International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25 www.brill.

nl/ijpt

2007: A Kairos Moment for Public Theology

William Storrar
Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton

Abstract
The simultaneous launch of the International Journal of Public Theology and its spon-
soring Global Network for Public Theology represents a ‘kairos’ moment of opportunity
for theologians and other scholars working in the emerging field of interdisciplinary
theological inquiry into contemporary public issues. Such moments happen, this arti-
cle argues, when a disruptive social experience calls for the response of collaborative
theological inquiry into the public issues generated by such disruptions. By telling an
autobiographical story of a public theologian and by reflecting on the history of the
pioneering Edinburgh University Centre for Theology and Public Issues, the article
identifies common factors that have led a growing number of scholars and research
centres around the world to identify with the phrase ‘public theology’. Such factors
include a commitment to the ecclesial and the emancipatory dimensions of doing
theology and employing research methods that include the marginalized as agents of
social transformation.

Keywords
disruptive experience, collaborative research, globalization, public sphere.

This is an extraordinary moment for those of us who have been engaged in

theological reflection on public issues around the world in recent decades. With
the launch of the International Journal of Public Theology and the Global Net-
work for Public Theology in 2007, we may speak of this year as a ‘kairos’ moment
for this emerging research field. It is the right time to reflect on the factors that
have led to this convergence of theological interest. It is an opportune moment
to consider the nature of our conversation and its potential for bearing fruit. As
the chair of the journal’s editorial board, a past and present director of research
centres in the Global Network, and the host of its first meetings, it is perhaps
incumbent on me to help start that conversation in this article.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/156973207X194457

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I shall begin with an account of my own story as a public theologian. All of

us come to this converging global conversation about public theology from
our own involvement with public affairs in the places where we live and work:
in my case, until recently, Scotland. That personal experience has both shaped
my understanding of public theology and prompted an openness and com-
mitment to this wider international collaboration. After telling this personal
story of my own journey towards an identity and calling as a public theolo-
gian, I shall reflect on the local story of the Centre for Theology and Public
Issues at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Under its visionary founder
Duncan Forrester, CTPI, as it is commonly known, was one of the pioneering
research centres in the field of public theology in the 1980s and 1990s. I had
the privilege of leading the Centre from 2000 to 2005, in a time of transition.
Out of that experience, the idea of a global network for public theology was
first conceived in conversation with fellow public theologians around the
world. The telling of this global story will lead me to set out some concluding
reasons why I think this is indeed a kairos moment for public theology, from
my new perspective as the director of the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI)
in Princeton.
Let me first offer a brief, opening definition of public theology that both
emerges from and shapes these three narratives, personal, local and global:
I understand public theology to be a collaborative exercise in theological
reflection on public issues which is prompted by disruptive social experiences
that call for our thoughtful and faithful response.1 Those familiar with my
own academic discipline of practical theology will recognize that I am drawing
on the pastoral cycle method of practical theological reflection, which also
begins its work with those interruptions to the routine of our lives—conflict,
suffering, death—that demand an explanation and pastoral response.2 Allow
me then to give such an account of public theology in terms of three critical
disruptive experiences.

A Personal Story: The Collapse of Christendom

My first disruptive social experience on the way to becoming a public theolo-
gian in the west was living through the final collapse of Christendom in

1)
On the collaborative nature of public theology, see David F. Ford, Theology: A Very Short Intro-
duction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 174-5.
2)
Paul Ballard and John Pritchard, Practical Theology in Action, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 2006),
p. 85.

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Britain. I am a cradle Christian, born and baptized into a Christian society. In

the village where I grew up in the Scotland of the 1950s and early 1960s, my
Christian formation was the daily responsibility not only of my family and
church, but also the local school and community, the media and the wider
society. I sang the same hymns, absorbed the same Christian values, heard the
same biblical allusions and worshipped the same God in all these spheres of
my young life: in my mother’s daily piety and weekly churchgoing with her
children; in my school teacher’s morning prayers and Bible stories with her
class; at my Scout troop’s wreath laying ceremony at the village war memorial;
and in the seamless mixing of hymns and popular songs on children’s radio
programmes. There was even an implicit public theology being taught and
imbibed throughout this childhood. Every week, uniformed and alert in the
Scout hall, we promised to do our duty to God and the Queen. At the end of
every visit to the cinema, we stood to sing ‘God Save the Queen’. This was not
a fundamentalist or even an evangelical upbringing. It was a comfortable but
sincere post-war marriage of Protestant Christianity and late modernity; but,
divorce was imminent.
This integral, conservative Christian world was swept away by the liberal-
ization of British society in the 1960s, on a wave of economic affluence, con-
sumerism and its accompanying youth and leisure culture. For most of my
own contemporaries in Scotland and Britain, this cultural sea-change meant a
growing indifference to a church that represented the restrictive and even
authoritarian and hypocritical moral values of the 1950s. What had been a
perfect marriage between church and culture in that decade, quickly became
grounds for divorce among the next generation, coming of age in the 1960s
and 1970s and seeking a new freedom from the old restraints of family, church
and social deference. This generational abandonment of institutional religion
can be traced in the numerical decline of the mainline American denomina-
tions as well as the historic state churches of Europe by the 1970s. But what
was my response to this collapse?
The social historian Callum Brown has named the year 1963 as the notional
date to mark the sudden ‘death of Christian Britain’, after its flourishing in the
post-war period, between 1945 and the late 1950s. His explanation of this
sudden collapse focuses on the emancipation of women in these years. From
the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries women were seen as the
guardians of the faith in home and society. For generations they passed on the
Christian discourse of salvation and ensured its circulation in daily family and
community life as well as in the Church. As women led more independent
lives from the 1960s onwards, entering the workforce, higher education and

