Abstract
The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope
Shannon Craigo-Snell
New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 208 pp. $74.00
In a book entitled The Empty Church, one might expect to find accounts of demographic decline or calls for liturgical innovation to fill empty pews. In Shannon Craigo-Snell’s book one is offered instead an illuminating and provoking ecclesiology in dialogue with theater and performance studies. Craigo-Snell starts with the question, “Why church?” Why, in particular, “ought Christians go to church, what happens there, and why is church vital to Christian identity” (3)? Acknowledging both that there are many doctrinal answers to these questions and that doctrinal answers rarely motivate one out of bed on Sunday morning, Craigo-Snell explores what happens at church by comparing it to what happens at the theater.
At first blush this might seem like a well-sung song. Comparisons between Christian liturgy and theater go back to the earliest days of the church. Theologians from Augustine and Chrysostom to Hooker and Edwards have worried about the theater as a competitor for Christian attention. Contemporary ecclesiology and ethics have turned, more optimistically, to theater and performance as metaphors for the Christian life. Craigo-Snell offers an excellent overview of this literature as she engages and expands the conversation. She also offers something refreshingly new: the suggestion that church and theater might be related by more than just metaphor. “Performance,” Craigo-Snell suggests, is not just a metaphor for the Christian life and “theater” a metaphor for church. Rather, she explores “church” and “theater” as concrete, if diverse, social institutions that do work in the world. She wants to know how each institution does its work and what they share in actual practice.
I was privileged to explore an early incarnation of the ideas in this book with Craigo-Snell in a graduate course when I was in my final years of doctoral course work, and she was on the faculty at Yale University. I was beginning to formulate my own ideas on performance and embodied epistemology in a more historical register and was submerging myself in critical performance and theater studies. Craigo-Snell was the first theologian I encountered who read the same texts. Reading this book several years later, I am struck even more strongly at how unique her contribution to the field is because of that engagement.
As Craigo-Snell makes clear in framing the project, theater studies folks already think of theater akin to church, and theologians think of church akin to theater. There are few, however, who are conversant in both literatures, and Craigo-Snell advances the theological conversation considerably due to the depth of her interdisciplinary engagement. But the real uniqueness to her approach emerges when she asks what it would mean to think of church not as a theater as much as a theater troupe. That is, Christians are not the audience in the theater, but the company of players.
As she explores this idea in terms of the physical gestures, emotional memories, social practices, social memories, and communal witness that come together to make theater a social institution with power to do something in the world, the suggestion that church should do the same grows increasingly strange and wonderful. How differently would we think about what church was and why it mattered if we assumed it was meant to train us the same way a theater troupe communally prepares to render truth on the stage?
Many of Craigo-Snell’s answers to this question strike a Reformed tone and make the most sense in that framework. There are explicitly anti-hierarchical assumptions built into this ecclesiology and Craigo-Snell’s commitments to a socially active, de-colonialist, feminist faith are central to her theological witness and to the conversation partners she engages. That said, the range of her interlocutors is expansive, and her conclusions are ecumenical (Craigo-Snell’s interpretation of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, for example, should be read by all Jesuits preparing to lead retreats). Those invested in the conversation between performance, theater studies, and theology will find an original contribution in this volume. The implications for ecclesiology, however, should be read attentively and appreciatively by anyone invested in answering the question, “Why church?”
Kathryn Reklis
Fordham University