International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 5 Number 3 November 2003 Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness? NICHOLAS M. HEALY* Abstract: Recent writing in ecclesiology has often focused on church practices and less on dogmatic accounts. Whilst welcoming this renewed awareness, there are problems in its development, demonstrated here through an analysis of the concept of a practice, and through readings of two examples of this tendency: Hütter s Suffering Divine Things and Hauerwas s With the Grain of the Universe. Resources from Thomas Aquinas are offered that might help the development of ecclesiology in this vein. Over the last decade or so there have been signs of a shift away from the highly systematic and ideal ecclesiologies of the twentieth century, those described, for example, in Avery Dulles s classic study, Models of the Church. 1 Increasingly, theologians have turned their attention to the concrete church, to its activities and distinctive functions. Significant and exciting work in this area has been done by theologians such as George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson and Stanley Hauerwas, and, in a second generation, Kathryn Tanner, Greg Jones, Bruce Marshall and many others. Their work explores in various ways the ecclesiological implications of the view, initially developed by Wittgenstein, that we are who we are, and we know and can live in the world around us, because we have been inculturated into particular ways of life embodied in distinctive communities in which certain language games and forms of life are performed and learned. I will call their work the new ecclesiology, not, indeed, to assert that it constitutes a consistent program, but simply to indicate that it shares certain tendencies, which are the topic of this article. A key element of many of the new ecclesiologies is a focus on the practices of the church. The turn to practices reflects a move away from certain philosophical notions, especially those associated with the turn to the subject, that support those liberal and privatistic theologies in which the Christian community has little role to * St John s University, 300 Howard Avenue, Staten Island, New York 10301, USA. 1 Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, expanded edn (New York: Doubleday, 1974/1987). For a critique of such modern ecclesiologies, see my Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.
288 Nicholas M. Healy play in the lives of individual Christians. 2 To discuss the church s practices is to attend to the necessarily communal and active nature of Christianity. So Reinhard Hütter contends that the church is to be understood as a web of core practices which at the same time mark and constitute the church. 3 According to Serene Jones, these practices form our identities as Christians: [w]hen one is sanctified, one performs and is performed by the script of divine love that comes to us in Jesus Christ, a script mediated to us ecclesially. It is the script of Christian identity, and its patterns of movement and thought are the patterns that comprise the essence of our Christian practices. 4 More contentiously, Greg Jones says that those who are troubled by Hauerwas s emphasis on the church, or by MacIntyre s account of the moral and intellectual virtues and the importance of practices and traditions, ought to explain how they can provide for the formation of Christian character better or why these are not crucial themes for understanding Christian living. 5 In what follows, I attempt to respond to Greg Jones s challenge. 6 I welcome the new ecclesiology s turn to the concrete. Critical reflection on the church s activities and practices has been too long neglected by modern ecclesiology s concern to define or model the being of the church. Moreover, the new ecclesiology retrieves some important aspects of premodern ecclesiology, especially its comparatively unsystematic approach and its concern for the proper performance of traditions and customs. 7 Yet I am indeed troubled by certain aspects of the new ecclesiology. I will argue that thus far its proponents have failed adequately to address some important matters, of both a philosophical and a theological nature. And this has made it too easy to read the new ecclesiology as moving in a troubling 2 See esp. George Lindbeck s The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). 3 Reinhard Hütter, in James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago, eds., Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 35. 4 Serene Jones, in Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass, eds., Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 60. 5 Greg Jones, in Buckley and Yeago, Knowing the Triune God, p. 173. 6 Jones s challenge is actually directed to those who accuse Hauerwas of sectarianism. However, the emphasis on the church and its practices may also be troubling to those, like myself, who think the sectarian charge entirely bogus. I discuss some aspects of Hauerwas s ecclesiology in the second section below. 7 The debates at the Council of Trent were clearly in part about the practices of the church. Trent s claim that the Roman magisterium has authority over morals as well as faith is not to be understood as simply a claim about morality, according to John Mahoney. The Latin word mores referred only part of the time to moral concerns. The Reformers and the Roman hierarchy were united in their concern about morality. What divided them were the mores, those traditional practices and customs handed on, or not handed on, from the Apostles, such as devotions to saints, private masses, celibacy and the like, things that would now be called practices. See John Mahoney, S.J., The Making of Moral Theology: A study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 120 32.
