In 1935, a new quarterly review, entitled Christendom, was founded in Chicago. It succeeded The Christian Union Quarterly which had been published during the preceding quarter of a century. Christendom in turn yielded to the Ecumenical Review in 1948 when the latter appeared as the organ of the newly formed World Council of Churches. Charles Clayton Morrison, the well-known editor of the ecumenical weekly, The Christian Century, served the new journal, Christendom, as editor pro tem. In his opening foreword, Morrison announced that this venture thought of itself "as an expression of the new creative era in world culture into which, despite powerful counter currents, the broad stream of human life is moving," and that "the Christian church is on the point of coming alive once more to the supreme responsibility of Christianity in civilization." Indeed, "Christianity is itself nothing less than a civilization." And then follows, what I shall here regard as, the "punch line"--"the goal of civilization can be nothing less than, literally, a Christendom" (emphasis added).

For reasons to be made clear as we proceed, I shall adopt this effusive yet ambiguous vision of Morrison as the frame of reference for this paper. Ours, too, is "a new creative period in world culture," though judging from Morrison’s experience, we had better be modest in our predictions! We confront the question: what is the meaning, that is, what is the content and the shape, of Christian identity in the world today? To what extent is that identity everywhere the same? To what extent is it situation specific? One of the most obvious situational variations arises between the lands where Christianity has long been a dominant faith, and lands where it is barely or newly introduced. The context of this colloquy, of course, is the former--Europe, and by extension, the European peoples, once known as Christendom. And the specific occasion is the collapse of the Soviet challenge to the course of European history. Given Soviet global projections and the corresponding superpower rivalry (the "Cold War"), the collapse, like the challenge, has global repercussions.

Poland, of course, was engaged far more directly by the Soviet enterprise than was the USA. Nonetheless both countries share in the global repercussions of the Soviet era and its collapse, as well as in the legacy of Christendom. Each of us, Poles and USA-Americans, have our particular Christian identities and tasks. Our task here is to assess those particularities in the frame of our wider commonalities.

In addressing here our common and respective futures in the post-Soviet era, I have been asked to profile the "free church" paradigm. I gladly do so, not, however, to advocate the "free church" as such, but rather to articulate this poorly understood facet of the story of Christendom. For while in the view of the established churches of Christendom--Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and in some instances Protestant--and often in disestablished, free-church self-understanding as well, the established and disestablished churches are mutually exclusive entities, together they constitute the Christendom story. Both "paradigms" of church emerged historically, from lived experience, rather, it may be added, than from externally reproducible blueprints.

As we move, as faith communities, into the post-Soviet era, the European Christendom legacy is at once our major asset and our major liability. But alas, it is more comforting to celebrate the assets than to confront the liabilities. Yet failure to confront the liabilities of that legacy may well result in our squandering the assets as well. The assets are familiar, and we need not tarry here to detail them. I refer simply to the sedimentation of Christian energies in the culture and civilization of Europe, and of the peoples of European origin.

The liabilities of the Christendom legacy, on the other hand, are less readily evident. Liabilities often appear in the guise of asset. But in any case the era of Christendom, the era in which political and religious institutions ruled conjointly among the European peoples, has passed, passed beyond recall. The era of "established" churches has ended. Diaspora, not Christendom, lies before us. Our awareness and assimilation of this reality appear to lag well behind the march of events. Many of the assumptions and idioms of Christendom, whatever their validity in the past, still imprison us, either positively or negatively, and by so much tend to inhibit our responses to our own era. For historical reasons the halo of ecclesial establishment lingers somewhat more brightly on the eastern than on the western horizon. Numerous people in central and Eastern Europe, still find it difficult to conceive the church and its faith in other than in established or national form.

Given the tutelary role of (establishment) Christianity over many centuries in the rise of the nations of Europe, the fusion of church with nation is readily taken for granted. But the resulting Christendom is not the gospel. Like any other historical era, Christendom stood (stands) under the judgment and grace of God. Ours, I here argue, is a very different epoch. Whatever the validity of the establishment and disestablishment paradigms of Christendom in their own time, neither is reproducible or normative today. But before I pursue the argument further, a few comments on definitions may be helpful.

