Brady Bowman

William T. Cavanaugh, on the “visibility” of the church:

To say that the purpose of the church is to show what human society is supposed to look like is to hold the church to a standard of unity and purity that it has rarely, if ever, accomplished in history. To bind the Holy Spirit to well-performed practices in human history is in effect to banish the Holy Spirit from much of that history. Salvation is visible in a few local instances of faithful churches, mere flotsam on the waves of historical unfaithfulness. […]

What the church makes visible to the world is the whole dynamic drama of sin and salvation, not only the end result of a humanity purified and unified….The church, to put it another way, plays out the tragedy of sin while living in the hope that, in the end, the drama is in reality a comedy and not a tragedy. Sin, then, is not simply to be contrasted with the visibility of the church. The sin of the church is manifest, but it is incorporated into a larger drama of salvation. […]

Sin is an inescapable part of the church in via, just as the cross is an essential part of the drama of salvation. The existence of sinful humanity in the church does not simply impede the redemption that Christ works in human history, but is itself part of the story of that redemption told over and over in the life of the church. As the fruit of the cross, however, the story can only be told in a penitential key. […]

The holiness of the church is visible in its very repentance for its sin. The church is visibly holy not because it is pure, but precisely because it shows to the world what sin looks like. That is, humanity is able to name sin because it has been confronted with the Word of God. The cross is the condition of possibility of sin. It is possible to overemphasize the church’s sinfulness; the church also makes grace visible, in its sacraments and its saints and its social presence among the poor. But the point is that, though sin and grace are countervailing movements in the church, repentance and sanctification are not. […]

The church’s proper response to being taken up into the life of God is not smug assurance of its own purity, but humble repentance for its sin and a constant impulse to reform. In doing so, it must listen to voices from outside the church as well. The church is visible in penance, not in the purity of an ideal social order.

William T. Cavanaugh:

The most common way that people are attracted to God is by seeing other people living redeemed lives in community and being able to envision themselves living like that.

Lewis, chilling in his hoodie (thanks to Lily and Bella)

Currently reading: The Emotionally Healthy Leader by Peter Scazzero 📚

William T. Cavanaugh:

There is a longing in nationalist ritual that bespeaks a desire for communion that is at the heart of Christian liturgy. Patriotic liturgies have succeeded in imagining communities because Christian liturgies have failed to do so in a fully public way. […]

If the Christian liturgy is to reclaim its centrality to the imagination of a redeemed world, we must look with a critical eye on liturgies that compete for our allegiance. We must not quarantine the liturgy into a “sacred” space, but must allow it to shape the way we form our mundane communities, our goals, allegiances, purchases, and relationships.

We get an extra hour of sleep tonight as well, right?

William T. Cavanaugh:

Globalization cannot simply aim at a borderless world, and in fact the rhetoric of borderlessness is deceptive. Transnational corporations are not really transnational, for almost all are based in the West. The utopia of limitless and borderless consumption is offered to those who can pay, primarily Westerners of the middle class and above. The globalized economy, like tourism, depends on the maintenance of a center and a periphery….The progress of modernity depends on the instability of modern identity and the conviction that reality and authenticity are elsewhere. The conquering spirit of globalism—the attempt to turn every other place and thing on the globe into a potentially consumable experience—depends ironically on the maintenance of bordered identities, the preservation of premodern authenticity. The primary boundary, then, that globalization must constantly reinforce is the boundary between the modern and the premodern, the developed and the undeveloped. […]

Globalism has tended to reinforce divisive borders, especially those between the developed and the undeveloped. The cosmopolitan gaze of the tourist seeks to connect with others, but ends up vacating their otherness, and thus destroying the connection. The pilgrim, on the other hand, sees all as potential brothers and sisters on a common journey to God. The pilgrim preserves otherness precisely by not seeking otherness for its own sake, but moving toward a common center to which an infinite variety of itineraries is possible. If God, the Wholly Other, is at the center, and not the great Western Ego, then there can be room for genuine otherness among human beings. The pilgrim church is therefore able simultaneously to announce and dramatize the full universality of communion with God, a truly global vision of reconciliation of all people, without thereby evacuating difference.