Dr. Martin spent most of the 1990s in South Africa, where he witnessed the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In June 2009 he revisited the country with a group of Christian scholars and recorded these images of the church.
While in South Africa, our team of Christian scholars was exposed to a number of examples of public theology—compelling accounts of how the church should be in the world. Central Methodist and J. L. Zwane churches were what one might call ecclesial embodiments of public theology; the Constitutional Court was a secular parable of public theology; and the Beyers Naudé Centre was a place of disciplined reflection on public theology. I think each was important in its own way. At the same time, each without the others would represent a distortion.
Without ecclesial embodiments, public theology can become dangerously abstract. Perhaps the best example of this danger is found in the leaflets that I saw scattered on the information tables of some churches—including Anglican churches—I visited. These leaflets listed in point form the features of a “values agenda” for the New South Africa. While one would never want to overlook the urgent need to address the corruption of political leaders, the selfishness promoted by consumer capitalism, and the careless and non-committal sexuality characterizing a “liberated” society, such lists omit the crucial question of how such “moral” people are formed.
One cannot simply choose to be morally upright, as if choosing makes it so. This is the error of liberalism. Morally upright people are formed—and from a Christian perspective they are formed by discipleship, and by having their desires shaped by Word and Sacrament. And yet the formation of disciples can never be simply a means to the end of creating a more moral nation without falling into the folly of idolatry, of forgetting that we live “during the world.”
Without secular parables, the church might find herself in danger of thinking that it is she and not the world that is the object of God’s redemption. And yet without the church, we have no way of “reading” what God is doing in the world. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “That I go to church does not mean I think that Jesus is only to be found there. It just means that he has promised to show up there in a manner that can help us discern how he shows up in other places.” The practices that discipline our desires “during the world” also provide pictures—in Karl Barth’s well-known phrase “parables of the Kingdom”—that map our situation in the world, but also (if we have ears to hear) point us beyond it.
Finally, without disciplined theological reflection, public theology isolates itself from academic life. Proceeding from a holy disposition (1 Pet. 3:15), public theology gives a reasoned account of the life of the church for the world. But the kind of public theology that I think apt is not the speculative, philosophical description of how to apply free-floating “values,” but a kind of anthropological “thick description” (as Clifford Geertz writes) of those practices that form citizens of the world to come, who live in amazingly faithful ways in relation to this world. And those practices are available to all of us Christians—yes, even you and me!—who participate in the Liturgy.
And so in baptism we are transitioned from a world of conflicting interests and agendas and enfolded into a people who live in conformity to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. We become that people who share the world’s rejection of Christ, but who also live the hope of God’s ultimate victory of life over death. In thus dying to the world we are liberated to be a people in solidarity with the despised and rejected, as the J. L. Zwane congregation shows. The sharing of our gifts in the Eucharist takes us up into a new economy—God’s economy—such as at Central Methodist where the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered. Seeing the world refracted through these practices, we participate in a redeemed world that irrupts into this one “like grass through cement.” We become a strange and peculiar people. We become the church.