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the professions, they increasingly abandoned or rejected this religious dis-

course and role. The consequences for British society were sudden and dra-
matic; as Brown concludes:

It was only when that discursive power waned that secularisation could take place.
The result was not the long, inevitable religious decline of the conventional secu-
larisation story, but a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event. In the
1960s, the institutional structures of cultural traditionalism started to crumble in
Britain . . . the immediate victim was Christianity, challenged most influentially
by second-wave feminism and the recrafting of femininity.3

Across the Atlantic, the American theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William
Willimon also think of that year as the moment when their own seamless
Christian social world changed forever:

Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended
and a fresh, new world began . . . When and how did we change? Although it may
sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening
in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina . . . the Fox theater opened on a
Sunday . . . That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Chris-
tendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville . . . served notice that it
would no longer be a prop for the church.4

In these two accounts of this same disruptive social experience, the end of
Christendom on both sides of the Atlantic, we see the seeds of two very
different Christian theological responses to such events.
For Hauerwas and Willimon the end of Christendom represents an exciting
opportunity to recover the true identity of the Church. Freed of its fatal com-
promise with power in the era of Christendom, and abandoning its false role
as manager of a Christian society, the Church can be now a colony of resident
aliens, bearing witness to Christ through its radical discipleship and distinc-
tive common life amid an American culture hostile to the Gospel.
Their theological response to this disruptive cultural event is an ecclesial
one. As they argue in their highly influential 1989 book, Resident Aliens, the
challenge is for the Church to reclaim its Christian language and practices as
the people of God and to rediscover its Christian calling to be the people of

3)
Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 175-6.
4)
Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nash-
ville: Abingdon Press, 1989), pp. 15-6.

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God. In these ways the Church after Christendom can offer an alternative
model of human society rather than seeking to manage its problems.
Callum Brown’s analysis as a social historian rather than as a theologian
suggests a rather different response to this disruptive experience; an emancipa-
tory rather an ecclesial one. He sees the end of Christendom as being about
emancipation for people in a restrictive society, especially women. Certainly
for me, the 1960s brought the disruptive social experience of a personal awak-
ening to the many emancipatory causes in the post-war political world. This
was the era of the civil rights and anti-war movements in America, the student
movement in France, the moral resistance of Czech dissidents to Soviet occu-
pation, and the postcolonial independence movements, civil wars, famines
and anti-apartheid struggle in Africa. Even new ideas about women’s rights,
the environmental crisis and ‘Third World’ development were dawning on
me. All the time I found myself asking how these public causes and issues at
home and abroad might relate to the Jesus of my childhood faith. I knew
enough from my Christian upbringing to think that the ethics of this Jesus
were radical in their implications for society and encompassed the whole of
life, not just Sundays; but how was that emancipatory connection to be made
between theology and the injustices of the world in the 1960s of my youth?5
This nagging question drew me to radical expressions of Christian disci-
pleship and spiritual practice outside the ‘ken’ of my conventional upbring-
ing in a parish and national church: the Christian pacifism and Quaker
spirituality of simplicity, equality and silence in the Society of Friends; the
militant compassion and active service to the poor found in the early history
of the Salvation Army; and the austere common life of poverty, work and
prayer in the Benedictine monastic order. All were closer to Hauerwas and
Willimon’s vision of a disciplined ecclesial response to a hostile world after
Christendom. Yet, in the end my response to the disruptive experience of the
1960s took a different turn.
A growing interest in public affairs led me to join not the Quakers, Salva-
tionists or Benedictines but more prosaically the high school debating team
and the local branch of a political party, before going on to study politics at
university in the early 1970s. This was accompanied by my involvement in

5)
On this question the Canadian Catholic theologian and ecumenist Gregory Baum notes:
‘Through an altogether unique historical development beginning in the 1960s, the emancipatory
dimension of divine redemption has assumed, for the first time, a central construction in Chris-
tian theology’, Gregory Baum, ed., The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 1999), pp. 247-8.

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student politics and university government on the tail end of the campus rad-
icalism of the 1960s. It was during this time that I had an unexpected and
disruptive spiritual experience of emancipation that fundamentally altered my
perspective on theology and public issues.
The most momentous event of my student years was a deep, life-transforming
experience of the crucified and risen Christ in the Church’s ministry of ‘word
and sacrament’. It came about through encounter with the Student Christian
Movement and the witness of the British evangelical student movement, at an
exciting moment in its history when it emphasized the critical use of the
Christian mind and social responsibility as well as personal salvation and evan-
gelism. I suspect that for many of us in the Global Network for Public Theol-
ogy today this formative Christian experience in our student days remains a
taproot of our spiritual and intellectual commitment to a publicly engaged
theology. It is certainly so in my case, although it required a further transfor-
mative encounter with the deeply evangelical Reformed theology of my
teacher, Thomas F. Torrance, before that student evangelical taproot was firmly
planted in the sustaining ecclesial soil of Scripture and the ancient creeds, the
Reformed confessions and modern ecumenical agreements. However, it was
that student evangelical experience which led my inconstant steps as a follower
of Christ back to membership of the institutional church and eventually to a
call to the ministry of the Gospel in my own Church of Scotland. The ques-
tion remained how to connect this growing faith with public life.
My theological education for the ministry took place in the later 1970s, at
an exciting time for anyone interested in the relationship between theology
and public life. At last I was introduced to ways of connecting Christian theol-
ogy and contemporary struggles for human emancipation. It was a time when
Jürgen Moltmann’s political theology of hope and the crucified God, arising
from the disruptive experience of ‘Germany after Auschwitz’, was being
brought into critical conversation with the political Christ of the new libera-
tion theologies from Latin America, arising from ‘the irruption of the poor’
into human history, as Gustavo Gutierrez put it.6 Nevertheless, the theologies
of Moltmann and Gutierrez did not separate their emancipatory political con-
cerns from their concern for the ministry and mission or history of the Church.
Rather, they challenged us all to re-conceive them more faithfully in biblical

