CHURCH AS CONTRAST SOCIETY: A REVIEW ESSAY, THE

Can Christians Serve the State?

Although I have mentioned the eucharist several times in these remarks, I have failed to indicate the prominent role that Cavanaugh gives to this central rite of the church. Without exegeting eucharistie theology in any detail, he is clear in his conviction that in the eucharist Christ gives his body, and through his body his entire self, to humanity. Furthermore, as Christians participate in the eucharist, they are received into Christ's body and renewed in their membership with one another in the new transtemporal, superspatial people of God.

Cavanaugh calls attention to the fact that the early Christians chose the word ekklesia, which meant the assembly of all with citizens' rights in the city, as the word to describe their gatherings. They did not use terms such as koinon and collegium, which came from the language of guild or association. The church was neither polis nor oikos, but both; it was "not gathered around particular interests, but was interested in all things; it was an assembly of the whole. And yet the whole was not the city-state or empire, but the people of God" (86). This understanding of the church, he notes, is rooted in the assembly of Israel at Mount Sinai where the Law was promulgated covering everything that Israelites were to do with their bodies as well as with their souls. If the church is to be faithful to its own tradition, it will continue to assert control over body and soul, even though the state demands control over the body and also tries to possess the soul.

As the body of Christ, the church can insist that its members live according to Christ's will, even though this often means that they must stand against the demands of the state. "The Christian way to resist institutionalized violence," for example, is for Christians "to adhere to one another as Church, to act as a disciplined Body in witness to the world" (89). Cavanaugh cites the work of Archbishop Oscar Romero to illustrate his point.

He also gives a North American example in his mention of Minnesota churches establishing relationships with community-supported agricultural groups who resist globalization and instead give "priority to personal relationships, community responsibility, a livable income for farmers, and a direct stewardship of the land from which our food comes" (95). One wonders, however, whether church action, even a highly concerted pattern of community-supported agriculture, will be able to counteract the power of multinational corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland and its globalization of agriculture.

Although Cavanaugh mentions dangers in his understanding of the church as the body of Christ-becoming "a place-bound theocracy or sect" and using its rites "to reinforce a fixed social hierarchy within a certain location, and to exclude others, especially Jews, from that space" (116)-he argues that the greater drive is for the church to become a space-transcending manifestation of the City of God coexisting with the City of Man. The church is then related to the state and civil society as a counter movement, an alternative society that continually pressures the ordinary society to set aside its evil ways and to adopt better ones.