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 289 direction and, as it may be or not in some cases, perhaps too easy to misunderstand it. In the first section, after some initial discussion of practices in the new ecclesiology, I note, from a philosophical viewpoint, some of the things that are missing. In the second section, I look at the implications of this inadequacy as it is combined with and compounded by further omissions, this time of a theological kind. In the final part, I try to show how Thomas Aquinas, to whom many of the new ecclesiologies often appeal, might offer some resources for a more well-rounded version of the new ecclesiology. I One difficulty with the new ecclesiology s turn to practices is that there is no settled definition of what a practice is. In part this reflects the newness of the new ecclesiology, in part the variety of sources from which theologians draw their theoretical understanding of practice, which include the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 8 Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, as well as combinations of these and other social theorists. 9 David Kelsey, for example, defines a practice as any form of socially established cooperative human activity that is complex and internally coherent, is subject to standards of excellence that partly define it, and is done to some end but does not necessarily have a product. 10 For Dorothy Bass, practices are patterns of co-operative human activity in and through which life together takes shape over time in response to and in the light of God as known in Jesus Christ. 11 As Bass and Craig Dykstra note, a practice may be almost any socially meaningful action, though they themselves say an activity qualifies as an ecclesial practice only if it is a sustained, cooperative pattern of human activity that is big enough, right enough, and complex enough to address some fundamental feature of human existence. 12 8 MacIntyre defines a practice as: any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and good involved, are systematically extended. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, second edn (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 187. 9 Bourdieu s concept of practice differs in important respects from MacIntyre s. See Bourdieu s Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); also The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 80 97. 10 David H. Kelsey, To Understand God Truly (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 118. 11 Volf and Bass, Practicing Theology, p. 3. 12 Volf and Bass, Practicing Theology, p. 22.
290 Nicholas M. Healy The practices discussed by the new ecclesiologies fall into two main groups. One group consists of those practices which are clearly structured, requiring specific actions at specific times and places. Of this kind, some may be more complex than others. Baptism is clearly a big and complex activity. It requires more actions for it to be performed properly than, say, the practice of dipping the hand into holy water and crossing oneself. The other kind of practices are loosely structured, if they have any structure at all, so they can be performed in many different ways. Bass lists a number of these, including saying yes and saying no, honoring the body, keeping sabbath, dying well and hospitality. 13 Some theologians talk more about the wellstructured kind of practices, especially the sacraments, while Miroslav Volf contends that the sacraments are not practices but belong in a separate category. 14 Reinhard Hütter ranks practices according to Lutheran doctrine. On his view, two of the sacraments, baptism and eucharist, are practices that are constitutive of the church, as is the proclamation of the gospel and the commemoration of the law ; others are necessary but not constitutive, such as theological inquiry and, for some, confession. 15 Yet other practices are neither necessary nor constitutive, such as Christmas, especially the Christmas tree. 16 All who talk about church practices agree that they are an often-overlooked yet vital aspect of the church, that they are an essential element in the formation of Christian virtues and character, and that Christian identity is brought about (at least in part) by membership in particular congregations and church communities in which these practices are performed. Thus James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago reflect a common view when they propose that the church should be understood primarily in terms of the singular practices through which it is formed and bound to God. 17 Beyond this general agreement, it is possible to distinguish two somewhat different versions of the new ecclesiology. One is characterized by a concern to bring to discourse or to make explicit the often overlooked or taken-for-granted practices of the churches and congregations so that they may be brought into closer conformity to the word of God. Here attention is directed to the practices themselves, which are critically and constructively analyzed in light of contemporary challenges (theological and others) and, as it may be, abandoned, changed, reconstructed or maintained unaltered. This kind of ecclesiology can be understood as continuing the traditional theological effort to reform the church, now using, in additional to the 13 These are taken from Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), cited by Bass and Dykstra in Volf and Bass, Practicing Theology, p. 19. 14 Volf and Bass, Practicing Theology, p. 248. 15 By confession, Hütter means generally what the Roman church calls specifically the sacrament of reconciliation, not the practice of making confessional statements, as in the Reformed tradition. 16 R. Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology As Church Practice, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 37 and 211. 17 Buckley and Yeago, Knowing the Triune God, p. 11. Their proposal is made in the interest of practical ecumenism. They may not mean it as an absolute statement.