6)
Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Political Theology in Germany After Auschwitz’, in William F. Storrar and
Andrew R. Morton, eds, Public Theology for the 21st Century (London: T&T Clark International,
2004), pp. 37-43; Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, rev. edn (London: SCM Press,
1988), p. xx.

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and evangelical terms. Studies in the mission history of the Jesuits in Asia and
Latin America or the radical evangelical campaigners for slave emancipation in
America and indigenous rights in Africa brought home to me that theirs was
no new voice in the Church.7
What was happening here, of course, was that the collapsed Protestant
world of my childhood was being repaired as a new ecumenical cosmos. I was
learning to live in a larger religious and public world of meaning, with a grow-
ing sense of the ecumenically rich fabric of global Christianity. Again, I sus-
pect that I am not alone in that journey of faith. Many of us in mid-life within
the Global Network have come to our commitment to a global public theol-
ogy through this disruptive and reparative experience of both evangelical and
ecumenical conversion to the Gospel, the Church and the world. Our response
to the disruptive social experience of the collapse of Christendom, in its west-
ern or postcolonial or apartheid forms, has been to seek a public theology that
is both ecclesial and emancipatory. Again, for many of us, our commitment to
holding together both the ecclesial and the emancipatory dimensions of pub-
lic theology has found its most helpful articulation in the work of the late
South African missiologist and anti-apartheid theologian David Bosch. In his
seminal book, Transforming Mission, he offers an integrative ecumenical and
postmodern paradigm of mission that seeks to hold together all aspects of the
triune God’s mission to the world in creative tension.8
Inspired by that kind of Reformed and ecumenical vision, I answered a
congregational call to serve as a local parish minister in an area of declining
heavy industry and high unemployment in the west of Scotland in the 1980s.
My members were among the last workers and managers in the last steel mill
in Scotland, before it too closed. There, I was humbled time and again by the
exceptional public witness and costly service of ordinary church members;
they cared quietly for their vulnerable neighbours; they worked unseen for
justice and reconciliation across the sectarian divide of Catholic and Protes-
tant in their local community; they tirelessly raised money and awareness on
issues of poverty in the wider world; and all of this was inseparable from their
life of worship and prayer and their faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
When I became a university teacher of practical theology in the 1990s, I saw
the same willingness in my best students to live out the radical implications of

7)
Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China 1542-1742 (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1994); and John Philip (1775-1781): Missions, Race and Politics in
South Africa (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986).
8)
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 1991), pp. 368-510.

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their faith and studies. Years later, for example, I discovered that one former
student was living and working as a Baptist minister with her husband and
young family in one of Britain’s poorest urban communities. Unknown to me
at the time, the challenge of writing an essay on liberation theology in one of
my classes had set her on this sacrificial path of service. Such students are far
above their teacher.
This disruptive experience of ministry in a local church and of teaching in
the context of theological education for ministry was formative in my under-
standing of public theology. Hauerwas and Willimon are right—such a theol-
ogy must be rooted in the common life and public witness of the local church.
Public theologians need to learn from congregational pastors and members as
they seek to be faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ in their communities; but
public theology must also be rooted in the academy, whether in a university,
college or seminary setting. It is vital that we engage in the critical study of
biblical and theological texts that challenge our own narrow interests, includ-
ing ecclesial interests, and give us a larger grasp of the mind and mission of
Christ. Such theological work on public issues in the Church and academy
requires other perspectives to understand the human social condition; and so
we are also committed to interdisciplinary study and dialogue with colleagues
in other branches of knowledge, everything from economics and ecology to
philosophy and psychology.
The work of local ministry in the congregation and the work of academic
study in the classroom are therefore two key sites for doing public theology. It
is here that we experience the disruptive solidarity of suffering with our neigh-
bours and learning with our students. It is here that we are in conversation
with viewpoints that challenge and bring into question our unexamined prej-
udices about faith, politics and life. I know these have been formative experi-
ences for many of us in the Global Network. We therefore need to keep the
congregation and classroom at the heart of our collaboration in doing public
theology, keeping alert to the emancipatory potential of both as ‘truth-seeking
communities’.9
However, my understanding and practice of public theology have been
shaped also by wider publics than those of the local church or university class-
room. Through engagement with our churches and politics at the national and
international level, many of us have learned both the severe limits and the
surprising opportunities of institutional public engagement for theologians.

9)
I am indebted to two colleagues in the Center of Theological Inquiry, John Polkinghorne and
Michael Welker, for introducing me to this helpful phrase.

