[Dialogue] Prolegomena to the rule of the order

[PSchrijnen at aol.com]

Here is a  trans-cription of the scanned documents. The sentence that really 
struck me was  sentence three.  


THE 
PROLEGOMENA 
TO  THE 
RULE OF  THE ORDER 

A MORAL  COVENANT AND CORPORATE DISCIPLINE 

A Prologue  to Corporate Discipline 

I 
    1.  We, the __________  Community, by our free resolve, before the 
creator of our personal and  collective destinies and the name of Jesus Christ our 
Lord, take upon  ourselves the moral covenant and rule of life, for the sake of 
a particular  corporate mission within the total calling of the church, to 
which we have  been commonly elected.

II

    2.  We confess, in the first  place, that we can do so only because we 
have been seized by the word of the  love of God in Christ Jesus solely for the 
sake of the mission of being His  People in the world. 
    3.  We acknowledge, secondly,  that we can do so only because we find 
ourselves so historically situated that  we are commonly called to exercise this 
self-understanding and mission in a  particular time and place and endeavour.

III

    4.  We further acknowledge and  confess that we have been immediately 
prompted to this course by the church’s  new vision of the Gospel as the freedom 
to involve oneself utterly in this  world; and we believe that free 
involvement in the world demands a disciplined  life; 
    5.  By the church’s new image  of herself as mission: the bearer of the 
Word of Life in and to history  without which men do not live as historical 
beings; and we are persuaded that  historical mission calls for a disciplined  
people; 
    6.  By the church’s new concern  for her own radical renewal in our time 
which necessitates creative  experiments of many kinds and various forms; we 
deem this corporate discipline  to be one such experiment for the renewal of 
the  church; 
    7.  By the church’s new  confrontation by the Fathers with the fact that 
wherever authentic faith in  Jesus Christ has been recovered in the past, 
there has followed a new sense of  mission to the world and intentional discipline 
for the sake of that  mission; 
    8.  By the church’s new  awareness, born of the times, that all men live 
consciously or unconsciously  by some structure and that the self-aware man 
does and must exist in a  self-consciously ordered life. Discipline is a concern 
of our age both inside  and outside the church. 

IV

    9.  We must always remember and  ever remind one another that in our 
corporate discipline we begin with Christ;  we do no strive toward Him. Our 
covenant is a sign and symbol of our immutable  standing before the Lord; it must 
never be perverted into a means to that end.  God’s acceptance of us is 
accomplished forever and it is utterly impossible  and utterly unnecessary to gain our 
salvation through this rule or any other  pious work, so called.  
    10. This means, and let us ever  be clear about it, that our covenant is 
solely for the sake of the common  mission to which we have been called. 
By-productive consequences there may be,  but the rule is not directed toward the 
nourishment of our religious life, the  development of a sense of togetherness, 
the creation of harmonious  relationships, or the establishment of human 
community as such, in any form.  Our common rule thrusts us upon our task and 
exists only for the sake of that  task. 
    11. We must always remember and  ever remind one another that while our 
corporate discipline does and must make  explicit certain structures in which 
we labor, our common existence is in no  sense and at no time synonymous or 
reducible to structures of any kind, hidden  or disclosed, written or unwritten. 
Human relationships remain mysteriously  beyond the power of human reason to 
articulate and any order to contain.   
    12. Again, let us also be aware  that tough our covenant necessarily has 
a definite fixedness and a certain  rigidity, it must always be kept pliable, 
ready for adjustment or the varying  needs, situations and obligations of the 
different individuals participating  in it. Finally and most important, the 
total rule must constantly be  maintained as open for alteration, for continuing 
development and indeed for  complete discontinuation.  
    13. We must always remember and  ever remind one another that in our 
corporate discipline, we no longer live  and work alone as isolated individuals. 
Henceforth our historical calling and  mission, our corporate being and doing, 
our personal thinking and acting, are  embodied in a definite community itself 
incorporated into the total life and  mission of the historical church. All 
men hiddenly or overly live our of some  community; in our moral covenant we 
make our social being explicitly  intentional. 
    14. On the other hand, we dare  not forget that moral covenants are never 
for the purpose of escaping the  burden of selfhood. Authentic, 
self-consciously disciplined community does not  swallow the individual; it rather creates 
the very possibility of personhood  pushing the individual against the 
necessity to decide for himself and then  holding him accountable for the 
consequences of his own actions. Genuine  participation in the structures of community 
and authentic individuality are  two poles of the same reality. 
    15. We must always remember and  ever remind one another that in our 
corporate discipline we are both  responsible to and for one another. Not only 
must each one of us carry the  burden of his own relation to the rule, but we 
must each bear the loyalty and  disloyalty of our brothers under the rule. We 
must assume responsibility for  intruding into the other’s existence up to the 
point of his freedom, and in  turn, freely open ourselves to the other’s 
responsibility to intrude into our  life up to the point of our conscience before  
God. 
    16. Furthermore, let us never  forget that tough we are utterly bound by 
our covenant, we remain free at any  time and in any circumstance to break the 
covenant; never, to be sure, by  default in decision but by a self-conscious 
free resolve made in the light of  other claims which other covenants in life 
lay upon us. In one sense, a rule  was made to be broken and the disloyalty 
taken freely upon ourselves. Our  covenant thrusts upon us our freedom and 
responsibility.   
    17. We must always remember and  ever remind each other that though our 
corporate discipline necessarily must  include within it explicit ways and 
means of accounting before one another and  exposing ourselves to our fellows, it 
is never to the end of maintaining the  rule intact, never for the sake of 
judgment in and for itself, but rather to  provide the opportunity for taking 
upon ourselves afresh our freedom to be  responsible persons in our mission. 
    18. Moreover, we must bear in  mind that such explicit opening of 
ourselves through our covenant to our  promises before the gaze of another, though 
not determining our objective  guilt, does bring many hidden guilts to the 
surface of our lives. Such  intensifying of our sensitivities to guilt in a 
community grounded in the word  of acceptance becomes a great gift. The releasing of 
hidden guilt and the  possibility of embracing the same, is that without which 
we cannot and do not  have life. 
    19. We must always remember and  ever remind each other that a corporate 
discipline involves a kind of total  commitment; he who enters into it 
therefore must do through his own free  resolve in such a fashion that the rule 
becomes his own life discipline and  not some demand thrust upon him by another. 
And if the covenant is to remain  an imperative from within ourselves rather 
than an alien pressure from  without, it must ever and again be renewed with an 
abandonment which mixes our  total being with it. 
    20. Nevertheless it is utterly  necessary that any covenant be understood 
and held as relative: relative  before our relation to God in Christ; 
relative to our effective engagement in  the world. For this reason it must 
continually be grasped as open-ended;  responsible discontinuation will then be an 
ever-present possibility for  everyone involved; our concrete concern for one 
another will insure that such  a course be taken only in the same sobriety and 
fear of God that our entrance  into the covenant demands. 





   
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