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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
The past twenty-five years have seen a widespread turn to the concrete in theology, and an increased awareness of the importance of practices, believing communities and material culture for both Christian faith itself, and theological engagement with it. In ecclesiology, this turn to the concrete has manifested itself in the rise of concrete approaches to ecclesiology. These have developed over the past fifteen years or so, as ecclesiologists have integrated theological and social-scientific perspectives on the church, to create both general methodological studies, and smaller scale ‘ecclesiological ethnographies’ of particular church communities.
This article critically explores some of the key methodological moves of the emerging discipline of concrete ecclesiology. In the first part of the article, I argue that concrete ecclesiologies display two characteristic methodological tendencies. First, they exhibit a tendency to define their approach as concrete and realistic in contrast to twentieth-century doctrinal approaches to ecclesiology, which they perceive as unhelpfully idealising and abstract. Second, they tend to express the task of ecclesiological ethnography as one of balancing the claims of two descriptive languages, theology and social science, with regard to a single object, the church. The underlying metaphor here is borrowed from christology: just as theological language about Christ's divine and human nature must be kept in balance, so doctrinal and social perspectives on the church must be kept in balance to avoid ‘ecclesiological Nestorianism’.
In the second part of the article, I argue that these two methodological tendencies result in caricatured understandings of theology and ethnography as functional opposites. Theology tends to be regarded as an inherently abstracting and idealising influence in ecclesiology, while ethnography tends to be regarded as a means of straightforwardly accessing the ‘real’ church. This in turn creates a problematically thermostatic understanding of the relationship between theological and ethnographic insights in ecclesiology, casting them as mutually regulating and opposite influences. The article closes by proposing a potentially more fruitful alternative model for integrating theology and ethnography, by exploring the similarities between the ways in which the two disciplines understand and relate to their respective objects of study.
1 Healy, Nicholas M. notes this general turn to the concrete in his essay ‘Ecclesiology and Practical Theology’, in Sweeney, James, Simmonds, Gemma and Lonsdale, David (eds), Keeping Faith in Practice: Catholic Perspectives on Practical and Pastoral Theology (London: SCM, 2010), pp. 117–18Google Scholar.
2 McClintock, Mary Fulkerson describes the same change in a different way in her ‘Theology and the Lure of the Practical: An Overview’, Religion Compass 1/2 (2007), pp. 294–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Healy states that ecclesiology's task is ‘to aid the church in the performance of its two main tasks . . to witness to the Lord in the world and to help the individual Christian in her task of discipleship’. See Healy, Nicholas M., Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar (hereafter Church). See also the introduction to Scharen, Christian (ed.), Explorations in Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012)Google Scholar, in which it is stated (p. 3) that ‘The foundational aim of this work is to further turn scholarship to the task of strengthening pastoral leaders and the congregations they serve as they seek to understand and effectively guide congregations for the sake of faithful witness and service in the world’.
4 Healy distinguishes between the empirical church and the concrete church in Church, p. 4. For a distinction between the institutional church and the concrete church, see Jinkins, Michael, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Postmodern Context (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p. 42Google Scholar.
5 For arguments against distinguishing between the visible and invisible church, see Jinkins, Church Faces Death, p. 48, and Mudge, Lewis, Rethinking the Beloved Community: Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics and Social Theory (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), p. 9Google Scholar.
6 Roger Haight e.g. argues that ‘[t]he principal object of ecclesiology consists in the empirical organization or collectivity or community called church’. See Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 1, Historical Ecclesiology (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 5.
7 See e.g. Harald Hegstad's simple statement that ‘the church is a social reality, accessible for empirical investigation’ in his ‘Ecclesiology and Empirical Research on the Church’ in Scharen, Explorations, p. 41.
8 Ward, Pete (ed.), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), p. 2Google Scholar.
9 Healy, Church, p. 3.
10 Ibid., p. 26. Healy contrasts such highly systematised modern accounts of church with pre-modern accounts of church from Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin, arguing that pre-modern ecclesiologies are more practically minded: ‘Doctrines about the church are formulated to serve the tasks of the church rather than for theoretical purposes’ (pp. 55–9).
11 Roger Haight's articulation of the difference between ecclesiologies from above and ecclesiologies from below is perhaps the clearest example of a concrete ecclesiologist engaging in contrastive definition of his or her project. ‘Against the background of an ecclesiology that is abstract, idealist, and a-historical,’ he writes, ‘an ecclesiology from below is concrete, realist and historically conscious.’ See Haight, Christian Community, vol. 1, pp. 4–5, and further pp. 17–56. While Haight makes clear that his distinctions are between ideal types, his description of ecclesiologies from above and his articulation of his own programme in distinction from them leaves little doubt that he has in mind a certain sort of magisterial ecclesiology. See also Roger Haight and James Nieman, ‘On the Dynamic Relation between Ecclesiology and Congregational Studies’, in Scharen, Explorations, pp. 11–13.
