Ecclesial leadership as friendship

82 A deep remembering the inner life of humanity (Jeremiah 31:31–34) is only ‘made possible by the limiting grace of the Spirit of God given to them’, 31 and finds final enfleshment in ‘Jesus . . . born out of Mary, out of the organic correlation of Word and response in the existence of Israel’. 32 In the flesh of the Logos himself, limit and response were finally unified. 33 The proposal thus far is clear. Using God’s history with Israel to elucidate the inner logic of incarnation, Anderson identifies God’s relation with humanity as a covenant. God thereby places himself in concrete and temporal relation to humanity, progressively intensifying his identification with Israel – and ultimately the one Israelite. God also makes possible humanity’s covenant response after their rejection of God’s transcendence as limit by providing a new limit, initially through the cultus but ultimately in the person of that one Israelite. In the incarnation, we have God’s transcendence of himself into human form, thus avoiding metaphysical problems of divine-human correspondence: the God-man became humanity’s limit, the concrete Other to whom humanity could respond. 34 This unity found in Christ of transcendent limit (‘the reality of God for man’) and covenant response affirming that limit (‘man’s perfect love’ for that reality) is thus the incarnation’s inner structure. 35 Christ is, as limit, the ‘God who is for man’ and, as the human whose covenant response is to love the Father perfectly, the ‘Man who is for God’. In him, the logic of incarnation converges in concrete fulfilment. 36 To some it has appeared prima facie problematic to sustain God’s eternal transcendence alongside the historical humanity of Christ. Yet after the Chalcedonian consensus, the focus moved towards the question of how this might be. Much ink has been spilled concerning kenoticism which treats the logos asarkos as subject of the kenosis in Philippians 2. 37 Historically, the sixteenth century Formula of Concord opposed an alleged divestment of divine attributes like omnipresence and omnipotence. 38 Yet nineteenth century German theologians, including Thomasius and followed by British kenoticists, proposed the self-emptying of the eternal Son to become the human Jesus (kenosis by divestment) albeit that they differed over the extent and period of the emptying. 39 Some today reject kenoticism, especially on the basis that the Son divesting himself of his attributes produces theophany, not incarnation; 40 others defend it. 41 Yet despite the allure of philosophical speculation Anderson is clear that, because divine transcendence should be understood as revealed in God’s action whatever its form, 42 emphasis must be on the person of Jesus as the one in whom the incarnational inner logic converges such that he is both God and man. He argues that to focus on the ‘who’ over the ‘how’ opens a new perspective on the kenosis of the logos asarkos . 43 I thus employ this term on the understanding that kenosis is not a proposal to articulate the mystery of the ‘how’. As Barth notes: It is in full unity with Himself that He is . . . in Christ, that He becomes a creature . . . It is this that we have to see . . . as the deity of Christ – not

Memories of incarnation 83 an ontic and inward divine paradox, the postulate of which has its basis only in our own very real contradiction against God and the false ideas of God which correspond to it. 44 This Christological starting point establishes that the incarnation reveals Christ’s self-emptying as the ‘God who is for Man’ to be an intra-trinitarian act: the Son is not thereby placed outside of the Trinitarian relationship or else he cannot be the ‘God who is for Man’. 45 The language of kenosis in Philippians 2:5–9 cannot logically mean total self-renunciation by God and its sense should be understood accordingly. Rather because the meaning of being in the form of both God and servant is found in Christ and is consistent with the inner logic of incarnation as first displayed in God’s progressive enfleshment in the life of Israel, 46 the kenosis which is incarnation is better understood as neither concealing nor renunciation of divinity, but revealing thereof. 47 Anderson is not the only one to read kenosis thus. 48 Barth describes the incarnation as entrance into ‘unrecognizability, into the incognito ’, 49 yet because this self-emptying is no loss of divinity 50 it cannot be inconsistent therewith but must somehow reflect the divine life. Gunton identifies kenosis in Edward Irving similarly, as ‘the expression of the inner dynamic of the Trinity’, not a divesting of divine attributes but ‘the human life as the outcome of the Son’s self-giving’. He remarks that, for Irving, kenosis is thus ‘ expression of the Son’s eternal reality and not an exception to it as kenotic theories . . . tend to teach’. 51 Michael Gorman agrees that kenosis reveals divinity: in Philippians 2 divinity is ‘narratively defined as kenotic and cruciform in character’ and kenosis as not the emptying of divinity but its exercise. 52 This interpretation coheres with the line of scholarship which translates huparchōn in Philippians 2:6 causatively (because) rather than concessively (although). 53 Philippians 2 describes not only kenosis of the logos asarkos. It also describes Christ’s self-renouncing solidarity with humanity in his life, prefiguring the ultimate solidarity of the crucifixion. 54 Anderson calls this the ‘way of humility’ and, interchangeably, the ‘way of kenosis ’. 55 He recognises here, as an aspect of kenosis, a growth into covenant response in Jesus’ life, a progressive solidarity with humanity until his final identification with the lost and least and a longing for the union of humanity with God which intensifies as he nears Jerusalem. 56 This growth is ‘a progressive “working into” the estranged flesh of humanity and also a progressive “working out” of that same humanity, a will that perfectly conforms to the will of the Father’. 57 It is not that the growth is progressively from disobedience to obedience but rather that as Jesus increasingly experiences identification with alienated humanity so the depth of his obedience on behalf of humanity must increase. Indeed, the helplessness of Christ crucified, most notably his cry of dereliction, reveals the distance which the covenant response had to bridge. 58 As human covenant response, it comes from the one ‘whose personhood is constituted as eternal Sonship acting towards the Father from and as

84 A deep remembering creaturely being’. 59 Such response is possible even from this distance because it remains within the reach of God’s transcendence: humanity’s failure of covenant response cannot increase the distance between God and humanity. Indeed, the estrangement between God and humanity must be lesser than the reality established in the creation covenant and included therein if it is not to render the limit to God’s transcendence other than Godself. 60 So it is still possible in principle for the created logos to make the covenant response, albeit no longer in actuality because of Adam’s attempt to bypass God’s transcendence as his limit thereby rendering that response an impossibility. Thus, only the uncreated Logos could make the human response to God’s transcendence as humanity’s limit. 61 If Jesus’ cry is only that of a man concerned for others, Anderson argues, the cross would be to no avail. 62 Yet the ‘Man who is for God’ is also the God who is for humanity: because the divine-human estrangement is a lesser reality than that established in the creation covenant, the cry of dereliction must have taken place within the Father-Son relation. 63 It is expressed in the context of a solidarity between Son and Father as deep as God’s solidarity with humanity. 64 Indeed, Jesus’ prayers illustrate the intimacy of this relationship even from the ‘far side’ of alienated humanity, a divine intimacy where one of the voices speaks from a standpoint in history. 65 Accordingly, there was no ‘“way of humility” . . . which was not intrinsic to the eternal life of the Son with the Father’ 66 and therefore, for Anderson, kenosis of the logos ensarkos, as with kenosis of the logos asarkos, is not so much renunciation of the divine nature as it is revelation of self-renunciation as God’s own nature. Anderson describes this self-renunciation as that which is constitutive of intra-trinitarian relations, namely ‘the renunciation of a negative self-existence, in the form of a “separate” kind of existence’ and thus ‘the dynamic dimension of love as activity’. 67 This indicates an ‘ intra -active personal reality of love’: the incarnation, as God’s move beyond himself to become flesh, reveals distinct activities of communion within God, particularly the intra-divine movement of Son to the Father 68 by which he offers the obedience of love. Apprehending the reality of God in the incarnation Not content with the assertion that divine transcendence is an intra-divine active personal reality, Anderson extends the logic of the incarnation further. He proposes, unsurprisingly given his discussion of the organic connection between the incarnation and God’s pre-history with Israel, that the incarnation is the basis for ‘an inter-active personal reality of divine transcendence’. By this, he means a community of inter-relatedness between God and humanity notwithstanding their mutual otherness. This community’s reality is located in the incarnation for only in Christ is there inter-relatedness between God and creature, the solidarity of eternal Logos with humanity. Not identical with the intra-divine transcendence, this inter-action is rooted

Memories of incarnation 85 in the created image and thus images the communion within the Godhead rather than being one and the same. 69 Since the incarnation reveals God as triune being who relates to himself as differentiated being in the unity of the Spirit (God as Father being present outside history and, simultaneously, as Son inside history), 70 communion with God as the imago would appear, accordingly, to presuppose humanity’s existence also in polarity of being with another, a deduction supported by Genesis 1:26–28 and 2:18–20. 71 However, whereas in the intra-divine community God himself is not only the polarity of his being but also by his Spirit its unity, the inter-active community expresses the imago as a polar relation of co-humanity in which God himself participates as its unity. 72 The beginnings of this community of inter-action which is co-humanity located in Christ can be traced in the accounts of Jesus’ life: first, the twelve disciples are invited to share in Jesus’ life and teaching from the inauguration of his work and, similarly, he elects to share in theirs by submitting to John’s baptism; then, as Jesus moves inexorably towards Jerusalem, the invitations to identification with him become starker – a call to take up the cross, to partake of his body and blood and, eventually, death. 73 More than simple co-humanity, this community of inter-action was being drawn into the intra-divine transcendence: as the summons to identification crystallises, so also promises of an experience of relational community are made, community with not only the Son but, by the Spirit, the Father too. 74 Thus, in Anderson’s words: the inter-action between Jesus and his little flock has its place in the kenosis as the place where Spirit forms the true community between God and man. But this community is formed by transcendence, for it is brought into the intra-divine transcendence so that it is also the place where Father and Son make their ‘home’. 75 The intra-divine transcendence is thus expressed concretely as a community of divine-human inter-action: the Son’s kenosis is not only an activity of intra-divine community but also the activity of divine transcendence interacting with humanity and uniting humans into community by uniting them to God. 76 As such, Philippians 2 invites humanity not only to individual imitation of self-renouncing practice but to participate in this kenotic way which is the life of the intra-divine community. 77 Accordingly, having seen the inner logic of incarnation operate first as the triune God being and acting for humanity, now we see the other side to this inner logic. This is the offering of covenant response by the ‘Man who is for God’ which grounds the formation of a ‘community of covenant response’ by the Spirit as humanity participates in the Son and his covenant response to the Father. 78 For the covenant response of the Son in his humanity operates as solidarity ‘in and for’ all humanity. 79 Further, because the imago is structured in co-humanity, this response to the Father includes not only the upward movement from

86 A deep remembering each human to God but also the outward movement of one human responding to another from whom they are differentiated. 80 In Christ, the intra-active and the inter-active reality of God is thus one reality. 81 Yet how can humanity apprehend the reality of God? Such is important to ascertain for those who would commit themselves to participation in the community of inter-action. I noted earlier in this chapter that, for Anderson, the matter of personal encounter is significant for apprehension of any reality and, implicitly, also for discerning the reality of God. Yet how do we encounter God in person-to-person relations? Anderson uses John Macmurray’s concept of personal reality to found his own articulation in light of God’s self-revelation in his act of incarnation. 82 Macmurray’s ‘form of the personal’ derives from his Gifford Lectures in the 1950s which critiqued the concept of personal reality as handled by modern philosophy, suggesting that the modern Kantian approach to personal reality was purely theoretical in portraying the self as thinking subject, as well as egocentric in its characterisation of self as subject and consequent rendering of the other as object. 83 Anderson, we have seen, also rejects reality as determined by reference to the self as thinking subject in favour of an intrinsic reality in that which confronts the self as ‘other’. 84 This, of course, led him to this point of questioning about personal reality and puts him in sympathy with Macmurray. Macmurray’s move is to reconceive ‘the self as primarily constituted by the practical’, 85 subordinating thought to action 86 as the self’s primary mode of being. This leads Macmurray to conclude that the self could not exist personally in isolation because personal action requires the ‘resistance’ of a fellow agent, the other who constitutes a limit to the self thereby enabling the self to experience itself as agent. ‘Resistance’, as the experience of movement against the agent, generates the possibility for action constitutive of an agent-self. Such action depends on what Macmurray calls a ‘clash of wills’ forcing discrimination between objectives by the agent-self. 87 This overcomes Kantian dualism by including the other in the unity of the self: the other is not discriminated by the self only as thought but is first experienced as distinct from the self and yet also as constitutive of the reality of the self. 88 For Macmurray, though relation with the other is primary to the self’s existence, this does not contradict the reality that each self necessarily must be an individual to act as agent. He dubs this individuality egocentricity and designates it a strictly secondary aspect. 89 No less real, this individuality is included in the self’s action with the other for when the self is revealed to the other in an action, what becomes known to the other is the ‘real’ person. 90 Yet, it is only through the transcendence of individuality represented by the self’s action in an actual encounter that the self can experience the ‘resistance’ by which that individuality is made personal. 91 Withdrawal from relation, a focus on this individuality rather than transcending it, can derive from love or fear of the other. In the former case, where withdrawal is motivated by love for the other, the intention is ‘towards

Memories of incarnation 87 relation’ with the withdrawal ‘intentionally for the sake of the return’ 92 such that individuality remains secondary. Fear, however, focuses the self on selfprotection, not relation, resulting in individuality becoming primary and the self incapable of ‘personal’ relation, instead adopting either the passivity of contemplative idealism or an aggressive will to power. 93 Indeed the development of the self depends upon encounters with another where trust prevails. 94 To succumb to a fear-based withdrawal into egocentricity is to view the world as means to the individual’s ends rather than for its own sake, 95 to be ‘society, but not community . . . associates, but not friends’. 96 A relational withdrawal motivated by love, however, might be for reflection, to enable the self to modify its action towards the other. Since the other is discerned through action – in the realm of the practical rather than thought – theoretical knowledge of other and self cannot be unerring, and thus knowing self and other (thinking and acting rightly) is a process of actions and modified actions by which the reality of other and of self is revealed and even modified progressively. 97 Accordingly, withdrawal into individuality for the other’s sake may enable reflection concerning appropriate modification to actions by which the reality of the other might better be discerned: this would be an attempt, in Anderson’s words, ‘to love objectively in terms of the Other’ 98 by which the reality of the self both is modified and modifies the reality of the other. 99 Essentially, then, Macmurray contends that encounter with a human other constitutes personhood. 100 Thus, the form of the personal is community. Anderson suggests that commitment, or faith, is what moves an individual into belonging-in-community. 101 The commitment of belonging is a personal act of self-transcendence, comprising action-including-reflection. It is accordingly grounded partly in historical evidences of the other’s existence as an agent who has acted in self-transcendence (reflection) and partly in evidences of ‘action out of the future’ (action). Historical evidences signal the other’s reality as extrinsic to the self and suggest the other’s intentions towards the self considering commitment, albeit that being historical they are equivocal in their predictive capacity regarding the other’s future action. They can operate as a context for the self’s reflection regarding commitment to the other but, notwithstanding, so-called future evidences are indispensable. 102 For without personal encounter, there can be no commitment: an action constituting intention towards commitment can only issue in belonging where the other is present to receive/respond to that act. 103 In Macmurray’s eschewal of the approach prioritising self as thinking subject by his recasting of humans as agent-selves whose act in the context of encounter with another constitutes them persons, the potential of his agent-self is apparent. He successfully preserves individuality and freedom of future action in the context of being which is primarily relational and other-centred. However, his thesis fails to connect satisfactorily the ‘form of the personal’ to the reality of God. 104 Without this, we cannot yet determine how we may apprehend the reality of God. If personal encounter with

