Walking Worthily

T here is a lot of spirited talk these days about public theology-about what it might mean to express our faith in a public setting-and I want to explore some of that talk by considering two meanings of public theology that have appeared in recent scholarly reflection on the Christian moral life.In the first meaning, public theology refers to the fact that the church itself is a public realm, a society of some sort, which in turn compels us to ask what kind of society it might be and what effects its social forms might have on the souls of its inhabitants.In this meaning, the phrase concerns the moral formation of Christians in the intermediate realm that the church now occupies between oikos, Greek for household or family, and polis, the state.In the second sense, the phrase public theology refers to the fact that theological commitments are often expressed in public and, more often than not, in social settings outside of the church: in friendships, in clubs, on the job, and in the civic realm.With this meaning, there is no assumption that the theological commitments expressed to others in society will be shared by them all, and with this sense of the phrase, the questions posed typically concern matters of legitimacy.Can this or that theological utterance be legitimately expressed in this or that public setting?Is its theological content too blatant or too subtle given the character, aims, and norms of propriety of the society in question?It is this latter meaning of the term public theology that I want to explore, and I suggest that these worries about legitimacy are, in fact, misguided.Shared by both secular and theological critics alike, they do not get us to the real problems posed by the public expression of theological commitment, not in our day and not in the political societies of Europe and North America, or so it seems to me.How might we better understand these problems?Let me suggest that the contours of at least one such problem come into view once we unite St. Thomas Aquinas's reflections on the natural persistence of religion with the well-known facts of Christian disestablishment

Political science · Sociology · Christian Theology and Mission · Psychology · Religion, Society, and Development

• Mission-minded pastoral theology and the notion of God’s power

  Open Access•Stéphan Van Der Watt•In die Skriflig/In Luce Verbi•2023

  Add to list

• The Theology of John Calvin

  Partee Partee•The Princeton Seminary Bulletin•2008

  Add to list

• The trickster

  Paul Radin•The trickster•1969

  Add to list