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Good morning. I'd like to introduce to you our speaker this morning and just briefly share some of the things that he has accomplished. From August of 2005 to June of 2007, the very Reverend Philip W. Turner was the interim dean and president of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest here in Austin, Texas.

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The very Reverend Turner earned his Bachelor of Arts from Washington and Lee University, the Bachelor of Divinity, which is equivalent to our M.Div., and his Doctor of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Recently, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University awarded him the Dr.

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Canon Law upon his retirement And the Seminary of the Southwest here awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 2007. From 1964 to 1974, Philip Turner was a missionary in Uganda, Africa. In 1974, he took the call to begin his academic career here at the Seminary of the Southwest.

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And in 1980, he took up the call to General Theological Seminary in New York City. and general has one of the most beautiful places in all of New York City, in Chelsea Square, actually. And he served there for 11 years as professor of Christian ethics. He then moved further north to New Haven, Connecticut, and served 7 years as a dean at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.

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Dean Turner has authored 5 books. The very Reverend Turner is a scholar, a teacher, and a trumpet-like voice of his church. Here's A memorable quote of something that he said on March 6, 2006. Lent is now here.

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We clergy are as busy as we can be, and it will be that way until Easter. We will spend our time helping others live a holy life and a holy Lent. And in the process, It will be in all likelihood, there will be little time to attend to ourselves.

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The following meditation is meant to give us some help in observing Lent, ourselves. It concerns a matter that lies close to the heart of our calling, a calling that entrusts us with what used to be called the cure of the souls, that matter at certain places within the New Testament is called godliness. There is indeed something quite godly about the two persons that the very Reverend Dr.

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Philip W. Turner III will lecture upon this morning. His second lecture is entitled, Barth Was Right and H.R. Niebuhr Wasn't.

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Will you welcome him, please? This guy's good. Well, you're right. The overall title of this two-lecture series is The Focus of Christian Ethics.

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Yesterday, Our Options in the Last Days of One Nation Under God, and today, Barth was right and H.R. Niebuhr was wrong. I hope that will become clear. I've always been interested in what I like to call theological motivation.

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That is to say, I've always wondered what concern or concerns actually drive a person to sit down and spend a goodly portion of their lives poring over books and seeking to transfer their thoughts to paper or, in our day, computer chips. Of course, in academia today, The concern may well be no more than the need of a professor to get tenure. And I suppose that a competitive environment like this does produce spectacular results in certain fields, particularly those of mathematics, science, technology, and economics.

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Nevertheless, I don't think it's so in the case of theology. Theological work of genuine seriousness is always born from burning questions. St.

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Augustine, as he said, became a problem to himself, a problem he had to solve. And so he wrote his Confessions. In like manner, the fall of Rome presented problems for Christian believers that could not be ignored. And so he wrote The City of God.

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Or, again, Karl Barth, shaken by the palpable failure of liberal Protestantism that was exposed by the First World War and the rise of fascism, sought to regram. theology in the word of God rather than in the word of man. I have, I believe, said enough to make my point. If one wants to understand the thought of any significant theologians of the church, it's important to be conscious of their motivation.

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And these lectures grow out of the conviction that it is equally important to understand the motivation for producing an account of what I've called life in Christ. And so it is that I've given this series the overall title, The Focus of Christian Ethics. The focus of a given account both reveals the motivation of its author and helps us understand his account of life in Christ and the interrelation of its various aspects. Now my own motivation for, as it were, focusing on focus of Christian ethics,

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is that the two most common centers of attention now shaping the mind and practice of the churches are, in my view, inadequate to the task that lies before us. Excuse me. I believe also that they lack sufficient biblical basis. And I speak, of course, of a focus on spirituality on the one hand, or on the reform of the social order on the other.

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And these were my topics yesterday. My task in this lecture is to establish first that a focus on the common life of the church rather than the life of the soul or the reform of society most accords with the witness of Holy Scripture, and second, that such a focus provides a better foundation for speaking about the life of the soul and the relation of the church to its social environment. Sorry, I'm a little bit hoarse. And as an overly dramatic way of highlighting these tasks, I have entitled this lecture, Barth was Right and H.R.

