Abstract
Churches are in crisis. Across Europe, Christian churches attract fewer and fewer practitioners—in their pews and in their pulpits. Exemplified by the Church of England,1 the statistics are shocking, projecting the loss of practitioners to a point where church disappears in ‘a puff of smoke.’2 In England, the increase in female (often non-stipendiary) ministry cushioned the decrease in male (often stipendiary) ministry, but current calculations clarify that the Church of England cannot keep up with the rapid
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Notes
- 1.
In my summary of the situation of the Church of England, I draw on the ‘Church Health Check,’ a selection of studies which combines sociological and theological accounts of Anglicanism in the UK. Published by The Church Times in 2014, the ‘Church Health Check’ attracted attention both inside and outside academia. Here, I refer to the compilation in which the studies were collected, How Healthy Is the C of E? The Church Times Health Check, ed. Malcolm Doney (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2014). The Church of England excellently exemplifies the crisis of churches throughout Europe. As Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta argue in their sociological study, Religion in der Moderne: Ein internationaler Vergleich (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2015), the loss of practitioners marks the practices of European and non-European churches. This loss is dangerous for Christianity because, empirically, communities like churches are indispensable for the vitality of religion. See esp. ibid., 473–475.
- 2.
Linda Woodhead, ‘Time to get serious,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 14.
- 3.
Linda Woodhead, ‘Not enough boots on the ground,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 50.
- 4.
Woodhead, ‘Time,’ 14.
- 5.
Linda Woodhead, ‘A remedy for an ailing church,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 118. See also ibid., 119–120.
- 6.
Diversification is the core characteristic of modernized and modernizing contexts. For David Tracy, these contexts are so diversified that ‘we live in an age that cannot name itself.’ David Tracy, ‘On Naming the Present,’ in David Tracy, On Naming the Present (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 3. Hence, regardless of whether the current context of church is called ‘modernity’ or ‘postmodernity,’ it is a diversified and diversifying context. See Gerard Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 8–24. Mannion focuses on the neutralization of difference through exclusion. See the contributions to Ecclesiology and Exclusion: Boundaries of Being and Belonging in Postmodern Times, ed. Dennis M. Doyle, Timothy J. Furry and Pascal D. Bazzell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), which discuss his ecclesiology. I aim to argue that difference can be neutralized through both inclusion and exclusion. See esp. Chap. 6 of my study.
- 7.
Woodhead, ‘A remedy,’ 117.
- 8.
The contributors to the ‘Church Health Check’ refer to the ‘identity’ of Anglicanism repeatedly, albeit without describing or defining it. See How Healthy Is the C of E?, 16, 26, 30, 37, 97, 104, 105, 116, 150.
- 9.
Thus, the compartmentalization of church is indebted to the ‘homogenous unit principle,’ proposed by missiologists in the 1970s. See Martyn Percy, Shaping the Church: The Promise of Implicit Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 77–78, who snippily summarizes this principle as ‘like attracts like,’ stressing that the principle runs the risk of legitimizing ‘ageism, sexism, racism, classism and economic divisiveness.’
- 10.
See also the critical considerations of Maggi Dawn, ‘Read the signs of the times,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 151–153. Such closure characterizes both ecclesial and non-ecclesial communities which conceive of themselves in crisis. See Hartmut Rosa et al., Theorien der Gemeinschaft: Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2010), 54–65, 91–115. See also Chaps. 5 and 6 of my study.
- 11.
The concentration on competition is also criticized within the ‘Church Health Check,’ see esp. Martyn Percy, ‘It’s not just about the numbers,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 127–130. See also his piercing and provocative thought experiment, ‘Faith in the Free-Market: A Cautionary Tale for Anglican Adults,’ in Martyn Percy, The Ecclesial Canopy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 197–204.
- 12.
For the history of the concept of crisis, see Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Crisis,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (2006), 357–400.
- 13.
Already Paul’s ecclesiology is articulated in response to the crises of the communities which he founded (1 Cor. 3:1–23; 10:14–22; 12:1–31; 2 Cor. 5:11–21; Rom. 6:1–11). For the crises in the history of ecclesiology, see Roger D. Haight’s trilogy, Christian Community in History, 3 vols. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014).
- 14.
Natalie K. Watson, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 4: ‘Ecclesiology as a theological discipline was born out of a historical need, a situation which made it necessary for the church to define itself.’ Watson uses the concept of ‘crisis’ to describe this situation (ibid., 4–5).
- 15.
See Woodhead, ‘Time,’ 17–18, where she points to a generational gap between those who confirm and those who criticize the Church of England. See also Robert Warner, ‘Why young people turn their backs on church,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 25–27. Philip Giddings, ‘Listening out for the laity’s voice,’ in ibid., 55–58, argues that a ‘persistent clericalism’ in the Church of England has prevented the church from considering its internal and external critics (ibid., 55).
- 16.
For a short history of the notion of alterity in philosophy and theology, see Pamela S. Anderson, ‘The Other,’ The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. Nicholas Adams, George Pattison and Graham Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 83–104. Anderson tells a story which ‘lacks a happy ending’ (ibid., 101), suggesting that ‘it would be altogether better if theologians were to reject … the pernicious category of otherness’ (ibid., 102). While I agree with Anderson that ‘the other’ is difficult to describe and to define, I aim to argue that these descriptive and definitional difficulties provide a promising point of departure for the interdisciplinary combination of theology and sociology. See esp. Chap. 3 of my study.
- 17.
The trilogy, ‘Philosophy at the Limit,’ consists of The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), and Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003). See also Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), esp. 17–39, where Kearney also analyzes scenes in the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions in which the creator is encountered through the creature. Arguably, Kearney understands ‘the other’ as a sacrament.
- 18.
Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 11.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., 3.
- 21.
Ibid., 12–20.
- 22.
Kearney argues that the difference between others deserving hospitality, on the one hand, and others not deserving hospitality, on the other hand, needs to be defined. See ibid., esp. 83–108, 191–212. However, he downplays that one has to engage the other in order to define such a difference. The risk of alterity can be neither escaped nor erased. See the account of the trouble with trust in Chap. 7 of my study.
- 23.
Throughout my study, I use the terminology of ‘finite other’ and ‘infinite other’ to signal the difference between creator and creature, because I aim to argue that the exposure to both others—the finite and the infinite—involves transcendence. Terminologically, I follow Friedrich Schleiermacher, who, in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Couter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), argued that religion is characterized by the relation between the finite and the infinite. For Schleiermacher, ‘infinity’ has more than a mathematical meaning: it is open to one’s ‘intuition’ (ibid., 13). See ibid., 23–26, 45–48, 59–70, 89–95, 115–118.
- 24.
Anna Strhan, ‘What do we believe?,’ in How Healthy Is the C of E?, 33–35, points to the alterity of both the finite and the infinite other as a core concern in the practices of church.
- 25.
The concept of practice to which I refer throughout my study relates to the Greek concept of πρᾶξις. For a short summary of this concept, see Kearney, On Stories, 130. Like Kearney, I use the spelling of ‘practice’ rather than the spelling of ‘praxis’ for the sake of consistency with the literature consulted throughout my study.
- 26.
The characterization of church through the interrelation of the relation to the finite other with the relation to the infinite other is, of course, not uncontroversial. It could be considered a translation of the definition of church advanced by the Reformation. For the Reformers, the church is where the Gospel is communicated. See ‘The Augsburg Confession (1530),’ article VII, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 32. Throughout my study, I conceive of such communication not as a ‘describing’ of the Gospel but as a ‘doing’ of the Gospel. If the Gospel is done rather than described, its communication engenders relations to the finite and to the infinite other. As will be argued in Chap. 4, the concern for these interrelated relations can be traced back to the practice of Jesus.
- 27.
For Troeltsch’s biography, see Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch: Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1991), ET: Ernst Troeltsch: His Life and Work, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1992).
- 28.
Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch, 216. The transfer from a professorship of theology to a professorship of philosophy does not mark his abandonment of theology (as past and present critics of Troeltsch would have it). Theology remained important to Troeltsch’s thinking throughout his life. See MO, 373–375. See also Mark D. Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 1–12 and 161–186.
- 29.
For the notion of historicism, see, with reference to both the philosophy and the theology of Troeltsch, John H. Zammito, ‘Historicism,’ in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 779–805.
- 30.
For the reception of Troeltsch’s thought, see the comprehensive contextualization by Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology, 1–12.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
See KG, 101–102, for Troeltsch’s critique of ecclesial liberalism and FV, 178–181, for Troeltsch’s critique of political liberalism. If Troeltsch is labeled a ‘liberal,’ ‘liberalism’ has to be carefully defined or re-defined in a way which incorporates Troeltsch’s critique of liberalism. See Jörg Lauster, ‘Liberale Theologie: Eine Ermunterung,’ Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 49/3 (2007), 291–307. See also Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘What has London (or Oxford or Cambridge) to do with Augsburg? The Enduring Significance of the German Liberal Tradition in Christian Theology,’ in The Future of Liberal Theology, ed. Mark D. Chapman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 18–38.
- 33.
AK, 102.
- 34.
MO, 365. See also MÜ, 3: ‘Ich habe kein eigentliches System und dadurch unterscheide ich mich von den meisten anderen deutschen Philosophen.’
- 35.
MO, 365.
- 36.
MO, 375–376.
- 37.
The hidden hermeneutics in Troeltsch’s thought has been noticed by Gregory Baum, ‘Science and Commitment: Historical Truth according to Ernst Troeltsch,’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1 (1971), 259–277, and Andrzej Pryzlebski, ‘Troeltschs Kultursynthese als halbierte Hermeneutik,’ in ‘Geschichte durch Geschichte überwinden’: Ernst Troeltsch in Berlin, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 137–153. For a succinct summary of the hermeneutical circle, see Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London: SCM, 2002), 5–6.
- 38.
BF, 61. See also BF, 75, 115.
- 39.
