\u201cIs the church true?\u201d<\/p>\n
This question is, I think, poorly posed. It seems ill-suited to the kind of existential burn that might compel me to ask it. It seems like a bad fit for what I\u2019m after in a white-knuckled prayer.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that the question is \u201cwrong\u201d or that it couldn\u2019t be answered affirmatively.<\/p>\n
No, the problem is that it\u2019s too thin<\/em>. It\u2019s not a load-bearing question. It\u2019s too narrow a thing to support the weight of the lives I’d be staking on it.<\/p>\n Framed like this, it\u2019s an institutional question. It\u2019s a question fit for answering certain kinds of (inevitable) institutional needs. It smells like bureaucracy. Like correlation in general, it filters the gospel through an institutional lens and\u00a0then systematically highlights what seems best for maintaining and reproducing that institution. (Which, often, can be a good thing if, like me, you care about maintaining and reproducing the institution.)<\/p>\n But, more, it also feels like an Amway-esque question. It feels like the kind of question that\u2019s meant to set an enormous apparatus of decisive\u00a0inferences<\/em> in motion \u2014 a deductive pyramid scheme where if X is true, then A, B, C, D, and E must also be necessarily affirmed \u2014 that will, with one fell swoop, reduce the scope of life to the span of just that one question and, thus, answer everything all at once and once and for all.<\/p>\n In this respect, it doesn\u2019t have the feel of a question that\u2019s meant to be used as<\/em> a question. It feels, instead, like the kind of question you\u2019re meant to ask when you already know the answer. It feels inherently rhetorical. It feels like the kind of question a missionary is supposed to ask Mr. Brown, a Boolean question meant to force a binary response.<\/p>\n The problem with these vast institutional machines of deduction and inference is that they tend to be super fragile. One cog comes loose, the whole thing groans and grinds to a halt. The wagered \u201call\u201d of its \u201call or nothing!\u201d risks, without further consideration, simply returning\u00a0“nothing.”<\/p>\n It\u2019s in this sense especially that the question seems to me to be much too thin to dependably accomplish real religious work.<\/p>\n The question has just two foci: church\u00a0and truth. That is, it\u2019s a religious question that, when prioritized, implicitly assumes (1) that the <\/em>religious question is fundamentally institutional in character (which church?), and (2) that the <\/em>religious question is also fundamentally epistemological and veridical in character (which X is correct?).<\/p>\n When prioritized, it implicitly assumes that the decisive question in a religious life takes just this form: the verification of institutional bona fides.<\/p>\n This aims too much at an office building. And it aims too exclusively\u00a0at the head.<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m not arguing that verification isn\u2019t important and I\u2019m certainly not arguing that the institutional church shouldn\u2019t be sustained.<\/p>\n But I am<\/em> arguing that making the whole thing turn on our evaluation of \u201cthe truthfulness of the church\u201d is not the best way to approach a religious life or <\/em>to sustain the institution. To do so is to ask the institution to bear a spiritual weight that it cannot \u2013 and was not designed to \u2013 bear.<\/p>\n Only Christ can bear the weight of any question that deserves to occupy the center of a religious life. If you want to get the right kind of answer about the church, don\u2019t ask about the church. Ask about Christ.<\/p>\n If your life itself depends on the question, then ask a question that is rich enough to cover the whole rich span of that (messy, unfinished, broken, vulnerable) life.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t ask the thin question: \u201cIs the Church true?\u201d<\/p>\n Ask the thick question: \u201cIs this the body of Christ?\u201d Is Christ manifest here?\u00a0Is this thing\u00a0alive? Does it bleed?<\/p>\n This<\/em> is a load-bearing question. This is a question properly fitted, by Christ himself, to address the existential burn that compels its asking.<\/p>\n This is a question that is big enough to not only address issues of veridicality, but the whole of the head and the whole of the heart. And not just these, but the arms, legs, feet, fingers, toes, spleen, bowels, and loins. The body of Christ includes them all. It includes the beautiful and the ugly, the public and the private, the desirable and the foul, the lost and the found.<\/p>\n Inquire into the body of Christ itself.<\/p>\n And then say:<\/p>\n \u201cThough I may not even know what it means<\/em> to ask if the church is true, I\u2019d stake my life (and the lives of my children) on the fact that Christ\u2019s body is manifest here and that we<\/em> are its members.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIs the church true?\u201d This question is, I think, poorly posed. It seems ill-suited to the kind of existential burn that might compel me to ask it. It seems like a bad fit for what I\u2019m after in a white-knuckled prayer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31837"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31850,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31837\/revisions\/31850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}