The other context in which the gospel stands in the history of Jesus is conversion, the fresh start. Mark’s summing up of Jesus’ mission is: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’ (1:14). According to this the promised messianic era has dawned with Jesus’ coming. In his person and in his ministry the God who was far off has come near. The phrase ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’ is only a paraphrase of the prophet’s cry: ‘God is king’. It is therefore time for men to make a fresh start and to free themselves, and this they can do. The gospel itself is the mediation between the coming kingdom of God and the person who is turning to freedom. In it the coming kingdom is present through the Word and in this way is powerful in the present wherever men and women entrust themselves to it. The future of God set in the present Word is therefore at the same time the call to a new start. The imminence of the kingdom, as it is preached and believed, makes men free to repent, free to turn away from their godless way of life and their Godforsaken circumstances (Rom. 13:12ff.). The turning away from this world of oppression, death and evil to the future of life, righteousness and freedom is in itself the anticipation of the kingdom of God under the conditions of this world and this society. Here the new start includes both persons and the relationships and conditions in which these persons live. Conversion includes soul and body, the individual as well as his community, his own way of life as well as the system in which he lives. Conversion is in tendency as universal as the kingdom of God, in whose imminence it is both made possible and demanded. For that reason there is no room here for a narrowing down to the individual or the collective, the religious or the political sphere. But for that reason too conversion is the concrete form of the people of God, which gathers together for the kingdom of God and lays hold on its freedom in the kingdom’s imminence. Just as the fellowship of the sick who will be healed, the blind who will see and the poor who have heard the gospel is the preliminary form of the church in the messianic mission of Jesus, so the fellowship of discipleship which exists among the converted is the other provisional form of the church of the Messiah. The fellowship of the poor, about whom the messianic history of Jesus tells, and the fellowship of the converted, which it also describes, are proto-forms of the church of Christ—not in the sense that they have been superseded, but in the sense that they give their stamp to the church’s basic forms. The church loses its fellowship with the messianic mission of Jesus if it is not ‘the people of the beatitudes’ and does not consist of the poor, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the pure in heart and the persecuted.
The special thing about Jesus’ gospel is that he proclaims the dawn of the messianic age ‘today’, in his own present and his own hour. Consequently his word, in which the rule of God and the liberation of men become effective for the present, is bound up with his person and his imprint. ‘Blessed is he who takes no offence at me’ follows the quotation from Deutero-Isaiah in Matthew 11:6. Jesus’ proclamation of the gospel and his person cannot be separated from one another in the way that religious, philosophical and moral doctrines can be detached from the people who have postulated them. The authority of his messianic announcement of the time, and with it the truth of his proclamation, depend on his person and are not transferable. That is why Rudolf Bultmann rightly stressed that Jesus’ whole existence, as far as we can know it, is completely merged in his proclamation. But when he goes on to draw the conclusion that Jesus is ‘the Word’, then the converse which Julius Schniewind stressed, that the Word is Jesus, must be taken seriously too. The gospel and its claim (the nearness of God and the liberation of men) are so closely bound up with Jesus’ earthly appearance that his human nature (‘a carpenter’s son from Nazareth’) and his vulnerability (‘the Son of man must suffer many things’) become a scandal for those who have dreamed of the Messiah in divine splendour and worldly glory. A poor man as liberator of the poor, a vulnerable man as saviour of the helpless—that seems like a contradiction in terms. It is either blasphemy or a complete reversal of the concept of God. The crucifixion of Jesus as a blasphemer and rebel, as history testifies to it, and his resurrection from the dead, attested by the Easter faith, are the answers to his contradiction between Jesus’ messianic claim and his unmessianic appearance. In the light of Easter we must therefore say in retrospect that the gospel of Jesus, because it is indissolubly bound up with his person, also enters into his history, hence taking on the features of his passion and death on the cross. The gospel of the coming kingdom and of present liberation is incarnate in the suffering of Jesus and finally assumes the form of the one who was crucified. On the basis of the identification of his message with his person Jesus can be called ‘the incarnation of the promise’ of the kingdom. That is why Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God can only, after his death and in the light of his resurrection, be continued as the proclamation of Jesus the Christ of God, the crucified and risen liberator of men. There is hence no fundamental difference between the proclamation of Jesus and the proclamation of the church. Through his history itself, Jesus’ gospel about the kingdom of God became the church’s gospel about Jesus, the Christ of God. On the other hand this cannot lead to a narrowing down of Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom, for the church’s proclamation of Christ is in essence the gospel of the kingdom, and the word of the cross essentially contains the call to start anew towards freedom. The gospel of the crucified and risen liberator leads to a universality—‘to the Jew first and also to the Greek’ (Rom. 1:16)—which goes beyond the limits of the earthly history of Jesus, even if this Pauline universality, which directs the gospel to all men in their deprivation of the divine splendour (Rom. 3:23, neb), is already implicit in the first of Jesus’ beatitudes. The gospel of Christ as ‘the word of the cross’ even reaches into the depths of the Godforsakenness of the godless, filling them with a sense of God’s nearness and of their liberation, which was begun in the forgiveness of sins conferred by the earthly Jesus.
The messianic mission of Jesus is only fulfilled in his death and is put into full force through his resurrection. Through his history it becomes the church’s gospel for the world. Through his death and resurrection the church participates in his mission, becoming the messianic church of the coming kingdom and man’s liberation. In so far as the church participates in his mission, it is drawn into his fate and will experience ‘the power of his resurrection’ in ‘the fellowship of his sufferings’ (av). The prophetic mission brings it into conflict with the society in which it lives, and evokes conflicts between the powers of the past and the forces of the future, between oppression and liberation.
If the proclamation of Christ is the legitimate way of preaching the gospel of the coming kingdom and the present liberation of men in the light of Christ’s cross and resurrection, then this proclamation ought to be seen against the horizon of messianic world mission. This gospel makes the coming rule of God a present reality in the Word and through the Word. With this it seeks to open the world, sealed up within itself as it is, for the coming of God. Where the kingdom is at hand, the people gather together for the kingdom and free themselves from the power of slavery. Where the future of God in Christ is at hand, men are converted and move towards him. The church of Christ is hence simultaneously the people of the kingdom. It is not ‘the not-world’; it is the world which is now already turning anew to the future of God because it follows the call of freedom. It understands its movement as the new eschatological exodus. The church of Christ can therefore be characterized as the ‘exodus church’. This does not mean the ‘emigration of the church’ from society into the ghetto; it means the exact opposite: the departure from exile and ghetto into freedom.
The exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt and also the new exodus from Babylon which the prophets proclaim were, and were supposed to be, movements out of a land of captivity into the land of freedom, away from Egypt or Babylon into the land of Israel and to Zion. The exodus of the last days in whose movement the church finds itself, is in the first place universal, and sees itself as the beginning of liberation of the whole of enslaved creation for its consummation in glory. In the second place it is to be understood historically, as an eschatological movement away from the past and out of death, towards the future and into life. What is meant is therefore emigration from ‘the world that is passing away’ to ‘the future world’, and out of slavery to freedom in every land on earth. The symbols of ‘Egypt’ and ‘Babylon’, the long ‘wanderings in the wilderness’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘the city of God’ are hence interpreted historically and eschatologically by the Christian hope.
In this framework the exodus church can interpret itself as corresponding to the rule of God and as the beginning of the liberation of man and creation. The fellowship it forms is incarnate hope if, as Paul says, it abolishes mankind’s aggressive divisions and fatal separations, and if it can be said of it that here ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28). The way the passage continues shows the hope in which the church lives: ‘And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise’—that is to say, heirs of the kingdom. This community is the present form of the messianic liberation. It is the present form of conversion and the new beginning. It is the exodus of the people out of captivity, poverty and inhumanity into the freedom, the glory and the righteousness of God’s new man.
By proclaiming the history of Jesus as the history of the liberator and by relating the history of its relationship with him as the history of the universal eschatological exodus, the church carries the gospel into the world, infecting men with the germ of hope and liberation. Because of that this gospel cannot be ‘the word of the church’; on the contrary, the church understands itself as ‘the church of the Word’. It is the vehicle of the gospel of freedom, not a schoolmaster for the nations. It is not the church that has the gospel; it is the gospel that creates for itself a people of the exodus, which is the true church of Christ. Insight into the messianic dimension of the gospel will crystallize in the practical recognition of the missionary dimension of the gospel. As a call to freedom the gospel is an event of missionary calling. Its aim is not to spread the Christian religion or to implant the church; it is to liberate the people for the exodus in the name of the coming kingdom. The future which the mediator proclaims and into which he waits to lead his people is: ‘No longer shall each man teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, “Know the Lord”, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord’ (Jer. 31:34; cf. Rev. 21:3). It is precisely for the sake of this future of the immediate presence of God experienced by liberated and glorified man that the missionary movement must take the messianic Word to the ends of the earth and to the end of the world’s history of suffering, continually pressing for the transformation of mediation through the Word into the power of the Spirit.
Under the influence of the messianic mission of the earthly Jesus, the poor were blessed, the sick healed and prisoners freed. Men were called to repentance and a new start into freedom. These proto-forms of the church become explicit in the post-Easter community, in which Jesus’ mission begins to fulfil itself through the gospel. It is the community of the liberated, the community of those who are making a new beginning, the community of those who hope. Their fellowship serves to spread the call of freedom in the world and, as new fellowship, should itself be the social form of hope. Fundamentally, all Christians share in the prophetic ministry of Christ and are witnesses of the gospel.
At the centre of the New Testament stands the proclamation of salvation through the suffering and death of Christ. What makes the gospel a pure message of joy and an unequivocal call to freedom is Jesus’ offering of himself, his vicarious suffering and death, in abandonment by God. His cross indeed seems paradoxical compared with the doxa which men strive for when they deify themselves and humiliate God and their neighbours. But it corresponds in the deepest sense to the glory of the one who became man, the God who humbled himself and whose love reached to the point of suffering death. Consequently it also reveals the unlimited freedom of the person who is accepted, loved and therefore united with God. According to the prophetic and messianic ministry of Jesus, his giving of himself to death on the cross for the life of creation can be called his priestly ministry. But just as his messianic mission surpasses the remembrance of the prophets of Israel and goes further than the hopeful picture of the messianic prophet, so his sacrifice on the cross also goes beyond all priestly prototypes and copies. Whatever is termed ‘the priestly ministry’ in the church must take its bearings from the one who was crucified; the crucified one cannot, conversely, take his bearings from the church’s priestly ministry. Fellowship with Jesus’ self-offering therefore points beyond the church’s particular priestly ministry and affects the existence of the whole church and every individual Christian in the world. But the meaning of Jesus’ self-offering even goes beyond this fellowship, for in principle and tendency it comprehends the reconciliation and liberation of the world (2 Cor. 5:19; Rom. 11:32).
It is undoubtedly superficial to ask about the moment when the church was born, for all datings fall short and therefore restrict the church’s mission and the movement of God in which it finds its meaning. But if we all the same want to ask about its origin, we are led from Pentecost and the ‘outpouring of the Spirit’ to Easter and the visions in which the apostles experienced their calling. But Easter points unequivocally to the cross. In the framework of this question, therefore, it is correct to see the origin of the church in the crucified Jesus. ‘Having established the Church in His blood, he fortified it on the day of Pentecost with special power from on high.’ ‘It begins in the wounded side of Christ on Calvary, goes through the “tempering” of the Pentecostal fires, and comes onward like a burning flood.’ When devotion sees the church springing from ‘the heart of Jesus’, then it is meditating on the cross, for there ‘his heart’ is revealed in his sacrifice of himself ‘for many’. On the cross there takes place what Luther so vividly calls ‘the merry exchange’, as he draws on the bridal imagery of medieval mysticism, in which Christ and the soul become one body, Christ makes the soul’s sin and suffering his own, conferring on her in her poverty his own righteousness, his freedom and his divinity. Here man’s sufferings become Christ’s history, and Christ’s freedom becomes man’s history. As the community of Christ the church understands itself as the church out of the cross, and the church in solidarity with the men and women who are living in the shadow of the cross. We will therefore try to put the theologumenon de nativitate ecclesiae ex corde Jesu in cruce at the centre of ecclesiology and to gauge its consequences.
