In the face of all these puzzling questions, Bryan Stone, E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Boston University, contends throughout his book Evangelism After Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness that becoming the church of God as a distinctive people, a new social option, and the body of Christ would be the best answer for Christians to give not only to themselves, but also to society in general; his thesis could be taken as “an argument for a more ecclesially grounded evangelism” (24).
In this light, ecclesiology is central for his theology of evangelism, and perhaps Stone’s most important theological interlocutor in this regard may be John Howard Yoder, a pacifist theologian-Christian ethicist of Mennonite breed, whose vision for Christian ethics, i.e., a right kind of living for God’s people, is inconceivable apart from being the church. It is this particular ecclesial vision, namely, church as the herald of God’s reign of peace, which Stone creatively appropriates to the practice of evangelism. Of another note in Stone’s conversation with Yoder throughout the book is the notion of witness, which Yoder employs to be the governing logic of Christian ethics, meaning that bearing a faithful witness to God is the manner in which Christian ethics operates. In the same vein, Stone argues that the governing logic of evangelism is also witness, for “there is no greater challenge for a church that would evangelize at the beginning of the twenty-first century than to relearn the practice of bearing faithful and embodied witness”(21).
Alongside Yoder, another figure that determines the general contour of the book, especially in terms of Stone’s method, is Alasdair MacIntyre. Drawing upon MacIntyre’s understanding of the notion ‘practice,’ which locates a certain practice’s telos, its standard of excellence, its activities, and its rules all within the practice itself, Stone first plumbs whether evangelism is a practice or not, and if so, what kind of practice evangelism is. At this juncture, deep in the context of MacIntyre’s thought on practice, Stone acknowledges that MacIntyre employs narrative and tradition in order to provide the background for his retrieval of the virtue tradition: narrative provides unity, meaning, and direction for our practices, while in the tradition one could raise the question of the internal goods of a particular practice socially embodied within a community, as a result of which the acquired qualities through practice is virtue (34). Patterning his book after MacIntyre’s three pillars (narrative, tradition, and virtue) for understanding practice and attempting to go beyond MacIntyre for the church of God, Stone organizes his book around evangelism’s narrative (Scriptural and contemporary), its social context(the church as an evangelizing community), and its virtues(the acquired qualities of evangelism as practice) (46). In this regard, understanding MacIntyre’s notion of practice is pivotal in understanding the book’s overall arguments, to which I now turn.
Summary of the Main Arguments
According to Stone, MacIntyre’s notion of practice has four peculiar characteristics. First, the goods of a certain practice do not reside outside it, but internal to it; second, its standard of excellence is internal as well; third, practice is always socially established, so no practice is possible apart from “a community of other practitioners,”(35) to whom we make our abodes; fourth, deriving from the third, the standards of a practice are open to criticism by fellow practitioners. What one could tease out of these four features in understanding practice is that it is a community-specific, tradition-specific, habitus-like (structured actions that remain largely unconscious to most of us) way of life, of which the means, the standard of excellence, and the ends are all internal to the practice itself.
In light of such understanding of practice, is evangelism a practice? Doubtless Stone critiques that the current ‘practice’ of evangelism is not qualified to be called as such, for the goods of evangelism, as well as its standard of excellence, are, more often than not, understood to stand outside the practice, namely, evangelism as more of poiesis (autonomous production) than practice(49), aiming at producing as many converts as possible with the least amount of time and energy, neglecting the particular stories and traditions of how the Christian community has been formed, is in current shape, and would be striving for the future. Against such understanding, Stone affirms that evangelism “does not necessarily produce anything… [it] is not a means to some other end, for faithfulness in witnessing to and offering God’s peaceable reign is its end, even if that witness is rejected” (49). At the end of part one, Stone really nails down what he has been meaning to say all the way up to this point on evangelism: “to put it plainly, there is only one criterion by which evangelism may be measured, and that is whether or not it is a faithful, virtuous witness to God’s peace” (52).
The three chapters in part two deals with the Scriptural narratives of evangelism in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the early Church community respectively. Now that Stone has demonstrated that evangelism as a practice is by nature community-specific and tradition-specific, what sounds naturally scandalous is the seeming discrepancy between the particularity of God’s people and the universal nature of God’s promise, even from the Old Testament. If such particularity is to remain consistently inviolable throughout the history of Christian community, how could the gospel be the good news for everyone? Stone contends that this should not be the case, for “particularity is the instrument of universality”(65). In other words, God’s way of offering salvation to the world is through the particularity of Israel embodying God’s presence on earth. Therefore, it makes sense to say that “the few are given for many”(65). However, for what were the few given to many then? What could this small people offer to the world for its salvation? In response, Stone unabashedly answers that it is God’s shalom, “peace and justice in the context of a Spirit-created community where human flourishing, blessedness, and wholeness is accompanied by the well-being of animals and even plant life”(70). Quoting Micah 4 as representative of God’s ways, Stone declares shalom as a precursor to what evangelism is calling for, namely, the person and story of Jesus. This is really important in that Stone here locates the origin of evangelism in the Old Testament, urging the readers “to drink deeply from the wells of the prophetic tradition apart from which the life, ministry, and message of Jesus makes no sense”(72).
Having shown how Jesus is connected to the Old Testament, Stone really crystallizes that Jesus in the New Testament is “the very content of evangelism,” meaning that evangelism is all about Jesus’ inviting us to make his story ours(76). Given this, what would be Jesus’ evangelism like? First, the person of Jesus is the inauguration and embodiment of God’s rule on earth, and that is why Origen calls Jesus “autobasileia–the reign of God in person”(110). This should challenge our privatizing, interiorizing of evangelism, since the ways of God embodied in the person of Jesus was all about being public and political, the inbreaking of a new social order. At the same time, the reign of God which Jesus proclaimed as a new social order was essentially the reign of peace. This demands the followers of Jesus never to resort to violence, no matter how subversive and challenging the message they proclaim is against status quo, and no matter how violently the worldly powers react to that message. In all these, Stone argues that Jesus never intended to draw the attention of his disciples away from the reign of God toward himself as the savior. In other words, Jesus focused not on himself, but on God’s reign.
Even so, Stone observes that after Jesus’ resurrection, the focus had subtly shifted from Jesus the proclaimer to Jesus the proclaimed. This means that Jesus’ message had been turned into the message about Jesus among the post-resurrection Christians. Therefore, “instead of Jesus’ typical emphasis on forgiving one another’s sins, what is now emphasized is Jesus as the one who forgives our sins”(88). What would this mean? Stone immediately pursues this question, and answers that such shift would not necessarily mean that the apostles were abandoning the original message of Jesus, meaning that the proclaimer and the proclaimed were still united in the consciousness of the early Christians. This is difficult to understand for us moderns, for “… the early Christians were able to keep together that which we are prone to separate–the message and the messenger–is that we have been trained not to think of messages as embodied in persons or social bodies, embedded in narratives, and enmeshed in practices”(107). What Stone contends here is only through story-telling and ecclesial exemplification, and not through propositional statements, will the reign of God become realized. Such particular story-telling and ecclesial exemplification, when combined together, truly constitutes evangelism. In part three, then, Stone proceeds to examine the narratives of modern consciousness: Constantinianism and modernity.
Through Constantinianism the church had access to the worldly power for the first time in history. It was Constantine who had made it easy for Christians to become worldly powerful, from which the power of God and the power of the world began to be fused with each other. In 313 Constantine had mandated the toleration of Christians, and the consciousness of Christendom, which looks at the state and the church as mutually friendly to each other, begins to develop. Therefore, Stone asserts that “by the fifth century the visible church is not the same as the true church, and thus it is more accurate to speak of the true church as “invisible””(119). In terms of time, Constantinianism had removed from the consciousness of the Christians that “they lived between the times, in the tension between the already and the not yet,”(122) for the reign of God was realized in the reign of the worldly emperor. This is why Stone calls Constantinianism fundamentally “an eschatological heresy”(124), and this is lethal for the practice of evangelism, for it annihilates the spirit of witnessing to God by making the particularity of such witnessing null.
Whereas the problem with Constantinianism consists in the world’s accepting the church fully as its chaplain, the problem with modernity is something of the opposite, for the modern person, in her desire to become the autonomous ‘self,’ independent of all traditional authorities, no longer wants the church at all. Besides, Stone notes that in this context the social world of modernity has been “bifurcated,” between “a realm of the ‘organizational,’ in which ends are merely given and human life is handed over to the control and rationality of bureaucrats and a realm of the ‘personal,’ the realm of individual values without rational or other grounding,”(134) which subsequently produced the division between ‘fact’ and ‘value,’ and between ‘public’ and ‘private.’ With the story of modernity, the church strictly belongs to the realm of the private and the personal, thus enslaving the church in the opposite fashion to that of Constantinianism. If this is where we are, what is the church? Therefore, in part four Stone goes on to probe into the nature of that evangelizing community called the church.
