2. The Church as Public: Doctrine, Practice, and the Holy Spirit
I. The Eclipse of the Church in Modernity.
The dynamics of advance modernity seem to be forcing the church in America (especially Protestantism) in two directions: either toward an ever intensified understanding of faith as an essentially private gnosis or experience made "relevant" through various subject-related activities or toward more and more objectified forms of faith - as especially in fundamentalist biblicism or traditionalist ecclesiasticism. Common to both of these Christian reactions to modernity's forces of dissolution is that the church as a genuine "public" is eclipsed.
Yet we might very well ask why this should be deemed an important issue at all. What is lost if the church is just an association of religiously interested individuals? Under the conditions of modernity, can the church be anything other than a private association - and even if so, can it be a "public" in any full sense?
[...] II. The Protestant Church - an Oxymoron?
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The thesis I am going to argue in this chapter is that it is essential for the church to be a "public." When the church is not characterized by those aspects that constitute it as a public in its own right, the church is a church in crisis. It is not God's crisis; rather, it is a crisis self-inflicted by the church's accommodation to modernity's norm for the organization of a public that is shaped by the liberal nation-state and the free market.
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As a political project, modernity is constituted by a particular way of organizing the "private" and the "public" that entails the dichotomizing - and thereby the effective taming - of religion. On the one hand is a "civil religion" destined to justify and stabilize the project of a liberal society. On the other hand are those idiosyncratic opinions that particular individuals and traditions might hold on their own. The latter are strictly relegated to the realm of privacy. The freedom of religion becomes, for individuals, the right of privacy in religious opinions and, for the church, the "right" to exist in denominations - which is synonymous with the crisis of the church as public. This politico-religious context, in which the church as public has to a high degree been eroded or even lost, makes it imperative that the church explicitly claim its public character as a nota ecclesiae, an essential mark of the church.
The central contention of my argument here will be that the church has to break out of the iron cage of privatism set up by modernity's specific way of defining "private" and "public" in order fully to be the church. The church is either fully church and thereby a public in its own right or a bundle of denominations. So the key question concerns what a public is and how a public is constituted. I will argue that any public is constituted by binding teachings and practices.
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III. Objectivism versus Subjectivism: The Peterson-Harnack Impasse
The correspondence between Peterson and Harnack reflects in a paradigmatic way two reactions to Christianity's existence under the conditions of an increasingly secularized modernity. On the one hand, Harnack give in to secularity and espouses an essentially individualistic and relativistic perspective:
What will become of the Evangelical Church, I do not know; but, as you correctly state, I can only welcome the development which leads more and more to independence and purely intentional community in the sense - I do not shrink from this - of Quakerism and Congregationalism....We will indeed find a way and forms free of ecclesiastical absolutism (absolutism only has a place in a lively spirit) - of course in the meantime we are still severely dependent on the remains of Catholic tradition among us, as it were, on the aroma of an empty bottle, and I am also not of the opinion that we should intentionally hasten the process, which will proceed slowly but surely, of its own accord.
All that remains is nonbinding moral exhortation and voluntary association with those who hold similar convictions - of whatever sort. The church as distinct, identifiable public disappears.
On the other hand, there is Peterson's option, the return to Roman Catholicism, a step he took, after long hesitation and inner struggle, on December 25, 1930. Peterson raises the question of the church under the conditions of modernity. If the Protestant church has lost its public character by being disestablished (whether culturally or politically) and by increasingly being pressed into modes of privacy, can it still be church?
It is worthwhile to listen to Peterson's analysis of modern Protestantism in Germany:
It seems at first sight one of the most astonishing features of modern Protestantism that it stands in alienated, uncomprehending opposition, not only to Catholicism - which at least makes psychological sense - but to its own past in traditional Protestantism, and, let it be noted, not just in "liberal" circles, but today quite generally, even among those of the so-called "positive" theology. The only way to grasp this incomprehension is to realize that the ontological basis of Protestantism has changed. The civil and public character of the Protestant church and theology, which was essentially definitive for traditional Protestantism, has vanished with the extinction of the Christian state, that is, of a confessionally defined territory. Along with it, the dialectical relationship to the Catholic church and to Catholic theology with its authentically ecclesiastical public character has been dislodged. As I see it, a good part of the development of the Protestant church makes sense in light of this slippage in the foundations.
