I’ve made the claim that the Christian Church itself is but one organ in the Body of Christ, though the most important and potentially most powerful organ. I would supplement that claim with another: the true power of the Church is dependent not upon external force but upon proper execution of Her duties of teaching those who are at least nominally within Her doors and evangelizing those who are without. The Church prays and worships; She teaches how to pray and worship, Who it is that we worship, and why we pay Him such respect.
I’ll ignore the great complication, but no more than complication, of the various schisms in Christianity, some being historically driven schisms at some level of hierarchy and some involving more serious differences in theology or in understanding of Creation and its relationship, and our relationships, to God. This makes it hard to understand the Christian confusion on earth in terms of a pilgrim Church with a direct relationship to God, but only hard.
I’ll also mention a somewhat new complication. There has been some tendency, increasingly strong in recent centuries, to see Jews as being on the road to salvation despite not having accepted Jesus Christ as the Messiah. The real issue within my developing worldview is the communal nature of Judaism. After all, I see this world as being the story of the birth and development of the Body of Christ which is the completion of the work accomplished by the Son of God in sacrificing Himself to the Father as an oblation of love. It is the People of Israel and not some collective of individual Jews who are truly moving toward God, the People of Israel who are—at least at the level of human perception and conception—the parallel to the Christian Church rather than individual Jews being some sort of parallel to individual Christians.
There are more open questions than certain statements in any interesting exploration and analysis of God’s Creation and of our relationships to Him. This is good, not because such questions bring us knowledge which we can then integrate into our minds but because our minds are formed by our acts of restating those questions properly as thoughts manifested by the Creator in the various realms of created being. Our good questions about revealed knowledge, speculative knowledge, and various sorts of empirical knowledge lead to larger and richer human minds, especially in the communal form of the human mind—the intellect.
The ultimate setting for an intellect, the largest possible domain in terms of human culture and individual minds, would be a civilization encompassing all of humanity. Some would say, the prior sentence should have `pilgrim Church on earth’ rather than `civilization’, but I’ve taken the different position that the various aspects of human life over which the Church’s human servants have renounced complete authority—moral and spiritual authority over all human institutions still belongs to Her—are manifested and lived in institutions which are part of the Body of Christ but somewhat independent of the Church. Nothing in the Body of Christ can be independent of the entirety of that Body or of each individual member.
Let me state the implicit conclusion I just drew: the perfect and complete human civilization in this mortal realm would be one which is a balanced, honest, and creative response to all of God’s revelations and also the explorable aspects of Creation as it can be understood by creatures such as us.
Now I shift momentarily to social insects. Ants and other social insects are quite plausibly described by scientists such as E.O. Wilson, a founder of the discipline of sociobiology, as slaves to their DNA, or perhaps to the family line whose characteristics are encoded in their DNA—in this restatement, I’m proposing that DNA is more a glue than a substance. It’s mostly correct to say that this makes those insects non-individualistic members of a community which is, typically a domineering sisterhood of neuters or a sisterhood of neuters dominated by a fertile mother. In the first case, the fertile mother exists but, more or less, as a slave of her daughters. There is a genetic basis for these two different ant societies which the interested reader can find in Wilson’s books on sociobiology, such as Sociobiology, The Abridged Edition, or in articles over the years published in magazines such as Scientific American.
[I will now switch to my preferred term `community’ rather than `society’ for describing human communal entities, just because it seems more usefully general.]
There are examples of slave societies, such as the Mameluks who were non-Arab warriors purchased as slaves by Arabs. Those non-Arabs became members of the Mameluk caste of warriors, a caste whose members were typically of higher status than free-born Muslims, but the Mameluks were in theory and to a large extent in fact subordinated absolutely to their caste as a whole. This can be seen, at least by me, as a human society resembling in some ways ant societies but far from completely because, while education and training would have inculcated the Mameluk-attitude, there was a necessary external pressure to conform rather than conformance being a part of the basic nature of the member as is true of ants and other social insects. More generally, the caste was defined by other than genetic relationships though most Mameluks were captured from a relatively small number of ethnic groups, typically Christians.
Recent science-fiction television series, and probably movies, have included such societies as a 1984-ish bogey. This is a very unlikely development of the human race, not because of some idealistic understanding of man but because of man’s strategies and skills for survival and reproduction. We are individualists in a sense but mostly small-group creatures. By `small-group’, I mean simply that concrete, hand-to-hand, mouth-to-ear, relationships—based on genetic or gene-proxy relationships—are the foundation of any larger human communities. Human communities form from smaller units which are then formed from individuals who retain some of the good and bad characteristics of that implausibly free-standing individual of American myth and libertarian ideology.
I’ve grossly oversimplified by claiming “Human societies form from smaller units which are then formed from individuals.” In fact, individuals and various communal groupings of human beings, such as teen-agers or young mothers or members of a crafts group or local politicians or lawyers, form various groups in all sorts of combinations of individual and group relationships. Larger-scale societies are complex networks drawn from this entire mess. The mess is certainly interesting and a mere hint as to why E.O. Wilson rightly claims that understanding the biological and social nature of man is a problem orders of magnitude greater than those of physics.
The problem with sociobiologists is that they see men clearly in terms of the evolutionary past but have a fundamental misunderstanding of men as they have now are and that leads to a still greater misunderstanding of possible futures for the human race and a similarly great misunderstanding of men in their relationship to being or `created being’ in my usage.
What do I propose instead? In Why Does Time Move Only Forward?: Once Upon a Time…, I wrote a highly summarized version of my understanding of human nature:
What is the relationship between a world [unified and coherent and complete] and a person as I understand them? A creature such as a human being is born a particular sort of physical animal and is more or less invited implicitly by his surroundings (and perhaps explicitly by his Creator) to start shaping himself by response to those surroundings. Human communities play an important role as the centuries go by, developing broader and deeper understandings of those surroundings, perhaps even coming to view that physical entity which we call the `universe’.
I also wrote:
The overall narrative by which this concrete realm, this universe, moves forward is what makes it a world, unified and coherent and complete. The overall narrative by which we concrete human beings move forward can make us persons, unified and coherent and complete.
The narrative, which is the movement into the future in our world, is as fundamental as the entities and relationships studied by physicists and other physical scientists. It cannot be reduced out of our understanding of this world. It cannot be explained by way of the field equation of general relativity or by Schrodinger’s equation in quantum mechanics. In fact, I would suggest that many physical laws, many physical entities, are what they are because of their role as the `stuff’ of a particular narrative.
Find the story of our universe, or at least a plausible story given our current knowledge. That is the world. At least to a Christian who intends to be a member of the Body of Christ and perhaps to a Jew intending to be a member of Israel, that story is also him, her, us and—expanded properly—that story is the story of all of Creation.
A perfected and completed civilization would be the form and substance of a perfected and completed human race acting and thinking and feeling along with the Creator as He goes about His work. This is a description of the Body of Christ, at least to a sacramental Christian. It’s the description of a human race at peace with itself and its members, individual and communal, and also at peace with Creation and with God Himself. It’s an ideal but one which can guide us in forming communities which are morally and spiritually well-ordered as well as being appropriately rich and complex in cultural areas, artistic and intellectual.
It is Christianity, the religion in which God is both three Persons and also a community of perfect unity, the religion in which the Son of God is incarnate in His own Creation, which can give us such a view of a civilization, one which can be seen ultimately to be a view of the world of those resurrected to live with Jesus Christ for time without end.