Community Is Essential.

I read a lot of people who pretty explicitly say, “Jesus is good, but the Church is bad.”  They say the Church corrupted and debased Jesus’ teachings almost from day one.

There is a lot of truth in this, of course.  By the time of the Renaissance the Western Church had been thoroughly corrupted.  It is hard to find any commonality between Jesus and a vile Pope like Alexander VI.  Many people have experienced the Church as a violent, exclusive, hateful institution dispensing punishment, threat, and guilt.  The Church has often been most effective at separating people from Jesus Christ.  Obviously, this is an anti-Church, not the beloved community Jesus intends.

At the same time, I fear that this anti-Church mentality betrays the hyper-individualistic bias that pervades Modern thinking.  For Modernity, tradition and community tend to be viewed as bad, corrupting, degrading factors.  Only the individual is pure and undefiled.  According to this way of thinking, anything that applies any kind of brake to the individual is bad.  Progress is defined as the removal of these restrictions.  

In practice, this serves to feed the ego that people tend automatically to identify with their individuality.  That causes our sense of ourselves as autonomous individuals to move into the center of our existence, becoming the idol around which everything else orbits.

Nothing offends the egocentric individual as much as having to make room for other people.  The most hated restrictions on individual freedom are therefore community and tradition.  That is, the annoyances of having to deal with other people today, and, worse, with the legacy of other people who have died.  To the ecocentric individual, “Hell,” as Sartre said, “is other people.”  

The kind of pure egocentric individualism that Modernity valorizes is, of course, impossible.  The truth is that humans are made to live in community.  People live with others.  Anthropologists sometimes refer to humans as a kind of “small group mammal.”  

The opposite of the Modernistic impulse towards radical individualism is a recognition and acceptance of community as essential to human, and all, existence.  Life happens together.  And this interactive, reciprocal togetherness extends to all people, all of life, all of creation, and even to God.

Jesus comes to establish the Church as an alternative community, a place where every individual is equal and valued for their diverse gifts and voices.  Jesus calls this the Kingdom of God, and he contrasts it with the dominating regime of Empire with its pyramidal rankings of people by wealth, fame, and power.  Empire thrives by playing on the egocentric desires of individuals, making them into enemies or competitors, dividing in order to keep people conquered and the regime in place.

But the Kingdom of God presents a “flattened” and distributed polity in which all are one and God is present with and within all.  It models a community of reciprocal equality and an economy of mutual sharing.  It is originally and radically democratic in the sense of excluding no one.  It takes into account the well-being of the other life forms with which we also live in community.  Indeed, it acknowledges the wisdom (and errors) of ancestors, by the longitudinal democracy of tradition, and the circumspection to act on behalf of the  generations yet to come. 

So the real question is not individual versus community, but moving away from bad forms of community, and living into the kind of liberated community Jesus calls us to.  So when Paul writes, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12.27), he means that the unity and integrity of the body gives meaning and purpose to the lives of its members.

I would even go further and suggest that “you are the Body of Christ” is addressed not just to the Church, but to the whole  creation.  For we all live in a network of intersecting and overlapping communities.  Just as he is the representative human being, revealing our unity with God and all, Jesus intends the Church to serve as the representative community, where we come to know that the Spirit and Wisdom of God is present in all the others.

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