When Christians discuss the role of the church in the world, we—lay and clergy alike—often talk of being ‘in the world but not of it.’ The gist is this: we live in spaces and times that have been corrupted from a created perfection, and in the face of this reality we are ourselves to remain uncorrupted.[1] And yet it seems that, at least in America, we are content to live in a nation that has been ‘God blessed’ while overlooking the bare fact that this nation was founded on the extermination of, or at the very least the radical displacement of, an entire race. We seem easily to overlook the bare fact that the first settlers banished not only our red brothers and sisters—to use Cornel West’s language—but also our white brothers and sisters, based upon religious differences that now, to our modern sentiments, often appear ridiculous. The founding of Providence, Rhode Island is but one of dozens of examples. Living ‘in the world but not of it’ necessarily includes, therefore, remembering that the specific world in which we so comfortably live is rooted in violence and banishment—simply put, coercion—from the very beginning, often perpetrated by those who call themselves followers of Jesus Christ. Not only is our situation rooted in coercion, but this coercion is still at play both inside and outside the church. The legal debate about homosexual marriage and the ‘Christian Right’s’ encouragement of the Iraq war stand as enough evidence of this coercive tendency. How should the people of God conceive of themselves in this paradoxical situation—this situation mired in bloodshed and manipulation, however brilliantly subtle? More pointedly, what is the role of the church, especially when it comes to the coercion that founded and still exists within American liberal democracy? In order to arrive at a substantial thesis, this question becomes twofold: (1) what is the church? and (2) What is coercion and its limits for use by the people of God?
William Cavanaugh’s analysis and application of Augustine’s two cities, as well as my own, combined with insights from Miroslav Volf, will serve as the point from which I will delineate a concept of ‘the church.’ In the final analysis I will argue that the church is a corpus permixtum, in the Augustinian sense, but that the city of God is a performance of reconciliation and charity anticipating the full eschatological reign of God, practiced both within the church and outside of it, reaching into liberal democracy and beyond—wherever God’s purposes are being accomplished. Furthermore, when the concepts of church as corpus permixtum and city of God as performance are applied to the public square, the possibility is opened for peaceful pluralism without the need for Christian coercion. Finally, coercion, I will argue, can be wholly defined neither as physical violence nor as subject interpellation or truth production (Althusser and Foucault). Because of this, before entering the public square each community must establish its definition of coercion and the limits thereof. With Volf and the insights of Judith Butler on violence and coercion, I will argue that in order to enact the city of God in public, ‘we need to want to exercise power rightly.’[2]
When Augustine was confronted with the challenge of clergy who had been unfaithful to the scriptures in the face of persecution and were looking to re-enter the church, he argued that the church was not a monolithic fortress for the righteous but a material space wherein the sick and healthy, the faithful and unfaithful, the holy and the sinner, could be found together; “the good fish and the bad are for the time mixed up in the one net.” [3] Not only were the good and the bad mixed in the same net, but Augustine used Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast to justify compelling heretics to re-enter the Catholic fold, for the sake of ecclesial unity and to teach the heretics ‘true doctrine’.[4] This emphasis on compulsion toward unity has been criticized by many, and I think rightly, due to its influence on the development of the church’s coercive tactics against heretics, especially during the medieval inquisitions. Whatever the case may be, the church as an empirical, material institution is not to be understood as an institution of the righteous alone, but of the righteous and unrighteous, its clergy and theologians notwithstanding. If we temper Augustine’s notion of coercive compulsion, as I have done below, not only does this understanding allow the church to further open its welcoming arms to the world, but it helps us to make sense of its ongoing complicity in violence. Nearly every denomination today, however, has its own understanding of the proper identification of a church, or of ‘the Church.’[5]
The church has often been understood as that which directs the sacred, spiritual affairs of its members, while the state is that which directs the profane, secular affairs. In this model—the division between sacred and profane—the church does not concern itself with the profane, but rather directs its members’ spirits toward love and good works as they act within the profane realm. Problematically, however, as Cavanaugh points out, in the case of contemporary American liberal democracy, when the unity of the state is at risk, sacred specificity must give way to the profane universal, or, at the very least, in the Habermasian sense, sacred specificity must be ‘translated’ into universal secular language and divested of its transcendent referent. If, however, there is no division of goods between sacred and secular, if all is sacred due to its having been created by God, as Cavanaugh has it, then both practices, the earthly and heavenly, make use of the same goods. The city of God can be enacted within the institutional church, and often is, but it can and is also performed in liberal democracy.
