The modern problem of the Church, and a quick think about Bonhoeffer....

This is the next bit of thinking about the church and where we are at. It moves sideways slightly from where I started yesterday, and begins to think about the self-understanding of the church in scripture, and the way this has been massively challenged in the last few hundred years. It also then does a little thinking with Bonhoeffer about this. It is all top of the head stuff - hence nothing is referenced. I'm trying out ideas here to see how folk react, to stimulate my thinking more, and just in case anyone else finds it helpful! Do let me know your thoughts...

Biblical visions...

There has never been a golden ear of the Church. Various traditions look to various moments, but I’m not sure any of them really count. Many will, of course, look to the biblical era – but really, if that lot at Corinth were the best there were going, then does that really constitute a golden era? Equally, one can look to the period of the early Church Fathers, but as one dwells on the disputes about who really was the church, and who not, and the struggles that went on for power between folk like Cyprian and Novation, was that a golden era? Or high Christendom when the Church is often seen to have ordered life in its totality and yet was actually experienced by many as an oppressive power? Or the period of the reformation – where Luther went off the idea of the priesthood of all believers once he discovered that Peasants were revolting? Or even my hero Calvin...not even I would have wanted to live in his Geneva, thank you very much. Or the era of great Church expansion and cultural influence in the 19^th century – which perhaps bequeathed us many of the problems that we have today? No...there is no golden ear.

All Christian traditions acknowledge the reality that we live in a sinful and fallen world. Different traditions place the Church differently in this context. For the Catholic and Orthodox traditions the Church is holy, because Christ is Holy. The Church per se cannot sin. The members of the Church, even the Pope himself can, and do, sin – and must repent from their sins. The Church does not. In the reformation traditions the Church itself is sinful and can and must confess. You will have noted where I sit in this trajectory already, I suspect...!

The Church is part of creation – as such, it is fallen. Creation is fallen – St. Paul was just so right when he spoke of doing the things that we would not do, and not doing the things that we would! Structural sin abounds – how on earth do we have a bank account, even, never mind a pension, without finding that we have supported some heinous oppressive firm or regime somewhere? It is in the midst of a world like this (which is still a wonderful and remarkable world which is capable of great good!) that the Church exists. I do think it is important, however, that we do not mistake the Church for the Kingdom. I rather like Leslie Newbigin’s description of the Church as a ‘sign and a foretaste’ of the Kingdom – at its best it is. In the New Jerusalem, however, there will be no temple.

As the church lives in the midst of a changeable history that is life in the world, it seeks ever and ever again to be faithful to Christ and to discern its vocation. I think that something has happened in the last 300 years or so that has made that very significantly more difficult – and that one thing we have not really attended to is what this has done in Western Europe to the life of the Church (things are slightly different the other side of the pond for various reasons that I won’t distract us with now). The process that we often call ‘modernity’, or ‘the Enlightenment’ radically changed things for the Church – a process which continues into what we tend to call ‘post-modernity’ – though I’m never quite sure that it really is after modernity at all, or just a working through in a new phase of some of the key bits of what happened in modernity. All of this can seem rather obstruse, and attending to the development of intellectual history can seem desperately boring – but I ask you to stay with me, for I think some very significant things happened that we’ve often entirely not seen the connection with the Church.

First of all, let us just orientate ourselves around some very basic scriptural realities about the Church. One of my favourite essay questions to set students is ‘Does it make sense to speak of a biblical ecclesiology?’ – there are very many ways of giving a good answer to this question, but anyone who says that there is a clear and specific biblical ecclesiology that supports one particular contemporary church polity clearly is not actually reading the texts of scripture! There is not. What we see are various different visions of being the church (the edited volume by Marcus Bockmuehl and my Federation colleague Mike Thompson Visions of the Church witnesses fascinatingly to this – I’m very grateful to them for this work!).

