Introduction:
The following essay by Donald Bloesch
(1928-2010), a noted American
evangelical theologian, has been adapted
from a presentation offered at the
Allies for Faith and Renewal Conference
held in 1987, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
The sponsor of the Allies Conferences
was the Center for Pastoral Renewal, an
office representing the Sword of the
Spirit, an international,
inter-confessional network of Christian
communities. The theme of the conference
was on Courage in Leadership. The
purpose for the Allies conferences was
to help one another understand the
battles between contemporary
de-Christianized culture and Christian
life and thought, and to respond in
faithfulness to the word of God and in
the power of the Holy Spirit.While
holding their respective confessional
positions firmly, the Allies conference
participants were united in a
conviction of the urgency of standing
for historic, biblical Christianity.
In this essay Donald Bloesch reflected
on Paul the Apostle's implicitly
trinitarian teaching in the Letter to
the Ephesians. Bloesch distinguishes
that teaching from post-modern
distortions that attempt to capture the
Gospel from this-worldly causes and end
finally in giving God a new identity.
Bloesch maintains Christians must unite
in acknowledging one Lord and one faith.
In language that is both eloquent and
unequivocal the apostle Paul writes to the
church in Ephesus: “There is one body and
one Spirit, just as you were called to the
one hope that belongs to your call, one
Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and
Father of us all, who is above all and
through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).
When Paul speaks of “one body,” he has in
mind the church as Christ's own
self-manifestation, the mystical body of
Christ. He is describing the Holy Catholic
Church, which is not identical with any
visible institution but present in many
ecclesial bodies, though not necessarily to
the same degree. I am reminded of
Augustine's words, "Many whom God has, the
church does not have; and many whom the
church has, God does not have."
The "one Spirit" Paul is speaking of is the
Holy Spirit. This Spirit is not an
impersonal power but a personal agency. The
Holy Spirit is God in action, not a force
that emanates from the being of God.
When he refers to "the one hope that belongs
to your call," he is indubitably thinking of
our vocation to be witnesses and ambassadors
of the Lord Jesus Christ. By "one hope" he
means salvation through the one mediator,
Jesus Christ. This one hope becomes ours
through the empowering of the Spirit.
"One faith" probably refers to an objective
doctrine, the faith "once delivered to the
saints," rather than faith as a subjective
instrument of justification. But the apostle
might also have in mind the act of laying
hold of the treasure of salvation, Jesus
Christ.
The "one Lord" Paul is acclaiming is, of
course, Jesus Christ, the Lord of all
creation. This is even more clear in Romans
10:9: "If you confess with your lips that
Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead, you will be
saved." Peter makes a similar confession in
Acts 4:12: "There is no other name under
heaven given among men by which we must be
saved."
Paul goes on to acknowledge "one baptism,"
and most scholars agree that he is referring
to sacramental baptism. It is at our baptism
that we make the joyous confession that
there is one Lord and one faith. Faith is
the inward disposition of the heart. Baptism
is the external sign of the authenticity of
our faith.
The apostle next focuses on the being of
God. He declares that there is "one God and
Father of us all, who is above all and
through all and in all." "Above all"
indicates God's utter transcendence.
"Through all" signifies his omnipresence.
"In all" is a reminder of his immanence. Yet
it is well to bear in mind that God is
transcendent before he is immanent, for he
has created the world out of nothing.
We have in this passage the Trinitarian
confession of the early church – one Spirit,
one Lord, one God. There is firm biblical
ground for contending that Father-Son-Spirit
is the proper name for God in the apostolic
church, equivalent to Yahweh in the Old
Testament. The source of our faith lies in
God the Father. The object of our
faith is the Son, Jesus Christ. The giver of
faith is the Holy Spirit. The goal of faith
is union with God in Jesus Christ through
the Holy Spirit.
This confession represented a potent
challenge to the pervasive polytheism of
that time. In the Graeco-Roman world there
were many initiatory rites, but Paul
declares that there is only one baptism.
There were many lords, but the church
confessed that there is only one Lord. There
were many gods, but Christian faith
recognized only "one God and Father of us
all." There were many religious associations
and cults, but our text speaks of only one
body and one Spirit.