In the history of the passion we can see three dimensions in which Christ’s suffering and death take on significance. For a church which sees itself as the church under the cross, it is important to perceive all three of these dimensions.
On the basis of his messianic proclamation of the kingdom to the poor and of grace for sinners, Jesus was declared a blasphemer and was condemned as one in accordance with his people’s understanding of the law. Anyone who preached God’s law as the law of grace for the unrighteous and those without rights, anyone who—when he was only a carpenter’s son—set himself above the authority of Moses, was bound to come into conflict with the established law and its custodians. And he was bound to be the loser in this conflict, humanly speaking. The fact that Jesus, as the suffering Son of man, demonstrated the power of God as prevenient love to the powerless and the outcasts, made him vulnerable. The conflict which finally killed him was etched into his life from the very beginning. His story began in a stable and ended on the gallows. But in the light of his resurrection and the Easter faith, his death on the cross is not a story ending in disappointment; it is the completion of his mission and his obedience. As an outcast he brought the gospel to outcasts through his death. Through his self-sacrifice he brought God to those who had been sacrificed. Through his death under a curse he brought liberating grace to those who were cursed according to the law. In the light of Easter his end on the cross is therefore his real beginning.
His earthly life ended with the open question of whether he was right to direct the gospel to the lost in God’s name, or whether he was breaking the law of the holy God. Is he ‘truly the Son of God’ (Mark 15:39) or is he one who is to be ‘reckoned with transgressors’ (Luke 22:37)? Just as his helplessness on the cross confirmed his ‘godlessness’ in respect of the gods in whose name he was executed, so his resurrection from the dead justifies him for all who believe in him. The trial of Jesus, which ended in the earthly sense with his death, must therefore be reopened in the light of the resurrection faith. In his trial, in which the church has to appear as witness, the real question at issue is the question of the divine righteousness.
If the ‘lawless’ and ‘godless’ man of Nazareth was rightly condemned, then in this world the law applies in its most legalistic sense, as the law of reciprocity—the requiting of like by like, in both the good sense and the bad. On its fringes justice may be tempered with mercy, but there can be no merciful justice as such, repaying evil with good, letting enemies be loved and creating justice for the unjust. This understanding of the law is not identical with the Old Testament’s understanding of the torah. It must rather be understood as what governs the world, the foundation of the systems of life with which people try to defend themselves politically and psychologically against chaos, evil and death, and yet by so doing disseminate chaos, evil and death as the same time. We might describe this law archaically and psychologically, and in the general religious sense, as Ananke. If Christianity takes its understanding of itself from the cross of Christ, then it lives from the experience of the new righteousness proclaimed by Jesus (Rom. 1:17) and revealed to the godless in his death. The new righteousness of God is manifested in the ‘godless’ death of the Son of God, and with it the outcasts are accepted, the unrighteous are made righteous and justice is secured for those without rights. That is the new divine righteousness revealed in the gospel.
Those who are caught up in this live from ‘the forgiveness of sins’ through ‘the blood of Christ’. They have been born again to new life and new righteousness through Christ’s surrender of himself to death on the cross. The theological expressions which are used to describe being born again to the righteousness of God, by means of the forgiveness of sins through the blood of Christ, are as radical as they are because they seek to bring out the scandal of the qualitative difference from the system of life imposed by the law which rules the destiny of this world. Anyone who lives in the righteousness of Christ through the experience of the forgiveness of sins is ‘dead’ to the legal systems of life in this world. Anyone who lives from and for the righteousness of Christ will, like Jesus, be ‘reckoned with transgressors’; for he no longer believes and follows the protective gods of those legal systems of life. He no longer accepts the inescapability of that law and its consequences. Since he has been forgiven, he will forgive. Since he has received good for evil, he will repay evil with good. Since, even when he was the enemy of God, God loved him, he will love his enemies. Because this life of the new righteousness cannot be restricted to the private sphere, but in the trend of its being presses towards the new creation or the new order of all things, it is bound to operate as rebellion amid the legal systems of life. For here things are experienced and done which are impossible and inadmissible according to the law which humanity in its misery has taken up. Between the church and that world whose character is described as ‘law, sin and death’, stands the cross of Christ. It is not too high-flown—it is in line with faith and experience—when Paul maintains that the world is crucified to him and that he is crucified to the world (Gal. 6:14).
Anyone who follows the ‘godless’ Son of God because he is beginning to live from his self-giving, sees that no one becomes righteous through the law. For him the legal systems of life are vicious circles, made up of unrighteousness, the law which tries to control that unrighteousness, and the death to which the law leads, because it has been pressed into service by unrighteousness (Rom. 7:10ff.). He cannot try to improve the previous systems of life on the basis of the law, but will spread the new righteousness of the gospel in their midst, the new righteousness which serves the new creation of all things. He can no longer adapt himself to the pattern of this world, but will change and renew his aspiration, seeking after the living will of God towards new creation (Rom. 12:2). The birth of the church out of the cross of Christ leads the church to take its stand beneath the cross, if it remains consistent, in opposition to the systems of life governed by nomos and ananke and assailed by these systems of life, their laws and their gods. ‘Forgiveness of sins’ through ‘the blood of Christ’ has dangerous results in experience and practice. But it holds within itself liberation for new creative righteousness.
Jesus did not suffer the penalty for blasphemy, which was stoning. He was crucified for political reasons by the Roman occupying power, for inciting unrest and for rebellion. At that time crucifixion was the Roman punishment for runaway slaves and rebels against the pax romana. That is to say, it was a punishment designed to protect the slave-owning society and the imperium. Pilate undoubtedly misunderstood Jesus himself and his mission, for he was no zealot leader in the holy war to free Israel from Rome; nor was he a second Spartacus. But since Pilate had to see to it that there was peace and order in the occupied country, he was bound to misinterpret the trouble-maker from Nazareth as a political trouble-maker, and to have him executed in the name of the lex romana. It was therefore not a chance misunderstanding. As a crucifixion by the Romans, the death of Christ has an irrevocably political dimension. In the passion stories of the New Testament, the scene in which Jesus appears before Pilate is adorned with typical features which have theological overtones. The representative of God and the gospel appears before the representative of the Roman state and the holder of political power. Even Jesus’ declaration that ‘his kingdom is not of this world’ does not solve the conflict that is inherent in this confrontation, for in the first place ‘this world’ does not mean the earth but the ‘age of this world’ which will pass away, and secondly the kingdom that Jesus is talking about is ‘in this world’ through Jesus himself. The statement speaks of the origin and the foundation of the kingdom which Jesus proclaims and represents; but it does not mention its place. It is neither in heaven nor is it ‘purely religious’, so it cannot be called ‘non-political’ for the one reason or for the other. It is, as we are bound to say in this context, ‘Jesus in person’, and it becomes political through the confrontation with Pilate and through Jesus’ crucifixion.
On one level, in this political dimension Pilate with his judgment represents the Roman imperium and with it Roman law and the Roman Caesar. This means that he is not merely representing a policy, but a political religion as well. There can be no talk here about a demarcation between religion and politics. That was only brought about in Christendom in modern times, after prolonged struggles between emperor and pope. If what Pilate is representing towards Jesus is religious politics or a political religion, then there is inherent in the trial of Jesus the conflict between his messianic message and his self-giving on the one hand, and the religious and political reality on the other. This alternative could be called ‘either Christ or Caesar’. For the church which appeals to the crucified Jesus, it is an alternative which is highly relevant in its continual conflict with the political and bourgeois religions of the societies in which it exists. The idolization of political power and the religious legitimation of economic, social and political conditions of rule are compulsions which no people and no society and hardly any political movement escapes. The idolatry of power, the fetishism of money and ‘things’, as well as political messianism are as modern as they are archaic. They go on living as long as the heart of man is ‘a manufactory for idols’ (in Calvin’s phrase), because fear makes him aggressive and in need of legitimation. Even the churches are not free of this. But inasmuch as the Christian faith is born out of the death of Jesus, ‘the rebel’, the political religion of its society is ‘crucified’ to it, and it is ‘crucified’ to the political religion of society. Between faith and political idolatry stands the remembrance of the crucified Jesus. That remembrance allows the believer to see ‘the nation’s most treasured values’ as idols. In the sphere of political religion he will support the iconoclasm of the cross. He will be considered ‘godless’ in the sense of the idolized nation, class or race. In so far as the church of Christ as a whole is born ‘from the wound in Christ’s side’, it will also as a whole, through its existence and way of life, be a ferment to break down political idolatry. It will press for the desacralization of political power and the democratization of political rule. As a critical ferment to break down economic fetishism it will spread freedom in solidarity. It was dangerous for Christians in the Roman empire to appeal to a God who had been crucified for political reasons. The martyrs who refused to participate in the cult of the emperor took the consequences of their confession of faith and so spread liberty. Churches which forget the martyrs who were ‘political’ in this sense are in danger of adapting themselves to the political religion of the society to which they belong.
On the other level of this ‘political dimension’, through his public mocking, torture, rejection and crucifixion ‘outside the gate’ (Heb. 13:12), Jesus enters the company of the despised, the tortured, the rejected and the murdered. His public execution together with two ‘robbers’ (they were probably zealots) can be interpreted as a sign of his solidarity with these lost people. When he says to the dying man beside him, who recognizes him for what he is, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’, it shows that in the act of dying he brings the liberating rule of God into the situation of deepest abandonment. According to Luke his mission begins with the ‘today’ in Nazareth. ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And it is completed on earth in the paradise opened ‘today’ for the one who has been crucified with him. ‘He who gives help to the lost is lost himself’, writes Brecht. But for Jesus it is the other way round: the one who gives himself up for lost in this way, helps the lost. It is not a question here of assent to the motives which had made them fight and for which they were being executed. Jesus’ crucifixion together with two Jewish freedom fighters cannot be interpreted as his blessing on their struggle. But what this public scene on Calvary does do is to reveal the unconditional fellowship of the Son of man with tortured and executed men and women whoever they are. This scene too has typical features with theological implications. It can be viewed as the counterpart to Jesus’ encounter with Pilate.
The Easter faith sees the one who was crucified in the light of the divine glory. The disciples recognize the risen Christ from the marks of the nails. What does that mean for the ‘political dimension’ of the cross? It means that for believers the divine glory is revealed on the face of the crucified Jesus; it no longer belongs to the crowns of kings or the fame of a nation or any other earthly authorities. ‘The worldly dishonour, the cross, is transfigured; what according to the common idea is lowest, what the State characterises as degrading, is transformed into what is highest.’ ‘When the cross has been raised to a banner and to a banner whose positive tenor is the kingdom of God’, then there is inherent in it a ‘revaluation of all public values’, as Nietzsche acutely reproached Christianity—a revaluation which is as dangerous as it is liberating, and a revolutionary tendency. It is true that the Christianity of the major church soon allied itself with the Roman empire, after the Emperor Constantine claimed to have triumphed ‘in the sign of the cross’. The fact that according to the history of Christ’s passion the kingdom of God is present, not in the Roman empire but in the person reviled for his name, was pushed aside. The crucifixion of the Son of God was laid at the door of the Jews rather than the Romans by the church of the empire, and the Jews were therefore suppressed, as the laws of the emperors Theodosius and Justinian show. But wherever remembrance of the crucifixion of Christ revived in the church, it produced estrangement from the religious legitimation of the political authorities and solidarity with the people whom they were humiliating and persecuting.
As the community of the crucified Jesus the church is drawn into his self-surrender, into his solidarity with the lost, and into his public suffering. His suffering is in this respect not exclusive but inclusive and leads to compassion.
That is shown in the public form of the church, as Paul sees it:
For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God … as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord’ (1 Cor. 1:26–31).
