Introduction
Ad Gentes 2 famously affirms that ‘the Church on earth is by its very nature missionary since, according to the plan of the Father, it has its origin in the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit’.Footnote 1 While this now axiomatic statement may reflect a general ecumenical consensus, mission infrequently enters systematic discourse, and this holds true for the great volume of post-Vatican II material expounding the doctrine of the Trinity. It is possible to develop sophisticated ecclesiologies in immediate correlation to the being of the Trinity – and to omit reference to the church's ‘missionary nature’.Footnote 2 The missions of the Trinity establish the church but, precisely in its establishment, the missionary act seemingly fades as a characteristic mark of that apostolic community. Robert Jenson, as one example, notes that it is possible to think of the church from two perspectives: from one, ‘God uses the gospel to gather the church for himself’, while from the second, ‘God provides the church to carry the gospel to the world’.Footnote 3 Which perspective dominates ‘depends entirely on the direction of thought in a context’, i.e. from within or without the church.Footnote 4 Jenson chooses to ‘follow the first direction and consider the church in its own proper entity, in which it is in God's intention antecedent to the gospel’.Footnote 5 He desires here to protect the ‘communal presupposition’ out of which the gospel is proclaimed, to salvage something of the church as a body of people out of the ‘wrack of “Christendom”’.Footnote 6 This leads to an account of the communion nature of the church rooted in, and an echo of, God's own triune life. Baptism and the Lord's Supper orient the church to the being of God and, in so doing, mark the church as a ‘missionary community’, for by living in the triune communion it becomes ‘a distinctive, even “countercultural” community’.Footnote 7 Mission foremost is not an intentional act undertaken by an identifiable agent, but a culture which develops as the community attends to its given institutions. Evangelistic outreach occurs as a by-product of the church's holy distance from the world.
This missionary method becomes muted, however, when those to whom the church is called explain it away precisely by understanding it as a particular way of life. Reinhard Hütter defines this challenge in now familiar terms: ‘As a political project, modernity is constituted by a particular way of organizing the “private” and the “public” that entails the dichotomizing – and thereby the effective taming – of religion.’Footnote 8 This taming effect is twofold. First, those outside the church reduce the difference between the church and other social bodies to culture, ritual and perhaps moral choice, no aspect of which is normative for the whole in pluralist societies. Second, deleterious consequences for the communal life of the church follow from this mode of organisation as a private religious institution. Re-establishing the church as a ‘public’ – a gathered entity which competes with the normative claims of other publics – becomes necessary for the above missionary account.
Hütter goes one step further. While this ‘taming’ manifests itself within the political realm, the contemporary privatisation of the church is a theological problem and its solution theological. God is by nature communion, and the church in correspondence becomes a communion, through the specific mission of the Spirit in the operation of church practices. Hütter's practical solutions rest in a reaffirmation of the seven core practices delineated by Luther in his On the Councils and the Church. Only as the church attends to these practices as binding will it re-establish its public character and, with this, its vocation to witness. Hütter's positive proposal, in other words, is missionary in intent, and he locates this method in the triune life.
This account matches an argument more than fifty years ago by an exponent of the ‘Dutch theology of the apostolate’ – Johannes C. Hoekendijk. Hoekendijk also initiates his discussion by noting the concern for ‘ecclesiastical influence’ which has arisen within Protestantism at the collapse of Christendom.Footnote 9 This he affirms as a theological, not political, problem – the Reformers failed to develop a full doctrine of the church. Christendom provided the community foundation upon which Protestantism built its church. As Christendom eroded, so the Protestant church collapsed. The proposed solution rests in an intensified focus on the word and sacrament and the promotion of a church culture. For Hoekendijk, however, this logic exemplifies the problem: ‘Church-centric missionary thinking is bound to go astray, because it revolves around an illegitimate centre’.Footnote 10 A twofold problem results: first, the institutions of the church, and the life which results, come to bear the full evangelistic load, thereby distorting theological accounts of the church's life and work. Second, with the missionary act a secondary step beside this evangelistic life, its task consists of replicating the institutional structures basic to this life. The missionary act does not itself proclaim the gospel because true Christian piety is non-missionary. Defining the nature of communion without reference to missionary movement produces a method which was universally repudiated as propaganda during the early twentieth century.
