Podcast: Should Our Churches Be Political? (Alan Strange)

February 12, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

What Place Does Politics Have in Church?

In this episode, Alan Strange discusses the doctrine of the spirituality of the church—a doctrine focused on clearly defining the church’s central mission and mandate—and emphasizes that the church and the church alone has been entrusted with the mission of proclaiming the good news of the gospel to a lost and dying world.

Empowered Witness

Empowered Witness

Alan D. Strange

In Empowered Witness, author Alan D. Strange examines the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, urging readers to examine the church’s power and limits and to repress the urge to politicize it.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:24 - What Is the Doctrine of the Spirituality of the Church?

Matt Tully
Dr. Strange, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Alan Strange
It’s my great pleasure to be here with you.

Matt Tully
Your new book that you’ve written with Crossway is about the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, which on the surface seems like a rather straightforward, obvious, maybe non-controversial kind of doctrine. And yet nothing could really be further from the truth. There’s a lot going on with that seemingly simple name for a doctrine. So I wonder if you could just very briefly summarize what is the doctrine of the spirituality of the church.

Alan Strange
Well, yes, Matt, and maybe I could just begin by saying one of the reasons that it is controversial is because it’s been badly used at times. If something is badly used, there’s a phrase that we have. It’s a Latin phrase, and I’ll just give it in English: the wrong use of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a right use. But sometimes something has been so wrongly used, you sort of have to recover it and say, Let’s aim for a better use of it.

Matt Tully
There’s some rehab work to be done.

Alan Strange
Yeah. And part of the challenge with this doctrine is it came into being in the Reformation, particularly in the Scottish context where you had the king being the head of the church. And the Scots said, We don’t think the king should be head of the church. They weren’t Episcopalian, they were Presbyterian. And they said, We think Jesus Christ is the head of the church, and you have ministers and elders and deacons, but the church is its own proper institution. It’s not under the state. Nor is, properly, the church over the state. You had these different models before the Reformation—of the church over the state or the church under the state—and the Reformation tried to see all these different institutions as under God, each one properly relating. So the idea that the church would be over the state, they said no. And they argued for what they call the “spiritual independency of the church,” meaning the church isn’t properly under the state. It is its own institution right under God with Jesus as its king. And so that kind of language got picked up in the nineteenth century in America, and instead of saying spiritual independency, it tended to be talked about in terms of “spirituality of the church.” But it got used especially by some Southern theologians—Presbyterians being prominent among them, but Baptists and Methodists—and that language got used in a way that was to quiet the church, to shut the church up (if I can say that) about the institution of slavery. In other words, they didn’t think that the church should be, as a spiritual institution, addressing something that was essentially a political matter. And Charles Hodge of Princeton—who was the great Presbyterian theologian of the nineteenth century and trained so many students at Princeton Theological Seminary—he came into this discussion and wasn’t buying this, what he called, “muzzling the prophetic voice of the church.”

Matt Tully
That would be the distortion of this doctrine.

Alan Strange
Right. So he said you shouldn’t muzzle the prophetic voice of the church because the church has a moral place to speak about slavery. And he was an emancipationist. He thought that this should come to an end. The 1818 General Assembly, in fact, had adopted a unanimous motion saying, basically, that slavery should end, and it’s the duty of Christians everywhere to help bring it to an end. And then, I hate to put it this way, but slavery just became really much more profitable, especially in the 1830s and 1840s.

Matt Tully
So in the decades that followed that very clear statement, people started to compromise.

Alan Strange
Yeah. It sort of fell to the ground. And then you had people picking up that old doctrine that the Scots had of the spiritual independency and saying, Well, spirituality of the church means the church really shouldn’t even be addressing this. It’s not the church’s business. It’s the state’s business. But Hodge said, Well, the church’s business is whatever the Bible addresses.

