Brian Hamilton

Volf/Berry on Church/World

Miroslav Volf, in A Spacious Heart, can contribute to what has become my theological obsession with the church/world divide. In reflecting on the tragedy that characterized Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia in the early 90’s, Volf questions whether the Croats have assumed the separatist motivations of their Serbian oppressors:

But, like many other countries, Croatia wants to be clean too—at least clean of its enemies, the Serbs! There is, of course, a world of difference in whether one suppresses otherness by social pressure to conform and emigrate, or even by discriminatory legislation, or whether one works to eliminate it with the destructive power of guns and fire. Is not the goal the same, however—a monochrome world, a world without the other? (37)

It’s not yet clear where Volf is taking this, but it occurs to me that I am attempting something similar, from a very different angle, in trying to blur the line between church and world. To pretend that differences do not exist between the two may be akin not to doing away with racism, as I suspected and hoped, but to ignoring that race exists and is a powerful social force. Confusingly, though, the way to recognize and value race without ignoring it is to do away with any value judgments implicit in our talk about race, and to recognize the differences as a spectrum. This is difficult to apply to church/world, because (1) the spectrum by definition carries a value judgment, and (2) to recognize it as a spectrum would force us to create hierarchy even within the church, which we certainly don’t want.

But I’m reminded of Berry and his commitment to place, and I wonder what he would have to say about all this. Berry, I think, would have little trouble forging community around something that community takes to be supremely valuable—for him, likely land or place—and even “excluding” those who refused its value. In his fiction, Berry imagines this exclusion as an act of nature, almost, not at all an act of oppression wrought by anyone but the excluded him- or herself. Jayber Crow, for example, watched Troy Chatham closely—Troy never leaves Port William, so far as we can see, but he forges his own exclusion as he buys into the industrial mindset and forsakes all that is valuable to the people he loves and who surrounds him. Maybe this broad equalizing force that has found its way into my theology stems less from nonviolence than from radical American individualism and relativism, where nothing is important enough that people should rally around it. Maybe forgetting that there actually is a difference between church and world—if not an ontological or practical one, at least a confessional one—does violence to the possibility of genuine community and, as Hauerwas might fear, enslaves everyone to the tyranny of their individual wills.

7 February 2005 |
tags: Miscellaneous