INTERNATIONAL football can be fun to watch but we can’t ignore how, for many fans, it is an important habituator of patriotism. Billig notes in his book ‘Banal Nationalism’ how national symbols – national football teams, flags and anthems – are part of everyday routines through which the ‘nation’ is reproduced:

We must be reminded, constantly, that we are part of this thing called a “nation.” Even more, that we belong to it and it belongs to us. Banal nationalism is how the idea of the nation and our membership in it is reproduced daily. It occurs not with celebrations, parades, or patriotic war, but in “mundane,” “routine,” and “unnoticed” ways.

The mediation of such symbols are sociologically differentiated but national football teams, in global sporting events, have a powerful populist effect, cutting across cultural class divides. The powerful signifier that is the national football team should not be underestimated and merely stating the name of a team as ‘England’, ‘Germany’ or ‘France’ personally brings strong discomfort – football teams are football teams but in the logic of patriotism they are extensions of the ego.

Gus Poyet defends Luis Suarez as a ‘national’ hero and Maradona documents his handball goal and elimination of England as if “it was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team … although we had said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas war, we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.” The French team’s mutiny, in South Africa, sees moral responsibility extending to the ‘nation’ and its prideful appearance amongst other nations. Stuart Pearce sends a special message, on the behalf of the England team, to ‘our’ service men and women in Afghanistan. Similarly Bobby Moore states, concerning England’s 1966 team – “we were more than a team. We were a formidable nation, bonded and held together by our will to win for England.”

One football fan observes from the stands, when England defeated the USA (2008) in a friendly:

The majority of those around me were so busy singing that St George was in their hearts and Brittannia would never, never, never be slaves that it took nearly 40 minutes for them to realize just how dire England were. Not that they were that bothered by the football, it was the shirt that counted not the ball.

These banal forms of nationalism, rituals of honour and self-serving pride, flag nationhood in daily lives – a reminder, observes Billig, that “provides a continual background for their political discourses, for cultural products, and even for the structuring of newspapers. In so many little way, the citizenry are daily reminded of the national place in a world of nations”.

Importantly, while interpretive categories or theories of nationhood are important, Billig states these as lived embodied cognitive schema – schema that provide an imagined communion of what it means to be part of a national community. These schema emerge over time but are not merely waiting to be triggered in a ’salient situation’- ”it is part of a wider rhythm of banal life in the world of nations. What this means is that national identity is more than an inner psychological state or an individual self-definition: it is a form of life, which is daily lived in the world of nation-states”.

In other words, we are reminded daily of what makes ‘us’ an ‘imagined community’, with stereotypes as distinction, as opposed to ‘them’ – we mustn’t forget that institutional settings and contextual resources are domains affecting a social genesis of shared practice (the interaction order). The salience of the situation is important but not abstracted from its systemic settings. So the situation is a site of lived interactions and mediation of social conditions can be found here.

Bourdieu’s notion of a community of dispositions is insightful, as it considers mediation as collective – the habitus as subjective meaning. The habitus, for Bourdieu, is an immanent law and as such is inherent within social conditions – there is a consciousness and strategic logic to practice but this only extends to a prior rationale of practice and “in accordance to schemes engendered by history”. The national team (Nationalmannschaft) is just one of many social materials that fall within a rationale and generates conduct in its fulfilment.

There is much to say about Bourdieu’s emphasis on a narrow discursive rationale and mediation of social conditions, being viewed on those terms. But that is for another post.

So is international football both divisive and sows the seeds of distinction and boorish pride? May be its banality and mundane nature renders the symbol of the national team and the arena of performance (international tournaments) a harmless event, where patriotic sentiments and affectual energy could be discharged, after all it is merely a game.

Billig believes that the everyday and mundane forms of nationalism does not entail its harmlessness. In fact, he states “banality is not synonymous with harmlessness. In the case of Western nation-states, banal nationalism can hardly be innocent: it is reproducing institutions which possess vast armaments. As the Gulf and Falklands Wars indicated, forces can be mobilized without lengthy campaigns of political preparation. The armaments are primed, ready for use in battle. And the national populations appear also to be primed, ready to support the use of those armaments”

I agree, despite a personal enjoyment when following the game. An event that features two teams as national symbols, in opposition and labelled in the name of their nation states (labelling theory is relevant here), can only make collective folk categories salient. It is true that these categories cannot be blamed on football (a stratified and relational view of sociality, will not allow this reductive form of analysis) but the language of nationhood, more than mere football, finds for itself an almost ideal-type arena – football games provide the event for pre-existing lived categories (contextual resources) or what Bourdieu would state as “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”.

In this place we are engulfed with national flags and chants, flagging collective memories of historic events and what it means to be on our side of an imagined community, in pitch distance of the ‘other’. There is little place for deliberation or reflection in the midst of a collective, almost hysteric, mediation of global sporting events – a heightened site for an implicit pedagogy with its own logic of nationalistic ideas. At even a more banal level, Bourdieu states “nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as “stand up straight” or “don’t hold your knife in your left hand”. To discount this is to be bereft of a sociological imagination.

