Life in the Christian Colony
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon
A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know
that something is wrong
Abingdon Press Nashville
Copyright Information
To
Thomas Langford and Dennis Campbell
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of [human beings]. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. . . . Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.
—Philippians 2:5-11; 3:20-21
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul uses an image that appeals to us, that serves as a symbol for the change in mood we describe in this book. After asking the Philippian church to "have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (no small order for ordinary people), Paul tells this forlorn, struggling church, "God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:13). In you. Then Paul reminds them, "Our commonwealth is in heaven”
(3:20).
In the space of a few lines, Paul has called the Philippians to be part of a quite spectacular journey—namely, to live and to die like Christ, to model their lives so closely upon Christ that they bear within themselves the very mind of Christ. Yet he also calls them to "rejoice” (3:1), because in them, in their ordinary life together as congregation, God is enjoying them as divine representatives in the world. Great demands, but also great joy, at the wonder, at the adventure of being the church.
The image that evokes this adventure for us is, again, found in Philippians 3:20— "our commonwealth is in heaven.” Moffatt more vividly translates this politeuma as "We are a colony of heaven.” The Jews in Dispersion were well acquainted with what it meant to live as strangers in a strange land, aliens trying to stake out a living on someone else’s turf. Jewish Christians had already learned, in their day-to-day life in the synagogue, how important it was for resident aliens to gather to name the name, to tell the story, to sing Zion’s songs in a land that didn’t know Zion’s God.
A colony is a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another, a place where the values of home are reiterated and passed on to the young, a place where the distinctive language and life-style of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced.
We believe that the designations of the church as a colony and Christians as resident aliens are not too strong for the modern American church—indeed, we believe it is the nature of the church, at any time and in any situation, to be a colony. Perhaps it sounds a bit overly dramatic to describe the actual churches you know as colonies in the middle of an alien culture. But we believe that things have changed for the church residing in America and that faithfulness to Christ demands that we either change or else go the way of all compromised forms of the Christian faith.
The church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another. In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another, and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens. As a pastor and as a layperson, we intend this to be a critical, but hopeful, reflection on ministry for pastors and their churches in the light of our inclusion in the colony called
church: critical, because we believe that church thought and life need to change direction; hopeful, because in your church and ours, "God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
To be resident but alien is a formula for loneliness that few of us can sustain. Indeed, it is almost impossible to minister alone because our loneliness can too quickly turn into self-righteousness or self-hate. Christians can survive only by supporting one another through the countless small acts through which we tell one another we are not alone, that God is with us. Friendship is not, therefore, accidental to the Christian life.
While writing this book together, we have been acutely aware of the many friendships that make our lives possible—not least of which is the friendship we enjoy with each other. We hope, moreover, this book makes evident our indebtedness to our friends, far and near, who live better lives than we and who, in so doing, make our lives better. There are some we need to thank in particular for reading, criticizing, and improving the manuscript generally—Professor Michael Cartwright of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, Professor Greg Jones of Loyola College in Maryland, Mr. Steve Long and Mr. Phil Kenneson of the graduate program in religion at Duke University, and Dr. Paula Gilbert of the Divinity School at Duke. We have dedicated the book to two persons we are honored to call friends who provide leadership in training women and men for the ministry of Jesus Christ. As deans of the Divinity School at Duke, they have never let us forget that the intellectual love of God and vital piety must be one. They make our lives possible.
Duke University Divinity School 1989
Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. We do not mean to be overly dramatic. Although there are many who have not yet heard the news, it is nevertheless true: A tired old world has ended, an exciting new one is awaiting recognition. This book is about a renewed sense of what it means to be Christian, more precisely, of what it means to be pastors who care for Christians, in a distinctly changed world.
When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us—regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church—made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox.
That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world—served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.
You see, our parents had never worried about whether we would grow up Christian. The church was the only show in town. On Sundays, the town closed down. One could not even buy a gallon of gas. There was a traffic jam on Sunday mornings at 9:45, when all went to their respective Sunday schools. By overlooking much that was wrong in that world—it was a racially segregated world, remember—people saw a world that looked good and right. In taking a child to Sunday school, parents affirmed everything that was good, wholesome, reasonable, and American. Church, home, and state formed a national consortium that worked together to instill "Christian values.” People grew up Christian simply by being lucky enough to be born in places like Greenville,
South Carolina, or Pleasant Grove, Texas.
A few years ago, the two of us awoke and realized that, whether or not our parents were justified in believing this about the world and the Christian faith, nobody believed it today. At least, almost nobody. Whether we are with Pentecostals, Catholics, Lutherans, or United Methodists, we meet few young parents, college students, or auto mechanics who believe that one becomes
Christian today by simply breathing the air and drinking the water in the generous, hospitable environment of Christendom America. A few may still believe that by electing a few "Christian” senators, passing a few new laws, and tinkering with the federal budget we can form a "Christian” culture, or at least one that is a bit more just. But most people know this view to be touchingly anachronistic. All sorts of Christians are waking up and realizing that it is no longer "our world”—if it ever was.
We in no way mean to imply that, before 1963, things were better for believers. Our point is that, before the Fox Theater opened on Sunday, Christians could deceive themselves into thinking that we were in charge, that we had made a difference, that we had created a Christian culture.
