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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Evangelical. Sacramental. Pentecostal. Christian communities tend to identify with one of these labels over the other two. Evangelical churches emphasize the importance of Scripture and preaching. Sacramental churches emphasize the importance of the eucharistic table. And pentecostal churches emphasize the immediate presence and power of the Holy Spirit. But must we choose between them? Could the church be all three?Drawing on his reading of the New Testament, the witness of Christian history, and years of experience in Christian ministry and leadership, Gordon T. Smith argues that the church not only can be all three, but in fact must be all three in order to truly be the church. As the church navigates the unique global challenges of pluralism, secularism, and fundamentalism, the need for an integrated vision of the community as evangelical, sacramental, and pentecostal becomes ever more pressing. If Jesus and the apostles saw no tension between these characteristics, why should we?
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EVANGELICAL, SACRAMENTAL& PENTECOSTAL
WHY THE CHURCH SHOULD BE ALL THREE
for joella
INTRODUCTION
I CAN REMEMBER SITTING ON a bus in Lima, Peru, along with others who were attending a conference where I was speaking to a group of theological educators from around Latin America. After we boarded and as we headed to the conference venue, I began chatting with those seated across the aisle from me and learned that they were from an Anglican theological college in Chile. We conversed a little more, and then I asked, “So what is distinctive about the Anglican Church in Chile?” The reply quickly offered was, “The Anglican church in Chile is evangelical, not sacramental.” Interesting reply, I thought, and while I did not ask it out loud, my immediate thought was, but do we have to choose? Why the immediate need to insist it is one and not the other and, in effect, to pit them against each other?
Then later that same year I was in Romania, visiting with the faculty of a Baptist theological college in Bucharest. From there I was scheduled to head across town to pay a visit to the pentecostal theological college. I let my hosts at the Baptist school know where I was headed and asked about the differences between the two schools and their ecclesial families. My host at the Baptist school made it very clear that these were two very different worlds: we are evangelical, they are pentecostal. And in moving between these two “worlds” in Romania, I was reminded of similar contrasts around the world—between Presbyterian and pentecostal in Brazil, or Baptist and pentecostal in the Ukraine, or Methodist and charismatic in Cuba—and how one could easily get the impression that these are two different religious traditions.
I grew up in Latin America, in Ecuador. For my teen years, I worshiped with my family at the Templo Evangelico Alianza, on the corner of Quito Street and Avenida Primera de Mayo in Guayaquil. The church was founded in 1915 and reflects a century of evangelical missionary presence in Ecuador. The pastor who baptized me in that church was the Rev. Miguel Lecaro Tobar. The church was very definitely located, theologically and spiritually, as not sacramental; my baptism, however meaningful, was as much about what it did not mean rather than what it might mean. Pastor Lecaro insisted that this was not a sacrament, not a means of grace in itself. And the church was also very clear that we were not pentecostal or charismatic. This was an evangelical church, meaning that the heart and soul of worship was the Word preached, and Pastor Lecaro was quintessentially a preacher.
My evangelical heritage typically assumed that one had to choose: evangelical meant that you rejected the sacramentalism of not only the Catholic Church but any Protestant church that even seemed to hint at the possibility that the sacramental rites were a means of grace. Further, evangelical meant “not pentecostal” in the sense that we were very much a people of the Scriptures—read, preached, studied—and that as such we were suspicious of any kind of experience of a spirit or the Spirit that was not directly mediated through the Scriptures. Tension between Evangelicals and Pentecostals actually came to a head during the second Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism in Manila in 1989, with many pentecostal Christians actually threatening to leave the conference. With gratitude we need to recognize the huge role that Professor James Packer played in that congress, assuring those present that we are all called, to quote the Pauline line that Packer uses for a book title, to “keep in step with the Spirit.”
But do we need to choose? Or can we be pentecostal, evangelical, and sacramental? Indeed, I wonder if we need to be, if in fact we want to appropriate as fully as possible the grace of the ascended Christ.