The earliest appearance of the term, Christendom, cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, is 1389. Christendom, according to the Dictionary, refers to "the countries professing Christianity, taken collectively." Above I used the term the terms "established" and "establishment" to characterize the Christianity of Christendom. "Established," and correlatively "free" or "disestablished," are concepts that arose in English history. The Church of England developed its linkages to monarchy and state following the break with Rome, and was therefore described as established: the monarch became "the Supreme Head of the Church in England." Subsequent religious movements gave rise variously to "free" churches, such as Baptist, Quaker, and Methodist, churches permitted to exist along-side the Church of England, but without state linkage or support. A corresponding term, Freikirche emerged in 19th century Germany, with one group of churches naming itself evangelische Freikirche.

Disestablishment language, however, refers primarily to the external status of churches in societies, that is, to their relationships to other social configurations, especially the political order. It has no necessary reference to the church intrinsically or theologically. Accordingly, as Durnbaugh observes, "believers’ church" is a more adequate term. In fact, use of the term "free" at times been applied internally or intrinsically as well--"free" understood as the absence of theological or creedal affirmation. Meanwhile, on the other hand, formerly established bodies--Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant--have been increasingly disestablished outwardly, without also, for that reason, having adopted a "believers’ church" ecclesiology.

What, then, is at stake in the two ecclesiologies, established and free/believers’? Without presuming at this point to provide a concise definition, I offer several definitional comments. Ernst Troeltsch, to whose classic study I will return later, contrasted the "objective" concerns of the Kirche-type ecclesiology (sacramental, established) and the "subjective" preoccupation of the Sekte-type (free, believers’). Whereas the former sees the integrity of the church secured sacramentally, the latter sees it realized in existentially, that is, in the gifted faith experience of the believing community. The contrast between the two ecclesiologies is analogous to the distinction drawn in organizational language between "top down" and "bottom-up" dynamics. This latter contrast was been captured dramatically in the concept of subsidiarity, set in orbit by Pius X in Quadragesimo Anno (1931). It is "a gravely harmful disturbance of right order to turn over to a greater society of higher rank functions and services which can be performed by lesser bodies on a lower plane" (quoted here from Abbott). Creative energy in social life, in other words, flows upward. These contrasts, of course, are conceptual devices, not real entities.

European Christianity, as we know, passed through three historical stages: first, the early pre-establishment centuries, then a millennium of establishment, and finally, the post-establishment era in which we find ourselves today. Transitions, of course, were gradual, and the distinctions between the stages were relative rather than absolute. Perhaps the most dramatic shift came during the fourth century, C.E., under the Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosisus, when Christianity evolved from being a persecuted minority to a persecuting majority in the Empire. For more than a millennium Christianity was imperially established.

Disestablishment, the third stage of European Christianity, came far less abruptly and more unevenly than did the fourth century establishment. Symbolically the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation can be taken as the beginning of the disestablishment era. Initially, however, the Reformation, as far as it reached, merely replaced the imperial (quasi universal) establishment of the church by national establishments.

National establishment, it will be recalled, however, did not originate with the Reformation. Virtually all the peoples of Europe, beginning already in the fourth century with Armenia and Georgia, emerged as nations in the course of a millennium under royally-sponsored Christian tutelage. Indeed, for more than a millennium, the contest between the national and imperial "paradigms" was an important factor in European history. In the end, as the familiar formula of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) signified (cuius regio, eius religio), the national paradigm prevailed.

Despite the momentary triumph, national Christianity as the disestablishment of the Roman church and the rise of the modern believers’ church movement were rooted in the Protestant Reformation, the former indirectly, the latter directly. The story, of course, cannot be told in any detail here. I will merely identify two salient aspects of the Reformation era, as indicated, one indirect, the other direct. Indirectly, in the long run, Protestantism hastened the secularization and pluralization of modern society, thus setting the stage for disestablishment. Directly, though marginally, it gave rise to the first modern "free church" (Blanke).