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 291 philosophical tools of earlier times, those of sociology and ethnography, too. In my opinion, the best theoretical example of this version can be found in Kathryn Tanner s more recent work. Her understanding of practices is sophisticated, both theologically and social-theoretically, and since I do not find it particularly troubling, I do not discuss it here. 18 The other version seeks to recover and promote traditional ecclesial practices in order to help the church face the unusual challenges brought on by the dominance of secularism and the decline of orthodox Christian identity and church life. The established practices of the church are considered to be adequate for this task, by and large, provided that they are retrieved from distortion. The church s practices will help restore what George Lindbeck has called the church s center, which at present is not holding. The center is giving way either to liberal constructivism and group-identity theologies or to reactionary conservatism. 19 Merely reaffirming our beliefs is not enough to deal with the problem. We must recover our traditional practices, for only they can provide us with what Greg Jones calls new disciplines and practices of formation 20 by which the center may be restored. For many of the new ecclesiologies, these practices also foster a sense of the church as countercultural. Stanley Hauerwas, for example, contends that Christians need to recover a sense of themselves as resident aliens. 21 Sometimes in this version of the new ecclesiology the difference between us and them is put very strongly. The church is different from the world because its traditional practices oppose the prevailing practices of the culture of death or modern consumer society or liberal warmongering, or whatever is named as the fundamental problem with the world. John Milbank s assertion that the church s counter-cultural identity is based on its claim to exhibit the exemplary form of human community illustrates an extreme form of this view. 22 Now let us look more closely at some examples and, to begin with, make some elementary points about the more loosely structured kind of practices. Consider hospitality. Hospitable actions can take very diverse forms, provided that somehow care is given to a visitor. Consequently, when my family acts hospitably towards a stranger, we cannot simply follow a rule without much thought about the matter, nor can we simply perform the practice of hospitality we have learned as church members, even when the stranger is a Christian. This is because it is not at all clear that there is such a practice. Our actions must be made up as we go along, 18 See Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997). 19 George A. Lindbeck, Ecumenical Imperatives for the Twenty-First Century, Currents in Theology and Mission 20 (1993), pp. 360 6, p. 364, cited by Hütter, Suffering, p. 195. 20 Greg Jones, in Buckley and Yeago, Knowing the Triune God, p. 149. 21 See especially his Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989). The countercultural view of the church is advocated generally throughout his writings, though Hauerwas clearly acknowledges that the church learns from society. 22 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 388.
292 Nicholas M. Healy as we borrow useful gestures from all kinds of places, few of which may be Christian. The flexibility and imaginative effort needed to act hospitably with success, whether as an individual or a family or a congregation, make it difficult to see the point of calling such actions practices. We must decide, for example, whether we should shake hands with the visitor, or hug them, kiss cheeks once or twice or thrice, offer food of some kind or, as the case of Dorothy Day noted by Hauerwas, decide whether or not to rent a large apartment building to house visitors in need. 23 The extraordinary range of possible hospitable actions indicate that, if our care for a visitor is prompted by faith in Jesus Christ, we are not performing a practice so much as simply attempting to obey a precept of the church. In such cases, Kelsey s standards of excellence lie not in the socially sanctioned structures of a specific practice, but in the precept, our conformity to which is measured by the success of our imaginative efforts, gestures and utterances. The same point applies to the other loosely-structured kinds of practices. 24 I take it that practices are not mere behavior patterns; they are actions performed by human agents. An agent s intention informs their action, making it this action rather than that. Surprisingly, intention is largely ignored when the new ecclesiology talks of practices. For example, Bruce Marshall s otherwise splendid account of truth in Christian discourse seems to rely upon a notion of practice that is largely independent of intention. 25 Or, to put the matter another way, it seems to rely upon ideally intended and performed practices. Marshall notes that whether or not a sentence is true or false depends upon what the sentence means. The meaning of a sentence, in turn, depends upon the action-context my term, not his of the one who utters the sentence. The classic illustration of this is George Lindbeck s crusader who shouts, Christus Dominus est as he chops off his enemy s head. The actioncontext gives his utterance a false note. The phrase now has a different meaning, and is therefore a different claim, from what it would have had had the phrase been uttered in other action-contexts, such as prayer. Christ s Lordship is not such that it warrants killing an enemy. 26 23 Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church s Witness and Natural Theology, The Gifford Lectures, 2001 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001; London: SCM Press, 2002), pp. 230f., note 58. 24 It is likely, moreover, that all the practices of the church, including the well-structured kind, are governed by some precept or other, whether implicit or explicit. At least, that would seem to be the Roman Catholic claim with regard to the church s sacraments as instituted by Christ. 25 Bruce D. Marshall, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 26 Lindbeck s illustration can be found in his Nature of Doctrine, p. 64. Even in this case the practice does not fix the meaning of the utterance, though it certainly affects it, of course. Suppose the crusader had been reading his Bible the night before the battle and had become convinced that the crusade is wrong. He argues with the camp priest about it in the morning, and becomes confused and despondent by the priest s exhortations to do his duty by Christ, the Pope and King Louis. Going into battle, he recalls a sermon by a Dominican who once visited his parish, and has the spiritual insight that his knowledge of right and wrong is of less import, finally, than the work in him of him who
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 293 This is all quite reasonable. But Marshall seems to go somewhat further when he says that a practice fixes the meaning of an utterance. 27 The Spirit creates the church, he believes, as a community structured by specific practices. It is possible to determine the precise shape 28 of these practices. So the shape of a practice is the basis for determining the meaning of sentences we utter as we perform the practice. Thus it is primarily the church s practices which have to guide any effort to fix the meaning of this community s most central beliefs. 29 However, such a determination would seem remarkably difficult to do in the concrete. For one thing, the intention of the one performing a practice also affects its meaning. For example, I and my family may act hospitably, making hospitable utterances like Welcome, make yourself at home, how good of you to join us, and the like, as we invite some stranger into our home. The meaning of our utterances is certainly affected by our hospitable actions, such as shaking hands and offering food. But it is not fixed by them. Sets of utterances and their action-contexts may, in behavioral terms, be precisely the same, yet be informed by diverse intentions. We might be hospitable in order to network for my business, because we are lonely or bored, because my wife wants to secure a suitable husband for our daughter, or because we are obedient to a Christian precept. The issue of intention is significant in similar community actions, too. As a church we may invite the stranger to worship with us because we need more members, or because we wish to have warm feelings about our community. Or, again, it may be our attempt to fulfill the mission command of Matthew 28:19 20. Not infrequently, of course, as a community or as individuals we may be so confused about our reasons that our practice is not consistent with what we believe or say. Fixing a practice s precise shape and thereby determining the meaning of utterances made as it is performed is difficult to do, too, because of the evident fact that we all live within more than one cultural or sub-cultural setting, as indeed Christians have done throughout their history. Christians usually do not spend all their time only with Christians, and ordinary congregations do not offer their members a sufficient number of practices to constitute a complete way of life. Thus Christian practices, as concretely performed, are necessarily infused with non- Christian influences, including many non-christian practices, and these bear upon our intentions as we act. To determine the normative meaning of a practice would thus require that one could also assess the bearing of one s own social contexts upon is truth. So he fights against his opponent, and says Christus Dominus est, not as a shout of triumph, but as a shout of hope and trust in the faithfulness of God. His attitude towards God still authorizes the action, for it is, in an odd but genuine way, a gesture of surrender (to God). Far fetched, yes, but not impossible. The point is that it is his Spirit-informed intention, his spiritual poverty, that saves the confused man, irrespective of his behavior, and it is his intention which informs the meaning of his utterance, not his action-context. 27 Marshall, Trinity and Truth, p. 194. 28 Marshall, Trinity and Truth, p. 194. 29 Marshall, Trinity and Truth, p. 202.
294 Nicholas M. Healy its ideal description. At the least, for me to claim that my description of a particular practice is normative, I would have to make some reference to those social contexts and influences which might be assumed to influence my description. 30 Another related and often overlooked factor that affects every Christian action is the agent s construal of what Christianity is all about. My conception of the over-arching theological context in which I act affects the intention of my action. Construals are formed in part by community membership, including the performance of community-sanctioned practices. So denominational formation partly determines what I think I am doing when I participate in the eucharist, for example. But my construal is not determined by community membership. My formation within cultures and sub-cultures that are non-christian, my personal experience and my reading, may convince me that Christianity should be construed fundamentally in terms of a preferential option for the poor, or theodrama, or worship, or contemplative ascent, or practices of non-resistance. Moreover, it would be difficult to mount a convincing argument that there is a single normative construal of Christianity. Every Christian develops their particular conceptions of what is central, what peripheral, in Christianity as they grow in their faith and engage with other Christians and non-christians in a variety of cultural settings. Unfortunately, my construal and intention can be weak or erroneous. If it is, one can ask whether I merely distort a Christian practice or in fact perform a different practice. Consider now the more well-structured kinds of actions, those that are more obviously practices; first a simple, optional practice, that of dipping one s fingers into holy water and crossing oneself upon entering a Roman Catholic church. This might seem to be a classic example of the kind of minor practice that, in combination with many others, inculturates one into the Roman form of Christianity. Yet it may well not function that way at all. It is not at all the same as a language-game, such as the shopping example found at the beginning of Wittgenstein s Philosophical Investigations. 31 As a child, I watch my mother or father shopping and soon learn the game so that I can go shopping, too. But when I watch my mother dip her hand into a small bowl of water as she enters and leaves the church, I need some explanation for me to understand the game properly. I ll perform the same bodily movements as she does, but my understanding of my action, and thus my intention, may be wrong and unchristian. Hers may be, too. I may perform this action because I, and perhaps my mother and most of the congregation, are superstitious and think doing so will ward off accidents and other evils during the coming week, or because we think the practice is part of our identity as good Catholics over against those Protestants down the street. Whilst I might initially misunderstand or distort the language game of shopping, that could be for only a short time. My failure to follow 30 Here I draw upon the other version of the new ecclesiology mentioned above. For some background, see my Church, World and the Christian Life, pp. 170 9; a more detailed discussion can be found in Tanner, Theories of Culture. 31 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953/2001), section 1ff.
