CHAPTER 10
WE BELIEVE IN THE HOLY SPIRIT . . . THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH
JOSHUA COCKAYNE
AS THE TITLE OF THIS PAPER SUGGESTS, in reciting the Nicene Creed, we do not claim to believe in God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit and the church. Rather, as T. F. Torrance’s puts it, “The clauses on the Church . . . follow from belief in the Holy Spirit, for the holy church is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. . . . If we believe in the Holy Spirit, we also believe in the existence of one Church in the one Spirit.”1 Put another way, the church is not an organisation instituted and maintained by human beings striving to act as one body (even if the majority of its members are human beings). Rather, the church is a body instituted and directed by the one Spirit, through whom all its members are united.2
This paper seeks to develop a social ontology of the church which emphasises the primacy of the Spirit’s agency. In doing so, it seeks to utilize “the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive Christian theology.”3 More specifically, I will borrow from the tools and methods of contemporary social ontology to give a model for thinking about the Spirit’s work in uniting the church; to borrow Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, in this paper “social philosophy and sociology are employed in the service of theology.”4
The discussion proceeds as follows: I begin by considering the close relationship between ecclesiology and pneumonology in 1 Corinthians. As Paul describes in 1 Corinthians, the church is a social body that is similar in many ways to other social bodies. Borrowing from the language of the political thought of his time, Paul makes clear that the church is united in spite of its apparent diversity. Yet unlike any other social body, 1 Corinthians makes clear that the church’s unity comes not from humanly imposed political structures but rather from the work of the one Spirit. Thus, unless the work of the one Spirit is emphasised, the church can only be understood as a human organisation, fractured and broken with little true unity. Instead, I argue, pneumatology and ecclesiology must come hand in hand. Expanding the pneumatological ecclesiology in 1 Corinthians, I turn to consider recent work in social ontology to give an account of the church’s unity in the one Spirit. Mirroring Paul’s use of political philosophy, I consider how far contemporary social ontology can take us in the endeavour of ecclesiology and emphasise some points of distinction between the church and social bodies more generally.5
ONE GOD, ONE SPIRIT, ONE CHURCH
There are a number of places where something like a social ontology is offered in the New Testament in explaining the nature of the church and the relation between members and its whole. Typically, these explanations proceed by way of metaphor—the church is described as a temple of the Holy Spirit constituted by individual bricks,6 a household constituted by many stones,7 as a nation or city comprised of many citizens, 8 and as the body of Christ, in which its members are body parts.9 This paper focuses on the last of these images and the discussion of ecclesiology in 1 Corinthians in which the body metaphor is used to describe the unity of the church, despite the obvious diversity in practice, behaviour, and worship.
In providing an account of social unity, throughout the epistle, Paul borrows from political philosophical arguments and terminology to make theological points. First, the term ekklēsia, translated in English as church, has political resonances. The term was commonly used in Greek to refer to an “assembly of the free-men of a city who were entitled to vote. In a more general sense, it describes any public assembly.”10 Thus when Paul uses the term church of God (ekklēsia tou theou) in 1:2, he is using an overtly political term to refer to the church. As both Margaret M. Mitchell and Dale Martin have argued in detail, throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul is drawing from the political philosophical thought of ancient Greek literature. In chapter 1 verse 10, for instance, there is evidence that the language of unity and diversity, as well as the command to be of the “same mind” and “same purpose,” can be found put to similar rhetorical uses in contexts of political disagreement. The pairing of “same mind” and “same purpose” is sometimes paired in political texts; Mitchell argues that 1:10 “is filled with terms which have a long history in speeches, political treatises and historical works dealing with political unity and factionalism.”11
Thus in reaching the image of the body of Christ in chapter 12, where Paul’s account of unity is filled out in most detail, the readers have already become familiar with thinking of the church through this political lens. The metaphor of the society as a body was common in political and philosophical literature, particularly in the Greco-Roman homonoia discourses (speeches used at times of political strife to urge the city or state to remain unified and that all members of the polis remained in their proper place). Mitchell writes that there can be “no doubt that 1 Corinthians 12 employs the most common topos in ancient literature for unity.”12 The well-known fable of Menenius Agrippa (which may have its origins in Aesop’s fables), for instance, “tells of a revolt of the hands, mouth and teeth against the belly, thus weakening the whole body.”13 As Mitchell notes, Paul’s use of the metaphor of the body is not just similar in form but also in detail; many of the homonoia discourses using this metaphor use the same body parts as Paul (hands, feet, eyes, ears) and employ a similar rhetorical strategy of personification.14
So Paul borrows from political philosophy to emphasise the unity of the church in terms very similar to the unity of any other social body. But he is also keen to stress that in other respects, the social ontology of the church is unlike that advocated by political texts. For instance, Martin has argued that, in addition to borrowing from these texts, Paul also subverts the expectations of those familiar with this genre of writing. Whereas the body metaphor was typically used to keep lower class citizens in their places, Paul uses the metaphor to reverse the worldly “attribution of honor and status.”15 Paul repeatedly emphasises that the seemingly lesser parts of the body ought actually to be held in higher esteem (12:23–24)—thus arguing that the perceived hierarchy of political status is only surface level.16 We can see this contrast between political and ecclesial social ontology starkly in verse 12; the expectation, especially given the use of the political metaphor, might be that this verse should finish, “just as the body is one and has many members . . . so it is with the church.”17 Instead Paul finishes this sentence: “so it is with Christ.” Paul is here borrowing from the metaphor of the body but also pressing us to move beyond metaphor—this is an ontological statement about the relationship between the members of the church and Christ.
Importantly for our purposes, as we see in verse 13, the oneness of the community comes not from any human organisation or structure but rather from the work of the Holy Spirit, whose activity brings about a unity in Christ. Gordon Fee, writing on the application of this passage to the contemporary church, claims that unity does not come through human organisational structures, we cannot force our own “brand of ‘spiritual unity’ on the church as simply another human machination. Our desperate need is for a sovereign work of the Spirit to do among us what all our ‘programmed unity’ cannot.”18
Moreover, it is important to see that Paul is not only drawing from Greco-Roman political texts here but also providing an “ecclesial application of the [ Jewish] Shema” and its emphasis on the oneness of God.19 There is “one God” and “one Lord, Jesus Christ,” Paul tells us in 8:6, and chapter 12 repeats this emphasis on oneness—the “one church” is the work of the “one Spirit” (12:12–13), as we constitute the body of the [one] Christ (12:27). Paul is affirming “the emergence of a new social construct,” which, unlike the Greco-Roman polis, is founded on, and united in “the singularity of the one God and Christ (and their one Spirit).”20 In other words, while there are clear similarities between the community of the church and other kinds of social community, it is important to see that the church’s unity comes not from human structures and the externally imposed ideologies of politicians but only through the work of the one Spirit, who unites the one church with Christ, the one Lord. Tom Greggs puts the point succinctly: “Although the church shares in many—if not all—of the characteristics of other organizations, its primary existence is ultimately distinct from every other expression of human sociality. The church comes into being as an event of the act of the lordship of the Holy Spirit of God who gives the church life.”21
How, then, might we think about nature of the church as a human community that is united in and through the lordship of the Holy Spirit? Just as Paul uses the sociopolitical thought of his time to outline his ecclesiology, we now turn to consider the application of contemporary analytic work on the nature of social groups.
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AND ECCLESIOLOGY
In contemporary analytic philosophy there has been a surge of interest in the metaphysics and ethics of social groups and a growing conviction that not all ethical questions can be answered by appealing only to the actions of specific individuals. Groups appear to be responsible for oil spills, financial crashes, and the rise of xenophobia in ways which do not reduce straightforwardly to individual actions. Recent work on the metaphysics of groups has attempted to make sense of these intuitions.22 There are some helpful points of clarification in this literature, I think, which can help us to see the role of the Spirit in the church more clearly.
One particular point of clarification comes in considering the ways in which group attitudes differ from attitudes of group members. Consider the following remark from a sermon on John 17 by Johann Blumhardt, which I think highlights the need for a clear social ontology in theology:
Do we as Jesus’ disciples really want to become one? . . . We must find a way where what you believe I believe and what I believe you believe. For the Lord says in his prayer, “I have given them glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.” What is this glory given to him which he passed on to his disciples? . . . Jesus emphatically promises to give his disciples the Holy Spirit: the Comforter, the guide to all truth, and the One who will unite them. Without this Spirit, they could not become one.23
While I’m sympathetic with much of what Blumhardt wants to say about the role of the Spirit in the church, there appears to be a flattening of social ontology at work in his remarks. This is illuminated in his description of the church becoming one when what you believe I believe and what I believe you believe. The assumption here is that oneness entails a uniformity of belief. More worryingly, the underlying position here appears to assume that unity is located in the actions or beliefs of human members of the church rather than in the unity of the one Spirit or the one body of Christ.