The following, however, is not an examination of mission method; the problem is one of systematic theology. The omission of mission as a dogmatic category has deleterious consequences for theology across its breadth, including the doctrine of God. The fundamental linkage of Ad Gentes 2 remains in effect: the missionary nature of God as revealed in his missions, calls, forms and sends a church in correspondence to his being. A failure to give proper theological attention to the missionary act is consequent on an inadequate of the doctrine of the Trinity, and specifically a failure to define the communion of the triune God in relationship to the event of reconciliation and redemption.
The ‘church as public’
Hütter initiates his constructive proposal by observing the changed ‘ontological basis of Protestantism’, and the revelation of this change with the ‘extinction of the Christian state, that is, of a confessionally defined territory’.Footnote 11 While the twin affirmations of sola fidei and sola scriptura encapsulate the positive complaint of the Protestant Reformation, their tendency towards individual interpretation and away from ‘binding doctrine’ essentially collapsed the space necessary to such interpretative endeavours. By evacuating this prior ground, the Protestant churches lost connection with ‘their peculiarly ecclesiastical public character’.Footnote 12 The full implications of this shift, however, were not immediately apparent. The Reformers developed their theology assuming as normative the type of church/state relationship typical of Christendom. The problem did not lie with Christendom; Christendom hid the problem. This political condition maintained Protestantism's public space either politically as a state church, or culturally as a Volkskirche. As Christendom disintegrated, so did the very ontological basis of the Protestant church.
Without its own proper theological basis, the church became susceptible to other forms for constituting it as a public. Protestantism became bound to the foundation which had supplanted Christendom: modernism and political liberalism. This now supplied the necessary space to undertake its theological discourse and the means by which it connected with its local environment. This, however, came with conditions attached; the church had to rethink its own life according to the limits established by this political order. Initially, it sought to ‘re-establish its “public relevance” through new, general points of reference: reason, inwardness, and activism’.Footnote 13 This exacerbated the problem, for under these conditions the church can only ever be a private institution. A reformulated public character required a change in the very form of its gathering: ‘the church either has to become a political force under the conditions of the saeculum – which totally politicises and thereby distorts the church – or the church has to claim that “faith” has nothing to do with politics – which wrongly privatizes and also distorts the church’.Footnote 14 The question of the church's mission is not benign. The lack of a public character has a direct and deleterious effect on the liturgical shape of the church with the attendant consequences for the actuality of its communal life.
With the emergence of religious privatisation, and insofar as Protestantism's changed ontological basis already tended towards congregationalism, the political temptation of an ecclesial ontology based on private voluntary association proved too strong. By taking the specific form of a ‘variety of theologies bound to specific individual or group identities as a form of self-reflection or as a representative of these groups’ interests’, the church accommodated itself ‘to modernity's norm for the organization of a “public” that is shaped by the liberal nation-state and the free market’.Footnote 15 As now an association of private religious ‘clubs’, instead of witnessing to culture, the church merely reflected its surroundings.Footnote 16 This, for Hütter, helps explain Protestantism's susceptibility to being used by national or civil religious interests. In the case of America, Protestantism overcame ‘its crisis of relevance by becoming culturally established as a civil religion’.Footnote 17 Gathering as private clubs ‘mirroring the religious interests, likings, longings, and tastes of its members’ reduces the church to ‘“American religion”, a “faith” that sanctions and undergirds “democracy” and that – while “free” to be exercised within the confines of democracy as an idiosyncratic private enterprise – is finally determined by the “project of America”’.Footnote 18 The public character of the church is as the propaganda arm of a particular national myth.
