Christendome is and is not the Church catholic

The idea that Christendom is the universal church of Christ is a very good one, and I hope the one that we all first thought of as an appropriate definition. That the Church makes up the people of God is, I think, something we can all agree on.

There is that business of culture, though. I think that we use "the church" to mean Christ's bride, but that Christendom implies a (here's for you roomie) lower, less important, vastly important cultural order. When one looks at Oxford's dreamy spires, one looks at Christendom. When one looks at two or more people gathered together to pray in name of the Triune God, one sees the Church. One is cultural, the other something more.

I'm not trying to make anyone upset, so here's a better illustration, borrowed from Rowan Williams' introduction to a new book series put out by Baylor University Press entitled 'The Making of the Christian Imagination.' His book, the only to be published so far, is on Dostoevsky. Anyway, the Archbishop points out that there is a particular culture of Christianity which is somewhat opaque to outsiders. Here's his example:

We often say that Graham Green and Waugh are 'Catholic' or 'Christian' authors. What we mean, in regards to most of their books (The Power and the Glory is a good example) is that the themes being dealt with will seem particularly, well, non-existent to a non-christian audience, or at least to an audience which has no understanding of the way Catholic ordinations work. One need not be Christian to understand Graham Green's novel, but one must be well versed in Christianity to understand it, much less appreciate and by moved by it.

We also call Flannery O'Conner a "Christian" or "Catholic" author. What we mean here is different. Where one must be culturally sensitive to Christianity to appreciate Graham Green's "The Power and the Glory," one need not be Christian at all to like O'Conner's short stories. But, if one is a Christian, her novel appears to be about the absence of Grace, where it will appear to be about nihilism to an outsider (for an example, try reading "A Good Man is Hard to Find.").

So, we have this thing called "the Church" which we could very well and rightly call Christendom. But, for the sake of conversational shorthand, we could also call "Christendom" the cultural body that can properly read and appreciate O'Conner, Cather, Eliot, and (maybe) Dostoevsky. These two bodies are not necessary one and the same. Melville, for instance, could be considered part of the cultural body known as Christendom as he works within an anthropology that he most definitely inherited from his New England puritan ancestry (his novels being able to be read alongside, say, Hawthorne but NOT Emerson), whereas, as far as we know, he did not participate in the body known as Christ's Church, the primary definition of Christendom.

So, the first Christendom we mentioned and all (I hope) thought of, we could define as the Church catholic, the other we could define as a mental and epistemological framework that knows why there are pelicans all over that old building with the "t" on top but thinks its still kind've odd that you'd eat your god.

I'm not trying to make less of the Church by trying to say that there is a Christian Culture apart from it. Byron and Emerson both have poems that most certainly come out of a Christian mental and cultural framework (biblical narrative, eucharistic imagery, etc) which can only be understood if one has an understanding of Christianity, but they certainly do not represent the work of Christ's church.

Just looking for the proper shorthand I guess...