cochrane_public theology in global era

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156973211X543733

International Journal of Public Theology 5 (2011) 4462 brill.nl/ijpt

Against the Grain:Responsible Public Theology in a Global Era

James R. CochraneUniversity of Cape Town, South Africa

AbstractIn commenting on William Storrars distinction between theologies of public anger (lib-eration theologies) and theologies that reect public spirit, the latter being for him more properly understood as public theologies, this article considers the roots of criti-cal theology in South Africa. The former are neither homogeneous nor as distinct from post-apartheid public theologies as Storrars formulation might suggest. Thus this article argues for rethinking what seems too narrow a view on what constitutes public theology, an argument against the grain starting from theologies against the grain. To make the argument clear, the article considers the global order within which the liber-ated state now sits, and proposes that three key issues place the greatest demands on a responsible contemporary public theology today: a revised view of human being; the ordering of society in the polis; and the management of the well-being of the (global) household, that is, the international economyall in relation to the contemporary erosion of the public sphere proper.

Keywordsinterlocutors, oikos, participation, privatization, responsibility, solidarity

Introduction

If we ask what a responsible public theology in a global era might be, three subsidiary questions appear to me to lie at the heart of any satisfactory answer: who may speak of public theology, who the primary interlocutors of such discourse are, and what would make such speaking responsible. The rst asks about what counts as public theology; the second about whose voice is most central to a fully realized public discourse; the third about its social import.

J. R. Cochrane / International Journal of Public Theology 5 (2011) 4462 45

Using the article in this issue by William Storrar as a foil,1 I will attempt to address these three questions together, beginning with an argument that chal-lenges the idea of public theology proper as conned to contexts in which a relatively free sphere of the public exists and thus, somewhat contra Storrar, locating the source of a fully adequate public theology in the roots of struggles for public space.

Speaking of Public Theology from South Africa: Roots and Responsibility

Roots

A contemporary public theology coming from this place, South Africa, must consider its roots. They are both diverse and contradictory. Some were anchored in the theologies constructed against the notorious system of apartheid, others supported that system. They were, some argue, opposite sides of the same coin: anti-apartheid theologians spoke of a contextual theology, for example, but white Afrikaner theologians claimed strongly that their style and method was as contextual as any, resting on their historical resistance to British oppres-sion. Another kind of public theology called itself the third way of engaging with society, one that claimed (questionably) to be free of ideological bias.2 Leaving aside any extended critical analysis of these various positions, their existence makes a point that I wish to emphasize at the outset.

Theology that is public, spoken to an audience in the social space that is wider than the community of the faithful, is seldom, if ever, homogeneous or singular. So, for example, Afrikaner theologies of the twentieth century spoke by and large to a narrowly dened white public only, certainly not to the great many Afrikaans-speaking people not dened as white (except to remind them of their subservient place in society). On the other hand, black theolo-gies were perceived by many whites as excluding themeven if not always accurately (many black theologians had a universal rather than a particular view of freedom).

1) William Storrar, The Naming of Parts: Doing Public Theology in a Global Era, International Journal of Public Theology 5:1 (2011), 278.2) Anthony O. Balcomb, Third Way Theology: Reconciliation, Revolution and Reform in the South African Church (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 1993).

46 J. R. Cochrane / International Journal of Public Theology 5 (2011) 4462

It appears that there are multiple publics, each with its particular theology, though Storrar would perhaps call them audiences rather than publics. If there are multiple publics (or audiences), then we must ask whose public counts, and who determines this. One answer to this question might be to suggest that there may be many audiences, but only one public sphere that counts, the one within which all audiences are able to participate relatively free of constraint and free to put forward arguments for their own validity claims. This would t Storrars use of Habermas. One might also conceivably posit a universal notion of the public, as in the Enlightenment view of a civic public freed from aristo-cratic or theocratic rule and created by individual, autonomous citizens inter-acting with each other. But this is a very particular, historically framed view of the public that cannot be deemed to be universal. It may, as Jrgen Habermas among others suggests, primarily reect a specic expression of bourgeois soci-ety.3 If one accepts the meaning of the public as the sphere of civic engagement that the Enlightenment tended to postulate, and then treats as public theol-ogy only that which ts this model, one certainly circumscribes the idea of public theology considerably, perhaps with deleterious consequences for understanding how theology becomes public. I think the idea of public theol-ogy put forward by Storrar and others, in trying to tightly dene a eld of public theology as distinct from theologies that arise where the public sphere is overly constrained rather than free, does not escape this problem. As I will argue, I think it tends to understate or even exclude some important elements of actual theological practice in such contexts, giving rise to the odd situation that people whose theological contributions are patently and specically pub-lic nevertheless feel it necessary to reject the label public theologian, regard-ing what mostly counts as public theology to be an ideological distortion of the notion of the public.4 The permanent instability of theory, and the always historically conditioned limits of knowledge, both count against too narrow a denition of the public and, hence, of public theology.5

3) Jrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cate-gory of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]).4) See, for example, Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, The Elusive Public of Public Theology: A Response to William Storrar, International Journal of Public Theology, 5:1 (2011), 7989.5) For a lengthy discussion of these issues, see Dirkie Smit, What Does Public Mean? Ques-tions with a View to Public Theology, in Len Hansen, ed., Christian in Public: Aims, Methodologies and Issues in Public Theology, Beyers Naud Centre Series on Public Theology, vol. 3 (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2007), pp. 1146.


