Confessing Christ in a Post-Christendom Context.

As a foreigner at this conference, and inheritor of Presbyterian identity by only one-third of my ecclesiastical lineage, I have little right to be here. My only qualification for accepting the honour of the invitation, I think, is a life-time of attempting to comprehend the same mysteries that you yourselves seek to address. I also feel a strong sense of identification with what I believe to be the generative basis of this "network". At a time of unprecedented transition in the Christian movement, when (as George Orwell once put it) "the little orthodoxies of the right and the left vie with one another for possession of our souls", it is necessary to assert both the modesty and the complex, nuanced character of Christian faith and theology against the false certainties of true belief, ideology and religious simplism. Today, Christians of integrity are thrown back upon the never-reducible testimony of Scripture, Tradition and the divine Spirit -- a testimony that defies possession, but also manifests an exceptional trust in the insight, imagination, reasonableness and spiritual courage of ordinary human beings when they are modest enough to ask for what they do not and cannot possess. As I keep assuring myself, "God permits theology". That, in any case, is the spirit in which I would like to address the two topics I have been asked to treat: Christology and ecclesiology.

Both of these topics, obviously enough, demand far more time and space (not to mention wisdom!) than are available to me. I will comment upon aspects of these two areas of doctrine that have seemed to me especially vital for the life and mission of the church in our context. I will concentrate on what I think are critical questions -- critical in the sense that they represent, at least in my opinion, points on which greater clarity is required if the community of Christ's discipleship is to move into the post-Christendom future with something like apostolic confidence.

The centrality of Jesus as Christ

Christianity is a dialectically monotheistic faith in which the nature and purposes of the Ultimate are illumined by historical events culminating, though by no means terminating, in the life, death and resurrection of the Jewish teacher Jesus, called by faith the Christ. This may seem a truism, but it acquires new import in our historical situation. For as the Christian religion emerges out of the Constantinian cocoon in which, throughout most of its history, it has been so tightly enclosed, Christians find themselves relieved of the burden of assuming, as the raison d'etre of their movement, custodianship of the random religious sentiments and moral codes that have clustered about the corpus Christianum. In short, we are free, insofar as we are courageous enough to undertake it, to contemplate and to enact in concrete ways the only biblically and theologically sound reason we have for calling ourselves Christians -- which is to say our confession of Jesus as the Christ.

As long as Christianity had to play -- or allowed itself to play -- the role of Western culture-religion, the nomenclature "Christian" was obliged to stand for all sorts of dispositions extraneous or tangential in relation to biblical faith. In the post-Christendom context that has been in formation since the 18th century and will be the normal situation of the church in the third millennium, Christians are required to become knowledgeable and articulate about the christological basis of their belief. We are Christians, not because we are (or think we are) good, or right, or just, or "concerned" -- and certainly not because we are "nice", though hopefully we are (as Reinhold Niebuhr once said) "as decent as ordinary people". We are Christians because we believe in God as God is made known in Jesus Christ through the divine Spirit and the testimony of scripture.

This is basic, and indeed it is so basic that we should expect, over the next few decades, that any for whom such a confession contains no element of meaning or conviction or even interest would likely withdraw from the churches and seek …