We believe the world has been changed but that change did not begin when the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. The world was fundamentally changed in Jesus Christ, and we have been trying, but failing, to grasp the implications of that change ever since. Before the Fox Theater opened on Sunday, we could convince ourselves that, with an adapted and domesticated gospel, we could fit American values into a loosely Christian framework, and we could thereby be culturally significant. This approach to the world began in 313 (Constantine’s Edict of Milan) and, by our reckoning, ended in 1963. Of course, "Constantinianism” had begun earlier than 313 and ended before 1963, but dates, like birth and death, remind us that the way things were and are is not set in stone.
We are not suggesting that all Christians from 313 to 1963 have been unfaithful. Much can be said for those Christians who sided with the Constantines of our world—given what they perceived to be their alternatives. Much can be said for those who sought to uphold a day of rest for all God’s creation through discouraging any form of behavior (e. g., attending Sunday movies) that fell short of praise to God. Moreover, we are aware that from 313 to 1963 many Christians found ways to dissent from the coercive measures necessary to ensure social order in the name of Christ. What we are saying is that in the twilight of that world, we have an opportunity to discover what has and always is the case—that the church, as those called out by God, embodies a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know.
The demise of the Constantinian world view, the gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding "Christian” culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament. It is an opportunity to celebrate. The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis between the church and the world means that we American Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.
One of our former parishes was next door to the synagogue. One day over coffee, the rabbi remarked, "It’s tough to be a Jew in Greenville. We are forever telling our children, ‘That’s fine for everyone else, but it’s not fine for you. You are special. You are different. You are a Jew. You have a different story. A different set of values.’”
"Rabbi, you are probably not going to believe this,” I said, "but I heard very much that same statement made in a young couples' church school class right here in Bible-belt Greenville the other day.”
Pastors who listen to their members, particularly to young parents, will hear them saying to their own children, with increasing regularity, "Such behavior is fine for everyone else, but not fine for you. You are special. You are different. You have a different story. You have a different set of values. You are a Christian.”
And we believe that recognition signals a seismic shift in the world view of our church, which makes all the difference in the world for how we go about the business of being the church. Now our churches are free to embrace our roots, to resemble more closely the synagogue — a faith community that does not ask the world to do what it can only do for itself. What we once knew theologically, we now know experientially: Tertullian was right—Christians are not naturally born in places like Greenville or anywhere else. Christians are intentionally made by an adventuresome church, which has again learned to ask the right questions to which Christ alone supplies the right answers.
Of course, much of what we describe happened long before that Sunday evening in 1963. The project of theology since the Enlightenment, which has consumed our best theologians, has been, How do we make the gospel credible to the modern world?
Christians, our theologians told us, are in the rather embarrassing position of having a faith rooted in ancient, parochial, Near Eastern writings, which present the life of an ancient, parochial, Near Eastern Jew named Jesus. Modern Christians stare at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus across what the German philosopher Lessing called the "ugly wide ditch” of history. Copernicus, despite the church’s efforts to silence him, finally convinced us that the sun did not go around the earth, and everything changed. The Copernican Revolution was the first, we were led to believe, seismic shift for the church. Everyone’s world view had shifted to something called "the modern world view.” The poor old church, however, was stuck with the legacy of a "pre-scientific (i.e., pre-modern) world view.”
This explains why, at least for a century, the church’s theology has been predominantly apologetic. The church did not want to duplicate the mistake we had made with Copernicus. When we took our first religion course in college, it was a course in how to fit the Bible into the scientific world view. We compared the archaic cosmology of Genesis to that of the true cosmology revealed by science. We learned how Moses could not possibly have written the Pentateuch nor Paul have written Ephesians. When we got to preaching, we were told to hold the Bible in one hand and today’s newspaper in the other. The preacher was the one who heroically bridged that great, wide gap between the old, ancient world of scripture and the new, real world of the modern era. Schleiermacher’s project of making the faith credible to Christianity’s "cultured despisers” was adopted by everyone.
The most supremely apologetic theologian of our time was Paul Tillich. In one sense, he seemed the most modern—a theologian thoroughly conversant with modern thought, particularly existentialist thought, who could translate our archaic, inherited thought forms into modern ones. God = Ultimate Reality; Faith = Ultimate Concern; and so on.
Yet Tillich was not so new as he first appeared to be. He is best described as the last great nineteenth-century theologian, a systematic theologian whose foundational assumption was that the "modern world” had provoked a crisis in thought, an intellectual dilemma so great that Christian thought must be translated in order to become intelligible to modern people. When the modern pastor stands up to preach to a modern congregation, the pastor is the bridge that links the old world of scripture to the new world of modern people. In our view, the traffic has tended to move in one direction on that interpretive bridge. Modern interpreters of the faith have tended to let the "modern world” determine the questions and therefore limit the answers. Is it true that the church’s modern problem is the intellectual dilemma posed by Tillich: how to relate the ancient world of the faith to a modern world of disbelief?
Tillich’s position is filled with nuance but, crudely stated, Tillich assumed that, though believing in Christianity had become difficult, many modern people are unavoidably religious. Indeed, religion became the determinative Tillichian genus of which "Christianity” is but a species. In the American utilitarian setting, this became the coarse generalization (Eisenhower) that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something. With Bultmann, Tillich thought that it was not so much that Christianity was inherently unbelievable, it was that Christianity was burdened with too many false intellectual impediments. Who cares, modern theologians asked, whether or not Jesus walked on water, or Moses split the Red Sea, or Christ bodily rose from the dead? The important matter is not these pre-scientific thought forms but the existential reality beneath them. Everything must be translated into existentialism in order to be believed. Today, when existentialism has fallen out of fashion, the modern theologian is more likely to translate everything into Whiteheadian process theology, the latest psychoanalytic account, or Marxist analysis in order to make it believable.
