By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
What about the slogan, "Let the church be the church!"
My view is that there's nothing wrong with the slogan itself, since the church is precisely what the church is called to be. So, if anything's wrong, it's the use of the slogan in connection with an underlying misunderstanding of the church and of the church's calling.
Contrary to some, the church is not called out of the world for its own sake, to be a community of virtue and peace that is a foretaste and a sign of God's peaceable kingdom. The church is called out of the world for the sake of the world, to be a sign of the whole world's redemption, and thus of the salvation of all women and men, and a means of the whole world's emancipation, by achieving whatever measure of peace with justice its circumstances allow.
19 February 2004
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