The Pilgrim Church

A "pilgrim" is one of the richest biblical pictures of the people of God. Lost in a monastic interpretation during the Middle Ages, it was rediscovered at the time of the Reformation by Anabaptists who found in it their heroic prototype, the wandering, persecuted Christian, loyal to Christ, aloof from the world, and ready at a moment's notice to sacrifice even life itself in obedience to the kingdom. Later, the pilgrim became the single original motif in the theology of seventeenth-century Lutheran theologian Johann Valentin Andreae, appearing as Christianus Cosmoxenus in De Christiani Cosmoxeni Genitura and as Christian Rosencreutz in Andreae's hauntingly beautiful allegory, Die Chymische Hochzeit. Pilgrim, of course, was also the leading character in Pilgrim's Progress, the work of a simple tinker in whom the biblical metaphor dramatically came to light.

Now, after three centuries in which the pilgrim was lost again amidst Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and wars of "Christian" nations, the church is beginning afresh to see the relevance of the biblical imagery. Lumen gentium, the "dogmatic constitution on the Church" prepared at the second Vatican Council, describes "the eschatological nature of the pilgrim church" in a chapter richly endowed with quotations from the New Testament. Modern sons of the Anabaptists have gone even farther in drawing out the contemporary implications of the pilgrim metaphor. "The people of God are described as pilgrims,' says Art Gish, "not as corporation presidents, bureaucrats, or the bourgeois.... A pilgrim people is the very antithesis to an establishment." Dale Brown, Moderator of the Church of the Brethren, adds that "the posture of the pilgrim is not so much of one who is running away from the world as of one who has a transcendent vision of what the world might become."

This resurgence of interest in the pilgrim concept of the church is not coincidental. Those who understand properly the dimensions of the biblical metaphor and the historical circumstances in which the church now finds herself immediately see the importance of conceiving the true church to be a band of pilgrims, alone in the world, striving to be faithful against immense odds, and hoping for the consummation of the kingdom of God.

Foreigners on the Earth
The term "pilgrim" embraces four biblical words for the church. In the English Bible they are rendered as "exile", "alien" (or "sojourner"), "foreigner", and "stranger". Their common element is clear enough: Christians are displaced persons. They are not where they rightfully belong. When they sing "This World is Not My Home," despite the song's tragic omission of responsibility, they sing a certain truth. Paul says it directly in Philippians 3:20: "our homeland is in heaven." Christians are, in fact, citizens of the kingdom of heaven. As the patriarchs desired "a better country, a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:16), so in salvation Christians "have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem" (Hebrews 12:22) which is yet to be. They, too, "seek the city which is to come" (Hebrews 13:14); they "wait for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13); they groan inwardly as they "wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8:23). "They are not of the world," said their Lord, "even as I am not of the world" (John 17:16).

As parepidemos the church is exiled from her homeland. She is a temporary resident, a "man without a country" in the cosmos. The word is a rare one, both in the New Testament and in the classical world. In 1 Peter 1:1 it refers in part to the political condition of Jewish converts among Peter's addressees as they resided in the provinces of Asia. From the word's use again in 2:11, however, we are justified in reading more into its first occurrence, for Peter bases his ethical, appeal not on the geographical or ethnological but on the theological import of the term: "Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul." E.G. Selwyn explains that "the historical circumstances of St. Peter's readers were an outward expression of the detachment from the world which belonged to their calling as God's holy community; and their combination provides a strong ground for the ethical injunction which follows. They do not belong to the Gentile world around them, and they must not mix with it" (The First Epistle of St. Peter). Like the faithful of Hebrews chapter 11, Peter's readers had "an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading" and a "salvation ready to be revealed in the last time" (1:4, 5). The exiled churches of Asia were being urged to acknowledge that they, like those faithful ancients, were "strangers and exiles on the earth" (11:13).

