V
The church lives in the history which finds its substantiation in the resurrection of the crucified Christ and whose future is the all-embracing kingdom of freedom. The living remembrance of Christ directs the church’s hope towards the kingdom, and living hope in the kingdom leads back to the inexhaustible remembrance of Christ. The present power of this remembrance and this hope is called ‘the power of the Holy Spirit’, for it is not of their own strength, reason and will that people believe in Jesus as the Christ and hope for the future as God’s future. It is true that people believe and hope with all their strength, reason and will. But the certainty of faith and the assurance in hope is joined by the consciousness that in these we are already living in indestructible fellowship with God. It is not faith that makes Jesus the Christ; it is Jesus as the Christ who creates faith. It is not hope that makes the future into God’s future; it is this future that wakens hope. Faith in Christ and hope for the kingdom are due to the presence of God in the Spirit. The church understands the tension between faith and hope as the history of the Spirit that makes all things new. Its fellowship with Christ is founded on the experience of the Spirit which manifests Christ, unites us with him and glorifies him in men. Its fellowship in the kingdom of God is founded on the power of the Spirit, which leads it into truth and freedom. It is when the church, out of faith in Christ and in hope for the kingdom, sees itself as the messianic fellowship that it will logically understand its presence and its path in the presence and the process of the Holy Spirit.
The traditional doctrine of the Holy Spirit follows the structure of the Apostles’ Creed. The presence and future of redemption, the church and the kingdom of God are framed and comprehended by belief in the Holy Spirit. History and eschatology are therefore parts of pneumatology. This means, conversely, that pneumatology is developed historically and eschatologically, in the sense that the history of the church, the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins are to be interpreted as the history of the future; while the eschatology of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting are to be seen as the future of history. That is why we understand this mediation of eschatology and history as the presence of the Holy Spirit.
It is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in particular that depicts the processes and experiences in which and through which the church becomes comprehensible to itself as the messianic fellowship in the world and for the world. These processes and experiences are on the one hand the ‘means of salvation’—proclamation, baptism, the Lord’s supper, worship, prayer, acts of blessing and the way in which individual and fellowship live. On the other hand they are the ‘charismata’, the ministries, gifts and tasks (or offices, as they are often called) in this fellowship, or which flow from this fellowship for society. If these ‘means of salvation’ and these ministries of the church are understood as mediations and ministries of the messianic fellowship in the world, then they cannot be misinterpreted in a clerical sense; nor will it be permissible to represent them merely in the context of the inner mutual relationship between Christ and the church, or between the church and Christ. As the mediations and powers of the Holy Spirit, they lead the church beyond itself, out into the suffering of the world and into the divine future. It is precisely in its character as a fellowship in word and sacrament, and as a charismatic fellowship, that the church will understand itself as a messianic fellowship of service for the kingdom of God. For the mediations and powers of the Holy Spirit are open for the things they seek to mediate and bring about, and they open people for the future of the new creation through newly awakened faith and fresh hope.
In the following chapters, therefore, we shall be presenting the ‘means of salvation’ and the ‘ministries of the church’ in the framework of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Within the all-embracing framework of the trinitarian history of God, we shall have to unfold both the eschatological understanding of the historical reality of the church in its mediations of salvation and its ministries, and the historical interpretation of the eschatology of the kingdom and God’s glorification in the world which that framework implies. Although the doctrine of word and sacrament and the doctrine of the ministry are interwoven and cannot be separated, we shall present them one after another, although we shall continually be relating the individual statements to each other, so that their unity in the messianic fellowship becomes perceptible.
The expression ‘sacrament’ has become open to misunderstanding through the development of different theological traditions. What is usually meant are ‘the means of grace’, the visible signs which mediate the invisible grace, and the ‘sacred rites’ through which, according to Christ’s ordinance and promise, salvation is consummated to men, or by which man is assured of salvation.
The Eastern church has not fixed the number of these sacraments or sacred rites, though concentrating on the church’s worship, the sacred liturgy, which stands at the centre of its life. Here, in the form of ‘living dogmatics’, the great saving mysteries of the Trinity and christology are celebrated and related to the event of the eucharist.
Since its medieval reform, the Roman Catholic church has confined itself to seven sacraments, ‘no more and no less’, as the Council of Trent said, following Peter Lombard. Historically this can be understood in the light of the struggle to free the church from the power of the Christian imperium, for through these seven sacraments the former imperial sacraments of anointing and consecration lost their status, investiture with the ecclesiastical offices being reserved for the church alone. On the other hand the symbolism of the perfect number may have played a part in the differentiation and limitation of the sacraments to seven. In actual fact the question of the number of the sacraments has no particular significance, for the special position of baptism and the Lord’s supper (the eucharist) compared with the other sacraments or sacramentals is undisputed. According to their inner order, the seven sacraments can easily be concentrated on baptism and the eucharist. At the same time, churches with a plurality of sacraments must be asked about the unified ground to which these sacraments are related, and why these acts in particular are called sacraments, and others are not.
The Protestant traditions have another difficulty. The heading de mediis salutis covers the proclamation of the word, baptism and the Lord’s supper. Then follows, under the heading de sacramentis in genere, the exposition of a concept of the sacraments which is particularly designed to take in baptism and the Lord’s supper. Proclamation, baptism and the Lord’s supper are ‘means of salvation’, but only baptism and the Lord’s supper count as ‘sacraments’. That is to say, the proclamation of the Word can take place without baptism and the Lord’s supper; but the latter cannot take place without the proclamation of the Word. But this raises the question of what binds the ‘means of salvation’ together and what differentiates them from one another. Finally, the question of the number of the sacraments was substantiated in early Protestant orthodoxy through a ‘founder’ christology. What can be traced back to an express ordinance of Christ and is bound up with his especial promise counts as a sacrament. If we are not content with this information, then here too we must enquire into the inner connection between christology and the doctrine of the means of salvation and the ‘sacraments’, baptism and the Lord’s supper.
In the three great Christian churches there is a tendency today to trace back most of the sacraments to a single foundation and to seek for a ‘primal sacrament’. In the Roman Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, Karl Rahner’s teaching about the church as ‘the fundamental sacrament of salvation’ is helpful here. If the church itself is the ‘fundamental sacrament of salvation’, then it is no longer possible to set up ‘the church of the sacrament and the sacraments’ against ‘the church of the word’ or to play off sacrament and word against one another in controversial theology. If the church itself is ‘the fundamental sacrament of salvation’, then we will also view the word as the fundamental element of the sacraments and recognize that there is a ‘real presence of the Lord who creates salvation’ in the word of the proclamation. Finally, if the church is ‘the fundamental sacrament’ of salvation, it is not so of itself, but only in ‘relation, distinction and subordination … to Christ as to the historically primal sacrament in which God’s promise of himself as forgiveness and glorification comes to historical appearance and irreversible completion’.
In modern Protestant theology Karl Barth in particular developed a christological concept of the sacraments. The incarnation is ‘the great Christian mystery or sacrament’. ‘The humanity of Jesus as such is the first sacrament.’ Whereas in the first volumes of the Church Dogmatics the other sacraments are supposed to find their substantiation in the thesis that Christ is the sacrament, or the first sacrament, in the volume on The Doctrine of Reconciliation Barth explained the incarnation as ‘the one and only sacrament, fulfilled once and for all’, whose reality is to be attested to the world in proclamation, baptism and the Lord’s supper, but whose reality can neither be represented nor repeated in baptism, the Lord’s supper, preaching or anywhere else; and which is not to be put into effect through the activity of the church itself. In this way Barth radically called in question the concept of the sacraments which has become customary in the various Christian confessions and supported the exclusively christological use of the term—after an initially open christological substantiation of the sacraments. In so doing he picked up theses of Luther and Melanchthon from the early Reformation period. But if we follow Barth’s exclusively christological use of the concept of the sacrament, we are compelled to choose other terms for the events which are traditionally so termed. Proclamation, baptism and the Lord’s supper are then ‘attestations’, ‘celebrations’ or ‘responses’ made by man to the one and only divine sacrament, which is Christ. If sacrament means ‘the theological concept of a mediation which does not merely mediate something, but mediates itself as well’, then we must certainly accept other mediations in addition to the one and only mediation of God in and through Jesus Christ—mediations through which this unique mediation is itself mediated.
In the face of these reflections, it is possible to talk about converging tendencies. Karl Rahner traces back the sacraments of the church to the church as the fundamental sacrament of salvation, and this fundamental sacrament to the primal sacrament of God’s promise of himself in Christ; while Karl Barth starts with the primal sacrament, preserves the qualitative priority of Christ before his church through the exclusively christological use of the word sacrament, and relates the attestations through word, baptism and Lord’s supper just as exclusively to God’s promise of himself in Christ. This ‘turn towards christology’ on both sides in fact makes clear the uniform origin and unique content of the church’s rites; but it leaves untouched the question why the attestation of Christ and the mediation of salvation has to take these precise forms and not others. The present different theological traditions remain untouched; they are simply newly, and christologically, interpreted. This is certainly of considerable importance, both for the renewal of the church from its single foundation, and for the ecumenical fellowship between divided confessions. But does it lead any further than a better mutual understanding of our particular characteristics in each given case? Orthodox observers of the Protestant-Catholic convergence can gain the impression that the Western churches are now escaping from the danger of legalistic ecclesiastical positivism into the danger of Christomonism. Granted the remaining difference in the Protestant-Catholic convergence—Christ as the exclusive sacrament of God, or the church as the fundamental sacrament and Christ as the primal sacrament—could this not be overcome through the Trinitarian understanding of the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit as the sacrament?
As we know, the expression ‘sacrament’ for baptism and the Lord’s supper, or for other rites in the church, is not found in the New Testament. The New Testament knows no such overall term for these proceedings in the church. When the Greek word mysterion is translated by the Latin sacramentum, what is meant is not baptism and the Lord’s supper, but the divine eschatological secret.
In Daniel mysterion takes on for the first time a sense which is important for the further development of the word, namely, that of an eschatological mystery, a concealed intimation of divinely ordained future events whose disclosure and interpretation is reserved for God alone … and for those inspired by his Spirit.
According to the apocalyptic writings, everything that is going to happen is already present in heaven in concealed form. At the end what God has already determined in eternity is revealed. His ‘secrets’ are the divine decrees destined for the final revelation. The apocalyptic mysteries do not refer to a fate suffered by the deity or the heavenly redeemer, but to a destiny which the deity determines and which is at his disposal. The reception of the mysteries is not understood by the apocalyptic writings as deification. The mysteries point towards an eschatological cosmic revelation. In the New Testament ‘the secret of the kingdom of God’ lies in the appearance of Jesus himself ‘as the Messiah’, according to the interpretation of the parable in Mark 4:11ff. The ‘secret of the kingdom of God’ is the dawn of the messianic era through Jesus. In the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline epistles, the concept of ‘mystery’ has entered into firm association with the kerygma of Christ. Christ is the divine secret. To proclaim him as the one who was crucified means to proclaim God’s secret. God’s hidden, eschatological decree becomes manifest on the Lord’s cross and embraces the glorification of those who believe. The proclamation of Christ does not only bring tidings of the revelation of the divine secret which has taken place; the proclamation itself is part of the event of the secret and the event of its revelation. The conversion of the Gentiles (Eph. 3:4ff.) and the uniting of Gentiles and Jews in one body under Christ, the head, is also called the divine mystery. Through the proclamation of Christ and the faith of the Gentiles, the eschatological mystery of the summing up of the cosmos in Christ becomes manifest. The revelation of the eschatological divine secret (apokalypsis) takes place in veiled and hidden form, out of faith to faith, in the struggle between those who love God and the lords of the world; and it proclaims the coming glorification of believers and the consummation of God’s decree of salvation.
The term mysterion does not everywhere in the New Testament take its content from the Christ revelation, nor is it always part of the kerygma. But it always has an eschatological sense.
Paul terms it the gift of the Spirit to penetrate the mysteries of God (1 Cor. 14:2). He also calls the future of Israel, whose heart is now hardened, a divine mystery (Rom. 11:25). For Paul an especial mystery is the transformation of believers at the Lord’s parousia (1 Cor. 15:51). The second epistle to the Thessalonians (2:3ff.) calls the revelation of Antichrist the ‘mystery of iniquity’ (av—‘mystery of lawlessness’, rsv). Similarly Rev. 17:5, 7 talks about the ‘mystery’ of the whore of Babylon. If we sum up the varied New Testament usages we arrive at the following range for the term ‘mystery’:
1. Mysterion is an apocalyptic term for the future already resolved on by God, for the end of history. The mystery is the divine resolve. Its revelation in history has the character of a veiled announcement, of a promise of the future, and of anticipation. Its revelation at the end of history takes place when it is openly put into effect.
2. In the New Testament Jesus is the revelation of the eschatological mystery of God through his mission, his death and his resurrection from the dead. The future determined by God for the world becomes manifest through his messianic mission. The final salvation resolved on by God becomes efficacious through Jesus’ death and resurrection. But future and salvation only become manifest to faith as a mystery through the proclamation and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Salvation and future are disclosed to faith through the Spirit and the Word. The Spirit and the Word therefore point beyond themselves to the consummation.
3. Precisely on the basis of this eschatological christology, which sees the coming of Christ as the dawn of the revelation of the divine secret or mystery in the last days, we are justified in finding (and not merely as ‘a mythological survival’) the eschatological transition to the expectation of the future revelation of this mystery. The riches of God revealed in Christ are overflowing and spread beyond themselves. The use of the word ‘mystery’ therefore spreads beyond christology and flows into pneumatology, ecclesiology and the eschatology of world history. They are, as it were, fluid transitions which necessarily arise from eschatological christology. In so far as Jesus as the Messiah is the mystery of the rule of God, the signs of the messianic era are also part of his mystery. In so far as the crucified and risen Jesus manifests the salvation of the world determined on by God, proclamation and faith and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles are also part of this salvation. The revelation of the divine mystery which is veiled in word and sign stands ultimately, on the basis of this concealment, in the context of the mystery of the last days, the conversion of Israel, the revelation of Antichrist and the ‘changing’ of believers.
It follows from this that an exclusively christological rendering of the concept mystery or ‘sacrament’ does, indeed, touch the heart of the New Testament statements, but is too narrow, especially when christology is so concentrated on the incarnation that it does not embrace the messianically open history of the incarnate, crucified, exalted and coming Christ. It also follows that a christological-ecclesiological rendering of the term—Christ and the church as the primal and fundamental sacrament of salvation—certainly touches on a further sphere covered by the New Testament but does not go far enough, especially if the church of Christ is only understood in its sacraments and not at the same time in the context of the eschatology of world history. The term ‘mystery’ and the concept of the ‘apocalypse’ which goes with it lead to a christology which has to be understood eschatologically and to an ecclesiology which takes its bearings from eschatology. Even if Christ is termed the one, unique mediation of God, yet this mediation presses forward to its self-mediation in the world; for this self-mediation seeks to complete itself. That means that Jesus as the Messiah is open for the messianic era and that as the Christ who has come he is open for the future of his rule. Even if the church is termed the ‘fundamental sacrament’, the thing that makes it so points beyond itself. ‘The eschatologically victorious grace of God’ leads the church beyond its own present existence into the world and drives it towards the perfected kingdom of God. If, therefore, the term mystery allows Christ and the church to be understood eschatologically—if it leads in addition to an eschatological understanding of world history—then it would seem obvious to introduce a trinitarian concept of mystery or ‘sacrament’. This brings us back to the inclusive doctrine of the Trinity which we developed in chapter II, § 4; the presence of the kingdom of God and the revelation of the divine mystery of the last days are to be found in the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit. He reveals Christ and creates faith. Proclamation, fellowship and the emblematic messianic acts take place in the power of the Holy Spirit. He is the power of the divine future and the one who completes the divine history. He glorifies Christ in believers and is the power of the new creation of the world. Not Christ for himself but Christ in the Holy Spirit, not the church for itself but Christ’s church in the Holy Spirit, must be called the mystery or ‘sacrament’. This trinitarian concept of the sacrament includes on the one hand the eschatological history of God’s dealings with the world in the ‘signs and wonders’ of the Holy Spirit, and in the ‘signs of the end’. In the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit ‘word and sacrament’, ‘ministries and charismata’ become comprehensible as the revelations and powers of Christ and his future. As the emblematic revelations of Christ they are the messianic mediations of salvation. As glorifications of Christ they are actions of hope pointing towards the kingdom. In the framework of the trinitarian concept of the sacraments we therefore understand the proclamation, the ‘sacraments’ and the charismata as the ‘signs and wonders’ of the history of the Spirit who creates salvation and brings about the new creation, and who through Christ unites us with the Father and glorifies him. In our account we shall begin in detail with the prophetic and apocalyptic promises and announcements of the divine future, and establish the grounds of the gospel and its signs, as well as the powers and ministries of the church, in the person and history of Christ, in order finally to unfold them as historical forms of the Spirit.
The Christian church grew out of the apostolic proclamation of the gospel and is alive in the act of proclamation. But the expression ‘proclamation’ does not reproduce the full breadth of the church’s linguistic communication, especially if it is limited to the public discourse of a preacher who is commissioned for the purpose. By the proclamation of the gospel we therefore mean here all expressions of the church and of Christians made through language which have as their content the history of Christ and the freedom of man for the kingdom which that history opens up. This includes preaching, teaching, conversations with groups and individuals, story-telling, comforting, encouraging and liberating, through the publicity of the media. Instead of proclamation we could also talk about verbal witness in the different relationships of life. In any case, what matters is that public preaching and the preacher should not be isolated from the simple, everyday and matter-of-course language of the congregation’s faith, the language used by Christians in the world. In order to indicate the breadth of the verbal communication of the gospel we can talk about proclaiming a promise and liberating by story-telling.
The theological problem of proclamation in this comprehensive sense is the determining of the relationship between word and truth, or to put it in traditional terms—the relationship between Word and Spirit. The practical problem is not whether anyone can preach or tell a story; the question is, how is he freed and authorized to use the language both of preaching and of storytelling. Much has been written about the crisis of language in general and the crisis of preaching in particular, at a time when we are flooded with words in public and are personally inarticulate. People have lamented the powerlessness of language in a period where words are not supposed to decide anything. The ‘visual age’ is supposed to have replaced the age of language and the book. The language of the Christian church undoubtedly always shares the fate of language in its society, and of course it can make use of new forms of communication. But the inner powerlessness to proclaim and the freedom to do so will not be decided by outward circumstances; it will be tested against the truth of the proclamation itself and the authority to proclaim in the power of the Spirit. As long as there is a prevailing impression that the sign is not the thing it stands for, the name is not the thing, the idea is not the deed, the dream is not the action, ‘the true world (is) unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable’, Christian proclamation and liberating narration is impossible. It would be better to be silent if only silence did not lie as well. It is only the truth of the proclamation that makes us free for the proclamation, and it is only the liberation that has been experienced which gives authority for liberating narration. Recent Protestant theology has therefore put the question of word and truth, Word and Spirit at the centre of its endeavours. That is the meaning of the ‘Word of God theology’ or ‘kerygmatic theology’. Its question about the theological interpretation of the proclamation is at heart the question about its criterion of truth; hence it is also the question about the liberation of men and women for proclamation.
Karl Barth has interpreted the proclamation of the gospel as the proclamation of the Word of God. His whole programme is implicit in this expression. The task of theology is the Word of God. The proclamation is not supposed to interpret the world religiously or to give religious articulation to the personal feelings of men and women; it has to express the Word of God. This seems to be an impossible claim:
As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize our obligation and our inability, and by that very recognition give God the glory.
Yet for Barth this is the only possible starting point; for how else can we speak about God, if God himself has not spoken? How else can we proclaim God if not in the name of God? The Word of God is hence not a discourse about a history which God reveals, nor is it a personal talk about our own faith; it is God’s own Word. It is the Word which God himself utters and in which God corresponds to himself, and that therefore for its part corresponds to God. But this cannot be a concept, an image or a symbol; it can only be the name of God itself. There is consequently no definition of the Word of God other than the name of God. Nomen Dei est Deus ipse (Calovius). In his name God reveals himself. In his name people have to do with God himself. Consequently in the divine revelation the Word of God is identical with God himself. Understood as God’s name the Word of God is the ‘self-manifestation’ or the ‘self-word’ of God. For the correctness of this view one can point to the ‘self-introductory formulas’ in the Old Testament: ‘I am the Lord your God’; ‘and they shall know: I am the Lord.’ The corresponding sayings in the New Testament are the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus in the gospel of John. The criterion of truth applied is important theologically: the proclamation of the Word of God takes place in the name of God, and the premise is therefore that the person and the name correspond and that hence speech in the name of the person also corresponds to this person. The criterion for the truth of the Christian proclamation is accordingly: God himself has spoken. God has revealed himself in Christ. Jesus Christ is the name in which God corresponds to himself. Christian proclamation testifies at heart to this divine name in which God himself is revealed and ‘is with us’. ‘According to the Bible God’s being with us is the event of revelation.’ As the name of God, God’s Word is the revelatory event. In the name of Jesus Christ God’s Word is the reconciling event. The human preaching of the Word of God in the name of God stands in an indirect identity with this self as indication, likeness, echo, testimony and answer to this event. The Word of God is hence not verified against anything else, either the external events of history or the inner experiences of man; it verifies itself, enforces its own claim, illuminates through its own being. The criterion of proclamation’s truth is a criterion which God himself handles and which is in no other hands than his own. Liberation for proclamation and for the telling of the gospel comes from the certainty that as God’s Word it corresponds to God himself. This inner correspondence is that adaequatio which we call truth. Outwardly we can draw on Spinoza’s definition of truth here: veritas est index sui et falsi. The truth verifies itself and falsifies what is untrue.
