Churches as imagined communities

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Each Church, and thence Christianity as a whole, is an imagined community 

Imagined community

Churches are imagined communities in the sense used in Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book on nationhood, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. [Wiki]

Just as a nation is imagined as an entity by both its citizens and outsiders so too is a church. Members will never know or even hear of almost all other members and yet consider themselves and those strangers as constitutive parts of the same body. Membership implies an expectation of shared belief, culture, language and understandings. Each member holds and enacts a mental image of mutual affinity which – however attenuated in practice - is nonetheless greater than the divisions between them.

Commonality is strengthened by internal difference and disputes. Contention and disagreement are only important if all are struggling together for something that affects all. To outsiders, our disputes may be irrelevant or, at most, a spectator sport. Internal arguments emphasise the boundary between outsiders and those who belong. (And debate on heresy cases was generally conducted by ministers and clergy who thus expressed themselves as an inner community within their church.)

To allege heresy is to imagine and assert a border to the community. This border has two aspects and a consequence: it delineates the limit of accceptable theological ideas, the edge of communal debate and, third, the prospect of deporting both the alleged heresy and its proponent. 

The alleged heretic is not seperable from their heresy and both are perceived as potent threats to the coherence of the imagined community.  The allegation implies a worm in the apple, loose wires in the circuitry. 

Heresy is never simply a matter of intellectual disputation, it is also emotive. It threatens the integrity of the imagined community and thus the presumed boundaries of belief and belonging, and thus members' identity. 

An allegation of heresy can suggest that the community is be divided and compromised, or, worse still, hollow. It also, inherently, implies that those who ought to be responsible for maintaining the integrity and truth of the community have failed in their duty: that all is not well in the state of Denmark.

The intention of an allegation is not to provide a forum for the debate of contested ideas but to drive the accused, and their notions out of the church into the spiritual desert. It is an act of verbal violence threatening to kill both idea and the person-as-member and, in so doing, to restore the collective unity, harmony, and authenticity of the church. The sole cure is to exile both herestic and heresy from the community and this raises the prospect of the heretic as sacrifice. 

Guilty

Consequently an authoritative finding of guilt – that the accused has indeed expounded heresy – can come as a deep relief to the whole community. All the weight of responsibility is thus placed squarely on the shoulders of the now convicted heretic. Their contrition or expulsion, re-establishes communal and spiritual order and members can once again sleep peaceably in their beds.

I suspect, incidentally, that it is precisely the communal-emotional aspect of heresy and heresy trials, with the cathartic nature of a conviction, that explains why discussion of a case and its issues often seems to evaporate almost immediately a final judgment is reached and guilt established. Perhaps too this is why most cases (with some notable exceptions) were forgotten very quickly after final judgment was given.

Equally, a finding that the accused was not guilty, could leave a church with a continuing sense of unease and unresolved discontent.

But in real life

In practice, of course, few cases carried such dire freight. Most were local and relatively trivial. Most were resolved without schism, and hurt was largely confined to those immediately concerned and their families. The community, real and imagined, largely continued much as it had done before. 

Next:: heresy and sacrifice>