A Companion to Public Theology

Brill’s Companions to
Modern Theology

Editors-in-Chief

Tom Greggs
(University of Aberdeen)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bcmt

A Companion to Public Theology

Edited by

Sebastian Kim
Katie Day

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Arch Street Methodist Church (foreground) is a vibrant faith community committed
to civic engagement in Philadelphia. A statue of William Penn, founder of “The Holy Experiment” in
Pennsylvania sits atop Philadelphia’s City Hall. Photo © Edd Conboy.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kim, Sebastian C. H., editor.

Title: Companion to public theology / edited by Sebastian Kim, Katie Day.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2017. | Series: Brill’s companions to
 modern theology, ISSN 2451-9839, 1 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051514 (print) | LCCN 2017001774 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004336056 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004336063 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Public theology.
Classification: LCC BT83.63 .C65 2017 (print) | LCC BT83.63 (ebook) | DDC
 230—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051514

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issn 2451-9839
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Contents

Foreword ix
William Storrar

Acknowledgments xii

List of Contributors xiv

Introduction 1
Katie Day and Sebastian Kim

PART 1
Foundations of Public Theology

1 The Bible and Public Theology 25

Paul Hanson

2 Public Theology in the History of Christianity 40

Sebastian Kim

3 Does it Matter?
On Whether there is Method in the Madness 67
Dirk J. Smit

PART 2
Public Theology and the Political Sphere

4 State, Democracy & Community Organizing 95

Luke Bretherton

5 Public Theology and Reconciliation 119

David Tombs

6 Public Theology in the Context of Nationalist Ideologies:

A South African Example 150
Nico Koopman
vi Contents

7 Politics, Church and the Common Good 164

Andrew Bradstock and Hilary Russell

Part 3
Public Theology, Economics and Social Justice

8 Public Theology in the Context of Globalization 187

Scott R. Paeth

9 Social Cohesion and the Common Good:

Drawing on Social Science in Understanding the Middle East 211
Katie Day

10 Public Theology as a Theology of Citizenship 231

Rudolf von Sinner

11 Public Theology, the Public Sphere and the Struggle for Social
Justice 251
Nicholas Sagovsky

12 Forced Labor and the Movement to End Human Trafficking 271

Letitia M. Campbell and Yvonne C. Zimmerman

13 ‘I Met God, She’s Black’: Racial, Gender and Sexual Equalities in Public
Theology 298
Esther McIntosh

14 Public Theology and Health Care 325

Frits de Lange

Part 4
Public Theology, Ethics and Civil Societies

15 Whence Climate Injustice 349

Larry Rasmussen

16 Public Theology and Bioethics 369

Lisa Sowle Cahill
Contents vii

17 Urban Ecology and Faith Communities 390

Christopher Baker and Elaine Graham

18 The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis: Examining the Attraction of a

Public Theology from the Perspective of Minorities 418
Clive Pearson

19 Mediating Public Theology 441

Jolyon Mitchell and Jenny Wright

20 Worship, Liturgy and Public Witness 466

Cláudio Carvalhaes

Index 487
Foreword
William Storrar

In opening this superb new Companion to Public Theology, it is good to ask at

the outset, who are theology’s companions as it addresses public issues in the
public sphere for the public good? Who are theology’s travelling companions
as it goes public? Visiting a seminary in the United States, I noticed a newspa-
per clipping on a theologian’s office door. The headline read, ‘Why are there
no more Reinhold Niebuhrs?’ The religion reporter’s article was lamenting
the lack of theologians capable of contributing to American public life in the
opening decade of the 21st century in the way Reinhold Niebuhr did for his
society in the mid-20th century. We might as well ask why there are no more
Dietrich Bonhoeffers, Martin Luther Kings, or emerging Desmond Tutus, fig-
ures who are rightly and frequently cited in this Companion to Public Theology
as its pioneers and progenitors. Should we be looking to such heroic individ-
uals to be theology’s companions as it goes public in the 21st century, those
solitary prophets who were willing to face hostility and even death to oppose
injustice and hold out hope of a better world?
I put the question to Tutu himself in an interview I conducted with him
after his retirement as Archbishop of Cape Town. I asked him about the public
role of the churches in post-apartheid South Africa. He replied that his suc-
cessor as Archbishop faced a much harder task than he did under apartheid.
Then the issues were clear cut theologically; there was an evil to be denounced,
racial segregation, and a hope to be offered, a non-racial democracy, while the
churches were one of the few civil society institutions that could act indepen-
dently of the regime, receiving wide support and attention from around the
world. Now the issues were much more complex, he noted. Democratically
elected South African governments were wrestling with limited resources,
conflicting interests and competing priorities on issues like jobs, housing, san-
itation, education, health care and public investment. There could rarely be
the same clear-cut stance on such policy issues in a democracy; the churches’
unequivocal position on rising inequality, crime, corruption, rule of law or
press and academic freedom made little public impact, as they were now
just one among many civil society institutions competing to be heard in the
public sphere.
I asked what gave Tutu hope in this situation. The resilience of ordinary peo-
ple in the face of injustice and oppression, he replied, which was so evident
under apartheid and so urgently needed again in post-apartheid South Africa.
x Foreword

Here is the clue to identifying theology’s companions for our time. Public the-
ology in the 21st century will not be the work of heroic individuals so much
as effective social networks and movements for change, congregations and
communities drawing their energy, strength and wisdom from the resilience of
ordinary people, as Tutu saw. If theology is to address public issues in the pub-
lic sphere, influencing public opinion, inspiring public action, and impacting
public policy, then it must do so as part of a common endeavor, led by the local
organizers of collective action and global enablers of collaborative thinking.
Their names will not be well known. Yet their time has come. Their leadership
will change the world.
The pre-history of this volume began in such a cooperative venture. In
2005 representatives from around the world met in the Centre for Theology
and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh to consider founding a global
network and new journal for public theology, which they went on to do in
2007. That initiative has ultimately led to this volume. Its place of origin is
not incidental. Edinburgh’s Centre for Theology and Public Issues found itself
uniquely placed to engage with public life in the opening years of the 21st cen-
tury when the re-convened Scottish parliament first met in its building com-
plex. The General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, adjoining New
College on the Mound, home of the University’s School of Divinity, became the
temporary home of Scotland’s democratic legislature from 1999 to 2004. Here
David Tracy’s three publics for theology overlapped: the academy, the church
and society’s elected representatives all co-existed and interacted in the same
place for five remarkable years.
The theological meaning of this shared public space was dramatically
symbolized for me one January day during this period, as I walked passed the
Parliament building, General Assembly Hall, and New College on the Mound.
The public entrance to the Parliament was a modest one, a side door specially
created for the purpose up a close, the old Scots name for a narrow alleyway
running between Edinburgh’s grander streets. On this occasion a water pipe
had burst at the public entrance of the Parliament. Down its steep stone steps
and out into the city ran a river of rushing water, glinting gold in the low hang-
ing winter sun at midday. The words of the prophet Amos came immediately
to mind: ‘But let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty
stream.’ If we are to accompany theology into the public sphere as its true
companions, then this must be our vision for every parliament and policy and
­public—let justice roll out of them like a river.
That is why the contributors to this volume are to be congratulated on
their achievement. The Companion to Public Theology is for theology’s true
companions, those who are rescuing academic theology from self-isolation,
Foreword xi

church theology from self-preservation, and public theology from self-obses-

sion. To what end? For the common good, as the editors rightly affirm in their
Introduction. Public theology is theology for others and done with others; that
is its true end and means. I welcome this Companion and commend it to all
who would see justice run down as a mighty stream into every area of our com-
mon life.
Acknowledgments

They say that it takes a village to raise a child but it has taken more than a
village to produce this Companion to Public Theology. This project was born
out the Global Network for Public Theology, which was organized in 2007. The
GNPT was founded by a collection of public theologians from six continents,
seeking to broaden their focus to engage issues of public theology from a global
perspective. That dialogue expanded and deepened, particularly through the
International Journal of Public Theology (IJPT) now in its tenth year of publica-
tion by Brill. Many of those founding members of the GNPT, as well as newer
conversation partners, are contributors in this volume. As public theology has
developed in the twenty-first century, it became apparent that a definitive
work was needed that could present, and challenge, the current state of public
theology. ‘What is public theology?’ is a question often raised in the academy,
the church and the public square. This volume attempts to respond by draw-
ing on the many contexts and perspectives in which public theology is being
produced. In many ways, this Companion continues the dialogue.
While this publication is very much a collective effort, there are some indi-
viduals who must be singled out; without their vision and support this project
would not have been possible. We are indebted first to Will Storrar, the Director
of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton. He recognized the need for
public theologians around the globe to be called together, from diaspora to
dialogue. Will organized the first gathering out of which the GNPT emerged
and he has continued to serve as the Chair of the Editorial Board of the IJPT as
a wise and insightful leader. We would also like to acknowledge the contribu-
tion of Eddy van der Borght of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who initiated the
idea of the Companion. In addition, we are grateful to Mirjam Elbers at Brill,
who has overseen both the IJPT and this volume. Mirjam has been consistently
encouraging, as well as pushing us for focus, clarity, and excellence. Without
her and her team, this Companion would not have been possible.
The editors are indeed thankful to supportive colleagues in our institutions.
The Dean of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, Jayakiran
Sebastian, a public theologian in his own right, has enthusiastically supported
Katie Day in her work with the GNPT and particularly in her role for this proj-
ect. Sebastian Kim wishes to thank his colleagues at York St John University,
particularly Julian Stern, Dean of the Faculty of Education and Theology, and
Esther McIntosh, for their academic insight and practical support.
Acknowledgments xiii

Finally, we are grateful to the contributors to this volume, who carved out
time in their already-full schedules to produce these fine chapters which reflect
both their scholarship and their commitment to making Christian theology
relevant and active in building the common good.
List of Contributors

Christopher Baker
is Director of Research for the William Temple Foundation and William
Temple Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Chester. He
has researched and published extensively on the role and impact of religion in
the public sphere, but also how it is in turn shaped by the public sphere. His
work crosses boundaries between theology and religious studies, and public
policy, sociology, critical human geography and political philosophy. His book
Postsecular Cities—Spaces Theory and Practice (Continuum, 2011) has been
extensively cited, and his next volume entitled Postsecular Geographies—
Re-envisioning politics, subjectivity and ethics, co-written with Paul Cloke and
Andrew Williams, will be published in 2017.

Andrew Bradstock
is a visiting professor at the University of Winchester (UK) where he convenes
the Centre for Theology and Religion in Public Life (TRiPL). From 2009–13 he
was inaugural Howard Paterson Professor of Theology and Public Issues at
the University of Otago (NZ), and he has also been Co-Director of the Centre
for the Study of Faith in Society at the Von Hügel Institute in Cambridge and
Secretary for Church and Society with the United Reformed Church. He is a
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the steering group of
Together for the Common Good. He is currently researching and writing the
official biography of Bishop David Sheppard.

Luke Bretherton
is professor of theological ethics and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for
Ethics at Duke University. His publications include Christianity & Contemporary
Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing; and
Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life
(CUP, 2015). His primary areas of research are Christian ethics; the intellec-
tual and social histories of Christian political thought; political theology; the
relationship between Christianity, capitalism and democracy; and practices of
social, political and economic transformation.

Lisa Sowle Cahill

Ph.D., University of Chicago is the Monan Professor of Theology at Boston
College. She is past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America
List Of Contributors xv

and the Society of Christian Ethics. Her works include Global Justice, Christology
and Christian Ethics; Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice and Change;
Family: A Christian Social Perspective; and Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics

Letitia M. Campbell
is the Director of Contextual Education I and Clinical Pastoral Education and
Senior Program Coordinator for the Laney Legacy Program in Moral Leadership
at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. A social ethi-
cist by training and a scholar-activist by vocation, her research focuses on the
popular practice of short-term international volunteerism and Christian inter-
nationalism, and on the role of religion in challenging global inequities. Letitia
holds an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, a
B.A. in Political Science from Davidson College, and a B.A. in English Language
and Literature from Oxford University. She is a PhD candidate in Ethics and
Society in Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion.

Cláudio Carvalhaes
a former shoe shining boy from São Paulo Brazil, is now an activist, liturgist,
theologian and artist. He has 3 books published in Brazil, and his first book
in English is Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic
Hospitality (Wipf and Stock, Pickwick Publications, 2013). He also edited Only
One is Holy: Liturgy in Postcolonial Lenses (Palgrave, 2015). During the process of
writing this chapter he was the Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship
at the McCormick Theological Seminary. In the fall of 2016 he joined the Union
Theological Seminary in New York City as Associate Professor of Worship.

Katie Day
is the Charles A. Schieren Professor of Church and Society at the Lutheran
Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Her publications include Faith on the
Avenue: Religion on a City Street (OUP, 2014), Difficult Conversations, (Alban
Institute, 2001), Prelude to Struggle: African American Clergy and the Resurgence
of Community Organizing (University Press, 2001) and co-editing Yours the
Power: Faith-based community organizing in the U.S. (Brill: 2013). Her primary
areas of research are urban religion, race, and violence, drawing on the inter-
section of public theology and social science. Her current research focus is on
the relationship of religion and guns in the U.S.

Frits de Lange
is Professor of Ethics at the Protestant Theological University in Groningen/
Amsterdam. He is also Extraordinary professor in Systematic Theology and
xvi List of Contributors

Ecclesiology at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He published

widely on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil. The last decade his research
focusses on the ethics of care and the ethics of ageing. He recently published
Loving Later Life. An Ethics of Aging (Eerdmans, 2015).

Jolyon Mitchell
is Professor of Communications, Arts and Religion and Director of the Centre
for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) at the University of Edinburgh. He is
also President of the UK’s National Association for Theology and Religious
Studies (TRS UK) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). He directs
a number of interdisciplinary research projects (several on peacebuilding).
Professor Mitchell worked as a producer and journalist for BBC World Service
and BBC Radio 4 before he was appointed to the University of Edinburgh. His
publications reflect some of his research interests and include: Promoting
Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (New York and Oxon:
Routledge, 2012); Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University
Press, 2007); and Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 2012).

Elaine Graham
is the Grosvenor Research Professor at the University of Chester and Canon
Theologian of Chester Cathedral. She is the author of Making the Difference:
Gender, Personhood and Theology (1995); Transforming Practice: Pastoral
Theology in an Age of Uncertainty (1996), Representations of the Post/Human:
Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002) and Words Made Flesh:
Writings in Pastoral and Practical Theology (2009), and co-author, with Heather
Walton and Frances Ward, of Theological Reflection: Methods (2005). Her most
recent book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular
Age (SCM, 2013) examines the relationship between public theology and
Christian apologetics.

Paul Hanson
has taught at Harvard since 1971, and was Lamont Professor of Divinity until July
2009, when he became Lamont Research Professor. In his courses he focuses
on Hebrew prophecy, Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period, the reli-
gion of the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and biblical theology.
The titles of his books give an indication of his range of scholarly interests: The
Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic
Eschatology; Dynamic Transcendence: The Correlation of Confessional Heritage
and Contemporary Experience in a Biblical Model of Divine Activity; The Diversity
List Of Contributors xvii

of Scripture: A Theological Interpretation; Visionaries and Their Apocalypses; Old

Testament Apocalyptic; The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible;
Isaiah 40–66; Political Engagement as Biblical Mandate and A Political History of
the Bible in America.

Nico Koopman
is Vice-rector for Social Impact, Transformation and Personnel (acting),
Director of the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology and professor of
Systematic Theology and Public Theology at the University of Stellenbosch.
He is an ordained pastor of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa.
Since 2008 he is a member of the Council of the University of Stellenbosch. His
research focuses on the meaning of religious faith for public life. He has pub-
lished widely on themes in the field of public theology. He is chairperson of the
Global Network for Public Theology. During the academic year of September
2007 to June 2008 he was public theologian-in-residence at the Center of
Theological Inquiry in Princeton. As academic, public speaker and writer he
plays a leading role in public theological discourses in the academy, churches
and broader society, both locally and internationally.

Sebastian Kim
holds the Chair in Theology and Public Life in the School of Humanities,
Religion and Philosophy at York St John University. He is a Fellow of the Royal
Asiatic Society and the author of In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious
Conversion in India (OUP, 2003), Theology in the Public Sphere (SCM, 2011)
and co-author of Christianity as a World Religion (Continuum, 2008) and
A History of Korean Christianity (CUP, 2014). He is the editor and co-editor of
twelve volumes, including Christian Theologies in Asia (CUP, 2008), Peace and
Reconciliation (Ashgate, 2008) and Cosmopolitanism, Religion and the Public
Sphere (Routledge, 2014). He is the editor of the International Journal of Public
Theology and executive member of the Global Network for Public Theology.

Esther McIntosh
is a Senior Lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics and Director of Theo‑
logy and Religious Studies at York St John University. Her primary research
interests are John Macmurray scholarship and feminist theological ethics; more
specifically, definitions of personhood and community, the ethics of personal
relations, gender justice and the use of social media by religious communities.
She is author of John Macmurray’s Religious Philosophy: What It Means to Be
a Person (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011) and her most recent publications include
‘John Macmurray as a Scottish Philosopher: The Role of the University and the
xviii List of Contributors

Means to Live Well’, in G. Graham, ed., The Oxford History of Scottish Philosophy,
vol. 2 (OUP, 2015) and ‘Issues in Feminist Public Theology’, in A. Monro and
S. Burns, eds, Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism (Routledge, 2015).

Clive Pearson
is currently a Research Fellow in the Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT)
research centre of Charles Sturt University, Australia. He is a member of the
editorial advisory board of the International Journal of Public Theology. His
particular areas of interest lie in the fields of public theology, climate change,
diasporic and cross cultural theologies, and the relationship of the Christian
faith to Islam in the public domain.

Scott Paeth
is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University. He writes in the
areas of Christian ethics, public theology, philosophical theology, and applied
ethics. He holds a Ph.D. in Theology and Ethics from Princeton Theological
Seminary. He is the author or editor of seven books, including most recently
Shaping Public Theology: Selections from the Writings of Max L. Stackhouse,
Philosophy: A Short Visual Introduction, and The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair
Theologians. He lives in Chicago, IL.

Larry L. Rasmussen
is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union Theological
Seminary, New York City. His most recent book, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious
Ethics in A New Key (OUP, 2013), received the Nautilus Book Awards as the Gold
Prize winner for Ecology/Environment and as the Grand Prize winner for best
2014 book overall. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hilary Russell
is Emeritus Professor of Urban Policy in Liverpool John Moores University.
She has had extensive experience in evaluating and writing about urban
regeneration, neighbourhood renewal and a wide range of poverty issues.
She is an Anglican who has been widely involved in both Church of England
and ecumenical bodies, nationally and locally. She is a member of the steer-
ing group of Together for the Common Good, an initiative looking at how faith
groups can best work together for social justice. Her book A Faithful Presence:
Working Together for the Common Good (SCM Press, 2015) discusses the ways
in which churches work together to strengthen local communities through
social action, presence, prayer and advocacy and contains many examples and
case studies.
List Of Contributors xix

Nicholas Sagovsky
is Whitelands Professorial Fellow at Roehampton University. He has taught
theology at Liverpool Hope (where he was Liverpool Professor of Theology
and Public Life), Newcastle, Durham and Cambridge Universities. As Canon
Theologian at Westminster Abbey, the practice of public theology was for
seven years integral to his daily work. He is the author of a number of articles
and books on social justice, including Christian Tradition and the Practice of
Justice (SPCK, 2009). With Peter McGrail, he co-edited Together for the Common
Good (SCM: 2015). He has been a member of the Anglican-Roman Catholic
International Commission (ARCIC) since 1992.

Dirk J. Smit
is Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of
Stellenbosch, South Africa, and serves as Chairperson of the Board of the Beyers
Naudé Centre for Public Theology of the Theology Faculty. He has published
extensively on systematic theology, ethics and public life, in scholarly contri-
butions, church studies, popular genres and newspaper columns. Colleagues
are editing selections from his work in a series called Collected Essays, already
including for example Essays in Public Theology (Collected Essays 1), Geloof en
Openbare Lewe (Versamelde Opstelle 2), Essays on Being Reformed (Collected
Essays 3), and Remembering Theologians—Doing Theology (Collected Essays 5).

William Storrar
is the Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, USA. He was
formerly Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology and Director
of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh,
where he initiated the Global Network for Public Theology. His co-edited
publications include Public Theology for the 21st Century (2004), A World for
All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology (2011), and
Yours the Power: Faith Based Organizing in the USA (2013). As a civic activist in
Scotland, he chaired the Common Cause civic forum on democratic renewal
and organizes the Bus Party civic arts tours, fostering dialogue on public issues
in smaller, remoter and poorer communities.

David Tombs
is Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues, and Director of the
Centre for Theology and Public Issues, at the University of Otago. He has long-
standing interests in the contribution of religious faith to social justice and
political change, and the complex relationship between religion and violence.
Before moving to New Zealand he worked in London and then in Belfast. His
xx List of Contributors

current research includes a focus on Christian responses to torture and gender-

based violence. His publications include: Latin American Liberation Theology
(Brill, 2002); ‘The cross and the reconciliation of enemies’, in K.M. Heffelfinger
& P.G. McGlinchey, eds., Atonement as gift: Re-imagining the cross for the church
and the world (Paternoster, 2014); and ‘Silent no more: Sexual violence in con-
flict as a challenge to the worldwide church’, Acta Theologica (2014).

Rudolf von Sinner

is Professor for Systematic Theology, Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue,
Dean of Postgraduate Studies and Research as well as Director of the Institute
of Ethics at Faculdades EST in São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and
a Minister of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil.
He is also Professor Extraordinary at the Theological Faculty of Stellenbosch
University in South Africa and Moderator of the World Council of Churches’
Commission on Ecumenical Education and Formation. Public Theology is
among his main fields of research.

Jenny Anne Wright

is a research associate in the Department of Systematic Theology at the
University of Stellenbosch and a tutor in Theology and Ethics at the University
of Edinburgh. She is ordained in the Scottish Episcopal Church. She recently
completed her Doctorate in Theology on social justice, human dignity and
public theology.

Yvonne Zimmerman
is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at the Methodist Theological School
in Ohio (MTSO) where she teaches courses on Christian social ethics, feminist
and womanist ethics, sexual ethics, and the movement to end human traffick-
ing. She has been researching and writing about the U.S.’s anti-human traf-
ficking movement for over a decade and is author of the book Other Dreams
of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking (OUP, 2012). Her current work
focuses on developing ethical resources for progressive Christian responses to
human trafficking.
Introduction
Katie Day and Sebastian Kim

On a summer afternoon in 2014 a young African-American man was shot by a

white police officer in a small suburban town in the Midwestern section of the
United States. The police officer who shot the unarmed man was acquitted by
the court, which ruled that the use of force had been justified. In the months
following, a number of other similar incidents filled American media, iden-
tifying a disturbing trend of police killings of African American men, many
of which had been filmed by bystanders with their cell phones. In a majority of
cases, police were not found guilty of their use of force. After two police shoot-
ings in 2016 went viral on social media, anger fueled retaliation—this time
police officers were the victims in Texas and Louisiana. This escalating cycle of
violence galvanized the African American community, bringing racism again
to the center of public conversation. Social media accelerated the mobiliza-
tion of a new social movement, #BlackLivesMatter. Multi-racial faith-based
coalitions became involved, calling for tangible reforms in police practices
and local laws, among other things on their focused and expanding agenda. At
critical times when frustrations spiked and violence between police and pro-
testers seemed imminent, the civic courage of faith leaders was instrumental
in establishing peace and even dialogue.1
Six months after the initial incident in Ferguson, Missouri, faith-based lead-
ers from the region and beyond returned to that community and held a public
rally of clergy, religious leaders and community members. Leader Michael-Ray
Matthews of the PICO Network (People Involved in Community Organizing, a
coalition of religious groups), wrote:

As I continued to lead songs and chants in the pouring rain, one of the
seminarians grabbed the bullhorn and asked if we could change our
chant from ‘show me what democracy looks like’ to ‘show me what the-
ology looks like.’ She was calling her sisters and brothers in the faith to
go all in—to be totally immersed in mind, body and spirit, to bring the
­richness of our faith into the public space.2

1  See Leah Gunning Francis, Ferguson & Faith: Sparking Leadership & Awakening Community
(St. Louis: Missouri, Chalice Press, 2015).
2  <http://www.piconetwork.org/> [accessed 25 January 2015].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_002

2 Day and Kim

This volume is, in many ways, a response to that plea: show us what theology
looks like. In this time in human history of seismic shifts in politics, cultures,
economies, technologies, and religious institutions, this becomes a critical
question. Even as church leaders had literally entered the public square in the
example above, there is a need for theology to be reflexive about its own role.
What does it mean to ‘do theology’ in our current contexts? Where is theology
being done? Who is doing it and what is its content? What does a public theol-
ogy look like? Those within the academy, in the church and on the streets are
interrogating the role and relevance of theology. Our hope is that this collec-
tion of essays will provide a resource for this project.
The term ‘public theology’ is a more recent addition to our lexicon, yet
has accelerated in its prevalence in recent years. Publications, academic cita-
tions and media references have proliferated. This is a limited measure of the
influence of an intellectual trend, but it does reflect that increasingly there is
interest in theology that is public. Theologian Linell Cady has suggested that
perhaps this burgeoning theological movement is a corrective to theologies
that have been individualistic, parochial and inaccessible to those outside of
the world of academic theology.3 A more detailed definition will follow, but
generally public theology refers to the church reflectively engaging with those
within and outside its institutions on issues of common interest and for the
common good.
This impulse is not a 21st century phenomenon in Western theology.
Public theology has drawn from many streams, including the Social Gospel
Movement of the 19th and 20th century, Catholic Social Teaching (such as the
Living Wage advocated by John Ryan in the early 1900’s),4 and the Christian
Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (and particularly his work on the political econ-
omy). Theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Multmann, Dorothee
Soelle, William Temple, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Courtney Murray,5
continue to be cited as sources in contemporary works under the rubric of
public theology.

3  Linell E. Cady, ‘Public Theology and the Postsecular Turn’, International Journal of Public
Theology, 8:3 (2014), 292–312.
4  See Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present: A Historical, Theological and
Ethical Analysis (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002); Pontifical Council
for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (London: Burns &
Oates, 2004).
5  See We Hold These Truths: A Catholic Reflection on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1960).
Introduction 3

It is indicative of a movement come of age that there is a common histori-

cal narrative among writers tracing the development of what is now known as
public theology.6There are now a number of sources for the reader interested
in this history which goes into much greater detail than this brief overview. In
the common historic narrative, church historian Martin Marty is credited with
coining the term ‘public theology’ in 19747 in responding to sociologist Robert
Bellah’s analysis of civil religion in the American context.8 Bellah had described
a national philosophy in the U.S. which used some religious language and
symbols, yet was non-sectarian. In the tradition of Emile Durkheim, Bellah
considered this civil religion to provide social cohesion in a diverse nation
of immigrant groups. Marty wanted to distinguish further the work of public
theologians and public theology from the construction of this civil religion, a
corrective that Bellah accepted.
The next chapter in the evolution of public theology in the late twentieth
century is usually identified with the work of theologian David Tracy9 who par-
ticularly interrogated the meaning of public in public theology. He contended
that theology needs to engage three publics: the church, the academy and soci-
ety. Rather than only speaking in and for the church in language understood
only within that context and from a perspective of a privileged rationality,
Tracy argued that theology needs to break out of insularity into true public dis-
course. This influential work generated scholarly debate on the frontiers of the
theological project in the public sphere, including important publications by

6  For more detailed historical treatment, see E. Harold Breitenberg, ‘To Tell the Truth: Will the
Real Public Theology Please Stand Up?’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 23:2 (2003),
55–96; Cady, ‘Public Theology and the Postsecular Turn’; Elaine Graham, Between a Rock
and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age (London: SCM Press, 2013); Sebastian
Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere: Public Theology as a Catalyst for Open Debate (London:
SCM Press, 2011); Dirk J. Smit, ‘The Paradigm of Public Theology: Origins and Development’
in Hienrich Bedford-Strohm, Florian Höhne, Tobias Reitmeier, eds, Contextuality and
Intercontextuality in Public Theology (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 11–23.
7  See Martin Marty, ‘Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion,’ American Civil Religion (1974),
139–157; ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience’, Journal of
Religion, 54:4 (1974), 332–359.
8  Robert N. Bellah, ‘American Civil Religion’, Daedalus, 96:1 (1967), 3–4.
9  David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad, 1981).
4 Day and Kim

then-Lutheran Richard John Neuhaus10, Reformed ethicist Max Stackhouse,11

and Harvard theologian Ronald F. Thiemann.12 These all helped to establish
public theology within mainstream academic theology.
The emerging movement begged the question of its own definition, which
was addressed by a number of scholars, particularly as contextual liberation
theologies and political theologies were growing in influence. Perhaps the
clearest and most influential contribution came from E. Harold Brietenberg,
Jr. in his article, ‘To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand
Up?’13 Here he distinguished public theology from other streams which are
related to it but do not duplicate it in essence or purpose: civil or public reli-
gion, political theology, public church, public philosophy, and public or social
ethics. After reviewing the proliferating literature under the rubric of public
theology, he concludes that there is enough consensus to be able to define pub-
lic theology as:

Public theology is thus theologically informed public discourse about

public issues, addressed to the church, synagogue, mosque, temple or
other religious body, as well as the larger public or publics, argued in
ways that can be evaluated and judged by publicly available warrants and
criteria.14

Brietenberg had constructed this definition after surveying what he catego-

rized as three different sources within the genre. Some of the early founda-
tional works had focused on providing an apologetic for public theology,
arguing why and how theology should be in, with, and through a public con-
text. Included in this group of scholars are many identified earlier: Moltmann,
Tracy, Stackhouse, Thiemann as well as Robert Benne15 and Linell Cady.16

10  Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).
11  Max Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy: Christian Stewardship in Modern
Society (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991).
12  Ronald F. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991).
13  E. Harold Brietenberg, Jr. ‘To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand
Up,’ Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 23:2 (2003), 55–96.
14  Ibid., 66.
15  Robert Benne, The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995).
16  Linell E. Cady, Theology and American Public Life (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 1993).
Introduction 5

A second dimension of public theology is biographical: that is, identifying and

exploring the lives and work of theologians whose scholarship was formed in
and for a public context. For individuals such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin
Luther King, Jr, Desmond Tutu and Beyers Naude of South Africa, Dorothy Day,
Reinhold Niebuhr and others, it is impossible to extricate their theology from
their social engagement or their activism apart from their theological writing.
The inextricable dynamic of action and reflection is mutually reinforcing, sym-
biotic. The fact that these public theologians are considered exceptionalistic
reflects how rare is the kind of theological integrity which is in dialogue with
human experience and moral action. Focus on public theologians themselves
can be, and has been, a rich source of insight into theological methodology.
Breitenberg’s definition captures a fundamental dimension of public theol-
ogy that distinguishes it from other expressions of theology, social ethics and
moral theology constructed within the academy. Public theology is as much
about a process as it is about content. An ethic or perspective on a social issue
is not just developed within the theological community and then ‘delivered’
to the public(s). The church is not over-against the world, holding up the pro-
verbial ‘mirror’ to society that offers critiques of political policies and social
realities. This traditional posture of the church and society is laden with
assumptions: first, that church and world are distinct, the boundary inviolable.
Secondly, the assumed gaze of theology is to see the world in pathological
terms, as a bundle of social sinfulness. Thirdly, the theological project itself is
assumed to be grounded in immutable and transcendent truth apart from the
possibility of self-critique. One characteristic of those considered to be public
theologians (such as those listed above) is that they held a critical gaze not just
on society but on the church itself. (Consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s argument
that the church is Christ in the world. As Christ is the ‘one for others,’ so too is
the church. ‘The church is church only when it is there for others.’17)
In contrast, the process of constructing public theology is socially interac-
tive; it is discourse within and toward both the faith community and with vari-
ous publics. This reflects what is the third genre of public theology identified
by Brietenberg, constructive public theology. There are several recurring exam-
ples of this discussed in the literature to illustrate this constructive aspect. An
early example often cited is the pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops in 1986.18Economic Justice for All was a comprehensive analy-
sis of economic issues, both domestic and global, developed in the context

17  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, John de
Gruchy, ed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), p. 503.
18  http://www.usccb.org/upload/economic_justice_for_all.pdf [accessed 16 February 2016].
6 Day and Kim

of the laissez-faire economic policies of then-President Ronald Reagan which,

together with globalization, were producing significant structural shifts in
the economy. The pastoral letter followed the traditional pattern of Catholic
statements by drawing deeply on the sources of scripture and Catholic Social
Teaching.19 It went on to address a wide range of economic issues, from poverty
and unemployment in the U.S. to agriculture, trade policies, military spending
and global economics. While at the outset disclaiming partisan or ideologi-
cal perspectives, and eschewing status as economists, the sizable statement
reflected informed analysis and critique and advocated for particular changes
in policy. What was remarkable about Economic Justice for All was that it clearly
was addressing both the Catholic audience as well as policy makers (‘the larger
public or publics’). Further, it was not crafted in monastic isolation but in dia-
logue with church, society and academy. Early drafts were circulated in par-
ishes as well as published in the national news media, generating dialogue and
critique. The language needed to be accessible and credible to both the faith
community as well as those with expertise and influence in policy formula-
tion. This process marked a turn from theology speaking to society from a per-
spective of moral privilege to engaging with publics as informed citizen in civil
society having agency in the construction of the common good.
One of the key developments in the global South on the issue of economic
and political justice was the rise of Latin American liberation theology in the
1960 and 70s.20 Liberation theology encouraged a hermeneutic of suspicion that
raised questions of power and vested interest in theology. Liberation reading,
without doubt, has been the most influential development of hermeneutical
methodology in modern biblical and theological studies. Liberation theology,
Black and Feminist theologies have their roots in the hermeneutics of ‘socio-
critical theory’ which is ‘an approach to texts (or to traditions and institutions)
which seeks to penetrate beneath their surface-function to expose their role
as instruments of power, domination or social manipulation’.21 The protago-
nists of liberation theology took their stand with the poor and marginalised,
according to their understanding of the ‘option for the poor’ demonstrated in

19  See also The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response (1983) at http://
www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peace-gods-promise-our-response-1983.pdf [accessed
16 February 2016]. For in-depth discussion on earlier documents of the Catholic Social
Teaching, see Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present: A Historical,
Theological and Ethical Analysis (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002).
20  See Gustavo Gutiérrez , A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, rvsd edn.
(London: SCM Press, 1988).
21  Anthony Thistelton, New Horizons of Hermeneutics (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 379.
Introduction 7

the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Bible. State and society must treat the
poor and oppressed, who are victims of a competitive and aggressive market
system and of politics of majoritarianism in a democracy, in a supportive and
preferential way. Liberation theology was formulated in the midst of abusive
political power and an unjust economic system in which it made clear its
stance on the side of the poor and oppressed.
Another historical touchstone which exemplified and clarified public the-
ology has been in the South African context in the move from apartheid to
democracy. It might be argued that the apartheid theology that had been
appropriated by Dutch Reformed Church theologians in South Africa, much
like the oppressive theologies developed by slaveholders in the American
South and Reich Theology in support of the Nazi regime, were forms of pub-
lic theology. After all, they were all developed in response to their contexts
and were concerned with particular visions of the common good. These the-
ologies were developed in their respective academies and were not marginal
in their historic contexts. They became mainstreamed, and as they supported
state policies, so the state supported them. They became, essentially, state
theologies, based on self-serving understandings of the ‘orders of creation,’
supporting the status quo and justifying unjust social relations. Scripture was
used, but selectively. Formal structures (such as barring dissident theologians
from teaching positions, writing or speaking) and informal censoring created
closed systems in which the state theologies precluded critique both internally
and externally.
In each of these contexts, counter theologies of struggle, resistance and lib-
eration also emerged: Black Theology, first in the U.S.; that of the Confessing
Church in Germany in the 1930’s, and the anti-apartheid theology, expressed
most clearly and definitively through the Kairos document. Each of these the-
ologies was also forged in historical contexts with theological commitments to
God’s intentions for the human community. All three emerged from the mar-
gins and finally helped clarify what is distinctive about public theology. While
there has been overlap among the three movements as they have drawn from
and learned from each other (as well as many other sources), it is the South
African Kairos public theology that has become a significant reference point in
the latest chapter of the overall project.
South African theologian John de Gruchy has argued that originally ‘politi-
cal theology’ referred to ‘those theologies in Europe that gave legitimacy to
the state and it claims within the context of Christendom.’22 He continues his

22  John de Gruchy, ‘From Political to Public Theologies: The Role of Theology in Public Life
in South Africa,’ Public Theology for the 21st Century in William F. Storrar and Andrew R.
8 Day and Kim

analysis of the term by citing the works of Johannes Baptist Metz and Jürgen
Moltmann who appropriated the critical role of theology to challenge the sta-
tus quo, rather than provide the theological infrastructure for it. Eventually
their work turned ‘political theology’ on its head by shifting the focus from
church and state to a more inclusive project of church and society. Writing
in the context of the Cold War, Metz and Moltmann brought the public back in
to the center of theological discourse.
Drawing inspiration from this development, as well as from the work of
Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church and emerging liberation theologies
(including the Black theology of James Cone and others) South African theolo-
gians began developing their own anti-apartheid theological movement. They
took seriously the importance of social location in constructing theological
perspective; the gaze from below is quite different than that from the posi-
tion of power. The process of producing the Kairos Document in 1985 (revised
in 1986), therefore, was intentionally a collaborative effort of black and white
theologians from across the ecumenical spectrum; the medium was indeed
the message as they embodied the change they were seeking. This statement
of what they called ‘prophetic theology’ at once critiqued the ‘state theology’
which provided the theological rationale for a racist and repressive regime as
well as the ‘church theology’ that did not go far enough in its social analysis
and advocacy for justice, but was satisfied with a superficial, individualistic
reconciliation. Such church theology contributed to maintaining the apartheid
structure, as did the state theology. Like the Barmen Declaration produced by
German and Swiss theologians in 1934, Kairos was grounded in biblical the-
ology. However, unlike Barmen, there was an awareness that a theological
statement was not enough in itself to bring change—Kairos concludes with
a strong, and specific call to active resistance on the part of the faith com-
munity. It was not a reified statement but an ongoing resource in the struggle
against apartheid, and into the construction of a new non-racial democracy.
Theologian John de Gruchy writes about the transition from political struggle
to nation-building and the role of the Kairos theology:

The metaphor that emerged was no longer that of the Exodus a favourite
of liberation theology, but that of the Wilderness experience, the experi-
ence of post-liberation struggling to reach the promised land. . . . South
Africa did enter the Promised Land, though we soon recognized that the
Promised Land is not flowing with unlimited quantities of milk or honey.

Morton, eds, Public Theology for the 21st Century (London: T & T Clark, 2004), pp. 45–62
at p. 47.
Introduction 9

Indeed, the very question of land, its distribution and use, has thus intro-
duced the need for a new approach to doing theology in the public area.
On the one hand, the legacy of apartheid still has to be overcome; on the
other there is the task of building a just and democratic nation. The ques-
tion, then, is what does it mean to do public theology in the new South
Africa?23

The prophetic theology of Kairos became the basis for the public theologies of
South Africa which were not confined to the academy but were visibly being
constructed in the context of the emerging democracy. Further, the church was
not relegated to a separate sector within civil society, but was engaged, and
still is, with government, media, commerce and cultures. Perhaps the expres-
sion of public theology with the highest profile in post-apartheid South Africa
is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was commissioned by
legislative order in 1995 and chaired by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The well-known series of hearings, which brought together both victims and
perpetrators of human rights abuses during the apartheid years, was based on
theological principles of restorative justice, truth-telling, the possibility of for-
giveness, and the privileging of those who have suffered in service to the build-
ing of the common good. Indeed these concepts became part of the public
discourse in South Africa.24
These two manifestations of creative public theology have contributed
to the evolution of the movement in the last decades, moving us into new
areas in answering the challenge, ‘Show us what theology looks like.’ Centers
for public theology were being developed in institutions of higher education
around the world to pursue the development of theologies that were meaning-
fully engaged with their public contexts. In 2007, twenty four of these centers
came together to establish the Global Network for Public Theology, a coalition
of focused on ‘interdisciplinary and action research on theology and public
issues.’25 The GNPT has not codified public theology but has provided an insti-
tutional base which supports the work of its individual centers which meet
triennially. It was founded out of a recognition that public contexts are not just
local, national or regional but increasingly global. Associated with the Global
Network is a journal, the International Journal for Public Theology, published
by Brill. The IJPT publishes juried articles from international scholars from

23  Ibid., pp. 52–53.

24  Katie Day, ‘The Curious Conversion of Adriaan Vlok’, Journal of Religion, Conflict and
Peace, 2:2 (2009).
25  Website for the Global Network for Public Theology.
10 Day and Kim

multiple disciplines engaging public issues. This, too, is a unique forum within
theology in that it transcends the boundaries of region as well as academic
disciplines in consideration of public issues of global import.
As the project of public theology has developed there is no single, identi-
fiable corpus of orthodoxy that has been produced, but rather some ‘marks’
have been generally recognized as essential to the process of constructive
public theology. While scholars might vary in the weight given to these, there
is emerging consensus on the indicators which distinguishes public theology
as such. These have emerged from the earliest discourse through more recent
scholarship and projects. They are also reflected in the contributions to this
volume, the first compendium of public theology.
Perhaps the most essential mark of public theology is the recognition that
theology, to be relevant, is inherently incarnational. Public theology is indebted
to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) as a continuing source of theo-
logical grounding. A recurring theme, and word, for Bonhoeffer throughout his
works is concrete. Influenced by the emergence of process theology, he consis-
tently argued against dichotomies that would relegate the church to a realm
separate from the world: sacred/secular, public/private, church/world, Christ/
world were not defensible polarities. Rather, reality is much more interactive;
the church and indeed Christ can only be known in the concrete. The moral life
is not the object of principled reflection alone, but lived in the concrete, in par-
ticular historic time and place. This radical incarnational orientation under-
mines the parochialism, indeed elitism, of academic theology. If theology is
only addressed to the church, and in language understandable only within the
halls of theological academies, it does not touch lived life, and ceases to be
relevant. There is an assumption within disembodied theological work that in
fact the church is apart from the world, over-against and transcendent of it. It
does not consider itself enculturated but sees itself as politically neutral, above
the fray of human conflict. Captured in H.R. Niebuhr’s ‘Christ against culture’
type in his seminal work, Christ and Culture,26 this posture views the world as
irreparably fallen with the only hope of salvation being through the church
in withdrawal from the world. When seen in separatist fundamentalist sects,
this can be relatively benign. However, when this is the considered location of
some theologians it can be have devastating consequences—such as within
other-worldly theologies that are averse to any moral obligation for the stew-
ardship of the planet and its resources. Contemporary theologian Miroslav Volf
argues against the church maintaining such an external location in relation to
social realities:

26  
H.R. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 2001 [1951]).
Introduction 11

As the Word came ‘to what was his own’ (John 1:11) when it dwelled in
Jesus Christ, so also Christians live in each culture as in their own proper
space. Cultures are not foreign countries for the followers of Christ but
rather their own homelands, the creation of the one God . . . Christian com-
munities should not seek to leave their home cultures and establish
settlements outside or live as islands within them. Instead, they should
remain in them and change them. . . .27

Note that embedded in Volf’s argument, and that of a theology that is inten-
tionally incarnational, is an understanding of purpose. The goal, finally, of the
theological project is not to evangelize a sinful society, focusing on individual
salvation, but to seek God’s intentions for all of creation, i.e. the common good.
Of course this could be said to be bringing the evangel, or good news, but it
does so not in a narrow sense. Public theology is concerned with all aspects of
human life and social experience.
The actual process of theological engagement with public issues has begun
with defining ‘public.’ As long as public is perceived as the public—amorphous
and monolithic—any attempt at theological engagement will be abstract and
irrelevant.28 The premise of public theology is that the discourse does not
remain within a rarefied community of academic theologians, which would
only be self-serving. It is discursive within particular contexts on particu-
lar issues, as exemplified by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the
economy and the Kairos theologians in South African apartheid. The second
mark of public theology has been the discussion on the nature of the ‘public
sphere(s)’ and an identification of ‘which publics’ to engage. As stated above,
David Tracy’s foundational work drew theology beyond its academic habi-
tat. Really, he argued, theology needs to engage three publics: the church, the

27  Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good
(Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2011).
28  See discussions on the nature of public sphere, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [1962]); Craig Calhoun, ed, Habermas and
the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Nick Crossley and John Michael
Roberts, eds, After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004); Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy’ in Craig Calhoun, ed, Habermas and the Public Sphere
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–42 at p. 115; ‘Transnationalizing the
Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian
World’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24/4 (2007), 7–30.
12 Day and Kim

academy and society at large.29 Others have continued in this vein, identifying
the various social sectors, or publics, theology should engage. Theologian Max
Stackhouse added a fourth public to the academic, religious and political sec-
tors, which is the economic.30 Robert Benne appropriated law as another pub-
lic theology should engage.31 South African theologian Dirkie Smit identifies
four publics with a slightly different emphasis: political, economic, civil soci-
ety and public opinion.32 Sebastian Kim builds on these works, identifying six
‘bodies’ engaging the public square, with theology as one of them within the
academic and religious sectors. He further analyzes the interactions with and
through one another as they engage, shape and reproduce the public sphere.33
The attention given to identification of publics begs two questions: 1. What
do we mean by public? 2. How essential is this to the project of public the-
ology? Scottish theologian Andrew R. Morton considers the first question in
the context of reflecting on the work of Duncan Forrester.34 He concludes that
‘publics’ can be differentiated from ‘communities,’ in that the emphasis is not
on commonalities but difference. That is, publics might share language but are
essentially those social spaces where dialogue occurs. They cohere in the midst
of, and because of, the difference and even conflict they accommodate. ‘It is
indeed a forum or agora, a space which allows and indeed encourages encoun-
ter with that which is different . . . The whole thing is pervaded by questioning,
doubting and challenging, as well as asserting, confirming and agreeing.’35 It is
clear from this paradigm that democratic participation is essential to publics
(whether media, economy, politics, academy, religion, etc.) and therefore to
public theology.
This begins to address the second question of how essential identification of
publics is. Perhaps this very effort is fueled by the shifts and fluidity in societ-
ies currently. These sectors are not reified but in constant motion. Linell Cady
challenges public theology to turn its attention from trying to define the pub-
lics that are the contexts for theological work and to instead interrogate the

29  Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 3–5.

30  Max Stackhouse, ‘Public Theology and Ethical Judgment,’ Theology Today, 54:2 (1997).
31  Robert Benne, The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).
32  Dirkie Smit in Nico Koopman ‘Some Comments on Public Theology Today,’ Journal of
Theology for Southern Africa, 117 (2003), 3–19 at 9.
33  Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere, pp. 10–14; The six bodies are: state, market, media,
religious communities, academies and civil society.
34  Andrew R. Morton, ‘Duncan Forrester: A Public Theologian’, William Storrar and Andrew
Morton, eds, Public Theology for the 21st Century (London: T & T Clark, 2004), pp. 25–36.
35  Ibid., p. 29.
Introduction 13

meanings of ‘secular.’ ‘I am struck by how much energy has gone into reflection
on variations in the meaning and use of ‘public’ without corresponding atten-
tion to the roots, evolution and politics of ‘the secular’ that so readily stood and
stands as its modifier.’36 Cady understands that as public theology has evolved,
the very boundaries between theology and public have become more porous;
secular and sacred are not separate but interactive and co-productive. Echoing
the approach taken by Bonhoeffer decades earlier, she concludes: ‘In so doing,
a way of inhabiting the world is constituted that is a refusal of the pernicious
choice that the either/or logic, and our current ideological climate so readily
fosters; it is a way that envisions transcendence embedded—if not ever fully
embodied—in the immanent.’37
As bi-polarities are challenged, so too does contemporary public theology
challenge the boundaries between disciplines—interdisciplinarity is a third
distinguishing mark. In order to access relevant publics, theology draws on the
resources of social sciences (including history, sociology and anthropology) to
more deeply understand human experience. In addition, to engage economic,
political or scientific issues, theology must understand and work with scholars
in these areas, not only to establish credibility but so that genuine dialogue
might occur. As exemplified by Larry Rasmussen in his chapter on climate
justice, for a public theologian to engage this critical public issue, there must
be an understanding of the science behind it. Elaine Graham discusses the
contested appropriation of bilingualism in public theology, speaking the lan-
guages of other fields.38 Some public theologians further advocate the incor-
poration of informants outside of academic bibliographies. In engaging issues
such as poverty or human trafficking, for example, the deepest insights will
come from those most directly affected. What Bonhoeffer identified as ‘the
view from below’ in his noted message in 1943 (‘After Ten Years’)39 brings
the voices previously unheard into the production of public theology. This
raises the question of who exactly is a public theologian? Public theology is no
longer to be found solely in the academy, asserts Andries van Aarde, but is the
work of others who engage public issues, seek the common good and appeal to
the transcendent, including many in the arts.40

36  Cady, ‘Public Theology and the Postsecular Turn’, p. 300.

37  Ibid., p. 309.
38  Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, pp. 99–102.
39  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, John de Gruchy, ed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Works, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010).
40  Andries van Aarde, ‘What Is ‘Theology’ in ‘Pub’ and What Is ‘Public’ About ‘Public
Theology’?, Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 64:3 (2008), 1214.
14 Day and Kim

The fourth mark of public theology is that in is essentially dialogical. This

is more easily stated than truly understood. True dialogue incorporates several
facets critical to the production and reproduction of public theology: self-
critique, transparency, accountability and the construction of authority.
As public theology challenges the traditional boundaries that have encased
theology within the academy—speaking to society rather than with it—the
question of the coherence and integrity of the field becomes the focus of robust
discussion. This is a healthy dynamic, increasing the reflexive capacity for self-
critique. Consider public theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther
King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and South Africans involved in the Kairos move-
ment. Part of their work included turning their analytical and critical gaze onto
their own religious traditions and institutions. By doing so, they reflected a
consistency in their thought which facilitates public discourse. If theologians
are only addressing issues internal to the church, this is perceived as parochial
discourse which only reinforces insularity. However, when shining the same
bright light on the church, this presumes that the church is not immune to
the social issues being addressed within the public discourse. There has been
no shortage of church statements, pronouncements or op-eds (opinion pieces
published in the media), reflecting a prescriptive voice from the position of a
critical distance. This can be perceived as arrogant and hypocritical, and does
not serve to effect the change they are calling for. Certainly there is biblical res-
onance for such self-critique from the scriptural tradition which records Jesus
as challenging those who find fault in others but not in themselves, and finally
accuses them of hypocrisy. A recent example of this lack of publically accessible
self-critique has been seen in the epidemic of sexual abuse by clergy. Although
a phenomenon not limited to the Roman Catholic Church, the Catholic hier­
archy did come under withering public critique in many countries for—
advocating ‘traditional marriage’ on the one hand, and decrying homosexuality
as a sin, and at the same time covering up not only the presence of gay clergy
but the sexual abuse of children. Contributing to this was an understanding
of a rigid separation of church and state in which the church argued that they
were not accountable to the state and would deal with problems internally.
Legal scholars outside the church also supported such a separation in order to
protect the free exercise of religion.41 This was premised on an understanding
of religion within society as an ‘unalloyed good,’ asserts American legal scholar

41  From the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: ‘Congress shall make no law respect-
ing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .’
Introduction 15

Marci Hamilton.42 By assuming that religion can only be a social good, trans-
parency and accountability are sacrificed. This was readily apparent in many
responses by archdioceses, especially early in the long-running scandal. They
resisted legal action and media attention when accusations of sexual abuse
began to escalate in the last two decades. Hamilton argues that the welfare of
citizens is the fundamental responsibility of the state and supersedes the right
to the free exercise of religion. In other words, when the health and safety of
citizens who do not have full agency (in this case, children) is jeopardized, the
state has jurisdiction over religious institutions.
Why this painful chapter in the church’s history is important for public the-
ology is because it crystallizes the importance of transparency and account-
ability if the church is to participate meaningfully, and credibly, in the public
square. It is not enough to simply make pronouncements from a location above
public scrutiny, sometimes with theocratic intentions. When theology is so
one-sidedly confessional, the public is excluded from theological formulation.
There might be a self-perception of its own authoritative voice but the absence
of transparency, accountability and self-critique contribute a public percep-
tion of its insularity, and therefore irrelevance.
‘By what authority?’ is an essential question for public theology to be asking
of itself. Within confessional theology, the authority comes from transcendent
sources—revelation. For public discourse, authority is a social construction,
mediated through social processes. Revelation must be met in the concrete
in socially credible ways. For example, public response to Pope Francis has
been overwhelmingly positive as he has exemplified a much more transparent
style and has held accountable abusive priests and the institutional structures
that enabled their destructive behavior. His very public critique of the Curia
has resulted in widespread respect and trust outside the church. While those
inside the Catholic tradition consider his authority coming from transcendent
sources, outside the church his authority is being socially constructed.
In the democratic public forum, only when theology is willing to enter the
discourse by arguing ‘in ways that can be evaluated and judged by publicly
available warrants and criteria’43 can it be considered a public theology. This
means that as public theology engages issues, the values and perspectives
appropriated must make sense in terms of accessibility of language (bilingual-
ism), as well as remaining demonstrably open to evaluation and critique. The
risk for confessional theology is that theology is no longer immutable, but can

42  See Marci Hamilton, God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
43  Breitenberg, ‘To Tell the Truth’, 66.
16 Day and Kim

be shaped by the public, even as it seeks to shape or influence society. It enters

into public space that incorporates multiple voices. To avoid cacophonous
gridlock, there must be true listening to different viewpoints as well as willing-
ness to have our own informed perspectives further deepened, and influenced,
by those of others. Public theology seeks the shared values by which arguments
can be heard and critiqued. Ultimately such dialogue can move toward public
actions for the common good.
Even as the process of public theology challenges boundaries between
sacred/secular, public/private, church/state, theology/other disciplines, so
too does it push its gaze from the national context to global realities and con-
cerns. Therefore the fifth mark of public theology is its global perspective.
Globalization is a well-documented phenomenon44 knitting cultures, econo-
mies, technologies, politics and religions into an increasingly interactive real-
ity often experienced and described as a shrinking of the world. Even local
contexts are shaped by globalization, an effect described as ‘glocalisation,’45
in which the universalizing tendencies of globalization impacts local con-
texts but can also spur a particularlising of cultures and economies. In recent
years, it is encouraging to see various research centers for public theology
being established in global contexts46 and also scholarly reflection on theo-
logians and church leaders in the public sphere, such as Bishop K.H. Ting,
M.M. Thomas, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Óscar Romero, Pandita
Ramabai Saraswati and Cardinal Sou-Hwan Kim.
As public theology considers issues confronting societies, it soon becomes
clear that we cannot afford the luxury of limiting our attention to one nation-
state or culture. In engaging the challenges of immigration, climate change,
human rights, human trafficking, health and epidemiology, poverty and hun-
ger, or peace-building, for example, we need to widen our lens and our conver-
sation. The mobility of capital creates relationships of reciprocity—as wealth
is created in one context, poverty is exacerbated in another; one migrating
group’s pursuit of freedom creates scarcity of resources in the destination
economy; one country’s environmental policies impacts the quality of air and
water not only for neighboring countries but those far away. Therefore what

44  See Max L. Stackhouse, God and Globalization, Vol. 1–4 (New York: T & T Clark, 2000–2009);
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002).
45  See Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 1992).
46  For example, Institute for Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong and Tongji University,
Shanghai; Department of Christian Studies, University of Madras; and Institute for Public
Theology, Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary, Seoul.
Introduction 17

looks like justice in one context is experienced as injustice in another. The

‘common good’ needs to be more broadly writ by public theologians who must
expand their analysis and dialogue partners.
Further, Christian theology asserts a human connectiveness that transcends
boundaries of nation, race, gender, ethnic identity or social location. Beginning
with a creation theology, we affirm that all creatures reflect the imago dei of the
Creator. This is the case not just for individuals, who each embody the prover-
bial ‘thumbprint of God,’ but most especially as they are in communion, in
relation with each other. The relational Creator intends interdependence and
is most clearly reflected as humans are in relationship.47 It is our hope that this
volume will contribute to the globalization of theological discourse, as each
of the contributors writes out of particularity, for sure, but for the purpose of
engagement across disciplines and contexts on issues of common concern.
The final distinguishing mark of public theology is that it is not only
expressed in publications, such as this one, but it is performed. Returning to
the public action in Ferguson, Missouri in 2015, a part of the #BlackLivesMatter
movement, there was an awareness of the connection between theology and
social justice. The final boundary being challenged by public theology is that
between action and reflection. Again, there is not a one-way movement from
theological reflection that is then ‘applied’ to a social context; rather the two
are interactive. Theology is being produced even as it is being performed or
expressed in the public sphere. Action challenges and informs theological
understandings, even as theology interrogates the methods of activism. A pub-
lic faith critiques and engages the strategies employed for social change, as
highlighted in the chapter on community organization by Luke Bretherton. A
theological anthropology which affirms the dignity of all persons, therefore,
cannot employ a strategy which seeks to demonize opponents, regarding them
as less than creatures of God. Activism performs theology, even as it is in rela-
tionship to it.
To visualize this dynamic, one only has to return to the biographies of some
public theologians identified earlier: Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Beyers Naude, Falata Moyo.
For these theologians and many others, their ‘theology’ and their ‘activism’ are
inseparable and co-productive. ‘Doing theology’ is not a static enterprise, only
expressed in publications, but within civil society as well. Theology is not rei-
fied but mutable; as context changes the questions and the reflections change
as well. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, was prolific in his writing. Many of

47  See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, John de
Gruchy, ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
18 Day and Kim

his core theological understandings remained constant throughout his life,

only deepening as he returned to them. Still, the challenges of his particu-
lar context—during the Nazi regime and Holocaust—demanded new forms
of moral action. His co-conspirators in the plot to assassinate Hitler looked
to him to help them understand the meaning of their action in a time which
defied rational explanation.48 Not all public theology is produced in such dra-
matic contexts. But all public theology is produced in context and incorporates
the moral agency of the theologians.
Our current context is placing new challenges on the project of public the-
ology. There has been a proliferation of analysis on the shifts in religion in
the 21st century. The church in the West now finds itself in an era universally
acknowledged as being post-Christendom. The hegemony of religion in soci-
ety has dramatically eroded (as evidenced by the referendum on gay marriage
in Ireland in 2015 in which a positive vote prevailed despite the strong advo-
cacy to the contrary by the church). Patterns of believing and belonging are
shifting; religious participation is declining across the ecumenical spectrum in
the Northern Hemisphere, even as it increases in the South. The rapid increase
of those with no religious affiliation is creating angst among American reli-
gious leaders, who decry ‘the rise of the nones.’49 Denominations and insti-
tutions are restructuring to accommodate the decline as well as the growth.
Departments of theology are moving out of the academy and the structure of
theological education is changing.
Ironically, just when secularization theory would predict the death of reli-
gion altogether, there has been a post-secular turn, not only where the church
is flourishing in the South but particularly where it is in decline. Religion has
re-emerged in the public square in higher relief and in new forms. Describing
this turn, Linell Cady states: ‘In the academy religion was largely ignored: that
is not our world. In recent decades the public face of religion has exploded,
nationally and internationally. It is not just that there is a greater recognition of
religion’s public role, though that is certainly part of it; we have also witnessed
a notable resurgence of religion in public life, a resurgence that has caught
most scholars and analysts by surprise.’50 Elaine Graham explores the tensions
and contradictions of this moment as public theology is caught ‘between a
rock and a hard place.’51 Even as the public profile of religion is changing from

48  See Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years.

49  This trend was identified first and most clearly by Robert Putnam and David Campbell,
American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
50  Cady, ‘Public Theology and the Postsecular Turn’, p. 297.
51  Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
Introduction 19

piety to an elevated public presence, and religious participation in the public

sphere is needed in fractious public spaces, so too this comes at a time when
‘the very legitimacy of faith to speak or contribute at all is contested . . .’52 How
then does public theology cross the boundaries of publics, disciplines, lan-
guage, nation, and human experience itself for meaningful action and reflec-
tion on the common good, as a credible voice, accessible, open to critique by
‘publically available warrants and criteria,’ without, as Graham describes it,
‘getting lost in translation?’53
Hopefully, the shared wisdom in these pages will enable the project of pub-
lic theology to move forward, clarifying its voice in this increasingly complex
social, cultural and political terrain. The challenges are formidable, as is the
occasion for creativity in shaping a response to the call from the public square,
‘Show us what theology looks like.’

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 PART 1
Foundations of Public Theology

∵
 CHAPTER 1

The Bible and Public Theology

Paul Hanson1

The relation between biblical tradition and political process in the history
of the United States, as in other countries, demonstrates how deeply religion
has influenced both domestic and international policy and contributed to
the nation’s sense of identity and purpose. In spite of the secularizing trends
accompanying modernity, the role of religion in political debate and in the
wider public arena remains strong. The results are no less mixed now than in
previous centuries.
On the positive side is the fact that the passion for justice and equality at
home and concern for the health and security of the masses of the poor and
suffering in other parts of the world run deeply in the American soul and help
shape the country’s policies and actions. On the negative side, there persists
a sense of entitlement and destiny that often translates on the international
level into self-serving intrusion into the affairs of other sovereign states and,
closer to home, into a growing gap between rich and poor and legislative hard-
ening along party lines resistant to compromise and vulnerable to procedural
gridlock.
Since it also has become clear that the religious arguments advanced in
support of political positions frequently enlisted biblical texts for support, the
question we need to address is apparent: can the Bible that frequently has been
enlisted in defense of unjust and even inhumane practices and has fomented
bitter inner-religious conflict be reengaged on the basis of a more trustwor-
thy hermeneutic that provides safeguards against arbitrariness and guidelines
for appropriate application? We shall organize our affirmative answer under
two rubrics that thread like warp and weft through our approach to the Bible’s

1  ‘The Bible and Public Theology’ was originally published as ‘Epilogue: What Is the Bible’s
Message for Today?’ in A Political History of the Bible in America by Paul D. Hanson, © 2015 by
Westminster John Knox Press. It is republished here with permission, gratitude, and minor
edits for this volume. Readers are encouraged to read Hanson’s magisterial book for a chrono-
logical case study of the Bible in American political history, and a chronological exegesis of
politics in biblical texts.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_003

26 Hanson

message for today, namely story and theocratic principle; we will then conclude
with a description of our proposed theo-political hermeneutic.

Story (Warp)

Story as a metaphor captures the Bible’s dynamic understanding of the man-

ner in which God reaches out in covenant to humans. Like the dry bones in
Ezekiel’s vision, divine spirit is breathed into the pages of the Bible when
they are read not as timeless, inerrant laws mixed with sundry cosmological,
numerological, calendrical, and teleological data, but as chapters of a story
recounting the identity-shaping relationship between a loving God and all that
God has created. For many, to be sure, a chiseled-in-stone method has a greater
appeal than a narrative approach, for it generates an authoritative handbook
providing definitive answers to all questions, rather than opening up a living
drama that invites readers to lifelong engagement. However, the deity encoun-
tered in the Bible is not a pulpited lecturer dictating timeless verities, but a
living Lord who enters into the thickness and concreteness of human life and
discloses himself as one who delivers slaves from bondage, not as a one-time
episode, but as the inaugural event of a lasting relationship, the unfolding of
which is recorded in the stories of the Bible.
Authentic biblical interpretation therefore begins not with broad gener-
alities or abstract concepts, but individual stories, for each narrative pulsates
with meaning, even revelatory meaning. However, the auspicious dynamic of
encounter is lost if impatience to seize a final, immutable truth spurns the
caressing intimacy of the mysterium, a lesson learned long ago by Jacob: ‘Surely
the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it’ (Gen. 28:16).
At the same time it is important to realize that attentiveness to the distinc-
tive meaning of each story does not lead to the atomization of Scripture into
a disjointed anthology, but opens up a vast drama. Standing out with particu-
lar luminosity in that drama are certain episodes we have designated as par-
adigms, that is, stories opening a window through which we can discern an
ongoing divine purpose amid the flux of human experience. The Passover story
in Exodus will serve as an example of a paradigmatic story.
The stage is set in the land of pharaohs with a description of an oppressed,
enslaved people. Out of their misery they cry to a God they know only vaguely
through their ancestral stories. The compassionate reply that reaches them
from heaven inaugurates a new age and a new reality, an age of freedom and the
reality of living in a covenant relationship with a God preveniently gracious.
The Bible And Public Theology 27

The unfolding of the exodus story reveals the heart of the Bible’s histori-
cal view of reality. God’s reaching into human life to deliver slaves from their
bondage reveals the divine nature and attributes:

The Lord, the Lord,

a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty.
(Exod. 34:6–7a)

To be noted is the manner in which the historicist perspective of the Bible

arises out of narrative detail. Beginning in the raw stuff of human existence,
the story is moved forward by the divine deliverer reaching into a perilous
situation, disclosing his personal identity, and manifesting justice and loving-
kindness in saving an enslaved people.
Since every authentic relationship depends on reciprocity, we now turn to
the human side of the covenant, beginning with the hymn of praise performed
by Miriam and her maidens on behalf of the community (Exod. 15:20–21) as
they respond to the saving acts of the one now recognized as the only true
God. In this phase of the story we witness how recitation and commitment
to memory of the story of God’s beneficent acts, and celebration of the divine
nature and attributes manifested in those acts, shape Israel’s identity as a peo-
ple. This shaping of character through immersion in the story accounts for the
inseparable bond between Israel’s Epic and its Torah, the latter consisting of
the inferences for daily living drawn by the faithful from the ongoing experi-
ence of God in their midst. This organic connection between story and behav-
ior can be illustrated by a poignant example: ‘You shall not oppress a resident
alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’
(Exod. 23:9). To oppress a migrant is not only heartless; it is the obliteration of
your heart, of what makes you authentically human.
We can conclude our description of the felicitousness of the metaphor of
story to convey the dynamics of the biblical understanding of reality as follows:
each episode arising out of the experiences of a people struggling to shape
its common life in relation to its God amid the concreteness of human exis-
tence has a particular lesson to teach. But as the chapters of an individual’s
life disclose threads of meaning that emerge into an identity-shaping whole,
28 Hanson

so too the chapters of the Bible allow the attentive reader to discern the warp
of a purposeful drama from a promise-filled beginning, through stages replete
with the tragedy and comedy of human existence, and on toward fulfillment in
God’s time of the peaceable kingdom.

Theocratic Principle (Weft)

Appreciation of the dynamic function of story in shaping the identity of a cov-

enant people provides the conceptual framework for summarizing the insights
gained from our study regarding the Bible’s contribution to political thought.
As in the realm of biblical theology generally, so too in the more circumscribed
area of biblical politics, the Bible does not transmit logical formulations lend-
ing themselves to a system, in this case a political philosophy of the Bible. What
we find instead are narratives, speeches, prayers, admonitions, and guidelines
arising within a nation seeking to organize its public life in a manner that will
enable it to survive within the concrete circumstances of its world, while it
remains faithful to its identity as a people called into being by a loving God.
Once again careful attention to individual texts leads to recognition of a unify-
ing strand, a theocratic principle, the weft in our homespun metaphor. It affirms
that there is but one ruler of the universe, whose attributes and commensurate
standards of governance are known through his self-disclosure in the events
of history. These attributes and standards constitute the ideal that a faithful
nation will seek to implement in its ongoing historical task of forging viable
political institutions and social structures.
The biblical texts amount to a running commentary on the covenant com-
munity’s ongoing task of formulating and then implementing the qualities
of God’s universal rule within the sphere of human history. From the divine
imperative to adhere to the theocratic principle arises the Bible’s rich body of
texts dealing with judges, kings, landowners, peasants, prophets, and scribes.
Every lesson reverberating through these texts adheres to a pattern inherent in
the theocratic principle itself: since all human institutions are subject to the
ultimate authority of the sovereign of all nations, it is the responsibility not
only of the nation called to be God’s people but of all nations to implement the
normative standards of divine governance within the particularities of their
time and setting. To this is added a solemn warning: the provisional legitimacy
of any government extends only to the extent that it conforms to the governing
standards of the heavenly sovereign.
What is created by this melding of theocratic principle and mandate to
adapt the eternal qualities of divine rule to the ever-changing circumstances
The Bible And Public Theology 29

of human history is a dynamic set of paradoxes. The authority of all human

regimes is relativized by the only authority that is absolute, yet all such regimes
are held responsible for implementing the qualities of the heavenly sovereign’s
rule. What is more, while human servants of the sovereign one are respon-
sible for counseling and judging their leaders against the normative standard
of divine governance, that standard by definition transcends the limits of mor-
tal understanding, giving rise to the unremitting conundrum of discerning
between true and false prophecy. There is ample evidence in the Bible of an
acute awareness of these paradoxes, for example, in Deuteronomy 18:18–22 the
warning against illegitimate forms of prophecy and in Deuteronomy 4:7–8
the emphasis on the only possible source of human knowledge of torah resid-
ing in God’s gracious drawing near to humans.
An understanding of politics in the Bible in terms of an ongoing task of
implementing God’s eternal rule within the temporal sphere of human his-
tory explains the importance of a period-by-period examination of relevant
texts. This historical approach was called for by the nature of the object of our
research, the relationship between God and the people God called into a living
covenant. Because that object is not static, but dynamically moving through
time, we were challenged to trace the strategies, policies, and structures of gov-
ernance as they developed over time, identifying lines of continuity as well as
disjunctures. What prevented the unceasing movement from devolving into
conceptual anomie was the communal vocation inherent in the divine-human
covenant, that is, the injunction from deity to people to conform their gov-
erning structures to God’s universal order of compassionate justice as it was
disclosed to them in the events of their history and preserved in the collective
memory of their story.
While the theological uniqueness of the Bible is not questioned by the
interplay of biblical politics with political process in the history of particular
nations, the setting of both narratives in human history enables people of faith
to discern the presence of God in the events of the contemporary world as
vividly as in the biblical past. The result is that the applicability of the Bible to
current events is not mechanical in nature but covenantal.
We are connected to the victims of genocide in central Africa within the
same covenant of compassion that bound the Hebrews to the homeless of
their time. We know that the cries arising from the homes demolished by a
supertyphoon in the Philippines are heard in heaven as urgently as were the
cries of Hebrew slaves in the land of the pharaoh. Disturbingly unbiblical, on
the other hand, is the rupturing of the tie between our world and the world of
the Bible by the myopia of ascribing an order of creation to the world of the
Bible categorically different from the one visible to the modern mind. Inherent
30 Hanson

instead in the biblical understanding of God’s universal sovereignty is that it

extends seamlessly over all space and time.

The Dynamic Effect of the Theocratic Principle: A Brief Review

Not to be captured in a blueprint, definitive formulation, or even list of six

prototypical models, the politics of the Bible can be glimpsed most vividly as
the phenomenon that it is by describing episodes in the historically rooted
process of generations of the covenant community implementing their devel-
oping understanding of God’s universal rule within their ever-changing world.
Respecting the brevity befitting a conclusion, we limit ourselves to six paradig-
matic accounts that, as a representative section of the weft of God’s abiding
presence, will serve as the staging for our final task of outlining a suitable theo-
political hermeneutic.
Already in the period of the tribal confederacy, the identity-shaping power
of reciting stories of God’s involvement in a people’s history became an essen-
tial dimension of Israel’s worldview. From recital and ritual enactment arose
the audacious claim that one God alone created and forever will reign over the
cosmos. Thus it was that a unique political perspective emerged that defined
a people in covenant with its God and distinct from neighboring nations and
their purported gods.
A major crisis was precipitated by the introduction of monarchy, for it set
alongside the sole sovereign a potential rival, a human tempted by the luster of
royal ideology to go beyond mediating the qualities of divine rule by claiming
divine status and special entitlements. Crisis proved to be the mother of an
important adaptation of the theocratic principle to the new model of govern-
ment. The threat of an idolatrous distortion of God’s exclusive sovereignty gave
birth to a new office filled by an unco-opted representative of the heavenly
king, the office of prophet. In part 1 we noted the perduring importance of
this adaptation of the theocratic principle to a new environment, given the
perpetual conflict between the Yahwistic ideal of God’s universal standard of
impartial justice and equality and the idolatry of claiming special entitlements
for privileged classes, nations, or races.
Like all else political in the Bible, the office of prophet defies a precise job
profile. Compare Isaiah and Jeremiah, one an aristocrat and the other a politi-
cal outcast. Prophets, like the stories they tell, are spokespersons of the eternal
embedded in the temporal. One quality alone is shared by all true prophets:
they acknowledge only one absolute authority, the sovereign of all creation,
whom they served in a struggle to preserve the heart of a people that was
The Bible And Public Theology 31

endangered by hostile empires, to be sure, but even more by themselves and

their leaders.
For our next example of embedded politics, we jump to the community
struggling to adapt its core theo-political principle of God’s universal sover-
eignty to a series of calamities with the potential to annihilate its identity as
a nation: destruction of temple and royal capital by a pagan empire, exile of
its nobility and upper classes to a foreign land, and finally return to a ravaged
homeland, only to be made subject to another foreign king. Israel, now obliged
to honor a king who attributed his authority to a deity other than YHWH, was
facing a challenge unprecedented in its history, the challenge of reserving ulti-
mate allegiance for its sole sovereign in the face of a rival.
That a viable solution was found is attributable to the contributions of the
prophets to a deepened understanding of the theocratic principle, ­illustrated
by the following examples. In renunciation of King Jeroboam’s idolatrous
attempt to nationalize the cult and silence the prophets, Amos depicted
YHWH as the sovereign of all nations who not only delivered Israel from Egypt
but ‘the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir’ (Amos. 9:7). In
Isaiah 44:24–45:7 we meet YHWH the creator and redeemer whose unre-
stricted authority enables him to appoint the mighty Persian emperor, Cyrus,
as the ‘messiah’ who will fulfill his plan for the nations. Within such an expan-
sive vision of YHWH’s universal dominion, accommodation to a political
arrangement in which a foreign king maintained civil order, while Israel was
free to worship and obey its exclusive Lord, was a viable form of implementing
YHWH’s reign. Here again we witness a changed historical setting prompting
an enrichment of Israel’s theo-political understanding through adaptation of
the theocratic principle in such a way as to enable the covenant community to
preserve its unique identity even in Diaspora or as a population colonized by
a foreign power. The example of a sojourn people stands even to the present
time as a witness against the hubris and triumphalism of imperial religion.
Since our limited purpose here is to illustrate the adaptability to change
that was inherent in biblical political reflection and practice, we can skip over
two forms of mediation examined in part 2, the ‘natural law’ model coming to
expression in Wisdom writings like Proverbs and Sirach and the apocalyptic
model of Daniel and the book of Revelation. We turn then to Jesus and the
apostle Paul.
In shaping his theo-politics under the master image of the kingdom of God,
Jesus located himself in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He adapted
that image in such a manner as to heighten the tensive relationship between
a vision of the fulfillment of God’s universal reign (‘on earth as it is in heaven’)
and the provisional nature of God’s imminence (‘among you’). This balancing
32 Hanson

of the ‘already/not yet’ provided a robust defense against the idolatrous uto-
pias of false messiahs, even as it spurred the disciples to embody the quali-
ties of God’s reign in a world in transition. Specifically regarding the foreign
occupation, it allowed him to follow a path of limited accommodation, bal-
ancing acceptance of the provisional governance of the Romans in civil affairs
with uncompromising acknowledgment of God’s universal sovereignty (‘unto
Caesar . . . unto God’).
The apostle Paul’s politics was forged within an eschatological tension
similar to the one visible in the authentic sayings and parables of Jesus. He
introduced a political classification that defines in a poignant way the identity
of one who affirms the theocratic principle of God’s sole sovereignty, namely,
those whose ‘citizenship is in heaven’ (Phil. 3:20). What guides the political
engagement of such citizens is the belief that this world and its ruling powers
are ephemeral, while the world to come, in which God alone reigns, is authen-
tic and eternal. The result was a political realism that enabled him to adapt
his political strategies in relation to the Romans with a flexibility ranging from
denunciation leading to imprisonment (Phil. 3:19) to accommodation border-
ing on appeasement (Rom. 13:1–7).

A Theo-Political Hermeneutic

One task remains: to describe a method of interpretation capable of transmit-

ting the meaning of the Bible for contemporary political thought and action in
a manner both sensitive to the intrinsic nature of the Bible itself and suitable
for the particular setting of a religiously/philosophically diverse constitutional
democracy.2
Given the chaotic nature of much that conscientious citizens hear from the
halls of Congress, it is not surprising to witness a widespread desire to discover
in the Bible the source of an unequivocal, unchanging political truth. Drawing
on the imagery of our age of information technology, this would enable us to
send through the Internet a search request: Bible: God’s plan for government.
With our cursor we drag the plan and paste it onto a document that then
serves us as an e-manual covering all matters of political policy and action
and including links offering definitive answers to specific issues like abortion,
sexual orientation, immigration.

2  See ‘A Five-Step Hermeneutic for a Biblical Based Political Theology’, in Paul D. Hanson,
Political Engagement as Prophetic Mandate (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010; and Cambridge,
UK: James Clark and Co., 2010), pp. 35–41.
The Bible And Public Theology 33

For better or for worse (depending on one’s theological perspective), our

study of the Bible reveals not timeless answers but a lively discussion on issues
relating to being authentically human and fashioning a common life that
envelops all members in loving-kindness, equality, and peace.
Contemporary communities that look to the Bible for guidance and insight
are heirs to that discussion, not as passive beneficiaries, but as active partici-
pants mediating the wisdom and virtue of our spiritual ancestors to the pres-
ent world and the world of future generations. The meeting place in which
we gather is filled with sacred stories, all of which we are to treat with respect
combined with audacity, for the one convening the symposium is the Creator
whose loving care for his children enlists them in his plan for universal justice
and peace.
Given the living, open-ended nature of our scriptural inheritance, the pas-
sive e-manual analogy is inadequate as a medium for depicting our method
of interpreting the Bible. We turn instead to an action-filled image borrowed
from the world of sailing. Guided by this image, our theo-political hermeneutic
will lead us through a five-stage venture involving a compass, a chart room, a
rudder, a convoy, and a home port.

Compass (Step 1)

A ship without a reliable compass is likely to founder. The individual citizen

or party engaging in politics without a reliable moral compass will more likely
promote social decline than enhancement of the common good. So who in a
modern society is the keeper of the compass?
The first part of the answer we offer may appear to be complicit in abet-
ting social decline, for it argues that in a constitutional democracy, a claim
to the right to calibrate the society’s moral compass by any one group, be it
religiously, philosophically, or ethically defined, is illicit. However, have we
not seen deeply ingrained in the American moral consciousness the convic-
tion that the virtues requisite for the integrity and strength of a nation do not
arise spontaneously from human nature, but require cultivation? In replying
in the affirmative, we may seem to be introducing a contradiction, or at least
a conundrum, for our question takes on an added dimension of complexity,
‘Is anyone in the society qualified to serve as keeper of the moral compass?’
Our reply that all of the constituent religious/philosophical/ethical groups
in the society are responsible may seem to address the constitutional issue, but
confound the moral dimension of the discussion by raising the specter of ethi-
cal relativism, that is, a compass spinning endlessly in all directions at once.
34 Hanson

The caveat is serious and calls for a credible answer, and while the lively
debate between neo-Kantian, communitarian, and pragmatist philosophers
offers assurance that pluralism does not lead inevitably to moral paralysis,3
the biblical heritage we have studied adds an important insight. The invitation
to inclusive participation in discourse concerning the sources of public virtue
is based not merely on civility or social etiquette, but more fundamentally on
a categorical imperative inherent in the theocratic affirmation of God’s sole
sovereignty: God’s reign alone is absolute, all human governments and politi-
cal philosophies are provisional; therefore no mortal individual or group can
claim more than partial understanding of the attributes of God’s universal
rule that human regimes are to mediate. From this faith perspective, inclu-
siveness in the debate over public virtue is not the blight of secular relativism
but the rediscovery of the political implication of the First Commandment’s
injunction against idolatry, that is, the confusion of what is human with the
divine. Or back to our analogy, since no human is capable of precise calibra-
tion of the compass, the input of the captains of all vessels in the convoy
is important.
Though conceptually clear, the above description of the theological case for
an inclusive form of moral discourse lacks the passion and power requisite to
the cultivation of public virtue that we have described through the analogy of
story: divine and human examples of compassionate justice embedded in life
experiences shape a strong sense of identity infused with virtue. The process
of character formation arises not out of abstract rational thinking, but from
the beliefs and practices of flesh-and-blood communities. So we need to add
a living dimension to our description of the moral compass, and in the case
of a Christian community this would embrace the sacred stories comprising
the Bible, the inspired reliving of those stories in sermons, and eucharistic fel-
lowship with the Lord who has called humans into a servant community. This
leads as well to an enrichment of our metaphor. The compass modulates in our
imagination into the form of a cross. Imagine, further, worship becoming the
holy space in which the faith community can calibrate its moral direction in

3  Though in our case the five steps describing the process of transition from a particular com-
munity of discourse to the public forum draw on Christian tradition, the structure of our
theo-political hermeneutic can be recast in terms drawn from any other religion or restated
as a philosophical-political hermeneutic. To cite one example of the latter, the function of
‘biblical tradition’ in our hermeneutic would be exercised in the neo-Kantian philosophy
of John Rawls by his ‘theory of justice.’ See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
The Bible And Public Theology 35

the world more clearly and with a more profound sense of commitment than
in any other place.

Chart Room (Step 2)

Important as the transformation of the heart through story and practice is for
an individual’s or group’s sense of moral direction, the process of reshaping
embraces the mind as well. Again we cite as our example one of the constitu-
ent communities in a diverse society: a Christian congregation, which, having
renewed its bond with its source in worship, gathers for study in the fellowship
hall or, let us imagine, the chart room.
Here the beliefs and values of the faith community are exposed to the
enormous complexity and confounding urgency of the needs of society
and world. The ensuing discussion is rigorous, drawing on a critical under-
standing of Scripture and the history of biblical interpretation as well as the
church’s creeds and confessions. The global horizon of its focus is secured to
the extent of its racial, geographic, and socioeconomic embrace. Participants
seek to bring to bear on their deliberations the specialized knowledge requisite
to intelligent discussion, and to that end they both consult relevant study doc-
uments of their own denomination and other agencies and invite into their
midst reliable experts. Throughout the process of inquiry and study they dispel
any pretense of superior knowledge with humility born of honesty.
The goal of the chart room is preparatory in nature: Drawing on the resources
it has inherited, those gathered strive to formulate positions and strategies that
will alleviate world hunger, advance the crusade against disease, promote jus-
tice and equality, foster peace among the nations, and hasten the ultimate goal
of tiqqûn ʿôlām.
The last mentioned goal stands as culminating objective and is written
in the language of the portion of Scripture the Christian community shares
with Judaism for both substantive and heuristic reasons. Translated ‘healing
of the world,’ it conveys the heart of the Bible’s understanding of God’s plan
for creation. By being written in Hebrew, it reminds us that ‘chart room’ talk
is parochial and draws on the intimately communal language of its particu-
lar understanding of life’s deepest mysteries that is alone capable of nurturing
the passion essential to authentic selfhood but is fragile when exposed to the
clamor of Babel. Yet the temptation to remain in the warmth of the chart room
would be to indulge in a manner denied Peter, James, and John on the moun-
tain (Matt. 17:1–8). For God calls together a people not for personal comfort,
36 Hanson

but for engagement in a plan for all creation. Prepared with a clearer under-
standing of the tasks at hand, we thus leave the private discourse of the chart
room and make our way to the rudder.

Rudder (Step 3)

In the endeavor to contribute from one’s own field of study to the growth of a
good society and more peaceable world, the benefits gained by the student of
the Bible from theologians, philosophers, and political scientists are enormous.
To take one example, the writings of communitarian savants like Alasdair
MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas can kindle one’s sensitivity to the profound
significance of a community’s intimate familiarity with its traditions and prac-
tices for its self-understanding, as manifested in steps 1 and 2.4 However, the
challenge presented to a community by step 3, and correspondingly the nature
of the help it seeks from philosophy, is directed not toward further enhance-
ment of self-understanding, but toward the desire to share what it can from its
own legacy for the benefit of the wider society and world.
This involves translating ideals and strategies from the comfort zone of our
own communal traditions and practices into a language comprehensible to
the other communities populating a diverse society. Expressed within the
frame of our metaphor, the question reads, what philosophical perspective will
enable us to trim the rudder in such a manner as to carry our cargo from home
port into less familiar waters and hopefully into constructive contact with the
other vessels encountered? Though the clear beacon of John Rawls’s goal of
defining a universal theory of justice as the foundation of civil harmony serves
to urge communities of all persuasions to persevere in the search for truth,
the more down-to-earth pragmatism of Jeffrey Stout offers a practical program
for uniting a cacophony of world visions into a productive plan of action.5
What it calls for in a world in which widespread agreement in the areas of
metaphysics and metaethics is impossible to reach is a more modest agenda,
which can be described thus: (1) It invites participants of all persuasions to
contribute to public discourse views, drawn from their deepest convictions

4  See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, UK: Duckworth, 1981);
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
5  See Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004), and Blessed Are the Organized: grassroots democracy in
America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
The Bible And Public Theology 37

and values, with the only condition that they be as attentive and respectful of
the views of others as they desire others to be of theirs. (2) The participants
commit themselves to defining reasonable goals and then working together to
achieve them.

Convoy (Step 4)

Our ship has joined a convoy comprising ships from different ports of origin,
each guided by a compass calibrated and a chart drawn by the wisest of their
officers and a rudder trimmed for progress toward the final destination. The
ensuing interaction between the ships is not predetermined. Different scenar-
ios are possible. Since each crew deems its cargo of great value and perhaps
more precious than that borne by any other ship, one option is to view the
other vessels as likely hostile and justifying preemptive fire. Another option is
to seek to establish contact aimed at clarifying their origins, cargoes, and des-
tinations. The outcomes of the two strategies are diametric, the former leading
to widespread destruction benefiting none, the latter to discovery that all are
trying to reach the same distant and elusive harbor and that the likelihood of
success is greatly enhanced by the free flow of communication and the sharing
of information regarding the most favorable winds, the location of dangerous
shoals, and the hideaway coves of pirates.
A study of the polarized nature of American politics in the opening years of
the Twenty-First Century presents us with the deplorable picture of a nation
following the former option of lack of genuine communication and hostility,
leading to great damage to political process and ultimately to the health of the
nation. Accompanying the mood of cynicism and partisan warfare is a cry from
the broader public for a restoration of healthy political process. This is the aim
of step 4.
The prerequisite for constructive public discourse is not the exclusion of
values and beliefs rooted deeply in the identity-shaping traditions and prac-
tices of the diverse communities constituting a modern society. Contrariwise,
the wide array of such values and beliefs is celebrated as an irreplaceable asset
in the kind of robust discussion that can forge long-range solutions to the
most intransigent domestic and international problems. But such discussion
is not for the petty-minded or faint-hearted. It requires leaders and a support-
ing public that can clarify goals and then subsume lesser objectives, like party
ideological supremacy and victory in the next election, to the give-and-take
(yes, compromise) that gets the res publica back on a course of rebuilding the
commonwealth.
38 Hanson

At this point we cannot ignore the role religion has played in the realm of
public discourse. In any period of the nation’s history it would be difficult to
determine whether the influence of religious leaders and groups has weighed
in more heavily in support of option one or option two. Within the guidelines
of our theo-political hermeneutic, the case has been made that the Bible’s cen-
tral theo-political principle of God’s sovereign rule nullifies as idolatrous any
group’s claim to absolute truth and authority. From the First Commandment
then we derive the theological argument for the inclusive approach to public
debate as the one most consonant with biblical faith. This is not to deny the
importance of the arguments for such debate deriving from other philosophies
or religions, for example, practical reasoning, civil decorum, and humanistic
sensitivities. As stated in the introduction, the tent is wide that welcomes fair-
minded citizens of all persuasion to goal-oriented political discourse, and writ-
ten into the historical identity of the Christian community is the mandate to
join the common cause.

Home Port (Step 5)

Step 5 functions to restrain the common inclination of social reformers to

confuse their achievements with the final goal of human history, the reign of
universal peace and justice. Such human utopian dreams inevitably collapse
amid the ruins of war, economic depression, or urban decay. Inordinate trust in
the ability of humans to build the perfect society and world order commonly
yields to cynicism and despair.
We have found that the biblical antidote to political hubris again arises out
of its core theo-political principle: humans are incapable of building or even
predicting the advent of the perfect society. To them is assigned the provisional
work of living in an imperfect order as citizens of heaven who embody the
qualities of the kingdom to come. It is a work they can carry on courageously
even in the face of failure, for ‘faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen’ (Heb. 11:1). ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but
then we will see face to face’ (1 Cor. 13:12).
With confidence then in the plan God has been enacting since creation, we
sail on, grateful for belonging to a diverse convoy of fellow mariners and ben-
efiting from calibrating the readings of our compass against theirs, comparing
charts, trimming rudders, and peering together through clouded lenses in the
hope of finally bringing our convoy into the safety of home port.
The Bible And Public Theology 39

Bibliography

Hanson, Paul D. ‘A Five-Step Hermeneutic for a Biblical Based Political Theology’, in

Political Engagement as Prophetic Mandate (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010; and
Cambridge, UK: James Clark and Co., 2010), pp. 35–41.
Hanson, Paul D. ‘Epilogue: What Is the Bible’s Message for Today?’ in A Political History
of the Bible in America (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015).
Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social
Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, UK: Duckworth,
1981).
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1971).
Stout, Jeffrey. Blessed Are the Organized: grassroots democracy in America (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004).
 CHAPTER 2

Public Theology in the History of Christianity

Sebastian Kim

Although the term ‘public theology’ or ‘public church’ was introduced into
theological circles by Martin Marty and Robert Bellah in the 1970s,1 the con-
cept of theology in the public sphere or the Christian gospel in public life
can be recognised throughout church history. Public theology has recently
gained wide support from theological circles and churches as is evidenced
by the establishment of the Global Network for Public Theology (GNPT), the
International Journal of Public Theology and a large number of centres and
institutions in universities and church denominations. ‘Public theology’ or
‘theology in the public sphere’ is quite commonly accepted in contemporary
theological departments and churches but the understanding of what it means
differs from one to another. For the purposes of this chapter, I would like to
define public theology as critical, reflective and reasoned engagement of the-
ology in society to bring the kingdom of God, which is for the sake of the poor
and marginalised.2 Throughout Christian history, churches have engaged with
the wider society and political institutions both as minority communities and
as dominant bodies.
The aim of this chapter is to highlight some key theologians and theologi-
cal discourses and their contributions to the formation of public theology.
I shall limit my discussion to selected writings up to the 1990s by which time
the term public theology was starting to become widely used by scholars. The
various chapters in this volume are selected to demonstrate the variety of
topics and approaches within public theology. Public theology arises out of the
engagement of theology in the spheres of politics and economics, which was
then expanded to civil societies and other areas of the public life. For the
earlier development of theologies of church-state relations, I will examine
St Augustine and the Reformers; for alternative approaches to dominant politi-
cal and economic systems, I shall examine the Catholic Social Teaching, which
has made such a deep impact; for wider engagement with the socio-political
and cultural, I will discuss ecumenical developments in Europe and the USA.

1  See Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere (London: SCM, 2011), pp. 3–5.
2  See Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology (London:
SCM Press, 1999), pp. 5–23.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_004

Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 41

I will then go on to discuss some insights from other continents in their engage-
ment in the public sphere; and finally I shall make some suggestions for the
future endeavours for public theology.

The Public Engagement of Theology in St Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) formulated a Christian understanding of the

church’s role in social and political life beyond personal morality and religious
matters. Although commentators agree that he does not develop a systematic
theory of politics and social organisation,3 mainly through his City of God,
Augustine provided an important platform from which Christians could deal
with political, social and economic questions, especially relations between
the state and wider society, at the time of the dawn of Christendom and the
decline of the Roman Empire. Augustine’s major concerns were in what way
citizens exercise rational control over their political environment, how society
can be organised to enforce order and stability, and the questions of Christian
obligations towards civil community and allegiance to the Empire. In fact,
in the City of God, Augustine tried to define the kind of civil community that
would enable Christians to engage with the Empire.4 Augustine’s critique of
the late Roman Empire was based on the failure of that public life ever to attain
a genuine res publica or commonwealth. For Augustine, the city of God was
being shaped and guided by the indwelling Spirit of God even in the midst of
natural disorders and human weaknesses. It was ‘not a figment of the imagina-
tion or a projection of philosophical speculation’ but a reality unfolding.5
As to the nature of state and society, Augustine understood that any politi-
cal power and authority was ordered by God in order to maintain social order
and that political authority was not natural but the result of the sinful human
condition. Aware of the dilemma of human beings aspiring for peace and yet
having serious limitations, he envisaged that the role of human society was to
ensure order. Unlike Greek thought which perceived the political framework

3  See R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 73; Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Augustine’ in Peter Scott and
William T. Cavanaugh, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), pp. 35–47 at 35.
4  P.R.L. Brown, ‘Political Society’, in R.A. Markus, ed., Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays
(New York: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 313; R.A. Markus, ed., Augustine: A Collection of Critical
Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), p. xii.
5  Mary T. Clark, Augustine (London: Continuum, 1994), pp. 96–98.
42 Kim

of human life was the chief means of achieving human perfection and saw
politics as a creative task, Augustine was more concerned with the state’s
authority to sustain the rights of the religious community rather than the
active participation of Christians in creating the social order. Augustine had
a rather limited view of human society and was cautious of active Christian
engagement in the shaping of political life.6 For Augustine, the role of gov-
ernment was not to inculcate virtue but was limited to preventing disor-
der but both church and the state share a common objective in securing an
earthly peace.7
Augustine emphasised the importance of the stability and order of society
and the obligation of its members because he believed that ‘the social order
was part of the all-embracing cosmic order, grounded in the ultimate rational-
ity of the world’. However, as R.A. Markus argues, at the time of writing the
City of God, his concern about political authority and institutions was not to
seek a systematic and rational order of society but to prevent the disruptive
power of political authority.8 Furthermore, Augustine saw justice as the right
ordering of society. He argued that human laws must be the public embodi-
ment of the eternal law and that, though human law cannot make a person
good, it can secure public order.9 To this endeavour for an ordered society,
Augustine thought that religion brought the indispensable virtue of justice.
He saw unjust social structures as the consequences human greed and pride
and argued that political and social action can reduce the suffering that sin
causes.10 Augustine saw the eternal law as the divine reason or the will of God
and he rejected the idea that political authority was wielded by God. For him,
God alone rules, and political authority is delegated and limited to the realm
of maintaining justice, order and stability.11 Augustine understood that all
human beings are citizens of the earthly kingdom and that civic order was a
vital necessity for human society but he saw political authority as legitimised
only as a matter of status and not by nature.12 For Augustine, membership
in the city of God was not meant as an escape from temporal responsibility
nor as a devaluation of the temporal world. Christians have a responsibility
to contribute to the stability of the earthly peace which is the government’s

6  Markus, Saeculum, pp. 74–84.

7  Clark, Augustine, pp. 101–102.
8  Markus, Saeculum, p. x.
9  Ibid., p. 88.
10  Clark, Augustine, pp. 99–104.
11  Markus, Saeculum, pp. 88–89.
12  Elshtain, ‘Augustine’, p. 39.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 43

direct concern.13 Augustine adopted an image of the social order which sprang
from a strong sense conflicting purposes, of uncertainties of direction, and of
divergent values in society. His justification for waging war or the enforcement
of order was based on the notion that those who hold political responsibility
are compelled by necessity and that coercive power is inseparable from the
social existence of fallen human beings.14
Rowan Williams argues that Augustine is not simply seeking the appropriate
relationship between the two cities because he understood that the spiritual
is the authentically political. Instead, Augustine is engaged in a redefinition
of the public itself, designed to show that it is life outside the Christian com-
munity which fails to be truly public, authentically political. For Williams, the
Augustinian idea of commonwealth is an ‘association of men united by a com-
mon sense of right’. ‘[W]here there is no jus towards God, there is no common
sense of what is due to human beings, no juris consensus’.15 Williams sees that
the essence of the City of God as love and longing for goodness, in contrast to
Rome which seeks glory and is therefore in danger of vision without transfor-
mation. He concludes that Augustine’s reason for condemnation of public life
in the classic world was that it was not public enough. It was incapable of a
stable sense of commonality because of its pervasive implicit elitism, divisive-
ness, and the lack of a common human project.16
The key aspects of Augustine’s contribution to public theology could be sum-
marised in four areas: first, he placed theology in the wider contexts of politics
and society beyond the church as a religious community, matters of faith or the
building of a separate exclusive body. He saw a close connection between the
Christian community and wider politics and the implications of the changing
socio-political situation surrounding the newly formed religious community.
More significantly, he saw that the understanding of the relationship between
sacred and secular, both philosophically and practically is vital for the well-
being of the Christian community as well as the wider society. Though his
political theology is not systematic, he paved the way for open discussion of
Christian theology of public life. Second, Augustine saw, as a theologian of the
time, God’s sovereignty over politics and society and exhibited his confidence
in Christian faith and authority to bring the whole society under the authority
of the church, which was the only earthly institution ordained of God. Though

13  Clark, Augustine, pp. 95–103.

14  Markus, Saeculum, pp. xii–xiii.
15  Rowan Williams, ‘Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God ’, Milltown Studies,
19/20 (1987), 55–72 at 56–59.
16  Ibid., 62–68.
44 Kim

this confidence was based on his understanding of the sacred being higher than
the secular, and is therefore in need of revision, nevertheless, he provided the
rationale and responsibility of the church in its public engagement. Third, he
saw the stability and the order of society as crucial for both sacred and secu-
lar communities and argued that Christians and non-Christians should work
together to establish this. He supported governments and rulers with force to
secure and prevent the destructive power of politics. Fourth, as expressed in
his approach to just war, in seeking justice while maintaining peace, he envis-
aged that the divine rule will constantly interact with the natural order, and
should be the guiding principle for the statecraft. As was shown in his critique
of Roman peace, he believed divine justice would achieve both justice and
peace in a sustainable way for both sacred and secular spheres.

Engaging Public Life in the Theologies of the Reformers

Augustine provided rationale for the engagement of the church in the public
sphere and as the church gained political influence, it became dominant in the
wider realm of the socio-political life of medieval Europe. Although the main
issue the Reformers faced in the sixteenth century was about the Christian
church itself, the interpenetration of secular and spiritual in the sixteenth
century meant that no reformation of religion could take place without the
transformation of public order of the commonwealth, nor could such trans-
formation be institutionalised without the assistance of secular rulers.17 The
doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ is a spiritual matter but it has profound ‘polit-
ical and ecclesiological repercussions’.18 The Reformers, who sought the refor-
mation of the whole of Christendom, realised the limitations to that task, but
radical reformers either took over secular authorities or withdrew from public
life, forming an exclusive congregation. Many of the Reformers accepted what
was known as magisterial reform, which limited the reformation to particular
territories subject to jurisdiction of some secular ruler or magistracy who was
not implacably opposed to the Christian principles. This limited its application
but guaranteed some approximation to protection against disorder.19 Martin

17  Harro Höpfl, ‘Introduction’, in Harro Höpfl, trans. & ed., Luther and Calvin on Secular
Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. vii–xxiii at vii.
18  Andrew Bradstock, ‘The Reformation’ in Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, ed., The
Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 62–75
at p. 62.
19  Höpfl, ‘Introduction’, p. ix.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 45

Luther, as an Augustinian monk, restricted the duty of secular government

to protecting the good and punishing the wicked. Secular authorities were
entrusted with preventing chaos but this could not be done by law alone. Luther
taught that someone should use force against the wicked, but whether the ruler
is benevolent or wicked, that power itself is of divine ordinance.20 Luther chal-
lenged the doctrine of two estates of medieval church authority: temporal and
spiritual, which, rooted in Augustinian theology, understood that the spiritual
estate could intervene in the temporal but not vice versa. Luther’s fundamen-
tal principle of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ meant that all Christians shared
the same status and yet bore different functions. This principle was extended
beyond the realm of the church when Luther expounded the doctrine of the
two kingdoms, which was central to his social thought. While God’s spiritual
government is under the guidance of the word of God and the Holy Spirit,
God’s worldly government is effected through the use of sword and civil law
by secular rulers as they perform a divine role, since God has ordained that
order too. So, unlike the two estates, the two kingdoms existed in parallel. They
also overlapped with each other. In Luther’s view, though good and evil can be
distinguished, it is difficult to isolate them. Good can be ruled by the Spirit but
the evil must be ruled by sword. Luther’s political theology was pragmatic in
line with the political reality of the time as he reinforced political authority by
grounding it in the divine providence.21
It is argued that Luther was no political thinker, he only appealed to the
political powers to achieve his version of reformation of the church.22 John
Calvin on the other hand, provided a new model of religion between the
church and the civil authorities. Although there are limited writings by Calvin
on civil government, his influence on reconciliation between church and state
in Geneva is significant to consider. Calvin was less pragmatic than Luther on
the public engagement of the church with the authorities because he saw that
both institutions were ordained by God to be partners in a common enterprise;
both share a common task but differ in the means of exercising their God- given
mandates. For Calvin, politics was important for the church as he understood
that secular government is divinely instituted, rulers have a responsibility to
God and to those whom they serve, and citizens should be obedient to any and
every form of government.23 Although Calvin saw political action as legitimate

20  Ibid., p. xv.

21  Alister McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
pp. 205–210.
22  Ibid., pp. 205–210.
23  Bradstock, ‘The Reformation’, pp. 71–74.
46 Kim

and a duty, he insisted on the Christian duty of obedience to rulers. Protest

must take the form of supplication, suffering or exile and not rebellion. The
political theology of Calvin was that all rightful authority derived from God,
therefore he legitimised the use of sword or bridle for government discipline.24
Calvin held that the government authorities had the right to coerce whereas
the spiritual authority takes the responsibility of the promotion of virtue. So
magistrates and Christian priests are committed to same cause and differ only
in their sphere of authority. Calvinism was instrumental in effecting the transi-
tion from a medieval notion of worldly order to a modern order ‘founded upon
change’. He offered an ideology of transition which was the doctrine of the
‘fundamental changeability of the existing social order’.25
The peasant leader Thomas Müntzer took a radical approach to the relation-
ship of church and state authority. He believed that true faith should counter-
act false faith and that the secular authority should aid this task. Unlike Luther,
he emphasised the duty of the government authorities towards the people as
not only to maintain peace and order but also to protect and to propagate the
Christian faith in order to establish a new socio-political order. He led a revolu-
tion which involved a radical break away from the state church as well as the
civil authorities.26 At the same time, the radical reformer Ulrich Zwingli’s view
of the relationship between the church and state was that they are not separate
entities but different ways to manage the city (Zurich) from the point of view
of the rule of God. Zwingli understood that the need of government was the
result of sin; that government use of force was necessary; and that government
possesses the authority of God; and he encouraged Christians to take up poli-
tics. Following up Zwingli’s ideas, the Anabaptist movement, which started in
Switzerland, also advocated for social justice and transformation of the church
as it challenged the church to break out from under political authority.27
The key contributions of the Reformers could be described as: first, their
challenge to secular power as well as to the church, which was the very con-
cept of authority itself, both ecclesiastically and politically; second, their con-
tribution to the development of modern democracy through the concept of
the ‘priesthood of all believers’, which brought ‘new and democratic notions
of authority’; and, third, the modern idea of individualism, that individuals
directly relate to God directed by their own conscience, therefore leading to
the idea of challenging the monopoly of politics which is a vital concept of

24  Höpfl, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiii.

25  McGrath, Reformation Thought, pp. 215–217.
26  Bradstock, ‘The Reformation’, pp. 67–68.
27  McGrath, Reformation Thought, pp. 211–214.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 47

public theology.28 However, the Reformers saw involvement in politics and

wider society as less relevant due largely to their understanding that political
authorities are ordained by God and also because of their preoccupation with
the church.

Catholic Social Teaching and the Theology of the Common Good

While the churches in Europe continued to wrestle with church-state relations,

a significant area of theological thought developing in the late nineteenth cen-
tury in the Catholic Church was the relationship with the church and the mar-
ket system. In terms of theology of economic and political life in a national
and global setting, Catholic Social Teaching (CST), which was systematically
articulated in the Catholic Church from 1891, has been immensely influential
in Catholic communities and beyond. At the very heart of its principles is the
concept of the common good.29 In the most comprehensive documentation of
CST, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), the Pontifical
Council for Justice and Peace (PCJP) identified the common good as one of
the three key principles of the church’s social doctrine, along with subsidiarity
and solidarity.30 Furthermore, The PCJP insists on the common good as the
primary goal of society; that it has to be achieved together and that it should be
closely connected to the notion of respect for and integral promotion of fun-
damental rights. It also asserts that the raison d’être of the political authority
is to further the common good and that state must ensure the common good
by keeping the requirements of justice for individuals and groups within the
state.31 In the middle ages and following the Reformation, the church was pre-
occupied with the relationship between political authority and the church. But
today CST is more concerned to address the economic system, which is closely
related to the problem of the poor and the structural issues of economic and
social organisation.

28  See Bradstock, ‘The Reformation’, pp. 62–65.

29  For in-depth discussion on the Catholic Social Teaching, see Charles E. Curran, Catholic
Social Teaching, 1891-Present: A Historical, Theological and Ethical Analysis (Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002); Martin Rhonheimer, The Common Good of
Constitutional Democracy: Essays on Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching
(Washington. D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013).
30  Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
(London: Burns & Oates, 2004), p. 83.
31  Ibid., pp. 84–85.
48 Kim

In his discussion of the common good and Christian ethics, David

Hollenbach acknowledges that there is scepticism about the compatibility of a
shared vision of the good life and the freedom of individuals, especially in US
politics. The very nature of pluralist society is that people do not agree with
each other and a political arrangement of tolerance cannot handle the com-
plexity of conflicting good and justice for each community.32 He sees justice as
a prerequisite for the common good in that the socio-political system cannot
rely on people’s good will and it has to have justice with solidarity towards
the poor and marginalised built in. Hollenbach sees the importance of the
strengthening of ‘commutative justice’ (by which he means the reciprocity in
exchanges among individuals, for example, wage justice, protection of con-
tracts) but he insists that a more comprehensive system of justice is required.33
Although there are various interpretations of the meaning of the common
good,34 there is some consensus among church leaders and theologians: First,
the earlier documents of CST emphasise that the pursuit of the common good
is the purpose of the state or government. Rerum novarum (1891) states the
purpose of the common good as justifying state intervention to help the poor,
while Gaudium et spes (1965) asserts that the political community exists for
that common good.35 Second, although the exact concept and definition of
the ‘common good’ is rather general and vague, in CST the concept highlights
the Catholic approach of rejecting extremes of individualism and collectivism
(or liberal democracy and social democracy), and tries to bring the good of
the individual and the good of community together.36 It could be described as
‘a good that is shared, being the sole property of neither one party nor another’.37
Third, the common good is regarded as a comprehensive means to organise
political life regardless of political orientations. According to Charles Curran,
the development of the concept of the common good in the CST was three-fold:

32  David Hollenbach, The Common Good and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 2002),
pp. 20–22.
33  Ibid., pp. 190–200.
34  For discussion on the development of the concept, see Peter McGrail & Nicholas
Sagovsky, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas Sagovsky and Peter McGrail, eds., Together for the
Common Good: Towards a National Conversation (London: SCM, 2015), pp. xxvi–xxviii.
See also Martin Rhoheimer, ed., The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays
on Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2013); and Dennis P. McCann and Patrick D. Miller, eds.,
In Search of the Common Good (London: T & T Clark, 2005).
35  Rerum novarum (1891); Gaudium et spes (1965).
36  Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, pp. 144–145.
37  McGrail & Sagovsky, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvii–xxx.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 49

first, an emphasis on freedom, equality and the participation of persons as well

as incorporating human rights; second, a distinction between temporal com-
mon good and spiritual common good (including the right to religious free-
dom) as well as between temporal common good and public order; third, CST
stresses global interaction and that its application should be widened beyond
local and national boundaries.38 Fourth, the common good implies a challenge
to the utilitarian approach of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It
also encourages that the principle that no one should be sacrificed for the sake
of the state and for the good of majority. In order to achieve fairness or the
common good, it is envisaged that the politics of consensus be used to reach
a maximum agreement toward the advantage of all, such as in the case of the
rule of law.39 Fifth, seeking the common good requires the parties to pursue
commonality and relationship. This is more than sums of individual benefits,
which is an assumption of welfare state, and more than seeking the goods of
shared culture and intrinsic values which are rooted in human nature.40 Sixth,
the common good has to be understood not as an idea, which can be readily
defined, but rather as a ‘set of responsibilities pertaining to a shared project of
which all are part’. It is not regarded as predetermined but rather conditions
the participation of all for the good of all.41
CST primarily considers the economic order or solidarity with the poor and
interacts with the theological insights from liberation theology. There are prob-
lems of the understanding of the common good, such as the questions of how
to protect individual rights while seeking the common good; of who should
define the common good within a modern plural and secular state; and who
says so, on what grounds and in whose interests.42 Nevertheless, the theology
of common good has provided significant insights for the development of pub-
lic theology. The principle of the CST rests in the dignity or sacredness of the
human person and the social nature of the person. CST has a special empha-
sis on the structures and institutions that bring about a just society and sees
the state as based on creation. In particular CST discusses political order and

38  Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, pp. 156–58.

39  McGrail & Sagovsky, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvii.
40  Anna Rowlands, ‘The language of the Common Good’, in Nicholas Sagovsky and Peter
McGrail, eds., Together for the Common Good: Towards a National Conversation (London:
SCM, 2015), pp. 3–15 at pp. 6–7.
41  Esther Reed, ‘Wealth and Common Good’, in Nicholas Sagovsky and Peter McGrail, eds.,
Together for the Common Good: Towards a National Conversation (London: SCM, 2015),
pp. 49–64 at pp. 58–59.
42  See A.P. d’Emtreves, The Notion of the State (Oxford: OUP, 1967), p. 225.
50 Kim

economic order in modern society. As for the political order that will deliver
these economic benefits, CST sees the role of the state as to intervene to protect
the weak and the poor and the political community as divinely foreordained.
CST holds a positive view of the state that pursues justice, public wellbeing
and personal prosperity and directs people to the common good. However, to
counter both individualist and communist approaches, CST emphasises the
principle of subsidiarity, which means that the state must recognise the pri-
mary importance of the human person and the family, and that social matters
ought to be handled by the lowest competent social authority.43 In the 1980s,
the publication of the two pastoral letters from the US Conference of Bishops,
The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response (1983) and Economic
Justice for All (1986) triggered much discussion within the church and the gen-
eral public on the issues of ‘civil discourse’ and the ways and means to engage
in public life.44

Ecumenical Development of Theology in the Public Sphere in the

Twentieth Century Europe and the USA

In the context of ‘Christian socialism’ in the early twentieth century,

Archbishop William Temple significantly developed the church’s engagement
with public life. His contributions to church’s approach to social welfare were
the most significant. In his most influential book, Christianity and the Social
Order (1942), on the question of church’s involvement in socio-political and
economic issues, he emphasised four things, namely: sympathy for those who
suffer, which ‘Christian heart and conscience cannot ignore’; the educational
influence on the social and economic system; Christian justice; and the ‘duty of
conformity to the “Natural Order” in which is to be found the purpose of God’.
He was particularly concerned about the sufferings caused by bad housing,
malnutrition and unemployment:45 He was adamant that the church needs
to challenge the existing social order and ‘find a social order which provides
employment, steadily and generally . . . Christian sympathy demands this’. He

43  Curren, Catholic Social Teaching, pp. 137–139. See also Chapter 7 of this volume.
44  See W.D. Lindsey, ‘Public Theology as Civil Discourse: What are we talking About?’,
Horizons, 19:1 (1992), 44–69.
45  William Temple, Christianity and the Social Order (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942),
pp. 17–21.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 51

further argued that the ‘Church cannot, without betraying its own trust, omit
criticism of the economic order’.46
Temple then presented his own method of the social engagement of
Christians as twofold: First, the church announces Christian principles and
sees where the existing social order is in conflict with them. Second, it encour-
ages Christians to re-shape the existing order in line with the principles and
for this, ‘judgements of practical expediency are always required’ and also the
‘expert’ to devise the ‘precise means to those ends’. In his ‘derivative’ Christian
social principles, he put forward three key principles: freedom, social fel-
lowship, and service (or the power of sacrifice).47 Temple’s significance for
public theology could be identified in several ways: he provided the church
with the tools for a critical analysis of the whole economic and social order;
he showed the significance of ‘intermediate groupings’—families, churches,
voluntary organisations in between the individual and the state; he affirms the
voice of the weaker sections of society; and he emphasises choice, freedom
and responsibility.48
While Temple was engaged in the socio-economic problems of mid–twen-
tieth-century England and effectively persuaded Christians as well as the gen-
eral public as the head of the Church of England, Reinhold Niebuhr dominated
Christian social thought in the USA. Niebuhr was regarded as a ‘theologian of
public life’ not only because he related Christian theology to the secular age
but also because of his ‘ability to reach a theological interpretation for a wider
audience’.49 The key importance of his approach was that his public discourse
did not require knowledge of theology for the secular audience to listen to it
and respond to its messages. For Niebuhr, ‘theology is to aid the ethical recon-
struction of modern society by forging a religious imagination which sustains
a strong commitment to public life’. He attended to ‘morality and power’ in
political liberation and, influenced by prophetic eschatology and the ethics of
Jesus, he called on Christian realism for the establishment of justice.50

46  Ibid., pp. 21–22.

47  Alan Suggate, William Temple and Christian Social Ethics Today (London: T & T Clark,
1987), p. 34.
48  Paul Wilding, ‘Re-Review: William Temple’s Christianity and Social Order’, pp. 40–49.
49  Larry Rasmussen, ‘Introduction’, in Larry Rasmussen, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of
Public Life (London: Collins, 1989), pp.1–41 at p. 3.
50  Ibid., pp. 17–21. See also Graham Smith, ‘Taking Sides: An Investigation into Reinhold
Niebuhr’s Rise to the Position of Public Intellectual’, International Journal of Public
Theology, 8:2 (2014), 131–57.
52 Kim

In his book, Nature and Destiny of Man (1955), Niebuhr examined two
Christian attitudes to government: first, the government is an ordinance of
God’s and its authority is attributed to God, and second, the authorities are
subject to divine judgement due to their oppression toward poor. He thought
that, although the principle of order and its power prevent anarchy, its power
is not identical with divine power.51 He acknowledged the tension between
prophetic criticism and priestly sanctification towards the state authority, and
believed that Calvinistic thought came close to his understanding of authen-
tic justice as Calvin allowed his followers disobedience, though not resistance,
against authority. Furthermore, Niebuhr argued that later Reformers under-
stood the importance of human action in the formation of government and
the responsibility of human beings to seek justice, and that therefore a triangu-
lar covenant of justice between God, ruler and the people was articulated. He
further presented his case by using John Knox’s argument that justice rather
than mere order and peace was vital in the relationship between authority
and the people. Niebuhr argued that justice should be the criterion for gov-
ernment, and that democratic criticism becomes the instrument of justice.
Furthermore, while there will be always the problem of either tyranny or anar-
chy in politics, we should not seek justice only by human endeavour nor will
we seek to escape from involvement in them, but seek ‘creative possibilities
of justice’.52
While Temple and Niebuhr appealed to a wide audience on the issues of
politics and socio-economic life, Edward Schillebeeckx, a Catholic theologian,
provided his insights through the media to a broad audience in the Netherlands
on Christian praxis for the transformation of the society. He saw that the rela-
tionship between theory and praxis as articulated by the Frankfurt School
was of vital importance in the hermeneutical process of theology because
he understood theology as ‘self-consciousness of a critical praxis’ in the liv-
ing community of believers. The theologian simply interprets critically their
self-consciousness. Praxis, then, is an essential element of this actualising and
liberating interpretation. In this sense theology must be the critical theory (in
a specifically theological manner) of the praxis of faith and the relationship
with praxis forms an inseparable part of doing theology.53 The importance
of Schillebeeckx for public theology could be summarised in four areas: first,
his emphasis on theology as a critical self-consciousness of Christian practice

51  Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 269.
52  Ibid., pp. 270–284.
53  Robert Schreiter, ed., The Schillebeeckx Reader, pp. 118–119.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 53

and the importance of the integral nature of theory and practice; second, his
emphasis on hermeneutics anchored in Scripture, tradition and practical
experience of common life; third, his firm challenge to the secular notion of
the monopoly of public engagement by dominant bodies in the public sphere
and his insistence on Christian contributions to the public discussion and
decision-making in whole spectrum of life in the wider society; and fourth, he
saw change as best brought about by a reforming process rather than a radical
replacement. This reforming process should involve the various parties bring-
ing their own expertise into the debate and contributing to the formation of
policy for the common good, and this in turn will transform the Christian com-
munity as well. The emphasis of Schillebeeckx on the balance between theol-
ogy as hermeneutical enterprise and theology as critical reflection on Christian
praxis is an important tension54 which is relevant to public theology.
On the issue of the separation of the church and state and Christian involve-
ment in the public life, John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian, addressed
primarily Catholics in America. In his widely read book, We Hold These Truths
(1960), which was published in the year when John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic
president, was elected in the USA. Murray presented a Catholic defence of
American constitutionalism and argued that the Catholic community could
participate fully in American public life with religious integrity. His argument
can be summarised thus: First, he argued that the ‘American consensus’ recog-
nises the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual people. It
is based on the tradition of natural law and the principle of consent. He fur-
ther pointed out that, in the US constitution, the state is distinct from society
and limited in its offices toward society and that the freedom of the people
is not libertarianism but a ‘moral and spiritual enterprise’, the freedom to do
what is right.55 Second, because Murray worried that this ‘political freedom is
endangered in its foundations as soon as the universal moral values . . . are no
longer vigorous enough to retrain the passions and shatter the selfish inertia
of men’,56 he emphasised the need for strengthening the ‘public philosophy’
already present in the Declaration of Independence, which is the foundation
of American public life. He regarded this as already compatible with Catholic
faith but, in view of tendencies to the ‘philosophical error of pragmatism’, he

54  Robert Schreiter, ed., The Schillebeeckx Reader (London: Crossroad, 1987).
55  John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: A Catholic Reflections on the American
Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), pp. 28–36.
56  Ibid., p. 37.
54 Kim

argued the need for the Church to work with society to establish a ‘new moral
act of purpose and a new act of intellectual affirmation’.57
Temple and Niebuhr were effective in their engagement with public life by
presenting insights and interpreting wisdom from Christian theology and faith
in a secular age. They therefore paved the way for Protestant theologians to be
actively involved in wider issues without on the one hand bringing exclusively
Christian notions nor on the other hand shying away from the discussion on
the wider topics as well. As political and secular leaders listen to theological
insights, Schillebeeckx and Murray were engaged in persuading theologians
and Christians more generally to be active in the engagement in the public
life. In the 1950s and 60s, the USA witnessed the rise of the ‘social gospel’ or
‘social Christianity’ for socio-economic justice and the civil rights movement
led by Martin Luther King, Jr., which resulted in the Civil Rights Act, 1964
and 1968. James H. Cone, through his book Black Theology and Black Power
(1969) and other writings, provided the ground work for ‘black liberation theol-
ogy’ and made a lasting impact on the church and wider public.58 In Europe,
in the post-World War II context, there was the development of political
theology, articulated by Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann and Dorothee
Solle. Interacting with the Frankfurt School of critical theory as well as with
Latin American liberation theology, they made significant progress on the
relationship between Christian theology, social ethics and politics in modern
European contexts.59
Inspired by the above theologians, and responding to the strength of demand
for the socio-political involvement of theology in the late twentieth century,
three scholars contributed the formation of public theology: Martin Marty pre-
sented his understanding of ‘public theology’ or ‘public church’ through his
publication, Public Church (1960);60 the publication of Jürgen Habermas’ influ-
ential book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 in German;
1989, English translation)61 stimulated much debate on the public sphere; and
David Tracy, in his The Analogical Imagination (1981) suggested the three pub-
lics of theology as academy, church and society and argued that there are three

57  Ibid., pp. 79–87.

58  James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997 [1969]).
59  For the relationship between liberation theology, political theology and public theology,
see Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere, pp. 20–25.
60  Martin Marty, Public Church: Mainline-Evangeical-Catholic (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
61  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989; original pub-
lication in German in 1962).
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 55

types of theology corresponding respectively to each public: fundamental the-

ology, systematic theology and practical theology.62 Other theologians such as
David Hollenbach, Richard John Neuhaus, Duncan Forrester, Gavin D’Costa,
Rowan Williams, Max Stackhouse, Linell Cady, Ronald F. Thiemann and David
Ford started to explore the possibility of ‘public theology’ from various per-
spectives and contexts. The most significant recent development for public
theology was the formation of the Global Network for Public Theology (GNPT)
in 2007 under the leadership of Will Storrar.63 The growth of the discipline is
demonstrated by the topics and the articles in International Journal of Public
Theology and also the chapters in this volume. Its expansion of scholarly dis-
cussions in the context of the global South made a significant contribution to
public theology as a theological discourse, and we now will turn our discussion
to this.

