Abstract
Pete Ward is one the leading figures in the emerging field of ecclesiology and ethnography. His work and thinking have been seminal to the field, and his contribution thus far has been both vital and interesting. In this book Ward continues to develop his thinking around the ways in which the church as an empirical reality interacts with the Divine and generates new insights into theology and ecclesiology. His intention is not to prioritize practice, but to reflect carefully on the suggestion that theologians should apply the same kind of rigor and attention to the life of the church that they apply to Scripture and tradition. If God is real, God is active. If God is active, the church is a location for divine action and not simply a place that supports distanced theological reflection. The book falls into two sections. The first is the theological foundation that Ward wants us to consider. The second is a case-study approach that shows how the theory works itself out in practice. Here I concentrate on the theological foundations.
Ward calls us to engage in an empirically based theological exploration of the church as it is lived. By “church,” he does not necessarily mean the standard solid structures through which people have traditionally expressed their worship and developed community. “Solid church” has a place, but in a changing cultural context the church needs to become more like liquid than iron, although like iron, it can be both. Fluidity is a characteristic of society and culture, but it is also a characteristic of the Divine. Liquid church mirrors the liquidity of the Divine.
Ward’s thinking is irrevocably Christ-centred. Jesus is with us, and the church roots its being in the real presence of Christ. This presence is real but inevitably bounded in terms of human reception. It is influenced, shaped, formed, and constrained by its existence within particular forms of culture. Divine presence can be found within the church, but it is inevitably mediated presence. The love of God continues to reveal itself through the church in response to God’s self-emptying love that we encounter poignantly in the humiliation of the cross. The partial nature of the churches’ understanding of divine presence is eased by the kenotic presence of Jesus, who in and of himself is the Gospel and the message that the church proclaims. There is thus an odd tension wherein Jesus (the Gospel) is present with us but is revealed and constrained by the churches’ cultural situatedness. This tension—or paradox, as Ward refers to it—causes the church inevitably to be fluid rather than solid; lived rather than merely propositional; constantly moving rather than static.
Christ comes to our attention in the liquidity of the church and the liquidity of culture. In order to perceive and understand the presence of Christ, we need to find ways of looking seriously at church and culture. In looking seriously at these dimensions of human experience, we look seriously at Jesus.
In this book Pete Ward offers us a theological approach that has deep promise for enabling the church to formulate a faithful response to an ever-changing cultural context that is filled with the Divine but deeply shaped by the mundane.