Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas

Abstract

In Book IV of Calvin's Institutes , the ‘external means …by which God invites us into the society of Christ and holds us therein’ consists chiefly in ‘the true church, with which as mother of all the godly we must keep unity’. Like Luther, Calvin could speak of mater ecclesia with an unembarrassed reference to the visible, historical community of God's people. The rhetoric of ‘mother church’ did not long remain a part of Protestant sensibility. The Reformation principle of ‘Christ alone’ has often tended to undermine strong claims for the church; conversely, the critique of institutions has played a key role in the shaping of Protestant identity, at times seeming to be the very point of the Reformation. The distinction assumes classic form in Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith . Protestant Christianity, Schleiermacher writes, ‘makes the individual's relation to the church dependent on his relation to Christ’, whereas Catholicism ‘makes the individual's relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the church’. This intuition would seem to be confirmed by recent ecumenical dialogue, which has fastened on the church's role in salvation as the most likely candidate for a ‘basic difference’ between Catholicism and Protestantism. At the same time, important voices on both sides have been asking whether such a sharp distinction can or should be sustained.