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Niebuhr was Wrong. And by that I mean Barth saw the task of Christian ethics as witness, while Niebuhr saw the task as cultural transformation. And I do not wish to be misunderstood on this point. I am not opposed to cultural transformation.

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It's just that I do not believe it to be the defining focus of Christian ethics. But more of that later. I'm just going to take a drink. Excuse me.

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I don't know what has attacked me, but something has. Now, my purpose at the moment does not go beyond establishing the common life of the church as a more adequate focus for Christian ethics. than either spirituality or social reform. And I propose to accomplish this task by taking a leaf out of the book of the sociologist Emil Durkheim, who argued in the Rules of Sociological Method that one could establish a norm by means of one well-chosen example.

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And I have chosen for this purpose the epistle to the Ephesians, in belief that a close reading of this text will establish the case. And so I ask, what is the focus of life in Christ as presented in this remarkable letter? And to find an answer, I look once more at what, according to its author, is the goal, the foundation, and the character of life in Christ.

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These are the distinguishing, or the diagnostic questions that will reveal the theological and ethical focus of its author. Now, according to this disciple of the apostle Paul, what is the goal of life in Christ? 1 makes a clear link between life in Christ on the one hand and the calling of the church on the other.

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This verse is as good a place as any to begin in search of an answer. Believers are here urged, and I quote, to live a life worthy of the calling to which they have been called. The question is what that calling might be, and what form of life might be worthy of it. The letter provides a bold answer to both questions.

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The calling of the church is stated with economy and clarity in 1:9-11, And this is sort of my translation, but I think it's accurate. For He has made known to us, that is to say the church, the mystery of His will, in accordance with His purpose which He set forth in Him, that is to say Christ, for administering the fullness of the ages, so as to sum up all things, ta panta, in Christ, things in the heavens and things on earth, in Him.

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An expansive, and I admit somewhat free, paraphrase of these verses might run something like this. In Christ, God has made known His eternal purpose for the creation. That purpose is to unify all things in Christ and so bring them under the rule of God. This purpose stands before the foundation of the world, but until the present, it has remained a secret.

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However, at the beginning of the last age, it has been made known to the church. Further, God has revealed not only that the last age is issued in by Christ, but also that it is to be administered by Him in a way that makes the summing up, the unity He purposes, visible. Now, given the extraordinary expanse of God's purpose, one can only be surprised by the fact that the arena in which God's plan begins to unfold is remarkably small.

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As the argument of the letter develops in chapter 2, verses 11 through 12, it becomes clear that it is in the small congregations of Asia Minor, rather than in the expanse of the Roman Empire, that the plan begins to make its appearance. And according to these verses, the primary expression of Christ's administration of God's purpose first becomes visible, are you ready for this? in the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile that characterizes the common life of these little congregations. The result of Christ's atoning work is not only that Jew and Gentile alike have access in the Spirit to one God and Father, it is also the case that the Gentiles who once lived apart from the commonwealth of Israel

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the covenants, sorry, and so they lived apart from the Commonwealth of Israel, and so without access to God's covenants, are no longer strangers to either the Commonwealth, the covenants, or the promises that go with them. The Gentiles are no longer at best foreigners and resident aliens among God's people. Rather, in these little congregations, Gentile believers are now united with Jewish believers in such a way as to be called fellow citizens with them and members of the same household. Namely, that of one God who is now Father to them both.

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This household can also be termed a structure whose foundation is the apostles and prophets, and whose capstone is Christ. If you will, the Gentiles have been built into this structure in a way that leads to its growth into a holy temple. I think you can see the metaphors mix one with another in this remarkable paragraph.

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But in the end, the meaning is clear. These congregations, by growing into a holy temple, become the place on earth God is present. They become also the place where the divine plan is visible, apparently even to the principalities and powers in heavenly places, 310. Christ's successful administration of the divine plan is understood by the addition of two other images

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that strengthen even further the centrality of unity as definitive of the calling of the church. In 215, the author states that Christ's act of reconciliation serves to create in Himself one new man, henna kenan antropon, or if you will, a new Adam. This new man, or better, humankind, is not divided, as are the peoples of the earth. Rather, in Christ, Jew and Gentile are bound so closely in this one new man that they become one body.

