Rain and the Rhinoceros

In his excellent work Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology, Nicholas J. Healy mounts a scathing critique against what he calls “blueprint ecclesiologies.” Blueprint ecclesiologies are, according to Healy, characterized by the effort to articulate an ideal version of the church–a blueprint–by which the concrete church is meant to conform or realize itself. Healy detects five key methodological elements that are often at work in much of modern ecclesiology. First, there is the attempt to encapsulate in a word or phrase the essential nature or function of the church. One immediately thinks of Avery Dulles’ important work Models of the Church, which distinguishes between five concepts or images of the church that govern different approaches to ecclesiology. Dulles distinguishes between the church as “sacrament,” as “herald,” as “institution,” as “mystical communion,” and as “servant.” In a later expanded edition of his book Dulles includes a chapter on the church as a “community of disciples.” Dulles provides examples of key representative figures of each approach. So, for instance, Karl Rahner is usually associated with the “sacrament” model, while Karl Barth is seen as the prototype for the view of the church as “herald.”

In many ways Dulles is simply organizing what others have already done. Indeed, much of modern ecclesiology begins with a single primary concept or image of the church and then develops a systematic theological account for the legitimacy or the superiority of a given model. For instance, Tillard and Zizioulas, in differing ways, employ the concept of communion as an organizing and governing principle to describe the nature and function of the church. The Second Vatican Council, of course, employed a variety of concepts and images to describe the church. For instance, the council members spoke of the church as the “body of Christ” or as “the people of God.”

Healy notes that theologians tend to use a specific model in two ways: “in an explanatory way, to synthesize what is already known about the church; and in an exploratory way or heuristic way, to lead to new insights about its nature and activity” (27). It is also common to describe the variety of differing views about the church as a precursor (or a foil!) to the developing of one’s own superior view, or what Healy calls a “supermodel.” Dulles’ book can be seen as an example of this or H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture might also come to mind.

In many instances, theologians will distinguish between the supposed twofold ontological structure of the church. The primary and most fundamental aspect of the church is “spiritual” or “invisible.” In this view, the church has some true nature or essence. The other ontological aspect of the church is its “visible” or empirical reality, that is, its everyday practices, institutions, etc. The two ontological poles of the church are often described as a relation between the “invisible” and the “visible,” or the “ideal” and the “real.” Thus, the central task of ecclesiology becomes a matter of articulating the essential nature of the church or what the church ideally is.

One of the major problems with this approach, according to Healy, is that it tends to ignore the concrete reality of the church’s present practice and institutions in favor of an idealized, perfected church. In particular, the reality of the sinfulness of the church is often kept at bay in the theological description of the church. The disjunction that arises between the “ideal” church and the “real” church can lead to the view, as Healy puts it, “that ‘underneath’ our visible flaws there lies the ideal heart of gold if only those carping critics had sufficient ‘faith to see it.’”

Is it theologically problematic that the core convictions of many contemporary accounts of the church seem fundamentally reactionary in character? Does this reflect a loss of confidence in the gospel or at least some feelings of insecurity? It seems to me that Radical Orthodoxy is probably the most obvious “movement” in theology that seems almost exclusively oriented toward positing the church as an “alternative” to modernity, liberalism, individualism, capitalism, nihilism, the nation-state, fill in the blank. Now while I think there are certain helpful insights to be gained from John Milbank and RO, I am uncomfortable with the highly reactionary character of their work. I wonder if this tendency extends beyond RO.

In his insightful essay “Ecclesiology and Communion,” Nicholas Healy suggests that much of post-Vatican II “communion ecclesiology” tends to idealize the church and therefore lends itself to ideological distortion. He argues that, when coupled with a realized eschatology, communion ecclesiology conceives the church “primarily in terms of an attained or always-already grace-given perfection–communion–its need for continual reform and repentance can too easily be forgotten.” The question for Healy then is whether the concept of communion can do the critical work necessary in order to avoid a sort of valorization of “community.” Healy sees this approach problematically at work in John Zizioulas, Jean-Marie Tillard, Joseph Ratzinger, and also in the approaches of the so-called “new ecclesiology,” which consists of thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas, George Lindbeck, Reinhard Hütter, and others.

