chosen object lesson. Let a cell of that body be recreated in every place, composed of believers whose life together proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes. Let this death be proclaimed, and let the universality of that communion be visible in every place in the reality of persons whose lives are wholly shared with one another and not by a definition in words or in ordination. Let us be freed from our capacity to separate the action and its meaning until our eating together truly means that our life is real communion.
Then forces of social renewal, like those unleashed in the first Christian centuries, may well go out from this table. Like the New Testament, the “Brotherly Union” (from which we quoted before) clarifies the unity of the church by speaking of its separation from the hostile world. Other theologies can define the sacraments without reference to the world, for the emblems and the ritual have their meaning in themselves. That meaning was defined in the age of Christendom. But, if the “one bread” we break truly points to “one body,” that meaning demands an awareness of the church’s mission in the world. The church is not an institution dispensing sacramental benefits to the population at large but a people called together for a mission in and to the world. Its separate identity is not a proud or fearful retreat but the presupposition of mission.
We already observed that it is the free church that alone stands toward the world in a genuinely missionary posture when renouncing a proprietary control even over children of believers in baptism. Only if one recognizes the line between belief and unbelief, between community and alienation, can the message of reconciliation be known. Here we touch on one of the genuinely live issues in contemporary ecumenical thought on the mission of the church in the modern world. Now that the alliance of church and state is ending, those theologies that were molded by the alliance would like to reestablish it by understanding mission only in the sense of a pedagogical service to society as a whole. Reconciliation then means a call to all people to live together in mutual respect and to reorder their society in a more human way.
If anyone questions the needfulness of this message to society, it would be a misunderstanding of what we need to debate. In the past, it has been the believers churches that have had this kind of impact on society and not those official churches to which one belonged by virtue of birth. But we doubt that such a pedagogical proclamation is either possible or desirable if it is not being made by a visible, committed community in which at least something of that reconciliation and social reordering—which the gospel commands and promises—is in process. Missions and nonconformity to the world are not alternatives but are mutually prerequisite. It is the city set on a hill that cannot be hid. It is where Christians will love one another—as Jesus himself asked it of his Father—that the world will believe.
In order to be understood by humanity, or in order to deal with their own common concerns, it may well be that Christians in our day will be led to change the times, or places, or forms of their meeting together. There is much to learn in the current ecumenical studies of the missionary structure of the congregation. But the deeper need, and one with which the disciples’ church must help, is to rediscover the congregational structure of the mission. Let there be, first of all, a loving community of whom it can be said, “you have received Grace, you are God’s people,”12 and the world’s capacity to understand will not be a problem.
1. 1 Cor 11:26.
2. 1 Cor 11:25.
3. 1 Cor 11:24.
4. 1 Cor 11:26.
5. See 1 Cor 11:17–22.
6. Acts 4:34.
7. Mark 10:29–30, emphasis added by author.
8. Luke 1:53.
9. The Schleitheim Confession, trans. and ed. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1973) 11.
10. This is commonly referred to as The Schleitheim Confession, although it is important to note the particular emphasis intended by the author here.
11. The Schleitheim Confession, 10–11.
12. See 1 Pet 2:10.
4. Walking in the Resurrection
Baptism shall be given to all those who have been taught repentance and the amendment of life and [who] believe truly that their sins are taken away through Christ, to all those who desire to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and be buried with him in death, so that they might rise with him.1
One of the great unsolved problems of the Reformation era was the foundation of Christian morality in its relationship to the gospel: What does it mean to live a life pleasing to God? How can it be done? Why should it be done?
On this point, the medieval Roman Catholic tradition had been perfectly clear. The moral life is to be understood in terms of law and reward. There was no question of what to do. This was taught infallibly by the church and that infallibility reached right down into the life of the individual through the confessional. It was just as clear why to do it: fear of excommunication and social ostracism in this life or worse punishment in the next was the goad for the common man. For the religious, there might also be a positive call: the promise of social recognition in this life and the vision of God as an earned reward in the next.
Whatever must be said about the inadequacies of this social system, we must grant that it provided a solid basis for the teaching of moral obligation. It provided medieval society with something to lean on. It educated a whole continent, creating an entire civilization in which the notion of moral obligation rooted in the revealed will of God was fundamental. For the first time in history, it created a civilization in which God was conceived of as essentially a moral person.
And what does the preaching of the Reformation do to all of this? If it is proclaimed that a person is justified before God because of faith and not of works, why then should works be needed? If, in the first place, it is impossible to justify ourselves before God by our morality and if, in the second place, God has chosen precisely to save sinners, would we not magnify the grace of God by accepting our sinfulness and ceasing to struggle against it so that we might be all the more dependent upon God?
Furthermore, the knowledge of the will of God is undermined. The pope or the parish priest no longer has a monopoly on the truth. Everyone can read one’s Bible; everyone can know what it means to be a Christian in one’s own vocation. Traditions are of no value; every one is one’s own priest.
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