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A new humankind. One body. a commonwealth, fellow citizens, members of a single household, children of one God and Father, those who share one spirit and one inheritance, the temple of the Lord. All these images of unity cascade down upon the reader.

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The goal and plan of God in history is to unite all things, tapanta, in Christ, and the place that goal and plan become manifest is the common life of the church. It is fair to say, I believe, that by this author's likes, unity is God's chief business, and unity is the chief calling of God's people. The unity of all things in Christ is God's purpose in creation.

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It has been his plan from the beginning, and this plan takes effect through a people whom, out of love, he picks. out ek legomai and marks out to live in a way that manifests God's glory. God's aim through this providential movement is to lead the peoples of the earth to respond by glorifying God. One might say by way of summary that God's purpose and so that of the life of Christ is the unity of all things in Christ

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in a great act of glorification of the Father in the Spirit. Now, given the divided state of the churches and their increasingly marginal social location, one must at least pause to ask if a vision such as this of the calling of the church represents no more than a pious hope translated into stirring rhetoric. Sadly, many of those now involved in the ecumenical movement appear to think so. As long ago as 1971, the World Council of Churches issued a paper that seems to give up the struggle for unity almost altogether.

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Rather, the paper seeks to justify ecclesial division on the basis of differing interpretations of Scripture, each of which apparently has the backing of the Holy Spirit. In hindsight, the 1971 statement seems little more than a pneumatic approval of Christian division rooted in contemporary notions of the pluriform nature of truth. It seems to me, however, that this form of trimming represents nothing less than disobedience on steroids. The focus of the common life of the church on unity is rooted in the providence of God rather than in the possibilities of history.

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And a closer look at the basis of this focus can do nothing but display with even greater clarity the centrality of this defining feature of life in Christ. Another drink, excuse me, whoever did this, thank you. According to the author of this letter, on what foundation does life in Christ rest? The author may well not have been Paul, but he was a good Jew, and like all Jews, he thought of the unity of the world in very different terms than the wise people of the Greco-Roman culture he inhabited.

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The Jews did not think of the unity of the cosmos in metaphysical terms. as did the philosophers, but in political terms, as did the prophets. As Stig Hansen wrote some years ago, The world being a unity means from a Jewish viewpoint, everything in the world, nature, culture, history, the whole shoot and match, conforming to the will of its Creator. Ephesians locates God's unifying purpose first,

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in a sovereign choice made by the ruler of the universe before the foundation of the world. And that choice was to mark out beforehand, poorizo, and adopt as children those who will become members of God's assembly. God's purpose for these children is that they live a holy and blameless life of love that redounds to the praise of God their Father's glory. 4-12, 3:1-11.

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It seems fair to say that God's eternal purpose is for the entire creation to find its unity in the praise of God's glory, and that the election of a people is the point at which the council, hebule, the council of God's will, begins to take effect. Calvin got that right, didn't he? The ultimate basis of the unity of all things is the eternal purpose of God, who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of His will. The unity of all things has a penultimate basis, however, in Christ's sacrificial death.

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His death procures things, sorry, procures for believers both redemption from bondage to the powers, and forgiveness of their trespasses. Further, Christ, vindicated by God through the resurrection, has been given a position far above that of any ruler within the created order. And as the administrator of God's will, He exercises this authority in a most immediate way, surprise of all, within God's assembly, chapter 1, verses 22 through 23.

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He also, as the conqueror of the powers, like a triumphant general, distributes the fruits of his conquest to the citizens of God's commonwealth. 8. And so his gifts, that is to say, people, some of whom are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, these walking, talking, breathing, living gifts of the Spirit serve to build up the church and so further God's unifying purpose. The goal of life in Christ is unity.

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The basis of that goal is first the eternal counsel of God the Father. It is second, the saving action of the Son who distributes gifts to the Church. And as one might anticipate, there is a third basis, namely in the work of the Holy Spirit. I believe it's possible to show that the author's statement that the saints are now seated with Christ in the heavenly places, 2:6, makes sense only if we understand that they are united with the ascended Christ through the Spirit that dwells within both.