If I understand Storrar, then theology must enter into the public sphere in an informed manner, accepting the diversity of norms and values that marks the public sphere today, with a view to staking ones claims (even on behalf of others, such as the silenced), arguing for their validity, and allowing the same right to others, thus accepting in principle the possibility of ones own error. The fact of the public sphere is thereby armed. In this regard, Storrar distin-guishes between theologies that are a representation of public anger, which may be vital in a situation where one is excluded from the public in one way or another, and a public theology, characterized by a civic spirit in the context of a more or less inclusive public sphere.6 Here the question of what makes for a responsible public theology is already answered, and it presents us with two specic challenges: to expand the sphere of the public (so that more people are able to participate in it), and to defend it (so that those who do participate are not subsequently excluded from participation or unfairly constrained in their ability to participate). Up to this point I would concur with Storrars position.

But I have a problem with this limitation of the term public theology. Storrar places theologies that directly represent public anger outside of his denition of public theology. They are, rather, oppositional or protest theolo-gies, not yet oriented towards the conditions of publicness, which depend upon a genuinely open and democratic public sphere. They would include black theology, kairos theology and many forms of liberation theology. Storrars argument seems to be that though such theologies may expressly address social systems and structures as well as a particular community (of the oppressed) in public, they are not yet an element of an inclusive public sphere; they are more like a demand for such, where the civic life within which a genuine public theology may function does not yet suciently exist (a condition, we must note, that still obtains in a great many parts of the world). As Storrar puts it, Clearly, then, where such a public sphere does not exist or operate, we cannot speak of a public theology in this denition, although we could speak of a liberation theology, for example, which contested the exclusion of the poor or other parties from history.7

This restrictive sense of the public introduces a tension that I wish to explore by returning to the question of roots. The tension arises in the dierence between civil discourse and prophetic discourse, which Storrar appears to set apart, reserving the former for public theology. My argument is that this tension never disappears, even in the most open public spheres that one might

6) Storrar, The Naming of Parts.7) Ibid., 28.


nd in the real world of particular societies, and that the tension itself is den-itive of an adequate public theology, rather than public theology being dened as one side of that tension.

The roots I wish to consider in pursuing this point are those of theologies that stood against racism and white domination in South Africa; specically, black theology and prophetic theology. Some have understood these two forms of theology to be related to each other (notably leaders of the Institute for Contextual Theology, founded in 1980);8 others see them as competing, even contradictory projects (notably Itumeleng Mosala, a leading black theo-logian at the time, and more recently, Tinyiko Maluleke).9 Whatever the dif-ferences, both kinds of theology overtly focused their attention on South Africas then racialized system of domination. Deliberately public in intention, though clearly not in a context where an open public sphere existed, their mode and style were confrontational and critical, angry if you like, and thus not (yet) reconstructive and civil.10

Embedded in a commitment to the struggle of oppressed, poor or dehu-manized human beings against domination, exploitation and indignity, these theologies had at their core a basic methodological similarity. Like feminist and African womens theology, they armed what Per Frostin calls a contrast experience, dened against the dominant or normative experience of the priv-ileged and powerful.11 Each theology takes its contrast experience (blackness, marginalization, femaleness, African womanhood) as denitive for theological understanding. The practical experience of oppression or dehumanization, allied to a transformative public and ecclesial praxis, thus provides criteria for assessing valid doctrine and dogma, for critically analysing oppressive teaching and practices, and for guiding faithful behaviour and action. Inherited tradi-tions, while usually (but not always) valued, are thereby brought under criti-cism, as are the social contexts within which such traditions emerged and are communicated.

8) Larry T. Kaufmann, Good News to the Poor: The Impact of Albert Nolan on Contextual Theology in South Africa, in McGlory T. Speckman and Larry T. Kaufmann, eds, Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology: Essays in Honour of Albert Nolan (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Pub-lications, 2001), pp. 1732. 9) Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, Theology in (South) Africa: How the Future Has Changed, in Speckman and Kaufmann, eds, Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology, pp. 36489.10) For a recent review, see Mokgethi B. G. Motlhabi, African Theology/Black Theology in South Africa: Looking Back, Moving On (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2008).11) Per Frostin, Liberation Theology in South Africa and Tanzania (Lund: Lund University Press, 1988).