The religious conflict that the church
precipitated in the ancient world was that
between monotheism and polytheism. This was,
moreover, an exclusive monotheism as opposed
to henotheism, entertained in some circles,
in which one god was worshiped without
denying the existence of others. Paul
stoutly reaffirmed the ancient Hebrew
confession: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our
God is one Lord" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The
church upheld a trinitarian monotheism, a
Creative Oneness, versus a mystical
monotheism in which all distinctions
disappear in a higher unity.
No Other Lord
The Christian faith proclaims Jesus Christ
as Lord of the church, the state, and indeed
of all creation. As the apostle Peter
confessed, "He is Lord of all" (Acts 10:36).
In the perspective of New Testament faith,
the world belongs no longer to the devil but
now exclusively to Jesus Christ. We need to
ponder seriously Jesus' words to his
disciples, "I saw Satan fall like lightning
from heaven" (Luke 10:18), a prescient
depiction of his cross-and-resurrection
victory over the powers of darkness.
Yet the powers of death and destruction
continue to rule, but through deception.
Their ontological power has been taken from
them, but they still exert the power to
deceive. It is no wonder that Satan has been
called "the father of lies" John 8:44).
In our time, as in biblical times, there are
other faiths, other gods that seek to turn
us away from the worship of the one true
God. One of these new salvations is
nationalism, in which sovereignty is
assigned to the voice of the people or
nation. The court of final appeal is not
holy Scripture but the "general will" or the
"common good." National security is prized
more highly than eternal security. Religion
is valued for its social utility, for its
contribution to national unity. The church
is important because it provides a moral
consensus that makes our country strong. The
individual is ultimately sacrificed to the
collectivity, and we then have the sinister
phenomenon of statism.
Another secular salvation is racism, in
which race becomes the criterion for
assessing the intelligence, motives, and
aspirations of people. It invariably
involves elevating some particular racial or
ethnic group over others. The Spirit of God
becomes virtually identical with the soul of
the race. Racism is alive and well in this
country, but in prewar Germany it became the
driving force in national politics. The
German Christians, that group within the
German churches in the 1930s that sought to
accommodate the faith to the ideology of
National Socialism, spoke of "one body," but
they meant not the church but the German
people or the Aryan race. In South Africa,
Iran, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, India, and many
other nations what is celebrated is either a
racial or an ethnocentric unity rather than
a spiritual unity.
Still another pseudo-religion of our time is
militarism, in which military might rather
than the living God becomes the anchor of
our hope. I see in America today many
people, including evangelicals, placing
their faith in the power of nuclear
deterrence rather than in the infinitely
greater power of God. A nation is justified
in defending itself by force, but it often
does so at a price—the price of idolatry. A
disturbing report in the Dubuque
Telegraph
Herald reveals that nearly 50,000
Americans each week play combat games at 600
commercial sites in the United States,
"gunning down numbers of the opposing team
with air guns that shoot paint pellets" (May
11, 1986, p. 2). Militarism is indeed
becoming a way of life for a growing number
of Americans. A 1986 Gallup poll revealed
that for the first time the military
establishment rather than the church was
ranked as our most-trusted institution. We
need again to pay heed to the words of the
psalmist: "A king is not saved by his great
army; a warrior is not delivered by his
great strength. The war horse is a vain hope
for victory, and by its great might it
cannot save" (Ps 33:16, 17).
One of the alluring salvations of our time,
Baalism, is a repristination of the paganism
of ancient times. It signifies a rebirth of
the gods of nature and fertility. Sexual
gratification is celebrated as the pathway
to divinity. Baalism is a manifestation of
that broader stream of devotion, Dionysian
mysticism, which enthrones the instinctual
drives or the will to power. This new kind
of mysticism, in which we immerse ourselves
in the world rather than detach ourselves
from it, is glaringly evident in the
writings of Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin,
D.H. Lawrence, Alan Watts, Nikos
Kazantzakis, Matthew Fox, and Friedrich
Nietzsche.
Finally, it is important to mention what I
have chosen to call technological
liberalism, in which technique is divinized.
When Richard Nixon hailed the landing of man
on the moon during his presidency as the
most significant event in world history, he
was giving graphic utterance to the modern
faith in human technology. Technological
liberalism has regrettably penetrated the
circles of conservative religion, where
worship and prayer are often reduced to
techniques for bending the will of God or
gaining spiritual consolation.
