Onwards, Expediti!

On the church that is "fleet of foot"

“‘The Church’ should really represent ‘becoming’, ‘the state’, on the other hand, ‘subsisting’. That is why it is so dangerous for the state and Church to grow together and be identified with each other. With ‘the state’, even though for one or another institution it might prove less fortunate, just because it is the subsisting order one should be very wary about abolishing it, precisely because ‘state’ is part of the concept of ‘subsisting’, and one may be better served by energetically maintaining a less than successful subsistence than reforming it too soon. With ‘the Church’ it is quite the opposite, since its concept is Becoming. ‘Becoming’ is more spiritual than ‘subsisting’; the servants of the Church should therefore not be state functionaries, not even married, but those expediti [those unfettered, ready or without obstruction] who are suited to serving ‘becoming’.”¹

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To discuss a Kierkegaardian ecclesiology is to expect your listener to endure an intellectual death by a thousand cuts, constantly refining and reforming our image of this word church until it seems so highly qualified and highly particular that a widespread understanding seems almost impossible. Taking the bookish mode of interpreting and reinterpreting before coming to some abstracted definition is highly tempting, a humorous activity that leads to us presenting so idiosyncratic a case for what church means that it serves only to alienate and estrange the world from this particular activity—and such is the nature of communication when it comes to communicating the noncommunicable.

However, not all is lost. In fact, this exercise in intellectual jousting, slicing off and grafting together minutiae from the decorated history of the Christian tradition, possibly, ought to lead us into dead ends when we take such a scholarly approach. Something clear from the very foundations of the Christian message to those who have walked ahead of us and continue to sojourn away from the world is this:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18)

“...this journey of discovery of God is an inland journey.”²

The task of the Christian, and of all peoples who are drawn unto Christ³, is to understand that this inland journey of faith wherein one discovers God is one that one must sojourn: the view from the balcony is a failure to actually see anything because we can only see it when we are amongst it. Christian faith, it appears, is not the intellectual problem of “faith seeking understanding”—where understanding, always the tempting fulcrum on which the world could be turned around to conform to one’s will, is the efficiency-technique of the one who sees Christianity and salvation as a formula amongst formulae⁴—but rather the revelation of faith that changes life.⁵ In that sense, to build an ecclesiology is to unveil a becoming, a way of life for those on the road that constitute “the outward bound”. In that sense, the church is existential and not essential; a doing, or, even more specifically, a doing which constitutes “the caravan”.

Overcoming the Avant-Garde

The avant-garde’s mission is one which is confined by the context in which it exists, always jousting with the world and turning back to ensure that the world follows—and abandoning the “drawing” of the Spirit when it refuses. Think back to Cox’s celebration of the “outsider church” that is, in a fashion typical of the aesthete, presumes its sophistication and civilisation in comparison to the thing it attempts to be “outside” of:

The church is the avant-garde of the new regime, but because the new regime breaks in at different points and in different ways, it is not possible to forecast in advance just what appearance the church will have. It is not even possible to delineate the mission of the church “in the city.” Cities differ, and the visage of the church in any given urban environment will differ. There are, however, certain basic facts about urban secular life that will need to be taken into consideration by any church. Let us take the three elements of the church’s task as avant-garde—kerygma, diakonia, and koinonia—and see how they work out in a typical urban setting.⁶

Always bound to the object of “the world”, Cox’s project—a deeply important case of generalising and theologising the innovations of liberal theology for the Western Christian—seems to accidentally take on the assumption of authority, of an arky, that is derived from the Christian community an sich in relation to the world. It pulls along, influences, civilises—manipulates.

“No!”, says Vernard Eller, “we have gone too far!” As is so often the case for theological correctives, we have gone too far and allowed for a total consumption of an anti-authoritarian theology by its own authoritarian presumptions in the background; we, says the crowd gathered together at this bleeding-edge, are here to show the world how to live. It seems, as is often the case, that we have failed to escape the confines that we assumed we had smashed through. But all hope is not lost, Eller adds: contrast this avant-garde notion with the expediti, who march solely to the rhythm of their orders and are limited merely by their understanding of those orders.

