This lecture was given at a Conference in Berlin, Germany, dealing
with ethnic animosity.
"Discerning
the Signs of the Times!"
Culture and the Triune God
Thorwald
Lorenzen
1.
"Looking"
It
is our privilege and task to ask how we as Christians can responsibly
live our faith in Christ in a culture where we are confronted with
ethnic conflict, as well as suspicion and animosity against foreigners.
Since faith does not derive from ourselves, but is a gift of God,
we have to inter-relate our Christian understanding of God with our
respective culture.
1.1.
Beauty.
Culture like all of
creation has the imprint of God. Looking
at what God had created, God
said it was "very beautiful" (Gen 1:31).
Christians affirm the essential goodness of creation by
confessing Christ as
"mediator of creation". And
the Spirit of God is not only
the Spirit of shalom, but also the Spirit of life:
"… you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in
his work!" (Psalm 104:29-31)
We have good reason,
therefore, to seek and see God's goodness reflected in the beauty of
dancing waves, in the colours of Chagall and Monet, and in the
symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart.
At
the same time we are daily confronted with the aberrations of life: rape
as an instrument of war, child abuse, torture and ethnic hatred, and the
destruction of our environment.
How
can we as believers and church leaders respond to life -
to its glory and its aberration? What
is our place and our responsibility in the network of nature and
history? Does God have a
mission for God's people -
and can we know and fulfil such a mission?
1.2.
Kairos. While
theologians have speculated about the imminent return of Christ, they
have overlooked the fact that God is always
"near", impinging upon us with grace and judgment.
It is not enough to
look back and take our stand with Amos and Jeremiah, against Amaziah and
Micaiah; with Jesus, Peter and Paul, against their religious and
political opponents; with the Anabaptists, Baptists and Dissidents
through the ages, against their political and ecclesiastical opponents.
It is not enough to criticise the "Deutschen Christen"
and praise the Confessing Church in the Germany of the 1930's.
It is not enough to remember with reverence and pride Martin
Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights and his prophetic protest
against the Vietnam war (at a time when this protest was unpopular in
his own circles. His
friends wanted him to concentrate on the civil rights movement and not
"touch" Vietnam; but King believed that the moral conscience
cannot be divided!). It is
not enough to say that God was on the side of the Anti-apartheid
movement in South Africa, that the prayers of Christians helped to bring
down the wall and open the Gate in 1989, and that God is on the side of
the struggle for freedom and justice in Burma.
We
must also discern and decide -
here and now! We must
correspond to the "nearness" of God by taking a stand -
today! We must speak.
We must act. With
our trinitarian doctrines we confess that God continues to accompany
God's creation, that God is involved in God's world, that God's Spirit
is present here and now, and that it belongs to God's passion, for grace
to become event. It is up
to us to hear the word of the Lord, to discern the signs of the times,
to be obedient to God's will, and to muster the courage to pray, to
speak, and to act.
This
presupposes, of course, that God's grace does not disempower us, or
consign us to passivity, but that we learn to accept and appreciate that
we are 
= ("fellow workers with God" - 1
Cor 3:9), "the salt of the earth" and "the light of the
world" (Matth 5:13-16).
Through faith and baptism, we are drawn into God's passion for
the world. Many biblical
texts reflect, as Karl Barth says, that God's activity can only be
recognised if we are prepared to join in.
1.3.
Authority. We
have no choice! We must try to discern the signs of the times and to act
accordingly. Indeed, our
commitment, our life before God and our credibility in the world is at
stake.
Our commitment
to biblical authority reminds
us that to know God means to do justice (explicit in Jeremiah 22); and
whatever Christology we adopt, we cannot overlook the fact, that Jesus
did not die of a heart attack or of old age or as the result of a
judicial error, but that he was "executed as a political subversive
and crucified between two social bandits. It appears that Jerusalem elites collaborating with their
Roman overlords executed Jesus because he was a threat to their economic
and political interests."
Our respect for
our spiritual heritage reminds
us that there are many situations in which radical commitment to Christ
in an estranged and violent world calls for dissent
and the subsequent willingness to suffer. During the Reformation thousands of Anabaptists were
persecuted, tortured and banned, because they were unwilling to
compromise their voice of conscience.
5.000 of them were killed, often in barbaric fashion.
The baptist tradition of dissent and suffering has lived on into
modern times, as Baptist testimonies from Bulgaria, Spain, Brazil,
Israel and Indonesia will readily demonstrate.
And, lest we are immediately pushed into the sectarian corner,
let us not forget that neither the patriarchs, the prophets, Jesus, and
the leaders of the earliest Christian churches (Stephen, Paul, Peter.
James) can be understood apart from their leaning into the promises of
God and thereby paying the price of loneliness, persecution, torture and
death. The Christian faith
does not glorify martyrdom, nor does it seek suffering.
