More on “the church”: continuity

A recent discussion at Church and Pomo fell into what are by now some very familiar grooves, with me asking: “Guys, what is the deal with your obsession with ‘the church’?” As usual, the post and some of the comments performed a weird kind of short-circuit: responding authentically to Christ requires some form of communal life, and therefore we must be loyal to one of the already-existing communities that puts itself forward as being Christian. Criticizing said organizations from the standpoint of Christ is finally incoherent in this view, because they are constitutive of one’s relationship with Christ in the first place. Starting one’s own community from scratch never seems to be a live possibility — if anything, it would probably be dismissed as willful self-assertion that must be replaced with submission to the community. (Apparently the biggest potential problem facing the Christian church is that a group of well-educated people with convictions on average more progressive than the fabled “people in the pew” will somehow assert themselves and try to influence church life.)

It should be clear that I find this whole line of reasoning deeply flawed and even dangerous. But what I want to investigate here is that initial short-circuit between the need for a community and the need for one of these specific already-existing communities. The unstated concern here seems to be one that has always been a part of the broadly catholic tradition, the concern for continuity. In the absense of a normative ideal, however, it seems to me that virtually every social grouping and institution in the Western world is in some sense continuous with Christianity — including capitalism (which we are given to believe we supposedly resist in “the church” through the sheer act of taking communion or something). And if capitalism is in some continuity with Christianity — meaning that Christianity bears some responsibility for the rise of capitalism, something that I think only bad-faith propagandists could wholly deny — then arguably the whole world stands in continuity with Christianity.

Obviously there’s not a complete absense of a normative ideal — anything that looks too much like being “merely liberal” is obviously suspect to these people — but the normative ideal itself seems to be heavily slanted toward the value of continuity as such. Just by adhering to tradition, we’re suddenly really subversive. Meanwhile, the occasional critiques of “the Enlightenment” and various other hints show that we’re dealing with a really strong view of the break represented by the advent of modernity — meaning that “the church” preserves the old good stuff as a kind of foreign body in a modern world that has completely rejected Christianity and self-originated as something completely and irreducibly different. I leave the question of whether this theory of modernity is at all credible as an exercise for the reader.