10.18.09

place, modernity and abstraction

Posted in culture, ekklesia, semiotics at 5:30 am by len

“Everything that the Creator God does in forming us humans is done in place. It follows from this that since we are his creatures and can hardly escape the conditions of our making, for us everything that has to do with God is also in place. All living is local: this land, this neighborhood, these trees and streets and houses, this work, these people.”  Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Peterson

What Peterson describes was not assumed in modernity. Increasingly we lived in an abstract world. We travelled across towns to gather in a building that often had few connections to its neighborhood location. And in our own nieghborhoods, we have little contact with our neighbors. We lived with an abstracted piety in a world where sacred and secular were separate domains. In an article in 1991, and echoing the work of Michel de Certeau, Delbert Wiens writes of the pietism of abstracted moderns:

“One of the original meanings of Liberalism was precisely the “freeing” of the individual from the “bondage” of concrete societies. In principle, all of us-whether Liberal or Evangelical or Fundamentalist-are liberal. But then a new economy (the Industrial Revolution) and new ways of thinking (as consolidated in Enlightenment rationalism) produced a new kind of “liberation.” Individuals were abstracted from their concrete communities to concentrate on abstracted tasks in new kinds of functionalized settings. And so modern society is no longer a layering of concrete communities on the way to peoplehood. The nuclear family is now the last vestige of the older way of organizing peoples, with the result that no concreteness stands between it and that replacement for peoplehood which is the modern state. But the state is also no longer concrete; it is based on a contract (a constitution) tacitly adopted by individuals. On the one hand everything is supposed to exist for the sake of the individual. On the other hand, the individual has to fight to resist being swallowed up by {46} “mass society” and the bureaucracies which service the “functions” which have been abstracted from what was once “all-grown-together.”

“It is ironic that those Christians who recoiled from the debilitating social consequences of modernity and tried to alleviate them (the Social Gospel) have been saddled with the name “Liberals” while those who fled that title have most resolutely pushed a gospel of religious individualism which is the result of modernity. It is true that Evangelicals more firmly resisted some of the heterodox results of the application of the thought forms of functional rationalism into doctrinal matters; but, in fact, the reason that theological liberals and conservatives could fight so hard on how best to preserve Christianity under the new conditions is that both had accepted the demise of concreteness and welcomed the basic thought forms of modernity. They disagreed on tactics and in specifics, but they shared the same turf.

“Evangelicalism seldom questioned whether the abstractive, functionalizing spirit of modernity should have been countered. Nor did it understand that it was transforming churches into mere congregations. One result is that Protestants, and especially Evangelicals, have little understanding of the real character of the biblical peoples of God or of the biblical understanding of the corporate nature of the Body of Christ. As a movement it has been suspicious of religious “tribes” and “peoples”-and even of denominations, that halfway house between the corpus Christianum and autonomous congregationalism.

“Dispensationalists argued that the church was an “unforeseen” interlude in God’s history with the Jews and that the spiritual “invisible church” made up of converted individuals took priority over concrete worshipping communities. Evangelical leaders in the late nineteenth century were so habituated to the forms of modernity that they largely relinquished their affiliations, finding their “real church” in summer conferences. Then the Bible Institute movement created the institutional structures which focused Evangelical activity. Since then, an incredible number of para-church organizations have specialized in the abstracted aspects of nurture and mission which were once the “all-grown-together” aspects of concrete Christianity. A result, not surprisingly, is that the exploited, already weakened congregation, becomes ever more fragile {47} and irrelevant.

“The modern congregation is not a coherent context which can teach us how the abstracted aspects of our lives fit together to create a unified reality. It is itself an abstraction, that institution which has the function of servicing the “spiritual” aspect of life. Because an individualist society is a mobile society, the congregation loses the power to superintend the lengthy rhythms of the creation of a self. Indeed, the sense that life is related to larger natural and social and spiritual rhythms-or that it is itself such a rhythm in time-is gradually lost. Nor can the growing self experience the older crises through which we once stepped outside and then above our concrete “spaces” to a self-transcending individuality before God. Therefore there is really nothing tangible against which one can even rebel. Instead of dramatic rage against a very real but too-confining group identity or life-plot, there is that interiorized amorphous anger which we name depression.”

“Mennonite Brethren: Neither Liberal Nor Evangelical,” in Direction, Spring, 1991

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