The shear number of biblical images of the Church that the New Testament contains suggests that there is not one, prescribed way of being the Church. Just the big ones, ‘body of Christ’, ‘People of God’, ‘creation of the Spirit’, and so on, witness to this. Never mind the smaller ones ‘salt’, ‘light’, ‘bride of Christ’ etc. etc. (Paul Minear’s Images of the Church in the New Testament is fascinating on this). But one thing that is in common with all of them is the fact that the church is a social entity. St. Paul is absolutely key here – we cannot, for Paul, ever conceive of doing faith without the church.

“As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave of free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong o Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” (Gal. 3:27-29)

Baptism, the sign of the beginning of new life in Christ, is baptism into Christ. That is baptism into the body of Christ – the Church. We come together as one community. It forms our identity in a way that displaces and relativises all our other identities. We are no longer defined as men or women, slave or free, Jew or Gentile – or in other words, by our biological distinctions, our cultural distinctions, our social distinctions and so on, but rather we are identified by being part of a new people. We no longer belong to our old people, or at least not in a way that now primarily identifies, us, rather we belong to a new people. This Paul works out elsewhere, in Ephesians (lets leave aside the question of authorship shall we...it is in the canon after all!):

“...you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in who you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God” (Eph.2:19-22).

The togetherness of what it is to be the church is paramount. In fact, it becomes the ‘House where God lives’ (to quote the title of a great book by Gary Badcock on the Church). This forming of a new people is equally a vision that we receive in 1 Peter “Once you were not a people; but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10). This understanding of the church as a ‘people’ actually went so far as for people to speak of a ‘third race’- not Jew or Gentile, but something different. Something not dependent upon what you were born, but what you were by virtue of you baptism and your membership of the body. In the early Church conversion was a big thing – it meant a fundamental change of identity because the people that you belonged to changed. The thing that defined you became different. Living into that was a process that lasted years for those in the chatecuminate on their way to baptism.

This understanding of the primacy of the people of God over the individual rests too, of course, on the entirety of the Hebrew scripture too. Abraham and Sarah – and their offspring – are elect. It is a social election. It is the people of Israel as a people that are God’s people, and called to keep the law and be a light to the nations. And so on...being human was first and foremost to be social.

And for much of the life of the Church this has worked. It has been worked out in very different ways in different periods of the history of the Church. It worked out one way in the very early church where quite literally one changed the people one belonged to and therefore ones identity. In a post-constantinian world where the church had become the same thing as the sate in certain sense (or was the state in its religious and spiritual aspect), this gets worked out in a different kind of way. What is still the case, though, is that from the point of view of the individual, identity still comes from being part of a people, a Christian people who are a Christian empire, or later, perhaps, a Christian nation.

This situation, however, has shifted quite radically in the last few hundred years, and I don’t think we’ve caught up with it yet. We are beginning to catch up with the fact that we are now in a post-constantinian world – the empire or the nation is no longer co-terminus with being a Christian people. However, I worry that although there is some really interesting thinking and discussion going on by those working at this particular observation – what it has not necessarily fully grappled with is that the pre-constantinian era is not necessarily going to guide us terribly well into how to be church in the 21^st century. This is because whilst it has taken good account of what has happened in terms of political and to an extent social realities, I’m not sure its taken quite as seriously what has happened in terms of how we understand our human identity.

What modernity has done to the Church...

When Descarte said ‘I think therefore I am’ in his Meditations, the world changed. Perhaps not there and then, and perhaps this had been implied in thought before him – this is not the kind of place for a full genealogy of how this has all happened. None the less, things became different. It is the fundamental concern with the ‘I’ as the thinking subject.

Charles Taylor, in his A Secular Age (a deeply frustrating book in so many ways, but that points to some important things) has begged the question as to what has changed in the last 500 years that has led to religion in the West becoming so fundamentally different in terms of its place within the world. He speaks of secularisation not only in terms of religious practice and in terms of the decline of the way in which religion helps us order life in the world, but in another fundamental sense: whereas we simply used to believe – one was a Christian and basically believed in God and was a part of the Church (even if people did not necessarily go very often...) now we can choose. Religious faith has become a choice – I can believe or not. Increasingly people are choosing not to. Taylor begs the question as to what it is that has happened that has brought about this particular understanding.