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As a member of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly committees

and boards, I participated in working groups and church reports on a range of
issues—medical ethics, the government of Scotland, the future of ministry—
reflecting the distinctive Reformed vision of Christ’s lordship over all aspects
of church and society. Despite valuable work done, the experience left me
wondering whether years of service by theologians in producing such official
reports have any lasting impact on the life of the Church or its witness to
the world. In reflecting on the risks of institutional involvement for theolo-
gians, I am reminded of the Anglican theologian and Scottish moral philoso-
pher Donald MacKinnon’s scorching remarks, in his essay on ‘Kenosis and
Establishment’:

The young Christian in the academic world . . . can easily be blind to the sort of
abuse of genuine talent encouraged by ecclesiastical and quasi-ecclesiastical insti-
tutions . . . Men and women are taken from their proper, fundamental profes-
sional work and the resources of their gifts mercilessly exploited in order that the
Christian cause can be commended . . . There is a characteristically Christian phi-
listine disdain here for disinterested concern with the truth for its own sake . . .
and there is a graver pastoral irresponsibility in that the lasting spiritual damage
which is done to individuals in this way is often completely overlooked until it is
too late.10

This suspicion was raised even more acutely for me by the experience of taking
on a formal institutional leadership role in the national church: convening the
General Assembly’s Board of Ministry from 2000-2002. During that time we
successfully delivered new policies on the vocational profile, selection and sti-
pends of ministers, based on the work of a theological study group on the
future of ordained ministry that I had already led for the Board. Circumstances
demanded that we also conduct a review of the Board’s internal administrative
structures and ways of working in line with that same Reformed theological
vision and a more postmodern approach to organizational culture and ethics.
In the event, the theologically informed administrative reforms that the Board
unanimously agreed offended certain established interests in the church and
met with fierce opposition from prominent figures in the General Assembly.
After having had to defend them as the Board convener in a long debate on the
floor of the Assembly, the changes were vindicated in the final vote and subse-
quently implemented. Within a few years, however, such carefully reasoned

10)
Donald MacKinnon, The Stripping of the Altars (Collins: Glasgow, 1969), pp. 27-8.

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and hard won reforms were lost amid the crisis of financial cutbacks and the
vortex of reorganization affecting so many reeling central bureaucracies in the
declining mainline churches today.
Other members of the Global Network also bring this senior level of
experience in institutional church leadership to the work of doing public the-
ology, whether in a denominational or ecumenical context. This too must
become part of our conversation on doing public theology. We are launching
a new journal and research network at a time when many regard the ecu-
menical movement to have lost its way, when the historic western Catholic
and Protestant churches are retrenching and caught in divisive internal debates,
and when the global majority of Christianity has shifted to the south and been
transfigured by Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism and other indigenous Chris-
tian movements. It is a matter of urgency that the international journal and
Global Network give thought to identifying and supporting the new loci of
public intellectual renewal for the global Church; including their own part in
that endeavour.
In stark contrast to my experience of the institutional politics of the national
church, when I joined with fellow citizens in practising a postmodern style of
institutional reform in Scottish public life, our approach clearly resonated
with the national mood and led on to lasting constitutional changes. With
suitable irony, this secular and pluralist political movement, launched in 1988
with a Constitutional Convention, was quite open to a critical retrieval of
Scottish theological traditions in support of its cause, as articulated in a 1989
Church of Scotland report on the government of Scotland; while the Kirk’s
later approach to internal reform launched in 2001 seemed to me set on
abandoning the self-critical and explanatory power of its own Reformed theol-
ogical memory for the sake of typically modern institutional interests and
evangelical fashions.
In these circumstances, my theologically shaped public concern found more
constructive and fruitful expression within Scottish civil society in the 1990s,
as an active member of the civic democratic movement for Scottish self-
government. As the chair of Common Cause, a national civic forum on dem-
ocratic renewal, I worked closely with secular intellectuals, cultural artists and
civic leaders to make the democratic case for constitutional reform across the
party political divide. We were a small but, on occasion, influential part of a
much broader civic coalition for democracy that included the trade unions,
the churches, the political parties, the voluntary sector and campaigning
groups. This style of participatory politics was ultimately successful with the
establishment of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999, after the resounding

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1997 referendum vote by the Scottish people in favour of a legislature for

Scottish affairs with fiscal powers.
To give an example of the postmodern politics in which we were engaged in
Common Cause and the wider civic movement: during the closing days of the
referendum campaign in September 1997, I organized a tour round small
town Scotland by a travelling caravan of mainly secular Scottish writers and
musicians, poets and artists, joined en route by church and political leaders.
We held public forums and cultural celebrations in church halls, town halls,
school and university halls from the Scottish north east and Highlands to the
lowland Borders; encouraging honest, serious, open discussion of people’s
hopes for the future, rather than partisan debate, as they prepared to vote in
the referendum. We called our little touring group ‘the Bus Party’ in homage
to our battered mode of transport and out of our concern to transcend party
political differences in this common cause of democratic renewal. The Church
was present in this bus party and wherever it stopped, as a host offering hospi-
tality for public conversation, whether in a poor urban community or prosper-
ous country town, and as a listener offering careful attention to the aspirations
of young people and adults who felt far from the centres of power in Edin-
burgh or London. This postmodern mode of public engagement may seem
removed from the fiery pulpit of John Knox, denouncing an idolatrous reign-
ing monarch, but it manifests the same Reformed spirit of public responsibil-
ity, not least for the educated wellbeing of people in every place, especially
those on the margins.
Secular academic commentators on these recent political developments in
Scotland have since recognized that Reformed theological arguments on pop-
ular sovereignty and the limits of power played a not insignificant role in shap-
ing Scottish public thinking on constitutional reform. They have also noted
the critical role of civil society organizations, including the churches, in the
cross-party political movement for self-government that led to the democratic
recall of the Scottish Parliament almost three hundred years after its adjourn-
ment in 1707.11 Hence, 2007 is an opportune moment to remember this