The church of God is a socially embodied argument for the Christian witness(172). This captures well the very thrust of Stone’s claims in the following sections of the book. In particular, such a socially embodied argument is different from the world. But what kind of difference is it, especially in terms of evangelism? Stone sets out to make it explicit that the church’s evangelistic difference is that of politics and economics, of which the representative practice is respectively baptism and Eucharist. First, baptism is a political practice in the sense that it “marks the induction of persons into a new and distinct people”(182) called the church. For that matter, evangelism is also inherently a political practice because it is about inviting people into that community. Once invited, baptism ushers the invited into the receiving of a new identity in Christ. In all these, baptism in relation to evangelism marks out the church’s differences from the world.
However, Stone also mentions that the church’s difference is not only from the world, but for the world, which means that such difference presupposes unity. Therefore, Stone now moves on to the unity between the two, which is ontological. In brief, the church and the world form unity in the sense that “the people of God is called to be today what the world is called to be ultimately”(194). Moreover, one has to remember that the Lordship of Jesus Christ is another unifying factor between the two; it is just that the church obeys that Lordship, where as the world doesn’t. In this light, we need to maintain both the unity and the difference between the church and the world in order to practice evangelism well; putting an emphasis on either unity or difference would result in a skewed understanding of evangelism.
In the case of Eucharist as the church’s economic practice, Stone asserts that at its bottom Eucharist is “a shared meal”(200). Having said this, Stone criticizes the understandings of Eucharist as merely a sign, saying that it is bread and a cup, i.e., the means of our daily sustenance. The reason Eucharist is an economic practice is that “the breaking of bread around a common table creates a solidarity and a unity that may be organically extended to every area of life and that further reinforces the leveling of rank and status established in baptism”(200). At the same time, since in God’s household abundance is what defines our situation, “we are able to lend “expecting nothing in return””(Luke 6:35)(203). Here the organic unity between baptism and Eucharist as they relate to evangelism is at issue. In fact, throughout the book Stone has been emphasizing how organically related each Christian practice is to another, and at one point he defines evangelism at once a quality of every Christian practice as well as a distinct Christian practice(47). This is because evangelism as bearing witness to God could define the entirety of the Christian life, let alone the unique distinctness of evangelism as a practice. Since the Lord’s table is a place of welcoming and invitation, “Eucharist is central to the practice of evangelism”(215). At the same time, evangelism is significant in terms of Eucharist, for the Christian life is never that of receiving God’s gift only, but offering and sharing the news of God’s reign to the hopeless and the poor(213). Such practice of evangelism, however, is not our own practice, but the practice on God’s own initiative, particularly the Holy Spirit. Hence, the next chapter looks into the role of the Holy Spirit in evangelism.
Even though we do offer the gospel to people through evangelistic practice, Stone contends that “evangelism is fundamentally a mode of reception”(226). This is because the Holy Spirit is the one who offers the news of God’s reign to us first, then leading us to share it with others through our evangelistic practice. Precisely because it is not our own practice, evangelism does not have to produce tangible results all the time. Rather, quoting Reinhard Hütter, Stone argues that the logic of the Holy Spirit is that “the ends are embodied in the ‘means,’ and the success is defined only by the specific nature of particular ends”(225). In other words, the logic of the Spirit is nothing less than bearing a faithful witness to God. Moreover, since evangelism is the practice of the Holy Spirit, it necessarily involves hope as eschatological certainty. Such eschatological hope is not only about the future, but also about the present, for the church is evangelism embodied, where the Spirit pours out hope every day, and in that regard, evangelism is “an invitation to “come and see””(John 1:46)(228).
