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What Could It Mean for the Church to Be Christ's Body?: A Question without a Clear Answer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas
Affiliation:
Divinity SchoolDuke UniversityDurham, NC 27708
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Extract

We were on our honeymoon. Theological questions were not high on our agenda as we toured Ireland. We drove innocently into Sneem, a village on the ring of Kerry, identified as the ‘tidy town of Ireland’ in 1988. It was certainly that. The houses that surrounded the central square were as immaculate as they were colorful.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1995

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References

1 I am indebted to Professor Reinhard Hutter for suggesting the chapter headings for this paper as well as his reflections about what a rethinking of ecclesiology might look like.

2 I cannot resist contrasting this account of Sneem with the description offered in Newsweek, (December 17, 1990, pp. 50–56) of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). ‘A group known as the CGM has sprung up, advocating an unsentimental, businesslike approach for clergy. “The marketplace is now the most widely used system of evaluation by younger churchgoers”, says Lyle Schaller, a leading figure in CGM. In practice that means polling, marketing and advertising. Evangelical Protestants, who have always been entrepreneurial, take those teachings as their own. “The No. 1 rule of church growth is that a church will never get bigger than its parking lot”, says the Rev. Gerald Mann, pastor of the 3,000–member Riverbend Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. On Sundays, therefore, Mann employs a squad of off-duty police officers to direct traffic around the church's 51-acre complex.

‘CGM experts judge a minister's accountability not by his faithfulness to the Gospel but whether, as Schaller puts it, “the people keep coming and giving”. By that measure, the most successful churches are those that most resemble a suburban shopping mall. What works best, according to the CGM, is a one-stop church complex that offers an array of affinity groups where individuals can satisfy their need for intimacy yet identify with a large successful enterprise. The ideal advocated by the CGM is the megachurch, a total environment under a single canopy.

‘Second Baptist of Houston, which claims a membership of 17,000, tries to be all a megachurch can be. it supports 64 softball teams and 48 basketball teams and fields an additional 84 teams in volleyball, soccer and flag football. There are also periodic golf tournaments and a year-round snack bar called Second helping. The hub of this activity is the church's Family Life Center, which is equipped with six bowling lanes, two basketball courts, an indoor jogging track, racquetball courts, weight and aerobics rooms, and separate areas for crafts and game – plus a music wing for its orchestra and 500-member choir. “Second Baptist is a place where I can go with my family to worship, where my wife can play and teach music and where I can play and coach basketball”, says Phil Elders. “It meets all my needs, both spiritual and physical.” Elders, 31, is a former college player who joined the church in 1988 after going through bankruptcy. He recently ran Second Baptist's conditioning programs for congregants, including members of the San Antonio Spurs and the Houston Rockets basketball teams.’ I am grateful to DrKenneson, Philip for calling my attention to this quote in his The Reappearance of the Visible Church: An Analysis of the Production and Reproduction of Christian Identity (Ph.D Dissertation, Duke University, 1991), pp. 408–409.Google Scholar

It is interesting to ask, ‘Why is Sneem appealing and Second Baptist of Houston so appalling?’ Of course most people that go to Second Baptist would not even know what the Feast of the Ascension means, but is that sufficient to suggest their difference? I think it is sufficient, yet both are clearly forms of ‘cultural Christianity’. Sneem is a culture shaped by monasticism and skills necessary to survive a ‘foreign’ government; Second Baptist is the product of a commercial civilization in which the ‘body’ is ‘privatized’. The hard practical question is, How can bodies shaped by a Sneem-like Christendom ever be reclaimed in a culture that produces Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas?

I obviously prefer a Sneem because of the ‘obligatory’ nature of what goes on in Sneem. As we shall see, the crucial issue is whether a Sneem can be sustained as church practice without a state. I am indebted to Mr William Cavanaugh, a good Roman Catholic graduate student, for pressing the issue.

John Howard Yoder in a memo to me challenges my use of Sneem as an example of ‘Constantine’. He suggests Sneem is a celebration of primitive pagan (i.e. village) religiosity, covered with a Catholic veneer by St Patrick. He thinks we need somehow to honor the elemental human dignity which is in such rites but to also distinguish them from the Gospel. More important, according to Yoder, is to see that Sneem is not Constantine, ‘who burns dissenters at the stake, having done so literally in the foundational generation of all mainstream forms of “responsible” Christendom, and still does so with a good conscience in derived forms (from Baghdad to Waco).’ There is no doubt something right about Voder's objection, though lam not convinced he is rightly narrating Sneem, but the strategy of choosing a Sneem – like example is to try to show a way of disciplining the body that is not a choice between bureaucratic stratification and ‘individual choice’. I am looking for traditioned practices or disciplines where the liberal alternative of imposed will versus freedom is not assumed to be the only alternative.