But if God is God, and if human sin as selfishness, rebellion and
sloth is real, then faith cannot be had apart from dissent and
suffering. Being in
the world is not the same as being of
the world. One can be part of culture, and yet march to a different
tune.
The
credibility of our confession to Christ as 
is at stake. Will we be the
ship that dares the storms of life, that knows its builder and steers a
clear course through the waves, or will we seek the safe harbour of
comfort and compromise when things get rough out there?
The very fact that, in retrospect, we realise, that Baptists in
America's South, in the Germany of the 1930's, and in South Africa in
more recent times, should have seen more clearly, spoken more boldly,
and acted more courageously, provides a challenge to us: will our
faith be stronger, will we see
more clearly, will our courage
be bolder?
2.
"Reflecting"
Our
topic is controversial. The
literature is legion. Without
being able to go into great detail, I need to sketch my use of terms and
disclose the theological grammar that underlies my suggestions.
2.1.
Culture. This is not the place to present a theory of culture.
Yet it is very important that we recognise and admit the shaping
influence of culture on all of us.
We are born into a culture and we become deeply embedded in it.
Space, soil, trees, bushes, landscape, language, songs, music,
stories, traditions, food, smells, family, friends have so deeply and
fundamentally shaped us that they become part of us and determine our
identity.
Living
in a different culture to the one into which I was born, I experience
the enduring power of culture in my own life.
I also try to minister to people who have lived for 40, 50, 60
years, all their creative professional and marriage and family years, in
another culture. They have
children and grandchildren in their adopted culture.
But they themselves never feel at home.
"My body is here, but my soul is in
Serbia/Germany/Greece/Italy/Spain" -
a lady said to me the other day. If
one has no appreciation of the attractive power of culture, one will
never understand ethnic animosity or what people will do to defend their
space.
Here
are some aspects of culture that we need to be aware of for our
reflection.
·
Culture is the product of human
activity and creativity. It
is in flux. It changes. It is not fated.
Within certain parameters (language, tradition), it can be
influenced and changed for good or evil.
·
Culture covers the entire
way of life of a certain group of people, their habits, customs,
rituals, values and institutions.
·
Human cultures are very divers.
Culture is different in Germany, Brasil, Mongolia and Indonesia.
Even in one country there can be a variety of cultures, which
overlap and influence each other. A
much debated question is, in how far the church
as a distinct sociological entity needs to develop its own culture, with
the possibility of serving as a model
for the "world".
·
At the same time, there is an emerging trans-national
culture. It affirms
national and cultural particularities, but at the same time, it
recognises a "European", "Latin American",
"Asian" or even "global" awareness, responsibility
and identity. The human
rights tradition reminds us that within cultural diversity there are
values that are universal. Torture, racism, child abuse, rape, genital mutilation and
slavery are and should not be acceptable in any culture.
Religious tolerance is and should be affirmed against any
cultural pressure to the contrary.
As
intentional Christians we confess Christ as Ku/rioj, not only of the
world, but of our life. But
I propose to you that our primary existential
identity is cultural. Only
if we realise and admit that, can we do something about it.
Historical and sociological evidence says that more often than
not we functionalise the word "God" to serve our cultural
interests. Wars and
conflicts in our life time have shown that we are quite willing to
de-humanise and kill brothers and sisters in
Christ in order to protect our natural
family and our cultural
identity.
2.2.
Trinity. "Trinity" is the Christian identity symbol for God.
It implies God's togetherness with God's creation.
This togetherness entails several dimensions.
2.2.1.
Creator. God
creates and sustains the
world. Although human sin, rebellion, pride, selfishness and sloth have
distorted God's creation, Christians affirm that God remains patiently
committed to God's creation. Christian
faith is intimately linked to the hope that ultimately,
at its depth and at the end, it is not sin, death and the devil, but God
and God's Christ who rule.
Culture
therefore, whatever its corruption and perversity, injustice and
oppression, is not damned or fated. It is graced with the promise of renewal to become what it
was created to be: to reflect what God called "very
beautiful".
2.2.2.
Redeemer. God
displayed God's sovereignty and patience by gifting what humanity
needed, but could not provide by and for itself: in Christ,
God not only loved the world, but in fact reconciled
the world with God's self. Whatever
picture we may use, or however we may understand
"reconciliation" or "atonement", I suggest that we
must resist the modern tendency to reduce Jesus Christ to an example or
hero. Christ is the "saviour" who can and does free us from
sin and its consequences.
2.2.3.
Presence. When
we refer to the Holy Spirit,
we speak of God's presence in our life, in the church, in the world, and
in the cosmos. The
"identity" of the Spirit, i.e. that aspect of the work of the
Spirit, which complements the Father and the Son, is that the Spirit
makes God effectively present as creator and redeemer.
