It is liberating to know that we do not need to present an apologia for the Christian Church. We do not need to pretend that “real Christianity” hasn’t been tried yet. We are not guilty of the gap between the Kingdom of God and the empirical Church. Indeed, it would be the height of presumption on our part to claim that we are responsible for, and therefore guilty of, that gap. We are not that important; our transgressions are not that consequential. This is not to deny that individually and corporately we have sins to confess, that we have in numerous ways resisted the coming of God’s rule, beginning with his rule in our own lives. But the irony is that one of the ways the Church has resisted the coming of the rule of God is through its own preoccupation with guilt. Guilt is deadly entanglement with the past; forgiveness is the gracious opening to a genuinely new future.
We do not have to justify the Church. The magnitude of what is wrong with it does not mean, as some urge, that we should start saying what’s right with the Church. That way lies self-righteousness, smugness, and fact-denying illusion. The ministry is not the Church’s office of public relations, or it should not be. Our job is not to project a more positive “image” of the Church, as that term is used in the communications media. Our task is to take seriously the biblical images or models of the Church that illuminate the Church’s full mission as the sign of humanity’s future. As we take this biblical understanding of the Church seriously, there is ever so much in the empirical Church of which we must be relentlessly critical.
Whatever else we may be guilty of, we are not guilty of the fact that the Church is not the historical consummation of the Kingdom of God. Far from our being embarrassed by the limitations of the existent Church, it is among our chief responsibilities to underscore the truth that the Church is not to be confused with the Kingdom of God. The Christian community points toward that Kingdom. In some important respects it anticipates that Kingdom. But the Church is as far in time from the Kingdom as is the whole creation of which the Kingdom is the universal future. The disappointment, discontent, and frustration that the world feels over its distance from perfection is also our disappointment, discontent, and frustration. In this sense, the Church is emphatically part of the world; indeed, as Paul describes it in Romans 8, the Church is the most restlessly yearning part of the whole creation. The difference is that we know the reason for the hope of perfection that is within us (1 Pet. 3). That reason is the preview or proleptic appearance of our hope vindicated in the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Living in communion with him, we not only share but articulate and intensify the world’s discontent. Our gospel is not the gospel of optimism, which is, after all, simply a different way of looking at things. It is not simply an angle of vision but a new datum that we proclaim to the world. That datum, which is the message and life of Jesus, is the reason for the hope that is within us and, if only they knew it, the foundation and rationale of hope within all people. And so, because we do not pretend that the Church is the Kingdom of God, we offer no excuses for its not being the Kingdom of God. There will be no satisfactory Church, no Church that can be embraced without ambiguity, until the world of which the Church is part is satisfactorily ordered in the consummation of God’s rule. In short, we cannot get it all together until God has gotten it all together in the establishment of the Messianic Age.