Peterson's analysis is, I think, of considerable importance for understanding some aspects of the dynamics internal to mainline Protestantism in the Western world. Having lost itself as a distinct public, mainline Protestantism is constantly in search of its own relevance in that public that is the currently determining and normative one, namely, that of secular society. Peterson anticipated already in 1928 the three dominant ways in which current mainline Protestantism makes itself "relevant" in this public: rationalism, mysticism, and activism - until quite recently the three most popular strands of American mainline Protestant theology. Yet Peterson's insight is suggestive beyond anticipating the major trends of contemporary Protestant theology: his insight suggests a crucial link between Protestantism's lack of a public nature and its ongoing crisis of relevance. The very collapse of its public character might be the reason that American mainline Protestantism took the national project of America as its subject matter, overcoming its crisis of relevance by becoming culturally established as civil religion. And accordingly, it is the loss of precisely this status as civil religion that has thrown mainline Protestantism into a renewed crisis of relevance in the last decades. Only by becoming itself a distinct public can mainline Protestantism overcome this systemic crisis of relevance. But then again, mainline Protestantism is not a church but a conglomerate of loosely affiliated denominations.
The glue holding together the panorama of so-called "evangelical" or "free" churches today is not their membership in a common "public," nor their possession of a common dogmatic corpus, or a shared history, or shared practices. They are, quite modernly (think Hegel, at least via Adorno) defined by their shared list of negations, by what they're not, more than any common affirmation. (One of the only common affirmations seems to be the tool or instrument of their negations). Indeed, in the end, what often seems to define them as a common subculture is a shared mood, expressed often in a shared form of worship as lecture-and-entertainment. This mood is the logical end of the dissolution of the "public" that Hütter talks about above. Because the Protestant Revivalists are defined and determined by those forces that have disengaged them from their representative role as cultural stewards, the only option left is to baptize the remaining glue of social feeling left in our commercial environment.
If, as Hütter argues, doctrine (or dogma -- I can't recall how he parses the two out, one of the two, I think dogma, is something like the local communion's expression of the non-negotiable deposit given over in doctrine) provides the Spirit-given grammar of the Spirit-infused conversation that the particular communion has with itself (and I don't know that I accept this formulation, as perhaps it collapses the Spirit into the community's conversation too much, though I do affirm that the Spirit guides the Church, even if she is only a remnant, as with St. Athanasius and St. Maximus), then there can be no community-conversation without a shared group of dogmas. This seems clear and self-evident to me. Thus, the Protestant Revivalist world, lacking a polis or a "public" which would possess a shared grammar of dogma to explicate and give sense to a common practice, has only a shared mood, with a shared practice -- the stage, taken from the secular canopy that defines them.
There are a number of things that must happen within the American context among us who are in the Orthodox Catholic Church. We do not need to abolish the current political system or anything like that, but we do need to find a way of translating our faith and practice into this context - for the Life of the World. To be a nation of priests ministering to those about us requires that we first know ourselves as a nation in exile, as pilgrims and strangers - and not just say this with our lips, but arrange our lives accordingly. The Church is not the religious institution of a given public, as the mainline Protestant churches were when established and sometime thereafter, until the media became the locus of public feeling and acquired determining power. The Church is a public. Neither is it a religious affiliation of individuals -- the unity Christ calls us to is not only a "spiritual" unity, but a political one, and not the unity of a voluntarily affiliated "religious group."
The Orthodox Church is not in danger of ceasing to become the Church, as its life is not subject to a public who keep it around for other purposes. The Orthodox Church is a public, it is a people, defined ultimately by the Spirit of Christ. Thus, though the lives of individual Orthodox may reflect the determining influence of a cultural context that is not the Polity or City of the Church herself, this is not normative, not is it understood to be proper. I recently read that a member of the British House of Lords rebuked a bishop who said something contrary to the tone and content of the House's general stance on some matter, saying "your job [as Anglican bishops] is to keep up and in step with the culture at large," or something almost identical. This is what happens when an established church is co-opted as an instrument within a larger cultural and political package, which it serves. It cannot be authentically itself. While our faith is not merely a set of practices, but a relation with God and a participation in Christ's divine-humanity, this reception of the God-manhood of the God-man is suffered and expressed in various concrete practices by which the Spirit of the Father begets Christ in our hearts and constitutes us as the Church. These practices cannot be neglected.