As such, the Spirit is the Spirit of life (Ps 104:29f.) and at
the same time, with the added input of the atoning work of Christ, the
Spirit of healing, liberation, and shalom (Luke 4:14-30).
Nevertheless,
within a trinitarian understanding of God, the biblical message invites
us to measure the Spirit whether it affirms the humanity
and the cross of the risen Christ (1 Cor 12:1-3, 10; 1 John 4).
The references are, of course, not to abstract theological
affirmations, but they want to insist that in our praxis it must become
evident that God is on the side of making human life human.
2.2.4.
Promise and Fulfilment. In
a broken and estranged world the journey of faith will always be
accompanied by the question of whether it was and is worthwhile
to follow Christ. In the
same chapter where Paul confidently says that the day will come when the
death of death will be manifest and when God will be all in all, he adds
the encouragement: "Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable,
always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in
the Lord your labour is not in vain." (1 Cor 15:58)
2.2.5.
The Community of Faith.
The church as the community in which Christ is heard, believed
and obeyed, echoes the communitarian nature of God.
The difference between the world and the church is not that one
is sinless and the other is sinful.
"All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"
(Rom 3:23). Both, the world and the church are sinful.
The difference between the world and the church is, that the
church knows it and tries to
do something about it. As
salt of the earth, as light of the world,
the people of God know the resources of love
and hope, which, if
exercised, can actually make a difference by transforming society in the
direction of what is true and what is just.
2.3.
Identity. Although I have emphasised the strong influence that culture
has on our identity -
for reality's sake we need to be honest at that point -
we must remind ourselves continually (as we do in the Lord's Supper)
that through faith and baptism, Christ has become our ultimate
concern. He has ushered
us into a new sphere of
reality.
We
believe in Christ and are baptised into Christ.
Christ is "in us".
Christ has freed our conscience from sin and selfishness, and as
such has become the determining foundation, centre and focus of our
life. We agree with the
apostle Paul when he defines his identity:
"… to me, living is Christ and dying is gain" (Phil 1:21); "…
through the law I died to the law, so that I
might live to God. I have
been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it
is Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith
in the Son of God, who loved me
and gave himself for me" (Gal 2:19f.).
The believer's identity is in Christ.
That is an ultimate concern.
It is a matter of life and death, as the martyrs in the early
church, the dissidents of the Middle Ages, the 5000 Anabaptists in the
16th century, and Bonhoeffer, King and Romero in modern
times, have manifested. All
other concerns are pen-ultimate.
As
Christians we belong both to culture and
to Christ. Our life in culture is recognised and affirmed.
At the same time, we are given a responsibility.
Our responsibility is to make known by word and deed, "to
all in the house", to the "world", that "the earth
is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in
it."
3.
"Listening"
Our
topic has been and still is a matter of vigorous theological debate.
We do not think and discuss in a vacuum.
We need to listen to those who have faced similar challenges.
At the same time, the literature is legion. A selection must be made.
I have limited myself to those visions that have actually been
shaped in situations of conflict and that have stood the test of time.
Since
we meet in Germany, I want to retrieve briefly Dietrich
Bonhoeffer's and Karl Barth's
theological response to the situation in Germany during the 1930's.
Their response has stood the test of time and their influence
continues amongst discerning Christian circles in many parts of the
world. To widen our
horizon, I want to make a brief reference to the Kairos
Document: Challenge to the Churches (1985)
that originated in South Africa's struggle against apartheid, and The
Road to Damascus Document: Kairos and Conversion (1989),
originating from the African, Asian and Latin American struggle against
poverty, humiliation and oppression.
And finally a reference to the "baptist" vision, mainly
developed in the United States, where Baptists are most numerous, and
associated with names such as James Wm. McClendon, John Howard Yoder,
Stanley Hauerwas, Glen H. Stassen and Miroslav Volf, will round up the
picture for our orientation.
3.1.
Karl Barth.
It was an existential shock for Karl Barth, and subsequently a
significant factor in his break with liberalism, when in 1914 he read
that his theological teachers were among German intellectuals who
supported the war policies of the German emperor.
History repeated itself a few years later.
We all know that a great number of sophisticated and world famous
theologians lived in the Germany of the 1930's.
And we continue to be surprised that many of them failed to meet
the challenge of the day. They
actively or passively supported what the Kairos
theologians call "State theology".
It abuses the name "God" by using it to validate
nationalism, racism, genocide, and war.
Theologians
had failed to problematise culture.
They were not clear about the ambiguity of culture and how the
cross centred message of Christian faith relates to it.
