The Church in Exile

Living in Hope After Christendom

Lee Beach

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830897025
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

The people of God throughout history have been a people of exile and diaspora. Whether under the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks or Romans, the people chosen by God have had to learn how to be a holy people in alien lands and under foreign rule.For much of its history, however, the Christian church lived with the sense of being at home in the world, with considerable influence and power. That age of Christendom is now over, and as Lee Beach demonstrates, this is something for which the church should be grateful. The "peace" of Christendom was a false one, and there is no comfortable normalcy to which we can or should return.Drawing on a close engagement with Old Testament and New Testament texts, The Church in Exile offers a biblical and practical theology for the church in a post-Christian age. Beach helps the people of God today to develop a hopeful and prophetic imagination, a theology responsive to its context, and an exilic identity marked by faithfulness to God?s mission in the world.

- Part One -

A Theology of Exile

1

Exile as a Motif for the Church Today

In the early fifth century Romans reclined in their villas in the south of England feeling secure that their world was intact and would remain that way for many years to come. Yes, the army was busy, always off somewhere to put down an uprising here or a barbarian raid on the frontier there. But the roads still bustled with commerce, the public baths were still operating, and the harvest was under way. The citizens of England were oblivious to the fact that the Saxons were already crossing the English Channel with designs on the land that once seemed to be the eternal possession of the mighty Roman Empire. Soon they would invade, pillage and plunder Roman Britain. It took less than one generation for Roman Britain to vanish. The villas were ransacked and some of the people were killed; others were sold as slaves or driven away. The physical structures were still there, roads, villas and buildings largely intact, but the society as it once stood was completely gone. The Roman world seemed stable, even unshakable. Rome had existed for a thousand years. But times change, and sometimes it doesn’t take long.

The story of Romans living in England has relevance for the church in the West today. The world as it existed for a long time has undergone a change that is almost as drastic as the one just described. Ways of life, ideals, positions of power and influence that have long been established, no longer exist the way that they once did. There was a time when the church’s place in society was central to the culture, and it may have been hard to imagine things any other way. However, those of us who have lived in North America or parts of Western Europe in the past few decades have an understanding of how things can indeed change in a very short period of time.

Before we can appropriate the wisdom of ancient Israel and the early church and its potential benefit for the church in contemporary Western society, we need to further consider our own circumstances and determine how or even whether exile is a legitimate way for us to understand our place in the current culture. As we briefly explored in the introduction, exile is not an idea that should be appropriated in a flippant manner.1 Its painful effects on millions are far too severe for us to engage it as a faddish new idea for innovative ministry practice in our comfortable middle-class churches. However, as we examine the realities of our culture and the changing place of the church within it, we can begin to identify ways in which an exilic perspective could help the church identify itself and its place in the Western world today. The key concept that we must look at to make this connection is the demise of what is often referred to as “Christendom.” Understanding the significance of this cultural trend will help us to appreciate how the motif of exile is useful as an orienting paradigm for the church today. Thus we will briefly look at Christendom’s demise and the development of a post-Christendom cultural experience in the Western world today.

The Demise of Christendom

As we considered in the introduction to this book, there was a time in the history of most Western nations when Christianity held court as the de facto religion of the empire, and the church stood at or near the center of political power. In this cultural setting the church had a significant role to play in the shaping of culture and the determining of the overarching moral structures of society. The demise of this former cultural reality has actually been quite rapid and has received extensive treatments by a number of authors.2 Each of these studies confirms what many of us already know to be true, that Christianity has been gradually losing its status as the lingua franca in Western culture for some time and has increasingly tended to become a local language used only by those who are professing Christians, not understood by others.3

Christendom is a term given to the religious culture that has dominated Western society since the fourth century C.E. when Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which declared imperial toleration of Christianity in the Roman Empire. From here the emperor offered several more edicts that were favorable to Christianity and that eventually led to Christianity being equated with the religion of the state. This held true and was largely unchallenged for at least the next fourteen to fifteen centuries, as the church and the state stood as pillars equally supporting the overarching cultural milieu. Christianity was an official part of the empire, and in some countries the leader of the country was also head of the church, and citizens of the country were often baptized in state churches and assumed to be Christians simply because of their citizenship.4 Even in countries where there was not a state church, such as Canada or the United States, Christianity was by default the religion of the nation in its early formation.

