Kindle Notes & Highlights
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October 15 - November 9, 2019
The language of “our land,” “this season,” and “the nations” introduces an apocalyptic element into the worship, and this is associated with a pessimism concerning society and also the wider church. In the sermon the need for revival is linked to a world that is seen as groaning and disintegrating morally. The rector speaks about the present time as a “winter that will soon be over,” a time when the “temporary madness that is over our city will soon be over.”
In worship we do not contemplate the three persons of the Trinity as if they were three supernatural beings, not even as an exercise in our minds. We do not observe God, but we participate in the divine fellowship as God opens up the divine life to make room for us to dwell.
and “Trinity” only makes sense as we actually participate in these movements of relation.
It is as if the sacramental aspects of baptism are being relocated into a new ritual, leaving baptism simply as a profession of faith, despite the reference in the introductory explanation to dying and rising with Christ. Implicitly, the service does provide an opportunity, with its concluding rite, for all those present to participate in the movement of baptism along with the candidates, but this opportunity could have been more effectively presented if the baptismal rite itself had also been explicitly seen as a ministry of God to the candidates.
The separation between water baptism and receiving the Spirit (“baptism in Spirit”)23 persists when essentially the same order of baptism is used both for infants and “those who are able to answer for themselves.”
The sound system is an important signifier related to those leading the service: as the rector comes to the front of the platform it is when he picks up the large microphone that people start to become quiet. The microphone, because it is held in the hand, is also a key feature associated with everyone who comes to the lectern to speak.
Unless Christian students are gathered into the church — with its whole range of age, ability and disability, ethnicity and intellectual variety — they will not continue in the church after university days are over.
The service shows much evidence of participation in God, and as observers we have learned from the distinct form this takes in this particular congregation, whose worship is shaped by the creative merging of the several currents we have identified. In theological reflection on the service, we have been prompted to consider new “sacramental” forms of engaging the whole body in the movement of a God who is humbly giving God’s own self in the world. In our turn, we have wanted to suggest ways in which this participation might be deepened in baptism, taking our cue from the rich potential that we
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In particular, those of us involved in various kinds of “practical ecclesiology” are familiar with the use of social-science methods as ways of better enabling our theological thinking about church by grounding it in real, lived experience and structures.
What is, perhaps, less common is an appreciation of how the holding together of descriptive accounts of church practice with more traditional theological sources can both disclose something about the nature of the lived reality, and contribute to theological learning and pedagogy.
Reflection on these moments of disclosure — or “epiphanies” — illustrates the value of such interdisciplinary method, not only for practice, but for theological vision more fundamentally.
“sacramental epiphanies.”
This first stage involves a certain reflective reading of raw data witnessing to practices of faith as they are understood by the practitioners themselves, and is indebted to social-science methods and insights, especially from the field of action research. A second stage leads us to relate these embodied, theological voices to the more public voices of systematic theology regarding the sacramental, using distinctive methods developed by the authors’ research work, Action Research — Church and Society (ARCS).
We conclude by suggesting some possible remedies for the fractures, in the belief that the “fullness” of systematic theology requires a deep coherence between the ways in which faith is articulated, and the manner in which it is lived out, in the Christian community. It is significant that these conclusions draw us into an area that might be described as “formative theology.” This term brings to the fore the various and complex ways in which Christians are “formed” in their faith, and suggests this locus as a place for particular attention. The question is: How might formation for “epiphanic
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The method employed in the ARCS research is described as “theological action research.”1 Theological action research is an approach to research that focuses on enabling practitioners to renew their practices or the meanings they attach to those practices.
Theological action research starts with a theological question for research and then uses theological methods to interpret the data; it is thus characterized by being theological “all the way through,” as well as by its being grounded in particular practices.
On one level this work can be seen as a fairly classic example of action research in getting insiders to compare what they said they did (their “espoused theology”) with what they actually did (their “operant theology”). This critical bringing together of the espoused theology and operant theology was an important trigger for reflection, and led to discussions about whether what the group espoused needed to be moved closer to what it did, or whether what it did needed to be moved closer to what it espoused.2
We do this by introducing two other terms — or “voices of theology” — alongside the operant and espoused “voices”: the normative theological voice, referring to those texts and traditions of ecclesial teachings that a particular group may recognize as “authoritative” (e.g., Scripture, Church Councils, liturgies, etc.); and the formal theological voice, referring to the ideas and texts of “professional” theologians, of the theology of the academy, and its interdisciplinary partners.
What seems clear is that, even when the connection between Eucharist and feeding the homeless is made and understood, it fails to be an active or appropriated interpretation for the volunteers. The ritualized, “sacral” expression of meal in the Eucharist seems hard to relate to the real, down-to-earth activity of the shelters; the experiences are too different.
what is perhaps most striking in the data is the way in which this very present, well-known normative voice fails to engage thoroughly with the embodied eucharistic practices that reflection identified. We have here a first question about the apparent breakdown of communication between the normative and operant-espoused voices: What might be preventing a more fruitful conversation between the normative theology of liturgical practice and the embodied sacramental theologies of outreach practices?
Jeff Sharlet, based on discussions with congregants from New Life Church on the northern edge of Colorado Springs, noted a pattern regarding evangelical perceptions of the city. According to these suburban parishioners, [c]ities are especially dangerous. It is not so much the large populations, with their uneasy mix of sinner and saved, that make Christian conservatives leery of urban areas. Even downtown Colorado Springs, presumably as godly as any big town in America, struck the New Lifers as unclean. Whenever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from downtown’s neat little grid of
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Our goal in this chapter is to use this particular case study as a catalyst for articulating a necessary partnership between theology and sociology, working in tandem to understand the nature of faithful practice.
Thus, contesting reductionisms of various stripes, Christian Smith is especially critical of methodologies that reduce humans to merely economic or biological animals; in contrast, he argues that sociologies that attend to the cultural aspects of human society yield more fruitful, persuasive accounts of complex social phenomena. In particular, Smith argues for the importance of seeing human beings as also moral, believing, storytelling animals.
This is then easily wed to theological paradigms that also tend to overemphasize the cognitive and propositional (doctrines, ideas, values) rather than embodiment and practice.
This requires not only a sociology attuned to the importance of practices (following Bourdieu), but also a theology that is primed to be attentive to the central role of formative practices. A sociology of practice tethered to a “talking head” theology will not do justice to the particularities of religious formation. In order to consider any correlation between evangelical spirituality and geographical habits, we will need a theological approach that considers the formative impact of affective practices.8
Thus we share Christian Scharen’s conviction (echoing Milbank) that theology needs sociology to supply “judicious narratives” that keep ecclesiology from floating off into the realm of the ideal (Scharen 2005). However, we have also tried to emphasize that sociology of religion needs theology to better inform its interests, questions, instruments, and observation in order to do justice to the particularities of congregational life.
And it is also important to remember that on a national scale, urban evangelicals are a significant minority: less than 20 percent of all white evangelicals. In other words, urban evangelicals often talk like “converts”: they have had to reflect on place and their relation to cities in ways that have forced articulation. In contrast, suburban evangelicals have tended to “go with the flow,” as it were; they have not thought about place and thus are more easily shaped and directed by status quo habit-forming practices.
That is, choices about geographic habits are rarely brought under any type of theological interrogation; in other words, they might not be “choices” at all, but rather the sort of automatic outcomes of habits acquired through practices that operate below the radar of reflection. In short, many evangelicals — like many Americans more generally — fail to think critically about geography and location. In an echo of Emerson and Smith’s argument regarding race, we see from these interviews that evangelical spirituality also has deep ramifications for attitudes regarding the city and geographical
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There will be distinct limits to surveys and interviews precisely because they expect articulation, whereas the practices that significantly drive behavior carry implicit, unarticulated orientations to place. Further research on these themes, then, would have to pioneer an ethnography that carefully “reads” the practices of evangelical worship, as well as other suburban “secular liturgies,” in order to determine how our orientation to place, especially cities, is shaped and primed.
growing literature in systematic theology about the dangerous potential for social theory to colonize the discipline.
He was perhaps even more alarmed by the popularity of Latin American Liberation Theology, with its emphasis on contextual praxis and critiques of traditional theology from “the underside.”3 In such approaches to the study of the church, Milbank and others have worried that theology was losing its sense that to speak theologically of the church was to speak of God. Rather than investigating the church’s origin in the movement and work of the divine, ecclesiology was simply describing particular measurable phenomena found within contemporary communities who happen to call themselves “Christian.”
So in a sense the very real issue: the debate in the church isn’t about homosexuality at all. Homosexuality is the presenting problem. I think we all wish it was a different one but it’s the presenting problem of how seriously we take the authority of the Bible and especially of how seriously we are committed to the faith of the apostles.
The bishops recognized the “symbolic” nature of the dispute, insofar as “homosexuality” in this conflict largely stands for something else, even as there is considerable disagreement about what that something is. Several of the bishops argued, in different ways, that the symbolic nature of this conflict is one of the primary reasons it seems so intractable. Bishop Timothy makes a comparison with the conflict in Northern Ireland, where tough legislation had swept away political patronage, and resulted in substantial change.
the methodology employed primarily involves semistructured interviews, which ask participants to describe what happened in Pittsburgh, why their congregations made the decisions they did, and what they hope the future will bring for their church. The data from this study are still being analyzed, but some preliminary findings can be mentioned here.
In a context in which the church is tearing itself apart and facing schism, might not the act of stepping back from a focused attention on the disputed theological doctrines, in order to attend to those forces and dynamics that may be fueling the crisis, serve in some sense as an act of reflexive confession on the part of the theologian? If so, then there is a rather strong argument for suggesting that ethnography may serve an important role in ecclesiology. It contributes to the presentation before God of the church’s present reality.
ecclesiology, if it is to help the church discern its true nature and calling, cannot remain at the level of ideal and abstract theorizing. The tensions and conflicts disrupting the life of contemporary Christian communities are too complicated and painful for the church to be transparent to itself, or to the theologian. It is here that the contribution of ethnography and other social-scientific methodologies to ecclesiology emerges. Without losing track of the proper goal and focus of ecclesiology, a disciplined exploration of the church’s present reality can serve as an act of careful
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In essence we are dealing here with a dual shift, first from the image of knowledge as a superstructure progressively erected on the basis of sure and certain, discretely verifiable foundations and to the image of knowledge — particularly associated with Willard van Orman Quine — as a complex, flexible, context-specific web.5 Second, we are dealing with the shift from viewing truth purely in terms of cognitive understanding and linguistic and conceptual articulation alone to recognizing the need to view truth also in performative terms of efficacy and fruitfulness, and this not just as a means
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As a means of holding together a similar constellation of concerns, Rowan Williams suggests the language of “celebratory,” “communicative,” and “critical” to speak of three necessarily interacting “styles” and interwoven responsibilities in Christian theology: while theology rightly begins in celebratory rootedness in the particularities of Christian faith, if it is not to risk becoming “sealed in on itself” it needs both to engage in “fruitful,” potentially mutually enlightening “conversation” with the “rhetoric of its uncommitted environment” and to pursue with rigor critical questions
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Clear recognition is given to two apparently opposed points: (1) that for a number of reasons the hope for full structural and sacramental unity as a realizable goal that drove much classical ecumenical work has receded from view as a realistic proximate aspiration; (2) that the ultimate goal of full structural and sacramental unity — however that might variously be imagined as being configured — must nevertheless form an essential and abiding orientation for Christian ecumenism as a non-negotiable gospel imperative.
the fundamental ecumenical need for the Christian churches in this context is to find an appropriately imaginative way of living this orientation in the here and now; of walking now the way of conversion toward more visible structural and sacramental unity in the future.
Accordingly, at the heart of Receptive Ecumenism is the basic conviction that further ecumenical progress will indeed be possible but only if denominational traditions make a shift from typically asking what other traditions might fruitfully learn from them and instead take the creative step of rigorously exploring what they themselves might fruitfully learn (or “receive”) with integrity from their “others.”
“Ask not what your ecumenical others must learn from you; ask rather what you must learn fr...
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Much ecumenism is about, as it were, getting the best china out; about wanting others to see us in our best possible light. In contrast, Receptive Ecumenism is an ecumenism of the wounded hands, of showing our wounds to each other, recognizing that we cannot save ourselves but trusting that we can be ministered to by each other, receiving in our needs from each other’s particular gifts.
It is possible to think in terms of there being five broad phases to the project. For each team, the first task was to conduct an initial, detailed mapping of what is currently happening, at least in theory, in each of the participant denominational groupings, and the formal theological self-understanding that pertains in each case. These mapping exercises were carried out on the basis of available documentation (e.g., authoritative theological self-descriptions, mission statements, terms of reference of relevant committees and bodies, minutes, etc.) cross-referenced with a select number of
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The threefold purpose was: (1) to test how the respective theories work in practice; (2) to begin to identify respective areas of good practice and difficulty/dysfunction alike; and (3) to begin to identify where fruitful receptive learning might potentially take place across the traditions, whereby one tradition’s particular difficulties might be tended to, or enabled, by another’s particular gifts.
(structured interviews with key/representative individuals in each denominational grouping and at each of the relevant levels of region, congregation, and intermediate structure)
(group listening exercises/focus groups and participant-observer analysis).
As such, the aim was to build in a degree of triangulation not only within the work of the respective teams but also between them.
(examples of good practice) and needs (areas of difficulty/dysfunction)
we might turn to R. S. Warner’s exemplary ethnographic study of a small-town Presbyterian church, New Wine in Old Wineskins, which engages the lived reality of church life among leaders and townsfolk. What is produced is a rich account of change: from liberal to evangelical sympathies, as filtered through the experiences of ordinary churchgoers and the ministers subject to their shifting allegiances.
