The Ontology of Congregational Life: On the Conditions for the Possibility of Christian Intelligibility

Center for Congregational Revitalization

The present reflections arise from the ongoing work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization, whose task is not merely to address the decline of congregations, but to inquire more fundamentally into the conditions under which congregational life is intelligible at all in the early twenty-first century. What follows is not a programmatic proposal, nor a set of strategies for institutional renewal, but a more basic investigation. It asks what a congregation must be if it is to be recognized as a site of Christian life rather than as one more voluntary association among others.

The crisis now facing congregations is widely acknowledged, but it is rarely described with sufficient precision. It is said that attendance is down, that engagement is weak, that younger generations are absent, and that cultural conditions have shifted. All of this is true. Yet none of it reaches the heart of the matter. These phenomena are not the problem itself, but the surface manifestations of a deeper dislocation. The more fundamental issue is that congregational life increasingly takes place under conditions in which its central claims are no longer stably intelligible as referring to what is real.

To state the matter more directly: the difficulty is not simply that fewer people believe, but that what it would mean to believe is no longer clear. The language of God, grace, sin, redemption, and resurrection continues to be used, but its referential force has become unstable. It is heard, at times, as expressive, at times as symbolic, at times as ethically suggestive, but only intermittently as naming what is the case. Where this instability takes hold, congregational life becomes ontologically thin. It persists as form, but its substance is no longer secure.

It is at precisely this point that many contemporary responses go astray. Efforts at revitalization frequently assume that the underlying problem is one of execution: that congregations need better leadership, clearer vision, more compelling communication, or more effective programming. Such efforts are not without value, but they presuppose what is no longer given. They assume that the congregation already exists as a coherent site of meaning and that the task is to make that meaning more accessible or more attractive. But if the conditions under which that meaning is intelligible have themselves been eroded, then no amount of strategic refinement can restore what is absent. Strategy cannot generate ontology.

The question, therefore, must be pressed at a deeper level. What is a congregation? Not in sociological terms, nor in institutional terms, but in ontological and semantic terms. What must be the case for a gathering of persons to count as a congregation in the full theological sense?

A first approximation may be offered as follows. A congregation is a community constituted by practices in which the Word of God is not merely spoken, but is understood as referring to and effecting what is real. This definition is deliberately modest, yet it carries significant weight. It does not require uniformity of experience, nor does it deny the presence of doubt, struggle, or partial understanding. What it does require is that the practices of the community presuppose that the language they employ is truth-apt and world-disclosing. The Word is not merely meaningful; it is about something, and that something is the living God.

From this, several consequences follow. First, the reality of God cannot be treated as an optional background assumption. It must function as a constitutive presupposition of congregational life. Where God is tacitly bracketed, treated as a hypothesis, or reduced to a projection of communal meaning, the congregation ceases to be intelligible as a congregation in the theological sense. It becomes instead a community organized around shared values, narratives, or practices, but no longer a site of divine address and action.

Second, the language of the congregation must retain its referential integrity. The words of proclamation, prayer, and catechesis must be capable of referring beyond themselves. If they are heard only as expressions of human interiority or as symbolic gestures within a closed system of meaning, then their theological function collapses. Semantic realism is not an optional philosophical addendum to congregational life; it is one of its conditions of possibility.

Third, the practices of the congregation must be understood as participatory rather than merely expressive. In proclamation, something is said that is not reducible to the speaker’s intention. In the sacraments, something is given that is not exhausted by communal recognition. In catechesis, something is learned that is not constructed by the learner. These practices presuppose that reality exceeds the subject and that the congregation is addressed by, and drawn into, that excess.

It is here that a decisive distinction must be made between two kinds of congregational existence that are often outwardly indistinguishable. There are congregations that are formally Christian but ontologically thin. They retain the language, the structures, and even many of the practices of the tradition, yet these no longer function as disclosures of what is real. Alongside these are congregations that are ontologically thick, in which the same practices are inhabited as sites of divine presence and action. The difference between them is not primarily one of style, size, or even doctrinal precision. It is a difference in the mode of being.

If this is correct, then the task of revitalization must be reconceived. It is not first a matter of innovation, but of recovery. Not the recovery of past forms as such, but the recovery of the conditions under which those forms were intelligible as bearing truth. The question is not simply how to make congregations more effective, but how to restore them as places in which the Word of God can again be heard as referring to and effecting what is real.

This shifts the entire horizon of the discussion. Leadership, programming, and strategy remain important, but they must be subordinated to a more basic task: the cultivation of an ecclesial life in which the reality of God is presupposed, the language of faith is truth-apt, and the practices of the church are inhabited as participations in what exceeds them. Without this, revitalization will remain a matter of surface adjustment. With it, even small and fragile congregations may become again what they are called to be.

Subsequent reflections will seek to draw out the implications of this account for the concrete practices of congregational life, including proclamation, catechesis, and leadership. For the moment, it is enough to have clarified the point at which the problem must be engaged. The crisis of the congregation is, at its core, a crisis of intelligibility. And the renewal of congregational life will require nothing less than the recovery of its ontology.

From Deconstruction to Intelligibility: Why the Emerging Church cannot Revitalize the Congregation

Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR)
Institute of Lutheran Theology

This essay is part of an ongoing series produced by the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) examining the theological and cultural conditions under which congregational life now unfolds. CCR’s work proceeds from the conviction that the central challenge facing the church is not first institutional decline, but a more fundamental erosion of intelligibility. Where the claims of the faith are no longer heard as referring to what is real, efforts at renewal remain superficial. This document offers a diagnostic analysis intended to clarify these conditions and to contribute to a more adequate theological understanding of the contemporary situation. 

I. The Misdiagnosis of Decline

Across the contemporary ecclesial landscape, a common narrative has taken hold. Congregations are declining. Participation is weakening. Institutional Christianity is losing its cultural and social centrality. In response, a wide range of proposals has emerged, many of which seek to reimagine the church in more flexible, adaptive, and contextually sensitive forms.

Among the most influential of these responses has been what is often called the “Emerging Church.” It presents itself not as a programmatic reform but as a reorientation of Christian existence. Its proponents speak of conversation rather than proclamation, community rather than institution, authenticity rather than authority. They seek to create spaces in which individuals may renegotiate inherited beliefs and practices in light of contemporary experience.

There is, at first glance, something compelling in this effort. It recognizes that the problem facing the church is not merely organizational. It acknowledges that the conditions under which Christian language is heard and understood have changed. It senses that what once could be assumed can no longer be presumed.

Yet for all this, the movement remains fundamentally misdirected, for it does not address the deepest level of the crisis.

The central issue is not that the church has failed to adapt its forms. It is that the conditions that once made theological language intelligible have been eroded. The problem is not first institutional. It is semantic and ontological.

Until this is seen, all attempts at revitalization—no matter how creative—remain superficial.

II. Deconstruction as Religious Orientation

The Emerging Church is best understood not as a coherent movement with defined doctrines, but as a shared orientation. Its unifying feature is not what it affirms, but what it resists. It resists institutional authority, doctrinal fixity, and the perceived rigidity of inherited forms of Christianity. In their place, it elevates openness, plurality, and ongoing reinterpretation.

At the heart of this orientation lies a continual practice of deconstruction. Beliefs are not received as given but treated as material for revision. Practices are not normative but experimental. Identity is not stable but negotiated. The church itself is not a fixed reality but an evolving network of relationships, conversations, and experiences.

This deconstructive posture is not accidental. It arises from a broader cultural situation in which claims to truth are met with suspicion, and where meaning is understood to be constructed rather than given. Within this horizon, the task of theology is no longer to articulate what is the case, but to facilitate processes by which individuals may find what is meaningful for them.

Thus faith becomes conversation. Doctrine becomes narrative. Proclamation becomes performance.

What is lost in this shift is not merely clarity, but reference.

III. The Loss of Theological Reference

The decisive weakness of the Emerging Church lies here: it cannot secure the referential status of its own language.

To speak theologically is to intend something. It is to say not merely what is meaningful, but what is the case. It is to speak of God, not as a projection of human discourse, but as that which stands over against and addresses the human subject. Without this referential orientation, theological language collapses into expressive activity.

The Emerging Church, however, systematically suspends this question.

It does not deny reference outright. Rather, it relocates it. Truth is no longer understood as correspondence to reality, but as the outcome of communal discourse. What is “true” is what can be sustained within the conversation. The criterion is no longer adequation to what is, but coherence within what is said.

This shift has profound consequences.

If theological claims do not refer beyond the practices that sustain them, then they cannot bind. If they cannot bind, they cannot command belief. If they cannot command belief, they cannot form a community ordered toward truth.

What remains is a space of negotiated meaning, in which individuals are affirmed but not adjudicated, included but not instructed, accompanied but not addressed.

Such a space may be psychologically appealing. It may even sustain a certain kind of communal life for a time. But it cannot sustain a congregation as congregation.

For a congregation is not merely a gathering of individuals in conversation. It is a community constituted by its relation to what is proclaimed as true.

IV. The Instability of Deconstructive Ecclesial Forms

The practical consequences of this failure are already visible.

Communities shaped by deconstructive orientations tend toward instability. Their structures remain informal, their commitments provisional, their practices continually subject to revision. Participation is often intense but transient. Leadership is diffuse. Institutional continuity is difficult to maintain.

This is not simply the result of poor organization. It is the natural outcome of the underlying orientation.

Where no claim is permitted to stand with normative authority, no structure can endure. Where all forms are subject to continual renegotiation, no form can stabilize. Where the individual is the final arbiter of meaning, communal coherence becomes fragile.

It is therefore not surprising that many such communities function as transitional spaces. They provide a context for those disillusioned with more traditional forms of Christianity, offering a place in which inherited beliefs may be questioned and reconfigured. But they rarely provide a durable framework for sustained ecclesial life.

They are, in this sense, parasitic upon the very traditions they critique. They draw their energy from the deconstruction of inherited forms, yet lack the resources to generate new forms capable of enduring beyond that deconstruction.

V. The Category Error: Adaptation Without Ground

The fundamental error of the Emerging Church lies in its attempt to solve a problem of intelligibility through adaptation of form.

It assumes that if the church becomes more conversational, more inclusive, more flexible, it will once again become meaningful. But meaning does not arise from form alone. It arises from the relation between language and reality.

One may alter the setting of proclamation, soften its tone, or multiply its modes of expression. But if what is said is no longer heard as referring to what is real, these changes do not restore intelligibility. They merely obscure its absence.

The result is a subtle but decisive displacement. The focus shifts from what is said to the conditions under which it is said. The success of theological language is measured not by its truth, but by its capacity to generate engagement.

This is not revitalization. It is accommodation to the loss of intelligibility.

VI. Toward a Different Diagnosis

If the analysis offered here is correct, then the path forward cannot consist in further experimentation with ecclesial forms. Nor can it rest content with the multiplication of conversational spaces.

What is required is a recovery of the conditions under which theological language can once again function as language that refers.

This requires, at minimum, the reassertion of three claims.

• First, that God is not a function of discourse but the ground of it. Theological language does not create its object but responds to it.
• Second, that theological statements are truth-apt. They are not merely expressive or performative, but capable of being true or false.
• Third, that the congregation is constituted by its relation to this truth. It exists not simply as a community of shared experience, but as a community addressed by what it confesses.

These claims do not solve the problem. But without them, the problem cannot even be properly posed.

VII. Conclusion: Beyond Deconstruction

The Emerging Church has performed a valuable service. It has exposed the inadequacy of merely institutional solutions to the contemporary crisis of the church. It has shown that inherited forms can no longer be assumed to carry their own intelligibility. It has made visible the depth of dislocation experienced by many within contemporary Christianity.

But it has mistaken the nature of the problem. By treating the crisis as one of form rather than of intelligibility, it has directed its energies toward continual deconstruction and reconstruction of ecclesial practices. In doing so, it has produced spaces that are open but unstable, creative but indeterminate, hospitable but unable to bind.

What it cannot do is restore the conditions under which theological language is heard as referring to what is real.

Until that task is undertaken, the revitalization of the congregation will remain beyond reach.

For related work developing this diagnosis, see:

“Congregations after Christendom: Why the Focus Must Return to the Local Church,”
“Preaching in Changing Contexts: The Crisis of Theological Intelligibility,” and
“Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization,”
available at: https://ilt.academia.edu/DennisBielfeldt/Congregational%20Revitalization%20(CCR)

Catechesis after Christendom: Reclaiming the Intelligibility of the Faith

This document is issued under the auspices of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at the Institute of Lutheran Theology. It represents an ongoing effort to clarify the theological and cultural conditions within which congregational life is now lived, and within which the church’s speech, practices, and forms of witness must take place. As part of CCR’s broader research initiative, this text is offered not as a final statement, but as a working articulation intended to assist pastors, congregations, and church leaders in discerning the conditions of intelligibility under which the claims of the Christian faith may be received as referring to what is real.

I. The Catechetical Situation

Catechesis has always been a quiet but decisive work of the church. It does not carry the immediacy of preaching, nor the visibility of public worship, yet it is the means by which the language of the faith is actually learned, retained, and inhabited. In the Lutheran tradition, this task achieved a remarkable clarity in Luther's Small Catechism. Its structure is not merely pedagogical but theological. It orders the Christian life: existence under God’s command, trust in God’s promise, address to God in prayer, and reception of God’s gifts.

For a long time, catechesis could proceed with a certain confidence. The language it employed, though requiring explanation, was heard within a horizon that rendered it broadly intelligible. One might struggle with particular claims, but the claims themselves were not heard as unintelligible or referentially void. The catechetical task was thus largely one of instruction within an already functioning world of meaning.

That situation has changed.

II. The Loss of Intelligibility

The present difficulty is not first a matter of declining knowledge, though that is real enough. It is a matter of intelligibility. The language of the catechism is no longer reliably heard as referring to what is real. Its words remain, but their ontological weight has thinned.

This shift is often obscured because the vocabulary persists. One can still speak of “God,” “sin,” “grace,” and “forgiveness.” Yet these terms are now frequently received in ways that alter their function. They are heard as expressions of human experience, as symbolic articulations of value, or as markers of communal identity. What is no longer assumed is that they name realities that exist independently of such expression.

The result is a subtle but decisive transformation. Catechesis continues, but it increasingly operates within a framework in which its own claims are not taken to be straightforwardly about what is the case. It teaches a language whose referential status is uncertain.

III. From Instruction to Reestablishment

Under these conditions, catechesis cannot remain merely instructional. It must take on a more fundamental role: the reestablishment of intelligibility.

In an earlier setting, catechesis could presuppose that its claims were, in principle, understandable as true or false. Today, that presupposition must itself be addressed. The task is no longer only to teach what the catechism says, but to make possible an understanding of how what it says can be heard as referring to reality.

This does not entail a turn to abstraction for its own sake. It entails a renewed attentiveness to the conditions under which theological language functions as more than expression. Without such attentiveness, catechesis risks becoming either rote repetition or symbolic formation. In neither case does it form believers in the classical sense.