Many of those who failed to read the signs of the times, and
therefore failed to meet the challenge of the day, by omission or
commission, gave theological relevance to cultural values that negated
the content of faith in Christ. The
words “God” and “Christ” were used to baptise nationalistic,
cultural and racial ideas; and the Spirit of God was seen to have been
actively engaged in a history of nationalism, racism, genocide and a
bloody war. Besides the one
word of God that we are to hear, trust and obey in life and in death,
other images, truths and powers had claimed and were given theological
dignity, and thus became sources for the faith of Christians and the
ministry of the church.
Karl
Barth is helpful because he allows us to appreciate cultural, political
and economic phenomena without ascribing divine dignity to them.
Barth invites us to presume that the Spirit of God may be active
“out there”.
On the one hand, human sin has caused estrangement
-
not separation
-
between God and God’s creation; therefore we can never identify human
and historical phenomena with manifestations of the  . On the other hand, however, God has not only created the
world, but through Christ has reconciled
it with God. Therefore,
there can be no human and historical manifestation that is outside the
realm of God's sovereignty.
Barth therefore
suggests that human and historical phenomena can become
"analogies", "parables" ("Gleichnisse"),
"correspondences" ("Entsprechungen"),
"witnesses" ("Bezeugungen") to the
.
This means that existing cultural, political or economic
phenomena, since they are part of the realm of God's redemption, can
become "parables of the kingdom": they are "gleichnisfähig".
Yet, since at the same time they are also human and historical
products, and as such are part of a world that is estranged from God,
they cannot be identified directly with the kingdom of God, they must
be measured against God's revelation in Jesus Christ: they are
"gleichnisbedürftig".
Jesus Christ as he has
been revealed in the Scriptures is therefore the measure by which the
church evaluates cultural phenomena.
3.2.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer adds
further helpful dimensions, not only with the prophetic witness of his
life, but also with his theological insights.
He
affirms, first of all, that reality cannot be divided into two spheres,
into "the one divine, holy, supernatural and Christian, and the
other worldly, profane, natural and un-Christian."
In Jesus Christ these two spheres have become fused to constitute
one reality.
"In Jesus Christ the reality of God entered into the reality
of the world."
Therefore any attempt to either absolutise one or the other
should be resisted.
Consequently,
Bonhoeffer rejects two
alternatives, we may call them the sectarian
and the liberal alternatives.
The sectarian
alternative argues that Christ is the fulfilment and end of the world;
that there is a radical break between faith and the world; that the
world is damned and that the Christian will therefore not need to accept
responsibility for the world. The
world must be “hated” and the church must withdraw from the world.
The other, the liberal alternative,
which has been the great temptation of all established churches, is to
assign theological dignity to culture as such, which, by implication,
means, that the world does not really need the gospel. The only function
of the gospel would be, to bring to light, what is already there.
Within
the one reality, which God has established through the incarnation,
Bonhoeffer distinguishes between the ultimate
and the penultimate.
He leaves no doubt that the "justification of the sinner by
grace alone" is the "origin and essence of all Christian
life".
Faith as God’s gift of salvation, and not human achievements or
human morality, constitutes our ultimate concern.
But what does that mean for the matters of time and space, for
the things and structures and institutions of this world, for our human
activities, achievements and morality? In Bonhoeffer’s words: how is the penultimate related to the ultimate?
In
Jesus Christ -
incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection -
God neither divinises nor destroys the penultimate, but God wants to
heal, to liberate and to save it. The
penultimate is graced to become the preparing of the way of the Lord,
and the Christian life "is the dawning of the ultimate in me; it is
the life of Jesus Christ in me."
This
means concretely:
The
hungry man needs bread and the homeless man needs a roof; the
dispossessed need justice and the lonely need fellowship; the
undisciplined need order and the slave needs freedom. To
allow the hungry man to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and
one's neighbour .... It is
for the love of Christ, which belongs as much to the hungry man as to
myself, that I share my bread with him and that I share my dwelling with
the homeless. .... To provide the hungry man with bread is to prepare
the way for the coming of grace.
3.3.
The Kairos (1986) and The
Road to Damascus (1989) documents.
The Kairos and The
Road to Damascus documents add further important dimensions for
developing a constructive relationship between culture and God.
These pamphlets from the two-thirds world help us to look beyond
our "Western" borders to gain a "global"
perspective. They are authentic illustrations of theologians and church
leaders who have discerned the signs of the times, and who in situations
of injustice, poverty, humiliation, and oppression have dared to speak
the word of the Lord.
3.3.1.
Justice and reconciliation.
They have sharpened our minds with regard to the relationship
between justice and reconciliation.
Some
Christian leaders have argued, that since every situation is ambiguous,
since right and wrong are on all sides of a conflict, therefore the best
Christians can do, is not to
take sides, but instead work
for reconciliation. The
answer of Kairos is clear.
