An essay written as part of my Grad. Dip. Theology in 2014.
Abstract
Anabaptist ecclesiology emphasises that the Church is a voluntary community that embodies a witness to the new humanity inaugurated by Jesus. These dual concepts of community and witness distinguish the Church more than the more commonly cited “marks” of the Church. In this essay I juxtapose the Anabaptist perspective with the writings of Kazoh Kitamori and Peter Rollins in order to address two questions: to what does the Church bear witness and what form of community can present that witness effectively? I propose that the answer to both questions, and consequently a distinguishing mark of the Church, can be found in the concept of brokenness.
Framing the question
Different ecclesial traditions have formulated diverse expressions of the essential characteristics of the Church. A well-established view in Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology is that the characteristics of one, holy, catholic and apostolic are what distinctively mark the Church. In Lutheran ecclesiology, the essential marks of the Church are commonly claimed to be the Word properly preached and the Sacraments properly administered1. In this essay, however, I start from an Anabaptist framework that sees such “marks” as less definitive than community and witness. I will try to clarify those two Anabaptist emphases, but will assume rather than argue for their primacy.
From that starting point, I want to use Kazoh Kitamori’s theology of the pain of God and the recent Christology of Peter Rollins to challenge Anabaptist ecclesiology. If Rollins’ post-modern, Radical Theological account in books such as The Idolatry of God and Insurrection is taken seriously, then what is it to which the Church bears witness? And what form of community can present that witness effectively? My central theses will be that both questions are answered in the concept of brokenness.
Community and Witness in Anabaptist tradition
I will take as representative of the Anabaptist tradition two American books: John Howard Yoder’s The Royal Priesthood, and Art Gish’s Living in Christian Community. Yoder and Gish concur that the Church is not simply the bearer of the message of reconciliation, nor the result of the message, but part of the message (Gish 1979, p. 25; Yoder 1994, p. 74). Mission is not something that the Church does but something the Church is, and the core of that mission is to act as witness.2
Yoder’s criticism of the two Lutheran marks is two-fold. Firstly, that they rely too heavily on the word “properly”, which could be interpreted to support virtually any theological position. Second, that they say more about the super-structure and priesthood than about the Church itself. (Yoder 1994a)
In contrast, Yoder endorses multiple lists of features – he avoids the term “marks” – by other authors. W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft described the functions of the Church as witness, service and communion/fellowship. S. Neill proposed missionary vitality, suffering and the mobility of the pilgrim. Menno Simons proposed holy living, brotherly (and, Yoder adds, sisterly) love, unreserved testimony (witness) and suffering (the Cross)3 (Yoder 1994a, p. 77). All of these approaches imply two key dimensions: the Church as a community of people and the Church standing in a certain relation to the world. “Thus peoplehood and mission, fellowship and witness, are not two desiderata, each capable of existing or of being missed independently of one another; each is the condition of the genuineness of the other.” (Yoder 1994a, p. 78)
Gish provides a more detailed analysis of the Church as a “visible community”: a covering term under which he subsumes the concepts of people of God, new humanity, fellowship of believers and body of Christ. The community is faithful to Jesus through sharing, discerning, discipling and worshipping together. It is a voluntary and non-conforming community that embodies a witness to the gospel. (Gish 1979)
In summary, the Anabaptist tradition, while affirming that there is something distinctive about the Church, does not see that distinctiveness captured by either the Anglo-Catholic or Lutheran “marks”. Anabaptists in general do not deny the truth of such attributes but think that the new thing God is doing in the world through the Church is the visible embodiment of a witnessing community.
Peter Rollins
Peter Rollins is a contemporary philosophical theologian who applies post-modern and psycho-analytical theory to Christianity. His early writings draw on apophatic theology, while his later thought moves into a Radical Theology from which, following John Caputo, he considers where theology leads after the Nietzschean death of God.
Rollins would reject any attempt to form aspirational lists of distinguishing marks of the Church4. Such “marks” are characteristic of people seeking to define a collective self-image to demarcate who’s in and who’s out, whereas for Rollins, the central challenge of Christianity is to continually undermine any attempt to define tribal identities. In the Crucifixion we see the subversion and abandonment of all identity so that there is no longer Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. This subversion needs to be applied to the personal and collective “Christian” identity as well. (Rollins 2013, ch. 5)
It may seem incongruous to apply Rollins’ ideas to ecclesiology since his work is primarily Christological and he deliberately stands outside the Church. Nevertheless, his own practice includes the formation of communities that seek to articulate the kind of disruption implied by his theology. There are clear implications for the way the Church understands its purpose and its practices, some of which are discussed in Part Three of The Idolatry of God.
To what does the Church bear witness?
