Ecclesial “denotation”

In his books, Ephraim Radner offers numerous profound insights into the complications and implications of a divided Christianity. Near the beginning of Hope Among the Fragments , he points to some of the dangers of post-Reformation efforts to “denote” the church -that is, to describe the church as “something that can be pointed to, examined, analyzed, and wherever possible manipulated according to whatever current theories of cultural resistance or viability are at hand, all supposedly for the sake of God.” Because the very definition of the church was contested, Protestants and Catholics sought for “sociological” marks that would denote the true church, markers “whose scriptural character is simply absent.”

This leads, Radner suggests, to a sociological reduction of ecclesiology: “The measures of the Church are now all neatly traced according to quantifiable signs given up by each republic’s records, from which Scripture itself is detached except at some justifying cachet to the deeper argument over the implication of demographic figures. Is the South taking over the North in its Christian vigor? What do the numbers show? Are conservative churches growing faster than liberal bodies, and is it based on moral demands or the dynamics of education?”

Along with this ecclesial reduction to sociology, there is a simplification of providence. Christians have traditionally sought to grasp “some link between Holy Spirit and . . . historical referents,” but the new thing today “is the almost complete disavowal of that linkage’s intrinsic obscurity – and with that repudiation a consequent flight from the Spirit’s more intricate and shadowy temporal corridors by theological adepts and Church leaders. Everyone seems to know what the world’s objects signify, what events add up to, how each affects the other, and therefore what and how the Church is doing within time and space; and if we do not quite know it yet, further analysis will yield the pertinent information.”

And this, in turn, shapes the church’s hope and eschatology: “when the reality and meaning of the Church are simply linked to the objective references of space and time, they become slaves to the standards by which these references are regularly, if usually unconsciously, analyzed by the cultural instruments of measurement – size, longevity, numerical expanse, ethnic representation, financial viability, and so on.” If the church lacks success when judged by these (inherently this-worldly) standards, then the result is “despair over the Church,” which Radner describes as “the great vice of modern Christianity.”

All this is valuable and wise. But I’d want to gloss things in a slightly different direction. While it is true that the church cannot be reduced to sociology, neither can any other community. So, following Milbank, I’d suggest that sociology itself arises from an heretical ecclesiology and doctrine of providence, both ultimately arising from heresy in theology proper. It is not as if the church is suffused with mysteries, and everything else is transparent to reason (a point with which Radner agrees). There is surely a deeper mystery in the church, but that merely points to the fact that there are always more participants in any community than the living visible members of that community – though they be only the demons and the dead. Or, to follow Milbank again, the problem with sociological reduction is that there is no “social” to reduce to, no purely immanent causation or community that can “explain” what purports to be transcedent.