Christian Prayer as Political Theory

Abstract

The question concerning the boundary between the religious and political is a continuously vexing question for Christians who want to contribute to public life and those who want to engage public life in a manner that is consistent with their spiritual lives. This article argues that the spiritual life, enacted in the practice of prayer, is not incidental to public life but actually constitutes a unique politics. Prayer bears in its practices a political theory that on the one hand provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many political presumptions of the status quo. The article will first look more generally at the relationship between practice and theory, before analysing how the embodied nature of prayer implicates the contours of a new public body. This new body in turn suggests new contours of what it means to be a political subject, new terms of citizenship, and flowing from that, a new kind of political modus vivendi, exemplified by new attitudes to the necessity of survival in politics.

Notes

¹There exist a number of highly authoritative works which question the neat compartmentalisation between the sacred and the profane, or the religious and the secular. See for instance William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Erin K. Wilson, After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

²Richard Bourke, ‘Theory and Practice: The Revolution in Political Judgement’ in Political Judgement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 74.

³James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 232; Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Cox and Wyman, 1969), p. 166.

⁴Althusser, For Marx, p. 172; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 268; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 380.

⁵Richard Robert Osmer, Practical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2008).

⁶Herman Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought (Lewiston: Mellen, 1999), pp. 13–17.

⁷Gerben Heitink, Practical Theology: History, Theory, Action Domains (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1999).

⁸Terry A Veling, Practical Theology: On Earth as It is in Heaven (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).

⁹Heitink, Practical Theology, p. 9.

¹⁰Veling, Practical Theology, p. 4.

¹¹Ibid.

¹²Graham Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 60. See also Graham Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’ in James K. A. Smith (ed.) The Church and Postmodern Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), pp. 280–283.

¹³Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London: Vintage, n.d.), p. 42.

¹⁴John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Cartrand, ‘The Unbearable Automaticity of Being’, American Psychologist 54 (1999), pp. 462–479.

¹⁵Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 94.

¹⁶Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 94–95; Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’, p. 281.

¹⁷See for instance, Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 2.

¹⁸Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 110.

¹⁹Luigi Giussani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, trans. Viviane Hewitt (Montreal; Buffalo: McGill Queens University Press, 1997), p. 7.

²⁰Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’, p. 280.

²¹Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), p. 289.

²²Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 4–5. This is in spite of Hervé Juvin's claim that the body has been cut off completely from all forms of social meaning and is subject to none other than the whims of the individual. Indeed, Juvin implies that this very form of corporeal isolation is, paradoxically, the result of its immersion in a series of technologies which are the result of social mediation anyway. See Hervé Juvin, The Coming of the Body (London; New York: Verso, 2010).

²³Ward, Christ and Culture, p. 96.

²⁴See for example Ann Manicom, ‘Feminist Pedagogy: Transformations, Standpoints and Politics’, Canadian Journal of Education, 17:3 (1992), pp. 365–389; Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).

²⁵Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’, p. 282.

²⁶Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, p. 88.

²⁷Althusser, For Marx, pp. 175–176.

²⁸William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 94.

²⁹Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 127. For a similar critique of Connolly see Barry Harvey, ‘Book Review: Why I Am Not a Secularist’, Journal of Church and State 43 (2001), p. 141.

³⁰Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 353.

³¹Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’, p. 280.

³²Sarah Coakley, ‘Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 37. See also Sarah Coakley, ‘Living into the Mystery of the Holy Trinity: Trinity, Prayer and Sexuality’, Anglican Theological Review, 80:2 (1998), p. 225. See also Ruth Burrows, Letters on Prayer (London: Sheed and Ward, 1999), p. 29.

³³Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 202.

³⁴1 Cor 13:pp. 9–10.

³⁵Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 192. This is not to say that nothing can be known, but that there is an incomplete understanding in the subject proposed by Christian prayer, as opposed to full comprehension in the Cartesian sense. On this note see James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 28.

³⁶G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Simon and Brown, 2012), p. 45.

³⁷Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’, p. 282.

³⁸Cited in Saint Bonaventure, The Soul's Journey into God (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 100.

³⁹William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), p. 51.

⁴⁰Psalm 22:31.

⁴¹Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage: The Sixties (New York: Curtis Books, 1972), p. 94.

⁴²This tendency is suggested in a series of essays edited by Janet Coleman. See The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, The Origins of the Modern State in Europe (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1996).

⁴³Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, p. 45.

⁴⁴Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 7–8.

⁴⁵Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, n.d.), p. 2.

⁴⁶Scott Bader-Saye, ‘Figuring Time: Providence and Politics’ in Randi Rashkover Pecknold and C. C. Pecknold (eds) Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), p. 98.

⁴⁷Philip Goodchild, ‘Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology’ in Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek (eds) Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 127.

⁴⁸Bader-Saye, ‘Figuring Time: Providence and Politics’, p. 110.

⁴⁹Ward, ‘The Politics of Discipleship’, p. 280.

⁵⁰de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 110.

⁵¹Song of Songs 5:16.

⁵²St Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs (Brookline: Hellenic College Press, 1987), pp. 109–124.

⁵³Steven Kepnes, ‘Rosensweig's Liturgical Reasoning’ in Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold (eds) Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), p. 123.

⁵⁴This hope is at the same time the recognition of a risk. The fact that veracity of this promise lies in a future hope rather than a demonstrated efficacy, says Daniel M. Bell, sharpens the difference between the calculus of a politics grounded in prayer and that grounded in secular statecraft, between a politics rooted in an empirical evidence and another grounded in witness, which then distinguishes the seeming ‘refusal to cease suffering’ in the calculus of a prayerful politics as mere resignation. See Daniel M. Bell Jr, Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 192–195.

⁵⁵Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, Studies in Literature and Religion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), p. 4.

⁵⁶Graham Ward, ‘A Christian Act: Politics and Liturgical Practise’ in Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold (eds) Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), p. 40.

⁵⁷Rudolf J. Siebert, From Critical Theory to Communicative Political Theology: Universal Solidarity (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), p. 188.

⁵⁸On this see Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 80.

⁵⁹Graham Ward, ‘Radical Orthodoxy And/as Cultural Politics’ in Laurence Paul Hemming (ed.) Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry (Burlington, IN: Ashgate, 2000), p. 103.