Dogmatic Ecclesiology : Volume 1: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church

By Tom Greggs

Ecclesiology is a key issue for the present age of church history. This groundbreaking work by one of today's leading theologians offers a major Protestant ecclesiology for the church catholic. This volume, the first of three, considers the priesthood of the church in light of the priesthood of Christ. Tom Greggs shows the connection between Christ's work as high priest and the universal church's role in salvation. All together, the three volumes will offer a major statement on the doctrine of the church for Christians from a variety of backgrounds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781493419722

Tom Greggs

Tom Greggs is Chair in Historical and Doctrinal Theology at the University of Aberdeen, having previously been Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Chester. His publications include Theology against Religion (T&T Clark); Barth, Origen, and Universal Salvation (OUP); New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology (Routledge); and The Vocation of Theology Today (Cascade). Tom sits on the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, and also holds the position of Honorary Professor of Theology at St Mellitus College, London.

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© 2019 by Tom Greggs

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-1972-2

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For Heather,

my wife,

in whose love and world I move

within the movements of God’s grace,

with all my love and all my heart.

Contents

Cover    i

Half Title Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Dedication    v

Acknowledgments    xi

Abbreviations    xvii

How to Read This Book    xix

Preface: A Brief Prospective Theological Prolegomenon to Ecclesiology    xxvi

Why the Church?    xxvi

I Will Be Their God, and They Will Be My People: Issues of Method, Approach, and Dogmatic Topography    xxx

Which Church?    xlv

The Church of the Spirit, Not the Spirit of the Church    li

Chart of Prospective Chapter Topics    lxi

Abbreviated Chapter Theses for Volume 1    lxiii

1. The Spirit: The Lord of and the Giver of Life to the Church    1

The Church as Creature of the Spirit: An Act of Divine Grace    2

A Reformation Church: An Event of God’s Act    8

A Truly Pentecostal Church Whose Life Comes from the Living Holy Spirit    12

Pneumatologically Actualistic Ecclesiology    15

The Mediation of the Spirit: God’s Vertical Act in the Horizontal Axis of the Medium of Creaturely Space-Time    21

To Your Advantage That I Go Away: The Spirit’s Continuing Work of Salvation in the Horizontal Axis of Creaturely Existence    30

The Love of the Other in Her Givenness as a Salvific Event of the Spirit’s Act    39

The Essential Given Variety with the Church in Its Life of Love    43

2. The High Priesthood of Christ: The Essential Hierarchy of the Church (1)    ⁴⁸

The Rule of the Only Priest: The Lordship of Christ over the Church    49

The Priesthood of Christ in Hebrews    55

The Gospel Form of Christ’s Priesthood    58

The Modality of Christ’s Priesthood    68

3. Participative Ontology and the Church’s Internal Priesthood: The Essential Hierarchy of the Church (2)    82

The Uniqueness of Christ, Who Is Head of His Body    83

Participation in Christ by the Spirit    88

The Church as an Active Participation in Christ’s Spirit-Filled Humanity    92

The Church as Participating in Christ’s Priesthood in Its Internal Sociality: Priesthood Internal to the Church    99

Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus Est?    107

4. The Priestly Ontology and the Church’s Life for the World: The Essential Hierarchy of the Church (3)    113

The Corporate Priesthood of the Church in the World    114

Challenging Traditional Accounts of Essential Hierarchy    117

A Clergy That Demarcates Church from (and Not for) the World: The Damned for the Sake of the Saved    125

A Priestly Church for the World    129

A Boundary Fundamentally for the Sake of the World    134

Orders Exist for the Sake of the Church    139

The Intensity of the Church’s Priesthood Is Its Fringe    145

5. Baptism: Entry into the Priesthood of the Church    148

A Note on the Genus Sacrament    149

A Note on the Language of Means of Grace    159

Sacrament, Sign, and Semiosis    163

Baptism as a Sign    166

Baptism as Entry into Corporate Priesthood    174

Subsistent Identity in Christ: The Internal Priestly Dynamics of the Community of the Baptized    178

The Positive Challenge of the New Identity in the Quotidian Givenness of the World    182

Infant or Adult Baptism?    192

The Worldliness of Water: One Baptism    198

6. Holy Communion    202

A Semiotic Commemoration    203

A High Memorialist Interpretation of Zwingli    209

The Question of Agency    212

No Further Sacrifice    216

The Temporal Semiotics of Participation    219

Participation in the Body: Bound to One Another in Space-Time    225

Bound to One Another in Holy Communion for the World    233

Celebrating Holy Communion Together in the Givenness of a Church Service    236

7. The Communion of Saints    246

The Provisionality of the Passing Church in Time    246

The Everlasting and Universal Communion of Saints    251

Subsisting in the Communion of Saints: A Protestant Account of the Tradition of the Church    261

8. Intercessory Prayer    276

Prayer in Christ the Unique High Priest    276

The Internal Priestly Act of Prayer within and for the Church    283

Intercessory Prayer as an Expression of Salvation in the Horizontal Sphere of Spatiotemporality    290

Intercessory Prayer as a Priestly Act for the World    294

9. Thanksgiving and Praise: Participating Graciously in Grace    303

Less Quid Pro Quo Than Overflow    304

Creator-Creature Distinction and Relation: A Creation of Sheer Grace    307

Caught Up in God’s Movement: Living Thankfully in the Divine Willing for the Other    313