88 A deep remembering the object of knowledge precedes all human thinking concerning it and if encounter requires the action of an agent-self which transcends its selfexistence and reveals itself, then we can only hope to apprehend the reality of God in an act by which he transcends himself thereby revealing himself. Here, Anderson enters the fray to extend Macmurray’s proposal, noting that it is the incarnation, God’s self-transcending revelatory act, which permits humanity’s interaction with the reality of God as personal being. 105 It is, Anderson argues, the incarnation which permits us to speak of the reality of God in the form of the personal 106 and the incarnation which provides the past and future evidences by which relational commitment to God (faith) may be grounded. The historical evidence disclosed by the incarnation is evidence of intra-active community: we see in the unity of the Spirit not only the Father’s will to love but also the Son’s response of obedience. 107 Yet historical evidences are insufficient to ground relational commitment to God by human persons: a future element is imperative. The incarnation here furnishes evidence of the living Christ made present by the Spirit. 108 It thus incorporates both past and future evidences as grounds for belonging to the divine-human inter-active community. Having become historical, the Word now has a past and a future: his words and actions served as one strand of evidence to place in the truth those who heard and saw (first- or secondhand) by inviting reflection upon those things, leading to an intention to come into his presence by the Spirit, itself the second source of evidence revealing his reality. 109 Anderson calls these the two ‘poles of transcendence’, one being Jesus’ historical life and, the other, encounter with him as living person. The former pole (historical transcendence) remains available to humanity in the Scriptures, written witness to Jesus’ words and actions; the latter pole (personal transcendence) was passed to the Spirit at Christ’s death, tasking him with carrying the living reality of Christ. 110 Neither pole is alone sufficient for the faith/commitment which includes belonging with God: just as the Scriptures cannot be separated from the reality of the living Word who, even now, is made present to us in the life of the Spirit, similarly faith would, without the historical witness to Jesus, depend entirely on human experience of encounter with the Spirit and could have no historical grounding extrinsic to human experience since the Spirit has no past of his own by which such grounds for belonging and faith may be established. 111 The work of remembering in this chapter has identified a movement of inter-active transcendence, parallel to the intra-trinitarian transcendence of love, by which the Spirit enables divine-human community in the Son. In the Spirit-carried presence of Jesus, humanity receives a new opportunity to live out of the divine life in the space between the poles of historical transcendence (Scripture as God’s Word) and personal transcendence (the indwelling Spirit), in the community between God and humanity and between humans one with another. 112 Though in one sense an act of historical transcendence continued beyond the incarnation, ‘lived transcendence’, as Anderson dubs life in this space, is also qualitatively different: this community is not,

Memories of incarnation 89 ontologically, an extension of the incarnation and, though God’s act in Christ is foundational for new life in Christ, it is not identical thereto. 113 Nevertheless, this sense of continuation points to Christians as standing in the world for Christ by the Spirit, with the church as the concrete place where the reality of God is expressed in the world. 114 The next chapter will pursue, in more detail, this aspect of Anderson’s thought whereby the form of God in the world ‘has its transcendent ground in the life-form of the Incarnate Word . . . and its concrete ground in the historical existence of the “new man” who lives in the Spirit’. 115 This reality of Spirit which is lived transcendence, a reforming of humanity into Christlikeness in the context of a community in the Spirit, is of interest because such is the church, the community living in union with the Incarnate One by the Spirit’s power. It is to these memories of the church, as Anderson recounts them, that I now turn. For to engage in an act of prophetic imagination regarding incarnational ecclesial leadership requires recounting of the deeply rooted memories of the Christian tradition relating to the context in which that leadership is exercised. Notes 1 Donald G. Bloesch, ‘Creative Transcendence’, The Reformed Journal 27:12 (1977), 30. His comment that ‘its style and language do not make for readability’ matches another assessment of it as ‘rather complicated and involved’ (Phillip R. Thorne, Evangelicalism and Karl Barth: His Reception and Influence in North American Evangelical Theology , Allison Park: Pickwick, 1995, 118). 2 He also calls its language ‘impenetrable’ and its argument ‘severely compressed’ (Rowan Williams, ‘Review of Historical Transcendence and the Reality of God’, The Downside Review 94 (July 1976), 236–239). Cf. C.B. Kaiser, ‘ Historical Transcendence and the Reality of God’, Reformed Review 30 (1977), 150–151; David A. Pailin, ‘God’s Otherness’, ExpTim 87:8 (1976), 248–249; A. Skevington Wood, ‘ Historical Transcendence and the Reality of God’, EQ 51 (1979), 174–175. 3 Thorne claims that ‘Anderson manifests a degree and kind of appropriation that can only be described as operating within a Barthian paradigm’, as Torrance had himself modelled to his student ( Evangelicalism, 117). Further: John Lewis, ‘The Formative Influence of Karl Barth in the Theology of Ray Anderson’, Colloquium 37:1 (2005), 27–44. To some extent, I could perhaps be described in similar terms here: although I am highly critical of Anderson’s proposals in relation to ecclesial leadership, I am largely operating, perhaps, within an ‘Andersonian paradigm’ when it comes to appropriating his reading of incarnation and ecclesiology. I raise critique of the paradigm in this chapter and the following one where I consider that to do so is necessary to justify my use of it. For example, I express my frustration with Anderson’s somewhat confused articulation of ‘kenotic community’, a confusion which leads Bloesch to note the possibility of ‘incipient universalism in Anderson’s thought’ (‘Creative’, 30) yet which I think can be untangled satisfactorily. Nevertheless, my purpose here in reading Anderson is not one of general critique but has a much narrower and constructive edge. 4 Thorne, Evangelicalism, 119; HTRG, chs.1–4, especially 103, 190. Cf. Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, Belfast: Christian Journals, 1980, 8–9; Torrance, Theology , 39, 53.

90 A deep remembering 5 Thomas F. Torrance, God and Rationality, London: Oxford University Press, 1971, 105. 6 HTRG , 105. 7 HTRG, xv. 8 HTRG , 109. 9 HTRG, 114. In doing so, he follows Torrance: see Mediation, 73–77; Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, Downers Grove: IVP, 2008, ch.2. 10 HTRG , 131. 11 HTRG , 188–189. 12 This is demonstrated through anthropomorphic event: examples include God’s meeting with Abram (Genesis 17:1) and interactions with Moses (Exodus 3:6; 31:18) by which God speaks, appears and acts ( HTRG , 110–118). 13 Israel is the concretised location of God’s self-revelation to creation by virtue of his self-election to Israel which was expressed as a temporal event in the establishment of his covenant with her ( HTRG, 118–121). This election not only establishes the temporal and historical relation of Israel to creation: it also reveals God’s own temporality through his interaction with creation in spacetime whereby he alone determines history ( HTRG , 123–125). 14 HTRG, 127–131. Though naming himself to Israel, this name, YHWH, is ‘a refusal of any name’ (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. 1.1 (tr. G.T. Thomson), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936, 365). 15 HTRG , 129. 16 HTRG , 130. 17 HTRG , 131. 18 HTRG , 130. 19 HTRG , 134. 20 OBH , 38. 21 HTRG, 135–136. The discussion which follows has resonances with Torrance’s own proposals on the Word of God and the answering of humankind (see God, ch.6 and Incarnation , ch.2). 22 OBH, 60. Note that the response is not an ‘originating act of personhood’ but evidence of personhood which is determined by the Word ( OBH , 40–41). 23 OBH , 58. 24 OBH , 59–62. 25 I capitalise ‘Other’ to denote God, using lowercase for human ‘others’. Anderson, however, uses ‘Other’ for both. Quotations from his work reflect this. 26 OBH, 79–80. Word and response are thus bound together. Human being is accordingly grounded in ‘ ek-static personhood’ ( HTRG, 170–171), as developed in chapter 5. Cf. Gunton, Promise , 128. 27 HTRG, 137. In the Garden of Eden, the limit which made free response possible was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a limit which, located in the centre of the garden, was also the centre of Adam’s existence and which invited humanity to the freedom of an affirmative response to God as both limit and centre of creaturely existence ( HTRG, 136–137). Essentially, the prohibition of that tree operated as the context enabling a free response of obedience. 28 HTRG , 138. 29 HTRG , 138–141. 30 Torrance, God , 158. 31 HTRG , 141. 32 Torrance, God , 149. 33 HTRG , 143. 34 HTRG , 143–144. 35 HTRG , 145.

Memories of incarnation 91 36 HTRG , 151. 37 Bruce McCormack, ‘Kenoticism in Modern Christology’ (444–457) in Francesca Aran Murphy (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Christology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 455; Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender , Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, ch.1. 38 Coakley, Powers , 16–17. 39 McCormack, ‘Kenoticism’, 450–454; also Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001, 168–175. 40 D.M. Baillie, God Was in Christ, London: Faber & Faber, 1948, 94–98. L. Berkhof lists other objections ( Systematic Theology, London: Banner of Truth, 1958, 328–329). 41 See: C. Stephen Evans, ‘The Self-Emptying of Love: Some Thoughts on Kenotic Christology’ (246–272) in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds.), The Incarnation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; R.J. Feenstra, ‘Reconsidering Kenotic Christology’ (128–152) in R.J. Feenstra and C. Plantinga, Jr. (eds.), Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. 42 HTRG , 147–151. 43 HTRG, 167, 162 (quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology (tr. John Bowden), London: Collins, 1966, 30–31); cf. Donald G. Dawe, ‘A Fresh Look at the Kenotic Christologies’, SJT 15 (1962), 337–349, 348. 44 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. 4.1 (eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956, 186, 188. 45 HTRG , 160–161. 46 HTRG , 162–164. 47 HTRG , 167. 48 These approaches resonate with the ‘new-style kenoticism’ which Colyer claims is hard to define but generally has four characteristics: (i) initial emphasis on Christ’s real humanity; (ii) a movement from ontology to functional/relational themes; (iii) the kenotic view as not limited to Christ but revelatory of God; (iv) inward kenosis in the very being of the triune God (Peter J. Colyer, The SelfEmptying God: An Undercurrent in Christian Theology Helping the Relationship with Science , Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, 113). 49 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians , s.l.: SCM, n.d., 63. 50 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. 2.1 (eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance), Peabody: Hendrickson, 2010, 516. 51 Colin Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’, SJT 41:3 (1988), 359–376, 364, 372. Note also the characterisation of ‘self-giving humility’ as the ‘essence of divinity’ by C.F.D. Moule, ‘Further Reflexions on Philippians 2:5–11’ (264–276) in W.W. Gasque and R.P. Martin (eds.), Apostolic History and the Gospel , Exeter: Paternoster, 1970, 265. 52 Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009, 25, 28, 32–39. 53 Gorman, Inhabiting , 29 n.74. 54 John Macquarrie notes both Thomasius’ distinction between kenosis of the logos asarkos and humiliation of the logos ensarkos and his parallel recognition of their continuity (‘Kenoticism Reconsidered’, Theology 77 (1974), 115–124, 120, 123). Fowl supports kenosis as comprising becoming-flesh and humiliation ( Philippians , 96–97). Anderson is doing the same ( HTRG , 167, cf. 182). 55 HTRG , 178–179. 56 HTRG ,173 especially n.84. 57 HTRG , 174.

92 A deep remembering 58 HTRG , 175. 59 HTRG , 176 n.88. 60 HTRG , 176. 61 HTRG , 176–177. 62 HTRG , 172, 175. 63 HTRG, 177. ‘At the very heart of the divine ministry of reconciliation, there is a receptivity and self-emptying that, in its depth of divine being, is capable of assuming a human “estrangement” that does not result in what Barth once called an “ontic cleft” in God himself. In his identification with sinners, even to the point of the experience of “Godforsakenness” on the cross, Jesus does not move outside of the “Godness” of his own being in order to fulfill a moral intention located merely in the freedom of God to act outside of his own being’ ( SPT, 115). 64 HTRG , 175. 65 HTRG , 178–179. 66 HTRG , 178–179. 67 HTRG , 179. 68 HTRG, 179. Anderson calls this ‘the intra-divine transcendence of God’ ( HTRG , 181). 69 HTRG , 181. 70 HTRG , 179. 71 OBH , 36. 72 If the actual self is composed in relation to God and others (as Anderson construes from Genesis – ‘Holistic’, 11), then this must be in and through Christ. Thus, the ‘“third” element in mutual encounter as existence before God is Jesus Christ’ since ‘one cannot exist in the fulness of human being before God and others apart from union with Christ’s humanity’ (Andrew Purves, ‘The “Third” Element in Mutual Encounter as Existence before God Is Jesus Christ’, Edification: Journal of the Society for Christian Psychology 1:2 (2007), 35–36). Without this unifying participation, the polarity of co-humanity ‘would become a division of being, rather than simply a difference in being’ ( OBH, 85–86). Deddo discusses how this way of union and communion is problematic to those located in the Western philosophical tradition, which he characterises as ‘an Aristotelian substantival ontology (reinforced by Newtonian physics, Cartesian metaphysics and modern Deism, naturalism, and solipsism)’. This is because the tradition designates relations as only accidental to human being and thus reduces this union in one of two ways, namely a fusing which obliterates differentiation or a differentiation which denies real union. This manifests psychologically as ‘fleeing or fusing’ (‘disengagement’ or ‘enmeshment’ in family systems theory) or as an unpredictable oscillation between the two (Gary W. Deddo, ‘Resisting Reductionisms: Why We Need Theological Anthropology’ (168–193) in Speidell (ed.), Christian, 175). I recognise this dynamic in chapters 9 and 10. 73 HTRG , 181–182. 74 HTRG, 182. In Christ, the Spirit comes to humanity having ‘composed himself . . . to dwell with human nature’, itself ‘adapted and become accustomed to receive and bear that same . . . Spirit’ (Torrance, Theology, 246), rendering possible community with the Father. 75 In this sense, the community of lived transcendence – as Anderson calls it – is the place which the Spirit requires to ‘work out the intra-divine transcendence which belongs to the historical reality of the Incarnate Logos’ ( HTRG, 182–183). 76 HTRG , 183. 77 HTRG , 183–184. 78 HTRG , 185. 79 HTRG , 181.

