Christian collective responsibility
Do Christians bear any collective responsibility for our/their faith? In an attempt to get away from the well-worn idea of atrocities (etc) done in the *name* of Christianity:
Do Christians share any collective responsibility for those people who come to faith? And do we/they bear any collective responsibility for people who subsequently lose their faith?
Or when a group, congregation or denomination prays collectively, does it bear any collective responsibility for those prayers, for the consequences of those prayers?
Do Christians share any collective responsibility for those people who come to faith? And do we/they bear any collective responsibility for people who subsequently lose their faith?
Or when a group, congregation or denomination prays collectively, does it bear any collective responsibility for those prayers, for the consequences of those prayers?
Comments
I think it is up to us to challenge fellow Christians if people are being harmed in the name of our faith.
I wonder how to do that, plus eg if a church is backing rather than speaking out against the decision of a national authority to go to war.
We only share collective responsibility if someone loses their faith if they have done so as a result of harm we knew about but did not speak out against, or if we neglected to help them with spiritual issues.
We bear no collective responsibility for the consequences of prayers in my view - all we can do is to bring issues to God which are on our minds. We must pray, however, if we have said we will.
Generally speaking, though, it's hardly likely that the church down the road is going to be praying for any harm to befall anyone else - although there are some fundamentalist outfits who seem to engage in asking God to judge or oppose people they don't agree with.
But that's largely fringe stuff.
1) Yes
2) Sometimes; it depends.
I'm curious what other people from other places will have to say. And to hear their thinking behind what they say.
I'll add to my response later on.
Collective responsibility dilutes even that.
Is there collective or personal responsibility at work in North Korea? Or Russia? Or Israel? Or Iran? Seems a bit of a mirage. Like free will. What's the reality of it? What difference does it make to anything as a concept? Like any theological one? What difference would its absence make? That's an open question.
Thanks Kendel. I'm intrigued by the "depends".
In relation to those who come to faith, it does seem hard to get past New Testament passages about Christians to caring for each and building each other up. Or, for that matter, praying for each other - which I suspect many/most Christians on this site would subscribe to - in an individual as well as a collective capacity. If we do these things because, at least in part, they are expected of us, do we do more than share pain or sadness over those who lose faith?
Exactly. Only in law. Not of a whole nation for a few terrorists for example.
I find this super interesting, but I have to narrow it down to give any kind of sensible answer.
And the first difficulty for me is simply that Christianity, in itself, makes you your "brother's keeper" regardless of whether that human being is a Christian or not, and regardless of their faith status at the moment too. You've got collective (and individual) responsibility for everybody, that way.
But it's also limited, of course. Because what one person can do or bear is limited; and justice also directs us to give special care to those for whom we have a heightened responsibility, either because we helped bring them to faith, or they are family or friends, or we owe them in some way, etc. etc. etc.
And given the number of people out there, one person's share of collective responsibility overflows pretty quickly. In my own case, for instance, I figure that if God throws them in my way (drops them in my lap, so to speak), then they are probably the bit of the world I'm supposed to be caring for. The rest of the Body of Christ (in the sense of all believers) is presumably getting on with the rest of the collective responsibility.
So for me that works out to personal share equalling my family and close friends, my small congregation, my close co-workers, and at a slightly greater remove, all the Vietnamese in the St. Louis metro area, because those are the people my family has been called to serve. Also anybody I've directly impacted with my writing, esp. if (God forbid) it was for bad.
Now the idea of being responsible for the outcome of one's prayer--
This one is a bit different in my understanding, because you've got God there making decisions about what he does in response to prayer, whether it's yes, no, wait, or "You've got to be kidding." So I think the responsibility of the pray-er is a great deal less, maybe nil. It would be different if we were somehow influencing an impersonal force, or one that could not be trusted to make good decisions (a la someone influencing a mentally incapable or drunk friend to do something questionable). But that's not the case, as I understand it. God's free choice is so much a factor that the bulk of the responsibility falls on him, not us. Thank God, because we can be such idiots in what we ask for, sometimes...
Yes, I understand being responsible for each others well-being.
But I understand collective responsibility as meaning all share in the punishment for the wrong-doings of the few, from keeping a whole class of kids in after school when just a couple have been disruptive up to obliterating whole cities because a handful have done wrong. That is what I question.
It seems hard to justify a notion of "collective responsibility" that is merely imposed by one group on another. However, your second example, as seen in the Old Testament, raises the issue of collective sin.
@Lamb Chopped covered a lot of the ground I think is important. I could say, "Read Lamb Chopped's post." But of course, I feel compelled to add more words.
Some people indicated that the term "collective responsibility" is unclear.
Does "collective responsibility" have a definition I'm not thinking of?
Well, of course it does! Although I'm not sure that that's what @Pease has in mind in the OP.
Maybe Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy can help? I glanced at the beginning of Plato's entry.
How collective is collective?
To the single individual, the idea of "collective" might mean something as small as "my local religious body." To people of the future, as we are to members of religious movements of the past, or to the contemporaneous people looking across one or another pond, "collective" looks more like whole regional or historical movements.
Part II:
Do Christians share any collective responsibility for those people who come to faith?
Yes.
so we take collective responsibility upon ourselves.
If the New Testament informs the Christianity that stems from it, then we don't get out of this responsibility. Unless the commands are situational or optional.
Traditionally, that responsibility has been carried out in the form of congregational life and discipleship in the local church. What is discipleship exactly? While it should be teaching and training in the faith, that leads to spiritual maturity, it can be used simply as a method of enforcing conformity to the community's cultural standards (for example "Purity" culture, newly retightened corset strings of "biblical womanhood", insistence on one form of another of pseudo-scientific apologetics, and all the other stuff I didn't mention). This use of "discipleship" can/does lead to all manner of abuse.
To what degree, or at what level is there wider collective responsibility to prevent abuse or mishandling of Scripture or _____? Today, maybe at the congregational or denominational level. Eventually, it will all be attributed to historical "Christianity."
Part III:
If responsibility is collective, then who is responsible now to call whom to account? And how? Historically, I think there have been a few approaches:
1) Top-down institutional structures provide formalized, rather broad-reaching oversight.
2) Loosely affiliated congregations that function by congregational rule (what I'm used to) provide localized oversight and opportunities for local leaders to consult with others, or even hold other congregations to account, depending on the affiliation.
3) Commonly, churches also simply split and abandon the disaster.
But all of these structures/plans are susceptible to corruption. And all behave as insular. I am not familiar with any (unless you count Trent) church body calling another publically to account, because we share collective responsibility. While we all have plenty of our own business to mind, is there a time for wider churches to say publicly and formally, "_______ church/denomination is acting contrary to the basic tenants of the Gospel! Stop it! Do right!" Might be interesting to hear. Wonder if it would do any good?
Would various parts of the Church be more introspective about their own faults in order to avoid a backlash? Dunno.
Part IV:
And do we/they bear any collective responsibility for people who subsequently lose their faith?
I think someone mentioned above, that there are many reasons that people might lose their faith. Certainly. Some of them have nothing to do with the church. Some people may attribute loss of faith to the church, when that really isn't the case. It's not always easy to tell from the outside.
If the church is a part of the reason, though, then the church possibly bears collective. But here we have to ask again, how big the collective is. If a person's loss of faith is due to their local congregation, it's hard to blame the church down the road or across a continent. If the reason exists at a denominational level, maybe the collective is bigger.
Not all people lose faith because of abuse in the church. But more cases are coming to light all the time in the States. However, if local bodies are aware of abuse at a church down the road, there must be some responsibility to report it. There is no excuse for "minding our business."
How to handle, if they know of mishandling of the Gospel? Do they just mind their business then, while members lose their faith?
