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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/8/2022, SPi
OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY
Series Editors
Michael C. Rea Oliver D. Crisp
OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy
for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian
tradition and development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases
high quality, cutting-edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia.
  :

Atonement
Eleonore Stump
Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory
Kent Dunnington
In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology
A Philosophical Essay
Timothy Pawl
Love Divine
A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity
Jordan Wessling
The Principles of Judaism
Samuel Lebens
Voices from the Edge
Centring Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology
Edited by Michelle Panchuk and Michael C. Rea
Essays in Analytic Theology
Volume 1 & 2
Michael C. Rea
The Contradictory Christ
Jc Beall
Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion
William Wood
Divine Holiness and Divine Action
Mark C. Murphy
Explorations in Analytic
Ecclesiology
That They May be One
JOSHUA COCKAYNE
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom
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For Eleanor
Preface
1. Analytic Theology and Ecclesiology
While analytic theology is still a young and emerging discipline, the lack of
work on ecclesiology within this field is striking.¹ Despite path-breaking work
on many of the core doctrines of the Christian faith, work on ecclesiology has
not received the same share of attention. Analytic theology, as I approach it, is
committed to explicating the core claims of the Christian tradition, using the
tools of contemporary analytic philosophy.² Since belief in the ‘one holy,
catholic, and apostolic Church’ is a core doctrine of this tradition,³ it seems
obvious that analytic theologians should pay attention to this important area
of theology. There have been numerous calls to address the lack of ecclesiology
in analytic theology. In Tom McCall’s An Invitation to Analytic Theology,
which is seen by many as the go-to introduction to analytic theology, he writes,
consider the underdeveloped areas of inquiry in ecclesiology. What is the

church? Is it best understood as a four-dimensional entity? What is the relation
of the “one” to the “many” in ecclesiology? What happens in the liturgy?
What do we learn from the liturgy about God, Christ, sin and salvation? How
should we understand the sacraments? What is the mission of the church?
What happens in acts of ministry? These questions, and many more, largely
await further exploration and analysis.⁴
McCall is right that these questions have largely gone unasked by analytic
theologians. This book aims to begin this task of exploration into the nature
and life of the Church by addressing the issue of the Church’s unity in Christ
through the Holy Spirit.
One area that has seen some growth since McCall wrote these words is the
discussion of Christian liturgy by analytic thinkers. In his address to the 40th
¹ A few exceptions include the contributions to the special issue of TheoLogica on Analytic
Ecclesiology (see Cockayne and Efird, 2020), a chapter of Abraham (2018), and a chapter in Crisp
(2022).
² See chapter 1 of Crisp, 2019. ³ Taken from the Nicene Creed.
⁴ McCall, 2015: 151–2.
viii 
Anniversary of the Society of Christian Philosophy, the leading figure in the

analytic discussion of liturgy, Nicholas Wolterstorff, reflected on the need for
more work in this area. In Wolterstorff ’s words: ‘I would love to see a
flowering of discussion about liturgy in the next decade or two, perhaps that
flowering is beginning . . . . I have come myself to think that liturgy is in fact
one of the most challenging and fascinating fields for philosophical inquiry.’⁵
The ‘flowering’ to which he refers is exemplified by the three recent books and
a number of articles penned by Wolterstorff and Terence Cuneo. Here,
they explore the philosophical significance of Christian liturgy.⁶ But as
Wolterstorff ’s comments make clear, there is still to more to be done. As
I have argued elsewhere,⁷ the discussion of liturgy in analytic theology would
be enriched by gaining clarity on the nature of the Church. In Wolterstorff ’s
words, ‘The church enacts the liturgy not to satisfy the needs and desires of
individual congregants but to worship God . . . . It’s not the individual mem-
bers who do these things simultaneously; it’s the assembled body that does
these things.’⁸ This seems right to me. And yet, the discussion of liturgy in the
analytic tradition has really only scratched the surface on the relation between
the Church and its worship. Thus, the present volume aims to address the lack
of ecclesiology in analytic theology, whilst also seeking to expand the discus-
sion of liturgy.
2. The Scope of the Discussion
Before we can proceed, some clarifications about the scope of the present
volume are required. First, it is not within the scope of this book to offer a
comprehensive ecclesiology which presents a far-ranging account of the
nature and life of the Church. Rather, as the subtitle of the book alludes to—
that they may be one—the focus of the discussion is on the issue of the unity,
or oneness, of the Church. That is, the volume seeks to offer an account of
what it means for the Church to be one, and to consider the implications of
this accounts for the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church. As such,
there are many issues on which I will remain silent. My hope is that this is not
the end of the discussion of ecclesiology in the analytic tradition and that
flowering of liturgical theology in the analytic tradition, of which Wolterstorff
describes, will also extend to the study of the Church.
⁵ Wolterstorff, 2018. ⁶ I summarize this literature in Cockayne (2018a, 2018b).

⁷ See Cockayne, 2021b. ⁸ Wolterstorff, 2015b: 11.
 ix
Secondly, a brief word on methodology. Throughout the book, I seek to

draw from work in contemporary analytic philosophy in order to explore the
nature of the Church’s unity. That is to say, the book belongs in the tradition
of analytic theology. In certain respects, it follows the approach advocated by
the late David Efird, of offering ‘philosophical explanations’ to issues in
theology.⁹ As Robert Nozick describes it, a philosophical explanation offers
one possible explanation of how X might be so, given that Z is the case.¹⁰ In the
context of ecclesiology, the assumptions or limitations of the discussion (Z) are
provided by our theological reflections from Scripture and tradition. So, for
example, Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the theological claim that the Church
is one through the work of the Holy Spirit and then turns to recent work in
analytic philosophy to provide one explanation of how this might be so, within
the parameters specified in our theological exploration.
However, where I differ from Efird is that I think of such work as part of the
theological task, whereas Efird maintained it was only really a kind of applied
philosophy. In the work of Oliver Crisp, we can see the kind of philosophical
explanation advocated by Efird pressed into the service of theological model
building. As Crisp describes it,
By a “model” . . . I mean a theoretical construction that only approximates to

verisimilitude, offering a simplified account of a particular data set or (in this
case) cluster of theological doctrines . . . . This also comports with an intel-
lectual humility on the part of the theologian: it may be that we are unable to
capture the truth [of the matter] . . . because we are incapable of understand-
ing it as finite creatures or do not have the epistemic access to comprehend
the doctrine, which is part of the mystery of the divine nature. Similarly, in
contemporary physics Newtonian classical mechanics can still be used to
generate accurate results when applied to large-scale macroscopic objects
that are not traveling at very high velocities, though it is understood that
classical mechanics is, strictly speaking, an approximation to the truth of the
matter rather than the truth simpliciter.¹¹
Thus, in the spirit of Efird and Crisp, this project offers a model of ecclesiology
which serves to make clear what it means to think of the Church as one in
Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, but one which never pretends to
get to the full truth of the matter.
⁹ See Cockayne and Worsley (2021) for a discussion on Efird’s approach to analytic theology.
¹⁰ Nozick, 1981. ¹¹ Crisp, 2019: 54–5.
x 
Such an approach is not without precedent in ecclesiology, and by no means

is it limited to analytic theology. For instance, as Avery Dulles describes in the
introduction to his book Models of the Church, by offering ‘models’, ‘aspects’,
or ‘dimensions’ of the Church, we never describe the Church ‘directly’,
since the Church is ultimately mysterious.¹² Instead, these indirect descrip-
tions of the Church can allow us to grow in understanding, so long as these
descriptions remain indirect. Similarly, by providing a philosophical
explanation of one possible way in which the Church may be united yet
divided, the same might be said. The explanations which I explore in the
chapters of this book are models, intended to expand our understanding of
the Church, but without seeking to give an ultimate account of the
Church’s mysterious life.
Thirdly, whilst drawing from the concepts and ideas found in analytic
literature on the nature of social groups can prove illuminating in offering
models of the Church, we cannot apply these discussions without qualifica-
tion. Any attempt to reduce the Church to the level of the human institutions
which social metaphysicians and epistemologists have as their subject-matter
will lead us to making the Church in our own image. And so, our aims must
remain modest.
Lastly, whilst I hope there is much in this book which will interest those
from a range of traditions, this project is intended neither to be entirely
ecumenical, but nor is it constrained to one particular theological tradition.
I do not pretend to offer an account of the Church with which all will
agree. I am sceptical about the possibility of offering a truly inclusive
ecumenical ecclesiology without distorting important theological claims.
For instance, Protestants and non-Protestants will think very differently
about issues of who has authority to speak on behalf of the one Church.
Trying to force these views together is not a promising approach.
Moreover, while I am an ordained Anglican, I do not attempt to provide
an Anglican ecclesiology which is applicable only to those in my own
tradition. The theological voices I draw from throughout the book are
varied—as well seeking to ground the discussion in the witness of
Scripture, each chapter considers a theological figure from the tradition.
The book draws insights from Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Eastern
Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican traditions. The insights gleaned
from figures in these traditions provide the starting points, or correctives,
to the models developed in each chapter.
¹² Dulles, 1978: 14.

 xi
3. One Church: A Summary
Before embarking on our exploration of the unity of the Church, it is worth

beginning with a big picture summary of the book’s argument, such that we
might see how the pieces of the discussion fit together as a whole.
The central thesis of the book is that the Church is a social body, composed
of many individual members, united through the work of the Holy Spirit to be
the body of Christ. Call this the unity thesis. This thesis is then expanded in
two directions: first, conceptual and second, practical.
We begin with the conceptual. Chapters 1–3 provide a model of the Church
which seeks to offer a philosophical explanation of how the unity thesis might
be so. Chapter 1 is really a piece of conceptual groundwork, which must be laid
before this task of model-building can begin. More specifically, I seek to clarify
the relationship between individualism and collectivism in the Church.
Focusing on Jesus’ prayer in John 17, that his disciples may be one, I argue
that to speak of the oneness of the Church is not a call to enforce humanly
imposed unity on the Church, but rather, it is to claim that the Church is one
in virtue of its relation to the one God. The reason conceptual groundwork is
in order is that such claims about social oneness in the Church are sometimes
treated with suspicion, as if they entail that individual responsibility is at risk
by talking of social wholes. It is therefore important to make clear just what the
commitments advanced by my ecclesiological model are.
This discussion of individualism and collectivism is advanced in two direc-
tions, one theological and one philosophical. First, I consider Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s assessment of Hegelian anthropology in his doctoral thesis,
Sanctorum Communio. Bonhoeffer emphasizes that while the Hegelians may
be right to emphasize the importance of community for the Christian life, they
downplay the significance of the individual before God. Thus, Bonhoeffer
thinks, both the individual and the Church must respond to God in faith.
Secondly, I argue that recent philosophical developments can help clarify
Bonhoeffer’s theological claim. Here, I unpack Philip Pettit’s discussion of
individualism in contemporary political philosophy. Pettit contends that indi-
vidualism commits one to the view that social realities never override or
undermine individual agency, but it does not preclude a commitment to
holism, according to which human thought must be realized in community.
Thus, drawing from Pettit and Bonhoeffer, I argue that the apparent disagree-
ment on individualism is terminological, rather than substantial. We can
endorse the thesis that individuals must relate to God, and yet stress that
their doing so is bound up in the life of community. Individualism does not
xii 
undermine a commitment to the reality of social groups, nor the importance

