Is there any ‘giveness’ to church anymore?
4 Dec 2007
This post is short piece I have written for ‘The Church and Post Modern Culture’ blog. You can read and comment on it here (heads up, it is a largely academic theological, and philosophical zone/discussion area).
Or you can read and discuss it below.
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It does seem that with the movements of structure to agency , and of the cataphatic to the apophatic, there remains very little ‘giveness’ with regards to the ontology of church anymore.
We become individuals who are prior to the church, in terms of our experience, being and identity. The church at times has tried to control Christian identity and formation, with hegemonic filtering, and authorization/censure.
However do we now see Christian identity collapsing into the bricolage of a ‘shallow pick and mix-ipod-download-what ever I want -whenever I want’ of consumer agency and private God Spaces?
It seems that the main way to express and experience any ‘givenness to church’, is to leave church, for a ‘post-church’ being, as expressions of ‘authentic’ identity and being. If so, can we re-discover what it means for Christian identity to be formed in community together?
I’m sure an understanding of liminality, is one way to navigate this transitional time, but over to you for ideas/thoughts?
Tagged: Being, Church, Epistemology, Giveness, Ontology
6 comments
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Comment by fernando
12.08 pm on 4 Dec 2007
OK – that’s a really good question I haven’t thought about for a while!
I would open that up by trying to explore three questions: First, is bricolage necessarily a bad and “random” thing (I don’t think it has to be)? Second, does pneumatology give us a way to talk about giveness that is neither traditio-specific or ecessively concrete? Third, should our starting point be community in some geo-specific sense (I’m a Baumanian about the problems of community), or should we be talking about witness across time?
Comment by Jason
12.22 pm on 4 Dec 2007
Hi Fernando: I think bricolage has been a normal transformational process for church since it began. I think resisting it (as in fundamentalism) is futile, but I do think it becomes shallow and superficial as never before in the hands of consumerism.
I think we need to deep our agency and thus bricolage. We need to reach deeper and further, than just a private god space church, of disembodied beliefs and practices that support what works for me.
It’s here that I think you see the recovery of tradition and liturgy helping people, as one possibility.
Comment by fernando
7.14 am on 5 Dec 2007
Jason, I think we are agreeing substantially here on the ways forward in terms of informed and deep bricolage.
But, maybe we are disagreeing about how common this is – I’m not sure.
My experience is that the church, or at least the church in the consumer West, is seldom cosmopolitan or multicultural enough to reflect deep bricolage. Certainly I’ve seldom met pastors or church leaders who really welcome it. Rather, it seems that the options presented are either the “private god space” as you put it, or abstactly doctrinaire theology.
Liturgically and historically informed bricolage is often treated as a form of deviance.
Which comes back to my third point/question about cosmological community versus local community.
Comment by Jason
7.58 am on 5 Dec 2007
Hi mate. I think we agree very much. I think Bricolage is the natural condition of the Christian faith, that the church has resisted it as you say, but we have the problem of a substantively bricoloaged faith in pluralism, that is shallow, and in dire need of deepening of it’s agency.
Most of the bricolaged faith in consumer west is outside the church, whilst that within is largely homogenized…I think.
I think the start for a liturgically and historically informed community, is the place of the local. I’m a believer in the Catholic notions of subsidiarity, and plurality of communities, and the solidarity that comes from those communities orientations towards God and others in the cosmological & teleological.
Comment by Paul
1.27 am on 5 Dec 2007
It’s a very good Q Jase (at least as much as i understand it and i appreciate the audience to who it was written primarily for).
2 thoughts strike me:
i. what is the point of the church? As you say the move to agency means that individuals can have a life of faith outside the church. This particulary resonates where salvation is seen as crossing a line and then waiting around to die and go to heaven. Once the deal has been sealed so to speak why need church. Afterall once i have Jesus why do i need anyone/anything else..? church maybe is like breakdown cover/insurance, there in case anything goes seriously wrong and in most cases hopefully they can get me back on the road quick smart.
ii. what is the christian identity anyway – what is it about being a christian that makes me distinct from any other concerned citizen on planet earth? After all to do good, to care about the planet, or the poor, or justice i don’t need to be a christian so what difference does it make unless it means being connected to/part of something more than my own concerns/interests?
Comment by Jason
8.02 am on 5 Dec 2007
The freedom that christ brings is a freedom to ‘be’ myself, but is always in relation to God and others.
Yet we are now free to be what we want in isolation, and withdrawal. Maybe we need our freedom to be liberated!
I think you’re onto something. If ontology collapses into a being that takes place after death, eternal live insurance, then follow that to it’s logical conclusion, and what is the point of church?
We need an understanding that to become the people we were meant to be, that our formation in this life will last for eternity, takes place with others in the mission of Jesus in this world.
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