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They are through the Spirit in Christ Jesus. I will not die in the ditch of this interpretation, however. It is nonetheless indisputable that the Spirit strengthens and informs the saints by attaching them more closely to Christ.

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The connection the Spirit establishes between Christ and the saints makes it possible for them, that is to say the saints, both to live their lives on a different basis, and most important, to take in the full dimensions of God's purpose and the extraordinary glory of His nature. what is called, what is the breadth and length and height and depth. And so it is that our author prays for the members of Christ's body to be strengthened by the Spirit in the inner man. And the inner man, as it appears here, is best understood to mean the base of operation at the center of a person's being.

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There the Spirit works to strengthen believers by the gift of power. Such power is associated in Ephesians 3:18-19 with the saint's ability jointly to comprehend or grasp fully the dimensions of God's intentions for the creation, the dimensions of the salvation wrought in Christ, and the dimensions of God's love. Now, I'm sorry for this trip through Ephesians on roller skates. Perhaps after such a rapid passage, we should pause for a moment to take stock.

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It seems a fair summary to say that the basis of the unity God wills is the economy or the working out of God the Father, whose purpose is the unity of all things in Christ, of God the Son, who through His sacrificial death establishes the conditions for the unity God plans, and God the Holy Spirit, who incorporates believers into Christ and so makes available to them the reconciling benefits of His death and resurrection. Though it's anachronistic to say so, it nonetheless seems reasonable to say that the author of Ephesians bases his focus on unity in the life of the Holy Trinity.

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The entire economy of God, the entire economy of God, is placed at the foundation of what he presents as the telos, the end of God's people, and the providential purposes of God Himself. Now, before I show how this letter depicts the character of life in Christ, a passing observation is in order. You will have noticed that both John Cassian and Walter Rauschenbusch based the focus and goal of their respective accounts of life in Christ on the teaching of Jesus, on the life and teaching of Jesus. And they do so in a way that stands in marked contrast

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to the full Trinitarian account that is found in Ephesians. For these two writers, Christ is an exemplar that serves both to justify and shape their depiction of Christian living. For John Cassian, Christ's renunciation displays both the basis and the goal of life in Christ. For Rauschenbusch, Christ's socialized love serves the same function.

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Now, my observation is this. As substantial as these accounts of life in Christ are, and indeed they are substantial, there is nonetheless about them the odor of moralism. Jesus stands there as an example to imitate, and he hovers over one as a taskmaster who speaks through the superego. Come, renounce the world.

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Come make society new, or had we looked at John Howard Yoder, come be a non-violent. counterexample to the world's pragmatism. How different is the call of the author of Ephesians, who locates the life of the believer within the unfolding of a divine council administered by Christ and furthered by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church and in the heart of the believer. How much more inviting is the call to live a life that is axios, worthy, or perhaps better, proportionate to the counsel of God?

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These remarks are an aside that perhaps reflects my own reactions, but I think not. I do believe that if a call to imitate Christ is separated from a full account of the economy of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One cuts the moral life off from the source that sustains it.

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When that happens, one inevitably ends with one form or another of moralism. Well, be that as it may, we are still left with the question of the character of life in Christ as presented in this letter. Here's where we get down to the parish stuff. We know that the character or shape of that life is to be axios, worthy or proportionate to God's plan to unite all things in Christ Jesus.

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Or to put it another way, the common life of the church is to be worthy of Christ's administration of the last age. Question is, what does a worthy life look like? The letter describes it under three headings: being holy and blameless before God in love, being careful how one walks, and being strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. And taken together, these three characteristics display the shape of the common life of the church.

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Now, I have space to sketch only the first of these three, but they all display the central importance of the common life of the church. What is it to be holy and blameless before God in love? It means this. The saints have been chosen or marked out at Lego beforehand for this destiny.

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The point to note is that love for which they are destined is not a pious sentiment. Love has a face, it is recognizable. Its presence gives God's assembly their identity and makes it clear that their common life is proportionate to their calling to unity under Christ Jesus. And thus love imitates God who accomplishes His plan through the sacrifice of Christ,

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who gave himself up for us. It is in giving oneself up for that love assumes a distinct identity as the engine of unity. Love that gives itself up for first manifests itself as tapeno prosunes and protes. These are the first characteristics of a worthy life, but there is much dispute over how best to translate these words.

