Practicing Baptism

Christian Practices and the Presence of Christ

Bård Eirik Hallesby Norheim

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625641755
  9781498268011
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630872847
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Where is Jesus Christ? This fundamental question is the starting point of this book, which investigates the shape of Christian life and ministry in a post-Christendom context. Over the last decades there has been a shift in much of Western theology towards focusing on Christian practices in ministry and theological education. This may be seen as a way to deal with theological anxiety in an era of heightened personal autonomy. In Practicing Baptism Bard Norheim critically analyzes the engagement in Christian practices. As a response to this engagement Norheim develops a missional and diaconal theology for ministry, focusing on the presence of Christ in Christian practices. Fundamentally, this is an attempt to answer a pressing question for today: What do Christians do? Norheim draws on Martin Luther's theology and his notion of the three modes of Christ's presence, the present tense of baptism, and Luther's idea of the marks of the church. Based on this reading of Luther's theology, Norheim suggests that Christian life and ministry could be interpreted through the concept practicing baptism.

1

Christian Practices
in a Post-Christendom Era

Why Christian practices?

Christian practices in a time of theological anxiety

There is a certain anxiety within Western theology on how to understand the construction of the (Christian) self in an era of heightened personal autonomy and secularization. The appeal to focus on Christian practices in ministry and theological education is an attempt to respond to that anxiety. The common ground for all those engaging theology with practice(s) is a mix of this ambition to rethink faith formation and a radical contextual impetus. The context of the Western church has been fundamentally altered over the last few decades. The church can no longer lean on a Christendom approach to theological education and Christian formation.1 Church and theology have to rediscover the shape and nature of the Christian life in a radically and rapidly changing context.

During the late 1980s and the 1990s various theologians, particularly in the US, started to discuss the role of so-called “Christian practices” in theological education and ministry.2 This engagement grew out of a self-critical evaluation of the theological education and ministry offered by the traditional churches in the US, the so-called Mainline Protestant Churches.3 The problem, according to many, was that the traditional churches had largely neglected the challenges of the rapidly changing context, where fewer and fewer people have knowledge of the Bible and the Christian tradition. At the same time, the churches were failing to engage the resources of their historic tradition with the evolving religious market.4

The response was a call to return to communitarian, Christian practices such as prayer, hospitality, forgiveness, and caring for the sick and the poor, and to discover the shaping role of these practices for the everyday Christian life. The hope was that this would lead to a rediscovery of the vitality of the church in a post-modern context, where bare words seemed to have lost their power.

This concern has also influenced the way the traditional churches do—and think about—youth ministry. Kenda Creasy Dean has developed a practical theology for youth ministry based on rediscovering the historical practices of the church.5 For Dean, Christian practices are tools for the church to communicate with and shape the identity of a generation of passionate young people. According to Dean, the present younger generation in the US has been betrayed by the Mainline Protestant churches, which have failed to offer young people relevant Christian practices that meet their desire and longing for authenticity, fidelity, transcendence, and communion, that could give them “something to die for,” as Dean puts it.6 Dean finds that Christ “Jesus enters the world in these practices again and again . . . through us.”7 But exactly how the presence of Christ in Christian practices should be understood has been subject to controversy.

Christian Practices and the presence of Christ
in the light of Lutheran Theology

Interpreting the presence of Christ is a key issue for theological reflection and for ministry as it is key to understand the formation of the Christian self. For every part of Christian ministry, it is crucial to ask:

• How is Jesus Christ present in the world?

• How is Jesus Christ present in the practices of the Christian community?

• What constitutes this presence?

Starting and ending in ministry, this book takes as its point of departure the need to investigate further how the presence of Christ in Christian practices should be interpreted in the light of Lutheran theology. The question of how the presence of Christ in Christian practices should be interpreted is largely “unanswered” within the Christian practices paradigm. But this question is crucial for a church, which wants to rethink and reshape its catechetical practices in a rapidly changing context.

My focus in this book is not to investigate practices in general. This book does therefore not attempt to discuss every possible practice that may occur in the context of ministry theologically, but it is an attempt to develop some basic theological principles on how to understand the presence of Christ in Christian practices. Through this it is my aim to enable systematic and critical reflection on the role of Christian practices in the context of ministry.

It is my intention, that the reflections and discussion in this study will offer helpful theological insights for other theological traditions than just the Lutheran tradition. Lutheran ecclesiology is in its scope and intention fundamentally ecumenical. The logical structure of the Confessio Augustana (1530) is one example of this understanding, where the first twenty-one articles of the confession are presented as catholic, common, for the one church.8 Ultimately, the scope of this book is therefore to contribute to the outlining of an ecumenical theology of Christian practices in the context of ministry based on a Lutheran interpretation of the doctrine of the presence of Christ.

In the light of Lutheran theology, the question of how to interpret the presence of Christ is fundamentally a soteriological question. In the Lutheran tradition the question of salvation is closely related to the doctrine of the present Christ, Christus Praesens. One example of this is found in Article III and Article VI of the Confessio Augustana, CA III and IV, where CA IV on justification by faith relies on CA III on Christology. Also by looking at Luther’s main treatises, soteriology and Christology are intrinsically connected.

For Luther this soteriology is fundamentally connected to ministry and everyday life, and it finds its practical expression in the “practice” trajectory of the Small and Large Catechisms, which both outline the everyday life of the new self, born in baptism.9 Here the life of the Christian is outlined as an everyday life shaped by a set of “practices”: using or practicing the Creed, one’s baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the Ten Commandments and prayer.

Many of Luther’s treatises take as their point of departure the liturgical practice of the church—like the Lord’s Supper, baptism, or the creed.10 Luther even develops the notion of the marks of the church—the notae ecclesiae—when he speaks about these practices. These marks of the church run as a binding ecclesiological theme through all the main documents of the reformers. Rather than being peripheral to Lutheran theology, the marks of the church arise from the very center of it, from justification by faith alone.11 The question of how the presence of Christ should be interpreted, and how it relates to certain “practices” is therefore central to theological discourse in general and to Lutheran theological discourse in particular.

So although the Lutheran account serves as a sort of confessional filter or confessional hermeneutics, it is not an arbitrary th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Christian Practices in a Post-Christendom Era
• Chapter 2: The Engagement in Christian Practices
• Chapter 3: Christian Practices in the Light of Lutheran Theology
• Chapter 4: Practicing Baptism
• Chapter 5: The Diaconal Telos of Christian Practices
• Bibliography