In response, Hütter seeks to establish the ‘church as public’: a ‘human “space” which is constituted by binding teachings, principles, and norms; that makes possible a “coming together” for action and interaction; and that creates a common identity and mutual accountability’.Footnote 19 A set theological foundation opens a space in which human beings gather and develop into a particular identity. While the marks of ‘apostolicity, catholicity, oneness, and holiness designate [the church] as a public in its own right at all times and in all places’, Hütter's positive construal is ‘highly contextual’.Footnote 20 It ‘emerges with special urgency under the conditions of our ever-advancing modernity’ that ‘the church explicitly claims its public character as a nota ecclesiae, an essential mark of the church’.Footnote 21 Against the acids of modernity which erode the basic structures and mediating institutions of human community, the church must gather as an identifiable people group. The category of public substantiates the Nicene ideals. ‘Catholicity’ becomes a concrete actuality ‘rooted in distinct practices’ which are ‘understood as the Holy Spirit's work’.Footnote 22 Likewise ‘apostolicity’, or the ‘church's vocation to witness’, becomes its ‘ethical character’ which is formed ‘paracletically . . . in and through its own practices, procedures, and policies’.Footnote 23 Indeed, this paraclesis ‘strictly is a mode of the gospel – its urging, inviting and claiming side’.Footnote 24 For the purposes of the following discussion, it is important to note here the necessary connection between prior practices, growth in ethical behaviour and the church's evangelistic act of witness.
Communion as the being and act of the church
Hütter's positive theological solution hangs on a correct interrelationship between the church's ‘being’ and ‘act’. The concrete form assumed by the church within its local environment must itself reflect the content of its message. Or, ‘the way we name the church's vocation is, in itself, a witness to the church's vocation’.Footnote 25 What the church is and how it acts must be directly informed by the content of its message; it must gather in correspondence to the God who calls it. Hütter puts the matter this way:
the church's roots and its vocation are intrinsically interrelated in that explicating the foundation of the church in God's salvific activity – which is to be understood in a trinitarian mode as the presence of the Holy Spirit – means necessarily to articulate the church's vocation. And explicating the church's vocation means necessarily to make its rootedness in God's salvific activity explicit.Footnote 26
Hutter's basic stance here matches one of the twentieth century's key missiological discoveries. When the missionary act occurs as a secondary and derivative step alongside some more primal form of Christian faith, then this act is not essential to the faith itself, i.e. the expression of the message is not the message itself, thereby rendering this process of communication susceptible to being informed by other forces. Simple reference to mission history details the painful consequences of such methodological synergism. The church is missionary, not simply because it began in the mission of the Son and Spirit, but because the living triune God continues to act and the church lives in corresponding service to this act.
Hütter integrates the church's being and act via a social account of the Trinity, drawing on especially Nazianzus and Zizioulas: God is a ‘communion of persons’, an ‘onto-relational unity’.Footnote 27 He states that ‘the central assumption of this trinitarian perspective is the logical priority ascribed to the “divine persons”, who can exist only in relation to one another and as such constitute God's deity, providing thus also the basis of God's unity’.Footnote 28 God's oneness resides in his relationality rather than in some preceding substance for which the missions of the Son and Spirit become ‘modes of being’. In his being-in-communion, God, through the eschatological telos of the economy of salvation, actualises human participation into his own life. Hütter specifically locates the nature and form of the church's mission in this trinitarian ground. As the one God in the differentiation of the three, God can and has acted in ‘self-binding to the koinonia’.Footnote 29 The fellowship which lives in correspondence to this God is not ‘“reified” in se’.Footnote 30 God's own self-binding is the ‘perspective from which to understand the mission as the church’. Footnote 31 This ad se movement of the church in a communion key takes the form of submitting to the act of God in making it a new creation. As it does this, it becomes ‘the organ of actualization of the salvific-economic mission of Christ and of the Holy Spirit’.Footnote 32
Leaving momentarily aside his depiction of God's ad se movement with its subtle shift from ‘God so loved to the world’ to ‘God's self-binding to the koinonia’, Hütter links the life of the church to God's own life via two further moves. First, the being of the church is christologically instituted and pneumatologically constituted. It is begun in Christ with the gift of the eschatological meal, and finished in the Spirit when he draws ‘humanity and creation into this communion’ via core church practices.Footnote 33 In this twofold form, God ‘attached his communion to the ecclesial koinonia’.Footnote 34 Second, ‘these practices are understood pneumatologically as acts to be interpreted enhypostatically as “works” of the Spirit’.Footnote 35 These practices are not ‘self-grounded’, that is, while they are concrete actions sociologically identifiable, they cannot be flattened to the social alone – they ‘participate in the being of the Spirit’.Footnote 36 Employing enhypostasis as an analogy enables Hütter, first, to stress the primacy of divine agency while establishing the necessity of human agency, and second, to connect mundane practices to the very being of God. Practices ‘are the pathos of the trinitarian economy of salvation that actually determines or shapes us’, but also introduces human beings as ‘“agents”, that is, actively present in praise, confession, prayer, obedience, and discipleship’.Footnote 37 Care is taken not to identify the action of the Spirit with human action. Human beings do not possess the Spirit, nor is the church's public nature reduced to human planning and bureaucratic administration. Rather, these practices ‘constitute the indispensable “mediate forms” of [the Spirit's] activity’.Footnote 38 They constitute the action of the Spirit in assuring the church's ‘eschatological participation in the communion of the triune God in faith and ecclesial communion’.Footnote 39 In this ordered and differentiated activity, ‘the church becomes an image of the Trinity itself; it becomes “communion” of the triune love’.Footnote 40
Church practices as a ‘public’ witness
‘In its trinitarian constitution’, the church ‘is essentially koinonia’.Footnote 41 Fellowship is the church's visible, i.e. communicable, reality. It is the telos of salvation, but, precisely as the being of God, communion is an action of God. It is a work of the Spirit both in binding the Trinity to this fellowship, and in binding the fellowship to the Trinity. The missionary nature of the church given in and with the Father's plan assumes the following form: ‘the soteriological mission of the church as the public of the Holy Spirit’ becomes ‘the specific nexus of church practices and church doctrine’.Footnote 42 Living the life of promised communion makes the church a ‘public’ in its own right. It becomes a culture, ‘a way of life, i.e., a distinct set of practices interwoven with normative beliefs, concretely and distinctly embodied’.Footnote 43 This culture, because it develops as the proper act of God, is by nature declarative; witness inheres within the life demarked by this prior time and space.
In correspondence to Christ's objective institution and the Spirit's subjective constitution of communion, two elements are basic to this becoming a witnessing people. First, ‘a public is to be understood as the space of and for praxis, made possible by rules and norms which are precisely not the product of praxis but precede and frame it’.Footnote 44 Certain binding doctrines must already be in place to create the necessary ‘time-space’ which makes praxis possible. Eliminating this binding authority made Protestantism reliant on other time-spaces, immediately that of Christendom, but latterly that of political liberalism. Second, via the practices undertaken in this theological time-space, the Holy Spirit unites the community with the ‘triune communion, reestablishing thereby our own relationality and “in-forming” us through faith’.Footnote 45 This leads Hütter to seven practices delineated by Luther in his The Bondage of the Will, and ‘On Councils and Churches’.Footnote 46 The church is communion as it is lifted by the action of the Spirit into the life of God. Given that the eschatological future of communion is already present in the ‘economic mission of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit through the communion of the ecclesial body of Christ’, the Lord's Supper is the paramount practice.Footnote 47 Christian witness to this God occurs as the community, formed by Spirit in the operation of the core practices, lives now the life of promised communion. Conceiving the practice of communion as both the act of the Spirit binding the community to its eschatological future in God's life of communion, and as the act of edifying the community as a communion ‘overcomes the ecclesiological contradiction between “institution” and “event,” between “being” and “act”’.Footnote 48
However, given that Hütter identifies these practices as enhypostatic actions of the Spirit, ‘paraclesis does not address humanity as such, not a general and abstract audience. Rather it addresses those who already are encompassed and claimed by God's salvific activity, the “brothers and sisters,” the community of the baptized, in one word: the church.’Footnote 49 The church is ‘the soteriological locus of God's actions’.Footnote 50 His integration of being and act means that the actions of proclaiming the word and administering the sacraments are located in and directed towards those already within the church. While, precisely in its publicness, the church seeks contact with those external to this communion, this contact is a consequence of that communion, i.e. it does not inform, but results from communion. This allows Hütter to overcome the notion that religion subjectively informs actions which are themselves undertaken in an alternate sphere external to the church's own life. With this, the church is not delivered ‘over to an alien logic’; it is not defined in relation to the dominant culture, neither as an affirmation, i.e. a ‘people's church’, nor as a negation, i.e. as a ‘contrast community’.Footnote 51 The church is outward as a natural by-product of its inward focus, due to its identifiable particularity as a people. As it both possesses and is constituted by its own distinct salvific telos, the church becomes an alternate political order and ‘enters into multilayered relationships of tension with other publics’.Footnote 52
Johannes C. Hoekendijk
Hütter offers a concrete formulation of Ad Gentes 2, of the church's missionary nature in living relationship to the Trinity. With this missionary intent, his proposal is fruitfully placed into conversation with the work of missiologist Johannes C. Hoekendijk.Footnote 53 Hoekendijk, writing half a century earlier, follows a logical path identical to that of Hütter – but reaches a contrary conclusion.