Cavanaugh comments extensively on Augustine’s conception of the two cities. He argues that the earthly city and the city of God are not, as is often assumed, two separate institutions existing in space—state and church—that make use of different goods, but two performances, two practices in time, which make use of the same goods for different ends. Wherever God’s work is performed, there the city of God is, regardless of the company kept. Christopher Insole, in his critique of Cavanaugh’s essay, misunderstands him on this point. Insole criticizes Cavanaugh for holding a double standard—writing off the church’s complicity in violence as non-essential while accusing American liberal democracy of essential violence. For Cavanaugh, however, American liberals, such as Insole, can certainly perform the city of God within liberal democracy, since liberal democracy is not identical with the earthly city, but because it is concerned with issues of life and death and security without the end of glorifying God it internalizes the practice of the earthly city. Neither is the church identical with the city of God, but because it is interested in glorifying God and enacting God’s salvation on earth it internalizes the practice of the city of God.[6]
A problem arises in this conception of the church and city of God: discerning where the city of God exists can only be done in retrospect, and the church as institution begins to lose its significance, moving closer to a (neo)Protestant conception of the priesthood of all believers, wherever they are. Continuing a metaphor of playacting, Cavanaugh writes, “not only does the church find itself involved with other troupes, but the improvisation that goes on to try to prevent death from having the final word often leaves the boundaries between what is church and what is not church permeable and even ambiguous.” If the church is a corpus permixtum and the city of God is a performance of selflessness, then by definition the church is not identical to that performance, however much the city of God is practiced within it.
In Miroslav Volf’s After our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998), he argues for an open understanding of the church
…by taking Matt. 18:20 [‘…where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am with them’] as the foundation not only for determining what the church is, but also for how it manifests itself externally as a church. Where two or three are gathered in Christ's name, not only is Christ present among them, but a Christian church is there as well, perhaps a bad church, a church that may well transgress against love and truth, but a church nonetheless.[7]
If Volf’s argument is taken together with Cavanaugh’s, then the institutional church does indeed lose significance. Wherever two or three are gathered in Christ’s name takes the place of the institution. If there are no defined institutional freedoms to protect, no taxes to avoid, then the people of God are set free to enact God’s love in history without defensiveness and, thus, without the need for coercion. It is only when the well-being and unity of an institution is at risk that its members must defend it. And this is precisely the trouble with the institutional church’s existence within a nation-state, liberal or otherwise.
According to Giorgio Agamben, the classical state left many decisions vis-à-vis life and death to individuals, families and religious institutions. But now, as it stands, the modern state is characterized by Agamben as having enlarged its control, taking into itself the entire human life, bare life as such (“zoe”).[8] The rise of modern science and technology have aided this enlargement, opening the possibility of decision concerning issues that would have been unimaginable less than a century ago. An aspect of this that has arisen recently is the state’s subsidizing of transgender surgical processes. Gender, life, death, and so on are all under the power of the state.
If the institutional understanding of the church remains, then the incorporation of zoe into political life is a threat to the unity of believers, because the state takes over the issues that were previously left to the church, leaving it unnecessary as an institution. Social welfare programs take the place of the church, and this, I think is one of the primary reasons for the recent dramatic decline in mainline denominational church membership in America. If the church allows itself to be incorporated into the state, which is necessary if it declares itself an official institution within national borders, it will result in either insignificance, separatist retreat, or violent confrontation and an us-versus-them antagonism. But, as Cavanaugh has argued, violent confrontation of the church against the state by definition refuses the practice of the city of God and makes the church just another institution practicing the earthly city—fighting sin with sin, violence with violence.
