No Community Without Boundaries, Need to Hold Loosely?

"It seems that this requires a twofold emphasis and corrective, First, Ward’s skeptical stance with respect to boundaries should be jettisoned for a post-critically dogmatic stance that asserts the necessity of boundaries as the condition for community. As Reinhard Hutter has argued, there can be no ‘public’ without borders: ‘An unlimited, altogether open space does not constitute a public. Openness in all directions actually destroys any public.’ [Reinhard Hutter, ‘The Church as Public: Dogma, Practice, and the Holy Spirit,’ Pro Ecclesia 3 (1994): 347.] Second, the conception of the church as counter-polis must be deeply pneumatological. As Hutter suggests, improvising on Kant, ‘Pneumatology without ecclesiology is empty; ecclesiology without pneumatology is blind.’ The assertion of an ecclesial antithesis requires a more persistent Augustinianism that resists the tendencies to make the human community coextensive with the ecclesia by recovering the centrality of the Spirit’s operation in the work of regeneration (and sanctification) and risking the scandalous affirmation of the utter particularity of that work in the community of the elect, while still constructing the community as one of welcome and hospitality. Such a pneumatological ecclesiology, particularly with an emphasis on regeneration, can be found in both Kuyper and Calvin. In other words, an ecclesiology that construes the church as polis requires a robust pneumatology and a recovery of the doctrine of election, providing the shape of an ecclesiology that is Reformed, catholic, and charismatic. In this respect, RO stands in need of reform."

James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 258-59