Now certainly this phenomenon is not a particularly modern or postmodern one. The church has always defined itself against internal and external forces. One thinks, for example, of the role of Augustine’s dispute with the Donatists in formulating his own constructive ecclesiology. But Healy thinks that there is an evident shift in recent times. Healy, for example, criticizes Zizioulas and Tillard for identifying church membership with salvation, thereby collapsing ecclesiology and soteriology, and defining the characteristics of ecclesial existence against what is lacking in the world outside the church. To Zizioulas and Tillard, “to become a member of the church,” in Healy’s words, “is to be saved from a world that is corrupt and sinful so as to live as God lives, in communion.”

Healy’s central fear is that the strong emphasis on the church’s practices coupled with the polemics against the world’s practices tends to neglect the place of divine action. Such accounts “foster a confusion of sanctification with salvation and ecclesiology with soteriology.” The point here is not to deny the centrality of the church, but to highlight that membership in the church does not bring about salvation–it is rather Christ who saves. Healy also notes that the independence of the Holy Spirit is downplayed. The Spirit must always “move us if we are to perform any right action, even when we have the virtues for it.” And, indeed, the Spirit is free to act, even within the modern liberal world. Further, Healy observes the lack of an account of the Word as judgment on the church as well as the world. Healy’s central concern is that an idealized view of the church and its practices tends to neglect the real independence and freedom of the Son and the Spirit.

Healy suggests that what binds the communion ecclesiologies and the so-called “new ecclesiology” together is, in part, their reactionary character, namely, their common opposition to modernity. Just as the Roman Catholic church in the face of modern atheism tended to abandon the narrative of the gospel for apologetic philosophical and scientific proofs to ground belief in God, perhaps contemporary ecclesiology makes a parallel move when it shifts attention away from Christ’s saving acts to the church and its saving acts. As Healy puts it, “Perhaps the outrageousness of the gospel claims may seem less outrageous when they are placed within a critical account of the woes of modernity and how we may be saved from them.” In this way, ecclesiology takes on a distinctly apologetic function, “that of ameliorating the starkness of the gospel claims by situating them within a communal solution to contemporary social problems that appeals to well-meaning moderns and postmoderns.”

In his excellent book Christ, History and Apocalyptic Nate Kerr criticizes the “church-as-polis” model in favor of a missionary conception of the church. For those schooled in the world of Stanley Hauerwas the “church-as-polis” model marks a basic conviction. In fact, if Kerr is correct in his criticisms, then many of us will need to radically rethink not only our indebtedness and relationship to Hauerwas, but also our theology of the church more generally. But Kerr’s criticisms do not apply only to Hauerwas and his followers, they also apply to John Howard Yoder.

Kerr’s criticisms of Hauerwas and Yoder revolve around two key points: 1) the political ontologization of the church and 2) the instrumentalization of worship.

What Kerr calls “the political ontologization of the church” is a way of conceiving of the church as an ontologically “stable” political body that exists prior to “encounter” with the world. In this perspective, the church’s worship is instrumentalized insofar as it tends to correlate or even identify specific practices of the church with the work of the Spirit. When the Spirit is identified with the specific practices of Christian worship, then the Spirit is domesticated precisely as the possession of the church. For Kerr, however, “worship only ‘is’ as an apocalyptic pneumatological event” (Kerr, 170). As apocalyptic event the Spirit refuses domestication and possession. If the church is constituted by the Spirit, who exists only as event, then the church, in Kerr’s perspective, never really “is” at all. The consequence of such a view of the Spirit’s relation vis a vis the church is the loss of any identifiable continuity. The “tradition” of the church is never stable, never certain, and can always be called into question by the ever newness of the Spirit’s action. Lest this view be misconstrued as another form of liberal Protestantism (think of the UCC slogan “God is still speaking”), the Spirit’s work, for Kerr, is precisely not in discontinuity with the “apocalyptic historicity” of Jesus of Nazareth.

