Symposium: The Politics of Discipleship - Part 2

Today I'm glad to post a second response to Graham Ward's Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens.  This reflection comes from Luke Bretherton, a theologian, organizer, and activist who is Senior Lecturer in Theology at King's College London.  Luke is the author of two important books: Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Ashgate, 2006) and most recently, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Blackwell, 2010)--a book that deserves a lot of attention from both scholars and practitioners. 

In addition to engaging the theoretical issues at hand, Bretherton begins to broach concrete questions of practice and strategy.  Here's a slice of his response:

As an archaic tradition Christianity also keeps in play fundamental questions about what human life is for.  And religions do this not just at an abstract level of intellectual debate.  They do this by creating alternative institutions, forging new practices, and sustaining different regimes of life.  So for example, in debates about euthanasia and what is a good death, hospices present an alternative vision of what the good death consists of to that embodied by, on the one hand, euthanasia and on the other, technologically driven interventions that refuse to let a patient die.  We may not like the alternative religious groups present us with, but by presenting liberal polities with contradictions religious groups interrupt the bypassing of public, political deliberation through legal procedures, managerial techniques or leaving it all up to the market to decide: i.e. they are a primary cure for depoliticisation.  They open up a space for the political by making a demand for genuine deliberation about what constitutes the common good.  So far from faith and citizenship being in conflict, religious traditions, especially in poor urban contexts most acutely affected by processes of commodification (e.g. the selling off of school playing fields) and instrumentalisation (e.g. the co-opting religious groups to deliver social welfare) are the bearers of moral notions of the person that re-present to modern liberal polities questions about the limits of money, the limits of the state and the importance of faithful, committed and mutually responsible social relationships.

A central focus of Ward’s work is the urban and urban politics is a vital context for the recreation of politicalness.  Within urban spaces a common life has to be negotiated and common goods protected by multiple faith traditions and those of little or no faith.  And while there are certain things that must be done alone – for example, determining how to order the worship and leadership structures of a particular tradition – there some things religious groups must do together or lose the ability to do at all.  Bringing accountability to the market and the state, enabling a genuinely political space and protecting the possibility not of social cohesion but of fully social relationships are just such activities.

So the question arises as to what kind of civic practices enable such common action.  I propose three: the first is listening (which ties in with and draws out Ward’s account of prayer); the second is a commitment to place; and the third is building institutions.  The latter proposals enhance and directly address Ward’s analysis of the postmodern City as a site of contestation and flows by pointing to the kind of practices that can aid the church in faithfully negotiating such a space.

To continue reading, download Bretherton's reflections (pdf), and be sure to contribute your questions, comments, and criticisms as part of the conversation.  And watch for Graham Ward's response to both papers next week.

Comments

[adhunt]

To be sure this is a constructive piece of political theology, unfortunately to me it only touches Ward's book tangentially by way of an initial dismissal as not "practical enough" which leaves him free to write an entire essay that left me still ignorant about anything Ward is actually saying.

I kept looking for at least a summary of Wards arguments, unfortunately there is next to nothing about him in the whole essay.

[Josh Rowley]

"Is it a theology that has any use for real people and their performances of church in the contemporary context?"

This statement gets at one of my main criticisms of the book--it's contextual theology that isn't contextualized for "real people."

adhunt-I've summarized many of Ward's arguments on my blog.

[adhunt]

Thanks Josh. Thanks also for stopping by my site. I will read your review soon. Whether or not the book connects with "real people" is certainly acceptable to bring up as a critique; I guess I'm just disappointed that two essays into this "Symposium" and I don't have a clue as to the main arguments Ward makes.

[James K.A. Smith]

I'm not sure we were hoping this particular symposium would restate the argument of the book. It grew out of a symposium at the American Academy of Religion, where the author was responding, and so Ward didn't need to hear the book's argument rehearsed. So both Kuipers and Bretherton were engaging the book as a catalyst to get into some other issues. (Is it being coy to suggest those looking for Ward's main arguments might, well, read the book?)

[adhunt]

Don't get me wrong, I totally plan on it. I was just comparing it in my mind to the Westphal Symposium which did both.

[Hill]

Is it being coy to wonder why participation in this symposium has been basically nonexistent?

[James K.A. Smith]

Hill: so is it because we haven't summarized the argument of the book? If so, I'd be glad to know of that.

We tried something a little different with this one, so it's a learning experience. But if this sort of symposium isn't conducive to conversation, I'm glad to learn that for the future--though perhaps people might still value this sort more as "book reviews" of a sort.

[Hill]

I think that's a big part of it. Here are my two cents (possibly worth quite less than that). I think the number of people who have read a book (especially a new one) and found there way to a blog having a symposium on it and feel comfortable commenting becomes quite small. I have really enjoyed many of the symposia here, either as a lurker or participant, and in some of those cases, I hadn't even read the book. This format and the articles so far, provide almost no handhold whatsoever to engaging the book unless one has already thoroughly read and meditated on it. In an ideal world, blog book symposia would be overflowing with these sorts of people, but in reality they hardly exist at all.

[Hill]

I managed to lose the majority of my last comment. Long story short, I think the best part of these symposia is the discussion, and even uninformed comments lead to good discussion as the more knowledgeable commenters correct and modify them. Thus the uninformed learn and the informed hone their position through translation and potentially unexpected insights from the (comparatively) ignorant. So even if brief summaries tend to invite uninformed commentary, so long as the commentary is in good faith, good things frequently emerge.

I'm personally very interested in the book and have been checking the site here when I heard about the impending symposium, but having not yet read it, I find it very difficult to engage with it in the present format. I think it is unrealistic to expect anything like a critical mass of people to emerge for something like this that have all read the book, especially a book this new. That doesn't mean that it's hopeless, just that these things depend on interested but somewhat uninformed parties in order to function. As a sidenote, I found the long article format linked to a pdf file on another page to be asking a lot of the average attention span of the blogosphere. I don't mean to sound cynical, but I think something more concise than AAR length presentations probably works better for this venue.

I think the papers are useful and I will revisit them once I get a chance to read the book (it's very high on my list). I just don't think it is conducive to the sorts of discussions one typically associates with (the best of) blog book symposia.

[James K.A. Smith]

This feedback is really helpful, Hill. I really appreciate you taking the time to articulate that. It's something we'll definitely keep in mind as we plan for the future. I'm still not sure what the blogosphere is "for," so it's helpful to get a sense of what doesn't work.

[Luke Bretherton]

Just to say sorry for not providing a summary of the book but by way of explanation and to re-iterate what Jamie has said already, Ron and I were asked to 'respond' not 'review' the book. But I can quite see the need for such a review in this context. Thankfully, as already mentioned on a previous post, for those wanting an extensive overview of the book one is given by Josh Rowly on his blog - www.postyesterdaychurch.blogspot.com.

[Andrew Brower Latz]

I think Bretherton's response was superb. His criticisms of Ward were spot on; I had exactly the same thoughts when I read the book. Luke, is there a reason in your new book you don't use the work of Christopher Insole? Thanks again for the contribution.

[Luke Bretherton]

Andrew, many thanks for your comments. I do engage with Chris's work albeit briefly in my new book. It is in a rather long footnote where I take issue with what I take to be his under realized eschatology (at the risk of being self-referential it is in ch 1 - endnote 85). Although in general I think his work is really helpful, especially his more nuanced reading of Rawls.