William Cavanaugh 'Theopolitical Imagination'

"In the Church, then, the practices of the liturgy, the creeds, the scriptural canon, hospitality, binding and loosing, the exercise of episcopal authority, all constitute the Church as a distinctive public body. Augustine goes beyond saying that the Church is public like the Roman Empire is public, however, arguing that the Empire is not public at all because its practices are not oriented toward the worship of God. A true res publica is based on justice, which must include giving God his due in sacrifice, for only when God is loved can there be love of others and a mutual acknowledgement of right. According to Augustine, the true public thing is thus constituted by the Eucharist, which offers true sacrifice to God and makes the Church into Christ's body."

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Myth of Civil Society as Freespace

I am entirely in agreement with the attempt to envision a space for the Church that is neither Constantinian nor privatised. There is much to applaud in the Himeses attempt to allow theology out of the ghetto of private discourse. Boyte's scheme goes further in breaking out of a narrow focus of the making of public policy. I am in deep sympathy with Boyte's populism, his appreciation for the churches as potential 'free spaces' which escape the hegemony of the state. Christian educators' attempt to use Boyte's ideas in the form of public achievement have the potential to aid in moving the churches' political discourse and activism beyond limp recommendations on how to vote. Nevertheless, I want to point to some problems that undercut these attempts to give the Church a significant public presence.

To me, both the Murrayites and Boyte are far too reticent about the interpenetration of state and society. In both models civil society appears as an essentially free space outside the coercive reach of the state. The flows of power tend to move from civil society to the state, such that the ultimate goal of democratic organisation and social movement – even for Boyte – is to generalise the impact of such movements through influencing the state. The potential of every person to limit, control, and use the state is highlighted in a fashion not too distinct from the 'civics' approach that Boyte criticises. Though Boyte's approach emphasises power more than the Murrayites stress reasoned consensus, power nevertheless tends to be envisioned as flowing in one direction, from civil society to state.

Insofar as they are speaking descriptively, however, I find this view of civil society far from convincing. As political scientist Michael Budde, has written, 'Murray’s theory of the state, such as it is, can only be described as naïve, almost a direct transferral from civics texts to political description.' In a society in which up to a third of the work force labours directly or indirectly for the state, it is simply empirically false to claim that the state is a small and limited part of the wider societal whole, regardless of the intentions of the Founding Fathers. In fact the supposedly free debate of the public square is disproportionately affected by the state. What counts as news is increasingly determined by spin doctors and media handlers. The media looks for its sources among government spokesmen and various 'experts' closely linked with the state apparatus.

Beyond the issue of 'big government' , however , other political scientists writing on the state in late capitalism tend to emphasise the extent to which civil society and the state have been fused into different moments of a single complex. The economic, political, social and cultural spheres have merged to such an extent that culture obeys the logic of the market and the political apparatuses in turn create spaces for capital to operate. What is permissible as public discourse increasingly obeys the logic of accumulation, state-funded school lunch programs are defended in terms of increasing student's performance and thus enhancing the country's position in the global economy vis-a-vis the Japanese. In this way the state-society complex comes to disempower and co-opt other forms of discourse, such as that of the Church.

Imagining that the state is a limited part of society only makes the Church more vulnerable to its own debilitation. The state is not simply a mechanism for the representation of the freely gathered general will, nor is it a neutral instrument at the disposal of the various classes. It is rather, in the words of Kenneth Surin, an institutional assemblage which has as its task 'the modification and neutralisation, primarily by its symbolic representations of social classes, of the efforts of resistance on the part of social subjects'. The state, as Surin puts it, 'subserves the processes of accumulation by representing the whole world of social production for its subjects as something that is “natural”, as an inevitability.' Thus for example, the 'laws' of supply and demand and maximisation of self-interest are presented as responding to human nature and economists' predictions are held to be descriptive of reality rather than prescriptive, when they are in fact both.