Theological Engagement for Seeking a Just Society in the

Global South

Although the leading figures in the developing of public theology mentioned

so far are all from the West, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
there are many examples of the practice of public theology from other conti-
nents in response to challenges such as political oppression, social cohesion
and economic injustice. Here I would like discuss some representative theo-
logical explorations.

Seeking Democracy and Reconciliation in South Africa

As is well known, Christians played key leadership roles in the struggle against
Apartheid and in the peace-making initiatives and the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) which followed it. At the height of the Apartheid oppres-
sion in South Africa, the Kairos document was signed by 156 church leaders
and theologians in the town of Soweto on September 1985: ‘The time has come.
The moment of truth has arrived!’. This is a highly significant document which
challenged not only the Apartheid régime but also the churches in South Africa.
The signatures questioned what they called ‘state theology’, which endorsed

62  David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad, 1981).
63  Other leading members include: Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Elaine Graham, Nico Koopman,
Katie Day, Clive Pearson, Dirkie Smit, Andrew Bradstock, Luke Bretherton, Jolyon Mitchell,
Esther Reed, Rudolf von Sinner, David Tombs, Frits de Lange and Esther McIntosh.
56 Kim

the status quo and instead, they advocated ‘prophetic theology’, which urged
Christians to act to bring hope for the nation. The legacy of this ‘Kairos’ move-
ment continued when the post-Apartheid South African government set up
the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
which made a significant contribution to healing the wounds of the nation.
On the issue of forgiveness and reconciliation, which he saw as the realisation
of ‘God’s dream for humanity’, he reflected on an incident in which how he
was challenged and moved by the confession and plea for forgiveness from his
black fellow Christians made by a leading theologian, and how he and others
accepted that sincere plea for forgiveness at a large ecumenical gathering of
South African churches in 1990. In spite of the shortcomings and limitations
of the Commission, Tutu demonstrated the truth of the Christian message and
translated it into the complexity of socio-political conflicts and deep wounds.
Reflecting on the struggle of democracy in South Africa, John de Gruchy, in
his Christianity and Democracy, distinguishes the democratic system, which is
constitutional principles and procedures, and the democratic vision, which
is the hope for society of equality, freedom and justice. In his view, the demo-
cratic vision in South Africa originated in the message of the prophets of Israel,
including that of Jesus, which is manifested in the reign of God’s shalom.64 In
order to establish a just world order, which he sees as an ultimate vision for
Christianity, de Gruchy argues that the prophetic tradition, which is based
on Israel’s liberation from Egypt, provides the vision for social justice for the
oppressed, poor and other victims of society so that ‘all people are equally
respected as bearers of God’s image’.65 Since knowing God is a relational real-
ity and not stand-alone idea, compassion and mercy are at the very heart of
it and God’s demand for his people is to practice these qualities towards the
vulnerable in the society. The key issue here is that how a society can provide
a framework for the people to act justly and in what way the political system
meets political vision, to use de Gruchy’s taxonomy.
De Gruchy sees the common good as binding its members together in
mutual accountability and as a process rather than a static set of principles. He
argues that it is a necessary vision of a just social order, which challenges indi-
vidualism and promotes the welfare and fulfilment of society as a whole. He
insists that the doctrine of the common good will provide an important chal-
lenge to the possessive individualism which lies at the heart of liberal demo-
cratic capitalism, and to the sacrifice of human rights by social collectivism. He

64  John de Gruchy, Christianity and Democracy: A Theology for a Just World Order (Cambridge:
CUP, 1995), p. 8.
65  Ibid., p. 11.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 57

points out that the relationship between power and powerlessness has always
been a struggle for democratic theory and that the church’s role is important in
keeping those who are in power accountable and at the same time empower-
ing those who are weak to exercise their rights for the good of the whole soci-
ety. He challenges the notion that a democratic system will produce morally
responsible citizens as a matter of course; he rather sees that it is the morally
formed and empowered who are able to make democracy work.66

Searching for a Public Platform between Hindu and Christian

Communities in India
The topic of conversion rose to prominence in Indian Christian theology par-
ticularly during the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Theology of
conversion is a key issue for both Christian and Hindu communities, along
with Dalit theology, which is part of the socio-economic liberation move-
ment, and the theology of inculturation, which emphasises the interaction of
Christian theology with Hindu religions and philosophy. It became clear that
the strength of Hindu opposition to it and the concern of Indian Protestant
theologians was mostly to do with the relationship between the Christian
community and the Hindu community, particularly the question of whether
converts should leave the Hindu community and join the Christian commu-
nity, and what joining the church entailed.67 M.M. Thomas was a prominent
theologian who held a Gandhian political philosophy with a strong social-
ist agenda. He was involved in various world-wide ecumenical movements,
chairing committees and speaking both in the church and in public. Later he
took up direct involvement in politics as governor of the state of Nagaland
for two years. Throughout, his main concern was the relationship between
the Christian community and wider Hindu society in India. Thomas strongly
criticised the ‘minority consciousness’ of the Indian Christian community and
urged Christians to overcome their isolation from the national mainstream
and live for the larger community. The goal of Christian mission, he argued,
should not be to create an exclusive ‘Christian’ culture but an ‘open’ culture.
Thomas developed his thoughts on conversion and raised the question
of the ‘form’ of the Christian community within the human community. He
introduced the concept of the ‘Christ-centred secular fellowship’, a koinonia
which was the ‘manifestation of the new reality of the Kingdom at work in the
world of men in world history’. For Thomas, ‘secular fellowship’ does not mean

66  Ibid., pp. 244–247, 264–267.

67  Sebastian Kim, In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India (Delhi &
Oxford: OUP, 2003).
58 Kim

making the gospel secular. What he intended was not for Christians to lose the
religious or spiritual aspect of the gospel, nor for Christianity to be absorbed
into Hindu religion but for the secularisation of the Christian community in
order to bridge the gap with the wider Hindu community and identify with
Hindus. Secular for him meant the Christian community becoming truly ‘reli-
gious’ without being ‘communal’.68 He insisted that the ‘secular fellowship’ was
the ‘point of contact’ and could be in ‘partnership in the struggle’, and he called
on the church to break the communal structure and build up a new partner-
ship of Christians and non-Christians—the ‘human koinonia’.69
Conversely, M.M. Thomas challenged the wider Hindu community to
expand their public space to include the Christian community for a healthy
and frank discussion for the common good. Thomas wanted to overcome the
problem of the Christian community becoming more and more isolated from
the main community, especially because of the insistence on a radical disconti-
nuity between the gospel and Hindu religion through the means of conversion.
It was this, he believed, which led to the exclusion of Christians by the Hindu
majority as ‘outcastes’, which resulted in the fact that the Christian community
was no longer able to make an impact on Hindu society. Thomas’ suggestion
of ‘human koinonia’ was intended to facilitate open discussion between the
Hindu and Christian communities. Thomas’ ‘secular fellowship’ could provide
a mutual space between Christians and Hindus. Through the permeation of
Christian principles and values, the Church could be more effective in engag-
ing in the wider society. Integral to his thesis are the close relationship between
salvation and humanisation; that the Christian community should be an ‘open
community’ in order to achieve this permeation; that the meeting point would
be the mutually inclusive space of human koinonia or secular fellowship; and
that Christians would achieve this through permeation of gospel values and
principles.70

Public Demonstration for Seeking Justice for the Poor in Latin

America
Liberation theologians took a clear stance on the question of the poor and
marginalised which has been widely accepted by Christians mostly, though

68  
M.M. Thomas, ‘Baptism, the Church and Koinonia’, Religion and Society, XIX:1 (Mar 1972),
69–90 at 88.
69  
M.M. Thomas, “The Struggle for Human Dignity as a Preparation for the Gospel”, National
Council of Churches Review, LXXXVI/9 (Sep 1966), 356–59.
70  
M.M. Thomas, Salvation and Humanisation: Some Critical Issues of the Theology of Mission
in Contemporary India (Madras: CLS, 1971), pp. 4–12.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 59

not exclusively, in the more non-democratic situations. The protagonists of lib-

eration theology took their stand with the poor and marginalised, according to
their understanding of the ‘option for the poor’ demonstrated in the prophetic
tradition in the Hebrew Bible. Liberation theology continued the prophetic tra‑
dition of seeking justice and encouraged a hermeneutics of suspicion that
raised questions of power and vested interest in theology. Liberation reading,
without doubt, has been the most influential development of hermeneutical
methodology in modern biblical and theological studies. It calls on both the
state and society to treat the poor and oppressed, who are victims of a com-
petitive and aggressive market system and of the politics of majoritarianism
in a democracy, in a supportive and preferential way. Liberation theologians
see the ‘problem of minorities’ in a democratic state as mainly an economic
one and call for revolutionary change in the system of capitalism, but this is
major threat to the viability of democracy itself. Liberation theology was for-
mulated in the midst of abusive political power and an unjust economic sys-
tem in which it made clear its stance on the side of the poor and oppressed. It
challenges the economic abuse of the liberal democracy and capitalist market
and has shaped the churches, as was demonstrated in the practical implemen-
tation of base communities in Latin America and socio-political protests in
South Korea.
Because of their work on behalf of the poor and action to reduce the power
of the landowning elite, Catholic priests, nuns and church workers suffered
violent attack and persecution in the militarized societies of 1970s and 80s
Latin America. El Salvador had perhaps the most highly charged atmosphere.
In 1980 Archbishop Óscar Romero (1917–80), an advocate of the poor, was
gunned down while celebrating Mass in his cathedral. In the midst of increas-
ing violence, Archbishop Romero sent his ‘fourth pastoral letter’ in which he on
the one hand condemned ‘structural violence’ and the ‘arbitrary and repressive
violence of the state’ and on the other hand endorsed ‘violence of legitimate
defence’ against unjust aggression. He made his position clear: the ‘church
is peaceful, but not passive’.71 Romero was regarded as a ‘humble, gentle and
straightforward man’ but through his actions, he became an ‘icon, a symbol of
holiness, a source of hope for the poor and oppressed’.72 He interpreted the
true meaning of conversion as converting oneself toward the poor and argued

71  Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), pp. 144–45.
72  Julian Filochowski, ‘Oscar Romero, Bishop-Martyr and Model of Church’, in Austen
Ivereigh, ed., Unfinished Journey: The Church 40 Years after Vatican II (New York: Con­
tinnum, 2003), pp. 273–6.
60 Kim

that ‘the face of the Christ is in the poor who ask the church for their voice to
be heard’ and the church is persecuted as it tries to ‘incarnate itself in the inter-
est of the poor’.73 He often mentioned his concern for the poor in his teaching
and in all his four pastoral letters. He called for the ‘conversion to the poor’
and emphasized Christ’s preference for the poor, very much in the language
of the Latin American Bishops’ Conferences in Medellín and Puebla which are
regarded as the foundations of liberation theology.74
The theologians in South Africa, India and Latin America mentioned above
represent how theology can be addressed to the struggle against political
oppression, and for social integration and economic injustice. These are on-
going problems, in which contemporary public theologians and insights from
other continents are vital for a mature endeavour.

Furthering Public Theology as a Theological Discourse

I have discussed the developments of public theology by examining some of the

key public theologians and schools of thought. I have shown that, although
the term public theology is relatively new, the concept of the engagement
of theology in the public sphere has been developed throughout the history of
Christian church; that whereas the issue of the relationship and the nature
of politics and the church was the dominant concern for public theology dur-
ing the medieval period and the Reformation, the issues were extended to
economics during the articulation of the Catholic Social Teaching; and that in
recent years, along with the establishment of public theology as a theological
discourse, the scope and methodology of public theology expanded to interact
with a range of contemporary public issues.
It is interesting to observe different themes and approaches in the con-
temporary writings of public theology published in the International Journal
of Public Theology.75 In terms of the content of the articles, according to key-
words of each article provided by authors, the most frequently used terms are
(including their various derivative forms): ‘justice’, ‘ethics’, ‘urban’, ‘feminism’,
‘liberation’, ‘climate change’ and ‘community’. Although identifying important
themes and topics in this selection of key words could be artificial and also

73  Marie Dennis, Renny Golden and Scott Wright, Oscar Romero: Reflections on His Life and
Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), pp. 28–35.
74  Romero, Voice of the Voiceless, pp. 68–71.
75  This analysis is based on the IJPT articles up to issue 7.1, excluding the special issues. See
Sebastian Kim, ‘Editorial’, IJPT, 8:2 (2014), 121–127.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 61

some areas are influenced by the theme of special issues, these keywords indi-
cate some of important terms and concepts being discussed in the field of pub-
lic theology. They also provide us with a basis for discussing some of the areas
that have not been discussed in public theology and that we should be actively
engaging with. In terms of approaches, although most articles overlap them,
we could also analyse the content of the articles in the following ways. First,
there are articles dealing with the theological and theoretical framework for
public theology and the concept of the ‘public sphere’ that engage with sys-
tematic theology and biblical theology. Second are articles examining con-
temporary issues and themes in order to develop an appropriate methodology
for public theology: Third, there are articles discussing particular theologian(s)
or public figures in order to trace their relevance to develop public theol-
ogy: A fourth category of articles are situated in the interplay between the-
ory and practice, between theology and the church and practical theological
disciplines: Fifth, there are articles that examine particular issues in differ-
ing socio-political contexts in order to develop methodologies for contextual
public theology. As I have mentioned, the five categories are not mutually
exclusive—rarely does an article discuss only public theology in a particular
context—often authors interact with various issues, key figures, and theologi-
cal discourses.
The strength of public theology lies in its diversity of approaches and
engagement with a variety of issues; this results in a range of methodolo-
gies for engagement with church, academy and wider society.76 However, it
seems we are in need of a more systematic approach in order to continue the
endeavour of public theology and its methodology. First, the concept of ‘pub-
lic’ in biblical, historical and ecclesiastical perspective and the rationale for,
and meaning of, ‘public theology’ from the perspective of systematic theology
would strengthen the platform for engagement with other theologians. The
various workings of ‘public’ in contemporary society have been conceptual-
ised in several ways: church, academy and society (Tracy); the religious, politi-
cal, academic and economic public spheres (Stackhouse); the political sphere,
the economic sphere, civil society and public opinion (Smit); the institutional
public, a constructed public and a personal public (Elliot); and the state, mar-
ket, media, religious communities, academies and civil society (Kim).77 The
conceptualisation of these realms or main bodies in the public sphere needs
to be further developed in order for meaningful engagement with systematic

76  Some strengths and weaknesses of public theology see Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere,
pp. 20–26.
77  See Ibid., pp. 10–14, 19–20.
62 Kim

theology, and each sphere has to be examined using the expertise of different
academic disciplines.
Second, there needs to be more active engagement with various academic
disciplines as well as different bodies interacting in the public sphere beyond
the boundaries of theology or Christian community for the pursuit of the com-
mon good. Jürgen Moltmann argues that theology must publicly maintain
the universal concerns of God’s coming kingdom in the mode of ‘public, criti-
cal and prophetic’ by presenting ‘its reflections as a reasoned position’.78 The
‘interactive pluralism’ advocated by Rowan Williams in his lecture in 2008 has
two dimensions of mutual accountability: one explicit and one implicit. On
the one hand, it calls for the acknowledgement of the potential contributions
of religious communities, the obligation on the state to provide this possibil-
ity in the public sphere and the challenge to the state’s holding the monopoly
over the conduct of the law. On the other hand, it brings religious communities
into the public discussion. Interactive pluralism helps religious communities
to be more open for scrutiny of the public and hence encourages them to inte-
grate into the wider society. This should be welcomed as the two dimensions
would mutually benefit both religious communities and the wider society.
Williams is challenging both the secular state for monopolising public discus-
sions and the religious communities for their tendency to exclusive approaches
to matters relating to wider society. Charles Taylor, in his book Secular Age,
identifies the key characteristic of a secular society is that it has moved ‘from
a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to a context
where having faith is one human possibility among others and that belief in
God [or Allah] is no longer axiomatic’ and he suggests the creation of a public
sphere where communities meet to discuss common interests on the principle
of intercommunicating and that this social imaginary is the key to developing
modern society.79
Third, as a Christian theology, public theology needs to draw its resources
from the Scripture as well as from other religious and secular sources, and it
seems to me that the concept of wisdom in the Bible could be a vital method-
ological tool. In recent years, the use of scriptural wisdom has been promoted
and this seems provide a possible approach for public theology.80 The wisdom
tradition is the result of practical and pragmatic advice from sages, which is

78  Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology (London:
SCM Press, 1999), pp. 5–23.
79  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard: Harvard UP, 2007).
80  David Ford, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: CUP, 2007),
pp. 1–13.
Public Theology In The History Of Christianity 63

grounded in God and his presence in its foundation but is not limited to it in its
scope and application. In other words, it covers both religious and wider societ-
ies on the matter of both sacred and secular issues and concerns. The theoreti-
cal mode and sources of enquiry are from living conduct and experiences and
the results are also open to scrutiny from a wider readership. The investigation
is not closed when the findings are written, but rather they form the begin-
ning of further investigation as the pursuit of wisdom is an on-going process. It
tends to seek common knowledge of shared experience and is also open to les-
sons from various sources, therefore it can easily understood and implemented
in the daily lives of the wider public regardless of differences of faith, commu-
nity and nation.81 These characteristics of wisdom in the Scriptures provide an
important insight for our search for an appropriate methodology for theologi-
cal engagement in the public sphere in contemporary society.
Fourth, justice and the common good, which are recurring themes in the
development of public theology, and support for minorities, the poor, margin-
alised and voiceless need priority. Freedom, equality, and the rule of law are
some key aspirations for the modern nation-state, which enable human soci-
ety to flourish, but society must also deal with the ‘problem of minorities’ and
this is not just a matter of tolerance, compassion or charity from the majority
or from those who have authority, wealth and power, but the system has to
provide for the ‘least of these’. As Hollenbach convincingly argues, ‘the choice
today is not between freedom and community, but between a society based
on reciprocal respect and solidarity and a society that leaves many people
behind’, and this choice will have a ‘powerful effect on the well-being of us all’.82
Public theology has been articulated throughout church history as Christian
theologians have expressed their ‘commitment to relate private faith to public
order’,83 as we have seen above, but it also requires critical assessment from
within theological circles in order to continue in its endeavour to bring God’s
presence into the public sphere for the common good.

81  See Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol 2 (London: SCM, 1965), 418–434;
Wisdom in Israel (London: SCM, 1972), pp. 74–81, 289–307.
82  Hollenbach, The Common Good, p. 244.
83  Martin Marty, Public Church: Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic (New York: Crossroad, 1981),
p. 98.
64 Kim

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 CHAPTER 3

Does it Matter?
On Whether there is Method in the Madness

Dirk J. Smit

Method in the Madness?

There is hardly any agreement on what constitutes public theology—but does

it matter? Those who claim to pursue public theology have widely different
views on what they are doing. Many who seemingly engage in doing public
theology never use the term at all—and some deliberately choose not to. Those
who critique the notion hardly share any consensus on what they are reject-
ing. Opinions differ. What should be included as public theology? What does
not qualify as public theology? Who is actually doing public theology—where,
and how? Confusion seems to abound. But does it matter? Does it matter that
this growing field, already widespread and popular, has not (yet) developed a
definite and normative methodology? Or is there after all some method in the
madness?1
These questions are not new either. In South Africa, the late theologian,
ecumenical figure and public intellectual Russel Botman already during the
1990s described the state of the country’s public theologies (in the plural) as
one in which they found themselves in what he called ‘a pre-paradigmatic
mode’ in his still helpful and instructive essay called ‘Theology after Apartheid:
Paradigms and Progress in South African Public Theologies.’2 He meant that
these diverse and often competing theologies, all responding to the shifting
political, cultural and economic realities of the time, were all searching, fol-
lowing different images, pursuing different metaphors, making different pro-
posals, holding conflicting viewpoints, and raising new questions.

1  Even the notion of public theology developed according to different narratives in different
contexts. For an account of six such narratives, see my account in ‘The Paradigm of Public
Theology—Origins and Development’, in H. Bedford-Strohm, F. Höhne and T. Reitmeier, eds,
Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 11–24.
2  Russel Botman, ‘Theology after Apartheid: Paradigms and Progress in South African Public
Theologies’, in Wallace M. Alston Jr., ed, Theology in the Service of the Church (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 36–52.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_005

68 Smit

For him, there was enough commonality in what these theologies were all
attempting to do in order to describe them as public theologies—in a broad
and vague use of the word—but not enough which they shared in order to be
able to describe them (yet) as representing a new paradigm of doing theology,
as a distinct form of public theology—in a particular and precise use of the
word—that would both define their own distinct methodology and norma-
tively distinguish them from other forms of doing theology. For him, public
theology was not (yet) a paradigm in the singular: a new form of doing theol-
ogy, a new methodology, describing the state of the art, the rules to be fol-
lowed, the method to use, the best practices known and available.
Of course, paradigm may also be used in a different, almost contradictory
way, namely to refer to classic examples, to the specific, the particular and the
contextual, to concrete examples and representative figures in their unique-
ness, even their strangeness.3 Paradigms are then seen as the paradigmatic,
as instructive examples from whose specificity and singularity one cannot
deduce general rules or methods. Perhaps this is the sense in which the term
public theology first came to the fore in the North American discourse, when
it described the very different roles of public figures, like Martin Luther King Jr
and Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, when it referred to theologians and their
public contributions rather than to a kind of theology? Perhaps this was also
the sense in which theology became public in South Africa, in the lives of peo-
ple like Desmond Tutu, Manas Buthelezi, Beyers Naudé, Allan Boesak, Frank
Chikane, Tinyiko Maluleke, and Denise Ackermann4—even if no one of them
used the expression to describe their own life and work?5 Perhaps this is the
meaning intended by Will Storrar, now from the Center of Theological Inquiry
in Princeton—who initially envisioned and then organised and co-founded
the Global Network for Public Theology—when he described reflection on

3  See for example Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, translated by Luca
di Santo and Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009).
4  For the ways in which several of these theologians see and play their roles in different spheres
of public life, see my essay ‘Morality and Politics—Secular or Sacred? Calvinist Traditions
and Resources in Conflict in Recent South African Experiences’, in R.R. Vosloo, ed, Essays on
Being Reformed. Collected Essays 3 (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2009), pp. 513–549.
5  On the occasion of the celebration of Beyers Naudé’s centenary, on 5 May 2015 at the Beyers
Naudé Center for Public Theology in Stellenbosch, his friend of many years and leading
South African feminist theologian Denise Ackermann reflected on the question whether he
was a public theologian and came to a very hesitant and ambiguous conclusion. He would
probably also have rejected the use of the term, she says. See her ‘Beyers Naudé: Public
Theologian?’, unpublished paper.
Does it Matter ? 69

public theology as naming of parts, gathering fragments, and joining strings

on a pearl?6
In this sense, it is tempting to describe the life and work of Russel Botman
himself as one such paradigm of public theology from the South African expe-
rience. Over many years he developed his own ‘theology of transformation’,
building on the intuitions of his earlier years and doctoral work in which he
searched to link discipleship and citizenship. He pursued this theology of
transformation as local minister and ecumenical figure (from being impris-
oned without trial under the security laws of the apartheid state to serving
as president of the South African Council of Churches), as pastoral theolo-
gian and public intellectual (serving as professor, ethicist, research fellow
and dean), and as university rector and vice-chancellor of the University of
Stellenbosch (as well as director of HESA, the body for Higher Education in
South Africa, and as vice-president of the Association of African Universities).
During these years he envisaged and then founded the Beyers Naudé Center
for Public Theology at Stellenbosch and contributed to the growing accep-
tance and spread of the term. However, he never thought or suggested that
his own way of doing theology of transformation was the only way and
that there was only one normative methodology for public theology to fol-
low. On the contrary, he consistently developed even in his own thought and
practice, which became very clear when he became rector and no longer used
theological language as such in his public discourses, although he certainly
remained true to his own theological logic.7
Following the same usage of the term paradigm, however, it may also be
instructive to learn from the life and work of another well-known paradigm
of public theology today, namely the present Chairperson of the Board of the
Evangelical Church in Germany, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, the Evangelical
Bishop of Bavaria and an extraordinary professor in the Faculty of Theology
in Stellenbosch. He has played an influential role in the international develop-
ment of the field of public theology. He has reflected intensely and written
extensively on the notion and nature of public theology (and even argues for

6  William F. Storrar, ‘The Naming of Parts: Doing Public Theology in a Global Era,” IJPT 5:1
(2011), 23–43.
7  See Dirk J. Smit, ‘Making History for the Coming Generation’—On the Theological Logic of
Russel Botman’s Commitment to Transformation, The First Russel Botman Memorial Lecture,
19 October 2015 (Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University, 2015); also forthcoming in the
Stellenbosch Theological Journal. For Botman’s own thoughts in this regard, see already his
doctoral dissertation, Discipleship as Transformation? Towards a Theology of Transformation
(Bellville: University of the Western Cape, unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1994).
70 Smit

public theology as a new paradigm in the narrower and stronger sense of the
word, namely as a distinct kind of theology with its own methodology). As
theologian and ethicist (in the academy), as bishop and office-bearer (in the
church) and as well-known public and political role-player (in the public media
and in national and international politics) he has been a paradigmatic exam-
ple of doing public theology in all three the spheres so commonly accepted
today as the dominant publics in which theologians (should) function.8
He has published prolifically on public theology.9 Both his doctoral dis-
sertation and his later habilitation thesis were published in a well-known
German academic series called Öffentliche Theologie (Public Theology, by Chr.
Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, respectively in 1993 and 1999).10 Together
with Wolfgang Huber he has been serving since 2009 as editor of this series on
Öffentliche Theologie (published now by the Evangelische Verlagshaus, Leipzig).
He is also the founder and co-editor of a more recent series called Theology
in the Public Square/Theologie in der Öffentlichkeit (Lit Verlag, Münster, since
2010). As professor in Bamberg he founded the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Research
Center for Public Theology. Shortly after he became bishop, a collection of
his essays on public theology was published with the title Position beziehen.
Perspektiven einer öffentliche Theologie, in translation, Taking Position. Public
Theological Perspectives.11 In the foreword he explained that public theology
takes place between the pulpit, the professorial podium and the prime minis-
ter’s office (in German, zwischen Kanzel, Katheder und Kanzleramt). This is also
biographically true of himself, and therefore his views may serve as paradigm
of one important contemporary form of both the doing and the reflective self-
understanding of public theology.
He played for example an active role in public life in Germany, but also
broader in Europe, during the recent arrivals of so many refugees onto the
continent. Not only were his own actions visible and clear expressions of pub-
lic witness, but his positions were also articulate and reflective, informed and

8  Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square. Church, Academy and Nation (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005).
9  See his extensive bibliography, including a large number of contributions on
public theology, at http://landesbischof.bayern-evangelisch.de/downloads/2015-10-30
-veroeffentlichungen-bedford-strohm.pdf.
10  Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Vorrang für die Armen. Auf dem Weg zu einer theologischen
Theorie der Gerechtigkeit (Gütersloh: Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlag, 1993); Heinrich Bedford-
Strohm, Gemeinschaft aus kommunikativer Freiheit. Sozialer Zusammenhalt in der mod-
ernen Gesellschaft. Ein theologischer Beitrag (Gütersloh: Kaiser, Gütersloher Verlag, 1999).
11  Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Position beziehen. Perspektiven einer öffentliche Theologie
(München: Claudius Verlag, 2012).
Does it Matter ? 71

rooted in his own convictions as outspoken public theologian and scholar over
many years. During advent 2015 he published for example an extended con-
tribution on these controversial public issues in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung on ‘Responsibility based on Christian Conviction’.12
Bedford-Strohm concludes his small book with a paragraph claiming that
six characteristics should be kept in mind in order to determine the content
and purpose of the notion of public theology. These are its biblical-theologi-
cal profile, its bilingual ability, its inter-disciplinary character, its competency
to provide political direction, its prophetic quality, and its inter-contextual
nature.13 Since many other well-known authors also use these—or closely
related—aspects, albeit in different combinations and with different interpre-
tations and emphases, in order to describe the issues at stake in public theo-
logical methodology, his overview may hopefully serve as a brief but helpful
and paradigmatic introduction to the insights, the questions and the method-
ological debates in this new and growing field.14

Biblical-Theological

Bedford-Strohm’s first claim is that public theology should demonstrate a

clearly biblical and theological profile. This aspect underlines the “theology”
of public theology. Public theology should be recognizable as theology. The
theological content and contribution, and indeed the biblical background
and logic, should be credible and persuasive, not merely religious window-
dressing. Theology and indeed the Bible should not superficially be used as
religious and ideological support and justification, but the evangelical profile
of the contributions and activities should be convincing and demonstrable.
For him, this is possible—and indeed self-evident—because he is con-
vinced that the gospel itself has a public thrust and the church accordingly
has a worthwhile contribution to make in public life. He sometimes calls it ‘the

12  Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, ‘Verantwortung aus christlicher Gesinnung’, published

18.12.2015, at http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/die-gegenwart/fluechtlingskrise-verant
wortung-aus-christlicher-gesinnung-13951414.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2.
13  Bedford-Strohm, Position beziehen, p. 122.
14  See for example the influential descriptions of characteristics by E. Harold Breitenberg Jr,
‘To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand Up?’, Journal of the Society of
Christian Ethics 23:2 (2003), 55–96; and his ‘What is Public Theology?’, in D.K. Hainsworth
and S.R. Paeth, eds, Public Theology for a Global Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010),
pp. 3–17.
72 Smit

inherent public character’ of these religious traditions. The church and there-
fore theology is called and indeed challenged by its own nature and message to
care about and to be involved in the world.15
In many of his own writings, from scholarly treatises to academic papers
to church statements to public speeches to sermons and open letters he is
therefore engaged in spelling out these evangelical, biblical and theological
claims and implications inherent to his understanding of the gospel and of the
Christian faith. Public theology, for him, belongs to the heart of the Bible and
of being church, including its theological reflection. His former colleague in
Bamberg, Eva Harasta, can therefore define (this paradigm of) public theology
as ‘the academic form of proclaiming the gospel’.16
For many who claim to be engaged in doing public theology these kinds of
claims are indeed of great importance, but they raise at the same time complex
and contested issues. Contemporary examples abound, both of attempts to
read the Bible with a view to public life and public issues, as well as of attempts
to spell out the public implications of doctrine and liturgy, of faith and
worship.17 Not all these attempts are of course explicitly described as public
theology, but many are indeed regarded as public theology—and many who
are not identified as public theology are certainly regarded as public theology
by others who do prefer to use the expression.18
At the same time, these attempts are deeply contested and they raise dif-
ficult questions—from hermeneutical issues about the responsible and legiti-
mate use of the Bible to systematic-theological issues about the adequate

15  Bedford-Strohm, Position beziehen, pp. 91–96, on the role of the church as compass for
society.
16  Eva Harasta, ‘Glocal Proclamation? An Excursion into “Public Dogmatics” inspired by
Jürgen Moltmann and Heinrich Bedford-Strohm’, in Bedford-Strohm, F. Höhne and
T. Reitmeier, eds, Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology, pp. 291–299.
17  One well-known example would be the work of Nico Koopman, the Director of the Beyers
Naudé Center for Public Theology and the present chairperson of the Global Network
for Public Theology. In his inaugural lecture, for example, he argued for public theology
from a Trinitarian perspective, see his ‘For God So Loved the World . . . Some Contours for
Public Theology in South Africa’ (Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University, Inaugural Address,
March 2009). In a more recent publication he drew implications for public life from an
exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, see his Cries for a Humane Life. Reflections on the Lord’s
Prayer (Wellington: Biblecor, 2014).
18  To mention only two randomly chosen examples, namely climate change and torture,
consider for example E.M. Conradie, S. Bergmann, C. Deane-Drummond and D. Edwards,
eds, Christian Faith and the Earth (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2015) and George
Hunsinger, ed, Torture is a Moral Issue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
Does it Matter ? 73

interpretation and application of Christian doctrine in general and specific

doctrines in particular. One only has to read through all the issues of the first
nine years of the International Journal of Public Theology, founded and edited
by Sebastian Kim since 2007, and sponsored by the Global Network of Public
Theology, to which more than fifty institutes and centres from all over the
world belong. It already gives an impressive picture how scholars from a whole
range of theological disciplines, following the methodologies of their own
particular disciplines and reflecting all the well-known internal debates and
contestations within these disciplines, are participating in these attempts to
uncover and demonstrate the contemporary public relevance of these classical
documents, these historical traditions and these convictions of faith.
Against this background it is also understandable why there is such a lack of
clarity and so much confusion about the question exactly what public theol-
ogy is—what it includes and what it excludes. It is not surprising that so many
of the contributions in the IJPT—as well as so many contributions in the pres-
ent volume—attempt to provide their own descriptions of public theology, in
this process justifying their own methodologies, and also distinguishing (their)
public theology from similar, related and perhaps even the same endeavours,
like social ethics, civil religion, political ethics, and political theology.19 For
some, these distinctions are very important. For others, they are irrelevant. For
some, public theology may be a sub-discipline of social ethics, while for others
public theology is an umbrella term covering all possible attempts to relate text
and tradition to public life.
It is therefore also not surprising that many are deeply critical of the notion
of public theology because they find it too innocent and harmless. In South
Africa, for example, this is certainly true. Several of the leading theological
voices—in public life—are sceptical of the term public theology or they even
outright reject it. This would include major theological figures like Tinyiko
Maluleke20 and Denise Ackermann.21 Many find the term either confusing
and misleading or outright dangerous and to be rejected, because, according

19  See for example Max Stackhouse, ‘Civil Religion, Political Theology and Public Theology.
What’s the Difference?’, Journal of Political Theology 5 (2004), 275–293.
20  See for example Tinyiko S. Maluleke, ‘The Elusive Public of Public Theology’, IJPT, 5:1
(2011), 79–89.
21  It is for example interesting that Denise Ackermann has on different occasions been
described as a public theologian although she does not find the expression helpful herself,
even to describe the work of others; see for example Ronel Bezuidenhout, Re-imagining
Life: A Reflection on ‘Public Theology’ in the Work of Linell Cady, Denise Ackermann, and
Etienne de Villliers (Port Elizabeth: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, unpublished
doctoral dissertation, 2007).
74 Smit

to them, it misconstrues the proper relationship between biblical-theological

message and contemporary public life in South Africa. This form of criticism
often stems from the circles of those who found their own way of engaging pub-
lic life in forms of resistance and struggle, like the traditions of anti-apartheid
theologies, black theologies, African theologies, liberation theologies, pro-
phetic theologies, contextual theologies, kairos theologies, and feminist the-
ologies in South Africa (but also in other contexts). They do not want their
theological traditions to be subsumed and thereby robbed of their power
under broader and more general categories like public theology.22
Serious criticism, however, is particularly expressed against the very sug-
gestion that this is the first aspect of public theology, since this may create
the impression that public theology somehow begins with the Bible and with
theology, while, for many, the opposite is rather true, namely that public theol-
ogy is and should be responding to issues raised by public life itself. For many
the methodological move should not be seen as one from text (and tradition)
to context, but much rather as one from context back to text (and tradition).
Many in the traditions of the well-known see-judge-act methodologies are
convinced that the first step in theological reflection should be a different one
and that any possible biblical-theological perspective can only function at a
different stage in the theological process.
In fact, many are not equally convinced about the need and even the pos-
sibility to move back to the text (and tradition) at all. This may be because they
do not fully share Bedford-Strohm’s convictions about the positive inherent
public character of text and tradition. It may however also be because in their
own circumstances it is not possible to take the biblical-theological profile and
the public presence and role of the church for granted in the way that he seems
able to do. This may be because the plausibility structures in other societies
differ from public life in contemporary Germany. In many other contexts it has
perhaps never been possible or it is at least no longer possible—for complex,
diverse and even radically different reasons—to present a biblical-theological
profile in public life and to expect others to take that seriously. The question
how much religion the public sphere (in different contexts) can tolerate there-
fore seems to reappear again and again.
It may indeed be possible that Bedford-Strohm’s own paradigm is deeply
dependent on the particular nature of the contemporary German society—on
the privileged position of the Christian community and tradition, on the insti-
tutional and historical roles of the church, on the public respect for the gospel

22  See for example the very instructive contribution in this volume by Esther McIntosh on
public theology and racial, gender and sexual inequalities.
Does it Matter ? 75

and those representing those values and traditions, like bishops, on the discur-
sive, argumentative formation of public opinion in Germany, and many other
factors. To the extent that this is true, it will in fact demonstrate and underline
a further aspect of all public theology, namely its inherently contextual nature.
Public theology can by definition only be practised as public theologies in
the plural.

Multilingual

To be fair, Bedford-Strohm is aware of and sensitive to the need to take the

plausibility structures of each public very seriously. In fact, his claim is not that
the biblical-theological profile is first in the sense of most important, since it
inevitably goes hand in hand with what he describes as the second aspect.
It would also be possible to switch these two around in one’s description of
public theology, since they are two sides of the same coin and presuppose one
another. The one does not exist without the other.
The second aspect is namely the ‘public’ nature of public theology. Public
theology differs from say church theology precisely in this sense that it plays
out in public, it is performed, done, practised in the world, in the open, in soci-
ety, in communities, in the—controversial—“public sphere”, in life in general,
where all and everyone takes part and should be able to take part. It is not the
talk of insiders—within the safe and secluded spaces of the church’s worship;
the theological faculty’s isolation; the publications of professional theological
societies—talking only to themselves and to the like-minded, but it is talking
in public about life in public to all others sharing this public space, from the
streets to the market to the public media.
For Bedford-Strohm—as bishop, as professor, but also as political role-
player—this is of extreme importance. He often expresses this conviction by
saying that public theology should be bilingual, but since the public sphere
itself is so complex and multifaceted, it is perhaps better to extend the meta-
phor to multilingual. It is not as if church (and theology) stands over against
the world (in the form of the public sphere) speaking two different languages,
although this perception still dominates and distorts much of the discussion
about public theology and about the role of the church and the witness of
faith. The reality is much rather that the church (in all its diverse social forms,
including believers, congregations, denominations, ecumenical structures,
office-bearers, theologians) participates in the many, diverse and complex,
aspects and spheres, structures and institutions of public life and speaks many
different languages at the same time, like all others.
76 Smit

Somehow, the public church and public theology speak these languages
with their own particular accents, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics—and
here many challenges and questions arise, albeit in different contexts and cir-
cumstances in many different ways. The question is how much translation of
the biblical-theological content is necessary, and what translation precisely
entails.
Many stress the need to participate in the public discourse and opinion-
formation in secular and pluralist societies in such a way that everyone can
understand and be informed and persuaded and they therefore conclude that
biblical-theological language has no place in such a public discourse. For them,
the translation should be so complete that public theological language carries
no biblical-theological accent any longer, whatever biblical-theological con-
tent there may be should be presented in language acceptable to anyone and
everyone.
Others however argue that it is indeed possible to participate in public dis-
course and opinion-formation in secular and pluralist societies while speak-
ing biblical-theological language, appealing to biblical-theological sources
and resources, and arguing for biblical-theological viewpoints and values. For
them, different communities with their different traditions—including reli-
gious traditions—should engage in public discourse speaking with their own,
distinctive voices, thereby contributing to richer and more complex, better
informed and stronger motivated public visions and convictions.23
At stake is therefore the question what ‘public reasoning’ entails and how
to participate in public reasoning. Again, the answers and opinions often dif-
fer from one historical context to another. What is taken for granted and what
is feasible, what is regarded as possible and seen as completely unacceptable
not only changes over time in a particular society24 but also differs between

23  For an interesting and constructive proposal, see the public-theological reflections on
these issues by Nigel Biggar, Behaving in Public. How to Do Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2011).
24  Addressing the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa in 2009, the political phi-
losopher André du Toit for example gave an instructive interpretation of major shifts that
have taken place in public life in South Africa from the early eighties (the time of the
Belhar Confession) to the mid-90s (the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission)
to today. He turned to what he called ‘perhaps the secular equivalent of a religious ‘con-
fession’: that of having a ‘vocation’ in public life,’ and used Max Weber’s famous lecture
to show how a sense of politics as vocation in the service of a public cause has been
largely replaced by politics as vocation in the sense of career opportunities like any other,
with resulting changes in the moral and social fabric of public life, so that, according
to him, both a confessional statement like Belhar and the public process of truth and
Does it Matter ? 77

communities and societies. This means that forms of public theology that
would be regarded as possible and sometimes even necessary under specific
circumstances would be considered completely impossible and offensive in
other contexts.25
Influential figures in this discussion—about the historic transformations of
the public sphere, the criteria of public reasoning, the complex nature of pub-
licness and the so-called translation of religious language—have changed their
minds over the last years or defended positions that would surprise many.26
A leading voice in these discussions over many years, the Catholic theologian
from Chicago David Tracy, recently concluded his essay on ‘Three Kinds of
Publicness in Public Theology’ in the IJPT by arguing that ‘(t)heologians should
not hesitate to render their most basic theological-ethical-prophetic convic-
tions as genuine public resources for new thought and action, not only for the
public of the church but also for the public of the academy and the public
realm of our principled pluralistic and democratic society’.27 The challenging
question for public theology is how to fulfil this task under deeply divergent
and continuously changing public conditions.

Knowledgeable

This second aspect almost logically calls for a third characteristic of public the-
ology and perhaps the most obvious characteristic, the one that distinguishes

reconciliation would no longer be possible in South Africa today; see his unpublished
paper ‘The Belhar Confession, the TRC and Reconciliation in South Africa: A Historical
and Secular Perspective.’
25  See for example Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, ‘Nurturing Reason. The Public Role of Religion
in the Liberal State’, Nederduits Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif 48 (2007), 25–41.
26  The many recent discussions and disagreements on how to understand and evaluate
Jürgen Habermas’ later work on so-called post-secularism, including his views of the
semantic potential of religious language, of the necessity of ritual forms and of the com-
plexity of the so-called translation processes or crossing of boundaries that are needed,
represent well-known examples. See for example the recent inaugural lecture by Thomas
Wabel at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Research Center for Public Theology in Bamberg, ‘ “Der
Mensch hat zwei Beine und zwei Überzeugungen”. Öffentliche Theologie im Raum sozi-
aler Verkörperung’, still unpublished.
27  See David Tracy, ‘Three Kinds of Publicness in Public Theology’, IJPT, 8:3 (2014), 330–334.
He distinguishes between publicness as dialectical or argumentative reason, publicness
as dialogical or hermeneutical reason, and publicness as meditative or contemplative
reason.
78 Smit

public theology most clearly from other forms of theology. Bedford-Strohm

often describes this as Sachlichkeit, which refers to the competence to speak
with insight and authority, but therefore also as Interdisziplinarität, which
refers to the need for public theology always to speak together with other dis-
ciplines and fields.
This is for example the thrust of his recent open letter in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung. His argument is that the refugee crisis provides a chal-
lenge to bring the passion of an ethics of conviction together with an ethics of
responsibility, with the concrete responsibilities of those who have to discern,
decide, act and carry the responsibility for policies and their implementations.
He explains how those (from the churches) moved by compassion for the
refugees and inspired by strong convictions should take seriously the realities
which those in positions of leadership and responsibility have to consider—
and these are often the same people. Public theology should therefore com-
bine the Biblical orientation and convictions with informed knowledge and
responsibility, he argues in the letter, and then spells out both the (three) evan-
gelical convictions which motivate the churches in the refugee crisis (Biblical
justice and the option for the poor; the universal and inclusive nature of the
Biblical vision; the golden rule and love commandment implying respect for
all other human beings), as well as several very concrete and detailed practi-
cal consequences, in the language of the present public debates in Germany,
so that there can be no misunderstanding about the official positions of the
EKD in these debates. It is clear how his contribution is the result of practical
involvement in real discussions with political and other role-players and real
debates about the real issues at stake.28

28  In a more theoretical first part of the letter, he first construes the dilemma in terms of
Max Weber’s famous distinction in his study of Politics as a Vocation namely between
a Gesinnungsethik—of which he suspected especially Protestant ministers, not caring
about the concrete consequences, only inspired by their principles and convictions—
and a Verantwortungsethik, an approach to ethics which in responsibility takes the
practical and political questions, including those about long-term consequences into
account. Bedford-Strohm argues against both those who are so passionate that they do
not care about the consequences and those who argue that one “cannot do politics with
the Bible”—in German debates a well-known phrase by a former Chancellor, used dur-
ing the time of the peace movement against those who then appealed to the Sermon
on the Mount. According to Bedford-Strohm, Weber in fact argued that both approaches
together are necessary, and that he did not suggest a choice between the two, as many
today seem to think and claim. In a second argument he then engages with what he sees
as the misuse of the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms in the present public debates,
Does it Matter ? 79

Perhaps this—the need for informed knowledge—is the only real criterion
that can be used to describe public theology. It can never simply be believ-
ers and theologians (whether ministers, office-bearers, church commissions,
or theological writings) giving running theological commentary (whether reli-
gious, biblical, doctrinal, or pious) on public affairs and issues, but it always
requires others as well—other scholars, other sources, other insights, other
participants, other perspectives, particularly, other knowledge.
Precisely because public life is so complex and the questions and issues so
varied, this calls for all possible kinds of collaboration. During recent decades
there have been several attempts to distinguish different spheres of public
life and to provide lists of aspects of our common life—for example politics,
the economy, civil society, the public media—in order to make some sense
of the diverse challenges which public theologians discern and attempt to
address.29 The best-known distinctions remain Tracy’s description of the three
spheres of the academy, the church, and society—and many public theolo-
gians have followed him and are using these distinctions—but others, for
example the systematic theologian from Heidelberg, Michael Welker, have cor-
rectly argued that, helpful as this threefold distinction may be, it still provides
only a fairly rough grid and it is therefore in need of much more detail and
further distinctions in order to be really helpful. Each of these three publics
involves so many and complex historical and social forms that each one calls
for much finer rubrics.30
Perhaps the best way to get an impression of these complexities is simply to
look at the variety of themes, issues and questions addressed by public theo-
logians in recent years. A survey of the contents of the nine years of the IJPT is
already instructive in this regard.
It included for example discussions on the public spirit of the times like
globalization, secularism, the post-secular turn, modernity, decolonization,
and empire. It included essays on social themes like urban life, cities as spaces,
urban regeneration, the cyber space, twittering, and religious films. It included

as if Luther would have meant that the gospel has no implications for public and political
life, an interpretation and reception of Luther which Bedford-Strohm rejects.
29  See for example the informative study by Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere
(London: SCM Press, 2011).
30  See for example Michael Welker, ‘Is Theology in Public Discourse Possible Outside
Communities of Faith?’, in L.E. Lego, ed, Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 110–122. In his God the Revealed. Christology (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2013), pp.209–250, especially 244ff, Welker develops these ideas more fully, by
means of the threefold office of Christ.
80 Smit

contributions on the ecology, climate change, carbon markets, environmental

ethics, and the global water crisis.
It included more political themes like power and knowledge, freedom, citi-
zenship, global citizenry, good governance, the common good, social thought
and social teaching, social movements, faith-based organizations, civil solidar-
ity, the state, political ethics, national unification, social integration, liberal
democracy, multi-culturalism, and social networking. It included economic
issues like the market, poverty, economic policy, welfare, prosperity, wealth
and health, financial profits, surplus and lack.
It included more traditional ethical topics like respect, reconciliation, iden-
tity-politics, threatening others, sacrifice, victims, immigration, difference,
the war on terror, indigenous people, sharia law, inter-faith dialogue, ethnic
persecution, forgiveness, nonhuman animals. It included themes related to
being human and human well-being like personhood, aging, intergenerational
justice, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and health care. It included themes like justice,
human rights, dignity, gender justice, restorative justice, satisfying justice, lit-
urgy and justice. It included themes like peace, tolerance, violence, murder,
the Holocaust.
It included feminist issues, abortion, reproductive technologies, intimate
spaces, masculinity. It included essays on the public implications of worship
and music, leadership, spirituality, and the global Pentecostal-Charismatic
spirituality, theological education, and mission. It included contributions on
the public role of presidents (like Obama) and on cricket in the Caribbean as
a theological practice.
In short, there is clearly no common theme in public theology. Public theo-
logians seem to feel free to address almost any theme of public life. In some of
these the biblical-theological profile is unmistakably clear, in others it is more
hidden or almost absent. The common aspect is rather that they all claim to be
informed and knowledgeable about the specific field, which inevitably means
they have to engage with other scholarly disciplines and fields of expertise.
The approach made famous by Richard Niebuhr when he argued that the first
question should always be what is going on captures this methodological char-
acteristic of public theology very well.31
This inter-disciplinary nature often takes the form of real collaboration, for
example in the case of church studies on public issues.32 Study commissions
often consist of members with diverse backgrounds and knowledge. In the

31  See for example the contribution in this volume by Campbell and Zimmerman and the
way they use the Niebuhr question about what is going on.
32  See for example as an interesting example of a public theological document in the name
of one person but representing the shared knowledge of many the Encyclical Letter of the
Does it Matter ? 81

case of Bedford-Strohm, he has had ample experience of such real collabo-

ration not only with scholars from other academic backgrounds and disci-
plines, but indeed with stakeholders and representatives from diverse affected
groups. This has been the case in several academic collaborations on themes
ranging from the economy to civil society to the ecological crisis as well as in
ecumenical commissions and task groups, but especially in church and public
life in his own German context. Even before he was elected as Chairperson of
the Board of the Evangelical Church in Germany, he has namely been serv-
ing on different study commissions dealing with public issues and publishing
discussion documents for public life on issues of public importance. Some of
these include the Commission for Social Affairs, where he was a member of
the group that included for example the highest-ranking politicians, judges,
scholars, trade union leaders, industrialists and other figures representing
important sections of public life. They have for example recently published
discussion documents on economic justice (Gerechte Teilhabe. Befähigung zu
Eigenverantwortung und Solidarität, 2006), on business from an evangelical
perspective (Unternehmerisches Handeln in evangelischer Perspektive, 2008),
on minimum wages (Pro und Contra Mindestlöhne—Gerechtigkeit bei der
Lohngestaltung im Niedriglohnsektor, 2009) and on fairness regarding taxes
(Transparenz und Gerechtigkeit. Aufgaben und Grenzen des Staates bei der
Besteuerung, 2009). He served for example also as chairperson of an ad hoc
commission studying the health sector and publishing a discussion docu-
ment on the role of solidarity in dealing with issues of health (Das Prinzip der
Solidarität steht auf dem Spiel, 2010). As Chairperson of the Evangelical Church,
he recently published together with the Catholic Church in Germany repre-
sented by Kardinal Reinhard Marx a joint study document for discussion and
reception on a just society (Im Dienst an einer gerechten Gesellschaft, October
2015), seventeen years after a similar joint study, then called “For a Future in
Solidarity and Justice (Für eine Zukunft in Solidarität und Gerechtigkeit, 1997).33

Holy Father Pope Francis called Laudato Si’. On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City:
Catholic Truth Society, 2015).
33  In his own publications, this strong awareness has been present from the beginning, for
example in his doctoral work, which involved a detailed engagement with John Rawls
and Robert Nozick’s understandings of justice, as well as his habilitation thesis, which
involved a detailed engagement with the views on community of Ferdinand Tönnies and
Emile Durkheim as well as a whole range of empirical research studies from different
societies at the time, It has remained a characteristic of his work that he is willing to
engage with the best available resources and the most recent studies from relevant fields,
in those cases where he is not involved in direct personal collaboration with experts and
representatives from other backgrounds and spheres.
82 Smit

Public theology is often presented in the form of consultations, conferences

and volumes of essays written by experts from different fields.
This need for informed perspectives often leads to contestation about
inclusion and exclusion. Sometimes the criticism against public theological
approaches is that they are not inclusive enough, and that particular voices,
who also need to enjoy their rightful place in any discourse claiming to be
public, are excluded and ignored. Sometimes the criticism against public theo-
logical approaches is that they are by definition too inclusive, too democratic
and rational and discursive, too concerned with consensus and fairness, that
they in effect silence the voices of those already silenced and oppressed and
excluded, rather than giving them an activist and emancipatory presence. The
need to know what is going on inevitably raises the—contested—question
where to look for the proper answers and to whose stories attention should
be given.

Orientating

This criticism already suggests two further closely related—and again seri-
ously contested—aspects of public theology. Bedford-Strohm describes the
first of these aspects, and therefore the fourth characteristic of his own para-
digm of public theology, as the intention and the ability of public theology to
provide orientation, direction, and even guidance for policy-making and deci-
sions about public life.
For him this is of crucial importance, since it belongs to the calling of
the church and the thrust of the gospel, according to his own understanding.
Church and theology is not merely interested in public life for interest’s sake,
but because it wants to make a difference. Public theology wants to contrib-
ute, to help provide perspective, to help suggest ways forward, to help provide
direction. This is probably the deepest intention behind the title of his volume,
namely Taking Position, making choices, standing for something, providing
direction.
Of course, already if one considers some of those figures who first became
known as public theologians it seems obvious that there are different ways of
speaking in public, of offering guidance and suggesting orientation—which
included leading marches and boycotts like Martin Luther King Jr., giving per-
sonal advice to presidents themselves like Reinhold Niebuhr, and speaking
as the voice of the voiceless for millions like Desmond Tutu. Much attention
is therefore given to the rhetoric of public theology as an integral part of its
methodology. Knowing where to speak and how to speak, understanding who
should speak and to whom to speak, discerning when to speak and with what
Does it Matter ? 83

purpose, style, genre or authority to speak are all crucial questions for the pub-
lic church and for those practising public theology.34
After all, if public theology is truly about participating in the public dis-
course and even taking positions and making a difference and providing ori-
entation and direction, then public theology cannot really happen in scholarly
books and journals and even during academic conferences attended by other
professional theologians. Then public theology should rather take place in pub-
lic places and spaces, where public opinion is indeed formed and even where
public policies are debated and decided. When Bedford-Strohm, together
with many others, were therefore waiting on the train station in München to
publicly welcome the first train with Syrian refugees, that could be seen as an
act of public theology, witnessed by millions of television viewers in many
parts of the world.
This once again leads to very interesting and contested questions. After
all, not everyone doing this—participating in public life and discourse with a
biblical-theological profile with the intention to take sides and to help make a
difference—does that in the name of public theology. On the contrary, many
of those deeply involved in public and political life, in economic discussions
and the eradication of poverty, in debates about health and well-being, in dis-
cussions of public values and civic virtues, in ethical commissions and in the
fields of welfare and education all do that without ever claiming to be public
theologians. Should and may their contributions therefore be interpreted as
public theology, or not?
At the same time, those who participate in these and other ways in public
discourse and public orientation do not speak in the same way, but practice
many different forms of discourse and rhetoric. There is clearly no norma-
tive methodology for speaking as public theologians. In different societies,
under different plausibility structures, public theologians are rather ‘learn-
ing to speak’—in the well-known words of the ecumenical figure Keith
Clements35—in many different ways. In fact, even in one and the same society

34  The Evangelical Church in Germany has in fact not only a tradition of publishing (inter-
disciplinary) study documents for public discussion, called Denkschriften, but from
time to time they have also published study documents about the nature of study docu-
ments themselves, Denkschriften about Denkschriften, see for example ‘The Right Word
for the Right Moment’ on the public role of the church, Das rechte Wort zur rechten Zeit.
Eine Denkschrift des Rates der EKD zum Öffentlichkeitsauftrag der Kirche (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008).
35  Keith Clements, Learning to Speak. The Church’s Voice in Public Affairs (Edinburgh: T & T 
Clark, 1995).
84 Smit

different public theologies may speak in different ways, providing guidance

and participating in public life, in widely diverse and even contradicting ways.36
There is therefore no single way of doing public theology. There are rather
many attempts to describe such different forms of discourse in order to dis-
cern and to suggest available options for public theology. Many of them again
depend on the plausibility structures of the specific contexts and societies
where the public theologians live and work. Bedford-Strohm himself for exam-
ple describes four dimensions of the church’s public discourse. According to
him, it should be pastoral, it should be discursive, it should provide policy
advice and it should be prophetic.37

Prophetic

His description of these different dimensions of public theological discourse

already leads to his fifth aspect, closely related but often mentioned separately
in methodological reflections, namely—what he calls—its prophetic quality.38
It is as if, on the spectrum of possible forms of public discourse, this option
appeals so strongly to many that they regard this as a separate and important
characteristic of all public discourse, namely that it should be prophetic.
For most this claim means that public theology should somehow be critical,
in opposition, resisting, warning, critiquing, opposing what is already happen-
ing in public life, and for most this is an aspect that belongs inherently to the
gospel and therefore to the role of the church and the task of theology. For
them this means that the task of orientation and direction almost necessarily
calls for a critical attitude and a position of critique and resistance.
Many metaphors (biblical and otherwise) are used to express this aspect. In
South Africa, for example, the emphasis on kairos and kairos theology often
serves this purpose, although many kairos theologians themselves find the

36  See for example his reflections on the advocacy responsibility of the church, in Heinrich
Bedford-Strohm, ‘Poverty and Public Theology. Advocacy of the Church in Pluralistic
Society’, IJPT 2:2 (2008), pp. 144–162. In this essay, as so often in his writings, he describes
public theology as ‘a liberation theology for a democratic society’
37  See Bedford-Strohm, Position beziehen, pp. 47–55.
38  See for example the volume which he edited together with the ethicist from Pretoria
Etienne de Villiers with the proceedings from an inter-disciplinary conference at
Pretoria, H. Bedford-Strohm and D.E. de Villiers, eds, Prophetic Witness. An Appropriate
Contemporary Mode of Public Discourse? (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011, Theology in the Public
Square Band 1), including his own essay in which he considers the European plausibil-
ity structures in general and the German situation in particular, ‘Prophetic Witness and
Public Discourse in European Societies—A German Perspective’, pp. 123–137.
Does it Matter ? 85

expression public theology for this very reason too harmless and unacceptable.39
While many therefore see kairos theology as a paradigmatic form of pub-
lic theology, many kairos theologians themselves refuse to be called public
theologians.
Again, as popular as this claim may be, the call for prophetic theology is also
contested terrain. Many are not convinced that church and theology should be
prophetic. For example, in societies where the church itself is deeply divided
and therefore cannot easily speak with a unified voice, or where the public
spirit is radically secular and religious discourse is not taken seriously as legiti-
mate contributions in the public sphere, or where the church is in a minority
position and does not enjoy any influence or authority, or where the church
has lost its credibility through its own involvement in historical guilt, or where
the church is intrinsically part of and therefore loyal to the ruling ideology and
powers,40 or where church and theology for whatever reason, conviction or
principle do not feel that they (perhaps any longer) have any claim to authority
in public affairs,41 there is no such agreement that public theology should be
prophetic. In all such cases, when public theologians do claim to be prophetic,
there is often resistance against the very idea of (such) public theology itself,
arguing that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of
faith, church, religion and theology in such societies.

Inter-Contextual

These last comments already point to a sixth—according to Bedford-Strohm—

and final characteristic of public theology, namely that it is done in widely dif-
ferent ways in diverse contexts. For him this implies that it should strive to
be inter-contextual. Public theologians should learn from one another and

39  See for example Allan A. Boesak, Kairos, Crisis, and Global Apartheid. The Challenge to
Prophetic Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
40  Within ecumenical circles in South Africa, for example in the South African Council of
Churches, it led to intense debates to find appropriate ways to revision and redefine the
relationship between the churches and the new and majority government after the first
elections and the transition to a democratic society. Gradually the expression ‘critical
solidarity’ was proposed by the new leadership, but it was very soon again critiqued and
rejected by others, who found it to be either too loyal or too critical of those in power.
41  See for examples contributions from the Netherlands, including Gerrit G. de Kruijf, ‘Is
Prophetic Witness the Appropriate Mode of Christian Participation in Public Discourse
in the Netherlands?’, in Bedford-Strohm and De Villiers, Prophetic Witness, pp. 117–121; also
F. de Lange, R.R. Ganzevoort, J.B.G. Jonkers and L.A. Werkman, eds, Profeten van de Ronde
Tafel (Kampen: Kok, 2002).
86 Smit

from what is happening in other contexts without any attempt to emulate one
another or to reduce what is called public theology to one comprehensive and
all-inclusive methodology. Being inter-contextual, being widely divergent and
different, belongs to the very nature of what is today known as public theology.
This may be the internal logic of why there was such a need for a global net-
work of public theological institutions and public theologians. This may also
be the reason for the popularity of the International Journal of Public Theology
and for its deliberate approach to dedicate specific essays but even separate
issues, from time to time, to such different contexts—examples during the first
years have been essays and issues on Northern Ireland, Brazil, Australia, New
Zealand, Argentina, Ethiopia, Korea, Oceania, the Caribbean, South Africa,
England, China, Canada, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Spain, amongst others. This is
also the reason why so many publications on public theology include contri-
butions from many diverse contexts, for example the valuable collection with
basic texts from North America, South Africa, Oceania, Australia and Asia,
Latin America and Europe, Grundtexte Öffentliche Theologie, edited by Florian
Höhne and Frederike van Oorschot.42 This was the reason why Bedford-Strohm
and the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Research Center for Public Theology in Bamberg
hosted an international conference on inter-contextuality, with the proceed-
ings published as Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology, with
Bedford-Strohm, Höhne and Tobias Reitmeier as editors.43
However, in her own essay in this volume44 (related to her doctoral work
on the public theology of Max Stackhouse from Princeton45), Frederike van
Oorschot convincingly argues that there are deeper, material reasons for this
inter-contextuality than mere practical necessity and benefits. Following
Stackhouse and Wolfgang Huber, she claims that public theology itself is
fundamentally linked to globalization. It is in itself a phenomenon of theol-
ogy in a globalized world. Precisely this characteristic already distinguishes

42  Florian Höhne and Frederike van Oorschot, eds, Grundtexte Öffentliche Theologie
(Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015), with texts by Martin Marty, David Tracy,
Max Stackhouse, Ronald Thiemann, Robert Benne, John de Gruchy, Dirk Smit, Elaine
Wainwright, James Haire, Rudolf von Sinner, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfgang Huber, and
Heinrich Bedford-Strohm.
43  H. Bedford-Strohm, F. Höhne and T. Reitmeier, eds, Contextuality and Intercontextuality in
Public Theology (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2013).
44  Frederike van Oorschot, ‘Public Theology Facing Globalization’, in Bedford-Strohm,
F. Höhne and T. Reitmeier, eds, Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology,
pp. 225–232.
45  Frederike van Oorschot, Öffentliche Theologie angesichts der Globalisierung. Die Public
Theology von Max L. Stackhouse (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Öffentliche
Theologie 30, 2014).
Does it Matter ? 87

public theology from many other forms of doing theology, she argues,
namely that it is deeply aware of the ways in which all publics in our com-
mon world are today linked to one another by various manners and degrees
of globalization. Each local and national public, she argues, in which theo-
logians do theology today exists in a variety of global interdependences and
inter-contextual implications. While many other theologians may prefer to
ignore this growing reality, public theology refers to those attempts that are
consciously aware of this globalizing public and seek to take it seriously, in
the form of inter-contextuality. This material reason makes the structural
inter-contextuality—the networks, journals, conferences, exchanges, hand-
books—so necessary and useful.
In fact, she claims, there is an even deeper material reason, namely what
Stackhouse calls the trans-contextuality of God. Bedford-Strohm refers to
this as the ecumenical aspect of public theology. It is an acknowledgement
of the danger that claims about God could easily be too local, parochial, con-
textual, and therefore limited. The tension between contextuality and inter-­
contextuality, according to Van Oorschot, therefore lies not only in the reality
of globalization, but even deeper, in the subject of theology itself, in its ecu-
menical character, in the one oikos or household of the God of life. Public the-
ology thus responds to both a sociological and a theological necessity. By its
very nature, she says, it cannot and should not lead to a unified public theology,
to harmony and consensus and uniformity. The complexities, the seeming con-
fusion and the many contradictions and contestations are rather all integral to
the inter-contextual and ecumenical task.

Does it Matter?

The scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where the expression “method in the mad-
ness” originates opens with Polonius asking Hamlet ‘What do you read, my
lord?’ and his blunt reply, ‘Words, words, words’ (Act 2, Scene II). Does it sug-
gest irritation, confusion, cynicism, despondency? Whatever Polonius might
have heard, ‘What is the matter, my lord?’, is his response. Is he asking about
the subject of Hamlet’s reading? Or about the motive behind Hamlet’s mood?
Hamlet misunderstands—deliberately?—and asks, ‘Between who?’ When
Polonius explains that he was asking about the meaning of all these words
that Hamlet is reading, Hamlet gives another seemingly confused answer.
He is reading things with which he agrees, but he does not like the way it is
being written, he says. This causes Polonius’ well-known aside, ‘Though this be
madness, yet there is method in ‘t’. It is as if he appreciates and acknowledges
that what may seem like confused gibberish is somehow serving its goal and
88 Smit

achieving its purpose. All the words, words, words, after all, do matter. Hamlet
somehow knows what he is reading and why, and what matters and why.
Perhaps that is another vague yet helpful distinguishing marker of what con-
stitutes public theology—the question whether it matters? This ­conviction—
that theology matters—has been an implicit assumption in much of what has
already been said, in describing the six aspects of Bedford-Strohm’s paradig-
matic illustration of public theology.
It is certainly the underlying assumption of Bedford-Strohm’s own life and
work of public theology, whether in the pulpit, the podium, the premier’s pol-
icy discussions—or the train station’s platform. That is why his book is called
Taking Position. There is something at stake. Something matters.
This is after all the heart of the conviction that public theology should show
a biblical-theological profile—it should speak about what is at stake. This
is also the point of the argument that it should be public—public theology
should be about what counts in public life, about what makes a difference,
about what affects human beings and the created world, about what matters
to real people in real life. This is what is meant by the need that it should be
informed and knowledgeable—it should understand what the matter is, what
the full story is, what the truth of the matter is, what the real concerns and pos-
sibilities are. This is what is implied by the claim that public theology should
provide orientation and offer direction—it thereby claims also to know what is
good for life, for human beings and the world, and that its intention is to con-
tribute to this, whether this state is described as flourishing, well-being, or the
common good.46 This is of course also the presupposition behind the urge to
be prophetic—it has the pretence that it knows what is missing, what is wrong,
and what is lacking in life. Public theology is ultimately based on the ecumeni-
cal longing to serve the God of the fullness of life—to participate in the divine
economy of love and care, grace and blessing, wisdom and truth. Tracy also
discusses the desire for the good which according to him is ultimately driving
all these attempts towards publicness, including the desires for knowledge, for
truth, for justice, and for love.47

46  See the many contributions in this volume that somehow deal with notions of happiness,
flourishing, well-being, values, and the common good.
47  See Tracy, ‘Three Kinds of Publicness’; this is also the reason why the South African theo-
logian Wentzel van Huyssteen, the retired James I. McCord Professor of Theology and
Science at Princeton Seminary, described his own work over many years as public theol-
ogy. See for example his ‘Pluralism and Interdisciplinarity: In Search of Theology’s Public
Voice’, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 22:1 (2001), 65–87, but also the essay in
his honour by George Newlands, ‘Public Theology in Postfoundational Tradition’, in LeRon
Shults, ed, The Evolution of Rationality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 394–417.
Does it Matter ? 89

Although she is very sceptical about the term public theology and prefers
not to use it, Denise Ackermann therefore also concluded—in her tribute on
Beyers Naudé’s centenary—that if public theology means anything it is prob-
ably ‘in its broadest sense concerned with the common struggle for justice and
the general welfare of people and their quality of life in a society’.48
It is for this reason that so many proposals for doing public theology in one
way or another, whether explicitly or implicitly, employ notions of happiness,
fulfilment and flourishing. In this sense it is a visionary and normative project,
seeking to take a position, to make a difference, to serve what matters. In the
words of the African American faith-based worker quoted in the introduction
to this volume, it is the urge to show the world what theology looks like. It is
concerned with issues of common interest and of the common good, whatever
that might mean. It is about discipleship as transformation, in the words of
Russel Botman. This is the matter behind all the seeming madness.49

48  Denise Ackermann, ‘Beyers Naudé: Public theologian?’, still unpublished paper.
49  Notions like flourishing, well-being and common good are of course themselves ambig-
uous, controversial and often contested, see for example Nadia Marais, Imagining
Human Flourishing? A Systematic Theological Exploration of Contemporary Soteriological
Discourses (Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University, 2015, still unpublished doctoral disser-
tation). This is one of the major reasons why the issue of normativity in public theology
is deeply contested. The question whether specific instances of religious fundamentalism
justifying violence and terror should for example be seen as legitimate forms of public
­theology—since it may seemingly claim to fulfil several of the other criteria (religious
inspiration; speaking about public issues in public language; claiming informed knowl-
edge; providing orientation to followers; being critical and prophetic; being ­contextual)—
will often be decided by some based on their judgement whether the vision of flourishing
or the notion of the good that is pursued is indeed acceptable to them. Some may be
of the opinion that such notions are deeply problematic and inhumane, and they may
therefore claim that these public religious voices do not qualify to be regarded as—
legitimate—public theology. This is also why, on one end of the spectrum, some would
argue that public theology is only present where democratic ideals are being pursued.
Of course, the issue of normativity may also be at stake regarding all the other criteria as
well. People may disagree about the claims concerning the Biblical orientation, they may
disagree about what kind of language should be allowed on the public square, they may
disagree about the technical knowledge involved and about what is really at stake (for
example in the economy, in climate change, in political questions), they may disagree
about the direction and orientation to be offered, they may disagree about the critical and
prophetic engagement needed or justified, they may disagree about the reading of spe-
cific contexts or which contexts to listen to and to learn from. For all these reasons, some
may fundamentally disagree with others who (also) claim to be doing public ­theology—
which is an additional indication of the fact that there is no simple normativity to be
applied in these questions of methodology.
90 Smit

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Naudé Center for Public Theology, 2015).
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and Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009).
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Bedford-Strohm, Heinrich. Position beziehen. Perspektiven einer öffentliche Theologie
(München: Claudius Verlag, 2012).
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Bezuidenhout, Ronel. ‘Re-imagining Life: A Reflection on ‘Public Theology’ in the
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Biggar, Nigel Behaving in Public. How to Do Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
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Does it Matter ? 91

Breitenberg Jr., E. Harold. ‘To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand
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Conradie, E.M., S. Bergmann, C. Deane-Drummond and D. Edwards, eds, Christian
Faith and the Earth (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2015).
D’Costa, Gavin. Theology in the Public Square. Church, Academy and Nation (Oxford:
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de Kruijf, Gerrit G. ‘Is Prophetic Witness the Appropriate Mode of Christian
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A Historical and Secular Perspective.’, (Uniting Reformed Church in Southern
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Harasta, Eva. ‘Glocal Proclamation? An Excursion into “Public Dogmatics” inspired
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Höhne, Florian and Frederike van Oorschot, eds, Grundtexte Öffentliche Theologie
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Biblecor, 2014).
Maluleke, Tinyiko S. ‘The Elusive Public of Public Theology’, IJPT, 5:1 (2011), 79–89.
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 PART 2
Public Theology and the Political Sphere

∵
 CHAPTER 4

State, Democracy & Community Organizing1

Luke Bretherton

Sovereignty is generally understood in relation to the nation-state and concep-

tualized as indivisible, monistic, and transcendent. In reaction to such a view,
ways are sought to limit what the unbounded sovereign will—in the form of
the state—can do to its subjects. These include such measures as strengthen-
ing the rule of law, democratic counter-movements within civil society, and
external means of accountability such as the International Criminal Court.
But such measures give too much ground to a top down, monistic view of
sovereignty.
To understand sovereignty, and how it shapes contemporary conceptions of
democracy and the role of the state, we must reckon with the tensions between
three competing conceptions of state sovereignty that are at work today, but
largely hidden from view. Crudely put, the first of these conceptions draws on
Roman law and conceptualizes politics as being about the rule and dominion
of an over-arching sovereign power.2 What is ‘public’ relates to the apparatus of
this rule and the administration of its laws. The sovereign, who represents pub-
lic and legitimate authority, stands above and acts on behalf of society, which
is made up of ‘private’ individuals who bear rights granted to them by the
sovereign. Power in this concept of politics is unilateral.
The second conception of sovereignty draws on Greco-Roman notions of a
political community as a self-governing polity or republic built on the capacity
of citizens to participate in processes of collective self-determination. In this
conception, debate, deliberation, action in concert, and collective decision-
making between those who are free and equal are all paramount and constitu-
tive of public life and citizenship. Power in this second conception is generated
collectively and through relationships, and sovereignty is derived from some
notion of the people or citizenry. In the modern period notions of popular

1  Parts of this essay draws on work previously published in Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting
Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
2  For an account of the centrality and adoption of Roman law into Western political and social
conceptions of sovereignty and the theological debates that mediated this, see Jean Bethke
Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_006

96 Bretherton

sovereignty and democratic citizenship are posed as in opposition to the

sovereignty of God, monarchs, and all patriarchal and patrician authorities.
Yet, in most modern conceptions of democracy, an indivisible, monistic, and
transcendent sovereign is not replaced with something new. Rather, the basic
structure remains intact so that in place of a godhead or monarch is put an
autonomous, sovereign individual with a singular, indivisible, and transcen-
dent will who issues laws to him- or herself. Popular sovereignty on such an
account is an aggregation of sovereign individuals.
Modern democratic citizenship sits on the cusp between these two differ-
ent but historically interrelated conceptions of sovereignty. There is a need for
the exercise of top-down sovereign power to protect or create the capacity to
exercise non-dominatory relational power. Civil rights legislation or legislation
protecting the right to form unions or freedom of worship aim to inhibit the
domination of vulnerable others and to ensure the basic interests of all are
taken into account in any decision affecting them. The coercive sanction of
legislation is thus used to preserve or create a common world of meaning and
action within a polis in which all citizens may participate with relative liberty
and equality.3 A full-orbed conception of sovereignty, politics, and democratic
citizenship needs to recognize the interplay of both a top down and a bottom
up vision of sovereignty. However, if we are to understand how sovereignty is
constructed and contested in the contemporary context, we must further com-
plicate my initial picture by adding a third conception of sovereignty.
The third conception of sovereignty is what we might call consociational. The
term ‘consociation’ is taken to mean a mutual fellowship between distinct
institutions or groups who are federated together for a common purpose.
The consociationalist tradition of political thought has been largely eclipsed
on both sides of the Atlantic, but at the turn of the twentieth century it rep-
resented an important and vibrant stream of conversation that ran between
North America and Europe.4 And arguably, a consociational conception of
sovereignty has more in common with non-European conceptions than the
previous two I have mentioned. A consociational understanding emerges
from reflection on the medieval gothic order that did not wholly disappear
with the advent of a ‘Westphalian’ order of nation states. Rather, this order
was displaced and re-described so that forms of political community became
re-located and re-named as ‘economic’ or ‘social’. This led to the depoliticizing

3  See Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003),
pp. 51–5.
4  My use of the term ‘consociation’ differs markedly from its primary use in political science as
initially developed by Arend Lijphart.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 97

of what should properly be viewed as highly political entities. For example, the
joint stock trading company—the early modern archetype of the contempo-
rary capitalist firm—was an explicitly political community based on the con-
cept on the corpus politicum et corporatum or communitas perpetua that went
back to Roman law. A paradigmatic and highly abusive example of the early
modern mercantile ‘republic’ was the East India Trading Company which, as a
colonial proprietor

did what early modern governments did: erect and administer law; col-
lect taxes; provide protection; inflict punishment; perform stateliness;
regulate economic, religious, and civic life; conduct diplomacy and wage
war; make claims to jurisdiction over land and sea; and cultivate author-
ity over and obedience from those people subject to its command.5

Yet the nature of the Company as a political and sovereign institution—and of

all analogous company-states since—is viewed as either anomalous or denied.
Such entities are labeled ‘economic’ not political. For example, the World Bank
is bound by its charter to deal only with economic or technical issues, yet its
work has directly political consequences and severely affects the actions of
other sovereign authorities.
Contrary to how it is often presented, legal and political pluralism is the
norm rather than the exception in contemporary societies. Most nations are
a series of overlapping political associations with varying degrees of self-
government, intersected by a number of legal jurisdictions (local, national,
regional, and international) and deploying various strategies of devolution,
decentralization, federation, cross-border linkages, and ways of recognizing
‘non-territorial’ collective autonomy in order to navigate ‘internal’ plurality.
Sovereignty is an assemblage that opens up different conditions and possi-
bilities for agency depending on where one is located within that assemblage.
Moreover, the relationship between the governed and regimes of governance
is never one of unilateral control: it is always a more open-ended negotiation
involving the interplay of different performances of citizenship and the proce-
dures and institutions of governance.6

5  Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of
the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 4–6.
6  James Tully, ‘On local and global citizenship: an apprenticeship model’, in Public Philosophy
in a New Key, vol. 2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), p. 279.
98 Bretherton

So the problem we face is not so much how to limit sovereignty but why
some kinds of corporate power are perceived as acceptable—notably, ‘eco-
nomic’ forms—but other forms, in particular religious, cultural, and political
ones, are viewed with deep suspicion.
One response to the continued existence of ‘estates’—religious, economic,
or otherwise—is to develop a more consociationalist position that opens
them to the representation of diverse interests in their governance and that
immerses all forms of corporate life in democratic politics. This is an approach
that is exemplified in broad-based community organizing, which one can only
participate in as a member of an institution rather than as an individual.7
Rather than being derived from a single source (as in the first view of sov-
ereignty) or from an aggregate of many individuals (as in the second view)
sovereignty emerges from the common life of a broad base of consociations.
Broad based community organizing is not alone in taking such an approach.
On many fronts a consociationalist position seems to be an increasingly preva-
lent, if tacit, recommendation. For example, in response to processes of glo-
balization and the increasing cultural diversity of nation-states, some legal
theorists are advocating what amounts to a more consociational approach.8
In the realm of social policy there is a shift towards the advocacy of the
co-governance and co-production of services such as education and health-
care. With this move there is recognition that the state and the market do
not define or exhaust the parameters of provision. Non-commercial and self-­
governing institutions and patterns of association must be involved in the
construction and delivery of public goods. An example of such an approach is
Elinor Ostrom’s work on ‘polycentric governance’ as a form of economic and
political management, which highlights the complex interweaving of state,
market, and forms of self-organized and self-governing associations in polic-
ing and managing common-pool resources such as fisheries, forests, irrigation
systems, and groundwater basins.9
The account of consociational democracy and of community organizing
as a performance of consociational democratic citizenship differs markedly
from the standard uses of the term ‘consociational democracy’ in political
science and its application to countries like Switzerland or power-sharing

7  Other terms include ‘faith-based’ or ‘institutional’ community organizing.

8  See Brian Z. Tamanaha, ‘Understanding Legal Pluralism: Past to Present, Local to Global’,
Sydney Law Review, 30 (2008), 375–411; and William Twining, General Jurisprudence:
Understanding Law from a Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
9  Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 99

arrangements in contexts like Bosnia-Herzegovina. Standard accounts of con-

sociational democracy build on the pioneering work of the Dutch political
theorist, Arend Lijphart. Lijphart’s initial reflections were born out of trying
to understand the paradox of the Netherlands, which, on the one hand, had
deep social and religious cleavages, yet, on the other, was a notable example of
a successful and stable democracy.10 However, Lijphart’s conception of conso-
ciational democracy is state-centric and aims at creating a consensus between
a ‘cartel of elites’ through engineering highly technical power sharing, voting,
and constitutional arrangements.11 Feminist scholars have noted the ways in
which these elites arrangements often reinforce existing gender hierarchies.
Lijphart’s work has also been criticized for the lack of conceptual clarity and
theoretical depth as well as its empirical inaccuracies.12 Part of the problem
with Lijphart’s approach is that he does not pay sufficient heed to what origi-
nally inspired it: the work of Johannes Althusius and its subsequent develop-
ment in Roman Catholic and Calvinist political thought.13 In short, for all the
richness of Lijphart’s insights, he turns a diverse tradition of political thought
into a technocratic set of procedures. Rather than draw on Lijphart in order to
develop a conception of consociational democracy I turn instead some pos-
sible theological rationales.

Theological Rationales for a Consociationalist Conception of

Sovereignty

A consociationalist view of sovereignty draws on and resonates with a range of

developments in modern theology. A key one is the re-statement of a robustly
Trinitarian conception of the doctrine of God. This is exemplified in the work

10  Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the
Netherlands, 2nd ed. (Berkley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 1–2.
11  See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); and Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and
Majority Rule in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2008).
12  For a summary of these see M.P.C.M. van Schendelen, ‘Consociational Democracy: The
Views of Arend Lijphart and Collected Criticisms,’ Political Science Reviewer, 15 (1985),
143–83. See also Kenneth McRae, ‘The Plural Society and the Western Political Tradition,’
Canadian Journal of Political Science 12.4 (1979): 675–88; Jürg Steiner, ‘Review: The
Consociational Theory and Beyond,’ Comparative Politics,13:3 (1981), 339–54.
13  Peter Gourevitch and Gary Jacobson, ‘Arend Lijphart, A Profile,’ PS: Political Science and
Politics, 28:4 (1995), 751–54. On the reception history of Althusius and the rival inter-
pretations of his political theory, see Stephen Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in
Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), pp. 122–30.
100 Bretherton

of Karl Barth (1886‒1968), Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905‒1988), Catherine

LaCugna (1952‒1997), and Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926). With the recovery of a
Trinitarian theology, good order comes to be seen not as the result of the exer-
cise of sovereign will, but instead constituted through participation in right
relationships as encountered and empowered through participation in the
perichoretic communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In place of images of
political rulers (emperors, kings, or lords), music, drama, and dance become
more common analogies for the nature of God. In such accounts God is no dis-
tant sovereign but both loving Creator and intimately and vulnerably involved
in creation through the on-going work of the Son and the Spirit. In the light of
this kind of God, monarchical, absolute, and indivisible claims to political sov-
ereignty that override the freedom and dignity of the one, the few, or the many
are revealed as in opposition to the divine nature. The true order of being is
one of harmonious difference in relation. Likewise, humans are not monadic
individuals but persons constituted through relationships with various others
(including non-human life) and whose dignity and worth is not reducible to or
definable by any immanent social, economic, or political claims upon them.
However, as debates in Trinitarian theology make clear, the Trinity cannot and
should not provide the basis for a social program.14
If the recovery of Trinitarian theology represents one counter-monarchical
stream of theology, there is also another counter-movement. This other stream
of Christian reflection begins not with the doctrine of God but with human
nature and more specifically, the recovery of an Aristotelian sense of humans
as political animals and attention to customary practices and tradition as con-
stitutive of securing a common life. Such a beginning point is in stark contrast
to most modern political thought—even in its ‘conservative’ strands—that not
only begins with the individual as the primary point of reference but also sees
tradition (even if it wants to preserve it) as of the past and in conflict with what
is new or modern. The Weberian rationalist-legal order that is the dominant
political imaginary shaping both left and right banishes custom to the realm
of the private. By contrast, for medieval constitutionalists, custom mediated
consent and established historical practices, such as use of common land, set
limits on what could or could not be done. These limits were not set in stone:
they constituted arenas of negotiation and enabled discretionary judgments
built on apprenticeship into particular habits of action. The counter-tradition
that takes time, social life, and customary practice as having public force is best
identified as consociational.

14  Miroslav Volf, ‘‘The Trinity is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the
Shape of Social Engagement’, Modern Theology, 14.3 (1998), 403‒23.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 101

On the kind of consociational account envisaged here, to arrive at good

political judgments requires phronesis/practical wisdom and to acquire phro-
nesis requires habituation into the virtues. The arenas through which we come
to be formed in the virtues are schools, forms of craft production, congrega-
tions, or any form of local society that aspires, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it: ‘to
achieve some relatively self-sufficient and independent form of participatory
practice-based community and that therefore need to protect themselves from
the corrosive effects of capitalism and the depredations of state power’.15 On
this account, the pursuit of the virtues through forms of institutionally medi-
ated practices with substantive goods is a prerequisite for being a good demo-
cratic citizen: that is, being one who has the understanding and the ability to
rule and be ruled and so is able to make just and generous political judgments
with and for others. However, the sense of what it means to be a zoon politikon
developed here is better described as Althusian rather than Aristotelian.16
The Dutch seventeenth century political thinker, Johannes Althusius
(1563‒1638), rejected Aristotle’s distinction between natural domestic rule
and the political rule among free and equal citizens. For Althusius, all forms of
social life, whether in the family or the guild, may participate in the formation
of political life. However, this does not mean that Althusius totalizes the politi-
cal sphere so that every aspect of life is subsumed within it. Rather, as Thomas
Hueglin clarifies:

For Althusius, each consociation or political community is determined

by the same principles of communication of goods, services, and rights.
The essence of politics is the organization of this process of communica-
tion. Therefore, families and professional colleges are as much political
communities as cities, provinces, or realms insofar as they participate in
this political process through their activities.17

In contrast to Aristotle who overly separates public and private, and most mod-
ern conceptions that separate social plurality from the public sphere in order
to maintain political unity, Althusius allows for the pluralization of the politi-
cal in order to accommodate and coordinate the diversity of associational life,

15  Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995’ in Alasdair
MacIntyre, Selected Essays, Vol. 2: Ethics and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), p. 155.
16  Thomas Hueglin, Early Modern Concepts for a Late Modern World: Althusius on Community
and Federalism (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999), pp. 56‒82.
17  Ibid., pp. 95‒6.
102 Bretherton

whether economic, familial, or religious. To be a political animal is not to be

a citizen of a unitary, hierarchically determined political society. Nor is it to
participate in a polity in which all authority is derived from a single point of
sovereignty. Rather, it is to be a participant in a plurality of interdependent,
self-organized associations that together constitute a consociational polity. In
such a compound commonwealth, federalism is societal and political rather
than simply administrative (i.e. it involves more than merely the separation
of powers).18 The singularity and specificity of each is constitutive of the com-
monwealth of all. Such an approach entails a strong affirmation that there is a
commonwealth and it is this affirmation that sharply distinguishes it from the
antipolitical visions of ‘minarchist’, ‘statesrights’, and neoliberal conceptions of
state sovereignty.
In a consociational commonwealth, federalism is societal and political
rather than simply administrative.19 In contrast to constitutional federalism
as a way in which to limit the governmental power exercised by a sovereign
authority (as exemplified in the dominant interpretations of the US constitu-
tion), but which leaves undisturbed the top down, transcendent, and monistic
nature of that authority, consociationalism envisages a full-orbed confeder-
alism whereby the authority of the sovereign arises from the whole or com-
monweal that itself is constituted from multiple consociations. For Althusius,
sovereignty is an assemblage that emerges through and is grounded upon a
process of mutual communication between consociations and their reciprocal
pursuit of common goods and in which unity of the whole (that is, a common
life) is pursued as a non-instrumental good. This unity is premised on the qual-
ity of cooperation and relationship-building and is not secured through legis-
lative procedure, the transcendent nature of sovereign authority, a centralized
monopoly of governmental power, or the formation of a unitary public sphere
premised on a homogeneous rational discourse. The definitional judgment of
the sovereign is not deciding the exception but the discernment and weighing
up of common goods that emerge through the complex weave of social rela-
tions and customary practices that constitute the body politic and then adjudi-
cating what should be done in order to fulfill these goods. On a consociational
account, sovereign authorities should not impose order but discover it.
In a consociational vision of sovereignty the individual is not subordinated
to a collective vision of peoplehood, as is the case with nationalist, fascist, state

18  Hueglin, Early Modern Concepts, p. 113.

19  James Skillen, The Development of Calvinistic Political Theory in the Netherlands: With
Special Reference to the Thought of Herman Dooyeweerd (PhD diss., Duke University, 1973),
pp. 191–217.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 103

socialist, and state communist regimes. Polities characterized by one or other

of these regimes may include democratic elements, but the demos is perceived
as grounded in a supposedly pre-political species of peoplehood such as the
ethnos or Volk. By beginning with the formation of the people through multiple
forms of consociation (families, trade unions, congregations, and the like), col-
lectivist, homogenous, and monistic conceptions of peoplehood and popular
sovereignty are thus challenged. Understanding ‘the people’ as being made up
of many parts prioritizes the relationship between distinct but reciprocally
related ‘consociations’ or forms of life. Such an approach is seen as the best way
of generating the collective self-rule of a people. Such a consociational people
are a non-natural, entirely contingent yet meaningful political community.
It is as a provider of various consociational conceptions of sovereignty
that we can make sense of a theologically diverse, yet interlinked tradition of
political reflection. If Althusius is its progenitor, a key mediator is the German
legal theorist, Otto von Gierke (1841‒1921). He influenced a number of early
twentieth-century political thinkers across Europe, most notably John Neville
Figgis (1866‒1919), and the early work of two key thinkers in the British Labour
movement, G.D.H. Cole (1889‒1959) and Harold Laski (1893‒1950). While there
were substantive differences between them (unlike Figgis, Cole and Laski had
a decidedly voluntaristic anthropology), up to 1920 these thinkers, commonly
referred to as the English Pluralists, advocated a decentralized economy based
on the non-capitalistic principles of cooperation and mutuality and proposed
a radically federalist conception of the state.20 In their view sovereignty was
not something that could be appropriated by a single agency or institution.
Rather it emanated from the complex and divided governing powers that com-
pose the body politic. In distinction from anarcho-syndicalists in France, the
Pluralists thought there was still a need for a public power but that its role
should be severely circumscribed. A key concern of the Pluralists was the ques-
tion of how to maintain the freedom and self-development of all forms of asso-
ciation, particularly the churches and trade unions.
A further strand of consociationalist thought can be identified in the
‘sphere sovereignty’ of the Dutch Neo-Calvinists, Abraham Kuyper (1837‒1920)
and Herman Dooyeweerd (1894‒1977). For them, the sovereignty of indepen-
dent spheres such as the family, schools, and workplaces are expressions of
the sovereign will of God. Each sphere has a relative autonomy and specific
character that needs to be respected. Government has a role in ordering and

20  Cécile Laborde, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900‒25 (Basingstoke:
MacMillan Press, 2000), 45‒100; and Paul Hirst, ed., The Pluralist Theory of the State:
Selected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis, and H.J. Laski (London: Routledge, 1993).
104 Bretherton

protecting the general good but it does not have the authority to interfere
with or determine the character or telos of each sphere.21 In turn, the state is
bounded by the sovereignty of other spheres. It was in the Netherlands that
notions of sphere sovereignty overlapped with and found a parallel expression
in the emergence of Roman Catholic Christian Democratic thinking. Central
to this was the development, from Rerum Novarum (1891) onwards, of Catholic
Social Teaching.
The Roman Catholic strand of consociationalist, democratic thought is
best exemplified by the work of the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain
(1882‒1973).22 He describes the plurality of society as ‘an organic heterogene-
ity’ and envisages it as being constituted by multiple yet overlapping ‘politi-
cal fraternities’ that are independent of the state.23 Maritain distinguishes his
account of a consociationalist political society and economic life from fascist
and communist ones that collapse market, state, and civil society into a sin-
gle entity and from collectivist and individualistic conceptions of economic
relations.24 Crucially, society constitutes a sphere of social or ‘fraternal’ rela-
tions that has its own integrity and telos but which nevertheless serves the
defensive function of preventing either the market or the state from establish-
ing a monopoly of power, thereby either instrumentalizing social relations for
the sake of the political order or commodifying social relations for the sake
of the economy. Within this sphere there can exist multiple and overlapping
and, on the basis of subsidiarity, semi-autonomous forms of institutional life
and association, forms that are not reducible to either a private or voluntary
association.
Animating the Christian consociationalist tradition of which the English
Pluralists, Neo-Calvinists, and Catholic Social Teaching are a part is the sense
in which we participate in a cosmic order than can disclose to us some measure
of meaning and purpose. It is this cosmic social imaginary that distinguishes

21  Jonathan Chaplin, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
22  Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), and
Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of the New Christendom, trans.
Joseph Evans (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), pp. 162–76.
23  Maritain, Integral Humanism, pp. 163 and 171.
24  Ibid., pp. 169–71, 186–95. A parallel distinction is made by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno
(1931), §§ 94–96 as a way of distinguishing a Christian corporatist vision of politics from
Fascist ones. On the Christian account, corporatist and personalist forms of civic associa-
tion and economic organization are precisely a means of preventing the subsuming of all
social relations to the political order.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 105

the Christian consociationalism of Figgis, Kuyper, Maritain, and others from

their immanentist confreres, notably Emile Durkheim and the contempo-
rary political theorist, Paul Hirst.25 However, consociational approaches can
equally produce a simplistically secularized vision of political order. For exam-
ple, Maritain’s own conception of the relationship between the church and
state tends to replicate the marginalization of the church as a self-governing
and public body.26 And a consociational vision can easily become state-­centric
as happened with Christian Democratic parties in Europe after World War II.27
That said, this consociational tradition, with its distributive and federal con-
ception of sovereignty, offers a rich yet under-explored thickening of more
Trinitarian and ‘civic Augustinian’ conceptions of public theology.28

Community Organizing and the Crafting of a Political Life Together

In the rest of this essay, I will explore how broad based community organizing
embodies and helps us think about alternatives to both overly monistic, top
down conceptions of state sovereignty and aggregative bottom up conceptions
of popular sovereignty. At the same time I will explore how it operates with
a more consociational vision of political order that is used to unmask, fight
against, and bring accountability to concentrations of economic and political
power that over-determine and dominate our common life.
Community organizing as practiced today has a distinct genealogy. As a rep-
ertoire of practices that foster forms of placed-based, grassroots, participatory
democratic politics it has analogies around the world. However, I will focus on a
distinct approach to organizing that originated in North America and emerged
out of various nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements for democratic
change, notably, the American Populist, Labor, Civil Rights, and Farmworker
movements. Key figures associated with its contemporary manifestation as a

25  See for example, Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social
Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
26  See William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 195.
27  Such tendencies have been criticized in more recent papal encyclicals. See for example,
the critical comments by John Paul II of what he calls the ‘social assistance state’ in
Centesimus Annus, §48.
28  See Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic
Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
106 Bretherton

distinct craft include Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Saul Alinsky, Fred Ross, Cesar
Chavez, Ernesto Cortes, and Edward Chambers. These figures represent differ-
ent streams of organizing, each of which has its own emphasis. The Industrial
Areas Foundation is the most well-known of the formal organizing networks.
It was founded by Saul Alinsky in 1940 in Chicago and developed the template
for much contemporary community organizing work. It now has affiliate coali-
tions in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and Australia.
Beyond the work of the IAF, Alinsky’s legacy, and community organizing
more generally, is hugely influential in many strands of democratic activism.
It is seen as an influence on the student and anti-war activists of the 1960s
and the organizers of the environmental movement, feminism, and consumer
activism from the 1970s onwards.29 Since the formation of the IAF numerous
other community organizing networks have been founded. Among the most
prominent are PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing),
DART (Direct Action Research and Training), the Center for Community
Change, National People’s Action, and the Gamaliel Foundation. A recent com-
prehensive survey of community organizing in the US calculated that there
are now 178 different coalitions involving 4,145 member institutions.30 Outside
of the North American context, community organizing has influenced many
grassroots democratic efforts in diverse cultures. For example, the Rev. Herbert
White helped set up community organizing in the Philippines, while Thomas
Gaudette worked extensively in India.31 Both worked directly with Alinsky.
Currently, the Gamaliel Foundation operates in South Africa; PICO works in El
Salvador, Guatemala and Rwanda; and the European Community Organizing
Network promotes community organizing in Central and Eastern Europe.
Community organizing is of particular interest in discussions of ‘public theol-
ogy’ for a number of reasons: it has drawn on theological insights in its for-
mulation as a practice; churches have, historically, been a primary institution
involved in and funding it; and as a practice, community organizing explicitly

29  Peter Dreier, ‘Community Organizing for What? Progressive Politics and Movement
Building in America’, in Marion Orr, ed., Transforming the City: Community Organizing
and the Challenge of Political Change (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), p. 224.
30  Brad Fulton and Richard Wood, ‘Interfaith Community Organizing: Emerging Theological
and Organizational Challenges’, International Journal of Public Theology, 6:4 (2012), 398–
420 at 402.
31  On the origins of community organizing in the Philippines, see Jennifer Conroy Franco,
Elections and Democratization in the Philippines (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 119–20.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 107

seeks to ‘re-weave’ the public sphere so that it is directed to a vision of a com-

mon life.32
I take the term community in the term ‘community organizing’ to denote
a coming together by mutual agreement of distinct institutions or groups of
people for a common purpose without loss of each of their specific identities
or beliefs and practices. As an organization it is consociational in structure:
that is, it is a federated alliance of institutions and groups with often divergent
and conflicting beliefs and practices that nevertheless form a single union and
in which authority is constituted from the consent of each participating group
rather being derived either from some pre-existing or superior authority or
aggregated from the votes of individuals. The community or koinon is founded
on the identification of mutual need for each other, shared interests and the
pursuit of goods in common (for example, decent housing, a living wage, clean
air, ending predatory lending practices). The recognition and pursuit of their
mutual need, interests, and substantive goods gives rise to mutual obligations
to support, aid, and defend each other. The common life of the community
organization is shaped by a common rule and set of practices. This rule is not
legal or contractual in nature, rather it is covenantal and can be renounced
or opted out of at any time. Like a monastic rule, the rules and practices of
community organizing, first articulated in a systematic way by Alinsky, but
subject to ongoing improvisation and innovation by other organizers, defines

32  ‘Public theology’ is, in this contribution, taken to mean theological reflection on what
is public, common or relating to the whole: i.e. that pertaining to the res publica. There
is thus overlap with political theology, liberation theologies, contextual theology, and
Christian social ethics, and as a topic, it may be approached from and draw on multiple
discursive traditions. Yet public theology on this interpretation has a particular task. It
pertains to theological reflection on a number of inter-related themes, most notably: the
nature and purpose of what we might call the public sphere or public square and the
role of theological speech and the institutions of the church within it; the construction
of what is public and what is private; conceptualizing the inter-relationships between
state, market, civil society and kinship structures as constitutive of a common life within
a distinct polity; regimes of law, order and governance; and the basis and formation of
a demos, people, ‘nation’ or body politic, and thereby the character and ground of rela-
tionships that form the basis of a polity. Public theology on this reading is a sub-set of
Christian ethics. Another term might be Christian political thought. Although a tacit
assumption, one that is backed up by the genealogy of the term, is that public theology
is reflection on and within the context of broadly liberal democratic regimes of gover-
nance, whereas Christian political thought is reflection on any type of polity or regime of
governance.
108 Bretherton

and structures the common life of the federation and provides the measure or
standard of excellence among those in membership. It is sustained through
education and training in the disciplines and habits necessary to uphold the
practices. It is its consociational structure—a structure that allows community
organizing to combine unity and plurality—which provides the best defense
against organizations becoming either dominatory (that is, establishing a
common life by attempting to subjugate, expel, or assimilate others) or anti-­
political (that is, withdrawing from or refusing to acknowledge the possibilities
of and responsibility for a common life with others).
Community organizing has come to renewed prominence in Europe and
the States as part of a broader debate about the role of civil society in the pro-
vision of welfare, the means of good governance and the vitality of demoracy.
Given the prominence of religious groups within community organizing coali-
tions and increased anxieties about the role of religious groups in the public
sphere, community organizing is also beginning to be seen as a way of enabling
the constructive involvement of religious discourses within liberal democratic
polities, but in such a way as to enables them to deploy their own language and
symbols rather than having to translate them into some form of ‘public reason,’
subscribe to a mediating democratic creed or adopt wholesale the languages of
either ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ politics. And rather than the patron-client
model that characterize much charitable work by faith-based NGOs, commu-
nity organizing helps develop relations of mutual accountability and reciproc-
ity across racial, religious, class and other divisions.
There is a mutually critical but symbiotic relationship between the struc-
tures of community organising and that of the participating congregations.
Churches are crucial, and often catalytic participants in community organizing
coalitions as these coalitions are mostly dependent on the prior social bonds,
practices and moral-political teachings of the churches and other religious
groups involved. At a pragmatic level, as non-pecuniary institutions, congrega-
tions represent a legal, organisational, financial, and physical place to stand at
some remove from state and market processes. Congregations are places con-
stituted by gathered and mobilised people who do not come together for either
commercial or state-directed transactions, but who instead come together to
worship and care for each other. Without such places there are few real places
through which to resist the processes of commodification by the market and
the processes of instrumenalisation by the state. In short, if we have nowhere to
sit together free from governmental or commercial imperatives we have no
public spaces in which to take the time to listen to each other, develop mutual
trust and forge shared speech and action through which to challenge the status
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 109

quo. Community organizing needs such spaces as a condition and possibility

of its kind of democratic politics, to which I now turn.

Community Organizing and the Democratic Accountability of

Corporations

Inherent to the practice of community organizing is the claim that represen-

tatives may be elected office holders, such as a mayor, but they can also be
those who hold real power to act within or on behalf of a community such as
an office holder in a business or a public administrator. Processes of political
accountability need to include those who have power over a place and with
whom the people of that place are identified, whether they want to be or not,
but whose office holders are not publically accountable for that power and
the representative nature of the office they hold. Supermarkets such as Kroger
or Walmart, factories, schools, government offices, universities, etc., are all
‘estates’ or powers within a place, yet ones whose ‘office holders’ (managers
and executives) more often than not have no meaningful relationship with or
actively disavow connection to the people in that place.33
Managers and executives tend to see themselves as purely economic or
bureaucratic actors answerable solely to shareholders, internal institutional
commitments, or abstract procedures, rather than office holders of anchor
institutions that have a direct impact on strengthening or weakening the civic
life of an area and its social and political resilience. Yet when personal iden-
tity, social relations, and civic participation are often produced, mediated, and
expressed through brands, patterns of consumption, sponsored activities such
as sports clubs, and access to the goods and services of anchor institutions
such as education or healthcare facilities, then it is vital that the office holders
of the ‘estates’ (that is, corporate forms of power and status-bearers in a place)

33  Use of the term ‘estates’ draws on formulations of the medieval polity as constituted by
those classes with property, power and public rank or status (notably, the nobles, clergy
and townsmen or commons) that together constitute the body politic. It has also a theo-
logical register. The medieval conceptuality was drawn on by Luther to describe that
which structures created reality (Luther uses various terms ranging from ordo, stand,
genus vitae to hierarchia). He names these estates as church (ecclesia), the household
(oeconomia) and the civic life (politia). These spheres are distinct yet mutually constitu-
tive and co-inhering spheres of communication and responsibility in which humans take
up the tasks, offices and vocations through which we love God and neighbour.
110 Bretherton

identify with and listen to the people of that place. Community organizing is
one means through which to agitate and cajole such ‘non-political’ office hold-
ers into recognizing their broader social and civic duties of care.

Standing for the Whole

As a way of enacting democratic politics, community organizing cuts across

how most political and economic office holders understand sovereignty,
democracy, and the nature of political representation. Moreover, the ten-
sion between community organizing efforts and the elected politicians these
efforts confront over who best represents the views of local people exemplifies
the conflicting views of sovereignty at work in the public sphere.
The conflict between different understandings of how sovereignty, and
thence legitimacy and representativeness operate can be overheard in the fol-
lowing comments from Quentin Peppiatt, a Labour councilor and ordained
Anglican minister in Newham—one of the poorest parts of London and argu-
ably one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse areas in the world:

[P]arty politics is the way to organise things. I think actually doing it

through the democratic ballot and putting yourself up to the elector-
ate is the way to get that legitimacy. Now community organising and the
Alinsky approach is very good at getting the grassroots mobilised over
issues and doing the single issue campaigns which may be the way for-
ward. Greenpeace and all the rest of it, I’ve got nothing against it. I sup-
pose when I get frustrated is when I meet them and I say, ‘Yes that’s a
point of view and I agree with you on the minimum wage, living wage,
and I agree with a lot of your campaigns, but I’m not going to sign on the
dotted line because actually I stand on a ticket which isn’t that ticket’.
If I was wanting to be chosen as a party for those sort of things . . . then
I would stand on that and you would put people up and we would have
a fight over that particular agenda, and that’s fine, I’ve got no problem
with that but they’re not willing to engage in that democratic politics as
I see it in the wider community. . . . [I am] happy for them to claim, or
for anyone to claim, like Greenpeace or whatever, that they are pressure
groups to make things happen and that is absolutely fine. I think what
I find frustrating is when they claim more than that, that they represent
community and therefore have a mandate. They don’t have a mandate
I’m afraid, the mandate comes from the ballot box.34

34  Interview, 5 June 2009 (London).

State, Democracy & Community Organizing 111

As part of my ethnographic research on community organizing in London and

elsewhere I frequently encountered sentiments such as those expressed by
Peppiatt. Such sentiments signal a contrast between the authorizing processes
of representative democracy and those of a participatory and consociational
democracy of the kind that broad based community organizing embodies.
Peppiatt’s comments raise the question of the nature and form of the legiti-
macy and representativeness of community organizing.
The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) developed an instructive set of
reflections on exactly the question of representativeness. These reflections
are contained in a document produced in 1990 and entitled ‘Standing for the
Whole’. There are a number of aspects to how the legitimacy, representative-
ness, and the ‘mandate’ of the IAF’s work are conceived.
First, the representativeness of an IAF coalition is seen as grounded in
the experience and reflections of the thousands of ordinary people involved. The
legitimacy is not based on specialist or technical knowledge or electoral man-
date but the fact that the IAF is a vehicle through which the untapped talent,
wisdom, and leadership of parents, bus drivers, secretaries, ‘dignified people
on public assistance’, and the like can be harnessed and brought to bear on the
decisions that affect them. Key here is the sense that the IAF’s legitimacy is
partly premised on being a means through which the experience and insights
of those who are the subjects of failed programs and policies determined by
others can be included and learned from in the formulation of new programs
and policies. However, the emphasis on the wisdom of ordinary people goes
beyond the romanticization of ‘hardworking, simple folk’ present in many
forms of populism because community organizing actively involves a mean-
ingful process of listening to and learning from ‘the people’.
Second, the IAF is said to represent an alternative voice to both commer-
cial interests, whose primary point of reference is generating profits, and the
‘bureaucratic state’ and its elected representatives, who deploy state processes
to achieve narrowly defined party platforms. The IAF is presented as a token of
the ‘third sector’, which is said to give the market and state their meaning: ‘This
sector is where we grow and see our children grow. This sector is the soul of the
whole’.35 Explicitly rejected is the characterization Peppiatt gives of London
Citizens as a special interest or single-issue group, equivalent to Greenpeace.
Rather, as a body that encapsulates the ‘soul of the whole’ a community orga-
nizing coalition is seen to represent a vision of the ‘common good’ beyond sec-
tional interests of either commerce, party politics, or special interest groups.

35  Industrial Areas Foundation, Standing for the Whole (Chicago: Industrial Areas Foun­
dation, 1990), p. 1.
112 Bretherton

Lastly, in contrast to a heroic model of leadership in which the enlightened

official, technocratic specialist, elected representative, charismatic personality,
social entrepreneur, or philanthropic CEO will deliver change, the legitimacy
and representativeness of the IAF is taken to rest on involving and building a
distributed form of leadership in which everyone, including ordinary citizens,
takes responsibility for building change. This is a vision encapsulated in the
populist slogan: ‘We are the change we’ve been waiting for’. The IAF presents
itself as a catalyst for this broad-based and comprehensive conception of pub-
lic responsibility and political freedom. As the document puts it:

What matters to us is not consensus, but a stake in the ongoing dynamic

of controversy, resolution, and change. We do not want to dominate. We
do not want to be the whole. We want and will insist on being recognised
as a vital part of it—and as capable as others of standing for it.36

Popular Participation, Deliberation, and Discrimination

Despite a widespread commitment to popular sovereignty, there is a tendency

in modern political theory to view ongoing popular involvement in the for-
mation of political judgements with some suspicion. It is a suspicion that
elected representatives seem to share and one that is reflected in Peppiatt’s
remarks. Symptomatic of this suspicion is the account of democracy given
in Joseph Schumpeter’s seminal Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1947).
Schumpeter’s account is part of a broader tendency to justify democracy on
the basis that it provides a mechanism for aggregating preferences in a com-
petitive electoral process and thereby provides legitimacy to whichever party
wins. Self-interest and economic advantages are the proper basis of party plat-
forms for which individuals can express a preference through voting.
Within Schumpeter’s framework popular participation in the making of
decisions is to be discouraged since it is thought to have dysfunctional conse-
quences for this kind of system. Stability and order are to result from compro-
mise among elected politicians and the interests they represent rather than
from encouraging participation in the discernment of goods in common. As
Chantal Mouffe suggests, a consequence of this is that democratic politics is
separated from its normative moral dimensions and is viewed from a purely

36  Ibid., p. 2.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 113

instrumentalist and utilitarian standpoint.37 Yet it is when it is understood

simply as a system of aggregation that democracy is dysfunctional. With
democracy reduced to an electoral procedure for collating individual prefer-
ences and interests, the consultative, deliberative, and discriminative aspects
of making democratic political judgements drop from view (that is, those ele-
ments that make up the second and third conceptions of sovereignty I outlined
earlier). However, as Oliver O’Donovan contends: ‘For representative action to
have moral depth, the representative needs a comprehensive sense of what
the people at its best, i.e., at its most reflective and considerate, is concerned
about’.38
In a democracy, wisdom is not seen to rest with the one or the few but
with the many. To sustain good political order, the contention of democracy
is that the widest possible net must be cast to catch wisdom and experience
in the formulation of good policy. This is exactly the argument of ‘Standing for
the Whole’, which valorizes the dignity and practical wisdom of ordinary peo-
ple. If the distinctiveness and particularity of this experience is lost because
it is collapsed into an aggregation of individual preferences, then the demos
becomes a crowd or mass. As O’Donovan points out:

Aggregated in a mass, their separate contributions lose their distinctive

basis in experience, and are reduced to a fraction of a decibel. The power
of the crowd is the power of none. The price paid for strengthening its
voice is for everyone to lose his own. ‘Demagoguery’ was the name given
to the reductive technique of political management that appealed to the
crowd rather than the people, suppressing the relational structures that
made for common practical reasonableness.39

Consultation, Communication and Acclamation

Against aggregation, community organizing emphasizes the consultative,

communicative and acclamatory moments in democracy, allows for the wis-
dom of each to be heard in its particularity rather than be lost in the mass, and
enables the people’s considered views to be put forward and deliberated upon.
This is the basis of the IAF’s self-identified mandate to represent ‘the whole’. It

37  Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), p. 82.
38  Oliver O’Donovan, Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 179.
39  Ibid., p. 167.
114 Bretherton

is also how community organizing as a practice sustains the public realm as an

arena of political freedom and guards against an elective despotism emerging
wherein representatives, once elected, simply do as they see fit (and thereby
conform to the first vision of sovereignty I outlined).40
It is significant that the IAF document emphasizes standing for the whole
rather than representing the one community, nation, culture, or interest.
The document points to the aspirational sense of the term ‘people’ as denot-
ing the whole, as distinct from its factionalist use as a term for one section
of the whole, the ‘have-nots’. The aspirational use of the term emphasizes the
heterogeneity rather than homogeneity of the people/demos.41 This whole is
not monolithic. Rather, it is a complex, intricate, and differentiated body. An
emphasis on wholeness rather than oneness encourages a vision of democratic
citizenship as about mutual exchanges between different parts of the whole.
As Danielle Allen notes: ‘The metaphor of wholeness can guide us into a con-
versation about how to develop habits of citizenship that can help a democ-
racy bring trustful coherence out of division without erasing or suppressing
difference’.42 For wholeness to stand there is a need to find common interests,
and democratic politics is the ongoing way in which to do this. Community
organizing is a practice through which to inhibit the dissolution of the whole
and reweave a sense of a common life. In the absence of a common tradition
or a well-established collective identity (which in any case, tends to emphasize
oneness and thence demand homogeneity), community organizing provides
a means through which those involved in a place can grasp imaginatively the
whole. Its constituent elements can be seen and heard as possessing a com-
mon life for which ruled and rulers (whether economic, social, or political) are
publicly and mutually accountable.
For democratic legitimacy to be sustained, the people must be able to see
reflected in the goods upheld by their representatives something of their own
sense of the good of the whole. If there is too great a sense of disparity, trust
will break down and a crisis of representation ensue. The frustration Peppiatt
expresses in his remarks indicates a failure to grasp how representativeness
is an ongoing project of imagination. An election is but one moment of com-
munication and mandating. The kind of public accountability sessions that

40  On the importance of ongoing arenas of collective deliberation for sustaining politi-
cal freedom and the role of self-organized associations in this, see Hannah Arendt, On
Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), pp. 223–40.
41  Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of
Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 70–71.
42  Ibid., p. 20.
State, Democracy & Community Organizing 115

community organizing orchestrates are another. They aid democratic repre-

sentation because they strengthen and make more meaningful the sense of
identification and communication between office holders and the people they
represent. Moreover, they involves pieces of political theater that play out a far
richer drama of democratic representation than the pageant of an electoral
rally or the passive reception of a party agenda at a hustings, both of which
operate on the logic of one-way acclamation (the people recognize the ruler)
rather than reciprocal recognition (ruler and ruled acclaim and respond to
each other’s concerns).43 Jeffrey Stout notes that earning recognition of one’s
representative authority comes from one’s responsiveness to the experience,
concerns, proposals, and reasons of those one claims to represent.44 The pub-
lic accountability that comes from such earned authority is a defense against
vanguardism: that is, the claim to stand for the whole based either on a self-
selecting group’s sense that it incarnates the popular will or a specialist gnosis
that discerns the true direction of history and so claims to know better how
everyone else should live.

Conclusion

The practices of community organizing encapsulate a vision of democratic

representation as involving a communicative process through which repre-
sentatives and those they represent are drawn into ongoing relationships of
reciprocal and affective recognition. In representative democracy, where the
act of legitimacy is conferred by an electoral procedure, this procedure is often
conflated with the equally important moments of consultation and identi-
fication through which ‘the people’ can be imagined as a meaningful entity.
Yet if this is done, important elements of democracy are thereby eclipsed.
Consultation involves listening and responding to one’s constituents. This is
often done on an individual basis through responding to letters and ‘surgeries’

43  For the genealogy of acclamation as a juridical-political act that mediates consent,
enacts a procedure of legitimation, and constitutes a people, see Giorgio Agamben,
The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 169–93. However, Agamben does not dis-
tinguish its reciprocal, call and response forms from its unidirectional ones and therefore,
following Carl Schmitt, sees an emphasis on acclamation as necessarily ‘conservative’
rather than democratic.
44  Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010),
p. 109.
116 Bretherton

or in an aggregative way through elections, opinion polls, and referenda. What

is missing in these modes of listening is the connection between consultation,
identification and acclamation of the kind that takes place in community orga-
nizing. As a craft, organizing enables moments of collective self-discovery that
involves affective ritual through which ‘the whole’ or the ‘people’ is visualized,
experienced, and represented. It thereby deploys and performs the second and
third vision of sovereignty so as to limit the dysfunction and dominance of the
first form of sovereignty I outlined at the start.
The relationship between congregations and a consociational form of
democracy as exemplified in community organizing, displays something of how
to prevent the subordination of human flourishing to the demands of either the
state or the market. The congregation and the demos are echoes of each other
and neither is a crowd or multitude whose disassociated and disorganized
form leaves the individual utterly vulnerable to concerted action upon her by
state or market processes. Moreover, it is a partnership that can bring a mutual
discipline to both the congregation and the demos. In joint action in pursuit
of common goods, the congregation has to listen to and learn from its neigh-
bors through participation in a community organizing coalition. Conversely,
the congregation, as part of a moral tradition with an eschatological vision of
the good, brings a wider horizon of reference and relationship to bear upon the
immediate needs and demands of the demos in the form the community orga-
nizing coalition. This mutual disciplining helps ensure that when it comes to
earthly politics, both congregation and demos remain directed towards merely
penultimate ends.45

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 CHAPTER 5

Public Theology and Reconciliation

David Tombs

Introduction

‘Reconciliation’ has a long history as a theological concept, but only a short

history as a prominent term in politics and public debates. Current interest
in reconciliation as a social issue developed in the 1990s, and became a sig-
nificant topic in discussions on post-conflict peacebuilding and in the emer-
gent field of transitional justice.1 These debates examined the challenges after
periods of conflict, or transitions after sustained human rights abuses, and
how societies might best negotiate the competing challenges of truth, justice,
reconciliation and the restoration of democracy as they sought to build their
new futures.2 This chapter examines how theologians have reconsidered the
ministry and mission of reconciliation in response to this renewed interest in
social and political reconciliation in other academic disciplines and in public
policy discussions.3

1  
Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen Gonzalez-Enriquez and Paloma Aguilar, eds.,
The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies, Oxford Studies in
Democratization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Priscilla S. Hayner, Unspeakable
Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocities (New York: Routledge, 2000); Neil Kritz, ed.,
Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, vol. 1, General
Considerations; vol. 2, Country Studies; vol 3. Laws, Rulings and Reports (Washington, DC:
United States Institute of Peace, 1995); Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena, eds., Transitional
Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006).
2  
John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies
(Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1997); Mohammed Abu-Nimer, ed.,
Reconciliation, Justice and Coexistence: Theory and Practice (Lanham and Oxford: Lexington
Books, 2001); Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, ed., From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004); Cleo Fleming, Philipa Rothfield and Paul A. Komesaroff, eds.,
Pathways to Reconciliation: Between Theory and Practice (Aldershot, Hamps: Ashgate, 2008).
3  See for example, John Brewer, Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach (Cambridge: Polity,
2010).