First, secularization. Martin Luther, informed by the medieval conception of the religious unity of society, set out to reform and renew the one universal church. Contrary to his intention, the interaction of events and ideas in the early Reformation led quickly to a break with the papacy, and the eventual repudiation of much of the Roman religious practice, including monasticism. Outwardly this meant the transfer of monastic properties to "secular" auspices, a transfer described later as "secularization." Meanwhile the erstwhile-cloistered ascetic energy of medieval Christianity was redirected into what Max Weber (1958) was much later to describe as innerworldly asceticism.

Secularization, as the term is most commonly used today, has primarily a negative connotation, signifying the decline or loss of religious belief and practice, and/or of religious of influence in culture and society. But as a socio-cultural process, secularization is far more complex, with both positive and negative dimensions. Biblical faith, as Wax Weber emphasized, resulted in the "disenchantment" of the world; that is, in the displacement of animistic or magical conceptions of nature by the conception of transcendent Deity, a loss no less for the ancient traditions involved.

Meanwhile, religious beliefs, insofar as they become socially or culturally embodied, are subject to the "laws" of society and culture. A hospital, informed initially by religious motivation, may increasingly assume a life of its own, governed instead by technical and administrative logic, without further recourse to the originating vision. Indeed, only by some degree of such "secularization" can the vision be implemented.

Secularization is linked to a continuous increase in the number of social agents, acting autonomously, both individual and group, and in the range and scale of social action. Some degree of secularization, and pluralization, is implicit as well in biblical ecclesiology and eschatology, as is the rise of what in our time is called civil society. Both numerically and qualitatively speaking, there is always a "world" outside the "little flock," which is the gathered, believing community. This reality was obscured, if not denied, by the medieval synthesis of church and society, and despite their break with Rome, retained by the leading reformers. The recovery of the church/society disjunction may well have been the most important plank in the free/believers’ church platform. Secular pluralism is in any case implicit in the free church paradigm (Peachey, 1976). Despite the reformers’ retention of the medieval conception social unity, in the long term their action contributed importantly to the dissolution of the medieval synthesis, and to that extent contributed to the rise of the free church. I turn now directly to the free church story.

Here there is a relatively new story to be told. In recent decades the archival source materials on sixteenth century religious dissent in western Europe have been systematically published. Voices from that distant time, then suppressed by the major reformers as well by the Roman Church, can now be heard. Admittedly, those were turbulent and confused times, and dissent was by no means always wholesome or authentic. Nonetheless, on the basis of these materials, important chapters of Reformation history are being fundamentally rewritten. A coherent free/believers’ church alternative to both the Roman and the Protestant "paradigms" emerged, and though small, survived into our own time (Mennonites, Hutterites, Amish).¹

It was through later independent religious movements, however, chiefly in the Anglo-Saxon lands, that the free church made its impact in the modern world. Historians labor to trace the filiation of ideas from movement to movement, and debates continue. There were borrowings by the English Baptists and Independents in the seventeenth century from the continental Anabaptists. Yet there and eventually in North America these movements and other free and believers’ churches developed their own genius. Though the halo of Christendom still lingers over the continent, the (USA) American ethos bears a "free church" stamp.

Before proceeding with this very brief sixteenth century account, a thought experiment may be helpful. Confronted with the break with the papal monarchy, where might the Reformers have turned to ground the church? What were the options? Here I refer only to the early reformers, Luther and Zwingli. One possibility would be to establish a new papacy. Another would to move radically in the opposite direction and to posit the autonomy of each faith community. A third possibility would be to seek the help of civil authorities. Perhaps there are other possibilities? If you, the reader, were a Luther or a Zwingli, what would you do?

