[Oe List ...] Salmon: The Responsibility of the Church for Society.doc

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Hey Bill!  Thanks for the shove and for the colored editorializing (or whatever you want to call it) of Niebuhr.  It made my day, and I hope it makes all my remaining days.  Sort of reminds me of the phrase of from the New Testament: "Can anything good come out of Kansas?")  It is proven that it can.
Grace and Peace,
Charles




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From: William Salmon <wsalmon at cox.net>
To: Ecumenical Order <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Thu, February 4, 2010 12:57:08 PM
Subject: [Oe List ...] Salmon: The Responsibility of the Church for Society.doc


Colleagues on the Journey--
            Just to add to the dialogue on the nature of the Christian Church, I offer for your reflection a familiar article. I apologize for messing with it, but this was done for the Friends of Trinity study group, a group of the Queer Community to whom I minister and they to me. This is one of the groups who feel left out, yet stay with it in order to live and love on behalf of it. 
            Perhaps it can be said that much of the institutional church isn’t the church at all. However, within it are pockets that act on behalf of all. However, the institutional church is where the Bread is broken and the Word is spoken; can the awakened life be far behind? 
            What we learned as the Order is that to enable the process of renewal it was necessary to build a structure of care. It is unfortunate this was necessary when the structure and the infra-structure already was in place; this was part of our necessary deed to enable our demonstration of what the church needs to look and act like.
            What the institutional church represents is the Body of Christ. Again, getting this demonstration of sacrificial obedience back into history could well be the task of a renewed Order; couldn’t it?
            Inner Peace, Bill Salmon
The Responsibility of the Church for Society
by H. Richard Niebuhr
H. Richard Niebuhr, for many years Sterling Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale, was one of mid-century's most respected teachers and writers. This essay appears as Chapter 5The Gospel, The World and the Church ed. Kenneth Scott Latourette 1946 Harper Bros.UniversityDivinitySchool

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1. The urgency of the question. 
2. The meaning of Christian responsibility: responsibility to and for, the kinds of irresponsibility, the scope of responsibility, responsibility to God, universal responsibility. 
3. Irresponsible religion: the worldly church, false prophecy and false priesthood, isolationism in the Church. 
            4. The Church as apostle, pastor and pioneer.
The Church as social pioneer
Finally, the social responsibility of the Church needs to be described as that of the pioneer. The Church is thatpart of the human community which responds first to God-in-Christ and Christ-in-God (read: The Big Picture is revealed in the Little Picture and visa-versa). It is the sensitive and responsive part in every society and mankind as a whole (read: Boy Scouts, Moslems, Baptists, atheists, Sony, Ford, Toyota, etc.). It is that group which hears the Word of God (You are loved), which sees His judgments (Tough Love when we miss the mark of living the humane life), which has the vision of the resurrection (living the Awakened Life). In its relations with God it is the pioneer part of society that responds to God on behalf of the whole society, somewhat, we may say, as science is the pioneer in responding to pattern or rationality in experience and as artists are the pioneers in responding to beauty. This sort of social responsibility may be
 illustrated by reference to the Hebrew people and the prophetic remnant. The Israelites, as the major prophets ultimately came to see, had been chosen by God to lead all nations to Him. It was that part of the human race which pioneered in understanding the vanity of idol worship and in obeying the law of brother-love (and sister-love). Hence in it all nations were eventually to be blessed. The idea of representational responsibility is illustrated particularly by Jesus Christ. As has often been pointed out by theology, from New Testament times onward, he is the first-born of many brothers (and sisters) not only in resurrection but in rendering obedience to God.His obedience was a sort of pioneering and representative obedience; he obeyed on behalf of men, and so showed what men could do and drew forth a divine response in turn toward all the men he represented. He discerned the divine mercy and relied upon it as representing men and pioneering for
 them. (Our freedom is to be obedient, and we know when we are obedient to At-One-Ment because we feel so dog-gone good about our selves, spouses, neighbors, jailers, etc.)
This thought of pioneering or representational responsibility has been somewhat obscured during the long centuries of individualist overemphasis. Its expression in the legal terms of traditional theology is strange and often meaningless to modern ears (read: Head-Trip Analysis). Yet with our understanding of the way that life is involved with life, of the manner in which self and society are bound together, of the way in which small groups within a nation act for the whole, it seems that we must move toward a conception similar to the Hebraic and medieval one(read: Gut-Trip Analysis)..
In this representational sense the Church isthat part of human society, andthat element in each particular society, which moves toward God (read: At-One-Ment), which as the priest acting for all men worships Him, which believes and trusts in Him on behalf of all, which isfirst to obey Him when it becomes aware of a new aspect of His will (read: all means ALL). Human society in all of its divisions and aspects does not believe. Its institutions are based on un-belief, on lack of confidence in the Lord of heaven and earth. But the Church has conceived faith in God and moves in the spirit of that trust as the hopeful and obedient part of society. (read: that part or that element of any society that acts as the hopeful and obedient society.)
In ethics it is the first to repent for the sins of a society and it repents on behalf of all. When it becomes apparent that slavery (read: homophobia) is transgression of the divine commandment, then the Church repents of it, turns its back upon it, abolishes it within itself. It does thisnot as the holy community separate from the world but as the pioneer and representative. It repents for the sin of the whole society and leads in the social act of repentance. When the property institutions of society are subject to question because innocent suffering illuminates their antagonism to the will of God, then the Church undertakes to change its own use of these institutions and to lead society in their reformation. So also the Church becomes a pioneer and representative of society in the practice of equality before God, in the reformation of institutions of rulership, in the acceptance of mutual responsibility of individuals for one another.
In our time, with its dramatic revelations of the evils of nationalism, ofracialism (read: homophobia) and of economic imperialism it is the evident responsibility of the Church to repudiate these attitudes within itself and to act as the pioneer of society in doing so. The apostolic proclamation of good and bad news to the colored races without a pioneering repudiation of racial discrimination in the Church contains a note of insincerity and unbelief. The prophetic denunciation of nationalism without a resolute rejection of nationalism in the Church is mostly rhetorical. As the representative and pioneer of mankind the Church meets its social responsibility when in its own thinking organization and action it functions as a world society, undivided by race, class and national interests.
This seems to be the highest form of social responsibility in the Church. It is the direct demonstration of love of God and neighbor rather than a repetition of the commandment to self and others. It is the radical demonstration of faith. Where this responsibility is being exercised there is no longer any question about the reality of the Church. In pioneering and representative action of response to God in Christ the invisible Church becomes visible and the deed of Christ is reduplicated.
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