Kerr’s worry is not only that the identification of the Spirit with the practices of the church stablilizes the church’s interior identity and domesticates the Spirit, but that such a view usually involves an instrumentalization of Spirit by positing “the church” as a counter political identity over-and-against “the world” (i.e. liberalism, capitalism, secularism, modernity, whatever). Such a move, according to Kerr, amounts to an inversion of Constantinianism. As Kerr puts it, “The ‘meaning’ of Christ’s lordship is displaced from the operativity of Jesus’ ‘independence’ and onto the operation of the church as a polis in history, such that the meaning of history is borne along precisely by the ‘social function’ of the Christian community, which is now bound to the world precisely as ‘a microcosm of the wider society’” (Kerr, 170). Kerr is worried about Yoder’s claims that “the ultimate meaning of history is to be found in the work of the church” and that “the meaning of history is carried first of all, on behalf of all others, by the believing community” (See Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 118, 151). Such claims are, however, absolutely central to Yoder’s ecclesiology. Contrary to Kerr, for Yoder, the church is a polis, almost paradoxically, precisely in its dispossession and deterritorialization. The meaning of history is to be located in “the church” not because of an easy identification of Jesus or the Spirit with the church and its practices of worship, but because redemption and reconciliation happens and this is what “the church” names. The church’s existence is always unstable—Jesus indeed remains independent—but the church is no less a political body. Moreover, the church-as-polis in Yoder’s vision resists the political ontologization of the church precisely because of its proleptic and secular character. The claim that the church is what the world is called to be ultimately is not a statement about the ontology of the church but about God’s work in the world to judge and redeem humanity.

In a recently published collection of lectures entitled Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, John Howard Yoder observes the oddity that the major Mennonite identity crisis of the twentieth century is the consequence of accommodation to a professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary.  The professor, of course, is one of the major American Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr. With the rise of Hitler, the liberal pacifist movement, so prominent after World War I, almost completely collapsed not least due to the stinging critiques launched by Niebuhr. If the threat of the Hitler regime pushed the liberal pacifist ethic to its limit, Niebuhr’s theological critique was just enough to push the movement over the edge. The remaining pacifists in America, found primarily now in the historic peace churches, were also forced to respond to the Niebuhrian challenge, but from a different angle. Niebuhr’s criticism of liberal pacifism questioned both the scriptural basis and the effectiveness of their position. According to Niebuhr, the Jesus of the New Testament teaches nonresistance as opposed to the type of strategic active nonviolence advocated by liberal pacifists. The problem with liberal pacifism, in Niebuhr’s view, is that it attempts to ground its absolutist position in an erroneous interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. Strategic active nonviolence is to be commended as a (sometimes) effective method of social change, but it is a form of coercion, a form of power that Jesus expressly rejects. Thus, liberal pacifists have no basis to attack non-pacifists. Pacifists of the Mennonite variety, however, in their simple obedience to Jesus’ teachings on nonresistance are at least biblically consistent, despite their social and political irrelevance. Niebuhr believed that Mennonites fulfill a particularly important vocation of the Christian church. By their social and political “withdrawal” Mennonites helpfully serve to remind the rest of the Christian church of the lofty ideals of Jesus. Yet, no matter how commendable, such an ethic of nonresistance can never serve as the basis of a Christian ethic that seeks to be responsible in the messy world of politics.

Niebuhr’s back-handed compliment to Mennonites in his critique against liberal pacifism helped to create a division in Mennonite theology along the lines of a dichotomy between withdrawal and responsibility. In response to the criticisms of Niebuhr many Mennonites felt compelled to distinguish themselves from the liberal pacifist position by accepting the role of pacifism as an apolitical socially irrelevant vocation that Niebuhr had created and commended. Yoder observes a strikingly similarity in the responses of the conservative Mennonite biblical scholar John R. Mumaw and the liberal Mennonite Donovan Smucker to the challenge of Niebuhr. In order to section themselves off from Niebuhr’s critique of liberal pacifism, both thinkers chose to accept the role given to them by Niebuhr: to become more fully that nonresistant sectarian withdrawing enclave of Niebuhr’s imagination, in the name of renouncing the type of pacifism that is concerned with effectiveness and responsibility. Yoder observes that more than anything Niebuhr’s impact served to reinforce “a Mennonite tendency to dualistic analysis…that says we cannot do anything in the wider world—because we want to be different from those pacifists who are naïve about the possibilities of the good” (297).  Such a position, however, did not stem from the history of  Mennonite faith, but was rather learned from Mennonite “accommodation to Reinhold Niebuhr.” In short, such a position was invented by “accepting the backhanded compliment that Niebuhr gave us when he said we are consistent but irrelevant” (298).