But let us turn to the events. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk in Wittenberg, Germany, nailed a paper to the door of the Castle Church. On that paper he had inscribed 95 theses describing the need for church reform. Outwardly, that act marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Controversy ensued at once. By 1520 the Pope Leo X sent a decree of excommunication, which Luther burned in public. For the next few years, Luther temporized. From the outset he expected dramatic results from the new gospel preaching. The renewal of faith communities would result. Zwingli in Zurich, though in a different setting, proceeded similarly. During those years, both reformers accordingly toyed with the second option above, a church polity based on the early Christian view that the church is fully present in each assembly ("Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" Matthew 18:20).

Meanwhile events overtook deliberations, notably the peasant uprisings of the mid 1520s. The expected results from the new preaching did not materialize. Already in a 1523 sermon, Luther admitted that significant steps toward believing assemblies effect, would have to wait until "God makes Christians," (Pelikan, 67). Meanwhile, despite the break with Rome notwithstanding, Luther retained the medieval vision of the organic unity of society (later termed the corpus christianum). As the emergency became acute he turned to his territorial prince, the ruling authority in the land. While retaining the inner freedom of the life of faith, Luther yielded the external affairs of the church to temporal control. Baptism thus became important as a civic symbol. As Pelikan notes, Luther, in his treatment of baptism, worked with analogies from the order of creation (p. 87). Accordingly, religious dissent, action outside the prevailing order, became in effect, civic subversion and insurrection. Steven Ozment, a contemporary Reformation historian, observes: "To the people of Reformation Europe no specter was more fearsome than a society in which the desires of individuals eclipsed their sense of social duty" [Ozment, 177].) Not surprisingly, then, the response of the ruling authorities to dissent, to autonomous action in what we now call civil society, resembled the response of totalitarian regimes of the present century.

Events in Zurich took a similar turn, though there the government was urban and republican. Perhaps partly for that reason, Zurich, rather than Wittenberg, was to become the cradle of the "believers’ church." Taking the reformers’ call for faith and commitment seriously, several groups discontinued the baptism of infants, arguing that baptism should follow repentance and faith, acts of which only adults are capable. Thereupon, in January, 1525, baptism of all unbaptized infants was ordered by the government, under penalty of law, within eight days. The hour of decision had come. On a January night, in 1527, fourteen persons met in a dwelling behind the Great Muenster (church) in Zurich to decide what to do. A chronicle of the era describes the scene:

And it came to pass that they were together until fear (angst) began to come over them, yea, they were pressed (gedrungen) in their hearts. Thereupon, they began to bow their knees to the Most High God in heaven and called upon him as the Knower of hearts, implored him to enable them to do his divine will and to manifest his mercy toward them. For flesh and blood and human forwardness did not drive them, since they well knew what they would have to bear and suffer on account of it. George Cajacob (a former monk) arose and asked Conrad (Grebel, a young Zurich patrician and humanist scholar, till then a coworker of Zwingli) to baptize him, for the sake of God, with the true Christian baptism upon his faith and knowledge. And when he knelt down with that request and desire, Conrad baptized him, since at that time there was no ordained Diener (minister-Williams translates deacon) to perform such work. After that was done the others similarly desired George to baptize them, which he also did on their request (Williams, 1957, 43f).

Awareness of the gravity of their action--the violation of an express law--clearly sets the tone for this event. But as the chronicler indicates, and as numerous other reports of that era confirm, hesitation sprang also fundamentally from the extraordinary nature of their action. To act without priestly sanction was obviously a more daring act in a medieval setting than it would be in today’s more secular cosmos. Meanwhile a new order, to replace the one stemming from Rome, is already inchoate in the above definition of the situation--baptism is to be administered by a designated leader. Order is implicit in human action.

Meanwhile autonomous Bible and Reformation-tract reading circles had sprung up in many localities in northwest Europe, and the late night scene in Zurich was reenacted in many places, usually by traveling missioners from previously established groups. While the movement represented a rediscovery of the self-authenticating power of the gospel ("where two or three are gathered in my name..."), it must also be said, from the hindsight we have of believers’ church history, that a general or "satisfying" alternative to the claims of the Great Traditions (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, etc.) did not emerge. However authentic the act of the little band in Zurich, it was incomplete.

