The church's crucible: koinonia and cultural transcendence.

In an article on "The Church and Racism," (1) Albert "Pete" Pero articulates for ecclesiology some of the consequences of his argument regarding "cultural transcendence." (2) In the relationship between koinonia and cultural formations he sees the very raison d'etre of theology itself:

Theology cannot be separated from God's community and cultures. Theology
is God's people attempting to define in every generation its reason for
being in the world.... The enduring constant, then, on which we can
always depend is not the material meanings of dogma such as grace, sin,
and so on. Rather the constant is God's community filled with the fruits
of the spirit; not the ideas of theology but koinonia. God's community
is the one thing that cannot be sacrificed. (3)

In this dynamic movement between church and culture, theology finds its discrimen, its distinct and decisive criterion. In my contribution to this collection of essays that celebrates the life, theology, and ministry of Dr. Pero, I will examine one particular aspect of this movement defined by the two poles of church and culture that often become reified as entities in and of themselves. What I am intimating here--and this shall be my main argument--is that communio ecclesiology, which is presented under the ecumenical notion of koinonia, runs the risk again of being a static and abstract conception of the church, always drifting toward one of those two poles. The result, as we shall see, is that the church becomes either a self-enclosed public without "cultural transcendence," or else it dissolves itself in culture, in a given culture, as a matter of pure private sensibilities. Certainly this way of phrasing the problem is not new. Yet, if we take Pero's advice for theology to redefine itself for every generation, we must now seek a distinct answer in this age characterized by a pervasive globalization and a simultaneous radical fragmentation.

Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Da Matta has used the metaphors of "house" and "street" to characterize Brazilian culture as a constant movement between the outer space of the streets and the intimacy of the home. (4) Instead of the frozen separation between the public and the private, (5) Da Matta's metaphors allow for a fruitful way to address the overlapping features in the relation between civic spaces and those of intimacy.

These metaphors describing a culture stand in clear contrast to the reality of globalization, in which a dramatic integration of worldwide relations is concomitant with a radical fragmentation of isolated territorial spaces, often not larger than a computer terminal from which one can "navigate" in the World Wide Web. The streets have become spaces of displacement and the houses increasingly inaccessible from the streets, protected by walls, fences, and security systems. Those who cannot "web-in" become the excluded ones, the subaltern people of the world. And to these is also denied the possibility of keeping the movement and exchange between the "house," or realms of intimacy, and the "street," or spaces where people exercise civic rights and duties. They are the homeless, the (illegal and also legal) immigrants, the landless peasants, the street children, the shut-ins, the imprisoned, the institutionalized, and the children and women abused in their homes, among others.

Globalization has meant for many the denial of the alternation of living contexts between civic spaces and realms of safety and shelter. And without such possibilities of contextualization, globalization becomes imperialism. (6)

If Da Matta's metaphors are inept to describe this new situation, I take them to be very helpful to address in an analogous way the basic character of the church as an alternative "economy" placed in this very transition between the civic spaces and the intimacy of the home, calling us out and gathering us in. I suggest that the church, in its very catholicity, be understood as a movement between "house" and "street" that bridges the cleft between globalization and fragmentation. Further, this is biblical and also a more promising and dynamic way to describe the church than the static opposition between enlightened liberals with their ecclesiology of private spaces and free associations, on the one hand, and the orthodox, neo-orthodox, or radical orthodox proposal of the church as a public in itself, to be distinguished and even separated from other publics (such as the State, academia, and civil society).

Already in the Hebrew Scriptures the Tent of the Tabernacle provides an image for and prefigures the Christian Church precisely by being this "house" on the way, neither the intimate space of the home nor the utter exposure of the street, yet both at the same time: the presence of the divine, yet in dynamic transition. To phrase it differently, what the communio ecclesiology does not do sufficiently is to convey the idea that the church is always a conjunctive reality--it is always the church and, the church but, the church however ...; it is not even a third entity situated somewhere between the private and public, as denominationalism does at the cost of eschatology. (7)

Evangelist Luke, in the book of Acts, often refers to the Christian community as those of the "Way" (hodos: road, way, street, path; cf. Acts 9:2; 19:23; 22:4; 24:22). But the same evangelist when referring to the gathering of the actual congregations often describes them as the church in the "house of ..." (8) The house and the street are complementary images that in their tension suggest movement and at the same time also a sense of homely calm and ease. Exposure and also a haven, risk and comfort, wanderlust and refuge are often the biblical notions attached to the church and, as opposed as they are, also complement each other.

