Is the church an idol?
Davis, Charles
A STATEMENT WITH SIX RESPONSES Is the church an idol? CHARLES DAVIS IN Freedom For Ministry (Harper & Row, $8.95), Richard Neuhaus has written a worthy book of advice and exhortation to...
...The history of salvation is not main-line history, nor is it a continuity parallel to main-line history...
...It has the balance, insight and good sense we should expect of someone with the author's personal experience of the Lutheran ministry in the inner city...
...But there is, he asserts, only one church...
...the organizations of the church are subordinate to its institution...
...Those who have come to recognize themselves as excluded from history in the past and present are unlikely to be moved by appeals to the authority of historical institutions and the continuity of tradition...
...CHARLES DAVIS IN Freedom For Ministry (Harper & Row, $8.95), Richard Neuhaus has written a worthy book of advice and exhortation to Christian ministers...
...Nor is there a history of the beliefs and norms by which ordinary Christian people actually lived...
...it rightly has no place in any account of the permanent institutions of those nations...
...but the purely religious institution, possessed of authority and historical continuity, is the sham...
...The author himself designates his book as "a critical affirmation of the church and its mission," and his treatment of the theoretical and practical problems of the Christian ministry is based upon a clearly articulated and strongly held belief in the church...
...The poor everywhere are outside the movement of history...
...It is not in that sense a history at all, but a repeated .apocalyptic subversion of history through its intersection by a saving power and a faith-vision...
...The nonparticipation of religious faith directs the search for meaning away from the continuity of human history to discontinuous paradigmatic configurations, uniting scattered events of the past with happenings of the present, joining the forgotten, the slain, the victims of the past with the poor and oppressed of the present, finding a source and center of meaning in their protest...
...They are outside its design...
...The apocalyptic lightning-flashes group together people and events unnoticed by and consequently nonexistent for the mighty of this world...
...It promises without delivering, and its evasive dexterity leaves them doubting their own common sense perceptions...
...On the other hand, in its substantial content, the book does not say anything particularly new...
...People will perhaps come to realize that what they were rejecting was not merely the individual outlook and policy of Pope Paul VI, but the very conception that a man (women will here emphasize the gender) should claim to make declarations of belief and lay down norms of conduct on their behalf without their full participation in the formation of those beliefs and norms...
...It is the assimilation of protest and the claiming of transcendence as a piece of property in possession...
...The force of his statement on the church has challenged my own position and compelled me to analyze why I still remain in disagreement...
...It will not be a history, but a configuration of discrete, paradigmatic events...
...It is for this reason that many people can abide "critical" ecclesiology a good deal less than the old conservative variety...
...Despite the different denominational voice, I could parallel most of it from books I read when preparing for the priesthood some thirty or so years ago...
...What, then, is his concept of the church...
...We do need spiritual leaders, people who can open our minds and hearts to a new vision, but such leaders should not sit on thrones nor wear the trappings of authority, nor should they tell us that our freedom consists in accepting a teaching and a history which are not and have never been ours...
...And yet, and yet: through all this, millions of people are receiving a more adequate and truthful view of the world than they might otherwise have (p...
...It is to be hoped that the personal qualities and intelligence of Pope John Paul II will highlight for many the unacceptability of the papacy as an institution—a first step on the way of recognizing the unacceptability of the church...
...The fact that he writes from a Lutheran, not a Catholic perspective, makes his challenge more fundamental...
...TO BEGIN WITH, the "relentless criticism" advertised by Neuhaus and others is a sham, because what is shouted with one breath is quietly taken back with the next breath...
...The church defined theologically and the church defined sociologically are one and the same: the two accounts are two descriptions of the one Christian people...
...What, for example, do we know of the actual sexual morality as lived by Christian married people in the past, as distinct from what the ruling clerical elite was telling them to think and do...
...First, we should not identify the real church with what now exists...
...I see no reason to suppose that destructive activities carried on by churches do not in fact destroy, and the efficacy of destructive church activities in warding off even more destructive activities has to be shown, not simply piously assumed...
...It would take a book fully to follow up all the lines of thought now pulling my mind...
...It was an isolated, discrete event of no significance within national or imperial history...
