You might get the impression that I think the Christian church is a highly political institution that ought to engage in activist politics in order to ensure its freedom to move and breathe about in the world. But I don’t think this. As I noted in my response to pastor Dave Rolph, I do think that based on the analogy of the incarnation the church has space to be politically active; and that the Gospel itself, in its highly disruptive reality (as God invading the world in Christ, and making known that His Son, Jesus is King) has inescapable political implications for both the church and the world. But I think this all from the fact that the church is, as the metaphor states, the body of Christ. As such, the church, and this also has serious political implications, along with the fact that Jesus is King, is an organism that derives its freedom neither from the state nor any sort of ideology. The church is a slave to righteousness, and Christ is God’s righteousness for us; therefore the church is a slave to Christ. It is in this righteousness wherein Christian freedom is actualized and rooted for the church. This implies that the church’s ear is slavishly bounded to hear Christ’s voice alone. The church is not subject to magistrates, governors, mayors, kings, queens, presidents, or gestapos. The church finds its freedom from Christ alone, because there is only one ontology of freedom around; and that is God’s Triune Life for us in Jesus Christ. The church cannot afford to capitulate, then, to any sort of worldly voices, whether, again, those be given expression in various ideologies, or as those might be enfleshed in respective personas we are confronted by in this world system.

Wolf Krötke helps develop these points further. Remember Krötke is the GDR (German Democratic Republic) theologian who worked in a very toxic and dangerous (he was jailed) political situation in his East German context. He writes:

So the church, by virtue of its commission, is “free with respect to the church’s situation in the former GDR, it is with genuine candor that Krötke remarks:

perhaps today especially, th[e] emphasis upon the ‘independent’ character of the church will have to be taken seriously. A church which is dependent upon political power and the presuppositions of worldviews, cannot fulfill its task in the world. It then loses its freedom to listen to Jesus Christ alone. With this, it also loses its freedom to proclaim him unreservedly in both his word of assurance and of claim.

An apostolic church knows that any form of political or ideological Gleichschaltung is impossible, as it “may not allow itself to be dictated to or told by anyone in the world how it must be the church. Its binding to Jesus Christ alone decides this.” And the freedom of this binding always outstrips whatever freedom the church might attain from elsewhere. He writes, “we also do not receive our freedom as the church, as a community, from the world or from society. Our freedom in the task of Jesus Christ already anticipates every possible freedom with which we can be blessed by the society.” The church’s context cannot furnish it with any genuine freedom which it has not already received from the hand of the One who commissions it to its task of witness. Indeed, to the extent that the church actually manifests its “freedom from ideology,” it does so solely as the result of having actually taken up the freedom its commission affords, i.e., to its “freedom for service.”[1]

As perceptive readers we can feel the presence of Barth’s anti-natural theology informing Krötke’s conception of a church who has ‘freedom from ideology.’ In Krötke’s understanding the church’s freedom is clearly derived by her raison d’etre, her contingency upon Jesus Christ as her flesh and blood reality.

I find much encouragement here. We live in a time where this couldn’t be more prescient. If there was ever a time when the church needs to understand her ontology, or her being from God in Christ, it is now. We are being pressed from every side with winds of information that would seek to blow the church to the right, the left, or into the moderate middle. But the church does not gain its orientation by the swells of popular opinion, or critical theories; the church’s sails are driven by the Holy Ruach of God, as He presses us into the rudder of Christ’s life who directs us to the sure shores of God’s ineffable and triune life as that is the very beachhead wherein the church finds safe haven and direction. As we bear witness to God’s life from the freedom we have in Christ, the church can point the tempest of this chaotic and rudderless world order to an extra reality that is beyond it, but for it. The church ought to use her freedom in Christ to her advantage. Let’s not fear man, but God; and in this fear, let the freedom of God reign in our lives as we bear witness to each other in Christian fellowship, and bear witness to the world that the Lord Jesus is King.

[1] Philip G. Ziegler, Doing Theology When God Is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 183.