Important and central though this theological insight into the inner correspondence between the Word of God and God himself is, it must not be stressed exclusively. In the Old Testament God’s self-manifestation is always associated with a story which has to be told in order to say who God is. It is, as the first commandment shows, the history of liberation which is constitutive for God’s people. Moreover in the Old Testament the Word of God and the name of God are not identical. The two never occur side by side in the same sentence, nor are they interchangeable. The name denotes God himself in his person and his nature. The Word of God is historically the expression of God’s thoughts or his will. A divine name reveals God himself, whereas a multiplicity of divine words create and stamp history. The name of God receives from the historical words of God the specific ideas which are associated with it. The Word of God designates the act of revelation, whereas the name denotes the God who is revealing himself. The Word of God is historical and creates history, whereas the name of God will be universally glorified at the end of history. In the New Testament too the trinitarian formulas do not exclusively delineate God’s self-revelation in Christ; they inclusively describe the history of God, whose centre represents the Christ event, as the event of God’s revelation and man’s reconciliation, but whose horizons span the beginning and end of history. The truth of Jesus’ proclamation, his preaching of the gospel to the poor, his forgiveness of sins and his healing of the sick is ratified through his giving himself up to death and his resurrection from the dead. The apostolic preaching of the calling, justification and liberation of men comes from this event of truth. But it is directed for its part towards the parousia and the resurrection of the dead, that is, the new creation. Its verification takes place between the remembrance of Christ and hope for the kingdom through the presence of the Spirit and the power of the resurrection.
This historical and eschatological dimension of the gospel and its proclamation is, however, sustained by the inner correspondence of God’s Word to God himself. Christian proclamation is in essence the proclamation of God’s name and the reconciliation which lies in God’s fellowship with the godless through Christ. But just because of this it besets the earthly future with restless hope, letting us wait for the redemption of the world and the glorification of God through the whole liberated creation. It is the very peace with God which the Christian proclamation conveys that brings discontent with an unpeaceful world. The inner correspondence between the Word of God and God himself leads to contradiction with a God-contradictory world and is directed towards a world corresponding to him. The self-revelation of God in Christ therefore does not end history but opens up the history of the future, because it lets us hope for God’s glorification in the world and lets us fight against man’s humiliation. For the presence of God in Christ is not merely a ‘being that is moved within itself’; it is also a being that moves and liberates all being.
Rudolf Bultmann has interpreted the proclamation of the gospel as kerygma, as an eschatological call to decision and as a summons which affects existence. This does not necessarily contradict Barth’s Word of God concept; it can be seen as its complement. Whereas the concept of the ‘Word of God’ illuminates the gospel’s power of expression, God’s self-revelation and self-utterance, the kerygmatic interpretation explains its power of address, which makes possible that existential decision which we call faith. In the event of proclamation and faith the two coincide; but factually statement and summons must be distinguished from one another, for they do not cover exactly the same ground.
Bultmann has brought out the character of the concept of kerygma in the New Testament by comparing it with the Greek concept of the logos. In Greek, logos means the content of meaning in what is said. The word is conceived of, not primarily as the event of a summons, but as the utterance of a comprehensible meaning. Its point is not the summons but the uncovering and revealing of certain facts. It is true that the logos also has an effect rhetorically, but this is secondary. One should assent to what the philosopher says, not because of his authority, but because of the truth of his statements. His person and his words ought to retreat behind the knowledge of the truth he communicates. But the New Testament (analogously to the Old) understands the Word of God as the Word of the Creator, the Word of the Judge, as commandment and promise—i.e., as the action of creative speech. It challenges us to hear and obey and is accepted or rejected. It is understood as the Word of God where it is heard as an authoritative summons which provokes a person’s decision. To perceive it therefore means to accept it. It is legitimated and verified in the very event of its being heard and believed. That is why this faith cannot demand any legitimation of the kerygma in the objective sphere or in the realm of objective knowledge. That has nothing to do with blind acceptance of unproved (and therefore ‘authoritatively’ postulated) assertions. Nor has it anything to do with outside clerical influence on people. If it were not comprehensible the kerygma would not be a summons; it would be speaking with tongues. To what does the comprehensibility of the kerygma extend? What is the person summoned going to understand?
To be true summons, a word must necessarily reveal man to himself, teach him to understand himself—but not as a theoretical instruction about the self. The event of the summons discloses to the man a situation of existential self-understanding, a possibility of self-understanding which must be grasped in action. Such a summons … requires decision, it gives me the choice of myself, the choice of who I will be through the summons and my response to it.
In this respect the Word’s potentiality for being understood coincides with man’s potentiality for understanding himself. In the Old Testament the event of the Word and the story which reminds us of it, or promises it, are separate. But in the New Testament ‘the Word of the Christian proclamation and the history which communicates it coincide, are one’, because it is the eschatological event of the Word, or rather the event of the eschatological Word. Word and history ‘coincide’ in the eschatological event of the Word. The comprehensibility of the Word as God’s Word ‘coincides’ with the true self-understanding of the hearer who believes. Although this ‘coincidence’, as Bultmann calls it, is open to misunderstanding in a number of ways, it is none the less clear that the verification of the kerygma through the faith which brings a man to his truth has the truth of this Word as the Word of God for its premise. Conversely, the Word that corresponds to God proves itself by bringing men through faith into correspondence with itself, i.e., its nature, its identity and assurance. This correspondence is again that adaequatio which we call truth. The criterion of truth which Bultmann applies can be called the adaequatio existentiae et essentiae.
Important and central though this theological insight into the correspondence of kerygma, faith and essential truth is, yet this must not be exclusively stressed. Similar questions arise particularly if we see this anthropological verification of the gospel, understood as kerygma, as complementary to the theological verification of the gospel, understood as the Word of God. The history of Christ and the proclaimed Word of Christ do, it is true, coincide noetically in the New Testament in so far as there is no access to the understanding of this history except through the history’s proclamation. But they still do not therefore coincide ontically. It is rather the case that the history of Christ precedes proclamation and faith not only in time but also factually and theologically as their foundation, something that took place once and for all. The proclamation and the history of Christ which opens up faith is not a past history in the historical sense; but in the eschatological sense it is an event of the past which opens up the divine future, thus making possible the history of proclamation and faith and giving it its bearings. The gospel therefore teaches more than the mere fact that ‘in [Jesus’] historical life the event had its beginning and the event continues in the preaching of the community’. It teaches that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). It teaches, therefore, that this history of Christ took place without us, for us. This enters into the kerygma in so far as the kerygma proclaims Christ ‘for us’; but it is not totally absorbed by the kerygma and does not coincide with it. That is why the gospel is more than merely kerygmatic address. It is also a liberating telling of the history of Christ at the same time. The difference between the history of Christ and its proclamation allows us to hope for the kingdom of God; it makes the kerygma the messianic mediation of this future and makes faith hope for the seeing face to face.
On the other hand man’s identity in faith leads to perception of the world’s non-identity. The certainty of faith does not separate men and women from the world, but leads them into deeper solidarity with unredeemed creation, in so far as this faith is itself hope for the redemption of the body. It is just when man comes to himself in faith that he sees that this world in which he lives is alienated from its true nature. It is just when man, through the kerygma, learns to understand himself again as God’s creation that he will suffer over the disfigurement of enslaved creation and will hope for and work for the new creation. Just as the event of reconciliation lets us hope for the redemption of this unredeemed world, just as the event of revelation lets us wait for the glorification of God through the new creation, so the kerygma as kerygma also becomes the remembrance of Christ and the promise of the kingdom, and faith as faith also becomes hope in the trials that come through variance with the world. It does not detract from the truth of the insights of dialectical theology if we dispense with the degree of enthusiasm with which it translates eschatology into the here and now, by confronting that eschatology with the world’s history of suffering, which experience can confirm.
Over against Barth and Bultmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg has suggested that we should once again understand the Christian proclamation as a statement about the history that precedes it, in which God was revealed, and only after that as an element in God’s history of revelation. As a ‘report’ of the fate of Jesus, in which God is manifest, the proclamation is entirely related to this event. Its content of truth must therefore be measured against that event.
The kerygma is to be understood solely on the basis of its content, on the basis of the event that it reports and explicates. In this sense the kerygma is not to be thought of as bringing something to the event. The events in which God demonstrates his deity are self-evident as they stand within the framework of their own history. [Consequently] the sermon as an event by itself is not revelation, but the report of the revealing history and an explication of the language of fact which is implicit in this history.
If the proclamation of the history is related to that history in such a way that it itself retreats behind the history and its ‘language of fact’, then the necessity for this account through proclamation only emerges out of the universal significance of the history that is to be reported. In the destiny of Jesus God reveals himself indirectly in so far as he anticipates the ‘end of history’ in him through the resurrection from the dead. The Christian proclamation therefore reports, not a self-contained event, but the prolepsis of the end of history in Jesus’ fate—that is, an event which is both open to the future and opens up the future. Hence, as a report, it ‘breaks into every situation as call and consolation’. It is not a ‘neutral chronicle’ but the proclamation of God’s decisive eschatological act of salvation. As an account entirely related to the fate of Jesus, it is one element in the completion of the coming event of revelation. On the basis of insight into the history of Jesus, which reveals God and anticipates the end of history, it conveys a universal historical view of the world which must prove to be the true understanding of reality.
In this way Pannenberg has again abolished the confrontation between logos and kerygma found in Bultmann. As an account of the history in which God reveals himself, the Christian tradition lets something be seen and understood. Because God reveals himself proleptically in Jesus’ destiny, this seeing and this understanding itself takes on the character of an anticipation of the end of history. But because all historical knowledge is anticipatory knowledge, and only grasps the meaning of past and present in the context of the future, the Christian knowledge of history proves itself the true one. The criterion of the truth of the Christian proclamation which Pannenberg employs is the old definition of adaequatio rei et intellectus. In that the Christian proclamation tells of the fate of Jesus, in whom God manifests himself, and in that its account corresponds to the facts, it is true. But in so far as it proclaims this fate of Jesus in the eschatological framework of universal history, it is dependent on eschatological verification through the end of history.
Over against the correspondence of God’s Word to God himself and the self-correspondence of believing existence in the kerygma, Pannenberg has drawn attention to the correspondence of the Christian proclamation to the fate of Jesus in the framework of universal history. This historical dimension of the Christian proclamation could be a perspective to supplement the two other aspects, if it were not put forward together with a denial of these aspects. The reproach levied against Barth and Bultmann is directed against the so-called ‘authoritarian principle’ on which their ‘dialectical theology’ has allegedly based their theory of the Word of God. By an ‘authoritarian principle’ Pannenberg apparently means ‘assertions’ which evade a rational justification of their truth, so as to spread their seeming truth through an appeal either to the higher authority of God or to the authority of the proclaimer. Even though anti-authoritarian gestures are occasionally effective, they neither touch Barth’s Word of God theology nor the kerygma theology of Bultmann. As we have seen, both start from the problem of verification, but apply altered forms of the simple criterion of adaequatio rei et intellectus. In so far as man exists and is more than a thing, for his existence truth can only mean the correspondence between essence and existence. In so far as God is God and more than a thing and a person—in so far, that is to say, as he is himself the source of truth—the truth of God can only lie in God’s self-manifestation, i.e., in the correspondence between the Word of God and God himself. Why should the different versions of the one criterion of truth, and with them the different aspects of the Christian proclamation, contradict one another?
Modern criticism of ‘authoritarian’ proclamation has the fatal tendency to be silent about its own inclination towards totalitarian ideology. But it is not a useful exchange, nor does it promote the freedom of man, when the supposed deification of authority is replaced by a deification of totality, and when the authoritarian principle is replaced by the totalitarian one. It is not a liberating change when belief in God’s promise and pardon is replaced by a world view based on a Christian version of universal history which seeks to exact faith through pressure for a logical assent in the wake of information; and this is the case whether the pressure be exerted through the argument that ‘Christianity’ is and remains simply our European destiny, or whether through the claim that Christianity is ‘the true religion’, theology is ‘the true philosophy’ and the church is ‘the true society’. Christian proclamation can neither set up authoritarian assertions and demand blind faith, nor can it offer ‘total’ interpretations of the world and seek to compel agreement. The Christian proclamation is the messianic message of joy and as such it is the language of liberation.
The expression ‘gospel’ (which is the term used in the New Testament both for the apostolic proclamation of Christ and for the history of Christ) is not an arbitrary one. It cannot easily be translated by any other term. Expressions such as the Word of God, preaching, proclamation, account or tradition only reproduce partial aspects. They do not lay hold of the full content and whole aura of the gospel and its practice, which is evangelization—that is to say, the liberation of the world in the future of God. Here we shall pick up what we have already said about ‘Jesus the prophet and the exodus community’ in chapter III, § 2, developing it further.
The history of New Testament interpretation in the last hundred years has turned away from the ‘didactic and doctrinaire use of the term gospel’. Nor have attempts at a Hellenistic derivation made by students of comparative religion taken us any further. On the other hand, the Semitic derivation of the term drawn from the prophecy of Deutero-Isaiah and the apocalyptic writings has evidently proved fruitful. Let us sum this up briefly, in order to draw considerable systematic conclusions from it.
Deutero-Isaiah, together with the literature influenced by him, is of the greatest importance for the understanding of the New Testament concept of gospel. Whereas the Psalms talk about individual acts of Yahweh—acts which are proclaimed and praised—the prophet expects from the future Yahweh’s final and decisive victory: his enthronement, his final rule without opposition and without end; and with it the dawn of the new era, the era of salvation. Before the coming rule of God the one eschatological messenger of joy appears, proclaiming the royal rule of God and the final liberation of his people. As he announces the rule of God and the liberation of man, and with them the eschatological era, his joyful message puts this era into effect and is, like the word of creation at the beginning, the word that creates the era of salvation. The new era begins for the world of the nations as well. The rule of Yahweh is proclaimed and the wonders of his liberation are praised among the Gentiles. The vision of the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion (Isa. 60:6) and the glorifying of Yahweh by the Gentiles shows the universality of hope in the ‘one who brings good tidings’ in the last days.
The apocalyptic thinking which follows on Deutero-Isaiah conceived of the gospel of the last days as ‘a revealed mystery’. Here the term stands in the context of the apocalyptic concept of revelation. The gospel reveals the eschatological divine secret. In addition, apocalyptic reckons with a twofold concept of revelation: in this age through special revelation to the righteous, while it is still hidden from the world; in the last days when God’s decrees come into universal effect. The gospel, then, is what the deutero-Pauline writers call ‘the mysterion’. With it there begins the epiphany of the secrets of the time of salvation, which have hitherto been concealed. Against this apocalyptic background, the New Testament gospel therefore has the character of a ‘hidden power of revelation already breaking into the present from the end of the world’. It is ‘the epiphany of the eschatological divine power per se’. In the gospel what will one day finally and visibly be revealed in Christ’s parousia is already revealed in a provisional way (ἐν μυστηρίῳ, says Paul, 1 Cor. 2:7). But this means that the gospel is nothing less than the preliminary presence, veiled in the Word, of the Christ who is finally to come without concealment. ‘Where the gospel is proclaimed, the exalted Lord hastens ahead of his appearance in his word in man’s mouth; there he anticipates his future in the announcement of himself as the one who is to come.’
According to this, gospel and evangelization are eschatological concepts. Prophecy and apocalyptic let us wait for the messianic messenger of good tidings who will speak ‘the word’ which, in the power of God’s Spirit, will open up the new era and the new creation. It will be the word in which God reveals his coming and makes his victory and final lordship over his creation known. It will be the word which frees captives and brings the nations to peace. In this word and its proclamation the time and the world of salvation become manifest as gospel. The end of history dawns in the midst of history, bringing it to its saving end. That is why the gospel of the last days is to come about ‘in power’ and is to be accompanied by ‘signs and wonders’.
The formula ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ is found for the first time in the New Testament. According to the synoptic gospels Jesus saw himself as the promised messenger of good tidings of the last days, since he proclaimed his message as ‘the gospel of the kingdom’. This includes the certainty that the eschatological ‘enthronement of God’ is imminent and that Jesus is sent ahead of it to bring about the turning point of time and the world. ‘Thus the joyful message of the enthronement of God and the gospel which is fulfilled with Jesus Christ are inextricably linked with one another.’ If the kingdom of God is ‘at hand’ then ‘the time is fulfilled’ as well. The messianic era dawns in the presence of the messianic messenger of joy with the ‘signs and wonders’ of men’s liberation. The history of Jesus is depicted by the synoptic gospels as the eschatological event of the gospel. The unique character and the scope of this event is, however, described in various ways. In Q the meaning is still predominantly Jewish: the gospel is the message about the coming of the rule of God, which brings salvation to the repentant (i.e., the community of the Son of man) but brings disaster and judgment to the people who are not prepared to repent. The good tidings of the rule of God brought about by the coming of the Son of man belongs to the lost sheep of the house of Israel; it is only when the Son of man comes that the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion will begin. But the gospel of the kingdom also belongs already, in advance, to the humiliated and insulted, although verbally this is obscured. Although it is uncertain whether Jesus himself talked about ‘the gospel’, the community which beheld in Jesus the prophet of the last days could appeal to the special features of his message and his ministry.
The connection between the apostolic gospel in Paul and the gospels of the synoptic writers is an open question. When Paul uses τὸ εὐαγγέλιον in an absolute sense, he means the ‘saving message of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen’. Its content is Christ himself, the Son of God, the Lord, his death and resurrection as an eschatological saving event. Here too the apocalyptic framework seems to be preserved, as in the terminology of the primitive Christian mission, but it is preserved because now it is rooted in this history of Christ and no longer in Israel’s Torah. ‘The gospel’ now means the redeeming message of salvation, which brings to expression and makes credible the salvation which comes from God through Christ and has now at last become universal and open to all. ‘The apocalyptic structure of the gospel therefore remains beyond the revolution brought about by the beginning of the mission to the Gentiles and the genesis of a Gentile Christendom. But the gospel now … has a decidedly christological focus and is just as decidedly understood as a saving event which presses on the present and presses into it out of the future.’ This is shown by the new conjunctions of the gospel as the gospel of God and the gospel of Christ. It is no longer described as ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ (βασιλεία). It is called ‘the gospel of the Son’, ‘the Word of the cross’, and related to the eschatologically interpreted history of Christ in his crucifixion and resurrection. But just because of this it manifests the saving divine righteousness, effects salvation, creates peace, liberates for final freedom and reveals the coming glory of God. As the revelation of Christ the gospel is the messianic sign of the new era and the charismatic power of the new creation. The gospel glorifies God and liberates man and is the ‘sacrament’ of the future. In the gospel and in the evangelization of the world this future becomes present in the Word. In the faith and hope which it brings this future of salvation becomes mighty towards the misery of the present.
We can here only mention more recent research into the gospels. Willi Marxsen has undertaken the interesting attempt at interpreting the ‘real’ gospel of Mark as a ‘commentary’ on the Pauline concept of gospel.
The gospel [i.e. the Pauline gospel] can therefore be described as standing between Easter and the parousia. The euangelion [of Mark] represents the life of Jesus from his first appearance in public up to the Cross as a proclamation; since Easter it has been possible to proclaim this event in Messianic terms (9:9). It is Easter that determines the account of the past as a secret epiphany—and in the same way the proclamation itself becomes a secret epiphany—and this is continued right up to the parousia.… The evangelist proclaims the One who once appeared as the One who is to come, and who—in secret epiphany—is present now as the proclamation is made.
Ernst Käsemann has also pointed to the theologically essential connection between gospel and gospels. Without the gospels the gospel is in danger of running into gnostic ‘enthusiasm’. ‘Present eschatology without this reference back to the past of salvation is delivered over defenceless to enthusiasm.…’ But without the gospel, the gospels are in danger of becoming merely historical reminiscences of the life of Jesus. ‘The earthly Jesus had to keep the preached Jesus from dissolving into the projection of an eschatological self-consciousness and becoming the object of a religious ideology.’ Whatever historical judgments we may form about these ideas (which rather belong to the sphere of systematic theology) the gospels about the earthly Jesus as the eschatological messenger of good tidings can be understood as hope in the mode of remembrance; while the apostolic gospel of Christ can be understood as remembrance in the mode of hope. Then the telling of the story of Christ implies proclaimed hope and the proclaimed hope of the risen one contains an actualizing remembrance of the one who was crucified. The gospels and the apostolic gospel complement one another, and not merely in this theologically necessary way, they also interpret one another and are mutually intertwined. If it is correct to see the celebration of the Lord’s supper as the centre of the life of the primitive Christian churches, then the telling of the story of the passion and the proclamation of Jesus’ saving death ‘until he comes’ coincide in this celebration.
