Kyle's Response

Note: Kyle graciously responded to my earlier post on Apostolic Succession and Validity in the comment section. I post it here for easier reading and reflection.

I also won't be able to make adequate response for a few days as I am off a daughter's college graduation out of town. Blessed Pentecost to all, even those with ecclesial communities of questionable pedigree! ;-)

From Captain Sacrament:
Okay, it's taken some work, but let's see if I'm following you.

You agree that a mechanistic notion of apostolic succession that is looking toward "sacramental validity" is problematic for a number of reasons. I think I see you moving the question way from that into something more foundational: what are the requirements for a Christian community to be a Christian community?

It is important to understand the eschatological action of the Eucharist - and we know that I have long since struck camp there - but what you're telling me is that eschatology only makes sense within a history. I think I understand. It really isn't about conjuring God by pulling all the right levers, but whether it makes sense for us to understand ourselves as the community that God is bringing to completion through that eschatological action. Are we the Church that God in Christ has promised to heal and judge?

When the question is put that way, we might shy away from our pronouncements on other Christian communions, and rather ask how we are and how we can be in continuity with the Church of the ancient martyrs, and with Christ himself. As you say, just like Jesus gathered up Israel into himself and reconstituted it as he received baptism and the descent of the Spirit, and the incarnation was the beginning of New Creation in continuity with the first one, so we must find that place of continuity.

My answer is, as you might suppose, shaped by the work of Hauerwas, Cavanaugh and Williams.

On a related note, I find it interesting that even as Paul "excommunicates" the Corinthians - bans the celebration of the agape feast - there is not a question about whether the Reigning King is present. If any Eucharist would be invalid, it would be the one that shames the poor by highlighting the divisions across the Body of Christ. And yet it is taken entirely for granted that Christ is present, judging and healing. As Cavanaugh says, the Eucharist is performing the Church - it's an instrument of Christ's eschatological transformation of those in communion with Himself who live in the continuity of the story and of that new creation.

In one of his essays in Why Study the Past, RoWill argues that a Christian church that is in continuity with that of ancient, broader faith is one in which the stories of the ancient martyrs make sense. Would those martyrs still die for the faith that we profess and practice? If their deaths are insensible through the lens of our faith, and our faith is insensible through the lens of their deaths, we lack that continuity - we are nto the same church.

I think it's a storied continuity. Do we tell the same stories? Do we understand ourselves to be characters in the same divine drama that our fathers and mothers were? If it's a different story, it's a different religion.

I joke about pomo anglo-catholicism, but I'm getting at something very real. the only chance we have of standing in such a continuity is to make the attempt, to will to receive it even as we beg the Lord for it. I want to preach and practice a faith that is intellible to people to were killed 1800 years ago. I think they - and the Lord - stand in judgment of me if I do not.