Community Engagement after Christendom

Douglas G. Hynd

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781725257375
  9781725257382
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725257399
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The post-Christendom era in the English-speaking world has seen a significant reduction in access to political power by the churches, a slow loss of their social and cultural influence, and a shredding of their moral standing from abuse scandals and other public failings. Community Engagement after Christendom directly addresses these challenges, proposing a different approach to the relationship between church and society.    Church agencies today are often entangled in contracting with the state and its private partners to deliver government policy and services. This means they can be increasingly vulnerable to external pressure. So what resources can they and their agencies draw upon to reshape community engagement in a difficult, unsettling context?   Community Engagement after Christendom proposes a multifaceted approach. It begins by reading Scripture afresh through questions shaped by the present situation. Douglas Hynd then explores the story of Anabaptist public servant Pilgram Marpeck, identifying how his critique of Christendom can help reshape our understanding today. Finally, he looks at the current experience of church-related agencies and Christian advocacy, suggesting fresh, imaginative ways forward.

Part I

Reading Scripture “Again”

1

Implicated in the Exercise of Power, While No Longer “In Control”

Liberation and feminist theologians have been forcefully drawing our attention to the impact of our social and political location on our reading of Scripture, in shaping the presumptions we bring to the reading, and the questions we ask. The more reflective reading of Scripture they are calling for takes account of contexts of vulnerability whether they be sexual, social, or political. The temptation in appropriating this insight for the purposes at hand is to lean into an unqualified binary approach in which you are, for example, either in a position of power, or you’re not. This approach to acknowledging our social and political location lacks nuance. Many who are reading this book are likely to be, along with the author, because of our education and employment experience, in a position to exercise some degree of power and influence, even if it is limited.

This idea of a gradient in access to power is relevant to mapping the location of the churches after Christendom. Though churches are no longer able to command power and influence in the way they used to, and while sliding further down the slope because of the sexual abuse scandals, they are not completely powerless. They are in an “in-between” location, not “in control” but still implicated to some degree in the exercise of political and social power, and its outcomes. That’s the location from which I am suggesting those of us connected with and committed to the church should be reading Scripture.

I start this chapter by discussing what is involved in reading Scripture “again” from this location, exploring examples of reading Scripture outside of a location of power, over against Christendom. I begin with the Anabaptists, followed by examples of other readers of Scripture from outside Christendom. In my account of reading Scripture “again,” I highlight the importance of undertaking a dialogical and reflective approach that works toward helping the Christian movement to reimagine community engagement beyond Christendom.

What are we doing when we read scripture “again”?

In suggesting that we read Scripture “again,” I am not proposing something strange or novel. As individuals and congregations we are constantly, though not always consciously, involved in rereading and reinterpreting Scripture. In paying attention to the preaching of the Word week by week we are offered insights by the preacher hopefully derived from their rereading of Scripture. New commentaries on Scripture, shaped by questions about colonial power and racist politics, show up regularly in Christian bookshops.

Such a rereading acknowledges the possibility of hearing a fresh word from God addressed to us in our contemporary location.1 Paul the Apostle resisted any absolutist controlling approach to Scripture. “The letter kills but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). Nobody’s reading can be final, as the “Character,” as Brueggemann puts it, with whom we are engaging in reading Scripture “again” is always beyond us, and beyond our control.2 Each reading is inescapably provisional, and we need to be ready to be surprised by what we learn.

We should expect that any reading undertaken in the cause of faithful discipleship will call for a response from us. Samuel Wells reminds us that the “test of which readings prove fruitful simply emerges through the experience, wisdom and grace of the Spirit working in the church over time. There is no short cut to a single ‘correct’ reading, nor any guarantee that there can be a reading that has found everything the text offers to every person in every culture in every time.”3 We are called to read Scripture afresh, as our historical, geographical, and social location, that is, as the culture and politics, as well as the time and place in which we live out our discipleship, changes.

Reading the Scriptures “again” in our current disorienting context is not an artifact of modernity and contemporary culture, and so not a surrender to popular culture. It is an activity with a long history, stretching back through the life of communities that were shaped by wrestling with the Scripture. Brueggemann points to an example of this in the Mosaic teaching in Deuteronomy 23:1–18, that bans from the community those who were identified as being of distorted sexuality and all those who were foreigners. Isaiah 53 in its account of the suffering servant, in a wrestling with God’s future for Israel, overturns this judgment. Similarly, Deuteronomy 24:1 teaches that marriage broken by infidelity cannot be restored even if both parties want to do so. Then we come to Jeremiah 3, on which Brueggemann comments:

God’s own voice indicates a readiness to violate Torah teaching for the sake of restored marriage to Israel. . . . The God of Jeremiah’s poem willfully overrides the old text. . . . The final form of the text is profoundly polyvalent [and] yields no single exegetical outcome but [allows] layers and layers of fresh reading in which God’s own life and character are deeply engaged and put at risk.4

Our willingness to read Scripture “again” in new contexts assumes a surplus of meaning in the text, offering the prospect that our existing interpretations will be challenged and new insights emerge. My conviction is that Scripture is able to engage us under the guidance and movement of the Holy Spirit in changing circumstances, enabling us to discern new responses.

The assumptions and images about the relationship of the church to the structures of power inherited from Christendom that we bring with us to our reading of Scripture will continue to shape our reading until we are able to step back, identify them, and reflect critically on their appropriateness for our context. To proceed unreflectively, ignoring changes in our context, closes us off from fresh guidance from the Spirit, and condemns us to ineffectiveness in our engagement in the wider world. In the transition from Christendom, we need to keep in mind that reading “again” will occur primarily, though not exclusively, in the life and activity of a community of disciples. The story of the disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus is an important reminder of this.5

A dialogical approach

Contemporary situations throw up opportunities to interpret experience and conduct through the lens of Scripture and, most importantly, vice versa, to discern the meaning of Scripture through the lens of experience. Scriptural texts when read analogically illuminate everyday life. In this action and commitment are the necessary contexts for discerning God in the midst of human existence.6

What I have so far said about reading Scripture “again” in changing contexts has pointed implicitly to the dialogical character of this process. The French theologian and social philosopher Jacques Ellul illustrates the dialogical character of reading Scripture “again.” Ellul reminds us that there is a tension in reading Scripture in a way that continually questions and critiques the social theories and realities that he is working with, that is followed by a turning the questions arising from sociology back on the reading of Scripture being undertaken by theologians and clergy.7

Ellul suggests that in interrogating contemporary life with biblical revelation we will be challenged to give a response that is shaped by a free dialogue with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Though influenced by the two Karls, Karl Marx an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: A Perfect Storm
• Part I: Reading Scripture “Again”
• Part II: “Anticipating” Community Engagement after Christendom
• Part III: Community Engagement on the Way Out of Christendom
• Epilogue: Lingering with the Beatitudes
• Bibliography