Interruption and Imagination

Public Theology in Times of Crisis

Fretheim

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498298698
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As we are faced with recurring crises--financial, migration, climate, etc.--there is a need to reconsider public theology as both a practice and a field of study. By discussing public statements made by Christians faced with different kinds of crisis, this book contributes to the development and understanding of public theology.The public statements addressed are three kairos documents: The Kairos Document from South Africa in the mid-1980s; The Road to Damascus document from authors in developing countries, issued in 1989; and the Palestinian Kairos Document from 2009. The discussion is structured around three problems of public theology: social analysis, politics and ethics, and language and voice. Fretheim suggests a constructionist understanding of public theology--a public theology that interrupts current debates and expands the imagination of the public sphere.As public theology is concerned with public life and social issues, Interruption and Imagination will be of interest to scholars and students of theology, political science, sociology, and religious studies, as well as practitioners, policymakers, and professionals in the public sector, civil society, churches, and Christian organizations.

1

Challenged by Crisis

There seems to be no end to the violent conflicts, oppression, and injustice in the world. Aid organizations keep sending out appeals in response to emergency situations and chronic poverty. Amnesty International continues to present brutal evidence of human rights violations and the International Crisis Group must carry on their work to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. In the midst of this turmoil the global community is faced with unprecedented climate change and its dire consequences. Global warming is a reality and we can see the effects of extraordinarily strong storms and hurricanes, floods, and drought. Some people, even some nation-states, find their livelihood and very existence threatened. Others struggle with changing weather patterns, seeking ways to cope and care for each other in new and unknown climate conditions.

Crises such as these call for action, but also deep reflection. How did we get to this point? What choices should we make now and how can we shape a better future?

The climate crisis illustrates the complexity of these questions. This is evidently an ecological crisis, but not only that. Climate change is caused by the wealth, consumption, and lifestyles of the rich, but also by the polluting industries and limited resources of poor countries. This makes the climate crisis not only an ecological or economic issue, but also a political challenge. New policies at all levels—local, national and global—are needed. This is no small task, but it must be done. In fact, it is an existential challenge. People’s lives are at risk. Living in despair and feeling hopeless, people ask the obvious, challenging, and disturbing questions: Why this suffering, and why me? Where is God in this crisis? The problem of evil becomes not only a philosophical riddle to solve, but a personal and collective struggle. It leads us into the abyss of suffering and meaninglessness, as well as to the imperative of care and compassion, and a fight for recovery, reconstruction, and reconciliation. The crisis presents us with not only an intellectual, political, and existential challenge. It becomes a moral commitment.

Although the contemporary climate crisis is of a scale and character that makes it unique in human history, these questions and challenges are not unprecedented. Most of us have faced crisis of some kind in our personal lives or in our families. Some of us have faced brutal conflict, terrorist attacks, and war. To the international community, two world wars and decades of cold war are defining events of our political history. They have involved political antagonism, a costly arms race, suffering, and death for far too many. These crises have challenged individuals, local communities, civil society groups, and politicians to respond with moral outrage, political vision, and new and creative policy measures. Similarly, political analysts, social scientists, and philosophers have been challenged to analyze, reflect, and reconsider. How should we respond to such crises? What can we say, and what can we do?

Different groups of people, communities, and countries have given different answers to these questions. This book deals with how churches and Christians—clergy, theologians, and lay people—can respond to them. In other words, the aim is to explore the shape, form, and meaning of public theology in times of crisis. Accordingly, the book is about theology, but not theology in general. It focuses on a specific kind of theological approach or theological enterprise: the kind of theology that intentionally and explicitly deals with issues of public concern and seeks to participate in the public debates on such issues.

Crises and Christianity

The Christian heritage with regard to world poverty, human rights violations, terrorism, war, and other forms of social and political crises, is a mixed one. Some see in religion in general and Christianity in particular a key contributing factor to crises. Christianity causes conflict, legitimizes hierarchy, and justifies oppression, it is claimed. Others point out how Christians and Christian churches have responded to historical crisis with love, care, and the message of Christian hope.

What seems clear is that crises have challenged and indeed changed Christian theology. The First World War challenged the optimism of European liberal theology and paved the way for a turn to God’s transcendence in Christian theology and a much more skeptical and realistic understanding of contemporary culture. The Second World War saw the complicity as well as quietist attitude of churches and Christians, resulting in heated debates in the following decades. The state of Israel was established in 1948 partly with the support of Christian churches. Later the same churches have become increasingly aware of the disturbing effects of Israeli policies and the plight of Palestinians. In South Africa the Dutch Reformed Church developed a theological legitimation of an appalling apartheid system that was later condemned as heretical by other churches.

These examples indicate how churches, Christian theology, clergy, and Christians have been part of the problem, both through complicity and passivity. There are, however, also examples of how churches and Christians have responded publicly, critically, and constructively to social and political crises. Brave Christians in the Confessional Church spoke out against the Nazi regime. New theological understandings of the Promised Land have been developed, questioning both Christian Zionism and the policies of the international community in the Middle East. For decades churches and Christians have addressed poverty, racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation.

Today the global community and the ecumenical fellowship of all churches are challenged by climate change. Again one of the issues is how Christianity is part of the problem,1 but churches and Christians have also developed new forms of theologies and are searching for creative ways of dealing with the crisis. Christian interpretations and viewpoints are articulated in the public sphere with an implicit or explicit understanding of climate change and its moral and political implications.

Public Theology

Such responses to climate change are examples of public theology in as much as they are articulated as theologically informed statements in the public sphere. Similarly, public statements given by churches, church officials, or ordinary Christians on economic exploitation, political oppression, or climate change are examples of public theology in practice. When they are examined and scrutinized by scholars they become the material and starting point for the academic field of public theology. The term public theology thus refers to both a practice and an academic discipline. To the extent that public theology scholars make their own contributions of this kind, they act as practical-public theologians.

As the North American theologian Robert Benne puts it, public theology is “the engagement of a living religious tradition with its public environment—the economic, political, and cultural spheres of our common life.”2 Similarly, Harold Breitenberg defines public theology as “theologically informed public discourse about public issues, addressed to the church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or other religious body, as well as the larger public or publics, argued in ways that can be evaluated and judged by publicly available warrants and criteria.”3 These definitions indicate what public theology is all about, but both Benne and Breitenberg also provide more elaborate definitions. Benne identifies two poles—religion and society (which consists of economic, political and cultural spheres)—and argues that “the vast majority of religious traditions not only intend to exist within and interact with them, but also aim to affect those public spheres.”4 This aim to affect leads the religious traditions to engage in the public environment. Further, Benne highlights two ways in which a religious or theological intellectual tradition engages the public world:

First, that intellectual tradition moves outward from the tradition toward the world. It interprets the public world in light of the religious tradition. ( . . . ) Moreover, the intellectual tradition may be used to persuade the world of the cogency of its vision of how things ought to be in the public spheres of life. That is, there may be an apologetic thrust in the tradition. ( . . . Second, the) world is interpreted and assessed by its teachers and scholars for the use of the tradition itself. ( . . . ) The tradition needs to clarify the character of the world so that it might resist where it needs to and adapt where it can. An interpretation of the world must be brought back to the tradition for the sake of its own integrity. At times this interpretation of the world may mean a critique and revision of the tradition itself.5

Breitenberg’s longer definition of public theology has three parts:

First, public theology is religiously informed discourse that intends to be intelligible and convincing to adherents within its own religious tradition while at the same time being comprehensible and possibly persuasive to those outside it. Second, public theology addresses issues that bear upon a religious community but also pertain to the larger society, including those who identify themselves with other faith traditions or with none. Third, to achieve such ends, public theology relies on sources of insight, language, methods of augment, and warrants that are in theory open to all.6

This concern and focus on “the larger society” is also reflected in the Scottish theologian Duncan B. Forrester’s approach to public theology. Forrester argues public theology is a “theology which is not primarily concerned with individual subjectivity, or with the internal discourse of the Church about doctrine and its clarification” and consequently different from “evangelical theology which addresses the Gospel to the world in the hope of repentance and conversion.”7 Rather, public theology is a:

theology which seeks the welfare of the city before protecting the interests of the Church, or its proper liberty to preach the Gospel and celebrate the sacraments. Accordingly, public theology often takes ‘the world’s agenda’, or parts of it, as its own agenda, and seeks to offer distinctive and constructive insights from the treasury of faith to help i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Challenged by Crisis
• Chapter 2: The Public Sphere
• Chapter 3: Public Theology
• Chapter 4: Times of Crisis
• Chapter 5: Social Analysis
• Chapter 6: Politics and Ethics
• Chapter 7: Language and Voice
• Chapter 8: The Climate Crisis
• Chapter 9: Responding to Crisis
• Conclusion
• Bibliography