“…Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish thinker of more than a century ago, spoke of the church as being made up of expediti. Expediti combines the Latin ex (“out of,” as in “exclude,” to include someone out) and ped (“foot,” as in “pedal,” to foot it around and around). Accordingly, it means “out of foot,” or more accurately, “freed feet,” or “those who are free of foot.” An “expedition,” it follows, is a trip taken by those who are free of foot. The term originated with the military machine that created and ruled the Roman Empire. It was used in reference to certain crack army corps, at the special disposition of the emperor, so organized and outfitted to get on their feet and into action effectively and fast. The American Expeditionary Forces of World War I probably would not qualify — although they were named right. Closer to the idea are some of the Special Forces and Task Forces of contemporary military and police organizations.

…

The concept “expediti’’ … includes no orientation [as in the case of the avant-garde]. Nothing is even implied about the presence of other troops. Expediti operate as a self-defined unit, independent of where the masses may be, or what the masses may be doing. But a self-defined avant-garde would be a contradiction in terms.

If “expediti” implies any orientation at all, it is toward the Emperor. The expediti are ready, unencumbered, unentangled, uncommitted (in one sense), precisely so that they can give the Emperor (who represents their one, total commitment) instant obedience. When the command comes to move, they move. There is no looking back to see whether anyone is following their lead, no need to compare their position with that of anyone else, for they are under orders. There is no temptation to take pride in their position. The most expediti can hope to achieve is the fulfilling of their orders. There is no common standard by which to measure their achievement over against the achievements of others (who knows what the Emperor wants from them?). Both the motivation and the goal of the expediti are entirely different from that of the avant-garde.⁷

And here is the journey of the expediti: a journey from the individual being related to the mass-object up to the individual only being related to all others as individuals⁸, a world totally dissimilar to anything that we have seen before and unrecognisable to the one who sits outside of it⁹. Much like the Roman soldiers who, in times of old, were tasked by their leader to carry out their task and their task alone, the Christian stands in relation to the wider world as a soldier with a command: “love your God” and “love your neighbour”, prior to all else.

When these individuals, in their caravan that sojourns bravely into the future, sojourn in the knowledge that they are bound only by their choice to reject “the world” and follow the guidance of their leader, they become freed from Christianity qua “civilising mission” and become the expediti. But, to understand this, we should understand two aspects of these “divine special forces”: their relation to the world and their relation to their command.

Breaking teleologically

“...expediti are not of the world, that is, their goals and values center entirely in the will of the Emperor and bear no relationship to what the world may call good or be on the way to calling good.”¹⁰

With the full-throatedness of his Kierkegaardian beginnings, Eller reminds us what it means to move from a sphere: it is to become ingratiated with a new way of engaging and looking at reality in a way that radically reinterprets where we have been, where we are, and where we are going—or, in short, it is a shift in the basic underpinning “intuition” that frames what the individual knows and how they know it.

“…“expediti” implies any orientation at all, it is toward the Emperor. The expediti are ready, unencumbered, unentangled, uncommitted (in one sense), precisely so that they can give the Emperor (who represents their one, total commitment) instant obedience...”

For the expediti, the matter of being the expediti and becoming the expediti is a matter of engaging with their Emperor’s commands, independent of what he or anyone else whosoever has issued commands to them: the independence of the expediti’s mission is not confused with some other mission or missions because those free of foot only respond to the particularity of their call. When the special forces operative is given a specialist task to “eliminate a target”¹¹, they are not concerned with whether a more general law for the society from which they emerged and which they now populate generally disapproves of “intentional killing”—with many, if not most, instances of such a thing constituting a serious crime and taboo. No, instead, they are aware that the particularity of their charge, even though it contradicts and transgresses against “the universal law” of the broader society, means that they must teleological suspend some aspect of “the ethical”, the Sittlichkeit, the socially pervasive norm. In this election to the ranks of the expediti, the individuals engage in their task for their Emperor in a way which binds them to a law unlike the law of the land. When their task is done, they may well return to the general ranks of the army or possibly blend back into the mass society from which they were drawn; however, clearly, my reader, these individuals were set apart in a way that was clear to them and may one day be unrecognisable to the world.