of these groups for human thought. And so, we can proceed to offer a model of
the social ontology of the Church without downplaying the importance of
individual autonomy or responsibility.
With this presupposition outlined, Chapters 2 and 3 offer a constructive
model of the nature of the Church in order to expound the unity thesis.
Chapter 2 begins by identifying what Paul Avis has described as the ‘unbear-
able paradox’ of ecclesiology;¹³ that is, I ask how it could be that the Church is
one in Christ, united by the work of the Holy Spirit, despite the overwhelming
division and discord it displays. I argue that unity in the body of the Church
must be located not in human organization or structure, but only in the work
of the ‘one Spirit’ in whom ‘we were all are baptised’ (1 Cor. 12:13). Thus, a
social ontology of the Church must emphasize the Spirit as the primary agent
at work within it. By outlining recent work on the ontology of social groups,
I argue that functionalist accounts of group agency can help us to see how the
Church as a social reality might be united by its decision-making procedures.¹⁴
Unlike the other social bodies discussed in this literature, however, the Church
does not derive its decision-making from the group aggregation of its mem-
bers, but instead, from the work of the Spirit within the community. Applying
Richard Hooker’s work on Anglican Church polity, I argue that one means of
discerning the Spirit’s work might be through the structures of the institu-
tional church, so long as these structures don’t seek to replace the Spirit’s work
in the Church.
Building on this functionalist ontology of the Church, Chapter 3 seeks
to offer a model for understanding the claim that the Church is the body of
Christ. After considering Gregory of Nyssa’s reflections on the Church as the
body of Christ, I seek to offer a philosophical model which can help to elucidate
his claims. I argue that recent work on the nature of extended cognition in the
philosophy of mind can help to shed light on the relation between the one
Church and the one body of Christ.¹⁵ As both Richard Cross and James Arcadi
have shown, this philosophical literature (which seeks to show that cognition
can be extended beyond the human brain into external artefacts) can help
provide models for understanding both the incarnation and the Eucharist.¹⁶
Here, I develop both Cross’s and Arcadi’s incarnational metaphysics to explain
how the Church might be thought of as the body of Christ. However, unlike the
¹³ Avis, 2018: 24. ¹⁴ See e.g. List and Pettit, 2011; Tollefsen, 2015; Collins, 2019.
¹⁵ See e.g. Clark, 2010; Clark and Chalmers, 2010; Tollefsen, 2015.
¹⁶ Arcadi, 2018; Cross, 2011.
 xiii
Eucharist and the incarnation, the doctrine of the Church does not think of
Christ as extended into some artefact or tangible object, but into a social body.
To give a metaphysics of the Church as the body of Christ, then, I build on
work in socially extended cognition, which seeks to show the ways in which
minds are extended into other minds. This can provide one model for thinking
about how the Church as a group agent might participate in the body of
Christ.
We then move from conceptual to practical. If Chapters 1–3 ask the
question: ‘What is the Church?’, then Chapters 4–7 ask the question: ‘What
does the Church do?’. The unity thesis and the theological model offered in
Chapters 1–3 are then used to help us examine the study of the sacraments
(specifically, baptism and Eucharist) and liturgy (both inside and outside of
formal church worship). Moreover, this discussion of what the Church does
focuses on the question of how the activities of the Church serve the unity of
the Church. Thus, we are able to see how the model offered in Chapter 1–3
might inform the practices that are performed by the members of the one
Church.
In Chapter 4, I consider the role of baptism in the one Church. The chapter
focuses on the role of a baptismal liturgy as an instance of initiation into the
community of the Church, reflecting on the implications of this initiation for
how a new member relates to the group. First, I consider recent philosophical
work on the nature of promises. I argue that the promises made in baptism
might be understood as instances of what Margaret Gilbert has called ‘joint
commitments’.¹⁷ As Gilbert shows, promising, understood as an instance of
joint commitment, always entails certain obligations of both promisor and
promisee, and the same is clearly true in the promises of baptism. However,
whilst Gilbert’s account captures important features of baptismal obligations
in local communities, it fares poorly when extending this to consider the
relationship to the Church as a whole. We must understand these promises
as a response to work of the persons of the Trinity, who determine the grounds
of membership in the Church, rather than effecting the membership by itself.
Here, I unpack John Calvin’s notion of baptism as a sign and seal of the work
already achieved through Christ. Finally, I consider how this position can be
extended to think about the case of the infant baptism. Understanding baptism
not as an instance of personal testimony, but as an initiation into the family of
the Church allows us to see that making commitments on behalf of a child can
be made sense of within our understanding of the Church’s ontology.
¹⁷ Gilbert, 2011.
xiv 
Whereas baptism is a once in a lifetime sign of our membership in the one

Church, the Eucharist stands as a perpetual sign of our membership into the
body. The New Testament makes it clear that sharing in the one bread
somehow allows us to share more fully in the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10). In
Chapter 5, I argue that the Eucharist is central to our understanding of how we
participate in the one body of the Church by sharing the body of Christ in the
one bread. First, drawing from recent work in social psychology, I reflect on
the significance of shared experiences and ritualized movement for commu-
nity cohesion, arguing that this might play a role in the outward forms of unity
in the Church. While these accounts can explain the psychological mechan-
isms behind the Eucharist as a human ritual, and thereby provide some
explanation of how the Spirit enacts unity through the sacraments of the
Church, an account which is solely psychological risks locating unity in the
wrong place. Secondly, then, I offer an account of the Eucharist as unitive
through the real presence of Christ. Here, I develop a discussion from the
American Reformed theologian, John Williamson Nevin, as he seeks to
emphasize the importance of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist for uniting
the Church.
The final two chapters consider the implications of our discussion of unity
for the practice of liturgy. First, in Chapter 6, I offer an account of participa-
tion in the life of the Church through the liturgies of gathered worship. The
discussion is framed around Evelyn Underhill’s three modes of liturgical
participation: joint action, representative action, and corporate silence.¹⁸
Expanding these three accounts of liturgical action, I draw from recent work
in analytic philosophy. On joint action, I consider how discussions of shared
agency can help explain what is to act jointly with another person in liturgy,
say, in reading a liturgical script at the same time. One limitation of such
accounts, I argue, is that they cannot offer inclusive accounts of Church action
which explain how all the Church’s members (including those with cognitive
impairments and young children) contribute to the actions of the Church as a
wider body. I then consider how the application of the literature on group
agency (see Chapter 2) can explain the notion of representative action. In the
practice of ordination, for instance, one individual is authorized to perform
liturgical actions on behalf of the whole community. I argue that this should be
understood in a similar manner to the way in which we authorize politicians to
act on our behalf through voting. This can also be extended, I think, to show
how non-paradigm participants in the liturgy can be brought into the group’s
¹⁸ Underhill, 1936.
 xv
liturgy, even if they lack the capacity to engage in joint action. Finally,
I consider the nature of corporate silence in liturgy. Drawing from work in
the philosophy of perception, I argue that liturgical silence is not the same as
absolute silence but, instead, stands as a contrast to the other aspects of the
liturgy. In the space which silence allows, our individual actions are united by
the work of the Holy Spirit to form group actions, thus emphasizing the need
for both liturgical action and leaving space for the uniting work of the Spirit in
worship.
I conclude, in the final chapter, by considering how the liturgy of the
Church extends beyond acts of gathered worship. Even if we recognize that
the Church is one in the Spirit, we must lament when the outwards of the
Church commit acts of abhorrence in the world. Reflecting on the discussion
of worship and justice in the minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible (see Amos
5:21–4, for instance), I show that there is a close connection between worship
and ethics. Bringing Augustine’s discussion of social justice to bear on the
ethics of worship, I show that we should look to an account of group injustice
to best understand cases of abuse and injustice in the Church. Then, I turn to
recent analytic work to help expand this claim. First, drawing from work by
Miranda Fricker, I consider how responsibilities might be shared by two or
more agents. However, I argue, such accounts are limited. Just as shared
agency accounts of liturgical action are insufficiently inclusive, collective virtue
accounts do not explain how non-paradigm participants in a community can
contribute to its virtue or vice. Thus, building on the discussions of function-
alist social ontology, I apply an account of group virtue to the context of
worship. I argue that we should think of group injustice in roughly the same
way that we think of individual injustice; as the community’s failing to do what
it ought to do, namely, to love. Finally, I conclude by considering a number of
questions for thinking about how we should respond to issues of group
injustice within our communities: When should an individual submit to a
church community and when should they protest? When does an action done
on behalf of the Church become disassociated with the Church as a whole?
Building on Stephanie Collins’ discussion of group responsibility, I argue that,
as a member of the Church, one has a responsibility to protest actions within
the Church which one takes to diverge from the Church’s purpose in Christ
through the Spirit. One form this might take, I argue, is the corporate act of
lament in liturgy.
Whilst the model expounded in this book has many facets, the core thesis
remains the same throughout the chapters: the Church is only one in virtue of
xvi 
the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at work in the midst of those who
are members of the one Church. In understanding the life of the body of
Christ, we must see that in all the Church does—whether in sacraments, in
corporate liturgy, or in acting in the world—unity can only arise in and
through the work of God.
Acknowledgements
This book marks the culmination of four years of research at the Logos
Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of
St Andrews. The colleagues, students, and visiting scholars who have shaped
this project are too numerous to mention.
I initially joined the institute in 2017 to work on analytic theology and
liturgy, but it soon became apparent that the project I wanted to write needed
to take a much broader approach. If we want to understand what it is to
participate in the worship of the Church, then we must first understand the
nature and life of the Church.
Andrew Torrance has been a constant source of encouragement, challenge,
and friendship over the past four years. Within my first month at the Logos
Institute, Andrew had suggested I read his grandfather’s book, Worship,
Community and The Triune God of Grace. Its contents shaped not only my
academic interests, but also my approach to ministry and liturgy in the
Church. I am grateful for the support of Alan Torrance and Oliver Crisp as
directors of the Logos Institute, both of whom have been relentless in their
support and friendship. I could not have wished for a better way to spend four
years, nor for better colleagues to work alongside.
Jonathan Rutledge and Koert Verhagen have proved to be invaluable
sources of theological correction and philosophical challenge, but most
importantly, they have been fellow connoisseurs of coffee and whisky over
the past four years. This book would not exist without their influence, support,
and friendship.
During the 2020–1 academic year, a group of colleagues in the institute
convened to provide feedback on one another’s work, building on a mutual
interest on the theme of participation. The group not only provided feedback
on many of the chapters from this book, but also proved to be a melting pot of
ideas which inspired many of the directions this book ended up taking. Thank
you to Oliver Crisp, Joanna Leidenhag, Jonathan Rutledge, and Andrew
Torrance for participating in this group.
Alongside the writing of this book, I have also embarked on two collabora-
tive projects. First, together with my good friends Scott Harrower and Preston
Hill, I have written a book exploring how the Church might respond to issues
xviii 
of trauma. These gentlemen (there are none to whom this title is more suited)
have been a source of support, friendship, and mutual care over the past
couple of years, opening my eyes to the reality of the damage the Church
has sometimes inflicted on survivors of trauma. I am thankful to God for their
companionship and look forward to many more joint ventures in the future.
Secondly, I have been grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Gideon
Salter, a psychologist at the University of St Andrews on a number of grant
projects and articles, exploring how psychology can help us to understand the
nature of corporate worship. Some of this material has made its way into the
present monograph, but our conversations have inspired much more than is
on the page. In Gideon, I have found a fellow long-suffering follower of the
English football team, and a likeminded co-author.
One of the most wonderful parts of being employed by a university is being
able to teach some of the brightest theological minds in the world. My doctoral
students: D.T. Everhart, Preston Hill, Madeline Jackson, Daniel Spencer, and
Jason Stigall have each been peers and friends in very different ways. Many of
them have given their time to grappling with the contents of this book and
discussing ideas late into the night over a glass of scotch. I am thankful for the
ways each of them have helped shape this project and I am excited to see how
their own careers and projects will develop. I am also blessed to have taught
outstanding MLitt candidates, many of whom have been inflicted with the
chapters of this book as compulsory reading and have provided many import-
ant insights.
A number of people have been kind enough to give feedback on draft
chapters of the book. I am grateful to Harvey Cawdron, Andrew Esnouf,
Derek King, Sarah Shin, and Chris Whyte for their insightful feedback,
which has transformed my own thinking on many issues. The two anonymous
referees from Oxford University Press provided timely direction to the project
in its infancy and raised many important points for clarification as it was
nearing completion. I am grateful to them both.
Before his untimely death, the late David Efird provided extensive com-
ments on many of the chapters. I am thankful to have known him and he
continues to shape my sense of vocation to this day. The research group
started by David at York—the St Benedict Society for Philosophy of Religion
and Philosophical Theology—kindly agreed to reunite to provide feedback on
a final draft of the manuscript. Our Friday morning Zoom meetings spanned
three countries (Chile, England, and Scotland) and I am very thankful to
Daniel Molto, Jack Warman, and David Worsley for their attention to detail
and probing questions, not to mention their continued friendship.
 xix
The completion of this manuscript also coincides with the end of my time at
the Logos Institute and a move into full time ministry in the Church. As such,
this book is not a mere academic study, but a reflection on the Church I have
committed to love and serve. The congregations of G2, York and Saint
Andrew’s Episcopal Church, St Andrews have shaped my faith and sense of
vocation in very different ways. In Christian Selvaratnam and Trevor Hart,
I have found like-minded colleagues in ministry and exemplary role models of
ordained ministry. Although he may not always have realized it, my weekly
coffee meetings with Trevor have also proved to be an excellent testing ground
for exploring many of the ideas in this book. Finally, as I embark on a new
ministry at Holy Trinity Church and St George’s Church in Leeds, I am
thankful to their openness and hospitality in welcoming us into their com-
munity and I am excited to get started in serving the one Church of Christ
together with them.
Finally, thanks are due to my wife, Eleanor and wonderful children Judah,
Emmeline, and Zachary. As well as providing a source of laughter, challenge
and love, Eleanor daily sharpens my faith in Christ and deepens my devotion
to serving his Church. I am looking forward to many more years serving the
Church alongside you.
Contents
1. That They May Be One: The Individual and the Community

of the Church 1
1. That They May Be One 1
2. Individualism vs Collectivism 4
3. Bonhoeffer’s Philosophically Informed Ecclesiology 8
4. Individualism and Its Implications 12
5. Clarifying the Debate 16
6. Conclusion 18
2. One Spirit: The Church as a Group Agent 20
1. The Unbearable Paradox of Ecclesiology 20
2. The Church as the Body of Christ through the Agency of the Spirit 21
3. Group Realism Expanded 24
4. Group Realism and the Church 30
4.1 Redundant Group Realism and the Social Ontology of Dictatorships 35
4.2 The Benevolent Dictator: Group Agency in the One Spirit 38
4.3 Polity and Discernment in the Life of the One Church 40
4.4 Rogue Agency and the Sin of the Church 44
5. Conclusion 46
3. One Lord Jesus Christ: The Church as the Socially Extended
Body of Christ 48
1. The Church as the Body of Christ 48
1.1 Participation in the One Body of Christ 49
1.2 Identifying the Church as the Body of Christ 54
2. Functionalism and Extended Minds 55
2.1 Bodily Extension and the Parity Principle Revised 59
3. Arcadi and Cross on Theological Applications of
Active Externalism 63
4. The Church as the Extended Body of Christ 66
4.1 Social Extension 68
4.2 The Church as the Socially Extended Body of Christ 71
5. Conclusion 74
xxii 
4. One Baptism: Group Membership and Rites of Initiation 75