IV. The Catechism as Grammar of Reality

A helpful way to recover the depth of the catechetical task is to understand the catechism as a grammar rather than merely a summary.

• The Commandments articulate the structure of creaturely life before the Creator.
• The Creed names the reality of God’s action—past, present, and ongoing.
• The Lord’s Prayer presupposes that God hears and responds.
• The Sacraments enact the presence and promise of God in concrete form.

Each of these does more than convey information. Each presupposes a world in which God is an acting subject and in which human life is constituted in relation to that action. To teach the catechism is therefore to induct persons into a way of speaking that is ordered toward reality.

Yet such induction now requires more than repetition. The grammar must be shown to be responsive to what is. Without this, it may be learned formally while remaining uninhabited existentially.

V. The Question of Reference

At the center of the catechetical crisis lies the question of reference.

Traditional catechesis assumed that theological language refers. When one speaks of God, one speaks of God. When one speaks of forgiveness, one speaks of an act that occurs. This assumption did not require constant defense because it was supported by a broader cultural and conceptual framework.

That framework has weakened. Theological language is now often interpreted within models that do not support reference in this sense. It becomes expressive, performative, or communal, but not truth-apt in relation to an independent reality.

Catechesis must therefore proceed with an awareness of this shift. It must not only use theological language but help restore the conditions under which that language can be heard as referring. This is not an optional supplement. It is now intrinsic to the task.

VI. The Pastor as Interpreter of Intelligibility

This altered situation places a new weight upon the pastoral office.

The pastor remains a teacher, but not only a teacher of content. The pastor must also function as an interpreter of intelligibility. He or she must be able to discern how the language of the faith is being heard and where its referential force is being diminished or lost.

At times this will require explicit clarification. At other times it will require a more patient form of guidance, in which assumptions are brought into view and gently corrected. In either case, the aim is not to win arguments, but to make it possible for the language of the faith to be heard as meaningful in the fullest sense.

Without such work, catechesis risks speaking past its hearers. With it, catechesis can again form persons who understand what they confess.

VII. Practice and Understanding

Catechesis is not exhausted by explanation. It is sustained and deepened through practice.

Prayer, confession, and participation in the sacramental life are not adjuncts to catechesis but integral to it. They provide the lived context in which the language of the faith is enacted. In them, what is taught is also performed.

Yet practice alone cannot secure intelligibility. Where the conceptual conditions of understanding have eroded, practice can persist without clarity. It may be maintained as habit, even as its meaning becomes uncertain.

The task, therefore, is not to choose between practice and understanding, but to hold them together. Catechesis must teach and form, clarify and enact. Only in this integration can the language of the faith be both learned and inhabited.

VIII. Toward Catechetical Renewal

The renewal of catechesis will not be achieved through novelty alone. It will come through a reorientation of the task.

Catechesis must again proceed with patience, allowing its claims to unfold over time. It must be attentive to the conceptual situation of its hearers, neither assuming too much nor conceding too quickly. Above all, it must retain confidence in its own subject matter—that it speaks not merely of human possibility, but of divine reality.

Such catechesis may appear slower than what contemporary expectations demand. Yet it is precisely this slowness that allows depth to emerge. It forms not only familiarity with the language of the faith, but understanding of what that language intends.

IX. Conclusion

The catechetical challenge of the present moment is not merely pedagogical. It is ontological and semantic. It concerns the relation between language and reality, between what is said and what is.

If the church is to remain the church, it must form persons who can confess the faith with the understanding that such confession is about what is real. This cannot be assumed. It must be cultivated.

Catechesis is the place where this cultivation occurs.

In a time when the intelligibility of the faith is no longer given, catechesis becomes again what it has always, at its best, been: the patient formation of persons into a way of speaking and living in which God is not an idea, but the living One who addresses, judges, forgives, and gives life.

Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization

In recent months I have been working through a series of essays on the present condition of congregational life in North American Christianity. These include Congregations after Christendom: Why the Focus Must Return to the Local Church, The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem, Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief, The Problem of God: Moral Reversal and Theological Instability, and What Are We to Make of Science? Each of these essays takes up a distinct dimension of the current situation. Taken together, they point toward a common conclusion.

The difficulty facing congregations today is not adequately described by decline.

Decline is real. Attendance has diminished, participation has weakened, and many congregations face uncertain futures. Yet these phenomena are better understood as symptoms than as causes. They are visible expressions of a deeper transformation, one that concerns the conditions under which congregational life can be understood at all.

The problem, more precisely, is one of intelligibility.

Congregations do not persist simply because they are well organized or effectively led. They persist when participation in their life can be recognized as fitting within the broader horizon in which individuals live. Where that horizon supports the claims of the congregation, participation appears natural, even necessary. Where it does not, participation becomes unstable, optional, and eventually difficult to sustain in any enduring way.

The present moment is marked by precisely this kind of shift. What has changed is not only how many people attend, but how congregational life is understood. The question is no longer simply whether individuals will participate. It is whether participation itself makes sense.

To address this, we must move from symptoms to structures, from observable decline to the underlying framework within which congregational life is interpreted. What follows is a brief account of five interrelated developments that, taken together, help to define that framework.

First, congregations have lost much of their social gravity. They no longer function as central gathering places within the lives of most people. Where congregational life once intersected naturally with patterns of work, family, and community, it now competes with a wide range of alternative structures. The result is not simply that people are less committed, but that fewer come into contact with congregational life in any sustained way.

Second, congregations have lost their normative status. Participation is no longer assumed as a basic feature of life. It has become one option among many and must now be justified. This shift is subtle but far reaching. Where participation was once taken for granted, it must now be explained, defended, and chosen. What is optional is always fragile.

Third, individuals increasingly inhabit what may be described as a condition of cross pressure. They live within multiple and often competing frameworks of meaning. They may affirm the language of the Christian tradition while simultaneously operating within accounts of reality that sit uneasily alongside it. The result is not straightforward unbelief, but fragmentation. The same individual may speak of God in one context and interpret the world in entirely different terms in another.

Fourth, a moral reversal has taken place in the way God is understood. In earlier contexts, the goodness of God was generally presupposed. Today, God is often evaluated according to moral intuitions formed independently of the tradition. Questions of suffering, justice, and fairness are no longer addressed within a framework that assumes divine goodness. They are brought to bear upon that assumption itself. The result is a growing instability in how central theological claims are received.

Fifth, a broadly naturalistic understanding of reality has become pervasive. The success of the natural sciences has contributed to a default framework in which events are explained in terms of natural causes and processes. This does not always take the form of an explicit denial of divine action. More often, it results in a situation in which such action no longer appears necessary for explaining what occurs. God is not so much rejected as displaced.

Each of these developments is significant in its own right. Their full force, however, lies in their convergence. Together, they alter the horizon within which congregational life is lived.

The most important consequence of this convergence is not simply decline, but the fragmentation of meaning within congregational life itself. The language of the church persists, but it no longer functions within a shared framework. Terms such as God, grace, and salvation are used, but they are heard in different and sometimes incompatible ways. The same practices are enacted, yet their significance is less stable. The same sermon is preached, yet it may be received as a claim about reality, as a symbolic narrative, or as a form of moral reflection, depending upon the framework within which it is heard.

This fragmentation is often not immediately visible. Congregations can continue to function with a considerable degree of outward continuity. Yet beneath this continuity lies a growing divergence in how what is said and done is understood.

