Theology from below?

Christian Community in History

Historical Ecclesiology, Vol. 1

Roger Haight

Continuum, $34.95, 423 pp.

Roger Haight is a Jesuit now teaching at Union Theological Seminary. This is the first of two volumes on the church that together are intended to continue his systematic theology, which began with Dynamics of Theology (1990) and Jesus Symbol of God (1999). In the preface, Haight identifies the fundamental insight that runs through his work: "Critical theology must keep theological assertions attached to the historical symbols that mediate the experiences on which they depend." In Jesus Symbol of God, a book on Christology which drew the attention of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, this meant connecting statements made about Christ to the historical Jesus, and featured respectful reports on a variety of contemporary reconstructions of Jesus. In Haight's ecclesiological project, it means deriving theology from the actual historical manifestations of the church.

Since the church's history is considerably longer than that of the Messiah, two volumes are needed: the first takes us through the late medieval church, the second will engage in explicit comparison among the versions of the church arising out of the Reformation, and will, presumably, draw some form of systematic treatment from the theological principles all this history provides.

Haight is an enthusiastic practitioner of "theology from below," and seems at times as excited about defining the method and perspective of such a theology as in its results. The present volume opens with a preface, an introduction, and a first chapter on method--seventy pages in all--explaining the author's approach. He begins by defining an ecclesiology from below in terms of four qualities: it is "concrete, existential, and historical"; it is "genetic"; it respects the "social and historical situation." Finally, it is a "theological discipline," because in the church "people recognize the presence and activity of God." This last element may appear to be outweighed by the first three, but Haight wants to avoid what he calls (borrowing from James Gustafson) a "theological reductionism," that is, regarding the church only from a religious perspective while neglecting historical realities.

Privileging religious perspectives rather than historical fact is a feature of the "ecclesiology from above" that Haight wants to challenge. Such ecclesiology is ahistorical, takes only one embodiment of the church as its focus (namely Roman Catholicism), finds its foundation in authority and its origin in doctrine, is Christocentric, and has a hierarchical understanding of ministry. In short, it is a form of "reductionism." An ecclesiology from below will, in precise contrast, take its stand on a postmodern perspective (more on that in a moment), will take the entire Christian movement into account, will find its foundation in "experience and praxis," will see its origin in historical terms, will be pneumatocentric, and will view ministry in terms of function. If this sounds as much like a list of prescriptions (or norms for church) as it does a set of perspectives (or ways of viewing the church), Haight may at least be credited with showing his entire hand from the start.

To be postmodern, according to Haight, means to have a critical historical consciousness, to be aware of globalization and global pluralism, to recognize the claims of other (Christian) churches, to attend to the role of other religions and secular movements. It means to acknowledge human suffering as connected to social experience, to recognize the experience and situation of women, and to be aware of increased secularism and individualism, together with a decreased participation in the life of the church.

If all of these lists--and there are still others in the introduction, dealing with "method" and "sources"--remind you of notes for a set of lectures in systematic theology, that's because, as the author states in his first sentence, "this work grew out of a course that I began teaching in the early 1980s and that provided the initial idea and inspiration for the project." Like most sets of expanded lecture notes, this book is diffuse, often repetitious, and stylistically uneven.

That's one problem. Another is revealed by the author's second sentence: "But it has grown in scope and size." The history of the church is a long one. If the author requires of his discipline that it derive its theological principles from "below" rather than from "above"--that is from the actual historical realizations of the church--he has committed himself to a task far more complicated than that of the historical Jesus, and potentially endless. This is to suggest not that the author is wrong in desiring such a theology, only that he is not likely to produce a book that actually accomplishes all that he desires.

There is still another problem, this one conceptual in character, and unrecognized by the author. It is one thing to be attentive to the actual embodiments of the church, and theology ought indeed to take them as seriously as it does the reality of the Incarnation. It does not follow, though, that the scholarly disciplines of sociology and history are necessarily the best ways of getting at such embodiment, any more than they are the best way of getting at the humanity of Jesus. Still less obvious is why it is a necessity to engage discipline-to-discipline in the manner of an "interdisciplinary" academic conference that never moves past the negotiation of mutually repelling discourses. It may even be possible to think of theology as working theologically with real and specific social and historical realities without necessary adversion to other disciplines and discourses. One can inquire into the specific ways in which the ekklesia gathers and articulates itself, and show the ways in which "edification" is a necessary element in the life of the ekklesia, without ever using the language of "intentional community" or "plausibility structure."

