Why Should People Love the Church?

Eliot on the Challenges to Faith in the Modern World

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

In today’s installment of our long analysis of T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock” (see parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven), Eliot considers a modern predicament: why love the Church? In other words, what makes Christianity challenging in the modern wasteland? These questions are imminent relevant in our own day as people continue to struggle with the value of Christianity, let alone its truth.

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?

She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.

Notice how Eliot frames the problem of loving the Church with his second question: “Why should they love her laws?” Quite perceptively, Eliot recognized that for modern liberated people, it would be the laws of the Church, the very idea that the Church could remind people of God’s laws that would be offensive. One of my favorite quotes from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age occurs on page 489: “For many people today, to set aside their own path in order to conform to some external authority just doesn’t seem comprehensible as a form of spiritual life.” This is precisely what Eliot is concerned about; for modern people, loving the Church’s laws seems incomprehensible as a “form of spiritual life.” Spiritual life feels like autonomy, not submission to laws. So how could we ever love her laws?

He goes on to note the other reasons the Church is difficult to love. Unlike the hum and rush of the modern world where we are (as he puts it in the Four Quartets), “distracted from distraction by distraction,” the Church “tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.” It has often struck me how difficult the role of a pastor is. A pastor must preach the Word of God, which will inevitably convict people of their sins. He must tell them things that they don’t want to hear: that they are going to die, that the way they live their lives matters, that what they do with their bodies matters to God, and so on. A doctor has to give people similarly hard news so that they can achieve bodily health, but people tend to respect doctors. We trust tend to trust medical science (setting aside COVID). Whereas we are skeptical of pastors. Why would anyone want to spend their Sunday mornings being told things that “they would [rather] forget”? It’s a miracle anyone attends Church. I mean that quite literally.

Even worse, the Church “is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.” This line is rich with meaning. On the personal level, the Church (and Eliot is thinking as a high-church Anglican here, so for us lower-church protestants, we can just think of Christ) is gentle with us when we sin, forgiving and restoring us to communion when we feel like we deserve condemnation. And when we sin and resist repentance, the Church is hard with us, even though we think it should be soft.

We can also see the relevance of these lines to the ongoing culture war. Those outside the Church think She is too forgiving of people who have harmed others. I have seen nonChristians (and Christians, for that matter!) object to victims families forgiving shooters for their acts of violence, for example. And they think She is too hard on people who are living in unrepentant sin because the Church calls it sin. Whether at the personal or the societal level, this line speaks to the modern perspective that Christianity should be evaluated based on how it fits our individual preconceived notions of Christianity. I will attend church if this church matches my politics. I will attend this church if it’s tender where I’m tender and hard where I’m hard. And so on. This happens a lot among evangelicals. Inevitably, the individual becomes the guide to the truth of Christianity.

Not only does the Church challenge our assumptions about when to be tender and when to be hard, but She also forces us to face the reality of evil in the world: “She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.” Part of the modern project is the rejection of the idea of sin as a category, replacing it with “choices” or “mistakes” or “dysregulation,” some psychological or personal failing, but not a cosmic wrong. evil still exists, but not Evil. And certainly not Sin. And as such we should no longer feel shame, a sense that we are bad, because we can never be bad, we can only be human. Whereas the Church has traditionally taught that humans can indeed be bad, and are, in fact, when they are dead in their trespasses and sins. That shame can be a way of reminding us of our need for redemption. It can also turn into worldly sorrow which Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians, but with the work of the Holy Spirit, that feeling of shame can awaken a sorrow that turns us to repentance and new life. But for the modern person, these are merely “unpleasant facts” to be avoided.

And the way modern people avoid them is through technique: “They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” Remember, a technique according to Jacques Ellul is a system for maximizing efficiency in all areas of human existence. Here it is being applied to morality. If we create laws, education, social programs, entertainment, medicine, and therapy just right, we can eliminate the need to be virtuous because everyone will be guided by hand to be socially efficient. This is, in fact, the world we live in, where virtue is not taught or even remembered and social engineering and conditioning are used to guide people, to nudge them to socially advantageous choices (graduate from high school, go to college, don’t smoke, exercise three times a week, don’t be lonely, and so on).

Here’s Eliot’s reply: “But the man that is will shadow / The man that pretends to be.” In other words, hanging over this socially engineered modern person who has been taught all the efficient ways of living well, the shadow of what is looms. And what is is our sin nature. That cannot be eradicated by a system of better living. This makes the voice of the Church reminding us of our sin nature all the more irritating, because it reminds us of a problem that we cannot solve with our tools of self-reliance. The shadow of our sin nature is all around us in the media, despite all our efforts to create a more just society, we have example after example in the media of abuse, neglect, harm, and violence. It’s too much to bear to read the headlines most days. The shadow keeps appearing. The person we pretend to be keeps being exposed.

How can we love a Body that reminds us of our fallenness, that exposes the pathetic ways we try to scurry away from our sin nature and hide in our systems? How can we love a Body that does not fit our image of that Body, that is tender where we would have it be harsh and is stern where we would have it be gentle?

Part of the answer is in the question. We love the Church because it does not answer to us and our whims. We submit to it. It’s Christ’s Body here on Earth, not our tool for self-improvement or our hammer in the culture war. We love the Church because it does remind us of Life and Death, so that we may have life and life abundantly, because without this reminder we will be swallowed up in the oblivion of consumption and numbness that is modernity. And we love the Church because it does remind us of Evil and Sin, that Evil is Evil, and will ultimately be judged by the God of the cosmos. And Sin is Sin, and is forgiven because of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross.

A reasonable follow-up question might be, but how does this help us share Christ’s love with unbelievers? And I think Eliot’s reply might be hidden partially in the last two lines of this selection: “But the man that is will shadow / The man that pretends to be.” Part of our work is in helping people recognize that they are pretending and that the shadow is looming. To help modern people acknowledge that their systems of efficient moral living are striving after the wind, and that there is beauty in acknowledging that we are sinners who living before a gracious God.

But perhaps another reply might be that Eliot’s goal is not so much to convince unbelievers as to remind believers of why it’s difficult to do the work of evangelism, to take honest stock of the barriers to belief for modern people.