In 1953 Lesslie Newbigin published one of the most important books on ecclesiology1 written in the twentieth century, The Household of God. Ordained with the Church of Scotland, he was writing from Madurai, India, where he served as bishop of the Church of South India. And as many have noted, his unique vantage point from both East and West enhanced his already astute theological insight into the nature of the church, or what it means to be the people of God. In this publication he speaks of the church, in distinct chapters, as Protestant, Catholic, and pentecostal. By Protestant, he meant the Lutheran and evangelical tradition of stressing the importance of faith in response to the Word preached. By Catholic, he meant the perspective that grants the sacraments pride of place in religious life. And by pentecostal, he meant that perspective that stressed, in his words, “experienced effects.”
Or, put differently (still Newbigin), in the first, the church is the gathering of those who hear and believe the gospel; in the second, the church is found in sacramental participation in the community that is in historical continuity with the apostles; and in the third, the church is the fellowship of those who receive and abide in the Spirit.
While I am going to use different language in the chapters that follow, I am indebted to Newbigin for the fundamental insight that there are three distinct angles by which we might consider and live in the grace of the ascended Christ. We do not need to choose one of them. Indeed, perhaps it is imperative that we not choose but actually embrace and engage each as the necessary counterpart of the other. In other words, not only is it not necessary to choose, it is crucial that we learn how each is an essential means in dynamic interplay with the other, by which we appropriate the grace of God.
This consideration of these three angles or perspectives suggests that there is an ecology of grace—a dynamic, a kind of eco-system, with distinctive contours that brings us to an appreciation of the very way that grace functions, with a generative counterpoint between Word, sacrament, and the immediate presence of the Spirit, with each known and experienced in the fullness of grace precisely because this is how grace works.
Recognizing this requires that we begin where we must begin, with the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ Jesus. The Christian faith is Trinitarian. And yet it is also Christocentric; there is to Christian identity, practice, and experience what Michael Welker aptly calls a “Christological concentration.”2 The goal and dynamic of the Christian life is to be “in Christ.” Or, as Paul puts it so eloquently in Colossians 1:27-28, this is the mystery of the gospel, “Christ in you, the hope of Glory.” And thus Paul therefore concludes, “It is [Christ] whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” Paul stresses this precisely and intentionally after the hymn of praise to Christ Jesus, whom he describes as the image of the invisible God, the one in whom the fullness of God dwells, and in and through whom God is reconciling all things in heaven and on earth to himself (Col 1:15-20).
Thus the goal of the church, its reason for being, is to live in dynamic communion with its Living Head: growing up into Christ, maturing in Christ, living in real time, organically, in the grace of Christ Jesus.
Paul presumes through all of this something that believers must keep in mind as they consider the grace of God and its place in the life of the church and the world, that everything, literally everything, pivots upon and is drawn up into the wonder of a living, ascended Christ. We begin here; we end here. Christ ascended. In chapters one and two I will be providing a more comprehensive consideration of the ecology of grace in the Gospel of John and the Luke–Acts narrative. And I will be stressing that both the Gospel of John and then the Luke–Acts narrative assume the ascension. Both only make sense in light of the ascension.
And yet the most extended and focused attention to the ascension is found in the book of Hebrews. Indeed, global theologians often comment that the lack of a dynamic theology of the ascension in the life of the Western evangelical church is in part due to a neglect of the book of Hebrews in her preaching and teaching.
In the book of Hebrews, the work of Christ is portrayed as a duality: cross and ascension. Thus Hebrews opens with the ode to Christ that includes the line, “When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb 1:3). The same dynamic of cross and ascension emerges again toward the end of the book of Hebrews. “Looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).
Jesus, to whom we look, is the pioneer and perfecter of faith. He is a pioneer in that he goes before us, leading the way, establishing the path and the example. We follow Jesus. But he is also perfecter in that through his work, he makes possible our following.
