Answering God

In “The Cop Killer,” one of the three stories in Rex Stout’s anthology Triple Jeopardy, a pair of illegal immigrants, refugees of Stalin’s Gulag, find themselves among those suspected of puncturing a policeman’s pulmonary artery with a pair of sheers. They flee for protection to the most powerful American they can think of, New York detective Nero Wolfe. Wolfe’s assistant Archie Goodwin explains with some asperity that, if innocent, they would have done better to stay put and answer the questions put to them. The husband, Carl, explains the world-view of a political refugee:

A policeman asking questions has a different effect on different people. If you have a country like this one and you are innocent of a crime, all the people of your country are saying it with you when you answer the questions. That is true even when you are away from home – especially when you are away from home. Two people alone cannot answer a policeman’s questions anywhere in the world. It takes a whole country to speak to a policeman.

“It takes a whole country to speak to a policeman.” While it may or may not take a whole village to raise a child, I’m pretty sure Stout got it right about law enforcement. Not to cast aspersions on the cops. In fact, that’s the whole point. The policeman and I meet on the terms of a social contract or the whole thing becomes a straight-forward power struggle in which he has all the strength on his side.

Think about it: a cop has a pistol, pepper spray, and handcuffs. He has training that I lack in physical combat. Most of all, he has a shield, a badge that puts the entire power of the state behind him. He wears a uniform which makes him more than an individual; it makes him the contact point between me and the hundreds of others who don the same livery.

Innocence, if it is only my individual, isolated innocence, cannot answer that kind of force. The peace officer will not – indeed, integrity dictates that he cannot – simply take my word for it that I have not committed a crime. When I speak to him, I must do so as a member of the same community, the same commonwealth that stands behind his badge. When that happens, though we still do not meet with equal force, we meet with equal assumptions, a common understanding as the matrix of our encounter. It requires the voice of the entire community citing its laws and insisting on its procedures to speak with sufficient volume to outshout the policeman’s lawful authority. It takes a whole country to speak to a policeman.

In a similar sense, I think it takes a whole church to speak to God.

I know the analogy is flawed, containing contrasts as well as comparisons, but I think it has merit. We Baptists are big on what we term “the believer priesthood,” a category by which we often really mean the believer-cowboy, a loner riding the range all on his own, fighting his own battles with the six-shooters of personal prayer and private worship. We don’t spell Church with a capital-C and we don’t slink into confessional booths where “some human being stands between me and God.” We like to quote 1 Timothy 2.5, not stopping to note that while the Mediator the verse mentions is, in fact, singular, the “mediated” are plural.

Our addiction to 1 Peter 2.5 and 9 needs careful re-examination. Certainly the apostle declares the priesthood of all believers. Baptists over the centuries have gone to prison, some to the scaffold, for our insistence that the kingdom knows nothing of a top-down distribution of saving grace, a sacred spout where the glory comes out with only authorized barkeeps tapping the keg. But somewhere along the way we got our adjectives mixed up. “Universal” priesthood became “individual” priesthood. The priesthood of “all” believers mutated into the priesthood of “each” believer. A shared priesthood shattered into shards of priesthood as we mistook mutual obligation for personal privilege. The very Hebrew word for priest has the root idea of mediation, a go-between. A private priest, then, is as silly an idea as a one-ended bridge.

This is on my mind because I continue to encounter those who cut themselves loose from the supporting community of saints in the name of some kind of individualized holiness that they feel gives them a superior spirituality. They grudgingly acknowledge that a verse or two here and there (Hebrews 10.25 forces its way through their reluctant - often clenched - jaws) may make church seem like a good idea, even obligatory, but this fact doesn’t appear to make much of an impact. They usually counter that the church in our day is such an un-Christlike mess as to provide a historical escape clause from a book they would otherwise acknowledge as eternal and unchanging.

I can spot a couple of problems with this approach. First of all, finding a proof-text for the church in the New Testament is like pointing to one car in five o’clock traffic to “prove” the rush-hour exists. It reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton says about proofs in general:

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long timem to get it into action.

The church is so big in the Bible that it overwhelms articulation. You see, the assumption of mutual commitment to a visible group of gathered believers is not argued in the Bible; it is assumed. Paul addresses one letter to a private individual, three to pastors to tell them how to minister to churches, and all the rest to churches. Most of the pronouns in the Pauline and general epistles are plural - “y’all” instead of “you.” There is a sense in which you can’t read the Bible by yourself without hogging a conversation meant for a multitude.

The other problem I find with the anti-church argument is the idea that because the church today is such a mess, those who have transcended her low-level holiness can opt out. Now, understand the nature of my disagreement: I don’t for a moment maintain that the church (or, if you prefer, “the churches”) of our day, at least in America, are a mess, a mare’s nest of carnality and spiritual shallowness and theological ignorance. What I do argue is that this is nothing new. To take but one example: the church at Corinth in the first century had turned the Lord’s Supper into a kegger complete with a cool-table for the upper class, was attending barbeques at the local brothel, and harbored political in-fighting that made Chicago politics look irenic. Yet, when Paul wanted to mete out the greatest punishment possible to a wayward member, what did he prescribe? Refuse to let the guy come to church! In other words, the worst punishment possible for a Christian is to be prohibited from attending a bad church.

Certainly I don’t mean to say that we should never speak prophetically to the church’s failings. One way of loving any community is to insist that it move toward its own ideals. I do, however, mean to say that such a conversation can only happen from the inside. But to return to my original theme, I mean something more than just that we should all go to church. I mean that we all need the church.

In the face of the righteousness of God and the complete power he has to enforce it, I must find a way to answer. Of course, the only “innocence” I or anyone else can claim is in the blood of Christ, the satisfaction of the law made not by my own merit but by Jesus’ sacrifice on my behalf. But I don’t think it stops there. My individual encounter with Jesus is critical, but my assertion of it leaves me insecure. I need an entire believing community to say of me, and with me, that I have come to the cross and found my sin forgiven.

When I kneel to pray, I need to know that I have backup from those who have agreed to underwrite my confession of faith and to share the liability of my spiritual misadventures. Come judgment day, I don’t hope to have priest or pope at my back to shore up my assertion of redemption. That isn’t a concept I find in Scripture. I do, however, hope to have the members of the Windsor Park Baptist Church there. I don’t want them to read a list of the good stuff I’ve done in order to win God over. I want them to say, “Father, we know this guy, and we affirm that he trusts Christ and nothing else for his salvation.”

It takes a whole church to speak to God, and my church, though not big and not perfect, is whole.

This entry was posted on March 17, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.