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I believe that the most likely translation is humility of mind, on the one hand, and gentleness on the other. That is, the first characteristics of a worthy life are, on the one hand, openness to instruction, And on the other, gentleness, particularly in the treatment of an erring brother or sister. That gentleness is better translated as, sorry, that gentleness is a better translation of than meekness, is strongly suggested by the next characteristic of a worthy life, sorry, macrotumia, or long-suffering patience.

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2. In Pauline letters, Makrotomia is connected in particular with the long-suffering of God who provides space for repentance (1 Thessalonians 5:14, Galatians 5:22). It is this background that serves to explain the following admonition in which Christians are urged to be forbearing, an ekomenoi. one before bearing one another in love.

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Not surprisingly, they are also urged to be eager, spudadzontes, to maintain unity of peace in the bond of peace. And why? Because there is one body, one spirit, just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all. It seems pretty clear to me that the primary focus of Christian ethics for this interpreter of Paul is the common.

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life of the church, and in particular its peace and unity. The truth of this conviction is made doubly plain by the concluding sentence of this section of the letter. Here the reader is urged to put away the things that cause division, namely bitterness, wrath, anger, contentious argumentation, slander, and malice. Here the reader is also urged to put on the reconciling graces of kindness, tenderheartedness, and forgiveness.

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And now a concluding word about this author's focus on the common life of the church. It's tempting to dismiss his counsel as naive and unrealistic. Where does such a church exist? The answer, and there is one,

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The answer is that it exists in the way in which it addresses the inevitable stresses, strains, and divisions that are ever present within its common life. Our author is more than aware that the church is filled with little children who are not mature in the Lord and who are tossed about by every trendy teaching. He is perfectly aware that what he calls a former manner of life still makes its appearance among the saints, 4.22.

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He is aware that the unity God purposes for the church and for all things is not a finished work. Rather, it is a reality that comes to be in the midst of failure and conflict. It is a reality that is manifest in the way in which conflict and failure are addressed by the saints. Not with bitterness, wrath, anger, contentious argument, slander, and malice, but with humility of mind, gentleness, patience, forbearance, eagerness for unity, kindness, tenderheartedness, and forgiveness.

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He is, in short, fully aware that the unity God purposes does not exist in a steady state. Rather, it comes to be in the midst of conflict and failure, and it is manifest by the way in which the saints live a worthy life by imitating God in their struggle to comprehend and live out what is the height and depth and length and breadth of the counsel of God. It is in this agonistic manifestation of the life for which they were marked out that the saints witness. This witness may or may not lead to the transformation of culture, but it does display, even if imperfectly, the purpose of God that has been since before the creation of the world.

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And so I conclude that Barth's account of life in Christ as witness is more in accord with what this writer, is more in accord with that of this writer than is H.R. Niebuhr's account of that life as a transformative of culture. Of course, Ephesians could be idiosyncratic, an anomaly in the New Testament.

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And I am more aware that I will have to show that this is not the case if I wish to establish my point. I am more aware that I will have to show, sorry, I'm also aware that I will have to show that this focus does not exclude an interest in the life of the soul or in the reform of society. Now, clearly, my last remarks suggest a minimum of two more lectures. All the time I have for is a few concluding remarks, and in this effort, I'm going to ask the best use of your imaginations possible, so that even if you do not see the finished product, you will at least see the direction in which my thought is headed.

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And I'm going to begin with the possible charge that one can't establish the position I've taken on the basis of the epistle to the Ephesians, because the views of this author are idiosyncratic. And my response is this. First, though one might claim that the prophetic stress on righteousness and justice found in the Old Testament is the true focus of Christian ethics, I note that these concerns are always contained within a vision of the larger purpose of God. This larger purpose is Israel's role as a light to the nations.

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Israel's common life serves to draw all peoples to the worship of the one true God. Israel's ethic of righteousness and justice is in fact an ethic of communal witness. It is not a warrant for a particular form of transformative politics. Excuse me.