These theologies thus have usually simultaneously addressed, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, both the church (the Christian community) and society (the state). The language and idiom used in either case were often the same. In this sense, there was one public discourse, albeit not that of the dominant elites. This is seen with clarity in The Kairos Document.12 A tract of considerable power and inuence that overtly aimed itself at the church, it nevertheless clearly had the state in mind as its target as well, using terms and theological claims that were meant to be understoodand responded toby both church and state. That the South African state recognized this is evident in its reaction; vitriolic and punitive. That the state had its own Christian theological rationale and religious support for its racial policies made it easier, of course, for both church and state to be addressed through a single discourse. Yet both were clear that this was theology that went against the grain.

Moreover, that is the point: public theologies, but against the grain. I would question whether one may therefore say they are not public theologies but only representations of anger, simply because they faced a constrained public sphere. My own view is that public theology understood this way easily turns into precisely the kind of conservative enterprise that many critique using the tools of a sociology of power and knowledge (as Foucault does) or subaltern theory (employed by Gayatri Spivak, for example).13 I shall consider this point further by looking at questions of responsibility for, and participation in, the public sphere. There are some commonalities here with what Storrar proposes, and a number of critical questions.

Responsibility

The increasingly petried religious legitimations of white rule, as we know, did not survive; those theologies that worked against the grain in attacking white rule won the day, or at least found their justication in the rise of a new order aimed at undoing racism and oppression. As this new order emerged, and a new democratic dispensation was put in place, theologies against the grain beforehand now began to turn with the grain, in support of the state project. A great many confusions arose, perhaps unsurprisingly.14

12) The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church, second edn (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1986).13) See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002 [1969]) and Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: MacMillan, 1988), pp. 271313.14) For an extensive account, see Katrin Kusmierz and James R. Cochrane, entliche Kirche und entliche Theologie in Sdafrikas Politischer Transformation, in Christine Lienemann-Perrin


One sign of such confusion came in a revised position announced by the South African Council of Churches (SACC) in the mid-1990s. Having stood rmly and publicly against the apartheid state, particularly in the 1980s, the SACC now described itself as being in critical solidarity with the liberated state. Apparently congruent with the past, having supported the liberation movements beforehand, this statement nevertheless reected a fundamental reversal.

In the anti-apartheid era, solidarity was strictly dened as being with blacks, the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden, in ways not dissimilar to the Latin American preferential option for the poor.15 That the state was an unjust, ultimately illegitimate state seemed clear enough. Yet the theological heart of black and prophetic theologies lay not in a mere commitment to a change of state rule. This would reect a neo-Constantinianism, withholding support as long as the state remained unreformed, but standing ready to baptize the vic-torious liberation movement once it had its hands on state power and institu-tions. But solidarity with those not in power or positions of domination was a theological principle that applied no matter who might wield the reins of power in the state, now or in the future. Critical solidarity, biblically and theo-logically seen, is always and irrevocably with those who suer.16 The form of state or the character of those who lead the state might aect mood, style, behaviour, strategy and tactics, but not this principle.

The language of the SACC has since become more sensitive on this point, but it remains instructive that the foundations of past public theologies against apartheid, for which the SACC stood as a guardian, could so easily be forgot-ten in the rush to arm the new order. That activists, including Christian clergy and church ocers of one kind or another, would want to help build the new society alongside all those of good will is understandable; indeed, commendable and necessary. That theological reection would follow suit might be expected.17 Yet this inclination begs serious questions, to some of which I now turn. I shall do so in continuity with an analysis of the church as

and Wolfgang Lienemann, eds, Kirche Und entlichkeit in Transformationsgesellschaften (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2006), pp. 195226.15) See John Eagleson and Philip Scharper, Puebla and Beyond: Documentation and Commentary, trans. John Drury (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979).16) I note here Paul Ricoeurs denition of the inability to act as a fully human person in relation with other people as being the beginning of the reign of suering; see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).17) James R. Cochrane, Re-Entering the Square, Fully Clothed: Religion in Public Life in South Africa Today, Bulletin for Contextual Theology in Africa, 6:1 (1999), 328.


tending, in times of relative stability, to function as a servant of power;18 and with a claim that the voice and the local wisdom of marginalized people needs to be constitutive of a responsible theology that respects the dignity and the humanity of those who stand outside the circles of high power and inuence.19

Among the questions to be addressed, we shall rst consider what we mean by public theology in a democratic order; specically, what norms public the-ology needs to work with, whether these norms are to be taken as ultimate, how marginality gures in them, and whether the norms that have governed South Africas transitional epoch have not confused the role of public theol-ogy. Then we shall consider the global order within which the liberated state now sits, and propose that three key issues face a responsible contemporary public theology: a revised view of human being; the ordering of society in the polis; and the management of the well-being of the (global) household, that is, the international economy. In my view, these three issues place the greatest demands on a responsible contemporary public theology.20

