Political Formation

Jenny Leith

Description

What might it mean us to be formed as disciples not only by the church but also by the world? In Political Formation: Being Formed by the Spirit in Church and World, Jenny Leith argues that ethical and political formation of Christians takes place through the work of the Spirit both in the church and in civic life, and the church, too, has something to learn from wider political practices and movements. This account of formation places centre stage a reckoning with the forms of exclusion and marginalisation that mar the church, and yields an understanding of the church as not only ethically formative but also in constant need of being formed itself.

Offering a fresh vision for ecclesiology, which grapples with the ethical failings of the church and takes seriously the need for the church to keep on recognising and repenting of its sins, the book offers a major new contribution to discussions around Christian formation and the relationship between discipleship and ethics.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334063056
• Langue: English

Extrait

Political Formation
Being Formed by the Spirit in Church and World
Jenny Leith






© Jenny Leith 2023
Published in 2023 by SCM Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-334-06303-2
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd



Contents
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Part I Locating Christian Formation
1. Ethical Formation in the Church?
2. Formation by the Spirit through Doubt and Disruption
Part II Ecclesial Formation
3. The Form of Church Polity
4. Formation through Conviction of Sin
5. Formation through Each Member
Part III Formation through Civic Life
6. Radical Democratic Discipleship
7. Formation through Civic Participation

Conclusion: Forming Common Civic Life

Bibliography



Acknowledgements
It is a wonderfully daunting task to have so many people to acknowledge and thank for their contribution to this work.
This book started life as a doctoral thesis, and my first thanks must go to my supervisor Mike Higton, for taking me on as a doctoral student and for the patient, perceptive, encouraging and always humorous way he has accompanied me on this research. I am deeply grateful also to my secondary supervisor Anna Rowlands for her thoughtful reading of my work and her coaching in navigating academic life. I am more thankful than I can say for PhD pals in No. 5 the College and Dun Cow Cottage who made writing a thesis a joyful thing to be shared when things were going well, and something not to be taken too seriously the rest of the time. I would also like to thank my doctoral examiners, Siobhán Garrigan and Frances Clemson, for their close reading and insightful questions and recommendations, which I continue to mull over.
My thinking has been shaped by the wider academic communities where I have shared this research, particularly the universities of Roehampton, King’s College London, and Durham, and the annual conferences of the Society for the Study of Theology and the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics. The ecclesial communities and institutions to which I have belonged in Durham and Cambridge – particularly St Giles, St Bene’t’s, Lyn’s House and Westcott House – have also done so much to remind me why theology matters and have kept on gently correcting my tendency to get distracted from the calling to be formed as a Christian by the task of writing about it.
David Shervington and Rachel Geddes at SCM Press have been wonderfully supportive and patient throughout the publishing process, and I am particularly grateful for Elizabeth Hinks’ careful copy editing. I would also like to thank the St Matthias Trust, the St Luke’s College Foundation and the College of St Hild and St Bede, Durham for their generous financial support.
My family have cheered me on through the process of this research (or, at least, in the case of my nieces and nephew, tried their best to understand what on earth a ‘PhD’ was and celebrated its completion). My dad has also modelled for me throughout my life what it looks like to undertake academic work with integrity and to engage generously with the work of other scholars. My final thanks go to my husband, Pete, who manages to combine being an all-round delightful human with a wise and insightful theological mind. I cannot express how grateful I am for his kindness and his patient attention to my fumbling attempts to articulate the ideas in this book. Thank you.




Introduction
How do we learn to live well as Christians? And is it the task of the church to teach this way of living to the world? Or does the world have something to teach the church? When I started thinking about these questions, I would have come down firmly on the side of the church teaching the world how to live well. Even when I began to working on the research that has become this book, I intended to write about how the church can form the world for the better. I still think this is something that the church can and does do but, as you will discover, I do not think this is the full picture. I have come to believe that the church also needs to receive from the world in order to become what it is called to be. This shift in thinking came through grappling with two questions that refused to submit to tidy answers.
First, how do we make sense of the ethical purpose of the church in the light of wave after wave of revelations of its moral failings? This is not to say that we live in a moment when the church is especially fallible, but I do think we are perhaps now more aware of the depths of those failings – recently, particularly with respect to white supremacy and sexual abuse. In the face of these revelations of sin, the ecclesial and theological resources offered in response are not always very satisfactory. There is often a tendency to ‘round up’ the image of the church to still being an essentially ethical community, with sin pictured as a kind of add-on – an aberration from the church’s usual good enactment of its calling to be hope for the world. In part, I think this ‘tidying up’ of the ethical status of the church is often driven by a concern to get back to the church’s task of shaping the world – perhaps even out of a sense that its ability to do this task successfully will be damaged irreparably if we spend too long talking in public about the ways the church goes wrong.
The second persistent question that shifted my thinking is: what do our day-to-day lives have to do with discipleship? Are we just living out what we receive in the church? Or is there something formative about the contingent situations in which we find ourselves through our work, friendships, family life and so on? Reckoning with this second set of questions grew out of my experience of working in politics, as a parliamentary researcher and then in social policy. During this work I often encountered the rhetoric from Christian advocacy groups that the work of Christians in politics was an act of sacrificial witness to the kingdom of Christ. However, this rhetoric did not really chime with the lived experience of the Christians I knew working in Westminster. Our day-to-day experience was less clear cut and much less dramatic than that evoked by these noble descriptions of sacrifice and witness. The work involves, like any job, many mundane tasks, and many areas where there is no clear ‘Christian’ course of action, but instead involve a scrappy struggle for integrity amid uncertainty and limited time. It is this kind of ethical tension that dominates, rather than clear moments of choice between a Christian course of action and a course that serves one’s own interests. In among this, I became aware, in an inchoate way, that this work was formative. It was not simply a matter of working out in political life an ethical formation that I had already received from the church. Rather, participation in political life was forming me too, in one direction or another.
In response to these questions, this book offers a political theology of Christian formation. It argues that the ethical and political formation of Christians takes place through the work of the Spirit both in the church and in civic life, and that the church too has something to learn from wider political practices and movements. This book is centred, then, on the question of how Christian ethical and political formation takes place: on how Christians are formed by belonging to, and participating in, the polity of the church and the wider civic community. I make the claim that Christian ethical and political formation must and should take place inside and outside the church. Our ecclesial and civic formation cannot be disentangled from one another and, moreover, this is how ethical and political formation should happen.
This argument stands in contrast to some of the most visible theological work in this area, which focuses on how formation takes place in the church and flows out into ethical action. Acknowledging the malformation that can take place through the practices of the church tends to come in as an afterthought. In contrast, an account of formation is pursued here that places centre stage a reckoning with the forms of exclusion and marginalization that mar the church, and that can be passed on even in its core practices. This leads me to offer an account of the church as not only ethically formative, but also in constant need of being formed itself. This account of formation also underlines the possibility of being formed as a Christian outside the church: making theological sense of the challenge to the church’s life, and to the formation of individual disciples, that can come from wider political practices and movements. This stems from a recognition of the ways of the Spirit, bubbling up in each of our lives in unexpected ways – in both the church and civic life – to lead us deeper into the life of God.