The Church as a Sacrament of the Future

Abstract

This chapter continues the thinking that I began with my chapter on Just War and State Sovereignty in the recent book, which I coedited with David Fisher (2010) called Just War on Terror? A Christian and Muslim Response. That book is a reflection, from Christian and Muslim standpoints, on the moral implications of the attack on the twin towers in New York in September 2001. My own chapter in it is a theological exploration of the long-term implications of this globally significant event and its ramifications in terms of the way humanity is politically organized (or disorganized) in the twenty-first century. It attempts to put some flesh on the concept of the Church as the sacrament of a globalized future, in the light of a key twenty-first-century fact: namely that the allocation of virtually every human being on this planet to membership of one or other “sovereign state” is now unsustainable. For the institution of the sovereign state is itself dying, despite the contrary claims of governments of such states. To avoid perishing through climate catastrophe or suicidal mass-destructive war, the human race has to find another way of organizing itself. And I maintain that the Church is the sign, or sacrament of what we have to do.