Justification by Grace Alone: Not Works, Only Gratitude for Divine Mercy    316

The Forms of Gratitude for Grace in the Church    320

10. Congregation: Priestly Polity    331

The Congregation as Foundational    331

The Givenness of the Community in Space and Time    343

The Congregation, the Great Congregation, and the All in All    350

Priestly Congregating    361

11. Sanctification    368

Sanctification as an Act of the Grace of God    368

Sanctification in Christ by the Spirit    384

The Non-interior Form of Sanctification    390

Communal and Corporate Sanctification for the World    399

12. Love    402

Love as a Participation in God’s Love, Both Economically and in God’s Internal Life    403

Love as the Concrete Form of the Sanctified Life    410

The Individual Exists for the Sake of Love    417

The Church Exists for the Sake of the World    420

13. Priestly Catholicity    426

Why Do Priesthood and Catholicity Belong Together?    426

A Catholicity of the Spirit and the Son’s Unique and Universal Dynamics    428

Active, Loving, and Dynamic Catholicity    435

Principles of the Forms of Priestly Catholicity    444

14. Coda: The Church as One    451

Oneness and Catholicity    451

One Irreducible Narrative    454

The Oneness of God    457

Works Cited    461

Index of Authors    479

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources    484

Index of Subjects    488

Cover Flaps    493

Back Cover    495

Acknowledgments

The process of writing a book feels in many ways like an enactment of ecclesiality. For all of the hours spent alone, reading and writing, one becomes acutely aware of the central role of others in the creation of a so-called monograph. The project of which this book is the first of three volumes was imagined almost a decade ago, and the completion of the first volume (which has come later than planned in part because a trilogy requires planning as a whole) marks a moment for reflection over the changes that have taken place. But what is constant in all that reflection is a deep and enduring sense of gratitude for those in whose worlds I move. I hope the reader will forgive a long series of personalized acknowledgments and see this as an enactment of the kind of ecclesiality of life I seek to propose.

This book would not have been possible in its current form or at this point in time were it not for the kind award of a British Academy Mid-Career Research Grant, which bought me out for a whole year from teaching and administration and allowed the opportunity for the intense work of drafting the planned volume, and I have gratitude beyond measure for the opportunities afforded me by the British Academy in this way. Two periods of sabbatical research leave from the University of Aberdeen also afforded me the opportunity in the first instance to plan this volume and in the second instance to complete it by turning a draft manuscript into a book. Dr. Kenny Laing, who acted as a part-time research assistant in preparing the manuscript, must also be thanked for all he has done to see this work come to fruition.

Baker Academic has been a remarkable and generous support throughout the planning and writing of this work. I am grateful to have a publisher who could imagine and contract a multivolume work and take the risk of commissioning this trilogy. Dr. Dave Nelson has not only sharpened my own sense of the project but has also been a sounding board, critic, and interlocutor throughout, and I am glad to say (in no small part owing to being caught for a week in a snowstorm at my house!) he has become a friend. I am also deeply grateful to all those who have helped in the editing of this work, bringing the final manuscript to publication, most especially Tim West, Ryan Davis, and Mason Slater.

The initial research for this volume took place during my last year at the University of Chester, and I continue to be grateful to colleagues there for ongoing friendship and collegiality, especially Professor Ruth Ackroyd, Dr. Hannah Bacon, Professor Celia Deane-Drummond (now at Notre Dame), Professor Paul Middleton, and Professor Wayne Morris. It is, however, to Professor David Clough and Dr. Robert Evans that I owe my deepest gratitude—not only for bearing with discussions of what must be for them both a tiresome project, but also for faithful and lasting friendship even with the personal distance between us: they have yet to escape me, and it was a particular privilege of working at Chester to come to know them and to become friends of these friends of God.

The vast majority of the work for this book has, however, taken place since I made the happy move to the University of Aberdeen, where I have been blessed to have not only colleagues but also friends. I owe so much to the late John Webster that it is difficult to find words to express my gratitude for his life. We debated and talked over many of the issues in this book, and without him I do not believe I would have had the courage to write it. Of course, on learning of many of my decisions, he would characteristically respond, On your own head be it: it’s your funeral. But for all of the differences we had theologically, he was a great ally, faithful supporter, and friend. I miss him.

Other colleagues have been no less influential. I cannot begin to explain how much it means to be able to execute the theological task among a community of peers that I not only respect and consider some of the most able theologians of our generation, but also have come to love and count as my closest of friends. Professor Paul Nimmo is someone I was honored enough to know before I came to work with him as a colleague. He is not only my fiercest critic but also the closest of friends, and I genuinely do not know where I would be without him. He, Jill, and the kids have been a source of constant faithfulness amidst all the changes that have taken place in the ten years it has taken to produce this book. Professor Phil Ziegler and his wife, Helena, have become like family to my wife and me, and as this book has been written I have seen their three boys grow into fine young men. The hospitality of their home and their hearts knows no bounds, and it is difficult to imagine life without them. Professor Brian Brock and Steph have been ever-present through all the ups and downs of life, ready with openness to share the realities of creaturely existence and to share their home even during the most trying of times for them; and their kids have always put a smile on my face come what may! Mrs. Rachel Hughes and Gordon have always been there to pull me back to reality and to eat, drink, and be merry with: as well as all the practical support Rachel has given me, she and Gordon have been a wonderful source of personal support, of kindness, and of grace. Professor John Swinton and Alison have been ready sources of fun and friendship—always there to share a bottle of wine (or two . . . or three!) and to point me back to the important things in life. Dr. Don Wood and family have taught me what it is to live as a family in faith before the God who is beyond all measure, and to do so in a way that is fun. Professor Grant Macaskill and Jane have been a joy to welcome to our little community, to share a dram with, and to laugh with in the context of whatever difficulties might emerge; I am particularly grateful to Grant for making me feel more normal. Dr. Mike Mawson and Ruth were housemates as was Russell Re Manning (now at Bath Spa) during my bachelor days, and I am grateful for lots of late-night chats, dinners, and shared bottles of wine and whiskey. Beyond these, Professor Chris Brittain and Katja (now in Toronto), Dr. Isa Ehrenschwentner, Professor Joachim Schaper, Dr. Katy Hockey and Joe, Dr. Paula Sweeney, Dr. Fed Luzzi, and Dr. Gerry Hough have all been wonderful sources of collegial support; I have been blessed to count them as colleagues and to work in such a happy local situation.