The history of the modern state shows that it is not simply the instrument of the will of the people expressed through the organs of civil society. In fact the modern sovereign state has been defined by its usurping power from lesser communal bodies. The view that the state is a natural outgrowth of family and community is extremely questionable. As Robert Nisbet points out, the modern state arose from opposition to kinship and other local social groupings; 'the history of the Western State has been characterised by the gradual absorption of powers and responsibilities formerly resident in other associations and by an increasing directness of relation between the sovereign authority of the State and the individual citizen.

Examples of this process are innumerable: the intervention of the state in matters of kinship, property, and inheritance; the conception of the law as something 'made' or legislated by the state rather than 'disclosed' from its divine source through the workings of custom and tradition; the abolition of ecclesiastical courts and the transfer of sole judicial proprietorship to the crown; the replacement of local duties and privileges by the rights of interchangeable individuals,; the enclosure of common lands; the state's securing of a monopoly over legitimate violence. Undergirding these and countless other instances is the use of Roman law on the Continent to arrogate to the state the sole privilege of recognising the existence of lesser associations; such associations become endowed with a purely fictitious personality, a nomen juris given from the centre by royal fiat rather than developed organically.

State sovereignty and the debilitation of other associations were not meant to oppress but rather to free the individual; even more state-centred theorists such as Hobbes and Rousseau are quite clear on this point. As Nisbet makes plain, 'The real conflict in modern political history has not been, as is so often stated, between State and individual, but between State and social group.' Indeed, the rise of the state is predicated on the creation of the individual. The realisation of a single, unquestioned political centre would make equivalent and equal each individual before the law, thereby freeing the individual from the caprice of local custom and sub-loyalties which would divide them from their fellow citizens. For example, the dissolution of the medieval guild system and the endless 'interventions' of religious custom in economic matters is what unleashes the 'free' market. The power of the state grew in concert with the rise of capitalism, because of direct state subsidies for business and international trade, the development of state-sanctioned standardised monetary and taxation systems, and the emergence of a centralised legal system which made possible the commodification and contractualisation of land, goods and especially labour. In other words, the impersonal and centralised state accompanied the invention of the autonomous individual liberated from the confines of the traditional group and now relating to other individuals on the basis of contract. Property – including one's own self in the form of one's labour – became alienable. Thus was born both the capitalist and the wage labourer.

In an article entitled 'War Making and State Making as Organised Crime', sociologist Charles Tilley explores the analogy of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence with the protection rackets run by the friendly neighbourhood mobster. According to Tilly 'a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing customers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government.' States extort large sums of money and the right to send their citizens out to kill and die in exchange for protection from violence both internal and external to the state's borders. What converts the state war making from 'protection' to 'protection racket' is the fact that often states offer defence from threats which they themselves create, threats which can be imaginary or the real results of the state's own activities. Furthermore, the internal repression and the extraction of money and bodies for 'defence' that the state carries out are frequently among the most substantial impediments to the ordinary citizen's livelihood. The 'offer you can't refuse' is usually the most costly. The main difference between Uncle Sam and the Godfather is that the latter did not enjoy the peace of mind afforded by official government sanction.

Building on Arthur Stinchombe's work on legitimacy, Tilly shows that historically what distinguished 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' violence had little to do with the assent of the governed or the religious sentiments which bind us. The distinction was secured by states' effective monopolisation of the means of violence within a defined territory, a gradual process only completed in Europe with the birth of the modern state in the 16th and 17th centuries. The line between state violence and banditry was a fluid one early in the state-making process. Eventually the personnel of states were able to purvey violence more efficiently and on a wider scale than the personnel of other organisations.

The process of making states was inseparable from the pursuit of war by the power elites of emergent states. As Tilly tells it, 'the people who controlled European states and states in the making warred in order to check or overcome their competitors and thus to enjoy the advantages of power within secure or expanding territory.' To make more effective war, they attempted to secure regularised access to the money and bodies of their subjects. Building up their war-making capacity, and the birth of standing armies, increased in turn their power to eliminate rivals and monopolise the extraction of these resources from subject populations. These activities of extraction were facilitated by the rise of tax-collection apparatuses, courts, and supporting bureaucracies, in short, the rise of the modern state capable of realising administrative sovereignty over a defined territory.

