Church Membership and Models

...Nixon is more easily tracked down than the Lord of the universe...

...What had once been esteemed was now decried...

...The conciliar ecclesiology put an end to these comfortable views, and it set up a movement which carried individuals and groups into novel and unforeseen areas...

...On the other side, the boundary became so fuzzy and floating that one hardly knew whether it was being crossed or not...

...If its claims were being scaled down, it was because they had been exaggerated...

...At a stroke identity was tested and affirmed...

...It seems likely that it will, although the little groups need intellectual stiffening and some sort of relationship to the larger institution...

...Faith is a stance, a posture, a fundamental attitude...

...It speedily became apparent that "Church," far from being univocal, was a richly plastic notion, capable of being pushed this way or that and made to serve various purposes, some of them ideological...

...But to say that is already to select a model...

...It is a matter of clarifying fundamental concepts and the interrelationships which exist among them...

...Their subculture flowered, with many national nuances, as a means of expressing, adorning and making bearable the norms and values which made this group so special, privileged and different...

...Consequently it does not demand of the believer more than that he too should be on the way, that he should set off on his pilgrim journey, firm only in hope, confident that in some sense yet to be made manifest Christ holds the key to human existence...

...But like all inferences, the evidence is circumstantial...

...if it now seemed more modest, that was because it had been arrogant...

...They wonder if there is any point or purpose to being and remaining a Christian...

...In Italy they go under the name of "alternative Church...

...Roman Catholics were urged to pride themselves on being different...

...6) '"Practical" models, finally, dismiss such ecclesiological discussions as vain, and find the true reality of the Church in the active service of the world...

...In one sense this is a rigorous and demanding position, since it supposes a perpetual conversion and reconversion, but it is nevertheless compatible with relatively unstrenuous demands since it does not expect the Church to be other than flawed, imperfect and incomplete...

...Of course, as always happens in ecclesiology, there was a delicate interplay between the real and the ideal, and it was the highest hopes that were likely to be most cruelly dashed...

...Faith infers the reality of God from reality itself...

...Praxis is all...

...Avery Dulles has usefully distinguished six models of the Church...

...PETER HEBBLETHWAITE is /ormer editor o/ the British Catholic publication, The Month...

...It is the contrast between the overground and the underground church, or the parish and the pentecostal Church, and the latter become the norm by which the former are judged...

...We can consider them in turn and see how membership fares in each...

...They assure nervous audiences of parents that the job of the religious educator is not to teach the views of modern theologians but to teach the faith, indeed "to teach as Jesus did" (the title of one of the American bishops' recent catechetical documents...

...I could cite actual statements and identify the speakers, but that would serve no useful purpose...

...Membership, therefore, is by aspiration and self-description, since no Church official is competent to decide whether you qualify...

...To say "It all depends on your model" may not seem very satisfactory, yet it is more honest than rushing flat-footedly in...

...Models and criteria combine to form the most variegated and confusing patterns of expectation and response...

...It was regarded as a source of inspiration for social or political commitment...

...The repentant future was to be different...

...Sometimes this secularization of faith is a last stage on the journey towards unbelief which can delay the inevitable, but not prevent it...

...The true Church is absent, elsewhere...

...instead of the notion that the Church was a "perfect society," we admitted that it was sinful and perpetually in need of reform...

...In some such terms one could roughly summarize the Council's achievement in ecclesiology...

...It is quite possible that what is alternative will become mainstream, as the larger institution is revivified from below...

...Ruether: the Church has still to be invented, and so the cultural conversation, which is the workshop in which it will be forged, must go on as broadly as possible...

...In this essay I propose a way out of the problem...

...They are known, and competent religious educators do not take them seriously any longer...

...You might stray far off or become a terrible sinner, but you remained a citizen and were still firmly held...

...On the other hand, many groups, lacking internal consistency, can be expected to peter out quietly...

...My thesis may be summarized in this fashion: faith is not theology is not belief...

...Opponents dismiss this position as horizontalism and predict for it a short life...

