Public Theology, Civil Society, and Education
https://www.khan.co.kr/culture/culture-general/article/202210041429001
Prof. Paul S. Chung
Abstract
This essay explores the public role of religion in society and culture for civil society and public pedagogy. Faced with a religious turn in the social sciences, I map the varieties of public theology, integrating the pedagogical components with the social-ethical dimension. When it comes to civil society and democracy, public theology employs a theory of the religious construction of the social cultural reality by revising a method of correlation, religious a priori, and analogical enquiry through the phenomenological strategy with attention to a genealogical theory of discourse and power. I refine a regime of solidarity justice and effective history in the tradition of Kant and Rawls, elaborating on a notion of the hospitality and cosmopolitan principle for public pedagogy.
Within this social scientific inquiry, I aim to refine postcolonial public theology by highlighting a regime of the effective history of the subaltern-minjung (Walter Benjamin) and alternative modernities in the era of late capitalism. This perspective critically renews a legacy of minjung theology in terms of immanent critique, biopolitics, intertextual strategy of biblical com-reading, and an emancipatory project that upholds a postcolonial orientation in opposition to colonial modernity.
Introduction
In the sociological context, Robert Bellah in the United States, Hans Joas in Germany, and Shumuel Eisenstadt in Israel offer a comparative study of religions during the axial period. They investigate how religion contributes to ethical behavior and a critical attitude toward the existing society. They also explore a project of multiple modernities or alternative modernities, which cut through the Eurocentric notion of modernity.
Modernity is unavoidable, but it is no longer Western-centric because modernity today is global and multifaceted, both transnational and transcultural in character. One way to think within alternative modernities is to refrain from making an extreme assumption about the end of modernity. This alternative perspective rewrites the distinction and the line between socioeconomic modernization and cultural modernity (Alternative Modernities, ed. Gaonkar, 1).
In this essay, I will first analyze the relationship between religion, society, and economy according to Max Weber and Karl Marx, because their discussion of modernity and capitalism provide significant challenges and responsibilities both to Christianity and public theology. Second, I will look at the legacy of Ernst Troeltsch as a classic example of a public theologian avant la letter. His legacy continues in Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich’s work. I seek to revise his historical-critical method through the lens of the lifeworld and narrative to overcome the limitations of historical relativism. On behalf of public theology within the lifeworld, narrative, and power, I integrate a theory of correlation and religious a priori through a social construction of reality and politics of meaning.
Third, it is crucial to review various types of public theology in Germany within the tradition of the Confessing Church and the United States. Here, I will survey Max Stackhouse, Ronald Thiemann, David Tracy, and Ted Peters. Most notably, Ted Peters’s public theology and work in natural science are significant for seminary education. Following this, I consider Torsten Meireis’s discourse public theology. In so doing, I explicate how the paradigm of discourse is intertwined with a power mechanism, asymmetry, material interests, and the technological mode of information.
Fourth, I will deal with the justice paradigm in evaluating Rawls’s theory of justice in connection with Kant’s concept of hospitality and political ethics. This combination will illuminate how to improve democratic education through his cosmopolitan principle and its postcolonial implications.
Finally, I will engage with Korean minjung theology and a pedagogy of the oppressed. Thereby, I make a paradigm shift toward a postcolonial constellation and alternative modernity away from a colonial modernity and colonial biopolitics in religious espousal.
Religion and Society: Max Weber and Karl Marx
Max Weber’s well-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, examined the social function and driving power of religious concepts and material concerns through the lens of ideal types. Weber focused on the elective affinity that arises between religious ideals and material interests. He proposed that charismatic figures or faith communities that embody religious ideals choose their religious beliefs to fit their overall material life situation, most often with an emphasis on economic ethics.
Here, social status and position are formed, as the rational organization and nature of society. Thus, the relationship between religious discourse and economic attitudes is neither purely idealistic nor reducible to materialist terms.
However, Weber failed to elaborate on the religious construction of reality in a broader spectrum of material concerns. Likewise, he sidestepped religious contributions to multiple forms of modernity and capitalist development in non-western societies.
Karl Marx, on the other hand, identified the Christian character of capital accumulation in his theory of primitive accumulation and drew on the Dutch Calvinist abstinence, as practiced among the Dutch Calvinists. The modernized capitalist saw accumulation as a renunciation of pleasure (Capital 1: 740-1).
If there is a difference between these two great thinkers, Weber saw Puritan inner-worldly asceticism and work ethic as an ideal type of capitalism in European and American society. However, as a consequence, Western modernity has been confined inside an iron cage.
In contrast, Marx saw capital accumulation within the context of the Christian colonial system which was marked by irrationality and exploitation in the world market.
Given the divergent perspectives, I am interested in a sociological articulation that identifies a center of public theology inside a social scientific framework. Thus, public theology considers Janus-faced realities of modernity, civil society, and democracy in the aftermath of colonialism. For public theology, religious discourse extends beyond the economic dimension.
The Legacy of Ernst Troeltsch and Constructive Public Theology
To illustrate the significance of public theology, I will begin with Ernst Troeltsch, a unique example of public theology, social ethics, and comparative religion. Notably, he integrated Weber’s sociological method into theology, refining a historical-critical approach. Troeltsch used Weber’s ideal types, specifically the church-sect-mysticism typology, in his two-volume work The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), and conducted a historical-sociological analysis that examined the mutual influences between religious ideas, social forces, and institutions.
Troeltsch’s theological legacy was promulgated in the United States through the work of the Niebuhr brothers (Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr) and Paul Tillich. Tillich integrated Troeltsch’s method of critiquing the universal history of religions into his phenomenology of the holy. As a result, Tillich contributed significantly to the public theology of religion through a theology of culture and inter-religious dialogue.
However, Tillich’s theological method was existential in nature, and his method of correlation tended to narrow Troeltsch’s historical sociology on the universal history of religion into the relationship between the answering Gospel and the inquiring existential human being (Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 8).
Richard Niebuhr shaped his theology by incorporating Troeltsch’s God-centered theology and historicism, as well as the sociology of Emile Durkheim’s sociology. This united perspective is still relevant to the discussion of radical monotheism and Christian moral philosophy (Niebuhr, The Responsible Self).
Troeltsch defined public theology as the critical understanding and interconnections of history and society. He sought to “think through and formulate the world of Christian thought and life in frank relation with the modern world” in a sociological-realistic-ethical outlook (The Social Teaching I: 1).
His task was to communicate and reinterpret the biblical and theological concepts to elucidate the relationship between Protestantism and social questions. For Troeltsch, social ethics was the apex of theology. Thus, he defined public theology as a perpetual wrestling and struggling with historical and social difficulties. In so doing, he reinterpreted religious ideas and practical behavior in constructive engagement with public realms.
Nonetheless, he lacked a historical and social understanding of the church’s relationship with the impoverished. His historical relativism often ignored the general structure of any religion and its social construction of reality.
I offer an improvement on the historical-critical approach by explicating the religious construction of reality using the method of correlation with various historical-social worlds. The correlation approach refers to the mutual interdependence of all historical processes and is applied to describe social interrelations and diverse public realities.
An elective affinity cannot be properly formulated through an ideal type unless it considers a historical-social constellation and the significance of immanent critique when it comes to the ideologically-tainted disgrace and impact of religion (the altar and the crown in espousal). I combine elective affinity with immanent critique and method of correlation.
This may appeal to individuals who view history as a series of similarities and differences, that is, through an analogical imagination. There is religion a priori, which entails religious rationality. Religion is a cultural spiritual longing for the mystery of God that cannot be reduced to a psychological or emotional dimension. Religion has its own narrative rationality or prophetic reasoning, and it has a transcendental dimension that leads to the mystery of God (“On the Question of the Religious A Priori,” 1909).
Thus, the comparative study of religion brings public theology into dialogue with other religions in a pluralist democratic society. Religious traditions, in the sense of the lifeworld, may serve as resources underlying modernity with many forms and voices in a continual manner, attempting to de-Westernize modernity as an ideal type. Religions, worldwide, are participating in the public sphere and political rivalry to address the current divides between systemic frameworks (politics, economy, mass media, and technology governance) and the lifeworld (culture, civil society, and ecological integrity).