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Second, a focus on the common life of the church is, I believe, central to the major accounts of the Christian life to be found in the New Testament. The natural place to turn for support of such a statement is the Gospel of John. John's Gospel is associated with Ephesus, as is our epistle.

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Many have noted the themes they share. Certainly an emphasis on the centrality of unity is chief among them. In the great high priestly prayer, Jesus asks that His disciples may be one even as He and His Father are one. And Raymond Brown is right to insist that the unity here spoken of is not to be moralized.

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The unity of Father and Son is not in the first instance moral. It consists most basically of a shared life. The same is true of the disciples' unity with Christ and with one another. Their unity is first to be understood as a living connection, rooted in common life and in the presence of one Spirit.

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Nevertheless, this unity of life expresses itself necessarily in the love the disciples have both for Jesus and for one another. Further, the love they have is defined by willingness to lay down their lives for their friends. And what is the goal of this communal ethic of sacrificial love? Jesus prays the Church be perfectly one so that the world might know that God has sent His Son into the world.

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The focus of Christian ethics for John is the common life of the Church. John's account of life in Christ is one of communal witness to the act of God in Christ by means of a common life that expresses itself in love. As a final indication that Ephesians is not idiosyncratic, I offer Matthew's communal ethic as presented in the Sermon on the Mount. I do not mean that the words of the sermon are meant for the disciples and only for the disciples.

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As Ulrich Lutz has pointed out, the disciples are told by Jesus to transmit to the Gentiles all that I have commanded you. The summary of what Jesus commands is contained in the Sermon on the Mount. Its counsels are meant for all people. Thus, the audience of the sermon is both the disciples and the crowds.

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However, Matthew makes it clear that Jesus addresses his words directly and in particular to the disciples. They are the ones whose lives lived in accordance with the dictates of the sermon are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Once more, one is presented with a communal ethic of witness, whose truth is guaranteed by the power of lives lived in accord with all that Jesus taught.

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Controversial as the statement may be, I believe that if I had time, I could show that what I have said of John and Matthew is true as well for Luke, who is now cited as the major authority for an ethic of social reform. That exercise will have to wait for another occasion. In the brief time that is left, it behooves me to indicate the way in which the position I have taken supports both a demanding ascetical theology and a demanding social ethic. First, the life of the soul.

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No Christian person, even a hyper-Lutheran, can ignore the question of sanctification. Christ can hardly want us to remain little ones for the rest of our lives. Surely He expects us to attain mature manhood. Surely He expects us to pummel our bodies lest we be castaways.

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And surely He expects us to learn the discipline of obedience, even to the point of leaving all and following Him. He expects all of these things. The problem comes when these expectations become for us an exercise in self-cultivation, self-realization, or self-absorption. Any good Lutheran will tell you that, noble as such exercises may appear, when directed at the self, they become yet additional examples of life, curvatus inssei.

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What happens, however? when holiness is located within a body whose life together exists to manifest the unity of all things in Christ Jesus? What happens when humility of mind, gentleness, patience, forbearance, eagerness for unity, tenderheartedness, kindness, forgiveness, and most of all love, are not goals on the way to self-perfection or growth, but graces given and learned in the midst of what Ephesians calls the bond of peace? What happens when these graces are not personal goals, but the form of life in the midst of which we have been placed?

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It is my conviction that a shift of focus of this kind, a shift that pries us out of our narcissism and redirects our gaze to our place within a communion of people who share Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, this shift would transform beyond belief the way in which we think of both spirituality and the way in which we understand our participation in our various congregations. Each church committee would become, first of all, the place I have a chance to grow further into what Ephesians calls the measure of the fullness of Christ. Each coffee hour

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would be a scene in which people learn to give up silly talk, morologia, and speak in a way that may impart grace to those who hear. Imagine what it would be like if our congregations began to think of themselves as the place God is present upon earth, and so a place where people learn to imitate God and walk in love so that the principalities and powers saw a new reality on earth. And what is this new reality? It is a communion of people who are recognizable as one new man, one body, a band of fellow citizens, the household of God, and yes, the holy temple of the Lord, the dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

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What if we came to think of spirituality in this way? We might give up journaling and seek instead to learn macrotomia, which is to say, the ability to put up with utterly insufferable people because God died for them. And what would it be like to view the culture of which we are apart from within another in which we are being formed into the likeness of Christ? This, I grant, is the most difficult of the questions I have posed.