...But ideological contamination would then have to be unmasked...

...But they also tended to be as liberal as they could so as not to discourage anyone of good will, and one method was simply to broaden the boundaries...

...In assimilating them, as the early Christian community did with Greek wisdom and Roman law, we may realize some of that catholicity we lay claim to...

...When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less...

...Charles Davis thought not: he found himself unable to redefine the Roman Catholic Church in such a way as to count himself in...

...But it would be wrong to assume in advance that no flowers grow in episcopal gardens, while all is in bloom elsewhere...

...1 ) The "substantialist" position starts from the stable, unchanging, unyielding institution against which the waves of error lash in vain...

...lmpasse An impasse seems to have been reached...

...There is no reason such disciplines cannot be adapted to fire-making in the Christian sense...

...The test of membership is conformity to clearly-held and firmly-defined doctrines, and it is the task of Church officials to see that they are maintained in their entirety, and that those who reject or adulterate the doctrines should, after due compassion has been shown, be excluded...

...For it were substituted several more or less Commonweal: 131 articulate views of the Church, not always mutually consistent with each other, which reflected the aspirations of the age, impatience with what had gone before and the experience of Protestants...

...but it is exposed to the "temptation of ~litism" insofar as the privileged group can be closed to "outsiders" (through no fault of its own, it will hasten to explain...

...But the collapse of preconciliar ecclesiology did not mean simply its one-to-one replacement by another ecclesiology...

...Perhaps all that talk about boundaries, even extended ones, was misleading, a relic of the Roman mania for definition...

...the good stranger is not...

...They do not ask what is the Church...

...and instead of contrasting Church and world, we were exhorted to share the hopes and joys of humanity...

...Roman documents generally continue to take a "substantialist" model as their starting-point, but then go on to modify its harshness by calling on elements borrowed from elsewhere, especially from "actualist" and "eschatologicar' models...

...But concealed within this question of boundaries lay another, still graver, question: Is it enough for the individual or a group to declare that this is where they are going to place the frontier, and that they include themselves in saying l'~glise, c'est nous...

...It is a judgment of faith that reality is more than the sum total of persons, places, things and events which constitute both history and the cosmos...

...A twitch on the thread of the Divine Angler could bring you back...

...To say, or to imply, that the Church itself was the object of faith was blasphemy: it was the milieu of faith, its mediating community...

...3) However, there is another form of "dualism" which has been very popular among Catholics in the last decade...

...Few demands are made as a condition of membership, other than a general willingness to "share in the experience...

...and it is not absurd on this model to start from considerable agnosticism and to hope that participation will eventually "lead somewhere...

...1. Faith is not theology...

...and to make it quite clear why she was shifting the boundary, she went on: "In this way we can keep the creative work of many people within the cultural conversation which shapes the future" ("Continuing Reform after Vatican II," in The Month, March 1973, p. 96...

...Meanwhile, it is the existence of overlapping and sometimes competing models---all sketches of a possible future--which makes the question "Am I a Catholic...

...It has been widely predicted, by Karl Rahner among others, that the Church of the future will take this path...

...In the meantime, however, many innocent bystanders remain confused...

...In the terminology of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearings, there is no "smoking pistol" by which the God-problem finds its definitive resolution...

...Where is your baptismal certificate...

...This is despite the fact that models 2-6 have FATHER DAVID S. TOOLAN, S.J., teaches in the Religious Studies Department at Canisius College in Buffalo...

...In this new situation very little thought was given to the question of "membership" in the Church...

...Faith apprehends the "beyond in our midst" (Bonhoeffer), the "other dimension" (Dupr6), the ultimaey of secular experience (Gilkey), the Ground of being (Tillich...

...Instead of being valued as a haven of security, the Church was praised for exhibiting signs of vigorous, if turbulent life...

...Neither credal statements nor union with Christ nor eucharistic participation are the tests of membership, but rather the commitment to justice and brotherhood...

...5) "Eschatologicar' models declare in effect that the true Church is nowhere to be found on earth, and that the best can be hoped for of any particular group of Christians is that they should be on the way towards their goal...

