Christian religion in the Netherlands has undergone a period of transformation, and this ethno-case study gives an insight into the different forms which this transformation has taken. The Dutch engagement with Christian practices is, in the light of this transformation, characterised by diversity and complexity, and the annual musical performance of The Passion is able to show that Christian religion manifests itself as, among other things, a spatial, ludic, reflexive and public-theological practice that is, in various ways, both ambivalent and contested. Processes of meaning-making surrounding this polyvalent practice relate to the religious, the sacred (not necessarily religious) and to the secular, and this study shows how the boundaries between these different notions have become blurred in public rituals such as The Passion. In these rituals, people are playing and keep on playing with religious heritage. Into their play, I have been able to read a new quest for God.
Religion as a Practice of Negotiation
What are the characteristics of this play? On the basis of this study, I am inclined to conclude that Christian practices in late-modern Dutch society have turned into practices of negotiation. Of course, (liturgical-)ritual practices through the ages have always involved negotiations, and processes of negotiating religion have existed for a long time.1 However, in the context of a society characterised by secularity, by fragmentation, by the continuing multiplication of new options for how to make sense of our world, and by new possibilities for how to give shape to spiritual ambitions in a universe that does not turn around a central point, these negotiations are strongly influenced by a thorough and large-scale diversity, to the extent that negotiation has now become a primary characteristic of contemporary ritual practices. Negotiations, both among groups and between individuals, characterise and surround the practice of Christian ritual in our time and culture; negotiations relating to the (public) space where these practices take place, and can be promoted, contested or obstructed; negotiations regarding how these practices take (and are given) shape in digital media cultures; negotiations around where and whether the sacred/the divine/God is, or is not, encountered; negotiations, evoked by such public ritual practices, relating to how society understands itself; regarding what is ‘ours’ and what is not; negotiations around the theology that is constructed and the desirability of the particular hermeneutic choices that have (or have not) been made in these practices, and so on and so forth.2 Thus – and this would be my answer to the first part of the central question of this monograph as to how Christian ritual repertoire is being transferred, transformed and reconstructed in late-modern Dutch society – Christian religion, in our society, largely seems to have become a bargaining game. This book has shown that the Dutch make meaning from religion by negotiating the meaning of a spatial, ludic, reflexive, and public-theological practice such as The Passion, yet without ever coming to an agreement. They continue to negotiate, playfully, about almost every aspect of the ritual.
And What about God?
The terms ‘negotiating’ and ‘bargaining’ fit Robert Wuthnow’s portrayal of a present-day ‘spirituality of seeking’, that I described in the introduction, in which individuals are convinced – or at least possess some degree of hope, I would add – that the divine plays a real role in the world, but in which they nevertheless continue to search for sacred moments in order to confirm and reinforce that conviction or hope.3 The conclusion that Christian religion in our society largely seems to have turned into a matter of negotiation is thus also in line with a situational approach to the sacred: the idea that the sacred or divine is indeed constructed (found, recognised), and that sacrality is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.4
This situational approach to the sacred has a certain ‘danger’ to it, however, when considered from a Christian perspective: it runs the risk that the sacred is, in the end, only recognised in positive/good things, as an affirmation of the things which people appreciate.5 If the sacred is only to be found in that which moves us in a positive way (it is nice, pure, inspirational, meaningful, beautiful, unifying, healing, empowering; it is love, solidarity, holistic cohesion, agreement, etc.), then this could mean that “there is no sacrality but ‘feel-good sacrality’”. From both historical and systematic-theological perspectives, this view is slightly one-sided: Christian theology has been deeply permeated by different ambiguities and ambivalences over the course of its existence. The meaning of the Christ event is a preeminent example of something with a fundamental lack of stability: its meaning is never fixed, but is always subject to ongoing processes of rediscovery, re-description and reconstruction.6 This implies that when the sacred/the divine/the Other fully coincides with or affirms our own ideas, beliefs, or convictions, but fails to goes any further, the theologian has reason for suspicion. Christian theology has indeed always left some space for an unexpected or uninvited approach by the Other, a ‘coming from the other side’: the human self is not the ultimate point of departure, and ‘I’ am not the centre of the universe, but, time and again, I become part of the greater story of God. Indeed, the gospel basically turns things upside down: those who think they know God, are proven wrong.7 This implies that a situational approach to the sacred, from a Christian perspective, not only finds traces of God in positive meaningful experiences that confirm our own opinions, but also in the unpleasant surprise, in the nasty, in things that itch, the argument, in conflicts and ambivalences, in places where interaction goes back and forth, where there are pros and cons, offers and counter-offers. Indeed, traces of God can also be found in the conflicts that surround (public) rituals with Christian roots.