Like the exaltation of the one who was crucified, the calling of the lowly in the world has a critical significance for the great. Like the glorification of the one who was dishonoured on the cross, the election of the despised has as its result the rejection of the proud. That is a double predestination in the dialectical process of the history of man’s calling. Only its goal is universal: ‘That no human being might boast but all boast of the Lord.’ In order that ‘all flesh shall see the glory of the Lord together’ (Isa. 40:5), the mountains are made low and the valleys are lifted up. In this respect the calling and gathering within the church of those who are foolish, helpless, contemptible and unworthy in the sight of the world has significance for salvation history, a meaning which every church must face that appeals to Christ. The church has ‘the form of a slave’. It is ‘God’s plebs’. It must in this sense be the church of the people (ὄχλος). The aristocratic attitude of wanting to be ‘a church for the people’ is denied it. ‘Christ belongs to all those who have a humble attitude and not to those who set themselves above the flock.’ ‘The life of Jesus’ is only manifested through the church if its form is like ‘the death of Jesus’. This cross-like form of the church cannot be achieved through a mysticism withdrawn from the world. It was for Paul a ‘bodily’ (2 Cor. 4:10) and a public form, which came into being through the apostle’s temptations, the contempt he experienced and the persecutions he endured. For Christianity too it will be a bodily and public likeness, for it comes into being in public apostleship and in public intervention on behalf of the lost and the despised. We might call it a worldly, bodily and hence also a political Christ-mysticism. How else should the life of Jesus, the life of the one who is risen, be manifest ‘in our mortal flesh’?
Jesus died on the cross not merely as a condemned blasphemer and as an executed rebel, but also as one forsaken by God. To the God whom he called ‘my Father’ and whose kingdom he had proclaimed to the poor, he cried: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34). That is the innermost, in the true sense of the word the theological dimension of his death. It is also the special and unique thing which distinguishes his death on the cross from the many others in the history of mankind’s suffering. In this respect what killed him was not only his people’s interpretation of the law and Rome’s power politics, but his God and Father; for the pain in his torment must have been this abandonment by God. With it a misery descends on the crucified Jesus which is in truth the misery within the misery of all abandoned men and women, though recognition of this fact is so unbearable that it is repressed. It is a pain which, indeed, makes itself felt in many forms of experienced abandonment, but it is not completely revealed and realized. We should note that in Rom. 1–3 Paul used the word παραδίδωμι—to deliver up, to surrender, to hand over—to describe the divine abandonment of all godless men who cling to idols, boast of themselves and desire to become righteous through the works of the law. They have abandoned the living God, and so God has abandoned them and ‘handed them over’ to their self-chosen path, which leads to death. This ‘handing over’, which shows itself as it were in ‘God’s silence’ at man’s self-glorification and in his ‘permitting’ the murderous and suicidal consequences which stem from it, is for Paul ‘the manifestation of God’s wrath’. In his abandonment by God the Son of God takes upon himself both the fate of the man who has been handed over and ‘the wrath of God’. In the light of his message about the impending kingdom of God, this abandonment on the cross is the end of Jesus’ mission. But in the light of his resurrection we have to say with Paul that through his forsakenness Jesus has brought God to the Godforsaken. The Father did not ‘spare his own Son’ but ‘gave him up for us all’ (Rom. 8:31ff.), in order through him to be the Father of the forsaken, the God of the godless and the refuge of those without hope. The full depth of his forsakenness on the cross only becomes recognizable in the light of his exaltation. His agonizing abandonment by God is revealed as his self-giving for those ‘given away’ by the God whom he calls ‘my Father’. It is at the same time and in this way recognizable as his self-surrender for the redemption of the lost (Gal. 2:20). The whole history of his passion stands under the sign of this self-surrender, which is on the one hand to be seen as abandonment by God and on the other as the consummation of God’s love.
Christ’s surrender of himself to a Godforsaken death reveals the secret of the cross and with it the secret of God himself. It is the open secret of the Trinity. The Father gives up his beloved Son to the darkness of Godforsakenness. ‘For our sake he made him to be sin’ (2 Cor. 5:21). ‘He became a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13). There is no remoteness from God which the Son in his forsakenness did not suffer, or into which his self-giving did not reach. The doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell seeks to make it clear that his self-giving reaches and opens every hell. The Father gives up his own Son, the Son of his eternal love, in order to receive those who have been given up and so that he may be there for them. The Son is given over to this death and this hell so that he may become the lord of the dead and the living. That is why the Father suffers with his Son in his passion. The Son dies in abandonment, suffering the death of sin, curse, wrath and hell. But the Father suffers the death of the Son in the unending pain of love. In his pain he participates in the Son’s death. The Son is given over to the power of this death, a power contrary to God. In his abandonment by the Father he experiences the fate of the godless and takes it upon himself for them. But as he is surrendered by the Father, so he surrenders himself as well in his limitless love. Thus, even though Jesus’ dying cry reveals his total abandonment by the Father, he is at the same time entirely one with the Father, and the Father with him, in this event of self-surrender, which sunders the two so far from one another that heaven and hell are included in its grasp, and all men can live in it. As the Gethsemane story aims to show, Christ’s giving of himself to death on the cross unites the Son with the Father at the very point where the separation and mutual abandonment is at its deepest. The Son offers himself through the Spirit (Heb. 9:14). The power which leads him into abandonment by the Father is the power which at the same time unites him with the Father.
The event of Christ’s giving of himself to death for the life of creation is continually summed up in the New Testament in terms of an event of God’s love: ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16). In the Son’s cross God takes this death on himself in order to give those who are lost his own eternal life. The first epistle of John fuses together the event of the cross and God himself even more tersely: ‘God is love.’ What happens in the Son’s self-offering on the cross is the revelation of the nature of God himself. In this happening God is revealed as the trinitarian God, and in the event between the surrendering Father and the forsaken Son, God becomes so ‘vast’ in the Spirit of self-offering that there is room and life for the whole world, the living and the dead. The trinitarian history of the self-offering of the Son on the cross therefore reveals in summary form ‘God for us’—for us, the godless; ‘God with us’—with us, the Godforsaken (Rom. 8:31ff.). And from this follows the double assurance: ‘Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God’ and ‘Will he not also give us all things with him?’ (Rom. 8:38f. and 8:32).
In this theological dimension of Jesus’ passion it is completely clear for the first time why the church of Christ lives, believes and hopes from the sacrifice on the cross. It is the fellowship of the godless who have found fellowship with God through Jesus’ abandonment by God. It is the fellowship of the sinners who through the one who for them was made sin have arrived at righteousness. It is the fellowship of the accursed, who were blessed through the accursed death of Jesus as their representative and who become a blessing. And because the Father is reconciled to ‘the world’ through the death of the Son, its new life must also serve the reconciliation of the world. In so far as, with the epistle to the Hebrews, we can term Christ’s sacrifice on the cross a priestly ministry, its consequence is the priesthood of all believers. They are all ‘ambassadors of reconciliation’ in Christ’s stead. They live in fellowship with God by virtue of Christ’s giving of himself for them. Because of this their life is also destined for self-giving—they are destined to love, to be representatives and to intercede. That does not divide them from mankind or raise them above others. What is true of Christ in this respect—that he ‘had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God’, and that it is only through his experience of suffering and temptation that he can help those who suffer and are tempted (Heb. 2:17f.)—applies in its corresponding degree to them too. The priestly ministry of the representative can only spring from sym-pathy, from ‘suffering with’ (cf. also Heb. 4:15). The fellowship called into life by Christ’s self-surrender serves to reconcile the world through solidarity with the suffering of the people and through participation in the representative work of Christ in the Spirit. The Christian ‘being-there-for-others’ cannot be detached from ‘being-with-others’ in solidarity; and being-with-others cannot be separated from ‘being-for-others’. Consequently there can really be no fundamental division between the general priesthood of all believers and the particular priestly ministry. The whole church lives from Christ’s self-giving and in self-giving for the reconciliation of the world. It is a question for the whole fellowship whether the deepest suffering of the forsaken world is experienced and finds expression in it, together with the present realization of Christ’s self-giving; whether in that fellowship the lonely find the healing fellowship of Christ and the Godforsaken find the brethren of Christ, who show them the Father of the forsaken in the spirit of acceptance. It is a question for the whole fellowship how it realizes the ‘priestly ministry’, about which Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that ‘participation in the sufferings of God in secular life’ makes the Christian. Fundamentally speaking all Christians participate in Christ’s priestly ministry and are witnesses of his intercession and sacrifice in the lives they live.
The church is called to life through the gospel of Christ’s self-giving. Hence it is fundamentally born out of the cross of Christ. At its centre is ‘the word of the cross’ and the eucharist with which the death of Christ is proclaimed. It is from the cross of Christ that there develops the fellowship of the godless with God. What makes the church the church is reconciliation ‘in the blood of Christ’ and its own self-giving for the reconciliation of the world.
The church of Christ is therefore at the same time the church under the cross. The fellowship of Christ is experienced wherever Christians take their cross on themselves. This fellowship is experienced in common resistance to idolatry and inhumanity, in common suffering over oppression and persecution. It is in this participation in the passion of Christ and in the passion of the people that the ‘life’ of Christ and his liberty becomes visible in the church. Christian fellowship proves itself in temptation and resistance.
Finally, fellowship with the crucified Jesus is practised where Christians in solidarity enter the brotherhood of those who, in their society, are visibly living in the shadow of the cross: the poor, the handicapped, the people society has rejected, the prisoners and the persecuted. Fellowship with the crucified one cannot be lived in any other way than in fellowship with the least of the brethren of the Son of man (Matt. 25:40).
All the New Testament proclamations about the person of Jesus and all the narratives relating his history are set against the horizon of Easter. The appearances of the crucified Jesus in the splendour of divine glory call into being the confession of faith in ‘Christ the Lord’. Christian faith is the acknowledgment of the lordship of Christ through public testimony, through new fellowship and through lived life. Christian existence is new life in Christ’s sphere of influence. Confession and life in the lordship of Christ are founded on faith in his resurrection from the dead through God the Father. Conversely, this faith in the resurrection is only alive in acknowledgment of the present lordship of Christ (Rom. 10:9f.). Without new life, without the ability to love and the courage of hope in the lordship of Christ, faith in the resurrection would decay into belief in particular facts, without any consequences. Without faith in the resurrection, new life in the lordship of Christ would cease to be a radical alternative to human forms of sovereignty and—adapting itself religiously, morally or politically—would lose its power to overcome the world. Where there is certainty that death has lost its power there is an alternative to those power structures that are built up on the threat of death. The removal of death’s power brings to light a life which overcomes the systems of domination and oppression and demonstrates freedom in fellowship. Faith in the resurrection and a life of liberty in the lordship of Christ therefore belong indissolubly together and mutually interpret one another.
The specific starting point for the titles with which the early Christian congregations acknowledged and lived the lordship of Christ is the Easter event. It has a double significance.
In so far as Easter is understood as Jesus’ resurrection ‘from the dead’, it means—in the framework of the general expectation of the resurrection ‘of the dead’—the anticipation and beginning of the general resurrection. Easter is not an isolated miracle confined to Jesus alone. It is the hidden beginning of the open new creation of all things (Rom. 8:11). In the midst of the history of death, the future of the new creation and the glory of God has already dawned in this one person. The earthly Jesus used to proclaim: ‘The kingdom of God is at hand’; so now after Easter the church understands the age in which it lives as the presence of the God who was to come: ‘The day is at hand’ (Rom. 13:12); ‘The end of all things is at hand’ (1 Peter 4:7). As the church now understands it, with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead the power of death and all the domination built up on the threat of death have already been overthrown and their end is already in sight. For these people liberty under the sovereignty of God is already present, in so far as it already determines their lives.
But if it is in the first place only the crucified Jesus who has been snatched from death and raised to new life, whereas all other men are still subject to this destiny, then this one person takes on a particular significance for all the others. In the New Testament this significance is expounded through the formulae of adoption and enthronement: through his resurrection from the dead Jesus was adopted as God’s son for others, and was appointed Kyrios for the world. As the Son of God he represents the God who is to come in this godless world. As Lord he spreads the rule of God in a world which is still subject to violence and death. As Christ he brings freedom to a world that is enslaved. Easter therefore means, together with his resurrection, Jesus’ exaltation to be Lord of the kingdom of God and his coming to power in the Spirit of freedom. The churches which acknowledge Jesus as Lord recognize in him the representative of the coming, all-redeeming kingdom. They live in the power of his Spirit and no longer recognize any other masters.
In order to understand the point at issue about the coming kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed and to which, according to the testimony of the resurrection faith, he was appointed to rule, we must consider the wider context of the history of the biblical tradition.
