More Than Communion

Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology

Scott MacDougall

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780567659903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

The dominant contemporary model for ecclesiology (theological views of the church itself) is the ecclesiology of communion. MacDougall argues that communion ecclesiologies are often marked by a problematic theological imagination of the future (eschatology). He argues further that, as a result, our ways of practising and being the church are not as robust as they might otherwise be. Re-imagining the church in the light of God's promised future, then, becomes a critical conceptual and practical task. MacDougall presents a detailed exploration of what communion ecclesiologies are and some of the problems they raise. He offers two case studies of such theologies by examining how distinguished theologians John Zizioulas and John Milbank understand the church and the future, how these combine in their work, and the conceptual and practical implications of their perspectives. He then offers an alternative theological view and demonstrates the effects that such a shift would have. In doing so, MacDougall offers a proposal for recovering the 'more' to communion and to ecclesiology to help us imagine a church that is not beyond the world (as in Zizioulas) or over against the world (as in Milbank), but in and for the world in love and service. This concept is worked out in conversation with systematic theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Johannes Baptist Metz, and by engaging with a theology of Christian practices currently being developed by practical theologians such as Dorothy C. Bass, Craig Dykstra, and those associated with their ongoing project. The potential for the church to become an agent of discipleship, love, and service can best be realised when the church anticipates God's promised perfection in the full communion between God and humanity, among human beings, within human persons, and between humanity and the rest of creation.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: MORE THAN COMMUNION?

1.1 Ecclesiology and Theological Imagination

At its best, ecclesiology is the theological articulation of an imagination of what it is to be church. This does not mean that ecclesiology is a flight of theological fancy. Ecclesiological imagination is the type of imagination that philosopher Charles Taylor describes in his concept of the “social imaginary.”1 For Taylor, this “imaginary” represents the pre-conscious, pre-theoretical “background” that unifies the members of a society or a community. Encoded in shared perspectives, repeated narratives, and common practices, this social imaginary provides a people with a foundational imagination of who they are, how they relate to one another, and what to expect from their joint life. It is the framework that gives significance to their daily actions. It supplies a horizon of normativity, commitment to a set of metaphysical or moral truths that are taken to underlie the social order, that make things “the way they are.” The social imaginary is not a mere mental construct, but a way of being in the world. It is “the water one swims in.” It is the context within which one’s reality, one’s actions, and one’s identity are formed and have meaning. This imagination often remains invisible. Partially, this is because it includes so much: the intellectual, affective, bodily, historical, religious, and aspirational aspects of a particular community. It is therefore too broad, deep, complex, and open to be contained by “theory,” and it is so thoroughgoing, so apparently “given,” that it is difficult to perceive. Such an imagination takes shape as it is lived, as new ideas result in new practices and vice versa, in a slow and never-ending circular flow of action into vision, vision into action, and around again.2

Theology in its broadest sense can be understood as being a kind of “theological imaginary” analogous to Taylor’s social imaginary. James K. A. Smith, for example, explicitly adverting to Taylor, demonstrates how a theological imagination shapes and is shaped by the mode of Christian life in which a person’s identity is rooted.3 As such, this theological imagination is much more profound than the “Christian worldview” that is often invoked, particularly in more conservative quarters. Such a notion is far too perspectival and intellectual.4 Although it includes the intellect, theological imagination, like the social imaginary, is pre-cognitive, synthetic, affective, embodied, narrative, and poetic.5 It cannot be limited to the mental sphere because this is an imagination of God, the world, and our place in it that is fully lived rather than merely thought.6 It is a theological vision of human flourishing, profoundly informed by the scripture, tradition, and personal experience of Christian faith, that shapes and is shaped by (for better and for worse) our manner of life and that provides and reflects (for better and for worse) a template for the world we desire and the people we seek to become.7 Theological imagination does not “express” a view of the world. That, again, would make it the result of an intellectual process. Instead, like the social imaginary, it is an embodied understanding of the world, a pre-reflective intuition about reality and how to live in it, operationalized by and already embedded in what we think and do.8 Transposed into a phenomenological key, the theological imagination is like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s praktognosia, “know-how,” a bodily, unthought, unthematized, deeply contextual capacity of the human person to move in the world in a way that has significance and that accords with the complex reality operating in a person’s “background,” prior to reflection and without having to make recourse to “theory,” which would include “theology,” in the technical sense.9

Christian community—church—is also theologically imagined in this way. Different imaginations of church result in and from the ways we “do” church. But in each case, this is, for most Christian people simply a facet of what Christian people do, not something carefully considered. When subjected to critical reflection, of course, this becomes ecclesiology in the formal mode of academic theology. But there is what we might call an ecclesial imagination that runs deeper and broader than scholarly theologies of church. It is this imagination of Christian community—conceptual, but not entirely so, embodied, “known” in the phenomenological sense in a pre-reflective way according to the deeper sense we have made of God, the world, and our place in it, supported by a common (scriptural) narrative and undergirded by common practices, both traditional and new, a manner of corporate life that endows our individual lives with profound significance—that I want to try to bring into focus. Being a piece of written theology, this discussion will necessarily be skewed in an intellectual and conceptual direction. But, being driven by theological imagination rather than simply “theology,” the embodied, the practical, the lived, the aspirational, and the affective dimensions of what it means to be church will be at all times close at hand and should be what come to the reader’s mind whenever “imagination” and its cognates appear here.

