Last year, I used Reformation Day as an opportunity to promote an ecumenist way of thinking. The past year has only revealed more thoroughly how the need for ecumenism is deepened not only by the West’s continual cultural slump, but also because Christianity’s recent decline in the West has coincided with the rise of the internet. While it is true that churches act as bulwarks for Christian communities against the deterioration of culture and thus require a certain level of insulation against the outside, the negative corollary to this fact is that churches are constantly at risk of becoming insulated against each other, especially in an individualist society. Happily, the advent of internet (which is not often an appropriate string of words) increasingly seems to force, or at least incentivize, interactions across lines of culture, tradition, and denomination that otherwise would not and even could not have occurred.

As should be expected when the internet is in view, that is about where the happy accidents end. The internet is full of its own kind of insular, isolated “communities,” echo chambers fomented by algorithms designed to introduce people to others who only talk about the things they like in the way they like it. The list of other drawbacks is probably inestimable, not limited to the hyper-proliferation of anger, parasociality that leads to real social withdrawal, and so on. Still, the poison is often in the dosage, and rightly balanced doses of internet usage have demonstrable potential to edify.

Fundamentally, the overwhelming danger of the internet is the indescribable volume of information it affords and the incomprehensible speed at which that information can be disseminated, consumed, transformed and regurgitated. We have collectively made a terrific mistake in assuming that, somehow, an exponential increase in the availability of information could effect an increase in quality. Certainly, more quality information is available to the layman than ever before, but the apparent cost of swimming through an ocean of useless distraction does somewhat nullify that benefit. Generative AI has proven that no one knows just how fast all these processes can get, nor how low the quality can sink.

Despite their clear flaws, these technologies have burrowed deeply into the fabric of culture. They did not emerge in a vacuum, after all, but are themselves the product of culture. The Information Age is the culmination of developments that truly could be traced back to Tubal-cain and Prometheus, but more relevantly to Gutenberg. This being the case, the information overload that the internet and generative AI present to the human mind is an insightful reflection of the environment and condition in which the modern Church contends.  

Too often, ideas are separated from the people who formulated and articulated them, and those people are further separated from the context in which they lived. It should come as no surprise that the advancement of scholarly rigor in Medieval humanism, the development of the printing press, and the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages all roughly coincided with what became the Protestant Reformation. No historical moment is a monolith exactly, but it would not be useless to characterize the Reformation basically as revolving around access to information. For proto-protestants like Wycliffe and Hus, it was clear that the Latin mass and dogmatic usage of the Vulgate inhibited the flow of divine revelation to common people. The concern of the medieval clerical establishment (insofar as that concern had any validity) was that unregulated dissemination of sacred information would degrade its quality such that it would become profane and harmful, leading to innumerable heresies and errors.

What that establishment failed to acknowledge, and thus what produced the Reformation, was the fact of the establishment’s vulnerability to a different form of decay into error. Overregulation, so to speak, allowed certain errors to creep into magisterial institutions and appropriate to themselves the same legal protections meant to secure divine truths. A survey of the Albigensian Crusade, as an example I’ve recently found quite illuminating, indicates that the strictures and structures of medieval Western Christianity made the Reformation or something like it reasonably inevitable. 

Unfortunately, though, the benefit of hindsight uncovers that the clerical fears of the party that burned Hus were not entirely unfounded. Both institutionally and theologically, the Reformation launched the Western Church into a fractal spiral in which unity once taken for granted was diffused and disintegrated into the myriad churches, denominations, sects and splinters now seen today. Luther and Zwingli were able to agree on fourteen out of fifteen articles they discussed at Marburg, and it is the foregone handshake on that fifteenth point which best describes what visibly propagated into the modern era. 

This is the world the modern Christian, especially in the West but to some extent everywhere, must now navigate. Is it any wonder, either, that the New World was discovered in the era of the Reformation? America’s soil proved fertile for unprecedented religious variegation. The internet is not merely a cause of informational overload, but a result. With restrictions like illiteracy and persecution done away with, modernity would slough off the medieval with a view to a new horizon of spiritual liberty, naturally accompanied with equally novel spiritual perils. America in particular is, therefore, something like a petri dish for this modern kind of religion.

Just as with the internet, the vibrance of American religion comes at the sacrifice of navigability. The epistemic crisis bubbling to the surface of public consciousness in issues around misinformation, distrust of institutions, “alternative facts” and whatever else have you is, again, a product of that which has preceded it. This inability to map the world, to know who and what can be trusted, to find safety in community or even know what community is, begins with the Reformation. The Reformation is the weakness of medievalism, and the Enlightenment is the weakness of the Reformation. The cracks introduced to “Christendom” by Protestantism have metastasized into the deep rifts of postmodernity.