1. Social Ontology and Initiation 75
2. Promising and Group Membership 77
2.1 On the Relationship between Promising and Membership 82
3. Membership and Authorization 84
3.1 Baptism and Speech Act Theory 86
3.2 Two Models of Baptismal Speech Acts 87
3.3 The Calvinian Model 91
3.4 Group Membership and Baptism 95
4. Infant Baptism and Group Membership 97
5. Conclusion 104
5. One Bread, One Cup: The Eucharist as a Sacrament of Unity 105
1. More than Metaphysics: Analytic Theology and Eucharistic Unity 105
2. Human-to-Human Unity through the Eucharistic Ritual 107
2.1 Social Cohesion and Eucharistic Ritual 107
2.2 Remembrance and Unity with the Past 110
3. Eucharistic Unity in Christ 117
3.1 Unity in the Eucharistic Body and the Ecclesial Body 118
3.2 The Difference between the Eucharistic Body and the Ecclesial Body 122
3.3 You Are What You Eat: The Eucharist as a Source of Unity 124
4. Conclusion 130
6. Acting as One: Liturgy and Group Action 132
1. The Gathered Church 132
1.1 Liturgical Participation 134
2. Underhill’s Principles of Corporate Worship 136
2.1 Corporate Silence 137
2.2 Representative Action 138
2.3 Joint Action 138
3. An Analytic Account of Group Liturgical Action 139
3.1 Joint Action 140
3.2 Shared Agency and Liturgical Action 141
3.3 Inclusivity, Belonging, and Joint Action 145
4. Representative Action 147
4.1 Inclusivity, Belonging, and Representative Action 151
4.2 Authorization and Discernment 153
5. Corporate Silence 154
5.1 The Nature of Silence 155
5.2 Group Action and Corporate Silence 157
5.3 Inclusivity, Belonging, and Corporate Silence 159
6. Conclusion 160
 xxiii
7. One Purpose: Extensive Liturgy and Protest 161

1. Go in Peace to Love and Serve the Lord 161
2. Systemic Abuse in the Life of the Church 163
3. Injustice and the People of God 169
3.1 Social Justice and the People of God 173
4. Social Justice as Joint Commitment 175
4.1 Social Justice and Collective Duties 179
5. Liturgical Protest 183
6. Conclusion 185
Epilogue 187
References 191
Index 201
1
That They May Be One
The Individual and the Community of the Church
1. That They May Be One
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said,
‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may
glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give
eternal life to all whom you have given him. . . . I am asking on their
behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those
whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and
yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no
longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.
Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so
that they may be one, as we are one . . . I ask not only on behalf of
these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their
word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in
you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you
have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so
that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they
may become completely one, so that the world may know that you
have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
(John 17:1–11, 20–3)¹
‘That they may be one’. Jesus’ departing prayer for unity in the Gospel
according to John is seen by many to offer one of the clearest articulations
of ecclesiology in the gospel texts.² It is not difficult to see why this is the case.
Chapter 17 concludes a pivotal narrative in John’s text, preceding the accounts
of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. The so-called ‘farewell discourse’ (John 14–17)
¹ All biblical references from New Revised Standard Version. ² See e.g. Byers, 2017.
Explorations in Analytic Ecclesiology: That They May be One. Joshua Cockayne, Oxford University Press.
© Joshua Cockayne 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844606.003.0001
2    
emphasizes the oneness of Christ with the Father (14:1–14), the promise of the
coming Holy Spirit (14:15–31; 16:4–15), and a vision of the life of Christ’s
disciples after his impending departure. A life grounded in the Father and the
Son must lead, Jesus tells his followers, to a life characterized by love
(15:12–13), but a rejection by the world (15:18–19). John draws these dis-
courses to a close with the striking words that Christ’s disciples will be one just
as the Father and the Son are one.³
This book takes as its starting point this notion of oneness in Christ. Not
only is this notion key to understanding Johannine ecclesiology,⁴ but it is also
the key to understanding ecclesiology tout court. Any account of the Church’s
oneness must not depart from this foundation in the oneness of the persons of
the Trinity.⁵ But how precisely we are to characterize such oneness is where
things get more complex. We might think, for instance, that the oneness of
Christ’s followers described by John implies that the Church is called to
overcome their disagreements and to unite as one body across traditions. In
his sermon on John 17, the Lutheran theologian Johan Blumhardt exemplifies
this way of thinking, writing, ‘Do we as Jesus’ disciples really want to become
one? . . . We must find a way where what you believe I believe and what
I believe you believe. For the Lord says in his prayer, “I have given them
glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.”ʼ⁶ Blumhardt’s
assumption here is that oneness entails a uniformity of belief. The Church’s
oneness means that I must believe what you believe and vice versa.⁷
The problem with such readings of the text, which stress ideal social
harmony above all else, is that they fail to recognize what is at the foundation
of John’s narrative. Jesus’ prayer in John 17 must be read in light of John’s use
of oneness language throughout the gospel. As Andrew Byers puts it,
‘approaches that understand “one” as signifying a unity of social harmony or
a unity of function or mission do not sufficiently take this prior narrative
development into interpretative account.’⁸ Expanding this narrative develop-
ment further, Richard Bauckham notes that ‘The very ordinary little word
“one” was a theologically very potent word for the Jews of the Second Temple
period because of its occurrence in the Shema.’⁹ It would not have escaped a
Jewish audience’s attention that John is repeatedly making reference to a
³ Note, as will become clear shortly, the position I articulate in this book emphasizes the oneness of
the Church as grounded in the oneness of Trinitarian persons, not only the Father and the Son.
⁴ Bauckham, 2015: 40.
⁵ See McCall (2021: chapter 5) for a discussion of the Trinitarian implications of John 17.
⁶ Blumhardt, 2019: 86.
⁷ For a critique of ecumenical readings of John, see Minear (1978: 5–13). ⁸ Byers, 2017: 144.
⁹ Bauckham, 2015: 23.
     3
crucial liturgical and doctrinal text. The Shema is perhaps the closest analogue
to the Christian use of the Lord’s Prayer, the twice daily recitation of the lines:
‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ (Deut. 6:4) would mean that
John’s oneness language was immediately recognizable. Just as mentioning the
two words, ‘Our Father’ has the power to connote the meaning and words of the
whole of the Lord’s Prayer, the seemingly innocuous word, ‘one’ is theologically
loaded and thus has important implications for understanding John’s usage of
the term.
As Byers argues, ‘In Jesus’ prayer, the multi-layered strands of ecclesial,
Christological, and theological oneness interfuse in an abbreviated but complex
polyphony.’¹⁰ Throughout the gospel, John uses oneness language in direct
reference to the Shema (‘we have one Father’ (8:41)), but also in application to
Christ (‘the Father and I are one’ (10:30)), and Christ’s flock (‘one flock, one
Shepherd’ (10:16)). John is pulling from a variety of sources. For instance, as well
as alluding to the Shema, John draws from the messianic texts of Ezekiel 34 and
37 and its reference to the ‘one Shepherd’ and the ‘one king’ who will unite the
divided nations of Israel. Thus, John’s use of ‘one’ in the gospel is both intentional
and cumulative; he aims at a careful weaving together of the oneness theology of
the Shema with the messianic and national emphases on the one Shepherd who
has come to regather God’s one people. As Byers summarizes, ‘To be “one” in
Johannine perspective is to be (re)gathered into the divine community of the
Father (Israel’s “one” God) and Jesus (the “one” messianic king).’¹¹
Yet, it is notable that whilst John is emphasizing a new social reality in
Christ, that the use of oneness language to refer to God’s people is not entirely
novel. Oneness language is not uncommon in Hebrew Scripture in referring to
God’s people and their places of worship.¹² Consider Bauckham’s discussion
of the one temple, for example:
A pagan might well ask why the Jews did not have many temples. The answer
given by Josephus is that the one God should be worshipped in one temple
where his one people worship him. This may not immediately seem to make
logical sense. Why should not the one God be worshipped in many temples?
¹⁰ Byers, 2017: 144. ¹¹ Byers, 2017: 146.

¹² More specifically, Bauckham writes: ‘There are a series of passages in the biblical prophets that are
key texts for understanding John’s usage of the word “one”: Ezek. 34:23; 37:15–24; Mic. 2:12; Hosea
1:11a; Isa. 45:20a . . . These passages reflect the biblical narrative that tells how, following the glorious
days of Solomon’s united kingdom, Israel was tragically divided into the two kingdoms of Israel or
Judah, the northern and the southern tribes . . . . the hope for the future of God’s people in the prophets
includes the expectations that God will regather his people, whom he has scattered among the nations,
returning them to the land of Israel’ (Bauckham, 2015: 24).
4    
But the correlation of one God, one temple, one law, one people makes much
more sense when we realize that at work in these passages is the idea that
God’s people are unified by their allegiance to one God.¹³
The emphasis in John’s use of such language in chapter 17, then, stresses not
social harmony, but rather, ‘social identity construction around Israel’s God’.¹⁴
In other words, the foundation of ecclesial oneness can be found only in the
work of the one God, and not by enforcing organizational structures and
ecumenical initiatives onto the Church from outside.
Yet, we must see that John does not merely extend the oneness language of
Ezekiel to Christ and Christ’s flock, he also presses these familiar theological
contexts to develop new conclusions. John’s words in 17:26 (‘they may be one,
as we are one, I in them and you in me’), ‘express participation within the
divine reality of the Father–Son interrelation’.¹⁵ That is, these words speak not
only of one people in a way that powerfully reflects God’s identity—as in the
use of oneness language in Hebrew Scripture—but also, the oneness of these
people is a metaphysical reality in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit.
Put differently, ‘Jesus does not just pray that the disciples will share in his
mission; beyond a task-orientated or functional unity, Jesus prays that this
new social entity will actually share in his preexistent divine glory.’¹⁶ The
Church is a social entity in which God’s people share in the life of Christ.
And it is this entity the present book seeks to explore. While there are many
important issues in the study of ecclesiology, my focus is squarely on the issue
of the Church’s oneness in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit, and
subsequently, the implications of this for the practice and work of the Church.
2. Individualism vs Collectivism
However, before offering a model of the Church’s social unity in Christ (in
Chapters 2–3), this chapter will pause to consider an important precursor to
this discussion, namely, the relationship between individual members of the
Church and the community as a whole. For whilst John 17 presents a
distinctive vision of the Church’s social unity in Christ, it is sometimes
thought that John’s view of humanity is distinctively individualistic.
Repeatedly, we see characters emerge from John’s narrative who encounter
¹³ Bauckham, 2015: 29. ¹⁴ Byers, 2017: 106. ¹⁵ Byers, 2017: 152.

¹⁶ Byers, 2017: 152.
     5
Christ in their particularity—whether that be Nicodemus, a member of the

religious elite who seeks Christ out alone in the middle of the night (3:1–21),
an anonymous Samaritan woman drawing water by herself at the hottest point
in the day (4:1–42), or his friend Lazarus raised from the grave (11:1–44)—for
John, it is clear that individuals are changed by their encounters, leading them
to testify to the astounding transformation that they have received.
Indeed, we find such interpretations of John’s gospel in the secondary
literature. Bauckham, for example, thinks that John’s anthropology is dis-
tinctly individualistic. Whilst John did not endorse a kind of ‘modern’ indi-
vidualism, according to which each person ‘takes his or her own chosen path
in complete independence of anyone else, free from all commitments to
others’,¹⁷ Bauckham argues that the evangelist does prioritize the individual
above the community in a way that differs from the collectivist culture of his
time. He continues by noting that, ‘readers or hearers are simply not allowed
to forget that response to Jesus has to be individual to be real.’¹⁸ Thus,
Bauckham thinks, whilst John provides a vision of a new social reality in
Christ, this never erases the priority of individuals. As he puts it, ‘The life of
the community, the disciples’ mutual love, stems from the relationship
between each individual and Jesus. The latter entails the former, but individual
relationship to Jesus has priority.’¹⁹
Contrastingly, Byers appears to endorse the opposite view of John. He
writes,
the evangelist is invested in a social vision that is explicitly communal,

not individualistic. He certainly depicts interrelations between Jesus and
specific disciples or would-be disciples; these interactions demonstrate that
Johannine ecclesiology is personal, but they are certainly not part of an
agenda promoting individualism. The Shepherd knows his individual
sheep by name, but he leads them in and out as a flock.²⁰
For Byers, participation language and oneness language in John denotes an

anthropology which is personal but not individualistic. That is, individuals
might be called by Christ, but they are always called into a new life which is
inherently communal; we cannot be one in Christ and remain distinct from
the community of the Church. At least on the surface, then, it appears that
¹⁷ Bauckham, 2015: 9. ¹⁸ Bauckham, 2015: 7. ¹⁹ Bauckham, 2015: 9.

