Church, Ideal and Real

Aidan Nichols’s Figuring out the Church: Her Marks, and Her Masters is a brief, clear, workmanlike introduction to ecclesiology. The book is divided into two parts, the first organized around the marks of the church (one, holy, catholic, apostolic) and the second expounding the ecclesiologies of four Catholic “masters” (de Lubac, Jean Tillard, Balthasar, and Charles Journet). Throughout, he brings his readers back to fundamentals – the Trinitarian, Christological, pneumatological foundations of the church.

Nichols is illuminating on ecclesiology itself and his chosen masters. He observes that for all de Lubac’s fondness for Eucharistic ecclesiology, he did not teach the church’s entire being and structure can simply be read off the Eucharist. Church comes to a “focus” in the Eucharist, de Lubac says, but not only there; it’s also focused in the saint and, de Lubac says, in the pope (105). Expounding Tillard’s communio ecclesiology, Nichols acknowledges that papal infallibility was not formulated in terms of communion and that “when the pope is presents as the ‘servant of communion’ . . . his task as universal pastor and . . . universal doctor of all Christians has to be reexpressed in novel ways” (127).

This is a book designed for Catholic catechesis, and within those limits, it is something of a little masterpiece. But the limits are severe, and disquieting. His insightful chapter on the unity of the church (ch. 1) makes no mention of non-Catholic communities of Christians. He of course knows that Protestants exist, and occasionally criticizes Protestant soteriology and ecclesiology (46-47). He acknowledges a debt to Congar, but there is no reference to the problems dealt with in Congar’s Divided Christendom: A Catholic study of the problem of reunion . Nichols appears to be breezily unconcerned about divided Christendom. The church he describes so movingly is an idealized communion that bears little resemblance to the empirical realities of Christianity today.

In startling contrast, Christena Cleveland provides a ground-level view of the church in her recent Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart .

Cleveland writes as a believer, but also as a professional social psychologist, and much of her book is an effort to apply her research in group dynamics to churches. She cites research showing (unsurprisingly) that people prefer to be around people like themselves, and she also notes the mutual-reinforcement that takes place in groups that have a homogeneous outlook on the world. We are all “cognitive misers” who don’t want to expend the emotional and intellectual energy required to interact with people who are significantly different from us; they wear us out because we have to be more alert. We draw lines and distinctions between our group or church and everyone else, and consider our own group the gold standard. We protect our own identity and esteem by being around people who tell us that what we believe is obviously right. She uses the controversial research of Muzafer Sherif on group conflicts to show that nice normal people become aggressively hostile when they are put in a situation where they are competing for scarce resources, like a football trophy. She explores how cultural biases toward “individualism” and “collectivism” push us toward disunity. In short, there are a host of pressures that lead Christians to divide the church into “Right Christian” (who is like me) and “Wrong Christian” (who isn’t).

Cleveland doesn’t minimize the theological or political issues that she raises. She doesn’t minimize the cultural differences either. Her goal is not to smooth over difference, but to highlight the points where difference turns to disunity or conflict.

Her entire book is motivated by a fundamental ecclesiological insight: She quotes Curtiss DeYoung’s statement that “in the household of faith, our relationship with God takes priority over our relatedness to family, race, culture, nation, gender, or any other group we belong to. This reordering also transforms how we related t each other. The concept of family was reconstrued in the household of God . . . . The household of God is an image that beckons the community of Jesus Christ to be a place of convergence for the great rivers of humanity. People of all cultures, races, languages, nations, tribes, and clans reside in the household of faith” (37).

Cleveland knows that Christians reach this ideal only through “the difficult process of lessening our grip on the identities that we have idolized and clung to for far too long. In many ways, this process will jar our souls, wreaking havoc on the satisfying homogeneous existence in which we are rooted” (189). But this is the “shocking journey” we’ll have to take “if we are to fully experience the reality of the body of Christ” (190).

Nichols is right that the church’s unity is founded on God and the result of God’s work. But God accomplishes that work through the determined efforts of His Spirit-filled people. And we can’t reach the often correct ideals that Nichols lays out without getting real about the obstacles that stand in the way.