Renewing the Evangelical Mission by Lints Richard;

Author:Lints, Richard; [Richard Lints]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Contract: Believers Create the Church by Personal Decision

Against the absorption of personal faith in Christ to the faith of the church, the Reformation emphasized that each of us must repent and believe the gospel. However, as Anabaptist scholars observe, justification was not a concern of the radical reformers for whom the central doctrine was obedient discipleship and the imitation of Christ.7 Rather than means of grace, baptism and the Lord’s Supper were seen as the believer’s act of commitment. Some even questioned the validity of these covenantal ordinances and later movements, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), abandoned them in favor of fellowship and spiritual conversation, each according to his or her “inner light.” If Rome virtually eliminates the need for personal decision and identifies the Body of Christ univocally with a particular organization in history, radical Protestants have tended to place the emphasis on personal choice and a voluntary society over against the visible church.

Under the conditions of modernity, everyone has to choose his or her religion and this is salutary for anyone who maintains the importance of personal faith. However, the autonomy of the self has argued for more than this: namely, the recognition that faith is only a matter of personal choice. To the extent that certain forms of Protestantism have given theological sanction to this emphasis, they have not only survived but thrived. If conversion is a matter of “signing up” for salvation, then the church will be conceived as a market niche or a club. Dietrich Bonhoeffer poignantly observed, “What is the point of admitting infants into an association?” he asks. “No chess player, no matter how passionate, would enroll a small child in a chess club. . . . Only a community [Gemeinschaft], not a society [Gesellschaft], is able to carry children. Infant baptism within an association is an internal contradiction.”8 By the way, Bonhoeffer’s main point was to remind paedobaptist churches in Germany of the obligation that they were neglecting.

Although the emergent church movement offers bracing critiques of the megachurch model, is it really a radically new paradigm or is it an updating of the revivalistic paradigm? Stanley Grenz observes, “The post-Reformation discussion of the vera ecclesia formed the historical context for the emergence of the covenant idea as the focal understanding of the nature of the church.”9 With its insistence on the marks of the church, “the Reformers shifted the focus to Word and Sacrament,” but the Anabaptists and Baptists “took yet a further step,” advocating an independent ecclesiology. “This view asserts that the true church is essentially people standing in voluntary covenant with God.”10 Of course, this principle of personal decision excludes the practice of infant baptism, Grenz argues. “As a result, in the order of salvation the believer — and not the church — stands first in priority.”11 “Because the coming together of believers in mutual covenant constitutes the church, it is the covenant community of individuals,” although it has a history as well.12 Although the language of “covenant”

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