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13 The True Church Confessing the Faith, the final volume in Hall’s trilogy on Christian theology in a North American context, is concerned with “the doctrine of the church, or ecclesiology; the nature of the church’s calling as a confessing body, or missiology; and the character of hope to which the being and work of the church points, or eschatology” (1996:22). Following somewhat the pattern of Professing the Faith, Hall looks at the church—which he refers to as “the disciple community”—in historical, critical, and constructive perspectives. He first explores the contours of the church, not only according to its traditional self-understanding, but also what those boundaries look like when translated into the North American context, where the breakdown of the church into thousands of denominational and sectarian expressions constitutes something of a scandal, compromising the message of the gospel. Caught between this challenge and the context of disestablishment, Hall thus proposes a new way of understanding the church relative to society, focusing especially on its minority status. This chapter is comprised of three noncontinuous sections from the book’s second chapter, “Contours of the Church,” that focus especially on those aforementioned issues. Source: Hall 1996:65–70, 97–101, 122–27. Parameters of the Discussion BOUNDARIES . . . What we want to ask [here] is in some ways a simple question, but history has made it complex, and its complexity is nowhere more conspicuous than in Protestant North America, where literally thousands of denominations and sects1 and vague affiliations announce that they are the church. Our question 199 will be phrased in this way: What may legitimately be regarded as “the Christian church”? From ecclesiastical history, as well as the history of doctrine, we have inherited so many direct and indirect answers to this question that the result is rather bewildering. Perhaps, however, we can classify the answers in such a way as to facilitate our further reflections on the question. This history presents us, let us say, with two extremes, with a spectrum of possibilities between the two. On the one hand, ecclesiastical conservativism insists that the boundaries of the true church may be drawn up quite strictly. It will, of course, depend upon the specific type of conservativism under consideration—for instance, whether it is of the conventional Roman Catholic or the fundamentalist-Protestant variety; but what is true of all such ecclesiologies is that the question of boundaries is really not a question. It has been determined in advance what the boundaries are and shall be; therefore the church need not concern itself with an ongoing attempt to decide where and what they are. Its identity is always quite certain. As with individuals who “know who they are,” this is obviously a very satisfying, comfortable position for any institution to assume, and particularly for those who bear authority within such institutions. The agony of identity does not affect such churches, and this, undoubtedly, is part of their popular appeal. The weakness of this position is also evident, however; and today it has become more obvious than in the past, to the point that many who have membership in such closely defined communities of faith find it increasingly difficult to sustain their own certitude. For in the pluralistic society they are bound to encounter others who, although “not of their fold,” entertain many religious and ethical ideas disturbingly similar to their own; and this naturally raises for the sensitive among such communities the question of why their boundaries must be so exclusive of others. For such persons, the wellestablished , conventional limits of the “true church” begin to assume purely institutional, theoretical, or even artificial proportions. They appear to have little or nothing to do with substance, but only with form—perhaps only nomenclature. It was one thing to maintain the exclusive veracity of Latin or “Roman” Christianity when it occupied an almost monopolistic position in preReformation Western Europe; it is something else to do so in a postmodern North America in which most of a person’s waking hours are spent in company with others, the majority of whom do not share his or her explicit convictions. At the other end of the spectrum we encounter the most broad-minded forms of Christian liberalism, which is as inclusive in its description of “church” as staunch conservatives are exclusive. In fact, historically as well as psychologically, the two positions often constitute reactions to one another. 200 | Douglas John Hall [3.137.192.3] Project MUSE...

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