Memories of incarnation 93 80 OBH , 37, 80. 81 HTRG , 189. 82 HTRG , 190–199. 83 HTRG, 191; John Macmurray, Persons in Relation, London: Faber & Faber, 1970, 15–16, 24. For comprehensive assessment and critical defence of Macmurray’s work: Esther McIntosh, John Macmurray’s Religious Philosophy: What It Means to Be a Person , Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 84 Accordingly, his conception of transcendence avoids references to that which is ‘beyond finite reason’ (i.e. transcendence as a limit fixed by humanity at the boundary of existence). He instead characterises transcendence as ‘the act by which a personal agent moves beyond his own self-existence to confront and inter-act with an “Other”’ ( HTRG , 190, chs.1–3). 85 John Macmurray, The Self as Agent , London: Faber & Faber, 1969, 84. 86 Reflection operates primarily ‘in-action’ by consideration of possibilities. Reflection draws inferences from what is already determined, namely the past (Macmurray, Self , 134–135). 87 Neither material nor organic world can elicit this: at most ‘behaviour’ – response to environmental stimuli – is possible (Macmurray, Self , 144–145). 88 HTRG , 194–195. 89 Macmurray, Persons , 94–95. 90 HTRG , 197. 91 ‘Holistic’, 7–8. 92 Macmurray, Persons , 175. 93 Macmurray, Persons , 94–95, 103–105, 135, 137, 142. 94 Macmurray, Persons , 101. 95 John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion , London: Faber & Faber, 1962, 52. 96 Macmurray, Persons, 150. A society, as Anderson understands it, is ‘an aggregate of individuals who may share a common task, but not a common life’ whereas a community ‘shares a common life where each one can be “singular” as an individual member, but not a “solitary” person amidst a group’ (Ray S. Anderson and Todd H. Speidell, ‘Interview with Ray Anderson: Toward a Christian Theoanthropology’, Edification: Journal of the Society for Christian Psychology 1:2 (2007), 65–72, 66). 97 Macmurray, Persons , 166–167, 169. 98 HTRG , 199. 99 The agent ‘cannot modify the Other without modifying himself’ since he ‘is part of the Other’ (Macmurray, Persons , 166). 100 ‘Holistic’, 7. LaCugna suggests that Macmurray intends to move thinking concerning the self away from substance and towards personhood as ‘an organism, an evolving reality, that incorporates both the negative (subjectivity) and positive (agency) dimensions of its existence’ (Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, 256). 101 Anderson admits dependence here on Edward John Carnell, Christian Commitment: An Apologetic , Macmillan: New York, 1957 ( HTRG , 206). 102 The acts of an agent determine the future by actualising what, aside from the action, would be merely possible (Macmurray, Self , 134). 103 HTRG, 207–208. This is Anderson’s articulation rather than Macmurray’s and is significant for his proposal concerning how God may be known. It is not inconsistent with Macmurray, however, who is clear that the encounter by which the self knows and is known presupposes reflection-in-action and the presence of another agent, expressly characterising reflection as concerned with past events (see n.86) and action as determining the future (Macmurray, Self, 132, 134–135). Anderson’s language of ‘future’ may feel somewhat strained in its reference to what is, perhaps more simply, the personal action of an agent

94 A deep remembering towards another; nonetheless, it coheres with Macmurray’s own language and concept. In everyday terms, this is also confirmed by experience. One’s intention to commit to a person/community, occasioned by a desire to belong, is informed by an existing knowledge – however small or second-hand – of that person/community (past evidence). That intention is only consummated in commitment and belonging where personal encounter occurs such that intention may become (future-determining) action. 104 HTRG , 204–205. 105 HTRG, 208–209. Implicitly, God’s act as Other not only reveals himself but operates also to reveal our human reality to us ( HTRG , 200). 106 Anderson remarks that strict application of Macmurray’s proposal leads to implications that, in his act for humanity, God might thereby be modified, making brief remarks but ultimately leaving this question open ( HTRG, 200 n.38). He further comments that whilst strict application also suggests that our actions towards God reveal our intentions towards him, John 2:24–25 implies that such would not be something that God could not already know ( HTRG, 200–201). 107 HTRG , 209. 108 HTRG , 209. 109 HTRG , 210–211. 110 HTRG, 211–222. As Anderson notes, continuity between God’s ministry in Jesus, Jesus’ ministry in service of God and the Spirit’s ministry as ‘the ministry of Christ in the world’ was ensured by Pentecost: even as Jesus had been Spiritanointed for ministry prior to his death and resurrection, so also the church was Spirit-anointed and thereby empowered to participate in the continuation of Christ’s ministry ( SPT , 44). 111 HTRG , 221. 112 HTRG , 222–223. 113 HTRG , 223; SPT , 114; MOTF , 31. 114 HTRG , 223. 115 HTRG , 228.

5 Memories of the church The last chapter closed with Anderson’s presentation of the church as community of divine-human inter-action located in the act of kenosis which is the incarnation. God’s act in Christ provides all the evidences needed to elicit the human response of faith/commitment to that community and to God as he is found there by the Spirit. These evidences are, first, the historical demonstration in Christ’s life, death and resurrection of the Father’s will to love and the Son’s response and, second, the Spirit-mediated encounter with Christ as resurrected person. That God himself in Christ as the true imago participates as the unity in the polarity of co-humanity operates to bind humanity into relationship not only with him but also with one another. Accordingly, as we shall see, the church has a reality which Anderson calls both kenotic and ek-static. This chapter will examine his proposals further before drawing some conclusions regarding the telos of the church and its ministry. This is significant for it is towards this telos that ecclesial leadership must point. Finally, comments will be made regarding the role of each believer in this ministry. The kenotic and ek-static community It is initially difficult to unravel what Anderson means by describing the church as both kenotic and ek-static. This is not helped by his use of another term, ‘kenotic community’. One of the few engagements with this aspect of Anderson’s work advocates that the kenotic community is one of his ‘most enduring contributions to theology’ yet does little to elucidate exactly how to understand the term save to say that it is ‘not the same as the church’ but that the church participates therein. 1 There is a very real tendency towards imprecision: not clearly defining ‘kenotic community’ at the outset, Anderson later claims that he used it to represent ‘a general sense of solidarity with the world, with its general implication being that it includes all that is meant by the term “church” as well’ but would thenceforward use it to refer ‘specifically to the solidarity which the church has with man in the world’. 2 That is, kenotic community means the whole of humanity by virtue of Christ’s solidarity in the flesh 3 but is often used, in a second sense,

96 A deep remembering as shorthand to denote the community of lived transcendence, the church. 4 This term used in the second sense emphasises what Anderson designates this community’s kenotic aspect – the self-renouncing solidarity of church with world – but does not thereby undermine its parallel ek-static aspect, of which more below. This second sense highlights that only the community of lived transcendence can live out the kenosis which is, as we shall see, the form of Christ in the world (because only those who have received the Spirit are so empowered). Yet even reasonably clear evidence of this second sense being intended should probably not thereby be read as implying that the kenotic community is exhausted in definition by ‘the church’: it includes rather, in one sense, all humanity. At issue for the kenotic community is not merely a life of self-emptying for its own sake. Rather, as concrete expression of the intra-divine transcendence – in that Christ in his kenosis is the activity of divine transcendence inter-acting with humanity, uniting humans into community by uniting them to God – this community of inter-action ‘becomes one with the kenotic form as explicated by the Son in his humanity’ such that it images the intra-divine community of Trinitarian love. 5 Thus, the source of the church’s kenosis is imperative. A mere ‘kenotic principle’ cannot empower a truly kenotic life and may, indeed, ‘envelop . . . the ego of the church ever more securely in a posture of humility’. 6 Plumbing the incarnation’s inner logic has instead taught us differently. Jesus’ kenosis is not merely a principle for imitation but rather the outworking of a quality of his very being, an intra-trinitarian act founded in his relation with the Father whereby he demonstrated that God’s own nature is self-renunciation in favour of existence in loving, other-preferring relationship. 7 A principle of self-emptying can, divorced from participation in the Son’s kenosis, become ‘a manner of self-existence’ and thus no kenosis at all. 8 Anderson expresses a similar dynamic regarding obedience: Obedience by itself is the most insidious of all temptations. It is the ontological source and motive behind obedience that gives it its character. Thus obedience is not the central motive in the life of Jesus as sheer ethical demand. Rather, it is the inner life of sonship that comes to expression through his obedience that characterizes Jesus. 9 Humility is only divine insofar as it flows from the eternal Sonship of Christ worked out in his humanity. 10 The church, which is kenotic community by virtue of Spirit-given union with the Son’s humanity, enters into the kenotic way on that basis only. Humanity’s authentic form of existence is found in the Incarnate One: just as the Spirit worked in him to enable the covenant response and his participation in God’s life, so the Spirit continues to work to conform humanity to Christ, 11 the one whose very life is kenotic. Thus, for the kenotic community participation in this life is the goal: the kenotic way is not means to an end. Indeed, there is no higher end, no higher ‘ideal form’ which determines the life of the Spirit, other than the Son’s life

Memories of the church 97 revealed historically and, therefore, no ideal for humanity other than conformity to Christ. 12 Life in the Spirit is the telos of the church: that is, ‘real personhood’ found in the form of Christ. 13 Yet what is real personhood? To answer this question is urgent, for ‘[i]f humanity is to escape its own propensity for self-justification, it must also have access to an image of humanity that is not merely a reflection of itself’. 14 It is, of course, the incarnation which constitutes the ‘hermeneutical horizon’ for real personhood: though Adamic humanity determines Jesus’ state of creaturely existence, it is Jesus alone in his life, death and resurrection who, in his new humanity, establishes the permanent orientation of humanity towards God. 15 At the cross, sin is judged for the disorder which it constitutes and its connection with creatureliness is severed such that sin ceases to be the deterministic principle of humanity. Crucified humanity thus holds in tension both real humanity and the actuality of sin’s true devastation, with the resurrection authenticating restored humanity as creaturely yet finally subject not to the determination of its creaturely nature but to the determination of the Word. 16 Accordingly, the restoration of the imago means not the loss of creatureliness or identity but the ‘opening up . . . of our true self’, our reorientation towards God which is freedom of response in hearing and obeying the Word 17 and thus freedom to respond to the other as ‘counterpart to one’s own personhood’. 18 Real humanity, founded thus in personal being as revealed in the incarnation, indicates that wholeness of person, an integration of the real and actual, is to be anticipated as a corollary of humanity’s reconciliation to God in Christ. This is indeed seen in Jesus’ own enactment of kingdom reality in restoring the value of persons by sharing his own self as he touched, healed and ate with them. 19 Life in the Spirit, as real humanity, means participating in Christ’s relationship with God and in his human person-to-person relations, whereby others embody the limit by which Christ confronts us. By this language of limit, Anderson indicates that the reality of Spirit found in the kenotic community does not take the form of one’s own existence but that of the other who in their concreteness becomes end in themselves, not means to an end. 20 This is not to deny personal indwelling of the Spirit, the pole of personal transcendence, but to suggest that the Spirit indwells us for the other’s sake and the other for our sake. Thus movement towards one’s real existence, the progressive formation of oneself to Christ, is found in relation to the other as we respond to the Christ we find there by the Spirit. 21 Indeed, real humanity ‘must be discovered through repentance towards both God and neighbor’ because Jesus’ summary of the law itself is rooted in social humanity: 22 without neighbour-love, repentance towards God would have ‘no real content’. 23 In locating the reality of Spirit in the ‘kenotic community’, I suspect that Anderson intends primarily to reference the community of lived transcendence, rather than all humanity. It is believing others who embody the limit by which we are confronted with Christ, for it is in the church, the community of lived transcendence where the Word is preached and the Spirit

98 A deep remembering is present in this community of others, that both poles of transcendence converge and the reality of God can be known. Nevertheless, this is not to render irrelevant the unbelieving other who has not received the Spirit or to confirm the church in inward-turned navel-gazing. For the believer who knows the reality of God by his Spirit in the ecclesial context, the point becomes not finding Christ concretely in the world but bringing his life to confront the world. 24 Consequently, as a believer acts in love towards an unbelieving other, seeing them as one who shares a common humanity with Christ 25 and looking beyond their actual existence to their reality as a person, the relationship with that other may become, in some sense, a context in which the believer experiences growth in real personhood as they choose to act in love towards that other. 26 It is in this ministry of love that believers enter more deeply into the life of the Spirit. For such love is central to the kenotic way of the church, being human participation in the intra-divine transcendence which is itself love, such that humanity’s ‘true nature’ – as those in God’s image – is thereby completed. 27 Person-to-person relationships thus become the potential context for personal transformation towards the goal which is one’s real existence, the re-formation of Christ’s kenotic life in each one who chooses to respond to the form of Christ in their encounter with another by serving them in love. Yet whilst this could be understood as presenting this community as no more than life with one another, such a perspective would be incomplete. 28 As Jesus not only related to humanity in his bearing of human nature but also interacted with the Father in what might be termed ‘ek-static relation’, so a concept of personhood in the context of inter-active community demands that it be understood as constituted not only by the hypostatic union of the Incarnate Word but also the ek-static reality of the Word which is life in the Spirit. 29 The Spirit’s work is, accordingly, not concerned only with the relating of human persons in the horizontal aspect of this inter-active community but also that each one might receive the Spirit, becoming oriented outward to God in the community’s vertical dimension, culminating in an ek-static reality whereby the many might participate in the one outward movement of love from Son towards Father. 30 Indeed, it is this ek-static dimension which is the difference between believers and the rest of humanity. By assuming flesh, Christ became identified with the whole of humanity, incorporating them into what Anderson sometimes, and rather inconsistently, calls the kenotic community. 31 Yet to experience life in the Spirit, the eschatological inbreaking, requires that humans respond in faith/commitment to God in Christ, receiving the gift of the Spirit. Thus, bound together by the Spirit, the ek-static community participates in the divine life. 32 We may understand this participation as occurring in the reality in which divine-human communion occurs: love, specifically expressed in works of love (1 John 4:20–21). 33 This love may mean practical engagement with human estrangement. For the loss of transcendence experienced in Adam’s denial of God as his limit resulted in humans ‘each

Memories of the church 99 seeking to bear the totality of humanity in their own hypostasis’, having lost the ek-static dimension which is community in the divine life. 34 Since the believer’s life of love is not only a kenotic self-emptying but also an ek-static movement beyond self, their response may be to face the sufferings of others, overcoming estrangement by choosing to bear these with them, in a care deriving not from a capacity of the believer’s own but rather a sharing in the love of God which humanity experiences only as incapacity. 35 Such care is intrinsically concerned with the embodied nature of suffering. Because the incarnation is par-ousia – a ‘being-with’ in the concreteness of human existence – and further because Christ in his resurrection remains embodied, participation in the divine movement of love as humans is inherently physical. 36 In Anderson’s words, ‘[t]he body too has its ek-stasis in acts of love which acknowledge the reality and the presence of other persons through all of the physical senses’. 37 The church thus comprises those who share in the ‘humanity . . . [of] Christ and the reality of the Holy Spirit which comes as gift’. 38 As we shall see, Christ’s solidarity with all humanity means, however, that the church cannot easily be set apart from the world as a separate entity. Accordingly, any gathering of two or three in Jesus’ name will inevitably be surrounded by persons who have not (yet) responded to God in Christ with faith/ commitment. Some may stand at a distance; others will adopt positions of close proximity in order to observe the gathering of believers, seeking to discern whether God is really present in the church. I suggest that, without compromising the integrity of the church as the community of lived transcendence which not only shares in Christ’s common humanity but has also received the Spirit, this larger community might also be recognised. Thus, I use the term ‘ecclesial community’ to reference the group comprising not only the church but also these persons who stand in close proximity to the believers for the purpose of discerning the reality of God and considering their own response of faith/commitment. 39 Anderson notes that the church ‘receives’ individuals not because of their maturity or capacity to love; 40 indeed, both believers and unbelievers can be ‘received’ in the midst of the church. For this common humanity shared with Christ by which the Spirit adopts as the form of Christ for us the other in their historical existence means that ‘a cripple is no less real than a whole person’ and that, whether or not a person has yet received the Spirit, he or she is afforded opportunity to experience an actual growth into real personhood, namely ‘the capacity to live in love’. 41 Those in the ecclesial community who have yet to receive the Spirit are thus ‘received’ by the church and, in this ‘being-received’, are thereby enabled to discern the reality of God there in the place between the poles of transcendence as they associate with the believers. This makes possible their consideration of a future response of faith/commitment and Spirit-reception. Receiving the Spirit remains implicit in a person’s full participation in the church yet may occur only after they have been received for what Anderson calls ‘a considerable length of love’. 42 The receiving of another means ‘to