(a) Here the kingdom of God does not mean God’s rule over the world in general through creation and providence, but the ultimately liberating, all-redeeming and therefore eschatological kingship of God over his creation. It differs from providence because it makes an end of the history of violence, suffering and death and brings about a new creation of all things. It differs from the creation at the beginning through the fact that God himself, with his eternal life and glory, will dwell in this creation and be ‘all in all’.
(b) This redeeming and renewing kingdom of God is universal. It embraces heaven and earth. Therefore hope for this kingdom leads us to speak not only of a new earth, but of a new heaven as well. The eschatological kingdom of God means: ‘Behold I make all things new’ (Rev. 21:1–5). It is not a ‘purely religious kingdom’ which could be realized through the power of a new religion. Nor does it merely hold sway over man’s personal relationship to God, which could be represented in the private religion of the heart. It is not a moral authority, confined to a changed way of life on the part of men. It is not even kingship only over the living, from which the dead would be excluded (as they are in the Old Testament). Like God himself, it is universal and without limitation. That is why Matthew makes the risen Christ say: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations …’ (28:18f.). That is why Paul sees Christ as ‘the Lord both of the dead and of the living’ (Rom. 14:9). The eschatological reign of God, whom Jesus as Kyrios represents and whose power he exercises, cannot therefore be limited. It bursts the bonds of a divided world. It embraces the religious life as well as the political one, the private as well as the social, the living as well as the dead.
(c) The proclamation of the nearness of God’s kingdom and the preaching of Jesus as Lord therefore raise the theological and political question: who has the right to rule over the world? This question takes us far back into the biblical traditions. According to the creation stories ‘man’ was created as the image of God in order to rule over creation (Gen. 1:27f.). As God’s image ‘man’ is God’s earthly representative, deputy and vice-gerent. Corresponding to the creator of all things, he is to rule over creation. Hence the way in which man is expected to rule over the world is neither arbitrary nor unlimited. It takes its dimensions and limitations from the way in which man corresponds to the Creator, who loves his creation and has pleasure in it. It is only this correspondence which legitimates man’s rule over the world. The fact that he rules over the world does not make man like God or equal to him. According to Old Testament tradition, the fact that ‘man’ is destined to be the image of God and to rule over the world is also to be understood as a promise of an ideal ‘man’ who has not yet appeared. For that very reason this designation can be perverted by the man who is no true man at all, but man’s negation.
According to Daniel’s great historical vision (ch. 7), world history is marked by the usurpation of ‘man’s’ rule over the world by a series of ‘bestial’ rulers. Out of the sea of chaos rise, one after another, ‘the lion with eagle’s wings’ (a symbol of the Babylonian empire), ‘the voracious bear’ (a symbol of the empire of the Medes) and the winged leopard (a symbol of the Persian empire). Then comes the iron empire of an indescribably terrible monster which crushes all the other empires. In this image the universal rule entrusted to ‘man’ is seized for themselves by usurpers in beast-like form. As the symbols of their rule show, in their kingdoms bestial conditions prevail, not human ones. With these political perversions of the universal rule of ‘man’, says Daniel, wickedness and sin will be brought to their peak. The future of these kingdoms is the downfall of mankind. But then, according to Daniel, one like the ‘Son of man’ comes with the clouds of heaven. He is given dominion and glory. All peoples will serve him. His kingdom will be an everlasting one (7:13ff.). This ‘son of man’ probably means ‘man’ or ‘mankind’. He is a representative person. He does not arise out of chaos but comes from God. The promise made at creation that man should be the image of God and should rule over the world finds fulfilment in the human ‘kingdom of the Son of man’. Through his coming the usurpers’ struggle for world domination is ended.
When in the New Testament Jesus is understood as being the Son of man, and when ‘all power is given him in heaven and on earth’, this statement of faith belongs to this context in the history of tradition: the struggle for world dominion is decided in favour of those who recognize in Jesus the Son of man. If they live in the sphere of his humanity, they leave behind the compulsions of the bestial kingdoms of the world and cease to obey them. The promise made to humanity at creation finds fulfilment in the human kingdom of the Son of man. As representative of the coming, redeeming rule of God, Jesus is also the representative of the true human existence that is to come. For that reason he is also called ‘the image of God’ (Rom. 8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49; Phil. 3:21; 2 Cor. 3:18; 2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15), the one whom believers are made like to, so that they may become ‘men’. That is why they are promised that they will ‘rule’ with Christ. Man’s likeness to God and his dominion over the world are fulfilled through Christ, in Christ and with Christ. That is the purpose for which he is sent into the inhuman world and raised from a violent death and called ‘the new man’.
The acknowledgment of Jesus as lord is (a) to be understood eschatologically, (b) to be recognized in its universality, (c) to be set in the context of the theological and political question of world domination and (d) to be grasped as the fulfilment of the promise made to man at his creation.
What is special and revolutionary about the Christian faith in Jesus, the Lord of the world, is not his deification and glorification by the church, which adorned him with many of the theological and political titles of worldly rulers. The statement that Jesus is now by virtue of his resurrection ‘Lord’ is open to misunderstanding, and so is talk about the ‘kingly rule of Jesus Christ’. For in this way he could be understood—in analogy to earthly rulers—as these rulers’ heavenly overlord. But a personal cult of this kind is not intended. The real statement is really the reverse: ‘The Lord is Jesus.’ It is only through this reversal of emphasis that this image of the ruler is related to the person and history of Jesus and thus radically transformed. For early Christianity to use titles of rule and lordship in order to term Jesus the true Lord and ruler of the world—the Jesus who was mocked because of his helplessness and murdered on the cross by the world’s rulers—involves about the most radical reversal of the ideal of rule that can be conceived: the Lord as a servant of all; the ruler of the world as a friend of tax-collectors and sinners; the judge of the world as a poor outcast. That is the ‘revaluation of all values’ with which Nietzsche reproached Christianity. The phrase ‘Jesus—the Lord’ is in danger of relating Jesus to the usual picture of lordship, which is derived from the experience of and longing for power. The phrase ‘the Lord is Jesus’, on the other hand, models the ruler’s title on the man from Nazareth, the crucified Son of man on Golgotha, and gives it a completely new impress. As the gospels show, the history of Jesus is the history of service for freedom. The ‘lord of the world’ washes his disciples’ feet like a house slave (John 13:1–16). The Son of man does not rule through acts of violence and oppression but through self-surrender for the purpose of liberation.
You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:42–45).
True dominion does not consist of enslaving others but in becoming a servant of others; not in the exercise of power, but in the exercise of love; not in being served but in freely serving; not in sacrificing the subjugated but in self-sacrifice.
But even service can make people dependent and be a concealed form of the love of domination. In Christendom titles like servus servorum and ‘the first servant of the state’ were claimed by spiritual and secular potentates. It is therefore important to grasp that acknowledgment of Jesus as Lord leads not to domination through service but to service for freedom. Here a switch-over from service to domination, or from work to possession, is not possible, nor is the surreptitious dominance achieved through ‘service’ and the making oneself indispensable. What is meant is selfless service, which is solely out for the human rights and dignity of the other. Christ’s surrender of his life, his freedom and his divinity ‘as a ransom for many’ is intended as a sacrifice for the liberty, dignity and happiness of others, without the desire to make them dependent and grateful. We could link Matthew 28:18 and Philippians 2:5ff. by saying that the one to whom ‘all authority was given in heaven and on earth’ ‘emptied himself even unto death on a cross’. It is only in this way that he exercises the authority given to him. The one who is risen is the one who was crucified, and the Lord is the slave. He is slave to the task of liberating all for their true humanity, their likeness to God and their rule over the world which corresponds to God’s own rule. He is the Son of God who humbles himself for their true exaltation to God’s glory.
The dialectic of lordship and servitude in society is many-faceted. There is dominion through the enslavement of others. But there is also domination through service, and through taking on the burdens of others. Domination can be gained through direct subjugation. But it can also be acquired indirectly through service. If ‘the Lord’s’ name is Jesus, and if lordship is read out of the story of his passion, then neither the one nor the other is meant. What is meant is rather freedom in the fellowship of created being, built up on brotherhood, the freedom which was intended by him and will be attained as the culmination of his ‘rule’, according to Paul’s vision of hope. That is why in 1 Cor. 15:24 hope for the abolition of ‘every rule and every authority and power’ is linked with the expectation of the consummation of the lordship of Christ in the universal rule of God. On earth his abolition of all earthly power in the eternal presence of God can be interpreted as anarchy. Human subordination and super-ordination, and a system of justice enforced by power, is to be replaced by the brotherhood of all men with the Son of God in the atmosphere of the all-pervasive glory of the Father. Then, as the indwelling of the divine glory in all being brings protection against futility, chaos and wickedness, earthly protective measures and human repressions become superfluous and void. Then freedom is fulfilled in the sphere of a new creation free of all dominion. If this dominion-free brotherhood is the final goal of the history of Jesus, then the universal rule ascribed to him means liberation from both lordship and servitude—liberation for messianic life. In this ‘crooked generation’ the hoped-for conquest of the structure of lordship and servitude is achieved in no other way than through the social and political form of a voluntary self-surrender on behalf of the liberation of those who are oppressed at any given time.
The church exists if, and to the extent to which, men are obedient to the rule of the Servant of God and receive their liberation from his self-giving. Participation in the liberating rule of Christ through a new way of life presupposes that men have experienced and believe in this liberation through the lordship of Christ in themselves. Before the practical question comes the question of experience; and before the question of the new obedience comes the question of faith. Only the person who through Christ has been snatched from the powers of this world wins the freedom and the strength to make these powers powerless. That is the meaning of the early creeds, which talk about a redemption from the power of the devil through the sacrifice of Christ, so that believers become Christ’s property. In other words, the church reaches as far as the rule of Christ reaches, and it is made up of the poor who are called blessed, the sick, now healed, freed prisoners, and justified sinners. Its new freedom is freedom in the spirit of the new creation of the world. It does not act out of freedoms or alternatives which are already implicit in a social system, and are conceded to the church; it proceeds from the freedom and the qualitative difference from ‘the form of this world’ which has been revealed to all things through the spirit of the new creation. If we are not to fall a victim to confusion, it is important to remember constantly that the lordship of Christ is the lordship of the risen one. As the conquest of death, it is directed towards the conquest of the domination of death and all deadly tyrannies.
The church is the fellowship of those who owe their new life and hope to the activity of the risen Christ. The use of its new freedom in this world ought to correspond to the rule of Christ and to reflect this physically and politically. Every human community corresponds to its environment and reflects it. The church is no exception. In its concrete form it corresponds to its social environment and reflects the conditions which govern the society in which it lives. Most of these are not in dispute but are considered ‘self-evident’. Most people find them self-evident because, as they say, ‘there is no other way of doing things’. This is the point at which the churches begin to be criticized by those who are oppressed by the normative power of what actually exists and in which they have no share. This is where the churches begin to be criticized by those who arrive at a self-understanding which is not ‘self-evident’. They criticize the church for betraying its Lord to the existing system of domination and oppression, because it reflects and corresponds to this system instead of to Christ. Whether this criticism ‘from outside’ is justified in any given case or not, it at all events brings the church up against criticism ‘from within’. How far and in what way does its common life and its use of freedom correspond to the liberty of the one who has called and liberated it? Where and in what way must its correspondence to the liberating lordship of Christ contradict the systems which rule its environment? Christ and society are reflected in the life of the church, as well as in the life of every Christian. The different claims of the two sides lead to conflicts in every specific case. In these conflicts the question which of the two has the greatest claim to obedience has to be answered in practical terms. It has already been decided by faith. The requirements and the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount speak unambiguously for following Christ, setting love in opposition to a loveless world.
