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The Church as Public
More Theopolitical Imagining:
The Church is its own social space. "For Augustine, not the imperium but the Church is the true res publica, the 'public thing;' the imperium has forfeited any such claim to be truly public by its refusal to do justice, by refusing to give God his due. For the Murrayite and Public Achievement models, on the other hand, what is public is that space bounded by the nation-state." Cavanaugh critiques individual Christians who work for the betterment of society by leaving the Church behind, understanding church as "an essentially asocial entity that provides only 'motivations' and 'values' for public action." They see only the nation-state as the public space within which to enact politics.
What does it mean to understand the Church as public? First, we need to remember that the very words we use to describe Church and its practices are words which have public meanings. Liturgy - leitourgia - is the "work of the people," meaning originally a public duty, a service to the state undertaken by a citizen. "The liturgy does more than generate interior motivations to be better citizens. The liturgy generates a body, the Body of Christ - the Eucharist makes the Church, in Henri de Lubac's words - which is itself a sui generis social body, a public presence irreducible to a voluntary assocation of civil society." Ekklesia (church) is the assembly of citizens in a given city-state. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word ekklesia is also used to describe the assembly of Israel at Sinai.
The public/private division falls away in the Church. Our homes are not private oases for our families because our families are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we practice hospitality to all. "As John Paul II says in his 'Letter to Families,' the family through the Church opens up to a wider public space - the widest imaginable; the family is the fundamental cell of society whose task is to extend its own communion of persons to the creation of a civilization of love." By civilization, he doesn't mean merely political but more widely, human culture in general. Ephesians 2:19 says we are both citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Cavanaugh doesn't make this point here, but until quite recently a household did not mean a nuclear family.
Back to Israel. The Torah that was given to Israel was not merely a set of private, individual practices. It covered all aspects of life. These practices form a distinctive people shaped by discipline, which Cavanaugh defines as "a performance of the body." Discipline forms virtue and "the virtues involve the whole person, body and soul, in practices which form the Christian to the service of God. Furthermore the virtues are acquired communally - in the 'public' practices of the ecclesial community...Christian 'political ethics' is inseparable from an account of how virtues...are produced and reproduced...in the habitual practices of Church. A public Christian presence cannot be the pursuit of influence over the powers, but rather a question of what kind of community disciplines we need to produce people of peace capable of speaking truth to power." [Emphasis mine]
The example Cavanaugh gives is of Archbishop Oscar Romero. (My question: why is this man not a saint yet? What's up with that?) The day before he was martyred, he ordered Salvadoran troops to disobey orders to kill. Cavanaugh reminds us that Hobbes wanted to domesticate the Church by making individuals adhere to the state and not one another, and to deny the international character of the church. But as some Latin American churches, especially ecclesial base communities, have witnessed, the way to resist the powers of violence is to adhere to one another in the body of Christ.
When we recognize the body of Christ does not stop at borders of the nation-state, we break the idolatry of the state. "In the Church, then, the practices of liturgy, the creeds, the scriptural canon, hospitality, binding and loosing, the exercise of episcopal authority, all constitute the Church as a distinctive public body." As even Augustine saw, the Church is more public than the Empire or the State, because the Church has the true public sacrifice - the Eucharist.
"idolatry of the state"
Can you give some illustrations here. I think I like it, but an illustration would be helpful. Is this jingo-ism? Is this syncretism in the Orthodox traditions?
AngloBaptist [tripp@anglobaptist.org]
The Church may be "its own social space," but is it mutually exclusive with
other social spaces? I understand Cavanaugh's critique of John Courtney
Murray's idea of a civil society that is purely natural and implicitly
outside of the discipline of the Church - which may then simply become an
ecclesiastical "private oasis." But can we still recover a robust idea of
public reason by observing how the Church's set of practices are analogous
to the practices of other religions, including what we might want to call a
nascent "post-Christianity?" That is, can we try to recover modestly
universal concepts of justice less through an ahistorical identification of
the "purely natural" and more through interreligious dialogue?
Here is the Benedictine Henri Le Saux on this sort of dialogue:
"Each partner in dialogue must try to make his own, as far as possible, the intuition and experience of the other, to personalize it in his own depth, beyond his own ideas and even beyond those through which the other attempts to express and communicate them with the help of the signs available in his tradition. For a fruitful dialogue it is necessary that I reach, as it were, in the very depth of myself to the experience of my brother, freeing my own experience from all accretions, so that my brother can recognize in me his own experience of his own depth. The detachment and the freedom required by such dialogue is no doubt enormous; yet at no lesser cost is real fellowship and communion possible between men. Interreligious dialogue is something too important to be taken lightly."
Apart from a cheap eclecticism or a domination of one by the other, interreligion dialogue tries to see a complementarity of the relational order. Jacques Dupuis, SJ: "This means that, notwithstanding the singular place and the unique significance which is proper to the mystery of Jesus Christ and to the Christ event in the overall process of God's involvement with humankind in history, this unique event must be viewed as essentially relational to all other divine manifestations in history." I wonder if this sort of practice, rather than conjectures of an inevitably reductive "pure nature," can ground Christian participation in a pluralistic political order.
Neil
Neil Dhingra [dhingra.2@nd.edu]
Neil, I honestly am not sure what you're getting at. Sorry. Can you
explain further?
Tripp, an example...that's what I want too. What does all this look like in the local church? See my new post.
Jennifer, I apologize for being unclear. I suppose that I sense two options
being presented. The "liberal" view reduces the Church to merely providing
the motivations and values for Christians to become better citizens in a
secular public space. The "theopolitical" view sees the Church itself as
the public space in which Christians act. I wonder if the "theopolitical"
view, despite its disawowal of the "Murrayite" model and its commitment to
the Church's "distinctive public witness," can still somehow sustain
universal concepts of "justice" and "nature." I'd like to suggest that such
concepts might be arrived at through the practice of interreligious
dialogue.
Thanks.
Neil
Neil Dhingra [dhingra.2@nd.edu]
Since Cavanaugh doesn't believe we should translate our Christian language
into a general social ethics that anyone could comprehend, I'm not certain
if he believes in arriving at universal concepts of justice through
interreligious dialogue.
I was just reading this about Milbank and interreligious dialogue in my friend's dissertation-in-progress:
"dialogue obscures the truth-of-difference. One can only regard dialogue partners as equal, independently of one’s valuation of what they say, if one is already treating them, and the culture they represent, as valuable mainly in terms of their abstract possession of an autonomous freedom of spiritual outlook and an open commitment to the truth. In other words, if one takes them as liberal, Western subjects, images of oneself...Indeed, if it were accepted that all cultures (religions) have equal access to the (religious) truth, then all critique, including critique of sexist and racist constructs, would become impossible. And since religions are such readings, deeply embedded in habitual practices and attitudes, it is clear that the idea of a universal religion free from cultural attachments, or even of an essential Christianity that could be expressed in non-Western cultural terms, is just nonsensical."
So I suppose this means, for example, that there is no concept of peace without Christ, for Christians. What this means for universal human rights and such, I'm not sure.