I was recently asked by a friend, “Why do you go to church?” He is not at the moment a regular communicant of any parish, but was raised in the Episcopal tradition. Thankfully, before I had time to stutter some half answer, he replied to his own question, “If I went to church, the only reason that I would go, would be because it is true.” 

If I were to pose the same question to the most devout and pious parishioners that I serve, I do not think any would answer, “I come to church because it is true.” I do not mean to discount their faith, but my guess is that their answers would be more practical. I assume, most would answer: “I come to church to fellowship,” “I come to church because I am fed spiritually,” or maybe even “I come to church to participate in serving others.” We mainline Christians, especially Episcopalians, tend to shy away from any claim that might seem exclusive, and “the church is true” seems to be a claim about the exclusivity of the church and of truth. 

Much of our discourse about "inclusivity" in mainline Protestant churches, especially in Episcopal churches, is a conversation about how we might make the church relevant to the current social moment. Like many in the modern age, we distinguish ourselves from our medieval and ancient ancestors by refusing to accept “justice” as an eschatological category. We long for justice here-and-now, and our anxiety about oppression and inequality is not soothed by a promise that all things will be settled in the hereafter. We are not unlike Jesus in this way, for Jesus’ ministry, while ultimately cosmic, involved the healing and restoration of individuals who suffered from disease and religious and imperial oppression. However, if we neglect the cosmic, universal, and eschatological aspects of Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection, we risk proclaiming our own stories instead of God’s story. In the modern age, Western European thought turned toward the human subject, and in doing so gradually made God irrelevant to the human story. William Desmond refers to this position as “postulatory finitism,” which means that we live as if the universe and all that exists is finite. From the perspective of postulatory finitism, the reason we might attend church could only ever be a reason that has meaning within our finite stories. Thereby, our individual human stories, and the human story, would be cut off from God’s story. 

A common theory as to how we arrived at this moment in the life of the church, a moment in which we are more comfortable telling our stories than proclaiming God’s story, is that the via moderna, or nominalism, has thoroughly shaped how we think about the knowledge of God and God’s creation. Nominalism refers to a late medieval reaction against realism. Realism held that universals, such as truth, beauty, goodness, and humanity, are real things. In contrast, nominalism teaches that universals exist in name only. So, there is no such thing as humanity, but only individual humans. For nominalism, universals are a mere convention of language. A consequence of nominalism is that theologians stopped thinking of the cosmos in terms of a participatory ontology. In other words, theologians became less concerned about describing how God is the source of the being of all things and how the proper end or goal for all things is to be in harmony, friendship, and union with God. Instead, theologians became content to describe God’s relationship to creation and created beings in terms of will and power. God remained the cause of the universe, but it was now possible to conceive of a reality that does not intimately participate in God’s life and work. 

Consequently, we are enticed more and more to speak about the universe, human relationships, the earth, and ethics as a purely human story. The human story, apart from God in the world, seems to me to be hopeless frustration. For apart from a real participation in God’s life and work, “the good” is merely a local finite good. And we all know too well that what one community identifies as a good for themselves, can be living hell for others. Or to again wax philosophical, local finite goods taken as absolutes are necessarily exclusionary. So, are our ecclesiastical commitments simply local finite goods? Do we proclaim that credal orthodoxy’s compatibility with LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice is only a local finite good, or that this good participates in the Being, Truth, and Goodness of God? I argue for the latter. 

If we are going to be able to say, “We go to church because it is true,” we should explore further what it means to be the inclusive body of Christ in communion with Triune God. M. Shawn Copeland, in Enfleshing Freedom, articulates a theological anthropology that understands Jesus as the savior and liberator of particular bodies, specifically the bodies of black women, even as Jesus recapitulates all of humanity into a new life of union with God. Copeland’s strategy is to accept the metaphysical nature of orthodox Christianity, while also grappling with the specific situations of human bodies in history. She constructs a theological anthropology which explores the “meaning and purpose of existence within the context of divine revelation.” (1) Key to Copeland’s thought is that she is able to recount specific stories of enslaved black women and allow these accounts of “black bodies” to be an entrance into speaking about the “body of human existence” and ultimately the “body of Christ.” In Copeland’s words, “any formulation of theological anthropology that takes body and body marks seriously risks absolutizing or fetishizing what can be seen (race and sex), constructed (gender), represented (sexuality), expressed (culture), and regulated (social order).” (2) Yet, it is only by this risk that we are able to talk about how God’s incarnation as the specific marked body of Jesus Christ recapitulates all of humanity into a meaningful participatory relationship with God. 

Thus, for Copeland, the true church is the mystical body of Christ formed by Christ’s self-offering of his body marked by gender, race, sexuality, culture, and social order. Christ’s body was tortured, abused, crucified, and abandoned to hang on a tree. Christ’s body was offered in solidarity with all who suffer oppression, exclusion, and dehumanization. Yet, it was also this very same body which was raised by God to have an eternal place in the Godhead, thereby proclaiming for all “The Many Thousands Gone,” who had their bodies sacrificed and discarded as refuse by those concerned with their own finite and immanent [illegitimate] good, that their bodily existence is desired by the God who is love. Just as God desires the presence of Jesus Christ in the Godhead, thereby God desires the specific bodies marked asblack, red, yellow, white, gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, female, male, etc. in the Godhead. This is the mystical body of Christ, the Church, and it is true, and good, and beautiful indeed. 

Now that we might say, “We are the church and it is true,” we must ask what this language signifies, and how this story is both a human story and God’s story. For we proclaim the church as true to compel others to embrace the freedom and salvation of Christ. For us to proclaim that the church is true it will be helpful for us to locate our horizon, the proximate point from which our field of vision extends, and the foundational categories of our culture and theology. (3) In the Episcopal church, our horizon includes the position of “inclusive orthodoxy”: that is there is space at our altars, in our pulpits, and in our pews for LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice. However, the foundational category of our theological language remains in a large part nominalist, and the foundational category of our understanding of the universe is an unwitting postulatory finitism. Though we are usually too pious or sentimental to say it, we would rather do the work of God in God’s absence than do the work God has given to us to do. We are making real progress in proclaiming the truth in that our horizon is truly inclusive while remaining orthodox. However, it would behoove us to consider the un-orthodox categories by which we attempt to participate in God’s story from within that horizon. To be able to say, “we are the church and it is true,” we signify that Jesus’ specific and marked body constitutes a universal body in which specific individual human bodies, in solidarity with humanity, are desired by God to enter into a bodily life-giving and liberating grace.

1. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 23.

2. Ibid, 56.

3. “Horizon” and “Foundations” are technical terms describing theological operations in the thought of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Copeland’s thought, as well as my own, is substantially influenced by Lonergan’s work.