Matt Tully
Obviously, there’s a lot of nuance to this. What are the things that are political issues versus moral or ethical issues that the church should have a voice on? And so we’ll get into some of that in just a minute. Is it fair to summarize this doctrine—the spirituality of the church—as it’s aimed at protecting the church against mission creep?

Alan Strange
Yeah, exactly. I think mission creep is not a bad way of talking about it because it’s really about the question, What is the mission of the church? And to talk about the spirituality of the church is to understand that the church is a spiritual institution. The state is a civil institution. The family is a biological institution. What do we mean when we say the church is a spiritual institution? Well, what Hodge meant, really, was it’s an institution that is created by, in a very direct way, the Holy Spirit. Calvin is called the theologian of the Holy Spirit because he brought the work of the Holy Spirit into view in a way that it had not been brought into view in church. And Hodge says at the end of book two of his Institutes, as long as Christ remains outside of us, he does us no good. It’s the Spirit who brings us to Christ, and Christ to us. And Hodge and others pick that up at Princeton, as theologians of the Holy Spirit themselves, and they say the Holy Spirit creates the church. He gathers the church by the means of grace—preaching the sacraments, prayer. He gathers the church and he perfects the church. That’s the language of the Westminster Confession. We would tend today to say that’s the task of evangelism—gathering the church—and discipleship—perfecting and growing the church. So the church, to use Kuyper’s language, the church as institute, that is the church as a formal organization, we think of it particularly as it’s gathered for worship Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day. What marks that body and what characterizes that body is the expression—in a very clear way through the preaching, through the sacraments, through prayer—of the gospel. That Jesus Christ is from first to last our Savior. It’s all of grace. And that message is preached. And that’s what brings people into the church, and that’s what builds people up in their faith. And then they go out from this church as institute to the church as organism—the church as it goes out to live its life in the world. As Dr Chapel talked about recently in a book published by Crossway, Grace at Work—going out to live out your faith in all the world.

Matt Tully
But the church as an institution has to be focused on proclamation of the gospel first and foremost.

Alan Strange
That’s right. No other institution is called to go into all the world and preach the gospel. The family? No. The state? No. The university? No. The publisher isn’t called to go into all the world and preach the gospel. That call is given to the church. And if the church becomes chiefly a political, economic, or social institution, it becomes an institution that is just one more form of kind of shouted political slogans in the cacophony and all the noise of our very polarized politicized age. If the church just becomes that, it loses that voice. It loses its proper agency. It loses its grip and its grasp on the gospel. And if the church loses the gospel, who has it? Where is the gospel? The church is called to preach the gospel to the world.

09:27 - What about the Separation of Church and State?

Matt Tully
I’m sure some people listening right now could say a lot of that sounds good, but maybe one possible response or concern could be is this dichotomy between the gospel—the preaching of the gospel—and what it looks like to live as Christians and engage with the world from a distinctly Christian worldview. Can we really separate those things? Can the church’s witness on those things really be distinct? And they might even say, as you mentioned already, this idea, this doctrine, this approach to the church’s life in the world was really prominent in the 1800s, and we see it kind of grow up in America in a really distinct way. Isn’t this just maybe a theologized way of talking about the American ideal of the separation of church and state, which is sort of not necessarily a biblical notion?

Alan Strange
Well, you see, I would say that the distinction of a civil authority, a civil power, from an ecclesiastical power is very much a biblical notion. You even get it, to some degree, in the theocracy, because you had King Uzziah, who went into the temple and said, I will assume the role of the priest. And he was struck with leprosy and thought, That wasn’t a very good idea. So you see the king in Israel being under law, not like the kings around him. When you talk about Israel as a theocracy, it’s interesting to note, and it is proper to speak of the theocracy in Israel, but it’s not a theocracy like the other nations that had theocracies. The other nations that had theocracies, part of the way they did that was either there was no proper distinction between priest and king, like in Islam—

Matt Tully
The king was the mediator.

