The Church's Religious Identity and Its Social and Political Mission

Abstract

THE MISSION of the Church is at the center of much contemporary theology. One basic theological issue is the relation between the Church's mission and its religious identity. How does any activity or ministry relate to the Church's religious identity? Unless its ministry expresses this identity, the Church fails to be church. The recent loss of membership within American churches has been attributed to their focusing on social issues rather than on their religious message. This essay will explore the specific issue, how the Church's political and social mission relates to its religious identity. First, it will raise the basic theological issue by analyzing distinct interpretations of the relation between religious identity and social or political ministry. Second, it will offer hermeneutical reflections on an adequate methodology and will propose how the interpretative nature of religion and the Wisdom development of Christology can provide a basis and guideline for elaborating the Church's Christian religious identity in relation to a social ministry. Third, without touching on the complex relations between morality and legality, church and state, policy and strategy, it will point to the basic correlation between the Church's tradition of a social mission and its political mission.