No Other Gospel
When Paul declares that there is one faith,
he means that there is only one gospel. Most
Christians would agree, and yet the term
gospel as it is used today, especially in
academic religious circles, has ambiguous
meanings. In one seminary class I know of
students were asked to define the gospel,
and there were as many definitions as
students. But what is ominous is that most
of these definitions could not be
harmonized.
Theology that has broken loose from its
biblical moorings will inevitably drift into
an understanding of the gospel antithetical
to the apostolic conception. In the old
liberalism the gospel was sometimes
described as "the fatherhood of God," "the
brotherhood of man," and "the infinite value
of the human soul" (Harnack).
In liberation theology today the gospel is
conceived as the call to solidarity with the
oppressed of the world. The gospel in this
sense then becomes a new law. Sometimes it
is said that the gospel is God's act of
solidarity with the poor in Jesus Christ.
But we are prone to forget that God not only
identified himself with our plight but also
acted to satisfy the claims of his holiness.
In feminist theology the gospel is the
promise of liberation to women who are
allegedly exploited and oppressed by a
patriarchal society. This is a promise that
can be realized through political action,
education, even social revolution. Certainly
the gospel brings hope to all who are
oppressed and downtrodden, but this is what
the gospel
does rather than what it
is.
For existentialist theology the gospel is
the breakthrough into freedom (Bultmann) or
the courage to be in the face of nothingness
and despair (Tillich). The gospel does
indeed bring freedom, but only because God
has acted decisively to deliver us from
spiritual slavery. This freedom that the
Spirit brings, moreover, is not the freedom
to realize our authentic selfhood but the
freedom to follow Christ in costly
discipleship. In process theology, which is
probably stronger in American theological
schools than in any other place, the gospel
is the availability of the power of creative
transformation, which is present around us
and within us. This power was manifest above
all in the Jesus of history, but it is also
evident in other charismatic figures in
history such as Plato and Buddha. The gospel
is the good news that we can become one with
the surge of creative power that carries the
world to a higher level of consciousness.
Process theology speaks much of love but
what it has in mind is eros – the love of
the good, the beautiful, and the true. This
is the love that seeks its own perfection in
union with the highest. How utterly
different is the agape love of the New
Testament, which drives us, out of
compassion, to the sacrificial service of
the lowliest. It is the difference between
eudaemonism (self-realization ethics) and
diakonia
( service) ethics.
Neo-gnosticism is another tantalizing
movement in religion today that teaches
another gospel and indeed another Christ.
The gospel becomes the secret knowledge (
gnosis)
of the kingdom of God within us, accessible
only to those who undergo the disciplines of
inner purification and consciousness
raising. Faith means an awakening to our
essential divinity rather than a confession
of the unique divinity of the Jesus Christ
of history. Tillich reflected this new mood
when he made self-discovery tantamount to
God-discovery.
The evangelical movement has for the most
part resisted these new gospels, and yet in
some of its popular manifestations it too
gravitates toward another gospel. The gospel
in this hybrid evangelicalism becomes the
promise of personal renewal through the
power of faith. Our hope is placed in faith
as a daring act or a positive attitude
rather than in Christ who alone can satisfy
our spiritual need. Faith is tapping into
the pool of unlimited power or unbounded
possibility, which, it is said, is directly
available to us.
The gospel in biblical perspective is the
good news of reconciliation and redemption
through the atoning sacrifice of Christ on
the cross and his glorious resurrection from
the grave. It is the story of what God has
done
for us in Jesus Christ and
will do in us through the power of his
Spirit. Faith directs us away from ourselves
to Jesus Christ. It is not a virtue by which
we win God's favor but an empty vessel which
receives God's undeserved mercy.
Resymbolization
The major theological issue of our day is
not demythologizing (as Bultmann urged) nor
deliteralizing (as Tillich advocated) but
resymbolizing. This in effect means renaming
God, which amounts to giving God a new
identity. We see this in existentialist
theology where God becomes "the
Unconditioned," "the Occurrence of
Transcendence," or "the power of being." In
liberation theology we encounter these
dramatic symbols for deity: "the power of
the future," "the event of self-liberating
love," "the all-determining reality," "the
dynamic of history," and "the courage to
struggle." Process theologians have called
God "the Power of Creative Transformation,"
"the Eros of the Universe," "the Directive
of History," "the Creative Process," "the
Creative Event," "the Power of Integration,"
and "the Principle of Concretion." One of my
former teachers, an esteemed process
theologian, described religious experience
as "getting in touch with the Creative
Passage."