Thus the Christ Jesus who is profiled in the book of Hebrews is the ascended Christ. And more, what defines the Christian life is our participation in the life of the ascended Christ. The ascension becomes the dynamic focal point for the Christian life and experience, as the book of Hebrews make clear early on in those tremendously comforting words:
Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb 4:14-16)
Jesus is spoken of as the great high priest who has passed through the heavens (Heb 4:14). This is the identity of Christ—crucified, yes, but crucified and now ascended. It is this dynamic between cross and ascension that, in effect, defines the Christology of this book in the New Testament.
In other words, in the book of Hebrews, the salvation of God is not defined solely and narrowly as something that is transacted for us, external to us and then applied or imputed to us.
Yes, there is an external action; yes, and, of course, this external action—the cross of Christ—defines all of history and defines our lives. Everything depends on this: Christ, in the language of the book of Hebrews, “endured the cross.” And yet it is a truncated gospel, a partial and incomplete gospel, if our understanding of the cross is not anchored in both the incarnation that set it up and the ascension that gave it ultimate meaning.
And the emphasis on the ascension reflects a particular vision of the Christian life. Fullness in Christ, maturity in Christ—the goal or telos of the Christian life—is to be drawn into the very life of God.
We are taken up in Christ, found in him, participating with him and thus able to enter—in him and with him—into the holy place. We become partakers of Christ (Heb 3:14 KJV).
The question this book considers is precisely this: How do we become partakers, entering into the grace of the risen and ascended Christ? How and by what means are heaven and earth transcended and the grace of the crucified and ascended Christ made available and appropriated by the church and by the individual Christian?
By “the grace of God,” we mean the liberating assurance of forgiveness. We mean the capacity to live in peace, love, and joy—the huge longing of the human soul. We mean actual divine strength that infuses our human frames and makes us capable of living the Christian life. Most of all, by “the grace of God,” we mean the capacity and experience of life in Christ—for the individual Christian and for the church. And this assumes, of course, that the Christian life is not self-constructed, but lived in response to the grace of God and in dependence on the grace of God. The church is not self-constructed. It is quintessentially the fruit of divine initiative and grace.
In what follows, I will begin with the Gospel of John and ask, with particular reference to the intriguing line in John 15:4, not only what it means to “abide in Christ as Christ abides in [us]” but specifically how this grace, the grace of being “in Christ,” is even possible and how it is to be sustained. Then I will do the same for the Luke–Acts narrative to demonstrate along similar lines how the church is to remain in dynamic communion with the risen and ascended Christ. As I trust will be patently evident, both the Gospel of John and the Luke–Acts narrative signal or indicate that our union with Christ can be understood as evangelical, sacramental, or pentecostal, or, more properly speaking, that both New Testament texts assume it is all three.
In chapter three, I will bring the three together and do two things: profile how the significant voices of John Calvin and John Wesley might speak to these questions and also show how the three might be considered together and why they each matter, together. From there, I will proceed to a full chapter on each, where I will consider this question: So then, at root, what does it mean to speak of the church as evangelical . . . as sacramental . . . as pentecostal?
THE EXTRAORDINARYINVITATION OF JOHN 15:4
JOHN 14–16 ARE TYPICALLY SPOKEN OF as the “upper room discourse,” and aptly so. At the conclusion of his earthly ministry, immediately prior to the cross, Jesus is in an intentional teaching mode with his disciples. Readers sometimes miss, though, that the teaching of Jesus in these chapters sets up what is to follow: Christ Jesus will be ascended; following the death and resurrection, Jesus will be returning to the Father; and the disciples need to be ready for this new reality.
The character and manner of their relationship with Christ will be altered. Big changes are coming. They will no longer see Jesus, hear him, or touch him. Well, they will hear and see and touch, but the terms of their relationship will change and change significantly.
The high point in these comments—everything prior to John 14 and 15 leads up to this declaration, and everything that follows, in the rest of John 15 and into John 16, fleshes it out further—is the extraordinary invitation of John 15:4, when Jesus says to his disciples with intimacy, power, and purpose: “Abide in me as I abide in you.”
