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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 427-466
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Neil Ormerod and Shane Clifton, Globalization and the Mission of the Church (London: T&T Clark, 2009). x + 217 pp. $130.00 hardback.
Tis book by two Australian theologians builds and proceeds to defend its case in an elegant way. It defines the church’s mission in terms of the values that are constitutive of the Chris- tian faith and then argues that the church’s primary responsibility in this era of globaliza- tion is to proclaim and embody these values. Te church’s mission “in the face of the unique challenges of a globalizing world” is to defend its values and to mediate “the essential ingre- dient of grace to the people, to cultures and to social structures so that evil is overcome and life and love permeate the world” (167).
Overall, Ormerod (a catholic theologian at Australian Catholic University) and Clifton (a Pentecostal at Alphacrucis in Sydney) have shown us one way that the church ought to address and respond to the impact of the globalization on the vital, social, cultural, and personal and religious virtues of Christianity. In doing this they weaved together the narra- tives of Christians’ historical self-understanding and the logic and dynamics of globaliza- tion and give us a fresh perspective on the corporate mission of the Church in a globalizing world. Teir primary contribution is to offer us a theological guidance on the mission of the church in the twenty-first century and how to pursue it in terms of the deep values of the Christian faith.
Tose who expect the collaboration of Catholic and Pentecostal theologians to yield an integrated catholic-pentecostal theological perspective on globalization will be frustrated. Tere is really no engagement with Pentecostal theology. Te theology of the book is one- sidedly catholic: the church is mediating grace for the transformation of persons and cul- tures. Te experience of the Holy Spirit is conceptualized as just another name for the “Christian tradition of grace” (162, 167, 169, 196).
What if instead of resorting to the language of mediating grace, the authors used Andrew Walls’ historical analysis of the move of the Holy Spirit at the peripheries of Christian cen- ters and then conceived of the church’s mission as focused on those at the margins of the social and religious landscape? What if they have shown us how the Holy Spirit is behind or not behind the globalizing trend? How does the telos of globalization align with the work of the Holy Spirit in terms of the New Jerusalem, the cosmopolitan urban civilization that is at the same time historical and trans-historical, a people and a city? What if they have broadened their examination of the relationship of the church and globalization from right doctrines and praxis to right pathos?
Tese hypothetical questions notwithstanding, the set of values around which Ormerod and Clifton defined the mission of the Church and showed how the church can critically engage with the forces of globalization is something both Pentecostals and Catholics can agree on as duly relevant in the public square. Te framework of values they offer is a start- ing point for defining the ethos of the emerging global common that is based on a vision of the human flourishing.
Tis book has many things going for it, but its quality of philosophical erudition is a notch below Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001). And its theological sophis- tication strives to rise to the level of the four volumes on God and Globalization (2001- 2007) edited by Max Stackhouse and Teological Ethics and Global Dynamics (2004) by
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007411X602952
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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 427-466
William Schweiker. In the end, the failure of the authors to engage recent important theo- logical-ethical interventions in the discourse of globalization is disappointing. Tey too swiftly present their borrowed framework (Bernard Lonerganian/Robert Doran theology of history) so that they do not even attempt to justify its adoption. Tere is no discussion of why readers should prefer their chosen framework to that of others.
Te authors claim to be working from the framework of theology of history, but there is really no framework for interpreting the dynamics of history, for discerning the historical place of globalization in the march to the eschaton, and how globalization fits within the overall movements of history. What we have is a twofold movement among the levels of values: an upward movement described as “creative vector in human history” and a down- ward movement noted as “a healing vector in human history.” Te first is focused on short- term orientation and reflects “human spirit working from below up.” Te second is focused on long-term orientation, healing distortions in the other scale, and is putatively divine in its origin. “Our creativity needs healing to liberate it to be itself, freed from the blocks and biases which undermine its power. On the other hand, the healing vector, though divine in its origin, has its own purpose within the creative domain of human history” (39).
Teir theology of history is the dialectics of interactions of the scales of values. Tose familiar with the works of anthropologists Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch know that they have presented similar analyses without calling theirs a theology of history. Ormerod and Clifton’s framework is not a theology of history, carefully defined, but an ethological analysis of the history and culture of globalization.
Finally, one must ask the question, how does this book’s conception of the mission of the church compare with another conception sourced from within Pentecostal theology? Recently Wolfgang Vondey in his Beyond Pentecostalism (2010) has attempted to nudge contemporary theological enterprise away from its “performative and task-oriented charac- ter” to playful participation in the joy of God guided by pneumatological, eschatological, and ethical imagination. He aspires to open up ecclesiology to the novelty and surprise of divine encounter, the forward moving expression of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a move that might have benefitted Ormerod and Clifton by guardedly interpreting globaliza- tion as a deepening, broadening, and complexification of social structures. Ten the church and the emerging global civil society might have been considered as a “playground” that invites the world and its peoples to the play of the Word and Spirit and to a form of exis- tence that enables all persons to surpass themselves.
Reviewed by Nimi Wariboko
Katherine B. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics
Andover Newton Teological School, Newton Centre, Massachusetts [email protected]
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