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 295 the rules properly would soon become obvious and someone would likely set me straight. That is not the case with the practice of using holy water; I could be mistaken all my life. In such a case, performing the practice would not contribute to the formation of my Christian character, but would instead strengthen my non-christian identity. Thus what, abstractly described, is a perfectly good practice from within a Roman Catholic construal, may concretely be a substantially different practice, even a socially established and internally consistent counter-christian one. This point applies even to the complex core practices of Christianity, such as the eucharist. As a Roman Catholic, I would normally call this practice the mass, of course, which may already alter the practice and its utterances somewhat. Be that as it may, although the text of the mass found in the Missal provides some guidance for its performance, it cannot determine it. Concretely, the meanings of a eucharist may be as numerous as the number of participants. 32 If I am asked why I went to mass last Sunday, my construal would have some bearing upon my response. I might say that I went to experience koinonia or to be gifted with Christ s sacramental species, or less theoretically, because I wanted to worship God within the church. Or I might have been so confused by repeated mass-going at a particular parish that my primary intention was to celebrate our community together or to keep me from illness and accidents or to win a promotion. Or I might explain that I hated going because it s boring and a waste of time. I went only because the wife makes me go for what she thinks is the good of the children and it s the only way to get a Sunday bulletin for them to be able to prove their attendance to their Catholic elementary school teachers so they get credit in their religion classes. Diverse intentions and construals alter the action, yet the behavior the practice in all these varied cases may well be the same. Within any given congregation, the practice may be performed properly by only a small minority. To sum up my argument thus far: practices as concretely performed are not patterns of behavior with sufficiently fixed meanings that they can do the task required of them by this version of the new ecclesiologies. Repeated performance of behavior patterns does not, of itself, issue in the right formation of church members nor the acquisition of Christian virtues. Character is indeed formed through practices, but only as they are performed with appropriate intentions and construals. Without such, practices may foster as much as halt the decline of the center and the absorption of the church into the world. The failure of the new ecclesiologies 32 Marshall s description of the eucharist relies upon liturgical texts (particularly The Lutheran Book of Worship) rather than descriptions of actions. To be sure, it is difficult to see how one could otherwise describe the performance of a eucharistic practice in a way that served Marshall s purpose, for each performance could be challenged as not meeting the norms of its ideal description (and such descriptions are also challengeable). But to turn to a liturgical text as the basis of an argument about what constitutes our central beliefs seems odd to a Roman Catholic of a certain age, for whom Denzinger might do as a short cut, or to many Christians more generally, for whom scripture remains normative over any Christian text, including any and all liturgical texts.
296 Nicholas M. Healy to address the confusions and complexities of practices as they are performed in ordinary congregations and by ordinary people may be considered an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Ideal and normative descriptions of the meaning of practices neglect the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought, in Whitehead s definition. 33 II While practices, and the virtues and character acquired by their means, are certainly a vital part of the Christian life and cannot be ignored by any account of the concrete church, much more must be considered to understand that life as it is actually lived within the churches. Besides intentions, construals and overlapping social contexts, there are also some theological matters that are insufficiently addressed by some of the new ecclesiologies. I illustrate this by briefly examining some aspects of the ecclesiologies of Reinhard Hütter and Stanley Hauerwas. Reinhard Hütter In his book, Suffering Divine Things, 34 Reinhard Hütter seeks to counter the modern understanding of theology as a work of poiesis, of imaginative construction performed by theologians independently of the Christian community. Though he develops a complex theoretical apparatus to support it, Hütter s thesis is fairly straightforward. Theology should be understood as a church practice. So theologians should consciously submit the suffering or pathos of the title to the defined doctrines and core practices of the church. In my view, this is an eminently reasonable thesis. What is troubling is the ecclesiology supporting the thesis and, furthermore, that it is an ecclesiology which supports it. In the course of his argument, Hütter faults Karl Barth s ecclesiology for its failure to be sufficiently concrete. Barth s fundamental problem is with his pneumatology. Unlike his Christology, which asserts a concrete referent for the Word in the humanity of Jesus Christ, Barth s doctrine of the Holy Spirit has no similar created referent. 35 Instead, Barth locates the witness of the Holy Spirit internally, in the relation, unmediated by the church, between the active God and the obedient and faithful individual Christian. The trouble with such a move, according to Hütter, is that it does not sufficiently establish the public nature of the church and its 33 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Harper, 1929), p. 11. 34 See note 16 above. Hütter s ecclesiology is by no means generally accepted by other new ecclesiologists. Nonetheless, his work is a useful illustration of some of the tendencies in the new ecclesiology, especially among some Lutherans. 35 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, pp. 105ff.
