We have in the last two posts been reflecting about congregational life in North America. In the post entitled Putting the Focus Back on Congregations, I spoke of the early days of the WordAlone Network, an effort in the first decade of the twenty-first century to return the Evangelical Lutheran Church to its theological roots. I claimed that WordAlone was trying at the time to point out that Lutherans have traditionally maintained both that the Church is the Body of Christ and means of grace, and simultaneously that it is a group of particular sinners gathered around the Word and Altar. I contended that our then critique of high church presuppositions that undergirded the Concordat and Called to Common Mission was warranted because the ELCA bureaucracy had assumed a non-dialectical understanding of Church, claiming that the baptized themselves in churchwide assembly could be identified with the activity of the Holy Spirit Itself. What was needed then was simply to say that the church is a body of very human sinners begging for morsels from the divine, that it was, accordingly, a very human institution fraught with errors, mistakes, and earthly pretensions.
I also indicated in that first post that the WordAlone critique of a non-dialectical understanding of high church could not become the one and only ecclesiology of the Institute of Lutheran Theology, because Lutheran traditions have not been historically monolithic in their understanding of church or in all the fine points of their theology. I argued that the Institute of Lutheran Theology needed to be a place where Fordean-inspired gnesio-Lutherans, Evangelical Catholics, pietists, confessionalists and neo-confessionalists could all study their traditions, and come to fuller appreciation of the theological accents the differing Lutheran theological traditions possessed.
At the conclusion of that first article, I spoke of what features a genuine Lutheran Center for Congregational Revitalization might have. Accordingly, it would work to enter into formal and informal relationships with congregations to help in keeping pastors in pulpits, to aid in the funding of theological education, to explore new models of congregational ministry, and to help keep an active and creative normative Lutheran theology at work in congregations.
In the second installment, Focussing on Congregations: Why the Decline?, I spoke about the eclipse of congregational life in North America as the congregation moved in many communities from the center of social activity and function to the periphery of community social life. I argued that while it might be tempting to say that it is a good thing to clarify what the mission of congregations really ought to be by pointing to the merely accidental nature of social life within the congregation, it is nonetheless important to understand what has been lost as such accidental congregational social life diminishes.
What is lost, I claimed, are the occasions to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached, as it were, to ears that while mostly indifferent to the proclamation, are nonetheless still in the pews to hear the proclamation. In the parable, the son comes home to the father because he is hungry and out of funds. In the humiliation of this home-coming he experiences a love that wholly transcends the situation; he experiences a prodigal love that does not return likes for likes, but by grace alone bestows more upon the son than he deserves. Congregational life for Lutherans is not the proper end of Christian life, but it is the very human social context into, and through which, the Word might speak and be heard. While God's love is every where apparent, His prodigal love perhaps is most clearly witnessed in congregational life, where sons and daughters indifferent to the Father are nonetheless loved, and despite their waywardness, counted as precious by that Father.
So let us examine the congregational horizon more deeply. What are the assumptions of many who continue to participate in congregational life in North America? What do they imagine their life to be in this third decade of the 21st century? They attend services and have caring conversations with other congregational members. They might be motivated to engage in projects of the congregation that help the disadvantaged. Possibly, they speak even prophetic utterances to a society that has forgotten the marginalized, that too closely identifies Christian life with the life of the successful American citizen. What are the root assumptions of people in the pews these day in Lutheran congregations in North America? What do they think of God and His benevolence? What do they think about their need for God or salvation? If they are to be somehow saved by hearing and doing the Word, in what does this salvation consist?
It is important that we don't wear blinders here. I pointed out that NFS Grundtvig liked to say "human first, then Christian," and I paraphrased this in an earlier post, exclaiming that we are "sinners first, then Christian." If we are going to get clarity into the actual intellectual and cultural horizon presupposed by congregational participants in North America in the third decade of the 21st century, we are going to have to be brutally honest. What is the contour of that initial horizon in which Christian life grows and develops?
There is no doubt that there are many within Lutheran congregations that have what might be called a pre-modern understanding of the world. Such people do not really find the existence of God a problem, nor are they much bothered intellectually by the Christian story: God created a universe that is good, that somehow features of this universe created good slipped into sin (the Fall) without God actively willing it, that all who have fallen into sin will ultimately perish eternally, and that God out of His infinite mercy will save some -- through the agency of His Son, Jesus the Christ -- who otherwise would eternally die, and that He thus turns their lives around as a witness to Himself rather than allowing them to remain in a ceaseless drive to their own sinful self-aggrandizements.
