This book is intended to help the church to find its bearings. The swift change of external circumstances, the revolutionary progress in science and technology, and a simultaneously growing threat through social, military and ecological conflicts have disseminated a feeling of general insecurity among many people in our society. It is not for nothing that today everyone feels uncertain and insecure. The word ‘crisis’ is on every lip, whether it be the oil crisis or the crisis of the spirit. Instability, both inward and outward, is growing. Our political, economic, ethical and religious systems are more vulnerable than many people thought. Consequently the longing for security in all spheres of life is growing as well. The churches are no exception to this general feeling of uncertainty. Church members are asking critical questions about the sense of church services, and sceptical ones about the sense of liturgical reforms. Clergy, church leaders and church assemblies are all discussing the crises they see, and their own crises as well. The call for greater security and for religious stability can be heard here too.
Every crisis means finding new bearings. The fundamental questions have to be answered afresh: Where do you come from? Where are you going? Who are you? For every crisis calls the traditional and familiar answers in question. But because of this every crisis also brings with it its own unique opportunities of supplying a new, personal answer which will stand up to life—an answer a man can live and die with. Anyone who only talks about a ‘crisis’ without recognizing this implicit opportunity is talking because he is afraid and without hope. Anyone who only wants to have new opportunities without accepting the crisis of previous answers is living in an illusion. The church would have no hope if it were merely to share the general insecurity, or even to deepen it into an ominous expectation of the end of the world. The church would have no tradition were it merely to hasten after new opportunities. In the crisis of its tradition and in the opportunities afforded by its hope, the church will take its bearings from its foundation, its future and the charge given to it.
When its traditions are imperilled by insecurity, the church is thrown back to its roots. It will take its bearings even more emphatically than before from Jesus, his history, his presence and his future. As ‘the church of Jesus Christ’ it is fundamentally dependent on him, and on him alone. What the church is and wherein it exists is and exists from him, whatever securities or insecurities present themselves from time to time. We shall continually be discussing the relationship between Christ and the church (and shall be considering this in detail in chapter III). This orientation is in the forefront for the church which calls itself by his name.
When the future prospects of the church are dark, when its relationship to Israel, to the religions of the world, and to the political, economic and cultural policies of society are in dispute, then it will no less radically project itself towards the future it is certain of, because it is the future of Christ, who has called the church to life: the kingdom of God. In chapter IV, therefore, we shall be going into the relationship between the church and the kingdom of God in detail. Because hope means the power of life, and life is lived in open relationships, the kingdom of God ought not to be described in abstract terms. It must be seen concretely, in all the living relationships in which Christianity is involved. The future of the church is only described through the medium of a church of hope for other people and with other people.
Because of its foundation in Christ and its existence for the future of the kingdom of God, the church is what it truly is and what it can do, in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit renews the church in fellowship with Christ. The Spirit fills the church with the powers of the new creation, its liberty and its peace. In chapters V and VI, therefore, we shall give an account of the church’s powers, potentialities and forms of life in the movement of God, of the Spirit which descends on all flesh.
This book was preceded by some lectures on ecclesiology given in Bonn in 1966 and in Tübingen in 1968 and 1972. Since 1968 several impressions of an unauthorized transcript of these lectures have been in circulation. Some of my listeners found this doctrine of the church too conservative; for others it was too progressive. In revising and completing these lectures for publication I hope to make it plain to both groups that it is possible to deal conservatively with the progressive elements in the Christian tradition, and that it is necessary to deal progressively with its conservative forms, if one wants to do justice to the dynamics of the Christian message. I have tried to discover the primal springs of the earliest perceptions of the Christian faith and the early forms of the Christian fellowship, in order to grasp the things in them that point us towards the future.
The contents of this book do not derive from the study, or from the lecture rooms of Tübingen University. Readers will rightly ask: What church is he actually talking about? Apart from the fact that for five years I was pastor in the country parish of Wasserhorst, near Bremen, lecture tours and ecumenical conferences during the past ten years have taken me to churches in other countries and other situations. The experiences of Christians in Korea, their missionary zeal and their suffering in political resistance; the charismatic experiences of the independent churches in Kenya and Ghana, their prayers and their exuberant dances; the work of Christian communes in the slums of Manila and the villages of the campesinos in Latin America, their life among their people and their persecution by the police—all these things impressed me more vividly than I probably realized myself. They have at least shown me the limitations of the church in Germany. I will not pretend to my readers abroad that I am not writing in the Federal German Republic, and on the basis of life in the established Protestant church to which I belong. But this point of departure does not, for all that, determine the book’s content. One’s own situation is only one of many. And some of Christianity’s situations are truly very different. To carry on theology in an ecumenical context does not mean being abstract; it means starting, as far as possible, from the church’s differing experiences and conveying them in a fruitful way. In the following theological discussions, therefore, I have tried to keep in mind both the established and the free churches, the national and the missionary churches, the local churches and the ecumenical movement, ecclesiastical institutions and the free Christian communities. My aim in doing this was not simply to add up all the different forms of Christian fellowship; my concern was the faith and authenticity of the one church of Christ.
Theological insight and the practical experiences I have mentioned would suggest that the book’s practical intention might be formulated as follows: to point away from the pastoral church, that looks after the people, to the people’s own communal church among the people. I do not believe that there is any other way in which the church can proclaim the gospel responsibly, theologically speaking, or can celebrate the Lord’s supper, baptize with the sign of the new beginning, and live in the friendship of Jesus. There is no other way for the church to exercise its office, its charge and its ministry, in the congregation, with the congregation and through the congregation. Missionary churches, confessing churches and ‘churches under the cross’ are fellowship churches, or inescapably become so. They do not stray into social isolation but become a living hope in the midst of the people. The crisis of the national and established churches in ‘Christian’ countries of long standing which has so often been described—the churches’ loss of function, the apathy of their members and their slowness to move—is a chance to build up the fellowship church and to realize the principle of the congregation, the community. The dangers of social adaptation and of the social ghetto are avoided when the church acquires and asserts its liberty of action. For this liberty it needs a fellowship which is more binding than other things. The experiences of the churches in other countries have confirmed me in my theological conviction that this is the church’s proper form.
Finally, I must say a word about the relationship between this book about ‘the church in the power of the Spirit’ and my earlier books Theology of Hope (1964; ET 1965) and The Crucified God (1972; ET 1974). It looks as if I have now arrived theologically at Pentecost and the sending of the Spirit, having started from Easter and the foundation of the Christian hope and travelled by way of Good Friday and the exploration of God’s suffering. But this would probably be to think too closely in terms of the pattern of the church’s year. The lectures which form the basis for these three books were not given in that order. Consequently the books dovetail into one another and their subject-matter overlaps. It is true, however, that I was impelled theologically from the one book to the other and had to shift my perspectives, the better to understand the wealth of God’s liberating dealings with the world. That is why I shifted the emphasis from ‘the resurrection of the crucified Jesus’ in Theology of Hope to ‘the cross of the risen Christ’ in The Crucified God. Both perspectives would be incomplete if ‘the sending of the Spirit’, its messianic history and the charismatic power of its church were not added. To that extent this book about ‘the church in the power of the Spirit’ is intended to complement the earlier books.
I should like to express my thanks to Dr Michael Welker and Dr Konrad Stock for continual theological discussion about the book’s subject-matter, for the criticism with which they accompanied me while I was writing, and for their reading of the proofs.
Jürgen Moltmann
Tübingen
Pentecost 1975