Review and Shared Vision
Paul S. Chung
In the following short essay, I offer a review of Professor Torsten Meireis’s public theology, focusing on his concept of “public” in public theology. I intend to introduce German public theology to US and East Asian public theological discourses to nurture a shared vision without degrading any distinct position within its unique context.
Torsten Meireis, “The ‘Public’ in Public Theology,” Theological Review 43, 2022, pp. 127 - 141
Torsten Meireis, a renowned public theologian at Humboldt University of Berlin, attempts to define the “public” from a German perspective while provincializing Europe. To broaden the German perspective of the “public,” Meireis includes those in geographical transition, such as refugees. Meireis provides an important example of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, where problems between the Global North and Global South often clash.
For example, many migrants from the Global South are ineligible for legal admission and status. This means that many migrants become part of the “public” without any acknowledged status. Subsequently, from 2019 to 2021, the refugee issue featured prominently in the German public discourse. During this refugee crisis, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, a Protestant Bishop and former chairperson of the EKD council, publicly declared “distress knows no nationality.”
In response, a Protestant group, in collaboration with NGOs, created the hashtag “#wesendaship,” which sparked an intense public debate across Germany. Meireis engages with these issues to demonstrate that the concept of “public” is interwoven between those who inhabit both the inside and outside of civil society. In so doing, Meireis demonstrates that the public debate in Germany does not escape from the global injustices that divided the rich and the poor.
An attempt to define the “public” from a German perspective is connected to the dialectics of Enlightenment. Thus, Meireis critically engages with the Enlightenment legacy without evading the negative aspects of European modernity, including colonialism, slavery, racism, and the civilizing mission. This mirrors his notable German predecessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his unfinished Ethics, Bonhoeffer explores the meaning of Enlightenment and modernity, without sidestepping its dark side.
Public Theology: Communicative Freedom and Discourse Clarification
Meireis draws from Immanuel Kant's work, which defines the concept of the public as a regulative principle. However, Meireis does not ignore distinctions between a normative and a factual dimension, between plurality and singularity, and between equality and inequality.
In addition, Meireis engages with critical voices from the postcolonial camp, such as Chakravorty Spivak, Achille Mbembe, and Tinyiko Maluleke. This postcolonial critique is significant because it undermines a common theological understanding of the “public” or “modernity” defined within the context of European modernity and colonialism.
Given this constellation, Meireis requires conceptual clarity when addressing the normative dimension of public discourse. Discourse clarification refers to a method of addressing questions of access and power while furthering an inter- and transdisciplinary inquiry; it goes beyond the confines of a merely dogmatic or exegetical theological understanding.
Aiding in discourse clarification, Wolfgang Huber deserves recognition at this juncture. Huber illuminates that public theology is bilingual in nature, using its own theological language to communicate in the public sphere. Civil society has undergone rationalization and secularization. Yet, it confronts a religious resurgence and pluralism within European culture. Thus, the Secularization thesis has transitioned from religious pluralism into an era of interfaith dialogue and cooperation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Huber
Huber also argues that public theology incorporates theological reflection on public significance and requires interdisciplinary and “glocal” interaction as it combines a particular, local setting with a global landscape. Thus, Huber’s seminal contribution to public theology is founded on communicative freedom and responsibility for the solidarity world.
Huber’s core characterization of public theology impacts Meireis’s subsequent development in the discussion of the Enlightenment, modernity, and postcolonial condition in a global setting. Modernity has left an incomplete legacy regarding freedom, responsible critique, and emancipation for the sake of solidarity. In contrast, public theology involves self-critique or a metanoia of the historical wrongdoing in colonialism.
Thus, the German public discourse is not generalized, as is much of the US public discourse. Instead, German public discourse refers to a regime of problems occurring in a wider constellation. As a result, it continues the legacy of political theology and advances a new paradigm of public theology in local, contextual, postcolonial, and global network and media space. A techno-paradigm becomes indispensable to identify the significance of the public sphere in a digitalized world.
Therefore, this epistemology inherent within public theology characterizes public theology in terms of a social scientific and multivariate framework, with a focus on the power-driven aspect of the public and its discourse.
Democracy and Differences Incorporation
According to Meireis, “the public” is a term that incorporates differences. There are always many publics and multiple realities with diverse participants, each with their own set of norms, cultures, and languages. We live in a world of various language games, which necessitate a detailed and thick description of “the public” as it relates to society, culture, and religion.
Regardless, there is a general structure of existence and cultural life—what we call life-world; it serves as the reservoir of meaning, morals, and truth in the face of postmodern deconstructionism or nihilism.
Meireis’s innovative position combines participatory democracy with media space, considering the emergence of the public sphere as critical and crucial. Participants create “the public” by gathering electronically or in co-presence and communicating. This results in the emergence of life-worlds in a participatory democracy in many ways and with varying scopes and horizons. In the constitution of the different publics, however, power asymmetry is always a concern in the emergence of “subaltern counterpublics.”
At this point, Meireis’s definition of “the public” offers a useful social critical epistemology. Through his social critical epistemology, communicative freedom confronts power imbalance, in conjunction with the subaltern counterpublics and sociocultural stratification. This exemplifies the resisting publics among the subaltern. Public theology contributes uniquely to discourse analysis, formation, and practice when examining communicative freedom, power relations, and sociocultural stratification associated with subaltern’s counterpublics.
To put it another way, the social construction of reality includes aspects such as access to power, material interests, education, employment opportunity, and privilege. These result in a reality of sociocultural stratification. The public sphere is stratified into a hierarchy according to power, wealth, education, and class/status.
Meireis argues that “publics are always spaces of conflict in which power is asymmetrically distributed when arguing about what may be seen as the common good.”
In conflict spaces, power allocation is inherently connected with how to establish and govern the common good. The term “the public” can be best understood as a space for democratic discourse and common societal deliberation amidst multiple publics and various constituencies.
The public has dialectical implications since it is both a fragmented space of articulation and a space of conflict from unequal power allocation. There are numerous publics, leading publics, and counterpublics. Many communicators wield more power than others because discourse revolves around the interplay between knowledge and power.
The normative idea of the public is characteristic of public theology, which seeks to tackle fragmentation, power asymmetry, and universal claims among specific interest groups.
Public theology advocates for a normative standard for the common good, benefiting those who are excluded or whose voices are marginalized in publicly charged conversations. Thus, it offers promise to analyze the postcolonial condition and its argument within World Christianity.
Public Theology: Discourse Paradigm and Intercontextuality
Unlike liberation theology, public theology does not exercise a wholesale critique of modernity, but rather safeguards the significance of civil society and democratic solidarity founded upon common good governance. It navigates between the Scylla of political populism and the Charybdis of the libertarian principle, which promotes laissez-faire capitalism and social Darwinism. The latter resurfaces in the garb of neoliberal hegemony and a genetically determined view of human life, culture, and religion tainted with militant atheism, racism, and misogyny.
To choose an abundant life, I think it is necessary to reinvigorate Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment as a modern critical attitude. This draws on his critique of colonialism, elaborating on a cosmopolitan principle and the ethics of hospitality. Kant extends his politics of recognition by incorporating Rousseau’s participatory democracy into his philosophy of Enlightenment and republican democracy.
Meireis traces the concept of “the public” back to ancient times around the world. For instance, ancient Israel, like many other societies, held assemblies and judicial court sessions at the gate or village square. In ancient China, the official courthouse acted as such a location. Similarly, the agora was a central feature of Greek cities, where political debates and public decisions were held. In ancient Rome, the forum functioned as a location for public gatherings and law courts during the republic democracy.
These historical instances illustrate that the public sphere and democratic freedom of communication transcends the politically charged dichotomy of binary opposition, which simplifies the social, political, and cultural complexities of bourgeois civil society. The civil society initiative and its democratic formation are innovative in their politics of recognition and committed to the pursuit of the common good in advocating for the lives of the subaltern.
In the Janus-faced reality of modernity, Meireis defines public theology as a discourse paradigm in which the global spread of literacy is combined with technological achievements such as mass media and the internet through the digital space. The public space has an expansion of many people participating on a global scale and an intensification of discourse, which is based on the internet communication of many-to-many and its creation of multiple publics.
The dark side of this internet public space cannot be avoided since it is mediated by corporate or state-based platforms that prioritize their interests and exercise control over digital divisions by justifying old and new power relations and inequalities.
In contrast, public theology arose as a paradigm of discourse across a variety of circumstances. In North America, Robert Bellah initiated civil religion, following in the footsteps of Rousseau and Emile Durkheim to mobilize moral impulses against the Vietnam War and garner support for the civil rights movement.
In Bellah’s sociology of civil religion, it is important to express the discourse as narrative, as he explains in his masterpiece, Religion in Human Evolution. Discourse is power-driven, whereas narrative is about enhancing one’s life and creativity. Thus, narrative must play a vital role in establishing public theology in the US.
