David Congdon on Salvation and the Church
Chapter 5 of The God Who Saves
I’m reading David Congdon’s new book The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch and writing about it as I go. Today I look at the fifth chapter, in which Congdon challenges what he calls the Cyprian axiom, that “outside of the church there is no salvation” (160). Instead, Congdon argues, “outside of salvation there is no church” (189). That is, he recommends that we not take for granted what it is that we mean by “the church” but instead define the church in terms of what we mean by salvation.
Congdon begins by noting that the Protestant reformers rejected the idea that the church mediates salvation. Salvation depends, they argued, upon individual faith rather than the church’s sacraments. Even so, the reformers left the traditional notion of the church largely unchanged. Congdon wants to reinterpret the church in light of his own account of salvation. This is consistent with his own soteriocentric approach to theology.
Congdon observes that twentieth-century theology gave pride of place to the church in its theology. He argues that this “ecclesiocentrism” or “ecclesiasticization” is a mistake. It represents an ancient Christian error. That is, after the apostolic generation, “the abandonment of the eschatological consciousness of the apostles and the corresponding conflation of Christ with the church that constituted the true fall of Christianity” (166). When Christ did not return as expected, the “defining mark of the church shifted from the imminent expectation of Christ’s coming to the sacramental expectation of the priest’s consecrating action” (167). That is, Christianity replaced its expectation of Christ’s soon return with an expectation of grace bestowed via sacraments administered by church leaders.
Furthermore, “In order to articulate this new self-understanding, early Christian leaders turned to the one paradigm of an alternative culture they all knew best: the people of Israel” (168). Israel became the model for the church, and the mission of the church changed from an outward mission of spreading the Good News to the nations to an inward mission, that of bringing the nations into the church. This was a loss. “The nations are sanctified as the nations,” Congdon writes, “rather than receiving God’s blessing only insofar as they are incorporated into the people of Israel” (170).
If this is what “the church” has come to mean, what should it mean on Congdon’s account? He observes that the original church was “constituted by its eschatological consciousness. The church had no raison d’être apart from its anticipation of the Messiah’s appearance” (180). That is, the church existed to await the second coming of Christ. Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper were interpreted in light of eschatological expectation rather than in terms of their sacramental value. (I would add that Albert Schweitzer seems to interpret New Testament baptism and the Lord’s Supper as both eschatological and sacramental.) As it happened, “The eschaton was deferred indefinitely and so rendered practically irrelevant. The apocalyptic Christ became the sacramental Christ” (181). Now, in these the last (?) of days, Congdon wants to reinterpret the church, once again, in an eschatological manner.
Leaving behind a sacramental or institutional interpretation, Congdon aims to interpret the church according to his own modified eschatology. Of course, Congdon’s eschatology is distinct from the early church eschatology — as it must be for all people today since Christ did not return as expected within a generation or so. The apocalypse of Christ, Congdon tells us, is a person-relative and ongoing “existential interruption” rather than a global cataclysm at the close of history. This apocalypse is the event of being co-crucified with Christ, in which the Spirit of God repeats the God-abandoned experience of Jesus in the lives of people today. Being God-abandoned, people are placed outside of themselves and thereby saved, in Congdon’s sense. This event of existential interruption — of being co-crucified with Christ by the repetition of his being abandoned by God through the Spirit of Christ — is something that God brings about rather than humans. In fact, humans need not be aware of it in any conscious or reflective sense. One can be abandoned by God without interpreting that event in those terms. Congdon calls this “existential dislocation” a “prereflective act of faith,” although it is God who acts and not the person of whom we say that they have faith (192). Forgiveness, in turn, “belongs to each person insofar a he or she exists as the child who shares in God’s reign without being conscious of it.” That is, the act of faith on God’s part “constitutes the apostolate as an unconscious community of those who participate in Christ’s death in God-abandonment” (193).
With this account of eschatological salvation in view, Congdon tends to speak of the apostolate rather than the church. Of course, the word “church” is too well-worn to for us to use it to describe the domain of salvation via existential interruption as unconscious co-crucifixion with Christ. The word “apostolate” serves this purpose instead. Indeed, since Congdon’s account of salvation gives it a universal scope, if there is no salvation outside the church — or rather no church outside salvation — then the church and the world become one and the same. “The apocalypse constitutes the apostolate,” Congdon writes, “by simultaneously dissolving the distinction between the apostolate and the world” (193).