The resymbolizing process is also
conspicuous in other currents of theology.
In feminist theology God becomes "the
Immanent Mother," "the Womb of Being," and
"the Empowering, or Primal, Matrix." Mystics
in the classical tradition envision God as
"the Eternal Now," "the Undifferentiated
Unity," "The Dazzling Darkness," "the Silent
Desert," or "the Infinite Ground and Depth
of all Being." Among the so-called
neomystics God is described as "the
Life-Force," which is both creative and
destructive; "the Creative Surge"; "the
Vivifying Power"; "the Divine Energy"
(Teilhard de Chardin); and "the Cosmic
Whirlpool" (Kazantzalcis).
How, one must ask, can one pray to "the Life
Force" or "the Eternal Now" or "the Creative
Process" or "the Womb of Being?" The story
is told of a Harvard University professor
who, after a lecture on the "ground of
being," was confronted with this
embarrassing question: "Professor, do you
ever pray?" The teacher thought for a moment
and then gave this candid answer: "No, I do
not. I meditate." One can meditate on the
"ground and depth of being," but one cannot
pour out one's soul to such a reality. The
move toward the resymbolization of deity is
a move toward depersonalization.
The resymbolizing process is even apparent
in popular religion, in the electronic
church, and in cultic evangelicalism.
Influenced by the New Thought movement, many
evangelical preachers have used these
symbols in talking about God: "the Unfailing
Resource," "the Pool of Unlimited Power,"
"Unlimited Possibility," "the Source of
Supply," "the Spiritual Presence," and "the
Slumbering Deep Within You."
Theologically, what is involved here is a
move from trinitarianism to unitarianism,
from particularism to universalism. God is
no longer "Father, Son, and Spirit" but now
"the God beyond God," the suprapersonal God
beyond all anthropomorphisms, the higher
unity beyond all multiplicity. The church
may well be engaged in the not too distant
future in a battle for the Trinity.
At a Methodist conference on hymnal revision
in Chicago a year or so ago, one of the
pastors whom I met vividly and, in my
opinion, accurately described the
differences between the United Church of
Christ and the Unitarian-Universalist
church. The Unitarian preacher says: "We do
not believe in the Trinity, but we may
believe if we wish." The U.C.C. preacher
says: "We believe in the Trinity, but we do
not have to." When the Trinity is made
optional, we become in fact unitarians or
mystics of one kind or other. I am not here
impugning the great Christian mystics like
Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux, both of
whom made a determined effort to subordinate
Neoplatonic ideas to the biblical outlook,
stoutly defending the holy Trinity. What
bothers me is our contemporaries who
blithely impose their ideological
convictions on holy Scripture and on the
church universal
Christian Faith
versus Idolatry
The real conflict today is between the true
God and idols, creations of our vain
imagination. We are being placed in the
position of having to choose between true
prophets and false prophets, between the
prophets of Yahweh and the prophets of Baal.
It is a conflict between the Sky Father of
prophetic religion and the Earth Mother of
perennial mysticism and nature religion. The
challenge to the church in our time lies in
its capacity and willingness to confront the
false gods and heresies that enthrall its
people.
One religious aberration particularly in
fashion today is latitudinarianism, the
willingness to let go of doctrinal
distinctive. It is said that true religion
in its essence is ethics, not doctrine.
Character training is esteemed more highly
than either discipleship or evangelism.
Another popular deviation is pluralism, the
willingness to tolerate a variety of
doctrinal allegiances. David Tracy complains
of the kind of pluralism that "masks a
genial confusion in which one tries to enjoy
the pleasures of difference without ever
committing oneself to any particular vision
of resistance and hope"). This type of
pluralism certainly conflicts with the
exclusive and demanding claims of the
gospel.
There can, of course, be a pluralism in
liturgy, modes of discipleship, lifestyles,
and evangelism, but definitely not in dogma.
There cannot be more than one gospel. Those
who are attracted to pluralism need to be
reminded that the true God is a jealous God
who will have no other gods beside him
(Exodus 20:2, 3).
When pluralism as a worldview begins to
receive support from the state, the freedom
of the gospel is then placed in jeopardy.