We have come to see that this project, though well intentioned, is misguided. The theology of translation assumes that there is some kernel of real Christianity, some abstract essence that can be preserved even while changing some of the old Near Eastern labels. Yet such a view distorts the nature of Christianity. In Jesus we meet not a presentation of basic ideas about God, world, and humanity, but an invitation to join up, to become part of a movement, a people.
By the very act of our modern theological attempts at translation, we have unconsciously distorted the gospel and transformed it into something it never claimed to be—ideas abstracted from Jesus, rather than Jesus with his people.
The belief, on which much apologetics tends to be based, is that everyone must believe in something. This is the Constantinian assertion that religious belief is unavoidable. Constantine knew that, in order to keep the Empire afloat, if people were no longer classically pagan, they would have to be made imperially Christian. You cannot run a world without people believing in something. Our best minds were enlisted in the Constantinian enterprise of making the faith credible to the powers-that-be so that Christians might now have a share in those powers. After all, we would never be culturally significant if we Christians talked a language unintelligible to the Empire. Apologetics is based on the political assumption that Christians somehow have a stake in transforming our ecclesial claims into intellectual assumptions that will enable us to be faithful to Christ while still participating in the political structures of a world that does not yet know Christ. Transform the gospel rather than ourselves. It is this Constantinian assumption that has transformed Christianity into the intellectual "problem,” which so preoccupies modern theologians.
We believe that Christianity has no stake in the utilitarian defense of belief as belief. The theological assumption (which we probably wrongly attribute to our first apologetic theologians—some of the early Fathers) that Christianity is a system of belief must be questioned. It is the content of belief that concerns Scripture, not eradicating unbelief by means of a believable theological system. The Bible finds uninteresting many of our modern preoccupations with whether or not it is still possible for modern people to believe. The Bible’s concern is whether or not we shall be faithful to the gospel, the truth about the way things are now that God is with us through the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Lately it has become fashionable to speak of "faith development” and "stages of faith,” as if faith were a natural human ability, an instinctual urge. There may be some truth to the suspicion that we humans are incurably religious animals, that we are determined to bow down before something. Yet the Bible seems to have little interest in encouraging such behavior or in analyzing its dynamics, except perhaps as our "faith development,” left to its own devices, is often an exercise of various forms of idolatry.
The Bible’s concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe. So this popular interpreter’s defense of prayer is beside the point:
Everybody prays whether he thinks of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the skyrocket bursts over the water. . . . Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC [New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973])
Such a defense of prayer begs the question of content. What does it mean to pray "in the name of Jesus”? What distinguishes the prayers of Christians from the inarticulate groanings of pagans? There are too many gods about to make belief qua belief interesting.
Which explains why Tillich and Bultmann, two premier "modern” theologians, were not so modern. They both bought into the notion, conventional wisdom at least since Schleiermacher (no, since Constantine), that the challenge of Christianity was primarily an intellectual one involving the clash of two different systems of belief: how to make old Christianity credible to the new modern world.
Which explains why Karl Barth was much more "new” than Tillich. Tillich still thought that the theological challenge involved the creation of a new and better adapted systematic theology. Barth knew that the theological problem was the creation of a new and better church. Tillich hoped that, by the time one had finished his Systematic Theology, one would think about things differently. Barth hoped that, by the time one had plodded through his Church Dogmatics, one would be different. For Barth taught that the world ended ‘and began, not with Copernicus or even Constantine, but with the advent of a Jew from Nazareth. In the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, all human history must be reviewed. The coming of Christ has cosmic implications. He has changed the course of things. So the theological task is not merely the interpretive matter of translating Jesus into modern categories but rather to translate the world to him. The theologian’s job is not to make the gospel credible to the modern world, but to make the world credible to the gospel.
And that’s new.
Christianity is more than a matter of a new understanding. Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ. Right living is more the challenge than right thinking. The challenge is not the intellectual one but the political one—the creation of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.
Although our assertion is based, as was Barth’s, on a theological assessment of the world, it is also based, as was Barth’s, on a particular experience. For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology. There we experienced the "modern world,” which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.
Barth was horrified that his church lacked the theological resources to stand against Hitler. It was the theological liberals, those who had spent their theological careers translating the faith into terms that could be understood by modern people and used in the creation of modern civilization, who were unable to say no. Some, like Emanuel Hirsch, even said yes to Hitler. (For a troubling account of Hirsch, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985]. What is so troubling about Ericksen’s account is his demonstration that Tillich and Hirsch were not only close friends, but also that their theology was essentially the same. They differed only on what political implications came from their theology.)
Liberal theology had spent decades reassuring us that we did not have to take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously. The particulars of this faith, the limiting, historically contingent, narrative specifics of the faith, such as the Jewishness of Jesus or his messianic eschatology, were impediments for the credibility of modern people and could therefore be removed so that we could get down to the real substance of Christianity. Jesus was not really a Jew, he was the pinnacle of the brightest and best in humanity, the teacher of noble ideals, civilization’s very best. It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.
