From Isolation to Community: A renewed vision for Christian life together

Book Review (Myles Werntz)

I first came across Myles Werntz via reading Brad East, and soon got hooked on his substack. He's a thoughtful writer, with a lot of insight and judicious prudence. On the back of that I decided to pick up one of his books to read, and this is it.

As I said recently, I'm a sucker for a vision of Christian community, and this indeed fits the bill. Not that Werntz is ignorant of the fact that it's not all light and sparkles. Reading the acknowledgements one is already reminded that Christian community is aspirational, not descriptive, and often out of pain and sorrow.

From Isolation

The first thing to love about this book is that it is not at all "now, let's build Christian community!" It begins by naming our problem, and our problem is not just that we have communities that suck. The main dialogue partner throughout the book is Bonhoeffer, and so Werntz begins by talking about isolation as our root problem. The thing that sin does to us and inside us is to isolate us, from God and from each other, robbing us of the mediated communion that is meant to characterise our existence. Isolation is not a practical nor a sociological problem, it is a theological one:

Isolation names a condition in which, because of sin, the human exists divided from others and from God. Because of this division, we share a common world sustained by God, but we view one another as competitors in that world, each of us closed off, threatened by all others, and sustained fundamentally by our own efforts. p2

Nor is isolation just an "out there" problem, it's an "in the church" problem too. Because all of fallen existence is characterised by this, we continually find that in the very place where isolation should be being-undone, it creeps its way in. Werntz, and Bonhoeffer, name this in two ways: the individual and the crowd. It's easier to see how isolation operates in individuals - we wall ourselves off as tyrants of our own reality, making us arbiters of truth and value; but even as crowds - collections of individuals operating together but still fundamentally isolated.

What Werntz is calling us to, and the telos of his book, is community as communion - the mutual and mediated giving of ourselves and our gifts to each other in Christ. But how to get there?

The book moves over two parts, across seven chapters. It's far too long for me to try to do it justice, but I want to sketch its contours at least. The first part (chs 1-3) is an attempt to sketch the problem - to train us to see isolation at work, both out in the world, and more importantly in the church. Ch 1 does this by following Bonhoeffer in seeing the origin of isolation in the Fall, and positing that the opposite, and the 'cure', is the church community.

The church is meant to be a community, and not eclipsed by individualism or by the crowd, for in the church-community, we share in Christ and each other and are changed by that exchange. p37

Ch 2 then looks at the way that we continue to practice isolation in the practices of the church. How is it that a body that seems or ought to be about community, so often reflects isolation instead? This chapter is a taxonomy of practices that perpetuate isolation, not because of what they are, so much as how we do them, and Werntz shows how they can sustain isolation as both individuals and as crowds.

For example, it's entirely possible that even as we gather, we do so as individuals:

For if a sermon or worship service is the same when I hear it by myself in my living room or walking the dog as when I experience it in the physical building of the church surrounded by others, then we see that what was always happening was only a gathered group of isolated persons, persons who happened to be in the same room. p57

Similarly, there are ways of reading scripture, of praying, ordering our moral lives that either put ourselves "outside the scrutiny of others" and "beyond the reproach of others" so that we are individuals before God, not in communion nor community. The temptation of the crowd is ultimately to submerge ourselves in a group identity, thus not having to bring ourselves to the table. We become faceless, and giftless, bodies.

Ch 3 turns to consider "how the church is sustained as a community in the person of Jesus Christ". It's thus a chapter that lays a framework or a foundation for the rest of the book - only with the "logic of bodily community" in place can we possibly hope to see the church-community as a place, and a means, to undo isolation through the gracious work of Christ by his Spirit. Here Werntz moves skilfully from bodily community in terms of the Incarnation, the embodied nature of humans as physical and finite beings, and the body of Christ.

First, apart from community, we cannot have Jesus Christ. Second, we cannot belong to one another apart from Jesus Christ’s mediating people to one another. And third, this union of persons in Christ is the eternal logic of who we are as creatures. p75

Hiding in this chapter are some real kidney-punches.

I cannot have Christ without others but also that I cannot have Christ alongside only ones I show pity to: the sick and the prisoner. To say that I cannot have Christ without others is to say that I cannot have Christ without the stranger (whom I do not know or choose) and the enemy as well: p76

Werntz goes on - to create a fellowship of people only I choose, is to create a community in my own image. Our community is bound up with our enemies, and yet, per Bonhoeffer. "when Jesus teaches about how we worship, he says that worship cannot—indeed, must not—take place when someone is at odds with me (Matt. 5:23–24)." (p77)

To Community

Part 2 turns to envision a renewal of community life. How might we undo isolation in the practices of the church in a way that lives out communion in Christ?

