Participatory Thinking
I have recently read a book entitled Participation in God by our own Diana Luck’s step-son Thomas. I appreciated it and commend it to you. The theme of participation has been important in theology: for example John Zizioulas developed an ontology around it, and the Finish Lutherans used it to find a détente between catholic and evangelical. It is easy to see how a careless use of the concept could end up compromising the doctrine of grace, and this in turn would have an ill-effect on preaching. Here Luck’s work is helpful in the way that it bridges biblical, theological, and practical.
The eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously used the term ‘thick description,’ and here is what he meant by it. While philosophical terms move in generalities, understanding a phenomenon in its particularity requires adding layer upon layer of historical, physical, social, and philosophical description. We might compare understanding to the old overhead projectors with multiple transparencies. Thus one builds up a picture of something located in place, time, and culture. What if we were to think about the word ‘participation’ in this way? (For this is what Luck’s book implicitly offers).
In this book, the overlays offering a thick description of ‘participation’ are richly varied. First the Jewish philosopher Joseph S. guides us, with a complex reading of the figure of Adam in Genesis. He differentiates ‘first’ Adam as the being gifted with insight and will, ‘a little lower than the angels,’ from ‘second’ Adam, a creature of the earth who gives and receives mercy. This tension within the ‘image of God’ is within Adam prior to the fall, though ‘sublapsarian’ Adam has yet another tension. For this reason, already from creation the form of participation for Adam the creature is obedience
The second vector on participation, guided by the New Testament witness, is table fellowship. This reaches back to the Passover tradition, through Jesus’ own table fellowship, to include the Last Supper and His atoning death it interpreted, and on to the Eucharist in the early Church. Here too participation has a complex, particular, and multi-valent meaning. Here too meaning moves ‘thickly’ from the specific to general, from Christology to ecclesiology. The third overlay, with perhaps a more uneasy fit with what has preceded, is participation as found in contemporary writings about social and systemic change. “Participation’ is not one thing but many, including distance, struggle, private emotion and public action, stasis and disruption. “Participation’ has seasons and its own variety of plot-lines. Here too we need to ‘take captive’ these secular categories and insights for Christ, and in this task what has preceded in the book can be our help in developing a practical and pastoral theology for parish life.