Barth’s commentary on Romans countered with the insistence that passages like Romans 9-11 must set the tone for Christian thought. There he noted how the liberals had asserted certain humanistic assumptions about human nature and the world that did not need a living God to make them credible. "God is not ‘man’ said in a loud voice,” was Barth’s caustic remark to liberals.
It might have all been explained away by asserting that Hitler was a maniac and the German people were infected with some sort of mass hysteria. Then we North American Christians could say that, although the compromised German church failed, at least ours did not. Unfortunately, the ethical results of our inadequate theology had global implications.
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on a Japanese city. Turning to a group of sailors with him on the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, "This is the greatest thing in history.” Truman, once described as "an outstanding Baptist layman,” was supported by the majority of American Christians, who expressed few misgivings about the bomb. The bomb, however, was the sign of our moral incapacitation, an open admission that we had lost the will and the resources to resist vast evil.
The American church had come a long way to stand beside Harry Truman in 1945. Just a few years earlier, in 1937, when Franco’s forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, killing many civilians, the civilized world was shocked. That same year, when the Japanese bombed the city of Nanking, the world felt it was now dealing with particularly insidious forces which had little intention of obeying historical prohibitions against killing civilians. President Roosevelt issued an urgent appeal to all governments, at the beginning of World War II, saying, "The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind. I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited.”
Yet only several years later, in 1942, Churchill spoke of "beating the life out of Germany” through routine bombing of German cities (after the bombing of London by the Germans). What had begun as the acts of ruthless Fascist dictators had become the accepted practice of democratic nations. Few Christians probably even remember that there was a time when the church was the voice of condemnation for such wantonly immoral acts (George Hunsinger, "Where the Battle Rages: Confessing Christ in America Today,” Dialog, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 264-74).
Obliteration bombing of civilian populations had come to be seen as a military necessity. A terrible evil had been defended as a way to a greater good. After the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier—nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world’s richest nation was a matter of economic necessity.
The project, begun at the time of Constantine, to enable Christians to share power without being a problem for the powerful, had reached its most impressive fruition. If Caesar can get Christians there to swallow the "Ultimate Solution,” and Christians here to embrace the bomb, there is no limit to what we will not do for the modern world. Alas, in leaning over to speak to the modern world, we had fallen in. We had lost the theological resources to resist, lost the resources even to see that there was something worth resisting.
A theologian may at first appear "radical,” or at least new, because he or she has identified with the latest leftist political developments. Tillich was a socialist and appeared critical of bourgeois conventions. In fact, even Tillich’s socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals,” that is, socialists. Today, there are those who take the same path, hoping to update the church, to recover some of the scandal of Jesus by identifying the church with the newest secular solution: Marxism, Feminism, the Sexual Revolution. Of course Barth was no less a socialist than Tillich. Yet Barth saw how our Christian belief makes a difference for how we are political.
That which makes the church "radical” and forever "new” is not that the church tends to lean toward the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church’s view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend toward solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus. These "solutions” are only mirror images of the status quo.
Barth was really more "new,” more "radical,” than Tillich in his determination to get the church accommodated to the gospel rather than the gospel adapted to the status quo in the world. In Barth we rediscovered the New Testament assertion that the purpose of theological endeavor is not to describe the world in terms that make sense, but rather to change lives, to be reformed in light of the stunning assertions of the gospel. Each age must come, fresh and new, to the realization that God, not nations, rules the world. This we can know, not through accommodation, but through conversion. As Barth noted, sanctification and justification go hand in hand. We cannot understand the world until we are transformed into persons who can use the language of faith to describe the world right. Everyone does not already know what we mean when we speak of prayer. Everyone does not already believe that he or she is a sinner. We must be taught that we sin. That is, we must be transformed by the vision of a God who is righteous and just, who judges us on the basis of something more significant than merely what feels right for us.
One cannot know what the world is without knowing that the "greatest thing in the history of the world” is not the bomb (then Truman, now certain anti-nuclear activists) but the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In this sense, a world ended, not on a spring evening in Greenville at the Fox Theater, but on a spring morning in Jerusalem. The reason we Christians must forever be letting go of our Constantinian assertions is that we are forever forgetting how decisive, how eschatological, is the event of Christ.
If the world is basically Christian, then one need not worry about the church. Conversion, detoxification, and transformation are not needed. All that is needed is a slight change of mind, an inner change of heart, a few new insights.
That evening, when the Fox Theater opened for business on Sunday, the world of Constantine in Greenville ended. The question about the relationship between the church and the world was rephrased. A world, constructed and kept secure since Constantine, collapsed. Everything needed to be reexamined, and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly by the glow of the furnaces at Dachau and the fires of Hiroshima, demanded new questions. The world had shifted. Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.
Our aim is to challenge those assumptions and to show what a marvelous opportunity awaits those pastors and laity who sense what an adventure it is to be the church, people who reside here and now, but who live here as aliens, people who know that, while we live here, "our commonwealth is in heaven.”
Having challenged the notion that Christianity is fundamentally a system of belief, in this chapter we want to argue that Christianity is mostly a matter of politics— politics as defined by the gospel. The call to be part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people, to join a counter-cultural phenomenon, a new polis called church. The challenge of the gospel is not the intellectual dilemma of how to make an archaic system of belief compatible with modern belief systems. The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us. In this chapter we will challenge the assumption, so prevalent at least since Constantine, that the church is judged politically by how well or ill the church’s presence in the world works to the advantage of the world.
