The Mission of the Church in the Face of Globalization - Part Two
As indicated previously, this two-part essay hopes to establish a connection between the thought of Lesslie Newbigin and William Cavanaugh in their shared concern for the phenomenon of globalization as a problem for the church. Thus far, an argument has been made that this is actually the case. Therefore, the question that we must now answer is this: What, then, is the church to do when faced with such apparently bleak circumstances? To get more to the point, what is the mission of the church in the twenty-first century in the face of the reality of globalization and all that it entails? How do we expect to make disciples of all nations in the name of the Trinity when those of us who claim to be God’s chosen people are currently being discipled by the global mass media and the “free” market economy? In this section, the case will be made that what Newbigin and Cavanaugh think we really need is to actually be discipled by the Trinity in a community oriented around certain formative practices.
As we have seen numerous times throughout this investigation, William Cavanaugh’s definition of what the church is involves a community of people who have been inscribed into certain practices. The language of “bodies” previously used could cause us to mistake Cavanaugh’s purpose. He is not attempting to dehumanize the situation but is making certain that his readers understand that the practices of the Christian community most certainly involve our bodies as well as our souls and minds. Because of his experiences in Chile during the time of the regime of General Augusto Pinochet, Cavanaugh was able to make the connection between Torture and Eucharist as formative in the lives of individuals in the Chilean situation. In this situation, the military government had overthrown the elected socialist government because of widespread economic and social poverty resulting from a variety of factors that are too numerous and complicated to be addressed presently. What must be known is that the elected government under Salvador Allende was overthrown by the forces under the command of Augusto Pinochet to bring order and economic prosperity to the people of Chile. What was actually set up was more akin to what we have in America and in other Western style democratic nations only much more extreme and unchecked. At any rate, the government under Pinochet conducted a campaign to rid Chile of all those who contradicted and served to subvert its purposes for the “betterment” of the Chilean people. By Cavanaugh’s account, Pinochet’s program included the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands of native Chilean people who disagreed with the government or simply got in the way because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This background has been provided so that when reading the following sentences, the reader will have at least a simple frame of reference for Cavanaugh’s discussion of Torture as a discipline that is similar in it’s goals and effects to the Eucharist. In his account of the scope and aims of Torture and Eucharist in the Pinochet regime, Cavanaugh writes, “Torture creates fearful and isolated bodies, bodies docile to the purposes of the regime; the Eucharist affects the body of Christ, a body marked by resistance to worldly power. Torture creates victims; Eucharist creates witnesses, martyrs.” Thus it may be said of our current situation that we are currently undergoing a slow, much less painful – but not less effective – torture at the hands of the negative aspects of globalization. This statement is made in no way to demean the lives or belittle the suffering of the Chilean people. The point is that what has happened to us in globalization is similar to the effects of the torture of the Chilean people under the rule of Pinochet. We have been victimized because of the subversive effects of the mass media and the free market on our lives both personal and collective. Our minds and our bodies have been made “docile,” to use Cavanaugh’s language, to the desires of corporations and fashion trends. We are in serious trouble and we often don’t even know it because we are having too much “fun” to know that we are dying inside and killing others through our lives of individualistic happiness tragically shaped by forces too often beyond our sight.
What is needed, therefore, is a place where we can develop the sight to “unmask” those forces that draw us further away from rootedness in a community of fellow travelers in Christ. What we need is
to distinguish between the political realities that shape our lives and the media version of “politics” that is little more than a form of mass entertainment and distraction. Much more has happened to us over the last twenty-five years than the rise of the West Coast business lobby in the eighties, the return of the East Coast Establishment in the nineties, or the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And yet an amazed public hears of little else as it watches on helplessly as would-be Caesars develop new technologies for Old Money and settle old scores with fresh blood (Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy, 132).
These prophetic words paint our situation quite well. We need a new politics, we need a new place to stand. In short, we need to really be the church. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, “the most important contribution the church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.” For both Cavanaugh and Newbigin, the strengthening of the local congregation is the first step toward furthering the mission given to the Church. In Newbigin we see that
the local congregation, where the word of the gospel is preached, where in the sacrament of the Eucharist we are united with Christ in his dying for the sin of the world and in his rising for the sake of the world, is the place where we are enabled to develop a shared life in which sin can be both recognized and forgiven (Truth to Tell, 85).
This recognition and forgiveness of sin is the basis for the “unmasking” about which Newbigin previously spoke. The practices of the church such as baptism and the Eucharist are the practical ways that this unmasking occurs in our common life as believers in Christ. The temptation in the face of the current negative effects of globalization is a retreat to the age-old practice of reproducing what the world does but with a Christian spin. In this light, we see that much of current Christian “culture” including t-shirts, “christian” music, and “christian” politics is not the product of a thoughtful, loving, Spirit-filled global community of Christian faith. In reality, much of this is itself a cultural phenomenon brought about when Christians have decided to vacillate and reproduce what the world has to offer rather than relying on our distinctive and formative practices to guide us through culture in a truly Christian manner. What is advocated here is not the wholesale rejection of culture and retreat into a sectarian “us versus them” mentality but rather a counter-cultural life lived in community that makes Christians different but not isolated. Political theorist and theologian Michael Budde puts it best when he writes that,
The church does not gain if the 20 to 30 hours of TV viewing each week changes from cops and sleaze to socially uplifting messages – it wouldn’t gain from 20 to 30 hours of TV viewing of religious programming, for that matter. With so many hours of human existence in the thrall of commercial culture industries, with human attention surrounded by barkers and enticers and noisemakers, the quiet but single-minded call to the gospel cannot be heard…Winning back members of the Body of Christ will not be done by imitating the techniques of the culture industries. Those who can be ransomed will be drawn to a radically reformed and revitalized vision of the church and its role in Jesus’ mission – or they will not be ransomed at all (Michael Budde, The (Magic) Kingdom of God, 95-96).
