Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism

Stephen Burns, Anita Monro, Stephen Burns, Anita Monro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317591474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Public Theology is a rapidly growing international field of study which focuses on how Christian belief and practice engage with wider social issues. Yet, whilst the ultimate concern of public theology is the well-being of society, this body of theology has largely developed without integrating the thinking of feminist theology and its insights into womens' lives and experience. Public Theology and the Challenge of Feminism argues that public theology risks re-inscribing traditional constructs of public and private, civic and domestic, and uncritical notions of gender and the work and worth of people. The book brings together both theory and case material to expose how public theology has actively downplayed or ignored feminist perspectives and to reveal how constructive feminism can be for the future of public theology.

1 WHICH PUBLIC? INSPECTING THE HOUSE OF PUBLIC THEOLOGY

DOI: 10.4324/9781315744223-1

Stephen Burns and Anita Monro

It is, I believe, bad in principle and bad in practice to talk about people behind their backs, particularly if they are relatively powerless people who are often labeled “problems”, and one is talking about their problems and how to solve them.¹

Prior to the late 1960s, women were not admitted into “public” bars in pubs (i.e. “public” houses) in Australia. They were confined to “Ladies’ Lounges”. Neither were they permitted to remain in the “public” service once they were married. On 31 March 1965, Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bogner, early second-wave Australian feminists, chained themselves to the “public” bar in the “public” house known as the Regatta Hotel on Coronation Drive in Toowong in Brisbane. The Regatta was and is one of the hotels frequented by students and staff from the University of Queensland. Thornton and Bogner were students at the university, wives of university lecturers, and mothers of two children each. By law, the publican was unable to serve them without facing the prospect of a fine. The bar, apparently “public”, in this house, apparently “public”, proved not to be entirely “public” at all, although the moment was effectively recorded by “public” television and became a defining symbol for women challenging their exclusion from a range of “publics” in Australian society.²

Those buildings called “public houses” are many and varied. They include the public houses of recreation as cited in the opening anecdote; the public houses of Western democratic parliamentary systems; and the places where public worship is conducted by the Christian church.³ In all these houses, the word “public” has carried different meanings in different historical times and contexts. 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. The public houses and hotels of Western culture have excluded women, people of colour, the over-intoxicated and the violent, to name some of the categories of limitation invoked both now and historically. The case is similar for both houses of parliament and places of public worship. Sanctions operate both formally and informally to define who the rightful “public” is in such “public” places. Such sanctions often claim the moral high ground of maintaining “public” order; and certainly they do; but the question is left dangling as for which public the order is being maintained.

The question as to with which “houses” public theology is concerned is an enquiry about two things: the audiences to which public theology is addressed and the voices which are permitted to speak as public theologians in and for the house of public theology. This collection of essays arises from first, an intuition, and then direct experience that “public theology” is all too easily able to replicate and reinforce the ancient delineations that tend to include within the “public” white male educated persons with a few token voices of variation, while excluding representatives of that greater “unwashed” public (hoi polloi) of diversity, multiplicity and ambiguity. The present essay addresses the question of the voices that are recognized as participating in public theology, that is, the acceptable residents of the house of public theology.

In making these explorations, we acknowledge that we also come from positions of privilege in church and academy; and that while this collection of essays includes many strong women’s voices, it has been less successful in promoting the voices of persons of colour. We look forward to “hearing to speech” other voices who find that they too must continually claim their place as part of the “public”, the people, and of the ecclesia, the assembly, the people of God.⁴

Accordingly, this collection is essentially a group of responses from feminist and practical theological perspectives to some of the diverse trajectories of what has come to be identified as contemporary public theology.

Contemporary public theology

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of “A Global Network for Public Theology” (GNPT), initially incorporating members of theology faculties in the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester in the United Kingdom, Stellenbosch in South Africa, Charles Sturt in Australia and the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, USA. The initial work of this five-ways initiative was headed from the CTI by its director, Will Storrar, himself a Scot who in the mid-2000s moved to Princeton from Edinburgh. The network intentionally describes itself as ‘“A’ Global Network for Public Theology” in recognition that it is not the first such initiative, but rather one among several. Other centres with more or less similar names and descriptions already existed (such as “Theos: The Public Theology Thinktank” [www.theosthinktank.co.uk] which was established in the UK the previous year, as just one example), although these distinct centres may have attracted different kinds of members, been aligned to different methods and legacies of theology, and expressed different ecclesial commitments. Given that GNPT itself “includes institutions that have very diverse views of their role and task”,⁵ if anything is distinctive about it, it is that it attempts in quite an intentional way to link persons in university theology faculties or similar institutions, such as theological seminaries, which are often either linked to university faculties of theology, or indeed sometimes constitute them. Within a short number of years from its inauguration, more than twenty other institutions have joined GNPT.

The network has spawned a journal, An International Journal of Public Theology (IJPT; www.brill.nl/ijpt), the title of which indicates something of the network’s “global” aspiration. Grand claims are made internationally for the cause of public theology by IJPT which describes its aim as “becoming the platform for original interdisciplinary research in the field of public theology”. It describes “public theology” as “the result of the growing need for theology to interact with public issues of contemporary society” (our emphases).