...nor are they concerned with where it might be...

...On the substantialist model, it is clear who is in, and who out...

...P6guy was brought in to emphasize the objective nature of belonging to the Church: "The bad citizen is of the city...

...so difficult to answer today...

...At any rate, this model solves the problem of membership with aplomb: membership is by affinity and sympathy, and it would seem fastidious to introduce doctrinal tests apart from general affirmations of the type "Jesus is the Lord...

...It is 15 November 1974:134...

...It is difficult to distinguish this position from other forms of purely political commitment, except that it brings to them a veneer of Christian motivation...

...In theory I could secretly belong to this invisible Church in the silence of my heart...

...In Holland Huub Oosterhuis devised a Eucharistic Prayer "for a time of doubting" which demands of its participants nothing more than a general sense .that life has dimensions of significance to which we ought to attend...

...Most intellectually committed Christians start from models other than the "substantialist" one, but may then find that they have to claw their way back there, at least for some minimum of "substance," in order to preserve some semblance of identity in the chill deserts of absolute openness...

...Groping replaced definition...

...4) "Actualist" models see the Church not as an institution but as an event...

...FATHER RICHARD P. MCBRIEN teaches theology at Boston College and is the author o] Do We Need the Church...

...The strategy to which B6ll alludes is a familiar one: you are not allowed to say a word in criticism of the institution because it is really the Mystical Body of Christ, and who would wish to find himself in opposition to so august a reality...

...In any case, since this view requires membership in the institution as a passport to the Mystical Body, it does not differ from the substantialist position on the question of membership...

...Moreover, it became fashionable in the late '60s not to know, and to compare the complacency of would-be certainties with the sincerity of inarticulacy...

...This model can appeal to and renew the most ancient tradition: ubi eucharistia, ibi ecclesia...

...but then this spiritual idea was juridicized to an extraordinary degree...

...As anyone familiar with our nearly forgotten mystical tradition is aware, many of these Eastern ways are not indeed at all foreign to what was once a living force among us...

...What people expected of the Church also began to change...

...Instead of the quasi-identification of the realized Kingdom with the Church--which led straight down the path of triumphalism--we were to stress its pilgrim and unfinished nature, always on the move...

...15 November 1974:132 However, there is a Catholic version of this model, to which Heinrich B6ll recently drew our attention...

...It is as though there were two Churches, one, like Rip van Winkle, which has fallen into slumber, and another that is meaningful and lively...

...Rosemary Radford Ruether gave such perfect expression to this strategy that she must be quoted here: "One creates a larger boundary for that social reality called Roman Catholicism which can encompass those whom a narrow institutional definition would keep out...

...In an interview he said: "You know that there are two definitions of the Church: on the one hand the institution (which I detest because of its tie-up with the bourgeoisie) and on the other the Mystical Body...

...The shadow of a question mark hovers ominously over everything in sight...

...The real Church, wherever it is, is the Church that sweats...

...2) "Dualist" models make a distinction between, on the one hand, the Church as we know it on earth, the concrete community of believers, and the invisible Church which alone is held to be the real Church...

...The next decade was filled with the shock waves from these simple, fundamental and necessary options...

...I re[use to play the game of eternally justifying the first by appealing to the second" (Commonweal, May 10, 1974...

...It was more creditable to stammer than to be eloquent...

...The advantages and dangers of the latter are of course more familiar to most of us, and so we cling to what we know, but the former approach is de rigueur in many Eastern anti-traditional traditions ("if you meet the Buddha, kill him...

...It used to be claimed that Roman Catholics were more fortunate than others, not of course because of their merits, but because a complete system of grace-bearing sacraments accompanied them from the cradle to the grave as a kind of celestial social security...

...It goes without saying that these models of the Church are rarely found in a chemically pure state, and that consequently the criteria of membership which they imply do not usually operate in isolation...

...This miracle was worked, antecedent to choice, thanks to something called ex opere operato...

...Of course, the church will itself be changed in form by the process, perhaps more radically than we now imagine...

...they ask rather when is the Church...

...The question was often a prelude to tip-toeing away or discovering that integrity without faith was better than faith without integrity...

...This is an attractive and highly plausible position, since it is a fact that most people really do discover the Church in small groups rather than in crowds...

...The contrast is made between the tedium of ordinary parish life and the vivid, vigorous life of small face-to-face groups...

...Harper & Row...

...That America is going Hindu or Buddhist (with the usual complement of frauds and romantic sentimentality) may just be one of the best things that ever happened to the Christian churches here...

...We are now long past the time when such purveyors of gross theological distortions have to be exposed...

...But inference is, after all, something to go on...

...There is a place for the "listening" friends whose "yes" to this historically continuous community is qualified by hesitations and questionings...

...Commonweal: 13J clearly been inspired by Protestant theology, but that no longer sends a chill down the spine...

...Changing concepts CHURCH MEMBERSHIP AND MODELS PETER HEBBLETHWAITE A T FIRST it looked as though the Church was merely being put in its place, in its proper place...

...The people, not the bishops, define the social reality which they choose to call Roman Catholicism" (ibM...

...It can and frequently does combine with the previous model...

...It was said to be an area of freedom...

...In other words, conciliar ecclesiology relativ~zed the Church in a healthy manner...

...They banished a whole library full of once'cherished apologetic arguments...

...In that sense I agree with Ms...

...Most pastors were sympahetic, and would seize the opportunity to try to redefine faith in terms of personal commitment rather than assent to a set of propositions...

...Faith is a way of perceiving reality...

...They were also alleged to be more fortunate because they "knew what they stood for," unlike (it must be assumed) other Christians who were still arguing about what to stand for...

...Each of the models (except for 2) has something positive to contribute to the rich and complex and unfinished idea of the Church...

...which have evolved disciplines for making it a path to the highest spiritual transformation...

...That is why one of the most significant facts of the decade was that people began to use values learned from the Church as the yardstick by which to criticize it and find it wanting: human values, discovered in personal experience, were contrasted with the vast, unwieldy ponderousness of the impersonal institution...

...And the answer is usually that "Church" is given in the breaking of bread or the experience of brotherhood...

...The question was avoided partly because it could prove awkward or embarrassing, though late at night in Newman Centers students would ask: "How much do I have to believe in order to remain a Catholic with sincerity...

...Ruether has no doubt about her answer to this question, and it is a populist answer: "In a real sense . . . it is the bishops who become the excommunicated, while a thousand flowers bloom in the open fields around their fortresses...

...The one true Church has four marks by which she can be recognized, and though other Christian groups may exhibit some Christian values, they do so only vestigially...

...But can one so coolly shift the frontier, rather in the manner of peasants stealthily removing the boundary stones at night...

...Teaching as Jesus d i d ? ' FAITH, THEOLOGY AND BELIEF RICHARD P . MeDRIEN I HAVE been convinced for some time that the source of many, if not most, of the troubles in the Catholic Church today is our stubborn failure to discern the differences among faith, theology and belief Many Catholics who should know better (even a cardinal or two may come readily to mind) continue to insist that faith and belief are somehow independent of theology...

...On the whole, this is not a model much used by Roman Catholics, since they tend to have an incarnational sense that the real Church cannot be placed somewhere else in a dream-like world...

...You were marked, sealed, branded--all images legitimately derived from the sphragis or seal of the Spirit...

...and perhaps, too, the Quakers are right to distinguish grades of membership...

...There was some truth in the remark that only those of a "conservative" bent "left" the Church, since they retained some regard for definition and clarity...

...The person of faith "sees" more than meets the eye...

...If that means more fire-makers, it will be a good thing...

...In the end, the question of Church membership can only be answered in the light of the implicit image or model which is being used...

...The person of faith discerns those "signals of transcendence" (Berger) intermingled with the sights and sounds, the sensations and the smells of ordinary, everyday human experience...

...When this happens, it is usually because different people are arguing from different premises...