Here I am moving on the forth and penultimate question that Steve Long posed over at the Church and Postmodern Culture blog recently:

Would [an understanding of the church as apocalyptic event] acknowledge that the transnational or catholic church should have an identifiable common life — creeds, worship, practices, liturgical time, even structure?

It seems to me that an apocalyptic understanding of the church does not speak so much to whether or not the church should manifest a form of “visible catholicity” (which I will use as a synonym for the facets Steve has mentioned here). Rather the apocalyptic notion of the church speaks more profoundly to how the church out to understand and pursue such ends. In other words, the question is not whether, but how we out to pursue such ends. Those who would deny that the church should have an “identifiable common life” seem to me to occupy a very small number of actual Christians or churches.

So, how ought an apocalyptic church manifest the signs of visible catholicity, of an identifiable common life? The first thing that must be said is that and apocalyptic theology places its center of gravity in our understanding that the church and its life are not something that the church produces, brings about, or controls. Rather the life of the church–its identifiable common life–is the gift of God’s invasive grace which, though the Spirit, break into history as the sign of the victory of Christ’s agape over the principalities and powers. As such, we should avoid understanding our task regarding visible catholicity is one of production and management. We are not called to bring about, or engineer some pure form of Christian visibility. Rather we receive the gifts of common confession, worship, and practice as the pure gifts of the Holy Spirit who comes to us, rests on us, and leads us into the truth.

However, this should not be seen as some sort of indeterminate, or ephemeral way of construing the visible catholicity of the church. Rather it simply locates catholicity where it truly belongs, in the person of Christ himself. It is Christ’s singularity as the embodiment of God’s radical love that is truly catholic. The church receives its catholicity as the Spirit breaks into our own contingent histories, unleashing ever and again the very particular love of Christ into the world. As such, the concreteness of the church’s visible catholicity is found in its reception of the very particular shape of agapeic action and habit that Christ himself embodied and commanded. What the Spirit generates in bringing the church into being in Christ are concrete signs and sacraments of Christ’s own radical, cross-bearing love. Thus, the identifiable commonality of the church’s life across time and space is not to be primarily located in the church’s structure or practices, but rather in the radical love of Christ which the Spirit everanew gifts to the church, and which its structure and practices are called to serve.

So, should the church have an identifiable common life? Certainly, indeed this is unavoidable if the church’s life is purely the gift of the Spirit of Christ. The life the the Spirit gives is participation in Christ’s own life of radical self-dispossesing love. This is the common life that the church is given and it is this life of missional, doxological self-dispossession that our practices, liturgies, and structures serve. So from an apocalyptic perspective, we should expect, in our contingent histories that our liturgies, structures, and practices may not bear complete uniformity in terms of social shape or order. Rather what makes them identifiable as a transnational common reality is the way in which, through the Spirit they testify to and become a sacrament of Christ’s own self-dispossession, his kenosis. And so it from that angle that the church, conceived apocalyptically ought to go about the task of pursuing fellowship and identifiable continuity between churches across time and space. The question is not primarily one of “How do we ensure our own visible conformity?” but rather one of “How do we pursue our common life in recognition of the work of the Spirit who brings all the gifts of Christ’s own catholic person into our unique and diverse communities?”