God’s Play
The transformation of Christian religion into practices of bargaining and negotiation will be grist to the mill of those who see in contemporary practices the decay of Christian religion (critics of The Passion in the media, both Christian and non-Christian, have described the event as a symbol of such a decay). In my theological view, practices of negotiation are nothing that a society should be ashamed of, nor are they unlike God. After all, to negotiate is to play, and, in this book, I have staged God as a playful God. The question could arise, however, as to what God’s response to this negotiation might be. As this book is drawing to a close, I will not offer an exhaustive list of possible responses, but I will offer one suggestion, based on a famous Biblical narrative of a man negotiating with God, and a peculiar commentary on one particular verse of this narrative.
In Genesis 18 (verse 16 ff.), the men (angels) who had visited Abraham and Sarah by the oaks of Mamre set out from there, and Abraham follows them. Abraham then discovers that God has the intention of wiping out Sodom. In a very polite manner, taking on a role like that of a market vendor, he starts to negotiate with God: in Sodom, the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of people are at stake. “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?”, Abraham says, and he comes up with his opening offer: “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city…”. In the end, Abraham succeeds in having God change the plan. God plays along with Abraham. Or actually, it may have been the other way around, as the set of critical texts which comment on the Hebrew Bible (the Masorah) suggests. A few verses prior to Abraham’s negotiation, in Genesis 18:22, the text reads “… while Abraham remained standing before the Lord”. According to a critical note in the Masorah, however, “this is a correction of the scribes [rather than saying] that the Shechinah (Divine Presence) would wait for Abraham”.8 This draws attention to a contested issue, with a refined explanation: of course, it was the other way around: God waited for Abraham (as God was walking in front and Abraham followed), but it would have been irreverent to say so.9 This critical note suggests that it is not so much Abraham, but God who actually takes the initiative in the play: it is God’s game. God remains standing in front of Abraham and shares his intention to destroy Sodom, as if God expects Abraham to come up with objections. God waits for Abraham. By objecting, Abraham indeed plays along with God, and by bringing in the righteous as a reason to spare the city, he eventually negotiates that only ten righteous people are enough to avert the destruction and to preserve life in the city.
The heart of this Biblical story, in my view, is that God displays an openness to Abraham’s wager. God’s play, then, may also include an openness to our wagers. The outcome of these negotiations is unsure: when Abraham lets go of his first bid, a space of uncertainty is opened up in which he risks something. Similarly, the outcomes of people’s rituals and meaning-making activity – whether ‘religious’, ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, a mixture of these or anything in between – are uncertain. Our negotiations as homo ludens are wagers by which we enter a playful space of “not-knowing”, where possibilities are opened up. In this playful space, Deus ludens may keep on waiting for us.
Thus, returning to the central question of this monograph, and the second part of this question in particular – the question of where traces of God might be found in this newly appropriated ritual repertoire in our society as it is transferred and transformed – I take the practice of bargaining that Christian religion has become as a playful wager: it opens a space of negotiation in which God may return. A space of negotiation in which self-declared atheists, as well as those who see no way to live up to a spirituality of dwelling, of going to a place where they know they will find God (be it houses of worship, liturgical rituals, or church denominations to belong to), and ‘floating believers’ as well as those who wager their atheist positions, might experience the counter-offer of the Other. A space of negotiation in which Christians with more or less fixed ideas of the way that things should be (either ‘in God’s eyes’, or according to their faith, hermeneutics, or theology) might gain new insights, finding traces of God in the counter-offers of individuals or groups of unlike views. Christian religion as a bargaining practice can enable people to find a God who stands waiting before them, in the ambivalence, the objection, the counter-offer of the other. Indeed, traces of God can be found in the places that one least expects: in processes of negotiation in and around contested spaces, in ludic practices, in the public efforts of societies to understand and act upon themselves, and in the staged theology of producers and broadcasters.