In the same few years, some of the institutions related to the network – such as Charles Sturt University (CSU) – have set up posts designated to the area of “public theology”, such as the position occupied by Stephen Burns as Research Fellow in Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT). Clive Pearson, a participant in the PaCT Research Centre, talks of “developing a public theology”, “the construction of a public theology” and of the need for “Christian theology and its ethics [to] clarify its public relevance”.⁶

Institutions beyond the network have also used the language of “public theology” for certain positions, not least because the North American Association of Theological Schools has encouraged the pairing of “pastoral” and “public” in positions in the field of practical theology. This shift is also taking place in British theological colleges, such as at Westcott House, Cambridge, where the first such post-holder was Anna Rowlands, the key collaborator with Elaine Graham in the practical theology venture Pathways to the Public Square.⁷

Not all self-styled “public theologians” engage in grandiose claims nor does all public theology suggest some form of disconnection between it and what has come before. As Harold Breitenberg notes, “it is not clear that public theology’s advocates and critics always refer to the same thing”;⁸ and we would add that it is not clear that all public theologians are referring to the same thing. For the purposes of this essay, “public theology” will be taken to refer to those Christian theologians who are specifically working to claim space in largely secularized “public spaces”; who style themselves as such; and who may, in doing so, seek to define other voices out of that space. This essay also seeks to recognize a wide diversity in approaches being encompassed by those who claim some kind of connection with public theology.

Beginnings and trajectories

If not the origin of the GNPT, then at least a key impetus for it was a Festschrift co-edited by Will Storrar which was presented to his colleague Duncan B. Forrester on Forrester’s retirement from Edinburgh University. Storrar went on to take the chair in Christian Ethics vacated by the honouree of the volume, before heading to Princeton a short time later. The Festschrift for Forrester was called Public Theology for the Twenty-first Century.⁹ Its title – like the title of the network – allowed for recognition that the “public theology” it contained was not the first or only public theology, but a public theology for a new era.

The Festschrift is organized into sections, the first of which deals with legacies from the twentieth century, mainly politically engaged theologies from post-Holocaust Germany, from South Africa and from Latin America. A second section then follows with reflection on the “contested legacy” of modernity: liberalism, rights, freedom, tolerance and pluralism are among the cluster of themes to be found therein. A subsequent section considers aspects of globalization – including an essay on aspects of Christian worship: “Farmed Salmon and the Sacramental Feast: How Christian Worship Resists Globalization”,¹⁰ but which unfortunately makes only one point of contact with any primary theological data (a Roman Catholic offertory prayer) and no secondary literature from liturgical studies at all. A final section deals with “emerging concerns”–medical ethics, justice, equality, exclusion, politics – before Forrester’s own response by way of conclusion.

A companion article by Forrester on “The Scope of Public Theology” traces a similar genealogy for contemporary ecumenical public theology from the World Missionary Conference of 1910 through the Barmen Declaration in 1934, the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Ronald Preston, the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism and responses to the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York on 11 September 2001. The identified voices in this survey are all male. Reference is made to the “1960s and 1970s” when “the ecumenical movement became more radical and Western white male academics became a minority”, but the influence of these other voices is mitigated by an observation about the “tensions” it created: The Forrester Festschrift seems to have served as a particularly important indicator of gathering impetus for further work in public theology and has been the subject of further reflection by Storrar.¹² Storrar points to what he regards as the special significance of the essay by Elaine Graham on “voter apathy”.¹³ This essay, Storrar thinks, forges a particular kind of public theology engaged in democratic processes appropriate to the time of his review (2009) more than the time of the initial presentation of the book’s essays. He cites in particular the election of Barack Obama as a black American to presidential responsibility, the Obama campaign’s use of web-based social networking to promote their leader, and the downward economic turn, which together make for “the reverse of the circumstances prevailing in the United States when the book was conceived and written”. At least as Storrar sees things in retrospect, Graham proposes a pathway in public theology that “make[s] the democratic process and the powers of citizenship central to their reflections on public life, combining elements of institutional development and political dissent”.¹⁴ Like the global network, the Festschrift for Forrester is international in its scope (although, we note that it includes no-one from Australasia), whilst retaining a strong cohort of scholars from Britain. Storrar himself ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Which public? Inspecting the house of public theology
• 2 Speaking with the dialects, inflections and rhythms of our own unmistakable voices: Feminist theology as public theology
• 3 Public theology and the politics of interpretation: A feminist reading
• 4 “In the company of God and one another”: Feminist theo-ethics, heterogeneous publics and intercultural churches
• 5 Issues in feminist public theology
• 6 “Princess theology” and the promotion of women within Pentecostalism
• 7 “Feminist public theology is an ecumenical issue”: The case of the NoToPope Coalition
• 8 Homemaking as an embodied feminist expression of interfaith encounters in public life
• 9 Digging behind Songlines: Tonga’s prayer, Australia’s fair, David’s house 105
• 10 Elaine Graham and the “good city”
• Index