Modern-day Christianity is an anemic shadow of its biblical self and no longer capable of fulfilling its biblical call to speak prophetically to the world. Shaken to its core by the Enlightenment demand that everything be provable by verifiable evidence, the churches have elevated reason and rejected revelation, stripping the Gospel message from its storied context. The faith has been reduced to a set of propositions about God that a person confesses and believes in his heart. Following Christ has become more about decisive statements that must continually be defended and less about the biblical call to change one’s way of life to love God and serve those around us.
The call of today’s churches does not entail a demand to die to one’s sinful, old self and live in the new, resurrection life of Jesus Christ. Today’s churches do not challenge its own members or people in wider society to lose themselves in Something larger and more real. As long as we understand in our hearts that we were “saved” (whatever that means) by the grace of God through Christ His Son, we are assured that we have a place in heaven. In fact, a faith that demands anymore than this “private” affirmation is frowned upon and, at times, dangerous. Such a faith that seeks to claim the whole person (i.e., more than just private affirmations believed “in your heart”) encroaches upon the areas of life which have come to be ruled by the Government and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”
In the book Baptist Sacramentalism, Barry Harvey contributed an essay, entitled “Re-Membering the Body,” which picks up on this theme. Harvey observes that the modern era of the past 350 years has worked to “dis-member” the public and bodily character of the Christian faith.
In the place of the biblical story about the collision between two ages, the leading figures of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment imagined not a time, but a space over which human beings were sovereign. Human beings were thus dissociated from the constraints of local communities, and for many from what was considered to be a dubious and altogether extraneous idea called ‘God’. The idea of the secular came to refer to this carefully demarcated sphere of action that supposedly contained and ordered (both practically and theoretically) all finite entities and events in isolation from any relationship to the infinite.
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As faith was restricted to ‘the inner man’, the bonds the church fostered between those who saw themselves as members of one body were gradually effaced. Sequestering religion in the private sphere reserved the public realm exclusively for the coercive rule of both state and market, and helped to provide an effective mode of social discipline to those in control of these political entities to claim absolute sovereignty over the bodies of their subjects. With Christian identity safely confined to the realm of individual values, the work of the church was increasingly devoted to nurturing the ‘soul’. Thusly defined this work not only posed little threat to the state, it could more easily be conscripted as a mode of social discipline in support of its aims and policies. The political challenge the church potentially posed to the state was effectively eliminated. (Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 104-107)
So rather than a church which calls to account a self-serving, self-gratifying world, denouncing “the wisdom of the world” as “foolishness in God’s sight” (1 Cor. 3:19), we have a church which aids the world in her unceasing rush for more and better and shinier things. “More stuff,” the world cries. “By all means,” the church responds. “March on.” The church works to bring comfort to the homeless and food to the poor, but these are nothing more than the efforts of a rich man throwing out the occasional crumb of bread to alleviate his conscious. The lot of the oppressed and dispossessed never really changes as the rich, many of them members of the church, continue to accumulate more and more.
Occasionally, when voices calling society back to biblical notions of fairness and justice and mercy arise from some poorly-lit corner of the church and become a little too loud for the comfort of society, the establishment yells out “Separation of Church and State” and the prophetic voices are silenced. If the church dares to call for the care of the homeless, the market will demand that the homeless work harder for what they want. If the church has the audacity to suggest that abortion is wrong under any circumstance, the state cries “freedom of choice” and accuses the church of trying to impose its values on those who are different. And through it all, the god of Demos (the ancient Athenian designation of the sovereign body of free citizens and later personified by Aristophanes) remains firmly seated upon his throne.
So modern society has effectively relegated the church to an “appropriate sphere,” outside of which Christians are expected not to prosyletize and speak prophetically to society. This has generally been part of a wider “baptistification” of society, particularly American society. By “baptistification,” I do not mean to imply that all Christians accept Baptist theological principles of the autonomy of the local congregation or believers’ baptism. I mean to point to the emphasis on personal fitness and individual rights that have saturated the modern mind. Ironically, through their advocacy for the freedom of the church and individual believer, Baptists have actually aided in relegating Christianity to the privacy of “the heart”, thereby working toward the dis-membering of the political and bodily aspects of the church.
In his essay, Harvey traces the involvement of Baptists in the dis-membering of the Body of Christ:
As Thompson points out, Baptists in the seventeenth century understood, at least intuitively, this form of political captivity. Their theology and practices, and in particular their critique of and resistance to the Church of England, were rooted in their conviction that God’s salvific work could not be constrained by any human institution. Idolatry, not violation of liberty and conscience, was the principal sin of the crown’s attempt to usurp divine authority over the church. The attention they give to what constitutes the faithful practice of baptism reflects this concern. They rightly saw baptism as the sacrament that conferred the proper significance to all bodies – communal as well as individual – thus relativizing all other political expressions by locating true politics within the church.