My PhD students through this time have been a continual source of conversation, of challenge, of dialogue, and (it must be said) at times of exasperation—albeit always in a good way that has proved a healthy distraction from writing. Many of them have commented on aspects of this work, and all of them have helped shape how I think. I am grateful to Dr. Yacob Godebo, Dr. Chris Burkett, Dr. James Holt, Dr. Aaron Edwards, Dr. Petre Maican, Dr. Nathan Paylor, Dr. Emily Pennington, Dr. Joan Evans, Dr. Rory Macleod, Dr. Roderick Grahame, Dr. Chris Dodson, Dr. Matt Burdette, Dr. David Emerton, Dr. DJ Konz, Dr. Ross Hallbach, Dr. Kenny Laing, Dr. Sean McGever, Dr. Jonathan Lynch, Jennifer LoPresti, Troy Onsager, TJ Tims, Cole Jodon, Robert Fortuin, Keir Shreeves, HyunJoo Kim, Porter Taylor, Ben Kim, Tim Dunn, John Blanchard, Christopher Button, Brent Johnson, Cameron Merrill, Matthew Crutchmer, Matthew Jones, Andrew Nelson, Marty Phillips, Daniel Cameron, Christopher Stead, and Alison Quient.

Alongside my own students, I am grateful to the generations of the Systematics Seminar at Aberdeen, some members of which have become great friends (as is the case particularly with Dr. Justin Stratis and Dr. Tyler Atkinson). I am particularly grateful to all the members of the Systematics Seminar in spring semester 2018 who read and discussed an earlier draft of this book, as well as many of my own students. This seminar included Petre Maican, HyunJoo Kim, Abraham Polanco, Zach Brigante, Cole Jodon, Jim Purdie, Marty Phillips, Declan Kelly, Jason Chambers, Heiyin Yip, Vo Huong Nam, and my colleagues Dr. Katy Hockey and Dr. Léon van Ommen.

Outside of the Divinity Department in Aberdeen, I am fortunate to have theological friends who have not only made significant contributions to the way I think and have commented on areas of my work, but who also make attending conferences bearable! I do not know if she knows this, but it was a conversation with Dr. Julie Gittoes which led me to reimagine my planned two books (one on the priesthood of all believers and another on preaching) into a three-volume trilogy; I am not sure I am grateful for this, given what lies both behind and ahead, but I would like to acknowledge it! A long and formative conversation with Professor David Ford led to aspects of the current structure of the volumes. More than that, it is a privilege for me to call David and Deborah true and lasting friends whose Christian lives have been a model for me of what the gospel calls us to. I cannot mention them without acknowledging Dan Hardy (whose work is very present in this volume). A photo of Dan looks over my desk, and it has always proved helpful to me in being reminded of his oft-spoken words to me: It’s just more complex than that, Tom. Professor Mike Higton, Professor Rachel Muers, Dr. Simeon Zahl, Dr. Jason Fout, and Dr. Stephen Plant have been wonderful conversation partners, examples of outstanding theologians, and true friends over the whole of my time from a graduate student onwards. Professor Ivor Davidson has held me to the highest intellectual and spiritual standards and been a constant friend. In Professors Iain Torrance and George Newlands I have found undeserved friendship, support, and wisdom as well as immeasurable kindness. In my Jewish friends Professor Adam Afterman, Professor Peter Ochs, Professor Stephen Kepnes, and Professor Laurie Zoloth I have found not only challenges to clear thinking and what a life lived before God demands, but also true, lasting, and (almost at times) academically parental support across difference: they are among those I am most blessed to know and for whom I give thanks to God. Although he is not a technically trained theologian, Professor Micheal O’Siadhail has been among the most important interlocutors for me for all areas of my life; I am grateful to him for his concern, care, compassion, support, and kindness. Dr. Graham Tomlin has become not only a wise and trusted mentor but also with Janet a true friend. Others to whom I owe gratitude for theological friendship and helpful conversations, and who warrant a greater discussion than space allows, include Professor Jeremy Begbie, Dr. John Bradbury, Professor Sarah Coakley, Professor Mark Edwards, Professor David Fergusson, Professor Richard Hays, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, Dr. Steve Holmes, Professor Karen Kilby, Professor Oliver O’Donovan, Professor Simon Oliver, Professor Ben Quash, Dr. Greg Seach, Professor Janet Soskice, Dr. Susannah Ticciati, Dr. Jim Walters, Professor Graham Ward, Alison Wilkinson, Professor David Wilkinson, and Professor Tom Wright.

It would be impossible to write on the church without living the reality of God’s love in the church. During the time of researching and writing this book, I have preached on the Liverpool South Circuit and the North of Scotland Mission Circuit, as well as preaching regularly at Methlick Parish Church and the University of Aberdeen. My church home (when I have not been preaching) has been Elm Hall Drive (in Liverpool) and Crown Terrace (in Aberdeen). It is unfair of me to name individuals in relation to these places, but I cannot but call to mind particularly the late Sheila and Mike Preston, Don Redman and Andy Dick (each of blessed memory), as well as Viv Redman, Steve and Judy Sutcliffe, Carol Reeves, Marjory Dick, and Willie and Dot Primrose. In all kinds of ways, these communities and these people in particular have shown me the love of Christ within the church and have been there for me.

My friends outwith church and academy have been no less supportive. Steven Jamieson, Andrea Chan, and Mark Perkins have been there particularly through thick and thin over the best part of three decades, as have Chris Allen, Dan Richards, and Fuzzy Iqbal: I only wish I could be there as much for them as they have been for me. It is remarkable for me to think as well that so many of those who are most important to me, and offer me rest, relaxation, and comfort, are people I got to know at school, through the church youth club, at university, or through my first job as a teacher, and I am particularly grateful for the ongoing friendship I receive from Neil and Esther Flynn, Dan and Becks Farr, Rick Gayton and Diane, Ed and Kirsty Gayton, Susan and Andy James, Tan and Sughra Ahmed, Dave and Val Richards, Lisa Murphy, Karen and Alison Williamson, Alex and Hannah Skinner, Simon Conway, Andy and Fleur Heyworth, Alistair and Helen Shepherd, Meriel and Jack Hodd, Annemarie and Lynton Bell, and George and Fran Bailey. Since moving to Aberdeenshire, new friends have entered our lives and become key to the rhythms of our lives such that it is now difficult to imagine a time without them: Deborah and Neil Buchanan, Jane and Sean van der Post, Alex and Georgie Cossorini, David and Hazel Hutchison, Tim and Anita Duffy, and Norman Gilbertson.

My family makes my heart swell with emotion. They are those who taught me first what it was to live a life in Christ, and who taught me what it was to live in community. Nothing I have ever done would have been possible without them. My grandmother, Pat, continues to bring joy and fun to my life. My parents, Jackie and Paul, are never-failing, ever-loving, and without them I would not be who I am. Ann and Colette, my sisters, remain my closest friends, and I love them more and feel closer to them with every passing year: I cannot express how proud of them I am. My nephew Billy brings me joy and makes me laugh, and the photos of him which adorn my offices have made me smile whenever I have looked up from my desk while writing, and I am sure the same will be true as our new nephew, Frankie, begins to grow. Over the course of writing this book, I have also acquired in-laws. Adrian is a delight to have in our family and seems somehow not only to cope with our eccentricities but also to rejoice in them. And I have become an addition to another family: Chris, Phil, Mark, Jenn, Frankie, and Emily have welcomed me into their clan and made me feel welcomed and like I belong.

The biggest change over the course of writing this book is that I have got married. Appropriately, my wife’s maiden name is Eccles, and while it might be true to say the Eccles-iology involved in getting to know her may have somewhat delayed the production of this ecclesiology, I cannot imagine the diminishment of my joy were she not in my life. Heather is my world and has taught me what it is to love and be loved. In her and her love, I feel whole. I cannot imagine producing this book without her, and her encouragement, support, self-giving, and constancy have brought this work into its being. She has helped me understand what it might mean to speak of the great mystery of Christ and His church—the depth and intimacy of love which I have found in no other. I thank God for her as the apex of all my blessings in this world. It is only fitting that this book be dedicated to her as the smallest of offerings back in love to all of the love she has so freely and openhandedly given me.

But it is, in the end, to the One who brought my world into hers and who is the source of all blessings that my final and greatest thanks must go—to the One in whose movements of grace I move and who is my beginning, middle, and end. Theology is not liturgy nor is it proclamation, but this work is offered on the bent knee of prayer to the living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is the source of all and from whom all blessings flow.

Abbreviations

How to Read This Book

This book is the first of a three-volume Protestant ecclesiology. Very often Protestant ecclesiologies have borrowed resources from more Catholic and Orthodox churches and their theologies. Protestant emphases on faith and Scripture alone have often determined that it is something of a struggle to understand or articulate the place of the church within the Heilsgeschichte. The temptation is to downplay insights from the Reformation in order to highlight the more Catholic (uppercase) aspects of the faith. One can see this not only in movements such as Anglo-Catholicism and the Oxford Movement but also in discussions of the church’s ministry and emphases on more sacramental approaches to the life and self-understanding of the church.

The trilogy, of which this book is the first part, seeks rather to build a theological account of the church that attempts to stay true to the variegated insights of the Reformation churches. The trilogy is offered as a response to the question, What does it mean for Protestants to say extra ecclesiam nulla salus est? In an age in which it is possible to download sermons from the best preachers in the world to our computers, and in which we can listen to the most edifying and beautiful music and worship of the church digitally, what does it mean for those of us who believe that we receive justification only by grace through faith in accordance with the teaching of Scripture to continue to believe in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? What makes this church necessary? And how does this church relate to the call to personal faith and discipleship in Christ? In considering these questions theologically, this ecclesiology seeks to take seriously the contours of the Reformation traditions and to build the case it makes about ecclesiology in relation to those traditions and the broader traditions of the church catholic. Rather than concerning primarily questions of how we do church—what form our services should take, the precise nature of our polity, and so forth—the account offered in these pages and in the forthcoming volumes attempts to offer a thicker, constructive, theological description of what the church is from the perspective of the broad contours of Protestant theology and its understanding of the divine economy. Questions of how we do church are of course important, and there is a sense in which it will be impossible to resist comment on some of these issues. But the primary issue of this ecclesiology is not to offer a blueprint ecclesiology1 or to comment on the relative merits of questions of polity or pattern. These issues may be deduced from more fundamental theological insights but are not themselves the foundational insights to which an ecclesiology should attend; such matters of doing are rather secondary and derivative to questions of what the church is and what its place within the work of the God of the gospel is. Readers of this book should not deduce from it any particular view as to whether systems of polity should be episcopal, presbyterial, connectional, congregational, and so forth. While it may be tempting to read the book in this way, given its focus on the whole people of God (and while that focus itself, of course, says something about the way in which the book seeks to inherit certain of the Reformation’s theological emphases), the book does not seek to displace any one mode or pattern of polity for any other. Nor does the book desire to advocate one form of liturgical life over another: again, there will perhaps be some implications, but there is no investment from the author (who finds it helpful to pray and worship in all kinds of varied contexts and forms) in defending or advocating one particular style of worship, whether high church or low, formal or relaxed, contemporary or traditional. The concern throughout is to speak of the church and its life in a way that seeks to reflect on its place theologically within the broader account of God and God’s ways with the world—to speak of the church as a locus of dogmatic and systematic theological reflection.