Even if this isn’t the most charitable way to read Blumhardt’s comments (something I won’t consider here), the position described certainly resembles a familiar way of thinking about church unity. The idea seems to be this: Betty comes to faith in Christ and joins the church by participating in a local church congregation. But Betty knows that down the road Jonathan goes to a church that believes different things (perhaps it holds to the ascension of Mary, for instance), and Jonathan’s church does things very differently (they use incense in worship, and don’t have any guitars). It seems clear to Betty that she and Jonathan cannot be part of the same church because if they were truly one in the Spirit, they wouldn’t have such differences in practice and belief. I am caricaturing of course, but there’s a serious point to be made: to understand the church’s unity, we cannot start with Betty’s beliefs, Betty’s practices, or even the beliefs and practices of her church.
To see this point more precisely, allow me to formulate it in terms borrowed from contemporary social ontology. Consider the following taxonomy of social groups:
Coalition: A group with a shared goal, but without a joint decision-making procedure. For example, “environmentalists,” “the oil lobby,” “democracy-promoting states,” “conservatives.”24
Combination: A group “constituted by agents who do not together constitute a coalition or a collective. Examples of combinations include ‘men’ (since common advantage does not suffice for a common goal), ‘humanity,’ ‘the international community,’ ‘the people in this pub,’ and ‘me, you, and Shakespeare.’ ”25
Collective: A group “constituted by agents that are united under a rationally operated group-level decision-making procedure that can attend to moral considerations.”26 That is, the British government is constituted by the ministers of the cabinet, who, through a series of group-decision-making procedure, deliberate on the “best” course of action for the country.
The retort to Blumhardt’s position (or some caricature of it) can be made more precisely in these terms. On Blumhardt’s position, the church is united only when its members share a commitment to a certain set of beliefs, say, the beliefs of Christian orthodoxy. In other words, the church is thought of as a coalition, in which unity comes through a commitment to a shared goal or set of values. This way of thinking about the church is problematic, for in Greggs’ words, “The being of the church is not held in the particular contingent phenomena of the church’s forms; the being of the church is held in the constancy of the Holy Spirit.”27
A social ontology of the church must give primacy to the Spirit’s agency and only an account of the church as a collective can make sense of this. For collectives, unlike combinations and coalitions, are united by their ontology rather than by any shared goals, commitments, or accidental properties of their members. Note that this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any obligations for members to believe and act in certain ways but that the unity of the group is not dependent on these individual actions. Another important thing to notice about collectives is that they allow us to distinguish between the beliefs of the group and the beliefs of a group’s members. A government can hold that some course of action is preferable, even if its members don’t unanimously agree, such as the British government’s commitment to ‘get Brexit done’, despite the divergent commitments of individual cabinet ministers. A committee can recommend a policy, even if its votes are split 90–10. More positively, an organisation can act as a single body even if its employees take on vastly different roles—indeed, it might sometimes aim to compensate for too much of one kind of employee by employing someone with vastly different values to better reflect the diversity of the organisation as a whole. In other words, unity is not the same as uniformity. If the church is a collective, then we can be united as one church, even if we don’t believe all of the same things.
Where things become more difficult in applying social ontology to ecclesiology is in considering how the work of the Spirit allows us to think of the church as a united collective, especially given the apparent diversity of the outward forms of the church, as Blumhardt attests to. Again, work in social ontology can help us to make important points of clarification here.