Alan Strange
Exactly, the king was the mediator, and the king was viewed as divine or semi-divine. Look at the stele of Hammurabi where the code is being given. Hammurabi is getting it, if you can see this in your mind and you can go and look at the stele where Hammurabi’s code is, and you see Shamash, the sun god, giving Hammurabi the code. So Hammurabi is the semi-divine. Well, it’s very clear in the Old Testament that the king is not divine or semi-divine. He is a man who is under law like the priest is, like the prophet is. They’re all mere men who, of course, need a savior. They all need Jesus to come. So it is the case that there has always been a proper distinction. Now, here’s what we want to be careful about. Your listeners who may be saying what you’re suggesting, I want to affirm a lot of what they’re saying and what you said. Put it this way: there is a proper distinction, I would say, from what I’ve just talked about between church and state, but there’s not a distinction between God and state. It’s between the institutions of church and state. What I mean by that is God is the Lord over all.

Matt Tully
He has authority over the state.

Alan Strange
He has authority over the state. He has authority over the family. So that’s not what we’re questioning. But, even there, he doesn’t exercise that in the same way. In other words, the ruler who exercises authority in the state does so by the sword. The one who does so in the church does so by the keys. When we excommunicate somebody—God forbid that we have to do that, but we do sometimes because they will not repent. They will not make something right. And we have to say, You’re not a part of this communion. And that’s a serious matter. If you really understand what that is, it’s more serious than the death penalty is. But that doesn’t mean that we have the sword. We don’t have the sword. And similarly, the magistrate, the civil magistrate, the civil ruler doesn’t have the keys. He doesn’t have the power to say who comes to communion and not to communion. That’s a power that deals with sin, whereas he is concerned with crimes.

13:18 - Common Distractions from the Spiritual Mission of the Church

Matt Tully
You note that there are today a number of powerful “competing claims that threaten to overrun and overwhelm the church in its understanding of its mission today, distracting the church from its spiritual mission.” So I wonder if you could just summarize what are a few of those competing claims for the church’s mission that you see?

Alan Strange
You’re asking about some of the movements that might run counter to what I think is a healthy spirituality of the church. There’s a bit of a revival of wanting a return to Christendom. We’ve had, in the last century and a half especially, we’ve seen it in America with what you might call, as Mark Noll in his recent book has talked about, the decline of a Bible civilization. We’ve had the decline of influence in the Bible, and there’s been a secularization. Some have even referred to it as a kind of vicious secularism that has come to reign. And I don’t disagree that in our highly heterogeneous, pluralistic culture there is much that militates against Christianity, that militates against the faith. And I have some agreement, and I have some criticism, but I have a good bit of agreement with Aaron Renn that there’s been movement from a kind of positive view of Christianity, to a neutral view, to a more negative view. I think all of these kinds of things reflect some of what’s going on in society. And so I think when those kinds of things go on, I think we’ve witnessed about us a general darkening of our culture. And when culture darkens, people feel very threatened. And I think some of the response to that is to sort of lose our spiritual heads, if I can put it that way. In other words, it’s easy when things about you seem topsy-turvy and things seem very confused—you can think of the massive gender confusion of recent times. And, of course, Crossway has done a wonderful service in addressing this, particularly through the books of my friend Carl Truman. And I know there’s more coming out. And I think Dr. Truman has got his finger on a lot of pulses here. And so your readers and your listeners shouldn’t be unfamiliar with this sort of thing. Any Christian who’s paying attention knows that our culture has about it a kind of—I’ll repeat and call it again—a kind of vicious secularism in which there’s a great deal of animus against Christianity. And so I think there’s a great deal of pressure that people feel to come up with an answer to this. How do we answer the hatred of our times? We’re called haters. Of course, this is not new. I mean, back in Nero’s time, because the Christians wouldn’t go along with the games and the circuses and all the sorts of things that went on there that were highly immoral, they were called haters of mankind. So this is not a new thing to be called haters. But we’ve experienced that, and I think one of the responses to that is Christian nationalism, for example, in which you are arguing we need to somehow return to a more homogenous society. A society that is not so largely variegated as is our society in beliefs and so bizarre. We need a more homogenous, Christian society, like we had when we were more a British Protestant nation. In the founding of America, it was largely British and Protestant.