In the 1960s people often said things like, "The real business of the church is in the world,” and "The world sets the agenda for the church.” Most of those who made such statements depicted the church as a sleeping giant, a great, potentially positive force for good in society if the church could just be awakened out of its lethargy. The American church was said, by commentators like Martin Marty, to consist of two types—the "public” church and the "private” church. The "private” church were those conservative evangelicals who thought that the business of the church was to stick to saving souls and to concern itself with the purely private world of religion. The "public” church (including our denomination) felt that Christians were obligated to go public with their social agenda, working within given social structures to make a better society.
American ecclesiology, however, is not adequately described as a dichotomy between private and public. This is true not only because, since the seventies, increasing numbers of evangelicals have gone public with their social agenda, but because both conservative and liberal churches, left and right, assumed a basically Constantinian approach to the issue of church and world. That is, many pastors, conservative and liberal, felt that their task was to motivate their people to get involved in politics. After all, what other way was there to achieve justice other than through politics?
This "public church” stance was often coupled with a critique of the "churchiness” of the church—of people who think that the church is mostly about "spiritual” matters, about the salvation of the individual, and who fail to appreciate the social character of salvation.
The great apologist for this public church viewpoint was Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr taught the public church how to understand the political process of democracy. In his words,
The democratic process is . . . , a contest of interests dominated by the fortuitous circumstances and not by rational argument.
Democracy must be regarded, on the one hand, as a system of government which men’s rational and moral capacities make possible, and on the other hand, as a system of checks and balances which the corruption by interest and passion make necessary. (Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robinson [New York: Meridian Books, 1967], p. 65)
We challenge the public-church view of church and politics. Of course, one of the ways it can be challenged is by noting the inadequacy of the distinction between the private and public church—namely, Jerry Falwell now sounds like Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet the challenge we want to issue is more decisive. We believe both the conservative and liberal church, the so-called private and public church, are basically accommodationist (that is, Constantinian) in their social ethic. Both assume wrongly that the American church’s primary social task is to underwrite American democracy.
In so doing, they have unwittingly underwritten the moral presuppositions that destroy the church. Aristotle argued that the primary purpose of the polis is the creation of people who are better than they would be without the aid of the polis. Yet what does our society, our polis, do to us? The primary entity of democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our needs, no matter the content of those needs. Rather than helping us to judge our needs, to have the right needs which we exercise in right ways, our society becomes a vast supermarket of desire under the assumption that if we are free enough to assert and to choose whatever we want we can defer eternally the question of what needs are worth having and on what basis right choices are made. What we call "freedom” becomes the tyranny of our own desires. We are kept detached, strangers to one another as we go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our rights. The individual is given a status that makes incomprehensible the Christian notion of salvation as a political, social phenomenon in the family of God. Our economics correlates to our politics. Capitalism thrives in a climate where "rights” are the main political agenda. The church becomes one more consumer-oriented organization, existing to encourage individual fulfillment rather than being a crucible to engender individual conversion into the Body.
Both so-called conservative and liberal theologies begin with the assumption that, since we American Christians are fortunate enough to be born into a constitutional democracy where we have rights, we Christians have no fundamental quarrel with the powers-that-be. Of course, we may not be particularly happy with the current national administration, or certain aspects of the legal process, but we do have great power—unlike those who are not lucky enough to live in a democracy—to change what we do not like at will. And we modern people adore personal power above almost anything else. Our society, in brief, is built on the presumption that the good society is that in which each person gets to be his or her own tyrant (Bernard Shaw’s definition of hell: Hell is where you must do what you want to do).
Most contemporary Christians cannot say enough good about rights. The way to ensure the "freedom of the individual” as well as to create a limited state is to protect the "rights of the individual.” It has thus become our unquestioned assumption that every human person has the "right” to develop his or her own potential to the greatest possible extent, limited only to the parallel of rights of others. But as Lesslie Newbigin has pointed out:
Once the concept of "human rights” has established itself as an axiom, the question inevitably arises: How and by whom are these rights to be secured? With growing emphasis, post-Enlightenment societies have answered: by the state. The nation state, replacing the old concepts of the Holy Church and the Holy Empire, is the centre-piece in the political scene in post-Enlightenment Europe.
After the trauma of the religious wars of the seventeenth century,
Europe settled down to the principle of religious coexistence, and the passions which had formerly been invested in rival interpretations of religion were more and more invested in the nation state. Nationalism became the effective ideology of the European peoples, always at times of crises proving stronger than any other ideological or religious force. If there is any entity to which ultimate loyalty is due, it is the nation state. In the twentieth century we have become accustomed to the fact that—in the name of the nation—Catholics will fight Catholics, Protestants will fight Protestants, and Marxists will fight Marxists. The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above that to the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state. In the present century this movement has been vastly accelerated by the advent of the "welfare state.” National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide— freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want—in a word:
"happiness.” (Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches [Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983], pp.
13-15)
Of course what we fail to note is that the very state created to secure our rights is based on an irresolvable dilemma because it has to present itself in two prima facie incompatible ways. On the one hand, the democratic state modestly claims to be a mere means toward an end.
On the other hand, the same state needs to convince its citizens that it can give them a meaningful identity because the state is the only means of achieving the common good. Dying for this state, as Alasdair MacIntyre has said, is "like being asked to die for the telephone company” ("Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats,” in Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, ed. Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988], p. 149). And yet, to preserve themselves, all states, even democracies, must ask their citizens to die for them.
