1 For most of my life, the standing of the American church as a source of national social and political order was measured by reports from the front of the so-called “culture wars.”2 Memory brings to mind battles over feminism and the ERA, so-called gay rights, the breakdown of the family and the creeping secularization of public schools. But most of all, we faithfully engaged in the long haul over the evil of abortion and won, sort of.
These were all important issues, undoubtedly. Still, there is a certain irony in calling this period the “culture wars,” as we did; the battles over the future of America were located almost exclusively on its political turf. Forgive us: we thought we understood how the game was played and did our level best. The strategies we employed were as American as baseball: build coalitions, go to the Legislatures, take over the school boards, but most of all: get out the vote so we have our man in the White House, picking the judges.
Gosh, that all seems so long ago; so Twentieth Century. Indeed, when I reminisce about those days with my daughter who was born in 2001, she looks at me like I am speaking in a foreign tongue, a dry, dead language. To her I am a soldier tres ancien sounding in tones she cannot even recognize. “No, no, love, we won the Supreme Court!” OK, Boomer. How did power politics work out for the church after all?
Sigh. And it was her that we all thought we were fighting for.
But as I look through the photos of those days, flipping through the metaphorical culture war scrapbook, I cannot help but wonder if she is on to something. As she worries about her own future, are there any grounds for her and her friends—all those baptized children we fear won’t stick around—to conclude that we had any insight into what was actually called for back then? I’m not so sure. She doesn’t need to hear my memories of Phyllis Schlafly and Gloria Steinem, Jerry Falwell against Hollywood, or Free to be You and Me versus Focus on the Family. She knows how all that turned out, and she is kind enough not to remind me of the score.
Even so, as we come to terms with the post-Christian culture that has overtaken the Enlightenment West, our despair is followed by recognition that the liberal order—secular as it is—built by the Enlightenment is itself exhausted, if not under siege. We see it all around us. The socio-political order that developed the modern West does not have a consensus on how to resolve the basic questions that press upon our political and social life. The men and women Enlightenment culture produces appear every day less governable by the hollowed out institutions our decrepit liberal order feebly maintains.
One way of understanding ecclesiocentrism as a social and political theory is to contrast it with the church’s culture war model of engagement of the questions presented by the Enlightenment.
Our Constitutional system assumed a social contract of its states and citizens, a people who by representation expressed their will in elections and enforced their determinations through a collection of institutions and procedures. Beyond that limited scope, Americans lived out their daily goals and preferences with little governmental oversight. The American church took its place as one of many constituent institutions of this order with a particular role in its success. If the social contract between these people was to be successful, so the story went, the church served as the agent of moral formation of the citizenry.
This of course begs a question as liberalism grows weary around us. Was there a larger mission for the church than as an agent of maintenance–a moral tutor–for the world that Enlightenment liberalism provided us? And if so, what would that be?
To outline the distinctive task of ecclesiocentrism for churches today, we should look to Robert Cover’s insightful Harvard Law Review article written forty years ago.3 Cover describes the ways that participants in every society construct, live within, and reflect on themselves by what he calls the nomos of that society. The nomos we inhabit includes political institutions, governmental regimes, and non-governmental means for resolving disputes between persons or conflicts in legal rights. But the nomos is more than that. The apparatus of the political and legal order is secondary in importance to the rich variety of narratives offered by the constituent communities within the polity, that larger context in which our political institutions reside.
The sub-communities that build each nomos determine what is right and wrong, evaluate truth claims, and prioritize what is worthy of social endorsement or prescription. In order to create and maintain a functioning political and social order, the society must have two sources at work. A flourishing community must first have the social and moral resources to build institutions; to transmit a compelling positive narrative of reality to the members of the community at large and over time. It does this by having the will to enforce the narrative against community members who violate it.
For Cover, two types of forces compose every nomos. The first is the “world-building” force. That force is composed of narrative sources that have sufficient historical, moral, and ideological content. Strong, world-building forces allow the particular identity of the group to develop and advance the meaningful claims critical to the identity of the community. They are also strong because any such social group must have sufficient internal allegiance to its own values to generate normative force behind the claims it makes. In this way, world-building communities have the internal strength to establish societies that did not previously exist.