11)
See Lindsay Paterson, ‘Scottish Social Democracy and Blairism: Difference, Diversity and
Community’, in Gerry Hassan and Chris Warhurst, eds, Tomorrow’s Scotland (London: Law-
rence and Wishart, 2002), pp. 116-29 at p. 119: ‘The same kinds of communitarian principles
were generalised in the constitutional debates from 1988 onwards. One of the most striking
features of these discussions, compared to the 1970s, was the interest in sovereignty and the
emerging conclusion that Scottish ideas about legitimate government rested on the principle of
popular sovereignty. Again the religious origins are unmistakable, and indeed Church of Scot-
land theologians in particular were eloquent in their contribution to the debate, modernising

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contemporary Scottish case study of theological engagement in public life and

the postmodern politics of civic networking and participatory democracy. It
reminds me that it is still possible, even in the secular, pluralist west, for
churches and theologians to influence political change in a democracy, if we
are willing to do so as one modest voice among many in a pluralist public
sphere and as one civic partner among many in a pluralist civil society. Again,
my hunch is that many of the theologians in the Global Network and contrib-
uting to the International Journal of Public Theology will be those who have had
similar experiences of articulating public theological ideas in appropriate ways
within participatory democracy and civil dialogue in the public sphere in their
own contexts. We need to learn from these local insights as we seek ways of
participating in the global public sphere.
This Scotland of the 1997 Referendum was a long way from the homoge-
neous Christian society of Protestant, Unionist Britain that was established in
1707 and which I grew up in during the 1950s. My journey from that child-
hood in the twilight of an imperial power to mid-life civic involvement in the
public affairs of a small democracy in an interdependent world has been both
a theological adventure and a public odyssey. It has shaped my own under-
standing of public theology and my reading of the kairos moment that we
now face with the launch of the International Journal of Public Theology and
the Global Network for Public Theology. Colleagues in the Global Network
have faced their own disruptive political experiences in this period: living in
post-apartheid South Africa and building a non-racial democracy there; or
adjusting to post-colonial rule in Hong Kong; or helping to restore demo-
cratic governance in Brazil; or working for reconciliation in Northern Ireland
or Indonesia. These personal stories challenge us to reflect now together on the
common and yet very diverse experiences we have had of doing public theol-
ogy in different parts of the world.
This leaves me wondering whether the following experiences will resonate
with colleagues in the Global Network to such a degree that we may speak of
a shared sense of what it means to be public theologians: engaging in the
politics of democratic transformation and not simply in the politics of protest
and prophetic resistance; participating in the public sphere with the civility to
strangers and attentiveness to their opinions that this requires of active and

the Knoxian idea that the people have the right to overthrow unjust rulers. Sovereignty, they
argued, is intrinsically limited. Federalism is not just a way of organising a constitution, but a
principle based on human fallibility. Because we have a duty to respect our fellow human beings,
governments should seek to share power, not to monopolise it.’

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responsible citizens; wrestling with the institutional forms of the Church and
its public witness as it seeks to be faithful to the Gospel and engaged with its
cultural context. These experiences have certainly shaped my own understand-
ing of the public nature of theology.
When I was appointed to the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theol-
ogy at the University of Edinburgh in 2000, I sensed it was time to bring
together the threads of these thirty years and more of personal engagement
with public issues. A growing awareness of the international radicalism of the
1960s had left me with a sense of the power of ordinary people to organize and
campaign for emancipatory change but also with a lingering question of how
that related to the emancipatory teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and my cradle
faith in God. In the 1970s my involvement in student politics and renewed
experience of Christ in the Church had shown me that living institutions like
universities and churches can both be changed and be the agents of change.
Adult responsibility as a parish minister, university teacher and active citizen
in the 1980s and 1990s had taught me to recognize the Holy Spirit at work
in the public-spirited, Christ-like lives of others, even beyond the boundaries
of the Church and Christian faith. Institutional leadership experience had
further taught me to recognize with Reinhold Niebuhr the demonic power of
human sin, spiritual evil, group interests and organizational pathologies in
corporate life and the moral power of individuals to resist such forces.12
By 2000, it was time for me to develop a more adequate theology of public
engagement in the context not of imperial Britain or autonomous Scotland
but of a globalizing world. As a stimulus to that theological reflection, I had
the privilege of becoming the director of the University of Edinburgh’s well-
known Centre for Theology and Public Issues, founded by Duncan Forrester
in 1984. He is one of the great, later twentieth century pioneers of an ecu-
menical and engaged public theology. It is significant that he chose to express
his public theological vision in the collaborative work of a university research
centre for theology and public issues and to found it at the time he did. This
is the second story I wish to tell in making sense of our present kairos moment:
the institutional story of CTPI and the disruptive social experience which led
to its birth.

12)
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner, 1960).