Religious liberty may well be a major issue
in the future. We may well have to choose
between a state-supported henotheism (civil
religion) and trinitarian monotheism.
One of the most vigorous advocates of
religious pluralism was Schleiermacher, the
nineteenth-century German liberal
theologian, in whom there is currently a
revival of interest. In his
Address on
Religion he indicated a distinct
preference for ancient Rome over modern Rome
because the former was hospitable to many
gods and religions.
Certainly it is also incumbent on the church
to combat a hazy mysticism, which regards
dogmatism as the chief error. In this kind
of thought, God is unknowable. He is
Nameless, beyond all human descriptions and
designations. Against the hazy mystics (not
to be confused with the great saints of
Christian tradition), we need to remember
the biblical axiom that God has indeed
revealed himself. He has also named himself
– Father, Son, and Spirit. As Francis
Schaeffer rightly said, "God is There, and
he is not Silent." We can join in the
prophet Jeremiah's lament: "Oh, that you
were not so proud and stubborn! Then you
would listen to the Lord, for he has spoken"
(Jeremiah 13:15).
With the rise of the New Age movement,
occultism is another threat to which the
church needs to be vigorously alert.
Occultism is the attempt to penetrate the
veil that separates us from the higher or
spiritual world. It often takes the form of
gnosticism—the claim to a secret knowledge
of things hidden from natural perception.
This higher knowledge is available only to
those who are willing to undergo the
discipline of self-purification. Against the
occultists and neo-gnostics, we have a
responsibility to make clear that the
mystery of faith is available to simple
faith.
In a spirit of boldness and resolution, Paul
acknowledged "one Lord, one faith, one
baptism." We as Christians must respect the
diversity in our unity, but we must also
demonstrate the unity in our diversity. We
may bring to the Ephesians passage various
interpretations, but we are surely united
with the apostles in confessing Jesus Christ
as the one Lord and the holy catholic faith
as the only faith.
Paradoxically, we will have to rediscover
heresy before we can affirm orthodoxy. We
can afford to tolerate a certain heterodoxy,
an imbalance in emphasis, in our midst, but
no public heresy. All of us entertain to
some degree views that would probably be
deemed heretical by the larger church, but
when we preach these things from the pulpit
then the church must act or else lose its
integrity.
I see theological confusion and mounting
discord in most of the mainline
denominations today. The Presbyterian church
U.S.A. might well be described as two
churches under one umbrella. The United
Church of Christ could accurately be
depicted as various religions that can
barely be contained under one umbrella. The
Episcopal church impresses me as one church
seeking for an umbrella. In the Roman
Catholic church there is admittedly one
church under one umbrella, but the focus is
on trying to see the holes in this umbrella.
The growing unrest in the Roman Catholic
church could be a sign of promise, but more
likely it stems from an ignominious
accommodation to modernity. My wife and I
have some sister friends at a mid-western
convent who speak of the "white martyrdom"
they have to undergo. They complain that
language in the worship services of their
convent is being altered so that God is no
longer referred to as Father, or Christ as
Lord or Son. They purposely choose to wear
the old habit as a visible sign of protest
against the modernizing trends of their
community. This reminds me of the
perspicacious words of the prophet Amos:
"Can two walk together, unless they are
agreed?" (Amos 3:3). Or the awesome words of
the Lord to Ezekiel: "Son of man, can these
bones live?" (Ezekiel 37:3).
What the church needs to pray for and
earnestly seek today is a new outpouring of
the Holy Spirit. And if this happens, we
shall see repentance for both personal and
national sin and renewed faith in the living
Lord.
Excerpted from Courage
in Leadership, Chapter Six, by ©
Donald Bloesch, published in 1988 by
Servant Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Donald
Bloesch (1928-2010) was a noted
American evangelical theologian. He
wrote numerous books, including Wellsprings
of Renewal: Promise in Christian
Communal Life, Crumbling
Foundations: Death and Rebirth in an
Age of Upheaval, The Battle for the
Trinity: The Debate Over Inclusive
God-language, A Theology Of Word
& Spirit: Authority & Method
In Theology. He was raised in
the Evangelical and Reformed Church,
in which his father and both his
grandfathers were also ordained
ministers. From 1957 until his
retirement in 1992, he was a professor
of theology at the University of
Dubuque Theological Seminary in
Dubuque, Iowa, USA.
