Patrick Grant on the church

I am sad now about things related to Christians and the church…

I believe Patrick Grant’s take on the church embodies my yearning as related to the church:

“As a cultural institution, the church preaches its own deficiency while promoting the good it safeguards. The institution protects, but in embracing the anawim it also becomes defenceless and insecure. This is because a church preaching the cross and resurrection preaches against the saving efficacy of religious observance and law; Jesus crucified outside the city wall shows that religion and the state do not save. Yet Jesus also upheld the law, which He came to fulfil and not destroy. The church carries both messages: the message that laws and walls protect and that they do not save.”

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Grant, Patrick. Out of Contradiction: Meditations towards a contemporary spirituality. (The Pentland Press 1994) p. 28

The Church and the Gospel

'The appointment of Jesus to be the Christ takes place in the Spirit and must be apprehended in the Spirit. It is self-sufficient, unlimited, and in itself true. And moreover, it is what is altogether new, the decisive factor and turning-point in man's consideration of God. . . . To the proclamation and receiving of this Gospel the whole activity of the Christian community — its teaching, ethic, and worship — is strictly related. But the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only insofar as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell that seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself. The people of Christ, His community, know that no sacred word or work or thing exists in its own right: they know only those words and works and things which by their negation are sign-posts tot he Holy One. If anything Christian (!) be unrelated to the Gospel, it is a human by-product, a dangerous religious survival, a regrettable misunderstanding. For in this case content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave, positive for negative, and the characteristic marks of Christianity would be possession and self-sufficiency rather than deprivation and hope. If this be persisted in, there emerges, instead of the community of Christ, Christendom, and ineffective peace-pact or compromise with that existence which, moving with its own momentum, lies on this side of the resurrection. Christianity would then have lost all relation to the power of God."

– Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans

What is The Church anyway?

“The Church is the pilgrim people of God. It is on the move–hastening to the ends of the earth to beseech all men to be reconciled to God, and hastening to the end of time to meet its Lord who will gather all into one. Therefore the nature of the Church is never to be finally defined in static terms, but only in terms of that to which it is going. It cannot be understood rightly except in a perspective which is at once missionary and eschatological, and only in that perspective can the deadlock of our present ecumenical debate be resolved.”

– Lesslie Newbigin, Household of God