3 This is the characterization of my teacher, Gustafson, James, in his ‘The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University’, Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society, 40 (1985), pp. 83–94Google Scholar. For my response see the ‘Introduction’ of my book, Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and living In Between (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1988), pp. 1–24.Google Scholar

4 Frei, Hans W., Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, edited by Hunsinger, George and Placher, William C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 213–214Google Scholar. There is no question that Hunsinger and Placher are right to suggest that there may be some difference between Frei (and Lindbeck?) and me on these matters. Just to the extent that Frei (and Lindbeck?) have tried to reclaim an intratexlual account of Christian doctrine abstracted from ecclesial context, they continue I fear to reproduce the presumptions of liberal political practice and thus liberal protestant theology. Though Frei (and Lindbeck?) are not, I think, the clear targets of John Milbank's suggestion that some sorts of neo-orthodox theology are but variants of liberal protestantism, insofar as the revealed word of God speaks only of itself without penetrating human construction, how they avoid his critique will make an interesting story. See Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 101Google Scholar; for Milbank's explicit worries about Frei and Lindbeck, see pages 385–386. I suspect that at least part of the story involves the difference being an American theologian makes. American ‘exceptionalism’ is a hard habit to break.

5 This paper was prepared for the Society for the Study of Theology meeting at Winchester College, Oxford, in 1994.

6 This quote came to my attention in an article by Michael Hollerick that deals with correspondence between Erik Peterson and Adolf von Harnack. His article is particularly important as he helps us see that the issue raised by Bonhoeffer were clearly seen by Peterson. He notes that Peterson understood well that the ‘modern church movement’, as represented by Dibelius and Barth as an alternative to Harnack ‘was doomed because no amount of activity could possibly demonstrate the church's public character if it didn't already have it’. ‘Retrieving a Neglected Critique of Church, Theology and Secularization in Weimar Germany’, Pro Ecclesia, 2, (Summer, 1993), p. 325Google Scholar. the Bonhoeffer quote is from page 305.

7 I owe this way of putting the question to Phil Kenneson in his The Reappearance of the Visible Church. In contrast to theologians who do not believe that it is possible for the church not to be the church, Kenneson argues, ‘but if the church is the community of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit can be quenched (at least Paul thought this was a danger, and therefore, presumably, a possibility), then it must remain at least thinkable that a community which considers itself “church” could fail to be a community of the Holy spirit. If this is so, then there is good reason to allow some place for those forms of social analysis that help make more visible obstacles to the Holy Spirit's work.’ (p. 309) For an argument quite similar to Kenneson's see Lash's, Nicholas book, A Matter of Hope (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1982).Google Scholar

8 Of course, one of the deep problems is specifying how different we as moderns have become, given what Anthony Giddens calls the ‘disembedding’ process characteristic of modernity. See his The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 21–29Google Scholar. Giddens suggests that money is ‘a means of bracketing time and so of lifting transactions out of particular milieux of exchange. More accurately put, money is a means of time-space distanciation.’ (p. 24) That such a process cannot be avoided is exemplified by my ‘use’ of Sneem – e.g., have I commodified Sneem through my use of Sneem as an ‘example’?

The implications of the following for theology: rise of modernity, the subsequent reshaping of the university as well as what counts for knowledge, and the churches' accommodation to these developments are nicely suggested by Peterson. If Protestant theology followed a Hamack-like position, Peterson argued, one of three things would happen: ‘to preserve its academic integrity, theology would be subsumed into history, in which case the field would survive only so long as there was an audience of these interested in the subjects whose history was under investigation; or theology would be reduced to nothing more than the personal opinions of its professors; or it would become mere catechetical instruction’. (Hollerich, p. 322) As a result ‘theology’ has begun to look the ‘same’ as theologians seek to become good academic cosmopolitans.

9 Lindbeck, George treats these matters in his account of Vatican II, The Future of Roman Catholic Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970).Google Scholar

10 Minear, Paul, Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960).Google Scholar

11 Minear observes: ‘“the body of Christ” is not a single expression with an unchanging meaning. Paul's thought remains extremely flexible and elastic. Here the term “body” has one meaning; there it has quite another. Here the term “members” signifies one thing, there another. In some passages the church is explicitly identified with Christ's body, but in other passages this identification becomes very tenuous indeed, this variety of usage should warn us against seeking to produce a single inclusive definition of the image, and against importing into each occurrence of the analogy the range of meanings which it bears in other passages.’ (pp. 173–174)

12 The Documents of Vatican II, edited by Abbott, Walter, S.J., and translated by Gallagher, Joseph (New York: Guild Press, 1966), paragraphs, 7 and 8.Google Scholar

13 See, for example, Scarry's, Elaine, The Body in Pain: the Makingand Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) for an extraordinary account of the relation of medicine and torture.Google Scholar

