While the final version is forthcoming in Luther Seminary's journal Word and World, I thought I'd share a draft of my review of the Catholic practical theologian Tom Beaudoin's new book, Witness to Dispossession: The Vocation of a Postmodern Theologian (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis books. 2008. Pp. 225 $24.00). I only got 900 words, so don't expect too much detail! As you'll see, I'm a fan of the book, and of Tom.
Catholic practical theologian and educator Tom Beaudoin will be well-known to many readers because of his popular books on young adult faith (Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X) and consumer culture (Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are and What We Buy). He is one of the most creative and relevant theologians of his generation, someone who constantly presses theology to serve as a critical resource for discipleship today.
While practical theologians such as myself have much to gain from serious engagement with Beaudoin’s work in this new volume, pastors have even more. Pastors are the frontline theologians of the church, and their work with communities is often a witness to dispossession, even if they do not yet have the language to it as such. How the practical theological work of the pastor and her community unfolds has much to do with how believable the witness is to an increasingly skeptical public. In this review, I aim to first characterize what Beaudoin means by his title, then summarize the main sections, and finally editorialize regarding how his work is relevant, essential even, for pastors and their congregations.
The title is not straightforward, but careful attention there begins to help make sense of what Beaudoin is up to. It is a passive title, and yet not at all passive. To witness could be to stand by and simply observe. Christians know, however, that to give witness is akin to testimony. It is a showing. What we witness to, Beaudoin argues, is dispossession, a taking away of what we have, a losing of what was our own. In such a witness we find ourselves with “empty hands” that “become Christian hands by how and what they give away” (144). Beaudoin shows this witness is integral to the postmodern reality of our loss of surety, of the received truths and the rules of the ecclesiastical game. They are lost when we give up our protection of cherished memorials to faith’s past and actually ‘undergo a genealogizing that is experimental, radical and necessary for ‘credibility’ today . . .” (144). Such a witness stares honestly into the face of the Church’s complicity with violence and abuse. It seeks a means to faith through giving up what one thought was right for the sake of being open to what and where God is unexpectedly active in the world. Beaudoin finds a way forward drawing on Bonheoffer, who in Letters and Papers, proposes that Christians follow a “secret discipline” that sustains a “belonging wholly to the world” (145).
The book’s chapters amount to serial undergoings of genealogical critique and witnessing to the dispossession thereby effected, while still seeking to find the “secret discipline” that sustains us day to day. He draws his critical method of genealogical critique from French philosopher Michel Foucault. Beaudoin’s book is among the most fruitful theological engagements with Foucault I’ve seen. The introduction outlines his struggle as a catholic theologian to make sense of the church and its faith in the wake of the sex abuse scandal—a recent history Beaudoin characterizes with the striking and strong phrase “Catholic evil” (xiv).
His turn to Foucault, and especially the tool of genealogical critique, helps make what is admittedly a collection of essays cohere quite well. The first section consists of chapters on the challenge of teaching theology today, in a more traditional classroom setting and in the give and take of daily life. The second section engages culture, including reflections on spirituality and pop culture. A third section takes up the identity and vocation of the theologian today, asking fundamental questions about what we think we’re doing when we speak of God and the world. The last section opens up the question of faith and daily life, including a provocative dialog between Foucault and Bonhoeffer on the question of identity. The conclusion is a stock-taking; what sort of vocation does this kind of theologizing imply, and what are the contours of such a vocation as a refiguring of Catholic theology, and theology in a postmodern context more broadly?
The third move in this review is to editorialize regarding how Beaudoin’s work is relevant, essential even, for pastors and their congregations. In their ‘witness to dispossession’ they embody in Christ. Chapter 8, “The Struggle to Speak Truthfully,” offers a way to see such a claim in action. He begins with the claim that we can name “any of the well-known grievances with the church, or some that are not yet well-enough known, and most of these are related to Catholicism’s problems with truth and with frankness” (125). “For centuries,” Beaudoin says, drawing on Foucault directly, “religion could not bear having its history told” (125). Turning from this problem, Beaudoin uses Foucault’s investigations into the ancient Greek term parrhesia, which literally means “saying everything.” It is often translated speaking frankly, truthfully, or boldly. After highlighting the major characteristics of parrhesia and those parrhesiastes who embodied it, he details how the New Testament deploys the word both for Jesus and for his disciples. All this allows Beaudoin to then expose the way ecclesiastical power confines frank speech to the confessional, refusing its use in broader church life, and even in extreme cases using that containment of frank speech as a deplorable technique to silence victims of sexual abuse. While this example is from the Catholic context, it is a lesson for all pastors or leaders in positions of power in the church.
Read this book if you want to think hard and critically about the Christian life today, the church, and especially theological and pastoral leadership. Don’t let the centrality of Michel Foucault’s philosophy keep you away. Tom Beaudoin, despite sometimes slipping into an imitation of the pretzel-like writing of endemic to French social theory, manages to offer a substantive introduction to Foucault along with his rich and rewarding theological reflections.
Anon, and peace,
Chris
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