A Question of Heritage

Glimpsing the Body of Christ

What is our heritage? What have we been given by those who came before us? Is it worth protecting? Do we understand it enough to preserve it? Or will we merely enjoy the fruit while failing to plant the seeds?

Photo by Elaine Casap on Unsplash

In April of this year, I attended a Christian conference — something I approached with low expectations born of having attended nominally similar events in the past. I was, however, pleasantly surprised. Not by the world-class production, nor by the famous speakers (they had neither), but by the personal and theological sincerity of the community that hosted the conference.

Attended by some 500 people, the conference was hosted by Homestead Heritage, a Christian community whose life together emphasizes family, craftsmanship, farming, and homeschooling. In more than one sense, I found the people of this community to be like the people of the mountain village in the film The Last Samurai. “From the moment they wake, they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue.”

As I spent time with these people, I thought of the words, “As wise as serpents but as harmless as doves.” While exuding an earthy, personable humility, I found them to be sharp students of Scripture, human nature, and their respective vocations. Some were prolific writers and scholars. Some were savvy but unassuming businessmen. Some were housewives who considered it a deep honor to pour themselves out for their children. All were kind, curious, bright-eyed, and hard-working.

Who were these people, and, in our selfish, fearful world, where had they come from?

As I listened to the lectures, the answer to this question slowly surfaced like a fossil from receding sediment. Yes, some of the lectures felt a bit like reviewing the subsections of a legal codex. But I would come to see that such review was, in fact, central to the longevity of this delightful community. As I would learn, their way of life is the result of a desire to honor God’s blueprint for the Church, his Body on earth.

Living Stones

While some of the lectures were a bit dry, others boiled over with flashes of insight that challenged my understanding of God, the Church, and Christianity.

For example, did you know that the Apostles Paul and Peter both refer to the members of “Christ’s body” (that is, those who carry his Spirit) as “living stones” being “built up and fitted together as a spiritual house”? (Ephesians 2:19–22, 1 Peter 2:4–7) Personally, I had read these verses before, but I hadn’t understood how they could be applied in any literal sense. I must have assumed they were mainly spiritual or symbolic.

But then Paul again uses the Body metaphor in places like Colossians 2:19, referring to “… connection to the head, from whom the whole body, supported and knit together by its joints and ligaments, grows as God causes it to grow.” And before Paul, there was Jesus, praying to the Father (in John 17) that all who believe in him “would be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us… may they be perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me.”

This kind of unity, though — a kind that could be witnessed by the world — cannot be symbolic. It requires a flesh-and-blood instantiation. This, then, is what (I hope) I was witnessing: the Body, rightly understood, being fitted together under the headship of the Father. Living stones, animated by the same Spirit, a house fashioned from the same broken fodder of this world, yet displaying a unity unknown to our self-serving, individualistic way of life: my way of life.

So why hadn’t I seen it before? I had grown up going to church, but hadn’t felt more than a glimmer of God’s life in Sunday services or charity work or Bible studies. Perhaps one of my personal reflections, jotted down while contemplating this community, sums it up: I was never attracted to the Church until I saw her not married to the world.

This thought called to mind a passage from the book of Hebrews: “Pursue peace with everyone, as well as holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.” Holiness here does not refer to moral perfection, but to being set apart for God. In a word, not married to the world. That is, not wed to the pursuit of power and self-exaltation that characterizes the world system.

Married To The World

In the view of the Heritage community, there are two distinct systems in the world. One of those systems, the apex of worldly wisdom, is represented by earthly governments (the kingdoms of men). The other system is the kingdom of God, which operates according to a wholly different set of norms and values. Jesus hinted at the distinction between these systems with such comments as, “If my kingdom were of this world, my disciples would fight,” and “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.”

Only a few centuries after Jesus had inaugurated this alternative kingdom, it was officially co-opted by the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine, a shrewd statesman and military commander, understood the political power of speaking the spiritual language of the masses. He therefore insinuated himself into the Church and baptized his conquests as the advance of Christendom. He killed in the name of Him who had not killed.

