I am a “low church” evangelical. In other words, my ecclesial heritage has its chops in the congregational form of church government. I am also Free church, so not part of a state endorsed church (like we get with the Church of Scotland, Church of England et al.). But this doesn’t mean us “low-churchers” can’t struggle with the same type of inherent inward turn and focus that high churches have historically been characterized by. That is, whether the theory of the church I follow is grounded by looking to its clergy as its formative esse, or whether I look at the particular church programs (low church) that often typify the very existence of the local American evangelical church, what is similar to both is that they find their relative identity as the Church by looking, in abstract ways, into the ‘heart’ of their own self-asserted referent for what it actually means to be the Church. It isn’t the Church for the world, for the other, but the Church for itself, collapsed in on itself as an end in itself.

My thoughts above were inspired by Tom Greggs and the work he is currently doing in his ongoing trilogy on the Church. Here we pick up with him mid-thought on the problems the churches have, as the Church, when they think themselves in abstraction from her genuine, and ec-static, center in Jesus Christ.

When churches speak of their mission, it is all too often code for self-preservation and survival. The desire is not to go to the world with the good news that it is the world reconciled by God, but to expect those outwith the bounds of the church to come to the church so that—in this or that institutional form or congregation or denomination—it may continue. What has resulted has been an ecclesial “hyperactivity of panic.” The church has grasped after every possible means, manner, policy, idea, and mode of survival. It has resorted to change, to “make itself relevant,” and to employ management and business modes—all of which may instrumentally be good, but are problematically employed for the sake of the church’s own survival. The problem is that the desire to survive, and to focus on organization, is often indicative of the instrumentalization of the world for the sake of the church (which sees the world and its members as the means of its own continuation) and of a non-episcopally oriented focus on the polity of the church which sees the reality of the church’s being as resting on this or that structure, program, or organization. Usually, the emphasis is not continuity of service for the world but continuity of this or that church. The focus, once more, is inwards: the church exists towards and for the sake of itself and the salvation of its own members, and not towards and for the sake of the world and its redemption.[1]

Greggs continues with an antidote for the above problem:

This inwards-orientated self-understanding of the church must be reversed. The essential hierarchy should exist but in its inverse form: the church must understand itself as existing for the sake of the world; the ministers of the church as existing for the sake of the church for the sake of the world; and the overseers of the church as existing for the sake of the ministers who exist for the sake of the church who exist for the sake of the world. The Protestant family of churches would do well to learn from Hans Küng:

The phrase “priesthood of all believers” can all too easily remain a negative slogan—even and indeed precisely in Protestant theology—in order to reject the idea of priestly representation and mediation. This may well be a justified reaction to centuries of clericalism in theology and in practice. But it is essential that the positive significance of the priesthood of all believers is realized; the positive authorization and obligation must be recognized and practiced. . . . Hence we must ask what the concrete content of this priesthood of all believers really is.

What is required of us is to explain more fully that “concrete content” of the church’s priesthood. This is not only the priesthood which accounts for the internal ordering and dynamics of the church, but also the priesthood which expresses something of the “positive authorization” to engage in representation and mediation corporately for the world. The church has a priesthood, but this comes about only and strictly as the church corporately participates in the forms of life of its one and unique high priest, Jesus Christ, whose body the church becomes through the Holy Spirit, who forms the church into Christ’s body as the church participates intensively in the same Spirit-filled humanity Christ has.[2]

Greggs traces the inward turned notion of the Church back to Augustine’s notion of predestination, particularly as that is fleshed out in the City of God. Suffice it to say, there is a theo-logic that stands behind the inward turned notion of the Church, and its reality, in the end is what TF Torrance identifies as the dualism of Augustine’s Latin Heresy. That is to think of the people of God, and the people of not-God, in abstraction from God’s life for the World in Jesus Christ. The consequence of not thinking the life of God’s people from God’s life for the world in His second person in Jesus Christ, is to think God’s people in abstract ways leaving room for a vacuum to be filled by some after-thought provided for by the witty among us. In other words, when there are a people of God who thinks their identity into, rather than from the identity of God for the world in Christ, this type of abstract people of God will necessarily elevate their own notions, and construct their own superstructures as the bases for thinking a God-church relation. But it is precisely because of this abstract way of thinking, that is abstract from understanding the Church’s existence as grounded in and by the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, that said people of God are ‘thrust back upon themselves’ to think out what in fact it means to be the people of God; what it means to be the Church.

Hence, by adopting an abstract frame for thinking a God-church relation, such people of God will necessarily turn inward, instead of thinking their life extra nos (outside of us) in God’s life for us in Jesus Christ. To turn inward is the organic consequence of thinking churchly identity from a contractual frame vis-à-vis a relation to God, rather than from a relational-filial frame that God unilaterally provides for us in Himself, in Jesus Christ. In other words, when the people of God think their own identity from a decree of God wherein God has already decided that this or that individual will either be elect or reprobate, and this apart from a grounding in the life of God, it is up to the people of God to think out how it is that the Church in fact comes to have a solid, “assured,” ground in the life of God. The problem, though, that this type of people of God is confronted with is that they can never get back behind the decree of God’s absolute predestination, since the decree doesn’t come in the face of Christ, but instead is simply made in abstraction from God’s life for the world. It is only when people understand that the Church’s existence has come to be purely because before the foundation of the world, God freely chose, in the eternal Son, to assume our humanity, as His, and then give us His resurrected humanity as ours. As Greggs notes, this is how the Church becomes the Church; not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of the living and triune God. The Church in the relational-filial frame is not something we have abstractly constructed as our possession; no, properly understood, the relational-filial frame for the Church recognizes that the Church is simply an event that is given afresh anew to us in and from the vicarious humanity of Christ as we are “unioned” into Him by the Holy Spirit, as He hovers over our dark lives, just as He hovered over Mary’s womb, bringing life where there was none before. Thinking the Church this way, theologically, is the only way out of living the ‘churched’ life as if it is something we are sustaining, rather than her Head, her true sustainer, Jesus Christ. Kyrie eleison

[1] Tom Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church: Volume One (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2019), 128.

[2] Ibid., 128-29.