14 Matzko, David has developed this point in his Hazarding Theology: Theological Descriptions and Particular Lives (Ph.d dissertation, Duke University, 1992)Google Scholar. As Matzko puts the matter, ‘for Christian theology, sainthood and the naming of particular saints are intelligible only when set within a network of relationships, a common memory, and a history of interpretive practice, all of which make God present to the world. I propose that saints are the inhabitants of this common memory and network of relationships, and I make the stronger assertion that “naming saints” is the means by which this common life is created. I assert not only that saints are a means of naming a continuing history of God's presence to the world but also that they are this continuing presence.’ (p. 4)

I confess I first began to reflect on these matters when considering the place of the profoundly mentally handicapped in the church. What they give us is their presence as through the body of Christ they become constitutive of our bodies and we of theirs. The implications for how we understand the place of those who suffer from Alzheimer's disease is obvious. They may no longer ‘know’ who they are, but the church knows who they are.

15 At this point I need to clarify the suggestion made above that Sneem represents a form of Constantinianism. Obvious ‘Constantinianism’ is as obviously as various as ‘Church’, though I assume only Christian presumptions can produce Constantinianism. For Constantinianism denotes the ‘identification of the church's mission and the meaning of history with the function of the state in organizing sinful society. The preference is so deeply anchored and so unquestioned that it seems scandalously irresponsible of the “sectarians” to dare to question it. This is why the American churches as a whole are embarrassed to be asked to talk of eschatology. Yet it is clear in the New Testament that the meaning of history is not what the state will achieve in the way of progressively more tolerable ordering of society, but what the church achieves through evangelism and through the leavening process.’ Yoder, John Howard, The Original Revolution (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1971), p. 83Google Scholar. ‘Constantinianism’ is, therefore, no more a ‘given’ than ‘church’. What at one time may have been practices associated with a form Constantinianism may later prove to be sources for resistance to those that would rule in the name of God. I suspect when all is said and done charges and counter charges of whether one is or is not ‘Constantinian’, given the condition of the church in modernity, are largely beside the point. Our situation as Christians is at once too desperate and too hopeful for such games.

This is a partial, but not sufficient answer to Yoder's challenge mentioned above. Sneem is, of course, part of the lingering conslantinianism of the Irish nation-state. Yet insofar as the practice of first communion at Sneem only makes sense as narrated from Rome the ‘Constantinianism’ of Sneem is qualified.

16 For a more extended account concerning these matters see my book, Dispatches From the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Beiner, Ronald in his What's the Matter with Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar argues that communitarianism is but the other side of liberalism. As he puts it, ‘at the moment, there are millions of North Americans passionately committed to a shared vision of a Christian evangelical community. Is their communitarian commitment in itself an answer to the ills of liberal individualism, or is it rather an expression of those ills? Surely, communitarianism of this sort is the consequence, not the cure, of the moral emptiness of liberal culture. If this is what the situated self looks like, then, as liberal countercritics argue, by all means give us back the “disencumbered self”! This is the standard liberal rebuttal of community, and to be sure there is much truth in the liberal's case that there is nothing intrinsically good in the experience of community as such. But the liberal rebuttal fails to recognize how deeply implicated the liberal and the communitarian are in each other's dilemmas.’ (p. 29)

A quite different account of community is offered by Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist, who observes that we cannot talk simply of community but of healthy communities. But to speak of a ‘healthy community, we cannot be speaking of a community that is merely human. We are talking about a neighborhood of humans in a place, plus the place itself: its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it. If the place is well preserved, if its entire membership, natural and human, is present in it, and if the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, then the community is healthy.’ Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p. 14Google Scholar. Later Berry argues that the concepts of ‘public’ and ‘community’ are radically, though not necessarily conflictual, different notions. He suggests, however, that the ‘public’ we confront in the modern state, that thrives by trying to create a economic and technological monoculture, cannot but be the enemy of community.

17 MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘A Partial response to My Critics’, in After MacIntyre: Essays on the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by Horton, John and Mendus, Susan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 302.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., p. 303.

19 Wendell Berry observes, ‘Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and healthy, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that “economic forces” automatically work for good and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that “progress” is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times. It has admired Caesar and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life. A part of the normal practice of his power is his willingness to destroy the world. He prays, he says, and churches everywhere compliantly pray with him. But he is praying to a God whose works he is prepared at any moment to destroy. What could be more wicked than that, or more mad?' Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, pp. 114–115.

