Caracterización de los EM reportados

Bruce Kaye* There is hardly a page of the New Testament that does not at some point refer to how Christians should live. The beatitudes paint a picture of a life-style that reflects the Kingdom of Jesus both proclaimed and embodied.

It is not enough to profess allegiance to Jesus. True allegiance is seen in action. ‘Not everyone who says to me “Lord Lord” will enter the kingdom of God, but those … or If you hate your brother how can you…’ This theme runs strongly through the early years after Jesus’ death. It is exemplified in the martyrdom of Polycarp and elaborated in the letter to Diognetus.

They dwell in their own fatherlands, but as if sojourners in them; they share all things as citizens, and suffer all things as strangers. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is a foreign country. They marry as all men, they bear children, but they do not expose their offspring. They offer free hospitality, but guard their purity. Their lot is cast “in the flesh,” but they do not live “after the flesh”. They pass their time upon the earth, but they have their citizenship in heaven (Lake 1912, pp.359-361).

Beliefs and practices shape a life that witnesses to the kingdom of Jesus, which as he told Pilate, is not of this world.

This visible shape of the Christian calling to belong to Jesus is the primary witness to those whom Christians encounter in life.

Our thinking about how the Christian and the church display this primary witness needs constantly to be reassessed. The question of how the church relates to its host society has often been discussed under the heading of church / state relations. In part this is because of the influence over long centuries by the institutions of Christendom. In what we loosely call Christendom, the state was the partner of the church and the church was necessarily conceived of in its institutional form in order that it could be regarded as in the same institutional category as the particular state with whom it was in partnership. That way of conceptualizing the issue has been dominant in those church traditions where church state relations have been integral to their history and identity. The Treaty of Westphalia and its principle of cuis regio cuis religio set this in concrete for the churches

Revd Dr Bruce Kaye AM speaking at the 25th anniversary of the Christian Research Association,

2010.

(Photo by Tim Hughes)

*. The Revd Dr Bruce Kaye AM is Adjunct Research Professor, Centre for Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University. Previously General Secretary of the Anglican Church of Australia and has taught ethics at the University of New South Wales and theology at the University of Durham UK. A member of the group that founded the Christian Research Association of Australia. An earlier form of this paper was given in 2010 at a conference to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Christian Research Association.

of the continental Reformation, but it had long been the pattern for the Holy Roman Empire and for Christians in England. The Royal Supremacy of the Tudors, which gave institutional shape to the English reformation is the pinnacle of this singular conception of sovereignty and the state.

That tradition has long since passed by. The idea of the government as the dominant and single expression of the communities of the nation is no longer with us. In Australia we live in a nation in which public institutions other than the parliament and the executive government have immense influence on the shape of national life. One only has to think of the power and influence of such public institutions as the Reserve Bank and the host of independent regulatory authorities that intervene at a variety of levels in community life. The court system, with its appellate peak in the High Court, is also independent of the Parliament. The government, parliament and courts all sit under the constitution which holds together the vast range of public institutions and centres of power and authority in order to serve and sustain the community.

The parliament and the government are undoubtedly crucial players in the protection of the community and in the sustaining of its life and character. But for most people their lives are also shaped most directly and immediately by the particular institutions within which they work, take their leisure and pursue their interests. The particular characteristics of the business corporation in which people work shape the understanding, and influence the character, of people’s working lives to an extra-ordinary degree.

In his history of The Life and Death of Democracy, John Keane(2009) has drawn attention to the variety of social institutions that go to make up participation in society in democratic countries. These institutions provide a monitoring function in the institutional life of the nation. The pattern of a citizen’s life in Australia is shaped by interactions with and within all sorts of institutions, a point to which HC Coombs drew attention long ago (Coombs 1970).

I want to approach this question of any critique of society therefore not from the point of view of what is going on internally in the church and how that might be applied to the different circumstances in the broader society. I think that is not an inappropriate thing to do. Certainly the church through its institutions has a responsibility to respond to the issues that arise for Australians. Churches should indeed have social issues committees or public affairs commissions in order not only to respond to public events and debates but also to inform the church community. However by approaching a question of witness in this way, that is to say from the perspective of the life of the church, runs the risk of privileging the inherited patterns of church life and thinking both in terms of their power structures and their priorities about the nature of social organisation.

Rather it seems to me that most Christians actually find themselves engaged day-to-day in trying to make sense of the circumstances of working in a small-business, a large corporation, a public service department, school, university or whatever. The challenge they face is how they should fulfil their obligations to their employers and colleagues and also, in the process, fulfil their obligations as Christians to witness to the faith that inspires their lives. We live in a culture where there are significant forces that pressure Christians into thinking not only that their faith is irrelevant in their day to day circumstances but in fact that it has no place there. Both those convictions are false, but just saying so is not an answer. The alternative conviction that a Christian’s faith has a place and is relevant has to be demonstrated by the way Christians function in the actual locations they occupy in society.

his Institutes of the Christian Religion and then more recently by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Christifideles Laici. First, John Calvin (1961, p.724):

the Lord bids each one of us in all life’s action to look to his calling ... lest through our stupidity and rashness, everything be turned topsy turvey. He has appointed duties of every man in his particular way of life. And that no one may thoughtlessly transgress his limits, he has named various kinds of living callings ... it is enough if we know that the Lord’s calling is in everything the beginning and foundation of well doing … from this will arise also a singular consolation; that no task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God’s sight.1

In 1988, John Paul II published an encyclical, the Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation,

Christifideles Laici. The Pope sought to take up the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and, in referring to it, stated:

In giving a response to the question who are the lay faithful, the Council went beyond previous interpretations which were predominantly negative. Instead it opened itself to a decidedly positive vision and displayed a basic intention of asserting the full belonging of the lay faithful to the Church and to its mystery. At the same time it insisted on the unique character of their vocation, which is in a special way, to ‘seek the Kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and ordering them according to the plan of God.’ ... Vocation of the lay faithful to holiness implies that life according to the Spirit expresses itself in a particular way in their involvement in temporal affairs and in their participation in earthly activities (John Paul II 1989, pp.25 and 41f).

Both Calvin and Pope John Paul II focus on the divine vocation of the laity in their work and life in society not on what they might do in church.2

I want to ask how might social research of the kind done by the Christian Research Association contribute to a more effective witness for Christians in our multi institutional and variegated community. I want to look at occasions, where life happens, and also agency, how are Christians effectively motivated and shaped in their witness in these