‘Ecclesiocentrism’, as it developed at the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference and at the 1938 Tambaram International Missionary Council conference, dominated the missionary thinking of the period. Karl Hartenstein, for example, summarised Tambaram's position with the affirmation that ‘whoever says church, says mission. Or conversely: whoever says mission, says church.’Footnote 54 The post-colonial complaint against nineteenth-century mission method had highlighted the complicity between missionary method and Western civilisation. Such a concern found uncomfortable reinforcement as the Western church encountered its own impotence in relation to the terrible events of the first half of the twentieth century. By the late 1930s, it was hoped that developing the church's missionary nature would clear a theological path for entering both problems – as a missionary community the church's identity would not rest in any particular ethnicity, nationality or civilisation. The solution, however, did not prove as simple as identifying mission and church. Instead of allowing the missionary act, beset by so many problems, to inform the nature of the church, mission became another way of describing concrete rituals which had long secured meanings. The missionary act faded, while the function it served became located in the institution life of the church which was itself defined in antithesis to the missionary act; the church was the end product of mission, when it was established the missionary act ceased. Into this context, Hoekendijk stated that ‘the call to evangelism is often little else than a call to restore “Christendom”, the “Corpus Christianum”, as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church’.Footnote 55 The key problem was not that of a positive or negative relationship to wider culture, but that of locating evangelistic authority in a culture – a particular way of life. This has significant consequences both for the life of the church, which now must bear the evangelistic burden, and for missionary method, which becomes the propagation of the structures essential to this life.
For Hoekendijk, the ‘breakdown of Christendom’ with the correlate insecurity over the political and cultural relativity of the church drove the rediscovery of the church's evangelistic witness.Footnote 56 That this problem developed was ‘natural’ since ‘the Reformers presupposed the existence of Christendom’ and their ecclesiologies eroded in conjunction with this sociological foundation.Footnote 57 Alternately stated, because they could suppose a relationship between the gospel and culture as normative, the Reformers failed to develop a ‘full doctrine of the Church’.Footnote 58 Nor did they require one – ‘their purpose was not to create new communities, but to reform those already in existence’.Footnote 59 Defined according to this methodology of reformation, growth became refinement and continuity the prolongation of established institutions. This strategy of ‘purity’ meant that the distinctive marks of the true church reduced to one – ‘the proclamation of the Word in its double form: the verbal and sacramental Word’.Footnote 60 Because it was these existing communities which required this application of purity – which under Christendom conditions included all of those within the parish – the Christian community constituted the main object of this proclamation.
