Which Commons, Whose Colors, What Goods? A (Perpetually) Foreign Witness in the Public Theological Wilderness

Photo by Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash

This article was adapted from a presentation given at the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2018.

In her book Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata tells the story of Keiko Furukura who is, as we might say, an odd duck. She doesn’t so much fight society as much as she just doesn’t get it. In trying to make her way in this world, she realizes that everyone is really playing a role, and there are rules. They’re not rules made by the people, but rules for social participation that the people fit into. Those who are successful are the ones who perform the best for those rules. There’s no breaking out, because society—using the people who are playing by the rules—pushes for conformity. After trying to live as she should, finding solace in the steady patterns of convenience store service, she realizes, “The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.” Later on, she adds, “Our society doesn’t allow any foreign objects. I’ve always suffered because of that.”

This isn’t unique to Japan, of course. Throughout the world, people struggle for integrity, to be their true self when the context pushes against it. They struggle when they are new to a social situation or even within a familiar social system. Or rather systems, because society isn’t a simple unity. A particular person can never be wholly integrated as self in society because society functions according to operationally closed systems, each with what sociologist Niklas Luhman calls “autopoietic patterns,” concerned with their own self-creation not with any participants. 

The legal system, the education system, the religious system, the political system, the economic system, all with their own goals. These goals establish their continuing. Our true self is foreign to each system, but we make do. Most by becoming an amalgamation of anonymized participation, communicating the communication of the different systems, which seek to perpetuate themselves independently, not move toward some moral, aesthetic, or social purpose. 

Thus, a person’s expression as an individual is often incoherent. That’s life, we say! Or, that’s business! Or, that’s just the way it is! Even when we resist, we can become tools of the systems. The systems incorporate protest within their functioning. Political protest feeds the political system. Religious protest secures reactionary religious powers in other ways. Academia furthers academic debate. Likewise, the systems are not concerned with integration with each other, except as a matter of necessity in sharing an environment and so are not concerned about a particular person’s identity or integration as a whole person. Systems are simply not concerned with people. They are an emergent social expression. 

So, when we talk about the “public” we’re generally emphasizing one particular system or setting or context, where a narrow set of rules gives some voice, and others are silenced as being foreigners or treated as third class citizens who act as servants to the privileged. Limited to a narrow sphere, or to narrow participation, there is rhetoric without transformation. We should indeed look for, and fight for, transformation, as the Spirit leads. The Spirit does not call us into isolation. The Spirit is the Spirit of life and arrives with power to change. But how is it that the Spirit leads? What is the way the Spirit works?

Not all paths seeking justice reflect the work of the Spirit. We can seek change in one realm while indulging dysfunction and oppressing in other ways. I think here about the dependency on adjuncts in our higher education systems. This leads to the occasional incoherence of underpaid and overworked women and men, often in great debt and without other skills, utilized in unfair ways to help highly paid, highly privileged faculty take time off for writing about societal dysfunction. This isn’t an argument for or against academic goals, rather just highlighting the incoherence involved in our contemporary systems. 

Politics especially seems to offer an opportunity for such incoherence, demonizing a new Other in a supposed defense of an outsider or maximizing one’s own wealth through rhetoric about helping the poor. “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Jesus asks in Mark 8:36. Galatians 5 offers a contrast, a way of life that is peace, joy, love, etc.; the pattern of the Kingdom.

This is where the particularity of the call for community is vital. Jesus repeatedly emphasizes that we are to love our neighbors as the beginning of any social engagement. In his musings on 1 John 4:20, Kierkegaard argues that the Christian duty is to “find in the world of actuality the people we can love in particular and in loving them to love the people we see” (Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 159).

Maybe this includes the public conversations within our immediate locations too. 

Our personal liberation is expressed in the contexts of our most intimate interactions or it is not liberation at all, but yet another pose for the sake of another system. This is how even good messages are easily co-opted by the world-systems. Jesus refused to be co-opted—and we should not grieve the Holy Spirit in presenting a co-opted pseudo-Jesus to the world. Our particular experience of community should be an active expression of our words, actions, and thoughts. We are to love those around us, even our specific enemies, because they are within our zone of influence, our field of force which can be oriented by ego or by the Spirit. The way of the Spirit orients this power in love and hope.