Ecclesiologically, this should be clear: the church, when it is a successful church, shall be noted not by its antagonism with the world or its “trailblazing” example that it sets for the world to follow, but simply by its presence against the world qua the visible church. What should be noted, for S. K., Ellul, and Eller alike, is that “church” is not a name of a building or the collective relationship of a particular church governance, but the forward march of a particular group—or, more properly, particular groups that were, are, and will be in contradiction and disagreement with one another—through time, beginning with “a bomb going off in history”¹² and constantly sojourning, erring, praying, betraying, accusing, forgiving, judging, and being judged through and over every corner of the known world. The church is not an entity defined into existence, but rather a participation in a raging river through the mere causality of time; a quiet whisper that can only be heard by the one who listens. And this presence, as a presence against the world, is itself the very aim of becoming a Christian: to surrender the “colonialisation” ambitions of the secular anarchist or the Marxist in the call for “worldwide revolution”, where personae non grata are identified and crushed underfoot in the forceful imposition of the Kingdom of Man, but rather in the simple faith that Christianity has always promised another way of life or, more properly, other ways of life that grant the freedom to do as we might hope we might do—even under the foot of evil itself.

“A free theologian is not a [member] of a sect. He speaks and he thinks his definite “Yes” or “No.” He is a person of action, not of reaction. His freedom is not primarily “freedom from” but “freedom for.” He bewares of becoming enmeshed in a friend-foe relationship.”¹³

And in order to do this, my reader, our view of the church must come from behind its veiling: we must discover what it is that each and everyone of us, by habit or by passion, engages in regularly when we attend the building that we call church and are invited to engage in the divine dance of the eternal in time, of the universal in a particular place, in the wholly other within the specifically present to us. When Paul advises us “do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” he is inviting us to step out from the mere conformity to whichever set of norms we exist within, whichever mere causality we have found ourselves “thrown” into, and to swim in this raging river that ruptures each and every attempt to find a way a swim which doesn’t simply involve getting into the water. In this way, where the “intuition”, for lack of a better word, breaks through and rearranges all other knowledge in a new way of seeing, in a new way of life.

But why? To what end does Paul call us to resist the pleasant ease of conformity? What can possibly be learned in this way? He continues: “Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2) Here, we uncover the opportunity for faith, the moment in which one can make that movement where that single individual enters into the beautiful, unearned gift of participating in the play of God’s freedom: only by doing, through the affirmation that this freedom is possible, can be we see that it is possible to do. The presence of this possibility opens us up to an alternative way of being and becoming, where the authority of the world that they laud over us is undermined: it is not the only path, the unstoppable march of “progress” is exposed as having a competitor that starts from the wreckage of that “bomb going off in history” and aims towards something that the world could never allow for; indeed, there is always a second option and to take the second path is to cast off all claims to the world and all claims that the world has on us.

And, in this presence, that the world must recognise as a challenge to its authority with the sword, is the presence that teleologically suspending the Sittlichkeit’s ethical universe is possible.

Grasping with a new telos

When the church can become this “presence”, it is itself now the mode for free action—for possibility. But what does it mean to allow the other to be free? To allow the other to recognise that there is some other telos that they can grasp? The church unveils itself in its obedience, first through the single believer:

“...the person who is a child of the times but who wishes to fight against those times cannot do so with authority, as someone recognizable, as a prophet who wishes to lead a lost generation back to time-honored ways of doing things.”¹⁴

When, in a position where one stands without authority, the believer amongst the collective of believers chooses themselves in the act of becoming obedient, the freedom of an obedience which fundamentally rejects the dicta of the world blooms: to be free as Christ was, is, and shall be free is to recognise that one is always wrong before God, always without authority in a world which demands for evidence of power, and always already committed to some way-of-life before they are capable of choosing the way one lives one’s life. As such, in the choice between the divine and the world, that single individual finds their freedom in the kind of obedience which doesn’t necessarily understand the implications of their choice; the choice to be as one is and as one is becoming in that possibility of a life unlike anything that the world could ever offer.