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 297 theology. The church s authority as a public body is not securely and theologically grounded in the work of the Spirit. Without an authoritative communal context within which to perform its task, theology can be nothing more than poiesis or, at best, the spiritualistic individualism to which Barth s inadequate ecclesiology brought him dangerously near. 36 For Hütter, it is the church s core practices and doctrines which make the church a truly public body. Their distinctiveness and their authoritative role within the church evidently separate it from those public bodies with different normative beliefs and practices. So Hütter proposes that we think of the church fundamentally in terms of these practices and beliefs, and that we legitimate their authority theologically by making a strong link between them and the Holy Spirit. He thus defines the church as the soteriological locus of God s actions, as a space constituted by specific core practices and church doctrine. These practices are understood pneumatologically as acts to be interpreted enhypostatically as works of the Spirit. 37 That is, the real subject (or hypostasis) of the church s core practices is not the human agent, whether individual or collective, but the Holy Spirit. The church s actions are not identical in form with those of the Holy Spirit, for the church s relation to the Spirit is always receptive, its action fundamentally passive ( pathic ) as the Spirit acts upon it. 38 Human activity is present in the church s practices, but it does not constitute them; only the Holy Spirit s work is constitutive. 39 Since church practices and doctrines are the concrete form of the Spirit (the divine things of the book s title), 40 they are established authoritatively once and for all. It is not possible for theology to leave behind the theorems which should bindingly formulate church doctrine, 41 nor can it propose changes to the meaning and structure of the core practices. Since their agent and speaker is divine, they are essentially impervious to human intention, confusion, sin and other concreta. Doctrines and core practices can therefore be described as the unequivocal referent of the Spirit. They are the concrete incarnation in which the Spirit speaks and acts. In them, God has bindingly fixed his own future, namely community with a renewed creation in the consummate reign of God. In them, God makes the eschata present to faith even now. 42 One might think that Hütter s conception of the Spirit as the hypostasis-agent of the church s practices might obviate the problems I raised earlier with regard to the intentions and construals of the human agent who performs church practices. With regard to the practice of theology, the theologians do their work, but it is the 36 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 113. 37 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 27. For some elaboration of his use of enhypostasis, see pp. 248f. 38 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 145. He also leaves open, though does not explore, the possibility that the Holy Spirit works outside the church; see p. 250. 39 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 132. 40 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, pp. 106f. 41 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 193. 42 Hütter, Suffering Divine Things, p. 176.
298 Nicholas M. Healy Spirit that is the real agent who actually enables theological inquiry to be done fruitfully. Similarly, the preacher proclaims the Gospel, but it is the Spirit of Christ who actually speaks the word of God to the congregation. This seems quite reasonable to say at one level about all practices, and the emphasis upon the Spirit as the primary agent is especially appropriate for the sacraments. Unfortunately, though, it leaves us with too limited an account of human action within the church. What do we say theologically about the feeble sermons and the wrong-headed theological practice we so often run across? How are such practices, as concretely performed, to be understood with regard to their incarnating the Holy Spirit? Hütter s theory says little to help us understand the theological issues involved in our inevitable failure to perform practices always as ideally described. His ecclesiology is concrete in the sense of proposing the church s doctrines and core practices as the incarnation of the promises of the Holy Spirit. And he offers a complex description of how theology should normatively be related to doctrine, practices and scripture. But he omits any theological (or sociological) consideration of the fact that ordinary individuals and congregations frequently do not perform these practices according to the normative account. 43 The issue may be put another way. Theologians who seek to suffer divine things as they do theology must do more than Hütter s account seems to allow. Christianity is necessarily subject to diverse construals, I noted earlier. Such construals order the relations between various doctrines and practices; the ranking that Hütter himself engages in is necessary, whether we do it explicitly or not. Some Christians may privilege proclamation, others the eucharist, others serving the poor. In doing so, they configure the elements of the Christian life differently, thereby affecting their practice and their understanding of doctrines. All theologians, whether professional or ordinary Christians thinking about how they can best live in obedience to Christ, must organize and construct, even as they submit to doctrine and practice. What guides them? Is it merely a question of conformity to core doctrines and practices and to the rules Hütter lays out for doing theology properly? If it were, then theology could be described in terms formally similar to the inquiries conducted within bodies other than the church. The practice of theology, like other kinds of communal inquiry, is said to work within the parameters established and authorized by the community. The additional claim that the Holy Spirit establishes these parameters and works in and through them does not much modify the description of the inquiry as such, because the description of the Spirit s work is not developed independently of the church s submission to the parameters. 43 Hütter s argument with Barth, then, is not with Barth s apparent lack of concern to find ways of talking theologically about the day-to-day activities of the church. This, I realize now, was my main concern in my essay, The Logic of Karl Barth s Ecclesiology, Modern Theology 10 (1994), pp. 253 70. Instead, Hütter s quarrel with Barth is with Barth s refusal to develop a secure basis for an authoritative public church. One form of Barth s response to Hütter s proposals can easily be guessed at from his account of Lutheranism in his Theology of the Reformed Confessions (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002).