This post is the second of three dealing with what a Wrightian ecclesiology looks like. In the first post I offered a critique of the Niebuhrian typology found in Christ and Culture which has largely shaped how North American churches negotiate their place in and relationship with culture. I then began constructing an ecclesiology using Wright’s work in hopes that it would render a more theologically faithful approach.

His ecclesiology begins with an understanding of the church as the “fifth act community,” meaning if scripture is a five-act drama, then the church is living in the fifth and final act. This speaks to not only the role scripture plays in the life of the church, but also the role the church plays in God’s salvific purposes. God’s desire to put the world back to rights has always involved God forming a community. First Israel (act three), then the Church (act five). In the present post I will outline the second major theme in Wright’s vision for and of the church.

2. The Cross and Resurrection as Paradigmatic

The cross and resurrection of Jesus stand – in Wright’s ecclesiology – as the two pillars of the church’s engagement with the world. Or, using a different image, if the church’s movement into the world is an ellipse, then the cross and empty tomb form its foci; they define the very shape and substance of the church’s mission. Put simply, Wright says that Christians are to be both cross-bearers and kingdom-announcers.

a) Cross-Bearers

Wright understands the cross of Christ as giving the church its prophetic edge and pastoral heart. When discussing the reason Jesus was crucified, he states it was the same reason so many people died in Sarajevo, Tiananmen Square, and Rwanda: “they got in the way of forces, of powers” (Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, p. 18). Jesus took on the principalities and powers and got what all rebels against the powers get: he was stripped naked, publicly humiliated, and hung on a cross as his torturers celebrated in triumph. But then, quoting Colossians 2:13-15, Wright shows how Paul stands all this on its head – the cross is actually about how Jesus stripped the powers, made a public spectacle of them, and triumphed over evil! The cross delegitimizes all oppressive rulers and teaches the church they need not fear speaking out against and confronting the powers since “these powers were defeated on the cross. They have no rights over you. The battle has been won” (p. 21).

Yet the cross is not only a prophetic witness to the victimizers, it is also a message of healing to the victims; it is not only confrontational, but also therapeutic. Thus, as cross-bearers, Christians are called to go to the places of pain in the world in order to mediate God’s crucified love. In The Challenge of Jesus, Wright describes this “strange and dark theme” which is “our birth right as followers of Jesus,” in the following way:

“Shaping our world is never for a Christian a matter of going out arrogantly thinking that we can just get on with the job and it will all happen. It is a matter of sharing and bearing the pain and puzzlement of the world so that the crucified love of God in Christ may be brought to bear healingly upon the world at exactly that point. Because Jesus bore the cross uniquely for us we do not have to purchase forgiveness again, that’s been done. But because following him…still involves taking up the cross we should expect as the New Testament tells us that to build on his foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life and work over and over again” (p. 189).

Wright’s interpretation of Romans 8:18-30 and what it means for the church is as startling as it is powerful. Though the cross is not mentioned in this passage, Wright recognizes it at work deep within Paul’s logic:

“Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning together in travail – where should the church be at such a time, sitting smugly on the sidelines because we’ve got the answers? No, says Paul, we ourselves groan inwardly as we wait for our renewal, liberation. But where is God in all of this? Sitting upstairs in heaven wishing we could get our act together? No, says Paul, God is groaning too, present within the church at the place where the world is in pain… The Christian vocation is to be in prayer in the Spirit where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation we discover it to be the cross-shaped way of following Christ. Arms out stretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world and the love of God; that’s what prayer is all about” (ibid.).

Colossians 1:24, 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, and Romans 8 all attest that the cross is the vulnerable point at which the world’s pain and the church’s vocation meet. In an earlier book, The Crown and the Fire, but still in concert with Romans 8, Wright writes:

“The present task of the Church is not only to share the sufferings of Christ, but in doing so to share and bear the sufferings of the world – and, indeed, to discover that those vocations are two ways of saying the same thing; so that the pain of the world, which was heaped once and for all on to the Messiah on the cross, is now strangely to be shared by those who suffer with him. The Church is not insulated from the pain of the world, but is to become for the world what Jesus was for the world, the place where its pain and grief may be focused and concentrated, and so healed” (p. 88).

Wright makes the same point in his giant, scholarly Romans commentary, as well as in his popular-level commentary in the “Paul For Everyone” series. All those who follow the crucified Messiah are called to follow the crucified One to the areas of greatest suffering so that God’s healing love might be brought to bear on that point.

b) Kingdom-Announcers

Because the story of Jesus does not end on Friday, but extends to Sunday and beyond, the Christian’s vocation must be not only as cross-bearer but also as kingdom-announcer. At times the two are so intimately woven together in Wright’s work that it’s useless to try to treat them separately, such as in this passage from Evil and the Justice of God: “Jesus on this cross towers over the whole scene as Israel in person, as YHWH in person, as the point where the evil of the world does all that it can and where the Creator of the world does all that he can. Jesus suffers the full consequences of evil… And he does so precisely as the act of redemption, of taking that downward fall and exhausting it, so that there may be new creation, new covenant, forgiveness, freedom, and hope” (p. 92).