Congdon further distinguishes the conscious from the unconscious apostolate. Those who are conscious of the source of the universal human existential interruption — that is, the present and existential repetition of the death of Christ by his Spirit — are the conscious apostolate. Even more broadly, Congdon allows the conscious apostolate to include those who merely “identify the source of our existential liberation as being ‘outside of ourselves.’ Extrinsicality of some kind is thus the bare minimum for the conscious apostolate” (195). Being conscious of the source, or rather of the externality of the sources, however, is no guarantee of participation. It the unconscious apostolate who participate — or perhaps rather are made to participate — in co-crucifixion with Christ.
What Congdon offers us then is “an apocalyptic theology that dissolves the boundary between church and world” (196). Specifically, any church construed as “a distinct social and cultural body” is annulled “as part of the passing age” (196). In its place, we have the apostolate as “nothing more or less than the site where the kerygma interrupts the world. This interruptive event does not generate an outward, visible separation between church and world but rather elicits an invisible, existential crisis between world and world” (196).
What then of the church’s mission? If the apostolate is “a constant dying to oneself that frees the community from attempting to secure its existence,” then, Congdon writes, it’s mission is “again and again, to become unconscious and invisible, to journey with Christ on the way of the cross into utter darkness” (197). Congdon summarizes this chapter as follows:
The apostolate is the site of the apocalypse by existing purely as event. In correspondence to Christ it pursues fidelity, not permanency; credibility, not authority; vitality, not stability; justice, not legality; translatability, not universality. The apostolate may be here today and gone tomorrow, but in each today it arrives as the emancipatory sign of God’s eschatological grace (198).
As he tends to do, the church is reduced to an event. Indeed, “The kerygma is to theology what the apostolate is to the church. The kerygma and apostolate are the divine events to which theology and the church are the creaturely correlates” (182). Just as theology speaks about and is governed by the kerygma, as existential interruption, so also the church must be defined in relation to the domain of existential interruption, the apostolate.
The key lesson is that we ought not to begin with our definition of the church as the given. Rather, “We must first discern what constitutes the ‘body of Christ’ and only then speak of public manifestations of this body” (192). Just as theology is a public account of the existential event of the kerygma, so also the church is a public manifestation of those who share in this existential and ultimately universal event, the apostolate.
It has been a few days since I tried to write about this book, and I must admit that when I come back to my notes and highlights, I find it tricky to remember what all the words mean. This confusion clarifies my reaction to Congdon’s book. Congdon writes clearly and I think I understand what he means for the most part, if I stay focused. Also, his dogmatic sketch is tightly constructed with a great deal of internal coherence. Yet I find myself regularly objecting to how he uses the words he uses. They fairly often don’t mean the same thing to me as they apparently mean to him. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But I am a long way, in many cases, from being convinced that I should adopt Congdon’s framework for myself. I fear that much of what I value in the Christian good news, as I understand it, is lost or buried by Congdon’s use of our common terms.
For instance, I can agree with Congdon that all people will be existentially interrupted by God in the course of their existence — if only at birth and death. And if salvation just is existential interruption — which I doubt — then if all people are existentially interrupted then all people are saved. This much is analytically true for a person who chooses to define salvation as existential interruption and existential interruption as a universal feature of human existence. That doesn’t mean that all people are saved in another more familiar (to some) sense of “saved.” Concerning other notions of salvation, Congdon seems to advise that we abandon hope. Existential interruption is all that we can have, and our final destination, he told us above, is “utter darkness.” I expect that the final couple chapters will shed more light on this front. Even so, the picture painted so far seems too bleak to do justice to the Christian good news as various people at various times and places have understood it. I see little cause for celebration or worship in Congdon’s good news so far. Maybe it’ll grow on me with time.
Continuing with Congdon’s definitions, if the apostolate/church is defined as the domain of salvation, and salvation is the universal event of existential interruption, then the distinction between the apostolate/church and the world collapses. They become one and the same, or at least coextensive. This is to be expected on a universalist dogmatic sketch. Yet if the terms we use leave us unable to speak of the Kingdom God over and against the world — the realm governed by God’s love from the realm opposed to it — then those terms risk losing contact with reality. I can grant, and even applaud, the idea that God is at work in the world as a whole, even challenging all people at the individual existential level during the course of their lives. At present I deny, however, that this challenge constitutes the salvation of each person. Such a salvation seems like no salvation at all. God’s challenge needs to bear fruit in some sense if I am going to be comfortable speaking of it as bringing salvation to those challenged.