Aspects of Loss
We must not ignore the fact that this transformation also has an aspect of loss. Christians who have not been enthused about The Passion, in particular, seem to have experienced this sense of loss: they have criticised The Passion’s spatial, ludic, reflexive and public-theological practices for being too mundane or too popular, for neglecting the prophetic aspects of the narrative of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection, and for a lack of proper hermeneutical interpretation, considering it to be too ‘Biblicist’, ‘too historical’, offering too much comfort, lacking challenge and nuisance, or pursuing emotional rather than transformative experiences.10 They have also criticised it for its one-off, no strings attached, character as its annual performance contrasts strongly with ideas of weekly-church-attendance-whether-you-like-it-or-not. Although these criticisms sometimes lacked a sense of reality, since they ignore the secularised context of the public sphere and the fact that The Passion was not a church event, but was organised by a production company and two broadcasting companies with Christian backgrounds, there was and is indeed a loss when churches are taken as the frame of reference.
I experienced this feeling of loss myself when in 2019, for the first time since 2011, I celebrated the ‘classical’ Maundy Thursday liturgy in our own congregation, before rushing home to switch on the TV in time in order to watch The Passion; I realised with a certain wistfulness that, unwittingly, I had actually missed celebrating Mass, and the intimacy and solemnity of some forty people performing the ritual together on Maundy Thursday. I also often encountered this feeling of loss when people started to vent their frustrations during the Q&A sessions which I have given after talks in parishes and churches throughout the country since 2011. They have often asked me questions that display a sincere concern regarding the downfall of Christianity. In doing so, they often take Christian liturgy as their normative starting point. “Interesting talk, it’s all fine, but The Passion is of course soooo superficial”, is one of the most frequent responses that I have received, in different variations. “Why of all days must they organise The Passion when we celebrate Maundy Thursday? Couldn’t they just choose another evening for this event? It is so inconvenient that they have this in our city on this particular evening…”, a regular church-goer complained. Or, in the words of an ordained minister: “Some of our really engaged church members no longer come to church for our Maundy Thursday liturgy, but instead stay at home to sit on the couch and watch The Passion. And I don’t know how to respond”. I have always tried to acknowledge the hurt that is often hidden behind these remarks: to the different questioners, Christian worship is the standard, the norm, and it is not surprising that these transformations of ritual practices are considered to be a loss from their perspective.
An interesting question, however, is why church-people’s meaning-making around a hymn or sermon in Sunday worship would be more genuine than television viewers’ meaning-making around Peter’s betrayal of Jesus and their relation of this narrative to experiences of betrayal in their own lives? Why should people, sitting in the windows of their houses, drinking beer and enjoying their view alongside the squares where The Passion was staged, be any different from those celebrating worship while sitting in monumental churches, enjoying the lights coming through the stained-glass windows and getting carried away by the sounds of the organ? Who are Christians to consider people’s meaning-making around The Passion to be cheap or even loathsome? Who are they to decide whether or not those without any knowledge of the passion narrative experience the sacred/the divine/the Other in this event? Here, being certain could mean being wrong: such views could run the risk of being condescending. And unnecessarily so: if God indeed responds to negotiation with openness and keeps on waiting, then God can probably take it, even when some of God’s people find this wager uncomfortable or inconvenient.
