Church Hunting pt. 1

“Church and world are often more prescriptive rather than descriptive terms; in practice, the church is full of the world. This is as it should be; the dialectical drama of sin and salvation implies a dialogical relationship between the church and its others, which include the world and God. Indeed, the Holy Spirit blows where it will, and the activity of the Spirit is not limited to the church. The church is therefore a relational body, and not a closed system. The church is not a polis; ekklesia names something closer to a universal “culture” that is assembled from out of the particular cultures of the world (Healy 2000: 159–75). The church is not only crossed by nonchurch elements; it also contains anti-Christ elements. The church is a corpus permixtum, full of both saints and sinners. As Nicholas Healy reminds us, ecclesiology must maintain both poles of Paul’s dictum in Gal. 6: 14, “far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” On the one hand, we must not boast of the church, as if the church were already the answer to all the world’s social ills; on the other hand, we must glory in Christ, and regard the church as a key actor in the unfolding of the drama of salvation which Christ’s cross has won (Healy 2000: 1–24). The eschatological “not yet” means that the history of the drama so far needs to be told hopefully but penitentially, with room for marginal voices and conflicts. The story is not told in an epic manner, as if the church were made to rule. As the embodiment of God’s politics, the church nevertheless muddles through. God is in charge of all of history. The church’s job is to try to discern in each concrete circumstance how best to embody the politics of the cross in a suffering world” (Cavanaugh “Church” in Blackwell’s Anthology of Political Theology 405).

In Katie and I’s search for a church home, I have kept this passage in mind to help us discern exactly where we should commit our time and resources to. Our search has not been easy, indeed we have to struggle against the temptation of sleeping in and going to the farmer’s market down the street instead of attending churches. I have found that my enthusiasm waxes and wanes in this attempt. When we do decide to go and then we discover how a place doesn’t feel right, or a theology is a little too out of whack for our liking, it seems to set the search back for a week or so. In this post I want to unpack this Cavanaugh passage and help shed some light on just what we are looking for.

I am fascinated and convicted by the thought that the church does not have a monopoly on the workings of the Holy Spirit. I don’t take this idea to necessarily mean The Holy Spirit, but a more general idea of God’s exertion of grace upon our world. I have been guilty of thinking that the Church is the super-structure end all of all ends for the World’s ills before, but I think that ultimately leads to an impoverished community of believers. I still believe that, I think, but the idea needs to be prefaced with the very important “not yet”. As Christians we must struggle with the knowledge that we are paradoxically already transformed into the new creation, while at the same time we are the broken and hapless community in need of much grace and patience. If we are indeed not so hapless, I would think that this whole eschatologic moment would have come a lot sooner. So if the church must negotiate with other voices, and perhaps even contain voices that can carry the whispers of God’s grace in our world, what does that look like? Surely there must be a very bare-bones sub-set of beliefs that one must in some way subscribe to in order to bear the witness of Christian. I don’t like muddled pluralism, but I don’t like rigid sects either. Can the church contain anti-Christ elements? Does the church incorporate the Truth’s of God’s grace outside of it in the same manner as the plundering of Egypt’s riches? Or perhaps the idea that the church is made of the world is very important here. Perhaps subscribing to Christianity is a continual act that can never stick for good. Perhaps there is so much of the world in those who profess the witness of the Church that our subscriptions and memberships are never enough to fully separate ourselves from even the world inside of us. If I interpret that passage as something to be applied personally and inter-church, it can certainly work, although it does sound as if the hope the Church has to offer the world is very muddled indeed.


This reminds me of the idea of Carnival. The saints are always sinners of a sort, and the sinners are always saints of a sort, and in the Carnival revelry, we are exposed as the “already-but-not-yet” hope of for the World. Although we are exposed as the corpus permixtum that we are, our hope is also reified by the act of switching places. When the Kings are made into fools, and the fools into Kings, when the Sinners are made into saints and the saints into sinners, we are reminded, by the sinners who play saints, that we are actually saints of a sort, and we must bear witness as best we can.