An assumption of reformation is poorly suited to a context of creation. Christendom performed the theological function of providing a natural point of connection between the church and its local community. When ‘the presupposed foundation of Christendom sank away’, the church continued with its ‘reduced ecclesiology’.Footnote 61 The word and sacrament were placed in this ‘void’ while their reforming power fell away for there was ‘no community to be reformed’.Footnote 62 Yet, with reformation the dominant methodology, a solution to this twofold problem of a collapsing ontological basis and of an evangelistic connection rests in returning to the ecclesiology of the Reformers and the aforementioned practices. However, and this is where the circle joins, since the Reformers’ ecclesiology presupposes Christendom as the normative social condition, the church's life is structured according to the telos provided by that framework. As it presupposed a culture, this setting must be posited as a prior condition, and since growth consists of purifying that space, the end of the church is itself the creation of culture. With a religious culture the necessary prerequisite for the form of witness envisioned by Reformation era ecclesiologies, the end of Christendom signalled the end of that method. This is a boon, according to Hoekendijk, for recourse to a Christendom model only results in a propagandistic mode of missionary activity.
Mission as the propagation of Christian benefits
Hoekendijk illustrates ‘this intimate relation between evangelism and an ideology of Christendom’ by reference to the missionary movement.Footnote 63 For those who regard cross-cultural mission as essentially propagandistic such a link may seem passé, but this is to miss Hoekendijk's main point. The problem is not that of cross-cultural movement – the movement reveals the problem. Missionary proclamation reduced to propaganda because the form of the sending church was itself the missionary end, and this church assumed a particular cultural form. The problem is not simply that the Western church was seen to be precisely that, i.e. Western in a non-Western context, but that this culture was accorded a necessary theological status. One required a culture before one could win converts, and mission became the act of replicating that culture in preparation for the primary evangelistic witness of the community's life.
For Hoekendijk, those churches which actively protested against gathering the church under the conditions of establishment proved the point. The Pietists and the Methodists ‘realized that individualism completely lacked the spiritual setting for their work. Yet they continued as if they still lived in Christendom. They tried to isolate individuals and assemble them in an island of the saved, floating on a flood of perdition.’Footnote 64 Individual conversion alone was insufficient: one required enculturation and conversion. Even those occupied with the sole task of ‘winning souls for the lamb’, such as Zinzendorf and the Moravians, ‘tried to build up a form of what they called “Christian civilization” before they could begin to harvest individual souls’.Footnote 65 Though it took various forms, this single concern unified the range of mission methods. Rothe, writing in 1871, stated that ‘Christian piety cannot be built in mid-air, but only on the foundation of Christianized life.’Footnote 66 It made no difference whether this life was conceived, following a church polity based in a state or cultural church, in broad civilisational terms, or following a church polity based in a gathered or believers’ church, in narrow congregational terms.
This necessary link between culture and evangelistic outreach is a consequence of the assumed nature of the church as it developed within the political conditions of Christendom. Because the church was conceived in non-missionary terms, that is, mission ceases with the establishment of the church, the missionary act cannot itself characterise the church's life. The church, as temporally the goal of mission, and eschatologically the future form of Christian existence, was the objective reality of the gospel. It came to understand itself ‘as well established, as God's secure bridgehead in the world, to think of itself as a beatus possidens’.Footnote 67 Conceiving this non-missionary life as the true Christian end resulted in a peculiar mission method. Mission became simply ‘a function of the Church’, and ‘Credo ecclesiam apostolicam is often interpreted as: “I believe in the Church, which has an apostolic function”’.Footnote 68 As now a derivative step beside the true nature of the church, mission occurs as the church ‘distributes its possession to others, until a new company of possidentes is formed’.Footnote 69 Evangelistic outreach is ‘the repetition of the Church on a larger scale’.Footnote 70 Where Hütter overcomes the being and act disjunction by locating it in the practices of the church, such an approach constitutes, for Hoekendijk, the fundamental error. These cultural elements work together to stimulate a community which focuses upon itself. The missionary act does not itself bear the evangelistic message; it transfers the fundamental building blocks of a culture, in preparation for the evangelistic message which results as a by-product of that culture. The missionary message is that of a preparatory cultural form in which the gospel is expressed. Moreover, mission disappears when that culture has been established as not itself essential to that culture. Mission, in other words, is antithetical to the gospel.