It is at this point that the limitations of many contemporary approaches to congregational renewal become apparent. Much of the existing literature assumes that the basic intelligibility of congregational life remains intact and that the task is to increase participation through improved strategy. Better leadership, clearer communication, and more effective programming are all taken to be central.

Such efforts are not without value. But they presuppose precisely what is now in question.

If the framework within which congregational life once made sense has shifted, then strategy alone cannot resolve the problem. It can refine what is already understood. It cannot restore understanding where it has weakened. One cannot optimize what no longer makes sense.

If this diagnosis is correct, then the work before us must be reoriented. The task is not simply to improve congregational performance. It is to clarify and, where necessary, rearticulate the framework within which congregational life is understood.

This line of argument has been developed in greater detail across the essays mentioned above, all of which are available on Academia.edu. Readers may consult Congregations after Christendom, The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem, Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief, The Problem of God, and What Are We to Make of Science? for fuller treatments of each dimension. A more extended and integrated account is also available in the longer paper Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization, which gathers these threads into a single argument.

What is now required is a second phase of work.

If the difficulty lies at the level of intelligibility, then the task is not only diagnostic but constructive. We must ask how proclamation, teaching, pastoral care, and congregational form can function under these altered conditions. This includes, in particular, a renewed attention to theological language, the reconstruction of plausibility, and the formation of persons capable of inhabiting the life of the church with understanding.

The next set of essays will take up these questions directly. The first of these, Proclamation under Conditions of Fragmented Meaning, examines the situation of preaching when the language of the church no longer carries a stable reference across hearers. Subsequent essays will address catechesis, pastoral care, and forms of congregational life in similar fashion.

The aim is not simply to reverse decline. It is to render congregational life intelligible again.

Where that occurs, renewal becomes possible. Where it does not, no strategy will suffice.

Readers who wish to explore the argument in greater detail may consult the individual essays available on Academia.edu: 

• Congregations after Christendom: Why the Focus Must Return to the Local Church , 
• The Decline of the Church Is Not the Problem 
• Cross-Pressure and the Fragmentation of Belief 
• The Problem of God: Moral Reversal and Theological Instability 
• What Are We to Make of Science? 

A more extended and integrated presentation of the full argument is given in Congregational Life after Christendom: A Diagnostic Framework for Revitalization, which gathers these analyses into a single framework and situates them within the work of the Center for Congregational Revitalization.

Proclamation under Conditions of Fragmented Meaning

This document is issued under the auspices of the Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR) at the Institute of Lutheran Theology. It represents an ongoing effort to clarify the theological and cultural conditions within which congregational life is now lived, and within which the church’s speech, practices, and forms of witness must take place. As part of CCR’s broader research initiative, this text is offered not as a final statement, but as a working articulation intended to assist pastors, congregations, and church leaders in discerning the conditions of intelligibility under which the claims of the Christian faith may be heard as referring to what is real.

Introduction: The Question of Preaching Today

Preaching has always stood at the center of congregational life. It is the primary means through which the Word is proclaimed, the place where the promises of God are spoken into the concrete circumstances of human existence. For much of the church’s history, the task of preaching, while never simple, was sustained by a relatively stable horizon of understanding. The preacher could assume that the language of the sermon, though requiring explanation and application, was heard within a framework that rendered it broadly intelligible. Lamentably, that assumption can no longer be maintained.

The difficulty facing preaching today is not only that fewer people are present, nor that attention is more difficult to sustain, nor even that cultural expectations have shifted. These factors are real, but they do not reach the heart of the matter. The more fundamental issue is that preaching now takes place within a context in which the meaning of its central claims is no longer stable.

The problem is not simply that the sermon must be made more engaging. It is that what the sermon says is not consistently heard as referring to what is real.

I. The Fragmentation of Hearing

Under contemporary conditions, the same sermon can be heard in multiple and divergent ways. The preacher may speak of God’s action, of sin and forgiveness, of judgment and grace, yet these terms do not arrive in the hearer as they once did. They are received within a plurality of interpretive frameworks that shape their meaning in advance.

For one hearer, to say that God acts may still be heard as a claim about divine agency in the world. For another, it may be understood as a way of expressing personal meaning or communal identity. For a third, it may be received with hesitation, as language that gestures toward something no longer clearly affirmed. These differences are not always explicit. They often remain unspoken, yet they structure the act of hearing.

The result is that the apparent unity of proclamation conceals a divergence in understanding. The same words are spoken, but they do not always say the same thing.

This condition is intensified by the fact that many hearers inhabit more than one framework at once. Within the liturgical setting, theological language may be affirmed in its traditional sense. Outside that setting, the same individual may interpret events in terms that leave little room for divine agency. The sermon is thus received not within a single, coherent horizon, but within a field of competing possibilities.

Preaching, in this context, does not address a unified act of hearing. It addresses a fragmented one.

II. The Weakening of Referential Force

The central consequence of this fragmentation is a weakening of the referential force of theological language. Statements that once functioned as claims about what is the case are now frequently received as expressions of meaning, orientation, or value.

To say that God forgives may be heard as describing an act of divine mercy, but it may also be heard as encouraging a posture of acceptance. To proclaim that Christ is risen may be received as a claim about an event in reality, or as a symbolic affirmation of hope. To speak of sin may be understood as naming a condition before God, or as referring to patterns of human brokenness. In each case, the linguistic form remains intact, but the mode of reference shifts.

This does not necessarily produce immediate resistance. The hearer may continue to participate, to assent, and even to be moved by what is said. Yet the relation between language and reality becomes less determinate. The sermon risks being heard not as proclamation, but as interpretation.

Where this occurs, the preacher faces a difficulty that cannot be resolved by rhetorical skill alone. One cannot simply make the language more vivid or more accessible. The issue lies not primarily in expression, but in reception.

III. The Limits of Adaptation

Faced with these challenges, it is understandable that preachers might seek to adapt their language. Terms that appear difficult or unfamiliar are replaced with more accessible ones. Doctrinal formulations are translated into contemporary idioms. The aim is to bridge the gap between the language of the tradition and the experience of the hearer.

Such adaptation has a legitimate place. Preaching has always involved the careful ordering of language so that it may be heard. Yet adaptation alone cannot resolve the present difficulty.

If the underlying issue is that theological language is no longer heard as referring to what is real, then the substitution of more familiar terms does not address the problem. It may reduce resistance, but it may also reinforce the tendency to hear the sermon within a non-referential framework. The language becomes more accessible, but its claim upon reality may be further attenuated.

The difficulty is therefore not that the tradition’s language is too complex. It is that the framework within which that language once functioned has been altered.

To adapt language without attending to this framework is to risk speaking more clearly while saying less.

IV. The Task of Rearticulation

If preaching is to retain its character as proclamation, then the task before the preacher is not merely one of translation or adaptation. It is one of rearticulation.

By rearticulation we do not mean the invention of new content, nor the abandonment of the language of the tradition. We mean the careful speaking of that language in such a way that its referential claim can once again be recognized. The aim is not simply that the hearer understand the words, but that the hearer grasp what those words are about.

This requires a heightened level of theological attention. The preacher must be aware not only of what is being said, but of how it is likely to be heard. This does not entail tailoring the sermon to each possible interpretation. It entails speaking with sufficient clarity that the claim being made is not easily reduced to something else.

In practice, this means that proclamation must resist the drift toward purely expressive or symbolic hearing. It must continue to speak of God as acting, of Christ as present, of forgiveness as given, in a manner that signals that these are not merely ways of speaking, but claims about reality.