This indicates that religion would construct multiple realities and play a significant role in shaping or renewing social stratification and ecological integrity. A sociological study of public religion concerns the deprivatization of religion and the repoliticization of private religious and moral spheres, including the renormalization of public economic and political domains (Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World).
Public theology: The Lifeworld and Power
Public theology leverages social-ethical intentionality in developing a comparative study of religion by examining the extent to which religion is understood in its context and comparing it via intercontextual relationships to other religions. The comparative dialectics between the context and the intercontext seek to reinforce a common goal in collaboration towards symbiosis, peace, and mutual recognition. The comparative study of religion has pedagogical significance in understanding the situation of the public church in a pluralistic democratic society.
Furthermore, I utilize critical theory or a phenomenological approach because public theology starts from a hermeneutical and ethical reflection on the givenness of life. The givenness of life is inextricably linked to the lifeworld (culture, religion, and language, among others) from which it originates.
Religion, as a system of symbols, establishes a fundamental congruence between a particular way of life, a specific metaphysic, and conceptions of a general order of existence that is wrapped in an aura of factuality. A paradigm of meaning based on sacred symbols combines a people’s ethos and worldview, tuning human activities to an imagined cosmic order and transferring images of cosmic order into human experience (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 90).
Meaning, or truth in the biblical sense of God’s promise, is not reducible to a power mechanism or class but rather plays an important role in dealing with reification and entrenched repressive authority. Meaning begins by problematizing (through interrogation) what has been taken for granted without examination.
An immanent critique is necessary in a responsible manner for the polysemy of religious meaning. This critique is internally founded on the religious source of Exodus, Torah justice, prophetic critique (religious rationality), and the gospel of Jesus. These aid in breaking through the obscurities, ambiguities, and hierarchical oppressions of the dominant discourse transmitted into tradition, culture, and social discourse.
This constructive approach to critique and meaning does not divorce a historical dimension from the social context. Through constant interactions with the lifeworld and its socialized episteme (knowledge system), historical-sociological methods—namely critique, correlation, analogical understanding, and religious a priori—are opened to a vivid present through meaning, recognition, and universal shared goal.
A correlation method can be strengthened by merging material interests with power dynamics, while evaluating social discourse in elective affinity with material interests, power networks, and political manner of governing. The politics of meaning considers the importance of narrative discourse as it incorporates a critical perspective that includes immanent criticism, lifeworld, and liberation.
The narrative form is distinguished from a legitimizing form of language entrenched inside a social system of knowledge (episteme). This is characterized by domination, power dynamics, discipline, and exclusion (Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 34-5). Two unique modes of discourse are essential for comprehending the religious construction of reality, particularly in relation to public theology.
Given this, public theology is shaped by the particularities of the biblical narratives of God’s freedom and grace, and it is grounded in the practices of the Christian community through faith, forgiveness of sin, and love. It addresses issues with public significance in terms of distributive justice, reparative justice, and restorative justice. This biblical narrative provides resources of immanent critique and emancipation, enabling people of faith to become a public voice for diakonia, solidarity, and economic justice in a pluralistic culture and society, which are stratified by inequality.
Different Types of Public Theology and Natural Science
Throughout history, German theologians contributed significantly to the integration of public and political theology. Jürgen Moltmann’s work sheds light on political theology and a theology of hope within the framework of public theology as it takes into account the project of modernity, its colonial history, and the rights of the earth (Moltmann, God for a Secular Society).
Moltmann and J. B. Metz break through the totalitarian regime of German fascism, focusing their critiques on Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Schmitt is a legal professor who accommodated Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan into Hitler’s totalitarian regime to promote its paganization and antisemitism (ibid., 24-42).
In Germany, however, public theology is an extension of political theology with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth at the forefront. This perspective culminates in Wolfgang Huber, an ecumenical public intellectual, who bridges Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms with Barth’s Christocentric Lordship, laying the groundwork for public theology.
Barth’s “The Christian Community and the Civil Community” (1946) is regarded as a seminal work on the bilingual nature of public theology which mediates and translates the language of the church for the discourse of civil society.
