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. The...