One of the central emphases in Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology is that the church is not optional for Christians. In fact, for Bonhoeffer, one cannot even be a Christian outside the concrete church community. To be Christian is to be in the church and to be in the church is to be Christian. Bonhoeffer insists on this point because he believes the Christian life is an inherently social affair. To be ‘in Christ’ means to be in the church community. In large part, Bonhoeffer is reacting against what he identified as the rising individualistic conception of Christianity in Protestantism. Certainly, this type of individualism is evident in many parts of today’s church, not least in evangelical circles. Perhaps it is no different in the mainline Protestant and Catholic world either. An individualistic conception of faith is driven by and reinforced by our current sociopolitical and economic context. The idea that faith is a private affair is, in fact, a central tenet of liberal democratic societies. Indeed, I suppose I take it for granted that in many important ways the sociopolitical shapes the way people think about matters of faith.

Among many Christians and non-Christians today one often hears a lot of vocal disdain for ‘the church.’ In fact, it seems to me that one hears this more from Christians than non-Christians. I have personally encountered this disdain for the church among former or lapsed evangelicals, many of whom still claim to be Christian. For many, there seems to be a sense of embarrassment attached with ‘the church’ but not so much with being Christian per se. In this perspective, Christianity is seen as a legitimate way to think and live in the world, but the church is believed to be a disastrous mistake. Now, on the one hand, who can blame this way of thinking. Let’s be honest, the so-called ‘church’ is, by and large, unfaithful to the man Jesus Christ. In America, the church sings songs about Jesus, goes on mission trips to save the lost, while at the same time being utterly enamored or complacent about American civil religion and global capitalism. When we say ‘the church’ we tend to think of right-wing political agendas and general intolerance to others. And so, in this framework it is not so bad to be a Christian (or ‘Christ-follower’) but ‘the church’–that old thing–now that’s got to go.

From a theological perspective, however, I am with Bonhoeffer on this one: the church is not optional. God’s self-revealing act in Jesus Christ is a social event and there is no way to get around it. There is, however, no logically compelling argument to be made on behalf of the church’s continuing existence in history. Put simply, the church is not a ‘logical’ reality–it is not a human innovation. This is an extremely important point one that is often missed. The legitimacy of the church does not rest on the faithfulness of its participants, but on the faithfulness of Christ. The church is a revealed reality and therefore it is something which must be believed. Thus, a denial of the church amounts to a denial of the efficacy of Christ’s cross and resurrection.

In 1932 Karl Barth offered a scathing critique of theological modernism. Although much of his attacks were directed at liberal Protestantism, Barth equally condemned the Roman Catholic church for its doctrine of the analogia entis (analogy of being). For Barth this doctrine was the invention of the anti-Christ. Barth thought that Catholic theology followed a formal analogy wherein an analysis of nature or being was taken up first only to later be read into faith. In Barth’s view, this led to a wrongful legitimation of the secular order, which bracketed political and economic life out of the realm of Christ. In Barth’s perspective, the analogia entis in Catholic thought was symptomatic of a deeply rooted Christological problem found especially in Thomas Aquinas and affecting all of Catholicism. According to Barth, beginning from nature rather than grace implicitly suggests a sort of dualism in Christ’s two natures, which pits Christ’s humanity against his divinity and unacceptably bifurcates the person of Christ so that one nature can exist self-sufficiently without the other. Although Barth correctly locates this position in much of post-Tridentine Catholic thought, he wrongly accuses Thomas Aquinas of

holding such a bastardized notion of the analogia entis. As Henri de Lubac rightly argued, Aquinas never conceived of “pure nature” independent of God’s supernatural grace and therefore did not pit nature against Christology.

