An Imagined Ecclesiology

Ecclesiology is, as many of my dear readers are aware, at the center of Christian theology.  How one views the nature and role of what it means for the church to be the church determines how one views the Christic events, the make-up of the trinity, and the role of our other theological categories: like justification, sanctification, sin, forgiveness, creation, and re-creation.  Ecclesiology is the lived outworking of St. John's mandate to, "love your neighbor whom you can see" before we "love God whom we cannot see."

Since we can see the church (we can bodily go there on Sundays) and since we can see how the church engages the world, it becomes the locus of our faith.  It is in church that our doxology (worship) guides our belief about God (the pronouncement of our theology) and turns into action in the world.  When we imagine our ecclesiology, we engage in a conversation about how the church should be verses how it is.  This internal act of self critical assessment is crucial to our very participation in the church becuase it engages us in church.  (and yes, I did just use the word church almost as a verb, but that isn't a bad thing.  If church is, as we have said, the location where our coporate worship becomes spoken belief about God and then lived action in the world, then the word most certainly also has verbal qualities).

In order for the church to be faithful to her scriptural witness, her lectional guidelines, and her sacramental core, she must continually bear the needs of the world to the God she worships.  For worship is song.  And the song comes out of the void - Rilke is correct - it is out of the void of the death of Orpheus' brother that the song which "enraptures and comforts and helps us" is born.  What I'm trying to say is this; our human ability to really and finally approach each other is born from the pain of shared loss.  Our ability to approach God (together with all our experience) also springs from the void of death.  Like Orpheus, Christ descent into Hell resulted in life granted anew.  Unlike Orpheus, all of hell joins in the song of new life eternally.  

From the stand point of those who self describe as being outside of the church, how do we bear their needs to God?  I imagine those needs being born through a lived theology of the descent into hell.  In other words, I only get what Christ does for me, when I see Christ in my hell.  It is all very nice that he was born, that he ministered, and that he died and rose again.  But I need to know that the isolation I live with everyday is not also a prison.  I need to know that the way the bars to my prison of isolation are busted is by Christ living with me in my cell.  

And there is the rub, isn't it?  Very often the isolation that people feel (especially in the LGBTQA+ communities and others) has been created by our own culture wars.  The church we inherited sought a war on culture in order to win people for Christ, but ended up burning the hearts and memories of those they sought to 'save'.  Instead of Christ, (whether Christ born or died, or resurrected) they implanted justifiable rage. 

Yet it isn't this simple either - for the isolatin is also social.  We have been ok with a prosperity gospel, a capitalist system, and equating patriotism with service to God.  By ignoring the needs of many who are no longer met by a minimum wage at 8 dollars, by allowing wage theft and corporate greed to drain the social safety net, and by turning our eyes instead of our cheek in the face of torture committed by our government, we effectively tell the 'least of these' to better their own lives on their own.  No wonder they feel isolated.

I imagine a church that is strong because she stands up for the weak.  I imagine a church which adopts the social realities of the least of these as their own personal concern.  I imagine a church which preaches that Christ descended into hell.  I imagine a church that preaches the descent of our Lord by simultaniously living in the hell we have complicitly created, while always already advocating for justice, mercy, and peace.