Nowhere
in the Bible or in Christian tradition has it ever been suggested that
we ought to try to reconcile good and evil, God and the devil.
Therefore:
To
be truly biblical our Church leaders must adopt a theology … of direct
confrontation with the forces of evil rather than a theology of
reconciliation with sin and the devil.
There
cannot be reconciliation, these theologians insist, apart from justice
and repentance.
3.3.2.
The church divided.
"The Church is divided against itself and its day of
judgment has come."
Whereever you look, whether you look at Germany in the 1930's,
South Africa under Apartheid, USA, Australia and Latin America today,
baptised believers who gather around the Lord's Supper table are on both
sides of the conflict. Both
oppressor and oppressed, torturer and tortured are taking the bread,
drinking from the cup, and pray to the same God.
There
we sit in the same church while outside Christian police men and
soldiers are beating up and killing Christian children or torturing
Christian prisoners to death while yet other Christians stand by and
weakly plead for peace.
Since
"God" has interpreted God's being in Jesus Christ, therefore
for Christians "God" cannot be an empty symbol into which
every one can read her or his self interest; if truth is not just
relative, then the church must face the challenge of truth in her own
midst. Theologians at all
times and in each situation have used and are still using
biblical-theological arguments to validate injustice, whether it was and
is white supremacy, Anti-Semitism, Apartheid or male superiority.
We
are a divided Church precisely because not all the members of our
churches have taken sides against oppression.
In other words, not all Christians have united themselves with
God, "who is always on the side of the oppressed" (Ps 103:6).
3.3.3.
Sin and conversion.
Neither sin, nor conversion should be reduced to the personal and
individual level. In
situations of injustice, the "problem that we are dealing with …
is not merely a problem of personal guilt, it is a problem of structural
injustice. People are
suffering, people are being maimed and killed and tortured every
day."
I recall the Baptist World Alliance General Council issuing
resolutions, in which apartheid in South Africa was named
"sin", "crime" and "heresy", which
"it is our duty in the name of God to denounce."
In a divided
church we may need to appreciate afresh that the biblical call to
conversion is not addressed to the outsider, to the unbeliever, to the
world in general. It is addressed to the people of God. "All of us who profess to be followers of Jesus of
Nazareth are in continuous need of conversion."
3.3.4.
Salvation and hope.
The radicality of sin can only be met with a deep and wide
understanding of salvation. Such
salvation is rooted in Christ's atoning work of reconciliation, but it
also includes liberating people from passivity and fear, and freeing
people from a view of history that instils in them the idea that they
are fated and that they can do nothing to change the world in the
direction of truth and justice. Salvation
includes the imperative "to act hopefully, to act with full
confidence and trust in God."
The
disciple cannot be greater than the master, and we are following the
path of a crucified Christ. Whatever
twists and turns the road might take, be firm and steadfast. The pain we undergo is part of the birth pangs of a new
creation.
3.3.5.
Christian Spirituality.
While traditional spirituality tended to be
"otherworldly", "purely private and
individualistic", leaving things to God, rather than accepting
responsibility for the affairs in the world, a
…
truly biblical spirituality would penetrate into every aspect of human
existence and would exclude nothing from God's redemptive will.
Biblical faith is prophetically relevant to everything that
happens in the world.
3.3.6.
God takes sides.
"God is not neutral!"
Karl Barth influenced the various streams of liberation theology
by retrieving the biblical insistence that when we speak of the
incarnation or of the cross or of the humanity of Christ, we are not
simply making important theological utterances, but we are confessing to
belong to a God who takes sides.
Jesus manifested the partiality of God in that "He ignored
all those who are high and mighty and wealthy in the world in favour of
the weak and meek and lowly."
3.3.7.
Praxis.
"Christians … must quite simply participate in the
struggle for liberation and for a just society."
Divine grace is not thrown at us, it does not ignore or by-pass
the believer, but it empowers the believer and the believing community
to active obedience.[46]
The content of that
discipleship is given by Jesus' journey of passion, which could
appreciate the beauty of nature and culture by drawing on their
resources to gather into language the most sublime insights into love,
joy and grace, and at the same time those very cultures opposed and
destroyed him.
3.4.
The "baptist" vision.
There is no intention, of course, to claim anyone for the "baptist"
(small "b") tradition who does not want to be identified with
it. But there is a small
"b" baptist tradition, reaching back to the non-violent
Anabaptists in the 16th century, which contains elements of promise for
our investigation.
Their input is important because it reminds us that the church is
not primarily an organisation with offices, laws, liturgies and dogmas,
but a voluntary association of intentional believers who are committed
to Christ and therefore to freedom, truth, equality, peace and justice.
