doing theology in public
I’ve had conversations three days in a row now about doing theology in public. One conversation was about how theology is under threat of disappearing from public conversation. One (linked to the last book I wrote) was about whether it’s pulling your punches to talk about theology without demanding a response. (I think it isn’t, in fact.) And the third was about mission. The three conversations were quite different, but all of them concerned the kind of no-man’s-land arena of theological debate that is not directly attempting to convert people, but is worthwhile simply to keep the theological strand of public conversation lively, and, well – public!
My observation is that a lot of what is done under the heading of “mission” is actually rather ill-conceived, just splurting out what people inside a Christian ghetto think people outside it need to hear, without any proper attention to what the big wide world is actually like. Theology, in that kind of context, tends to get distorted: it tends to be either defensive or aggressive, or both. It seems to be something like a theological grenade just lobbed out there in the hopes that it will hit some ill-defined target. But it doesn’t seem to include listening, or conversation, or the willingness to allow “outsiders” to contribute to theology. And it nearly always ends up being bad theology.
But what a difference it might make if theology was simply put out there – with every expectation that people would find it interesting and contribute to it. That would mean letting go the power of interpretation to some extent, and trusting that theology is interesting enough to do its own work without us banging every point home, and letting go also of the assumption that only God-botherers have any contribution to make to theological development.
One of the objectives I had in writing my last book ( The Writing on The Wall ) was to put biblical knowledge into a broad cultural context. To what extent I was successful remains to be seen, but in the process of writing I tried to ensure that I was doing no preaching whatsoever; no devotional leaning, no insistence on the theological ideas being taken personally. just putting them there on the basis that there is something in Christian culture that still bears attending to, even for those who don’t subscribe to Christianity in a personal and devotional sense. I do genuinely believe there is value in that, and that there is an extent to which the beauty of theology and of the biblical narrative should be regarded as a gift, which doesn’t need to be forced home as a message, but will – presented generously and without pressure – do its own work.
I’m barely half way into working out how and why this public theology thing matters, and every time I get a step closer to working out what I think the goalposts have moved again. But in a way that convinces me even more that it matters – for nothing stands still, and if theology is to remain alive it needs to remain in the public sphere, not locked away in a museum. Theology is much more interesting done in a broad context; it saves it from the angels-on-a-pinhead stuff, and from disappearing down rabbit holes that are really not that important. But what I fear to some extent is that Christian theology is becoming more and more privatised, and the gap between those who are totally inside it and totally alienated from it is widening. And we really shouldn’t let that happen.
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
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Very good post. By the way, speaking naturally just IMvHO, quite after close observation over time a lot of bibliobloggers, apologists and theologians who blog all seem far more interested in only talking with each other, or more bluntly, far more interested in keeping their areas exclusive clubs, rather than in talking with * the general public. This doesn’t just go for ‘experts’; tribalism, clique- and claque-building are of course well-known everywhere.
This is a problem that affects a good many groups, from the myriad disciplines of science and medicine, to atheists and humanists. Mission, after all, is hardly exclusive to believers.
Culture trumps strategy. If you have a culture which encourages active interparticipation and discourse (rather than mere preaching), and if you simply “keep the conversation going” when times are a wee bit hard, you will find people will out of their own initiative help your own efforts when a sudden spark gets discussion really going and popular. Building the culture that promotes that is hard work, but beats in the end all artificial strategies to promote points of view.
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* Of course, quite a few are more than happy to talk at the general public. Giving orders to others is definitely some people’s idea of heaven.
thanks Gurdur – and for our many excellent conversations, virtual and face to face!
If doing theology is supposed to take us out of our comfort-zone, I’d like to suggest that many members of the English Defence League are doing theology by examining how different religions add to or detract from the national good.
I think if one’s going to do it, the best way is just to let it be part of the natural flow of conversation. So (real example from yesterday, with one current and one former Robinson porter, as it happens) if someone asks when Twelfth Night is, enter into a discussion about Vigil Masses and Gregorian/Julian calendar systems (only if they are walking encyclopedias, obviously!) They weren’t religious, but that didn’t matter for the conversation (which also had discussion of many distilleries, languages, places to visit — or not — and aircraft types.)
And sometimes you *can* convert people in pubs. But I think they have to be wanting to be converted before that’s likely to work.
I am trying to bridge this gap in my own parish. We are trying to tell the story of the ancient parish church in the context of the story of the community which it has served for the last 1000 years. People from the village are keen to get involved – churchgoing and non-churchgoing alike. The story of the church is unintelligible without reference to the story of the community itself which is reflected in the stones themselves. By the same token the story of the community cannot be understood without reference to the Christian story which accounts for the presence of the village in the first place. At the very least, I hope the project will demonstrate that we are all shaped by a Christian heritage, which is not the monopoly of the worshipping community.
Mark that sounds fantastic! Good luck with your project.
I was involved once in a Church where the tower needed thousands of pounds of work on it and was threatened with closure. The Vicar I worked with got the whole village involved in it – like you by re-connecting the church to the story of the community – and not only did the entire village save the tower, the church congregation doubled in numbers too as people re-discovered its relevance for them. There was no “mission” in the conventional sense, but once the Church and the community were re-connected the rest just happened naturally.