Similarly, Bonhoeffer offered significant insight in his Ethics which demonstrated that the critical analysis of modernity can serve as the basis for public theology. In his critical and constructive understanding of modernity, Bonhoeffer showed remarkable concern for the impoverished, Israel, and the secularized mature world. He did not exclusively disregard Western modernity as the culprit of sub-modernity, as liberation theology claims.
In this regard, public theology in the German context focuses on public theology by upholding communicative freedom and its bilingual character in the interdisciplinary frame of reference, especially with an emphasis on the preferential option for the poor and the significance of political advice and responsibility (Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Liberation Theology: Collected Essays).
Expanding on this, Torsten Meireis at the University of Humboldt develops a discourse paradigm for defining the public in public theology. In the coming sections, I will explore his public theology, discourse clarification, and various publics.
While German public theology emphasizes communicative freedom and bilinguality, public theology in the United States emphasizes interdisciplinary communication between politics, ethics, philosophy, and the natural sciences. Max Stackhouse’s work reflects this epistemic and practical stance. His early work, Public Theology and Political Economy, emphasizes Christian stewardship in modern society. However, in his subsequent publication, including three volumes of
God and Globalization, he defends the significance of economic globalization.
However, following Karl Barth, Ronald Thiemann defines public theology within the narrative of the Christian faith. “Theology shaped by the biblical narratives and grounded in the practices of Christian community can provide resources to enable people of faith to regain a public voice in our pluralistic culture” (R. Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, 19).
This position is of a non-foundational and descriptive character. It reinforces the internal logic and strengthens the biblical narrative of the Christian faith, faith community, and church tradition through detailed and thick descriptions.
David Tracy explores analogical public theology, which involves reworking Tillich’s method of correlation using an analogical imagination and negative dialectics. His correlational theology is mutually critical and revised regarding Christian symbols, public discourse, and other religious symbols in light of the radical mystery of divinity. This analogical language is used to express divine mystery, implying similitude-in-dissimilarity rather than ambiguity or univocality.
Tracy focuses on three publics: the church, the academy, and the larger society (culture).
Clifford Geertz combines the ethos of a society’s life with its correlative worldview, defining culture as a “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 7).
If Tracy considers society in conjunction with culture to explain the publics, then cultural theory and religion remain critical to the goal of public theology, which elaborates on the comparative study of religion and culture through a detailed and thick description.
Sharing Tracy’s thinking, Ted Peters makes substantial contributions to the dialogue between religion and science, and his proleptic eschatology has opened a new frontier in public theology. He lays the groundwork for a constructive public theology, given that Christian theology already incorporates public discourse into its systematic examination of God, humanity, the world, and creation.
He respects Tracy’s description of the three publics: church, academy, and culture. From this, he contributes to a constructive profile, molding public theology as articulated in the church, critically reflected in the academia, and integrated into the larger culture.
He reflects on classic Christian doctrine in a post-secular pluralistic context in the form of pastoral illumination (public ministry and mission) and apologetic reason (or, more accurately, communicative freedom and rationality in witnessing to the meaning of the Gospel)—rather than a self-defying apologetic theology. Peters also discusses a theology of nature, political theology, and prophetic critique for common good governance (Ted Peters, “Public Theology: Its Pastoral, Apologetic, Scientific, Political, and Prophetic Tasks”, International Journal of Public Theology 12 (2018) 153-177).
Peters entails a strong component of pedagogy in the wider spectrum at the seminary level because public theology pedagogy emphasizes pastoral concern in testifying to God’s love in Christ for the world and advocating for communicative competence. All this occurs while incorporating a theology of nature and life sciences into seminary education in conjunction with prophetic rationality and political theology. Likewise, scientific research should improve human health, well-being, and flourishing in the medical benefit framework.
According to Peters, public theology in the context of a theology of nature is concerned with a global public discussion on environmental crises, climate change, bioethics, and public policy, employing empirical research and scientific data (Peters, Science, Technology, and Ethics, 167).