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 299 This is inadequate for at least two reasons. First, it relies upon a notion of practices and doctrines that omits both sociological and theological considerations of their concrete performance and application. Second, it seems unable to account for a common belief within the church, namely that in the past, the Spirit has prompted some theologians and church leaders to challenge these parameters and accepted rankings, to condemn or reinterpret established practices and reject the established theorems of past doctrine. Luther did so, surely, in many ways, as did Barth, in his doctrine of election, for example. It is not unreasonable to think that the Spirit is at work within such prophetic figures, particularly as they read the witness of scripture, a text which the Spirit employs to give them critical leverage over against the ecclesiastical status quo. The Spirit not only works within the church s traditions and practices, but also apart from them and even, at times, over against them, so as to destabilize what is settled and secure, whether through individual Christians or movements of reform, through scripture, events or worldly challenges. It is hard to see how such prophetic events could affect the church as it is described by Hütter. Hütter has established the practice of theology within the public church, which he describes as a secure and settled community whose authority lies in the Spiritauthorized core practices and doctrines. But the church s stability and authority comes at the expense of a theologically (and sociologically) thin account of the church and of the Spirit. Without further development, his theory seems unable to show how the Spirit might work salvifically in our mis-performance of church practices, or in our performance of non-christian practices. Nor can his theory help the church respond to those challenges to its established manner of life and thought that come to it, not from modernity and its distortions, but from the in-breaking of the prophetic word and Spirit of God. Stanley Hauerwas For those of us who find the new ecclesiology a welcome and exciting development, Stanley Hauerwas s writings on ethics and the church have always been essential reading. His wit and refreshing lack of pomposity has led some of his more superficial readers to fail to recognize the profundity and, I think one may say, the prophetic quality of his work. One of his most important books is his recent Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe, 44 which I will focus on here. Within the lectures is a learned and insightful account of Barth s theology, with which Hauerwas is largely sympathetic. Drawing in part upon Hütter, though, Hauerwas takes Barth to task over his understanding of church witness. Barth believes that the church s role is to witness by proclaiming the gospel, by pointing to Jesus Christ and thus away from itself. But this is inadequate, according to Hauerwas, because it fails to show what difference the church makes for how we 44 See note 23 above.
300 Nicholas M. Healy understand the world is and...how we must live. 45 Hauerwas s proposes that we expand the notion of the church s witness so that it is constituted, not only by what the church says, but also by how it lives, and thus by its configuration of human practices. 46 Hauerwas agrees with Joseph Mangina s contention that the church is itself the binding medium in which faith takes place. The medium is, if not the message, the condition of the possibility of grasping the message in its truth. 47 For Hauerwas, it follows from this conception of Christian witness that the truth of what Christians proclaim must be displayed by a habitable world exemplified in the life of the Christian community. 48 At times he seems to assert a very strong notion of necessity, answering Yes! to the question: Does the truth of Christian convictions depend upon the faithfulness of the church? 49 According to a more recent explanation, Hauerwas does not mean by this what he seems to say, namely that the truth of our claims about God and God s work in Christ and the Spirit stands or falls with our faithfulness. Rather, his contention is that among the more significant claims we make as Christians is the claim that Christianity can be lived, and lived well. 50 Christianity is unintelligible without witnesses, that is, without people whose practices exhibit their committed assent to a particular way of structuring the whole. 51 He gives examples of faithfulness and habitability to show that the church is not an ideal but an undeniable reality. 52 His examples, significantly, are not Christian communities but individuals: a Pope, John Paul II; a Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder; and, more briefly mentioned, the exceptionally faith-filled Dorothy Day. The church s faithfulness is shown in their lives for, as Hauerwas says with regard to Day, it is the church s practices that produce her. The habitable world of Christianity is constituted by the church s practices. 53 Clearly, the church can point to many splendid Christians it has nourished over the centuries. What, then, can we say about ordinary Christians and the ordinary congregations which form them? Hauerwas acknowledges that the church and its members do not live as they should, 54 pointing out that [l]ives that seem like failures 45 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 193. 46 The phrase is Joseph Mangina s and taken from his Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas, Scottish Journal of Theology 52 (1999), p. 278, cited in Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 192. 47 Mangina, Bearing the Marks, pp. 294 5, cited in Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 145. 48 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 214. 49 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 231. 50 See Hauerwas s Hooks: Random Thoughts by way of a Response to Griffiths and Ochs, a reply to a review of the Lectures by Paul Griffiths entitled Witness and Conviction in With the Grain of the Universe, both in Modern Theology 19:1 (2003), pp. 89 101, 67 75 respectively. The clarification is made on pp. 91f. 51 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 214. 52 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 230. 53 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 231. 54 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 196.