Typically, discussions of collective ontology locate the unity of the group in the decision-making procedures of that group. Christian List and Philip Pettit, for instance, hold that a group agent must have the capacity to form “representational states, motivational states, and a capacity to act on their basis.”28 Moreover, it must do so in a way which meets some basic standard of rationality. As List and Pettit attest to, one of the most difficult problems to be overcome in considering a group as a collective (or “group agent,” in their terminology) is that of group aggregation; many majority-based voting systems are unable to meet standards of group rationality (we don’t need to worry about the details here; if the church meets the conditions for counting as a collective, it certainly isn’t through the aggregation of its members’ beliefs and attitudes). For List and Pettit, “To count as an agent, a group must exhibit at least a modicum of rationality. And so, its members must find a form of organization that ensures, as far as possible, that the group satisfies attitude-to-fact, attitude-to-action, and attitude-to-attitude standards of rationality.”29
List and Pettit’s primary concern in Group Agency is to provide an account of how corporations and other groups could be considered agents and therefore responsible agents, capable of being held to account for their actions. While they hold that these conditions are typically met through group-level aggregation, they admit that it is possible, at least in principle, to meet these conditions without appealing to the agency of members at all. Elsewhere I have argued that this possibility opens up potential for using social ontology for thinking about the church as a group agent, even if its members’ decisions and structures are not the ground of its agency and thereby its unity. Here are three examples I’ve considered, each of which have some application for thinking about the ontology of the church:
Honeybees: “Bees can combine, on the basis of simple signals, so as to perform as a group agent.”30 While no single bee has this complex level of decision making by itself, the swarm as a whole has “impressive powers of decision making, especially with respect to simultaneous-option decisions.”31 “It is harder to imagine, though not conceptually impossible, that nature or culture could work to a similar effect on human beings eliciting, coalescent agents.”32
Terrorist Cells: Think of the cellular organization by which, so we are told, many terrorist organizations have operated. We can imagine that a cellular network may be established for the promotion of some goals, without those recruited to the different cellular tasks being aware of the overall purpose; they may be kept in the dark or even deceived about it. The organization would be composed of a group of people, in perhaps a thin sense of group, and would function as an agent. But it would do so without joint intention among its members, with the possible exception of a few coordinators.33
Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): The Marvel “shared universe” consists of a number of films and television series with an overarching plot and character arch. While actors and crewmembers are ignorant of this overarching purpose, they participate in the actions of the group by following scripts and instructions of directors and producers. The MCU acts as a collective despite widespread ignorance from its constituent members.34
I’ve argued these examples can help explain the unity we find in the church despite its apparent diversity. Perhaps, we might think, the Spirit guides and unites the church through certain instructions (as in the terrorist cell and MCU cases). Or perhaps the Spirit’s indwelling provides a kind of instinctive response, such that members are united in action (as in the honeybee case) even if they are ignorant of the mechanisms undergirding unity. All of these examples share a common feature: group-level agency can arise even if it is not the result of coordination of individual members. These examples all give some plausible ways of thinking about unity in spite of widespread diversity and ignorance.
But while these examples have some insights for thinking about how individuals relate to the church, the work of the Spirit acts as a kind of black box for unity in these cases. In other words, focusing primarily on the members of the church and their relation to the group pays insufficient attention to precisely what the role of the Spirit in the church is. And so more detail is needed if we wish to emphasise the primacy of the Spirit in the church.
THE SOCIAL ONTOLOGY OF DICTATORSHIPS
Returning to the discussion of social ontology will help us to say something more constructive about just how a single person (i.e., the Spirit) might be thought of as the primary agent in a social whole (i.e., the church). However, as soon as we begin to specify the role of the co-opting agent in the previous examples, we are met with the difficulty of explaining how the whole derives its unity from one individual while retaining a truly social ontology. Consider List and Pettit’s remarks on the nature of dictatorships, for instance:
Although some group agents may exist by virtue of the authorization of an individual spokesperson, this case is degenerate, since everything the recognition of such a group agent entails is already expressible in an individual‐level language. . . . The realism appropriate in relation to this kind of group agent is a thin and relatively redundant one, compared to the non‐redundant realism we defend more generally.35
Aside from the fact that this comment appears to undermine their example of the terrorist group agent above, the problem, as List and Pettit see it, is that group agency, which is rooted in individual agency, is metaphysically redundant in important ways. If decision making is the result of one individual in a group (such as a dictator), then it becomes difficult to distinguish between the actions of the group and the action of the dictator. In other words, the actions of the dictator just are the actions of the group.
