The Culture of Theology

John Webster, Ivor J. Davidson, Alden C. McCray

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781540960801
• eBook ISBN: 9781493419906
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

John Webster, one of the world's leading systematic theologians, published extensively on the nature and practice of Christian theology. This work marked a turning point in Webster's theological development and is his most substantial statement on the task of theology. It shows why theology matters and why its pursuit is a demanding but exhilarating venture. Previously unavailable in book form, this magisterial statement, now edited and critically introduced for the first time, presents Webster's legendary lectures to a wider readership. It contains an extensive introductory essay by Ivor Davidson.

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Culture

The Shape of Theological Practice

CHRISTIAN FAITH, and therefore Christian theology, emerges out of the shock of the gospel. Christian faith, and therefore Christian theology, takes its rise in the comprehensive interruption of all things in Jesus Christ, for he, Jesus Christ, now present in the power of the Holy Spirit, is the great catastrophe of human life and history. In him, all things are faced by the one who absolutely dislocates and no less absolutely reorders. To this regenerative event, this abolition and re-creation, Christian faith, and therefore Christian theology, offers perplexed and delighted testimony. That perplexity and delight—that sense of being at one and the same time overwhelmed and consumed yet remade and reestablished—are at the heart of the church, or as we might call it, Christian culture. Christian culture is the assembly of forms and practices which seeks somehow to inhabit the world which is brought into being by the staggering good news of Jesus Christ, the world of the new creation. “Behold,” says the enthroned one in the climactic scene of the Apocalypse, “I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Christian theology is an activity in a culture which reaches out toward that miracle, sharing that culture’s astonishing new life.

That, in briefest outline, is the heart of what I want to say in these lectures. My proposal is that much can be gained by thinking of Christian theology as part of Christian culture—as one of the practices which make up the disturbing, eschatological world of Christian faith and life. Christian theology flourishes best when it has deep roots in the region, the cultural space, which is constituted by Christian faith and its confession of the gospel. Moreover, within my proposal about the nature and tasks of Christian theology there is a diagnosis of the current state of the discipline. If Christian theology today is sometimes in disarray—as, indeed, I believe it is—then one of the major reasons is its dislocation from its cultural place. What inhibits Christian theology is not only the generally inhospitable intellectual and institutional environment in which it has to flourish but its lack of roots in the traditions of Christian belief and practice which are the soil in which it can grow. It is, in other words, as much internal disorder as external discouragement which cramps the exercise of Christian theology. And if this is so, then one of the most important tasks for Christian theology in the present is its reintegration back into the culture of Christian faith. Yet it is crucial to my argument that that culture is not a steady, stable world which affords those who belong to it the security of being placed in some definitive way. It is, paradoxically, a place which is no place, a place made by the presence of God who invades and interrupts all places. Being located in that kind of culture is equally a matter of dislocation, of discovering how to be more theological by encountering once again the shock of the gospel.

In using terms like “the culture of Christian faith” and “the culture of theology,” I have three things in mind. First, Christian theology, like any other form of reflective activity, takes place in a culture, that is, in a public or social space. Theological ideas both bear and are borne along by cultural practices, and cannot be isolated from the arena in which such practices occur. Discerning the plausibility of theological ideas is not a matter merely of seeing how they work in the abstract but rather of trying to figure out the functions which they perform in the particular world in which they have their home: the strange world of the gospel and the church. A good deal of what I want to say in these lectures concerns the components of Christian culture which bear on the practices of Christian theology—its canonical texts; its corporate, historical, and institutional shape as the ecclesial community; its ways of engaging with other cultural worlds; and its strategies for submitting itself to judgment. One of the things we need to undertake is an exercise in theological ethnography: a theological depiction (rather than a critical inquiry into the possibility) of the world of the church in which theology happens.

