The Challenge of Community
On my drive home the other day I was listening to an interview with Dr. Jeremy Nobel, a primary care physician who has led efforts to develop applications for utilizing creative arts expressions as a remedy to national health issues, in particular, loneliness.
This, of course, got me thinking about St. Augustine. To those who know me, not that surprising…but for everyone else, hear me out.
One of Augustine’s early theological entanglements was a robust discourse with a sect of Christians who called themselves Donatists, a group defined by their unorthodox practice of rebaptizing Christians into what they viewed as the only pure and holy remnant of the church.
Augustine approaches the Donatist schism by addressing two issues: one, that Donatist claims to being the only “pure” Christian church are misguided, since the church is a mixed body. The church’s embrace of all people, traditores (those who had denied their Christian faith under the threat of torture or death) or otherwise, means that the question of who’s in and who’s out is only answered in God’s eschatological future.
Second, Augustine argues that the Donatists continual effort to rebaptize Christians into the “pure” church threatens the unity of the body itself, so much so that Augustine is willing to acknowledge the “validity” of Donatist rebaptism if it means that all can embrace catholic unity.
It is here, after making a plea for the mixed body of the church and the essentiality of catholic unity that Augustine lodges what I find to be his most forceful rhetoric – that the Donatists, in their unceasing action against the church, have thrown themselves into the sea of destructive freedom – that in essence, their attempt to separate themselves out in order to maintain their sense of apostolic and ritual purity is an act of vain human dissension, a dissension that risks unraveling the underlying bonds of human community.
One faith, one baptism has been an important organizing principle in Christian theological discourse since the beginning of the church. The Donatist practice of rebaptism, for Augustine at least, constituted a serious break from Christian practice – its practice merited a vigorous response. And although such a practice today might not warrant the same kind of attention, we can probably, with great ease, identify various economic, political, and social practices and beliefs that are fraying the threads of what it means to belong to one another.
It's in this sense that I have been reflecting on the various studies pointing to a steep and persistent rise in loneliness, in increased rates of declining mental health among adolescents, and in the feeling that our body politic has become defined by the rhetoric of grievance, pessimism, and the worship of individual freedom at the expense of the communities that bind us together.
Among us religious leaders, there is a temptation to think that if folks simply go back to church that we could somehow quell or heal the fractures and fissures driving us apart. Perhaps. At the same time, I am persuaded that our religious institutions and practices, well intentioned as they may be, have often contributed to the problem. Our own theological and ecclesiastical communities are awash in a history rife with claims to being the only “true” or “authentic” church.
Getting at what underlies the seas of our own destructive freedoms is no small task, especially since we live in a cultural and religious context that bears practically no resemblance to that of Augustine’s. At the same time, I remain persuaded by the Christian hope of resurrected living, by the view of a church that embraces the complexity and messiness of life while also learning to love and live in community – and not in a superficial or naïve sense, but in a way that reaffirms our bonds to one another without denying the essential and unique humanity expressed in every one of us.
