Pistis Christou

Faith is a personal journal but it is not a solitary one. The understanding of what it means to be a follower of Christ and a part of the Body of Christ is formed in the tension between the individually committed and the deeply networked person.  As a consequence, sometimes understandings of faith swing to the extremes, sometimes going to the one side of defining faith as simply a solitary journey that one can do without the other. On the other hand, the other extreme can present that community is where God is experienced.

The present trajectory of devout Christians in today’s world, at least those who I am aware of via personal connections, social media, etc. is to emphasize the communal aspects of faith. It is largely obvious that solitary Christian is a fundamentally mistaken notion that almost becomes a oxymoron, if not outright being entirely self-contradictory. Compensating for this deficient understanding of faith and the spiritual life, fighting the trajectories of Western individualism, there is the emphasis on the other pole, the communal aspect of faith. And if you read the Bible, or even more specifically the New Testament, you would be right; the corporate, communal nature of life is very important.

But why is it important? The answer is important because not only does the theological answer serve to legitimate the pursuit of relationships and community in a religious, spiritual context, but it will direct the way we understand the purpose of community, which will direct our attention attention in our relational and communal engagement, formed our expectations of what to expect in relationships and community, and from our attention and expectations, direct in what ways we will act. The answer we provide, I would suggest, can amount to the difference between engaging in the authentic community of Christ and engaging in a community that is formed and controlled out of self-interests, the difference between the community of the redeemed and the cult of the controlling.

There are two important theological “data points” to briefly make. I won’t go into a thorough exegetical and theological rationale for them here, as it will distract from the ultimate point.

Firstly, God created us as people-in-relationship in order to accomplish the purpose of being in God’s image. Let me unpack this a bit. When humanity is said to be formed in the image of God in Genesis 1, there is often times the implicit assumption that this is some ontological statement about who we are as persons. We are in the image of God, so we have some special, divinely attuned capacities because of this. But I don’t think this is the right understanding. Rather, being in the image of God is God’s purpose for us in the created order; it is a designation of the function and role we are to place in this world. We are not ourselves images of God, but rather we are made in the image of God, which is a metaphor used to describe our relationship to creation. We represent the rule of God in the world, acting in accordance to that authority.

Consequently, we are given specific capacities that will enable us to fulfill this role. Three capacity that I think that are implied in Genesis narrative 1) love for each other, 2) capacity for creating (largely but not exclusively through reproduction), and 3) the capacity for language. It is each of these three things that become disrupted by the fall, such as the murder of Abel by Cain, the disruption of sexual order by the “sons of Gods” with the “daughters of men” before the flood, and the finally the God-caused disruption of language at the Tower of Babel. These capacities are not themselves the image of God, but they enable this Divine purpose when they are rightly directly. But with sin, these capacities become wrongly directed, to the point that God frustrates even further in disrupting language lest even greater damage occur.

In other words, the God-given purpose of humanity to be in the image of God entails our relational capacity in love, creating, and language but these can be wrongly directed for other purposes. So, if humanity is to be restored to that purposes, these capacities must be rightly directed again, including how our relatedness is an expression of these capacities.

Secondly, redemption in Christ through the Spirit comes through practice and experience, not in the absence of it. When Paul describes in Romans 5:2-5 how hope springs forth in our hearts, he doesn’t suggest the Spirit inserts hope into our lives as we are in silence and solitude, separated from the struggles of life. Spiritual maturity is not a sophisticated form of avoidance. Rather, it happens through the tribulations that try people. Later in Romans 8, Paul calls people to take on the thoughts of the Spirit, which are life and peace, while they put to death the deeds of the body. This entails thinking that occurs in the midst of practice and struggle, not aside from it. This reflects the Stoic influence on the Apostle Paul, who were deeply concerned about practical thinking rather than theoretical thinking; while in many ways Paul shows clear signs of rejecting, subverting, and reversing Stoic patterns of thinking because Paul is no Stoic, nothing seems to suggest he rejects the practical nature of thinking that the Stoics emphasized.

However, what is redemptive isn’t the experiences we have themselves, but the way the God who brings something new and unlike the present patterns through Christ and the Holy Spirit. God from the outside (and commonly, though not exclusively, from human agents) plants within us the seeds of this redemption that brings something new. 

So in other words, the redemption that comes from Christ and the Spirit occurs through our practice and experience, not in isolation from it. An implication we can draw from this then is as follows: What we avoid, will remain unredeemed.

So bringing these two points together is this. In order for us to fulfill our purposes of being in the image of God, we as humans must exercise our capacity for love, creativity, and language in a rightly direct manner as known in and coming from Christ and the Spirit to fulfill this purpose. When we don’t exercise, we are influenced by the reality of sin in the world away from our Divinely-given purpose, and maybe even ourselves engaging in actions that actively resists this purpose. Therefore, for us to be redeemed by what God is doing in us personally, we must work it out in the various capacities that we are given to fulfill this overarching purpose.

Therefore, to fulfill our purpose of being in the image of God entails the corporate, communal, relational capacities that we have to be rightly directed. This redemption comes through engaging our relational capacities, both through what is happening in ourselves but also what is happening in others that can impact us. The latter role Hebrews recognizes in that other people can help breaked the hardening that sin can cause. But if we do not seek to engage our social capacities, neither will we a) experience the redemption and transformation of these capacities nor b) will we rightly direct these capacities to fulfill our purpose. God’s work in creation and redemption is resisted when we neglect or refuse to engage our faith in relation to others.

But this is different from a similar form of theological reasoning: that we experience God in community. Certainly, this is true insofar as it goes, because we believe that God is at work in the entire cosmos. But it is potentially misleading because it suggests that God is working in a special way in the community that He does not do elsewhere. This presents the risk of deification of the Church, where it becomes assigned a status not merely as a redemptive work but its specific communities and networks of these communities (such as in larger denomination and theological traditions) as itself the necessary and/or sufficient means of redemption. This happens in the Roman Catholic Church in history that understood there is no salvation outside the Church to mean one must be part of the RCC to be saved. This routinely happens in smaller, religious movements that border of cults, suggesting their communal gatherings have a special power and presence of God. This can even happen more subtly within denominations without such dramatic and grandiose pretensions, which feel their current arrangement and existence as a network is necessary for God’s work.

However, when we understand God’s redemption occurring through a) universal history through the sending of His Son and b) the personal engagement through the sending of His Spirit as we put this into practice, the corporate, universal nature of redemption and the personal nature of redemption are met together in the communities and networks of Christian faith. The community of God’s People is what emerges from God’s redemption, as we seek to direct our relational capacities for our purpose of being in the image of God. But this community is never deified. Paul doesn’t say the believers/community is “the image of God,” but we are said to be “IN the image of God” recognizing there is a difference of being God and operated with the agency and purposes of God. The community is not itself the person of Christ, but is said to be merely the body of Christ, recognizing that Christ is still independent from ourselves individually and corporately.

Therefore, redemption happens as part of the community of faith because it is in relationship to others that we can realize God’s redemption to exercise our God-given capacities in the way to fulfill our God-given purpose to be in the image of God. The community should never be deified as the presence of God, but rather recognized as the outworking of God’s power that points us to the presence of God in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the outpouring Holy Spirit. Community as the exercise of redemption allows us to place God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit at the center of our relationships through worship, prayer, practice, and reflection; community as the presence of God risks making our communities authoritarian and/or cultish. The rationale for our communities is important for how our communities are formed, so let us select the exercise of God’s redemptive work as the reason we meet together.