Performing Practical Theology after the Death of God
It is widely acknowledged that the discipline of practical theology is characterised by a great deal of diversity, complexity and interdisciplinary fragmentation. Ecclesiastical, academic, social and cultural contexts influence how the discipline understands itself, and fundamental differences are the result: there is no shared understanding of what practical theology is. Nevertheless, definitions and descriptions of the discipline often somehow include terms such as ‘faith’, ‘human belief’, ‘Christian life’ or ‘Christian community’.11 At the Protestant Theological University in Amsterdam, the practical-theological research program in which I carried out my research on contemporary Passions in the public realm developed a focus on ‘practices of faith in socio-cultural networks’. With this focus, the program took an empathically open, dynamic and situational approach to the study of “new, usually complex and fragmented developments in practices of faith. The fading [of] church boundaries and the mixture of traditional faith and new spirituality on the one hand, and a renewed emphasis on strict protestant practices of faith in varying degrees on the other, position practices of faith both within and outside the church in the narrow sense”.12 My own research clearly relates to the first part of this last sentence (fading church boundaries and the mixture of traditional faith and spirituality). However, after eight years of research on The Passion, I wonder whether the term ‘faith’ as a qualifier of ‘practices’ might be too narrow in the context of this ethno-case study. ‘Faith’ can be understood in a very open sense to mean something like ‘worldview’, but when combined (or used in a text) with terms like ‘religion’, ‘belief’, ‘spirituality’, ‘Christian’, etc., the understanding of the notion of ‘faith’ is narrowed and the interpretation is steered in a particular direction. These terms, when used in practical theological contexts, categorise practices in ways that are sometimes unfitting: they are problematic in research about the transformation of Christian rituals in the public realm of a secularised society where there is significant religious illiteracy, and where many people do not consider themselves spiritual at all, and would never dream of talking about traces of the sacred/the divine/the Other. Even relating their engagement to a ‘spirituality of seeking’ would be too much for the engagement of some, and would do little justice to their experiences since many of the people engaged in the practice of The Passion are neither convinced, nor do they have some degree of hope, that the divine exists, let alone search for sacred moments to confirm and reinforce that conviction or hope.13 The problem of naming a public event like The Passion as a ‘practice of faith’, even when ‘faith’ is taken in its widest sense (e.g. as worldview), is that a single name is given to people’s diverse and fragmented engagements with a practice that sometimes cannot be captured by the language of ‘faith’ at all. I imagine that a great number of people whose meaning-making I examined as part of my fieldwork, if they were aware of this ‘faith-bias’, would perhaps refer to it as ‘theological land-grabbing’ or even ‘theological imperialism’. They were not, so they did not, but I could understand them if they did.
My feeling of discomfort with an understanding of practical theology as the study of practices of faith relates to what Tom Beaudoin has pointed out as one of the conundrums of the discipline. In his book chapter on the conundrum of the theological significance of practice, Beaudoin writes that “practical theologies render practice as divine material” before problematising the place of Christianity in practical theology.14 Beaudoin questions paradigms of “Christian-Centrism”, claiming that practical theology, at least in the USA, “has not done well enough at letting the religious “other” into the theological sense it makes of practice; neither has it allowed much wisdom and experience from non-affiliated/secular persons”.15 His conundrum regards the question of why practical theology has not been met with friendly criticism from within relating to the question of why practice is theologically significant.16 “Predication and affordance are pitched toward making practice a continuation of Christianity, and making Christianity live continually in the presence”.17 This invention of Christian experience, investment in the reproduction of Christianity, or religious identity building, is widely called ‘christianicity’.18 The practice of practical theology as an academic discipline in Europe is slightly different from what Beaudoin describes; in the Netherlands, for example, practical theologians often study practices and praxis that are situated in broader cultural fields and which are not necessarily or unequivocally Christian.19 I have, in this book, refrained from claiming that the event of The Passion is simply a continuation of Christianity: in the first chapter, I wrote that The Passion is, and at the same time is not, a (Christian) religious phenomenon.20 ‘Practices’ need not necessarily be ‘practices of faith’ to be able to be interpreted as a quest for God. ‘Faith’ is not necessary for this quest: practices of ‘unfaith’ may equally lead to searching for and finding God. As historian and philosopher of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw in 1933 wrote: “God (…) is a late-comer in the history of religion”, suggesting that there is a lot of religion before God shows up, and perhaps also that God is to be found among us only for a short while.21 The opposite is also true. Faith does not necessarily imply a searching for and finding of God, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 discovered when he sought to explore ‘religionless Christianity’, thus ridding the God-question from the religious baggage that had become a meaningless millstone to people.22