We cannot be church properly, we do not do Christian community well, if our ecclesial imagination is stunted. If theological imagination is a lived vision of human flourishing in light of a pre-thematized understanding of God, the world, and our place in it, what is imagined to constitute that flourishing will have everything to do with how we imagine church. This means our ecclesial imagination is inhibited if we do not have a robust imagination of that which gives rise to what is of ultimate value. The aspect of theological imagination that pertains to our vision of what has enduring significance is handled under the heading of eschatology. Eschatological imagination, the lived vision of what suffuses with divine meaning the entire drama of the cosmos from creation to ultimate fulfillment, provides the imaginative background for how we embody Christian community. The eschatological imagination and the ecclesial imagination are inextricably linked.

Doing the difficult work of opening the eschatological imagination, therefore, opens the ecclesial imagination, making available modes of being church that are more in keeping with the vocation of Christian community and that serve God and God’s beloved creation in more life-giving ways. In light of this, I want to show that “communion ecclesiology,” the principal working theology of the church among ecclesiologists in the West, in the East, and ecumenically, tends to be associated with an eschatology that is not as rich as it might be. This limits our ability to imagine church more fully. The way in which ecclesiologies of communion often imagine eschatology sometimes forestalls modes of being church that could emerge from a more generous eschatological imagination, modes that would allow Christian community to live better into its appointed task of loving and serving the world God loves, as an anticipation of the relational perfection God desires for the entire creation.

1.2 Communion Ecclesiology: Dominant Paradigm, Diverse Meanings

Communion ecclesiology is particularly strong among theologians rooted in what Miroslav Volf calls the “episcopal churches,” meaning “those churches in which the office of the episcopate is affirmed for strictly dogmatic rather than practical reasons,”10 which also happen to be the traditions with “higher” sacramental theologies—primarily the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions, though this also includes some Lutherans, Methodists, and other Protestants. Communion ecclesiology is by no means limited to these branches of Christianity, however. It is accepted by the vast majority of churches involved in ecumenical work. The ecumenical movement has played an especially significant role in bringing communion ecclesiology to the fore. It has not itself generated new versions of communion ecclesiology, but has drawn upon the communion-ecclesiological perspectives of the traditions involved to advance its work, as these are seen to be deeply consonant with the movement’s goal of visible Christian unity. Roger Haight contends that communion ecclesiology connects with the ecumenical desire to identify common ecclesiological ground among the manifold expressions of church in a manner that affirms and maintains their essential unity-in-plurality.11 In addition, Haight posits that the pre-eminent ecumenical organization, the World Council of Churches (WCC), without being a church itself, “represents a form of actual communion,” to some extent enacting the communion it extols in its ecclesiological statements.12

Despite the dominant status of the communion notion among ecclesiologists, to state that a particular theologian advances a “communion ecclesiology” does not indicate that she maintains a specific theology of the church so much as it does that she is theologically situated within a range of ecclesiological possibilities. “Communion ecclesiology” can mean different, sometimes even contradictory, things depending upon who is invoking it. For this reason, some think “communion ecclesiology” has become a relatively empty catch-all phrase.13 To others, the openness of the idea is its strength. For them, communion ecclesiology is a “flexible model” that includes (or can include) many different ecclesiological perspectives.14 Haight thinks that the term “communion ecclesiology” is left “deliberately vague” precisely for this reason.15 The subtitle of Dennis Doyle’s study, Communion Ecclesiology: Vision and Versions, gestures toward this.16 A WCC statement and an influential letter from the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for example, may both purport to espouse communion ecclesiology, but it certainly does not look the same in both cases.17 The breadth of the term “communion ecclesiology” permits it to underwrite ideas of church that differ significantly.18 As a result, it is better to speak of plural ecclesiologies of communion rather than a monolithic communion ecclesiology. An ecclesiology of communion falls somewhere within a generous spectrum of theological possibilities, depending upon how a theologian’s ecclesiology interacts with that theologian’s other commitments.

1.3 The Ecclesiological Importance of (Re-)Imagining Communion

Diverse as they are, however, all communion ecclesiologies are predicated upon a rich and multi-layered understanding of communion (koinonia) and its relation to ecclesial life: the trinitarian communion of persons in the Godhead, into which human persons are incorporated or in which they participate; church as a communion of persons within a community and of communities in communion with one another, related in some way to trinitarian communion; and the practice of eucharistic communion as an entry point into or mode of communion life. Communion ecclesiologies emphasize aspects of church that are crucial: unity, structure, apostolic fidelity, traditional wisdom, and eucharist as the ritual act that simultaneously effects communion with the triune ...