The Radical Resurgence

Read the complete interview with Christian Smith on “The Bible Made Impossible.”

How The Institutional Church Affects The Clergy

We have now seen what, in organic nature, churches show themselves to be. Let us now look at some of the effects of the institution upon churchmen. The dependence of doctrine for stability and of religious societies for continuity upon property, tends automatically to transfer the interest of the priesthood from the superstructure of faith and communion that first attracts them to the foundation of possessions that finally holds them. The manipulation of the gods for the benefit of men gives way to the management of properties for the benefit of Mother Church….

Creed and dogma are recognized as tools merely in the aggrandizement of the ecclesiastical institutions and the fortunes of the priesthood…. The deposit of faith is handled purely as a device for the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power. Competition is suppressed not because “the faith” is true but because income is threatened. It is the most enfranchised popes that worked the Inquisition and the Index the hardest, that refuse to stir in the face of the Lutheran revolt. It took a generation and the failure of thirty years of horrible religious warfare to convince the ecclesiastical authority that its sources of income could not be restored by the customary devices of the Inquisition, the Index, the crusade and the sword….

As for the lesser and individual clergy, they are what the institution and the general community make them. The practice of their profession sets them in a fixed routine, of which to repeat interminable prayers and litanies in a strange tongue is a large part…. Habit in liturgy leads to heedlessness and boredom. The point is, to get through. “Hocus pocus” is what remains of the solemn mass with its “Hoc est corpus meus.” The Buddhist parallel is the prayer wheel. In that the mantra is brought up to the highest mechanical efficiency — every turn a prayer… Liturgy and ritual and sermons and other priestly duties are to do, and to be done with, as quickly as possible, that other more interesting and novel things may be attended to…. The problems of great churchmen are problems in the management of properties, in the care and acquisition of properties; the Catholic Church once owned as much as a third of England….

Ensuring Conformity

Churches are possessed of instruments of destruction as well as habits of appropriation. Conformity can be imposed by means of excommuni­cation and interdict, in their varying degrees. It is a mistake to imagine that those devices are obsolete…. The function of excommunications and the interdict is to cut off a person or a community from the professional services of the clergy; they are sacerdotal strikes.

The Roman Catholic Church maintains a blacklist as well. The blacklist applies to books and ideas. The ideas are studied by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition and, according to their judgment, condemned or proscribed. Books are condemned by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and public notice is given that they are placed in the Index Expurgatorius. Then, without very special permission, no faithful Catholic may read them….

All churches that attain a fixed and infallible revelation, a set of sacred scriptures whose meaning is in the custody of a specially ordained priesthood trained for the purpose and organized in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, require considerable material equipment not only to win greater power but to keep from losing ground. A customary section of this equipment is the machinery of suppressing variations, exterminating differences, keeping the revelation secure from the menace of rivalry …. Churches, as we have seen, are founded on professional priests. They rest upon the establishment of a vested interest in the art of manipulating the supernatural. The products of this art constitute a commodity that churches sell and that they seek, each in its own way, to monopolize ….

How Clergy Developed

The story of the elaboration of the arts and crafts of manipulating the supernatural is like the story of any other enterprise of man that has come down the years as an institution. You begin with a technique in which the house-mother or the house-father or the tribal headman is especially skilled. The technique is a patterned action, involving the formal use of various objects such as we have already observed to be constantly recurrent in the practice of religion. The action is accompanied by incantations, by liturgical formulas, also patterned and highly stylized….

A Sociological Examination of the Traditional Elements of Religion

Religion comes first as a family or clan or personal endeavor to win the services of supernatural force in situations not otherwise controllable. Out of this endeavor a priestly caste comes into being and the gods are born. The recognized existence of specialists in the manipulation of the gods becomes the point of departure for a new system of relationships, a new mode of association between men and gods. This new system constitutes a church. It is a separate and distinct institution of society. It has its own traditions, its own learning and its own scheme of education for transmitting its knowledge and training its generations of experts. It has its own household and its own household economy. It bears the same relation to the rest of the community as any other institution seeking to live and grow in and with the complex striving disorder of works and beliefs we call civilization.

Since the Protestant Reformation in Europe, churches have multiplied and their importance has decreased. The Reformation was itself postulated on the principle that the relation between a man and his gods — or at least their revealed word — was primary and direct. It repudiated the well- known doctrine of Roman Catholicism that only through the mediation of a church, i.e., through the intervention of professional mediators, can a man establish communication with his gods…. Nevertheless, the institutional habit is so deeply ingrained in the social inheritance of the moderns that a religion without an institutional setting is difficult to conceive….

So far as religion exercises a recognizable modifying influence upon society, it does so through the medium of churches. Let us, then, inspect the general structure of the church, and get a view of its anatomy. On the first appearance the institution, however small and poor the example may be, looks pretty complicated.

In the New Testament we should be struck by the utter simplicity that characterized life in the early churches. We are given a broad picture of church life, but many particulars – which are troublesome for us – are left untouched by the New Testament. As time elapsed, the visible church lost its original simplicity and became enmeshed in a quagmire of ecclesiastical machinery and theological speculation.