Practices and the New Ecclesiology 301 do not disconfirm the gospel, because Christians learn to confess their sins by being made part of the work of the Spirit. 55 To be sure, most Christian churches teach their members to confess their sins, and sometimes we do. But the difficulty with his argument is not that Christians sin and must seek absolution; that is part of our proclamation, after all. It is that his theologically-informed social theory relies too heavily upon the assumption that the practices of the church are at least for the most part performed according to their abstract and ideal descriptions. Ordinary concrete mis-performance or non-performance and its effect upon character formation and church witness is left out of the picture. The characters and performances of exceptional Christians do not make a convincing case for the habitability of Christianity, let alone as Hauerwas would agree, I think for the faithfulness of the church or the truth of its members convictions. Rather, to those of us who are members of ordinary congregations, they could be taken as exceptions which prove the contrary rule, namely that Christianity is not a habitable world, for the majority of its adherents, at least. Some of the church s practices are confused or misguided or worse, even in the abstract. But even when abstractly perfect, they are performed by an often confused and sometimes sinful and faithless body. Now it may well be that Hauerwas would broadly agree with these remarks, and respond by pointing out that all he is doing (like Hütter, but in a somewhat different way) is trying to recover and promote Christian practices because such practices are the usual means by which the Holy Spirit works within us and the church. They are the ordinary vehicle, so to speak, by which the Holy Spirit achieves our sanctification. But if this is indeed his view, to avoid confusion and to address directly the sociological and theological issues that pertain to practices in so far as they are concretely mis-performed, a more substantial account of how the Spirit works in the church and how the church is related to its Lord is needed. 56 In order that church practices and the theory that supports them may be properly modified for Christian theological use, they need to be brought within a broader theological context. Put another way, we need to recover the traditional notion that, while theology is indeed a thoroughly practical form of inquiry, it must proceed on the basis of contemplation. 57 We need, in short, as we need from Hütter, a more robust 55 Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe, p. 212. 56 Developing such an account within which to talk about the church and its practices does not necessarily resolve the questions I have raised here, of course. Robert Jenson locates his ecclesiology within a well-developed doctrine of God in his Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 9). Whether or not one goes along with his argument, he is to be commended for making it possible properly to assess his version of the new ecclesiology. 57 In Hooks: Random Thoughts, p. 93, Hauerwas says that he believes that theological claims are practical from beginning to end. While that is true, I think he would agree that our claims are often not directly practical, but need to be construed, and thus ordered and located, in such a way that their practical import may be properly appreciated by the church and its members.
302 Nicholas M. Healy account of the doctrine of God the triune God as the starting-point for ecclesiological reflection. 58 Without such an account, the new ecclesiology may seem too reliant upon an overly abstract and thus flawed philosophical and sociological apparatus. As a consequence, it becomes rather too easy to interpret the emphasis upon the church and its practices as if it reflects the view that Christianity is all about being Christian, and the gospel is broadly identifiable with the church s practices and doctrines. A Christian is one who is disciplined by the church s practices so as to be transformed into the visible communal embodiment of the Gospel. The objective component of witness, that to which one witnesses, is thereby confused with the subjective component, the form of witness. It may then seem to those less than charitably disposed to the new ecclesiology that it has made a turn to a communal subject constituted by its particular set of abstract practices. Like the earlier turn to the experience of the individual subject, which it is intended to counter, this turn also threatens to collapse the object of faith into ourselves. Our proclamation becomes rather too much about us and what we over-optimistically think we do. The message becomes rather too easily identified with an ideal account of the medium. Clearly, this is not at all Hauerwas s intention. However, to block the confusingly abstract emphasis upon the church and its practices that leads to such a misunderstanding requires, to repeat, setting ecclesiology within a more developed doctrine of the economic Trinity, one in which the action of the Holy Spirit is accounted for in a way that does not bind it to the church s practices. In addition, as I have tried to show, it requires a theological account of the life of ordinary churches and their concrete performances, an account that also should be located in the context of the doctrine of the economic Trinity. Such a genuinely concrete ecclesiology must be able to make theological sense of the lives of those to whom Jesus Christ brought the good news of salvation in him, the obviously sinful, the publicans and the tax gatherers, those of little faith who can rely only upon the faithfulness of God. We are those whose actions, as individuals and as congregations, place in question the truth of Christian convictions for those who think such convictions must issue in visible holiness. We fail to perform the church s practices as they are normatively described by theologians and church authorities, and we go to churches that seem unattractive even to us, sometimes for good Christian reasons, sometimes not. There, too, we are sometimes taught well-established church practices that seem, even if they were to be performed perfectly, to be more or less inconsistent with what we read in scripture or with what we know, or think we know, about God s truth from elsewhere. 58 By this I do not mean a social trinitarian ecclesiology, as if one could use a doctrine about God s triune life as a kind of template for thinking about our own, but rather a thorough-going account of the economic Trinity (and thus, of course, of the immanent Trinity, etc.) initially independent of the ecclesiology, thereby determining the meaning and force of the concepts used in the latter.