Theses Toward an Ecclesiotomy
Craig Keen
Wesleyan Theological Society
March 1, 2024
In ordinary English usage, the word “catholic,” when not designating that ecclesiastical institution attached to the Vatican, is most often used as a synonym of the word “universal.”
Protestants unkind to the Church of Rome often substitute the word “universal” for the word “catholic,” when reciting the Creed’s “marks of the church.”
The word “universal” may, of course, be used carefully, or not, as a substitute for more ordinary words, say, for what is “widely occurring or . . . prevalent over all.” (OED)
It has, however, no fixed denotation. It is marked, as is all language, by the travails of its times and places. Never floating above history, words signify as they are put to use.
And yet the “universal” aspires to rule, to rule its variable and vulnerable subjects, from high above the vicissitudes of space and time, as an idealized Emperor might.
Particulars are ordered to comply, subordinately, signaling—however crookedly—the True, the One that this and that can sadly in the end only dissemble. And so, we might say . . . .
The universal is a forest unobstructed by the trees, trees exploited by logging interests. It is the quarterly projections spreadsheet of a land development consortium enveloping an ancestral burial ground. It is Thomas Jefferson’s grid of square mile sections, drawn to make the continent safe for the slave breeding entrepreneurs of his Old Virginia. It is White Supremacy, duty-bound to uproot a Oklahoma-clay-colored people from the land of grandmother, river, swamp, mountain, crow, and coyote to coral them within a well surveyed, soon at last to be useful, Indian Territory. [Pause]
The theological term for an effacement of a particular for the sake of a universal is “docetism.” More particularly, docetism is the sub-, indeed, the e-limation of the body and blood of Jesus, of his having assumed “sinful flesh.” “Docetism” claims that Jesus only seemed to have been a bloody body on the cross, that in reality he always was and always will be pure disembodied perfection; one might say, “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.” “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” [Pause]
It is in a text from the early second century that the first use in print of the phrase “catholic church” appears. Ignatius, while chained to a company of soldiers, in transport from the church he served in Antioch to be martyred in the eternal city Rome, wrote a series of letters to churches along the way. It is in his, “To the Smyrnaeans,” that he uses the term. He writes, “where Jesus Christ is, there is the [katholikē ekklēsia]” (8:2).
This letter is an explicitly anti-docetist plea. In it Ignatius draws attention to the flesh and blood particularity (1) of Jesus, (2) of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the hungry, the thirsty, (3) of the martyr, (4) of the eucharist, baptisms, love feasts, and marriages, and thus (5) of the bishop.
Ignatius worked in the space between the time when the political power of what we call “Christianity” was deemed negligible and the time when it was deemed subversive. The cessation of the uneven, but not less bloody, persecution of the church and the arrival of the Emperor’s favor must have seemed a gift of God. However, the Empire’s embrace—no less than its exclusion—of the church, was decidedly for the good of Rome. In time, the concreteness of a gospel that once appalled and bewildered a still young Western Civilization would more and more yield to institutional and theoretical pressures. Ecclesiasts under the watchful eye of imperial administrators would increasingly anchor ecclesial thought and practice to schema more stable than flesh and blood, land and soil, labor and delivery.
The better-situated “Christianity” became, the more it found affinity with principles long well-situated in the mind of the Empire. Indeed, “Christianity” immortalized the Empire’s nobler absolutes, fixating more purely and consistently on what cannot rise or fall, on what always has been, far beyond bread and wine, a realm of hierarchically fixed categories, laws, and ideals, of values without time or place, not unlike an Invisible Church. [Pause]
Richard Seaford maintains that the flow of energy in the West is largely the result of a Civilization-wide tsunami that was heaved from Greek Asia Minor in about 600 B.C., washing away land-dwelling Homeric heroic society and its poets, inaugurating the discipline philosophy, and, tellingly, the Greek art form tragedy, leaving a drowned world ruled by creatures of the air and the sea: kings, metaphysicians, and accountants. The quake launching this tsunami was the advent of the world’s first thoroughly monetized economy.