In seeking to speak of the church in this way, the account offered herein is not considered in any sense remotely exhaustive. How could it be? The ways of God are beyond the imagination of mortals, and any theological statement is simply part of an almost unending recursive pattern of descriptions of divine activity within the world.2 The claim, instead, is that through reading Scripture and reflecting on the theological consideration of it in the tradition of the life of the church, it is possible to detect three irreducible narratives about the church as a theological locus. There will, no doubt, be many other ways of describing the church—many other irreducible theological narratives of the church’s life—beyond what is offered here. The account given seeks neither to be exhaustive nor prohibitive of other accounts. Instead, this trilogy seeks to offer three such theological narratives that it believes emerge from a consideration of the church which takes Protestant emphases about the church seriously. The way in which these narratives are constructed in this trilogy is such that the volumes relate the munus triplex of Christ to three marks of the church from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, with a coda on the oneness of the church. The narratives concern, therefore, the priestly catholicity of the church (vol. 1); the prophetic apostolicity of the church (vol. 2); and the kingly holiness of the church (vol. 3). In relation to each of these volumes, the event of the act of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church is considered in relation accordingly to the Spirit who is the Lord, the giver of life (vol. 1); who spoke through the prophets (vol. 2); and who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified (vol. 3). The argument is that through the economy of the Holy Spirit in God’s work of salvation we are, as the church, enabled to participate in (vol. 1), encounter (vol. 2), and be transformed into (vol. 3) the body of Jesus Christ.3 These irreducible narratives are not in any sense a way of seeking to capture or essentialize theological reflection on the life of the church. But they are worked through systematically as three possible ways to describe the church in its relation to God the Father in Christ through the gracious event of the act of the Holy Spirit.4 These irreducible narratives interweave and relate to each other in the one church, but there are other ways in which a systematic theologian or dogmatician might approach the topic of a theological description of the church; and there are, of course, a multitude of other ways in which the church can be described. What is offered here is not designed to displace other approaches, but is intended as three theological fractal variations on the theme of the church, and these fractal variations are taken from one particular set of theological emphases within the life of the church.

The issue of feeling that there is more to say is compounded further given that this volume marks the publication of the first of three volumes. My (somewhat eschatological) hope and intention is that the second will be published within five years, and the third three or four years thereafter. There are things not contained in this volume that will be discussed in depth in subsequent volumes. I plead, therefore, with my readers for patience and generosity as I work through (and they await) volumes 2 and 3. Important topics like preaching, speaking to the nation, church-state relations, and the nature of specific ministries of the life of the church will all come in later volumes. In a different age, without the pressures of university publications and national measures of research, I would have resisted entirely publishing this volume until the others were also complete. We do not live in such a time (more is the pity for theology), and I hope the drip feed of volumes does not leave the reader frustrated and furious that major issues are not addressed herein. My hope is that—while the content may not satisfy the reader—the reader might continue to be aware that there are specific issues which are not addressed in this volume but will be in future volumes.

Indeed, it is worth noting (and this is important) that I intend for there to be two ways of reading and using this trilogy (once completed)—vertically and horizontally. At the moment, there is only the possibility of reading this book vertically. By this I mean that the book can only be read chapter by chapter as a single volume in an attempt to understand what it means to participate in the priestly catholicity of the church. But the plan for the completed three volumes rests on the idea that topics addressed in each chapter will have a corresponding discussion in each volume—in other words, that one will be able to read the material horizontally across all three volumes. There will be an intersection of the first chapter of each volume as each reflects on a related or similar topic from a distinct angle (or irreducible theological narrative), and the same with all the second chapters across the three volumes, and the third chapters, and so forth.5 Therefore, areas of frustrating lack in any given chapter or topic will hopefully be present (at least by degree) only so long as the remaining two volumes are unwritten and unpublished. Once the trilogy is complete, the breadth of the discussion of any topic across all three volumes might satisfy the reader that certain key issues and ecclesiological concerns have been addressed (that these issues have been addressed well or to the satisfaction of the reader is another matter altogether). However, even in its published form, the work will still be far from in any sense complete, and there are multiple other ways in which a theological account of the church could be given.

Of course, this account of the church comes from a particular perspective. It has been undertaken in part because of a concern about Protestant theological and dogmatic accounts of church underrepresenting speech about the whole people of God: too often concern has been placed on officeholders within the church and on church polity in the more narrowly construed sense. Many might well object to such an attempt at rebalance. But what is offered here is offered not in place of the important discussions of polity but in addition to them. The concern in this volume (as will be the case in the other two) is to present Protestant themes and emphases in nonpolemical and positive ways in accounting for the life of the whole church in a systematic and dogmatic theology. As described in this prologue, this ecclesiology, while not narrowly construed in a confessional way, does nevertheless belong to a particular tradition of thought and to a particular family of churches. I hope that those who do not belong to the same family as myself might treat the work with a degree of ecumenical generosity:6 I am clear that others think differently than I do in wrestling with the testimonies of Scripture, tradition, and reason about the contemporary experience of the church. I hope that where those differences (which are at times sharp) exist, all of the theology herein will not simply be rejected by the reader because it does not accord with the view she holds. We still live in a world in which the church is not yet one institutionally, and we all speak from particular views and expressions of the life of the church militant.