It will be interesting to see in 20 years how responsibility is seen and blame assigned for things that are happening in churches today. And how will those be seen in 200 or 400 years? I suspect the perimeters of responsibility will widen over the years, as the stories are simplified and homogenized.
I might be wrong but I think they had something to say about other parts of Christendom who didn't see things the way they did.
So it ain't just Trent.
The Ecumenical Councils also had something to say about those who didn't adhere to their conciliar decrees.
Arguably, any denominational confession of faith serves to differentiate its adherents from everyone else, be it the 39 Articles or a congregational statement of faith drawn up by Blogg Street Baptist or the independent Congregational Church on Gasworks Lane.
Has it gone out of fashion in Western culture? I would argue that Western culture is increasingly dominated by collective organizations. Corporations. Governments. Political parties. Groups that take actions which we ascribe to the group as a whole rather than (or sometimes as well as) specific individuals. We're just a comfortable saying "the United States bombed Hanoi" as we are with saying "John McCain bombed Hanoi". We're willing to assign responsibility for actions both collectively and individually.
@Gamma Gamaliel I'm not trying to leave anyone out in this thread about collective responsibility. Give an independent Baptist a break. I'm learning stuff all the time. To most of my brethren, church history started with Charles Finney. Or Billy Graham.
Sorry my failure on Church Councils 101 was all that was worth reading in my very long, time-consuming post.
Or maybe rather collective freedom from individual responsibility?
😉
Relax. I'm just riffing with these things occurring at micro as well as macro levels. I'm not disputing your general or overall point.
When I think of the collectiveness of Christian believers, I don't usually think of this being limited (in the sense of being localised), or of congregational assemblies; I think primarily of the Church - the Body of Christ, of which there is only one, and all Christians being members of this one Body, worldwide. The anatomy (or morphology) of the Church is that Christ is the head, and all Christians are the Body - it is a spiritual entity. Or, given that it involves human beings, an entity with a determining spiritual dimension.
In this conception, any subdivisions of the one Body that exist in human terms - how Christians organise themselves in groups - is a pragmatic, administrative issue, but it has no fundamental bearing on all believers being responsible for each other and accountable to each other. So how Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant organise denominations and congregations is essentially irrelevant to the notion of shared responsibility and accountability. If any Orthodox Christian suffers, all Catholic and Protestant Christians suffer with them.
(In ecclesiastical terms, this sounds like the church invisible, in contrast to the church visible.)
Depending on the context, thought, the answer depends on the viewer/speaker. That brings up the related question:
If we are talking in absolute terms, then first to God.
Does the Church have an absolute duty to the world as a whole, groups within the world? Individuals? (Who decides?)
And finally (for the moment)
I like the point that if any form of Christian, Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, suffers, then all Christians suffer.
Which makes all the mutual anathemas and tortures, executions, exiling and defamation that most Christian groups have engaged in at one time or other all the more lamentable.
Church visible: One, holy, catholic and apostolic.
Church invisible: All those believers who, by the Spirit, can say "we are".
Small "c" church: Any particular intersection of the two.
This would be in the sense of "church" being a space and/or group where practices we associate with worshipping Christians occur. Rather than addressing Kendel's question.
The idea of church invisible and church visible goes back to Clement of Alexandria#. Although it's true that the Protestants were the ones who subsequently picked church invisible up and ran with it.
#Now making an appearance on two different threads.
Recently, at a hearing session with leaders of the Nimiipuu (Nez Pierce) people, one of the Lutheran clergy asked what more can we do to help them. The response was interesting. One of the elders answered the last thing they needed was another white savior. The best thing the white church can do is get out of the way.
Food for thought.
True. The rule seems to be that if enough people are responsible for something then no one is responsible. To pick an historical example, let's say a particular Christian denomination ran an enterprise based on slave labor. (The denomination in question stopped holding slaves in the 1990s, so this isn't a contemporary example.) This enterprise was fairly abusive to its laborers, as most slaveholding enterprises tend to be.
So who was responsible for this? The individuals directly involved in operating the slaveholding enterprise? The denomination that administered it and received the proceeds? The congregants who supported the denomination and indirectly benefited from the enterprise? All of them? None of them?
"None of them" is the denomination's preferred answer or, failing that, only those directly involved in abuses. This is doubly convenient since many of those people had taken vows of poverty and thus legally owned nothing which might be subject to legal processes.
Those in administrative positions who only provided directions are held blameless, kind of a reverse Nuremberg defense: "I was only giving orders."
That's not a "collective responsibility" - it's joint and several.
Ok. The Orthodox do make a distinction between 'the faithful' and the purely nominal but don't generally go in for the idea of an 'invisible church'.
That said, there's the oft-quoted, 'We can say where the Church is, but not where it is not,' thing.
It’s an odd position to be in, truthfully—I’ve seen it in my city, that Christians and non-Christians alike show up at the church door expecting help whether they’ve had a connection to any church in the past three generations or not, unquestioningly—and get it, too, again with nobody seeming to notice the oddity. Somehow this bit of Christian doctrine has soaked into secular culture so thoroughly that almost the first thing you hear after any disaster is “what are the churches doing about it?” And straight up indignation if (completely secular) people think they’re not moving quickly enough. I’m glad it’s this way, but it does have me a bit bemused. Reminds me a bit of my college kid coming home and rifling through the refrigerator. He never doubts that what belongs to me is his... and Christ would agree, with respect to the community, in a lot of ways.
The unity of all believers seems pretty important to God's will for the Church (and the world). And it would be hard to say it's been going well. If there was a global Church unity index, it would have been languishing for some time. The not-so-bad news is that doing something about it isn't (in my view) the remit of congregations or denominations, but in the hands of the individual members of the Body of Christ, together.
Do collective/corporate entities hold responsibility for their actions? Or is responsibility a purely individual matter. This question has some interesting implications since collective or corporate entities are often held to have an existence external to its individual members. For example, the "United States" is still held to be the same entity that was founded over two centuries ago, despite the fact that none of its individual citizens is that old. Does the fact that no one alive today was involved with (for example) the acquisition of Alaska mean that the United States has no claim over that territory?
I suspect it's going better than we think, simply because the one-to-one acts of unity don't get reported anywhere. For example, we put up strangers in our home who were in town to attend an international conference. They were sent to us because we spoke their language, but we were from very different bits of the Church Universal. Didn't matter.
Similarly, there's an astonishing amount of undercover sharing of resources cross-denominationally and cross-culturally. I know of a congregation in Istanbul that is using my husband's sermons (originally spoken in Vietnamese) as a basis for their own, the two groups being at similar development stages in their faith. My church is making use of Baptist and CMA music resources, and has provided preaching and ordination study materials for United Methodists and Presbyterians (some in France). Some of my work's produced material (Lutheran) got highlighted at a recent Presbyterian conference for congregational use. And so on, and so forth. Divisions will always make the news; cooperation usually flies under the radar.
What that looks like and how it works out in practice goodness knows.
Christian collaboration and co-operation is good. Needs to be more of it. But it's good to hear about it when it happens.
Not all cross-fertilisation is a good thing, though. An American friend who trained for the Orthodox priesthood in 1970s Greece told me how appalled he was to see translations of 'The Late Great Planet Earth' and similar populist US fundamentalist shit on sale in monasteries there.
As if they didn't have enough of their own shit without importing someone else's.
All the terms in the op are a continuum and characters are complex. There's some actions that have the mildest connection to the church, long ago and where the harm is debatable. There's others where there's perhaps individual culpability.
That said, pretty much when other world regions are involved, or you think "why should I...". You need to be very careful you arent using double standards (unless you plan on being cynically hellishly hypocritical)
But the responsibility to maintain the wall lies on the church as a single entity, and not somehow collectively on the parishioners. And there's no responsibility on other Christians who are not members of your church to come and fix your wall, or even to be aware that you have a wall.