States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. All societies may go to war, but war for us liberal democracies is special because it gives us a sense of worth necessary to sustain our state. (For a substantiation of this unique role of war and armies for the development of the modern nation state, see Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985].) We are quite literally a people that morally live off our wars because they give us the necessary basis for selfsacrifice so that a people who have been taught to pursue only their own interest can at times be mobilized to die for one another. For example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her wonderful book Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987), quotes Randolf Bourne speaking in 1918:
War—or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy—seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity—on a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. (p. 119)
In short, there is nothing wrong with America that a good war cannot cure.
It is against the backdrop of such social presumptions that we must see the weakness of the liberal church’s flaccid calls for "peace with justice.” For example, a few years ago the National Council of Churches proclaimed one week in October "Peace with Justice Week.” To help celebrate our one week for peace with justice, the council sent member congregations a Peace with Justice poster. The poster depicted a globe, a world, held aloft by a group of different-colored human hands. The Greeks had Atlas, the Arabs had a turtle, we more modern people have disposed of such inadequate cosmologies. We have the multicolored hands of the National Council of Churches to uphold the world for Peace with Justice. In the corner of the poster of the world upheld by the hands was a dove, a dove of peace, presumably. The dove was flying away from the world.
We see this poster as an accurate portrayal of our situation. In chapter 1 we argued that our problem is not one of unbelief. Our problem is not how to make the Christian faith credible to the modern world. Yet in another sense, unbelief or atheism is a problem, not intellectually, but politically. Most of our social activism is formed on the presumption that God is superfluous to the formation of a world of peace with justice. Fortunately, we are powerful people who, because we live in a democracy, are free to use our power. It is all up to us.
The moment that life is formed on the presumption that we are not participants in God’s continuing history of creation and redemption, we are acting on unbelief rather than faith. Does not the Bible teach that war and injustice arise precisely at the moment we cease testifying that our world is in God’s hands and therefore set out to take matters in our hands? Why cannot the National Council of Churches proclaim that to the world? The council cannot preach that on its posters because the council, like most American Christians, assumes that the key to our political effectiveness lies in translating our political assertions into terms that can be embraced by any thinking, sensitive, modern (though disbelieving), average American. Peace with justice.
Christian politics has therefore come to mean, for both conservative and liberal Christians, Christian social activism. Of course, conservative and liberal Christians may differ on the particulars of just what a truly Christian social agenda looks like, but we are one in our agreement that we should use our democratic power in a responsible way to make the world a better place in which to live. Jerry Falwell wants "born again” people in places of power. Prayers must be said in the public schools in order to counter secular humanism. The National Council of Churches, on the other hand, urges the President to use military power in a restrained and humane manner. Such thinking is a form of Constantinianism, which, ironically, underwrites a culture of unbelief.
American Christians, in the name of justice, try to create a society in which faith in a living God is rendered irrelevant or private. For some, religion becomes a purely private matter of individual choice. Stick to saving souls and stay out of politics, it is said. On the other hand, activist Christians who talk much about justice promote a notion of justice that envisions a society in which faith in God is rendered quite unnecessary, since everybody already believes in peace and justice even when everybody does not believe in God.
We argue that the political task of Christians is to be the church rather than to transform the world. One reason why it is not enough to say that our first task is to make the world better is that we Christians have no other means of accurately understanding the world and rightly interpreting the world except by way of the church. Big words like "peace” and "justice,” slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what "Jesus Christ is Lord” means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Pilate permitted the killing of Jesus in order to secure both peace and justice (Roman style) in Judea. It is Jesus' story that gives content to our faith, judges any institutional embodiment of our faith, and teaches us to be suspicious of any political slogan that does not need God to make itself credible.
The church gives us the interpretive skills, a truthful understanding whereby we first see the world for what it is. People often complain that the political agenda of conservative Christians looks suspiciously like the political agenda of conservative secularists—the Republican party on its knees. And it seems inconceivable that an agency of any mainline, Protestant denomination should espouse some social position unlike that of the most liberal Democrats. The church is the dull exponent of conventional secular political ideas with a vaguely religious tint. Political theologies, whether of the left or of the right, want to maintain Christendom, wherein the church justifies itself as a helpful, if sometimes complaining, prop for the state.
In chapter 1 we argued that something fundamental has changed in our world which enables the American church to regain some of its lost theological integrity. The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state. We do not mean to argue that a purely sociological shift has led us to modify our ecclesiology. The church has been all too willing to derive its theology from sociological assessments in the past: If we cannot overcome present sociological realities, we might as well adjust to them and make the best of it.
We confess that our depiction of a sociological shift in the world of the American church arises out of our theological commitments. Indeed, we would not see what we see in the world without that theology. The church does not exist to ask what needs doing to keep the world running smoothly and then to motivate our people to go do it. The church is not to be judged by how useful we are as a "supportive institution” and our clergy as members of a "helping profession.” The church has its own reason for being, hid within its own mandate and not found in the world. We are not chartered by the Emperor.