That the church might be described by these metaphors suggests, on the one hand, its gregarious character, the search for a space of healing, safety, and rest. Nevertheless, it is simultaneously called to break away from this very safety and move out of the familiar spaces and comfort zones. This is indeed already indicated by the very word ek-klesia. New Testament authors borrowed the word from the civil and political realm. Ekklesia means an assembly of citizens called away from everyday routine, gathered to deliberate issues that pertain to civic and political life in order then to reenter it with a different attitude. Ekklesia means a moment of discontinuity with the quotidian, but not as an end in itself; it suggests the possibility of a retreat in which deliberations are taken in order to return to the polis.

This dynamic simultaneity of risktaking and safety is the reason why it is not wrong, but incomplete, and thus misleading, to call the church a communion of salvation (communio salutis) or the place of salvation (locus salutis), when salvation is associated with being at rest. It is necessary to say also, in the same breath, that it is a community in transit (communio viatorum). By being both a place and also a way, the church proclaims a world that it itself does not know but in which it believes and for which it sacrifices itself in fulfilling its vocation of being the witness (martyria) to this other world and the sacrament (mysterium) that anticipates it. Protestant ecclesiology, particularly its Lutheran version, expresses this incisively by presenting only two constitutive practices as sufficient (satis est) for the church's being (esse) and unity. These are the announcement of another world, or the World of the Other (the Word), and the foretaste of its reality (the sacraments), even if further components might be necessary for its well-being and function (bene esse). But these latter things are adiaphora, not of the essence, and they are changeable depending on context and circumstance. The minimalist ecclesiology that Protestantism inherited from the Lutheran Reformation preserves in its core precisely these two functions of the church: the Word proclaimed that provokes and unsettles, and the sacraments that comfort and heal (baptism that brings us into communion and the Lord's Supper that renews and restores it). Communio ecclesiology gave expression to this vision of the church by grounding it in the doctrine of the (economic) Trinity, which sustains simultaneously that God is transcendent and also radically immanent. God is the other, beyond and above us, who addresses us unconditionally, but who is also closer to us than we are to our own selves so that we can taste, savor, and feel the divine in the very stuff of this world. These two affirmations--utter transcendence and radical immanence--held paradoxically together are at the core of the doctrine of the Trinity, more than any and all trinitarian speculations.

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However, there is still often something else missing in this elegant and minimalist definition of the church. The doctrine of the Trinity as a basis for constructing an ecclesiology often runs the risk of defining it in analogy to the being of God manifested by the immanent relations of the three persons. (9) This being of the church, conceived according to trinitarian immanent relations, is too stable, too harmonious. It easily misses a mode of reasoning that has been also present in the Christian tradition, for example, in the Eastern notion of stasis (uproar, dissension) in the relations of the Trinity, (10) by Maximus the Confessor's notion of the work of God being accomplished through opposites, (11) and by Luther's theologia crucis. Unlike the claim that the Trinity is the communion of persons that grounds Being in itself, this latter tradition entertains the possibility of nonbeing, negativity itself, being rooted in the divine. It is only with this understanding of the trinitarian communion that we avoid a vision of the church triumphant without the recognition of its brokenness and its mission, inserted as it is in the midst of a damaged world, being a part of a defiled creation (Luther, for whom the visible church was an earthly regime, could even call it magna peccatrix!). So, what is it that makes the church the church?

When Luther wrote On the Councils and the Church (1538) he listed seven marks of the church ("among others" that apply to standards of sanctification; but these belong to the second Table of the Law and thus are subject to change depending on time, place and circumstance). Apparently, but only apparently, he expanded the minimalist definition of the church that both he in 1522 (12) and Melanchthon in the Augsburg Confession (art. VII) from 1530 held. But, in fact, in the first six marks he only unfolds the implications of what Word and sacraments mean.

He lists first the Word and then the sacraments as Christ instituted them, according to the Scriptures (Baptism and the Last Supper). Next, Luther mentions also the Power of the Keys, which includes penance and absolution (which, by then, the reformers considered not a sacrament in itself but a daily return to the promises of Baptism). After these marks he adds ministry, with the understanding that there must be an instituted order to proclaim the Word and administer the sacraments. As the sixth mark, Luther mentions prayer that includes public worship, which is only to reinforce that Word and sacraments are not a private affair. Up to this point the reformer restricts himself to the definition of the church as being made up by Word and sacrament adding only the necessary means for their dispensation (which imply absolution, ministry and worship; i.e., these "added" signs are implements and not supplements). These, then, define the esse of the church. Here Luther and the other reformers are in full agreement in keeping Word and sacrament as the only constitutive signs of the church.

However, there is a further external sign, which had not appeared explicitly before in either his or Melanchthon's writings about the church until then: cross and suffering. This seventh sign reveals the church as this community that, even when confessed to be one and holy, still lives under the sign of the cross, in transience, in trial, in weakness, in infamy, in vulnerability, in doubt and even abandonment, attesting that in these realities, as in the forsaken cross of Christ itself, there is God. Word and sacrament function as the formal criteria for the being of the church; the cross is the material criterion, the crucible, that marks the church's existence between the house and the street. If the Word does not confront, provoke, and promise, if the sacraments do not comfort and heal, then there is no cross; the "church" is an empty shell, the Word is dissolved in bare words, and the sacraments turned into a void ritualism.