How is the continuing common life of the gathered believers to be ordered, internally, by assembly, and among assemblies? Again and again, in the centuries that followed, when new conditions, new movements, or disagreements and rivalries emerged, new groups and groupings have been formed. Nor is an end in sight. New denominations erupt more rapidly than the older "main line" churches can consolidate ecumenically. Are we dealing with human frailties or historical inevitabilities? Or were these (and later) early "radicals" still too imprisoned in establishment imagery to elaborate the full logic of their position? Is the endless creation of miniature, sometimes rivalrous, Christian fiefdoms really a viable alternative to the Great Traditions?

In the above introductory remarks I underscored the liabilities inherent in the legacy of Christendom. The liabilities are most evident in places where we hanker after the external advantages inherent in religious establishment, or seek their restoration. Here, however, we direct our attention to the liabilities inherent in the free church tradition. As already indicated, that tradition is more deeply imbedded in Christendom than distinct from it. It both rested upon the Christendom legacy, and rose in criticism, indeed in opposition to it, perhaps like an adolescent in rebellion against a parent.

The intertwining of establishment and disestablishment in the career of Christendom is exemplified in the opening citation of this paper, namely Charles Clayton Morrison’s vision for the renewal of Christendom. Morrison, as well as the other journal he edited (The Christian Century), was rooted in the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), a uniquely American, free church denomination, a product of the American frontier. As the future beckoned to Morrison, however, despite his believers’ church heritage, like Luther, he still clung to the eschatology of Christendom.

Free church rootedness in, or dependence on, Christendom is evident in the ensuing polemics. The dialogue between the "established" and "disestablished" churches often became a contest over who has, or is, the "true church." On the disestablished side, this lead to a definition of faith that turned on the points of criticism of the established ecclesial communities. Ironically at times such criticism focused on liturgical forms or symbols, with the dissenters, in effect, thus conceding the point that they thought they were criticizing in the first place. More serious are the imbalance and the deficiencies resulting from a theology or creed organized around, or based upon, a polemical issue: other aspects of the gospel, of divine truth, are ignored.

Free church indebtedness to Christendom becomes the most tangible in the rise of the denomination. To be sure, in the United State we have a great number of independent congregations, groups that disavow formal ties to any denomination. But "no man is an island," an English curate wrote, and so it is with bands of Christians. Most groups (congregations) establish links to other groups, and particularly where they emerge from controversy, such groupings tend eventually to form "churches," that is, quasi-universal, self-contained ecclesial bodies, paralleling thus the older catholic traditions.

One can thus readily construct a bill of particulars in criticism of free/believers’ church ecclesiality. It has not been my task here to detail the flaws in the Christendom tradition. Instead I refer to the above paragraph on definitions and issues. Basically, just as free and believers’ church movements have been prepared to jeopardize the "objective" dimensions of religious expression in order to restore the "subjective," so the established traditions have sacrificed the "subjective" appropriation to guarantee the "objective" dimensions. And while the distinction between the traditions is relative--each in some measure embraces a both/and position--the differences between the relative emphasis is real and critical.

The theological and ecclesiological issues at stake in the interface of traditions here adumbrated are not to be trivialized. Nonetheless, at this juncture, history in effect drowns out much of the older controversy. The three-stage progression noted above (pre-establishment, establishment, post-establishment) likely has a deeper significance than such conceptual contrasts imply. In any case, it is instructive to observe that this three-stage sequence parallels the Israelite/Jewish experience and history. There, too, we confront an establishment era, an era challenged prophetically, that eventually miscarried. That, too, is followed by an era of disestablishment, whose positive content is captured, and to some degree sanctioned, by the concept of dispersion (Diaspora), the seeding of the Chosen People among the nations.