Such speech will not always be immediately received. It may encounter resistance or confusion. Yet without it, preaching risks losing its distinctive character.

V. Preaching as the Formation of Hearing

Under these conditions, preaching must also be understood as participating in the formation of the hearer’s capacity to hear.

The sermon does not simply communicate content to an already stable act of understanding. It addresses and, over time, reshapes the frameworks within which understanding occurs. This has always been the case, but it takes on renewed significance where those frameworks are contested. To preach is therefore to engage not only in proclamation, but in formation.

This formation is not accomplished in a single sermon. It is the cumulative effect of sustained proclamation over time. Through repetition, clarification, and patient instruction, the hearer may come to recognize the coherence of the language of faith and the reality to which it refers. The aim is not to eliminate all tension or difficulty, but to render the act of hearing more stable.

This requires patience on the part of both preacher and congregation. It also requires a willingness to acknowledge that misunderstanding is not an occasional obstacle, but a persistent feature of the present context.

VI. The Responsibility of the Preacher

The responsibility of the preacher, under these conditions, is both more complex and more demanding than in earlier periods. It is no longer sufficient to assume that the language of the sermon will be heard within a shared framework. That framework must, in part, be reestablished through the act of preaching itself.

This does not mean that the preacher bears this responsibility alone. The work of teaching, catechesis, and congregational life more broadly all contribute to the formation of understanding. Yet preaching remains central, because it is the place where the Word is publicly spoken and where the congregation is gathered to hear.

To preach, then, is to speak within a fractured horizon without conceding that fracture as final. It is to proclaim in such a way that what is said may once again be heard as true in a robust sense, even where that hearing is not immediate or complete.

Conclusion: Proclamation and Reality

The challenge facing preaching today is not merely one of communication. It is a question of reality.

If the language of the sermon is no longer heard as referring to what is the case, then preaching risks becoming one voice among others, offering interpretation without making a claim upon the world. If, however, the preacher continues to speak in a way that holds together clarity of expression and referential intent, then preaching may still function as proclamation, even under altered conditions.

The task is therefore not to abandon the language of the tradition, nor to rely upon it uncritically. It is to speak it with a clarity that takes seriously the context in which it is heard.

Only in this way can preaching continue to be what it is called to be: the public speaking of the Word through which God addresses the world.

Preamble to a Phenomenology of Congregational Life

Oftentimes we don't know what we have lost until we don't have it. 

The phenomenological movement attempted to uncover the fundamental meaning of the entities, properties, and relations in which we find ourselves, in which we dwell. The idea is simple enough. We are always already within a world of meaning prior to any explicit philosophical reflection upon this world. The man at work in his workshop knows how to get around in the shop; he knows what things he needs in order to make the things he wants to make. He "knows" these things pre-reflectively. He probably has not stopped to do an explicit ontological inventory of items in his shop and the properties each has that allow them to be related to each other.  Rather he just walks his shop and gets what he needs when he needs them. 

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1985-1980),  Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and a host of other thinkers were interested in getting to the immediate meaning of things, to their sense prior to explicit investigation. Husserl, in particular, was interested in what Frege (1848 - 1925) called Sinn, the mode of presentation of objects in the world, the that by virtue of which objects could be picked out in the world and referred to. Frege famously said that names had both sense and reference. Names refer when the sense of the name picks out an existing object.  Just because a name does not refer does not mean it has no meaning. After all, the name could have referred were there to be an object that satisfied the Sinn of the name. 

Frege's famous example was the Morning Star and Evening Star. Astronomers for centuries were able to identify the Morning Star as Morning Star and the Evening Star as Evening Star without knowing that the Morning Star is the Evening Star. The modes of presentation of Morning Star and Evening star differ, but there is identity in that to which they refer: Venus.  Accordingly, the name Morning Star refers to Venus as it presents itself as the Morning Star while the name Evening Star  refers to Venus as it presents itself as Evening Star.  Within a more comprehensive theory we identify the Morning Star and Evening Star.  So what is this world of sense by and through which we believe we have made reference to the world? 

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) spoke in terms of the manifest and scientific images of the world.  He espoused a scientific naturalism that nonetheless sought to save the appearances.  In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars characterizes the manifest image of the world as "the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world," it is the framework in and through which we ordinarily observe and explain our world.  (See Willem deVries, "Wilfrid Sellars," in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.). Persons and the things meaningful to persons is what has center stage in the manifest image of the world.  

The scientific image of the world is deeper; it is that which we hold ultimately is the case despite how things appear. Sellars famously adjusted Protagoras' statement to "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind).  The scientific image states what is the case, while the manifest image states what appears to be the case. Importantly, the manifest image is not merely an error.  It is a description of the place in which humans find themselves phenomenally prior to theory and experiment and the reality of how things stand in themselves.  

While Sellars held that what ultimately exists is that to which oue best scientific theories appeal in explanation and prediction, he understood that we do not and cannot live our lives merely within the conceptual categories of scientific naturalism. While neither Husserl nor Heidegger in anyway denigrate the activity of scientific theory-formation and confirmation, they really were interested in the world as it appears to and for consciousness.  (Heidegger despised the term consciousness for many reasons, but I will use it nonetheless in this context.). Husserl was so interested in what immediately appears to and for consciousness that he advocated a suspension of thinking in terms of our natural attitude of what there really is, and bid us to hold in abeyance questions of what there ultimately is apart from us and concentrate on that which is present to consciousness. His phenomenological reduction advocates that we again encounter the things themselves that give themselves to consciousness, before pressing on to the question of whether those things are real, whether they somehow track with that which ultimately is.  

Husserl believe that returning to die Sache Selbst of immediacy allow us to ground science even the more deeply. Heidegger wanted to examine the objects of our intentional acts within the meaningful context in which they dealt in order to get clarity about the nature of the world we immediately inhabit.  

While both he and Husserl were interested in the Umwelt in which we find ourselves, Husserl could never find a way ultimately out of his own transcendental image of things.  For Husserl, the transcendental ego exists as that which reaches out through its intentional "ego rays" to objects in meaningfully encounters.  Heidegger, however, had no time for such metaphysics.  What is given to consciousness is being-in-the-world.  Instead of an isolated ego related to its world of intentional objects, there is already the unitary phenomenon of hat which is phenomenologically prior to an ego and that which the ego intends. Husserl's transcendental ego becomes Heidegger's Dasein, the unitary being-in-the-world phenomenon that is clearly present in ways that a transcendental ego cannot be. 

Heidegger's emphasis was on the immediacy of that which shows itself as itself in the Lichtung (lighting up) of Dasein itself. Dasein is the "there-being" that in its being is always interested in being.  While Husserl's project was epistemological, Heidegger's became ontological. What are all those things that are, that in relating themselves to us, make us the kind of beings that have worlds?  

We are always already in a world and what it is to be me is to have a world of a definite contour. The manifest image of things, according to Heidegger, has been passed over in the history of philosophy.  It has not been deeply explored because our attention has always been drawn away from the immediacy of our life in the world to the question of what lies "present-at-hand" to us beyond that image.  We have been traditionally interested in the world of the Vorhandsein, the world of beings that are. But in concentrating on this, we have lost what is before our eyes. We have lost the very meaningful context in which we already live in all of our inquiry.  

Sellars understand that we cannot do without the manifest image of things, but he believes what ultimately is cannot be given by what phenomenally stands close by. We need to move to the deeper structural explanation of that surface the manifest image reveals.  Heidegger, however, wants us to follow Husserl and attend deeply and passionately to that which displays itself to us in all we think and do. Heidegger's interest in the immediacy of the world and the universal structures of immediacy that ground that world gives him quite a different orientation from Sellars. They latter was interested in science, but the former in religion. 

