Ist Das Alles?

Is this it?

I have been reading Kaerkkaeinen’s book, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical & Global Perspective. The one thing that surprised me was how much I identify with the Free Church tradition. The Free Church tradition, according to most theologians, has its origin in the Radical Reformation and emerging Anabaptism. One of the central convictions of free churches is that “the true congregation of Christ is those who are truly converted, who are born from above of God, who are of a regenerate mind by the operation of the Holy Spirit through the hearing of the Word of God, and have become the children of God” (62). In some sense there is the need to distinguish the true church from the false church and true believers from nominal believers.

The Free Church affirms that people have unmediated access to God, meaning they don’t have to go through some kind of institution or a priest to have access to God (the priesthood of all believers is affirmed).

One of the hallmarks of free churches is believer’s baptism. Growing up in a Free Church in Germany (Freie Evangelische Gemeinde) the thing that distinguished us from the other churches was believer’s baptism – (that’s what distinguished us from the Lutheran and the Catholic Church in Germany). Thus the church is made up of born again believers.

 

Kaerkkaenen identifies Miroslav Volf, a professor at Yale University, as one of the most creative Free Church thinkers. In his work, Volf poses the question, “What is the church?” and “Where is the church?” Kaerkkaeinen points out that “Volf sees God’s eschatological new creation as the all-embracing framework for an appropriate understanding of the church” (135). Furthermore, Volf distinguishes between the general and the particular presence of the Spirit and draws the following conclusion,

Wherever the Spirit of Christ, which as the eschatological gift anticipates God’s new creation in history (see Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 1:22; Col 1:11-20), is present in its ecclesially constitutive activity, there is the church. The Spirit unites the gathered congregation with the triune God and integrates it into a history extending from Christ, indeed, from the Old Testament saints, to the eschatological new creation. This Spirit-mediated relationship with the triune God …constitutes an assembly into a church. (129 – After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity)

The Catholic and Orthodox Church notion that the sacraments and the bishop are the guarantors of the Spirit’s presence is rejected by Volf. Thus the conditions of ecclesiality differ greatly between the Catholic / Orthodox camp and the Free Church. Volf argues that the only “condition for the ecclesiality of the church is the presence of Christ amidst the gathered community as mentioned in Matthew 18:20: ‘for where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’[….] Volf comes to the conclusion that ‘where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, not only is Christ present among them, but a Christian church is there as well, perhaps a bad church, a church that may well transgress against love and truth, but a church nonetheless’” (136).

 

In some sense Volf’s conclusions on the conditions for ecclesiality seem overly simple. However, I wonder if we make things sometimes too complicated that we build walls around the church (Martin Luther attacked some of those walls). Volf does not stop there he adds other things that he finds indispensible for ecclesiality (people assemble in the name of Christ; commitment to his will; confession of faith; baptism and the Lord’s Supper; etc.).  For me the question is not only what are the condition for ecclesiality, but what is church at its best?