The world has shifted in many ways, and charting all of this is beyond the scope of anything I can write here, others have done it far better, see Taylor himself, or perhaps also see John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory. What I would slightly warn about these accounts is that although they state the opposite, they do read to me a little like there was something of a golden age – and that we could return to a world where happy peasants danced around maypoles and celebrated Carnival every year and knew their place and that all were happy. That is to parody – but there is a slight tendency in this direction. I must state that I rather like living in a modern world with antibiotics, modern medical science, the general respect of human rights of the individual and so on! They do, however chart something of the intellectual shifts that the world has gone through very well.

But what, in outline, are these shifts? Well, we’ve moved from a world in which knowledge was essentially received from authorities (either authorities within a status structure, or the notion of ‘original’ sources) to a world in which knowledge is that which the individual human being constructs. Here, figures like Locke and Hume loom large – and of course, that preeminent thinker of the Enlightened age, Kant. The Enlightenment prioritised the individual thinking subject – the ‘I’ of Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’. The idea of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ then becomes very important. It is almost as if reason is a ‘thing’ that is ‘out there’ that the individual thinking mind utilises. The idea basically was that if only we reasoned well enough, that we would all ultimately end up thinking the same thing – because we would all be being Enlightened and ‘rational’. Of course it never did quite work like that – but it is a great idea.

This led to various responses – some theological and some other intellectual and cultural responses. Theologically, people began to ask what happened to the idea of God when one thought rationally about it – this is a topic that detained Kant in his ‘Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason’ and there is a significant theological response to all of this about the rationality of belief in God, and making religious belief make sense. Liberal theology is in many ways responding to this – it looks, in part at least, for a rational way of understanding the development of the faith in a trajectory of humanity becoming ever more enlightened. It looks to Jesus as an ethical teacher that shows us how to live lives well together. Interestingly, Liberal theology very rarely concerns itself with the Church at all. It is concerned with the individual Christian and how they can maintain a rational faith. The Church is largely studied only in terms of its historical development and as the bearer of ‘doctrine’ that becomes ever more Enlightened.

Another response to this Enlightenment stuff was what we tend to call ‘romanticism’. This was something of a reaction against the rather ‘rationalistic’ view that we’ve been talking about and responded with the importance of the individual persons feeling and emotion. It leads to some of the great literature and art of the period, to Goethe and to Wordsworth and so on. Feeling and emotion become central, but what has not shifted, is that it is the individual’s feeling and emotion that has shifted. This too, led to theological responses, which were often closely related to, but not entirely so, to Liberal theology. One figure that possibly unites both is Schleiermacher, who was the German theologian of the 17^th-18^th century who began with religious ‘feeling’ as the way in which we can gain access to ‘data’ that we can then rationally examine in the light of scripture and the tradition to make sense of how we speak of God. Church movements are also heavily influenced by this kind of romantic turn – the development of Evangelical movements and awakenings seems to me to be heavily influenced by this kind of turn – they are all about the individuals experience, emotion and feeling – the conversion experience being at the centre of it.

In all of this, we find that the centre of gravity about human identity (and we do need to watch that term, we use it with abandon, but it has particular connotations – to be identified with what, is in some sense the question it begs) has shifted. We are no longer identified (so we think) by our social group, but we construct our own identity as a thinking and feeling subject (and I’m using the word ‘subject’ here in the sense of I am the acting, thinking thing that makes use of ‘objects’ that I perceive in the world (which are also other people) to think about, emote about and ultimately make sense of the world through.

It is very interesting that in this, we see that bits of the contemporary church that are often at odds with one another – liberal and evangelical, actually have their roots in the same kind of era. They are both responses to this shift to the individual human beings being at the centre of the universe. They both, interestingly, often are very concerned with ethics (though in a different way) – they really are siblings. Siblings often scrap with one another...

