Cultural Consequences of Division

Unintended Consequences of the Reformation

Note: This essay was originally delivered as the 2017 Areopagus Lecture in Charlottesville, Virginia, a lecture series sponsored by Mars Hill Audio.

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It is a great honor to be invited to deliver the inaugural Areopagus Lecture. Like most of you, I have learned much of what I know from Ken Myers. I have little to say that he hasn’t already said more eloquently by the more qualified men and women Ken interviews. I’m grateful to Ken for the invitation, to Mars Hill Audio, and to all of you for coming out.

I don’t know if the mission statement says it this way – I don’t know if Mars Hill has a mission statement; it seems a very unKen thing to have – but I see Mars Hill as a ministry devoted to fostering Christian faithfulness in the modern age. Both sides of that statement are critical.

Mars Hill Audio is aimed at Christians. It’s target isn’t primarily apologetic or evangelistic, but discipleship and formation. It intends to help believers become more discerning and faithful. And it’s aimed at Christians in the peculiar set of cultural and political circumstances known as modernity. Mars Hill relies on communications technologies developed in the modern age; it would be suicidal for Mars Hill to take a Luddite stance toward the amenities of modern life. Yet, for twenty-five years Ken has been exploring the connections between the basic institutions of modernity and the pathological cultural cancers that are metastasizing at an accelerating pace. I won’t take time to enumerate them, and they are, in any case, symptoms of deeper currents of cultural history.

To foster Christian faithfulness in this age of history, Mars Hill has devoted considerable attention to the roots of the modern age. How did we get where we are? What went right, and what went wrong, to produce the world that we live in? One of the main roots of the modern age, on any account, is the Reformation. This being the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, I will focus on the cultural effects of the division of the Western church at the time of the Reformation. I hope that this inaugural lecture will provide something that at least distantly resembles the deep cultural insight Mars Hill regulars are used to.

Let me state two premises at the outset. First, I believe that the church is the center of history and therefore I believe understanding what happens in and to the church is fundamental to grasping the movements and trends of history.

Second, the Eucharistic liturgy, a liturgy of Word and Table, is the center of the church. If we want to understand the movements of history, we should attend to what happens at the Eucharist, and what people say is happening there. It’s not quite true to say that cult is the center of culture. They’re intertwined: Cult is always already cultural, and culture is infused with the cultic. Liturgy is where Christianity is seen to be irreducibly cultural, concerned with time, space, material objects, gatherings of people and collective habits. Liturgy is where theology meets sociology. Much Evangelical Protestantism lacks a liturgical theology because Protestants have ceded public life to the State.

We can describe the central importance of the liturgy in terms of the biblical imagery of water. Living water flows from the sanctuary, the place of worship – in Eden, in the temple, in the visionary temple of Ezekiel, from the new Jerusalem. Or, as in Revelation 6, poison flows from the springs and rivers of the temple.

With these two premises, I suggest an hypothesis: Insofar as the modern world diverges from earlier worlds, it deviates because of changes, for good and ill, in the church, and especially changes, for good and ill, in the Eucharistic liturgy. Some of these divergences are for the good. All the Reformation churches called for the communion of the laity in both kinds, with bread and wine. Holy things went to all the holy people, dignifying and in a sense “sanctifying” the laity in their “secular” vocations. But many of these divergences have poisonous effects downstream. That’s what I want to trace. And to do that, I need to add a second layer of biblical framing.

According to the apostle Paul, life in the old covenant took place under the aegis of elements of the world, stoicheia tou kosmou.¹ Sometimes, Paul’s use of this phrase suggests it refers to beings, angelic or demonic, who oversaw the old world. Typically, though, Paul links the phrase with submission to purity regulations (taste not, touch not) and festival observances (observing days, months, seasons). I believe the stoicheia are the common “elements,” the cultic/cultural ABCs, of the socio-religious world of ancient Israel and ancient paganism – purity, temple, priest, sacrifice.

The new covenant ends life under the stoicheia; the gospel announces the end of stoicheic institutions and the stoicheic order and stoicheic worship. Purity, temple, priest, and sacrifice are redefined and reformulated around Jesus and the church. The Christian temple consists of those anointed by the Spirit as pure and holy priests who offer a sacrifice of praise. Paul struggles, especially in Galatians, with Jewish Christians and converted Gentiles who are tempted to revert to stoicheic order. They want to reinstitute distinctions of sacred and profane, pure and polluted, that have been done away with or transformed by Christ. They want to restore restrictions on common meals and access to priesthood.

I think that Gallatianism has been a persistent but overlooked temptation throughout the history of the church. In various ways, the church has reinstituted boundaries and practices that revert to the stoicheic order. And I think this framework also illuminates the origins of modernity.