And although the meanings of cross-bearing and kingdom-announcing overlap and give witness to the same reality – namely, that Jesus has defeated evil and become the world’s true Lord – Wright is careful at other times to differentiate the two events for good reason; each has its own important emphasis.

Hope in the resurrection within first-century Jewish thought was not hope of going off somewhere else after you died. Bodily resurrection was part of a bigger package deal: the renewal of all things. Jews believed that the creator God would one day perform a triple- act renewal – renewal for Israel, for the world, and also for the righteous dead. Here, Wright is absolutely adamant: the resurrection of Jesus must not be seen as an isolated event, but as the sign that the great renewal has begun. Easter Sunday is about the inauguration of eschatology, and the empty tomb points toward the great New Fact that God’s kingdom has been launched on earth as it is in heaven. Jürgen Moltmann wrote years ago that a “proper theology” must always “be constructed in the light of its future goal. Eschatology should not be its end, but its beginning.” There is little doubt Wright has appropriated the Moltmannian dictum as his own, for a robust eschatology has been the linchpin for his ecclesiology.

In a set of lectures delievered at an Emergent Church conference in 2004 titled “The Future of the People of God,” Wright advocated doing ecclesiology backwards - that is, thinking from God’s future to the present. The church must first catch a vision of new creation - that what God did in raising his Son from the dead he promises to do for all of creation - and then in light of this, try to discern a vision of what the church should look like now and in the years to come. Thus at the recent Wheaton Conference Jeremy Begbie described this Wrightian idea as “reverse ecclesiology.” And pneumatology becomes central since it is only by and through the Holy Spirit that the church can experience this provisional yet concrete anticipation of the future.

Once again we hear Wright’s language of the church implementing what Jesus accomplished, but now with more force. In an Easter sermon preached at Durham Cathedral in 2006, he insists that the whole thrust of the Easter story is that “Jesus is raised, therefore the world is a different place, and we are called, as witnesses to the resurrection, to announce it, to make it happen, and to find ourselves remade in the process.” He echoes this in Surprised by Hope; the Easter vocation means “Jesus’s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice” (p. 204), it means God’s rule is resulting in salvation “both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church” (p. 205). Announcing God’s kingdom is more than mere verbal proclamation; it is an ushering in sort of announcing, an announcement made with word and deed and life. God is putting the world back to rights, and this has everything to do with the church.

Before moving on, let me address a danger that arises in Wright’s ecclesiology that pertains to whether his eschatology is over-realized. Does he believe it’s the church’s vocation to bring God’s kingdom? And the question my Barthian friends raise: is there room in his eschatology for the apocalyptic? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ It appears that Wright stresses the continuity or discontinuity of the present to new creation depending on his audience. Surprised By Hope, a book largely read by American Evangelicals, is an example of placing the accent on continuity, whereas a sermon he preached before a group of judges and lawyers titled “Full of the Knowledge of the Lord” is an example of the accent on discontinuity. For the most part, Wright is extremely careful in his wording with respect to the church’s involvement in new creation. In Following Jesus he writes, “We can’t build the kingdom by our own efforts; it will take another mighty act of our God to bring it in at the last. But we can build for the kingdom. Every act of justice, every word of truth, every creation of genuine beauty, every act of self-sacrificial love, will be reaffirmed on the last day, in the new world” (pp. 112-113). God is rescuing, not abandoning, his creation, for new creation is at the heart of God’s mission.

We have now seen the underpinnings of Wright’s ecclesiology by surveying various writings and sermons, and I would suggest the strength of this piecemeal approach in constructing an ecclesiology, or any doctrine for that matter, is its potential to be thoroughly consistent with one’s thought across the board rather than confined to a single treatment in a volume of systematic theology. His five-act hermeneutic combined with the twin towers of the church’s identity – the cross and resurrection – make for an ecclesiology that is thoroughly biblical and faithful to what Kenda Dean calls the “hot lava core of Christianity,” the story of God’s encounter with us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and promise of continued presence through the Holy Spirit. In the third and final post, I will evaluate Wright’s ecclesial convictions in light of my earlier assessment of Niebuhr and then conclude with a few suggestions of how these findings might change the future of ecclesiology.

THE subconscious practical orientation of individuals has been de-emphasised by theorists such as Margaret Archer (2007) – instead it is a reflexive era imperative as accentuated by the “macroscopic historical shifts from ‘contextual continuity’, dominant in traditional societies, through the intensification of ‘contextual discontinuity’, gradually spreading with modernity itself, to the advent of of ‘contextual incongruity’ in the last two decades of the 20th century” (Archer 2010: 136). In riposte, the problem is not merely an empirical fit, an imperative for an age, but a methodological one. The subconscious practical orientation is indispensable, as shall be argued, regardless of an era’s imperative, as mediation cannot be reduced to the internal conversation – the internal conversation being agency itself. Unless mediation between pyschobiography and objective conditions are viewed as collective and part of ongoing interactional episodes, then we are left with arguments of empirical fits and reflexive imperatives, rather than a methodological one that renders all sorts of phenomena, other than an aware reflexivity, as indispensable.

