Michael L. Budde
notes that
[f]or the past five hundred years, political and
economic leaders have worked to undermine Christian unity and fragment the Church
in the interests of nationalism, capitalism, and individualism. At the same
time, the now fragmented parts of Christianity—its ideas and institutions,
liturgy and laity—have been enlisted as legitimation and cultural cement in
service to radical political, economic, and cultural transformations of
modernity.
Budde makes a
notably harsh, poignant, and “radical” claim here—one that must be carefully
and critically considered before we take it as absolute truth. Of course, while
we must remain critical of Budde's claims, we must further recognize that Budde raises an
important concern that, if accurate, presents modern Christianity with a
significant problem, an identity crisis of sorts, the effects of which may prove toxic
and incriminating to the faith if not properly addressed. For as Budde also
states:
The fallout for the existing subordination of
Christianity to other allegiances, loyalties, and identities is widespread,
scandalous, and lethal. That it is no longer noteworthy nor even noticed—when Christians
kill one another in service to the claims of state, ethnicity, or ideology—itself
is the most damning indictment of Christianity in the modern era. How can
Christians be good news to the world, in what ways can they presume to be a
foretaste of the peaceful recuperation of creation promised by God, when their
slaughter of one another is so routine as to be beneath comment? World I is
described as interstate rivalry run amok, not the industrial butchering by
Christians of one another; Rwanda symbolizes the ugliness of ethnic conflict
rather than Catholics massacring Catholics; the U.S. wars in Central America
are charged to the Cold War account instead of Christians in the United States
abetting the killing of Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan Christians by
one another. That no one describes these events as scandal to the gospel, a
cruel inversion of the unity of the body of Christ, is among the most
embarrassing charges against contemporary Christianity.
While it may be
tempting to ignore Budde on grounds that his claims seem ideologically radical
and oversimplified in reference to “reality,” let us avoid for a moment that temptation and
rather humor Budde. After all, if Budde is correct that a slew of atrocious
global, nationalistic, ideological, and ethnic conflicts could have been
averted if Christians on both sides of these conflicts had pledged their allegiance to
the Cross of Christ rather than to other sorts of allegiance-demanding entities,
then we need to take very seriously, and approach very attentively, Budde’s admonition
that Christians worldwide need to redefine their allegiances in solidarity to one
another as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
What would it
mean for Christians if, upon their baptism into the church, they left behind
any and all old identities and allegiances in favor of finding their identity in
the risen God and in a community wherein all “are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians
3:28)? No doubt, if Christians did indeed take their baptismal vows seriously,
they might just be formed into “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, God’s own people, that [they] may declare the wondrous deeds of him who
called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).
This radical
sort of formation as a new nation, a new “race” of people, is certainly not a
new concept in church history. According to Denise Kimber Buell, early
Christians commonly saw themselves as a new ethnic group and race of people,
distinguishable by way of their worship, lives, and concerns as different from
Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews.
As we consider
the identity of early Christians in relation to other sorts of nationalistic and ideological identities, we
should bear in mind that our modern conceptions of “race” and “ethnicity” (two varieties of social allegiance) are notably different from such conceptions in the ancient world. Whereas today we
regard such categories as immutable and inextricably tied to genetics and
physical features, ancients had a much more flexible and mutable conception of
ethnicity and race.
Having a more flexible understanding of these categories
had a notable effect on how early Christians identified themselves. As Buell
indicates:
First, race/ethnicity was often deemed to be
produced and indicated by religious practices…Early Christians adopted existing
understandings of what ethnicity and race are and how they relate to
religiosity by reinterpreting the language of peoplehood readily available to
them in the biblical texts they shared with…Jews, as well as political and
civic language used broadly to speak about citizenship and peoplehood in the
Roman Empire.
Using the
language and concepts afforded them, early Christians could view race as both
fluid and “real” to the extent that “Christianness” could be thought of “as a
distinct category in contrast to other peoples…and also as inclusive, since it
is a category formed out of individuals from a range of different races.”
Thus, while Christianity was, on the one hand, a unique ethnic category,
rigidly defined by its practices, it was, on the other hand, fluid and dynamic to
the extent that one could “join” the Christian race by adopting its practices,
desires, and goals. Christianity, therefore, despite the exclusivity that
accompanies modern conceptions of race, was notably inclusive by way of conversion.
To change one’s race or ethnicity from that of Roman, Jew, Greek, or Egyptian,
one needed only to convert to Christianity.
This way of
viewing ethnicity, as we should expect, came with definite consequences. As
Buell notes, conversion to the Christian faith was not viewed as “a private
matter of individual conscience resulting in an individual’s affiliation with a
religious movement, but explicitly as becoming a member of a people, with
collective and public consequences.”
And as Buell further states:
[I]t is not sufficient to state that Christians
formed a “religion” in contrast to a “race” or “ethnicity.” Many early
Christians described the consequence of belief in Christ (even though the kinds
of belief varied widely) as acquiring membership in a people. When various believers
in and followers of Christ (however understood) used ethnic reasoning, they
were continuing a longstanding practice of viewing religious practices and
beliefs as intertwined with collective identifications that overlap with our
modern concepts of race and ethnicity, as well as nationality and civic
identity.
The extent to
which early Christians took their Christian formation as a political act with
public implications is highlighted by Joyce Salisbury.
Christians were perceived by their pagan neighbors
to be antisocial in the deepest meaning of the word. They were creating their
own society within the Roman one, and their loyalties were to each other rather
than to the family structures that formed the backbone of conservative Roman
society. Their faith led them to renounce parents, children, and spouses, and
Romans believed this actively undermined the fabric of society. In fact, it
did.
Despite the romanticism
and purity of the ecclesial solidarity ascribed to by early Christians, history
is rife with instances where the church failed to maintain its sense of unity
in the face of other claimants on political, ethnic, and ideological
allegiance. Whether it be the co-option of Christianity by the Roman Empire,
the fragmentation and subjugation of the church at the hands of emergent
European nation-states during the early modern era, or the influence of Enlightenment
and humanistic ideals on Christian thought and practice, what clearly befalls us, as describes
Budde, is that “[t]he bonds of baptism [have been] spiritualized and sidelined
in favor of the blood-and-iron ties of patriotism and ethnonational solidarity,
the dollars-and-cents sinews of capitalism, and the idolatry of modern and
postmodern selves.”
Budde, going futher, puts forth the following lament of the sort of “order of
things” incurred by the currently muddied and domesticated view of Christianity
adhered to by an unfortunate number of Christians:
In such a world it is unremarkable that Christian
Hutus can slaughter Christian Tutsis the week after Easter;
that Christian interrogators can torture Christian prisoners with impunity;
that a Catholic military chaplain can bless the atomic bomb that destroyed the
largest concentration of Catholics in Japan, including seven orders of nuns.
If we take the
above exposition seriously (and as we consider who Christians are, what they
do, and what they should value), then we must further ask: “Are we Christians?” This question may strike us as
a difficult question to answer, not because our answer need be complicated (though it could be), but because the answer may be a hard pill to swallow. How seriously do we
take our ecclesial bonds with our fellow believers in Christ worldwide?
Do we act in concern for and solidarity with our suffering brothers and sisters
who live beyond the circumscribed boundaries of the state? To what extent have
we allowed nationalistic identity to circumvent, subvert, and overrule our
loyalty to the politics of the Kingdom of God? Whether we can answer these
questions to an optimistic or pessimistic tune is a concern for another time;
it is only important for the moment that we ask these questions seriously and
honestly and contemplate them in a way that is far from superficial or guarded.
Budde , of course, would argue that we have fallen short of our purpose as the church. As he
notes:
My argument is that the revitalization and reform
of Christianity now and in the future will be both incomplete and doomed to
irrelevance until it reclaims the integrity and distinctiveness of the Church.
Unless the borders of baptism become capable of defining a people that “seek
first the Kingdom of God,” that sees itself as God’s imperfect prototype for
reconciled human unity in diversity (with the Sermon on the Mount as its “Magna
Carta,” in the words of Pope John Paul II), Christianity will continue its
rapid descent into a parody of its calling and vocation.
Should Budde be
right, and should the church indeed be gravely lost and have strayed from the Way,
then we the church must work hard to reestablish bonds of solidarity and
allegiance that will allow us to become anew the people of God.