100 A deep remembering recognize the[ir] humanity . . . especially when it is hidden within a broken creaturely existence’. 43 It is therefore often costly to the community of lived transcendence. Indeed, the church’s kenosis is not the powerlessness of abandoning status. Rather, it means refusing to abandon the weak for the strong: believers’ ‘humility is not in taking less than the world, but in receiving more than the world can give’ 44 because the Son’s kenosis is expressed as self-renunciation in favour of existence in loving, other-preferring relationship. Those engaged in ecclesial leadership know well the challenge of this kind of kenosis and may seek to avoid it. Yet, fundamentally, the human condition is one of belonging: 45 the reconciliation effected in the incarnation, orientating humanity to God in the new humanity of Christ, means that the church, entrusted with Christ’s ministry, must continue this work by upholding and reaffirming humanity, even in the face of the inhumanity of estrangement 46 by which actual existence may appear impossibly removed from real personhood. For believers, the re-enactment of Christ’s life in his ongoing ministry through the interactions with other members of his body serves as an enactment of personhood: by re-enacting the reality, a present knowing and experience of it is made possible for those who participate in that community. 47 This may occur in acts such as baptism and Eucharist but also in those daily interactions of the believers which constitute ‘the constant and continual affirmation of the community as to its own true order as created and restored by the divine Word’. 48 This communal self-enactment happens in the context of ‘rituals and relations that are personal’ rather than ‘merely pragmatic or idealistic’. 49 As each believer continues to be received, and receives other believers, within this community where God’s Word is heard and the Spirit makes Christ present in the concrete life of the other, there is progressive formation to Christ, the fuller reorientation towards God which is real personhood, the telos of the church. The same is true in relation to unbelievers. For a believer to incorporate an unbeliever into their ‘own self-enactment of communion with God’ in Christ 50 is also an act of ‘receiving’, one which operates evangelistically as invitation into an experience of the reality of God. Such a welcome into this community of lived transcendence impacts the unbeliever at the point of their ‘receptivity’, confronting them with their spiritual independence through the invitation to respond in faith/commitment so that they might participate in lived transcendence. 51 Where this invitation is accepted, of course, a relationship is instigated which is the context for discerning the reality of Christ in order better to love him objectively as he is (rather than as the self previously perceived him), an act which also modifies the self. In this sense, conversion may happen within the context of the ecclesial community because it is as individuals are received here as persons that they experience lived transcendence and, being received, in turn receive the Spirit, turning towards God and joining in the ek-static movement of love which is expressed concretely in neighbour-love.

Memories of the church 101 The telos of the church and its ministry I pause momentarily in my close reading of Anderson to draw some conclusions regarding the church’s nature and ministry as informed by reflection on the incarnation. This is a necessary precursor to development in chapter 6 of an alternative leadership discourse since ecclesial leadership must ultimately be directed to realising the telos of the church and its ministry. Whilst I accept that the church exists in a state of eschatological tension with co-humanity as participation in God being only provisional now and love experienced as presence-in-absence, I nevertheless do not consider that this justifies silence from the church regarding the ultimate telos of its ministry. As chapter 9 will note, I am cognisant of warnings concerning what others have dubbed ‘blueprint ecclesiologies’ such that ‘ideal ecclesiology and the realities of the concrete church’ are divorced 52 and Volf’s concern that there must be some accommodation to the weakness of humanity such that we recognise a ‘pre-eschatological form of the eschatological church of love’. 53 Indeed, such cautions are helpful and must temper this act of prophetic imagination, for there is certainly danger of divorce between the ideal and the concrete this side of the eschaton. However, to say nothing at all is also unwise. How else might the church and its leadership ‘correspond to their own future’, borrowing Volf’s language, 54 unless we articulate now their telos and propose a praxis to shape our movement towards this end? Reflection upon Anderson’s assessment of ecclesiological implications flowing from his theology of incarnation leads me to propose that life in the Spirit, the church’s participation in the Son’s life, is its true telos. This participation in Christ’s life is a participation in the community of lived transcendence, caught up by the Spirit in Christ’s movement of love towards the Father which is true worship and in his extension of divine love to humanity. The church’s telos as informed by incarnational reflection is accordingly not only Christological and pneumatic but also profoundly Trinitarian and world-affirming. To participate in Christ involves participating in his ministry. That it is Christ’s ministry does not, however, justify human passivity: human participation is central and ‘obedience and faith are not set aside by grace’. 55 The act of human participation in Christ’s ministry is the expression of his love towards human others. Yet, this neighbour-love is not only participation in Christ’s human person-to-person relations: it is simultaneously, as already noted, concrete physical expression of human participation by the Spirit in Christ’s ek-static relationship of love with the Father. In Christ, to love others is to love God. Such concrete expression of neighbour-love by the church – the place of convergence of the poles of transcendence where God is made present in Christ by his Spirit – comprises a receiving of people into this place, helping them to respond to these poles with faith/commitment, receive the Spirit and learn to live in Christ out of a loving personhood becoming increasingly conformed to him. 56 As those who share in the kenotic way, believers aspire, in life and ministry, towards

102 A deep remembering the self-renouncing neighbour-love which characterises the kenosis intrinsic to the divine life. This may mean for the church a long receiving in love of both believers and others who do not yet know how to receive that love, a sharing of life in a cruciformity lived out most clearly in the context of interactions which enact Christ’s life in his ongoing ministry amongst the ecclesial community. Being received in community is essential because wholeness is not self-centric in form. 57 Rather, wholeness – and indeed holiness – comes through experience of love being expressed ‘within responsible social structures’ where we are rendered ‘free to express our own unique and particular being in those relationships by means of and through our own personality’ 58 and where even superficial relationships can challenge or dismantle dearly held illusions of Christlikeness. 59 Thus believers who share in this life and ministry of the Son have neighbourlove as their telos, upholding the humanity of these others within the ecclesial community. 60 In every case, such love requires in practical terms an openness to the other who limits one’s own being by their presence alongside. 61 Macmurray contends that this openness must be externalised in actions which operate as ‘resistance’ to the other such that personal encounter may occur. Actions which are mere habit or compulsion are insufficient, for discrimination is required if the self is to express his or her being in the act, this being the invitation for truly personal response from the other. 62 Accordingly, ‘pure’ openness which leaves no place for differentiation is (even if possible on our part) not what is sought. Rather, to offer the necessary ‘resistance’ means to be the other’s concrete limit, to offer to the other one’s differentiation from them, that each might thereby experience both themselves and the other. Such ‘differentiated openness’ constitutes a commitment towards relation for the purposes of discerning the other, in order to love them objectively as they are, and desires the other’s best, especially that they might grow in openness towards God as both centre and ultimate limit. That this human relationship of neighbour-love finds its context in relation to God is central. Yet the pole of personal transcendence (Spirit encountered through the believing other) is insufficient for apprehension of the reality of God without the witness of Scripture (the historical pole). Thus neighbour-love relationships divorced from the ‘place’ of lived transcendence, the church, where Scripture is preached amongst a community of Spirit-indwelled others should be understood as less than ideal and probably less than sufficient for the reorientation of humanity to God in Christ’s own new humanity. 63 As each believer joins in Christ’s kenotic/ek-static ministry of neighbourlove, this believer’s expression of such love has two aspects in terms of this telos which is reorientation of humanity to God. First, without detracting from the commitment to love the other as ‘end’ in themselves rather than means to a ‘bigger end’, the believer does also experience their own growth in the life of the Spirit, which is Christlikeness. Second, this love operates as offer to the other (which may be refused) of a relationship where they may be received in the context of the believer’s re-enactment of Christ’s

Memories of the church 103 life in his ongoing ministry and which may engender initial or deepened response of faith/commitment by which the other receives their personhood in relationship with God in Christ. This, as the next chapter will develop, is a kind of leadership. Corresponding to these two aspects, this reorientation of humanity to God is thus simultaneously the telos of the church’s being and also the telos to which it directs its ministry to those inside and outside of it. Those who live thus in community, though sometimes experiencing this life as personally costly, benefit greatly for even as they express love they also receive love from many others. Zero-sum power situations, where the availability of resources means that leadership operates by excluding others from power and other resources, need not arise in such a community, albeit that the degree to which this is experienced is an eschatological question, something which those readers who have experienced ecclesial power struggles will be keen to highlight! Yet, where this is the telos towards which the church directs its being and ministry, we can expect progression – however halting – towards that end. Despite my characterisation of this dynamic of humanisation as the telos of the church in both being and ministry, it is worth commenting that the ministry of love towards the other is the domain of each believer rather than the church as entity for, as I have already intimated, Anderson contends that the church cannot stand as entity over against the world. Indeed, he describes the church’s mission not as empire-building but as the dispersing of God’s mission through its members’ lives and through the ‘groups and organizations that they form’. 64 This moves the focus on to the ministry of each believer in their ‘whole-life’ context 65 rather than the church as institution, such that the kenotic/ek-static ministry of neighbour-love must be expressed as a ministry not so much of the church as whole as of each believer. The incarnational and evangelical Christian Until now, I have left largely unexamined the nature of the kenotic community’s relation to the world, 66 a relation which might seem to be one of identity given that the only condition of membership in the kenotic community is to be human even as Christ is. Yet there is, of course, a difference between Christ and the world and, similarly, a difference between the kenotic community and the world. 67 Notwithstanding, this difference is not one which divides but rather results from God’s act of reconciliation in Christ: the tension proceeds from the reality that because Jesus lived on earth as the ‘new man’ who was also united with alienated humanity, the Christian in the kenotic community experiences this same tension. 68 Solidarity with all who share a common nature with Christ is a necessary implication of the Christian’s conformity to Christ. 69 Barth described this solidarity with humanity as: full commitment to it, unreserved participation in its situation, in the promise given it by creation, in its responsibility for the arrogance, sloth

104 A deep remembering and falsehood which reign in it, in its suffering . . . but . . . supremely in the free grace of God demonstrated and addressed to it in Jesus Christ, and therefore in its hope. 70 Still, this solidarity is not identity 71 and, with such a proposal, Anderson does not intend to detract from the biblical evidence demarcating the church as distinct from general humanity by virtue of believers’ Spirit-reception. Rather, he emphasises that the incarnation is not restricted in effect to the church only, instead representing the solidarity of God with all humanity. 72 Yet as Christ’s solidarity with humanity stood alongside an absolute difference from humanity, so it is with the church. The church’s absolute difference from the world cannot be located at its boundaries as if it were a separate entity, however; it cannot claim a monopoly on the reality of Christ which allows it to separate itself from the rest of humanity. 73 So where is the absolute difference which is the transcendence of Christ? Here, Anderson’s incarnational theology rises to the fore again. Because kenosis is not renunciation of divine transcendence but a self-emptying which reveals self-renunciation as God’s own nature, Christ’s solidarity with humanity was yet a divine act. Divine transcendence was here revealed as ‘the extrinsic, rather than the intrinsic reality of Being . . . par-ousia rather than ousia’, the par-ousia of God as triune. 74 In becoming flesh, Christ entered solidarity with humanity and yet brought difference to bear in that, because of the intra-divine transcendence, in Christ God was present by the Spirit to himself. 75 Humanity, being the image of God, can experience this difference in solidarity which is the transcendence of Christ: 76 its solidarity is as the kenotic community whilst the difference, which because of solidarity cannot be located in the body of Christ as separate entity, is found only in the life of each believer. In personal relations, there is not only solidarity but difference, constituted by the Spirit-enabled ek-static movement completing a Christian’s personhood in union with God’s own life. 77 As the Christian participates in this divine communion, the par-ousia of God to himself in Christ by the Spirit, they are one with this presence such that Christ is ‘present’ to the world in their humanity. 78 So it is that in HTRG Anderson can say: The Christian is enabled to express the same transparency within his solidarity with man and thus stand ‘as Christ’ in the world. Thus, instead of pointing away from himself, from his own humanity, to Christ, the Christian must say: to become involved with me is to come up against Jesus Christ who is ‘present’ to our humanity through the reality of the Holy Spirit who completes my life in the personhood of divine communion. 79 He had actually reached towards this concept somewhat earlier, during pastoral ministry at Covina in 1964, writing in his journal:

Memories of the church 105 If . . . Christ did send the Holy Spirit . . . into my life . . . if then I acknowledge the presence of God in my movements, those who become a part of me through that perilous exchange of selves involved with genuine relationship cannot escape being involved in the reality of God in a redemptive way. 80 Thus, it is as the believer chooses to live incarnationally – in the relational solidarity which is sharing of oneself in other-preferring love – that God is revealed to the other as present to himself in the believer through the Spirit. 81 Anderson calls this ‘the ek-static dimension of the kenotic community which has its primary focal point in the believer and only secondarily in the church’, that when the Spirit is received by faith Christ is re-formed in the believer for the sake of the other, even as another person makes Christ present to that first believer. 82 This is the difference: that believers now experience the inbreaking eschaton, which is life in the Spirit, even whilst living in solidarity with history and, in living as the ek-static community, they prefigure the eschaton for the kenotic community. 83 In short, only the Christian can stand in solidarity with humanity and there express the ‘difference’ which is lived transcendence, the oneness which the believer experiences with God through the Spirit by faith in Christ. The Christian, rather than church as entity, can live incarnationally, obliterating the boundaries between church and world. Yet to live incarnationally demands also that one ‘testify to the absolute difference’, the centre without clarity about which the boundaries cannot be obliterated. 84 This Anderson dubs ‘being evangelical’, understanding it as the testimony of a faith which affirms Christ as both Saviour and Lord. 85 Such a life, which finds its centre in Christ by faith, 86 needs no boundaries to distinguish it but can live in utter solidarity with the world. 87 Yet, the desire to identify boundaries remains strong in every generation, perhaps as an expression of the will to power. 88 We often seek to define the ‘outsiders’ in order to reassure ourselves that we are ‘insiders’ and perhaps even the centre by which the boundaries can be defined, itself an act of God-lessness. The work of Paul Hiebert on bounded and centred sets in the context of the church and mission relates here. 89 In my estimation, the form of church being proposed is not entirely a centred set for it does recognise a kind of boundary. The centre, of course, is Christ. Whilst the only true boundary for this community is the humanity which all share in Christ and which cannot separate insiders from outsiders, there is nevertheless a kind of boundary, this ‘difference’, which runs through each believer (rather than through the community). This is the union with God in Christ, by virtue of the gift of the Spirit, which belongs to the believer and is yet but invitation to the one who has not responded in faith/commitment. However, it does not divide insiders and outsiders, operating rather as tension. It is to represent this reality that I speak of both the church and, wider, the ‘ecclesial community’, a set which is only centred albeit that an