Matt Tully
Those are the people in charge.

Alan Strange
Right. And so Christian nationalism is saying something of that needs to be recaptured. Part of the problem there is I don’t know how you go from our degree of heterogeneity and so pluralistic to what they’re calling for without coercion or violence. There’s no way to do that. You can’t return to Mayberry from where we are without something close to a civil war, it seems to me. And another one close to that is some people are calling for mere Christendom, or Christendom. In other words, if it’s not so much nationalism, we want at least return to this kind of Christendom in which the civil magistrate is enforcing both tables of the law. And, of course, if you’re really calling for the civil magistrate to enforce both tables of the law, you are saying, and people need to know that you’re saying, and it’s fine that you say this. It’s perfectly okay to say this, but you need to know and people need to know that you’re saying the American experiment has been a failure and we reject it. Because the American experiment involves saying, No, the civil magistrate will not be enforcing that first table of law, the first four commandments. He will be enforcing that which is more outward in terms of the commandments that begin with loving your neighbor.

Matt Tully
But not worshiping a god?

Alan Strange
Right.

18:22 - What about Bible Passages that Command Concern for Meeting Physical Needs?

Matt Tully
I’d love to hear you quickly respond to a number of different possible concerns or objections that people might have to this, or questions they might have about what this looks like in practice. So the first one might be, What about all the passages in the Bible that command Christians to be concerned for physical or earthly issues like feeding the poor, caring for the poor, the outcasts, the orphans, the widows, Christians caring for their families and not neglecting their actual families? Doesn’t that push against this idea that the church’s primary mission is a spiritual mission concerned with saving souls?

Alan Strange
No, I don’t think so at all. I think the spirituality of the church, as I’ve mentioned, has particular–and I deal with this in the book in what I hope is a helpful way–the spirituality of the church has very much to do with what the call and task and mission of the church as church. And the call and task of church as church is, first of all, this spiritual mission. It’s also part of its spiritual mission to give a cup of cold water in the name of Christ. As I say here, the spirituality of the church ought not to prompt us to say, Be warm, be filled, and go away. It frees us to serve God and each other. It doesn’t make us those who flee the world, but who are able to engage each other from the best vantage point. That is to say, our chief goal is not political, economic, or social. The heart of the goal is spiritual. Surrounding that spiritual is giving a cup of cold water in Christ’s name. Surrounding that is helping the poor and the downtrodden. Surrounding that is all of that because think of it this way. I happen to believe that whatever problems we have, and as a pastor, I would have people come to me and I did a degree of counseling. But then I would refer people. I understood a) that people could have a variety of physical problems, which included a variety of mental and emotional problems. And these were real problems, and they were sometimes problems that I wasn’t best suited to address, and there were others who were professionals in fields who may be best suited to address those. But I also, Matt, at the same time always understood that the heart of their problem is always spiritual because the heart of our problem always is spiritual. No matter what other problems we may have. Take addictions. We talk about that a lot. I may have all these addictions, and the specifics of the addictions need to be addressed in various ways.

Matt Tully
There are physiological dynamics there.

