The Wounds of Division

From Ruptured Bodies

Today’s the day, Ruptured Bodies: A Theology of the Church Divided has officially been published! I thought I’d mark the occasion by publishing a brief excerpt from the Introduction, “Awash in a Sea of Division,” here. (If you’re interested in a bit more, you might also check out the excerpt I’ve published today on Covenant. If you want more than that, you’re going to have to buy the book!) The excerpt begins after a section that has noted that our willingness to divide from each other trivializes the teachings of Christianity.

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An Uncertain Sound

Beyond its trivialized message, the divided church cannot speak with one voice on any number of issues, which, once more, affects both intra- and extra-ecclesial matters. Here, I do not mean simply that Christians disagree, even, at times, upon matters of great import. To my mind, this is hardly a pressing issue — there is nothing wrong with disagreement on a whole host of matters— and disagreement is not at all incompatible with full visible unity. Beyond that, generally speaking, there is a broad consensus on such basics as “Scripture is, somehow, authoritative for the Christian community,” or “Jesus is Lord,” or “God is the Trinity,” or “salvation is by grace.” On the most fundamental matters, Christians are in relative agreement. Rather, the problem is with a divided external witness and a short-circuited internal forum of discernment. I’ll begin with the latter.

History is real, and is a product of human activity and especially of human meaning-making. Because human beings are living and dynamic organisms, we change with time. Shared cultural meanings shift and develop. To revert to or insist on some cultural arrangement from the past without considering how it ought to change in order to meet the present, is to insist on a sub-human set of values. The church is a human reality — more than this, to be sure, but also never less than this. Hence, the church must also change and develop as history progresses and new cultural forms emerge.

Because the way forward is not always clear, and, indeed, because Christians acting in equally good faith sometimes reach divergent conclusions, if this change and development is to be authentic and faithful, the church must engage in discernment. Above I mentioned the sometimes-agonistic process that belongs to the church’s internal life. To take a no-longer controversial matter, the earliest Christians faced the quandary of whether or not Gentile converts were to be circumcised in accordance with the Mosaic law. In other words, in order to become Christians, did they also have to be Jews? Sharp disagreement and vigorous debate ensued, until at the Council of Jerusalem a consensus emerged — Gentile Christians were not bound by the Mosaic law, but were also instructed to abstain from certain behaviors that might provoke scandal among their Jewish elder-siblings (Acts 15). The conciliar decree did not simply end debate either, as Paul’s letter to the Galatians attests. For some time thereafter, both positions were found within the Christian churches, and only over time was the decision that Gentile Christians could be simply that received as settled within the community.

To move beyond the no-longer-controversial, for several decades now, the churches have sought to reckon with the sea change brought about by newly emergent understandings of gender and sexuality. While, like the cultural matrices that generated them, the biblical witness and the subsequent theological tradition have been more or less unreflexively heteronormative and patriarchal, we have reached a new stage of how gender and sexuality’s meaning are constructed within our cultures.

While hardly actually implemented, it is generally accepted that women ought to have equal access to opportunities and responsibilities as men, that far from being deficient men, they are, in all ways, the equals of men. With the advent of reliable artificial contraception, sexual activity and procreation can be effectively decoupled in a way that they never could before. Research into sexual reproduction has moved us beyond an outdated Aristotelian view wherein women were simply passive recipients of male seed, but rather equally active in the process of conception. The category of sexual orientation, and the recognition that a non-negligible portion of the population has a persistent sexual orientation to their own sex; or that sexuality exists on a spectrum, wherein the binary of hetero- and homosexuality are hardly the only options, has raised the question of how folks with non-heterosexual orientations can most faithfully live out their sexuality.[1] The recognition that gender is a social construction, performed differently between and within cultures, and the experience of trans and non-binary persons has disrupted long-standing anthropological assumptions (theological and otherwise), and raised the question of how LGBTQ experience fits within the life of the church.

The answers to these developments’ implicit questions are not straightforwardly apparent, and different churches have engaged in their own discernment and made their own decisions according to that discernment. Some, in view of the newly recognized equality of women with men, have admitted women into holy orders. Others have resisted this, whether insisting that fidelity to Scripture and tradition demands otherwise, or simply declaring it an impossibility. Some have opened marriage or marriage-like unions to couples of the same-sex and/or ordained ministers who are in same-sex unions. Others have insisted that marriage is reserved for a man and a woman and/or that its validity depends upon an openness to procreation, ruling out same-sex couples, and, by implication, clergy in same-sex unions (as well as heterosexual couples who use birth control).