In this book, I have not aimed to turn the practice of The Passion into simply a continuation of Christianity. I have, together with the organisers, participants and other individuals in the public sphere, reflected on this practice, and interpreted it. And I have reinterpreted this process from a Christian theological perspective as a quest for God, understanding these practices as material (performances, experiences and/or meaning) in which the divine may or may not be encountered, thus adding to a discourse of God after God. So, in response to the conundrum, as phrased by Beaudoin, of why this practice matters theologically, I would say that a Christian reading of public ritual practices such as The Passion opens the possibility of discovering new ways to speak about God after God, and of finding traces of God in late-modern reality. This ethno-case study, therefore, does indeed read theologically significant practices (of both faith and unfaith) in ways that “make a new spiritual situation – irreducible to what has come before”.23 This does not, however, legitimize a univocal understanding of the research object of this practical theological work as a ‘religious practice’ or a ‘practice of faith’. The study serves rather to destabilise notions of (Christian) faith, belief, and spirituality. The religious/secular ‘ethnos’ which I have investigated consists of millions of people living in a polarised society, and is tremendously diverse and fragmented in itself and, as I have shown, even these categories are not always appropriate or helpful for a better understanding of what is going on in late-modern society. This does not solve the ‘faith-bias’; I have no alternative term that captures the kind of practices and the overwhelmingly broad and complex processes of meaning-making it includes, other than, perhaps, meaning-making itself (in our case: meaning-making as embodied practices of play; future exploration of the adequacy of this definition may be worthwhile). The conundrum remains a conundrum, at least for now.24
Having problematised the term ‘practices of faith’ in relation to the practices that have been described in this book, I will complete this chapter by presenting my view of what the study offers: a provisional and situational effort to perform practical theology on the transformation of Christian ritual practices, such as those described in this study, in ‘post-secular’ societies.
Practical Theology as Public Theology
Chapter 2 has already revealed how I understand practical theology in the context in which I live, work and theologise. As a practical theologian in a Dutch context where Christian rituality has moved towards the outer-ecclesial domain and has undergone radical transformations, I take it as my task to give a theological reading of practices of faith in the public sphere that constitutes my field of research.25 However, I do not just theologise on the public practices of individuals and groups, I also theologise in the public sphere, on their practices in the public sphere. During the past eight years of research on contemporary passions, and on The Passion in particular, I have offered my reflections in the public sphere, for numerous microphones and cameras, in newspapers and other print media, as a guest in TV talk shows, in interviews, in op-eds, during parish talks and in public correspondence published on internet websites.26 Particularly in the interactions with the media, this has been quite a venture: I have frequently found myself performing public theology on a public practice in the context of a public discourse in which God is considered to be dead;27 a fairly complex, but challenging play! I have received letters, postcards, emails and direct messages via social media from people who agree or disagree with me, and who have offered their own questions or reflections for me to ponder on. I have also received a number of thank-yous from people who had been wondering what to make of The Passion, and who have used the perspectives that I have offered for their own reflections. I have regularly had the thought, both during and after these interactions, ‘And this is the reason why I became a theologian’. The unprecedented speed at which ideas, cultural values, money, and information move through informational societies can be confusing for many people. How should they form their own opinions about complexities that are not easily understood? One of the duties of scholars in the humanities in general, in my view, is to offer informed reflection upon and interpretation of complex phenomena for a wide public. And this is why I perform public theology, it is something that I carry out for anyone – whether devout believers, floating believers, agnostics, atheists or the ‘ignorant’ – who is wondering what to make of contemporary appropriations of Christian religion in a changing world. As much as I have written this monograph for peers in academic practical theology, I have also written it for professional theologians (in all kinds of fields), and for any other readers who are involved in either their own quest for God or that of others. My works as a ‘public practical theologian’ will continue. This monograph is not the end of my journey, it is a temporary standstill, a stopping point on the way. Theory is indeed travel.28
Practical Theology as Play
In my practical theological work in the public sphere, I have sometimes offered my interpretations to people to play with. Sometimes people are challenged by the reflections and interpretations that I offer, and sometimes I have been challenged by other people’s objections or interpretative counter-offers. As much as the ritual of The Passion is a practice of negotiation, its interpretation was also, and still remains one too. This ritual event, which took place in the public sphere of a society that is ambivalent in its religious self-understanding, can invite people to make a wager as it challenges them to let go of fixed ideas on religion and secularity, and to engage in a ritual practice that might lead to different/deeper/embodied knowledge on these issues. And it may invite people to take part in the ultimate wager; the greatest wager is God.