What we see in what we often call ‘post-modernity’ is much of this going one step further. Kant realised that the ‘limits of human reason’ were our inability ever to know any object that we perceive ‘in itself’ – we could only know it as we perceive it, we could not know it as it really was as a thinking subject (in the case of another human person). However, Kant holds rationality in high enough esteem to still essentially think that we might all think the same if we reasoned well enough. However, post-modernity (and I don’t really think it is that at all) has basically shifted to a position that still thinks that we are individual thinking subjects, but that there is nothing ‘out there’ like ‘rationality’ that enables us all to end up thinking the same thing if only we think well enough. Therefore there is a significant move away from there being any kind of absolute.

That is not quite an adequate definition of post-modernity (and it is complex stuff that I don’t claim to fully get my head around – a good place to start is Stanley Grenz’s A Primer on Post-Modernity). For there is another side to it, which interestingly perhaps begins to move in a different direction. This suggests that ‘reality’ is a social construction. Here, linguistic philosophy from folk like Wittgenstein, and social theorists (like Peter Berger, perhaps) begin to collide in interesting ways. We are all caught up in language games and webs of meanings that get spun socially. We appropriate them individually, but they set the contours and context in which things have meaning and can be understood. There is perhaps some space here for the Christian story to begin to be one of those webs rather effectively. However, I think this is once again to get ahead of ourselves.

What is interesting is how all of this high flown thinking comes to shape day to day reality. I’ve never yet read a decent account of how this happens, but somehow it does. I do not, basically, tend to think of myself as having an identity that is formed by the groups that I belong to, I construct my own identity, thank you very much. We all tend to conceive of ourselves first and foremost as individuals. We express our individuality by what we wear and how we spend our money, by our choices in life. What we are bequeathed is a world which has fundamentally shifted away from the social entity – from the ‘people’ to whom you belong, to one where we ‘opt-in’ to the groups that I wish to. Hence, I can choose to join a political part of not, choose to join the church or not, choose to go clubbing or not, choose to be a Goth or not, choose to have anything to do with my family or not, choose who my friends are. We kind of take this stuff for granted, I suspect.

In all of this massive shift of culture, I think there has been some very significant theological thinking about the way in which we articulate our faith and make sense of it. Whilst it might not feel like it at times in the world of Richard Dawkins, theologically we can and often do give a rich and full account of our faith in a post-Enlightenment world. Huge effort has been expended on doing so – theology has been deeply productive in this period, as we have found new ways of talking of our faith in a ‘world come of age’, as Bonhoeffer put it. What I contend that we have not done very well yet at all, is to think about how all of this pans out in terms of the church. We have been rather better at thinking about it in terms of making the content of our faith – our propositional statements, as it were, make sense in this world. We have found it very much harder to think about how to make the church make sense. Put very simply, if the entire basis of the Church is grounded in the fact that our identity as individual Christians is founded by being baptised into this social group, and taking on a new identity by being part of a new people, how on earth does this translate out in a world where my identity does not come from and social group, but rather I generate it myself? Suddenly I don’t need the Church to be a Christian at all, rather, I am a Christian by virtue of my own decision about my own identity. That leaves really no space for the Church much at all, expect by virtue of the fact that I might want to spend some of my time with people who have chosen to construct their identity in a similar way to mine. And that is to construe the matter entirely without reference to the work of God, which we must not do...but I fear frequently do anyway!

Some thinking with Bonhoeffer

I think perhaps the one theologian who really grasped some of this and began to think, and live, something really rather different is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’m a little wary of bringing him up, not least because I’m rather wary of the ‘Bonhoeffer industry’. However, I think he was on to something – though it never got massively well formulated.

There is an extraordinary moment in his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio where he is thinking about how new emerging understandings of social relationships in the newly emerging field of sociology might help us understand the church. He is talking about ‘neo-Kantian’ conceptions of the person. Basically, this was a world view which was working with the idea that I am indeed the thinking subject, and any other person I only ever discern as an object. What Bonhoeffer does, without ever quite really stating it, is to reject this view very firmly – and in fact characterises it basically as sin. What makes true, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, ethical encounter between two individuals is precisely that I do not meet someone else and that person is simply an object. That person too, is a subject. It is basically the work of the Spirit that means that I can encounter someone not as a mere object, but as another thinking subject. We encounter one another truly, as it were. We are thinking subjects together. We become, if you like, something greater than two people merely looking at one another. True human encounter is possible. The Church, then, becomes the place where this becomes really possible. It also becomes the place where, through the proclamation of the Word and through the sacraments, and through the work of the Spirit, human subjects are united such that the Church itself becomes, as it were, a person – it becomes, ultimately, ‘Christ existing as community’.