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 18 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25

A Local Story: The Collapse of the Post-War Consensus

At CTPI in the 1980s and 1990s, Forrester developed a deliberate and distinc-
tive approach to doing public theology. The Centre’s method was to begin
with a current public issue that was discerned to be important to the public
welfare and where theology might make a constructive contribution to its
analysis and resolution. A group of theologians, research scholars in other dis-
ciplines (often from the social sciences), public policy makers and practitio-
ners in the field under review, would then be brought together for a sustained
conversation and period of research, writing and public discussion on the issue
in question. Up to this point, the method employed by Forrester and CTPI
was not markedly different from that of its ecumenical antecedents in the Life
and Work movement and Moot meetings of the 1930s; where J. H. Oldham
and other ecumenical pioneers of the World Council of Churches gathered
together similar groups of experts to consider public issues.13 However, For-
rester introduced a further partner to this classic interdisciplinary method in
ecumenical social ethics that made his approach radically different and of
momentous consequence for the development of public theology as it is
understood today in the new International Journal of Public Theology and the
Global Network. He insisted that the presence and voice of those most affected
by the public issue under scrutiny be welcomed and heard for their expert
opinion in the research process, alongside those of the theologians, social sci-
entists, policy makers and practitioners: ‘We must never talk about the poor
behind their back’, he famously declared and courageously practised. For
example, CTPI’s discussions on poverty and the future of welfare, a hot topic
in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s, took place in poor public housing com-
munities with local people as the hosts and expert contributors. Angry voices
were often heard in the university conferences CTPI held under his direction,
as people whose lives were a daily struggle for survival expressed their frustra-
tion at the detachment and veiling of their problems in the academic analysis
offered by even the most socially concerned and empathetic theologians, social
scientists or policy makers.
What led Forrester to develop this innovative method in doing theological
research on public issues? I think that at least three influences prompted his
welcome to the poor, the marginal and vulnerable as expert partners and col-
leagues in the work of CTPI: his early encounter with the human face of
poverty and the caste system as a young educational missionary in India; his

13)
See Graeme Smith, Oxford 1937: The Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Confer-
ence (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004).

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 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25 19

early openness as a teacher of politics, Christian ethics and practical theology

to Latin American liberation theology and the challenge it represented to the
western Church, its ecclesiology, ethics and mission; and the early apprecia-
tion he had of his theologically orthodox and evangelical Scottish Reformed
tradition, with its political radicalism and egalitarian spirit resonating from
John Knox in the mid-sixteenth century down to his own close relative, John
Baillie in the mid-twentieth century.14 This radical spirit served Forrester well
in the turbulent political years of the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It
enabled him to respond to the disruptive social experience of the collapse of
the post-war political consensus on the economy and social welfare by found-
ing the Centre for Theology and Public Issues to address its consequences for
the churches and society.
This Centre became one of the leading places in Britain during the Thatcher
and post-Thatcher era to conduct an ecumenical discussion, cross-disciplinary
analysis and public-spirited debate on the big public issues of that era: from
welfare reform and income distribution in a neo-liberal economy to interna-
tional security at the end of the Cold War and progressive politics after
socialism. Many secular British academic scholars and policymakers found an
intellectual, moral and even spiritual home in CTPI’s working groups and
conferences in this period. Through the Centre’s programmes, they could
express a common alienation from regimes and policies that mocked the post-
war consensus on low unemployment, social welfare, public services and inter-
national cooperation, as well as seeking to articulate an alternative vision and
policy framework. CTPI was a labour of love, typically run on a shoestring
with small grants from private foundations, enormous industry by its gifted
and dedicated staff and large amounts of free intellectual labour from its
mainly volunteer researchers and speakers at its famous weekend conferences.
Outstanding work was done in this period, including serious and well-funded
research, making a recognized theological contribution to public debate and

14)
See Duncan B. Forrester, On Human Worth (London: SCM Press, 2001) for an account of
his Indian experience; Theology and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) for his appreciation of the
insights of liberation theology; and Truthful Action (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) for his
identification with the Scottish Reformed tradition of politically radical orthodoxy. See also his
essay, ‘The Political Service of Theology in Scotland’, in William Storrar and Peter Donald, eds,
God in Society: Doing Social Theology in Scotland Today (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2003),
pp. 83-121, for his own reflection on this method; and my essay on his approach to public theol-
ogy, ‘Where the Local and the Global Meet: Duncan Forrester’s Glocal Public Theology and
Scottish Political Context’, in Storrar and Morton, eds, Public Theology for the 21st Century,
pp. 405-30.

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 20 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25

policy. However, by the time I became director in 2000, both the political and
the academic situations in Britain had changed, requiring a review of the Cen-
tre’s approach to doing public theology.
First, the national and international political landscape had altered percep-
tibly by 2000, compared with 1984. With the election of a Labour govern-
ment in Britain in 1997, there was a real sense of moving into a post-Thatcher
era. Blair and his ‘New Labour’ party and government presented themselves as
practising a progressive ‘Third Way’ politics and non-ideological approach to
national and global governance after the fall of Communism, leaving behind
the old party divisions of left and right as outdated and irrelevant to the times.
This was all rather different from the crusading neo-liberal rhetoric and height-
ened Cold War atmosphere in which CTPI had been born and initially pur-
sued its work in the mid-1980s. However, the hopeful approach to international
affairs launched in 1997, promising an ethical foreign policy and debt relief
for the poorest nations, was overtaken by the terrible events of 11 September
2001, ushering in an era of global terrorism, regional wars and national secu-
rity regimes, and a period of heightened tension between Islamic countries
and the more secular west.
The Centre therefore had to respond to a very different framework for
addressing public issues in Britain: the politics of the Third Way with its
emphasis on the vital role of active citizenship, social capital and a strong civil
society in addressing social problems and delivering policies and resources in
partnership with government and the market. Indeed, CTPI found itself
uniquely placed to conduct research and engage in a public dialogue on this
changed approach to government in the first years of the new millennium.
The new Scottish Parliament made its temporary home from 1999 to 2004 in
the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, in the same
buildings complex where the University’s School of Divinity and the Centre
for Theology and Public Issues were housed. A 2001 CTPI study on e-democ-
racy in the fledging Parliament, for example, was made easier by the ready
access our researcher had to the Scottish government ministers, members of
parliament and their staff literally standing on our doorstep. In 2004 the
Centre won a Scottish government research contract to study the attitudes of
Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Jewish and other faith communities to local
government and its service provision in Glasgow, prior to the appointment of
an inter-faith officer for the city. CTPI’s 2005 conference on global civil soci-
ety also received support from the Scottish Executive’s international affairs
unit in running a workshop on its new development partnership with Malawi
on public health programmes and HIV-AIDS treatment in both countries.