On the other hand, the second type of force composing communities that centrally identify with modern political orders are “world-maintaining” forces. These are forces that are necessary to maintain a social order that is already in place. These are “weak” forces, because they have little normative content and do not themselves create communities of meaning. Rather, the work of world-maintenance is a work of administration and not the creation of values. World-maintenance is institutional in nature, procedural in operation.
In a pluralistic society, the institutions of world-maintenance must also be neutral, as they are the arbiter of disputes between those particularist communities of meaning that are characterized by diverse moral presuppositions within their jurisdictions. With an eye to internal peace, these maintaining institutions generally avoid choosing sides between rival notions of the good within their societies at large. For example, the universalist virtues that we have come to identify with modern liberalism, the broad principles of our law, are essentially system-maintaining “weak” forces. They are virtues that are justified by the need to ensure the coexistence of diverse participant groups who are characterized by their respective worlds of strong normative meaning.
Political liberalism, then, can be understood as the Enlightenment West’s attempt to live out a speculative claim: while the existence of strong world-building forces may be necessary to create a viable political order, once established, the same realized political order can be maintained thereafter on weak, world-maintaining forces alone.
A good deal of modern political theory followed the Enlightenment assumptions that this project was possible; it is not too much to say that many late twentieth-century observers in the United States believed that the success of this model of the nation-state was on the horizon. The ideal has proved attractive: there has been a good deal of hope placed in the vision of attaining a neutral procedural state that could, through impartial arbitration of disputes and expansion of administrative technical proficiency, present a satisfying modus operandi to manage pluralistic societies. Much of the work in political theory over the last century operated on these assumptions. The classic statement of this claim is likely found in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Its most sanguine expression might be Francis Fukuyama’s manifesto, The End of History and the Last Man.
More recently, however, optimism has flagged. Whatever hope may have once existed for the prospects of a neutral, procedural world-maintenance regime as a modus operandi for a successful political order has given way to widespread skepticism about the project. For example, despite all the confidence placed in individualism as the foundation of classical liberalism, in fact, religious and ideological factions have not dissipated in favor of individuals, as many expected. Even as administrative states in the West have claimed to arrive at increasing levels of neutrality between rival ideological claims, conflicts over values persisted and even sharpened. As it turns out, where the state attempts to secure stability on the grounds of neutrality, the order is less stable. There is not even a consensus regarding the neutral principles that can be applied to resolve such clashes, particularly where adversaries are more and more disposed to understand their particularistic claims as grounded in so-called “universal human rights,” however disparate the content of such claims may be.
The Ecclesiocentric Alternative
It is at this point that the unique promise of the church of Jesus Christ as a world-building force—as the world-building force—comes into view. The church is first and foremost the communion of those united to Jesus Christ and one another. It is a foretaste of the Age to Come. Yet while it has one foot in the Age to Come, it also has one foot in this age. The Scriptures tell us that the church is a polis or city-state (Hebrews 12:22), the church is an ethnos or nation (1 Peter 2:9), the church is an oikos or household (Ephesians 2:19).4
The church provides the exemplar of which the earthly institutions are images. As a result, if what the world needs is a locus of world-building forces sufficient to establish a durable social and political order that advances human flourishing, Christians should expect that this work will be advanced and completed by and within the Christian church. At a most basic level, there is an unmistakably “political” project in the work of the resurrected Jesus Christ, although it is not necessarily “political” in the way the world understands the political. The prophecy regarding the birth of our Lord made clear that upon His arrival, the government of the world would thereafter be upon His shoulders and that the increase of His government and peace would never cease (Isaiah 9:6–7). At His ascension, Christ made it clear that He would now begin the work to bring about the conditions that God gave Him as the answer to His prayer that His Father would bring His Kingdom, as it is in heaven, to earth.
What was the answer? The church: “All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18–20).
