Act and being of the church

Over at www.churchandpomo.typepad.com, Nate Kerr is responding to various reveiws of chapters of his book "Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The politics of Christian Mission".

In this particular chapter, Nate took a swipe at Hauerwas for being too concerned at maintaining the churches practices, and seeing mission as a by-product of this. Nate wants to put the outward movement at the very centre of what we mean by, and do with, church.

Here's part of his response

"Take, for example, the practice of Eucharist. It is not that I think we should or could ever "do away" with the practice of Eucharist. I think that is the wrong way to think about it. It is rather the case that we cannot do away with the eucharist. For the eucharist is neither some thing that we "do" as such, nor is it a possession that we might "do away with." Eucharist is rather the happening, the event, an "apocalyptic ricochet" of the divine act by which occurs the sacramental gathering of those whose lives are are given over to one another as other as the sign and sacrament of that Kingdom table fellowship that is precisely the good news at the apocalyptic heart of the gospel (I am thinking Galatians here). Eucharist happens as the celebration of the fact that in Christ God's Kingdom has broken in as precisely the liberation from those powers which hold back the freedom whereby in Christ we are given to be for active love of the other. Where "the Eucharistic rite" becomes a means of delimiting and producing conditions, apart from or supplemental to faith in Jesus Christ, according to which participation in this table fellowship is defined and secured, and not rather a sign of its happening, then it is itself one of those powers that must be named as the refusal of that agape of which Christ himself is the sacrament of sacraments -- the refusal of justification/rectification, of faith, and of charity itself (and I am thinking of Augustine here, vis-a-vis the Donatists). I suppose that what I am saying is that in the Eucharist understood rightly as the event that it is, we have precisely the coming together of the "what" and the "how" -- the impossibility of their dichotomization. Eucharistic table fellowship is the fact -- the what -- of the reality that we have died to the need to secure an identity which is "our own" by the reception our identities through Christ in whom we now live in the mode of self-giving to one another in love. And this, at the same time, is the how of Eucharistic table fellowship: faith in Jesus Christ working through love. In fact, the reality of this "how" is the only basis at all for eucharistic table fellowship; it is the very reality of our participation in Christ's self giving love (the res) of which the eucharist is the sign and sacrament (signum)."