In Anabaptist thought, the Church will always be a minority in the world. As Yoder notes, that “is not a statistical but a theological observation.” Now that the Church has become weak in a socio-political sense we should “recognize with joy that her calling is [has always been] to be weak.” (Yoder 1994b, p. 175) The Church is not called to dominate the world but rather “Our witness is in being a new humanity in which all our social relationships demonstrate to the world how life is to be lived” (Gish 1979, p. 324).
It is reasonably common to understand the message of the Gospel, and the mission of the Church, as providing a solution to existential despair (Evans 1984 is one example). Anabaptists would most likely go along with that proposal, though would emphasise that the solution is not to be found in some abstract “Christian” way of thinking but in the wholeness and peace – the shalom – experienced in community.
In contrast, Rollins places the hope of Gospel in the midst of despair rather than as an escape from it. Christianity, he claims, calls into question the whole framework of our desire to replace separation and alienation with certainty and satisfaction (Rollins 2013). In this he departs substantially from the Anabaptist model5. Rather than viewing the Church as bearing witness to shalom, he calls on the Church to demonstrate how we can live in the lack of shalom. That should be central to the Church because it is central to the Cross: “The Crucifixion bears witness to a form of life … that promises joy in the midst of our brokenness and new life in the very embrace of our pain” (Rollins 2013, p. 97).
Rollins is not the only theologian to emphasise brokenness. Another approach to this theme comes from Kazoh Kitamori who, in his Theology of the Pain of God, claims that “Salvation is the message that our God enfolds our broken reality” (Kitamori 1958, p. 20). Kitamori was inspired by Jeremiah 31:20 to reconsider the nature of a God who “resolves our human pain with his own” (p. 20). Although most modern translations of this verse use phrases like “my heart yearns [for Ephraim]” and the King James has “my bowels are troubled”, Kitamori draws on Luther (“my heart is broken”) and Calvin to argue that this verse and others justify the “boldest anthropomorphism” that God is in pain (Kitamori 1958, Appendix).
Both Rollins and Kitamori see the epicentre of this brokenness as the Cross, although their reasoning is fundamentally different. For Kitamori, the pain arises from God fighting with God at the Cross. It is not that God empathises with us to such a depth that God feels our pain vicariously, nor the patripassian idea that God the Father experienced the pain inflicted on God the Son, nor even that our sins cause God to suffer, but rather the pain arises out of God’s inner conflict. “God who must sentence sinners to death fought with God who wishes to love them” (Kitamori 1958, pp. 21, 115)6. On the other hand, given Rollins’ commitment to apophatic theology, we would expect him to reject Kitamori’s anthropomorphism along with any theology that treats God as an object to be understood. Nevertheless, Rollins hears real abandonment in the cry of Jesus on the cross. “The Crucifixion signals an experience in which all that grounds us and gives us meaning collapses” (Rollins 2011, p. 23).
What I see from both Kitamori and Rollins is that the truths to which the Church bears witness – the God we serve and the Cross we proclaim – entail a deep sense of grief and anguish, in stark contrast to the triumphalism that is so prevalent in the modern Church.
What type of community can express that witness?
If the truth to which the Church witnesses so deeply entails brokenness, how would that affect the structure and practices of the witnessing community?
Kitamori aligns the Church with Isaiah’s Servant Songs (Kitamori 1958, ch. 5): “The church inherited the pain of God and became a symbol of the pain of God. Each believer becomes the ‘Servant of the Lord.’” For Kitamori, human pain, and in particular pain shown within the Church bears witness symbolically to the pain of God, a “unity with God through pain”. From this we could deduce that the Church itself should exhibit characteristics described by Isaiah. Kitamori picks out the response of silence under suffering (Isaiah 42:2) but we could add the unwavering demonstration of justice (Isaiah 42:4), offering the other cheek (Isaiah 50:6), the absence of violence and deceit (Isaiah 53:9) and pouring out its life as it bears the weight of sin (Isaiah 53:12).
Rollins proposes that “It is not the role of the Christian community to provide some escape from [finitude, meaninglessness, and guilt]; rather such a community offers a way for us to confront them and affirm them together” (Rollins 2011, p. 111). The kind of community he has in mind creates a relational, theological and liturgical space in which people can put aside tribal identities and encounter themselves through others’ eyes. In community we can share honestly about the ghosts that haunt us and we can confront the discrepancy between what we say we believe and the beliefs that are materialised in our behaviour.
In the Anabaptist tradition, the ideal of community is one in which people share each other’s burdens through works of love even to the point of death (Gish 1979, ch. 3). This too is inextricable from the Church’s witness: such actions within the Church are signs and demonstrations of how God acts towards all humanity. I believe that the challenge of Kitamori and Rollins to this conception of community is that we should neither expect nor preach that the “new humanity” is ever freed from pain and brokenness. The Church is not a utopia but a living demonstration of brokenness.
One powerful exemplar of the type of community the whole Church is supposed to be can be seen in the L’Arche network. In a L’Arche community people with obvious intellectual and physical disabilities live in the same houses as their less-visibly disabled carers. It is core to the L’Arche understanding that the carers are not seen as “not disabled”. Instead, the visibly poor, disabled and broken are seen as gifts to those of us whose poverty, disabilities and brokenness are more hidden. (Hauerwas and Vanier 2008)
Conclusion
In this essay I have attempted to locate the distinguishing marks of the Church not in any list of abstract concepts but in the grounded reality of the human condition and the felt absence of God. Yoder’s Anabaptist emphasis on community and witness provide a well-tested starting point for this approach to ecclesiology, but it seems to me that the works of both Kazoh Kitamori and Peter Rollins challenge the Anabaptist tradition to move into a deeper engagement with alienation, pain, loneliness, despair, betrayal, uncertainty, fear, remorse and shame.
This brokenness is a central and inevitable feature of the human condition, and a fundamental element in the event of the Cross. It is to this brokenness that the Church is called to witness. The Church is the site where the pain of humanity and the pain of God can meet. Brokenness is a distinguishing mark of the Church in two senses: it denotes both the truth to which the Church bears witness and the mode of community life through which that witness is made visible.
I have used L’Arche as an example of a community that puts into practice this mark of brokenness, both as an essential ingredient of their life together and as an essential ingredient of their witness. L’Arche is not itself a church, but as a group within the Church it demonstrates an attitude that I wish were more common: an attitude that embraces and values brokenness rather than seeking to escape it.
Reference List
Evans, C. Stephen. 1984. Existentialism, the Philosophy of Despair and the Quest for Hope. Christian Free University Curriculum. Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan Pub. House.
Gish, Arthur G. 1979. Living in Christian Community: A Personal Manifesto. Sutherland, Australia: Albatross Books.
Hauerwas, Stanley. 2002. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology : Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 2001. London: SCM Press.
———. 2010. ‘Beyond the Boundaries: The Church as Mission’. In Walk Humbly with the Lord: Church and Mission Engaging Plurality, edited by Viggo Mortensen and Andreas Østerlund Nielsen, 53–69. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
Hauerwas, Stanley, and Jean Vanier. 2008. Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness. Resources for Reconciliation. Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books.
Kitamori, Kazoh. 1958. Theology of the Pain of God. 5th ed. London: SCM.
McCain, Paul Timothy, ed. 2007. Concordia -the Lutheran Confessions: A Readers Edition of the Book of Concord. Concordia Pub House.
Rollins, Peter. 2011. Insurrection. Nashville, Tenn: Howard Books.
———. 2013. The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. 1st Howard Books trade paperback ed. New York: Howard Books.
Yoder, John Howard. 1994a. ‘A People in the World’. In The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, edited by Michael G. Cartwright, 65–101. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Pub. Co.
———. 1994b. ‘Let the Church Be the Church’. In The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, edited by Michael G. Cartwright, 168–80. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Pub. Co.
Footnotes
1 That summary, although often quoted, omits the element of community that I emphasise in this essay. The actual statement in the Augsburg Confession, however, is “The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.” (McCain 2007) – which includes the idea of community as a third attribute of apparently equal importance to Word and Sacrament. Yoder seems to me to be simply wrong to claim that “in this Protestant formulation … the presence of the community is not part of the definition” (Yoder 1994, p. 76).
2 I note in passing that Stanley Hauerwas endorses the same view (e.g. Hauerwas 2002, p. 219; Hauerwas 2010).
3 One aspect of Menno’s list that I find interesting is that they can be seen equally as the marks of a Christian and as the marks of the Church. This ambiguity arises naturally from the importance of discipleship in Anabaptist thinking: the Church is simultaneously a community of disciples and a community that disciples.
4 I am not aware of anywhere he has written that explicitly, but from the books and talks I have seen I think it is quite clearly the line he would take.
5 Rollins would concur with Yoder’s view of the Church necessarily being a minority movement, though not for the same reason. Whereas for Yoder that view arises from the history of “free” church opposition to the state-sponsored church system evident since Constantine and perpetuated by the Reformation, for Rollins it is because authentic Christianity continually subverts itself. But this is not the departure I am drawing attention to here.
6 Kitamori explicitly follows a Lutheran account of atonement here and assumes God’s wrath rather than argues for it. I would propose that an alternative analysis could be made in which God’s pain follows from God’s compassion towards our suffering rather than from God’s own wrath. Even the paradigmatic passage in Jeremiah 31 suggests such an alternative. Although the passage presupposes the prior imposition of punishment, it does not represent God as saying “My heart is in pain because my love is in conflict with my anger”. To the contrary, the parallelism in the second half of Jeremiah 31:20 associates God’s pain with compassion (NIV) or mercy (RSV).