Discourse Clarification and Diverse Publics
According to Torsten Meireis at the University of Humboldt, Christians face three basic obstacles. First, Christians should contribute to a public that values universal access and participation. Through this, Christians promote a just, sustainable, participative, and planetary civil society. Second, Christians should be self-critical in questioning their ambition for power or religious cupiditas for worldly power, as evidenced by their previous crimes of colonialism, sexism, and racism. Third, Christians must avoid becoming churches of excess by usurping the Lord's position or churches of deficit by suppressing their testimony in the public discourse.
This epistemic method illuminates Torsten Meireis’s explanation of diverse publics, which was explained in his article “The Public in Public Theology.” Here, he argues that social media and technological paradigms are constantly transforming the global collection of the publics. People form the various publics by assembling electronically or in person and talking through a network which creates public opinion by influencing people’s consciousness and will.
In my opinion, Meireis’s definition of the publics offers a relevant social-critical epistemology, arguing that communicative freedom—along with the subaltern counterpublics and sociocultural stratification—challenges power imbalances.
I incorporate the many realities of the publics and the counterpublics into the social construction of reality, encompassing factors such as access to power, material interests, education, employment opportunity, and privilege. The various publics are fields of contestation, conflict, and struggle in which power and material interests are asymmetrically allocated and ordered while arguing for common good governance across a broader spectrum of politics, society, and culture.
When we put the ‘common’ in the common good, we must acknowledge the complexity and diverse realities of the various publics. An American businessman does not have much in common with an American Tibetan monk. When dealing with the discursive paradigm of global expansion and intensification, public theology takes on a contextual dimension. However, it is also intercontextual in nature, since it is influenced by communicative freedom and media efficacy.
Given the interaction between context and intecontext, public theology aims to achieve universal recognition in pursuit of a common goal, such as human rights, restorative justice, and environmental rights through the communicative mode of production.
As a result, I believe that the term ‘public’ is best understood as a space of communicative freedom, contestation, conflict, and struggle within the multiple realities of social-cultural stratification, striving for democratic discourse, the politics of recognition, and common societal deliberation amidst different publics and various constituencies.
Public Pedagogy: Civil Society and Justice Paradigm
Since the Greek Renaissance in the eighth century BCE, democracy has been connected with civic society and economic justice, as well as fairness and acknowledgment. Along with the commercial civilization of the Near East, the polis (citizen-state) was essentially a people or citizenry that comprised peasants.
The polis ideal as a political community of citizens views citizens’ identities as inextricably linked to the state itself by locating the source of all authority in the community and promoting free discussion, notwithstanding the limits imposed on slaves, immigrants, and women. In fact, the difference between town and country was never as clear as in medieval Europe because citizens were the state (Moris, Burial and Ancient Society, 2-3).
This archeological understanding of civil society as political association or constitutional government contends that civil society or democracy cannot be defined unilaterally such as the bourgeois society founded on the Industrial Revolution in the Marxist tradition. Given the agency of status/class in social-political life, the economic mode of production does not precede civil society’s political life which intersects with culture, philosophy, and religion.
In fact, natural science and technological advancement fully modify an economic mode of production in a historical-social constellation; the intellectual spheres correlate with ideas, culture, education, language, and religion. At this stage, public theology considers the effective history and genealogy of inequality by attending to the lives of innocent victims who have been marginalized and foreclosed upon throughout history, society, and culture. It reconstructs the incomplete project of modernity in the examination of enlightenment philosophy.
Kant’s philosophy of enlightenment builds on Rousseau’s concept of democracy and civil society and expands on an idea of a universal history, a cosmopolitan civil society, and a critique of colonialism (“To Eternal Peace,” Third article. Basic Writings of Kant, 448-50).
In this regard, John Rawls advances social justice cosmopolitanism by using international legal concepts and standards.
He strives to explain global justice by addressing original equality between liberal and decent non-liberal peoples to achieve a common goal—a shared good idea of global justice.
Public theology aims to revive and update a cosmopolitan vision in a realist effort to grapple with the reality of a global civil society afflicted by conflict, disparity, and regional war as it is reified by a system of structural violence within world political power.
