Individualization,Mysticism,and the Life of the Church 1

Abstract

Christians trust that the church is present in every age not because its social forms are right, but because God is faithful. That confidence leads us to think theologically about changing patterns of church life. Theological reflection on the church needs to take sociological accounts seriously without reducing itself to them. The best accounts of changing patterns of church life today see declining rates of affiliation not as secularization, but as individualization. Individualization fits closely with an ecclesiology centered on mysticism, as Ernst Troeltsch saw. But Troeltsch’s mysticism assumes the individualized individual of this age as natural, even ontological. Michel de Certeau’s understanding of mysticism, on the other hand, stresses the contingency and instability of the subject and contains more potential for critique of this present moment. De Certeau describes the ways changing social realities press us to experience the gap between the world and our concepts of the world. Mystical speech flows from that gap as a kind of yearning. In that yearning, God renews the church.