[Note: I know this is long, but I thought it would be unhelpful to divide it. Sorry. Also, I have not included the footnotes, which are mostly bibliographical nor have I gone through it to italicize most of the portions that originally were. It’s a blog, come on.]
In his book Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens, Oxford scholar, Bernd Wannenwetsch explores the concept of Christian worship as the well-spring and source of Christian ethics. He specifically rejects foundational or instrumental notions, but instead argues that worship, as a self-constituting (through the work of God in the Holy Spirit) reality that exists as an end in itself and as the constitutive power of the Church, (that is, the Church exists only as the people of God worship and not as an ontological reality apart from its praxis), is the reality out of which, Christian ethics are formed. This formational/transformational process among the people of God then, through a spillover effect, can be the means by which a distinctively Christian ethics begin to be transformational in the world. In a nutshell, Dr. Wannenwetsch is arguing that the worshiping community is (not should be) a political community that is both constituted and formed as it worships by means of the work of the Spirit through the Word, both the audible and the sacramental. Thus, worship as the political activity and form of life of a public, the Church, and the grammar of that public, forms an ethical way of being in those who participate, which then affects the world as these people who have been formed by the grammar of worship and who model a creational political public in worship, interact with it.
Two things must be said about Dr. Wannenwetsch’s book before we go any further. First, it is an incredibly dense work. Written in German in 1997, and translated into English by Margaret Kohl, in 2004, it is a truly academic volume that interacts with a large number of other thinkers spanning the fields of political and moral philosophy, economics, ethics, theology, hermeneutics and modern and post-modern literary and structural criticism. Further, the author’s engagement with these various fields spans almost the entire length of Christian and pre-Christian Western thought, interacting with ancient philosophy (particularly Aristotle), the Patristics, Luther and other Reformational figures, 18th and 19th century political philosophers (espcially Kant and Hegel) as well as 20th century socio-political, economic and literary figures (including but not limited to Arendt, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Rawls, Schleiermacher and Milbank). This breadth of scope means that some familiarity with the stream of western philosophy and political thought is a necessary pre-requisite to even a basic understanding of the work. That said, although it is a dense work the author does a remarkable job of giving the reader the necessary understanding of those he engages to follow his own course of thought; thus, by a careful and patient reading, even one not especially well versed in the authors cited can grasp the main arguments made in the book.
The second necessary caveat to make before going any further with an analysis or critique relates to the author’s style of writing. As a careful scholar, writing out of the continental, and particularly German, academic tradition, Wannenwetsch argues with a subtlety that will not be appreciated by all. His work rarely states up front an unqualified thesis, but instead begins by working through a number of possible misunderstandings of his thought and critiquing a number of other conceptions of the constitutive elements of his theory such as politics, power, society, public and worship. This means that the book cannot be skimmed for ‘big ideas’ or summed up in a sentence or two, for it is precisely what Wannenwetsch is not saying, and does not want to be heard as saying, that is as important as what he is saying. Further, this extremely nuanced approach leads to the necessity of a somewhat technical and qualified approach to interacting with Political Worship.
Finally, before embarking on a more detailed analysis of Political Worship, a few words about the author’s contextual situation and perspective are in order. Dr. Wannenwetsch has a background both theologically and vocationally in the German Lutheran church, however, his approach is thoroughly ecumenical and impressively internationally aware. It is clear from his work that he is theologically orthodox and concerned to do his theologizing within the boundaries of a historically Christian approach. In Political Worship, he assumes a redacted authorship of the Old Testament and at points may seem willing to be critical of portions of the New Testament , although it seems likely that he is not criticizing the pastoral epistles themselves, but rather a particular, moralistic (mis)reading of them. Finally, he is writing as both a scholar and a worshiping Christian which means that his work takes seriously the contributions of those of many traditions and worldviews but seeks to engage them from a thoroughly Christian and Biblical perspective.
