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discussion

How important is the church?

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kstarkenburg
Sep 11 2002
11:12 am

Sam, Grant, and Keith (I’m Keith) had a long conversation after a recent wedding. This discussion began to get caught on whether the church (parse this however you want for now) is the central community of our lives in the many ways we might mean “central.” I, Keith, tend to think that church, especially church as a congregation, is the most important community in our lives (unless it begins to fail and become replaced by another community which eventually will take on the shape of church). That is, the church is our family before all other families. And so, the church, if it is a family, has the potential to get involved in just about any activity or need that occurs in a church community (such as education, counseling, health care, community organizing, etc.). Also, I tend to think the church is our family before all families because it is the time and place of our participation in the Triune community. And, that participation is the ultimate goal of our lives.

Anyway, Grant thought we should continue this discussion here, so here goes.

I’m going to copy some emails on to next post and let Sam summarize the discussion from his perspective.

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kstarkenburg
Sep 11 2002
11:17 am

Sam:
To press the issues however (and to state them starker than I mean): Keith, does your argument imply an abandonment of the old Reformational adage – Transform all of life? If so, does not that imply a different, much gloomer reading of the state of creation after the fall? Am I mis-reading you?

Keith:
I need to back up a little. I was telling Grant at breakfast a couple of weeks ago that my basic concern is that congregations (and perhaps denominations, but probably not) become real familial communities. When congregations become real communities, they tend to become heavily concerned with one another’s business. Questions such as the following emerge in authentic familial communities: Do you have enough money? Do you have work that suits you? Do we have enough money? Do we have work that suits us? How’s your relationship with so and so? Where is God calling you? etc., etc. Now, it is my contention that familial communities like this will have needs and callings that may lead them to take on projects that protect and nurture one another and the larger community (but not too large because no community of potential friends has unlimited resources). These projects may or may not include schools, hospitals, local political parties, labor unions, congregational organizing, etc. These familial communities may even discern together the best way to vote for the sake of the health of their community (which should also work for the health of other parallel communities).

So, contrary to what I might have said at 5 in the morning, I don’t think an institution or movement needs to come under the organizational auspices of a congregation or denomination to become authentically Christian. My point is the obverse: congregations have the freedom to protect and nurture one another as followers of Jesus and central participants in the Triune life. Where that leads is where that leads.

Now, about your question. The community is a part of the transforming of all of life, nothing is closed to its touch. The problem is not really the state of creation. I’m being highly sanguine about the potential for realized salvation, punctuated by the whims of the Spirit. However deep and long is the corruption, salvation goes farther and faster.

Sam:
I am still not sold on ecclisial communities (churched, etc.) being “the central participants in the Triune life”. What about non-ecclesial human communities that are bent on serving the Creator? Why privilege the ecclesial? I feel, and maybe my sentiment is skewed, that there is a kind of distrust in your rhetoric toward the non-ecclesial, or maybe, whatever is not sanctioned by the ecclesial? Am I missing your point?

Keith:
I hear two points. One, a rhetoric of distrust on my part. That makes me think a bit. Second, why privilege the ecclesial? What about non-ecclesial human communities that are bent on serving the Creator?

Let me think about your first point for awhile.

On your second query. I privilege the ecclesial for lots of reasons. First, the fullness of worship isn’t conducted and experienced elsewhere. Second, being saved always includes a call to a community that provides the matrix of your salvation. That called community is the church. The church with its structures of worship and accountability. Third, our relational potential is finite. And, if the church is a family, as I’ve been arguing, then it is hard to have more than one family (although the family can get larger and larger). I’ve got other reasons, but I have no doubt these will get you chasing lots of mental errands.

Sam:

I dare say that your ‘privileging’ of the ecclesial is begging the question. Let me explain. To explain the assertion that “the ecclisial is the central participants in the Triune life” you now assert that the ecclesial is also the locus of the “fullness of worship”, etc. This seems to simply reiterate the point without a sufficient argument to sustain the claim.
You probably expected for me to come back with the standard Reformational retort that worship has to do with all of life. (which I’ve implicitly made in the above paragraph.) And, it seems that you are making a further move and identifying the church with what in the Reformational circles is understood as the institutional sense of a church. Why not also envisage ‘church’ as a “called community” that permeates the entire social realm as ‘yeast through the dough’? That seems to be another, legitimate way to characterize ‘church’, what Kuyper, following biblical writers, would call the Body. What I am suggesting is that you are confusing two different senses in which ‘church’ can be envisaged, and, as a result, portraying church to be only an institution. Hence, there is a good deal of suspicion towards the non-ecclesial. If, however, you allow ‘church’ to be defined as ‘yeast permeated through the dough of society’ then there would be less ground for suspicion. More precisely, the same suspicion that you have towards the non-ecclesial should be aimed toward the ecclesial: unless your ecclesiology shifts toward high Anglicanism or Catholicism, it is difficult to uproot churches from the realm of divinely-ordained but humanly-constructed institutions as a Protestant. What I am hearing in much of your rhetoric is an quasi-Anabaptist argument. I am not sure what the standard argument is for exculpating churches from the same inadequacies and failures that plague the non-ecclesial.
Enough “mental errands” for now.

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grant
Sep 12 2002
04:59 am

Sorry to interrupt, but before Sam gives his version of what this discussion is about, I just wanted to say why I thought this discussion would be a good one for *cino.

From the discussion that inspired this topic, I gathered that part of the big debate is whether or not there really is a separation between church and state. As Keith was saying, if the church is indeed God’s big family, it will take care of the needs of its members without waiting for the state to do it. The Church would in fact function as the State for the community of Christians. But, as you can see, Sam wants to keep the State separate, perhaps giving it a broader jurisdiction than the church (ecclesia) so that groups outside the church (ecclesia) could be fairly represented, and so that conflicts between the community of Believers and other communities could be dealt with.

I know putting it in terms of church and state reduces the many dimensions of the discussion, but I think this is a way into the bigger discussion: If the church is THE ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY THAT GOD INTENDS FOR HIS WORLD, then shouldn’t the Church be a model for the State, indeed, a model for all communities? (but without becoming the Catholic monstrosity of centuries past)?

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kstarkenburg
Sep 12 2002
08:28 am

Yes, that’s a good reminder about the church/state implications of the discussion and your uncovering of my method (the church, as it ought to function, is the model of community for all other communities).

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sgassanov
Sep 12 2002
12:35 pm

Hi guys! I’ve finally figured out how to get on this thing: this is really cool. I’m quite impressed: bravo, to the originators and technical supporters!

I’ll jot a few thoughts though my last “mental errands” have not yet been appraised. It should be fairly clear why the church-modelling for all other kinds of human communities is a bad idea. I am not sure how we could avoid the problem that Grant alerts us to: church becoming a monstrosity that overtakes over the entire social world. Grant, I do not propose for a state to have somehow “broader” scope of responsibility. What I, or the Reformational and Catholic traditions of social thought, are recommending is a different kind of responsibility that states and religious institutions ought to entertain.

Enough for now…

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grant
Sep 13 2002
12:48 pm

O.K. So, you’re saying that the State must have responsibilities that differ from those of the church, right, like political responsibilities. But, if we set about to establish a Christian (normative/obedient?) state (as a Christian involved in political theory, you are interested in the idea of establishing the kind of state that God intends for His people, right?), then don’t the political responsibilities of those involved in the Christian state fall under the larger responsibility of the Church, which is to live according to God’s Word as a community? People who are living according to God’s Word as a community will take it upon themselves to establish a Christian state, right? (And by Church, I mean the one that God recognizes and we don’t always see.)

If we are to talk of a Christian politics or Christian anything, wouldn’t these activities be activities of the Church? I realize this is where your attempt to more carefully define Church comes in (the distinction between visible and invisible church), so maybe you could reformulate that again according to these comments. Or maybe you could speak further about the way Reformational and Progressive Catholic folks are thinking about these responsibilities now.

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sgassanov
Sep 21 2002
02:26 pm

Yes, the precise definition of “church” becomes crucial here. Your brief comment in brackets – ‘Church’ that God recognizes – suggests what Kuyper would call ‘church as an organism’. That is the body of Xst permeating the entire social body. I am not sure whether it makes sense of talking about subservience of a political body, e.g. the state, to ‘church’ in this sense. Typically, the Reformational people, as well as Catholics and others, also talk about ‘church’ in a sense of an institution. As two disparate institutions, that is state and church, both are responsible directly to God. That was, at least in part, a historical impetus of the Reformers to disentangle the political body from a distorted ‘Caesaropapism’ of some of the medieval arrangements. (All sorts of qualifications need to follow here.)

What I am perceiving in your comments though, Grant, is not dissimilar from the point I am making: if we are to talk about Christian politics at all, there needs to be a sense in which our political theorizing and activism are infused by the ‘sap’ of the Gospel. What I would reject, along with the mainstream Reformational tradition, is to somehow redraw the institutional lines of ‘church’ and ‘political community’ in such a way that would jeopardize their distinctive and INDEPENDENT of each other responsibility before God.

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kstarkenburg
Sep 29 2002
10:36 am

Ok, I think it is time I started asking some questions of Sam. You’ve been falling back on the institutional/organic distinction in order to maintain a positive ontological separation or distinction between the church and state. So, I want to return to this question in a more material way.

What, more specifically, is the purpose of government and its consequent tasks?

What, more specifically, is the purpose of the institutional church and its consequent tasks?

Even more importantly for both, why is that the purpose of the government or the church? This is not so much an epistemological question as a question of why those purposes must be separated into separate institutions. What is the ontological necessity, or the ontological sense, of the separation of their tasks? Is it merely historical? Was Israel as a theocratic worship and governing institution really just an antecedent form that needed to be historically diversified?

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sgassanov
Sep 30 2002
04:17 am

Interesting questions, Keith. I don’t have an answer for some ontological basis on which the institutional separation of ecclesial and political communities is maintained. More importantly, I don’t think there is a persuasive answer. More strongly, any quest for such a basis I would consider misguided. My leanings are toward historicism and particularism, and any theory of institutions that does not reckon with the vicissitudes of history and particularity of culture seems fruitless. So, you can see that for me a historical argument is not a “merely” good one. Let me then give a historical argument for the separation of institutions.

For simplicity of the discussion my case may be well made by appeal to the more recent history, at the time of, say, onslaught of modernity, rise of liberalism, secularization, you know what time frame I am talking about. Sometime after, or with the fragmentation of Christendom (in the wake of the Reformation), the irreducible plurality of what Rawls calls comprehensive doctrines becomes the mark of the age. At that point, the question becomes how is it possible for all of us to get along (and avoiding the strife of, say, religious wars) and yet maintain our integral identity. So, the typical answer has been to envisage a political and legal framework, what the Western jurisprudence calls the rule of law, which would then provide the necessary conditions for the sustained life of communities, like a Christian one. The purpose of civil authority is then to maintain the rule of law and adjudicate the LEGAL boundaries between other institutions of society. The mother-Church, i.e. Catholic church, may then exist along with the proliferation of Protestant denominations, without the two killing each other off. The purpose of the church (I guess you mean as an institution) has been debated since its birth, so I will not join that debate. This entire picture becomes more complicated of course in our post-modern milieu where the politics of recognition and identity prevail. The very legal and political framework is assaulted from various corners as being too restrictive. Whatever the merits of the “rule of law” tradition, it needs to be said that there was, at least, an aspiration to provide an impartial framework of laws in a society characterized by deep and thoroughgoing difference. To entrust the church, or any other “denomination” with procuring the legal and political conditions for all the colorful diversity of the populus is fraught with the dangers that the Federalist papers of the American founders did not foresee: the burdensome rule of the minority.

You give the example of the theocratic gov’t in Israel: need I remind us about the aberrations of that regime portrayed in the book of Joshua? In the name of some expansionist program, allegedly sanctioned by Yahweh, the nation of Israel extinguishes all the inhabitants of the land. Whatever one’s attitude toward the constitutional gov’t and the rule of law, I hope that we heed those historical examples.

Cheers,

Sam.

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sgassanov
Oct 08 2002
02:50 pm

Hey there! I guess my thoughts out loud have been SO deep that it stifled the conversation completely. :))

To throw something else in: I am reading Wolterstorff’s Until Justice and Peace Embrace, and I ’ve encountered his discussion of the rivalry between the Reformed and the Anabaptists on precisely the issue that we have been debating for some time now. (The discussion is somewhere toward the end of the 1st chapter.)

Wolterstorff makes some provocative comments. For instance, he suggests that perhaps the main reason for the “integrationist” model of the Reformed is the triumphalism with which they’ve read the history of Christendom. A related thought (and this is me speaking) is that ever since Calvin, and more importantly in Kuyper, the cultural and political power was too easy to acquire. The Anabaptists, on the other hand, are still bearing the scars on their bodies, so to speak, from the persecutions, etc. Maybe this IS the issue at stake in our entire discussion.

Any thoughts??

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JabirdV
Oct 08 2002
05:19 pm

I guess my question is more in the logistics of the definitions here. Are we speaking of the importance of the church as an institution or are speaking of the importance of the church as a body of believers?

The institution of the church has it’s place in the idea of established accountability and a centralized place of ordered worship, however, worship is a position of the heart towards God…a desire to enter into communion with Him that should be in place every breath that we take and accountability is something that we put ourselves under…not something forced by an institution. Worship and accountability can easily be found in a body of believers who might not assemble in a building every Sabbath. The other perk to the institutional church is the direction of a “head” or pastor who might lead the body and encourage growth by means of ministering through the Word, and by loving his/her congregation as a shepherd. This too can be found in small groups of believers who dig into the scriptures on a routine basis and encourage one another daily as a lifestyle.

The institution defines boundaries and offers direction, whereas the non-institution can become unprotected from doctrinal attacks and become misdirected if there is not a sound Biblical foundation that has been laid. That is not to say that the institutional church has a one up on the small group, but that the small group has a weakness in this area that must be guarded through prayer and biblical wisdom.

Lastly, the institutional church provides a place for the believer to pay financial tithes. In this world there are a considerable amount of ministries to support where you see first hand how your tithes are working for the goodness of God. This forum could be one of them. There is also tithing of time, the giving back to God a portion of the time He has given us.

If the church is required, scripturally, to preach the Word and tend after the widows and orphans, then that is our personal responsibilities and not the responsibility of an institution we may attend or belong to.

Just some thoughts I thought might be poignant to the discussion.