However, for many people participating in Lutheran congregational life, this view of things simply does not ring true any longer. Why is this? For many today, thinking of God in this way is simply not any longer possible. The pre-modern understanding of the Christian story presupposes there is a creator God who either does not anticipate that creation will fall into sin, or, if He does anticipate it, He does not prevent it. The so-called irrational fall from creation into sin must either be understood as an unintended consequence of creation -- a state of affairs that makes God seem to be ignorant -- or a design feature of the universe itself -- a state of affairs that makes God seem less than good. The problem of the God of the tradition for many today is that He does not seemingly act as well as He ought. If we assume He knows what He is doing, we simply cannot help questioning why He does things as He does.
Our questioning of the goodness of God is not confined to his creation of a universe that falls into sin and death, but it also extends to God's way of redeeming things. We Lutherans who claim that "I by my own reason or strength cannot believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him," must admit that the saving of contemporary man and woman is something that God does, not something that humans accomplish. But this saving seems to many today to be arbitrary and capricious. While somebody might say with confidence and sincerity that "God saved me despite myself," this cannot be generalized by most to statements about God's general saving of humankind, a wholly external saving in which humans might be along for the ride, but are never in the situation of doing any driving on their own. Making such general statements seems to contradict the very goodness of God in Himself.
I submit that this view of things simply does not operate for most educated people today in the North Atlantic countries. Whether they are aware of it or not, they have swam too long in the cultural waters of the west to return to the pristine pre-modern view of the 16th and 17th century Lutheran theological tradition. For most today, there is some sense that there is a God and some sense that in congregational life perhaps some kind of connection to this God is possible. But the God presupposed in the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon is not the God of the Christian tradition. What might be the marks of this other God?
There is a general sense, I think, among most educated participants in congregational life that some deep facets of our experience are simply missed or ignored if we look at reality as a product of an evolutionary physicalism. Physicalism is the claim that ultimately the things that exist are those things that our fundamental theories of particle physics quantify over, or presuppose. The idea is that matter/energy is that which is, and this matter/energy has an extraordinary evolutionary history, a history that finally eventuates in the appearance of human beings on the earth, beings of such an extraordinary complexity that one most posit that it took billions of years for purely adventitious processes to produce them. Those who participate in congregational life, while maybe not self-consciously breaking with the assumptions of evolutionary physicalism, yet sense somehow that there must be more than it somehow. This is not to say, that all would claim that there exist some deeper-level objective state of affairs by and through which the universe physically evolved. Perhaps they would say that such a view of things in not subjectively satisfying and claim that participating in congregational life somehow serves the heart if not the head.
What I am suggesting is that active members of congregations today might say that while there is not sufficient evidence in the world to assert God's existence in an unqualified way, there is too much evidence to assert His nonexistence with confidence. Thus, while the contemporary congregational member is no longer sure of the Christian verities of the past, he or she is nonetheless a bit skeptical about contemporary claims of scientific or metaphysical materialists that the universe is as simple as they claim it to be. Having not enough evidence for the traditional Christian God, but too much evidence to be confident that the skies are empty, the contemporary participant in congregational life is exploring those non-cognitive features of experience that make life meaningful, an exploration that they sense can somehow be pursued without denying the central claims of science or the so-called scientific view of the world.
There is much that can be said about whether the scientific view of things is an objective fact or merely an ideological commitment, and I will argue in a subsequent post that it is more like the latter than the former. For now, however, I want to return to the question of God. Perhaps there is some "more-than-ness" to the universe to which participants in congregational life witness. How do we think this? Can this be thought about in the way of the God of the Christian tradition or does the problem of evil block that path? At the end of the day, I agree with Charles Taylor in his epic, The Secular Age. Belief in the Christian God has diminished not primarily because of scientific challenges to religion, but more because of the human moral judgment of God. How can the God of the great Omnis -- omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, etc. -- act as the God of the tradition has reportedly acted? While scientific evidence against God might count in the actual world, the problem of evil applied to God obtains in each and every possible world.
We must be brutally honest today. In our teaching and preaching we encounter the default presuppositions of our contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon, the chief problematic one being the very goodness of God Himself. The question we ask is simply this: How is the goodness of God possible given the classical Christian story and our understanding of how God acts sub specie contritio?
Any attempt to revitalize congregational life must wrestle with the presuppositions of that life, the first of which is the nature of God Himself. As we try to understand congregational life today we must grasp the changed situation with respect to that life that has occurred in the last 500 years: Whereas people five-hundred years ago generally did not subject God's goodness to their moral judgment, they do so today, and it is not considered by most to be deeply sinful to do so. We shall return to this question in the next post, while introducing another assumption of our time: the general misunderstanding of scientific theory by most educated congregational participants.
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