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And it is one that returns us to H.R. Niebuhr's question about the relation between Christ and culture. And I give only the beginning of an answer. If, as Robert Wilkin has argued, the issue is not the abstract one of the relation between Christ and culture, but the very historical one of how Christ takes form in a culture, that is to say the church, how might we view that other culture in the midst of which the assembly of God carries on its life?

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H.R. Niebuhr would say we seek ways to transform it. In addition to theological issues I've raised, there are, however, several practical problems with this point of view. Chief among these is the fact that more often than not, it is impossible to proceed by clear Christian warrant from the tenets of faith to a particular social and/or political policy.

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The false assumption that one can do so has plagued the Protestant churches since 1966, a date when the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches gave up an investigation of the fundamental principles of a Christian society and turned instead to the advocacy of specific social, political, and military policies. And I say this shift caused a problem because policy advocacy on the part of the governing bodies of the church, given in the name of Christ, have served to pit Christian against Christian in respect to matters over which Christians may rightly disagree. It is also the case that a social mission of the sort Niebuhr imagined often lies outside the realm of possibility.

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For the Christian churches in Nazi Germany and in communist countries during the Cold War period, it was simply unrealistic to think of themselves as having a transformative cultural mission. Their only real possibility, slight though it proved to be, was to remain faithful in circumstances that threatened to compromise them at every turn. In borderline situations such as these, communal witness to an alternative system of belief and an alternative way of life not only accord with the witness of Holy Scripture, they also become the clear alternative to compromise with and absorption into an alien and corrupting way of life.

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Life in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia may seem far indeed from the world we inhabit. Perhaps, however, borderline situations such as these are not as far from ours as we might imagine. In the last days of one nation under God, when the sociologic of American society, based as it is upon the premise of autonomous individualism, runs counter to most everything Christians believe, resistance and witness are beginning to appear more realistic goals for Christian living than transformation. I do not mean to say that Christians should withdraw from social and political life, though I do not believe that transformation of culture through policy advocacy on the part of governing bodies of the churches is the right way to understand the manner in which Christians ought to conceive of their relation to the various cultures in which they may find themselves.

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I do believe, as many Muslims in Europe, I'm sorry, I do not believe, as many Muslims in Europe apparently do, that faith requires withdrawal into a religious ghetto. The question is this. In circumstances where public life is possible, what is the appropriate way to take part in that life and there make the witness Christians have to offer?

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It is clear that I do not believe the right way is for ecclesial bodies to pass resolutions favoring a range of policy options and then promulgate these as marching orders for the saints. The right way is for congregations to become cells in which people are formed with a range of moral sensibilities, capacities, and commitments that they carry from the culture of the church to that of the public arena. And I will mention five of these, each of which, had I whirled enough, and time, I could show to be the fruit of the sort of common life depicted in Ephesians. I could also show that each is essential to an orderly and just political society.

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I'm almost through. The first is a character that manifests splendid incapacities. It is of vital importance for a society to know that it has members that are incapable of doing certain things. You can draw up your list.

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Mine is torture and consistent lying. The second is an ability to recognize, expose, and resist idolatry that always accompanies money and power. The third is a commitment to both truth and reconciliation as necessary components of a healthy political life. The 4th is a dedication to ensuring that all the members of society have access to the goods that social life makes available.

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And the fifth is a willingness to suffer loss, even to die. in defense of what one believes to be both right and good. I feel compelled to remark that the presence of these virtues within a citizenry might or might not serve to transform culture. They would, however, in the last days of one nation under God, stand out in marked contrast to the moral habits and procedures of our present political life.

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They would be noticeable by their very difference, and they would call attention, often hostile, to the culture in which these people were formed. They would, in fact, serve as a witness, even though indirect, to the principalities and powers. They would lead the eyes of the rulers of this age to a people who carry in their common life the secret of God's will to unite all things in Christ Jesus. They would, from there, direct their eyes to Christ, who administers this plan and to that end gave himself up for us as we give ourselves up for the life of the world.