Despite Barth’s critiques of the analogia entis and de Lubac’s reinterpretation of Thomas Aquinas’ construal of the relationship between nature and grace, much of contemporary Catholic theology continues to treat nature as an ontological and epistemological category independent of grace. This understanding of nature can be found in Catholic moral theologians as diverse as Jean Porter, Gerard Hughes, and Timothy O’Connell. Each of these theologians maintain an understanding of the relationship between nature and grace that requires one to choose between either nature or Christology. The common assumption is that if one begins with Christology, then one’s work is not sufficiently universal. The effect of this, according to these Catholic moralists, is that such an approach lacks the ability to transcend confessional particularities, rendering moral theologians useless in finding common moral ground with other traditions.

It seems evident that the persistence of such an approach to moral theology is not just the result of a mere misinterpretation of Aquinas, for since Henri de Lubac and the Second Vatican Council this view has been under attack. Rather, such an approach arises out of a deep concern for common moral ground in the context of a radically diverse and pluralistic world. It is, indeed, a world that Aquinas could not have imagined. It is typically assumed that if we cannot appeal to some form of natural knowledge of the good, then we cannot speak to others outside of our tradition, at least not on any rational ground. The argument for a self-contained natural knowledge, however, presumes the ability to transcend all particularity. The attempt to transcend particularity, in part, is a fear rooted in the belief that too much particularity causes conflict and violence. Thus, there is the underlying assumption that such approaches are more “inclusive” and “world-affirming” and avoid “sectarianism” or “exclusivism.” Of course, the “common” approach of which I speak is not monolithic, nor is it peculiar to Catholicism. Obviously, Karl Rahner’s “anonymous” Christianity is different from the pluralism of a John Hick or Paul Knitter. Still, all seem to share a common mode of discourse, which presumes that one must choose between either being more or less “exclusive” or more or less “inclusive.”

Of course, the assertion that Christology is the proper starting point of theological and moral reflection has profound ecclesiological implications and it does, indeed, effect how we speak to people of other traditions. Despite the assumptions of some neo-Thomism, however, basing morality on Christological convictions does not condemn Christian convictions to sectarianism. Indeed, such a position is surely suspicious of claims to transcend particularity and confessional traditions, especially when such claims are proposed to stand alone or seen as more fundamental than faith convictions. For, as John Howard Yoder noted, claims to natural moral knowledge tend to not consider that “dominant moral views of any known world are oppressive, provincial, or (to say it theologically) ‘fallen’” (The Priestly Kingdom 40). In his view, “There is no “public” that is not just another particular province” (The Priestly Kingdom 40). In other words, claims to universality are always rooted, in some degree or another, in a particular tradition. Such a view does not entail a position of moral relativism, but instead it attempts to take seriously the universally salvific character of God’s unique self-revelation in Christ.

D.W. Congdon over at The Fire and the Rose has recently posted a very thoughtful and insightful critique of the “emergent church” movement.

He offers the following seven helpful suggestions for redeeming the emergent church movement:

1. Jettison the language of postmodernity. There is nothing helpful to be found there, and it only serves to create barriers where no barriers need or should exist.

2. Jettison the language of “incarnational ministry” or the church being the “hands and feet of Jesus.” All such language represents a superficial and erroneous christology, which in turn leads to an erroneous ecclesiology.

3. Reject all notions of relevancy, whether in christology or in ecclesiology or in any other area of Christian thought.

4. Similarly, stand under the judgment of God by standing under the judgment of Holy Scripture. Allow the witness of Scripture and life of Christ determine the proper shape of ecclesial existence. Remember that God is “wholly other” and calls us to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] minds, so that [we] may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2).

5. Read and engage with the work of missional theologians such as David Bosch, Lamin Sanneh, Darrell Guder, Andrew Walls, Christopher J. H. Wright, and others. There are important resources here not only for rethinking central doctrines of the faith, but for rethinking how Christ and the church relate to culture.

6. In addition to missional theology, read Barthians and Anabaptists on the church, the former to articulate the relation between Christ and the church and the latter to articulate the relationship between the church and culture.

