Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship, reviewed by Amos Yong

Pneuma Review Spring 2011
Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens, The Church and Postmodern Culture Series (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 317 pages, ISBN 9780801031588.

For most readers of The Pneuma Review, this will not be an easy book to read. Graham Ward, professor of contextual theology and ethics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, writes with a density and against a backdrop of contemporary philosophical debates that will simply be impenetrable to those without a graduate level theological education. Be that as it may, the argument developed here, an extension of a much larger project Ward has now prosecuted in the many other books he has written over the last dozen or so years, deserves attention by those in the renewal movement who are concerned about Christian discipleship in the twenty-first century.

In brief, the two central theses of this volume, captured in its title, is that all Christian discipleship has a political character, and the call to discipleship in our time involves the embodiment of a postmaterial form of life. Postmaterialism, Ward suggests, is a counter-cultural posture that not only resists the materialistic consumption of an unbridled capitalist way of life but also rejects the de-materialized virtual reality inhabited by an increasing percentage of the contemporary world. The former materialist mentality is hedonistic and self-absorbed, while the latter dematerialist trend perverts the embodied and material nature of men and women created as good in the divine image. The response, then, ought to be a postmaterialist theology, even metaphysics – as opposed to the claims regarding ours being a post-metaphysical era which actually masks the deployment of bad or destructive metaphysical assumptions- of the body, both at the personal level of intersubjective relationships and at the political level of ecclesial-social interactions.

Renewal church leaders and even scholars may contrast material with spiritual, thus assuming that a postmaterial citizen is one who is (in their mind) oriented toward the spiritual, other, or next world. Ward is indeed focused on what he calls throughout his book “the eschatological remainder,” the incompleteness of Christ-with-us in history and the heralding of partially present but yet to-appear-in-the-future kingdom. However, while this eschatological remainder names what we hope for, it is different from a false optimism that claims to fully know such hopes; instead, hope is shaped in part by what we don’t know. Thus the eschatological remainder serves as an apophatic check on our kataphatic theological commitments. Yet this eschatologically rich theological vision is clear also to highlight, because of Ward’s emphasis on a theology of the body, the very concrete, palpable, and political nature of Christian discipleship. To dwell in Christ (as St. Paul has it) is also to have Christ dwelling in us as embodied, social, economic, and political creatures, with embodied, social, economic, and political interactions with those around us. Thus to be disciples is to act out the way of Christ in the world, precisely the nature of public and political life. Being postmaterial therefore does not mean being spiritually minded if such involves being of no earthly good; on the contrary, being postmaterially and spiritually engaged with discipleship involves political witness, interaction, and engagement.

Similarly, when Ward talks about the “politics of discipleship,” he is also reacting to two trends. On the one hand, he is decrying the liberal experiment of the secular modern state which has erected an artificial barrier between the religious and political domains. Many renewalists who are also fed-up with liberal and secular politics (as are Muslims around the world, Ward reminds us) might then think we ought to move toward some form of a religious state instead. But this is, on the other hand, also what Ward rejects as contrary to the politics of Jesus. Rather than prescribing some form of alliance between the religious and the political, the embodied/ecclesial manifestation of the body of Christ living amidst the eschatological remainder calls forth a postliberal and postsecular posture that both challenges the messianic pretenses of any state and yet also, as did Jesus, embraces the contested nature of the political and public square. Such a postmaterialist attitude thus contests – with the many other voices, both religious and not – the depoliticization of public life (which leads to social atomism and hyper-individualism), the dehumanization of social life (which leads to classism and other forms of injustice), and the simultaneous commodification and dematerialization of economic life (which leads to the distortion of human desires and values).

More pointedly, political discipleship is vigilant against the soteriological myth of the capitalist system, backed up with the state in various ways, which promises infinite freedom to those who would worship at its altars. If capitalism’s insistence of laissez faire brings with it a concomitant drive toward apoliticism and depoliticization – because “bigger government” will undermine the “invisible hand of the market” and its automatic capacity to generate wealth for all (so the story goes) – Christian discipleship will challenge such individualism and atomism with the good news of (the body of) Christ instead. And if capitalism promises the freedoms of spending, consumption, leisure, and even the salvation of all, the politics of discipleship emphasizes instead the paradoxical nature of sharing, reciprocity, and work in Christ, while prophetically warning against the false idols that will destroy and damn human lives within an unchecked capitalist regime.

Without the requisite background or interest, the chapters in part I on “the world,” discussing the crises and transformations of democracy in our time, globalization trends, and the dynamics of a postsecular re-emergence, even explosion, of religion in the public domain, will be ponderous. The argument in this first part, though, is important in showing how even modern democracy and late modern globalization are fundamentally bound to religious visions informed by deformations of the Christian theological tradition. Readers who persevere through this material will be rewarded by periodic glimpses of the whole that will, hopefully, motivate them to persist. But then, turning to the more theological analyses of the volume, even the first three chapters of part II on “the church” will be, by and large, heady for many, focused as they are on a theological metaphysics of embodied agency in the city and of the ecclesial body in dialogue with a range of philosophers and theologians ancient and modern. It is not until about the last sixth of the book’s 300 pages that renewalists looking for more biblically informed arguments will begin to appreciate how the argument holds together scripturally, especially the illumination he sheds on St. Paul’s thinking about the body of Christ, and St. Luke’s parable of the prodigal son, and how all this relates to Christian discipleship in the body politic today.

The Politics of Discipleship will be challenging for most renewal readers in part because Ward speaks a language far removed from that of the renewalist constituency and in part because what he says here challenges many of the assumptions about politics prevalent across the global renewal. If I might be so self-serving, my own book, In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology (Eerdmans, 2010), is concerned with many of the issues that Ward deals with, but does so in an idiom more familiar to those within renewal circles. I am certainly not suggesting that my volume renders Ward’s superfluous – there is a sophistication to his thinking I do not match, reflecting his having abided for much longer at the intersection of theology and the political than I – but only that it may provide a point of entry into the larger discussion Ward represents for renewalists who are interested in expanding their horizons in thinking about the political. In the end, Ward and I may disagree about as much as we agree (that itself would be a conversation I would enjoy having), and The Pneuma Review readers might also then further disagree with us both. In any event, how all of this unfolds requires that at least some of the readers of this review take up and work through Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship, and that itself may be a portal for a new work of the Spirit to emerge in a postsecular and postmaterial age.

Reviewed by Amos Yong

Preview this book: books.google.com/books?id=58EKuwyTk9MC