The situation as mediating

In the the domain of situated activity (Goffman’s ‘interaction order’), we begin to appreciate the indispensability of the habitual – this without discounting the voluntarism orienting of many interactions. It is in the interaction order or the hidden hand of long worked habits or what Schilling (1997) notes as the somatic sector of consciousness that we can appreciate the embodiment of contextual resources. Similarly, cognitive neuroscientists differentiate between deliberative and automatic cognition, the relevance of either contingent upon conditions or the lived situation (Cerulo 2009). The triggering of either is situationally sensitive and thus mediated in live interaction, as Layder notes; unpacking the interplay of structure-agency requires a mediation that is to be found in the “most ‘immediate’ (that is, closest to action) features of the environment. They represent already constructed arenas of social behaviour” (Layder 2004: 14). This pushes the debates (contrast Sayer: 2010 with Archer: 2010) regarding both reflexivity and the habitus onto different terrains and moves beyond an emphasis on a singularity of a deliberative emergent personal identity, with mediation between structure and agency as a result of our internal conversations.

The internal conversation as direct mediator of objective structure gives up an analysis with strong biases to self-action, or compromises arelational approach that conceptually returns the debates regarding contextual continuity to reflexivity itself, rather than live situations or more immediate realities. In other words, generalisations are made regarding the creative nature of reflexivity as an empirical analysis – analysis is viewed at the level of individuals mediating their environment and with little collective focus, as a result deliberative or automatic cognition can be viewed as epoch defined (e.g. a reflexive modernity) with historical shifts defining structures and not sensitive, contingent and negotiated live encounters, that often escape such generalised analysis.

Therefore conceptually mediation requires an unpacking and a reliance on the singularity of cognition as directly implicated in that process gives “a rationalist bias” that does not take adequately account for subconscious impulses and pre-cognitive foundations of the social brain (habitual acts can be based on prior socialised impulses but not always) – the stratified nature of selfhood allows for both consciousness and more than consciousness, though all facets are relationally dependent in the emergence of a reflexive consciousness (a relational emergence of the irreducible properties of the agentic capacity, without any reduction of that capacity, as a stratified selfhood, to an aware consciousness). Thus multifaceted influences of the socialised body and precongitive foundation of cognition (e.g. Coole 2005), with its impulses, are important to mediation and how structures supervene – mediation is not reducible to an aware reflexivity and thus cannot be captured merely with a notion of the internal conversation.

This post intends the works of Margaret Archer, though a similar observation can be made with Giddens, as Schilling observes “ … the idea of agents always being implicated in the instantiation of structural ‘rules’ and ‘resources’ is ultimately, perhaps, too voluntaristic for the stubborn emotional desires characteristic of human bodily being in the world” (Schilling 1997). Mediating gives to different forms of cognition, affectual energy etc.; each type sensitive to its live context and can be triggered in situ – the “pivotal role of situated activity as a conduit and relay between individuals and their wider social entanglements” (Layder 2004: 22). The individual, or the domain of psychobiography, is composed of different elements, with the inner life being more than a conscious awareness of different orders and our place in relation to them. Layder (2005: 24) terms it in the following terms: “I propose that the self should be construed as possessing an unconscious element and that Mead’s stress on its cognitive, reasoning and rational side should be counterbalanced with an emphasis on the importance of emotion. In this sense “individuality” is not simply a social construct but has to do with an inner mental life?a psychological, affectual energy that constantly interacts with the social entanglements of the individual. To complete this amended picture these elements of the self need to be connected to some notion of biographical time as it depicts the history of a person’s involvements with significant others in their lives. All these elements comprise what I shall call the “psychobiography” of the individual. This traces the career of self-identities as they emerge, develop, reconstitute and regenerate themselves as a result of a person’s unique configurations of experience and social contacts over the course of their lives”.

While theorists like Archer emphasise a stratified ontology of selfhood, with a personal identity as analytically distinct and a-symmetrically related to a social identity, there is a subsequent denial of a domain analysis as sociological category (as shall be noted later), resulting in an almost exclusive analysis of contextual reproduction/transformation and the emergence of a social identity (what Archer terms as the discursive order) in the light of an reflexive imperative – mediated via a personal identity as acquired “from an individual’s own life experiences”. Variegated phenomena as affectual energy, sedimented memory, neuro-wiring etc. are in Archer’s terms the emergent properties “occupying the middle ground between the molecules and meanings” (Archer 2003: 88). They are viewed as part of a first person perspective – crucial for the emergence of self-consciousness and viewed as a territory that is chalked off and irreducible to anything discursive. However, mediation remains focused on as an aware reflexivity and emergent properties, that are often off our radars and importantly define mediation in live encounters, are de-emphasised. For example, Archer de-emphasising subconscious routines states “the old routine guide lines are no longer applicable and new ones cannot be forged because (even) nascent morphogenesis is inhospitable to any form of routinization”. Different orders and their influences are balanced in terms of “the ‘projects’ which subjects define and seek to accomplish” and “reflexive internal conversation (PEP) is responsible for mediating the impact of SEPs and CEPs because it is the subjects’ objectives and internal deliberations about their external feasibility that determine how they confront the structural and cultural circumstances whose presence they cannot avoid” (Archer 2007: 65). Further affirming this egocentric perspective – “That is to say, we talk to ourselves about society in relation to ourselves and about ourselves in relation to society, under our own descriptions”.