As I noted above, that Scripture and the tradition reflect heteronormative patriarchy is incontestable, but this alone does not resolve the question. While Scripture and tradition are also more than simply products of human meaning-construction, they are still these. Recognizing a biblical, or patristic, or medieval, or early modern figure’s patriarchal or heteronormative assumptions does not necessarily mean that they are binding as divinely revealed. But it also does not rule out this possibility. Careful discernment is needed to disentangle what is bindingly authoritative and what is a reflection of a cultural matrix that no longer obtains.

The point of all this is not to rehearse any of these debates, but to highlight how a state of division robs the church of its capacity for discernment. As those churches who still do not ordain women and who still prohibit same-sex unions deliberate and demur, they do so without the full complement of Christian people, notably those churches who have found women’s ordination and LGBTQ affirmation to be deeply compatible with if not entailed by the gospel. Meanwhile, those latter churches have moved forward by their best lights, but these are matters that affect the church as a whole and which must ultimately be decided and received by the church as a whole.[2] 

The point here is not to argue for one position or another on the questions of women’s ordination or gay marriage (or, for that matter, contraception), though I am convinced that the most viable way forward is for the churches to thread the needle of affirming women’s ordination and LGBTQ identity and sexuality while also upholding fulsome and traditional positions on biblical authority and doctrinal orthodoxy. Instead, the point is that the churches lack any way of resolving the issues so long as they remain divided, and that this cuts both ways. The churches who have revised their positions can only do so on a tentative, provisional basis, while they await the developments’ reception by the church as a whole. The churches who have not, are incapable of discerning a final no to the question, so long as the full complement of the catholica is not part of the deliberations. And as we wait, stymied in our attempts at discernment, women and LGBTQ folks are left in the lurch. The best anyone can do is muddle their way forward.

Meanwhile, humanity faces unprecedented crises, ranging from climate change to a resurgence of far-right authoritarian forces in government. While, historically, the churches’ divisions fell along doctrinal lines, in the past century or so, political and ideological divisions have tended to be more prominent. While the former has its own problems, the latter leaves the churches particularly susceptible to political cooptation. So long as a church contains a broad representation of political conviction, it resists being simply assimilated to some point along the political spectrum (usually one of the polar wings).

This has been driven home to me as, steadily since the 1980s, conservative white Christians have become essentially a proxy to the Republican Party and eventually Trumpist-authoritarianism. While I find the policies pursued by the Trump administration and the post-Trump Republican Party odious, the problem here would exist even if the GOP had not been swept up in the MAGA wave. The problem isn’t that political cooptation leads them to support bad policies — though it often does — but that it confuses the ultimate ends of the Christian faith with the immanent ends of the modern nation state, bastardizing the gospel, and undermining the unique allegiance owed by Christians to the one God by substituting an allegiance to a contingent political order. And, while I occupy the political left, and, so see more readily see the failings of the right, I am under no illusions that the same dangers do not also exist for “liberal” and “progressive” Christians. Hence, while existential threats mount, the divided church can only offer mealy-mouthed guidance, despite the bold vocality of its various factions. In a state of division, no one can really know what the Christian church stands for. “And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” (1 Cor. 14:8).

Deadly Feasting

Jesus’s dying bequest to the church is the eucharistic banquet, which remains a feature of the common life of all mainstream Christians, though with differences in emphasis, frequency, understanding, and practice. … Whatever else we might do, or neglect, we keep the eucharistic feast. Our divided state, though, risks transforming the medicine of immortality into deadly poison.

Writing to the Corinthians, Paul laments that their eucharistic assemblies have nothing to commend, because they do more harm than good. Divided as the Corinthian church is by factions, they cannot even really be said to be eating the Lord’s supper (1 Cor. 11:17–20). By celebrating the Eucharist in a state of mutual disregard, the Christians of Corinth eat and drink unworthily, and, so, are “answerable for the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:27). To participate in the meal “without discerning the body,” is to “eat and drink judgment against” oneself and can lead to illness and death (1 Cor. 11:29–30)…

Christians divided among themselves court divine judgment when they celebrate the sacrament, and this for several related reasons. Such celebrations contradict the meaning of the meal, which is the unity of Christ’s body. The Eucharist is meant to effect ecclesial unity (1 Cor. 10:17), so a celebratory context of willful division falsifies and resists the divine initiative for it. Similarly, the Eucharist commemorates the death of Christ, by which he reconciled divided humanity to one another and to God (John 11:52; Eph. 2:11–22). A divided Eucharist, then, makes mockery of the death whereby humanity has been redeemed. How shall we escape the dread judgment when we are “crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt” (Heb. 6:6)?