Assessing Public Theology Today: Publics and Participation

The disestablishment of religion in plural democracies necessarily destabilizes any existing theologies that have relied upon their normative position in soci-ety. This, according to Casanova, is the one solid claim that can be made by secularization theory.21 A further claim, that religion would become increas-ingly privatized, cannot be sustained. Whether or not religion tends towards privatization depends upon local conditions and changing temporal realities; indeed, we may assume that the public presence of religion has in the last

18) James R. Cochrane, Servants of Power: The Role of English-Speaking Churches, 19031930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987).19) James R. Cochrane, Circles of Dignity: Community Wisdom and Theological Reection (Min-neapolis: Fortress Press, 1999).20) These formulations point to the complex relations between ethics, economy, ecology and ecumen; for a particularly innovative attempt to think through these relations in relation to Christian theology, see Klaus Nrnberger, Prosperity, Poverty and Pollution: Managing the Approaching Crisis (London: Zed Books, 1999).21) Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).


couple of decades increased both generally and globally.22 A renewed interest in public theology accompanies this shift.

Many Publics?

David Tracy has set the ground for a new understanding of public theology in his classic proposal that theology speaks to three distinct publics,23 and since then, countless others have built their arguments around his suggestions. In this respect one may speak of a standard set of assumptions about public the-ology, at least in North American literature. They include the idea of the pub-lic in the rst place, and a conviction that theological arguments must be addressed dierently to dierent publics. Tracy denes three such publics (the civic, the academic and the ecclesial), while Storrar adds a fourth (world religions).24 Yet most of the literature focuses on one denition: the public that comprises the citizens of a plural democracy. Storrars particular contribu-tion is to argue for an engagement with the general public that has congrega-tional purchase, binding pastoral and priestly ministry to public mission (thus linking at least two of Tracys publics). Storrar, along with many others, thinks that David Boschs formulation of a new paradigm of mission25 ts the view of public theology Storrar oers, calling it in fact the name we should give this paradigm as its gestalt or pattern.26

These formulations, however spelled out, seem to have something of a nor-mative character in respect of a basic assumption that may not be very stable; namely, the existence of a plural democracy as the condition of public theol-ogy. One might even suggest that plural democracies as they really exist, espe-cially in Europe and North America, are (perhaps subconsciously) assumed to

22) See, for example, Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds, Religion: Cultural Memory in the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Jrgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?, in Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, eds, The Globalization Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3643; Max Stackhouse and Peter Paris, God and Globalization (Harris-burg: Trinity Press International, 2000); Manuel A. Vsquez and Marie F. Marquardt, Globaliz-ing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).23) David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).24) Storrar, The Naming of Parts, 27.25) David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991).26) Storrar, The Naming of Parts, 24.


be the ideal, in principle at least. To the extent that this is so, public theology is conservative in assuming a particular political model to be foundational.

This may be illustrated by referring again to two claims in Storrars article. After describing Boschs holistic missiological view as the basis of a new para-digm for public theology,27 and linking it to Habermas discursive theory of communicative action,28 Storrar notes that where a public spherea space for public opinion on public issuesdoes not exist, we cannot speak of a public theology.29 Thus, where the public sphere is weak or non-existent, we may speak of a political or liberation theology, but these are not then dened as public theologies. Consistent with this view, Storrar sees the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as paradigmatic in building an inclusive public space, and Archbishop Tutu in his leadership of the TRC as exemplary in expressing a public theology. Here, to Storrar, public theology gives expression to the public anger of the many dierent silenced and excluded voices of the oppressed or the marginalized.30 Curiously, however, although political and liberation theologies of the past did the same thing in opposition to the state, they are not considered to be engaged in public theology.

Storrar argues that the distinctive mark of a public theology is that it takes place in a relatively unconstrained space of speech and communication. Where such spaces do not exist, the task is to work towards creating them. Only once they are created may the voices of the oppressed and marginalized be regarded as formally part of the public sphere, that is, part of public theology. The curi-osity of this argument grows when one considers that the TRC, with all its proud and noteworthy achievements, was and remains a point of contention for many who feel precisely that their voices were either not heard, or inade-quately addressed in the process. They question this space of publicness. In doing so, they bring into question not the TRC itself (everyone, including Storrar in relation to the TRC, concedes that public processes are always limited), but the limits to understanding it as the model of publicness. It is an ironic eect of the TRCs success that, in making space for a selected range of people (logistically unavoidable), it both left others out, and more signi-cantly, inadvertently closed down other spaces to address the issues. It is one of its most vexing eects that the perpetrators of violence see it as a sucient

27) Bosch, Transforming Mission.28) Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).29) Storrar, The Naming of Parts, 28.30) Ibid., 31.


response to the history of conict and violence, a sentiment readily visible in the oft-heard now let the past be the past and let us move on, which allows the perpetrator to continue in unchallenged privilege and power in far too many instances. There is nothing wrong and everything right with the partial public space occupied by the TRC. The problem is that the partial public space all too quickly substitutes for the whole, and this, I suggest, is not dis-connected from an overly narrow view of the public.

We might take this line of thought a step further. Storrar uses Boschs model of missiology as a touchstone for dening an adequate public theology, refer-ring to it as part of a new (postmodern) paradigm.31 The key element of this paradigm is the integral link between pastoral, priestly and public dimensions of ministry, established by conjoining the ideas of salvation and liberation on the one hand, and the local church and justice on the other. The framework seems fair enough, but I doubt that it is really a new paradigm of the kind that puts liberation theologies outside of a denition of public theology. The foun-dations of liberation theology in Latin America, and important thrusts within black and prophetic theologies within South Africa, articulate exactly the same elements that Bosch identies, and indeed he uses the language of liberation himself.32 I would ask why the fact that such theologies emerge in an agonistic (alienated) relation to the state, rather than a supportive (civil) one, should be decisive for how one understands public theology.

My return to the roots of South African oppositional theologies under apartheid should yield the same results as Storrars appeal to Bosch in under-standing what counts as public theology, yet they appear not to. There is indeed a dierence between the two, as I have hinted. It is the importance of the role of contrast experiences, and with them, the issue of who ones primary interlocutor is for a public theology. This is what disappears in the idea of public theology as that which takes place in a relatively sanitized public sphere,

31) However, it is not clear in what sense it is postmodern if it is linked to Habermas theory of communicative action, self-described as an attempt to protect the (modern) Enlightenment legacy.32) Storrar follows the view that Boschs paradigm unites such elements as evangelism and the quest for justice, salvation and liberation. Since Storrar explicitly contrasts public theology, the name for this paradigm, with liberation theologies, I would argue that this is to short-change liberation theologies quite seriously. For example, Gustavo Gutirrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973 [1971]), explicitly seeks to unite precisely these elements in theory, as did the books pas-toral foundations in base ecclesial communities. I would suggest that Bosch, too, has such views in mind, seeing in them something of the paradigm he is calling for.


and this is why I am inclined to wonder whether Storrars view is too restricted. The methodological precision gained in dening public theology in relation to a relatively unconstrained sphere of discourse and communicative action comes at too high a practical price, I would argue.

Participation

Having myself argued for a discursive, communicative view on the public sphere informed by Habermas theories,33 I am sympathetic towards the idea of a public sphere predicated upon the participation of citizens through public opinion in the shaping of public discourse and practice. Equally, I take for granted both that where such possibilities do not exist, it is important to advo-cate for them, and that this is a genuinely theological task. Yet, attractive as such a position is, it remains bothersome. As an expression of the ideal speech situation, it makes philosophical sense, for it predicates a truly open society with maximum freedom, on the basis of argument in support of ones validity claims, for a principled engagement with diversity and plurality, a prime con-sideration in a globalizing world. But as an accounting of actual conditions, it begs the question of participation, indeed, of the ability to participate, in the public sphere; and this is so even if one adds, as does Storrar, (citing Parker Palmer) the criteria of welcoming the stranger into the public sphere,34 or (citing Iris Young) of speaking with reexive awareness that third parties could be listening.35

If, by extrapolation, a public theology is dened as such only where the conditions of participation are, to a greater or lesser extent, already met, then vast regions of society in the great majority of existing nations cannot be the context for public theology. Equally seriously, the global commons cannot be such a context either, outside of a very limited number of forums within which certain peopleone might even say certain classes of peopleare able to act. In general, in such contexts, only particular representatives of society can speak, and it is unlikely that they will reect the voices of the marginalized and

33) For example, James R. Cochrane, Nation-Building: A Socio-Theological Perspective, in W. S. Vorster, ed., Building a New Nation (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1991), pp. 5175; James R. Cochrane, The Fragility of Truth: Tolerance, Discourse Ethics and the Formation of a Democratic Citizenry, in Douglas McGaughey and Cornelia Cyss Crocker, eds, From Biblical Interpretation to Human Transformation: Reopening the Past to Actualize New Possibilities for the Future (Salem: Chora-Strangers, 2006), pp. 198217.34) Storrar, The Naming of Parts, 28 and 32.35) Ibid., 31.


the oppressed. On the contrary, it is more likely that such voices will not only be muted but translated into discourses of power and auence as dened by the rich and the mighty. This salutary lesson South Africans have had to learn late, as the nave optimisms of the rst fruits of our newly democratic society fade.

This is not a new problem, of course. The point is that the route suggested by Storrars arguments does not serve to resolve it. It too easily accepts an understanding of the public that rests essentially on a privileged, even if his-torically important, experience of liberal democracy, and on a conception of public participation that is possible only if and when one lives in such a soci-ety. Perhaps the goal of some such form of society remains admirable and necessary, but I would argue that public theology cannot be dened only in relation to that particular possibility. If so, then public theology is the practice of a privileged few, speaking globally. It is an oddly similar, even if less exclu-sive, modernized version of the ideal of reasoned speech that motivated Plato to argue that only educated, civilized and suitably mature persons should be trusted with the polis (his meritocracy was far more restricted than a Haber-masian notion of discursive arenas which owes more to an Aristotelian appre-ciation of diversity).36

We shall see if this is fair comment. Perhaps it needs further substantiation if it is to be more than a critical observation about the notion of the public. This may best be done by reference to the one sphere of activity that remains, in liberal democracies, fundamentally outside of the public realm and of the commons, namely, the economy.37

The Penetration of the Public Sphere: Privatization and Erosion

In Habermas social theory, the contemporary public sphere is penetrated by the media of power and money, which take the systemic form of the nation-state and the market. Power, the realm of politics, is relatively more open to the public, even in restrictive societies, to the extent that voices and actions force upon those who wield political power some accommodation, for their

36) Both Plato and Aristotle, of course, made few concessions, if any, to women or slaves in their conception of the public, which was clearly a gendered space privileging the male; see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).37) Storrar also turns to economic issues in his article (Storrar, The Naming of Parts, 39).


own survival, if for nothing else. The story of South Africas liberation struggle, against a highly repressive state willing to exercise any kind of force, tells us that. The market, however, is a wholly dierent proposition. Without pre-tending to enter into a substantive analysis of the political economy of the market, I shall raise the following points as indicators of a restricted notion of the public and of the commons in its contemporary form.

Privatization of the Oikos

First, the traditional Catholic doctrine of the common good holds little sway in most liberal democracies, and not much more at global level. Though there are interesting signs of its resurrection in the face of global warming, actual proposed policies to deal with this reality all move along market-oriented lines and economic self-interest, as in the idea of carbon osets and carbon trade. The global nancial meltdown that began in 2008 also raises the question of the common good, but rst signs are that it will do little more than change the way nancial capital markets are regulated.

Historically, the notion of the common good was supplanted by the idea of individual good, in tandem with the belief that individuals, dened as self-interested, should be freely allowed to enter into exchange relations with each other according to their needs and their means as the best basis for regulating society. Under the neo-liberal aegis of the Chicago School of economics, tri-umphant under Reagan and Thatcher (and in South Africa, under P. W. Botha, second last head of the apartheid state), the idea of the common good has been thoroughly exorcised. If there is a common good left at all, it is recast as welfare; that is, as the responsibility to assist those who, through no fault of their own but because of the negative eects of the system, bear the costs asso-ciated with having insucient means.

Secondly, in the long historical process thus described, it has come to be widely understood that the economy is not the business of the state, other than in respect of creating favourable macro-economic conditions, and that business is a private enterprise; hence, not the business of the public. Notwith-standing the massive impact that economic realities have upon the daily life of citizens, upon their families, their communities and their capacities for actu-ally participating in any public sphere, these realities are thus de facto ruled out of the public sphere. Should one try to reintroduce some public sway over business, one faces either resistance or a response framed only within the lim-its of the instrumental logicnot a public or communicative logicof money and market. The problem lies precisely in dening the core of economic life as


private. This calls forth an agonistic public theology,38 and suggests that a public discourse that pays no attention to this privatization of the most pow-erful element of human life together is severely limited or, more strongly, abro-gates its responsibility.

Thirdly, the designation of the economy as primarily the preserve of private enterprise protects a certain class, and excludes all other classes from inuence over the central decision-making processes of the economy. This impacts not just on economic life, but on the polis itself. The lobbying power of business, resting as it does on asymmetrically distributed resources, is generally accepted within the eld of policy studies to be by a long way the dominant role-player in state or government policies, both in nation-states and the global village.39 Unsurprisingly, therefore, politics, in the sense of political parties contesting for power, has also come increasingly under the sway of economic actors, one example being the enormous wealth or investment needed to be a serious contender in the US presidential elections. The ability of citizens to control through public means this economic form of inuence and power is also seri-ously constricted in liberal democracies by virtue of an odd legal principle; that is, corporations are generally dened as private persons with a range of accompanying rights.

Fourthly, the philosophical anthropology that underlies this construction of a central feature of the human oikos depends upon a truncated notion of the human being, who is now seen as a self-interested entity entering (or not), through rational choices regarding costs and benets, into exchange relations with other human beings; a view that eectively side-lines other norms and values as operative for social life. One telling impact of this in our current environment occurs in what might be called the sacred realmthat which is set aside as holy, relatively protected from instrumental means and endswhich has been eroded entirely in many places, leaving nothing sacred or set aside, as if demand and supply dynamics justify it (we are just providing what people want, is the common refrain). I am thinking here of the penetration of

38) One notable example is Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Leben ist Mehr als Kapital: Alternativen zur Globalen Diktatur des Eigentums (Druckhaus Bayreuth: Publik-Forum, 2002); available in English as Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Prot: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital, trans. Elaine Griths (London: Cath-olic Institute for International Relations, 2004).39) William N. Dunn, Public Policy Analysis: An Introduction (Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2009); Michael T. Gibbons, Introduction: The Politics of Interpretation, in Michael T. Gibbons, ed., Interpreting Politics, Readings in Social and Political Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1987).


a market logic, without remainder it seems, into intimate relations, private lives and religious rituals, as in so-called reality shows, or in the patterns of communication (if such it is) that characterize widespread popular culture described by OHagan thus: Spite as entertainment. Shouting as argument. Dysfunction as normality. Desires as rights. Shopping as democracy.40

It also enters into the ideology that claims that anything and everything can be sold if someone wants to buy it, that the right to enact such exchange rela-tions is the primary human right, the basic freedom. There is no responsibility to the other, here, except in terms of the particular contract of exchange that has been agreed upon.

The most potent expression of this kind of anthropology, in my view, lies in the notion of the shareholder. The person as shareholderholding shares, for example, in a food canning factory in the Overberg of the Western Capehas only one basic interest: the value of her or his shares, and an increase in their value, for personal gain. If the company concerned deems it necessary to close the factory or move it elsewhere in order to maximize dividends and improve nancial exibility, it is the shareholders who vote on this. Yet these sharehold-ers, in general, have no connection to the factory per se, nor to those who work in it, the community whose livelihood is aected by it, or the country in which it is located. They are virtual persons, owners of pieces of paper that give them decisive rights removed from any material context of work or pro-duction, making decisions about human beings who inhabit that material context but who will generally have no say in those decisions. What happens to the town or the people if the factory is closed is of no consequence to the shareholder.

We might ask what the role of public opinion is in this context. Moreover, if that is a key question, then we must also ask what one does to construct a dierent sense of the public sphere in which such decisions are not assumed to be private but a matter of common livelihood, or the common good. We may, in the context of what has been said above and considering the canning fac-tory in the Overberg as an example, wonder if the following description ts our condition better than most others: All xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,

40) Andrew OHagan, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), as cited by The Sunday Independent (27 July 2008).


all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.41

Marx and Engelss description of the political economy of their time seems even more apposite now. It is both a potent pointer to some key features of a globalizing economy and a reminder of its long history. But for my purposes, the relevant point here is less about the signs of the times, and more about the distortion of the public sphere itself that results from the nature of the politi-cal economy within which we sit.

Erosion of the Properly Public

A key claim from Habermas is particularly instructive; namely, that the life-worlds of persons, including the discursive sphere of the public and the reli-gious arena of faith, are increasingly colonized by the instrumental logics of both market (money) and state (power). If so, then a responsible public theol-ogy must surely reect not only anger and the spirit of citizenship, but also a capacity to counteract the erosion of the public sphere per se by forces internal to its structural foundations. To help to build local or larger publics without tackling the conditions that restrict what may be considered public under the dominant contemporary political economy is insucient. Indeed, it may sim-ply be whistling into the wind and, oddly, because empowering local and larger publics is indeed a vital task, we may nd ourselves engaged in support-ing and sustaining the mere appearance of the public on-stage while other forces swirl around o-stage, clapping our performance, but making the key decisions about how we will live and act when the performance is over.

This does not speak against Storrars call for a public spirit and spirited citi-zenship, and indeed, a number of my own writings in the post-apartheid era argue for something similar,42 including the sophistication that is necessary for

41) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1848]), p. 223.42) See, for example, James R. Cochrane, Corruption and the Role of Religion in Public Life, in Stan Sangweni and Daryl M. Balia, eds, Fighting Corruption: South African Perspectives, (Pre-toria: Unisa Press, 1999), pp. 4157; James R. Cochrane, Religion in Civil Society: Readings from the South African Case, in James R. Cochrane and Bastienne Klein, eds, Sameness and Dierence: Problems and Potentials in South African Civil Society (Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2000), pp. 1553; James R. Cochrane, On Religion and Theology in a Civil Society, in Lyn Holness and Ralf K. Wstenberg, eds, Theology in Dialogue: The Impact of the Arts, Humanities, and Science on Contemporary Religious Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 11632.


this to be eective and persuasive in a pluralist constitutional democracy.43 Storrar introduces the notion of neighbourliness, with a particular interest in welcoming the stranger, as a central metaphor for participation in public life.44 While he does not probe the idea deeply, it may be worth doing so, for most people probably still tend to think in terms of geographical proximity when they think of neighbours, and equally, of settled communities who are able to enter into the sphere of the public relatively normally. This may be mislead-ing in our time, given the vast sectors of the global population where destabi-lization of settled communities or neighbourhoods is a growing feature of the commons.

