Searching for God # 88

 What is, if any, the relationship between the ‘church’ and what I will call provincialism, parochialism, and what the church loves to call community?

There is  a Hallmark Card iteration of community in an urban/rural tension that is illustrated by a young professional returning to his/her home-town, after graduation and working in one or other of the big cities. Predictably, there is a former girl/boy friend either waiting and regretting a previous ‘lost relationship’ or somehow connected by family, providing the love interest. Plus, there are the also predictable ‘values’ of family, tradition, dietary memories, some business/estate needing recovery or bequeathing and a generally ‘warm-fuzzy-heart-and-hearth’ ethos and feeling of reconnecting and re-appreciation of the previously departed and returning young adult. Mis-communication, fragile emotions and/or some minor ‘glitch’ offers a turning point of minor tension just prior to the resolved and amicable love-interest-consummation at the end of the film.

Nostalgia, revived recollections of former happy days, and some usually pleasant shared events, meals, menus and festivities form the activity-menu of the plot. Many middle and upper-middle class young people have some identification with the template. What is not often included in these vignette-pieces is that many also have some early church affiliation, with the Bible stories, hymns, religious festivals and liturgies that fill out the theological, ecclesial and ‘community’ template of a religious background.

Family and church interwoven in a pastiche of ‘good times’ where basic morality, ethics, and religious ‘foundations’ were presented and integrated to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the young person’s individual preference. Parents, it was assumed, had already adopted the basic ‘terms’ of the template. In medieval times in Europe, churches were erected and formed the focal point of each and every little community almost as a mandated necessity for all inhabitants. Colonial times in North America saw a replication of the European, and especially Great Britain model, evolving into bifurcations of denominations. Indeed, early settlements in North America linked church, school and family, as ‘civilizing’ confluences, population development motivations and skill-development training.

Communities of ‘interest’ were also communities of survival; togetherness offered the needed protections from various forms of ‘enemy’ be they political, tribal, commercial, or even religious, in a narrow sense. And without in any way denigrating the principle that we all need ‘others’ for our early development as well as for our long-term survival needs, there are some aspects of the religious-tribal-menu that have less than admirable tentacles decades later.

For one, the perspective of ‘community’ is bounded by a geographic, cultural, ethnic, racial and religious moat. And, within that image of the moat, there are even mini-moats, segregating one religious group or sect from others. It is an extension of the Babel story, where multiple languages were divisive and also defining. The principle of ‘taking care of one’s own’ originates, with the best of intentions, given the urgency of need and the paucity of resources. Circumscribed, too were the communities through a gap in communication from ‘outside’ communities. Islands of opinion, convention, culture, religious belief, worship and pride, and the social hierarchies that built them and mutually sustained those hierarchies painted a picture of stability, security, normalcy and predictability. Weather, plagues, viruses, scarcity and/or plenty of food and growing families were the basic menu of the communities, irrespective of their racial, linguistic, social, ethnic and religious affiliations.

Of course, energetic explorers, of the geographic and scientific kind naturally began to search out ‘the limits’ of what the community ‘knew’ or perceived to be the range of perception, learning and understanding. Inevitable tensions, conflicts and the occasional consensus evolved and devolved from such excursions. And, invariably, within the community, there were the predictable tensions about the pro’s and the con’s of such ventures.

Whether for trade, or for military aggrandizement, or for accession to a human need to ‘stretch’ outside the boundaries of known experience, new invasions, wars, empires and cultural blendings left their heritage footprints among the ruins of temples, monasteries, battlements and the like. Similarly, in and through speeches, and writings eventually, ideas, theories, equations and even relationships with the gods and eventually one God, spread while all the time absorbing nuances and arguments for and against previously held concretized assumptions, beliefs and perceptions. A flat world eventually gave way to a 3-D globe with other universes ‘above’ and ‘below’ and the process of attempting to integrate the previously held religious beliefs, attitudes and perceptions with the new awareness comprised a process that continues into the 21^st century.

Churches generally enjoyed and relished in a dominant, if not actually supreme position within many communities and provided decades, if not centuries of control, influence and power over morality, ethics, and belief inside. So deep and profound was this degree of ‘superiority’ and exclusivity, that even the publishing of the Bible, and the concomitant dispersal of the text among the uneducated, illiterate in many cases laity shot the church’s anxiety meter through the roof. No longer would the ‘clergy’ have absolute control over what was meant by those ‘holy’ words. Indeed, history is strewn with stories of the lives of those who disagreed with church ‘doctrine’ ‘dogma’ and even church praxis. The ordination of women continues to divide and seriously impact the lives of those who support the full ordination of women from the church’s countenance, membership and access to the Mass. Similarly, the question of the admissibility, tolerance, and ordination of the LGBTQ+ community is today’s version of ‘another divide’ evoking memories of the church’s endorsement of slavery.

Tradition, shared participation in holy days, religious celebrations and rituals, think baptism, confirmation, marriage, and the funeral liturgy, in very personal moments of individual lives, along with the church calendar of events memorializing much of the life of Jesus, prior to and subsequent to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. The  ‘communities’ shared treasuring of these stories and their meaning, generally remained static, without evolving over time, in the public mind.

