The Proclamation of Free Grace, Pt. 3
The Church’s Freedom from Nostalgia for the Past
About the author: Sara Mannen is the McDonald-Agape Research Fellow in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. She is working with Professor Tom Greggs on the Ecclesiology After Christendom project. Sara recently completed her PhD on divine personhood in Karl Barth. She is passionate about theological study, especially modern and contemporary doctrines of God, and its import for the life of the church and world. She lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with her husband and two daughters.
“Back when the church was flourishing, we did xyz. We just need to replicate this past ‘success.’”
This yearning to the past is an understandable response for a church and minister facing declining attendance and financial challenges. Nostalgia, as a longing for the past, is a complicated emotion related to the past and the future. Mark Fisher beautifully argues that culture is haunted by the failure of the future to arrive. This lost future leads to a variety of nostalgia.1 Negative emotional states, including sadness and meaninglessness, usually trigger nostalgia. When the future looks bleak or hopeless, nostalgia is common. As the church faces an unknown future and is anxious about its success, as discussed in my previous post, the community can look longingly to “perfect” past successes—to the “glory days.”
If the church is not free from anxiety for the future, it will not be free from nostalgia.
Nostalgia is not inherently negative but can motivate one to positive action. The question is: What type of past is nostalgia longing to recreate? Is the church’s nostalgia one that is for a “perfect” time when it had greater influence in public life and politics? Or for a time when doctrine was “pure and perfect”? When its ministry was “effective”? When was social and family life “traditional”? I wholeheartedly affirm the importance of history and the church’s tradition. However, I want to challenge the reality of churches becoming stuck in the past and longing to recreate a perfect past.
What is the importance of the church’s purpose in proclaiming God’s free grace in these circumstances? I believe the church’s commission to proclaim God’s grace frees it from nostalgia seeking to petrify past methods or ways of life. Once the church is paralyzed by its past, it can no longer engage with the present.
After decades of ministry in the United States, I am convinced that Tom Greggs's assessment of the church’s presumption of a Christendom model of the church-world relation greatly contributes to this nostalgia.
All too often, churches within societies continue to work with some form of presumptive Christendom in their self-understanding—presuming a role, a power, and a status that they have not enjoyed for a long, long time, and thereby becoming ever more irrelevant to the societies (the world, indeed) for which the church is called in being and exists.2
As the church becomes aware that it does not have the role, power, and status it once (possibly) had in the past, a common response is to seek to find a way to relive and recreate this past. This spins out in various ways—attempts to reclaim political influence, retrieve theology from a perceived “golden era,” and implement past ministry methods to secure a “better” way of life for the church. However, all this fails to do is reckon with the church's present situation and purpose to proclaim God’s free grace.
Here, the church’s purpose to proclaim God’s free grace becomes vitally important. Just as the church is freed from anxiety about the future (as discussed in part 2 of this series), it is also freed from being chained to its past and seeking to relive a golden age.
Jesus Christ—the source and cause of grace—is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This does not mean grace is static and always takes the same mode. Rather, Christ and his grace are living, dynamic, and surprising. Barth repeatedly emphasizes the free grace of God is something that must be encountered anew every moment: “[G]rasping it anew because it is something which can only be grasped anew.”3 Grace was lifegiving in the past, but it is also lifegiving now.
Attempting to tie down the work of proclaiming grace by seeking to recreate the cultural conditions that sustained the church’s former status relegates God’s free grace to a formula and a thing of the past—something the church has at its disposal. This does not mean that the tradition of the church is irrelevant. However, understanding the church’s purpose in proclaiming free grace helps the church to recognize that the tradition of the church is living in the here and now: “Jesus Christ yesterday. Indeed, God’s grace has preserved us in all those things which were necessary yesterday and should become living matters again; but Jesus Christ today too, right now!”4 The church and ministers that live from their purpose continually ask: God, please give me eyes to see and recognize the grace of God in Jesus Christ today.
The church confidently expects that God brings fresh air in and moves the church along to respond to questions and tasks of the present due to the living nature of the free grace that the church proclaims. Karl Barth dismisses the idea that the word of divine grace is fettered to the church's theological language—its events, forms, liturgies, or polities. Instead, Barth argues that God moves the church along to face its current context: “We ought to reckon rather with the fact that God’s grace could have long since led the Church forward and put questions and tasks before the Church that are quite different from those of the sixteenth century.”5 God’s grace brings fresh air and new life to the church. Ministers are free to seek to discern what questions and tasks are put before the church now in their local contexts.
Jesus Christ is alive today—the church must cling to this truth. The problem with nostalgia is that it hinders one from recognizing how God’s free grace may be at work today. Even worse, nostalgia may actively work against the fresh air the Spirit is blowing into the church: “We need this fresh air, and we should not try to shut it out with the holy games of our churchly speaking and behavior, and above all not with antiquarianism—otherwise we shall be calling up the old demons again!”6 The purpose of the church to proclaim grace frees the church from anxiety for the future and nostalgia.
The final post in this series focuses on the positive freedom the church receives in its commission—the church is freed to be for the world in the present.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writing on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: John Hunt Publishing, 2014).
Tom Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), xxix.
Karl Barth, “The Proclamation of God’s Free Grace,” in God Here and Now, trans. Paul M. van Buren (New York: Routledge, 2003), 54.
Barth, “Proclamation,” 45.
Barth, “Proclamation,” 43. Due to the nature and length of this blog post, I can not delve into the complicated questions of doctrinal development, the relation of tradition to Scripture, and the authority of tradition. I have tried to allude to the importance of tradition. The problem of nostalgia that I am dealing with is longing to recreate a “golden age” that locks one into the past.
Barth, “Proclamation,” 43–44.