This slowly began to change in many older Western nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Enlightenment, or the “Age of Reason” as it is often called, began to emerge and call into question many of the assumptions of Western culture, including its religious ones. As the Enlightenment project grew, the modernist era developed and the foundations of Christendom slowly began to crack. As the twentieth century dawned, Western culture was going through a tremendous upheaval in its self-identity. While an in-depth analysis of the particulars is outside the scope of this chapter, Phyllis Tickle chronicles some of the main contours of this immense transition in her book The Great Emergence. Tickle calls attention to the world-changing developments in science, economics, political structure, technology, the role of women, family life and morality that began to germinate during the Enlightenment but found serious traction during the twentieth century.5 All of these contributed to a reevaluation of religion, both in terms of its content and its role in society, that led to its increasing privatization and diminishing role in public life.

While church attendance and expressed religious affiliation do not tell the whole story, they still offer us a window into the reality of how things have changed when it comes to the overall population’s relationship to Christianity. A 2008 Pew Forum religious landscape survey revealed the seismic shift that is taking place within the religious beliefs of American people today. The massive Pew survey on more than 35,000 people reports that the US is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country for the first time in its history (only 51 percent claim to be Protestant). Catholic Christians make up only 24 percent of the population; however, the survey also reported that 31 percent said they were raised Catholic. The fastest-growing religious affiliation is “unaffiliated.” This number is rising most rapidly with younger generations, as one in four Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine identify themselves as having no religious affiliation. This includes atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particulars.”6 The report offers an analysis of its data by reflecting on the fact that there is an unprecedented amount of religious movement taking place in the US overall, and those reporting no affiliation are the group that best exemplifies this trend. The survey found that 3.9 percent of the adult population reports being raised without any particular religious affiliation but later in life began to affiliate with a religious group. However, more than three times as many people (12.7 percent of the adult population) were raised in a particular faith but have since become unaffiliated with any religious group. This migration away from religious affiliation reflects a significant trend in American life.7 If these trends continue at their current pace, religious “nones,” as they are often called, will outnumber Christians by 2042.8

Even basic belief in God is waning. A 1960 Pew survey asked Americans whether they believed in God. A whopping 97 percent answered “yes” to that query. In 2008 only 71 percent were “certain” that God or a “universal spirit” existed. That represents a 26 percent decline in American religious certainty. Even though the questions were worded slightly differently and different options were offered for the response, the trend is clear.9

In Canada similar trends are easily detected; in fact, they are occurring at an even more rapid rate. The work of sociologist Reginald Bibby reveals that 47 percent of Canadian teenagers report that they “never” attend religious services.10 Bibby’s survey, which he has done every four years for more than twenty-five years, demonstrates the way religious affiliation has shifted among younger people in Canada. In 1984 85 percent of Canadian teens reported that they were either Protestant or Catholic. By 2008 only 45 percent reported the same. Dramatically, 32 percent reported themselves as “nones” in terms of affiliation (up from 12 percent in 1984), and 16 percent reported themselves as affiliated with some kind of non-Christian faith (up from 3 percent in 1984).11 Bibby’s stats show that Canada is rapidly becoming a different place religiously than it was only twenty-five short years ago, and the fact that these changes are happening among younger generations signals that these changes are only beginning. Their full effect is yet to fully be felt throughout Canadian culture.