This stratagem blurred the line between what was owed to Caesar and what was owed to God. Once the distinction between God and government had been erased, further theological developments (by Augustine and others) only served to conceal the merger of these inherently dissimilar kingdoms. In this way, believers were seduced by the idea that they could have both their safety and their sanctity — that they could defend the so-called “kingdom of God” with the weapons of the world.

Modern-day believers are divided on the value of this syncretism. The Heritage community, however, is firmly of the view that it was a hostile takeover: a distortion and corruption of the Spirit by which Jesus had lived and died. From this perspective, the system that had torn apart his physical body was still very much at work, this time tearing apart his spiritual Body by means of a counterfeit.

As a result, the people called to be set apart yoked themselves together with the system from which they had been called out. It would be almost a thousand years before the conviction to throw off that yoke would find the courage to do so.

The Vow of Baptism

One of the lecturers offered an illuminating tour of this history. From Peter Waldo and John Wycliffe up through Martin Luther and John Wesley, the lecturer detailed the risky steps taken by these men and others to disentangle Church and State. I was surprised to learn, for example, that as late as the 1500s, the Swiss government was still so religiously minded as to mandate the baptism of all infants under its rule. In fits and starts, believers began to see such governmental injunctions as the husk of the faith being used to bolster the purposes of — and identification with — the State.

The response of these reformers was not to overthrow their respective governments, but to restore the distinction between the two systems*, and to reclaim the traditions that had been hijacked. Baptism, because it was being used in the above manner, became central to this struggle.

Today, baptism has been thoroughly disconnected from citizenship, but it remains a subject of differing opinions within Christendom. The Heritage community is interested in preserving baptism not just as a sign of belief, but as an act that signifies one’s departure from the kingdom of the world. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that this very act, which had once symbolized one’s exit from the world system, had become the symbol of entrance into it.)

The Heritage community sees baptism as an act analogous to a wedding vow. It is an act that symbolizes the settled desire to give up the self-games and statecraft that characterize the system of the world. Accordingly, it is an act only appropriate for those who have determined that keeping their own ego on the throne of their heart will ultimately destroy their soul. In the language of the Bible, the one who is baptized is “baptized into the Body of Christ”. And what is that Body? You guessed it: the house of living stones.

Baptism, then, in the view of this community, is a bodily act that simultaneously signals a departure from the world system and a commitment to a spiritual Body (although not necessarily their particular portion of that Body). The million-dollar question is: Is this a Body that any sane person would want to be a part of?

Non-Coercive Love

The answer to this question, for me, came partly from the lectures but also from my conversations with members of the community. The easiest way to say it is that I found them to be the kind of people whose friendship I would cherish. They carry themselves with a humble dignity. While not being surprised by sin, they are keenly aware of its dis-integrating (atomizing, divisive, isolating) tendencies. They are wholesome without being sanctimonious.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that people who are intentional about community know how to do relationships. But this quality is so rare that I’ve come to hold out little hope of finding it anymore. It’s interpersonal gold. It’s something that all of us want but few of us know how to give. It’s the state of being connected, wanted, valued — yet still free to live, move, fail, and grow. It is, quite simply, the kind of love I’ve found in God but don’t really expect to find in people.

Now, it’s one thing for people to be pleasantly non-confrontational while interacting face-to-face. We all do this — often while mentally prescribing a plan of treatment for the other guy. But it was quite another thing to listen to a lecture that delineated the non-coercive quality of God’s authority, and the implications of that quality at the organizational level.

If the policy of God’s Spirit is to move us not through the blunt force of shame and condemnation but through patient, loving relationship, why would we be otherwise with each other? His is a love that doesn’t turn away in disgust when it finds us in our filth, but also isn’t content to leave us there. Does it, then, forcibly drag us out? No. It sits down with us and looks around and says, “I’ll be ready to go when you are.”