This remarkably simple invitation captures the heart of the matter. It was to this end that Christ came as the incarnate one; it was to this end that Christ is moving to the cross. The intent is not merely that they would be saved from their sins. In one sense, of course, that was the agenda. But to what end? This salvation means that Jesus’ disciples would find in Christ their true home even as they learn to be the one in whom Christ dwells. And Christ dwells individually—personally, as the dynamic of their faith and experience—and collectively, for the church finds its true identity as the community that abides in Christ as Christ abides in the church.
Admittedly, it might be a challenge for many if not most of us to get our minds around this. What does it mean to abide in Christ as Christ abides in us? What does Jesus envision when he says this to his disciples?
Our answer comes by two things that Jesus offers the original disciples. The most obvious is that Jesus gives the disciples an image, a picture by which they and we can get a sense of what Jesus means. He speaks of the vine and the vine-grower and of being grafted into the vine. It is a compelling image that is familiar to most if not all readers of the New Testament. Jesus speaks of God the Father as the gardener in this extended metaphor. Jesus himself is the Vine. This is so very significant; the original disciples would have assumed Israel was the vine. Now Jesus declares to them that he is the vine. And that is a clear reminder to the contemporary Christian that in the end, the church, however vital to the purposes of God and essential to what it means to live in the vine, is not to be confused with the vine. Jesus is the vine. And then—the point of the metaphor—life is found and fruit is borne as the disciples are “grafted” into the vine, that is, into Christ Jesus himself.
We would ideally feel the full force of this: our lives are so interconnected with the life of Jesus that we cannot be explained; we do not live, except by dynamic and essential communion with Christ. We quite literally draw our life from him; we live not merely by virtue of what he has done for us in the past but further that now, by virtue of the cross, we are being drawn up into the life of Christ and the life we live we live “in Christ.”
And then, second, Jesus offers something that may be even more powerful and compelling, though less obvious perhaps on first read. We see that the vision of the Christian life to which we are called in this text is dynamically portrayed to us—subtly, but powerfully—through the lens of the life of the triune God. What Jesus does here is simply breathtaking. And it must not be missed, else we do not feel the force of what Jesus calls us to in John 15:4.
John 14 is, in the estimation of many, the great Trinitarian chapter of Holy Scripture. Jesus makes it as clear as possible that he and the Father are one yet distinct and that his life, as the Son of God, is intimately one with that of the Father—as Jesus abides in the love of the Father and does the will of the Father. Indeed, he even says something that clearly anticipates John 15:4, when he observes that “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” and then he speaks of “the Father who dwells in me” (Jn 14:10-11).
But then, just as the reader is beginning to make some sense of that, we have the stunning revelation that there are not two but three: Jesus will not leave his disciples orphaned, but promises instead to send the Holy Spirit, a theme that is then picked up again in John 16.
Furthermore, Jesus speaks to the unique fellowship, or communion, that exists within the Holy Trinity, a communion where to know the one is to the know the other two. What demarcates this extraordinary relationship, Father-Son-Spirit, is love. The whole description of the dynamic of the Trinity in John 14 ends with the words that Jesus has said and done all that he has so that the world would know that he, Jesus, loves the Father (Jn 14:31).
The ancient church had a particular word, perichōrēsis, to describe this union of love, this giving and receiving of the triune God. It is a word that is unique to the fellowship of the Trinity, and it has been sustained in our theological lexicon through the Eastern Orthodox tradition. It speaks of the wonder of the most beautiful thing of all, the glory and wonder of the triune God, Father-Son-Spirit, living in dynamic and life-giving community, sustained by the love they have for the other.
Then we come to John 15 and the call of John 15:4: “Abide in me as I abide in you.” And what captures our imagination is that Jesus portrays the dynamic of this call, its essential elements or features, through the same phrases that Jesus has just been using to describe his relationship with the Father within the Holy Trinity. As Jesus abides in the love of the Father, we are to abide in the love of Jesus. As Jesus lived by the word and will of the Father, so we are called to allow his word to abide in us and to live as those who do his will.