This academic monograph is also a form of play; it is play, more than it is a goal-directed enterprise or an efficacious discussion of a problem.29 Theology can be described as a discipline in which we talk and theorize about God, but it could also be described as a discipline in which we investigate how God talks about us. In this book, I have, at some points, explicitly played with the ‘as if’-character of God’s perspective on us, thus reflecting the fact that our object of research, God, is not bound by our view of this object. These reflections are essentially playful, as they subjunctively combine our reality with God’s reality. More generally, I am by no means convinced that dealing with the research problem in the way that I have done so in this book is the ‘right’ choice. I have tried, however, to offer a meaningful contribution to the interpretation of what is going on with religion. It is serious play, as is scholarly research in general. Through research we simultaneously combine together multiple realities together in the same place: in a playful search for answers to different questions and problems, we combine reality as it presents itself to us with the reality of (one or more) possible interpretations, thus exploring new ways of seeing things. A side effect of my academic play is that it has changed me as a theologian: when I started this passion project, I had little idea what I was getting myself into. Now, at the end of the research and this monograph, I still do not know it, but in a different way. Between the first day and the last day, the first page and the last page, I have embraced a different way of thinking about God. The enterprise of reading a quest for God into the ritual practices of The Passion, has brought moments of creative ‘not knowing’ that have, to borrow a phrase from Kearney, opened up “novel possibilities of meaning” that may be valuable to theology, and have certainly been valuable to me.30
Playing with the question of where God can happen after God, this monograph accommodates a wager on two levels. Firstly, there is the level of secularised society: if we let go of the claim that secularity advances as Dutch society progresses, then taking part in the wager offers the option for people to discover more of the sacred than they, whatever their worldview, are usually inclined to see. Secondly, if we abandon the belief that God has almost disappeared from the Netherlands, but instead engage in a new quest for God, the wager opens a space to discover God after God, and to discover how God returns to humans. In this wager, there is the possibility that faith may or may not retrieved: God as a Deus ludens is an uninvited visitor, a Stranger who may be met with either hostility or hospitality. On both levels, there is the idea of a stranger (in the form of a transformed Christian religion and of ‘God’) presenting itself and challenging people to do something with it. On both levels the basic question is: do you want to get on board, do you wager on seeing God return in new ways? In the end, it is not about claiming the truth, or stating how things are, but how we see them. This also goes for the practical theological play that I have undertaken. The death of God invites us to return to creative and original play that is open to new things. It is all about the challenge to interpret things from a different perspective, to create new meanings, to set aside our certainties and our absolute talk, in order to enter the space where we may or may not see something new and unexpected; where we may or may not encounter God after God. It is all about the invitation of the Stranger to play on.
The conclusions of this book align, for example, with observations on processes of religious negotiation in the context of European societies within history, political philosophy, urban studies, and law, as explored in François Guesnet, Cécile Laborde and Lois Lee, eds., Negotiating Religion. Cross-disciplinary perspectives (New York: Routledge International, 2017), adding both a ritual studies perspective and a theological perspective to these explorations. One example of contemporary processes of negotiation might be the ecclesial-liturgical practices of Lebanese Eastern Orthodox women who are married to Protestant men. The work of Rima Nasrallah has demonstrated how Eastern Christian women in Lebanon celebrate Easter: they negotiate the bodily presence of Christ, who “is perceived to be materially very present in the Orthodox liturgical celebration of Easter”, but is not perceived to be materially present within Protestant liturgy. In their activities, “a dynamics of negotiation between Presence and Absence is evident. The women refuse to totally consent to absence, rather in their weaving of the different liturgical traditions they keep negotiating between distance and touch, in other words between presence and absence”. Rima Nasrallah, Moving and Mixing. The Fluid Liturgical Lives of Antiochian Orthodox and Maronite Women Within the Protestant Churches in Lebanon (=PhD dissertation Protestant Theological University), s.l. 2015, http://theoluniv.ub.rug.nl/153/1/NasrallahR_MovingandMixing_18febr2015.pdf, 73. Another example is the negotiation between religion and formative aspects of self, as Phillis Sheppard has pointed to in her womanist pastoral theological reflections. Cf. Phillis Sheppard, “Womanist Pastoral Theology and Black Women’s Experience of Gender, Religion, and Sexuality”, in Pastoral Theology and Care. Critical Trajectories in Theory and Practice, ed. Nancy J. Ramsay. DOI:
In fact, as Phillis Sheppard emphasizes, negotiation is itself a meaning-making process, and one that is not necessarily direct and self-evident. Cf. Sheppard, “Womanist Pastoral Theology”, 127-128.