The primary contribution of Wannenwetsch’s work, in my estimation, is its attempt to return the Church to an awareness of itself as a political entity. It is important to recognize here that Wannenwetsch is not using the term political in its modern sense of having to do with state-craft or civil activism, but in its classical, and particularly Aristotelian sense, of having to do with the mutual action and cooperation of a public or citizenry. With that understanding we can then move on to see that worship, as the context in which “God’s activity provides the initium, an activity to which people assent in baptism, in praise, in prayer, in the hearing of the Word, in the confession of faith, and in the Lord’s Supper…” (pg 10), and also as the context in which God’s Word, his laws, regulate the behavior and mutual action and interaction of humans, is distinctly political. As a community of political activity then the Church is a polis, and more than that the church is in some sense the primary or true polis, insofar as it is the polis that is ruled by God, through His Spirit and insofar as the citizenship that one has in this polis is one’s primary citizenship. (This falls directly in line with N.T. Wright’s concern that the Pauline gospel be understood first and foremost as the claim that Jesus is Lord and not X, be it Caesar or whomever.) This means that in a sense the Church is the place where reality is apprehended most clearly and where the true nature of things is named and lived.
The ethical dimension of this, Church as polis, concept is seen when we recognize the way in which the Church’s polis is different from all secular poleis. For example, in the Church as the household of God and the Kingdom of God, the two concepts of the oikos, the private personal life of necessity, and the bios politikos the public life of mutual interaction, which in the classical age were seen as fundamentally conflicting, are brought together in a way that brings a dignity to the oikos, the realm of those who were previously pushed to the margins (i.e. women and children) and at the same time undermines the totalizing claims of the bios politikos as normative for all of life or tantamount to the good life. In this way the Church as polis undermines the notion that the political life is somehow beyond the domestic in a hierarchical structure. Consequently this allows for the notion that in the polis of the Church citizenry is not based on some sort of perceived natural order of life but is a reality for all; those called in, whether slave or free, rich or poor, man or woman, are considered to be full citizens of the polis. In this way then, the Church as a community of political worship is the place where people are formed in terms of their new identity. It is in worship that the most lowly members of the secular hierarchy are placed on a level with all the other citizens of the polis. In worship citizens are named and given roles that correspond to their identity as citizens and are called upon to live, not as they are perceived in the world but as they are according to the naming and forming power of the Spirit.
This conception of the Church as the primary polis, as the place where we see things most truly, as they really are, then, is not a fantasy life that we move into on Sundays, or a form of play-acting for adults, but it is the realm and the activity where we are reminded who we are as citizens of God’s kingdom, and thus realigned to act as such in the world, which is itself the realm where reality is perceived inaccurately. It is important to note here that this is not a form of Platonic dualism in which what is true or real is behind or above the physical and tangible. Rather, it is a matter of being formed and re-formed to be something other than what one is naturally and then learning to accurately live as what one has been made to be in worship as one moves out into other realms. So it is a matter of learning a ‘form of life’ that is more congruous with one’s identity which is a gift of God.
This does not mean, of course, pretending that one is not in fact a janitor, if that is one’s vocation, nor does it mean simply resigning oneself to live out an unreality for six days out of every seven. Rather, worship, as the political context in which we see things as they are provides an eschatological horizon out of which men and women may live their lives. Further, as those named citizens and empowered for political action in the context of worship, Christians are given the ability to live out positions of submission and low rank freely, not as those under compulsion but as those who freely serve in these roles in conformity with the guiding of the Spirit of God. Thus, one does not serve as janitor because one is actually a janitor (in terms of ontology), but because as a citizen in God’s polis one has an ability to live out the ethics of that polis, an ethics of mutual cooperation and love for neighbor and even enemy, in the context of the secular world. This is simply one example of the way the formative effect of worship plays itself out in an ethics that spills over into the world.
A further aspect of the Church’s political worship is that it is actually in this worship that the world becomes the world. Extrapolating from the following comment from Stanley Hauerwas: “If the church does not worship rightly how can the world know it is the world exactly to the extent it does not willingly glorify God?” Wannewetsch says, “Where the Creator is worshipped ‘in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:4), the created beings who refuse to participate in this worship become in fact ‘world.’ Worship as the praxis which lives in an elemental sense from God’s creative activity, which the worshippers expose themselves to, becomes therefore outwardly efficacious activity, activity which ‘brings something about.. ’” Thus, the political worship which forms and shapes the people of God, the polis, also not only exposes the world as world, but in a sense causes it to be the world by creating socio-political structures of rejection of the worship of God. However, the Church’s political effect in this regard is not only negative, for it is precisely in this act of causing the world to become through highlighting its lack of worship that the Church models for the world how it may become ‘world’ in a second sense, a sense in which it reflects the creative will of God, by ceasing hostility to worship, and in fact recognizing worship as necessary to its own existence . In this sense then the world is compelled to give up its totalizing claims and recognize itself as saeculum, a temporal reality, dependent on the good will of the Creator.