As we enter into the twenty-first century and the dust from the cultural upheaval of the previous century begins to clear, it is apparent that the church no longer functions at or near the center of things any more. The new reality for Christianity is that it is no longer fully integrated into the culture, and this reality will only grow more acute as the next decades unfold. The church must now function within a framework that precludes any kind of cultural authority.12

This new cultural milieu has been described by pollster Michael Adams as “a winding journey from the death of God and traditional notions of family and community, to a highly individualistic population focused on personal control and autonomy, to a new embryonic but fast-growing sense of human interconnectedness with technology and nature.”13 For some these developments offer liberation from former cultural norms that inhibited human growth.

Adams’s analysis captures the evolution of Western culture and the ongoing shifting that leads the culture further and further away from its past allegiance to Christian beliefs. The question as to what led to this change is certainly valid, and the answer is complex, but several significant developments can be considered central to this shift in cultural ethos. The following analysis offers some insight into how Western culture changed so dramatically in such a relatively short period of time.

A growing affluence in the population. A primary development that led to these cultural shifts is the unmistakable growth in national affluence in the postwar years, particularly in North America. There was a boom in manufacturing as factories that had been established to help in the war effort were turned into production facilities for consumer goods. The advent of the suburbs, just on the outskirts of large cities, provided opportunities for young, middle-class families to buy homes and establish themselves in subdivisions populated by other families who, like themselves, were seeking to build their postwar lives in a way that assured that their children would “have it better” than they did. Despite times of recession, affluence was a dominant theme of cultural discussion in the 1950s and ’60s. Even though the Cold War presented many complexities, affluence was taken as a normal condition, and the struggles of the Depression and the travails of the World War II period were now a distant memory, with minimal hold over the new generation of baby boomers.14 The economic abundance produced by the postwar manufacturing boom was also a catalyst for a rise in the technology sector. These developments brought about overall state growth and an increase in individual wealth.

The rise of material security and comfort, and the freedom of choice that came with them, cannot be overlooked as contributing factors to the overall secularization of the US and Canada, as it led some to abandon any sense of need for religious consolation. While these nations had enjoyed a certain amount of affluence for most of their history, and the pursuit of affluence was certainly not something new in the evolution of human history, it occurred in an unprecedented way in the postwar years and saw a significant rise in the 1960s. The advent of new affluence for many brought changes to their lives and the lifestyles that they chose. These choices affected their participation in certain traditional practices, sometimes including religious ones. It also provoked them to question some societal standards that had long been in place, as they sought to use their newfound affluence to enjoy a variety of worldly possibilities. This adventurous spirit was to some extent inspired by the fact that many North Americans returned from the war having been exposed to other cultures and having acquired a taste for things that up until then had either been foreign or were considered taboo. Once back, they insisted on the opportunity to access some of these things at home. Thus, in many parts of postwar society, a growing lenience arose on things like social drinking, sexual mores and Sunday as a day of “rest.” The new consumers were eager to surround themselves with products that contributed to a lifestyle of refined living. Former, more puritanical ways of living were condemned as restrictive of natural human freedoms. As the twentieth century progressed, the advent of new products and new technologies, greater incomes as a result of two-income homes, and a growing appetite for consumption added fuel to the consumptive fire that roared through major parts of North American culture. Consumerism and the comforts of material possessions contributed to the dissipation of spiritual appetites.

Secularization. At an even deeper level, these changes drew their life from the momentum found in the movement of secularization that had begun to emerge early in the nation’s life yet took firmer hold in the post–World War II years. A brief examination of secularism and its influence on North American life is necessary if we are to forge a basic understanding of how exile becomes a viable paradigm for the church to understand itself in the twenty-first century.15

In the early years of the twentieth century the forces of secularization were already beginning to encroach on public life all throughout the Western world. Thus it is wrong to assume that the process of secularization was a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. However, both the United States’ and Canada’s development as nations had a strong religious tone, and it was only after World War II that the overt influences of secularizing forces began to take their tangible grip on North American culture. However, on close scrutiny, it is not hard to discern how the secular trends of the West as a whole ...