The Church in the Public

Thanks to the work of James Cone and Gustavo Gutiérrez, the notion of “structural sin” has entered the church’s vocabulary. It stands to reason that resisting such sins should be an integral part of the church’s witness. In The Church in the Public: A Politics of Engagement for a Cruel and Indifferent Age, Ilsup Ahn raises two questions:  Why has the church not been so publicly assertive about such resistance and seems so powerless against it? And how can the church take its public role more seriously in the face of the state’s failure to address injustices effectively?

Conveniently, the book’s six chapters are divided such that the first two chapters answer the first question and the last four respond to the second. Regarding the first question, Ahn traces the foundations of the church’s muted responses to injustices to a decontextualized interpretation of the Augustinian two-cities dualistic framework which has led to a territorial political theology. Under this theological framework, the church’s identity becomes rooted in the accumulation of power that is practically manifested in the occupation of spaces, an example of the latter being the church’s complicity in colonialism for much of modern history (22-23). In response, Ahn begins formulating his understanding of rhizomatic politics, a decentralized and grassroots way of political organizing, by drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, arguing that the church should shift from a territorial political orientation towards a more nomadic orientation. This, as Ahn describes, resists a “static order of striated space” that maintains systems of inequalities and injustices, thereby allowing the church to be an alternative community to existing systems (59).

The next two chapters seed the ground for the construction of a rhizomatic political theology by excavating its scriptural and theological foundations. In the first case, Ahn argues that hermeneutical strategies that de-emphasize the scriptures’ political nature (a consequence of the church-state framework) contribute to political territoriality. He calls for an anamnesis, a remembering of difficult histories, particularly regarding the church’s complicity with structural injustices, that re-members the political into the biblical text. Ahn then reclaims the politicality of the apophatic tradition in Christian theology to suggest a third-way political theology that is oriented towards a nomadic “church-social injustice” framework rather than a territorial “church-state” one (96-97). The final two chapters envision what a church that engages actively in rhizomatic politics looks like. Through several examples of various pastors and leaders, Ahn shows how church leaders and pastors can function as effective and influential nodes of what he calls rhizomatic organizing.

Ahn’s work issues a powerful and necessary call for the church to remember its inconvenient histories and its moral imperative to address structural sin. Additionally, the rhizomatic metaphor illustrates the organic ways in which churches and justice organizations often organize in order to resist various forms of injustice. Nevertheless, there are two points that require additional discussion. First, how does anamnesis lead to reclaiming scripture’s political nature? Johann Baptist Metz is a missing voice that could answer this question. In his book The Emergent Church (Crossroads, 1981), Metz laments how a market-driven secularity has essentially transformed Christianity into a “bourgeois religion” that ignores or resists what is challenging, particularly voices of suffering (4). That is why, for him, the gospel is dangerous memory; it endangers habits of thought and action that Christians have not reckoned with. This insight would’ve added depth to Ahn’s argument, since the church’s complicity with structural sin needs endangerment, which should motivate churches to rethink its political orientation.

Another important point of critique of Ahn’s wider argument centers on a seemingly obvious question: What is the church? Ahn’s proposal for the church to adopt a “third way” of existing beyond the binary of theocracy and secularism—that is, for the church to be a public church—assumes that what it means to be church is known and universally recognized. This is not always the case. Ahn brings up President Donald Trump’s administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border and asks why the church’s response was muted (95-96). The reality was that the response was not muted, however. Leaders from churches of all traditions, including Evangelical churches, denounced the policy. But there were also Christians who defended the policy. Some infamously pointed to the Bible, specifically to Romans 13, as biblical justification for the policy. Hence, the response isn’t so much that it is muted, but that it is contradictory. This raises a difficult question: Are Christians who encourage or participate in injustice a part of the church?

One reason why Ahn may not wish to define the church is that his book is about what being a faithful church amounts to, not what the church is per se. Interestingly, Augustine of Hippo might agree with such an approach. For Augustine, Christians are not called to sift the wheat and the tares in the church, but are called simply to be faithful, continuing in pilgrimage together until the last days, when the church will become the civitas Dei perfected. What this means for the church now, however, is that it continues to struggle with discerning what is faithful. Yet, as Ahn notes, there are times when the churches’ discernments seem to go awry. Too often to the public, churches are part of the problem of, if not major contributors to, social divisions and polarizations, leading many to identify as being spiritual rather than being part of institutionalized religion.

For these reasons, the church’s public role and witness is a topic of great interest among seminarians, pastors, and denominational authorities. Hence, Ahn’s book can certainly be useful in courses on political theology, community organizing, ecclesiology, and public theology. The book’s many examples, some of which come from Ahn’s interviews with various pastors and leaders of organizations, will be of great interest to students and pastors. The Church in the Public aptly reminds readers that to be the church in public is not to monopolize power in a retrieval of Christendom, or to engage in a total withdrawal from society, but to be peregrini (foreigners) and constructively effect organic and grassroots change in society through the lens of rhizomatic politics. 

Henry S. Kuo is associate professor of theology and ethics and director of the George Center for Honors Studies at Greensboro College (North Carolina).

Henry Kuo

Date Of Review:

July 29, 2023