Alan Strange
There are physiological dynamics and there are emotional dynamics, and I need to de-habituate and rehabituate, just to use kind of behavioristic language. There are things I need to stop doing, and there’s a kind of a detox there, aspect, right? And then there’s the engaging, on the other hand, what would be helpful habits and right habits. But the heart of that is always spiritual because insofar as we talk about idolatry, and idolatry is really doing something other than what God and his word has said to do. It’s doing something outside of the will of God. God has said this, and I’m going to do that. No. And that’s idolatry. But that always, at its heart, is spiritual. So the church, at its heart, is spiritual. And that spiritual has to be what defines the church as it ministers as the church. And that means ministers diaconally as well, word and deed. It has a word and deed ministry. But the deed is always accompanying the word. It would be like saying that for this ministry, the deacons are going to sit in the driver’s seat rather than a minister or the teaching elder. There’s going to be that aspect. The gospel aspect has got to be in the driver’s seat. That’s got to be central. And then all of the diaconal work is in support of that, surrounds that, is encouraging to that. But if what we’re really going out and doing is just a diaconal work divorced from that, it’s not different from any other non-governmental organization that’s a charitable kind of organization, or the state itself in the welfare work that it does. And I’m not questioning the propriety of any of these doing that work. I’m not questioning NGOs. I think they’re great in a right place. And I also think that the civil governments have a proper place to address these. Everybody’s not in the church. Everybody’s not a part of the church. They should be. We want everybody to be part of the church, but they’re not. And so I don’t want people falling through the cracks, so yes, I don’t want to not address any of the things you mentioned. You’re absolutely right. This is the part of the misuse of the spirituality of the church is a sort of Be warm, be filled. I put it this way: while it’s right that the spirituality of the church prompts us to remember the task and calling of the church—to gather and perfect the saints by the means of grace, empowered by the Holy Spirit—we mustn’t forget the mission of the church is always accompanied by and integrally involves good works and love for God and our fellow man. The church is an institution that both preaches the gospel to all people and shows the manifest love of God to all people, and by offering a cup of cold water. You could say the spiritual independence of the church, the spirituality of the church, should never be taken to mean that the church may attend to its religious duties and fail to love its neighbors. Like the Good Samaritan. Or we’re supposed to do good to all, especially those of the household of faith. So I agree with that. You’re talking about a holistic approach. Not only is that not at variance with the spirituality of the church, but it’s a part of the proper living out of the spirituality of the church.

Matt Tully
But it seems like the big distinction, though, would be keeping clear that the church as an institution has to be focused on—and not just prioritized, but laser focused on—the proclamation of the gospel. And maybe the living out portion is happening in the lives of individual Christians but isn’t the core to the life of the organized church. And I think one response, again, to that could be—just playing devil’s advocate—but we’ve seen the abuse of that. You mentioned the Civil War and what the southern states were doing and how they were using this doctrine to justify a passivity. Couldn’t that be one of the dangers here is that by emphasizing this uniquely spiritual mission of the church, even if you technically say there’s a place for these other things, you kind of demotivate Christians from actually being engaged and involved in the world like they should be?

Alan Strange
Yes, it is a danger. It is a potential danger. Dangers lurk everywhere. Any model you would set forth would have danger. Anytime you emphasize the deity of Christ, you can downplay his humanity. If you emphasize his humanity, you downplay his deity. You have to always attend to that. And so what I argue is that I think the reintroduction of this doctrine into the present-day discussions that we’re having, the theological conversations, can have a healthy effect, but only if we embrace what is at its heart—true spirituality—and reject its bad byproducts—apathy to our world and its needs. It can lead to apathy. I don’t really care. The church is an institution. And I say we must not allow a simple claim that something violates the spirituality of the church to settle a matter. We must not imagine that the mere citation of the spirituality of the church disposes of problems, allowing us to conveniently dismiss difficult matters. Hodge calls it the church not dealing with its painful responsibilities. So yeah, I agree. I agree with you. Rather, we should look at every proposal on its own terms and thoughtfully apply the principle of the spirituality of the church. But I’m telling you there is no magic bullet that answers all of this. See, we want to find things that answer all of our questions in an easy way. That isn’t the Christian faith.

Matt Tully
Yeah, it takes more wisdom.

Alan Strange
“Work out your salvation with”—what is it he said? “Fear and trembling.” In other words, this is hard in one sense, but so is anything worth anything.

26:39 - Should a Church . . . ?

Matt Tully
So maybe a few very practical Should a church do this? questions as we think through what it looks like to apply this doctrine to the life of the church. Maybe think of pastors right now who might be listening. I wonder if you can kind of very quickly give us a clear answer to Should a church do this or that based on this doctrine? So the first is, Should a church celebrate a right to life Sunday by publicly praying for laws that would protect unborn life and outlaw abortion?

