Abstract
‘Where’s the theology?’ asks the research supervisor when his student presents the write-up of her fieldwork. This books attempts to help researchers answer this question when they have taken seriously the need to study actual congregations or communities practising Christian faith. The edited volume opens a new series, ‘Studies in Ecclesiology and Ethnography,’ and four of the series editors contribute a chapter each to the first section to unpack the overall proposal. Eight further authors explore a mix of empirical studies and systematic theology. Some of the chapters in this second ‘conversation’ section lean more heavily towards the empirical (e.g. those by Elizabeth Phillips and Luke Bretherton) whilst Alister McGrath and John Webster offer discussions more embedded in the discourse of systematic theology. If we were mistakenly to call the latter, but not the former chapters ‘theology’ as distinct from ‘empirical studies’ we would stumble at the conceptual hurdle which this project seeks to address.
Between them, the four series editors writing here (Paul Fiddes, Pete Ward, Christian Scharen and John Swinton) offer a critique and constructive proposal for how systematic theology might collaborate with ethnography. The task is to research how the church is influenced by other cultures but to do so in a way that is methodologically theological. Instead of adopting uncritically tools from ethnographic studies to examine, for example, a congregation, the proposal is to view the act of looking as a theological venture. Theologians undertaking qualitative research are encouraged to not only self-identify as theologians but to appreciate that their way of seeing is impregnated with Christian doctrine and practice. A profound level of reflexivity on the part of the researcher is, it is argued, vital in order that she may navigate her dual calling to God and to the academy. For the Christian, her empirical findings are not to be allowed to float free from the community’s tradition.
This collection offers a valuable statement of the agenda of an emerging field that has already produced insightful studies (some of which are represented here). It will be of particular interest to researchers who are sympathetic to the idea of divinely revealed truth and who have hitherto been uncertain how to treat data that emerges from the study of actual Christian practice. Those who do not share such an approach to scripture and theology will find much to challenge what can sometimes be their rather loosely articulated assumptions.
The spectre of Radical Orthodoxy will entice some and unsettle others. Although this collection leaves open the possibility of value in a non-Christian ethnographic consideration of Christian practice (principally through John Swinton’s metaphor of hospitality to replace correlation) this reader is left wondering whether a new genre of theological ecclesiology is appearing that could have the effect of offering at least partial immunity from criticism by those who do not share a particular (theological) way of seeing.