Bosch - Where the early church “failed”
I’m working on a sermon for Sunday. During my research I ran across a quote in Bosch’s book that I heavily marked the first time I went through it. In commenting on the early church, Bosch argues that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. Those who followed Him were not given a name to distinguish them from other groups, no creed of their own, no rite which distinguised them. Nontheless, “Their survival as a separate religious group, rather than their commitment to the reign of God, began to preoccupy them.”
“Jesus foretold the kingdom and it was the Church that came.” Alfred Loisy (p. 50)
The second failure, according to Bosch, is that the early church ceased to be a movement and turned into an institution.
“There are essential difference between an institution and a movement, says H. R. Niebuhr (following Bergson): The one is conservative, the other progressive; the one is more or less passive, yielding to influences from outside, the other is active, influencing rather than being influenced; the one looks to the past, the other to the future (Niebuhr 1959:11f). In addition, we might add, the one is anxious, the other is prepared to take risks; the one guards boundaries, the other crosses them.” (P. 50-51)
A little further on Bosch asks a good question. Is it fair to expect a movement to survive only as a movement? He observes that every movement eventually disintegrates into an institution. “We cannot have it both ways, then: purely and exclusively a religious movement, yet at the same time something that will survive the centuries and continue to exercise a dynamic influence.”
His complaint is not that it no longer existed as a movement, but that when it turned into an institution, it lost much of it’s “verve.” A white hot movement cooled into crystallized codes, solidified institutions, and petrified dogmas. (p.53)