7. Pray for forgiveness for the way that the church in all times and places has compromised its witness to Jesus, desired to control and manipulate God, and sought to appease one’s cultural context rather than the Holy Spirit.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of “natural law” in modern Catholic social thought. Although something like the notion of “natural law” can arguably be found even in the Old Testament, the Christian manifestation of the theory is usually associated with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Despite the popularity of natural law language in modern Catholic thought, Thomas’ use of natural law actually played a relatively small role in his theological and ethical reflections. I’m not going to get into Thomas’ use of natural law right now, but I think it is interesting to look at how natural law theory functions to justify the translation of theological language into more “neutral” secular language. In order for the church to speak to secular power an appeal to “the natural” is made, that is, what “all people of good will” can comprehend. But does this translation result in a tempering or minimizing of the profundity inherent in Christian theological thought. In other words, is it really possible to translate theological language? Of course, theological thought cannot be separated from the community we call church and so the attempt is usually made to weed out the “relevant” politics imbedded in theology so our voice can be effectively heard. So the question arises can Christian social thought be separated from the embodied life and speech of the church without losing its distinctiveness? Does the church have a social ethic that it can bring to the pluralistic table or is the church a social ethic in and of itself?

The renewal of the vision of episcopal-primatial collegiality in the Second Vatican Council has not been effectively operative in the Roman Catholic Church. Despite the teaching of Vatican II on the subject, the Church still tends to operate under more of a centralist model than a one based on bishop-primatial collegiality. The primary reason why the Church tends toward centralism is not the result of a obsession for monarchical rule; nor does it have to do with a sort of will to power embedded or inherent in the papal office as such. Rather, the heart of the problem lies most fundamentally in the prevalent notion that the universal church precedes the local church. In 1992 the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith released a letter in which Cardinal Ratzinger states that the universal church is “a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual church.” The notion that the local church ontologically derives from the universal church has led to a privileging of the “one” over the “many.”

Eastern Orthodox theologian John D. Zizioulas sheds an important light on the subject. He argues that “the ‘many’ must have a constitutive and not derivative role in the Church’s being.”In other words, the ‘one’ cannot exist without the ‘many.’ Indeed, the opposite must also be true, and this is Zizioulas’ significant contribution to the discussion: the one Eucharist transcends ontological priority so that there is “simultaneity of both local and universal.” If there is to be true collegiality between the episcopate and the papal office, or true communion, the one cannot be set against the many, nor the many be against the one.

Vatican II’s affirmation of the “priesthood of the laity” led to a new understanding of the relationship between the laity and the ordained members of the Church. Vatican I emphasized papal primacy and infallibility and painted an image of the Church’s hierarchy as a pyramid. The vision of the Church’s hierarchy as a pyramid, with the pope at the top, the bishops right beneath, then the priest, left the masses, the laity, at the very bottom. As John Ford puts it, the problem with this image of the hierarchy is that it “implied a correlative understanding of the ministries of the person(s) at each level” (299). In this model, the laity play a passive role: they are recipients of the sacraments and teaching, but do not play any significant role in shaping the life and vision of the Church. In contrast, Vatican II envisioned the hierarchy, not as a pyramid, but as a communion. While affirming the structural hierarchy, the Church empowered the laity to share “in the one priesthood of Christ” (LG 10), which even includes playing a role in the formulation of doctrine (LG 12). Furthermore, the Council called the laity to “share in the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ” (AA 2) in the Church through participation in activities such as teaching the catechism, pastoral care, and administering the resources of the Church (AA 10).

The emphasis on the “priesthood of the laity” has led to new understandings of the various ministries of the Church and how they relate to one another. In this model, the ordained priest still enjoys particular duties, serving as “pastoral minsters of Word and sacraments in a local eucharistic community” (M 30), but his duty includes empowering the lay people to fulfill their own priestly, prophetic, and kingly functions in the Church and in the world. In effect, this vision of the Church collapses (and perhaps even inverts) the pyramid scheme: the pope, the bishops, the priests, and deacons, though fulfilling their respective duties, also serve the laity and empower them to fulfill their vocation to be “leaven in the world” and witnesses to the gospel.