Summing up, we can say that eschatology becomes effective in history whenever the gospel of Christ is proclaimed as the eschatological ‘message of good tidings’ expected by prophecy and apocalyptic. There the future glory of God and the liberation of man take on historical form; now, indeed, only as the Word that opens up the future and as hoping faith, but already in the power of God. In this way—a way that must be called messianic—the eschatological future casts its light ahead on history, and righteousness, the liberation of captives and the glorification of God are already realized. Consequently, in its very character as the proclamation of Christ the gospel is the revelation of the divine future; and the actual fact of this happening must be termed the presence of the Holy Spirit.
1. The prophetic and apocalyptic framework for the gospel and evangelization maintains that this ‘message of good tidings’ is not possible at all times and in all places, but belongs to the messianic era at the end of history. ‘The gospel of the kingdom is proclaimed to the poor’ ushers in the time when God takes possession of his dominion over his creation and man becomes free. When ‘the gospel of Christ’ is proclaimed to the whole world, Jews and Gentiles alike, this initiates the future in which God’s creative righteousness will become manifest and God will be all in all. The gospel of Christ proclaims that this era has dawned and this future has already begun with the passion and resurrection of the crucified Jesus. It has already become accessible for everyone in faith; and it can be experienced in the new potentialities of the Spirit. In love people can already live from the powers of the new creation and in the potentialities of the messianic era. But just because the gospel has the eschatologically interpreted history of Christ as its content, the history of Christ is also the presupposition for the public proclamation of the gospel. Every living thing has its particular atmosphere, its aura and its time. If we rob the gospel of its messianic aura—that is, the certainty that with and through Christ the messianic fulfilment of poor, expectant and empty-handed life has dawned—then the proclamation will become sterile, morally, religiously or ideologically. It has then been uprooted from its time and is no longer ‘timely’; or, to be more precise, then it is ‘not yet’ timely. We have to be silent, not because there is nothing to say but because the ‘eschatological message of good tidings’ is not yet to be spoken and must not be spoken. The history of Christ, his suffering to set the world free and his resurrection for its justification, are the guarantee that it is time to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom to the poor, as well as a blessing on those that mourn, the forgiveness of sins and the liberation of captives. The proclamation of the gospel of Christ has the history of Christ both as its content and as its presupposition. The gospel proclaims Christ as the Lord of the messianic kingdom and all its possibilities and is itself the first possibility and the first sign of the messianic era.
Jews and atheists do not really dispute the gospel itself; they dispute its possibility and its timeliness. ‘Morning comes, and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire; come back again’ (Isa. 21:12). Against this the Christian assurance in its proclamation of the good tidings of the last days says that the time has come because God’s future, like man’s liberation, is manifest in the history of Christ and its proclamation. It does not deny that the state of the world fails to display any marked messianic beauty and that there is little to be seen of the righteousness of the messianic era. But it sees the world’s evil and suffering summed up, revealed and overcome in Christ’s passion. That is why it discovers in the resurrection of this crucified Christ the turn of the age and the hidden dawn of the messianic future. That is why the gospel of Christ brings a saving future into the disastrous present, speaking of God in the face of godlessness, of our brotherhood in the face of enmity, and of the new creation in the face of a threatened earth. The gospel of Christ in the messianic era of Christ is at heart ‘the word of the cross’ and the contradiction in practice of a world which contradicts its Creator and itself. It is only out of this protest against the contradiction that the correspondences will be created which, as ‘signs and wonders’, are the proof of the messianic era. The exegetical and theological problem of the ‘delay’ of the parousia (which basically reproaches Jesus and Christianity with an outmoded enthusiasm and an illegitimate anticipation of the future) is solved christologically through the cross of the risen one and the resurrection of the one who was crucified. For the remembrance of the passion of the Lord and discipleship of the crucified Jesus keep the Christian faith alive in the contradiction of the time and fill it with protest against that contradiction. The Christian theology of the cross is the true reason for the messianic assurance of faith and the proclamation of the gospel.
2. It follows from this that the Christian proclamation cannot be supported by analogies in the cosmos or historical events. A damaged world and the history of guilt and death do not in themselves reflect any messianic light. Even human reason (which corresponds to the state of this world) and the interests which guide its perception cannot be drawn upon here. According to Paul the saving righteousness of God in the gospel (Rom. 1:17) is revealed in time inasmuch as the wrath of God is revealed against ‘all ungodliness and wickedness of men’ (v. 18). At the same time as the proclamation of the good tidings of the last days, the world moves into the growing shadow of the judgment which lies in the Godforsakenness of the godless who are surrendered to their self-chosen way. Romans 8:19ff. also sees the suffering which is anonymously enslaving the world, and not the beauty and righteousness of creation, as being the sign of the Creator’s struggle for the liberation of the world—a struggle initiated by Christ. In the context of Christ’s passion and resurrection this suffering of creation is interpreted messianically as ‘the birthpangs of the last days’. When the power of the resurrection becomes effective in the gospel of Christ, then the gospel belongs to the people who stand in the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, for whom the suffering Christ has become a brother, and for whom the crucified one died. The hermeneutical circle therefore does not close exclusively round word and reality or round word and faith. Faith and reality belong rather to the life which is stamped by Spirit and suffering. Just as the gospel of God’s kingdom is proclaimed to the poor, so the gospel of Christ is proclaimed to sinners, that is to say, to the Godforsaken godless. The messianic era opened up through the crucified Jesus and revealed through the gospel is no longer exclusively the era of the righteous and of righteous acts, as it was in Jewish expectation; it is first of all the era of the justification of the godless, the forgiveness of sins, the liberation of the humiliated and the reconciliation of enemies. Hope in action in the sign of the crucified Jesus is the messianic protest against godlessness and unrighteousness in this period of death; a protest which liberates men for response to and fellowship with God, and for righteousness. Wherever the liberating protest in the face of resistance leads to such responses, fragments and anticipations of the new creation come into being. They are to be understood as ‘signs and wonders’ of the Holy Spirit. In this sense the Spirit verifies the proclamation of the gospel. This comes about in the assent of faith, which says ‘amen’ to its messianic liberation. It comes about in the initial new obedience and in the forms of the new fellowship.
Consequently, although Christianity certainly has to understand the gospel and the evangelization of the world messianically in its eschatological context, it must equally substantiate its messianism christologically, from the cross of the Lord of the future. But how is this messianism to be practised in the form of a theology of the cross?
3. The gospel is the liberating word in the name of the God who is to come. Just as the coming kingdom is universal, so the gospel brings the liberation of men to universal expression. It seeks to liberate the soul and the body, individuals and social conditions, human systems and the systems of nature from the closedness of reserve, from self-righteousness, and from godless and inhuman pressures. It takes place in the word, in language, for the purpose of hearing and believing; but the freedom to which it calls reaches further and seeks to place the whole of life in the sphere of the hope of the kingdom. By preaching Christ the liberator, who was crucified and raised for us, the gospel heralds his kingdom and at the same time cancels the ties with sin, law and death—gives notice of the one and gives notice to the other. The proclamation of Christ is the proclamation of the new covenant. When the new covenant ‘in the blood of Christ’ with the coming God is proclaimed, the old ties of idolatry, superstition and self-justification are thereby abolished. When the ‘covenant with life’ is made, the ‘covenant with death’ is ended. Consequently the divine pardon stands at the centre of every proclamation of the gospel, the pardon that liberates men and women from the compulsion of evil, from the control of ‘the powers’, from fear of forsakenness, and from the apathy of the empty life, and that gives them courage for a new life for the kingdom in fellowship with Christ.
Every Christian proclamation is an expression in one way or another of ‘I absolve thee’. Redemption is properly only expressed in language that sets free, and freedom is only expressed in a language which does not determine, pin down, define and accuse, but acquits in the liberating word, makes new life possible and allows frontiers to be crossed.
The proclamation of the gospel always belongs within a community, for every language lives in a community or creates one. As public proclamation, the gospel is part of a society’s public activity and it alters its form when the society’s public character alters. In the Christianized societies of Europe, the proclamation long counted as the public ministry. Priests and pastors had a status which was analogous to that of the other public offices. Their proclamation to the people corresponded to the hierarchical, vertical pattern that public life takes in a class society—from the top downwards. For when society was Christianized the Christian church took over the functions of the socially essential ‘state religion’. The community of Christians and the community of citizens coincided. Parishes followed residential districts. The church took over the pastoral care of individuals and families and administered the religious framework of meaning of society. In a framework of this kind the gospel is in danger of losing its critical and liberating power and of being reduced to religious consolation, to morality and the teaching of the people. At the beginning of modern times voluntary religious fellowships of believers then grew up in Germany out of the pietistic movement. This Evangelical revival movement broke through the class order and the parochial divisions of the institutionalized church and organized itself into voluntary groups. The pattern of pastoral welfare was replaced by personal adherence to the faith; the public ministry gave way to the personal witness of the brethren; and prayer meetings took the place of public worship. Faith no longer meant being one of the recipients of the pastoral care exercised by the church; it meant personal experience and decision. Here the old vertical scheme of proclamation was replaced by a horizontal scheme of communication among the group of believers. In place of the pastoral care of the whole population, the fellowship of believers developed a missionary relationship to non-believers. At the beginning of modern times a new dialogistic relationship to the church also simultaneously developed among the educated classes. Faith is neither participation in the church nor personal decision but a kind of permanent reflection of Christianity in the form of critical religiosity. It is not the authority of the church and tradition that makes the religious system of thought acceptable; it is well-founded information. Free, interested discussion with the church takes the place of church-going and the decision of faith. The church becomes a forum and platform for dialogue with Christianity. The ‘public’ work performed by academies, church assemblies, radio, social work, work among men, women, school children and students reflects this form of proclamation. But whereas the pietistic ‘revival movement’, with its separatist tendencies, threatens to cut the gospel off from the very world to which it seeks to proclaim liberation in the name of the coming God, ‘enlightened’ Christianity threatens to rob the gospel of its character of commitment.
The fellowship which corresponds to the gospel in its original interpretation is the messianic community. It is the fellowship which narrates the story of Christ, and its own story with that story, because its own existence, fellowship and activity springs from that story of liberation. It is a ‘story-telling fellowship’, which continually wins its own freedom from the stories and myths of the society in which it lives, from the present realization of this story of Christ. It is a fellowship of hope, which finds freedom from the perspectives of its society through the perspectives of the kingdom of God. Finally, it is a fellowship which, by virtue of its remembrance of the story of Christ and its hope for the kingdom of man, liberates men and women from the compulsive actions of existing society and from the inner attitudes that correspond to them, freeing them for a life which takes on a messianic character. In Christianized societies this does not merely lead to the critical freedom of faith towards the respective social systems; it leads to critical freedom towards the church which is tied up with the social system, and towards Christianity in general. In this liberating society the language of liberation finds a correspondence that is seldom possible in the religious ‘pastoral’ church, or in the exclusive society of the converted, or in Christian society. The messianic community belongs to the Messiah and the messianic word; and this community, with the powers that it has, already realizes the possibilities of the messianic era, which brings the gospel of the kingdom to the poor, which proclaims the lifting up of the downtrodden to the lowly, and begins the glorification of the coming God through actions of hope in the fellowship of the poor, the sad and those condemned to silence, so that it may lay hold on all men. In the traditions of the established churches the important thing is to build up independent communities, capable of action. In the minority churches it is openness to the world in missionary and charitable activity that has to be developed.
‘The sign is not the thing it stands for, the name is not the thing, the idea is not the deed, the dream is not the action. The true world (is) unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable’, said Nietzsche. Is it really? Where the gospel corresponds to Christ, and the messianic fellowship of the people corresponds to the gospel, the truth of the proclamation is recognizable from the freedom it creates. The ‘true world’ is promised in the gospel of Christ and is made accessible in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Just as the Christian church is called into being through the proclamation of the gospel, so through baptism it is called to the freedom of the messianic era. Through baptism it demonstrates the dawn of the rule of God in personal life and the common conversion to the future of that rule. Through baptism in Christ’s name believers are publicly set in Christ’s fellowship; and through baptism in the name of the triune God they are thereby simultaneously set in the trinitarian history of God. In the framework of the concept of the sacraments which underlies our reflections here we understand baptism as a sign bound up with the gospel which is also the public sign of life of the Holy Spirit, who unites believers with Christ and brings about the new creation.
When we understand baptism in the context of this promise, however, the churches’ present baptismal practice and theology becomes problematical in a number of ways. We shall therefore begin with a brief account of the theory and practice of baptism in the Protestant tradition, so as to scrutinize it in its dogmatic, missionary, ecumenical and political aspects. The baptismal tradition ought to be reflected in the messianic light of the story of Christ’s history.
The renewal of the church at the Reformation assumed its largely binding form in the age of Protestant orthodoxy. Every alteration in Protestantism must digest this tradition. The dogmatic theologians put baptism in the framework of soteriology. The ‘principles of salvation’ in which christology is developed are followed by the ‘order of salvation’ in which the gift of the Holy Spirit is unfolded in faith, justification, calling, illumination, conversion, mystical union and glorification; and then comes the doctrine of the ‘means of salvation’. The grace of the Holy Spirit, which appropriates salvation in Christ, is mediated through the word, baptism and the Lord’s supper. The salvation which is objectively obtained through Christ is subjectively appropriated through the Holy Spirit. Salvation itself is spiritual, invisible and inward. It is mediated, therefore, through the audible and visible means of salvation, that is, through word and sacraments. Christ counts as the efficient cause of salvation, whereas baptism in the power of the Spirit is the instrument. The mediation through the word thus has pre-eminent importance, because the word can exist without the sacraments but the sacraments cannot exist without the word. Sacraments count as ‘holy rites or actions’ ordained by God through which saving grace is appropriated or people are given the certainty of that grace through the medium of visible signs. Baptism and the Lord’s supper are subject to an express divine intention. Over both are the promises of Christ’s presence. These promises are understood both as words of institution and as binding assurances to the receiver. A ‘holy rite’ becomes efficacious as a ‘sacrament’ when it is performed through the church and in the church, in accordance with its institution. Baptism is justified through a founder christology and legitimated by the fact that it was instituted by Christ himself. As a means of salvation it is part of the ground of salvation and participates in the power of its efficacy. As a ‘holy rite’ it links the visible and invisible reality in a metaphorical way. In the order of the means of salvation, baptism precedes the Lord’s supper. It is the sacrament of initiation and the door of grace. The Lord’s supper is the sacrament of confirmation and the path of grace. Through baptism men and women are born again to eternal life. Through the Lord’s supper they are sustained in that life. Accepted into the covenant of grace through baptism, believers are sustained in it through the Lord’s supper. Baptism is therefore by nature a holy rite commanded by Christ and invested with his promise. His word of institution and promise effects saving grace through the waters of baptism. According to its form, baptism effects what it says and promises, provided it is performed in accordance with its institution. Its purpose is to make saving grace efficacious in men and women. In adults, proclamation and faith precede baptism. In the case of children they are supposed to follow it. Since baptism is acceptance into an ‘eternal covenant’, it can only be performed once. But because it is valid once and for all, its efficacy is not restricted to the actual moment of baptism. Consequently the baptized person acquires the means of repentance, through which he can regain baptismal grace daily. Repentance is continual life in baptismal grace on the basis of the baptism that has been performed once and for all. That is why repetitions of baptism are inadmissible.
What baptismal practice lies behind early Protestant baptismal theology? Since the Reformers decided against the ‘Baptists’ in favour of the preservation of infant baptism, early Protestant baptismal theology was not only applied to infant baptism, but also served to justify it against Baptist attacks. It is true that it talks about adult baptism, but the trend of its comments is directed towards the justification of the baptism of infants. When the efficacy of baptism is based on its performance in accordance with its ordinance, when non-resistance is presupposed on the recipient’s part, when we speak of the vicarious efficacy of the faith of the parents or of the church, or even about a ‘seed of faith’ in infants—then this sacramental objectivism is ministering to the practice of infant baptism. For this practice requires the proof that baptism can not only follow on faith, but that it can also precede faith and the profession of faith, and can bring about both.
Infant baptism, as the attempts to justify it theologically show, is an open theological problem as long as the churches that practise it appeal to its origin in the history of Christ. The primitive Christian churches (like all missionary churches) spread through calling men and women and through their being born again; but churches with infant baptism propagate themselves from generation to generation by means of birth and tradition: everyone born of Christian parents is also born into the Christian church. The perpetual actualization of the New Testament continually calls this practice in question. Every baptismal theology is therefore forced to a critical comparison between the proclaimed story of Christ and the baptismal practice in question, whether it justifies the present baptismal practice from the history of its origin, or whether it criticizes the history of this activity in the light of its origin.
The practice of infant baptism is also an open political problem connected with the form of the church in its particular society. Infant baptism is without any doubt the basic pillar of the corpus christianum, the ‘Christian society’ which acknowledges—or at least does not reject—Christianity in the widest sense of the word as its tradition. Infant baptism is the foundation of a national church. Through it ‘Christian society’ regenerates itself in the bond that links one generation to another. Anyone who affirms infant baptism, for whatever theological reason, thereby affirms at the same time this public form of the church, or Christianity. Anyone who condemns it, for whatever theological reason, must also have in mind and want another social form for the church. A change of baptismal practice without a change in the public form and function of the church in society is not possible. Let us first examine the traditional theological arguments for infant baptism.
1. ‘He who believes and is baptized will be saved’ (Mark 16:16). The order of the New Testament churches is: first faith, then baptism. But the practice of infant baptism compels this to be reversed: first baptism, then faith. Generally, however, this reversal is not carried through theologically. In infant baptism faith comes first too—namely the faith of the parents, the godparents and the church. By virtue of the natural representative function of parents and community for children, their preceding faith must therefore intervene and be put to the children’s account, representatively and in hope for the children’s faith, which cannot yet be presumed. Now it is undoubtedly correct that believers are not baptized merely as individuals and private persons; through baptism their gifts, the tasks assigned to them and their responsibilities are also put at the service of Christ and his kingdom. It follows from this that parenthood is also accepted into this service through baptism. Parents have a messianic function towards their children too, being to a special degree their missionaries and evangelists. Children are not foundlings, so to speak, shut out from their parents’ faith and condemned to find it for themselves. But children are not, either, ‘a something from the father, as it were, an extension of his fatherly person’, as Thomas Aquinas put it, and hence able to be automatically integrated into their parents’ baptism. The baptism of the parents and their Christian responsibility for their children does not lead to any compulsive necessity for the children themselves, or to any justification of infant baptism either; though what it does lead to is undoubtedly the charge of proclamation to the children, prayer for them and the lived testimony of freedom in fellowship with them. The natural link between the generations has relevance for the proclamation of the gospel and for the ministry of liberation in the sequence of time. But it cannot compel the sequel of baptism and does not justify the baptism of infants. Faith and baptism commit to service in the natural relations of life, but they are not themselves passed on through these natural relations.
2. This also invalidates the other argument, that infant baptism represents in a particularly cogent way the unconditional justification of sinners and God’s prevenient grace. The justification of the sinner and prevenient grace come about when a person believes, not directly at baptism. The pure passivity of receiving, pardoned, liberated men and women is a creative receptivity, and it is at most metaphorically that it has anything to do with the defencelessness of new-born babes. If baptism were to effect grace ex opere operato, as an unconditionally effective means of salvation, then all children without distinction would have to be baptized. But only children of Christian parents who have been baptized themselves were and are baptized—by no means all the ‘heathen children’ one could lay hands on. Why are only the children of Christians baptized? Not because of prevenient grace, but because faith does in fact precede baptism—in this case the faith of the parents on behalf of their children. Infant baptism is not a token of prevenient grace; it is a sign of the prevenient faith of the parents. Consequently this argument too falls back on the first one, and is equally lacking in cogency. Baptism cannot be without faith. Faith commits us to representative service, but it cannot be taken as being representative for the faith of another person or as a temporary substitute for that faith. The faith of the fellowship is necessary, but it does not diminish the freedom of the child who is baptized to believe for himself; on the contrary, it is a challenge for him to do so.
Let us go on to examine the political arguments for infant baptism.
