C4CC(20): Hocus Pocus (3)

A slightly longer chunk to finish a slightly longer chapter

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Yet this is only to address one half of the problems that flow from the change during the Medieval Renaissance in the understanding of the Body of Christ. For the idea that theology is something private, that faith is something hidden – and therefore that there are no necessary public consequences to being a Christian and that the church should not get involved in political debate – this is entirely a product of this shift in understanding. As soon as we say that the Body of Christ is not our physical baptised neighbour, but the bread and the wine, and that therefore it is only through the eyes of faith that we see whether our neighbour is in fact part of the Body, it becomes an entirely inner reality. This paves the way for the idea that if we think that we have the right faith and we think that 'they' have got the wrong faith, then we do not have to respect 'their' Body. Whereas seeing another baptised person had previously meant seeing the Body of Christ – with all that that entailed for how to treat that person – now the foundations are laid for the Inquisition, which we can take as summing up the idea that the church authority knows what faith is, roots out heresy and is able to torture someone who seems to have no faith. Such a development would have been inconceivable in the first thousand years of our faith.

When it is argued that a person's physical body is not the Body of Christ in a physical way, that it is a mystical perception, then the physical bodies themselves become vulnerable. This is the origin for the crippling of compassion in Western Christianity. For example the Roman Catholic Church in Chile in the 1960s had an understanding of the church which said, “The church is this mystical body, and we can leave the physical realities to the political leaders.” So when Pinochet came to power and began a very systematic process of torturing the resisters, the church did not have the theological resources with which to say, “This is spiritually wrong.” It took a very great deal of time before they began to realise that, not only was the torture wrong but that there must be something wrong with their theology that had prevented them from seeing the situation clearly from the beginning. The church therefore began retrieving this different understanding and started the journey to become the single most important resistance to the Pinochet regime. Yet it has only been able to do that through changing the way it understands its theology. It starts saying, “No, if you torture a baptised Christian, you are torturing Christ.” This is real, the physical tangible stuff, our flesh and blood, this is the Body and the church must act to preserve this Body; it has a duty to do so.

As the Western church became progressively more corrupt, so too did resistance to this spirituality of death and torture gather momentum, culminating in Luther and the Reformation itself, leading to yet more wars. Although these were called 'the wars of religion', quite often it was Protestants and Catholics on one side and Protestants and Catholics on the other side fighting each other for the nation state, because the nation state is something which arises out of the same process, and the nation state has the monopoly of coercive force – that is, the nation state has charge of our physical bodies. Now that faith has been internalised and made into a matter of private and internal discernment, the church has no claim upon the physical bodies of her members. This is therefore handed over to the state.

What this lead to, in England especially, was a very gentlemanly faith. We avoided all emotional extremes, and enthusiasm was absolutely prohibited. Enthusiasm became a term of abuse: to say of someone, “He's an enthusiast,” meant “If you are not careful he is going to pick up an axe and hit you on the head.” The root meaning of enthusiasm, en theos, meant being filled with God. So when enthusiasm gets pushed to one side, God gets pushed to one side – we have to be respectable and reasonable and rational, and this is very much the English temper. This is coupled with the political reality that one could not be a Catholic because a Catholic did not acknowledge the nation state as the final authority. The Church of England accepted the head of state as head of the church, and so one could be a patriotic Englishman and a Christian, in theory, by staying within the Church of England, but one could not be a patriotic Englishman if you were a Catholic. The issue is that once we have shifted from the real stuff of faith – looking at who Jesus was, what He taught, and following Him – to an abstract exercise where theology is in the academy it becomes possible for someone like John Locke to insist that faith has to be reasonable – and then, for their own purposes, the political structures reinforce the intellectual evacuation and watering down of Christian faith.

Christianity was placed within an academic framework and there then developed the habit of reading the Bible principally through rational categories. Our rational intellect was equated with the apathistic stance and as it is impossible to gain an accurate emotional intelligence and wisdom from that process alone the church has slowly crumbled from within. The truth is that Christianity is not ultimately subject to reason. This is not to say that Christianity is irrational. It is to say that the most important things in our life cannot be rationally proven. There is more to being human than a rational intellect, and therefore what engages with the whole of us is more important than what only engages with a part of us. Our rational intellect is only a part of us, and if we give that rational intellect too much place then we end up with a very distorted understanding of life and meaning. This is what has happened in Western culture. Reason was given excessive importance and we have seen Christianity slowly became watered down and ultimately be eclispsed as the arbiter of meanings and values within our society.

This is the context for post-modernism. Post-modernism is the last gasp of this process that had its roots back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the idolatrous elevation of reason that has run its course and now exhausted itself. Post-modernism essentially says that we cannot establish truth by reason, there is no 'privileged meta-narrative'. The consequence drawn is that there is therefore no final truth – yet that is only the case if a 'meta-narrative of rational primacy' is accepted. That was only first claimed in this particular way in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In contrast to this, Christians have never said that the truth is established by reason. Christians say the truth is a person, because a person says, “I am the Way, I am the Truth, I am the Life.” The arbiter for the Christians of what truth is is not some sort of rational theory, it is about getting to know him, the whole, the man. He is the truth, so post-modernism really does not engage with faith understood deeply. We were made in the image of God and we had this thirst for the reality of God in our lives, and now that reason is being placed in a proper perspective within our culture this thirst is really coming out in all sorts of different ways.

The church has a much better sense of history now. In particular, it has a much better sense of what scripture teaches than at any time since the Apostles. We have a much better understanding of the texts and what the New Testament is teaching than the Reformers did, for example. That does not mean that the Reformers were bereft of insight, but we do not have to simply refer back to the Reformers; we can go back to the early church and the models of the early church, we can go right back, ad fontes, to the source and spring.

Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches, remain in me.” How are we to remain in Him? Not by having a magical and controlling understanding of what we do, but by having an understanding of communion as something which is mysterious and relational and in which we take part without fully understanding it. We take part by faith. We are not in control of the process, and we do it, not because it is reasonable, but because we are obedient and for the love of Jesus. This is not something which can be rationally justified, but this is what we have been given to do. We do it because we pursue union with the logos, the wisdom of Christ.

Jesus says, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh shall live forever and I shall raise him on the last day.” Christ is in the action, not the object. It is the action of sharing bread and wine and what that means in terms of the human relationships represented, the com panion, that is where Jesus is found. It is not that Jesus is this object that we can then manipulate as if we are in charge. Jesus is found in the action, the human sharing and reconciliation: Jesus is found there, not in the object. This is not just an abstract intellectual claim, about something taking place within our minds. Jesus remains really present. There is so often a profound physical impact that communion has on a person, particularly someone who has not had it for a while and who has felt estranged from a community. When someone has previously felt unforgiven the impact of receiving the spiritual medicine communion is immense. It is as if you can hear the angels sing hallelujahs, as the heavy weights fall off a person. As St Paul puts it, “each time we do this we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” This is how we learn how to live as Christians.