106 A deep remembering eventual response of faith/commitment to the centre operates to move that person into a position where the ‘kind of boundary’, the difference, now runs through them. 90 If ‘institution’ is defined as a structure of habitualised shared social interaction, 91 one can hardly deny the church as institution on this model which renders interaction with others so central. Indeed, the rejection of boundaries should not be construed as a rejection of institutional forms of church but rather an affirmation that the distinctive of the Christian, and hence of the church, must be in the ‘difference’ which flows from the incarnation, a freedom to participate in Christ. Nevertheless, Anderson does consider the form of church of lesser significance than its being as incarnational and evangelical. 92 He even says that because there is no difference which is not also in solidarity – that is, ‘the church is radicalized by the very fact that it has no place of its own’ – any ‘structures the church erects will be no more than “disposable containers”’ and, further, that the simple gathering of two or three in Jesus’ name is the ‘place’ where his absence is ‘celebrated as his Parousia – his presence to God in which we have our life, and his presence to the world in which we have our hope’. 93 It is not that individual believers have no need of ‘the church’ as they participate in Christ’s life. This would be blatant contradiction of the church as the ‘place’ of lived transcendence. However, the emphasis is on the ‘being’ of the church, as a fluid matrix of relationships in Christ, over its institutional ‘form’ as concretion of those relationships in relatively fixed and unchanging ‘containers’. Preservation of particular institutional form is not of priority on this view whereas the being of the believers (albeit still in relational matrices) is. Thus, logically prior to the church’s form is its way of being, that its members live incarnationally and evangelically in the world. 94 This, Anderson proposes, is best expressed as an ek-static participation in the diakonia of the Incarnate Word 95 by which the world is brought to know that, in Thomas Torrance’s words, ‘Christ clothed with His Gospel meets with Christ clothed with the desperate need and plight of men’. 96 This diakonia is both incarnational and evangelical: showing love to human persons regardless of their faith in Christ is always coupled with a commitment to the centre as witnessed to by the union of Word and Spirit, and any compromise of this centre reduces service to purely social care which can be neither incarnational nor diakonia . 97 True diakonia is not the service of one from outside of the situation but of one who participates in the life of the one who suffers and, crucially, in the life of the One who has borne all of our sufferings. Testifying to that centre, ‘being evangelical’, is essential in this incarnational ministry of kenotic/ ek-static neighbour-love that Anderson calls diakonia. With this clarification of the nuances regarding the ‘difference’ and the resulting emphasis on ecclesial being over form, the way is now clear for continuing to give rein to prophetic imagination, the act of remembering now giving way to the work of coding a discourse of leadership. The next chapter draws for that work on the building blocks for Anderson’s incarnational

Memories of the church 107 ecclesiology enumerated so far. Particularly relevant to that discussion is Anderson’s emphasis on an ecclesial way of being, the kenotic/ek-static way of love which, as participation in Christ’s human person-to-person relationships, receives others in the ‘place’ where the reality of God may be known. Given that this is the telos of the church, albeit a reality which is ultimately eschatological, what can be imagined about the kind of leadership which will direct it to that end? Notes 1 Kettler, Reading , 123–124. 2 HTRG , 259. 3 HTRG , 259. 4 For an example of this shorthand denoting the community of lived transcendence, see n.38. In the interests of definitional clarity, I add that Anderson, in other writings, describes this community of lived transcendence not only as the kenotic community but also as the ‘incarnational community’: ‘“[i]ncarnational community” means that community in which the life of Jesus continues to exist through the ontological reality of his indwelling Spirit’ ( SPT, 116). 5 HTRG , 232. 6 HTRG , 229 (italics mine). 7 HTRG , 179. 8 HTRG , 230. 9 SPT , 114. 10 Barth, Church 4.1 , 191–192. 11 HTRG , 233. 12 HTRG , 232–233. 13 ‘Actual existence’, in opposition to ‘real personhood’, also takes account of divinehuman estrangement. Only in Christ are the real and actual conjoined ( HTRG, 233). 14 Deddo, ‘Resisting’, 170. 15 OBH , 173, 199. 16 OBH , 17–18; ‘Christopraxis’, 14. 17 OBH , 84. 18 SPT , 170. 19 OBH , 173–174, 184–187. 20 HTRG, 233. For the reality of Spirit to take my own existence would ‘confirm me in a state of perfectionism, with its corresponding intolerance of the Other, or reduce me to a state of hopelessness, unable to escape my actual limitations’ ( HTRG , 233). Further: n.82. 21 This is consistent with Macmurray’s proposal. ‘Resistance’ is required to generate the possibility of an agent-self’s action and this depends on the Spirit assuming not the self’s own form of existence but that of the other. It also coheres with the covenant response made possible in creation, namely that Adam should love his limit as he experienced it enfleshed in Eve: now, ‘[a]s the Spirit re-forms the Other in the form of Christ, I can love the Other as the transcending limit of my own existence in the flesh’ ( HTRG, 234, cf. 142–143; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3 (tr. John C. Fletcher), London: SCM, 1959, 60–61). 22 MOTF , 185–186. 23 SPT , 172 n.7. 24 HTRG , 96–97.

108 A deep remembering 25 The unbeliever’s common humanity with Christ’s means that they may become, for the believer, the ‘form of Christ’ in the world, the ‘Christ clothed with the desperate need and plight of men’ ( HTRG, 275–276, quoting Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Service in Jesus Christ’ (714–733) in Theological, 724). In some secondary sense, then, unbelieving others, too, embody a limit by which believers are confronted with Christ even as those unbelievers are confronted by his life in the believer. Yet between believers and unbelievers, there is even so a difference, as this chapter will discuss. 26 This personhood/real existence is experienced by the believer in the fact of such love being concrete expression of a joining with the ek-static movement of love from the Son to the Father. Further, see below. Of course, such love, which brings the unbelieving other up against the Spirit-formed Christ in the believer, may also operate – in tandem with historical evidence – as a future evidence to influence that unbeliever to a response of faith/commitment and related receiving of the Spirit. 27 HTRG , 233. 28 SPT , 121. 29 Jesus’ personhood is not only hypostatic (the relation of eternal Word to humanity) but also ek-static (in his movement towards his Father by the Spirit) ( HTRG, 239–241, especially n.29). Personhood, Zizioulas says, demands both hypostasis and ekstasis: without both these conditions being present, being becomes only substance, that is, ‘an a-personal thing’ (John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, London: T&T Clark/ Continuum, 2006, 213). 30 Ek-stasis as movement of being towards communion with its source is constitutive of personhood (Zizioulas, Communion , 213). 31 HTRG , 259. 32 The degree to which the kenotic community experiences this participation is an eschatological question ( SPT, 122). Anderson argues that the eschaton has entered the world in the solidarity of the Incarnate Word with humanity so that all creation now finds its end in him, yet without terminating the historical context in which the kenotic community lives. The person of Christ unites ‘both the telos of historical existence and the eschaton of eternal existence’ without thereby ‘negat[ing] . . . or destroy[ing] historical existence, but [bringing] . . . the whole purpose ( telos) of that existence to its completion in the eternal life of God’: in his resurrection is the ek-static movement of the kenotic community, for it brings humanity into God’s life ( HTRG, 279–281). Accordingly, co-humanity as participation in God is present only ‘in provisional form in this life’ such that human love is experienced as the tension of ‘presence-in-absence’ until the eschaton ( OBH , 177, 183; cf. Zizioulas, Communion , 206–249). 33 HTRG , 242. 34 HTRG , 296. 35 HTRG , 297–298. 36 Regardless of whether the imago includes the physical body, it is only ever present as ‘embodied’, a particular, concrete instantiation of humanity ( OBH , 71). 37 HTRG , 299–300. 38 HTRG, 234. This quotation actually refers to the ‘kenotic community’. Having mentioned the fluctuations of Anderson’s terminology (see n.4), I believe that this is an example where ‘kenotic community’ means the community of lived transcendence which is both kenotic and ek-static (the church) rather than humanity as a whole. 39 Notwithstanding my conviction in n.38 that pages 234–237 of HTRG discuss the church, Anderson’s references to ‘receptivity’ do suggest a certain fluidity even within that extended thought: the ‘receptivity’ requirement intimates that

Memories of the church 109 ‘kenotic community’ here also includes, to some extent at least, those who have yet to receive the Spirit, those who belong by virtue of their common humanity with Christ but have yet to believe and thereby receive the fulness of belonging ( HTRG, 236). Anderson recognises this ambiguity of the relation between church and world and considers it less a matter of concern than of hope since it ‘evidences the incarnational character of Christ’s continued presence in the world’ ( SPT, 121). My decision to recognise a larger community of those who are receptive to discerning the reality of God in the church is consistent with Anderson’s fluidity of thought. 40 HTRG , 234. 41 HTRG , 234. 42 Anderson comments, evocatively: ‘one would naturally say “time”, but these “lengths” have a duration which only love can measure!’ ( HTRG , 236). 43 Deddo, ‘Resisting’, 190. 44 HTRG , 238 (italics mine). 45 OBH , 168–169. 46 OBH , 174, 188. 47 OBH , 183. 48 OBH, 174, 179–193. Such might include practices of community, particularly of listening, confession, encouragement, acts of practical service and giving, prayer, preaching/teaching of Scripture, church discipline and hospitality, all in the context of a matrix of relationships shaped by the two poles by which God’s reality may be experienced. Consider David F. Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, ch.6 regarding the formation of the self through the Eucharist: he notes the power of repeated liturgical practices to shape the self towards responsiveness to Christ and others (165). Also: Smith, Desiring , especially ch.5. 49 OBF , 120. 50 OBH , 188. 51 HTRG , 236; OBH , 189. 52 Stephen Sykes, Power and Christian Theology , London: Continuum, 2006, 72. 53 Volf, After , 237–238. 54 Volf, After , 238. 55 SoM, 50–51. 56 Susan Buckles locates formation/maturing of personhood ‘at the heart of the Spirit’s perfecting activity’ (‘Life in the Spirit and the Spirit of Life’ (128–146) in Speidell (ed.), Christian, 143). In Christ, we are invited to become what we already are through the determination of the Word, a becoming that occurs within the frame of human relationships ( OBF , 58, 119). 57 The telos of real personhood is not pure self-determination nor is it attainable by self-development techniques. (Cf. Alyce McKenzie’s related critique in Preaching Biblical Wisdom in a Self-Help Society , Nashville: Abingdon, 2002.) 58 OBF, 65. The church as matrix of relationships is, then, the context where believers live out the actual renewal of the imago, a ‘recreation of human personhood through the transformation of the relational structures by which it is formed and exists’ (Buckles, ‘Life’, 139). 59 Jeannine K. Brown, Carla M. Dahl and Wyndy Corbin, Becoming Whole and Holy: An Integrative Conversation about Christian Formation, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011, 19. 60 The telos of ecclesial ministry is not differentiated depending on whether it is directed towards believer or unbeliever. For each, this ministry seeks (initial or deeper) participation in Christ’s life and to each this is offered within the church as the place of lived transcendence, where persons may be drawn into a (more complete in the case of believers) reorientation towards God. The ‘difference’ is

110 A deep remembering in receiving the Spirit: the telos of ecclesial ministry in the context of unbelievers includes that ‘Spirit-reception’ as part of its definition of participation in Christ’s life, whereas its telos in connection with believers is simply that their ( already Spirit-enabled) participation in the divine life is deepened. 61 OBF , 123. 62 OBH , 63–64. 63 Jon Nielson makes a related critique in ‘Review of Andrew Root The Relational Pastor: Sharing in Christ by Sharing Ourselves’, Themelios 38:3 (2013), 533–535. 64 MOTF , 38; HTRG , 237–238; ETEC , 113. 65 ‘Whole-life’ is language employed by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and incorporates both sacred and secular aspects (assuming that such a divide even remains sustainable today in critical thinking about the life of faith). See: www.licc.org.uk/resources/the-imagine-team-at-your-service/,accessed 13/09/17; Neil Hudson, Imagine Church: Releasing Whole-Life Disciples, Nottingham: IVP, 2012; Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity , Wheaton: Crossway, 2008. 66 Anderson characterises the following thinking as ‘closing the circle of transcendence’ ( HTRG, 97–98, 263–264, 274), his clarification on how to reconcile what Phillips identified as Bonhoeffer’s ‘two Christologies’, namely ‘Christ existing as the church’ and also ‘as the personal centre and boundary of individual existence in the world’ ( HTRG, 77–85, 95–98; John A. Phillips, The Form of Christ in the World: A Study of Bonhoeffer’s Christology, London: Collins, 1967, 74–75, 83). For further detail of Bonhoeffer’s influence, see HTRG ch.3 where Anderson explores these Christologies and demonstrates how Bonhoeffer holds together what Anderson calls the problematic concerning historical transcendence ( HTRG, 62), the absolute otherness of God and his relation to everything else. 67 HTRG, 253. Anderson references John 17:9, 16, 25, implying that ‘kenotic community’ here denotes believers. 68 HTRG , 254. 69 HTRG , 254–255. 70 Barth, Church Dogmatics Vol. 4.3/2 (eds. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1962, 773. 71 SPT , 118. 72 HTRG, 255–259. It is in the context of this discussion that Anderson suggests the definitional fine-tuning highlighted earlier: having used ‘kenotic community’ thus far to represent ‘a general sense of solidarity with the world, with its general implication being that it includes all that is meant by the term “church” as well’, it should now be taken to denote the more specific solidarity which the church has with the world ( HTRG , 259). 73 HTRG , 259–260. 74 HTRG , 260. 75 HTRG , 261–262. 76 HTRG, 260. Indeed the human possibility of experiencing difference in solidarity because of the imago depends on sharing in Christ’s humanity since only in him has the imago been redeemed. 77 Although personal relations allow for difference within solidarity (transcendence) at a human level, the human I-Thou relation is insufficient to constitute the difference in terms of the transcendence of Christ. The Spirit-given difference, however, is sufficient. It is in the incarnation that humanity receives its ek-static dimension (through the Spirit-enabled ek-static communion of the Word – with whom it is now in solidarity – with the Father) which unites in Christ’s humanity the horizons of divine existence and human personhood. To be a person now