²⁰ Byers, 2017: 7. It’s not clear how Byers sees his thesis in relation to Bauckham’s; he describes
Bauckham’s individualist reading of John as ‘carefully nuanced’ but offers no explanation of its relation
to his own collectivist reading.
6    
there is some disagreement on the issue of individualism and collectivism,

even if we restrict our scope to one New Testament text.
This tension between individualism and collectivism is not unique to the
interpretation of John, either. Indeed, in discussing the arguments of this book
with colleagues, I have encountered opposing kinds of scepticism to its central
thesis. First, that it is not individualistic enough, and second, that it is too
individualistic. From the one flank, for instance, we find those who wish to
stress, with Bauckham, that Christianity focuses on the salvation of individ-
uals; there is no salvation en masse.²¹ Søren Kierkegaard appears to be an
exemplar of this tradition, describing his authorship as aiming to ‘shake off
“the crowd” in order to get hold of “the single individual”’.²² Indeed,
Kierkegaard elsewhere writes that ‘“The single individual” is the qualification
of the spirit; the collective is the animal qualification which make life easier,
provides a comparative criterion, procures earthly benefits, hides one in the
crowd.’²³ Similarly, Pope John Paul II expresses his scepticism concerning an
overly collectivist vision of humanity, which, he thinks, will
lead more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the
abolition of personal sin, with the recognition only of social guilt and
responsibilities . . . a situation—or likewise an institution, a structure, society
itself—is not in itself the subject of moral acts. Hence a situation cannot in
itself be good or bad. At the heart of every situation of sin are always to be
found sinful people.²⁴
As I was told recently by a leading scholar in asking a question concerning

St. Paul’s vision of sociality: ‘Paul is a rampant individualist.’²⁵ There is clearly
a vast amount of scholarship which simply assumes that Christianity is a world
view which prioritizes the single individual, perhaps making space for some
minimal ecclesiological claims about the importance of individuals meeting
together because it is ‘good for them’.
Second, from the opposing flank, many theologians have been at pains to
stress that Christianity is a religion that shuns individualism. Indeed, I was
²¹ As the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus puts it, ‘presumably we can be baptized en
masse but can never be reborn en masse’ (Kierkegaard, 1985: 19).
²² Kirkegaard, 2000: 9. ²³ Kirkegaard, 1967: 2:2044.
²⁴ John Paul II, 1984: 16. Thanks to D.T. Everhart for bringing this to my attention. Everhart’s
(forthcoming) discussion of individualism draws out many important features of the discussion of
individualism and collectivism and its application to theology.
²⁵ There is a live debate concerning Pauline notions of individualism in the field. Simeon Zahl
(2021) helpfully summarizes much of this debate and suggests some ways forwards.
     7
once scolded for using the term ‘individuals’ and told instead to use the term
‘persons’; since ‘there are no such things as individuals, but only persons.’
I have been pressed to see that passages in the New Testament typically used to
refer to individuals, ‘your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor. 6:19)
actually use the plural second-person pronoun in Greek, which is left ambigu-
ous by the English ‘your’ (perhaps a good case can be made for the inclusion of
a Texan ‘y’all’ here).²⁶ Indeed, the emphasis on the one temple, which
Bauckham attributes to Josephus, would appear to reinforce this idea. Often,
it seems this collectivist argument is a reaction to the prominence of individu-
alism in Western evangelicalism, in which the doctrines of the Church have
been distorted into claims only about individual salvation and personal rela-
tionship with God, ignoring the obviously communal emphases of the New
Testament.²⁷ The final nail in the coffin for the individualist, according to
some, is that contemporary psychology proves that human persons are inher-
ently social creatures; our ideas and minds are shaped collectively by those we
come into contact with, and so the idol of modernist individualism has come
crashing down through the empirical discoveries of the past century.²⁸
The problem, or so I will argue in this chapter, is that both ‘individualism’
and ‘collectivism’ are too loosely defined to be instructive in this context. For
instance, a rejection of individualism sometimes appears to be an assertion
that social wholes are important to take seriously. At other times those
attacking individualism appear to be claiming that social wholes are somehow
more real than individuals or deserve to have explanatory priority. Some
people simply seem to mean that human thought is developed in community.
These different senses of individualism are clearly not equivalent. More
precision is needed if we are to make progress in thinking about the Church
as a social reality in Christ. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to this
issue of specifying the relationship between individual persons and social
wholes. It is my contention that the opposing camps depicted above are not
really disagreeing substantially, but rather, disagreeing about what individu-
alism means. I expand this discussion in two directions. First, I consider
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s discussion of anthropology and ecclesiology in
Sanctorum Communio as he seeks to offer a middle way between philosophical
²⁶ A note on ‘y’all’. I have it on good authority from a Texan colleague that this term originates from
Texas, despite its widespread use in other states. For those who disagree, you can take up the issue with
him.
²⁷ Again, see Zahl’s (2021) discussion of individualism and soteriology for a helpful explication of
this argument and a response to it.
²⁸ For a fuller discussion of this claim in relation to the Church, see Strawn and Brown (2020).
8    
atomism and Hegelian collectivism. Secondly, I discuss a parallel account,

dubbed ‘individualist holism’, in contemporary social-political philosophy and
show its application to help navigate this thorny theological issue.
3. Bonhoeffer’s Philosophically Informed Ecclesiology
Bonhoeffer’s early work on the nature of the Church provides a helpful

dialogue point for the current discussion for several reasons. First,
Bonhoeffer’s methodology proves instructive for doing analytic ecclesiology.
As he describes on the first page of the book, ‘social philosophy and sociology
are employed in the service of theology. Only through such an approach, it
appears, can we gain a systematic understanding of the community-structure
of the Christian church. This work belongs not to the discipline of sociology of
religion, but to theology.’²⁹ Whilst Bonhoeffer does not engage analytic phil-
osophy, he does see the value of bringing philosophical insights from outside
of theology to clarify theological issues. However, after considering the many
similarities between sociological concepts of community and the Church,
Bonhoeffer concludes that the Church must be a ‘form of community sui
generis’.³⁰ Put simply, in making use of the tools and methods of philosophical
and sociological thought, Bonhoeffer is clear that theology cannot be reduced
to such modes of discourse; these disciplines must ultimately serve theology.
Thus, as well as helping us to navigate a middle way between the extremes of
collectivism and individualism (as we have so far conceived them), Bonhoeffer
also provides us with a model of philosophical theology from which analytic
theologians have much to learn.³¹
Secondly, Bonhoeffer’s discussion of anthropology can help us to move
beyond the caricatures of individualism and collectivism. In the opening
section of Santorum Communio, Bonhoffer attempts to locate ‘the Christian
concept of person’,³² by contrasting it with prominent philosophical positions,
before considering the import of this discussion to explore the nature of
community in Christian theology. The instructive insight, at least for our
purposes, lies in Bonhoeffer’s engagement with Hegelian metaphysics.
Bonhoeffer wishes to affirm, with the Hegelian, that human beings are struc-
turally ‘open’, that is, that human persons cannot be considered in isolation
²⁹ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 21. ³⁰ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 266.

³¹ Indeed, I think Bonhoeffer’s methodology is consonant with many of the existing reflections on
the task of analytic theology. For a detailed account, see Wood (2021).
³² Bonhoeffer, 1998: 34.
     9
since ‘human beings . . . are necessarily created in a community . . . human

spirit in general is woven into the web of sociality’.³³ As Bonhoeffer goes on
to describe, to think of human beings as structurally open, is to affirm ‘there
would be no self-consciousness without community—or better, that self-consciousness
arises concurrently with the consciousness of existing in community.’³⁴ Quoting
directly from the nineteenth-century Austrian sociologist Othmar Spann,
Bonhoeffer summarizes: ‘Only in interaction with one another is the spirit of
human beings ever revealed; this is the essence of spirit, to be oneself through
being in the other.’ Put simply, for Bonhoeffer, human thought is dependent on
community and cannot be known outside of community. The elusive Hegelian
notion of ‘objective spirit’ (or Geist) looms large in Bonhoeffer’s thought; in
Michael Mawson’s words, for Bonhoeffer, ‘personal identity is dependent
upon a prior stream or system of spirit, it can only be conceived of as
inherently social. All discrete individual persons and acts are possible and
meaningful only due to a prior sociality, which means only in terms of a
broader social network or framework of relationships.’³⁵
However, despite affirming the importance of objective social realities, and
insisting that human thought is dependent on community, Bonhoeffer is not
willing to adopt the idealist anthropology without revision. He asks, ‘does it
still make sense to speak of I and You, if all seem to become one? Does not
everything that appears individual merely participate in the one, supra-
individual working of spirit?’³⁶ The problem with idealism is that it gives the
wrong answers to these questions, Bonhoeffer thinks. He writes,
The tragedy of all idealist philosophy was that it never ultimately broke
through to personal spirit. However, its monumental perception, especially
in Hegel, was that the principle of spirit is something objective, extending
beyond everything individual—that there is an objective spirit, the spirit of
sociality, which is distinct in itself from all individual spirit. One task is to
affirm the latter without denying the former, to retain the perception without
committing the error.³⁷
The Hegelian does not affirm the importance of the individual in the com-
munity to a sufficient degree, according to Bonhoeffer, thereby leading to an
absorption of the I into the thou, in which individuals are no longer separable
as individuals. In contrast, Christian thought, Bonhoeffer contends, affirms
³³ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 65. ³⁴ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 70. ³⁵ Mawson, 2018: 82.

³⁶ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 73. ³⁷ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 74.
10    
the emphasis on the communal without losing the individual in the crowd. In
fact, to even make sense of the emphasis on sociality, we need a distinctive
notion of the individual, Bonhoeffer thinks; ‘social intention is inconceivable
without structural “closedness”, because no intimate act is conceivable without
corresponding openness.’³⁸ For Bonhoeffer, the human person is both struc-
turally open and structurally closed. As Clifford Green summarizes this
tension in Bonhoeffer’s account of the person, ‘If the premise of theological
anthropology is that the human person exists in relation to God, then the
human counterpart of this is person in relation to person. This is the I–You
relation: persons are independent, willing subjects who exist in relation to
others.’³⁹
Recall that, for Bonhoeffer, the purpose of developing this anthropology is
to inform our understanding of the community of the Church, a community
constituted by many such persons. Thus, he moves from discussing the nature
of the person to considering questions which concern the relationship between
individual persons and communities, more generally. Bonhoeffer asks:
Does the social unity then involve more than personal interactions, and if so,
how should we conceive it? Or does the social unity consist solely of these
interactions? In theological terms, does God intend by community some-
thing that absorbs the individual human being into itself, or does God intend
only the individual? Or are community and individual both intended by God
in their distinctive significance?⁴⁰
In answer to these questions, Bonhoeffer posits that, ‘community can be

interpreted as a collective person with the same structure as an individual
person.’⁴¹ That is, just as the individual person can be regarded as both
structurally open and closed, as well as being subject to moral responsibility,
Bonhoeffer claims that we can say the same about a community, whether that
be a family, a nation, or a Church. Since nations, as communities composed of
individual persons, can have the same kind of structural unity as each indi-
vidual person, we should regard the collective community as a person too. And
hence, Bonhoeffer thinks, collective persons can be morally responsible. The
kind of responsibility which Bonhoeffer is alluding to here can be helpfully
illustrated with an example:
³⁸ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 74. ³⁹ Green, 1999: 115. ⁴⁰ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 76.

⁴¹ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 77.
     11
In the Civil Rights movement in the United States led by Dr Martin Luther
King, Jr, the community of African-Americans encountered the white com-
munity with an urgent ethical claim for justice and freedom. Just as in ethical
encounters between individual people, the black community resisted the
injustices perpetuated by the white community, and challenged the white
community to make a responsible answer in legislation, economic policy and
social behaviour and customs.⁴²
It is important to stress that such an account of the collective personhood and

collective responsibility must not collapse the concept of an individual person
into the collective person. For Bonhoeffer, human persons and communal
persons are distinct and non-reducible. Not only does this account of collect-
ive personhood apply to nations, families, and other social groups, it also has
an important theological relevance. And, crucially for our discussion here, he
also maintains that these observations can inform our understanding of the
nature of the Church:
The universal person of God does not think of people as isolated individual
beings, but in a natural state of communication with other human beings . . . .
God created man and woman directed to one another. God does not desire a
history of individual human beings, but the history of the human community . . . .
In God’s eyes, community and individual exist in the same moment and rest
in one another. The collective unit and the individual unit have the same
structure in God’s eyes. On these basic-relations rest the concepts of the
religious community and the church.⁴³
What is the metaphysical status of such persons? And what is the relation
between individual and communal persons for Bonhoeffer? As Mawson clari-
fies, the relationship is complex: ‘while collective persons “transcend all
individuals” and achieve independence from them, collective persons in turn
are themselves “incomprehensible without the correlate of personal, individual
being”. In the primal state, a community as a collective person both emerges
from and requires persons as self-conscious willing individuals.’⁴⁴ According
to Koert Verhagen, while Bonhoeffer thinks that the individual and the
community have a mutually constitutive relationship, it is important to see
that God’s relational presence to individuals is logically prior to God’s
⁴² Green, 1999: 118. ⁴³ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 79–80. ⁴⁴ Mawson, 2018: 86.

12    
relationship with community.⁴⁵ So, while there is never a moment when the
individual and community are not enmeshed, God’s relational presence to
individuals must come first.
There are important implications from Bonhoeffer’s discussion for the
present discussion, even if some of the metaphysical claims are difficult to
render in precise analytic terms. For instance, in Bonhoeffer’s qualification of
the idealist position he puts his finger on an important issue, namely, that
structural openness, or a relational view of human persons, does not entail a
downplaying of individuals. Moreover, it is possible, Bonhoeffer thinks, to
claim that God values communities and holds communities responsible,
without thereby diminishing the importance of individuals and their respon-
sibility before God. Thus, if Bonhoeffer is right, we can affirm the psycho-
logical insights that highlight the importance of interaction for human thought
without claiming that communities are amorphous, and that salvation is
en masse. For Bonhoeffer, communities are dependent on individuals in an
important sense: without individuals there are no communities. And thus, we
can already see that the individualism vs collectivism debate is founded
on illegitimate premises and ill-defined terms. However, there is clearly
work to be done in specifying these arguments to explain just where the
tension may or may not lie between the individualist and the collectivist.
Here, contemporary analytic philosophical work can be of service to the
theological task in much the same way that Bonhoeffer sees Hegelian meta-
physics offering insight.
4. Individualism and Its Implications
In his influential book The Common Mind, Philip Pettit explicitly addresses
the issue this chapter seeks to explore, namely, the relationship between
individualism and collectivism. The context of Pettit’s discussion is that of
political philosophy, and thus, just as Bonhoeffer approaches the social phil-
osophy of his time, we too must be careful in importing the conclusions of
Pettit’s thesis wholesale into theology.
Pettit argues that much of the discussion surrounding individualism and its
implications conflates two important but distinct issues in social ontology,
namely, ‘the vertical issue’ and the ‘horizontal issue’. He summarizes the two
issues as follows.
⁴⁵ Verhagen, 2021: 114.

     13
The vertical issue:
The first issue has to do whether individual agents are compromised in their
agency by aggregate social regularities, whether a knowledge of how these
regularities work would undermine our view of those agents as intentional
and thinking subjects . . . the issue . . . is vertical in character. It bears on how
far individual agents are affected, as it were, from above; in part-whole terms
the issue is whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts.⁴⁶
The horizontal issue:
The other issue in social ontology is of a horizontal character rather than a

vertical, for it bears on how far individual agents are affected by one another,
not affected from above; in part-whole terms it might be represented as the
issue of whether the parts are transformed through being jointly belonging to
a single whole. The issue is whether individual agents non-causally depend
on their social relations with one another for the possession of their dis-
tinctive capacities: say, for the possession of the capacity to think.⁴⁷
Pettit argues that many discussions of individualism in political philosophy

and sociology are guilty of assuming that a certain kind of answer to the
vertical issue entails a certain answer to the horizontal issue. More specifically,
he notes, those who deny that individual agency is compromised by aggregate
social regularities also tend to deny that human thought is dependent on social
relations.
Expanding Petitt’s use of terminology will help clarify these claims. First, in
answer to the vertical issue, as he defines it, ‘Individualists deny and collect-
ivists maintain the status ascribed to individual agents in our intentional
psychology is compromised by aggregate social regularities.’⁴⁸ Put simply,
the defence of individualism concerning social explanations denies that ‘psy-
chologically mysterious forces’ play any role in social explanations . . . ‘the
status ascribed to individual agents in our intentional psychology is not
compromised by aggregate social regularities.’⁴⁹ In other words, in explaining,
say, the rise in unemployment in twenty-first-century Britain, we do not need
to appeal to the Geist, or spirit, of society to provide a social explanation; we
have all of the components we need by examining the intentions and
⁴⁶ Pettit, 1996: 117. ⁴⁷ Pettit, 1996: 118. ⁴⁸ Pettit, 1996: 118.

⁴⁹ Pettit, 1996: 118.
14    
behaviour of the individual constituent members of this social group. The issue
at the heart of this debate is thus, ‘whether the intentional subject, as the
individualists hold, enjoys the control over herself, the capacity to have thought
or done otherwise, which intentional psychology imputes to normal human
beings; or whether that autarchy is compromised, as collectivists allege, by the
presence of structural regularities of an overriding or outflanking character.’⁵⁰
Secondly, in answer to the horizontal issue, ‘Atomists deny and holists
maintain that individual agents non-causally depend on their social relations
with one another for some of their distinctive capacities.’⁵¹ We have already
seen one example of holism in Bonhoeffer’s defence of Hegelian anthropology.
Pettit outlines a similar account in his own defence of holism:
Thinking is not the purely private enterprise it seems at least sometimes to

be: it never involves a total renunciation of the public forum, a complete
seclusion in the cloisters of the inner self. The thinker may withdraw from
social life but she will still carry the voice of society within her into her place
of retreat. If that voice were absent, if there were no others to whom the
individual thinker was answerable, then scrutable human thought would be
impossible.⁵²
The crucial issue at stake for our purposes is to note the ways in which these
issues are conflated in discussions of individualism. For instance, it is sometimes
held that a defence of the interdependence of human thought on social relations
(i.e. a defence of holism) entails a rejection of individualism. But really what is
being claimed is that atomism is false. As Pettit goes on to argue, one’s answer to
the vertical issue does not entail that one must give a specific answer to the
horizontal question. There is no reason, he argues, to think that individualism
entails atomism, even if these theses have often been defended together. Indeed,
his own position is that individualism and holism are the correct positions to
hold. It is this clarification, I think, which can help shed light on the seeming
impasse between the opposing sides in the theological debate.
Pettit’s argument for individualist holism depends on the philosophical
notion of supervenience.⁵³ Put simply, ‘A set of properties A supervenes
upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to
A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan
⁵⁰ Pettit, 1996: 137. ⁵¹ Pettit, 1996: 118. ⁵² Pettit, 1996: 191.

⁵³ The issue concerning whether supervenience is sufficient for reduction is contested in the
philosophical literature. I will follow Pettit in assuming that is not.
     15
form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.’⁵⁴ It is some-

times held (and Pettit defends such a claim) that supervenience is not suffi-
cient for reduction. That is, while A properties supervene on B properties, they
are not identical to one another. An example will help illustrate. In seeking to
explain the relationship between the mind and the body, we might ask: Can
mental behaviour be explained by appealing only to material substances?⁵⁵
According to the materialist, yes. But there might be competing explanations
of how this is the case. For instance, reductivists claim that all mental prop-
erties are reducible to physical properties; the mental state, pain, for example,
can be reduced to the firing of c-fibres in the brain. But not all materialists
think this is the case. Some materialists defend a version of the supervenience
thesis, according to which mental properties depend on physical properties
but cannot be reduced to them. Both the reductivist and the non-reductive
physicalist are monists about mental substances (i.e. neither of them endorses
the existence of thinking substances) but differ on claims about the relation
between minds and bodies. Contrastingly, the substance dualist thinks that
mental properties can only be explained by positing a further substance,
namely, some kind of non-material substance. And so, we have at least three
approaches to the question of the relation between mental and physical states:
supervenient-monism, reductive-monism, and substance-dualism.
A parallel set of responses might be offered in discussing social realities. For
instance, individualism, analogously to materialism, claims that social explan-
ations require no appeal to additional substances or forces to make sense. But
this does not entail reductivism about social realities, either. For if we endorse
a supervenience thesis, then we need not think that social realities and
individual realties are in conflict. In other words, for the non-reductivist: no
social realities without individual realties.
If the relationship between social realities and individual persons is one of
supervenience, then we would be mistaken, thinks Pettit, if we were to focus
our discussion on the question of which of these enjoys causal priority. If social
regularities supervene on individual intentionality in a non-reductive way,
then the question of causal competition is eliminated. Thus, while individual-
ism of this variety does claim that individual persons are the most basic
building block of social reality, it does not follow, as some have supposed,
that social realities reduce to claims about individuals. A more robust account
of this thesis will be developed in the next chapter.
⁵⁴ McLaughlin and Bennett, 2018. ⁵⁵ This is List and Pettit’s analogy (2011: 3–5).
16    
Before considering an individualist account of social wholes, we should

quickly note that individualism does not entail the defence of atomism. That
is, if one keeps the vertical issue and the horizontal issue apart, then one can
affirm that human thinking is dependent on thinking in community and
supervenes on relations with others. But this need not entail that a person is
committed to thinking that ‘the aggregate regularities that characterise social
life leave the individual uncompromised in her autarchical status.’⁵⁶ In other
words, ‘The endorsement of holism is entirely consistent with accepting the
intentional-psychological picture of human beings.’⁵⁷
5. Clarifying the Debate
The most valuable insight afforded by Pettit’s discussion, I think, is the helpful
pulling apart of individualism and atomism. Much of the prior discussion can
be sharpened by interpreting it through this lens. For instance, to return to our
initial discussion of John, we can see that one interpretation of the apparent
disagreement between Byers and Bauckham is to note that Baukcham
endorses individualism and Byers endorses holism, along with a realist ontol-
ogy of communities. If Pettit is right, then these positions are not in conflict at
all. That is, one can claim, with Bauckham, that individuals are the most basic
building block of social reality and take precedence over communities, but also
agree with Byers that human beings are irreducibly communal and that talk of
communities is not reducible to individual explanations. Similarly, we can
claim that Kierkegaard was right in aiming to draw the individual from the
crowd (which is precisely Bonhoeffer’s worry in insisting that the human
person is structurally closed), but still argue that the human capacity to
think is dependent on social relationships.⁵⁸ Defending individualism and
holism allows the theologian to have their cake and eat it, so to speak. That
is, it allows us to affirm the priority and importance of individuals without
losing the emphasis on the community. Similarly, Bonhoeffer’s resistance to
the Hegelian notion of structural openness shows that individuals enjoy a kind
of priority in our thinking which means that we should reject the notion that
individuals and collectives can come apart. But this does not mean that we
must think of collectives as some metaphysically spooky entity to add to our
⁵⁶ Pettit, 1996: 173. ⁵⁷ Pettit, 1996: 173.

⁵⁸ In fact, I think this is Kierkegaard’s thesis. See his discussion of the self ’s relatedness in The
Sickness Unto Death, for instance.
     17
ontology.⁵⁹ Rather, all social realities supervene on individuals without being

reducible to them.
However, we must ensure we proceed with caution in applying these
arguments to theology. Given the definition of individualism above, there
might be concerns that it rules out too much.⁶⁰ More specifically, the definition
may seem to rule out the possibility of appealing to divine action in social
explanations, especially if we stress the importance of excluding ‘psychologic-
ally mysterious social forces’, to use List and Pettit’s phrasing. Pettit also claims
that ‘evil demon complications’⁶¹ would undermine his defence of individu-
alism. This seems worrying, especially if we think that that divine agency
could, in principle, override or outflank individual agency.
One way to respond to this worry is to endorse the thesis of libertarianism
about freedom of the will. In her Thomistic account of love, for instance,
Eleonore Stump thinks that for God to be united with a person, Paula, there
must be two operative wills: God’s and Paula’s. She writes,
no one else can fix Paula’s will for her either, not even God. To the extent to
which God fixes Paula’s will, he wills for Paula a certain state of Paula’s will.
But, then, to that extent, what is in Paula is God’s will, not Paula’s . . . . if God
determines Paula’s will, then the only will operative in Paula is God’s will. In
that case, there will not be two wills to bring into union with each other . . . .
Union between Paula’s will and God’s will is not established by such means;
it is obviated or destroyed.⁶²
On Stump’s account of soteriology, Paula must come to a point of quiescence,

in which her will ceases to resist God, such that God can bring about the
condition of faith in Paula. This is a much-contested aspect of Stump’s
account.⁶³ The point for our purposes is not to defend Stump’s account of
libertarian free will, but to note that if one were to defend this view, one could
easily endorse Pettit’s account of individualism. For on Stump’s account, while
God influences the will of an individual, God never overrides or outflanks their
will. And thus, we can retain the integrity of human agency, even if God is
omnipotent. Or, one might endorse William Alston’s ‘interpersonal mode’ of
the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, in which, God relates ‘to the human person as a
⁵⁹ In a recent article, Simeon Zahl (2021) has argued that the debate between ‘individualism’ and
‘communalism’ in Pauline studies rests on an oversimplification of both positions.
⁶⁰ Thanks to Derek King for this objection. See King (2021) and Crisp (2022) for a development of
this objection.
⁶¹ Pettit, 1996: 155. ⁶² Stump, 2010: 158–9. ⁶³ See Kittle, 2015.
18    
person, influencing the human being as one person influences another (albeit
making use of some of His extraordinary powers in doing so), seeking to evoke
responses, voluntary and otherwise from the other person, somewhat as each
of us seeks to evoke responses from others.’⁶⁴ On both accounts, individual
agency is influenced by divine agency, but never overridden.
However, adopting such an account of libertarianism will strike many as
problematic. We might think, for instance, that Paul’s dramatic conversion on
the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1–19) is clearly a case in which Paul’s will is
overridden by God. For some, the admittance that God can’t bring about faith
in Paul is too high a price to pay in order to retain the autonomy of the
individual.
Luckily, there is a more straightforward approach, which I think can ensure
that the central thrust of Pettit’s distinction is retained without wedding our
view to libertarianism and quiescence. That is, we might claim that individu-
alism rules out the overriding or outflanking of a person’s will by social
aggregate forces but remains agnostic on whether an individual’s will is ever
overridden or outflanked by divine agency. It is important to see that what
Pettit’s individualism seeks to rule out is the kind of emergent or dualistic
social theory that dominates nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theory.
But whatever the causal power of divine agents in social explanations is, it
seems strange to think of their status as akin to aggregate social regularities.
The agency of the Holy Spirit is not akin to the agency of an impersonal and
elusive social Geist. The persons of the Trinity are persons and agents, capable
of acting within social groups and causally affecting individuals. A social
ontology that refers to the persons of the Trinity but excludes appealing to
the social Geist is broadly within the spirit of individualism, I think, even if
many of its proponents may be sceptical of allowing divine agency to feature in
such explanations. In other words, the thesis defended in this book is that
there is nothing more to the community of the Church than the agents that
comprise it. This claim is true so long as ‘the agents that comprise it’ include
both divine persons and human persons.
6. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that the apparent conflict in thinking about the
relationship between the individual and the community is superficial. Many of
⁶⁴ Alston, 1989: 236.

     19
the objections of those who reject individualism can be levelled at atomism,

but do not seem to undermine the thesis of individualism. Indeed, we have
seen several reasons for adopting an individualist thesis; Christ encounters
individuals, transforms individuals, and brings them in new social relations in
the community of the Church. As Bonhoeffer maintains, without a notion of
the ‘I’, it is hard to make sense of the Christian view of the God-relationship or
the community of the Church. But this individualist thesis does not mean that
human thought and action is not enmeshed and intertwined in sociality, nor
does it follow that social groups are not real. To some, this might seem like an
incidental or peripheral thesis to the central argument of the book. However, it
is crucial to see that if the assumptions outlined in this chapter are false then
we cannot make much progress with the task of analytic ecclesiology, at least
as I conceive it. Thus, in what follows, I offer a model of the Church and its
oneness which assumes the truth of both holism and individualism. And as we
will see in the next chapter, an individualist starting assumption in no way
undermines the possibility of offering an account which takes seriously the
oneness of the Church in Christ. It is to this task we now turn.
2
One Spirit
The Church as a Group Agent
1. The Unbearable Paradox of Ecclesiology
Given the presuppositions outlined in Chapter 1, we are now in a position to

consider what kind of social reality the Church is and to begin the task of
offering a model of the one Church. This chapter aims to explore the role of
the Holy Spirit in uniting the Church as one body.¹
The oneness of the Church is an article of faith. In reciting the words of the
Nicene- Constantinopolitan Creed, we confess to believing in ‘one holy cath-
olic and apostolic Church’. As T.F. Torrance’s observes, ‘the clauses on the
Church . . . follow from belief in the Holy Spirit, for the holy church is the fruit
of the Holy Spirit . . . If we believe in the Holy Spirit, we also believe in the
existence of one Church in the one Spirit.’² Put another way—the Church is
not an organization instituted and maintained by human beings striving to act
as one body (even if the majority of its members are human beings). Rather,
the Church is a body instituted and directed by the one Spirit, through whom
all its members are united. But in confessing this oneness of the Church
through the work of the Spirit, we may be struck by the fact that the one
Church doesn’t appear to be one at all. In the words of the Anglican theologian
Paul Avis,
Ecclesiology wrestles with the truth that the church is at one and at the same
time both united and divided. It knows itself to be united in Christ; its unity is
part of its confession; but it also knows itself to be lamentably divided . . . the
fact of the fragmentation of the one church is the almost unbearable paradox
that confronts ecclesiology.³
¹ This chapter adapts some material from previously published work (see Cockayne 2019a, 2020a).
It is reused with permission.
² Torrance, 2016: 252. ³ Avis, 2018: 24.
Explorations in Analytic Ecclesiology: That They May be One. Joshua Cockayne, Oxford University Press.
© Joshua Cockayne 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844606.003.0002
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talk she never mentioned the name of Callendar.
When they had become more quiet, Lily kissed her and said, “You have
been too unhappy. You must stay now with me ... forever, if you like. You
must study and become a great musician. I am rich. I can help you.... If you
won’t take the money, you can borrow it from me and pay me back when
you are successful and famous....”
Lily rose languidly and brought a bottle of cologne and they both bathed
their eyes. All the strangeness was gone now. Their tears, in the way of
women, had brought them close to each other. The sun had come out and
the little park was filled by its slanting rays. Belowstairs one of the tall
windows opened and they heard on the gravel of the terrace the slow steps
of blind Madame Gigon who, wrapped in an antiquated coat of fur and
followed by the dogs, was moving up and down in the unaccustomed
warmth. There was something in the sound which, as they listened, filled
the room with the atmosphere of a conspiracy. For an instant the current of
kinship ran swift and high, as high indeed as it had run in the old days when
all the clan assembled for the annual feast at Shane’s Castle.
“She is growing feeble,” observed Lily. “Think of it. She’s eighty-five.”
Life was short. Only a little time before Madame Gigon had been a
young widow come to the school of Mademoiselle Violet de Faux to teach,
among others, an awkward young American called Julia Shane.
When Ellen had gone to her own room, she sat for a time before the fire,
thinking, and slowly the face which she saw reflected in the dim old mirror
began, though it was quite alone in the room, to smile back at her. It had not
been difficult. It was all done now. The future was certain. She had gotten
what was necessary, without asking for it; in some inexplicable fashion,
quite without any planning, it had happened. She had not even been forced
to say that all she had in the world were the seven francs that lay in the
sunlight on the Louis Quinze console.
39
I N this one fleeting instant life had been briefly a perfect and exquisite
thing. In the great house, surrounded by beauty, by warmth and
friendliness, the past and, even for a time, the future did not exist. It was a
moment which could not have endured; with such a person as Ellen a
moment of that sort might have been called a miracle to have happened at
all. As the months passed the very comfort which surrounded her
degenerated into a sort of dulness. After a time, Lily returned to her beloved
south and there remained in the house only Ellen, Madame Gigon and Jean.
The endless talk of Lily’s guardian, which in the beginning had seemed
vaguely diverting, became in the end merely the garrulity of a childish old
woman. But there were worse things to bear.
She soon discovered that Lily, in her indifference, had virtually given
over the house to Madame Gigon, and the old woman, poverty-stricken
until Lily appeared on her horizon in need of a companion and watchdog,
now used it to make up for all the years she had spent alone in a single
room in a Versailles pension. Her friends were coming and going
constantly, at the most inconvenient times, an endless procession of dowdy
widows and spinsters. It was their habit to fortify themselves in the great
drawing-room at just the moment chosen by Ellen for her practising. This
they did with an air of the utmost assurance, as if their great age in some
fashion gave them precedence over all else in this world. Thus they would
sit for hours talking volubly in a tongue which so far as Ellen was
concerned might have been Greek or Roumanian. But gradually as she
came to understand a word here and there, the mystery surrounding their
impassioned conversation was dissipated, and out of the fog there emerged
the prosaic fact that their excitement had no foundation. They became as
wild over the price of cheese or the health of Criquette as if they had been
engaged in a battle to preserve la glorie de la patrie. Yet they were all rich;
the very fingers which they shook so violently in the excess of their
excitement glittered with diamonds and emeralds. And presently, as her
knowledge of French increased, Ellen came to the dismal realization that
the bulk of their talk was concerned with gossip. Gathered in a cluster about
the blind old woman, they tore reputations as they might have torn cheese
cloth. The words “maîtresse” and “intrigue” leapt from the conference a
score of times within a single afternoon. Heads wagged and crêpe flowed,
(for all of them were so old that they were perpetually in mourning for a
husband or a brother or sister; indeed, they went beyond this and mourned
darkly the demise of the most remote cousins). Madame de Cyon, the
youngest of the lot and the one whom Mrs. Callendar had mentioned so
long ago, had a way of narrowing her green eyes and saying, “Tiens!
Tiens!” over some choice morsel, with an air of sniffing a bad smell. There
were times when Ellen felt that if she said “Tiens! Tiens!” another time she
would strangle her. Madame de Cyon was Russian but no better than the
rest. They were all, Ellen came to understand, like the women of the Town;
they visited Madame Gigon because she was blind and did not go out, and
the remainder of their time, it seemed, was spent in collecting morsels for
the delectation of the old woman.
There was but one thing which diverted the stream of their gossip and
this was the mention of the sacred name of Bonaparte. She gathered, after a
time, that there was a Prince Bonaparte in whom the existence of all of
them had found its core. She learned to her astonishment that they ignored
the very existence of the Republic. A tottering old man, the son of a
plumber’s daughter and a dubious prince who was a homicide (all this she
gathered from their talk) was, to them, a shining figure invested with all the
glory of the Corsican’s golden bees.
At length, when she could bear it no longer, Ellen had a piano brought in
and placed in one of the great empty chambers in the gallery above the
drawing-room, and there she played for hours in defiance of “le Prince” and
his court of old women belowstairs. There were times when the music
(especially the compositions of some of the hateful new composers) became
so violent that it threatened to drown the gossip of Madame Gigon’s
cronies. At such moments the blind old woman would raise her sightless
eyes toward the ceiling and observe to the others, “That is Madame Shane’s
cousin. She is a violent woman (une femme sauvage).... She suffers from an
excess of élan.”
At which Madame de Cyon would wag her head and observe, “Tiens!
Tiens! Perhaps if she had a lover it would help! A young widow like
that....”
During the long months two things sustained her. One was, of course, the
old passion for her music. The other was Jean. As they came to know each
other, a warm and touching affection developed between them, for the boy,
despite the good manners and the quiet grave charm born of his long
association with older people, had in him a spark which the presence of his
cousin fanned into a flame. The life he led was, to be sure, of a queer sort ...
a life spent almost entirely within the walls of the beautiful old house with
little company save old Madame Gigon, her fat dogs and the fussy music
master who came twice a week to give him lessons. It was a somber, quiet
life which changed only during the delirious summer months when, in
company with his mother and old Madame Gigon, he went to stay in the
country at Germigny l’Evec in the lodge of the park owned by Madame’s
nephew, the Baron. There he could ride a pony, sometimes alone and
sometimes following his mother and the Baron on their long rides at early
morning through the damp forest on the opposite bank of the Marne. And
there were the farmer’s boys for playmates.
But in winter everything was changed. Until his cousin came from
America he played alone day after day in the little park dominated by the
white pavilion. The fascination of having a cousin ... a real new cousin ...
seemed likely to endure forever. Indeed the power of the novelty was so
great that at times he slyly deserted old Madame Gigon and made his way
secretly up the long stairs and along the gallery to sit on the floor outside
Ellen’s door and listen, breathless, to the flood of music that welled up to
fill all the house.
When Ellen took him walking in the Bois she did not, like his mother,
walk in an indolent regal fashion; she moved rapidly, quite the way a person
ought to walk, and she talked of the people they passed and sometimes even
halted beside the pond and threw stones far out into the water.
The boy was, at that time, her only companion for, shut in by her
ignorance of French and an incurable dislike for the stringy American
students who sometimes sought her acquaintance, she had no opportunity
for making friends. Yet she was content to be lonely, for she had always
been so, save in two brief moments ... once when she had been overcome
by the presence of Callendar and again when Lily had wept and embraced
her. Jean worshiped her without claiming any part of her. He was, in this,
like his mother, for Lily, in the wisdom and indolence of her nature, allowed
Ellen to go her own way. It may have been that in this grain of wisdom lay
the secret of her charm and her power even over the old women who came
to gather about Madame Gigon’s chair and gossip. They succumbed to her
like all the others, like the Baron....
There were times when the presence of César troubled Ellen. During all
those months the first hatred she had for him failed to abate; she came to
tolerate him, perhaps because she saw that it was necessary just as once it
had been necessary to tolerate Mr. Wyck and the Bunces. She must have
known that he worked against her. Yet in a strange, abstract fashion, she
was able to understand the fascination of his hard and wiry masculinity. It
was, of course, a thing which she herself could not have suffered for an
instant, but she understood that to Lily it was a necessity. Beyond this point,
however, her shrewd mind was unable to penetrate; it was impossible to fix
the relationship of the pair. Lily never spoke of him, save in the most casual
fashion. Indeed, Ellen, who could not bring herself to pry into such matters,
never knew whether the Baron had been at Nice with her cousin or whether
he had met her at the railway station. Madame Gigon spoke of him as her
devoted nephew. She praised his virtues, and his constant presence at the
house she interpreted as an interest in herself. At times Ellen could have
cried out, “Rot! It’s not your nephew who’s supporting you and making you
comfortable. It’s Lily. And it’s not you that he comes to see. It’s Lily.”
But she said nothing. The strangest thing of all was that she did not
much care what their relationship might be. Once it might have disturbed
her; now she looked upon it as a matter of no concern, a thing which had
nothing to do with her. Yet there were moments in the evenings when,
sitting with them in the long drawing-room, she felt vague, faint envy of her
cousin. They came in the long silences when she would suddenly discover
that Lily, so happy, so radiant, so lovely, in the long gowns of black velvet
which she wore in the evening, was watching the Baron as he sat smoking
his pipe, his feet stretched out before him toward the fire. The dogs adored
him. He was the one person for whom they would desert Madame Gigon.
It was then that Ellen became conscious of her loneliness as a distant,
almost physical pain. She learned to kill the pain. Usually she rose, lighted
a cigarette, and sitting at the piano, fell to playing wild and boisterous
music out of the music halls.
Miss Rebecca Schönberg did not abandon her. She came once or twice to
the house, where her bright shiny eyes penetrated every corner. She
inspected, absorbed Madame Gigon and, having exhausted the possibilities
of the old woman, put her forever out of her mind. She would, no doubt,
have found marvelous material in Lily and the Baron but, as chance had it,
they were never present. She took Ellen with her to the theater and twice to
the opera, once to hear the inevitable Louise and once to hear
Götterdämmerung, with all the guttural power of its German diction ironed
out into smooth, elegant French. They called it Le Crêpuscule des Dieux, a
whimsy which caused Ellen endless mirth. And at the end of two months,
the restless Jewess having placed Ellen with an excellent teacher of French,
left the Ritz and set out to visit an aunt who was married to a rich Gentile
merchant in Riga.
But before she left she said to Ellen, “When I return we will arrange
some entertainments. You must know the right people. That is vastly
important. You must be modern, because during the next ten years to be
modern will be to be chic.”
It occurred to Ellen that Miss Schönberg, with remarkable speed, had
undertaken the position of guide and messenger toward the heights of
success. She was like a trainer who had taken in charge a new animal to
teach it a whole set of tricks. She did not protest, because Rebecca
Schönberg did not annoy her; on the contrary she was vastly amusing. In
her restless energy there was a quality akin to the vitality of Ellen herself.
They went everywhere; they saw everything; they absorbed the people
about them, and returned late at night as fresh as they had started.
“Vitality,” observed Rebecca, as they lunched at the Ritz on the day she
left for Riga, “is nine-tenths of success. With one grain of genius and nine
of vitality, any one can succeed.”
As she made this observation, she regarded Ellen with an intense and
speculative scrutiny. The girl was looking about her with a naïve interest in
the people who sat near them. Her whole manner was one of a vast wonder,
as if she thought, “I, Ellen Tolliver, lunching at the Ritz in Paris. It is not
possible that I am awake!” Miss Schönberg must have seen that she was
still a bit crude, still not quite free of the multitude, but she had an
unmistakable air, a certain distinction born in her which had to do with the
superb poise of the head, the slight arch of the nose and the line of the
throat. It had been sharpened and polished mysteriously during the few
months in Paris. The clothes were right for her style ... simple almost to
severity, fitting the tall, strong, energetic body to perfection. They came
from dressmakers, Miss Schönberg reflected, who knew their business.
Madame Shane must have had taste to have guided the girl so well. A touch
here and there and she would be perfect. What she lacked was a sense of the
bizarre which the public expected from artists. There was plenty of time to
accomplish that....
“As I was saying,” continued Miss Schönberg, over her coupe marron,
“vitality is everything. I once saw Mary Garden at a rehearsal on a stage
cluttered by the jumbled scenery of Pelléas and Melisande. There were
scores of people on the stage ... carpenters, musicians, a director, journalists
... all alive and moving about, but one didn’t see them. One saw only Mary
moving back and forth, in and out among them. No one else existed. It was
a case of vitality. She is ninety-nine per cent. vitality ... nothing else. She
hypnotizes the public. Why, she has even adapted the French language to
suit her own ideas.”
The men and women who sat at the adjoining tables must have found
them an interesting pair; they were both so neat, so trim, so raffiné. It was
not without reason that more than one person, in the years that followed,
spoke of Ellen as resembling a fine greyhound. The one, it was plain, was a
Jewess and very likely, if one could judge from the bright shrewd eyes, a
clever one. The other might have been anything ... Russian, French,
American, Hungarian; it was impossible to say. And she was young and
handsome.
“You must exercise,” continued Miss Schönberg, “so as not to lose your
figure or your vitality.”
So after Miss Schönberg had gone, Ellen took up riding, a thing she had
not done since the days when, as a wild young girl, she had ridden her
grandfather’s horses over fences and ditches without a saddle. And in the
Bois, as in the Ritz, people came to notice her, that she rode magnificently
and was dressed by the best of habit makers. Presently, Lily’s friend Paul
Schneidermann, who sometimes called at the house in the Rue Raynouard
to see young Jean, took to riding with her. He was a languid young man,
devoted to the arts, who led a sybaritic life, but he came presently to rise at
dawn in order to ride by her side through the dewy park.
In those days, she did not forget her mother; on the contrary she wrote to
her more frequently than she had ever done, and her letters were real letters,
filled with the details of her progress. She wrote that Sanson had placed her
with the proper teachers, that she had been to see the great Philippe and that
everything had been arranged for her to work under him. She described
Rebecca Schönberg.
Sometimes in the letters that came from the Town, Ellen discerned a note
of subdued and passionate jealousy which had, somehow, taken the place of
her mother’s old distrust of Lily. She understood all that well enough:
Hattie Tolliver hated Lily for giving her daughter all those things which she
had herself desired so earnestly to give. But there was in Hattie’s letters no
sense of remoteness, not the faintest note of her having yielded the
possession of her daughter. She treated Ellen still as a little girl. She saw her
still as she had seen her on that last afternoon, a stiff, proud, awkward girl
carrying her skates as she stepped through the door of the Tolliver house
into the bright sunlight on her way to Walker’s Pond.
40
I T was the death of old Julia Shane which set in motion the next event of
importance to the Tollivers. Things happened like that in their family. For
a time all would go forward, much as a wave moving in a great smooth
swell approaches a reef, until presently some event interrupted and the
courses of their lives had all to be redirected. The old woman was, perhaps,
the center, the one who at that moment held all the skeins in her withered
bony fingers. She chose at last to die, and so brought Lily back to the Town
and freed her niece, the faithful Hattie.
Together they cared for old Julia; together they sat by the side of her bed
and slowly, under the circumstances, being so close to death, there grew up
between them a new and unaccustomed affection. It was Lily herself who, a
day or two before her mother died, told Hattie that the old story about her
having had a child was true. The existence of Jean shocked Mrs. Tolliver
less than might have been expected, less even than she herself had expected
it to do, perhaps because always deep in her heart she was certain that Lily
had had a child born out of wedlock. It was old gossip, which she had
endeavored always to crush, yet it was gossip which she knew had its
foundations in truth. She knew it, always, just as she knew the days when it
was certain to rain or to be windy. She could not have explained the feeling,
save that she had always distrusted Lily’s charm. One could not be like Lily
and still be a good woman....
For the sake of morality, she made known with an acute frankness her
disapproval of such conduct, and when this had been done in conscientious
fashion she came to the subject nearest to her heart, the question which
interested her more profoundly at that moment than anything in the world.
It happened a day or two after the funeral when the old Julia, dressed for
the last time in her mauve taffeta, was borne through the Flats past Mills
made silent by the long awaited strike, up to the bleak hill where they
buried her by the side of her brother-in-law, Jacob Barr, the pioneer.
The two cousins, Lily and Hattie, sat together in the gloomy drawing-
room before a fire of cannel coal, surrounded by pictures which stood in
piles against the wall and rosewood furniture wrapped in ghostly
cheesecloth. Shane’s Castle, they both knew sadly, would no longer be a
source of talk and excitement for the Town. Harvey Seton need no longer
view it distantly with all the cold horror of a Calvinist. Its history was
ended; there would never be within its walls another gathering of the clan.
The gentle melancholy which filled the old house had, it seemed, an
effect upon the two women. Lily, clad in a loose gown of black velvet, sat
watching her cousin with a curious look of speculation. She was as lovely
as she had always been, so lovely, so gentle, so amiable that the Spartan
Hattie in heart could not believe that she had changed her scandalous way
of living. The older woman was, as usual, busy; it was as if her tireless
fingers could cease only in sleep or in death. She sat now mending a bit of
old lace which they had found while ransacking the vast attics of Shane’s
Castle.
“I will mend it and send it to Ellen,” she said. “It is fine lace, better than
anything she will be able to get in Paris.”
Lily smiled, perhaps because Hattie thought so little of Paris and the
laces it might offer, perhaps because it seemed to her that lace was so wildly
inappropriate to Ellen. What was lace to a creature so proud and fierce, so
ruthless? For she had discovered what the others had not known and what
Hattie, even in the moments when her daughter hurt her most savagely,
would never believe—that Ellen was ruthless.
“I am trusting you,” she murmured over the lace, “to look out for Ellen.
She is young and even if she is a widow she knows little of the world.”
Lily smiled again. She thought, “As if it were possible for any man to
seduce Ellen unless she chose to be seduced. She was born knowing the
world!”
“Do you think she knows her way about with you away from her?”
Lily leaned forward and touched her cousin’s strong, skilful fingers.
“Don’t fret over Ellen,” she said. “Why, Ellen is safer in Paris than I am.
Nothing can ever happen to Ellen....” She bent her head and the warm color
came into her cheeks. “I mean nothing of the sort that could happen to me.
Why, Ellen’s complete.... You don’t understand how independent she is. She
could go into the middle of Africa and land on her feet. She has no need of
friends or guardians. Why, she’s never even homesick.”
Hattie’s fingers paused in their work. “Never?” she asked in a low voice.
“Never?”
And Lily, understanding that she had hurt the proud woman, hastened to
add, “Oh, not that she doesn’t want to see you all. She speaks of you
constantly.... She wants some day to have you near her always.... You see,
now she has to work.... I don’t think you understand how ambitious she is.”
Slowly, as Lily spoke, the cloud passed a little from Mrs. Tolliver. When
her cousin had finished, she raised her head and said in a low voice, “Oh, I
know all that. I’ve been thinking about it all lately ... thinking a great deal.
Only I never understood why it was she never came home before she went
to you.”
“There were reasons,” said Lily. “Good reasons.... One was that she
hadn’t the money and wouldn’t ask you for it. She doesn’t know that I
discovered that ... but I did ... I know just how much money she had. When
she came to me, there were only seven francs left.... D’you know how much
that is? It’s a little more than a dollar. That’s all she had left. A girl who
would take such a risk is not likely to fail. You’ll see her famous some day,
Hattie. You can be sure of that. You’ll be proud of her.”
The fingers were busy again with the lace, and Lily knew suddenly that
she had hurt Mrs. Tolliver again, this time in quite a different fashion. She
had touched the old pride that had to do with money ... that curious, hard
vein of pride so incomprehensible to Lily who had never thought of money,
save only as something that was always at hand to make the wheels of life
run smoothly.
“To think,” murmured Mrs. Tolliver, “that there wasn’t enough money to
bring her home to me.” A tear slipping down the worn cheeks dropped into
the web of old lace and Lily hastened to speak.
“It wasn’t only that,” she said. “Money would have made little
difference. She couldn’t have come back.... She didn’t dare to come. You
see, she was discouraged.... How can I say it? She told me the whole story.
She said that if she had turned back then she would have been lost forever.
She would have turned into a pitiful old maid like Eva Barr. She could
never have married any one in the Town. There was no one with enough
spirit. The ones with spirit ... enough spirit for her, all leave the Town.”
Then after a silence: “You see the death of her husband was so tragic.... It
hurt her.”
For a second Mrs. Tolliver raised her head and faced the beautiful
cousin. “She never loved him.... I know that.”
Lily, a little frightened, kept silent for a time. She had come close to
betraying the awful secret. “No,” she said, presently. “I suppose she didn’t
love him. He was a creature without spirit ... a nice man, but no mate for an
eagle.”
“You knew him?” asked Hattie. “Where? You never told me that.”
“I met him on the train ... the last time I came here. I think,” she added
with a faint smile, “that he was a little épris of me ... a little taken by me. I
know the signs.... But he was terribly frightened ... timid like a rabbit.”
And then Mrs. Tolliver came round again to the old observation. “I
always said he wasn’t good enough for her. I couldn’t see why she had
anything to do with him.”
“Ah,” said Lily. “You don’t know your own daughter yet ... Hattie. He
helped her to escape.”
But she knew that Hattie would never believe such a thing.
It was a strange circumstance that Lily—the Lily whom Hattie had

always feared and distrusted—became in those days the one to whom the
vigorous woman turned for comfort and companionship. Somehow the
indolent Lily, so filled with understanding and knowledge of the world,
served as a bond between the mother and the daughter in far off Paris. She
succeeded in softening all the wounds made by Ellen in the abrupt notes
which came with an efficient regularity, for Lily possessed a great power in
such matters; it was a power which had more to do with the sound of her
warm, low voice than with any logic in the arguments she used. Her
arguments were neither logical nor profound; usually they were only
observations as to the shyness of Ellen in all the range of affection, and the
fierce ambition that tormented her.
“You will understand some day,” she said, “that all she is doing is more
for you than for herself. It is because she wants you to be proud of her.”
“I don’t care about that....” Hattie would say over and over again. “Not
very much. But I don’t want her to escape me forever. I couldn’t bear that.
She’s different from Fergus. He is warm and shows his love. But there are
times when I’m afraid I’ll lose Ellen forever.”
And Lily, in the depths of her placid mysterious soul, knew that here
again it was a matter of possession ... the same possession which the Baron
must always have over herself, the possession which Ellen, without willing
it, had exercised over poor Clarence. Hattie would not abandon her claim to
her children. She could not say to Hattie, without hurting her, that her
daughter was a creature whom none had possessed or ever would possess
even quietly, secretly, as Lily knew that she possessed the Baron, despite all
his boisterous show of domination.
41
O N a gray winter morning early in the year 1912, the Tolliver family
stood on the platform of the Town station, a dirty affair covered with
soot and shameful in a community so prosperous. There was no new
station because none could be built so long as Shane’s Castle stood upon the
only site worthy of so grandiose a building as the Town had planned. The
old woman was dead but her daughter Lily refused to sell, and Hattie
Tolliver, standing now on the platform with the air of a field marshal
surrounded by his troops, took satisfaction in this knowledge. Her family
was on the retreat now before the onslaught of the Mills and she herself
stood in command of the tiny rear guard.
“They’d give a lot for that land,” she remarked to her husband. “I hope
Lily will keep it. She doesn’t need the money.”
It was her parting shot at the Town. She stood now, free of it forever,
surrounded by her husband, her son Robert and the everlasting Gramp.
There was money in her pocket, money which Aunt Julia had left her, and
so there were no perils ahead for a little time at least. And in her heart there
were no qualms over leaving the place in which she had been born and
lived a life filled with petty cares and worries. She regarded it, on the
contrary, as a malignant desert from which two of her children had fled as
soon as they were able, a pest-hole filled with factories and furnaces which
had ruined her husband and forced her into poverty. She left nothing behind
her for which she had the faintest affection; for the dog was dead long since
of old age. Out of a family whose founder had settled the wilderness on this
spot, only one remained ... the hard and pious Eva Barr. They were all gone,
the uncles, the brothers, the cousins, the sisters ... all of them ... dead now or
gone out into the world.
Of this world, her ideas were still somewhat vague, for she never had
been outside the borders of the state: it was perhaps a great, roaring place
full of adventure, or again it might be very much like the county. It really
made very little difference; she was free now, with money in her pocket,
setting out at last in pursuit of her children.
A little way off, wrapped in a shawl and the coonskin coat, Gramp
Tolliver sat peering indifferently through the fog that had settled over the
Flats. In the depths of his heart, he respected his enemy. She stood there in
command of the party, beside her son and her husband, so self-assured, so
utterly fearless of the future. She might have been, he thought, a prophetess,
a leader in an Old Testament migration....
Only a week earlier there had been a skirmish between them over the
matter of his possessions. Hattie had been for leaving them behind
altogether with much of the family stuff; she had been for brushing aside
carelessly all his shelves of books, his beloved rocking chair and the
ponderous, antiquated desk. He would, she told him, be able to find all the
books he wanted in the libraries of so great a city as New York. (As if,
indeed, books out of libraries were the same as his own in which he had
written along the borders such remarks as “excellent,” “penetrating,” or
“tosh,” and “rubbish”!)
Gramp had learned long ago the great power which lay in simple inertia;
by taking no course of action, one became the possession of other people.
He knew that they could not cast him aside like a piece of old furniture. He
was a relative, a father; and one could not abandon a father. So he waited,
and when Hattie threatened not to send his books and chair and desk along
with him, he had refused to go at all and threatened her wickedly with the
awful scandal of staying behind and entering the poorhouse. He knew the
keeper well, he said (lying) and there at least they would let him keep his
books.
In the end he had won. The desk, the rocking chair, and ten cases of
books had been shipped ahead. With those things he would be content. He
would be able again to raise his sanctum somewhere among the buildings of
New York.
“The train is late,” observed Hattie with irritation. “Why is it that it is
never on time?”
She spoke with the air of an experienced traveler,—Hattie who had
never been outside the state. She begrudged every moment that she stayed
in the Town as a moment which kept her out of the future.
Bidding her not to worry and observing that eventually the train would
come as all trains did, her husband turned away and began to walk silently
up and down the worn bricks of the platform—the same bricks, he
remembered, that he had trod on the night he set out upon his futile pursuit
of his daughter.
It was one of those moments which occur sometimes between lover and
mistress, between husband and wife, between those who have loved each
other for years—a moment when it is impossible for the one to tell the other
what is in his heart because it is quite beyond understanding. He could not
say to her that he was sad because he was leaving so much that he had
loved; she, his own wife who loathed it all so deeply, would think him a
little mad. He could not say that he was sad because he would never again
see the pleasant farms of the county, never again talk with his cronies of the
Grand Circuit and quarrel about Pop Geers and how he had driven his latest
race. Never again would he have those long arguments over horses in hotel
bars and parlors during racing week, never again see the sap running from
the trees in maple sugar time, never again talk with old Bayliss and Judge
Wilkins about their Guernseys and Shorthorns. He was leaving a world
which, despite all the disappointments it had brought him, he loved. There
were friends in this world which it pained him to believe that he would
never meet again.
He was lonely in a way he had never known until now.
For a moment, at the far end of the platform, the gentle man halted and
fell to regarding his wife and his father with a strange and distant
expression, as if they were strangers to him. The one was so restless, the
other so indifferent. The one had love only for her children, the other had
love for nobody and nothing. No, they could not understand. It was easy for
them....
Far off a whistle sounded and he saw his wife hasten for the fifth time to
put all the luggage in order and pry old Gramp loose from his throne of
indifference upon the baggage truck. At the sight he turned and as he
moved, walking slowly toward them over the worn bricks, it occurred to
him that it was Ellen whom they were all pursuing and that he was being
dragged along with all the others.
He knew then what he had known before—that they would never
recapture her. She was gone forever.
From his eminence on the baggage truck old Gramp had been meditating
the selfishness of Julia Shane. She had left Hattie a fat sum of money,
enough to escape, but she had kept it until she died, allowing Hattie to live
for years on the very edge of poverty. Poor Hattie! She never saw the
reason; she never understood that the old woman had kept her poor so that
she might have her by her side as illness and old age claimed her. It was
poverty that gave Julia Shane possession over her niece, and she had
guarded the possession until the day her will was read, long after she had
grown cold in her grave on the bleak hill above the Town. She was beyond
help from Hattie now, and so, when she could keep her niece no longer, she
had set her free.
The train screeched over the crossing, through the mills and into the
station and Hattie, all agitation and worry now, jarred the old man loose
from his meditation and steered him in the direction of their car.
Five minutes passed and the great locomotive with a series of
demoniacal snorts pulled the train out of the station into the unknown. It
carried an old man, a middle-aged woman, her mild husband and a boy. It
was the last time that any of them ever saw the Town that bore the name of
Hattie’s grandfather.
42
T HE house in Paris to which Sabine and Richard Callendar returned after

