Theological Journal – September 12 Lee Camp: Scandalous Witness (13)

 PROPOSITION 13 Exemplary Political Witness Is the Goal

Bearing witness to the world as God intended and it will one day be is the witness of the church.

Three main historical models of Witness

1.       Medieval Catholic

-the hard teachings of Jesus are for a special religious elite. Conventional Christianity is for the bulk of the church. Nominal faith prevailed.

-Monasticism grew up as a response to this nominalistic faith. This led to some renewal but also to fragmentation and further dilution of Christian witness

-it became the default form of witness in Christendom in which the teaching of Christ was often just set aside.

-nevertheless, this approach where church and state worked hand-in-glove with the former serving as chaplain of the latter. Growth of hospitals, education, and science were gifts of this approach we should retain even if we reject the model itself

 

2.       Luther and the Protestant Reformation

-“For Martin Luther the key dividing line does not run between two classes of people in the church, between the religious and the lay. The key dividing line, we might say, runs through every individual. Thus, Luther draws a sharp distinction between the secular and the spiritual, between the inner self and what one does in the world.” The hard teachings of Jesus are for all Christians but only in their personal lives. Their vocational roles were governed by social convention and expectation.

 

-Weaknesses:

a. privatization of faith

b. abetted growth of nation-state which led to fragmentation in which Christians committed to the faith of their state (usually that of the king or ruler) and to war against Christians of other nations for national goals and interests. “With Luther privatizing fundamental Christian witness to the realm of the spiritual and the personal, the nation-state takes on the role of historical Messiah takes on the role of the primary bearer of the meaning of history. Seeds of the bastardization of Christian hope are thereby sown.”

c. ”And there is another tradition extending from Lutheranism that can provide us immense help: the notion of realism, which insists that we take realistically the sin- ful nature of human history. The question, however, is whether we may employ such realism without falling prey to Luther’s other failings.”

 

3.       The Radical Reformation (Anabaptists)

- “Adult believer baptism, in that context, was accounted a pushback against the assumptions of Christendom. It granted a believer a substantive voluntary will in taking up Christian faith and taking up the way of the nonviolent Jesus. This was a threat to both Lutheran and Catholic models of the day, which presumed the legitimacy of Christendom.”

-this voluntary commitment to take faith and the teachings of Jesus seriously threatened the social fabric of Christendom. Anabaptists were often persecuted and killed.

- “These radicals insisted on a voluntary community of believers who would be an outpost of the present-and-coming kingdom of God. They would, in their life together, seek to exhibit the reconciling and suffering love of God to the world. Their task, to use the language of the twentieth-century Georgian Clarence Jordan, was to be a demonstration plot exhibiting what it might look like to let the seeds of God’s goodness be grown in our midst. The persuasive power of the gospel had to be located, for these radicals, in its winsomeness, not in its terror.”

-is this simply withdrawal? “Some discount the radical tradition as a form of wrongheaded withdrawal. Be- fore considering this claim at some length in the next chapter, we may note that the body of Christ is gifted with a variety of giftings. Thus the Amish withdrawal to rural agrarian life or the monastic withdrawal to pray in the hills of Kentucky both may make significant contributions to the Christian witness in American culture. But we need not see this sort of withdrawal as the faithful form of Christian witness or even as the primary form of the radical witness. Surely particular communities of Christians might, however difficult it may be, find ways to bear witness to the grace of the gospel in a great variety of social contexts. There are in fact plenty of examples from within the radical tradition in which a different posture prevailed. These saw that their greatest contribution to so-called civil society could be made neither in privatizing their faith nor in spiritualizing away the import of the Sermon on the Mount or setting aside the way of Christ—but that their greatest contributions could be made precisely in holding onto all these things in public. In fact, the case has been made that this tradition played a key role in the development of modern democracies. Durnbaugh observes, “One point that must be made is that the effect of the life and witnesses of the Believers’ Churches helped create modern western democracy. It can even be said that these groups have made their most effective contributions to politics by their faithful, even stubborn, adherence to their religious views.”