Memories of the church 111 means to share in Christ’s humanity and to participate in his ek-static movement towards divine communion through the Spirit ( HTRG , 261–263). 78 HTRG , 263. 79 HTRG , 263. 80 Soulprints , 82. 81 HTRG , 263–264. 82 This dynamic makes it possible ‘to have a real relation to Christ in the Spirit without denying one’s actual existence’ ( HTRG , 264). 83 HTRG , 284, 293. 84 HTRG , 265–266. 85 HTRG, 266–268. I continue in this chapter to employ ‘evangelical’ in this sense rather than any other. 86 HTRG, 268. This ‘centre of transcendence within [this] . . . solidarity’, the incarnation, is known by the evangelical Christian in faith through Word and Spirit together: alone, the one might end in an empty rationalistic assent to a dead text whilst the other might tend towards the introversion of the ‘kenotic community’ ( HTRG, 272). (In my opinion, ‘kenotic community’ here designates the community of lived transcendence, that community which takes a form of existence both kenotic and ek-static.) 87 Anderson traces this combination of a clear centre coupled with a remarkable absence of boundaries in Jesus’ own practice with his contemporaries and in the practices of the early church, noting especially that the Jewish/Gentile boundary was removed and not replaced, ‘with only the authority of the Spirit left at the centre’, as well as the Markan interpretation of Jesus’ purity teaching (Mark 7:19). He accepts that a study of Israel’s cultic life with its rigorous boundaries might admit a different interpretation but suggests that faith was nevertheless ‘the operative principle’ here and argues for the final word being Galatians 3:25– 26, that the custodial significance of the law as boundary is now superseded by Christ ( HTRG , 266–269). 88 HTRG , 271. 89 Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994, 107–136. Further: Alan J. Roxburgh, ‘Missional Leadership: Equipping God’s People for Mission’ (183–220) in Darrell L. Guder (ed.), Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, 205–208; Frost and Hirsch, Shaping, 47–51, 206–210; Jack W. Niewold, ‘Set Theory and Leadership: Reflections on Missional Communities in the Light of Ephesians 4:11–12’, JBPL 2:1 (2008), 44–63, 45–50. 90 Harald Hegstad describes something similar regarding the Norwegian folk church where 80 per cent of the population is baptised into the Church of Norway although only 8 per cent of church members attend monthly or more, presumably with implications for how many express faith/commitment as Anderson describes it ( The Real Church: An Ecclesiology of the Visible, Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013, 110–116). 91 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge , London: Allen Lane, 1967, 72. 92 HTRG , 275; MOTF , 36–37. 93 HTRG, 304–305. This is consistent with Avery Dulles’ ecclesiological category of ‘Mystical Communion’ such that institution and organisation are secondary concerns ( Models of the Church: A Critical Assessment of the Church in All Its Aspects (expanded ed.), New York: Image, 2002, 39–54). 94 I would, of course, expect any ‘church’, however fluid in form, to be organically connected with the wider church (in its historical, geographical, heavenly and eschatological expressions – see Christopher Cocksworth, ‘Holding Together:

112 A deep remembering Catholic Evangelical Worship in the Spirit’ (131–149) in Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton (eds.), Remembering Our Future: Explorations in Deep Church, Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2007, 139–140). Whilst I affirm Volf’s position that in basic terms what defines ‘church’ is Christ’s presence amongst two or three gathered in his name (Matthew 18:20), I also recognise the significance of his thoughts on catholicity (Volf, After, 136, 259–282). I note too that ecclesial institutional reality cannot be ignored, and thus that those questions designated secondary by chapter 1 are important to answer. Chapter 9 engages these dynamics further. 95 HTRG , 275. 96 HTRG, 276, quoting Torrance, ‘Service’. He does not expand greatly regarding diakonia but describes his dependence on this portion of Torrance. 97 HTRG , 274, 276.

Part III Coding the discourse

The first two movements of the prophetic imagination comprise a description of the dominant consciousness, which occurs in the context of expressed pain, and a practice of deep remembering of the normative resources by which an alternative consciousness can be retrieved. This has been accomplished in the first two parts of the book. The task of this third part is to appropriate these memories, demonstrating how they ‘continue to inform and shape and compel even now’ 1 through the coding of a discourse of leadership which is rich in its integration of these memories with the questions which arise regarding ecclesial leadership’s telos and process of influence. To accomplish this task requires two steps. First, I will engage these questions as they were identified in chapter 1 . I will consider how the memories of incarnation and church might be brought to bear on those questions in the construction of a discourse of leadership alternative to that of managerialism. Second, I will propose one way in which such a proposal might be characterised, or coded, within the wider purview of theological thought. This chapter will engage both matters, whilst other chapters in this part will deepen my work relating to the second step of coding the discourse. Incarnational ecclesial leadership: an alternative discourse Having defined leadership as a process of influence towards a goal, the questions arising are twofold. First, what is the primary telos towards which ecclesial leadership directs the church? Second, what can be said about the related process of influence? Answering the former question demands identification of the fundamental telos of the church, for it is towards this, of course, that ecclesial leadership must point. Chapter 5 identified this proper end as the deepening of Spirit-enabled participation in the divine life – a ‘becoming one’ with the kenotic/ek-static life of the Son which constitutes the reorientation of humanity to God in Christ – expressed concretely as selfemptying neighbour-love in the context of the Son’s ek-static movement of love towards the Father. That kenotic/ek-static love which treats the other as end, not means to an end, is incarnational in its solidarity with the world yet also strongly evangelical regarding its centre in Christ. Influencing believers Incarnational ecclesial leadership and the eschatological inbreaking 6

116 Coding the discourse towards this end is, then, the telos of incarnational ecclesial leadership. Such leadership directs believers towards the upholding of their neighbours’ humanity, whether Christian or not, 2 sharing with them their joy and pain. 3 This love, Deddo notes, does not seek only ‘maximization of the actualization of creaturely capacities’ or the ‘avoidance of pain and maximization of pleasure’: though longing for such outcomes, this love sees beyond brokenness and distortion, hoping in God’s grace for restoration of real personhood and loving the other in their actual humanity. 4 He comments further: [o]ur own being and becoming human will be manifest only as we recognize [the humanity of others] . . . and love them in a way that affirms and upholds their humanity, that is, pursues God’s intentions for them to share in Christ’s own union and communion. 5 For, as chapter 5 established, expressing neighbour-love itself constitutes believers’ participation in Christ’s relationship with God, a sharing in his real personhood and becoming fully human. 6 Such interactions between believers and with the world must occur from the context of a relational matrix, namely the gathered church. 7 Constitutive of this relational matrix are its two poles: Christ’s presence in the life of each believer by the Spirit and the Scriptural witness concerning Jesus. Anderson’s emphasis on the believer as primary focal point of the church’s ek-static dimension may so far have suggested a focus on individual instances of personal relations without regard to the centrality of this relational matrix. Yet the gathered expression of church bears significantly on the telos of incarnational ecclesial leadership: to direct believers towards this kenotic/ek-static life in the Spirit is also to carry a charge for the church as corporate body to become a context which upholds this, particularly given the role of the believers in together re-enacting or re-presenting Christ’s life. If to direct believers towards this deeper participation is the telos of incarnational ecclesial leadership, what can be said regarding the process of influence towards that end? Before engaging further the memories of incarnation and church presented in chapter 5 , brief comments on the nature of praxis will serve to contextualise what follows. A process towards an end may be either a poiēsis or a praxis, depending on the nature of that end and process. Anderson defines Christopraxis as an action which includes and is informed by its ultimate telos. 8 This Aristotelian definition involves a distinction from poiēsis, an action which has its telos extrinsic to itself in the product which comes into existence only when the action reaches its conclusion. 9 The one engaged in poiēsis has a plan to achieve a goal; when that goal is reached, poiēsis is complete. 10 Praxis, conversely, is its end in itself: ‘its very activity is its fulfilment’ and thus its telos is perhaps not as much a ‘goal’ in the extrinsic sense as an ‘internal purposiveness’. 11 Accordingly, the activity which is praxis does not perhaps move towards its telos as a separate entity so much as it constitutes a participation in that telos. Whilst poiēsis operates as a

Leadership and the eschatological inbreaking 117 means to an end which, once reached, renders poiēsis redundant, praxis is both the means and the end and thus can never be discarded. Anderson also helpfully distinguishes futurum and adventus. He describes the future in the former sense as extrapolation of the present, having ‘its potential in the possibilities that emerge out of the present’. 12 Adventus, conversely, represents that which is approaching the present: it references the Greek concept, parousia, concerning events ‘anticipated but not under the control or power of the present’. 13 The future in this sense is not influenced by the present; rather it is influencing the present as it is brought to bear thereon. Anderson’s point is that adventus more closely expresses the biblical worldview, bringing a perspective into the present which futurum can never bring since it, by its very nature, relies fully on that present reality as foundational for what will be. Thus, whilst future planning by the futurum model can be of some value, the risk in a Christian context is that to ignore adventus is to lose sight of the One who is coming. 14 Whilst Anderson does not connect this distinction with his thinking on poiēsis/praxis, leadership poiēsis could perhaps be characterised as movement towards a telos consistent with the futurum concept. That is, it is leadership which moves towards a telos determined as achievable by extrapolation from the present, using a method deriving from past or present knowledge which will be discarded when that end is reached. Ecclesial leadership praxis, however, would be different, cohering more with the concept of adventus. It would be the act of apprehending God’s future as it bears eschatologically upon the present ( adventus), seeking to bring that future into present reality in the church. As this adventus, even the One who is coming, is brought more fully into present ecclesial reality by such leadership, those who engage in the activity which chapter 5 hinted at as incarnational ecclesial leadership by expressing neighbour-love are in fact participating in him more deeply, itself the church’s telos, even as their activity has effect on others. 15 This is praxis as I have defined it: the activity constituting incarnational ecclesial leadership is its own fulfilment. For a believer to engage in neighbour-love can be intended as an act of leadership inviting the other towards Christ but it is more than poiēsis for the act itself is not independent of its telos (deeper participation in Christ). It is more than mere means to an end – method – for it carries within it its own end, being the very expression of the leader’s own deepening participation in Christ’s ministry of love and invitation of the other into that same relationship. Neighbour-love is thus not for discarding one day when the end has been achieved. Rather, it is the very nature of participation in Christ, that as we love the other we participate in Christ and his relationship of love towards the Father. Ecclesial leadership praxis as human actions may not be the praxis of God, yet he nevertheless acts through these to disclose truth as they reveal his actions and presence. 16 By ecclesial leadership praxis, the future enters the present, enabling a growing apprehension of the inbreaking eschaton even whilst believers live in solidarity with history.

118 Coding the discourse My hints concerning the nature of incarnational ecclesial leadership praxis must now be crystallised. A leadership telos as inherently relational as that identified above presupposes a process of influence towards that end which is a relational praxis. If incarnational ecclesial leadership seeks the church’s deeper participation in the neighbour-love characterising Christ’s life and ministry of neighbour-love, this can only be achieved by a praxis in which a leader 17 takes the initiative to live out their own participation in Christ by loving persons in the church with the intention of bringing them up against Christ’s presence by the Spirit in the leader (as representative of the community of lived transcendence) and in the Scriptures which affirm Christ as centre. 18 This offer of a human-to-human personal relationship constitutes an intentional leadership act inviting those believers to respond with deeper levels of faith/commitment – not to the leader but to Christ as he is found in the community of lived transcendence and, specifically, in this relationship with the leader. Such deepening of commitment, 19 if made, issues for followers in the kenotic/ek-static neighbour-love which is life in Christ. This neighbour-love means the follower’s own growth in ‘real personhood’, as they participate actively in the Trinitarian movement of love. Such participation represents a movement towards wholeness of person as Christ is increasingly re-formed within. This is the leadership process of influence towards the defined telos: one influences another by acting intentionally in love to receive them in the place of transcendence, knowing that being received is the necessary precursor to the possibility of a more complete turning by the other towards God and joining in the ek-static movement of love. This activity of love is not necessarily an influence which is explicit directiveness on the part of the one exercising leadership that the other should respond in a certain way. Influence operates more subtly than this, as an intentionality to bring the other more fully into the ‘place’ where they now become capable of pursuing such a telos should they so desire, a place which invites the response of faith/commitment. 20 Whether faith/commitment is actually deepened is an ultimate measure of leadership. Did the leader succeed in influencing the believer to move more deeply into the life of the Spirit? Yet leadership success depends not only on the leader but on the other’s willingness to follow towards Christ by responding in mutuality of love to this leader or someone else. Whether influence is effective may vary: receiving the other in love may last many ‘lengths of love’ before the other responds, if at all. Yet it is still an act of leadership intentionally to create a relational space of influence in which the telos of ecclesial leadership, the eschatological reality of life in the Spirit, is brought to bear on the present reality of the ecclesial community 21 being led and thus made accessible for their participation. 22 Any response of neighbour-love is likely first to be expressed by the follower within the wider relational matrix that is the church and, more particularly, in the relationship with the leader since this is, at this point, a significant relational context for the follower. However, a leader-follower

Leadership and the eschatological inbreaking 119 relationship only permits this dynamic where the leader interacts as person with the follower rather than hiding behind an impersonal role. The follower’s growth in ‘real humanity’, their deepening participation in Christ’s life which is the goal of this leadership, depends on their opportunity to experience Christ by his Spirit in personal relations with the leader and to respond – also in the context of this person-to-person relation – with kenotic/ek-static love. Without genuine personal relations, it is far more difficult to experience Christ’s ‘actions out of the future’ through the leader as resistance and it is also more challenging for the follower to respond in love to the leader because of the leader’s lack of openness to receiving such love. To demand such personal openness of the leader is not to deny the place of individuality within personal relations: the incarnation supports the particularity, or differentiation, of persons and this means, as chapter 5 noted, that unmitigated openness of being is neither possible nor desirable. Yet, nevertheless, the genuine encounter between persons where each is treated as end in themselves is essential for the dynamic which I describe. An encounter in which the leader operates in a role which, by its impersonal nature and its expectations of a defined outcome rendering the follower means to an end, necessarily obstructs the follower from expressing kenotic/ek-static love in the context of personal relations with the leader will be less than true incarnational ecclesial leadership. 23 Such a demand on leaders is not unreasonable: the ‘ability to create a hospitable space in which others can recognize and experience the presence of God’ is a significant part of their own wholeness and holiness. 24 An act of leadership so defined requires cruciform vulnerability and must be understood as personally costly, for this laying down of the leader’s self may feel no less painful for the knowledge that crucified humanity is also resurrected humanity (John 10:18). Yet this cruciformity is actually no other than that demanded of all who would walk in the kenotic way. 25 The fundamental difference is that incarnational ecclesial leadership means an intentional embrace thereof in hope that others might grow in Christ. As noted above, intentionality is not intention thereby to force follower response, for such could be coercive or manipulative, 26 but intention formed in the knowledge that – even as this is what it means for the leader themselves to participate in Christ’s life – this dynamic of loving others for their own sake operates to bring them up against the reality of Christ. The relational space of influence has been created, although what happens thereafter regarding a follower’s response to Christ cannot be controlled by the leader. On one level, all believers can exercise incarnational ecclesial leadership as defined, and increasingly so as they grow in maturity and gifting, although experience suggests that not all will prioritise such intentionality in the gathered context. Notwithstanding the apparent ordinariness of such leadership, it should not obscure how much of a leader’s being such intentionality demands. Because incarnation is par-ousia and because to be human is to be embodied, human participation in the divine movement of love is inherently