As paroikos the church is a resident alien, living under common protection but without civil rights. Israel was so regarded in the Old Testament, both as a nation in Egypt and as a nation before God. This fact was always to remind her to show justice to aliens in her midst. In the New Testament the alien nature of Israel is found to be true also of the church. Her members, on the one hand, once "strangers and sojourners" with respect to the covenants and promises of God, had become "fellow-citizens with the saints and members of the household of God" through the reconciliation accomplished in Christ's death (Ephesians 2:19). On the other hand, they remain aliens with respect to the world. We have already seen how Peter bases his ethical appeal on the fact that believers are "aliens and strangers." In the same context he also urges that reverence characterize believers' conduct "throughout the time of your paroikia" (1:17). He is not saying that only so long as his readers find themselves as aliens in Asia they should behave in a God-fearing fashion. The "time" of their exile is "the rest of the time in the flesh" (4:2). Peter conceives the lives of Christians, and so the life of the church, to be alienated in character from the world.

"Exile" and "alien" are the major biblical terms which depict the church as pilgrim. They tell us that she is away from home, a temporary resident, an alien who does not possess the rights to sin which belong to the citizenry of the world. Two terms remain to complete the pilgrim metaphor. Hebrews 11:9 speaks of Abraham as sojourning (parokesen) in the promised land as allotrios—as a "hostile foreigner." We should not gather that he was overtly hostile to the land's inhabitants but rather that his presence was bound to evoke hostility, perhaps as it played upon Canaanite xenophobia. This understanding is underscored by the term xenos or "stranger" as it is applied to the people of God. In the same context the patriarchs are spoken of as "strangers and exiles on the earth" (11:13). Now the biblical teaching is that man is estranged from God. Like Abraham, the Gentiles had been "strangers and sojourners" so far as God was concerned (Ephesians 2:19). But when Jew and Gentile alike became reconciled to God as "one new man" in the church, like Abraham they became estranged from the world. They became "separate from sinners" like their Lord, whom they are to see in every needy stranger (Matthew 25:35-44). Therefore, the hostility which was once their attitude toward God was now to be expected in response to their new attitude toward the world. Peter, who emphasizes the pilgrim concept of the church more than any other New Testament writer, writes to believers not to be "surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you" (4:12).

What little relevance Peter's injunction has for established Christendom should be obvious to anyone who is sensitive to the role of the nominal church in present-day American society. She is not the persecuted but the persecutor. Her name is Legion. She stands behind torment administered to minority and prophetic movements which was once reserved for those with the convictions she now sadly lacks. She supports a contemporary Pax Romana not unlike that faced by Peter's churches in Asia. Though it does not follow that all who are persecuted desire to lead godly lives, the church has utterly failed to see the one valid corollary to 2 Timothy 3:12: that the unpersecuted do not desire to lead godly lives.

The contemporary church is not a pilgrim—neither a displaced exile, nor a rightless alien, nor a hostile foreigner, nor a persecuted stranger in this world. She has thrown away her visa and become its mercenary. She has learned to be a respectable citizen. Having lost her first love, she celebrates her secular cities, her dollar days, and her Honor America sabbaths with all the reticence of a whore. What F.D. Maurice said of nineteenth-century Romanism applies no less to the WASPianity of modern America: "Deprive the Church of its Centre, and you make it into a world. If you give it a false Centre... there necessarily comes out that grotesque hybrid which we witness, a world assuming all the dignity and authority of a Church—a Church practising all the worst fashions of a world; the world assuming to be heavenly—a Church confessing itself to be of the earth, earthly."

The Lord of the church said, "Just as the Father sent me, so I send you." If the church is to bring the kingdom of God to men at the end of the twentieth century she must re-center herself on the One who commissioned her. His "being-in-the-world" must be hers too—his life, his values, his attitudes, his persecution and death. Like Bunyan's Pilgrim, the church must see her destination beyond, the Vanity Fair of American culture to a time when the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Only in so doing will she acknowledge herself to be a pilgrim indeed.

J.R. Moore, who helped to begin Sojourners' predecessor The Post-American, was a contributing editor and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Manchester, England, when this article appeared.