Book Review: Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World

Abstract

Fieldwork in Theology: Exploring the Social Context of God's Work in the World. By Christian Scharen. The Church and Postmodern Culture. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2015. xviii + 117 pp. $19.99 (paper).What is fieldwork in theology? Fieldwork is both social scientific observational research and the aim of M.Div. placements, learning about how to be and to serve the church dwelling among its constituents. In this short book, Christian Scharen blends those two senses together, articulating methodology for localized, observational theological research.This book is introductory. It seeks to enable the church to make social commitments in new, more deliberate and humble way, rather than reacting perennially to the dominant culture's consumption habits or putatively retreating from the altogether. Scharen argues that social theory can help the church practice the (social) logic of incarnation. It offers tools for rigorous self-reflection, avoiding idealist illusions, and finding communion with the other in concrete ways. Social science can articulate aspects of congregational life which have become invisible, thereby articulating how the church and God are at work.As whole, this hook's methodology and invitation rest on the outwardlooking orientation of theology articulated in the first chapter. In this chapter, Scharen opposes his position on the relation between church and to that of Stanley Hauerwas, whom he characterizes as withdrawing a colony of heaven behind strengthened bulwark opposite the world. By contrast, Scharen argues for the church to awaken, to enact anarchic 'giving away' of itself in and for the sake of the world (p. 7). He grounds this response to the church's cultural displacement in our post-post-Christendom era in the theology of Rowan Williams. If there is to be no gap between the gospel and our common life, then driven an acknowledgment of its failings into greater openness to the other, the church must find itself pressing by virtue of its very life ... against the sources of division and fear to engage in radical communion with (p. 13). The practice of dispossession as theological practice opens the scholar to opportunities for being caught up in Jesus' own life through communion over which she exercises no independent power.At the core of subsequent chapters, Scharen introduces and discusses Pierre Bourdieu, his antecedents Gaston Bachelard and Maurice MerleauPonty, and his student Loic Wacquant. Scharen leads into each of the main chapters of the book, each covering one of the figures just named, through musical prelude. His reflections on songs John Legend and The Roots, Esperanza Spalding, Lauryn Hill, and others tie this book to his earlier Broken Hallelujahs (2011). …