This love is a love for life, a love for the other and for the whole cosmos. It is a hospitable love, one that “goes out to meet the stranger and does not depend on reciprocity” (Jürgen Moltmann, The Living God and the Fullness of Life, 138). Reciprocity depends on similarity, but community involves distinct differences of class and personality and context. In a Spirit-led community, the unlike participate together, an inclusive openness to each other rather than an expectation of like-for-like return in an investment. This love is ordered toward the advantage of the other rather than the self, a giving without expectation of return. Yet in a community that reflects the community of the Divine, we are never depleted or abandoned. 

In such love, we share the loving presence of God, what Michael Welker calls a “domain of resonance” (Michael Welker, God the Spirit, 296-297). We become the living spaces of love for and with each other. The transforming presence of God draws us together and together draws us into the divine life of God. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann writes, “Human beings are in harmony with God’s love for those God has created when they love life, the life of their neighbor, the life they share, and the life of the earth. They sanctify personal, social, and political life when they give themselves up to the flow of God’s love and interpenetrate life with this love” (The Living God, 149). This active and engaged love displays itself in a myriad of ways that constitute lived life. Michael Welker puts it this way:

The person upon whom the Spirit comes acts directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously for the benefit of other persons. The persons immediately affected by the Spirit’s action are for their part so ‘touched,’ or their services are so powerfully enlisted, that they likewise orient themselves to acting for the benefit of others. The Spirit of God effects a domain of liberation and of freedom (2 Cor. 3:17), a domain not determined by self-relation exercising control, or even merely by intellectual self-relation. People are liberated for action that liberates other people. (God the Spirit, 296)

Such engagement avoids lofty declarations that exist solely in a theoretical or religious sphere. As Jean Marc Ela reminds us, “A magical liberation from one's misery by the incantations of a theory is an escape tactic” (Jean-Marc Ela, African Cry, 128).

The work of the Spirit is not about escape; the goal is transformation. That requires real and engaged love that is interested in each other, that participates together, striving together for the expression of shared hope, a “love for life that makes us happy and at the same time lets us suffer with others,” as Moltmann writes (The Living God, 151).

Indeed, this love expresses desires for each other, but not in a corrupted way that uses others for the sake of one’s own benefit. When our deepest desire is transformed by the love of God, our participation with others is transformed. Our public participation is transformed too: no longer playing by the rules set by the systems we can speak according to the patterns of the Kingdom, an inviting invitation towards life. Imagine if that is what Evangelicalism became known for? That is the Good News after all!

It is because of this calling that Moltmann ends his book The Living God and the Fullness of Life with a discussion about prayer. Through prayer, we find the renewal of our desires and a renewed passion for that which God is passionate about. Such prayer is the source of our being with God in the contexts of the world, shaping our awareness and transforming our inner sense of self. It is not a quick process. Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea notes:

The process of human birth takes a long time and is not a single act. It happens moment by moment. There were stages that gave my life a decisive orientation. But these turning points were the hours, the moments of the day when, one-on-one with the Lord, I became aware of his will for me. The most important moments in life are the hours of prayer and adoration. They give birth to a human being, fashion our true identity; they root our existence in mystery. My daily encounters with the Lord, in supplication and prayer, are the basis for my life. (Cardinal Robert Sarah and Nicolas Diat, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith, 70)

This leads to a discerning, dynamic balance between via activa and via contemplativa as we journey through life with others, communicating the communication of God’s Word. 

In Spirit-led persistence, what Alan Kreider calls “the patient ferment,” we begin to seek God and desire God’s life in the intricacies of every aspect of our experiences. We live according to the patterns of God’s integrative Kingdom. We speak into our immediate contexts, and in the Spirit’s work this resonates into a widening sphere of influence that transforms the wider discussions as well as transforming our local communities. 

Because the Spirit is always particular—and the experience of the Kingdom is a fractal experience of the small extending within and spreading out among the whole—the emphasis can never be focused on the general goals while negating any person. That is a negating of the Spirit’s particularity. No one is foreign to the Spirit and thus no one is foreign to the Spirit’s work. Everyone has a voice and a name. The work of the Spirit takes public shape from below and spreads into the wider society. It is in the relationship of person to person that the most transformative experience of the Spirit takes place, because it is in each person that the Spirit chooses to work.

Patrick Oden is the Associate Dean of the School of Ministry and Christian Thought at Oklahoma Wesleyan University.