Feeding on the "Word" and gathered around the
"table", they clearly confess to whom they belong and as such
they provide an alternative way of life to a world that tries to survive
without God. Stanley
Hauerwas and William H. Willimon have coined the phrase "resident
aliens", describing a community of believers who have voluntarily
but clearly come to grips with the fact that their citizenship is in
heaven (Phil 3:20), that the church is a
distinct entity, which is different from the culture surrounding it and
has a distinct mission in and to the culture.
Only
if we know where we stand and to whom we belong, can we discern the
signs of the times and endeavour to speak the word of the Lord.
4.
"Deciding"
We
have posed the question, we have set the stage, we have listened to
relevant input from the community of faith.
It is now time to gather our thoughts into a model that may help
us to discern the signs of the times in order to speak the word of the
Lord.
4.1.
Faith and Baptism.
Although we are related to both, God and culture, and indeed, to
God through culture, in the event of faith and baptism a radical change of allegiance takes place. Our conscience, the
integrative centre of our personal self, is freed and focussed.
Christ becomes our ultimate concern to which all other concerns
are voluntarily subjected. The
earliest Christian confessions 
("Jesus is
Lord") and "God
raised Jesus from the dead" are foundational
for our life (Christ as sacramentum),
and at the same time, they point to the content
and measure for our life and ministry (Christ as exemplum).
Turning to God
includes not merely an inner personal and private experience of
repentance, faith and prayer, but it also includes a commitment to
justice and truth. The
branch that does not bear the fruits of love has become useless and is
cut off and cast away (John 15). Faith
becomes visible in love (Gal 5:6). Faith without works is dead (James 2:14-26).
Conversion to Christ as
includes the affirmation that
"the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good
news brought to them. And
blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me" (Matth 11:5f.).
For a Christian, it is not possible to worship God and by-pass
the stranger and disadvantaged in our midst.
4.2.
The Community of Faith. Although faith and baptism come to each individual, they do
not individualise believers, but place them into a community of faith, the church.
The church is necessary
for our being in the world. We
are relational beings, created to find our identity not apart from, but
together with each other. Christian
freedom is not an individualistic but a communal reality. The individualism that so strongly determines
"Western" culture and unfortunately also much of church
culture, needs to be criticised and resisted.
Church
is the 
("coming together") of the people of God
(1 Cor 11:18, 20) with the declared intention and commitment to
recognise and celebrate the presence of the crucified
Christ. And that is only
possible, as the apostle says in his letter to the church in Corinth, if
the "late comers" are not forgotten.
It is not possible to celebrate the Eucharist and fail to wait
for the "late comers". Relationship
to Christ and concern for the disadvantaged belong together.
4.3.
Knowing God's will.
Can God's will be known, not only in Corinth, but here and now?
Being aware of our own fallibility and knowing that the history
of the church is replete with injustice, make us hesitant at this point.
We want to be modest and we don't want to tell others what to do.
And yet, our modesty and our tolerance can be false.
They can be subtle and convenient ways to escape the claim of the
Lordship of Christ over our lives.
Is
there not a cognitive dimension to our faith in Christ?
Do we not confess with the first Christians that in and with the
story of Jesus, God has not only reconciled the world with himself, but
God has actually made known who God is and what God wants us to do?
It would therefore be a sign of disobedience if we claim, even if
it is under the umbrella of modesty, humility and tolerance, that we
cannot know God's will. In
and with the story of Jesus, God's will can be known.
Even a naive reading of the story of Jesus as it comes to us with
colourful variations from the Bible makes it absolutely clear that faith
in Christ implies and includes:
·
Announcing and demonstrating that "God" is a good
word that wants to bring meaning, joy and freedom to people.
God wants to set people in a "broad place" (Psalms
18:19, 31:8).
·
That by sharing God's rich life with the humanity of Jesus, God
has graced human culture with the promise of appreciation, renewal, and
transformation.
·
The indicative of the salvation of sinners
implies the imperative of loving one's enemy.
As God in Christ created space to include us sinners in God's
being, so we gratefully respond to God by creating space to include the
"other" in our own being: the foreigner, the refugee, the
asylum seeker, the orphan, the widow, the single mother, the drug
addict. Indeed, our
relation to the "other" is the test case of whether we want to
follow the crucified Christ
(Mark 8:34-38).
·
Resisting claims of religious and political establishments that
do not bring healing and liberation.
In shaping our attitude to social, political and economic
structures, we must always remember that Jesus did not die of a heart
attack or of old age, but that he was pursued, captured, sentenced and
killed by the religious an political authorities of his day.
The New Testament does not only include Romans 13, but also
Revelation 13. It belongs
to the prophetic task of the church to critically measure, unmask and
denounce when profit is placed before people, when the focus on the self
tends to exclude the "other", and when human institution
arrogate divinity to themselves.
