Scott R. Paeth, Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology and Social Theory in the Work of Jürgen Moltmann

Abstract

President Barack Obama was running late for his speech at the Civil Society Summit, Moscow (July 7, 2009). “This is a good reason why civil society is so important,” he remarked, “because you can’t always count on politicians.”1 Scott Paeth agrees about the importance of civil society as a space for moral and spiritual development that “allows a realm of independence from the potentially overwhelming and depersonalizing spheres of the state and the market” (124). Civil society, Paeth says, allows a space for participation in public life and enables social change to take place (129). Indeed, the book is written to inform and provoke those gospel obligations that rest upon public theology in dialogue with politicians and others concerning the social change that might take place within this space. It includes an explication of the meaning of the phrase civil society against a backdrop of political theory ranging from Aristotle through G. W. F. Hegel and Alexis de Tocqueville. More centrally, it is an engagement between the theory and practice of civil society and the public theology of Jurgen Moltmann. Particular attention is given to the church as public institution and the social character of the church. Criteria from Moltmann’s theology of the coming kingdom of God are isolated for use in discussion about the meaning-making capacity and plural character of civil society today. Part I is an account of Moltmann’s public theology. Paeth considers the question of “public” as distinct from “political” theology. Paeth concludes that there is a continuity and consistency that runs through both (11), and