Once more, the dissonance barely seems to register, much less the grievous danger facing the church. Division is not merely embarrassing or inconvenient, but blasphemous and deadly. Perhaps in our division, fasting and lament ought to be the order of the day, though this seems to be a prospect no one can quite countenance. Similarly, churches will pronounce upon the validity of their separated siblings’ sacraments, but the possibility that none of our Eucharists are valid is too threatening to stomach. Yet, given the Pauline injunction, it might be better if our Eucharists were invalid, for at least then the deadly effect might be ameliorated.

But it is the position of this book that, for the most part at least, our Eucharists are valid, and that this ought to fill us with foreboding and dread. For in a divided church, it is impossible to receive the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation without in that very act eating and drinking judgment upon oneself. And does not the sorry state of the church present its own empirical verification of the Pauline warning. We are sick unto death, and, in some quarters, nigh “falling asleep.”

If the Foundations Be Destroyed…?

Whether dismissed as irrelevant, or wracked with sexual abuse scandals or a reckoning for its legacies of harm (colonialism, patriarchy, the oppression of the LGBTQ community), or its cooptation by nationalism or calls for a renewed integralism that would eschew liberal values and forge alliances with authoritarians, despite pockets of vitality, the church’s overall trajectory is decline. To take but one striking example, the figures for my own Episcopal Church suggest that if present trends continue, it will be dead in under thirty years. That this is not how statistics work notwithstanding, it is nevertheless a sobering realization.

While I do not intend to, nor do I think I could demonstrate causation, I cannot help but suspect that the church’s sorry state, its sickness unto death, derives from the upstream pollutant of our division. Yes, in many cases, we can point to rather specific causes for our decline. Folks who depart from the Christian faith (or at least from association with any Christian church) might cite disgust over abuse, or the descent into MAGA, or their own exclusion on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity, or their solidarity with those so excluded, or so on. But I’ve yet to encounter someone who attributes their decision to disaffiliate to ecclesial division, nor is it likely to appear very high (or, really, at all) on the list of reasons non-believers would give for not becoming Christian. But, as I’ve argued above, the more proximate reasons for decline are downstream from and compounded by the church’s divided state…

It strikes me that with our decline, we are witnessing a fulfillment of Paul’s warning to the Corinthians. By our divided Eucharists we invite divine judgment, and as a result, our churches are deformed and nearing death. Similarly, a sickened Corinthian could probably receive a medical diagnosis, but that would not preclude a eucharistic etiology for the disease.By our own actions, as well as, perhaps because of cultural factors beyond our control (this latter is difficult to assess; enlightenment secularism has roots in intra-Christian theological developments, which were in turn affected by church division; everything is connected), many find the church’s proclamation of Jesus Christ crucified and raised to be in-credible. In view of this, we must attend once more to the words of the Johannine Jesus:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20–23)

Christ insists that the credibility of the gospel message will hinge upon the unity of his followers. There is a causal relationship between the church’s unity and the credibility of its proclamation of Jesus Christ as sent by God and of God’s love for us in him. Is it any wonder then if the divided church finds its message(s) unheeded and itself in decline? By our divisions, we undermine the foundations of our faith.

I do not suggest that if the churches put aside our differences and found our way to full visible unity that the scandals would disappear and decline would reverse itself into growth. But if the church believes that its foundation lies in Jesus Christ as the one sent from the Father, and if that same Jesus Christ prays for the church’s unity and suggests that upon that unity hinges the credibility of that foundation, I fail to see how any reversal of the decline could possibly occur apart from the restoration of unity. While I do not offer a program for church reunion in these pages, this book is offered in the service of addressing this crisis. Its contribution is to attempt something that, on its surface, should be impossible: a systematic ecclesiology of the divided church, for apart from such an account, attempts at reunion will devolve into groping about in the dark.

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[1] The terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are largely regarded as outdated, impersonal, overly-clinical. While I avoid using the former term throughout this book, I have decided to retain the latter, because while LGBTQ functions as a substitute for the one, there is not a handy substitute for the other. “Straight,” for instance, implies a rectitude and normativity that I wish to avoid. On that note, I recognize that “queer” is a fraught term, one that some but not all members of the LGBTQ community have claimed as their own. I utilize this term as a synonym for LGBTQ in contexts where LGBTQ would not suffice. I don’t necessarily imply transgression in this usage (nor do I exclude those who understand themselves and their sexuality in this transgressive sense), nor do I impose this label on LGBTQ people who do not apply this term to themselves.

[2] At times “conservatives” within these churches protest that only by a new general council could these issues truly be resolved or authentic developments be enacted. On the one hand, this is correct and is precisely the point I am arguing. But in this context, it is disingenuous special pleading to name an impossible condition for the possibility of this development, while remaining content to carry on with the life of the church in other areas. Suddenly, when the wellbeing of vulnerable populations is on the line, we must defer to the counsels of the wider church, even though these wider counsels do not stand in our way at any other time.

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