The Church of Us vs. Them – A Reflection

“That is the first question: no longer to know whether God exists, but to exist as Christian communities.” So writes the French Jesuit writer Michel de Certeau in an essay “How is Christianity Thinkable Today” (Theology Digest 19, 1971).  F. C. Bauerschmidt glosses this statement: “One cannot even pose a question about God without the existence of a community for which such a question would be of concern, and it is the existence of such a community as much as the existence of God which is in question for Christians today” (“The Abrahamic Voyage: Michel de Certeau and Theology,” Modern Theology 12:1, 1996, 10). Dietrich Bonhoeffer poses the same question this way in his notes for a book he never lived to write: “What do we really believe? I mean, believe in such a way that our lives depend on it?” (Letters and Papers from Prison (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works) Fortress Press. Kindle Edition: 486). This is the question David Fitch wrestles with in his new book The Church of Us vs. Them under the conditions the church in North America finds itself in today.

And Fitch answers this question in stunning fashion. In a way that will surprise, disconcert, perhaps even drive one to despair, but at the end of the day engenders hope. In a simple, and yet simply profound way, rooted in reality, open to the Spirit, driven  by a longing for presence, which as we will see is God’s eternal purpose in creating. In a world (and church) all arage (if I may coin a word) Fitch seeks to display the process driving this rage and a counter-process of openness to presence (the presence of Christ) as its antidote. This counter-process is not a formula (save in the most general sense) or a “Five Easy Steps to…” mantra so beloved of pragmatic Americans and American Christians. It is a way, a way without “the” way, tactics without strategies (de Certeau), improvisation without a script. An Abrahamic journey heading out with no destination we can know or control. We may not be of the world but we are surely in it, as surely as was the One whose journey we walk and whose cross shadows us as much as it did him.

This way eschews the Christendom hangover which still dogs us here and pushes us to frame everything in terms general, abstract, universal, and propositional. Yet on this journey the one present with us through his Spirit will push us to find him and our way in the concrete, quotidian, daily practices of faithful witness in which we know more than we can say, show more than we can tell, and seek not middle ways between extremes but paths outside that box altogether. David Fitch knows and walks this way enough to be a faithful witness to a church beyond us vs. them in hope encouraging the church to risk following it.

Starting at the End

I’m one who likes to know why I walking the way I walk. If you’re like me, you might want to read Fitch’s Appendix first. There he gives a brief and lucid overview of the biblical theology informing his proposals for moving beyond “the church of us vs. them.”  

Using Eph.1:21-23 as his baseline text, Fitch draws three insights that guide his reflections.

-according to v.23 God’s presence fills both the church and the world. His presence is the shekinah glory that filled the tabernacle and the temple. The difference between his presence in the church and in the world is that the former is more intense. That presence can be acknowledged or not but it is the reality of the world we live in.

-God’s shekinah glory was the sign of his presence in the temple. And the temple is a microcosm of the universe, a navel connecting heaven and earth. The temple, then, the church is not the exclusive presence of God but the4 -lace from which his presence in the rest of the world is made known to it.

-thus, there exists both a centripetal and centrifugal movement in the world. Centripetally, we have the world moving toward the church as its center. Here the church is best seen as a centered rather than a bounded set. The later is like a bird cage which allows only limited entrance and the point is to try and get inside the boundaries. The former is like a bird bath where there are outer boundaries but the birds want to move to the center where the deeper and cooler waters are in which to bathe. Here what matters is the movement toward the center. The church is better a community not focused on boundary maintenance, who’s in and who’s out, but a bird bath where the focus is on helping others move to the center from wherever they are. But there is also a centrifugal movement of the church into the world in obedience to God intention to make the whole earth his, a worldwide temple in which he and his people and creation may dwell together in peace and fellowship. From the less intense presence of God to the more intense and vice versa – this seems the biblical pattern for the temple/church and the world.

This forms the explicit biblical-theological basis that informs Fitch’s analysis all the way through. And for those who need it, like me, it’s good to know it from the get go.

The Enemy-Making Machine

North American Christianity is bedeviled by heated division and rivalries today. Rancor, vitriol, and hatred spew out from them at every turn. What is it that fuels and normalizes such blatantly unchristian behavior? According to Fitch,

-It starts with a good conviction that Christians have discerned in their own lives.