At least one New Testament writer senses the ecclesial significance of that development. Though with the call of Abraham the formation of a people apart, a Chosen People, is initiated, the goal is universal. That goal is more effectively realized in a people dispersed than in a territorial people that has become a nation like others. "Christendom" is an eschatological, not an historical, possibility. Within "history," the People of the Covenant can only witness; as People of the Covenant, they cannot rule. (Isaiah 43:8-13; Acts 1:8).

In the beginning paragraphs of this paper I illustrate the power of imagery of Christendom in the establishment, as recently as 1935, of a journal by that name. Ironically, that journal sprang from all-American, disestablished, free church soil, announcing that the goal of civilization must be nothing less than a "Christendom," the very illusion that had provoked the free church reaction in the first place. Meanwhile, the inaugural number of that journal contained also an article by John A. Mackay entitled, "The Adequacy of the Church Today." Mackay, a well-known Presbyterian churchman, and long-time president of Princeton Theological Seminary, acknowledged in this article that in some few lands the churches can still make "a real contribution toward a corpus Christianum." Basically, however, he argued that the church must more and more "concentrate upon persons and personal change in all classes of society. Its corporate witness will always be in direct relation to the number of twice-born men and women who make up the Christian community."

The disestablishment of the churches within Christendom is everywhere accompanied by the fear that this reduces the faith into a mere private interest. Simplification of the evangel by free churches and televangelists, at least in the USA, contributes to that fear. Mackay’s dictum, however, must be taken with utmost seriousness. Public pronouncements by church officials, though important in certain situations, carry little of the real impact of the churches in society, whether for good or ill. Caught, as we are, between repetitious Christendom ritual (the great churches) and the individual salvation rhetoric (free/believer’s churches), our churchianity is all too often impotent.

This observation, however, is not intended as either condemnation or as self-flagellation. And certainly it is not intended as an assessment of Christendom past. To the contrary, the contribution of Christianity to modernization is far greater than most of us, whether critics or devotees, realize. A year ago, in an international symposium in Munich, Professor Hans Buchheim of Mainz, observed:

A new species of freedom, freedom as we understand it, was brought into the world by Christianity. According to the Christian faith, every individual human must give an account as a person before a personal God in the last judgement. Thereby this now individual person is fundamentally freed from the "ethos" of society, since decisive final instance (of authority) is no this personal God. The decision thus required can require the person not to follow the custom of society but indeed to decide against it. That is the source of the innerworldly autonomy of the individual (tr. mine).

And Ernst Troeltsch, whose monumental work on the Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, written early in this century, wrote near the end of his treatise:

Troeltsch’s statement, though reflecting an earlier intellectual ambience, is remarkably prescient. Since he wrote, differentiation and the technicizing of life has continued apace. The individualization and (potential) personalization of existence may well be the most profound revolution to occur in human history. Purely positivist analysis leads increasingly to nihilistic conclusions in which the person as ontological entity disappears--the very outcome that Troeltsch foresaw (see, e.g., Gergen; Rorty). Troeltsch’s own prognosis led as we know to individual mysticism. Yet he also asserted that Kirche, Sekte and Mystik, and all three, are equally grounded in the gospel. The "future task," he then concluded, lay in "the mutual penetration of the three sociological categories, which must be united in a structure which will reconcile them all." The outcome, I would hazard, will more resemble Diaspora than Christendom.

*Written for presentation in a conference on "Church and Public Life," Warsaw, Poland, October 15, 1993.

1 For a benchmark overview of these developments see George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation (1972). Though much has been published since then, this work admirably serves our present purpose. Williams distinguished the "radical" (Anabaptist) from the "magisterial" (Lutheran, Calvinist) Reformation. His study is additionally relevant here, because in it (as he does elsewhere), he elaborates on the remarkable tolerance of the Polish polity in the sixteenth century, when elsewhere in Europe, religious dissent was harshly suppressed. For a briefer "radical Reformation" introduction, see Little.