Here, the “fleet of foot” understand that they step into the river that has run eternally and, yet, appeared at a point in history. In a sense, as Eller would illustrate in his analysis of “rendering unto Caesar”, the paradoxical freedom of obedience emerges because one refuses to become embroiled in the contest between God and the Emperor—because, quite simply, it is no contest at all:

“Choosing God [in “render unto Caesar”] with this sort of intensity must entail the denial that the outcome of history is being decided in the contest of the human arkys we have chosen to designate as “good” and “evil.” Consequently, Christians refuse to become embroiled in the contest, whether investing themselves in the arkys of the one side or the other. And this stance is what we have been calling “Christian Anarchy.””¹⁵

Free from the despair that comes with the attempt to make one self the arky on which all life shall rest, the expediti lay waste to their claim to the world, to the state, to the power over the other, to life itself—they have seen that they emerge into a world where they are not the basic building block of reality and, as such, must march differently. They recognise no orientation for action at all as from “toward the Emperor”. When the world would impose the product of mere inertia, the Christian can resist by loving their neighbour; when the world impose a telos, the Christian can resist by loving their neighbour.

At this point, we should remember that this “quickening” of the faithful, as if the believer has managed, finally, to get around to granting God authority over him (as is so often the way with “radical theologies”) is the fundamentally archic and Pelagian presumption of the one who sees Christianity as the change the world needs as opposed to the weaknesses which undermines the arky. No, the expediti understands that they are not there to rule, they are not there to take control of reality and bend it to its knees before God and before them; instead, they are aware that their calling is to be a presence, a presence that acts as a judgement for all of creation in its fallenness—even its own. Instead of a radical and wilful pietism that centres the individual’s choice to accept God, to grant God authority, but rather the release of the will to power and the acceptance of one’s place in the plan of the Wholly Other.

Onward, because it is asked

In that sense, my reader, it is difficult to offer you advice that gives us that foundation on which we will ground our faith without doubt. Indeed, I am, completely and utterly, without authority when I speak as a person who would join with this divine march. In some sense, I wonder if I would recognise this person—this completely free agent, who strides along in the knowledge that they don’t know God’s will, but are moved by the Spirit against the world.

Faith in the ekklesia, as far as Eller saw, was a matter of joining an already existing journey through time that is evidence that not has God loved His creation but also that we are not the first within God’s creation to be loved by Him—we must find our position in the world into which we are thrown, desperate to both find that relationship that holds us aloft over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep” and become the one who instigates that relationship, in relation to those who have loved and been loved by God and failed His plea to them: “be perfect, as your Father, in heaven, is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

1. JP X IA 552

2. JP II 1451

3. John 12:32; “Christian Expositions“ in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied’ It, p. 151, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

4. Although, of course, do not take this as a direct assault on the thought of Anselm due to the use of his famous assertion.

5. “Kierkegaard on Communication: Refusing to ‘Piddle’”, K. Roberts, from Clark T & T Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 46, ed. A. P. Edwards and D. J. Gouwens

6. The Secular City, p. 110, H. Cox

7. The Outward Bound: Caravaning as the Style of the Church, p. 17-19, V. Eller

8. A Vexing Gadfly: The Late Kierkegaard on Economic Matters, p. 44-45 E. Pérez-Álvarez

9. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. xxi, S. Kierkegaard; Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied’ It, p. 127, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

10. The Outward Bound: Caravaning as the Style of the Church, p. 19, V. Eller

11. Regardless of how grotesque that kind of language is in relation to the taking of human life.

12. The Epistle to the Romans, p. 29, K. Barth

13. Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth, p. 255, A. J. Torrance & A. B. Torrance

14. Kierkegaard and the Common Man, l. 892, J. K. Bukdahl

15. Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy over the Powers, V. Eller