Public Theology

Public theology participates in a long Christian tradition of theological reflection on the relationships between the church and the world. It emerged in the 20th-century U.S. context and addresses the relationships between Christianity and the political order, which is identified not with the state but with the polis, or a democratic assembly of citizens who collectively deliberate and decide their shared common life through civic debate. Public theology challenges a conventional understanding of religion and politics as two completely separate spheres of life and instead interprets them as rightly autonomous but mutually critical and informing spheres of life. Following the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World from the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), major pastoral letters by American Catholic bishops integrate the Church's pastoral self-understanding with its political responsibilities to be a public church, to actively engage with the political order, and to critically advocate human dignity and rights along racial, gender, socioeconomic, cultural, political, and international lines. Critics charge Catholic public theology with major inconsistencies between its public advocacy and pastoral practice, demonstrated most recently by U.S. scandals of priests' sexual abuse and the institutional church's continued cover-ups of such abuse.

Public theology refers to one major and multivalent subdiscipline of Christian theological reflection regarding the role of religion in response to the increasing religious diversity of American public life. It consists of many theological projects that relate to the church's engagement with society, such as public philosophy, civil religion, political theology, and populist theologies (progressive and evangelical). Historian W. Clark Gilpin helps clarify a central task among public theologies, namely to reimagine and reshape public life, that is, to conjoin different groups that constitute the political order into an overarching or more comprehensive community. Thus, public theology seeks to show the significance of religion to making and remaking a meaningful public life in the U.S. sociopolitical order. Different approaches to public theology undertake this task through different practices of sociopolitical engagement, which include but are not limited to rhetorical, symbolic, and prophetic practices.

A first approach utilizes rhetorical practices of democratic discourse to create and cultivate a discursive public and political order. An examination of the writings of some leading figures in U.S. public theology such as David Tracy, Francis Fiorenza, Ronald Thiemann, and Jeffrey Stout shows that rational democratic discourse lays the foundations for creating a discursive public realm and for fostering a broader discursive public through civic debate and consensus. For Tracy, participation in public life depends on the use of widely shared norms and procedures of rational argument, or the giving and exchanging of reasonable arguments in a deliberative democracy. Religious [Page 1181]claims are expressed in a widely accessible way by adhering to shared rhetorical standards of rational civic discourse. The goal of such religious expression is to articulate and apply theological perspectives in lively civic debates over contemporary issues and public policies and to cultivate an emerging consensus about those issues and policies.

A rhetorical approach to public theology and its associated practices of debate stake out a legitimate place for religion in public life and enable religious insights to shape both public debates as well as understandings of public life. For Thiemann and Fiorenza, Christians are prepared to engage in public discourse, not because they are socialized with the rhetorical principles and procedures used in a deliberative model of democracy but because religious traditions express and embody similar dialogical virtues required for such public life. Participating in a historically contextualized and developing religious tradition acts like a stepping-stone to becoming a good citizen. Actively deliberating among alternative visions of religious life is preparation for actively deliberating among alternative visions of public life. Christianity already constitutes a community of inquiry and debate about the good life, which inculcates certain conversational skills and virtues required for participating in and reshaping public life. Both religious and political traditions, as Stout observes, instill dialogical virtues and practices, thereby contributing to the formation of persons for a discursive public life.

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