This position contrasts with Michael Sandel’s teleological ethics. Sandel argues that if we are distributing flutes, we should look for the best flute player. This is because flutes are designed to generate good music (Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, 188).
Yet, could not a flute also be given in recognition for realizing someone’s potential? This position of recognizing possibility is consistent with John Rawls’s decision to choose behind “a veil of ignorance” in his Theory of Justice (1971).
Leaving room for possibility is vital. No one knows what will happen because we cannot know all of our advantages and weaknesses through our class or gender, our race or ethnicity, and other factors. The original position of a veil of ignorance involves a reflective equilibrium in amending the current judgment when dealing with the disparity between the original position and the proper distribution of wealth and authority (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 18),
Rawls associates the concept of the social contract with a hypothetical agreement in an original position of equality, which yields two principles of justice (freedom of speech and religion, as well as social and economic equality). It leads to the difference principle, which views the distribution of inherent talents as a common asset that allows everyone to benefit. This perspective works for the good of the least fortunate who cannot afford the costs of training and education (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, sec. 17).
Therefore, it is crucial to reconstruct Rawls’s conceptions in the context of postcolonial justice and cultural plurality, while retaining the ideal theory of rationally autonomous agents. It aims to create a realist utopia within a framework of political and social institutions (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 6-7).
The veil of ignorance can be situated within the lifeworld spectrum to effectuate the ideal theory in a realistic sense. In investigating the regime of effective history, nonideal theory approaches the noncompliance or unfavorable situation of the real world with the spirit of reform.
This stance reinforces the notion of the reasonable overlapping consensus within the horizon of the lifeworld, identifying those who are marginalized and subjugated in the universally established norm. A critical method of reflective equilibrium can be seen as a genealogical approach when dealing with the discourse on the origin and foundation of inequality in the historical and social constellation (J.J. Rousseau).
I utilize a genealogical clarification of inequality to address material interests, the agent’s role, dominant discourse, and power mechanism. It breaks beyond the restrictions of Foucault’s discourse, which is solely based on power relations which tend to undermine the significance of economic justice in the context of neoliberal globalization (See Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them, 2015).
In reality, Kant sharply denounced the lust for power, which was corrupting political society by plundering or even overpowering the other. Kant’s proposed political or judicial changes are a call to a moral politician endowed with morality, phronesis, and responsibility. A moral politician (as opposed to a political moralist or moralizing politician) is committed to reform and must be trained in critical political insight and judgment to grasp the essence of reform (“To Eternal Peace,” Appendix I. Basic Wirings of Kant, 458-69).
Kant’s political theory of juridical reform incorporates Aristotle’s prudent wisdom (phronesis) to emphasize the categorical imperative of reform, common good, and even revolution. Kant, following in the footsteps of the Apostle Paul, evaluates the radical evil ingrained in the greedy quest for worldly power and wants to change it through political reform as accorded with recognizing justice and common good governance.
From a Kantian perspective, I build on the concept of hospitality for public pedagogy in democratic classrooms, in which participants feel invited to participate due to the conviviality and congeniality. It fosters a hospitable atmosphere in the classes, encouraging students to employ opportunities to talk and write about themselves in an autobiographic way.
Public pedagogy requires a reciprocal openness and receptivity to new ideas and perspectives, which create a readiness to examine the most commonly held assumptions. It tries to uncover ignorance, test tentative hypotheses, and challenge erroneous or partial information through mutual critique of thought with respect and dignity (Palmer, To know as We Are Known, 74).
Public theology in the Post-Minjung Era
From my foundation in public theology, I now turn to minjung theology which has emerged through the leadership of Dr. Ahn Byung-Mu and his colleagues. Dr. Ahn represents a redaction critical interpretation of Jesus’s identification with the ochlos in Galilee, which does not refer to Israel or the Gentiles. Instead, these were the impoverished country people, massa perditionis (the multitude of the lost), who were reviled by the Pharisees.
Ahn’s interpretation of John the Baptist finds its echo in Moltmann. When we sing, ‘Thou who bearest the sins of the world’, we must consider minjung in a realistic sense, for minjung in the third World carries the sins of the First World.
