Chapter Four - Domination and Political Theology - Section Seven

The Community of Faith and Action

This political theology bears directly on questions of domination and liberation, oppression and freedom, and brings a unique perspective to the critique of domination which is only beginning to be heeded by secular critical theorists. Some political theologians explicitly draw on critical theory, partly because critical theoretical analyses of threats to freedom inform political theological critiques of the world, and partly through a mutually informing dialogue between Christians and secular social critics. As Peukert has already indicated, some political theologians are explicitly taking up recent critical theory to develop their own theologies, and in so doing, are seeking to overcome some of the problems faced by critical theorists attempting to develop a rational, morally justifiable, and effective critical theory of society. The Îhere­nowness1 of the Kingdom embraces the concept of a community, the People of God, into which the individual enters. The metaphor is one of rebirth in which the self dies to this fallen world and is reborn spiritually into the community of faith. The individual becomes part of this collectivity, draws strength from the community, is sustained by it, and through participation in it strengthens the whole. The individual is not alone, and thence entirely subject to the dehumanisation of rationalization, but part of a nurturing group equally rejecting the cloying encroachments of the rationalising world. Davis draws attention to this community aspect of lived faith when he writes that: Faith comes to us as the personal appropriation of the collective remembrance of a community, a remembrance that has accumulated a long historical experience, together with many attempts at its expression (Davis, 1980: 151). Being part of a community means that the individual's memory is strengthened and affirmed by others in the group and both individual memory and collective memory are rooted in a tradition and a lived experience which stands over against the reworkings of history required by the society which demands that its view of history is the only one. Moltmann, whose Church in the Power of the Spirit is largely focused on precisely this point, maintains that memory rooted in tradition helps place immediate events in historical perspective and anchors the individual and the community in a view of history and the future which is not determined by the present world order. The eschatological component, embraced even by critical theory with its orientation towards a human future free of domination, must be maintained for, as Moltmann writes, quoting Daniel Reisman, 3Non­eschatological man loses his humanity as a power that he consciously experiences. He will be exposed to control at the very centre of his person.2 The perspective of rebirth we have described is absorbed neither by private nor collective biography. It is able to reconcile the personal as what is uniquely one's own with the common element of the uniquely other, because it orients both sides of life, the individual and the collective, to the new creation of the whole (Moltmann, 1977: 282).