In a way, chapter nine is continuation of the previous chapters as well as further exploration of the church and evangelism. Stone attempts to closely examine some more contextual issues with regard to evangelism, particularly conversion. At the outset Stone admits that we live in a culture of conversion, meaning that switching of narratives happens more frequently and quickly now than ever before in the history of human civilizations. In such a time as this, what would it mean to engage evangelism? To begin with, one has to keep in mind that “conversion is a matter of formation,”(259) for conversion is about being formed into a new way of life, as baptism and Eucharist as Christian practices have shown well previously. In this regard, when conversion as a formation is not factored well in the process of the Christian life, evangelism would be regarded as more of technique than of practice, since it could focus on the moment of individual decision, neglecting the subsequent process of one person’s becoming Christian. This is true of faith too: faith is not “a simple act of individual will. Faith is instead a disposition formed over times and handed on in community”(262). If evangelism is leading people to faith, then we need to re-imagine both evangelism and faith more holistically, communally, and formationally. It is in this sense that Stone seconds Luther, who says “the church is the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God”(263). Therefore, evangelism and the church are inseparable from each other, the former being the invitation for holistic, communal formation, the latter being the place of such formation.
Given the previous discussions, it sounds so natural that we now move on to some of the virtuous practices evangelism would produce, as well as evangelism itself as a virtuous practice. Here Stone clarifies the following characteristic of Christian virtue: first, it is eschatological rather than teleological; virtue is received as a gift from God; virtues are developed dispositions and habits inclining us toward good ends(280). For Stone, the virtuous exemplar for evangelistic practice is a martyr, rather than a mega church pastor or a revivalist, for the martyr shows “a pattern of life and death that exhibits a radical and paradigmatic loyalty to Jesus”(282). The virtues of the Christian life Stone pays particular attention to are as follows: presence, patience, courage, humility, at the end of which Stone deals with common virtue. Stone brings up Aristotelian virtue of phronesis as explanatory of the wisdom required for the practice of evangelism. Phronesis is a distinct virtue, yet it is different from other virtues “insofar as it is a reflection on the right measure in which they are to be exercised”(310). However, the problem with phronesis is that depending on which community it is cultivated, it could be used for biased reasoning, which Charles Taylor also suggested. In terms of the Christian life, the form of life in which phronesis is cultivated is the church. For the Christian, it is an ecclesial phronesis. Summarily, it is this particular ecclesial vision that Stone promotes in this book, and he did the work well.
Contributions to Practical Theology and Areas of Further Development
In light of the foregoing, what would be the book’s contributions to practical theology, and to the reimagining of religious practices in particular? First of all, while reading Stone’s book, I could not help being reminded of David Tracy’s article “A Correlational Model of Practical Theology-Revisited: In Memory of Don Browning,” in which he argues that we need a practical theology in which the aesthetic-mystical is combined with the ethical-political, and Stone’s theology of evangelism in his Evangelism after Christendom perhaps exemplifies well how such a practical theology would be possible. Throughout the book, Stone adamantly insists upon the political-ethical nature of the church as the herald of God’s reign bringing a new social order; however, he never forgets to highlight the aesthetic dimension of Christian witness, often expressed in his term “the beauty of holiness”(230).
In addition, although Stone did not fully develop his theological aesthetics of Christian witness here, I highly appreciate Stone’s ingenious bridging between a Mennonite theology and theological aesthetics; this would be a great first step to forge a long-term conversation between the two not-so-friendly fields. I am convinced that something fruitful will yield as a result of such conversation. At the same time, I also feel so grateful for his attempt to re-imagine evangelism aesthetically, and for that matter, Christian witness too. (Honestly speaking, who could have imagined it possible to look at evangelism from the perspective of beauty?)
Along the same line, I also would like to see more of Stone’s understanding of the beautifying work of the Holy Spirit on the Christian community as witness to God’s work in Jesus Christ. While Stone did touch on the role of the Holy Spirit in evangelism, his treatment of aesthetics in this regard remained largely in the area of apologetics, and I would like to learn more about how the Holy Spirit beautifies the Christian community as it bears witness to God’s love in Jesus Christ. Lastly, Stone’s conversation on evangelism is replete with constructive insights into understanding the human person and community, especially with regard to the doctrine of imago Dei. Having been interested in the history of the doctrine, I have been deeply dissatisfied with the static, individualistic, and reason-centered approach of many traditional interpretations. However, as Stone incessantly emphasizes here the aesthetic dimension of the Christian life, imago Dei, when understood more dynamically, communally, and holistically, could provide a great complementary material to the current discussions on evangelism as a Christian practice. After all, isn’t the word ‘image’ inherently aesthetic?
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