Hoekendijk is not arguing for some sort of pure gospel in relation to culture; that culture is incidental to the Christian faith. Nor is this a negation of the church and Christian discipleship being a ‘way of life’ – it is a question of defining that life and the nature of that discipleship without relation to the missionary act, with the distorting effect of making that life bear the whole evangelistic burden, and reducing the missionary act to the propagation of this non-missionary life. It belongs to the necessary truth of the gospel that it takes cultural forms, that no particular cultural form is normative for the whole. This is not to question the necessary continuity of the institutions of baptism and the Lord's Supper, but a recognition that these events take particular forms, and that the particularity of these forms includes elements that, while necessary, are not themselves material to the event. Rituals, liturgies, confessions, dress, hierarchies and languages are all constructed with local materials. Even the identification of what constitutes essential practices is itself informed by this context. Recognising this is simply to affirm that the church confesses the one Lord, one faith and one baptism, in answer to the whole gambit of human questions in every time and place. As a simple illustration of this, Andrew Walls notes the large difference in the nature of gathering, modes of expression, visions of the true Christian life, the type of theological questions asked and the forms taken by the answers, evident at different times and places through church history. Continuity is not at issue: all times and places are marked by the confession of the final significance of Jesus Christ, and in the use of scriptures, of water and of bread and wine. These continuities, however, ‘are cloaked with such heavy veils belonging to their environment that Christians of different times and places must often be unrecognizable to others, or indeed even to themselves, as manifestations of a single phenomenon’.Footnote 71 To reiterate, the problem lies not with the veils themselves. It lies first in an, albeit tacit, identification of these veils with the gospel, and then making these veils necessary to the evangelistic purpose of the church – and one cannot avoid doing this when the culture is itself responsible for maturity in the true Christian end. When this occurs, these veils become basic to the transmission of the gospel as necessary preconditions out of which the gospel is proclaimed. And, to quote Martin Kähler, propaganda occurs when those who ‘think that in bringing their particular Christianity, they are bringing Christianity itself, and thus the gospel itself’.Footnote 72
How this church evangelistically connects with the world provides a further way of entering this issue. If the message of the church rests in the distance it creates from the world, in establishing a space where the church can ‘have its own style of life, speak its own language, determine its own life’, then evangelistic witness depends on the cessation of ‘direct discourse between the Church and the world’.Footnote 73 The important element rests in the church's own life in distinction to the world's life. But, herein lies also the connection. As Healy suggests, in communion ecclesiologies ‘the identities of the world and the church are perforce essentially the same at base. The only difference between them can be that the church more visibly realizes the primary reality than do other religions and ways of life.’Footnote 74 It is as itself a culture, a way of life, that the church connects with the world. When this is the case, for Kähler, ‘there is no substantial difference between whether one propagates a churchly Christianity, a confessional, institutional, morality, or some non-church modern faith. One just expands what is already one's own. Here competition with other religions and world views automatically results. It is a matter of human acquisitions and formations only. One proselytizes, i.e.: makes repetitions of oneself.’Footnote 75 Omit the pejorative language of propaganda and this description accords well with Hütter's account in which the church as public ‘enters into multilayered relationships of tension with other publics’.Footnote 76 Competition is the key mode of missionary witness, and its success depends on the better functioning of this life within the reality it shares with the world.
By establishing the public witness of the Christian faith within a culture which is per force local and contingent, by positing that this culture better accords with the reality which proceeds from the nature of God, by defining Christian witness in terms of competition between publics, and by making that culture necessary to the extent that one must leave one's culture in order to become Christian, the ‘communion’ at the heart of Christianity is propagandistic and its mode of conversion proselytism.Footnote 77 This approach becomes all the more problematic given the immediate relationship Hütter establishes between this missionary method and the being of God, for it now receives divine sanction.