This worry looks more severe when applied to the context of the church. For if we affirm that the unity of the church comes through the agency of the Spirit and that members act akin to ignorant terrorists, script following actors, or impulse following honeybees, then we are forced to admit that rather than talking about the mystical unity of the whole body, we might as well speak of a corporately empowered individual (to borrow List and Pettit’s phrase), namely, the Holy Spirit. Thus the examples used previously risk collapsing the church’s ontology into the ontology of the Spirit. Instead, we need a social ontology of the church that takes seriously the primacy of the Spirit’s agency but that doesn’t collapse into a metaphysically redundant account of the church’s social reality. Putting the point theologically, we need to make some distinction between the work of the Holy Spirit and the being of the church; in Gregg’s words, “While the Spirit is the sine qua non of the church, the church is not the sine qua non of the Spirit.”36
One way of meeting this challenge is to think more broadly about what counts as a group agent. While List and Pettit admit that some groups meet the conditions for agency without group-level aggregation, it is clear that their primary concern is to discuss those groups that employ a rational decision-making procedure involving a number of individual agents. What they fail to attend to is that even metaphysically thin group agents, such as dictatorships and tyrannies, have clear differences between group-level decisions and individual-level decisions. Consider an example from Stephanie Collins to help illustrate this:
Collective Rescue: There are six strangers at the beach. One is drowning and the others are sunbathing. Each sunbather has the goal that the swimmer be rescued, each believes that every sunbather has this goal (and each therefore believes each has prudential reason to do what they can towards this), and each is disposed to act responsively to the others (insofar as they encounter one another) to realize the goal. All of this happens via their exchange of concerned expressions. They are a coalition. The swimmer can be reached only with a motorboat. It will take two people to drag the boat to the water and hold it while a third starts it. The boat will take off straight away, so the fourth and fifth, who will pull the swimmer into the boat, must already be in the boat. . . . Each sunbather is wholly unknowledgeable about rescuing swimmers—except Laura. All see the drowning, but only Laura knows what any of the required individual actions are. Thankfully, Laura knows what all the required actions are. Laura asks if any of the others know what to do and receives puzzled looks in response. So she starts instructing one to drag the boat, one to pull the starter cord, and so on. At each instruction, Laura checks that the relevant beachgoer is willing and able to follow the instruction. Each commits (if only tacitly) to follow her instructions and each supposes the others have too. Laura’s instructions divide the necessary actions among the sunbathers. Each performs the action that Laura instructs him or her to perform, because Laura has instructed it. The swimmer ceases drowning.37
According to Collins, the reason that this account does not imply the kind of metaphysical redundancy which List and Pettit describe is that the “the decision-procedure is group-level (and not merely Laura-level) in that the beliefs and desires that Laura takes as inputs when she is deciding for the group are different from the beliefs and desires that she would take as inputs if she were deciding for herself.”38 In other words, the decisions that Laura makes as the leader of the group are different from those she would make if she were acting as an individual. She acts on behalf of the group in structuring the actions of individuals to bring about the rescue. In particular, when acting on behalf of the group, she takes the desires of others into consideration, she makes decisions that are properly sensitive to the capacities and situations to all of the group’s members, and she uses the others of the group to achieve the group’s ends. Put simply, while “the group’s attitudes . . . fully track Laura’s attitudes . . . this is only true of Laura’s attitudes qua leader.”39 So while it’s true that the group-level decision making is entirely in Laura’s head, it is not true that the decision of the group collapses into Laura’s decisions, since even in this case Laura must take a role within the group.
On Collins’s more permissive account of social ontology, tyrannies and democracies can be collectives, and they can do this in a nonredundant way. As she describes, “A group can have a distinctive decision procedure even if the group has a leader who instructs all the others such that the decision-making procedure is housed in the leader’s head.”40 On her account, all that is needed to give a nonredundant group ontology of a dictatorship is that “non-decision making members (i) are committed to the procedure and (ii) have inputs into the procedure, at least in the minimal sense that they could leave if they wanted to.”41 While Collins admits that many actual dictatorships fail to meet (i) and (ii) (e.g. because agency is enforced rather than opted-into), this is not because the ontology of dictatorships must lead to metaphysical redundancy. The difference between List and Pettit’s ontology and Collins’s, then, is that according to Collins we can distinguish between individual attitudes to beliefs/actions and group attitudes to beliefs/actions, even if these are entirely in the head of one individual. That is, we can distinguish between Laura qua individual and Laura qua leader.
THE BENEVOLENT DICTATOR: GROUP AGENCY IN THE ONE SPIRIT
Collins’s picture of collective ontology in which decision-making is rooted in the decision-making of one individual helps to focus our ontology of the church away from the members of the church and onto the agency of the Holy Spirit, but contrary to List and Pettit’s concerns, it does so in a way that allows us to distinguish between the agency of the Spirit in the church and the agency of the Spirit more generally.
