Some Thoughts on Doing Theology in Public

by John R. Bowlin, Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Associate Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life

There is a lot of spirited talk these days about public theology, about what it might mean to express our faith in a public setting, and this evening I want to explore some of that talk by considering two senses of the phrase that have appeared in recent scholarly reflection on the Christian moral life. In the first sense, “public theology” refers to the fact that the church is itself a public realm, a society of some sort, which in turn compels us to ask what kind of society it might be and what effects its social forms might have on the souls of its inhabitants. Here the matter regards the moral formation of Christians in the intermediate realm that the church now occupies between oikos and polis. In the second sense, the phrase “public theology” refers to the fact that theological commitments are quite often expressed in public, more often than not, in social settings outside of the church: in friendships, in clubs, on the job, and in the civic realm. Here there is no assumption that the theological commitments expressed will be shared in common by all who share a common society, and here the questions posed typically regard matters of legitimacy. Can this or that theological utterance be legitimately expressed in this or that public setting? Is its theological content too blatant or too subtle given the character, aims, and norms of propriety of the society in question? It’s this latter understanding of “public theology” that I want to consider briefly this evening, and I want to suggest that these worries about legitimacy are in fact misguided. Shared by both secular and theological critics alike, they don’t get us to the real problems posed by the public expression of theological commitment, not in our day, not in the political societies of Europe and North America, or so it seems to me. What might? Well, let me suggest that the contours of at least one such problem comes into view once we unite Aquinas’s reflections on the natural persistence of religion with the well-known facts of Christian disestablishment. What emerges is a problem on the horizon, one that will come into view with the next religious establishment.

Now, I admit that it might seem somewhat odd for a newly appointed professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life to seek inspiration from a 13th century theologian. As many of you know, the Reformers had few kind words for Friar Thomas, but bear with me. I will eventually work my way to Kuyper and Barth, and besides, this request for your endurance prefigures one possible response to one obvious problem posed by the public expression of theological commitment. If we Christians are to give our faith public voice in this age, then we will need to give and receive forbearance, the gift of love that, according to St. Paul, God extends to both Israel and the church and that Christians must provide to both Jews and Gentiles. But this is to get ahead of my story; let me return to the beginning. 

Consider, first, the well-known and much discussed position associated with the late John Rawls. I say “associated” because years of qualifications and provisos may have divorced his own settle opinion from the position associated with his name. But no matter; I’ll leave that question for the exegetes. In broad outline, the view is clear enough. When citizens of a liberal democracy consider questions that pertain to constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice, they should be prepared to argue for their conclusions on appeal to reasons that all reasonable persons are prepared to endorse. By these lights, social cooperation can be secured and fair treatment established only as the citizens of a free society agree to identify discursive principles and practical norms that all consider reasonable, to abide by those principles and norms whenever they take up the most pressing public matters, and to refer to them whenever they are asked to justify what they say and do. Local norms and parochial commitments might encourage participation in the public realm and reflection on important matters, but once engaged in public debate and once confronted with citizens from other locales, all must be willing to put home truths aside and rely on principles and norms that all might share. Parochial commitments need not be abandoned, only shelved. At the very least they cannot enter public reasoning in any essential way. As the friends of this view see it, the citizens of a rightly ordered society will proceed in precisely this manner. If we desire a society of this sort, then we ought to follow their lead, or so these friends insist. 

But notice what this means. If, in the end, citizens can engage each other as just and reasonable persons only as they proceed in public with the commitments they share, then in societies like ours—societies divided by disagreement about first and last things—many will have to restrain themselves and forsake appeal to those theological commitments that quite often motivate them to speak and act and reason as they do. Those who refuse to exercise this kind of linguistic self-policing, who find that they cannot give their reasons for this or that proposal without noting its theological causes and warrants, will find themselves cast among the unjust and the irrational. If, stubborn and forthright, they proceed nevertheless, they might also be lumped among the ill mannered. As Richard Rorty, also of blessed memory, would have it, those who make public appeal to religious reasons deserve the awkward silence and gapping looks that we typically reserve for those who speak of private matters in public settings.  

So goes a well-known complaint with theology that goes public. Unjust, irrational, and ill mannered, it can hardly be legitimate, or so we are encouraged to conclude.  But the complaint is misplaced. Jeff Stout has argued, convincingly I think, that as a description of what actually goes on in societies like ours, this account of theology and public reason is a bad one. It can’t accommodate the facts on the ground, where reasons traded back and forth in democratic debate about the most important matters frequently contain theological content that is neither shared in common, nor consistent with what any reasonable person would accept (whatever that might mean), nor accidental to what is actually said or proposed. So too, this complaint runs afoul of our own catalogue of exemplary democratic discourses. It can’t explain the admiration we feel for the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., the journalism of Dorothy Day, and the second inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln. In each of these examples, we find words loaded with theological content and images rich in biblical referents, and yet few of us can imagine wishing that content away or preferring images drained of sacred substance. Indeed, to me at least, it seems unlikely that Lincoln, King, and Day could defend their conclusions about basic matters of justice while at the same time shelving their theological commitments. By the same token, it is difficult to conclude that their resort to religious reasons made these men and women irrational or their remarks unjust. Of course, in their own day, much of what they said brought certain conversations to a screeching halt, and some contemporaries certainly considered their remarks ill mannered. King penned Why We Can’t Wait in response to precisely this charge from Birmingham’s white clergy. Still, from our vantage point, this disruptive character of their words only increases our admiration. Certain dominant conversations need to be stopped and then restarted in other directions, and often the best way to do this is to locate the topic discussed—be it slavery, racism, or war—in theology’s broad horizon of creation, fall, and redemption. 

Now consider a version of this worry about legitimacy that emerges from theology’s own quarters. On this rendering, trouble accompanies theology that goes public, not because the commitments expressed run afoul of the principles of public reason, whatever they might be, but rather because Christians will be tempted to trim their convictions in order to get a hearing. In the rough and tumble of democratic debate, a proposal wins the day only as a majority concedes its warrants. But this means that Christians will be tempted to defend warrants that a majority can concede, and quite often this will demand that they keep their own commitments in check.  Theologically robust versions of their views will only offend and thus concessions to the secular consensus will have to be made. Christians will have to accept standards of reasonableness and principles of justice that are not their own, recognize moral exemplars other than saints and martyrs, and assume accounts of the way things are that give little purchase to the reign of Christ. In short, they will have to domesticate the gospel, compromise its prophetic substance, and lose themselves in the world outside of the church. 

So goes another well-known complaint with theology that goes public, a complaint associated most prominently with the recent work of Stan Hauerwas and John Milbank. By these lights, when Christians speak in public they risk losing a robust sense of their own moral identity. Above all, they will be tempted to forsake Christian virtues for their secular semblances, the real article for mere vice in virtue’s clothing, true courage and genuine justice for rank imposters. If there is a fear that motivates this complaint, it’s that the secular defiles, that virtues cultivated outside of the church, while seductive, are always pretenders, just as secular reason, while frequently enchanting, is always false, always a fraud. If there is a solution to this fear, it is that Christians must do all that they can to retain their own unique identity. They must set themselves apart, resisting the wiles of secular reason and inoculating themselves against the sources of secular virtue. If, in order to do this, they must retreat from civic life, with its temptation to concede and compromise, then so be it. 

But again, this complaint is misplaced and like the one before it neither gets the facts right nor gives an adequate account of our normative commitments. On the one hand, the sharp distinction it assumes between a secular public realm and a church set apart is false. These have never been radically separate societies, but always and everywhere porous and mutually absorbent. Equally misleading is the distinction between selves formed by secular narratives and exemplars and those formed by the gospel and the saints alone. As the examples of King, Day, and Lincoln indicate, there is more church in the world and more world in the church than is credited by these sharp distinctions. The boundaries are fuzzier than that.  On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, it is not at all clear that a sharp and obvious distinction of this sort is desirable or that it sits comfortably with everything else that we Christians tend to believe and have traditionally asserted. As Jennifer Herdt points out in a forthcoming book that explores the sources of Christian anxiety about the semblances of virtue, this opposition between a secular public realm and a church set apart, like the divide between pagan and Christian virtue, assumes a competitive account of divine and human agency, a rivalry between nature and grace. While prominent at various times in church history and defended in various theological circles, this competition and this rivalry threaten what we typically assert about God’s sovereign rule over all things created, even human agency, even secular virtue. Nor does it line up well with what we have confessed about the moral and spiritual ambiguity of human life as we find it in the time between the ascension and the parousia. Augustine calls this time the saeculum, the secular age, by which he means—not an time when the churches retreat and the gospel goes quiet, but rather—an age when the sacred significance of events is difficult to make out, when the societies we happen to inhabit and the selves we happen to have possess porous boundaries, when each is subject to a variety of external influences, and when, as a result, each bears complex identities.  This complexity and ambiguity applies to Christian churches, to Christian selves, and to the broader societies that we Christians inhabit. As a fact about the world that abides between ascension and parousia, it is not to be denied. But perhaps more importantly, it is not to be lamented. Only porous selves and societies can be transformed from without, and we proceed with the assurance that God’s Holy Spirit will do precisely that, redeeming our fallen humanity and recreating our broken lives. So redeemed and recreated human beings are fitted to the divine life for which we were made and for which by grace we yearn. 

Where then does this leave us? If the problem with theology that goes public in a liberal democracy is neither its conflict with the so-called principles of public reason, nor its concession to secularity, then what is the problem? 

Well, consider what Aquinas says about the persistence of religion (ST II-II.81). By religion he means the prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonial rights of a people, typically a people who share a political community. These acts of worship are offered in honor of the power or powers considered divine, and honor is due because these powers care for the community that gives worship, or so its inhabitants believe. Worship is due repeatedly, with the repetition that typically distinguishes ceremonial rites, because the gifts provided from above exceed in measure and significance what can be offered in return from below. Thus to worship is to know that one has a debt that cannot be repaid with the honor and gratitude that one nevertheless provides again and again. So described, religion falls under justice, and a just community will be a worshipping community precisely because it recognizes its dependence on powers that transcend it. By the same token, a worshipping community will be one that can claim authority for its own affairs. It can assert that its temporal rule stands in right relation to those powers that rule eternally, and as such, it can insist that its laws be obeyed and its periodic resort to violence accepted.

Aquinas thinks this propensity to recognize dependence, offer worship in return, and claim legitimacy as a result is commonplace. It comes packaged with our humanity (ST II-II.81.2.3), and for Aquinas the point is strictly ethnographic. Look around, he seems to say, and you will find human beings everywhere and always offering prayers and sacrifices to the powers that are thought to govern all things. The details of that worship will, of course, vary considerably. The diversity of religious custom and practice is there for all to see. Still, behind this diversity lies a common sense of our dependence, a common need to align our political affairs with divine power, and a common desire to justify the violence that invariably comes packaged with temporal rule. When pressed for an example of this propensity, he twice refers to the story in I Samuel 8, where Israel asks for a king. The reason given is that they want to be like the nations, which Aquinas takes to be an expression of the ordinary desire to link worship and rule. 

Of course, Aquinas thinks that, diversity aside, only Christian conviction tracks the truth about the power who creates, sustains, and redeems all things, and thus only Christians manage to offer right worship. All other religions fall short; all other peoples flirt with injustice. It’s a stern and exclusivist view, no doubt, and yet for my purposes what matters is the claim about human beings, politics, and religion. If Aquinas is right—and I’m inclined to think that he is—then, for the most part, we should expect to find political communities everywhere and always recognizing transcendent powers, offering worship, and legitimating their affairs through these acts. It’s a claim that those of us who are Americans are ill disposed to concede, largely because we tend to think that the constitutional prohibition against an established religion rules out the possibility that a tacit religious establishment might accompany an established political regime. But again, if Aquinas is right, then regardless of what the first amendment says, every American political establishment comes packaged with an established piety of some sort, legitimating its affairs and justifying its rule. Historians of American religion and politics tend to agree, and most insist that the last de facto American political establishment—the one that emerged at the end of World War II and continued across the decades of the Cold War—came packaged with the prayers, devotions, and ceremonial rites of the mainline Protestant churches. And of course, as everyone knows, this political establishment collapsed in the closing decades of the 20th century, an event that was followed quickly in turn by the demise of its attendant Protestant establishment.

Now, at this point, some of you are probably thinking that this is old news, and I suppose it is, and yet if Aquinas is right about the persistence of established religion, then we should expect this age of religious disestablishment to pass with the coming of the next American political establishment. We may have to wait a while, of course—divided as we are into Red State and Blue, horns locked in culture war battles of various kinds, and subject to a Supreme Court perpetually split 5 to 4 on decisions that reverse previous 5 to 4 decisions—and yet a new political establishment will eventually emerge and a new established piety will almost certainly come in its wake. 

It’s at this moment, after thinking along these lines, that a problem with theology that goes public comes into view.

If it is in fact difficult to image a political society without an established piety that unites powers beyond with affairs below, then one wonders which piety will play that roll in the next American political establishment. If I had to guess, I wouldn’t pick mainline Protestantism. Indeed, I wouldn’t pick any particular variety of Christianity at all. I’m speculating of course, but it’s precisely this prospect that poses a problem for Christians who hope to give public expression to the faith they confess. Many speak of the advantages of post-Christendom, of the benefits that the Protestant churches enjoy now free of the burdens of establishment, but I suspect that these perks come precisely because we live in an age of disestablishment and pluralism; an age when no coherent politics holds sway, when no piety in particular legitimates our common life, and when the public square is a cacophony of competing voices, competing pieties. Change the facts on the ground, imagine the establishment of some other politics and some other piety, and I suspect that the advantages of post-Christendom will be harder to recognize. Indeed, as the Lukan story of Paul’s ministry makes plain, it is rarely easy and often quite dangerous to speak the substance of our faith in a public square dominated by the ceremonial rites and court theologians of some other religion.

This, I take it, is the coming problem of public theology. The question is this: how will Christians find a public theological voice in an age when some other piety legitimates our political affairs? How will we speak in a public square occupied by the prayers and sacrifices of some other god? What will we say? What moral posture will we take? 

I have no hip pocket answer to these questions, but I do have sources of inspiration. Surely those of us in the West should look beyond the borders of what was once Christendom, to the example and experience of those brothers and sisters in Christ who live in public squares long dominated by pieties not their own. Here, we have much to learn. 

So too, we should look to European social thought, Protestant and Catholic, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What unites figures as diverse as Abraham Kuyper and Pope Leo the XIII is the recognition that European Christendom perished in the revolutions of the 1840’s, that a secular piety of autonomy now legitimates the nation-states of Europe and occupies their public squares, and that the churches must find a public voice nevertheless. Both men insisted that Christians speak without cutting theological corners, without dumbing down their commitments, and yet without the expectation that Christianity will function as an established religion. The accents are no doubt different, and yet Kuyper’s talk of common grace and sphere sovereignty has much in common with Leo’s emphasis on natural law and subsidiarity. Both made use of these notions in order to find a way to assert the rule of Christ over all things but without making that assertion a source of legitimacy for any particular political establishment. At the same time, both men found a way to make peace with the new political establishments of Europe, with the new emphasis upon individual rights and democratic freedoms. Both found much to admire in these political arrangements, much that was compatible with the gospel. Yet in the end, both accepted a dissenting role for the churches. Both recognized that at times Christians must speak boldly and make a nuisance of themselves, above all when the worship of some other god or the devotions of some other piety legitimates injustice inflicted upon the weak by those who rule.

And finally, I suggest that we find inspiration in the Apostle Paul’s reflections on God’s forbearance, reflections that were taken up by Aquinas in his treatise on charity and by Barth in his excursus on divine patience. As Paul sees it, it is precisely God’s willingness of bear our sins, to endure our difference, and thus to wait upon our repentance that both generates and sustains God’s covenant with humanity, first with the Jews and now also with the Gentiles. When differences divide the church, when the words and deeds of some are trespasses and offenses in the eyes of others, then, as St. Paul tells the Galatians, we fulfill the law of Christ—not only as we seek forgiveness for our own misdeeds and uncharitable judgments—but also as we bear the burdens of those who trespass and offend (Gal. 6.1-5). To the church in Rome, he predicts that this forbearance will come, this patient love will emerge, only as the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells in their company (Rom. 8.9-11; 15.13).

It is, I think, a perfect virtue for the times we find ourselves in and for those soon to come, both within the church and beyond its walls. Of course, deep down, most of us resist the hard demands of forbearance. The reasons are many, but surely first among them is our fear that the societies we love, be they political or ecclesiastical, will be transformed by the differences we forbear. None of us wants our church or our politics shaped by commitments and practices that, by our lights, trespass and offend, and yet it is precisely this possibility that comes with the call to forbearance. Indeed, by grace, it is this possibility that the truly forbearant manage well, with the ease that distinguishes true virtue. 

So, forbearing those differences that ought to be endured in a society established by some other piety and making a nuisance of ourselves when that piety justifies injustice—these, I suspect, are two of the tasks before us as we give voice to our faith in public. Let us raise that voice together, trusting in God’s promise to be present when we speak God’s word, and let us proceed this year, in this place, speaking to each other and to the world, with a confidence born of that promise.