When the same number of drachmas purchase a lamb or a pair of shoes or a worker’s week of labor or seven gallons of olive oil, that number becomes the measure of what those goods are good for. Of course, the buying power of a historic currency varies with time and circumstances. A drachma in 600 B.C. did not buy what it did in 400 B.C. But the advent of a thoroughly monetized economy injects into Western consciousness the notion of a transcendent determiner of value, a Good for which the drachma varyingly stands. The lover of wisdom desires to know this transcendent Good and so to judge the justice of market values, to determine where entities in our world of commerce are truly to stand.
When it determines the relative value of work, food, labor, and land, money stands in judgment above them all, metaphysically, onto-theologically. [Pause]
Martin Heidegger set out to think his way back into the mist from which metaphysics emerged. What he gropes after is a vision of life not yet lost to abstractions, but at work where thinking flesh and blood is there—laboring and dreaming, hands and feet damp with damp earth. He looks to the world of poets and, though he did not say so, to a world not yet monetized. Let us say “being,” to which Heidegger devoted his life, is a trope for “goods,” which in the age of Homer might have constituted wealth, but could never have been deemed commodities having cash value.
In his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger writes of such a world of particulars, not forgetting—but also not enthralled by—metaphysics. Here he attends to a van Gogh canvas, in oils, of a pair of peasant shoes: “From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker's tread stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, wordless joy at having once more withstood want, trembling before the impending birth, and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and finds protection in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.” [Pause]
The task of an ecclesiology is not to situate “the church” within Heidegger’s vision. Heidegger thinks his way to a world behind the advent of Aristotle and Plato, to a heroic world not yet lost in abstraction. From there and then he performs a deconstruction of the history that subsequently presumed to improve upon it.
The ecclesiological task is to think to an ecclesia not yet monetized and from it to resurrect the subsequent history that has presumed to improve upon it, but to resurrect it dis-intact still mutilated by crucifixion. We may call a doctrine of the Body of Christ an ecclesiotomy, but only if on Pentecost it is no less mutilated than it was on bloody Golgotha. [Pause]
In her book, The Case for Mark Composed in Performance, Antoinette Clark Wire argues that the gospel as a novel, oral literary genre emerged in the village assemblies of illiterate Galileans in the years following the crucifixion of Jesus. It came eventually to be written, of course, but then, too, still to be performed, enacted, as a moment in which undulating performers and their resonantly undulating village kin make one body. That is, the gospel first speaks to a crucified people, the impoverished agrarian peasants rooted in the land, constantly under the threat of starvation, injury, disease, and the violence of Rome and Jerusalem, a fragile subsistence people who do not claim the right to survival. With the gospel ringing in their ears, knowing in their bones that the future is precarious, they await the coming of an uncoerced Reign of the God of the Jesus who did not survive.
That is, the gospel grows only in the soil of desperation. Mark’s account of the crowds that run to Jesus—the outcast, diseased, unclean, hungry, and oppressed—is an account of “good soil,” the only soil in which the gospel thrives. The gospel is not for what is accidentally proximate to the social/political/economic circumstances of spatial and temporal bodies—some poor, some rich, most somewhere in between—but simply and directly for those bodies, soulful as they be. The katholikē ekklēsia is a hospitable gathering of the poor, of those having the life sucked out of them by this present evil age. As hospitable, of course, the catholic church also welcomes others, say, those who are trained to recoil from the poor. The catholic church asks only of them that they “Come!,” with all who are gathered, that they mingle their goods, live as one body, abiding, solidarily, forsaking all social mobility. [Pause]
So also, the way to think such an ecclesiotomy may well be to think it as hospitable liturgy, liturgy as concrete work, not formal ritual normalized by Sabbath-obsessed choreographers, but the kind of work subsistence villagers do. The word liturgy (leitourgia) was once used quite concretely, that is, for labor (ergon) performed in gratitude and without pay by those (laos) sheltered by the society their work served. Indeed, the Jubilee—and similar Southwest Asian practices—was largely for the sake of reviving a liturgy depleted by the removal of indebted and enslaved citizens from their ancestral land and the liturgical work force. As hospitable, this liturgy is to be imagined as the body of Christ, a body with its protective surface—its hide—dis-closed, keeping no one out, like the walls of the New Jerusalem.