In some respects, this is a carping criticism, for Storrars metaphor can be argued as pertinent to all kinds of neighbourhoods, settled or fractured, stable or in motion. But his term weakens, at least rhetorically, the reality of the city and the commons as a place of deep contradictions, widespread interstitial existences, andconsidering the wide-ung, impoverished townships of our major cities in South Africaextensive alienation and inequality, sucient to undermine the sense of social community or Gemeinsamkeit that seems to me a prerequisite for a notion of neighbourliness.45

Here then, going beyond the limits of a secured discursive sphere of public opinion, we might return to a sense of public theology that marked the history of the critical and oppositional theologies of the past. However, it is not a return I would seek, for I agree with Storrar that the disjunctions introduced by a new social order require innovation rather than nostalgia, dierent sensi-bilities than those that govern a dysfunctional society shaped by deep patterns of oppression. Rather, I am suggesting that the split between public anger and public spirit that lies within Storrars distinction between oppositional and public theologies is the problem, when that split is conceived in terms of a denition of the public that rests only upon a relatively unconstrained

43) See, for example, James R. Cochrane, Theological Reection on Public Policy: The Church and the Reconstruction of South African Society, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 97 (1997), 115; James R. Cochrane, The Making and Unmaking of Public Life, Journal of Theol-ogy for Southern Africa, 100 (1998), 86103; James R. Cochrane, Polity, Probity and Piety: Religion in the Making of Public Policy, in Abdulkader Tayob and Wolfram Weisse, eds, Reli-gion and Politics in South Africa: From Apartheid to Democracy, Religion and Society in Transi-tion, vol. 1 (New York: Waxmann Mnster, 1999).44) Storrar, The Naming of Parts, 28 and 32.45) James R. Cochrane, Which Citizen, Whose City? Response to Wards Christian Political Practice and the Global City, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 123 (2005), 427.


discursive sphere of public opinion making. Both moments belong together, intrinsically, necessarily, and both are forms of public theology in my view.

The trick, nevertheless, is to nd a framework for seeing the task of public theologies, now understood more broadly, in such a way that the critical, excluded moment of public anger is not opposed to the reconstructive, included moment of civic spirit; for that is what stirs up the mud and makes it hard to develop a theological position that is congruent across transitional divides between the past and the present. A second trick, rightly highlighted by Storrar, is to nd a framework that simultaneously binds the pastoral, the priestly and the prophetic to an understanding of the irrevocably public signicance of Christian theology. I shall now explore the answer to these conundrums.

A sincere and responsibly limited view of the public sphere that enables one to oer, with the clarity that Storrar does, a way of dening the properly pub-lic task of theology in a settled public space is an option. Yet as I have argued, this too readily opens up the possibility of a disturbing discontinuity between the dangerous memories of the struggle for emancipation and the task of speaking within a properly, even if partially, constituted public space. In mov-ing towards a more contradiction-bound sense of the public, I seek a dierent kind of dialectic between the past and the present that would more fully reect the history of public theology in a place like South Africa.

I am not sure that such a dialectic has emerged yet. Perhaps our inability to discern adequate ways of meeting the necessary conditions for a public theol-ogy rests on the likelihood that we are living through timesspeaking of his-tory on a grand scalethat reect a shift from one paradigm that is in crisis to another that is not yet present or clear. We might well be victims of the future in that sense. Nevertheless, if any clue is in the ong, it might lie in a theology of life, in forms of reection and analysis that search for those markers, pro-cesses, energies and persons that exhibit, against the threats of death in what-ever forms they might occur, the movement of life and the promise of life abundant, for all.46 If there is anything that is simultaneously complex enough to be true to reality, fractal enough to coherently link macro- and micro-scale existences, integrated enough to bind the personal and the social or the private and the public, and comprehensive enough to t both action and aspiration, both faith and reection, it would be life.

46) A provocative reading of Pauline theology following this line of thought may be found in Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986).

/ColorImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorImageDict > /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 150 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict > /GrayImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayImageDict > /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 550 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /Warning /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 2400 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict > /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /PDFX1a:2001 ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError false /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox false /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (GWG_GenericCMYK) /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False

/Description > /Namespace [ (Adobe) (Common) (1.0) ] /OtherNamespaces [ > /FormElements false /GenerateStructure false /IncludeBookmarks false /IncludeHyperlinks false /IncludeInteractive false /IncludeLayers false /IncludeProfiles false /MultimediaHandling /UseObjectSettings /Namespace [ (Adobe) (CreativeSuite) (2.0) ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfileSelector /DocumentCMYK /PreserveEditing true /UntaggedCMYKHandling /LeaveUntagged /UntaggedRGBHandling /UseDocumentProfile /UseDocumentBleed false >> ]>> setdistillerparams> setpagedevice

cochrane_public theology in global era

Documents