The Social Body, Family Values and Jesus

In a "profound, earthy and funny" (from the book blurb by Paul J. Griffiths) book--Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels--by Rodney Clap I find inspiration for this piece. This all started when I decided to read the whole book, having read a few chapters a few years ago. You know how that is. By the way, it's an excellent book and is still available; I just checked the Baker/Brazos website.

As the host of a house church with some participants who are new to taking the Bible seriously, weekly prayer and communion, I find myself (lifelong Christian) thinking deeply about how to communicate effectively. And so, when I read the following in Tortured Wonders I brought this into our discussion about a healing story in Luke the next Sunday. These two excerpts are central to this essay.

Unlike any known culture before it, the modern West has seen individual physical bodies as the basis of the social body. The individual is real and primary, the social body a derivative fiction. The modern West has, in essence and contrary to the apostle Paul, said that individuals as "hands" or "feet" are most themselves in isolation from any social body of which they may be members. Premoderns saw matters differently. The individual, inasmuch as such a creature could be conceived [emphasis mine], was preceded by and dependent on the social body. The whole person exited only in community (72).

When I introduced the healing story, I invited people to think about how this played out for the whole community, not just the individuals, how healing might have taken place in the social fabric. I am going to be pondering this for a while, remembering that many of the second-person pronouns in the New Testament are second-person plural--which we lose in the English translation, and in our individualist mindset. OK, back to the topic at hand.

But still I have caught a glimpse of what St. Augustine called concupiscence, the darkness of disordered desire which would make of the self a god and of all other creatures (and even of God Almighty) means or tools of the self's satisfaction and aggrandizement (67).

 My impression is that this "disordered desire" has primarily been identified in the sphere of human sexual relations, however, does it not make sense in terms of much of human failing in other spheres as well?

A great deal of Christian rhetoric makes the news when it addresses family values, the constitution of a family, the parenting of children and marriage. On one side, people argue on behalf of what is commonly referred to as a conservative agenda, countered on the other hand by a so-called progressive agenda.
A: Marriage and family look like this... vs
B: No, marriage and family look like this.
Taking the Bible seriously leads to a close reading of the whole text (from Lot to Abraham to David particularly) and not finding a lot that supports a definition of family values that "conservatives" would affirm. And then there's that troublesome story about Jesus in Mark 3:31-35 (NRSV):

31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” 33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” 

Proclamations from all sides of the family debate tend toward an expression of "concupiscence," in other words, what serves the individual self's satisfaction. Making biological/adoptive/chosen family a primary value apart from the will of God is a disordered desire. Echoing what Clapp says in terms of Christian spirituality not wanting to erase all differences between person (76); neither do followers of the Way of Jesus want to deny the existence and importance of families (variously defined). We are called to rightly order our desires (to use Augustinian language) and to recall that Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 about the love that is to be found in Christian worshiping communities--which then would facilitate that love in all relationships, including marriage and family.

Because we post-moderns have lost this rootedness in communal ties in which premodern cultures were steeped, we desperately seek for alternatives and elevate them beyond the importance that is rightfully theirs. Nations, sports teams, corporations, families, political parties, etc--all are found wanting as social bodies to convey identity. At the same time, modern spirituality focuses on self-realization or self-fulfillment, which "in the terms of Christian spirituality [is] perversely making the fall its ideal. It puts forth the alienated and amputated individual as the highest and healthiest human condition. And--seen with Christian eyes--that is an illusion. The amputated limb is a dying limb" (Clapp, 77).

Death is all around us: addiction, violence, greed, species extinction, suicide, hatred.
For us to choose life, we must re-member the social body, and recognize that our choice for life in God's realm is a communal reality.