Alan E. Lewis

Ecclesia ex Auditu A Reformed View of the Church as the Community of the Word of God

Does a church in the Reformed tradition ever express its own essence and self-understanding more clearly than when, in the liturgy, with the subtlest blend of invitation and command, the minister bids the congregation: ‘Hear the Word of God!’? Here, in dramatic, personal (but corporate) encounter between the people and Gods Word — delivered first as Scripture and then expounded as proclamation — the church becomes anew what it already and always is: a community of the Word. A people are summoned into being by living, creative, divine Speech, and from their own side come into being — or better, move toward their true being — through the only appropriate response to divine Speech, namely that faith which comes by hearing (Rom. 10: 17). Our concern here is not to offer a systematic account of this Reformed understanding of the church in all its major aspects, but simply to raise a few of the hermeneutical questions involved: what does it mean for a church tradition to understand itself in these predominantly verbal and auditory categories, indeed to think of the whole encounter between God and man as occurring primarily in the mode of speech and hearing?