8. The Church in Creative Transformation

8.      The Church in Creative Transformation

Christ and the Churches

     In chapter 6, the church was described Christologically as the Body of Christ and the extension of the incarnation. In chapter 7 is was seen as a voluntary community of mutual participation and as an eschatological community of Peace.

     These statements about the church are intelligible in the categories of process theology. The problem with them is that they strain our credulity as we live in our empirical churches. What is the relation of the church for which these images have been used to the actual churches that are now extant?

     Ecclesiology today must concern itself as much with the relation of the extant churches to the church as with the shaping of ideal images of the church. → but in recent centuries we often discern the most striking efficacy of the power of creative transformation in the scientist, artist, and philosopher who stand outside the churches because they have rejected them or been rejected by them or because they have been simply too bored by the churches to take them seriously.

     Although the presence of Christ outside churches is a judgement upon them, it does not render them superfluous. When movement stemming from Christ do not acknowledge him, they lose their commonality of purpose and issue in a fragmentation of activity and understanding that becomes dehumanizing.  → as long as the intention of obedience to Christ continues within the churches they provide the possibility of the reunion of form and substance in the normative church. And in some measure such union has always been present even in the fragmented churches.

     One reason for the separation of the actual effective presence of Christ from the celebration of that presence in the churches is that the churches lost their nerve. In the face of the Protestant Reformation, the Counter Reformation sought to save the church by preservation of past thought and practice. In the face of eighteenth -century rationalism and the dominance of the scientific mentality, Protestants followed suit. Of courses the church had always intended to be faithful to this traditions, but through the early and medieval times this faithfulness was achieved by a dynamic process of rethinking the past in the light of current experience and of the best knowledge available.

     Whitehead shows that any movement must either advance or decay. There is no standing still. The effort to repeat the past while holding the present at bay leads to decadence. The vitality and zest that were of the essence of the worth of the past are lost. What remain are only dying forms. A movement preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure.” A living movement like a living person is continuously fashioning new syntheses of its own individual past and the new data with which external processes endlessly confront it.

     As Roman Catholic and conservative Protestant churches relapsed into defense of their inheritance, the effort to deal responsibly with changing cultural and scientific advances was continued by liberal Protestants. Apart from their great theological achievements, Christian thought today could hardly survive outside of ghetto. Nevertheless, the overall course of liberal Protestantism has been a decline. During a period of unprecedented intellectual progress, each development “has found the religious thinkers unprepared. Something which has been proclaimed to be vital has finally, after struggle, distress, and anathema, been modified and other wise interpreted. The next generation of religious apologists then congratulates the religious world on the deeper in sight which has been gained “through this process religious leaders have lost credibility, and religion is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. “

     Whitehead’s philosophy itself too often has been used by Christians to achieve some such low grade of harmony.

     Whitehead points to another option for Christians. “a clash of doctrine is not a disaster – it is an opportunity … religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.” Such a spirit can lead to deepened understanding and fresh insight, that is, to the creative transformation that is Christ. When Christians experience the clash of received doctrines, both with one another and with ideas coming trusted Christ, and despite all hesitation and wavering, a new chapter in the history of the church is being written.

     If the churches are to participate in the church, they must be creatively transformed through their openness to Christ. This means that they must accept ideas and practices against which they have been protecting themselves. But it does not mean that they should accept uncritically what is foreign to their traditions. Christ does not call us to Kulturprotestantismus! On the contrary, creative transformation for the Christian community involves the heightening of criticism both of itself and of that which it finds outside itself. It involves the critical appropriation of that which it discerns as the work of Christ in the world, at the price of whatever inner changes are thereby entailed. Such work is in fact now going on with impressive results. The catholic spirit is being released from its bondage in both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

     Openness to Christ as creative transformation is rightly feared as a threat to the extant churches. The work of Christ they find outside themselves truly threatens them to the extent to which they have resisted Christ and thereby creative transformation. There is no assurance that as our extant churches open themselves to creative transformation they will survive as churches.

       

The church and Women’s Liberation

     Of the many opportunities for creative transformation afforded by the achievements of Western civilization, one of the most challenging is that posed by the new self-consciousness of women.

     Idea

     Image

     Language

    

The Church and Buddhism

     The encounter with the many movements of creative transformation that have swept the West largely outside the church is profoundly demanding. But the church faces a still more radical challenge.

     Whitehead saw that this philosophy of process had special congeniality with some streams of Oriental thought. With Buddhism it shares in the denial of substance. Buddhism draws conclusions from this denial that are religiously far removed from the Western Christian tradition. Process theology has been shaped in its fundamental spirit by this latter tradition.  Does this mean that process theology has failed to follow to the end the implications of its own insights? Must it learn from Buddhism its own deeper religious meaning?

     Whitehead and Buddhist alike deny the existence of this self. Both whitehead and Buddhism hold that this Dasein is only a strand of experiences in the total flux of experiences.  The real entities are the individual experiences. The mode of connection that constitutes them as a single person is secondary to their individuality.

     Buddhist know that intellectual acquiescence in this theory of the person does not entail existential realization of its truth. People who believe it to be true continue to act as if their personal identity through time were an ontological given. To this failure of realization Buddhism traces human suffering. Hence it has devised meditations through which the power of illusion can be broken and people can know who and what they are. To do this they must stop interpreting their experience and simply let their experience be what it is. What it is sunyata, which is probably best translated as emptiness. It is the coming together of what is not. To realize this is to be free from anxiety about one’s supposed past or future or even present. There is not one about whom to worry.

     공(空)은 존재물(存在物)에는 자체(自體) · 실체(實體) · 아(我)라는 것이 없음을 뜻한다. 이 교의는 이미 고타마 붓다 당시의 원시불교에서, 모든 현상은 인연소생(因緣所生), 즉 인(因)과 연(緣)이 가적(假的)으로 화합해서 생겨난 것이기 때문에 거기에는 아(我)라는 실체는 존재하지 않는다고 주장한 불교의 근본적인 입장인 제법무아(諸法無我)에 해당한다.

         즉, 각 개인 자신의 존재를 포함한 모든 존재("법 · 法")는 인연(因緣)에 따라 생기(生起)한 것이기 때문에 연기(緣起)의 법칙에 의해 지금 존재하고 있다는 측면에서만 그 존재성이 가적(假的)으로(임시적으로) 인정될 수 있는 것("오온의 가화합")이며, 실제로는 거기에는 어떠한 항상불변(恒常不變)한 자아(自我)나 실체(實體) 같은 것은 없는 제행무상 · 제법무아이며, 때문에 모든 것은 "공(空)"이라고 설명하는 것이다.