The one showing the greatest tolerance for and acceptance of all truth claims, as having an equal and legitimate claim to a place in the common marketplace of ideas, is thought to be demonstrating the essence of liberty in and through his or her character. None of this is to say that the word liberty has lost all currency or needs to be retrieved from the trash bin of post-modernity; it is rather to suggest that the way in which the concept of liberty is understood in much of contemporary culture and society cannot bear the full weight of meaning located in the concept of graced freedom as proposed in this essay.
It is not merely the culture or society at large that have been adversely influenced by a limited concept of liberty; the community of faith has now had much of its own self-understanding and substantive ministry shaped and informed by a misconceived application of liberty and its several distorted manifestations (e.g., self-worth as primary; self-assertion; self-enrichment; self-determination; etc.). The vital nature of this essay is found in prior pastoral experience with the manifold ways by which this influence has distorted understanding of the ekklēsia as essentially determined by the Spirit of Christ, under the Lordship of Christ as event, and as accountable to Christ and Christ alone. Even more troubling is the manner in which many in the church/Church have come to embrace liberty as the true substance of the gospel; this has led to several critical and unfortunate distortions of Christian doctrine and dogma that are fundamental to orthodox faith and confessional practices. We will take up this same problem in a later chapter of this essay.
Liberty can be, even in its contemporary setting, understood to be a manifestation of what the apostle Paul refers to as principalities and powers, in the sense that it is built into the order of creation and structured for the purposes of preserving the dignity and just governance of any one nation of people. This would also imply that, as consequence of the Fall, liberty is often subject to the abuse of those same principalities and powers, to be engaged in ways that are contrary to the intent for which God purposed such liberty, and therefore in conflict with the will of God for its rightful purpose and use.
There was liberty (we are not yet speaking of—graced freedom) in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 1:26–31) in which Adam and Eve could enjoy all the richness of their environment, but within the evident limitations and restrictions (external to them and of God, see Gen. 2:15–17) that had been placed upon them. As we will touch on briefly in a later chapter of this essay, there is also a biblical sense in which a particular form of freedom is the mirror image of liberty as an external reality. We will also need to address the sense in which Adam and Eve were created by God with ontological1 freedom, forfeiting such graced freedom in the disobedience and rebellion of sin, which led to bondage in a multiplicity of forms to which Scripture also bears witness.
As a tentative and initial expression of the much larger argument that needs to be made in the body of this essay, the concept of graced freedom being proposed is not merely an external reality, but is more accurately understood as an ontological reality with extraordinary manifestations in every aspect of the existence of the freed person. While we contend throughout that there can be no division or separation between what is recognized as an ontological reality and the outward actions that give evidence to the actuality of such graced freedom, we would not want to suggest that such association prohibits treating either in isolation from the other. Rather, it is because the ontological reality of graced freedom is manifest in actions (understood in the widest and fullest sense of event) that they must be treated in dialectical fashion; we will say more about this dialectic in the introduction.
Furthermore, in light of the expressed hope of Dr. Barth we will contend that such graced freedom is, at its core, a freedom for humanity. This graced freedom is: (1) the foundation of redemption as the re-affirmation and re-actualization (i.e., recapitulation) of genuine anthropos (humanity created—imago Dei, and as male and female), as a new creation in Christ, in both the individual and larger sense of the term, and under the empowerment and continuing presence of the Holy Spirit; (2) the ground for the establishment of the New Testament ekklēsia, the body of Christ, and the collective manifestation of such evangelical freedom; the event in which such freedom is to be received, acknowledged, confessed, and expressed; and (3) the basis for the missio Dei and ministry as an expression of graced freedom in the ekklēsia, where freedom for humanity is evident as a passion for the furtherance of justice, integrity, and the enrichment of humanity in free obedience to Christ Jesus and as mandated by his gospel. In any and every instance, God alone is the Subjective Agent of graced freedom, while humanity is the objective recipient and beneficiary. As objective recipient and beneficiary of graced freedom, the human being and ekklēsia together—as imago Christi—become the subjective agents of the proclamation of such freedom for humanity in, with, and for the world, and as event.
In the introduction, and in other appropriate context throughout this essay, we make extensive use of the Greek term ekklēsia2 rather than the more familiar use of church/Church under the conviction that ekklēsia more adequately conveys the concept of event, as opposed to the implication of institution or localization of denominational presence normally associated with the use of church/Church. However, whenever we make use of the more familiar terms (i.e., church/Church), the intention is exactly to call to mind the more institutionalized and denominationally centered manifestation. This choice of terminology (ekklēsia) is directly related to the proposed concept of graced freedom which, like the ekklēsia itself, is also and always an event, in that it is the union of ontological reality and consequent actions.
Having some degree of sensitivity for the issues raised these days regarding the need for inclusive language in any reference to humanity (as individual or corporate reality), we find constant reference to either the human, humanity, or human being as incapable of bearing the full measure of what the Bible refers to by way of Man as male and female. Therefore, in both the introduction and in select portions of the essay that follows, we have chosen to make use of the biblical anthropos3 (the biblical-theological term for the human as male and female, which we will use for humanity in general and as part of the created world). We will allow the context to determine the reference to either the individual or the corporate; for example, where anthropos refers to the individual it will be followed by he/she, him/her, and where the term applies to humanity in general, it will be followed by “them, they, or their.”
We now turn to the introduction for a fuller explication of what will be covered in even greater detail chapter by chapter and to the conclusion of this essay.
Introduction
As stated in both title and preface, this is a pastoral proposal for the development of an evangelical theology of freedom and is, therefore, an expression of pastoral care (traditionally, care of souls) in the mode of a practical theology addressing both the ekklēsia, and the wider fields to which the ekklēsia is called in service to the one gospel of Jesus Christ, and in free obedience to the command of her Lord (there is no genuine obedience that is not free obedience, as one can only speak of genuine love as freely given). It addresses the ekklēsia out of the conviction that before we can speak of those actions endemic to graced freedom in and through her numerous avenues of service in Christ to the world, we must raise the critical issue of whether or not and to what degree such graced freedom is evident in the ekklēsia as an ontological reality. Do the actions of the church/Church give concrete testimony to the presence of graced freedom in the body and as the reality of the individual member, or are such actions reflective of a kind of liberty that is foreign to a fuller understanding of exactly what constitutes graced freedom in the ekklēsia as the body of Christ?
We will argue that there is, at present and in the contemporary church/Church, a greater sense of liberty than there is manifestation and expression of graced freedom. Such liberty is evident as an imprecise understanding of why the church/Church exists, how she is to approach decision making at every level, from whence she derives her purpose for existence, under whose authority she continues to exist as an event of free obedience, and what is, de facto, the exact nature of the message she is called, established, and commissioned