Heidegger's work at Marburg was filled with religious interest. Accordingly, Husserl had designated Heidegger to be his student that could apply the phenomenological method to religious experience and religion as such. What is the world of religion, and what are the deeper structures of religious experience and meaning as such that make possible any religious world?  Heidegger is accordingly interested in the facticity of religious life, the meaningful structures within which religious people operate and find themselves. Heidegger famously tried to understand the experience of the early Christian as being-to-the-parousia, an idea he later adjusted to Sein zum Tode, being-unto-death.  

All of this is is preamble for the topic to which I allude in the title: A phenomenology of congregational living. What is it to live congregationally?  In our penchant to treat congregational life using the tools of the social sciences we may shortchange what it is to be congregationally. Clearly, we could seek to understand congregational growth and decline by appealing to general sociological principles indexed for our particular historical-cultural standpoint. This can be extremely enlightening, of course.  But in the effort to explain and predict congregational processes, we may lose what shows itself as itself.  Were we to attend to the be-ing of congregational life we might find in the manifest image the world itself in which religions lives and moves, the world in which we finally find meaning, a salvific meaning allowing us to live unto the future.  What I am suggesting here, inter alia, that it is in the manifest image of things that we find meaning, purpose and ultimately hope.  

While the body dies and scientific naturalism finds no basis upon which survival of death is possible -- or maybe even conceivable -- within the manifest image, God is close at hand. Christ saves us and brings us into his house of many rooms. Our fundamental experience of being-in-the-world is not one where meaning is absent and must be constructed.  Our fundamental experience is filled with meaning for we are beings who in our be-ing find the question of be-ing at issue for us. As Heidegger says, the ontic superiority of Dasein is found in its ontological constitution.  As Augustine said, "our heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in you, O Lord." A thick description of the facticity of Christian being-in-the-world reveals what that life is like, and holds open the possibility that that life which is ontologically possible can be my life or your life. 

As the embers of western Christianity begin to smolder, it is important for us to know what it was for men and women to have lived this extraordinary life.  For many of us, the living of Christian life is always a living of that life within the Christian congregation.  We can perhaps remember what it was and how it was decades ago, and we can compare that living to living today.  Where was the axes of meaning then and now? What has changed? How was it that we could once recoil at the thought of touching the sky while now such touching is simply business as usual?   

In the next post I will try my hand at examining the facticity of congregational living. Perhaps we will be granted ontological insight into the preciousness of being-as-communion in Lutheran congregational life. 

Cross-Pressuring within the Congregation

Something extraordinary still happens our time, a time characterized by an intellectual and cultural horizon that seems inimical to its occurrence. All throughout North America, people still draw together into communities to worship a god who putatively creates and sustains the entire universe. This gathering together does not happen in the numbers it did in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still does occur. On any given Sunday morning millions of people are in worship.  

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial A Secular Age, adroitly interprets the cultural and intellectual horizon of our time with its attendant social imaginaries. His major question in the book is this: How is it that in the sixteenth century not believing in God was generally unthinkable, while believing today is very difficult, even for those professing such belief? What has happened? 

His answer to this is actually quite complicated, and I won't summarize it here, except to say that Taylor is no fan of subtraction theories, a view that conceives humans as being largely able to know the world in which they live and how to act within that world. Subtraction theory claims that human beings have largely not achieved their potential as responsible epistemic and moral agents because they have inter alia lost themselves in religion and have, accordingly, not developed the potential that they have had all along. According to subtraction theory, secularization is a good thing because as religion wanes, human beings are increasingly fulfilling the dream of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere ("dare to know").  It is a captivating view: we humans can finally turn away from the superstitions of the past and attain genuine positive knowledge of things.  

Taylor claims that in the North Atlantic countries (North America and Europe), secularization tends to bring with it either a closed "take" or "spin" on the universe and our place within it. A spin or take is closed when it accepts a naturalism that excludes traditional views of the transcendent; when it holds that there is nothing that "goes beyond" the immanence of this world. He distinguishes a closed "spin" from a closed "take", pointing out that while people adopting a closed take hold that rejection of traditional transcendence might be reasonable, but that it is not wholly irrational to hold otherwise, those in a closed spin assert that holding to traditional transcendence is completely irrational, and thus one's rejection of a closed view is either due to the mendacity or the irrationality of the one doing the rejecting. 

Much of the intelligentsia, argues Taylor, simply assumes a closed spin on things. Scientific theory gives us the best causal map of the universe and such theory makes no appeal to supernatural forces of gods. In the cities, the young often understand their human sojourn in this way: 

• Human beings are the products of a long evolutionary process beginning with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.  
• The universe came into being in an explosion from a infinitely dense point that had no magnitude. 
• The subsequent history of the universe is due to natural events and processes developing as they did out of earlier conditions of the universe. There is no supernatural agency involved in the origin and development of the universe. 
• Explanations why there was an infinitely dense point at the beginning that subsequently exploded are mostly not something that science can rightfully provide, although theories of quantum cosmology recently sketched suggest the prior existence of a multi-verse of which the particular development of our universe is one possible actualized trajectory. There is yet not a theory of why there was at the beginning a multi-verse. 
• Why deterministic processes propel the universe forward into concrete actualization, there are throughout these processes the presence of "far from equilibrium" situations that allow for the introduction of novelty. Thus, the history of the universe, while basically deterministic, has some elements of chance within it. 
• Since human life is a natural product of the natural life of the universe, it must be understood naturalistically. 
• Understanding human life naturalistically means that complicated features of human life, e.g., intentionality, reason, etc., must be understood in natural ways: What are the natural processes that drive forward the development of our species? 
• Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has wide acceptance as providing some explanation for why our species developed as it did: Genetic features are passed down from generation to generation, and the natural characteristics of the environment in which genetic mutation happens limits or excludes the development of some genetic variations while helping the development of other genetic variations.
• Accordingly, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no appeal to purpose or teleology, for the particular genetic variations that survive for later genetic variation are clearly caused by natural features of the environment. There is thus no pull (final causality) in neo-Darwinian genetic theory, only pushes (efficient causality). 
• Since human beings are natural products of natural processes, understanding them profoundly requires the casting of natural scientific theories, e.g., human characteristics like reason, love, empathy, etc., must be explained naturalistically.  
• To understand humans naturalistically, is to understand them in ways quite different from traditional great chain of being understandings. According to the great chain of being, human beings are created lower than the angels and higher than the beasts, and thus to understand what it is to be human is to look both above and below us: What are those features of human existence that clearly fall under the category of the imago dei, and what features are due to the fall into nature and flesh of those beings initially created in the imago dei?  
• Since human beings are fully natural beings developing as they have through natural processes since the beginning of the universe, the true key to understanding their existence is found by looking below ourselves and not above ourselves, e.g., what can the sexuality of orangutans teach us about our own sexuality? 
• Trying to look above ourselves for clues to our nature is the practice of idealism, and proceeding in this way is find putative answers in our own projections. While natural science can give us insight into our causal natures, traditional religion and philosophy obviates this causal nature by appeal to non-natural or supernatural processes and entities. In the words of Feuerbach, God did not create human beings, human beings created God. 
• Since we are natural beings, our sexuality should be understood along the lines of other natural beings, and our reason and communication should be understood in the way of other natural beings. Human beings do have a capacity to reason, communicate, and form sexual alliances, but these are not causa sui. Rather, it is a matter of degree, and not ultimate of kind, that separates our experience from that of the other higher primates. 
• The young living in vast urban areas who understand themselves naturalistically have, accordingly, very little motivation to either adopt religion or be open to it. Religious belief, they think rather confidently, does not track with our actual knowledge of the natural world in which we believe. It is thus a backward-looking movement motivated by wish and not knowledge. Religious people, they think, need a crutch to live in this naturalist world that is all around us. Thus, they think, religious people project views of the gods and pray their wishes to their gods. 
• The religious person is thus maladapted to the actual existing world. They don't have the courage to live in the actual world, and thus project upon the actual world a religious worldview that makes living easier. Religious people are thus more cowardly than those understanding themselves naturalistically, but also more dangerous, because in ignoring the causalities of the natural world and embracing superstition, those who could have been helped by the knowledge of natural processes are now not treated properly. Death that might have been avoided, now befalls the befuddled religious believer or those unlucky enough to take their advice and counsel. 
• Given that there is no God who cares or no ultimate metaphysics in which meaning and purpose are ingredient, human beings must simply create their own meaning in the limited days they have to live. 
• Since there are no objective structures corresponding to the good, the beautiful, and the true, human beings are free to develop in the ways that they might find pleasurable and useful. This does not mean that they act irrationally, but rather that they must assume the mantle of having to be their own law-givers. Reality does not come with moral structures. They must be sown and cultivated by human beings, and harvested only if the present situation is illuminated by them. 

