Worship as Public Theology
Rachel Baard
Rachel Baard is assistant professor of theology and ethics and director of the Master of
Arts in Public Theology Program at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.
In short, public theology is not an “extra” added to the theological reflection or worship practices of the church but is simply part and parcel of the whole theological package that makes up the self-reflection of the church, which in turn shapes the presence of the church in the world.
The public theology of the church has not always been faithful to the gospel, as illustrated by countless examples of the church conceiving theological ideas such as antisemitism, sexism, racism, the justification of colonialism, distorted theologies of creation that feed into the exploitation of the earth, and more.
In short, the question “Who is our God?” needs to be central to preaching for public theology.
It acknowledges that when we gather to break bread, to sing hymns, to pray for our neighbors, and to confess our sins, we are not engaged in private acts but in profoundly public ones that signal to the world who our God is and what God requires of us.
What is public theology?” This was the question I was asked, somewhat abruptly, by two of my Union Presbyterian Seminary colleagues at a faculty dinner in 2019. I was surprised by the question, since I had not previously focused explicitly on public theology in my work. Moreover, since Union proudly proclaims in its motto that it exists “for the church in the world,” I thought they must surely have already figured it out. But as the newly appointed assistant professor of theology and ethics, I wanted to put my best foot forward, so I offered some thoughts. I assumed they wanted my input because they knew that my theology had been shaped by the church struggle against apartheid in my native South Africa—a struggle which can certainly be described as “public theology.” This took the form of theological statements against apartheid (such as the Kairos Document and the Confession of Belhar), and of church folk getting involved in political action, with leading figures such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. Allan Boesak among them.
But that background did not necessarily provide me with a ready-made definition of the concept of public theology that I could offer as part of dinner table conversation. And so the question has remained with me, shaping my work since then. It led me to help craft and now direct our Master of Arts in Public Theology Program, which operates in intersection with the work of our centers on womanist leadership, global Christianity, and justice and reconciliation, as well as other centers and initiatives at the school, including a Lilly grant project focused on the “church in the public square.” In this work we have operated with a definition of public theology as “a field which draws on biblical, historical, theological, ethical, and practical resources of the Christian faith in order to serve the common good of society.”
The students who are drawn to our Public Theology program are interested in engaging topics such as public policy, ecological concerns, economic justice, gender issues, inter-religious dialogue, and issues of race and reconciliation. Some plan to include this kind of engagement in congregational ministry, while others are interested in working for charities or NGOs. Many of them arrive in the program with a vague notion of public theology as something different from the “regular” theology of the church—a kind of political addition aimed at social justice activism. But one would misunderstand what public theology is when one thinks of it as separate from the doctrinal theology or worship practices of the church. In fact, theology is never anything other than public.
In this regard it is good to recall Anselm of Canterbury’s classical definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding,” which means that it is the ongoing conversation of the Christian church about what we confess and how we are to live in light of that confession. Given the inevitably public nature of confession and of our very lives, it is in some ways unnecessary to speak of “public theology” since all theology is public—even those expressions that we think are “private” or belonging only to the inner life and organization of the church.
The theologian David Tracy suggested that a “thrust to publicness” must be present in all theologies, and he argued that the theologian is always addressing three publics: church, academia, and society.1 Even though theologians often tend to focus on one or the other of these publics, it is not really possible for theology to be only “churchy,” purely academic, or entirely aimed at the public. As illustration one may point to the work of Karl Barth, whose Church Dogmatics is the source of countless academic treatises, and whose work spoke loudly and clearly to the social struggles in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, among others. (This is exemplified in documents such as the Barmen Declaration and the Confession of Belhar in response to those respective contexts.) Or one might point to liberation theologians, who aim to address social issues, yet do so from the church experience of the poor and in constant dialogue with academia.
