Fieldwork in Theology (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World

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• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781493400263
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie et éthique systématiques

In this addition to the acclaimed The Church and Postmodern Culture series, leading practical theologian Christian Scharen examines the relationship between theology and its social context. He engages with social theorist Pierre Bourdieu to offer helpful theoretical and theological grounding to those who want to reflect critically on the faith and practice of the church, particularly for those undertaking ministry internships or fieldwork assignments. As Scharen helps a wide array of readers to understand the social context of doing theology, he articulates a vision for the church's involvement with what God is doing in the world and provides concrete examples of churches living out God's mission.

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Fieldwork in Theology

Waking Up to the World God Loves

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Whether you’ve never heard the name Pierre Bourdieu or you’ve already read some of his highly regarded yet quite difficult writings, this chapter puts Bourdieu in context, introduces the contours of his social science, and situates it in relation to the theological challenges of the church in a secular age. First, however, a musical prelude to lead us into the chapter’s main themes.

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A Prelude from John Legend and The Roots: “Wake Up, Everybody”

“Wake up, everybody, no more sleeping in bed.”[1] Forty years later, the urgency of this classic 1970s soul tune comes alive as John Legend and Melanie Fiona’s vocals soar above the funky beat laid down by The Roots. A closing guest appearance by Chicago hip-hop artist Common adds provocative rhymes. Originally written in the activist spirit of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the song is the center of gravity for an album inspired by the 2008 United States presidential election season, when so many people engaged the political process for the first time. Despite its contemporary musical and lyrical feel, the song draws on a biblical urgency. Saint Paul, writing in Romans, echoes Jesus’s summary of the law “in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:9–10). He then appeals to his fellow Christians to “wake from sleep,” for salvation is near, the night far gone, and it is time to “put on” the works of Christ in the struggle for a world healed and made new (vv. 11–12).

Under the swinging groove of bassist Owen Biddle, the verses of “Wake Up, Everybody” progressively “wake up” the people who can respond to the troubles of the world: “So much hatred, war, and poverty.” First, Melanie Fiona calls out to “wake up all the teachers,” who are to teach in a new way. The youngest, she croons, are our future, those whose world we are making today. Next, John Legend sounds the wake-up call for “all the doctors” to make the old people well. The latter are, he reminds us, the ones who have suffered a long road of this-worldly troubles, and they deserve to be cared for in their final years. Fiona then encourages all the builders to wake up and “build a new land.” She clearly casts a wide net here: the song implies we are all builders. Common picks up the theme, trying to “write a song as sweet as the Psalms.” He acknowledges the “earthquakes, wars, and rumors” but claims a powerful identity able to fund the call for renewed work for good. We are, Common pleads, “more than consumers, we’re more than shooters, more than looters.” Instead, we are “created in [God’s] image” so that God can “live through us.”

The album as a whole carries the urgency set by the title, Wake Up! Take the first track on the album, an intense cover of Baby Huey’s 1971 soulful lament “Hard Times.”[2] The picture of daily struggle is bleak: John Legend and Questlove tell us about hard times “sleepin’ on motel floors / knockin’ on my brother’s door / eatin’ Spam and Oreos and drinkin’ Thunderbird, baby.” Especially as a lament sung out of the African American experience, the song echoes the real-life struggles of people barely making it day to day. But in keeping with the empowerment of the times—both the activist era of the 60s and early 70s, as well as the swell of political participation in 2008—the final song of the album, “Shine,” strikes a hopeful note.[3] Granted, it is a song John Legend wrote for Davis Guggenheim’s film Superman, a film depicting the brokenness of America’s public school system. Yet Guggenheim’s film finds strength and hope in focusing in depth on several students, and Legend’s song picks this up. “So dark, but I see sparks, if we don’t snuff them out / We gotta let them flame / Let them speak their name / Let them reach up to the clouds / Let them shine.” The yearning of Legend’s voice and the soft intensity of the music echo the song’s words in reaching for hope. Together they offer a powerful combination of hope and urgency summing up the album as a whole.

Speaking about the genesis of the album, John Legend describes how inspiring it was to watch young people during the 2008 presidential election, many empowered for the first time to join the political process and thereby seek a better world. The album was recorded as a gift to these young people and attempts to connect the dots from the socially conscious soul music of the civil rights era to the new birth of activism today.[4] Rather than simply give in to the lowest common denominator of music stars seeking individual celebrity and enjoying conspicuous consumption, The Roots and Legend attempt to show a collaborative, communal approach to making music, a process less about their own egos and more about the world they fervently desire to live in.[5] Indeed, they go so far as to make the theological claim that in this shared work for good, God lives through us. The songs, the album as a whole, and the musicians behind it offer a bridge into this book, itself a call to “wake up” to the challenges facing the church in responding to the needs of the world God loves.

What Is Fieldwork in Theology?

The church, along with humanity and the earth as a whole, faces deep challenges we are unlikely to meet without just such collaboration, imagination, and passion. My own church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and churches of North America are emerging from a long history of empire. What some have called the “era of Christendom,” begun with Constantine’s vision at Milvian Bridge outside Rome in 330 CE, has dramatically ended. Admittedly, in some places, such as in the American South or in my own area of the country, the upper Midwest, the intoxicating aroma of Christendom’s opiate haze lingers, blinding people to the sharp contours of the church’s new relation to nation and creation. But across the North Atlantic nations, including Europe, North America, and their far-flung influences, especially Australia and New Zealand, First World Christians face a new reality. In response, there is a new vitality of mission. Christians are asking how they might “wake up” to the Spirit’s invitation to get involved in God’s love for the world and share in the passion of Jesus Christ in the midst of suffering, healing, reconciling, and doing justice. I will now turn to these themes regarding our social reality today. They provide the crucial context for and urgency of the central argument of this book.

However, before turning to describe this context more fully, I need to pause and state clearly my argument in the book. In doing so, I will briefly sketch the theoretical and theological territory covered in the chapters to follow, offering a view of the forest before we follow the trail through the trees.

Vitality of Christian faith today does not—and does—depend on us. Let me explain. Our capacity to live, breathe, and engage in our daily tasks, let alone our ability to find healing and new life in the midst of sin and brokenness, depend fully on the mercy and love of God who comes near to us in the passion of Jesus. Yet as we are met and marked by this Holy One, God’s Spirit animates our faithful attempt to be such mercy and love for all who suffer—people as well as the creation. Here the argument of this book comes into play. Turned from sin and joined to God’s mission of loving and healing the world, how do we as Christians, the body of Christ, understand the complexity of this beautiful and broken world? My argument is that the task of understanding requires a careful, disciplined craft for inquiry—a craft I call fieldwork in theology—if one seeks both to claim knowledge of divine action and to discern an appropriate human response. The social science of Pierre Bourdieu, in both its origins and influences, offers a way to do disciplined fieldwork in theology leading to clarity of understanding. This may serve the Spirit’s call for the church to get involved in what God is doing in the world.

Fieldwork in Theology: Williams

As I said above, one of the key challenges to take account of today is what some call the church’s post-Constantinian reality. In the Latin West, we have lived under the long shadow of Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christian faith and the subsequent Edict of Milan in February 313, which offered official acceptance of Christianity. The unity of church with the power of empire for over a thousand years created the circumstance of what I’ll call here the church’s “establishment” as the official religion, upheld both politically and culturally. In fact, Constantine was the one who initiated the long-held practice of treating Sunday as a sacred day of rest and legislating the closure of markets on that day as a result. The breakdown of Constantine’s legacy led to a series of disestablishments of the church in the West, including not only the separation of church and state but also the rising pluralism of belief—along with rising numbers of nonbelievers—adding a cultural disestablishment to the political.[6] We are now living, some have argued, in a secular age.[7]

Responses to a Post-Constantinian Era

Today, two main positions exist with respect to mission in response to this changing and in some places already changed circumstance known as the post-Constantinian era. One might construe the two positions as follows. In the first, the church withdraws from the world for the sake of forming a clear Christian identity over against the world. In the second, the church enacts an anarchic “giving away” of itself in and for the sake of the world. Obviously these are what Max Weber called “ideal types,” which work as analytic positions but don’t exist so neatly in lived form.[8] Still, they have lively voices arguing in their favor. Their trajectories directly impact our effort to develop a toolbox for mission, including the craft of fieldwork in theology.

Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon published the influential book Resident Aliens twenty-five years ago as of this writing. They intended the book to provoke a church in transition and change. Instead of simply offering strategic advice as so many texts on church health and growth had, they drew from deep biblical and theological wells to inform their project. They begin in the book by quoting the well-known Christ hymn in Philippians 2. The authors add a brief snippet of Philippians 3 and draw upon the idea of “our commonwealth” being “in heaven” to develop the idea of disciples of Jesus Christ as “resident aliens,” those who are in this world but whose true home is elsewhere.[9] This assertion is needed, they say, because the world has changed, and we are now no longer supported by the Constantinian compromise in which Christianity merged with the official powers of society.

Yet the center of the Christ hymn is a claim about the core of God’s work in the life, death, and resurrection of the rabbi of Nazareth: humility and self-emptying—or, drawing on a commonly used Greek term, kenōsis—in and for the sake of the world. Ironically, the rhetoric and substance of Resident Aliens continually turns on an embattled consolidation of identity and action over against the world. For instance, Hauerwas and Willimon write, “In fact, we are not called to help people. We’re called to follow Jesus.”[10] At a time when many formerly established churches, especially the broad mainstream evangelical and liberal Protestant denominations, find themselves losing cultural establishment, the rhetoric of the book has offered a path for defining a new identity of Christians as an embattled “minority” despite remaining the overwhelming majority in all regions of the United States.[11] Further, the book and its aftermath have sparked a focus on Christian formation, on worship and discipleship within the church, as itself an ethical witness to the world. As they put it, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[12] Among the many things that could be said about this view, it does not easily lend itself to a humble, grounded, curious approach toward understanding the other. There is no place, no need for a place, for the craft of fieldwork in theology.

Twenty years before Resident Aliens was published, Anglican theologian Donald MacKinnon gave the Gore Lecture at Westminster Abbey titled “Kenosis and Establishment.” This famous London church is the archetype of an establishment church: it has been the site of royal coronations (and often weddings and burials) since William the Conqueror on Christmas Day in 1066.[13] In his lecture, MacKinnon, who was at the time Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, presents a markedly different position from Resident Aliens. He favorably quotes “Father R. M. Benson, founder of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, that the conversion of Constantine was the greatest single disaster ever to overtake the Christian church.”[14] However, after expressing “heartfelt agreement,” he goes on to remark that the advent of the post-Constantinian age offers both unparalleled opportunity as well as profound testing to the church. MacKinnon then begins where Hauerwas and Willimon begin: with Philippians 2, with an accounting of the “costliness of the incarnate life to the absolute.”[15] Rather than highlighting the invitation to “resident alien” status, however, MacKinnon invites an inhabiting of discipleship shaped according to a radical self-emptying at the heart of the Philippians text. The term for such self-giving, kenōsis, functions for MacKinnon as a key idea “for the renewal of the church’s understanding of mission.”[16]

The rhetoric and substance of his argument do not underwrite a kind of Christian withdrawal by consolidating identity over against the world as in the case of Resident Aliens, but rather entail an acceptance of dispossession in and for the world. “To live as a Christian in the world today is necessarily to live an exposed life; it is to be stripped ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Series Editor’s Foreword James K. A. Smith
• Preface
• 1. Fieldwork in Theology: Waking Up to the World God Loves
• 2. Rigorous Self-Reflection: Bachelard, Science, and Sin
• 3. Embodied Perception: Merleau-Ponty and the Incarnate Body
• 4. Practical Logic: Bourdieu and the Social Art of Improvisation
• 5. Surrendering to the Other: Wacquant and Carnal Sociology
• Epilogue: Understanding as a Spiritual Exercise
• Index
• Notes
• Back Cover