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Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club A Brutal Unity The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church By Ephraim Radner

Book Excerpt: Introduction

The point of this volume is simple enough: to live is to give up and give away parts of ourselves. This is not just a comment about the social character of our lives. Giving up parts of ourselves fuels our very being as persons: it is how we learn, it is how we think, it is how we grow, it is how we make decisions, it is how we love. In giving up, of course, we are also gaining something new, although that is not always obvious, just as it is not always clear what we are losing as we live, at least not until the very end of this or that process. To live is to give up parts of ourselves, and to live fully is to give ourselves away fully. This is the simple Christian corollary of the fundamental character of human living, and it is not a novel claim in the least: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life" (John 12:24-25). It is a "corollary," however, in terms of the antitype standing over and against the type, the latter acting as a shadow to the former, one set of gifts, as it were, gesturing and appealing to the other, more final set.

But the argument of this volume is that these elements of giving up and of fulfilling at once, each of which will be discussed in various ways, all pertain to the Christian Church; they describe who she is and thus finally they describe what it means, given who she is, to be "one" Church, the united Church that so eludes her members and whose lack so subverts her life and purpose. To be "one Church" is to be joined to the unity of the Son to the Father, who, in the Spirit, gives himself away (Heb 9:14), not in some general flourish of self-denial, but to and for the sake of his enemies, the "godless," for their life (Rom 4:5; 5:6; 5:10; 1 Cor 15:22; Eph 2:12). Not that the Church in fact does this. She does not, and hence she is not one, and finally therefore she is not who she is meant to be. But though she is faithless, yet "he remains faithful" (1 Tim 2:13). The woefulness of Christian witness in this world is measured by the distance between these two realities; so too is measured the mercy of God. In the world, life is formed and extended in this giving away of self; it is a practice whose shape has itself given rise to various forms of social and political life and, as I will argue, to a life most especially embodied in the liberal polities that developed in Western Europe and America in the eighteenth century. But this kind of life, which the Church has both encouraged and failed to engage over and over, is also one that cannot sustain the Church's own final calling. Her own oneness, as she receives it, marks the redemption of human political ordering. And so her division marks the entrenched failures of human political aspiration, the intransigence of disorder.

This coincidence in the Church's life of disordered failure and redemptive capacity has proven one of the most anguished centers of human experience in Christian history, a place where hope has found birth in places where hopelessness was presumed, only to be denied its voice. Many have expended themselves in the face of this anguish, and it remains one of the great Christian mysteries as to why such witness and, more importantly, its object have been so belittled for so long by so many. Volumes like the present one stand as a pittance in reparation.

Eristological Analysis of One Church

It is possible to interpret this character of divine oneness in a way that stands against all political context, and hence that would rob the Church of her essential political character. A "miracle," after all, can be viewed as so unique as to constitute utter dislocation with respect to the normal pattern dislocation that exists in a kind of complete historical incommensurability with common communal life. This, I take it, is the conclusion of the late Paul Fletcher's valuable reflections. But it is, I think, a mistaken conclusion, and one that, in embracing such dislocation, severs the Church from the actualities and hence moral responsibilities of her own decision making. These are responsibilities, after all, that are demanded just because God's "being in the midst" of the world stands as the contour of God's oneness and hence of the Church's too by analogy.

The oneness of the Church takes place in the world in which God's own oneness is given in Christ's sacrifice, and this sacrifice is determined by its recipients and by the rich, if often disconcerting, details of their existence in time. Such oneness is not given, however, only as the end point of a political process. The eristic character of ecclesiological oneness stands as a certain kind of dialectic, although one that has a term that is continually reposited, in the same way that the Jesus' death, "once and for all," is temporally reasserted in various ways.

The oneness of God is furthermore given into the Church herself, ordering the Church's life and fueling her energies, not only as the representation of such sacrifice's purpose, but as the image of its actual contextualized form: the Church's mission necessarily is microcosmic in relation to the "coming into the world" of God in Christ. The Church's oneness is an image of just this. Eristology, then, is given as the discipline of the Church's worldly existence, tracing her vocation and passage within the divisions of her members and neighbors and within their own attempts at forging reordered and peaceable existences (however oftentimes violently). In this passage, which takes up in its wake the political efforts of those people whom the Church has herself betrayed, the sovereign work of God's oneness is displayed, and the unity of the Church is granted. That is why this volume must deal with the politics of Christian division and unity, and why this must include, rather than oppose and reject, the politics of Christianity's victims. To trace this inclusion, as I will do in a small compass in this book, is to realize also that the politics of the Christian Church's division and unity must finally include, and not reject, the politics of the modern and now predominantly liberal state, as well, whose embattled condition is given in its own eristic life with the Church and the Church's purported enemies. Indeed, as I shall argue, the Christian Church is intimately linked to the liberal state precisely because of the historical character of her eristological nature. Divine oneness is given in this and because of this.

Eristology as a theological discipline has to do, after all, with the character of contention as a social phenomenon and its resolution on the basis of such contention, as given in the historically engaging reality of divine redemption. The political aspect of ecclesiology, both in its internal forms and in its more broadly social interactions, cannot be subsidiary to a proper—that is to say, substantively definitive—understanding of the Church. The Church finds her place in the midst of the political search for peace, viewed physically and in terms of common decision making and its fruit. Hence, one might propose that one approach to eristology would be a complete "political history of the Church," something that has never been written. This would not be, however, a history of political concepts, in their theological meaning, influence, and deployment, useful though the latter is. "Political theology," in this sense, has proven fruitful, although also hotly contested as to its proper meanings and methods. Rather, an eristological ecclesiology would take up the Church's political history in a way that seeks to identify and specify the actual practices of decision making within various defining orders of Christian communal experience and on this basis to expose the character of oneness, in its historical forms, as it engages in enacted hostilities shaping these practices and decisions. And in doing so, we would see just this dialectical relationship between the "miracle" itself and the political processes of ecclesial life that unveils more fully the visage of God.

The present volume is not capable of fulfilling such a project, except in the broadest and most general of ways, pointing to a proposed dialectic of miracle, as it were, and emerging liberal engagement together as potentially explanatory of an eristological history of the Church. It is nothing but an experiment, aimed at Christians whose moral standing depends on faithful and responsible apprehension of their own historical form. I am convinced nonetheless, and despite the tentative "history" I offer, that such an approach must entail a rethinking of ecclesiology in a way that means a rethinking too of history and its character—that is, if the details are poorly presented, nonetheless the purpose is ineluctable and inevitably challenging. That is not to say that an eristological approach is something novel in its theological presuppositions. It is not; and, adopting Collingwood's metaphysical notions, it shares its "absolute" grounding in the same basic premises of most traditional Christian thinking. That is, it assumes a fundamental scriptural literalism, in the sense that the Scripture's textual language is viewed as having divinely determined referents and, hence, referents that are—and only because of this determination—"real." To this extent, Scripture and its referents, however defined in a secondary way, are in fact the primary language and meaning of the Church, privileged and prior to other reasonable languages. This, as I said, is a common understanding of Scripture as an "ultimate authority," albeit expressed in a particular way. In addition, an eristological approach to the Church assumes a commonsense, if not uncomplicated, view of the referents of human experience and apprehension as also being real, in the sense of their having a place within the arena of divine signification. These are "real to me," sometimes indeed "to me and others"; but they are also real somehow with respect to God's determination. And these commonsense experiences, in this case given within ecclesial life, are therefore accountable in their meaning to the primary language of Scripture. All this leaves much "as it is" in terms of historiographical discipline, with all of its contending, but also overlapping, schools of method; and critical discussion of such historical work, to which this volume refers in various places, remains essential to the task of identifying precisely the "realities" to which eristological analysis must turn.

But the purpose of this analysis is particular to itself: the issue is to judge these realities according to, or better to describe them in, the primary language of Scripture, so that their referents and signification can be rendered more coherent for the Christian understanding of God. This is a clearly theological project, then. It takes place within a well-established context of Christian ecclesiological reflection, even if it seeks to challenge certain common approaches to such reflection in ways that argue for particular understanding of, in this case, scriptural figuralism and historical meaning, in terms of the figure of Christ in all of this. Its tests, though, will be those that have always been applied to theological activity: Is God known, praised, and obeyed more fully as a result?