Alan Strange
Let me say in answering this that people who would agree that the spirituality of the church is a good thing won’t necessarily agree on all these answers.

Matt Tully
This is a high-level principle that is going to maybe be fleshed out differently by different Christians.

Alan Strange
Right. My answer to that is I think that there’s a way that can be done properly. I think that there’s a way that it’s often not done properly because it’s too linked with something that feels commercialized or something like that. Holidays are tricky things. It seems like Hallmark is in charge of things. Maybe I don’t want to put it in terms of “Right to Life Sunday.” Maybe I want to put it in other terms. Maybe I want to put it in my own terms that I think are more biblical terms. But is it wrong to have a day where you’re focusing on one of the big items and problems of our culture—this consciousless slaughter of unborn children? No. I think the Bible would clearly speak and militate against that, and I think that it’s proper to do it. Now, here’s the thing though. I also don’t think it’s proper to say, And here are all the political solutions to that.

Matt Tully
Or, Here’s the candidate that we know that you, God, are behind.

Alan Strange
That’s right. So there’s a way you can do that edifyingly. But a lot of it is done ham-handedly.

Matt Tully
Another quick question: Is it appropriate for a church to collect an offering for money to build wells in Africa, all in the name of Christ, but the money is really going towards this building project for clean water?

Alan Strange
Is this totally outside of—

Matt Tully
Maybe it’s another organization, a non-Christian organization, but the church really wants to support it and give them money to do a good thing like that.

Alan Strange
I would say that the church could support this if this were an extra-ecclesiastical agency—what people have come, in the recent decades, to call a parachurch agency. In other words, if there were a parachurch agency that has clear Christian commitments and convictions, you could do this. Now, what you’re talking about, I won’t say what, but my wife and I just gave a sizable sum to something like this involving some people. But that was something we did on our own.

Matt Tully
So it’s a good thing for Christians to support these things.

Alan Strange
Oh yeah. Christians can support what they choose in these ways. I don’t think the church, as a church, should ever be giving to something that is not distinctly Christian.

Matt Tully
Okay. What about a third thing: Should a church host a food pantry for the city’s homeless population?

Alan Strange
Again, I think there’s a reasonable place for that. Absolutely.

Matt Tully
Some Christian organizations, like food pantries, will be like, We’re going to feed people, but they’re going to be forced to listen to a sermon. Is that kind of a natural application of this idea, that in order to do this very earthly good, it needs to be paired in some way with a very clear proclamation of the gospel?

Alan Strange
I would reject the language of “forced to listen to a sermon.” I think it’s proper that we give a cup of cold water in Christ’s name. That’s always in tandem with some sort of gospel proclamation. This doesn’t necessarily mean a sermon, but it means, We are the church of Jesus Christ, and we’re giving this to you. If they don’t want it paired with that, they can get it from a governmental agency that’s not going to do that. We’re not called to give a cup of cold water not in Christ’s name. We’re called to give a couple of cold water in Christ’s name. So I don’t think that necessarily means that somebody getting something is going to have to sit there and hear a sermon. I don’t think that would be the better way to do that. But they come by the food pantry, they may not be able to read, so we’ll talk to them. But if they can read, we might give them something. We might say, You really should look to Christ. I think, yes, we should give them the word of Christ, and, no—I’ll get very strong about that—I don’t believe we’re doing this correctly if this is completely decoupled from Christ. Why would we do that? And why are we even competent to do that? Why is that a good thing to decouple this from Christ and say, We’re going to give it to you? I think we need to be wise about how we do it. And I think the sermon, pushing it down your throat, I don’t want to push anything down anybody’s throat.