What usually seems to be meant by "collective responsibility" is the idea that one inherits the credit or blame for some particular action based on sharing some characteristics with the people responsible for it. I don't deserve any credit for the success of a local sports team, unless I happen to have contributed in some way towards that success. If the sports team is supported by local taxation, and those funds have enabled the sports team to develop its programme, train a supply of young people, and as a consequence enjoy success then the choice to support this sport deserves some of the credit, but individual taxpayers are rather too removed from the decision or its implementation to have any credit or blame worth mentioning.
The Wikipedia article quoted above starts by calling Christian privilege a *social* advantage, which is common. But if it is significantly advantageous, I would expect to find, emerging over time, a corresponding financial advantage. I find it difficult to find many references to this, but I'd be surprised if the premise itself is completely unfounded. As this research article puts it: It just doesn't seem to be the focus of most critical assessments (and it isn't the focus of this one. And the direction of causality is intriguing). Although this article is about Australia, I would be surprised if the situation were significantly different in the other Five Eyes nations (allowing for differences in direct and indirect funding mechanisms).
While there are ways of defunding Christian privilege (eg by renouncing tax advantages), the problem isn't so much the likely unpopularity, but that it doesn't inherently improve the situation for those discriminated against. Maybe I should have addressed renouncing our attitudes, but I also think that, if we're going to make progress on renouncing our privileges, we should start coming to terms with the cost.
This IS a whole 'nother topic, @pease, and a worthy one. I've been ruined by Postmodern studies I can hardly remember, by having learned to see power at work within systems, and particularly where it does not belong or is handled improperly. I think it's key here, too.
However, as you said, it's a whole 'nother topic. One that would be quite demanding to really do well, because it would easily devolve into opinions with little or no basis. Just a lot of emoting. And meaningful posts from 2, or at max 3, people who are actually current on the theoretical work.
I've been away quite a lot recently and have only just come to this thread.
It strikes me that one can't expect anyone to feel bound by collective responsibility for anything without its being a euphemism for collective guilt. Most people have enough issues with personal responsibility to face up to, without dragging various vacuous collective responsibilities into the mix.
There's a certain sort of self-sacrificial spiritual masochism that likes to inspire itself with various versions of 'we are all guilty'.
I'd ask three questions of this discussion.
1. Is it ever legitimate to attempt to fix anyone with collective responsibility for anything that it is, and always has been, to all intents and purposes beyond their power to do anything about? or
2. Am 'I' using arguments about collective responsibility about things well beyond most peoples' personal capacity to do anything about, to duck - or otherwise postpone - paying attention to things closer to home that 'I' could do something about? or
3. Is this just an excuse high-mindedly to try to blame other people, probably an amorphous and even unidentifiable group of them (but certainly not one that includes 'me'), for things, 'I/we' think 'they' ought to take responsibility for?
IMHO the only good use of the concept is when someone is using it to take personal responsibility for some need or issue that they themselves can and should help fix.
Would you be the vocalist? I could be the promoter ....
1. confirms what I posted recently, and
2. demonstrates why any concept of 'collective responsibility' whether on the part of Christians, Moslems, Jews or anyone else, is something that everyone, of whatever creed or none, should both individually and collectively, vigorously and vociferously repudiate.
Whether we feel guilty for the things we are actually guilty of is another matter.
The inhabitants of Nineveh might have had something to say about repudiating the practice of collective responsibility - although what they actually did was collectively repent. In the Old Testament, it doesn't seem to have been considered unreasonable. Maybe things were different back then,
Maybe it is no longer legitimate to ascribe collective responsibility to others for something beyond their power to do anything about. But that is nonetheless what has happened for much of human history. That people who have historically done the ascribing might now want to oppose the practice, without examining critically the extent to which they benefit, begs some pertinent questions about justice. Either way, the people being discriminated against still don't seem to get much of a say.