·
In a world of violence, where "pay back", "an eye
for an eye", and the institution of war, are the accepted
structures of dealing with human conflicts, the church knows the power
of forgiveness and the prophetic witness of the peace churches and of
Martin Luther King's opposition to evil with the waging of non-violence.
By repudiating violence, the church refuses to let the
"world" define reality and instead decides to follow the crucified
Christ.
·
The church knows the power
of repentance
as the only way to redeem history and avoid letting the future becoming
captive to the sins of the past.
By word and deed the church can therefore encourage social,
political and economic institutions to admit mistakes, say
"sorry", and offer compensation.
·
Witnessing in word and deed to the new
reality that God has established by breaking the estranging power of
death. By raising Jesus
from death, the results of sin are suspended and new reality is ushered
in. This new reality excludes the association of power and
privilege with gender, class, or ethnicity (Gal 3:28).
I think, that
even our own experience shows us that in whatever situation we find
ourselves, it is not too difficult to know God's will.
As a Christian World Communion we should be able to create an
institute in which the great challenges of our time are studied and
analysed in order to help our unions and churches to reach responsible
decisions. But it seems to
me, that the greater difficulty is, whether we want to know God's will, and whether we have the courage
to accept responsibility for what we know.
4.4.
Human Rights. Besides Bible and tradition, culture also offers help to
discern the will of God. Our
spiritual forebears, with their emphasis on freedom of conscience, have
actually helped to shape the tradition of universal
human rights.
Human Rights are not divine law and they do not have
revelatory status. They can
and need to be interpreted theologically.
We may presume that they are part of God's providential activity
in the world to make and keep human life human.
Attention to human rights can help us to locate the important
issues that we need to address, and at the same time they show us what
universal human morality thinks about them.
Nevertheless,
since Christ is our ultimate concern, therefore we would have to interpret human rights and inter-relate them with our faith in
Christ. In light of that we
may even want to modify or deepen a merely popular and secular
understanding of certain rights. But
as universally accepted "common standard(s) of achievement for all
peoples and all nations",
it is very helpful to know that refugees and asylum seekers have rights,
that torture and rape and the denial of religious liberty is universally
shunned, that people in all parts of the world affirm that human beings
have an "inherent dignity
and ... equal and inalienable rights"; indeed that
All
human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act
towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
4.5.
Welcoming the stranger in our midst.
An illustration may help to undergird the last two points.
Ethnic animosity is obviously the source of major tensions and
conflicts around the world. People
jealously protect their space and their race.
The words "God" or "Allah" are freely used to
justify torture, murder, forced conversions, brutality and civil war.
Christians
understand racism as the result of sin, the manifestation of
estrangement from God. When
in Christ, God dealt with the estranging power of sin, a new reality was
born, a reality which relativised the traditional divisions of race,
class, and sex, and ushered in a community of equals (Gal 3:28).
The God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures does not only lean
to ease the burdens of the slave, the widow, the orphan and the
stranger, but it is God's declared will to welcome the stranger in our
midst. According to Matthew
25:31-46, our attitude of acceptance and rejection of the stranger
mirrors out attitude of rejection and acceptance to Christ. The
imperative results:
Circumcise,
then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer.
the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great
God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who
executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the
strangers, providing them food and clothing.
You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the
land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10:16-19)
The
protection of "strangers" -
asylum seekers, refugees, ethnic minorities -
has become international law. There
is a whole host of human right instruments and structures that protect
the rights of ethnic minorities, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant
workers.
Having
thus recognised the will of God, what hinders us from accepting
responsibility for what we know and do it?
5.
"Acting"
5.1.
Courage. The challenge is to accept responsibility for what we know,
to "be doers of the word":
"Anyone ... who knows the right thing to do and fails to do
it, commits sin" (James 1:22 and 4:17).
I
think that with our conscience focussed on a biblical understanding of
Christ, with an empathetic reading of the situation in which we find
ourselves, with the moral guidance that we receive from the human rights
tradition, and with a healthy suspicion of our human and ecclesiastical
self-interests, we can discern the will of God. The difficulty is less with our intellect than with our will.
Given the story of Jesus, which includes, of course, God's togetherness with
God's people in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is fairly easy to know where
our stand should be with regard to nationalism, racism, apartheid,
militarism, rape, torture, child abuse, poverty, forced conversions,
ethnic and religious hatred. The
question is, whether as individuals and as churches we have the courage
to be who we are.
5.2.
Options. In
trying to bring together the resources of our faith with the challenges
from our culture, we may want to be aware of different options for our
thinking and doing..
5.2.1
Creative. There is,
first of all, the creative and productive option that is part of the
holistic mission of the church. We
joyously witness to the fact that God loves everybody, that people can
believe in Christ, and experience the empowering and guiding presence of
the Spirit of God.