20 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, I /1. Translated by Thomson, G. T.. (Edinburgh: T. and T.Clark, 1936), p. 36.Google Scholar

21 Reinhard Hutter, ‘the Church as “Public” sui generis: Dogma, Practices, and the Holy Spirit’, Pro Ecclesia (Forthcoming), pp. 22–23 (manuscript). This article is written in response to Hollerich's article about Peterson. Hutter argues that Barth's account of dogma provides an alternative to Rome and Harnack. As he puts it, ‘The key issue is how we understand this eschatological “novus ordo saeculorum”, this assembling of an ekklesia of the eschatological polis that took place at Pentecost. Does not this civitas explode the understanding of “politics” of any civitas terrena by constituting another distinct “public”, a public sui generis? And if the dogma is the prolongation of the body of Christ in any significant pneumatological and eschatological sense does that not have precise consequences on how we understand dogma and church law, and even ministry –juredivino – but that means precisely christologically as forms of the Gospel in the “upside down kingdom” with the consequence that the dogma is not “defended” at the body of the heretic through burning, drowning etc., but that it is precisely the life and death of the martyrs and the confessors that defend the church's dogma. Thus from the perspective of a theology of the cross it needs to be maintained that if the dogma is truly the prolongation of the body of Christ in this world then it is not the body of the heretic who should feel that, this would be false theolgin gloriae and would only copy the power-logic of how the saeclum or civitas terrena maintains itself as public – namely by sheer force. Rather it is precisely the martyr and the confessor who give rightly witness to the fact that the dogma is the prolongation of Christ's body – and we get to feel it bodily sub contrano specie.’ Ibid., p. 22.

22 The Very RevFlorovsky, Georges, ‘Empire and Desert: Antinomies of Christian History’. The Greek Orthodox Theological Review (1957), p. 133.Google Scholar

23 Milbank, John, ‘Enclaves, or Where Is the Church?’ New Blackfriars, 73, 861 (June, 1992), pp. 341–342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Ibid., p. 342. Milbank's account of the eucharist is quite similar to Barth's account of proclamation which makes one wonder on what difference it makes whether one concentrates on word or sacrament.

25 Hutter, Reinhard, ‘Ecclesial Ethics, the Church's Vocation, and Paraclesis’, Pro Ecclesia, 2, 4 (Fall, 1993), pp. 433–434Google Scholar. For Hutter's more developed critique of my work see his, Evangelische Elhik als kirchliches Zeugnis (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1993)Google Scholar. For a wonderful account of the problems and potential of Barth's doctrine of the Holy Spirit see Buckley, James J., ‘A Field of Living Fire: Karl Barth on the Spirit and the Church’, Modern Theology, 10, 1 (January, 1994), pp. 81–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Hutter, , ‘Ecclesial Ethics’, p. 435.Google Scholar

27 In contrast to Milbank, I am more than ready to recommend ‘pacifism’ as a necessary stance for the church to be the church. He is certainly correct to argue that no prescriptive criteria will determine violence from non-violence, but I take it that that is why practices of reconciliation are intrinsic to the church's life. See his ‘Enclaves, or Where Is the Church?’ p. 349.

28 Wyschogrod, Michael, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel, (San Francisco: Harper and row, 1983), p. 26.Google Scholar

29 Wyschogrod, p. 28.

30 Throughout the writing of this paper I have thought of the challenge of Kent's, John H. S., The End of the Line? The Development of Christian Theology in the Last Two Centuries (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982)Google Scholar. In the ‘Introduction’ to that book Kent observes: ‘One senses the end of a line of growth, an end which neither Marxism nor Christianity can prevent, not even when they combine in “liberation theology”, which would like to see itself as legitimating an ecclesiastical takeover of a post-revolutionary situation, but which may be more correctly interpreted as a theology of nostalgia – the characteristic theology of the twentieth century – a harking back to the style of the ancien régime, however paradoxical this may sound, to a society in which the churches regarded themselves as the spiritual form of a material community. If the politics of the presen t century simply reflect human appetite – and I don't believe for a moment that they do more – no human interest of survival will be served by committing what remains of the Christian tradition to politics in any of its twentieth-century forms. A theology of survival would be more to the point than a theology of liberation. Survival, however, is a political issue, and we shall depend much more upon diplomacy than on ideological crusades.’ (p. viii) It was with this quote in mind I ended with the appeal to the practices that have provided the basis for the survival of Jewish bodies in the hope Christians might begin to learn that our task is in surviving and not ruling. Kent, moreover, seems to me right to suggest, as the Jews have long known, that the trick is diplomacy. In a holocaust century such a suggestion may appear naive. Perhaps even more troubling is the creation of the state of Israel. Once can hardly blame Jews for imitating Christians, though I hope they learn from us, the preeminent builders of nation-states, that such a ‘state’ may not be the best survival strategy.

I am indebted to Reinhard Mutter, Bill Cavanaugh, David Toole, and, of course, John Howard Yoder for their criticisms of this paper. I am also grateful to the response of those at the SST meeting for their attention and criticism.