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120 Tombs

The word ‘reconciliation’ is now commonly used, in other disciplines and

in the wider public square, as a secular term to describe a key challenge in
post-conflict societies if communities divided by violence and enmity are to
live together in a shared society. In the academic literature, discussion of rec-
onciliation addresses the legacies of conflict and division, and the mechanisms
to help former opponents live and work together more peacefully. Scholars and
practitioners form around the world have sought to clarify and define a fuller
and more precise understanding of reconciliation along these lines.
Before exploring the theology of reconciliation further, three features of
recent discussions of reconciliation are worth noting as relevant context.
A first feature is that reconciliation is understood as a constituent part
of a peacebuilding process that involves different stages and dimensions.
Reconciliation is the work that usually still remains to be done after the peace
agreement or political reforms have been signed, if the agreement is to have
substance and meaning for the wider society. This work involves a much
wider demographic than those directly involved in the political negotiations.
Political leaders can negotiate and sign agreements, but for most conflicts this
is not enough. These agreements are only of value, and only sustainable in the
long term, if they are followed by a wider reconciliation process at a broader
societal level.
Furthermore, if reconciliation is located within the peacebuilding pro-
cess, it is also clear that that reconciliation itself is most often a process
rather than a finished condition. Fanie Du Toit, a South African commenta-
tor notes that ‘reconciliation’ is a metaphor, and cautions against defining
reconciliation too closely. Instead of a tight definition Du Toit says ‘we pro-
pose a modest description of reconciliation as the beginning of a process
to overcome personal, social or political alienation which has the capacity to
destroy.’4
A second feature associated with reconciliation, is that reconciliation is
concerned with creating or re-building positive social relationships. The US
Mennonite peacebuilder and scholar John Paul Lederach, who pioneered the
study of reconciliation as an academic field, comments: ‘As a perspective, it is
built on and oriented toward the relational aspects of a conflict. As a social phe-
nomenon, reconciliation represents a space, a place or location of encounter,

4  Fanie Du Toit, Learning to Live Together: Practices of Social Reconciliation (Cape Town:
Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2002), p. 300.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 121

where parties to a conflict meet.’5 The Irish peacebuilder David Bloomfield

clarifies this further when he speaks of reconciliation as ‘. . . the long, broad
and deep intercommunal relationship-building process, whose constituent
instruments include justice, truth, healing and reparations’.6
A similar point is made by Daniel Bar-Tal and Gemma H. Bennink who state:
‘reconciliation as an outcome consists of mutual recognition and acceptance,
invested interests and goals in developing peaceful relations, mutual trust, pos-
itive attitudes as well as sensitivity and consideration of other party’s needs
and interests.’7
It is important to recognise that the concern for relationships in recon-
ciliation is not limited to inter-personal relationships, even though these are
critically important. To sustain social reconciliation, it is not just individuals
who must change, but also the social structures and organisations that govern
social life. Social structures and organisations incorporate and promote spe-
cific forms of relationships, and these are invariably distorted and corrupted
by periods of conflict and division. Very often changes at a more structural and
organisational level are a high priority if changes at the personal level are to be
meaningful.
A third feature, which is closely linked to the personal and structural dimen-
sion of reconciliation, is that reconciliation normally has both an individual
and a collective dimension. It strives for both a social and a personal trans-
formation.8 The collective dimension covers a wide range of groups, from the
small immediate family through to large ethnic or national group. In each
society, different forms of collective identity take on importance and weight
depending on the social and cultural context. In some societies, kin and clan
will be significant identities for any collective dimension to reconciliation.

5  Lederach, Building Peace, p. 30.

6  David Bloomfield, On Good Terms: Clarifying Reconciliation, Berghof Report 14 (Berlin:
Berghof Research Centre, 2006), p. 12.
7  Daniel Bar-Tal and Gemma H. Bennink, ‘The Nature of Reconciliation as an Outcome and as
a Process’, in Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, ed., From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 11–38 at 15.
8  Drawing on her work in Northern Ireland, Cecelia Clegg offers a typology of reconciliation
that has four elements, which reflect both the indivdual and collective dimensions of rec-
onciliations: personal; interpersonal; societal and political. See Cecelia Clegg, ‘Embracing a
Threatening Other: Identity and Reconciliaiton in Northern Ireland’, International Journal
of Public Theology, 1:2 (2007), pp. 173–87. In this typology, what Clegg calls the societal and
political reflect the collective dimension, the interpersonal the individual dimension, and
the personal refers to processes within the individual.
122 Tombs

In western societies, these are likely to have little resonance, but other social
identities might assume greater importance. The importance that individuals
place in different forms of group bonds will vary.
In all cases, however, collective groups are made up of individuals, and indi-
viduals never exist in isolation but are always constructing their specific iden-
tities as members of wider social connections. At its best, reconciliation can
address relations between individuals and between groups at the same time,
and this progress can be mutually reinforcing. Often, however, societies make
uneven progress in their reconciliation process, so it advances more quickly in
one area than the other. In such cases, individual progress and collective prog-
ress can come into tension with each other. Some individuals will embrace
a level of reconciliation well beyond the social norm, other individuals will
resist it no matter how much it is embraced more widely at a collective level.
Typically, these tensions between individuals and the collective can be accom-
modated, or at least accepted, within a pluralist democratic society. The collec-
tive process does not require every single member of society to agree with the
overall aim of collective reconciliation, or to support individual reconciliation.
However, if the number of individuals opposed to individual and collective
reconciliation is too great, then the collective process can only have a limited
success.
In summary, recent literature on reconciliation has proposed that: reconcili-
ation is part of a peacebuilding process, and is better seen as an ongoing pro-
cess rather than a finished outcome; it is focussed on changing and rebuilding
relationships, and this includes both structural and personal relationships; and
it involves both individuals and collective groups, and must address the social
identities that contributed to the conflict and division.

Historical Engagement of Christian Churches on the Topic

The language of reconciliation (and its counterpart reconciliación in Spanish)

is deeply embedded in Christian tradition and its theology. The emergence of
reconciliation in recent decades in discussions of peacebuilding and transi-
tional justice did not introduce the idea of reconciliation into Christian the-
ology, but it gave a fresh context to think about old ideas. In light of this, it
is hardly surprising that public discussion of social reconciliation came to
the fore especially in countries where a high percentage of people identified
themselves as Christian. This has led to new insights and fresh thinking on the
relationship between reconciliation as a post-conflict social challenge, and its
longstanding Christian and theological meanings.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 123

As will be discussed in a later section, the Greek terms translated as ‘recon-

ciliation’ and ‘to reconcile’ only feature fifteen times in the New Testament, and
this is mainly in the Pauline literature. Nonetheless, the idea of reconciliation
has been given more attention in sacramental and systematic doctrine than
these relatively few verses might suggest. Yet one of the paradoxes in the
attention that Chrisitan theology has given to reconciliation, is that despite
the extensive attention given to reconciliation in sacramental and systematic
doctrine, the challenges of social reconciliation did not receive more attention
from the Christian churches and Christian writers prior to the 1990s. Two fac-
tors that probably help to explain this apparent neglect are: first, the tendency
towards privatization of religious faith discussed elsewhere in this volume;
and, second, the churches’ reluctance to engage in political controversies.
Since the Enlightenment, there has been a strong tendency towards the
privatization of the religious sphere in Europe and North America.9 Christian
faith has been increasingly seen, by both religious believers and by wider soci-
ety, as a personal and private matter. This conception foregrounds the indi-
vidual in his or her relation to God, and limits religious authority to personal
ethics. There are significant political benefits to this liberal viewpoint in terms
of accommodating religious freedom and cultural pluralism in diverse and
democratic societies. However, it has often been at the cost of Christian faith
turning inward, and steadily withdrawing from the public realm.10
This tendency towards the privatization of faith has been especially nota-
ble in terms of reconciliation. Church engagement with reconciliation has
had both a sacramental and doctrinal focus, but neither have developed a
strong collective dimension or a clear social message. For Catholics, recon-
ciliation has mainly been understood primarily in a sacramental tradition.
As the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, reconciliation is one of the
seven recognised Catholic Sacraments. This Sacramental status of reconcili-
ation might have been a foundation to underpin the theological exploration
of social and political reconciliation and its challenges. In practice, however,

9  The privatization of religion has been much less marked in other societies, and it might
be argued that it is Europe and North America who are out of step with global trends
in this regard. Nonetheless, the cultural influence of Europe and North America have
shaped public debate well beyond their own contexts.
10  This version of faith has little to do with the demands of Biblical Prophets in calling for
social justice, or the message of Jesus of Nazareth announcing the Kingdom of God. There
is an inherent and irreducible public dimension to Christian faith. Public Theology seeks
to give appropriate expression to this public dimension. Public Theology’s origins lie in
a constructive response to the excessive privatization of Christian faith in Europe and
North American societies.
124 Tombs

the close association of reconciliation with the sacrament has usually served to
limit the horizons of wider theological interest in reconciliation. Reconciliation
was identified with the inwardly spiritual. It was linked to individual confes-
sion and repentance for personal sins, which were typically identified as pri-
vate matters, and often linked to sexual temptations. The church did little to
engage with reconciliation in relation to structural or collective sins, or to apply
creative insights from the sacramental rite to political violence, divisions, and
conflicts, or vice-versa.
A second factor that is likely to have discouraged historical Christian engage-
ment with reconciliation is that reconciliation initiatives are invariably contro-
versial and demanding. Even today, when reconciliation has established itself
as a reputable term, and most people see reconciliation in positive terms as a
desirable goal, there are different views on what it means and how it should be
approached. Some critics are suspicious of any notion of reconciliation, whilst
others warn that the ideal is attractive but it is often impractical in reality. Part
of the difficulty in public debates is that, as noted above, the word reconcilia-
tion refers to both a process and a state. Some of the criticisms that are offered
against reconciliation arise from thinking of it as a finished state, rather than
an ongoing process that might never be fully achieved, but is nonetheless a
desirable commitment. An expectation of reconciliation as a state of perfect
harmony places too high a burden on what is realistic. This can distract atten-
tion away from the significance of positive steps towards better relations. Just
as no human society can claim to be perfectly peaceful, or perfectly just, like-
wise no society can claim perfect reconciliation but, as with peace and justice,
this is no reason not to promote reconciliation as much as possible.
From another angle, some critics object to reconciliation as simplistic, a
naïve ‘do-gooding’. This criticism suggests that reconciliation is an optimistic
hope that deep-seated problems can be addressed by good-will alone, and thus
a way to avoid the underlying structural problems which generate and sustain
the bigger issues. This objection is closely linked to the view that the rhetoric
of reconciliation is a form of avoidance and a cover-term for doing nothing.
A more cynical view of reconciliation along these lines is that reconciliation
is not just misguided but an intentional distraction. This criticism sees recon-
ciliation as usually an empty gesture promoted by those in power who wish
to prevent real change and to maintain the advantages they derive from the
­status quo.11 In either case, whether reconciliation is seen as a benign but

11  This cynical sense of reconciliation echoes the Marxist critique of reconciliation, and its
co-option of religion, in which religion serves to help the proletariat reconcile themselves
to their state of misery and exploitation.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 125

i­neffectual ‘do-gooding’, or as a more cynical ‘do nothing’, it fails to live up its

promise. If reconciliation initiatives fail to address justice, they become a token-
ism that prevents real change and collective transformation. Reconciliation in
Latin American societies has often been strongly criticised along these lines,
and frequently with good reason.
There are those who see reconciliation as overly aspirational, and therefore
as hoping to do too much, and bound to result in partial or complete failure.
For some this caution reflects doubts about how much can be achieved given
the long historical experience of division and mistrust. They suggest that the
most that can be expected is a relatively peaceful ‘benign apartheid’, in which
people reconcile themselves not so much to each other, but to an acceptance
of continued but more peaceful division.12 For some in the churches this wari-
ness can also reflect a belief that true reconciliation between peoples can only
be realised after the final judgement. Any initiative to work for reconciliation
between people is therefore likely to be viewed as at best misguided.
Both the privatisation of theology and the reluctance to engage with the
difficult issues of practical reconciliation may explain why, until the 1990s,
Christian theology had relatively little to say on the subject of social recon-
ciliation. The much larger literature and tradition of Christian writings on
the theology and ethics of ‘peace’ had given relatively little sustained atten-
tion to the specifics of social reconciliation, at least in terms of its collective
dimension. To trace the attention to collective reconciliation (or lack thereof)
in Christian writing on peace and conflict would require a separate chapter in
its own right. Throughout history the Christian churches have been engaged
with peace and conflict in a wide variety of contexts, spanning the full spec-
trum from conflicts between individuals and families, through to wider con-
flicts between groups or social bodies, all the way to conflicts at a national
or international level. Looking back on this record, there are many achieve-
ments that might be celebrated, but the overall result is at best mixed. Christian
history in this area offers a wide spectrum, from the militancy of the Crusades
to the non-violent struggle for Civil Rights. There are certainly cases where
Christian churches brought a positive message of peace as an alternative to,
or at least as a partial mitigation of, destructive conflict. There has always been
at least an implicit theology of reconciliation in these contributions. At the
same, however, there are many examples where the churches have failed to
bring a positive message of peace. In some instances, the churches have called

12  See espcially Clegg, ‘Embracing a Threatening Other’, and also Joseph Liechty and Cecelia
Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation in Northern
Ireland (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001).
126 Tombs

for peace but their voice has been marginalised or ignored. In other cases, the
churches have actively supported conflict and legitimised violence. The rec-
ognition that religions are ‘ambivalent’ in their relation to violence applies to
Christianity as much as any other faith.13 Despite the apparent centrality of
peace in Christian values, and the celebration of Christ as Prince of Peace, the
churches have often focussed more on peace between individuals than at a
structural and social level. The same dynamic can be seen in the way it has
approached reconciliation.

Key Theologians, Christian Leaders and Christian Movements

From the 1990s onwards a new wave of important works on the theology of
reconciliation started to appear.14 The manner and extent to which Christian
movements and theologians have engaged with the topic has significantly
varied according to the local context, as can be seen by brief case studies of
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Guatemala, and Northern Ireland.
Overall, Latin American transitions after the dictatorships and authoritarian
regimes which characterised the 1970s and 1980s, were rarely accompanied by
a meaningful social or political reconciliation process. It therefore prompted
much less creative theological attention to reconciliation than in South Africa.15
In most Latin American countries, sweeping amnesties were enacted that
deliberately entrenched the undemocratic impunity of the powerful, and the
focal point of public debates was more around truth and justice than about

13  Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
14  For example, see Robert J. Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing
Social Order (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992); The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality
and Strategies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998); Donald Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies:
Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion
and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville,
TN: Abingdon Press, 1996); Gregory Baum and Harold Wells, eds., The Reconciliation of
Peoples: Challenge to the Churches (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1996; Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1997); Mary Grey, To Rwanda and Back: Liberation, Spirituality and
Reconciliation (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2007).
15  For a good overview of the transitions and the role of the church in different countries,
see Jeffrey Klaiber, The Church, Dictatorships and Democracy in Latin America (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1998). On the politics of reconciliaition and the role of the churches see,
Iain S. Maclean, ed., Reconciliation, Nations and Churches in Latin America (Aldershot,
Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006).
Public Theology And Reconciliation 127

reconciliation.16 Not surprisingly, the term reconciliation was generally viewed

with suspicion by Latin American liberation theologians, who argued that truth
and justice had to be pre-conditions of any reconciliation process.17

Argentina, Brazil and Chile

The authoritarian regimes, which had governed most Latin American coun-
tries in the 1970s and early 1980s, slowly gave way to more democratic govern-
ments from the mid-1980s onwards. Argentina pioneered the use of a truth
commission in the 1980s to hold to account perpetrators of human rights
abuses during the military dictatorship (1976–83).18 During the repression,
the security services had developed the technique of ‘disappearances’ to avoid
accountability for their actions and to spread uncertainty and terror in wider
society.19 Instead of arresting their targets the security forces abducted them,
and then refused to give information on what had happened to them. Even
as they denied any knowledge of what had happened, very often the prisoners
were tortured and then killed, and the bodies were buried in unmarked graves
or thrown into the sea without trace. Groups like the Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo had organised to publicise and protest the disappearances, and to call
the security forces to account, but had been derided and dismissed.20 The hope

16  An important exception to this can be seen in the work of US Catholic theologian Robert
Schreiter. Schreiter says his interest in the theology of reconciliation was first aroused
by the Chilean experience, Schreiter, The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and
Strategies, p. v.
17  See especially the analysis by Jose Comblin, ‘The Theme of Reconciliaiton in Latin
America’ in Iain S. Maclean, ed., Reconciliation, Nations and Churches in Latin America
(Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 135–70.
18  On the political violence in Argentina, and the role of religion, see Patricia Marchak, God’s
Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1999); Frank Graziano, Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and
Radical Christianity in the Argentine “Dirty War” (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
19  On the use of ‘disappearances’, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender
and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 1997); Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina’s Dirty War Against Human
Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990);
Horacio Verbitsky, The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, translated by
Esther Allen (New York: New Press, 1996).
20  On the Mothers, see Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (Boston: South End Press, 1989);
Matilde Mellibovsky, Circle of Love over Death: Testimonies of the Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo (Williamantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1997); Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The
Grandmothers of the Plaza De Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 1999); Marguerite Bouvard, Revolutionizing
128 Tombs

was that the commission would both provide an authoritative account of the
abuses, which would undermine the military’s denials, and that the findings
would then be used to bring prosecutions against those responsible. Initially it
enjoyed a significant degree of success. The commission produced the widely
read and influential report Nunca Más, and served as an important model for
future truth commissions.21 Its findings were used in legal proceedings against
the military leadership, who were convicted with long sentences. However,
when the civilian government sought to extend prosecutions to more middle-
ranking officers the military organised to prevent prosecutions by threatening
another coup. The government agreed to back down, and this set an influential
precedent for the wider region. During the 1980s and 1990s it seemed that Latin
American countries might realistically seek for truth but that justice was a step
too far.22
In neighbouring Brazil, even the establishment of a truth commission to
investigate abuses during military rule (1964–85) was too big a step during the
1980s. The military safeguarded their position with a sweeping amnesty before
the transition even got underway. There were no prosecutions of military fig-
ures in the 1980s and 1990s, and the return to democracy was not accompanied
by a meaningful social or political reconciliation process. Nonetheless, there
was an extraordinary initiative by the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo, with funding
from the World Council of Churches, to document torture during the military
dictatorship.23 This led to the Nunca Mais report, which offered a powerful
statement on the abuses which had been committed, and appeared just after
the Argentinean report.24

Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resource
Books, 1994).
21  National Commission on Disappeared People [CONADEP], Nunca Más: A Report by
Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People, translated by Writers and
Scholars International (Boston and London: Faber & Faber, 1986); Spanish original:
Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión
Nacional sobre la Desaparación de Personas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria, 1984).
22  Jaime Malamud-Goti, Game Without End—State Terror and the Politics of Justice (Norman,
OK and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Alison Brysk, The Politics of Human
Rights in Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Carlos Santiago Nino,
Radical Evil On Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
23  Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (New York:
Penguin Books; 1990; reprint with postscript Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
24  Archbishop of Sao Paulo, Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture
by Brazilian Governments, 1964–79, translated by Jaime Wright (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1988 [Portuguese orig. 1985]).
Public Theology And Reconciliation 129

The Chilean truth commission, was set up to investigate abuses during the
military regime led by Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989). This was the first com-
mission to carry the title Truth and Reconciliation. It is implied from this title
that those responsible for the commission believed that truth and reconcilia-
tion were related, but the nature of the relationship was not discussed at any
length in the report. Following the precedent of previous commissions, there
were no public hearings and no emphasis on inter-personal reconciliation in
the Chilean approach. Instead, the focus was on ‘truth recovery’. The concern
for reconciliation seemed marginal to its work, probably because it was felt
necessary to establish more of the truth first, and then reconciliation might
follow this. As with the Argentinean commission, the truth recovery work of
the Chilean commission made a significant contribution, but it was not enough
to ensure justice. The military had withdrawn from government but they were
still very powerful and resisted any attempts to be made accountable. Despite
the value of TRC report in documenting human rights abuses, the overall out-
come was far short of what a meaningful reconciliation would involve.
Renewed efforts to bring perpetrators to account in both Argentina and
Chile had to wait until later, and did not gain traction until near the end of
the 1990s, when new political dispensations in both countries allowed the
unresolved cases of the past to be re-opened. Probably the most famous exam-
ple of this was Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London at the request of a Spanish
Judge who wanted to question him in relation to a case concerning Spanish
citizens disappared during Pinochet’s regime in Chile. Pinochet was eventu-
ally released by the British on medical grounds and allowed to return to Chile.
After his miraculous recovery, there were renewed attempts to bring him to
justice through the Chilean courts. Not surprisingly, those amongst the mili-
tary and the social elite who opposed this were quick to call for reconciliation,
and insisted that the past should be left behind. Some influential voices in the
Catholic Church spoke in support of forgiving as a Christian duty. However,
others criticised this as a distortion of Christian teaching on reconciliation,
because it suggested that neither truth nor justice had a place in the creation
of a new society.

South Africa
South Africa offers a well-known example of a high-profile national com-
mitment to reconciliation with strong involvement of churches. This has in
turn generated some of the most creative new theological thinking on recon-
ciliation.25 Much of this literature is widely known, and closely linked to the

25  See especially John de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (London: SCM Press, 2002);
H. Russel Botman and Robin M. Petersen, eds., To Remember and to Heal: Theological and
130 Tombs

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995–1998).26 The TRC

prompted widespread debate on reconciliation, and especially the relationship
between reconciliation and forgiveness.27 The commission’s innovative, but
nevertheless controversial position on selective amnesty, was shaped by both
political pragmatism and Christian faith.28 Applicants were offered amnesty
if they had committed human rights abuses or crimes for political reasons, as
long as they could demonstrate a political motive for their actions, and were
willing to give a full and truthful account of their involvement.29 As long as
they told the truth and persuaded the commission that the actions were politi-
cal, applicants did not have to demonstrate remorse nor express regret.30 Some
victims and relatives found that the hearings gave important new information,
but others argued that perpetrators were treated too generously. The relative
speed of the amnesty process compared to the slowness, and limited budget,

Psychological Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau,
1996).
26  Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa, Report. 5 vols (Cape Town: Juta and
Co, 1998; London: Macmillan, 1999). For good overviews of the TRC, see Kader Asmal,
Louise Asmal and Ronald Suresh Roberts. Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of
Apartheid’s Criminal Governance, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 [1996]); Alex
Boraine, A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg:
Random House, 1998; New York: Times Books, 1999); Dorothy Shea, The South African
Truth Commission: The Politics of Reconciliation (Washington, DC: United States Institute
of Peace, 2000).
27  Russell Daye, Political Forgiveness: Lessons from South Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
2004).
28  On the ethical issues raised by the amnesty, see especially Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis
Thompson, eds., Truth and Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
29  The requirement to demonstrate a political motive criteria was to exclude applications
for actions that were simply criminal. Many of the applications that the TRC rejected were
made from black South Africans who were deemed to have committed crimes such as
theft. These were not classified as political but simply criminal, and therefore outside the
provisions of the amnesty. However, one of the criticisms of the TRC mandate was that
it focussed too tightly on individual acts and not on the wider context and the crime of
apartheid itself. The TRC amnesty criteria did not allow for the political context that led
to so many black South Africans being over-represented in the prison system for criminal
acts in the first place. It was therefore unable to offer amnesty for many acts that appli-
cants might not have committed if their lives had not been governed by apartheid.
30  Since applications for amnesty had to demonstrate a political motive, applicants coud
be challenged if the acts for which amnesty was requested did not seem reasonable in
proportion to the stated motive.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 131

of the reparation process was another source of criticism. Some commentators

saw the TRC as weighted in favour of perpetrators, and especially in favour of
white perpetrators.
As chair of the TRC, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a charismatic and influ-
ential spokesperson for the transformative power of forgiveness.31 Tutu used
his position to argue for the importance of reconciliation at both individual
and collective levels. Even though neither remorse nor repentance were condi-
tions for the amnesty offered by the TRC, Tutu encouraged perpetrators to con-
front their deeds, and to acknowledge their regret. He also encouraged victims
to forgive wherever possible. His own theological outlook shaped his actions
and words as chair of the Commission, and his conviction that forgiveness and
truth-telling were both crucial in any meaningful reconciliation process.

Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things are
other than they are. It is not patting one another on the back and turn-
ing a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness,
the abuse, the pain, the degradation, the truth. It could even sometimes
make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worth-
while, because in the end there will be real healing from having dealt
with the real situation. Spurious reconciliation can bring only spurious
healing.32

31  Tutu repeatedly emphasised his faith in the healing power of truth telling, captured in the
banners ‘Revealing is Healing’ at commission hearings; see esp. Desmond Tutu, ‘Foreword
by Chairperson’, in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRCSA), Truth
and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Juta and Co, 1998;
London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1–23. For his own autobiographical account of the experi-
ence, see Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday; London:
Rider, 1999). For a critical assessment of the way that Tutu’s faith perspectives influenced
the commission, see especially Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation
in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); for a more positive assessment, see Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu
Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1997). For a helpful collection
of reflections; see Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds., Looking Back and
Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa
(Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press; London: Zed Books, 2000).
32  Tutu, No Future Without Forgivness, p. 218.
132 Tombs

Tutu’s role as chair and the dramatic style of public hearings and testimo-
nies encouraged significant theological interest in the issues raised.33 There
were criticisms that it was inappropriate for Tutu to use Christian concepts
and language in his understanding and leadership of a public organisation. In
response, he argued that the majority of South Africans identified themselves
as Christian, and that many found Christian values helpful, even essential, to
their grappling with reconciliation. He also pointed out his commitments as
a Christian leader were well-known when he was appointed to be chair, and
presumably had been part of the reason he was appointed.
Nonetheless Tutu’s emphasis on forgiveness was criticised as giving too little
account to justice. Some of these criticisms failed to appreciate the nuance in
Tutu’s call for forgiveness. It was not a naïve call to forget the past and hope
that all would be well. On the contrary, according to Tutu:

In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is

important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities hap-
pen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done.
It means taking what has happened seriously and not minimising it;
drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire
existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have
empathy, to try to stand in their shoes, and to appreciate the sort of pres-
sures and influences that might have brought them to do what they did.34

In addition, Tutu went out of his way to stress that although the TRC process
was in tension with demands for retributive justice, it often contribute posi-
tively to restorative justice.
The issue of justice and reconciliation was taken up by Reformed theologian
John De Gruchy, who reflects extensively on the TRC and South Africa’s experi-
ence in his book Reconciliation: Restoring Justice. As De Gruchy noted, a tren-
chant criticism of any theological talk of reconciliation without a precondition
of justice had been offered in the Kairos Document in 1985.35 Without seeking
to minimise the difficulties involved, De Gruchy nonetheless insisted on the
need for Christians to speak on reconciliation in the public square.

33  On the role of Christianity in the TRC, see especially: Megan Shore, Religion and Conflict
Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Farnham,
Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).
34  Tutu, No Future Without Forgivness, p. 219.
35  Challenge to the Church: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa:
The Kairos Document (rev. edn; Braamfontein, Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers, 1986
[1985]).
Public Theology And Reconciliation 133

We must recognise the danger of speaking of reconciliation. There is cer-

tainly a time for remaining silent, and sometimes silence can express our
concern even better than words. But that is not an excuse for not speak-
ing, for not daring to speak when the time demands it. Sensitive to the
questions we have raised, we dare to speak of reconciliation because we
dare not remain silent in a world torn apart by hatred, alienation and
violence. We dare not remain silent as citizens or as Christians.36

In response to objections that Christian talk of reconciliation fails to address,

and often distracts from, the underlying injustices in a society, De Gruchy
argues for a Christian perspective in which ‘Reconciliation implies a funda-
mental shift in personal and power relations between former enemies’.
Nonetheless, some South Africans argue that the international acclaim
given to the TRC is unduly positive, and out of step with most assessments in
South Africa. They say international perceptions usually amount to a roman-
ticised and simplified response to complex problems, by those at a distance
who have little understanding of the issues and no involvement in the ongoing
problems. This included an over-emphasis on forgiveness by victims, a naïve
faith in truth-telling as healing, and criticism of both the ethics and efficacy of
the amnesty. There is little doubt that the TRC was not a magic wand, and there
is still a great deal of work required to create a more equal society. Nonetheless,
South Africa offers an example of widespread church engagement with the
national debate on reconciliation, and a critical stimulus for renewed reflec-
tion on reconciliation and its place in Christian theology.

Guatemala
In Guatemala the church went as far as to create its own truth commission,
named the Interdiocesan Commission on Recovery of Historical Memory
(REMHI). When Bishop Gerardi presented its findings at a launch at the Cathe­
dral in Guatemala City, when he stressed the importance of facing the truth.

36  John de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice, p. 17. De Gruchy suggests that public
debates on the TRC and reconciliation had been complicated and confused by a failure
to recognise sequential distinctions in reconciliation as a present process and a future
state. De Gruchy sees an acknowledgment of the differences between these as a necessary
step for any realistic discussion of reconciliation: ‘Irrespective of whether we speak about
reconciliation theologically, interpersonally, socially or politically, we need to recognise
that we are invariably talking about a sequential process. Reconciliation is a way of deal-
ing with and overcoming past alienation, enmity and hurt. But it is also a way of relating
to the ‘other’ in the present, and a goal that is always ahead of us in the future however
much we may experience it here and now.’; John de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring
Justice, p. 27.
134 Tombs

In support of this he cited from the Gospel of John ‘For you will know the truth
and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). As Gerardi observed, REMHI sought
to give practical expression to Christian faith in the power of truth:

The essential objective behind the REMHI project during its three years
of work has been to know the truth that will make us all free (Jn. 8:32).
Reflecting on the Historical Clarification Accord, we as people of faith,
discovered a call from God for our mission as church—that truth should
be the vocation of all humanity.37

Picking up on the preceding verse (Jn. 8:31b ‘If you continue in my work, you
are truly my disciples’) Gerardi explained:

If we orient ourselves according to the Word of God, we cannot hide or

cover up reality. We cannot distort history, nor should we silence the
truth. To open ourselves to truth and to face our personal and collective
reality are not options that can be accepted or rejected. They are indis-
pensable requirements for all people and societies that seek to humanize
themselves and to be free. They make us face our most essential human
condition: that we are sons and daughters of God, called to participate in
our Father’s freedom.38

The Greek word for truth aletheia, which literally means ‘uncovered’ (a-letheia),
is an apt expression for truth-telling as ‘dis-covery’. To discover what has hith-
erto been hidden and bring it out into the open may involve new pain, but it
can also help society and individuals to deal with the past and discover new
paths for the future.
As Gerardi commented:

It is a liberating and humanizing truth that makes it possible for all men
and women to come to terms with themselves and their life stories. It is
a truth that challenges each one of us to recognise our individual and
collective responsibility and to commit ourselves to action so that those

37  Juan Gerardi, ‘Speech on Presentation of the REMHI Report’, in REMHI, Guatemala:
Never Again! (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books; London: Latin America Bureau and Catholic
Institute for International Relations, 1999 [Spanish original 1998]), pp. xxiii–xxv at xxiv.
38  Gerardi, ‘Speech on Presentation of the REMHI Report’, p. xxiv.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 135

abominable acts never happen again . . . Discovering the truth is painful,

but it is without doubt a healthy and liberating action.39

Northern Ireland
The terminology of reconciliation featured significantly in the Belfast Good
Friday Agreement (1998), and was also adopted quite widely as part of the
peacebuilding process. Despite this, public attitudes to reconciliation often
reflect an ambivalence, and meaningful process has been elusive.40 Northern
Ireland can be seen as a good example of ‘peace without reconciliation’, rather
than ‘peace and reconciliation’.
Attitudes to reconciliation are as mixed and contested within the churches
as they are within wider society. On the one hand, there are those, like the
Founder and Leader of the Corrymeela Community of Reconciliation, Revd
Ray Davey, who insisted that for Christians, reconciliation is not just one con-
cern among many, it is a deal-breaker in Christian identity. In his well-known
words:

If we Christians cannot speak the message of reconciliation, we have

nothing to say.41

The sectarianism and social division which continue to characterise political

and social life in Northern Ireland provide the context for Corrymeela’s under-
standing of reconciliation. This guides their work of over fifty years to change
this. Because reconciliation initiatives in Northern Ireland are sometimes as
only addressing personal relationships rather than structural changes, the defi-
nition used at Corrymeela seeks to include both within its understanding of
reconciliation. Likewise, because some critics of reconciliation object to the
idea of ‘re’ in reconciliation, saying that this suggests that there was a time
when the division did not exist, Corrymeela seeks to balance a sense of restora-
tion and transformation.

39  Gerardi, ‘Speech on Presentation of the REMHI Report’, p. xxv.

40  See Norman Porter, The Elusive Quest: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff
Press, 2003).
41  Rebecca Dudley, What is Reconciliaiton? The Corrymeela Statement of Commitment
as a Resource for Life and Faith, Think Peace Series. What is Reconciliation? 1 (Belfast:
Corrymeela, 2013), p. 7.
136 Tombs

For historical reasons the centre of gravity for both Catholic and Protestant
churches in Northern Ireland is conservative. As discussed above, conservative
churches tend to see social reconciliation as a low priority, and even view it
with theological suspicion. For some critics within Protestant churches, there
is concern that reconciliation is a theological cover-term for ecumenism, and
that ecumenism is in turn a cover-term for compromise or betrayal of faith.
A further reservation is that talk of reconciliation is dishonest, since the under-
lying division in Northern Ireland remains. Some conservative Protestants
remain staunchly opposed to the peace process and power-sharing arrange-
ments, and see them as form of accommodation with violence and betrayal.
The still imperfect peace, and the ongoing social division, are used to justify
their withdrawal from society and politics rather than as a challenge for a
deeper engagement with the Christian call to reconciliation.
Research by Brandon Hamber and Grainne Kelly suggested that despite the
success of the Irish Peace Process, the term ‘reconciliation’ was seen as asking
both too little and too much in Northern Ireland.42 For some reconciliation is
too little because it is seen as too easy a way to avoid the really hard questions
about wrong-doing and what needs to change in society. For others reconcili-
ation is too much, because it is seen as requiring personal commitment, and
entails making new forms of relationships beyond the minimal requirements
of cease-fire and political peace.
For more secularly-minded people the affinity between reconciliation and
theological language adds further concerns. The way that the theological lan-
guage of reconciliation is most typically used, with an emphasis on the restora-
tion of individual relationships, seems to invite a simplistic interpretation of
complex collective and political challenges.

Biblical and Theological Insights from the Perspective of Public

Theology

Transformation and Reconciliation

Reconciliationis was the word used in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate to translate the
New Testament Greek noun katallagē (καταλλαγή), which was used by Paul
as an expression of God’s saving work in Christ.43 In the same way, Jerome

42  Brandon Hamber and Gráinne Kelly, A Place for Reconciliation? Conflict and Locality in
Northern Ireland, Democratic Dialogue Report 18 (Belfast: Democratic Dialogue, 2005).
43  katallagē occurs 4 times, in Rom. 5.11; 11.15; 2 Cor. 5.18 and 19.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 137

t­ ranslated variants of the Greek verb katallassō (καταλλάσσω) by correspond-

ing forms of the Latin verb reconciliare (to reconcile).44
The Greek verb katallassō means ‘to make different’ or ‘to change’, or
‘exchange’.45 It is derived from allos (ἄλλος), which means ‘other’ or ‘another’,
and kata (κατά), which is frequently used to denote opposition or intensity.46
The English words ‘transformation’ and ‘to transform’ might be more appropri-
ate, or when re-establishing a former relationship ‘reformation’ and ‘to reform’.
In either case, the Greek can suggest a quite radical shift, not a superficial
adjustment.
By contrast, the etymology of the Latin terms reconciliationis and reconcili-
are might imply more of a restoration to a former state than a revolutionary
change. This etymology suggests a process of ‘Calling together again’ or ‘Calling
back together’.47 The Latin etymological image of reconciliation suggests two
things. First, that reconciliation is concerned with restoration, second, that
reconciliation has an individual and inter-personal element, which is reflected
in the action of calling.
The word katallassō is used for restoring an inter-personal relationship in
1 Cor. 7.10–11, in the context of marital relations.48 However, elsewhere the New
Testament uses katallagē for a more dramatic new creation. The declaration
that God was making all things new in Christ (2 Cor. 5.17) immediately pro-
ceeds the clearest statement of God’s work of katallagē (2 Cor. 5.18–20).

[17] So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has

passed away; see, everything has become new! [18] All this is from God,
who reconciled [katallassō] us to himself through Christ, and has given
us the ministry of reconciliation [katallagē] [19] that is, in Christ God

44  katallassō occurs 6 times, in Rom. 5.10 (twice); 1 Cor. 7.11; 2 Cor. 5.18, 19, and 20.
45  Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol 1; trans. Geoffrey
Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 254.
46  The other terms related to allos which occur in the New Testament are: diallassō
(διαλλάσσω) in Matt. 5.24; and apokatallassō (ἀποκαταλλάσσω), in Col. 1.20, Col. 1.22, and
Eph. 2.16.
47  Reconciliatio combines ‘again’ (re) and ‘bringing together’ or ‘assembling’ (conciliatio).
Conciliatio is in turn derived from the combination of ‘together’ (con) and ‘to call’ or ‘to
summon’ (from the root verb calo/calare).
48  ‘[10] To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not
separate from her husband [11] (but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or
else be reconciled [katallassō] to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce
his wife.’
138 Tombs

was reconciling [katallassō] the world to himself, not counting their

trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation
[katallagē] to us. [20] So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is mak-
ing his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be recon-
ciled [katallassō] to God. (NRSV 1989)

Ralph Martin identifies the theme of reconciliation as the central theme

of Paul’s theology.49 He summarises the human predicament which prompts
Pauls use of the term as ‘one of cosmic disorder and human bondage resulting
from enmity to God and leading to fear of God and alienation in society.’50
Given the cosmic scope of the problem, and the depth of the dilemma, the
conventional English sense of reconciliation might seem a rather inadequate
term for what Paul had in mind. The Greek term katallagē captures more of
the sweeping and transformative dimension of what Paul had in mind, and the
sense of bondage and enmity make a clearer connection between the theo-
logical focus and a political milieu. By contrast, the language of reconciliation
derived from the Latin encourages a focus on restoration of relationships, but is
less effective in pointing towards the transformative dimension. Furthermore,
the transformative dimension of Paul’s understanding was further obscured in
English language discussions when the term reconciliation was itself displaced
by the term atonement. The shift to atonement served to further detach the
theological doctrine from its social and political reference point of enmity and
division.

Reconciliation and Atonement

Modern English versions, like the NrSV in 2 Cor. 5.18–20, translate katallagē
using the English noun ‘reconciliation’, and translate derivatives from katallassō
with variants of the English verb ‘to reconcile’. This echoes Jerome’s terms in
the Vulgate, where the Latin for 2 Cor. 5.18–20 includes reconciliavit, reconcili-
ationis (twice), reconcilians, and reconciliamini.51

49  Ralph P. Martin, Reconciliation: A Study of Paul’s Theology (London: Marshall, Morgan &
Scott, 1981). p. 5. Martin in turn credits this insight to T.W. Manson, On Paul and Jesus
(Ed. M. Black. London: 1963), p. 50.
50  Martin, Reconciliation, p. 81.
51  The Vulgate reads: ‘[18] ‘Omnia autem ex Deo, qui nos reconciliavit sibi per Christum:
et dedit nobis ministerium reconciliationis, [19] quoniam quidem Deus erat in Christo
mundum reconcilians sibi, non reputans illis delicta ipsorum, et posuit in nobis verbum
reconciliationis. [20] Pro Christo ergo legatione fungimur, tamquam Deo exhortante per
nos. Obsecramus pro Christo, reconciliamini Deo.’
Public Theology And Reconciliation 139

Wycliffe’s translation of this passage in his English Bible in the fourteenth

century, which was translated from the Vulgate, used the terms ‘reconciled’
and ‘reconciling’.52 By contrast, when William Tyndale made his English trans-
lation of the New Testament in 1526 it was the first English bible to use Greek
manuscripts assembled by Erasmus, rather than the Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate.
For katallassō in 2 Cor. 5.18 and 19, Tyndale chose ‘reconciled’ just as Wycliffe
had done. However, to translate katallagē in the same verses, Tyndale intro-
duced the noun ‘atonement’ rather than ‘reconciliation’.53 Tyndale also used
‘be atone’ (or ‘be at one’) in verse 20, instead of ‘be reconciled’.54
The language of atonement linked the New Testament notion more firmly
with the cultic context of atonement in the Hebrew Bible, and the Great Day
of Atonement (Lev. 16). This might not have made much difference when the
word atonement (at-one-ment) was seen as virtually synonymous with recon-
ciliation. However, over time the composite English word ‘atonement’ took on
a life of its own, to such an extent that the original idea of ‘at-one-ment’, and
the close link between this and reconciliation, has been largely forgotten.
Atonement encouraged a more doctrinal interpretation of the word
katallagē, and less attention to its social implications.55 The greater emphasis
that the language of atonement gave to cult and doctrine served to reduce the
attention to the political and social context. A gap developed between think-
ing of atonement with God, and thinking of reconciliation between people.

52  In Wycliffe’s translation the passage reads: ‘[18] and all things be of God, which reconciled
us to him by Christ, and gave to us the service of reconciling. [19] And God was in Christ,
reconciling to him the world, not reckoning to them their guilts, and putted in us the word
of reconciling. [20] Therefore we use message for Christ, as if God admonisheth by us; we
beseech you for Christ, be ye reconciled to God.’
53  In the early fourteenth century the phrase ‘at one’ (meaning in harmony or in peace)
started to be used as an adverbial phrase in English. The phrase ‘To one’ (a verb meaning
‘to unite’ or ‘to make one’) dates from about the same time. Over time, ‘Onement’ used
as a noun by John Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, gave way to ‘Atonement’ At-one-
ment. This prepared the way for an important shift in how the bible was translated when
English translations of the bible started to appear in the early sixteenth century.
54  In Tyndale’s translation the passage reads: ‘[18] Neverthelesse all thinges are of god which
hath reconciled vs vnto him sylfe by Iesus Christ and hath geven vnto vs the office to
preach the atonement. [19] For God was in Christ, and made agreement bitwene the
worlde an hym sylfe and imputed not their synnes unto them: and hath committed to
us the preachynge of the atonement. [20] Now then are we messengers in the roume of
Christ: even as though God did beseche you thorow vs: So praye we you in Christes stede
that ye be atone with God:’ (Tyndale translation 1526).
55  This is reflected in the linking of atonement with preaching in Tyndale’s translation of
2 Cor. 5.19.
140 Tombs

‘Atonement’ rather than ‘reconciliation’ became the more usual term to refer
to the doctrine of God’s restoration of relationship with humanity through
Christ. Over time, atonement became exclusively theological language
without connection to the overcoming of conflict and division in any other
human sphere. Some churches even contrast the concern for atonement
with the concern for reconciliation. Atonement is seen exclusively as a theo-
logical doctrine, and as the central focus of the Christian gospel. It is often
framed as being concerned with the ‘vertical’ separation of God and sin-
ner. Reconciliation, by contrast, is seen as a social ethic. It is often framed as
only concerned with the horizontal divisions between individuals or within
wider society. Reconciliation is typically seen as an appropriate application
of Christian love, but is not seen as inherently theological or foundational for
Christian faith.
Furthermore, for many Protestants, the doctrine of atonement has come
to be seen as an entirely spiritual transaction, with little relevance to social
and political concerns. In fact, on this basis, atonement (understood as a
spiritual matter) is sometimes presented as a contrast to reconciliation (an
earthly matter), rather than an alternative word for it. This concern is often
expressed through a spatial metaphor, which draws a distinction between the
vertical relationship (of atonement) with God above, and the horizontal rela-
tionship (of reconciliation) between people on earth. For some, the horizontal
element is acceptable (and might even be a positive addition) if it remains
subordinate to the vertical element. For others, especially in more conserva-
tive Protestant traditions, the possibility that the horizontal element might
displace or distort the relationship with God is seen as too dangerous. In this
context, the language of reconciliation is therefore perceived as a step down a
‘slippery slope’, where every step towards a more open engagement with soci-
ety is a step away from the sure ground of individual salvation.
This tendency is further reinforced by an imbalance in theological presenta-
tions of sin that emphasise the spiritual aspects of sin, and how these apply at
an individual level, without similar attention to the political and social aspects
of sin, and how these can operate at a collective level. This dovetails with an
artificial split between spiritual atonement and human reconciliation, and the
elevation of what is perceived as spiritual and individual over what is seen
as social and collective. Thus the theological doctrine of atonement became
uncoupled from its early reference point in practical experiences of reconcili-
ation as ways to understand a new relationship with God.
This historical disconnection then made it hard for the churches to offer
an informed and constructive contribution on social reconciliation. Some
conservative Christians criticise church efforts to address social reconciliation,
Public Theology And Reconciliation 141

citing this as an example of the church straying from its proper task, and adopt-
ing a secular agenda. Whereas, historically speaking, it would be more accurate
to see the concern for social reconciliation as a healthy correction. Attention to
the actual experiences that generated the theological metaphor in the first
place, should deepen the understanding of reconciliation as a social process
and shed light on why this has been a powerful theological metaphor.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of penal substitution models of atonement
in many churches reinforces this disconnect. Penal substitution is the doctrine
that Christ died in the place of men and women, and by taking punishment
in their place he paid the penalty for them. This model of atonement with
its strongly judicial and retributive emphasis has roots back to Anselm in the
medieval period, and was subsequently developed and revised by Calvin dur-
ing the Reformation. For some Evangelical Protestant churches penal substi-
tution is the only acceptable version of the church’s historical understanding
of atonement, and any alternative is a concession and betrayal.56 Its doctrinal
logic is to offer an exceptional instance, based on Christ’s unique nature as
a divine being innocent from sin. This innocence allows Christ’s death to be
substituted for the punishment of the sins of others. This substitution is seen
to unlock the otherwise unanswerable demands of retributive justice, and per-
mits the salvation of those who place their faith in Christ.
At its best, the penal substitution model of atonement might be seen to tes-
tify to the transformative power of grace, as an undeserved and extraordinary
gift from God. For many Christians who value its message it is likely to be this
overwhelming sense of grace that is most important. However, the assump-
tions behind penal substation have been strongly criticised on both ethical
and theological grounds. Its starting point appears to be an uncritical affir-
mation of retributive justice; and its proposed resolution appears to support,
and even to celebrate, the punishment of the innocent without good reason.
Feminist theologians have also pointed out that the logic of penal substitution
does little to challenge abusive power relations and punitive violence, and ulti-
mately provides a divine archetype for child abuse. Leaving these more general
criticisms of penal substitution aside, in terms of encouraging church engage-
ment with social reconciliation, it more likely to be a barrier than a bridge. Its
focus on the unique nature of Jesus, as innocent of sin, distances him from

56  Whilst penal substitution is undoubtedly an influential interpretation of how atonement

(reconciliation) was brought through the cross, it is by no means the only one. There
have been, and continue to be, different ways or ‘models’ or ‘theories’ that interpret the
re-creation of good relationship between God and humanity effected through Christ.
142 Tombs

other people. The exceptionality of Christ’s nature, which is stressed in penal

substitution, discourages the application of atonement theology to any other
form of reconciliation.

Reconciliation and the Cross

In addition to 2 Cor. 5.18–20, two other Pauline passages in the New Testament
(Rom. 5.10–11 and Rom. 11.15) use katallassō and katallagē to describe recon-
ciliation with God. Rom. 5.10–11 expresses Paul’s conviction that reconciliation
has been achieved through God’s initiative (not through human work), and
that it was effected through the death of Christ.57 Rom. 11.15 is part of Paul’s
discussion of how salvation for the Gentiles is related to the salvation of Israel.
Paul argues that Israel has stumbled so that the Gentiles might be saved, but
that Israel’s stumbling is not so that Israel will fall, but that it will lead to their
own salvation.58 Again it is clear that in Paul’s mind reconciliation has a radical
and transformative impact on human society.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, there are three closely related com-
pound words that are also translated as ‘to reconcile’. In Matt. 5:24 diallassō
(διαλλάσσω) is used, with reference to human reconciliation.59 This is another
compound variant of katallassō, the prefix dia (διά) suggesting ‘thorougly’ or
‘fully’.60 Likewise, in Acts 7:26, synallassō (συναλλάσσω) is also used for inter-
personal reconciliation, with the prefix syn (συν) suggesting ‘together’.61

57  ‘[10] For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled [katallassō] to God through the
death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled [katallassō], will we be saved
by his life [11]. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have now received reconciliation [katallagē].’
58  Rom. 11.15 ‘For if their [Israel’s] rejection is the reconciliation [katallagē] of the world,
what will their acceptance be but life from the dead!’
59  Mt. 5.23–24 reads: ‘[23] So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember
that your brother or sister has something against you, [24] leave your gift there before the
altar and go; first be reconciled [diallassō] to your brother or sister, and then come and
offer your gift.’
60  This verse offers a scriptural foundation to counter the frequent claim offered by conser-
vative Evangelicals in Northern Ireland, that reconciliation with God should always take
priority, and precedence, over reconciliation with other people. If it is taken literally, then
Matt. 5.24 suggests the opposite.
61  ‘The next day he came to some of them as they were quarreling and tried to reconcile
[synallassō] them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you wrong each other?’
Public Theology And Reconciliation 143

For reconciliation with God, Col. 1.20 and 1.22 uses the verb apokatallassō
(ἀποκαταλλάσσω) twice.62 The prefix apo suggests completion, giving the
sense ‘to fully reconcile’. The same term appears in Eph. 2.16.63 In both cases of
apokatallassō, the cross is seen as the instrument of reconciliation.
The way that the cross effects reconciliation is the central question in dis-
cussions of atonement doctrine and soteriology, and in this the metaphor of
reconciliation (or transformation) finds its place alongside other metaphors,
including redemption and justification, as well as the notions of salvation and
atonement, which have their own status as metaphorical images. It is not easy
to fit these different metaphors together into a single systematic theology, and
each will have its strengths and weaknesses. Nonetheless, it is clear that for
Paul, a decisive feature of reconciliation is that it has happened through the
cross, and that the initiative to overcome enmity and division came from God
rather than human efforts.

Development of a Creative and Concrete Methodology for the

Furtherance of Public Theology

Public theology seeks to enrich public discussion by both broadening the con-
versation with additional voices, and deepening the level of analysis with a
spiritual dimension and theological insights. At its best, initiatives in public
theology also seek to engage with the social and political analysis offered by
other contributors, and to promote a constructive dialogue with them. This
approach been shaped from many directions, including the European political
theologies associated with Johannes Metz and Jurgen Moltmann in the 1960s,
and also by the liberation and contextual theologies that developed in Latin
America and other contexts in the 1970s.64

62  ‘[20] . . . and through him God was pleased to reconcile [apokatallassō] to himself all
things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
[21] And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, [22] he has
now reconciled [apokatallassō] in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you
holy and blameless and irreproachable before him—’
63  ‘[Christ] might reconcile [apokatallassō] both groups to God in one body through the
cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.’
64  On similarities and differences between liberation theologies and public theologies, see
Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere (London: SCM Press, 2011). On the develop-
ment of liberation in Latin American theology, and the ongoing relevance of its legacy,
see David Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2002).
144 Tombs

Whilst this mutually illuminating engagement should bring additional

depth to any public issue, there is a special potential for any public issue in
which the language has an obviously religious resonance. Although libera-
tion theologians in Latin America did not make reconciliation a focus for their
theological work, and tended to view it with some suspicion, the methodologi-
cal approach of Latin American liberation theologians might still offer a para-
digm for a creative and concrete methodology for a public Christian theology
of reconciliation.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Gustavo Gutiérrez distinguished the three lev-
els of liberation as the political, the anthropological (or existential) and the
theological. For Gutiérrez these were three inter-related levels of a unified sin-
gle reality. The theological was not to be separated from the political or vice-
versa. Thus, for theologians, their engagement with political liberation was not
and never could be a purely political matter, it inevitably had a theological
dimension. A similar methodological approach in the theology of reconcili-
ation might make an important contribution to discussion of reconciliation
in public theology. It would offer a response to conservative Christians who
argue that political and social reconciliation is to be sharply distinguished
from theological reconciliation as atonement, and that attention to political
and social reconciliation will distort the distinctively theological meaning of
reconciliation. It would suggest that on the contrary, a distinctively theological
sense of reconciliation can only come through a more thorough and grounded
engagement between theology and social and political reconciliation. As De
Gruchy points out: ‘To speak of salvation, redemption, or atonement within
the political arena does not have the same potential or carry the same sense of
relevance as when we speak of reconciliation’.65 De Gruchy rightly warns that
there is a danger in this if the distinctively Christian meaning of reconciliation
is lost in this process. He argues that the value and relevance of the Christian
doctrine of reconciliation is dependent on maintaining its distinctive theologi-
cal meaning whilst exploring its political significance.66

Conclusion

Political transitions and debates on social reconciliation in different contexts

have offered an invitation and a challenge to the churches and to public the-
ology. Discussions of reconciliation point to a fuller understanding of three
elements in reconciliation. First, reconciliation is part of a peacebuilding

65  De Gruchy, Reconciliation, p. 46.

66  De Gruchy, Reconciliation, p. 46.
Public Theology And Reconciliation 145

process, and is better seen as an ongoing process rather than a finished out-
come. Second, it is focussed on changing and rebuilding relationships, and
this includes both structural and personal relationships. Third, it involves both
individuals and collective groups, and must address the social identities that
contributed to the conflict and division.
The theology of reconciliation that churches offer in response to this must
recognise this complexity. Despite the importance of reconciliation in sac-
ramental and doctrinal theology, for much of its history the church has had
relatively little to say about social reconciliation, and offered very little by way
of fresh insight. When churches have spoken of reconciliation between peo-
ple, there has often been an over emphasis on restoration of harmony, and
not enough on transformation and new creation. Likewise, there has been an
overemphasis on individual relationships, and not enough on structural rela-
tionships or collective identities. This has encouraged the suspicion that rec-
onciliation is an inadequate response to deep-seated problems, and may even
distract from real changes.
The work that has been done in different context in recent decades to redis-
cover the richness, complexity and relevance of the biblical sense of recon-
ciliation, and its relationship to truth, justice and new creation, is therefore
important for both the church and the public square. This rediscovery includes
a significant Greek New Testament nuance of radical transformation, along-
side the better known sense of return and restoration associated with the Latin
terminology. In the New Testament, reconciliation has an explicitly theologi-
cal element, as a pivotal metaphor to present God’s restored relationship with
humanity as a result of the cross. Reconciliation in the New Testament also has
an explicitly social and political dimension, as shown in the breaking down of
human social divisions.
Holding these different elements of a Christian sense of reconciliation
together, and exploring how the different strands creatively engage with
each other, is a challenging task. Yet is precisely because of the richness
and complexity of the biblical notion of reconciliation, that Christian theo-
logians might have something distinctive and relevant to offer to public
debates.

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 CHAPTER 6

Public Theology in the Context of Nationalist

Ideologies: A South African Example

Nico Koopman

Introduction

This essay discusses the humanizing and liberating Public Theology that was
practiced in the context of the nationalist ideology of apartheid in South
Africa. As ideologies both racism and Apartheid in South Africa, and Nazism
in Germany, functioned with three dimensions.1
They formed an idea, a picture, a way of looking at and of understanding
reality and human beings. This picture entailed that some humans are supe-
rior to others in terms of features like ethnicity, intellect, morality, religiosity,
physical appearance with regard to skin colour, hair texture and hair colour,
nose shape and form of face. In South Africa’s case white people were viewed
as superior and deserving of the highest quality of life, and black people as
inherently inferior and deserving of the lowest quality of life.
The second dimension of this ideology refers to the social structures, pub-
lic policies, laws and public practices that were erected based upon this pic-
ture of reality and ethnic groups. Those in power could erect these structures
and thereby institutionalize their power and privilege at the expense of the
other. In South Africa the three major laws of macro-Apartheid and the many
laws of micro-Apartheid were classic examples of the social structuring of a
racist picture. The three major laws of macro-Apartheid were the Population
Registration Act, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Group Areas
Act. Based on these acts ethnic groups were divided in terms of where they
would be born, where they would live, where they would die, where they
would receive education, health care, employment, where they would travel,
and where they would participate in leisure, art, culture, and sport. Various
laws of micro-Apartheid co-determined this life of diverse and apart.

1  This threefold distinction is derived from a very important article on racism of two
Dutch scholars, Hans Opschoor and Theo Witvliet. See H. Opschoor and T. Witvliet,
‘De Onderschatting van het Racisme’, Wending (1983), 554–565.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_008

Public Theology In The Context Of Nationalist Ideologies 151

The third dimension of this nationalist ideology refers to the religious

legitimation that was given to both the discriminating picture and corre-
sponding structures of dehumanization and racism, inequality and injustice.
Ideologising so easily becomes idolizing. Ideologies in the sense of ideas and
pictures of reality that are absolutised become idols that receive divine status
and legitimation. The ideology and structures of apartheid were legitimized by
Apartheid Theology.
These dehumanizing, racist and separationist ideologies were confronted
by Public Theologies that acknowledge, affirm and advance Trinitarian human
dignity in the context of the integrity of creation. This dignity has so-called
alien origins, meaning it has heavenly origins, and it therefore is inalienable.
This dignity comes from the triune God, and therefore it can be described as
created and inalienable dignity, Christological and confirmed dignity, pneu-
matological and actualising dignity.2 Two confessional documents consti-
tute the heart of this Public Theology, namely the Confession of Belhar 1986
and the Barmen Declaration of 1934.
The focus of this discussion will be on the Confession of Belhar 1986, which
draws upon and extends the Barmen Declaration. The Belhar Confession has
it especially in common with the Barmen Declaration that a so-called thicker
theological response is offered to the burning public challenges in apartheid
South Africa and Nazi Germany, respectively. Belhar and Barmen have both,
under influence of the theology of Karl Barth, a strong Christocentric—not a
Christomonistic,—focus. In both documents the central theme is the Lordship
of Christ amidst the god-like and lord-like pretentions of both the apartheid
and Nazism ideologies. Both documents also unmask and reject the theologi-
cal legitimations for these dehumanizing ideologies.
In South Africa Apartheid Theology had attempted to develop a theo-
logical rationale for the apartheid ideology, for apartheid prejudices and for
apartheid societal structures. Documents like the Belhar Confession and the
Kairos Document of 19853 unmasked and rejected Apartheid Theology. It

2  See Nico Koopman, ‘Human dignity in the context of globalization’, in A. Boesak and
L. Hansen, eds., Global Crisis, Global Challenge, Global Faith: An Ongoing Response to the
Accra Confession (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2010), pp.231–242. In terms of the three articles of
the Confession of Belhar this dignity manifests as dignity and social solidarity (article 1), dig-
nity and healing reconciliation (article 2), dignity and embracing justice (article 3), dignity
that culminated in freedom under the Lordship of Jesus Christ (conclusion of the Confession
of Belhar 1986). See Dutch Reformed Mission Church, The Confession of Belhar 1986 (Belhar:
LUS Publishers, 1986).
3  See The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church. A Theological Comment on the Political
Crisis in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1986).
152 Koopman

clearly showed that Apartheid Theology was not humanizing, dignifying and
liberating—all of which constitute the litmus test for Public Theology.
The Kairos Document resisted two forms of theology, namely State Theology
and Church Theology. State Theology was viewed as the theological attempts
to justify the apartheid status quo of racial and socio-economic oppression.
Injustice was blessed, the will of the powerful was canonized and the poor
were oppressed into passivity, obedience and apathy.
Church Theology sought ways of negotiating with the apartheid state. It
proclaimed reconciliation without justice, forgiveness without repentance and
morally unacceptable compromises. It did not distinguish between the overt
and covert violence of the state, the individual and institutional, structural and
systemic violent of the state, on the one hand, and the resistant and defensive
violence of the oppressed, especially oppressed young people, on the other
hand. It intended sustaining a law and order that did not address the plight
of those who are disadvantaged and wronged by their policies and practices.
Church Theology employed central theological categories like reconciliation
and justice in an a-contextual manner. It did not do a thorough social, eco-
nomic and political analysis of the apartheid society. It also was naïve about
the importance of changing political policies and about developing the politi-
cal will and political strategies to change society.
Prophetic Theology was advanced as the type of theology that would
address the wrongs of the apartheid society, and that would help to overcome
apartheid and advance a society of dignity and healing, justice and freedom. In
the language of Public Theology we can say the Kairos Document pleaded for
a prophetic Public Theology.
In the context of personal and structural violence, of racial prejudice, of
Apartheid and Apartheid Theology, of separation and discrimination, of exclu-
sion, alienation and enmity, of injustice, humiliation and dehumanization, of
threatened and challenged faith, a wonderful, God-given event of consolation
and comfort, of redemption and liberation, of hope and healing appeared on
our horizon, namely the declaration of a status confessionis on these evils and
the theological legitimations of these evils, and the adoption of the Confession
of Belhar 1986. The adoption of the Belhar Confession with its emphasis on
unity, reconciliation and justice constituted a thorough theological response
to the pleas of persons like Steve Biko to churches in apartheid South Africa
to bestow upon the country a more human face.4 The inter-relatedness of

4  See my article ‘Globalization and Rehumanization?’. in C Le Bruyns and G Ulshoefer, eds., The
Humanization of Globalization: South African and German Perspectives (Frankfurt, Germany:
Haag & Herchen Verlag, 2008), pp. 235–246.
Public Theology In The Context Of Nationalist Ideologies 153

notions like unity, justice and reconciliation confirms John de Gruchy’s plea
for a reconciliation with justice. The Belhar Confession echoes Allan Boesak’s
continuous emphasis upon the lordship of Christ, and the reflection upon the
meaning of the confession of the lordship of Christ for public life, as one of
the central tasks of Public Theology.5
In the status confessionis the 1982 synod of the former Dutch Reformed
Mission Church (DRMC) expressed the courageous conviction, which was also
expressed earlier in 1982 by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and in
1977 by the Lutheran World Federation, that the theological legitimation of the
apartheid system of violence and violation of human dignity, violated the heart
of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that it poses a threat to the essence, nature
and credibility of the gospel. And where Christian faith is threatened and chal-
lenged it needs to be confessed afresh. Consequently the DRMC decided to
confess faith in the triune God anew in this situation of threat to this faith.
The threatened faith that was in 1986 finally articulated in and officially
adopted as the Confession of Belhar 1986 is also protesting faith, in the sense
of pro testari, i.e. faith that testifies to, faith that bears witness to God and to the
reality that He desires and brings, a reality that is in contradiction to the apart-
heid reality. In the apartheid context which proclaimed that the powers of the
apartheid regime reign supreme and that we should pay allegiance to them,
the faith expressed in Belhar protested (cf. conclusion of the Belhar Confession):
Jesus is Lord. To Him we show loyalty and obedience. In a context where peo-
ple were dehumanized in such a way that they started to doubt whether God is
still alive, and whether He is present in their midst and involved in their lives,
the faith of Belhar declares (cf. introduction of Belhar) that the triune God is
real, alive, and present, and that He calls, gathers and cares for his church. And
in three articles the faith is confessed that separating, dividing and alienating
the diversity of people in South African churches and society, is not God’s solu-
tion for South Africa, because God is the God who brings unity amongst his
diversity of people (cf. article 1 of Belhar); in a context where doubt was shed
on the cherished conviction that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
reconcile people across all boundaries, the faith of Belhar protested: God is the
God who reconciles humans with Himself, with each other and with the rest
of creation (cf. article 2 of Belhar); and in a context of injustice which wanted
people to doubt whether they are fully human and whether they are fully chil-
dren of God, the faith of Belhar stated that in a situation of injustice God is the

5  See my essay ‘Jesus Christ is Lord!—An Indispensable Parameter for Theology in Public Life’,
in P. Dibeela, P. Lenka-Bula, and V. Vellem, eds., Prophet from the South. Essays in honour of
Allan Aubrey Boesak (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2014), pp. 36–48.
154 Koopman

God of justice who identifies in a special way with the suffering, the poor and
the wronged.
The Public Theology of Belhar opposed the ideology of racism and Apartheid
that had advanced division and separation, enmity and alienation, and injus-
tice and oppression.

A Public Theology of Unity Amidst Nationalist Ideologies of

Division

The public Theology of Belhar opposed the idealogy of division, separation

and discrimination. One of the authors of Belhar, Dirkie Smit6, pleaded for an
understanding of unity as unity in proximity. Continued disunity implies the
separation of people of different socio-economic groups with different levels
of privilege, training, skills and participation and influence in society. Disunity
constitutes the perpetuation of classism and the refusal to be involved with the
less privileged brothers and sisters. Smit reckons that these socio-economic fac-
tors were the main cause of the original church divisions. Theological reasons
for separate churches were only offered at a later stage. Disunity impoverishes
Christians. ‘Christians are denied the opportunity to get to know each other
and to love and serve each other. Consequently it becomes more difficult—
and mostly almost impossible—to know and to carry each other’s burdens.’7
Smit’s plea for unity in proximity was echoed by other South African theo-
logians and church leaders. Shortly before the establishment of the Uniting
Reformed Church in Southern Africa dr Beyers Naudé8 pleaded that members
of the new church from different ethnic backgrounds be brought into contact
on congregational level. They need to learn to communicate constructively
with each other, in order to prevent conflict and to build peace and justice
amongst them. Apartheid has deliberately estranged people from different
language, cultural and ethnic groups. In the quest for unity deliberate efforts
should be made to bring these estranged ones closer. Structural unity should
serve as a vehicle for unity in nearness, unity in proximity. Another South

6  See D.J. Smit ‘. . . op ‘n besondere wyse die God van die noodlydende, die arme en die veron-
regte . . .’, in: G.D. Cloete en D.J. Smit, eds., ‘n Oomblik van Waarheid (Kaapstad:Tafelberg
Uitgewers, 1982), pp. 60–62.
7  See D.J. Smit ‘. . . op ‘n besondere wyse . . .’, p. 62.
8  See C.F.B. Naudé, ‘Support in Word and Deed’, in P. Réamonn, ed., Farewell to Apartheid?
Church Relations in South Africa (Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1994), p. 71.
Public Theology In The Context Of Nationalist Ideologies 155

African theologian, Jaap Durand9, pleads that structural unity should open the
doors to these quality encounters of formerly estranged Christians. Durand,
emphasizes that the unification of the DRCA and the DRMC is not the end, but
the start of the process to grow ever closer together. Only after structural unity
can the problems of practical and attitudinal nature be addressed jointly.
Unity in proximity enables Christians to develop sympathy, empathy and
interpathy. David Augsberger10 provides a helpful definition of sympathy,
empathy and interpathy: ‘Sympathy is a spontaneous affective reaction to
another’s feelings experienced on the basis of perceived similarity between
observer and observed. Empathy is an intentional affective response to anoth-
er’s feelings experienced on the basis of perceived differences between the
observer and observed. Interpathy is an intentional cognitive and affective
envisioning of another’s thoughts and feelings from another culture, world-
view and epistemology’.
The quest for structural church unity and proximity is indeed important in
order to achieve the threefold pathos of interpathy, empathy and sympathy.
Structural unity, however, is not enough. Even within unified structures we
need to create spaces where this threefold pathos is developed amongst people
from a diversity of backgrounds and amongst people who were estranged from
each other.

A Public Theology of Reconciliation Amidst Nationalist Ideologies

of Irreconcilibality

The reconciliation that is confessed in Belhar reflects the two dimensions of

reconciliation in Paulinic thought. Reconciliation as hilasmos has to do with
the expiation of wrongs and stumbling blocks to atonement (at-one-ment).
Reconciliation as katalassoo refers to harmony in the relationship with the
other. The reconciliation of Belhar has in mind the embrace that Miroslav Volf11
refers to, the embrace of different races, tribes, nationalities, socio-economic
groups, genders, sexual orientations, age groups, ‘normal’ and disabled people.

9  See J. Durand, ‘Church Unity and the Reformed Churches in Southern Africa’, in
P. Réamonn, ed., Farewell to Apartheid? Church Relations in South Africa (Geneva: World
Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1994), p. 66.
10  See D. Augsberger, Pastoral Counseling across Culture (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox
Press, 1989), p. 31.
11  See M. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and
Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 171.
156 Koopman

The reconciliation of Belhar pleads that stumbling blocks for peaceful living,
for the embrace, be removed. Reconciliation therefore implies opposing injus-
tices like racism, tribalism, xenophobia, classism, misogeny, homophobia, age-
ism and handicappism.
And to this list we can add ecocide. The work of reconciliation of the triune
God, according to Michael Welker12, includes the reconciliation with the envi-
ronment. He specifically discusses the outpouring of the Spirit. The outpour-
ing of the Spirit shows the universal breath and inexhaustibility of God, as well
as his powerful concreteness and presence. This outpouring affects new com-
munity in various structural patterns of life that are apparently foreign to each
other. In this new community nature (environment) and culture (humans)
become open to each other. The Spirit lays hold of, transforms and unifies
apparently incompatible domains of life that obey different laws.
Belhar’s thinking about reconciliation is informed by the teaching of the
long Christian tradition about reconciliation. Reconciliation, therefore, is
viewed as the work of redemption of the triune God which is done for us in
Jesus Christ (cf. Anselm’s objective theory of atonement); reconciliation refers
to the transformation that the love of the triune God brings about in our lives
(cf. Abelard’s subjective theory of atonement); and reconciliation refers to the
victory of Christ over the cosmic powers of evil and our consequent libera-
tion from them (cf. Irenaeus’s theory of atonement). South African theologian,
John de Gruchy13, is of opinion that last-mentioned theory helps us to under-
stand the social and cosmic dimensions of reconciliation.
Another remark of importance regarding Belhar’s understanding of recon-
ciliation is the fact that reconciliation has both vertical and horisontal dimen-
sions. Belhar confirms, as suggested by the theories of atonement, that God
reconciles us to Himself, but that He also reconciles us with each other. Donald
Shriver aptly describes the horizontal (personal and even political) dimension
of reconciliation. According to him reconciliation and forgiveness imply the
honest and truthful facing of past evils, opposition to revenge, empathy for
victims and perpetrators of evil, and the commitment of victims to resume life
alongside evildoers.14

12  M. Welker, God the Spirit (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), pp. 145–147.
13  See J. de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (London: SCM Press, 2002), p. 58.
14  See D. Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford/New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. 67. This book of Shriver gives a helpful church historical analy-
sis of the public character of forgiveness, specifically on pp. 45–62. A later book of Shriver
on reconciliation in the public sphere builds on these ideas: D. Shriver, Honest Patriots:
Public Theology In The Context Of Nationalist Ideologies 157

The reconciliation of Belhar has in mind the embrace that Miroslav Volf15
refers to: the embrace of different races, tribes, nationalities, socio-economic
groups, genders, sexual orientations, age groups, ‘normal’ and disabled people.
To this list one could add the embrace of humans and nature. The reconcilia-
tion of Belhar pleads for the removal of stumbling-blocks in the way of peaceful
living, in the way of the embrace. Reconciliation therefore implies opposition
to various forms of alienation and enmity.
The significance of God’s reconciliatory work in a context of alienation and
exclusion sustained us during the Apartheid years and kept us believing that
reconciliation between people from diverse backgrounds, and between people
who had lived in enmity, is possible.
Over against exclusion of the other, the Belhar faith called out for participa-
tion in each other’s lives. One could even say that it calls out for participation
in the affairs of life, amongst others political and economic life. Belhar indeed
spelled out the road from exclusion to embrace and participation.
In line with this horizontal understanding of reconciliation South African
biblical scholar, Itumeleng Mosala16, decades ago described reconciliation as
katalassein, as at-one-ment, as re-unification with the land. Land stands for the
space that brings a life of dignity for all, for humans and nature.

A Public Theology of Justice Amidst Nationalist Ideologies of

Oppression

The Public Theology of justice that is articulated in Belhar opposes ideologies

of oppression and injustice. The justice that is confessed in Belhar might be
described as compassionate justice. In the Old Testament justice is described
as both judicial, forensic, legal justice, i.e. mishpat, and sacrificial justice, i.e.
tsedqkah. The New Testament dikaiosune, carries both meanings of justice.
Bruce Birch17 describes mishpat as a term with a basic forensic character. It
deals with judicial activities at every level. It is an ethical concept that deals
with rights due to every individual in the community and with the upholding

Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
15  See M. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 171.
16  See I. Mosala, ‘The Meaning of Reconciliation: A Black Perspective’, Journal of Theology
for Southern Africa (1987), 19–25.
17  B. Birch, Let Justice Roll Down: The Old Testament, Ethics, and Christian Life (Kentucky:
John Knox Press, 1991), pp. 155–156.
158 Koopman

of those rights. Especially God’s justice refers to the upholding of the rights
of the vulnerable, and with the advocacy of their needs (Deut. 10:18; Ps. 10:18;
Jer. 5:28). Where the rights of the vulnerable is violated, God’s justice can be
translated as judgement, the activity of God to hold accountable those who
deny, manipulate and exploit the rights of other.
Tsedaqah, according to Birch,18 is also translated as righteousness. Here the
focus is on right relationships. God’s righteousness refers to his concrete acts
to establish and preserve relationship. His law is a gift that aims at establishing
terms under which relationship is preserved and maintained.19 Both the Old
and New Testaments teach that sacrifice was required to achieve this rightness,
uprightness, deliverance, vindication and flourishing in relations. Palestinian
theologian, Naim Stifan Ateek,20 argues that tsedaqah carries the meaning of
kindness, compassion and mercy. God’s concern for social justice grows out of
his compassion and mercy.
Through the work of redemption of Jesus Christ God declares us just. People
who are justified by the grace of God are participating in the quest for jus-
tice in the world. Justified people, people who are made right by the triune
God, i.e. right humans seek human rights in our broken world. For Christopher
Marshall21 justification by faith is an expression of restorative justice.
The notion of sacrifice has a second dimension. It also indicates that justice
cannot be reached in this world when the willingness to sacrifice for the sake
of the other is not present.
A third aspect of the sacrificial dimension of justice is the fact that justice
does not seek revenge, but it is merciful. It seeks the healing and restoration
of both perpetrators and victims. In fact it seeks the healing of all broken rela-
tionships. Therefore this justice is called restorative justice. Marshall’s analysis
of the use of justice in the New Testament enables him to refer to justice as
restorative or covenantal justice. This covenantal justice goes beyond retribu-
tion and punishment and seeks, like reconciliation, the healing of relation-
ships. Like reconciliation, restorative and covenantal justice seeks embrace.

18  Birch, Let Justice Roll Down, pp. 153–154.

19  Tsedaqah can also be translated as vindication, deliverance, uprightness, right and even
prosperity.
20  N.S. Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (New York: Orbis,
1989), pp. 142–143.
21  See C. Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and
Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 59.
Public Theology In The Context Of Nationalist Ideologies 159

It seeks the renewal of the covenant of God and humans, of humans amongst
each other and of humans and the rest of creation.22
US theologian, Bernard Brady, supports the notion of compassionate jus-
tice. He identifies five types of justice, namely interpersonal justice (adherence
to the standards and expectations of families and friends),23 commutative
justice (in the sphere of promises and contracts between individuals in pri-
vate relationships),24 distributive justice (the fair distribution and alloca-
tion of social benefits and social burdens to individuals through structures
of government),25 communal justice (the contribution to the common good of
every member of society together with government)26 and social justice
(where the focus is not upon particular relationships but upon general pat-
terns of social relationships and social interaction, and on the reviewing and
evaluation of social policies, institutions and structures so as to defend, reject
or amend them).27 He is specifically describing social justice as compassion-
ate justice. With an appeal to the eighth century prophets Brady pleads for the
twofold understanding of justice as legal justice in the social structures and
institutions, and justice as concern and compassion for the most vulnerable
people in society.28
Ateek pleads that the forensic and sacrificial dimensions of justice not
be separated. Ateek29 is afraid that when the forensic and sacrificial dimen-
sions of justice are separated, the situation of injustice and brokenness might
deteriorate:

22  See Ibid., pp. 35–95.

23  B.V. Brady, The Moral Bond of Community: Justice and Discourse in Christian Morality
(Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998), pp. 95–97.
24  Ibid., pp. 108–109.
25  Ibid., pp. 113–117.
26  Ibid., pp. 117–120.
27  Ibid., pp. 120–122.
28  Miroslav Volf supports the notion of compassionate justice. He appeals to the ethics of
care of Carol Gilligan. She describes the identity of humans as that of relationality and
interdependency. Volf argues that justice should be redefined in terms of this anthro-
pology of interdependency. Such a view of justice implies that we cannot think about
justice in a rationalistic, detached way. Interdependency implies compassion and care of
the other. And where the participants in such a justice, i.e. caring and compassionate
justice, which is focused upon the quest for communion between interdependent
humans, are called into communion with the triune God, we are on the way to a life of
embrace. See Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 225.
29  Ateek, Justice and Only Justice, p. 139.
160 Koopman

Since, as result of the Fall, the dichotomies lie within the fragmentation of
the human being, people have a propensity to talk about justice in a strict
sense, especially when they have fallen prey to injustice. The symbol of
justice has become a blindfolded virgin carrying a scale in one hand and
a sword in the other, rendering impartially to each person his or her due.
In other words, justice is invoked as a totally uninvolved, independent,
objective standard. Legally speaking, such a concept might satisfy human
demands for justice, but it would leave much to be desired because there
is a sense in which blind, impersonal, and exacting justice can easily
become injustice. If strict justice were left to operate by itself, the line
that separates it from injustice would be very thin indeed. It is, of course,
quite understandable that humans who have been wronged usually
demand that absolute justice be done. Absolute justice not only restores
their rights but also has a way of condemning and humiliating the wrong-
doer. Yet so often such an outcome leaves the persons, the human family,
or the nation involved fragmented and lost. What we need in the Israel-
Palestine conflict is a way in which justice can be exercised so that the
ultimate result would be peace and reconciliation between and within
each people and not the fragmentation and destruction of either or both.
Our problem is that, while such positive results are innately naturally in
God, they are alien in unredeemed humans

The Belhar perspective on justice is that of justice as compassionate justice. The

brief discussion above shows the sound biblical and theological foundations
of such an understanding of justice. This brief outline hopefully also demon-
strates the close resemblance between justice and reconciliation. Although the
two concepts are not identical, it is clear that when we view justice as compas-
sionate, covenantal and restorative justice, (i.e. justice which seeks reparation
and restitution through forensic means, and justice which seeks in a merciful
way and in the willingness to sacrifice, through the grace of God, the healing
of relationships and the renewal of the covenant between God and his people
and among people themselves) that justice and reconciliation both stand in
service of the dawning of embrace, or in the words of Nicholas Wolterstorff,30
the dawning of shalom. The portrayal of justice and reconciliation as concepts
that stand in conflict with each other might be made less severe, if not non-
existent, when the expiation character of reconciliation, and the compas-
sionate and healing character of justice, which is clearly articulated in Belhar,
receive more attention.

30  See N. Wolterstorff, Until Peace and Justice Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 70.
Public Theology In The Context Of Nationalist Ideologies 161

Conclusion

Public Theology is charaterised by crucial criteria. Documents like the Barmen

Declaration, the Belhar Confession and the Kairos Document spell out these
criteria. Public Theology reflects upon the implication of the confession of
the lordship of Christ for life and for life together in all public spheres, from the
most intimate to the most social, global and cosmic. Where the lordship of
Christ is proclaim there is no room for loyalty to nationalistic ideologies and
theologies. Where the lordship of Christ is proclaimed, there the door is open
for life that rejects division and that seeks unity in diversity and proximity.
Where the lordship of Christ is confessed there alienation and estrangement
and irreconcilability are overcome and justice-seeking reconciliation are cel-
ebrated. Where it is confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord, there we overcome
wrongs and injustices, and there we live with embracing justice, reconciling
justice.
Both Belhar and Barmen confess the lordship of Jesus Christ. In the face of
threatening ideologies in Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany the con-
fession that these ideologies and their theological frameworks do not reign
supreme gave comfort and nurtured protest. Today we are threatened by ide-
ologies that in new ways and faces pretend to be idols. Today in South Africa,
Germany and everywhere in the world we need Public Theologies that atten-
tively recognize, courageously unmask, prophetically name, heroically oppose
and humbly conquer these ideologies. In contemporary South Africa, despite
appreciated progress, these ideologies are still present in the shape of high
levels of division after a generation of democracy, high levels of alienation after
a generation of democracy, and high levels of socio-economic inequality
after a generation of democracy. This picture is not strange to various other
societies in the world today, amongst others in Palestine-Israel where a nation-
alist ideology is employed to oppress and exclude people as has happened in
apartheid-South Africa.
Public Theologies amidst nationalist ideologies are today needed world-
wide more than ever. In the context of apartheid in South Africa, of Nazism in
Germany and of slavery in the United States, amongst others, public theology
played a liberating and transformative role. Public theology then exposed and
opposed oppressive nationalist ideologies and nationalist theologies. Public
theology conscientised, mobilized and organised people within and outside
faith communities to resist and overcome the oppressive societal structures
and powers. The world of exclusion and oppression in various forms hunger
for these liberating and transformative public theologies of unity, of reconcili-
ation, of justice today.
162 Koopman

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Orbis, 1989).
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John Knox Press, 1991).
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(Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998).
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of Reformed Churches, 1994).
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(Kaapstad:Tafelberg Uitgewers, 1982).
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 CHAPTER 7

Politics, Church and the Common Good

Andrew Bradstock and Hilary Russell

In an article published in the UK religious newspaper Church Times in 2015, the

British academic and political thinker, Maurice Glasman, reflected upon
the global financial crash of 2008. Suggesting that both ‘liberal economists’ and
‘state socialists’ could only understand the crisis as being ‘fundamentally about
money’, with the solution being either to spend more or less of it, Glasman
noted how the churches had sought to make a deeper analysis. While the
‘prevailing paradigms’ that governed our thinking about economics and poli-
tics had no capacity for recognising ‘sin’ as a contributing factor to the crisis,
church leaders such as the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury had ‘tried to
insert the concept of the “good” into economic calculation’—and in so doing
had retrieved ‘some forgotten ideas, carried within the Church but rejected by
secular ideologies, which turn out to have a great deal more rational force than
invisible hands and spending targets.’1
By ‘forgotten ideas’ Glasman meant the core principles of Catholic Social
Thought (CST), a collection of papal encyclicals spanning the last 125 years
which constitute the authoritative voice of the Catholic Church on social
issues. Drawing upon CST had enabled the pontiff and archbishop not only
to challenge the narratives of the political Left and Right, to endorse neither
state centralisation nor the centralisation of capital, but rather to highlight val-
ues such as human dignity, interdependence and care of creation. Importantly
they had drawn attention to the need for markets to promote the wellbeing of
all, the ‘common good’.
The common good has enjoyed something of a revival in the wake of the
financial crisis as commentators, both within the Church and beyond, have
called for moral as well as economic reform to the banks and city institutions.
Its potential to provoke a fresh conversation about the purpose of economic
activity, and about how cynicism might be replaced by hope as a response
to the crisis, was raised in a number of books, articles and conferences. Promoting
the common good enabled the Church to do some good public theology, to

1  Maurice Glasman, ‘After the bad and the ugly—good economics’, Church Times, 6 February
2015, p. 14.

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Politics, Church And The Common Good 165

bring to the public square not finely-honed theological principles or prescrip-

tive, authoritative pronouncements, but a new model for doing politics and
economics, a framework for engagement with others of goodwill to discern
how markets might function for the benefit of all rather than the few. The
Church rediscovered itself—as one of the pioneers of public theology, Duncan
Forrester, argued in the 1980s that it should—‘as a forum for moral discourse’,
the ‘day of pre-packaged answers and “moral instruction” [being] long past.’2
For Lord Glasman, writing from a Jewish perspective, the Church’s commit-
ment to the common good enabled it to make ‘its most significant political
intervention for a hundred years’,3 an opinion echoed by other observers of
the Church. Commenting on Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in
veritate, which explored the causes of the global collapse, Guardian columnist
Jonathan Freedland noted that, while politicians had ‘been left looking flum-
moxed by the financial crisis’ it had ‘been left to the Pope to offer the most
comprehensive critique of our devastated economic landscape’. Freedland also
observed how the ‘lead voices’ seeking to change the conversation about eco-
nomics in the wake of the crisis were religious ones, noting how one campaign
group had delivered to a bailed-out bank the holy texts of Islam, Judaism and
Christianity with a message that the banking system needed to pay attention to
the wisdom contained in these ‘if it was once again to serve the common good’.4

Origins

While the Catholic Church has done more than most Christian—and indeed
religious—traditions to promote and nurture the common good, the concept
did not originate with recent popes. Its evolution has been long and complex,
drawing upon such diverse sources as Plato and Aristotle and the writings of
early Christian leaders including John Chrysostum and Augustine of Hippo.
The question whether the ‘good life’ is ‘social’ is answered strongly in the
affirmative in Augustine’s City of God,5 and in his writings John Chrysostom
affirms, ‘This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition,

2  Duncan B. Forrester, Beliefs, Values and Policies: Conviction Politics in a Secular Age (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 96.
3  Glasman, ‘After the bad and the ugly’, p. 14.
4  Cited in Angus Ritchie, ‘Journeying Out Together for the Common Good: Community
Organising Across Denominations and Faiths’, Crucible (July-September 2014), pp. 34–41 at
pp. 38–9.
5  See, for example, Book XIX, chapter 5.
166 Bradstock and Russell

its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good . . . for nothing can
so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbours.’6
It was Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, who first gave the
common good the shape it has today, with a succession of papal encyclicals
from the late nineteenth century refining it further and giving it contemporary
application. In synthesising the writings of Augustine and Aristotle, Aquinas
considered how the good life might be attained, not merely by the individual
in the pursuit of goals such as health, education and the necessities to sus-
tain life, but in a collective sense, as all seek the attainment of such ends. For
Aquinas it is the responsibility of the virtuous ruler to ensure that society as a
whole enjoys such benefits, and that all are able to live together peaceably and
in a spirit of mutual assistance. As Anna Rowlands has commented, ‘In the
Catholic social vision . . . [t]he beginning and end of politics . . . is the common
good’,7 a point echoed in official Catholic documents: ‘the common good is the
reason that . . . political authority exists . . . To ensure [it], the government of
each country has the specific duty to harmonize the different sectoral interests
with the requirement of justice.’8
While the common good is widely considered a Christian doctrine, its roots
in ancient Greek philosophy make clear that it does not necessarily require a
‘religious underpinning’ and will be actively promoted by secular writers and
networks.9

Towards an Understanding of the Common Good

The common good, then, is not to be confused with utilitarianism—the great-

est happiness of the greatest number—nor is it a concrete vision of some
future ideal state, a ‘utopia’ toward which the committed strive to direct history:
rather it is a way or mode of ‘doing politics’ that moves beyond the promotion

6  Homily 25 on I Corinthians 11:1, cited in Jim Wallis, On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and
Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good (Oxford: Lion, 2013), p. 3.
7  Anna Rowlands, ‘The Language of the Common Good’ in Nicholas Sagovsky and Peter
McGrail, eds, Together for the Common Good: Towards a National Conversation (London: SCM,
2015), pp. 3–15 at p. 10.
8  Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
(Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), #168–9, pp. 95–6.
9  See, for example, Jon E. Wilson, ‘The Common Good after the Death of God’, in Sagovsky and
McGrail, eds, Together for the Common Good, pp. 79–90.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 167

of sectional, partisan concerns in the interest of securing the wellbeing of all.

While it may be the duty of rulers to pursue the common good, as CST asserts, it
is not a pre-conceived political programme or ideological vision to be imposed
from above. Rather, pursuit of the common good involves the application of
certain core principles in the search for political solutions—solutions which,
by definition, will be unanticipated and outside of ideological categorization.
Principles at the heart of the common good include human dignity, equality,
interdependence, community, solidarity, participation, subsidiarity, reciproc-
ity, care for creation and the preferential option for the poor—many of which,
like the common good itself, find particular expression within CST.
Indeed, it is to this corpus that one may usefully look for a working defi-
nition of the common good. Embracing some twenty encyclicals, statements
and letters issued from the Vatican since Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum in 1891,
CST has been influential in shaping, not only Catholic and Christian thinking
on social, economic and political issues, but, in the form of the principle of
‘subsidiarity’ (to which we shall return), the working of the European Union.10
And at its heart is the common good, a principle which, as Catholic commen-
tator Clifford Longley argues, should not be seen as one alongside the others,
nor even the first in order of priority, but ‘the overarching principle . . . which
permeates all of them’ and in the light of which the others ‘have always to
be read’.11
A succinct description of the common good is to be found in Pope Paul VI’s
encyclical Gaudium et spes, issued at the close of the Second Vatican Council
in December 1965. The common good, this document suggests, may be under-
stood as ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups
or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily.’12 Thirty
years later the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales observed,
in a document issued prior to the UK General Election in 1997, that the concept
implies ‘that every individual, no matter how high or low, has a duty to share
in promoting the welfare of the community as well as a right to benefit from
that welfare.’ Suggesting a close identity between the terms ‘common’ and
‘all-inclusive’, the bishops affirmed that

10  Article 5 of the Treaty of Maastricht, signed 7 February 1992.

11  Clifford Longley, ‘Government and the Common Good’ in Nick Spencer and Jonathan
Chaplin, eds, God and Government (London: SPCK, 2009), pp. 108–33 at p. 160.
12  Paul VI, Gaudium et spes, 1965, #26.
168 Bradstock and Russell

the common good cannot exclude or exempt any section of the popula-
tion. If any section of the population is in fact excluded from participation
in the life of the community, even at a minimal level, then that is a con-
tradiction of the concept of the common good and calls for rectification.13

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published by the

Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 2004, sheds further light on the con-
cept: the common good, it states,

does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each sub-
ject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and
remains ‘common’, because it is indivisible and because only together
is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with
regard also to the future.14

References to the common good are not to be found exclusively in Catholic

documents. The Church of England Prayer Book, for example, exhorts its
users to beseech the Almighty to ‘give wisdom to all in authority; and direct
this and every nation in the ways of justice and of peace; that we may honour
one another, and seek the common good’, and a letter issued by the House of
Bishops of the Church of England in 2015 spoke of the need for ‘a new kind of
politics’ based on the ‘Christian obligation’ of ‘pursuing the common good’.15
Statements issued by leaders of the mainstream Protestant and Catholic
churches in New Zealand in 1993 and 2005 called for the common good to
inform public policy and ‘the type of society we want to live in’.16 Within Islam
are found concepts which either equate with the common good or suggest
strategies for pursuing it, such as maslaha. ‘Most Muslims’, assert Salvatore and
Eickelman, ‘share inherited conceptions of ideas of the common good’.17

13  Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, The Common Good and the Catholic
Church’s Social Teaching (London, 1996) #70, p. 17.
14  Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, #164, p. 93.
15  The House of Bishops, Who is My Neighbour? (Church of England, 2015) #4,5, p. 4.
16  Jonathan Boston and Alan Cameron, eds, Voices for Justice: Church, Law and State in New
Zealand (Palmerston North: The Dunmore Press, 1994), p. 15; ‘Towards a robust society: a
statement from national church leaders’ (2005): www.presbyterian.org.nz/speaking-out/
resources-for-speaking-out/discussion-papers/towards-a-robust-society-a-statement-
from- [accessed 20 February 2013].
17  Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, eds, Public Islam and the Common Good
(Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004), p. xix; cited in Tehmina Kazi, ‘Social Action that Crosses
Politics, Church And The Common Good 169

A common good perspective views the relationship between the individual

and society differently from the way it is understood within liberalism. If within
a liberal framework society exists primarily to maximise the opportunity for
each individual to realise his or her potential, the common good prevails when,
in any given situation, the good of the individual is subordinated to the good
of the wider community. The common good specifically challenges notions of
well-being rooted in the individual maximisation of freedom and happiness,
in suggestions that the good life can be enjoyed by a person irrespective of
whether their neighbour does too. While liberalism equates liberty with the
freedom of private citizens to do as they please so long as they do not violate
the freedom of others, the common good is premised upon an understanding
that human flourishing is not complete without the ‘social dimension’.
The common good is rooted in an assumption that we are essentially ‘inter-
dependent’; its response to Cain’s rhetorical exclamation, ‘Am I my brother’s
keeper?’ (Gen. 4.9), would be a resounding ‘yes’, we do have a responsibility
for each other. Within the Christian tradition the common good might be
understood as an expression of the commandment ‘to love God with all one’s
heart and one’s neighbour as oneself’, described by Jesus as the greatest and
upon which ‘hang all the law and the prophets’ (Matt. 22.36–40; Mark 12:28–31;
cf. Rom. 13.8–10). As Longley comments, ‘principles do not come any higher
than that’, which is why one may find in Catholic teaching ‘striking statements
that equate the common good with nothing less than God’s will on earth, for
which Christians pray in the Lord’s Prayer.’18
Thus in cultures where moral behaviour is informed by neo-liberal econom-
ics and an emphasis on individual choices and rights, talk of the common good
can appear counter-cultural, if not downright subversive. It calls for nothing
less than a change of mind-set, a collective shift from a focus on individual
concerns to a consideration of how the common interest might be achieved—
something which in religious terms (as discussed later) might be equated to a
‘conversion’ or ‘moment of metanoia’, a complete change of heart. Yet counter-
intuitively, self-interest could be a motivator to seek the common good no less
than pure altruism, in the sense that my individual flourishing depends upon
the flourishing of all.

Boundaries and Overcomes Barriers: A Muslim Perspective on the Common Good’ in

Sagovsky and McGrail, eds, Together for the Common Good, pp. 107–119 at p. 110.
18  Longley, ‘Government and the Common Good’, p. 160.
170 Bradstock and Russell

The Bible and the Common Good

Support for a commitment to the common good may readily be found in

Scripture. In some translations of the Bible the term itself appears—for
example, in the New Revised Standard Version, when Nehemiah and others
decide to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, they are described as ‘committ[ing]
themselves to the common good’ (Neh. 2:18); and the English Standard Version
renders I Cor. 12:7, in which St Paul calls for public utterances inspired by the
Spirit to be used for the benefit of all: ‘To each is given the manifestation of
the Spirit for the common good’. St Paul’s employment of the human body in
this chapter as a metaphor for a properly-functioning community encapsu-
lates the essence of the common good: since each limb and organ has their
particular function, with none able to claim superiority over the others, it is
clear that ‘God has so composed the body . . . that there may be no division
in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another’
(vv. 24–25, ESV). Elsewhere St Paul exhorts the community in Galatia to ‘work
for the good of all’ (Gal. 6:10, NRSV), a sentiment echoed in I Thess. 5:15 where
he writes ‘always seek to do good to one another and to all’ (NRSV). The writer
of I Peter urges his readers to ‘serve one another with whatever gift each of you
has received’ (4:10, NRSV). The account of the Jerusalem church in Acts 4:32–5
suggests that they prevented their members experiencing poverty by sharing
their wealth according to need.
The teaching of Jesus himself also echoes themes we would recognise as
consistent with the ‘common good’. In the parable of the workers in the vine-
yard—in which each takes home the same wage regardless of the number of
hours worked—the concern of the employer appears to be that each person
receives sufficient to provide the basic necessities for themselves and their
families (Mt. 20:1–16); and the point about the parable of the farmer who pro-
posed to pull down his barns to build bigger ones, so plentiful had been his
harvest, is that he had lost sight of the fact that he was producing ‘goods’, some-
thing of potential use and benefit to others (Lk 12:13–21).19
While some of the Pauline injunctions may be read as applying only to
the ‘household of faith’, they do suggest that what we would today identify as
‘common good principles’ informed the practice of the earliest Christian com-
munities. A concern for the good of the whole community is also evident in
the covenantal laws and prophetic writings of the Old Testament, again if we

19  For a discussion of this parable see Esther D. Reed, ‘Wealth and the Common Good’, in
Sagovsky and McGrail, eds, Together for the Common Good, pp. 49–64 at p. 53f.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 171

acknowledge that references to ‘common’ in this context must be limited to

that which was shared among the chosen people of God, the Israelites.
Two imperatives which inform many passages in the Hebrew Scriptures
concern the need to prevent extreme inequality developing within commu-
nities, and the requirement that a community protect those of its members
considered especially vulnerable, such as the ‘orphan, the widow and the alien’.
Particularly noteworthy are the Jubilee or Sabbatical laws, with their concern
to ensure that no member of a community is condemned permanently to a
life of dependency on the goodwill of others: this is to be achieved through
the institution of measures to enable, at regular intervals, the release of slaves,
cancellation of debts, and return of land sold cheaply in a time of crisis to its
original owner. Laws requiring harvesters to leave crops and fruit to be gleaned
by ‘the poor and the alien’ were also expected to be obeyed (e.g. Lev. 19:9–10),
and prophets such as Elijah, Nathan and Amos are found speaking out against
rulers who take from the poor or pervert justice to benefit themselves at the
expense of the weak (II Sam. 11–12; I Kgs 21; Amos 5).
The Old Testament also contains images of societies where common good
principles appear to be operating, where all citizens enjoy the good life—
building houses and inhabiting them, planting vineyards and eating their fruit,
sitting under their own fig trees none making them afraid, beating their swords
into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks (see for example Isa. 11, 25,
35, 49, 58, 61, 65; Mic. 4; Zech. 14). The eschatological nature of these visions
speaks of a covenant extending across generations, a reminder that to seek
the common good today is to embrace a responsibility to those not yet born in
the light of what we know about climate change and the imperative to adopt
more sustainable lifestyles and business practices. The eschatological dimen-
sion of these visions thus encourages their reading in an inclusive light, while
a concern to pursue the common good specifically in the interests of those
beyond the ‘chosen people’ of God may be found in Jeremiah’s injunction to
the captive community in Babylon to ‘seek the welfare of the city where I have
sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will
find your welfare’ (Jer. 29:7).

The Common Good and Contemporary Politics

If to pursue the common good is to seek the welfare of the city, the wellbeing of
all members of a community, then conflictual and sectionally-based models
of political action—where the concerns and interests of one faction prevail
over those of others—will be inappropriate. Pat Logan has highlighted the
172 Bradstock and Russell

potential of the common good to reinvent the nature of political discourse

within democratic societies, observing that it ‘gives us a language which can
take us beyond the notion of politics as simple bargaining, where one group’s
rights and interests are played off against another’s, to mature political argu-
ment, where communication and a common search for good can be pursued.’20
Michael Sandel has also written of the potential for the common good to
renew political discourse towards ‘a politics of moral engagement’, noting that
this requires a reorientation among people away from purely individual con-
cerns towards a commitment to building a common life together. ‘If a society
requires a strong sense of community’, Sandel writes,

it must find a way to cultivate in citizens a concern for the whole, a dedi-
cation to the common good. It can’t be indifferent to the attitudes and
dispositions, the ‘habits of the heart’, that citizens bring to public life. It
must find a way to lean against purely privatized notions of the good life,
and cultivate civic virtue.21

In observing how contemporary political life is characterised by ‘a culture of

the individual with no larger loyalties than personal choice and provisional
contracts’, Jonathan Sacks identifies the necessity of a transformation or reori-
entation within citizens and communities, away from a focus on the attain-
ment of individual goals towards a sense of shared responsibility for all.22
Longley refers to the involvement of the conscience in embracing the common
good and the need for ‘conversion’ or a ‘moment of metanoia when the truth
really strikes home that “we are all responsible for all” ’.23
What this metanoia might involve, as Pope John Paul II implied in his 1987
encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, is a shift, when confronting social issues,
from harbouring feelings of pity or a concern to make a practical response, to
a recognition of our ‘solidarity’ and ‘interdependence’ one with another. The
response to social problems, says John Paul, should not be ‘a feeling of vague
compassion or shallow distress’ at others’ misfortunes but rather ‘a firm and

20  Pat Logan, A World Transformed: When Hopes Collapse and Faiths Collide (London: CTBI,
2007), p. 125.
21  Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the right thing to do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009), pp. 269, 263–4.
22  Cited in Paul Vallely, ‘Epilogue: Towards a New Politics: Catholic Social Teaching in a
Pluralist Society’ in Vallely, ed, The New Politics: Catholic Social Teaching for the Twenty-
First Century (London: SCM, 1998), pp. 148–75 at p. 151.
23  Longley, ‘Government and the Common Good’, p. 163.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 173

persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to

say, to the good of all and of each individual because we are all really respon-
sible for all.’24
This need to move away from a conflictual model of politics harks back to
Glasman’s point about the common good taking us ‘beyond Left and Right’.
Yet while it urges us to think beyond our traditional understanding of democ-
racy, characterised by periodic elections involving parties promoting sectional
interests, the common good also challenges assumptions that either greater
power for the state or greater freedom for the market will alone be the key to
improving human wellbeing. Instead it will prompt reflection upon the raison
d’être of both the market and the state, asking how both can work together to
promote the wellbeing of all, and upon the need to renew and reinvigorate civil
society and encourage activism at the grassroots.

The Common Good and the Market

As the Church leaders’ responses to the global financial crisis made clear, to
view market activity through a common good lens is to ask questions about the
purpose of that activity and how it can serve the interests of the many rather
than the few. If a common good perspective will recognise that the market will
need maximum freedom if it is to enable people ‘to reach their fulfilment more
fully and more easily’, it will also ask how far it is meaningful to talk of peo-
ple having the ‘freedom’ to pursue their conception of ‘the good’ if they lack
the basic necessities to be able to do it.
A particular concern within CST is that a clear distinction be maintained
between the market as a means—to satisfy individual and collective needs—
and an end in itself. As the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales
noted in their 1996 document, ‘market forces, when properly regulated in
the name of the common good, can be an efficient mechanism for matching
resources to needs in a developed society’. No other system is superior when
it comes to encouraging wealth creation, advancing prosperity and enabling
poverty to be relieved. But when the economy itself becomes the end rather
than the means, when the distinction between the market as a ‘technical eco-
nomic method’ and ‘a total ideology or world view’ is blurred, individual rather
than common interest may prevail. As the bishops put it,

24  John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 1987, #38.4.

174 Bradstock and Russell

an economic creed that insists the greater good of society is best served
by each individual pursuing his or her own self-interest is likely to find
itself encouraging individual selfishness, for the sake of the economy . . . A
wealthy society, if it is a greedy society, is not a good society.25

Other commentators on the common good have also observed how, within
certain models of capitalism, the ‘end’ of promoting individual and collective
wellbeing can become confused with the ‘means’ of making a profit.26 For
Longley it is in so far as it identifies a distinction between the market as a tool
and as an ideology that CST ‘has an important contribution to make to current
thinking on how to make contemporary capitalism a gentler beast.’27
The extent to which economic inequality is inimical to the advancement
of the common good has also exercised commentators. Sandel maintains that
deepening inequality results in rich and poor living ever more separate lives,
with the former withdrawing from public places and services and becoming
unwilling to support them through their taxes; and this leads not only to the
deterioration of their quality but to what were once public spaces ceasing to
be places where citizens from different walks of life encounter one another.
‘The hollowing out of the public realm’, Sandel concludes, ‘makes it difficult
to cultivate the solidarity and sense of community on which democratic com-
munity depends.’28

The Common Good and the State

According to CST, while all members of society have a role in attaining and
developing the common good, the state has the responsibility for attaining it
‘since the common good is the reason that the political authority exists’.29 CST
also challenges the notion that ‘the right ordering of economic life’ can ‘be left
to a free competition of forces.’30 Thus CST poses a challenge to neo-liberal

25  Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, The Common Good, #78–80, p. 19.
26  See, for example, Nicholas Townsend, ‘Government and Social Infrastructure’, in Spencer
& Chaplin, eds, God and Government, pp. 108–33 at p. 126; John Gray, After Social Democracy
(London: Demos, 1997), pp. 19, 35, cited in Vallely, ‘Epilogue’, p. 151.
27  Clifford Longley, ‘Structures of Sin and the Free Market: John Paul II on Capitalism’, in
Vallely, ed., The New Politics, pp. 97–113 at p. 107.
28  Sandel, Justice, pp. 266–7.
29  Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, #167–8, pp. 94–5.
30  Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931, #88.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 175

economic theories which argue that, left to its own operations, the market can
meet the needs and wants of individuals and society.
In a document issued following the demise of Communism in 1989, Pope
John Paul II warned against embracing a free-market capitalism ‘not circum-
scribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of
human freedom in its totality’. For the Pope, neither unrestricted capitalism
nor ‘the socialist system’ was compatible with a ‘society of free work, of enter-
prise and of participation’; for while such a society would not be ‘directed
against the market’, it would demand ‘that the market be appropriately con-
trolled by the forces of society and by the state, so as to guarantee that the basic
needs of the whole of society are satisfied.’31
A ‘common good’ perspective will ask certain questions in relation to ‘the
market’. It will wonder, for example, whether policy decisions should always
be considered primarily in terms of their economic implications or whether
there might be occasions when a course of action should be determined
because it is for the good of all before agreement is reached on how it will be
realised. It will ask whether Gross Domestic Product is necessarily the best
indicator of a nation’s collective health and wellbeing, or whether other fac-
tors may be involved. It will challenge society to consider its responsibility to
those beyond its immediate community, including those not yet born, in the
light of what is known about climate change and the imperative to adopt more
sustainable lifestyles and business practices. It will prompt reflection upon
the marketization or privatisation of ‘public services’ and ask whether the
good of all is better served by some continuing to be funded from the public
purse. And it will challenge the fundamental liberal assumption that a person’s
motive for engaging in market activity is primarily to acquire personal wealth
and comfort, that individuals do not also have the capacity to be concerned for
‘the other’ and the well-being of wider society.

The Common Good and Subsidiarity

If the common good asks government to be open to the possibility of acting to

ensure that the market works for agreed, social ends, it does not envisage the
return of big government: as noted earlier, it is the responsibility of all mem-
bers of society to promote and work for the common good, not only politicians
and government officials. Often spoken of in the same breath as the com-
mon good is the concept of ‘subsidiarity’, another core feature of CST, which

31  John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 1991, #35.

176 Bradstock and Russell

specifically rejects the notion that governments arrogate power to themselves.

Instead, stressing the importance of community initiative, mutual co-opera-
tion and de-centralization, subsidiarity asks of the state that it only undertake
those activities which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups
acting independently. ‘As much freedom as possible, as much intervention
as necessary’ describes the ideal relationship between government and local
communities in the search for the common good.32 The common good can
work most effectively at the grassroots, as local communities become empow-
ered to work together to improve their collective quality of life. It also serves
to renew the body politic by inspiring people to talk about what they consider
good, just and fair.33
Subsidiarity and the common good should be seen as complementary
rather than standing in isolation to one another. As Longley points out, while
subsidiarity requires schools, hospitals and the police to be administered as
low-down the chain of decision-making as possible, it does not require such
services to be privatised: ‘to insist on the withdrawal of “the state” from health,
education or welfare provision, as some of the more extreme proponents of
subsidiarity advocate, is not a true application of the principle because it could
easily undermine, rather than promote, the common good.’34

The Common Good in Practice

The common good can be most readily understood when it is seen ‘in action’. The
partnership amongst the Church leaders on Merseyside in the North West of
England from the 1970s to 1990s exemplifies a search for the common good in a
particular context and at a particular time. It also illustrates the significance of
leadership and the way that different styles and models of leadership can aid
or impede subsidiarity.
David Sheppard, the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock, the Roman
Catholic Archbishop and their Free Church colleagues, notably the Reverend
Dr John Newton, adopted an ecumenism of kingdom building. They wanted to
bring practical improvements to people’s lives and to local neighbourhoods,
and therefore set aside what might have divided them theologically and eccle-
siologically to concentrate on what united them. As Worlock said in 1981,

32  New Zealand Church Leaders, Social Justice Statement, 1993, #28: www.justice.net.nz/
justwiki/social-justice-statement-1993 [accessed 5 March, 2013].
33  Anna Rowlands, ‘Faith in the Common Good’, unpublished briefing paper, 9 June 2014.
34  Longley, ‘Government and the common good’, pp. 167–8.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 177

. . . it was a separate approach by the government about four years ago
to each religious denomination for its views of its Inner Cities Proposals
which led me to say to the others ‘If we cannot agree about this, we have
no right to talk about Christian Unity. Let’s send a joint reply.’35

While these leaders did not necessarily use the language of the common good,
they stressed what Sheppard called a ‘bias to the poor’.36 Their joint approach
demonstrated that although the Church of England and Free Churches do not
have a coherent set of documents to parallel CST, there are inherent similari-
ties across traditions.
Worlock’s ‘Roman Road’37 included attendance at the Second Vatican
Council, the purpose of which was to equip the Church to transform the mod-
ern world. He noted that before his appointment to Liverpool, ‘the priests of
the Archdiocese had asked for someone to help the local Church face up to
change, not only in the light of Vatican II but as a result of steadily worsen-
ing social conditions’.38 Sheppard was a conventional Anglican evangelical,
the product in part of the Cambridge University Christian Union though his
later experience at the Mayflower Family Centre in the east end of London
led to what he called a second conversion—‘conversion to Christ in the city’.39
Church life there had largely collapsed and he realised that he had to give
much of his time to the life of the wider community which ‘meant being ready
to listen to what was important to people whose social and economic experi-
ence of life was enormously different’ from his own.40 His previous involve-
ment as an England cricketer who refused to play in apartheid South Africa in
the 1960s had taught him something about public exposure in controversial
political issues.
Although sectarian tension between Protestants and Catholics was already
on the wane when the two Church leaders arrived in the mid-1970s, Liverpool
and the wider area of Merseyside presented massive challenges: widespread
poverty, high unemployment, desperately poor housing, and a shrinking pop-
ulation. How should the churches and church leaders respond? Over time,
they became acknowledged as honest brokers when there was open hostility

35  Speech to Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, Liverpool, 1981, quoted in Clifford
Longley, The Worlock Archive (London & New York: Geoffrey Chapman, 2000), p. 328.
36  This was the title of a book by Sheppard published in 1983.
37  Chapter title in David Sheppard and Derek Worlock, Better Together: Christian partnership
in a hurt City (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988).
38  Sheppard and Worlock, Better Together, p. 18.
39  Sheppard and Worlock, Better Together, p. 25.
40  Sheppard and Worlock, Better Together, pp. 25–6.
178 Bradstock and Russell

between the City Council and central government. More widely, they were
well known as advocates for the people they served. But their integrity and
effectiveness in these roles was wholly reliant upon the breadth and depth
of their engagement in local life. Three examples of this involvement may be
mentioned.
First, they gave support to local people striving to transform their own
communities. The Eldonian Village is close to the docks about a quarter of a
mile north of Liverpool city centre. Its development was the story of a group
of people who resisted pressures to break up their community through slum
clearance and went on to create a pioneering housing project and award-win-
ning Village.41 Throughout the period of trying to convince the City Council to
allow their co-operative to proceed, the Eldonians received considerable back-
ing from around the city, in particular from the Church leaders. Their public
support reflected their view that for inner cities to survive and prosper, it was
essential that skilled residents remained. They recognised the value of Tony
McGann, the Eldonians’ leader, who was committed to keeping the commu-
nity together. The Eldonians’ motto was Better Together, subsequently adopted
as a book title by Sheppard and Worlock.
Their reconciliation role in relation to the 1981 disorders in Liverpool 8, the
home of most of the city’s (largely British born) black community, is a sec-
ond example. Lord Scarman’s description of similar communal disturbances
occurring in Brixton as ‘arising from a complex political, social and economic
situation’42 equally applied in Liverpool. Sheppard and Worlock talked with
the police and with community leaders attempting to defuse the tension. In
this, as at other times, they depended considerably on the trust already gained
by local priests. At this time, ‘[t]he word “reconciliation”, with its counterpart
“alienation”, became a regular part of our vocabulary’.43 A development that
they and leaders from other churches supported was the establishment of
Liverpool 8 Law Centre, which later enabled better relationships to be forged
between the police and community representatives.
A third example was the way they established allies and valued their co-
operation. In 1982, after the disturbances, Michael Heseltine as Minister for
Merseyside took business directors from the City of London around parts of
Merseyside, urging them to invest in the area. There had been little response to
this challenge when Sheppard and Worlock formed the Michaelmas Group in

41  Jack McBane, The Rebirth of Liverpool: The Eldonian Way (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2008).
42  The Brixton Disorders: Report of an Inquiry by Lord Scarman, HMSO 1981, p. 45.
43  Sheppard and Worlock, Better Together, p. 170.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 179

1984. The Group brought together senior managers from Merseyside businesses
who agreed that there was a role for those on the spot to take responsibility,
‘before asking outsiders to come and rescue us’.44 The Group’s importance lay
in being ‘a forum where senior decision-makers in the city could meet and talk
about the Merseyside agenda in trust and security’.45 There was mutual learn-
ing. Sheppard and Worlock conveyed the extent and depth of poverty and its
implications, but they in turn came to realise that there was more than one
story to tell about the city and that an exclusive focus on the problems could
undermine the efforts of those trying to turn round the local economy.
The approaches of Sheppard and Worlock are also illustrated by separate
strands of their lives that resonated with their joint ministry. Sheppard was
a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority
Areas (UPAs) which was prompted by what was happening in England’s inner
cities and on outer estates and which produced the report Faith in the City in
1985.46 In addition to gathering other sorts of evidence, the Commission spent
weekends in various dioceses, holding public meetings usually in five or six
scattered locations to listen to the views of residents, church people and oth-
ers. ‘Our greatest debt is to the people we met in the urban priority areas, who
gave us their time, hospitality and honest opinions.’47 The Commission mem-
bers concluded the process convinced ‘that the nation is confronted by a grave
and fundamental injustice in the UPAs’.48
For Sheppard, therefore, the process could not end there. Recognising the
urgent need to consider the implications for his own area, he set up a group
to consider how to follow up the report and seek ways in which the Liverpool
diocese and its ecumenical partners could ‘own’ Faith in the City and ‘work to
express faith in our city . . .’49 Again, the methodology of the small working
group mainly entailed listening, drawing on people with a diversity of

44  David Sheppard, Steps Along Hope Street: My Life in Cricket, the Church and the Inner City
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002), p. 225.
45  John Furnival and Ann Knowles, Archbishop Derek Worlock: His Personal Journey (London
& New York: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998), p. 199.
46  Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation, The Report of the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas (London: Church House Publishing,
1985).
47  Faith in the City, p. iv.
48  Faith in the City, p. xv (emphasis in original).
49  Hilary Russell, ed., Faith in Our City: the Message of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s
Commission on Urban Priority Areas for Faith and Public Policy in Merseyside and Region
(Liverpool: Liverpool Diocesan Publishing Company Ltd, 1987), p. 8.
180 Bradstock and Russell

experience to secure a range of views on the section of Faith in the City

addressed to the nation. The introduction to the local report stated,

For Christians, the reality of today’s immense political and economic

upheavals, and the suffering brought in their wake, is set beside another
reality: that of Christian hope, and the affirmation that ‘the true nature
of human life is to be discerned in the life of Jesus Christ.’ This challenges
us to look for change—in ourselves and in society—and this is the basis
of our faith in our city.50

A concrete outcome of this locally-based exercise was the formation of the

Merseyside Churches’ Urban Institute, an ecumenical umbrella body that
aimed to encourage reflection on the churches’ own thinking and practice and
develop ways in which the practical social involvement of the churches and lay
Christians could be resourced and strengthened. Its dual focus on church and
society was important. It took into account that the first section of Faith in the
City was addressed to the church, drawing attention to aspects of church life
that were seen as a recipe for alienation between the Church of England and
people living in UPAs. Its underpinning precept echoed Forrester’s comment
that ‘[o]nly when the church is serious about setting its own house in order can
it call on the state to do justly and love mercy.’51
A similar observation can be made in relation to Worlock’s leadership style
in the Archdiocese. Kevin Kelly points out that he based his whole ministry on
the vision of the church found in Vatican II:

It seems to me that his legacy to us is summed up in the challenge: do we

really want a church according to that vision. If we do, we now have to
accept our own responsibility for making that vision permeate through
all dimensions of parish life in the Archdiocese . . . he was trying to offer
us a practical example of what life in the post-Vatican II church should
really be like.52

The dimensions of the church’s life and mission that Kelly thought summed
up Vatican II’s vision for Worlock were: a church committed to furthering the
coming of the Kingdom in society; a sacramental church; an inclusive church;
an ecumenical church; a catholic church; a praying and worshipping church.

50  Russell, ed., Faith in Our City, p. 8; cf. Faith in the City, p. 360.
51  Forrester, Beliefs, Values and Policies, p. 86.
52  Kevin Kelly, ‘Derek Worlock’s Legacy to Liverpool’, The Month (April 1996), 129–30.
Politics, Church And The Common Good 181

In his article, Kelly expands on each of these and offers suggestions about how,
if taken seriously, they might affect parish life.
Kelly indicates that for Worlock there was a tension between ‘commit-
ment to collaborative ministry (people power) and his natural inclination
towards the most efficient way to achieve results’.53 This can equally be said of
Sheppard. In the case of the Eldonians, a happy balance was achieved between
empowerment—support of their exercise of ‘people power’—and exerting
influence in the corridors of power on a few key occasions when appropriate.
But it was probably also true for both men that striking this balance required a
measure of self-restraint.
Sheppard and Worlock, separately and together, spoke to church and society.
Theirs was a ‘realised’ or ‘performed’ theology. It was incarnational: lived in
a particular time and place, relating to a specific context and issues. It was
shaped by listening and by dialogue. It drew on social and economic analysis,
but was rooted in active involvement and in an understanding of how politi-
cal decisions and socio-economic trends played out in local neighbourhoods
and people’s lives. Their debt to the groundwork of their local clergy and their
local networks and relationships has already been stressed. The presence
of the churches in every community and the intelligence they received about
the reality of people’s lives gave credibility to what they said that few could
match. They themselves identified other factors required to enable them to
respond quickly and thoughtfully. One was a willingness to prioritise even if
that meant dropping existing engagements. Another was the level of habitual
personal contact paving the way to regular consultation and open communi-
cation. Adequate organisation and a basis of parity were important: ‘We soon
learnt that true ecumenical partnership is not fostered by one Church making
its plans and then inviting others to join in.’54
This historical vignette illustrates some of the challenges of enacting com-
mon good principles. The concept of the common good contains the basis of
a vision for the ideal ordering of society, but its principles also underline the
importance of decision-making processes, whether at local or national level.
Whilst these principles are universally applicable, realizing them in specific
situations is not straightforward. The challenge will always remain of combin-
ing solidarity and subsidiarity in making difficult decisions, striking appro-
priate balances and reconciling diverse interests in order to marry individual
fulfilment and the welfare of the whole community.

53  Kelly, ‘Derek Worlock’s Legacy to Liverpool’, 130.

54  Sheppard and Worlock, Better Together, pp. 83–4.
182 Bradstock and Russell

Bibliography

‘Towards a robust society: a statement from national church leaders’ (2005): www
.presbyterian.org.nz/speaking-out/resources-for-speaking-out/discussion-papers/
towards-a-robust-society-a-statement-from- [accessed 20 February 2013].
Article 5 of the Treaty of Maastricht, signed 7 February 1992.
Boston, Jonathan and Alan Cameron, eds., Voices for Justice: Church, Law and State in
New Zealand (Palmerston North: The Dunmore Press, 1994).
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, The Common Good and the
Catholic Church’s Social Teaching (London, 1996).
Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation, The Report of the Archbishop
of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas (London: Church House
Publishing, 1985).
Forrester, Duncan B. Beliefs, Values and Policies: Conviction Politics in a Secular Age
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Furnival, John and Ann Knowles. Archbishop Derek Worlock: His Personal Journey
(London & New York: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998).
Glasman, Maurice. ‘After the bad and the ugly—good economics’, Church Times,
6 February 2015.
Gray, John. After Social Democracy (London: Demos, 1997).
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John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 1987.
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SCM, 2015), pp. 107–119.
Kelly, Kevin. ‘Derek Worlock’s Legacy to Liverpool’, The Month (April 1996), 129–30.
Logan, Pat. A World Transformed: When Hopes Collapse and Faiths Collide (London:
CTBI, 2007).
Longley, Clifford. ‘Government and the Common Good’ in Nick Spencer and Jonathan
Chaplin, eds., God and Government (London: SPCK, 2009), pp. 108–33.
Longley, Clifford. ‘Structures of Sin and the Free Market: John Paul II on Capitalism’,
in Paul Vallely, ed., The New Politics: Catholic Social Teaching for the Twenty-First
Century (London: SCM, 1998), pp. 97–113.
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Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931.