H. Richard Niebuhr, in his Christ and Culture, offered a typology for conceiving of our theological dilemma. Building on Ernst Troeltsch’s categories of sect versus church, Niebuhr grouped ecclesial traditions as falling somewhere along a continuum of "Christ Above Culture” (the "Social Gospel”) and, at the other end, "Christ Against Culture” (the Anabaptists and other sects that exclusivistically denied the claims of culture). Despite the allegedly sociological nature of Niebuhr’s book and its appearance as an objective description of the church and the world, it was not too difficult to discern which type of ecclesiology Niebuhr preferred: Christ Transforming Culture. Although Niebuhr put the liberals in the "Christ of Culture” camp, his own "Christ Transforming Culture” was the church that liberal, mainline, American Protestantism aspired to be. It neither capitulated to culture nor irresponsibly detached itself from the culture. The transformist church busied itself with making America a better place in which to live, transforming society into something of. which Jesus might approve.
We have come to believe that few books have been a greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of our situation than Christ and Culture. Niebuhr rightly saw that our politics determines our theology. He was right that Christians cannot reject "culture.” But his call to Christians to accept "culture” (where is this monolithic "culture” Niebuhr describes?) and politics in the name of the unity of God’s creating and redeeming activity had the effect of endorsing a Constantinian social strategy. "Culture” became a blanket term to underwrite Christian involvement with the world without providing any discriminating modes for discerning how Christians should see the good or the bad in "culture.”
Niebuhr set up the argument in such a way as to ensure that the transformist approach would be viewed as the most worthy. A democracy like ours must believe that it is making progress, that the people are, through their own power and choice, transforming the world into something better than it would be without their power and choice. Thus Niebuhr set up the argument as if a world-affirming "church” or world-denying "sect” were our only options, as if these categories were a faithful depiction of some historical or sociological reality in the first place. In good, liberal fashion, Niebuhr ensured that the most inclusive ecclesiology would be viewed as the most truthful, that any church becoming too concerned about its identity and the formation of its young would be rejected by American culture as incipiently "sectarian,” as irresponsible in a state that had given us the political tools to transform the world. Christ and Culture thus stands as a prime example of repressive tolerance. Since Niebuhr could appreciate the "rightness” of all the types of churches he described (after all, he claimed that he was only describing, not prescribing), his own pluralism underwrote the implicit assumption that his position (pluralism) was superior to other, more narrow ecclesiology. Pluralism in theology became an ideology for justifying the alleged pluralism of American culture. In Christ and Culture, liberal theology gave a theological rationale for liberal democracy.
There was a subtle repressiveness behind this seemingly innocuous pluralism. Niebuhr failed to describe the various historical or contemporary options for the church. He merely justified what was already there—a church that had ceased to ask the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing, that in fact the world had tamed the church.
It was Niebuhr who taught us to be suspicious of this kind of talk as "sectarian. The church should be willing to suppress its peculiarities in order to participate responsibly in the culture. Once again, this is the same culture that gave us Hiroshima. Ours sounds like an unduly harsh judgment on the thought of a great Christian like Niebuhr—a man who would have abhorred the violence of Hiroshima, a man who tried to find in his theology a place to affirm the unique witness of the church. Yet the problem remains within the structure of his categories—the temptation to believe that Christians are in an all-or-nothing relationship to the culture; that we must responsibly choose to be all, or irresponsibly choose to be sectarian nothing.
When the church confronts the world with a political alternative the world would not otherwise know, is this being "sectarian”? The early Anabaptists had no desire to withdraw from the world, nor do we. They were murdered by Calvinist, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic societies because they attempted to be the church. Their withdrawal came in an attempt to prevent people opposed to them (most of whom also call themselves Christian), from killing their children. The Anabaptists did not withdraw. They were driven out.
The worst that the Constantinian church can say, in its last gasp for life in a post-Constantinian situation, is that what we are calling for here is something that sounds suspiciously "tribal.” If we are going to live in a world of the bomb, say the Constantinians, we Christians must be willing to suppress our peculiarities, join hands with whoever will join hands with us, and work for peace and justice.
Under this argument, to the extent that Christians (or Jews, or Muslims) refuse to take the modern nation state more seriously than they take the peculiarities as Christians (or Jews, or Muslims), they are accused of being "tribal,” hindrances to the creation of a new world order based on international cooperation.
Constantinianism always demanded one, unified state religion in order to keep the Empire together. Today, the new universal religion that demands subservience is not really Marxism or capitalism but the entity both of these ideologies serve so well—the omnipotent state.
We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all—the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity. And the tribalism of nations occurs most viciously in the absence of a church able to say and to show, in its life together, that God, not nations, rules the world.
We must never forget that it was modern, liberal democracy, in fighting to preserve itself, that resorted to the bomb in Hiroshima and the firebombing of Dresden, not to mention Vietnam. This is the political system that must be preserved in order for Christians to be politically responsible?
In saying, "The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy,” we are attempting to indicate an alternative way of looking at the political, social significance of the church. The church need not feel caught between the false Niebuhrian dilemma of whether to be in or out of the world, politically responsible or introspectively irresponsible. The church is not out of the world. There is no other place for the church to be than here. In the sixties, it became fashionable to speak of the need for the church to be "in” the world, serving the world. We think that we could argue that being in the world, serving the world, has never been a great problem for the church. Alas, our greatest tragedies occurred because the church was all too willing to serve the world. The church need not worry about whether to be in the world. The church’s only concern is how to be in the world, in what form, for what purpose.
