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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Does a church in the Reformed tradition ever express its own essence and self-understanding more clearly than when, in the liturgy, with the subtlest blend of invitation and command, the minister bids the congregation: ‘Hear the Word of God!’? Here, in dramatic, personal (but corporate) encounter between the people and God's Word — delivered first as Scripture and then expounded as proclamation — the church becomes anew what it already and always is: a community of the Word. A people are summoned into being by living, creative, divine Speech, and from their own side come into being — or better, move toward their true being — through the only appropriate response to divine Speech, namely that faith which comes by hearing (Rom. 10: 17). Our concern here is not to offer a systematic account of this Reformed understanding of the church in all its major aspects, but simply to raise a few of the hermeneutical questions involved: what does it mean for a church tradition to understand itself in these predominantly verbal and auditory categories, indeed to think of the whole encounter between God and man as occurring primarily in the mode of speech and hearing?
1 cf. Keir, T. H., The Word in Worship, p. 1.Google Scholar
2 ‘Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists’ (Calvin, Institute, IV.1.ix). These ‘marks’ are standard in the Reformed (and Lutheran) confessions, though sometimes and significantly (see below) with the addition of ‘discipline’, as in the Scots Confession.
3 See Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, I/1, pp. 162ff.Google Scholar
4 On the other hand, the nature of God's being as Word does facilitate, in fact demands, a theological theory of language. Both in the Bible and subsequently, the Word of God has created its own linguistic tradition. Similarly, Martin Luther, in recovering the sovereignty and priority of God's Word in the Reformation, himself sparked off what has been called a ‘linguistic innovation’ (Sprachereignis). His attempt to give fresh utterance to the Word of God had a revolutionary and creative impact upon the German language itself. A new understanding of language, and new forms of linguistic communication, were required if the gospel word of grace was to be heard by the people. (See esp. G. Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought.) That ‘Word’ has been the absolutely dominant category of Protestant theology in the present century has much to do with the reappropriation of Luther (and hence of Paul) in the 1920s. And again it is no accident that one of the two major on-going developments from the common starting-point in early Dialectical theology (the ‘Bultmannian’ as opposed to the ‘Barthian’), has been preoccupied, rightly, with the question of language and interpretation. (Of course the Church Dogmatics can also be seen as Barth's own massive answer to the hermeneutical question!) Bultmann's pioneering work in existentialist hermeneutics has been developed by present-day disciples such as Fuchs and Ebeling to the point where theology has to have its own theory of language. It is now seen that all understanding, including theological understanding, is itself an event which happens through words. Here hermeneutics is not a formal tool of theology, but is theology itself reflecting on the process by which the Word of God, in the interplay of Scripture and preaching, again and again becomes a gospel ‘event’. See e.g. R. Bultmann, Jesus and the Word; G. Ebeling, ‘The Word of God and Hermeneutics’ in Word and Faith; ‘The Word of God and Language’ in The Nature of Faith; and Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language. For second-order discussions of this theory, see e.g. Braaten, C., History and Hermeneutics (New Directions in Theology Today, vol. II), ch. 6Google Scholar; and Robinson, J. M., ed., The New Hermeneutic (New Frontiers in Theology, vol. II).Google Scholar
5 When the Bible contrasts God's Word and man's word, it does not deny that ‘word’ is a shared, uniting property of God and man, but distinguishes the use that is made of words — by God, for truth and wholeness; by man, for falsehood and death. See Ebeling, , Word and Faith, pp. 325f.Google Scholar
6 On the notion that ‘logos’ is what makes humankind homo sapiens, whose existence has meaning, see Bonhoeffer, , Christology, p. 49Google Scholar. And for the importance of speech for personal I-Thou relations, see Farmer, H. H., The Servant of the Word, pp. 44ff.Google Scholar
7 ‘The power of words as communication is by no means restricted to information and the increase of knowledge. The power of words as an event is that they can touch and change our very life, when one man tells another, and thus shares with another, something of his own life, his willing and loving and hoping … but also his hardness and hates.’ (Ebeling, , The Nature of Faith, p. 186)Google Scholar
8 ‘Because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state, the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us.’ (Calvin, Inst. I. 17.xiii);cf. Inst. I.5.i; II.11.iii, etc., and see J. McLelland, The Visible Words of God, and R. S. Wallace, Calvin's Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament.
9 Calvin, Inst. IV.8.vii.
10 The unity of the two testaments as one Word of God in single testimony to Christ, was of fundamental importance to the Reformers, especially for their understanding of the sacraments. See Calvin, Inst. II.10 and IV.14.xx–xxvi. Luther, too, saw Christ as ‘wrapped in the swaddling clothes of the Old Testament Scriptures’. See Watson, P., Let God be God, pp. 149ff.Google Scholar
11 For example, Exod. 4:10ff; Isa. 6:5ff; Jer. 1:6ff; 1 Cor. 2:1ff.
12 On the vexed question of Calvin's view of Scripture (see esp. Inst. 1.6–8), which almost certainly was not one of verbal inerrancy (despite Inst. IV.8.ix), see McNeill, J. T., ‘The Significance of the Word of God for Calvin’, Church History XXVIII (1959)Google Scholar. The issue is discussed in J. K. S. Reid, The Authority of Scripture, E. A. Dowey, The Knowledge of Cod in Calvin's Theology, and R. S. Wallace, Calvin's Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament, ch. 8. Luther was quite emphatic that all authority of Scripture lay solely in its obedient witness to Christ himself. ‘All genuine holy books agree, that they all together preach and urge Christ. What does not teach Christ is not apostolic even if St. Peter or St. Paul teach it. Again, what preaches Christ would be apostolic even if Judas, Annas, Pilate or Herod were to do it’ (Preface to the Epistle of James).
13 Calvin, Inst. I.7.V.
14 The exposition of preaching in these terms in D. Bonhoeffer's Cliristology is brilliant, though preserved in a tantalisingly brief and gnomic form. See esp. pp. 49ff.
15 The humility and self-criticism with which alone the church may identify its preaching with the Word of God is brought out well in the Second Helvetic Confession (ch. 1): ‘When this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is preached … and that the Word itself is to be regarded, not the minister who preaches, for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.’ For the Reformed theology of preaching in general, see e.g. Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man; I. Pitt-Watson, A Kind of Folly; K. Miskotte, When the Gods are Silent.
16 For the whole notion, outlined above, of the three-fold Word of God, revealed, written and preached, see Barth, CD., I/1, pp. 88–124. Barth systematises Reformed intuitions here into a doctrine of the three-fold unity of the Word, whose sole analogy is that of the triunity of God. How far can this be taken? Without Barth's own precision and sensitivity it could obscure the essentially derivative and testamentary relationship of written and proclaimed revelation to Christ himself.
17 ‘I and any man that speaketh Christ's Word may freely boast that his mouth is Christ's mouth. My word is not mine but Christ's Word and so my mouth must also be His whose Word it speaketh’ (Luther, W.A. VIII, 263, 13).
18 See esp. Confessions, Christian Doctrine, and On the Spirit and the Letter, for Augustine's theory of language. See also Ebeling, Luther, ch. 6, and R. Prenter, Spiritus Creator, ch. 2, an excellent analysis of Luther's understanding of the ‘sacramental word’.
19 See Barth, C.D. I/1, pp. 132ff. Note the repeated reminder in the Second Helvetic Confession, ch. 1, that inward illumination does not eliminate the need for outward words or external preaching.
20 Cf. Prenter, , Spiritus Creator, pp. 123ff.Google Scholar, and Wallace, Word and Sacrament, ch.7.
21 Augustine, , St. John's Gospel, LXXX, 3.Google Scholar
22 Calvin, Inst. IV.14.vi, and cf. the whole chapter IV.14. See too McLelland, Visible Words, e.g. pp. 77, 129, 138. As McLelland emphasises, for Peter Martyr ‘the visibility of the Word and the sacraments is analogical to the visible accommodation of the Word in Incarnation’ (pp. 130f.).
23 Thus a Lutheran can say of baptism that ‘listening to the Word is the only possible way of holding fast to what has happened. Faith hangs on the Word and the water gives faith a foothold, saying, “The Word's promises apply to you, for you are baptised, touched with water, named by name;”’ and of the eucharist, that here ‘the real presence is heard’ (Wingren, G., The Living Word, pp. 154ff)Google Scholar; cf. his Gospel and Church, ch. 1, and, an important work on Luther's doctrine of the church and sacraments, Pelikan, J., Spirit Versus Structure, pp. 119ff.Google Scholar
24 ‘To ask whether the church is more in need of the one or of the other is somewhat like asking whether a man's life or his body is more important for his well-being as a physiological organism.’ (MacGregor, G., Corpus Christi. The Nature of the Church according to the Reformed Tradition, pp. 176f.)Google Scholar
25 See the Second Helvetic Confession, and Calvin's Geneva Confession (1541), respectively.
26 Inst. IV.4.iii–iv. cf. Wallace, Word and Sacrament, ch. 11. Luther's understanding of the ‘sacramental word’ and the relation between preaching and the sacraments is similar. See Watson, op. cit. pp. 160ff. Cf. too the Scots Confession, for which the second mark of the church is ‘the right administration of the sacraments, with which must be associated the Word and promise of God to seal and confirm these in our hearts’ (ch. 18).
27 Corpus Christi, p. 53.
28 The fact that the Word is essentially an incorporating, community-creating Word is a central thesis here. While focussing on the concept of Word we are concerned to deny it is an exclusive ecclesiological concept over against those, say, which begin with the corporateness of the church, such as the Body of Christ. Certainly, ‘word’ just because of its trinitarian and Christological ground has a definite conceptual priority for Reformed ecclesiology. But the truth of Christ the Word is precisely that he is corporal and corporate, so that the church can only exist and understand itself as the community which dwells in him as his Body. When it is true to itself Reformed theology of the Word is an antidote against, not an invitation to, individualism.
29 ‘We most surely believe that God preserved, instructed, multiplied, honoured, adorned and called from death to life his Kirk in all ages since Adam until the coming of Christ Jesus in the flesh’ (Scots Confession, ch. 5).
30 See Calvin, Inst. II.9–11; IV.14. Cf. Scots Confession chs. 5 and 21; Westminster Confession, ch. 7. See also T. F. Torrance, ‘The Foundation of the Church’ in Theology in Reconstruction. There are of course important discontinuities between the old Israel and the new, not least, since Christ is both the fulfiller and the end of the law and cult, the abrogation of OT priesthood. This, though a gracious provision of God's covenant, permitting a representative of the people to approach his holiness, was also a function of the incompleteness of Israel as a real community. Though they were a people, a laos, only the priestly few could approach Yahweh. As the Epistle to Hebrews argues, this inadequacy and incompleteness is removed in the church, where Christ has broken every barrier between God and the people. The one priest has made all the people priests in him. The church is a universal priesthood, but only because it is firstly a laos, a ‘laity’, a whole people without division or rank. This fact is obscured by a persistent history of Protestant sacerdotalism.
31 For a full discussion of the meaning of ecclesia, with particular reference to Israel, in the context of a Reformed doctrine of the church, see MacGregor, Corpus Christi, ch. 6.
32 See esp. the Augsburg Confession, ch. 7.
33 Inst. III.1.i.
34 ibid. IV.1.iv. cf. MacGregor, chs. 9 and 10.
35 Careful Protestant exegesis has always recognised (e.g. in 1 Cor. 12) that the church does not qualify as the Body of Christ by being a corporate sociological entity, but is a community because it is brought into essential union with Christ who is corporal, a body with many members. See Barth, C.D. IV/1, pp. 663ff. and IV/3, pp. 856ff., and Robinson, J. A. T., The Body, esp. pp. 59ff.Google Scholar cf. Bonhoeffer, Communio Sanctorum.
36 For this, once neglected but now recovered, notion of Christ as the one who worships for us, in the Reformed theology of worship, see J. B. Torrance, ‘The Place of Jesus Christ in Worship’ in R. Anderson, ed., Theological Foundations for Ministry; J. J. von Allmen, Worship, its Theology and Practice; and T. F. Torrance, ‘The Word of God and the Response of Man’ in God and Rationality, ch. 6.
37 This Protestant dialectic in ecclesiology is brought out very subtly in an extended section on ‘The Being of the Church’ in Barth, C.D. IV/1, pp. 650–725.
38 C.D. IV/3, pp. 762ff.; cf. IV/1, pp. 661ff; IV/2, pp. 620ff.
39 See Barth, C.D. IV/3, pp. 742ff. This contemporary theme of the ecclesiology of the cross is movingly expounded from a Reformed standpoint by Moltmann, J. in The Church in the Power of the Spirit (esp. pp. 93ff.)Google Scholar and The Open Church.
40 And of course our precariousness as a church is compounded by a triumphalist history, sadly still in the making, in which we refuse to live in the spirit of precariousness and match a humble theology with humble praxis.
41 Küng, , The Church, p. 267Google Scholar. See the article by Avis, P. on ‘“The True Church” in Reformed Theology’ in Scottish Journal of Theology, XXX (1977)Google Scholar, for a full discussion of these ‘signs’.
42 Newbigin, L., The Household of God, p. 50.Google Scholar
43 See Avis, op. cit.
44 ‘And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites and ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike’ (Augsburg Confession 7, 8). cf. Calvin, Inst. IV.1.vii–xiii.
45 Barth, , C.D. IV/2, p. 616Google Scholar. cf. Torrance, T. F., ‘What is the Reformed Church?’ in Conflict and Agreement, vol. 1.Google Scholar
46 On the crucial questions of continuity, succession, and catholicity for Luther, see Pelikan, Spirit Versus Structure, esp. chs. 1 and 6.
47 See e.g. Barth, , C.D., IV/1, pp. 691ff.Google Scholar, and IV/2, pp. 672ff.; also Theology and Church, pp. 272ff.
48 C.D. IV/3, p. 749.