We noted above that the liberal theological reaction to everything that had happened in modernity essentially ignored the Church. The church became, if anything, a place that could be the breeding ground of good ethical individuals (again, not entirely unlike classical Evangelical responses too). Part of what is so radical about Bonhoeffer is simply that he writes about the Church – something pretty unheard of. What is even more radical, is that he entirely rejects the received notion of what it is to be human. He does this through paying careful attention to scripture, and finding in revelation in Christ something rather different. He does this, at least in part, through his attention to the early Karl Barth – another vital figure in this story, but someone who always seems to me struggled somewhat when it came to the topic of the Church. In revelation, Bonhoeffer actually offered a very different account of the human being, as being primarily social. Interestingly, he found here support in the emerging ‘secular’ field of sociology. This whole set of thinking he then extends in his second doctorate, Act and Being, where he evaluates much of the kind of thinking about modernity, in terms of idealism, and reinterprets it, again largely in an ecclesiological context.

What Bonhoeffer was pointing to in these early works was, I think, the emerging reality that the huge challenge that modernity left in its wake was about what it was to be the church – not simply what it was to believe. Sadly, for a long while these early works were rather left behind in everyone’s great excitement about the quest for a ‘religionless Christianity ‘ in a ‘world come of age’. Too often, this got translated out as some kind of faith without the trappings of the church which were written off as useless ‘religion’. Nothing could really be further from the truth about what Bonhoeffer was calling for, as I see it.

Bonhoeffer’s context was, of course, ultimately to become a very troubled one. One in which the very essence of the Church was entirely at risk. One in which one can even say (as the Confessing Church did, in a rather troubling statement) that the Church (ie that majority of the German Church that was under the influence of the German Christian movement that was behind Hitler’s transformation of Germany) was no longer the Church. It was no longer ‘Christ existing as community’. One cannot compare lightly the situation that Bonhoeffer and the confessing Church found itself in with the situation that the Church is in now. We are not suffering from persecution, but rather indifference. However, something of the soul of the Church might still be at stake. Certainly, something of how it is we are called to be church in the midst of a world where popular thinking still begins with the individual is vital.

For Bonhoeffer, this began to work its way our in very radical ways. I cannot imagine anyone can read his Discipleship, which is a very literal kind of reflection on the sermon on the mount as a model for Christian Discipleship, and find it easy. I personally find it deeply difficult – and deeply challenging, and sometimes just a little lacking in the joy of grace. However, it is a call to a radical kind of ecclesial existence. In his Life Together one sees that this works out in a radical kind of community of the Church in which each is deeply accountable to the other in terms of the shaping of our personhood (our identity, as it were). This happens in communal worship and daily living together, it also happens in our life on our own. It happens in encounters of deep trust with the other, in moments of individual confession, for example. It is a deeply ecclesial way of being.

Perhaps our final reflection with Bonhoeffer needs to take us to the Ethics, unfinished at the time of his death, and yet deeply radical in many ways. Many people within the history of the Church have called the church to a kind of radical separation and holiness of living that one can begin to see in Discipleship and in Living Together. However, in the Ethics, we see that this kind of separatism is far from what Bonhoeffer is calling for. Rather, his is concerned that the Church be indeed Christlike. And to be Christlike is to take massively seriously what the Church came to teach about Christ at Chalcedon, where it defined Christ as ‘fully human and fully divine’. Christ is fully human – fully worldly, fully engaged in human life within the world. God is therefore fully engaged with human life within the world. The Church is therefore called to be fully engaged with life within the world.

