Breaking Out of the Immanent Frame

               

             I will offer a review of Andrew Root’s book Churches and the Crisis of Decline, but for this reflection, I want to pick up on his comments about the immanent frame. It’s true that the churches are experiencing a decline. Our numbers are getting smaller by the day. My denomination seeks to be an important player, but on a good Sunday, the 4000 churches or so might have about 75,000 people in attendance. A half-century ago we boasted a membership of over a million, but that 75,000-attendance number (just a top-of-the-head guess) probably covers a majority of our membership. We’re not what once were.

                The question that this reality raises concerns the degree to which an increasingly secular age is making God irrelevant to a majority of people living in North America and Europe. Even folks who continue to inhabit our churches, to what degree do we (and I include me) operate as practical atheists. That is, are we living in this world as if it’s all on our shoulders?

                I will admit that I’ve not read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, but I’ve encountered him in several other sources, including books by Andy Root. The question that gets raised in Root’s books and others concerns whether the secular age leaves room for God to act. When it comes to churches, do we really believe that God is at work? After all, there are all kinds of books, podcasts, and consultants that will provide methods by which churches can grow. Just do these five things and your church will explode with growth. But this still begs the question as to whether God is involved?

                Another way of putting this concerns what Root calls the immanent frame, a reality in which the world is closed off from transcendence. He writes that “it is easier to conceive of God only as a flat concept—a kind of final contingent relation behind the curtain of all other explanations—than to conceive of God as an acting and speaking agent in the world. It’s difficult inside this framework to live as though God is ever present and ever active in each and every one of the contingent relations that make up our lives” [Churches and the Crisis of Decline, p. 11].

                Root turns to Karl Barth, especially Pastor Barth from Safenwill, the Barth who wrote the Commentary on Romans that stirred up so much attention shortly after the end of World War I, the commentary that caught the eyes of the world and led to his academic career. With Barth, there is a dialectical approach that envisions God acting. I have vacillated when it comes to transcendence and the immanent frame. I believe God acts as Barth understands it, but I also find myself engaged with folks in the Open and Relational world who seem to place limits on how God acts. My denomination is rooted in the Enlightenment, with figures like John Locke offering foundations that seem stuck in immanence. Of course, we’re also an “American-born” denomination.

                Perhaps my interest in Eastern Orthodox theology, with its emphasis on the mystical nature of reality, is that it serves as a reminder that there is more to reality than meets the eye. Eastern Orthodoxy isn’t a cure-all. It has its own struggles, which we’re seeing play out in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.  Barth might be perfect either, but a church that exists in the flattened world of the immanent frame, with little room for God to act, would seem to have little future other than as another means of entertainment.

                    So, what do we do? Is the answer to be found in waiting for God to act? After all, in five years even more of our aging congregations will face closure? Yet, on the day of his ascension, Jesus told the disciples to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit who would empower them (Acts. 1:1-11). Might that be our answer, waiting for God to break through the roof of the immanent frame? Consider Andy Root’s word here.

The only way to both love the world and hold to the bold line that separates the kingdom of God from the kingdoms of Europe (or of the US) is to wait. Inside the immanent frame, the only way to even find a God who is God at all is to wait. This means that the only way for the church to remember that it is not, and cannot be, the star of its own story is to wait. The church is the church of the living God only when it waits. Only in its waiting can the church love the God who is the God by serving the world. And only by waiting can the church serve the living God by loving the world. [Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline, p. 141.]

                We’re not good at waiting. That’s not the American way. Yet, perhaps that is the only way can break free from the immanent frame that keeps transcendence at bay.