It
also belongs to the Christian tradition in general and to our baptist
tradition in particular that we have encouraged and intensified the
human rights tradition; that we have built and staffed hospitals,
schools, seminaries and universities; that we have opposed slavery, and
be part of peace and civil rights movements.
In various countries we have encouraged the trade union movement,
worked for reconciliation, opposed racism and apartheid.
As
Christians we must also shape our own community culture in which it
becomes manifest to whom we belong.
We must show by example that reconciliation of differences, that
saying "sorry" for sins of the past, that loving ones enemy,
that telling the truth, that being faithful, is possible, and that
equality can actually be lived. The fact that many Baptist churches still refuse to ordain
women, that segregation is still an ostensible fact in many of our
churches, that Baptists often belong to the most conservative and
militaristic sectors of their society, shows that we have a long way to
go before our actions match our words.
5.2.2.
Critical anticipation.
Remembering that God is
the creator of the world, that in Christ,
God has reconciled the world
with himself, and that through the
Spirit, God is present and active
in the world, we may presume
God’s providential and sustaining and liberating activity in the world.
But whether it is God
who is active in the world, and where
God is active, we will have to measure
and evaluate. I would
therefore suggest that we adopt an attitude of critical
anticipation to our culture.
5.2.3.
"No"! There are situations in
which we must say a clear and serious "no". In a culture where human life is evaluated in terms of
usefulness, where human beings tend to become a commodity, where freedom
is interpreted as protection from the "other" rather than
living with the "other", I would suggest that the church needs
to publicly oppose euthanasia, capital punishment, militarism, and
ethnic hatred.
Such
a clear and radical "no" has its parallel in the human rights
tradition. The International
Bill of Human Rights in its International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights lists a number of human
rights which are valid in all circumstances (§4:2): the inherent right
to life (§6), the prohibition of slavery and servitude (§8:1,2), the
prohibition of imprisonment merely on the ground of failing to fulfil a
contractual obligation (§11), the right that "no one shall be held
guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which
did not constitute a criminal offence, under national or international
law at the time it was committed" (§15), the right that everyone
must be recognised as a person before the law (§16), and the right to
freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (§18).
We live in an era of
post-modernism where moral absolutes are suspect.
The results of imperialism have made us sensitive to the Asian
and African claims to respect their cultural values.
We affirm that tolerance is one of humanity's great cultural
achievements. But we also
know that tolerance can be used as an excuse to escape moral
responsibility, just as convenience and sloth can easily stifle our
moral sensitivity. We must
certainly appreciate and affirm regional, national and cultural
differences, but at the same time we must affirm that not all morality
is situational and relative. There
are certain absolutes that need to be unmasked and named, whether we are
in Kenya, Afghanistan, France, Chile, Canada, Sweden, America or
Australia. Torture, child
abuse, rape, genital mutilation, racism, sexism, ethnic cleansing,
slavery, poverty, hunger, and oppression can never be right.
5.3.
Challenge to Church leaders.
It belongs to the role of church leaders to discern the signs of
the times, to speak the word of the Lord, to challenge and empower the
churches, and give credibility to their words by appropriate actions,
programs and structures.
Since all of us attending this
conference are in one way or other church leaders, I want to invite you
to consider whether the following elements should not be part of shaping
our self-understanding as church leaders.
·
Developing a holistic
evangelical theology, which is true to the Word of God, attributes
relevance to our tradition, and seeks to name and address the challenges
of our time. Such a theology will be trinitarian, it acknowledges Jesus
Christ as sacramentum and as exemplum,
it recognises the Holy Spirit as empowering believers to discipleship,
and it recognises that the God of the Bible is love and as such
"works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed"
(Psalm 103:6). God leans to
save that which is lost, heal that which is broken, and liberate that
which is oppressed.
·
As a ship is designed to leave the harbour and brave the storms
and the waves, so the church must be encouraged and empowered to leave
the comfort of non-involvement and risk participation
in the challenges of society. To
know God means to do justice. The
way of faith is to seek and find Jesus in the word and in the sacraments
and in the gathered community, but according to Matthew 25, we are also
to seek him in the stranger and prisoner and others in need.
·
Commit ourselves to a holistic ministry by being evangelists,
declaring the good news, servants,
bringing help where it is needed, priests
who are willing to reconcile in situations of conflict, and prophets
who dare to unmask, denounce and oppose injustice.
·
The
churches can expect and should demand moral
and theological
guidance from their
leaders. Not popularity,
but obedience, not money, but faith, not numbers, but faithfulness, not
unity, but truth, should guide church leaders. It is a sad fact that too often leaders tend to please the
conservative majority in their churches and thereby fail to empower
their churches to fulfil their prophetic task.
How much have we contributed to dividing the church (see above §3.3.2)
by living and preaching cheap grace, which according to Bonhoeffer |