In the framework of ‘Christian society’ infant baptism is understood as a rite of initiation and accordingly as an analogy to circumcision among the people of Israel. Children are received into society at birth. Through baptism they are accepted into the religious bond of this society. Infant baptism then counts as the first act of pastoral care performed by this religious system, to which society assigns the custody of the feeling for the life of individuals and society as a whole. Earlier, people liked to see baptism and the Lord’s supper as analogies to circumcision and passover in the Old Testament. The Mosaic system, the law and order of the ancient people of the covenant, counted as the prefiguration of the Christian society, not the church in particular but the public form of God’s rule on earth in church and society. This picture of ‘Christian society’ as the successor to Israel and as the earthly anticipation of the kingdom of God has in essence persisted, even if the impress of the Old Testament has been lost. ‘Christian society’ allots to the church, as religious functions, functions of socialization and integration. It claims the care of the church as the custodian of the significance at the central moments and turning points of life: baptism at birth; confirmation at puberty; the wedding at the beginning of married life; extreme unction before death; and church burial afterwards. If the religious system of significance becomes looser, more pluralistic and more diffuse, then baptism loses its original binding character as well. Calvin still called it a seminarium civitatis coelestium. It then developed into a seminarium, civitatis christianae and finally into a merely private seminarium familiae. Erosions of the Christian society chiefly appear in individuals at puberty and the age of independence. This gives rise to the curious situation that religion is still considered necessary and helpful for children, whereas for adults it is thought of as a ‘private affair’. Consequently the religious ideas of adults often remain in their childish phase. Through this practice the original promise of Christian baptism is distorted to the point of unrecognizability. Here the theological question of the relevance of the social bond for Christian baptism arises. Because every individual person lives not merely for himself but in a community, churches and missionaries have often baptized whole families, villages, tribes and peoples. If rulers and chiefs were baptized, the whole society was baptized in principle, for the previous cults were abolished, the ‘national’ religion was Christianized and baptism was made obligatory for all. If it is impossible to ignore the links between the generations, it is just as impossible to disregard the social groupings in which people actually live. But a society which is open for Christianity always allots religious functions to the church as well and it has to fulfil these whether they correspond to its origin and nature or not. The church can be persecuted; but it can also be alienated from its foundation, and its Christian rites and symbols can be misused. A society’s leanings towards infant baptism and the religious education of children is always based on more than one motive and cannot merely be assessed as an opportunity for baptism; it must also be seen as a hindrance to the real meaning of baptism. The social structure can encourage baptism through the pressure of the public aspect of religion—adult baptism as well as infant baptism, but pre-eminently the latter. Then, however, the form and interpretation of baptism takes on the impress of the society’s predominating interests. The social structure can constrain baptism, but it does not justify it. Faith and baptism impose an obligation to service in the social structures of life; so much we can say here too. But they cannot be passed on through the social structure. The freedom of faith takes form in the freedom to be baptized. This freedom must be observed, both in the face of a society’s resistance and in the face of a society’s misuse of baptism. Baptism can only be practised in accordance with its proper meaning if the church’s public form and function in society is altered at the same time, and if the church becomes recognizable and active as the messianic fellowship of Christ. A convincing baptismal practice can only be acquired together with a convincing church. There can be no reform of baptism without a reform of the church, and no church reform without a reform of baptism. If we abide by the bourgeois religious form of the church in a ‘Christian society’, as we have described it, then if infant baptism is the general rule, the individual baptism of an adult on the basis of a personal profession of faith would only lead to baptism’s becoming a matter of the inner, personal life, which would have to be lived in private; or it would lead to a life in the exclusive circle of the converted. In both cases baptism would lose the character of a public, confessional sign of resistance and hope.
Early Christian baptism is connected genetically with John the Baptist’s repentance movement, and with Jesus’ baptism by John. It has no genetic connection at all with Israelite circumcision or the purification rites of the mystery religions, although analogies can be discovered. John baptized ‘in the wilderness’ at Jordan. He called the people to repent of their unrighteousness and to come out from bondage, because the judgment of God on the mighty and the compromises made with them was at hand: anyone who now lived the righteousness of God, radically and without any compromise, anyone who repented and went ‘into the wilderness’ could be saved from the coming divine wrath. The ‘desert preacher’ introduced a movement for repentance in Israel whose critical social and political consequences were such that he was considered dangerous and was executed. John’s baptism in Jordan was intended to symbolize the new exodus from bondage, and the eschatological entry into the promised land of the divine kingdom. In this respect the baptism of John was particular and unique. It differed from the daily lustrations of the Essenes through its eschatological finality. It was not an initiation rite for an existing society; it was the eschatological sign of the setting forth out of present oppression towards the immediately imminent freedom of the divine rule. Going down into the waters of the Jordan is to be understood as the step out of the old life of unrighteousness into the new life with the righteous God. This baptism is ‘an expression of repentance and guarantees salvation from judgment. It is an eschatological sacrament of repentance’: the kingdom of God is at hand. But the kingdom is breaking in as judgment. Anyone who wants to stand the test must let the judgment be anticipated on himself. John the Baptist did not apparently found any new sect, but preached to the people the kind of repentance that was only aware that the open space of the imminent divine rule was ahead of it.
John’s baptism of Jesus of Nazareth is relatively well authenticated, historically. We can assume that Jesus was one of John’s disciples for a time, and only began his public ministry after John’s imprisonment. Some of Jesus’ disciples probably also came to him from John. On the other hand we know nothing about any baptismal practice on the part of Jesus and his disciples. He himself did not baptize. It was evidently only after Easter that the community received the command to baptize, on the occasion of their sending forth by the risen Christ. At all events, in the apostolic period we find no appeal to the earthly Jesus’ own establishment of baptism, or to his institution of it as a sacrament. But Jesus’ baptism by John was from the very beginning constitutive for the acceptance and taking over of John the Baptist’s eschatology—his teaching about the coming rule of God—by Jesus and the Christian community. The Christian church’s acceptance and heightening of John’s baptism does not go back to a particular institution on the part of Jesus, but it does follow from Jesus’ acceptance and alteration of John’s eschatology. The fact that Jesus parted from John in order to begin preaching his own message can be taken as a sign of the fact that his eschatological gospel deviated from John’s eschatology of judgment. Where John proclaimed the kingdom of God as judgment; with a view to repentance, Jesus evidently proclaimed the kingdom of God as the justice of grace and demonstrated it by acts of forgiving sins. For Jesus the gospel of the kingdom was an eschatological message of joy. Unlike John’s disciples, the disciples of Jesus did not fast. Nor did they emigrate from the oppression under which the country was living ‘into the wilderness’; they went into the villages and taught the people. Jesus’ parting from John therefore points to his new version of John’s eschatological message. But he took over the imminent eschatological expectation, with its provocation of the powerful and the collaborators, and the call to freedom it addressed to the people. Now, however, the threat of judgment was replaced by the liberating good tidings of grace. Because the earthly Jesus and his gospel cannot be understood without Jesus’ baptism by John and his parting from him, Christian baptism follows, with inner cogency, from the eschatology of Jesus and is founded on the church’s eschatological profession of faith in Jesus as the Christ of God. In conjunction with John’s eschatology, Christian baptism is comprehensible as being a sign of the coming of God into a person’s life and his turning to the future. That is why ‘the baptism of John’ is to be preached as well.
The primitive church evidently baptized very soon after Easter. Remembering Jesus’ baptism by John, they understood their baptism eschatologically. Under the impression of Jesus’ resurrection and in the experience of the Spirit, they proclaimed their baptism with the Holy Spirit. They ‘Christianized’ the eschatological sealing of the repentant for the coming kingdom of God by baptism in the name and into the name of Christ. When they baptized ‘in the power of the Holy Spirit’, they understood this event as the earnest and dawn of the glory of God in the story of a person’s life. As a matter of fact we can see the baptism with the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit after Easter as corresponding to the earthly Jesus’ turning from John’s threat of judgment to the revelation of the gospel of the kingdom in the forgiveness of sins. Historically, it seems likely that after Easter some of the disciples of Jesus who had been baptized by John began to baptize believers. We may also suspect that there was competition between Jesus’ disciples and John’s, and that this led Christians to proclaim the crucified and risen Jesus as the one whom John had promised was to come, and to their outdoing John’s baptism with water through their baptism with the Spirit, which they represented as being the fulfilment of John’s. The period after Easter shows that baptism corresponded to the understanding of the new fellowship in any given case. Where the Christian community understood itself as ‘the holy remnant’ and therefore as the beginning of Israel in its eschatological renewal, Christian baptism counted as being the symbol of this messianic renewal of God’s people. Where they conceived of themselves as ‘the new people of God’, made up of Jews and Gentiles, baptism became the emblem of the ‘new creation’ in Christ. At all events, in 1 Cor. 12:13 Paul assumes as a matter of course that all Christians are baptized, although he himself was sent not to baptize but to preach the gospel (1 Cor. 1:17) and only baptized occasionally.
On the foundation of Easter, in the experience of the Holy Spirit and together with the proclamation of the gospel, believers were baptized into the name of Christ, the Lord of the coming divine kingdom. Like the proclamation of the gospel of the last days, Christian baptism is eschatology put into practice. It manifests the advent of the coming God through Christ in human life and is the sign of life’s conversion to the life of Easter. Like the proclamation of the gospel of the last days, Christian baptism is Christian hope in action. The Christian meaning of baptism follows from the eschatological understanding of the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus, the Christ of the God who is to come. An eschatologically open christology explains why baptism was taken over from John and was reformed. Its own eschatological and pneumatic character can only be maintained if the connection with John’s baptism is preserved. Without baptism in this sense the eschatological history of Christ would be incomprehensible. That is why baptism for Christ’s sake is necessary, even if we cannot say that it is ‘necessary for salvation’ in any further sense.
The intertwining before and after Easter of eschatology and gospel, or christology and eschatology, can also be interpreted pneumatologically: after his baptism in Jordan, Jesus was anointed with the Spirit (Mark 1:10ff.) and equipped for his messianic mission. His public ministry stands in the sign of the Spirit (Luke 4:14, 18 et passim). The Spirit leads and drives him on his way (Mark 1:12). His signs and wonders count as the signs and wonders of the Spirit. In the Spirit he offers himself up for death on the cross (Heb. 9:14). Through the power of the Spirit, God has raised him from the dead (Rom. 8:11) and exalted him to be a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). In so far as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are formed by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit reveals, glorifies and completes the lordship of Christ in believers, in the church and in the world. It is not that the gift of the Holy Spirit is merely the subjective side of the objective divine acts of salvation in Christ, nor is it as if its dispensation and intercession for us could be added to the salvation really gained on the cross. The history of Christ and the history of the Holy Spirit are so interwoven that a pneumatic christology leads with inner cogency to a christological pneumatology. We shall therefore have to see baptism, as well, as part of the trinitarian relations of the eschatological history of God’s dealings with the world.
The multiplicity of the notions about baptism found in the New Testament makes it difficult to ascertain the fundamental ideas which can be justified theologically today. Every choice is one-sided. We must therefore try to discover the fundamental problems which gave rise to the different answers, and then go on to seek an answer of our own. The central problem is the relationship of the baptismal event to the history of Christ.
Mark found the reason for Christian baptism in the baptism of Jesus, which in its turn points forward to Jesus’ passion and death. The meaning of Jesus’ baptism is his election to be Son of God and his messianic equipping with the power of the Holy Spirit. The divine sonship of Jesus is confirmed in the story of the transfiguration (9:7) and is finally acknowledged by Jesus during his cross-examination (14:61f.) and by the centurion at the foot of the cross (15:39). The divine sonship of Jesus includes Jesus’ mission and his self-giving. In the passage about the sons of Zebedee (10:38ff.), baptism also points towards martyrdom. Jesus’ baptism points forward to his passion and includes the whole of his path to death on the cross. This link between baptism and the death of Jesus is important for Mark.
Matthew, on the other hand, found the reason for Christian baptism in the missionary charge of the exalted Lord; but he understood Jesus’ own baptism as an eschatological epoch. John’s baptism is completed with the baptism of Jesus, for in Jesus the one who fulfils righteousness has come (3:14ff.). This gives Jesus’ baptism an exclusively christological meaning. It does not as yet tell us anything about Christian baptism. Christian baptism, according to Matthew, is based not on Jesus’ own baptism but on the missionary charge of the exalted Christ, which includes the whole world of the nations, because the risen one has been given all power by God (Matt. 28:18).
Luke, finally, finds the reason for Christian baptism in what happened at Pentecost. He distinguishes it from John’s baptism with water as being a baptism with the Spirit. John is the forerunner of the era of Jesus, and his baptism is the prefiguration of the era of the church. Luke therefore stresses the conferring of the Spirit at Jesus’ baptism (3:21ff.). Whereas Mark found the justification for baptism in Jesus’ death, and whereas Matthew found it in the missionary charge of the exalted Christ, Luke explains baptism in the light of the miracle of the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 1:5–8), which is then further explained in Peter’s sermon (2:38ff.). It takes place for the forgiveness of sins and is linked with the receiving of the Spirit.
For Paul Christian baptism gives tangible form to Christ’s fellowship of believers. He consequently makes baptism’s relation to the Christ event thematic. Baptism is the expression of belonging. Christ is crucified for you, you are baptized in Christ’s name (1 Cor. 1:10–18). The saving event is not baptism through Cephas or Apollos itself, but the cross of Christ, baptism being a link with the cross’s saving significance. That is why in this context he also calls his gospel ‘the word of the cross’. According to Romans 6, those who are baptized into the name of Christ are ‘baptized into his death’ and ‘buried with him in baptism’. In this way they have died to the power of sin. Just as all accusations and claims fall when they are brought against the dead, so those who are baptized are out of reach of the accusations of the law and the claims of power. Baptism into the death of Christ thus demonstrates the liberation of believers from the power of sin. They have the death of sin behind them and life in the divine righteousness ahead. Just as burial is a final declaration of death, so dying to sin in the death of Christ is also valid once and for all. Since baptism into the death of Christ is the mark of the whole of Christ’s fellowship of faith, it also demonstrates fellowship with the risen one. But fellowship with the death of Christ is in the perfect tense, while fellowship with his resurrection is in the future. The perfect tense of the ‘having died into Christ’ opens the future of eternal life with Christ, which has already dawned here and which will be completed at the resurrection of the dead. It is new life in the Spirit, in the dawn of the new creation and the glory of God. It is new life in the service of righteousness, and therefore in discipleship of the crucified Jesus. But it is also new life in the community of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul sets baptism in the charismatic community. Just as this community lived in the manifestation of the Spirit, which sets every one in his particular ministry and makes him a member of the whole, so through baptism people are integrated into this community and are entrusted with their particular ministry. Through baptism the believer is called into this messianic community and is called to liberating creative service for the kingdom. Baptism is in this sense a ‘call’. In Galatians 3 Paul puts baptism in the same context as justification and the right to hope for the future rule of God. Baptism therefore gives concrete form to the divine righteousness manifest in the gospel, as this touches a single person, making the universal future of Christ effective in his particular life.
If we try to sum up the different aspects of New Testament baptismal theology, we shall have to see the baptismal event in the framework of the whole history of Christ—that is to say, in the framework of the baptized, crucified, risen and coming Christ. The baptismal event is not something that stands over against this history of Christ; it must be seen as an integral part of this history itself. In this perspective, the theological dispute as to whether baptism is a cognitive, or a causative and generative means of salvation ought to be open to solution.
In his writings on baptism, Karl Barth has stressed the saving event completed and perfected in Christ, thus denying to baptism the character of a means of salvation which is sacramental, or necessary for salvation, or which supplements or prolongs salvation. In the power of the Holy Spirit baptism is entirely and exclusively related to the Christ event and must therefore be understood as the representation, witness, sign and illumination of this event. It points away from itself and its own happening in the direction of Christ alone. In so far it has cognitive meaning. Barth deduces from this the inadmissibility of infant baptism and pleads for the baptism of believers.
On the other hand Heinrich Schlier maintains that baptism is a sacramental action, which effects the salvation of the person baptized in a causative sense. It is true that it does not effect salvation itself, since that has already been brought about in Christ; but it does effect salvation in the case of the baptismal candidate. Baptism is, indeed, a figurative action in Christ’s name, but as an instrumental sign it effects the thing it denotes, through the actual fact of its performance. It is consequently, according to Schlier, ‘necessary for salvation’ in the sense of a necessary means. Between Pentecost and the parousia Christ linked his efficacy with baptism. As a result, Schlier says, infant baptism is not only possible but necessary. Through infant baptism the church—the body of Christ growing through the cosmos—is to incorporate people of every age, just as it is also to incorporate all nations and institutions.
If we leave infant baptism on one side in this dispute (because in my view it cannot be justified even by Schlier’s arguments, unless he wants to incorporate all children, not merely the children of Christians, into the church through baptism) certain extremes, even in Barth, could become superfluous in the theological justification of baptism. The dispute between an exclusively christological orientation and an ecclesiological justification of baptism can be solved if baptism is understood in a trinitarian sense in the light of the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit. As ‘representation’ and ‘recognition’ of the reconciliation brought about through Christ’s giving of himself to death ‘for us’, baptism manifests the creative power of the Spirit. As a leading back into the death of Christ it is the anticipation of the resurrection in this life. Together with the ‘word of the cross’, it belongs to the spirit of the resurrection and the power of the new creation. Just because it is a cognitive event it is a creative one, for knowledge of Christ is knowledge that changes existence. Because baptism is a call in faith, it also stands in the power of the one who calls into being the thing that is not. For that reason it demonstrates the believer’s new identity in the fellowship of Christ and proves him to be an heir of the divine future. Baptism points to the liberation of man which took place once and for all in the death of Christ. At the same time it reveals the crucified Lord’s claim to new life and anticipates in man the future of God’s universal glory. In this context there can be no talk about the efficacy of baptism ex opere operato. Baptism is efficacious ex verbo vocante. Its word of promise is the word through which it calls. But the calling gospel is a call to faith, to the new obedience of righteousness, to freedom and to hope. It is hence perceived by faith and laid hold of in hope. It is a creative event, but it creates nothing without faith. In so far as faith is a call, baptism is necessary. But we cannot say that it is necessary for salvation.
The way to a new, more authentic baptismal practice will be the way from infant to adult baptism. By adult baptism we mean the baptism of those who believe, are called and confess their faith. The usages of centuries cannot be suddenly altered. The path proposed means a learning process for the Christian church which has many implications.
As a first step the time of baptism should be made a matter of free decision and left to the parents. Church law and church order would have to be altered in this sense. The clergy and the church’s ‘full-time workers’ should not be forced to have their children baptized either. But for their part they must not compel anyone to postpone baptism, or prevent parents from having their children baptized. They should preach and teach the Christian meaning of baptism and make it comprehensible, and not only at baptismal services themselves. Responsibility for children lies in the parents’ hands in the first instance. This responsibility must be impressed on the parents as regards baptism, but it cannot be taken from them.
Infant baptism should be replaced by the blessing of the children in the congregation’s service of worship and by the ‘ordination’—the public and explicit commissioning of parents and congregation—for their messianic service to the children. The baptism of parents is a call covering their family, social and political relationships as well. The Christian ought to follow his call in his secular profession too, and act accordingly. That is why it is important to make this call clear in the vocation of parenthood. Parenthood is a charisma, and becomes a living charisma in faith. The calling of the community is then realized in missionary service to the children and in their instruction. ‘Confirmation’ classes can then be directed towards baptism, which people approach when they feel able to confess their faith before the congregation and desire the assurance of their calling. Through the birth of children to Christian parents, the church is called to the service of reconciliation and liberation on their behalf. This progression from infant baptism to baptism as a call cannot be pursued unless we note the implications for the history of the individual life and for the church of Christ.
In the history of the individual life the religious festival of birth and name-giving would be replaced by a call event, which would make clear the believer’s Christian identity. The person’s natural identifications through family, nation and society then recede into the background. The new identity of Christ’s fellowship frees the believer from those natural identifications for representative, liberating service on their behalf. So-called voluntary baptism does not really make baptism a matter of choice, but is essentially a baptism into the liberty of Christ. It is a liberating event. In the history of a person’s life this means the pain of alienation from his present associations and groups, and often enough an exodus like the exodus of Abraham. But it leads him into a freedom in which he can ‘be there for others’. In baptism as a call, the important thing is to stress not merely the alienation from the existing groups and associations of life, but even more the commission to service for their reconciliation and liberation. This baptism must not become the symbol of inner emigration and resignation in the face of ‘the wicked world’. It is the sign of the dawn of hope for this world and of messianic service in it. It is a missionary sign. Through a baptism of this kind the meaning of one’s own life is comprehended in the wider framework of God’s history with the world. Baptism joins a fragmentary and incomplete human life with the fullness of life and the perfect glory of God.
Without new fellowship in a supporting group, this way cannot be pursued by individuals. It is only in the degree in which the church ceases to be a non-committal religious society and turns into a recognizable messianic fellowship of service for the kingdom of God that individuals can realize their calling in the sense we have described. Conversely, however, such a fellowship only develops out of professing believers. Here we are concerned with a reciprocal relationship which has to be given effect from the individual and the social side simultaneously. If individuals go over to vocational baptism from infant baptism, then the church must develop at the same time from the religious welfare institution to a social body built up on firm fellowship. It must stop being a church of ministers functioning on behalf of laymen, and become a charismatic fellowship in which everyone recognizes his ministry and lays hold on his charisma. People then become ‘subjects’ within the church, losing their position as ‘objects’ of religious welfare. Just as believers’ baptism can lead to inner emigration, so a confessing community of this kind can of course turn into an introvert group in a self-made ghetto. That is why this development must be accompanied by increased stress on the individual’s call to liberating service for society and on the fellowship’s openness to the world. If a ‘worldly’ church were merely to become an ‘unworldly’ one, nothing would be gained. The church’s detachment from worldly influence must lead to the ‘church for the world’, which renders service to society and the individual out of the things that are its own: the proclamation of the gospel and the new turning to the future. Common baptism binds together the fragmentary form of this church with the perfection of the coming kingdom of God. Baptism as the calling event in the life of the individual person corresponds only to a church that follows Christ’s call, the ‘call to freedom’. Baptism as the liberating event in a person’s life corresponds only to a church which spreads the liberty of Christ. This must not be confused with a liberalization of religious usages in a ‘Christian society’. A liberal church may make adult baptism ‘voluntary’. A church of liberation lives from baptism as liberating event. That is something different.