Congdon speaks of the existential interruption of a person as an “act of faith.” Normally, the actor in an “act of faith” is the human who places their trust in God. But by “act of faith” Congdon means the act in which God existentially interrupts a human life via God-abandonment. God acts. Yet the act of faith applies to the human. So who has faith here? This strikes me as a very odd way to use the phrase “act of faith” since the human does not act but is rather acted upon. And the action in question is not faith — as many construe it — but God-abandonment. This strikes me as collapsing the distinction between an opportunity for faith, or a test of faith, and the faith itself. I see no reason to collapse this distinction, apart from supporting the coherence of Congdon’s dogmatic sketch, and have reason not to. I want to acknowledge that humans seem to have a role to play in responding to God’s challenge, to cooperating when existentially interrupted. I want to say, with the author of Hebrews, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” Such a command, which I doubt we should regard as culturally-bound, makes no sense to me when an act of faith is distinct from the actions of the faithful.
Likewise, by “forgiveness” Congdon means unconsciously sharing in God’s reign, which really means unconscious co-crucifixion with Christ. But what manner of forgiveness is it to be abandoned by God? And might forgiveness involve a role for the human who is forgiven, such as receiving and accepting an offer of forgiveness? In Congdon’s system, forgiveness is unilateral. It is something that happens to a person, like faith, perhaps without their knowing of it. Admittedly, some Christians do treat forgiveness as something that does not require prior repentance or even informing the forgiven person. I’m not sure such construals are helpful, but I admit they are fairly common. At the very least, forgiveness means different things to different people. For my part, being co-crucified with Christ seems distinct from being forgiven inasmuch as apart from resurrection “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). Crucifixion may lead to resurrection, but without resurrection we lack forgiveness and so I want to maintain a distinction between forgiveness and co-crucifixion.
Faced with Congdon’s account of the ecclesiasticization of Christianity, I largely agree that a turn away from eschatology to the sacraments is a turn for the worse. He truly brings home the need for an eschatological theology. For my part, I lack a well developed eschatology. I acknowledge that I can’t simply adopt the New Testament eschatology as is. But I’m not convinced that I have nowhere else to go other than Congdon’s present and existential eschatology. I thank him and his book for pushing me to think harder about this important area.
I also value Congdon’s distinction between the church’s original (and proper) centrifugal or outward mission to the nations and the subsequent centripetal mission of assimilating the nations and incorporating them into the church. Congdon is right to remind us that Christianity is not a culture and the church is trans-cultural. Too often we have confused our culture and social group with the church. Yet I wonder if Congdon’s collapse of the world and the (unconscious) church concedes too much. I expect that the people of God — that is, the people who respond to the good news and are empowered by the Spirit of Jesus to manifest his love for each other and outsiders — will be empirically distinct from world they inhabit. Indeed, they will be known by their love. This seems to be a sort of trans-cultural evidence that God is with them. Such evidence requires human cooperation, unlike various sacramental strategies for identifying the church.
I remain wary of how Congdon collapses various entities into events (so far this has happened to God, Christ, the Spirit, and people in general). In this chapter, Congdon speaks of the apostolate or church as an event. I don’t quite understand why personal terms and notions should be replaced with what strike me as impersonal event-talk. I wonder if it has something to do with a distinction between time and eternity. Maybe David can help me out on this. In any case, it reminds me of a letter that Albert Einstein wrote after his friend Michele Besso died. Einstein wrote:
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Put another way, perhaps Besso’s life is just a series of events in four-dimensional space-time. Those events retain their coordinates and it matters little if — as a set of events — they include a so-called final event of death. But it does seem to matter when a life ends. And I am inclined to think that there is a real distinction between past, present, and future given our inescapable experience of the passage of time and of the apparent tragedy of death. I think along these lines for the same reason that I deny that an evil Cartesian demon is deceiving me about the external world. Anyway, I just mention this quote because Congdon’s reduction of persons to events reminds me of this Einstein quote. But I probably haven’t quite understood his reasons for this yet.
Finally, what about the Christian proclamation? Yes, Congdon rightly points to a non-verbal element of the Christian faith as foundational. The non-verbal features of Christianity are all too often ignored. Talk, of course, is cheap and Congdon rightly reminds us that an unconscious element lies deeper than conscious Christianity. Yet if the Christian proclamation is re-cast as an event of unconscious existential interruption, then it sounds to me like no proclamation at all. That is, Congdon’s kerygma seems utterly unlike a proclamation inasmuch as it is essentially non-verbal. I’d rather call Congdon’s kerygma the acts of God in Christ and Congdon’s theology the kerygma as he articulates now. I’d rather not use the term kerygma to denote a non-verbal thing.
Well, that’s chapter 5. I hope I haven’t said anything too naive in my reflections here. On to chapter 6.