-The conviction is then extracted from daily discipleship and is turned into a marker that signifies you’re a part of the group that has experienced this conviction.

-This marker then becomes a banner or a cause that rallies people together as a tribe against those who disagree with the banner.

-Soon this banner defines our identity. Violence, coercion and hate stir up around the banner to galvanize the church of us versus them.

This Fitch calls “the enemy-making machine.” And he claims it is ubiquitous in the North American church.

He begins with a relatively easy example for most of us – the issue of alcohol in the church. Near the start of the 20^th century many Christians felt led by the Spirit to forgo alcohol use because of the negative consequences of alcoholism they observed. In time, imbibing alcohol became a sign by which serious Christians could be distinguished from less serios ones. Soon followed blue laws and total abstinence as a banner that united certain groups of Christians.

Not all Christians, though, saw it the same way. Abstinence advocates began to separate from the non-abstainers, as less serious Christians than themselves and see them as enemies. Their identity became wrapped around this particular commitment. Some even felt a sense of schadenfreude, or unseemly pleasure, or vindication, at other’s troubles with alcohol. Now our cause has usurped and shaping our lives around his presence. Abstaining from alcohol becomes the point of being Christian. Then we are in a place we know too well today, the place of rancor, coercion, violence, and intimidation.

Weaving stories from his pastoral experience Fitch moves through a variety of other issues the church has faced. He treats biblical authority, making a decision for Christ, the quest for social justice and shows how each of them have become banners under which some of us have united and defined our faith (or defined it against). He looks briefly at the most vexing issue most Christians face today: sexuality, particularly gay sexuality. The extraordinary amount of passion and anger around this issue indicates that ideologies are being tweaked. Affirming or not-affirming gay sexuality has become a banner under which each side has defined itself. Fitch comments: “The perverse enjoyment and the enemy making that lie behind the church’s engagements with sexuality and are not opening space for God to work amid the sexual confusion and hurt among our churches” (100).

“Opening space for God to work” is Fitch’s aim. Getting past the enmity generated by the Enemy making machine and into a space where we can all submit to the presence of Christ in openness and expectation of his work in among us toward reconciliation and wholeness. Here Fitch depends on the understanding of the presence of God in the world beyond the church (see above) to help us get beyond the tendency to see the world as bad and to be condemned and avoided as has too often happened. His notion of the more intense presence of God in the church than in the world creates a centripetal impetus toward the church that protects against “God is at work everywhere, why do we need the church” mentality that is a typical response to the condemnation and avoidance of the world some advocate.

Believing God is at work in our world beyond the church and intends to make the world his dwelling place gives us the courage and hope to reach out beyond our enmities and antagonisms. We enter this space as we are willing to sit, listen, sense the Spirit, confesses our sin and complicity, eschew need to win and trust that God will lead, grace, forgive and renew us in this space. We are then free to move toward new understandings, process old hurts and angers, forge new relationships, and wait to be surprised by the new things God will do in our midst.

Fitch points us to the story in John 8:2-11 and Jesus’ posture in it as or model in inhabiting a space beyond enemy making. Jesus is confronted by a crowd led by the scribes and Pharisees, hauling a woman caught in adultery before him. They have already condemned this woman, made her the “enemy.”  They want to draft Jesus into this enemy making by demanding to know whether he assents to the Law’s demand that such a woman be stoned. Here the Law as an abstract entity is the banner behind which these (presumably) male interlocuters rally. One wonders why the male involved in the adultery was not also dragged before Jesus for judgment. They were caught in the act, after all. But I think we know the answer to that!

Will Jesus get caught up in this antagonism? Will he play this ideological enemy making game under the guise of concern for God’s Law? No. He just its there in the midst of all this wrangling. He sits and writes in the dirt at his feet. This tactic throws the crowd, and doubtless the woman too, off balance and shifts the center of gravity in the debate. Then he speaks: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Jesus shifts the issue to how all present stand in the presence of God. The crowd can no longer maintain their stance of self-righteousness. He pushes their own claim to a reduction ad absurdum. Unable to accept his call to deal with God himself in a space beyond enmity the crowd melts away.

