Church and Ethical Orientation

Ecumenical Review, The, July, 1999 by Werner Schwartz

Such a situation evidently offers an invitation to a new orientation.(7) Ecclesial reality that is shaped in a volkskirchlich way will have to ask itself about a new orientation to the message of the power of God which transforms the world. Along these lines churches and congregations can give themselves a new profile.

When it comes to sorting out how Christian congregations can contribute to the moral formation of their members, a whole series of pressing questions comes up: questions about the education of children and young people, about accompanying them in their early years in a community which passes on a social context in which moral orientations can grow and be strengthened; questions about the role of the Bible in this process of educating young people and adults; questions about the appropriate forms of mediating the biblical message in a pluralistic church in the midst of a pluralistic world; questions about the role of worship in its narrower or broader form as a celebration of the salvation for which the world is waiting and which God has prepared and means to prepare for it; questions about determining the relationship between Christian and secular morality; questions about what it means for morality to be anchored in a sustaining worldview. Considerations, in other words, which comprehend the whole of the life of Christian individuals, churches and congregations.

All these considerations confront the churches and their members anew with an invitation to mission -- an invitation to listen to the biblical tradition, to experience its relevance for themselves, to exemplify its life-serving values with conviction and self-consciousness and to seek effective ways to share them with the world and to live in them. For there is great power in what the Judaeo-Christian tradition can contribute to the grounding, building up and practical stabilizing of diverse moralities, for individuals, for a society and for the world.

What Dietrich Ritschl wrote in a small book more than four decades ago is still worth taking seriously:

   The task and promise of the church is that it should be and always will be
   alive enough to work as strongly outwardly as inwardly. A church will
   strengthen itself inwardly precisely when it dares to go out and to make
   its message audible there ... Through God's word Christians know in what
   they can hope ... The contemporary life of Christians is determined by this
   hope. It maintains its power through the hope in this future, in which God
   will show himself to the whole world.(8)

NOTES

(1) The reports of the three consultations convened in the course of the study - "Costly Unity", Ronde, Denmark, 1993; "Costly Commitment", Tantur, Israel, 1994; "Costly Obedience", Johannesburg, South Africa, 1996 - have been published in Thomas F. Best and Martin Robra, eds, Ecclesiology and Ethics: Ecumenical Ethical Engagement, Moral Formation and the Nature of the Church, Geneva, WCC, 1997.

(2) Among the earlier ecumenical studies which also contributed to the ecclesiology and ethics study may be mentioned the Faith and Order text Church and World: The Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community, Faith and Order Paper No. 151, Geneva, WCC, 1990.