Accordingly, the claim that Christ is at work building a new world is an ecclesiocentric claim: a claim about how Christ Himself, through the ministry of the gospel within and through the church, and by means of the Spirit, conducts the work of world-building. The church is both the location of Christ’s kingdom and the transformative instrument of Christ Himself within the world at large. Christ’s kingdom advances in the world-building project in the manner and to the extent that the church pursues her central mission.
But how do communities build worlds? And why should we think the church is a superior agent for building a flourishing and durable political order than what has gone before?
It is important to emphasize that in comparison to all other institutions, the church is sui generis. The church has its own life, its own mission, and an idiosyncratic manner in which it builds its world. Political institutions are the works of men. The church is first and foremost the work of Christ Himself through the Spirit. It is formed up first and foremost socially, by a Lord, by a Father, by a Priest, and by a Brother. It is a city, a family, a nation. Indeed, it is ultimately the polis, the oikos, the ethnos. It does not seek power to build worlds because it ultimately is the power that builds its World. As it lives and breathes, so live and breathe the communities in which it flourishes.
But if the church operates in its own sphere, its own realm, how does it build the world around it?
To answer this question, it is helpful to understand the concept of the “social imaginary” that Charles Taylor presents in his important work, The Secular Age. Taylor describes how the social realities in which people live have a strong—if unconscious—influence on organizing society. Their present social realities construct what their imaginations can conceive of as possible, normative ways of life. Social communities of diverse people come to see themselves as a whole by working out certain assumptions about the proper way of life in the artifacts of their daily lives. They develop customs and symbols, and they entertain common practices or habits, all of which reveal and reinforce the unstated consensus about how things are, and how things should be, that underwrites the larger society.
The collection of these social structures, symbols, customs, and ways of life form what Taylor called a “social imaginary” which comes to rest in the conscience of the society’s members. In this way, a society’s social imaginary limits the horizon of its members’ imaginations: it sets out the range of what those who live within the community can conceive as real possibilities for current and future ways of life. Likewise, when communities are introduced to alternative social forms, their “social imaginary” will introduce a reactionary response: It will initiate critical evaluation and, in the ordinary case, repel the community against change.
On the other hand, Taylor pointed out, heterodox ways of life may expand the community’s outlook—consciously or not—as the community is exposed to frameworks of living that would otherwise never have arisen in the imagination of the prevailing culture despite being possibilities all along. In his history of the development of modernity, for example, Taylor described how medieval Europe—with its commitments to the hierarchical assumptions of feudal Europe—eventually transitioned to the modern age. This transition, Taylor explained, was the result of the development of egalitarian ideals during the Renaissance which were sharpened during the Reformation. The political forms of order in Europe changed, of course, but only after the “social imaginary” of European society had shifted first, opening up new possibilities for European life, allowing members of those communities to imagine egalitarian modes of living that had not been conceivable before.
Ecclesiocentricism uniquely claims that the church builds the world by providing it with the definitive social imaginary, the telos for God’s plan for social and political order. After the ascension of Christ, the church was placed in the center of the world, just as the temple had been the center of the world in the prior order (Ezekiel 5:5). The temple was the dwelling place of God on earth, but with the coming of Christ, it was fulfilled in Christ’s body. Christ’s arrival announced that the church—Christ’s body—would thereafter be the dwelling place of the Lord in an earthly kingdom that Christ Himself is building and that will not pass away. The divine fire once rested on the mercy seat in the middle of the temple. Now, the same fire rests on the members of the church, a new temple “made without hands” (Matthew 24:1–2; John 2:19; Hebrews 9:11). The priests of Israel served to mediate God to the Hebrew community, which in the gospel that was preached to Abraham, was a “blessing to the nations” (Genesis 12:2–3; 22:18; Galatians 3:8). They lived and died. Now, the High Priest who has defeated death has come to dwell in the church and minister the gospel to the world. In the new World configured at the eschaton, Jesus reveals a new city He has built in its center, the church (Revelation 21:1–2).
