Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T00:15:28.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Communion as propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the missionary witness of the ‘Church as Public’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2009

John G. Flett
John G. Flett*
Affiliation:
Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary, 23 Saemmal-gil, Gwangjin-Gu, 143-756 [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , November 2009 , pp. 457 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Flannery, Austin, Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, rev. edn, vol. 1 (Northport, NY: Costello, 1996), p. 814Google Scholar.

2 As one example among many, Miroslav Volf's extended examination of the church's trinitarian nature in his acclaimed, After our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), fails to include any reference to the missionary act, or to anything external to the church.

3 Jenson, Robert W., Systematic Theology: The Triune God, 2 vols (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. 1, p. 5Google Scholar.

4 Ibid.

5 Jenson, Robert W., Systematic Theology: The Works of God, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University, 1999), vol. 2, p. 168Google Scholar.

6 Ibid. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 5.

7 Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 187.

8 Hütter, Reinhard, ‘The Church as “Public”: Dogma, Practices and the Holy Spirit’, Pro Ecclesia 3/3 (1994), p. 336Google Scholar.

9 Hoekendijk, J. C., ‘The Call to Evangelism’, International Review of Missions 39 (1950), p. 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Hoekendijk, J. C., ‘The Church in Missionary Thinking’, International Review of Missions 41 (1952), p. 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”’, p. 339. See further, ‘the Protestant church and theology have been facing a dilemma at least since the elimination of the territorial episcopate’. Hütter, Reinhard, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, trans. Scott, D. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 9Google Scholar.

12 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 11.

13 Ibid.

14 Hütter, Reinhard, ‘Ecclesial Ethics, the Church's Vocation, and Paraclesis’, Pro Ecclesia 2/4 (1993), p. 448Google Scholar.

15 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 28; Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”’, p. 336.

16 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, pp. 3, 4.

17 Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”‘, p. 339.

18 Ibid., p. 335.

19 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 28; Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”’, p. 336.

20 Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”’, p. 336.

21 Ibid., pp. 336–7.

22 Hütter, Reinhard, ‘Karl Barth's “Dialectical Catholicity”: Sic et Non’, Modern Theology 16/2 (2000), p. 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Hütter, ‘Ecclesial Ethics’, p. 440.

24 Ibid., p. 441, n. 23.

25 Ibid., p. 440.

26 Ibid.

27 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 117.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 126.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., p. 117.

34 Ibid., p. 125.

35 Ibid., p. 27.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 125.

38 Ibid., p. 128.

39 Ibid., p. 125.

40 Ibid., p. 119.

41 Ibid., p. 125.

42 Ibid., p. 126.

43 Hütter, ‘Barth's “Dialectical Catholicity”’, p. 149.

44 Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”’, p. 349.

45 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 125.

46 The seven practices are: (1) proclamation of the word, which includes believing, confession and deed; (2) baptism; (3) the Lord's Supper; (4) the office of the keys as church discipline; (5) ordination and church offices; (6) prayer, doxology and catechesis; (7) discipleship in suffering, or cross bearing. He adds a further ‘outer’ circle of seven practices which expand upon this ‘inner’ circle, all of which are ‘necessary to maintain the church as the public of God's own oikonomia’. Hütter, ‘Church as “Public”’, pp. 354–6. It is worth noting not simply the absence of mission as an act constitutive of the church as public, but that all the practices are internally focused – the church is both the subject and object of each of these practices.

47 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 124.

48 Ibid., p. 119.

49 Hütter, ‘Ecclesial Ethics’, p. 442.

50 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 27.

51 Ibid., p. 171.

52 Ibid., p. 126.

53 Hoekendijk was born in 1912 to missionary parents and raised in Indonesia. He undertook theological studies at the State University of Utrecht, 1936–41, and was ordained as a missionary in 1940. His deployment to the mission field was interrupted by the war, and when he finally made it to Indonesia ill health forced him to return home inside a year. He served 1946–7 as the study director of the ecumenical centre at Bossy, 1947–9 as secretary of the Netherlands Missionary Council, and 1949–52 as secretary of the Department of Evangelism of the World Council of Churches. His 1948 doctoral dissertation focused on the relationship between church and Volk in German missiology. A later revised version, including a significant appendix titled, ‘Anfang: zur Frage einer missionarischen Existenz’, was published as Kirche und Volk in der deutschen Missionswissenschaft (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1967). This and a collection of essays, titled The Church Inside Out (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1966), constitute his only major academic texts. In 1953, Hoekendijk took an academic post in practical, apostolate and biblical theology at the State University of Utrecht, and was promoted in 1959 to state professor in church history of the twentieth century. From 1965 to his death in 1975, he held the chair of World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary, New York. During this period he was involved in the WCC study on ‘The Missionary Structure of the Congregation’, 1962–6, and the final document, The Church for Others, and the Church for the World: A Quest for Structures for Missionary Congregations (Geneva: WCC, 1967), draws on his key insights. In 1970, Hoekendijk married his second wife, one of his former students – Letty M. Russell. Russell attributes her own approach to Hoekendijk's schema, stating that ‘I myself have always recognized the links in my feminist liberation theology to the theological understanding of God's Mission. . . . I think of God's Mission or action in the world as equivalent to God's liberating action or liberation. I tend to avoid the use of the word “mission” because it has been so frequently used to mean proselytism or drawing people into membership, and propaganda that convinces persons “to become as we are” that it is likely to be misunderstood.’ Russell, Letty M., Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp. 89–90Google Scholar. For further biographical information, see: Hoedemaker, L. A., ‘Hoekendijk's American Years’, Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 1/2 (1977), pp. 7–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoedemaker, L. A., ‘The Legacy of J. C. Hoekendijk’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19/4 (1995), pp. 166–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Hartenstein, Karl, ‘Was haben wir von Tambaram zu lernen?’, in Schlunk, Martin (ed.), Das Wunder der Kirche unter den Völkern der Erde: Bericht über Weltmissions-Konferenz in Tambaram (Stuttgart: Evangelischer Missionsverlag, 1939), p. 194Google Scholar.

55 Hoekendijk, ‘Call to Evangelism’, p. 163.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., p. 164.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid. See here, for example, against the notion that the Reformers had no missionary concern, Hendrix's argument for a deliberate mission method of Christianisation. Hendrix, Scott H., Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2004)Google Scholar.

60 Hoekendijk, ‘Call to Evangelism’, p. 164.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., pp. 164–5.

64 Ibid., p. 164.

65 Ibid., p. 165.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., p. 164.

68 Ibid., p. 170.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., p. 164.

71 Walls, Andrew F., ‘The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture’, in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), p. 7Google Scholar. This raises the question of cultural continuity and discontinuity, from the perspective both of the form of the gospel brought by the missionary, and the requirements of conversion demanded by the Spirit of the hearers of the gospel. The complexities of this issue extend well beyond the space available here, but for a basic introduction see Newbigin, J. E. Lesslie, The Finality of Christ (London: SCM Press, 1969), pp. 107–15Google Scholar.

72 Kähler, Martin, Schriften zu Christologie und Mission: Gesamtausgabe der Schriften zur Mission, ed. Frohnes, Heinzgünter (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1971), p. 115Google Scholar.

73 Hoekendijk, ‘Call to Evangelism’, p. 166.

74 Healy, Nicholas M., ‘Communion Ecclesiology: A Cautionary Note’, Pro Ecclesia 4/4 (1995), p. 446Google Scholar.

75 Kähler, Schriften zu Christologie, p. 114.

76 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 126.

77 Part of the problem with the absence of mission from these discussions is that the question of what occurs in cross-cultural situations never materially informs the debate. Hütter, as far as I know, and despite the apostolic intent underlying the language of ‘public’, never addresses the issue of conversion and the questions this raises when thinking of the church as a culture. However, Lindbeck, upon whom Hütter draws, states that ‘it is above all by the character of its communal life that [the church] witnesses, that it proclaims the gospel and serves the world’. Lindbeck, George A., ‘The Church’, in Wainwright, G. (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1988), p. 193Google Scholar. The missionary nature of the church belongs to her existence because it is by her mundane operation, and the culture which results, that she proclaims the truth of the kingdom of God to the world. Lindbeck continues that, with the church understood as a culture, conversion would necessarily consist of leaving one culture and accepting another. This reflects the type of narrowness ‘which became dominant throughout all of Christendom in the post-Constantinian era’. Lindbeck, George A., ‘The Sectarian Future of the Church’, in Whelan, J. P. (ed.), The God Experience (New York: Newman, 1971), p. 231Google Scholar. It is proselytism, and so propagandistic and imperialistic. Thus, he distances mission from evangelistic activity: ‘“dialogue” rather than “proselytism” [is] the appropriate form of witness’. Lindbeck, ‘Sectarian Future’, p. 230. However, if one's conception of the church leads to a position whereby mission can only be proselytism, then questions must be asked concerning this conception of the church. Andrew Walls notes, in reference to the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, that pagan Christians were not forced to accept the cultural and religious practices which identified the Jewish community. They were not forced to be proselytes, but were to be converts. And, following Paul's rejection of the ‘Judaizers’ in Galatia, those who preached a message which demanded the acceptance of cultural elements were preaching a different gospel from that of Christ. See Walls, Andrew F., ‘Old Athens and New Jerusalem: Some Signposts for Christian Scholarship in the Early History of Mission Studies’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 21/4 (1997), pp. 146–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walls, Andrew F., ‘Converts or Proselytes? The Crisis over Conversion in the Early Church’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28/1 (2004), pp. 2–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As with Hütter, it appears counter-intuitive to establish a parallel between Lindbeck and the circumcision school since this type of cultural division is precisely what he seeks to avoid. Yet, he acknowledges that the church's missionary mode is that of creating a culture, that joining the church means joining a different culture (as evident by his high catechetical standards) and that evangelistic mission amounts to proselytism. It is, in other words, only by reducing evangelistic missionary activity to the mundane operation of a culture that he escapes the basic charge of propaganda.

78 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 126.

79 Hütter, ‘Ecclesial Ethics’, p. 442.

80 Thanks are due to Sarah Wilson and Keith Johnson for comments on an earlier draft of this work.