Moltmann’s poignant inquiry is directed at minjung theology: “If the minjung is to redeem the world, like the suffering servant of God, who then redeems the minjung?” (Moltmann, Experiences in Theology, 258).
My counter-question is this: Has minjung ever redeemed the sin of the world in history and society? They are not the redeemers but rather innocent victims of the dominant class/status within social stratification which is penetrated by the center-periphery dialectics.
In contrast to minjung-Jesus collectivist identification, Mark favors Pilate against the ochlos who sought to crucify Jesus (Mk 15: 14). Jesus stands out because a woman among the ochlos touched the edge of his cloak (tzitzit or tassels; Mk 5:27-28).
This refers to the cloak that any Torah-observant Jew would wear, which Mark indicates Jesus wore (Mk 6:56). These are the blue-white tassels on the four corners of the arba kanfot (the tassels, the small prayer garment), which was part of the daily dress of devout Jews at the period (Num 15: 37-40; Deut. 22:12). Jesus dressed appropriately for a Jewish session of prayer. He prayed the Shema Israel, as the most important prayer of his people (Mk 12:29). In so doing, he became a partisan for the impoverished and identified himself with even his smallest disciple, one of the little ones (elachiston/mikron, Mt.10:42, 25:45).
While the Gospel of Mark lacks Q (the sayings of Jesus), Matthew and Luke contain many of the sayings of Jesus. However, to analyze Mark’s narrative in terms of Q, an archeological clarification considers the significance of intertextual reading. The archeological interpretation features sociological com-reading in terms of the intertextual correlation approach for public theology. Such an epistemic stance fosters a retrieval of Jesus’s own social location and status identity as the source of meaning and an immanent critique as it is eclipsed (or even replaced) by the ochlos-minjung collectivism.
In addition to portraying minjung-Jesus, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed impacted minjung theology through conscientization. Freire's pedagogy of liberation is a classic example of the interaction between multidisciplinary communication and field education through discussion, communication, and participatory democratic approaches.
However, in the post-democratization political context, Freire’s pedagogy may be critically revised when dealing with late capitalism, ecological crises, and postcolonial situations. Late capitalism is defined by the great civilizing influence of capital and ecological exploitation. Its political strategy is consolidated by class struggle from above—that is, the ruling politics from the state—rather than the class struggle from below (Gollwitzer, Die Kapitalistische Revolution, 62-85).
Furthermore, artificial intelligence ushers a new era of information, knowledge representation, and learning in computing and technology. Natural science and technological advancement appear to be critical regimes for understanding the reality of late capitalism. As a result, social-cultural stratification is exacerbated by the immigration problem, while the social system relies on the information mode of production through the digital media space, the internet, and artificial intelligence.
The fetishistic structure of a capitalistic society is built in the system of commodity and its power which permeates workers’ psyche. In this reification process, the socio-cultural habitus has an impact on the human body. This is known as the phenomenology of habitus, and it calls into question the legitimacy of conscientization through external intervention (Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 41).
This is directly correlated to the complicated reality of South Korean civil society as it claims opposition to military dictatorship and violations of human rights. In fact, the postcolonial constellation is enmeshed with economic exploitation, cultural penetration, biopolitical control of the human body and public health, military alliance, and division of binary opposition in the social-cultural strata through education, employment, and elitist privilege.
Public theology is concerned with the religious construction of a social-cultural reality and its stratification which shapes the entirety of society’s life and results in the joining of the publics and counterpublics underlying effective history. A position of effective history (Walter Benjamin) breaks through “the thought of history’s countless victims being nothing more than stepping stones along the path of development” (McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development,153).
In fact, this sociological articulation enables deep cultural and ideological differences to be effective at multilevel levels because social justice pluralism is part of the public political culture of a particular historical society. Furthermore, it necessitates the method of reflective equilibrium with an emphasis on effective history, social justice pluralism, and biopolitics.
This supports an overlapping consensus through shared political and moral conceptions even within the conflict of interpretations and reconstructions through the horizon of the lifeworld, which underpins a critical approach to reflective equilibrium. This epistemic posture is crucial to postcolonial discussions of the regime of religion and biopolitics.
