The church-as-polis

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.