The Lord’s Supper is a case in point. There is a simplicity about this practice in the sketchy New Testament data. Yet in post-apostolic times the remembrance meal (1) became embedded in hierarchical church structures so that it became a mysterious ritual to be “administered” by the “ordained,” and (2) ended up being the source of endless speculation about “what happens” in the “sacrament.”[1]

The evidence indicates that this remembrance meal, and the instruction which accompanied it, was a center point in Christian assemblies (cf. Acts 20:7). Eating together in the “breaking of bread” and remembering the Lord in the Supper were virtually synonymous in Christian worship.[2] Obviously, many things have changed in our practice since the early days. In this article, I would like to explore some basic points concerning the Lord’s Supper – based on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 – and compare them with our conceptions and practices.

The asteroid has struck, the sky is darkening, and the mainstream churches and any evangelical megachurch you care to name are the dinosaurs.

The asteroid is late capitalism and it is darkening the skies in at least two ways.

(1) The global economy is putting an end to national economies and marginalizing the modern nation state. The present recession is the result of our inability to understand or control global financial flows. People in the right places press a few keys on their desktops and laptops and vast amounts of money leap across boundaries and around the world and ‘national’ economies are twisted into bizarre pretzel shapes by the event.

Capital intensive forms of church and parachurch will undergo a mass extinction event as this recession is followed by later ones. It is impossible to predict (much less control) the outputs of what mathematicians call ‘ a chaotic system’ so this will just be the first of many such downturns each resulting in yet another episode of what the economist Shumpeter called ‘creative destruction”.

(2) Historic cultures are replaced by a symbolic marketplace. Cultures are looted in order to replace them with niche markets, lifestyle options, and colorful commodities. Counseling options of all sorts become available (Freudian, Neofreudian,and Postfreudian psychotherapy are joined by Jungian depth psychology, Adlerian analytical psychology, gestalt therapy, rational-emotive therapy, reality therapy, Skinnerian behavioral modification, hypnotherapy, group therapy, New Age spiritualities et cetera, et cetera).

“When I wrote in my letter to you not to associate with people living immoral lives, I was not meaning to include all the people in the world who are sexually immoral, any more than I meant to include all usurers and swindlers or idol-worshippers.

To do that, you would have to withdraw from the world altogether. What I wrote was that you should not associate with a brother Christian who is leading an immoral life, or is a usurer, or idolatrous, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or is dishonest; you should not even eat a meal with people like that. It is not my business to pass judgment on those outside. Of those who are inside, you can surely be the judges. But of those who are outside, God is the judge.”  1 Cor. 5:9-13

Many churches today are faced with a very serious problem and are not even aware of it. If people who were poor or homeless or immoral or generally lower-class were to appear as visitors or new converts in many churches, our initial response would be negative.

We would be put off, perhaps, by the way they smell. Or we would say “we don’t want our children around such undesirables.” The result of these attitudes is that churches have isolated themselves from those with needs, and feel threatened when the security of their homogeneous, white, middle-class atmosphere is violated. Why is this the case?

Its ideology, at least, has to do with the doctrine of “separation” that was crystallized in many denominations earlier in this century. Church leaders taught those in the pew that Christians were to be totally separate from unbelief and sinful lifestyles, using 2 Cor. 6:14-18 as a proof-text.

To be sure, there is an important element of truth in such sentiments. Christians must not mingle with society in ways that compromise gospel values. However, this separation doctrine seems to have translated into church practices which flatly contradict both the example of Jesus and the teaching of Paul in l Cor. 5:9-13.

Decision-making.

It cannot be without significance that in both cases where Jesus used the term “church” (ekklesia), the concept of “binding/loosing” was connected to it (Matt.16:18; 18:17). John Yoder summarises some key aspects and implications of this ‘‘binding/loosing” function in the church:

Two aspects of meaning. (1) Forgiveness: to “bind” is to withhold fellowship, to ‘‘loose” is to forgive . . . . (2) Moral discernment: to “bind” is to enjoin, to forbid or make obligatory; to “loose” is to leave free, to permit . . . . Moral teaching and decision-making in Judaism took the form of rulings by the rabbis on problem cases brought to them, either ‘‘binding” or “loosing” depending on how they saw the Law applying to each case . . . .

By taking over these terms from established rabbinic usage, Jesus assigns to his disciples an authority to bind and loose previously claimed only by the great teachers in Israel . . . The promise of the presence of Christ “where two or three are gathered in my name” in the original context of Matt. 18:19-20 refers to the divinely authorised process of decision.

The word ekklesia itself does not refer to a specifically religious meeting, nor to a particular organisation: it rather means the “assembly,” the gathering of a people into a meeting for deliberation or for a public pronouncement . . . . The church is where, because there Jesus is confessed as Christ, people are empowered to speak to one another in God’s name . . . .

We understand more clearly and correctly the priority of the congregation when we study what it is that it is to do. It is only in the local face-to-face meeting, with brethren and sisters who know one another well, that this process can take place of which Jesus says that what has been decided stands decided in heaven . . . .