An Ecclesial Missiology of the Cross
from the world. By affirming how foreign the church is to the world, it affirms its fellowship with the world. “The Church is divided from the world solely by the fact that she affirms in faith the reality of God’s acceptance of man, a reality which is the property of the whole world.”96 Here Bonhoeffer’s dialectic argues from a cross of “opposites.” Only a church of the cross can exist simultaneously foreign to and in fellowship with the world. Just as the dying body of Jesus of Nazareth as God for the world accomplishes a scandalous salvific act through crucifixion as a condemned person, that same act preserves a required linkage with all Creation. The alien work of God prepares the proper work of God. A hidden God is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. The church is in the world, but not of the world. Such statements derive from an epistemology of the cross. The body of Jesus Christ, especially as it appears to us on the cross, shows to to the eyes of faith the world in its sin, and how it is loved by God, no less than it shows the church, as the congregation of those who acknowledge their sin and submit to the love of God.
Thus, Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of theologia crucis and the death of God in the crucially vicarious act modeled by the Stellverterter, the Christ, defines the church and its mission to existentially complete the sufferings of the Crucified One as ambassadors of reconciliation. Such reconciliation is possible, the Apostle tells us, only in the scandalous idea that a holy God chose to become the maximus peccator that sinners have their human dignity restored. The cross fulfills both the creation and redemption mandates of missio Dei on earth. A missional mandate of the church is to proclaim the reality
96 Ibid., 203. 303