The Broken Body

The Rwandan genocide, the modern liberal democratic state, Catholic and Orthodox doctrines of the Church’s sinlessness, twentieth-century ecumenism, Nazi Germany’s failed Confessing Church movement, churches’ traditional disavowal of heretics. These, Ephraim Radner says, are all developments of the long, frustrating history of Christian responses to division. Christians ought finally to hear our Lord’s call to follow him in self-emptying obedience and suffer the consequences of being neighbors rather than trying to escape our neighbors. 

The mainstream Christian approach to discord, argues Radner, an Anglican priest who teaches at Wycliffe College in Toronto (and is a member of First Things’ advisory council), assumes that a difference with the mainstream understanding indicates apostasy and the denial of Christ. It thus treats the contending belief as a “heresy” to be dismissed, treated with contempt, or vilified. He names this the “Epiphanian paradigm,” after Epiphanius’ classic fourth-century Refutation of All the Heresies. 

The Epiphanian paradigm, he laments, attempts to ensure that the Church-as-such cannot be guilty of systemic failures. In this conventional ecclesiology, the “true Church” remains sinless, even though God’s people are culpable for their individual sins. 

Christians have maintained Catholic and Protestant forms of such claims for centuries even while Christians have methodically murdered one another. What Christians can do is discern the true theological significance of our situation, stop our futile resistance to it, and move from being complicit in the very violence and disorder we decry to becoming more fruitful travelers of Jesus Christ’s self-giving way.

Radner has long contemplated our divided Church. The topic of violence represents not a shift to a new topic, but a fresh angle on the old one. “Only by resolving the issue of the divided ‘Church as such,’” he says, “can the question of the ‘sins’ of the Church’s people find their proper location.”

A sinless Mary is a popular typological figure for the Church. However, the squabbling apostles and even Judas Iscariot all participating in Luke’s Last Supper scene show that “it is the Church, not something other than the Church, who divides and murders.” Like covenanted Israel before it, the Church-as-such is bound to the cross,  and not just as a fellow victim. Only when we face the ecclesial challenge of this fact will we comprehend Jesus’ program and our place in it.

Radner’s minority position has at least partial precedents in tradition, such as Salvian in the fifth century, Martin Luther and the Jansenists (in some aspects), ­Dietrich Bonhoeffer and early voices in the World Council of Churches, and even Karl Rahner and John Paul II. Even so, his full claims will be non-­starters in most Catholic and Orthodox circles, where the sinless Church-as-such is an article of faith, as well as many Protestant circles where “the invisible Church” is the essential Church. If Radner’s analysis is correct, that unwillingness to reconsider will merely consign the Church to more decades of being led where she does not wish to go. 

Though church establishments will find his proposal unpalatable, it could open up a new kind of dialogue with Christianity’s many “spiritual-but-not-religious” critics. As long as we hold our churches’ failings at a distance from the Kingdom of God, our testimony will seem disin­genuous, if not self-deceived, and suspicious and hurting people will tune us out. 

That is my own reaction whenever a Muslim apologist disavows as “not true Muslims” the perpetrators of some new atrocity committed in the name of God. At one level it is true, of course, but at another it is much too facile. Islam has something to do with them, just as the gospel has something to do with the despicable Westboro Baptist Church. 

Until we articulate that relationship in terms beyond mere difference and dissociation, our witness will not sound convincing. Besides, if in ­imitating Epiphanius we disown those whom Christ has not simply disowned, are we not disowning Christ, too?

Radner seems habitually unwilling to anticipate the resolution of this struggle, even when he is trying to do so. The redeemed Church “has learned to live wholly with this self-giving Lord and thus to give herself over with him . . . to those who sin and who divide.”

Where do we find this life? Only “where Christ Jesus places himself”: in “that gift made to sinners and dividers,” in “self-giving to the impure. Hence, the Church will seem, even in her purity, to be ‘marred.’” If the risen Jesus is scarred, his risen bride will be also. There is no getting around suffering with him in order to be glorified with him (Rom. 8:17).

However, Radner goes on to focus rather strangely on the grave before its harrowing: “the Church will be found not apart from but buried in the ‘grave of the wicked’ (cf. Isa. 53) as she lives with her Lord, whose form she must take (or be given) as joined to him and located where he has gone.”

And yet our Lord “has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand” (1 Pet. 3:22). Radner seems so suspicious of ecclesiological escapism that he won’t let us “set our hearts above, where our Lord is seated” (Col. 3:1). As understandable as his reticence is, withholding that eschatological perspective is not the answer. We need our ascended Lord’s resources to equip us so we can do what he has given us to do (Eph. 4:7–13). 

The good news itself proclaims that Christ alone has assumed lia­bility for our sins. Doesn’t that mean that in some fundamentally true way, the Church doesn’t bear responsibility for the sins of those it has embraced and who abide in it? Instead of the overly realized eschatology that leaves the Church’s critics cold, ­Radner seems to have left us buried in the old creation, still consigned at least for the moment to sin and death, supposedly “with” Jesus but where Jesus no ­longer is. 

As a result, his account leaves the impression of a Church that is powerless to do anything but endure its assigned humiliation. Though the apostles could talk that way from time to time, this is not their whole spirit.

Is it possible to look above without escaping from below? Can the Church truly be both here and there at once, divisive and one, violent and at peace? 

The Church is said to be both “militant” and fighting and “trium­phant,” successful, and rejoicing. Radner notes that this imagery, which became widespread only in the twelfth century and was used to exonerate the Church from its members’ sins, can help us overcome this dilemma. The Church is already in both places: still given over to the impure, and already purified by the blood of the lamb. 

On the grounds of Christ’s decisive deliverance and his baptismal gift of a new personal and ecclesial identity, the apostles are firm about the need to discipline and even exclude false teachers and hypocrites. Jude, 1 John, 2 Peter, and Matthew all clearly “disown the unfaithful” in a pretty Epiphanian manner. They issue grave warnings of God’s coming judgment on those who disobey after being delivered. They assure faithful remnants that the false ones didn’t ­really belong in the first place. 

The whole counsel of Scripture suggests that Radner is right to reject a disingenuous dualism that gets the Church off the hook for her people’s sins, but that his treatment needs to honor the biblical witness to the genuine duality between the Church’s true self and untrue self. All were “bought at a price,” but not all will inherit the Kingdom they serve (1 Cor. 6). So there is a time for the pure Church to judge and expel the stubborn evildoer from within (1 Cor. 5).

Radner’s exercise can open our eyes to aspects of ourselves that we have ignored or disowned at a terrible cost, but the Church knows Christ in his ascension as well as his sufferings. Even while we desecrate him, we make our faultless bridegroom visible. Ours the cross, the grave, the skies: The Church can only fulfill its impossible mission because it is in all these places at once.

Telford Work is associate professor of theology at Westmont College.