The initial trajectory plotted by the first generation of Baptists was not, however, generally sustained by later generations, particularly in North America and Europe. They began to embrace the division of spheres implemented under the auspices of ‘religion’, which they interpreted as the liberation of Christian faith from all political entanglements. One of the most prominent names in this unrecognized retrenchment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that of John Leland of Virginia (1754-1841). As Curtis Freeman has shown, Leland adopted Lockean and Madisonian language with its theories of natural rights and voluntary associations to justify and display the historic Baptist convictions of liberty of conscience and the disestablishment of the church from the state. Liberty of conscience was for Leland ‘the inalienable right that each individual has, of worshipping his God according to the dictates of his conscience, without being prohibited, directed, or controlled therein by human law, either in time, place, or manner.’
What Leland and his supporters did not understand is that no world is free of political discipline of some sort. Their position unwittingly contributed to the double dismemberment of Christianity – the separation of the disciple from the body politic of the church and of their faith from their own physical bodies. They did not realize that the church was thereby re-established socially and politically, in a new form to be sure, but one that nonetheless fit perfectly into the world they thought they were challenging. The institutional disestablishment of ‘religion’ they sought took place under the auspices of a social arrangement that sanctioned a moral identity of the church with the state and its commercial republic. Persons were now cast as ‘autonomous individuals’, and thus required to render to ‘Caesar’ (the political consortium of managerial government and the global market) their unconditional loyalty. This new Caesar in his sovereign benevolence then permitted, or rather guaranteed these newly minted individuals the right to ‘religious beliefs’, which are perfectly free as long as they are perfectly private (‘in the closet’ of one’s mind or heart, so to speak). As a result, Baptist groups now find themselves in the ironic position of refusing out of principle to force their religion on anyone, but sense nothing amiss in supporting the mandatory establishment (by any means available, including force of arms) of liberal democratic capitalism.
The social institutions of the state and market continue unabated to reconfigure what it means to be human beings, divesting the world of the ‘old, old stories’, and reinvesting its human capital in global networks of production and consumption. Practically speaking these networks congeal in a curious mixture of permissiveness and supervision, as people do exactly what these institutions want them to do, all the while reassuring them that this is what it means to be free. As a result, says Wendell Berry, ‘we have been reduced almost to a state…in which people and all other creatures and things may be considered purely as economic “units”, or integers of production, and in which a human being may be dealt with …”merely as a covetous machine”.’ Effectively sundered from meaningful points of reference beyond our present self-defined wants and desires, men and women are little more than the sequence of economic roles they perform. Day-to-day life is little more than a series of consumer choices to make a series of jobs from which to be made redundant.
The workings of the market determine not particular acts, but the range of possible acts available to us as individuals, the ‘rational’ patterns that govern our day-to-day lives, in public and in private. Within the logic of the earthly city’s commercial republic, then, the ‘question of what you permanently are, or what permanently is, and is permanently valuable, does not arise.’ There is little possibility of this question ever arising, for our age lacks the sort of imagination that would allow it even to pose such a question in an authoritative way. The control that this form of rationality exercises over us is therefore anonymous and indirect but precisely for this reason all the more sweeping. It determines where we will live (and when we will move), what kind of clothes we will wear (proper ‘business’ attire and uniforms with the company logo), and what sorts of food we may eat (no sack lunches at the desk, please). As Clapp observes, if a church were to impose this sort of discipline on its members it would quickly be denounced as ‘authoritarian’ if not worse. (Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 107-109)
It would seem, then, that to loosen the grip of “baptistification,” it becomes necessary for Baptists, as a start, to reject the current form of “disestablishment” and work to a new vision of separating the Church from the iron grip of Caesar. To see the future, it is at times beneficial to look at the past. In this case, the natural inclination is to examine the manner in which the patristic church, the only other time period in which Christianity was not in some form wedded to the authority of the political establishment, dealt with keeping itself separate from the state so that it could fulfill its call to be speak prophetically to the culture. According to Harvey, the picture we will see painted is as simple yet revolutionary as the gospel. Indeed, it is the living of the gospel:
Though it is not commonplace to speak of Christianity as a ‘worldview’, one would be hard pressed to find such a description in scripture or the early church fathers. Instead the sense and significance of Christian convictions were part of a communal discipline embodied in the public life of the church….
The conduct and convictions of this body politic so questioned the established social and political categories of its time that the resulting reorganization of human life and language became a never-ending task. In the words of Rowan Williams, this people had the temerity to claim ‘that all “meaning”, every assertion about the significance of life and reality, must be judged by reference to a brief succession of contingent events in Palestine.’ The sense and direction of all created life could therefore only be truthfully discerned in relation to the events that swirled around one seemingly insignificant Jewish man. This unlikely figure was an itinerant rabbi who spent his days pursuing a way of life which, though it was a way of peace, moved inexorably toward confrontation and violence. His life was tragically cut short by a peculiar alliance between the mightiest and most efficient empire the world has ever known, and those whom this empire had selected to administer the affairs of the Jewish people. And yet his mysterious triumph over death, together with what he accomplished during his lifetime, so radically called into question the dominant categories and relations that the restructuring of language and life continues to this day. (Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 98-99)
So we see that the believers of the early church took the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and made it their own. They inserted themselves into the life of God by extending the story of Jesus Christ into their own story, until the two stories were synonymous and continual. And we must do the same for ourselves if we truly want the see the Good News embodied in our own day and time. And to live the story, we must tell the story. Harvey continues:
If we are to grasp the significance of Jesus for those of us who live in a different time and place, who say and do and endure things in different circumstances that are also marked by their own particularity and contingency, we must know to narrate our own lives as a continuation of that same story. This will happen only as the universal efficacy that the gospel attributes to Christ’s concrete historical existence is perfomatively extended to, and displayed in, every time and place so that it becomes the immediate norm of every human being’s singular existence.
It is the work of the Spirit to repeat differently (and therefore precisely) the polyphony of life that has been revealed in Christ, and in both the New Testament and the early church fathers that work is mediated in large part by baptism and Eucharist to gathered communities throughout the globe. The sacramental labor is ongoing, a never-ending endeavor, because times and circumstances change. New characters, social settings and historical events are constantly being incorporated within the ebb and flow of time around its center. The meaning of this process is therefore never fixed, but continues to unfold in the style of a historical drama that is never over and done with. The unity of this drama’s story line resides not in the sameness of the performance, but in timely transpositions of the rhythms and progressions of human acting and relating decisively enacted by the life and passion of Jesus. (Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 101)
And how does making Jesus’ story our story move the Church beyond entanglement with the state of today? By making us question our identity as “autonomous individuals” and bringing us to realize that we are part of Something bigger than our own desires and our capacity to fulfill them. Through participation and adoption into the story of the Messiah of God, we are brought into a dance – a Trinitarian dance – which holds the world together in perfect unity and multiplicity. Oneness and individualism live in harmony in the life of God.
The depth and breadth of the triune God’s reign, then, is encountered in both the utterance of the Word and the breathing forth of the Holy Spirit. It is in the power of the Spirit that the sovereign address of God in Christ Jesus becomes for all humankind a word of redemption, the sign that life and not death is the goal of creation. The movement of God’s Spirit in the world, however, is inseparable from the history of God’s people, the story of Israel and the church. This people universalizes in the power of the Spirit the concrete singularity of this one Jewish man, for ‘the personal in Christ can only confront the personal in the individual Christian in union with what appears to be impersonal, the church and the sacraments’. The gift of the Spirit, though it cannot be contained by any created thing, creates and sustains a people who display before the world a different kind of existence in which relations misshapen by death and sin are transfigured into patterns of life and wholeness. The restructuring of life and language according to patterns of Jesus’ life and death gathers together persons from ever tribe and language, people and nation, and re-members them into the body politic of Christ, the corpus verum or earthly-historical form of the crucified and risen Christ. (Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 101-102)
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Participation in the sacraments does not, however, render these transactions immediately transparent. On the contrary, says Rowan Williams, Jesus is God’s revelation in a decisive sense ‘not because he makes things plainer…but because he makes things darker’. The identity and conduct of Jesus’ followers are ‘at least as must a matter of promise, of prospect, and of the task that is laid upon us, as they are a matter of past achievement or present reality’. As a consequence, the impetus of baptism and eucharist is for each member of Christ’s body to make ‘his or her own that engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith which is so evident in the classical documents of Christian belief.’ The questioning engendered by these signs and seals has little to do with fashionable notions about the relative nature of all human endeavors, nor does it encourage romantic sentiments about the self-made individual who, while half-believing, withholds assent from all commitments in order to preserve some sort of moral and intellectual autonomy.’ The question here,’ Williams insists,
is not our interrogation of the data, but its interrogation of us. It is the strangeness of the ground of belief that must constantly be allowed to challenge the fixed assumptions of religiosity; it is a given, whose question to each succeeding age is fundamentally one and the same. And the greatness of the great Christian saints lies in their readiness to be questioned, judged, stripped naked and left speechless by that which lies at the center of their faith.
(Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 111-112)
This was the lesson which Job had to learn. This is the lesson which we have to learn.
The purpose of this process of sacramental interpellation – of learning how to become a question to oneself – is mot to condemn, but is located in the triune mission of gathering all things in heaven and on earth together in Christ (Eph. 1:10). In our own context it serves first to exegete the idea of the autonomous individual as a tragic character within the dramatic work of fiction that is the world as ordered by the power of the state and the principality of the market. In then resituates the self within the reign of Israel’s God that establishes the goal toward which things tend and sets the limits for the exercise of power by all worldly authorities. In and through the commonwealth of the body politic of Christ everything in the created order, all life, is ‘now, at once, immediately confronted with a claim that is non-negotiable in the sense that in the end God will irrefutably be – God’. (Baptist Sacramentalism, pp. 112)
Our theology informs the way we live, so it is not surprising that a narrow, detached view of the sacraments correlates to a narrow Christianity detached from the call of the gospel. The sacraments are but the tip of a theological iceberg, revealing the nature of the content below the icy waters. We are creatures who experience life through five senses, and the practice of our faith must engage all five senses in order for our faith to be applied to our entire self. So long as belief is confined to a set of theological propositions, we will think nice thoughts and say nice words, but we will not be changed. Only when belief demands the whole person – body, mind, heart, and soul – will we experience the change in lifestyle called for by the gospel. And only when Christians live their beliefs will they be able to once again speak prophetically to society.