Enter the so-called metamodern, perhaps the age of re-integration. I’ve written at great length about a sort of theory of “Spirit” in a Hegelian sense as the constant phenomenon of dissolution and reconstitution. Spirit is, like the Tao, that harmony which persists through death and rebirth. Protestants in America live at the end of a long and storied line of negation, a history of excising excesses and stripping away that which had buried and obscured the sacred truth of the gospel. Now, as the re-paganizing of the West signals a kind of spiritual rock bottom, the tides seem to shift toward reconstruction.

Luke Behncke pointed out in a recent symposium that institutions of the Church seem to fail and go awry when they fail to put themselves under Christ through humble acknowledgement of their distance from His perfection. From the Protestant perspective, that certainly sounds true of the Reformation, but it is in an important sense no less true now. The Reformation more or less freed churches to no longer appeal simply to institutional authority but to appeal to propositional validity. As the symposium went on, the participants arrived at an emphasis on the central tenet of Christian faith that the Logos is not a proposition or set of propositions but rather a Person, and that the propositions of truth are meant to introduce one to faith in that Person. 

Furthermore, they rightly observe that the Church is not an “it” but a “she.” The constancy of remorse that Behncke mentioned sounds a lot like this working definition of Spirit I’ve proposed. The Spirit in sanctification is the continuity in grief and restoration, in repentance and holiness, remorse and praise, the pattern that binds the opposites of mortification and revivification together toward their teleological end, which is Christ. The Church is personally one, as one “person,” so to speak, a “she,” not least because she is inhabited by one Spirit. 

Just as one knows a tree by its fruit, as the Scripture tells us, one knows where the Spirit is by the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Although, “know” must be used rather loosely in this case, since the Spirit of God is not bound by anything but Himself, and therefore the wind blows where it wishes. Nonetheless, as the dust of the Reformation has settled, and further as the dust of the Enlightenment has settled into the current situation in America, full of scattered, disparate little churches, communities in Christ all insulating against each other, and full of sheep unsure which flock belongs to the Good Shepherd, it must surely become clearer and clearer that the Church is a she. The Spirit is a Person. His work is that of mystical union to Christ, and it is from that unity that all lesser unity follows.

I cannot help but bring this to bear upon an important pastoral point. Basically, in the present world of informational overload, of competing theological and ecclesial propositions, in a field so thick with contenders claiming the right to be called “truth,” do not ever forget that Truth is not a thing, He’s a Person. If you want to know the truth, know Christ. If you want to be in the Church, seek Christ. If you want unity in the Body, be joined to the Head. If you want peace between believers, find peace with God. Behncke’s use of the term “fractal” was poignant because it is in the pattern of the Reformation’s disintegrating impulse that the Spirit is in fact still evident. That pattern of semper reformanda, of constant dissolution and reconstitution around the personal Essence Himself toward greater holiness, is the pattern for the individual persons in the Church as well.

I am personally persuaded that now is a time to be building. Churches must build communities that are robust by founding them on intimate intellectual, emotional, lived and personal knowledge of Christ, and that can only happen if believers commit themselves to becoming one with Him. The word “re-form” does not merely signify removal, but a general changing of shape. The shape to which we must be conformed is Christ. Only that which is built upon the Rock will withstand the storm. 

The Church is in a historically strange time, but from where I’m standing it looks rather like the beginning again. Rome was Babylon, America is Rome. There is nothing new under the sun. The pattern goes on, and by the Spirit it leads to Life. The Church overcame the most violent persecutions from pagan Rome, she will surely be victorious over whatever the neo-pagan world can muster. As Paul Vanderklay wisely noted of the symposium, the Church cannot think her way out of the present circumstance, she must simply live her way through it. So, I do not have any propositional answers of “right church, wrong church.” I cannot point to any one institution or denomination and say “Lo! There is the Kingdom.” But, if by spiritual means we can behold Christ, then perhaps we shall see the Kingdom after all. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God… I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

The Body of Christ must be knit together in the Spirit if her diverse nature is to conform to her blessed calling. It is Christ alone who can give meaning and purpose in the fragmentation of the modern Church. The whole beauty of the Reformation in the end was not in itself, but in Christ and Him crucified.

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all. — Ephesians 4:1-6 (RSV)

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. — Romans 12:2-5 (RSV)