Collins’s example of Laura and the collective rescue has some promise, I think, for thinking about the kind of agency the Spirit employs within the church. Unlike the previous examples we have considered, in Collins’s example, agency is rooted not in organisational structures but in relationship. The reason the beach rescuers can act as a collective is because of Laura’s interaction with each individual and her coordination in bringing the preferences of all together into group-level actions. And although the decision-making procedure that unites the group is located in Laura’s head, the inputs and outputs of the groups actions and decisions lie beyond Laura. This example speaks more specifically into the how of pneumatological ecclesiology.
Whereas previous examples left unsaid just how the Spirit acted as the primary uniting agent of the church, an ecclesiology drawn from the Collective Rescue example stresses that the Spirit, attentive to the particularity of the church’s members (including the needs and desires of every individual), seeks to instruct and guide the members of the church to act as the one body of Christ. Yet, as in the collective rescue case, the Spirit’s agency is not exhausted by fulfilling the desires and needs of the individual members, but the Spirit also pursues the good of the collective; the church must act as one body of Christ in unity with the will of Christ and not merely for the good of its members. It follows on this picture that the human acts of the church cannot be synonymous with the divine actions in the church.42 While the Spirit employs and uses the outward manifestations of the church, it is the Spirit’s agency and not these human manifestations that are the locus of unity. Put in philosophical terms—the attitudes of the collective are not identical to the attitudes of its members.
A collective ontology rooted in the will of a single decision-making person, the Holy Spirt, emphasises that unity is not equivalent with shared beliefs or shared actions but only arises through the agency of the Spirit. Drawing the insights of ecclesiology and social ontology together, here is a picture that, perhaps optimistically, considers what a true unity in the church might consist of:
Collective Rescue 2: There are millions of individuals who belong to the one church. Some worship in formalised, institutional churches, others in non-denominational contexts. Each member of the church has the goal that God’s kingdom come (broadly construed), each believes that every other member has this goal (and each therefore believes each has prudential reason to do what they can towards this), and each is disposed to act responsively to the others (insofar as they encounter one another) to realize this goal. But no one of them can fully realize this goal or see how to achieve it. Each church member is unknowledgeable about how to bring about the ends of God’s kingdom. All see some of the problems the church faces, but only the Holy Spirit knows what any of the required individual actions are. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit knows what all the required actions are. Moreover, the Spirit works in the lives of individual members and communities to orientate them towards these required actions. The Spirit starts guiding one to serve the needs of local community estate, one to write profound and beautiful liturgies, and so on. At each instruction, the Spirit checks that the relevant member is willing and able to follow the instruction. Each commits (if only tacitly) to follow her instructions and each supposes the others have too. The Spirit’s instructions divide the necessary actions among the members of the church. Each performs the action that the Spirit instructs him or her to perform, because the Sprit has instructed it. The kingdom of God comes.43
This picture paints an image of how true unity in the church might come about, namely, by discerning the will of the one Spirit and acting in accordance with the will of the Spirit in union with Christ.
However, it might be argued that this picture of ecclesiology dispenses with community and the gathered worship of the institutional church and her sacraments altogether. If the unity of the church is found not in some particular method or tradition but in the Spirit, then perhaps unity is best found in private meditation in which one encounters the Spirit and discerns the Spirit’s presence and guidance. The picture I have been painting admits the possibility—indeed, it is surely possible for the Spirit to use religious hermits and those far from the communities of the gathered church in enacting the will of Christ in the world. Possibility does not admit normativity, however. For it is important to note that one further question concerns precisely how the Spirit instructs the members of the church. While the church must be thought of as grounded in the work of the Spirit, we must still note that it is a community in which the Spirit is primarily revealed. The community is vital for revealing the will of the Spirit to the church.44 As Greggs puts it, “The church is that community in which the other is given as a gift in her otherness by the event of the Spirit’s act in creating the particular church in a particular time in its creaturely contingency. The otherness is not an otherness like any in the world: this otherness is based not on utility or attraction but on the very givenness of the other person.”45
Before concluding, it is worth reflecting a little on why the community of the church might be especially helpful in revealing the will of the Spirit. As I’ve argued elsewhere (with David Efird), there are good reasons for thinking that an engagement with God in community has potential to provide a richer and deeper experience of God’s presence than one might encounter alone. To show why, we draw on the psychological notion of “joint attention.” Joint attention, broadly construed, occurs when two or more individuals are aware of one another’s awareness of some object of attention. This ability to jointly attend with others plays a crucial role in infant development; infants learn to navigate the world, to develop a sense of self, and are able to imitate the actions of caregivers through joint attention. An important feature of joint attention is that our experiences of the world are shaped by the attention of others. Philosopher of mind John Campbell writes,
The individual experiential state you are in, when you and another are jointly attending to something, is an experiential state that you could not be in were it not for the other person attending to the object. The other person enters into your experience as a constituent of it, as co-attender, and the other person could not play that role in your experience except by being co-attender. 46
Consider driving in the car with another passenger (an example given by Campbell); in pointing to a feature of the road (perhaps by telling the driver to watch out for the upcoming speed-camera), the passenger shapes and alters the driver’s experience of the road in important ways. Even though the passenger might not be a feature of the driver’s direct experience, the driver is aware of the passenger as a co-attender to the object of the road.
