Teologie publica - S2

15-16 OCT 2019

An introduction to Public Theology

Gregg A. Okesson, PhD
Asbury Theological Seminary, USA

15 noiembrie 2019

“Ascultă, Israele! Domnul Dumnezeul nostru este singurul Domn. Să iubești pe Domnul
Dumnezeul tău cu toată inima ta, cu tot sufletul tău și cu toată puterea ta. Și
poruncile acestea, pe care ţi le dau astăzi, să le ai în inima ta. Să le
întipărești în mintea copiilor tăi și să vorbești de ele când vei fi acasă, când
vei pleca în călătorie, când te vei culca și când te vei scula. Să le legi ca un
semn de aducere aminte la mâini și să-ţi fie ca niște fruntarii între ochi. Să le
scrii pe ușorii casei tale și pe porţile tale.”
Deuteronomul 6:4-9 VDC

Unde sa fie dragostea de Dumnezeu?

⁃ Acasa = private
⁃ Sa le legi la maini = sa-ti aduci aminte de ele cand lucrezi
⁃ Fruntarii intre ochi = sa-ti fie in minte, in gand
⁃ Usiorii casei = the only acces to your house, rep. autoritatea peste
casa
⁃ Pe portile tale = intalnirea batranilor la portile cetatii, tranzactii,
judecati

The love of God should be everywhere (including public space).

We don’t learn public theology in University, it is dependent on context and
location (see Gregg in Tanzania).
To learn theology we need to become children again?

What is the problem? Why we need public theology?

Problem 1: Theology divorced from the rest of life

⁃ Thinking theological of the body?
⁃ Everyday people “do” theology without knowing
⁃ There is a separation, a divide between Academic theologians and
everyday people.
⁃ Theologians: private, sacred cognitive, theoretical
⁃ Everyday people: public, secular, embodied, ordinary, experiential
⁃ We need to learn theology for everyday needs
⁃ People think science deals with facts and religion with belief. That is
not true, often times it goes the other way around
⁃ Daca vrem sa avem efect asupra spatiului public trebuie sa facem cu
adevarat parte din el, sa ne angajam activ
⁃ What we do inside the church: worship, preach, pray, study doctrine,
etc
⁃ What we do outside the church: play, vote, relate, learn, buy/sell, etc
⁃ We separate Christ’s life / Christ’s death, assign different priorities
⁃ Another divide: we separate earth from heaven

Problem 2: What do we do with the public realm?

⁃ Public realm = things we share, outside of our home, politics,
ethnicity, economics, academics, media, technology, books, movies, etc
⁃ Politics tries to influence education, religion, personal beliefs > why
would be theology be any different?
⁃ Visible publics = structural, cultural, social, individual
⁃ Invisible publics = symbols, narratives, myths
 ⁃ Narratives: the story of freedom, origin, ethnicity, etc
⁃ If you want to change the world through theology you need to understand
and use the contextual narratives
⁃ How do we think theologicaly about invisible things that affect public
life in significant ways?

Problem 3: Contrary to the theory of secularization, religions always go public

⁃ religion always goes in public but not always in a healthy way
⁃ Religion never stays in a box, it always goes out
⁃ Publics refuse to stay still, they interpenetrate with other publics.
When they combine with other publics they become thicker and more powerful
⁃ Religion + nationalism + ethnicity = ??
⁃ Politics + economics + land + religion = ??
⁃ People are always bringing their publics with them in church and we are
not prepared no deal with them because we are not studying public life
⁃ Just studying the Bible in not enough to have a meaningful impact in
the public space

Problem 4: What do we do with sin in the public realm?

⁃ Cultural sins, structural sins, societal sins
⁃ How do we confront sin in poverty?
⁃ We think of sin in personal places, rarely in public spaces
⁃ How do we confront “complicated wickedness”? (poverty, racism, human
trafficking, etc)

Problem 5: Our theology is so simple and thin that it doesnt have answers for the
thickness of Publics and complicated wickedness

Problem 6: What gets saved?

⁃ We associate salvation with individuals and especially with their souls
⁃ What about groups and cultures along with systems and structures in
society?
⁃ Don’t just care about theology and the Gospel, think about Salvation,
saving people
⁃ We teach salvation in church where people are (hopefully) already saved
⁃ Is our salvation big enough that it can go public? Is our salvation
“reserved” only for individual?
⁃ Can a nation’s history be saved? Can we witness to invisible publics?
⁃ Can poverty be saved?

Problem 7: Separation of Theology and Mission

⁃ Mission began as the “mother of theology” but soon separated into
separate streams
⁃ We specialized theology and left out missiology
⁃ We have made mission “what we do” not what God does through us
⁃ We specialized inSaving souls but not the rest of humanity (the
invisible and visible publics)

How do we “solve” the problems?

⁃ Theologians need to read the gospels at least 2 times/year. Always

refreshing our understanding in regard to the ever changing context
⁃ Don’t preach only the death and ressurection of Jesus, also preach His
life
⁃ Too often the church mirrors the society and not viceversa
⁃ Is the church a part of publics or is it just private and personal?
⁃ God created diversity for the sake of oneness (the two shall become
one)
Our starting point in theology always needs to be God
⁃ we need to understand Scripture as a mission of God in the world
⁃ It is not that the church has a mission of salvation in this world. It
is father son and holy spirit misssion that creats and envolves the church along
the way
⁃ It’s not our mission, it’s God’s mission and He is asking us to
participate in it.

What is Missiology?
⁃ Missiology dialogues with all the disciplines
⁃ It cares about the relatinship between the gospel and the church, the
gospel and the world, the world and the church, it’s a triangle
⁃ Theology for the early church arose from the urgency of mission and
translation of thr Gospel into culture and context around the world
⁃ Theo-drama: God is the director, the Bible is the Script, Doctrine is
the theatrical direction, humans as actors (all humans), Stages as global
situations
⁃ How can we be faithful in God’s drama in our cultural context?
⁃ The Gospel is not private, belief is not private. Don’t believe just
for yourself, believe for others as well

What is public theology?

⁃ How do we think of theology as public theology?
⁃ First person to use the word is Martin Marty (public religion)
⁃ Public Theology = theologically informed discourse that seeks to be
understandable both to those in it’s religious tradition and to those outside of it
⁃ Public theology through narratives and stories that anyone can
understand and about things that everyone cares about
⁃ Public theology must be a collaborative exercise in theological
reflection on public issues
⁃ Don’t just speak theology, do theology!
⁃ How do you RElearn something you did wrong for a long time? Retrain
your mind. This is the case with unhealthy teachings in church. It is very hard if
not impossible to retrain the church. We need to be like children to relearn.
⁃ Christianity is a missionary religion with a message for the world
⁃ Everything that we have been given we ought to share with others
⁃ Not all public theologians talk about gospel

Evaluation

⁃ Strengths: it excites interest, welcomes different approaches,

integrative in nature
⁃ Weaknesses: it can be overwhelming because it’s so diverse

Three general types of Public Theology

1. Describing different theologians and their views
2. Those theology that clarify ahat public theology is and how it ought to
be done (teologia publica in spatiul romanesc, post comunist)
3. Constructive efforts, descriptive accounts and normative proposals
about issues, institutions, interactions and processes of public life

Other categories or types

⁃ Public role of christian churches
⁃ How public theology works within a context of the separation of church
and state
⁃ Development of a constructive public theology
⁃ Influence of the Ortodox church in romania today
⁃ How to speak theologically to a non christian audience?
16 noiembrie 2019
The church and local congregations

“El este chipul Dumnezeului celui nevăzut, Cel Întâi Născut din toată zidirea.
Pentru că prin El au fost făcute toate lucrurile care sunt în ceruri și pe pământ,
cele văzute și cele nevăzute: fie scaune de domnii, fie dregătorii, fie domnii, fie
stăpâniri. Toate au fost făcute prin El și pentru El. El este mai înainte de toate
lucrurile și toate se ţin prin El. El este Capul trupului, al Bisericii. El este
începutul, Cel Întâi Născut dintre cei morţi, pentru ca în toate lucrurile să aibă
întâietate. Căci Dumnezeu a vrut ca toată plinătatea să locuiască în El și să
împace totul cu Sine prin El, atât ce este pe pământ, cât și ce este în ceruri,
făcând pace prin sângele crucii Lui.”
Coloseni 1:15-20 VDC

⁃ When we do public theology we follow Christ. The kingdom of God is more

powerful than anything on earth
⁃ Visible culture is sourced by invisibility (the image of an iceberg)
⁃ Forms (visible) and meanings (invisible) of culture
⁃ We need to interpret Scripture and we need to interpret contemporary
culture

What happens when we neglect exegesis of the biblical text?