If Cyprian defined the church as the requirement for salvation (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), (13) it might be so in at least two senses that the Greek word soteria or the Latin salus have. One is to heal, cure, preserve, and provide refuge. In this sense we are describing the house-function of the church. In the other sense "salvation" can also mean to deliver, to rescue, and to liberate. This would describe the street-function of the church. The idea of a salvation into another world (which would be a third sense of the term) is only a derivative and eschatological blending of the first two distinct semantic senses that the word "salvation" has. Hence, if we follow the etymological sense of the word, we can say that the church is the community of salvation insofar as, and only insofar as, it manifests itself in the places of perdition as a community that both heals and liberates. (14) Where this happens there is the church. The church happens! We believe it; we do not believe in it (credo ecclesiam, as the Nicean Creed formulates (15)). We believe it to be the place of salvation, of healing and deliverance, when the evidences of our time point to the cross of our forsakenness.

The time of the church in Lutheran ecclesiology is symbolized by this void that extends itself from the moment of Jesus' death (God's apousia, absence) and his return, and presence (parousia). It is not a time of dramatic events, great discourses, and certainties. It is the time of weakness and hope, the hope against all hope, as Paul describes Abraham's faith in Romans 4:18, and Brazilian bishop Dom Helder Camara applied to the church, calling it an "Abrahamic minority." This is also what Luther meant in calling the church the community of the cross. It is the community that lives precisely in this time, in the shabbat (which Luther in his Genesis lectures defined as the institution of the earthly church (16)), the distinctively Christian shabbat that stands between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Intriguingly, that was a time in the Gospels during which the apostles were silent! That was the time in which we know only what might be called a "practice of resurrection" exercised by the women that witnessed Jesus' burial. This was the practice of those women that witnessed the burial of the beloved and then went to the "street" to buy spices and oil. And after preparing spices and oils at home, and observing the shabbat, they go to anoint a putrescent dead body, only to be themselves surprised and scared to find the tomb empty and that very body alive.

Needless to say, the church is also often frightened in encountering novelty (as was Mary), even terrified in face of experiences of redemption and resurrection; it is always easier to administer grief than handle the unexpected that exceeds human management. This is the practice of resurrection, which prefigures the community of those who in proclamation and communion hope against all hope. This is the practice that keeps history open, open to revisit even its past of victimization and suffering. This is the task of the church: not to allow history to end in calamity, and not to allow the past to be closed. The prayer of the church indeed ends with the petition to deliver us from evil, that evil might not have had the last word.

Here I make a brief but important digression. In 1937 the Jewish German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an article published in a journal edited by his friend and colleague Max Horkheimer. In this article he gives his unique interpretation of "historical materialism": "The work of the past is not closed for the historical materialist. He cannot see the work of an epoch, or any part of it, as reified, as literally placed on one's lap." (17) Horkheimer writes to Benjamin a sharp criticism in which he says, "The supposition of the unclosed past is idealistic.... Past injustice has occurred and is closed. Those who were slain in it were truly slain.... In the end, your statements are theological." (18) Benjamin answers back, establishing a discussion that has been called possibly the most significant theological debate of the 20th century:

The corrective for this sort of thinking lies in the reflection that
history is not simply a science but a form of empathetic memory
[Eindenken]. What science has "settled," empathetic memory can modify.
It can transform the unclosed (happiness) into something closed, and the
closed (suffering) into something unclosed. That is theology, certainly,
but in empathetic memory we have an experience that prohibits us from
conceiving history completely non-theologically." (19)

This empathetic memory is capable of opening the closed past in a labor of love and mourning. It keeps memory alive, it preserves the shabbat against all evidence, against all science. Horkheimer played the role of the disciples on the way to Emmaus. He left the tragedy closed behind; Calvary was tragic and no longer redeemable. Benjamin, like the women in the Gospels, kept the empathetic memory, against all evidences, in a practice of resurrection that carried them to the Easter Sunday. After having witnessed the place where the body of the beloved was laid, they were those who witnessed the empty tomb and first met the resurrected one. This is what makes them the "prefiguring" of the church. They were the witnesses of a decisive affirmation of the Christian faith: the resurrection of the body. If it were not for them, Christianity's great promise could have been only the belief in an apparition.

But to keep this practice and the memory alive there must be a labor of love and mourning. Wendell Berry expressed this well in one of his poems:

    I read of Christ crucified,
    the only begotten Son
    sacrificed to flesh and time
    and all our woe. He died
    and rose, but who does not tremble
    for his pain, his loneliness,
    and the darkness of the sixth hour?
    Unless we grieve like Mary
    at His grave, giving Him up
    as lost, no Easter morning comes. (20)

I believe that the ecclesiology of Juan Luis Segundo, in the first volume of his Theology for the Artisans of a New Humanity, needs to be revisited. (21) There he defines the church as the community of "those who know." Although such an affirmation can suggest a Gnosticism lurking behind it, Segundo could not have been more faithful to the gospel. The church comprises the followers of Jesus who--unlike those condemned by the parable of the Great Judgment in Matthew 25, who thought they knew him and thus could recognize him--will not be surprised to know that Christ is to be met among those who in this world are lowly, excluded, and shaken. But this knowledge, as much as it is a promise, is also the acknowledgment of the transience of the church, the consciousness that its end does not belong to itself, as the "end" of Jesus did not belong to those faithful women. What the church knows and understands is embedded in the practice of those women; it is the belief against all evidence that no gesture of love will ever be lost.

This was well expressed not by a theologian but by Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, the main author of the Carta 77, which represented the voice of protest against the political regime in Czechoslovakia (that included playwright and later president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel), and who later died while under police "interrogation." In his posthumously published Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History we find an image apt to define the church: the community of those who are moved and shaken, but they are those who also understand. Patocka has called this the "solidarity of the shaken," which is, he continues,

the solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and
death are all about. That history is the conflict of mere life, barren
and chained to fear, with life at its peak, life that does not plan for
the ordinary days of a future but sees clearly that the everyday, its
life and its "peace," have an end. Only one who is able to grasp this,
who is capable of conversion, of metanoia, is a spiritual person. A
spiritual person, however, always understands, and that understanding is
no mere observation of facts, it is not 'objective knowledge.'... The
solidarity of the shaken is built up in persecution and uncertainty.
(22)

In the transit between house and street and in this cross-ing of the divide between globalization and exclusion, in this crucible ("in persecution and uncertainty") the church of the crucified God finds and founds itself.

1. Albert Pero, Jr., "The Church and Racism," in Between Vision and Reality: Lutheran Churches in Transition (LWF Documentation No. 47), ed. Wolfgang Greive (Geneva: LWF, 2001), 257-65. This article was originally presented in a 1999 consultation on the Lutheran Church in the U.S.A. held in Chicago.

2. See Albert Pero, Jr., "Cultural/Self-Transcendence," Currents in Theology and Mission 20:5 (October 1993), 380-89.

3. Pero, "The Church and Racism," 261.

4. Roberto Da Matta, A Casa e a Rua: Espaco, Cidadania, Mulher e Morte no Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1985), 55-80.

5. For the classical distinction between the private and the public see Immanuel Kant, "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung," in Ausgewahlte kleine Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1965), 1-9.

6. I owe this phrasing to my colleague Dr. Antje Jackelen.

7. See H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Hamden, CT: Shoe String, 1954), for a pointed denunciation of the treachery of the gospel and the evasion of the eschatological message of the kingdom in North American denominationalism.

8. See also Paul's (according to Luke) complementary use of demosios (public) and oikos (house) in Acts 20:20.

9. John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary, 1985).

10. The classical text is in Gregory Nazianzen's "Third Theological Oration," in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 301.

11. See Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3 vols., trans. David Smith (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 3:11-18. See also Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 159.

12. WA 7:720, 34-36: Signum necessarium est, quod habemus, Baptisma scilicet, panem et omnium potissimum Evangelium: tria haec sunt Christianorum symbola, tesserae et caracteres.

13. This expression is often quoted outside of its original context. Cyprian was opposing a papal disposition that accepted the baptism of those who belonged to heretical communities. In his opposition to the pope, Cyprian, ironically, played an anti-ecumenical role.

14. It is likely that the etymological root of the word "salvation" is the Latin sal, "salt." Salt was and is used to preserve or cure food. But it was often used as currency for the payment of wages earned; hence the connotation of something that affords one's freedom.

15. As the Tappert edition of the Book of Concord correctly translates, as opposed to the translation we have in both the Lutheran Book of Worship and the Kolb and Wengert edition of the Book of Concord.

16. See Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehman (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Muhlenberg and Fortress, 1955-1986), 1:103, 106. Cf. Oswald Bayer, "Nature and Institution: Luther's Doctrine of the Three Orders," Lutheran Quarterly 12/2 (Summer 1998): 125-59.

17. Walter Benjamin, Ausgewahlte Schriften II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955), 311.

18. Cited by Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 206f.

19. Peukert, Science, Action, 207.

20. Wendell Berry, Collected Poems (San Francisco: North Point, 1985), 210.

21. Juan Luis Segundo, The Community called Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1973). (Original Spanish publication, 1968).

22. Jan Patocka, Heretical Essay in the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 134.

Vitor Westhelle

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago