Enclaves, or Where is the Church?

Extract

It was not the purpose of Theology and Social Theory (whose argument has been so accurately precised by Fergus Kerr) to imagine the Church as Utopia. Nor to discover in its ramified and fissiparous history some single ideal exemplar. For this would have been to envisage the Church in spatial terms—as another place, which we might arrive at, or as this identifiable site, which we can still inhabit. How could either characterize the Church which exists, finitely, not in time, but as time, taken in the mode of gift and promise? Not as a peace we must slowly construct, piecemeal, imbibing our hard-learned lessons, but as a peace already given, superabundantly, in the breaking of bread by the risen Lord, which assembles the harmony of peoples then and at every subsequent eucharist. But neither as a peace already realized, which might excuse our labour. For the body and blood of Christ only exist in the mode of gift, and they can be gift (like any gift) only as traces of the giver and promise of future provision from the same source. This is not an ideal presence real or imagined, but something more like an ‘ideal transmission’ through time, and despite its ravages. Fortunately the Church is first and foremost neither a programme, nor a ‘real’ society, but instead an enacted, serious fiction. Only in its eucharistic centring is it enabled to sustain a ritual distance from itself, to preserve itself, as the body of Christ under judgement by the body of Christ, which after all, it can only receive. In a sense, this ritual distance of the Church from itself defines the Church, or rather deflects it from any definition of what it is. In its truth it is not, but has been and will be. (Here I am much indebted to Kieran Flanagan for pointing out that my book omitted the ritual dimension).