The assent of the governed followed, and is to a large extent produced by, state monopoly on the means of violence within its borders. As a general rule, people are more likely to ratify the decisions of an authority that controls substantial force, both from fear of retaliation and, for those who benefit from stability, the desire to maintain that stability. As Tilly puts it, 'A tendency to monopolise the means of violence makes a government's claim to provide protection , in either the comforting or the ominous sense of the word, more credible and more difficult to resist.

In contrast to the Murrayite model, in which power flows from civil society to state, other political theorists beginning with Hegel have drawn the flows of power in the opposite direction, from state to civil society. For Hegel, the associations of civil society take on an educative function between the state and the individual. Work is not excluded from Hegel's definition of civil society. Rather, civil society is where concrete labour is converted to abstract labour, that is, where the raw untamed forces of labour are taken up by the institutions of civil society – such as trade unions, schools, and corporations – and domesticated for the sake of the universal interest of society. Labour, and all the interests and ends of individuals, must pass through the educative project of civil society before they can be fully realised, gathered, and universalised in the state, which is the 'actuality of the ethical Idea'. Though based on production and family, the state is not the result of them, but rather comes first and is the true ground of them according to Hegel. Work, family and the person himself only becomes 'real', takes on objectively, by participation in the state.

Michel Foucault has shown in empirical detail how what Hegel considered the ideal has become a baleful reality. The institutions of civil society – the party, the union, the school, the corporation, the Church, the prison – have an educative or disciplinary function which realises the state project. Rather than seeing the labour union, for example as the representative of the interests of workers in the open debate fro influencing state policy, Foucalult describes the way that unions serve to mediate the antagonisms of capitalist social relations and produce workers who are supportive of the capitalist state. The hyperpatriotism of unions (and churches) during wartime illustrates this. It is not necessarily that the state directs a conscious conspiracy aimed at educating and propagandising its citizens. Surveillance has become a general feature of Western society, a feature that is one with state hegemony but does not depend on a totalitarian centre to enforce its rule. The power of Foucault's Panopticon image is precisely that self-discipline becomes the norm, reinforced by the pedagogical function of the apparently free institutions of civil society. As Michael Hardt argues in an essay entitled 'The Withering of Civil Society', it is perhaps most descriptively accurate to say that there is no longer any significant distinction to be made between civil society and state, the two having been fused to such a great extent. For example, government regulation – much of it for good ends – reaches into every facet of society and every type of activity. Furthermore government is increasingly seen as a bureaucratic provider of goods and services whose primary job is to serve its 'customers', a fact which Boyte himself laments. In arguing against the voluntarists, Boyte acknowledges the extent to which spaces in state, business, and civil society have come to resemble each other because they have been colonised by the rationalisation of the market. He singles out the managerial culture of the mega-church, with its emphasis on attracting new congregants by providing them with specialised service, as a particularly bleak example.

Today's gods do not respect the neat divisions between state and civil society, and economy, a point made sharply by Michel de Certeau:

Seized from the moment of awakening by the radio (the voice of the law), the listener walks all day through a forest of narratives, journalistic, advertising and televised, which at night, slip a few final messages under the door of sleep. More than the God recounted to us by the theologians of the past, these tales have a function of providence and predestination: they organise our work, our celebrations – even our dreams – in advance. Social life multiplies the gestures and modes of behaviour imprinted by the narrative models: it continually reproduces and stores up the 'copies' of narratives.

