Alternative Reality

“The Holy is that which preserves the belief in the reality of an alternative that is true and trustworthy.” So stated Peter Brown, a noted Oxford historian of the 4th and 5th centuries, one recent evening in Washington when a group of scholars, theologians, and government officials were called together to discuss “Is the Holy Wholly Gone?”

That is a question urgently worth asking in an age ruled by the gods of technology and the nation-state, sustained by faith in progress and ideology.

Throughout history those whose lives have been grasped by God have sought to worship and cling to a sense of sacred holiness amidst a world, and often an institutionalized church, which appeared dominated by the profane.

In the 4th and 5th century, when traditional foundations of society seemed to be crumbling, a few individuals sought God by severing the normal ties of kindred and society, embarking for the solitude of the desert. These ascetics and hermits became known as the “holy men.” To the society they were seen as bearers of the eternal, those whose lives were testimonies to the truth that God’s life was still present in the world. Particularly in the unstable and increasingly rootless culture of Egypt and Syria, these holy ones eventually came to play a central social and political role through the purity of their quest for God.

The power of God’s Spirit was internalized through their dramatic pilgrimages which made the most radical breaks with the normalcy of life in late antiquity. Peter Brown writes that the holy man "belonged to a world that was not so much antithetical to village life as marginal ... The life of the holy man is marked by so many histrionic feats of self-mortification that it is easy, at first sight, to miss the deep social significance of asceticism as a long drawn out, solemn ritual of dissociation -- of becoming the total stranger. For the society around him, the holy man is the one man who can stand outside the ties of family, and of economic interest ... He was thought of as a man who owed nothing to society."

The dramatic irony is the deep relevance to society that was played by those whose existence was so distinctively marginal to the dominant thrusts of their culture. Because their lives were so clearly rooted in spiritual reality rather than entangled in the vested interests of their temporal age, they were asked to settle arguments, mediate disputes over village boundaries, arrange for needed loans, reconcile potentially warring differences to preserve peace, distribute food in times of famine, and other acts of justice.

When the monastic movement originally sprang up, it represented corporate expressions of this same individual quest for a life that was molded by the love of God rather than structured according to the realities of their age. Though in ways an attempt to break from the structures and values of institutional church life, the movement became a force for its renewal until that time when the monastic orders had become such an intrinsic part of the church’s earthly power and wealth that they had to undergo another dramatic renewal of their own.

The various streams which flowed from the Reformation represented another attempt to cleave more purely to that Word which in its holiness relativized the structures of supposed sanctity of that era. In modern centuries, the history of those believers who have given their lives in seeking that city whose builder and maker is God has continued with pilgrims, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Shakers, Amish, and hundreds of other movements of Christians who have attempted to build the church, witnessing to God’s new community on earth.

These quests for holiness are marked, of course, with heresies, excesses, divisiveness, and failures; as such, they reflect the maladies that have afflicted all church history through the ages. In particular, the historical attempts to break apart from the structures of one’s age in order to respond more fully to a vision of God’s kingdom have been beset with a self-righteousness which summarily rejects all the world and the rest of the church as if it were immune from God’s grace.

This has frequently produced a sectarianism which further divides Christ’s body, producing a broken, fragmented body which contradicts the biblical vision of the one church. Such sectarianism frequently assumes that the church has no truly valid history outside the experience of one’s particular group.

Yet, the history of the church demonstrates that renewal in its life has come when believers have been moved by the Spirit to break free from bondage of fallen values, self-serving structures, lifeless traditions, and petrified, deadened institutions. They have heard Christ’s word and call with a consuming clarity and given themselves to a fresh building of his body, molded by the steadfast belief in the coming of his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

When such surges of renewal have had the humility to guard against the sins of self-righteousness and sectarianism, receiving the grace to see themselves within the sweep of the church universal, they have been used dramatically to build the body into a deeper identity with its Lord and a forceful witness for his kingdom.

To be a holy people is not to be a self-righteous lot; from the Old Testament we learn that a holy people means those who have been called apart, those who follow a separate way, those who are called unto God.

Whenever the established church has lived its life wedded to the realities of society’s present order, it has lost its sense of preserving the holy, of truly living under the Word of God.

To rebuild the church as community in this age, then, is to form a body of believers called by God around an “alternative that is true and trustworthy.” It is to live life based on this alternative reality -- the Word of God, building Christ’s kingdom.

Franz Kafka wrote: “The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.”

In a profane age, the body of believers becomes as a community the guardian of faith in the eternal truth of God’s Word, nurturing life’s true richness, based upon that which is ultimately real.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.