Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens. By Bernd Wannenwetsch. Pp. xiv + 402. (Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics.) Oxford University Press, 2004. isbn 0 19 925387 0. £75

Abstract

Recent publications such as The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), reaffirm traditional interconnections between worship and ethics. Bernd Wannenwetsch's Anglican–Lutheran informed study, an English translation of his 1997 Gottesdienst als Lebensform: Ethik für Christenbürger, contributes to this conversation by developing an engaging account of Christian citizenship that mediates debates between liberal and communitarian frameworks. The basic presupposition of the book is that ethics begins with worship, which, according to Wannenwetsch, amounts to a capacious ‘form of life’ as conceived by Wittgenstein's late philosophy that underlies (and therefore cannot be attenuated by) public political participation. In the book's three principal thematic sections, Wannenwetsch examines the dimensions of worship vis-à-vis Christian ethics: worship as the foundation, the critical power, and the formative power for Christian ethics. One of the book's strengths is its sustained dialogue between Scripture, Luther's theological ethics, and recent thinkers, including Hannah Arendt (Wannenwetsch's most frequent interlocutor), Charles Taylor, Wittgenstein, James Cone, John Milbank, Barth, Richard Rorty, and Habermas. These dialogues demonstrate the critical breadth of Wannenwetsch's project, but they could benefit from more nuanced distinctions. For example, Wannenwetsch remains uncharitable to the Catholic tradition because he discovers ‘certain characteristics of a clerical ethic’ (p. 56) in papal writings. Although Wannenwetsch also notes specifically Protestant variants of the clericalization of ethics, his reduction of Catholicism lapses into tired denominational dichotomies. This reduction glosses Catholicism's robust social teaching, notably its principles of solidarity and subsidiarity that illuminate two of Wannenwetsch's central concerns: the relationship between oikos and polis and the demands of neighbourliness. Another shortcoming of these dialogues derives from his failure to note the dynamics of power and oppression in politics outside of—and within—the Church. Wannenwetsch distinguishes his preferred concept of political worship from political theology, ‘which aims at the politicization of the whole of life’ (p. 12). Yet, part and parcel of serving as Christ to the neighbour—in the way that Jesus challenged social boundaries and oppressive mechanisms and ministered to those excluded from political participation—demands unmasking hegemonic power structures. Wannenwetsch insightfully argues that the heart of political worship consists of intercession and compassion, where ‘the permanent political task’ (p. 341) of Christians is to serve as advocates for others. In carrying out this advocacy, political theology, and its analogues in feminist, liberation, and womanist theologies, integrates praxis and a complex hermeneutics, a hermeneutics of suspicion and retrieval. Wannenwetsch contends that in and through worship the hermeneutics of suspicion ‘can be unlearnt’ (p. 296); however, it is precisely through such a hermeneutics that one reconfigures the relationships between self, other, and world, calls the world into ethical and political accountability as it offers resistance as well as forgiveness, and enables others’ voices to be heard in a transformed world (p. 324) without capitulating the basic tenets of Scripture and tradition.