Abstract
In the previous chapter we explained the evolution of the Charismatic City in both historical and ecclesiological terms. We took the nature of the Church as an ecclesia as our point of departure for our argument about the evolution of the paradigmatic cities. Our analysis and discourse drew heavily from the work of theologian and ethicist Max Stackhouse, especially as it relates to the voluntary principle. Stackhouse enables us to undergird the notion of the Charismatic City with a theological contemplation of the panorama of history. His philosophy (theology) of history provides the systematic orientation to evolution of the Charismatic City.
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Notes
Before the current globalization the corporation (as corpus Christi: such as the university, the monastery, the “free city,” and chartered business) had also emerged as an ecclesia. See Max Stackhouse, “The New Moral Context of Economic Life,” Quarterly Review: A Journal of Theological Resources for Ministry 2, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 239–53; “The Moral Roots of the Corporation,” Theology and Public Policy 5, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 29–39.
Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 31; italics in the original.
Max L. Stackhouse, Creeds, Society and Human Rights: A Study in Three Cultures (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).
Max Stackhouse, “General Introduction,” in God and Globalization: Religion and the Powers of the Common Life, vol. 1, ed. Max Stackhouse and Peter Paris (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000), 52.
Max L. Stackhouse, God and Globalization: Globalization and Grace, vol. 4 (New York: Continuum, 2007).
Max Stackhouse and Dennis P. McCann, “A Postcommunist Manifesto: Pubic Theology after the Collapse of Socialism,” in On Moral Business: Classical and Contemporary Resources for Ethics in Economic Life, ed. Max L. Stackhouse, Dennis P. McCann, and Shirley J. Roels with Preston N. Williams (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 949–54;
Max Stackhouse, “Introduction,” in God and Globalization: Christ and the Dominions of Civilization, vol. 3, ed. Max L. Stackhouse with Diane B. Obenchain (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002), 1–57.
A borrowed phrase from Tsenay Serequeberhan, Contested Memory: The Icons of the Occidental Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2007), 15.
May I quickly add that we can follow Jean-Francois Lyotard to say that whenever the acorn appears, “it does not occur without shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality in reality—a discovery linked to the invention of other realities.” See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 9, quoted in Serequeberhan, Contested Memory, 12; italics added.
Max Stackhouse, “Social Theory and Christian Public Morality for the Common Life,” in Christianity and Civil Society, ed. Rodney L. Petersen (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995), 40.
See Stackhouse, God and Globalization, 4:158; see also Stackhouse, “General Introduction,” in Stackhouse and Paris, God and Globalization, 1:35. There are five major spheres of society or “orders of creation” in any civilization: family, polity, culture, economy, and religion. (Each of these spheres has its associated principalities: family [eros], polity [mars], culture [muses], economy [mammon], and religion [dominion].) Each needs its own social space to develop. Each sphere needs a significant degree of freedom from state (external) control in order to support human flourishing and influence the political order. These spheres are institutionalized patterns to house and guide the biological and sociophysical energies: the dynamic spiritual forces that invite and capture people’s loyalties and shape the ethos of societies. These not only enable people to move beyond the boundaries and capabilities left to them by their ancestors, but can also, and too often, anchor them to antiquated practices, institutions, and beliefs. He calls these powers or energies by their ancient names, eros, mars, the muses, mammon, and dominion (worldview, comprehensive moral vision, religion). “Humans are sexual, political, economic, cultural, and religious creatures. Each one of these dimensions of life involves a certain potentiality and needs an institutional matrix to house, guide and channel its energies.” Stackhouse, “Introduction,” in God and Globalization: The Spirit and the Modern Authorities, vol. 2, ed. Max L. Stackhouse and Don S. Browning (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2001), 5. In another place, he writes: People carve out spheres of social activity, clusters of institutions that house, guide, and constrain, and in certain ways, permit, even encourage, these powers to operate. Each sphere is regulated by customary or legislated rules, and each is defined by its own specification of ends and means, as these accord with the nature of the activity and its place in the whole society or culture. Each sphere develops methods of fulfilling its own standards, ways to mark accomplished goals, definitions of excellence, and standards of success. See Stackhouse and Paris, God and Globalization, 1:39.
François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, “Translators’ Introduction,” in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York, 2007), 2.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 25; italics in the original.
Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1996), 82.
Max Stackhouse, Ethics and the Urban Ethos: An Essay in Social Theory and Theological Reconstruction (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1972), 7.
Jacob Kehinde Olupona, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
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© 2014 Nimi Wariboko
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Wariboko, N. (2014). The Church. In: The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion. CHARIS: Christianity and Renewal—Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463197_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463197_3
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