The messianic proclamation of the gospel calls faith into life. The call which the believer hears leads him to baptism in Christ’s church. This fellowship assembles in worship at the Lord’s table, celebrating its bond with Christ and with one another in the Lord’s supper. Just as baptism is the eschatological sign of starting out, valid once and for all, so the regular and constant fellowship at the table of the Lord is the eschatological sign of being on the way. If baptism is called the unique sign of grace, then the Lord’s supper must be understood as the repeatable sign of hope. Baptism and the Lord’s supper belong essentially together and are linked with one another in the messianic community. In the baptismal event the community is linked to the individual who enters the fellowship of Christ and confesses it publicly. In eating and drinking at the Lord’s table individuals are linked to the community which is visible in these acts. Baptism and the Lord’s supper are the signs of the church’s life, because they are the signs of the one who is their life. They are in this way the public signs of the church’s confession of faith because they show the one who leads the world into the liberty of the divine life.
Just as the gospel is the language of the messianic era, so we may call baptism and the Lord’s supper the signs of the messianic era. For the Lord’s supper is the sign of the actualizing remembrance of the liberating suffering of Christ (signum rememorativum). As such it is the prefiguration of Christ’s redeeming future and glory (signum prognosticum). In the coincidence of remembrance and hope, history and eschatology, it is the sign of present grace, which confers liberty and fellowship (signum demonstrativum). In the Lord’s supper Christ’s redeeming future is anticipated and this hope celebrated in remembrance of his passion. In this meal his past and his future are simultaneously made present. This present actualization frees the assembled congregation from the powers of the world which lead to sin and gives it the assurance of the divine future. The Lord’s supper is an eschatological sign of history. The Christian experience of time and the corresponding theological understanding of time will consequently take their bearings from the Lord’s supper, and only cautiously look for other experiences of history. It is only in the light of the Lord’s supper that the interpretation of ‘the signs of the time’ is possible and has any point—the point being for the church and its individual members to perceive their tasks for the world amid the opportunities of history. The fellowship at the Lord’s table involves fellowship with one another, and in the framework of that fellowship conversation about the current problems and tasks of our daily work in the world. In the messianic understanding of it, the Lord’s supper is not a mystery cult which the initiated celebrate in separation from their surroundings; it is a public and open meal of fellowship for the peace and the righteousness of God in the world.
Because the Lord’s supper has always stood at the centre of the Christian life, it has acquired a great wealth of meaning in the course of history. It is difficult to sum this up. But today everything depends on our grasping the Lord’s supper in its nature as a unified event, and on our understanding its different perspectives in the light of its common ground, so that it confers fellowship and not division. For though the Lord’s supper in itself is fundamental to the wealth of the church, in history it has unfortunately also been the occasion for the misery of schism and denominational conflict. The very names by which it is called are an expression of the different aspects on which emphasis has been laid and which—when they have been held with rigid absolutism—have destroyed fellowship. Whereas the expressions ‘the Mass’ and ‘the sacrifice of the Mass’ point to Christ’s sacrifice, the sacrifice of the church and of believers, the Protestant expression ‘the Lord’s supper’ stresses the link with Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. The name ‘Eucharist’ puts the meal in the context of divine worship, of praise and thanksgiving. In the ecumenical movement the name ‘Lord’s supper’ has become established usage in recent years, because it points to the common christological foundation of the different church traditions. We shall adopt it here.
Before arriving at a theology of the Lord’s supper we must be clear about what a theological doctrine of this kind is supposed to achieve, and whom it is supposed to serve. The doctrine of the Lord’s supper is the theological theory behind a particular practice. But the Lord’s supper is not the practice of a theological theory. Communion with Christ in his supper is obeying Christ’s own invitation, not a christological dogma. For it is the Lord’s supper, not something organized by a church or denomination. The church owes its life to the Lord and its fellowship to his supper, not the other way round. Its invitation goes out to all whom he is sent to invite. If a church were to limit the openness of his invitation of its own accord, it would be turning the Lord’s supper into the church’s supper and putting its own fellowship at the centre, not fellowship with him. By using the expression ‘the Lord’s supper’ we are therefore stressing the pre-eminence of Christ above his earthly church and are calling in question every denominationally limited ‘church supper’. The theological doctrine of the Lord’s supper must consequently not be allowed to exercise any controversial theological function through which Christians are separated from Christians. If it represents the supper as being the supper of the Lord, then it is setting itself in the sphere of interest of his open invitation and is giving effect to that invitation. The theological doctrine of the Lord’s supper includes the understanding of it as a task in the service of the Lord and his universal liberation, and therefore as a task belonging to his true church. In view of the divided church—divided by, of all things, its concept of the Lord’s supper!—it is essential to stress this. Just as the Lord’s supper is a sign of fellowship and not of division, so the corresponding theology will have to present what is in common and not what divides.
What is true of theology applies to church discipline as well. The Lord’s supper is not the place to practise church discipline; it is first of all the place where the liberating presence of the crucified Lord is celebrated. But in many churches the admission of one person to communion is practically linked with the excommunication of others, so that the Lord’s supper is preceded by a ‘test’ of the individual’s worthiness or unworthiness. The question of ‘admission’ to the meal becomes burdensome. Confession and absolution often precede the Lord’s supper, so that the open, prevenient invitation of Christ is linked with legalistic injunctions and moral conditions for ‘admission’. Christ’s original feast of joy is then unfortunately transformed into a meal of repentance where people beat their breasts and gnash their teeth. It is then no wonder if many people excommunicate themselves from this meal, and if even serious Christians experience an unholy dread before the Lord’s supper. This moral legalism spoils the evangelical character of the meal just as much as dogmatic legalism. We should therefore start from the Lord’s supper as something done together and openly, and try to explain the moral questions on the basis of this action and this fellowship.
Finally, what is true of church discipline applies to the ministry as well. Can acknowledgment of a special priestly ministry (and, with it, of bishops and pope) be made the condition for recognition of the legitimacy and efficacy of the communion? In the Lord’s supper Christ exercises his ‘ministry’ as prophet, priest and king. He exercises it in the same way that he gave himself for the redeeming liberation of many. His invitation involves no condition about the acknowledgment of ministries in the church. It is gracious, unconditional and prevenient like the love of God itself. Everyone whom he calls and who follows his call has the authority to break the bread and dispense the wine. The administration of the supper is the ‘ministry’ of the whole congregation and every person who is called. The acknowledgment of a ‘special’ ministry obscures Christ’s giving of himself ‘for all’ and the fellowship of brothers and sisters into which all are to enter. Hierarchical legalism spoils the evangelical character of the Lord’s supper just as much as dogmatic and moral legalism.
Life is more than knowledge about the laws of life; and in the same way the fellowship of Christ and fellowship with one another are more than knowledge about its conditions. The Lord’s supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is as open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of ‘the world’, the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper. It is not the openness of this invitation, it is the restrictive measures of the churches which have to be justified before the face of the crucified Jesus. But which of us can justify them in his sight? The openness of the crucified Lord’s invitation to his supper and his fellowship reaches beyond the frontiers of the different denominations. It even reaches beyond the frontiers of Christianity; for it is addressed to ‘all nations’ and to ‘tax-collectors and sinners’ first of all. Consequently we understand Christ’s invitation as being open, not merely to the churches but to the whole world.
The meal whose theological interpretation we are discussing has particular characteristics and elements. It is a real fellowship at table of the whole assembly. People meet in order to eat and drink together. It is not a matter of an individual giving and taking. Eating and drinking together are physical actions which point beyond themselves, by virtue of Christ’s promise. They do not serve to satisfy the body, but they do embrace (1 Cor. 11:23ff.) the common meal. The fellowship gathers round the table for the sake of the bread and wine (which originally, no doubt, was not particular bread—wafers—or wine mixed with water), breaking bread with one another in Christ’s name and with his words, and with his words offering one another the cup of wine. While it does this and in the action of so doing the fellowship relates the messianic story of the passion, proclaims the representative death of Christ and announces its hope for his coming in glory to fulfil God’s rule in the world. During the meal it prays for the whole church and the whole world. It thanks God the Father for the creation and redemption of the world and glorifies the triune God in its song of joy. It prays for the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit, so that the Spirit may fill it with the powers of the new creation and may descend on ‘all flesh’. It prays for the coming of his kingdom. The congregation gathered at the Lord’s table discusses, in the common meal that precedes or follows, the specific needs of the community and of the world around it, the tasks of the community and of each of its members in the world. It is the Lord’s supper above all that ought to show in its eschatological openness the openness to the world of Christian mission. And it ought moreover to have room for comforting and encouraging, and for planning actions and offerings. It was not for nothing that the primitive Christian pareneses had their Sitz im Leben at the common meal.
With these elements and characteristics of the Lord’s supper before our eyes, let us consider its historical origin and what the meal really makes present in the act of remembrance. Of course many religious communities have solemn cultic and sacral meals. In daily life too eating and drinking together is a sign of fellowship and friendship. But the nature of the Lord’s supper and the unique character of the Christian fellowship cannot be derived from these things. The Lord’s supper has never been celebrated by the church in any other way than as a pointing back to Jesus’ own feast. It has its origin in Christ’s particular history. Because in its own way it makes this history of Christ present in the act of remembrance, Jesus’ own feast remains constitutive for ‘the Lord’s supper’.
The earthly Jesus celebrated the feast with tax-collectors and sinners. These common meals of Jesus are to be understood as anticipations of the sacred banquet of the last days. They have their particular meaning in the context of the prophetic promise of the great feast of joy celebrated by the nations in Zion:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever … (Isa. 25:6–8).
This prophetic vision talks about the eschatological feast of peace and joy shared by the nations in the kingdom of God. According to the gospel of the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, many will ‘sit at table’ in God’s kingdom (Matt. 8:11; Luke 13:29). ‘Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God’ (Luke 14:14). The synoptic parable of the ‘great supper’ (Matt. 22:2–10) clearly shows the unity of the kingdom of God and the fellowship of the table. The kingdom of God is a physical reality, not a kingdom of ghosts. When Jesus eats with publicans and sinners, this must be understood in the context of his gospel of the kingdom as an anticipation of this eating and drinking in the kingdom of God. But just as the special thing about Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom is to be seen in the prevenient justice of God’s grace on the unjust, so here the special thing about his sitting at table with tax-collectors and sinners is its anticipation of the ‘feast of the righteous’ with the unrighteous, who are made righteous through his presence. Just as Jesus demonstrates his message of the kingdom through the forgiveness of sins, so he also shows it through his acceptance of tax-collectors and sinners: ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’ (Luke 15:2). Jesus’ fellowship of the common meal is therefore inseparable from his gospel of the nearness of the kingdom and his acceptance of sinners. His message about the kingdom and his forgiveness of sins are incomprehensible without this fellowship of the table. The feast of the messianic era and the community of the saved was anticipated by Jesus, and anticipated with tax-collectors and sinners. That is why his feasts are joyful ‘wedding’ feasts in the dawn of the divine rule as demonstrations of God’s undeserved, prevenient and astounding grace (cf. Luke 15:22ff.; 19:1–10).
Jesus’ meals with his disciples are to be understood in the same context. Through these too he anticipates the eating and drinking in the kingdom of God, in correspondence with his gospel of the kingdom. This is shown by his renunciatory words at the Last Supper (Mark 14:25ff.): ‘Truly, I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’ The special thing about Jesus’ eating together with his disciples is that not only does it give effect to Jesus’ messianic mission in the disciples themselves (as in the case of the tax-collectors and sinners), but they are also drawn actively into his messianic mission and participate in it. That is why the meal with the disciples has a different significance from the meal with the tax-collectors and sinners, although they are related. The meal with the disciples is not an exclusive meal enjoyed by the righteous; it is the meal of Jesus’ friends, who participate in his mission ‘to seek that which was lost’.
The Christian supper of the Lord therefore has its origin in the messianic history of Jesus and his messianic feasts with his disciples and with tax-collectors and sinners. It follows from this that, in the first place, without common feasts of this kind the messianic history of Christ cannot be actualized properly and appropriately. A community without the common table loses its messianic spirit and its eschatological meaning. It also follows however, that the fellowship at table of the men and women who follow Jesus and enter into his messianic mission must be open for the meal which accepts and justifies ‘tax-collectors and sinners’, and must be seen in the perspective of the universal banquet of the nations in the coming kingdom. In this sense the Christian fellowship of the table needs no especial institutional command on the part of the historical Jesus. Like baptism, the Lord’s supper emerges of its own accord from the messianic history of Christ. The ‘evangelist’ of the poor is also the messianic ‘host’ who invites the hungry to eat and drink in the kingdom of God and brings them into the divine fellowship.
Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples before his crucifixion has always had a particular significance for the Lord’s supper. According to 1 Corinthians 11, the church never celebrated the feast without pointing back to Jesus’ Last Supper. The backward reference to ‘the night in which he was betrayed’ is not a reconstruction of the situation on Maundy Thursday. But Jesus’ supper the night before his death has its particular importance in the fact that, according to the gospels and to Paul, it anticipates his death as a sacrificial death for many. In this way the messianic anticipation of eating and drinking in the kingdom of God are linked with Christ’s giving of himself to death for the world’s salvation. The breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the wine acquire a unique significance through the self-giving of the Messiah. They make the kingdom of God present in the form of Christ’s body broken ‘for us’ and Christ’s blood shed ‘for us’. They make the kingdom of God present in Christ’s person and his self-giving. He is both the giver of the feast and the gift itself. The gift, the kingdom of God, is he himself in person. By joining us with him and his self-giving, the feast is a bond with the kingdom, for through his death the kingdom he proclaimed and anticipated has become a historical reality. Again we can say that without his giving up of himself to death the messianic feast of the kingdom is not properly understood, just as, conversely, his offering of himself ‘for many’ is not fully understood without the messianic feast. His death is to be understood eucharistically, and the eucharist is to be understood in the light of his death.
Although the Lord’s supper has its historical origin in Jesus’ feasts, it itself none the less makes present the crucified and risen Lord. It is not the historical remembrance as such which provides the foundation for the Lord’s supper, but the presence of the crucified one in the Spirit of the resurrection. As the one who is risen, Christ through his Easter appearances makes his earthly ministry binding, and reveals the meaning of his death for salvation. The church therefore remembers Jesus’ earthly ministry and makes his death present in the presence of the risen Lord. ‘The Lord’s supper is the feast of the community of the saved, who wait but wait with assurance; the community which is grounded on the dying of Jesus and lives from his living presence.’ This is proved on the one hand by the injunction to repeat the rite ‘in remembrance’ (1 Cor. 11:24f.; Luke 22:19); and on the other hand by the Pauline phrase about the ‘new covenant’ of Christ’s body and blood (1 Cor. 11:23ff.). Both statements are eschatologically motivated; the first is linked with Jesus’ renunciatory vow (Luke 22:18 par.) and the second with the perspective ‘until he comes’ (1 Cor. 11:26). The Lord’s supper must not be understood solely in the light of the passion, but in the light of Easter as well. It mediates communion with the crucified one in the presence of the risen one. On the basis of Christ’s giving himself up to death, it is itself the eschatological banquet of life. Through his body given to death for all, and his blood shed for all, the exalted Lord gives those who are already his a share in the future fellowship of the kingdom of God. According to Luke and John, the Easter appearances of the risen Christ and the eschatological banquet were already intimately connected with one another in primitive Christian thought. They interpret one another mutually. It is true that this fact shows certain analogies with the experience of the exodus and the feast of the passover in Israel. But it corresponds much more closely to the festival of the todah, the feast of thanksgiving celebrated by the person who had been preserved from death, according to Psalm 22. For Old Testament thinking the experience of salvation had necessarily to be followed by the feast of the todah. Consequently the proclamation of the resurrection can only be fully valid in the todah feast. The breaking-in of God’s sovereignty into this world is realized in Jesus’ death and resurrection. That is why this feast is the eschatological feast of the divine lordship in him.
If we follow this reasoning, we can understand why the history of Christ’s passion is proclaimed in the Lord’s supper and why this takes place in the joy over his resurrection and in the hope of his coming. The connection between eating and drinking in the kingdom of God and the gift of his given body and his shed blood becomes clear. At long last we no longer have any need to seek for a historically dated institution for the Lord’s supper, nor must we confine its christology to a founder christology. The Lord’s supper is, with inner, factual cogency, the expression of the eschatological history of Christ—that is to say, the dawn of the kingdom of God in his self-giving and his resurrection from the dead. The fellowship with Christ made effective in the supper is the fellowship of the coming kingdom, and the fellowship of the kingdom of God is present in the fellowship of Christ in the midst of the history of evil and suffering. The Lord’s supper is the eschatological sign of the coming kingdom in history. In the Lord’s supper the coming kingdom is present in the form of the body given for us and the blood shed for us. The Lord’s supper is not an unmediated messianic anticipation of the banquet of the nations, although it points towards that. Nor is it simply the continuation of the fellowship at table of the earthly Jesus, as this is to be seen in the daily ‘breaking of bread’ of the primitive churches, although it cannot be separated from that. Nor is the Lord’s supper a sacred meal in remembrance of the dead; or a sacrificial meal; or a Christian passover meal. As the joyful feast of the Christ given for us and raised before us, it gives a foretaste of the coming kingdom, because the coming kingdom has become history in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Because Christ’s cross and resurrection stand in the sign of the eschatological eucharist, the Christian eucharist stands in the sign of cross and resurrection.
The Lord’s supper is the eschatological sign of remembrance of this hope. It mediates the power of Christ’s passion, and redemption from sin and the powers through his death. It mediates the Spirit and the power of the resurrection. It confers the new covenant. Finally, it confers fellowship in the body of Christ, a fellowship which overcomes separation and enmity through the self-giving of Christ for all men, and which creates solidarity among people who are in themselves different. This new covenant and this new fellowship are in tendency universal, all-embracing and exclusive of no one; they are open to the world because they point to the banquet of the nations.
The Lord’s supper, with the bread and the wine, can be understood as a sign in a number of different ways. It can be an evident sign of spiritual recollection. The feast is then a remembrance feast. It recalls to our memory the history of redemption, which took place on the cross of Christ for us. The remembrance bridges the difference between the history there and the event here. Christ is therefore present in the Spirit that recalls him to us, and the bread and the wine are merely the outward signs of our spiritual communion with Christ. Zwingli interpreted the Lord’s supper in this sense. He rightly stressed what happened on Golgotha, which took place once and for all, compared with its actualization in the supper. But his Platonic concept of spirit hindered him from perceiving the presence of the crucified one in the Spirit of the resurrection.
The Lord’s supper can further be understood as the earthly sign of the presence of the God who has become man and of the man who has been exalted to God. Then the bread and wine signify that which they are according to Christ’s promise—the body and blood of Christ. Christ’s body and blood are present in the bread and wine. Because the Son of God has become flesh the bread and the wine are part of the humanity he has assumed, like the manger and the cross. But because, on the other hand, the crucified Jesus has been exalted ‘to the right hand of God’, he is also, according to his humanity, bodily present in the divine presence that permeates all things. Luther interpreted the Lord’s supper in the framework of these ideas. If we understand Christ’s presence in the Lord’s supper along the same lines as the incarnation, then the christological difference between what happened on Golgotha and what happens on the altar can easily be overlooked; while if we understand it in the framework of his exaltation, then it is easy to ignore the eschatological difference between the supper in history and the feast in the kingdom of God.
Finally, the Lord’s supper can be a token of the future. Then the bread and the wine are the symbols of the great future shalom feast of the nations and are understood as the beginning of the universal banquet of the kingdom. The supper of the hoping church is a ‘foretaste’ of the messianic banquet of all mankind. The bread that is broken counts as a fore-token of peace for all men. The wine that is poured out counts as a fore-token of the hope of the nations. The groups which celebrate the supper in this sense understand it as a love feast for the celebration of life, fellowship, hope and work for peace and righteousness in the world. The remembrance on which this hope is based reaches back to Old Testament prophecy. But if it does not, at the same time and at its very core, reach back to Christ’s giving himself up to death, this hope loses its fermenting power and its stability.
Historical orientation and prophetic orientation only faintly bring the presence of Christ in the meal to expression. The christological unity of God and man, eternity and history makes it almost impossible to understand the relation of his presence in the feast to his past on the cross and his future in the kingdom. The difficulties lie basically in the spatial concepts which people used in their attempts to understand Christ’s presence. ‘Every spatial interpretation of the event of the supper represents a one-sided view. For the primary problem is the problem of time.’ But how can Christ’s presence in the feast be understood in terms of time?