In other words, in some mysterious way, the phenomenal inter-communion of Father, Son, and Spirit sets the stage for the fellowship that we have with Christ. And our appreciation or understanding of the Trinity is the lens through which we are to consider our relationship with Christ. We enter into fellowship with Christ—abiding in him—and we are drawn into the life of the triune God, individually and corporately, as the church.
Both of these images call us to a realization that the Christian life is defined first and foremost by union with Christ.
Thus three things call for special emphasis. First, the animating dynamic of the Christian life is not a Christological principle or a doctrine about Christ, however important it is for us to have an understanding of Christ Jesus that is faithful to the Scriptures and to the Christian tradition. Rather, what defines us, animates us, not merely informs but transforms us, is Christ himself who in real time dwells in our midst and in our lives.
Second, it is therefore very important to stress that the heart and soul of the Christian existence is not ultimately about being Christlike, however much that might be a good thing. It is rather that we would be united with Christ. So much contemporary reflection on the Christian life speaks of discipleship as becoming more and more like Jesus. There are two potential problems with viewing this Christlikeness as the Christian ideal and the goal of the church. On the one hand, this is problematic because Christlikeness is derivative of something else, namely, union with Christ. And to pursue it on its own actually distracts us from the true goal of the Christian life.
And then also, when Christlikeness is the goal, we get caught up in debates about what Christlikeness looks like and so easily the church descends to a less than subtle form of legalism as we impose on the church a vision of what it means to be “like Christ.”
And then third, so much piety, especially in evangelical circles, presents what might be called a transactional understanding of Christian spirituality—that Christ has “transacted” something on our behalf. While Christ has definitely acted on our behalf, it was to an end; his actions, notably his death, were not an end in themselves. The purpose of the cross was not merely about a transaction, effected for us and for our salvation. The cross had a purpose, an intended outcome: namely, union with Christ.
So we have the call “abide in me as I abide in you” (Jn 15:4). We have the image of the vine and the powerful references to the intimacy and fellowship within the Trinity. But we still have the question. How is this even possible? Christ is the ascended Lord at the right hand of the Father. And we are invited—called—into this union with Christ, a union anticipated in the amazing encounter Jacob had with heaven—the ladder, between heaven and earth, between God and humanity, between Christ Jesus and ourselves.
How can heaven and earth be transcended? How can we, mere mortals, be in dynamic fellowship and union with Christ, Lord of heaven and earth, one with the Father and the Spirit?
In the history of the church there have been three defining and paradigmatic answers—three answers that have in their own right each had a profound influence on the church and what it means to be the church. Three answers: the evangelical, the sacramental, and the pentecostal. And for each, the case can be made from the Gospel of John that this is indeed the answer to the question of how we can speak of mutual abiding in Christ.
All three answers or responses presume the cross. They each assume the passion of Christ (Jn 19). Each only makes sense in light of the work of Christ as the crucified one. But then we are asking this: Given the cross, how is the grace—gained, one might say, on and in the cross—effected in our lives? How are the saving benefits of the cross made available to the church and to the world? How is this grace available and actually effected in the life of the individual Christian believer?
THE EVANGELICAL ANSWER
How can Christ abide in us even as we abide in him? How can we speak of this mutual co-habitation, so dynamic that it can be thought of as comparable in kind to the mutual love and fellowship that is found within the Trinity? The evangelical response is simple: Christ abides in us through the Word of God, most notably through the Scriptures read, studied, preached, and meditated upon. It is the Word that transcends heaven and earth; it is by the Word that we are drawn into fellowship with Christ and thus with the triune God.
Evangelical tradition sees John 15:4 through the following series of considerations. First, an evangelical would note that the call and invitation, “abide in me as I abide in you” is quickly followed, just a few verses later, with the words, “if . . . my words abide in you” (Jn 15:7), which seem to echo the language of mutual abiding.