Cf. Chapter 2 and Wuthnow, After Heaven, 3-4. I emphatically do not equate the play of negotiation with a spirituality of seeking: this would mean that I would classify all those who engage in negotiation around a Christian ritual such as The Passion into spiritual seekers, which would be problematic.
On the situational approach to the sacred, see Chapter 4.
This situational understanding of the sacred was frequently encountered in the field, particularly among people in the city squares, but also on the internet (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook and the virtual procession). It can be characterised as an ‘ordinary theology’ (cf. Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology, Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), or an ‘espoused’ theology (cf. Helen Cameron, Deborah Bhatti and Catherine Duce, Talking About God in Practice: Theological Action Research and Practical Theology (Norwich: SCM Press, 2010)).
The four gospels, among other canonical biblical texts, already demonstrate that there has been a (turbulent) search for a single stable Christian identity. Cf. Peter-Ben Smit, “Authority in the New Testament and the New Testament’s Authority”, Eccesiology 13 (2017), 83-101, here 96-97. Also cf. Judith Gruber, Theologie nach dem Cultural Turn: Interkulturalität als theologische Ressource (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), in which the author claims that ambivalence is at the heart of Christianity. Smit even goes one step further by claiming that the ambiguity and the recontextualisation of Christian tradition are necessary for its further development. Cf. Peter-Ben Smit, Traditie als missie. 125 jaar Unie van Utrecht – 1275 jaar in de voetsporen van St. Willibrord (Amersfoort/Sliedrecht: Oud-Katholiek Boekhuis/Merweboek, 2015).
This insight can be found in a wide range of theological streams, ranging from Karl Barth’s idea of God as ‘der oder das ‘ganz Andere’ who breaks in upon us ‘senkrecht von oben’ to the work of practitioners of liberation theology, queer theology, etc. whose theologies circle around the idea of a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.
From the Midrash Bereishit Rabbah 49,7 (a midrash with a collection of rabbinical homiletical interpretations of the book of Genesis). The quotation is from Rabbi Simon ben Pazi. Source: “Bereishit Rabbah 49”, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Bereishit_Rabbah.49?lang=bi. Last accessed May 10, 2020.
It would not have made sense that they walked towards Sodom and that Abraham remained standing before the men/the Lord, as Abraham did not walk in front of them. Rabbi Simon’s critical note deals with this inconsistency.
See for example Hendro Munsterman, “Briefwisseling The Passion – De derde brief”, NieuwWij, April 9, 2015, https://www.nieuwwij.nl/themas/briefwisseling-the-passion-de-derde-brief/, where the author suggested challenging the viewers by having a real washing of feet as part of The Passion: the feet of homeless people, bankers, voters for right wing political parties, asylum seekers, bus drivers, hairdressers, victims of sexual abuse, garbage men, rabbis and imams, prostitutes, detainees, paedophile fathers, and even celebrities.
E.g. “Its greater aim is to foster richer material understandings of embodied theology so that those who practice ministry and pursue lives of Christian faith will have a greater sense of their theological and religious vocation”. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “Five Misunderstandings about Practical Theology”, International Journal of Practical Theology 16, no. 1 (2012), 5-26, here 26. “Practical Theology is ‘practical’, and ‘theology’, only when it is shaped by the ordinary practice of the Church”. Pete Ward, “The Hermeneutical and Epistemological Significance of Our Students. A Response to Bonnie Miller-McLemore”, International Journal of Practical Theology 16, no. 1 (2012), 55-65, here 64.
