The Politics of Discipleship by Graham Ward
Author:Graham Ward
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Academic & Brazos Press
Published: 2009-08-31T16:00:00+00:00
SECTION 2
THE
CHURCH
4
Theological Introduction
What can we learn from the preceding analyses of where we are culturally in the West? Let me make two points. First, the four dominant cultural trends—the postdemocratic, globalization, postmaterialism, and the new visibility of religion—are profoundly related to and implicated in a fifth trend, postmodernity. The new profile for religion affords an opportunity for the practitioners of faith to speak out in what remains of the public sphere, not just for what they believe in but also—and perhaps more important— against the cultural impulses that challenge and compromise the tenets of that faith. For there is no mistake to be made here: these cultural trends define what St. Paul would call the principalities and powers against which Christians must wrestle (Eph. 6:12). The situation also makes demands on believers because in the mists of religion and pseudospirituality that are now arising and passing down Main Street—bookshops selling such titles as A Quiet Belief in Angels, advertising hoardings, store chains such as Britain’s All Saints, and brands of fragrance such as Eternity, Euphoria, and Truth—discernment is needed in trying to distinguish the authentic from the fake when there is no immediate access to what people are hungering for. In this discernment, it is not the resistance to commodification that will help—for commodification is inevitable while capitalism still remains—but resistance to the reductions of materialism. Postmaterialism is helpful here, but as we saw, it needs to be securely anchored in something more than market trends and individual lifestyle options.
Second, along with the new opportunities and demands for those practitioners of piety in the public sphere, there will have to be the recognition that it will not be just Christians making such public proclamations. People from other faiths and people from no faith perspective at all will stand up for what they believe.1 But difference must be heard, must be articulated, because the vitality of the public sphere depends on this. And the vitality of the public sphere challenges one of the major social trends we have observed: depoliticization. We need, then, more contestation and something much deeper than liberal tolerance—for example, a theologically grounded respect for the human person. Such a theological grounding would deepen postmaterialist inclinations. I recall a visit to the monastery in Sergiev Posad, Russia. Standing in a room thick with incense and the smell of lit candles, I participated in a mass that was being sung. A deep bass voice was intoning the Orthodox liturgy. Swinging a bejeweled thurible, a deacon draped in a gilded vestment approached the laity. Three times he swung the thurible, enveloping us in a perfumed cloud. And then he offered one low, slow bow to the people before him. A friend whispered, “He bows to the image of God in you.” We bowed in reply. It did not matter what my past or my present circumstances were, what sins of commission or omission I might have committed. All that mattered was that being human was profoundly sacred not just in and for itself but because it figured forth the divine.
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