The earthly city is not averse to violence where its well-being is concerned. Coercion of all kinds, most recently even to the point of the torture of prisoners, is perfectly acceptable so long as national safety and security are at stake. It is often assumed that the earthly city for Cavanaugh is identical with the liberal state, but this is not so. One can work within the liberal state and perform the city of God while doing so.[9] As Christopher Insole emphasizes in his critique of Cavanaugh’s essay, “The very heart of the liberal conception of politics is a concern about the abuse of power.”[10] In my reading of Cavanaugh’s essay, this statement does not stand against his argument. Rather, for Cavanaugh, the liberal state is the de facto state in America, and as such it necessarily incorporates the coercive practices of the earthly city. Coercion and violence have their place in the state for the sake of its unity and security, actually, descriptively, whether that state be a liberal democracy, totalitarian regime, or otherwise. Here there is neither time nor space to discuss the influence of capital on the use of power by these various regimes, but it will suffice to say that over the course of the past two centuries global capitalism has perhaps become the de facto sovereign, reigning supreme over the whole ‘civilized’ earth.
A serious issue arises in my reading of Cavanaugh’s analysis of space and time. In practicing the earthly city, fighting sin with sin, coercive power is employed that, according to Cavanaugh, the practice of the city of God refuses and opposes. Yet in the not yet of the kingdom of God, which Cavanaugh identifies with fallen sinfulness, the city of God lives and moves and breathes within the order provided by the very coercion that it claims to refuse. In the last analysis, for Cavanaugh, the earthly city does the ‘dirty work’ so that a tentative peace can be secured, which the city of God makes use of for its own ends.
In his essay From One City to Two, at the beginning of his consideration of Augustine, Cavanaugh makes the following statement: “It is not my present intention to critique Augustine’s comments on the use that the city of God makes of the coercive powers of the earthly city.”[11] Is this usage not primary in considerations of the relationship between the city of God and the earthly city? Left unquestioned and unanalyzed, Adolf Schlatter’s comment in his discourse on Christian ethics appears altogether correct: “In the dealings of one nation with another, we have also to reckon with the possibility of quarrels, and to prepare accordingly. Hence there can be no Christian objection to conscription. We continually enjoy the security of the state and the benefits procured by the army.”[12] That is, since the city of God enjoys the peace secured by the earthly city’s use of physical violence, it must not criticize the war efforts of the earthly city. For Augustine, this is partially true. The heavenly city makes use of the peace afforded by the earthly only “because it must,” and only insofar as the means by which peace is achieved does not injure “faith and godliness.”[13] The question becomes, then, what is the limit of the use of coercive power for the sake of earthly peace, the limit at which faith and godliness remain uninjured? At what point does complicity in coercion, or the enjoyment of its fruit, become ‘unChristian’?
For Karl Barth, to whom Cavanaugh briefly turns, the citizen of the city of God is to remain intentionally undogmatic in her stance against violence.[14] The Christian is to work continuously for peace, always encouraging mutuality and respect for the other, speaking out against the notion that war is a necessary evil. In this practice, coercion will take place and the Christian will be able to hold a critical distance from it without stepping into full pacifism, which Barth rejects as untenable.
The Church must not preach pacifism, but it must see to it… that the many ways of avoiding war which now exist in practice should be honestly applied until they are all exhausted. It is better in this respect that the Church should stick to its post too long and become a forlorn hope than that it should leave it too soon and then have to realise that it has become unfaithful by yielding to the general excitement, and that it is thus the accessory to an avoidable war which can only be described as mass murder.[15]
For Cavanaugh, the earthly city sees war not only as necessary but as beneficial for the creation of national unity, which he describes as a false, or negative, unity, revolving around the recognition of a common enemy rather than a positive common good. This critical stance toward war is fine, but it does not go far enough. Coercion must be further defined.