120 Coding the discourse physical. Consequently, the leader ministers as one who is finite: this leadership laying down of self is emotionally and physically demanding and limits the number of persons with whom a leader can relate personally or at least the degree of personal relation possible. 27 Over time, one might expect a follower to grow in other relationships of neighbour-love within the church which encourage mutual growth in participation in Christ, as well as similar relationships within the wider ecclesial community with those who have not yet received the Spirit. 28 At this point, as Christian maturity and gifting develop, the relationship between follower and the one who was initially leader may change. Leadership towards the church’s telos of deeper participation in Christ may now occur as something of a mutual exchange in the matrix of relationships in the church and be less dependent on the act of the initial leader. Where the telos of the church as defined is clearly understood and the matrix of relationships generally healthy and directed thereto, this apparent displacement of the ‘leader’ should not be of concern for there are now many engaged in the praxis of leadership as I have described it and their continuation thereof ensures safeguarding of the church’s development towards its telos without need for control by one or a few leaders. 29 For some this may be uncomfortable. Silence regarding the structural fluidity of such patterns of leadership, and the identity of ‘the leaders’, may even appear cavalier. Yet this silence is consistent with my starting point, namely, leadership as process of influence towards the telos earlier described. When ecclesial leadership is studied thus, as activity, interest is not primarily in limiting leadership to a focus on the people who are final decision-makers or initiators of all things ecclesial. Some do default to this perspective which presents leadership as ultimately singular, or at least very limited, a conception so reminiscent of ‘great man’ theory. Yet such a perspective is blinkered, bracketing out all exercise of leadership which does not involve ‘taking charge’ in some way. Still, hard upon the heels of an understanding of leadership as activity will admittedly be questions regarding positions of leadership and structures which authorise decision-makers regarding what I called subsidiary objectives. Whilst I argue that these questions are necessarily secondary to the work of conceptualising leadership activity, I will outline possible approaches to pursuing these questions in chapter 9 . Certain observations can be made concerning leadership in terms not only of the dynamic of personal relations but of the matrix of those relations, the gathered church. Indeed, I noted earlier that emphasis on the former should not obscure the centrality of the latter. The church must be a concrete relational context where the poles of transcendence converge as the Word is heard and the Spirit manifested in the lives of believers. Implicit is that the church as corporate body operates as relational matrix where each believer is both growing in personhood and, eventually, able to provide a relational context for receiving ‘second-generation’ others from the ecclesial community who have not yet begun to receive, or who are in process of receiving, their

Leadership and the eschatological inbreaking 121 personhood. Ensuring this is part of incarnational ecclesial leadership. This is the safeguarding referenced above. It occurs to the extent that each believer operating in leadership recognises that their leadership encompasses not only commitment to their individual relations of neighbour-love but also concern to ensure that the community as a whole is a context where the testimony of the Word 30 and the practices of community which reaffirm the church’s true order as determined by Christ’s life 31 remain central. This concern is foundational because fundamental to the individual relationships is that they occur in the context of the inter-active community, the ‘place’ of the poles of transcendence. Accordingly, although Christ is made known by the Spirit in particular relationships, the wider relational matrix must not be ignored as irrelevant to the pole of personal transcendence. It is here, however, that leadership is most challenging. What kind of leadership is needed to lead not just one other but a community of others together towards Christ? For a community to remain united when relationships become challenging, complex choices demand decisions or competing priorities tussle for attention is difficult. Yet here is where those exercising leadership must seize with most conviction the witness of Scripture and the practices of community by which Christ’s life is re-enacted amongst them. Whilst the ultimate telos of their leadership is the church’s participation in Christ, intrinsic thereto is the responsibility of interpretation. 32 Interpretation, as an aspect of leadership, is exactly this task of seizing Scripture and Christ-enacting community practices as markers of reality by which ecclesial life may be shaped so that both community culture and believers’ individual lives cohere with the telos of the church’s being and ministry. Interpretative leadership promotes contexts and processes by which believers may make sense collectively, perhaps through stories and symbols, of their life and purpose together. 33 This communal discernment of the reality of God in that place is, of course, Christopraxis, the grounding of theological reflection in God’s act in Christ. 34 For the church community to function healthily in terms of day-to-day decision-making on subsidiary matters, constant (re-)interpretation and, if necessary, adaptation is essential that the community might move forward together. 35 Incarnational ecclesial leadership does this by turning followers’ attention again to the poles of transcendence by which they know the reality of God amongst them, namely, Scripture and the practices of community by which Christ’s life is re-enacted. I have already considered how, as believers are directed to find their stories and symbols caught up in the bigger story of the One whose humanity they share and as they are reminded thereof in engagement with these poles of transcendence, a present knowing and experience of this life is made possible for participants in the ecclesial community. 36 The significance of this story is only now fully apparent. It is the hermeneutical frame holding this relational matrix in unity for it alone is the story capable of encompassing the diversity of the many, honouring each yet holding them as one. Thus incarnational ecclesial leadership’s attention to this constitutes part of its commitment to its ultimate telos.

122 Coding the discourse Coding the discourse of incarnational ecclesial leadership The second step set out at the beginning of this chapter related to how this relational and kenotic praxis of leadership might be coded. This matter of coding is about the recognition of shared language and imagery, a mode of discourse by which those who would engage in this alternative consciousness of leadership might identify its telos and praxis. The language must, Brueggemann says, be ‘cherished across the generations . . . distinctive, and . . . richly coded’, 37 constituting an ‘ offering of symbols’, language by which ‘hope becomes possible again’. 38 What language, then, might be offered to characterise incarnational ecclesial leadership as I have begun to imagine it? Anderson, we saw, opts for servant-leadership couched in Greenleafian terms, a coding which I have argued as being unsatisfactory on several levels. It is worth acknowledging that his inspiration for the servant metaphor may have been his adoption of diakonia as a characterisation of Christopraxis and thus not entirely unfounded in his incarnational theology, albeit that he does not work this out in detail. However, speaking of leadership in terms even of a more biblical conception of servanthood is problematic. Feminist and womanist theologians are vocal in their concerns; furthermore, the diakonia which Anderson describes might be misunderstood, perhaps especially in our professionalised service culture, to emphasise a meeting of human need which may be other than relational at its very heart. 39 Some other language is needed instead. The relationship described in this chapter, a relationship demonstrating love for another in their particularity, a sharing of one’s very self with the desire for eventual mutuality and openness to extending love to still others, looks very like friendship. Whilst friendship has never been linked with incarnational ecclesial leadership, 40 there are two adjoining areas of thought. The first considers the significance of relationships in incarnational youth ministry and comprises the work of Andrew Root. 41 There are synergies between Root’s work and mine, particularly an emphasis on the relationality of an incarnational dynamic, the centrality of participation over imitation and an understanding of personhood as ecclesial. Significantly, however, such relationships are not examined by him through the lens of friendship but Bonhoeffer’s Stellvertretung (place-sharing/vicarious representation) nor does he give detailed consideration to the category of leadership per se. What follows might thus be seen as in sympathy with his proposals albeit offering a very different coding of the relational/ incarnational dynamic, framed also by different questions. The second set of adjoining proposals links friendship with the church or leadership more generally. Moltmann and Summers exemplify the former. 42 As to the latter, a few popular-level references and some largely undeveloped scholarly offerings consider, from a Christian perspective, friendship in the context of leadership. 43 Those scholarly offerings include Andrew Greeley’s assertion of leadership and friendship as linked. He, however, refused to establish

Leadership and the eschatological inbreaking 123 a theological rationale for this, considering the connection ‘sufficiently established’ in the NT. 44 From a feminist perspective, Yolanda Dreyer again assumes rather than defends this connection. 45 Empirical work, too, has assumed, or perhaps largely ignored, the question of theological connection, focusing instead on the effectiveness of leadership that intentionally includes friendship and, separately, exploring friendship between pastors and their congregation. 46 Of most note, therefore, is Pickard’s discussion, raising the possibility that friendship may helpfully designate ‘collaborative ministry’ and considering whether friendship and authority can co-exist. 47 This, however, is disappointingly brief. Incarnational ecclesial leadership might fruitfully be imagined as friendship. Yet it is apparent that scholarship has not demonstrated this and the work of correlation, or coding, remains outstanding. Before moving forward with this, however, we must be sure that the discourse of friendship is sufficiently rich for a prophetic reimagining of leadership. The next two chapters will therefore exegete friendship’s theological depth and breadth, asking how, in Brueggemann’s words, this shared language has been ‘cherished across generations’ 48 by the Christian community. Only after this will it be possible, in part IV , to engage prophetic imagination in the final coding of ecclesial leadership as Christian friendship and, embracing the Ricoeurian semantic ‘shock’ value 49 implicit in predicating friendship of ecclesial leadership, to discover active practices of hope by which the pain of the dominant consciousness might perhaps be healed. Notes 1 Brueggemann, Practice , 40. 2 Believers live in this incarnational way in the context also of their evangelical testimony to the ‘absolute difference’, particularly significant for unbelievers. 3 Self-Care , 236. 4 Deddo, ‘Resisting’, 190–191. 5 Deddo, ‘Resisting’, 190. 6 Grenz writes concerning the ecclesial self: ‘participation in the Jesus-narrative and hence incorporation into Christ by the Spirit not only inherently includes but also is even comprised by being-in-relationship with those who participate together in that identity-producing narrative’ ( Social , 331). 7 Regarding gathered/scattered terminology, see Hugh Halter and Matt Smay, The And: The Gathered and Scattered Church , Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010. 8 SPT , 49. 9 NE, 141–143 (1140a–b). (References to NE are to pages in the Oxford University Press edition; bracketed numbers denote the traditional page/column referencing system.) Also: Christopher P. Long, The Ethics of Ontology: Rethinking an Aristotelian Legacy , Albany: SUNY, 2004, 128; SPT , 47–51; SoM , 26–29. 10 Poiēsis recognises an end different from its activity; the activity necessary to accomplish the end must also eventually cease (Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, Lanham: University Press of America, [1983?], 9–10). 11 Long, Ethics, 128; Thomas H. Groome, Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision , San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980, 155.

124 Coding the discourse 12 MGB , 52. 13 MGB, 52; cf. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (tr. James W. Leitch), London: SCM, 1967, 103; Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (tr. Margaret Kohl), London: SCM, 1996, 25–27. 14 MGB , 51–59. 15 The activity of praxis has its end in itself but may also have external effect on others (Lobkowicz, Theory , 9–10). 16 MOTF , 29. 17 See discussion of ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ terminology in chapter 1. 18 The love entailed by the praxis described should not be understood as anything less than the kind of love offered by Jesus, a love kenotic in its self-renouncing preferring of others, a ‘being-with’ them in both joy and suffering which, finally, lays down its life for its friend. 19 I have mentioned the power of sacramental (in a broad sense) acts in re-enacting and re-presenting Christ’s life. Where such deepening of commitment constitutes the initial faith/commitment, being sealed by the gift of the Spirit it is confirmed in the sacrament of baptism. Later progressions in, and reaffirmations of, faith/ commitment by believers are concretised in other enactments of the faith community, including the Eucharist. 20 Jacob Firet writes about ‘pastoral role-fulfilment’ in which God comes to people ‘by way of the official ministry as intermediary . . . in his word’ ( Dynamics in Pastoring, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986, 15). For him the ‘agogic’ moment, which activates human transformation, occurs in relationships of trust which operate as a ‘field of tension’ in which a person is influenced towards change and growth by another operating within ‘official ministry’ ( Pastoring, 233–234, 248–250). This concept of deliberately establishing a field of tension as a form of influence echoes how I describe influence here, although my perspective on that field of tension differs in that I do not limit this dynamic to the ‘official ministry’ and, further, in that I demand a more personal relational dynamic than Firet allows (see below; cf. Pastoring , 254–257). 21 Subsequent references to the praxis of incarnational ecclesial leadership allude to the church (the principal group for which leaders are responsible); however, this leadership technically may be exercised in relation to (although not by) the wider ecclesial community also. 22 Chapter 1 discusses the interplay between leadership intention and outcome. 23 ‘Role’ cannot entirely be excised from the reality of human interactions (see chapter 9). However, the point here is that to the degree that the impersonal dynamics associated with role-fulfilment occlude personal relations, incarnational ecclesial leadership cannot operate. 24 Brown, Dahl and Corbin, Becoming , 47. 25 Consistent with my proposal, Martin describes ecclesial leadership as ‘a more visible, more prominent form of discipleship’ (‘Encountering’, 99) and ‘a special form of Christ-like discipleship’ (‘Dwelling’, 124). 26 Martin, ‘Encountering’, 97. 27 On this model, one person can lead relatively few others. Chapter 10 considers this further. 28 Where there is leadership intentionality, the follower may thus invite ‘secondgeneration others’ (Christian or not) to that same (deepened) participation in Christ’s life and ministry, having been equipped to do so in the context of their own experience of being received. For outsiders to receive such love may eventually result in their reorientation towards God as they recognise with faith/ commitment the reality of God in the church, receive the Spirit and join in the ek-static movement of divine love, thus having evangelistic potential. 29 Indeed the one who was initially leader may even be glad since the ecclesial community never lacks others whom they can influence by receiving them!

Leadership and the eschatological inbreaking 125 30 The place of historical transcendence must not be denigrated. A relationship of neighbour-love is insufficient for persons to know the reality of God unless also incorporating reflection upon the historical evidence which is the Scriptural witness concerning Christ. Without due weight given to the revelation of Scripture, a relationship of neighbour-love is insufficient to draw a believer into deeper commitment to God in the context of the inter-active community. Such a relationship would be less than incarnational ecclesial leadership; it must include mutual encouragement to reflect on Scripture and respond in obedient faith. 31 Especially those which presuppose the involvement of the gathered community en masse, such as Eucharist. 32 Martin, ‘Dwelling’, 126; Cormode calls this ‘meaning-making’ ( Making ). 33 Scott Cormode, ‘Multi-Layered Leadership: The Christian Leader as Builder, Shepherd, and Gardener’, JRL 1:2 (2002), 69–104, 88–101. Also: Mark Lau Branson, ‘Ecclesiology and Leadership for the Missional Church’ (94–125) in Craig Van Gelder (ed.), The Missional Church in Context: Helping Congregations Develop Contextual Ministry, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007, 118–12; Bolman and Deal, Reframing , 253–267, 441–443; Heifetz, Leadership. 34 SPT , 53. 35 Though decision-making processes exceed my remit, chapter 9 indicates some possibilities. 36 This may also occur through practices of formal and informal education and even correction of one another. 37 Brueggemann, Prophetic , xvi. 38 Brueggemann, Prophetic , 63. 39 Michael Wilson, A Coat of Many Colours: Pastoral Studies of the Christian Way of Life , London: Epworth, 1988, 142. 40 Friendship has been associated in passing with incarnational mission by Hill (see chapter 2) and incarnational youth ministry (Griffiths, Models, 37–38; Sam Richards explores ‘friend-like relations’ in youth work at semi-popular level, concluding that friendship is not appropriate – ‘Appropriate Relationships: “Like a Friend”’ (113–129) in Sally Nash and Jo Whitehead (eds.), Christian Youth Work in Theory and Practice: A Handbook, London: SCM, 2014; cf. Kerry Young, The Art of Youth Work, Lyme Regis: Russell House, 1999, 73–74). However, it has not been developed at any length. Patterson devotes a page to an ‘NT model of incarnational leadership’ operating within ‘a community of friends’ but calls this leadership servanthood (‘Reflection’, 358–359). 41 Root, Revisiting. 42 Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (tr. Margaret Kohl), London: SCM, 1977, 314–317; The Open Church: Invitation to a Messianic Lifestyle, London: SCM, 1978, 60; Steve Summers, Friendship: Exploring Its Implications for the Church in Postmodernity, s.l.: T&T Clark, 2009. Also: John Swinton, Resurrecting the Person: Friendship and the Care of Persons with Mental Health Problems, Nashville: Abingdon, 2000, ch.1; Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society , Downers Grove: IVP, 1996, ch.12. 43 E.g., Ajith Fernando, Reclaiming Friendship: Relating to Each Other in a Frenzied World, Scottsdale: Herald, 1993, 48–54 (suggests leaders can be friends with their followers); David Hansen, The Art of Pastoring: Ministry without All the Answers, Downers Grove: IVP, 1994, 121 (presents friendship as one of many elements of pastoring: ‘[m]any pastoral responsibilities fall under the rubric friend’); Marshall, Understanding, 164–165 (friendship is ‘integral’ to biblical leadership); Zaragoza, Servants, 62–76 (a largely uncritical assertion that ‘the new theology of ordained ministry is friendship’).