The act of reconciliation and the being of the Trinity
Hütter's positive construal of the ‘church as public’ includes a strong account of the ecclesiological errors which occur when the church fails to gather according to its own missionary purpose. Forming according to the possibilities afforded by political liberalism renders the church susceptible to agendas not its own. However, while reducing the church to propaganda is antithetical to Hütter's own best insights, he fails along the same lines as his diagnosis. Cross-cultural missionary movement brought the problem of propaganda to the fore; it revealed this replicated way of life to be a domestication of the gospel. However, identifying the problem of propaganda with cross-movement only reinforced the problem. A simple denial of evangelistic missionary activity, including the dogmatic neglect of mission, reduced the ‘missionary’ nature of the church to a gestalt of practices. This intensified the internal focus and the coordinated emphasis on particular cultural forms which the missionary act was tasked to replicate. Needless to say, with the increasingly pluralist nature of contemporary societies, the cross-cultural question is one which has pursued the retreat of the Western church, and any ‘contextual’ proposal for the church's apostolicity must take this into account. It is, in other words, no longer possible to avoid the charge of propaganda simply by ignoring the missionary question.
Nor can one relativise Hütter's use of culture language. The strength of being a public rests precisely in the nature of this culture as a visible tangible actuality which communicates the nature of eschatological fellowship with the God who is communion. The absence of mission, alternatively stated, is a direct consequence of an inadequate doctrine of God. Reference to cross-cultural missions has provided here a critical standard, but it offers, more importantly, a positive theological datum for understanding God's nature as communion and the form of humanity community which is called by and serves this God. Hütter's description of God's ad se movement as his ‘self-binding to the koinonia’ omits reference to the world as material to that communion. God's freedom must be maintained; he does not require the world in order to be. Yet, what is materially lost when the communion of God's own life is defined without reference to his act of coming to his own and his own not receiving him? How God acts in reconciling humanity to himself may be a true expression of God's life of communion – but the true nature of that life is defined primarily by reference to God's in se existence. Reference to the event of reconciliation does not define the nature of that communion. It serves to connect the church's life to this otherwise posited communion. Reconciliation is conceived as a non-intentional, i.e. an accidental, consequence of communion. Since God's life of communion is defined behind his economic sending of the Son and Spirit, the communion life of the church is not defined in terms of the act of reconciling. The true nature of the church is defined according to its eschatological future, one without such issues as conversion, and it therefore follows that these questions cannot be material to defining the true nature of Christian existence now.
This has significant consequences for a theological account of the life and practices of the church. It would seem that the proper nature of the church, while constituted by God's self-sending, is not called to live in correspondence to that act. While the church is not to be ‘“reified” in se’, its ad se movement is its becoming a new creation – an eschatological foretaste of a non-missionary communion – and this occurs as it submits to the action of the Spirit in attending to its own internally defined church practices.Footnote 78 Mission is overlooked precisely as a derivative form of the gospel, and is, thus, provisional alongside the proper reality of the church as communion. The problem is not simply that of neglecting mission as one practice in relation to others – it is the immediate reduction of ‘proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes’ to those who have already heard the story. The proclamation of the word is, to be sure, the salvific mission of the Spirit. Problems arise when proclamation is accorded such a status that it no longer addresses humanity, but ‘those who already are encompassed and claimed by God's salvific activity’, and when the external character of this word is a consequence of a mature human capacity.Footnote 79 This, in turn, forces the Spirit into a certain mode of acting. Rather than impelling the community into the world in correspondence to the life of Jesus Christ, the Spirit now acts to deepen the being of the community as the primary means of proclaiming the word. The same complaint holds for the Lord's Supper. The issue does not lie in giving this practice a premier place, but in defining communion in abstraction from God's reaching out in reconciliation and redemption, and his calling human beings to participate in this evangelion.
Mission, defined as the intentional movement of the church into the world God so loves that he sent his Son in the power of the Spirit, would seem to constitute a positive dogmatic resource for thinking through the problems correctly identified by Hütter. God's superfluity, and the form this takes in redemptive mission, is itself material when defining the nature of communion. Communion is a living and intentional reality, an active and vulnerable reaching out. This requires a more robust account of the living triune God who lives his own proper life in binding himself to those who would be his enemies and calls them his friends; an account of communion which lives its own proper life as it is broken and bleeding for the world.Footnote 80