The church must first of all reflect and represent the lordship of Christ in itself. It cannot adopt its social order from the way in which the society in which it lives is run, or allow its social order to be determined by that; for it has to correspond to its Lord and to represent new life for society. It cannot be a racial church, which permits racial separation and discrimination within its own fellowship. It cannot be a class church, which sanctions from above a separation or conflict of classes in its own fellowship. It cannot be a male church, tolerating patriarchal forms of rule within itself. It cannot be a national church, which bolsters up national arrogance by its own limitations and ideas. For the church, as it seeks to conform to the liberating rule of Christ, the watchword must be: ‘Here there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3:28; cf. also Rom. 10:12 and 1 Cor. 12:13). In the church of Christ the religious, economic and sexual privileges that obtain in the world around lose their force. But if they lose their force and their validity, then another power holds sway—the power of the Spirit. Then other values obtain, the values of acceptance of the other. The church is not a ‘holy autocracy’; it is the fellowship of believers who follow the one Lord and have been laid hold of by the one Spirit. It is in principle the community of equals, equipped with equal rights and equal dignity. All have the gift of the Spirit. If, in thinking of Christ’s self-surrender, we talk about ‘the priesthood of all believers’, then in thinking of Christ’s lordship we must speak of ‘the sovereignty of all believers’. In this sense the church cannot be anything other than the council of believers or the synod—the common way—of the liberated. The social realization of these ideas is a continual problem and a continual opportunity.
We start from the idea that before God every man is a person in an identical way, and that as a person he has received grace, rights and dignity from God. Then the church is a fellowship of persons, which as such transcends society’s power struggles and conflicts about the role to be played by different groups. But where is this personal dimension ‘before God’ actually visible? It cannot be interpreted in an ideal sense, for in the church it becomes visible through the fellowship in the Word and the fellowship of the Lord’s Supper. In this fellowship divine law prevails. Consequently no divisions of race, class or anything else can be tolerated here, not even if state and society demand them. But if these divisions are not permissible at the central point of the congregation gathered for worship, they are not permissible in the congregation’s public and everyday life either. The common life comprehends the whole of life. To split the congregation into a vertical dimension ‘before God’ and a horizontal dimension ‘in the world’, so that contradictory laws are set up, is both wrong and practically impossible. Important though the idea of personal fellowship in the church is, it cannot be separated from an alteration in our way of life.
Recently people have started from the idea that the church of Christ must present itself as a ‘derestricted area’ amid the restrictions imposed by society. Schleiermacher meant by this a fellowship without an ulterior purpose; modern writers mean communication without repression. A ‘liberated zone’ of this kind in society would certainly fulfil that unfulfilled promise of the French revolution—‘fraternity’. The problem is only that this ‘fraternity’ cannot exist without ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. The idea becomes illusory when it overlooks these presuppositions for unrestricted communication, or simply assumes that they exist. In a society without ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, fraternity cannot be presented all by itself. This is true even of the Christian fellowship itself, so that even there brotherhood is achieved not through the idea of freedom from restriction but in the first instance only through the removal of the privileges enjoyed by one person beyond another, and by one group beyond another. In its new application, the removal of privileges already possessed or acquired cannot be for its own sake but only ‘for others’; it must therefore be directed towards the equal distribution of power and responsibility to all who are endowed with the Spirit. The idea of the ‘derestricted area’ is no more, but also no less, than the specific idea of a goal which ought to be realized as far as possible. In reality power structures and divisions in society penetrate the church as well. There is no point in passing over these realities by way of ideal notions about personal fellowship, partnership or a ‘derestricted area’. If faith’s ideas and love’s hopes are to be realized, we must begin at the bottom, starting with the raising of the downtrodden, the liberation of the oppressed and the right of those who have been silenced to speak out. The ideas of personal fellowship, of partnership and of unrestricted communication cannot be used to stifle the cry for freedom and the call to freedom. It is therefore realistic to begin in the church of Christ by freeing the poor, the unimportant, women and victims of racial discrimination, freeing them for their human rights in order to make room for that joyful experience of the partnership and fellowship which can be shared in a ‘derestricted area’. The goal of emancipation in the church is not the reversal of earthly rule as such, important though the experience of their rights, and even their power, is for the powerless; the goal is the ‘new man’, who no longer acts within the system of lordship or servitude, and hence cannot be the slave of any master or the master of any slave. The church finds the yardstick for new humanity in the lordship of the humiliated Son of man, and the possibilities of it in the experience of the Spirit. In the conflicts between the claims of Christ and the claims of society it will discover its historic opportunities.
Basically, all Christians participate in the kingly service of the Son of man and are witnesses of his liberating rule in their ecclesiastical life, as well as in their social one. The kingdom of all believers sets its stamp on the life of Christ’s church, both inward and outward. With the raising of the crucified Jesus the church becomes manifest. In the spirit of the risen Jesus it experiences the reversal of the idea of lordship. In the fellowship of the Son of man it experiences the fulfilment of the promise of ‘man’. Liberation for fellowship is experienced in the church, and fellowship for the liberation of the world is practised through it—if, and in so far as, the church follows the one whom it acknowledges not only as ‘its’ lord but as ‘the Lord’.
Our understanding of the meaning of the risen Christ remains one-sided if we see this meaning only in his exaltation as Lord. The new life in his spirit does not merely reside in the overcoming of domination and bondage through service for liberation to true humanity. In the Western church a one-sided stress on the lordship of Christ has led to an ethicization of the freedom of faith in new obedience. This ethicization has often enough led to a new legality in which Christ was conceived of as the new lawgiver, and in which faith took its public form from this legality’s demands. This is why it is important for us to perceive the aesthetic side of the resurrection as well.
The aesthetic significance of Christ’s resurrection lies in his transfiguration. The word transfiguration means both Christ’s spiritual irradiation, and the metamorphosis from the form of the slave into the form of glorified man (Phil. 3:21). In this twofold sense the risen Christ is both the irradiated Son of man and the crucified Jesus, transformed into divine beauty. He is not only exalted to be lord of the coming kingdom of God, but as such is also transfigured into ‘the Lord of glory’ (1 Cor. 2:8). By virtue of his conquest of death he already lives, the new fulfilled humanity, in the Spirit. As the exalted, transfigured and transformed man of God he works on downtrodden, barely human and mortal man not only through his liberating power and new demands, but through his perfection and his beauty as well. Consequently the new life under his influence cannot be understood merely as new obedience, as a reversal of life’s direction and as an endeavour to change the world until it visibly becomes God’s creation. It is also, and with equal emphasis, celebrated as the feast of freedom, as joy in existence and as the ecstasy of bliss. These aesthetic categories of the resurrection are part of the new life in faith; without them the imitation of Christ and the new obedience would become a joyless legalistic task. Easter begins with a feast, for Easter is a feast and that makes the life touched by Easter a festal life. ‘The risen Christ makes of man’s life a continual festival,’ declared Athanasius; and Roger Schutz has rightly picked up this idea, making it the centre of the Council of Youth at Taizé in 1973. Jesus himself compared the approaching kingdom of God with a marriage feast. How much more will Christianity see his resurrection into this divine lordship as an eternal joy and an unfading bliss!
Easter is the feast of freedom, when the risen Christ sits at table with his disciples. Originally, Easter epiphanies and celebrations of the Lord’s supper probably belonged together. In the Lord’s supper the risen Christ, as the leader of life against death, takes his own followers into his indestructible life, letting them partake of it. That is why the eucharist is full of remembrance of his death on the cross and full of hope for his coming, and is, in the unity of remembrance and hope, a demonstration of present joy in grace. Before the liberation experienced in faith is translated into new obedience, it is celebrated in festal ecstasy. There is no other way of realizing the extravagance of grace towards the misery of sin. There is no other way of measuring the breadth of the new life compared with the narrowness of death. In the Christian tradition the freedom manifested in the appearances of the risen Christ was first of all apprehended in aesthetic categories, and was celebrated through the feast.
With Easter the laughter of the redeemed, the dance of the liberated and the creative play of fantasy begins. According to Hippolytus the risen Christ is the ‘leader of the mystic round-dance’ and the church is the bride who dances with him. From ancient times the Easter hymns have celebrated the victory of life; they laugh at death, mock hell and drive out the demons of the fear of sin. The earliest of all the Easter hymns, 1 Cor. 15:55–57, makes this clear:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?
The sting of death is sin,
and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ.
In Paul Gerhardt’s Easter hymn the sight of Christ’s resurrection is ‘ein rechtes Freudenspiel’—a proper game of joy. And consequently sin and death and hell, the world and its tribulation, have all lost their power over him. ‘Misfortune is my fortune and night to me is day’, he ends. But the same ideas recur in all the great Easter hymns. English-speaking readers will remember Wesley among many others:
Lives again our glorious King;
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Once he died, our souls to save;
Where thy victory, O grave?
What is expressed in this way in song and laughter, in the play and dance of joy, corresponds to the liberation experienced in the presence of the risen Christ. The exuberance of freedom is depicted and anticipated in the exuberance of ecstasy. The feast of freedom is itself the festal liberation of life. For a particular time, in a particular space, through a particular community, the laws and compulsions of ‘this world’ become invalid. The laws, purposes and compulsions of everyday life no longer apply. An alternative emerges and is presented in festal terms. This feast always means first of all that a community is freed from every compulsion and arrives at the spontaneous expression of its feelings, spontaneous ideas and spontaneous bodily movements. The liberating feast of the resurrection cannot be without euphoria. But it is not simply rousing a passing euphoria when it seizes men in the heart of their oppression and, with the freedom they celebrate, wakes their hunger for freedom; when it meets men in their suppressed feelings of loneliness and through the fellowship they celebrate wakes their cry for the other person. Then the liberating feast radiates into everyday life a remembrance which cannot be forgotten again in the daily round. It works as an antitype to normal standardized life and lets us seek for possible ways of changing it. The liberating feast builds up a tension towards life in this world which can only be resolved through conscious suffering over its lack of freedom and through conscious intervention for more freedom and more open fellowship.
If the feast of freedom is itself celebrated as a liberating feast then it takes on the character of anticipation. It is anticipated in song, in laughter, in play and in dance—not yet in everyday life, but potentially there too. For the feast of freedom does not play with unreal possibilities but with the actual potentialities of the future of Christ in the creative Spirit. Its purpose is not to compensate present lack of freedom through a merely dreamed-of freedom, so that one can better come to terms with lack of liberty later; it is rather to break the spell of life’s immutability and encourage men and women to find true liberation and new fellowship. It is true that the liberating feast is in the same danger as all feasts: namely of being pressed socially into the functions of lightening the burdens of daily oppression, offering a safety valve for pent-up pressures, and providing compensation for daily failure. But as the feast of freedom of the risen Christ, the transfigured and transformed Son of man, it will have to defend itself against this misuse. As an anticipation of what the redeemed life will be in the future it demonstrates the alternatives offered by the creative Spirit. The spell of destiny and the feeling of personal helplessness are lifted where the possibilities and powers of the creative Spirit are experienced in the feast. The helpless discover their power as they are seized by this Spirit. Those who have adapted themselves discover their own personalities as they begin to sing, talk and move within the feast. They discover that they are something and can do something. They ‘come out of their shells’ in a way that surprises themselves. We do not have to think here immediately in terms of speaking with tongues or healing the sick at the liberating feast, though phenomena of this kind certainly ought not to be excluded from the outset. But the Pentecostal churches and the independent churches in Africa have discovered that worship can be experienced and organized as a liberating feast. Their experiences can teach churches with fixed liturgies to be open-minded towards the spontaneous. According to the epistle to the Ephesians (1:19; 3:19; 4:13ff.) the church of Christ counted as the place of the overflowing fullness of the Spirit’s powers. This fullness of the Spirit ought not to be smothered by established and regimented forms of worship. The understanding, in the spirit of Easter, of worship as a liberating feast ought rather to abolish the traditional quenching of the Spirit.