12 Healy, Church, pp. 25–51.
13 For theological histories see Healy, Church, pp. 161–4; for theological sociology ibid., pp. 164–7; for theological ethnography ibid., pp. 167–76.
14 Jinkins, Church Faces Death, pp. 50–68. Jinkins recognises the usefulness of taxonomies (such as those of Avery Dulles and H. Richard Niebuhr), but also argues that they have serious weaknesses. For his critique of ecclesiological essentialism, see ibid., pp. 73–84 and 86–101.
15 Ibid., pp. 80, 73.
16 Ibid., p.73.
17 Ibid., p. 101. It is worth noting that Healy and Jinkins, despite making such strikingly similar moves within a year of one another, were completely unaware of one another's work: the emergence of this methodological common sense is quite remarkable.
18 In articulating his project in contrast to modern/twentieth-century ecclesiologies, it is arguable that Healy underplays some of the ways in which these ecclesiologies are also responding to practical concerns. Haight argues that ‘twentieth-century ecclesiology betrays a growing consciousness, appreciation, and organization of pluralism’ and a sense that ‘the ecumene, or whole world, both in geographical terms of the five continents and human terms of the secular sphere of human activity, progressively becomes the horizon for understanding the church’. It could be argued that, in trying to systematise and organise this pluralism, twentieth-century ecclesiology is responding to a practical concern. See Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 2, Comparative Ecclesiology (London: Continuum 2005), p. 368.
19 For the empirical/doctrinal and from below/from above distinctions see Haight, Christian Community, vol. 1, pp. 18–35, 56–66. For an example of the real/ideal distinction, see Anglican theologian Martyn Percy: ‘Sociology is an attempt at social realism; religion though, is about idealism’. See Percy, Shaping the Church: The Promise of Implicit Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), p. 35.
20 Healy, Church, p. 75.
21 Jinkins, Church Faces Death, p. 73.
22 My wording here is indebted to Edward Schillebeeckx, who talks about ‘pseudo-problems’ building up in theology around the questions of human reality and the reality of grace. See his Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1990), p. 211. The christological theme is also evident in Jinkins, Church Faces Death, p. 92.
23 While Johannes van der Ven does not use the christological analogy, he does draw on the idea of social science and theology as two languages describing a single object, for which see van der Ven, Johannes A., Ecclesiology in Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 87Google Scholar. The church's functions can be described in either exclusively social scientific (pp. 87–90) or exclusively religious language (pp. 91–2); the key is to balance them (p. 93). Van der Ven writes, ‘ecclesiology should be developed proceeding from the coordination of the social and religious aspects of the functions of the church’ (p. 98, author's emphasis).
24 Healy references Schleiermacher's characterisation of the church as a ‘moral person with an individual life’. See Healy, ‘Ecclesiology, Ethnography and God: An Interplay of Reality Descriptions’, in Ward, Perspectives on Ecclesiology, p. 198. The social body analogy is also characteristic of the contributors to Ideström, Jonas (ed.), For the Sake of the World: Swedish Ecclesiology in Dialogue with William T. Cavanaugh (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009)Google Scholar, e.g. Ola Sigurdson's comments in ‘The Return of the Body: Re-imagining the Ecclesiology of Church of Sweden’, pp. 125–45.
25 Ideström, Jonas, Lokal Kyrklig Identitet: En Studie Av Implicit Ecklesiologi Med Exemplet Svenska Kyrkan I Flemingsberg (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma, 2009), pp. 36–40Google Scholar, 251–5.
26 Ibid., p. 275.
27 Though the analogy leans heavily on the side of the individual body as moral agent, some theologians have a sophisticated sense of the body as constructed by, and permeable to, societal influences. McClintock Fulkerson draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to make this move. See her ‘“We Don't See Colour Here”: A Case Study in Ecclesial-Cultural Intervention’, in Brown, Delwin, Davaney, Sheila Greeve and Tanner, Kathryn (eds), Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 140–57Google Scholar.
28 Gerard Mannion's attempt to develop a ‘virtue ecclesiology’, despite its vocal criticisms of Hauerwas, stands in continuity with ecclesiologies influenced by the MacIntyrean return to virtue in modern ethics. See Mannion, Gerard, Ecclesiology in Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time (Collegeville, MI: Liturgical Press, 2007), pp. 192–215Google Scholar.