Therefore, the church has the unique, divinely appointed mission in history to build the world. It is itself formed by Christ through its common practices of the proclamation of the Word and sacraments. The sacraments are common practices internal to the community life of God dwelling among man; that is, they are signs that communicate the fundamental community. But unlike the signs and banners of nations that have come and gone, the signs of the church are also the thing signified: those within the church are transformed by their baptisms and membership in this community. By the work of the Spirit, their participation in the Supper of their Lord both calls them into a life of communion with Christ at the center and into a communion of life together, one that is grounded in the life of the Trinity itself.
In this way, the church stands in the center of the world, presenting a divinely constituted World to the world: in both the teachings and practices of the church, it portrays the divinely designed resolution of the fundamental issues of political and social life as it does individual life. The gospel, through both Word and sacrament conveyed in the church, transforms its members. So too, by living out its common practices, the gospel transforms our imaginations: we are able to convey possibilities in the world that otherwise cannot conceive of them. As we live out those possibilities, the world outside the World is transformed as well (cf. 1 Corinthians 14:24). As discussed in several chapters of the Civitas volume, Hell Shall Not Prevail,there are at least two concerns of world-building that are most pressing in the current moment. To the extent it is carrying out its mission, the church will stand in sharp contrast with two that arise out of the individualistic anthropology that is the sine qua non of liberalism. With a rightly understood anthropology—the new man of Ephesians 2—the church provides the world with a community of strong, enduring social bonds. These bonds last where Enlightenment era liberalism does not because the church understands each of its persons as an image bearer of God. This alone can provide the substantive foundation for a thick commitment to the respect for persons that liberalism has sought for in vain.
But fair warning: the failure of Enlightenment liberalism to create meaningful and durable communities and to provide for the respect for persons brings with it a warning and a place where a change in understanding within the church must occur for it to live out its role in the world. The new (even transfigured) social identity gained by baptized Christians in the church implies a rejection of classical liberal categories in the World. As Christians take the map of the church into the world, they must throw away their Enlightenment compasses. The church has drunk deeply of the Enlightenment’s old man anthropology: its reduction of the human person to the autonomous individual and its voluntarist assumption about community life. To our shame, the church’s social imaginary has been formed by this understanding. Like the world, our social bonds are often weak and largely utilitarian. Our forms of church government follow democratic institutions rather than biblical models.
If the church is or has been syncretic with liberal assumptions about its own nature, if the church does not have a self-understanding that is transformed by its union with Christ, if there is no “new corporate man,” then the church will not build a community any more meaningful than the one it replaces. It will not build a World. Rather, we will continue in our own cycle of world-maintenance, “old man” Christians living out our own modus operandi, offering nothing to our counterparts in the secular world who watch us from outside our beautiful buildings.
There is a different way: churches must thicken and intensify their efforts to do what the church is always called upon to do, to be a community formed by and around Jesus Christ through the Spirit. In forming their ecclesial cultures, churches, at least in America, have for too long free-ridden on the moral boundaries provided by American civil society as opposed to developing and supporting distinctive intra-church practices. The weakening, if not removal, in recent decades of traditional moral buttresses provided by civil society consequently left churches unpracticed in being self-supporting moral communities, the fruits of which are being reaped today. This weakened condition, however, is not inevitable or necessary. The church has often prospered for centuries under cultural conditions hostile to her and her mission.
But to do this, the church must be willing to be the church. As the Lord wills, we must live the transformed life of the baptized. We must share the communion life of those who share a meal with our Savior. We must, in our common practice of reconciling love for each other, demonstrate His love for those He would reconcile to Himself. This mission is, in the same breath, both grand and mundane: to build the World for the world.
- This essay draws on my chapter, “The Church Builds the World,” in Rogers, James R. and Peter J. Leithart (eds). Hell Shall Not Prevail: Essays in Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism (Athanasius Press 2024). pp. 58-73. ↩︎
- Rogers, James R. and Peter J. Leithart, note 1. ↩︎
- Robert Cover, Foreword: Nomos and Narrative, 97 Harv. L.Rev. 4, 5 (1983). ↩︎
- James R. Rogers develops this argument more broadly in his chapter, “Church as Polis, Church as Ethnos, Church as Oikos: Ecclesiocentric Political Theory,” in Rogers James R., and Peter J. Leithart (eds), note 1. ↩︎