For a short history of ecumenicity, see Thomas F. Best, ‘Ecclesiology and Ecumenism,’ in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, ed. Gerard Mannion and Lewis Seymour Mudge (London: Routledge, 2008), 402–420. According to Gesa E. Thiesen, ecclesiology must be done ecumenically today. Differences are apparent both intra- and inter-denominationally which is why ecumenicity cannot be escaped. See the contributions to Ecumenical Ecclesiology: Unity, Diversity and Otherness in a Fragmented World, ed. Gesa E. Thiesen (London: T&T Clark, 2009).
- 40.
Haight concludes his instructive and influential trilogy, Christian Community in History, with what he calls ‘an essay in transdenominational ecclesiology’ (Haight, Christian Community in History, vol. 3: ‘Ecclesial Existence,’ xi). Transdenominational ecclesiology, he explains, ‘refers to an abstraction’ (ibid., 11) because its referent is not a concrete church. Instead, its referent is constituted by those ‘elements’ which are shared by ‘all ecclesial existence’ throughout history (ibid.). While I appreciate Haight’s effort to emphasize ‘the possibilities for a mutual recognition of churches’ (ibid., 27; see also ibid., 270–292), I prefer an inter-denominational approach to ecclesiology. The inter-denominational approach allows the ecclesiologist to engage differences in and in-between denominations critically and self-critically. Thus, recognition is sought in conversation and in conflict; it is not merely tolerated or transcended through the notion of a shared ecclesial existence.
- 41.
For these complaints, see the summary by Gerard Delanty, Community (London: Routledge, 2004), 7–23.
- 42.
- 43.
William H. Swatos, ‘Weber or Troeltsch? Methodology, Syndrome, and the Development of Church-Sect Theory,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 15/2 (1976), 129–144. See again, Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, esp. 89–100. For Milbank, Troeltsch is guilty of both ‘liberalism’ and ‘positivism.’ Hence, Troeltsch is, in a way, the personification of what Milbank argues against. See esp. Milbank’s introduction ‘Between Positivism and Liberalism,’ xi–xxxii. For a compelling critique of ‘Milbank’s Troeltsch,’ see Lori Pearson, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Troeltsch in American Debates over Religion, Social Theory, and Theology,’ in Religion(en) deuten: Transformationen der Religionsforschung, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Friedemann Voigt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 331–360.
- 44.
For a discussion of this call, see Neil Ormerod, ‘Ecclesiology and the Social Sciences,’ in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, 639–654.
- 45.
However, the hermeneutical–constructive account of Troeltsch’s thinking is rooted in the historical–critical account of Troeltsch’s thinking. Since Troeltsch’s oeuvre has been rediscovered as a ‘classic’ for both sociology and theology in the 1960s (a re-discovery which took place primarily in English-speaking and secondarily in German-speaking countries), a multitude of material has been published by now. Particularly Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe is significant for the scholarship on Troeltsch’s thinking. It is a collection of all the texts written by Troeltsch in 20 (partly published and partly not yet published) volumes.
- 46.
See esp. SL. See also the contributions to Ernst Troeltschs ‘Soziallehren’: Studien zu ihrer Interpretation, ed. Trutz Rendtorff and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Gütersloh: Güterslohver Verlagshaus, 1993), which underscore that Troeltsch’s studies of history where concerned with the present as much as with the past. Trutz Rendtorff and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Vorwort,’ in ibid., 9–10, point to the ‘zeitdiagnostische Züge’ in Troeltsch’s works. See also Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, trans. Alex Skinner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013). Joas’s approach of ‘affirmative genealogy’ is rooted in Troeltsch’s account of historicism (ibid., 97–139).
- 47.
KG, 104.
- 48.
Of course, my distinction between performativity and propositionality draws on John L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words? The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. James O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); it will be discussed in Chap. 1.
- 49.
The concept of ‘work in movement’ is taken from Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1889). See Chap. 9 of my study for a detailed discussion.
- 50.
For case studies of ecclesiological exclusion, see again the contributions to Ecclesiology and Exclusion.
- 51.
SL, 979–980.
- 52.
Throughout my study, I concentrate on the communities which constitute Christianity. However, as will be argued in the Conclusion, the difference between Christian and non-Christian communities has to be relativized. If church is concerned with the other, it cannot reduce alterity to the Christian other at the cost of the non-Christian other. For a comparative account of the concept of community in the context of inter-religious conversations, see Keith Ward, Religion and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 53.
In order to introduce the three parts of my study, I will offer vignettes about a congregation with which I celebrated a service. The ‘snapshots’ of the religiosity, the community and the identity of this congregation cannot substitute ethnographic explorations of concrete churches, but allow me to sketch what the elasticization of ecclesiology might look like in practice. For the strategy of vignettes in the study of religion, see Graham Harvey, ‘Introduction,’ in Religions in Focus: New Approaches to Tradition and Contemporary Practice, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 1–10.
- 54.
The appreciation of plurality is a core concern in current ecclesiologies. See esp. Haight, Christian Community in History, vols. 1–3. While I agree with Haight, I aim to argue that appreciation is not enough, because the other is vital for the practices of church.
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Schmiedel, U. (2017). Introduction: Church(es) in Crisis. In: Elasticized Ecclesiology. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40832-3_1
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