The liberating feast finds its foundation, but also its limits, in the risen Christ himself. Remembrance of the crucified Jesus forbids us to see and use this feast of his resurrection as a flight from earthly conditions of suffering. Hope for the coming of the risen one and the transformation of our mortal bodies (Phil. 3:21) forbids us to confine ourselves to a lament over suffering and earthly misery, and keeps us from simply attacking its causes without rejoicing in its future transformation. In the liberating feast we discover that the resurrection hope is realistic and that reality is hopeful. Joy in the resurrection of Christ therefore actually leads to solidarity with the groaning creation. It turns dumb suffering into articulate pain. It does not separate us from the wicked world. Joy in present freedom remains together with pain over lack of freedom and even with grief over each of our dead. But it also links pain and grief with hope for the redemption of the world. The ecstasy of the liberating feast constantly produces new attitudes of resistance to the unfree life to which men are subjected. Even if the festal experience of freedom cannot be completely translated into movements of liberation, and so for this reason seems purposeless to some people, it none the less remains meaningful in itself; for it points enduringly to the resurrection as the great alternative to this world of death, stimulating the limited alternatives to death’s dominion, keeping us alive and making us take our bearings from the victory of life. The freedom of the resurrection and the victory over death which are ecstatically celebrated in the liberating feast rise above this ‘body of death’. They are still ‘the Lord’s song in a foreign land’. The certainty of triumph celebrated in the Easter hymns will continue to rise above the bounds of our human life, because it cannot remain content with any other victory. It works on the possibilities of the creative Spirit in the world of death in a twofold way: it produces attitudes both of resistance and of consolation. Without resistance, consolation in suffering can decline into a mere injunction to patience. But without consolation in suffering, resistance to suffering can lead to suffering being repressed, pushed aside so that in the end it actually increases. In this double function of resistance and consolation the liberating feast becomes a ‘messianic intermezzo’ (A. A. van Ruler) on the risen Christ’s way to the new creation of the world.
In the way which we have just been discussing, Jesus’ earthly life can be termed a festal life. It was not the life of a ruler, nor was it the life of an unwilling slave. Luke (4:19) linked the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed with the remembrance of the Israelite ‘year of release’ (Lev. 25) and with the prophetic hope for its messianic equivalent (Isa. 61:1–2). The coming kingdom of God is hence understood as the time of liberation and as the opportunity for true human fellowship. The kingdom of God which Jesus embodies in his life has a correspondingly festal character. How much more, therefore, are we bound to interpret the life of the risen, transfigured and transformed Christ as a festal life! It is life without death, time without transience, and participation in the glory of God without hindrance.
The participation of believers in the life of the risen Christ through their hope, their new obedience and their festal ecstasy makes their own life a feast in a similar way. These expressions only seem illusory if we forget that the risen ‘Lord of glory’ is the humiliated servant, the crucified Son of man. When the lord of the feast is the crucified Son of man, then the unfestive, dark side of life—defeat, guilt, fear and death—all belong to his feast of freedom. Then everything really does ‘work for good’ (Rom. 8:28, rsv marg.). Nothing excludes us from the feast, not even ‘my sins’ (Augustine). To gaze on the risen one makes life a feast, but it is only the gaze on the one who was crucified and who descended into hell that makes ‘the whole of life’ a feast, and a perpetual feast, a feast which even death does not terminate, so that it is indeed a ‘feast without end’.
The liberating feast and life as a feast without end complement one another. Neither of them can remain in the truth of Christ without the other. Essentially, ordinary days and holidays are merged here into a single ‘reasonable service’ (Rom. 12:1, av)—that is to say, they are fused into joy in freedon. Fundamentally all Christians partake of the transfiguration of Jesus in the Spirit of freedom. The general participation in the liberating feast of the risen one, with the powers and potentialities of every individual, is the mark of the assembly of Christ. The feast without end puts its stamp on the personal life, on intervention for the liberation of the oppressed, the sad and the apathetic, and on the struggle for a happier world. In view of the transfiguration of Christ and the transfiguration of the world anticipated in it, Dostoevsky’s remarkable saying that ‘beauty will save the world’ proves to be true. He meant by this redeeming beauty the bodily form of grace. And he described this loveliness of lived freedom in the prostitute Sonia, who had pity on the unhappy murderer Raskolnikov. The glory of God on the face of the rejected Son of man frees us for this freedom. The risen Christ works through his lordship and through his glory. These two aspects cannot be divided from one another.
The titles through which the church defines what Jesus means are usually called his titles of office. Whether Jesus is understood and acknowledged as prophet, priest or king, these titles always express his divine dignity towards men and his saving task on their behalf. The christological titles describe his uniqueness and set up a certain distance between him and the church. In devotion, this distance finds expression in the worship and adoration of Christ, and in obedience to him. In the garb of his titles of honour he appears with divine authority. Even if—in the light of his passion and his death on the cross—his exaltation is perceived in his lowliness, his wealth in his poverty and his power in his helplessness, he still stands at God’s side and suffers and dies for men at God’s behest. But the fellowship which Jesus brings men, and the fellowship of people with one another to which he calls, would be described in one-sided terms if another ‘title’ were not added, a title to describe the inner relationship between the divine and the human fellowship: the name of friend.
Friendship is an unpretentious relationship, for ‘friend’ is not an official term, nor a title of honour, nor a function. It is a personal designation. Friendship unites affection with respect. There is no need to bow before a friend. We can look him in the eye. We neither look up to him nor look down on him. In friendship we experience ourselves for what we are, respected and accepted in our own freedom. Through friendship we respect and accept other people as people and as individual personalities. Friendship combines affection with loyalty. One can rely on a friend. As a friend one is a person for other people to rely on. A friend remains a friend even in disaster, even in guilt. Between friends the determining factor is not an ideal, a purpose or a law, but simply promise, loyalty to one another and openness. Finally, friendship is a human relationship which springs from freedom, exists in mutual freedom and preserves that freedom. Friendship is ‘the concrete concept of freedom’. We help our friend without any reward or return, for friendship’s sake. We trust our friend and entrust ourselves to him. We need friends in order to communicate the joy of our own life and in order to enjoy our own happiness. Common joy creates friendship. Sympathy only follows from this, so that it can be said that true friendship proves itself in sorrow. Friendship lives without any compulsion or force, but it is something permanent. That is why friendship conquers enmity, for permanence counts more than the moment, and one cannot be an ‘enemy’ for ever. Force and violence spoil human relationships. Friendliness makes them live and keeps them alive. That is why ultimately friendship is stronger than enmity. The world will belong to enduring friendliness.
When, in the field of human relationships, the parent-child relation comes to an end, when the master-servant connection is abolished and when the privileges based on sexual position are removed, then what is truly human emerges and remains; and that is friendship. The new man, the true man, the free man is the friend. Existence for others within the regulation and functioning of the social order is necessary. But it is only legitimated as long as the necessity continues to exist. On the other hand existence with others, in unexacting friendliness, is free from necessity and compulsion. It preserves freedom because it unites receptivity with permanence. Friendship is the reasonable passion for truly human fellowship; it is a mutual affection cemented by loyalty. The more people begin to live with one another as friends, the more privileges and claims to domination become superfluous. The more people trust one another the less they need to control one another. The positive meaning of a classless society free of domination, without repression and without privileges, lies in friendship. Without the power of friendship and without the goal of a friendly world there is no human hope for the class struggles and struggles for dominance.
Jesus is only called ‘friend’ in two passages in the New Testament. ‘The Son of man has come eating and drinking; and you say, “Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” ’ (Luke 7:34). These words are to be found in the discourse about John the Baptist. John neither ate bread nor drank wine, and was thought eccentric. Jesus accepted sinners, ate and drank with them, and was thought to disregard the law. This is the way the people described the obvious differences between Jesus and John the Baptist. The inner reason for Jesus’ friendship with ‘tax collectors and sinners’ was to be found in the joy of the messianic feast which he celebrated with them. It was not sympathy, it was overflowing joy in the kingdom of God, a joy that sought to share and to welcome, that drew him to people who were outcasts in the eyes of the law. The dawn of the kingdom is celebrated in the messianic feast, often described as a marriage feast. The regard which Jesus showed for the unregarded and despised when he ate and drank with them was determined by the law of grace. Jesus laid claim to this law by forgiving sins and by living in fellowship with tax-collectors and sinners.
This law of grace is nothing other than the righteousness of the kingdom of God. When the people call Jesus a ‘friend of tax-collectors and sinners’, they are meaning to compromise him, for they identify men with their sins and talk about ‘sinners’. They identify men with their job of collecting taxes, and call them ‘tax-collectors’. They identify men with their disease and call them ‘lepers’. Here they are expressing the law which pins men down to what they do. But as the Son of man, Jesus becomes the friend of the sinful and the sick. By forgiving them their sins he gives them respect as people and becomes their friend. By eating together with them in celebration of the messianic feast he brings them the fellowship of God. When the people denounce Jesus by calling him ‘the friend of tax-collectors and sinners’, they are expressing a profound truth from Jesus’ own point of view. As a friend, Jesus offers the unlovable the friendship of God. As the Son of man he shows them their true and real humanity, through which they are liberated from their unrighteousness. A liberating fellowship with the unrighteous like this always has something compromising about it outwardly.
According to John 15:13f., Jesus declares himself the friend of his disciples and calls them into the new life of friendship. ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.’ Here the sacrifice of a man’s own life for his friends is the highest form of love. Whereas love in general can be interpreted as ‘existence for the other, pure and simple’, friendship leads to actually risking one’s life to protect a friend. When John makes friendship the motive for Christ’s suffering and death, then he means by this love as clear-sighted faithfulness and conscious self-devotion for the salvation of others. Through the death of their friend the disciples become his friends for ever. On their side they remain in the circle of his friendship when they keep his commandments and become friends of one another. According to John too Jesus’ friendship with the disciples springs from joy: ‘These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full’ (15:11). That is the divine joy, the joy of eternal life, the overflowing joy that confers fellowship and gives joy to others. He has come, he suffers and dies for them out of the divine joy, not out of condescension, and for the joy of those who are his, not out of sympathy. That is why the disciples are called ‘friends’ and not ‘servants’ (15:15). The relationship of servants to God, the Lord, comes to an end. Through the friendship of Jesus the disciples become the free friends of God. In his fellowship they no longer experience God as Lord, and not merely as Father either; they experience him as a friend, in his innermost being. It is true that there is no equality in the divine friendship revealed through Jesus’ friendship. But it is a relationship of mutual friendship none the less. If God is experienced as a friend, then men become the friends of God. Friendship becomes the bond of their fellowship.
According to Luke and John, friendship with God comes preeminently to expression in the prayer of the free man. A man may feel himself to be God’s servant in obedience to the commandments. He may see himself as the child of God through faith in the gospel. But in prayer he talks to God as to his friend. The parable which follows on the Lord’s Prayer in Luke (11:5ff.) talks about a quite everyday request for bread made to a friend. Although the time is inconvenient, he still fulfils the request for friendship’s sake, and because he cannot refuse his friend’s urgent appeal. When a man prays in the name of Jesus, he prays to God as to a friend and is insistent for friendship’s sake. In John too Jesus’ friendship leads to certainty in prayer: ‘so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you’ (15:16). The prayer offered in the assurance that prayer will be heard therefore becomes the expression of life lived in friendship with God. God can be talked to. He listens to his friend. Thanks to this friendship there is room in the almighty liberty of God for the created liberty of man. In this friendship there is the opportunity for man to have an effect upon and with God’s sole effectiveness.
The grace of God to sinful man is that He encounters him as the hearing God; that He calls him not merely to the humility of a servant and the thankfulness of a child but to the intimacy and boldness of a friend …
Apart from obedience and faith, this prayer is therefore the highest stage of human liberty. In it man as the friend of God participates in his lordship. By bringing the sighs and groans of the world’s misery to God, he claims God’s friendship for those who sigh and groan. God shows his friendship by listening to man. By doing so he gives man an irreplaceable dignity, respects him in his freedom and responds to him. Prayer and the hearing of prayer are the marks of man’s friendship with God and God’s friendship with man. The relationship expressed in prayer is one of mutual freedom and respect. It would be thinking like a servant to assume an obligation for prayer to be heard. It would be thinking like a child if the one who prayed did not respect God’s freedom. God’s friend prays out of freedom and trusts to the friendship of the free God.
The concept of Jesus’ friendship sums up everything that can be said about fellowship by the titles of office we have used up to now: As the messianic harbinger of joy, Jesus brings the gospel of the kingdom to the poor and becomes the friend of tax-collectors and sinners. As the high priest he offers himself ‘for many’, and consummates his love by dying as a friend for a friend. As the exalted Lord he liberates men from their bondage and makes them friends for others. As the one who is glorified he intercedes with the Father for the world. In his name friendship with God through prayer and the hearing of prayer comes into being.
