I contend that a properly Protestant way for understanding the church is to think it in a Christ concentration. This means that the church’s esse (or being) is not grounded in herself, or within a liturgy of various practices accrued over the centuries. Instead the church, I contend, can only be properly understood within and from the object and subject of God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. It is within this space, of His gracious election of humanity pro nobis, that the church finds location (and locution), as God freely mediates Himself to us, that we might freely be mediated to Him through the priestly and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; as both the Godward to human/humanward to God movement kiss in the hypostatic union and singular person of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. If the church finds its being there, rather than in the accidents of history (providentially caused, as my critics would assert) as those who have been given concretion in the historical developments of ecclesial history, then the church can no longer claim to be God’s means of grace for salvation. Once the church is identified as the God ordained location wherein salvific grace is mediated alone, the church takes on the attributes that belong to Christ alone; the church takes on an authoritative role wherein bruised reeds must find refuge, and the salvation that can alone relieve them of their downtrodden souls. But what if the church herself needs all of these divinely given resources, ever afresh and anew? What if the church isn’t supposed to bear the burden that only God alone in Jesus Christ could bear for the sins of the world? What if the church isn’t supposed to speak in absolute ways for God; what if the church is only supposed to bear witness to this otherworldy reality that became thisworldly through the invasion of God’s life into our humanity in Christ? What if all the things that the church, especially high-churches often assign to itself, are only attributions that belong to Christ alone; what if He alone is ‘the mediator between God and humanity?’ What if the church isn’t the means of God’s grace, and instead just a witness of how all of this has already happened in the humanity of Christ for us?

In line with the sentiment I have been sketching above, East German theologian, Wolf Krötke writes something in the same vein. He emphasizes how the church can only be the church by being a listening church. For Krötke, as he writes in referral to the Barmen Declaration, the church isn’t a possessor of God, but a recipient of God’s voice as He speaks to her afresh through the vox Christi (voice of Christ). Krötke’s notion is very closely aligned with Barth’s understanding of the church. One significant point, in regard to this understanding of the church, is that it emphasizes that the church’s locus ought to be understood solely in the actualized reality of incarnation and atonement as that has always already been in concurrence in God’s choice to be for us in Christ. In other words, Krötke, I believe, is intent on making sure that people in the church understand that there is no room wherein the Christian can or should make the inward turn back to an abstract subject, such that the church returns to the natural ‘idol factory’ that God in Christ came to save her from. If we remain in the posture of a ‘listening church,’ we will always be looking away from ourselves, and in doxological mode, be looking to the voice of the church as it is allowed to confront and contravene us afresh and anew. In this way the church will avoid a stultifying stasis of always needing to re-invent herself, per the pressures of the respective cultures she finds herself within. And instead she will be able to live in an anticipatory mode wherein the apocalyptic life of God, a life beyond but, by grace, freely within her by the Spirit, is finding her ‘times of refreshment’ from a place that is not self-generated but Christ-generated. Philip Ziegler writes of Krötke’s ecclesiological understanding thusly:

Because “successful listening” will always occur as a “breach in our own incapacity to listen,” the church’s hearing the Word of God’s free grace is only possible as a “community of the Holy Spirit.” This orientation toward renewed listening is revolutionary, giving the church an essentially open and forward looking posture. Since the Word of God’s free grace cannot be understood as anything other than “a Word that the Holy Spirit makes living for us,” Krötke contends, “the community lives in the vivid expectation of being surpassed by all those who listen afresh to Jesus Christ.” the church’s speaking to others aims not merely to allow them “to participate in the community’s own listening,” but to see “the community surpassed in listening by them.”

The Spirit thus acts to bring about an appropriate and primary passivity in the community, for the church is first and foremost in receipt of God’s address and activity. As Krötke would have it, “the spiritual character of the community,” and so its basic reality, “consists in just such listening.” In opposition to those who would read in Barmen the elevation of Jesus Christ “into the principle of a religious Weltanschauung, Krötke asserts that far from being “a principle administered by some,” Christ is “the life that comes to us and addresses us” such that “one cannot merely have listened to him once. One can only ever listen to him anew.” A church not oriented toward listening for the Word of Christ in the witness of scripture would somehow have “left what God is doing behind” and would fail to hold God’s activity “continually before and over against itself.” It would be a church whose profile was no longer decisively determined by the free grace of God made effective by the Spirit, a church chasing an idealized image of itself rather than following the living God who goes before it.[1]

For Krötke, according to Ziegler, and for Barth, insofar that Krötke riffs Barth, the church ought to have a decidedly eschatological character to her. She ought to be a church that understands that she is just as much of a sinner as the world who is constantly in need of the evangel of God. She ought to be in recognition that her only hope for real ‘churchly’ existence comes from her daily reception of God’s voice for her in Jesus Christ. If she sees herself this way, she will not see herself in institutional terms, but in the terms she ought to: as simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner)—which are personal terms. And in this seeing, by her listening, made effective by the Holy Spirit, the church, as she participates in and from Christ’s life, will find a correspondence with the work of God, and the finished work of Christ, as that life becomes hers in afresh and anew iterations. In this the church can rightly bear witness to the world that she is not her own, that she has ‘been bought with a price; with the blood of Jesus Christ.’

It is in this witness that the world can come to see another world, not of their making, that they are being invited into along with the rest of the redeemed sinners who inhabit the churches. But this is the point: the church, in this way, will not attempt to own possessions that alone belong to God; the church will only bear witness to that reality insofar as she hears the life giving voice of God breathe new life into her every moment of every day. If this is the way of the church’s being she will cease attempting to pro-longate the incarnation, and instead recognize that her being as a communio sanctorum (communion of the saints), is gifted to her moment by moment by the unceasing and ever active mediation of God’s life for the world, for the church in particular, in Jesus Christ. In this way the church will no longer understand itself as a possessor of God, but as ones possessed by God; and in this way ‘he who the Son sets free will be free indeed,’ because this person, this community (those who populate the churches) will not feel compelled to bear a burden that only God Himself could bear for the world in His freely elected humanity in Jesus Christ.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 172.