But there it was: Christ is our steering wheel, not our spare tire. Now I will confess that I actually pondered this for several minutes, not because I wanted to penetrate to the spiritual truth, the kernel of eternal wisdom embedded in the saying, or because I was smitten by its double-entendre. Rather, I found myself wondering who chose this particular message, why it was selected at this moment, and what it suggested about the church whose marquee it adorned. Pondering these questions reminded me that in my last entry I indicated that I would spend some time in this blog taking a closer look at the types of churches that take up or stay away from social justice as a congregational mission. I think this aphorism is suggestive for one type of church.
I think the message here is simply this: Christ is the means we employ to maneuver ourselves in such a way that we can get to where we want to go; he is not a spare part to employ in the event of an equipment failure that would bring the maneuvering and advancement to a halt. I'm not sure if I like this message.
In my previous blog entry, I noted the distinction some sociologists of religion make between high-tension churches and low-tension churches. The former are those religious groups that are at odds with prevailing social and economic conditions, and are in conflict with the social beliefs, attitudes and values that are dominant in society. The latter are those religious groups that are rather comfortable with existing social and economic conditions, and whose peculiar constellation of religious and social beliefs, attitudes and values serve in both active and passive ways to bring legitimacy and stability to social and economic structures. The former opposes and resists the status quo, and the latter sanctions and preserves the status quo. We will need to keep this distinction in mind as we move forward here.
I also noted in the previous blog entry that, in general, there are two orientations toward the world evident among churches. On the one hand, there are churches whose concern for and interest in the world extend no further than seeing it as the place to go to preach the gospel so that others might come to faith. On the other hand, there are churches whose concern and interest moves them to work actively for social change and a more just and equitable socioeconomic order. The former take their warrant from passages like Mark 16:15-16, while the latter appeal to passages like Matthew 25:31-46. The former do not consider the “world” as such to be salvageable, but rather the temporary venue for the prevalence of sin and evil from which the gospel can save. The latter regard this same “world” as the very object of divine love and initiative to overcome all that challenges the divine intent that all live and flourish in a diverse community of love. We need also to keep this distinction in orientation to the world in mind, and we can do this with the aid of these labels: The former we will refer to as the “preaching” churches, and the latter as the “enacting” churches.
Clearly, in conceptual language coined by the great sociologist Max Weber, what I’m setting up here are “ideal types,” or a set of general descriptions that distinguish one category of phenomena from another, but which do not actually exist in pure form. Rather, precisely as ideal types, these descriptions and distinctions are aids to forms of thought and analysis, tools to help us get our minds around complex and variable phenomena that might otherwise remain indistinguishable.
If we can acknowledge that these ideal types–high-tension/low-tension, preaching/enacting–represent the ends of two continua, then a most interesting picture begins to emerge. By crossing these two continua, it becomes possible to perceive four fairly distinct types of churches. There are high-tension preaching and low-tension preaching churches, both of which are at some remove from the enacting end of the preaching–enacting continuum. And likewise, there are high-tension enacting and low-tension enacting churches, both of which are relatively detached from the preaching end of the continuum.
Or, there is yet another way to look at it. There are preaching churches that are high-tension, at odds with their context but doing little more than evangelizing the unsaved into the church as a separate social and religious world. And there are preaching churches that are low-tension, effectively in support of the socioeconomic status quo but nonetheless interested in enlarging the citizenship of the future heavenly world. Then there are enacting churches that are high-tension, so put off by the injustice of our current state of affairs that their voice and behavior are unmistakably evident as they participate in our public life. And there are enacting churches that are low-tension, concerned to bring aid and comfort to those who have been overlooked and disadvantaged by an otherwise stable, workable, and equitable socioeconomic system.
What the ideal types in this crossed continua suggest is that any given church’s regard for and involvement in matters of social justice will be correlative to its (1) basic sense of the gospel, (2) its understanding of the ecclesial job description bequeathed by the gospel, and (3) its perception of the social, economic, and political systems that provide the conditions necessary for one to flourish–in this world and/or the next!
Now let me complicate this typology even more by introducing yet a third continuum, namely that of liberal/conservative. What I have in mind here is the use of these terms more in their social and political sense than in their theological sense (though the theological sense is not excluded entirely).
I would describe an orientation as “liberal” if it was predisposed to favor social and political reform, to value change and diversity of thought and ideas, to assure personal freedom and civil liberties, and to be resistant to the imposition of patterns and practices of authority inherited from previous eras simply because they were formerly established or had become tradition.
On the other hand, I would describe an orientation as “conservative” if it was disposed to favor existing patterns and practices and maintain them to assure their continuity, to construe reform as a means to return to traditional beliefs and values from previous eras, to regard with suspicion any initiative whose outcome might bring alteration to established social, economic, and political authority, and to place trust in systems and institutions to guide and constrain the use of human imagination and reason in the development of the social and political order.
To be sure, these too are ideal types. However, when juxtaposed with the other two continua, this continuum suggests a greater degree of complexity and nuance to the characterizations of churches and their regard for social justice. The addition of this continuum effectively means that, instead of four types, there are actually eight types altogether possible to describe. There are liberal high-tension enacting churches, and conservative high-tension enacting churches. There are liberal low-tension preaching churches, and conservative low-tension preaching churches. And there are four other types in between these four....
So what type of church embraces the sentiment, Christ is our steering wheel, not our spare tire? Actually, depending on your reading of the aphorism, it could be any one of the eight possibilities. The task ahead of us is to describe the four basic types of churches, each of which admits of variation along the lines of a liberal/conservative continuum. More particularly, the task is to explore the characteristic features and theological commitments that encourage a community of faith to stand up or give in, to cultivate change or preserve tradition, to go out preaching good news and preparing for a future world, or go out enacting good news and embodying the future world here. Stay tuned....
Peace,
Douglas Sharp
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