From the perspective of some in the church, however, there have been shifts both in emphasis and perception of both the narrative of Jesus’ life and the interpretation of His purpose and meaning subsequent to the Resurrection.

Leonardo Boff begins his Jesus Christ Liberator, A Critical Christology of our Time, with the question he says each of us must face: “Who do people say that I am?” He writes: Anyone who at some time has become interested in Christ cannot avoid similar questioning. Each generation must answer with the context of its own understanding of the world, of the human person and of God. (p.1)

Segmenting off various perceptions and interpretations, Boff begins with what he calls imperturbable faith: To imperturbable faith the answer is quite clear: Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the only begotten and eternal Son of God, sent as man to liberate us from our sins; in him are fulfilled all the prophecies made to our fathers; he executed a pre-ordained plan; his sorrowful death on the cross was a part of his plan; he fulfilled, even unto death, the will of the Father; though dead he arose, thereby making it clear that his claim to be the Son of Man, the Son of God, and the Messiah was substantiated and genuine….This is the image of the dogmatic Christ.

Next Boff parses what he calls the ‘era of criticism’.

He writes:

The eighteenth century, however, saw the breakthrough of critical reason. People began to question the social and religious models of interpretation. Historical studies, based on serious research or original sources, unmasked dominant myths and ideologies. The questions did not stop when faced with the New Testament. People saw immediately that in the case of the Gospels we are not dealing with historical biographies about Jesus but with the witness of faith, the fruit of preaching, the pious and self-interested meditation of the primitive community. The Gospels are above all a theological interpretation of the events rather than an objective and disinterested description of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. This discovery operated like a fuse setting a fire that even today is not yet fully extinguished….The question imposes itself: Should we look for the historical Jesus which is at the base and root of the dogmatic Christ? (p.2)

After digressing into the question of whether or not Jesus actually existed, and concurring unequivocally that He did, Boff then asserts in a sub-head, these words: “There Is Not, Nor Can There Be,  a Single Biography of Jesus.” He concludes this section in these words:

(E)ach author (of the New Testament) seeks within his pastoral, theological, apologetic and vital preoccupations to respond in his own way to the question: ‘Who do men say that I am?’ Each sacred writer sees the same Jesus –but with his own eyes. With such material transmitted to us through the intermediary of the New Testament we cannot construct a biography of Jesus that would be historically and scientifically clear.(p.6-7)

Borrowing from Rudolf Bultmann, Boff writes:

From the fact that historical exegesis failed to reconstruct a precise historical Jesus of Nazareth, Rudolf Bultmann draws an ultimate consequence: We should definitely abandon such attempts and concentrate exclusively on the Christ of Faith. Yes, the methods of historical criticism have given us some secure information about the historical Jesus even though they do not allow us to reconstruct a biography. But such information is irrelevant to faith, because it presents Jesus as a Jewish prophet who preached a radical obedience, demanded conversion, and announced the pardon and proximity of the kingdom. Jesus is not a Christian but a Jew, and his history does not pertain to Christianity but to Judaism: ‘The message of Jesus is a presupposition of the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.’ …Bultmann insists on a distinction between the ‘so-called historical Jesus and the Christ of biblical history….He urges that we distinguish between plain historical (historisch) data and interpreted historical (geschichtlich) data, between Jesus and Christ. Jesus refers to the man of Nazareth, whose life critical historiography attempted in vain to reconstruct. ‘Christ is the Savior, the Son of God announced by his church through the Gospels. (p.6,7,8)

Quoting from R. Bultmann, Verhaltnis, p.6, W. Kunneth, Glauben en Jesus? Christologie und modern Existenz (Munich-Hamburg, 19690, pp.79-86, we read in Boff:

1.Instead of the historical person of Jesus, te mythical figure of the Son of God entered into the apostolic teachings (kerygma).

2. Instead of the eschatological preaching of Jesus concerning the kingdom of God there entered into the kerygma the proclamation of the Christ who died crucified for our sins and was marvelously resurrected by God for our salvation. Jesus preached the kingdom; the church preaches Christ. The preacher is now the preached.

3. Instead of radical obedience and total living out of love demanded by Jesus there now entered the doctrine about Christ, the church, the sacraments. What Jesus put in the first place now comes second; ethical parenesis (in place of a parent). (Boff. Op. Cit. p. 8-9)

And Boff then concludes:

What then is Christology? ‘Not a doctrine concerning the divine nature of Christ,, but an announcement, a call of faith inviting me to believe, to take up the cross of Christ, and thus justified, to participate in the resurrection….For example, what does it mean to believe in the cross of Christ? It does not mean to believe in some bygone fact that happened to Jesus. Rather is means ‘making the cross of Christ one’s own cross, that is, letting yourself be crucified with Christ. To believe in the Crucified is to wrench oneself away from oneself. Salvation is to be found in this. Christology is thus reduced to soteriology.  Christology is ‘the explanation of the Christian understanding of being,’ ‘an explanation of the understanding that faith has of new being, the remainder consists of mythological representations and cultic concepts from Hellenic syncretism. (Boff again borrowing from Bultman, on p.9-10)

To be continued……