What, or who, is a Christian? In the broadest sense—that of the census, for example—one's status as a Christian is decided merely by self-appellation. But this is problematic enough that I'd rather ignore it and move on to the next sense, that of creed. Let's agree, for argument's sake, that there is a set of beliefs expected of Christians. (In a better age than this one we could've agreed that said beliefs were articulated in the Creeds of the Church; such is not the case nowadays. I will not, however, go so far as to exclude those who would deny, for example, the Virgin Birth: perhaps it is a matter of integrity for them.) Etymologically speaking, our word "creed" comes, of course, from the Latin credo, "I believe", the first word of both the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds. You will note that it is singular. (It is curious that the Roman Catholics altered this to "we believe" in their current English translation; however, the new translation coming out soon will correct this.) Belief, then, is a personal decision: though we express the creed communally, it is by its nature an act of an individual. The Protestants are generally more insistent about this. Kierkegaard, for example, emphasized that we relate to God as individuals, we attain truth as individuals, we are judged and saved as individuals. There's a good deal to be said for this.
But at the same time, no man is a church unto himself. The sacraments—let's also assume that Christians have those, shall we?—are by their nature administered communally. Paul, in his first letter to Corinth, insists that we are baptized into the mystical "body of Christ": we cannot exist as independent individuals and remain a part of this unity. Once we have established that to be a Christian is to belong to a community, we must then ask ourselves what constitutes a community.
The Sage of Kentucky calls a community a "membership", a term he borrows from Paul (whom, he adds, he doesn't always approve of!). This implies that an individual is not only accepted by the community, but also that he knows himself to be a part of it. Elsewhere we are reminded that community is necessarily local, even though it belongs to a larger order of things: A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation.(That's from Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, by the way. It's worth a look-see.) Very well, then: when we say Christians belong to a community, it is necessarily the particular church they attend, with all their fellow congregants—the people who, in better times, we could've assumed are all neighbors anyway. Here, then, is the first problem with Christianity in these United States: a Christian "community" no longer need be defined by close proximity. That is to say, it is no proper community at all.
But how, you may ask, can we balance the imperative for a real community with our personal integrity: that is to say, should I attend the nearest church possible, regardless of its doctrinal errors? That's the question. It's late; let's continue this some other time.
What it sounds like you're describing is a situation in which a person is raised in a certain church comes to believe that the 'creed' of that church is false. Does he continue, for the sake of community, to worship in the church whose tenets he believes to be false, or does he leave the church of his fathers to find the church of his new faith?
ReplyDeleteBerry answers this somewhere, but I know of it only through a second-hand conversation. What he (supposedly) said was that part of the problem with numerous single-community churches and especially numerous single-community churches of a single denominations (say, two Baptist churches in the same city limits) is that the proximity of a spiritual community that better fits your beliefs will lead you to neglect the community you're already a part of. That is, if you know you can leave your church for one you 'prefer' whenever the spirit moves you, you'll be far less inclined to work toward the truth with the church you always knew.
And it's pretty easy to imagine what would happen in the sort of single-church communities that Berry is talking about. I mean, if you KNOW that the eucharist is transubstantiated into the body of Christ, but you know at the same time that it's support your local Baptist church or don't go at all, you'll be a lot more inclined to engage your church in the differences you have with it.
This sounds, at first, like a pretty un-Catholic view, but my sense is that Catholicism's periodic rewriting of its own tenets works much in the same way that a community church's rewriting of its tenets would work.
Now, I'll grant that this doesn't really account for the more extreme cases--say, where you're a Baptist and you all of a sudden believe that the host has to be blessed by a priest. Maybe the notion of missionary-ism can do some work on this front. If you're Catholic in a place that doesn't have a Catholic church or if you want to become Catholic and you're Baptist and don't want to leave your community, perhaps the appropriate attitude to cultivate is one of missionary-ism. Surely, when missionaries are away from home, they can't always do things by the book (ha). But they do things as near-to-the-book as possible, and so long as they're missionaries, near enough is good enough....
Yes, that's the sort of thing I'm wondering about. And I think it does come off as a pretty un-Catholic view: there's an inherent conflict between a real church community and an organization—a hierarchy—that makes claims to catholicity. You mention their "periodic rewriting of tenets"; the thing is, that sort of thing almost always happens from the top down.
ReplyDeleteChurch government, in general, is problematic. The ancient ideal, of course, was the Episcopacy, which I suppose is best approximated by the Orthodox, or the Anglicans. But such a model far too easily leads to Caesaropapism (see: Catholics, Roman). I suspect the best sort for any true localist would be the Congregationalist model.
Your last paragraph brings Flannery O'Connor to mind; perhaps she'd serve as a good example of that sort of "missionary"?