The Loss of Church as Public
14 Apr 2008
I’m a guest author over at the ‘Church and Post-Modern Culture’ blog/site.
I’ve put up a post today, about the loss of church as a public.
Beware, theological and academic zone.
Tagged: Ecclesiology, Emerging-Church, Theology
13 comments
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Comment by steven hamilton
12.12 pm on 14 Apr 2008
intriguing post jason…i would certainly agree with you and the venerable Hütter, in that my experience is that the emergent conversations have been helpful, i see many people floundering, and this may be my somewhat informed assumption, but they flounder in the aftermath of more and more conversations because, as you say: “… collapses into the conversations about church, the flux and idealizations of talking about what church might be (and often the pathology of what it isn’t), such that ecclesiology remains a hermeneutical horizon of discussions about church, rather than a concrete reality of growing and new communities with new Christians.”
it’s more than a little frustrating. (i am also with you on the private gnosis of ‘relevance’…)
question, and this was my question from Paul’s previous post on public space and the church, but i think i am having trouble understanding precisely what you mean by third space. maybe i’m drinking too much of the newbigin kool-aid, but doesn’t the church, the more concretely reality of it, not just our wishes about what it might be…the church emerge in the context of life and culture and being…is that emerging space the third space you are talking of? or is this something else between public space and “us”?
thanks for invigorating me this morning…
Comment by Jason
11.30 am on 15 Apr 2008
Thanks Steven, I’m posting my reply to you here and over at the Church and Postmodernism site.
I’m not an expert in Newbigin, I have read a few of his books, and like you I do think the church emerges in the context of life and culture, as an alternative and reconciliation of the other spaces of life, without the collapse into the private or the public that we see so often happen.
Comment by fernando
12.41 pm on 14 Apr 2008
Fascinating. I felt a tug of irony in your call for a more compellingly public ecclesiology in reference to reading RO and on (what feels to me) like an RO-oriented site. That’s a dry well right there.
I can’t help but feel that there is an important discussion available here on contingency – a discussion I’m straining to listen out for in the current emerging.missional discourse. When I’m feeling generous, I like to see the softness of e.m ecclesiology as a desire to maintain a sense of institutional contingency, something I pine for myself. I feel that here, there is a strong distinction between RO, CST and the AnaBaptists and neo-AnaBaptists. Then again, I’ve been reading a lot of Zizke lately!
Beyond that, I’m deeply sympathetic to your idea of an institutional hermeneutic – but you probably knew that already.
Comment by Jason
11.34 am on 15 Apr 2008
Hi Fernando,
Think RO offers something from it’s neo-augustinian well, that could offer a great deal to ecclesiology, that they have failed to develop. That will be part of my PhD work, probably, maybe ;-)
There is certainly a strong distinction between RO, CST and the AnaBaptists, hence my desire to explore my problem area from these three key discourse perspectives.
I’m not familiar with Zizke, any good places to start with them/him/her?
If I can articulate an institutional hermeneutic, that would be great…any ideas from you?
Comment by fernando
4.22 pm on 15 Apr 2008
Maybe it’s not developed because they filled the well with too many ladders and scaffolds?
As for Zizek, best place to start is with The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. 48 pages, pure gold.
Comment by Jason
7.23 am on 16 Apr 2008
Tnx mate.
Comment by jprapp
6.17 pm on 14 Apr 2008
Jason asked – “What does it mean within this context to try to establish a vibrant church community that enables Christian’s formation and grow in faith, and for people in our local community to convert to that form of life, as Christians, in and through our church plant?”
Well, from one church planter to another: nothing.
Except perhaps that “to convert to that form of life” is a “testament betrayed”: Kundera (in Village Voice): “Intimate life .. understood as one’s personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one’s originality.”
Or, as Dave Kahn once admonished me in a totally chance encounter involving beer and a flat tire from a nail dropped a century ago from a pioneer wagon at a natural hot springs in the Eastern Sierra: about the Inuit’s Great Spirit, “there is only secret (implicitly agreed between two or more), sacred secrets (between intimates), and Secret Sacred (God).”
The church plants can figure it out for themselves.
Larry Kreider’s naive apostolic simplicity of the recipe of variety in church plants is their freedom to testify without their testaments betrayed (Kundera).
And this from a modernist on third probation!
Cheers,
Jim
Comment by Jason
11.37 am on 15 Apr 2008
Thanks Jim, great to hear from you.
Comment by jprapp
6.26 pm on 14 Apr 2008
Jason asked – “What does it mean within this context to try to establish a vibrant church community that enables Christian’s formation and grow in faith, and for people in our local community to convert to that form of life, as Christians, in and through our church plant?”
Well, from one church planter to another: everything, something, nothing.
Except perhaps that “to convert to that form of life” is a “testament betrayed”: Kundera (Village Voice): “Intimate life .. understood as one’s personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one’s originality.”
Or, as Dave Kahn once admonished me in a totally chance encounter involving beer and a flat tire from a nail dropped a century ago from a pioneer wagon at a natural hot springs in the Eastern Sierra: about the Inuit’s Great Spirit, “there is only secret (implicitly agreed between two or more), sacred secrets (between intimates), and Secret Sacred (God).”
The church plants can figure it out for themselves.
Larry Kreider’s naive apostolic simplicity of the recipe of variety in church plants is their freedom to testify without their testaments betrayed (Kundera).
And this from a modernist on third probation!
Cheers,
Jim
Comment by brodie
11.11 pm on 15 Apr 2008
Jason
When I saw the title of your post my thoughts went to wannenwetsch, so I’m glad to see he’s on the list of those you’ve been drinking deep from. I assume it’s his “Political Worship” that you’ve read. I think the key chapters in this book are 7 & 8.
Several thoughts strike me from this work.
(1) Does his argument only hold if you have a similar Luthern sacramental view of worship and in particular the Eucharist.
(2) He’s rather vauge about what is / is not worship, although he does end the book with some examples. That said I think that for people to be formed by worship in the way he describes then we need to help people join the dots as it were. Tease out and point out how the church is polis, tease and point out the political significance of say baptism.
I think there are also big questions here about how the local church relates to the universal church which don’t really get addressed.
Comment by Jason
7.34 am on 16 Apr 2008
Brodie: yes that the book!
(1) Unlike Cavanaugh his view is open to more than the eucharist, but does need a lutheran, or at least some sacramental understanding of worship.
(2) He is vague, and I think it’s outside his remit, and it’s up to us to establish the public formation practices of our church communities, if we understand the as doing and being as such.
I think Cavanaugh is the link from Wannewestch into an understanding of the universal church. or maybe that’s because I read them back to back :-)
Comment by Richard Sudworth
4.08 pm on 16 Apr 2008
Couldn’t help involving myself in the discussion now I’m making forays political theology and Islam in these early PhD stages. I’ve been enjoying Cavanaugh too but wonder whether he and the anabaptist/neo-anabaptist thinkers (Yoder, Hauerwas) both suffer from sectarianism. They always tend to being oppositional to society/state. I’m wondering (is this the Anglican in me?) whether you’d see anything in Oliver O’Donovan’s vision of a genuinely all-encompassing political theology.
The Catholic tradition has huge resources here and Nicholas Healy is worth looking at as someone who I think avoids Cavanaugh’s sectarian direction (a Catholic influenced by his teacher Hauerwas?)and talks of “theodramatic theory” (after Bon Balthazar) as a way of exerting Christian distinctiveness and the prophetic critique whilst being able to affirm the good and the godly in modernity.
Anyway, stimulating stuff Jason….
Comment by Jason Clark
10.12 am on 17 Apr 2008
Hi Richard.
I sometimes wonder if many ‘emerging groups’ are sectarian, culturally exclusive, in their post-church doctrines?
Living faithfully in consumer culture, might entail sectarian like behaviour. How do you opt out of the consumer narrative and anthropology? I think Cavanaugh, provides ways to reconcile oikos and polis, and oppose the hegemony of individualized god spaces, that are the new civiv religion.
Have you seen he has a new book on Globalisation coming out in the next few weeks?
I am more inclined to anglo catholic ecclesiology these days, and was greatly impacted by Healy early last year. His ‘blueprint ecclesiology’ seems to inhere with much of the lack of concrete mission by groups that want to be missional.
I am going to read some O’Donovan next month for his political and public method.
Sounds like there are many intersections between our studies, I hope yours are going well. Great to hear from you, and thanks for the encouragement.
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