Christian Faith Is a Public Community

by Runar Eldebo

Translated from Swedish by Tommy Carlson

The Christian faith is to be viewed as both inclusive and exclusive. It is a misfortune that various Christian traditions as well as other traditions have played the inclusive and exclusive against each other. Christian faith is inclusive in that it recognizes only one God who is creator and sustainer of everything that is. It is inclusive in that it maintains that if this God took this sustenance away from any one of us, that person would cease to exist. It is inclusive in that it does not differentiate between natural and unnatural or ordinary and extraordinary. Everything reverts back to this one and only God who has granted life and given it to us freely.

Christian faith is exclusive in that it maintains that God in person has communicated with us people with something that is ours without effort, “given” or revealed freely beyond merit or effort. It is exclusive in that this revelation is possible for us to understand and to cultivate intellectually.

Through the ages, the Christian faith has been formulated in three articles of faith. These three individually and collectively guarantee that grace does not speak against creation but presupposes it. There is a tension between creation and grace, between the inclusively given and the exclusively given, that belongs to a person’s existence and gives this existence beauty and meaning. Grace does not speak against creation but presupposes it. Grace does not protest against creation but needs it, is its friend. In God’s tension between creation and grace, a person’s life takes place. In this tension between creation and grace, we are called from going astray.

The first article of faith is about the creator of everything. All life receives its name from the creator. According to Martin Luther, God personally creates each person, so that I must thank God for all my senses and everything that is gathered together that is I. All this I must credit to God and, for this, thank God. Luther does not mean that creation is only the event that lies furthest away on the time axis, but that it is also the power which starts every new day and causes every person to want that day.

The second article of faith is about the Savior. The background of this article of faith is the ambiguity inherent in everything created. Not only is creation of this ambiguity something to be thankful for, it is also to be wondered about and agonized over. The creation is marked not only by goodness but also by evil. Ambiguous is the world which is God’s. Ambiguous is the life which is ours. To this ambiguity, Jesus Christ came with salvation. When the modern person experiences life as opaque and difficult, he or she faces a reality that is already known and addressed by the Biblical texts. Such has God’s world always been. Already in Leviticus humankind is described as “modern,” enticed by everything, tempted in everything — “a lost generation” if you talk with Ernest Hemingway. Jesus Christ came to this ambiguity with reconciliation and salvation. Salvation is found in time and nowhere else. The remedy for broken souls is in time. This remedy is the balm for tired brains and the new life for recovering capsized life projects. The claim is clear. The claim is exclusive.

The third article of faith talks about the life giver. None of us exists without the Holy Spirit, says the Swedish bishop, Bo Giertz. Without the Holy Spirit, Biblical history could never be humankind’s major concern, life solution, or comfort. The Spirit, from a Biblical perspective, is God actively renewing the earth’s face, nature, and the seasons. The Spirit is God actively renewing a person’s inner worlds, the secret and holy sources, and the one who makes frozen ground warm again. God’s spirit makes a person who is completely disappointed in Jesus Christ able once again to begin to believe and live.

From a Nordic perspective, N.F.S. Grundtvig has described the Christian faith as a faith in God that possesses both the “present” and “universal history.”¹ In Grundtvig’s terminology, the “present” means the Christian congregation’s spirit of community during worship. The Christian now of the Christian’s faith is therefore more cooperative than individualistic. It is personal in that an individual identifies with one people and in one liturgy. Grundtvig ties the drama of the worship to the scope of the creed’s universal history, and he views the place of worship and the worship itself as the happening in which the faith’s big word about God of God and light of light receives esthetic and meaning. In such a way, Grundtvig’s theology is a way of handling the subjectivity that has snuck into Christian faith — that God is present in me rather than that God is present in God’s revelation. In his loved psalms, Grundtvig creates “presence” by making scene changes between the living conditions of Biblical stories and present-day, well-known contexts in which people live their lives.² This Danish finesse has surely been a deciding factor in the Folk high school movement of which Grundtvig was a founder and in the whole Christian educational tradition. The Danish finesse of Grundtvig deals with both the opening of the Biblical texts to present living conditions, and the pointing of the living conditions of modern situations of human life toward the paradigm of the Biblical texts.

Perhaps one can join Grundtvig by singing with Walt Whitman this poem from Leaves of Grass:

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.³

Perhaps here is the key to Grundtvig’s success — to sing the Gospel to the Danish people. Finally comes the poet! We live in an age in which the modern person reduces secrets, if not to problems, certainly to knowledge, and translates the Biblical truths into mixes of ideological, psychological, and philosophical truths. Is there then another way to speak than the prosaic? Is there another way to preach the Christian faith so that its universal historical claims become “present” in a person’s life?

Walter Brueggemann sees the modern Christian faith as poetry that speaks against the prosaic world.⁴ By prosaic he means that world which is organized, planned, memorized, and predictable. By poetry he means a language that moves like a ball when Stefan Edberg plays tennis. A language that captures moments, that brings worlds together, that carries surprises. Such a language is not ethical instruction, nor numerous doctrines that must be learned. Rather it is a suggestion or hint of a language oriented to realities other than information, to singing rather than speaking. Such a language does not reduce reality, as the prosaic has a tendency to do. A poetic language is open to new and surprising realities, in just about the same way as are the parables of Jesus. It is a risky language, an improper, prophetic language in a world that wants control at any price.

Perhaps the poetic also helps to “explain” [sic!] how liturgy works among a secularized people, as in Sweden. Here one continues to baptize one’s children, confirm the youth, fix one’s love in marriage, and bury one’s dead in spite of a lack of prosaic warrants. People light candles on all the graves in Sweden on All Saints Day in spite of the fact that no one has asked them to do so and in spite of the fact that no decree for such a thing has been issued. Fantasy has found a way. People’s inherent fantasy and a world of poetry has created something they like to do.

Removed from the world, for the world

What then is the relationship between Christian faith and the surrounding community? Already in the New Testament there is an ambiguity in the Christian’s relation to the community or “the world.” In both John’s Gospel and his letter there is a trust and loyalty to the world and, at the same time, a suspicion of it and a flight from it.⁵ And throughout the history of Christendom there is a continuing critical question regarding the Christian’s relation to the community and to the world. Sometimes the response is formulated in slogans such as, “The Christian shall be in the world, but not of the world.” Perhaps the best formulation of the Christian’s inclusive and exclusive relation to the community around is provided by American theologian David Tracy. He writes that the Christian is removed from the world, for the world.⁶ The Christian is removed from the world, with all the ambiguity that belongs to the world — the lovely, the dangerous, the awful, and the completely wonderful. The Christian is lifted out of this world to be lowered back into it later. The world is and will remain the place for the Christian life and for the Christian person’s understanding of self. The Christian is not called to the church. For so God loved the world.

The Christian and the church are called to the world. But the Christian in the world is “different.” The Swedish poet Birger Norman writes about the Christian that he or she is a “nose hound in the world.” The Christian is in the world for the sake of the world, but as one first removed from the world. That means that the Christian is also in the world to cast suspicion on the world. Therefore, the Christian person and the faith correct the world. Christian faith is always suspicious when absolutes appear in the world. The confessional church was suspicious of the absolute claims of Nazism, as were many Russians of Communist claims that the Communist community was absolute. So should Christian faith always suspect absolutes of every kind, no matter what they are: economic, political, religious, or Christian.

The Christian person ought to be a person on whom the world can not rely. Christians are not to be the good people that one can rely on in all kinds of weather. A Christian person ought to be a person on whom the world can not rely and whom, therefore, it needs — a person Bill Clinton needs in his cabinet because he knows that he or she will not blindly obey him, but has her or his life anchored someplace else. Or one who, as Ezra Pound describes the artist, is “the human race’s antenna.” The Christian is one who has visions about a new humanity, about a new world and values, about a new organization of community, and about newer and fuller theories of what beauty and goodness could be. Such a person is an asset to people in power because they can not rely on him or her. Such a person is the very best friend and intimate, in that he or she stands free, removed from the world, for the world. The Christian faith and the Christian person are, in other words, not against the world. There is always more to admire in a person than to look down upon.⁷ The same can be said of the world. Christian radicalism always stands together with the created reality as it is given by the one and only good God. The understanding of sin is an understanding of sin in the light of grace only.

The Christian faith in public areas

In Sweden today, the Christian faith risks being rhetorical and marginalized. Rhetorical as a voice without body, speech without action. Marginalized, spiritualized, pitiful, and diminished in both character and influence. The Christian faith is at risk to be passed by with indifference by ordinary people, by people in power, and by educators. Or it risks exaggerating itself, as in Livets Ord (Word of Life) and other utterings that should be viewed as an avant-garde artist who does everything to protest against the marginalizing of art.

So far we have asserted that the Christian faith in public is inclusive and exclusive at the same time. We have wanted to advocate the faith in the face of all that is born of God and given to the world. We have said that the Christian is removed from the world, for the world, and that this difference is not only a personal and individual concern. The Christian faith does not make claims that limit faith to the personal and individual. It makes broader claims beyond any individual interpretation.

The Christian faith orients these claims. It does not offer a Christian community or a Christian academy. It casts suspicion on absolutes and appeals for transparency. Therefore, when it comes to religious reality, it chooses between faith and church. Faith casts suspicion on the church, also. Faith sees the church in two forms: It is God’s creation — not something we people have achieved for our own pleasure; and it is a human building that like all others is fortified with human weakness, prestige, and hegemony.

Perhaps with David Tracy one can differentiate between three public areas where faith is active: community, education, and the church.⁸ In all three of these public areas, faith appears as both inclusive and exclusive. Faith is not a stranger to any one of these three areas, but it is also free by God’s grace to cast suspicion and be a corrective in each one.

With respect to the community, the faith questions the vision of community as the outcome of engineering art. Faith seeks to interpret secularization, which in the West reveals its forgetfulness and loss of meaning. Faith raises the question about the community’s why and where — not just the how of the art of engineering.

With respect to education, faith feels like a stranger in the face of present teaching about questions of truth. Faith questions the educational trends that have made people competent and knowledgeable, but have refrained from teaching goodness and wisdom. Faith takes its place in classical training. Without faith and the church’s foundation, classical theology is hard to penetrate. Christian faith also questions the “methodical atheism” that easily becomes atheism as a life view in the educational mess that differentiates between the brain and the heart and isolates the head from the person and from life.

With respect to the church, as in the other two areas, Christian faith hovers between gratitude and impatient critique. Grateful because God is so good in this world, but impatient and critical of human greed and self-important arrogance that reaches all corners of earthly reality. Faith never forgets that the righteousness of the pharisees could never really accept the heavenly kingdom that Jesus Christ came to present, and faith continually calls attention to that fact.

There is a quiet delight and a healthy skepticism in the public arena of the Christian faith. There is a delight which only the children can recognize — just as the children did in the time of Jesus. And there is a skepticism that can make the people in power shake, as they always have done and will do, when Christian faith speaks.