The same might be true of participating in acts of liturgy in community. Just as a driver’s attention to the road is shaped by a passenger, our experience of God’s presence in the context of communal worship can allow others to point or direct our attention to God in ways that would simply not be possible alone. Encountering God in community importantly shapes our experiences and can potentially help overcome blind spots or biases that we were previously unaware of.47 While it is at least possible for the unity of the Spirit to be achieved through individual prayer and devotion, there are good reasons for thinking that this is not the primary means by which the Spirit communicates, and there are some good explanations for why this might be the case. The discernment of the Spirit’s will for the community and by the community is therefore crucial for the unity of the church.
CONCLUSION
While clearly the church has many similarities with other social collectives—it is constituted by diverse groups of people with diverse beliefs and backgrounds yet united to act as one—it is a form of community that is radically distinct from any social or political body. In Bonhoeffer’s words, the church is a “form of community sui generis.”48 While Paul clearly sees the relevance of political language and metaphor to describe the church, he also roots this ecclesiology in the oneness of God. The church’s unity comes not from any human social endeavour but from the work of the one Spirit. I’ve argued that contemporary social ontology can help give precise language to some of these distinctions and to affirm the doctrine of the church asserted by Paul and many others in the theological tradition. Thus the task of ecclesiology on the ground, so to speak, is that of discernment. That is, the church must discern the will and instructions of the Spirit as they relate to the will of Christ and seek to live faithfully in light of this discernment. This must ultimately be done in the community and for the community.
NOTES
1. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 252.
2. I would like to thank David Efird† and Koert Verhagen for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this material, as well as the members of the audience at the LA Theology Conference for their excellent questions.
3. Oliver Crisp, “Analytic Theology as Systematic Theology,” Open Theology 3, no. 1 (2018): 165.
4. In a recent paper, “Analytic Ecclesiology,” Journal of Analytic Theology (2019): 100–123, I argued that the oneness of the church might be understood by appealing to work in contemporary social ontology. There, I gestured toward two models of thinking about the church’s unity; a terrorist cell constituted by ignorant agents united through a top-down organisational structure, and a honeybee colony, which is able to make decisions about its environment as a group which seemingly surpass its capacities to make decisions as individual honeybees. I suggested that appealing to the work of the Holy Spirit, we might say similar things about the church’s unity. However, what was left unclear was just how the Holy Spirit might act in uniting the one church. This paper attempts to further develop this model, paying closer attention to the pneumatology at work in the one church.
5. It is worth noting that for the sake of scope my focus will be on the Holy Spirit. This narrowing of focus should not, however, be taken as a tacit denial of the work of the Father and the Son in constituting the church, which I take to be essential.
6. 1 Cor 3:10–17; 6:18–20; 2 Cor 6:14–18.
7. Eph 2:11–20; 1 Tim 3:14–15; 1 Pet 2:3–8.
8. Heb 11:8–16; 13:7–16; 1 Pet 2:9–10; Rev 21:9–27.
9. Rom 12:3–8; 1 Cor 12:12–31; Col 1:18–20; 3:12–17.
10. Eckhard J. Schnabel, “The Community of the Followers of Jesus in 1 Corinthians,” in The New Testament Church: The Challenge of Developing Ecclesiologies, ed. J. P. Harrison and J. D. Dvorak (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 105.
11. Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 79.
12. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation, 161.
13. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation, 157–58.
14. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation, 159. Those familiar with Plato’s Republic will see the obvious points of connection—Plato thinks of the structure of polis as analogous to the structure of the individual, and of discord in each as the source of injustice.