To sum, the contingencies of an interaction order – how we encounter the discursive order – should be considered more than an aware navigation and running commentary on it, as Sayer notes “we should acknowledge both our capacity for reflection on our circumstances, and the embodied dispositions of our habitus, remembering that the latter depends on prior needs and susceptibilities … To be sure, contrary to what she terms as the ‘hydraulic model’ of social processes, individuals are not simply and passively moulded by constraints and affordances; rather, the effect or lack of effect of such contexts depends on the active mediation of individuals monitoring and deliberating on their situation. However, people’s internal conversations do not mediate all such influences. It’s an overstatement to say that ‘the efficacy of any social property is at the mercy of the subjects’ reflexive activity’ (Archer 2007: 12). We are not omniscient, omnipotent beings; some influences get beneath our radar, especially in early life, in our ‘formative years’, shaping our dispositions and responses without our even noticing them. Realists, of all theorists, have to acknowledge this” (Sayer 2010: 113).

Domain levels and size analysis

Finally, Archer argues that domain levels are a reversion to a size analysis:

That is, the real ‘aspects’ or ‘features’ of social reality are not by definition tied to the size of interacting elements (the size of the encounter, or for that matter, the sentiment accompanying the interaction).’” and “However, the key points in this connection are that emergent strata constitute (a) the crucial entities in need of linking by explaining how their causal powers originate and operate, but (b) that such strata do not neatly map onto empirical units of any particular magnitude. Indeed, whether they coincide with the ‘big’ or the ’small’ is contingent and thus there cannot be a ‘micro’-'macro’ problem which is defined exclusively by the relative size of social unity” (Archer 1995: 10).

The relational emergence of different empirical points of analysis is all correct but to speak of it in terms of size is to miss the point. As Archer notes the immediate domain of situated activity could encompass both large scale and micro level units, but either way in the face-to-face interactions we have the most immediate level of mediation of social settings and contextual resources. To be sure, the size analysis, micro/macro, shifts in accordance to the phenomenon in focus but once again this does not negate a domain level of live encounters being the most immediate to whatever is the focus of analysis. In other words, mediation is best understood as collective and thus accomplished – this gives a rich terrain of contingencies and thus differing facets of mediation, from neurological, socialised embodied impulses, subconscious cognition etc. Despite methodological differences with Francois Depelteau’s conception of the structure/agency problematic, his insight on replacing an egocentric perspective is worth noting (he juxtaposes what he terms ‘relationism’ and ‘co-determinism’, though both are very compatible, in terms of the problematic he spells out):

One important goal of relational sociology is to replace the egocentric perspective for a relational perspective, which helps us to see what is occurring by studying transactions. We will see that in the case of M. Archer’s “morphogenetic approach,” the main difference between co-determinism and relational sociology is that the latter takes a relational perspective from the beginning to the end, whereas the former switches from an egocentric one to a relational one during the demonstration. The same comment could be made about P. Berger and T. Luckmann’s social construction of reality and many other co-deterministic theories. (Dépelteau 2005: 63)

Regardless of how Dépelteau terms the ‘co-determinism’ and ‘relationalism’ debate, the egocentric bias of the “morphogenetic approach” follows from Archer’s analytical focus on mediation from a restricted reflexive imperative and without adequate consideration of myriad influences in the “domains of collective experience and social interaction” (Tilly, cited in Dépelteau 2005).

Young global optimism, typified in the Obama generation, seems to be on the rise, as does the growing conviction in others that the new leaders and promises of today are simply new faces and voices for the same age-old power structures of yesterday. This is simply one of the many complexities and contradictions amid our culture. What is the church’s calling in all this? And how is the church to engage (or disengage) these cultural currents?

This is part one of a three-piece post on how N.T. Wright’s ecclesiology might be used to navigate the church through the complexities of today’s global, postmodern culture. The idea for this post first came to me while having lunch with Wright a few months back when he was in Princeton. I asked him about his ecclesiastical commitments, how they’re informed by and connected to the rest of his theology. Soon after I began constructing a Wrightian ecclesiology – and mainly for two reasons.

