities, the church finds the assurance in Scripture that not its accomplishments, but God's call enables it to serve as God's agent in the world. And this means that where it fails, God's antecedent grace is already present to forgive and to renew. In its very failures, it learns repeatedly that its mandate is not to summon people to greater acts of virtue, but to be reconciled with the Source of all good. For as the Apostle Paul explained to the Corinthians, only by being reconciled with God do God's people become ministers of reconciliation, capable of seeing the world not in terms of its fallen state, but in terms of what it can become by divine grace. That is to say, that even how the church looks upon the world is a gift of God, who has given it the mind of Christ, the heart of the New Creation, the perspective of the redeemed (I Cor. 5:16-21).

Secondly, the church must remain open to the presence of the Spirit. As Jürgen Moltmann has emphasized, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit rightfully belongs at the heart of our understanding of the church.² For only as the Spirit of God moves within the community of faith can it be related to its source, and lifted above self-serving agenda to the transcendent vision of being God's people on behalf of the world. The Spirit draws the people of God today, as on the first Pentecost, into a bond and a sense of purpose that establishes its identity as not its own, but God's. In this identity is found true freedom, the fulfillment of what God intended for humanity, the state of being whole, and thus free to be wholly present for others.

This sense of being God's possession is what determines the particular policies worked out by the church in relation to specific issues, and the structures it evolves in response to its concrete tasks. Unquestioning subservience to structures of the past must be judged as mistaken

² Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Eschatology (London: SCM1977).

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allegiance, for where the Spirit of God is present, received structures are subjected to ongoing reform as a part of the church's dedication to being God's agent in a changing world.

V

The clear, dynamic ontology which the church derives from its confessional heritage equips it for the demanding responsibility it carries of enabling its members to be moral agents within a threatened world filled with ambiguities. We see on all sides evidence of how powerful the temptation is for religious groups to retreat into the answers of the past, in effect, to adopt a static ontology. One particular interpretation of Scripture accordingly becomes an immutable source supplying answers to all questions. One fixed formulation of truth and justice is defended as definitive for all time. One form of ecclesiastical structure is declared orthodox. If this posture should prevail, the church will no longer be a faithful guide to the creative impulses within our civilization, but will be left behind as a drag on progress. But being left behind is not the greatest resulting tragedy.

To adopt this posture is to betray its own mandate to be at the center of God's ongoing creativity in dedication to the healing of the whole world. But its dedication to progress is not naively enthusiastic either, for the church is equipped by its long confessional heritage with a deep sense of compassion and justice which does not judge discoveries on the basis of their novelty, but on the basis of their contribution to the harmony and peace of the whole created order. This allows it to exercise a critique of the many novelties of our modern world which do not enhance life on a deep level, but merely detract humans from the tasks which constitute their central vocations, the tasks of tender mercy and courageous justice.

The church is not some curious or pitiable relic of the past seeking to justify itself either by appeal to an archaic golden age or by attempts to appear more progressive and radical than the latest protest movement, but is an agent of reconciliation and healing basing its identity on its sense of being present where God is present in the world, and for the same purpose. The context of its life, to use Bonhoeffer's words, is "not on the borders of life but at its centre, not in weakness but in strength..." For its God is not a God of the periphery, not a God of vanishing worldviews and pre-scientific theories. Rather, "God is the 'beyond' in the midst of our life. The Church stands not where human powers give out, on the borders, but in the centre of the village,"³ that is, right in the middle of the everyday, at the centers of scientific discovery, at the capitals of the nations of the world, in the market places, hospitals, and sports arenas.

Wherever people sorrow, hunger, despair, rejoice, or prosper, the

³ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1971). p. 282.

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church is the people called by God to direct the attention of all to the Source of all hope and blessing, to the only One who can draw the families of the world toward justice and peace. The event to which it is called by God and to which it calls the world is the Jubilee, the restoration and healing of the world inaugurated by God in Christ, and carried on wherever the faithful live their lives for God's reign.

For many, the life of the Kingdom of God seems too demanding, a weak competitor in relation to the dazzling fascinations offered by the world of material wealth and pleasure. For nearly two thousand years, throngs have rejected God's call in Christ to the kind of discipleship we have been describing. But this does not disprove the validity of that call; it simply testifies to the fact that it relates to a truth which the world is still unwilling to accept. Jesus, therefore, stands before the church not as a quaint symbol of its past, but as a daring sign of the future toward which all reality yearns. The shocking relevance of God's call in Christ as that which may be humanity's last hope for escape from annihilation is described poignantly by Gerd Theissen by way of an example from nature, the example of the industrial melanism of moths:

As a result of industrialization in some areas of England the birchwoods became grey and black. The salt and pepper moth, which otherwise had the best protective colouring and chance of survival, became more easily recognizable and a prey to its enemies. Now from time to time black mutations of it had already appeared. As long as the birchwoods were: white, these fell victim to selection. Now, however, they had the better chances of survival. Gradually the moths became darker. In a different situation their dark colouring, which was once dysfunctional, gave them a chance of survival. One is tempted to add a moral to the illustration: Jesus is such a black moth. He was done away with, but his mode of existence could later offer a chance of survival. Jesus' love of his enemies seems to have been an impracticable dream in world history so far. But the time could come-indeed is already here -when our survival depends on how far we are successful in reducing aggression between human beings and changing our ways of reacting to enemies.⁴

By keeping alive an alternative to the ideologies and systems of our modern, materialistic, power-loving world, and by preserving reminders derived from its sacred tradition that much of what we moderns call real is an illusion whereas much that we had dismissed as illusory is in a deep sense the most real, in other words. by being faithful to a heritage which is both ancient and radically new, the church has kept alive hope for an otherwise very troubled world. There is grave danger that even those of us within the church will grow timid vis-a-vis this alternative, and either out of discouragement over our inability to live true to our vision or out of doubt will accommodate to worldly standards. Not in order to preserve an ancient tradition, but in order to save a very endangered human race, we must not be lured into a form of religiosity indistinguishable from modern habits and modes of behavior. Our standards

⁴ Gerd Theissen. Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach, tr. J. Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 168.

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must not be determined by mass media or by commercial interests, but by saints of the faith, ancient and modern. For the future of the human race is not secured by Sister Carrie and her pleasure-crazy ilk, but by the type of characters appearing in another novel of that time, a work lacking to be sure in the literary quality of Dreiser's novel, but powerful in its witness to the true calling of God's people. I have in mind Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps, a story of those who discerned God's presence in their community in the form of a dying homeless tramp, and who responded in the way they felt Jesus would have responded. It is a story about a way of being human forgotten by most people today, but one which, like the black moth, may be a sign of God's future.