Earlier we said that Nazi Germany was a devastating test for the church. Here the church was quite willing to "serve the world.” The capitulation of the church before Nazism, the theological incapacity of the church to see things clearly and to call them by their proper names, sends a chill down the spine of today’s church. Yet there were some who, though they did not always know what was to be done, at least had retained the vision to say what was true. This was the Confessing Church. Was this church being "liberal” or "conservative,” "sectarian” or "tribal” when it said no to Hitler?
In 1934, Karl Barth wrote "The Barmen Declaration,” the confessing church’s attempt to see things clearly. There it was said:
Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.
We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation. (In The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, tr. Arthur Cochrane [Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1962], p. 239)
Note the exclusive, not the inclusive, nature of this declaration, its determination, not first to do right but to hear right, again to assert the rather (is there a better word?) imperial claims of the Lordship of Christ. "The Barmen Declaration” stands in marked contrast to a church willing to adjust its claims to those of Caesar in service to the world.
More helpful than Niebuhr’s typology in Christ and Culture is that of John Howard Yoder ("A People in the World: Theological Interpretation,” in The Concept of the Believer’s Church, ed. James Leo Garrett, Jr. [Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press,
1969], pp. 252-83). Yoder distinguishes between the activist church, the conversionist church, and the confessing church.
The activist church is more concerned with the building of a better society than with the reformation of the church. Through the humanization of social structures, the activist church glorifies God. It calls on its members to see God at work behind the movements for social change so that Christians will join in movements for justice wherever they find them. It hopes to be on the right side of history, believing it has the key for reading the direction of history or underwriting the progressive forces of history. The difficulty, as we noted earlier, is that the activist church appears to lack the theological insight to judge history for itself. Its politics becomes a sort of religiously glorified liberalism.
On the other hand we have the conversionist church. This church argues that no amount of tinkering with the structures of society will counter the effects of human sin. The promises of secular optimism are therefore false because they attempt to bypass the biblical call to admit personal guilt and to experience reconciliation to God and neighbor. The sphere of political action is shifted by the conversionist church from without to within, from society to the individual soul. Because this church works only for inward change, it has no alternative social ethic or social structure of its own to offer the world. Alas, the political claims of Jesus are sacrificed for politics that inevitably seems to degenerate into a religiously glorified conservatism.
The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other two approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.
We might be tempted to say that faithfulness rather than effectiveness is the goal of a confessing church. Yet we believe this is a false alternative. Few of us would admit to holding an ecclesiology that believes in either faithfulness regardless of cost or results, or effectiveness that is purely pragmatic. The person who says, "The church must give up some of its principles in order to have a more significant impact on society,” is still claiming that the goal of influencing society is a worthy principle. "Effectiveness” usually means that I have selected one principle as being more important than others. For the confessing church to be determined to worship God alone "though the heavens fall” implies that, if these heavens fall, this church has a principle based on the belief that God is not stumped by such dire situations. For the church to set the principle of being the church above other principles is not to thumb our noses at results. It is trusting God to give us the rules, which are based on what God is doing in the world to bring about God’s good results.
The confessing church, like the conversionist church, also calls people to conversion, but it depicts that conversion as a long process of being baptismally engrafted into a new people, an alternative polis, a countercultural social structure called church. It seeks to influence the world by being the church, that is, by being something the world is not and can never be, lacking the gift of faith and vision, which is ours in Christ. The confessing church seeks the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God. The confessing church has no interest in withdrawing from the world, but it is not surprised when its witness evokes hostility from the world. The confessing church moves from the activist church’s acceptance of the culture with a few qualifications, to rejection of the culture with a few exceptions. The confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as part of its necessary proclamatory action. This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most "effective” thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith.
Yoder also notes that the confessing church will be a church of the cross. As Jesus demonstrated, the world, for all its beauty, is hostile to the truth. Witness without compromise leads to worldly hostility. The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers.
The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s. The cross stands as God’s (and our) eternal no to the powers of death, as well as God’s eternal yes to humanity, God’s remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices.
The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.
Sometime ago, when the United States bombed military and civilian targets in Libya, a debate raged concerning the morality of that act. One of us witnessed an informal gathering of students who argued the morality of the bombing of Libya. Some thought it was immoral, others thought it was moral. At one point in the argument, one of the students turned and said, "Well, preacher, what do you think?”
I said that, as a Christian, I could never support bombing, particularly bombing of civilians, as an ethical act.
"That’s just what we expected you to say,” said another. "That’s typical of you Christians. Always on the high moral ground, aren’t you? You get so upset when a terrorist guns down a little girl in an airport, but when President Reagan tries to set things right, you get indignant when a few Libyans get hurt.”
The assumption seems to be that there are only two political options: Either conservative support of the administration, or liberal condemnation of the administration followed by efforts to let the U. N. handle it.
"You know, you have a point,” I said. "What would be a Christian response to this?” Then I answered, right off the top of my head, "A Christian response might be that tomorrow morning The United Methodist Church announces that it is sending a thousand missionaries to Libya. We have discovered that it is fertile field for the gospel. We know how to send missionaries. Here is at least a traditional Christian response.”
"You can’t do that,” said my adversary.
"Why?” I asked. "You tell me why.”
"Because it’s illegal to travel in Libya. President Reagan will not give you a visa to go there.”
"No! That’s not right,” I said. "I'll admit that we can’t go to Libya, but not because of President Reagan. We can’t go there because we no longer have a church that produces people who can do something this bold. But we once did.”
We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.