While space prevents a full analysis of the other major contributions of this book to an ethics springing from political worship it is worth noting that in the final section Wannenwetsch spells out a number of particular theoretical instances of the Church’s formative effect on an ethics of politics (in the narrow, Machiavellian sense, not the Aristotelian). In these chapters he considers the effects of political worship’s trust in the power of the Word as a challenge to the reigning hermeneutics of suspicion, which is primarily the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Drawing on late Wittgenstein, and his notion that words do not have something behind them but only ‘mean’ as they are used and tying that in to the grammar (the way we use vocabulary) of worship, he argues for the hermeneutics of trust, and of taking words at face value, as is done in worship. The political worship of the Church can then be an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The value of this is that it is only when words are assumed to ‘mean’ that accountability is possible. Following from this then, not surprisingly, he argues for an ethic of consensus and forgiveness. Consensus can only be conceived as a possibility when words are taken at face value, because it is only if words are trusted to ‘mean’, according to an agreed vocabulary, that one can be confronted with words as a challenge to present behavior. Further, it is only through forgiveness, with a background of trust, that the vicious cycle of action and reaction can be cut short and given a new beginning.
Finally, he argues for homiletics as an event in which the illocutionary goal is seen as the role of the speaker, with no direct attempt at the perlocutionary, which is the realm of the Spirit, as a model for true political discourse in the realm of the state and society, because it is only when this is done that discourse is actually capable of being an interaction of ideas between speaker and those spoken to (with consensus and accountability at the table) rather than the selling of a product, and thus move toward the goal of the common good. While, this is only a brief summary, it shows that although Wannenwetsch, by his own admission, has not worked out a complete ethics of political worship, he has, by an eclectic approach, given a number of examples of the way in which political worship does not merely model a ‘Church ethics’ which can then be superimposed on other social structures, but actually forms a public which is capable in varied situations of applying an ethic, a form of life learned in worship, to the various situations to which life calls them. Further, the way in which people are formed in the Church through political worship, as its constitutive activity, does serve as an example, not of how to apply ethics, as the formation is passive through assent to the ruling and shaping of oneself by the Spirit and each other, but of what it is to be formed and act out of the way of life formed in worship.
One possible critique of the vision laid out in Political Worship which I believe is worth mentioning is what appears to me to be a lack of attention given to the way in which the overflow effect of the ethical formation that occurs in Christian worship is to be translated into the rest of the world in light of the fact that while the Spirit of God convenes and is present and active in political worship, it would seem that such is not the case, at least not in the same way, in the other social settings and spheres of the world. This is not to deny the ubiquity of the Spirit, or the ability of the Spirit to act in non-self-consciously religious settings; rather, it is simply to note that worship, as the special praxis in which God has promised to be present, acting on and blessing His people, seems to be a unique type of realm/praxis pneumatologically. Therefore, especially given Wannenwetsch’s emphasis on the way in which the Spirit is both the initiator, and the critical transformative/transpositional power in worship, it is difficult to understand how he conceives the way of life learnt in worship spilling over in an efficacious way into the other realms of life.
It is important to note however, that this is not, in my judgment, a problem for Wannenwetsch’s work in principle. That is, I see nothing in his general thesis, nor in the particular details of how it is worked out, that fundamentally precludes an answer to the question about the distinction between the special presence of the Spirit in worship, and the absence of that special presence in other activities/realms. In fact, it seems to me that Wannenwetsch comes close to an answer to this objection in his chapter The Transposing Power of the Spirit. Here he elucidates a conception of how it is that the individual can take on the burdens of others through the notion of transposition. Drawing on the Apostle Paul’s determination to become all things to all men and, more heavily, on Martin Luther’s notion that just as we live in Christ through union, and thus all that is predicated of Christ is predicated of us, so we also live in our neighbors, becoming Christ to them. In this way he answers the question of how it is that we can be transposed into our neighbor without subsuming his identity, or making his identity intelligible to ourselves only through our own conceptions and ability to perceive. This problem is solved by the recognition that contra Schleiermacher’s divination method, or Rawl’s theory of justice, the Christian transposes himself, not as self, but as Christ and this happens not by a parsing out of a perceived limited number of goods but out of the super-abundance that spills over from the fact of being in Christ and thus having all that is His. Nevertheless, although it seems possible that from this conception of transposition a more fully schematized concept of how the ethical formation from and by the Spirit which occurs in worship could be extended or brought to bear on the world per se, it does not seem to me that this has been done in a thorough manner in Political Worship.