If the mission of the church is to make disciples then we are not helped at all by pitiful and misguided attempts to recreate what culture offers in a more “Christian” manner. The local practices of the universal community of faith are the only ways we can resist the subsuming impulses of contemporary culture in a way that allows Christians to be both “in the world” but not “of the world.”
The mission of the church in the chaotic and confusing world of Western globalizing culture will only be helped if our common life together reflects who we are as a community of people that truly believes that we were created to live life together. Baptism and the Eucharist are simply two practices that must be strengthened if we are to truly be the church who lives out its mission to “make disciples of all nations.” These disciplines and others must be practiced more regularly and taken more seriously if the church is ever going to move beyond cultural confusion and fragmentation toward a truly embodied witness to the Gospel in the contemporary world. We must not lose hope, however, when our situation seems bleak – as it certainly does today. Indeed, Newbigin reminds us that
In a world that is now knit together into a single global city, the Church must be visible and recognizable as the community that embraces the whole city in the Father’s love. The word of truth that the Church speaks to Caesar must be, or must aim to be, the word of the whole Church. Splintered, confused, and compromised, the Church seldom sounds worth listening to. But the Church has outlasted many occupants of Caesar’s throne and will outlast many more, for the truth entrusted to her is the truth of God (Truth to Tell, 90).
With these beautiful words, we see that it is God’s Spirit that empowers us to live these practices. These last words in Newbigin’s book, Truth to Tell, remind us of his Reformed heritage that believes that it is truly God the Father who enables any of us to respond to his calling on our lives. It is truly the Son of God who has mediated our way to God so that we are now worthy to be called His children. And it is truly the Spirit of God that empowers the Church to live its mission in spite of and – somehow – because of the many divisions and trials it will face and has faced throughout history and into the future. This Trinitarian vision of the upholding of the church as the community of God is the beginning step out of the fog of globalization and into the New Life inaugurated by Christ for our culture today.
The reflections and research presented here cannot be considered a comprehensive account of either the scope and effects of globalization on the church – neither can it be a complete vision for the role of the church in the face of these challenges. My only reservation regarding the conclusions reached by this research is that they have painted a wholly negative picture of the phenomenon of globalization. I understand the positive gains in medical technology and other realms of human existence, but for our purposes these concerns must wait for another occasion for further research. What I hope has been communicated clearly here is that, if the church is to truly be a witness, if the church is ever going to fulfill its mission, we must constantly learn and relearn what it means to actually be disciples together in community with fellow followers of Christ. Therefore, it is my hope that this essay has reflected my strong interest and passion for seeing the church fulfill its mission in a way that is compassionate, learned, and led by God rather than by the whims of culture.
————————————————
In these two posts, I have presented in a shortened form one of my academic essays. I have attempted to provide clear citations should further reading on the subject be desired. Below, find a list of the works that were utilized in the writing of this essay. Cheers!
Cavanaugh, William T. Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1997.
__________. Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time. New York: T & T Clark Publishers, 2003.
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989.
__________. Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991.
Mills, C. Wright. “Some Effects of Mass Media.” in Mass Media and Mass Man. ed. by Alan Casty. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1968.
Budde, Michael. The (Magic) Kingdom of God: Christianity and Global Culture Industries. Boulder: Westview Publishing, 1997.
Foust, Thomas F., George R. Hunsberger, J. Andrew Kirk, & Werner Ustorf. A Scandalous Prophet: The Way of Mission after Newbigin. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002.
Inchausti, Robert. Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2005.
Scott, Peter & William T. Cavanaugh eds. The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Comment by:
1Larry Hershenson
05/27/07 8:55 PM | Comment Link |
Yes, you present a negative but yet visceral view of the forces at work today. It is frightening to see the effects of this pattern of universalism using the cover of the business world to disguise the truth of the wickedness that appeals to humankind. The theologians that you chose have developed a treatise to expose this mind-set for what it really is. We know however, that the sin of globalizers isn’t something novel it’s an old hideous sin. The sin of self-indulgence and manipulation of power has continued from the very first sin of humans wanting to be God. We can find many ways to define the loss of culture and individual identity through media and bringing western ideas into traditional cultures. We also recognize the integration of socially acceptable trends that impact the community of faith, by its look like me, act like me and be like me mentality. Let’s all fit in, don’t be different or people will make fun and disparage you. The refusal of the community of God to stand up in this attack on the Body of Christ has allowed our expression of faith and discipleship to be compromised. We blend into the big picture and are not distinguishable from anyone else. Certainly the great commission has been diluted and has lost its true uniqueness.
In truth the globalization of economies and free markets are only precursors to the articulated belief that everyone will go to their own heaven, because the god they know wouldn’t let anything bad happen, or perhaps this is all there is, so let’s make the best of it. Why worry, we need to be happy and enjoy what little time that’s left for us to express and to consume the products of children, after all just think they would be starving if someone didn’t put them to work.
I appreciate your attempt to bring this to our attention. My fear is that no one really listens we just nod our heads and clap our apathetic lips to the tune of what’s best for me has to be good for everyone else. Shout it out like the prophets of our past, let the world attend to a word from God. Perhaps someone who has been vacillating about their call to live the disciples walk and speak the truth will feel the nudge of the Holy Spirit to be who God would have them to be. May it be so? Continue on my brother and pursue the divine calling, proclaim the gospel to all nations.