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It is God's will to rule. Now I grant it my view that we are called upon to shift the focus of our moral concern. from spirituality and social reform to the common life of the Church, calls for a jarring change in the way we think and act as Christians. Nonetheless, I do believe that this is the option that most accords with the witness of Holy Scripture and best suits our circumstances.

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I cannot escape the conclusion that Christ is administering our age in ways that will force us as Christians who live in the last days of one nation under God to shift the focus of our moral concern. And for that reason, I close with a word of thanks to President Wardlaw for providing me this opportunity to share with you the most profound of my convictions. I thank you.

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What a testament to euangelion, which is the gospel and the ecclesia, the church in itself. We have some time available at hand, and if you have questions, the protocol will be that you may raise a question, and I'm going to repeat your question, hopefully verbatim, if not just with slight emendation. And our speaker, the very Reverend Philip Turner, will address them to you for the sake of recording this for our community and our purposes. Yes, sir.

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Yes. May I repeat the question? Let me repeat the question so that way we can record the question. for the purpose of those who are in right now in Macmillan.

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So the question was, can you sort of give us a feedback on the unity and the current status of our church? Is that correct? Struggles going right now in the church. Very briefly, the struggles that are going on are inevitable struggles because they are the struggles of the society in which we live.

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The problem is not that we're having the struggles. The problem is that we have lost the ability to address them as Christians address problems. And that, to me, is a sign of a church under judgment in which we cannot claim the presence of the Spirit. Yes, sir.

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The paper that pops up on the internet when you enter your name. and criticize the theology that you call God is love's theology. Is that correct? And would you say something about that?

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All right, let me try to repeat that question as succinctly as I can. In a recent Googling of Philip Turner, you came across a little piece on the Episcopal Church and love. And would you expound on what that critique of that love is in the Episcopal Church? Yeah, the standard sermon in an Episcopal Church on Sunday, though the examples change, is roughly this: God's love, God loves you, God loves everybody, you ought to love everybody.

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That's it. There is no cross in that. is to say God does love us, but He loves us in a way in which Christ died to absorb evil, to forgive it, to pay the price for our sins. I don't hear that being done.

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So actually the gospel of the Episcopal Church is a kind of charter myth for democratic pluralism. Do we have other questions? Yes, back there. Yeah, I do not believe we're called to uniformity, even in terms of church polity.

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I'm with Cranmer, He thought Presbyterians were fine. He didn't have a problem with them at all, nor with the Lutherans. I do think that we have to find some way, and we will forever be searching for it, to recognize the fact that there are points at which what David Kelsey calls the Christian thing,

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has been distorted in a very serious way. And it's at those points we are bound and duty, it is our bound and duty to seek unity and truth. I'm not sure that there's ever been a formula that allows the church to figure out, aha, now here's the litmus test. This is the one we've got to work out.

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I mean, my own denomination tried to come up with the notion of foundations or fundamentals. And as long as everybody thought they knew what they were, that worked. But then everybody said, what about the virgin birth? Is that a fundamental or not?

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What about descending into hell? Is that a biggie or a little one? And so we have to find, that's why I think that charity and truth are yoked. That is to say,

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Apart from charity and all the space that presents, one cannot get to the point of recognizing, A, the seriousness of the issue of division, and two, one can't get over it. That's the perfect question. It's a great question. If I had the perfect answer to it, maybe Jesus would be back.

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I don't know. But no. I mean, I lived for 10 years in East Africa, in the Anglican churches of East Africa, which are as different from the Episcopal Church as anything you can imagine. The only grid I had to understand that was Southern Baptist when I got there.

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And I soon learned that, well, you know, they knew more about it than I did. But one has to go down underneath those diversities that, what shall I say? They are inappropriate points for division.

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And they are inappropriate points for conflict. But I defy anyone to get the litmus test that certainly pops it up. The community that is healthy, in which there is patience, kindness, charity, truthfulness, et cetera, et cetera, they'll get there. That's what I think.

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Thank you very much.