Judith Butler defines coercion beyond physical violence. In her Frames of War, as well as throughout Precarious Life, she argues compellingly that the audio-visual world of media, especially in its mass communicability, has the power to act selectively in the voices and images that it represents to the public, especially as the state prepares for war. This power is itself violent. Life is framed in a certain way, often intentionally, and this framing can be used to justify injustice by keeping silent and dark those voices and images of the oppressed and destroyed. In this way, before a war is waged with guns and bombs and cyber-attacks, it is waged audio-visually by implicitly declaring which lives are grievable and which are not. Those lives that count and are to be protected and those that do not are established before the guns come out. Mass communication of ideas, images and audio can actually construct a reality within which the public categories of understanding are formed, especially as this relates to representations of the ethics of violence and war-waging.
If Butler is right, and I think that she is, then it is necessary to identify the point at which the effectiveness of this framing stops. If subjects can be framed as ungrievable, then why not entire religions, as we see with Islamic extremist groups, however justifiable this frame? The important point to be grasped is that Butler’s notion of ‘framing’ has implications for much more than war, or even physical violence, which she certainly recognizes.[16] It seems clear to me, especially in the recent blending of politics and media (Joe Biden's cameos as a friendly in Parks and Rec, as a vulgar example), that those with the control over frames have much more at their fingertips than mere conceptions of war-waging. The earthly city uses all available resources for the establishment of its unity. But what about those who practice the city of God? Is not the distribution of Bible tracts, for example, also a form of framing? Tracts are overly simplistic, and as such leave out the difficulties that come along with ‘a free ticket to eternal life.’ Salvation is framed in a certain way, and evangelism can become manipulative, coercive against the other.
For Butler, each human subject is constituted through interactions with an environment that it did not choose. The others with whom one inhabits the earth are essential for the constitution of the individual subject through language, and no decision is involved regarding the identities of those others. If the use of language by individuals and institutions and the media and so on, vis-à-vis the other, has power to constitute a subject, then it has the power to coerce at the most sublime level. In the Christian scriptures, the epistle of James has a great deal to say about the power of language and one’s use of it:
We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.[17]
If we take the metaphor of the ship, the whole human life is guided by its choice of language. According to James, then the improper use of language actually coerces and corrupts the identity of the speaking subject herself. But what of proper language? It is also coercive according to these metaphors, if by coercion we mean the power to change the identity of the subject, beneficially or otherwise. Thus, as was mentioned above, a well-meaning Bible tract is coercive, and when mass-produced by means of modern technology, the power of a simple pamphlet can be overwhelming.
Augustine employed the parable of the great banquet in order to compel the heretics and unfaithful into the Catholic fold for the sake of ecclesial—and, perhaps on a darker side, imperial—unity. But this seems an unfaithful interpretation of the parable. In the parable, a master’s feast is poorly attended by the invitees and he therefore tells his servant to invite those previously uninvited: “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”[18] After the servant does this, he reports that there is still room at the banquet, to which the master replies, “go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.”[19] The sense here is not that the unfaithful are compelled to re-enter the institutional church for the sake of unity. Not at all. Rather, the previously uninvited ‘outcasts’ are invited in the absence of the invited elite. In fact, this is in direct opposition to Augustine’s interpretation. Those invitees who left the banquet of their own accord are left outside (in the Matthean version, they are outright condemned) and replaced by the uninvited. In the absence of the invitees, all are compelled to come in—the poor wanderers, the wretched of the earth. The sense, then, is an open-armed invitation to all, not a call for the return of the previously invited heretics and unfaithful for the sake of ecclesial unity. The point here is not to rehash the notion of the church as a corpus permixtum, but to consider the definition and limits of coercion for the performance of the city of God, which, vis-à-vis this parable, is the activity of handing out invitations to a superabundant banquet of divine love, inviting all into the performance of the city of God.