their honeymoon stood in the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. It
belonged, properly speaking, to Thérèse herself, an enormous florid
house of white stone built in the baroque German style which came to
dominate the new parts of Paris in the early part of the twentieth century. In
all honesty it could be said that Thérèse was not responsible either for its
architecture or its decoration; the house came to her in partial payment for
the loans she had made a year or two before the mysterious collapse of the
international banking firm, Wolff and Simon. It had been the property of
Wolff, and Thérèse, examining it one day shortly after the transfer to her
possession, decided that it would suit her admirably as a pied-à-terre in
Paris. Instead of turning it into cash she kept it and used it, unchanged,
during her visits.
Wolff, in the heyday of his prosperity (long before he shot himself after
fleeing half-way across Europe from such tender creditors as Thérèse) had
fancied himself as a collector of art. The house remained as a monument to
his bad judgment in this matter; in a German fashion he had absorbed
quantities of sentimental pictures and rococo bronzes that hung or stood on
marble pedestals between enormous second-rate tapestries. All pieces of
any value had vanished long ago when Wolff, in a frantic effort to save the
collapse of his firm, had summoned a dealer who stripped the place of its
Degas, its Rodins, and even the Seurat and the Rousseau which a mistress
had led Wolff into buying against his will because she thought it chic to
“buy moderns.” All that remained were remnants, grandiose, vulgar and
sentimental, among which Thérèse Callendar moved and lived with as great
an indifference as she displayed toward the solid house on Murray Hill. The
vast mass of marble and tapestry satisfied, it seemed, an Oriental longing
for pomp and splendor. All that was Greek in her and much that was French
exulted in this phantasmagoria of marble, red plush and mirrors.
The house depressed Sabine from the very moment she crossed the
threshold and beheld with a shudder the expanse of tesselated floor, the red
plush stair rail and the drawing-room beyond with its modern gilt furniture
set upon an authentic Savonnerie beneath sentimental German pictures of
the Dresden school. Unlike her mother-in-law she had an Anglo-Saxon
feeling that a home should be a place in which one was surrounded by
warm and beautiful things. To Thérèse Callendar a house was a house. She
owned houses in London, New York, Paris and Constantinople. A house
was simply four walls within which one found rich food and soft beds
during the brief weeks between journeys from one capital to another; and so
the houses she possessed, like the one in the Avenue du Bois and the one on
Murray Hill, came to have the indifferent air of great caravanseries. The
only rooms which might have attained the dignity of the word “home” were
those occupied by the concierges and the caretakers.
It was in this house, after the turbulence of her honeymoon, that Sabine
found the time to analyze, with all her passion for such things, the exact
character of her position. The process began during the first week when her
husband, a little gruff over her dislike for the place, left her a great deal in
solitude. She found that he expected her, during the day, to amuse herself; at
night he was devoted enough, but the days clearly were to be his to be spent
among his friends of the Jockey Club and elsewhere. The afternoons she
passed languidly in a sitting room which adjourned their bed-chamber and
had once served as a boudoir for the same mistress who led Wolff into
buying a Seurat.
Sabine understood perfectly the character of the room; indeed, she found
amusement in reconstructing from the evidence furnished by the atrocious
house, the character and history of the suicide banker; and, though she
never knew it, she came miraculously close to the truth.
The former boudoir had a marble floor on which were spread a tiger skin
from India and a white bearskin from Siberia. There were mirrors on every
side; the lady who had once occupied the room could not have turned her
head without encountering a dozen reflections of her pink voluptuous body.
(Wolff, being a German and a Jew, was certain to choose that sort of
mistress.) The walls were covered with black satin on which had been
painted a Parisian decorator’s version of Tokyo in cherry blossom time. The
chaise longue, fashioned like an Egyptian couch with carved lions’ heads at
both ends, stood almost hidden beneath great piles of cushions of fanciful
design and color ... mauve, yellow, green, crimson and black, all decorated
with a profusion of tassels and gold lace. Lying upon it Sabine gazed at her
innumerable reflections and thought that being a lady was much more
satisfactory than being a demi-mondaine; only to laugh aloud the very next
moment at the picture of her mother-in-law in respectable black satin and
jet moving complacently about amid such vulgar and guilty splendor.
But all her thoughts were not amusing ones. For a bride, they were
remarkably cynical and disillusioned. She was troubled by the change
which had come over Callendar since their marriage ... a change of which
she had become aware almost at the moment she turned away from the altar
of St. Bart’s. Being the wife of Richard Callendar, she understood, was not
the same as being his friend. This new relationship had altered everything.
As a friend she might have found him satisfactory until the day of her
death; as a husband ... she did not know. She was puzzled. It seemed to her
that in gaining a husband, she had lost a friend.
She understood, quite coldly and without conceit, that she was much
more clever than most women of her age. She was not silly; she had few
illusions. Nor was she, perhaps, romantic; though of this she could not be so
certain.
It puzzled her that in becoming the wife of Richard Callendar, she had
forfeited so quickly the old understanding, the habit they had of exchanging
jests and of mocking people in the manner of naughty school children. She
had tried from the first to revive the old intimacy, but when he failed to
respond to her sallies and regarded her with a queer look of disapproval, she
had grown depressed. It was as if the new intimacy, so intensely physical
with a man like Callendar, had killed the old; as if by becoming his wife she
had attained a position immeasurably remote from that of his friend.
Would he, she wondered, treat a mistress in this fashion, as if she were
an institution? And an institution over which he had complete authority?
It was not that she thought him in love with her. Reflecting now with
some bitterness, she knew why he had married her. From his point of view,
the time had come for him to marry; she was suitable, and he must have
known that a woman so clear-headed would cause him no difficulties, no
scenes, no unpleasantnesses. His mother had desired it because she liked
Sabine and because it increased the already vast fortune for which she cared
so tenderly. Lately, when they dined out together, she had come to
understand even more—that he had perhaps chosen her because she made

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Explorations in Analytic Ecclesiology:

That They May be One 1st Edition

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Unity and Catholicity in Christ: The Ecclesiology of

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY

  :

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

1. Analytic Theology and Ecclesiology

consider the underdeveloped areas of inquiry in ecclesiology. What is the

Anniversary of the Society of Christian Philosophy, the leading ﬁgure in the

2. The Scope of the Discussion

⁵ Wolterstorff, 2018. ⁶ I summarize this literature in Cockayne (2018a, 2018b).

Secondly, a brief word on methodology. Throughout the book, I seek to

By a “model” . . . I mean a theoretical construction that only approximates to

Such an approach is not without precedent in ecclesiology, and by no means

¹² Dulles, 1978: 14.

3. One Church: A Summary

Before embarking on our exploration of the unity of the Church, it is worth

undermine a commitment to the reality of social groups, nor the importance

Whereas baptism is a once in a lifetime sign of our membership in the one

1. That They May Be One: The Individual and the Community

4. One Baptism: Group Membership and Rites of Initiation 75

7. One Purpose: Extensive Liturgy and Protest 161

1. That They May Be One

2    

     3

¹⁰ Byers, 2017: 144. ¹¹ Byers, 2017: 146.

4    

¹³ Bauckham, 2015: 29. ¹⁴ Byers, 2017: 106. ¹⁵ Byers, 2017: 152.

     5

Christ in their particularity—whether that be Nicodemus, a member of the

the evangelist is invested in a social vision that is explicitly communal,

For Byers, participation language and oneness language in John denotes an

¹⁷ Bauckham, 2015: 9. ¹⁸ Bauckham, 2015: 7. ¹⁹ Bauckham, 2015: 9.

6    

there is some disagreement on the issue of individualism and collectivism,

As I was told recently by a leading scholar in asking a question concerning

     7

8    

atomism and Hegelian collectivism. Secondly, I discuss a parallel account,

3. Bonhoeffer’s Philosophically Informed Ecclesiology

Bonhoeffer’s early work on the nature of the Church provides a helpful

²⁹ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 21. ³⁰ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 266.

     9

since ‘human beings . . . are necessarily created in a community . . . human

³³ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 65. ³⁴ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 70. ³⁵ Mawson, 2018: 82.

10    

In answer to these questions, Bonhoeffer posits that, ‘community can be

³⁸ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 74. ³⁹ Green, 1999: 115. ⁴⁰ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 76.

     11

It is important to stress that such an account of the collective personhood and

⁴² Green, 1999: 118. ⁴³ Bonhoeffer, 1998: 79–80. ⁴⁴ Mawson, 2018: 86.

12    

4. Individualism and Its Implications

⁴⁵ Verhagen, 2021: 114.

     13

The vertical issue: