Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation

42-57 Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 139 (March 2011) Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation A Proposal for Rethinking Public Theology's "Public" in South Africa Stephen W. Martin ABSTRACT Using contemporary retrievals ofAugustinian theology, this article explores the possibility of a public theology based on a liturgically-formed sacramental imagination wherein ordinary materials and people are transformed into the extraordinary and eschatological. In the first section, it puts forth a concept of public that reflects such an imagination, and uses it both to suggest a more robustly theological view of public, while criticizing secular, sociological imaginings of public. However, this runs ashore on the empirical experience in South Africa of liturgies that legitimate non-transforming views both of public and church. Indeed, both liturgy (liturgies) and public (publics) are ubiquitous and contested. One finds the church multiply-implicated in its localities. But this signals the very place where the public theology imagined in thefirstsection begins: a transformed materiality. Thefinalsection calls for "ethnographic ecclesiologies" to trace this transformed materiality, the "coal face" where this renewed public theology begins. The Claim: Liturgy, Public and Sacramental Imagination As [members of St John's Apostolic Faith Mission Church] entered the liminal period created byritualand reflected in the social reality of their lives, they participated in a drama that transformed categories of domination imposed by the macro-structure into micro-level factors of existence that were life-enhancing This transformative drama used common but essential elements: water, candles, and colored fabric that protected members' bodies, and a Eucharist that protected their spiritual lives.1 I start with a claim: a Christian sacramental imagination2 is produced and Linda E. Thomas, "Survival and Resistance in an African Indigenous Church," Journal of Theologyfor Southern Africa, no. 98 (July 1997): 15. What I write in the following paragraph about the eucharist could be expanded to include these other "ordinary things". The terms "imagination" and "imaginary" are used here in the sense of "seeing [and acting] as if, and to indicate "what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society." Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginarles, Public Planet Books (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 2. Ivor Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist?: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Identity of the People (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 12 and Bettina von Lieres and Steven Robins, Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 4 3 shaped in the way simple ritual acts ("taking", "blessing", "breaking", "sharing") involving ordinary things (bread, wine, and water) and done through the agency of ordinary people (the gathered community called "church") in response to the command of Christ (1 Cor 11:23-26), transfigures these ordinary things, making them extraordinary (the body and blood of Christ). As they participate in these acts, the people are themselves transfigured into something extraordinary (the body of Christ, the ekklesia of God). And the place where this action happens is also transformed into the meeting place of heaven and earth, the navel of the world, the temple of the living God. In short, the gathering of people to perform these actions, whether it be in a majestic cathedral, a rented schoolroom, or a humble squatter shack, perform the city of God in the midst of the city of this world, creating a radically new public. This new public anticipates the eschatological shape of humanity, the fulfillment of the human calling. There is perhaps no better adjective than "public" to place beside "theology". But what of "public theology" as a disciplined reflection on the meaning of this new people (public) for a world burdened by sin, but under the promise of redemption?3 In modern usage, "public" can refer to a space, an amenity or amenities, or a group. Public space is space that is accessible to all citizens (a garden, a park, a library), as opposed to private space, which is accessible only to a few (or to one), usually its "owners". When something is called "public" in this sense, it can appropriately be claimed as "ours", belonging to a people collectively A service or amenity may be called "public", when it is funded by taxpayers, as in a public broadcaster.4 Such a thing is supposed to represent the interests of the whole citizenry, apart from "private" commercial or other interests. In recent history, however, the latter example (of a public broadcaster) actually shows the ascendency of non-public interests: both the Canadian and South African Broadcasting Corporations rely on advertisements to supplement their funding, and air programs originally created 3 4 "Democracy and Citizenship," in New South African Keywords, ed. Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins (Johannesburg: Jacana; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 47 speak of the "democratic imaginary" generated by the 1994 South African elections. In a recent article, I've tried, with specific reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to show how "social imaginary" can be used both of nation and church as they engage practices that transform them into social bodies. Stephen W. Martin, "Civic Sacrament and Social Imaginaries in Transition: The Case of the Churches and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission," Political Theology, forthcoming (2011). For what follows, compare the typology in Dirkie Smit, "What Does 'Public' Mean? Questions with a View to Public Theology," in Christian in Public: Aims, Methodologies and Issues in Public Theology, ed. Len Hansen, Beyers Naude Centre Series on Public Theology (Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University Press, 2007), 11-46. But note the United States, where public broadcasting is privately funded, though its charitable status means that the funders get tax exemptionsfromgovernment. For more on the ambiguities of the term, see Smit, "What Does 'Public' Mean?" 29-31. 44 Martin for private networks. Their "publicness" is in this case rethought in economic terms, of something "not-for-profit". Etymologically, the word "public" is related to the Latin poplicus, or "(a) people" as a collective entity defined, in the case of modern societies, by social contract and governed by law to which they consent. The contrast of public in this sense is again with "private", which exists on the other side of the distinction between "mine" and "thine" (i.e. where "mine" is not "thine"). It is here, in the realm of the "personal", where "religion" finds its home. Religion belongs to persons, not communities. The peace of the secular is policed by defining religion as a set of idiosyncratic convictions,5 and then keeping those convictions out of public view. More benign secular views of the public speak of the "invisible sources" of public morality, usually under the rubric of "values". All these ideas present "public" as essentially static, and usually mapped and managed bureaucratically. They rely on descriptions deriving from modernist sociology, and assume what John Milbank has called "simple space", that flattenedout idea of the social that makes an autonomous "secular" possible.6 Overlapping spaces and multiple publics, where belonging is complex and boundaries contested, make moderns deeply uncomfortable. The fear is of a loyalty beyond the reach of the secular city, especially if that loyalty is subject to canons other than those of instrumental reason.7 Though liberals understand that in order to maintain the peace personal values must be permitted, truth is public and asserts itself against the mere opinion of private persons and particular communities. Both Christian theology and the church are entrenched in a private realm of values and opinions—unless they can bridge to the public through accommodating their discourse to the canons of rationality. But in so doing, they not only accommodate to a non-theological understanding of public, they also spiritualize their own robust, embodied sacramental life. Moreover, they leave the shaping of their bodily desires to other forces. 5 6 7 Graham Ward, True Religion, Blackwell Manifestos (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 2003) and William T. Cavanaugh, "God is not Religious," in God is Not: Religious, Nice, 'One of Us, 'an American, a Capitalist, ed. D. Brent Laytham (Grand Rapids.: Brazos Press, 2004), 97-115 have helpfully traced the transformation of the term "religion" from its classical roots (re + legere, to re-bind) connoting practices which enable connection on horizontal and vertical axes to its modern iteration as a set of idiosyncratic, personal beliefs. John Milbank, "On Complex Space," in The Word Made Strange (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 26892. There is a formal analogy to this in so-called "Christian" South Africa (pre-1994). What did African nationalism have in common with die Rooi gevaar, die Romse gevaar, and die Islamse gevaar! All charted their ultimate loyalties to a reference point outside the space of South Africa. See my Faith Negotiating Loyalties: Exploring South African Christianity Through a Reading of the Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), 86-87. Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 4 5 But there have been other ways of configuring space and constructing publics. Consider this definition: a people (public) is "a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love."8 This definition understands the construction of a public as active and ongoing, rather than passive and settled, and configured by a particular dynamic of ordered passions. Here there is no "naked public square" void of particular views,9 which individuals enter only by divesting themselves of their loves. Augustine's public reflects the Pauline vision of a community, gathered around a common confession ("Jesus is Lord") that shares gifts material and spiritual (see 1 Cor 10:16-17; 12:4-31; Rom 12:3-13). The creation of this social body through liturgical ordering contests other ways of making bodies politic.10 Indeed, William Cavanaugh suggests that an Augustinian "public" is more like a public performance of an imagined social reality, which contests settled constructions of the public realm.11 His strong claim is that what passes for "public" in modernity is actually false from a theological point of view, since a modern "public" rests on a disruption of the particular loves of people by the market or the state, resulting in disordered loves, fragmented selves, and dysfunctional communities. There is no authentic or lasting public in modernity because there is no agreement as to common objects of love which could transform the "multitude" into a "people". The true public is the destiny of human community, which is anticipated in the order ofthat Body which presents itself to God as a living sacrifice, and orders its common life according to love of God and neighbour (Rom 12:1-15:13).12 8 City of God xix. 24, as translated by Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, 100-1625 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 162. 9 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984). 10 Sylvia C. Keesmaat, "If Your Enemy is Hungry: Love and Subversive Politics in Romans 12 & 13," in Character Ethics and the New Testament: Moral Dimensions of Scripture, ed. Robert L. Brawley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 141-58. 11 William T. Cavanaugh, "From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space," Political Theology 1, no. 3 (2006): 299-321. 12 For this reading of Book xix of The City of God, which sees the secular public as parody of the true public, see William T. Cavanaugh, "The City: Beyond Secular Parodies," in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 182-200. I'm inclined to disagree with this radical reading of de Civitate Dei, if only because Augustine's concern is to establish that there is in fact a public (called "the city of this world") which, while malformed by cupiditas, nevertheless can be analysed theologically in terms of the (false) end toward which it is oriented. This is why Augustine rejects Scipio 's definition earlier in Book xix, which if followed would lead to the conclusion that Rome never was a public. 46 Martin I want to argue that a genuinely theological public theology begins from Augustine's definition. This is in contrast to a public theology that begins sociologically by assuming the mapping of space given within the city of this world.13 Such a mapping accepts the church's proper "place" as in the realm of the private, the particular, the socially irrelevant. The language of the church is "made public" (and therefore socially relevant) through the adoption of a discourse deemed "proper" to what is shared across particularities.14 Charles Mathewes' indictment is apposite: "Typically, public theologies are self-destructively accommodationist: they let the 'larger' secular world's self-understanding set the terms, and then ask how religious faith contributes to the purposes of public life, so understood."15 Hence this kind of public theology often takes the form of policy suggestions to government, or interpretations of government policy to churches. It may also seek to communicate the importance of "values" that undergird healthy social and political life, and to advocate for the recognition of churches as helping to supply these values. In this, public theology plays an important mediating role. While it's not unaware of the danger,16 this kind of public theology runs the risk of becoming largely a discourse between elites, forming vaglie generalizations about, rather than producing specific embodiments within human society. And yet the juxtaposing of the terms "public" and "theology" in a situation that tries to keep faith at bay challenges both church and world. Through the articulation of a liturgically-formed Christian sacramental imagination sketched above, I want to suggest a possibility for a public theology that is more trasgressive of the settled "public sphere",17 the language of which confronts, rather than confirms, a world in which God is not a necessary postulate. This would be a theology which finds 13 I say this while also affirming the basic insight of Milbank: namely that sociology can be read as heretical theology. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Second ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), esp. ch. 5. My affirmation of Milbank's insight is not to discount the value of the social sciences per se. In section three, I will suggest ethnography as a fruitful partner for theology. 14 While Benjamin Franklin understood public theology in Rousseau's sense of "civil religion", the contemporary use of the term can be traced to Martin Marty's 1974 article "Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience," Journal of Religion 54, no. 4 (October 1974): 332-59. Two paradigmatic examples of this kind ofNiebuhrian public theology are the Catholic David Tracy and the Protestant Max Stackhouse. See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), chs 1-2; Max Stackhouse, "Civil Religion, Political Theology and Public Theology: What's the Difference?" Political Theology 5, no. 3 (2004): 275-93. 15 Charles T. Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1-2. 16 See for example James R. Cochrane, "The Making and Unmaking of Public Policy," Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 100 (1998): 86-103. 17 Perhaps "settled" needs to be qualified, even as "public" in a sociological sense requires careful contextualization, as Smit "What Does 'Public' Mean?" 29-34 has done. Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 4 7 its starting point not in the halls of academia, nor in the lobbies of parliament, but in those spaces that irrupt into the world through practices that render the ordinary extraordinary, that engage the world in its settled imminence, that remind the world of its dependence on God, that confront the world with the claims of the crucified, and the Crucified.18 It is from these places that we catch a glimpse of the things of the world as properly-ordered to their true end, the glory of God—which is also, as Irenaeus famously put it, humanity "fully alive". In this re-ordering, the old "disordered" orderings of the city of this world, governed as they are by concupiscence, are contested, engaged, overcome by caritas. Such a radicalized public theology would challenge the kind of correlationist theology19 that assumes a "given", untheologized world, in favour of re-visioning the world in the light of the Gospel, "the world in a wafer".20 In other words, this public theology refuses to see the Christian story in terms of the world's story, but refigures the world's story as part of the story of Israel, of Jesus Christ, and of the church.21 The conviction underlying my quest is that theology's primary task is neither to make the Gospel more acceptable to "all reasonable people", nor to supply the values that can help underpin the project of liberal democracy,22 but to help Christian communities be more fully the Body of Christ on earth, "during the world" (to use another phrase of Mathewes'). This will get the world's attention, and will provoke questions of the "reasonable". And when they say, "what on earth is going on here?" then theology can enter into conversation with the "other" public. It will add the preaching of words to the church's embodiment of a world 18 For programmatic examples, see Nico Koopman, "The Beyers Naude Centre for Public Theology: Five Years On," in Christian in Public: Aims, Methodologies and Issues in Public Theology, ed. Len Hansen, Beyers Naude Centre Series on Public Theology (Stellenbosch: Africa SunMedia, 2008), 287. 19 Paul Tillich, "Aspects of a Religious Analysis of Culture," in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 40-51; Tracy, The Analogical Imagination. 20 William T. Cavanaugh, "The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Response to Globalization," Modern Theology 15, no. 2 (1999): 181-96. 21 There are elements of this in the work of South African public theologian Nico Koopman, who speaks of an explicitly trinitarian account of the world, and the centrality oí formation in reading the world thus. Nico Koopman, "Churches and Public Policy Discourses in South Africa," paper presented at Charles Sturt University (Adelaide, Australia, 2007); Nico Koopman, "Curing or Caring? Theological Comments on Healing," Religion and Theology 13, no. 1 (2006): 38-53; Nico Koopman, "Contemporary Public Theology in the United States and in South Africa: A Dialogue," in Freedom's Distant Shores. American Protestants and Post-Colonial Alliances with America, ed. R Drew Smith (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 209-22. 22 See Jacob Zuma, "Address at the Launch of the Moral Regeneration Movement," address (Bisho, 2003), www.info.gov.za/speeches/2003/03092209461008.htm. and in response Mark Chapman, "Pluralism and Moral Regeneration: Building Community in South African Perspective," Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 119 (July 2004): 4-14. 48 Martin transfigured. But it will also open the church to "the judgement of the world",23 reminding the church that it also lives in media res, that its pilgrimage as "the Body of Christ on earth" is a matter of practice-shaped encounter, and that its life is found in subjection to that kingdom which is not simply its own destiny, but the destiny of all humanity. The Problem: Liturgical Failure? The evil forces we speak of in baptism must be named. We know what these evil forces are in South Africa today. The unity and sharing we profess in our communion services or Masses must be named. It is the solidarity of the people inviting all to join in the struggle for God's peace in South Africa. The repentance we preach must be named. It is repentance for our share of the guilt for the suffering and oppression in our country. Much of what we do in our Church services has lost its relevance to the poor and the oppressed. Our services and sacraments have been appropriated to serve the need of the individual for comfort and security. Now these same Church activities must be reappropriated to serve the real religious needs of all the people and to further the liberating mission of God and the Church in the world.24 There is a rather big problem with my initial claim, however. It is a problem assumed in the Kairos Document's assessment of characteristic liturgical practices. Church communities that have profound liturgical identities can, and often do, fail to differentiate themselves from other communities once the liturgy is done. Indeed, liturgies themselves can create divided publics, most notoriously in the blasphemous separation of races during communion that anticipated (and undergirded) the public policy of apartheid.25 The formation of a sacramental imagination oriented to the eschatological shape of humanity in Jesus Christ fails to "take". Churches can reinscribe the very divisions their baptism professedly negates.26 Christians celebrate the Lordship of the crucified Christ in the liturgy, while living in the world as if the powers of class, nation, and capital (which continue to crucify the oppressed) were sovereign. People might well question the relevance of a sacramental imagination for "the real world"—neglecting the fact that "reality" and "world" are also constructs. Nevertheless, the failure of 23 Rowan D. Williams, On Christian Theology, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), ch. 3. 24 The Kairos Theologians, Challenge to the Church: The Kairos Document (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 44. 25 Chris Loff, "The History of a Heresy," in Apartheid is a Heresy, ed. John de Gruchy and Charles Villa Vicencio (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 10-23. 26 For examples, see Research Institute on Christianity in South Africa, "Faith Communities and Apartheid: The RICSA Report," in Facing the Truth: South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ed. James R. Cochrane, John W. de Gruchy, and Stephen W. Martin (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999). Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 4 9 liturgically-formed churches to contest "reality", and the multiple ways they simply work with, rather than against, "the ways things are", makes such sentiments understandable. Indeed, as Rowan Williams pointed out in a response to Milbank's Theology and Social Theory, such accounts as my initial claim in thefirstsection run the risk of idealization, and hence ideologization, of the church.27 If we want to maintain the view that a sacramental imagination transforms materiality in ways that embody a new materiality (including material relations), then this transformation should be visible in communities formed in the matrix of such an imagination. Perhaps this means that liturgy is not enough to effect the transformation claimed by a Christian sacramental imagination, and to put such imagination on display before the world. Liturgy must be supplemented by something else, such as the preaching of the Word. Such preaching would clarify the political meaning of the liturgy, directing the people to the most consistent action after their dispersal. Indeed we do see something of this in Peter's sermon in Acts 2 when, in response to the startling events which interrupted the pilgrims sojourning in Jerusalem, he said (in response to their question, "what does this mean?"), "this ... is that... [and] therefore" (Acts 2:12,16,36). There is, however, an important difference between doing liturgy and talking about doing liturgy. Theologian William Cavanaugh was once invited to give a talk on "the political meaning of the eucharist." He responded by quipping, "Well, if I tell you what it is, you've got to promise me you're not going to stop coming to Mass."28 In other words, if the liturgy can be reduced to a "meaning" expressed in words, then the actual practices become redundant. But it's in the practice of the eucharist, not in its disembodied "meaning", that Jesus Christ is bodily present. More common in South Africa, perhaps, has been a second intervention: the adaptation of liturgy to events "outside". After mentioning my interest in liturgy and politics to a professor at Stellenbosch's Faculty of Theology, he replied, "Ah yes! It was an important moment for us when we began to adapt our liturgies to the struggle, and to observe Worker's Day and other events as part of the worship of the church."291 think he pointed to something very important—that worship inside the church could reflect a status quo attitude with respect to people's lives outside the church. Such worship is indeed problematic. Worship can and should be a public disturbance, not in the sense of mere mischief, but as the 27 Rowan Williams, "Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision," New Blackfriars 73, no. 861 (1992): 319-26. 28 In a seminar entitled, "Liturgy and Politics: Is the Church a PolisT Seminars in Christian Scholarship, Calvin College, Grand Rapids MI, 3 July 2006. 29 Nico Koopman makes a similar observation about "special" liturgies during the struggle years, then highlights the importance of recovering ordinary practices now. Koopman, "Public Theology in US and SA," 221. 50 Martin disturbance of one public in the name ofanother. Think of the powerful witness of the Berrigan brothers during the Vietnam war, or of members of "The Simple Way" monastic community in Philadelphia performing a "Stations of the Cross" outside an arms manufacturing plant.30 However, the Professor's statement also carried the assumption that ordinary worship is not always already political. As intimated above, ordinary worship claims to shape a new body politic and to found a new system of exchanges, a new economy in radical contrast to the distribution systems of the world. To then try to "politicize" (or "re-politicize") the liturgy—even for the sake of protecting itfromco-optation into an oppressive ideology—runs the risk of making it subservient to another ideology, rather than to the Gospel that judges all ideologies.31 And when liturgy is co-opted, God is "used" rather than "enjoyed".32 There's no question (especially in South Africa) that the church has been, implicitly or explicitly, a spokesperson for the contemporary political and economic status quo.33 This is, indeed, the most profound problem the church has to face today: that amidst the secularizing acids of modernity the church has learned to survive by showing itself to be "useful" to the one project or another. Is there a third option for addressing the problem? Developing an Augustinian philosophical anthropology that sees humans as primarily lovers, rather than thinkers, and claiming that these loves are revealed in, and shaped by, liturgies James K. A. Smith34 suggests that the human person is homo liturgicus. This means that liturgies (understood by Smith as ritual practices that orient the heart towards an ultimate concern) are ubiquitous; they're not simply found in buildings with "church" written on them. In particular, 30 Shane Claiborne, "Death Be not Proud: The Easter Gospel of Non-Violence," Huffington Post, 3 April 2010, Http://www.hufImgtonpost.conVshane-claibome/death-be-not-proud_b_524340.html (last accessed 13 Feb 2011). 31 In her book, After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), Anglican theologian Denise Ackermann writes movingly of the deep difficulty of, but also the hopefulness latent in, kneeling at the communion rail next to the man who opposes everything she stands for as a progressive South African woman. In receiving the body and blood of Christ, we are reminded of a shared human destiny deeper than even the important issues that divide us. 32 For a discussion of the crucial distinction in Augustine between "use" (the proper referent of which is the things of the world) and "enjoy" (the proper referent of which is the Creator of the things of the world), see Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 88-94. 33 Under apartheid, the Dutch Reformed Church was the explicit spokesperson, but the ecumenical and later (when these churches began to be radicalized) the evangelical churches were implicit spokespersons. In today's post-Apartheid context, the newer Pentecostal and charismatic churches are becoming the spokespersons for the new elite, leaving the older ecumenical churches far behind. The dramatic shift in the ANC's attention to the newer churches calls for careful research. 34 James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009). Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 5 1 Smith urges that we take into account the fact that the Sunday morning liturgy is not the only liturgy Christians participate in.35 There are other liturgies that form publics. And these "other liturgies" are jealous of rivals. In South Africa, for instance, powerful social and cultural practices from the voting booth to the office, to the stadium, to the shopping mall shape identities as "citizens of the Rainbow Nation", "young urban professionals", "supporters of the Amakhozi", or just plain "consumers". Churches have deep rifts within them, and while the eucharist provides a ritualized means of dealing with conflict, so do Hollywood movies, soap operas, and video games. Of course, there may well be a confluence of competing identities in play, with context determining which comes to the fore. And these configurations may co-opt the church's liturgy to serve other ends—and vice-versa. There's nothing new in this, as Nicholas Healy has pointed out: attending church services has often been seen, in the past at least, as a sign of middle-class respectability. Attending a particular church, such as a Presbyterian church in Northern Ireland, marks one not simply as a Christian, but as a member of a certain "tribe". Moreover, a church may practice eucharistie hospitality simply because it brings more members—and a greater image of success.36 More examples could be offered, suggesting that a sacramental imagination takes place as a contest over the ordering of loyalties and loves. Re-forming intent is also part of the action of liturgy. I will return to this point in section three. A study by Andre Czeglédy37 suggests that the appeal to young black and white professionals in the concert-like, high-powered, youth-oriented liturgies of the neo-Pentecostal His People churches—along with the attendant ideas of building the nation for the sake of becoming a launch-point for missions and the use of the same "Big Five" symbols—fits hand-in-glove the government's nation-building appeal to the "new South African" elites. In this case, a secular liturgy has been adapted for Christian use.38 And yet the maintenance of the centrality of the sovereign individual who has made a consumer choice to "follow Jesus" in His People's understanding of Christianity demonstrates,391 would argue, its failure 35 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 208. 36 Nicholas M. Healy, "Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?" International Journal of Systematic Theology 5, no. 3 (November 2003): 293-94. 37 André P. Czeglédy, "A New Christianity for a New South Africa: Charismatic Christians and the Post-Apartheid Order," Journal of Religion in Africa 38 (2008): 284-311. 38 Stephen W. Martin, "Civic Sacrament and Social Imaginaries in Transition: The Case of the South African Churches and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission," Political Theology forthcoming (2010). 39 One could also argue this with reference to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God which, while less concerned with creating a "South African" identity (its headquarters remain in Brazil), organizes its liturgy around a series of offerings, each of which is keyed to the promise of prosperity (of greater 52 Martin to enact the people of God that indwells the sacramental imagination I spoke of above. The valorization of nationalism and classism as legitimate components of a Christian identity perpetuates the disordered loves that mis-forms subjects away from the image of Christ and his body. Is it any surprise that the new South African elites have given up dialoguing with mainline churches in favour of Pentecostal and Charismatic "super-churches" within which they see their ideal of a new, empowered elite so visibly manifest?40 My intuition, then, is that the inconsistency amongst Christians may in part be due to the fact that they are formed in contexts admitting other suitors. This is a serious problem for contemporary churches, especially those that have arisen since the end of apartheid. But it's also a problem for more "traditional" churches. Consider the following account. Its Good Friday. An Anglican congregation is engaged in a traditional three-hour service of devotion—traditional except for the screen hanging over the altar and displaying images corresponding to the Stations of the Cross meditations, scriptural readings, and hymns. As is the practice of this particular congregation, no one leaves their seat. Then, an hour into the service, the music changes. The organ accompanying traditional hymns is displaced by recorded contemporary praise and worship songs. The congregation is transformed into an audience, though some members attempt to sing along with the recordings. Then the screen-images of waving grain fields and rippling pools of water changes to a live picture of an evangelistic crusade, with a singer crooning "I am the Lord that healeth thee. " The camera zooms in on a silver-haired figure in a white suit: the faith-healer, Benny Hinn, who gives a meditation on the song. After this (with meditations illustrated by pictures of contemporary global events interspersed with the music) the service returns to the traditional Good Friday theme, closing with a solemn veneration of the wood ofthe cross, the reading of the reproachesfrom the Prayer Book, and communion from reserved sacrament. To say that there are multiple forces engaged in forming Christians in contemporary South Africa is to state the obvious. In addition to the discourses of the nation (which forms people as "South Africans"), the mall (which forms people as "consumers", refracted through a host of transnational brand loyalties), and the community (which reminds people which colour-band of the rainbow nation they represent), there are discourses of globalized Christianity which operate outside the constraints of tradition, the disciplines of study and reflection, "returns") to those who "invest" in the work of the church. On the UCKG, see Paul Freston, "The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: A Brazilian Church Finds Success in Southern Africa," Journal ofReligion in Africa 35, no. 1 (2005). 40 See Mandy Roussouw, "Zuma's New God Squad Wants Liberal Laws to Go," M&G Online, 11 September 2009, Http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-09-11 -zumas-new-god-squad-wants-liberal-lawsto-go (last accessed 13 Feb 2011) and Tracy Kuperus, "The Political Voice and Witness of Churches in a Democratic South Africa," unpublished paper (Grand Rapids, 2010), 22-23. Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesia! Transformation 5 3 and the canopy of communal discernment.41 Generic, "McDonaldized" praise and worship music manufactured in the United States fills the shelves of Christian bookstores, while satellite television beams slick evangelists and healers into homes. And yet the formative importance of the church remains, as testified by this particular congregation of mostly Coloured families who, displaced under apartheid to a nearby township, have continued for the forty years since to make the trek to this humble church. Clearly the understanding of what it is to be Christian is under negotiation. The formative power of a globalized culture is challenging the ordering of loves in other spheres of life. Just as the presence of multinationals like Levis and Pepsi-Cola (which stayed away during the years of isolation) in South Africa marks the country as part of the world, and by extension allows South Africans to share the symbolic power borne by such global icons, so the high-powered, consumer-friendly kinds of Christianity promise a connection with the icons of success outside (Benny Hinn being a prime example). And yet there's also a link, I would suggest, between these things and the abandonment of liturgical practices that sustained the church in struggle, as well as values that taught wealth is for sharing, not hoarding or displaying.42 The Proposal: Tracking Transformation Through Ethnographic Ecclesiologies Traditions stay alive and grow organically precisely because those who share them are in conversation with the past—above all, for Christians, in conversation with Scripture—and in debate with each other about their meaning for the present. This may result in strong disagreement, but it is also the path to renewal. The truth is, traditions are alive because they are always being contested from within and challenged from without; they embody what Alasdair Maclntyre referred to as "continuities of conflict."43 My articulation of a Christian sacramental imagination against the disordered loves both in the church and in the world (section one above) owes a great deal to the most important African theologian of the ancient world: St. Augustine of Hippo. Following recent readings of Augustine by Williams, Cavanaugh, 41 A fascinating discussion at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in January, 2010 between the Muslim theologian, Faried Esak, the Christian theologian, Charles Amjad-Ali, and the orthodox Jewish theologian, Yakov Rabkhin came to this conclusion: that what Muslim, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalists share in common is a lack of engagement with the traditions of disciplined textual study and the understanding that one exists as a Muslim, Christian, or Jew within a conflictual history of interpretations. 42 This is also a struggle within the congregation I'm referring to. 43 John W. de Gruchy, "Transforming Traditions: Doing Theology in South Africa Today," Conference presentation, Theological Society of South Africa (Stellenbosch, 2009), 5. 54 Martin and Smith,44 I am sounding two motifs from the thought of this great African theologian. The first concerns the [liturgical] transfiguration of a collection of "I'"s into the "we" of the body of Christ. The second concerns the [liturgical] re-orienting and re-ordering of disordered desire/loves that animates and directs that body and its members toward their eschatological destiny, which is the eschatological destiny of humanity itself.45 Putting these two motifs together, I will in this section suggest a way of doing theology that investigates the ways in which the latter (re-ordered loves) can be read in the post-liturgical46 actions/ practices of the former (the liturgically formed "we"). The bridge between them is a liturgically informed sacramental imagination. The questions about how all this actually cashes out in concrete situations adds complexity, but also textured particularity, to this investigation. Section two of this article showed that Christian subjectivity, personal and communal, is multiply-formed within a host of contesting and contested liturgies. I say contesting because liturgies are collective practices that reach toward and make present the highest (or most ultimate) of goods. I say contested because these liturgies themselves are in history, having developed through a plurality of cultural interactions. And yet, at least in the case of Christian liturgies, each innovation makes a contribution to the whole tradition. Thus my proposal speaks not of a single public to which the gospel must be "related", but of imaginatively construed and liturgically sustained publics. For "public" is never simply a given. It is always constructed out of the gathering(s) of a multitude that inform, contest, and reimagine communal existence in the way "goods in common" are shared. It is my intuition that returning to such an understanding of public, and eschewing the notion of public as commonality without particularity, could also animate a new South African public theology. That is to say: the concept "public" in public theology would be a more robustly theological concept. The tradition side of the picture would be a retrieval of Augustine's understanding of liturgical formation and ordered loves, while the transforming side would be shown (or not) in thickly textured, empirical studies of local congregations, and the ways their practices reflect the shape of their worship, and contest their context. In doing this, such studies would also attend to the way 44 Rowan D. Williams, "Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God," Milltown Studies 19/20 (1987): 55-72; Cavanaugh, "From One City to Two"; Smith, Desiring the Kingdom. 45 This extends my concerns first expressed in Martin, Faith Negotiating Loyalties, especially chapter 9. 46 By "post-liturgical" I do not intend a return to the idea of a non-liturgically formed self or community, but the self and community after the dismissal. The pronunciation "ete missa est marks the completion of the "mass", but at the same the beginning of the "mission", both terms being derivedfromthe same Latin root. F.L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, "Mass," in The Oxford Dictionary ofthe Christian Church, 3rd rev. ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1058. Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 5 5 the reordering of loves by the gospel struggles with the distortions of desire during the world, and with the church as "treasure in earthen vessels." (2 Cor 4:7 KJV) This theology is public in another way: not only does it investigate the formation of a people through the way in which it shares common objects of love, it also examines how this people is transformed as it visibly moves from a life governed by cupiditas to a life oriented to caritas, in this way prophetically embodying an alternative way of life to the principalities and powers, to the governing authorities, to the policy makers. Such a public theology would abandon abstract, sociological analysis and ecclesial idealization in favour of concrete exegesis, a "thick description"47 that could also be termed, following Christian B. Scharen, "an ethnographic ecclesiology".48 Scharen claims that a clear line between church and world is difficult to draw, and that the church finds herself embedded in the world. But embeddedness-in does not limn compromise-with the world. This kind of zero-sum-game way of relating church and world has been the flaw in sociological descriptions from Troeltsch onwards.49 It has also dogged accounts of those contemporary Donatists who insist on a purification of all worldly elements from the church. For Scharen, its particular forms of embeddedness are what constitute a local church's identity, and the role of the theological is to construct "judicious narratives" which render this identity, theologically, as part of "the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church."50 Focusing on three churches in Atlanta, Scharen portrays the way liturgies function in each in terms of multiple and distinctive social identities at play. The point is not simply to say that such identities constitute "the world" opposed to the church, nor are they mere "secular" renditions of a reality to which sociology is necessarily blind. Rather, they constitute the ongoing transformations in congregational identity, a "structuring logic based in ideals and a mode of living that fits with such ideals, hand in glove."51 In contrast to simple, linear accounts of the relation between worship and ethics, Scharen suggests an interactive model, whereby congregational identity and "fields of force" are situated in relations of mutual transformation.52 47 Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30. 48 Christian Scharen, "'Judicious Narratives', or Ethnography as Ecclesiology," Scottish Journal of Theology 58, no. 2 (2005): 125-42. 49 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, ed. Olive Wyon (London; New York: Allen & Unwin; Macmillan, 1931). 50 Christian Scharen, "Ethnography as Ecclesiology," 142. The term is from Rowan Williams, "Saving Time". 51 Christian Scharen, "Ethnography as Ecclesiology," 131. 52 Christian Scharen, Public Worship and Public Work: Character and Commitment in Local Congregational Life, Virgil Michel Series (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2004), 22 If. 56 Martin However, Scharen's analysis seems to make "ideals" prior to "mode(s) of living", and his assertion that people choose their churches on the basis of previously existing moral values assumes that it's possible to hold such values apart from a generating moral community. This idealism risks losing the transformed materiality of sacrament, in my view. And yet, his winsome suggestion of an "ethnographical ecclesiology" points to a further important element of a sacramental imagination: that such a thing is always articulated locally, in terms of the socio-economic, cultural, and geographical factors making up a community. If we maintain the kind of robust sacramentality articulated at the beginning of this article, then such factors constitute the very material of transformation. The articulation of a sacramental imagination as earlier stated runs theriskof gnosticism unless it can be mapped, and indeed empirically discerned, contextually. But this means also that the abstractions inherent in talking about "race", "class", and "gender" must give way to the thicker description of story-telling, of narrating the life of a people as an ongoing journeying into transformation. Another contemporary Augustinian, theologian Graham Ward, has also claimed that an ecclesiology must be embodied in the sense that the church is always located within the world, and the world in the church. Using evocative Christological language, "World" and "church" name for him mutual indwellings. The Word always takes culturalflesh;neither gospel nor world exist autonomously, and "neither can be accessed without the other."53 An ethnographic ecclesiology would attend to those forces that shape desire, and the liturgical contestation and reshaping of those forces within a local setting. As something that tracks the contestations of publics, and discerns in this contestation the ultimate shape of human existence, such an ethnographic ecclesiology would be nothing other than a new public theology. Conclusion: A New Public Theology? While western theology has kept the thought of St. Augustine in the fore, more recent currents have combined this with a "liturgical turn" addressing the question of how that "people" who identify with the City of God are formed. It is my conviction that public theology, which has yet to be influenced by this turn (or, arguably, by a serious re-engagement with Augustine) could greatly benefit. Public theology has been content for the most part to build theological bridges to a sociologically imagined context. The present article has challenged such imaginings. But liturgies are ubiquitous in culture. And insofar as Christians 53 Graham Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10. Sacramental Imagination and Ecclesial Transformation 5 7 participate in culture they also are subject to those "worldly" (in the Augustinian sense of the city governed by cupiditas) shapings. This creates the problematic identification of Christians with a malformed public, something that has been taken up by those contemporary Donatists who seek a "purified" church, a "Christian colony" amidst a dark and dangerous world. However, it is this dual participation also points to a redemptive possibility: that as they participate in culture and find themselves being reshaped in conformity with the eschatological destiny of the world in Jesus Christ, Christians become themselves signs of the transformation of the kingdoms of the world into the Kingdom of our Lord. This is the assertion behind what I've called a new public theology. This kind of public theology would engage, for instance, economics not simply through the recommendation of a Christian version of progressivism; rather, it would locate communities of the faithful in the midst of a society formed by consumerist practices, communities who are contesting and redirecting that formation through a liturgy and a life that renders and re-presents "common objects of love" within the story of the coming Kingdom. Arguably this is what happened when Christians appropriated and redirected pagan liturgies and practices in early—and also recent—missionary activity. Here is the value of ethnographic descriptions of thickly textured church practices. For the Gospel does not take us out of the material world into a "spiritual" realm. Rather, it transforms the world in its particularity and materiality (this church, in this community, struggling under these conditions) into the materialist New Creation, where goods are shared in common, and used to glorify God. This fresh appropriation of tradition can transform not only public theology, but the culture within which it finds itself. ^ s Copyright and Use: As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. 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