If this interpenetration of state, society, and economy is indeed the case, then appeals to the idea of free space outside the state may not be sufficient for the creation of true alternative spaces. Indeed, a project like Public Achievement can be seen as fulfilling the kind of educative or disciplinary role that Hegel and Foucault envision for the institutions of civil society. Embedded in Public Achievement's definition of freedom, for instance, is an anthropology that allows easily assimilation to a democratic capitalist order but is not so easily assimilable to a Christian anthropology in which a person's ends are not chosen but given by God. If Christian children's public identities are being formed to be citizens of the nation-state, those same students can perhaps be forgiven for forgetting that by baptism their 'citizenship is in heaven', as Paul tells the Philippians (3:20) and that their fellow citizens the saints, as the Ephesians are reminded (2:19). In other words, it is difficult to conceive of the church as a 'free space' when we have been self-disciplined to avoid public Christian language even within our own schools.

In both the Murrayite and Boyte models, the price to the Church of admission to the 'public' is a submission of its particular truth claims to the bar of public reason, a self-discipline of Christian speech. In the case of Public Achievement, particular Christian ends – such as an especial care for the poor before considerations of self interest – are subjugated to a purely procedural search for consensus among a diversity of ends, none of which can ultimately claim a larger warrant than what issues from self-interested choice. Political theorist Romand Coles criticises Boyte's pragmatism for its propensity - contrary to Boyte's intention – to silence minority positions and unpopular claims to some measure of truth. An emphasis on drawing together many diverse voices can foster a need to converge prematurely around common goals. Coles argues that proposals to change the terms of political discourse that seem 'absurd' or 'divisive' to the mainstream are in danger of being silenced. 'Pragmatic politics can foster poor listening and restless intolerance toward those who speak from angles and idioms that are foreign to many in the organisation or those in the middle to whom an organisation would appeal.' Thus although B. holds up the black church as a model of a 'free space,' it is not clear how he could accommodate as public the outrageous truth claims some black churches might want to make, claims such as 'Jesus is Lord, and not just for us.' An even deeper problem, however is the fact Public Achievement, despite its claims, does present as given on ultimate end: the renewal of American democracy. On this point there is no talk of diversity of ends; the achievement of American democracy is simply presented as the telos of one's actions and the proper object of one's faith.

Murray is at least clear that the public consensus is built not upon self-interest but upon God-given truth. Nevertheless , the M. project represents the self-disciplining of the Church's ability to make theological claims in public. Theology must submit to what 'the public' can consider reasonable, where 'the public' is understood in terms of the nation-state. Christian symbols must be run through the sausage grinder of social ethics before coming out on the other end as publicly digestible policy. As Talal Asad has shown, however, religion as a symbol system theoretically detachable from communities of discipleship is a modern invention that facilitated the absorption of the Church into the modern secular state. For the Himeses, ritual and symbol are generically distinct from instrumental or pragmatic actions. Christian symbols stand at one remove from the reality they represent, and they function (Geertz maintains) to elicit motivations which are then translatable into publicly available actions. Christian symbols can elicit transformations apart from participation in a community of discipleship. However, as Asad points out in his study of medieval – especially Benedictine – practices, ritual was never imagined as a distinct activity seperate from a complete programme of Christian discipline and discipleship. Indeed, religious symbols are never seperable from bodily practices of discipline and power. In the modern era, Asad points out, 'discipline (intellectual and social) would abandon religious space, letting 'belief', 'conscience' and 'sensibility' take its place.' This does not mean, however, that discipline has disappeared, only that it is now administered by the state, which is assumed to possess an absolute monopoly on the means of coercion. In the modern West the primary locus of discipline has become the state-society complex, and the Church has been essentially transformed into a semi-private voluntary association.

A major problem with the attempt to make religion public is it is still a 'religion'. Asad shows how the attempt to identify a distinctive essence of religion, and thus protect it from charges that it is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of 'politics' or 'economics' is in fact linked with the modern removal of religion from the spheres of reason and power. Religion is a universal essence detachable from particular ecclesial practices, and as such can provide the motivation necessary for all citizens of whatever creed to regard the nation-state as their primary community, and thus produce peaceful consensus. As we have seen, religion as a trans-historical phenomenon seperate from 'politics' is a creation of Western modernity designed to tame the Church. Religion may take different cultural or symbolic expressions, but it remains a universal essence generically distinct from political power which then must be translated into publicly acceptable 'values' in order to become public currency. Religion is detached from its specific locus in disciplined ecclesial practices so that it may be compatible with the modern Christian's subjection to the disciplines of the state. Echoes of Bodin resound in the public theologians' attempt to make religion the glue that holds the commonwealth together. Religion, that is, and not the Church, for the Church must be seperated entirely from the domain of power.

The great irony, then, is that in trying to arrange for the Church to influence 'the public', rather than simply be public, the public has reduced the Church to its own terms. Citizenship has displaced discipleship as the Church's public key. In banishing theology from the public sphere, the Church has found it difficult to speak with theological integrity even within the Church. The flows of power from Church to public are reversed, threatening to flood the Church itself.

It is little wonder many people find liturgy, sacrament, and doctrine to be irrelevant to the 'real world' of social problems. Christian symbols float free from the Church, which theologically is a social reality in its own right. Christian symbol must be translated and replaced in order to escape ghettoisation. In the Christian tradition, by constrast, the liturgy is more than a generator of symbols for individual consumption. It is, as the original Greek leitourgia suggests – and despite PA – the true 'work of the people' , the ergon of the laos. The Church gathered around the altar does not simply disperse and be absorbed into civil society when God's blessing sends it forth. The liturgy does more than generate interior motivations to be better citizens. The liturgy generates a body, the Body of Christ – the Eucharist makes the Church, in Henri de Lubac's words – which is itself a sui generis social body, a public presence irreducible to a voluntary association of civil society.

As this suggests, I think the deepest problem with the two models of civil society we have been examining is their anaemic ecclesiology. Their search for a public Christian presence that is neither private nor in the thrall of the state simply bypasses the possibility of the Church as a significant social space. Missing is even a basic Augustinian sense that the Church is itself an alternative 'space' or set of practices whose citizenship is in some sort of tension with citizenship in the civitas terrena. For Augustine not the imperium but the Church is the true res publica (public thing/affair); 'the imperium has forfeited any such claim to be truly public by its refusal to do justice, by refusing to give God his due. For the Murrayite and B models, on the other hand, what is public is that space bounded by the nation-state. To enter this public is to leave behind the Church as a body. Individual Christians fortified by 'basic orienting attitudes', can enter public space, but the Church itself drops out of the picture. The Church is an essentially asocial entity that provides only 'motivations' and 'values' for public action. Christians must therefore find the politics and the publicness elsewhere, borrowing from the available options presented by the secular nation-state. If we wish to go public, we must take on the language of citizenship.


IV THE CHURCH AS PUBLIC SPACE

In the modern age, Christians have tended to succumb to the power of state soteriology, and they have often done so on Christian grounds. It is not enough to see what is called 'secularisation' of one mythos of salvation for another; what's more, the successor mythos has triumphed to a great extent because it mimics its predecessor. In the dissociation of the Church from the sword, many Christians have seen the God of peace emancipated from captivity to the principalities and powers, and in national unity despite religious pluralism many have glimpsed the promise of original Christian quest for unity and peace.

If the Church accedes to the role of voluntary association of private citizens, however, it will lack the disciplinary resources to resist the State religare , its practices of binding. The call for the Church to be 'public' is not, however, a call for the Church to take up the sword once again. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. I have contrasted Church discipline with state discipline in order to counter violence on behalf of the state, which has spilled so much blood in our time. Contesting the state's monopoly on violence does not mean another form of Constantinianism. What I have tried to argue is that the seperation of the Church from power did nothing to staunch the flow of blood on the West's troubled pilgrimage. The pitch of war has grown more shrill, and the recreation of the Church as a voluntary association of practitioners of religion has only sapped our ability to resist. The discipline of the state will not be hindered by the Church's participation and complicity in the 'public debate'.

What would it mean to construe the Church as a public space in its own right? First we must be more precise about what 'public' means. In one sense I have been using the term negatively to mean 'not private', that is , not confined to the individual or the home. It would be a mistake, however to simply accept the dichotomy of public and private as it is currently construed. In the Christian tradition, the home is not simply private space, simply oikos, in part because the home is always open to the community through the practice of hospitality (Luke 10.3-11) but also because the Church itself is a new 'family' that breaks down the isolation of the old family unit (Mark 3:20-35). As John Paul II says in his 'Letter to Families', the family through the Church opens up to a wider 'public space', the widest imaginable; the family is 'the fundamental “cell” of society' whose task is to extend its own 'communion of persons' to the creation of a 'civilisation of love.'. John Paul reminds us that etymologically the word 'civilisation' is derived from civis ,or citizen, but this meaning should not be confined to what is ordinarily construed as the civil or political: 'the most profound meaning of the term civilisation is not merely political, but rather pertains to human culture.

The Church appears then as a reality that is neither polis nor oikos . Ephesians 2:19 uses both 'public' and 'private' language simultaneously. : 'you are citizens (sympolitai) with the saints and also members of the household (oikeioi) of God'. The early Christians borrowed the term ekklesia or 'assembly' from the Greek city-state, where ekklesia meant the assembly of all those with citizen rights in a given city. The early Christians thus refused the available language of guild or association (e.g. koinon, collegium) and asserted that the Church was not gathered around particular interests, but was interested in all things; it was an assembly of the whole. And yet the whole was not the city-state or empire, but the people of God. As Gerhard Lohfink points out, the ultimate source for the language of ekklesia is not the Greek city-state but the assembly of Israel at Sinai. In Deuteronomy the foundational assembly of Israel at Mt Sinai takes place according to the formulaic phrase 'the day of the assembly.' In using the term ekklesia the Church understood itself as the eschatological gathering of Israel. In this gathering those who are by definition excluded from being citizens of the polis and consigned to the oikos – women, children, slaves – are given full membership through baptism.



The gathering of Israel is made possible by certain detailed practices, structured by the Torah, and oriented toward the exclusive worship of God. What makes these practices 'public' is that no aspect of life is excluded from them. The Law makes clear that what one does with one's money, one's body, one's neighbour, even one's faeces are all within the ambit of the people's worship of God, and all these practices combined form a distinctive body of people. When I use the term 'discipline', it refers to a performance of the body. According to Hugh of St Victor, 'it is discipline imposed on the body which forms virtue. Body and spirit are but one: disordered movements of the former betray outwardly (foris) the disarranged interior (intus) of the soul. But inversely, of dressing (in habitu), in posture and movement (in gestu) , in speech (in locutione), and in table manners (in mensa). This is no disjunction between outer behaviour and inner religious piety. The modern construction of religion interiorises it, and makes religion only a motivating force on bodily political and economic practices. The modern Church thus splits the body from the soul and purchases freedom from religion by handing the body over to the state.

The recovery of the Thomist idea of religion as a virtue is crucial to the Church's resistance to state discipline. The virtues involve the whole person, body and soul, in practices which form the Christian to the service of God. Furthermore the virtues are acquired communally, within the 'public' practices of an ecclesial community which, as the Body of Christ, witnesses to the ability to discern vice from virtue, or violence from peace. Christian 'political ethics', therefore, is inseparable from an account of how virtues such as religion and peaceableness are produced and reproduced – or deformed – in the habitual practices of the Church. A public Christian presence cannot be the pursuit of influence over the powers, but rather a question of what kind of community disciplines we need to produce people capable of speaking truth to power.

The virtues are acquired by disciplined following of virtuous exemplars. Discipline is therefore perhaps best understood as discipleship; whereas the discipline of the state seeks to create disciples of Leviathan, the discipline of the Church seeks to form disciples of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. For this reason our discipline will more resemble martyrdom than military victory. Oscar Romero, the day before he was martyred, used his authority to order Salvadoran troops to disobey orders to kill. Romero understood that the discipline of Christian discipleship was in fundamental tension with that of the army. He put it this way: 'Let it be quite clear that if we are being asked to collaborate with a pseudo peace, a false order, based on repression and fear, we must recall that the only order and the only peace that God wants is one based on truth and justice. Before these alternatives, our choice is clear: We will follow God's order, not men's.'

What I am pointing to is not the discipline of coercion but its antidote, to be found in all those practices of the Christian Church which bind us to one another in the peace of Christ. Recall that Hobbes' two crucial moves in domesticating the Church were to make individuals adhere to the sovereign instead of to one another, and to deny the international character of the Church. In contrast, as some Latin American churches have shown us, the Christian way to resist institutionalised violence is to adhere to one another as Church, to act as a disciplined Body, in witness to the world. As Romero wrote, 'The Church is well aware that anything it can contribute to the process of liberation in this country will have originality and effectiveness only when the church is truly identified as the church.' The ecclesial base communities of peace and justice without waiting for an illusory influence on the state while the poor go hungry. And the very Eucharistic practices by which the world is fed in turn join people into one Body which transcends the limits of the nation-state. To recognise Christ in our sisters and brothers in other lands, the El Salvadors, Panamas and Iraqs of the contemporary scence, is to begin to break the idolatry of the state, and to make visisble the Body of Christ in the world. We must cease to think that the only choices open to the Church are either to withdraw into some private or 'sectarian' confinement, or to embrace the public debate policed by the state. The Church as Body of Christ transgresses both the lines which seperate public from private and the borders of nation-states, thus creating spaces for a different kind of political practice, one which is incapable of being pressed into service of wars or rumours of wars.

In the Church, then, the practices of the liturgy, the creeds, the scriptural canon, hospitality, binding and loosing, the exercise of episcopal authority, all constitute the Church as a distinctive public body. Augustine goes beyond saying that the Church is public like the Roman Empire is public, however, arguing that the Empire is not public at all because its practices are not oriented toward the worship of God. A true res publica is based on justice, which must include giving God his due in sacrifice, for only when God is loved can there be love of others and a mutual acknowledgement of right. According to Augustine, the true public thing is thus constituted by the Eucharist, which offers true sacrifice to God and makes the Church into Christ's body.

Having discussed what it means to call the Church 'public', we need to be more precise about what it means to call the Church a 'space'. One option is to produce a two-dimensional mapping of the nation-state, then configure the borders of the Church on this grid. Those borders could be drawn coterminous with the borders of the nation-state (theocracy) or as an isolated island geographically within the nation-state but not participating in it (Amish), or as a space within 'civil society', that is, within the national borders but outside the state apparatus (Murray). What these models have in common the map, a formal figure of abstract places from which the dimension of time has been eliminated. [e.g. mathematical abstraction of quantity from moving bodies represented by motion graphs] Placing the church on such a grid is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. In medieval theology, the temporal indicated a time between the first and second comings of Christ, during which the coercive sword of civil authority, under the tutelage of the Church, was 'temporarily' necessary. One need not endorse Constantinian arrangements of medieval Christendom to lament the fact that in modern times the temporal has become not a time but a space, a realm or sphere, one which is usually located outside the spiritual realm occupied by the Church.

There is a much richer concept of space to be found in the work of Jesuit social theorist Michel de Certeau. Certeau contrasts the 'place' (lieu) of the map with 'space' (espace). Place is a static order in which all the elements are arranged in their proper location, beside one another, no tow things occupy the same location. The map produces a place by means of an abstract, two-dimensional grid produced by observation, allowing surveillance and control of a particular territory. After the fifteenth century, maps gradually replaced itineraries, which had described journeys or pilgrimages in terms of the actions prescribed at different points (spend the night here, pray at this shrine, etc.). Such itineraries describe not place but space. A space takes into account the vector of time, such that different spaces are created by the ensemble of movement and actions on them. Space is produced by people performing operations on places, using things in different ways for different ends. According to Certeau it is stories that 'organise the play of changing relationships between spaces and places.' For example, the stories told in history books (Manifest Destiny) and on the evening news induce belief in a national territory, which mobilises certain actions such as participation in war. The stories told by Native Americans might, on the other hand, refract space in entirely different ways, and mobilise other types of actions. In theological terms we can think of Certeau's work here as a gloss on Augustine's conception of the two cities. They do not exist beside each other on a territorial grid, but are formed by telling different stories about ends, and by thus using matter and motion in different ways.

The Eucharistic liturgy can be understood as what Certeau calls a 'spatial story', an operation performed on matter and place – in this case by God, with human co-operation – which produced a different kind of space. The liturgy is not a symbol to be 'read', its 'meaning' formally detached from its signs, internalised to the individual, and smuggled as 'attitudes' or 'values' into another space outside of the Church. Just as eating and drinking together do no merely symbolise a family, but help to constitute a family, so eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ transform the partakers into a body with a social dimension. For this reason the discipline of the Christian community has since the very beginning taken the form of excommunication; who is and who is not partaking of the table defines the spatial limit of the community gathered around the table.

David Schindler uses the home-cooked meal to illustrate how the family is a different practice of space. The home-cooked meal, is a different economy, one which transforms material objects and reconfigures space and time. Lest this be seen as a quaint and strictly private practice, Schindler describes how the Christian is called to extend this space into ever wider circles; the task of the Church is to domesticate the world, to heal homelessness and anomie of the modern condition by extending the 'community of persons' that exists in the family – and that mirrors the Trinitarian life – to the whole world. The Church does this by performing actions on matter and motion, space and time.

To speak of the Church as a public space means, then, that Christians perform stories which transform the way space is configured. The pre-eminent 'spatial story' is that of the formation of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. Imagine if Christian students, such as those involved in Public Achievement, were trained to see other not through the lens of self-interest but as fellow members of the mystical body of Christ. Why not tell them that in taking action on the plight of undocumented workers they are not reinforcing the borders of the national territory defined by 'citizenship' , but rather building up the body of Christ, which transcends those borders, and in which all – Christian or not – have a share? This approach shares with B a concern to move beyond the image of the unitary 'public square' to the fostering of a multiplicity of free spaces that are nonetheless fully public. Far from a withdrawal, this approach asserts the full public currency of the most basic Christian convictions. Furthermore, the international nature of the Church challenges the sectarian narrowness of the nation-state for whom citizenship stops at the border.

To take the Church seriously as a 'free space' would mean more than encouraging Christians to look for the public elsewhere. B's work helpfully suggests that our imaginatoin have been limited by a narrow focus on one public forum supervised by the state. When Christians approach the creation and use of material goods, for example, we have been trained to think in terms of 'economic policy', by which is meant the conversation in civil society and state among banks, the Federal Reserve, corporations, labour unions, Congress and other concerned parties over how the state ought to manage or not manage the flow of money, taxes, tariffs, etc. When framed in these terms, the only responsible reaction seems to be lobbying. Under certain circumstances lobbying – or, better, witnessing – may be helpful. The most fruitful way to dialogue with those outside of the Church, however, is through concrete practices that do not need translation into some putatively 'neutral' language to be understood. A significant response would be creating spaces in which alternative stories about material goods are told, and alternative forms of economics are made possible. For example Churches in my area have already begun to establish relationships with CSA (community supported agriculture) farms. In CSA's, a community is formed by buying shares of a farm's produce at the beginning of the growing season, thus sharing the risks involved in farming. The community is invited to help with the work of the farm and receives the benefits of its produce. In a significant and material way, the imagination of globalisation is short-circuited and replaced by an alternative economic space which gives priority to personal relationships, community responsibility, a liveable income for farmers, and a direct stewardship of the land from which our food comes.

The irony implicit in the models of civil society I have examined is that in our attempts to do social justice and to make theology public, we in fact consign the Church to public irrelevance. Public theology is simply not public enough. What is lost is an important possibility of challenging in a fundamental way the dreary calculus of state and individual by creating truly free alternative spaces, cities of God in time.