Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Page 49

Further Implications
The paradoxical vision also moves toward indirect ways of connecting the
church to the public world. The second theme particularly calls the church
to the task of nourishing and sustaining the callings of lay Christians as they
move from the church into the world. If the church is really the church it will
effect an internal “revolution of the heart” among its laity that will indeed
affect the world. The church will form the hearts of minds of laity who will
then enter all the complex interstices of the public world that are unreachable
by the direct efforts of the church.
Indeed, I suspect that the most effective public theology of the next cen-
tury will be done by lay people who have been formed powerfully in the
church and then are able to connect their Christian formation with the learn-
ing and activity of their secular callings. Christian senators in legislatures have
far more political impact than either church statements or advocacy centers.
Christian professors in universities have more effect in shaping the “normai
sciences of the day” than the resource materials cranked out by church and
society bureaucracies. Christian doctors will have more voice in shaping a
humane medicine than theological ethicists in seminaries.
Christian lay persons, however, will need help and encouragement in con-
necting their Christian convictions to their public lives. The church must
spend far more time in playing another indirect role, that of a mediating in-
stitution. Not only must it form the hearts and minds of its laity, it must help
laity connect the social teachings of the church with their public lives by pro-
viding contexts in which those connections can be self-consciously made. The
Lay Academies of Europe have been models in this regard, though they seem
now to be succumbing to the temptation of the activist American churches:
they are more and more letting the society know “where they stand.” But if
the church is to take seriously its role to mediate its tradition to the challenges
of the modern world through the lives its laity, it will have to give more atten-
tion to that task and resist the temptation to pronounce and act on everything
in sight.
Moreover, the church must also show more courage and resolution with
regard to its related institutions. If it cannot insist that its vision make a mar-
gin of difference in the life of its schools, colleges, homes, camps, and hospi-