ESSAY: The Church as God’s New Language

Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed is in the middle of a provocative discussion on the fuller message of the “Kingdom Gospel” found by reading the Bible as Story over and against the more popular, privatized gospel boiled down to a few abstract propositional truths pertaining to individual salvation.  McKnight pushes us to a larger, more corporate view of the gospel as the creation of a new community of redeemed peoples united in Christ and sent out into the world to be the corporate manifestation of the Kingdom of God on earth.  The discussion reminded me of an essay I wrote years ago on the “The Church as God’s New Language” based on the ecclesiological writings of Stanley Hauerwas.  If you have a moment, grab a cold drink or cup of coffee and settle in for a longer, more scholarly essay from the Daily Illumination seminary archives.

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The Church as God’s New Language

Stanley Hauerwas and an Ecclesiology of Embodied Story

by Jeremy Berg (2005)

“Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you.”

(2 Corinthians 3:2 MSG)

*NOTE: Unfortunately footnotes did not transfer to this blog post.  Most unreferenced block quotes are from Hauerwas’ various works. My apologies.

 

Introduction & Thesis

Stanley Hauerwas, reflecting on the birth of the church and its purpose, claims that “at Pentecost God created a new language, but it was a language that is more than words.”  It is a community shaped and formed by the memory of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

    The following essay explores this image of the church as God’s new language in and for the world. I will explore aspects of Hauerwas’ ecclesiology more fully and examine them in light of the ecclesial teachings of the apostles and early church fathers.  I will argue that the church gradually shifted away from embodying God’s message to the world to a community who instead possessed a particular message for the world.  In other words, the church as an embodied sacrament began with an incarnational model and as soon became an institution administering the sacraments with a more confessional and proclamational model.  

Issues relevant to ministry and spiritual formation that arise in this study include (1) the question of what type of evangelistic approach should the church have in today’s post-Christian world and (2) the issue of whether Christian ethics should focus more on right acting (behavior) or right being (character).   Let us begin by exploring in Hauerwas’ ecclesiological contributions.