Religious beliefs are ideologically exposed to promote military biopolitics. The comparative research of religion is evaluated by examining religious ideas in elective affinities with material interests and colonial power and problematizing the regime of biopolitics in the colonial military context.
For instance, the Buddhist practice of Zen was espoused during the Nanjing massacre (beginning December 13, 1937 and continuing for six weeks). D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) legitimized the Zen militaristic killing in China and Korea. Such an espousal of religion and power generated the genocide of innocent victims as it undergirded the Buddhist stage of no mind, absolute nothingness, and karmic immortality.
Therefore, public pedagogy is concerned with the discourse clarification of an effective history of religion and invites different linguistic, cultural, philosophical, and ecumenical traditions (which have often been silenced) toward more effective and more humane action through hospitality, mutual recognition, conviviality, and congeniality.
In South Korea, public theology requires a paradigm shift to remove the Japanese colonial residue which has been further polluted by the emergence of far-right intellectuals in South Korea who legitimize colonial modernity through a political strategy of blaming the victim.
Furthermore, a social-scientific approach examines how the dominating public intersects with a middle-strata layered public and a counterpublic among the subaltern. In the top layered strata in Seoul, for instance, English education coupled with cultural penetration is not accessible to those in the middle layered.
The core zone at the upper strata is created at the periphery. In social-cultural formation, the life of the subaltern is subsumed into a structure of violence and dominance. Society and culture are stratified like the life pyramid, which can be seen according to the chain between core-semi-core-semi periphery-periphery.
This dangerous reality makes postcolonial pedagogy a pressing issue in which critical discussion draws on the epistemology of immanent critique to test the dominant interests and political ideology. This also requires interrogating different languages, or ideological discourses, as they emerge in a variety of texts as well as the socially dominant discourse (Giroux, “Citizenship, Public Philosophy, and the Struggle for Democracy.” Educational Theory, 37. 1987. 103-120).
Epilogue: Public Intellectuals and Postcolonial Critics
Before the trade war during the Trump era, I communicated with the Institute of Christianity and Chinese Culture at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, for over ten years. Zhejiang University is a prestigious university regarded as “the Cambridge of the East.”
I met and communicated with Chinese professionals in the fields of humanities, society, and religion. In addition, I gave many lectures. One of my Chinese colleagues offered a poignant comment that remains with me: “Chinese collectivism existed before Marxism. We grew up in China’s collectivist culture and selectively accepted Christianity within that environment—without distinguishing between Confucius and Marx. Civil society and public discourse are ongoing concerns.”
However, the overall trend of collectivist thinking becomes problematic because it devours the effective history of innocent victims through ideological interpellation to surrender the Great Name (a personal cult within national communism). Eventually, this vanished as a stepping stone in the collectivist narrative of meta-history.
Public theology is postcolonial in nature through its attention to the regime of effective history and the human body as an inscribed location of political control and intervention. The public intellectual emerges as a postcolonial critic, particularly in South Korea. This public intellectual seeks an alternative form of modernity, questions biopolitics, and argues for solidarity democracy and ecological rights.
Meanwhile, the church is an integral part of the public sphere, serving as a platform for proclaiming the gospel of the Triune God, the source of life, grace, and justice. It refers to God's method of governance (God’s oikonomia), which includes the dimensions of restorative justice, compassion for victims, and distributive justice in the economy. It leads the perpetrator to metanoia, allowing them to be reborn as a new human being through the mercy of forgiveness. This is also the crux of the gospel of reconciliation and public duty.
God’s word must be interpreted in relation to the life given. “The Word became flesh” (assumptio carnis) relates to the corporeal dimension of the Gospel, which assumes suffering humanity. The church is an integral part of the public sphere, serving as a platform for proclaiming the gospel of the Triune God, the source of life, grace, and justice.
It refers to God’s method of governance embodied in Jesus Christ, who models restorative justice, compassion for victims, and distributive justice. It leads perpetrators to metanoia, allowing them to be reborn as new human beings through the grace of forgiveness. This is the crux of the gospel of reconciliation and public theologia crucis.