The struggle for liberation from apartheid in South Africa fueled the rise of public theology. However, its particular character differs from the binaries of liberation theology because it advocates for restorative justice (forgiveness and reconciliation) and recognition politics. It also addresses the persistence of economic and racial injustice while constructing the new democracy and the elected government of the African National Congress (ANC).
In Germany, the paradigm is connected to the critical political theology that originated in the 1960s and attempted to emphasize liberating aspects of Christianity. Following in the footsteps of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, minjung liberation theology in South Korea was involved in the democratic process to move against the military dictatorship. Currently, public theology in South Korea focuses on discourse paradigm while assessing the significance of civil society, democracy, biopolitics, and the postcolonial condition within late capitalism.
Given the paradigm of discourse within global expansion and intensification, public theology is deeply contextual. Yet, it is also intercontextual in nature as it is affected by the freedom of communication in the media space. It then progresses to universality in pursuit of a common goal, such as human rights, restorative justice, and environmental rights.
On the other hand, as the public expands and intensifies, religious pluralism and worldview diversity rise. Therefore, the comparative study of public religions remains imperative since it provides conceptual clarity and a social-scientific approach for exploring religious constructions of sociocultural realities.
Challenges and Confession Attitude
Meireis summarizes three challenges within public theology. First, there is the issue of the church’s public participation because all humans—regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, creed, or race—receive the love of God in Jesus Christ, who created and redeems us. They are endowed with an inalienable human dignity. Therefore, the church needs to be the church for others rather than only for its members (Bonhoeffer).
Second, a self-critical perspective within the public alludes to the power of sin, as evident in struggles for power within the public. This self-critical perspective became guilty of crimes such as colonialism, racism, slavery, discrimination, using religion to justify sexism, and even the exploitation of the earth.
Third, ecclesial significance for public theology is based on Barth’s idea of “church in excess,” which prioritizes the common good in politics rather than striving toward hegemony in any given public. Christians do not stay away from the public but rather participate in discipleship by witnessing the liberating message of the word of God.
Without a prophetic witness, the church is defective, as it has departed from the lordship of Jesus Christ. As a result, it obstructs the ministry of reconciliation in Christ. However, a prophetic witness is evident in actions such as the Confessing Church’s Barmen Declaration (1934), which rejected the totalitarian state and its dictatorship.
Churches may enter the public debate as members of civil society. However, they ought to adopt a humble attitude in giving witness and accepting criticism without self-righteousness or condemning opposing viewpoints. Adopting humility handles issues of diversity through “dialogue and rapprochement.’” This contributes to the public through critical involvement and manages conflict in a peaceful and participatory manner.
The challenges would benefit from clarifying if the challenges are with public theology as a discipline, within public discourse between questions from the broader society for public theology, or within the church’s engagement with public theology.
Concluding Reflection: Shared Vision
Prof. Torsten Meireis acts in a spirit of ecumenical consensus, embodying the prophetic legacy of the Confessing Church. He is highly qualified in employing social-scientific studies of religion and culture, as well as articulating the importance of public theology both within and outside of global concerns.
His definition of “the public” in the public theology accentuates the paradigm of discourse while continuing critical political theology and furthering the distinctive regime of public theology by recognizing the importance of the techno-paradigm in an age of mass media, digital space expansion, and intensification.
In my view, Barth’s posthumous ethics of reconciliation in The Christian Life (Church Dogmatics IV, pt.4, §78 The Struggle for Human Righteousness) offers a profound insight into public spheres that are stratified by social and cultural concerns and yet are threatened by lordless powers. They manifest in various forms of political absolutism or empire, as exemplified by Leviathan, Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism, as well as economics (Mammon), ideologies, technology, art, and chthonic destructive forces, among others. They are penultimate enemies and active as adversaries of humanity and God.
The analysis of the impersonal forces positions Barth at the foundation of public theology within a social scientific or multivariate framework, strengthening it to engage with public discourse, power relations, and material interests, among others.
Moreover, Barth’s comparative study of the Reformation teaching on justification by grace with Amida Buddhism facilitates the contextualization of Luther’s theology of grace within interfaith dialogue with Shinran Buddhism in Japan. The comparative study of religion and its public role is an essential component of public theology, which investigates the religious construction of social and cultural realities (Chung, Constructing Reality of Comparative Theology. UK, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2022).
Indeed, Meireis’s contribution is seen in his elucidation of the spectrum of “the publics,” which breaks through a typical tendency of public theology that lacks a social-scientific or multivariate framework. He is at the forefront of incorporating the concept of “the public” through the discourse paradigm into the definition of the unique regime of public theology.