I could continue with a description of what seems plausible to the urban young. It is important to see all of this under the category of a closed spin. To many of our urban youth, what I have sketched above is simply settled. Just as it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, so is it true that human beings are natural beings who must develop their science, societies and families ultimately without appeal to heavenly beings. To give up on what I have articulated is, for them, to descend into irrationality. There simply is no other option for them not to believe this. There is a new social imaginary at work, a communal way of seeing that can imagine a fulfilling life without gods, prayers, divine laws, or even transcendence itself. While earlier generations hoped for life out beyond our physical deaths, this new way of imagining existence is one where death is not a problem. In fact, death is part of the circle of life, and this circle of life can be understood naturalistically. 

people participating in congregational life in the North Atlantic countries today are sons and daughters of their age. While they may be attending Christian congregations, their intellectual and cultural ethos is likely one wherein naturalism makes sense. They have learned from their teachers about the difference between facts and values, and they believe that natural science somehow is concerned with the facts, while perhaps their religion deals with the values of those whom are at some level aware of these facts. People in Christian congregations today in the North Atlantic countries are thus decidedly cross-pressured. They participate in Christian life, even though their deepest understanding of the world provides little rational justification for that participation. 

Preaching to men and women today must take into account the cross-pressuring felt by those in the pews. While their participation in congregational life probably points to them not holding a closed spin, such a participation is entirely congruent with them assuming a closed take. While it seems like materialism or physicalism is true, there are some features of our experience that does not fit a closed spin on the universe. Perhaps it is because of these features that certain people become congregational members. Maybe they sense that the naturalism that they ought to believe is inadequate to their experience in its totality. 

Most of the time we leading Christian congregations underestimate, I think, the cross-pressuring that our members are likely experiencing. Yes, clearly many are waiting to hear the saving Word proclaimed in the sermon and celebrated in the sacrament. But in their desire to hear that Word, they remain deeply conflicted. As twenty-first century men and women, they cannot easily affirm the views of their sixteenth century ancestors. The naturalism everywhere regnant today was not known to Luther and his contemporaries. Luther had the advantage of having a metaphysical view of things that was consonant with his theological accents and innovations. 

But this is not the case today. Contemporary Lutherans who wish to retain Luther's theology must now do so in a culture whose dominant social imaginaries reject the metaphysical underpinnings Luther simply presupposed. So how does Lutheran theology play now in congregations whose members have little understanding of how God could truly be possible and relevant? It is to this question that we shall turn in the next post. 

The Contemporary Ethos of Congregational Life in North America: What to make of Science?

In a recent series of posts, I have been reflecting about congregational life in North America and have suggested that what happens in local congregations is quite extraordinary and anomalous with respect to other human activities and endeavors. Consider for a moment what it would be to come upon congregational life from the outside, as it were, with no pre-understanding of what congregational life is all about. What would one see? 

Bob walks into a building with people he does not know, and strangers come up to him exchanging greetings or engaging in conversation with him. He sits down on a chair or long bench and remains dutifully silent while a series of non-mundane events transpire. People speak from the front, sometimes in conversational voices and other times in a very solemn way. Sometimes they read from texts for long periods of time. Someone either in the front or elsewhere in the building starts singing and others join in. Finally, a person in the front addresses those listening for 15 minutes or longer speaking of events from long ago that he or she believes have significance for today. After this, an even stranger event occurs. After some serious words, people sitting on chairs or benches rise from their seats and walk forward, gathering at a rail in the front where they are given little wafers and a sip of wine and told that these things are the Body and Blood of Christ. At other times infants or adults are splashed with water with concomitant solemn pronouncements and prayers.  

After more singing, people finally leave their seats and congregate in the back where friendly discussion ensues about divers and sundry matters. Perhaps Bob is invited to go downstairs or into another part of the building to be part of a class, or maybe he is offered coffee and donuts. Bob's experience here might be like Rita's at another time or another place, or it could be quite different. Rita might be asked to help feed people who have limited funds, or to aid in cleaning the building itself, or to bring a dessert next week. Perhaps someone asks her as to what she thought of the address that someone had given.  

Christians have been meeting in communities like this from their earliest days in the catacombs. In those days men and women listened to readings from texts and speeches about those texts. They cared for each other and oftentimes pooled their resources to help each other. With people they knew and some they just met they worshipped Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of God's messianic expectation. While contemporary church buildings do not look much like the early catacombs, there remain between those days and today common practices of congregational life. 

Congregational life happened then and happens now, and people involved in that life seem to know how to participate in that life. One might say that they have an unthematized pre-understanding of the possibilities and inevitabilities of their gathering together. Congregating to worship a God, hearing speeches, singing and murmuring prayers are all activities that are quite unlike what most people do in contemporary societies of the North Atlantic countries. It is so unlike what people generally do, that one naturally wonders whether these things would be done if there was no already operating social institution for doing these things. Already established is the practice of congregational activity and participation. Without this already established practice, would it ever happen that these activities would develop to be practiced again? In other words, if congregational life were not already occurring, would it happen that it would ever come to occur? Without the reality of an historical institutional of congregational practice and participation, would there be any cultural motivation to invent congregational life again? Is there something about us as social animals that would make the development of congregational life inevitable, or is the having of it fully contingent?

I fear that the answer to the question of inevitability is likely a resounding "no." The fact that there still exist Christian congregations goes against general cultural expectations. I believe that it is because of the unlikeliness of it developing again ars nova, that congregational life is so precious now. Speaking theologically, we might say that the utter contingency of congregational existence is entirely a matter of grace. The practices of congregational living are not something that can be facilely established upon the horizon of contemporary individual piety. One might say that Christian congregations have an ecstatic existence; they live not on their own but out of the life of the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ. They are creatures of grace first, and only secondarily of law.  

In the last post I began to explore facets of the intellectual and cultural ethos of those today participating in Christian congregational life. I spoke of the general cultural default of contemporary man and woman who judge God morally and find Him lacking. As pointed out then, I follow Charles Tylor in claiming that Christianity has not been slowed in its growth primarily because of the rise of science, but rather because the traditional God of Christianity appears arbitrary, capricious and decidedly old fashioned in His choices and judgments, and thus is either widely rejected or deemed irrelevant. Accordingly, it is God's putative morality that makes His existence suspect for millions of denizens of the North Atlantic countries in the early twenty-first century.  