Some people will find this volume somewhat homiletical in tone. They are right to do so. The volume, which is a piece of academic theology, is offered by one who studied theology because of a call to preach; and that call is still the primary reason that he continues to study theology and write. To speak about the church theologically is also to speak to the church about its self-understanding as a community of faith. The exercise, therefore, of writing a theological (or dogmatic) ecclesiology is an exercise in a participative self-description of the church for the church. There is a degree of urgency in this task as the church in Western Europe at least faces a profound crisis: the church’s relevance and reach to the communities of which it is a part seems to be ever reduced. This reduced sense of relevance and reach often leads to two possible modes of being church: the first mode is to become so indistinct from the culture of which the church is a part that it is impossible to know what the particular contribution of and role for the church is; the second is that the church so demarcates itself from the world of which it is a part that it stands against the world and is unable to relate to it in anything other than an oppositional, antagonistic, and condemnatory way.

The urgency of this situation, and the failure of theological accounts of the church very often to move beyond discussions of history and polity, is in part what has led to the degree of passion with which the current project is presented. Academic disinterest might be considered a virtue in many disciplines, but in systematic approaches to theology, which will always involve making presentational decisions and constructive theological maneuvers, it is not only impossible but also unhelpful for such disinterest to lead any discussion of theology; and this is certainly the case for issues relating to the contemporary church. This book hopes to reorientate the discussion for the churches of what the church actually is. To that end, it is executed with passion and with a desire to change the perceptions of those who read it and the communities to which those people belong. There is, therefore, a twofold urgency and necessity to this trilogy—first, in relation to the lack of distinctly Protestant contemporary dogmatic ecclesiological accounts; second, in relation to the reality of a post-Christendom context in which the visible church seems in certain quarters to face death.

In light of this twofold urgency and necessity, and in light of the nature of the project with its fractal variations on a theme that can be considered horizontally (for any given topic across the volumes) and vertically through each volume (in its relation to the irreducible narrative), the mode of argumentation forms a wavelike pattern within these volumes. The desire not to reduce the discussion to any given essentialized core determines that I have avoided reductive modes of deductive reasoning within the book. Instead, I present the argument in such a way as to suggest waves which build up and break in relation to the themes discussed, and do so in repeated forms which move further and further forward to the shore of the argument’s summative conclusions. The hope is that the reader enters into these theological wavelike movements and is carried along through the discussions only to then be drawn back and carried along once more in a slightly different form, until she moves nearer and nearer the conclusionary shore of the argument. But even then the hope is that this results only in being taken up again into the movement of the argument from a slightly different perspective or in relation to a distinct ecclesiological topic. In other words, what is offered within these volumes are variations on themes, but variations which are themselves related to each other: they are variations, but they are variations on a series of related themes.

The sheer scale of the enterprise of these three volumes determines that a sequential deductive ordering of logic would oversystematize and reduce the complexities of the undertaking. Such a form would offer a reductive essentialization of the discussion such that the vast complexities of God’s ways with the world could be thought to be finally or conclusively captured in one system, or one logical sequence. The purpose of these three volumes on the church is quite the opposite of that desire. Rather than believing that an account of the church can be captured even in three (overly long) volumes, these volumes proceed in the belief that we cannot exhaust any account of divine grace—even divine grace in relation to the life of the church. While there are a lot of confident claims made herein, what is presented is done so with the degree of humility and provisionality demanded by the subject and with the sense that it will always be possible and necessary to say more about the unending grace of God.

I hope that those who read this book will find something beneficial from the description of that grace in these pages, and that where they disagree with the presentation, they too might give another fractal theological account of the theology of the life of God’s church without themselves ever desiring to reduce the account of the church to any single perspective or approach. These three volumes are to be written not to say the last word on this topic but because one volume was not quite enough to present the kind of noncompetitive fractal account of the theology of the church which is desired, and equally because of a desire to make plain the need for other nonreductive and nonessentialist accounts of ecclesiology. May others add their accounts to this one.

1. This term is borrowed from Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life.

2. The image here is one of recursive fractals: patterns that repeat and move and shift in differing but plainly ordered, thematized, and similar ways. See my description of theology in this form in Greggs, On the Nature, Task and Method of Theology.

3. One might wonder why these tropes are located in relation to each other. Why not, for example, relate priesthood with holiness (and certainly there is discussion of holiness in the first volume)? Of course, there are other ways in which these themes and loci might be arranged, producing subtly different dogmatic content, and it would be interesting to see how these might be developed. What is claimed here is that this is one possible and logical arrangement that allows ecclesiology to be explored, and that these themes cohere and resonate in powerfully constructive ways that help us articulate what the church is in a way that is helpful for Protestantism in the current age.

4. On church as an event, there is a helpful discussion in Severson, The Church. Aspects of the current discussion differ to some degree (as a less realized account than that of Severson), but his observation about the doctrine of the church is true: "The doctrine of the church is not so much about a special set of ideas as about positioning our lives together in such a way that we might participate in something of God happening" (32).