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 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25 21

This all made for a more direct and closer relationship to government for
CTPI after 1999; one that was very different from the distant and prophetic
relationship with the Thatcher and Major governments that CTPI was known
for in the 1980s and 1990s. The altered situation was not without its own
ethical dilemmas for a research centre concerned with academic independence
as well as influence on public policy. It did, however, highlight the changed
contours of the political landscape for the Centre in the opening decade of the
new century.
CTPI in 2000 also faced a changing academic environment, with the intro-
duction of the Research Assessment Exercise for all subject areas in British
universities. This required all research-active academic staff to produce a regu-
lar portfolio of their published work for peer assessment and national ranking.
With these additional pressures, the Centre could no longer expect friendly
theologians and interdisciplinary colleagues to contribute their precious
research time to work on its behalf, as in the past, without greater funding
support and publishing recognition. It became imperative to pursue research
projects that could be considered and assessed under this new research regime
in the British universities. CTPI’s future as a fully-fledged university research
institution, rather than as a semi-autonomous, church-related, part-time
think tank, depended on adapting to the increasingly demanding university
research climate.
In fact, CTPI’s story in these years was only a small part of a much larger
disruptive experience facing the academic world: the experience of globaliza-
tion in all its forms, benign and malign, complex and ambiguous. Increas-
ingly, national universities had to measure themselves on an international
scale, in a global educational market for higher education. This in turn was
only one dimension of globalization’s impact on local economies, communities
and cultures around the world in the opening years of the twenty-first century.
It was once more out of a disruptive social experience that a new approach to
doing public theology was conceived and brought to birth at CTPI.

A Global Story: The Convergence of the World

The work of the Centre of Theology and Public Issues from 2000 had to
respond to the global environment, with its storm clouds of fear about an
impending clash of civilizations, the ominous return of furious, fundamental-
ist religion to the centre stage of world affairs, and increasingly alarmist warn-
ings about global warming caused by the planet’s addiction to burning oil to

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 22 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25

fuel its globalizing economy. I had to deliver my inaugural lecture as professor

and centre director within days of the destruction of the Twin Towers in Sep-
tember 2001. I chose to speak on ministry and the renewal of public life in
that terrible and sobering global context. This concern led me to work closely
with university colleagues in other disciplines, not least in Islamic studies, to
seek external research grant funding for an interdisciplinary research pro-
gramme on the ethics of global civil society from Christian, Muslim and secu-
lar perspectives. It was designed to include collaborative research partnerships
with many of the institutions around the world now represented in the Global
Network for Public Theology. Exchange visits with colleagues planning cen-
tres for public theology in this period were formative in developing this vision
for collaborative research. I was especially grateful to Nico Koopman at Stel-
lenbosch University, leading the new Beyers Naude Centre for Public Theol-
ogy in South Africa; to Elaine Graham at Manchester University, preparing to
establish the Manchester Centre for Public Theology in the UK; and to Clive
Pearson and James Haire from Charles Sturt University, about to found PACT,
a new centre for public and contextual theology in Australia. Together and
with other colleagues in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North Amer-
ica, we began to discuss and plan a more cooperative approach to theological
research on global issues.
An international and interdisciplinary conference on the ethics of global
civil society in September 2005 was therefore not only the culmination of my
own research programme as director of CTPI, it also provided the occasion for
the directors of these research centres and graduate programmes for public
theology emerging around the world to meet together for the first time as a
group. The consultation established the strong support for new collaborative
research partnerships in a global network for public theology. It also high-
lighted the common experience of the participants that the local public issues
they were addressing in their part of the world—at Manchester, York and
Edinburgh in the UK, and in Ireland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, South
Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada and the USA—also had
a global dimension. The disruptive social experience of globalization in our
various contexts proved to be the catalyst for this new approach to collabora-
tive theological reflection on public issues.
This was certainly our experience at CTPI and in Scotland. The Centre
worked on a range of public issues during my five years at Edinburgh that
reflected this changing political and academic landscape. Together they con-
tributed to an evolving research agenda that focused on local and global citi-
zenship and civil society. We could not consider the question of children’s

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 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25 23

rights and the churches in Britain, for example, except in the global context of
the UN Convention.15 As we invited a group of distinguished theologians and
ethicists from around the world to reflect on the character and challenges of
doing public theology in the new millennium, the question of globalization’s
impact on both theology and public issues proved to be a recurring theme.16
Our study of e-democracy in the Scottish Parliament could not be isolated
from the work of scholars in Canada on the impact of the internet on social
networks and public participation in the political process there.17 Research
questions that we raised about the problematic role of ethnic identity in the
civil societies of Scotland and Northern Ireland required wider comparisons
with local civil society research around the world. Our work with educational-
ists on citizenship education in Scottish schools prompted us to ask whether
we also needed to be prepared to live as global citizens in an emerging global
civil society. Our studies of immigrant faith communities in urban settings
raised research questions about multi-cultural and multi-faith living in global
cities around the world.
All of these research projects also required us to adapt our methods to con-
temporary social expectations and values, as well as to the changing political
and academic landscape. We moved away from holding weekend conferences
to disseminate our research findings, recognizing that this was increasingly
‘sacred space’ for busy families and ‘time poor’ professional people. Instead, we
organized high value day conferences in the working week that policymakers
and practitioners could attend for credit as recognized professional develop-
ment opportunities. With the expert contribution of my CTPI colleague Cece-
lia Clegg in leading the project on faith communities and urban government,
we began to develop more experience of research methods that allowed people
in a study to be co-agents of our work and research findings. We were moving
from welcoming the angry voice of the outsider in our occasional deliberations
to recognizing them as active subjects in our regular research processes.
Again, I am reflecting on this changing Edinburgh experience of conduct-
ing research on theology and public issues in order to invite similar and

15)
See the CTPI publication by Kathleen Marshall and Paul Parvis, Honouring Children: The
Human Rights of the Child in Christian Perspective (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2004).
16)
See Storrar and Morton, eds, Public Theology for the 21st Century, pt III ‘Changing Con-
texts—Globalization’s Impact’, chs 11-14.
17)
See the essays by Barry Wellman and Keith Culver in the CTPI publication Johnston
R. McKay, ed., Netting Citizens: Exploring Citizenship in the Internet Age (Edinburgh: Saint
Andrew Press, 2004).

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comparative analyses from the research experience of colleagues around the

world. It is timely for us to address such questions of method and approach in
the new International Journal of Public Theology and the Global Network for
Public Theology. In doing so in 2007, we are all indebted to public theologians
like Duncan Forrester, whose thoughtful and faithful response to the collapse
of the post-war consensus on social welfare and international security in the
1980s was to found collaborative research institutions like CTPI that pio-
neered such imaginative and creative approaches to theological inquiry on
public issues. Others could tell similar local institutional stories from their
part of the world. The challenge now is to respond in similarly thoughtful
and faithful ways to the disruptive social experience of globalization and to
develop equally creative and imaginative collaborative approaches to theologi-
cal inquiry on global issues.

Public Theology: A Global Theological Flow

My involvement in helping to create a global research network for public the-

ology took an unexpected turn when I was invited to move to the United
States in 2005 as the new director of the Center of Theological Inquiry in
Princeton. The Center was founded in 1978 with a global and ecumenical
mission to promote advanced studies in theology across the borders of denom-
inations, disciplines, nations and religions; in order to generate fresh thinking
on the major problems of religion and society in the contemporary world.
This remit has led the Center of Theological Inquiry to address a range of
public issues in recent years, including collaborative studies on religion and
globalization and on theories of the common good. For almost thirty years
the Center of Theological Inquiry has been convening theologians and scholars
in related disciplines from around the world to hold rich interdisciplinary
conversations at the cutting edge of emerging fields of inquiry, like the dia-
logues between science and religion in the 1970s. It is therefore entirely appro-
priate that CTI should host the founding consultation of the new Global
Network for Public Theology, representing now over twenty research institu-
tions from every continent, each conducting its own set of local and interna-
tional conversations on theology and public issues.
In closing I want to suggest five reasons why our meeting in Princeton and
our launching of this new journal seem so timely and truly represent an oppor-
tune moment for global collaboration from my perspective at the Center of
Theological Inquiry. First, we all recognize that only the ecumenical fullness

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 W. Storrar / International Journal of Public Theology 1 (2007) 5–25 25

and global breadth of the Christian tradition, in dialogue with the other great
religious traditions, can enable a faithful theological engagement with con-
temporary public issues. Secondly, we all recognize that those public issues
increasingly have both a local and a global dimension to them and therefore
require to be studied from both perspectives in collaborative research projects
around the world. Thirdly, we all recognize that such local-global public issues
are being debated by an emerging global civil society and public sphere. As
public theologians we are all committed to participating in that global public
sphere as well as critiquing the economic, social, political and environmental
disruptions of globalization. Fourthly, we all recognize that this requires us to
be dialogical and pastoral as well as analytical and prophetic in doing public
theology. The model of the single prophetic voice that characterized public
theology in the twentieth century is giving way to a more collaborative
approach to our theological task and public witness, involving faith commu-
nities and the marginalized as well as scholars and experts. Fifthly, we all wel-
come the commitment of our academic institutions around the world to
international research collaboration in all disciplines and look to the Global
Network and this journal to help make public theology a leading discipline in
this global academic enterprise.
Together, these five statements may not amount to a Princeton manifesto
for public theology in the twenty-first century, but they do give us sound rea-
sons to hope that we are witnessing, in Robert Schreiter’s happy phrase, the
launch of a new ‘global theological flow’.18 If so, then CTI will have done its
job of fostering such global and ecumenical theological inquiries and 2007
will indeed prove to be a kairos year for public theology.

18)
Robert Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Local and the Global (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 1997), pp. 108-15.

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