The Shape of Participation: A Theology of Church Practices

by L. Roger Owens

The Shape of Participation is a work of constructive theology addressed to theologians, seminarians, and thoughtful pastors. Owens engages and deepens recent popular discussions of church practices by approaching practices from the church Fathers' understanding of the church's participation in God. Through a wide-ranging engagement with theologians, both ancient and contemporary—including Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Herbert McCabe—Owens argues that the embodied practices of the church are the church's participation in the life of God, making the church Jesus' own continued, peaceable embodiment in and for the world. This book is for theologians, pastors, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how the visible presence of God's church is extraordinarily good news in a violent world.

Endorsements:
"A wonderful book—Owens takes the significant interest in 'practices' that has emerged over the last decade, engages it theologically in rich ways with attention to specific ecclesial examples, and deepens it through insightful analyses of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Herbert McCabe, and Maximus the Confessor. Pastors and scholars alike will benefit from careful study of Owens's significant argument."
—L. Gregory Jones
Duke University

"By reframing the church's practices as a participation in Christ and, indeed, as Christ's own practicing in and for the world, Owens has brought to the study of Christian practice new theological depth, shape, and creativity. Moreover, by doing this in dialogue with ancient as well as contemporary theological and philosophical sources and in a way that takes seriously the concrete, embodied church rather than remaining on the level of idealized and abstract ecclesiology, he has provided us a helpful new model for thinking about what it means to be the church."
—Bryan Stone
Boston University School of Theology

Genres: Theology

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2010

About the author

Co-Pastor, Duke Memorial United Methodist Church, Durham, NC

Reviews

[Lyndon · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be fair, my interest in this work had to do with Owen's exposition of Herbert McCabe's Eucharistic theology. In this matter, Owen does well to capture McCabe's claim that the Eucharist is the central, visible, material and embodied human practice that constitute's the church as God's new language. Owen's goes on to reflect how, "for McCabe, participation in God is participation in God's self-communication through the body of Jesus" (p. 106). This summarizes things nicely.

The larger argument of this work implicates a broader understanding of our participation in God that includes the Eucharist, but also preaching (Bonhoeffer is used for this topic). Owen's relies on a variety of theologians (Cyril of Alexandria, Robert Jenson and Maximus the Confessor) to argue for a participation in the divine life that is fundamentally the practices of the visible church as understood as the life of Christ practiced through the faithful activity of the church. Along the way, Owen's engages John Milbank and Schleiermacher (to name just two of many) and finds them wanting with regards to the materiality of Christ's body, the church, and (in the case of Schleiermacher), wanting with regards to a reliance on interiority as the ontological space where the agency of God is realised. I particularly appreciated Owen's critique of Barbra Brown Taylor as a heir of the school of interiority that displaces the embodied church in order to focus on the preaching event as requiring inner 'movement' in the life those receiving the sermon. I wish this was developed a little more; such critique is needed.

It is the Eastern theology of the Confessor that ties the argument together. The concluding chapter on participation as divination establishes the teleological character of God's grace which completes its work through the agency of the Holy Spirit in bringing into unity our graced humanity into the very life of love and joy that is God. The embodiment of Christ in the church becomes a sign and vision of our destiny within the expanse of Christ's own resurrected body.