5. See the Chart of Prospective Chapter Topics that follows.

6. It might be tempting to see such a focus on more Protestant emphases as being antithetical to the ecumenical project, but this is not so. Ecumenism cannot confuse unity with uniformity, and there is a need for honest dialogue to be engaged in receptively and with an awareness of the different starting points and issues of the different traditions and what these might offer to the ecumenical project. (On this generosity, one would be wise to consider the work of Paul Murray; see Murray, Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning.) All too often ecumenism has been engaged in in such a manner as to forget what positively the Protestant church might offer theological articulations of the church, and has presupposed more Catholic or Orthodox emphases in relation to the life of the church. Those who feel that they cannot subscribe to a more Protestant account of the church because of their own confessional identities should see this volume simply as an offering with which to engage from a distinct ecclesiastical perspective, and are invited further to reflect on their own ecclesiologies either independently, in light of what is said herein, or in an engagement in receptive ecumenism.

Preface

A Brief Prospective Theological Prolegomenon to Ecclesiology: An Account of the Need to Account for the Act of God Which Takes Place in Creaturely History

Why the Church?

It was in fact the Roman Catholic modernist Alfred Loisy who said, Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church.1 This is a sentiment often recited in any number of Protestant, and perhaps especially evangelical and pietistic, contexts. Protestants at times have a hard time explaining why the church is significant.2 After all, Scripture is sufficient and is the only basis on which any theological judgment can be made,3 and salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone. The inward disposition of faith and the individual personal relationship with God, standing on the authority of God’s Word known in the Bible, do not seem straightforwardly to demand community formation, faithfulness to a congregation or denomination, regular Sunday attendance at a service, a sermon, or even the sacraments.4 Clearly, in the ways the Magisterial Reformers expand on the categories of sola gratia, sola fide, and sola scriptura, there is a presumption of a self-ordering body of believers who gather themselves in the locus in which the Word is read and proclaimed and the place in which the sacraments are administered. But in an age of (in the West) almost universal literacy levels and of free and critical thinking,5 even if people do continue to identify with the Christian faith, many find it irrelevant to identify with a church. After all, we can read sermons or listen to services through the media. Given our emphasis on personal faith, surely the old religious rubrics and behaviors are unnecessary, goes the argument. Even where there is still belief in an age of skepticism, this is an age, in the words of Grace Davie, of believing without belonging.6 And this argument is magnified in relation to the question not just of church congregations but of denominations.

Within a society in which the individual rules supreme and in which there is atomization of community (compounded ironically by the age of communication in which physical location and presence are secondary to me and my screen),7 the Protestant propensity towards individualism and the individual’s relation to God has burgeoned like a weed in the garden of the church community. If it is arguable that Protestantism has at times struggled to give due weight and consideration to the nature of the church as a community with salvific purpose, then in a post-Christendom society,8 marked by a rise in individualism, Protestantism has struggled even to account for the continued existence of its own ecclesial structures. Unsure of what the church is in the salvation history of God, Protestantism’s own emphases have become proportionately more individualistic in light of a society which no longer operates with assumptions about the place of the church within the broader society. Not only does Protestantism have a potentially underdeveloped account of the church, but the resources that it does have in a post-Christendom context have given way to a reflection of the atomized cultural individualism in which the church exists—a new Kulturprotestantismus freed even from the need of its own self-description as a community by virtue of the cultural individualism it reflects.9

To be honest, looking around at the churches (in Western Europe at the very least),10 one can sympathize with the critical view which sees church community as at best an unnecessary extra. The lack of clarity about the relevance of the church—even to those who would claim to be Christian—has determined that many churches (and indeed whole denominations) are in free fall. At best, me, my Bible, and Jesus is all that is needed; at worst, there is a civic form of Christianity freed from the commitments of the life of faith practiced within the life of the church (the believing without belonging syndrome). In relation to those who do not understand themselves to be Christian, the situation is even worse. The church no longer occupies the societal role it did even thirty years ago, and its relevance as an institution to contemporary society is highly disputed by that society. In short, as one North American professor and Christian leader has put it, The church faces death.11 The church has become an institution whose role seems primarily at points to be to occupy sitcoms, and the church’s worth and usefulness in society is seen by large swaths of the population in terms of its capacity to provide nice buildings and words to mark births, marriages, and deaths. While all this has been happening, many churches and church leaders, either unsure of what to do or preoccupied with questions of their own individual power or status internal to their churches, in relation to other churches or in relation to the world, effectively play on while the Titanic sinks. I do not know how to be negative enough about the situation in which the church finds itself.12 Of course, there are examples of wonderful practice and growth—Holy Trinity Brompton in London, the Alpha Course, this or that diocese or district, this or that megachurch. But that we can name these (or other examples), and think in those terms, is itself symptomatic of the general culture of failure and shrinkage. All too often, churches within societies continue to work with some form of presumptive Christendom in their self-understanding—presuming a role, a power, and a status that they have not enjoyed for a long, long time, and thereby becoming ever more irrelevant to the societies (the world, indeed) for which the church is called into being and exists.

There is a radical need for Christians today to rethink the church, or even in the first instance just to think about why the church might be important. All too often, the response to the current situation has been one of considering what the church does, but these questions will only be meaningful in relation to the question of what the church is and what its significance within the divine economy in creation is. In an age of what seems for many traditional Protestant denominations to be a situation of terminal decline, the temptation is to engage in knee-jerk reaction. Michael Jinkins calls this the hyperactivity of panic. He goes on to say, This manifests itself in clutching for any and every programmatic solution and structural reorganization in the desperate hope that survival is just another project or organizational chart away.13 But the better response is calmly to ask what it is that God intends in creating a people in the world who are called together to live in the life of the church. This question is an attempt to understand what the church is and why it is important and what its purpose is—questions necessary before we ask questions of form. To consider these questions without hard thinking is mistaken. These questions are not just questions about what the church does. They are rather questions that arise from the need fundamentally to consider what the church is, and what the church’s role is in the economy of God and what God’s role in the church is.14 Only in light of understanding the place of the church within the economy of God’s grace can we begin to understand how we are to be the church in the vastly changed contexts of rampant individualism and post-Christendom in which the church now exists.15 Only in understanding what the church is, and what God seeks to do with and through the creation of the church, can we begin to add any content to the questions posed prophetically by Dietrich Bonhoeffer the best part of a century ago: What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world?16 It is for this reason that ecclesiological study of the church within systematic and dogmatic theology as an object of faith proves vital to an age in which we have engaged symptomatically in ecclesial atheism—seeing the church as little more than a human enterprise and thinking how best to engage in that enterprise independent of the divine economy.

I Will Be Their God, and They Will Be My People: Issues of Method, Approach, and Dogmatic Topography

Problematic Methodological Approaches to Ecclesiology

To consider the church as an object of faith and to consider the place of the church within the economy of God provides that theological speech about the church has always to be aware of its dogmatic topographical locatedness.17 The issue of dogmatic topography, indeed, is a particularly acute issue with the particular doctrine of the life of God’s church. In the church, one is confronted with the very revealedness of God’s grace. The church is the place where the gospel is heard and where salvation and forgiveness are proclaimed and received. The church is the locus in which we know the faith and learn the life of discipleship. It is tempting, therefore, to think of the church as belonging to the dogmatic locus of anthropology—the place where humans who have been reached by God’s salvation come together to share and learn the experiences of faith they have—and approach the topic through anthropological investigation. Another option might be to locate the significance of the church to the order of knowing (and not being). The church’s significance is not in the first instance related in dogmatic importance to being but only to its location as the place in which we come to know the more material matters of faith. The church does not provide an object of doctrinal inquiry in and of itself but is rather the knowing subject that reflects on the material objects of the faith; if the church is of material significance, it relates primarily to its place in the order of knowing or in relation to the doctrine of revelation.

However, it is unwise to neglect the significance of the church not only as a locus of knowing but also as a place created by an act of the event of God, more particularly of God the Holy Spirit. In other words, theology must attend dogmatically to the church in relation to categories of being and the order of being. We might put this formally in the following terms. Materially, in the order of being, ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church) is a derivative doctrine of economic pneumatology (the doctrine of the works of the Holy Spirit), which is itself derivative of the doctrine of appropriations (the doctrine of attribution of specific works to individual persons of the Trinity) and the doctrine of ontological pneumatology (the doctrine of the person of the Holy Spirit). The doctrine of appropriations is derivative of the doctrine of the economic Trinity. The doctrine of the economic Trinity and the doctrine of ontological pneumatology are derivative of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity and the principle opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt. The doctrine of the immanent Trinity establishes that all of God’s ways with the world are ways of sheer, superabundant, and free grace.18

It is certainly true, and important, that ecclesiology is a doctrine which exists formally a long way downstream from more foundational areas of dogmatic inquiry. But unless the highly derivative nature of ecclesiology is understood, accounts of the church will be offered which do not recognize that the community of God is fundamentally different from all other communities in the world, and that the church’s existence depends on the sovereignty of God and God’s unnecessary and gracious acts within the world in creating community.19 An account of the church which begins with descriptions of the human form of the community in decidedly empirical and functionalist terms will fail to see the church as a creation of God’s saving grace in the person of the Spirit,20 describing a human society in a manner akin to descriptions of any other human society rather than describing the "society of God" (to employ a phrase from Calvin)—a community that God establishes for God’s purposes. Within Christian systematic theology, ecclesiology can never be understood, therefore, to be a free and independent locus of inquiry separate from God’s works in the person of the Holy Spirit in the time between Christ’s resurrection and His return. Indeed, the history of the doctrine of the church establishes that it is only in relatively recent times that ecclesiology as an independent locus has been discussed.21 Part of this relative novelty stems from the historical reality that until the Reformation there was little dispute in the arena of ecclesiology.22 From at least the time of Cyprian (ca. 200–258) or the Great Schism of 1054 (over the filioque clause), for the majority of people the church was the church as organized in relation to an essential hierarchy whose apex was the pope in Rome (even if only as a primus inter pares among the autocephalous churches), and to be a member of the church meant to be in communion with him. The Reformation clearly changed all this, and there were competing accounts of what the church was and what purposes it fulfilled. These accounts were not just at the level of governance and polity, but stemmed from real theological concerns about what the church actually is.23

One response to this situation of lack of theological and ecclesial consensus in terms of dogma about the church has been to shift the focus away from ecclesiological discourse towards more primary areas of theology—perhaps areas in which there can be more ecumenical agreement. In certain quarters the call of Edward Schillebeeckx has been heard clearly: what is needed is "a bit of negative theology, church theology in a minor key."24 Or else, in recognizing the highly derivative nature of the doctrine of the church from other doctrines (as above), a shift in proportion has been advocated—away from talking about the church and towards talking about the God who creates the church and all things from nothing. The problem with this kind of response is that it has tended to offer an account of the life of the church with little actual reference to the church, and to focus instead on the God whose divine life a se is the foundation of any theological statement. This latter point is repeated constantly, but little materially about the church itself ever emerges. John Webster, for example, has a concern for what he sees as the proper order and proportion of theological speech about the church. Considering 2 Corinthians 5:18 (All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation), he advocates that the ek tou theou in the verse requires us "to invest