Is he wrong? An Easter Question

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George Lindbeck’s willing to say it:

What the good God is doing to the church, it seems to me, is destroying us bit by bit. And I think that God insists God wants us to be united. And destroying each denomination’s identity is precisely the way in which eventually we’ll have to be united.

from Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic (Baker Academic, 2012), 118.

At least three arguable claims here, it seems to me.

  1. the church is being destroyed
  2. by God
  3. on account of church division

The first claim would be the easiest to develop given the growing literature on the current decline of the contemporary Western church. For instance, HERE.

The third claim, to my mind, would be the weakest. Or maybe I should say, the sort of sociological analyses advancing the first claim seem to point the finger elsewhere, or at least offer a more multifactor explanation. I certainly have my share of ecumenical sympathies, but I’m doubtful church division can bear this weight alone.

I’d venture to say division bothers theologians more than the typical lapsed churchgoer. The latter could conceivably mention church scandal among their reasons for disaffiliation, but I’d suspect division wouldn’t be the first scandal in their minds. Theologians might reply it’s a further measure of the severity of the scandal of division that our consciences take it for granted, but that could also just tell us decline is overdetermined. There’s plenty more sufficient reasons out there to pick from.

The second claim, though, that God is behind the church’s decline, nonetheless remains a genuinely theological proposal in what’s too often merely a sociological conversation. Is our current trajectory (what would you call the opposite of a Great Awakening?) just a historical trend that ebbs and flows like any other tide, and therefore a big nothing burger, even if temporarily disappointing, or is it an act of God? Is God telling us something? Judging us? 

As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” Ro 8.36

But if that’s the case, to what new life may we hope to be raised? Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Clifford Geertz on Local Knowledge

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I have never been able to understand why such comments as “your conclusions, such as they are, only cover two million people [Bali], or fifteen million [Morocco], or sixty-five million [Java], and only over some years or centuries,” are supposed to be criticisms. Of course, one can be wrong, and probably, as often as not, one is. But “just” or “merely” trying to figure out Japan, China, Zaire, or the Central Eskimo (or better, some aspect of their life along some chunk of their world line) is not chopped liver, even if it looks less impressive than explanations, theories, or whatnot which have as their object “History,” “Society,” “Man,” “Woman,” or some other grand and elusive upper-case entity.

Available Light (2000), 137-138.

PS Variations on a Theme in Anthropology

Herman Sasse on the present Christ

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The Church that Luther believed was the Church of the real presence. … Perhaps there are many among us who have…taken offence that Luther remained so stubborn in the strife over the Lord’s Supper concerning the meaning of the words of institution: ‘This is my body.’ That is not his obstinate nature but his great worry that the Church of the Reformation would lose that upon which the Church has always lived, … If Christ is in a heavenly location far from this world, where he has only left behind authority, orders, and commands; if we confuse him with our fantasy, and must visualize him with our faith; if he is only present according to his divine nature, and not also according to his human nature as the God-man, who has taken on our poor flesh and blood, and is present with us according to his humanity, as he is present with the Father according to his divinity, then we are a lost little band in this world. Because, we have to admit that without him we are nothing, that without him and his presence, the Church is a helpless, poor, despairing band of men.

from Witness (2013), 318. Originally preached 1943.

See also Luther on the present Christ.