...Bluntly, the ability to swallow every criticism, every objection, without its being allowed to affect one's commitment is for me the sign of an absolute and therefore idolatrous commitment to the church as an institution...
...There is and can be no continuous history of heresy and dissidence as there is a history of orthodoxy...
...I am prepared to participate in the ongoing life of my society, acknowledging the compromises that inevitably involves...
...Even though, of course, "there is ever so much in the empirical church of which we must be relentlessly critical" (p...
...Religious faith is not a separate sphere of human activity and endeavor, and for that reason it finds its institutional expressions not apart from but within the secular institutions of society...
...If that means anything at all, it is equivalent to saying that historically the church has done more harm than good—an admission I find impossible to reconcile with the general contention that it does more good than harm...
...Really...
...Hence one can belong to any denomination, provided the particular group does not separate itself from the larger body...
...The blacks in America cannot see American history as culminating with themselves...
...In viewing the church in terms of possibility and promise, we are not parting from reality but simply embracing the greater reality...
...I know that sociologists, legitimately for their purposes, give religion a wider definition and scope, but I want to reject much that usually comes under the heading of religion...
...The penalty for idolatry is unreality, because of the nothingness of idols...
...That is to confuse institutional collapse with the way of the Cross and to indulge in a nostalgia for the catacombs...
...Certainly not in the form of a stable institution with a structure of authority and a continuous history...
...They rightly see such appeals as an invitation to heteronomy, not an indication of a source of personal and social liberation...
...He considers that thinking about the church suffers from a prevalent antiinstitutionalism...
...How many obsolete social institutions in history have been supported beyond their time by admitting all the harm they do, but arguing that without them things would be even worse...
...Possibility and promise, when real and not imaginary, are rooted in present reality, not an excuse for its absence...
...This is a ruling-class pattern of social order, however mystified by appeals to divinely-bestowed authority...
...I am reminded of the Catholic theologian, Metz, who tried to define the church as the institution of social-critical freedom, while at the same time admitting that there has hardly been a single idea of critical societal importance that has not at least once been disallowed by the institutions of historical Christianity (Theology of the World, p. 117...
...For me personally it renewed all the impact of the objections previously made to me by many / February 1980: 45 whose own commitment I admired, objections to the effect that my protest would have been of greater service had I remained within the institution and that to leave was to enter into a barren desert as far as the Christian life was concerned...
...It is the partial actualization of the reality of the Kingdom" (p...
...Neuhaus's language and examples have a Protestant flavor, but the same attempt to have it both ways is found in Catholic writers...
...To declare otherwise is a pretense...
...A short laudatory notice would therefore meet the bill, and indeed a short notice was all that this reviewer was asked for...
...Those who are now on top can see history as leading to themselves...
...I have felt those objections strongly in the past...
...It does not seem to occur to those who claim religious authority that things might be a great deal better if ordinary people were allowed the freedom that belongs to them as human subjects...
...Or, to put it in another way: what is truly creative in the order of prophecy is "on behalf of and not against a great tradition'' (p...
...The drift of what I am saying is that the whole Catholic concept of the church, shared, as we have seen from Neuhaus, more or less by other Christian churches, to the effect that the Christian people, the redeemed community, is embodied in a stable institution, with an official ministry, a hierarchy of authority and a continuous meaningful tradition from its origins to the present, is just a religious transposition of the structure of domination that has determined and still determines the very conception of human history as well as its ongoing course...
...Not religious faith itself...
...The consequence is plain:' 'Secular or churchless Christianity must be rejected because in fact there is no Christianity apart from the historical community that bears its truth, however inadequately" (p...
...IS THERE, then, no institutional expression of nonparticipation and subversion...
...132...
...Human beings cannot live socially, let alone create highly civilized societies, without establishing institutions, which by definition are stable formations...
...It runs into contradiction with the growing self-understanding many have of themselves as full human subjects of their social and individual existence, even though they are largely prevented from putting it into effect...
...104—Neuhaus's emphases...
...The defeated, the oppressed, the slaves, the poor do not constitute the flow of history, but are in the stream as unconnected eddies, which check but do not alter the onward movement of the main current...
...Nevertheless, earnest reflection has left me unconvinced—still the unrepentant outsider, despite the fact that the welcome given me again and again by Catholics has frequently tempted me to slip without fuss into a renewed if informal membership...
...What they have to do is to recover in memory some of the forgotten women and their actions, which history has not succeeded in fully erasing, and form those discrete elements into a constellation of meaning that stands over against the continuity of history and rejects its pattern of meaning...
...Let me admit that the case thus made out for the church as an institution is most plausible...
...Commonweal: 48...
...But there is no other historical continuum...
...Social institutions are a necessary part of human existence, but they must not claim religious authority...
...Human history in its continuity is the history of the victors not of the vanquished, of the oppressors not of the oppressed, of the rulers not of their subjects, of the successful not of the failures...
...The book, not surprisingly, seeing that Neuhaus was one of the originators of the Hartford Appeal of 1975, contains an emphatic affirmation of the church as a manifestation of transcendence and a repeated denunciation of all those (sometimes identified as "theologians of liberation") who lose or obscure that transcendence by seeking a conformity with modem thought or values...
...It liberated, not by capturing the flow of history— indeed, it lost much of its liberating power when the rulers of history captured it...
...Here I shall simply try to indicate the more insistent...
...it is not their history...
...I prefer my economics and politics straight, without the dilution of the religious mix, which I think is rightly seen as a cover-up...
...An outsider does feel isolated and ineffectual, and, since oddity is always open to mockery, somewhat ridiculous...
...It runs against the grain of human history...
...That it is which is a deceit and illusion...
...By freedom I mean the actualization of human beings, men and women, as creative subjects, participating together in the project of making a world corresponding to human needs and interests, which I am not limiting to the material and secular...
...The People of God or the redeemed community of the Spirit is a scattered people, a diaspora...
...As liberating, it became the center of a new configuration, which grouped and conferred meaning upon people scattered throughout past, present and future that had no history, because they were the poor and oppressed of this world...
...We should not regret that the church is institutionally strong...
...So far the ongoing course of human history has been a succession of patterns of domination...
...I risk, therefore, being unfair in using this book with its limited objective as a foil for a general critique of the church and its credibility...
...That all the discrete configurations of meaning will somehow all fit together in the end is a hope for the eschaton, not to be sought as realized in the continuity of any historical institution...
...As regards its purpose, the church or Christian institution is in service to the Kingdom...
...I am identifying religious faith with the moment of nonparticipation that reaches a transcendence present as limiting all human institutions, which as transcendence cannot be separately institutionalized without contradiction...
...It represents the appropriation of the hope of the poor by whatever happens to be the ruling class...
...All institutional religion is a part of the economic, social and political order...
...Their liberation must be by the creation of a new pattern of meaning, standing over against the flow of events...
...In more detail: "It is the purpose of the church to sight, to signal, to support, and to celebrate the future of all human kind...
...This is what it means to say the church is a sacrament...
...106...
...These come and go...
...The contradiction I want to uncover and protest against is in the conception of a purely religious, stable institution...
...These institutions are never perfect, are always open to criticism and change...
...The poor have no history...
...Hie familiar procedure of heartily admitting, with vivid description, all that is objectionable, but then declaring that, deplorable though the defects might be, they leave the essential intact is found quite early on in Neuhaus's book: To be sure, we all deplore the superficiality, the cheap grace, the caricature of Christian discipleship that mark some of the most successful peddling of the gospel in our time...
...Hence Neuhaus rejects the idea that the church has to die before it can rise again...
...It has simply reflected or reinforced whatever has been the contemporary pattern1 of domination...
...Yes, I agree with all that, but it does not meet the point of my objection to the church...
...But for me religious faith is the factor of non-participation, the refusal to be recruited, the denial that the ongoing movement of history, which is in the interests of some but not of all, which is governed by power and not by love, represents the meaning and end of human existence...
...The ruling Christian tradition in its institutional forms and collective, social action, as distinct from its verbal professions of belief, has by and large not acted so as to release all human beings, men and women, to become free subjects, acting together in responsible co-operation and mutual respect to create a worthy human existence...
...The continuity of Christian history, like that of states and empires, is that of the victorious orthodox, not of the defeated heretics, that of the ruling elites, not of their subjects...
...The very conception of history as a continuum with a goal is a ruling-class conception...
...At the same time, protest also expresses itself socially in unstable and transitory groups and movements...
...Two points qualify the general affirmation...
...Later on in the book he writes: "It is probably fair to say that, as often as not, the communal life of Christians has obscured rather than signaled the love of God" (p...
...My own assessment of the Christian church in both its history and present existence corresponds to the negative admissions of Neuhaus, Metz and its other defenders: namely, that it has obscured rather than manifested Christian love and other Christian values...
...Those who claim spiritual rule always say that it is for the good of ordinary people, who, it is understood, cannot be trusted if left to themselves...
...We must not identify the church as an institution with a particular form of organization...
...History is and has been the denial of their human subjecthood...
...The struggle for human freedom has no stable institutions...
...yet, it is only in and through them that we can effectively act for human development and liberation...
...Despite all its defects, it is on the whole for the good of millions of people...
...Let me explain, because a further precision is indeed needed...
...In other words, it is false to put the "true church" over against the empirical church...
...Again, institution is not to be equated with organization...
...The attempt to house it in a permanent institution is a disguised imprisonment or at least a bid to domesticate die Spirit and thus soften the subversive demands of human freedom...
...Would anything be left of the Catholic church in America if it gave up its property and thus severed its involvement in American I February 1980: 47 business...
...It is the failure to recognize the institutional church for what it is as deeply involved in the structure and functioning of society that makes reading ecclesiology like entry into a massive and complex lie or being lost in a maze of illusion...
...The opposite of freedom is when participation in the common human enterprise is blocked or hindered by a structure of domination that denies to some—in historical fact, to the greater number—their full dignity as human subjects, excluding them from the right and the means of sharing in the making of the human world...
...doing my best, but sadly aware that I am inevitably implicated in a history of injustice and oppression...
...Surely, a policy of nonparticipation is a withdrawal from the human enterprise into a helpless passivity or destructive negativity...
...Those who are seduced into unconditional loyalty are lost in an unreal world, in which images and talk of the People of God cloak membership of socially backward and often harmful institutions...
...The hustling that dominates "the electronic church'' of religious broadcasting, the mile-long cathedrals of glass made possible by the avoidance of controversy, the multimillion dollar commerce in books that reinforce every prejudice and stereotype—all this is repugnant on many scores...
...History is an account of the official teaching and the imposed norms...
...If we understand history as the ongoing course of social actions and events, interpreted in such a way that the significant past is taken as what has led to and is in continuity with the social present, then women in the world, like the blacks in America, have no history...
...AM I not falling into a naive anti-institutionalism...
...Reading Neuhaus's book renewed their force, probably not just by itself, but helped by the context of the election of Pope John Paul II and the prevailing sense that the Catholic church was about to move out of the stagnation and partial reversal that followed Vatican II...
...The victorious orthodox like other conquerors have suppressed the heretical witnesses, but in any event there was no continuity, but instead discontinuous though conCommonweal: 46 stantly renewed instances of refusal, rebellion and protest...
...It is worth noting that Neuhaus's defense of the church, like that of many others, parallels the argument previously made by the defenders of paternalistic absolute monarchy as a social system: namely, that, despite all its abuses and defects, it is for the good of millions of ordinary people...
...I RECOGNIZE that in asking for a different history I am asking for what is sociologically impossible from any permanent institution that being permanent represents the continuity of history...
...My own contention is that the churches are an obstacle to the development of sound relationships and activities, and it has, I think, at least as much going for it as the assumption that without the churches things would be far worse than they are...
...Neuhaus himself gives the game away by making a greater admission than his defense can consistently allow...
...I suggest that religious faith as a permanent attitude of non-participation finds indirect social expression in the struggle to keep social and political institutions open and in the refusal to accept their claims to totality...
...Excluded from institutional expression, their lives have been forgotten and have no history...
...However, Neuhaus has to bear part responsibility for provoking the present reflections...
...The crucifixion was not part of the flow of either Jewish or Roman history...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 2