Matt Tully
It’s interesting there because you kind of hit on two things. There’s obviously the big concern that you would have is that the church loses sight of its core mission and purpose. But on the other hand, and you kind of alluded to this, that sometimes the church can, as we sort of neglect our core mission and become obsessed with these other good things on their own, we actually aren’t even as equipped as the church to do these as well as maybe a non-Christian organization that’s really good at doing that.

Alan Strange
That’s right. My kids like to joke around. They know my musical taste. They’re very sort of high class, and as I told you, I’m going to the orchestra tonight and I love the opera and all that. But a lot of churches that call themselves contemporary music, my kids laugh and say, Yeah, of how many decades ago? I mean, it’s not really contemporary. This is false advertising. The point being is when the church apes the world in very intentional ways, it doesn’t always work out that well. But yeah, we should never lose sight in any of these diaconal ministries, any kind of outreach. We are doing it as the church. We’re not doing it as a government agency, and it’s perfectly proper for government agencies to have these kinds of things. It’s proper for the church, but the church is doing it as the church.

32:47 - Empowered Witness

Matt Tully
Why is your book entitled Empowered Witness? How do those two words in particular connect to what you’re saying here?

Alan Strange
Empowered, of course, is by whom? The Holy Spirit. And so the church’s witness to the world is always empowered by the Holy Spirit. And her witness to the world is to preach Christ, and to preach Christ and him crucified. Paul said, “I’m determined to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified.” That sounds like a very narrowing concern. And it actually is in one sense. Now you might think, Well, was Paul, wherever he went, not concerned if somebody came up and said, ‘My Aunt Tilly has got really bad rheumatoid arthritis’? Did he say, I don’t care about your aunt’s arthritis? No. It’s a concern. It’s a focus on Christ—and I wish the listeners could see me here—it’s a narrowing. It is a narrowing of the focus to Christ and him crucified. And Christ and him crucified sort of stands. The fancy word we use for what’s going on there—the figure of speech—is a synecdoche. It’s a part for the whole. It stands for, really, the heart of Christ’s work, his death on the cross for our sins. And Paul says, I’m determined to know nothing but that. And so he sort of narrows down to that, through which lens he sees everything. So he sees all of reality through Christ and him crucified. So yeah, he’s concerned about Aunt Tilly. He’s concerned about everything. But it’s through Christ and him crucified. And this is what an empowered witness means. We are looking at the world with new, that is to say, renewed eyes. And it’s all a power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has worked in us, and we go out in the world and we preach Christ so that the Spirit might work in them, because the Spirit works through the means of grace and he takes that witness that we bring by his empowerment. He takes that in the lives of others, makes them his children, brings that to them.

34:51 - Let the Church Be the Church

Matt Tully
And that is the incredible message that the church, and only the church, has to bring to the world. Last question for you, Dr. Strange. In the introduction you write, “Martin Luther’s theology has been portrayed as teaching, ‘Let God be God!’ It is the burden of this book to say, ‘Let the church be the church.’” I wonder if you could just leave us with any final comments on that.

Alan Strange
The church, as you just suggested, is the only agency in the world that is commissioned and called to go into the whole world and preach Christ, to preach the gospel, Christ and him crucified. And so for the church to be the church means to stay on that task. Or as I put it right at the end of the book, I’m concerned about how the church is to relate to the world in which it finds itself, both in how it distinguishes itself from the world and how it gives itself to the world. So the church has to know who and what it is—it’s the church—so that it’s distinguished from the world, but then it gives itself to the world. That’s what we’re called to do, and that’s what Jesus did. Jesus gave himself to us and for us, and then he called us to go. He washed our feet, and he tells us to go and wash the feet of others, to be servants to others, and to bring this message. It’s a unique message, and I mean unique in the right sense of it. It’s one of a kind, and no other agency in the world has this message. So let the church be the church.

Matt Tully
Thank you so much for helping us to understand this incredible doctrine, the spirituality of the church. And maybe think a little bit more intentionally about how we view the church in our own lives as Christians.

Alan Strange
Thank you, Matt. Good to be with you.

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