Ch 4 looks at the practices of our common life. Many of the same ones that in chapter 2 we were considering as infected with isolation! It is not the practices themselves that are our problem, nor truly are they our solution (as if they were techniques guaranteed to produce social, community, or spiritual outcomes), but they are our means nonetheless. I think this part is where Werntz really shines - how might the reading and interpretation of Scripture, singing, praying, eating together, and the work of mission and mercy in the world, be so done as to recognise and form us not as individuals isolated from each other, but as distinct selves in communion with each other, bound and limited and giving of ourselves as well as genuinely receiving from each other. This is the kind of Christian community life we ought to long for, and to circle back on myself, it's right to feel a pang when this isn't what we experience.

Ch 5 considers what Bonhoeffer calls "the day apart" - what about when we are not together? What does Christian life look like in work, leisure, and scatteredness, and how can this still be ordered in a way that is oriented and ordered by our fundamental communion in Christ? In some ways this chapter is even more challenging:

It is these four points—a composite life of prayer and action—that help make the day apart a time of deepening our relation to the community of the church and not, on the one hand, a time spent in some sphere separate from the church or, on the other hand, a time of isolation that we endure until we can be rejoined to the church. p132

I say this because it is so easy, tempting, and simple given that the time apart for many of us is precisely that - time spent outside the sphere of church, with little thought to the way we are in fact extensions of the church in time and space, alone but not isolated.

Ch 6 is a bit hard to pin down. Werntz titles it "renewing the shape of ministry", but he certainly doesn't mean professionalised or clerical ministry, he means the ministry of one to another, the practicing and cultivating of virtues or habits that shape our common life together, and apart. Here he treats such things as power dynamics within the body, our speech practices towards one another, meekness, listening, neighbourliness, bearing each other's burdens (both other's sufferings and hardships, and each other's sins), proclamation, and authority. I don't think I can in any way do this section justice, so I'll leave it at that!

Ch 7 might come as a surprise, in that it suggests two practices that come at the end of all the others:

And so now we approach the practices that the others have been preparing us for and that enable the others: confession and forgiveness. These practices invite us to see the face of another and enter into communion with them. p173

Confession has been on a slow decline since the Reformation. Luther certainly threw out sacramental confession to a priest, but still considered confession of sins between believers to be a useful and beneficial practice. I would say that this is rarely practiced in the low church circles I've been a part of. Werntz suggests two reasons confession ought to be our practice:

First, as we have seen, sin is never privatized, any more than the spiritual growth or virtue of the Christian is a singular work: sin and its effects never remain with us; p175

But second, when I do not confess to another person, I am perpetuating the isolation of sin for religious reasons: I am withdrawing from others and hiding from them the sin that is affecting them, claiming that I need only confess to God. p176

It's confronting, not least because we of all people do not like to confront our sins at all, and if we confess them privately to God, this seems enough. But in doing so, we are perpetuating an individualistic conception of redemption that undercuts the communion with have in community.

If, when we gather, we bring only our confessions of faith and not our confessions of sin, we are still gathering only as a crowd. Without the common confession of faith, we are only a body who knows how to judge in a way that divides, but without confession of sin, we are not a body that is willing to be healed. p178

Confession stands at the end here, but really at the beginning:

we cannot enjoy Christ’s presence unless we enjoy it together, and we enjoy it reconciled to one another. You may have your arguments and disagreements or you may have Christ; you may have your isolation or you may have Christ; you may not have both. p182

It is the reconciliation of each of us to God in Christ, and to each other, that makes communion possible - but the sharing in one another and with each other that makes 'community', as well as the communion that is instantiated and realised in the sharing of Holy Communion, our sacramental sharing in the one body and blood of our Lord Jesus. It is to this, in all its dimensions, that we are called.

Concluding Thoughts

This was a slow read for me, even though it's not technically a long book. It was dense though, with lots to chew on. I think it might even need a re-read, to ponder in particular the practices at every point and how to do them. I also suspect I need to read this book in closer dialogue with Bonhoeffer himself, who conveniently is on my 2023 reading list. One thing above all I am convinced of - we need this kind of vision of life together in Christ to not only sustain us, but to draw us with the hope of what we can be, drawing us to Christ and each other in our lives.