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(London: SCM, 2015), pp. 49–64.
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Rowlands, Anna. ‘Faith in the Common Good’, unpublished briefing paper, 9 June 2014.
Rowlands, Anna. ‘The Language of the Common Good’ in Nicholas Sagovsky and
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Salvatore, Armando and Dale F. Eickelman, eds., Public Islam and the Common Good
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(London: SCM, 2015), pp. 79–90.
 Part 3
Public Theology, Economics and Social Justice

∵
 CHAPTER 8

Public Theology in the Context of Globalization

Scott R. Paeth

Introduction

Globalization is the inescapable social, cultural, and economic reality of

twenty-first century public theology. It is the background noise that colors our
social experience, our economic relationships, and the political possibilities
that are available for examination and critique within the discourse of public
theology. We live, as William Schweiker has put it in ‘the time of many worlds,’1
yet at the same time the boundaries between those worlds have become
increasingly porous. As David Held and Anthony McGrew describe it:

Globalization, simply put, denotes the expanding scale, growing magni-

tude, speeding up and deepening impact of transcontinental flows and
patterns of social interaction. It refers to a shift or transformation in the
scale of human organization that links distant communities and expands
the reach of power relations across the world’s regions and continents.
But it should not be read as prefiguring the emergence of a harmonious
world society or as a universal process of global integration in which
there is a growing convergence of cultures and civilizations. For not only
does the awareness of growing interconnectedness create new animosi-
ties and conflicts, it can fuel reactionary politics and deep-seated xeno-
phobia. Since a substantial proportion of the world’s population is largely
excluded from the benefits of globalization, it is a deeply divisive and,
consequently, vigorously contested process. The unevenness of global-
ization ensures it is far from a universal process experienced uniformly
across the entire planet.2

While dreams of global political structures and world governance remain in

the minds of many either an unattainable pipe dream or a dystopian pros-
pect, the increasingly integrated nature of economic systems, as well as the

1  William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2004).
2  David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Polity, 2002), 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_010

188 Paeth

transnational character of more informal social relationships, suggest the

emergence of an ungoverned and as-yet-unregulated global society. This
situation has the potential to produce significant benefits, particularly to
the ‘haves’ of the emerging global society, but only at significant cost to the
global ‘have nots.’
The economic crisis of 2007–2008 illustrated the precarious nature of those
unregulated intersections, as the lack of regulation in the global finance indus-
try led to unprecedented market manipulation and corruption within the
theoretically ‘safe’ realm of mortgage securities.3 The result was the worst eco-
nomic downturn since the Great Depression, and a global economy teetering
on the edge of collapse.4
More recently, the Greek debt crisis has illustrated the difficulties of eco-
nomic integration within the eurozone, as accusations of profligacy by numer-
ous Greek governments met cries of injustice against the harsh austerity
measures demanded by the German banking industry.5 The continuing power
of nationalism remained throughout this controversy a powerful motivator
beneath the surface of what was intended to be a genuinely transnational
set of economic relationships. In its aftermath, the European Union appears
less than ever to be a community of nations or a federal governmental orga-
nization, and more to be a jury-rigged contraption, at risk of falling apart at
any time.
Public theology’s role in the global social, economic, and political situa-
tion in which we find ourselves is to cast light on the way in which the global
dynamics that lie in the background of all of our reflection have a theological
dimension.6 By analyzing and interpreting the present situation in light of the
resources offered by the Christian theological tradition, public theology may

3  For an in-depth analysis of the crisis in mortgage-backed securities, see Betheny McClean
and Joe Nocera, All The Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (Portfolio,
2001).
4  See Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big To Fail (Penguin, 2010).
5  This crisis is recent and ongoing, but several books have already been written on the subject.
See James Angelos, The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins (Crown, 2015),
Costas Simitis, The European Debt Crisis: The Greek Case (Manchester University Press, 2014),
and Matthew Lynn, Bust: Greece, The Euro, and the Sovereign Debt Crisis (Bloomberg, 2010).
6  The perennial question of just what precisely Public Theology is complicates any discussion
of it’s proper role. However, public theology as I define it is the analysis and interpretation of
all that takes place in the public dimension of human life in terms of Christian ideas, symbols
and categories, with the goal of constructively engaging in the broader public discourse in a
way that can offer moral and spiritual insight which would not otherwise be apparent in the
context of a discourse absent those dimensions.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 189

examine how concepts embedded within that tradition may surface unexam-
ined presumptions and unexpected solutions to the continuing conundrum
of globalization.

The Context of Globalization

In identifying globalization as the context of public theology, it becomes nec-

essary to understand both what globalization is and how it operates as a driver
of human social and cultural reality. This is complicated by the multifaceted
nature of the concept itself, as well as the lack of any agreed upon definition.7
Often globalization is simply defined via a description of what it does: How it
affects local communities, how it breaks down barriers between nations and
ethnic groups, and how (depending on who is doing the speaking) it either
exacerbates or overcomes social and economic inequalities around the world.
For our purposes, however, globalization can be defined as ‘a worldwide set of
social, political, cultural, technological, and ethical dynamics, influenced and
legitimated by certain theological, ethical, and ideological motifs, that are cre-
ating a worldwide civil society that stands beyond the capacity of any nation-
state to control.’8
In many discussions, globalization is described solely in terms of the increas-
ingly transnational nature of economic activity, freed from the regulatory con-
straints of individual nation-states, and thus not beholden to the particular
agendas of any individual country or political entity.9 However, globalization
takes in much more than that. It encompasses and transforms every dimension
of culture, including art, academe, medicine, media, technology, and religion.10
While global economic forces represent the most obvious manifestation of
globalization, these other dimensions of culture have both contributed to and
been affected by the increasingly global nature of human society in varying
degrees. Political institutions and structures, on the other hand, seem to have

7  Justin Rosenberg, ‘And the Definition of Globalization Is . . .? A Reply to ‘In the Death’ by
Barry Axford.’ Globalizations, 4:3 (September 2007), 417–421.
8  Max Stackhouse, Globalization and Grace: God and Globalization vol. 4. (New York:
Continuum, 2007), p. 7.
9  For example, David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford, CT:
Kumarian Press, 1995).
10  See Max L. Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy: Christian Stewardship in
Modern Society (Langham, MD: University Press of America, 1991).
190 Paeth

lagged behind, remaining trapped within a nationalist paradigm that more

globalized institutions have left far behind.
In practical terms, this means that a musician in the the United Kingdom
can collaborate with a singer in South Africa, playing on an instrument made
in China by an American company, and distributed by a Korean subsidiary.
They can upload their digital audio files to a ‘cloud,’ which is actually a disk
drive living on a server farm in Canada, then sell their final product via a web-
site hosted in Japan to a consumer in Israel.
Receiving their payment digitally, they can then use the income created
by their collaboration to buy clothes sold by a German label, but made in
Indonesia, Vietnam, or Bangladesh, driving to the store in cars run on gasoline
refined from oil that comes from Texas, or Saudi Arabia, or Nigeria, and all of
this seems to happen seamlessly in real time, with little to no delay at any point
in the process despite the fact that the participants in this process live what
would have been prohibitively far from one another even twenty years ago,
at the beginning of the digital age. This is what journalist Thomas Friedman
has described as the ‘flattening’ of the world: The elimination of the barriers
of space and time to the interactions of individuals around the world, and the
creation of what constitutes for all intents and purposes a single global space
in which we all dwell.11
This example demonstrates the way in which economic, cultural, and tech-
nological forces are all implicated in the process of globalization. Artists coop-
erate with one another in digital space, commerce takes place via the transfer,
not of greenbacks or gold coins, but a series of zeros and ones, and each of these
factors mutually reinforces the others to create a context in which nationality
and location are virtually irrelevant to the entire process.
At the same time, the social dislocation caused by the globalization of the
economy has led to severe critique among those who see it, not as a liberative
force but as an instrument to enhance the power and privilege of those already
at the top of the social and economic ladder. As with any large scale economic
transformation, globalization inescapably produces both ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’
though there is tremendous debate as to which predominates.
Globalization’s ‘discontents,’ as Joseph Stieglitz has put it, have made a
powerful and legitimate critique of the way in which the globalization of the
economy functions to exacerbate poverty and inequality around the globe, but
globalization also opens up opportunities for the expansion of genuine human
goods, if it is approached in the right way:

11  Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century (New York:
Picador, 2007).
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 191

Today globalization is being challenged around the world. There is dis-

content with globalization, and rightfully so. Globalization can be a
force for good: the globalization of ideas about democracy and of civil
society have changed the way people think, while global political move-
ments have led to debt relief and the treaty on land mines. Globalization
has helped hundreds of millions of people attain higher standards of
living, beyond what they, or most economists, thought imaginable but
a short while ago. The globalization of the economy has benefited coun-
tries that took advantage of it by seeking new markets for their exports
and by welcoming foreign investment. Even so, the countries that have
benefited the most have been those that took charge of their own des-
tiny and recognized the role government can play in development rather
than relying on the notion of a self-regulated market that would fix its
own problems.12

Thus while Friedman and other proponents of globalization see the ‘flat-
tening’ of the world as an emancipatory force for social change, opening up
opportunities and possibilities where none had previously existed, critics of
globalization, such as Ulrich Duchrow and Franz Hinkelammert, see it as an
expansion of what they call ‘the global tyranny of capital.’13 Thus for them,
‘globalization has the sole goal of liberating the accumulation of capital from
all social and ecological barriers. The result is the total market, which is in the
process not just of destroying life on earth but with it its own foundation.’14 In
a similar vein, David Korton warns of ‘global dreams of vast corporate empires,
compliant governments, a globalized consumer monoculture, and a universal
ideological commitment to corporate libertarianism,’ which puts at risk both
democratic structures of social governance, the economic well-being of the
vast majority of the human community, and the ecological sustainability of
the planet.15
Both of these narratives have validity, and both need to be reckoned with
in any theological account of globalization. It is undeniable that globalization

12  Joseph Stigliz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 248.
13  Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not For Profit (London: Zed
Books, 2004). However see Virginia Landgraf’s critique of Duchrow and Hinkelammert in
‘Competing Narratives of Property Rights and Justice for the Poor: A Nonannihilationist
Approach to Scarcity and Efficiency,’ Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 27.1 (2007),
57–75.
14  Ibid., 3.
15  Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 121.
192 Paeth

has created new possibilities for communication, collaboration, community

and commerce, as well as for greater upward social mobility among many of
the world’s poorest people. Supporters often point to examples of the power of
globalization to lift people out of abject poverty and establish a decent, if often
meager, standard of living.
At the same time, it is also undeniable that globalization has opened up
opportunities for political manipulation, financial malfeasance, the exploita-
tion of labor, and the increased downward social mobility among many other,
previously relatively well-off people. It is also undeniable that, left unregulated,
the possibilities for greater exploitation and the creation of small, medium,
and large scale ecological disasters are manifold. Additionally, there is legiti-
mate question as to the long term sustainability of the good that globalization
imparts even to those who see its benefits, as the lack of governance and regu-
lation create underlying economic instability that can sweep away all the gains
made in a given society with the press of a button, the signing of a document,
or a glitch of computer code.
The fact that these competing perceptions of globalization are both rooted
in differing analyses and interpretations of its actual effects points to the para-
doxical nature of globalization as it has thus far developed, as well as to the dif-
ficulties inherent in a state of affairs in which economic transformation takes
place at a pace far too rapid for current structures of governance to keep up. It
also points to the difficulty in parsing the genuine consequences of globaliza-
tion without reference to the ideologies that seek to sustain one or the other
narrative.
Critics of overweening state power and tendency of over-regulation to stifle
innovation see globalization as opening up new vistas of human economic
freedom, while critics of capitalism see in it the prospect of a global hegemony
of plutocratic elites, operating apart from any possibility of democratic con-
trol. Yet again, each of those ideological positions reveals something about
the way that globalization functions as shorthand for genuine concerns about
freedom, justice, and the future of human community.
To the degree that globalization can only be understood and discussed from
within the frameworks of these ideological alternatives, debates about global-
ization are likely to continue to cover the same ground, with very little new
being offered. Public theology should ideally offer an alternative framework
for analysis and interpretation that may aid in the development of a set of cri-
tiques and constructive proposals for the creation of a globalization which has
the potential to both enhance the well-being of all human beings, expand the
realm of human social possibility, and yet strive for the creation of a just and
ecologically sustainable future.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 193

The Place of Public Theology

To what extent then does public theology, as a particular approach to theologi-

cal and moral reflection, have something to contribute to the conversation on
globalization? If it can add to our understanding of the effect that globaliza-
tion is having on the larger public world which we inhabit, in what way does
it do so?
The public theologian who has done the most work in this area is Max
Stackhouse, whose multi-volume God and Globalization set out to develop a
public theology of globalization.16 Drawing on the work of multiple collabora-
tors, co-editors, and contributors, he developed a multi-faceted theology of glo-
balization through which he saw God’s providence manifested in the ongoing
process of social and economic realignment which globalization represents.
From a broader perspective, public theology is engaged in the analysis of
the whole range of social and cultural institutions that constitute pluralist
modernity. This analysis is particularly well suited to the understanding of
globalization as a collision of multiple institutional realignments rather than
monolithic phenomenon.
Additionally, public theology aspires to move beyond the purely local and
secular epistemological positions that defined much of the discourse sur-
rounding religion in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, public
theology, as articulated by Stackhouse, strives to provide a perspective which,
if not universal, at least has the capacity to engender a constructive religious
discourse across the boundaries of local communities. As Stackhouse writes:

Today, globalization demands the recognition of a wider public, one that

comprehends and relativizes all of the particular contexts in which we
live. A new kind of particular context-transcendence is required. Thus, a
number of scholars around the world are attempting to develop a pub-
lic theology, for it has become a serious question whether a society or
civilization can be sustained on the basis of either a purely local and par-
ticular faith, or a purely secular basis that claims to transcend all religion
and theology. In fact, the moral fiber seems to go out of a society or a

16  Max L. Stackhouse, et al. God and Globalization. Four Volumes. (T & T Clark: 2000–2007).
Each of the first three volumes was produced with a co-editor and multiple contributing
authors. The final volume, Globalization and Grace, is written exclusively by Stackhouse
and can be taken to be his exclusive and particular analysis of the theological implica-
tions of globalization in the modern era.
194 Paeth

civilization if it is not sustained by a compelling vision of transcendence

to continually fund its spiritual capital.17

Whether or not one agrees with Stackhouse’s assessment that religion

addresses the inescapable need for a principle of transcendence within soci-
ety, public theology offers a language through which the particularly Christian
conception of a transcendent point of view can be applied to the pluralistic
topography of a society in which there is deep dissensus about questions of
ultimate concern. Options for an analysis of the relationship between theology
and society that embrace either the total divorce of Christian thought from a
robust public engagement (as in some forms of post-liberal or post-modern
Christian theology) on the one hand, or on the other insist on the exclusive
legitimacy of only one form of theological discourse in public life (as is often
so in the case of the American Religious Right), fail to do full justice to the
complex ways in which religion contributes to public discourse.
At the same time, a wholly secularized discourse, which deems religion
irrelevant to public life, also fails to recognize the continuing relevance that
religion holds within a modernity that often seems to shunt it to the side. Much
as the advocates of neo-atheism would like to insist that religion ‘poisons
everything,’18 much of the depth dimension of culture is rooted in religious
symbolism which continues to wield power on even the secular imagina-
tion. This is a point made by Elaine Graham when, in dialogue with Jürgen
Habermas’s conception of the ‘post-secular,’ she writes:

The boundary established by the Enlightenment, between the public

sphere of economic and political processes, and the private realm of faith,
is thus dissolving under the paradoxical currents of religious resurgence
and enduring secularism. Similarly, there is a crisis in secular modernity
which appears to have lost ‘its grip on the images, preserved by religion,
of the moral whole—of the Kingdom of God on Earth—as collusively
binding ideals . . . Some people would regard the ideal of the Kingdom of
God on Earth as a secularized version of a complex theological thinking
anyway, but Habermas’s point is that mere pragmatism is not enough to
sustain a global vision of human dignity and to move secular, materialist
citizens to an awareness of what is missing.19

17  Stackhouse, Globalization and Grace, 78.

18  Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, 2009).
19  Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age
(London, SCM Press: 2013), 49.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 195

Public theology addresses this question directly by suggesting that ‘what is

missing’ can best be understood through a reengagement with the symbolic
resources supplied in religious discourse. Furthermore, by taking seriously the
sociological implications of the way in which those symbols are utilized by
communities of faith, it is possible to provide moral resources to aid in the
achievement of a measure of social justice denied within a wholly secularized
social discourse.
The challenge that globalization presents to public theology is how it is pos-
sible to utilize the particular symbolic resources of the Christian tradition in an
effective way, given the vast array of symbolic frameworks which exist within a
globalized context. Wholly apart from the narrative of secularization that has
become prominent in Western society, Christian theology must contend with
the symbolic worlds of Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the
myriad local religions that exist throughout the world. To the extent that
the boundaries between local conceptions of ultimate concern have been bro-
ken down through the process of globalization, no one conception can claim
ideological authority to establish the normative boundaries of discourse.
As Jorge Rieger points out, globalization as it has come to exist in the 21st
century does not require homogeneity of belief and action. On the contrary,
‘globalization appears to be evolving: while it continues to be about global
expansion, it is no longer about the erasure of difference—as long as that
difference remains trivial.’20 Few would consider their religious viewpoint to
be trivial, but in the context of an emerging global society that marginalizes
religious discourse in the name of the erosion of national boundaries and the
establishment of open markets and free trade, religion must reassert its rel-
evance against claims that it is a passing phenomenon.
The threat to religion that this represents at least in part explains the
rise of religiously motivated terrorism over the past several decades. As reli-
gious communities find themselves disempowered precisely in the places
where they were most influential, the possibilities for radicalization and vio-
lence toward the perceived agents of that disempowerment increases. In the
face of ‘McWorld,’ some opt instead for ‘jihad.’21 Religious reactions against

20  Jorge Rieger, Globalization and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 42.
21  Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York:
Ballentine, 2001). This book remains sadly relevant even two decades after its original
publication in 1995, both in terms of its analysis of terrorism as a symptom of globaliza-
tion, as well as in his suggestions for the development of a cure, as I will discuss below.
I do wish, however, given the rise in anti-Muslim violence since 2001, he had come up with
a different title. While he emphasizes in the text that ‘jihad’ is a stand-in term for all forms
196 Paeth

globalization, whether or not they resort to violence, are attempts to escape

the possibility of trivialization in order to affirm the continuing relevance of
the religious voice in the midst of a changing world.
Because of this, a public theology rooted within the Christian lifeworld has
to take account of the religious pluralism in the midst of which it finds itself.
Globalization posits a singular global reality, defined by the breaking down of
social, cultural, national and legal barriers between peoples throughout the
world, allowing them to interact with one another in myriad new ways. This is
often discussed in terms of market relationships, but it embraces a great deal
more than that.
This globalized reality encompasses the various differences between and
among cultures, including religious world views. But the experience of reli-
gious difference demands that Christian theology develop an account of how it
is possible to be Christian in a publicly meaningful way, either by establishing
that Christian theology has something unique and substantive to say within
the public square that is not said by other traditions, or by making the case
for a common framework within which it can coordinate with other religious
traditions in order to respond to the moral questions that globalization raises,
or some combination of both of these.
The way in which public theology articulates its approach to the problem
of religious pluralism, social and economic dislocation, and the erosion of
national boundaries will define its capacity to offer a relevant Christian voice
in the midst of myriad cross-pressures created by globalization. The Christian
tradition offers numerous theological resources that can contribute to the
development of such a public theology of globalization.

A Public Theology of Globalization

To the extent that public theology is a particularly Christian project, it draws

from the resources of the Christian tradition to establish the contribution it
makes to the larger public discourse within which it participates. As such, it rep-
resents in its content the tension within globalization between particularism

of religious violence, regardless of the confession of those committing it, by defining his
subject in this way, he places Islam at the center of the discourse. While more than a
decade of war in the Middle East, and the continuing problems of radical Islamic terror-
ism, may justify that position in some cases, it also minimizes the degree to which reli-
giously motivated violence is an interreligious concern, which victimizes Muslims even
more than most others.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 197

and universalism to which William Garret and Roland Robertson refer as ‘one
of the fundamental modalities for structuring the contemporary situation.’22
As Steven Bevans notes:

We live in a church today . . . that for the first time is really catholic, really
a world church. There is no longer a European and North Atlantic cen-
ter and a third world periphery—indeed . . . this has never been so. But
especially today, the church is fully established and flourishing in every
sense, with few exceptions, in every part of the world. Furthermore, since
the end of the twentieth century, the ‘center of gravity’ of Christianity
has shifted from the white, affluent world of Europe, North America,
and Australia/New Zealand to the world of black, brown, and Asian
Christians, and theology is flourishing there.23

The various resources offered by the Christian tradition cover a multitude of

doctrinal and ethical possibilities, but there are several key themes that emerge
in the interaction between globalization and public theology that are worthy
of note.

Covenant and the Structures of Society

As noted above, because globalization represents a large-scale shift in insti-
tutional arrangements within every segment of society, it requires an analysis
of the moral dimensions of institutional life. If institutional arrangements are
wholly arbitrary, and therefore subject to the directions of whatever the social
and political whims happen to be blowing through the world at any given time,
then there are few resources available within Christian public theology to pro-
vide a critique of the particular institutional arrangements being formed by
the process of globalization. If, however, it is possible to point to institutional
forms which are fundamental to the creation of a truly human life then pub-
lic theology can make a case for the preservation of those forms of life, even
within the radically shifting terrain of globalization.
Typically, the theological touchstone for institutional analysis can be found
in the idea of covenant, particularly as a dimension of the idea of ‘common
grace’ within the Christian tradition. To the extent that, as created beings, we
exist both individually and socially for particular ends, then the institutional

22  Roland Robertson and William Garrett, Religion and Global Order (New York: Paragon
House, 1991), xviii.
23  Steven Bevans, An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis Books,
2009, 4–5.
198 Paeth

forms in which we dwell must serve those particular ends. The idea of cov-
enant expresses our fundamental dependence upon and relatedness to the
God who has created us to live in relationship with one another via particular
institutions. As Stackhouse writes:

Let us note that what is pre-given to us to guide the conduct of life is both
standard and end, both nomos and telos as the philosophers noted long
ago—both law and purpose. Both the overarching right order of things
and the ultimate destiny of creation have to be interpreted, of course,
and neither is easy to read off the raw data of life. This is due in part
to the limits of human understanding, in part to distortions introduced
into life by the sinful failures of humans to use the freedom available to
us to choose for the right and the good, and in part because the full data
of creation and history are not in yet. But those who believe in this God
hold that enough is known that we can believe with good reason that
life is governed by a moral law and that existence is not without pur-
pose. Ultimately, human existence is governed by first principles that
we do not construct and cannot deconstruct, and directed toward an
ultimate end that we cannot know in detail or attain without divine aid
and guidance.24

The question of how those first principles manifest themselves in institutional

form is an ongoing argument within Christian social thought. For some, the
institutional forms of human life—Family, State, Church, and the various
economic and social institutional that make up the totality of social life—are
rather thoroughly defined and largely unchangeable as particular forms of
‘sovereign spheres’ within society.25 As such, while they may change and shift
over time, they should do so only within carefully constrained boundaries, lest
they abandon their covenantal purpose and cease to function in the way they
are intended by God. Others view these spheres as fairly plastic in their form
and relationship, capable and even required to re-form themselves in light of
changing social realities and circumstances.
The value of the concept of God-given ‘spheres’ within society is subject to
debate. But in understanding ourselves as existing in covenantal relationship

24  Max Stackhouse, in Scott Paeth, Hak Joon Lee, and E. Harold Breitenberg, Shaping Public
Theology: Selections From the Writings of Max L. Stackhouse (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2014), 206.
25  Stackhouse discusses these forms of institutional life at length in various publications.
A brief account can be found in Paeth, et al. Shaping Public Theology, 145ff.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 199

with a God by whom we are created for particular ends, and with whom we
exist in a relations of loving promise, we recognize that the particular insti-
tutional forms in which we dwell are required to sustain us in our hopeful
striving to become what we are created by God to be. While on the one hand
they are only contingent and penultimate manifestations of the eschato-
logical hope toward which as Christians we strive, through them, we should
seek to anticipate the Kingdom of God which is the final institutional form
of human life and covenantal relationship that we are promised by God.26 To
the extent that social structures are formed according to that anticipatory
hope, they can be embraced and encompassed within a public theology of
globalization.

The Globalization of Sin

At the same time, whatever we may be created to be and do by God, the fact
remains that we fall far short of the mark most of the time. The besetting prob-
lems of human corruption, violence, and injustice which are manifold within a
globalizing world demonstrate the degree to which sin is an inescapable facet
of human existence. Globalization has on the one hand created more oppor-
tunities for greater prosperity than has ever been possible within the world,
and has at the same time magnified hideous evil in the forms of war, terrorism,
economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.
The optimistic view of human potential represented by liberalism is in
many ways at the center of globalization’s most bold promises—the world
as a consumerist paradise, where the bonds of nation, ethnicity, and reli-
gion no longer hold sway over us and we may each act as autonomous agents
in a world of our own making. This promethean boast assumes that all of
the problems of social and economic dislocation that attend globalization
will pass away, and with them the accompanying problems of violence and
poverty. Like all merely finite claims to ultimacy, globalization cannot ful-
fill this promise, precisely because it fails to take into account the limita-
tions that accompany all human action. Due to the unlimited character of
human desire, no promise of unconstrained wealth and consumption can
be fulfilled. The barriers that globalization is in the process of eroding are
just those that have in many ways succeeded in constraining our unlimited
desires by placing them in the context of laws, customs, and traditions that
either persuade or compel us to act within bounds of social acceptability.

26  In this I am deeply influenced by Jürgen Moltmann, particularly his Theology of Hope
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
200 Paeth

Globalization exacerbates the problems of human sin and excess in erasing

those boundary markers.
At the same time, however, it should be said that those constraints them-
selves were subject to abuse and sinful manipulation, and it would be a mistake
to romanticize the nation state or ethnic identities as superior alternatives to a
globalized society, culture, or economy. On the contrary, the 20th century gave
us all too many examples of the ways in which nationalism and ethnic chau-
vinism could themselves be the engines of hideous evil. However, to the extent
that legal systems and cultural norms provided a necessary constraint on the
human capacity for sin, they served a function which does not yet exist within
the context of globalization, at least not in a sufficiently robust way.
What’s more, the potentially global scale of sin means that the implications
of the failure to constrain it are potentially catastrophic for the entire planet.
This possibility is most clearly manifest in the increasingly grave problems rep-
resented by climate change and other ecological disasters, such as the 2009 BP
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the large-scale flooding in the United Kingdom
in 2015. These disasters are compounded by the fact that, by circumstance or
design, they often have a disparate effect on the poor. The inability as of yet to
find ways to constrain the human tendency toward sin on a global level thus
has the potential to create apocalyptic levels of suffering.

The Common Good and the Nature of Human Flourishing

Acknowledging the reality of sin as a factor in globalization requires us as
well to contemplate the possibility of creating a global conception of the
common good to serve as a bulwark against our own worst moral tendencies.
Globalization opens up the possibility of imagining a world in which we truly
can transcend the moral and political limitations of nation-state and ethnicity,
to envision a genuinely global polity operating for the sake of the collective
well-being of all humankind.
There is of course a vast gulf between stating this possibility and realizing it.
However, only through imagining such a world can we tap the potential within
globalization to actually make strides in that direction, and potentially fore-
stall the social and ecological disasters that globalization at its worst threatens
to impose upon us.
The theological touchstone for this theme is the eschatological possibility of
the Kingdom of God. As I noted above, insofar as the Christian faith is rooted
in the promises of God made manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God serves as the predominant symbol of the
fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer that Gods’ reign be made manifest on Earth as it is
in heaven. Any conversation about the concrete dimensions of social, political,
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 201

and economic life in a globalized society within the Christian community

must take place against the backdrop of this hope.27
Imagining a truly just and equitable form of globalization, one which
anticipates the Kingdom of God in the midst of our fragmented human cir-
cumstances requires us to take seriously the ways in which really-existing
globalization falls far short of the mark, and to seek concrete solutions to
the problems it creates or exacerbates. In particular, it means attending to the
poorest and most vulnerable of those affected by the shifting social, political,
and economic realities of global society—those members of the human family
who remain among the poorest of the poor, whose traditional ways of life have
been stripped from them due to the depredations of an unconstrained global
capitalism, and those who are the victims of worsening ecological crises.
In the first instances, this requires us to insist on the strengthening of
those international political and economic institutions which already exist,
such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World
Bank, but doing so in such a way that genuinely requires and empowers them
to place their efforts at the service of the most vulnerable, with the goal of
developing what economist Amartya Sen refers to as the ‘capabilities’ through
which human beings are enabled to experience themselves as free members
of society. These capabilities are experienced in myriad ways, and enhancing
them means removing the obstacles to their realization in every dimension of
human life. As he writes:

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic

poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve
sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the
opportunity to be adequately clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean
water or sanitary facilities. In other cases, the unfreedom links closely
to the lack of public facilities and social care, such as the absence of epi-
demiological programs, or of organized arrangements for health care or
educational facilities, or of effective institutions for the maintenance of
local peace and order. In still other cases, the violation of freedom results
directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian

27  Here again, the theology of Jürgen Moltmann is of particular importance of the devel-
opment of this concept, particularly The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) and The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic
Dimensions (London: SCM Press, 2009).
202 Paeth

regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in

the social, political, and economic life of the community.28

Unfortunately, the current structures of these institutions continue to be

shaped by a post-World War II consensus which privileged the victorious pow-
ers in that conflict at the expense of everyone else. As a result, the substantive
freedoms to which Sen refers have been repeatedly subordinated to the politi-
cal and economic agendas of those powers.
A genuinely global set of political and economic institutions would recog-
nize their obligations to act with genuine equity toward all people, and pursue
policies that genuinely seek to improve the well-being of all persons, through
more equitable economic development priorities, more just regulation of the
monetary system, and the creation of a system of international law and eco-
nomic regulation which has the capacity to justly enforce a common set of
standards throughout the globe, against not only individuals, but also nation-
states and corporations. Supporters of the United Nations Global Compact
point to it as one possible example of such a system, albeit at this point in the
form of a set of principles lacking the full force of law.29
Such a set of institutions, laws, and regulations, would also have to priori-
tize the protection of human rights and individual dignity. The United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights stands as a model of idealistic and aspirational
policy-making at a time when the United Nations was considered, though
briefly, to hold out hope for a genuinely transformed setting for international
policy-making after the Second World War. The failure of both national and
international institutions to live up to the promise of the UN declaration dem-
onstrates the degree to which those promises have been been abandoned. Yet
it nevertheless continues to stand as a touchstone for a truly global civil soci-
ety, which places the respect of persons above the interests of capital and the
well-being of the most politically and socially powerful.
The question of how such institutions should be formed and managed,
and how their ends and goals should be constituted is rooted for Christians
in the principle that we are created as human beings by a good God for the
sake of life together in community. The ultimate goal of Christian public policy
should be the creation of a common good for each human being and for all
human beings. Vast inequalities in wealth, political repression and violence,
discrimination against religious, cultural, sexual, or ethnic minorities, systemic

28  Amartya Sen, Development As Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999), 4.
29  https://www.unglobalcompact.org.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 203

violations of human rights, economic exploitation, and ecological destruction

all stand in contradiction to that struggle for the common good.
At the same time, there is not one and only one possible constitution of
political society that represents a uniquely Christian perspective on how such
a society should be created and managed. Ultimately ‘you shall know them
by their fruits’ (Matt. 7:16). The goal is to create institutions that succeed in
contributing to the genuine common good for the human community in order
to allow all human beings to flourish in all of those ways for which God has
­created us—social, economic, aesthetic, and spiritual.30

The Creation and Limitations of a Global Ethic

A key element in the creation of human flourishing and a unified search for
the global common good is the creation of capacities for understanding these
goals as part of a common moral project, shared across national, cultural,
ethnic, and religious lines. This is at the core of attempts to articulate an
authentic ‘global ethic,’ that can be universally acknowledged as morally com-
pelling. Theologians such as Leonard Swidler and Hans Küng have been lead-
ers in the attempt to fashion such an ethic—one that can both be recognized
as sufficiently all-embracing to cover the whole of human experience, and
which can at the same time obligate us in the particularities of our own lives
and situations.31
The project of constructing a global ethic is an important dimension of
public theology’s contribution to the discourse of globalization, because it
assumes that morality both can and should transcend the insularity of par-
ticular communities and engage in a meaningful way with other contexts and
traditions. Contrary to Alasdair McIntyre’s contention, we are not mired in
incommensurable language games, but have the capacity to comprehend one
another’s moral standpoint, even from the perspective of deeply entrenched
­disagreements.32 What’s more, it is even possible to agree on broad moral
principles even in the midst of fundamental philosophical, religious, and

30  Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2016).
31  See, for example, Leonard Swidler and Paul Mojzes, The Study of Religion in an Age of
Global Dialogue (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), Leonard Swidler, For All
Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic (Ashland: White Cloud Press, 1999),
Hans Küng, Global Responsibility (London: SCM Press, 1991) and A Global Ethic for Global
Politics and Economics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
32  See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1981).
204 Paeth

cultural disagreements. The idea of a global ethic assumes that such broad
agreement is attainable, and that for the sake of the creation of a common
global community, it is necessary.33
However, as Küng points out, the creation of such an ethic cannot simply
be reduced to some form of ‘moral Esperanto’—a molding of our various par-
ticular moral language into a singular, and singularly unrecognizable, whole.
Rather, Küng advocates for a form of ‘minimal ethical consensus,’ which does
not attempt to form an all-encompassing system, but rather comes together
around a ‘thin’ conception of morality that can meet with widespread accep-
tance. At its heart though, says Küng, is the appeal to our common humanity:

The basic ethical demand . . . is the most elementary that one can put
to human beings, though it is by no means a matter of course: true
humanity. . . . In the face of all humanity our religions and ethical con-
victions demand that every human being must be treated humanely!
That means that every human being without distinction of age, sex, race,
skin colour, physical or mental ability, language, religion, political view,
or national or social origin possesses an inalienable and untouchable
dignity. . . .
Humans must always be subjects of rights, must be ends, never mere
means, never objects of commercialization and industrialization in eco-
nomics, police and media, in research institutes, and industrial corpora-
tions. No one stands ‘above good and evil’—No human being, no social
class, no influential interest group, no cartel, no police apparatus, no
army, and no state. On the contrary; possessed of reason and conscience,
every human being is obliged to behave in a genuinely human fashion, to
do good and avoid evil!34

However, even in the face of such an appeal, there are difficulties and limita-
tions to the idea of a global ethic that can’t be gainsaid. The reality of sin and
self-interest, the dynamics of political and economic power, the gravitational
pull of cultural particularism, all tend to limit the appeal of a genuinely global
moral outlook, even one that takes our humanity as its common starting point
and seeks only a minimal social consensus.35 A healthy skepticism toward the

33  Küng, A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics, 91.
34  Küng, A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics, 110.
35  I argued this point at greater length in my essay ‘Shared Values in Communal Life:
Provisional Skepticism and the Prospect of a Global Ethic,’ Journal of Ecumenical Studies
42.3 (Summer 2007), 407–424.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 205

capacity to successfully construct such an ethic, and establish it as the basis for
a genuinely global morality is quite well warranted.
However, that having been said, a public theology grounded in the Christian
expectation for a transformed world, which lives in expectation of the com-
ing Kingdom of God in the midst of the human experience, is nevertheless
permitted—even obligated—to hope for such a thing. A global ethic, in this
sense, is an aspirational, and perhaps eschatological, horizon against which
to measure the current state of or global morality. And while the idea that a
global ethic of the kind advocated by Küng and Swidler may reach wide-spread
acceptance may not be realistic at present, the hope that it may one day be
can lead to the anticipatory discernment of its presence in the midst of the
world in which we now live. Indeed, as Christians we are obligated to seek
those ‘graced moments’ when God’s presence breaks in on us and transforms
what may be into what is. Such may indeed be the case with a global ethic.

The Morality of Markets and the Creation of a Just Economy

Given the centrality of open markets and the free flow of capital across national
boundaries to the construction of globalization over the past several decades, a
discussion of the morality of markets represents a crucial dimension of a pub-
lic theology of globalization. Particularly in light of the ­dimensions of global
capitalism that I referred to earlier, how we conceive of the moral limits of
economic activity in a global setting will inform our capacity for the creation of
a global society capable of enacting a modicum of social and economic justice
in the future.
The multiple financial crises to which the global economy has been subject
over the past several decades illustrates the problem that economic instabil-
ity represents to globalization. The emphasis on the freedom of business and
finance to move money quickly and efficiently (sometimes measured in fac-
tions of a second) across national borders has often created perverse incen-
tives to deregulate banking and finance, to undermine the rights of workers
and other citizens, and to minimize the capacity of government to craft poli-
cies for the good of citizens qua citizens, rather than as mere buyers and sellers
in a set of market transactions.36
As Max Stackhouse has pointed out, over the past several decades, the mar-
ket and the corporation, particularly the multi-national corporation, have
moved to the center of economic organization for much of human social
life, supplanting the family and the state as the primary locus for much of

36  For a description of the means by which IMF and World Bank often exacerbated such
crises, see Stigliz, Globalization and Its Discontents.
206 Paeth

the economic activity of a globalized world.37 Yet, the corporation is itself a

theologically and morally freighted institution that demands an assessment
in terms of how its action affects those who are, often involuntarily, subject
to it. Yet, like all institutions, the corporation has its own spiritual dimension,
which can be formed for good or for evil, depending on how it is conceived and
managed in the context of the various social dynamics to which it is subject.38
To the extent that the global economy is and will continue to be capitalist, the
corporation will be at the center of its organization. As such, a public theology
of globalization should offer an account of the place of the corporation among
other social institutions, its relationship to questions of creation, salvation,
and consummation, and the ways in which, like any other human institution,
it is both subject to sin and capable of redemption.39
However, the creation of a just economy requires more than an awareness
of the ways in which markets are both created and corrupted or a theological
account of the nature of corporations. Economic justice is a task of the whole
of society, and thus requires a robust engagement between business, govern-
ment, and the various institutions of civil society in order to discern those eco-
nomic policies which will contribute to a greater degree of human flourishing
within a global society, both in striving to minimize or even eliminate poverty,
as well as in working to continually increase the overall well-being of all mem-
bers of the human family.
However, this raises the troubling issue of the ecological limitations of genu-
inely global economy. As long as well-being is understood primarily in terms of
the creation and expansion of wealth, and wealth is associated primarily with
consumption, a global society that meets with genuine success at eliminating
poverty and increasing well-being will quickly outstrip the planet’s capacity
to sustain it. Thus it becomes necessary for us to begin to disentangle the idea
of well-being from the idea of consumption. We have to imagine a model for
the global common good that is grounded in the values of sustainability rather
than continual expansion. In doing so, we need to reconfigure how it is that

37  Max Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy: Christian Stewardship in Modern
Society, 114ff.
38  Stackhouse, Public Theology and Political Economy, 130ff.
39  And here once more Stackhouse has offered the most fulsome description of these theo-
logical dynamics of the corporation throughout his work, particularly in the essay ‘The
Moral Roots of the Corporation, in Paeth, et al., Shaping Public Theology, 230ff, as well as
in Public Theology and Political Economy.
Public Theology In The Context Of Globalization 207

the economy itself functions, what purposes it serves, and to what principles
it adheres.40
The idea of stewardship can provide a theological touchstone for address-
ing the concerns of economic justice and ecological sustainability within a
global society. By emphasizing the idea that the Earth is the Lord’s, and not the
property of human beings, we can develop policies oriented toward the care of
creation rather than its exploitation. As Douglas John Hall writes:

Bringing this down to the concretes of our own present situation, it means
that the Christian community, to be true to its own roots, will increasingly
have to be found on the side of those who argue that the basic resources
of the earth belong neither to individuals, nor corporations, nor nations,
but are global treasures, given perpetually by a gracious God for the use of
all the families of the earth—including those not yet born. The preserva-
tion and distribution of these treasures must not be allowed therefore to
fall into the hands of a few who, through such control, ensure their own
brief moment of prosperity at the expense of the survival and welfare of
earth’s human and extra human creatures for generations to come.41

Thus a genuinely global ethic of economic justice will, perhaps paradoxi-

cally, emphasize the radically local forms of economic activity that can sus-
tain smaller communities in a relatively self-sufficient way, in the context of
global markets that can ensure the efficiency of supply and demand in order to
ensure that no one on earth must go without those basic requirements for the
living of a genuinely human life.

Conclusion

Given the scope of the issue, it is impossible in a brief article to do justice

to the myriad dimensions of a public theology of globalization. What I have
attempted to do is to offer an outline of the themes and issues that public the-
ology brings to the subject. However, each of the topics addressed here could

40  See, for example, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting
the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future 2nd Edition
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
41  Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1990), 178.
208 Paeth

be the subject of a chapter unto itself. As a result, it is often only possible to

gesture toward deeper issues best explored elsewhere.
However, to the extent that globalization remains the fundamental context
in which theological reflection in the 21st century and beyond must be done, it
is incumbent on public theology not to neglect a thorough and ongoing analy-
sis of its dynamics and their implications for the Christian community. How
that community will be changed by the shifting global setting in which it lives,
and how it will in turn change the way in which globalization evolves, remains
to be seen. It is in this sense that Stackhouse refers to globalization as a ‘mis-
sion,’ ‘a mandate for our time to invite all the peoples of the world to become
participants in a global civil society that is marked by the empowerment of the
people in these ways.’42
What is clear however is that in the absence of a sustained theological and
ethical analysis and critique of globalization as it has already developed, the
besetting questions of cultural erosion, poverty, and ecological decline will not
be addressed. In that case, globalization will truly be what its most vociferous
critics have always claimed: A system designed for the benefit of the global
haves at the expense of the global have-nots. Only by facing the difficulties
presented by the reality of globalization, can we begin to construct sustainable
alternatives for the future.

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42  Stackhouse, Globalization and Grace, 246.

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 CHAPTER 9

Social Cohesion and the Common Good:

Drawing on Social Science in Understanding
the Middle East
Katie Day

Central to the project of public theology is the consideration of the ‘common

good.’ Elsewhere in this volume, Andrew Bradstock and Hilary Russell go into
much more detail about the meaning and history of this concept, highlight-
ing the indebtedness Protestant theology has to Catholic Social Thought in
understanding the common good. They argue that the common good is not a
normative utopic or ideological scheme but is a social process into which the-
ology participates, bringing core values and commitments to the development
of policies that will benefit larger society. That process is multidisciplinary and
necessitates a multi-linguality.
This essay will consider one of the languages and tools needed in the con-
struction of a public theology—social sciences. After a consideration of the
relationship of social theory and research with the project of public theology,
the lens will then be used in examining the concept of the common good.
What value does social science bring to public theology? Finally, this discus-
sion will turn to looking at contemporary issues such as Israel/Palestine and
the waves of immigration in the first half of the twenty-first century. How can
public theology and social science engage the complex and volatile realities in
ways that bring some clarity in public discussion?

The Role of Social Science in Doing Public Theology

What do theology and social science have to do with each other? How does
the traditionally normative task of theology relate to the descriptive task of
social science? How is the vocation of public theology, which is rooted in faith,
to co-exist with the call to analyze and speak about the dynamics of human
experience from a faith-free perspective? Do they, by their very definitions,
cancel each other out, that is, invalidate the other? Theology, on the one hand,
focuses on ‘things not seen;’ public theology engages in bringing theological
perspectives and commitments to the common good. Its grounding in faith

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_011

212 Day

and search for meanings necessarily brings a bias to its perspective—but

bias is considered a contaminate in social research. Traditionally social sci-
ence, especially quantitative research, has sought to rid itself of subjectivity
while theology cannot exist apart from subjectivity. It would appear that they
are indeed incompatible.
There are several ironies that cannot go without comment. The first has to
do with the rigid atomization of academic disciplines that has resisted decon-
struction for generations, even within theological education. In a study of theo-
logical institutions in North America published in 1957, H. Richard Niebuhr,
Daniel Day Williams, and James Gustafson identified a trend in theological
education toward the introduction of non-theological disciplines, particu-
larly history of philosophy, psychology and sociology.1 They wrote: ‘In part this
movement seems to reflect the concern that theology be studied in a large con-
text and in continuous dialogue with the ideas that most affect contemporary
secular thought . . .’ They go on to argue that the social sciences are ‘germane to
theological study.’ Despite this trend, they were dismayed to find that in 1955
sociology courses only accounted for about 6% of the total units for gradua-
tion in the theological curriculum. (This is apart from almost 10% accounted
for by social ethics, which surprised the writers since they were in such a time
of ‘war and revolution:’ the times, they felt, demanded more disciplined ethi-
cal reflection by the Church). Ironically, despite their projections of a grow-
ing trend to changes in theological curricula, the social sciences have less of
a presence in theological education today than they did in 1955. According to
the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), which accredits and monitors its
more than 270 member schools, with 3200 full-time faculty members, less than
1% of all faculty (actually .4%) hold degrees in the social sciences. (Only 5.6%
of faculty account for fields of Ethics and moral theology).2
This brings us to a second irony. In the years since their analysis of theologi-
cal education was done, Post-modernism has come like a tsunami, crashing on
the shores of virtually all academic disciplines, including those represented
in theological education. In some cases it has completely redefined the meth-
odologies of our fields, in other cases it has offered a significant critique and
generated soul searching (at least identity searching) conversations among
scholars. Postmodernism is, of course, a complex and dynamic confluence

1  
H. Richard Niebuhr, Daniel Day Williams, James M. Gustafson. The Advancement of
Theological Education (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), p. 21.
2  Data on breakdown of theological faculty by discipline acquired by author directly from
Association of Theological Schools (Meinzer@ats.edu) 2/20/15.
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 213

of critical perspectives in a variety of disciplines that cannot be reduced to

one single theory. But at the core is a challenge to the Enlightenment notions of
objectivity and neutral rationality in the pursuit of ontological ‘truth’. The
external gaze is impossible but through human experience.
The social sciences (particularly sociology, anthropology, psychology) have
been redefined by Postmodernism. The modernist approach to the other as
subject to be objectively studied has been largely discredited. Objectivity itself
has been interrogated. In its search for the ‘exotic other,’ argued Postmodernists,
the project of social research is actually the search for self. ‘The other’ is con-
structed as a way to come to understand (and validate) our own culture (or
economy) vis a vis the other. Further, rather than maintaining the objective
gaze of an outsider, the very act of research itself creates an inter-subjectivity.
That is to say, in the encounter between researcher and ‘subject’ the relation-
ship created is not that of observer/observed but an encounter in which both
are, to some extent, affected. Research is a social act, not a scientific one.
In a pure Postmodernist approach, social scientists do not go ‘into the field’
to gather facts, but to generate them. They do not impose a theoretical con-
struction on social data, or even test existing theories, but go with an open
mind to allow theory to emerge from the data.3 Grounded theory, therefore,
emerges from the ground up through disciplined research and analysis. The
interpretation of findings is a further social production. This approach decon-
structs an academic elitism in which a theoretical construction is imposed on
human experience. It privileges human experience as complex, dynamic and
multivalent, and seeks to understand and interpret social phenomena in the
context of the relationship between both subjects (including the researcher).
The methodology employed is more likely qualitative (as opposed to quanti-
tative). The ethnographer will become immersed in the field as participant-
observer. That is, he/she will enter into a culture, participating as fully as
possible, in order to get what Clifford Geertz called the ‘thick description,’4
that is, a description not just of behaviors but of contexts in which mean-
ings are constructed. The Postmodernist critique of objectivity has not elim-
inated quantitative sociology, although its claim to scientific truth has been
dealt a crippling, if not mortal, blow. Current social science research still
employs quantitative research (surveys, census data, etc) but recognizes the
impossibility of absolute objectivity and the inability of correlations to have

3  Barney Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for
Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine, 1967).
4  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
214 Day

explanatory value. To understand the dynamics of pluralistic societies, the

thick description of ethnography is needed.
Despite the low numbers of social scientists represented within the theolog-
ical academy, there is, ironically, a growing appreciation for, and incorporation
of, the Postmodernist approach. In biblical studies, the possibility of neutrality
has also been critiqued. The writers, interpreters, and readers of sacred texts
are not disembodied vehicles but embedded in contexts. The encounter with
the Gospel comes through layers of social production, through many cultures
through time and across continents. The classical fields of church history
and theology have felt the impact of Postmodernism as there is recognition
that the formulation of doctrines, such as the nature of God, the person of
Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit and the meaning of Church, have been
produced and reproduced within contexts of particular communities. A tran-
scendent objectivity has been replaced by giving place for human experience
and cultures in the development of liturgy, preaching, Christian education and
pastoral care.
All of these are products of social processes in which contexts have shaped,
and are shaping, texts far more than was acknowledged in the old paradigm.
This is not news.
What is a new development, however, is that ‘ethnography’ is showing up
in discussions of theological methodology. Particularly pushed by liberation
theologies, there is a growing appreciation for the particularity of human expe-
rience to be explored as a route to understanding universal themes. This is in
contrast to an old mission orientation in which it was important to understand
local context so that then the theological truths could be delivered most effec-
tively. In a Postmodernist approach, theological truth is co-produced; the con-
text is not the recipient of theological claims but the co-generator of them. This
was recognized by Dietrich Bonhoeffer prior to the advent of Postmodernism
and liberation theologies. Ten years into the Nazi regime, his academic theol-
ogy had been tested and reshaped as the repressive policies of his time and
place became more extreme with each day. He could not ‘do theology’ apart
from his context; then and there, more than ever, was the need to find mean-
ing in what seemed meaningless. Theological meaning that would be relevant
to the public context could not be constructed in an elite, academic vacuum.
Writing to his co-conspirators in 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote of what he had learned
in the struggle about, essentially, doing public theology:

It remains an experience of comparable value that we have for once

learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 215

perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless,

the oppressed and reviled; in short from the perspective of the suffering.5

From Bonhoeffer, through indigenous and liberation theologies, into con-

temporary public theology, human experience is becoming seen not as the
‘application’ of pre-formed theology but as essential to the very production of
theology.
I have argued briefly that theology and social science have both been chal-
lenged by critiques of their a priori claims which has impacted their very meth-
odologies. Human experience has been afforded more agency; ‘subjectivity’ is
no longer a dismissive criticism of both projects, but instead affirms the cen-
trality of the human subject. Both public theology and social science seek to
deeply understand human experience, both employ (to different degrees) eth-
nographic inquiry to develop the ‘thick description’ of social dynamics. Both
understand the goal of their discipline not to be knowledge for the sake of
knowledge, but knowledge production in service to human flourishing. This
is not to say that postmodern social science and post-colonial theology are
the same—but that they are partners. Theology becomes public theology as it
becomes a relevant participant in the public sphere. The fear theologians have
maintained has been that relevance will devolve into relativism—that social
science, that the immersion into human experience, will finally undermine
theology by defining it only as a social phenomenon. That risk was addressed
by H. Richard Niebuhr in his 1941 classic, The Meaning of Revelation.6 Here he
made a case for revelation as both relative and relevant. Indeed this tension for
public theology will enable a more robust process.

Social Science and Public Theology in Partnership: Understanding

the Common Good

With most discussions of public theology, there is a central concern for the
common good. In fact, the goal and evaluative standard for public theology
is its contribution to the common good. Public theology, it is argued in many
places within and outside this volume, is a process in which core theological

5  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘After Ten Years,’ in John W. de Gruchy, ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works
English Edition, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009).
6  H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006
[1941]).
216 Day

values and commitments are brought into engagement with public issues—
such as climate justice, human trafficking or poverty. It is recognized that secu-
lar disciplines (from science to economics) and sectors within society (from
media to government) share a common concern for the advancement, sur-
vival and flourishing of the human species. Theology moves from its insular-
ity of speaking with and for the Church, and leaves its normative and critical
voice which only speaks to the public, and goes into the public square. Here
we engage other disciplines and sectors in meaningful dialogue about creating
and sustaining the common good. We interrogate the various ‘publics’ which
should be engaged and encourage ourselves to become appropriately multi-
lingual. At the table of public discourse there is shared consideration from the
variety of disciplines and sectors with the development of public policies that
will be effective in furthering the public good. What public theology brings to
the table is that effective policies also be faithful to Gospel values.
Underlying this pursuit of ‘the common good’ are, perhaps, assumptions by
public theology about the existence of a coherent public. Does the common
good depend upon a degree of social cohesion, or is social cohesion a definitive
element of the common good? Surely we are not imagining a common good
in which pluralism becomes synonymous with anarchy or chaos. The ‘com-
mon good’ implies common-ness, cohesion, connectiveness. This question is
the very stuff of social theory—an important overlapping agenda with social
science. In a partnership with social science as appropriated in the first part of
this chapter, public theology can deepen and clarify its understanding of the
‘common’ in ‘common good,’ drawing on both social theory and research as
will be seen.
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), considered the father
of sociology, focused much of his work on understanding the cohesion of soci-
eties which is necessary for their functioning. How do societies hang together?
What is the source of their social cohesion? How is it constructed and main-
tained? He was particularly aware that the Church, for generations, had cre-
ated what he called a ‘mechanical solidarity’7 which had enforced a social
cohesiveness. But as the hegemonic influence of the Church was eroding, what
then was going to hold societies together? For Durkheim, understanding this
social glue was essential—social cohesion is a basic good, critical to human
survival and flourishing. In other words, without social cohesion, or solidarity,
there can be no common good.

7  See Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1984).
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 217

This social cohesion for Durkheim is sui generis, and the whole becomes
greater than the sum of the parts. In a famous quote, he describes the process
and product of social solidarity:

The hardness of bronze lies neither in the copper, nor in the tin, nor in
the lead which have been used to form it, which are all soft and mal-
leable bodies. The hardness arises from the mixing of them. The liquidity
of water, its sustaining and other properties, are not in the two gases of
which it is composed, but in the complex substance which they form by
coming together. Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as is granted
to us, this synthesis sui generis, which constitutes every society, gives
rise to new phenomena, different from those which occur in conscious-
nesses in isolation, one is forced to admit that these specific facts reside
in the society itself that produces them and not in its parts, namely its
members.8

Within mechanical solidarity the collective consciousness is more pervasive

and enforced, with little room for individual consciousness. He had in mind
the Church in previous eras which had permeated all aspects of life and
society, dictating beliefs and ordering life. We could imagine the Europe in
the mid-twentieth century, in which the collective consciousness created by
Nazism organized all aspects of society from youth activities to the structure
of churches, from the construction of gender roles to control of art, sports,
and culture. What made its lethal agenda possible was the social cohesion the
Nazis were able to create. Part of how this was done was through the formation
of a national identity which drew on a narrative framing the German people
as both superior yet victimized by their humiliation through the Treaty of
Versailles after World War I. Further, social cohesion was reinforced through
the construction of the ‘other’—particularly Jews, but also Gypsy/Roma,
homosexuals, and those with physical and intellectual handicaps, who were
perceived as threats to the ‘purity’ of the newly-constructed Aryan race.
This type of social cohesion, while effective (at least for a time), does not
contribute to the thriving of society. Durkheim looked for other sources
of solidarity beyond that which is mechanical. Is it possible for a society
to value individual consciousness and develop social cohesiveness that is
not coercive? Religion had been the original source of social solidarity, but
what would replace it in an increasingly secular age? Durkheim saw human
society evolving into an organic solidarity. As the individual becomes more

8  Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 39–40.
218 Day

recognized as having dignity and agency, the bond of collective consciousness

is created and reinforced in the division of labor. The growth of population
density and industrialization meant that a complex differentiation of roles and
functions developed. Organic solidarity is created, ironically, by diversity and
interdependence. It is decreasingly important that all believe the same things
as individuals, but increasingly important that societies build their solidarity
on reciprocity. As the dignity of the individual is valued, this is transferred not
into isolation but into equality and inclusiveness. (Durkheim did recognize
that individualism could devolve into anomie or alienation. But by and large
in order to survive, individuals are dependent on one another and have to
develop social relationships of exchange and interdependence.)
Other social theorists also developed theories to account for social organi-
zation. For contemporaries Karl Marx and Max Weber, societies were defined
by economic relations and the rationalization of the division of labor, respec-
tively. Marx’s perspective, of course, was historical materialism and focused
on the class struggle created by capitalism; the ‘common good’ would vary
according to social location and economic interests. The dialectical histori-
cal processes of revolution/change would keep reproducing the common
good. Weber focused more on understanding individual participation in the
evolving capitalist societies rather than on social cohesion as he described
the development of bureaucracy. Durkheim’s strong influence in subse-
quent generations of social scientists, such as Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah,
Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and Robert Wuthnow, to name but a few, is
reflected in their own exploration of the ways that social glue is reproduced
and expressed. These disciples have not necessarily shared Durkheim’s cer-
tainty about the inevitable replacement of religion by secularism. Religion has
been more resilient and adaptive than he had predicted. Rather, religion has
continued to contribute to the organic solidarity, however, even as it is con-
tinually being constructed and reconstructed. Robert Bellah in particular rec-
ognized the construction of a civil religion within the American experiment.9
The new nation, with its high regard for the individual, expansive frontiers,
religious pluralism and aversion to tyranny, could have disintegrated under the
weight of its own diversity and individualism. Instead a kind of pious national-
ism developed, bringing together a soft Protestant sensibility with a patriotic
narrative. This civil religion is non-sectarian, reflective of the separation of
church and state in the First Amendment to the Constitution which guaran-
tees that the government will in no way ‘establish’ one particular religion while
protecting the ‘free exercise’ of all religions. Bellah drew on Rousseau’s earlier

9  Robert Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Dædalus, 96:1 (1967), 1–21.

Social Cohesion And The Common Good 219

use of the term, and described the national civil religion, consisting of narra-
tive, symbols, rituals and world view, which together express and reinforce val-
ues, a shared language and web of meaning for a dynamic society. Durkheim
would have been surprised to know that within his legacy sociologists were
identifying social cohesiveness within a society of organic solidarity as having
a religious character.
The legacy of Emile Durkheim in understanding the social processes that
produce social cohesion is instructive to the project of public theology, par-
ticularly in the discussion of the common good. As stated earlier, there is an
assumption, by both social scientists and public theologians, that social cohe-
sion is a good thing as long as it is not coercive. There are further ways that
the two approaches overlap, as if in a Venn diagram. It is notable, for example,
that Durkheim incorporated a morphological image—organic solidarity—to
capture his understanding of social bonds which are created and nourished by
diversity and interdependency, much as in the human body. While he particu-
larly focused on the division of labour, reciprocity extended to all aspects of
social life. Steven Lukes observed, ‘Durkheim’s notion of the division of labour
extended very much wider than the system of production, encompassing the
‘division of labour in the family, commerce, administration and government.’10
Paul also gravitated to the body as the primal metaphor for describing the
interdependence which provided the connective tissue for the Christian com-
munity (see I Corinthians 12:12–31). Although he narrows his discussion to
the Church, he wrote in a context in which social solidarity, such as it existed,
was mechanical as all were under the iron grip of the Roman Empire. Such
an inclusive description of social relationships, in which those most privi-
leged and those most disparaged cannot exist apart from one another, pre-
sented a radically different understanding of community. Their bond is not
portrayed as much metaphysically as it is realized in social interaction; it is
only through interdependence that they become the community known as the
Body of Christ.
Bradstock and Russell, in their survey of biblical and theological sources of
the common good, identify key ‘principles at the heart of the common good
[which] include human dignity, equality, interdependence, community, soli-
darity, participation . . .’11 These principles, or values, are not just moral com-
mitments but essential elements of vital and cohesive human community.
That is to say, here is where the normative voice of public theology and the

10  Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 1985), p. 164.
11  Andrew Bradstock and Hilary Russell, p. 167 in this volume.
220 Day

descriptive, analytical gaze of social theorists come together. What Durkheim

described as a social fact—interdependence creates social solidarity—is
appropriated by public theologians as normative values and commitments to
be cultivated for the good of humankind. Here is an interdisciplinary partner-
ship that is beneficial to each. Specifically, as public theology engages complex
public issues in pursuit of the common good, such as the Middle East and mass
immigration, social theory and even a research agenda can enhance a more
nuanced understanding.

Bringing Social Science to Bear: Public Theology and

the Middle East

Perhaps the most volatile place on the planet in the twenty-first century is
the Middle East, particularly the land of Israel. Curiously, it is also one public
issue with little attention by Christian public theologians. For example, even
the International Journal for Public Theology, had only included one article
about Israel/Palestine policy in the first ten years of its publication.12 The land
of Israel has been churning since before its birth into nationhood in 1948.
Despite its own internal conflicts, which have been formidable, it is uncomfort-
ably situated in a larger region constantly marked by distrust, ancient vendet-
tas, and shifting geopolitical alliances. The Fertile Crescent, called the Cradle
of Civilization, could also be the locus of civilization’s demise. This would seem
to be an issue which would attract the attention of public theologians. Like
climate justice, this is a global issue which precludes narrow national engage-
ment. With the threat of nuclear weapons and the waves of immigration the
instability in the region is spawning, public theology cannot be parochial in
its response. And yet, there is limited engagement with the issue among main-
stream Protestant theologians.
The Middle East is an issue which is fraught for Christians. Israel, and
particularly Jerusalem, is sacred space for Christians, as well as for Jews and
Muslims. This has led some to embrace a ‘Christian Zionism,’ which aggres-
sively supports Israeli nationalism with eschatological hope: the rebuilding of
the Temple will inaugurate the return of Christ. An alliance between politi-
cally conservative Christian and Jewish Zionists supports the State of Israel in
its political and military goals, including the encroachment into the occupied
territories of Palestinians. (The irony is, of course, that the return of Christ

12  
Zehavit Gross, ‘Religious-Zionist Attitudes toward the Peace Process’, International
Journal for Public Theology, 7:2 (2013), 174–196.
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 221

will also spell judgement on Jews who do not convert. This does not seem to
bother Jewish activists who appreciate the financial and political support of
the Christian Zionists).
Mainstream theology is divided, ambivalent and often silent about Israel.
The painful memory of the Sho’ah (Holocaust), enabled by the complicity of
Protestant and Catholic churches, remains a source of unresolved guilt for the
Church. There is reticence to again abandon the Jewish community, to remain
as bystanders while the small country is surrounded by hostile neighboring
countries, some of whom do not believe Israel should exist. On the other hand,
there is a long history of Christian missions in the Middle East, including
Palestine. Liberationist commitments to stand with oppressed peoples in seek-
ing justice has led to organizations and efforts within the Church to criticize
Israeli policies and advocate for the Palestinian people. The arena where these
two perspectives have clashed has been in denominational struggles over ‘BDS,’
or the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. At issue is whether Christian
bodies should divest from companies and products which would benefit the
expansion of the Israeli settlements in occupied lands. In the U.S., Presbyterian,
Methodist and Congregationalist bodies have voted to support divestments
while Lutherans have adopted a pro-Palestinian policy of support and invest-
ment. These decisions resonate with the history of coordinated divestment to
bring economic pressure for social change which was particularly effective in
South Africa. Then, the global church joined governments, educational insti-
tutions and corporations in divesting from the apartheid government, finally
contributing to political transformation in South Africa. Despite this historic
precedence of the use of this economic strategy, the decisions in U.S. church
bodies have been contentious, polarizing those who are pro-Palestinian and
pro-Israel voices. These divisive debates have focused on specific actions but
have not generated broader theological reflection. Many simply conclude that
the Israel-Palestine issue is ‘complicated,’ and do not engage it deeply.
I would like to suggest theological pathways into the debate which draw on
the discourse of the common good and the tools of social scientific theory and
research. The most basic question raised is who is included in the ‘common’
of ‘common good?’ That is, what are the boundaries of the common good that
need to be considered? Are they the geographic borders of the State of Israel,
or the inclusive Land of Israel or the entire region (including Jordon, Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Yeman, Oman, Saudi Arabia). The geopo-
litical relationships among the nations are, indeed, complex and dynamic.
Interaction cannot be equated with interdependence; stability understood as
the absence of aggression cannot be said to be solidarity. As the long-running
war in Syria creates continuing waves of immigrants flowing into neighboring
222 Day

countries and into Europe, more questions of inclusivity and interdependence

are being raised.
Before zooming out to consider the region, let us focus on Israel/Palestine.
What does it mean to discuss the common good in this context? If social
cohesion, or solidarity, is a critical component of the common good, how
is that being constructed in Israel today and how can public theology inter-
rogate that?
To begin, it is essential to have familiarity with the historical background
of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.13 Modern Israel is a product of European
Zionism from the late 19th century. Jews in Diaspora had been vulnerable to
antisemitism and pogroms for generations, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Zionist leaders felt that the only way for Jews to be safe would be to have their
own nation and a number of locations were considered. In 1903 the Zionist
leaders considered British Uganda. When that was voted down, other destina-
tions were considered, including Canada, Australia and Iraq. Finally the secu-
lar Zionists settled on the ancient Jewish homeland of Palestine. The original
plan of these first settlers was not religious but based on a socialist and secu-
lar utopic vision. At the turn of the last century, Jewish settlers accounted for
10–12% of the population of Palestine, a land of Arabic-speaking Muslims and
Christians, then controlled by the Ottoman Empire. They established agrar-
ian communes called kibbutzim. Gradually, as more Jews were fleeing repres-
sion in Europe and immigrating to Palestine, conflict over the land became
more prevalent. In 1947 the United Nations declared a resolution that suited
no one—two states, Jewish and Arab—and war immediately broke out.
As a result of the war in 1948 in which Israel was victorious, over 700,000
Palestinians left their homes and took refuge in Gaza and the West Bank. There
are conflicting narratives as to whether they left voluntarily or were forced out
by the newly established nation in its quest for independence. But the’ result
of the refugees’ exclusion [was that] the Jewish population increased from
30 percent of the total in 1947 to 80 percent by 1949.’14 Israel wanted to pre-
serve the Jewish majority and so prevented Palestinians from returning to their
homes, although Jews in the diaspora have always been welcome to ‘return’.
Since 1948, there has been an ongoing struggle for land and resources, the
details of which go far beyond the scope of this essay. After its establishment

13  For helpful background, see Matthew Berkman, ‘Historical Overview of the Israeli-
Palestinian Conflict,’ in Reframing Israel (http://reframingisrael.org/wp-content/uploads/
2015/08/17-Historical-Overview.pdf [accessed 8 December 2015]; also Ari Shavit, My
Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013).
14  Berkman, ‘Historical Overview’, p. 86.
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 223

as a state, Israel has had to defend its very existence in wars in 1967 and 1973. As
the new country developed, Palestinians have increasingly been squeezed into
smaller parcels of land, surrounded by walls and requiring residents to pass
through military checkpoints. As Palestinians have struggled with poverty and
the loss of human rights, Israel has grown into a major military, economic and
presumably nuclear power. Palestinians have organized themselves politically
(through the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Fatah, and Hamas) and have
staged several uprisings or intifadas. A particularly neuralgic point has been
the establishment of Jewish communities, or ‘settlements’ in areas designated
as Palestinian (the West Bank and East Jerusalem).
As the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, the American government has
worked continuously and unsuccessfully to broker peace, significantly in the
administrations of Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama. The political goal
has been the establishment of two states—Israel and Palestine—which could
coexist as neighbors, ideally in a cooperative relationship. However, the peace
negotiations have been stalled after Israel’s ‘incursion’ into Gaza in 2014 which
left over 2200 Gazans killed and almost 11,000 wounded; 71 Israeli citizens were
killed (of whom 66 were soldiers) and over 700 were injured. That conflict con-
tinued to deepen the cycle of grievance and to harden the resolve of Jewish set-
tlers to claim land in the Palestinian areas and to establish new communities.
It is difficult to even speak of social cohesion in Israel today. Despite the
hostility from neighboring countries, the greater threat to social solidarity
in Israel is internal. Palestinian Muslims represent only part of the diversity
of the country. There are Israeli Arabs and Christians, as well as Haredi (also
known as ‘Ultra Orthodox’) Jews. This last group philosophically questions the
establishment of a Jewish state as a failure to rely on Yahweh. There is also
ethnic diversity among Jews who trace their roots to Northern Africa and Spain
(Sephardic) or Central and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazi). Further, internal ten-
sion between the religiously observant and the secular Israelis exists, dramati-
cally apparent when traveling between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. As with most
countries, there is further ideological diversity and robust political debates
abound, in coffee shops and around dinner tables—but this diversity does not
create social cohesion. It is interesting to note that at the birth of the Jewish
state, a vision of diversity was included in the Declaration of Independence:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the
Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country
for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice
and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete
equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of
224 Day

religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience,

language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all
religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the
United Nations.15

In the Durkheimian tradition, and in the theological construction of the com-

mon good, diversity becomes the basis for interdependence, particularly
through economic exchange and the creation of social capital. Given the
lofty ideals reflected in the Declaration, and the diversity of the population,
the conditions for social cohesion exist (if not without constructive tensions).
However, in Israel interdependence between Israeli Jews and Palestinian
Muslims is thwarted structurally—and also through the contested construc-
tion of a national identity.
Israel was established as a Jewish state and its flag, language, holidays and
symbols represent the religious identity. Its very origins are rooted in the
ancient covenant with God, as God’s beloved and chosen people.16 As part of
that covenant, God promises land to Abram, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. In the
Biblical narrative, the land is lost and restored, and is related to faithfulness of
the chosen people. As Jews in the Diaspora were suffering persecution leading
up to, and especially in, the Sho’ah, the return to Zion became a powerful sym-
bol of homeland and refuge.
However, in modern Israel, the national identity is by no means resolved.
The question of ‘Who is a Jew?’ remains a perennial issue for debate. An
increasing number of Israeli citizens define themselves as secular, yet are sup-
portive of a Jewish state. The state itself claims both its religious heritage yet
wants to be regarded as a nation like any other nation. At times Israel appeals
to a ‘higher authority,’ yet at other times seems callous to human rights of
Palestinians and its own Biblical and rabbinical teachings on how to treat the
aliens, the others, in their land.17 Israel by no means is exceptional in hypoc-
risy among nations but it does vacillate on its own exceptionalism as a chosen
people claiming a promised land.
Israel’s political system has been defined as an ‘ethnic democracy.’ Sammy
Smooha, a sociologist at the University of Haifa, has defined ethnic democracy:

15  Declaration of Independence: ‘official translation.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_

Declaration_of_Independence [accessed 1/20/16].
16  Jer. 11:4; 24:7; 30:22; 31:33; Ezek. 11:20; 14:11; 36:18; 37:23, 27, New Revised Standard Version.
17  Lev. 19:34, New Revised Standard Version.
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 225

Ethnic democracy is propelled by an ideology or movement of ethnic

nationalism that declares a certain population as an ethnic nation shar-
ing a common descent (blood ties), a common language and a common
culture. This ethnic nation claims ownership of a certain territory that it
considers its exclusive homeland. It also appropriates a state in which
it exercises its full right to self-determination. The ethnic nation, not the
citizenry, shapes the symbols, laws and policies of the state for the ben-
efit of the majority. This ideology makes a crucial distinction between
members and non-members of the ethnic nation. Members of the ethnic
nation may be divided into persons living in the homeland and persons
living in diaspora. Both are preferred to non-members who are ‘others,’
outsiders, less desirable persons who cannot be full members of the
­society or state.18

Smooha argues that ethnic democracy, unlike liberal democracy, is a dimin-

ished form of democracy. It maintains its stability by protecting the ethnic
majority, and garnering the support of the international community. Non-
members of that majority have fewer rights and are perceived as an internal
threat that needs to be controlled. However, the democratic impulse allows
for minorities to peacefully protest and to participate in the political pro-
cess. Indeed, there is an increasing presence of Arab-Israelis in the Knesset,
although still very much the minority. For Palestinians, however, whose rights
to land, mobility, and free economic participation are quite limited, ethnic
democracy seems a contradiction in terms. Tensions break out on a daily basis,
often violently. In this volatility, how is Israel’s identity to be constructed and
what will be the basis of its cohesiveness?
Despite the potential for the solidarity formed out of diversity, social sci-
ence and public theology can examine the identity formation which too often
is based on the construction of ‘the other’. In the public narrative of chose-
ness, for example, there is the introduction of the non-chosen. This is not
only used by Israel but is true for all groups that appropriate themselves as
chosen—including Christians and Americans. The other is constructed in
­myriad ways—by emphasizing difference (cultural, religious, ethical) particu­
larly interpreting it as threat to security. There is nothing so bonding for a
social group as facing a shared threat and Israel clearly sees its Arab citizens as
a threat to its security. The incursion into Gaza in the summer of 2014 had been
prompted by the murder of three Israeli teenagers from one of the settlements

18  Sammy Smooha, ‘The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic
State’, Nations and Nationalism, 8:4 (2002), 475–503.
226 Day

in the West Bank by two members of Hamas—certainly a heinous crime. The

retaliation was intense, as noted above. Further, there were constant reports
of rockets being fired from Gaza which were intercepted by guided missiles
under Israel’s Iron Dome (a sophisticated defense system). Despite the rela-
tive safety of Israeli citizens, this was an effective invocation of ‘chaos rheto-
ric’ which brought Israelis into social consensus over against the Palestinians.
Chaos rhetoric is defined as ‘a type of speech used by a group to naturalize its
own political agendas. It persuades by using fear, threat and anxiety imagery to
generate social sympathy for a position that aligns with a groups own political
platforms, which the group offers as the resolution to the very threat it rhe-
torically created.’19 This is not to say that there was not some threat or that
chaos rhetoric was not also employed by Hamas as they faced endangerment.
Although Hamas leaders frame their aggression as purely defensive, their tar-
geting of Israeli civilians has been condemned by human rights groups.20 This
is to say that chaos rhetoric is particularly effective when used among groups
that are already traumatized, and certainly that can be said for both Israeli
Jews and Palestinian Muslims. During the conflict in 2014, there was little pub-
lic dissent in Israel and support for Hamas increased in Gaza.21
There are even more subtle ways that otherness is constructed beyond
chaos rhetoric. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian wrote about how the very
understanding of time creates social boundaries between groups. The other
not only has different cultural norms but is perceived as living in another time,
which he refers to as the ‘denial of coevalness’.22 This is reflected in the lan-
guage of Zionist settlers in the West Bank, as well as the official designation
by the state of Israel, referring to the area by its biblical names, Samaria and
Judea. Although the settlements are considered illegal by international law, the
use of the original names reflects a prior claim to the land. This resets the clock
and designates subsequent residents as illegitimate, as other. Ancient promise
becomes contemporary entitlement.

19  Leslie Dorrogh Smith, Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women
for America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 60.
20  ‘Gaza: Palestinian Rockets Unlawfully Targeted Israeli Citizens’, Human Rights Watch
8/6/09 https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/08/06/gaza/israel-hamas-rocket-attacks-civilians
-unlawful [accessed 19 February 2016].
21  I was in Jerusalem during the Gaza conflict, as well as the following summer, in 2015.
22  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983).
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 227

How then shall public theology engage the issue of Israel/Palestine?

Approaches of Christian theology to the question have been largely based
on biblical narratives of choseness and a deep appreciation for the trauma
Jews have suffered, especially during the twentieth century and particularly
as the Church failed to intervene to “not just bind up the wounds of the victims
beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself”23 and to stop the Nazi killing
machine. More recently, some sectors of the Church have focused attention
on the BDS strategies which can be limited in effectiveness and inflammatory
within public discourse. These approaches have served to further polarize
the debate rather than advancing it toward some resolution. Public theology
should be able to facilitate moving dialogue beyond increasingly entrenched
and exclusive positions. It will require seeing nuances and accepting modifica-
tions in positions. Some, such as biblical scholar and public theologian Walter
Brueggemann, have been questioning an uncritical support for the state of
Israel. While maintaining his position that the Jewish people were chosen by
God for a covenantal relation of promise, this does not translate into a contem-
porary foreign policy position:

Consequently, it is simply not credible to make any direct appeal from

the ancient promises of land to the state of Israel. That is for two rea-
sons. First, much has happened between text and contemporary political
practice that resists such innocent simplicity. Second, because the state
of Israel, perhaps of necessity, has opted to be a military power engaged
in power politics along with the other nation-states of the work, it can-
not at the same time appeal to an old faith tradition in a persuasive way.24

To be able to speak about this issue, or any other public issue, we need to utilize
a number disciplines and methodologies. Brueggemann has ventured outside
of biblical scholarship into contemporary political science in formulating his
perspective. Here, his interdisciplinary approach as a public theologian allows
him to challenge the construction of the other through the ‘denial of coeval-
ness.’ Faithfulness to the sacred texts and revelation of God in history should
be used to reinforce timeless principles but not to replicate ancient societies as
contemporary public policies.

23  Dietirch Bonhoeffer, ‘The Church and the Jewish Question’, in Larry Rasmussen, ed.,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works vol. 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), p. 365.
24  Walter Brueggemann, Chosen? Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), pp. 37–38.
228 Day

Conclusion

In this essay I have argued for incorporating the descriptive tools of social sci-
ence as resources for looking at public issues in new ways—social theory, soci-
ology and anthropology in particular. If engagement with an issue begins first
with understanding it, then ethnographic methods (including discourse analy-
sis and participant observation) enable a disciplined and nuanced approach
to listening and learning from the perspective of those who are most impacted
by the issue.
Further, in seeking the common good, we need to critically examine the
construction of social solidarity and the obstacles to it. Social media, which
transcends borders, redefines boundaries that have traditionally contributed
to the construction of social cohesion. As war in the Middle East spills into
Europe in the waves of refugees, questions of common good and social soli-
darity will become increasingly relevant for public theology. In Israel, where
corporate identity is fluid and inconsistent, a partial social cohesion is being
produced at the expense of the other. In other words, a too-narrow focus of the
common good becomes destructive. What is good for a majority ethnic group
can be oppressive for a minority, especially as they are sharing geographic
space. As long as this continues, the common good in Israel/Palestine—the
peaceful coexistence of two traumatized peoples with history and claims
to the land—will be an elusive goal. The Church, as a critical but loyal part-
ner, can neither abandon Israel nor Palestine in the pursuit of a just peace.
Rather than being immobilized or overwhelmed by the complex dynamics,
public theologians should identify new sources of inclusive cohesion that are
nourished by, rather than undermined by, pluralism. There are certainly orga-
nizations and courageous informal efforts to transcend the social disparity
between Israelis and Palestinians and are seeking an inclusive shared public
good. When the Rabbis for Human Rights, for example, advocate for the pres-
ervation of Palestinian villages threatened by settlement expansion, new rela-
tionships are formed. As the Jewish Shalom Hartmann Center brings Christian,
Jewish and Muslim public theologians together, the opportunities for deepen-
ing dialogue and understanding are increased. It is not just understanding of
the other that results, but an emerging understanding of a shared future. The
cultivation of such social capital becomes the basis for working toward the
common good.
Israeli feminist writer Zehavit Gross, together with educator E. Doyle
Stevick argue for the critical role of Holocaust education in building social
relationships in which broader social goals of justice and peace can be
Social Cohesion And The Common Good 229

pursued.25 Rather than just focusing on the particularistic history of the

Sho’ah, skilled educators can cultivate a deeper appreciation for universalis-
tic values of compassion and solidarity. Encountering the horrific suffering of
the Jews becomes a pathway to understanding the dynamics of racism and
power that can result in the suffering of others. In other words, understand-
ing the Holocaust does not have to result in support for an uncritical Zionism,
but can enable the gaze ‘from below,’ from the perspective of those who are
suffering. For Christian public theologians, such a focus on the Holocaust can
further create a self-critical lens. During that dark era, few public theologians
came to voice in critiquing the ideology of racism, tyranny, unbridled expan-
sionism and violence against those constructed as other. Before coming to
speech, it is important to understand the dynamics of our own silencing. The
Holocaust can be the basis of self critique and healing, as well as an entry into
the trauma of others. Such understanding creates the conditions for building
social ­solidarity and the social good.

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civilians-unlawful [accessed 19 February 2016].
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Reframing Israel (http://reframingisrael.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/17-His
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works vol. 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009).
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Works English Edition, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009).
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(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015).
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Israeli_Declaration_of_Independence [accessed 1/20/16].
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Education in Curriculum, Policy and Practice, (Heidelberg and New York: Springer
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 CHAPTER 10

Public Theology as a Theology of Citizenship

Rudolf von Sinner1

A Constituição empenha-se em tornar o homem cidadão. Entretanto, só

é cidadão quem recebe salário adequado e justo. Só é cidadão quem pode
ler e escrever, tem casa, acesso a hospitais, médicos e lazer.
Ulysses Guimarães2

…
For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is
to come.
Heb 13.143

∵
Citizenship is a central issue of human conviviality. It features prominently
in the third book of Aristotle’s Politics, defining the citizen (polites) of the city
(polis) with its specific constitution (politeia). Paul insists he is a ‘Jew from
Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of an important city’ (Acts 21.39) and claims, at the
same time, to be a Roman citizen (Acts 16.38; 22.25–28), invoking specific rights
and privileges implied.4 The author of the letter to the Ephesians insists that

1  This chapter was elaborated during a research period sponsored by Brazilian CAPES and the
Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung at the University of Munich, Germany.
2  ‘The Constitution strives to make Man [sic] a citizen. However, only he who receives an
adequate and just salary is a citizen. Only he who knows how to read and write, has a house,
access to hospitals, doctors and leisure is a citizen’, as quoted in Francisco Weffort, ‘Brasil:
condenado à modernização’, in Roberto DaMatta et al., eds., Brasileiro: cidadão? (São Paulo:
Cultura, 1992), pp. 185–215, at p. 188. Guimarães, an eminent politician, was president of the
Constituent Assembly from 1987 to 1988 and had an important hand in the drafting process
of what he called the ‘citizen constitution,’ as which it has been known ever since.
3  Bible quotations in this chapter are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
4  Cf. Sean A. Adams, ‘Paul the Roman Citizen: Roman Citizenship in the Ancient World and
its Importance for Understanding Acts 22:22–29’, in S.E. Porter, ed., Paul: Jew, Greek, Roman
(Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 309–26.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_012

232 von Sinner

Jews and Greeks in Christ ‘are no longer strangers and aliens, but [. . .] citi-
zens [sympolites] with the saints and also members of the household of God’
(Eph. 2:19). The author of the letter to the Hebrews insists on the precari-
ous character of earthly citizenship: ‘For here we have no lasting city, but we
are looking for the city that is to come’ (Heb 13.14). The vision of the book of
Revelation is a city, the celestial Jerusalem, interestingly a city without a temple
(Rev 21.22). In the eschaton, the profane and the spiritual, the secular and the
religious coincide in the presence of God. Augustine prominently wrote about
the City of God and the City of Men.5 Thus, citizenship has been a genuine
Christian topic since the outset of Christianity. The human city is always pre-
carious, but it is the proper location of Christians in their lifetime. Christians
are loyal to the City of God which is to be revealed and installed in its fullness,
and which is already present in the human city with all its ambiguities.
Today, issues of national citizenship, but also and especially the struggle for
inclusion in a broader sense, to have a home and a ‘right to have rights’ (Hannah
Arendt),6 to belong somewhere and to be owned by that place are central.
The streams of migrants and refugees the world is facing today show the chal-
lenge of uprooting and dislocation. Christians know they are never totally at
home in this world, and their loyalty cannot lie unbroken with a specific place,
a specific people, a specific nation. The Gospel transcends any limits set by
humans. And yet, Christians are called to give their contribution precisely in
a specific location at a specific time, and to help to make people feel at home
wherever they currently are. This implies that they are to work for the rights of
citizenship for all people in all places.
Over the past decades, a whole brand of ‘citizenship studies’ has emerged,
stating that the three fundamental axes of citizenship—extent, content and
depth—are being redefined.7 A recent publication has centred on three prob-
lems: ‘national citizenship in relation to human rights, the question of the obli-
gations and virtues of the citizen, and finally the problem of globalization and
territoriality’.8 It might be no coincidence that such issues are discussed pre-
dominantly in the Northern Atlantic region, focussing on issues of nationality

5  U.S. American theologian Charles Mathewes has developed a theology of citizenship

based on Augustinian theology: Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
6  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994), p. 296.
7  See, for instance, Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, ‘Citizenship Studies’, in Engin F. Isin and
Bryan S. Turner, eds., Handbook of Citizenship Studies [2002], (London: Sage Publications,
2008), pp. 1–10, at p. 2.
8  Isin and Turner, ‘Citizenship Studies’, p. 5.
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 233

and migration. In a Southern, Latin, traditionally Roman Catholic country

like Brazil, which I have been experiencing and studying extensively over two
decades, having been a resident foreigner for nearly fifteen years—i.e. not a
citizen by nationality, but a resident with most citizen rights and duties—
cidadania (citizenship) has become the key concept for democracy after the
return to a civil government in the mid-1980s.9 Similar, but at the same time
distinct discussions also occur in other Southern countries, where the English
language and Protestantism are more dominant, as is the case in South Africa.10
It seems to be more than a coincidence that while in Brazil the focus tends
to be on the claim to, effectiveness and expansion of rights, in South Africa
the issue of a ‘responsible citizenship’ seems to be more easily plausible in the
public sphere, and therefore on the individual acting guided by his or her vir-
tues, based on religious or philosophical grounds.11 As is well known, there were
churches on both sides of the apartheid conflict, and so it was, mutatis mutandis,
the case under the military dictatorships in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America.
In Brazil, the Roman Catholic Church with its Church Base Communities, but
also tacit or explicit help from the hierarchy, formed the basis of a future civil
society. Today, however, the setup of Brazilian society is much more diverse
than it used to be, which has also reshaped the role and influence of Christian
churches in the public sphere. This means the issue of citizenship and the con-
tribution of Christian churches towards it has to be rethought and reshaped.
For South Africa, Nico Koopman affirms: ‘During the years of the struggle
against apartheid we described our struggle as a struggle for full citizenship.
Black people were bereft from our citizenship with all the rights and responsi-
bilities that this entails. In the context of a young democracy we reflect afresh

9  See my The Churches and Democracy in Brazil: Towards a Public Theology Focused on
Citizenship (Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2012). I here draw freely on this earlier work.
10  For a dialogue see Felipe Gustavo Koch Buttelli, Clint Le Bruyns and Rudolf von Sinner,
eds., Teologia pública no Brasil e na África do Sul: cidadania, interculturalidade e HIV/AIDS
(São Leopoldo: Sinodal, 2014), Teologia pública vol. 4. Most of the texts in this collection
have been published in English in the South African Journal Missionalia, 43:3 (2015).
11  See, for instance, Clint Le Bruyns, ‘The Church, Democracy, and Responsible Citizenship’,
Religion & Theology 19 (2012), 60–73; more critically ‘The Rebirth of Kairos Theology and
its Implications for Public Theology and Citizenship in South Africa’, Missionalia, 43:3
(2015), 460–77; Sharlene Swartz, ‘A long walk to citizenship: morality, justice and faith
in the aftermath of apartheid’, Journal of Moral Education, 3:4 (December 2006), 551–70.
See also Russell Botman, Towards a Theology of Transformation (unpublished PhD
dissertation: Bellville: University of the Western Cape, 1993), where, in Dialogue with
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Latin American Liberation Theology he defended faithful dis-
cipleship and responsible citizenship.
234 von Sinner

about citizenship in a new time.’12 At the same time, Koopman stresses that cit-
izenship ‘cannot be limited and restricted by indicators such as natural birth,
nation-state, socio-economic position and nationalistic loyalty. Citizenship
is determined by indicators like inclusivity, participation, embrace, global
friendship and trust’.13 Churches, he contends, have a crucial role to play in
the struggle for and fostering of citizenship, especially if and as they visibly
embody ‘this heavenly and earthly citizenship of catholicity and inclusivity,
unity and action for justice, holiness and civic virtue, apostolicity and public
responsibility’.14 That is why he recalls ecclesiology, especially the traditional
marks of the church, for his version of a theologically grounded citizenship.
In what follows, I shall seek to develop a public theology of citizenship.
First, I shall expand further on citizenship and the possible or effective con-
tribution churches are making towards it. Then, thoughts of key theologians,
mainly from Brazil and South Africa, will be examined, followed by theologi-
cal insights relevant to citizenship in the perspective of a public theology and,
finally, I shall establish important aspects for the further development of pub-
lic theology as contextual and catholic. Brazil will be frequently present as a
case study. However, I have tried not to be exclusive and to link up to other
contexts wherever possible. In any case I hope that the concrete case and con-
clusions drawn from examining it will be useful for a global discussion.

Citizenship and the Contribution of the Churches

‘Citizenship’ denotes a conceptual field rather than a clear-cut concept, due to

the ever increasing plurality of subjects, issues, goals, and policies. The concept
has been historically forged in the West, having as its initial references Athens
and Rome and passing through the 18th century revolutions in the United States
and France.15 However, one should not forget that the first person to speak of
‘human rights’—an indispensable presupposition for modern. comprehensive
citizenship—was Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), and that an important
discussion on the human status of indigenous people under the patronage of
the ‘very catholic’ kings of Spain and Portugal and, therefore, their entitlement

12  Nico Koopman, ‘Citizenship in South Africa Today: Some insights from Christian ecclesi-
ology’, Missionalia, 43:3 (2015), 425–37, at 427.
13  Ibid., 429.
14  Ibid., 437.
15  See Jaime Pinsky and Carla Bassanezi Pinsky, eds., História da Cidadania (São Paulo:
Contexto, 2003).
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 235

to rights and protection was held way back in the 16th century.16 The issue did,
of course, not stop there. For long, it was thought to be evident and just that
poor people and analphabets, as well as slaves and women, should not be enti-
tled to vote. In independent, Catholic Brazil, Non-Catholic immigrants were
finally allowed to settle in the 19th century, but there were restrictions in their
citizenship—Protestant baptisms and marriages were not accepted by the
Catholic Church, which called into question, in the absence of a civil registry
and civil cemeteries, their very existence as legal citizens. Indigenous peoples
have been gaining a proper status along the 20th century, culminating in the
1988 Constitution when they emerged from State tutelage into equal citizen-
ship with a particular right to difference. Racism against African Brazilians has
finally led to affirmative action in the early 21st century. These three examples
show from the outset that it is impossible to restrict citizenship to an issue of
passport and—in this case, Brazilian—nationality.
Thomas Janoski, followed by Liszt Vieira, defines citizenship as ‘passive
and active membership of individuals in a nation-state with certain univer-
salistic rights and obligations at a specified level of equality’.17 Many authors
refer to British sociologist Thomas H. Marshall’s (1893–1981) three categories of
rights—civil, political, and social—conquered in this order in the 18th, 19th,
and 20th centuries, respectively, with Great Britain as his reference.18 Brazilian
lawyer Darcísio Corrêa introduces into his definition of citizenship economic
and social aspects: ‘Citizenship is [. . .] the democratic realization of a society,
shared by all the individuals to the point that all have their access to the pub-
lic space and conditions of a dignified survival guaranteed, having as its basic
value the fullness of life’.19 It is plain that such a definition surpasses the issue
of rights (and duties) as foreseen by law, introducing an utopian, eschatological

16  See Enrique Dussel, Der Gegendiskurs der Moderne. Kölner Vorlesungen (Wien: Turia
+ Kant, 2013), especially pp. 50–65; Matthias Gillner, ‚Bartolomé de Las Casas und die
Menschenrechte‘, Jahrbuch für Christliche Sozialwissenschaften 39 (1998), 143–160.
17  Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 9; Liszt Vieira, Os argonautas da cidadania: a sociedade civil na globalização (Rio
de Janeiro: Record, 2001), p. 34.
18  See Thomas H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City: Anchor
Books, 1965), pp. 71–134. Marshall argued that the equality of citizenship was ‘not incon-
sistent with the inequalities which distinguish the various economic levels in the society’,
as quoted by Derek Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship (New York: New York University
Press, 2004), p. 113.
19  Darcísio Corrêa, A construção da cidadania: reflexões histórico-políticas (Ijuí: Unijuí, 2006),
p. 217.
236 von Sinner

dimension when speaking of the ’fullness of life’ (cf. John 10.10, often cited
in Christian social movements and NGOs). ‘Access to public space’ seems to
include both the political and juridical system and the discursive space, while
a ‘dignified survival’ indicates having the basic needs met appropriately.
The frequent use, in Brazilian literature and advocacy, of ‘conquest,’ ‘partici-
pation,’ ‘emancipation,’ and ‘active citizenship’ indicates the hope and, indeed,
expectation of many active in civil society to construct a new society, a society
from ‘below,’ with more emphasis given to the social than to the individual.
For sociologist Pedro Demo, citizenship is, ‘a historical process of popular
conquest, by which society acquires, progressively, conditions of becoming a
conscious and organized historical subject, with a capacity to conceive and
make effective a project of one’s own [i.e. in a move towards emancipation].
The contrary signifies the condition of a mass of manipulation, periphery,
marginalization’.20 Theologians of liberation, strongly allied with leaders of
civil society, blew into the same horn.21 The question is whether there was or
was not a certain overstatement of the potential of the people and their move-
ments (as well as a sometimes rather abstract notion of ‘people’) underlying
their discourse, without sufficiently specifying differences and ambiguities.
In any case, the strong expectation of a system revolution was frustrated by
a number of events in 1989, not only the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the non-­
election of Lula to the presidency and the non-continuity of the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua.22 Thus, new forms of participation within a more
modest horizon (the ‘construction’ of citizenship in a ‘process’) had to be
elaborated. The so-called participatory budgeting, a Brazilian invention today
practiced in many parts of the world, is part of this new vision: part of the
municipal budget is decided upon in popular assemblies, relatively modest
quantitatively, but still important in indicating a concrete increase in popu-
lar, democratic participation.23 Popular votes are another means of an ‘active
citizenship’ foreseen in the 1988 Constitution, but very rarely used.24 This is

20  Pedro Demo, Cidadania menor. Algumas indicações quantitativas de nossa pobreza política
(Petrópolis: Vozes, 1992), p. 17.
21  See von Sinner, The Churches and Democracy, pp. 100–120.
22  Cf. in a global perspective Klaus Koschorke, ed., Falling Walls: The Year 1989/90 as a
Turning Point in the History of World Christianity (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).
23  See, for instance, Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 135–164; for examples in Germany
<http://www.buergerhaushalt.org/en> (site in English) [accessed on 7 January 2015].
24  Maria Victoria de Mesquita Benevides, A cidadania ativa: referendo, plebiscito e ini-
ciativa popular [1990], 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Ática, 2003). There have been only two such
votes in post-transition Brazil: On the form of government (1993—the decision was for
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 237

deplorable, because it would be another important advance of popular partici-

pation in politics. But it also shows the problem of what kind of issue should
be submitted to the people’s vote. The death penalty has, wisely, not been put
to the vote, because it is taken as being against fundamental rights which are
on principle not subject to change. According to opinion polls, it is quite think-
able that, were it put to the vote, it would find a majority in favour.25
Another trend, identified globally by Janoski, includes an emphasis on civic
culture and specifically virtue.26 This tendency is less strong in Brazil and Latin
America, although there are signs of it in speaking of ‘responsibility,’ ‘duty,’
and ‘behaviour.’ This is why the ‘learning’ of democracy and education are so
central.27 It is also no surprise that this aspect is of particular interest to theo-
logians, namely those who think of society in terms of a large community, like
Boff, who emphasizes ‘virtues for another possible world’, these being hospital-
ity, ‘co-living’ (convivência) and ‘feasting’ (comensalidade).28 Churches are, or
at least can be, schools of democracy, where ways of linking up motivation,
analysis, and action in a participatory discussion are tested. Civic culture, i.e.,
the significance attributed to being a citizen and the attitudes of pride, rejec-
tion, or disbelief held by citizens toward their citizenship, has a direct influ-
ence on the degree to which citizenship can be effective and participative,
not least because those in power and working in the administration are also
citizens, and their shortcomings reflect all citizens’ potential and limitations.
In sum, citizenship cannot be reduced to rights and duties in a national State.
For one, the law as written needs grounding in something that is prior to it, to
which the people at least broadly agree and feel committed to. Morality and
normativity come in here, as do human rights, which by definition go beyond
national boundaries. Secondly, the law is useless unless it is effectively avail-
able for the people, which includes both how it is handled by the instituted

­ residentialism) and on the prohibition of the commercialization of firearms and ammu-

p
nition (2005—the decision was against the prohibition).
25  According to the 5th Report on Human Rights in Brazil, prepared by São Paulo University
(USP), for 44% of the respondents the death penalty is at least acceptable; Núcleo de
Estudos da Violência da USP, 5º Relatório Nacional sobre os Direitos Humanos no Brasil,
2001–2010 (São Paulo: USP, 2012), p. 46.
26  Cf. Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society, p. 7.
27  See for instance Paulo J. Krischke, The Learning of Democracy in Latin America: Social
Actors and Cultural Change (New York: Nova Science, 2001); Ester Buffa, Miguel Arroyo
and Paolo Nosella, Educação e cidadania: quem educa o cidadão? [1987] 13th ed. (São
Paulo: Cortez, 2007).
28  Leonardo Boff, Virtues for Another Possible World [2006], translated by Alexandre
Guilherme (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011).
238 von Sinner

authorities and perceived by the citizens. Third, citizenship is moulded by

discourse and practice in the public sphere, where civil society has a specific
task as the organized part based on, as I define it, private initiative engaged in
fostering citizenship in the public sphere to promote the common good for the
whole of society.29 Even if going beyond an issue of passport and nationality,
it is within the nation state that citizenship becomes effective. It is there that
people can and do struggle for the improvement of their lives and effective
participation. Still, of course, civil society is interacting and networking glob-
ally, spreading inspiring concepts, actions and methods across the globe, vis-
ible, for instance, in the World Social Forum that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
There certainly are realities and conceptions of a global citizenship.30 A glo-
balized economy as well as ever-faster means of communication seem to make
nonsense of national boundaries. But fragmentation, ethnic issues, migration
with subsequent reactions of xenophobia, and closing of borders have also cre-
ated new boundaries and reinforced old ones. In any case, it is the national
setup that puts into practice concrete rights and claims duties.
I come back to the role of churches in the struggle for citizenship. There is
little doubt that churches have been and are making important contributions
to democracy and citizenship, being present in the public space and interact-
ing with other organizations of civil society.31 In Brazil, notably the Roman
Catholic Church has become widely recognized for its providing a sort of incu-
bator for the emerging civil society in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The con-
tribution of the historical Protestant churches, among them the Evangelical
Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil, is less visible. They have often
been criticized for their quietism or even outright support of the military
regime. Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches, the fastest growing seg-
ment of churches in Brazil, as in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, are
effective in establishing a most important sense of human dignity among their
believers, fostering self-esteem, providing opportunities for personal and pro-
fessional qualification, and redeeming many prisoners and persons addicted to

29  For further elaboration see von Sinner, The Churches and Democracy, pp. 48–67. As to the
public sphere, I refer to the works of Jürgen Habermas and their critical reception in Brazil,
e.g. Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Space. See also Eneida Jacobsen, ‘Deliberative
Public Sphere: The Rereading of Habermas’ Theory in Brazil and its Significance for a
Public Theology’, Missionalia, 43:3 (2015), 493–512.
30  Cf. Vieira, Os argonautas da cidadania; John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
31  This applies not least to the role of churches in democratic transition, see Christine
Lienemann and James R. Cochrane, eds., The Church and the Public Sphere in Societies in
Transition (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2013).
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 239

drugs. At the same time, many ‘nominate’ and support specific candidates for
political offices, maintain an evangelical caucus in parliament and seek public
influence and even hegemony. On the whole, the picture is, thus, ambiguous.32
Four aspects appear to be particularly important: (1) The churches’ own
practice; (2) their pedagogical role; (3) their action in public space and (4) their
theological reflection. I shall explain these four dimensions briefly.33

The Churches’ Own Practice

The way persons are recognized within the churches’ practice, in worship,
catechesis, retreats, Bible reading groups, social programs, and the like will
reflect on their ways of feeling and behaving like citizens conscious of their
rights and duties. Such practice covers activities developed by the churches
and can include church members or the larger population beyond member-
ship. Activities will, in many places, count on baptized and non-baptized, con-
tributing and non-contributing members, even more so as many churches do
not have a reliable registration system. Special attention needs to be given to
outreach programs, where the churches deliberately make a contribution to
the wider population’s well-being, grounded in their faith but directed to all,
regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof.

The Churches’ Pedagogical Role

In many places, the churches reach more people than any other organization.
Many of their activities include some sort of education, be this directly—
through sermons, lectures, catechesis, retreats—or indirectly, through devel-
oping people’s practical, organizational, and leadership skills. Explicitly or
implicitly, issues of citizenship can be part of such educational processes.
Another point in case are the churches’ own schools, many of which belong
to the best private—albeit often exclusive—schools in a number of countries,
and there are also confessional universities with very good standards.

The Churches’ Action in the Public Sphere

The churches, through their leadership, congregations, media, or specialized
organizations and ministries, collaborate with civil society and with the gov-
ernment on all levels and make their critical and constructive contributions
through seeking solutions, offering concrete support, performing advocacy,

32  Cf. Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
33  For further elaboration and analysis of these factors in three representative Brazilian
churches, see von Sinner, The Churches and Democracy in Brazil, part II, pp. 121–278.
240 von Sinner

and partaking in the debate on the course social action is to take, as well as by
offering a religious legitimation to such activity—and delegitimation where it
is necessary. Sadly, in Brazil and many other countries, namely in the Global
South, given the increasing competition between the churches, they are not
only part of the solution, but also of the problem, in terms of corporatist ten-
dencies and enmities that reflect on their action and, of course, on the public
perception of their contribution. This makes collaboration between different
churches in the ecumene, and indeed between different religions difficult,
although there are examples to the contrary.

Theological Reflection
Although not always explicit, theological reflections undergird the churches
action both ad intra and ad extra. Official church documents usually carry with
them a theological foundation of their argument, even if it is stated rather than
developed, or implicit rather than explicit. At the same time, they relate to
issues from the wider debate on democracy, citizenship, politics, public space,
poverty, and the like.
There can be no doubt that the churches do have a public role to play. This
is so empirically, because of their numerical weight, their influence on the lives
of many people as well as the political system, their innumerous educational
and social institutions and projects, and the great amount of trust they still
hold among the population.34 But this is also so theologically and, thus, nor-
matively, since its mission following Jesus is public from the outset. Let us now
look further into aspects of a Theology of Citizenship as Public Theology.

Towards a Theology of Citizenship as Public Theology

As stated before, the heavenly and worldly citizenship of Christians and their
relation is an issue that has been accompanying Christianity since its outset.
My intention here, against the background of the Brazilian and Latin American
context, is to explore the heritage of Liberation Theology and its recent inno-
vations. One of the most challenging essays of Liberation Theology in the
1990s was an article by Roman Catholic theologian and professor of education
Hugo Assmann (1933–2007), where he precisely claimed the continuation of

34  See Rudolf von Sinner, ‘Trust and convivência. Contributions to a Hermeneutics of Trust
in Communal Interaction’, The Ecumenical Review, 57:3 (2005), 322–41.
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 241

Liberation Theology as a ‘theology of citizenship and solidarity’.35 His criti-

cism of classical Liberation Theology included the lack of a perception of who
the poor—or, more realistically, the excluded and the discarded36—in fact
are, having held an idealized view of them as subjects of their own liberation
while not perceiving their genuine desires and aspirations. Thus, he counts
among the pending challenges ‘a theology of the right to dream, to pleasure
[prazer], to fraternal tenderness [fraternura], to creative life [creativiver], to
happiness’, summed up in the notion of embodiment [corporeidade].37 At the
same time, as the poor have become dispensable for the dominant neo-liberal
market capitalism, they only come into sight for those ‘converted to solidarity’.38
Thus, Assmann has consistently worked on the necessity of educating for soli-
darity.39 He further insists that it is necessary to ‘join values of solidarity with
effective rights of citizenship’.40 Presupposing the lasting presence of a market
economy, there is need for the compensation of the logic of exclusion’s effects,
combining market and social measures by democratically installed institu-
tions. Assmann further criticizes the exaggerated emphasis given by Christians
‘to the communitarian relationships, as if they were a sufficient—although
indispensable—basis to make solidarity effective in large, complex and highly
urbanized societies. [. . .] there’s a dangerous non-observance of the use of law
as the weapon of the weakest [. . .], especially a fallacious anti-institutional
stance’.41 While Assmann situates his argument more in the economic sphere,
I would add that the new situation of political participation, rather than a new
economic situation, makes a new kind of theology possible and necessary,
precisely as a theology focused on citizenship.

35  Hugo Assmann, ‘Teologia da Solidariedade e da Cidadania. Ou seja: continuando a

Teologia da Libertação’, in Crítica à Lógica da Exclusão (São Paulo: Paulus, 1994), pp. 13–36.
36  On this see the recent book by Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the
Global Economy (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
37  Assmann, ‘Teologia da Solidariedade e da Cidadania’, p. 30f. Fraternura and creativiver
are neologisms created by Leonardo Boff and Hugo Assmann, respectively. The issue of
embodiment becomes more and more common in both theology, especially as developed
from a perspective of gender, and education, see for instance: Wanda Deifelt, ‘The Body
in Pain’, in Katrin Kusmierz et al., eds., Grenzen erkunden—zwischen Kulturen, Kirchen,
Religionen (Frankfurt a.M.: Lembeck, 2007), pp. 257–71.
38  Assmann, ‘Teologia da Solidariedade e da Cidadania’, p. 31.
39  Hugo Assmann and Jung Mo Sung, Competência e sensibilidade solidária (Petrópolis:
Vozes, 2000).
40  Assmann, ‘Teologia da Solidariedade e da Cidadania’, p. 33.
41  Ibid., p. 34.
242 von Sinner

Methodist theologian Clovis Pinto de Castro dedicated a major study to the

theme of citizenship, in which he claimed a pastoral da cidadania (pastoral
action for citizenship) as ‘public dimension of the church’.42 His central con-
cept is that of an ‘active and emancipated citizenship’, which he develops based
on Hannah Arendt’s vita activa, on Brazilian political philosopher Marilena
Chauí’s reflections on Brazil’s foundational myth—which fostered paternal-
ism and messianism, contrary to a democratic and participatory notion of
citizenship—and on Pedro Demo’s critique of a paternalizing (cidadania
tutelada, as in a liberal state) or social assistance based citizenship (cidada-
nia assistida, as in a welfare state), in favour of an emancipated citizenship
(cidadania emancipada), in which the effective participation of the people
is being central to democracy. Theologically, Castro grounds the pastoral da
cidadania on God as the one who loves justice and right, on the command-
ment to love one’s neighbour, good works and justice according to the witness
of the New Testament; on the concept of shalom (‘peace’) as comprehensive
well-being, and finally on the perspective of God’s Kingdom. From there,
he deduces the church’s mandate to live not (only) its private, but its public
dimension (pastoral), oriented towards human beings in their daily, real life,
and not only towards the church’s members. Faith conscious of citizenship ( fé
cidadã) is oriented by the three dimensions of faith as confession (knowing
God), as trust (loving God) and as action (serving God). The latter includes
the formation of subjects of cidadania (sujeito cidadão) and participation of
Christians in democratic administration of cities.
Citizenship, then, has at least incipiently made its way into theology.
Economic exclusion has made it urgent and political change has made it pos-
sible. I see this as an adequate re-contextualization of Liberation Theology’s
central insights like the preferential option for the poor and the theological
importance of praxis. A similar insistence can be identified in other contexts.
South Korean theologian Anselm K. Min43 states that citizens themselves
have to be the focus of attention, ‘agents’ rather than ‘agendas’, overcoming
‘tribal’ tendencies in Asian traditional culture and a simplistic blame of pov-
erty and corruption on outside forces alike. Min urges a re-contextualization

42  Clovis Pinto de Castro, Por uma fé cidadã. A dimensão pública da igreja. Fundamentos para
uma pastoral da cidadania (São Bernardo do Campo: Ciências da Religião, São Paulo:
Loyola, 2000).
43  Anselm Kyonsuk Min, ‘From the Theology of Minjoong to the Theology of the Citizen:
Reflections on Minjoong Theology in 21st Century Korea’, Journal of Asian and Asian
American Theology, 5 (Spring 2002), 11–35; ‘Towards a Theology of Citizenship as the
Central Challenge in Asia’, East Asian Pastoral Review 41:2 (2004), 136–59.
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 243

in Minjung (people’s)-theology, understanding that its logical continuity in a

changed context would be the ‘theology of the citizen’, which is essentially a
theology of solidarity with others which overcomes ‘tribal’, i.e., closed, group-
centred solidarity. Koopman, from the point of view of a South-South dialogue
between South Africa and Brazil insists that

societies hunger for people of public and civic virtue: public wisdom in
contexts of complexity, ambivalence, ambiguity, paradoxality, tragedy
and aporia (dead-end streets); public justice in context of inequalities
and injustices on local and global levels; public temperance in context of
greed and consumerism amidst poverty and alienation; public fortitude
amidst situations of powerlessness and inertia; public faith amidst feel-
ings of disorientation and rootlessness in contemporary societies; public
hope amidst situations of despair and melancholy; public love in societ-
ies where public solidarity and compassion are absent.44

Elements of a Theology of Citizenship

It is now my task to dig further into the theological foundations of a public

theology of Citizenship. As mentioned, Nico Koopman has theologically con-
nected citizenship to the traditional marks of the church, towards a catholic
and inclusive, united and justice-seeking, holy and virtuous and apostolic and
responsible citizenship.45 However, he has also expanded on the Trinity within
the framework of a public theology, taking up Sallie McFague’s planetary the-
ology and insisting on the ‘public dimension of Trinitarian faith’ which holds
together God and the world.46 In his inaugural lecture held at Stellenbosch
University in 2009, Koopman defended a ‘theological anthropology of rela-
tionality, vulnerability and interdependence that is mainly based on so-called
economic Trinitarian thinking’. Emphasizing the economic Trinity allowed
Koopman to discuss anthropology ‘with regard to concrete public challenges,

44  Koopman, ‘Citizenship in South Africa Today’, 434.

45  Ibid., 427.
46  Nico Koopman, ‘Some Comments on Public Theology Today’, Journal of Theology for
Southern Africa, 177 (2003), 3–19; cf. Sallie McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology
and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).
244 von Sinner

like differently abled persons, gender relations, ubuntu discourses, social iden-
tity, human dignity and violence’.47
In their Trinitarian theologies, Jürgen Moltmann and Leonardo Boff took
a critical stance towards what they call ‘monotheism’—rather, it should be
monarchism—in the understanding of God which, according to them, gave
way to possible analogies of the type ‘one God—one Empire—one Emperor’, a
line of thought Erik Peterson has notoriously denounced in a historical thesis
as contemporary critique against rising Nazism in Germany.48 Positively, they
suggested a social analogy of the Trinity through perichoresis (interpenetra-
tion) that could sustain an egalitarian communion both within the church and
in society. Boff furthermore presents the view of a planetarian community of
nature and humanity, of humans among themselves, of humanity and God;
for him, citizenship is (national) citizenship, co-citizenship and citizenship of
the Earth.49
The question is as to how such trinitarian ‘inspiration’ can be applied to
the formation of structures in society and the church. Boff himself does not
go beyond claiming, in general terms, the need for a ‘basic democracy’: ‘Basic
democracy seeks the greatest possible equality between persons, achieved by
means of progressive development of processes of participation in everything
that concerns human personal and social existence. And beyond equality and
participation, it seeks communion with transcendent values, those that define
the highest meaning of life and history.’50 Trying to combine the critical and
constructive (‘inspiring’) function of a perichoretic Trinitarian doctrine and the
challenges of Brazilian society, I would like to emphasize four aspects which
I believe are fundamental aspects for the churches’ contribution towards
democracy, motivated by faith: Otherness, participation, trust and coherence.
As it is a widely participatory democracy which is aimed at by civil society,

47  Nico Koopman, For God so Loved the World: Some Contours of Public Theology in South
Africa, Inaugural Lecture delivered on 10 March, 2009 (Stellenbosch: Sunprint, 2009), p. 6.
48  Erik Peterson, ‚Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur Ge­schichte
der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum [1935]’, in Theologi­sche Traktate,
Ausgewählte Schriften vol. 1 (Würzburg: Echter, 1994), pp. 23–8; Jürgen Moltmann, The
Trinity and the Kingdom [1981], translated by Margaret Kohl (Augsburg: Fortress, 1993);
Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society [1986], translated by Paul Burns (Tunbridge Wells,
Burns & Oates, 1988).
49  Leonardo Boff, Depois de 500 anos: Que Brasil queremos? (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2000),
pp. 25–28, 51–53. See also William F. Storrar, Peter J. Casarella and Paul Louis Metzger,
eds., A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 265–281.
50  Boff, Trinity and Society, pp. 151f.
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 245

and as the churches are part of civil society, Trinitarian thinking in relation to
society as a whole may indeed encourage and inspire actors of civil society, and
thus foster citizenship. This is not to make simplistic deductions or inductions,
but to encounter features of God as Trinity which are fundamental for human
beings not only to coexist, but to interact in communion.51
A first central aspect is otherness. Plurality implies diversity, and community
in a democracy is unthinkable without recognizing the uniqueness of each
member of society. Therefore, respect to otherness, the acknowledgment of
difference and the right to be different is essential. In Latin American theology,
this originated among those who were in close contact with indigenous peo-
ples, but has received wider attention in recent times. A sensitive hermeneutic
of the other is necessary to preserve each person’s uniqueness and her right
to difference, including religious difference. It preserves mystery and seeks
understanding, as happens in theology trying to unveil and, at the same time,
respect the mystery of God as tri-une, unity in difference.
A second aspect is participation. This concept is central to the discourse on
citizenship. Aspects of the citizen’s effective participation come to the fore, as
does the political culture by which such participation is encouraged or hin-
dered. The churches, as part of civil society, have an important role to play
in this encouragement of citizen participation, and indeed do so in different
ways, as indicated above. In many places, churches can count on much larger
membership and participation than other kinds of voluntary organizations. In
terms of Trinitarian theology, the aspect of participation forms an appropriate
analogy of the idea of interpenetration, perichoresis.
A third aspect is the need for trust. In a democratic society, it becomes nec-
essary to trust persons in a rather abstract way because I shall never know the
majority of my fellow citizens. If democracy is to work, I have to presuppose
that others have a similar interest in the functioning of democracy.52 If such
common interest cannot be taken for granted, and if a good number of fellow
citizens, especially those who hold more power than I do, fail in proving to
be trustworthy, a deeper reason is needed in order to still be ready to invest
trust. Such reason can be given by faith, which essentially means trust—not
in oneself, but in God. Especially Lutherans are accustomed to think of the
human being as simultaneously just and a sinner. They know that humans

51  The Brazilian word for such communal interaction is convivência, conviviality, which goes
much beyond mere coexistence; cf. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York, Harper &
Row, 1973).
52  See Claus Offe, ‘How can we trust our fellow citizens?’ in Mark Warren, ed., Democracy
and Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 42–87.
246 von Sinner

cannot trust themselves and each other for their own sake and merit, but for
God’s sake and merit, because God proves trustworthy even in the ambiguity of
life. God seen as Tri-une preserves continuity in the midst of different, highly
ambiguous historical situations where God manifests Godself, most centrally
on the cross at Golgatha, but also in Creation and the presence of the Spirit,
and empowers persons to live their lives seeking to be just while knowing they
are inescapably sinners.
Finally, a fourth necessary element is coherence: to have a project for the
whole of society and not just for oneself or one’s peer group or even for one’s
church. As this depends on a specific perception of both society and of faith,
what is needed is a hermeneutic of coherence.53 The highly competitive religious
market emerging in many places in the world, especially in Africa and Latin
America, with an ever-increasing diversity of churches and religious move-
ments, is giving a very sad testimony of such (in-)coherence. Theologically
speaking, insisting on God as Trinity could help to prevent restrictive misun-
derstandings, as if God were only Holy Spirit and not also Son, made human
in Jesus Christ, and Father, as creator. This balance of a unity and diversity in
God is prone to foster koinonia, the ecumenical key word for community
among the different members of the body of Christ.54 In terms of society as
a whole, such integration of unity and diversity could, if well succeeded, be
an important contribution of churches to a pluralist society. This presupposes
that Christians and churches do not primarily seek to gain advantages for their
respective churches, but see their mission as a testimony of service (diakonia)
to the whole of society.
Another way of grounding a theology of citizenship, which I have explored
extensively elsewhere, is to correlate theological and practical elements that
are both central elements of Christian, namely Lutheran theology, and major
challenges to citizenship. That is to understand creation and justification by
grace through faith as crucial for being a citizen, the fostering of trust—as
expanded above—for living as a citizen, a realistic sense for life’s ambigui-
ties for enduring as a citizen, Christian freedom as liberation to serve as a citi-
zen, and namely for being a Christian citizen, to serve One God under Two

53  Cf. Commission of Faith and Order, A Treasure in Earthen Vessels. An Instrument for an
Ecumenical reflection on hermeneutics (Geneva, World Council of Churches, 1998), p. 9
and passim.
54  Cf. Jean-Marie R. Tillard, ‘Koinonia’, in Nicholas Lossky et al., eds., Dictionary of the
Ecumenical Movement, 2nd ed. (Geneva: WCC, 2002), pp. 646–52.
Public Theology As A Theology Of Citizenship 247

Regiments, in order not to blur the different spheres of action he State and the
churches where one would dominate the other.55

Ways Forward for Public Theology: Contextual and Catholic

The debate on public theology as developed within the Global Network of

Public Theology and its correlate periodical, the International Journal of Public
Theology, has shown the diversity of understandings and implications of the
concept. Already the first issues of the journal have dealt explicitly with
the overall project and implications of the concept. Various authors affirmed
that public theology was not uniform nor monolithic, had no single meaning,
and that there was no universal public theology.56 Yet, there is global articula-
tion around the term. I would call it an aggregating concept, that is, a way of
expressing a dimension intrinsic to the church while incorporating a diversity
of aspects and foci. It is more of a dimension than a specific line of thought.
While this provides a rich openness for contextuality, it shows a certain vague-
ness and flexibility of the concept. Constantly it is also being asked whether
public theology was not something so obvious it was unnecessary to be named.
I do not think this is the case. But it gains by being contextually specified. In
the Brazilian context, it can adequately be qualified as a theology of citizen-
ship, which shows concretely how churches contribute to a deeply necessary
and still wanting dimension of human life—not for simple opportunism, but
out of its theological conviction. Public Theology appropriately denotes a field
and insists on ways of communication beyond the churches into the public
sphere. It is, therefore, a theology developed from the inside out, communicat-
ing the church’s mission in faith, life and action. As Christian theology, draw-
ing on the same sources, it is catholic in a broad and qualitative sense, which
includes its public dimension. As explicitly public theology, it is contextually
situated in a specific context with its specific publics and public sphere. This
makes a thorough analysis necessary on what the public sphere is in every con-
text where theology is to make its contribution. Methodologically, thus, both
contextuality and catholicity of public theology should always be borne in
mind and made explicit as to its specific meaning.

55  See von Sinner, The Churches and Democracy in Brazil, pp. 281–317.
56  A seminal taking stock of the various narratives is provided by Dirk J. Smit, ‘The Paradigm
of Public Theology—Origins and Development’, in Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Florian
Höhne and Tobias Reitmeier, eds., Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology
(Münster: LIT, 2013), pp. 11–24.
248 von Sinner

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 CHAPTER 11

Public Theology, the Public Sphere and the Struggle

for Social Justice

Nicholas Sagovsky

Introduction

The historical relationship between public theology, the public sphere and the
struggle for social justice is extraordinarily complex. It depends upon changing
understandings of the public sphere which can be traced back to the world of
ancient Greece. It also depends upon changing notions of theology that shifted
from theology as public rationale for the Christianised political practice of the
later Roman Empire to theology as prophetic critique of the social injustice
perpetrated by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Since the end
of the Second World War, one crucial task for public theology has been to sup-
port the institutions and political practice of democratic states publicly com-
mitted to social justice. A key task for public theology today is to articulate in a
secular public sphere the fundamental Christian commitment to the struggle
for social justice.

Social Justice and the Public Arena: Classical Foundations

We cannot understand the notion of ‘the public’ without attending to its roots
in the thinking of the classical world. It is ultimately from Greek and Roman
ideas of the ‘public’ that modern, western notions of the ‘public’ and ‘public
life’ have developed. The public included all that pertained to the common life
(koinonia) of the city. It included all that was regulated by the city’s ancient
laws. Hence the notion of Rome as a ‘res publica’ even when its common life
was controlled by an oligarchy of senators and an Emperor.1 We must not, how-
ever, make too much of the continuities between understandings of public life
in the classical world and that of today. In the world of Greece and Rome, reli-
gion was interwoven with every aspect of public life. The narratives, the laws,

1  For the Roman conception of ‘res publica’, see Melissa Lane, Greek and Roman Political Ideas
(London: Penguin, 2014), pp. 245–94.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_013

252 Sagovsky

the temples, the statues and the festivals of civic life, the experienced identity
of the city, were all grounded in a pervasive and variegated apprehension of
the divine. The secularity of public life today is in sharp contrast.
For both Plato and Aristotle, social justice was integral to the functioning
of the city. The Republic brings this into the open by making the nature of jus-
tice the subject of an extended dialogue. First, Cephalus woodenly suggests
that for him justice consists of telling the truth and paying his debts; then,
Polemarchus suggests it is helping friends and harming enemies (‘rendering
to every man his due’); Thrasymachus suggests justice is the pursuit by the
strong of their own interests (‘might is right’). Socrates hears them out and
then presents his own vision of justice, arguing from his vision for a just soci-
ety, in which each constituent section plays its appointed role, to the practice
of justice by the well-balanced individual in which each constituent part of
the person (roughly: reason, appetite and will) plays its part. Plato famously
offered a vision of the ideal republic (polis) in which justice is realised by each
of its citizens fulfilling his (women were excluded) duties according to their
place within a given social order under the benevolent rule of a philosopher
monarch: ‘When each order—tradesman, Auxiliary, Guardian—keeps to its
own proper business in the commonwealth (polis) and does its own work, that
is justice and what makes a just society (polis).’2 For Plato, social justice and
social structure are one.
Aristotle’s approach, by contrast, was pragmatic and inductive rather than
visionary: he believed that human beings are at their best and most truly ful-
filled in ‘political’ life. In his Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, he explores
what is meant by the virtue of justice (‘rendering to each their due’), always
bearing in mind that justice is a social virtue and to be practised as an expres-
sion of the koinonia that binds the city and its citizens together. Aristotle dis-
tinguishes between distributive justice (which ensures the fair distribution of
resources in society) and corrective justice (which restores social equilibrium
when it has been disturbed by misbehaviour).3 Under the heading of correc-

2  The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1941), IV.434c, p. 129.
3  The term ‘social justice’ is a modern construct. Classical and biblical texts speak only of ‘jus-
tice’. A phrase like ‘rendering to each their due’ can clearly be applied in the context of what
we would call ‘criminal’ justice as well as what we would call ‘social justice’. The two are
related, but ‘criminal justice’ focuses on the consequences of transgression by individuals
whereas ‘social justice’ focuses on ‘fairness’ and the distribution of resources amongst popu-
lations. In Christian theology, God is the source of all ‘right’ dealing, both in the application
of criminal justice and the practice of social justice.
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 253

tive justice, he discusses the task of the judge: the ideal judge, in administer-
ing corrective justice, is, so to speak, ‘justice personified’. Aristotle goes on to
discuss the right use of money as an instrument of compensation for goods or
services rendered, thus restoring social equilibrium. Money used in this way is
being used as it should be: it is being used as an instrument to correct potential
injustice. In his Politics, Aristotle develops an account both of the oikos, the
home of the extended family, and the polis, the arena of public life. It is in
the political arena that citizens are called upon to practise the virtue of justice.

Early Christianity in the East and West

In her study of The Human Condition,4 Hannah Arendt reflects on the contrast
between the public and the private in ancient Greek culture. She stresses that,
whilst the ‘public’ was the realm of political debate and action, the ‘private’,
based on the cultivation of land and the extended households that farmed it,
was the realm of production and consumption (oikonomia). The common life
of the extended household was regulated by the rule of the householder or
those to whom he5 delegated it. When Christianity first began to penetrate the
world of Graeco-Roman civilisation, it was as a private religion, based in the
extended household: Christians are ‘citizens with the saints’ and ‘members
of the household of God’ (Eph. 2:19). The interaction of the Christian gospel
with public life is represented by Paul’s preaching on the Areopagus: he relates
‘the unknown God’ of the public arena to his proclamation of Jesus Christ
(Acts 17:22–31). Paul’s discernment of the presence of God within the public
arena may well count as the first instance of ‘public theology’. In the early years
of the Church, the ‘household’ religion of Christian citizens continued to pro-
duce tensions with their role in public life, making exclusive claims on believ-
ers who found themselves unable to practise the public cult which ascribed
godlike status to the Roman Emperor. They were publicly branded as ‘atheists’.
The decisive reversal of this situation occurred under Constantine, who in
the early fourth century gave to Christianity a privileged position within the
Empire. In the east, the public space of the Empire was gradually transformed
into a monolithic, religiously-based Christian ‘society’, guided by imperial laws,

4  H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958).
5  A householder would normally be male (cf. Stephanas, 1 Cor. 1:16) but female householders
were not unknown. ‘Chloe’s people’ (1 Cor. 1:11) may refer to one such.
254 Sagovsky

which in 534 were definitively codified and reaffirmed by Justinian.6 Justinian’s

Institutes begin with a discussion of justice as ‘the constant and perpetual wish
to render everyone his due’. In the west, the Church developed as a relatively
autonomous ‘household’ governed by the Pope and the bishops, living inter-
mittently under the rule of a western Emperor. There was always the possibil-
ity of friction between the imperial and the papal systems of governance, the
one with a concern for ‘public life’ (including the Church) and the other with
its own system of canon law and a concern for the visible ‘household of God’—
usually, in practice, the clergy.
Augustine’s City of God may be seen as a text in public theology because it
discusses the relation between the life of the state (res publica) and the life of
the Church. Writing after the fall of Rome in 410 AD to the marauding armies
of the semi-Christianised Goths, and from a western perspective, Augustine
set out to defend the Church against the accusation that the Christians, by
causing Rome to turn from its ancient public religion, brought about the moral
and physical collapse of the Empire. His defence is to point out the shared
concerns of Church and state—for social justice—in this world order and
the weakness of the public morality of Rome even before the coming of
Christianity. Augustine quotes Cicero’s De Re Publica, in which his fictional
Scipio Africanus, one of Rome’s greatest heroes from the republican period,
plays a prominent role. Cicero’s Scipio argues that, ‘What the musicians call
harmony in song is concord in a state, the strongest and best bond of perma-
nent union in any commonwealth (res publica); and such concord can never
be brought about without the aid of justice (iustitia)’.7 Cicero believed that this
bond, which amounted to a shared sense of social justice, had been lost in
Rome since the great days of Scipio and the Roman Republic. Augustine cites
Cicero, amongst other respected Roman writers, to make his case that the dec-
adence of Rome was not the fault of the Christians. His positive contribution
is to offer a theology of the saeculum (this present age) in which Church and
state have their complementary roles to play.8 Central to this is a theological
account of the importance of public life, and the responsibilities of those with

6  Justinian’s Code (534) built on the Code of Theodosius (438), which collated all the impe-
rial legislation since the reign of Constantine. For an introduction to these and other codes,
see Paul du Plessis ed., Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law, fourth edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), pp. 50–62.
7  De Re Publica (translated by C.W. Keyes, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass. and
London: Harvard University Press, 1928), II.xlii.69, p. 182.
8  The classic study is R.A. Markus, Saeculum, History and Society in the Theology of Saint
Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 255

political authority for maintaining good order from which all benefit. Both the
earthly and the heavenly cities are rightly concerned, each in its own way, with
justice: the state with earthly justice based on the observance of natural law,
and the Church (which, being far from perfect, cannot simply be equated with
‘The City of God’) with God’s justice based on the divine law as revealed in
Scripture. The City of God gives qualified affirmation to the role of ‘public life’,
so long as it is based on justice, within the purposes of God. Nevertheless, there
is always in Augustine a reserve about the position of the Church, which in its
inner life represents an anticipation of the Kingdom of God. God rules over
Church and state, but in different ways. Their responsibilities are distinct but
complementary. There was always an area—a private area—reserved to the
guidance and governance of the Church. This was the essentially private area of
people’s souls—about the destiny of which there was much anxious concern,
especially in the later Middle Ages. The Church’s moral theology developed out
of its guidance to penitents.9 This was an essentially ‘private’ source of teach-
ing which might at any time produce confrontation in the public domain.
The sources for an understanding of justice in west and east were similar
and overlapping, but distinct. Under the auspices of the Christian Emperors,
the laws of previous generations, deriving from Roman law, were accepted and
affirmed. In the east, Constantine and his successors actively promoted the
canonical processes whereby the Church laid down new laws to regulate its
worship and decision-making through its synods, including those now recog-
nised as ecumenical councils.10 The concern of the Emperors was, above all,
for the unity and harmony of the Church within the body of the Empire (for
the Church to be given its ‘due’11). The task of the godly Byzantine Emperor
was to rule as ‘God’s Viceroy’. When Leo III published a revised lawcode (The
Ecloga) in 726, he prefaced it with the words:

Since God has put in our hands the Imperial authority, according to his
good pleasure . . . bidding us to feed His faithful flock after the manner
of Peter, head and chief of the Apostles, we believe that there is nothing

9  On this, see J. Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
10  This did not, however, mean that political issues could be feely discussed. ‘Real discus-
sion or serious debate’ was never permitted by the autocratic nature of Byzantine rule.
See, Judith Herrin, Byzantium, The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London: Penguin
Books, 2007), p. 28.
11  Judith Herrin writes (Ibid., p. 79), ‘By insisting on a distinct sphere for the Church,
governed by its own law, Byzantium sowed the seeds of a secular state administered by
civil law.’
256 Sagovsky

higher that we can do than to govern in justice those who are committed
to us by His care.12

In the thought of Byzantium, the Empire and the ‘household of God’ were
coextensive, and the justice to be practised in the Empire was to be ‘the justice
of God’. The role of the Church was to promote the health of the body politic,
maintaining constant public prayer (leitourgia), by praying for the Emperor,
his family and for all those Christian peoples over whom he ruled. Sometimes
this spilled over into social criticism, such as that of St John Chrysostom
(c347–407), who preached scathingly against the inequalities of wealth in
Byzantium—a prophetic form of public theology. This prescription for social
justice within an ordered society is reflected in the litanies and prayers of the
Liturgy named after St John Chrysostom, which has its roots in the worship of
Byzantium and is still used by the Orthodox churches today. The criminal and
civil law that regulated the public life of the Empire was developed through
imperial edicts in parallel with the edicts of the Church. Social justice was
fostered by the harmony with which the two operated together. Both systems
were ‘sacral’ because of the sacral status of Emperor and of the subservient
church authorities. The only sense in which one could be said to be ‘secular’
and the other ‘sacral’ is that imperial edicts were ultimately concerned with
the good order of the Empire as a God-given political structure in this world
and the edicts of the Church were ultimately concerned with the salvation of
souls in the next.

Civic Republicanism, Mercantilism and Social Justice

The Italian Renaissance brought a rebirth of interest in pre-Christian struc-

tures, especially those of Greece and Rome. The civic republicanism of
Florence, which was much influenced by this conscious re-appropriation of
classical sources, was not opposed to an accommodation with the Church.
Florence and its allies had historic Guelf (pro-papal) loyalties. The battles of
Venice in defence of Christendom and against the armies of Islam were fought
under the banner of Saint Mark. The medieval republics of Italy were, how-
ever, totally opposed to hereditary monarchy. The enormous lengths to which
Venice went to ensure democratic validity for the election of a Doge were leg-
endary. The Venetians’ sense of the public realm and the priority given to civic

12  Quoted by S. Runciman, The Byzantine Theocracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1973), p. 63.
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 257

structures that supported mercantilism was vital to their economic success.

Civic republics like Florence and Venice played a major role in the develop-
ment of notions of a public sphere marked out by relative tolerance and the
beginnings of an autonomous economy. The secularism that began to develop
in the public realm of the civic republics of Italy was not so much anti-
clerical as pro-mercantile. The pragmatism of the Italian city-state was affirmed
in the thought of Machiavelli who had a great deal of interest in successful
governance but little in social justice.13 The Aldine Press in Venice was famous
throughout Europe for its use of the freedom to publish new editions of classi-
cal texts. The major cities of Europe contained within themselves Jewish com-
munities which played an important part in the commercial life of the city
and in international trade but, being confined within the ghetto, maintained
an essentially ‘private’, religiously-based, community life. In the seventeenth
century, Amsterdam benefited from the civic freedom of the Dutch Republic to
become the leading city in Europe for the printing of a whole variety of texts,
including those produced by its thriving Jewish community.
It was, however, in Germany that the idea of tolerance, and so of religious
diversity in the public domain, was painfully developed out of the conflicts
of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. The Peace of Westphalia (1648)
acknowledged that within the Holy Roman Empire Catholics and Protestants
had to coexist in peace.14 From this point on, religious tolerance of a sort was
practised in the public sphere throughout the Holy Roman Empire, at the heart
of Europe, though, strikingly, not in France. In German-speaking lands, foun-
dations were laid for diversity in both public and private life.15 The challenge

13  Famously, Machiavelli separated politics and ethics. What he praised was ‘virtù’, which
could mean providential foresight, adaptability, or domination over fortuna. Despite his
interest in Aristotle’s understanding of politeia (constitution), he had none in the justice
which Aristotle believed was essential to the flourishing of the state.
14  For a nuanced account, see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, Religious Conflict and
the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge Mass. and London: Belknap
Press, 2007). On the Peace of Westphalia and the imperfect practice of tolerance which
followed, see pp. 336–7.
15  Kaplan notes (p.195) the emergence in early modern Europe, of ‘a new distinction
between public and private worship’ (how ‘new’ is open to question), which contrib-
uted to a new distinction between public and private spheres generally: ‘In the wake of
the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, Europe’s new religious divisions threatened
to destroy the cohesion of communities; distinguishing public from private was a way to
save it.’ The introduction of this distinction marked an important step on the way towards
the modern widespread secularisation of the public sphere and the relegation of religion
solely to the private sphere.
258 Sagovsky

for Protestantism and Roman Catholicism was to develop theological accounts

of this diversity. By failing to do so, for different reasons, both eventually lost
their purchase on the public arena, which was left vulnerable to the increas-
ingly aggressive secularism of the eighteenth century. This was not, of course,
true of Britain, where, after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the Act of
Uniformity of 1662, despite a short period when the monarch (James II) was
Roman Catholic (1685–88), the Church of England maintained a measure of
control over public life, ensuring the exclusion of Roman Catholics, Jews and
Nonconformists from full civic participation.

The Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the Revolutionary Era

Throughout the seventeenth century, a stream of those who looked for greater
freedom in the practice of their religion emigrated to the New World, laying
the foundations for a union of states with differing religious practice. From this
religious patchwork there was forged in the American Revolution a new repub-
lic in which religious diversity characterised the public realm. The American,
and then the French, Revolution, in very different ways, ushered in modern
understandings of the public realm, with huge implications for the practice of
social justice. For both, social justice was a matter of freedom: freedom from
oppression and freedom for the pursuit of agreed social goals. This freedom
was expressed in the newly minted language of the rights of man (sic). Thus,
the Declaration of Independence (1776) famously declares:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to
secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.16

16  Quotations from the Declaration of Independence (1776), The Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen (1789) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948)
are taken from Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, A History (New York and London:
Norton, 2007).
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 259

The War of Independence and the subsequent constitution of the United States
established the newly independent land as a non-religious republic, founded
on the rule of law, which, from the beginning, recognised the fundamental
importance of freedom to engage in diverse religious practice. Its Constitution,
adopted in 1787, described a public space for the practice of democracy:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,
establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common
defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty
to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America.

In the event, the proposed structures of governance were thought to be too cen-
tralised, so a counterbalancing Bill of Rights, which spelt out and guaranteed
the rights of individuals, was passed. The first Amendment to the American
Constitution repudiated all established religion, but guaranteed freedom of
religious practice:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or

prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to peti-
tion the Government for a redress of grievances.

Thus was defined the nature of the public sphere in American polity: it was,
and is, non-religious, but allows for religious practice; it is a place of debate
informed by a free press; it is a place of free assembly and of freedom to pro-
test against grievances. In each of these aspects, it differed from the public
sphere in England. The preamble to the Constitution made clear that the aim
of the legislators was to ‘establish justice’. As the Declaration of Independence
affirmed, their legitimacy in so doing lay—by the will of the Creator—in the
derivation of their ‘just powers from the consent of the governed’. The task of
‘public theology’ in states which stand within this tradition of governance is to
take advantage of the civic space thus created, contributing to debate amongst
the ‘public’ so constituted.
The French situation is rather different. The fundamental revolutionary
declaration is the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man (‘L’Homme’) and of the
Citizen’ of 1789. The preamble begins:

The representatives of the French People, constituted as a National

Assembly, and considering that ignorance, neglect or contempt of the
260 Sagovsky

rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental
corruption, have resolved to set forth, in a solemn declaration, the natu-
ral, inalienable and sacred rights of man.

The central place of the ‘rights of man’ is striking. ‘Citizenship’ is mentioned

in the title and ‘the rights and duties’ of citizens referred to in the preamble,
but there is no exposition of the meaning of citizenship nor any further discus-
sion of the duties of citizens. There is no reference to justice, nor is there any
reference in this incomplete document to the means of realising social justice.
Article 2 spells out ‘the purpose of all political association’, which is ‘the preser-
vation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’. This is ‘freedom from’
the infringement of human rights, not ‘freedom for’ any particular form of
social justice other than that of freedom and equality. The right to private reli-
gious practice is assured, provided it does not impinge on public order: ‘No one
shall be disturbed for his opinions, even in religion, provided that their mani-
festation does not trouble public order as established by law.’ (10) The public
realm is therefore to be strictly controlled in accord with the law to ensure the
exercise of personal freedoms, such as ‘the free communication of thoughts
and opinions’. The public realm is effectively secularised. It is to be the arena of
the exercise of human freedoms. Private theological opinions are not to be ‘dis-
turbed’ (inquiétés) but they are not themselves expected to ‘disturb’ the public
realm. The challenge for subsequent public theology is to reconcile theologi-
cally based interventions that are made in the public realm with a notion of
human rights that privileges freedom from governmental interference, mar-
ginalises religion and is largely couched in individualistic terms.

The Twentieth Century and the Theory of Justice

Not until the middle of the twentieth century was there a similar period of
searching reflection on the nature of the public realm and its relation to social
justice. The first half of the century saw the consolidation of the Leninist-
Stalinist regime in Russia and the Nazi regime in Germany, when the public
realm expanded into every area of private life and every expression of dissent
was ruthlessly suppressed by ideologically centralised, propagandist states.
There could be no critical, public opinion and there could be no critical pub-
lic theology. Once the Second World War had ended with the comprehensive
defeat of Germany and Japan, there was a deep desire to re-establish public
life in those nations and elsewhere as an arena of democratic debate in the
service of social justice. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 261

and the human rights instruments that followed, were borne out of an inter-
national consensus (ostensibly including Russia and China) that ‘never again’
should totalitarian, racist regimes take over the signatory nations. Whereas the
French Revolution defined ‘the rights of man and the citizen’, this new declara-
tion spoke of ‘universal human rights’. Deep within it are two key rights which
are to characterise the public space in which all human rights are exercised:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion;

this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom,
either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to
manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and obser-
vance. (Article 18, emphasis added)
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right
includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regard-
less of frontiers. (Article 19)

The UDHR offers a disparate list of human rights. It was left to John Rawls to
weave these together within an overarching Theory of Justice (1972).17 Rawls
has described how, as a soldier serving in the American army in the Far East
at the end of the War, he couldn’t wait to get back to Princeton University and
think through the nature of the justice which should characterise the regime
that had now be created amidst the ruins of Germany.18 Rawls repeatedly
referred to his understanding of ‘justice as fairness’. His theory is a theory of
social justice because it concerns what is fair to all and the demands thus made
on each individual. His rule-of-thumb principles of justice are derived from
a simple thought experiment which dramatises a Kantian understanding of
justice. Rawls invites us to imagine a group who have no idea who they are or
where they stand in society: in this ‘original position’, what kind of ground-
rules would they lay down for harmonious co-existence? He suggests that,
contrary to all utilitarian understanding, they would devise rules that were
‘fair’ to all, ensuring no-one was ultimately disadvantaged—since no-one
could know if they themselves would be amongst the disadvantaged. The a
priori rules of social justice would maximise opportunities for advancement
but they would judge the ‘fairness’ of such advancement by the impact for

17  See J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
18  For a brief, biographical essay, which illuminates Rawls’ post-War project, see Thomas
Pogge, John Rawls, His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
pp. 1–27.
262 Sagovsky

good it had upon the least advantaged in society. In the Theory of Justice, Rawls
follows this through a discussion of the major institutions of society—such as
those that had recently been established in Germany.
The more, though, Rawls considered the nature of such institutions, the more
he realised they could take various forms.19 His vision for social justice became
less concerned with the concrete institutions of a society like the United States
and more concerned with well-informed, open debate within a ‘deliberative
democracy’ as its citizens sought to establish ‘overlapping consensus’. Rawls
was, until he suffered several traumatic experiences in the War, a practising
Christian. His liberalism is distinguished by an understanding of the place
that ‘comprehensive convictions’ (like those of religious believers) can play in
the market-place of ideas. An essay on ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’
(1997)20 set out his conviction that in a plural democracy ideas of justice can-
not be received uncritically from established tradition but must be established
through processes of debate in accord with ‘public reason’. In other words, the
public nature of public life is established not by appeal to prior agreement
(to tradition) but by the deployment of ‘public reason’. Rawls does not discuss
the extent to which ‘public reason’ can accommodate religious premises. The
challenge from Rawls to those who argue for religiously inspired notions of
‘fairness’ in the public domain is to deploy what is accepted as ‘public reason’
in the service of publicly recognised elements of social justice.

Theological Intimations of Social Justice in the Public Square

In modern, market societies we are in a place far removed from the Greek polis.
Like the Greeks, we live with a public/private split but the nature of both the
public and the private realms, as we think of them, is radically different. In
the west, our aspirations of inclusion are universal, but our practice has all
too often been exclusive. We have seen that a defining moment was the end of
the Second World War when public opinion in Germany had to confront the
truth of what really occurred under the Nazi regime, especially the exclusion
of the Jewish people (and other ‘undesirables’) from the public realm, their
confinement to the state-controlled ‘privacy’ of the ghetto and the concentra-
tion camp, and the carefully planned genocide of the Holocaust. It was in the

19  Rawls develops his ideas about justice as ‘fairness’ in a plural context in Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
20  John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited ’ (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 263

context of overwhelming devastation, as they sought to re-imagine and rebuild

public life after the War, that Germans thinkers had to face fundamental ques-
tions about their own complicity in, and responsibility for, the moral disas-
ter of Nazism. Only later was it known that these were questions with which
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been wrestling throughout the War, or that during the
War the Christian-inspired Kreisau Circle, a number of whose members were
executed after the failure of the July 1944 plot, had been sketching a blueprint
for a just regime to govern Germany after the defeat of the Nazis. Lecturing
in Heidelberg in 1945, Karl Jaspers wrote eloquently about the task facing
the nation:

Today we Germans have only negative basic features in common: mem-

bership in a nation utterly beaten and at the victors’ mercy, lack of a com-
mon ground linking us all; dispersal—each one is essentially on his own,
and yet each one is individually helpless. Common is . . . non-community.21

Jaspers’ concern was that Germans should face what he called their ‘meta-
physical’ guilt for the disaster that National Socialism had brought about. For
him, it was a fundamental question of human dignity. Only by facing their guilt
together, he believed, could the German people begin to rebuild on solid foun-
dations. They had to face the truth about themselves: ‘Unity by force does not
avail; in adversity it fades as an illusion. Unanimity by talking with and under-
standing each other, by mutual toleration and concession leads to a commu-
nity that lasts.’22
Similarly, in the Stuttgart Declaration (1945), a representative group of lead-
ing German theologians publicly acknowledged their personal failure and the
failure of their churches adequately to stand against Nazism: ‘We accuse our-
selves that we did not witness more courageously, pray more faithfully, believe
more joyously, and love more ardently.’23 Hannah Arendt, reflecting on the trial
of Adolf Eichmann in an interview with Joachim Fest in 1964, comes at the
question of responsibility somewhat differently. She had been shocked at

21  K. Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial Press, 1947), p. 18.
22  Ibid., p. 23.
23  For discussion, see J. Moltmann, ‘Forgiveness and Politics, Forty Years after the Stuttgart
Confession’ in W. Krusche, Guilt and Forgiveness, the Basis of Christian Peace Negotiations,
published for the Forgiveness and Politics Study Project (London: New World Publishing,
1987). The text of the Stuttgart Declaration is given on pp. 53–4. As Moltmann notes, not
all Protestant leaders welcomed it; some were strongly critical. H. Thielicke called it ‘typi-
cal German self-accusation, betrayal of the Fatherland, masochistic self-indictment’.
264 Sagovsky

the unthinking nature of Eichmann’s cruelty. His pathological desire to please,

to be good at his job, which happened to be the administration of mass murder,
led him to abdicate all sense of personal responsibility, something no human
being ultimately can do. Arendt points to the public nature of law which calls
each one who appears before a court to account:

The bureaucracy . . . administered mass murder, which naturally cre-

ated a sense of anonymity, as in any bureaucracy. The individual person
is extinguished. As soon as the person appears in front of the judge, he
becomes a human being again. And this is actually what is so splendid
about the legal system, isn’t it? A real transformation takes place. For if
the person then says, “But I was just a bureaucrat,” the judge can say, “Hey,
listen, that’s not why you’re here. You’re standing here because you’re a
human being and because you did certain things.”24

Arendt’s words contextualise for us the emphasis on responsibility as constitu-

tive of true humanity in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: the responsibility
of Adam and Eve for their sin in the garden; the vicarious responsibility that
Christ assumes in bearing human sin; the Christian vocation to responsible
living in the world (mündigkeit).25
There is a direct line from the German post-War experience to the stand
taken by public theologians like John de Gruchy in South Africa. The fis-
sure in the public realm created by apartheid and the acceptance of this by
some elements within the Dutch Reformed Church created the context in
which the Kairos Document (1985), another significant text in public theol-
ogy, from a predominantly black perspective, was written.26 In the context
of apartheid, the authors took a public stand against ‘the justice of reform’,
because they saw it as ‘a justice that is determined by the oppressor, by the
white minority’. Their contention was that ‘true justice, God’s justice, demands
a radical change of structure’. Without the breaking down of the oppressive
social and political structures of apartheid there could be no ‘true justice’. With

24  H. Arendt, The Last Interview and other Conversations (Brooklyn NY and London: Melville
House Publishing, 2013), p. 59.
25  For further discussion of ‘Bonhoeffer and responsible action’, see N. Sagovsky, Christian
Tradition and the Practice of Justice (London: SCM, 2008), pp. 200–02.
26  The Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986). The
debt to Liberation Theology, with its challenge to the unjust structures of Latin America,
is very clear. Another significant debt is that to the indigenous African understanding of
ubuntu: ‘social solidarity’ or ‘interdependence’, which embraces all.
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 265

the ending of the apartheid regime, the work of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, over which Archbishop Desmond Tutu presided, was premised
on the conviction that only by facing the truth of what individuals had done
could there be reconciliation both individually and corporately. When individ-
uals took responsibility for their misdeeds, the process of healing could begin.
The challenge in Germany and South Africa was to construct socially just
regimes after the social devastation inflicted by repressive, racist regimes. The
post-War experience in the UK was very different. During the War, William
Beveridge, a distinguished civil servant and friend of both William Temple and
R.H. Tawney, worked on his proposals for Social Insurance and Allied Services
to combat ‘Want’ (‘The Beveridge Report’, 1942). He described his programme
as an attack on ‘five giant evils’ which threatened human flourishing in post-
War society: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.27 The way was
paved for him theologically by William Temple’s little classic, Christianity
and Social Order (1942).28 Temple was clear that ‘there is no such thing as a
Christian social ideal, to which we should conform our actual society as closely
as possible’29 but he was prepared to sketch what he called ‘primary Christian
social principles’, concerning the relation of God and Man (sic), and ‘deriva-
tive Christian social principles’: freedom, social fellowship (‘Man is naturally
and incurably social’) and service. Temple’s primary Christian social principles
indicate why Christian individuals and Christian churches should work for
social programmes characterised by freedom, fellowship and service. To this
end, he sets out six objectives for government, summed up in the conviction
that ‘the aim of the Christian social order is the fullest possible development of
individual personality in the widest and deepest possible fellowship.’30 It was
Temple who coined the phrase ‘welfare state’ and Beveridge who spelt out in
concrete policy proposals for social security, a national health service, educa-
tion, housing and employment, what this could mean.
The Christian society envisaged by Temple and many of his contempo-
raries was never fully realised, but the Christian-inspired vision for social jus-
tice within a welfare state was realised after the War. Beveridge hoped that

27  Cmnd 6404, Social Insurance and Allied Services; Report by Sir William Beveridge (London:
HMSO, 1942), p. 170. Two years later, Beveridge produced Full Employment in a Free
Society (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1944), containing his proposals for combating
‘Idleness’.
28  W. Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London: Penguin Books, 1942). Quotations are
from the 1976 edition (London: Shepheard-Walwyn and SPCK).
29  Ibid., p. 61.
30  Ibid., p. 97.
266 Sagovsky

access to justice supported by adequate legal aid would also be assured and,
in a further report on Voluntary Action (1948),31 he developed his thinking on
what individuals might contribute to the flourishing of the welfare state. It
was the erosion of the welfare state that led to the report by the Archbishop
of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City (1985).32
The fact that it was addressed to Church and Nation makes it a significant text
in public theology. It discusses first the theological basis for an intervention
of this sort (which proved highly controversial), then it addresses the needs of
the Church if it is to serve the communities of urban priority areas, before fol-
lowing Beveridge’s agenda and providing a detailed critique of urban policy
in the areas of poverty and unemployment, housing, health, social services,
education, order and law. One specific outcome was the Church Urban Fund,33
which now focuses on empowering local churches to combat the poverty which
continues to be endemic in both urban and rural areas within the UK.
The Church of England, as an established church, has modelled a public
theology which supports incremental change in the service of social justice,
working within the democratic structures of the British state.34 This is very dif-
ferent from the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, which has no such social
locus.35 Early texts like Rerum Novarum, The Condition of Labour (1891) and
Quadragesimo Anno (1931) consist of theologically grounded social comment,
addressed to the faithful to encourage them in their public witness, but with
John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), there comes a change: this is addressed not
only to church dignitaries, as well as ‘the clergy and faithful of the whole world’,
but also to ‘all men of good will.’ From this point on, authoritative documents
of Catholic social teaching have been in part addressed to a public that stands

31  W. Beveridge, Voluntary Action, A Report on Methods of Social Advance (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1948).
32  Faith in the City, A Call for Action by Church and Nation, The Report of the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas (London: Church House Publishing,
1985).
33  https://www.cuf.org.uk/home.
34  For a recent study, see M. Brown ed., Anglican Social Theology, Renewing the Vision Today
(London: Church House Publishing, 2014).
35  An invaluable compendium, which gives full English texts of all the official documents
mentioned here, with the exception of Laudato si’ (2015), is David J. O’Brien and Thomas
A Shannon eds, Catholic Social Thought, The Documentary Heritage, expanded edition
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2010). It also contains the text of the US Catholic
Bishops’ Pastoral Letters on Racism (1979), The Challenge of Peace (1983) and Economic
Justice for All (1986). These are addressed to Catholics but, in their use of ‘public reason’
may be seen as important texts in public theology.
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 267

outside the Church. Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World, one of the last documents to be issued by the Second
Vatican Council, begins:

This Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the
mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not
only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ,
but to the whole of humanity. For the Council yearns to explain to every-
one how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the
world of today. (2)

It concludes with an appeal for dialogue:

We also turn our thoughts to all who acknowledge God, and who pre-
serve in their traditions precious elements of religion and humanity. We
want frank conversation to compel us all to receive the inspirations of
the Spirit faithfully and to measure up to them energetically. For our part,
the desire for such dialogue . . . excludes no one . . . we can and we should
work together without violence and deceit in order to build up the world
in genuine peace. (92)

This set the tone for a series of documents, addressed both to the Church and
to all those in the public realm, on Social Concern (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,
1987), on Integral Development in Charity and Truth (Caritas in Veritate, 2009,
which discusses the proper role of the state and the market), and on Care for
the Environment (Laudato si’, 2015).36 In the last, Pope Francis says, ‘I wish
to address every person living on the planet’ (3), going on to suggest five key
areas for dialogue. Catholic Social Teaching is the most powerful instrument
of public theology today. Its key themes are human dignity, the common
good, subsidiarity,37 and dialogue, together with a specific concern for the

36  Francis, Laudato si’, On Care for Our Common Home (London: Incorporated Catholic Truth
Society, 2015).
37  ‘Subsidiarity’ is a theological term derived from the Latin, subsidium, meaning ‘help’ or
‘support’. Central authorities are seen to exist in ‘support’ of local authorities: decisions
should be taken as much as possible at the local level. Where decisions cannot effectively
be taken at the local level because they have wider implications and applicability, they
are remitted to a ‘higher’ authority with the appropriate wider responsibility. Decision-
making is thus, as far as possible, sustained at the local level.
268 Sagovsky

poor—themes about which all Christians, together with many others commit-
ted to social justice, can unite.38
All of the key texts in twentieth century public theology call for public dis-
cussion and debate. No contemporary thinker has done more to set the scene
for such debate than Jürgen Habermas. His Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere39 traces the emergence of ‘public opinion’ in the eighteenth
century, pointing forward to the importance of public opinion for any public
theology today. Surprisingly, Habermas does not discuss the manipulation of
public opinion under the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, but,
with the rapid worldwide spread of social media the question of the forma-
tion of public opinion through free access to unbiased information has prob-
ably become the most important challenge for public theologies committed to
social justice. The approaches of Rawls (‘deliberative democracy’), Habermas
(‘communicative action’), and Catholic Social Teaching (‘see, judge, act’), all
rely on there being open access to truthful information, and open discussion
by an educated public of that information according to the rules of ‘public rea-
son’. The marketization of the media and of much scientific research make this
an increasingly challenging ideal. In his fine book, The Price of Truth, Marcel
Hénaff talks of the creation of a ‘space of simple encounter and recreation, a
sort of agora for ordinary folk’ where ‘the threads of a frayed social fabric are
rewoven’.40
It is the task of a public theology committed, for theological reasons, to social
justice to articulate the truth of Christ in what, at least in the western world,
has become a predominantly secular public sphere. This task, as I have tried to
show, demands strenuous, self-critical, intellectual and political engagement
in the public sphere in the service of the gospel. The global contexts for this
work may be continually changing but the inspiration, the task and the com-
mitment to social justice of contemporary public theology echoes precisely
the public, missionary task as seen by Paul: ‘For the weapons of our warfare
are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We

38  See, Nicholas Sagovsky and Peter McGrail, Together for the Common Good: Towards a
National Conversation (London: SCM, 2015).
39  J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1989
[first published in Germany in 1962]). Charles Taylor stresses the ‘radical secularity’ of the
public sphere as identified by Habermas at this early stage of his work in A Secular Age
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 2007), p. 192.
40  Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth, Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 404.
Public Theology, Public Sphere and Struggle for Social Justice 269

destroy arguments (logismous) and every proud obstacle raised up against the
knowledge of God.’ (2 Cor. 10:4–5, NRSV).

Bibliography

Arendt, H. The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958).

Arendt, H. The Last Interview and other Conversations (Brooklyn NY and London:
Melville House Publishing, 2013).
Augustine, De Re Publica (translated by C.W. Keyes, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge,
Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1928).
Beveridge, W. Voluntary Action, A Report on Methods of Social Advance (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1948).
Beveridge, W. Full Employment in a Free Society (London: George, Allen and Unwin,
1944).
Beveridge, W. Social Insurance and Allied Services; Report by Sir William Beveridge
(London: HMSO, 1942).
Brown, M. ed., Anglican Social Theology, Renewing the Vision Today (London: Church
House Publishing, 2014).
du Plessis, Paul, ed., Borkowski’s Textbook on Roman Law, fourth edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
Faith in the City, A Call for Action by Church and Nation, The Report of the Archbishop
of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas (London: Church House
Publishing, 1985).
Francis, Laudato si’, On Care for Our Common Home (London: Incorporated Catholic
Truth Society, 2015).
Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity,
1989 [1962]).
Hénaff, M. The Price of Truth, Gift, Money, and Philosophy (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2010).
Herrin, J. Byzantium, The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London: Penguin Books,
2007).
Hunt, L. Inventing Human Rights, A History (New York and London: Norton, 2007).
Jaspers, K. The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial Press, 1947).
Kaplan, B.J. Divided by Faith, Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 2007).
Lane, M. Greek and Roman Political Ideas (London: Penguin, 2014).
Mahoney, J. The Making of Moral Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
Markus, R.A. Saeculum, History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
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Moltmann, J. ‘Forgiveness and Politics, Forty Years after the Stuttgart Confession’ in
W. Krusche, Guilt and Forgiveness, the Basis of Christian Peace Negotiations,
published for the Forgiveness and Politics Study Project (London: New World
Publishing, 1987).
O’Brien, D.J. and Thomas A Shannon, eds, Catholic Social Thought, The Documentary
Heritage, expanded edition (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2010).
Plato, The Republic of Plato, translated by Francis M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1941).
Pogge, T. John Rawls, His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Rawls, J. Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Rawls, J. The Law of Peoples with ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited ’ (Cambridge, Mass.
and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Runciman, S. The Byzantine Theocracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Sagovsky, N. and P. McGrail, Together for the Common Good: Towards a National
Conversation (London: SCM, 2015).
Sagovsky, N. Christian Tradition and the Practice of Justice (London: SCM, 2008).
Taylor, C. A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, 2007).
Temple, W. Christianity and Social Order (London: Shepheard-Walwyn and SPCK, 1976
[1942]).
The Kairos Document, Challenge to the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986).
 CHAPTER 12

Forced Labor and the Movement to End

Human Trafficking

Letitia M. Campbell and Yvonne C. Zimmerman

Introduction

In the last two decades, human trafficking has gained prominence as a social
justice and human rights issue of great urgency. While religious communities
have been prominent players in the movement to end human trafficking, con-
cern about the issue is widespread. Anti-trafficking efforts often bring together
activists and policy-makers who represent a wide range of political, ideologi-
cal, and theological positions but find consensus on this point: trafficking
must end. Yet despite focused efforts by national and governmental organiza-
tions, the proliferation of anti-trafficking NGOs and widespread media atten-
tion, the trafficking of human beings continues, apparently unabated. Estimates
of the number of trafficked people around the world range from 12.3 million
people to a figure more than double that, 27 million people.1
Most depictions of human trafficking, especially in the U.S., focus on sex-
ual trafficking. We are bombarded with the idea that human trafficking is
mostly the commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.2 For many
Americans, the term ‘human trafficking’ is more likely to call up the image of a
young woman forced into prostitution by a pimp in an inner city, or a brothel
in Thailand, than a meat-packing plant in the American mid-west or migrant
laborers picking tomatoes in the fields of an agricultural zone—let alone

1  International Labor Organization, A Global Alliance Against forced Labor: Global report under
the follow up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles of Rights at Work (Geneva:
International Labor Organization, 2005), pp. 12–13; Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New
Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
2  The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that of the 12.3 million persons who
are enslaved worldwide, just 1.39 million individuals (about 11 percent of all trafficking vic-
tims) are trafficked into the commercial sex industry. International Labor Organization,
A Global Alliance Against forced Labor, pp. 12–13. For a fuller explication of the anti-traffick-
ing movement’s dominant rhetorical and conceptual framework, see Letitia M. Campbell
and Yvonne C. Zimmerman, ‘Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism: Progressive
Christianity and Social Critique’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 34:1 (2014), 145–172.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_014

272 Campbell and Zimmerman

workers on the production lines of cell phone factories. The impression that
human trafficking refers to the commercial sexual exploitation of women and
children is one that has been carefully cultivated and widely circulated, despite
the fact that legal definitions of trafficking are much broader. In the popular
political discourse, concerns about human trafficking often reflect concerns
not about forced labor per se, but about forced sexual labor specifically.
There can be no doubt that images, stories, and statistics about human traf-
ficking are alarming. This makes it tempting to leap immediately into action.
What can we do? Where do we begin? Following H. Richard Niebuhr, how-
ever, we argue that a public theology in response to human trafficking must
begin with a different question. In The Responsible Self, Niebuhr presents
moral decision-making as a dialogue in which the question ‘What should do
I do?’ cannot be answered without first responding to the question, ‘What is
going on?’3 Carefully exploring ‘what is going on’ in relation to human trafficking
is essential, even before any particular course of action is proposed or solutions
are recommended. The ways in which trafficking is framed and described—
the words used, the images invoked, the stories told or implied—shape how
we understand the problem. And how the problem is understood—what
trafficking is, why it happens, and how it violates our moral commitments to
one another—will in turn shape the interventions that we devise and support
in response.
One of the first tasks of public theology is to examine the moral commit-
ments and definitions that frame our understanding of particular social issues
in order to make more explicit the moral and theological assumptions at work
in public conversation and debate.4 Given our concern that the popular politi-
cal discourse on human trafficking tends to treat trafficking as if it is only, or
most urgently, a problem of sold sex, we have chosen to focus the following
analysis on this common perception. By exploring this popular understanding
of trafficking, and its impact on both public policy and marginalized and vul-
nerable populations, we aim to focus attention on the moral and theological
assumptions at work in a much wider range of anti-trafficking advocacy. Our
work is grounded in a conception of justice described by the work of Christian
feminist social ethicist Beverly Harrison: ‘a theological vision of a world where

3  H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 1963, 1999), p. 60.
4  Traci C. West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2006), p. xiv; Ruthellen Josselson, ‘The Hermeneutics of Faith and
the Hermeneutics of Suspicion’, Narrative Inquiry, 14:1 (2004), 1–28 at 3.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 273

there are no excluded ones.’5 From this perspective, our concern about under-
standing human trafficking as ‘sold sex’ is that this framing reduces human
trafficking to sex-trafficking and, in the process, downplays situations of forced
and exploited labor—situations that sometimes involve sexual abuse and
exploitation, as well—and simultaneously reinforces a problematic conflation
of sexual purity and virtue. The radical inclusivity of Harrison’s theological
vision inspires a framework for understanding that learns from a wide range
of voices, stories, and experiences of forced and exploited labor, and thus is
accountable to a broad range of communities.
With this in mind, we begin by defining human trafficking. In the following
section, we trace the history of Christian engagement with this issue. We then
turn to some of the key theologians whose work informs our perspective and
method. In the final section, we sketch a methodology for engaging human
trafficking that centers the issue of forced labor, as well as the dignity and
contributions of those who have experienced trafficking. Our methodology is
guided by a set of religious values that resonate with the theological vision
of ‘no excluded ones’ that grounds our work. Sound public theology on the
issue of human trafficking is that which makes more subject positions more
humane and survivable than they currently are.6

Human Trafficking Defined

At both the national and international levels, human trafficking refers to the
wide variety of processes by which individuals lose control over their lives so
that they are forced to work for nothing or next to nothing and are unable to
leave a situation without fear of violence.7 International law defines human
trafficking as

5  Beverly Wildung Harrison, ‘The Fate of the Middle “Class” in Late Capitalism’ in Elizabeth M.
Bounds, Pamela K. Brubaker, Jane E. Hicks, Marilyn J. Legge, Rebecca Todd Peters and Traci
C. West, eds, Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2004), pp. 200–214 at p. 202.
6  Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of
Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press), p. 128.
7  Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), pp. 11–12; Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United
States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 6. See also, Kamala Kempadoo, ‘From
Moral Panic to Global Justice’ in Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera and Bandana Pattanaik,
eds, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and
Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), pp. vii–xxxiv at p. viii.
274 Campbell and Zimmerman

the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of per-

sons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of
abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or a position
of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments of benefits to
achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for
the purpose of exploitation.8

This definition is echoed, with only minor variation, in scores of national laws
that make trafficking illegal in the eyes every nation in the world. While human
trafficking is a term for the modern problem of forced labor, the lack of control
that characterizes trafficking situations often has repercussions that extend
beyond a person’s working conditions, touching their entire life.
Despite this impressive legal consensus, trafficking remains widespread
because it reflects broader dynamics in our global political and economic sys-
tem. Anthropologist Denise Brennan argues that abuses surrounding labor
and migration are the twin pillars that undergird trafficking into forced labor.
‘The desire, and sometimes desperation, to migrate for work and the kinds
of jobs available for workers in poorly regulated or unregulated labor sectors
produce a perfect storm of worker exploitation—a global regime of worker
exploitation.’9 As Brennan notes, trafficking is the most extreme and morally
alarming of a much broader range of troubling conditions faced by workers in
the global economy:

A range of exploitation thrives without legal protections for all work-

ers regardless of their immigration status. When workers fear reporting
exploitation, employers can exploit with impunity. Widespread migration
labor abuse—including trafficking—is the result of robust demand for
low-wage workers, the absence of federal immigration reform, ineffective
labor laws, and migrants’ fears of detection, detention, and deportation.10

8  United Nations, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially
Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational
Organized Crime (2000), Article 3. Many countries have passed anti-trafficking laws as a
way to implement and enforce international law at the national level. In the U.S., human
trafficking refers specifically to the legal category created by the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA). Brennan, Life Interrupted, p. 9.
9  Brennan, Life Interrupted, p. 7.
10  Ibid., p. 5.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 275

Human trafficking, then, is a predictable consequence of widespread poverty,

systemic injustice, and the brutal efficiency of global capitalism.
As we have noted above, the association of trafficking with sexual exploi-
tation is widespread in both mainstream and religious media and among
anti-trafficking advocates. Women who experience trafficking report sexual
violence and exploitation at alarming rates, whether or not they are trafficked
primarily for sexual work or other purposes. Yet approaches that treat traffick-
ing as a primarily sexual phenomenon fail to understand the pervasive issues of
economic exploitation that are its driving forces. Moreover, these approaches
tend to wrongly assume that everyone who sells or trades sex has lost control
over their lives, a point to which we return below.

Historical Engagement

The anti-trafficking movement is often described as a ‘movement to end mod-

ern slavery.’ This turn of phrase evokes powerful images of the institution of
chattel slavery and situates contemporary anti-trafficking activists as heirs of
the celebrated abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.11 This
connection underscores the importance of evangelical Christianity in both
movements and has the potential to illuminate the centrality of slavery and
forced labor in the development of global capitalism historically. At the same
time, characterizing contemporary trafficking by way of an analogy to chattel
slavery obscures as much as it reveals. In important ways, the legal, political
and economic contexts in which human trafficking flourishes today are dif-
ferent from that of the institutions of the slave trade and chattel slavery that
nineteenth century abolitionists fought to end. Slavery is not legal in any coun-
try in the world today. Moreover, as we have seen, trafficking reflects a particu-
larly egregious form of a much more widespread pattern of exploitative labor
arrangements. Social analysis by way of historical analogy risks oversimplify-
ing these broader contextual factors.12

11  For example, see National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, ‘Modern Abolition’
<http://freedomcenter.org/enabling-freedom/modernabolition> [accessed 16 July 2015];
Michael G. O’Callaghan, ‘The Health Care Professional as a Modern Abolitionist’, The
Permanente Journal 16:2 (2012), 67–69 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC
3383168/> [accessed 16 July 2015]; Eric Marrapodi, ‘The New Christian Abolition Move­
ment’, CNN Belief Blog (12 February 2012) <http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/05/
the-new-christian-abolition-movement/> [accessed 16 July 2015].
12  Brennan, Life Interrupted, pp. 7–8.
276 Campbell and Zimmerman

In recent decades, evangelical Christian activism has shaped both U.S. anti-
trafficking policy and the anti-trafficking movement as a whole. In the 1990s,
evangelical Christians began to raise concerns about religious persecution
globally. The coalition they built around this issue was instrumental in pas-
sage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which made religious
freedom an official priority of U.S. foreign policy.13 Even before the act became
law, the coalition that advanced this legislation had identified human traf-
ficking, and specifically the sexual trafficking of young women, as a ‘logical
follow-up’ to the cause of religious freedom.14 So powerfully did the discourse
and imagery of the religious freedom movement frame their advocacy on this
new issue that human trafficking was treated as a religious issue.15 Evangelicals
in the religious freedom movement imagined ‘the paradigmatic Christian’ of
the 21st century as a ‘poor, brown, third-world’ woman, and the quintessential
victim of trafficking was portrayed in similar terms.16 Both religious freedom
and freedom from trafficking were imagined as women’s issues, and were con-
sistently framed for the public in ways that evoked the threat of sexual abuse
and exploitation.17
This understanding of trafficking as a religious and a gender issue, and the
corresponding focus on sexual exploitation, was an innovation. Prior to this
point, a handful of mostly secular NGOs worked on human trafficking, but
they tended to focus broadly on labor trafficking and the structural precon­
ditions of labor exploitation, not exclusively on sex trafficking.18 As U.S. anti-
trafficking law was debated in the late 1990s, some U.S. lawmakers pushed for a

13  International Religious Freedom Act 1998, 22 USC 6401 § b(1).

14  Allen D. Hertzke, Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 325; and Yvonne C. Zimmerman, Other
Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking: (NY: OUP, 2012), p. 47. For our
fuller analysis, see Campbell and Zimmerman, ‘Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking
Activism’, 148–149.
15  Campbell and Zimmerman, ‘Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism’, 149.
16  Michael Horowitz, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence Culture’, Christianity Today
(September 2005), 71–78 at 75. See also Zimmerman, Other Dreams of Freedom; Campbell
and Zimmerman, ‘Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism’, 149.
17  For a fuller discussion of the relationship between the religious freedom movement and
antitrafficking movement, see Zimmerman, Other Dreams of Freedom; and Campbell and
Zimmerman, ‘Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism’.
18  Elizabeth Bernstein, ‘Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics
of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns’, Signs, 36 (2010)
45–71, at 49; Elizabeth Bernstein and Janet R. Jakobsen, ‘Sex, Secularism, and Religious
Influence in US Politics’, Third World Quarterly, 31:6 (2010), 1023–1039 at 1030.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 277

definition of human trafficking informed by this earlier, broader understand-

ing of human trafficking, incorporating issues of labor exploitation alongside
concerns about sexual trafficking. Others wanted to define human traffick-
ing as sex trafficking in order ‘to categorically distinguish sex trafficking from
other, nonsexual forms of exploitation.’ In particular, they wanted to avoid
confusing ‘low-wage sweatshop issues’ with the issue of human trafficking,
which, in their view, concerned the sexual exploitation of women and girls,
not exploited labor more generally.19
The United States’ flagship anti-trafficking legislation, the 2000 Trafficking
Victims Protection Act (TVPA), defines any labor or services induced by fraud,
force, or coercion as human trafficking (§103(8)), and states ‘trafficking in
persons is not limited to the sex industry’ (§102 b(3)). Nevertheless, a special
concern about sex trafficking is clearly evident in the statute, and implemen-
tation of the TVPA has tended to focus disproportionate resources on sexual
trafficking.20 According to sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein and religious studies
scholar Janet Jakobsen,

Although the US Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act (TVPA) officially

defines the crime of human trafficking to include forced labour as well as
forced sex, and the legislation is broad enough that it could be deployed
to combat the widespread and egregious labour violations that are rou-
tinely committed by companies such as Verizon, Walmart and Tyson
Foods, in terms of current US enforcement priorities, media attention
and NGO practice, the forced prostitution of women and girls constitutes
the paradigmatic instance of what ‘trafficking’ is assumed to be.21

While the TVPA codified a relatively wide definition of human trafficking as

exploited labor, images of ‘sold and abducted sexual victims’ and ‘women and

19  Hertzke, Freeing God’s Children, p. 324. See also, Beatrix Siman Zakhari, ‘Legal Cases
Prosecuted Under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000,’ in Sally
Stoecker and Louise Shelley, eds, Human Traffic and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and
American Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 125–149; and
Debbie Nathan, ‘Oversexed’, The Nation (August 29, 2005), 27–31.
20  Victims of Violence and Trafficking Protection Act of 2000. Public Law 106–386, 106th
Congr. (October 28, 2000). Sex-trafficking is the first type of human trafficking specified
in the TVPA, and the only type whose basic characteristics are described in detail.
Moreover, the TVPA also identifies the sex industry as the primary culprit in the prolifera-
tion of human trafficking.
21  Bernstein and Jakobsen, ‘Sex, Secularism, and Religious Influence in US Politics’, 1031.
278 Campbell and Zimmerman

children trafficked into lives of sexual bondage’ persist as the primary images
defining human trafficking.22
The consequences of this focus on sexual trafficking are important to
observe. This approach has made opposition to prostitution a central issue
for an ‘ever-spiraling array of faith-based and secular activist agendas, human
rights initiatives and legal instruments’ that claim to fight human trafficking.23
Yet claims that prostitution is slavery and that commercial sexual exchanges
are inherently exploitative fly in the face of the actual working conditions of
most sex-workers. Bernstein and Jakobsen explain:

Although it would be foolish to deny that situations of force and coercion

can and do occur in sex-work (as they do in other informal and unregu-
lated labour sectors) and are no doubt exacerbated by the compounded
inequalities of race, class, gender and nation, reputable accounts by sex-
worker activists as well as by field researchers, including those based in
Third World, suggest that the scenarios of overt abduction, treachery
and coercion that abolitionists depict are the exception rather than the
norm.24

This distance between the anti-trafficking movement’s rhetoric about sex work
and the conditions under which most people who sell sex live and labor chal-
lenge the dominant understanding of ‘what is going on’ in situations that are
often subsumed under the umbrella term ‘human trafficking’.
In addition to this, some of the most popular anti-trafficking policies and
approaches inspired by this focus on sexual trafficking have minimal posi-
tive, and sometimes even harmful, effects on the very people they intend to
serve. In a recent study of minors working in the sex trade, only two percent
of the young people interviewed said that they would ever consider going to
an anti-trafficking service organization for assistance in leaving sex work or
for help if they were in trouble.25 According to the authors, the anti-trafficking

22  Ibid; Campbell and Zimmerman, ‘Christian Ethics and Human Trafficking Activism’, 148.
23  Bernstein and Jakobsen, ‘Sex, Secularism and Religious Influence in US Politics’, p. 1031.
24  Ibid.
25  Anthony Marcus, Amber Horning, Ric Curtis, Jo Sanson and Efram Thompson, ‘Conflict
and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps: A Closer Look at Domestic Minor Sex
Trafficking’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 653
(May 2014), 225–246 at 231. This U.S. Department of Justice-funded study that took place
in New York City in 2008 is the largest in situ data set on minors working in the sex trade
ever collected in the United States.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 279

movement has created ‘an environment in which many young people in trou-
ble are unwilling to access the resources necessary to gain control over their
lives and make informed choices about leaving sex work.’26 Despite a focus
on the commercial sexual exploitation of women and children, it is not
clear that the approaches championed by the anti-trafficking movement are
effectively addressing the needs of those who are most vulnerable to sexual
exploitation. This is at least in part because the mainstream anti-trafficking
movement fails to comprehend that overt coercion by another party (a pimp
or a trafficker, for instance) is not the only reason people sell sex. As Lia Claire
Scholl explains, ‘The number one motivator for individuals to get into sex work
is money. The lack of money, whether real or perceived is the root cause of sex
work in all shapes and forms.’27 The unfair distribution of wealth and resources
further compounds issues of access to money. Failing to understand the com-
plex reasons people might sell sex, the anti-trafficking movement struggles to
provide the kinds of resources and social supports that generate viable alterna-
tives for people who sell sex. Opportunities for alternative livelihoods, includ-
ing jobs that pay living wages, therefore must be central to all interventions in
the sex industry that claim to help and empower people who sell sex.28
Similarly, the anti-trafficking movement tends to treat trafficking as an aber-
ration in the normal patterns of labor within the global economy, rather than
a regular feature internal to the system. Despite efforts to distinguish human
trafficking from ‘low-wage sweatshop issues’, Brennan contends that turn-of-
the-century sweatshops are actually a more fitting historical reference than the
institution of chattel slavery for understanding forced labor today. ‘Contrary
to sensationalist claims that slavery is all around us, a more mundane and
politically thorny reality is that exploited migrant labor undergirds parts of the
U.S. economy’—and, we might add, the global economy.29 The scale of the

26  Ibid., 242–3.

27  Lia Claire Scholl, I Heart Sex Workers: A Christian Response to People in the Sex Trade
(St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2012), pp. 28–29.
28  Ibid., p. 87.
29  Brennan, Life Interrupted, p. 9. On migrant labor in the U.S., see Seth M. Holmes, Fresh
Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2013); John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the
Dark Side of the New Global Economy (NY: Random House, 2008). On the integral role
of the informal economy to late capitalism see Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell
Hochschild, Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, eds.
(NY: Metropolitan Books, 2003); Mark B. Padilla et al., eds, Love and Globalization:
Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World (Nashville: Vanderbilt Press,
2007); Rhacel Parreñas and Eileen Boris, eds, Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies
280 Campbell and Zimmerman

informal sector has expanded dramatically in both developing and developed

economies over the last few decades, as more elements of the economy escape
regulation by nation-states and their legal regimes. And the pervasive exploi-
tation of low-wage migrants in the current labor system is more similar to the
abuses that accompanied early 20th century sweatshops than to the legalized
institution of chattel slavery.
Shifting the framework so that we see human trafficking in relation to, and
indeed, as a product of, the routine working of global capitalism can help us to
remain attentive to issues of forced labor and economic exploitation. Wherever
people lose control of their lives and choices in situations that we call traffick-
ing, structural and interpersonal forces interact to create a situation of grave
injustice. Answering Niebuhr’s question—What is going on?—in relation to
these situations will require us to engage the wide range of issues that make
people vulnerable to the harms of trafficking. In the second half of this chap-
ter, we explore some of Christian theological resources that can help to center
these sorts of concerns in public conversations about human trafficking.

Theological Resources for Shifting the Frame

While opposition to slavery and forced labor are widely shared moral commit-
ments today, the Bible and the Christian tradition reflect deep ambivalence
about these practices. Slavery was a common social arrangement in the ancient
world, and the authors of the Bible generally accepted slavery as a legitimate
practice.30 In fact, as New Testament scholar Jennifer A. Glancy points out,
Jesus did not condemn the institution of slavery; nowhere permitted his fol-
lowers to flee slavery or seek liberation; and actually urged his follows to act as
slaves (Mk 10:44; Mt. 20:26–27; 23:11; Mk. 9:35; and Lk. 22:26).31 With very few

and the Politics of Care (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Robert Neuwirth,
Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy (NY: Random House, 2011).
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, 2nd edn.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
30  Sylvester A. Johnson, ‘The Bible, Slavery, and the Problem of Authority’, in Bernadette J.
Brooten, ed, Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacies (NY Palgrave
MacMillan, 2010), pp. 231–248 at p. 231.
31  Glancy, ‘Early Christianity, Slavery, Women’s Bodies’, in Brooten, ed, Beyond Slavery,
p. 145. On Christianity’s ambivalent attitude toward slavery, see Katie Geneva Cannon,
‘Christian Imperialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Journal of Feminist Studies in
Religion, 24 (2008), 127–134; Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2006); Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery as Moral Problem: In the Early Church and
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 281

exceptions, Christians in the early church did not consider slavery to be at odds
with the demands of the gospel.32 Bernadette Brooten writes in the introduc-
tion to Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ‘Slavery
had a profound impact on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinking and laws
about bodies, sex, and marriage, as well as property and ownership.’33
We must also explore the Christian theological inheritance around issues of
work and wealth, particularly as they came to be understood alongside the rise
of capitalism and industrialization. John Calvin, a key Reformation theologian
whose views stand behind the religious identity of many Protestants, empha-
sized the godly and virtuous nature of work. Social ethicist Emilie Townes
summarizes Calvin’s understanding of labor:

work gives meaning to life; hard work is necessary and one should give
work the best of one’s time; work contributes to the moral worth of the
individual and to the health of the social order; wealth is a major goal
in life; leisure is both earned by work and prepares one for it; success in
work results primarily from personal effort; and finally, the wealth that
one amasses from work is a sign of God’s favor.34

Sociologist Max Weber famously explored the impact of these religious ideas
on the development of capitalism in the U.S. in his classic text The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.35 Although the religious framework of
reformed Calvinist Protestantism no longer enjoys the same level of cultural
dominance it once did, many of these ideas are alive and well today. Hard work
is an American value, and it is presumed to be intrinsically good. Working
hard makes individuals into decent people, capable of mature and responsi-
ble citizenship. This is one reason that serious questions about the conditions
under which people labor, or the purposes for which people ought to work, are
seldom raised.

Today (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011); James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013).
32  Glancy, Slavery as a Moral Problem, pp. 51–100.
33  Bernadette J. Brooten, ‘Introduction’, in Bernadette J. Brooten, ed., Beyond Slavery:
Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacies (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 1–29
at p. 2.
34  Emilie M. Townes, ‘From Mammy to Welfare Queen: Images of Black Women in Public-
Policy Formation’, in Bernadette J. Brooten, ed., Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious
and Sexual Legacies (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 61–74 at p. 66.
35  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (NY: Scribner, 1930).
282 Campbell and Zimmerman

Feminist Christian ethicist Beverly Harrison raises critical questions about

work and economic life. She offers a critique of global capitalism, calling atten-
tion to its potential to destroy human community and the earth. The political
economy, she argues, shapes the details of daily life, our concrete sufferings,
and social relations, and yet, she adds (addressing U.S. Christians), ‘economics
is a mystified dimension of our lives.’36 In other words, although many people
feel acutely the rising tide of powerlessness in their personal lives caused by
the de-industrialization of the economy, the rise of corporate agri-business,
environmental degradation, and the erosion of the social safety net, they fail
to understand the dynamics of the political economy and how their personal
struggles are connected to larger forces that are reshaping the global economy
and the lives of everyone in the world.37 Lacking such an understanding, she
argues, renders us unable to act effectively for change. ‘Without a broad under-
standing of what’s happening,’ she writes, ‘it is difficult to resist policies that
purport to serve the interests . . . [of] all decent and hardworking people’, but
fail to do so.38
Harrison proposes a ‘socialist-feminist liberation hermeneutic’ that is
informed by concrete experiences of economic life and approaches the
present order with a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion.’ She explains

The aim is to illuminate the concrete suffering of those victimized by the

social orders we human beings have constructed. . . . Feminist-socialist
theological and ethical perspectives seek a complex, interstructural
account of human suffering and a praxis that understands human-
divine, human to human, and human-cosmic relationships holistically
and critically. . . . This theological vision is of a world where there are no
excluded ones.39

36  Beverly Wildung Harrison, ‘Theology, Economics and the Church’, in Elizabeth M. Bounds,
Pamela K. Brubaker, Jane E. Hicks, Marilyn J. Legge, Rebecca Todd Peters and Traci C.
West, eds, Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2004), pp. 172–184 at p. 173.
37  Ibid., p. 181.
38  Beverly Wildung Harrison, ‘Toward a Christian Feminist Liberation Hermeneutic For
Demystifying Class Reality in Local Congregations’ in Elizabeth M. Bounds, Pamela K.
Brubaker, Jane E. Hicks, Marilyn J. Legge, Rebecca Todd Peters and Traci C. West, eds,
Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004),
p. 203.
39  Harrison, ‘Fate of the Middle “Class” ’, p. 202.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 283

Harrison places the particularity of people’s real lives and struggles at the cen-
ter of ethical and theological reflection.40 Her work seeks to help people see
that the economic struggles of individuals and communities are not the result
of personal failure or blind fate, but part of larger global economic situation.
This makes them not victims of economic injustice, but fully conscious actors,
whose understanding of the economic system and ‘hope for dignity’ empowers
them to re-engage ‘a struggle for life’.41
Like Harrison, womanist ethicist Katie Cannon also rejects frameworks
that cast African Americans as victims of racism and economic exploitation.
In Black Womanist Ethics she focuses on Black women’s ethical agency dur-
ing slavery in order to refute dominant white models of theological ethics that
assume ‘that the doing of Christian ethics in the Black community was either
immoral or amoral.’42 She explores the traditions of moral reflection that have
flourished in African American communities despite oppressive conditions. In
particular, she explores the ways in which Black women drew on the realities
of their own lives to develop moral resources that helped them to survive the
brutalities of chattel slavery and the hardships of Jim Crow racism ‘on their
own terms . . . [and] with moral integrity’.43 Cannon insists that people exercise
moral agency and engage in constructive ethical activity even under the harsh-
est conditions of oppression.
Cannon’s analysis and critique of capitalism complements Harrison’s.
Despite the widespread belief that industry, frugality, and self-reliance are
both the touchstones of moral virtue and keys to economic success, she
points out that these ‘cherished ethical ideals’ have never been available to
African Americans. ‘Racism does not allow Black women and Black men
to labor habitually in beneficial work with the hope of . . . developing a stan-
dard of living . . . congruent with the American ideal.’44 Indeed, the Protestant
ethic’s formula for economic success works only for people who are already free
and enjoy a wide range of choices in their lives and for their futures. Failure to
succeed economically, moreover, is widely assumed to be a result of personal
moral failing, rather than a reflection of economic and political structures.
Cannon’s careful description of black women’s relationship to capitalism clar-
ifies why initiatives that attempt to solve the problem of economic exploitation

40  Harrison, ‘Toward a Christian Feminist Liberation Hermeneutic’ in Bounds et al. eds,
Justice in the Making, pp. 185–199 at p. 187.
41  Harrison, ‘Theology, Economics, and the Church’, p. 183.
42  Katie Geneva Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1988), p. 2.
43  Ibid.
44  Ibid.
284 Campbell and Zimmerman

by incorporating marginalized individuals into the capitalist system as wage

earners will ultimately disappoint: hard work does not guarantee wages that
are adequate to meeting basic needs. Brennan documents the lives of formerly
trafficked people living in the U.S., showing the complexity of the economic
challenges they face as they try to find an economic foothold in the insecure,
low-paying, and dead-end jobs to which they have access. The formal labor
market is often a site of economic instability and exploitation for marginalized
individuals, not the necessarily the solution to these problems.45 Sometimes
labor ennobles and enhances freedom, but often it exploits and dehumanizes.
Yet, as Cannon’s articulation of black womanist ethics shows, the margins
are not merely places of death and despair where pitiable victims wait to be
rescued. The margins are spaces where suffering, joy, struggle, aspiration, and
hope co-exist and lead to moral critiques and moral insights about the very
systems that exploit and abuse.46 A response to human trafficking that learns
from Cannon’s approach will be characterized by its refusal to see economic
success as a measure of moral integrity, and by attention to the strategies by
which people who experience trafficking find the strength and resources to
survive with moral integrity.47
Argentinian feminist liberation theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid similarly
emphasizes the imperative to begin theological reflection with the concrete
realities of the poor. In the opening pages of Indecent Theology, she describes
the women who sell lemons in the markets of her native Buenos Aires, crouch-
ing on the sidewalk, sometimes without underwear. Althaus-Reid argues that
we must learn to see the connection between the experiences of these women
and the ideas and institutions that powerfully shape society:

A materialist-based theology finds in [the images of lemon vendors] a

starting point from which ideology, theology, and sexuality can be rewrit-
ten from the margins of society, the church, and systematic theologies.
Our point of departure is the understanding that every theology implies
a conscious or unconscious sexual and political praxis.48

The ways conditions of economic restructuring and poverty affect the poor,
and in particular poor women, are central to Althaus-Reid’s theological method.

45  Brennan, Life Interrupted, p. 18.

46  See also West, Disruptive Christian Ethics.
47  Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, p. 2.
48  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Gender, Sex and
Politics (NY: Routledge, 2000), p. 4.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 285

The ways in which poor women cope with poverty, she argues, are often ‘inde-
cent.’ That is, in their daily struggles for life and dignity, they frequently make
decisions that challenge middle-class notions of sexual decency and respect-
ability. Because of this, poor women are often dismissed or devalued in relation
to society, branded ‘indecent,’ sexually deviant, or threatening.49 Yet simplis-
tic moralizing about the sexual virtue and respectability of the poor—these
‘lemon vendors without underwear’—in theological reflections on issues
of women and economic struggle falls short of the standards of ‘feminist
honesty.’50
In addition to these critical feminist contributions to conversations about
economic life and moral agency, there are a number of theological resources
that deal specifically with commercial sex; we mention two of these here. The
most well-known feminist theological text on prostitution, Casting Stones:
prostitution and liberation in Asia and the United States, was written by femi-
nist theologians Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Rita Nakashima Brock, and
published in 1996.51 Written prior to the emergence of the contemporary
anti-trafficking movement, the book uses the lens of liberation theology to
explore the cultural, historical, sociological, and religious roots of prostitution
throughout the world, focusing especially on exposing concealed ideologi-
cal connections between religion, patriarchy, and prostitution. On the whole,
the authors treat commercial sex as inherently exploitative, applying a lens
of victimization uniformly to all women’s experiences of sexual commerce.
Nonetheless, Brock and Thistlethwaite model a nuanced approach to under-
standing prostitution that takes economic, political, and social factors into
account, and they insist that liberative responses to the commercial sex indus-
try must recognize the humanity of people who sell sex. Both the sex industry
and theological discussions of sexuality have changed a great deal since this
book’s publication, but it remains an essential contribution to feminist theo-
logical reflections on prostitution and commercial sex.
In I Heart Sex Workers, Mennonite pastor Lia Claire Scholl argues that
Christian responses to the sex trade should help create better options for peo-
ple who sell sex, through education and employment opportunities, fighting
prejudice and stigma, and by listening to the hopes and needs of sex work-
ers themselves. Her discussion of the relationship between sex work and sex

49  Ibid., p. 5.
50  Ibid., p. 2.
51  Rita Nakashima Brock and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Casting Stones: Prostitution and
Liberation in Asia and the United States (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1996).
286 Campbell and Zimmerman

trafficking focuses on the need to address the fundamental economic issues

that make life precarious for the poor, and particularly poor women. Her
critique of Christian approaches to anti-trafficking is worth quoting at length:

I think the antitrafficking and profamily movements miss the real issues
that keep the sex industry expanding and keep interested parties from
impacting change. If they keep us distracted by horror stories of women
trapped by traffickers, then we won’t pay attention to the fact that women
still make less money than men. If they keep us distracted by statistics
about Internet porn, then we won’t wonder why women are still the pri-
mary caregivers of children. If they keep us distracted by stories of women
being pimped, we won’t notice that our corporations, focused on the
bottom line, are hiring easily replaceable automatons to keep from hav-
ing to specially train employees. We won’t notice that these same corpora-
tions are laying off women in this “recovering” economy. We won’t notice
that they are firing women who have young children. We won’t notice that
childcare prices keep women in cycles of poverty. We won’t notice the
gender discrimination happening right in front of our faces. And we
certainly won’t notice the injustice, abuse, poverty, and discrimination
against people of color and individuals who are members of the sexual
minority.52

For Brock and Thistlethwaite, and for Scholl, as for Althaus-Reid, Cannon, and
Harrison, an honest response to human trafficking requires recognizing that
the issues that people vulnerable to trafficking face are not issues of personal
morality that will disappear if the sex industry is abolished or sex workers ‘get a
real job’. The issues at stake are women’s issues, immigration issues, economic
issues—systemic issues of social justice.

Methodology: Values for a Public Theological Response to Human

Trafficking

How might we pursue public responses to human trafficking that take these
theological and theo-ethical reflections seriously? Insisting that all theology
is contextual, our analysis has focused on the dynamics of human trafficking
in the U.S.; yet we think these theoretical tools and methods can and should
be applied in other contexts as well. In what follows, we identify some key

52  Scholl, I Heart Sex Workers, p. 87.

Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 287

values that can guide in developing contextually based public theological

responses to human trafficking. We explore what it means to be committed to
the common good, mutuality and respect, and accountability, and then describe
some of the concrete implications of these values in relation to trafficking.

The Common Good

Christians have long considered a commitment to the common good one of
the pillars of moral reflection on social and political life. The concept is not
exclusively Christian, of course. Similar concepts—general welfare, com-
mon good, and public interest, among others—exist across a wide spectrum
of modern social and political thought. In the last century, however, the con-
cept of the common good has been developed most richly in Catholic social
thought, where it signals a commitment to the idea that human beings are fun-
damentally social animals and that establishing the necessary conditions for
human flourishing should be a central concern in a community’s arrangement
of social and political life. The common good reflects a vision of the collective
good, as distinct from the goods enjoyed by individuals, and focuses attention
on the structural and institutional character of social life.53
Emilie Townes defines the common good as ‘having the social structures on
which all depend work,’ so that everyone benefits.54 Townes envisions a work-
ing social structure to include health care that is accessible and affordable, a
just and legal political system, equitable educational systems, effective and
nondiscriminatory public safety, a healthy environment, and an effective and
humane social welfare system.55 We would add safe and affordable housing
and access to nourishing and healthy food; you can probably imagine other
features of a society organized around systems that ensure justice and flour-
ishing for all. It is not enough for social structures to work for people who are
white and middle class; who are straight and male; who earn college degrees
and carry a passport. Valuing the common good means shaping a society in
which no one is excluded from the conditions for flourishing.
It may go without saying that human trafficking has no place in such a soci-
ety. Indeed, transforming social structures and institutions so that they sup-
port the flourishing of all takes aim at some of the factors that make people
most vulnerable to the harms of trafficking in the first place: poverty, violence,

53  William A. Barbieri Jr., ‘Beyond the Nations: The Expansion of the Common Good in
Catholic Social Thought,’ The Review of Politics, 63:4 (2001), 723–754 at 728.
54  Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (NY: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2006), p. 137.
55  Ibid., p. 137.
288 Campbell and Zimmerman

and social exclusion. Poverty is the most significant reason that people pursue
the kind of risky work opportunities that make them most vulnerable to traf-
ficking. People experiencing poverty often experience other forms social exclu-
sion, as well, such as those rooted in racism, sexism, heterosexism, or religious
bias. Whether at the local, national, or global levels, it is the lack of justice
in our societies—unfair distribution of wealth and influence, unequal access
to legal protection, a socio-political situation of patterned exclusion—that
causes men, women, and children to become vulnerable to human trafficking,
whether for labor or sex, or for some combination of the two.
A focus on the common good highlights the importance of thinking about
human trafficking in relation to other social justice concerns: access to and
affordability of housing, food, transportation, medical care, good education,
living wages, and, public safety. Understood in this way, work to prevent human
trafficking is truly expansive: addressing systemic issues of poverty, eco‑
nomic injustice, hunger and food insecurity, homelessness, mass incarceration
and re-entry, addiction, education, immigration reform, the juvenile justice
and foster care systems, and much more. Whenever student groups, con-
cerned citizens, or faith communities feed hungry people; provide childcare to
low-income families; advocate for kids in foster care; support shelters and the
expansion of other services for queer, transgender and gender-nonconforming
youth who aren’t welcome or safe with their families of origin; write elected
officials in support of comprehensive immigration reform; support the civil
rights of sex workers; protest police violence and racial profiling; or mobilize
for the creation of affordable housing, such actions—whether or not they are
framed primarily as anti-trafficking activism—are the concrete shape that
anti-trafficking work takes when it is oriented by a commitment to the com-
mon good.
This vastly expands our understanding of ‘anti-trafficking’ efforts. The ‘Fight
for $15’ campaign in several U.S. cities that is demanding an increase in the
minimum wage to $15/hour is a trafficking-prevention strategy insofar as the
ability to earn a living wage lessens the economic vulnerability of unskilled,
low-wage workers.56 Likewise, petitioning the Columbus, OH-based corporate
headquarters of the fast food chain Wendy’s to join other companies (includ-
ing McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, and
Walmart) by signing onto the Fair Food Program, in which corporate buyers of

56  Noam Scheiber, ‘In Test for Unions and Politicians, a Nationwide Protest on Pay, New York
Times, April 15, 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/business/economy/in-test-for
-unions-and-politicians-a-nationwide-protest-on-pay.html> [accessed 30 July 2015]. See
also the ‘Fight for $15’ campaign website, <http://fightfor15.org> [accessed 30 July 2015].
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 289

Florida tomatoes agree to pay one additional cent per pound to support a wage
increase for farm workers, and to comply with a Code of Conduct that includes
zero tolerance for forced labor and sexual assault of workers, is also anti-
trafficking activism.57 These initiatives are part of the slow but crucial work of
building social and economic structures that work for everyone. They aim to
eliminate the conditions of poverty and labor exploitation that put people and
communities at risk for human trafficking.

Mutuality and Respect

Mutuality means that in pursuing social justice, we must ‘work with, not for
others.’ In A Feminist Ethic of Risk ethicist Sharon Welch argues that acting
alone on behalf of others can never bring about a more just and peaceful soci-
ety. ‘Too much power poisons virtue,’ she writes. However appealing and well-
intentioned, this sort of ‘decisive action is intrinsically immoral.’58 Drawing
insights from the writing of African-American novelist Paule Marshall, Welch
shows how this assumption of power shapes dominant, Euro-American tradi-
tions of ethical reflection:

[Marshall] names the seemingly innocuous assumptions of the power-

ful: that it is responsible to act for others, that one can be certain of one’s
moral intent and strategic and practical wisdom. These assumptions pre-
vent powerful groups from seeing the destructive consequences of their
well-intentioned projects.59

These assumptions thwart accountability. Because those who have social

power do not see or experience the concrete results of their work for social jus-
tice, they cannot take responsibility for (or even learn from) the consequences
of their actions. True justice cannot be created ‘for the poor by the rich,’ but
requires a mutuality that opens the eyes of the powerful and builds up the
power of those who have been oppressed.

57  Stephen Greenhouse, ‘In Florida Tomato Fields, a Penny Buys Progress,’ New York Times,
April 24, 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/business/in-florida-tomato-fields-a
-penny-buys-progress.html> [accessed 30 July 2015]. For more on the Campaign for
Fair Food and the Fair Food Program, see the website of the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers <http://ciw-online.org/campaign-for-fair-food/> and the website of the Fair
Foods Standards Council <http://fairfoodstandards.org> [both accessed 25 July 2015].
58  Sharon D. Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk, Rev. Edn. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press,
2000), pp. 15, 51.
59  Ibid., p. 51.
290 Campbell and Zimmerman

Mutuality is rooted in a fundamental respect for others. This notion of

respect is sometimes confused with sympathy, particularly for those who are
seen as harmed, in need of help, or as prospective beneficiaries of our actions;
but the two are not the same. Sympathy maintains social distance, and how-
ever unconsciously, defines the other person as a passive recipient of aid,
rather than an independent actor. Respect, on the other hand, acknowledges
‘the equality, dignity, and independence of others.’60 Theologically, explains
Lia Scholl, respect is rooted in perception of the imago dei—‘seeing God in the
other person. It is recognition that this person deserves all the rights and privi-
leges that come with being a child of God and created in the image of God.’61
While ideas such as mutuality and respect may seem unobjectionable, even
commonsense, in practice they challenge some of the most common features
of anti-trafficking advocacy. For instance, many public awareness campaigns
focused on trafficking appeal to the sympathy of the public by depicting
people who experience trafficking as helpless, pitiful, and in need of rescue.
While such campaigns are ‘effective’ in the sense that they attract a great deal
of attention (and sometimes money), commitments to mutuality and respect
should raise some concerns. Such depictions objectify people who have expe-
rienced trafficking, defining them as passive recipients of rescue, care, and
benevolence, rather than active participants in their own empowerment and
in the transformation of society. Moreover, such campaigns generally cast anti-
trafficking activists in the role of savior or moral hero, and summon others to
imagine themselves in that role, as well. While the relationship between ‘the
victim and the moral-hero-who-rescues-her’ may make an interesting news
story or a gripping movie, it is hardly one of mutuality. As Townes notes, ‘it is
far too easy to fall into a warped and inarticulate rhetoric of victimization that
does little to craft justice and truth.’62 The victim/savior scenario is morally
dangerous because it is premised on the inequality of pity rather than on the
equality of respect, and because it assumes that responsible action for social
justice is unilateral rather than fundamentally mutual.
A commitment to mutuality and respect also requires keeping the rights
and desires of people who have experienced trafficking at the center of all
responses to human trafficking. This will involve listening to their stories with
humility; speaking of them not simply as victims, but as people with rights,
dignity, and agency; and building partnerships, where possible, with survivors
of trafficking and communities who are vulnerable to trafficking’s harms. The

60  Ibid., p. 15.

61  Scholl, I Heart Sex Workers, p. 150.
62  Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, p. 53.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 291

kind of listening we aspire to requires more than listening to people who show
up in our churches or social service agencies, or those whose personal testi-
monies of escape from trafficking circulate most widely in the press. It means,
with humility and genuine openness, seeking out people whose stories may
challenge some of our most basic assumptions. This seeking may take us into
locations and communities that we find unfamiliar, even uncomfortable.
People who experience trafficking are extremely diverse, and they do not all
want or need the same things. While we are critical of conceptions of human
trafficking that conflate it with commercial sex, many people who sell sex do
not wish to do so. For them, sex work is violation and victimization. No one
should be forced, whether by an individual or by circumstance, to sell sex for
money or to trade it for food, shelter, transportation, or other basic necessities.
Both forced labor and forced sexual intimacy are wrong. Those who wish to
leave the sex industry should have the support they need to make that transi-
tion successfully. But not everyone who sells sex feels victimized or wishes to
stop, and we are committed to keeping these desires also in view. Since a cen-
tral part of what it means to experience trafficking is that another person or
persons makes choices for you, the centerpiece of all anti-trafficking initiatives
that aim to help people who have experienced trafficking must be the restora-
tion of choice-making prerogatives.63 Respect that is cultivated through gener-
ous listening requires the ability to accommodate diversity and complexity,
making space for the dreams and values of others to be in dialogue with our
ideas about what it means to live a flourishing life.

Accountability
An ‘ethic of accountability’ reflects both a deep sense of community and an
understanding that responsible action for justice is not an individual undertak-
ing, but ‘a communal work’.64 As Sharon Welch notes, accountability requires
both a willingness to ‘acknowledge the costs of our attempts to do good’ and a
commitment to using our power and resources ‘in concrete ways to implement

63  A unifying aspect of the phenomenon of human trafficking is that people who experience
trafficking are robbed of the opportunity to exercise agency. However, when a person
loses control of their life in a trafficking relationship, it does not mean that they lose
the capacity to make choices. Rather, they are deprived of the opportunity to make them.
Making choices is so crucial because this is how people exert power in their own lives;
how they exercise agency. Thus the choices that individuals who have experienced traf-
ficking make, including the choice to leave a trafficking relationship or situation, must be
their own.
64  Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk, p. 47, 75.
292 Campbell and Zimmerman

the demands of justice.’65 In particular, for people who have access to more
social power and whose lives are more saturated with privilege, accountability
requires taking seriously the perspectives of those who have less social power,
and learning from their struggles for survival, dignity, and social justice.
Despite our best efforts, we do not always accurately predict the outcomes
of even our most well-intended actions. Accountability therefore requires
humility, a willingness to acknowledge the limitations of our perspectives and
to revise our actions and strategies accordingly.66 In the context of the anti-
trafficking movement, this might mean raising questions about the ways in
which Christian theologies of sex, work, and family have been instrumental in
shaping harmful attitudes that contribute to the deep causes of human traf-
ficking. It might mean addressing ideas about male supremacy and women’s
agency; taking on taboos related to sexuality, homophobia, transphobia, and
domestic violence; or engaging the stories of prostitution and sexual violence
that come to us in scripture.
If accountability means using our power to implement the demands of
justice, then it will be necessary to raise questions about some popular anti-
trafficking strategies, such as efforts that aim to ‘end demand’ for commercial
sex and promise ‘zero tolerance for human trafficking’ by expanding polic-
ing. These initiatives are often intuitively appealing, but the effects that these
approaches have on the lives of people who sell sex are troubling. According to
some experts, targeting street-level prostitution in the name of fighting human
trafficking turns out to be more successful at criminalizing already marginal-
ized communities and punitively enforcing immigration policies than it is at
providing concrete benefits to trafficking victims.67 Instead, we must demand
accountability for the impact of law enforcement actions on the lives of the
most marginalized. When anti-trafficking efforts leave these individuals in pre-
dicaments of greater vulnerability—when, for example, transgender women
are profiled as sex workers simply on the basis of their appearance or because
they have condoms in their purses; or when sex workers are less safe, less

65  Ibid., p. 35.

66  Ibid., p. 34.
67  Elizabeth Bernstein, ‘Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The ‘Traffic in Women’ and
Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex and Rights’, Theoretical Sociology, 41 (2012), 233–259 at
253; ‘Transgressive Policing: Police Abuse of Communities of Color in Jackson Heights’,
(Make the Road New York, 2012) <http://www.maketheroad.org/pix_reports/MRNY_
Transgressive_Policing_Full_Report_10.23.12B.pdf> [accessed 20 July 2015]; ‘Walking
While Trans: Police Profiling and Abuse of LGBTQ Communities of color in Queens’
(Condom Monologues: March 15, 2013) <http://condommonologues.com/walking-while-
trans/> [accessed 19 January 2015]; Bernstein, ‘Militarized Humanitarianism’, 57.
Forced Labor And The Movement To End Human Trafficking 293

protected, and enjoy fewer civil rights because of policing—accountability

means speaking up and working with communities affected by these practices
to press for change.68
The moral value of accountability asks: What are the unintended con-
sequences of the anti-trafficking policies and approaches we endorse? How
can we respond to human trafficking in ways that do not deepen entrenched
dynamics of racism and class discrimination? To be sure, these questions will
not always be easy to ask. The conversations they generate will require humil-
ity, as well as the ability to imagine and the courage to try new ideas for solving
social problems. But these conversations are essential if we hope to develop
strategies for resisting human trafficking that do not deepen the stigma, vio-
lence, and vulnerability that people and communities vulnerable to trafficking
already must navigate. It is essential that we listen to what these groups say
about the kinds of things that will make their lives better, lend support for the
ways they are already organizing themselves to advocate for their needs, and
then advocate for policies that reflect these perspectives.

Conclusion

In a movement already so shaped by religious communities and assumptions,

public theologians have important roles to play in the many conversations
about human trafficking that are happening in legislatures and law enforce-
ment agencies, as well as civic associations, churches, and the media. We can
begin by seeking to understand trafficking complexly, identifying the theologi-
cal and ethical ideas already at work in particular national and local advocacy
and policy-making discussions and raising critical questions about the under-
standings of labor, economy, sexuality, and power that animate the anti-traf-
ficking agenda. We have focused on the U.S. context, and on how concerns
about commercial sex shape and overshadow problems of exploited labor.
However we believe that the questions that have guided our analysis can and
ought to guide analyses of trafficking and public theological responses to it in
contexts beyond the United States: What is going on? How is this issue shaped by
larger political, economic, and social dynamics? How does it relate to other social
justice movements and concerns? What theological and moral values are already
shaping public discussion of the issue? Only once we have asked these most basic
questions about human trafficking can we move on to questions about what do
to and how to act at particular times and in particular places. Further, when we

68  ‘Transgressive Policing’, 13.

294 Campbell and Zimmerman

do contemplate action, we must do so alongside individuals and communities

who are most vulnerable to the harms of trafficking, and in ways that consider
the common good in the broadest possible sense. Commitments to mutuality,
respect, and accountability will mean listening carefully to people and groups
who have less social power, taking their perspectives seriously, using our
power in concrete ways to implement the demands of justice, and remain-
ing open to learning and change. In these ways, our work to end forced labor
and human trafficking that takes many different forms in local contexts across
the world, and to address the broader set of social conditions that make these
harms a ubiquitous part of our social and economic life, participates in the
theological vision of a world where there are no excluded ones, building
relationships and movements that reflect this vision as we act together for
social transformation.

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 CHAPTER 13

‘I Met God, She’s Black’: Racial, Gender and Sexual

Equalities in Public Theology

Esther McIntosh

Introducing the Issues

At the outset, the very notion of ‘public theology’ is contentious when con-
sidering issues of race, gender and sexual equality and yet these issues are of
primary significance for Christian churches today. Despite the election of its
first black President, Barack Obama in 2008, racial justice is not a reality in
the United States of America; on the contrary, the number of black Americans
killed by police is a serious concern. While some white Christians have sup-
ported ‘Black Lives Matter Sunday’,1 polls conducted by the Pew Research
Center, following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in
2014, reveal that eighty per cent of blacks believe that the grand jury made
the wrong decision in not charging the police officer, Darren Wilson, in the
death of Brown, compared with only twenty-three per cent of whites; likewise,
only sixteen per cent of whites believe race was a ‘major factor’ in the grand
jury’s decision-making, compared with sixty-four per cent of blacks.2 Even
more troubling than the discrepancies in the perception of racial discrimina-
tion is the perpetuation of notions of white supremacy through the Ku Klux
Klan, its claim to be a Christian group and its use of biblical texts to support its
views.3 In June 2015, over one hundred and twenty years since Ida B. Wells
called for an end to the lynching of black people, and over fifty years since
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail highlight-
ing the ‘whiteness’ of the gospel as it was preached in America, controversy

1  http://georgeowood.com/black-lives-matter-sunday/ [accessed 11 June 2015].

2  http://www.people-press.org/2014/12/08/sharp-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to-brown
-garner-decisions/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
3  http://www.kkkknights.com/ [accessed 11 June 2015].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_015

‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 299

over the Confederate flag and the burning of seven black churches has made
international news headlines.4
On the matter of female bishops, the Anglican church in the UK lagged
behind the US, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden and South Africa until
January 2015, when Libby Lane was consecrated at York Minster as the Church
of England’s first female bishop. Despite approving the ordination of women
as priests over twenty years ago, following decades of campaigning, the issue
remains controversial with both those for and those against female ordination
employing biblical texts in support of their position. When the General Synod
voted to allow the ordination of women to the priesthood in 1992, over four
hundred male clergy left the Church of England in protest. In an attempt to
appease those who opposed the ordination of women, the Church of England
introduced ‘flying bishops’ (properly known as Provincial Episcopal Visitors)
who would be ‘flown in’ to minister to parishes who refused to accept the min-
istry of female priests or the ministry of bishops prepared to ordain women
to the priesthood; yet, making such an allowance continued discrimination
against women. Although the General Synod voted in 2005 to remove legal
barriers to women becoming bishops, drawing up the necessary legislation
involved a further seven years of wrangling and was not put to a vote until 2012.
Despite an overwhelming majority of dioceses supporting the legislation, the
outcome was that the two-thirds majority required was a mere six votes short;
this was a severe blow to gender equality and to the credibility of the church.
By the end of May 2014 revised legislation had been approved by all dioceses of
the Church of England which went on to pass the vote at General Synod in July
2014; yet, still with an allowance for those in opposition to female ordination to
request male priests and bishops.
Similarly divisive has been the debate over gay priests and same-sex mar-
riage, which has attracted media coverage since Gene Robinson hit the head-
lines as the first priest in an openly gay relationship to be consecrated as a
bishop in New Hampshire’s Episcopal Church. In response, the Archbishop
of Canterbury formed the Eames Commission (published as the Windsor
Report), which put a halt to the consecration of bishops who were in same-sex
relationships. Nevertheless, in 2003 Canon Jeffrey John was appointed Bishop
of Reading whilst advocating faithful same-sex relationships (although insist-
ing on his own celibacy). For years the Church of England has opposed active

4  http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/245579-obama-thinks-confederate-flag
-belongs-in-a-museum [accessed 20 June 2015]; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trend
ing-33368317 [accessed 4 July 2015].
300 McIntosh

homosexuality, only allowing the ordination of gay priests on the grounds that
they remain celibate. Yet, changes in the law have galvanized campaigners for
lesbian and gay rights within the church; an issue which threatens to spilt the
African Anglican churches from the worldwide Anglican Communion.5 A bill
to allow same-sex marriages was passed in England and Wales in July 2013, and
came into force in March 2014, but churches were not compelled to perform
them. While the Pilling Report suggested that churches might provide bless-
ings for gay couples, the House of Bishops stated that the Church of England
would not provide them and it reiterated its belief that marriage is between
one man and one woman; although, the bishops’ statement also acknowledges
the social virtues of same-sex relationships.6 Hence, in 2013 the Church of
England officially sanctioned the appointment of gay bishops who are in civil
partnerships, but still on the grounds that they remain celibate.
Catholicism has been unwavering in its condemnation of female ordination
and homosexuality and yet the Catholic Women’s Ordination movement has
been active since 1993, a year before Pope John Paul II’s definitive statement: ‘it
is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood’ was made in the Ordinatio
Sacerdotalis of 1994. Pope Francis has upheld this view on women, and main-
tains that gay sex is a sin, despite speaking of ‘welcoming homosexuals’; a
phrase used in the Vatican’s document, Relatio Post Disceptationem, of October
2014. Both of these views were widely reported following his earlier conversa-
tion with reporters on a 2013 flight from Brazil, in which he supports ‘a greater
role for women’ but not the priesthood, and similarly, opposes the marginal-
ization of homosexuals in society stating: ‘if a person is gay and seeks God and
has good will, who am I to judge?’ and yet continues to condemn homosexual
acts.7 As with the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church hierarchy lags behind
the views of ordinary Catholics, most of whom do not think homosexuality is a
sin and are not opposed to same-sex marriage. For example, polls from the Pew
Research Center indicate that seventy per cent of US Catholics think society
should accept homosexuality and fifty-seven per cent also support same-sex

5  See Harriet Sherwood, ‘Anglican Church Risks Global Schism Over Homosexuality’, The
Guardian (12 January 2016).
6  https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/02/house-of-bishops-pastoral
-guidance-on-same-sex-marriage.aspx [accessed 11 June 2015].
7  See, for example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23489702 [accessed 12 January
2016]; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/pope-francis-gays_n_3669635.html [accessed
15 January 2017]; http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/world/europe/pope-francis-gay
-priests.html?_r=0 [accessed 12 January 2016].
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 301

marriage.8 Moreover, while maintaining a discriminatory position on women

and homosexuality, the Catholic Church has been plagued by child sexual
abuse scandals. From the 1980s cases of sustained sexual abuse by Catholic
priests in the US, Canada, Ireland and Europe, covering several decades, began
to make global headlines. As victims’ accusations were investigated, it was not
only further cases that came to light, but also the shocking cover-up by the
Catholic Church: victims had been ignored and paedophile priests had been
quietly relocated rather than reported to the police and removed from office.
In particular, the 2009 Ryan Report (also known as the Commission to Inquire
into Child Abuse) found endemic child sexual abuse dating back to 1936 in
Catholic children’s institutions in the Republic of Ireland. Cardinal Ratzinger
(later Pope Benedict XVI) faced the gruelling task of meeting victims and
cleaning up the ‘filth’, as he called it. Between 2001 and 2010 allegations came
before the Holy See concerning three thousand priests over a fifty year period.
These scandals undoubtedly caused enormous damage to the Catholic Church
resulting in a loss of moral credibility and an exodus of persons (which, in turn,
meant substantial financial loss).
According to Pew Research Center polls, over a quarter of US Catholics
who have left the church did so because of sexual abuse scandals; in addi-
tion, of those now religiously unaffiliated sixty per cent were dissatisfied with
the Vatican’s position on homosexuality and abortion, fifty per cent cited dis-
agreement with the ban on contraception and forty per cent left because of
the Church’s position on women.9 Linda Woodhead’s similar research in the
UK also finds that those referring to the Catholic Church as ‘a negative force in
society’ cite its discrimination ‘against women and gay people’ as the top two
reasons for this view, while those referring to themselves as Roman Catholic
disagree with Vatican teaching on abortion and homosexuality.10
Clearly matters of race, gender and sexual equality are highly significant
areas of engagement for public theology. Both biblical material and the theo-
logical interpretation of it is used on both sides of the debate: by campaign-
ers in favour of greater equality and those arguing against it. Therefore, as key
areas of debate and tension in which church and society struggle to reach

8  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/16/young-u-s-catholics-overwhelmingly-
accepting-of-homosexuality/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
9  http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/clergy-sexual-abuse-and-the-catholic-
church/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
10  The 2013 ‘Religion and Public Life’ YouGov surveys designed by Linda Woodhead can
be downloaded at: http://faithdebates.org.uk/research/ [accessed 11 June 2015]; see also
Linda Woodhead, ‘Endangered Species’, The Tablet (14 November 2013).
302 McIntosh

agreement, there is a need for public theologians to make their voices heard.
However, there are few theologians seriously engaged with issues of race, gen-
der and sexual equality who refer to themselves as ‘public theologians’ or to
their work as ‘public theology’.

Is it Public Theology?

Since Martin Marty coined the term ‘public theology’ in 1974, certain key names
have become associated with it.11 For instance, Duncan Forrester in Scotland
and John de Gruchy in South Africa have spearheaded work on social justice
and aimed at changing public policy and have, accordingly, become associated
with contemporary public theology. More theoretically, David Tracy’s argument
that theology should engage with three publics: church, academy and society, is
regularly cited and expanded upon as the basis for public theology, while Max
Stackhouse advocates a persuasive public theology.12 Consequently, public the-
ology seems to refer to theology that is public; in other words, theology that
reaches beyond academia to debate with the wider public on issues of public
interest. Hence, in his oft-cited 2003 article ‘Will the Real Public Theology Please
Stand Up?’, Harold Breitenberg refers to public discourse that is informed by
theology and yet addresses both the religious and the non-religious audience.13
Thus, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm argues that public theology must be ‘bilingual’;
that is, in order to be intelligible to both the religious and the non-religious
audience, it must be able to express itself in both theological and secular terms.14
What is immediately noticeable, however, is that this emerging ‘canon’ of
public theologians is composed of white men. In fact, nearly all of the centres
for public theology that have sprung up around the world in recent years are
either named after or headed by men (mostly white men). Notable exceptions
to the whiteness of public theology are Nico Koopman at the Beyers Naudé

11  Martin Marty, ‘Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion,’ American Civil Religion (1974),
139–157 and ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience’, Journal of
Religion, 54:4 (1974), 332–359.
12  David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad, 1981); Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere (London: SCM
Press, 2011); Max Stackhouse, God and Globalization, vol 4: Globalization and Grace (New
York: Continuum, 2007).
13  E. Harold Breitenberg, ‘To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand Up?’,
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 23:2 (2003), 55–96.
14  Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, ‘Nurturing Reason: The Public Role of Religion in the Liberal
State’, Nederduits Gereformeerde Theologiese Tydskrif, 48 (2007), 25−41.
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 303

Centre for Public Theology, Stellenbosch in South Africa and Sebastian Kim
at York St John University in the UK; while the only female regularly cited as
a public theologian (given her work on the role of religion in American pub-
lic life) is Linell Cady, although Elaine Graham’s work also asserts the public
nature of theology and critiques its gendered and exclusionary perspectives.15
Consequently, it seems that public theology, thus far, has failed to properly
acknowledge its reliance on a Habermasian notion of the public sphere that is
founded on a concept of reason that has excluded women and other marginal-
ized groups. Habermas’ influential work on the public sphere imagined a liberal
democratic space in which social status could be eradicated and reasoned con-
sensus could be reached on important matters.16 Yet, as Graham reminds us:

many of the same processes that gave birth to modernity’s elevation of

public reason, impartial and non-contingent subjectivity, and models of
the free, self-actualizing autonomous agent facilitated by the formation
of liberal democracy, were not actually neutral or universal; but highly
gendered. They rested on binary representations of women and men’s
differential nature; and they conceived of differential and gendered divi-
sion of labour which often precluded women’s claiming full humanity, let
alone full and active citizenship.17

As soon as public theology employs the term ‘public’ it sets boundaries around
who is included and who is excluded. Tracy’s ‘three publics’ does not go deep
enough into an examination of whose voices are heard and considered legiti-
mate in church, academy and society. In all three publics, those who have
access and those to whom we listen are demarcated by race, gender and sexu-
ality. As Stephen Burns and Anita Monro assert: ‘There are always limitations
on the ‘public’: who may enter, speak, act, and the roles that they are allowed
to play in these public spaces’.18 Questions of power and authority that are

15  Linell E. Cady, Religion, Theology and American Public Life (New York: SUNY Press, 1993);
Elaine L. Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age
(London: SCM Press, 2013).
16  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [original in
German, 1962]).
17  Elaine Graham, ‘What’s Missing? Gender, Reason and the Post-Secular’, Political Theology,
13:2 (2012), 233–245 at 234.
18  Stephen Burns and Anita Monro, ‘Which Public? Inspecting the House of Public
Theology’, in Anita Monro and Stephen Burns, eds, Public Theology and the Challenge of
Feminism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1–14 at p. 1.
304 McIntosh

central to feminist and other liberationist theologies have not been drawn
out by public theology, with the effect that the position of privilege occupied
by the white, educated, elite males has not been challenged amongst public
theologians and, in effect, the diversity of marginalized voices speaking theo-
logically about pressing public issues has not been heard. Admittedly, public
theologians cite influences from amongst marginalized groups; especially
Martin Luther King, Jr in the US and anti-apartheid activists, such as Desmond
Tutu, in South Africa (alongside the social critiques of Reinhold Niebuhr and
Dietrich Bonhoeffer), but in its effort to determine the public relevance of
theology in what has been the increasingly secular public sphere of western
liberal democracy, the developing public theology corpus risks re-inscribing
patriarchal and androcentric boundaries. On the contrary, if the aim of public
theology is to engage with diverse voices from interdisciplinary fields, so as to
constructively critique both church and society, it must ‘align itself with prin-
ciples of empowerment and participation of groups who for whatever reason
often operate outside the mainstream’.19 Moreover, in so doing, public theology
may need to grapple with theology that takes place outside of official church
documents and academic publications; as Graham suggests, ‘theology may not
necessarily find expression in academic treatises but in other, more performa-
tive styles, such as liturgy, creative writing, drama or music’.20
In spite of the decline in church attendance in the global west, religion is
very much on the agenda and being played out in the public arena, with women
seemingly at the centre of a political battle for their autonomy and a religious
one for their conformity. It is striking, therefore, that the public theology being
played out in this post-secular public sphere is doing little to engage with and
promote women’s voices and concerns. Drawing on Habermas’ recent work,
Graham suggests that it is not only religion that is missing from post-secular dis-
course, but also an analysis of the gendered construction of the public square.21
In the light of the ‘resurgence of religion’,22 Habermas has partially softened his
position on the exclusion of religion from the public sphere, while still retain-
ing a cautious attitude given the potential for fundamentalism. In reply to his
religious critics, he states: ‘whether religious communities will remain visible in
the future is an open question . . . those religious interpretations of the self and

19  Elaine Graham ‘Power, Knowledge and Authority in Public Theology’, International
Journal of Public Theology, 1:1 (2007), 42–62 at 61.
20  Ibid.
21  Graham, ‘What’s Missing?’, 234.
22  See, for example, Martin Riesebrodt, ‘Fundamentalism and the Resurgence of Religion’,
Numen, 47:3 (2000), 266–287.
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 305

the world that have adapted to modern social epistemological conditions have
an equal claim to recognition in the discourse’.23 Clearly, the revival of religion
as a political impetus is a significant challenge for secular democracies, forcing
Habermas to acknowledge the ideological nature of the secular public sphere
over and against its assumed neutrality. Nevertheless, the twin principles of
participation and reasoned discourse remain at the heart of the Habermasian
conception of the public sphere without fully appreciating the economic and
gender-based hurdles that have been built into its construction.24
As Nancy Fraser explains, when ‘public sphere’ is taken to mean ‘everything
that is outside the domestic or familial sphere’, it ‘conflates at least three ana-
lytically distinct things: the state, the official-economy of paid employment,
and arenas of public discourse’.25 When Habermas writes of the public sphere,
he is only referring to the latter; namely, to participation in rational discourse
that is distinct from both the state and the official economy. However, women
have found themselves excluded from such participation, at first formally and
then informally. Formal and legal exclusions from the public sphere on the
grounds of biological sex, race and economic status have gradually dimin-
ished, but this has not eradicated social inequality and informal exclusion.
On the contrary, the dominant class continues to make decisions concerning
the manner of discourse and the issues to be discussed, such that subordinate
groups are silenced (even in the media).26 Feminist research reveals, as Fraser
notes, that: ‘men tend to interrupt women more than women interrupt men;
men also tend to speak more than women, taking more turns and longer turns;
and women’s interventions are more often ignored or not responded to than

23  Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reply to My Critics’, trans. Ciaran Cronin, in Craig Calhoun, Eduardo
Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds, Habermas and Religion (Cambridge: Polity,
2013), pp. 347–390 at p. 348.
24  See, for example, Lisa McLaughlin, ‘Feminism and the Political Economy of Transnational
Public Space’, The Sociological Review, 52 (2004), 156–175, also in Nick Crossley and John
Michael Roberts, eds, After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004).
25  Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy’, Social Text, 25/26 (1990), 56–80 at 57 (reprinted from Craig Calhoun,
ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–42).
26  Even electronic media in a capitalist economy is run for profit and does not provide equal
access for all persons; hence, although it can be a vehicle for giving voice to some margin-
alized groups, it does not always expand access to the official public sphere. For a more
detailed discussion of this, see Esther McIntosh, ‘Belonging without Believing: Church
as Community in an Age of Digital Media’, International Journal of Public Theology, 9:2
(2015), 131–155.
306 McIntosh

men’s’.27 As a rejoinder, women and other subordinate groups have formed

counterpublics28 in which to strengthen their voice and challenge the pre-
vailing view of what constitutes the common good and warrants inclusion in
the discourse of the public sphere. It is only through such counterpublics that
sexual harassment, rape and domestic violence have been given prominence
as legitimate subjects of common interest, as opposed to being dismissed from
mainstream attention as ‘private’ or minority issues.
Public theology, I suggest, needs to take up the position of asking ‘what is
missing’ in its account of itself, in order to broaden its version of who counts
and of who and what matters. It is not sufficient to ask this question from a
position of privilege and then to include a few token voices; rather, serious
theological discourse on issues affecting women and women’s participation
in the public sphere is required, alongside a recognition of historical privi-
lege that seeks to actively rebalance that privilege. For example, domestic
violence is a matter of deep public concern; a public theological response to
this issue needs to engage with the feminist critique of the Christian motif of
self-­sacrifice and the ways in which this has been used to legitimize the sub-
ordination of women.29 Similarly, black theology and queer theology need to
be part of the public theological agenda, if both social and religious justifica-
tion of discrimination against blacks and homosexuals is to be tackled and the
privileging of white, heterosexual men and women is to be corrected. Thus,
the extent to which liberation and political theologies of Africa, Asia and Latin
America constitute public theology is up for debate, just as Christian social
ethics both interacts with and is differentiated from public theology. It is pub-
lic theology’s self-definition as dialogical rather than particularist that has kept
issues of gender and race at the periphery of its concerns; that is, by viewing
feminist theology, black theology and queer theology as ‘one-issue’ theologies,
public theology has sought to retain a broader focus on the role of theology in
the public sphere.30 Yet, in order that public theology engages with criticisms
of the Habermasian public sphere and criticisms of exclusionary theology, it
is essential that it promotes a dialogical relationship with critical theologies as
much as with public issues. Counterpublics and counter-theologies should be
informing public theology, since these are the publics that push the discourse

27  Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 64.

28  Fraser calls these ‘subaltern counterpublics’, ibid., 67.
29  See Esther McIntosh, ‘The Concept of Sacrifice: A Reconsideration of the Feminist
Critique’, International Journal of Public Theology, 1:2 (2007), 210–229.
30  See, for example, Nico Koopman, ‘Some Comments on Public Theology’, Journal of
Theology for Southern Africa, 119 (2003), 3–19 at 7.
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 307

of the official public sphere beyond the status quo and ‘render visible the ways
in which societal inequality infects formally inclusive existing public spheres’.31
Dialogical public theology has a vital role to play in evaluating and rectifying
the exclusion and discrimination of women and minorities at the intersection
of the public spaces afforded by the state and the church. As Graham points
out: ‘More nuanced understanding of the complexities of what happens when
faith enters the public space may actually rehabilitate women of faith into the
body politic as active citizens capable of directing spiritually and theologically
grounded reasoning toward inclusive, constructive and emancipatory causes’.32

What is Missing?

Writing for the International Journal of Public Theology, Heather Walton

explains that while she is both politically and theologically active—a left-wing
feminist, a church elder and an academic—she has ‘a lack of interest border-
ing closely on distaste for most of what appears under the heading ‘public
theology’’,33 precisely because of its reliance on a model of rational discourse
that has excluded women. Contrastingly, Nicola Slee presents ‘an account of
feminist theology which . . . is always and must always be public theology’.34
Slee is referring to the sense in which feminist theology is bound up with a
critique of the notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and as such sees theology and
issues of public concern as inextricably linked. Unlike mainstream public
theology, though, feminist theology begins with the experience of women in
church, academy and society, critiquing the exclusionary nature of those ‘pub-
lics’ and the one-sided account of humanity that they offer. Conversely, by con-
sidering the perspective of women and other marginalized groups, we are able
to broaden the description of what it means to be human.
In the attempt to speak in public, theology risks either the pitfall inherent
in the move towards ‘bilinguality’—that it speaks in vague terms that aim at
universal intelligibility but produce only opacity—or the opposing pitfall of
apologetics—whereby, in the aim to defend itself and its public relevance,

31  Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 65.

32  Graham, ‘What’s Missing?’, 244.
33  Heather Walton, ‘You Have to Say You Cannot Speak: Feminist Reflections Upon Public
Theology’, International Journal of Public Theology, 4:1 (2010), 21–36 at 22.
34  Nicola Slee, ‘Speaking with the Dialects, Inflections and Rhythms of our own Unmistakable
Voices’, in Monro and Burns, eds, Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism, pp. 15–34
at p. 15.
308 McIntosh

theology retrenches down the path of tradition and adopts a position of ‘radi-
cal orthodoxy’.35 On the one hand, the current global picture of growing secu-
larism and religious resurgence makes the effort to speak in ways which are
universally accessible and agreeable almost impossible; on the other hand,
the patriarchal tradition is not a place of welcome and safety for women.
Alternatively, feminist theology challenges public theology to recognize and
listen to the experiences of women, not to assume that the male perspective or
the male voice is sufficient, not to speak for others and not to assume authority
in theological matters. Instead of aiming for universal intelligibility, public the-
ology needs to start with the realities of everyday lives and speak with honesty
from those contexts.
Examples from the Women-Church movement36 demonstrate ways in
which feminist theology combines issues of public concern with new liturgies,
but only minor inroads have been made into mainstream theology; or, rather,
the mainstream publics of church, academy and society have done little to
take on board and change themselves in response to feminist critique. Hence,
women-church exists in peripheral public spaces. In challenging the patriar-
chy of church and society, feminism does theology differently; it concentrates
on dialogue, stories, poems and the creative arts and does not focus on doctri-
nal assent and institutional affiliation. Moreover, in so doing, feminist theology
is open to diverse forms of the divine, such as Christa,37 that are better able to
promote social justice in community than the traditional emphasis on per-
sonal salvation. Furthermore, feminist theology responded to the criticism of
‘whiteness’ that came from womanist and mujerista theologies, and expanded
its commitment to social justice and the ending of all oppressions, using the
term ‘kyriarchy’38 to address the multi-layered and interlinked oppressions
bound up with race, class, sexuality and disability.
Similarly, public theology needs to employ a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ that
acknowledges the misogyny in its traditions and sources, and does not retain
a patriarchal hermeneutic of the Gospel. Public theology must challenge all

35  See John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds, Radical Orthodoxy: A New
Theology (London: Routledge, 1999).
36  See Teresa Berger, ed., Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2001).
37  As used, for example, by Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic
Power, second edn (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008), p. 52.
38  This term was introduced by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices
of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 309

oppressions in church and society, but in order that it is credible, it must first
challenge its own sexism and homophobia; while there is oppression within
the church, its message of liberation and hope has little traction. A convincing
message requires an honest analysis about who has the power in public spaces
and that analysis must include a commitment to change. Public theology must
ask who is invited into dialogue and who has access, who is being listened to
and whose stories are not being told. If we only hear from educated males, we
are not hearing the whole story. Furthermore, the commitment to enter into
dialogue with other faiths and with a non-religious audience is not genuine if
its aim is to persuade the other; genuine dialogue means being open to having
one’s own mind changed. For public theology, such dialogue requires that dif-
ferent ways of doing theology are respected and included, as Nelle Morton’s
notion of ‘hearing the other to speech’39 implies. Thus, we are prompted to be
alert to the fact that theology is not only where we think it is (in the church and
the academy), nor is it necessarily expressed in the ways we expect (church
texts and academic publications); instead, it is also to be found in the silence of
those who are not given a voice on the established platforms. To escape the tra-
ditional structures of power and its limitations, public theology needs to listen
to the theological conversations occurring at the grass roots, in the workplace
and on the streets; and on social media, since it is through blogs and other
forms of digital media that those who are silenced can speak without interrup-
tion. It is essential to the integrity of public theology that it embeds the femi-
nist critique and adopts both its receptive attitude to diversity and its reticence
in claiming authority; as Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood attest:

One of the many strengths of feminist theologies has always been the
ability to include many voices within the debate . . . This is not the same
thing at all as having no method and no cohesion, it is, however, about
creating space for diverse voices to express what they experience about
the divine among and between us. It is about respect and an overwhelm-
ing belief that the divine cannot be contained by any one group whoever
they may be and however blessed and sanctioned they believe them-
selves to be.40

39  Nelle Morton, ‘Beloved Image’ (1977), in Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 122–146 at p. 128.
40  Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, Controversies in Feminist Theology (London:
SCM Press, 2007), p. 1.
310 McIntosh

Key Formative Moments

As a suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the early campaigners for the
rights of women in nineteenth century America. In conjunction with her inde-
fatigable fight for rights such as equal pay, birth control and divorce, Stanton
sought religious reform, arguing that the natural equality of men and women
had been falsely distorted by men who claim support from the Bible. Amongst
the eighteen grievances that she listed in The Declaration of Sentiments for the
first Woman’s Rights Convention, which met in New York in 1848, she included
the following critique of Christianity:

He [man] allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate posi-

tion, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry,
and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of
the Church . . .
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his
right to assign her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience
and to her God.41

Further, it became clear when the Church of England began the process of
revising the Authorized Bible in 1870, without consulting any women, that
misogynistic interpretations of biblical material would not be challenged. As
a retort, Stanton and her committee of women resolved to produce a com-
mentary on the passages of the Bible (approximately one tenth) that deal with
women; the resulting publication was The Woman’s Bible. At the time of publi-
cation, the women involved were dismissed as heretics and the message of the
publication was largely ignored by the Church or deliberately avoided. There
are inconsistencies in scholarship in The Woman’s Bible; nevertheless, it repre-
sents an admirably brave undertaking that finds biblical passages supporting
the equality of men and women, and thus concludes that the subordination of
women in Christianity is solely due to its misinterpretation by men.
Stanton’s belief in the inherent egalitarianism at the heart of the Gospel
message finds greater purchase in the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
almost a century later. In 1983 Fiorenza published In Memory of Her in which
she puts forward an argument for a feminist biblical hermeneutic of suspicion

41  Eleanor D. Bilimoria, ‘Editor’s preface’, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible
(Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974 [1898]), pp. vi–viii at vi.
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 311

that questions androcentric interpretations of the text.42 Given a lack of proof

regarding the historical non-participation of women, Fiorenza proceeds from
the assumption that they may well have contributed and that it is patriar-
chal recordings of history that have failed to acknowledge their contribution.
Consequently, while she finds the Bible to be both a source of empowerment
and victimization for women, she makes the radical assertion that biblical
texts sustaining oppression are either untrue or misinterpreted, since, they are,
after all, written by fallible men.43
Prior to Fiorenza’s reformist biblical analysis, Mary Daly’s revolutionary
appraisal of misogyny in the Catholic Church hit the headlines in 1968 with the
publication of The Church and the Second Sex.44 Daly had hoped that the 1965
meeting of Vatican II in Rome would mark a turning point in the Church’s atti-
tude to women, but was dismayed that the few women present had to remain
silent. Hence, borrowing Simone de Beauvoir’s assessment of women as ‘the
second sex’, Daly’s work highlights the Catholic contradiction of both idealiz-
ing Mary and treating all other women as inferior. In her work, Daly acknowl-
edges the sexism of certain biblical texts but also argues that such texts should
be contextualized and not taken as a decree for the continued exclusion of
women from positions of authority in the Church. In addition, she emphasizes
passages of the Bible that express the equality of the sexes, such as Gen. 1:27
‘God created man in his image. In the image of God he created them. Male and
female he created them’ and Galatians 3:28 ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all
one in Christ Jesus’.45 Despite initial hostilities, Daly’s work gathered support
and led, in 1973, to the publication of her second and most well-known book,
Beyond God the Father, in which she states: ‘if God is male, then the male is
God’.46 Having recognized the damaging effect on women of the imagery
of God as father-figure, Daly ultimately finds the patriarchy of the Bible and
of institutionalized Christianity overwhelming and irredeemable, and thus,
the combination of her radical feminism and the intransigence of the Catholic

42  Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of

Christian Origins (London: SCM Press, 1983).
43  See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical
Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) and But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical
Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
44  Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
45  Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985 [1968]), p. 192.
46  Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1973), p. 19.
312 McIntosh

Church leads her to a position of ‘post-Christian feminism’. Nevertheless, her

analysis of the maleness of God proved to be grist to the mill of a generation of
feminist theologians seeking to reform Christianity.
For instance, Rosemary Radford Ruether, an active supporter of the cam-
paign for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, contends that:
‘Male monotheism has been so taken for granted in Judeo-Christian cul-
ture that the peculiarity of imaging God solely through one gender has not
been recognized.47 Yet, the impact of having only male imagery for God is to
remove women from their direct relationship with God and to reinforce the
rule of men, as though this is divinely ordained. In spite of this one-sidedness,
institutionalized Christianity has been slow to admit that God imagery is not
literal truth and should be adapted to reflect the equality of women and men.
Ruether, therefore, argues that women should leave the sexism of the institu-
tionalized church and form women-church (ekklēsia) in which liturgies make
use of goddess imagery.
Around the same time as these feminist theologians were honing their ideas,
African American women were arguing for an exploration of racism as well as
sexism. Since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, James Cone
had been developing a theological commentary on the experience of African
Americans, but Cone’s work did not address sexism (the same criticism can
be levelled at the contemporary black British theologian, Robert Beckford).48
Through the thought of Delores Williams, womanist theology was emerging
to fill the gap left by black theology and feminist theology, namely the experi-
ence of the dual oppression of being both black and female.49 With the aim of
liberating black women from androcentrism and social domination based on
race and class, womanist theology re-reads biblical stories from the perspec-
tive of slavery and economic exploitation, seeking motifs of resistance and
survival. Consequently, while feminist theology re-reads the story of Abram
and Sarai from the point of view of Sarai, womanist theologians re-read this
story from the point of view of the slave and concubine, Hagar (Gen. 16:1–16;
21:9–21). Moreover, in parallel with the feminist analysis of male God-language
and symbolism, Williams tears apart the whiteness of patriarchal God imagery.
She exhorts black women to find God in themselves, asking ‘who do you say

47  Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), p. 53.
48  See James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1969); see
also Robert Beckford, Jesus Dub: Theology, Music and Social Change (Abingdon: Routledge,
2006).
49  The term ‘womanist’ is a black folk expression coined by Alice Walker, In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Orlando: Harcourt, 1983).
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 313

God is’?50 Further, it is not only the image of God the Father that legitimizes
the oppression of women. In addition, womanist theology asserts that the
image of Jesus suffering on the cross has also been used to keep black women
in a subordinate position; hence, the image of a black female Christ (Christa),
who identifies with and frees them from their suffering, enters the arena.51
In conjunction with the threefold oppression of gender, race and class
experienced by African-American women, other marginalized groups also
use their experience to write new theologies appropriate to the issues with
which they are faced in their daily lives. Women in Africa, Asia, Central and
South America are claiming their right to have their voices heard and to do
theology in public. Of particular significance is Ivone Gebara’s Latin American
ecofeminism. Borne out of her experience as a Catholic nun living and work-
ing with extremely poor women in the Brazilian favelas, Gebara sees the links
between androcentrism and anthropology (as does Ruether from an American
perspective) and strives for better health care and sanitation. In a profoundly
brave interview for Veja magazine in 1993, Gebara challenged the Vatican
stance on abortion by affirming that terminating a pregnancy is not necessar-
ily a sin for women living in poverty; she was subsequently silenced for two
years, but thereafter resumed speaking out against the oppression of impov-
erished women.52 Correspondingly, from the perspective of a Latin American
woman living in the United States of America, Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s mujerista
theology advocates restorative justice for diasporic Hispanic people;53 Kwok
Pui-Lan dissects the negative effects of the missionary belief that liberation
for women is bound up with conversion to western Christianity;54 while The
Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians fights against the limitations
to self-determination placed on African women by western imperialism and
deconstructs ‘the decisively ambiguous impact of Christianity in their lives’.55

50  Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk
(Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993).
51  See, for example, Jacquelyn Grant, White Woman’s Christ and Black Woman’s Jesus:
Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).
52  See, for example, Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999).
53  See, for example, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, ‘Justice as Reconciliatory Praxis: A Decolonial
Mujerista Move’, International Journal of Public Theology, 4:1 (2010), 37–50.
54  See, for example, Kwok Pui-Lan, ‘The Image of the ‘White Lady’: Gender and Race in
Christian Mission’, in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ed., The Power of Naming (Maryknoll:
Orbis Books and London: SCM Press, 1996), pp. 250–258.
55  Teresia M. Hinga, ‘Between Colonialism and Inculturation: Feminist Theologies in Africa’,
in Fiorenza, ed., The Power of Naming, pp. 36–44 at p. 41.
314 McIntosh

Colonialism and the remnants of Christian fundamentalism that it has left

behind presents an ongoing struggle as former colonies, such as Jamaica and
India, disentangle the discourse of domination and the elevation of the fairer-
skinned from their indigenous identity and hopes for future progress. While
the writing of Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment gives Jamaicans a New Testament
in Patwa, it does not resolve issues of land rights and justice for the underclass
(issues that are also pertinent for public theology in Australia, New Zealand
and South Africa).56
Deliberately expanding the boundaries of what counts as theology creates
positive opportunities for previously silenced minorities, including those who
do not conform to the ‘heterosexism’ of Christianity. Carter Heyward writes:

Many feminists, gay men, and lesbians have begun to ‘come out’ of con-
cealment and put themselves visibly on the ecclesial line as representa-
tive of those women and men who, throughout Christian history and the
ecumenical church today, have seen that the liberal Christian emperor
has no clothes—no sense of the misogynist, erotophobic, and oppressive
character of his realm.57

Heyward’s argument is that Christianity operates on the basis of a heterosex-

ist theology; that is, an assumption that male domination of females is both
natural and divinely ordained. Further, this heterosexuality is bound up in the
portrayal of God as ‘he’ and the church as ‘she’, so that, in effect, being Christian
means being heterosexual. Thus, liberal Protestantism encourages the individ-
ual to be true to his/her God-given nature, so long as doing so fits within the het-
erosexist norm. Consequently, subservient women and ‘closeted’ homosexuals
are tolerated within the Church, but ‘to press seriously for women’s liberation
or for the affirmation of gay and lesbian sexual activity is to fly in the face of the
idealistic tradition itself, in which femaleness and sexual activity are, de facto,
ungodly’.58 Hence, Marcella Althaus-Reid’s ground-breaking work challenging
the heterosexism of Christianity speaks of ‘indecent theology’.59 Bringing lib-
eration theology and queer theory into conversation, Althaus-Reid searches

56  See the special issue on ‘Matters of the Caribbean’ of the International Journal of Theology,
7:4 (2013).
57  Carter Heyward, ‘Heterosexist Theology: Being Above It All’, in Fiorenza, ed., The Power of
Naming, pp. 172–180 at p. 178.
58  Ibid.
59  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and
Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000).
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 315

for a different face of God, freed from the shackles of traditional Christianity
and present in the lives of ‘deviant’ persons. Her monograph entitled Queer
God is a radical quest to expose the sexual foundations of theology and to do
theology from the perspective of the sexually excluded.60

Lessons for Public Theology: The Imago Dei and Transgender

Any dominant group will value its concerns above those of a subordinate
group and it is for this reason that public theology must proceed with a her-
meneutic of suspicion. If public theology continues to use biblical sources and
their interpretation uncritically, it proceeds as if decades of feminist, black and
queer theologies have not happened; it adopts the position of the dominant
class. Whenever public theologians seek to deliberate on a matter of public
interest they must stop to consider whose interests are being represented,
ensuring that there are opportunities for minorities and subordinate groups to
have their voices heard. It is only by engaging in dialogue with counterpublics
that the false ‘we’ of a dominant group, assuming it speaks for the common
good of all persons, can be avoided. Similarly, it is by hearing and incorporat-
ing the critiques of mainstream theology put forward by counter-theologies,
rather than viewing them as optional extras or side-issues, that public theology
can guard against bias and injustice. In particular, public theology is located at
the intersection of the gendered public sphere and the patriarchal imago Dei.
Unless public theology levels self-critique at its understanding of the public
sphere and expands its conception of the imago Dei, its engagement with pub-
lic issues will favour the dominant class.
A particularly challenging area for a society and a theology demarcated on
gender lines is the acceptance of transgender persons. As a burgeoning field of
study and contestation, public theology could helpfully open up the debate by
listening to the conflicting voices from a number of different publics. On the
one hand, the Church of England, for example, has recognized the need to con-
template the existence of transpersons. In 2000, Carol Stone became the first
transsexual priest in the Church of England, having transitioned from male to
female with the support of her bishop. Then, in 2005, the ordination of Sarah
Jones marked the first openly transgender priest in the Church of England. Yet,
in its 2003 document Some Issues in Human Sexuality, the Church of England
begins to consider its position on transsexualism, but falls back on the binary
of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in the biblical text without properly critiquing the

60  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Queer God (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003).

