Читать книгу Revolutionary Christianity - John Howard Yoder - Страница 6

Only two times in the reporting of the gospel story do we find the word ekklesia from the lips of Jesus: in chapters 16 and 18 of the Gospel reported according to Matthew.1 Both times, this is in connection with the authorization given to the gathering of believers to “bind and loose.” The phrase is not a current one in our modern conversation. Yet, for Jesus and the New Testament church, it seems to have been of such importance that part of the definition of the church is that it is where this binding and loosing take place.

To understand the full significance of this phrase in our modern languages we need to use more than one translation. It often happens that in one language concepts can be brought together under one word which requires a choice between two different terms in another language. Where you in Spanish say hacer, we in English must choose between “to make” and “to do.” Conversely, when we in English are satisfied with one verb, “to be,” the Spanish must choose between estar and ser. In a comparable way, in order to understand fully what Jesus instructed the church to do with the use of these terms—binding and loosing—we must make two distinct applications in our modern context.

The Church Is a Community of Forgiveness

In the parallel passage in John 20, Jesus speaks in almost the same language, imparting the gift of the Holy Spirit to his gathered disciples, and authorizing them to forgive sins; “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”2

Thus it is clear that one meaning of binding and loosing has to do with the remission of sins. The church is authorized to speak on God’s behalf, like an ambassador or an attorney empowered to sign a document in the name of someone else.

Our churches of the free church tradition have often taken great and careful concern for the holy living of their members. This was the case for the early Anabaptists, for the Puritans, and for John Wesley. In this history, however, it is not clear whether evangelical Christians always succeeded in making it plain that what they were doing when they expressed concern for the sin and the obedience of members was, in fact, reflecting the gospel by being instruments of forgiveness.

In the instructions of Jesus found in Matt 18:15, it is abundantly clear that the purpose is not to punish but to forgive: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.” The normal outcome of this procedure of reconciliatory approach is that “you have regained that one.” The purpose is not to penalize, nor is it to teach a lesson to others that they might learn the seriousness of sin, nor is it to give an outlet to the resentment and the anger of the one sinned against. The need of the offender is to be restored, and this is the way to do it. Exactly the same procedure is referred to in Galatians 6:2—“Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ”—and in Jam 5:19–20—“My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

The point of this instruction on the part of our Lord was not simply that his disciples would need ways of resolving social problems. It is rather that, if the church is to preach a gospel of forgiveness at all, this must be made real in specific times and places in the relations between particular persons. Forgiveness must be made flesh among people where it is needed.

We need this biblical teaching especially when we seek to build the church in those parts of the world that have been strongly under the impress of Roman Catholic practices. We need this teaching as a safeguard against purely anti-Catholic reflexes that lead secular humanity and some Protestants in the direction of spiritual solitude. What is wrong with the traditional Roman Catholic practice of penance and absolution, as it is routinely understood and practiced in popular forms, is not that a person forgives another person’s sins in the name of God—this is a fundamental assignment given to the church by the New Testament and, normally, should be exercised first of all by one individual according to Jesus’ own words.

The errors in the current Catholic practice concern not whether but how this word of forgiveness is spoken. Jesus indicates that it is the responsibility of every person: “If another member of the church sins against you, go . . .” This is a universal responsibility carried by every Christian for every other believer with whom one is acquainted. It is neither a ministerial specialization nor a sacramental privilege.

Secondly, what is questionable in the Roman Catholic practice is the prescribed relationship of the absolution to a process of penitential performances in such a way that the offender may think that it is the penitential performance which earns forgiveness. Further, everything that makes the Catholic penitential practice legally consistent, objective, and impersonal takes it away from the context of a living community. This is in contrast to the New Testament church where forgiveness was affirmed between believers as a social relationship and not simply as a divine transaction.

In the post-Catholic parts of the world, we need especially to safeguard the biblical understanding of forgiveness against its interpretation as a purely spiritual and solitary occurrence in the mind of God and in the mind of the sinner, mediated only through the words of preaching. When a person really knows that he or she needs to be forgiven, that forgiveness needs to be spoken by a fellow believer.

Although Martin Luther had no intention of radically doing away with the practice of aural confession, the effect of the Reformation was to make the practice unpopular. Martin Bucer in the sixteenth century and pietism in the seventeenth attempted to restore something of this element of personal humility, confession, and assurance. In a similar way, Methodism came into being when John Wesley created a way for the individual to experience, in the conversation of a small group, what it means to be admonished and forgiven. Today, in the Western Protestant part of the world, there are some who suggest that a large part of the popularity of psychoanalysis (which moves far beyond serving as therapy for sick spirits and becomes almost a substitute religion) is partly explained by the fact that the psychoanalyst hears confessions and imparts a kind of secular forgiveness by his very acceptance of a continuing relationship with the client.

But, it is not only the Catholic and Protestant mass churches which have failed to make this forgiveness real in the life of the congregation. The free churches, for their part, have been tempted to transform this process of reconciliation into a tool of punishment. Instead of speaking of forgiveness, we have come to speak of church discipline. It has been conceived of as a way to make the sinner suffer, to make the sinner conscious of having hurt the church, to give release to the resentment of the church, to demonstrate to others within the church the seriousness of the offense. Likewise, this procedure has come to center especially upon open and public kinds of offense rather than being an instrument for the discernment of the sins of the mind and the spirit as well. Thus, what was meant as a joyous reestablishment of the fellowship has too often become a rigid expression of the power of church leaders.