I’m cognizant of the possibility that I’m seeing this all through rose-colored lenses. I don’t mean to suggest that these people are perfect. But I perceived, in both their teaching and their conduct, this quality that is so essential to any lasting relationship. Perhaps I was only seeing what I wanted to see. Time will tell.

Personal Reflections

For many years, I have been unable to wrap my mind around the point of joining a church. This probably has as much to do with personal misgivings as it does with the posture of churches I’ve attended. To be blunt, they often seem so watered down, so half-hearted, so institutional. On top of that, the people in these places seem to be at least as lost as I am, but with an important difference: the inclination to medicate that lostness by going through motions that are all but meaningless to me.

I suppose that’s what it boils down to: an absence of discernible meaning, for me, personally, in the motions of doing church.

As I write this, I think of how our individualism and consumerism have shaped our churches. Today, many churches seem to be in the self-help business, offering a product that is yet another experience to be consumed. Good vibes, a mediocre speech, have a laugh, mouth a prayer, see you next week. Really? That’s it? I have self-help books at home. I don’t think I’ll be back.

Does that make me the poster child of the picky, individualistic consumer? The shoe sure seems to fit. How did I end up this way?

Seeing some form of the above as what it meant to join a church, I opted for walking out my faith more or less alone. Don’t get me wrong: I still shared my heart and life with other believers, and I was still spiritually intentional in shepherding my family, but I saw the journey of faith as something primarily worked out between oneself and God. In one sense, it certainly is that. But what place or purpose does that leave for relationship between believers?

Apart from friendship with other believers, and a vaguely cosmic, amorphous view of the Church, I was essentially ignorant of the Scriptural plan and vision for the Body — even though others had written to me and pleaded with me on this topic at length.

Not until being confronted with the living, breathing reality of that Body — not until I could “put my finger in their side” — did I see how atomizing my approach had really been. I knew it was isolating, but given the messy superficiality of the only other option in sight, I very much preferred to go it alone.

The Heritage community has put a third option on my radar. They have upped the ante. Their life-on-life approach to Church is anything but superficial. Whether it’s messy remains to be seen. They recognize (accurately, in my opinion) that salvation is a relational journey, primarily between the believer and God, but also between believers. Is that journey always going to be tidy and painless? I’m not sure how it could be.

The fact that insular faith communities have so often gone wrong, however, certainly gives me pause. Because of this, I am situated on a thin line of hope: the hope that someone, somewhere is doing it right, and that my family and I might be able to be a part of that, to learn from it, and be shaped by it. That hope is tempered by the fear of finding merely another diseased charade.

One thing is clear: Jesus wanted his disciples to be “one as he and the Father are one.” My individualistic approach to faith, therefore, has been (at least somewhat) at odds with Jesus’ explicit desire for his followers.

How could I have missed it for so long? Perhaps it’s because I was busily constructing a worldview whose unstated purpose was to sanctify my preferences behind a veil of “truth.” Perhaps, as Andrew Klavan puts it, I was trying to “… transform my dysfunctions into a philosophy.”

*Note on Church and State

Believers were not alone in the desire to separate the sword and the cross. As both atheists and theists sought to disconnect God and government, Western nation-states gradually lost their claim to speak with divine authority. It is a fascinating fact of history that as this zeitgeist advanced, cultural commentators began to pronounce the death of God — a death which just so happened to coincide with the decline of God’s political usefulness.

The death of God begs several questions: If God was dead, what would take his place? Or were we naive enough to think the position would go unfilled? And if the one we had called God could die, had he ever really been God? Who was it, then, that we had been referring to as “God”? Had it been anything more than a popular fiction parasitized for political ends?

Whatever the case, as the political deity began to decompose, governments leaped from its carcass to the next most promising host in sight: in a word, Science. Not coincidentally, the new host (like the old one) is a tradition known for its pursuit of truth. It, too, speaks through specialized officials, not so different from the priests and bishops they replaced. Today, the authority of science, like religion before it, is being similarly discredited as its bona fides are dragged through the mud of Statist agendas.

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