29 Healy suggests that it is not unreasonable ‘to describe the concrete church, at least initially, more in terms of agency than in terms of being’. See Healy, Church, p. 5.
30 See Mudge, Lewis, The Sense of a People: Toward a Church for the Human Future (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), pp. 138–41Google Scholar, and Mudge, Beloved Community, p. 13.
31 Haight and Nieman state that ‘Congregational studies determines the credibility of a theological account of the church precisely by its concrete appeal to history, that is, by providing realism. Theology always tends towards the normative . . . Theology's language frequently prescribes ideals and thus often seems at odds with what appears on the ground.’ Haight and Nieman, ‘Dynamic Relation’, p. 17.
32 See e.g. Healy, ‘Misplaced Concreteness? Practices and the New Ecclesiology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5/3 (2003), pp. 287–308.
33 Healy, ‘Ecclesiology, Ethnography and God’, p. 183. Compare Haight and Nieman's observation about congregational studies in which ‘broad doctrinal claims about the church are being tested by a realistic scrutiny of the concrete political and social dynamisms driving particular churches and the practices of actual congregations’. Roger Haight and James Nieman, ‘Dynamic Relation’, p. 9.
34 Van der Ven notes this problem and attempts to break down the opposition between theology and social science. See van der Ven, Ecclesiology in Context, p. 101. Haight and Nieman speak of congregational studies as providing a ‘credibility test’ or ‘reality check’ for theology. See Haight and Nieman, ‘Dynamic Relation’, p. 30.
35 Haight and Nieman provide a good example of this: ‘If the marks of the church are not a theological sleight of hand, they must be brought down to earth and made to reflect the actual life of the congregations.’ See ‘Dynamic Relation’, p. 20. See also Mulder and Smith's statement that ‘we share Christian Scharen's conviction (echoing Milbank) that theology needs sociology to supply “judicious narratives” that keep ecclesiology floating off into the realm of the ideal’. Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith, ‘Understanding Religion Takes Practice: Anti-Urban Bias, Geographical Habits and Theological Influences’, in Scharen, Explorations, p. 100.
36 References in parentheses. While Healy's name crops up in critical tone frequently in this article, this should be taken only as a reflection of the fact that he is one of the most prolific writers in the field, and one of the most sophisticated and interesting with whom to engage.
37 For a thoroughly theological set of assumptions being brought to a fieldwork situation, see Fulkerson, Mary McClintock, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: OUP, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a rather more subtle theological flavour in an ethnographic work, note the deeply Anglican thinking at work in Timothy Jenkins’ discussion of religion and social flourishing in his Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999).
38 Haight is not just using social science to argue against ecclesiology from above: he is using social science to argue against the church from above. Gerard Mannion has a good appreciation of this, and discusses Haight's work in the context of what he calls a growing climate of ‘neo-exclusivism’ in the Roman Catholic Church. See Mannion, Ecclesiology in Postmodernity, pp. 32–7.
39 Hastrup, Kirsten, Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 22Google Scholar.
40 Jenkins, Timothy, ‘Fieldwork and the Perception of Everyday Life’, Man 29 (1994), p. 451CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Moore, Sebastian, ‘Four Steps towards Making Sense of Theology’, Downside Review 382 (1993), pp. 87–8Google Scholar.
42 For the ‘fictive’ character of anthropology, see e.g. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), p. 15Google Scholar; Geertz, Clifford, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 62Google Scholar. For comments on ethnography's performative nature, see Hastrup, Passage to Anthropology, pp. 123–45.
43 Turner, Denys, The Darkness of God: Negativity and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), p. 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Ibid., p. 37. The debate over the accuracy of Margaret Mead's portrayal of Samoa and the accuracy of Derek Freeman's critique is well-known. See Mead, Margaret, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Study of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies (London: Penguin, 1928)Google Scholar and Freeman, Derek, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
45 See Turner, Denys, ‘Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason’, in Davies, Oliver and Turner, Denys (eds) Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), p. 16Google Scholar.
46 Christopher Brittain makes a similar point, suggesting that ‘There is often an elusiveness to the object of study in ethnography, and this can be one of its principal contributions to ecclesiology’. See Brittain, ‘Ethnography as Ecclesial Attentiveness and Critical Reflexivity: Fieldwork and the Dispute over Homosexuality in the Episcopal Church’, in Scharen, Explorations, p. 135.