First, I’ll be planting a church with a group of friends in Miami this coming fall, and I’ve come to believe that the picture Wright paints of the church is not only relevant, but also strongly evangelical while being deeply ecumenical. Second, while the academy has critically engaged Wright’s perspectives on, for example, justification, eschatology, and narrative theology, not much scholarly writing has been done on his ecclesiology (Jeremy Begbie’s recent paper being perhaps the one exception). Thus, one idea I’ve had for future study involves developing an ecclesiology using Wright, John Howard Yoder, and Martin Luther King, Jr., since each have their own different yet (in my view) complementary understanding of the church’s mission that’s important for us today.

Because I am writing from and for a North American context, I will begin not with Wright’s work but with a short assessment of H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology in Christ and Culture since it has provided the framework for many churches and mainline seminaries in this country for the past sixty years. I hope to point out why in the end such an approach is inadequate for the church to understand its relationship with culture. Next, I will turn to Wright’s work in order to outline the methods and foundations that support his ecclesiology. I’ll survey a sampling of his writings and sermons (chiefly in my second post) in a concerted effort to discover what sort of cultural and political engagement his ecclesiology leads to. Once this is on the table I’ll be ready in my third post to evaluate Wright’s ecclesial approach to culture in light of my earlier assessment of Niebuhr and then conclude with a few brief suggestions and ouverture.

Assessment of Christ and Culture
Definitions of culture abound. Leslie Newbigin provides as good an understanding as any; he defines culture as, “The sum total of ways of living built up by a human community and transmitted from one generation to another.” Culture is comprehensive – including language, politics, art, science, technology, and religion – for it is “the whole life of human being in so far as it is a shared life.” I will work from this basic assumption while keeping in the forefront that our globalized culture is in fact not one single culture but a multitude and mixture of cultures, and that all cultures remain fluid and dynamic, refusing to be confined to static existence.

Herein lies the first critique of Niebuhr’s typology. In Christ and Culture he outlines five different postures the church can take toward culture: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. The problem is that he never pauses to explain what exactly he means by “culture” before rushing into assessing the five types. Furthermore, culture appears to be a monolithic entity in Niebuhr’s mind. “These churches have historically opposed culture, while those over there have mixed with culture.” This simplistic understanding fails to recognize the dynamic nature of culture, that it is an ongoing aspect of human society and thus calls for different levels and ways of engagement as it continues to change.

Second, Niebuhr assumes a Christendom model of the church as normative in his assessment of the five options. He takes for granted that the church is responsible for fixing culture’s problems; apparently in the end the church must give account to both God and the world. As the authors of Missional Church state, “Virtually every Christian public ethic justifying behavior that runs counter to the example and teaching of Jesus does it on the grounds of responsibility… If an action is not responsible, then, these critics imply, one must of course not do it… The best rejoinder to such arguments is, Responsible to whom?” (pp. 124-125). It is not at all clear in Niebuhr’s thought whether the church’s primary responsibility is to God or to the dominant culture.

Third, Niebuhr’s claim – that only a church that works in tandem with the surrounding culture can transform culture – fails to take seriously the specific shape of Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. Even before he’s finished with the introduction to Christ and Culture, Niebuhr has neutered the Matthean Jesus and rendered him as useless. Christian discipleship and social ethics look totally different without the Sermon on the Mount. John Howard Yoder levels a substantial critique against Niebuhr’s various formulas for skirting the ethical demands of the gospels, stating that all such formulas “make or presuppose a case for placing our faith in some other channel of ethical insight and some other way of behaving than that which is offered us through Jesus as attested by the New Testament” (The Original Revolution, pp. 134-135).

Wright’s Ecclesiology
Having seen the limitations of Niebuhr’s typology in helping the church understand its relationship to culture, we now turn to N.T. Wright’s ecclesiology in search of a more adequate approach. Since Wright does not spell out his ecclesiology in simple form – he is not a systematician but a biblical scholar and clergyman – my first task will be to trace the ecclesial underpinnings and contours of his thought. I propose that two themes in Wright’s work be used as the foundations of his ecclesiology; the first will be examined presently, while the second will be saved for the next post.

1. Five-Act Hermeneutic
Wright uses the analogy of a five-act Shakespearean play to explain his biblical hermeneutic. Suppose the fifth act of the play has been lost, while the first four are intact. What could be done if we agreed that the play ought to be staged? We would gather the most trained and experienced Shakespearian actors, immerse them in the first four acts of the play’s script, then once they had become familiar with the language and setting of the play, and most importantly its plot and impetus, and fully imbued with their characters, we would put them on a stage and ask them to carry the story forward by acting out a fifth act for themselves. In The New Testament and the People of God, Wright explains:

“…part of the initial task of the actors chosen to improvise the new final act will be to immerse themselves with full sympathy in the first four acts, but not so as merely to parrot what has already been said. They cannot go and look up the right answers. Nor can they simply imitate the kinds of things that their particular character did in the early acts. A good fifth act will show a proper final development, not merely a repetition, of what went before” (p. 141).

Wright contends that if the biblical story is a five-act drama, the church finds itself living in the fifth act. The five acts are thus: I-Creation; II-Fall; III-Israel; IV-Jesus. The fifth act is formed by the writing of the New Testament – including the gospels – and “would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of Revelation) of how the play is supposed to end” (NTPG, p. 142). Scripture is authoritative in that God’s people “live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion” (p. 143).

This means the church cannot disregard the first four acts by taking the story wherever it wills and the wind blows, but neither can it simply repeat the four first acts as if the story were frozen in time. The church needs both faithfulness and innovation; both consistency and creativity. The ecclesial identity advanced here is that the church has been given the vocation to be the people of God in the fifth act of creation. What Christ accomplished through the cross and resurrection (“it is finished”), the church is called to implement. And what exactly this implementation entails will be the subject of the next post.

THIS is a continuation from a previous introductory post, the objective here is to briefly review Derek Layder’s critique of Elias and then, in a future post, his noting of Margaret Archer’s neglect of a domain level analysis of size i.e. level of analysis as sociological category. Layder makes the point that Elias, a proponent of process analysis, blurs differences between both objective structure (which has no relative independence apart from individuals) and meaningful intentional acts (individuals are part of chains of interdependence). There is no real objective/subjective dualism, at most the objective conditions, or figurations, arise out of the “processes and structures of interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people” e.g. the rules of a dance sequence may be independent of individuals performing a given dance act but not of acting individuals proper, as if it is some form of abstract mental phenomena. In other words, structures are reducibly performative acts of current individuals, in society, and have no independence apart from these same actors, to quote Elias “… yet on another on another level of awareness one may know perfectly well that societies are composed of individuals, and that individuals can only possess specifically human characteristics such as their abilities to speak, think and live, in and through relationships with other people -”in society”"

As objective conditions and acting individuals are not conceptualised as irreducible, Layder (1986) argues we are left with the following irrevocable conceptual errors – quotes are direct from Layder (1986):

1. “Thus Elias’s usage stands in stark contrast to the idea of interdependencies, for example, in an interactionist context, where the processual relationism is both cause and consequence of interactional emergents which are articulated through the meaning conferring, interpretive skills of intentional, self-reflexive social actors. This is the great strength of the phenomenological and interactionist schools; their concern with the nature and consequences of intentional social action. Whilst he often covers himself by making nominal reference to intentions, in actuality Elias is concerned with people only from the point of view of their being links in chains of interdependence. The only things that could be said to ‘act’ are the never shifting balances of power between people.”
2. The notion of the reproduction of social relations as a theoretical problem – “In this respect Elias’s position leads to a strange conception of social ontology which suggests that whilst change and process are ubiquitous and ever present in figurations of individuals, there are no relatively enduring external structures whose rates of change and mechanisms of change are relatively independent of these figurations … In short, Elias provides no reason to accept that all aspects of social reality change at the same rate, and for the same reasons as figurational changes”

Regarding the first point, the implication being “the ‘person’ as an individual with a unique psychobiography and self-identity is submerged in social process virtually without trace” After all, with no barriers or distinctions between the social world and the individual, lest we reify/reduce individuals to core psychological and cognitive states, the relative endurance of cognitive conditions (e.g. consider the examples psychosis, autism etc.), we will not be able to adequately consider the influence, among many influences, of the cognitive neurosciences and how they give for a unique individual mediation and intersection “with the dynamics of particular situations and the influence of wider social contexts to determine a person’s behaviour” (Layder 2005: 148). Further, interactionist approaches, though confirming and affirming causal powers to the acting individual, as “are articulated through the meaning conferring, interpretive skills of intentional, self-reflexive social actors”, are prone to acknowledging these powers as derivative of an already social identity. Thus the filter is reduced to an utterly socialised self – the dynamics of the situation rely on the common stock of conceptual interpretive schemes. Thus the importance of drawing the lines between the inner world and its external environment is twofold:

1. In the reflexive mediation and interpretation of this world, that can only be processed through an individual consciousness i.e. motivation & intentionality (Dewey’s reflex arc);
2. An a-social cognitive framework that is not a mere derivative of its sociality but irreducible and relatively independent of any intersubjectivity. I will argue in a future post that this pre-disposition, while not reflexive awareness proper, influences a unique reflexive capacity or aboutness i.e. we can only have a mind with a prior social self but this mind is not exclusively formed (as Mead would argue) in reference to an objective ‘Me’. For example, Mead states “That is, it is only as the individual finds himself acting with reference to himself as he acts towards others, that he becomes a subject to himself rather than an object, and only as he is affected by his own social conduct in the manner in which he is affected by that of others, that he becomes an object to his own social conduct. The differences in our memory presentations of the “I” and the “me” are those of the memory images of the initiated social conduct and those of the sensory responses thereto.” However, between images of initiated social conduct and the sensory response thereto are filtering, irreducible and relationally emergent mechanisms – these affect how meaning is perceived. An encompassing explanatory power requires that we take this into account (why do people behave as they do in social situations cannot be reduced or made an epiphenomenon of sociality), as an influencing factor on the dynamics of the situation and the influence of wider social context. Again, this will be further investigated in a future post on domain level analysis.