According to Volf, the truth of the practice of Christianity is determined by its underlying motivations. He considers Foucault’s ideas about the construction of truth and the coercive power of interpellation, which he agrees with in essence. What he does not agree with, however, is Foucault’s solution—that the only way forward is to continue questioning and exposing the various wills to power behind truth construction via the selective presentation of knowledge.[20] Instead, Volf argues that, while Foucault is correct in his thesis that truth is produced in order to justify and bolster power, the will to power can be for good or evil. When something is presented as truth, the motivations behind it are what make it good or evil. “In order to know truly we need to want to exercise power rightly.”[21] If selfish gain is at stake, to the detriment of the other, then truth production is, in Volf’s particular Christian sense, evil. If, however, the truth that is presented is for the benefit of the other without consideration of the presenter’s good, then the truth production is good. Volf is quick to point out with many biblical quotations that this is not to say that facts do not matter. Much the contrary. Presenting truth in facts is just as important as the motivations behind that presentation, or at least cannot be separated from such presentation.
The upshot of all of this is that the performance of the city of God does and must make use of the coercive power of language, communicating truth and knowledge in words and symbolic gestures, but it must do so with full consideration of its motivations. The city of God is by definition not being performed where selfish motivations are underlying.
Conclusion
The church as an institution opposed to the state has lost any real significance due to the envelopment of biopolitics by the state and state-sponsored institutions, as Agamben (and many others) has rightly shown. Instead, what ought to be fought for is the understanding that the performance of the city of God can be carried out anywhere, within the boundaries of any other institution or nation-state, whether that be Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Obama’s America. Because of Butler’s explication of the subtlety and vastness of the concept of coercion through language, and because of Foucault’s penetrating analysis of knowledge, truth and power, practitioners of the city of God must consider the limits of their use of coercion. Miroslav Volf has done excellent work for the people of God toward this end. While his political work is lacking in many areas, his emphasis on the examination of motivations is incredibly insightful. Practitioners of the city of God must use language selflessly, distributing in love invitations to the superabundant feast of God, taking the message to the poor wanderer that the kingdom of God is open to all peoples. This is the primary work of the people of God, no matter the state in which they find themselves. Keeping distance from institutions and thus gaining freedom from defensiveness and violence done for the sake of self-survival and unity, the people of God are able to remain constantly, undogmatically critical of the selfish use of power by any state, any institution, any individual. The Christian, then, can speak forcefully against oppression in all its forms without themselves being involved therein. And all that as we wait for Christus Victor.
[1] James 1:27, ESV
[2] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2010), 192.
[3] Cf. Augustine, De doct. Christ., 3.45: corpus permixtum.
[4] Cf. Augustine, Letter 173 and Letter 93 to Vincentius, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1. Trans. J.G. Cunningham, ed. Philip Schaff. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.)
[5] For an excellent historical analysis of the varied understanding of church, see Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 127–158.
[6] William T. Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two; Christian Reimagining of Political Space,” Polit. Theol. 3 (2006): 318.
[7] Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, 136.
[8] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[9] William T. Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two; Christian Reimagining of Political Space,” Polit. Theol. 3 (2006): 318.
[10] Christopher J. Insole, “Discerning the Theopolitical: A Response to Cavanaugh’s Reimagining of Political Space,” Polit. Theol. 3 (2006): 327.
[11] Cavanaugh, “From One City to Two; Christian Reimagining of Political Space,” 315.
[12] Adolf Schlatter, Christliche Ethik, 1914, p. 138.
[13] Augustine, The City of God, XIX.17.
[14] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III, v. 4, 458-61.
[15] Barth, Church Dogmatics III, v. 4, 460.
[16] See, for example, the discussion of immigration in Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2010), 24-5.
[17] James 3:2-6, NIV.
[18] Luke 14:21, NIV.
[19] Luke 14:23, NIV.
[20] Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 192.
[21] Ibid.