On the other hand, it is possible that Wannenwetsch has chosen not to address this topic because he does not see a particular scheme as the method of the overflow effect at all. One may understand his thesis to require no such formal explanation, but rather to rest on a more organic chain of events, not exactly an evolution but a maturing. In this conception the overflow effect of the formation of Christian ethics through political worship occurs as those people who are formed by the grammar of worship, and who have learned to live through the tutelage of the Spirit in worship, go out into the world and live political lives in other spheres. In this sense, the existing structures will eventually come, not so much to share the ethics of the Church, as the Church does not have an ontological existence apart from her praxis and thus does not exactly “possess” an ethics, but to behave as structures formed and conforming to a Christian/Spiritual ethical way of life that springs from political worship. This would in fact harmonize well, it seems, with the author’s conception of worship as providing an eschatological horizon to which we look in political worship. Further, Wannenwetsch comes close to saying something like this in his section on Christendom.
Finally, I would like to consider one other potential concern regarding Wannenwetsch’s discussion of the doctrine of the Priesthood of Believers . While he offers a very helpful and accurate stress on the importance of congregational participation in political worship, and is very clear about the need for the citizens to act as citizens and not as mere spectators I wonder if he gives too little credence to the fact that the doctrine of the priesthood of believers is in fact, an Old Testament doctrine (Ex 19. 6). As a result of this seeming oversight, Dr. Wannenwetsch seems to attach a degree of change in the order of things to this doctrine that is exaggerated. Further, I wonder if his understanding of this concept without reference to its Old Testament reality leads to an inadequate understanding of the role of the minister as distinct from the congregation, not in ontology or worth, but in calling and position of authority through that calling. Rather than conceiving the theological significance of the priesthood of believers as the access that those who call on Christ have to God and the requirement that all who call on Christ come alongside others and assist them toward worship, Wannenwetsch seems to lean toward an understanding of the doctrine as an egalitarian flattening of the community of the saints, not merely into a community of citizens, but an undifferentiated community of citizens. While he acknowledges the place of roles in the Body of Christ, and has some excellent insights into the nature of giving special honor to the least ‘respectable’ parts, he seems to view the priesthood of believers as barring any type of role hierarchy.
Consequently, in my judgment, Wannenwetsch is led to an egalitarian position with regard to the ordination of women. This was the one section of the book that I found most in need of explication , not because of his conclusions, but because the conclusions seem to have been assumed more than demonstrated. Wannenwetsch, does not interact with the relevant New Testament texts, and (given his lack of interaction with the priesthood of believers as an Old Testament doctrine) does not interact with the relevant Old Testament texts either. While this does seem to me to be a weak point in the book, it is by no means a fundamental component of Wannenwetsch’s argument and thus does not do violence to the work as a whole.
Overall, Dr. Wannenwetsch has provided an invaluable resource to the scholarly community by re-introducing to the Church its ancient, even apostolic, self-awareness as a fundamentally political public that is formed and learns how to ‘lean into the world’ in the context of worship. He has reminded us that the Church is the true polis and the truly political community in which humans receive their identity as citizens of the Kingdom of God and the Household of Faith through the praxis of political worship, and that in doing so they are formed and re-formed week after week as they learn the grammar of worship and the way to ‘be’ in the world from the way the Spirit makes them to ‘be’ in worship.
I am ashamed to say that I am just now posting links to the lectures given at the recent Conversation on Denominational Renewal recently given here in St. Louis at Memorial Presbyterian Church. I have to say, nothing has made me more optimistic about the future of the PCA than these lectures in years. They are wonderful. Download them. Listen to them. Be invigorated by them. The charitable spirit, ecumenical hope, and future goals are a true inspiration.