Second, and this follows directly from above – the interplay between individual and objective condition (or figurations of interdependence). Can we conceptualise social products and their emergence, over time and subsequent reproduction (morphostasis), as reducible to those acting them in social life? We have facts about the act, performance and rules but nothing about why they appear as they do (agentic mediation) or why they exist in that form (objective structure, including possession of power and privilege – Elias conceptualises power in terms of relational power ratios but not as quantity of relatively enduring structures of power, that are static and relatively independent of the incumbent occupiers of roles e.g. teacher and student). As there is no distinction we lose the explanatory powers of “interpretive skills of intentional, self-reflexive social actors.” (e.g. in individualist approaches) or the idea of social structure as relatively autonomous, pre-existent of current performers and causally efficacious. If there is no interplay, as there is no distinction, it follows we cannot adequately explain both the mediation of structure and the figuring of structure upon this mediation. Hence we can make two points that are neglected (1) continued emergence in terms of reproduction and hence its temporal pre-existence; (2) Its future tense emergence in terms of transformation. Thus Layder makes the insightful point that Elias was caught up in a sophisticated form of empiricism i.e. the simultaneously of present figurations (the observable phenomena that is process) but without the historicity of emergence that requires the recognition of underlying mechanisms of a stratified conception of both objective sociality and its mediating agency.

In the next post, I wish to consider the situation as mediating, rather than the internal conversation as reflexivity, as stated by Archer. I believe a consideration of mediation through the situation will open analysis to a much more richer terrain and considers the nature of face-to-face encounters and both lower and higher levels of embodied sociality. A level analysis complements this approach and this is something I wish to move to next…

Further Reading:

• Understanding Social Theory by Derek Layder
• Social Reality as figuration: A critique of Elias’s conception of sociological analysis by Derek Layder
• Norbert Elias on civilization, power, and knowledge: selected writings by Norbert Elias, Stephen Mennell, Johan Goudsblom

Here is an insightful discussion on N.T. Wright’s critical realism (conversants come from a Reformed background, with a commitment to Cornelius Van Til’s pre-suppositionalism approach to Christian apologetics). I cannot give an opinion on Cornelius Van Til, as I have only recently come across his ideas, so these are running thoughts. This post is born out of an interest in theological contributions on epistemic debates regarding narrative and tradition. After all, these debates could be generalised beyond its immediate context and consider narrative, in its broadest sense. For example, to what extent is knowledge situated and can our psycho-biography, as an onto-genesis, make a pre-suppositionalism unavoidable and thus, from a Reformed perspective, unable to commit to God or good, as autonomous free will? If that is the case, then this pre-supposes that our fallen nature cannot account for itself, and the purposes it seeks for itself – we do not choose God but are converted and this conversion is a sovereign act.

In a sense this is theology gone sociological, it accounts for human agency and it understands its dis-capacity as a bondage to sin (an inherited nature posit has a transcendental element but still made effectual inter-subjectively) embodied within a social trajectory. If that is the case, then the social worlds we create are fallen and any attempt to transcend this matrix, through constructing our own meta-narratives, unleashes only further misery, as we seek apart from God what can never be achieved – human knowledge can never relate to the world as it really is.

Pre-suppositionalism fits with Calvin’s conception of sovereign grace and more seeks to provide sociological insights, within a theocentric system. The problem with Critical Realism? It still assumes an autonomous man, that can judge and commit. This approach, I believe, though not one of the hard ‘bible told me so’ pre-suppositional approaches, remains circular . First it assumes to know the world as it is, including the Will of God and His works and then negates its epistemic standpoint. How do we reach this conclusion, if we have no capacity to? Even Common grace, as bestowed, is sovereign and the knowledge it gives to, is at most restraining. In other words, it commits an epistemic fallacy, by negation – a self-defeating posit. Perhaps it is the work of effectual grace, the elect are privy to this, but again in what way is this made known? Experientially?

I am currently reading Professor Derek Layder’s social theory textbook – ‘Understanding Social Theory‘ and find his approach refreshing (strongly methodological, with a focus on debates and influences of different theorists). I am particularly interested in the later chapters that tackle the issue of linking macro/micro and structure/agency. His critique of Elias for neglecting the dynamics of the situation as an important link, (he argues Elias blurs this difference with his focus on chains of interdependence i.e. figuration as “a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people” ) is something very insightful. I’ll post about this topic next, as Margaret Archer’s concept of the internal conversation is very relevant (the internal conversation being reflexivity itself – thus analytically distinct from the alien unplanned process. If we are left with chains of mutual interdepence, we forget that these chains do not ultimately explain how the individual herself is a process or even trace socio-genesis, something Elias strongly affirms with his repudiation of the idea of a closed personality).

• Why I Go To Church
• The Historicity of Genesis
• The Scandal of Particularity
• Genocide in the Holy Land