In Good Company

The Church as Polis

Stanley Hauerwas

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780268161163
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

By exposing a different account of politics—the church as polis and "counterstory" to the world's politics—Stanley Hauerwas helps Christians to recognize the unifying beliefs and practices that make them a political entity apart from the rest of the world.

PART I

In Protestant Company

1

What Could It Mean for the Church to Be Christ’s Body? A Question without a Clear Answer

I. Why Some Remnants of “Constantinianism” Are, after All, Not Such a Bad Idea¹

We were on our honeymoon. Theological questions were not high on our agenda as we toured Ireland in 1988. We drove innocently into Sneem, a village on the ring of Kerry, identified as the “tidy town of Ireland.” It was certainly that. The houses that surrounded the central square were as immaculate as they were colorful.

We decided to stop and shop at one of the stores selling Irish sweaters. We were enjoying the large and beautiful selection the shop offered when, suddenly, the young man who seemed to be the proprietor announced that he had to close up shop in order to go to Mass. It was eleven o’clock on a Thursday. So I asked what was going on that might make an enterprising young man close his store just as the tourists were showing up.

He explained that it was the feast of the Ascension and also the traditional day marked for first communion. Suddenly little boys and girls appeared from everywhere fitted with white suits and white dresses. Then they all marched together into the church for Mass. After Mass, we were told, they all came out of the church, circled the fountain in the center of the square, while everyone in the town cheered and clapped. This was confirmed in every little town we passed through that day in west Ireland. Little girls and boys dressed in white were everywhere celebrating their first communion.

I confess that I have suspicions about what it means to dress up young girls to become brides of Christ. I even have deeper questions about the very idea of “first communion,” believing that if you baptize infants there is no reason not to commune them. Yet I could not suppress the thought: “If this is Constantinianism, I rather like it.”²

That, of course, is not a thought I am supposed to have. I have, after all, been labeled a “sectarian, fideistic tribalist” who is calling for the church to beat a retreat from the world.³ George Hunsinger and William Placher, in a note introducing a particular essay by Hans Frei observe that the essay

is valuable for understanding Frei because of the way it addresses political themes. An interest in progressive politics was an important part of his life but something he wrote about only rarely. Many of those often placed in the same theological camp as Frei seem to propose that the Christian community focus on its own internal identity, arguing that it serves the larger society best when it witnesses to the possibility of a different kind of community formed by a different language. Stanley Hauerwas maintains such a stance most forcefully, but it also sometimes appears in the works of George Lindbeck.⁴

This puts me in a particularly difficult position, not only with regard to explaining why I find Sneem on the feast of the Ascension so attractive, but also in fulfilling the mandate that came with the kind invitation to address this conference. As Dr. Logan put it in his letter to me, “The overall theme for the 1994 Conference is taken appropriately from the famous letter of Bonhoeffer of 30 April 1944: ‘Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today?’ We therefore invite you to give the final paper on the topic: ‘The Church as the Body of Christ’, drawing out the ecclesiological-ethical implications of the more ‘theoretical’ discussions explored in the earlier papers (respectively, ‘Biblical Criticism and Christology’, ‘Divine Agency in History and the Question of Universality’, ‘Spirit of Christ? Trinitarian Theology and Christology’ and ‘Christ, Contingency and Gender: The Ontology of Human Being’).” I appreciate the quotes around the word “theoretical,” but I still fear, as one identified with “ethics,” that I am supposed to be the one who spells out the “practical implications” of the more straightforward theological claims. If the “ecclesiological-ethical implications” still need to be “drawn out” then I worry that the “theology” is embedded in a politics I have long tried to resist by admittedly inadequate means, that is, by refusing to distinguish between theology and ethics.

Yet ironically that refusal is the reason some would argue I should not, on my own account, be able to say what kind of social ethic is appropriate for the church understood as the body of Christ. And if I wish to remain true to my view—in particular, if I am serious in my oft-made claim that the first task of the church is not to make the world just, but to make the world the world—then I cannot “draw out the implications” since the implications are embedded in my theology. What I will try to do, however, is to show why it is necessary to make such a claim about the church’s first task if we are to appreciate appropriately what it means, particularly under the conditions of modernity, for the church to be the body of Christ. By doing so I hope to suggest why Placher’s and Hunsinger’s characterization of my position as proposing that the Christian community focus on its own identity is a misunderstanding. It is, however, a misunderstanding that is understandable and it is important to understand why it is so.

Even if I am successful in countering the claim that my stress on the importance of the church commits me to an apolitical account of the Gospel, I fear that I still will not have written the paper that was desired for this conference. For in truth I fear that part of the problem is the very presumption that theology constitutes “thought” which then must seek embodiment. Once theology becomes “thought” the church has already accepted modernity’s disembodiment of the Gospel. Why that is the case, therefore, becomes part of the burden of this paper.

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge in 1940, Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised what I take to be the challenge before us. He was reflecting on the Kirchenkampf of the previous decade, but I think his words are as relevant today as they were then:

The question is whether, after the separation from papal and from secular authority in the church, an ecclesiastical authority can be established which is grounded solely in Scripture and confession. If no such authority is possible, then the last possibility of an Evangelical Church is dead; then there is only return to Rome or under the state church, or the path of individualization, of the ‘protest’ of Protestantism against false authorities.⁵

The problem is, quite simply, that we can talk all we want about the church as the body of Christ, but in fact such talk is more than likely to be just that—i.e., talk. We have no means of knowing if the Holy Spirit has abandoned the church because we have no means of knowing what it would mean for the spirit to matter as matter.⁶ In short, we have few ways to resist what seems unavoidable everywhere but in Sneem; namely, the “spiritualization” of the church.

II. Why the “Body of Christ” Is Not an “Image”

These last remarks are not meant to disparage the importance of Christological and ecclesiological analysis. Rather they are meant to remind us that theological reflection never occurs in a vacuum—a point easily made and usually eliciting universal assent but whose implications are seldom appreciated. For example, it surely makes some difference that I write as a Christian schooled by the habits of American academe. What I say about the church as the body of Christ cannot help but be shaped by that context.⁷

My claim “that the church does not have a social ethic, but rather is a social ethic” cannot help but sound, in some contexts, like a call for group narcissism. Yet I make such a claim in the hope of reminding Christians in America that we too are an imperialistic polity that must challenge the imperialistic pretensions of that entity called “The United States of America.” The question for me, then, is how does the description “the body of Christ,” help Christians better understand what we must be in order to face the challenges of being the Church in the United States. That much is clear. What I remain unclear about, however, is how much actually hangs on which particular “image” of the church is thought of as primary.

I can illustrate my unclarity on this point by recalling some of the debates that surrounded the drafting of Lumen Gentium at Vatican II. At the time I was a seminarian and Catholicism for me was, at best, a theoretical idea. I did, however, have the advantage at the time of taking classes with George Lindbeck. The issue, as presented by Lindbeck, was whether the primary image for the church was to be “the body of Christ” or “the people of God.” The former was said to be associated with hierarchal and authoritarian forms of the church; the latter was said to indicate a more open and democratic understanding of the church.⁸ At the time, of course, I was on the side of the “people of God” image, since I just assumed that any right-thinking person was against hierarchy.

What seems odd to me now is the assumption that an “image” entails a sociology. I have no doubt that the presumption that “the body of Christ” is an image is produced by a certain sociology and politics—a sociology and politics that I wish to counter. What I am unclear about is why the choice comes down to one between “the body of Christ” or “the people of God,” and why either one of these images, in and of itself, determines an ecclesiology. As Paul Minear suggested in his book Images of the Church in the New Testament, a book that was said to have a profound influence on the participants at the Council, there are well over fifty images for the church in the New Testament.⁹

I think there can be little doubt that “the body of Christ” is, as Minear argues, one of the major descriptions of the church, particularly for Paul.¹⁰ Moreover, if the image does in fact entail some hierarchic account of the church, then I am for it. As Lumen Gentium puts it,

Having become the model of a man loving his wife as his own body, Christ loves the Church as His bride (Eph. 5:25–28). For her part, the Church is subject to her Head (Eph. 5:22–33). “For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). He fills the Church, which is His Body and His fullness, with His divine gifts (Eph. 1:22–23) so that she may grow and reach all the fullness of God (Eph. 3:19).

Christ, the one Mediator, established and ceaselessly sustains here on earth His holy Church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as a visible structure. Through her He communicates truth and grace to all. But the society furnished with hierarchical agencies and the Mystical Body of Christ are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things. Rather they form one interlocked reality which is comprised of a divine and a human element. For this reason, by an excellent analogy, this reality is compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word. Just as the assumed nature inseparably united to the divine Word serves Him as a living instrument of salvation, so, in a similar way, does the communal structure of the Church serve Christ’s Spirit, who vivifies it by way of building up the body (Eph. 4:16).¹¹

Of course, the question must then be asked whether the hierarchy of Christ as head of the church must take the form, as Lumen Gentium later suggests, of the hierarchy of bishops ordered to the office of Peter. Yet what I take to be significant about Lumen Gentium is that we at least have a definite politics associated with the “image.” For it is no longer simply an “image” for “self-understanding,” even on the part of the church, but a question of who has authority over bodies. Lumen Gentium quite rightly assumes that questions about the status of the church as “the body of Christ” are inseparable from questions of government.

Such a practice is necessary for a reading of the Pauline stress on the body if we are to avoid the ontology of the body so characteristic of liberal societies—i.e., that my “body” is an instrument for the expression of my “true self.” That is why I suspect that nothing is more gnostic than the celebration of the “body” in liberal societies. The “body” so celebrated turns out to be the body created by the presumption that there is an “I” that has a body. Nowhere is such a view of the body better seen than in the assumption, enshrined in modern medicine, that there is no limit to what we can and should do to overcome the limits of the body. Thus the difficulty of distinguishing torture from some forms of medical practice.¹²

The body politics of liberalism can make no sense of passages like 1 Corinthians 6:12–20. Paul did not think that we, as baptized believers, ought to view our bodies as if we were one with one another through Christ, but rather that our bodies are quite literally not our “own” because we have been made (as well as given) a new body by the Spirit.¹³ What is crucial, therefore, is not whether the Church is primarily understood as “the body of Christ” or “the people of God,” but whether the practices exist through which we learn that our bodies are not “ours.”

Such practices require community disciplines through which the story of our baptism is embodied in all that we do and are. We require practices through which we learn that we do not know who we are, or what our bodies can and cannot do, until we are told what and who we are by a more determinative “body.” In this respect, the saints are reminders of the character of what it means for us all to be members of Christ’s body. For the saints cannot know who they are until we, that is, the communion of saints, tell them who they are.¹⁴ In like manner, we are only known to the extent we are known by God and by God’s church. To learn to live our lives on the basis of such a “knowing” requires, I am sure, a lifetime constituted by many disciplines. White suits and dresses at the feast of Ascension is surely a small and insufficient step in such disciplines, but something like that practice must surely be part of the process.¹⁵

III. Why the “Body of Christ” Is Not a “Community”

I use the word “community,” as well as the example of Sneem, with trepidation. The use of the word “community” soon earns one the label of being a “communitarian,” and examples like Sneem are usually dismissed as hopeless and naively romantic. The latter designation usually carries with it a strong condemnation for one’s failure to see the ugly underside of Sneemlike villages where male patriarchy and Roman Catholic oppressiveness continue to rule. All I will say about the latter criticism is that, given the alternatives, I would rather deal with the problems presented by a Sneem. At least in Sneem you have practices in place that give you a basis for making non-arbitrary judgments.

I must be more emphatic in my rejection of the description of being a communitarian.¹⁶ Community is far too weak a description for that body we call church. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, contemporary communitarians usually advance their proposals as a contribution to the politics of the nation-state. Liberals want government to remain neutral between rival conceptions of the human good. Communitarians want government to give expression to some shared vision of the human good that will define some type of community.

Where liberals have characteristically urged that it is in the activities of subordinate voluntary associations, such as those constituted by religious groups, that shared visions of the good should be articulated, communitarians have insisted that the nation itself through the institutions of the nation-state ought to be constituted to some significant degree as a community. In the United States this has become a debate within the Democratic Party, a debate in which from my own point of view communitarians have attacked liberals on one issue on which liberals have been consistently in the right.¹⁷

What must be resisted, according to MacIntyre, is the identification of the Romantic vision of nations as potential communities, whose unity can be expressed through the institutions of the state, with the Aristotelian conception of the polis. Unfortunately, an idealization of the latter, combined with the Romantic vision, has led some thinkers, particularly in Germany, to view the nation-state as an all-embracing community. And that combination, as we know only too well, certainly can generate totalitarian expressions. Yet, according to MacIntyre, the practice-based forms of Aristotelian community generated in the modern world are small-scale and local. (Of course, if smallness is made an end in itself, these Aristotelian forms of community can also become another form of romanticism.)

Liberals mistakenly think that the evils they associate with authoritarianism and/or totalitarianism arise from any form of political community which embodies practical agreements based on a strong conception of the human good. In contrast I assume, with MacIntyre, that such evils arise from the character of the modern nation-state. As MacIntyre puts it,

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. As I have remarked elsewhere (‘Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats’, in On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, ed. V. Bell and L. Lerner, Nashville, 1988, p. 149), it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.¹⁸

I see...