Thus, theologically, the many-faceted work of Christ, which in the doctrine of Christ’s threefold office was presented in terms of sovereignty and function, can be taken to its highest point in his friendship. The joy which Christ communicates and the freedom which he brings as prophet, priest and king find better expression in the concept of friendship than in those ancient titles. For in his divine function as prophet, priest and king, Christ lives and acts as a friend and creates friendship.
Of course the expression ‘friendship’ is just as much misunderstood today as the ancient titles of office. It must therefore be clearly defined and differentiated. Friendship was the quintessence of the Greek doctrine of society. It is the principle of companionship. Because righteousness without concord remains sterile, friendship fulfils the meaning of righteousness and is itself the most righteous of all. But for Plato and Aristotle the reciprocal character of friendship is connected with the equality of the partners. It is true that wise men and heroes are called ‘the friends of God’, but it is not really possible to talk about friendship with Zeus. It is true that a free man can be friends with a slave, but only in so far as he sees him as a man and not as a slave at all. Because of the principle of equality and rank, the Greek ideal of friendship tended to conceive of it in exclusive terms. Jesus breaks through this closed circle of friendship, reaching out alike to God, the disciples, and the tax-collectors and sinners. In the Christian tradition the name of friend was often exclusively applied to the circle of the devout, the saved, or to the mystics, who sought by this means to distinguish themselves from the ordinary brethren. According to this interpretation, Jesus’ friends would be the group of people who see themselves as his disciples in a particular way. Through this exclusive use, which shows the powerful influence of Greek thinking, Jesus’ open and public friendship for the unrighteous and the despised is lost. But in fact Christian friendship cannot be lived in the inner circle of one’s equals but only in open affection and public respect for other people.
In Old High German ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ were still public concepts based on alliances of protection and aid. Friendship was forged through alliances and publicly proved through loyalty. The modern division between public and private life has led to the concepts being differently distributed. The enemy has remained a public and political concept, whereas friendship has moved into the private sphere, there acquiring a purely inward significance. The friend has become the personal friend, the ‘bosom’ friend; friendship has become individualized and emotionalized. Inner agreement, natural affection, mutual goodwill and free choice have now become the determining factors in friendship. In the modern world it has consequently become necessary to give moral stability to the feeling of friendship through the ideas of respect, virtue, loyalty and reliability. Because the individual becomes lonely when the private sphere is separated from the public one, he needs friends. But they do not break through the loneliness in any essential way. The friendship of heart or soul becomes ‘the loneliness of two people’. Goethe called the man happy who shut himself off from the world without rancour, enjoying the society of a bosom friend:
Selig, wer sich vor der Welt ohne Haß verschließt,
einen Freund am Busen hält und mit dem genießt …
This modern intimacy and transference of friendship to the private sphere is quite foreign to Jesus’ friendship with his disciples and with people who were publicly known as tax-collectors and sinners. In order to live in his friendship today, Christians must remove friendship from the private sector, so that it may again acquire the character of public protection and public respect.
The friendship of Jesus cannot be lived and its friendliness cannot be disseminated when friendship is limited to people who are like ourselves and when it is narrowed down to private life. The messianic feast which Jesus celebrates with his own and with the despised and unregarded is not merely ‘the marriage of the soul with God’; it is also ‘the festival of the earth’. Because it is the core on which his open friendship is based, a total concept of friendship will have to be developed which includes the soul and the body, the people who are like ourselves and the people who are different. When we compare the ancient and the modern concept of friendship it becomes clear that Christians must show the friendship of Jesus in openness for others, and totally. In his Spirit they will become the friends of others. They will spread friendliness through a sane passion for humanity and the freedom of man. The Quakers, who call themselves ‘the Society of Friends’, have shown this in exemplary fashion through their open social work in the slums and their struggle for the abolition of slavery.
Open and total friendship that goes out to meet the other is the spirit of the kingdom in which God comes to man and man to man. From Ambrose to Augustine, and from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, Christian love was continually given the name of friendship. Love is the friendship of man with God and all his creatures. In this inclusive sense friendship really is the most righteous of all. Open friendship prepares the ground for a friendly world.
The question what the church is, is not the same as the question where it is. To give an account of the church’s nature and purpose is not to answer the question about the place where it has to give an account of its nature and its purpose. It is true that traditionally this question of where the true church is to be found is often answered by a pointer to the signs of the true church, and by a catalogue, whether extensive or brief, of its essential characteristics. But if the question is seriously directed towards the church’s truth, then the question is not fundamentally about this or that characteristic at all; the question is about the one who leads the church into its truth and makes it what it ought to be. If the church is, according to its own claim, ‘the church of Jesus Christ’, then it is Christ who leads the church into its truth. In this case the true church is to be found where Christ is present. We sever the question of the true church from the doctrine about its visible characteristics and answer it by pointing to the happening which makes the church the church and leads it into its truth. This happens with the phrase, ‘the church is to be found where.…’ It indicates that the church is a happening which is not totally absorbed by its definition. The concept of the church ought rather to point to the event which makes it a living church, compared with its concept. We cannot start from the concept of the church in order to discover the happening of Christ’s presence; we have to start from the event of Christ’s presence in order to find the church. In this sense we start from the proposition: ubi Christus—ibi ecclesia.
But if the church finds the place of its truth and its true constitution in the presence of Christ, the difficult question arises: where, then, is Christ present? The simple answer is: Christ, as the crucified and risen one, is only there where he promised to be present—but there he truly is present. In the Old Testament Yahweh was experienced, not as heavenly substance but as a divinely historical person, and the promise of his presence was believed in his name: ‘I am who I am’—‘I will be who I will be’—‘I will be there’ (Ex. 3:14). In the same way, in the New Testament Jesus is not remembered as a dead man belonging to the past, nor is he defined as a heavenly authority; he is believed as the subject of his own presence. It is also true of the one who has been exalted to God that ‘I am who I am’—‘I will be there’. Christ is therefore present where he has expressly given the assurance of his presence. And here we must distinguish between the promises of his presence in something other than himself, and the promise of his presence through himself, between the identifications according to which he is to be expected in something else, and his own identity, according to which he himself is to be expected.
If we enquire about the promises of his presence in this way, we find three different groups of assurances in the New Testament:
(a) By virtue of his identifying assurance, Christ is present in the apostolate, in the sacraments, and in the fellowship of the brethren.
(b) By virtue of his identifying assurance, Christ is present in ‘the least of the brethren’.
(c) By virtue of his assurance, Christ is present as his own self in his parousia.
If the thesis ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia is correct, then the church in its existence and method of activity will unite in itself and mediate to others these three modes of his promised presence. It will find the place of its truth in this field. If it omits any one of these promises of Christ’s presence, its truth will be obscured.
Here the word apostolate is used to sum up the medium of the proclamation through word and sacrament, as well as the persons and community of the proclaimers. Here Christ’s identifying promise runs: ‘He who hears you, hears me.’ ‘As the Father has sent me, even so I send you. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. Receive the Holy Spirit’ (John 20:21–3). In Matthew 28:18ff. the missionary charge to the disciples is linked with the promise: ‘and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age’. Paul knows that he is an ‘ambassador for Christ’ and beseeches the Corinthians ‘on behalf of Christ’ to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20).
Here the exalted Christ promises his presence to the church in the church’s apostolate. It takes up his missionary charge, participating in it as Christ’s representative. That is why the exalted Lord is also to be present in the church’s testimony through the Spirit. He identifies himself with the apostolic word and joins the human word of his witnesses with the eschatological word. He unites the powerlessness of his witnesses with his own fullness of power in the assurance of the Spirit. This gives the human word its authority, without doing away with its human character. The word of Christ is present in the apostolic word and as the apostolic word. But the converse is not true: the apostolic word is not identical with the word of Christ. Formally, there is here an indirect and limited identity by virtue of the unilateral identification. The apostolic word takes its certainty from Christ’s promise, not from itself. The equation: ‘He who hears you, hears me’ is set up by Christ and hence is not reversible.
This indirect identity by virtue of the promise does not merely cover the apostolic proclamation; it applies to the apostolic existence as well. In the movement of the apostolate the person of the apostle takes on the form of Christ’s destiny. He does not merely bear Christ on his lips in the word of the gospel. He also ‘carries in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in his body’ (2 Cor. 4:10). Here Christ’s substitution is reflected: ‘So death is at work in us, but life in you’ (2 Cor. 4:12). The ‘beseeching on behalf of Christ’ in the ministry of reconciliation also corresponds to Christ’s intercession (2 Cor. 5:20). The promised presence of Christ is the presence of the one who was crucified. For that reason the apostolate has the bodily and social dimension of the passion, and the power of the resurrection.
A corresponding promise of Christ’s presence is to be found in the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:23ff.). The thanksgiving and the breaking of bread is described in the words ‘This is my body which is broken for you’. And the thanksgiving and the drinking from the cup is described as ‘This is the new covenant in my blood’. The whole eucharist is given the meaning: ‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor. 11:26). We are bound to understand this as an identification of Christ’s presence with bread and wine and the whole eucharist, by virtue of the promise. The feast of his presence is surrounded by the remembrance of his death and the expectation of his coming.
Baptism contains a corresponding promise of Christ’s presence (Rom. 6). People are baptized into his death so that they may walk in new life, just as Christ has been raised. They become of like form with him in his presence, by virtue of his promise.
Finally, a corresponding identification of Christ is to be found in the fellowship of believers itself: ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them’ (Matt. 18:20).
To sum up, according to the view of the New Testament churches, the exalted one is present where he desires to be present. He desires to be present where he promises his presence according to his own assurance: in the apostolate, in baptism, in the Lord’s supper, and in the fellowship of the brethren. This is a Real Presence in the Spirit through identification, and an identification on the basis of promise. This leads to the proposition: where the apostolate, baptism, the Lord’s supper and brotherly fellowship take place in Christ’s presence, there is the church.
Article VII of the Augsburg Confession therefore uses the phrase in qua when discussing the place of the church: ‘Est autem ecclesia congregatio sanctorum, in qua evangelium pure docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta.’ The German version expounds the right use of the sacraments with the provision ‘laut des Evangelii’—according to the gospel. This means the institutionary promises (propter ordinationem et mandatum Christi). The Barmen Declaration has clung to this form of words in article III: ‘The Christian church is the community of brethren in which Jesus Christ acts as Lord in the present, in word and sacrament, through the Holy Spirit.’ Here the brotherly fellowship is stressed on the one hand, and the present actions of Christ through the Spirit on the other. The logic of the in qua, or in which, is not entirely clear, and its interpretation is therefore a matter of dispute. Does the congregatio sanctorum precede what happens in it through word and sacrament, or does it proceed from it? Is ‘the community of brethren’ the premise for the place in which Christ as Lord is present and acts in word and sacrament through the Spirit, or does this place only come into being out of Christ’s activity? Here we are assuming a truly mutual relationship, which is factually constituted through the present actions of Christ. The risen Christ makes himself present in the Spirit through word, sacrament and brotherly fellowship. The church exists in its truth as the church of Christ where it stands at the place of these manifestations of Christ’s presence, and where it itself becomes this place.
In the realization of Christ’s presence per identificationem with the apostolate, baptism, the Lord’s supper and fellowship, his presence, his parousia, announces itself. That is why the church constituted through his presence in word and sacrament lives ‘in expectation of his appearance’ (Barmen III). This means that Christ arrives at his identity in the world by way of his identifications with something else, and that conversely his parousia is anticipated in the realization of his presence through word, sacrament and fellowship.
Another group of similar promises of Christ’s presence is found in the picture painted in Matthew 25:31–46 of Jesus as the Son of man in his function as Judge of the world. The Judge of the world gathers men and women before his throne on the right hand and the left. To those on the right he says: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the people he is addressing will ask wonderingly: ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty?’ And the Judge will answer: ‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ The judgment pronounced on the people on his left is a corresponding one: ‘I was hungry and you gave me no food.’ When they ask in surprise, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty?’ they are given the answer: ‘As you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ According to this story the coming judge is already hidden in the world—now, in the present—in the least of his brethren—the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. Whatever we do to them we are doing to him. Because, according to this story, the Son of man, who is also the world’s Judge, calls all men to their account, judging them according to what they have done to him in his hidden presence in the poor, ‘the least of the brethren’ cannot only mean poor and persecuted Christians. That would also be contradicted by the people’s ignorance about what they were doing. Just as the last judgment is universal, so is the Judge’s anticipatory identification with the hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned and sick wherever and whoever they are. If this identification is perceptible anywhere, it is in the path of suffering of the one who told the story: the way to Golgotha trodden by the hungry, thirsty, naked prisoner, the Son of man from Nazareth.
The way in which the identification between the Judge of the world and the least of men is formulated is remarkably closely parallel to the identification of Christ with the community of believers. Whereas there we are told: ‘Whoever hears you hears me’, here we read: ‘Whoever visits you visits me.’ In both cases there is an identification, by virtue of which the one is present in the other. But in the case of the apostolate there is an identification with the active mission; whereas in the least of the brethren, it is an identification with the suffering expectation. In the apostolate the exalted Lord speaks. Ought it not to be the crucified one who speaks in the least of the brethren? Does not the church of Christ then stand between Christ’s missionary charge—‘Whoever hears you hears me’—and the expectation of Christ—‘Whoever visits them visits me’? Can the church exist in the truth and presence of Christ if it does not link this mission and this expectation together and, acting in the presence of the exalted one, seek the fellowship of the crucified one in the poor? Up to now the ecclesiological significance of Matthew 25:31ff. has hardly been perceived. But if the thesis ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia is to be considered a valid one, then this story with its promise of the presence of the Judge of the world is part of the doctrine of the church and the place where it is to be found.
The giving drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry, the sheltering of strangers and visiting of prisoners has often been treated ethically, with somewhat colourless talk about ‘love of our neighbour’. But on the basis of what we have just said about the identification of the Judge with the least of the brethren, we really have to talk here about ‘love of Christ’. It is not only the case that a man becomes ‘a Christ like Christ’ to the other by opening himself to him in love, as Luther said. It is also true that the other, the one who is overlooked, the Lazarus before Dives’ door, becomes one like Christ, a saviour and judge. The Christian programmes of neighbourly love, works of charity, care for the poor and development aid, often cover up this sting in the story, because they think that the hungry, thirsty, naked and imprisoned Christ would be helped with a little trouble. But it is not only love that is demanded. It is in the first place faith, the faith, namely, that the least of the brethren are waiting in Christ’s stead for the deeds of the just man. It is not that the wretched are the object of Christian love or the fulfilment of a moral duty; they are the latent presence of the coming Saviour and Judge in the world, the touchstone which determines salvation and damnation. The hidden presence of the coming Christ in the poor therefore belongs to ecclesiology first of all, and only after that to ethics.
On the other hand Rudolf Bultmann has called Matthew 25:31–46 ‘the most striking account of the “transformations undergone by God” ’. This expression, taken from Ernst Barlach, is meant, according to Bultmann, to describe the ‘unity of Creator and creature in the sense that the present moment is only a mutable fragment of eternity’. ‘God encounters us in the here and now, as the Unconditioned in the conditional, the Transcendent in the transitory present, the other-worldly in the this-worldly.’ That is why we have to hold ourselves open for encounters with God in the world and in time. True faith is ‘readiness for the eternal to encounter us in the present, in the changing situations of our lives’. ‘This readiness can be questioning or it can be completely unconscious. God can encounter us overwhelmingly where we least expect it.’ The great picture of the last judgment which Jesus draws contains, according to Bultmann, ‘the two closely linked doctrines of the “transformations” of God and of the presence of the eternal in time’. It is right to make Matthew 25 part of the doctrine of God, because the point at issue is the Judge of the world who is present in concealed form in the poor; but it none the less appears questionable to take this story as an illustration of the doctrine of the ‘transformations of God’ and the potential presence of eternity in time. Does this not make this discourse about concrete reality into a general truth about what is universally possible? For this is not simply a question of the changing situations of our lives, but of specific encounters with the hungry, thirsty, sick, naked and imprisoned—that is to say, the encounters on which neither divine nor human splendour is shed, according to our general view of things; encounters which everyone who wants to live, and to live well, is bound to avoid and flee from. Nor is it simply a question of possible transformations of the presence of God in time; it is a matter of the identification of the coming Judge of the world with those who are oppressed in the present—an identification which challenges the righteous to act. Finally, the story does not seem to talk about the paradox of ‘the presence of eternity in time’, but rather about the presence of the coming Judge hidden in the poor.
If we introduce Matthew 25 into ecclesiology, then an unheard-of tension arises for the church, which finds its truth in the presence of Christ. Where is the true church? In the fellowship manifest in word and sacrament, or in the latent brotherhood of the Judge hidden in the poor? Can the two coincide? If we take the promises of Christ’s presence seriously, we must talk about a brotherhood of believers and a brotherhood of the least of his brethren with Christ. ‘He who hears you hears me’—‘He who visits them, visits me.’ The two have seldom been successfully combined in the church’s history. The Christian church in its manifest form has always appealed to the exalted Christ’s promises of authority, interpreting itself as the body of the exalted Lord. The apocalyptic Christ, the poor, hungry, forsaken Judge, has generally remained outside the door of church and society. The only people who have asked about him have been the Christian religions of the oppressed and Christian communities which were themselves pushed out of society and church as sects. But if the church, in appealing to the exalted Christ’s promises of authority, understands itself as his earthly presence, must it not also, and with equal emphasis, seek the presence of the world’s humiliated Judge? Evidently there are two brotherhoods of Christ, the professed and professing brotherhood which is the community of the exalted one; and the unknown and disowned brotherhood of the least of men with the humiliated Christ. If the church appeals to the crucified and risen Christ, must it not represent this double brotherhood of Christ in itself, and be present with word and Spirit, sacrament, fellowship and all creative powers among the poor, the hungry and the captives? Then the church would not simply be a ‘divinely human mystery’ but the mystery of this double presence of Christ. Then the church with its mission would be present where Christ awaits it, amid the downtrodden, the sick and the captives. The apostolate says what the church is. The least of Christ’s brethren say where the church belongs.
If Matthew 25 is applied to the teaching and practice of the church, then the conflict between a ‘dogmatic’ and an ‘ethical’ Christianity must be resolvable. Statements about the ‘manifest’ and the ‘latent’ church could also be understood in the sense of the double presence and brotherhood of Christ. Admittedly one could not then simply talk about a ‘Christianity outside the church’ or about ‘the workings of the Spirit outside the church’. For then the question is not how people or happenings outside the church respond to the church, but how the church responds to the presence of Christ in those who are ‘outside’, hungry, thirsty, sick, naked and imprisoned. It is not a question of the integration of Christians outside the church into Christianity in its ecclesiastical form; it is a matter of the church’s integration in Christ’s promised presence: ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia.
Here too it must be noted that the hidden presence of the coming Judge in the least of the brethren means identification but not transformation or identity. The realization of his presence per identificationem with the least of men is the harbinger of the presence of the Judge in identity—that is to say, in his parousia. By way of his identification with the poor, Christ attains his identity in glory. Conversely, his parousia is anticipated in the fellowship of those whom he calls the least of his brethren.
Finally, we find in the New Testament those promises of Christ’s presence in glory and open appearance and manifestation. Parousia literally means presence, but in prophetic and apostolic usage it has taken on the sense of future. Luther translated the ‘Parusie Christi’ by ‘Zukunft Christi’—Christ’s future. Because of this the word ‘future’ became the equivalent of the Latin adventus, not the translation of futurum. Later it came to be rendered as ‘Christ’s second coming’. But there are objections to the word ‘second’, because through its use Christ’s parousia seems to presuppose a period of absence.
Primitive Christianity waits for the Jesus who has come already as the one who is to come. The hope of an imminent coming of the exalted Lord in Messianic glory is, however, so much to the fore that in the New Testament the terms are never used for the coming of Christ in the flesh, and παρουσία never has the sense of return.
It is only since Justin that theology has counted several parousias of Christ; he came in the flesh—he comes in the Spirit—he will come in glory. That would be Christ’s threefold parousia, interpreted according to the three temporal modes. But is this not to weaken the significance of the Christian faith’s eschatological orientation, to fit it into the general flux of time? The three temporal modes speak fundamentally not about a future, but only about the futurum of being. There is what was, what is and what will be. ‘What is to come’ is, it is true, close to what will be, but is not totally absorbed by that; it stands in relationship both to the future and to the present and past. For what is to come does not emerge out of the forces and trends of growth and decay but comes in liberation to meet what is becoming, what has become, and what has passed away. To this extent, what is to come also contains the end of growth and decay.
When they conceive of the coming of Christ in messianic glory, the New Testament writers are simultaneously thinking of the end of the world, or the end of all things (Matt. 24:3ff.; 1 Peter 4:7). Consequently Christ’s coming parousia is expected in universal, all-embracing and openly manifest form. For the primitive church the ‘end of the world’ expected in his future was not merely the close of history but the key to an understanding of the history of Christ, the history of the Spirit, and the history of the world. People remembered his history, experienced the Spirit and saw world history in the light of his future. For this experience of history his future took on priority in the interpretation of time, with respect to past, present and what can develop out of both.
Is this orientation of the future towards Christ’s parousia factually necessary, or a dispensable piece of mythology belonging to that particular period? It proves itself to be necessary in the fact, not in the content of the idea, from the dynamism of the provisional in the remembrance and experience of history which it occasions. The character of promise in the history of Jesus, the eschatological character of his cross and resurrection from the dead, the hopeful character of faith and the unique nature of the experiences of the Spirit, which point beyond themselves, would be incomprehensible without this future orientation towards Christ’s parousia and would hence ultimately themselves be null and void.
The messianic presence of Christ in glory cannot, it is true, be conceived of, because conceptions are formed out of experience, and we have not yet experienced this presence. The events of ‘the end of the world’ cannot be told either, because we can only tell of what is past. But his messianic future in glory and the end of the world in it can be expected and anticipated. They are expected in the hope which is kindled at the remembrance of Christ and which in its suffering over this world cries out for the new creation in righteousness. It is anticipated inasmuch as the present is brought into ‘messianic abeyance’, or, better, into the dynamism of the provisional. The hope of the parousia brings the historical present of Word and faith into the dynamism of the ‘not yet’ which thrusts forward to what is ahead. The faith that points to the word of promise therefore presses on to the seeing face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). Hence the Spirit is understood as earnest, advance payment and foretaste of the coming glory. The presence of Christ in baptism and the Lord’s supper is hence believed as the hidden presence ‘on the way’ to his direct presence.
Christ’s presence in word and sacrament points beyond itself (by virtue of its indwelling logic of identification) to his presence itself, to his identity in the world. The identification of Christ with the poor and his brotherhood with the very least belong, according to Matthew 25, within the framework of the coming judgment. The Judge who is to come actualizes his presence in the least of his brethren, realizing through the judgment what was done to them as something done to him. Without this orientation the least of the brethren lose their eschatological dignity as brethren of the universal judge. Without his anticipatory incarnation in them the universal Judge loses his present significance.
If we try to link Christ’s presence in the apostolate and his presence in the least of the brethren with his presence in glory, then on the one hand the dynamism of the provisional in the apostolate and in the poor runs to meet his consummating and redeeming appearance in glory. On the other hand the one who is to come is then already present in an anticipatory sense in history in the Spirit and the word, and in the miserable and helpless. His future ends the world’s history of suffering and completes the fragments and anticipations of his kingdom which are called the church. His parousia in messianic glory is universal, all-comprehending and openly manifest. Here it can only be convincingly upheld and testified to in its breadth and depth through a fellowship which hears both assurances simultaneously: ‘He who hears you, hears me’—‘He who visits them, visits me’. If the church were to confine itself to the first (as it has always traditionally done) then it would not be able to expect the one who was crucified in the coming Lord. If we were only to direct our gaze towards the second, then the church would all too easily wait for the coming Lord as an apocalyptic angel of revenge on behalf of those who are oppressed on earth. The fellowship of Christ lives simultaneously in the presence of the exalted one and of the one who was humiliated. Because of that it expects from his appearance in glory the end of the history of suffering and the consummation of the history of liberation.