316 McIntosh

conflict between binary interpretations of the text and current scientific and
psychological evidence regarding the existence of transsexuals.61 Furthermore,
as Christina Beardsley points out, the document reaches conclusions without
speaking to transpeople:62 once again, the Church’s position has been decided
by a hierarchical leadership without listening to the personal accounts of the
minority group on whom it is pronouncing judgement.
In wider society, transpersons have been heard and the demand for the legal
right to change gender has been enshrined in law in the UK, with the passing of
the Gender Recognition Act 2004.63 Thus, since April 2005 it has been possible
to obtain a new birth certificate in accordance with a change in gender and to
marry as a person of that gender, without undergoing sex reassignment sur-
gery. Nevertheless, the Church of England is exempt from accepting acquired
gender for the purposes of marriage. Such an exemption reinforces the notion
that the Church still holds to a binary conception of humanity and of sexuality
and a limited conception of the imago Dei. On the contrary, transtheology sets
out its argument for the full acceptance of the diversity of human persons by
building on the need identified by feminist, black and queer theologies to free
the imago Dei from oppressive and exclusionary perceptions.64 Since humanity
exists in multiple forms, the imago Dei cannot be claimed by only one group or
representation, but must be capable of being imagined in just as many diverse
and pluralistic configurations as those in which humanity is embodied. In this
respect, transtheology goes further than other counter-theologies in its expan-
sion of the imago Dei, seeking to move beyond adding black, female and homo-
sexual identities onto the restrictive white, male, heterosexual norm. Rather,
as B.K. Hipsher states: ‘We must be critical enough to open up the possibilities
for human expression to include the full range and fluidity of human sexuality

61  The Archbishops’ Council, Some Issues in Human Sexuality (London: Church House
Publishing, 2003), esp. pp. 221 ff.
62  Christina Beardsley, ‘Taking Issue: The Transsexual Hiatus in Some Issues in Human
Sexuality’, Theology, 58:845 (2005), 338–346 at 342–343.
63  Both the Act and its amendments are available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/
ukpga/2004/7/contents [accessed 12 January 2016].
64  Transtheology is a relatively new field combining academic and personal accounts of
stigma and acceptance; see, for example, Justin Edward Tanis, Trans-Gendered: Theology,
Ministry and Communities of Faith (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003) and Susannah
Cornwall, ed., Intersex, Theology and the Bible: Troubling Bodies in Church, Text and Society
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 317

and sexual expression and embrace the concept of surgical and hormonal gen-
der reassignment’.65
However, minority groups need to be conscious of hearing other voices while
pursuing their need to be heard. When feminists, such as Germaine Greer and
Janice Raymond, have questioned the helpfulness of the definition of ‘woman’
as used by transwomen, such questioning has been met with extreme aggres-
sion and ‘no-platforming’ rather than open debate.66 Feminists have spent
decades revealing the extent of sexual discrimination and male violence that
biological women face on a daily basis. In turn, this has led to the strong case
for female-only spaces, and the battle against social and theological construc-
tions of women as possessing feminine characteristics that are contrasted
with the masculine characteristics supposedly possessed by biological men.
Consequently, feminists questioning the use of the term ‘woman’ by transper-
sons are making the point that being born female in a patriarchal society is a
different experience from being born biologically male and then transitioning
to female. Secondly, identifying as a woman because of having feminine rather
than masculine characteristics supports a male fantasy of a delicate and sub-
missive woman that feminists have been arguing against, and it fails to chal-
lenge socially-constructed definitions of masculinity or to expand the notion
of what it is to be a man.67 Thirdly, for a transwoman to demand legal access
to female-only spaces in order to avoid male violence fails to challenge male
violence. Thus, when those who question the trans use of the term ‘woman’ are
exposed to vitriolic abuse, labelled transphobic (or TERFs) and told to ‘check
their cis-privilege’, not only is sexual discrimination being ignored, biological
women are being silenced.68

65  B.K. Hipsher, ‘God is a Many Gendered Thing: An Apophatic Journey to Pastoral Diversity’,
in Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid, eds, Trans/formations (London: SCM, 2009),
pp. 92–104 at p. 97.
66  Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman (London: Anchor, 2000 [1999]), esp. p. 422; Janice
Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (London: The Women’s
Press, 1980); Ben Quinn, ‘Petition Urges Cardiff University to Cancel Germaine Greer
Lecture’, The Guardian (23 October 2015).
67  For examples of the fantasy woman aspired to by some transpersons, see the pseud-
onymous blog http://thenewbacklash.blogspot.co.uk/ [accessed 12 January 2016], esp.
‘Woman is a Male Fantasy: Autogynephilia’.
68  For examples of the threats levelled at so-called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical femi-
nists) and transpersons supportive of hearing the argument put forward by Germaine
Greer, see, for example, http://aoifeschatology.com/2015/10/26/whos-afraid-of-germaine
-greer/ [accessed 12 January 2016]; see also Julie Burchill, ‘Don’t You Dare Tell Me to Check
My Privilege’, The Spectator (22 February 2014).
318 McIntosh

In the struggle to have sex dysmorphia recognised and transdiscrimination

outlawed, self-identification, rather than biology, has become the standard by
which a person’s gender is ascribed. However, when Rachel Dolezal insisted that
she identified as black, despite being biologically white, she was condemned
and ostracised by the black community.69 Someone who is biologically white
does not experience the racial discrimination encountered by someone who is
biologically black, but neither does a biological male experience systemic and
pernicious sexism. Public theology could usefully step in here with the aim of
listening to all of these counterpublics and the requirements of their members.
Furthermore, we need to hear the concerns of transpersons without threaten-
ing and suppressing those born with female bodies, without disregarding the
oppression of those born with female bodies and without reaffirming the gen-
der stereotypes that link women with femininity and men with masculinity.
Most importantly, public theology cannot continue to make uncritical use of
biblical and hermeneutical sources that legitimize the subservience of women
and promote oppressive binary categories of humanity. If public theology is
to contribute to the pressing issue of self-identification, it needs to speak out
against women’s experience of discrimination in church and society, but it will
only have a credible voice if it roots out any theological justification of sexism
and denounces male violence against biological women and transpersons.

Looking Towards the Future

A constructive methodology for the future of public theology has to begin by

looking at who is included in its canon and where it finds its theology. Just as
black university students are asking ‘why is my reading list white’, female theol-
ogy students are asking ‘why are there no women on my theology bookshelf’.
These questions are pertinent in the three publics of church, academy and
society, where the prevailing experience is of male authority and dominance;
moreover, it is predominantly of white, straight male authority and dominance.
As Fiorenza argues, wo/men previously ‘excluded from institutions of knowl-
edge and power must be allowed to participate in articulating the full circle of
human perception and imagination’.70 Although even Fiorenza does not go far

69  For her own account of the reaction, and the destructive effect it had on her life, see Chris
McGreal, ‘Rachel Dolezal: I Wasn’t Identifying as Black to Upset People. I Was being Me’,
The Guardian (13 December 2015).
70  Fiorenza paraphrasing Anna Julia Cooper, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Feminist
Liberation Theology as Critical Sophiaology’, in Fiorenza, ed., The Power of Naming,
‘ I Met God, She ’ s Black ’ 319

enough, since use of the term ‘allow’ suggests that those in power have the
right to grant some form of access to others, just as the term ‘tolerance’ implies
putting up with those who are different rather than fully accepting their differ-
ence as legitimate. It is, therefore, not sufficient for elite, white, heterosexual
males to include a token black person, woman or homosexual amongst its
ranks; rather, it must critique its whiteness, its maleness and its heterosexual-
ity, because not to do so is to retain privilege and power unchallenged.71 To
truly challenge historical privilege and dominance, we have to engage in the
uncomfortable task of analysing how whiteness is perceived by blacks, how
maleness is perceived by women and how heterosexuality is perceived by
homosexuals. We have to take concrete steps to amend historical privilege and
unconscious bias. Public theology, as a dialogical discipline, should be engaged
in open debate that stimulates the process of changing public spheres and ren-
dering them more inclusive.
Theology reading lists are one place where we can start: both including
female and black theologians who do not necessarily write about ‘women’s
issues’ or matters of race, but who do theology from the context of their expe-
rience as a woman or a black person, and making feminist and queer theolo-
gies part of the core reading and discussion, not optional extras that can be
avoided, both in church and the academy, not as a special branch of theology,
but simply as theology per se. Yet, expanding theology curricula is not sufficient
in itself. In its pursuit of relevance in contemporary issues, public theology
will only be credible if it engages in self-reflection that challenges rather than
consolidates the interests of elite, white, western men. Before mounting an
intelligible response to the rise of IS or the burning of black churches, public
theology needs to engage in a critique of the racism, misogyny and homopho-
bia on which it is founded and which it still retains in its sources. Moreover,
it needs to engender and embody change. Despite years of feminist liturgies,
mainstream Christianity has done little to incorporate them; it has not chal-
lenged its right to allow access to others or applied the right to be admitted
through fully opened doors, and so it has missed out on the opportunity ‘to
reform malestream knowledge about the world and G*d in order to correct

pp. xiii–xxxix at p. xiii. Fiorenza uses the nomenclature wo/men ‘in order to destabilize
the essentialist notions of woman and indicate that from the perspective and positional-
ity of wo/men who are multiply oppressed, the term is also inclusive of disenfranchised
men’ (ibid., at p. xxxv n. 1).
71  See, for example, George Yancy, Look a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Phila­
delphia: Temple University Press, 2012).
320 McIntosh

and complete the world’s and the church’s one-sided vision’.72 Similarly, even
though same-sex couples are more visible in society, the church is still drag-
ging its heels on granting full access and acceptance to lesbian and gay per-
sons. If public theology is going to be liberative for the oppressed, it has to find
a theology that supports the equality and full humanity of all persons. In short,
it is essential that public theology asks ‘who is missing’ and practices ‘hearing
the other to speech’. When Dylan Chenfield, who describes himself as a Jewish
atheist, decided to confront the image of the white, male God by printing the
trope ‘I Met God, She’s Black’ on a T-shirt, he soon found that his shirt was in
high demand by the #BlackLivesMatter movement:73 this open conversation
about who God is and how that relates to contemporary issues and the every-
day struggles of human persons, conducted outside of the established church
and the high profile academy, is a prime example of germane public theology.

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[accessed 11 June 2015].
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/pope-francis-who-am-i-to-judge/ [accessed 12
January 2016].
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/contents [accessed 12 January 2016].
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/world/europe/pope-francis-gay-priests.html?_
r=0 [accessed 12 January 2016].
http://www.people-press.org/2014/12/08/sharp-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to
-brown-garner-decisions/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/clergy-sexual-abuse-and-the-catholic
-church/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/16/young-u-s-catholics-overwhelm
ingly-accepting-of-homosexuality/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2014/02/house-of-bishops
-pastoral-guidance-on-same-sex-marriage.aspx [accessed 11 June 2015].
https://www.kkkknights.com/ [accessed 11 June 2015].
 CHAPTER 14

Public Theology and Health Care

Frits de Lange

Introduction: Christianity, the ‘Religion of Healing’

Historically, health care is perhaps the key domain where the Christian church
started its public engagement. As the famous historian Adolf von Harnack
(1851–1930) wrote, Christianity started as ‘the religion of salvation and heal-
ing’. The early Christian community practiced ‘ “the medicine of soul and body”
and at the same time it recognized that ‘one of its cardinal duties was to care
assiduously for the sick in body’.1 As the synoptic gospels abundantly reveal,
healing was of central importance to Jesus’ mission. ‘Those who are well have
no need of a physician, but those who are sick’, he explained the why of his
ministry (Mark 2:17 and parallels). Throughout history, from the early Middle
Ages through imperial and missionary Europe until the post-colonial era, the
church, understanding itself as ‘the body of Christ’, has recognized health
care as one of its cardinal responsibilities. The historical claim—without ulte-
rior apologetic motives—that without the Church there would have been no
hospitals nor any publicly organized health care is not too far stretched: hos-
pitals are a fourth century, Christian invention. To take care of the sick and
needy, to alleviate their sufferings, and—if possible—to restore their health is
a perennial, essential part of the Christian vocation, because of the Christian
understanding of divine salvation as God’s compassionate care. In our times,
health care is predominantly a secular enterprise, dominated by methods of
natural sciences and advanced technologies. One of the reasons for Christians
to be present in the highly complex and differentiated world of late-modern
health care, however, is to constantly remind the health care sector—easily
colonized by the powers of money and market—at this divine compassion-
ate care, as the original ‘why’ and ‘what for’ of our care for human bodies
and minds.

1  ‘The Gospel of the Saviour and of Salvation’, in A. von Harnack, Mission and Expansion of
Christianity in the First Three Centuries. Translated and edited by James Moffat, 3 vols. (New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), pp. 121–151, at p. 131f. Quoted by Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine &
Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 64.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_016

326 de Lange

Public Theology: A Good Word for Salvation

Public theology can be described as ‘theology turned inside out’. It is a dynamic

style of doing theology, rather than a distinctive academic discipline. Academy,
church and society are the three audiences (David Tracy), but also the three
social settings (‘Sitz im Leben’) between where public theology is located and
is constantly moving back and forward. Public theology is a theology in dis-
placement, a theology ‘in-between’, keeping—and bringing, if necessary if
one of them opts for a ‘splendid isolation’—society, church and academy in
dialogue.2 Public theology requires the capability of its practitioners to switch
between audiences and languages, bringing them into an open, often inter-
disciplinary, dialogue. That’s why public theology is always contextual and
also a matter of personal talent. It is practiced by theologians who let them-
selves gladly be engaged in concrete debates, practices, and professional net-
works outside their departments and faculties, sometimes as the host, often
as a guest, but always as a reliable conversation partner. Public theology is
personal, also in the sense that it requires faith. Public theology is one of the
few academic disciplines in which existential commitments and intellectual
scholarship are combined. A public theologian has to be firmly rooted in the
Christian tradition, being personally captured, in some way or another, by
the truth of the gospel. Some public theologians, active in the domain of health
care develop an apologetic, church based style of witness (Gilbert Meilander,
Stanley Hauerwas), others opt for a more dialogical approach in which they
examine the practical wisdom of the Christian tradition (James Gustafson,
Paul Ramsey, Robin Gill). But in either way, there is advocacy, some kind of
‘evangelism’ in public theology3: public theologians want to put in a good word
for the Christian understanding of salvation.
Public theology is a practice, learned by doing, engaged in a respectful dia-
logue with health care professionals. There are some methodological and stra-
tegic lessons to be learned on the road: (1) A public theologian never sets the
conditions of the dialogue between Christian faith and the practice of health
care but already finds her- or himself involved and situated in complex politi-
cal, economic, and institutional environments and ongoing already estab-
lished discourses. (2) Though a public theologian needs to be an expert in the
field in order to be accepted and respected as a serious conversation partner,

2  Andrew R. Morton, ‘Duncan Forrester: A Public Theologian’, in William F. Storrar & Andrew
R. Morton (eds.), Public Theology for the 21th Century: Essays in Honour of Duncan B. Forrester
(London. New York: T & T Clark, 2004), pp. 25–37.
3  Morton, ‘Duncan Forrester’, p. 27.
Public Theology And Health Care 327

his or her contribution does not specifically consist of detailed solutions for
practical problems or in moral casuistry [medical ethics], but first and for all in
the critical evaluation of ‘social imaginaries’ by which health care practices are
inspired and motivated. What are the virtues and values health care policies
and institutions are driven by? What are the goals they set themselves? Public
theology often only reminds professionals and institutions to their original and
genuine mission, firmly rooted in the history of Christianity, on what ‘health’
really is and how good ‘care’ should be practiced. A vocation, easily lost and
forgotten in the turmoil of political and economic powers. In doing that job,
public theology does not stand alone, but can look for secular allies and gladly
cooperate with them.
Given this task, this chapter presents two contributions of public theology
to health care, one concerned with the goals of health care (what is health?),
the other with its values and virtues (what is good care?)

Healing and the Goals of Health Care

‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who
believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ (John 3:16) A theo-
logical reflection on health care needs to start with the experience of the love
of God and Jesus’ promise of an abundant life for those who share in it, as the
heart of Christian faith. (John 10:10) Christians, with other words, believe in
and experience a God who cares. Salvation is what happens when God cares
for us. The concept of care offers an accurate hermeneutic for the understand-
ing of God’s steadfast love (agape, mercy) for us. Care implies both an attitude
(caring about and for), as well as a concrete practice (taking care of). ‘God’s
‘care’ stands for a divine concern for vulnerable human beings, seeking to
promote their flourishing.4 The care of God is exemplified in Jesus’ healing,
as depicted in the synoptic gospels. Jesus’ compassionate and liberating care
for the vulnerable and those who suffer not only sets a standard for what good
care incorporates, but also questions—as we shall see further on—our com-
mon understandings of what ‘health’ entails.
Jesus’ healing performance was central to his mission. Most NT scholars
agree upon that. ‘It is almost certainly a part of the historical core of that
tradition’, Howard Clark Kee writes. ‘Jesus worked miracles, healed the sick

4  Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice in Love (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge UK: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2011), p. 105. By translating love with care it is presupposed by
Wolterstorff that God is vulnerable too, that he is and can be wronged as well.
328 de Lange

and cast out demons’, Gerd Theissen, a critical historical Jesus’ scholar, affirms.
According to him, the intensified form in which these events are presented in
the gospels is not only due to an afterwards embellishment in the process of
transmission, but goes back to Jesus himself: Jesus considered his healings not
as single miraculous events, but as integral parts in his public witness, semeia,
‘signs’ of the coming of the reign of God.5 The synoptic gospels contain plen-
tiful prove: there are about—his exorcisms included—forty accounts, cover-
ing the three years of his ministry, narrating Jesus’ healing of people struck
by blindness, deafness, leprosy, epilepsy, hemorrhaging, lameness. He even
resurrected the dead (Mark 5:21–24, 35–43; John 11:1–44). Whatever happened
according modern historiographical standards, Jesus must have been a power-
ful healer.
It is difficult to judge these accounts from the modern perspective of
advanced medicine. The experience and understanding of illness and health
in ancient times profoundly differed from ours.6 Greek medicine, going back
to Empeclodes’ (c. 490–430 B.C.) theory of four fluids, was widely spread
throughout the Hellenistic world. The body was supposed to contain four
fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), in analogy to the four ele-
ments earth, air, fire, and water. Many doctors believed disease was caused by
an imbalance of the humors of the body, and their treatment consisted of a
combination of dietetics and cathartic therapies (e.g. purging, or bloodletting).
Those who could not be helped were left to the vis medicatrix naturae, the
healing power of nature.7 In the Hellenistic world it was quite common to
explain diseases as having a natural cause, but in Judaism and early Christianity
sickness and disability were—religiously understood largely within the frame-
work of sin, either directly as individual responsibility, or indirectly as a gen-
eral human condition.8 In the world of early Christianity, people fled in their
sufferings and distress to physicians and a variety of healing practices. Both
miraculous (or: religious, ritual, magical) and natural healing practices were
common. Natural healing consisted of a physician’s therapies (as the evange-
list Luke must have been practicing) that ranged from folk remedies to home

5  Both authors quoted by Robin Gill, Health Care & Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 63.
6  Cf. Darrel W. Amundsen, Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval World
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996).
7  Fenrgren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 18.
8  Cf. Günter Thomas, Günter Thomas & Isolde Karle (eds.), Krankheitsdeutung in der postsäku-
laren Gesellschaft. Theologische Ansätze im interdisziplinären Gespräch (Stuttgart: Verlag W.
Kohlhammer, 2009), pp. 47–247.
Public Theology And Health Care 329

cures, traditional treatment, and herbal recipes. Jesus’ healings and exorcisms
seem to belong to the category ‘miraculous’.9 They are depicted as a powerful
manifestation of God’s coming reign. At the same time Jesus tried to break with
the religious approach of illness as a causal consequence of (individual) sin,
common in the Jewish world of his time.10 This opened ground for a through-
out natural explanation of illness and disease, inherited from the Greek. The
early Christians ultimately understood illness theologically as a manifestation
of God’s will, but at the same time as caused by nature.11 Magical healing was
not supported by Christians, until about the 4th century.12 Miraculous healings
and exorcisms however continued to be practiced in post-eastern Christian
community, as accounted for in the Book of Acts (3:1–11; 5:15–16; 8:6–7,
14:8–0; 16:16–18; 19:13–17; 28:8. Cf. also 1 Cor. 10: 19–21 for Paul listing healings as
a gift of God to the church for ministry) though at a lower rate and intensity as
during Jesus’ ministry.13

Cure and Care

How to evaluate these New Testament accounts of healing from a modern

Enlightenment point of view? Though not conclusive, the distinction between
healing and curing might be helpful here. Etiological diagnosis and functional
therapy are the ultimate aims of modern medicine. Therefore, we can make
distinctions between disease, as the loss of functions of parts, illness as a dis-
tressful state of being culturally agreed upon as belonging to the competence
of medicine, and sickness as a subjective experience of not feeling well. Curing,
as the successful restoration of bodily functions, is a relatively new ands revolu-
tionary phenomenon in the history of medicine, starting with modern surgery
and 19th century antibiotics.14 The assumptions of healing in the ancient world
of the New Testament—as still in large parts of the non-western world—,

9  By Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p.4f. defined as ‘extraordinary events that results
from the intervention of a divine power beyond the normal course of nature.’
10  Ruben Zimmermann, Krankheit und Sünde im Neuen Testament am Beispiel von Mk 2,
1–12‘ in Thomas & Karle (eds.), Krankheitsdeutung, pp. 242, 246.
11  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 43.
12  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, pp. 79–81. Cf. Also Thomas Staubli, Amulette:
Altbewährte Therapeutica zwischen Theology und Medizin‘, in Thomas & Karle, eds,
Krankheitsdeutung, pp. 91–115.
13  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 47f.
14  Cf. Michael Bliss, The Making of Modern Medicine. Turning Points in the Treatment of
Disease (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
330 de Lange

however, were radically different. Illness was regarded not as a natural acci-
dent, but as a deplorable state of being. The essence of healing then consists
in the restoration of meaning to life, even when this means that one comes
to grips with a disease, instead of being cured of.15 Modern Western medi-
cine nowadays is primarily concerned with active doing and achieving, as the
future oriented individualism of its culture: illness equals ‘no longer being able
to do this or that’. In the ancient world healing is about states of being. ‘What
a Western reader might interpret as a loss of function (being blind, deaf, mute,
leprosy), an ancient reader would see as a disvalued state of being.’16 Though
the distinction between healing and curing itself is also a modern one, it opens
the eye for the comprehensive character of Jesus’ healing ministry, embodying
God’s compassionate and powerful care for the sufferer. The healing he offered,
involved that the sick and disabled were given back to their loved ones, and
could live a respectful life on their own again. As the deceased Lazarus was
given back to his sisters (John 11: 1–46), this did not mean that he’d never had to
die again. ‘‘Healing’ should be understood as a complement, not as an alterna-
tive to modern medicine. ‘Curing’ is one element—and not always the decisive
one—in a comprehensive understanding of health care.
After Eastern, early Christianity continued as a ‘religion of healing’. The
theme of ‘Christus medicus’ became a popular theme and a commonplace for
Christian writers from the second to the fifth century. Christ was presented
metaphorically as the healer of mankind. Jesus became the ideal physician
who unselfishly succors the ill, and cures the sin-sick souls, qualities that were
associated with both Hippocrates and Asclepius, the god of Greek medicine.17
The image of Christ as iatros was used as an analogy to, not as a replacement
of medical care. What the physician is to the body, Christ, the Ultimate Healer,
is to the soul. Again, a natural explanation of the causes and cures of illness
seems to be generally presupposed and widely accepted among Christians.
The second century apologists Tertullian (c. 160–225) is well known for his
critical stance towards Greek philosophy and the phrase: ‘What indeed does
Athens have to do with Jerusalem?’ (The Prescription against Heretics, 7) At
the same time, he praised the healing art and considered medicine a gift of
God.18 In that, he was joined by other church fathers from Origin (c. 185–254)

15  John Pilch, Healing in the New Testament, Insights from Medical and Mediterranean
Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000, p. 141, as referred to by Gill, Health Care,
p.74.
16  Pilch, Healing in the New Testament, p. 25, as quoted in Gill, Health Care, p. 73.
17  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 30.
18  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p 26.
Public Theology And Health Care 331

to Augustine (354–430), though Ambrose cautions that one’s faith should be in

God, not in medicine. It is the power of God that heals, the physician being its
intermediate.19
A biblical informed, comprehensive understanding of healing can fuel the
public discussion about the definition of health and the goals of health care.
Thanks to science, modern medicine made revolutionary progress in its abili-
ties to cure. As the early Christians and church fathers, we should welcome
this as a gift of God and work on its advancement. But as long as the human
condition prevails, we will be confronted with the finiteness, vulnerability, and
dependency of our bodies and minds, and with its pain and distress. People
will continue to be born with or acquire disabilities during their life time,
and will depend on the care of others. This is not the place to assess and evalu-
ate the aspirations of ‘transhumanism’, the philosophical movement which
would like to enhance the human body and mind’s constitution so radically
that illness and even mortality will be eliminated.20 Even if half of its—far
from modest—scenarios will come true, people still will suffer and die of phys-
ical and mental distress, and will have come to terms with that. Technological
fixes cannot answer existential questions. Therefore, for people suffering and
dying, ‘medicine’ is not enough; they need ‘health care’.
‘To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always,’—this Hippocratic
aphorism is still accurate, not in spite of but as a consequence of the progress
of cure. Due to the improved life conditions, a low birth rate, the success of
advanced medicine in many parts of the world, populations are rapidly age-
ing. As in old age the risk of co-morbidity and chronic illness increases, health
care in ageing societies is undergoing a shift ‘from cure to care’. Long term care
is not only to be provided to the disabled and handicapped, but also to the
very old. Instead of improving one’s health condition at the threshold of death,
medical overtreatment deteriorates the quality of life.
The complementarity of cure and care also becomes evident in the treat-
ment of cancer and other—up until now recently fatal—ailments, where life
chances have considerably been ameliorated in the last decades. Previous
lethal diseases now allow for at least a partial recovery. ‘Curing’ cancer,

19  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 61. Ferngren concludes that early Christians ‘viewed
disease and physical impairments as part of the natural order of a fallen world what was
under the dominion of sin and yet providentially ordered by a sovereign God.’
20  Nick Bostrom, ‘Transhumanist Values’ in Frederick Adams (ed.), Ethical Issues for the
21st Century, (Philosophical Documentation Center Press, 2003); reprinted in Review
of Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 4, May (2005) [http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/
values.html].
332 de Lange

however, is not (not yet?) at issue. Many people live in remission; they have
to live permanently with their cancer or chronic disease. Arthur W. Frank sug-
gests that we are now living in a ‘remission society’, in which the distinction
between being a patient and being healthy no longer applies, and people stay
under treatment for their life time.21 For the restoration of meaning in their
lives, a strict technological approach of their health condition is not sufficient.
Here, as in analogue cases, the physician is an important but not the only, nor
the most central health care professional involved. Cure needs to be embedded
in practices of multidisciplinary healing.

Health: The Ability to Live Upright

What is healing? To tell a story is perhaps better than to give a definition. Jesus’
parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke.10:25ff) informed and shaped the practice
of faith based health care throughout the ages and can be taken as a biblical
paradigm of the Christian understanding of salvation.22 Following Nietzsche,

21  A.W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller. Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press 1995), pp. 8–13, at p. 9: ‘In modernist thought people are well
or sick. (. . .) In the remission society the foreground and background of sickness con-
stantly shade into each other. (. . .) Parsons’s modernist “sick role” carries the expectation
that ill people get well, cease to be patients, and return to their normal obligations. In the
remission society people return, but their obligations are never again what used to be
normal.’ In the remission society, the patient is always in between a state of health and
illness, without a passport for the kingdom of health or the kingdom of the sick (Susan
Sontag), but with a permanent visa status requiring periodic renewal. ‘The triumph of
modern medicine is to allow increasing numbers of people who would have been dead to
enjoy this visa status, living in the world of the healthy even always subject to expulsion.’
22  Cf. Ralf van Bühren, Die Werke der Barmherzigkeit in der Kunst des 12.–18. Jahrhunderts.
Zum Wandel eines Bildmotivs vor dem Hintergrund neuzeitlicher Rhetorikrezeption,
Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1998. Representations of the story of
the Good Samaritan are known to exist from the fourth century onward. The allegori-
cal interpretation, in which the Samaritan serves as a model for Christ, is dominant and
will remain so for centuries. The story is read as a symbolical expression of the cosmic
salvation history. The man is Adam, Jerusalem is paradise, Jericho the world, the rob-
bers are humanity’s evil traits, the priest represents the Law, the Levite the prophets, the
Samaritan is Christ, and the inn is the church. From the Renaissance onward, however,
attention begins to be paid to the story itself. The human drama in the scene is magni-
fied. The corporeality, the drama, the subjectivity of agents—they are all allowed to speak
their own language. Their artistic display aims to stir something up in the observer, to
entice him or her to have compassion.
Public Theology And Health Care 333

the Christian ethic of compassion is often criticised as condescending and

paternalistic: the powerful Samaritan bending over the powerless victim,
reconfirming his dependency. The way Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) painted
the narrative (easily accessible at the internet) induces another reading of the
parable.23 The representation is classical in the sense that here too it shows
the Levite and the priest moving away. The opened and empty trunk points
to the robbery that has taken place. But the representation is special, because
any reference to a paternalistic ethics of philanthropy is absent here. The
Samaritan is just a common man from the people, with his sleeves rolled up
and wearing plain slippers on his feet. His horse is a mule, far from regally
harnessed. As he tries to help him onto the horse, the traveller having pity
is located underneath the victim. The Samaritan’s assistance, raising the vic-
tim on his horse, is hard physical work, as health care often is. The goal of the
Samaritan’s compassionate care is not to a create servile dependency ‘from
above’, but in putting him in the saddle to exalt him, or, without metaphor: to
restore and strengthen the victim’s ability to live a meaningful life on his own
again. He tries to raise the victim, to resurrect the sufferer. Is not the Greek word
for human being, anthropos, derived from ana-trepein, to lift up something, to
raise high? The sick human being, laying down, is a creature meant to move
about with ‘aufrechten Gang’ (Immanuel Kant), to live upright, in a status
erectus, with dignity. The care giver humbles himself in order to let the Other
be exalted.24

23  In the following, I use some passages published previously in: Frits de Lange, Loving Later
Life. An Ethics of Aging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eeerdmans 2015), p. 132.
24  Gerd Theissen, The Religion of the Earliest Churches. Creating a Symbolic World
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1999), pp. 63–80, describes how the early Christian ethos
was characterized by a double movement: humiliation and exaltation. Out of his love for
humanity God renounces his divine status and humbles himself by becoming a human
being. In Jesus, God liberates humanity from its misery and guilt, becoming one flesh with
us. Alongside humiliation there is exaltation: the risen Jesus, God incarnated, partakes in
the position and the power of God as the risen one. Redemption means to participate in
Christ’ resurrection and reign in his Kingdom, being seated at the right left side of Christ
(cf. Math. 20: 20; Acts. 2:26f.; 3:21; 20:6, symbasileia). The double movement of humility
and exaltation in Christian ethics follows the divine example of God: ‘. . . whoever wants
to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must
be slave of all. (Mark 10:43, 44 NIV; cf. 9.35, Math 23:11)’. As Joel James Shuman & Keith
G. Meador, Heal Thyself, Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity (Oxford
New York: Oxford University Press 2003), p. 126 argue ‘all of the healing stories in the New
Testament must be read through the lens of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead (. . .)
Just as the resurrection is the ultimate sign of the Kingdom and its victory over sin, sick-
ness, and death, so are the healing stories incremental signs of that same victory.’
334 de Lange

The telos of health care according to this understanding of the gospel,

should be to contribute to a person’s capability to ‘live upright’.25 The French
nurse practitioner and philosopher Philippe Svandra summarized this under-
standing of the goals of health care in a secular definition of health care as
‘the organized activity which makes it possible to give back to a vulnerable
person the abilities which, temporarily or definitively, he/ she has lost at a cer-
tain moment in his/her life.’ The task of the care giver then consists ‘in helping
him/her to give back a horizon to his/her life again, opening up a new field of
possibilities. To strengthen the autonomy of patients means helping them to
regain the abilities which allow them to realize what they value.’26 In a similar
manner, Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics defines health as ‘the strength for
human life’. ‘Health means capability, vigour and freedom. It is strength
for human life. (. . .) If man [sic!] may and should will to live then obviously he
may and should also will to be healthy and therefore to be in the possession of
this strength too.’27 Health—in the restricted, negative sense of: the absence
of disease—is not a goal in itself, but allows people the capability (‘Fähigkeit’)
to exercise the psychical and physical functions, required to live a meaningful
human life. Health—now understood as the strength to be human—serves
human existence in the form of capacity, vitality and freedom to exercise the
psychical and physical functions, just as these themselves are only functions of
human existence.’28 Who falls ill, is not necessary unhealthy, in the sense that
to him or her the strength to be human is lacking. There has been an assault
on the functions that support him or her in this capability, but the strength of
being human may remain unbroken.
An essential element in both health care and spiritual care, according to this
approach, is to appeal to the patient’s own ‘will to be healthy’.29 To someone

25  In terms of ethical theory: from a consequentialist point of view the main goal of an eth-
ics of health care should not be the promotion of one subjective well-being, or meeting
one’s preferences or wants, but—as the so-called ‘capability approach’ defends—more
fundamentally, the optimal restoration of one’s capability to lead the sort of life that, and
be the person who they have reasons to value. (cf. Amartya Senn, Development as freedom.
Oxford New York: Oxford University Press 1999, p. 63).
26  Philippe Svandra, Éloge du soin. Une éthique au coeur de la vie—Sources philosophiques,
pratique et conditions de l’engagement soignant (Parios : Seli Arslan 2009), p. 147.
27  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4, eds. G.W. Bromily and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh:
T & T Clark, 1961), p. 356.
28  Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 357.
29  Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 358. cf. H.-M. Rieger ‘Gesundheit als Kraft zum Menschsein.
Karl Barths Ausführungen zur Gesundheit als Anstoß für gesundheitstheoretische und
medizinethische Überlegungen‘, in Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik 52 (2008), pp. 183–199.
Public Theology And Health Care 335

who has to live permanently with limitations and handicaps, the will to live
healthy means exploring ánd exploiting the strength to live fully with his or her
limitations. Did the victim in the parable of the Good Samaritan fully recover
of the afflictions the robbers caused him? In what condition did he leave the
inn where the Samaritan left him? We don’t know, he might be have stayed dis-
abled for the rest of his life. But if he regained his strength of life and his ability
to lead a meaningful life again, we may call him healed.

Intrinsic and Instrumental Definitions of Health

How one defines health, determines the targets of health care policy. In 1948
the World Health Organization adopted an intrinsic definition of health, not
amended since then: ‘health is a state of complete physical, mental and social
well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’30 In its all-com-
passing ambition, the definition has eschatological overtones. It reminds the
biblical shalom, a state of wholeness. It rejects the mere negative definition
of health as a biological provision, broadly supported by the 19th en 20th cen-
tury’s successes in medical technology and pharmacology. It opens the eye for
the psychological, spiritual, sociological, economic and political conditions
and dimensions of healing. But precisely because it alludes to a cosmic scope
of salvation, it should be critically approached by public theology. We should
not mix up the signs (semeia) of the kingdom (health and healing) with the
Kingdom of God itself (eternal salvation). Health care cannot eliminate, only
alleviate the brokenness of creation. The healing of the body and the mind
offers a foretaste of eternal salvation, but is not its realization.
The WHO definition is very ambitious. It has, since its introduction, fueled
the efforts of international bodies (WHO and UN) in its struggle against
diseases world wide. It has been the leading vision behind the Millennium
Development Goals, the UN initiative adopted in 2000. Child mortality, mater-
nal health and HIV/AIDS are three of the eight targeted goals, and significantly
progress has been made on these issues over the last fifteen years. Because
of its broader scope, the definition of health as an overall state of well-being
keeps an open eye for the connection between poverty and disease. Health is a

30  Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the
International Health Conference, New York, 19–22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946
by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization,
no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.The Definition has not been amended
since 1948.
336 de Lange

throughout political and economic affair. However, the WHO definition appears
very difficult to operationalize, both in developing and developed countries. In
many situations, striving for the total eradication of illness as a policy goal is
not realistic; often it is better to learn people (for example: elderly with chronic
health condition) live the best as possible. Instrumental or functional concepts
of health, as e.g. recently developed by the Dutch physician Machteld Huber
seem more appropriate: health is ‘the ability to adapt and to self manage, in the
face of social, physical and emotional challenges.’31 An instrumental concept
of health and healing also puts into broader perspective the exclusive role of
biomedicine and the physician in the practice of integral health care. The doc-
tor represents one, though important, component in the professional chain.
Further, a functional approach of health that takes ‘the ability to live upright’
as its goal respects the diversity and uniqueness of human beings in the goals
they have set for their lives. It avoids totalizing concepts of health. What it
means to live a meaningful life is different for each person. Health care should
not prescribe what a happy life consists of. An eschatological proviso resists
the medicalization of society.

Early Christianity: Compassion and the Image of God

The science of biomedicine stayed a ‘Greek’ affair throughout its history, also
after its revolutionary developments in the last centuries. The decisive con-
tribution of Christianity for health care lies elsewhere, both historically, and
theologically. Through Christianity, health care became a matter of public
responsibility. In the world of antiquity health care was regarded as a private
affair, available for those who could afford it. Good works (euergesia) were
practiced by the aristocracy in order to obtain public recognition and to avoid
social chaos. There was no public support system for the destitute, the sick and
the dying, outside the family. Through Christianity, then, health care became
a public affair, a religious obligation and a moral responsibility for all, a matter
of institutionalized compassion.
In the middle of the second century, Christianity had spread through the
major cities of the Roman empire. Churches started an active ministry of care

31  M. Huber, J.A. Knottnerus, L. Green, et al. ‘How should we define health?’ in BMJ 2011;343
(4163):235–237. Cf. also Machteld Huber, Towards a New, Dynamic concept of Health. Its
operationalisation and use in public health and healthcare, and in evaluating health effects
of food. PhD 2014, Maastricht University. [(http://www.caphri.nl/data/files/alg/id547/
Thesis%20Machteld%20Huber.pdf].
Public Theology And Health Care 337

for the poor, the sick and the dying. Christians opposed the exposure of infants,
infanticide, and abortion. Life, both born and unborn, became to be publicly
valued. Charitable institutions (xenodocheia) were founded, run by deacons.32
Public health care can be dated back to bishop Cyprian of Cartago (c. 210–258),
who, around 250, took up a leading role during a devastating plague, probably
caused by measles or smallpox. The officials did nothing, but Cyprian enjoined
the Christians care for the sick and the dying, and to bury the dead, believers
and pagans alike.33 He urged the rich to donate funds, and the poor to vol-
unteer. At the height of the great epidemic mentioned above, around 260,
Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (c. 190–264) wrote in a pastoral Easter letter
to Christians from his local congregation, many of whom lost their lives while
caring for others:

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never
sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger,
they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and minister-
ing to them in Christ . . . Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred
their death to themselves and died in their stead.34

The behavior of Christians made emperor Julian (reigning from 355–363)

jealous: ‘Nothing has contributed to the progress of the superstition of the
Christians as their charity to strangers . . . the impious Galileans provide not
only for their own poor, but for ours as well.’ He urged his subjects, to ‘erect
many hostels, one in each city, in order that strangers may enjoy my kind-
ness, not only those of our own faith but also of others whosoever is in want
of money.’ Christian health care became strongly motivated by personal faith,
but at the same time an institutionalized public responsibility. Around 360,
Basil ‘the Great’ (329/330–379) founded in Cappadocia what is considered to
be the very first hospital (from the Latin hospes, Lt. stranger, foreigner, guest,

32  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 124.

33  See Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, pp. 115–124.
34  After having described at length how the Christian community nursed the sick and dying
and even spared nothing in preparing the dead for a proper burial, he noted:
 ‘The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they
pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the road before
they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread
and contagion of the fatal disease; but do what they might, they found it difficult to escape.’
Quoted by Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
1997), p. 82f ., who makes plausible that bishop Dionysios described real characteristic
Christian behaviour.
338 de Lange

and hospitium, place of hospitality), with a staff of physicians and nurses. A

model and predecessor of hospitals established throughout the world, and
rooted in Christian medical or missionary charity. Early Christianity hereby
induced a decisive ‘change in the social imagination’35 that still deeply marks
contemporary health care practice.36
While medicine is rooted in Athena, care comes from Galilee. The first
teaches you how to treat, the second who you should care for and why. Christian
agape is embedded in the Eucharistic sharing of God’s compassion, incarnated
in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. A few theological convictions
originally served as the impetus for this comprehensive and inclusive vision on
the practice health care. First, the concept of imago Dei: the belief that every
human being reflects God’s image. It has strong implications for the protec-
tion of human life (Gen. 1:26–27), all the more when it is radicalized in the
light of the doctrine of Incarnation, and God is also seen present in the least
of Jesus’ brethren. In the Clementine Homilies, written sometime before 380,
we can read: ‘Ye are the image of the invisible God. (. . .) Therefore it behooves
you to give honor to the image of God, which is human—in this wise: food to
the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, care to the sick, shel-
ter to the stranger, and visiting him who is in prison, to help him as you can.’
(Cf. Matthew 25:35–36, 45).37
Ferngren38 distinguishes four important consequences for practical ethics
in the Christian understanding of the imago Dei: (1) it gave a strong impetus to
the motivation of caring for other’s well-being, as no longer associated with a
general civil kindness (philanthropia), but rooted in the personal experience of
God’s compassionate love. Health care then is no longer a matter of contract
(do ut des) between a care giver and care receiver, but driven by a logic of abun-
dance, the experience of grace: I give because I have been given to (do quia

35  Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England), p. 74.
36  The public character of health care is not only threatened by commercialism, but also by
innovative technologies. Until recently, medicine circled around the professional author-
ity of the medical doctor, institutionalized in the hospital. The convergence of bio-, nano-
and information technology applied to the world of biomedicine provokes a shift from
curative to preventive care. The increasing power of technology in health care makes
health into a matter of bio-politics and ‘technologies of the self’ (Michel Foucault). Health
care is moved out of the public institutions, by making individuals privately responsible
for their own health. Social risks such as illness and poverty are transformed into prob-
lems of ‘self-care’.
37  Quoted by Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, p. 99.
38  Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, pp. 97–104.
Public Theology And Health Care 339

mihi datum est); (2) it stands for the intrinsic value of every human being as a
bearer of the image of God, regardless one’s social status; (3) it entails a posi-
tive perception of the human body. If the Word took on flesh in the Incarnation
(John 1:1), it can no longer be devaluated in a body-mind dualism. (4) it lead
to a redefinition and recognition of the poor as the primary receivers of health
care.39 The poor no longer represent a threat for public order, but they are shar-
ing in the Eucharistic solidarity of the members of the ‘body of Christ’. The
disabled are not to be treated and marginalized as social outcasts, but as full
members in right of society, sanctified, because they mirror the face of Christ.
These fundamental convictions still provide public theology today with
strong principles, to be brought in persuasively in the domain of health care:
while health care is subjected to the powers of money and market, these theo-
logical intuitions stress the importance of justice as equal access to and distri-
bution of health care. Health care is not a privilege but a basic right. It depends
not on the capricious mercy of some, but on the solidarity of all. Poverty and
illness are closely related. As Denise Ackermann observed in her home coun-
try South Africa: ‘It is no coincidence that 90 percent of people infected with
HIV live in developing countries. Here, 800 million people lack access to clean
water and are wanting for basic health care and perinatal care, primary edu-
cation, nutrition and sanitation, all of which grievously affect their physical
well-being and make them vulnerable to disease. Not only do people living
in poverty suffer general loss of health but they are forced to adopt survival
strategies that expose them to health risks. Families break up as men seek work
in cities where they meet women, themselves under economic duress, who
are willing to trade sexual access for a roof over their heads and some finan-
cial support. Inevitably less money reaches families back in the rural areas and
poverty spirals.’40
The Christian ethos can be summarized in the word compassion: the heart
that opens itself to the misery of others.41 Two Biblical stories have informed
and shaped the ethics of compassion in health care throughout the ages. In the

39  ‘In a sense, it was the Christian bishops who invented the poor. They rose to leadership
in late Roman society by bringing the poor into ever-sharper focus.’ Brown, Poverty and
Leadership, pp. 8–9.
40  D.M. Ackermann, ‘Seeing HIV and AIDS As a gendered pandemic’, in Dutch Reformed
Theological Journal/ Ned. Geref. teologies Tydskrif, Vol. 45, nr. 2, supplementum 2004,
pp. 214–220.
41  Marcus J. Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity Press International, 1998 (2nd ed.)), especially pp. 135–156. See also his The Heart
of Christianity. Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).
340 de Lange

first place the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke.10:25ff.). The Samaritan is
the neighbor, who spontaneously interrupts his journey and takes care of the
victim. In the second place Jesus’ announcement and description of the last
judgment in Matthew 25, 31–45. Every human being, without distinction, will
be subject to the same test: has he or she not had compassion with the needy
neighbor, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of
these, you did not do for me.’ (Math. 25:45). From the late Middle Ages onwards
the six works mentioned by Jesus were referred to as the Corporal Works of
Mercy and were included—together with the work of burying the dead based
on a passage in the book of Tobit (1,17f.; 2,8)—in the religious instruction and
moral theology of the church. The Good Samaritan—that is compassion as
interruption, as excess, as moment, as spontaneity. Conversely, the works of
mercy, neatly codified into seven moral maxims, attempt to institutionalize
compassion. Mercy, not as a burning necessity, but as a ‘normal’ social duty.
Compassion is, as St. Augustine puts it in one place, sorrow ‘on behalf of’
the other (City of God XIV, 9). In our compassion the all-pervading presence
of God’s compassion manifests itself. The subject­-object distinction is a meth-
odological reduction that proves to be quite helpful in biomedical technol-
ogy, but disastrous for the practice of health care.42 Modern moral philosophy
separates and isolates the individual subject from others as objects of care. In
contrast, in the event of compassion one is bodily invaded by the other’s suf-
fering, without being able to exactly separate what are my feelings and what
are hers. There is a commonality of suffering there, ‘a Fellowship of those who
bear the Mark of Pain’ (Albert Schweitzer).43 In the event of compassion an
original receptivity manifests itself in the heart of my interiority.44 The ethical
self awakens when the call of the other is responded to. The philosopher Paul
Ricoeur, in a text written during and after the sickbed of his wife, describes
compassion ‘not as a moaning-with, as pity, commiseration, figures of regret,

42  ‘Medicine cannot help but see the body as an anticipatory corpse’, Jeffrey P. Bishop,
The Anticipatory Corpse. Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame, IN,
University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), p. 278, himself a physician, argues.
43  ‘The Fellowship of those who bear the Mark of Pain. Who are the members of this
Fellowship? Those who have learned by experience what physical pain and bodily
anguish mean, belong together all the world over; they are united by a secret bond.’
(Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (A. C. Black Ltd.: London, 1924)
pp. 173f.)).
44  The concept of ‘altruism’ does not capture the experience, but is just an egoism upside
down in its presupposition of an isolated ego. Cf. Emmanuel Housset, L’intériorité d’exil.
Le soi au risqué de l’altérité (Cerf: Paris 2008), p. 317.
Public Theology And Health Care 341

it is a struggling-with, an accompanying.’45 In the decision to stay, and not to

flee, a decision often taken pre-reflexively with the body, the ‘we’ of common
suffering transforms itself into a responsible ‘I’, taking care of a unique ‘Thou’.
‘It’s you, and no one else, who should stay with me’. The answer: ‘Me voici’,
‘here I am’—is the place of birth of a caring self. Suffering binds us together
in a primordial commonality, but also individualizes, in making our personal
presence irreplaceable.46

Conclusion: An Ethics of Care

As mentioned in the introduction, public theology in health care should look

for allies and gladly work together with them. The ‘ethics of care’, developed
since the 1980s at first by secular feminist thinkers47, presents itself as a fruit-
ful conversation partner and powerful ally. It reminds health care to its basic
commitments and objectives, as seen from a Christian perspective: compas-
sionate care for vulnerable people, in line with Jesus’ healing practice and his
ministry of the reign of God. The ethics of care liberates health care ethics
from its narrow focus in the 19th and 20th century on the doctor’s agency and
moral dilemmas. Care is not to be viewed as a product, delivered by medical
professionals in private or public institutional environments, but as the funda-
ment of all relationships in society. The scope of health care ethics therefore
needs to be broader than ‘medical ethics’, as paradigmatically exemplified in
the ‘four principle ethics’ of Beauchamp and Childress,48 and also consider the
political conditions under which the responsibility for care is taken.

45  Paul Ricoeur, Living Up to Death. transl. by David Pellauer (Chicago and London: Chicago
University Press 2009), p. 17.
46  The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–38) then should not be read as an ‘exam-
ple story’ (‘Beispielserzählung’) (as Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (Tübingen:
Mohr Diebeck Tübingen, 1910), p. 146 does) about moral heroism. The Samaritan is not
an ethical hero. He differs from the priest and Levite only in the sense that he could not
resist, was lured into, and consented eventually in letting himself been overridden by the
physical distress of the victim in the ditch. Why caring? Because you cannot do otherwise.
47  Virginia Held,The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006], p. 26) locates the beginnings of the ethics of care with a pioneering essay
called ‘Maternal Thinking’ by philosopher Sara Ruddick published in 1980. Important fig-
ures to be mentioned, among others, are also Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Eva Feder
Kittay, Joan Tronto, Selma Sevenhuijsen, and Annelies van Heijst.
48  Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, The Principles of Biomedical Ethics Seventh
Edition 2012, Oxford: Oxford University Press). ‘Beauchamp and Childress’ is a classic in
342 de Lange

Care is what makes humans primarily human. Cura ego sum, I care, there-
fore I am. That is the basic empirical or phenomenological claim the ethics
of care puts forward.49 Or rather—because every human being is a mother’s
child—I am being cared for, therefore I am. The ethics of care defends a rela-
tional and interdependent conceptions of persons, in contrast to neo-liberal
individualism. Our relationships are a constitutive part of our identity. Central
to the ethics of care is the recognition that (1) human beings are dependent and
vulnerable. How we flourish, depends on the care given to us; (2) care- induc-
ing emotions as empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness need to be cultivated;
(3) care claims of particular others with whom we share actual relationships
need to be respected; (4) traditional notions about the public and the private
character of care responsibilities need to be questioned.50
Public theology has to remind its conversation partner in the domain
of health care constantly of its genuine relational character.51 Care entails
both attitude as well as action, and summons God’s concern for his creation.
Political philosopher Joan Tronto integrated both elements in a description of
the phases of a dynamic care relationship between vulnerable, finite, depen-
dent human beings.52 It can be applied to all kinds of informal and formal care
settings (family, education, welfare), professional health care included. Care is
a process with four interconnected elements, each associated with a key moral
category. Seen from a theological point of view, her model corresponds to the
paradigmatic event in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The first phase is

the field of medical ethics. The first edition was published in 1979 and identified the four
principles of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice, which
have to be weighed and balanced in each case, in order to solve medical dilemmas.
49  Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1994), p. 103 defines care on the most general level ‘as a species activity that
includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can
live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environ-
ment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.’ Cf., also
Leonardo Boff, Essential Care. An ethics of human nature (Waco: Baylor University Press,
2007). From a theological perspective, see Ruth E. Groenhout’s publications, Theological
Echoes in an Ethic of Care (Notre Dame: Erasmus Institute, 2003), Connected Lives: Human
Nature and an Ethics of Care (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004), and
her essay ‘I Can’t Say No: Self-Sacrifice and an Ethics of Care’, in: Ruth E. Groenhout &
Marya Bower (eds.), Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith (Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University press, 2003), 152–174.
50  Held, The Ethics of Care, pp. 9–13.
51  For the following: Frits de Lange, In andermans handen. Flow en grenzen in de zorg
(Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2011), pp. 36–55.
52  Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp. 105–108.
Public Theology And Health Care 343

caring about, perceiving the need for care, with attentiveness as its core moral
moment. ‘When he saw him, he was moved with pity’, the parable reads. (Luke
10: 33) Seeing the whole person in distress, not just screening him with a partial
‘clinical gaze’, is the first step towards compassionate care. The second is tak-
ing care of, taking concrete steps that care gets started, with responsibility as
the crucial moral attitude. While the Priest and Levite pass by, the Samaritan
comes near, responds. He cannot escape the victim’s appeal and awakens as
an ethical, responsible self. The third phase is care-giving, the actual hands-on
work of care, with competence as main moral notion. The Samaritan bandages
the victim’s wounds, pours oil and wine on them, puts him on his animal,
brings him to an inn. The final phase is care receiving, with responsiveness as
moral guideline Without the victim’s consenting response to the Samaritan’s
help his care would not have been successful.
Tronto’s elements of the care relationship also remind the basic features
of Jesus’ healing practice. As Robin Gill analyzed, Jesus’ healings were char-
acterized by some distinctive features: compassion, care, humility, and faith.53
‘Moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes’, we read about his healing
of two blind men at Jericho (Math 20: 34).54 Jesus’ healings were no isolated
medical interventions, but the manifestation of a deep affective concern with
the distressed, trying to remediate their suffering. The bodily closeness with
the sick was striking: he touched (Mark 1, 40–1), put his fingers (Mark 7, 32–3),
laid his hands on (Mark 5, 22–3), took by the hands (Mark 9, 21–2, 27). Second,
Jesus took care of the sick, both in the sense of ‘caring about’ and actively and
effectively ‘caring for’. Caring about implies a concern for the whole person.
Healing a leper for instance (Mark 1, 40–5), is more than curing a contagious
disease; it is bringing someone back to the community from which he was
excluded. Thirdly, ‘your faith has made you well’ (Mark 5, 34) is read in some
fifteen synoptic healing accounts. It expresses the role of confident trust and
mutuality in the healing process; in Jesus as the healer, and in God as the ulti-
mate power of salvation. Tronto does not mention humility as a genuine care
characteristic. Jesus, however, shows—in at least ten of the gospel’s healing
stories—a remarkable reticence or restraint in making claims about himself
in his healing ministry. The power of his healing does not belong to himself,
but to God as Creator and Savior. As a virtuous ingredient of a genuine care
relationship it represents an effective antidote to paternalistic behavior in
health care. Humility is to be considered a cardinal virtue in health care too.

53  For a full account, see Gill, Health Care and Christian Ethics, pp. 75–93.
54  ‘Mercy or compassion features in several forms within the Synoptic healing stories (with
a weighting of at least fourteen). Gill, Health Care and Christian Ethics, p. 79.
344 de Lange

The world of contemporary health care is endlessly more complex than it was
in the gospel’s times. Still, Jesus’ healing practice, as the embodiment of God’s
compassionate care provides strong criteria for a quality assessment of ‘secu-
lar’, professional health care.55 In the midst of the pressures of the market and
the state, the memoria Christi constantly confronts the health care sector and
its policy makers with the question: are we participating in God’s care?

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Gespräch (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2009), pp. 91–115.
Svandra, Philippe. Éloge du soin. Une éthique au coeur de la vie—Sources philosophiques,
pratique et conditions de l’engagement soignant (Parios : Seli Arslan 2009).
Theissen, Gerd. The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1999).
Thomas, Günter, Günter Thomas & Isolde Karle, eds., Krankheitsdeutung in der
postsäkularen Gesellschaft. Theologische Ansätze im interdisziplinären Gespräch
(Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2009).
Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1994).
van Bühren, Ralf. Die Werke der Barmherzigkeit in der Kunst des 12.–18. Jahrhunderts.
Zum Wandel eines Bildmotivs vor dem Hintergrund neuzeitlicher Rhetorikrezeption
(Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1998).
von Harnack, Adolf. ‘The Gospel of the Saviour and of Salvation’, in Adolf von Harnack,
Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. Translated and
edited by James Moffat, 3 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), pp. 121–151.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice in Love (Grand Rapids/ Cambridge UK: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011).
Zimmermann, Ruben. ‘Krankheit und Sünde im Neuen Testament am Beispiel von Mk 2,
1–12‘, in Thomas, Günter, Günter Thomas & Isolde Karle, eds., Krankheitsdeutung in
der postsäkularen Gesellschaft: Theologische Ansätze im interdisziplinären Gespräch
(Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2009).
 Part 4
Public Theology, Ethics and Civil Societies

∵
 CHAPTER 15

Whence Climate Injustice

Larry Rasmussen

Here is Part 1 of the four-part thesis: The modern world puts capitalism before
creation. Creation is thereby eclipsed, save one exception. Capitalism pro-
cesses creation as the décor for the human, with nature the world storehouse
and the engineered environment the preferred habitat.
Part 2: The eclipse of creation and the subjugation of life to capitalist
imagination is also the eclipse of the sacred. The natural world as a commu-
nity of kindred subjects and the bearer of mystery and spirit is nostalgia, if a
memory at all. When everything is for sale, the numinous is leeched away like
water from sand. Awe and wonder fade as the full drama of life in the natural
world—death and renewal, birth and rebirth, life lost and emergent—eludes
our waking hours. Even miracles of seedtime, growth and harvest are distant.
Rich though we be as consumers, as creatures who belong body and soul to the
cosmos we are paupers.
Part 3: Desacralized creation mined in the interests of a species hell-bent on
mastery and control renders nature slave and humans, at least some humans,
master. In the most recent rendition of this ancient ethic, the divine right
of emperors morphs into the divine right of homo sapiens. Earth is, without
apology, human empire.
Part 4: To address climate injustice, social justice becomes creation justice,
for Earth as a sacred trust.

Iron Cages

Were the outcome of human entitlement mutually enhancing across the

community of life, all might be well. But when sacred creation is eclipsed
in severely utilitarian fashion, the true, the good, and the beautiful are nar-
rowly self-referential. They are cut away from our attachment to the natural
world. The economy, or rather this kind of economy, separates workers from
the product of their labor, consumption from production, art from life, doing
from being, and human love from love of the rest of nature. Unabated adver-
tising crafts desire, displacing all else, including religious discipleship, as the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_017

350 Rasmussen

day-by-day guide for living. Capitalism is the single strongest force forming
human character and conduct. Its cosmology reigns.
The eclipse of creation and the sacred by the economy is not new news.
Already by 1904, Max Weber thought the mechanistic rationality driving capi-
talism’s efficiency was ‘disenchanting’1 the living world. It drained away its
mystery and magic and set us on a fateful course.
The economy’s impact, however, was phase two of ‘disenchantment.’ Phase
one came at the hands of the monotheistic religions themselves. They removed
spirit, mystery, and even wisdom from nature. Nature’s gods were not trust-
worthy, nor real. They were idols. The true, transcendent God stood vis-à-vis
creation.
Ironically what followed was God’s removal to the periphery of lived life. God
was assigned a separate sector—religion—with a limited agenda—human
guilt, death, and tragedy, together with a few rites of passage. This seculariza-
tion of daily life issued in a de-natured and de-divinized world absent objec-
tive grounds for shared values (not in nature and not in God). The outcome
was instrumental and utilitarian rationality partnered with subjective values
expressing individual tastes. A continuing consequence is that even remain-
ing spiritualities are now ‘shopped’ in an emporium of transcendence subject
to little more than appetite and personal choice. This is yet another instance
of the reach and power of the capitalist ethos. Capitalism approves, even pro-
motes, a thousand flowers blooming, provided they serve a consumerist world.
Weber thought this combination of all-pervasive economic rationality and
individual tastes as the chaotic source of value resulted in the disempower-
ment of the modern self, at least the modern Western self. Needed, in his view,
is a ‘reenchantment’ of the world.2

1  Entzauberung—from the German ‘Zauber’ (magic) and ‘ent’ (removing).

2  Sung Ho Kim, ‘Max Weber,’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition),
available online at plato.stanford.edu/entries/Weber. David Brooks, in ‘Time for a new cul-
ture war,’ The New York Times, appeals to social conservatives to lead the way to grounded
values as the antidote to this analysis of U.S. society some hundred and more years after
Weber: ‘We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux in which bonds, social
structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and
fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many
young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there
are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual
vocabulary to think things through.’ Brooks’s column is reprinted from The New York Times in
The Santa Fe New Mexican, Sunday, July 5, 2015: B-2.
Whence Climate Injustice 351

Our attention, however, is the public effects of this economy. Weber’s clas-
sic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, finishes with the modern
capitalist order pictured as an ‘iron cage’ in which we’ve trapped ourselves.
Bound to ‘the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order,’ ‘the lives of
all the individuals who are born into this mechanism’ [are determined], ‘with
irresistible force.’ The lives of all are determined—rich, poor, those at home,
those abroad, every race, creed, and clan. ‘Perhaps [this order] will so deter-
mine them,’ he adds, ‘until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.’3
That was 1904. More than a hundred years later, not only are the lives of
all individuals determined with irresistible force but so, too, are the gen-
erative elements of life itself—earth [soil], air, fire [energy], and water. This
economy embeds all natural systems in human ones, or profoundly impacts
them, changing the biochemistry and core surface processes of the planet.
Even places we do not live—the high polar regions, the upper atmosphere,
the ocean depths—bear a human imprint. But this is disenchanted creation,
creation without soul, creation as capital pure and simple.

Weber’s century-old prognosis merits a careful read.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at
the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise,
or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,
mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-
importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might
well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart;
this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never
before achieved.’4

New prophets? Old ideas and ideals reborn? Or mechanized petrification and
convulsive self-importance? Meaningless civilization defended to the death, or
escape from the iron cage? A utilitarian master-slave ethic or a living ecological
alternative?

3  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1958), p. 181. The original was published in German in 1904.
4  Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p.182. Weber’s quotation, ‘Specialists without spirit,’ etc. is from
Schiller. He does not cite the source, however.
352 Rasmussen

Not for Sale

How curious and out of step, then, is the Lutheran World Federation’s triple
theme for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation: Not for Sale: Salvation; Not
for Sale: Human Beings; Not for Sale: Creation.
Not for Sale: Salvation is the most readily accepted of the three themes.
At the time, however, it earned Luther vilification as a heretic. The papal
bull excommunicating him on June 15, 1520, begins: ‘Exsurge Domine (Arise,
O Lord) and judge thy case. A wild boar has invaded thy vineyard.’5 So it had.
But the boar prevailed and Not for Sale: Salvation stands.
Not for Sale: Human Beings is true by degrees. The law and judicial rulings
forbid slavery, yet global sex trafficking is big business, and wages at the bottom
end of numerous global supply lines are slave wages. For example: almost all
European and U.S. apparel makers have factories in Bangladesh. Work there,
under unsafe and oppressive conditions, pays $.18–$.20 per hour, $38–$40 per
month. Shrimp from Thailand for chain restaurants in the U.S. is cleaned by
workers who make less than $.20 per hour and are held against their will. Not
for Sale: Human Beings dies hard.
That should not surprise, since slavery was hard-core economic practice
and essential to privileged classes for millennia. Aristotle and his children are
certain that slavery belongs to the created order itself; some human beings
are born to rule, others to be ruled. The former he calls ‘natural masters,’ the
latter ‘natural slaves.’ He also thought men ‘naturally’ rule over women and
the ‘­civilized’ (Greeks) over ‘barbarians.’6
Slavery was in place, off and on, in the church, too, for eighteen centuries.
Its legacy lingers, not least as the economy’s rule over other-than-human life
(think of factory farming, collapsed ocean fisheries, and mined aquifiers).
Which brings us to Not for Sale: Creation. What is the Lutheran World
Federation thinking? Of course creation is for sale, as the LWF is keenly aware.
In a world where creation=capital, planetary creation mounts the auction
block daily. To propose otherwise for colonized, industrialized, and marketized
Earth is rank heresy, though rarely named as such. Nor will it be so named,
since any good heresy is someone else’s trumpeted orthodoxy (the global econ-
omy’s, in our case).
Yet ‘Not for Sale: Creation’ isn’t the title of this essay. Nor is ‘The Eclipse of
the Sacred.’ ‘Whence Climate Injustice’ is. If there is a connection of climate

5  Quoted in Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1950), p. 147.
6  Aristotle argues all this in Book I, Chapters III–VI of the Politics and Book VII of the
Nicomachean Ethics.
Whence Climate Injustice 353

injustice to creation for sale and the eclipse of the sacred, what is it? And if a
logic of domination ties climate injustice to the global economy, what is that
logic and what are those ties? A crawl back through history is in order.

Bodies, Labor, and Land

Jennifer Harvey argues that ‘European-Indigenous-African relations’ have

swung on a ‘shared hinge.’7 James Cone lays out what for him is that hinge.

The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, coloniza-
tion and apartheid in Africa, and the rule of white supremacy through-
out the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals
and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that
defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the
development and defense of white world supremacy.8

Delores Williams, in ‘Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies,’ confirms Cone’s
thesis. The same logic of domination governing Black women’s bodies in slav-
ery holds for strip mining and human treatment of earth. African enslaved
women were forcibly raped and repeatedly impregnated to breed more slaves,
some giving birth to twenty and more. The reason—always the chief reason
for slavery everywhere—was economic. Williams lays out the logic of an
extractive economy built on the backs of slaves and argues that it continues
as the domination of other nature as well. Taking the license of the poet she
is, she compares the treatment of the productive/reproductive capacities of
slave women and the productive/reproductive capacities of Appalachian
mountains. Stripping and strip-mining, their violence and degradation, govern
both.9 She could not know it then (1993), but the subsequent remark (2011) of
Jason Bostic, Vice President of the West Virginia Coal Association, unwittingly

7  Jennifer Harvey, Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and
Sovereignty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 14.
8  James H. Cone, ‘Whose Earth Is It, Anyway?’, in Dieter Hessel and Larry Rasmussen, eds.,
Earth Habitat: Eco-Injustice and the Church’s Response (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001),
p. 23.
9  Delores S. Williams, ‘Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies’, in Carol J. Adams, ed.,
Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 24–29. I am indebted to
Dr. Melanie Harris and her remarks at Union Theological Seminary, New York, at the Religions
of the Earth Conference, for this treatment.
354 Rasmussen

makes her point: ‘What good is a mountain just to have a mountain?’10 What
good is a slave girl if she doesn’t do your economic and sexual bidding? No
‘good’ at all.
Are Cone and Williams right that this instrumentalist logic still prevails, with
other-than-human life the irreplaceable slave alongside exploited humans? Is
Carl Anthony right that ‘Historic moments of excessive abuse—slave trade,
colonization, genocide—developed in tandem with humanity’s unsustainable
relationship to the environment’?11 Is the metaphor of James Baldwin as he
marched from Selma in 1965 dead on? ‘I could not suppress the thought that
this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from
these trees.’12 Are all four correct that slavery and industrialized nature both
belong to what Anthony calls ‘the old story’ we need to be liberated from in a
reborn abolitionist movement? And is the implication that, until we are shorn
of this old story, we cannot imagine the ‘new story’ of a reenchanted world and
a sacred universe? Supremacy that works well for the privileged dies hard.
Their argument continues. Not only does the economy fit the old story
tongue-in-groove; the corporate capitalist order was itself made possible by
slavery. Consider Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and
the Making of American Capitalism.13
The half never told includes ‘the island at the center of the world,’14
Manhattan. Only Virginia had more slaves than New York State, and only
Charleston, South Carolina, was home to more slaves than New York City.
Many of those, we now know from graves in Lower Manhattan,15 were Muslims
from West Africa.
These Manhattan slaves built the wall of Wall Street. They also raised
Trinity Church brick-by-brick at the western entrance to Wall Street. Trinity

10  Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) p. 337, quotes
this from Paige Lavender and Corbin Hiar, ‘Blair Mountain: Protesters March to Save
Historic Battlefield,’ Huffington Post, June 10, 2011.
11  Carl Anthony’s remarks as reported in the National Catholic Reporter by Jamie
Manson, November 21, 2014. Online at http://ncronlineorg/print/blogs/grace-margins/
yale-conference-continues-journey-universe.
12  Cited in Steve Schapiro, ‘The Long Road,’ The New Yorker, December 22 & 29, 2014: 109.
Alabama soil, like much soil in the deep South, is dark red. Reference to the trees is their
use as lynching trees.
13  Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
14  A reference to the book with that title, by Russell Short.
15  In a section near the present City Hall but then known as ‘Little Africa,’ many bodies were
buried facing Mecca, with amulets and other items common for African Muslims.
Whence Climate Injustice 355

was home to the city’s commercial and governing elite. By way of contrast, the
other end of Wall Street hosted the human auction block. We find no marker,
however. Wall Street’s slave market, like the slave-erected wall itself, belongs to
the half rarely told, the half for which slavery was normal and torture accepted.
Accepted, too, was ‘kidnapping of free blacks, especially children,’ not only in
New York but all over the Northeast. Manhattan itself was rife with kidnappers
and enslavers, some of whom entered Black churches during services or broke
into Black homes.16
Slaves also built what the British came to call ‘Broadway.’ But when slaves
built it, it was De Heere Wegh, ‘The Street of the Masters.’ Peter Stuyvesant laid
it out in 1658 as two parallel streets separated by small plots of land. Road and
land were meant to support settlement from Nieuw Amsterdam on the harbor
to Nieuw Haarlem on the river between what is now 125th and 126th Street in
West Harlem. History books say Broadway was built ‘under the Dutch.’ They
often omit that ‘under the Dutch’ was the cargo of the West Indies Company,
slaves. The half not told is that the turn to profits in the rising slave trade on
the part of the West Indies Company was in significant degree because the
flourishing fur trade of the Dutch with Indians and settlers had waned because
of unsustainable trapping.
The moral is clear: to understand how people and the rest of nature were
treated, follow the money along Wall Street, up and down The Street of the
Masters, and around the globe, starting with European colonization and
moving from there into the Industrial Revolution. The same logic prevails
throughout—possession, profits and growth, growth, possession and profits,
organized as the marketing of human labor and nature’s treasure together.
Bodies, together with labor and land, were possessed and commodified. Their
status as sacred and their value as ends were lost. They were means, and
means only.
The hinge on which these relations swung was not only European-African.
The same story, different chapter, was European-Indigenous.
We turn to Willie James Jennings in The Christian Imagination: Theology
and the Origins of Race. Jennings traces Spanish colonization of the Andean
lands and peoples to conclude that ‘the reconfiguration of living space is the
first reflex of modernity in the New World; that is, the denial of the author-

16  From Kevin Baker’s review of Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the
Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.), p. 11 of The New York
Times Book Review, February 1, 2015.
356 Rasmussen

ity of sacred land.’17 The ‘first reflex of modernity’ desacralizes the land,
removes native authority, and subjugates native populations and habitat to
space reconfigured in keeping with the colonial economy and its imperial
design. The result, only one lifetime after Columbus, was the oppression of
native peoples in ways that, to cite Bartolomé de las Casas in his Short Account
of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), wore them ‘to a shadow’ and ‘hastened
their demise.’18
The trails of tears that accompanied the ‘world-altering avalanche’ slid-
ing out from Europe to colonize all continents save Antarctica19 was noted
by others as well, including now-famous students of the new economy itself.
Adam Smith, writing what would become the classic of capitalism, The Wealth
of Nations (1776), notes with remarkable confidence that ‘[t]he discovery of
America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,
are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of
mankind,’20 only to go on to say that nonetheless for the natives of the Indies
‘all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events have
been sunk and lost in the misfortunes which they have occasioned. . . . [The
Europeans] were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in
those remote countries.’21
The Columbian undertaking had already been justified repeatedly as a
sacred mission. But Smith was not convinced. ‘The pious purpose of convert-
ing [native inhabitants] to Christianity sanctified the injustice of the project.
But the hope of finding treasures of gold there, was the sole motive which
prompted to undertake it.’22 Follow the money; the rest is epiphenomenal.
Little more than a half-century later, Charles Darwin, in 1839, documents
indigenes worn to a shadow and worse. ‘Wherever the European had trod,
death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the
Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the

17  Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 75.
18  Jennings, p. 76, citing from p. 39 of Bartolome Las Casas and Anthony Pagden A Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies (New York, Penguin, 1992).
19  Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 131.
20  Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York:
Modern Library, 1994), p. 675.
21  Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 675–76.
22  Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 605.
Whence Climate Injustice 357

same result.’23 Already by the mid-1800s, then, ‘the wide extent’ of reconfig-
uring sacred space and re-narrating the worth of its peoples and their lands
girdled the planet. Both served the political economy of white colonizers.
Nine years after Darwin and ninety after Smith, Karl Marx, too, saw the dis-
covery of the Americas and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope as inau-
gurating epic transformations of culture and nature together, via the economy.
Marx, now in a new era for capitalism, that of the trade-minded bourgeoisie,
focuses not on the fate of native inhabitants in the Age of Discovery, however,
but on the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Yet like the earlier incur-
sions, laborers and the land are affected together and in the same way, as dic-
tated by economics. Progress in ‘the union of agriculture and industry,’ Marx
writes in 1867, is progress ‘in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of
robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given
time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more
a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like
the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction.’24
Development and degradation go hand-in-hand. Subsequent centuries, hold-
ing tenaciously to the orthodoxy of such progress, would continue to search
out new territory and resources with new technologies as well as grope for ways
to render such development ‘sustainable’ rather than destructive. Anthony’s
thesis that ‘historic moments of excessive [human] abuse . . . developed in tan-
dem with humanity’s unsustainable relationship to the environment’25 seems
to hold.
Yet it is Frederick Engels who arrives at the logical end point of the story
that began as ‘the first reflex of modernity’ (denying the authority of sacred
land and the authoritative presence of those who lived there). Engels’s focus is
the cosmology of the new economy. For him capitalism simultaneously inter-
acts with both nature and culture, land and peoples, so as to render all things
commodities to be peddled for profit on the market. Marketing everything for
growth and profits drives the action.
This is the ‘huckstering’ of the Earth, Engels says, and for him it is pro-
foundly alienating. It is in fact a change in the manner of being human, one

23  While I have cited Darwin from Crosby, the original is in Chap. XIX, ‘Australia,’ in Darwin’s
diary account in The Voyage of the Beetle, first published in 1839.
24  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward
Averling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 507.
25  Carl Anthony’s remarks as reported in the National Catholic Reporter by Jamie Manson,
November 21, 2014. Online at http://ncronlineorg/print/blogs/grace-margins/yale-confer
ence-continues-journey-universe [accessed 18 February 2016].
358 Rasmussen

that distances us from the indispensible sources of our existence and leads to
a shrunken identity as homo economicus.

To make the earth an object of huckstering—the earth which is our one

and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step toward
making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this day an
immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And
the original appropriation—the monopolization of the earth by a few, the
exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life—yields
nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.26

In short, what had been initiated as a market economy within civil society
grounded in non-economic values (Smith) has become one-dimensional mar-
ket society via ‘huckstering’ gone global (Engels). The political economy deter-
mines the lives, lands, value, outlook, and way of life of all born into it (Weber).
Lest the world of huckstering seem distant—Engels writes in 1844—
consider U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman (R-Tex.) on Twitter: ‘The best
thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.’27 (Or
Spanish gold.)
Or consider ExxonMobil’s CEO, Rex Tillerson’s response to the petition of
shareholders that ExxonMobil cease using the atmosphere as a sewer: ‘What
good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?’28
Tillerson and Stockman share with Bostic the huckstering cosmology of
anthropocentric capitalism. What good are mountains and planets if they
don’t do your bidding? For this doctrine of creation Earth is shorn of all inher-
ent value and subjected to continuous do-overs by homo economicus in the
manner of master to slave, even though Earth is, and of necessity remains, ‘our
one and all, the first condition of our existence.’ (Engels)
In sum, three successive Earths—colonized Earth, industrialized Earth,
marketized and monetized Earth—have abolished creation as sacred in favor
of an economic cosmos that captures and determines all. Perhaps it will do so

26  Frederick Engels, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,’ in Karl Marx, The Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 210, as cited in Marx and Engels on Ecology, ed.
Howard Parsons (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 173.
27  Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything, p. 161, cites Steve Stockman’s Twitter post of
March 31, 2013, 2:33 pm ET, https://twitter.com.
28  Cited from Al Gore, ‘The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate’, Rolling Stone, June 18,
2014: p. 11 of the online edition.
Whence Climate Injustice 359

until the last pipelines of oil and natural gas are emptied, and the last ton of
Weber’s fossilized coal is burned.
Or until climate change, as the great slave rebellion, forces an alternative.

Continued, for Now

How consistent and far-reaching is this logic of domination? Are we still with
Anthony’s ‘old story’?
Canada has undertaken a truth and reconciliation process into the forcible
removal of aboriginal children from their families. On June 2, 2015, the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission issued its report, saying this former policy ‘can
best be described as ‘cultural genocide’ ’.29 The schools, run largely by churches,
were filled with abuse aimed at forcing the assimilation of native peoples into
the body politic of Canada. At its extreme, abuse meant death—3,201 docu-
mented to date, with perhaps as many as 6,000.30 What leaps out for us, how-
ever, is this conclusion: ‘The overriding motive for the program was economic,
not educational.’31
Economic, not educational? In a Christian school system? The report
explains: ‘The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide
because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to aborig-
inal people and gain control over their lands and resources. If every aboriginal
person had been ‘absorbed into the body politic,’ there would be no reserves,
no treaties and no aboriginal fights.’32 (U.S. policy also included drumming the
Indian out of Indians.)
Here nothing is lost in translation, even across centuries and around the
world: The logic of a colonizing economy mandated abdication of the identi-
ties and authority of native peoples living on sacred lands. This is 1492 déjà
vu all over again just as it is confirmation of Jennings’s thesis that the ‘diseased
imagination’ of white Christianity accompanied the economic cosmos to
effect a ‘redescription and renarration of what the world is and what it means

29  ‘Report Details ‘Cultural Genocide’ at Schools for Aboriginal Canadians,’ The New York
Times, June 3, 2015, A7.
30  Ibid.
31  Ibid.
32  Ibid.
360 Rasmussen

to be human.’33 White bodies remain ‘true north’ on the compass used to map
the world.34
But wait. The Canadian government has apologized for this policy and there
is no reason to doubt its sincerity. The report, however, goes on to say that an
apology does not suffice without ‘concrete actions on both symbolic and mate-
rial fronts.’. And here, too, the sticking point, the absence of actions, is eco-
nomically motivated. While indigenes the world over have the longest and best
track record for living ecologically on lands under their control, Canada, the
United States, Australia and New Zealand, all white settler nations by origin,
have not, despite repeated calls, adopted the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Why? Because issues involving ‘the lands, ter-
ritories and resources of aboriginal people’ would be subject to their ‘prior and
informed consent.’35 Aboriginal Canadians would, in effect, have a veto over
Canadian law and its white settler economy. And even though this ‘informed
consent’ would pertain only to native ‘lands, territories and resources,’ such sov-
ereignty is too much to ask. Even boarding schools were meant to serve the
national economy.
In sum, current attention to the economy’s desacralization of native lands
and peoples, together with its reconfiguration of both land and identity for
‘better use,’ bolsters the contention that European—Indigenous—African
relations swing on the same hinge. It also bolsters our thesis: Capitalism before
creation, accompanied by the eclipse of the sacred, renders all of Earth capital-
ist empire.

The Sudden Swerve

‘Evidence from several millennia shows that the magnitude and rates of
human-driven changes to the global environment are in many cases unprec-
edented. There is no previous analogue for the current operation of the

33  This is Norman Wirzba’s summary of Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and
the Origins of Race, p. 38 ff. From Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation (Grand Rapids:
Baker Academic Press, 2015), p. 25.
34  Wirzba, From Nature to Creation, p. 26.
35  ‘Report Details ‘Cultural Genocide’ at Schools for Aboriginal Canadians,’ The New York
Times, June 3, 2015, A7.
Whence Climate Injustice 361

Earth system.’36 This is the 2004 judgment of the International Geosphere—

Biosphere Programme.
‘No previous analogue’ means that for the very first time, human time has
merged with geological time with sufficient impact to initiate a world unlike
any earlier one. With economic time outstripping biological time, we’re either
inaugurating a dramatic new era in the Holocene, the geological epoch that
has hosted all human civilizations to date, bar none, or we’re moving into a
new epoch altogether, ‘the Anthropocene,’ the Age of the Human.
The name is apt. The 34th International Geological Congress declared in
2012 that ‘[f]or the first time in geostory [their word for Earth history] humans
are the most powerful force shaping the face of the Earth.’37
‘The most powerful force shaping the face of the Earth’ looks like this. This
anthropos (Greek for ‘human’) has, for the first time, modified the flows of
most rivers and changed the catchment areas of the world. This anthropos
reengineered more rocks, soil, and landscapes in the last century than volca-
noes, earthquakes, and glaciers. The re-regulation of solar radiation and the
role of the carbon cycle in the acidification of the oceans are roles that have
fallen to this anthropos because this anthropos has usurped them by burning
fossil-fuels. This anthropos is now the main agent in the planet’s nitrogen cycle.
This anthropos sends innocent species to eternal death at a quickening pace.
And this anthropos is bringing on a geological era or epoch whose tattoo is no
longer climate stability but climate volatility. Whereas the human mind pre-
viously observed ‘flux within fixity, mutability within larger immutability, and
unpredictable weather within predictable climates,’38 this anthropos confronts
flux, mutability, and unpredictability in a different frame on a different scale.
Said differently, the human footprint of this anthropos is present in every
natural domain that matters—the carbon footprint, the water footprint, the
biodiversity footprint, the ecological footprint (land and energy footprints),
and the material footprint (the measure of resources used). A resident of the
planet has become its manager,39 a single species its autocrat.
For the economy that has largely effected this, and for planetary creation
impacted by it, the upshot is two-fold.

36  W.L. Steffen et al., Global Change and the Earth System (Berlin and New York: Springer,
2004), p. v.
37  The New York Times, August 15, 2012.
38  Jay Griffiths, ‘Myths of Stability: Putting Capitalism before Creation,’ Orion (November/
December, 2013), 13. Emphasis is mine.
39  Robert Arthur Stayton, Power Shift: From Fossil Energy to Dynamic Permanent Power
(Santa Cruz: Sandstone Publishing, 2015), p. 6.
362 Rasmussen

First, dimensions of human responsibility expand dramatically in time and

space, though not yet in our consciousness and morality. The swollen pow-
ers of this anthropos are now exercised ‘cumulatively across generational time,
aggregately through ecological systems, and nonintentionally over evolution-
ary futures.’40 This stretches human agency and responsibility far beyond any-
thing we have known. And not only for distant generations of human beings,
but for innumerable other citizens of the community of life as well, together
with life’s generative elements—earth, air, fire, and water. Little on the books
holds us accountable to these dimensions or provides guidance for the exer-
cise of swollen human powers. Least of all do economic practices internalize
the true and full costs for either present or future generations of planetary life.
Second, we find ourselves at a stand-off we’ve never faced. Naomi Klein lays
it out concisely:

[O]ur economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or,
more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth,
including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a
contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model
demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets
of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.41

If it’s ‘not the laws of nature,’ then it’s ‘the economic model.’ But who, other
than Pope Francis,42 has the courage to even admit we live in an iron cage of
our own making, much less the courage to face down the global economy and
homo economicus as the deep-seated cause?
Sin in the late Holocene or early Anthropocene is to stay this course, to
retain this same economic model and its doctrine of creation. This systemic
violation of creation continues as corporations search out increased revenue
and profits via cheaper resources and labor while evading constraining regula-
tions and externalizing or socializing as many costs as possible, despite the toll
on human society and the rest of nature.
It is not a metaphorical creation that groans in travail, awaiting the redemp-
tion of this anthropos. It is the literal one (Rom. 8:22–23).
What does this mean for public theology, and for the critical topic not yet
broached in this essay—social justice? Specifically, what does it mean for

40  Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, p. 1.

41  Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 21.
42  See the Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home, issued June 18, 2015.
Whence Climate Injustice 363

climate injustice? (Climate change visits its worst on those with the fewest
resources for protection, mitigation and repair).
If climate injustice is the locus of attention, and if the vulnerable, both
humans and other members of the community of life, are the focus of con-
cern, as they are in the papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, the place to begin is with
the known terrain. Does the social justice we know suffice for justice attuned
to planetary health comprehensively?

Justice Reconsidered

The social justice traditions most familiar to Christian communities arose in

response to what the early 20th c. identified as ‘the social question,’ or ‘the
modern social problem.’ The phrases are those of Ernst Troeltsch, a contempo-
rary of Weber’s. In 1911 Troeltsch wrote:

This social problem is vast and complicated. It includes the problem of

the capitalist economic period and of the industrial proletariat created
by it; and of the growth of militaristic and bureaucratic giant states; of
the enormous increase in population, which affects colonial and world
policy; of the mechanical technique, which produces enormous masses
of materials and links up and mobilizes the whole world for purposes of
trade, but which also treats men and labour like machines.43

Christian communities responded to ‘the modern social problem’ across a

broad front on innumerable issues, including the right to unionize, a minimum
wage, decent and safe working conditions, housing that went beyond hovels,
the franchise, child labor laws, an eight-hour day, legal recourse to discrimina-
tion in hiring and firing, protests against obscene wealth for the robber barons
but meager rewards for those receiving slave wages, and some beginning provi-
sions for child care and health care.
That said, this social justice tacitly affirmed the economic cosmos of the
industrial paradigm. Its glory and considerable achievement was to render the
consequences of the industrial economy fairer in the lives of those determined
by it. Yet it was justice captured by an economy tone deaf to the needs of the
natural world upon which it depended.

43  Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (University of Chicago
Press, 1981), Vol. 2, p. 1010.
364 Rasmussen

Despite consistent warnings from indigenous peoples, these social justice

traditions were thus unprepared when the twentieth century added ‘the eco-
logical question’ and unsustainability to ‘the social question,’ even though they
had the same origins. They, too, were the direct outcome and downside of the
organization, habits, and exacting requirements of modern industrial-techno-
logical society and its ever-expanding economy. Nor did these social justice
traditions protest the desacralizing of nature and the ‘disenchantment’ of the
world, much less seek an alternative based in a sacred universe.
Differently said, social justice, while admirably driven by fair play and fair
outcome for human communities, wrongly assumed that the basic unit of
human survival is human society. It never was, and isn’t. The basic unit has
always been planetary creation comprehensively, with the primal elements—
earth (soil), air, fire (energy), water—truly primary. No human good is possible
apart from the goods of the planetary commons, and care for them. To cite
a maxim of Thomas Berry’s overlooked in social justice traditions: ‘Planetary
health is primary; human well-being is derivative.’4445
Where does this leave us? If our thesis is correct that climate change has its
source in the downside of the organization, habits, and requirements of the
ever-expanding capitalist economy, first as colonialism and then industrial-
technological society, then climate injustice can only be addressed if social
justice becomes creation justice.
The detail of that transformation goes beyond the limited purpose of
this essay, which is to locate the roots of climate injustice and describe the
logic of the economy that has created it. We would nonetheless be remiss
to finish without some broadbrush strokes of the necessary conversion. The
domains are three: cosmology, policy for systemic change, and a different
understanding of ourselves. All three are matters of public theology just as all
three are integral to the primary example of effective public theology today,
the encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.

44  Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (San Francisco:
Sierra Club, 2006), p. 19.
45  This section on ‘the modern social question’ and social justice traditions is a paraphrase
and abbreviation of two related essays of mine. ‘Getting from Protestant Social Justice
to Interfaith Creation Justice: What Does It Take?’ will appear in an edited volume by
Orbis Press in 2016 as the conference proceedings of the Journey of the Universe confer-
ence held at Yale Divinity School in November, 2014. A longer treatment, ‘From Social
Justice to Creation Justice in the Anthropocene,’ will appear in a volume, John Hart, ed.,
Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming
in 2016).
Whence Climate Injustice 365

Cosmology for social justice-cum-creation justice is creation as sacred. All

creation, not human life alone, is worthy of wonder, awe, respect and reverence
(the defining marks of the sacred). This is creation that bears moral claims
upon us and mandates that its well-being be braided together with ours. The
gift of life, an unearned gift of pure grace, bears a value far beyond the stark
utility accorded it in the master-slave paradigm.
Policy for systemic correction of the systemic violation of planetary creation
can only be illustrated. Economic and energy policy must suffice.
Economics and ecology would merge as ‘eco-nomics.’ Eco-nomics embeds
all human economic activity within the ecological limits of nature’s economy
and pursues the three-part agenda of production, relatively equitable distribu-
tion, and ecological regenerativity. Growth is not precluded, provided it is eco-
logically sustainable and regenerative for the long term, reduces rather than
increases the instability that obscene wealth and income gaps generate, and
bolsters rather than undermines the capacity of communities and cultures to
draw wisely upon their cultural and biological diversity. In all events, and to
cite Berry a second time, ‘the first law of economics must be the preservation
of the Earth economy.’46
Energy policy for creation justice would also begin in a very different place
from capitalism’s. Attention has always been to energy resources and use: Do
we have enough to continue to grow the economy to meet human needs? Are
we energy-independent? How will energy be distributed fairly? These discus-
sions go on without first asking what energy sources and uses are mandated
by the planet’s climate-energy system. Our energy policy assumes that human
energy use is primary, then we’ll deal with effects. This is exactly backwards.
The first law of energy is preservation of the planet’s climate-energy system
as conducive to life. Human energy use is necessarily derivative of the planet’s.
This is the energy parallel to Berry’s maxim that the first law of the human
economy is the preservation of nature’s economy.
A different understanding of ourselves in the planetary scheme of things
and in the cosmos is a third domain—an improved anthropology, if you will.
Our present segregated sense of ourselves as the master species is a miser-
ably shrunken grasp of who we are as creatures of Earth and cosmos. From
both a scientific and a religious point of view we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully
made,’ the handsome fruit of two wombs, our mother’s and Mother Earth’s
(Psalm 139).

46  Thomas Berry, ‘Conditions for entering the Ecozoic Era,’ Ecozoic Reader 2, n. 2 (Winter
2002). 10.
366 Rasmussen

To be ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ across the convulsive stop-and-start

eons of evolutionary life, to belong to life’s drama and grandeur and have a
perch of our own in the great Tree of Life, is our glory. Creation justice takes on
such transcendence as this.47
At the same time, creation justice intensifies rather than diminishes social
justice attention to the logic of domination we’ve traced. Race, class, gender,
culture and place are impacted negatively to greater, not lesser, degree by cli-
mate injustice. An improved anthropology, a different narration of what it
means to be human, starts here, face-to-face with the two inequality gaps of
the 21st c.: inequality across human ranks and inequality between human priv-
ilege and the rest of life. Social justice, then, is more urgent and far-reaching
than ever, but now as creation justice.

Coda

Planetary reality as we have known it is profoundly changed and chang-

ing, whether as a sudden swerve in the late Holocene or as the emerging
Anthropocene. This unprecedented change will not only continue; it will
intensify. It will intensify because the climate pipeline is loaded and long, and
because ‘the old story’ itself digs in and fights back. As they have for centuries,
corporations still traverse the globe in pursuit of resources and cheap labor as
driven by possession, profits and growth. It may no longer be in the service of
white world supremacy alone, since if you have enough money, shares, and luck,
you can join the club regardless of race, creed, clan, nationality, or religion. But
it’s still world supremacy and Cone, Williams, and Anthony are right. This is a
mechanistic and instrumental logic of domination that affects everything and
that will not, cannot, be broken without justice. For the anthropogenic scourge
of climate injustice, social justice of necessity becomes creation justice.

47  This section on three domains of change also draws on discussions in the upcoming
essays listed in note 48 above, as well as extensive discussions in my Earth-Honoring Faith:
Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Whence Climate Injustice 367

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 CHAPTER 16

Public Theology and Bioethics

Lisa Sowle Cahill

Introduction

The mission statement of the Global Network for Public Theology (GNPT) is
an excellent anchor for an essay on public theology and bioethics. It points
the way back to the beginnings of public theology and points the way forward
to changes that have been essential in the twenty-first century and are still
continuing to unfold. According to the GNPT, public theology is ‘academic
research’ to promote ‘theological contributions on public issues, especially
those affecting the poor, the marginalized, and the environment in a glocal
(global-local) context.’1 This definition harkens back to the beginnings of both
public theology and public bioethics in that it envisions theological partici-
pants as academics and researchers. It looks ahead, however, to a global era
in which the guiding concerns are no longer the technological innovations in
medicine and research that consumed the attention of mid-century bioethi-
cists, theological or otherwise. Now public theology’s guiding aim is greater
distributive justice in an environment of great economic inequality. To achieve
this aim, public theology is moving out both from academia, and from the
‘secularized’ societies in which it began, to engage politically in a globally
more religious and interreligious environment. As the functions of public
theological bioethics have evolved, so the meaning of the concept has diversi-
fied to fit new fields of discourse, yielding today’s pluralistic definitional and
methodological scenario.2 The end result of the adaptation of public theology
to a variety of contexts, proponents, and social mandates is that the lines have
blurred among public theology and other forms of Christian social ethics and
justice-oriented theologies. This is especially evident when we turn to more
recent work in the global sphere.

1  Global Network for Public Theology website, http://www.chester.ac.uk/node/15313 [accessed

14 April 2015].
2  See Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere: Public Theology as a Catalyst for Open
Debate (London: SCM Press, 2011), p. 14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_018

370 Cahill

Bioethics was one of the main arenas of public theology in the years imme-
diately before and after the term was coined by Martin Marty in 1974;3 since
2000, bioethics has provided stellar examples of the changes the new century
demands. In the 1960s, ‘70s, and 80’s, theologians who took on a public role in
bioethics debates were scholars in academic institutions. Many served on elite
government commissions, participated in interdisciplinary centers or insti-
tutes, and wrote scholarly and semi-popular analyses of current issues that
attracted media attention. Their analyses were focused primarily on the ethi-
cal questions posed by new technologies available to well-financed patients,
clinicians, and researchers; on how clinical decisions should be made; and on
whether and how technologies should be regulated. As time went on, varieties
of liberation theology influenced the agenda of Christian ethics (building on
earlier strands of the social gospel, political theology, and Catholic social teach-
ing). Likewise, the perspective of ‘public theologians’ in bioethics shifted from
medical, research, and policy decisions of elites to the needs of the poor locally
and globally. Public theological bioethicists began to appreciate more deeply
the connection between theological analysis and action for social change.
Soon, ‘the poor’ themselves became theological voices and public activists,
making public theological bioethics even more contextual and ­practice-based.
Thus, while debates over religion, culture, and biotechnology still continue in
the US, the UK, Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and other places,
these are no longer the overriding focus of theological bioethics as ‘public,’
because attention has shifted to economic inequality, its global impact on
access to health resources, and to specific, culturally differentiated instances
of health care injustice.
As in public theology generally, the bioethical challenges that today’s theo-
logians must confront demand an approach that is attuned to and inclusive of
the poor, that is practical and activist, and that not only has a public academic
voice, but is politically active to affect bioethical access, economics, and policy.
Going forward, public theological bioethics must be inclusive along the lines of
gender, class, race and ethnicity. It must embrace the intercultural and interre-
ligious profile necessary to address global problems such as poverty, violence,
and climate change. Illustrations of all these developments are abundant at
the intersection of public theology and bioethics.

3  Martin E. Marty, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience,’ Journal
of Religion, 54:4 (1974), 332–59.
Public Theology And Bioethics 371

The Emergence of Public Theology

The designation ‘public theology’ was applied by the American church histo-
rian Martin Marty to the theology and public voice of Reinhold Niebuhr, who in
1948 made the cover of TIME Magazine. Marty stresses that although Niebuhr
saw it as the theologian’s ‘task to present the Gospel of redemption in Christ to
nations as well as to individuals,’ he tended to see ‘national religiosity’ in terms
of hubris and idolatry, and was cautious if not pessimistic about the degree to
which theologically-based correction would be effective.4 In so doing, Niebuhr
exemplifies some characteristics of a fundamental and important strand of
public theology--that done by Protestant (often Reformed) thinkers, who tar-
geted theologies that either directly ratified an unjust political status quo (the
Third Reich and later apartheid), or accomplished the same result by priva-
tizing religion; and who (with Augustine and the Reformers) saw society and
its institutions as profoundly and irremediably sinful. Next-generation public
theologians were to draw from liberation theology and Catholic social teach-
ing, whose Thomistic roots allowed a more positive construal of the common
good and its prospects, especially after the Second Vatican Council. These plu-
ralistic origins led to eventual disagreements among public theologians about
how to characterize the ‘publics’ they address, the style they should adopt, and
how confident they can be about whether they will be heard or heeded.
Marty makes two further observations about Niebuhr’s brand of public the-
ology that are predictive of later controversies about the meanings of the term
and its methods. First, Niebuhr’s approach brings together earlier strands in
American religion. One is that of theologians like Jonathan Edwards and Walter
Rauschenbusch, who saw ‘the covenanted religious community as a base for
public action.’ The other is that of public political figures, above all Abraham
Lincoln, who saw ‘a kind of ecclesiastical dimension in national life.’5 These
strands, kept in tension by Niebuhr, foreshadow later debates about whether
religious and theological language belongs properly within the faith commu-
nity, where members are formed in political virtues and prophetic capacity;
or whether such language can and should play a positive role in the public
sphere itself.
Second, Niebuhr saw that the fundamental test of ‘modern religion’ is ethi-
cal, and he understood that the inequalities wrought by industrialization, mili-
tarization, and racism are opposed to the gospel. Yet he ‘devoted surprisingly

4  Martin E. Marty, ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience,’ The
Journal of Religion 54:4 (1974), 332–59, at 355; citing Christian Realism and Political Problems.
5  Ibid., 354.
372 Cahill

little attention to the lower-class churches, the forces of the dispossessed.’6

This lacuna is an indicator of the eventual shift in focus that would be required
of public theology and public theological bioethics as they became more con-
cerned with disparities of wealth and power locally and globally.
Marty frames his own constructive position in terms of a ‘public church’
rather than a ‘public theology.’ Theology, properly speaking, is the endeavor to
better understand and articulate the essentials of the Christian life and faith.
The church includes the theology done in its service, but more explicitly envi-
sions the practical expressions of faith in worship, service, morality, the arts,
and social engagement (both in the academy and in society more generally.)7
The public church is a ‘communion of communions’ in which distinct tradi-
tions share common commitments to the Christian vocation and to the res
publica they inhabit.8 As a church historian, Marty realizes that the influences
of Christianity on American public life have not all emanated from the halls of
academe.
In Marty’s view, the public church has a power of democratic action that
remains to be fully realized. Effective action by the churches requires that
their representatives and members speak to the larger community in a plural-
ist situation. ‘Clinical, legal, commercial, consumer, and theological languages
will come together.’9 We may add to that the political, medical, scientific, and
aesthetic. The public church will not dominate the domain of discourse, but it
brings distinctive notes of grace and hope, especially as it gives a new hearing
to ‘women, the aged, and people in minority groups,’ and engages in activities
of social welfare and service.10 These remarks set the stage for the evolution of
public theological bioethics into faith-based advocacy for social justice that
has a strong intellectual and ethical grounding.11

6  Ibid., 346.
7  According to David Tracy, theology has three ‘publics,’ the church, the academy and soci-
ety as a whole. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 3–31.
8  Martin E. Marty, The Public Church: Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic (New York: Crossroad,
1981), p. 3.
9  Ibid., p. 166.
10  Ibid., pp. 169–70.
11  Three books, also by Americans, that represent this trajectory, are Lisa Sowle Cahill,
Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change (Washington, D.C.; Georgetown,
2005); Emilie M. Townes, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues
and a Womanist Ethic of Care (Portland OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006); and David M. Craig,
Health Care as a Social Good (Washington, D.C.; Georgetown, 2014). A theme of my book is
that the ‘marginalization of theology by secularism’ narrative is inadequate, for theology
Public Theology And Bioethics 373

The standard or basic or starting-point definitions of public theology,

however, see it in a somewhat different light, especially as the particular foe
of modern Western secularization; as advancing the Christian case through
‘discourse’ in the literal sense (proposals, statements, arguments, and reasons);
and as having to struggle constantly to balance Christian faithfulness and intel-
ligibility ‘in the wider, secular and pluralistic society.’12
Duncan Forrester, a University of Edinburgh professor, director of the uni-
versity’s Centre for Theology and Public issues (founded in 1984), and a mem-
ber of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, has been held up as an exemplary
public theologian.13 In addition to numerous scholarly writings on the sub-
ject, Forrester has sponsored and coordinated a long list of interdisciplinary
conferences, consultations, seminars, and working groups on social and policy
matters, from which he has endeavored to distill ‘some uniquely theological
insights.’14 The public relevance of these insights can be hard to pin down
and push forward, however. This threatens, as Forrester himself laments, to
leave public theology stranded between the Scylla of a ‘theology so distinc-
tive, so orthodox . . . so unrelated to today’s world as to be effectively irrelevant’;
and the Charybdis of ‘the extreme liberal, with a banner proclaiming godless
morality, and a wonderful ability to communicate acceptably to secular men
and women.’15
Sebastian Kim sees the realm in which public theology engages society as
ideally governed by the principles of free speech and universal access; the main
players in this realm are the state, the market, the media, the academy, civil
society, and (like Marty) religious communities.16 Yet it is the state, market, and

and religion can be, have been, and are very active in seeking health care justice in a
variety of modes of social participation. Townes illustrates the new turn in theological
bioethics to scholarly work done from the perspective of ‘the poor.’ A distinctive mark
of Craig’s study is that he brings together Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish health care
providers to show that there is an interreligious ‘communion of communions’ offering
service and advocating for health care reform for both religious and justice reasons.
12  Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere, p. 7.
13  ‘Public theology almost is the man.’ Robin Gill, ‘‘Public Theology and Genetics,’ in
William F. Storrar and Andrew R. Morton, ‘Introduction,’ in William F. Storrar and
Andrew R. Morton, eds., Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of
Duncan B. Forrester (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2004), p. 253.
14  William F. Storrar and Andrew R. Morton, ‘Introduction,’ in Storrar and Morton, Public
Theology, p. 4.
15  Duncan B. Forrester, ‘Working in the Quarry: A Response to the Colloquium,’ in Storrar
and Morton, Public Theology, p. 432.
16  Ibid., p. 11.
374 Cahill

media which dominate; and they ‘tend to incorporate a secular ideology and
reject anything to do with religion.’17 Linell Cady likewise discerns hostility to
religion and theology in the public realm, requiring public theology to ‘over-
come the cultural marginalization so highly characteristic of contemporary
theology.’18 Therefore, while remaining grounded in religious communities
and theological scholarship, public theology must expand its sources, applica-
tions and audiences to gain a hearing and be effective in the public sphere, in
ways dependent on the issues at hand.19

The Birth of Modern Bioethics

It was in a very similar environment to that just painted for public theology
that ‘bioethics’ appeared as a public and policy-oriented field in the mid-twen-
tieth century. Albert Jonsen, a Catholic philosopher (and at that time a priest)
attended its birth in the United States. Jonsen taught at a medical school of the
University of California, authored books and articles in the field, and served on
the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects of Behavioral
and Biomedical research, a federally sponsored group that came into existence
in 1974 in the wake of the exposure of a few highly exploitative medical research
programs enrolling vulnerable subjects. Jonsen notes that The Hastings Center,
a field-defining institute ‘dedicated to bioethics and the public interest’ was
founded in 1969 (and originally called the Institute for Ethics Society and the
Life Sciences), while Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, primarily a
bioethics think tank, came into being in 1971. Theologian Paul Ramsey’s The
Patient as Person (regarded by Jonsen as ‘the first genuine example of bio-
ethics’) appeared in 1970. Theologians were active in the early years of both
these centers and their journals, where they participated in consultations and
debates with medical professionals, research scientists and philosophers.
Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center, wrote a 1973 article on
the still-emerging discipline, in which he attested to the prominence of repro-
ductive technologies in shaping ‘the problems . . . in medicine . . . which raise
ethical questions’; ‘they begin with ‘A’ (abortion and amniocentesis) and run

17  Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere, pp. 11–12.

18  Linell E. Cady, Religion, Theology and American Public Life (Albany NY: State University of
New York, 1993), p. 147.
19  Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere, p. 14.
Public Theology And Bioethics 375

all the way to ‘Z’ (the moral significance of zygotes).’20 In addition to research
on human subjects, other central issues were the allocation of scarce organs for
transplant; decisions about when to treat, refuse treatment or withdraw life-
prolonging treatment for seriously ill or dying patients, including newborns;
the drive to legalize euthanasia; what was then known as ‘genetic engineering’;
and somewhat later, genetic testing, gene therapy and gene patenting.
American theologians who were active in the emergence of bioethics
included the Protestants Ramsey, James M. Gustafson, William F. May, and
Karen Lebacqz; and the Catholics Richard A. McCormick, Charles Curran,
and Germain Grisez. James F. Childress, Warren Reich and Robert Veatch had
theological training, but wrote almost exclusively as moral philosophers, as did
Jonsen. Early bioethicists in the Jewish tradition included David Bleich, Moshe
Tendler, and Baruch Brody. These and other theologians served on govern-
ment bodies, such as the aforementioned commission on research subjects,
President William Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC),
and President George W. Bush’s President’s Council of Bioethics.21 Not only
in public policy forums, but also as prominent members of their respective
denominations, and in their theological writings, these thinkers drew connec-
tions among theology, society and ethics. Ramsey hoped to ‘address the wid-
est possible audience’ by in terms of the norms of covenant fidelity and love,
drawn from the Christian duty of agape22; Gustafson thought that one ‘contri-
bution of theology to medical ethics’ is an attitude of self-criticism, tracing back
ultimately to human sinfulness and finitude23; and an article by McCormick
appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, appealing to a
‘higher, more important good’ than life, and citing Pope Pius XII.24

20  Daniel Callahan, ‘Bioethics as a Discipline,’ The Hastings Center Studies 1:1 (1973), 66–73,
at 68, <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3527474?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents> [accessed
16 July 2015].
21  For extensive information on and documents from these and earlier national bioethics
committees, see the website of The President’s Council on Bioethics, https://bioethics
archive.georgetown.edu/pcbe/ [accessed 21 July 2015].
22  Paul Ramsey, The Patient as Person Explorations in Medical Ethics (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970), p. xi.
23  James M. Gustafson, The Contributions of Theology to Medical Ethics (Milwaukee WI:
Marquette University Theology Department, 1975), p. 67.
24  Richard A. McCormick, ‘To Save or Let Die: The Dilemma of Modern Medicine,’ Journal
of the American Medical Association 229 (1974), 174.
376 Cahill

Public Theology and Bioethics

These early theological bioethicists engaged their ‘publics’ (church, academy,

society) in multiple and overlapping ways, that are too often reduced to one—
policy-making--by those debating the viability of bioethics as public theol-
ogy. James Gustafson points out that theologians (as well as religious leaders)
engage in at least four types of discourse: narrative, prophetic, ethical and
policy.25 Narrative discourse is the way faith traditions tell their own stories
and form members in a shared tradition; prophesy is the way they bring those
values to bear on ecclesial and/or public life in a challenging countercultural
way. In ethical discourse, theologians think through and express clearly the
ways their worldviews lead to principles and virtues, finally arriving at action-
guiding norms that can be applied in concrete situations. Policy discourse
joins a faith tradition and its theology to a broader social conversation about
the infrastructure of a good society, and may require negotiation and compro-
mise to reach a satisfactory result.
Obviously, explicitly theological and religious language is found, and appro-
priately so, not only in community narratives, but also in the prophetic voice
faith communities bring to the public and the common good. A prophet—such
as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, or Oscar Romero—neither
assumes nor requires that every member of the general public will concur in
his or her religious convictions. A faith-based witness to higher values that
demand justice in the common life can evoke an imaginative response in others
that enlarges the horizon of debate and allows the values of one faith to reso-
nate with the values and ideals of multiple traditions. This need not exclude
ethics and policy, assuming the right approach. ‘Efforts to use public theology
to enlarge and invigorate public discourse may explicitly draw on particular
symbols and rituals while remaining modest and open to genuine dialogue.’26
From virtually the beginning, however, theological bioethicists had to con-
tend with the assumption that the primary forum of their public contribu-
tion would be policy, and that ‘secular’ and ‘neutral’ language should prevail.
Cathleen Kaveny notes that the NBAC report Cloning Human Beings included
both religious and secular thinkers, but segregated religion and theologians

25  James M. Gustafson, Four Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and
Policy (Grand Rapids MI: Calvin College, 1988).
26  Kristin Heyer, Prophetic and Public: The Social Witness of U.S. Catholicism (Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006), p. 15. See also John de Gruchy, ‘From Political
to Public Theologies: The Role of Theology in Public Life in South Africa’, in Storrar and
Morton, Public Theology, pp. 45–62, at pp. 45, 56, 59.
Public Theology And Bioethics 377

into a separate chapter, the content of which was summarized as ‘pluralistic’

(and hence not determinative), even though the evidence cited showed a clear
consensus against the cloning of a human child.27 The sociologist John H.
Evans makes a similar point about Splicing Life, a 1983 report of the President’s
Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical
and Behavioral Research. The Commission took into account the views of
theologians and religious bodies on genetic engineering and its immediate and
cultural effects. However, the final report dismissed their concerns as ‘vague,’
thus sidestepping questions such as the boundaries of prudence and humil-
ity, and whether the new genetic sciences exclude the needs of the poor. The
‘thick’ traditions of faith communities have been marginalized, according to
Evans, and replaced by a ‘thin’ secular language that elevates autonomy and
refrains from putting any serious limits on scientific innovations.28
Kaveny further observes that theologians serving on federal commissions
are typically selected on the basis of the views of the President or of the body’s
chair. On the one hand, it is understandable and valid that a head of state will
appoint members who can be expected to carry out the policies for which he
or she was elected. On the other hand, it is deleterious to the democratic basis
and refinement of policies if those charged with crafting them are predisposed
to avoid serious discussion of contested issues.29 While Clinton commission
members represented only one view of the role of law, as maximizing individ-
ual freedom, the Bush council included only ‘neoconservative’ religious think-
ers, who were set up against the secular liberal members in culture-war fashion.
For example, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (1996–2001), cre-
ated by President Clinton, examined cloning, human stem cell research, and
research involving human subjects. It sought to protect individual rights; and
also to permit research using human embryos to go forward. President George
W. Bush established the President’s Council on Bioethics (2001–2009), which
issued reports on stem cell research, human enhancement, and reproduc-
tive technologies, raising alarms about the encroachment of technology on
humanistic values and human dignity (while still not excluding for-profit stem
cell research).

27  M. Cathleen Kaveny, ‘The NBAC Report on Cloning,’ in Guinn, Bioethics and Religion,
pp. 221–51.
28  John H. Evans, Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical
Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
29  M. Cathleen Kaveny, ‘Moving Beyond the Culture Wars: Why a Bioethics Council Needs
Diversity,’ Commonweal, 136:15 (2009), 8; and ‘Diversity and Deliberation: Bioethics
Commissions and Moral Reasoning,’ Journal of Religious Ethics 34:2 (2006), 311–337.
378 Cahill

Theologians in both bodies were free to and did couch some of their per-
spectives in biblical and theological references,30 but the lack of complexity
of viewpoints led to an inability to ponder the ‘’big questions,’’ and theology
did little to influence the outcome.31 In the views of Albert Jonsen and Daniel
Callahan in the US, and Robin Gill in the UK, the expert role of theologians in
national debates was overwhelmed within a generation by the arrival to bio-
ethics of philosophers, trained mostly in the analytic tradition (with a ‘cool,
impersonal and putatively ‘rigorous’ style’32), and of lawyers with training or
interest in ethics.33
Though the participation of theologians on national bioethics bodies seems
more to have been a subject of media attention, scholarly debate, and theologi-
cal commentary in the US than elsewhere, theologians did and do serve parallel
roles in Britain and in the European Union. In the UK, the historically privi-
leged role of the Church of England yielded an expectation that theologians
would have a say on matters of public import, despite growing secularization.34
Robin Gill points out that in the UK as in the US, ‘many of the pioneers
of modern health care ethics were hospital chaplains, church leaders or
academic theologians’; as examples he names Bob Lambourne, Gordon
Dunstan, Norman Autton, John Habgood, and Ted Shotter.35 The 1982 Warnock
Committee, charged with investigating in vitro fertilization and treatment of
embryos, included one theologian, A.O. Dyson. Similarly to the U.S. presiden-
tial committees, the contributions of theology were of uncertain weight in
the eventual findings, since the Warnock Report recognized a significant theo-
retical value in embryonic life, but imposed no practical restrictions on the
destruction of embryos.36

30  See for example Gilbert Meilaender, ‘In Search of Wisdom: Bioethics and the Character
of Human Life,’ a paper prepared for the President’s Council for Bioethics, January 2002,
https://bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu/pcbe/background/meilaenderpaper.html
[accessed 21 July, 2015].
31  Kaveny, ‘Moving Beyond the Culture Wars.’
32  Daniel Callahan, In Search of the Good (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2012),
p. 68.
33  Jonsen, ‘A History,’ pp. 33–34; Callahan, In Search of the Good, pp. 68–70; Gill, Health Care,
1–3.
34  Nigel Biggar, ‘Why Christianity benefits secular public discourse, and why, therefore,
Anglican bishops should sit in a reformed House of Lords,’ Theology, 117:5 (2014), 324–33,
at 332.
35  Gill, Health Care, p. 1.
36  The report mentions ‘safeguards’ in a number of areas, but does not spell these out.
Department of Health and Social Security, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human
Public Theology And Bioethics 379

Nevertheless, despite the ‘apparent triumph’ of lawyers and philosophers,

British bioethics committees still include theologians and even bishops.37
Having served in an advisory role himself,38 Robin Gill asks, ‘‘What was I as
a theologian supposed to contribute to public committees concerned with
bioethics?,’ especially given the need to be theologically accountable yet intel-
ligible to philosophers, scientists, lawyers and doctors. He is dissatisfied with
framing the theologian’s sole options as capitulation to secularity or a ‘theo-
logical purity’ in ‘radical conflict’ with all that is secular.39
In an essay from a chair’s perspective, the legal scholar Jonathan Montgomery
ventures a reply. Montgomery describes himself as ‘a chairman (previously of
the Human Genetics Commission and currently of the Nuffield Council on
Bioethics, the nearest that the United Kingdom has to a national ethics com-
mittee),’ and sees his role as ‘the creation of an environment which facili-
tates the richest and most profound deliberation on the matter in question.’40
According to Montgomery, the public sphere is properly understood as plural-
ist and not religion-free. Yet he finds the pronouncements of church leaders
to be frequently dogmatic and ill-argued, if not simply emotive, using tac-
tics that destroy any credibility as public ethics because they fall outside the
accepted public ‘rules of engagement.’ For better or ill, the established frame-
work in the UK is the adjudication and balance of competing individual rights,
with concepts such as human dignity and the common good ‘uncomfortably’
accommodated. Theological ethics might properly enhance receptivity to such
values, but it will need to do so in terms that do not presuppose and require
recognition of biblical or ecclesial authority.41
Montgomery approves of Gill’s basic ‘theological realist’ approach, which is
to advance Christian virtues in terms that can be more generally appreciated
on shared human terms. These virtues augment rather than supplant bioethi-
cal principles such as beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy and justice.42

Fertilisation and Embryology, Chair Dame Mary Warnock (known as The Warnock Report).
Submitted to Parliament July 1982, http://www.hfea.gov.uk/docs/Warnock_Report_of_
the_Committee_of_Inquiry_into_Human_Fertilisation_and_Embryology_1984.pdf
[accessed 21 July 2015].
37  Gill, Health Care, p. 4.
38  Gill gave testimony to the Commission on Assisted Dying, Chair Lord Charles Falconer,
January 2011, http://commissiononassisteddying.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Robin
-Gill-Transcript.pdf [accessed July 21, 2015].
39  Robin Gill, ‘Faith and Truth in Public Ethics’, Theology, 117:5 (2014), 334–41 at 334.
40  Jonathan Montgomery, ‘Public Ethics and Faith’, Theology, 117:5 (2014), 342–48, at 342.
41  Ibid., 334–45.
42  Gill, Health Care, p. 214.
380 Cahill

Gill takes from the Synoptic healing stories the virtues of compassion, care,
faith (or trust) and humility. These can be recognized as common human val-
ues, in the UK or in other modern societies of whose cultures Christianity has
been a longstanding part, as well as in the heritages of other faith traditions.
What faith adds is the expansion of compassion beyond one’s own family or
political group (an ideal widely accepted in societies with religious roots),
and an intensified sense of moral obligation.43 To ‘deepen and widen’ public
debate, the theologian may even draw explicitly on theistic and Christological
assumptions, though these will not become part of the public bodies’ final rec-
ommendations.44 Yet Christians do well to remember that they do not have a
monopoly on concrete moral discernment, especially in fast-paced and com-
plicated areas such as genetics. It is imperative that they attend carefully to the
expertise of their colleagues in science and moral philosophy.45
Cynthia B. Cohen, an Episcopalian bioethicist who served as executive
director of NBAC, nuances Montgomery’s hope for constructive theological
participation, and echoes Kaveny’s concern that public commissions be inclu-
sive enough to encourage the kind of debate that could lead to new insights.
Debaters in the public bioethical forum need to be exposed to views that are
initially at odds with their own. In order to avoid ‘blandness’ and truly engage
different possibilities, no one should be barred from expressing the grounds
and even ‘comprehensive doctrines’ on which their positions are based. The
basic ground rule, however, is that all views ‘are offered in a spirit of respect for
others as free and equal persons,’ where persuasion, not ‘overbearing pressure,’
is the goal and norm. Nigel Biggar, addressing debates about euthanasia in the
UK, believes that even a ‘thoroughly theological’ argument ‘can be accessible,
rationally engaging and even acceptable.’46 Theology among other disciplines
and moral traditions can ‘allow contextually sensitive, dialectical, improvisa-
tional, candid conversation about public goods between genuinely different
points of view, which articulate themselves in their own terms while seeking
to be persuasive to others.’47

43  Gill, ‘Faith and Truth,’ 340; and Health Care, pp. 60–61.
44  Gill, Health Care, p. 8. See also Robin Gill, ‘Public Theology and Genetics’, pp. 253–65 at
p. 263.
45  Ibid.; and Health Care, p. 57.
46  Nigel Biggar, ‘Not Translation but Conversation: Theology in Public Debate about
Euthanasia’, in Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan, eds., Religious Voices in Public Places (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 151–93 at p. 161.
47  Ibid., p. 161.
Public Theology And Bioethics 381

In a study of genetics and Christian ethics that stresses theological dis-

tinctiveness more strongly, Celia Deane-Drummond also embraces a virtue
approach. Her emphasis is not so much on religious views that might be
expressed directly in public, but on the difference religious identity makes
at the level of discernment and decision. She believes that when a bioethics
approach is theologically informed, and nurtured in ‘the life and liturgy of
the community,’48 it can foster a qualitatively different type of discernment
in which grace is operative, a discernment less focused in individual rights,
more conscious of sinfulness, and more open to the determination of freedom
by openness to the love of God.49 Thus, contra Gill, Cohen, and Montgomery,
Christians have better prudential capacity. After all, the expression of all vir-
tues is rooted in wisdom, a virtue ‘fostered in friendship and rooted in the
friendship with God.’50
Deane-Drummond does not see the practical outcome of such discernment
as limited to Christian ethics and the church. She incorporates analyses of
UK and EU statements on genetics, as well as the churches’ response to reports
and policy proposals; she evidently believes that theology and theologians
should engage the broader public on these issues. Her framework best sets up
this engagement to be in the mode of formation and transformation of church
members, who will exercise their roles as citizens or as public officials on the
basis of the requirements of friendship with God. This approach opens a space
for Christian distinctiveness at both the theoretical and practical moral levels,
without going so far as a ‘theological purity’ that results in ‘radical conflict’
with nonreligious colleagues. Yet it leaves unsettled the basis on which the
unique insights of the graced discerner are to be introduced into wider discus-
sion or advocacy in a persuasive and effective way. Cohen, Biggar and Gill (who
explicitly mentions natural law) more strongly presuppose that people from
numerous traditions can arrive at the same point of practical discernment,
although Christian convictions and virtues can be uniquely useful in moving
the discussion to that point.
Similarly to Gill’s depiction of the virtues, the American Protestant theo-
logian Karen Lebacqz, who gave testimony to NBAC on embryonic stem cell

48  Celia Deane-Drummond, Genetics and Christian Ethics (Cambridge UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 257.
49  Celia Deane-Drummond, Genetics and Christian Ethics (Cambridge UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 245–46.
50  Ibid., p. 244.
382 Cahill

research51, sees the distinctive Christian theological contribution as its view of

justice. This view, while not unintelligible to outsiders, includes priorities that
rarely characterize justice as a policy criterion. Theologians highlight these pri-
orities, aiming to sensitize, advocate to, and persuade others of their practical
importance. Based on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the religious view
of justice 1) expands the scope of justice from fair distribution to virtue, char-
acter, and relationships in community, including just systems and structures;
2) makes oppression and liberation primary categories for understanding jus-
tice, not just equality; and 3) makes justice the first principle of ethics and
bioethics, not secondary to autonomy, beneficence, or nonmaleficence.52
Implicit in Lebacqz’s liberationist ethics, and in the writings of many or
even most Christian public or social bioethicists writing after 2000, is the turn
from secularity and individualism as the primary adversaries to economic
inequality spawned by poorly regulated market capitalism, which in ‘demo-
cratic’ societies has been abetted and enabled by the elevation of autonomy
and the dampening of religious participation that earlier public theologians
had decried.
When we turn to the European Union, we find that theologians rarely if ever
as such find designated places on EU bioethics commissions. Christian Byk, a
judge of the Court of Appeal of Paris, has published widely on international bio-
ethics and religion.53 Byk represents France on the UNESCO Intergovernmental
Bioethics Committee, and participated in drafting the European convention
on biomedicine (1991–1993), and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and
Human Rights (2005). He points out that while religious representatives were
not instrumental in the creation of European bioethics (in contrast to the U.S.
and U.K.), European bioethics is rooted in longstanding Christian cultural
traditions, collective identities, and institutions. In fact, the Roman Catholic
bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, openly opposed Nazi
racial theories from 1934 onward, and denounced policies of euthanizing or
forcibly sterilizing the disabled.

51  Agenda, National Bioethics Advisory Committee, January 19–20, 1999, https://bioethics
archive.georgetown.edu/nbac/briefings/agendas/jan99.htm (accessed 21 July 2015).
52  Karen Lebacqz, ‘Philosophy, Theology and the Claims of Justice,’ in Guinn, Bioethics and
Religion, pp. 253–63, at pp. 253–59.
53  See Christian Byk, ‘Bioethics, Religions and the European Institutions,’ Derecho y Religión,
Dedicado a: Biolaw & Religion, 2007:2 (2007), 91–102, http://www.deltapublicaciones
.com/derechoyreligion/gestor/archivos/07_10_39_916.pdf (accessed 22 July 2015). See also
Christian Byk, ‘Religion, Bioethics and Biolaw,’ in Silvio Ferrari, ed., Routledge Handbook
of Law and Religion (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), pp. 310–317.
Public Theology And Bioethics 383

The continuing role of Christianity in bioethics has become contentious,

however, due to the tension between the Christian value of respect for life
(a ‘moral dogma’), and the ‘modern’ value of human rights, expressed pri-
marily in terms of individual freedom.54 The Catholic Church has opposed
developments in bioethics and policy since the 1960’s, especially concerning
abortion, reproductive technologies and euthanasia. That being said, religions
and churches are still an integral part of the European heritage, despite greater
secularization than in North America. As the current century proceeds, the
religious character of Europe is sure to become more mixed, due to immigra-
tion and the potential expansion of the European Union. As Elaine Graham
argues, religion may be resurgent in public spaces in a ‘post-secularist’ Europe,
becoming more cosmopolitan, more diverse, and more open to incorporating
insights from the natural and social sciences.55
Currently, Catholic and Reformation churches are represented in policy
forums primarily by their two main lobbying groups, the Commission of the
Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, and the Conference of
European Churches, both of which have internal committees dedicated to
bioethics. Both Protestant and Catholic churches have observer status in the
Council of Europe’s European Steering Committee on Bioethics. The Catholic
Church also has permanent observer status as a state at the Council of Europe,
to which a delegate is appointed by the Holy See. Both Catholic and Protestant
churches submit written opinions and testimony at hearings. Yet Byk perceives
the aims of the two organizations to be quite different. Whereas the Protestant
group wants dialogue and responsible participation, the Catholic goal is ‘to
adopt practices and regulations in conformity with the ethical principles pro-
moted by the doctrine of the Church.’ The political status of the Holy See is
thus used to advocate and pressure for vetoes on proposed recommendations,
especially those related to reproduction.56
In contrast to such tactics, theologians who actually serve on EU bioethics
bodies operate in practice more as philosophers, using generally amenable lan-
guage such as ‘human dignity’ and ‘the precautionary principle,’ both of which
connote special concern with society’s vulnerable members. Their appeal
may be due in part to Europe’s Christian heritage, but religious authority or
relation to God is not invoked in their defense. Catholic theologian Dietmar
Mieth, a former member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and the

54  Byk, ‘Bioethics, Religions,’ 92.

55  Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age
(London: SCM Press, 2013).
56  Ibid., p. 99.
384 Cahill

New Technologies or EGE, (which comes under the European Commission),

identifies tensions that can arise around the divergent priorities of self-
determination or dignity advocated philosophically, with member states set-
tling the question differently when implementing EU recommendations.57
Hille Haker, also a German Catholic and a member of EGE, agrees that
moral debate and normative reasoning should occur in terms acceptable to
all.58 Various ethical theories are available as starting points (e.g., Kantianism
and Utilitarianism), and different cultural and intellectual traditions within
Europe may favor one over another partly for historical reasons. This does not,
or at least should not, prevent those of different beginning points from joining
in a deliberative process toward relative agreement on the basic demands of
justice in applied bioethics.59
In its 2007 report on nanotechnology, the EGE offered a fairly abstract reso-
lution that combined several different ‘European values’ as a basis for policy:
human dignity, human rights, and the more solidaristic and globally-oriented
value of meeting the Millennium Development Goals.60 In 2015, theological
membership on the 15-member EGE included Haker, Emmanuel Agius (Malta),
Peter Dabrok (Germany), Marie-Jo Thiel (France), and Günther Virt (Austria.)
Although human dignity and the commitment to the poor as represented by
the millennium goals may be indebted to Christian values, and very possibly
to the influence of the theologians, public theology as such is not part of the
EGE’s formal deliberations.
It seems evident that explicitly theological appeals and rationales must
be sensitive and appropriate to contexts, which necessarily vary with place,
time, culture, and audience. On some occasions, humility, openness and
prudence suggest that the invocation of religious symbols and rituals might
impede civil and successful public dialogue. On others, to recall a parable of
Jesus, for example, can create solidarity and strengthen commitment to justice.
With Lebacqz, I would say that the heart of the Christian ethical witness is love

57  Dietmar Mieth, ‘Bioethics and Biolaw in the European Union: Bridging or Fudging
Different Traditions of Moral and Legal Argumentation?,’ in Cathriona Russell, ed.,
Ethics for Graduate Researchers: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach (Amsterdam and Boston:
Elsevier, 2013), pp. 59–68.
58  Hille Haker, ‘Ethical Reflections on Nanomedicine,’ in Johann S. Ach and Beate Lüttenberg,
eds., Nanobiotechnology and Human Enhancement (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2008),
pp. 53–75; and ‘Nanomedicine and European Ethics—Part One,’ in Ach and Lüttenberg,
Nanobiotechnology, pp. 87–100.
59  See also Linda Hogan, ‘Emerging Debates and Future Prospects,’ in Russell, Ethics for
Graduate Researchers, pp. 201–08 at pp. 203–05.
60  Haker, ‘Nanomedicine and European Ethics’, p. 96.
Public Theology And Bioethics 385

of God and neighbor, attentive especially to ‘the least of these’ (Mt 25). With
Deane-Drummond I agree that friendship with God enhances moral wisdom,
but with Karl Rahner and recent Catholic teaching, I would say that friendship
with God is not limited to Christians or even to believers.61

Looking Ahead

As noted earlier, public theology in the twenty-first century has taken on a dif-
ferent character than it had a half-century ago. Today, it consists in advocacy
and action as much as it does ‘discourse;’ it no longer takes for granted that
politics occurs in a ‘public’ realm where religious presence requires a defence.
Feminist theologians have rightly questioned modes of ‘public theology’ that
rely on and reinforce the implicitly gendered public-private divide, restrict
the theological ‘conversation’ to white male elites, assume the propriety of all-
male God language, assume theology to be the province of Christianity, see
politics and the church’s role in it as agonistic, and overemphasize criteria of
‘rationality’ while neglecting emotional and aesthetic discernment.62
In bioethics, for example, Heather Widdows seeks to avoid the polarities
that beset both public theology and feminist theology, resituating a theological
and normative approach to reproductive technologies within a shared concern
for the common good.63 Tina Beattie circumvents the clash of women’s rights
and rights of the unborn that has created an impasse in abortion ethics, argu-
ing that ‘humanization’ requires both maternal recognition and fetal develop-
ment. She proposes that early abortion can be acceptable, while third-trimester

61  See Karl Rahner, ‘Unity of the Love of Neighbour and Love of God,’ in Theological
Investigations VI (New York: Crossroad, 1974), pp. 231–49; and Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, 2000, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/
congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000806_dominus-iesus_en.html
[accessed July 24, 2015].
62  See Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Feminist Theology: Where Is It Going?,’ and Heather
Walton, ‘You Have to Say You Cannot Speak: Feminist Reflections on Public Theology,’
International Journal of Public Theology, 4:1 (2010), 5–20, and 21–36 respectively; as well
as the entire special issue, ‘Hearing the Other: Feminist Theology and Ethics’; Esther
McIntosh, ‘Issues in Feminist Public Theology,’ in Anita Monro and Stephen Burns, eds., in
Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 2015),
pp. 63–74; as well as the volume as a whole; and Elaine Graham, ‘What’s Missing? Gender,
Reason and the Post-Secular’, Political Theology, 13:2 (2012), 233–45.
63  Heather Widdows, ‘The Janus-Face of New Reproductive Technologies: Escaping the
Polarized Debate,’ International Journal of Public Theology, 4:1 (2010), 76–99.
386 Cahill

abortion is prima facie wrong. Beattie also adduces biblical and theological
warrants, particularly as deriving from the pregnancy of Mary the mother of
Jesus.64 Kristin Heyer stresses that the Catholic pro-life agenda would be more
credible if it attended to a range of interrelated issues, linking abortion with
poverty and inadequate family support programs, health care, and education;
and with forms of violence like the death penalty and war.65
Today, women and men around the globe who are working to overcome
inequalities of gender, race, class, wealth, and sexual orientation speak and
act as theologians in myriad networks of social interaction. They often but not
always identify their roles and goals in terms of Christian narratives, symbols,
understandings, and practices. Advocates of gender equality who today write
as ‘public theologians’ demonstrate the evolution and expansion of the term.
To Gustafson’s four varieties of moral ‘discourse’, a fifth can be added: partic-
ipatory engagement. Of course, social participation is assumed by the first four
modes (narrative, prophetic, ethical and policy). But to lift up participation
as a distinct mode of theological presence and communication is to explic-
itly draw attention to the concrete conditions and effects of theology, the way
in which theology and context are mutually constructing; and the potential
of theology, religion, the churches, mosques, and synagogues to effect actual
change. Theology as participatory engagement connects ‘discourse’ with the
faith-based activism that is increasingly a part of ecclesial mission.66 Not only
theologians, but the churches themselves have a broad presence in public life.
This is well demonstrated in recent theories of theological bioethics, and in the
practices they reflect and endorse.67
Christian service and relief organizations like Caritas Internationalis, Jesuit
Relief Services, or Christian Aid have prominent religious identities that pub-
licize values, while soliciting and inviting collaboration with entities outside
their own traditions. A salient global example with a bioethical dimension
is Christian response to the AIDS crisis. Individuals, churches, and organizations
have networked with one another, with governments, business, and elements

64  Tina Beattie, ‘Catholicism, Choice, and Consciousness: A Feminist Theological Perspective
on Abortion,’ International Journal of Public Theology, 4:1 (2010), 51–75.
65  Kristin Heyer, Prophetic and Public: The Social Witness of U.S. Catholicism (Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006), pp. 196–200.
66  See Katie Day, Esther McIntosh, and William Storrar, eds., Yours the Power: Faith-Based
Organizing in the USA (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), a reprint of International Journal
of Public Theology 6:4; and Philomena Njeri Mwaura, ‘Civic Driven Change—Spirituality,
Religion and Faith,’ in Alan Fowler and Kees Biekart, eds., Civic-Driven Change: Citizen’s
Imagination in Action (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 2008) 1–8.
67  See Cahill, Theological Bioethics, 23–40; ‘Theology’s Role in Public Bioethics,’ in Guinn,
Bioethics and Religion, 41–46; and Gill, Health Care, 28–33.
Public Theology And Bioethics 387

of civil society to enhance the access of the poor to expensive patented AIDS
drugs; to fight stigmatization of people with HIV/AIDS (especially women);
and to improve quality of care.68 As Katie Day has argued in the case of South
Africa, using the interaction of academics at Stellenbosch University with local
congregations combatting poverty and AIDS, the efforts of theologians to raise
their ‘public’ profile can and do interface profitably with Christian ministries
and activism on behalf of specific social justice concerns.69
Another article on AIDS, also published under the aegis of ‘public theology,’
ties together many theological and ecclesial threads in the re-woven portrait
of the field presented here. Adriaan van Klinken explores African responses
that employ the metaphor of the body of Christ to overcome the exclusion and
stigma that often has afflicted infected people.70 To announce that ‘The body
of Christ has AIDS’ is to urge solidarity, challenging the Eucharistic community
to enact socially and politically what it celebrates liturgically, and proclaims
creedally—that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Van Klinken
attends particularly to the writings of African women, and examines the global
colonial and economic conditions that have made HIV/AIDS so persistent. It is
up to theology and the churches to take on AIDS as a justice issue, particularly
its disproportionate effects on women. Van Klinken draws upon liberation the-
ology and Catholic social teaching, concluding that ‘the body of Christ calls
not only upon western churches and Christians but the western world in gen-
eral to enter into solidarity with people, communities and societies in Africa
and elsewhere. . . .’71

68  A few of the many available treatments are James F. Keenan S.J., Jon D. Fuller S.J., Lisa
Sowle Cahill, Kevin Kelly, eds., Catholic Ethicists on HIV/AIDS Prevention (New York:
Continuum, 2000); Cahill, Theological Bioethics, 164–70; Gill, Health Care, 140–51; Robin
Gill, Reflecting Theologically on AIDS: A Global Challenge (London: SCM Press, 2007);
Mary Jo Iozzio, ed., with Mary M. Roche Doyle and Elsie Miranda, Calling for Justice
throughout the World: Catholic Women Theologians on the HIV/AIDS Pandemic (New
York: Continuum, 2008); Musa Dube, The HIV and AIDS Bible: Selected Essays (Scranton
PA and London: University of Scranton Press, 2008); Musa Dube and Musmbi Kanyoro,
eds., Grant Me Justice!: HIV/AIDS & Gender Readings of the Bible (Maryknoll: Orbis
Books, 2005).
69  Katie Day, ‘The Construction of Public Theology: An Ethnographic Study of the Rela­
tionship Between the Theological Academy and Local Clergy in South Africa’, Inter­
national Journal of Public Theology, 2:3 (2008), 354–78.
70  Adriaan van Klinken, ‘When the Body of Christ has AIDS: A Theological Metaphor for
Global Solidarity in Light of HIV and AIDS,’ International Journal of Public Theology, 4:4
(2010), 446–465. For a similar treatment from the angle of ‘Catholic moral theology’, see
Maria Cimperman, When God’s People Have AIDS: An Approach to Ethics (Maryknoll NY:
Orbis, 2005).
71  Ibid., p. 463.
388 Cahill

Considering the relation of public theology to bioethics as participatory

engagement allows us to appreciate the reality of environments, especially in
the global South, where cultures as a whole are still religious and interreligious,
and increasingly so in some areas.72 For example, the Circle of Concerned
African Women Theologians’ collection, African Women, Religion and Health,
presupposes rather than argues that religion is an integral dimension of politi-
cal society, and includes African traditional religions and healing practices.73
In its new global contexts, Christian public theology has not only a new wealth
of opportunities, but a greatly magnified responsibility to be a constructive
political force for good, making its priority the emancipation and empower-
ment of the poor. In this it converges with many of the theological commit-
ments and practical aims of political theology, liberation theology, Christian
social ethics, Catholic social thought, feminist theologies, and contextual the-
ologies worldwide that hope to embody the gospel in a kaleidoscope of social
environments.

Bibliography

Kim, Sebastian. Theology in the Public Sphere: Public Theology as a Catalyst for Open
Debate (London: SCM Press, 2011).
Marty, Martin E. ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience,’
Journal of Religion, 54:4 (1974), 332–59.
Tracy, David. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of
Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
Marty, Martin E. The Public Church: Mainline-Evangelical-Catholic (New York: Cross­
road, 1981).
Cahill, Lisa Sowle. Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change (Washington,
D.C.; Georgetown, 2005).
Townes, Emilie M. Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and
a Womanist Ethic of Care (Portland OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006).
Craig, David M. Health Care as a Social Good (Washington, D.C.; Georgetown, 2014).

72  David Hollenbach shows that the ‘secularization hypothesis’ is not only contested in
some parts of the ‘modern world,’ it is patently false in others. The Global Face of Public
Faith (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003), pp. 183–85.
73  Isabel Apawo Phiri and Sarojini Nadar, eds., African Women, Religion and Health: Essays in
Honor of Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye (Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 2006).
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Gill, Robin. ‘‘Public Theology and Genetics,’ in William F. Storrar and Andrew R.
Morton, eds., Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of Duncan
B. Forrester (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2004).
Storrar, William F. and Andrew R. Morton, ‘Introduction,’ in William F. Storrar and
Andrew R. Morton, eds., Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in
Honor of Duncan B. Forrester (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2004).
Forrester, Duncan B. ‘Working in the Quarry: A Response to the Colloquium,’ in William
F. Storrar and Andrew R. Morton, eds., Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century:
Essays in Honor of Duncan B. Forrester (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2004).
Cady, Linell E. Religion, Theology and American Public Life (Albany NY: State University
of New York, 1993).
Callahan, Daniel. ‘Bioethics as a Discipline,’ The Hastings Center Studies, 1:1 (1973), 66–73.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3527474?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents> [accessed
16 July 2015].
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[accessed 21 July 2015].
Ramsey, Paul. The Patient as Person Explorations in Medical Ethics (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970).
Gustafson, James M. The Contributions of Theology to Medical Ethics (Milwaukee WI:
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McCormick, Richard A. ‘To Save or Let Die: The Dilemma of Modern Medicine,’ Journal
of the American Medical Association, 229 (1974).
Gustafson, James M. Four Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and
Policy (Grand Rapids MI: Calvin College, 1988).
 CHAPTER 17

Urban Ecology and Faith Communities

Christopher Baker and Elaine Graham

This chapter seeks to address a framing question of this volume, ‘What does a
public theology look like in the 21st century?’ It will do so with reference to the
strikingly pervasive and fluid material cultures and imaginaries of the urban
which are influencing our increasingly globalized understandings of what it
means to be ‘in community’ with others. The chapter will locate this contem-
porary context within an historical trajectory which moves from the origins
of biblical theology and reflection on the city as site of divine providence and
covenant, to the emergence of the modern industrial city of the mid-nine-
teenth century, when ‘[b]eing self-consciously urban’ definitively transformed
the church’s understanding of ‘the context of mission and the possi­bili­ties of
wider engagement’1 with corresponding implications for the nature of public
theology it­self.

The Biblical Interpretation of the City

The Biblical tradition tells a story of humanity’s evolution from rural to urban
living, something that continues to characterize patterns of population move-
ment and global migration to the pre­sent day. The United Nations estimates
that by 2020, 80% of the world’s population in Europe, the Americas, China
and South Asia will live in cities; in the same period in sub-Saharan Africa, East
Asia and Oceania, where the urbanization started later, cities will have drawn
an estimated half of the popula­tion into their orbit.
If cities of various kinds have been microcosms of human life and engines of
civilization for over six thousand years, then this is inevitably reflected in the
Biblical literature which, like secular history, reflects humanity’s gradual gravi-
tation from the rural to the urban.2 When it comes to attitudes to the city in

1  Andrew Davey, ‘Being Urban Matters: what is Urban about Urban Mission?’ in A. Davey, ed.,
Crossover City: Resources for Urban Mission and Transformation (London: Continuum, 2010),
pp. 24–36, p. 30.
2  However, it should be noted that biblical “cities” are far from today’s modern cities in terms
of scale. What is in common over time, however, is their relative population density, their

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_019

Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 391

the Biblical literature, however, there are contrasting imagin­aries. Babylon,

on the one hand, represents everything that is iniquitous and excessive about
human behaviour. On the other hand, the Book of Revelation presents us with
a vision of the New Jerusalem, the utopian city of righteousness and divine
rule. This image points towards the writer’s eschatolo­gi­cal hope for the city, in
which human creativity, exchange and flourishing are sources of blessing and
recon­ciliation, and where God’s enduring covenant with humanity will be ful-
filled (Rev 21–22). Despite its rural or nomadic past, humanity is asked to divest
itself of any lingering nostalgia for the countryside and embrace the city of the
present for the sake of the one to come, whose landscape and polity will rep-
resent a transfiguration of the shortcomings of contemporary urban culture.
Biblical literature repeatedly rehearses this theme: amidst the chaos and
injustice, the city shines forth as a place of faithful and resilient incarnational
witness to divine blessing over human en­deavour.3 God’s people are called
to ‘keep faith’ with the divine promise of deliverance and to proclaim it even
in the midst of humanity’s failings, embodied in the troubles of the city. As
Jeremiah’s denunciation of the rulers of Judah observes (Jeremiah 22:1–5;
8–17), a city built on the foundations of injustice is neither secure nor sustain-
able. The fate of widows, orphans, so­journers and poor people at the hands
of the ruling classes calls into question the integrity of any grand design. In
Matthew’s story of Jesus’ contemplation of the wickedness of the provincial
cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum (Matthew 11:20–25) and Luke’s
account of his weeping over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44), Jesus’ attitude is less
one of denunciation and outrage and more a spirituality of lament. Jesus is
placed within the prophetic tradition as one who con­templates the prospect
of the cities as much in sorrow as in anger, and, like the prophets of old, views
the quality of urban life according to a God who hears the cry of the poor and
margin­al­ized.
Further reflection on the obligations of inhabiting a particular and spe-
cific urban ecology comes later in Jeremiah (29:4–14). Despite their status as
migrants in Babylon, the people of Israel are instructed to remain resilient and
to ‘seek the welfare of the city’. In the face of advice from the ‘prophets and
diviners’ amongst them, who preferred the utopian ‘dreams’ of return to their
homeland, the counsel of Jeremiah is to discover the virtues of the alien city

function as hubs of trade and commerce, and the cultural diversity wrought by migration—
with concomitant challenges as well as benefits. See Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban
Christians: the Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
3  Néstor O. Miguez, ‘A Theology of the Urban Space’, Anglican Theological Review, 91:4 (2009),
559–579; Andrew Davey, Urban Christianity and Global Order (London: SPCK), 2002, pp. 58–65.
392 Baker and Graham

within the routine tasks and ‘everyday faithfulness’4 of dwelling, planting and
sowing, raising families and making a living.5
As well as being a call to personal repentance, therefore, the Bible also
anticipates the redemption of quotidian, collective institutions and calls their
rulers to account accordingly. It follows that faithful engagement with the city
must undertake a mission and ministry that is public and structural as well as
personal and spiritual. This introduces a further, perennial tension for public
theology: is the Kingdom of God to be attained by elevating our eyes beyond
this world to a new Jerusalem only apparent in heaven; or is the heavenly city
one that can begin to be glimpsed, albeit partially, through the tasks of build-
ing and inhabiting the cities of earth?
Since its very beginnings, Christianity has been an urban phenomenon. From
its origins in Jerusalem, as major centres of population, commerce and politi-
cal rule, cities facilitated the spread of the gospel. Cities—as hubs of cultural
pluralism, of extremes of wealth and poverty, social mobility and immense
dynamism—have always occupied the heart of the church’s missionary
strategy and its theological imagination.6 Contemporary Christians are used
to reading the texts of the New Testament as riven by disagreements about
the identity of the early church as predominantly Jewish or Gentile, as opting
for a lifestyle of wealth or poverty, or of hierarchy or equality in matters of
class, status and gender. Yet it is clear that the urban/rural question, too, pre-
occupied the earliest generations of disciples. The transition of Jesus’ first
disciples from a predominantly rural, provincial movement into a global and
predominantly urban community is also apparent in the New Testament. One
of the post-resurrection appearances of the risen Christ has him telling the
disciples not to leave Jerusalem (Acts 1:5)—an echo, perhaps, of Jeremiah 29,
but also an extraordinary sign of the early Christians’ resolve that, despite
the trauma of the events of Jesus’ capture, trial and crucifixion, they must
resist the temptation to return to where they came from, even though this
means remaining in plain sight of the imperial and religious authorities. It is
in Jerusalem, the very hub of the powers and principalities, where the work
for which they have been commissioned will be set in train. The realization

4  Andrew Davey, ‘Faithful Cities: Locating Everyday Faithfulness’, Contact: Practical Theology
and Pastoral Care, 152 (2007), 9–20.
5  See also Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1977), p. 126.
6  Andrew Davey, Urban Christianity and Global Order (London: SPCK), 2002, pp. 66–86; see also
Tissa Balasuriya, ‘Religion for Another Possible World’, in M. Althaus-Reid, I. Petrella and Luis
Carlos Susin, eds., Another Possible World (London: SCM, 2007), pp. 10–15.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 393

appears to have been that despite the jeopardy, the economic and political
insecurities, the complexities of managing cultural and religious pluralism, the
vocation—and the very eschatological imagination—of the church gradually
becomes avowedly urban in character.
The Mediterranean region, the geographical cradle of Christianity, was
essentially a network of urban centres characterized by a market-based econ-
omy and held together by Rome’s imperial infra­structure. From its rural, pro-
vincial beginnings, the journey to Jerusalem for the final drama of Jesus’ trial,
death and resurrection was the first step on what Hans Georgi has termed the
‘urban adventure’ of the Church throughout its history.7 Much of the growth of
Christianity recorded in the Acts of the Apostles takes place in the major cities
of the Mediterranean and Middle East: from Jerusalem, to Rome, via Athens,
respectively, centres of religious authority, Imperial power, cultural diversity
and philosophical enquiry. Similarly, the nascent churches addressed in the
Epistles are essentially urban congregations: Philippi, Corinth, Ephesus, not to
mention the seven (urban) churches of the book of Revelation. However, this
essentially urban context of early Christianity is often overlooked:

Any redrafting of the formative past of church and Western culture has
to make up for the neglect theology and the church have shown for the
socioeconomic situation of the Hellenistic world, the cradle of Western
civilization, an urban culture interested in achievement that is repre-
sented and traded on the market. This was the context that shaped the
early church.8

City of God
In the fifth century CE Augustine of Hippo articulated a classic vision of the
city of God as metaphor for the conflicted loyalties of those who seek to pur-
sue forms of public engagement. City of God (c. 427 CE) is not a work of urban
theology in the sense of aiming to analyse the mission of the church in relation
to the political economy or topography of a particular city. It stands as a classic
text, rather, by virtue of its extended reflection on Christian obedience in rela­
tion to the temporal state.
Continuing the Biblical theme of the struggle of humanity to maintain their
covenantal vision in a fallen world, Augustine chooses to identify these condi-
tions with the experiences of contrasting bodies politic, or the ‘two cities’ of

7  Hans Georgi, The City in the Valley: Biblical Interpretation and Urban Theology (Atlanta, GA:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), pp. 53–68.
8  Georgi, op. cit., p. xxii.
394 Baker and Graham

Babylon and Jerusalem. In theological terms, this is the period of the saeculum
between the resurrection and the eschaton. Yet it also, surely, echoes Israel’s
actual experiences of those cities as places of exile and return, and the early
church’s an­ti­cipation of the second coming of Christ. These are then, however,
extrapolated into an allegory of Christian civil obligation: the believer must
observe the earthly jurisdiction of Babylon, whilst shaping the life of faith
according to the precepts of the heavenly city. The earthly city embodies both
progressive but also ultimately regressive and doomed human attempts to
re-create the per­fect society, whilst the city of God realizes the true spiritual
home and judgemental assessment of all worldly endeavour.9
This de-contextualization of the materiality of the urban into primarily a
theological motif has inspired centuries of political theology which, under
Augustine’s influence, sees the city become pri­marily a symbolic cipher rep-
resenting the hubris of human political power and the corruption of divine
truth and love. This motif of Christians not being true citizens of the earthly
city has sur­vived to the present day with the highly influential work of Stanley
Hauerwas in the US and Radi­cal Orthodoxy in the UK.10 Both traditions stress
the need for theology and the church to pre­sent a counter-hegemonic narrative
to economic and political liberalism and draw upon its own sources of wisdom
and epistemology. This has led to criticisms, that whilst the critique of econo­
mic and political neo-liberalism is well made by these traditions (as epitomized
in the shallow and glittering anomie of the ‘glass and halogen uplighting’11
of the postmodern city), the practi­cal wisdom of how to engage constructively
and progressively for the common weal of the city is submerged under a welter
of highly abstracted descriptions of both the city and the church.
After Constantine, as more assets were transferred to the Church, and
more wealth passed through its hands, so ecclesiastical authorities became
more tightly woven into the financial, legal and political life of their cities. In
the medieval period, the Church was at the very heart of the cities of Europe,
simply because Christianity permeated the whole of daily life: trade, poor

9  Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010);

Charles Matthewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
10  Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice,
and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991); John Milbank,
‘Enclaves: or, where is the Church?’ New Blackfriars 73 (1992), 341–352; Graham Ward,
Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000).
11  Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids,
MN: Baker Academic, 2009), p. 216.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 395

relief, government, the law as well as holy days and festivals. In the Reformation
era, Calvin’s theological vision of sanctification directly overlaid a spatial and
developmental urban one. Within this vision, both the church and the munici-
pal authority had a symbiotic role. The church was responsible for ensuring
the principle of holiness and morality publically permeated the wider urban
society. The church did not rule the city, but actively shaped the city’s virtue
by helping in the practical task of social order, education and social care for
the poor and marginalised. In response, the municipal authorities provided the
church with protection, defending its rights and functions in society. This rela-
tionship was physically and figuratively cemented by the rigorous preaching
plan initiated by Calvin in which a newly created Company of Preachers (mod-
elled on business and artisan companies) would preach day and night from
the pulpits of the city’s three churches, under order from the city’s magistrates.
Citizens were required to attend two services on a Sunday but also a Thursday
(moved from Wednesday so as not to conflict with Market day).12
In these respects, the Church shared in the totality of city life, and through
its abbeys, cathedrals and monastic foundations was chiefly responsible for
many key functions such as dispensation of alms and charity, hospitality to
pilgrims and indigents, as well as maintaining the life of prayer for these com-
munities. The question is whether this called for much conscious theologizing
about the life of the city and the calling of the Church in the city as a specific
and peculiar context, and whether that could, by modern standards, be char-
acterized as a ‘public’ theology, in terms of addressing a pluralist and discrete
polity independent of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

The Birth of the Modern City

Whilst cities had always been important centres for trade and manufactur-
ing, the industrial rev­olu­tion, which had its origins in the wool and cotton
industries of the North West of England, was the catalyst for the emergence
of the truly modern city. Whilst the pre-modern city had always been a hub
of activity, the modern city began to exercise an almost metaphysical fas­cin­
a­tion in proportion to its economic significance. The impact of rapid popu-
lation migration represented unprecedented challenges to the established
order, not least to organized religion: the un­ravelling of traditional ties of
deference, the influx of immigrants, the deterioration of public health and its

12  Scott Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed
Church 1536–1609 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 148.
396 Baker and Graham

accompanying moral risks. Throughout northern Europe and the United

States, as urban­ization spread, therefore, there was a massive mobilization
of Christian activism: middle-class, lay philanthropy for the relief of poverty;
establishment of educational initiatives for the children of the urban working
classes; public campaigns around issues such as sanitary reform, prosti­tution,
labour rights, factory conditions and electoral reform.
Much of this was inspired by the emergent Evangelical movement, mobi-
lized by the whole-scale dis­appearance of conventional church-going hab-
its amongst the urban working classes. New strate­gies for evangelising them
needed to be adopted, and in these we see the beginnings of modern urban
mission, using many of the marks of evangelical revivalism such as new hym-
nody, public rallies and the emotional power of personal testimony. One such
movement was the Salvation Army, founded in 1865 by William and Catherine
Booth. The Booths’ central con­cern was initially conventionally evangelistic,
but the extremities of squalor and poverty con­vinced them, and many other
early Salvationists, that they should be ministering to the physical as well as
spiritual conditions of the urban masses: ‘to bring not only heavenly hopes
and earthly glad­ness to the hearts of multitudes of these wretched crowds, but
also many material blessings, including such commonplace things as food, rai-
ment, home, and work.’13 Compassion for the ‘lost city’ is held within what
is perceived the wider biblical mandate of the Great Commission (Matthew
28:19–20); namely to make disciples of the world and to preach verbally the
saving love of God in Jesus, even if the sanctified individual went on to exercise
a reforming influence in wider society as a result.14
The unique and material circumstances of urban society were, however,
more fundamental to the emergence of one of the most significant public the-
ologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Social Gospel.
Walter Rauschenbusch’s ministry in the notorious ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ neighbour-
hood in New York City between 1886–1897 convinced him that conventional
Evangelical piety, focused on the personal conversion of the individual, was
an inadequate response to the endemic inequality and privation, both of
material conditions and quality of life, that he saw around him.15 This Social
Gospel tradition went on to influence American public theologians and social

13  William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: Army Barmy books, 2001
[1890]), p. 2.
14  David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1999).
15  Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1907); Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912. See also
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 397

reformers later in the 20th century who also addressed urban and economic
issues in practical ways. Social amelioration through the influence of the
reformed believer alone was not enough: the church, as institution, needed
to intervene in political and economic processes and work with secular
agencies—such as political parties and labour unions—to bring about the
Kingdom of God, which, for Rauschenbusch, constituted the very essence of
the Christian faith.16
Also notable in this respect would be Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther
King Jr. At the height of the economic depression of the late 1920s, in the influ-
ential magazine The Christian Century Niebuhr delivered a sharp critique of
the impact of Henry Ford’s industrialised production techniques and low
wages on his workers and the wider communities of Detroit, which were in
conflict with Ford’s more paternalistic but nevertheless humanitarian attitudes
to his workforce. Ford’s charity, Niebuhr suggested, had become an obstacle to
real social justice. Dr. King meanwhile, in response to the racial riots in US
Cities commissioned and wrote, with Stanley Levison, a 1967 report entitled
The Crisis in American Cities. This identified the destructive social impact of
poverty, unemployment and poor housing. In order to focus efforts of peace-
ful and more effective campaigning and disruption, King, together with the
Southern Christian Leadership, established the Poor People’s Campaign in
1968. The campaign drew up an ‘economic bill of rights’ which demanded from
the Federal government a $30 billion investment package for a guaranteed
minimum wage and an increase in decent low-wage housing. These were seen
as vital, practical measures towards, in King’s words, ‘opening a bloodless war
to final victory over racism and poverty’.
As the mainstream churches became more engaged with urban life and
faith throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these differing
emphases continued to work themselves out. The heirs to nineteenth Christian
socialism and the Social Gospel focused more on a structural analysis and the
articulation of an alternative economic order, often on the basis of Biblical
precepts. The Church was an agent and sign of new social order of equity and
mutuality; but in the process, it was necessary to address and ally itself with
wider public causes and constituencies. The blueprint for this kind of faith-
based urban organization emerging after the Social Gospel Movement was the
Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by Saul Alinsky in Chicago, which drew

W. Rauschenbusch, The Righteousness of the Kingdom, ed. Max Stackhouse (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen, 1999).
16  Gary J. Dorrien, Reconstructing the Common Good: Theology and the Social Order (NY:
Orbis, 1990), pp. 16–47.
398 Baker and Graham

much of its core support from the city’s large Roman Catholic congregations.
Alinsky realized that if organizations such as faith communities provided the
activists and a principled commitment to social justice (as articulated in the
emerging tradition of Catholic Social Teaching after Rerum Novarum in 1891),
then community organizing offered the pedagogy and strategic methodology
for successful campaigning.17
These movements were fuelled by an incarnational theology which envis-
aged the circum­stances of human living as material, embodied and social,
and the redemptive activity of God as mediated through these conditions. For
Christians, the reality of Jesus Christ invests human beings with inestimable
value—so there is no theological reason for believing that God would not use
the avenues of human sociality, embodiment and subsistence—which is what
cities are, essentially—as the means of grace.
On the other hand, traditions of what was often termed ‘urban mission’,
emanating from more evangelical wings of the church, continued to stress
the necessity of personal conversion and individual salvation from an essen-
tially degenerate social order. For these practitioners, the making of converts
and schooling of disciples in an urban context involved attention to matters
of social justice and material amelioration; but ultimately, whilst urban con-
texts might embody greater extremes of iniquity, and some theologians might
refer to this as structural sin, the dynamic was one of the movement of the
Spirit in transforming human hearts and minds in classical evangelical mode.
Such social change as occurs is a consequence of personal conversion, which
is understood in terms of the individual’s encounter with Christ and involves
being saved from the world and into a better life.18

The Secular City

Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965) represents another landmark text in
the history of urban theology.19 In its vision of God incarnate in the vitality
and freedom of the modern city, and its call to all Christians to join the com-
mon human movement towards justice, Cox inspired a generation of urban

17  Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (London: Vintage, 1989; first published in 1971). See also
Katie Day, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Faith-Based Organizing in the USA’,
International Journal of Public Theology, 6:4 (2012), 383–397; and Lowell W. Livezey, ed.
Public Religion and Urban Transformation: Faith in the City (New York University Press,
2000).
18  David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York:
Orbis, 1991), p. 325.
19  Harvey Cox, The Secular City (London: SCM Press, 1965).
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 399

ministers, congregations and activists to become the standard-bearers for a

particular kind of incarnational Kingdom theology. It served as a refreshing
antidote, too, to what some commentators by mid-century were terming ‘the
suburban captivity of the Western church’20 and liberal Protestant retreat into
privatized spirituality.
Cox’s intellectual debt to Dietrich Bonhoeffer runs throughout The Secular
City, particularly in its motif of ‘the world come of age’,21 and in Cox’s conviction
that the demands of the Gospel require Christians to abandon the securities of
institutional religion for the costly discipleship of sacrificial living amidst the
complexities of the modern world. Urban life epitomizes the spirit of moder-
nity, and Cox draws extensively on urban theory to portray cities as character-
ized by cultural diversity, geographical and social mobility and the triumph of
technological innovation. Yet this is not to lose the robust theological ration­ale
underpinning Cox’s celebration of the secular city. Even though urbanization
brings with it the currents of religious pluralism and secularism, The Secular
City argues that such forces should be embraced as a liberation from the ‘other-
worldly’ illusions of traditional religion in favour of a ‘this-worldly’ and incar-
national spirituality, more attuned to the needs of the mod­ern world.22
To re-read The Secular City today is to realize how far theological fashions,
the nature of religion, even cities themselves, have changed over the interven-
ing years. In con­trast to Cox’s expansive, even utopian, vision of the modern
city, later social analysis—and much urban theology—has stressed its frac-
tured and dysfunctional nature. Far from being magnets for the best of human
endeavour, the cities (and inner cities especially) have become perceived as
places of danger, stagnation and exclusion. Similarly, Cox’s call to the churches
to abandon their institutional citadels in favour of the flows and novelties of
urban living, whilst reflecting Bonhoeffer’s call for a ‘religionless Christianity’,
runs counter to later em­phases on the distinctiveness of Christian profession
in the city, especially in the forms of counter-cultural witness, or even as the
local congregation as a vital source of ‘social capital’ within urban civil society.
But most of all, looking back, it is apparent how far the trajectory of secu-
larization, so central to Cox’s revisioning of the urban church, has taken new
and unexpected turns. We may not talk so much today of the ‘secular’ city, so

20  Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant
Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
21  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, (London: SCM Press, 1953),
pp. 324–329.
22  Harvey Cox, The Secular City (London: SCM Press, 1965), p. 154.
400 Baker and Graham

much as the ‘post-Christian’ and ‘post-secular’.23 Whilst mainstream Christian

denominations continue to see a decline in formal affiliation, there is evidence
of many new expressions of religious faith, many of which have migrated to
the Western city as a result of globalization.
As a decade, the 1960s was in many respects the high-watermark of tech-
nocratic optimism, rational urban planning and economic expansion. By the
1980s, the effects of the oil crisis, economic recession and de-industrialization,
exacerbated by phil­o­­sophies of neo-liberalism, meant that the prosperity of the
urban powerhouses of northern Europe and the United States—Manchester,
Liverpool, Hamburg, Antwerp, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York—
was at an end. Some cities such as New York and Liverpool had been bank-
rupted by local councils unable to reign in public spending in the face of
spiralling welfare expenditure and central or federal retrenchment, unable to
maintain investment in public infrastructure, transport or social housing. If
the economic and political ascendancy of these modern industrial cities had
been expressed in the confidence and spectacle of its iconic buildings, then
the reversal of their fortunes was similarly reflected in physical decay and
social disintegration.24 If the incarnational theology of the 1960s, had iden-
tified with the political and economic strivings of vibrant markets, function-
ing local governments and progressive civil society, then the urban theologies
of the late twentieth century found themselves speaking into a much more
divided and entrenched public discourse, in which the managerial and redis-
tributive powers of the centralized state have become discredited, and market
forces heralded as the true guarantors of economic stability.25
Whether they explicitly cited theo­logies of liberation or not, urban and pub-
lic theologies of this period emphasize such themes as God’s preferential
option for the poor, the imperatives of Bib­li­cal calls for justice in the face of
corruption, conspicuous consumption and inequality. These theo­logies were
not reflecting on cities as alluring hubs of innovation, therefore, but often as
places of post-industrial decay, in which large sections of the once-prosperous
(if always pre­carious) urban working-classes now find themselves abandoned
to poverty and long-term unem­ployment. The response of many churches was

23  Justin Beaumont and Christopher Baker (eds.) Post-secular Cities—Space, Theory and
Practice (London and New York: Continuum, 2011); Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a
Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age (London: SCM Press, 2013).
24  Katie Day, ‘Gun violence in the U.S.: the Challenge to Public Theology’ in H. Bedford-
Strohm, Florian Höhne & Tobias Retmeier, eds. Contextuality and Intercontextuality in
Public Theology (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 161–172.
25  Miguez, ‘A Theology of the Urban Space’, 559–579.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 401

Urban Theology 1960s 1980s 2000s

Urban Context Optimism Abandonment Regeneration

“Technopolis” Inequality Pluralism
Growth Decline Postmodern planning
Anonymity
Theological Secular City Marginalization ‘Resacralization’
Tradition Humanity come Biblical justice Post-secular
of Age Incarnation— Christianity
Incarnation— identifying with Incarnation—
identifying with suffering of urban embodying Christ
human progress poor in the city
Ways of being Institutional church Advocacy and Church as
Church dissolves resources sacramental
Social activism, Established Church community or source
prophecy, justice as conscience of the of social/‘faithful’
nation capital
Return to tradition—
or new ways of being
church?

Figure 1 Changing currents within twentieth-century urban theology

to take a stance of solidarity alongside mar­gin­alized communities, by ‘speaking

truth to power’ in their public pronouncements. Increasingly, how­ever, such
solidarity found expression in new patterns of church-building and church
plant­ing in the inner cities, and the emergence of forms of inten­tional com-
munity that sought to em­body Christ in the urban context. These anticipate
some of the experiments in incarnational and new monastic communities and
‘new ways of being church’ inspired by a reformulated Missio Dei theology in
the 21st century.

Faith in the City

As economic decline deepened, so too did a sense of alienation, which some-
times led to acute social and racial conflict. After riots broke out in many inner
city neighbourhoods in the United King­dom in the summer of 1981, the Church
of England established the “Archbishop’s Commission on Urban Priority
Areas” which produced a report, Faith in the City, in December 1985. Critical of
the policies of the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher for doing
402 Baker and Graham

little to alleviate the effects of recession and structural shifts in the economy
away from traditional manufacturing in­dustry, the report called for greater
investment in public services and for policies that priori­tized the needs of the
poor and marginalized. Not surprisingly, it provoked a robust repudiation:
the story goes that one senior minister branded the report ‘Marxist’, thereby
gaining it huge publicity and ensuring a wide readership.26 At a time when the
Conservatives were busy neutralising many of William Temple’s famous ‘inter-
mediate organizations’ that stood be­tween the individual and the State, and
political opposition was divided amongst itself, the Church of England found
itself one of the few effective sources of dissent, generating a legacy of distrust
between Church and State that endures to this day.27
The main thrust of the report’s theology was to set out, with reference to
Biblical teaching and tradi­tions of Christian social thought, the theological
rationale for ‘social and political action aimed at altering the circumstances
which appear to cause poverty and distress’ (3.4). It defends a staple principle
of public theology, namely that the gospel speaks to institutions and struc-
tures as well as to the human heart. More surprisingly, perhaps, it cites Latin
American Liberation Theo­logy to do so, although it is probably more accurate
to conclude that the public stance of the Comm­issioners was informed, ironi-
cally, by its Established status, which meant that through the parish system
the Church of England takes responsibility for the ‘cure of souls’ of all mem-
bers of every community in the land, regardless of religious faith or affiliation.
Put more inten­tion­ally, it is the outworking of an incarnational theology that
maintains the Church’s presence in every neighbourhood, including the most
margin­alized, and which serves as a powerful conduit of information from the
grass-roots to the corridors of power. (Hence the significance of the Re­port’s
deliberate recommendations to Church and Nation, and its insistence that in
exposing the plight of the inner cities, the Established Church had a duty to act

26  Adam Dinham, Faith and Social Capital after the Debt Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012); Elaine Graham and Stephen Lowe, What Makes a Good City? Public Theology and the
Urban Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009).
27  Unfortunately, this means that the default position of any government may now be to
dismiss the public pro­nouncements of church leaders out of hand. See, for example the
dismissive reaction on the part of political leaders and media to the Church of England
Bishops’ document on the UK 2015 General Election, Who is my Neighbour? An attempt to
articulate the deeper moral issues underlying the campaign is rejected as a partisan inter-
vention on the part of those with no authority to speak on political matters. See Malcolm
Brown, ‘Who is My Neighbour?’ Huffington Post (online), 20 April 2015, available at: www
.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rev-dr-malcolm-brown/bishops-house-of-lords_b_6704094.html
[accessed 30/07/2015].
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 403

as the conscience of the nation.28) This was also matched by the methodology
of the Commissioners, who—once again tak­ing advantage of the placement of
a parish church and incumbent in every part of the country—saw fit to muster
statistical evidence and first-hand testimony in their portrayal of the realities
of poverty in urban priority areas.29
Much of the criticism of Faith in the City over the years has focused on the
perceived weak­nesses of its theology. According to its critics, the report’s polit-
ical, moral and economic argu­ments were insufficiently grounded in theologi-
cal principles; it overlooked the signi­fi­cance of glob­alization, multiculturalism
and religious pluralism; it made no explicit reference to mission; it failed to
argue for a conversion of the nation’s heart and soul as well as a change of
govern­ment policy. Yet a focus on its deficiencies must be tempered by atten-
tion to its central task and main achievement, which was to articulate a theol-
ogy that took structural injustice and regenera­tion as seriously as personal sin
and salvation, and to make that the basis of its intervention into public debate.
Nevertheless, to re-read the report thirty years on is to discover priorities
for public theology that appear remarkably prescient. In keeping with a pref-
erential option for the excluded, the church’s en­gage­ment with public issues
are understood as emerging from, and equipping, the ‘grass-roots’ of everyday
urban life and faith, and develop a more inductive, vernacular approach. In
keeping with a secularising and increasingly pluralist nation, it realizes that
the church must become more adept at speaking to a society that is no longer
familiar with ‘Christian concepts and language’. Later theological work, much
of it inspired by Faith in the City, has pointed the churches in these more con-
textual and ‘mission-shaped’ directions.

Global Cities

It is a matter of continuing historical dispute whether, in the transition from

rural (or small town) to urban throughout the nineteenth century, the working
classes of in Europe and North America were effectively en masse lost to orga-
nized Christianity. Certainly, the consensus would appear to be that in those
contexts urbanization represented a lost opportunity. Much of the churches’
subsequent public theology and urban mission strategies have been premised
on attempts to ‘win back’ the un- or de-churched masses.

28  See Henry Clark, The Church Under Thatcher (London: SPCK, 1993).
29  Archbishop’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City: a Call for Action by
Church and Nation (London: Church House Publishing, 1985), p. xiv.
404 Baker and Graham

Contrast that with processes of urbanization into the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries: in South Korea, for example, where Christianity is overwhelm-
ingly an urban phenomenon, its growth after 1945 and after the partition with
the North coinciding with South Korea’s rapid and highly successful shift into
an industrial-urban economy;30 or countries such as Brazil, in which urbaniza-
tion, similarly, has provided opportunities for Protestantism, especially Pente­
costalism, to gain vast support—a pattern of growth and denominational
emphasis also replicated in many parts of Africa.31 As the direction of global
population move­ment and urbanization changes again in the early decades
of the twenty-first century, and migration into the mega-cities of the world
becomes transnational, many post-industrial Western cities are experien­cing
unexpected growth in church numbers, swelled by migration from Eastern
Europe and the global South. So, for example, in Europe and North America the
fastest-growing churches are now either majority African, African-Caribbean,
Eastern European, Latino/a or Hispanic in composition, in contrast with some
mainstream Prot­estant denominations which continue to head to­wards poten-
tial extinction.32

Re-Engaging Public Theology with the Material City of the

21st Century

The first two decades of this century have seen the realization of trends first
anticipated by a generation of post-Marxist urban theorists and sociologists in
the 1990s, who saw the global economic and social order being transformed
from structures of institutional hierarchy and the secular nation state to that of
the globalized ‘Network Society’.33 The intensification of the global economy

30  Byung Suh Kim, ‘The Explosive Growth of the Korean Church Today: A Sociological
Analysis’, International Review of Mission, 74/293 (1985), 59–72.
31  Sebastian and Kirsteen Kim, Christianity as a World Religion (New York: Continuum,
2008); Philip Jenkins, Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
32  Jane Garnett & Alana Harris, eds., Rescripting Religion in the City (London: Ashgate,
2013). For evidence of the influence of increasing diversity on urban and public theol-
ogy, see Kathryn Tanner, ed. Spirit in the Cities: Searching for Soul in the Urban Landscape
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), Lowell W. Livesey, ed. Public Religion and Urban
Transformation (New York: New York University Press, 2000), and Thomas Tweed, Our
Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford
University Press).
33  Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 405

and the de-territorialization of much manufacturing and trade due to techno-

logical change led Manuel Castells to argue that:

[T]he network society is global, it is based on global networks. So, it is

pervasive throughout the planet, its logic transforms extends to every
country in the planet, as it is diffused by the power embedded in global
networks of capital, goods, services, labor, communication, information,
science, and technology. So, what we call globalization is another way to
refer to the network society.34

Other urban theorists such as David Harvey and Saskia Sassen have shown how
cities serve as nodes in these global networks, and how the network-generating
power of those cities (especially around finance, research, innovation and cul-
ture) reconfigure the spatial and social inequalities in and between cities and
city regions.35
As the world becomes increasingly interconnected by networks of services,
labour and communication, so the speed and intensity of change (especially
urban change) becomes more pro­nounced and disorientating. Into this hyper-
fluid era, scholars have observed the resurgence of religion as a materially-
grounding force that re-connects people and places. For Thomas Tweed, the
genius of religion in an increasingly uprooted world is to help citizens create a
sense of ‘dwelling’ or home that is created within the very processes of migra-
tion or ‘crossing’.36 Within what Manuel Vasquez refers to (borrowing Gilles
Deleuze) as the ‘relentless dialectic of de-territorialization and re-territorial-
ization’ of the globalization process,37 religion does two significant things. The
first is that, through the circulation of the efficacious power of religious
artefacts and goods on an everyday basis (‘including audiotaped sermons,

34  Manuel Castells, ‘The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy’, in M.Castells and
G. Cardoso, eds., The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy (Washington, DC: Johns
Hopkins Center for Transatlantic Relations, 2005), pp. 3–22, at pp. 4–5; see also Davey, op.
cit., pp. 28–39.
35  David Harvey: Rebel Cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution (London: Verso,
2013); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press,
2001).
36  Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press,
2008). See also James Bielo, ‘Urban Christianities: place-making in late modernity’,
Religion 43:3 (2013), 301–311.
37  Manuel Vasquez, More than Belief: A Materialist theory of Religion (Oxford University
Press, 2011).
406 Baker and Graham

charismatic pastors or prophets, missionaries, sacred music, and relics’38), reli-

gion imbues profane life with a transcendent quali­ty and dimension. Similarly,
by repopulating new pop-up venues (such as disused shops and in­dustrial
units) as well as historically-embedded spaces, people can experience face-to-
face en­counter within the context of storied space, where personal narratives
and experiences are held with­in those of others, as well as connecting with
transcendent and eschatological religious dis­courses of remembrance and
awe. In other words, it is the ability of religion to hold in dialectical tension
and express in material form the competing dynamics of crossing and dwelling
that con­tri­bute to its extraordinary global resurgence.39

A Post-Secular Public Sphere?

Religion’s ability to thrive under the condition of twenty-first century global-

ized capitalism and urban­­ization is throwing previously-held sociological
assumptions about the public decline of religion into considerable disarray. A
2015 report by the Pew Research Centre40 analyses a series of global dynamic
trends including age, fertility, mortality, migration and religious switching to
suggest that by 2050, the percentage of the world that identifies as unaffiliated
(or espousing ‘No Religion’) will decline from 16% to 13%. Around 60% of the
globe by contrast will comprise of those who identify as Christian and Muslims.
The remaining 27% will be other global and folk religions. A small minority of
countries in the West will become increasingly secular: the Pew Report suggest
that by 2050, the proportion of citizens identifying as ‘No Religion’ in the US
will rise from 17% to nearly 26%.
These empirical trajectories have led to the emergence of the concept of the
‘post-secular’ as a new way of mapping and imagining the public sphere. The
term has attracted considerable critic­ism. Some object to its implied linear-
ity, whilst others say that it is government social policy that is driving recent
increased awareness of religion.41 However, the most pervasive definition

38  Vasquez, op. cit., p. 282.

39  Thomas A. Tweed: Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006).
40  Pew Research Center, ‘The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections,
2010–2050’ (April 2015), <www.pewresearchcenter.org> [accessed 28 July 2015].
41  Jürgen Habermas, ‘On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion’, in
H. de Vries and L.E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Religion in a Post-Secular World
(New York: Fordam University Press, 2006), pp. 251–261.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 407

of the term, developed in the early 2000s by Jürgen Habermas, does not posit
a linear or teleological thesis. It simply calls for a way we might re-imagine
a public sphere in which religion has re-emerged as a potent repository for
political ideas and cultural imagination. We need, Habermas says, to cultivate
a ‘post-secular self-understanding of society as a whole in which the vigorous
con­tinuation of religion in a continually secularising environment must be
reckoned with’.42
This open-ended and non-essentialised narrative of the public sphere
contrasts sharply with the clear teleological narrative of Cox’s ‘Secular City’,
which assumed that secularization (as the ex­pression of modernity) and secu-
larism (as a normative epistemology and cultural position) was an irrevers-
ible process that would radically reformulate the structure of religious belief.
Haber­mas’ definition articulates a useful shorthand definition for the changes
being wrought in the public sphere by globalization which have also seen the
increased impact and growth of religious practices, discourse and imaginaries,
albeit alongside continued resistance and unease on the part of many liberal
democracies to the new visibility of religious groups in the public square.43 It
is in the urban where we see proleptically the new post-secular spaces that
emerge under the pressure of globalized change, spaces that often run ahead
of our ability to theorize them. Such changes are driving trends in performance
and engagement that are shaping our understanding of key theological and
ecclesial concepts, and it is these new spaces and emergent practices that dis-
cussion now turns.

Missio Dei and Holistic Mission

The theological concept (at least within the Protestant tradition) that argu-
ably epitomizes the shift towards the new expression of ecclesia within these
new urban spaces of networked global­ization and post-secularity is that of
‘Missio Dei’. It has its roots within the Edinburgh Con­ference of 1910 and sub-
sequent development by Karl Barth in the 1930s and Leslie Newbiggin and the
ecumenical movement of the 1960s. However, it is the popularized account by
David Bosch in his seminal work Transforming Mission in the 1990s that is driv-
ing much con­temporary urban public theology. In Bosch’s classic formulation,
mission is not seen as origin­a­ting from the church or any other human agency,

42  Jürgen Habermas, ‘Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism,’
Journal of Political Philosophy, 13:1 (2005), 1–28 at 26.
43  Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place (London: SCM Press, 2013).
408 Baker and Graham

but is an attribute that flows from the pro­gressive and outward economy of
the Trinity. ‘Mission has its origin in the heart of God. God is the fountain
of sending love. This is the deepest source of mission . . . there is mission
because God loves people.’44 The Church’s mission is to participate in that
economy through a life of ser­vice and discipleship by becoming ‘the church
for others’.45 This also has the effect of im­pell­ing the church towards the world
as a pilgrim people of God, shaped and impelled by the prompt­ing of God’s
Spirit and no longer a static or introverted institution.
Cloke, Thomas and Williams call this kind of Missio Dei theology a ‘post-
structural evangel­icalism’.46 It tends to express forms of faith that emphasize
the love, solidarity and suffering of God through the person of Jesus rather
than the power and glory of God: ‘a journey from the being of God to the
story of God’s being’47 and, in an echo perhaps of Bonhoeffer, the search for
new forms of religionless Christianity.48 There are also strong resonances
in this ecclesiology of Bonhoeffer’s concept of the Church for others (as
in the Church is only the Church when it exists in the same way that Christ
is the one for others), outlined in works such as Ethics.49 It is a commitment to
the essence rather than the structures of belief, in the expectation that the per-
formance of Christian virtue will meet, in challenging but hos­pi­table ways, the
increasingly de-institutionalized searching for meaning and truth in a newly
re-enchanted and re-sacralized world. It stresses the power of the impossible
and the invisible (or virtual) dimensions of faith—what John Caputo calls ‘the
religious loving of the impossible’50—that leads Christians to acts of love that
embody an incarnational ethic which is often at odds with the institutional
norms of both church and politics.
This activity becomes the basis of urban mission because of the prior-
ity of attracting the un­churched searcher for community, belonging and

44  David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York:
Orbis, 1991), p. 392.
45  Mark Laing, ‘Missio Dei: Some Implications for the Church’, Missiology: An International
Review, 37:1, (2009), 89–99 at 91.
46  Paul Cloke, Samuel Thomas and Andrew Williams, ‘Radical Faith Practice? Exploring the
changing theological landscape of Christian faith motivation’ in J.Beaumont and P. Cloke
eds., Faith-based Organisations and exclusion in European Cities (Bristol: Policy Press,
2012), p. 120.
47  op. cit, p, 117.
48  John Caputo, Katharine Moody, Pete Rollins et al., It Spooks: Living in Response to an
Unheard Call (Shelter50 Publishing Collective LLC, 2015).
49  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 2009).
50  John Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 13.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 409

truth. Spaces of authentic, relational but non-creedal and non-institutional

Christian caritas and agape thus create new forms of attachment to an
urban Christian community, serving as the basis of more sustainable and
long-term relationships.51
In seeking new ways to engage with disaffected and marginalized urban
localities, these in­ten­tional communities engage in proactive listening and the
facilitation of new public spaces in order to discern what practical projects
might bring people into contact for the first time with an attractive and rel-
evant expression of Christian good news.52
The edited volume by Cloke, Beaumont and Williams53 looks at UK-based
case studies of evangelical urban mission with particular reference to the
more politically-edged forms of incarnational engagement following the Great
Recession of 2007–8 and the enduring impacts of govern­ment austerity
measures on urban neighbourhoods. In seeking new ways to engage with
dis­affected and disenfranchised urban localities, these intentional communi-
ties engage in pro­active listening in order to discern what practical projects
might bring people into contact for the first time with an attractive and rel-
evant expression of Christianity. Such examples include: developing an award-
winning children’s adventure playground on derelict land in the middle of a
large housing complex; creating a new public park out of a disused clay pit;
reclaiming a public housing estate from the control of drugs gangs and men-
toring young people at risk of mental illness, crime or abuse at schools and in
employment schemes. These organic and bottom-up projects came to involve
all sections of the community including citizens, service providers and public
bodies. They created new sets of relationships and partnerships that sprang

51  Much of this theology has been taken up and developed by pioneers of the New
Monasticism movement in the States such as Shane Claiborne, Rob Bell, Doug Pagitt
and Robert Webber which has close links with Missio Dei network. A number of vol-
umes have recorded vibrant and innovative case studies of this new kind of incarnational
urban mission; for example from the States, James Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals—Faith,
Modernity and the Desire for Authenticity (New York and London: New York University
Press, 2011); Josh Packard, The Emerging Church—Religion at the Margins (Boulder, CO:
FirstForumPress, 2012, Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel, The Deconstructed Church
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
52  Paul Cloke, Justin Beaumont & Andrew Williams (eds.), Working Faith—Faith-based
Organisations and Urban Social Justice (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2013 ); Elaine
Graham, ‘The Unquiet Frontier: Tracing the Boundaries of Philosophy and Public
Theology’, Political Theology, 16:1 (2015), 33–46.
53  Working Faith (2013).
410 Baker and Graham

from an identifiable faith-community, but mobilized people of all faiths and

beliefs (including secular ones).
Mike Pears, a theologian-practitioner attached to Urban Expressions, an
evangelical network in the UK that models many of the principles and attributes
of the Missio Dei movement, identifies several ‘urban virtues’ that express this
new, visceral type of incarnational, missional public theology.54 These include:
living alongside the host community; becoming a community of listeners and
learners; appre­ciating and developing ‘a sense of place’; participation—both
spiritual, in the sense of Missio Dei as participating in God’s mission, and tem-
poral, in terms of serving as hubs and facilitators of participation on behalf
of others; and a holistic approach that brings one’s vulnerabilities as well as
competencies to the process, in recognition that this type of mission is often
costly in terms of burn-out and self-doubt. These incarnational expressions
of urban mission and ministry reflect perhaps a more entrepreneurial form of
public theological engagement, which nevertheless have clear genealogies
of connection with established and mainstream Christian institutions. The
structural critique that they bring to urban and policy systems is more often
rooted in localised politics and agendas, and often involves such churches, as we
now elaborate, in being local catalysts for conscientisation and organisation.55
The curating and facilitating of new hubs and spaces of cross-over engage-
ment contained within some of the case studies highlighted in the Working
Faith volume above has strong resonance with another category emerging
from urban geography. The concept of ‘post-secular rapproche­ment’ directly
correlates to Habermas’ understanding of the post-secular, articulated earlier
in this chapter. Beaumont and Cloke suggest that these emergent spaces are
forged out of new ‘inter­connections between religious, humanist and secular-
ist positionalities in the dynamic geo­gra­phies of the city’56 and are located in
contexts such as Fair Trade Cities, Cities of Sanctuary, energy provision net-
works, places of obvious socio-economic need that demand a collective pol­i­
tical and ethical response (for example food banks), welfare projects such as

54  Mike Pears, ‘Urban Expression: Convictional Communities and Urban Social Justice’, in
P. Cloke, J. Beaumont and A. Williams, eds., Working Faith: Faith-based Communities
Involved In Justice (Paternoster, 2013), pp. 85–110, at pp. 107–108. See also Philip Sheldrake,
The Spiritual City: Theology, Spirituality and the Urban (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
55  For examples of this, see Chris Baker, Hybrid Church in the City: Third Space Thinking (2nd
edition) (London: SCM Press, 2009), pp. 111–137.
56  Paul Cloke and Justin Beaumont, ‘Introduction to the Study of Faith-Based Organizations
and Exclusion in European Cities’ in P. Cloke and J. Beaumont, eds., Faith-Based
Organizations and Exclusion in European Cities (London: Policy Press, 2012), pp. 1–36
at p. 32.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 411

homelessness support and mental health projects which directly subvert offi-
cial government rhetoric or action.57
These new trends thus signify both a new willingness towards, as well as the
strategic im­por­tance of, being open to working alongside others who share a
similar ethical drive (or ‘spiritual capital’)58 to transform things for the better.
It represents a form of Hogue’s ‘pragmatic public theology’ in terms of col-
laborative activism which strategically sets about forming new local assem-
blages and economies of spatial scale that are tailor-made to fit the required
task and which do not rely on unwieldy and artificially-imposed cartographies
of bureaucratic authority.59
On the more traditional end of the spectrum of evangelicalism, a wealth
of new research is in­vesti­gating the interface of theology, spirituality and
praxis within large urban evangelical mega­churches in the post-secular cit-
ies of Europe and the United States as well as the global South.60 Such mega-
churches are simultaneously global and local: most of them are Pentecostal
or Charismatic, reflecting the fastest-growing branches of Christianity and
reflecting the increasing pre­dominance of developing nations as they experi-
ence mass urbanization. In keeping with the dyn­amics of globalization, such
congregations perfectly reflect the diversity and global flows of con­temporary
urban life, and have significantly contributed to the transnational migra­tion
of patterns of religious practice and behaviour from one context to another.
Many take advantage of new technologies of mass communication such as
broadcasting, web presence and social media in order to develop a global audi-
ence that further transcends and complicates the physical limits of time and
place.61

57  See also Tanja Winkler, ‘Super-Sizing Community Development Initiatives: the Case of
Hillbrow’s Faith Sector’, International Journal of Public Theology, 2:1 (2008), 47–69.
58  See Christopher Baker, ‘Spiritual Capital and Economies of Grace: Redefining the
Relationship between Religion and the Welfare State’, Social Policy and Society, 11:4 (2012),
565–576.
59  Michael Hogue, ‘After the Secular: Toward a Pragmatic Public Theology’, Journal of the
American Academy of Religion, 78:2 (2010), 346–74.
60  Scott L. Thumma and Warren Bird, ‘Megafaith for the Megacity: The Global Megachurch
Phenomenon’ in Stanley D. Brunn ed., The Changing World Religion Map: Sacred Places,
Identities, Practices and Politics (Springer, 2015), pp. 2331–2352; Ju Hui Judy Han, “Urban
Megachurches and Contentious Religious Politics in Seoul”, Handbook of Religion and the
Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century (2015), 133.
61  Mark Cartledge and Andrew Davies, ‘A Megachurch in a Megacity: a Study of Cyberspace
Representation’, Pentecostal Studies, 13:1 (2014), 58–79.
412 Baker and Graham

Yet many of these megachurches also demonstrate a remarkable localism,

being closely tailored to the expectations and interests of specific migrant
communities, not only in worship styles, but in meeting particular economic,
legal, linguistic and cultural needs such as visa and immigration advice,
debt counselling and housing provision. Nevertheless, the theology of such
mega­churches represents continuity with a classically evangelical emphasis
on conversion of indivi­duals within institutions rather than engagement in the
networked, public spaces of urban civil society.62 In her study of one mega-
church in London, Anna Strhan quotes a sermon in which it was stated, ‘It’s
a wonderful, godly thing to care for your neighbour, to love others. But it is
not Christian mission unless the gospel is being proclaimed verbally.’63 Other
churches preach an ex­pli­cit ‘prosperity gospel’ in which the route to economic
advancement is not through collective poli­tical or social campaigning, or struc-
tural reform, but the acquisition of wealth as a sign of divine blessing. Whilst
some congregations are mobilising to exercise their political muscle—often in
pursuit of conservative agendas around sexual morality—the prevailing view
of the urban within these circles is still generally that it is ‘lost’, and a shal-
low environment prone to moral depravity, ‘sin’ and ‘idolatry’, often equated
with a form of ‘aggressive secularism’ that seems determined to stigmatize and
silence the expression of Christian faith.64

From the Material to the Virtual City and Back Again

This chapter has argued that the early church emerged as a strategic expres-
sion of a Good News im­perative that deliberately chose to embed itself in the
material, economic and political realities of the urban, rather than retreat to
the safety and stability of the rural. For the first three or four centuries of its
existence the Christian church critically, but also creatively, engaged with the
public context of the city. It essentially felt at home in the diversity and flow of

62  Samuel Zalanga, ‘Christianity in Africa: Pentecostalism and Sociocultural Change in the
Context of Neoliberal Globalization’ in Stanley D. Brunn ed., The Changing World Religion
Map: Sacred Places, Identities, Practices and Politics (Springer, 2015), 1827–1861, although
a more engaged public and political sensibility within Pentecostalism is also emerging:
see Amos Yong, ‘Pentecostalism and the Political—Trajectories in Its Second Century’,
Pneuma, 32:3 (2010).
63  Anna Strhan, ‘The Metropolis and Evangelical life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the
“Lost City of London” ’, Religion, 43:3 (2013), 331–352 at 337, emphasis in original.
64  Strhan, op. cit; Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, pp. 140–175.
Urban Ecology And Faith Communities 413

the urban milieu, and it was in these contexts that its often subversive power
was most felt and feared.
After the Constantine dispensation in the fourth century and the emer-
gence of Christianity as a self-confident, dominant and empire-spanning
cultural-political force, the theological engagement with the city ceased to be
a practical and urban-shaped mission. However, this ‘virtual or ‘ideal­ized’ read-
ing of the city has been more recently balanced with a return to ecclesial and
theologi­cal patterns that engage fully with the material practices, imaginaries
and ecologies of the urban. Some of these ‘new ways of being church’ can be
traced back to movements that emerged in the last cen­tury and the ineluctable
rise of the industrial city. The pragmatic experi­mentation that is being created
by new spaces of engagement and challenge offered by the global­ized city of
the twenty-first century reflect a further, new avenue for public theology. This
is no naïve return to the utopian city (or indeed the early urban church) but a
nuanced and finely balanced hermeneutical and missional task that calls for
an experimental, attentive but also critical spirit of theological discernment
and praxis.

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 CHAPTER 18

The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis: Examining

the Attraction of a Public Theology from the
Perspective of Minorities
Clive Pearson

An Ambivalent Hope

At face value the prospect of a public theology appears to serve cultural and
diasporic minorities well. Its purpose of fostering the public good, a civil soci-
ety and the flourishing of all carries a rhetoric which ought to appeal to those
living on the edges of a mainstream culture. The praxis of a public theology
presents a way of looking at the world as it currently is and imagines instead
a world of reconciliation, peace and justice; it is a discourse which expresses
itself in terms of social cohesion, harmony and belonging. Through its bilin-
gual and interdisciplinary nature it can draw upon the rich store of symbols
and beliefs found within the Christian tradition in a manner appropriate for
culturally diverse societies. The very temper of a public theology thus pos-
sesses an air of welcome and hospitality alongside its prophetic advocacy of
rights and justice. Its aspirational language seemingly offers a potential dis-
course of solidarity for those whose everyday living is defined by the theme of
marginality made popular by Jung Young Lee.1
The affective tone of this language of the common good is further matched
with a desire to address occasional issues which reveal various forms of injus-
tice which can breed alienation. That matters like asylum-seeking, migration,
citizenship, racism, confusion of identity and generational difference can
come under an umbrella of public theology breaks through the constraints
which conceive faith as purely a matter of private volition. From the perspec-
tive of its bilingual praxis the imperative is to set this language of social well-
being into an interpretive dialogue with the Christian tradition and a biblical
witness. The presence of minorities is likely to release a hermeneutic that will
advocate for the stranger, the poor, those who are disadvantaged and the com-
ing together of those whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds differ. It is

1  Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1995).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_020

The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 419

more than likely that the inclusion of these otherwise marginalized voices will
expand our understanding of a public theology and what constitutes its rheto-
ric of a civil society, the common good and the flourishing of all.
From these vantage points the relationship of a public theology to matters of
utmost concern for minorities in a multicultural society seems assured. It has
an appearance of hope. There is indeed much fine work which has been done
on selected issues2—but there is a proviso. There has not been much explicit
work published on the relationship of a public theology per se to minorities
written from within these marginalized cultural spaces. It is now time to make
room for the intimations of a public theology coming from a minority point
of view. The relative attraction of a public theology can then be understood
in a more nuanced way than its apparent immediate attraction would seem
to suggest.
There are some prior steps to negotiate first.

Subaltern Publics

The overarching issue has to do with how the public sphere is organised and
whether it can actually deliver a common good in a multicultural society.
That these questions can be raised is a sign of how the emergence of a self-
consciously named public theology has arisen in western democracies. Its
advocates have often been male and belonged to the dominant host cul-
ture.3 In the circumstances it is helpful to consider the case Michael Warner

2  For example, on refugees and asylum-seeking see: Fleur Houston, You Shall Love the Stranger
as Yourself: The Bible, Refugees and Asylum (New York and Abingdon: Routledge Press, 2015),
and Susanna Schneider, Asylum-seeking, Migration and Church (Farnham and Burlington:
Ashgate, 2012). For migration, see: Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Short History of Migration
(Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012); Phillip O’Connor, Immigrant Faith: Patterns of
Immigrant Religion in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (New York and London:
New York University Press, 2014); Stephen Boumann and Ralston Deffenbaugh, They Are Us:
Lutherans and Immigration (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress,2009); For citizenship, see: Tim
Soutphommasane, The Virtuous Citizen: Patriotism in a Multicultural Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012). For generational difference, see: Clive Pearson, ed., Faith
in a Hyphen: Cross Cultural Theologies Down Under (Adelaide: Open Book, 2004; Sydney:
UTC Publications, 2009).
3  The male nature of the public sphere / theology is open for ‘inspection’ in the anthology
edited by Stephen Burns and Anita Monro, Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism
(Abingdon and Oxford: Routledge, 2015).What is then noticeable is that only two of the eleven
contributors are from a non-western cultural background: Seforosa Carroll, ‘Homemaking as
420 Pearson

has made against the idea of ‘a single, comprehensive public’ and what that
might mean for those who have felt themselves to be excluded or rendered
invisible.4 In the background lies the earlier work of Nancy Fraser on
‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’.5
Warner took seriously the deceptive simplicity of the word public itself. He
observed that the very ‘texture of modern social life lies in the invisible pres-
ence of these publics which flit around us like large, corporate ghosts’ and in
which we are only ever ‘transient participants’. There are indeed ‘multiple pub-
lics’ which are ‘self-organized’ or ‘autotelic’.6 This rather innocent naming of a
pluralist understanding of what constitutes a public provided a launching pad
for Warner to invoke a noetics of difference and, in effect, call into question the
notion of the common good. Warner argued that there are publics which ‘mark
themselves off unmistakably from any general or dominant public; their mem-
bers are understood to be not merely a subset of the public but constituted
through a conflictual relation to the dominant public.’7 That which may have
been regarded as equal or invisible is supplanted by that which is oppositional
and does not share in all the benefits accruing to the dominant majority. Here
Warner’s thesis becomes indebted to Fraser’s critique of Jürgen Habermas’
bourgeois political sphere (variations of which have informed the design of
much public theology). Fraser included among those who are marginalized
‘people of culture’ who ‘constitute alternative publics’ or ‘subaltern publics’.8
The gradual emergence of a public theology in non-western contexts has
raised issues beyond those identified by Warner and Fraser. Their language
of subaltern and counterpublics presupposed an idea of the public in the
first place. That cannot always be taken for granted. There is no equivalent
word, for instance, in the island nations of the Pacific. Mercy Ah Siu Maliko
has striven to write a public theology around the level of domestic abuse in
fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way) and needed to invent neologisms and search out

an Embodied Feminist Expression of Interfaith Encounters in Public Life’, pp. 96–104; and
Jione Havea, ‘Digging Behind the Songlines: Tonga’s Prayer, Australia’s Fair, David’s House’,
pp. 105–116.
4  Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books, 2005), p. 118.
5  Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–142.
6  Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, pp. 7–9; 67–96.
7  Ibid., pp. 117–118.
8  Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, pp. 122–123; Also, see: Nancy Fraser, Trans­
nationalizing the Public Sphere (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2014).
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 421

roughly corresponding equivalents.9 What this relative absence of vital words

and concepts signifies is a much more substantial difference. Writing in the
field of pastoral care Lydia Johnson has emphasized the importance of rec-
ognising how cultures possess different world-views and the importance of
interpathy as a cross-cultural virtue.10 For a public theology which is seeking
to express itself in a multicultural society the business of communication and
comprehension is critical. Where is meaning to be found? Is it in what is said,
what is heard, or is it something to be negotiated somewhere in between the
two? So much depends upon the level of sensitivity to the practice of cross-
cultural dialogue.11 The merits of being interpathetic rather than empathetic
is a recognition of limits to a full emotive and cognitive response to an alien
culture and its flourishing.
Warner and Fraser’s critique was also directed at ‘actually existing democ-
racy’. That is not the political context in which many minority expressions
of the Christian faith find themselves. One example to the contrary is China
where the ruling regime is Marxist. Now and then the state-sponsored policy
of atheism is relaxed and degrees of religious freedom are allowed in a time of
rapid urbanisation. The public theology which is emerging is espoused by an
intellectual elite whose core concerns are a defence of human rights and the
transformation of society. Alexander Chow prefers to describe this elite as expo-
nents of a public theology which has been grounded in a recovery of Calvinism
rather than as a collection of ‘Christian public intellectuals’. Chow further dif-
ferentiates this exposition of faith from other versions of the Christian faith
in China which are inclined to various forms of separatism (often expressed
through a house church). In a way which is not the same as it is for its western
equivalent the bivocational task of a public theology includes the necessity of
establishing a sound ecclesiology. That task is not simply one of making the
case for a prophetic church over and against one which is designed primarily
for personal salvation and an inward spiritual life. The public theologian in
China must also negotiate the tensions of being a minority seeking recognition

9  Mercy Ah Siu Maliko, ‘Constructing a Samoan Public Theology of Values’, unpublished

PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2015.
10  Lydia Johnson,, Drinking From The Same Well: Cross-Cultural Concerns in Pastoral Care
and Counseling (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011), pp. 58–61.
11  Benno van den Toren, Christian Apologetics as Cross-Cultural Dialogue (London and New
York: T. & T. Clark, 2011).
422 Pearson

as an NGO within an ideological culture which is, at best, indifferent to its con-
fessional claims.12
Nor is the revised public sphere in Fraser’s ‘actually existing democracy’
the same as that which can be found in India. The construction of a public the-
ology here takes place inside a religiously pluralist state where the Christian
faith is a small minority and inclined to be associated with the consequences
of western imperialism and colonialism. In this kind of setting Ankur Barua
has demonstrated how a public theology will not simply need to engage with a
multiplicity of faiths: how will the Christian faith’s reputation for exclusivism
and ‘religious aggression towards other religions and their cultural traditions
fare alongside the Hindu ‘pluralistic attitude’ which is ‘often put forward as a
paradigm of open-ended acceptance’ of diversity?13

First and Second Languages

From these examples it becomes evident that the underlying sociology of the
cultural context in which an ethnic minority is to express a public theology
matters. For those living in diaspora the sociology in which they are embedded
is often likely to be one which self-consciously deems itself to be multicultural.
The term itself is deeply problematic and contested.14 For the present purpose
the pivotal concern revolves around how a minority culture participates in the

12  Alexander Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today”, International
Journal of Public Theology, 8:2 (2014), 158–175. Also, see: Zhibin Xie, Religious Diversity and
Public Religion in China, (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006); Easten Law, ‘Working
Out a Chinese Public Theology: 3 Preliminary Guidelines’, China Source (2 September,
2015); <http://www.chinasource.org/resource-library/from-the-west-courtyard/working-
out-a-chinese-public-theology>.
13  Ankar Barua, ‘Ideas of Tolerance: Religious Exclusivism and Violence in Hindu-Christian
Encounters’, International Journal of Public Theology, 7:1 (2013), 65–90. Gnana Patrick
seeks to describe ‘certain aspects’ and ‘challenges’ facing the construction of an Indian
public theology in the midst of a ‘polyphony of voices’ which includes a constitutional
secularism, a revitalisation of religion, the effects of modernity and subaltern concerns.
‘Public Theology in the Indian Context—A Note on Certain Aspects, Its Prospects and
Challenges’, Conference of Catholic Theological Institutions, Pune, November 2011,
<http://fiuc.org/w/cms/COCTI/ACTESPUNE/Gnana%20Patrick.pdf>.
14  For example: Michael Murphy considers whether the anxiety which now surrounds the
previously acceptable ‘multicultural experiment’ is a threat to liberty and equality; can
western democracies accommodate minority groups without sacrificing peace and stabil-
ity? Multiculturalism: A Critical Introduction, (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012);
That earlier acceptance has given way to backlash. See, Steven Vertovec and Susanne
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 423

quest for the common good. At face value that concern is seemingly innocent
but it can mask several potential problems. The most substantive flows from
the definition of what constitutes that common good or its equivalent.15 Those
minorities who come to a nation state in a subsequent immigrant wave fre-
quently experience what Fumitaka Matsuoka describes as a number of contra-
dicting experiences which arise out of their ‘ruptural liminality’. They possess a
particular ‘angle of vision’ which distinguishes between the experience of ordi-
nary everyday living of an ethnic minority and the aspirational claims of the
destination’ society—those claims are frequently housed within a bill of rights
and/or constitution that is tightly bound to the history and national imaginary
of a dominant majority.
In order to address these tensions Matsuoka makes a distinction between
first and second languages. It is not the same kind of bilinguality which is a
standard feature of a public theology seeking to establish a bridge between
the ecclesial audience and the broader public sphere. Here this analogy of two
languages is tied to how a minority culture names its experience in the light
of the nation’s first language. Matsuoka’s intention is not to construct a public
theology per se; he is writing for the sake of a ‘new architecture of peoplehood’.
The irony he has discerned is how a nation’s first language for life-together
can ‘generate[s] deviation and dissonance’ as a matter of course for those who
whose ‘deep spiritual and cultural DNA’ is inherited from another time and
place. That alien DNA cannot always be reconciled with the neatly formulated
creed of a monotheistic religion out of the legacy of which a public theology
has come. The coming together of this first and second language may well
require a ‘hybrid [form of] faith’ which longs for ‘bridge-heads’.16 The impera-
tive now is to find ‘resources to function as human beings in the midst of an
alienating universalism imposed by the dominant cultural group.’17
The kind of distinctions Matsuoka is identifying should be seen in the light
of whether social justice is actually possible in a multicultural society. For a

Wessendorf, eds., The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and

Practices (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010).
15  Cheryl A. Kirk Duggan examines closely the meaning of the term ‘common’, ranging from
its ordinary usage to the way in which it can sanction and benefit a majority or particular
elite. ‘A Rose by Any Other Name? Deconstructing the Essence of Common’, in Patrick D.
Miller and Dennis P. McCann, eds., In Search of the Common Good (New York and London:
T & T Clark, 2005), pp.190–194.
16  Fumitaka Matsuoka, Learning to Speak a New Tongue: Imagining a Way that Holds People
Together—An Asian-American Conversation (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011),
pp. 1–15.
17  Ibid., p. 62.
424 Pearson

public theology this dilemma is pivotal insofar as the quest for social justice is
a foundational axiom. The issue at stake here is not so much one of whether
a distributive understanding of justice where concerns surround issues like
equal access to housing, work, health benefits and other designated primary
goods are met. For Douglas Miller the deeper question is about whether there
is an overlapping consensus on what justice actually is.
The very nature of a multicultural society is one where ‘citizens belong to
a number of distinct ethical and religious groups’ that constitute an ‘impor-
tant source for personal identity’ and also can compete for loyalty. What hap-
pens in a social union where a compelling allegiance is given to a minority
culture rather than to the democratic citizenship of the larger society? What
happens when the dominant majority is deaf to the cries of those who are dis-
advantaged by race or the status and history of their citizenship? Miller is thus
addressing the question whether there are different understandings of justice
held ‘by cultural groups within the same political community’.
For Miller social justice comprises a number of ‘primary goods’ and ‘steps’.
Those goods which go into the making of the common good have to do with
rights and liberties, opportunities and power, and wealth and income. The
most obvious strategy for the realization of social justice would seem to be
the distribution of resources and benefits that fulfil these goods on the basis
of need and equity. From empirical research Miller argues that such a conclu-
sion is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. In the first instance the
composition of social justice is more complex. Here he identifies several ‘steps’
which intersect with one another in various ways. Those steps embrace a con-
cern for rights (or equality or desert), scope (to whom is justice owed), context
(in what circumstances does any particular principle apply) and application
(which practices and policies are mandated by justice). Miller is effectively
defining social justice not merely in terms of principles but also by its practice
of distribution. The very idea of social justice, of course, presupposes the com-
ing together of these two otherwise discrete component parts.18
From empirical research Miller has noted that there are differences in the
way in which values to do with what is just play themselves out in diverse
cultures. The dominant majority in a western democracy is liable to favour
personal rights and an instrumental view of justice. By way of contrast
the emphasis in many non-western cultures is on an inner harmony and the
strength of the community.19 How are we then to talk of social justice in a

18  David Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), pp. 70–74.
19  Ibid., pp. 74–84.
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 425

multicultural society—and, by extension, the common good?20 It cannot be

assumed that the much vaunted overlapping consensus actually exists in the
‘real world’ of multiculturalism. It cannot be assumed. It is conceivable that
such agreement may not be achieved; it is entirely possible that a culture is
willing to exercise justice towards its own insiders but not to outsiders.21
The implications for a public theology which seeks to be inclusive of
minority and subaltern perspectives cannot be ignored. Miller was particu-
larly concerned with the implicit sociologies which are to be found in the
political community. So much depends upon whether it nurtures alienation,
segregation or some form of integration. In terms of a coherent and compre-
hensive understanding of social justice Miller argues that the role trust plays is
pivotal.22 It is a public virtue which warrants close attention and Miller is under
no illusion: there are ‘different levels of trust’ ranging from the inter-personal
through to trust in government via a ‘generalized trust in one’s fellow citizens’
and a ‘willingness to support socially just policies’. One of the critical features
of a civil society is the extent of its lines of thin trust which can embrace the
stranger who is different from oneself. For the pursuit of the common good
and the flourishing of all in culturally and linguistically diverse society the
broadening of such trust is essential—and it must allow space for a prophetic
concern for liberation and voice.

Mediating a Public Theology

Matsuoka is well aware of how difficult it can be to coax a diasporic minor-

ity within a given country to develop a public face to its belief. The Asian
American ‘communities of memory’ face the ever-present risk of being left in
a ‘minor key, irrelevant, or worse, an obstruction’ to the wider society and a
prevailing tide of homogeneity.23 The established practice has been one of not
seeking to draw attention to the community’s presence and needs.

20  Also see, Lenn E. Goodman, Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014); Miller and McCann, In Search of the Common Good,
especially ‘Whose Good? Whose Commons?’, pp. 167–250.
21  David Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), pp. 70–74.
22  Ibid., pp. 84–92.
23  Fumitaka Matsuoka, Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches
(Cleveland: United Church Press, 1995), p. 53.
426 Pearson

Writing in Australia Clive Pearson has sought to nurture a public theology

for the Korean diaspora in Sydney. The primary strategy for this task has been
the writing of brief opinion pieces for one of the Korean language newspa-
pers in this city.24 The frequency of copy has allowed Pearson to respond to
occasional issues of a public nature as they arise. In order to secure a mea-
sure of plausibility this way of expressing faith needed to be presented in an
accessible way that built upon what was already known. The transition was not
simply a movement away from a practice of faith which had been one of vary-
ing degrees of adherence to evangelism, church growth, personal conversion
and what has been designated as “Bible Christianity”.25 The rhetoric of mis-
sion requires the kind of expansion beyond what Paul S. Chung has described
as an ‘ecclesial narrowness’ which effectively ‘sidestep(s) the public relevance
of God’s mission for that society and the world.’ The missio Dei can then end
up being confined to a ‘churchly sphere’ and its more universal message and
relevance for all humanity lost.26 This transitional phase also involves a shift
in the ‘inner geography’ of a migrant people which encourages them to show a
greater interest in those matters of public concern which inform the nurturing
of a civil society in the destination society.27
Such a transition is far from straightforward. For recent migrant cultures
there are settlement and identity issues to negotiate. It is now clear that the
media most often consulted for news and current affairs was not that which
emanates from Australia.28 The ready availability of internet and digital sub-
scriptions has altered the immediate sense of belonging for most migrant
communities. Writing out of the Arab-Australian experience Ghassan Hage
and Abbas El-Zein describe the ways in which such media and local Arabic
newspapers allow a migrant to be much more intimately involved in the
affairs of the original homeland. This facility further allows for there to be a
relative ambivalence and confusion over how and where those who migrate

24  Clive Pearson, MEDIAting Theology (Sydney: Christian Today and UTC Publications, 2012).
25  Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere: Public Theology as a Catalyst for Open Debate
(London: SCM Press, 2011), pp. 37–39.
26  Paul S. Chung, Public Theology in an Age of World Christianity: God’s Mission as Word-Event
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4.
27  Daniel G. Groody, ‘The Spirituality of Migrants: Mapping an Inner Geography’, in Elaine
Padilla and Peter C. Phan, eds., Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 139–156.
28  Gil Soo Han, Korean Diaspora and Media in Australia (Lanham and Plymouth: University
Press of America, 2012).
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 427

belong.29 In the case of the Korean diaspora Kisoo Jang has revealed a lack of
familiarity with public events and ‘breaking news’ in Australia.30 The default
practice is to be much more well informed on what is happening back in Korea.
That public sphere is more readily intelligible and accessible.
The dilemma facing many minority cultures is that the public space in which
debates are held and decisions which affect the public good are made is usu-
ally monolingual. The very nature of migration frequently involves arrival in a
new political context where that language is alien. It creates a situation which
François Grosjean describes as one where ‘life [is] lived with two languages’.31
The implications for a public theology are far-reaching for a minority culture
whose expertise does not necessarily lie in the vehicular language most used
in the civic space. The lack of a working familiarity with the official language
of the receiving culture places pressure upon the capacity to develop shared
experiences and nurture the lines of thin trust so important for the making of
a civil society.
In the circumstances of a public theology the bilingual task reframed in
this way requires the emergence of a prophetic and representative voice. That
vocation is deceptively simple. In order to be a bridge between cultures the
spoken form must secure trust from both the English and Korean speaking
audience. For that to happen the bilingual voice must negotiate what Grosjean
has identified as the complementary principle. Those who exercise this role
will need to possess sufficient levels of competence in different domains and
manage ‘domain-specific vocabulary’.32 The task expects levels of sensitivity
for when it is appropriate to switch codes from one language to another33 and
how to manage the translation from a ‘source language’ to a ‘target language’.34
According to Grosjean the apparent ease with which this task may be per-
formed does not disclose the complexity of what is involved in being bilingual.
This capacity to move in and out of linguistic spaces is not simply a matter of
finding the right words at the right time. It is through the use of language that

29  Ghassan Hage, ed., Arab-Australians: Citizenship and Belonging (Carlton South: Melbourne
University Press, 2002).
30  Kisoo Jang,‘The Role of Korean Migrant Churches in Australia in Welfare Service Provision
and Social Action’, Unpublished PhD thesis, Charles Sturt University, 2016.
31  François Grosjean, Bilingual: Life and Reality (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 2010), p. 15.
32  Ibid., pp. 29–31.
33  Ibid., pp. 51–57.
34  Ibid., pp. 148–152.
428 Pearson

a window is opened onto the composition and values of a particular culture.

There is always linguistic anthropology at work and it is not necessarily the
same from one culture to another.35

Mapping a Public Theology

This emphasis on language and voice is part of a larger complex facing the
call for minority cultures to develop a public theology in a multicultural soci-
ety. The standard practice of minorities is to focus upon ‘the task of cultural,
identity and difference recognition.’36 The ever-present risk Benjamin Valentín
discerned in this strategy is ‘an insular enchantment’.37 Writing in the service
of a prospective public theology for his fellow Hispanic/Latino(a) theolo-
gians Valentín argued that it was still important to pay attention to such mat-
ters and confront racism and cultural imperialism—but then he added the
proviso: there is little in the way in which this theology “aspires to a public
quality . . . [and to focus] on the state of current affairs in a given society’.38
There are no overarching visions as to how this minority perspective might
engage in the public domain and seek to contribute to a just and civil society.39
Valentín writes out of a deep familiarity of the nature, purpose and method of
a public theology.
The foundation upon which this call for an expansion into public theol-
ogy relies on is a history of disempowerment and its continuing reality. The
statistics provide empirical evidence for disproportionate levels of unemploy-
ment, poor educational, income and health opportunities.40 Valentín places
this inventory of issues alongside ‘the hurtful experiences of racist attitudes
and negative stereotypes; denial of access to substantive decision-making
processes, wealth and legal forms of entrepreneurial activity; and cultural
alienation.’41 Valentín is not presenting an either-or case. Now is the time for

35  Zdenek Salzmann, James Stanlaw and Nobuko Adachi, Language, Culture and Society: An
Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, revised and expanded edition (Boulder: Westview
Press, 2015); Ho-Min Sohn, ed., Korean Language in Culture and Society (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2005).
36  Benjamin Valentín, Mapping Public Theology: Beyond Culture, Identity and Difference
(Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2002), p. xi .
37  Ibid., p. xiv.
38  Ibid., p. 118.
39  Ibid., p. xii.
40  Ibid., p. 8.
41  Ibid., pp. 8–9.
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 429

a ‘synthesis [which] calls for a public vision and disposition, and for modes of
public discourse’.42 His intention is to furnish an introduction, a preface and
make the case for the blending of liberation and public theologies.43
The first step in this task is to draw out what kind of good is the common
good. Valentín is wary of any hint of a ‘universalizing emphasis’ which ignores
a legitimate ‘post-modern suspicion’. The common good is not an abstraction
that privileges a dominant culture.44 What Valentín discerned from his famil-
iarity with cultural theologies dedicated to issues of identity was a need for
specificity in the public domain. There is always ‘some disguised form of cul-
tural particularism . . . lurking behind what passes as the universal’.45 This pub-
lic form of theology cannot then recognize any structural inequalities which
might then exist in this company of strangers: ‘the interlocutors speak to one
another as if they are peers’.46 Its specific vocation is to ‘address the pressing
issues in a given social context and to cultivate a care for the quality of our lives
together from within theology.’47
The transition into a public theology requires a shift in audience and a
recognition of voice. The two are related but not necessarily the same. There
is first an obvious need to expand the ecclesial and theological horizons of
the Hispanic-Latino(a) communities. The focus for so long has been on ‘the
remembrance of who we are . . . and the disclosure of what is uniquely ours’.48
This way of doing theology determines its own audience. It makes sense to a
particular culture familiar with those localised filters of identity, symbols and
sense of difference. It can also possess the capacity to inform the experiences
of other cultures for whom there is a ‘family resemblance’ of living in margin-
alized spaces. Whether it can command or, better still, demand notice more
broadly is a moot question. Valentín has also noted that Hispanic / Latino(a)
theologies have ‘rarely commanded high regard in theological scholarship.’49
The implications for the development of a public voice for the sake of a com-
mon good is that minority perspectives are often disadvantaged in the wider
theological setting—right from the outset. What he envisages is a theological
activity which seeks out a ‘large and diverse audience’ and which can ‘pull

42  Ibid., pp. xii–xiii.

43  Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii.
44  Ibid., p. 76.
45  Ibid., p. 122.
46  Ibid., p. 123.
47  Ibid., pp. 86–87.
48  Ibid., pp. 40–41.
49  Ibid., p. 40.
430 Pearson

persons beyond boundaries of difference to work towards worthy public

goals’.50 Valentín is seeking to find a way where a fragmentary and localized
thought can inform and participate in an ‘overarching vision, broad analysis,
and [a] sense of the whole.’51
Writing some years later Michelle Gonzalez has likewise observed that the
emphasis on culture leads to an internal discussion that those familiar with
the Latino(a) community find it difficult to penetrate. The difficulty Gonzalez
discerns is that such theological work can leave the outsider with the ‘sensa-
tion of eavesdropping on an important debate, not entirely clear why it is so
important.’52 This lack of transparency may indeed mask a divisive contest—
between us and them—over rights to being regarded as an authentic theo-
logical voice’ for what is a heterogeneous community anyway. The problem
is further compounded by what we might call the politics of theology which,
in this instance, assumes two forms. The first has to do with the balance and
perhaps proprietorial interest in the discipline itself. Gonzalez notes that
Hispanic/Latino(a) theologies primarily address two audiences: the church
and the Euro-American academy. The emphasis is deemed to be ‘overwhelm-
ingly ecclesial’.53 In terms of an academic discourse Hispanic/Latino(a) the-
ologies are seemingly unable to move beyond the ‘comfort zone of systematic
theology’ and its categories.54 The second facet has to do with reception. Which
theologies are able to achieve status and which are not—and why? Gonzalez
argues that Hispanic/Latino(a) theologies are ‘trapped between two different
understandings of the theological task’—the Euro-American and the Latin
American liberationist. These theologies thus occupy a liminal space in which
they become vulnerable to ‘the negative reception of identity-based discourse
in the United States as a whole’.55
The kind of public theology Valentín is mapping is made up of several
strands. It is familiar with the disciplinary claims on what constitutes a public
theology. The purpose of theology is not to become ‘the private property of
the church’. This map embraces and seeks to transcend theologies of cultural
identity. It is also which can ‘visualize the possibilities and conditions of an

50  Ibid., p. xi.

51  Ibid., p. 82.
52  Michelle Gonzalez, ‘Expanding Our Academic Publics: Latino/a Theology, Religious
Studies and Latin American Studies’, in Hal Recinos, ed., Wading Through Many Voices:
Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), p. 20.
53  Ibid., p. 17.
54  Ibid., pp. 21–22.
55  Ibid., p. 20.
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 431

overarching emancipator project that could account for the diverse processes
that produce social injustices and could prompt fellow citizens to take public
action on behalf of justice’. Here Valentín is indebted to the legacy of a lib-
eration theology. The intention is to transform society and not simply try and
‘decipher the role of the institutional churches in the public sphere, and/or
to describe the characteristics of a public-oriented church’.56 It is a call to be
prophetic in a context where theology ‘rarely has much of an impact in the
public realm’.57 In terms of strategy Valentín recognizes that a minority public
theology cannot stand on its own. It must seek out ‘alliances of struggle across
racial, cultural, gender, class and religious lines.’58

The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis

The momentum behind Valentín’s argument is towards what Hal Recinos

calls an intercultural public theology.59 The Hispanic/Latino(a) theologians
are drawn into a closer collaboration with potential Black African-American,
Asian-American and native American allies. The theoretical necessity for such
a coalition is most strongly put by Eleazar Fernández. His call for solidarity
is a response to the ‘exercise of hegemonic power on subaltern communities’
or on ‘the subaltern multitude’. That hegemonic power is likened to a global
empire which ‘transcends nation states’. It is a ‘mighty power’ which is inclined
to homogenize and eliminate difference.60 Fernández believes it is critical for
the subaltern multitude to develop strategies of transformative praxis; it is a
praxis which is built upon a preferential option for the poor and a recognition
of the poor’s heterogeneity.61 There is here more than an echo of a liberation
theology but with a difference. The coalition Fernández has in mind embraces
the subaltern multitude of the world which is established within what he calls
a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’.62 From the perspective of a public theology this
emphasis on the preferential option for the poor is consistent with one of John

56  Valentín, Mapping Public Theology, p. 85.

57  Ibid., p. 114.
58  Ibid., p. 87.
59  Harold J. Recinos, ‘Introduction’, in Recinos, ed., Wading Through Many Voices, pp. 1–16.
60  Eleazar Fernández, ‘Global Hegemonic Power, Democracy, and the Theological Praxis of
the Subaltern Multitude’, in Recinos, ed., Wading Through Many Voices, pp. 53–55.
61  Ibid,, p. 59.
62  Ibid,, p. 65.
432 Pearson

de Gruchy’s seven principles of good praxis.63 Through the call for solidarity
and a coalitional praxis Fernández is seeking to overcome the prospect of frag-
ments of opposition to the hegemonic power; instead he makes the case for
the creation of multiple counterpublics.64
The rhetoric of coalition, the subaltern multitude and counterpublics
should not hide the difficulties before such a venture. The most obvious is lin-
guistic differences; the common language for a coalition praxis must become
in this instance English and thus often be at a remove of the cultural discourse
on identity and differentiation. The particular issues facing each minority
also possess a distinctive history and can be culture-specific. Writing from an
African-American perspective Marcia Riggs has discerned the importance of
overcoming the experience of being a ‘beleagured minority’ and the kind
of xenophobia which can arise out of such a history where full citizenship has
been denied. Riggs argues that it is time to escape the polarity which has set ‘us
as a social group against other marginalized peoples’.65
The problem Riggs has discerned for a coalitional praxis is not confined
to Black-African American communities. For Andrew Sung Park the coming
together of ethnic groups in the public space needs to be set within the ‘de facto
reality’ of what he names as the multiculturality of contemporary American
society. This act of forming a coalitional interest somehow needs to deal with
those things within a particular culture which may hinder the advancement of
the common good and do so on the basis of cultural values and pluralism. Park
is addressing head-on the presence of patriarchy, racial bias, domestic abuse
and classism which is also to be found in minority cultures. In the service of
a coalitional praxis Park proposes a theology of enhancement. Park envisages
a set of cross-cultural relationships which is grounded in the death and resur-
rection of Christ where one culture can hold up another the potential of ‘what
each culture can be’.66 This coalitional praxis aspires after a common good
made possible partly through the way in which cultures transform each other
through mutual enhancement.67

63  John de Gruchy, ‘Public Theology as Christian Witness: Exploring the Genre”, International
Journal of Public Theology, 1:1 (2007), 38–41.
64  Fernández, ‘Global Hegemonic Power’, p. 67.
65  Marcia Riggs, ‘Escaping the Polarity of Race Versus Gender and Ethnicity’, in Recinos, ed.,
Wading Through Many Voices, pp. 37–39.
66  Andrew Sung Park, ‘Theology of Enhancement: Multiculturality in an Asian American
Perspective’, in Recinos, ed., Wading Through Many Voices, p. 157.
67  Ibid. p. 159.
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 433

The Search for a Responsible Public Theology

The coalitional praxis upon which an intercultural public theology is viable is

most plausible in Fraser’s understanding of an actually existing democracy. It
relies up a level of thin trust and associational life where there is at least a tacit
respect for such. By way of contrast the summons to a public theology made
by Oliver Byar Bowh Si and Pum Ma Zang arises out of an experience of ‘politi-
cal oppression, religious persecution and ethnic genocide’.68 The setting for
which they write is Myanmar. Here the minority status applies to the Christian
faith itself as well as, more specifically, to particular ethnic minorities like the
Chin, Kachin and Karen. From the perspective of a more general understand-
ing of a public theology for minorities Myanmar serves as an example for the
competing claims of a liberation theology and a theology which concerns itself
with the flourishing of a more broadly based civil society.
For Bowh Si and Ma Zang the primary motivating reason lying behind
these calls is thus a tightly bound-up knot of threats to existence. Both look
back to the betrayal of the Panglong Agreement (1947) between the Burmese
Government led by Aung San and the representatives of the Kachin, Chin and
Shan peoples. Full autonomy in internal administration for the frontier areas
was accepted in principle (Clause V); citizens were to ‘enjoy the rights and
privileges which are regarded as fundamental in democratic countries’ (VII);
and, it was acknowledged that a separate Kachin state within a unified Burma
‘is desirable’ (VI).69 Ma Zang further invoked the United Nations Declaration of
Human Rights (especially Articles 1 and 5) and the United Nation Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (especially Articles 2, 3 and 7). This cit-
ing of international agreements established a benchmark which included an
equality of dignity for all peoples and vouchsafed the rights of indigenous peo-
ples to self-determination and ‘not be subjected to any act of genocide or any
other act of violence.’70 Myanmar endorsed these declarations.
Both Ma Zang and Bowh Si recite a national and military history which
exposes the discrepancy between the rhetoric of successive governments and
their actual policies. The purpose is not simply designed to record ‘six decades
of ethnocide’.71 Bowh Si interprets the plight of these ethnic minorities through

68  Pum Za Mang, ‘Ethnic Persecution: A Case Study of the Kachin in Burma”, International
Journal of Public Theology, 9:1 (2015), 68–69.
69  Hugh Tinker, Burma: The Struggle for Independence, 1944–1948, Volume II (London: HMSO,
1984), pp. 404–405.
70  Ma Zang, ‘Ethnic Persecution’, pp. 68–69.
71  Ibid., p. 71.
434 Pearson

an adaptation of Lee’s theory of marginalization. Here it is of a different form

from those who live in diaspora; it is a ‘systematic marginalization’ of a minor-
ity brought about through the exercise of domination by those with power.72
The imperative which arises is one of ‘how are we to be followers of Jesus
Christ in a setting of structural violence and ethnic holocaust?’73 The task has
become one of how a persecuted minority can negotiate its way ‘around one
of the least explored contours of theology’ in Myanmar and proclaim a public
theology that addresses these ‘unspeakable miseries’.74
The task of constructing a public theology in this kind of environment is
confronted with the most daunting set of obstacles. The initiative for such
must come from the beset-upon churches themselves. Ma Zang is adamant
that church must be a prophetic ‘instrument of justice and peace’ and ‘direct
resistance to and responsible protest against social injustice.’75 Whether the
churches have sufficient capacity to generate the necessary theological capital
is a moot point. The problem is partly one which is internal to the church.
The received understanding of the Christian faith has been mediated through
American missionaries; there is little in the way of indigenous theology
addressing contextual issues—and thus to build upon. The standard practice
has been for faith to be ‘spoon-fed’ from western sources and that faith has
been more concerned with personal conversion.76 That emphasis carries with
it its own disadvantage: Buddhists in Myanmar reject a faith which is likely to
submit their own religion and its role in Burman culture and identity.77 The
introverted nature of the Christian faith has also been compounded by
the level of censorship and other restrictions imposed by the military dictator-
ship. The effect of these constraints has been to limit the potential audience
for the Christian kerygma. Bowh Si observes that the characteristics of a pro-
phetic religion have been submerged in fear and silence.78 The minority and
repressed status of the Christian faith has meant that there can be no compari-
son made with the saffron revolution of Buddhist monks in 2007.79 The power
of this movement lay in ‘the huge emotional impact’ made by the very physical

72  Oliver Byar Bowh Si, God in Burma: Civil Society and Public Theology in Myanmar
(Milwaukee: Oliver Byar Bowh Si, 2014), pp. 94–101.
73  Ma Zang, ‘Ethnic Persecution’, p. 85.
74  Bowh Si, God in Burma, p. 46.
75  Ma Zang, ‘Ethnic Persecution’, p. 68.
76  Bowh Si, God in Burma, pp. 78, 86.
77  Ma Zang, ‘Ethnic Persecution’, p. 106.
78  Bowh Si, God in Burma, pp. 67–68.
79  Ibid., pp. 70–73.
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 435

presence of large numbers of monks which became ‘a manifestation of the

sacred in a secular public space.’80
The difficulties facing the creation of a public theology are not simply a con-
sequence of faith’s minority status. It is a type of theology which relies upon
the language of the common good, a civil society and the flourishing of all for
its bilingual appeal. Bowh Si has noted that there is no indigenous Burmese
terminology for the concept of a civil society and the public. For these terms
to have meaning in the Myanmar context they will need what he describes as
a ‘retro-fit’.81 The Burmese words for ‘mass’—pyi thu or pyi thu ludu—will also
need to be handled with care in order to ascertain their political temper and be
distinguished from ideas of rebellion.82
Of the two prospective theologian Bowh Si has developed the more finely
textured case for a public theology. It is designed to be responsible and aspire
after a theology of a civil society. Bowh Si assumed the troubled history of
‘bitter relations’ and of how the Generals have left Myanmar ‘with a narrow
definition of a civil society’. Bowh Si drew upon western political theorists to a
much greater degree than Ma Zang has. The kind of civil society he envisages
is one of democratic freedoms, a federal system of government where there is a
separation of religion and state and inter-faith dialogue is pursued. The latter is
not likely to be easy given the manner in which most congregations have only
ever been exposed to exclusivist understandings of other faiths.83
Bowh Si is very deliberate in the manner in which he embeds this vision
of the common good inside a theological discourse. It is a case of contractual
and covenantal views of the social order coming together.84 In a way which is
a little unusual for a public theology (and left implicit) Bowh Si reckons that
a public theology is essentially a ‘kingdom-of-God theology’—and is, as such,
eschatological in its nature. For Bowh Si eschatology is not about the release of
anarchy and the world coming to an end. It is, rather, about the ‘beginning
of a new world’; the church has no option but to ‘find its space in the horizontal
dimension of the kingdom of God’.85 It must seek to interfere ‘critically and pro-
phetically because it sees public affairs in the perspective of God’s kingdom’.86
This focus upon the kingdom of God lies behind Bowh Si’s argument that what

80  Ibid., pp. 57–58.

81  Ibid., pp. 45–46.
82  Ibid., pp. 58–59.
83  Ibid., pp 107–115.
84  Ibid., pp. 47–51.
85  Ibid., p. 46.
86  Ibid., p. 63.
436 Pearson

is required is a theology of hope. What he has in mind is not some otherworldly

hope. His public theology is activist in nature and must engage with ‘the suf-
fering situations’ and ‘unfreedoms’ currently found in Myanmar.87 Here hope
is an ‘eschatological reality that God’s righteousness will prevail over suffering
and oppression.’88
Bowh Si differs from Ma Zang in one strategic emphasis. Both recognize the
pressing need for a public theology. The point of difference lies in their atti-
tudes towards a liberation theology. Bowh Si distances himself from liberation
theology; he believes it to be tied to insurgency and the desperate plight of
those Christian ethnicities to be found in the highlands. It reflects the ‘intensity
of a suffering situation, poverty, social and spatial alienation from mainland
Burma.’89 Ma Zang is writing on behalf of the Kachin peoples. He combines
a public and liberation theology without any apparent tension between the
two. These two types of theology provide the church with drivers in its call to
exercise its mandate and prophetic vocation of calling the state to account
when innocent citizens are slaughtered.90 Ma Zang is able to identify a range
of protests theologians might make behalf of the Kachin church based on the
conviction that Kachin ‘shall overcome their sufferings’ and ‘God will set them
free from Burman captivity’.91

By Way of Conclusion

The very nature of a public theology requires minority voices to be heard. Its
vision of a civil society aspires after the flourishing of all and the redress of
social grievance. Its theological dimension justifies a commitment to hospital-
ity and a liberative bias towards those who are in some way disadvantaged.
The obstacles which a would-be minority public theology needs to negoti-
ate are complex and diverse. The most basic include the nurturing of voice
(Matsuoka’s coming out of silence) and Valentìn’s shift away from the dis-
course of cultural identity. Neither of those steps are necessarily easy. In their
very different setting both Bowh Si and Ma Zhang draw out the crucial impor-
tance of developing a theology which progresses beyond a missionary legacy
and a concern for personal salvation.

87  Ibid., p 60.

88  Ibid., pp. 88–90.
89  Ibid., pp. 101–102.
90  Ma Zang, ‘Ethnic Persecution’, pp. 87–93.
91  Ibid., p. 92.
The Quest for a Coalitional Praxis 437

It almost goes without saying that minority cultures will express a deep
sense of grievance in their expressions of a public theology. There is more
than likely to be a strongly self-reflexive concern for justice and a summons
to be prophetic and aspire after freedom. How and why a public theology dif-
fers from a liberation theology is liable to be blurred at times. The differences
between Ma Zhang and Bowh Si exemplify the importance of a public theology
discerning its own end purpose. Bowh Si is more interested in a civil society for
a multifaith Burma while Ma Zhang is in pursuit of a liberation from suffering
and genocide being experienced bu the Kachin peoples.
The examples which have informed this chapter could easily be multiplied—
especially insofar as a minority voice tends to heterogeneity. The public the-
ology of the future will need to be wary of its capacity to homogenize; to be
inclusive of a minority voices due attention will need to be given to the subal-
tern multitude and its quest for a coalitional praxis.
That task is nevertheless daunting. The moment the category of minority is
admitted pressure is placed upon the very idea of a common good (or whatever
other synonym is employed). It is nearly tempting to do away with the idea
because of the need for so many potential qualifiers—and yet a public theol-
ogy still cleaves to the idea of a public good, a civil society and the flourishing
of all. The presence of a subaltern multitude and the call for a coalitional praxis
will nevertheless require considerable forethought and strategic planning. The
work done by the minority communities represented in the Recinos anthology
recognized that a coalitional praxis which might hold them together would
probably first focus on addressing specific issues—Miller’s primary goods.
The benefits of a public theology which is inclusive of a minority point of
view is not one way. These subaltern publics and public theologies emerging
out of non-western societies carry a hope of an enlarged understanding and
practice for public theology as a whole. That future public theology will need
to negotiate the intersections between a global citizenship and how these
minorities emphasise the value of the local and the heterogenous—and, do so
for the sake of the common good as well as the eschatological hope which lies
behind them.

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 CHAPTER 19

Mediating Public Theology

Jolyon Mitchell and Jenny Wright

Introduction

The Royal Mile in Edinburgh brings together churches and media in unex-
pected ways. It is one of the iconic routes of the city: thousands of visitors
wander the mile from Edinburgh Castle where it sits high on its crag, down
to Holyrood Abbey and Palace at its foot. The journalist and novelist, Daniel
Defoe (1660–1731), famously celebrated it as the ‘largest, longest and finest
street in the world’. Along the way, one now commonly passes street artists,
buskers or even guides dressed as Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde. Taverns such as Deacon
Brodie’s and the Mitre,1 and numerous cafes and coffee shops line the street.
While shopkeepers promote their wares, waiters take orders and tourists snap
photos. In August, the thoroughfare becomes one of the most crowded streets
in the city: performers from the Edinburgh Fringe festival transform this road
into a near-impassable sea of clapping, music and performance. By contrast,
earlier in the year, on Palm Sunday one might encounter a procession of robed
clergy and members of nearby congregations waving palm branches. In May,
one could easily bump into delegates of the Church of Scotland processing
towards the General Assembly Hall. Nearby are the tourist-magnets of the
Scotch Whisky Experience and the historic six-floored Outlook Tower, now
known as the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions.
One building about halfway down this busy Scottish Mile (which is 107 yards
longer than the standard mile) is hard to miss. Its tower is dominated by a
crown-shaped late fifteenth-century steeple. Known as the High Kirk and the
Mother of the Church of Scotland, St Giles’ Cathedral on the High Street (a sec-
tion of the Royal Mile) remains apparently unchanging among waves of visi-
tors, colour and noise. The current church was established in the fourteenth

1  Deacon Brodie’s Tavern takes its name from the real-life figure upon whom Robert Louis
Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was based. By day Brodie
was a respectable citizen and city councillor, but by night he gambled, drank and then bur-
gled to pay his debts, for which he was hanged in 1788. The Mitre bar is on the site of a tene-
ment owned by a previous Bishop of St Andrews. Some claim his episcopal throne is still
buried beneath the bar.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_021

442 Mitchell and Wright

century and then largely renovated in the nineteenth. There are layers of his-
tory in its dark stone, which point back to earlier pivotal moments in Scottish
history such as the Reformation in the sixteenth century, disputes over episco-
pacy and prayer books with the English monarchy in the seventeenth century,
and more recently the opening service for the first Edinburgh International
Arts Festival in 1947.
St Giles’ Cathedral continues to play a role not only in the life of the Church
of Scotland, but also in civil religion and civic services. For example, follow-
ing the September 2014 referendum there was a ‘service of reconciliation’
for representatives of the different political parties. In July 2015 there was a
service marking the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in the
Balkans. These, and other special services, are covered by local and some-
times international media. St Giles’ Cathedral is also a venue for concerts, lec-
tures and art displays. Alongside these special events, there are regular acts
of worship, as well as weddings and funerals. St Giles’ is by no means the only
church on the Mile. The Church of Scotland’s Canongate Kirk, the evangeli-
cal Carrubbers Christian Centre and, down one of the many steep alleyways
(or ‘closes’), the Scottish Episcopal Old St Paul’s offer different kinds of wor-
ship throughout the year. These diverse patterns of religious life and practice
may go largely unnoticed by photo-hungry and digitally connected tourists,
but they nonetheless go on through each season. Like so many others around
the globe, these Edinburgh churches inhabit a highly competitive communica-
tive environment.
Continue to stroll down the Royal Mile, and you will reach two contrasting
buildings: the elderly Holyrood (holy cross) Palace and the youthful Scottish
Parliament. In September 2014 the space between these two was transformed
into a media city. Temporary television studios, along with dozens of televi-
sion cameras, satellite dishes and reporters filled the space between young and
old. Journalists from all over the world descended upon Edinburgh to cover
the results of the referendum which was to decide whether or not Scotland
would separate from the United Kingdom. Nearby, just off the Royal Mile,
behind the Parliament, there is a modern glass structure, the Tun, which
houses BBC Scotland and which was probably busier than ever before at this
historic moment in 2014. Unlike the temporary media centres established for
less than a week, the Tun provides a more permanent home for media pro-
ducers serving television, radio and internet outlets. Within seconds of the
2014 Referendum result being announced, the news was circulated around the
world. Instantaneous communication ensured that those people in other parts
of the globe hoping for a ‘Yes’ vote, such as in Catalonia, Quebec or Ukraine,
and equally those wishing for a ‘No’ vote, such as in London, Washington or
Mediating Public Theology 443

Belfast, could hear or see the news immediately. Space is compressed as history
is made.
For a brief period Edinburgh became the focal point of media attention.
Within a few days all the temporary structures, the television vans and the stu-
dios had vanished, gone in search of the next major international news story.
The Tun and several other more permanent media hubs remain, and continue
to offer the regular diet of news, entertainment, and comment. Location and
time are arguably more fluid in an increasing digitised world. It is still possible
of course, with a few clicks on a computer or mobile phone, to return to those
emotionally charged and politically memorable days in September 2014, and
to experience them again as if for the first time. In the same way it is possible
now, online, to travel back in time to discover the history of St Giles’ Cathedral
and to learn about the worshipping community who gather there and at other
locations on the Royal Mile each week. Likewise, the complex and sometimes
contested histories of local, national and international media are easily acces-
sible online.
While some writers use the metaphor of ‘the public sphere’2 and the others
‘the public square’3 we are employing the image of an actual ‘public street’ for
reflecting upon the churches’ engagement with a range of media. In this essay
we begin in the first section with a brief overview of the historical engage-
ment between churches and media, while also discussing how there are many
different kinds of media. We move on, in the second section, to consider two
different approaches to media: iconographic and iconoclastic. In the third
section we analyse how interpretive approaches to media can draw upon nar-
ratives and worship to engage creatively and critically with ‘dangerous memo-
ries’. In the fourth and final section we discuss how Church communities and
Christians can participate in alternative practices in order to remember and
reframe media stories wisely.

Media Histories

Any overly-neat historical account of churches driving media revolutions, such

as the development of early books (codices), the invention of printing, and
even the digitization of information, needs to be nuanced. There have clearly

2  See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1962 trans. 1989).
3  See, for example, Rowan Williams’s critical account of consumerism, materialism and exces-
sive military spending in Faith in Public Square, (London: Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2012).
444 Mitchell and Wright

been a number of significant media revolutions during the last two millennia,
which to different degrees have been shaped by churches and arguably have
also shaped theologies. Nevertheless, there has also been a continuous and
gradual evolution of communicative practices. One way to trace the gradual
evolution of media use is to consider local histories of Christian communica-
tion and church buildings.
Reflecting specifically on the history of St Giles’ and more broadly on
Christianity in Scotland, it becomes clear that the churches and Christians
have regularly made use of a wide range of media. At different times and in
different places certain media were more popular than others. For example,
it was not until later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that coloured
stained glass was returned to most of the windows in St Giles’. Seen as idola-
trous in the years following the Reformation, many colourful medieval win-
dows had been smashed in Scotland as throughout Northern Europe. Some
believe the Protestant Reformation in Europe began in 1517 with the simplest
use of media: the pinning on a door in Wittenberg of 95 theses, written state-
ments in Latin critiquing the ‘power and efficacy of indulgences’. Whether
Martin Luther actually carried out this provocative act remains the subject of
scholarly debate, but what is not contested is Luther’s and other reformers’
prodigious use of writing, printing and preaching to communicate their public
theologies.4
Other older media in St Giles’ illustrate a variety of beliefs. One window now
depicts six Scottish saints, including St Andrew, the Patron Saint of Scotland,
dressed in a peacock-blue and white cloak. In the north aisle stands a 1904
bronze statue of a former minister of the High Kirk, John Knox (1513–1572). In
the Thistle Chapel, built in 1911, a small wooden carving of an angel playing a
bagpipe is an example of another form of media. In other words, embedded
within this church, devoted to Edinburgh’s patron saint, there are clear exam-
ples of different kinds of old media, such as coloured glass, sculptures, and
memorials. Sermons, anthems and hymns can still be regularly heard. These
old media can now be accessed through newer digital media. The broadcast
service, online publicity and the digital photograph all allow the High Kirk to
be seen by different people thousands of miles away. The relationship between

4  See Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (2 volumes), (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979). See also Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Pettegree discusses the role of drama, ser-
mons, songs, pamphlets and books in the European Reformations. See also Peter Matheson,
The Rhetoric of Reformation, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998).
Mediating Public Theology 445

different media and different churches is complex and continually evolving. A

broader historical perspective is useful, especially as churches and Christians
have a long history of successfully embracing a wide range of media and com-
municative practices.5
These can be categorised into separate types.6 While these categories are
obviously not watertight, they are useful for analysing the many different kinds
of media and related practices. First, there are primary media practices, where
the communicator normally needs to be present with the audience, such as
speaking, preaching, singing, praying, acting, dancing or miming. Then there
are secondary media practices, where the original creator does not need to be
present for the communication to be successful. These include writing, illumi-
nating, carving, etching, sculpting, painting, printing or even playing a piece
of music. Interestingly, an actor may be involved in the primary media prac-
tice of performing, while bringing to life a script, which was created through
the secondary media practice of playwriting. These secondary or traditional
media practices are sometimes also known as traditional media arts, and they
rely upon tools such as a pen, a chisel, a brush, a script or a musical instru-
ment. A third kind are sometimes described as electronic media practices and
they commonly rely on some type of industrial power, such as electricity, and
include telegraphing, broadcasting, filming, emailing, texting, blogging, web-
casting, and even snap-chatting. This third category of practices is commonly
divided between the somewhat confusingly entitled ‘old media’ (such as the
telegraph, film and radio) and ‘new media’ (such as the internet, the mobile
phone and other more recent technologies which are almost entirely reliant
upon digital communication). These are often now described as ‘digital media’
or ‘social media’.
Scholars have turned their attention both to the contemporary ‘participa-
tory’ or ‘convergence culture’7 enabled by digital media, as well as describ-
ing and analysing media histories. For example, over a number of years, the
Jesuit scholar Walter Ong (1912–2003) developed a theory that described the

5  See, for example, Peter Horsfield, From Jesus to the Internet: A History of Christianity and
Media, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
6  This paragraph draws and adapts from discussions by Jolyon Mitchell on ‘Media’ in William
A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Karkkainen, editors, Global Dictionary of Theology, (Downers
Grove IL: IVP, 2008), pp.524–528; and from the ‘Communication’ and ‘Media’ entries by
Jolyon Mitchell in Wesley Carr, ed., The New Dictionary of Pastoral Theology (London: SPCK,
2002), pp.59–61 at p.215.
7  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006).
446 Mitchell and Wright

evolution from ‘primary orality’ to ‘secondary orality’.8 For Ong, ‘primary oral-
ity’ describes a time before writing when humans commonly communicated
orally by telling stories in communal settings, such as around the campfire.
With the development of writing and then printing, forms of communication
evolved and even human consciousness was transformed. No longer was it
necessary to remember long epic tales, as it was now possible to transcribe
stories. Storytellers could etch tales onto paper rather than rely upon inscrib-
ing them into memory. Printing facilitated rapid reproduction and dissemina-
tion. Electronic forms of communication further accelerated the process. Ong
observes that secondary orality is rooted in the ability to write, but has the
appearance of a return to primary orality. This can be seen, for example, when
a newsreader appears to speak directly to their audience, apparently without
notes, but in fact is reliant on a written script and reads from a tele-prompter.
Ong’s thought-provoking analysis has much to commend it, but Ong died in
2003 before many of the digital transformations of media. Ong’s reflections on
oral cultures and communication are useful also for considering the commu-
nicative origins of Christianity.
Christian engagement with orally dominated communication can be traced
back as far as the first telling of stories about Jesus of Nazareth, with each gen-
eration of story tellers adding new insights and commentary. What was done
and said by Jesus was remembered and retold by his first followers and then
by the communities which they encountered. The impact of Jesus’ life, death
and resurrection alongside the needs of local communities, contributed to the
formation of the documents that make up today’s New Testament. Scholars of
the Ancient World and its texts debate endlessly the nature of that impact, but
any historical discussion of Christianity’s media practices does well to attempt
to return to first century Palestine and Second Temple Judaism. James G. Dunn
suggests that the earliest traditions would be diverse, with ‘reports and rumours
regarding things Jesus said and did’ being ‘told and retold in the market place,
around camp fires, in homes and places of assembly’.9 The impact Jesus made
was not based on a bound collection of sermons or on videos of miracles going
viral. Jesus’ influence was arguably ‘lasting because it was disciple-making’
and ‘community-forming’.10 Unlike some other New Testament scholars Dunn

8  Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London and New
York: Methuen, 1982). For further reflections on Ong’s work see Jolyon Mitchell, Visually
Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999).
9  James, G. Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013),
pp. 314–315.
10  Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition, p. 316.
Mediating Public Theology 447

believes that when stories were recounted, they would be ‘told often in differ-
ent versions, but characteristically with the core of the story fixed, the sub-
stance and point of the story constant, while the supportive details could be
elaborated or abbreviated as circumstances allowed or necessitated’.11 Other
New Testament scholars have also emphasised the oral characteristics embed-
ded in the gospels, including examples of hyperbolic contrasts, alliterations
and tautological parallelism.12 These features would have assisted with the
memorisation of early Jesus stories. The oral tradition and the first written
accounts gradually blended as they were used in more organised and formal
worship settings.
After several centuries images including frescoes, icons, and statues, became
an important form of post-Constantine communication in the Church as its
power grew, offering ‘both a means of conveying information and a means
of persuasion’, with Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) describing ‘images
as doing for those who could not read, the great majority [in the early church],
what writing did for those who could’.13 The practice of image creation and
veneration was not without controversy, as can be witnessed by the eighth
and ninth century iconoclastic controversies in the Eastern Byzantine church
(c. 726–787 [First Iconoclasm] and 814–842 [Second Iconoclasm]) and the
iconoclasm inspired by some of the Protestant reformers during the sixteenth
century (e.g Karlstadt, Zwingli and Calvin). Returning to the Royal Mile today
and visiting its churches, the reformers would be shocked by what they could
see and hear.
In Scotland, the triumph of reformation theology also had a significant
impact upon musical practice, with songbooks destroyed, instruments banned
and pipe organs removed.14 In the nineteenth century pipe organs were still
considered by many as ‘monstrous and violent architectural intrusions’ into
the ‘worship space’. Today, with a few exceptions,15 pipe organs are common-
place and can be joined, or even replaced, by microphones, keyboards, drum
kits and screens. In many settings services include some form of media and

11  Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition, p. 320.

12  See, for example, Werner Kelber, The Oral and Written Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1983). Kelber draws on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Routledge, 1982).
13  Briggs, Social History of the Media, p. 7.
14  Andrew T.N. Muirhead, Reformation, Dissent and Diversity: The Story of Scotland’s
Churches, 1560–1960 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
15  See Edward Royal, Modern Britain: A Social History 1750–2011, third edition (London:
Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 375.
448 Mitchell and Wright

technology, be it candles or slide shows, vestments or drum kits, choral music

or microphones. Much of what many now consider essential, or at least com-
monplace within the church, was not always deemed useful or necessary. This
use of technology, according to Doug Gay, ‘enables a new choreography of
liturgical performance for worshippers’.16 These acts of worship which incor-
porate modern media may take place behind closed doors or sometimes in the
public square or even on a busy shopping street such as the Royal Mile.
Even if new forms of media have been initially regarded with suspicion it
is sometimes claimed that Christians and churches have pioneered their use.
While some church leaders initially regarded printing with suspicion and did
not immediately make use of it as a means of communication, it soon became
a useful tool for the reformers such as John Knox and Martin Luther to spread
their message. Pamphlets, often in the vernacular language, appealed to large
audiences. Latin by contrast, while widely accessible to religious leaders and
the scholarly community, did not allow the laity access to theological infor-
mation and teaching. In order to learn, the laity had to rely on those who
controlled the media used at that time in the churches, such as preaching,
singing and painting.17
Luther’s radical theology spread even more rapidly once it was written in
German, printed and distributed. ‘His first pamphlet written in German in
March 1518, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace”, was reprinted 14 times
in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 dif-
ferent pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between
1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In
all, some 6 million to 7 million pamphlets were printed in the first decade of
the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther’s.’18 This ‘informational
cascade’, drawing not only on printing, but also on oral communication, news
ballads and infectious local support for Luther’s beliefs, presented leaders
in the Catholic Church with a dilemma: if it did not reply to Luther, people
might think that this heretic, whom they believed was spreading a ‘disease’,
was right; conversely if they did reply, it would allow the laity ‘to compare the
two sides, think for themselves, and choose between the alternatives instead

16  Doug Gay and Ron Rienstra, ‘Veering Off the Via Media: Emerging Church, Alternative
Worship, and New Media Technologies in the United States and United Kingdom’, Liturgy,
23:3 (2008), 39–47 at 40–41.
17  Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, Social History of the Media. From Gutenberg to the Internet
(Cambridge and Maldon, MA: Polity Press, 2009). pp. 62–69.
18  See Tom Standadge, ‘How Luther Went Viral’, The Economist, 17 December 2011 http://
www.economist.com/node/21541719 [accessed 1 August 2015].
Mediating Public Theology 449

of doing as they were told’.19 Luther’s message went viral, even faster than the
way in which news about Thomas Becket ‘s murder in Canterbury cathedral
had spread all over Europe in 1170. In both cases it took several weeks for the
news and messages to spread.
Instantaneous communication is a mark of today’s media. The development
of the telegraph, radio, film, television, the internet, mobile phones and social
media, continue to challenge the way in which theology is done in public.
Preaching and teaching are no longer limited to the immediate congregation,
nor to those who have access to books. Space is compressed and transcended
with simplicity and ease. Blogs, webpages, Facebook and Twitter have changed
the way in which many churches engage with their audiences by redefining
communities and expanding borders. The relationship between theology and
media continues to evolve. Stephen Garner discusses how theological engage-
ment with the internet has evolved over the last 20 years, moving from focusing
on the internet’s effects on individuals and society in the late 1990s (with refer-
ence to reports by the Church of England and The World Council of Churches),
to currently approaching the internet as a vehicle that can be creatively used
for ministry. Garner highlights how communication experts now encourage
churches to create an online presence, emphasising that a church’s website
might be the first encounter someone has with the congregation.20 For Garner,
and those he cites, this leads to a theological approach to the internet that is
two-fold. First, it is oriented towards Christians, focusing on the media ‘in rela-
tion to the nature and purpose of the Church’, ‘the teachings of Jesus’ and ‘wise
living in the world’. The second approach is public theology, where it is neces-
sary for the church to participate ‘in public dialogue and policy shaping from
its own unique theological perspective’.21 This may hold true for many different
kinds of other media.
Taking seriously the changing communicative, social and political environ-
ments which are formed and informed by evolving media, and in which the
church continues to be present, is a profound challenge. Walk down Edinburgh’s
Royal Mile, and you can simultaneously to be connected to the other side of
the world, and learn of an earthquake in Nepal, a bombing in Syria, a papal
mass in Manila: no longer is any road an island, disconnected from the rest of
the world. A related tension for churches is ‘between the past (represented by

19  Briggs, Social History of the Media, p. 68.

20  Stephen Garner, ‘Theology and the new media’, in Heidi A. Campbell, ed., Digital Religion:
Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013),
pp. 256–257.
21  Garner, ‘Theology and the New Media’, p. 256.
450 Mitchell and Wright

scripture and tradition), and the personal and community experience of the
Internet’.22 The challenge in public theology is to continue working out ‘how to
live authentically, wisely and justly’in a mediated world,23 and to understand
how best to engage with the way in which media has changed and is changing
the ways we communicate. This has implications for communicative practices
such as preaching. For ‘many listeners the single voice’ trying to speak ‘authori-
tatively from the pulpit’ has lost some of its power as ‘the sermon delivered as
closed monologue will probably fail to connect with listeners.’24 Traditional
media and newer social media offer increasingly diverse ways of participating
in communities, accessing new information, and opportunities for participat-
ing in various daily activities. Learning to develop more open forms of cre-
ative communication and witness is one of the pressing challenges of public
theology.

Media Iconoclasts and Iconographers

Over several centuries the Royal Mile has been the home for media iconoclasts,
iconographers and interpreters. Each group has employed diverse methods for
interacting with different media. Passionate responses have been theologically
inspired or motivated. Churches and theologians rarely remain neutral, choos-
ing how, when and whether to make use of both new and old media. Responses
range from completely shunning certain communicative media to wholeheart-
edly embracing them for furthering ministry and mission. The three responses,
iconoclastic, iconographic and interpretive, provide a useful way of categoris-
ing and reflecting upon different approaches to media.
Iconoclastic approaches to various media are identifiable in a number
of historical settings. For example, during the 16th century Reformation in
Scotland iconoclasm ‘left an indelible mark on Scottish history. The coun-
try’s medieval churches and abbeys seem to have been richly endowed with
paintings, sculpture, and other furnishings as in any country of similar wealth

22  Ibid., p. 259.

23  Ibid.
24  Mitchell, Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching, p. 32. There is an
extensive literature on preaching in an audio-visual age. See, for example, Thomas H
Troeger, Imagining A Sermon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990) and his Ten Strategies for
Preaching in a Multi-Media Culture (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).
Mediating Public Theology 451

and population, yet that heritage has almost completely vanished.’25 St Giles
and the Royal Mile undoubtedly look different because of actions during the
Scottish Reformation. Iconoclasts destroyed religious art: pictures, windows,
statues and carvings, partly inspired by the Second Commandment which pro-
hibits the creation of ‘graven images’ that bear a likeness to any ‘living thing’. It
is important to bear in mind of course, that while they destroyed examples of
visual and physical media, these iconoclasts actually embraced spoken or writ-
ten media to make their point. Their relation to media, when broadly defined
to include both primary and secondary media, is therefore complex.
The same can be said for those who have been iconoclastic in their criti-
cisms of more recent media, such as television or the internet. Several writers
and social critics have become standard bearers for this kind of highly critical
approach. For example, Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985), writes that television promotes ‘incoherence and triviality’ and ‘is trans-
forming our culture into one vast arena for show business’.26 Postman feared
that television was gradually becoming our culture, ‘the background radiation
of the social and intellectual universe’ and that it is ‘a form of graven imagery
far more alluring than a golden calf.27 Other critiques of media are even more
theological in approach. Jacques Ellul, in The Humiliation of the Word (1985),
draws simultaneously on Marxist critique and a theology based on that of Karl
Barth, putting forward the idea that it is disastrous for the church to mimic
the ‘technique’ of an image based culture and make television programmes.
He believes that ‘by allying ourselves with images, Christianity gains (perhaps)
efficacy, but destroys itself, its foundations and its content.’28
Another iconoclastic voice is the former broadcaster and editor of Punch,
a satirical weekly magazine, Malcolm Muggeridge, author of Christ and the
Media (1977). He contrasts the reality of the encountered person of Christ
with the fantasy created by television, writing that ‘In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word became flesh, not celluloid . . .’29 He famously described
the fourth temptation, where Jesus is offered a global chat show on televi-
sion with international reach, which he turns down. Not only is television
incompatible with Christianity, but it is even destructive of it; a view which
leads Muggeridge to challenge his readers to throw away their television sets.

25  Duncan MacMillan, ‘Iconoclasm’, in Michael Lynch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Scottish
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 330.
26  Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 80.
27  Postman, p. 79, 122–123.
28  Jacques Ellul, Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 203.
29  Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (London: Hodder and Stoughton), p. 88.
452 Mitchell and Wright

Something it is claimed that he himself did, though he continued to appear on

television programmes up until near to his death.
These three represent a group of iconoclastic scholars who were deeply
critical of television, in the 1970s and 1980s, perceiving ‘television’ to be the
chief culprit in the alleged decline and fall of contemporary culture’.30 For
these iconoclasts television was a form of corrosive, dangerous and poisonous
amusement. More recently, several theologians writing in the 1990s described
television as part of a culture industry which promotes capitalist hegemony,
which threatens the values that set Christian communities apart.31 Criticisms
of television resonated both with critical accounts of film in the 1930s, in books
such as The Devil’s Camera,32 and with more recent deeply critical readings of
the internet and virtual reality, produced during the 1990s.33 The iconoclas-
tic paradigm can be interpreted partly as a reaction against the popularity of
films, television and now new or social media.
Iconographic approaches have an equally long history. For example, por-
trayals of Mary (as theotokos) holding her son Jesus either as a baby or as a
corpse are ubiquitous and familiar. A whole panoply of media have been used
to represent these two scenes, including icons, frescoes, sarcophagi, ivory
plaques, mosaics, carvings, sculptures, stone work, illuminated manuscripts,
etchings, woodcuts, printed books, frescoes, tapestries and paintings; and
more recently, photographs, television programmes, films and web sites. It is
hard to think of any media that has not been used in some way to ­re-present
Jesus’ mother holding her son in life or death. Some are reticent, others
expose his humanity and suffering in detail. Even in St Giles’ Cathedral there
are at least two striking representations of Mary holding Jesus when a baby,
one sculpted on the light marble pulpit and one painted carved into a on a
carved wooden memorial plaque. As Mitchell has suggested elsewhere such
pictures: ‘can educate, oppress and liberate. They can appeal to more than just
the visual sense, with viewers touching, holding, stroking and even caress-
ing these artefacts. Materials matter. Often they become sites and sources of

30  Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses—Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 19.
31  Michael Budde, The (Magic) Kingdom of God: Christianity and Global Culture Industries
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
32  Richard George Burnett, The Devil’s Camera: Menace of a Film-Ridden World (London:
The Epworth Press, 1932).
33  Tal Brooke, ed., Virtual Gods (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishing, 1997).
Mediating Public Theology 453

devotion and piety, even leading to changes in behaviour and belief.’34 The
point here is that practices such as creating, viewing, or touching icons, pietàs,
or crucifixes have a long tradition within Christianity. Admittedly, these prac-
tices can be controversial, but they have provided significant devotional and
pedagogical resources for many Christians for two millennia.
The art, pictures and posters that now adorn the Royal Mile bear witness to
the popularity of other creative traditions to be found outside the churches.
Near to St Giles’ west door is the Heart of Midlothian, a mosaic of cobblestones
on the pavement in the shape of a heart. It marks the spot where the fifteenth
century tollbooth (council chamber, court and jailhouse) stood, where public
executions were carried out, and where a prison was also once located, which
explains why some people spit on it disdainfully as they pass by. Within a
few yards are marble statues of the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) and
the economist Adam Smith (1723–1790) and further down the mile outside
Canongate Kirk a bronze statue of the poet Robert Fergusson (1750–1774). Each
figure gestures towards differing enlightenment world views. Across the road
and down the hill from St Giles’ is John Knox’s house, one of the only ‘original
medieval building surviving on the Royal Mile’.35 Now owned by the Church of
Scotland, it is decorated with a small plaque depicting a golden sun bursting
out of grey clouds. Even if the iconoclastic Knox only stayed their briefly before
his death in 1572, it is ironic that while he ministered at St Giles (1559–1572) it
was inhabited by a goldsmith and jeweller (James Mosman) who worked for a
person Knox vehemently opposed: Mary Queen of Scots.
Obviously, the media available to Knox and Mary Queen of Scots, Hume and
Adam Smith are significantly different from the media used over the last few
decades. Iconographers have adopted both old media and now new media. One
way of wholeheartedly embracing media is seen in the work of several genera-
tions of electronic evangelists in the United States.36 These evangelists view
television, radio, and more recently social media as God-given tools to enable

34  See Jolyon Mitchell, Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 11.
35  For more on John Knox’s house see http://www.tracscotland.org/scottish-storytelling-
centre/john-knox-house-step-inside-history [accessed 1 August 2015].
36  For three useful accounts of this phenomenon see: Stewart Hoover and Robert Abelman,
eds., Religious Television: Controversies and Conclusions (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990);
Stewart Hoover, Mass Media Religion—The Social Sources of the Electronic Church
(London: Sage, 1988); and Peter Horsfield, Religious Television—The American Experience
(Longman: New York, 1984). See also: Leonard Sweet, ed., Communication and Change in
American Religious History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), especially Elmer J. O’Brien’s
bibliography on ‘The Modern Electronic Era: 1920 to the Present’, pp. 452–479.
454 Mitchell and Wright

them to preach the Gospel to the ‘ends of the earth’ by embracing the ‘values
of the world of commercial broadcasting’ and ‘producing slick “professional”
products for precisely targeted audiences’.37 Today some of the best known
preachers and pastors in North America (e.g. Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Rick
Warren, Gardner Taylor, and Joel Osteen) and beyond (e.g. Joseph Prince in
Singapore, David Cho in South Korea, David Oyedepo in Nigeria, Edir Macedo
Bezerra and Romildo Soares in Brazil, and Pope Francis in Italy) have devel-
oped a global reach through skilful use of media.38 Electronic iconographers
have now largely become digital iconographers, enabled by the digitization of
their broadcasts to use radio podcasts, television broadcasts and webcasts. By
comparison with Luther and Knox these religious leaders can develop, over
comparatively short periods of time, far larger international audiences than
their sixteenth century predecessors. These extraordinary changes in commu-
nication demand careful attention and scrutiny.

Creative and Critical Interpreters

Public theologians may adopt an iconographic or an iconoclastic approach

to media, but they may also adopt an interpretive approach. These do not
necessarily eschew creative or critical practices. Interpreters may draw upon
both iconoclastic and iconographic approaches. An interpretive approach to
media engagement need not be passive or uncreative: sharp critical analysis
and narrative-making both play significant roles. To borrow the title of Michael
Warren’s book, Seeing Through the Media is a practice that takes time to develop.
Warren encourages audiences to become involved in ‘critical demystification’,
explaining that in order to do this viewers need to ask: ‘Who wants me to see
what I am seeing from the angle I am being allowed to see it, and why?’39 For
those seeking to participate in public theology this involves an audience going
beyond simply analysing the artistic merits of a production, to developing a
critical awareness of how media are produced, disseminated and received.
Interpretive resources for responding critically, and also for engaging cre-
atively can be found in unexpected places. The Scottish Storytelling Centre

37  James McDonnell and Frances Trampiets,, eds., Communicating Faith in a Technological
Age (Slough: St. Paul Publications, 1989), p. 15.
38  See Jolyon Mitchell, ‘Editorial: Christianity and Television’, Studies in World Christianity,
11:1 (2005), 1–8.
39  Michael Warren, Seeing Through the Media: A Religious View of Communications and
Cultural Analysis (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press 1997), p. 91.
Mediating Public Theology 455

(owned by the Church of Scotland) on the Royal Mile encompasses both the
Netherbow Theatre and John Knox’s house. The Centre is a hub for storytell-
ers from Scotland and beyond. Narrative is used here to recreate past events,
explore current dilemmas and imagine new worlds. Real stories and fantastical
stories are told and re-enacted. These stories enable audiences to interpret,
interrogate and re-interpret the worlds we inhabit. They can also enable indi-
viduals to weave new meaning around familiar tales.
A narrative based interpretive approach to media can empower individu-
als and audiences to critique the interpretations that they are offered through
different international media organisations. Much of the information that we
receive concerning both public and private worlds is mediated. Media scholar
Roger Silverstone argued that public life is dependent upon ‘the oxygen of pub-
licity’, meaning that ‘politics is inconceivable and unsustainable without its
appearance and its performance on the screens and through the speakers of
the world’s media’.40 Silverstone insightfully underlined the centrality of the
media and different media within our lives since everyday reality is mediated
on screen, through speakers, and in print. Everyday life now includes the media
in its many forms; ‘the modern world has witnessed, and in significant degrees
has been defined by, a progressive technological intrusion into the conduct
of everyday life, of which the most recent and arguably the most significant
manifestations have been our media technologies’.41 This reality demands both
critical and creative interpretive responses.

Interpreting ‘Dangerous Memories’42

The complexity of our relationship with different kinds of media, as well as
our networked relationships through these media, present us with various
interpretive challenges. These include the challenge to re-interpret how we
engage with difficult or dangerous memories. A difficult or dangerous memory
can persuade a person or a community or a nation to continue a cycle of vio-
lence or on the other hand to try to build peace. Media offer opportunities
to access, engage with and keep alive significant events long after they have
happened. Images of news stories that are played over and over on our screens
will become ingrained in our minds; posting comments on the Facebook page
of a deceased friend allow for a very public grieving, keeping the memory of
that person alive; the availability of news stories online long after an event

40  Ibid., p. 25.

41  Ibid., p. 109.
42  The argument of the next two sub-sections is drawn and developed from Mitchell, Media
Violence and Christian Ethics, especially chapters 1 and 2.
456 Mitchell and Wright

has taken place allow it to resurface; and documentaries about atrocities,

such as the genocide in Rwanda, apartheid in South Africa, or migrants in the
Mediterranean bring these events, and the suffering, grief and injustice that
they encompass to become a reality in the present.
Different kinds of media can encourage Christians to participate in what
Johann Baptist Metz calls ‘dangerous memories’.43 Metz distinguishes two
kinds of dangerous memories; those that happened in the recent past and are
known through direct experience or first-hand accounts, and those such as the
one upon which the Christian faith is founded, particularly the death and res-
urrection of Christ. This framework allows recent, painful memories to stand
alongside the memory of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
‘on which is grounded the promise of future freedom for all’.44 Both kinds of
dangerous memories have the potential ‘to break through to the centre-point
of our lives and reveal new and dangerous insights for the present.’45
Facing dangerous memories recurs in different ways through the bible. The
Israelites are encouraged again and again to remember what God has done for
them. The Sabbath and the Passover remind the people of their Exodus out of
Egypt. In Deuteronomy, remembering becomes a communal activity, a moral
imperative with the telos of human flourishing.46 Elsewhere in the Hebrew
Scriptures, there are individual cries to remember and be remembered by
God, for example Hannah yearning for a child (1 Samuel 1:11) and Jeremiah in
unceasing pain (Jeremiah 15:15).
These cries for help are echoed in our own time in contemporary Western
news reports. Family members who have lost loved ones in natural disas-
ters or to human violence will often ask implicit questions, questioning why
God allowed it to happen and wondering where God is in the aftermath.
Any explicit signs of an active, living or remembering God, however, are
invariably left out of the news frame, because an invisible God is not an ideal
figure for television news.47 The perpetrator, the eye-witness or the victim
become the central subject, while signs of God’s compassion can be found
in the rescue workers and those attempting to restore peace. Most journalists in

43  Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental
Theology, trans. David Smith (London: Burns and Oates, 1980 (1977)), p. 37.
44  Metz, Faith in History and Society, p. 111, 115, 184 and 188.
45  Metz, Faith in History and Society, pp. 109–10.
46  Jolyon Mitchell, Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), pp. 47–48.
47  Colin Morris, ‘The Theology of the Nine O’ Clock News’, in Chris Arthur (ed.), Religion and
the Media (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), pp. 137–146.
Mediating Public Theology 457

the West, however, would not refer to these acts in the terms of Colin Morris’
statement: ‘God’s love is at work in history’.48 When religion is the focus of
a news report, it is increasingly associated with fundamentalism and is por-
trayed as one of the leading causes of violence, suggesting a God who is absent,
powerless or even the catalyst of the violence.
Public theologians or any Christians working as interpreters can engage crit-
ically and creatively with such news reports in worship and beyond. Worship
can include a space for questioning, lamentation and even anger. Individual,
family and collective memories can be reoriented, allowing people to partici-
pate in the reading and hearing of scripture in the context of worship, allow-
ing participants to place their individual memories and personal narrative
within a larger set of communal memories and narratives. This communal
remembering influences what is valued, which in turn shapes the process
of remembering. In his book Memory and Salvation, Charles Elliot suggests that
the members of the church dynamically and playfully interact with memories,
which in turn feed ‘the symbols, imagination and responses’ of Christians. The
church as a community does not only preserve memories, but allows Christians
to perform memories through worship, art and other media.49

Facing ‘Dangerous Memories’

The worshipping community becomes the setting of ‘counter-memories’ which
provides some of the resources for rewriting our own personal narrative and
our collective narrative ‘by revealing the partiality, limitedness, illusoriness and
non-ultimacy’ of our memories.50 As we recall the underlying suffering of so
many contemporary news stories, counter-memories can be built up through
practices such as confessing past sins, absorbing God’s forgiveness, listening
to spoken words, celebrating the peace, interceding for the world, gathering
around bread and wine, hearing the story of the last supper and then commu-
nally eating and drinking.51 Through both conscious and unconscious process,
by evoking semantic, sensory and autobiographical memories, the collective
practice of worship evokes the recollection of a reality beyond the headlines.
This process, however, is not necessarily easy. Regular texts are used in
worship, such as the ‘Psalms of Complaint’ where remembering is through

48  Morris, ‘The Theology of the Nine O’ Clock News’, p. 140.

49  Charles Elliot, Memory and Salvation (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995),
pp. 221–3.
50  Elliot, Memory and salvation, pp. 221–44, 226 and 193.
51  See Samuel Wells on ‘remembering’, in God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 201–4.
458 Mitchell and Wright

wrestling with the reality. This ‘actualization’ (Vergegenwärtigung) is an ‘act of

remembrance’ which is ‘not a simple inner reflection, but involves an action,
an encounter with historical events’.52 This can draw people into remembering
collectively, rather than alone, allowing a space which can create and evoke
powerful memories, which point forwards to a hope-filled future.53 Some theo-
logians go even further, suggesting that the act of remembering Jesus Christ
has the potential to be redemptive and bring about healing.54 The process of
remembering must allow memories to be preserved and passed on as a form
of ‘remembering rightly’, without leading to escapism. Miroslav Volf suggests
in The End of Memory, that ‘to remember well is one key to redeeming the past;
and the redemption of the past is itself nestled in the broader story of God’s
restoring of our broken world to wholeness.’55 In addition, we need to exam-
ine the truthfulness of our memories, since we are surrounded by ‘a culture of
suspicion and spin’.56

Remembering and Reframing as Public Theology57

Christian communities can offer resources which help people remember

wisely, re-narrate creatively, and reframe what they have encountered online or
in the airwaves. Liturgy plays an important part in remembering, and through
remembering, creates a community of belonging and solidarity. Karen Lebacqz
speaks of the powerful remembering action of liturgy, which not only provides
meaning for people but also provides a context for their work in the world.58
Worship and ritual are important aspects of remembering Christian history,
because it is through repeated actions that Christians remember that they are
part of a broader community. In this context Christians remember where they
come from, who they are and who they are called to be. Liturgy is therefore

52  Brevard S. Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel: Studies in Biblical Theology (London:
SCM Press, 1962), pp. 34, 65, 80 and 88.
53  See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi
Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1950; repr. 1980).
54  See Flora Keshgegian, Redeeming Memories: A Theology of Healing and Transformation
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000).
55  Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory. Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids,
MI and Cambrdige: Eerdmans, 2006), p. 42.
56  Volf, End of Memory, p. 46.
57  For more on remembering wisely and reframing see chapters 1 and 2 of Mitchell, Media
Violence and Christian Ethics.
58  Karen Lebacqz, Justice in an Unjust World. Foundations for a Christian Approach to Justice
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), p. 101.
Mediating Public Theology 459

crucial to remembrance not only in providing a space for individual memory,

but for sustaining and growing collective memories. Common elements in the
worship service can stretch far beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries mak-
ing it possible to find a sense of community, a sense of meaningfulness and a
sense of belonging that few other situations provide.
The worship service has often played an integral part in uniting communi-
ties in times of struggle and forming places of healing by creating a safe space
in which people could share their experiences. We see this in the war memori-
als placed in churches around the world, which create a space for people to
mourn as well as to remember. In South Africa, the worship service was an
example not of solidarity but of disunity during the apartheid era. Black peo-
ple and white people were forbidden to gather around the same table. Today,
breaking the bread together symbolises both the atrocities of the past and the
beginning of a new reality, a reminder of how things were and a caution against
allowing such a divisive situation to be allowed to happen again.
In such settings media audiences and gathered congregations both have the
potential to become dynamic moral agents through remembering together in
a context of worship, providing the Christian community with different sto-
ries. Domestic violence, most often perpetuated against women, is commonly
left outside news frames—as are other ‘minor stories’. When the widows,
orphans, poor and marginalized in their numerous modern-day groupings are
overlooked in news reports which focus on spectacular events or sensational
violence, elements of Christian worship can provide a powerful corrective.
Counter-cultural, wise and peaceable action can be inspired through worship
practices such as prayer, preaching, and eating together. These actions allow
the community to experience reality in a way which asks different questions
and allows interaction with mediated reality from a different perspective,
which can be regarded as a reframing of reality.
Reframing is a way of reconsidering the ‘reality’ which media present. In
particular it is noticeable how even if news story is initially framed by a jour-
nalist, it will take on a life of its own online. This may provide a setting and
a set of resources for those keen to develop alternative lenses, language
and frames through which to view, engage with and reflect on these media
narratives. Reframing allows the viewer to observe the original images and sto-
ries in a new light, where a form of ‘moral reflection’ which combines theo-
retical analysis with practical wisdom is practised as a shared and collective
enterprise.59 It is here that people are encouraged not to only ask ‘what shall

59  Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of
Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 19.
460 Mitchell and Wright

we do?’ but to go further and ask ‘how shall we live?’ a question which con-
cerns ‘our placement in the world’ and ‘our relation to other realities’.60
Framing both includes and excludes; while it may focus our attention on
a specific view it can also limit what we see. What we see in the frame is also
influenced by where we choose to stand; as an audience we create and rec-
reate frames for ourselves. It is necessary to consider how Christian frames,
rooted in the memories of God’s action might actually be in direct conflict with
news and other media frames. Television, film and digital news provide vari-
ous frames for looking at a story. For that reason it is imperative to cultivate
a ‘frame-consciousness’ so that it is possible to ‘learn to see the frames that
the mass media construct and to appreciate the quite different stories that are
told outside them’.61 It is not only producers and journalists who make use of
frames; viewers make use of their own frames of reference or ‘schemata’ to
interpret the news and their own experiences. This is when people ‘actively
project their frames of reference into the world immediately around them’.62
These schemata are created through exposure to and interaction with a range
of sources, such as participating in worship and employing biblical narratives
which help the Christian to create alternative frames of reference, thereby
allowing reframing to occur in order to accommodate new information or
experiences within the worshipping community.

Conclusion

In this essay we have made a case for a developing a creative and critical
approach towards a range of different media found on many streets around the
world today.63 This is grounded in an understanding of the evolving nature of
communicative practices. By considering three different approaches to
media (iconographic, iconoclastic and interpretive), we laid foundations for
analysing how narratives, communities of interpretation and worship can
enable creative and critical engagement with the ‘dangerous memories’ that
are commonly recycled through different media. This can in turn enable
Church communities and Christians to participate in alternative practices in
order to remember, reframe and develop media stories wisely.

60  O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, p. 14.

61  Christ Arthur, ‘Seeing (beyond) the Frame’, Media Development, 4 (2000), 4.
62  Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (London: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 39.
63  For reasons on why this is a vital task see: Jolyon Mitchell, Promoting Peace, Inciting
Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
Mediating Public Theology 461

The media can offer the opportunity to remember wisely and to reframe cre-
atively. The challenge is to take dangerous narratives about Jesus of Nazareth
out of the library, seminary and church into both open and digital public
squares.64 This creative interpretive approach for interaction with media may
draw upon both iconographic and iconoclastic approaches. It expects the
viewer to engage dynamically with different media,65 rather than being part
of a passive audience. In this way networked viewers themselves become the
mythmakers who construct together their own myths, rituals and meanings
out of what they see.66 The diversity of media offers the opportunity to engage
in conversations on many different levels beyond the extent of the traditional
theological audience. The influence of media in information exchange needs
to be valued and utilised, since ‘the media serve the functions of reporting
and critiquing the activities of individual and corporate bodies in the public
sphere, and enhancing the exchange of information and entertainment’.67
Rather than seeing news media as a threat to faith because it exposes the
church’s darkest secrets, rather than believing entertainment media is a dan-
ger to human flourishing because of its seductive temptations, it is possible to
interpret media insights as a challenge to churches and Christians to re-form
and to develop more authentic and faithful patterns of living. Alongside the
family, alongside church and communal associations, there is now an ever-
expanding and fragmenting public sphere in which personal identity, opinion
and ‘worlds or illusion’ are formed and re-formed. This reality raises further
questions for public theologians working as critical and creative interpret-
ers of media in relation to remembering wisely.68 There is a need for further
research and discussion into prophetic, pastoral and pedagogic responses to
different media.
The increase and convergence in communication technology, web sites,
chat rooms, and other digital media allow people from different cultures, con-
texts, social groups and religions to participate in groups and conversations,

64  Elaine Graham, Words Made Flesh. Writings in Pastoral and Practical Theology (London:
SCM Press, 2009), p. 172.
65  Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn S. Clark and Diane F. Alters, Media, Home, and Family (New York
and London: Routledge, 2004).
66  Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby, Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture (Thousands
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997).
67  Sebastian Kim, Theology in the Public Sphere. Public Theology as a Catalyst for Open Debate
(London: SCM Press, 2011), pp. 11–12.
68  Jolyon Mitchell, ‘Questioning Media and Religion’, in G. Lynch, ed., Between Sacred and
Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture (London and New York: I.B. Tauris,
2007), pp. 34–46.
462 Mitchell and Wright

and to obtain information. Media offers many ways in which new audiences
can be reached and also offers opportunities for those audiences to engage
with the message, interact with others, discover new ways of expression in
worship and be challenged by different world views.69 Religion online—from
online churches to blogs to twitter accounts—allows creative and diverse
opportunities for public theology, offering new opportunities for participation
in religious expression and rituals.
The Royal Mile contains several sanguine warnings to a church reflecting
upon the place of public theology today. At least three churches are no longer
used as places of worship. This can be seen in the ruins of Holyrood Abbey,
the visitor centre at the Tron Church and the International Festival offices
at the Hub. Theology may be embedded in the stones and histories of churches
on the Royal Mile, but these ruins and transformed buildings point to another
reality. The church in Scotland, and in much of the West, no longer occupies
a central position in public life. Even on the peripheries it dominates neither
old or new media. Like The Scotsman newspaper which has moved from its
iconic Victorian building above Waverley station in the very heart of the city,
to impressive modern offices by the Parliament on the edge of Holyrood Park,
and then, most recently, relocated again to a couple of floors in an office block
some distance away from the centre of the city, the churches are learning to
adapt to their new position. In a move that highlights transformations within
mediascapes, the Scotsman’s offices have been taken over by Rockstar North,
the multi-million dollar creators of the Grand Theft Auto computer games.
Remembering wisely, reframing creatively and narrating imaginatively is
certainly a challenge for churches seeking to bear witness within a commu-
nicative environment that sees newspapers being out-performed by contro-
versial video games. Nevertheless, communicating from peripheral positions
of apparent weakness may allow more creative engagements with media that
take the churches beyond the historic high street in the West, to spaces beyond
the focus of common news frames, and to many more locations, in search of a
gospel that embodies peace.70

69  The different ways in which media is employed in alternative worship in particular, see
Doug Gay & Ron Rienstra, ‘Veering Off the Via Media: Emerging Church, Alternative
Worship, and New Media Technologies in the United States and United Kingdom’, Liturgy,
23:3 (2008), 39–47. Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/04580630802003693
[accessed 1 January 2016].
70  For more on peace and violence see: Jolyon Mitchell, Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence:
The Role of Religion and Media (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
Mediating Public Theology 463

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 CHAPTER 20

Worship, Liturgy and Public Witness

Cláudio Carvalhaes

Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.
Walter Benjamin

∵
Introduction

The liturgical/worship aspect of the Christian faith is fundamental for any pub-
lic theology. The ways Christians worship entail a certain posture in society, one
that organizes, produces and disseminates a collective form of living. Thus, any
ritual format mirrors a societal structure in one way or another. Nonetheless,
many theologies do not engage the liturgical space as a fundamental part of
the theological doing, the quehacer teologico, especially because theology is
sometimes understood as only related to thinking. It has been observed: when
theologians go to church they should sit in the back seat.
The liturgical space reveals a dichotomy, a divide in much of our theological
and liturgical thinking: praxis does not belong to the doxa, liturgy is a self-
enclosed event that can shape the world by its self-enclosedness, mission is
what the church does outside; the inside of the church shows how to live out-
side but the inside of the worship space, the sacred space, should be protected
from the outside, the not sacred space, often by stained glass. For a good part
of the liturgical field, liturgy can only be understood by liturgical things, one
next to the other. The preaching is explained by the eucharist, confession by
baptism and so on. J.M.R. Tillard says: ‘The eucharist is explained by the church
and the church is explained by the eucharist.’1 In other words, the church is
explained only by the inside reasoning and its holy things. Nonetheless, any
Christian worship is a public event.
The definition of liturgy, ‘the work of the people’, has become the work
of specialists who define the what, when and how people are supposed to

1  J.M.R. Tillard, Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the Ecclesiology of Communion
(Collegeville, MN: Pueblo Books, 2001), p. 28.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004336063_022

Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 467

do things. Liturgical meaning is a circular movement, with the ritual being

­organized around interior symbols and traditions. Gordon W. Lathrop, one of
the most brilliant liturgical theologians of our time, uses notions of juxtaposi-
tions and maps to claim that meaning and structure are all inside of the liturgi-
cal grounds. He says:

The thesis operative here is this: Meaning occurs through structure, by

one thing set next to another. The scheduling of the ordo [written direc-
tions about what service to schedule when or which specific rite, scrip-
ture readings, or prayers to use, and the suppositions underlying those
directions], the setting of one liturgical thing next to another in the shape
of the liturgy, evokes and replicates the deep structure of biblical lan-
guage, the use of the old to say the new by means of juxtaposition.2

The problem with this conception of liturgy is that it works from a pre-
conceived meaning, only constructed from within the given limits of the field,
as if always already there, that we must only reenact when we worship. The
construction of other liturgical orders and practices and the engagement with
outside sources (meaning the political, cultural, or social-economic) will run
the risk of creating another meaning(s), setting the church at the risk of alter-
ing, shifting or losing the proper theological meaning of liturgy and the proper
way to worship God.
This form of liturgical thought has consequences for theological and bibli-
cal interpretation. The liturgical calendar, biblical interpretation, and the use
of the lectionary, as well as any liturgical practice, have a precise use. The
reasoning of these liturgical sources has taken precedence over other forms or
ideas, beliefs and feelings in shaping life. The liturgical calendar, while offer-
ing a Christian path through the alternating moods and experiences of life,
does not give much space to the unpredictable influx of life. The lectionary
avoids some challenging texts in the Bible and does not pay attention to new
readings of it, such as the centrality of Hagar in Womanist theologies. The
historical method of reading the Bible takes precedence due to its supposed
non-ideological reading of the texts: a constructed theological read, around
universal salvation history, uncritically accepted by liturgical theologians
who sometimes fail to see the ideological markers of texts and their assumed
uncritical supersessionism.
The hope for a universal and broad liturgical theology fills certain dogmas,
a (universal) credere that precedes the orandi, feelings and praxis, (as reason

2  Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things, A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998),
p. 33.
468 Carvalhaes

precedes bodies, order precedes justice, concepts precede doings) and creates
a sense of a private/group sense of worship that is then called public and uni-
versal. This private sense of the public prefigures any sense of the public which
is delineated into understandings of the nation-state.
Liturgies fulfill the logic of dogmatics, while liturgical theologies explain
their systematic underpinning. Liturgies and theologies occur within the con-
fines of the church walls with the assumption that public/secular powers will
follow our lead. Perhaps this troublesome relationship between private/public
worship and private/public politics witnesses to the fact that we must create
and engage our liturgical theologies more clearly by naming, taking sides, and
claiming our power.
It is redundant to call theology public, since every theology is necessarily
public, even those marked ‘private’ for the church only.
This essay wants to do the following: 1) through alternate worship lenses,
expand the notion of private/public (understood here as a blurred line),
including the vast array of arrangements within private and public spaces, the
individual and the collective; 2) challenge public theologies’ looseness in their
theological (in)definitions and (lack of) commitments; 3) offer public ways to
think about the liturgical space and 4) provide a direction for the construction
of a liturgical theology, which will always be necessarily public.

Public vs. Private Worship: A Too-Brief Historical Account

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a common good, similar to God’s grace and natural
resources, available to all of humanity. As the community of the Kin-dom of
God, the church announces that we all carry the Imago Dei, properly reflected
when we live in a fair and equal manner, with equal chances and common lim-
its. From the first churches we learn that it is crucial to share: anything belongs
to anyone and everything belongs to everyone. No one needs to suffer more
than others, for our resources belong to one another. There is a demand upon
us as the church to announce a collective gospel, a gospel that teaches us that
life can only be lived fully if shared in love, the love of God, with all its limits,
demands and possibilities.
However, this public, common way of living is rarely practiced. Let us con-
sider briefly the public sense of our theologies/worship. We said that every the-
ology is necessarily public, but when we give theology a proper name, public
theology, the word public must be checked, developed and defined. Also, we
have to engage with its pair, or opposite term, i.e., the private that the pub-
lic is struggling against. In very broad strokes, liturgical Christian history can
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 469

be divided between private and public worship/testimony. Christianity began

with secret gatherings due to persecution. Using Greco-Roman banquets as
ritual-cultural structures to celebrate the new faith, the Christian faith was
shaped by a variety of ritual orders organized around a circular movement of
public and private prayers and beliefs.3 The lex orandi and lex credendi, the
law of prayer and law of belief, attend to the fact that the inward and out-
ward worlds of this faith were in constant mutation and transition. With the
arrival of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, Christian gatherings moved
from catacombs to public areas, from houses to basilicas, from secret to public
events. This shift changed the sense of being church and the Christian faith’s
relationship to power. If before the faith was a threat to power, the church then
became the social structure through which the Roman Empire organized itself.
Baptism went from belonging to the family of God to a means of becoming
citizens of the Empire.
This intertwining of church and imperial leadership and the consequent
expanded access to power henceforth complicates the ways Christians
deal with the public and private. The liturgical autonomy of local churches
decreased as new centers of power reinforced relations between church and
imperial leadership, which was reflected in common forms of worship. Bishops
and popes were entangled in an endless game of power with emperors and
kings. Consequently, it is impossible to determine ‘authentic’ or ‘original’ forms
of prayers and beliefs; historical power dynamics played out through creeds
and concilia, defined the directions of the church, and revealed its relation
with powers that be.
Liturgical space created/reflected the notion of the sacred and the hier-
archy of power. When the naves of basilicas were shaped, the worship space
established a differentiation between the sacred space where people stand and
the sacred of the sacred, where priests and bishops move. The altar became the
highest place where God manifested Godself. Whoever inhabited this space
possessed religious and civil power.
During the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church created private
masses without the people, missa privata sine populo, which were often used
to bargain for power, money and privileges; secrecy has always been a tool of
the powerful. Vatican II abolished the missa privata/secreta and only public
masses can now be celebrated, but another liturgical practice still in use is
the private confession. How does private confession embody a public notion

3  Cláudio Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic

Hospitality. (Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2012) (Kindle Location 2033), especially Chapter
2 ‘Eucharist and Hospitality and the Early Christian Meals.’
470 Carvalhaes

of the faith? Michel Foucault reminds us that the Christian confession was a
church apparatus of control, obedience and power, entangling the western
imaginary and behavior.4 Both mass and confession are filled with specific
theologies and liturgical practices that define both the private and the public
sphere of the Christian faith.
With the Reformation, with Martin Luther and John Calvin, the public and
the private were further transformed as God’s ‘real’ presence moved from the
Eucharistic Altar to the believer’s heart.5 Also, Luther’s doctrine of the priest-
hood of all believers opened up the possibility of shifting the exteriority of
the faith to the interiority of the believer, thus shifting power and control. The
public and the private became more complex, since inner faith could now
only find its full meaning in the outward manifestation and celebration of the
public gathering of the congregation. When that happened, countries that
rejected the control or influence of the Roman Catholic Church embraced the
Reformation movement.
Recent re-formations of the Christian faith have further complicated the
public and the private. We can name few: a) popular Roman Catholic religios-
ity that uses daily and official elements and symbols of life and the Christian
faith combine a variety of personal/collective, private/public liturgical prac-
tices, troubling the senses of what public and private; b) for some Protestant
churches, preaching, liturgical practices and hymnody have turned inward,
away from the political, simultaneously privatizing faith while both avoiding
the public and shaping it; c) other forms of Christianity, such as prosperity
gospels and neo-pentecostalism, have been fundamentally shaped by the eco-
nomic market, where the private sense of faith is only accepted if related to
commitments made in public to the whole church.
Through this too-short history, the very notion of the public and the pri-
vate becomes complex. At each historical moment we see the creation of
different symbols, theological narratives, a sense of the subject/faith partici-
pant, a different allegiance to God and different notions of private and public.
Liturgies favor or condemn the state according to the theologies developed by

4  ‘Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for
the production of truth . . .(a) continuous incitement to discourse and to truth . . . that helped
to give the confession a central role in the order of civil and religious powers.’, in Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),
pp. 56–58.
5  For a wonderful take on the resignification of the Body of Christ during Reformation
see Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken. The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the
Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth—Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 471

their leaders and confessions. Private and public desires in a private/public

faith always work in tandem, with or against, the economic order. In our pres-
ent age, our challenge is to create public liturgies, with symbols, narratives,
and norms, that engage the public illusions of neoliberal economies and resist
privatized religion/faith that serves only the powerful, so that minorities can
find ways to survive and thrive and we are able to commit ourselves to those
with a claim on the gospel: the afflicted, the naked, the prisoner, the elderly,
the outcast, the poor.

Public Liturgical Theologies: (Lack of) Definition, Criticism and

Possible Ways of Doing it

How are we to think about a public liturgical theology when the modern sense
of the state is shifting: the public norms of Protestant churches no longer
involve protest and fail to influence people’s lives; the pauperization of the
world is growing exponentially; the ecological crisis is insurmountable;
the idea of the modern has been marked by one form of (white-male-European)
reasoning that sustains colonial reasoning, feelings and sovereignty; demo-
cratic states are replaced by the massive control of neo-liberal unregulated
markets; desires are limited to the confines of lack and consumerism; the real
and the virtual still remain undefined; the mission(s) of the church haven’t rec-
ognized the necessity of responding to the uneven power dynamics of its own
structures and the world; the massive exclusion of people from our societies;
racial and patriarchal systems are still at the heart of Christian institutions; the
colonization process in the 21st century seems to be far more robust and perni-
cious and complicated than the colonization of the last 500 years?
In other words, how can the private/public witness of the Christian faith
engage the thousand (dis)connections of the public/private relations of pow-
ers in our societies right now and offer a gospel that can offer hope, create resil-
ience, provoke resistance and engage in transformation, and offer redemption
in a world without redemption?
To answer these questions we must understand the commitments of pub-
lic liturgical theologies. The starting point of any public theology must be a
clearer sense of what ‘public’ means, as well as with whom and to whom we
are making a commitment. In other words, the liturgical quest here is to deter-
mine where and with whom we pray. The answer will decide what we believe
and what sort of liturgical theology we are offering.
Public theology is a relatively new development with which we must wres-
tle. We can begin by referencing David Tracy, who associates public theology
472 Carvalhaes

with ‘three distinct and related social realities: the wider society, the academy,
and the church.’6 Public theology has added to the theological debate critical
notions of citizenship, the place of the state and the role of law, the discussion
of the discussion of secularism and the sacred, theology as theology as a fun-
damental science that is always in creative dialogue with any other discipline,
discussions around public education, dialogue with Pentecostalism and other
religions, engaging pertinent political issues of the moment and simultane-
ously working within the macro and the microphysics of power.
In places like South Africa and Brazil, public theologians are trying to
work with but also to move beyond liberation theologies, out of which Public
Theologies (PTs) emerged, to create a more engaging form of theology that
provides a more nuanced theological discourse. In this process, some think-
ers in Latin America criticize, sometimes naively and superficially, the rigid-
ity of liberation theologies’ commitments. They say that liberation theologies
have fossilized one reading of reality and do not offer a larger field of knowl-
edge for the quehacer teologico. Although public theologians have not been
attentive to the new and vast development of liberation theologies they have
expanded the themes of theology to be engaged publicly.
Brazilian Theologian Alonso Gonçalves defines PT this way: ‘the idea is to
articulate theology with issues that affect people as a whole, being accessible
to all in the public sphere . . . The words involved in this project are converge,
dialogue, adapt.’7
The so-called ‘social democratic’ proposal of Gonçalves and other public
theologians work with an expanded view of life and citizenship. People as a
whole and the general public square are fused into a category that is hard to
read or to define. This puts public theology at risk since its desire to deal with
plural sources, theories, symbols, and public themes at a societal level may lose
any focus on specific contextual situations or the ability to develop a more sus-
tained argument on issues at that are emerging in our societies. It is necessary
to radicalize not only the themes but the theoretical ways to to do theology as
well as the alliances with those excluded, bringing to the forefront of our theo-
logical public debates class struggles and the destructive inequalities created

6  David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981), p. 5.
7  Gonçalves Alonso, Teologia Pública: entre a construção e a possibilidade prática de um dis-
curso, in Ciberteologia, REvista de Teologia e Cultura, Ano VIII, n. 38, August 1, 2015, http://
ciberteologia.paulinas.org.br/ciberteologia/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/03/04
-Teologia-Publica.pdf.
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 473

by capitalism. Our world is in such a disastrous state that it demands from us

much more than just converging, dialoguing and adapting.
The choice of these key words is telling: converge, dialogue, adapt. All terms
belonging to people with choice and voice, who are included in the larger
society and are able to enter societal discussions. Thus we must ask: converge
where, dialogue with whom and adapt what and to what? It is no surprise that
public theologians have made an assertion that PT is in solidarity with the poor.
However, by not taking a clear stance on the side of the poor in a more sustain-
able way, PT does with the poor what it does to most other issues: passes them
by without engaging more deeply in biblical interpretation, theological think-
ing, public commitments, and so forth. Public theologians are often middle-
class intellectuals watching the social situation from and keeping themselves
at a certain distance from the world’s disgrace and pain. But that is not only a
‘privilege’ of public theologians.
The fundamental claim of openness to difference, diversitiy while engaging
conflict, plural spaces for all, and heterogeneities, runs the risk of not creating
a real space for anybody, or only for those who can afford this sense of plural-
ism. That means a naïve middle-class sense of what is public, avoiding the con-
flicts of social class and the voracious appetite of economic elites. That means
dealing with issues of the poor from somewhat secure places, such as universi-
ties and seminaries, where PT is still problematically and primarily located.
Nancy Pereira Cardoso, from Brazil, engages public theology and Alonso
Gonçalves’s definition quoted above. She says:

What does ‘as a whole’ mean? Accessible to all? As if we were all arranged
on the social fabric defined as public sphere, magically equalized by
some good manners of a tired theology! To converge? Not really! The
elites accumulate and expel! To dialogue? Not really! The state kills, the
media lies and the market consumes us! To adapt? Ah . . . that is enough!
There is much laziness and unwillingness in such small theology!!

Any PT that wants to exist and to expand its criticism must own its stance in
regards to the poor. Solidarity at a distance is not enough; engagement with
public themes via disconnection from the systemic conditions that create
them will dilute PT’s potency. Moreover, if PT wants to be fully lived, it will have
to engage fully the economic structures of our society and recognize that it is
the elites and their economic hold that sustain oppression. PT must engage in
public movements of resistance with the poor and propose changes to church
structures and hierarchy. If PT wants to make a difference, it must work in soli-
darity with the Basic Communities in Latin America, the Landless Movement
474 Carvalhaes

in Brazil, the Via Campesina, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the
Umbrella movement in Asia, and other pre-existing movements, to name and
resist the racial economic patriarchal apartheid still rampant throughout the
world. The neo-liberal market must be duly criticized for what it does, espe-
cially to those for whom the gospel has a preference: the least of these.
My criticism of PT can easily be considered unfair, treating it as reduction-
ist, which is exactly what public theology is trying to avoid. Any theological
endeavor, including PT, that does not have the poor as its main subject and
concern, with all of its difficulties and even impossibilities, will be destined
only for the academy and for middle-class theologians who deal theoretically
with the theological field. It will propose surface changes that will sustain
access to goods and knowledge for a certain class of people, and will only offer
lip service to the poor while fundamentally maintaining the power dynamics
and imbalance of our societies.
Thus, every theology, especially a public theology, must start by acknowl-
edging where and with whom its discourse/practice starts so we know how
to name the desire for God, where and how we pray, how to read the Bible,
what to claim from this reading, what to sing and what to resist. Emmanuel,
God at the margins, with us. Theology should start from where it hurts, among
those who are despised in our society: black and indigenous people, the poor,
the unemployed, battered women, prisoners, queer people and those who can-
not consume. From those places, from the refugee camp, private and public
prisons, public squares with spikes everywhere so the poor cannot rest their
bodies, from the outskirts of society where none of us live and are scared to
drive by—yes, it is from these places that we have to figure out how to pray
and worship God, how to interpret the Bible and say yes and no, what songs
are to be sung, what to ask to be forgiven for, what to eat and at whose table,
how to use water for Baptism, and how to be sent forth into the world. From
these places we can figure out many public liturgical theologies. Next, we will
try to name the public liturgical space. Then, from this liturgical place we will
exercise a liturgical theology, already embedded in the definition of the liturgi-
cal space, and rehearse God’s kin-dom, instead of “converging, dialoguing, and
adapting,” using the motto of the Landless Movement (MST) in Brazil: “occupy,
resist, produce.”
We want to foster necessary sustenance, conflict, and resistance, and pro-
mote social transformation by rehearsing it together every time we gather.
Liturgical things might converge, dialogue, and adapt, but they might not. The
point is to get beyond that (what?). We must converge people and resources,
but for the lives of the poor. As for dialogue, it must be only with poor peo-
ple of any religion, quasi-religion or no religion, because a dialogue with the
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 475

powerful can only happen after they give up their possessions. Then and
only then they can join the church and become disciples of Jesus Christ. As
for adaptating, yes, we must indeed, but adapt to the cries of the poor, the
homeless, the abandoned, the black and indigenous and Palestinian popula-
tions until their lives matter! Our liturgical hermeneutical motto, ‘occupy, resist,
produce,’ will sustain our worship of God, from beginning to end. The ways we
shape our worship services locally, in autonomous ways, while in the midst of
global forces, will define our testimony, public beliefs and commitments, and
from there, where our feet meet the ground, with the people we decide to be
with, we can create another thousand possibilities for public liturgical theolo-
gies that will address the issues at stake in each local (global) parish.

Forms of Public Liturgical Theologies

Instead of considering how we should begin to worship, we must ask: Where

are we meeting to worship God? Our place will guide our prayers, our loca-
tion will inform the shape for our faith. More than a liturgical space, each wor-
ship space is a territory, marked by social, economic and class signs.8 Worship
spaces in suburban areas or away from the poor already mark a certain mis-
sion of the church and define the identity of the group. Thus, our places will
already define what kind of public theology we are offering and what kind of
witnessing to Jesus we are committed to. When we gather, who owns the land
where we are honoring God? Which indigenous people was this land stolen
from? What colonial power has created a worship space that has now become
private? What social, class, or identity group owns this territory?
Here we face a conundrum: if the worship of God is a public event, open for
all, why can some people, including private religious societies, own it? If we
have holy things within this space understood as Christian common goods fun-
damentally belonging to God (and thus to the people of God), why is the space
locked away from their free use and access? What is at stake in the constitution
of our faith, in the confessionality of our beliefs and belongings, our creeds
and major theological tenets, regarding public access to our religious sources,
to the holy of holies? Access to holy things mirrors the access we establish in
our societies, and the correponsing privatization of the common goods of God.

8  See Cláudio Carvalhaes, ‘In Spirit and in Truth: The Liturgical Space as Territory’, in Todd E.
Johnson and Siobhan Garrigan, ed., Common Worship in Theological Education (Oregon: Wipf
and Stock Publishers, 2009).
476 Carvalhaes

Today, it is the poor who are reminding us of the necessary cleansing of the
temple, bringing Jesus’ words back to us again.
At the heart of the holy things, there is a clear sense of the private and
the public, even though these gifts are offered publicly. Every ‘citizen’ of the
Christian family lives in a territory demarcated by baptism, and by the inside
space that defines the holy. If one wants to have access to holy things, one must
be formally trained and given permission to touch, access and distribute the
holy commons.
However, at the heart of the Christian faith is a radical criticism of any
tradition or established power, any ownership, any privatization of the faith.
Nobody owns Christainity, but anyone can belong, in more than one way, and
beyond the proper documentation of citizenship. Liturgy has to get rid of the
dogma when it makes liturgy more important than God or the people, so it can
propose something to live by, even a dogma! The liturgical moment is funda-
mentally a critical time for a de-centering faith, even if a center for the faith
of the believer at that moment. As Jaci Maraschin, one of the most important
liturgical theologians of Latin America, said:

The liturgical moment is always a kind of center where the memory

of the divine lived in the past, faces the challenges and the exigencies of
what is to happen. That is why the judgment of the present preceeds
from the celebration of what happened in the times of liberation and it
is animated by the hope of what might happen because of our commit-
ment to this common decision . . . But what kind of gatherings do we have
now? Assemblies eaten away by the commitment to the powers of this
world and captive of the social, political, and economic system in which
we live. That is why, in general, the liturgical gatherings become tiresome,
devoid of the vital element that would make them exult in joy and act as
interpreters of reality.9

Freed from the heavy weight of the past and yet committed to the the divine
memory that liberated and continues to liberate us, we will be critical of our
present, and from that criticism we will discover the joy that comes from the
Spirit!
As is true for any symbol, reading, song, ritual order or interpretation of
the Bible, there is always a public, political choice at the heart of our worship.
The question always is: What God are we serving? The God of the poor? Of

9  Jaci Maraschin, ‘Libertação da Liturgia,’ in A Beleza da Santidade. Ensaios de liturgia (SP:

ASTE, 1996), pp. 133–138.
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 477

those in power? Of social democracy and democratic processes? What kind

of urgency do we have when we worship? Jaci Maraschin helps us here again:

We need to free our liturgies from false celebrations. We must ask what
God we are worshiping in our services. Besides the one God revealed
in Jesus Christ and in the face of the poor and oppressed as seen in the
Gospels, there are many other gods who by nature are false . . . In a society
divided into oppressors and oppressed, rich and poor, it is necessary to
distinguish between the God who has chosen the poor and the oppressed
and the God of the rich and powerful. What do we celebrate in our
churches? Do we celebrate the stable economic system . . . or the victory
of multinationals, of large corporations that oppress us and rob workers?
Or do we celebrate the hope of the poor? False worship celebrations are
the celebrations of the false gods of money, capitalism, profit, success of
institutions, the welfare of those on the top of the hierarchical system.10

This fundamental political choice, always made, consciously or not, in our

worship services will help us pay attention to the ways we actually hold our
liturgical structures and define how they are in sync with our public engage-
ment around issues such as work systems, class, climate change, health care,
agrarian reform, economic issues, and so on.

A Place Where We are Demanded to Love

What gathers us together is God’s love: we are called first, we came from God
who loves us all without distinction. It is this love that makes a demand upon
us: we must love one another. The two main commandments given by Jesus
are to love God and to love one another.11 The word ‘worship’ means ‘worthi-
ness, honor.’ To worship is to ascribe worthiness, or honor, to somebody or
something. As I honor God I must honor my neighbor because of the mutual-
ity between God and my neighbor. My public worship comes from love and
it offers love back to God. At the same time, this love/honor offered to God
demands that I also love/honor those around me, a radical call of equality. Any
private sense of this faith crumbles into a public sharing and mutual recogni-
tion and transformation.

10  Ibid.
11  Matthew 22: 36–40 and 1 John 4:20–21, NRSV.
478 Carvalhaes

Ubuntu! I am because We Are, We Are Because I am

This fundamental sense of individual/collective, private/public love is not nec-
essarily one of kindness since it follows the one who said that his presence
would bring the sword and division.12 This love breaks down all forms of hier-
archy and injustice and demands a radical egalitarian society. The demand of
love is equal honor and justice, and it must be done must in a variety of ways.
The basic ground rule, the truth that should hold the worship space, is the
demand that there will be no inequality within this nomadic community.
In order for this to happen the liturgical space sbould be a foreign space, a
third space, a place in between, a space always already public that belongs to a
plethora of people, those who used to live in that space but were eliminated by
colonization and economic greed and those who arrived.

Third Space
The worship space is fundamentally a ‘third space,’ a space that is both real
and imagined, a transient place that checks the formation of identities, memo-
ries, belonging and rootlessness, globalization, languages, desires, differences,
placelessness and alienating aspects so marked in religious places. The wor-
ship space is fundamental to any confession of faith and to a public proposal
of how Christians believe societies should be organized. The worship space
is not only subject to religious interpretations but also to all of the dynamics
of life. Worship as a ThirdSpace is akin to what Edward W. Soja describes ‘as
an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human
life, appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the
rebalanced trialectices of spatiality–historicality–sociality.’13
In one way or another, worship spaces produce and reproduce social dynam-
ics, linguistic relations, governing structures, and capital production, either
reiterating what is already in society or offering resistance and alternative
forms of social conviviality.14 Our religious lives are woven with understand-
ings of law, role of state, notions of nationality, power dynamics, processes of
translation, negotiation of metaphors and symbols, perceptions of mental,

12  Luke 12: 51–53: ‘I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under
until it is completed! (v.51) Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No,
I tell you, but rather division! (v.52) From now on, five in one household will be divided,
three against two and two against three; (v.53) they will be divided: father against son and
son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, mother-in-law
against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law’, NRSV.
13  Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace (Malden: Blackwell, 1996), p. 57, 61.
14  See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 479

bodily and epistemological frameworks. In the worship (interstitial) spaces we

re/create stories about ourselves and provide a hybrid space where mimicry,
repetition, new orientations, transformation of identities thrive.15

Neplanta
Our worship space is a very complex place. As we gather to worship in any
public space anywhere we claim this space as a foreign space where everybody
is invited by everybody and no one owns the keys to it. The worship space then
becomes a space that is neither mine nor yours, neither a space that belongs
exclusively to one tradition nor a place that avoids this tradition, but a space to
be re-created time and again with clear political moves and theological inten-
tions. Spaces of continuity and ruptures, creation and dismantling of dogmas,
doing and undoing of identities, fostering myriad differences and finding strat-
egies of living among them.
Our worship spaces are bridges, in-between places akin to Nepantla, a place
that is on hold and home at the same time. Nepantla was a term used by the
Nahuatl-speaking people in 16th-century Mexico. Gloria Anzaldúa defines it
so well:

Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call

nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations
occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious,
always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra
desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant
state of displacement—an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most
of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of ‘home.’
Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel
threatened by these new connections and the change they engender.

In this place we create our liturgies, amidst our fears, anxieties, lacks, wants
and longings; using our liturgical maps, we create others, we use old, familiar
prayers and we create new ones, we live in dialectical modes, unfolding con-
nections with not always foreseeing results.

The Worship Space as a State?

No. The notion of the state is very dangerous to associate with the liturgical
event at the worship space. The nation-state institutionalizes violence, cre-
ates states of exception, establishes nationalisms that will kill those near or

15  See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).
480 Carvalhaes

outside of its borders. It controls citizenship and the limits of our lives. Jesus,
also killed by the state, said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’16 A growing
number of ‘democratic’ nation-states have been taken over by corporate pow-
ers, enacting ‘lawful’ covenants with economic powers that steal lands, priva-
tize agriculture, destroy workers’ rights, shatter social programs and so on.
Moreover, the very political sense of these nation-states is based on a social
contract idea of a liberal democracy that serves only a minority, which, using
militarization, force, and social media, struggles to prevent changes and
transformation.
The problem with our liturgical theologies is that they have often relied on
the sense of a state with centralized power to dominate people, sometimes
holding up state theologies or reflecting the consolidation of power and
boundary. A very few faith traditions, such as the Quakers, have criticized
and deconstructed the political-country-nation-state form of organization
that is reflected in their structured worship. Yet they still subscribe to a notion
of the nation-sate. In this liberal representative form, Christian worship often
interprets liturgy as work on behalf of the people and not liturgy as the work of
the people. That interpretation often carries a (hidden) sense that people can-
not know God’s holy things properly.
Instead, public liturgical theologies should take up the radical sense of the
power of the people; the people should be the reference point of any litur-
gical theology. It should be the work of holy people to redistribute the holy
things and create holy ground anywhere they go, moving away from the notion
of a nation-state, towards notions of political structures as seen and lived by
native peoples, a society not structured with oppressors and oppressed, but
refuses any hierarchical power or top-down relations that are often coercive
and depend on individuals’ ideas and power.17
Liturgical theologies should then readjust, redistribute and resignify not
only the worship space but also all of society’s material goods: baptismal font
and citizenship, housing and oikós, healing and health care, eucharist and
food, joyful noise and circus.

Foreign Space
This public space is rendered a foreign space since no one has the right to own
it. The worship space redirects us all to a common place, a place in between,
a place where all of us have the right to live, to eat and to have a dignified life.

16  John 18:36, NRSV.

17  See the work of Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
(New York: Zone Books, 1989); and the work of Leonardo Boff, Church, Charism and Power:
Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church (New York: Crossroad 1985).
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 481

In this space, Public Theology might be a foreign space, a territory marked by

social values and inequalities, a dis-placed place in the world where we utter to
each other the words: Welcome! In the name of a loving God, welcome to this
place. For God’s love is also here! Finally we could get together again! From
many places and situations and conditions, we have arrived. Some more
bruised than others due to the conditions of the road, but we are here. We
are all undocumented migrants, traveling from one place to another, moving
through things and moments, beliefs and doubts, fears and hopes. One thing
we know: Jesus said that, while we are sent into this world, we do not belong
to it.18 The writer of Hebrews reminds us that “here we have no lasting city, but
we are looking for the city that is to come.”19 And Peter challenges us to live “in
reverent fear during the time of our exile.”20
This sense of being a foreigner walking somewhere else is a mark of the
early Christians, and it is present in ancient literature. A letter to Diognetus,
perhaps written in the late 2nd century, mentions the ways in which Christians
relate themselves to place.

Christians might stay in their own countries or elsewhere, but simply

as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet
endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their
native country and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.

As wanderers in this world, we stop for rest, for prayers and songs and food,
bringing our holy symbols. Our task now is to worship God, and to offer help
and support, care and provisions for one another to continue this journey. Set
up in this frail, provisional sacred space, like the Jews who built the taberna-
cle from time to time in the desert, like Bedouins stopping in deserted areas
until they figure out where to go next, like nomads making tentative shelters in
urban areas and engaging with strangers all the time, or even like many immi-
grants crossing the desert between Mexico and the U.S., building small shrines
to worship God, so we can meet our religious obligations and gain strength to
make this forbidden journey.
But then, if this worship space is a foreign space, that means that it does not
belong either to you or to me. It has neither a Presbyterian nor a Roman Catholic
liturgy, neither a Pentecostal nor Southern Baptist worship, and for that mat-
ter, it is neither solely a Christian, nor a Muslim nor Jewish nor Hindu nor a
Candomblé worship. This place will not be privatized by any denomination

18  John 17:14, NRSV.

19  Hebrews 13.14, NRSV.
20  I Peter 1:17, NRSV.
482 Carvalhaes

or religion! Like all the earth, this place belongs to God and God alone. But
now, here, together, we have to figure out how to use this space for now, how to
put together the gestures and the provisions of our faith, or lack thereof.
Thus after hearing God’s call to love God and one another, empowered by
this love, this grace beyond measure, we go to work in our own locations, uti-
lizing the wisdom of our many traditions. What is the sort of public theology
we shall sing? The song of the undocumented, of the queer, of the black and
indigenous communities of religions, engaging old and new resources, autoch-
thonous ritual creations and manifestations where confused, we deal with dif-
ferences and complications. After we learn how to sing and pray somebody
else’s prayers and songs and eat together, we leave and go about our lives with
a better idea of what the kin-dom of God looks and feels like. Our rituals will
reorient us in the world with many maps, triangulations, assemblages, and jux-
tapositions. At this place converges the liturgy of the church, the liturgy of the
neighbor and the liturgy of the world.21
More than anything, the worship space should provide a full sense of what
life/lives should be all about. A place where other forms of civilization and
resources offer new forms of existence. Perhaps we could pursue what the
Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro said: ‘My idea for the
future is not that we all should go back to live like Indigenous people, but instead,
to look at them and imagine a civilization that may have a relationship with their
own living conditions that is not so stupid and suicidal like ours.’
The task? To honor God and each other, offering restitution to those who
have been robbed, giving possession to the dispossessed, bringing life to death,
and justice and peace to situations of inequality and despair.

Occupy, Resist and Produce

This is the public form of a liturgical public theology: within liturgical space we
learn to ‘occupy, resist and produce.’
Occupy—we occupy every worship space and restore what has been taken
from the people. We will bring all of the poor and the beggars and the home-
less inside. We will cry out: this holy place and everything that is here belong
to the poor! Rehearsed, we will mirror this movement in society and occupy
places where the rich live and share what they have. We will occupy the
financial buildings and multinational companies and take away their sources/
structures and debunk their power. We will occupy refugee camps and bring

21  See Nathan D. Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments: Theology in Global
Perspectives (Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2007).
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 483

the resources from the rich to make a home with schools, and water and seeds
for harvesting, so people can begin a new life. We will occupy private and state
prisions and implode their buildings. With the debris we will build new houses
for immigrants and other prisoners to gather with their families. We will
occupy the dumpsters of the cities and bring people out so together we can
find ways to provide dignity for us all. We will occupy the lands of agri-business
and distribute them to the poor. We will occupy oil companies and break down
the pipelines that are putting our lives at risk.
Resist—We will resist worship services that keep power for a few leaders. We
will resist worship services that make people mimic prayers and songs made by
white males from Europe and the U.S. We will resist biblical readings and inter-
pretations that are indifferent to poor contexts. We will resist monolithic forms
of worship that do not engage inter-religious dialogue. Rehearsed, we will con-
tinue this resistence in society and we will resist new laws, new tyrannies and
any concentration of power and money, distributing everything. Everybody
will have health care, a home, schools, and the possiblity to eat three to five
times a day! Our resistance will begin by redistributing resources to the poor.
Produce—We will produce autonomous liturgies and engage whatever wor-
ship resources any way we want in the ways that local contexts demand. We
will produce new ways of engaging with each other and sing somebody else’s
songs and pray somebody else’s prayers. We will produce a myriad of worship
services that will empower people and transform social, economic, sexual, and
patriarchal structures. Rehearsed within the liturgical space, we will produce
ecologically sound agriculture and cooperatives. We will produce other forms
of symbolic exchange, eco-nomic values and new forms of life. We will follow
the campesinos across the globe and learn with them how to live this gospel
of love and might.
As the lyrics of a song sung in Latin America read:

There, we follow the Lord’s receipt;

Let us all together prepare the dough with your hands,
and we will see with joy how the bread grows.
Women do not forget the salt
Men bring the yeast.
And may we have many people invited:
blind, deaf, lame, prisoners, poor.22

22  Flávio Irala e Elza Tames, ‘Venham,celebremos a Ceia do Senhor—Convite ao compro-

misso,’ 26/06/1983, IECLB, visited the site on August 26, 2015, http://www.luteranos.com
.br/conteudo/venham-celebremos-a-ceia-do-senhor-convite-ao-compromisso.
484 Carvalhaes

I offer the following challenges to PT:

• Be with the poor and try to imagine ritual possibilities from amidst their
struggles;
• Understand that if our worship space is really public, it means it will be a

place where anyone can come and be a part of it, which also means having
to go through changes while the very landscape of that very place will con-
tinue to change in order to adapt to forms of justice and peace.
• Expand the possibilities of the public beyond the Greek-Christian-Western
understanding of politics;
• As a consequence, delve deeply into the knowledge of native people every-
where to learn and foster other possibilities for life and life together;
• Know that any other category of thought comes after being with. The first
step is always to be with the poor, and from there, we shape our public faith.
Time and again, the lives of the poor come first, and traditions and thinking
come afterwards to support them and help change anything that is is rob-
bing people of lives lived in fullness.

Thus, reoriented, rehearsed and empowered, always from the perspective of

the poor, we will offer a public view of the world by our way of worshiping and
honoring God. Our concern is not ourselves but somebody else, the poor. As
Catholic Amy Levad proposes:

More than a rubric or a list, liturgy and sacraments comprise the work
of the church in consecrating the world in emulation of Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, through the Holy Spirit by serving God and neighbors,
particularly victims of injustice. Engaging in this work is the worship
of God . . . With this refocus, Christians move from concern with one’s
authentic self toward the transformation of one’s self and one’s commu-
nities in response to God’s call for justice. We ought to reclaim our faith
and its practice from privatisation, or else ‘the liturgy loses its power to
embody a vision of social transformation, and its ability to elicit commit-
ment to the social project is vitiated.’ We ought to emphasize the public
service of liturgy consecrating the world in anticipation of God’s reign as
we participate in the religious practices that nurture our souls.23

23  Amy Levad, Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass
Incarceration (Kindle Locations 1930–1932; 1939–1944; Fortress Press, 2014). She quotes
M. Francis Mannion, ‘Liturgy and the Present Crisis of Culture’, Worship, 62:2 (1988),
98–123.
Worship, Liturgy And Public Witness 485

Thus giving God glory and honor by learning how Jesus did it all in his own time,
God’s love will send us forth and God’s grace will sustain us as we go beyond
measures and limits and private spaces to reshape our own territories and con-
texts to be more inclusive to those who are not there. We will continue to work
in our own locations, using the sources of our own contexts and the wisdom of
our many traditions. The task of public liturgical theology? To honor God and
each other, offering restitution and restoration to those who have been robbed,
giving possession to the dispossessed, bringing life to those who are dead in life
and justice and peace to situations of inequality and despair. Then we can say:
let us go in peace!

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Index
Aboriginal Canadians 359–60, 367
abortion 32, 80, 301, 313, 337, 374, 383, 385,
386
abuses 128–9, 131, 200, 274, 280, 284, 286,
292, 294, 359, 409
abusive political power 7, 59
academic publics 430, 438
academy, theological 10, 214
accountability 14–15, 95, 105, 127, 287,
291–4
ethic of 291
Ackermann, Denise 68, 73, 89–90, 339
actions, responsible 264, 290–1
activism 5, 17, 173, 387
activists 82, 271, 370, 398–9, 436
anti-apartheid 304
cast anti-trafficking 290
advocacy
anti-trafficking 272, 290
faith-based 372
advocacy responsibility 84
advocates of gender equality 386
African Americans 1, 89, 283, 312
African traditional religions 388
African Women 313, 387–8
African Women Theologians 313, 388
agency, moral 18, 283, 285
agendas
public theological 306
secular activist 278
AIDS 80, 233, 248, 335, 387
AIDS & Gender Readings 387
alienation 133, 138, 152, 154, 157, 161, 178, 180,
218, 243, 401
aliens 27, 160, 171, 224, 232, 427
alternative worship 462–3
Althaus-Reid, Marcella 284–5, 294, 309,
314–15, 317, 320, 322, 392, 413
America 25, 36, 39, 53, 58, 106, 123, 127, 218,
226, 229–30, 298, 353, 356–7, 390
American civil religion 3, 19–20, 302, 322
American experience 3, 20, 302, 322, 370–1,
388, 453, 464
American public life 4, 19, 53, 303, 321, 374,
389
American religion 371
American religious right 194
amnesty 126, 128, 130–1, 133
anarchy 52, 216, 435
androcentrism 312–13
Anglican Church 299–300
Anglican social theology 266, 269
anti-trafficking activism 288–9
Anzaldua, Gloria 479
apartheid 7–9, 55, 67, 69, 90, 130, 150–2,
154–5, 157, 161–2, 177, 233, 250, 264, 353,
371, 456
apartheid theology 7, 151–2
Aquinas, Thomas 166
Archbishop of Canterbury 179, 182–3, 266,
269, 299
Arendt, Hannah 114, 116, 232, 242, 248, 253,
263–4, 269
Argentina 86, 126–9, 147–8
Aristotle 101, 165–6, 252–3, 257, 352, 367
atonement 138–41, 143–4, 155–6
atonement theology 142
Augustine 41–4, 64–5, 165–6, 232, 254–5,
269, 331, 371, 393
Augustinian theology 45, 232
Australia 86, 106, 197, 222, 314, 356–7, 370,
420, 426–7, 439
authority
civil 45–6
municipal 395
religious 123, 383, 392–3
state’s 42
Babylon 171, 391, 394
Baker, Christopher 390, 400, 411, 413
baptism 58, 66, 466, 469, 474, 476, 478
Barmen Declaration 8, 151, 161
Barth, Karl 100, 151, 334, 344, 407, 451
Beaumont, Justin 400, 409–10, 413–4
Bedford-Strohm, Heinrich 55, 67, 69–72,
74–5, 78–9, 81–8, 90–2, 247, 302, 320,
415
Belfast 135–6, 147–8, 443
Belhar Confession 76–7, 91, 151–3, 155–7,
161–2
488
Bellah, Robert 3, 19, 40, 218, 229
Benne, Robert 4, 12, 19, 86
Berger, Peter 218
Berkman, Matthew 222
Bernstein, Elizabeth 278, 292, 294
Beyers Naudé 68, 89, 154, 302
biblical interpretation 35, 308, 311, 321, 390,
467, 473
biblical politics 28–9
biblical theology 8, 28, 61, 390, 458, 463
Biggar, Nigel 76, 378, 380
bioethics 369–71, 373–9, 381–9
biomedicine 336, 382
Black Lives Matter 1, 17
Black theology 6–7, 54, 64, 312, 321
black women 281, 283, 297, 312–13
body politic 102–3, 107, 109, 176, 256, 307,
359
Boff, Leonardo 237, 241, 244, 248, 342, 344,
480, 485
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 2, 5, 8, 10, 13–4, 18–19,
214–15, 227, 229, 264, 399, 408, 413–4
Botman, Russel 67, 69, 89–90, 129, 146, 248
bourgeois society 11, 20, 54, 64, 303, 322,
443, 463
Brazil 86, 126–8, 149, 233–4, 237–8, 240, 242,
244, 248–9, 300, 404, 473–4
Breitenberg, Harold 3–4, 19, 91, 198, 209, 302
Brueggemann, Walter 227
Byzantium 255–6, 269
Calhoun, Craig 11, 20, 305, 322, 420, 438
Callahan, Daniel 374–5, 378
Calvin 44–6, 52, 64, 141, 395, 447
campaigns 110, 288, 290, 312, 397, 402
public awareness 290
Campbell and Zimmerman 80, 272, 274,
276, 278, 280, 282, 284, 286, 288, 290,
292, 294, 296
Canada 86, 106, 190, 301, 359–60, 419, 439
capitalism 59, 101, 112, 174, 182, 192, 218, 281,
283, 297, 349–51, 354, 356–7, 360, 365
Cardoso, Nancy Pereira 473
care
compassionate 325, 333, 341, 343–4
ethics of 159, 341–2
good 327
care of creation 164, 207
care relationship 343
index
caring 78, 159, 166, 327, 337–8, 341, 343
Catholic Bishops’ Conference 167–8, 173–4,
182
Catholic church 47, 129, 164–5, 180, 182, 221,
235, 300–1, 311–12, 383, 448
catholic faith 53, 123
Catholic Social Teaching 2, 6, 40, 47–50,
60, 65, 104, 164, 167, 172–5, 182–3, 211,
266–8, 398
Catholicism 300, 376, 386
catholicity 234, 247
Chile 126–7, 129
China 86, 190, 261, 421
Chinese public theology 422, 439
Christendom 7, 41, 44, 118, 256, 394, 415
Christian praxis 52–3
Christian values 126, 132, 384
Christian worship 459, 466, 480
Christianity
institutionalized 311–12
religionless 399, 408
Christians, early 329, 331, 392, 481
church
early 280–1, 295, 392–4, 412, 447
ecumenical 180, 314
established 266, 320, 402
Church of England 51, 168, 180, 183, 258, 266,
299–300, 310, 315–16, 378, 401–2, 449
Church of Scotland 441–2, 453, 455
Cicero 254
citizenship 69, 80, 95, 97, 114, 116–17, 231–47,
249–50, 260, 418–19, 424, 427, 432, 472,
480
public theology of 234, 243
responsible 233, 243, 249, 281
theology of 232, 241, 246–7
city, post-secular 400, 411, 413
City of God 41–3, 66, 165, 232, 254–5, 340,
393–4
civil religion 3, 20, 73, 92, 218, 302, 322, 442
civil society 6, 9, 12, 17, 40, 61, 79, 81, 104,
107–8, 235–9, 244–5, 418–19, 425–8,
435–7
global 202, 208, 238, 249
urban 399, 412
clergy sexual abuse 14
climate 352, 358, 361–2, 367
climate injustice 349, 351, 353, 355, 357, 359,
361, 363–7
index
climate justice 13, 216, 220
coalitional praxis 418–19, 421, 423, 425, 427,
429, 431–3, 435, 437, 439
colonialism 313–14, 322, 364, 422
colonization 353–4, 471, 478
common good 11, 17, 21, 47–9, 63–5, 102, 111,
116, 164–71, 173–7, 179, 181–3, 207–8, 211,
215–19, 287, 438–9, 475
common life 27, 33, 53, 79, 95, 98, 100, 102,
105, 107–8, 114, 116–17, 172, 251, 253
communication 37, 101, 109, 113–15, 172, 192,
247, 386, 405, 421, 445–6, 453–4, 464–5
creative 450
means of 238, 448
community
local 176, 189, 193, 446
minority 40, 437
political 48, 50, 95–7, 101, 103, 424–5
worshipping 443, 457, 460
community organising 105–8, 109–10, 115–7,
183
compass 33–4, 37–8, 72, 360
compassion 29, 56, 63, 78, 158–9, 172, 229,
243, 332–3, 336, 339–40, 343, 380, 396
Cone, James 8, 54, 64, 281, 295, 312, 353–4,
366–7
Confessing Church in Germany 7–8
Constantine 253–5, 394
constitution 14, 218, 231, 235–6, 257, 259,
335, 423, 475
constitutional democracy 33, 47–8, 65
conversion 57–9, 169, 172, 177, 313, 403, 412
personal 396, 398, 426, 434
Corrymeela Community of Reconciliation  divine governance 28–9
135–6, 147
covenant 26–7, 29–30, 159–60, 171, 197–8,
224, 390
Cox, Harvey 398–9, 407, 414
critique
feminist 306, 308–9
public faith 17
cultural diversity 391, 393, 399
cultural genocide 359–60, 367
culture wars 377–8
cultures
civic 237
minority 422, 424, 427–8, 432, 437
particular 428–9, 432
489
Daly, Mary 208, 311, 321
Davey, Andrew 390–2, 405, 414–5
Day, Dorothy 5
de Castro, Educardo Viveiros 482
de Gruchy, John 5, 7–8, 13, 17, 19–20, 56–7,
64, 86, 129, 132–3, 144, 147, 156, 162, 432
declaration 137, 152, 224, 229, 258–9
Declaration of Independence 53, 223–4,
229, 258–9
deliberative public sphere 238, 249
democracy 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 20–1, 56–7, 59, 95–6,
99, 112–19, 233, 236–40, 244–5, 247–50,
321, 421–2, 438
basic 244
consociational 98–9, 111, 118
deliberative 262, 268
generation of 161
democratic citizenship 96, 105, 114, 117, 424
democratic states 59, 225, 230, 251, 471
dialogue 5–6, 12–13, 16, 181, 194, 216, 228, 233,
267, 272, 291, 308–9, 315, 326, 472–4
cross-cultural 421, 440
inter-faith 80, 435
inter-religious 483
diaspora 31, 222, 224–5, 422, 434
digital media 305, 309, 322, 444–5, 461
discernment 102, 112, 381
theological 413
disciples 32, 73, 134, 218, 392, 396, 398, 475
disciplines 13, 16–17, 19, 55, 78, 81, 108, 120,
212–13, 215–16, 380, 430, 472
discrimination 112, 152, 154, 202, 286, 299,
301, 306–7, 318, 363
divine nature 27, 100
divine rule 28, 30, 44, 391
doctrine 44–6, 56, 72–3, 100, 118, 139, 141, 214,
338, 358, 362, 383, 385
dogmas 467, 476, 479
Durkheim, Emile 3, 81, 105, 216–17, 219, 224,
230
Dutch Reformed Church 7, 264
Dutch Reformed Mission Church 151, 153,
155, 162
Early Christianity 253, 280, 295, 325, 328,
330, 336, 338, 345, 393
eco-injustice 353, 367
490
ecology 80, 358, 364–5, 368, 413
economic activity 164, 189, 205–7
economic cosmos 358–9, 363
economic order 49–51, 397, 471
economics 40, 60, 96–7, 164–5, 203–4, 209,
216, 282–3, 295, 357, 365, 370
economy 2, 6, 11–12, 16, 79, 81, 89, 115–16,
173–4, 190–1, 205–8, 349–51, 361–2,
364–5, 411
ecumenism 136, 176
Emerging Church 409, 416, 448, 462–3
empathy 132, 155–6, 342
empire 41, 244, 253–6, 469
Engels, Frederick 357–8, 367–8
England 51, 86, 168, 177, 179–80, 183, 258–9,
266, 299–300, 310, 315–16, 378, 401–2,
449
equality 25, 30, 33, 35, 49, 56, 63, 96, 135, 167,
218–19, 235, 244, 290, 310–12
sexual 298, 301–2
ethic of care 341–2, 345–6
ethics
global 203–5, 207, 209–10
political 73, 80
theological 283, 379
ethnic democracy 224–5, 230
ethnic minorities 202, 422–3, 433
ethnicity 150, 199–200, 370, 432, 440
eucharist 105, 117, 466, 469–70, 480, 485
European Union 167, 188, 378, 382–4
euthanasia 380, 383
Evangelical Church in Germany 69, 81, 83, 92
exploitation 124, 192, 207, 273–7, 284, 353
economic 199, 203, 275, 280, 283, 312
worker 274
Fabian, Johannes 226
fairness 49, 81–2, 252, 261–2
justice as 261
faith
public 11, 21, 243, 388, 471, 484
religious 123, 400, 402
faith-based organisations 80, 398, 408, 410,
414–5
feminism 60, 106, 303, 305, 307–8, 321, 323,
342, 345, 385, 419, 438–9
feminist liberation theology 320–1
feminist public theology 385
feminist social ethics 273, 282–3, 295–6
index
feminist theologies 6, 74, 306–9, 312, 320,
385, 388
feminists 285, 304, 306, 314–18, 322
Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler 308, 310–11,
313–14, 318–22
Flavio, Irala 483
forced labor 271, 273–5, 277, 279–81, 283,
285, 287, 289, 291, 293–7
forgiveness 9, 56, 80, 126, 130–3, 148–9, 152,
156, 162, 263, 270
Forrester, Duncan 12, 20, 55, 165, 180, 182,
302, 326, 345, 373, 389
Foucault, Michael 470
France 103, 117, 257, 382, 384
Francis I, Pope 15, 267, 300, 362, 454
Fraser, Nancy 11, 20, 305–7, 321, 420, 422, 438
freedom 16, 26, 49, 51, 53, 56, 63, 151–2, 169,
173, 201–2, 257–61, 265, 276, 334
individual 48, 377, 383
religious 49, 123, 276, 421
freedoms, substantive 201–2
fundamentalism 304, 323, 457
religious 89
gay 300, 314, 463
gay priests 299–300
Gaza 222–3, 225–6, 229
Geertz, Clifford 213
gender 17, 74, 127, 148, 155, 157, 241, 278,
284–5, 301–3, 312–14, 316, 322–3, 385–6,
431–2
gender justice 80, 292, 294
genetics 373, 375, 377, 380–1, 389
Germany 70, 75, 78, 106, 150, 152, 161–2, 231,
236, 244, 257, 260–3, 268, 299, 384
Gill, Robin 326, 328, 330, 343–5, 373, 378–80,
387
Glasman, (Lord) Maurice 164–5, 173
global capitalism 205, 275, 280, 282
global dynamics 187–8, 209
global economy 205–6, 241, 250, 271, 274,
279, 282, 294, 352–3, 362, 404
Global Network for Public Theology 9, 40,
55, 68, 369
global society 71, 91, 188, 195, 201, 205–7
globalization 16–17, 21, 86–7, 98, 152, 162,
187, 189–93, 195–7, 199–201, 203, 205,
207–10, 279–80, 297
context of 151, 200
index
process of 190, 195, 197, 405
public theology of 193, 196, 199, 205–7
reality of 87, 208
glocalisation 16
God
image of 290, 311, 313, 338–9
kingdom of 31, 40, 435
God of justice 154
God’s justice 158, 255, 264
Goncalves, Alonso 472–73
governance 28, 97–8, 105, 107, 192, 254–5,
257, 259
Gross, Zehavit 220, 228–9
Guatemala 106, 126, 133–4, 147
Gustafson, James M. 212, 230, 375–6,386, 389
Habermas, Jürgen 11, 19–20, 54, 64, 77, 194,
238, 268–9, 303–5, 321–2, 407, 410, 415,
420, 438, 463
Hamilton, Marci 15
harmony 87, 139, 145, 155, 254–6, 418
Hauerwas, Stanley 36, 326, 394
healing 56, 121, 133, 152, 158, 229, 265, 325,
327–32, 335–6, 343, 345, 458–9, 464, 480
health care 80, 150, 201, 287, 313, 325, 327,
329–31, 333–9, 341, 343–5, 363, 372,
378–80, 386–7
domain of 326, 339, 342
goals of 327, 331, 334
practice of 326, 340
professional 342, 344
health care ethics 334, 341
hermeneutics 6, 21, 25, 34, 53, 246, 248, 315,
327, 418
theo-political 26, 30, 32–4, 38
heterosexism 288, 314
heterosexuality 314, 319
HIV/AIDS 233, 248, 335, 339, 344, 387
Hollenbach, David 48, 55, 63–4, 388
Holocaust 18, 80, 221, 229, 262
homosexuality 14, 217, 300–1, 306, 319, 323
human dignity 58, 66, 151, 153, 162, 164, 167,
194, 219, 238, 244, 263, 267, 377, 383–4
human rights 16, 56, 80, 127–8, 146–7, 158,
202–3, 223–4, 228, 232, 234, 237, 258,
260–1, 382–4
human trafficking 13, 16, 216, 271–80, 284,
286–94, 297
491
iconographers 450, 453
iconographic 443, 450, 454, 460–1
identities
national 217, 224
religious 224, 281, 381, 386
social 122, 145, 244
ideologies 46, 150–1, 157, 161, 174, 192, 225,
284
nationalist 150–1, 161
imago Dei 315–16, 338, 468
immigrants 221, 395, 481, 483
incarnational 10–11, 181, 401, 409–10
India 57, 106, 314, 422
indigenous peoples 80, 234–5, 245, 360, 364,
433, 474–5, 482
individualism 46, 48, 218, 382
inequalities 151, 190, 202, 235, 243, 256, 290,
366, 371, 386, 400, 478, 481–2, 485
economic 174, 189, 369–70, 382
injustice 17, 133, 151–4, 156–7, 159–61, 188,
199, 243, 286, 315, 353, 356, 391, 418, 456
correct potential 253
economic 55, 60, 283, 288
fundamental 179
social 251, 431, 434
structural 403
inter-contextuality 86–7
intercultural 370, 431, 433
interdependence 17, 159, 164, 167, 172,
218–22, 224, 243, 264
Iraq 221–2
Ireland 18, 301
Islam 165, 168, 195, 256, 281
Israel 27, 31, 56, 63, 66, 142, 190, 211, 220–8,
230, 391, 394, 458, 463
Italy 256–7, 454
jihad 195, 208
John Paul II, Pope 172, 175, 300
justice 34–6, 47–8, 50–2, 80–1, 119–21,
124–30, 132, 147–8, 152–4, 157–62, 252–7,
260–2, 294–6, 382, 424–5
commutative 48, 159
compassionate 29, 34, 157, 159–60
corrective 252–3
distributive 159, 252, 369
economic 6, 50, 81, 205–7, 266
legal 157, 159
492 index

justice (cont.) black 54

pervert 171 classical 241
political 6 contextual 4
public 243 liturgy 72, 80, 214, 256, 304, 312, 381, 448,
racial 298 458, 462–3, 466–71, 473, 475–7, 479–86
reconciling 161 Longley, Clifford 167, 169, 172, 174, 176
restorative 9, 80, 132, 158, 160, 313 Luckmann, Thomas 218
retributive 132, 141 Luther, Martin 44–6, 64, 79, 109, 444, 448, 454
sacrificial 157
socio-economic 54 Maraschin, Jaci 473
universal 33 marriage 235, 281, 300–1, 316
same-sex 299–300
Kairos Document 7–8, 55, 132, 151–2, 161, market 7, 47, 59, 61, 75, 80, 98, 104, 108, 111,
163, 264, 270 116, 164–5, 173–5, 188, 191, 195–6, 205–7,
kairos theology 8, 74, 84–5, 233, 249 241, 246, 262, 267, 284, 325, 339, 344
Kelly, Kevin 180–1 Martin, Ralph 20, 44, 65, 138, 148, 322–3, 388
Kim, Cardinal Sou-Hwan 16 Marty, Martin 3, 20, 40, 54, 65, 86, 302, 322,
King, Martin Luther 2, 5, 14, 17 370–3, 388
kingdom of God 123, 194, 199–201, 205, 255, Marx, Karl 218, 357–8, 367–8
335, 392, 397, 452, 463 Matthews, Michael-Ray 1
Knox, John 155, 162, 444, 448, 453, 455, 465 media 9, 12, 14, 52, 61, 189, 204, 216, 239, 261,
koinonia 57–8, 66, 246, 250–2 268, 373–4, 426, 441, 443–65
human 58 communicative 450
Küng, Hans 203–5, 209 international 442–3
public 70, 75, 79
labor 105, 192, 216, 218–9, 229, 266, 277–9, religious 275
281, 283, 288, 293, 303, 349, 353, 355, social 1, 228, 268, 309, 411, 445, 449–50,
362, 405 452–3, 480
exploited 273, 277, 293 medical ethics 327, 341–2, 375, 389
Lathrop, Gordon 466–7 medicine 189, 325, 328–31, 333, 338, 340, 344,
laws 14–15, 20, 45, 49, 62–3, 95, 97, 150, 346, 369, 377
168–9, 198–9, 202, 237, 255, 259–60, 469 mega-churches 411–12, 414, 416
civil 45, 255–6 Middle East 196, 211, 220–1, 228
eternal 42 migration 233, 238, 273–4, 296, 391, 404–6,
first 365 418–19, 426–7, 438–40
human 42 military dictatorship 127–8, 233, 434
international 202, 226, 273–4 Missio Dei 407–10, 416, 426
natural 53, 255, 381 Mitchell 442, 444, 446, 448, 450, 452, 454–6,
Lefebvre, Henri 478 458, 460, 462, 464–5, 486
Levad, Amy 484 modern society, developing 62
liberalism 169, 199, 262 Moltmann, Jürgen 40, 62, 86, 100, 199, 201,
liberation 6–7, 20, 59–60, 126, 143–4, 147, 244
152, 158, 162, 236, 241, 246, 285, 313, morality 68, 92, 150, 203–5, 233, 237, 250,
399–400 353, 362, 367, 372, 395
political 51, 144 Murray, John Courtney 2, 53
women’s 311, 314, 321 Myanmar 433–4, 436
liberation theology 6–8, 20, 49, 54, 59–60,
74, 84, 107, 214–15, 240–2, 370–1, 387–8, nation-states 16, 95, 98, 189, 200, 202, 227,
431, 436–7, 472 234–5, 280, 468, 480
index
nationalist ideologies 150–1, 153, 155, 157,
159, 161, 163
Nazism 150, 161, 217, 244, 263
Neuhaus, Richard John 4
Netherlands 52, 85, 91, 99, 102, 104, 117–18
Niebuhr, Reinhold 2–3, 5, 14, 17, 20, 51–2, 65,
68, 82, 302, 304, 322, 370–1, 388, 397
Niebuhr, H. Richard 10, 21, 51–2, 54, 65, 80,
212, 215, 230, 272, 296, 371, 397
Northern Ireland 86, 121, 126, 135–6, 147
Palestine 211, 222–3, 227–8
Parsons, Talcott 218
Paul II, John 105, 117, 173–5, 182
peace 6, 9, 20–1, 33, 35, 46–7, 119, 124–6, 135,
147–8, 168, 228, 266–7, 462, 484–5
Pentecostalism 404, 412, 417, 472
Philippines 29, 106, 117
Pluralism
interactive 62
religious 196, 218, 393, 399, 403
pluralist 103, 183, 395
pluralist democratic society 122
pluralistic society 84, 90, 214, 373
PICO Network 1
polis 96, 231, 252–3
political authority 41–2, 46–7, 174, 255
political context 130, 421
political economy 2, 4, 21, 189, 206, 210, 282,
357–8, 367–8, 393
political freedom 53, 112, 114
political order 49–50, 104–5
political powers 41, 45, 105
political process 25, 29, 37, 101, 194, 225
political science 96, 98–9, 118, 227
political society 41, 65, 104, 203, 388
determined 102
political structures 264, 283, 480
political theology 4, 7–8, 41, 43–6, 54, 64, 73,
92, 107, 303, 306, 370, 385, 388, 415
politics 12–13, 29–30, 40–7, 52, 76, 78, 95–6,
101, 104–5, 116–19, 126, 148–9, 164–7,
171–3, 183
democratic 98, 109–10, 112, 114
post-secular 303, 322, 385, 406, 415
postmodernism 212–14
praxis 52, 242, 282, 411, 413, 418, 431, 438,
466–7
preferential option 167, 242, 400, 403, 431
493
principles
common good 170–1, 181
social 51, 265
theocratic 26, 28, 30–2
prophetic 62, 84–5, 88–90, 376, 386, 389,
425, 427, 431, 434, 437, 461
prophetic tradition 7, 56, 59, 391
prophetic witness 84–5, 90–1
prophets 28, 30–1, 56, 153, 162, 169, 171, 223,
332, 376, 391, 406
public accountability 115
public action 16–17, 371, 431
public affairs 79, 83, 85, 91, 336, 435
public church 4, 40, 54, 63, 65, 76, 83, 372
public discourse 9, 14–15, 36, 38, 51, 69, 76,
83–5, 90–1, 188, 194, 216, 227, 302, 305
constructive 37
entrenched 400
public domain 255, 257, 262, 428–9
public engagement 44–5, 53, 325, 393, 477
public opinion 11–12, 20, 61, 75, 83, 260, 262,
268
public order 44, 49, 63, 260, 339
public philosophy 4, 53, 97
public policies 83, 119, 150, 168, 179, 183, 202,
216, 227, 272
public reason 76–7, 108, 262, 266, 268, 303
public witness 70, 266, 328, 466–7, 469, 471,
473, 475, 477, 479, 481, 483, 485
public worship 468–9, 477
publics 2–4, 6, 11–13, 16, 19–21, 54, 61–2, 79,
86–7, 92, 251, 302–3, 306–7, 370–3, 420
constitute alternative 420
dominant 70
mainstream 308
multiple 420
subaltern 419–20, 437
Rawls, John 34, 36, 39, 81, 261–2, 270
reconciliation 45, 55–6, 77, 80, 91, 119–27,
121, 127, 129–33, 135–49, 146–7, 152–3,
155–8, 160–3, 178, 265, 418
refugees 70, 78, 222, 228, 232, 419, 439
Rerum Novarum 48, 104, 167, 266, 398
restoration 37, 119, 136–8, 145, 158, 258, 291,
329–30, 332, 485
restoring justice 129, 132–3, 147, 156, 162
retribution 158, 162
Romero, Oscar 16, 59–60, 64, 376
494
Rowlands, Anna 49, 65, 166, 176, 183
Ruether, Rosemary Radford 312–3, 323, 385
Ryan, John 2
Sandel, Michael 172, 174, 183
Saraswati, Pandita Ramabai 16
Schillebeeckx, Edward 52–4, 65
Schreiter, Robert 52–3, 65, 127, 148
Scotland 302, 441–2, 444, 447, 453, 455, 462,
465
secular age 51, 54, 62, 66, 165, 182, 217, 268,
270
secular authorities 44–6
secular state 49, 62, 255
sex industry 277, 279, 285–6, 291
sex trade 278–9, 285, 297
sex-trafficking 271–7, 276–80, 286–8, 290–1,
293–5, 297
sex work 273, 278–9, 285, 291, 296
sex workers 279, 285–6, 288, 292, 295
sexism 288, 309, 311–12, 318, 323
sexual abuse 14–15, 273, 276
sexual exploitation 275–7, 279
sexual orientations 32, 155, 157, 386
sexuality 284–5, 292–3, 303, 308, 316, 320
Shavit, Ari 222
Sheppard, (Bishop) David 176–81
slave trade 275, 354–5
slavery 161, 275, 278–81, 283, 294–7, 312,
352–5, 367
slaves 26–7, 171, 235, 273, 280, 294, 311–12,
333, 353–5, 358
Smooha, Sammy 224–5
social cohesion 3, 55, 211, 213, 215–19, 221–5,
227–9, 216–7, 418
social ethics 4–5, 54, 73, 107, 140, 212, 306,
369, 388
Social Gospel Movement 6
social justice 17, 46, 56, 123, 158–9, 185,
251–63, 265, 267–9, 288–90, 308, 362–4,
366, 398, 423–4
defining 424
practice of 252, 258
real 397
Soelle, Dorothee 2
Soja, Edward W. 476–8
solidarity 47–9, 63, 81, 167, 172, 174, 216–19,
221–2, 229, 241, 387, 401, 431–2, 458–9,
473
index
mechanical 216–17
organic 217–19
social 151, 217, 219–20, 223, 228, 264
South Africa 7–9, 20, 55–6, 67–8, 73–4,
76–7, 84–6, 126, 129–30, 133, 150–1, 161,
221, 233–4, 249
South Korea 59, 404, 454
Stackhouse, Max 4, 12, 16, 55, 61, 86, 92, 189,
193–4, 198, 205–6, 302, 397, 416
state (and the common good) 166, 173–6
Stuttgart Declaration 263
subsidiarity 47, 50, 104, 167, 175–6, 181,
267
Syria 221, 449
Temple, William 2, 50–1, 65, 265, 402
terrorism 195, 199, 208
Thiemann, Ronald 4
Thomas, M.M. 16
Ting, Bishop K.H. 16
tolerance, religious 257, 273, 296
torture 72, 91, 105, 128, 149, 355
Tracy, David 3–4, 12, 21, 61, 66, 88, 92, 303,
323, 388, 486
transformation 11, 35, 43–4, 46, 52, 69,
89–90, 92, 136–7, 143, 145, 156, 172, 187,
471–72, 479–80
theology of 69
transgender 288, 292, 315
Truth and Reconciliation Commission) 9,
55–6, 76–7, 91, 129–33, 148, 265, 359
trinitarian theology 100, 244–5, 250
Tutu, Desmond 5, 9, 16, 56, 68, 82, 131–2, 146,
149, 304
Ubuntu theology 131, 146
United Nations 127, 147, 201–2, 222, 224,
274, 297
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights 
202, 433
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 
258, 260
urban church 399, 402, 415
Urban Ecology 391, 393, 395, 397, 399, 401,
403, 405, 407, 409, 411, 413, 415, 417
urban theology 393, 398–401, 415
United States of America 40, 50–1, 53–4, 161,
259, 262, 274, 277–9, 285, 293, 295–6,
357, 360, 374, 396, 400
index 495

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 5, 6, 11 Williams, Daniel Day 212

U.S. Constitution 14
van Aarde, Andries 13
Vatican II 59, 64, 177, 180, 469
vision 31, 43, 56, 89, 107, 111–12, 114–15, 171,
180–1, 194, 223, 232, 252, 398–9, 435–6
consociational 102, 105
democratic 56
theological 272–3, 282, 294, 395
Volf, Miroslav 10–1, 21, 100, 118, 126, 149, 155,
157, 159, 163, 210, 458, 465
Weber, Max 78, 218, 281, 297, 350–1, 363,
368
welfare 15, 56, 80, 83, 89, 108, 167, 171, 181,
207, 259, 266, 287, 342, 477
welfare state 49, 242, 265–6, 411, 413
well-being 43, 63, 83, 88–9, 164, 169, 171, 173,
175, 192, 202, 206, 239, 335, 338, 365
Williams, Rowan 43, 55, 62, 66, 312, 323,
353–4, 366, 368, 408–10, 416, 443,
465
wisdom 31, 33, 62–3, 66, 88, 111, 113, 165, 168,
378, 381, 394, 482, 485
witness 27, 31–2, 75, 153, 242, 263, 326, 450,
453, 462
Woman’s Bible 310, 321
world Christianity 236, 249, 426, 438
World Council of Churches 128, 246, 248,
449
Worlock, (Archbishop) Derek 176–81
worship 31, 34–5, 72, 80, 96, 108, 255–6,
442–3, 448, 457–8, 460, 462, 466–9,
475–9, 481–6
Wuthnow, Robert 218
Zuccari, Taddeo 167
Zucchi, Jacopo 267, 273–274