The risen and exalted Christ manifests and confers his presence solely in his character as the one who was crucified. The Lord’s supper confers fellowship with the crucified Jesus, his body given on Golgotha and his blood shed there, not with any heavenly body of Christ. The Lord’s supper points expressly to the one who was crucified. The presence of the exalted one can therefore be nothing other than the manifestation of the one who was crucified. Conversely, however, the manifestation of the crucified Jesus in the fellowship of his body and his blood takes place in no other way than through himself, the exalted one. But the risen Jesus who is exalted to be Lord is ‘the one who is to come’. The fellowship of the table with the one who was crucified for us once and for all, takes place in the presence of the one who is to come; and it is therefore, as fellowship with the crucified Jesus, the anticipation of the coming kingdom. In the one who is to come the one who died for us is present in our midst. The Christ who has torn down the dividing wall once and for all manifests himself as our future. The fellowship of the table with the one who was crucified therefore becomes the foretaste of the eschaton.
What is gained by these temporal and eschatological categories? ‘The present’ is not something absolute; it is always the being present of something or someone. Prae-sentia really means being in advance. In the eschatological sense the one who was once crucified on Golgotha is now himself present with the power of his suffering and the fruit of his death, in his giving of himself for many. This happening in the past is not a past event; it is an event which liberates, opens up the future, and therefore determines the present. In the temporal sense the crucified Jesus is present as the One who is to come in the Spirit of the new creation and final redemption. His future is not a future happening; it is a power that liberates, determines the future and opens up new possibilities. In this eschatological context the feast can be termed a sacrament of time, for in the presence of Christ, understood in this way, the experience of time is itself transformed. It no longer flows, as a stream of transience, from the future through the present into the past; on the contrary, through the Christ event it is opened up once and for all, in order to be consummated in his parousia. Time has become eschatological time and flows, as it were—to keep the image—out of his past through his presence into his future. The images of evanescence are evening and parting. The image of eschatologically transformed time is morning and the greeting of hope. In this sense the Lord’s supper in Christ’s presence is the real anticipation in common of the coming fullness of time. The eschatological presence of Christ then embraces the material elements, the personal fellowship, the proclamation and the spirit of the feast, so that there is no need to localize it any further. We must learn to think in a new way here: not—Christ is present in the feast here or there, but—the feast is held in his presence and carries those who partake of it into the eschatological history of Christ, into the time between the cross and the kingdom which takes its quality from his presence.
The words of institution and promise can then be understood in a similar sense: ‘This is my body which was broken for you.’ The identifying ‘is’ in this sentence must not be separated from the promise ‘for you’. Fact and purpose are a unity. Consequently we ought not to make a division between a word of consecration addressed to the elements and a word of promise addressed to the congregation. The presence of Christ is, in that it happens; for it is his presence ‘for us’. Both sentences are expressions of the promise of Christ’s presence: I will be there as the one I will be there as. I will be there for you. I will be with you thus, and in this mode of self-giving. The presence of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and the wine is the presence of Christ in person, and his person in its self-giving for us. But it is his presence in something different, in signs, by virtue of his identification with them. In that Christ makes himself present in bread and wine, the difference between the event of the cross and the event of the Lord’s supper is preserved. Golgotha is not the equivalent of the Lord’s supper. The Lord’s supper, which can be repeated, signifies the history of Christ which has taken place once and for all and is therefore unrepeatable. Nor does Golgotha become a mere prefiguration of a ‘sacrifice’ continued on the altar. The concept of ‘making present’ preserves the difference in the unity. The presence of Christ in the Lord’s supper is credible simply on the basis of his promise, in which he identifies himself; not on the basis of metaphysical speculations. But the reason that makes this promise possible lies in his resurrection and his future. That is why his promise to be present in the meal is at the same time the anticipation of his parousia in glory. What he makes present is the meaning of his death for salvation, as the coming redeemer. If we understand his presence in the feast as the anticipation of his coming kingdom, then the difference between the unity of his presence in the feast and in his kingdom will be preserved. In the unity between difference and unity we understand the feast as a messianic mediation between the Christ event, which opens up and creates freedom, and his kingdom, which completes this freedom universally. As a messianic mediation the feast strengthens and preserves the freedom of faith, the courage of hope and the fellowship of love.
In the presence of Christ the Lord’s supper joins the past and the future, history and eschatology in a unique way, and becomes the token of liberating grace. For the participants this means that in this meal they remember the death of Christ, through which God reconciled the world once and for all; acknowledge the presence of the risen Lord in their midst; and hope with joy for the coming of his kingdom in glory. Whenever they do this they are responding through their own free gratitude to the grace that frees them. The charis experienced corresponds to joy in pardoned existence, and therefore to the eucharist. The glorification of God on earth, which is to lay hold on the whole of creation, begins in the feast of gratitude. Joy in freedom and fellowship anticipates the joy of the new creation and its universal fellowship. Understood as a eucharist in this sense, the feast of Christ’s fellowship is the great thanksgiving to the Father for everything he has made in creation and has achieved in the reconciliation of the world, and has promised to accomplish in its redemption. In the eucharist the congregation thanks the triune God for all his acts of goodness and sets itself in his trinitarian history with the world. The universal meaning of the eucharist becomes comprehensible because, and in so far as, it brings to expression the song of praise through which the whole creation honours its creator, singing the hymn with which all things rejoice in him.
For the world which God reconciles with himself is present at every eucharist: in the bread and the wine, in the believers and in the prayers which they offer for all men. Because believers and their prayers are joined with the person of our Lord and his intercession, they are transformed and accepted. Thus the eucharist reveals to the world what it is to be.
This aspect of the Lord’s supper has been chiefly stressed in the liturgy of the Eastern churches. It does not obscure the fellowship with the self-giving and future of Christ, which stands in the forefront in the Western church’s tradition; but it sets the christological foundation and the eschatological direction of the feast in its trinitarian context. Just because the fellowship in the supper is a remembrance of Christ’s death as the ground of liberation and reconciliation, this remembrance can only be gratitude; and this gratitude will be as wide and as all-embracing as the liberating reconciliation itself. It comprehends the whole of creation in representative thanksgiving and intercession and awaits its coming redemption. Through the fellowship of Christ which the Lord’s supper mediates, God the Father is glorified in thanksgiving, praise, delight and joy. The meal becomes a feast when this gratitude is expressed not only in official liturgies but in the free utterance of those who meet at the table and their spontaneous joy.
The prayer for the Holy Spirit (epiclesis) is also an inseparable part of this feast, for the feast itself is celebrated as the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who allows Christ to be truly present in the meal and gives us fellowship with him in bread and wine in accordance with the words of institution. It is the Spirit who, as the power of the kingdom, gives a foretaste of the new creation in the feast. Through him the fellowship of the table receives the life and the powers of the new creation and the assurance of the coming kingdom. The eschatological bearings of the meal and its messianic character find particularly clear expression in the epiclesis, the prayer for the eschatological gift of the Holy Spirit and the assurance of his presence. Here the liturgical position of this prayer for the Spirit is not as important as our understanding of the whole feast and the assembled fellowship as actually being this prayer. In the prayer for the coming of the Spirit the fellowship opens and prepares itself for his coming. It becomes conscious of its charismatic renewal and commission. It is therefore part of the movement through which the Spirit descends ‘on all flesh’, in order to make it live eternally. Just as the remembrance of Christ’s death makes the fellowship conscious of the ‘openness’ of his self-giving, so the prayer for the Spirit opens it for the perfecting power of his glory. In this way the Lord’s supper becomes the mark of the history of the Spirit.
Because the fellowship of the table unites believers with the triune God through Christ, it also causes men to unite with one another in messianic fellowship. The common bread and the common cup point to the oneness of the people who partake in the one Christ, and in him with all participants at all times and in all places. Every individual fellowship of the table therefore confesses its fellowship with the whole of Christendom on earth. Every feast is understood as the fellowship of the body of Christ. Every individual congregation knows itself to be a member of the whole people of God. The open invitation of the crucified one to his supper is what fundamentally overcomes all tendencies towards alienation, separation and segregation. For through his giving himself up to death for the fellowship of men with God and with one another, the godless and inhuman divisions and enmities between races, nations, civilizations and classes are overcome. Churches which permit these deadly divisions in themselves are making the cross of Christ a mockery. The fellowship of the table is the visible sign of the church’s catholicity. But because this catholicity is messianically open for the uniting of mankind in the presence of God, the fellowship of the table is open to the world too. This fact finds expression best of all when—following the custom of the early church—the Lord’s supper is followed by an agape meal. For this the participants brought their gifts with them, gifts which were then distributed by deacons to the needy members of the fellowship. This does not mean that it was a ‘charitable’ feast. It is rather that the common meal and the fellowship of the table have directly charitable consequences for the hungry and the sick. As the supper with Jesus and his disciples demonstrates fellowship with his mission to the poor, the imprisoned, the sick and the despised, so in the same way the Lord’s supper leads to mission and missionary tasks for the conquest of need, the liberation of prisoners and the acceptance of the despised. The fellowship of the table strengthens and encourages the sense of mission in all who partake, opening their eyes to specific hardships and the opportunities to overcome them. Anyone who celebrates the Lord’s supper in a world of hunger and oppression does so in complete solidarity with the sufferings and hopes of all men, because he believes that the Messiah invites all men to his table and because he hopes that they will all sit at table with him. In the mysteries, the feast separates the initiated from the rest of the world. But Christ’s messianic feast makes its participants one with the physically and spiritually hungry all over the world.
We have tried to understand the different perspectives of the Lord’s supper in the light of the unified, eschatological nature of Christ’s history, and in the all-embracing trinitarian history of God’s dealings with the world; and now suggestions for the actual practice of the Lord’s supper would seem to be indicated.
(a) The fellowship of the table must be central for the assembled congregation, just as much as the proclamation of the gospel. The Lord’s supper must be integrated into the service of worship. It must no longer be celebrated as a coda to it. The communion must be in bread and wine, and the whole congregation must communicate. The more the church becomes a fellowship church belonging to the people, the more important the fellowship in the Lord’s supper will be. It will celebrate this fellowship of the table at all its assemblies. It will extend it in time so that it does not merely consist of a common liturgy, but so that spontaneous fellowship in the mutual exchange of the experiences and problems of everyday life becomes possible.
(b) Because this fellowship comes into being on the basis of Christ’s unconditional and prevenient invitation, the fellowship will be an open one. It cannot limit Christ’s invitation on its own account. Everyone can participate who wants to participate in the fellowship of Christ. The communion is the answer to Christ’s open invitation. Talk about the ‘intercommunion’ of Christians belonging to different churches and denominations is misleading if it draws away attention from communion with Christ. What this means is obvious on the basis of Christ’s invitation to everyone. The traditionally varying interpretations of the Lord’s supper can only be clarified when we all follow Christ’s open invitation together. The contradictions can be solved through a common practice, because then they have to be solved.
(c) Because of Christ’s prevenient and unconditional invitation, the fellowship of the table cannot be restricted to people who are ‘faithful to the church’, or to the ‘inner circle’ of the community. For it is not the feast of the particularly righteous, or the people who think that they are particularly devout; it is the feast of the weary and heavy-laden, who have heard the call to refreshment. We must ask ourselves whether baptism and confirmation ought to go on counting as the presuppositions for ‘admittance’ to the Lord’s supper. If we remember that Jesus’ meal with tax-collectors and sinners is also present in the Lord’s supper, then the open invitation to it should also be carried ‘into the highways and byways’. It will then lose its ‘mystery’ character, but it will not become an ordinary, everyday meal for all that, because the invitation is a call to the fellowship of the crucified one and an invitation in his name to reconciliation with God (1 Cor. 11:27).
(d) In a congregation which sees itself as a messianic fellowship, one person will offer another bread and wine with Christ’s words of promise. Everyone who tells the gospel story and proclaims faith will distribute the bread and wine as well. The celebration of the supper is not bound to any particular ministry, though it is bound to the ‘ministry’ in the sense of the calling and mission of the whole congregation and every individual Christian.
(e) The meal’s character of fellowship is brought out when the person performing the liturgy stands behind the altar, so making it the table, and celebrates facing the people. It is demonstrated even more clearly when the congregation sits round a table. But for this the body of the church has to be altered; the traditional church form, designed for a number of people facing the front, has to be changed to a ‘common room’ in which the participants can see and talk to one another.
(f) This will also make it externally possible to celebrate divine worship as the assembly of the community, to follow the Lord’s supper by a common meal, and the proclamation of the gospel by a common discussion of people’s real needs and the specific tasks of Christian mission. The agape meal that follows shows the Lord’s supper’s openness to the future. Between the feast with Christ and the great banquet of the nations in the kingdom of God lies the world’s hunger and misery. In this tension we become aware of this and accept it as our task in the hope for the kingdom founded on the fellowship of Christ. This means that the agape will not be a friendly appendage to the Lord’s supper; it will be a shalom meal to express, in the promises of the prophets, the eschatological hope which is the ground for the Lord’s supper.
As a feast open to the churches, Christ’s supper demonstrates the community’s catholicity. As a feast open to the world it demonstrates the community’s mission to the world. As a feast open to the future it demonstrates the community’s universal hope. It acquires this character from the prevenient, liberating and unifying invitation of Christ.
The messianic feast is part of the language of the messianic era and its signs. It is a feast of the assembled community, which proclaims the gospel, responds to the liberation experienced, baptizes with the token of the new beginning and, at the table of the Lord, anticipates the fellowship of God’s kingdom. The divine lordship which is manifest in the history of Christ and is experienced in the Spirit gives a new quality to the whole of life. It itself is the feast of freedom in the presence of the triune God and is here therefore celebrated and experienced in feasts.
Understood as a messianic feast, the Christian service of worship is entirely determined by the history of God and by what takes place in it. The assembled community perceives anew the complete history of Christ, his giving himself up to death for the salvation of creation, and his glorification in the life of God for creation’s future. The messianic feast renews the remembrance of Christ and awakens hope for his kingdom. In this way it sets everyday life in the great arc spanning this remembrance and this hope. In this history of Christ the assembled community perceives the trinitarian history of God, his love’s openness to the world and the perfection of all things in his joy. The liberation it experiences in the present moment seeks harmony with the joy of all creation in being, and lays anticipatory hold on the joy of redeemed existence. The messianic feast sets the assembled community, with its daily pains and joys, in the broad context of the trinitarian history of God with the world. This is what is meant when Christian meetings and services are begun in Christ’s name and in the name of the triune God. The church satisfies itself about its own history in the history of Christ, the history of God with the world. In this it acquires and demonstrates freedom—freedom from the alienations of existence, freedom for the alternative of new life, and freedom for the acceptance of existence in the present.
Just because it experiences the freedom of the messianic era in the feast, the things that are in contrast with this—the pains, omissions and failures of everyday life—are brought to expression in the service of worship. The messianic feast is not an ecstasy that transports us into another world; it is the experience of the qualitative alteration of this world. Joy in the divine liberation is therefore accompanied by the expression of suffering over the godlessness that restricts life; rejoicing in the presence of the Spirit is accompanied by the utterance of the sighs of expectant creation; while knowledge of the Son of man is linked with a sense of society’s inhumanity. The service of worship reveals the heights of life, but also the poverty of the depths of our own lives. These dissonances are part of its harmony. They make it at once realistic and hopeful. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?’ asks Psalm 137. The messianic feast is the Lord’s song ‘in a foreign land’. Its melodies mingle thoughts of home with the sighs of exile. For it is the feast of the lordship of God under the cross of Christ, and at the point where Christ’s discipleship in the world belongs. But it has an unmistakable trend and a clear direction towards the victory of life and the consummation of freedom in God’s coming. The liberating feast ‘in the foreign land’ is the fragmentary anticipation of God’s free and festal world.
The assembled community comes to know itself as the messianic fellowship in the messianic feast. But for that very reason it must also critically re-examine the outward functions of its services in relation to the life of the individual and the public life of society. Like preaching, baptism and the Lord’s supper, the service of worship also stands at the point of intersection between very different interests and functions. The important point is that the assembled community should not merely give its worship the character of a messianic feast, but should also give its everyday individual and social functions the impress of messianic impulses.
Before anyone speaks or sings in church, the church has already spoken and sung through its ritual. Sermons and liturgies may change, but the ritual remains and speaks its own language. It draws religious needs and acknowledged expectations into itself. If the priest or minister has not preached a good sermon, he can comfort himself with the thought that at least the hymns were well chosen; and if the hymns were unfamiliar, church attendance still has the functions ascribed to it by the people who go. An effective church reform begins first of all by altering the rituals. But these are so hard to change that they have caused more than one split in the church.
The ritual of the service of worship is fixed. In the succession of the Sundays and in the rhythm of the church’s year, the services form a seasonal ritual. Every human society is familiar with rituals of time which give order to time’s flux and in the yearly cycle awake particular memories which are fundamental for the community. Through these memories tradition and continuity is grafted into life’s changes and chances. Without a temporal order and repetitions of this kind it would seem to be impossible for man to live in ‘the terrors of history’. In its outward order the Christian service of worship is institutionalized by its setting in time. Through the church’s year the unique and eschatologically open history of Christ is brought to expression in a recurrent cycle (even if the church year does not quite coincide with the calendar one): from Christmas by way of Good Friday and Easter to Pentecost; from Advent to All Saints, All Souls and—in the Lutheran church—‘the Sunday of the dead’—the last Sunday before Advent. What does this mean? Does it spring from the divine history celebrated in the Christian services, or from the history of our culture, or from the very nature of man?
Human life—like animal life too, incidentally—is to a great extent ritually ordered and constituted. A functional analysis shows that ritual has four fundamental purposes:
(a) Every ritual creates historical continuity. It regulates the course of the year, as well as the course of the individual life and society, by relating particular seasons and turning points to the past, by means of anniversaries, birthdays, days of remembrance, jubilees, and so forth. In this way it also orders the future by mediating values and patterns of behaviour that have been handed down by tradition. The presupposition for historical continuity is the repeatability of the past through rites. Without ritual there is no tradition. The participant in the ritual does not find the repetition in any way boring; it is solemn and of decisive importance for his life, and he associates it with personal commitment.
(b) Every ritual has an indicative character. Through the binding together of the different levels, the sign and the thing denoted, ritual becomes the symbol that points beyond itself, expresses something different and invites us to remembrance, to hope, or to a new page in life. Through the ritual representation, the thing represented becomes present in an accentuated way.
(c) Every ritual stands in a framework of social coherences and also establishes social coherences. Through ritual a group assures itself of its own character, integrates itself and portrays itself. Because rituals socialize, they are also joined with sanctions against outsiders and against deviating behaviour. Common rituals and symbolic interactions give a group form. Taboos protect it against others, and against intrusions.
(d) If, then, ritual has the function of temporal integration through the formation of tradition; of spatial integration through the forming of a social group; and of an overriding indicative character, it follows that the functions of ritual are primarily ordering functions. Rituals regulate the group in the face of the chaos of diverging interests and anti-social behaviour. They establish stable patterns of thinking and behaviour for constitutionally unstable man. They are necessary for the building up of individual and collective identity. Free, spontaneous and creative life, whose effect is not destructive, only becomes possible out of the security ritual confers.
It is not difficult to see that Christian worship and ecclesiastical ‘rites’ fulfil these ritual functions, and in what way, and how they are consequently related to the ritual constitution of human existence. A special functional analysis of the church’s feasts and celebrations can show this in its anthropological necessity. But any other religious and ideological content can invade these functions and fulfil them. Initiation rites, maturity ceremonies, wedding and burial rites, rituals of tradition and integration are to be found everywhere. They can be religious, but they do not have to be. They can be Christian, but they are not necessarily so.
The functional analysis of ritual enquires into its necessity and sees the ritualization of life against the background of the needs of the anthropological situation of man, that ‘undetermined animal’, world-open, flooded with stimuli and unstable as he is. It easily overlooks the ‘play’ element in the rituals, especially the religious ones—their ‘non-essential’ character, free and exuberant. In everything that people have to produce, economically, socially and ritually, in order to survive, they also portray themselves. Anyone who produces and reproduces presents himself for inspection at the same time. He introduces himself. Rituals do not merely have the necessary functions we have mentioned; they always express a demonstrative existential value as well. It is not expedient in the functional sense, but it is meaningful. Religious rituals in particular show a creative play of expression, of free self-portrayal and an excess of joy in existence that cannot be calculated in terms of purpose and utility. This play makes the ritual a feast beyond what necessity demands of it. In religious ritual people do not merely order their time and their community against chaos, so as to master the necessities of their situation; they also present themselves before the ‘wholly other’ of the gods in prayer, song, thanksgiving, intercession, sacrifice and dance. This orientation turns ritual, purposive though it still is, into something free, playful, demonstrative and festal.
In religious ritual the cult is celebrated as the feast of the gods and is performed together with the gods. Religion is not at all ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstances’. It is not ‘the opium of the people’. It can become that in a particular social situation. But from the point of view of the history of religion the cult can hardly be explained as an illusory compensation for material and psychological deprivation. It is to be understood as the expression of ecstasy, of orgy and exuberance. Far from having to be termed religious in the sense of the great pagan festal religions, Christianity, and especially Protestantism in its modern workaday world, must rather be termed their opposite pole.
One has to be very coarse in order not to feel the presence of Christians and Christian values as an oppression beneath which all genuine festive feelings go to the devil.… The feast is paganism par excellence.
In this respect Marxism, with its religious criticism of Christianity and with its transformation of religious energy into its revolutionary counterpart, is entirely in line with the prophets and the Christian Puritans. Its constraint plays the devil with the festal mood, and the feast as ‘paganism par excellence’ is driven out altogether.
In pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures the cult is the feast of the gods. In this feast the pure primal origin of the world returns and renews time past and the life that has been expended. The place of the cult is the centre of its civilization, and it orders the space round the universal centre which it symbolizes. The cultic seasons order fleeting time into a cycle of eternal recurrence, a cycle of time’s origin. At the sacred places and at sacred seasons gods and men again meet as in their unscathed beginnings. The myth relates the primal event of the world’s beginning; the cultic liturgy depicts it. The feast lifts men up to their origin, where all is as it was on the day of creation. The feast therefore has the character of renewal. It regenerates time, people and society. What is celebrated is the restitutio in integrum. ‘Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold.’ People wish one another ‘a happy New Year’, even if it is only another year like the last that is coming; and this is a survival of the old feast of yearly renewal.
The modern workaday world has taken away from the religious feast this sense of life’s renewal from its source. The reproduction of life through work has replaced its festal renewal from its transcendental foundation. Consequently the world has come to ascribe different functions to feast days and holidays. These functions are no longer the original religious ones, nor are they the general anthropological ones. Formally, feast days and holidays have acquired the role of a temporary suspension of the laws and ways of behaviour that regulate daily work. People are to ‘have a break’; they are to rest from the compulsion of action, relax and recuperate. What is the purpose? Because the modern working world demands a disciplined orientation of life towards utility, means directed to an end, and success, it has to sacrifice a great deal in the renunciation of its natural urges. Without temporary and controlled safety valves the psychological balance can hardly be preserved and the self-control which is necessary can hardly be endured. Leisure, feasts and celebrations turn into a safety-valve for the pent-up pressure of emotions and aggressions. But where they function in this way they are ministering to a domination that is irreconcilable with freedom, either in personal life (where spontaneity and self-control cannot be reduced to a single common denominator) or in public life, where the people dominated are prescribed ‘bread and circuses’ so that they can ‘live it up’ for once. Because daily life is stamped by tension, stress and the pressure to produce ‘results’, it needs suspensions and safety valves for relaxation, and relief from its burdens in order to make the burdens bearable and the tensions endurable. One must have a holiday in order to recover one’s resilience. One looks for some ‘compensation for everyday working life’. Hand in hand with reliefs and relaxations of this kind go the compensations which make all free time a function of the time that is not free and offer ‘ersatz’ pleasures for the joyless features of the working world. One might call it the advertisers’ philosophy: ‘Have a break’, they say, meaning: life really consists of work and we are not in the world to enjoy ourselves. But there are intervals in which we ought to refresh ourselves so that we can work all the better afterwards. There are leisure ‘activities’ as well. Because ‘keeping fit’ is all-important, towns lay on sports and recreation grounds, and ‘health farms’ are opened for ‘the top people’ who really make the grade in the economic world.
Christian worship on Sunday, the ‘day off’, is no exception, for it is used by the harassed people of our society in the way we have described, even if it cannot offer the same ‘leisure activities’ and ‘fun’. What people mainly look for in it is therefore mainly inner, spiritual relaxation and a religious lifting of the burden of responsibility they have to carry during the week. It is not by chance that here the church service is finding increasing competition from new practices of religious meditation of what is thought to be an Eastern kind. In modern society religious functions in the form of suspension, outlet, relief and compensation can, but do not have to be, taken over by Christian worship. Consequently the church must ask itself whether its services are expressing messianic freedom when they fulfil these functions.
From the very beginning the biblical traditions show a particular, and in many respects a unique, understanding of the feast. It was as a nomadic people that Israel entered the cultivated land of Canaan, with its fixed cultic sites. It settled down, planted the fields, bred cattle and took over the cultic forms of the agrarian religion of the country, which expressed the yearly cycle of seedtime and harvest. But Israel did not change its gods, as so many other peoples did, when it changed from a nomadic to a settled existence. The tension between Yahweh, the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, and the country’s Baals remained and led to continual new conflicts, as the Old Testament shows. Protest and criticism were directed both against the Baal cult and against the baalization of Yahweh.
The difference between Yahweh and Baal can be typologically described as follows: the nomad does not live in the cycle of seedtime and harvest. He is continually on the move in search of pastures and hunting grounds. His gods are moving, guiding gods, who go ahead, journeying with the people, and are themselves wayfarers. Nomadic religion is a religion of promise. The god who inspires, leads and journeys with the people differs from the gods of agrarian peoples because he is not territorially bound and possesses no cultic sites where he dwells. Under the guidance of the wayfaring God, therefore, life is experienced as history. The future sought is not a repetition of the past, nor is it a confirmation of the present. It is the goal of a journey. It gives the journey its meaning and makes the experiences of privation on the way endurable. A settled people, on the other hand, does not live in time so much as in the space of a particular country. It is dependent on the circulatory movement of nature and has to observe the annually recurring seasons of spring and autumn, summer and winter, rains and drought. It therefore celebrates the festivals of the gods in the cycle of the year, thus celebrating the cyclical renewal of life. Its future lies in the eternal recurrence of the same thing. In addition to this temporal order, a settled people needs an order for the space in which it lives. That is why a country’s civilization is ordered round the cultic site. It is the centre of its culture, symbolically representing the centre of the ordered world, over against chaos. The festal seasons hallow the time and the cultic places hallow the space where man lives and tills the ground.
When the Israelite tribes came into the cultivated lands, they adopted the cult in the yearly cycle, but gave its content a new function. In the feast held at the beginning of the barley harvest they remembered the historic exodus from Egypt, at the great vintage festival in autumn, the period in the wilderness and the unsettled life in tabernacles, or leafy huts. In this way the Israelites related the cyclical festivals of the year to the history of their relations with God and to the God of their history. They historicized the agricultural festivals, no longer celebrating the eternal recurrence of the same thing, but the unique, unrepeatable history of their relations with the God of the promise. The feasts no longer carried participants back to the primal origin of the world; they set them in the historical era of the patriarchs, their exodus from bondage and their long march through the desert. Israel also gave a future dimension to the feasts which it took over. Just as they made present the historical faithfulness of God to the patriarchs, they also awoke trust in the future faithfulness of this same God. They did not point to their own repetition the following year; they pointed to the future history of God’s dealings with the people. The historical uniqueness of the divine history that was remembered corresponded to the future finality of the divine history that was hoped for. It was certainly a lengthy and complex process, but its trend and its result can be seen in the fact that the God of the promise, who went ahead of his people through the space of the wilderness, became in the land of Canaan the God of history, who goes ahead of his settled people through time. The experience of history was not dissolved in the experience of the space of a particular time; it integrated the experience of space in times that transcend it. Yet it remains an open question how the feasts of the divine history can enter the annual cycle without being dissolved in that cycle. Does the cycle serve to give an assurance of the unique divine history, or does it dominate that history and confuse the one with the other?
This question can be answered on the basis of the Israelite and Jewish understanding of the sabbath. The sabbath goes back to the story of creation. The seventh day is the festival of creation. On that day God ‘rested’ and took pleasure in his creation because ‘everything was very good’. According to the creation accounts this cannot be understood as a resting after strenuous work. It is the goal of the divine creation and its completion. The rest and pleasure are the quality of the divine life. The sabbath is not there for the sake of the work; the work is there for the sake of the feast. The festival of creation is the goal of the whole history of God’s dealings with the world, from the creation in the beginning to the creation of the last days. The sabbath, therefore, simultaneously reaches forward to the messianic era. The messianic era is often called the ‘era of the endless sabbath’, so the weekly sabbath is understood as an anticipation and foretaste of this time. The sabbath brings ‘the central idea of Judaism’ to expression, the idea of freedom and complete harmony between man and man as well as between man and nature. That is ‘the idea of the anticipation of the messianic time and of man’s defeat of time, sadness and death’. Since all work is an interference with nature on man’s part, sabbath rest means the state of peace between man and nature. The weekly sabbath is not merely ritual and symbol but an anticipation of the shalom, even if it is on the ‘exceptional day’. The sabbath is certainly part of the weekly cycle but in its content it interrupts the cyclical rebirth of time by anticipating the messianic era. It stands in the cycle of time, yet it is the sign of freedom from time’s cycle, since it anticipates the victory over time and death. ‘Time is suspended; Saturn is dethroned on his very day, Saturn’s-day. Death is suspended and life rules on the Sabbath day.’
Jesus’ attitude to the sabbath is often reduced to his polemic against its ritualization: ‘The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the sabbath’ (Mark 2:27f.). With this he justifies the healing of the sick on the sabbath. The sabbath is made for man’s sake, not for work’s sake. Jesus does not orientate it towards the working days. The fact that ‘the blind receive their sight, the deaf hear and the dead are raised up’ is actually part of Jesus’ messianic mission. According to Luke this begins with the proclamation of the final ‘acceptable year of the Lord’ through Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 4:18ff.). According to Leviticus 25 this is the sabbatical year; and according to the prophets (Isa. 61:1ff.) it is the final dawn of the messianic era—in other words the fulfilment of the weekly sabbath’s anticipations and promises. Jesus did not therefore ‘make the sabbath a matter of indifference’. Like the prophets, he attacked the confining of the divine history and law to the cult and to cultic seasons. But when he abolished the division between the cultic and the secular, the pure and the impure, sabbath and the ordinary days, it was not in favour of everyday secularity, but in favour of the messianic festiveness of all life. If his mission is a messianic one, then it is also the beginning of the sabbath of the last days. The whole of life becomes a feast.
It is true that we know of no special pilgrimages made by Jesus to cultic festivals; but the journey to Jerusalem which ended with his passion and crucifixion can be understood in this sense as his festal procession. If his suffering and dying manifests the lordship of God, and with it the liberation of man, then his self-giving must be understood as the end of the special cult and the beginning of a new quality of life in the feast of the divine rule. As the end of the particular sabbath the history of Jesus is the beginning of the all-embracing eschatological sabbath.
The ‘Christian cult’ consists of Christ’s person and history, and the history of the church’s relationship to Christ in the Spirit. Apart from that there is no special ‘Christian cult’. Paul understood this new quality of the whole of life through Christ and his history, and upheld it in his congregations against Judaism and enthusiasm. The freedom for which Christ set us free cannot put up with any cultic legalism (Gal. 5:1ff.). He considered that the observance of holy days, months and festal occasions showed lack of knowledge of the true God. For the man who knows God, all days are alike (Gal. 4:10; Col. 2:16; Rom. 14:5). ‘I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (av: reasonable service; Rom. 12:1). When he describes the surrender and obedience of our bodies on the ground of God’s mercy—Christ’s giving of himself for us—as ‘worship’ then ‘the doctrines of worship and Christian “ethics” converge’. But worship is not replaced by ethics; ethics are turned into worship. The new unity of worship and ethics which abolishes the division between ordinary days and feast days cannot be interpreted ethically, or in a secular and everyday way; for the feast of God’s lordship is lived in the secularity of everyday. Bodily obedience in resistance to the powers of the passing world and its laws becomes ‘the offering of self-sacrifice’. The service of reconciliation in the forum of the world becomes an expression of joy in God’s rule. That is why worship has priority over ethics.
In the early church Chrysostom once gave a definition of festivity which is in line with this: ‘Ubi caritas gaudet, ibi est festivitas.’ The love that serves our neighbour without having any personal axe to grind is joy. It is the feast of the new life. Here no special festal times and periods of leisure are required. Wherever it comes into being there is the sabbath, God’s sabbatical year, the messianic era. To preach the gospel of the kingdom to the poor, to heal the sick, to receive the despised, free prisoners, and eat and drink with the hungry is the feast of Christ in the history of God’s dealings with the world.
It is understandable that John saw no temple in his visions of the new heaven and the new earth and the Jerusalem coming down from heaven. What the temple in the sacred precinct represented—namely, the cultic indwelling of God—becomes superfluous when the glory of God fills everything. For John too the separation between the temple and the street, Sunday and weekday, is overcome by the one whom the temple and Sunday stand for. He then overcomes even the temple and Sunday itself.
What we have said up to now has shown that in their intention and their tendency both the Jewish sabbath and the Christian Sunday aim to overcome the division between the feast day and the ordinary day. The messianic era is to be the era of the eternal sabbath. For Christians the whole of life is to be a perpetual feast of love and joy. But wherever the polemic against particular holy days, places and rituals is detached from this messianic hope it becomes moralistic—even when its arguments are political—and puts the feast at the service of everyday life. The Reformers proclaimed man’s justification by faith alone, and therefore abolished the ‘meritorious’ cults and festivals. The Christian’s whole life was to become the reasonable service, or spiritual worship, of love. But by so doing they merely multiplied the number of working days and encouraged an unpleasant rationalization of everyday life—a result they did not aim at at all. Marxist criticism of religion completed this development. The worker was to be freed from his various forms of alienation. But the overcoming of his religious alienation was followed by the abolition of the feast days, and in some countries by an increase in the number of working shifts. This way of overcoming the difference between the feast day and the working day in favour of the latter cannot be called messianic. It is merely sad. Sunday can be made a working day, but the working day just cannot, within history, become Sunday. But the difference can already be overcome here if worship on Sunday is consciously directed towards a stimulation of the festal life in everyday existence. Since, as messianic feasts, they are open for the divine future, they will also be open to the world for the pains and joys of life in love. They then bring hope into the world and everyday life. If they are to do this the following elements should be noted when we mould our services of worship:
(a) As ritual, divine service is a celebration. Only a relatively closed group, after years of practice, can inwardly join in the ceremonies and symbols which have been formed through long tradition. But as a feast the service is closer to an unsolemn and open game. A celebration is simply disturbed by anything unexpected. But the feast is open for spontaneous ideas and for accidents coming from outside. There are no disturbances in it, only surprises. Strangers can participate in the feast too. For a feast, only the framework is planned in advance. What happens in it depends on the participants themselves. The feast therefore expands the traditional elements of the celebration in order to leave scope for spontaneous and creative contributions. If we interpret the Christian service messianically, we will have to expand its ceremonies with elements of the feast, and its dignified ceremonial with spontaneous festivity. Then it has an infectious influence on the festiveness of everyday life.
(b) The Christian service was originally and still is the feast of Christ’s resurrection. That is why it was celebrated on the first day of the Jewish week, at sunrise. The resurrection feast is a feast with the risen Christ. It reveals and demonstrates in him the eschatological alternative to this world of work, guilt and death. The inescapability of history is broken through, the compulsion of wickedness is abolished and death is disarmed. As such an alternative resurrection is celebrated in a festive way and is carried into unfree and alienated life as an anticipation. That is why the Easter character of the Christian service also contains the contradiction of the powers of death that oppress life and the apathy that gives way to them. This disarming of the powers and the rebirth of hope out of apathy should be stressed more strongly than hitherto, so as to free church worship from misuse as a safety valve and compensation. As an action of hope in the resurrection, worship is, in a crucial sense, a liberating, public matter.
(c) The Christian service of worship, as the feast of the risen one, is always at the same time the making present of the one who was crucified. Together with joy in the freedom manifested, it also expresses pain over the failures and omissions of life. Where the nearness of God is experienced in the Spirit, there is also awareness of life’s godlessness. Where people begin to live in the kingdom of the Son of man, inhuman relationships and inhuman behaviour become painfully obvious. In this sense the service will also express the laments of the Psalms and the cry from the depths of the assailed life. If it is expanded from a ceremony into a feast, this cannot be done merely through pre-formulated psalms and prayers; it must also emerge through spontaneous laments springing from the actual situation of individuals and groups. The feast of the resurrection makes room for the cry of the crucified Jesus to God, and for the outcry of the dumb, imprisoned, suffering people. ‘And if man in his torment falls dumb, a God taught me to say how I suffer,’ said Goethe. The human, suffering, crucified God, whose presence is celebrated in worship, lets us cry out and utter what we suffer. If he breaks the spell of silence he will also bring the cry of the peoples who have been politically silenced. A celebration cannot endure the unanswered cry out of the depths or unsolaced pain; but the feast with the crucified Christ in the presence of the Christ who is risen can be open for these things.
(d) Though worship in the name of the crucified and risen Christ makes a stand against life’s inward and outward oppressions, its criticism of the state of the world is still none the less bound up with man’s justification and the assent to creation. Just because it is the leaven of liberation it mediates the power to accept existence. It does not justify the existing state of affairs or ruling circumstances; but it does justify creation.
Right through its criticism of evil, the feast will be an affirmation of existence, and hence an expression of joy in that existence. The ‘Yes’ of God’s incarnation implies the ‘No’ of the cross. Right through the ‘No’ of the cross the ‘Yes’ of the kingdom is to be heard and cannot be mistaken for any other extorted affirmations of things that are not ‘very good’.
(e) Through the presence of the risen Christ the feast of the resurrection always has elements of rapture. The new messianic life is not merely changed life; it is life of new quality. The rapture of the divine future will first of all be felt and celebrated in festal ecstasy. It can only be transferred into practice fragmentarily and as a beginning. But this does not make the liberating feast senseless or superfluous. Its very superfluity in the literal sense—its overflowing character—produces continually new attitudes of resistance to the different forms of repression and unfree life. It provokes and stimulates companions in the feast to bring freedom and more freedom into everyday life, in accordance with the powers they receive and the potentialities they recognize. The feast of Christ’s freedom and serene joy in him are not a contradiction of struggle and labour and do not paralyse energies. Through the spirit of the feast the struggle for the liberation of the poor is guarded against narrow-mindedness and daemonism, and preserved from resignation in the face of resistance and the sense of our own helplessness. Understood as a liberating feast, Christian worship becomes ‘the messianic intermezzo’ in the history of God’s dealings with men and women and on the path of the fellowship which follows Jesus’ messianic mission, taking up its cross in the world.
(f) The messianic feast is dependent on a fellowship which sees itself as a messianic fellowship. A ‘religious’ church which aims to ‘look after’ people will always stylize its services into fixed ceremonials and will understand them quite generally as being anthropologically founded rituals with social functions, adapted to people’s particular needs in certain social situations. But a messianic fellowship of the people will see itself as the subject of its assemblies, and will hence mould them into feasts of the divine history. The reform of church worship and reform of the church therefore belong together. No reform of worship succeeds without a new building up of the congregation ‘from below’, that is, its own organization of itself in accordance with the gospel, its promises and its challenges.
Wherever people experience and hold on to the meaning of human life, a certain way of living comes into being. Man attempts to direct his life in accordance with its meaning. He ‘leads’ his life in its changing situations and demands by trying to make it correspond to the sense he has extracted from it. The meaning of life gives man a firm, inner support and this then gives its stamp to his outward attitude as well. Life which is consciously lived forms itself and acquires stature. Man absorbs his experiences and projects himself towards his future. The personality comes into being in the mutual play of person and history, in suffering and action. It acquires a profile in the mutual play between individual and community, in being there for himself and for others. In the great cultural revolutions and in life’s crises, ways or styles of life decay because they are no longer capable of putting their stamp on experiences and actions and have lost their power of lending orientation. Then ‘breaks in style’ come about. A new ‘style’ of life has to be worked out, because a person cannot live without style, which is to say formlessly. One can ‘lose face’ but one cannot live without a face. ‘Let your manner of life be worthy of—or, in accordance with—the gospel of Christ’, demands Paul (Phil. 1:27). His exhortations to the Christian churches are directed towards a conduct of life which receives its messianic quality from Christ’s gospel.
In the history of Christianity Christian theology has taken its bearings from the Christian life—even if not always consciously. Where it did this consciously, it did not merely see itself as a science but as ‘an art of living’ as well; for ‘the theory of a practice’ belongs to the sphere of art. Under the influence of humanist educational ideals, Huguenot theologians declared theology to be the ars Deo vivendi. The practical façon de vivre stood at the centre of their endeavours and they set up the motto of recte vivere (which took its impress from the Old Testament) as against the eudaemonistic ideal of beate vivere. It is not the striving for earthly happiness and eternal bliss that ought to mark the Christian’s life, but the struggle for divine and human righteousness. Catholic traditions have a theology of the monastic life. Its centre is spirituality, which is brought out particularly clearly and influentially in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Spirituality does not only mean the inner life of devotion and prayer, cut off from the world; it is also the conduct of life in distinguishing one spirit from another, and in making decisions under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality includes the whole of life, soul and body, individual and community, the inner life and the outward one. Loyala’s spirituality influenced the façon de vivre of theologians more than an initial glance into their theological works would suggest. It is therefore necessary to investigate and understand the history of theology, not merely in the context of the history of thought, but also as part of the history of life. On the Lutheran side, we shall discover that the Reformation hymns and catechisms have given their stamp to the style of life and thought of theologians for generations. The experiences of faith shared by communities in the Thirty Years’ War (which find classic expression in Paul Gerhardt’s hymns), the pietistic awakening of the revival movement, the youth movement, the Confessing Church, as these are reflected in hymns, biographies, poems, forms of fellowship and church buildings, have made history and influence our life and thinking even today. These are only a few examples of the interdependence of theology and devotion, the history of life and the history of the Spirit When theology thinks in terms of the experiences of the Christian life, it also interprets the experiences of this life. If theology does not consciously take hold of this task, far-reaching differences can arise, which are themselves already the mark of a ‘break in style’. In this case theology is no longer expressing and defining the experiences of Christian life in the present, but is only reproducing the definition of earlier experiences. Its scholarship then divides it from the life of the people and that life will separate itself from theology. Then rival styles arise which are more influenced by the ‘place’ where life is lived than by its meaning. This finds expression in talk about ‘university theology’ and ‘community theology’; or ‘professional theology’ and ‘lay theology’. The community of theology and the Christian life is an urgent task in situations of this kind.
When we talk about the style, the forms and the conduct of the Christian life, we enter the complex sphere of mutually contradictory prejudices. Many people reject a Christian life in its established form and yet have a profound longing for its clear lines. The generations which still knew (or thought they did) how one could live a Christian life and die a Christian death, whose prayers and devotional forms followed the course of the day and the week, and the progress of life itself, the generations which encountered the changes and chances of life with a time-tested outlook and a firm attitude, frighten many people and yet at the same time fascinate them. Why?
The Christian way of life as it has been handed down obviously has many legalistic features. It often takes more account of life’s prohibitions than its injunctions. This life is not always viewed as conduct ‘worthy of—or in accordance with—the gospel of Christ’, but often more as conduct in accordance with the law of Moses and the Stoics, or the rules of church and society. Every established form of life is stamped, not merely by the meaning of life which people hold, but by the circumstances of the time as well. But this cannot lead to the gospel’s being turned into a law. A common law demands uniformity, but the gospel spreads individuality in fellowship. Legalism makes a Christian way of life (and the church’s way of life too) pervasively timid and narrow-minded. Self-discipline and continual control over the natural urges and feelings are its way of life. It says nothing about self-affirmation and an acceptance of one’s own individuality, about the liberation of natural and physical life. Because people have no courage for spontaneity they are continually forced to ask what is permissible and whether they are ‘allowed’ to do what they want to do.
Of course people’s individuality rebels against the moral pressure of this legalism, especially in the adolescent years, when a person is finding himself, has to arrive at himself and become responsible for his own life. The firmly established faith of his parents then becomes for him a set of ‘childish beliefs’ which he has outgrown. But the freedom for which ‘Christ has set us free’ (Gal. 5:1ff.) also rebels against this legalism. That freedom is not identical with the natural rebelliousness of youth, but it has importance for it. For legalism certainly cannot be replaced by lawlessness, and firm obligations can by no means be replaced by libertinism. That does not lead to freedom but merely replaces the ties of the generations by the ties exerted by groups. Their solidarity can have just as legalistic an effect as loyalty to fathers and mothers. Life ‘in accordance with the gospel’ is life in recognized and accepted personal individuality, but an individuality that is charismatically alive, a personality that is lived in and for the community, and an independence that does not suppress originality but sets it free and develops it in relationship to forefathers and contemporaries. A life ‘in accordance with the gospel of Christ’ seeks the individual and common messianic way of life. It cannot have anything to do with either legalism or lawlessness, for it looks for forms of the liberated life in experience and for forms of life’s liberation in practice. The messianic gospel liberates oppressed life. It gives it bearings and meaning. It gives its stamp to life in the Spirit.
Before we consider the life which is stamped for freedom by the gospel, it may be helpful to look round for the theological concept which expresses this experience of faith. Here we shall take the concept of ‘rebirth’. Regeneration, renovatio—‘incipit vita nova’ seem to capture the sense of what is meant better than sanctification, with its many levels of meaning. The actual word ‘rebirth’ is seldom used in the New Testament (Matt. 19:28; Titus 3:5). But the fact is often treated in the context of baptism. Like all related concepts, rebirth is to be understood eschatologically. Matthew 19:28 means by it the renewal and rebirth of the world in the future of the Son of man and his glory. Titus 3:5 talks about the rebirth (regeneration) of believers in the Holy Spirit according to the mercy of God through Jesus Christ, which makes them already heirs of eternal life ‘in hope’. When the Johannine writings talk about new birth ‘from God’ and ‘from the Spirit’ they are talking about the new source of new life. Born again of the Spirit, believers acquire a share in the kingdom of God. The first epistle of Peter talks about being born again ‘to a living hope’ (1:3) by the mercy of God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In the rebirth of life the new creation of the world into the kingdom of God in an individual life is already experienced and anticipated here. This has its foundation in the prevenient mercy of God; it is manifest in the resurrection of Christ from the dead; and it is efficacious in the Spirit, which moulds life in faith to the living hope. Theological tradition has seldom taken account of this eschatological character of rebirth. But it is just this that makes it clear that the rebirth of an individual means his orientation towards the new creation: ‘The one who is born again is, as it were, ahead of himself; he lives from the thing that is coming to him, not from what is already in him.’ The one who is born again cannot, therefore, be scrupulously and anxiously preoccupied with himself, although he lives in this experience. His life has become new because, being orientated towards the new creation, he lives in the presence of the Spirit and under his influence, the ‘earnest of glory’. At the same time the eschatological orientation of the individual’s rebirth opens him for the community and for the world. The experience is his own—irreplaceably so; but it sets him in the movement of hope and in the fellowship of the messianic community. Re-birth does not isolate a person, even though it affects the individual in his unrepeatable character. On the contrary, it links his life with the future, giving that life, limited as it is, a meaning that transcends it. Rebirth does not isolate the individual, even though it makes him a person, but sets him in the common movement of the Spirit which is poured out ‘on all flesh’. Where the messianic gospel is heard and evokes faith, life is born again ‘to a living hope’ and—in however fragmentary a form—the rebirth of the world is anticipated. The ‘new man’, the heir of the future and citizen of the kingdom, takes form. As the concepts which are related to ‘rebirth’ show, this means that the Messiah takes form in the individual and in the community, in the soul and in the body.
What form does rebirth take in a person’s life? Its eschatological orientation cannot endure any legalism which makes man his own overseer. On the contrary, it manifests itself in the new spontaneity in which a man lets himself go and entrusts himself to the Spirit—that is to say, acquires self-confidence through his confidence in God. It shows itself in the openness of an otherwise timidly withdrawn existence, an openness which nevertheless forms personality and does not surrender man to what he encounters at any given moment without any will-power of his own. But its eschatological orientation cannot endure lawlessness and formlessness, for what is visualized is not redemption from the body, but the redemption of the body.
The problem of the form taken by the reborn life really lies in experience, and our dealings with experience. The new life style cannot be set up as a programme and carried through without any interference. ‘Man makes something, and history makes something out of him.’ When he entrusts himself in faith to the history of God, then his way of life takes the impress of this history. The form of the new life is experienced and suffered, and is only recognizable subsequently for what it is. Life history in faith is the history of enduring God: ‘Not my will, but thine, be done.’ This is a challenge to wise dealing with inward and outward experience. There is no such thing as experience per se. Experiences are always remembered, digested and actualized, and their meaning is evaluated afresh in every new situation. Certain experiences are grasped as being fundamental ones, if they alter the whole of life and give it new perspectives. External, shared experiences—war, the collapse of the state, captivity or revolution—have put their stamp on the life of whole generations. Inner personal experiences, conversions, inspirations, sufferings and decisions influence certain periods, and more than that, in the life of individuals. Daily experiences are generally interpreted in the light of these fundamental experiences, and these test their viability and power of lending orientation against this interpretation. It is hardly possible to re-examine one’s life and to make existential decisions every minute. Even faith cannot be the ‘ever new decision’. In the history of a life, faith is also loyalty to the experience that one has once had and the decision that has once been taken. Only this loyalty must not be confused with a security which is ready to hand. Our dealings with the experiences and decisions of faith are stamped by living faith themselves.
Here we can distinguish between the work of memory and the work of hope. This is the two-sided hermeneutical process in the history of a person’s life. With the aid of memory we return to past experiences and disperse possible repressions and bitternesses, such as grow up in connection with painful and embarrassing experiences, for example. We expose ourselves to these experiences again, rediscovering ourselves in them as being moulded by them. Thanks to memory we actualize these experiences and the ‘I’, which is affected by them, links them with experiences and decisions which have to be made in the present. The work of memory creates continuity. There is no identity which is not also continuity, stretched over a period of time and held fast through memory. But identity in the history of life is always historical and open to the future. A life can only be surveyed as a whole when it has reached its end. But it is questionable whether the hour of death is this end in which a life is completed and becomes surveyable as a whole. For the whole of life is more than the sum of its parts and periods; it is the whole for which this life was led and from which it took its meaning. The work of memory on life’s past is bound up with the work of hope on its future. The meaning which we see in our future determines the significance we ascribe to the past. The continuity of life history therefore involves the design planned with a view to a meaningful whole. Remembered experiences and decisions become significant in the present in so far as they open up for us angles of approach to the potentialities of the future. We then remember past experiences, not under any compulsion to repeat them, but in freedom, so as to be certain of our destination.
If the experiences of the Christian faith are called the rebirth of life to a living hope, then the natural work of memory stands in the light of this work of hope. The power of continuity won through memory is directed towards the rebirth of the whole. Life, temporally limited and historically forgetful and fickle as it is, is set in this perspective. The incompletable fragments of a human life become fragments of the rebirth of the whole creation. Memory will in this light understand all the experiences of faith as open experiences pointing beyond themselves and as changing signs which point in the same direction—that is, as fragments and prefigurations of the new creation. It is not death that completes life but the kingdom of God. The hermeneutics of the history of an individual life are hermeneutics of the cyphers of rebirth. It is only one part of the hermeneutics of the Spirit’s history, but it is a necessary and irremissible part.
The bourgeois age of personalities and biographies may be at an end. But if its end is not to be ‘the death of man’, then courage must be awakened for our own lives in their narrow limitations and for our own life histories in their banalities. Without the eschatological orientation of his rebirth man can lose his ‘I’, letting it be dispersed into mere reactions to actions from outside. Without it he can also crawl into the story of his own private life and lose himself just because he wants to save himself by this method. ‘Non-eschatological man loses his humanity as a power that he consciously experiences. He will be exposed to external control to the very centre of his person.’ The perspective of rebirth we have described is absorbed neither by private nor by collective biography. It is able to reconcile the personal as what is uniquely one’s own with the common element of the uniquely other, because it orientates both sides of life, the individual and the collective, to the new creation of the whole.
The style of life that is reborn and new comes into being from creative tensions. There are times in which these tensions allow themselves to be brought harmoniously into a form which appears consistent. Today they are tensions which often enough produce disharmonies and lack of consistency and lead to forms of life which display the points of fragmentation rather than the unity of the whole. We mean by this the tensions between prayer and faithfulness to the earth, between contemplation and political struggle, between transcendental religion and the religion of solidarity. Today many people are carrying out the experiment of Christian life between these poles. But polarizations threaten the rebirth of life. We must therefore seek pointers for a way of life which springs from the endurance of these tensions.
(a) The dialectical unity between prayer and earthiness was the fascinating secret of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s spirituality. His Letters and Papers from Prison have become the breviary of committed Christians all over the world. He fought passionately against the withdrawn piety of those who put up with every injustice on earth because they have long since resigned themselves to it and only live life here in a half-hearted way. But he opposed with equal passion the flat and trivial this-worldliness of those who consider themselves enlightened, who want to enjoy the present, resign themselves in the face of the future, and therefore only live half-heartedly and without fervour. An other-worldly piety, which wants God without his kingdom and the blessedness of the soul without the new earth, is really just as atheistic as the this-worldliness which wants its kingdom without God, and the earth without the horizon of salvation. God without the world and the world without God, faith without hope and hope without faith are merely a mutual corroboration of one another. They are the products of the disintegration of a Christianity without Christ. ‘Brethren, remain true to the earth!’ With this cry from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Bonhoeffer fought against resigned, half-hearted Christianity in its flight from the world.
In the same way, earlier than Bonhoeffer, the Blumhardts attacked the liberal bourgeois attitude which limited faith to God and the soul, and in opposition to both made their central watchword: ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be yours as well.’ ‘Yes indeed, Christian, by all means see to it that you die in a state of blessedness. But the Lord Jesus wants more than that. He does not want my redemption and yours; he wants the redemption of the whole world. He wants to put an end to evil altogether. He wants to make the whole world, in its utter godlessness, free.’ Christoph Blumhardt, Kutter and Ragaz therefore also took the practical step away from religion to the kingdom of God, away from the church to the world, away from concern for the individual self to hope for the whole. They became religious socialists and Social Democrats because they looked for the coming of the kingdom of God in the world among the poor and oppressed. But this investment of one’s own life, experience and strength in preparing the way for the coming Lord in the world presupposes (as Christoph Blumhardt made unmistakably clear) ‘the ceaseless prayer for the spirit of perseverance’. It is only self-forgetful trust in the faithfulness of God that creates freedom for selfless service for the world’s liberation.
‘Only the man who loves the earth and God as a single unity can believe in the kingdom of God’, declared Bonhoeffer as early as 1932. ‘Christ does not lead man into the backwoods of religion’s flight from the world; he gives the world back to him as her faithful son.… The hour in which the church prays for the kingdom today forces it completely, for good or ill, into the comradeship of the children of the earth and the world; it swears the church to faithfulness to the earth, to misery, to hunger and to dying.’ The person who really hopes for the kingdom of God endures the conflicts and defeats of history. He remains true to the earth and does not give it up, because he directs his gaze unswervingly towards the point where the curse is broken and God’s ‘Yes’ to the world can be perceived: ‘the resurrection of Christ’. Bonhoeffer’s notion of the profound this-worldliness of the Christian life takes its whole colouring from the present actualization of the crucified and risen Liberator and has as little to do with bourgeois secularization as it has with a religious moderation of the feelings. The more intensely a man loves the earth, the more strongly he feels the injustice done to it, its fatal self-destruction and the way it is forsaken, and the more spontaneously he laments with the suffering and cries out with the wounded—which is to say prays, if praying means crying out to God the lament of the people, the cry of the oppressed and the hunger of those who hope. The more spontaneous and worldly a man’s prayer is in this sense, the more deeply he is drawn into the people’s suffering and will participate in it as God’s suffering over the world. Praying in the Spirit and interest in life drive one another on, if both are concentrated on the crucified Christ and his messianic kingdom. Then prayer is not a compensation for disappointed love; it makes love ready to absorb the pain into itself and to love more fiercely than before. Then faithfulness to the earth is not a dispensation from praying and crying, but increases their passion. Bonhoeffer’s life, his resistance, his faith and the way he died are an example of a way of life which has its genesis in the creative tension of prayer and faithfulness to the earth. It remained a fragment and was broken off in 1945 at the place of execution in a concentration camp; but just because of that it points beyond itself. The way of life of the messianic era is stamped by messianic suffering. It is hardly ever recognizable in any other way, for ‘dying, and behold we live’.
(b) The dialectical unity between contemplation and political struggle is the secret of Taizé’s way of life. Here prayer is not an inner tranquillizing of the self, or a religious flight from the world. It is interpreted messianically. ‘Prayer is first of all waiting. It is allowing the “Come, Lord” of the Apocalypse to well up in oneself, day after day. Come for mankind! Come for us all! Come for me!’ Whoever prays takes up the world’s cry of hunger. Whoever prays abides in the hope of Christ. Whoever prays opens himself for the world and the future of Christ, uniting both in himself. Contemplation is linked with prayer, but it is not the same as prayer. In contemplation the lament falls silent and the heart is open to receive. Man becomes free for others, free from egoistical desires and his own ideals. Contemplation and meditation are not directly ‘practical’. But meditation on Christ’s passion and contemplation of the presence of his Spirit alter practice more fundamentally than all the alternatives which the active man sees as being at his disposal. They lead his practical faith away from the trivializing of the idea of God and the future hope, setting both face to face with God’s hard reality. To know God means to suffer God, and anyone who ‘suffers’ God experiences the reversal of his existence, the pains of his life’s rebirth. He becomes a different person. He dies, as Paul says, to the demands and compulsions of ‘this world’ and awakes to new life for God and his kingdom. Only meditation without any object can lead to flight from action, not Christian meditation. That is at heart meditatio crucis. Turning to Christ and turning to the men and women for whom he died are part of a single movement. Contemplation in the presence of his Spirit destroys man’s own will more thoroughly than anything else and makes the messianic will of God the meaning of one’s own life. Contemplation concentrates on the one thing that is needful, the seeking for the kingdom of God. It reduces life, which struggle has inevitably diffused and confused, to a single common denominator.
Just as meditation cannot be a flight from action, so, conversely, action cannot be a flight from meditation. Anyone who falls back on activity because he cannot come to terms with himself, and who praises action because he is afraid of theory, achieves nothing at all, but is merely a burden to other people. Activity and political commitment for the liberation of the oppressed are not a panacea against feebleness of the personality and lazy thinking. It is only the person who finds himself who can give himself. It is only the one who has become free that can free others without taking away their capacity for ideologically free decision. But there is no ‘I’ which I can hold fast to in myself. There is only the ‘I’ in the context of a history, in which it finds its place and its task. Christian meditation and contemplation allow the real ‘I’ to be discovered as an ‘I’ accepted, liberated and redeemed by God in the context of its call to partake in the messianic liberation of the whole. We are told that we must not merely discover who we are but also where we belong. In meditating on the history of Christ and in becoming conscious, in the Spirit, of our own history in relation to this history of Christ, we discover ourselves and our tasks in the process of this open history. This can only be the reverse side of the practical life in which we try to realize ourselves and our destiny in the messianic history of God’s dealings with the world. Meditation and liberating practice in the different spheres of life complement one another and deepen one another mutually. The style of the Christian—which is to say the messianic—life comes into being from the tension between meditation and struggle. In this field of tension too we find fragments, fractures and inconsistencies. The new life is seldom experienced in any other way than as: ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed’ (2 Cor. 4:8).
(c) Today transcendental religion and the religion of solidarity have polarized wide groups in Christianity. Anyone who prays is standing aloof from politics, is evidently concerned with himself and ‘his God’ and makes no protest. Anyone who publicly protests is standing aloof from traditional devotionalism, is concerned with the world, and no longer prays. The unforgettable picture when Martin Luther King, with his black and white civil-rights supporters on the march to Selma, knelt down in the road in front of the rifles and prayed, is as off-putting for many devout people as it is for many who are politically committed. There are student societies which now see themselves solely as part of the political movement for liberation and have relinquished their Christian identity. They leave the Bible, prayer and mission to the conservative groups, and ultimately have nothing to offer their left-wing comrades except their solidarity, without any ideas, visions and initiatives of their own. On the other hand there are devout student groups which meet together for Bible classes and prayer meetings and are concerned in a more traditional way with God and the soul or, to put it in more modern terms, with the experience of the transcendental and the self. Their self-styled detachment from politics usually exerts a conservative political influence, to preserve the privileges of their class, country and society. Generally the dispute between the two is fought out in the pusillanimous and stupid alternatives of a ‘vertical’ dimension of faith and a ‘horizontal’ dimension of love. This does not preserve the tension between prayer and political effort, reading the Bible and reading the newspaper; it puts an end to it altogether. Transcendence is not the transcendence of the risen Christ if it does not lead to solidarity with those he came to free and for whose salvation he died. Solidarity is not the solidarity of the crucified Jesus if it does not lead to the transcendence of that future into which he was raised. The religion of transcendence and the religion of solidarity are two sides of the Christian way of life. If they are separated and polarized in opposition to one another, the new life is either hindered or destroyed.
No one who prays in Christ’s name and cries out for redemption can put up with oppression. No one who fights against injustice can dispense with prayer for redemption. The more Christians intervene for the life of the hungry, the human rights of the oppressed and the fellowship of the forsaken, the deeper they will be led into continual prayer. It sounds paradoxical, but the more their actions are related to this world, and the more passionately they love life, the more strongly they will believe, if they want to remain true to the hope which Jesus brought into the world.
Prayer for the Spirit makes people watchful and sensitive. It makes them vulnerable and stimulates all the powers of the imagination to perceive the coming of God in the liberation of man and to move into accord with it. This prayer therefore leads to political watchfulness, and political watchfulness leads to prayer. The spirituality of fellowship with Christ grows up between solitude with Christ and fellowship with others. It is seldom manifested in any other way than: ‘We are always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh’ (2 Cor. 4:10).
We cannot ‘make’ a messianic way of life. It is not practice that makes perfect here; it is suffering and hope. This way of life is created by the Spirit where people, personally and collectively, discover their life and the history of their lives in the comprehensive history of Christ, and participate in the history of God’s dealings with the world. The rebirth of the individual and the fellowship then becomes the sign and foretaste of the coming rebirth of the whole creation. Fellowship with the crucified Jesus leads to the fellowship of the world’s messianic suffering. Fellowship with the risen Christ leads to the dawn of the liberty of the messianic era. In the light of the messianic history of God the life reborn in pain begins to shine—but not of its own power. Its fragments and beginnings become lived and suffered signposts of hope for others. Anyone who enquires seriously about ‘the sacrament of the Spirit’ and its signs will not pass over this sign of the lived life. In life together with the Messiah his life will itself be forged into a messianic sign.