126 Coding the discourse Outside of the Christian perspective, an unpublished thesis studies ‘relational leadership’. Further: Deborah A. Fredericks, ‘The Leader’s Experience of Relational Leadership: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of Leadership as Friendship’, Antioch University: unpublished PhD dissertation, 2009; cf. Gerri Perreault, ‘Rethinking Leadership: Leadership as Friendship’, Advancing Women in Leadership Online Journal 18 (2005), 1–14, www.advancingwomen. com/awl/social_justice1/Perreault.html,accessed 13/09/17. Robert French also connects friendship and business leadership, though without justifying why or how it might be expressed (‘Sharing Thoughts on Leadership and Friendship’ (43–57) in Kim Turnbull James and James Collins (eds.), Leadership Perspectives: Knowledge into Action, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). More recently, Gareth Edwards has considered briefly French’s work, concluding that further research is needed ( Community as Leadership, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2015, 33–44). 44 Andrew M. Greeley, ‘Leadership and Friendship: A Sociologist’s Viewpoint’, Jurist 31 (1971), 266–288, 266; Andrew M. Greeley, Come Blow Your Mind with Me, Garden City: Doubleday, 1971, 104. The connection has been defended briefly in Johannine work: Rekha M. Chennattu, ‘Towards a Covenant Model of Leadership: An Interpretation of John 13’, Jeevadhara 42/248 (2012), 133–145; Nancy Claire Pittman, ‘The Best Friend of Jesus: A Model for Pastoral Leadership in the Gospel of John’ (72–88) in Warner M. Bailey, Lee C. Barrett, III and James O. Duke (eds.), The Theologically Formed Heart: Essays in Honor of David J. Gouwens, Eugene: Pickwick, 2014. Cf. Joas Adiprasetya, ‘Pastor as Friend: Reinterpreting Christian Leadership’, Dialog 57 (2018), 47–52. 45 Yolanda Dreyer, ‘Women and Leadership from a Pastoral Perspective of Friendship’, HTS 58:1 (2002), 43–61. 46 Matthew Messner, ‘Leadership That Cares: How Intentional Friendship Revolutionizes Leadership’, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary: unpublished DMin dissertation, 2005; David B. Simmons, The Pastor’s Personal Friendships: Conflicts, Boundaries, and Benefits, s.l.: lulu.com, 2014. Brian Edgar refers to Messner’s research, noting the importance of ‘friendship in leadership’ without detailed theological development ( God Is Friendship: A Theology of Spirituality, Community, and Society, Wilmore: Seedbed, 2013, 183). Another DMin project claims to be more theological but friendship is here only a cipher for a broad and theologically undeveloped ‘impressionistic sketch’ of a ‘ministerial model of Reformed spirituality’ (Stuart Thomas Wilson, Sketching a Scheme: A Friendship Model of Ministry as a Mediating Structure, Lanham: University Press of America, 2005, 121). 47 Pickard, Theological, 232–236; Stephen Pickard, ‘A Christian Future for the Church’s Ministry: Some Critical Moves’, Ecclesiology 8 (2012), 33–53. Other than this, friendship is linked with leadership, ministry or pastoral care only in passing: Ambrose, On Duties of the Clergy (1–89) in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds.), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Ser. II Vol. 10, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d., §III.131–135; David Deeks, Pastoral Theology: An Inquiry, London: Epworth, 1987, 177–184; L. Gregory Jones and Kevin R. Armstrong, Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006, 74–77; Wayne E. Oates, The Christian Pastor (3rd ed.), Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982, 194–199; Thomas C. Oden, Pastoral Theology: Essentials of Ministry, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983, 55; Wilson, Coat, 142–144. 48 Brueggemann, Prophetic , xvi. 49 Ricoeur, Text , 172.

If friendship is to be the discourse of the prophetic imagination when it comes to incarnational ecclesial leadership, there is significant work to do in coding that discourse for contemporary culture has weakened the concept. We must ask whether Christian tradition underpins a coding of friendship sufficiently robust to bear the weight which the prophetic imagination would place upon it. I will argue in the affirmative, drawing out the richness of this language as grounded by John 15, the central passage where friendship in Christ is clearly described, as well as later constructions by the church. The first of these later constructions is Thomas Aquinas’ contribution which considers friendship in conversation with both Scripture and the classical tradition. The second is Aelred of Rievaulx’s work regarding friendship in monastic contexts. Whilst not identical to the ecclesial context, monasticism being in some sense a narrower expression than the church, Aelred’s work assists in strengthening our understanding of friendship, especially its concrete form. These investigations found my confidence that friendship is indeed a discourse which is richly coded in the Christian tradition and which can fund the prophetic imagination. Friendship in the Facebook generation For the Western church, friendship may not appear conceptually promising. Not only do a community’s historical and cultural traditions influence the accessibility of images for ecclesial contemplation. The contemporary shades of meaning of the image also affect its value for appropriation and must therefore be considered. Whilst friendship assumes different cultural forms, 1 my focus on ecclesial leadership in specifically Western contexts means that what follows does not consider friendship in non-Western cultures. 2 Further, the aspect of virtualisation by which I read the contemporary context of friendship here is merely representative in illustrating how Western concepts of friendship might appear insufficiently stable for further use. Other concerns might include the corrosive impact upon friendship of cultural ideologies including consumerism/materialism, individualism and domination. 3 7 ‘I have called you friends . . .’

128 Coding the discourse In the Facebook generation where ‘I-You’ encounters are replaced by ‘I-it’ relationships, 4 perhaps friendships inevitably tend towards becoming ‘collectible commodities and status symbols’. 5 The Facebook ‘friending’ phenomenon recognises a world of weak ties, relationships with colleagues and acquaintances. What was, in 1967, merely sociological experiment 6 has become a significant aspect of Western perspectives on relationships: social ‘links’ are now celebrated, at least on Facebook and similar social networking sites (SNSs), with the language of friendship. 7 With Sherry Turkle, we might affirm: ‘Facebook is a world in which fans are “friends”. But of course, they are not friends. They have been “friended”. That makes all the difference in the world’. 8 Indeed, virtual SNS ‘friendship’ does not presuppose reciprocity, trust and timed revelation of personal data within the bounds of privacy but is ‘public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized’. 9 Friends can be added, removed or classified at the touch of a button – and all this publicly – even whilst we review our friends’ friends. 10 Further as the number of SNS friends increases, communications tend towards anonymous broadcast relationships. 11 These relationships are cumulative, in that more online friends are added than deleted, and interactions tend to be ‘briefer bursts of activity rather than more sustained conversations’. 12 Now friendship means being informed about status updates and photograph uploads. 13 Whilst technological advances have rendered electronic communications methods ubiquitous and arguably offer benefits including easy maintenance of long-distance relationships and relationships where parties are rarely available to interact in real time, 14 Mark Vernon considers them inherently risky. For him, ‘there is no substitute for face-time’ because of the capacity of communications technologies for enabling misunderstanding and offence. 15 Indeed, real-life interaction is not central to virtual friendships: 16 although some might demur that with technology allowing real-time personal interactions and video-conferencing capabilities communicating non-verbal cues risk to friendship is minimal, 17 Robert Putnam contends that such technologies are nevertheless concerning and may only reduce rather than eliminate depersonalising effects of asynchronous computer-mediated communications. 18 First, these technologies have generally been accessible primarily to an elite group of predominantly young white males with high levels of education and income, thus limiting virtual friendship to a certain tranche of society. Second, what Putnam dubs cyberbalkanisation occurs: the formation of relationships around commonality of interest. Whilst homogeneity may always have been a starting point for offline friendships, Putnam notes that these highly specialised virtual friendships tend to exist only in the context of the topic of mutual interest whereas offline friendships historically have usually operated across multiple contexts, including ‘supermarket . . . church, or . . . ball field’. 19 Virtual friendships often become more focused around information about the other rather than experience of them 20 and are lowintimacy relationships, ‘less interdependent and more ephemeral form[s] of social connection’ than offline friendship. 21 For William Deresiewicz:

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 129 Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet [SNSs] . . . are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn’t invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. 22 Contemporary challenges associated with friendship’s virtualisation relate not only to the expansion of the concept beyond the point of it appearing to retain any significant meaning. There is also the aspect of commodification, transforming ‘social relations and self-expression . . . intimacy, into immaterial commodities’. 23 Despite a generally positive assessment of SNSmediated intimacies as friendship, Deborah Chambers warns that ‘repertoires of personhood presupposed by social network sites are interrelated with technologies of marketing and the shaping of consumption’. 24 As the average person’s relational reach has increased through SNSs, so also has the opportunity to use these friendships for value. That value could relate to professional leverage: the LinkedIn network is dedicated to promoting such relationships and the weak links celebrated as friendship by SNSs are often employed by those wishing to establish a publishing platform. 25 Related value may derive from SNS friendships with the ‘right people’, communications being staged as ‘public and oftentimes performative act’ on Facebook walls or elsewhere. 26 In fairness, however, the emphasis on friendship’s utility cannot be solely attributed to the rise of SNSs but has been ascribed also to contemporary societal narratives, both managerial and therapeutic, which seek economic growth and mobilising of individuals’ internal resources towards personal satisfaction. 27 Friendship utility in these contexts is, respectively, the economic success championed by Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and ‘the subjective states of wellbeing that make up a sense of self-worth’. 28 Whilst such relationships based on utility do not necessarily exceed friendship’s scope, 29 increasing focus on friendship’s extrinsic value to participants occludes the broader conceptual range historically ascribed thereto. Some time before the advent of SNSs, Digby Anderson had contended that friendships were ‘thinner . . . increasingly restricted . . . seen as belonging to recreation’ only. 30 Ray Pahl, however, had located friendship ‘at the core’, suggesting in 2000 that friendship might be fulfilling functions historically ascribed to kinship. 31 This diversity of opinion may have stemmed from a dearth of clearly accepted sociological criteria for friendship 32 but it is surely relevant that Pahl’s optimism preceded the advent of significant use of SNSs and other media bringing the virtualising dynamic to bear on friendship. This dynamic has evidently broadened contemporary conceptions of friendship, thinning them considerably and emphasising aspects of utility to the detriment of friendship’s other facets. Must we surrender hope therefore

130 Coding the discourse that the contours of a more robust concept of friendship remain within the conception of this generation? It appears not. Despite SNS friendships, we find ourselves lonely. 33 This suggests continued recognition of the relational space filled by friendship which Facebook friendships and the like cannot satisfy. As Lenora Rand acknowledges in a Christian context, though virtual relationships may have value, ‘physical manifestations of the body of Christ’ are also needed. 34 Turkle comments similarly in her review of technology’s effect on relationships in a broader context: [though] we have come to a point at which it is near heresy to suggest that [SNSs are] . . . not a community . . . I think I spoke too quickly [in using such language]. I used the word ‘community’ for worlds of weak ties. 35 Much of Turkle’s work is a disturbing prognosis for friendship: one research subject prefers online interactions to what he calls ‘flat time’ with his family because he can easily race through online interactions, attending only to the highlights, whereas face-to-face interactions require slower engagement, a fuller immersion. 36 Yet Turkle also finds evidence of young people longing for a friendship which is more than a string of virtual interactions. 37 Friendship, then, is not dead even if ‘our minds . . . can be ever-changing around the idea of friendship’ 38 and notwithstanding the breadth of relationships thereby encompassed. Accordingly, what is necessary is not a new relational concept. Meaning endures in friendship. Yet its appropriation by the prophetic imagination requires that friendship be reclaimed, its content clarified and image rehabilitated. Contemporary Westerners know that friendship is more than it seems to have become: consider, even, how we refer to ‘Facebook friends’, the adjective evidencing that many cannot quite call this friendship without qualification. 39 Yet, though we know that Facebook friendship is not all there is, the resources to inform a robust notion of friendship are not intrinsic to popular culture. Accordingly, the prophetic imagination must turn to the retrieval of earlier resources, including those from Scripture, in pursuit of a clear understanding of friendship’s richness. Friendship in John 15:12–17 The major NT text concerning friendship amongst believers and with Christ is John 15:12–17. Whilst there are other Scriptural texts on friendship, particularly OT accounts of specific friendships and of certain individuals as friends of God as well as passing NT references to friendship with Jesus, this is the most sustained reflection concerning friendship in the context of New Covenant life. 40 In focusing on these verses only, I am largely ignoring the wider cotext and, especially, the interaction between this text and the first eleven verses of the chapter. I would underline that the incarnational theme of participation in Christ (15:1–11) as the context for the command to love others as friends (15:12–17) is important and deserves more intense

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 131 scrutiny elsewhere. However, the task at hand demands a tight focus and will be limited here to two aspects. First, I will scrutinise the theme of friendship from the primary angle intended by the text, namely the friendship of Jesus with his followers. Second, I will extrapolate an understanding about friendship between Jesus’ followers, an extrapolation which the inclusio framing 15:12–17 indicates as appropriate. 41 ‘I have called you friends . . .’ The friendship which Jesus offers to his followers is shaped by a number of factors. It is, first, cruciform. The statement in 15:13 delineates the kind of love which Jesus shows his friends and, though evoking similar classical maxims, this concept is filled with new meaning by Jesus’ coming death on the cross on behalf of ( huper) his friends. 42 This laying down of his life evokes what the Good Shepherd does for his sheep (10:11, 15), 43 a parallel which may establish the context of tithēmi in 15:13 such that Jesus’ interactions with his followers may be understood within a ‘“shepherding” friendship’, 44 that is, a friendship which yet accommodates a diversity of role. Certainly, in making cruciformity the measure of Jesus’ love, John frames friendship as ‘christological category’ 45 and, in the context of his command to the disciples in 15:12, presents it as the Christological mode of neighbourlove commanded to Jesus’ followers. The second characteristic of friendship with Jesus is obedience, although this needs some clarification. Does 15:14 make Jesus’ friendship with his disciples conditional upon their obedience, specifically here to his command to ‘love one another’, or is something else implied? In fact, commentators generally concur that obedience characterises Jesus’ friends rather than constituting them his friends. 46 This is consistent both with earlier statements that apart from Jesus the disciples can do nothing and with a causative interpretation of kathōs in 15:12. This interpretation of kathōs suggests that because Jesus loved his followers they now love one another: his love precedes their obedience to his love command and is the foundation for that obedient response. Friendship is not conditional upon performance, with obedience instead the fruit of being Jesus’ friend. Eldho Puthenkandathil expresses it helpfully: ‘the expression of friendship on the part of Jesus [is] presented as already established, while on the part of the disciples [it] is a not yet realized one’, requiring their obedience in terms of neighbour-love as response, for then only comes ‘convergence of their will’. 47 Accordingly, the text makes clear that to enjoy friendship with Jesus means to obey his relational expectation, an expectation that this same friendship is offered to others. Yet the obedience for which Jesus calls is not a blind obedience. On the contrary, the expectation of obedience does not preclude intimacy, friendship’s third aspect. John 15:15 expounds what Jesus shares with his friends. The content of that revelation is not explicit here, save that it is all that he has heard from his Father. Such revelation parallels a Greco-Roman