Even if theology should be instructed by such scholarly disciplines, real history and real sociology are no more easily recoverable for much of the story of the church than they are for much of the story of Jesus. However much one may want ancient sources to yield a "theology from below," they were composed by people whose theology was "from above." The sources do a better job of providing theological ideals than of sociological and historical realities. Haight therefore faces two unsatisfactory options: he can try to derive social history from sources that are fundamentally theological in character, or he can describe theological writings as though they constitute real history.

As may be expected, the book follows the church's historical development. After a lengthy treatment of the genesis of the church, Haight turns to the pre-Constantinian church, post-Constantinian church, the Gregorian reform and the new medieval church, and conciliarism and the late medieval church. Each chapter follows the same format: historical development, sociological-anthropological considerations, theological perspectives, and ecclesiological principles to be derived from these analyses. As one may expect, given the great expanse of history covered, each chapter does less and less real history and sociology, and more and more resembles a survey of selected ecclesiologies in the history of theology.

We can see some of the problems that follow from this method in Haight's critical chapter "The Genesis of the Church." He begins with a historical narrative of the early church's development. This is the standard version, although in strictly historical terms, it is not nearly so established as he seems to suppose. Then he provides a "social-anthropological account," which means, in effect, the application of Weber's "routinization of charism" to the historical development, followed by an organizational analysis of early church structures and activities. Readers of Wayne Meeks and Gerd Theissen will find much of this material familiar.

Next, Haight provides a "theological account" of the earliest church, "as this is perceived in and by faith and proposed in theological language." He proposes that Jesus and (in his terms) "God as Spirit" are the theological foundations of the church. Then he provides a "theology of ecclesial organization," which goes back over the sociological data in theological terms: members are chosen in the Spirit to be the body of Christ, they have a divine mission in history, they engage in activities that unite people to God and each other, they find a divine authorization for governance. Throughout this discussion, Haight does not engage in a close reading of New Testament passages, but cherry-picks texts with old-fashioned systematic aplomb.

The fourth stage is to turn from the descriptive to the prescriptive, by listing some "principles for a historical ecclesiology." Characteristically, he begins with "multiple tensions in the original self-constitution of the church," such as the tension between charisma and office, change and continuity, organization and environment, ideals and actuality, unity and plurality, large and small communities. Yet all of this is still descriptive. Haight must therefore ask how the early church is normative, and after some struggle, he concludes: "The early church is normative because it represents the original, classical reception of and response to the saving revelation of God in Jesus Christ which constitutes the church."

But this is still a nonanswer. Why should any historical event be normative? How can a historical reconstruction be "classical"? Haight partially recognizes the difficulty, because he adds a footnote, rather confusedly asserting that both the early church and Scripture are normative "in analogous ways." The belated concession speaks volumes about the degree of logical rigor brought to the entire enterprise. Haight closes the chapter with a set of "principles" that are more or less derived from his analyses. The church through the ages should attend to its generative principle (the historical Jesus), be attentive to the developmental character of the early church, appreciate institutional differences, strive for "communion, interdependence, interaction, mutuality," and be "Jesus centered and Spirit filled."

Haight has, in this first substantive chapter, certainly avoided what he has called a "theological reductionism." In fact, he has almost avoided theology altogether. For that matter, he has equally given little sense of how early Christian history is simply extraordinary, how its social arrangements challenged and did not simply mimic pre-existent forms, and why its sense of the presence of the exalted and powerful Lord manifested itself in transformed lives and transforming communities. The later chapters are equally sprawling and indecisive. Every reader can learn something from these pages, for Haight has read widely, and reported carefully, especially in the last section on conciliarism. And perhaps Haight will, in the end, pull a really impressive rabbit out of this enormous hat. Up to this point, however, he has spoken a great deal about the church through the ages without communicating the one thing that theology must above all communicate--that somehow the topic urgently matters.

Luke Timothy Johnson teaches at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. His latest book is The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (Doubleday).