Abstract
Myles Werntz's From Isolation to Community opens: ‘A great deal is at stake with how we as Christians name both our problems and our solutions. For if we name the problem too trivially, we wind up offering an unserious solution’ (p. 1). Such a qualification is programmatic; in the analysis of church practice which follows, everything depends, for Werntz, on the fact that one takes seriously the condition we find ourselves in as human beings—namely, the condition of sin—and must therefore respond in ways appropriate to the severity of this situation. Specifically, Werntz defines the condition of sin as one of isolation, the profound alienation one has from one's fellow creatures and, most fundamentally, from God. To name the condition of sin as isolation with appropriate sobriety is not to paint a neat picture of an estranged world from which the church of Christ stands at a distance. Instead, naming our condition theologically causes us to confess how our own practices of church life, even ostensibly effective ones, ‘may actually replicate isolation’ (p. 7, emphasis original). From Isolation to Community builds off this foundational premise via the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in order to offer a practical theological vision of life together.
The book is separated into two parts, bracketed by an Introduction and a Conclusion. Part 1 examines ‘Isolation and the Structure of the Word’, and Part 2 ‘The New World of Christian Community’. Isolation functions for Werntz as a controlling metanarrative for the ways in which sin affects our common life on earth and our relation to the human and divine other. Building off Bonhoeffer's lectures on Genesis 1–3, chapter 1 shows how sin breaks the natural conditions of creaturely limit and mediation in exchange for mastery and knowledge. The breaking of this communion, rather than giving creatures what they need to thrive—that is, dependence and mediation via God and neighbour—now isolates them to their own self-enclosed visions of personhood and relationality. Since Eden, Werntz sums, creatures now ‘construct a world without God, with others only as accidentally there’ (p. 27, emphasis original). Such self-enclosure causes human creatures to hide, developing habits and dispositions in which they flee from the presence of others. Here, Werntz might have turned to longstanding criticisms raised by feminist theology which seek to show how universalised accounts of sin as a form of atomism often ignore the gendered dynamics of self-negation and the experiences of women. Though Werntz himself does not seem invested in a rugged masculinist vision of the tragic individual, the lack of engagement with feminist voices at this point is noticeable, especially given Bonhoeffer's own ambiguous witness regarding matters of gender.
For Werntz, a theological account of sin as isolation is fundamental in addressing practical and cultural problems. It is not that examining the various conditions of, for example, consumer capitalism, social technologies, or (post)modernity in depth does not help us address isolation—such conditions of the modern world indeed stretch and extend our isolation in unique and distressing ways. But the condition of isolation has existed for human beings since time immemorial: ‘modernity breaks human life in novel ways, but isolation is not simply a product of modernity or curable by adopting premodern habits’ (p. 26, n. 21). Werntz indeed offers a rich analysis of various social conditions in contemporary North America which exacerbate isolation. Understanding, for example, the Eucharist as a personalised experience given to the individual means it can be easily celebrated online apart from the gathered body during times of public health restrictions and pandemic. Viewing preaching as a message of personal application and information means that recorded sermons can simply be uploaded and watched back at the convenience of church members, divorced from the event of gathering.
Chapters 2 and 3, then, further develop how isolation has become fundamental to human life both within and outside the church community. Werntz argues that humans hide from one another and from God in two distinct settings: the individual and the crowd. Hiding as individuals, in some ways, is more manifestly obvious in highly individualised capitalistic cultures such as North America. In this frame, individuals become the sole locus of Christian practice and vocation. The rise and use of digital technologies within church practice, for example, even as they morph over time, are undergirded by ‘a common ethos of the time of gathering as a vehicle for content delivery for individual listeners’ (p. 57, emphasis original). Less obvious, however, is the ways in which humans seek to hide in crowds; whereas ‘the individualist presumption places too much on the Christian—asking them to be an excellent hermeneut, interpreter, moral authority, and arbiter—the crowd presumption takes the opposite approach (albeit toward the same end) in asking too little of the Christian’ (p. 60). Crowds, then, replicate isolation not in orientating the Christian life around the individual but in collecting aggregate individuals into a group united by a common cause or leader. Crowds are often more seductive to churches than the individual precisely because they give the appearance of community without actually addressing the heart of our creaturely condition: isolation. The act of gathering in and of itself, even around effective means such as a common cause, a charismatic leader, or shared interest, does not mean we avoid the problem of isolation: ‘we remain not in community but among crowds, thus avoiding the true call to come out from among them’ (p. 66, emphasis original).
