God, World, Church

This story is becoming increasingly familiar to me. A church spends a lot of time focusing on its identity. It does this primarily in relation to certain beliefs or ideas. These get shaped into a mission or vision statement, perhaps even a strategic plan if the church is really aggressive. The idea is that if identity can be established before hand, then action will follow. Great theory. It seldom works.

It seldom works for a lot of reasons. The biggest of these reasons, and perhaps the source of all the rest, is that identity discovery is a complex matter requiring more than just self-reflection. We don't know who we are fully before we act. And we don't know who we are fully apart from our life with others.

When we think of identity as something we settle before mission, then the world ends up being only the place where we deliver the things that have already been decided. The world becomes an extension of our project, a target of our good intentions, a passive recipient of a benevolent patron. Often, we define our identities over/against the world, and when we offer them our already determined lives we find them less than impressed. We are often irrelevant to their lives.

The great thing about the missional church movement from my perspective is that is insists that the church only understands its life as a church in mission, as a church in relation to others. Some who write about the missional church still want to define the church's identity before engagement with the world. They talk about the church's essence as something that comes before mission. The church is and then the church does.

But if our identity is truly an identity in God's mission, then we cannot know who we are, not completely, apart from a real life engagement with God's world. We discover who we are in relation to others.

This view of mission makes more sense in relation to a particular view of God. If God is just a set of enduring characteristics, an essence, or enduring substance that is unchangeable or unaddressable, then there is no need to consider the other in terms of our identity or mission. This, however, is not the biblical view of God.

In our last post, we noted that the Cappadocians (you remember them, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his other brother Gregory Nanzianzus, well only the first was his actual brother) held together the three persons of the Trinity as one by defining personhood in relation to otherness. We find our personhood only in relation, in this case God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Cappadocians, however, still wanted to protect the Father from the otherness of the world. God is known primarily only in the inner relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the world participates in God only through the Son. The otherness of the world tells us nothing of who God is as a person.

Recent theologians, however, have taken the Cappadocians view of personhood and tied it to the biblical narrative in a way that brings the world back into view. We don't know who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit, apart from a fallen, suffering world. God's identity as Father, Son, and Spirit is only fully revealed in the concrete circumstances of the world, and in particular in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We know God as Father, Son, and Spirit only through God's suffering participation in, with, and for the world. Our identity, as well as God's, cannot be defined in essential categories, but only in suffering participation with the world.

God, World, Church, 3

What accounts for some of our practices in church? For instance, what accounts for various practices of communion? In congregations of my ecclesial tradition we typically pass trays down rows and urge people to turn inward, to reflect on the meaning of the death of Jesus for them personally. This is not the way churches have always practiced the Lord's Supper. We read no description of this kind of practice anywhere in the literature of early Christianity? What accounts for this practice?

Several things would have to be answered to get a question like this. Our practices bear many meanings and not all of them are readily accessible. But at the very least there would be issues related to what we think of God and what it means to be human, and in turn what it means to be saved.

I've been making the point that in the Western theological tradition, God tends to be thought of as a single subject with three different roles (creator, redeemer, sustainer). Personhood is related to the acting subject. This not only applies to God, but also to humans. I am a self-contained individual. I count as a person because I am a self. Salvation, therefore, is primarily an encounter between Jesus and the self. It happens to me, in me, as a self-contained individual. It makes sense, in light of this, to practice "table" as a private experience with individual portions and inward thoughts.

This applies to more than just communion. This kind of individualism accounts for much of what we experience in worship. I often hear prayers or calls to worship that invite us to put the cares of the world aside so that we can focus on God, as if we could understand God apart from the cares of the world. I have invited students to observe worship to determine the "horizon" of the congregation's awareness. What is it that the worship service is aiming at? What horizon accounts for its practices, its language, etc. It becomes pretty clear for them that our practices cannot be understood primarily in relation to the world, or to a community, but in relation to individuals and most directly to their inner lives.

This is not wrong, in and of itself. It is, however, limited. And ultimately, if it is the primary imagination of the congregation, it makes otherness a problem. And I think this is rooted in part by our understanding of God.

This is not, however, the only way that God and humanity have been conceived in the Christian tradition. As we noted before, the Eastern church emphasized the thre persons of the Trinity. They had to account for God's unity in some way that did not diminish the three persons. They did this, in part, by redefining what it truly meant to be a person. We are not persons as individuals. We are persons only in relation to an other. Personhood is not defined primarily by individuality, but precisely in our recognition and engagement of the other. We understand personhood more completely when we imagine God as three.

Eastern theological notions have recently gained more currency in ecumenical discussion in large part because our understandings of personhood are changing in the Western philsophical tradition. Descartes' "I think, therefore, I am," has been expanded. There is no, "I think," apart from the recognition of an other. There is no "I" apart from a "Thou." Our identities are inescapably social. Ricouer, Levinas, Volf and others have written powerfully about our obligation to the other on the path toward personhood. It is not surprising, in light of this, that the Trinity has come more into focus in Christian theology. And social understandings of the Trinity have changed the way I think about what happens at church.

But here's the bigger payoff in my book. When we see God this way, the world becomes something other than the target at the end of the church's strategic interests. The church cannot know its true identity apart from its koinonia, its sharing participation, with the world. More, it is in God's love for the world that we truly see the nature of God, the love of the truly other. God's participation with the world, not just the church, is necessary for us to see God as a person, for his righteousness to be revealed. This kind of imagination about God would radically change our practices related to mission.

OK, I've gotten some of the big pieces out there, though in an overly simplified way. Let me see if I can break it down over the ext few weeks. Some of you have confessed eye glaze when you read this kind of stuff. I'll only invite you to love me as an other and I'll try to love you as a reader better as I unpack this.