For a full description of this research program, see Marcel Barnard, “Practices Research Program”, Protestant Theological University, https://www.pthu.nl/Onderzoek-PThU/Practices/onderzoeksprogramma-practices.pdf. Last accessed May 10, 2020.
To refer once more to Wuthnow’s ‘spirituality of seeking’. Wuthnow, After Heaven, 3-4.
Tom Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” in Conundrums, eds. Mercer and Miller-McLemore, 8-32.
Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 12.
Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 15.
Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 18.
Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 18, esp. footnote 16.
Cf., for example, Ganzevoort and Roeland, who write that: “The attention for such variegated practices within practical theology clearly signals an evolution of the discipline. Whereas the term ”practical” used to refer to the praxis of ordained ministry and - more recently - to practices of Christian faith communities in a broader sense, it nowadays includes much more. Many praxes or fields of moral, existential, and religious practices are of interest for practical theology. This includes conventional fields like care, education, church, and politics, but also fields like media, leisure, and sport. In principle, every praxis carries potential topics for practical theological research”. Ganzevoort and Roeland, “Lived religion”, 96.
On the way in which the arts (specifically the paradox of the image) can (or should?) influence the practice of both Christian faith and academic practical theology, cf. Marcel Barnard, “Ambivalent Images. Rethinking Biennale 52 Venice/ Documenta 12 Kassel and the Task of Practical Theology”, International Journal of Practical Theology 14, no. 1 (2010), 68-85.
Beaudoin himself mentions that, in cultural contexts outside of the US, the discipline has started to promote non-ecclesial and non-Christian approaches to practices. See Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 17-18 and, on p. 18, footnote 15.
Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation. A Study in Phenomenology [transl. from the German: Phänomenologie der Religion, Tübingen 1933] (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014 [1938]), 104.
Cf. Bonhoeffer’s letter to Eberhard Bethge, April 30, 1944. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, [transl. from the German: Widerstand und Ergebung. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, München 1951] (New York: Touchstone, 1997 [1953]), 280-282.
Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 29. It will be clear that I have not sought to apply ‘traditional’ ideas of God to new ritual practices in new situations or contexts. Nor have I intended to identify God for people for whom traces of God are not real or do not matter. Rather, and much to my surprise, the (disciplinary) openness with which I have performed this academic research appears to tolerate God very well, and vice versa. This book thus does not ‘open’ a God who was ‘closed’ or ‘locked up’ in the tradition: after God, the openness of the God of the Christian tradition appears to be able to come out of this tradition, time and again. After God, the God with which Christianity has concerned itself appears not to be a closed concept. Although I feel at ease with the academic discourse presented throughout the book, the reflexive Side lights in particular have helped to discover this. To me, and perhaps to any reader who undertakes a quest for God, these Side lights have reached out even more than the arguments offered in the chapters, which is why I have presented them as interstitial reflections instead of integrating them into the overall narrative of the book.
Addressing or specifying a conundrum is a way, however, to further a theological project “with respect to the rhetorical parameters and political stakes of a historical moment”, as Beaudoin rightly states. See Beaudoin, “Why does practice matter theologically?” 15.
This does not alter the fact that others are also doing public theology in/on the practice of The Passion: in Chapter 7, I defined public theology as a multi-actor practice, pointing to producers and broadcasters doing theology at the grassroots’ level, i.e. in public, in their own right and in their own way.
Most of these reflections ended up in this book and helped me to perform this complex task.
I.e. the public discourse that sticks to the stubborn image of the Netherlands as a secularised country, in which God is becoming more and more dead; see the Prologue.
Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 11ff. Also cf. Chapter 2.
Joyce Ann Mercer, when comparing the expertise of practical theologians and the expertise of jazz musicians, described the first as having, among other things, the ability to play with unconventional combinations of theory from diverse fields, and the latter as having the ability to play with the unconventional combinations of notes that constitute jazz music. Joyce Ann Mercer, “Interdisciplinarity as a practical theological conundrum”, in Conundrums, eds. Mercer and Miller-McLemore, 163-189, here 174.
Kearney, Anatheism 7. Also see the Prologue where I have characterised this monograph as an effort to ritually think through the anatheistic project.