Moving beyond the crowd and beyond the individual is finally what brings us to community—a reality of life together which occurs only in and through Christ. As Bonhoeffer himself famously writes, ‘Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none that is less than this’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, trans. Daniel Bloesch and James Burtness (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 31). This means that such community is not achieved via human means of gathering or, as Werntz earlier shows, the various ways in which humans seek to hide from God in a state of isolation either in the individual or the crowd. Instead, the new life achieved by Christ and now witnessed to in the church draws the church into a form of community which ends isolation and overcomes our estrangement from God and our neighbour.
How, then, does the church come to embody community, especially when it may be easily confused with the crowd and the individual? Werntz once again takes his cue from Bonhoeffer, structuring chapters 4–7 within Part 2 around the key moments in which the ‘new world of Christian community’ is experienced. Chapter 4 deals with what Bonhoeffer calls ‘The Day Together’, the practices of Christian gathering. Human creatures live in time, time that is redeemed and reconciled to God in Christ. As such, within time and space, the church gathers together to read, sing, pray, eat, and act. Each of these activities derives its shape, for Werntz, from the Word manifest by the Spirit in scripture and sacrament. Chapter 5 deals with what Bonhoeffer calls ‘The Day Alone’. Far from being a break from Christian community in which the sanctity of gathering ceases amidst mundane life and work, the practices of the private life instead include and extend the activities of communal gathering. The private practices of Bible reading, silent prayer, or intercession, for example, are not ecstatic moments in which the individual receives unique or special revelation apart from the body. Rather, such practices extend the reading and intercession of the wider body—both in the church's past readings of scripture across history and the church's present readings of scripture in gathered communion.
Chapter 6 takes a step back to examine the ways in which such corporate and private practices take their shape amidst the wider dynamics of communal life, in which the weak and the strong are to hold together and learn from one another in acts of listening, sharing, and proclaiming. This ordering is important: for Werntz, as much as for Bonhoeffer, community life cannot be realised first through acts of human imagination or innovation. Instead, community is found first in the concrete habitation of creaturely life together in and through Christ, out of which isolation is overcome. Chapter 7, finally, offers an enigmatic picture of the practice of confession. Confession, Werntz argues, is the ‘culminating practice of the Christian life’ insofar as it confirms and attends to the body of Christ in its very weakness and humble historical form (p. 176). To confess our sins and recognise our shortcomings to one another relies on our prior joining together through singing, eating, praying, and reading. Confession assumes community, entrusting our own creaturely fragility to each other in and through Jesus Christ.
Throughout the text, Werntz speaks unapologetically from within his own confessional background (Baptist) and his constructive reading of Bonhoeffer employs his ecclesiology to certain free church ends. Yet his approach, much like Bonhoeffer's, has an ecumenical spirit, engaging in both wider Protestant and Catholic perspectives throughout. Werntz also draws from patristic sources with some frequency, offering a wider catholic reading of the church from within his own Baptist frame of reference. The result is a vision of church life accented towards free church Protestantism but one that offers a broader appeal to readers of different confessional contexts. Nor is Werntz uncritically confessional. For example, he outlines compelling and insightful internal critiques regarding prevailing memorialist understandings of the Eucharist within Baptist settings in chapter 4 and offers a call for a Protestant embrace of the practice of confession in chapter 7.
The book draws generously and consistently from Bonhoeffer's insights, but, as Werntz himself puts it, ‘this is a book that is not directly about Bonhoeffer’ (p. 12). In the first instance, the primary aim of From Isolation to Community does not lie in adding another interpretation of Bonhoeffer's theological corpus to the literature. Instead, Werntz's purpose is to offer a practical theological vision of contemporary church life in North America. In the second instance, the book builds constructively and dialogically from Bonhoeffer's various insights, freely drawing from both historic and contemporary sources beyond Bonhoeffer's own reach. The text itself is not overly long or dense—coming in at under 200 pages—and does not seek to provide lengthy scholarly excursus. Neither, however, does it shy away from offering a richly detailed constructive interpretation of Bonhoeffer's theology which should be of access and interest to Bonhoeffer specialists and non-specialists alike.
While From Isolation to Community can therefore be heartily recommended to theological ethicists, practical theologians, and interpreters of Bonhoeffer alike, it should perhaps most pressingly be read by church leaders and ministers, those involved in the detailed, messy work of local church life. To local churches, Werntz offers practical theology at its best: a patient investigation into the concrete interplay of divine action and human life, examining the ways in which Christian revelation speaks to the most fundamental realities of the human predicament and points towards, within these realities, the promises and practices of redemption. Werntz's text offers a Bonhoefferian vision for church life in the twenty-first-century West in which anxieties about church decline and cultural status dominate. Graciously yet firmly diagnosing our ecclesial complicity in furthering isolation, he does not stop there, instead offering a picture of how such communities, God-willing, might break into the promised new life of community and healing.