Anarchy & Grace - Will D Campbell on disorganised religion as ecclesiology

Despite all my reading on the sociology of institutions and the way movements become institutions not least the Christian movement I find something bracing about Will Campbell's anarchic views and practice of a radical Christian discipleship. In the light of the current difficulties created by institutions of established Christianity commitment to self preservation in their handling of sexual abuse cases you can't help feeling that he has a point.

In his account of a personal struggle for soul freedom he observes:

As most of you know my institutional flings didn't work out. None of them. There is not time here to list them nor explain their demise. To do so would serve no purpose. Doubtless part of my failure within the structures had to do with my own intractable genes. Whatever. I was a pastor, a university chaplain, an employee of the allegedly most free religious institution in the world. I didn't keep any job for long. But through it all I discovered one thing. All institutions, every last single one of them, are evil; self-serving, self-preserving, self-loving; and very early in the life of any institution it will exist for its own self. So beware out here this week. True soul freedom cannot be found in any institution. That is the guts of my testimony to you today. True soul freedom can never be found in any institution. If they will pay you, let them. I did it too. But never trust them. Never bow the knee to them. They are all after your soul. Your ultimate, absolute, uncompromising allegiance. Your soul. ALL OF THEM. Jesus was a RADICAL! And His Grace abounds.

 There are echoes here of William Stringfellow with his vigorous assaults on the institutional structures of the Episcopalian church in the name of the Gospel.

Will D Campbell: Radical Baptist - Theologian of Radical Grace

For reasons that I am not totally clear about I have been dipping back into the life and writings of Will D Campbell a radical Baptist preacher from the south of the USA. If you dip into the history of the civil rights movement you are likely to find him popping up here and there as a fugitive presence. He was an activist, pastor, theologian for most of his life without a formal church position and with a habit of raising difficult questions for theological and social liberals who might have assumed that he was on their side.

For an account of his life check out Will Campbell - A man of the Word.

Richard D Goode has recently edited an anthology of Campbell's work, Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance (Cascade Books, 2009). The book contains some good extracts that catches the flavour of what Campbell has on about.

If prophets are called to unveil and expose the illegitimacy of those principalities masquerading as "the right" and purportedly using their powers for "the good," then Will D. Campbell is one of the foremost prophets in American religious history. Like Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day and probably Wendell Berry in his own more gentle but nonteheless challenging way Campbell incarnates the radical iconoclastic vocation of standing in contraposition to society, naming the racial, economic, and political idols that seduce and delude. (Jacques Ellul is one of the influences lurking behind the scenes here)

In this anthology Campbell diagnoses a problem afflicting much of the church today. Zealous to make a difference in the world by acquiring the power of legislation and enforcement, Christians employ society's political science rather than the scandalous politics of Jesus. Although well-intentioned, Christians are, Campbell laments, mistakenly "up to our steeples in politics." Campbell's prescription is for disciples simply to incarnate the reconciliation that Christ has achieved. Rather than crafting savvy strategies and public policies, "Do nothing," Campbell counsels. "Be reconciled!"

Yet his encouragement to "do nothing" is no endorsement of passivity or apolitical withdrawal. Rather, Campbell calls for disciples to give their lives of reconciliation in irrepressible resistance against all principalities and powers that would impede or deny our reconciliation in Christ—an unrelenting prophetic challenge leveled especially at institutional churches, as well as Christian colleges and universities.

In sermons, difficult-to-access journal articles, and archival manuscripts and extracts from his books assembled here by Goode, Campbell develops what reconciliation looks like. Being the church, for example, means identifying with, and advocating for, society's "least one"-including violent offenders, disenfranchised minorities, and even militant bigots. In fact, in Campbell's understanding the scorned sectarian and disinherited denizen is often closer to the peculiar Christian genius than are society's well-healed powerbrokers.



Part 2 on Campbell's ecclesiology and Part 3 on Campbell's publications to follow