Second, I use the word “culture” to suggest that theology needs to be “cultivated.” The encouragement of good theology requires that certain interventions be made in order to promote certain practices and achieve certain ends. Thus, for example, I shall argue that among the most important practices which need to be cultivated—especially at the present time—are textual practices, habits of reading. There can be few things more necessary for the renewal of Christian theology than the promotion of awed reading of classical Christian texts, scriptural and other, precisely because a good deal of modern Christian thought has adopted habits of mind which have led to disenchantment with the biblical canon and the traditions of paraphrase and commentary by which the culture of Christian faith has often been sustained. Such practices of reading and interpretation, and the educational and political strategies which surround them, are central to the task of creating the conditions for the nurture of Christian theology.

Third, fostering the practice of Christian theology will involve the cultivation of persons with specific habits of mind and soul. It will involve “culture” in the sense of formation. To put the matter in its simplest and yet most challenging form: being a Christian theologian involves the struggle to become a certain kind of person, one shaped by the culture of Christian faith. But once again, this is not some sort of unproblematic, passive socialization into a world of already achieved meanings and roles. It is above all a matter of interrogation by the gospel, out of which the theologian seeks to make his or her own certain dispositions and habits, filling them out in disciplined speech and action. Such seeking is painful; as a form of conversion it involves the strange mixture of resistance and love which is near the heart of real dealings with the God who slays us in order to make us alive. Good theological practice depends on good theologians; and good theologians are—among other things—those formed by graces which are the troubling, eschatological gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Before proceeding any further with making my proposal, however, two introductory comments need to be made if we are not to get off track. The first is a qualification about my title: the culture of theology. For all its usefulness when deployed to talk of Christian theology in relation to Christian faith, the term “culture” has some definite limitations. Certainly, Christian faith is a culture: like any other distinctive, large-scale pattern of human life, it is a historically embodied project through which the world is given meaning. And I hope to show that we may learn a good deal more about the nature and tasks of Christian theology by considering it in relation to that historical project than we do by subsuming theology under some ideal of disengaged, acultural critical reason. Yet the notion of culture begins to reach the limits of its applicability when we realize that, for its practitioners, Christian faith is not simply a human project, a set of human undertakings and activities. Christian faith is eschatological. It is a response to God’s devastation of human life and history by the miracle of grace. Moreover, the response which we make is itself somehow contained within the miracle. Christian faith and culture are never simply a matter of appropriating that miracle, making it “our own,” for grace is always utterly free and present only as the event of gift. If all that is so, then there is a necessary tension—even, in one sense, an antithesis—between “faith” and “culture.” For all that it may be necessary to speak of the culture of Christian faith, Christian culture is in one real sense an impossibility: How can the shock of the gospel become a culture without being stripped of its sheer difference and otherness? At the very least, we have to say that the culture of Christian faith and therefore the culture of theology stand beneath the sign of their contradiction, which is the gospel of God.

The second introductory comment is an anticipation of dissent on the part of you, the audience. I have no doubt that to some of you what I have to say will seem to fly in the face of some of the prevailing trends of modern theology. That’s because it does. My diagnosis of the present state of the discipline, as well as the therapy which I have to offer, cuts across the grain of what—despite some pretty heavy shelling—remain well-entrenched intellectual conventions in post-Enlightenment Christianity. Nor will what I have to say be particularly congenial to those whose turn from the Enlightenment has led them into one or other variety of postmodernism; however chastened by the genealogists, I remain unrepentantly (though not, I hope, belligerently) committed to grand narratives and substance ontology, which are in my judgment far more serviceable to anyone seeking to give an account of the Christian gospel than are philosophies of playful contingency. But I fear that the expression of such commitments may raise all sorts of anxieties. Do they not inevitably lead to the ecclesiastical captivity of theology, its withdrawal from both modernity and postmodernity into a closed (premodern?) religious world, its isolation from interchange and conversation, which are the essential conditions for intellectual life? And does it not mean the prosecution of a style of theology which, devoid of criticism, slips into becoming repetitious, self-perpetuating, and, in the end, ideological? These are, indeed, crucial questions and will occupy us much over the course of these lectures. At this stage, let me merely indicate the way I hope to respond to them. I will try to argue that the capacity of Christian theology to sustain lively conversations with what lies outside its culture, as well as to engage in serious self-criticism, is dependent upon its grasp of its own proper object: the gift of the presence of God in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Because that object is what (who) it is—the living God among us with sheerly intrusive force—the culture of Christian faith and theology is at the same time an anti-culture. It is the site of a struggle against the domestic idolatry of Christendom, against the creation and establishment and defense of settled representations of God. And if this is so, then the cultivation of Christian culture, far from isolating theology from subversion through critique, is in fact the essential precondition for a theological practice characterized above all by repentance.

First, then, we tackle the question: to what extent may we think of Christianity as a culture and of Christian theology as a practice within a culture?

What is a culture? In using the term I am not referring to “high culture”; nor am I using it in quite the same sense that Richard Niebuhr famously used it in Christ and Culture to refer to the world which lies outside church and faith. Rather, at risk of a dramatic oversimplification of the issues, I mean something like this: a culture is a space or region made up of human activities. It is a set of intentional patterns of human action which have sufficient coherence, scope, and duration to constitute a way of life. A culture is not occasional (limited to a single fragment of time) or utterly local (restricted to a mere handful of persons in a particular place), for it must have sufficient range and comprehensiveness to make a world within which primary, enduring aspects of human life and experience can be negotiated. The elements of a culture—language, ideas and beliefs, shared patterns of behavior, roles, dispositions and habits, norms of evaluation, and instruments of identity—assemble together to form an arena within which thought, speech, and action are meaningful, and human life can be projected. Thus defined, culture is the frame of actions; it is the larger field within which human life-acts take place, and without which they would lack purpose and intelligibility. Our capacity to formulate ends for ourselves, to undertake actions to realize such ends, and to evaluate our performance—all are dependent upon a sense of orientation in historical and social space. Culture is thus what Heidegger called the “region of objects”1 or what the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz called a “finite province of meaning.” If these geographic, spatial metaphors point to the way in which culture locates human life and activity, we need also to bear in mind that culture is also history, giving order and direction to discrete temporal activities, and enabling us to see human life as a coherent project through time. In sum: culture is that through which human life and activities have enduring shape, identity, and meaning.

What of the term “practice”? Once again, at the risk of oversimplification or caricature, we might say something like this: A practice is a set of activities through which human beings pursue complex, socially established goals. Because they are socially established, practices transcend particular practitioners. Undertaking a practice involves playing a role, that is, shaping one’s actions in accordance with certain conventions about how to realize the goals that are pursued. And as “conventional” behavior, practices involve us in attending to norms through which we are able to judge whether we have attained our goals, and with what degree of excellence. Culture and practice are clearly mutually defining concepts: part of what constitutes a culture is sets of practices; practices as forms of social activity take place and have their meaning in a cultural region. Thus it is through practices that we inhabit cultural space, as it were colonizing the world, making it habitable as a place in which we may be human.

So far, perhaps, so good. But now we have to ask: How does this affect the way in which think about the tasks of Christian theology?

Intellectual activity is a practice in a culture. Far from being abstract, ahistorical, and asocial, intellectual activity is a complex form of human action which occurs in a determinate cultural locale and, in some measure, takes its shape from that locale’s conventions. Intellectual activity is not simply “the life of the mind,” if by “mind” we mean some special region within me, or perhaps some clear, uncluttered space above and beyond time, society, and persons. “The life of the mind” is not bodiless interiority nor does it consist of a capacity to abstract ourselves from our historical entanglements and look down on them from some privileged vantage point. “The life of the mind” is always the life of the mind here, in this space. The theological ramifications of this point can best be appreciated by drawing a rather rough-and-ready contrast.

The Enlightenment ideal of absolute reflection has sustained serious damage: from herme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Culture
• 2. Texts
• 3. Traditions
• 4. Conversations
• 5. Criticism
• 6. Habits
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover