Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Christian Community – an idol?

With Dr Philip Turner, a most able thinker and writer, I want to suggest that to call the church of God “a Christian community” is to erect an idol.

As far back as I can remember the word “community” referred to a specific people living in a specific area. Thus in an American city there would be a Jewish community in one neighborhood and a Polish in another. In the prayers of intercession in the parish church in England I vividly recall how that the priest and congregation prayed for the local community and its various leaders and needs.

In the decades since the 1960s, it has become more and more fashionable to speak of the church itself as the Christian community. The apparent reason for this usage is that community became in the 1960s the preferred word to speak of the coming together of individuals (= individual human persons). Here the logic was that individualism is supreme in western society; that each human being is an individual (an adjective become a noun); and that a collection of “individuals” for a common purpose is a community. (At the same time as this usage developed, the traditional Irish, Polish, Italian local communities in cities were breaking-up as their inhabitants moved to the suburbs).

In the book which introduced the 1979 Prayer Book (Introducing the Proposed Book, p.43), to the Episcopal Church, Charles P. Price singled out “Christian Community” as one of the major emphases of this innovatory Prayer Book. If the assurance of immortality was the need of people in the patristic era, and forgiveness the need in the sixteenth century, said Price, then community is the need in our time. And he saw it writ large in the structure and content of this new kind of Prayer Book (not by any means an edition of the classical Anglican Book of Common Prayer).

Most people bought this idea and freely used the expression “Christian community” and it is very much in vogue these says by all parties within the ECUSA. Yet an evangelical theologian, Philip Turner, then the Dean of Berkely Divinity School at Yale, took a very different position. “To turn the Church into a ‘Christian Community’ is unacceptable to God,” he said. And writing in The Anglican Digest (Michaelmas 1992) he explained:

What I have come to believe is that if Christians look to the Church in any of its manifestations or institutional forms to provide them with a community, they distort the nature of the Church and, more seriously, construct an idol that, like all idols, is but the mirror image of themselves. If, however, they learn, in coming to God through Christ, to long for and rejoice in the communion of the saints, they will find union with God and with the saints of God that both transcends and transfigures any community they have ever known or will know.

He describes how, in seeking to create “a community” everyone is expected to become like everyone else; but this is an impossible goal. So everyone has to become like the inner community which is seeking to impose its identifying features and ways upon everyone so that all may be a real community (just as a Polish community is all Poles and Jewish one, all Jews).

So he concludes his piece by stating that the extent that churches,

Are motivated by a search for “Christian community” they will most certainly prove inhospitable, oppressive and divisive. To the extent that they are motivated by a longing for communion with God and communion in Jesus Christ with people from very different communities, we may even as strangers, hope for hospitality, liberty, and unity with God and with one another.

The Church is a congregation of people from a variety of human communities, ethnic, political, social, who meet together for and in communion and fellowship (communion and koinonia) in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the presence of the Holy Ghost, in order to worship and serve the Father.

In the history of the Episcopal Church since the 1970s we have seen what this idol of community has allowed and fostered. Attendance is down, traditional Episcopalians are not welcome, new doctrine and morality are espoused and celebrated, new forms of worship with new ways of speaking to Deity are in place, and all in all the Church is in one big crisis and mess.

One sad feature of this story is that many who ought to know better have embraced this use of “Christian community” and in so doing have lost the biblical and dynamic sense of koinonia as a the biblical word for fellowship one with another in the Body of Christ under Christ the Head. Koinonia is NOT community but an anticipation of heaven on earth within the Household of God and Body of Christ!

Those who seek to be orthodox in the Anglican Way should, I suggest, try to go one week 1) without calling a human person an individual, 2) without using the word “community” of the local church congregation, and 3) without describing the holy relation to God brought about by the divine work of regeneration and sanctification as “a relationship”. There are so many good words and phrases in the Bible and holy tradition for the church and her members and how they relate to God.

The Revd Dr Peter Toon, May 18, 2005

(For a solid but readable critique of the structure, content and style of the 1979 Book see NEITHER ORTHODOXY NOR A FORMULARY by Lou Tarsitano and Peter Toon, available by calling 1-800-727-1928)

No comments: