A False Dilemma: the Church as Hospital for Individuals and Reformer of Society
None of what follows should need to be said, for it is all trivial, obvious after a moment of reflection.
None of what follows should need to be said, for it is all trivial, obvious after a moment of reflection. But still, we seem to have forgotten it.
Individualists and Collectivists
"Conservatives" in our Churches typically treat salvation and mystical experience as a purely individual phenomena. "Woke liberals", or progressives, see salvation as communal, and often decry the individualism of their opponents.
I am sick of seeing these two camps fight over these issues, because both are shortsighted children.
The greatest Christian thinkers do not find there to be any tension between the salvation of individuals and groups. For it is the group that is saved, and which most fully knows and resembles God. Yet the group consists in individuals, so that each individual must be saved and know God, in some sense, in order for the group to do so. Any perception of tension is illusory, a result of learned foolishness.
Many social-justice oriented Christians emphasize the Church's role in communal being. But they often neglect the personal, individual and private aspects of the spiritual life. The true salvation of man can only come when each individual is healed, remade into a worthy, functional part so that they might be a part of a beautiful whole. For a society to be healed, and brought further towards realizing justice, the individuals in that society must be themselves reformed. Any revolution that does not change the hearts and minds of the populace is unstable, able to be overturned simply through negligence. Changing laws without changing those bound by them is futile. To do so is akin to removing a cancerous mass without rooting out the dysfunctional cells from which it grew.
So, the true salvation of mankind and human society must happen at the individual and group levels. Given that the Church is tasked with helping God save mankind, then the Church will have to offer means of healing for both the individual and the group, however it can.
An Important Aspect of Individual Salvation
We often overlook the idea of spiritual, moral and conceptual liberation. Pre-Christian religions and worldviews often imprisoned the minds and moral vision of the poor, lowly and weak. To live while believing that the gods favored the strong who murdered and raped your family is a horrible way to live. I encourage my readers to spend some time with Homer's "Illiad." Despite being wonderfully written, it is truly a disgusting expression of a horrendous view of the world. Christianity is revolutionary, in part, because it liberates the mind of individuals from this sort of burden, and offers encouragement to all. The Christian mind has a very particular view of virtue; the virtuous man is a man of infinite love, a meek man, a man willing to die for His enemies without opening His mouth to protest. The Christian hope and trust is in a God of infinite love, a God concerned with each of His creatures, who creates and sustains purely out of selfless charity. This vision of the world, the more it entrenches itself in the mind, causes the person to delight, to be lifted from despair, and to hope in a future of infinite bliss.
This, frankly, is a good worth more than the temporary achievement of justice in one thousand fickle societies. So many of our arguments about the overall status of Christianity fail to take these sorts of aspects of Christian theology into account. And that, I think, is really because those who argue about theology are not typically those who have experienced this sort of liberation, or have not fully appreciated what it was like to live under such an oppressive "common sense" as the pagans had.
Salvation is not Our Goal
Of course, after all I've said, I acknowledge that the Church often neglects social, collective justice. This is a valid criticism. But it is all too common to see people disregarding individual piety and transformation. Ascetic discipline and prayer is important; the Church, especially at its local levels, primarily works for the transformation of individuals, in the hope that they will go out into the world and transform it by constituting the beginnings of a "new creation."
There is one further point that needs to be made, however. Even if/when human society has been purified, healed and redeemed, the work is not done. For salvation, construed merely as "deliverance from harm," is only the baseline of the Christian hope, the precondition of our true aim. We do not strive to be saved, but for infinite beauty, joy, and goodness. That is, we strive for eternally increasing perfection, union with the divine that grows ever tighter into infinity. And so, even if our societies are saved, man must be given the means to live meaningful, joyful lives in pursuit of He who is the good, the beautiful and the true. Collective justice is merely the precondition for man's freedom to pursue the good!
"[Even if] the state were developed to the highest degree of education and morals, yet even then it would still be necessary to provide people for contemplation, in addition to the general activities of citizens, in order to preserve the spirit of truth, and having received it from
all the centuries that are past, to keep it for the generations to come and hand it on to posterity. Such
people, in the church, are hermits, recluses, and anchorites."-The Way of the Pilgrim.
In short, to overlook our individual need of self-fulfillment, or to delay it until after we have perfected society, or even only to regard it as a lesser good than forming a just society, is horribly cruel. It is to deprive those living under an evil order access to meaning and fulfillment now, in this life.