What still stands before us is a promise rather than an achievement of the free churches. Every revival movement has begun by reestablishing, through repentance, a possibility of communication among estranged brethren that had been broken off by the pride and the search for power of those within the church. This is our call as free churches. The free church is not simply an assembly of individuals with a common experience of personal forgiveness, brought about between individuals and God in the realm of the Spirit. It is not simply a practical instrument, a kind of working committee to get certain kinds of work carried out in order to evangelize the world. The church is also, in the world, that new people through whom God makes visible, in the most concrete form, that forgiveness is a social reality.

The Church Is a Community of Discernment

The other modern way of stating the meaning of the phrase “to bind and loose” arises clearly out of the usage of the rabbinic teachers of the time. To these scribes and teachers were brought problems of moral decision: “Is it permitted to . . . ?” The teacher who then spoke to permit or to forbid was binding if he stated a clear obligation, especially a negative one; he was loosing if he left the matter open or permitted the action which the pupil had proposed. Thus, the authorization given to the church deals not only with the offender but also with the authority of the standards by which an offense is to be recognized.

The two functions of moral discernment and forgiveness are closely interrelated. It is only because there is some clear understanding of what the standards are that sin can be recognized; it is only in continued wrestling with particular offenses and asking why they should be considered as offenses that the church keeps its understandings of what is right and wrong alive and practical.

The first clear lesson of Jesus’ instruction is that the discernment of right and wrong cannot be separated from the situation in which we deal with our brothers and sisters and their need. We do not promulgate ethical generalities outside the context of their application. We do not identify as vices or as virtues whole categories of behavior without sharing the struggle and the tension of applying them to the situation of the believer who must determine how to behave when one really meets the choice. This is the easiest way to ensure that the church will not continue to proclaim standards that are no longer capable of application. The standards must constantly be tested by whether it is possible to convince a believer that he or she has sinned. In the process of conversation with the believer, if the church has been accusing one of sin when the accusation was unfair, the mutual reconciling procedure is the way to modify the rules. If, on the other hand, the standards by which the offender is judged continue to be correct, it is in the conversation with the tempted believer that the church will give the most fruitful attention to finding other ways of meeting those needs and temptations which led that person to fall. Thus, the redeeming conversation with the believer is the instrument of ethical discernment in the New Testament church.

The second clear statement about this process is recorded in Matthew’s Gospel: “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”3 It is in this context of wrestling with fellow believers and their decisions that Jesus promises the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit to the church. The Holy Spirit is described in the New Testament as empowering to obedience and as driving the church into mission. But just as often the Spirit’s function is leading within the congregation in the discovery of the path of obedience.

It is this mutual pastoral responsibility of every member for every member, this “cure of souls” exercised by every believer as a priest for fellow believers, which prevents us from being led by anti-Catholic reflexes into a posture of spiritual solitude. As a matter of fact, in the sixteenth century, the first Anabaptists did not say that infants should not be baptized because they cannot have an experience of faith and the new birth, nor did they reject infant baptism only because there was no biblical text commanding it. Rather, their belief was that one who requests baptism submits oneself to the mutual obligation of giving and receiving counsel in the congregation—this is what a child cannot do. In the first clear statement rejecting infant baptism, in September 1524, before going on to discuss whether water has a saving effect or whether unbaptized children are lost, Conrad Grebel says, “even an adult is not to be baptized without Christ’s rule of binding and loosing.”4 Thus, the issue is not the age of the one baptized but the commitment one makes upon entering into the covenant community with its claims on the believer. Likewise, Balthazar Hubmaier, the theological voice of the earliest Anabaptism and author of its first catechism, writes:

Q. What is the baptismal pledge?

A. It is a commitment which man makes to God publicly and orally before the church, in which he renounces Satan, all his thoughts and works. He pledges as well that he will henceforth set all his faith, hope and trust alone in God, and direct his life according to the divine Word, in the power of Jesus Christ our Lord, and in case he should not do that, he promises hereby to the church that he desires virtuously to receive from her members and from her fraternal admonition, as is said above.

Q. What power do those who are in the church have over one another?

A. The authority of fraternal admonition.

Q. What is fraternal admonition?

A. That one who sees his brother sinning goes to him in love and admonishes him fraternally and quietly that he should abandon sin. If he does so he has won his soul. If he does not, then he takes two or three witnesses with him and admonishes him before them once again. If he follows him, it is concluded, if not, he says it to the church. The same calls him forward and admonishes him for the third time. If he now abandons his sin, he has saved his soul.

Q. From where does the church have this authority?

A. From the command of Christ, who said to his disciples, all that you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven and all that you loose on earth shall also be loosed in heaven.

Q. But what right has one brother to use this authority on another?

A. From the baptismal pledge in which a man subjects himself to the church and all her members according to the word of Christ.5

Far from being the extreme expression of individualism, the baptism of believers is the foundation of the most sweeping community responsibility for the life of all members. It is this process of binding and loosing in the local community which provides the practical and theological foundation for the centrality of the local congregation. It is not correct to say that the local congregation is of central importance because no other gathering of Christians can be called the church. The Bible uses the term “church” for all of the Christians in a large city or in a province. In recent centuries, the concept of local congregational autonomy has sometimes been misunderstood in such a way as to deny mutual responsibilities between congregations or between Christians of different congregations. We understand more clearly and correctly the priority of the congregation when we study what it is that it is to do. It is only in the local face-to-face meeting, with brothers and sisters who know one another well, that this process can take place, this process in which what is decided stands decided in heaven. Whether the outcome be the separating of fellowship or its restoration, the process is not one that can be carried on in a limited time and by means of judicial formalities. It demands conversation of a serious, patient, and loving character. Only when people live together in the same city, meet together often, and know each other well can this “bearing of one another’s burdens” be carried out in a fully loving way.6 The church is defined by this process—not as a legal organization nor in a purely spiritual sense. The church is where two or three or more are gathered in the name of Jesus around this kind of need. The Synod, or the overseer from outside the congregation, may very well be of real assistance, but there is no way such persons could replace the process of binding and loosing community conversation.

If we understand the significance of the promise of the Holy Spirit deeply enough, related so specifically in Jesus’ words to the church which gathers to bind and to loose (Matt 18:19-20), this may even protect us against certain misunderstandings of the use and the authority of scripture. One of the most enduring subjects of unfruitful controversy over the centuries has been whether the words of scripture, when looked at purely as words isolated from the context in which certain persons read them at a certain time and place, have both the clear meaning and the absolute authority of revelation. To speak of the Bible apart from persons reading it and apart from the specific questions which those persons reading it need to answer is to do violence to the very purpose for which we have been given the Holy Scripture. There is no such thing as an isolated word of the Bible carrying meaning in itself. It has meaning only when it is read by someone, and then only when that reader and the society in which one lives can understand the issue to which it speaks. Thus, the most complete framework in which to affirm the authority of scripture is the context of its being read and applied by a believing congregation using its guidance to respond to concrete issues in the witness and obedience of this congregation. Our attention centers not on what theoretical ideas a theologian separated from the church can dissect out of the body of scripture in order to relate the one to another in a system of thought. It is for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in right behavior that the inspired scripture is useful. Let us, therefore, not be concerned as amateur philosophers to seek for truth in itself as if it were more true by its being more distant from real life. The Bible is the book of the congregation, the source of understanding and insight as the congregation seeks to be the interpreter of the divine purpose for humans in the congregation’s own time and place with the assistance of the same Spirit under whose guidance the apostolic church produced these texts.

A Community of Grace

If we think of church discipline in the puritanical sense, as an expression of the narrowness of the vision of persons without love concerned only for an ideal pattern of life, then we shall stand before this divine promise—“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” 7—dismayed at its hardness and afraid of its demands. But if we see in this promise of forgiveness the way of making real in the minds of guilty people the fact that God does genuinely forgive, then we may discover again (as has been the case in one revival movement after another through the ages) that it is precisely this opening up of believers one to another through which not only the immediate problems of personal guilt and offense but many of the other difficulties of the church can be solved as well. The only conditional petition in the Lord’s Prayer asks that our debts be forgiven as we forgive the debts (the sins) of our debtors. Our Lord’s only commentary on “Our Father” is to underline this same point: if you forgive others, your heavenly Father will forgive you also. The only topic of the rest of Matthew 18 is a series of parables about forgiveness. Thus, it is far more—immeasurably more than the mere formal restoration of one erring member or the maintenance of the church’s discipline—which is at stake when we choose whether or not to believe that it is within the purpose and power of God working through the church to forgive and reconcile a fellow believer to myself. Might it even be the case that, in the effort to reach out evangelistically beyond the borders of our present membership, the churches have failed to retain within their midst that quality of loving fellowship which would certify that they truly do have a message for the world? In the ages before Constantine, the churches grew not because they were able to preach in public or to argue people into recognition of their guilt; it was the demonstration of the quality of life in the community that made others see their need and the power of God. Might it not be especially the case today, in a civilization deformed by legalistic and sacramental misunderstandings of the nature of forgiveness and absolution, that this restoration of the person-to-person character of forgiveness among believers could again come to be seen as our message to lonely individuals? An invisible God who forgives my past sins but leaves me alone in the present is not what I need; I need visible believers who forgive my daily sins, making it their responsibility to bear with me that burden. Let not the fear of mixing in others’ business, or of legalism, or of Catholicism, hold us back from this most costly and most valuable gift of ourselves to the fellow believer. “Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”8

1. See Matt 16:18 and 18:15.

2. John 20:23.

3. Matt 18:19–20.

4. See “Letter from C. G. to Thomas Muntzer,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) 170.

5. See Balthazar Hubmaier, Balthazar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, ed. H. Wayne Pipkin and John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1989) 350–51.

6. See Gal 6:2.

7. John 20:23.

8. Matt 18:15.