The church has drunk deeply of the Enlightenment’s old man anthropology: its reduction of the human person to the autonomous individual and its voluntarist assumption about community life. Our—and I mean the church’s—social imaginary has been formed by this understanding to our shame. Too often, our self-understanding starts with the individual person, who, standing outside the church, enters into it from some social distance. The authenticity of one’s membership in the church is equivalent to one’s consent in his participation. Like the world, our social bonds are often weak and largely
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I have said this exact thing (using far less sophisticated phraseology) so many times over these last few months.
The Western Church is sick with the disease of Enlightenment Liberalism. We see ourselves first and foremost as autonomous, disconnected individuals seeking the spiritual, and we use Christ's corporate Body to pursue these pietistic aims.