I close with an interesting note from a book on Nietzsche. On page 166 of the 10th chapter of the book "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion," Julian Young writes on the theme, "The gods":
Themes in Nietzsche come and go. They press into the foreground of one work and recede into the background of another. In Twilight [of the Idols] the gods remain in the background. None the less, enough tips of the iceberg remain visible to show, I think, that the persistent idea that authentic community is impossible without 'gods of the hearth' to provide it with a 'mythical home' (Birth of Tragedy 23) survives.
In contrast to modernity, a healthy society needs, we have seen, hierarchy and spiritual leadership. But it also needs rootedness in the past:
Criticism of modernity. -- Our institutions are no longer fir for anything...For institutions to exist there must exist a kind of will, instinct, imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice; the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards ad infinitum. If this will is present there is established something like the Imperium Romanum. (Twilight of the Idols IX 39).
Authentic 'institutions' are, that is, immutable social structures. By this standard modern marriage has ceased to be an 'institution' since, built on the shifting sands of love, it has lost the 'indissolubility in principle' that used to be its rationale (ibid.).
The idea, here, that a society thrives only in the light of a 'will to tradition', to 'backwards and forwards' solidarity between generations, is a repetition of the thesis that community requires (self-modulating) communal ethos. And according to what we have understood to date, the preservation of ethos requires its embodiment in 'monumental' figures, in role models or 'gods'.
I think that this is enough to paint an image of the size of the problem we have on our hands if we succumb to the liquidity of modernity's dissolutions - if we allow our polis to be assimilated as merely another "religious group," we will be unfaithful to our own nature, and we will dissolve. The liquidity of modernity is highly susceptible to extreme demagoguery, and we must be immune from this, as Daniel, for our own sake and for those about us. This ship has plenty of anchors, but we need to more widely appropriate them, and make them known, and fix the irregularities that have crept into some quarters. And we need to not be sophomorically reactionary about it, but wise, and clear-eyed.
As a final note, I should say that the push from some in the old guards of several jurisdictions to ethnicize the Church precisely mutilates the Church as public, for though the Church is a public group at that point, namely the ethnos, it is not simply the ethnos, for the ethnos is defined by other categories, and the Church then merely becomes a religious institution to function within the tent of other institutions relating to the maintenance of this ethnos as such. The ethnos, however, is part of one's private identity -- seen thus, the Church and her practices does not define the ethnos, the polis, the tribe of Christians. To have an ethnic identity in the context of modernity, as American secular democracy defines it, has leisurely and stylistic implications, not ethical ones. It is relegated to the realm of the private.
To be Orthodox, however, means to do certain things -- to pursue virtue, to read the scriptures, to heed the Spiritual symphony of the fathers, to wait upon the Spirit, to pray in various ways (not ways improvised from a vacuum), to fast in various ways (again, not from a vacuum), to attend to and care for those about us, especially the "remainders" of our social and economic equations, to receive spiritual counsel and discipline from those whose care we're entrusted to, and above all, to receive the holy Gifts. One can be part of an "Orthodox" (or "Catholic") ethnos and not do this. One cannot be Orthodox and not do them. To be Orthodox creates tension with the public/private dichotomy, but also goes beyond it, for if we do these things, not as religious narcotics, but in response to Jesus Christ as he shows himself to us as the Glory, then our labors are priestly, and the work following this call, our work that is as a response, will go beyond any duty a secular ethic can impose, and will make manifest a Good beyond the public and common good. Thus, the particular and non-publicly demonstrable Tradition of the Church, Jesus Christ, is reconciled with the universal and inter-traditionally demonstrable reasons of the public square. Or else we are unfaithful.
Forgive me, friends, for my infidelity.
I remember reading about St. Aiden in my old Anglican Breviary, how he would declare the good news everywhere, and when someone could not go with him, he would exhort them to good works. He would encourage them in the good they were able to recognize.
So too with Joseph, who is as it were, a model for our relationship with the secular world. Joseph benefacted Egypt and Pharaoh, while remaining faithful to the tradition he had received, and the wisdom thus granted to him was of public benefit for all.
"This is the pure and undefiled worship before our God and Father: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself untarnished by the world..."