15. Martin, The Corinthian Body (Hartford, CT: Yale University Press, 199), 96.
16. Martin, The Corinthian Body, 94.
17. Richard Hays, First Corinthians, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 213.
18. Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 607.
19. Andrew Byers, “The One Body of the Shema in 1 Corinthians: An Ecclesiology of Christological Monotheism,” New Testament Studies 62, no. 4 (2016): 517.
20. Byers, “The One Body of the Shema in 1 Corinthians,” 532.
21. Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 2.
22. See Deborah Tollefsen, Groups as Agents (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), for a good overview of this literature.
23. Johann Blumhardt, Gospel Sermons (Walden, NY: Plough, 2019), 86.
24. Stephanie Collins, Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 16.
25. Collins, Group Duties, 20.
26. Collins, Group Duties, 12.
27. Collins, Group Duties, 19.
28. Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20.
29. List and Pettit, Group Agency, 36. Similarly, according to Stephanie Collins (Group Duties), there are three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for holding a decision-making procedure to be group-level: (1) “Each member is committed (even if only tacitly) to abide by the procedure’s results. This commitment can be overridden, but is presumptively decisive in the member’s decision-making” (p. 12). (2) “The beliefs and preferences that the procedure takes as inputs, and the way the procedure processes those inputs to form decisions, systematically derive from the behaviour (e.g., deference, votes, meetings, contributions, etc.) of members, while be operationally distinct from the inputs and processes that any member uses when deciding for herself ” (p. 13). (3) “The enactment of the group’s decisions requires actions on the part of its members, where those actions are also properly understood as attributable to the collective” (p. 14).
30. Thomas Seeley, “Decision Making in Superorganisms: How Collective Wisdom Arises from the Poorly Informed Masses,” in Bound Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, ed. Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
31. Seeley, “Decision Making in Superorganisms,” 249.
32. List and Pettit, Group Agency, 33.
33. List and Pettit, Group Agency, 33. I consider these two examples in “Analytic Ecclesiology.”
34. I consider this example in an unpublished manuscript, “Baptismal Obligations.”
35. List and Pettit, Group Agency, 7–8.
36. Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology, 15.
37. Collins, Group Duties, 108–9.
38. Collins, Group Duties, 167–69.
39. Collins, Group Duties, 167–69.
40. Collins, Group Duties, 166.
41. Collins, Group Duties, 166.
42. Greggs makes a similar point: “The Spirit is the condition for the event of the church: there is infinitely more to the dynamic self-determining act of the Holy Spirit than the event of the church, and the church cannot simply be identified with the Spirit. Faithful attendance to the Spirit’s activity is needed, but overconfidence that human activity is the condition of or even is divine activity must be guarded against. The church’s creaturely forms cannot be the basis for such claims, nor can they straightforwardly be identified with the Spirit’s presence. Rather, despite the human propensity to sin and idolatry, it comes to pass that, in the Spirit’s gracious faithfulness, the Spirit acts faithfully to bring about the event of the church. No form of church—high or low, traditional or modern—can ever be either conceived as the basis for the Spirit’s act or identified with the Spirit’s act. The forms are merely the events of the creaturely and contextual spatiotemporal conditions in which the Spirit acts to fulfil faithfully and constantly the promise of the presence of Christ where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name” (Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology, 9–10).
43. My adaptation of Collins’s “Collective Rescue” case in Group Duties, 108–9.
44. Greggs continues, “This community is so vital, since, ‘the individual is not already free; sin continues in the life of the church as in all creation. . . . But in the concrete givenness of the other is the gift of the Spirit of God—a gift which leads us to our true identity in God.” Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology, 44.
45. Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology, 40.
46. John Campbell, “Joint Attention and Common Knowledge,” in Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, ed. Naomi Elian, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, and Johannes Roessler (Oxford: Clarendon), 287.
47. We put it as follows: “In allowing others to shape and guide our perception of God in the worship . . . one of the results is that our own biases and impairments can be corrected by sharing attention with others. When alone, we might have the tendency to focus on certain aspects of God’s character, and thereby build up a biased picture of God, in worship, it is possible to be guided by the focus of another’s attention. This change in our focus might simply be by means of the emphasis another person places on certain words, the shape and posture of their body, or even the focus of their gaze (on, say, the altar, or the cross, for example). All these ways might serve as pointers to redirect our own attention and thereby to experience some different aspect of God, thereby removing our biases in important ways.” Cockayne and Efird, “Common Worship,” Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 3 (2018): 320.
48. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 266.