I don’t want to entirely idolise Bonhoeffer and become part of the Bonhoeffer ‘industry’. I think there are theological problems: I think he never really overcomes some of the structural problems of certain forms of Lutheran thinking, for example. It takes a long while for him to recover from a particular Lutheran reading of the Two-Kingdoms understanding of the place of secular rulers as appointed by God, and in the Ethics I’m deeply unconvinced by the idea of divinely appointed ‘spheres’ of human life as if they are unchangeable and immutable in ways that life in the world rather suggests they are not. What I do find in Bonhoeffer, though, is someone who really understood the predicament that the Church is in when it comes to being Church in our world. He saw that the problem is that in a world where we think of ourselves as autonomous thinking subjects, the church simply does not make sense. He also began to find radical ways in which this got lived out, and ways it could be lived out whilst radically engaging with the world, not simply withdrawing from it. There is much here to learn from.

Being Church today

Now is in many ways a really rich moment in the life of the churches in terms of how they are attempting to grapple with much of this stuff. To what extent the grappling can really flourish around the reality of the church as we have received it I’m far from sure. That is why we need to think very carefully about attempts to preserve the church simply as it is.

There are things going on that are interesting though. The whole emergent church movement, and ‘fresh expressions’ and the like provide some interesting thinking and ideas. I worry that ‘Fresh Expressions of Church’ in the very title contains the seeds of its downfall. It presumes that we know what Church is and are it, and can therefore ‘freshly express’ it. I think we might need to do some rather more bottom up thinking than that. And yet also, I want to take seriously some of the strong critique of such movements that have come from people like my colleague Andrew Davison and Alison Millbank, that you cannot simply shift the form of something without shifting the content! There are moments indeed when I wonder whether some fresh expressions really are church. If Church is where the Word is proclaimed and the sacraments duly celebrated, how odd that things call themselves church where these never happen. On the other hand, sometimes they happen in new and exciting ways that breath new life.

One thing that worries me greatly, though – is that there is a simple buying in to the kind of individualism that modernity has bequeathed us. The whole idea that people come to faith in the company of people like themselves may, in one way of thinking be right. What kind of faith is it though? If to be ‘in Christ’, is fundamentally to have entirely relativised your other identities by taking on the identity of the new people who now define you, in what sense can Church ‘for single professional people in their twenties’, or for ‘young mums’ ever actually be Church? I’m equally rather aware of the alternative approach which can appear to idolise received models of Church. Those expressions of Church that are based around the notion of the Parish very often fail miserably to represent the diversity of human life. Parishes, particularly in urban areas, are very often full of people of the same sort and of the same class, never mind the fact that many people in parochial churches don’t go to their local parish church but rather travel to the church which they find more suited to them – which is probably full of people rather like them.

Another feature of many new expressions of the life of the church is that they tend, frequently, to be ultimately about the perpetuation of the institutionalised Church as we have received it. They can be seen as a route into ‘proper church’, and can, if one is not careful, be nothing but an extension of the ‘if we don’t get some new people then we won’t have anyone to do any of the jobs’ syndrome that we’ve already noted.

What we see in much of this though, is the church beginning to grapple with how it goes about being Church is the rather radically different context that we now find ourselves in. In terms of beginning to think further about the URC, and its future – or perhaps, in the light of what I’ve written, what comes after it, we perhaps need to think a bit more specifically about it, and what was happening in its constituent traditions throughout the period that we are saying has been so decisive for the church. The traditions of the URC are coming to be formed in the way in which we know them now precisely through the modern period. In fact, one might even perhaps say that they not only were reacting to, but also to some extent empowering the development of modernity as we’ve viewed it in outline in here. We might well do well to examine in slightly more detail how we came to be where we are more before moving on further. We also need to return to the question of what exactly is the Church, that we’ve begun to feel our way to here. But by what means, or through what practices and forms of life does the Church become this radical identity giving people that scripture points to? That too, is a question we must turn to. In what ways might the church facing its death and ‘turning to Jerusalem’ as Christ did, open up space for something new, radical and Christlike?