While all of this is true, there is also little doubt that Christianity today is simply a non-starter for many because it appears to violate the very presuppositions of science itself. Many participating in contemporary congregational life carry with them both a sense that God is morally unreasonable or suspect and that the ultimate description of reality is physical, that what ultimately exists are those entities over which our fundamental theories of physics quantify. In other words, what ultimately exists are those entities to which our fundamental physical theories refer.  Accordingly, while people might enjoy participating in congregational life, there is a sense that they actually know better, that human existence is ultimately a physical matter and that congregational life is a living as if this were not the case.

It is unfortunately characteristic of our time that people generally know little about the practices and theories of science, particularly those of natural science. Most think that science simply deals with facts, not recognizing the deeply theoretical nature of scientific research. Accordingly, some review of what we claim when we make scientific claims is perhaps useful.

Every scientific claim is theoretical. To claim that the earth revolves around the sun is to have a theory in which the terms 'sun', 'earth', and 'revolves' occur. The meaning of a set of theoretical statements is found in the models which make these statements true. 'Sun' refers to a particular entity, 'earth' refers to a particular entity as well, while 'revolves' refers to a complex set of duples or ordered pairs. Theories, no matter how simple or complex, state the way the world might be. At the risk of gross oversimplification, true theories state how the world actually is -- or alternately what is reasonable to believe about how the world is -- and false theories how the world is not -- or what is reasonable not to believe about the world. 

Theoretical claims of how the world is are tentative and provisional because we are never certain that the theory we are assuming won't finally be shown to be false by how the world ultimately turns out to be. It could take hundreds of years to disconfirm statements of scientific theory. For instance, our theory of the early universe makes theoretical statements about states of the universe in its initial nanoseconds, and these statements are presently untestable because we don't have requisite energy to recreate conditions of the early universe to confirm or disconfirm the statements.  Maybe 500 years from now we would have the technology to accelerate particles to velocities characteristic of the very early universe, and we can then claim that the theory then regnant is consistent with observations or that it has been falsified by them. 

When we construct scientific theories, we bring certain values with us as to what a good scientific theory might be. We want our theories to be simple if possible. They should be applicable to our observational experiences and adequate to them. Adequacy means that the theories can deal in principle with all the kinds of experience we have. Theories should be internally consistent and coherent. Coherency means that we should not have in them arbitrarily disconnected assumptions or that we should not appeal to different kinds of entities if explanation is possible by appeal to only one kind of entity. Simple theories that appeal to one principle are often thought to be more beautiful than those making appeal to differing fundamental principles. While there is nothing necessarily in nature that would disallow it from operating upon many different ultimate principles rather than one, human theory-making always attempts to explain experience in terms of one rather than many. Theories doing this are simply assumed by most to be more beautiful than others. Another value we want theories to have is fecundity. Can a theory sustain a hearty research program? Is it properly relatable to other theories? Theories which do not sustain interest or research are simply irrelevant, and science in general does not develop its views of the world on the basis of irrelevant and/or isolated theories. 

Scientific theory formation happens by adopting likely stories of explanation, stories which fit our already theoretical views of the world. We establish theories that try to give natural explanations for natural events. Because we assume in the practice of science a methodological naturalism, God cannot be a theoretical entity within scientific theory. It is not that science ultimately excludes God from the universe, but it is rather that the humble practice of scientific theory-building limits itself to explanation in terms of natural processes, events and laws. By its very nature, science does not and cannot appeal to non-natural explanations for natural events. Despite the final metaphysical implausibility of a particular physicalist explanation, natural science must attempt to explain why something is the case by appealing to only those natural entities and processes that can be in principle referred to by standard scientific theory.  

One can see this clearly in the way that explanation often occurs in macro-evolutionary theory. Since 'natural adaptation' is a theoretical notion it can be appealed to in explaining why this particular life form developed in this way and not another. Oftentimes 'natural adaptation' is a notion that can't be profoundly specified. One appeals to it in a way that mimics perhaps the appeal that earlier generations made to God's will. Why did x develop in a P way and not in Q way? God willed it!  

But while all would agree that God willing nature to develop in a P way rather than a Q way is not a persuasive explanation in our time, many nonetheless believe that a simple appeal to natural adaptation can explain P development rather than Q development. But when it comes to the really big issues of macro-evolutionary theory, the devil is clearly in the details. Oftentimes, mechanisms by which putative natural adaptation selects for P development rather than Q development cannot yet be specified, and one is left with a direction and a trust that someday a mature theory will be able to explain this P development. While appealing to the general direction of "nature selects it" rather than "God wills it" has greater plausibility in our time, the logic of the argument remains the same. Unless particular natural explanations can be given that explain the particulars of macro-evolutionary development plausibly no true explanation has been given. Simply put, just because "natural adaptation" is a more popular explanation today than "God wills it," does not mean that the former explanation is, or ultimately will be, more successful. 

My point here is simply to say that natural science is a deeply theoretical human activity. In casting about for a natural theory to explain some set of natural events, one must select a theory that "fits in" with the theories that one already has, and that is supported by the observational data. Scientific theory, we now know, is always underdetermined by observation and the acceptance of other theories. It is always logically possible to explain events by appealing to other sets of natural events than those assumed in one's theory, or by explaining things in terms of non-natural events. The point is, that explanation in terms of non-natural events is not the way that the institution and practice of scientific theory formation and confirmation/disconfirmation proceeds. Moreover, there is no scientific decision procedure, no algorithm, on the basis of which "correct" scientific theory is selected and "incorrect" theory rejected. Natural science, like all human activity, is messy. 

All of this is simply to say that the best explanation for why the universe bears the marks of design can be the fact that God was at work designing the universe. One can reasonably hold this while still holding that such an explanation is not scientific, for it violates the rules by which scientific theory-formation proceeds. It is not a scientific explanation because it appeals to non-natural agency, something clearly disallowed in the doing of natural science. But why think that all rational explanation must be natural scientific explanation?  

My point is that few people participating in the life of Christian congregations in these days know how theoretical and rule-governed is the activity of scientific explanation. So again, how can it be that God was involved in creation when our natural scientific models show the universe to be a broken symmetry flowing out of an infinitely dense point without extension? 

The answer is not difficult because, in truth, in any explanation we cannot avoid metaphysical models. Ought we explain the universe by making no appeal to non-natural agency? If so, why? The point is that there is nothing in the observational data that disallows a metaphysics of divine action in creation. The choice is ours: Do we want to adopt a materialist/physicalistic metaphysics or not? If so, why, and if not, why not? 

But the horizon of most in congregations is that science does explain things, and that this explanation finally does not rest in human freedom as to the adoption of a metaphysics of physicalism or that of theism. However, just because we can give physicalist explanations of most physical events does not mean that we should always do so, or even that it is rational to do so.  

In summary, the horizon of many within congregations now is that the morality of God is problematic, and that there is something in the nature of the world or natural science itself that calls for natural scientific explanations for things. I acknowledge that the first problem has no easy and quick solution, but want to point out that it is a certain misunderstanding and ignorance of the scientific process itself which makes many simply assume that science is in conflict with religious faith.  Reinvigorating congregational life in North America must deal with the fundamental assumptions of people in the pews today. Of these, two are very important: Can the nature of God be deemed consistent with Christian congregational experience and practice, and can our understanding of the divine escape from the easy physicalisms that dominate much of popular culture today?