What happens if we neglect exegesis of the world (context)?
⁃ We interpret scripture for other people, based upon our own cultural
interpretations
⁃ We don’t allow God’s word to affect underlying meanings that influence
people’s lives
⁃ Our theology misses the important things that really matter to people
⁃ We are blind to the ways people are already thinking of Scripture

Publics are sourced by an inner spirituality

⁃ We need to identify and name our ideologies, the invisible ways in

which we see the world
⁃ Ideologies want to be invisible, they don’t want to be named
⁃ We need to critique ideologies through the lens of Scripture
⁃ The problem is that contemporary publics are complex and have deep
spiritual roots and we try to change them with simple, easy solutions (money often
times)

Public missiology
⁃ How do we relate to the public realm through the lens of God’s mission?
⁃ Local congregations witness to their surrounding publics through
movement, like the process of weaving
⁃ Where is the congregation when it’s not at church or at home? What
places do they frequently visit or inhabit? In this way we can find out the area of
witness and influence of our congregation
⁃ Trinitarian nature: Father as sender, Son as embodiment (sent), and
Spirit as power (sending). God is within Himself a society, a community
⁃ We need to adequately represent the Trinity in our society and local
culture
⁃ The only hermeneutic of the Gospel is a congregation of men and women
who believe it and live by it. (Newbigin, The Gospel in a pluralistic Society, 227)
⁃ The most importand contribution which the church can make to the new
social order is to be itself a new social order (Newbigin, Truth to tell, 85)

Understanding the relations between the Church and the local publics

Historic approaches:
 ⁃ 1. Merging culture with Christianity (ex: post Constantin christianity,
electing a christian president, legislative actions, symbols, cross on public
buildings)
⁃ 2. Separations from culture (ex: persecutions, monasticism, pietism
during the enlightenment period, alternative community like anabaptists)
⁃ 3. Baptizing contemporary culture with different “sacred” meanings (ex:
consumeristic choices - boycotting a non christian company or buying from a
christian company)
⁃ 4. Translating the gospel into new cultures (ex: early church with
status of gentiles, social issues in history like slavery and indian “sati”)

We inhabit a story
⁃ Scripture offers a story that is the story of the entire world
⁃ Salvation is more than a ticket to go to heaven, it is the orientation
of everything toward the Lordship of Jesus Christ
⁃ It’s about growing into salvation not just “getting” salvation
⁃ Salvation is about the reorientation of every aspect of humanity to God
⁃ How do we offer salvation to people in a way that includes their
publics?
⁃ There is nothing in the world that can make you love your enemy except
the Gospel of Jesus Christ
⁃ Gathering and scattering concepts of the church
⁃ Gathering nurtures a thicker form of identity in the world as public
witness
⁃ Scattering unsettles the idolatrous forms of gathering (God isn’t just
for the israelites but for all families of the world)
⁃ Irak experiences the fastest growing church right now, Afganistan is
the second (because of persecution)
⁃ God cares about all the nations. He allowed His temple in Jerusalem to
be destroyed so that others may be exposed to the Scripture, scattering the
believers all over the world to witness for Him (to the ends of the world)

Yes and No
⁃ we need to know where we should affirm culture and when to say no and
try to redeem culture through the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ
⁃ We have churches that are very good at saying “yes” or “no” and nothing
in between.
⁃ We need more than a simplistic approach - nuanced engagement, complex
attitude is required
⁃ Changing symbols and naratives (Your task is to find symbolic ways of
doing things differently, planting flags in hostile soil, setting up signposts that
say there is a different way to be human. And when people are puzzled at what you
are doing, find ways, fresh ways, of telling the story of the return of the human
race from it’s exile and use stories as your explanation - N.T. Wright)
⁃ Foarte putini din biserica cunosc marea poveste a Scripturii, sunt
foarte buni sa faca exegeza pe un cuvant si mai putin pregatiti sa accepte si sa
inteleaga intreaga narativa a Scripturii

Nu este nimic in lume care sa te indemne sa-ti iubesti dusmanii in afara de Mesajul
lui Isus Hristos

#sieucred