Free now from the enemy making machinations of the crowd, Jesus meets the woman in God’s presence and offers her the grace and mercy (“the true sense of the Law,” Fitch, 171) she needs to move more fully into her life as God’s covenant daughter. Jesus has unwound (one of Fitch’s favorite words) the antagonism, created a space of freedom for dealing with God, and offered her a healing she never expected nor would have found within the original conflicted situation.

Jesus demonstrates here the posture he desires of his church in this world. “Can my church be this Jesus in my neighborhood?” Fitch asks. There’s that question again. The one Michel de Certeau asked. The one F. C. Bauerschmidt asked. The one Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked. Certeau at the end of his investigations seemed to doubt whether such a community was possible in the modern world. Bauerschimdt and Bonhoeffer insist it must be possible. As does David Fitch, as we have seen.

Reflections

In my judgment, this book and Fitch’s earlier book Faithful Presence, offer the most creative, praxis-crafted, and consequential accounts of a way forward for the North American church. Perhaps the only such works we have at present. As I noted, this is not a template one just take and lay over your church and get predicted results. The post-modern temper has pretty well deconstructed that paradigm (though many still cling to it). Fitch offers a highly relational movement from God’s presence in the church toward his presence in the world which God seeks to shape into a temple. This is slow, patient work with all the ups and downs building and maintaining relationships entails. It involves seeing the world and human beings differently. The world as the temple of God as his dwelling place with us and human beings intended by God to be his royal priests in this creational temple. Such a change of perspective is utterly transforming if we can make it. You never see anything the same way again!

Fitch’s biblical work is spot-on as far as I can see. His differentiated view of God’s presence as more and less intense in the church and world respectively underwrites the prescription for the church de Certeau gave at one point in his career. This is the best description of church I am aware of. Certeau frames it as a simultaneous double movement (“How is Christianity Thinkable Today,” http://pastorkeithanderson.net/writing/blog/item/how-is-christianity-thinkable-today-2).

-the first movement is providing a place, a home with its necessary boundaries, rituals, institutions, stories, and behaviors. Place gives a point of orientation for its people to live by and live from. Jesus is that place for the church.

-the second movement is the transgression of that sense of place with its boundaries and limits the first movement creates and crossing those lines in the interest of reaching others.

Certeau writes “a coordination between necessary grounding points (languages, theories, institutions) and critical divergences (inventions, ‘prophetic’ actions, or displacements hidden within each Christian experience). But both these functions are equally necessary.”

Further, he says, “The Christian movement is always the recognizing of a particular situation – and the necessity of a new step forward. There is always a necessary risk in being different. It requires simultaneously a place and a ‘further,’ a ‘now’ and an ‘afterwards,’ a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere.’”

Finally, “Boundaries are the place of Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work.”

This, as I see it, affirms what Fitch lays out here and with Certeau’s emphasis on the simultaneity of these two movements sharpens the sense of necessity and urgency of this work. There are also affinities here with Bonhoeffer’s call for a church immersed in the day-to-day life of their neighborhoods “serving and helping” not dominating, modelling among them the way of Jesus Christ. Certeau, Bonhoeffer, and Fitch all counter a church-centric view of God’s people and its ministry/mission. If the church is separate from the world for its worship (Bonhoeffer’s “arcane discipline”), that separation is only legitimate if it is for the sake of the world and the sending of it people into that world to tap into God’s presence there in the interest of extending his temple, sharing God’s blessings,  and inviting others to become the royal priests they are by divine creation.

His emphasis on divine presence as the center of the biblical story is not new (Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence) but needs reemphasizing today. My own work sees God’s presence as the center of scripture too, with covenant and kingdom its central drivers through the story. Presence keeps the relational piece at the heart of things. Covenant draws the familial into the orbit of that presence, while kingdom establishes the power by which God assures us he can and will establish his presence at the center of all things. I think this is a non-negotiable for us today to make any headway interpreting and preaching the gospel in our world today.

Fitch’s book gives hope, slender hope perhaps, for the church in our time and place. Whether or how many churches can make the transitions necessary for the kind of church he envisions is an open question. But the one question, in my judgment, we must be wrestling with! We owe David Fitch a debt of gratitude, or more pertinently, a genuine grappling with the fine work he is doing on our behalf.