In short, public theology is not an “extra” added to the theological reflection or worship practices of the church but is simply part and parcel of the whole theological package that makes up the self-reflection of the church, which in turn shapes the presence of the church in the world. This dynamic is perhaps best captured by Ted Peters’s definition of public theology: “Public theology is conceived in the church, critically reasoned in the academy, and offered to the world for the sake of the global common good.”2
Nevertheless, although all theology has a public nature, adding the adjective “public” to theology does have the merit of emphasizing the “outward facing” of the theological work of the church—an emphasis that is not always captured adequately in the traditional nomenclature of “systematic theology,” “practical theology,” etc. Indeed, using the language of public theology offers a challenge to the theological self-reflection of the church, to the ways it understands what it means to believe, to think, to pray, to worship, and to live in the world. More specifically, I want to suggest that emphasizing the public nature of theology has implications for how we think about the worship practices of the church. In order to examine the worldview-creating power of the church’s worship and how it may play a role in the broader culture, we need to delve more deeply into the concept of the common good and point to some complexities of the relationship between church and society, as well as some tensions inherent to public theology.
Public Theology and the Common Good
The language of “the common good” is usually associated with Catholic social teaching, a tradition that originated in the late nineteenth century when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, which addressed the plight of the working classes in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. In contrast to some versions of the “greater good” that would sacrifice some in the interest of the majority, the common good seeks the best interest and well-being of all.
Care for the common life reflects the very character of God as understood in the sources and traditions of the Christian faith. The Christian tradition leans into God’s providential care for all of creation, and to the divine presence in all of life. Religious concepts such as humans being made in the image of God—a concept variously interpreted as signaling human worth, freedom, and dignity—shaped Western secular ideas about human rights, thereby contributing to notions about the common good even beyond the direct sphere of influence of the church.
Expressions of theology explicitly focused on the common good include not only Catholic social teaching, but also the abolitionist movement, the Social Gospel Movement, the religious elements of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as liberation theologies of various stripes across the globe, and more. While these theologies are often political in tone, public theology is not synonymous with political theology. The political theology that emerged in Germany after the Second World War as well as the liberation theologies that later came out of Latin America, the United States, South Africa, and elsewhere are characterized by a prophetic tone and a focus on social justice concerns. Public theology includes political theologies, but the focus is not exclusively on issues of liberation or structural renewal, but also on the broader conversation in the public square.
In participating in this public conversation, the idea is not for the church to stick its nose where it does not belong by claiming the final voice in setting public policy, or by interfering with the rights of people of other or no faith. But the church cannot be a private club either, lest we find ourselves with only the alternatives of either a privatized gospel of the individual, or heretical public theology such as that of Christian Nationalism. The reality is that, if the church does not speak from its theocentric vision, or more broadly, if people who believe in a higher morality do not participate in the public conversation, those with political or economic power will be the only voices heard.
I find the theologian Paul Tillich’s categories of heteronomy, autonomy, and theonomy helpful in thinking about the public nature of theology and the church’s role in society.3 In heteronomy (i.e., rule by a foreign law) the church dominates, imposing its religious ideals upon society in a manner that oppresses freedom of thought. One may describe the Middle Ages as at least to some extent heteronomous due to the dominance of the Catholic church.
Conversely, in autonomy, expressed in particular in the European Enlightenment and its aftermath, human reason rules supreme, and religion is seen as at most a source of personal ethics, so faith is relegated to the private sphere. Tillich, like his contemporary Karl Barth, realized that a privatized faith ironically becomes a mere handmaiden to the dominant powers in any given culture, as illustrated in the theological decline that preceded the two world wars. Barth’s response to that problem was to turn to what may be broadly called a confessional tradition that proclaims the historical confession of the lordship of Christ with an eye towards preserving the integrity of the church amidst the social crisis of the time.
Tillich, in his response to an autonomous culture that relegated faith to the “private” sphere, but fearful that a confessional approach is naively grasping for a new heteronomy, instead proposed theonomy. This concept essentially means that the church recognizes the deep spiritual elements of all of life, including life beyond the boundaries of our faith tradition, and participates fully in that life from its own wisdom. In other words, while Barth’s church-focused theology certainly had a significant public dimension, Tillich suggested a more self-conscious form of public theology that recognizes that God moves and works beyond the boundaries of the church.
If we make use of Tillich’s categories, what that would suggest is that public theology neither dominates the public square nor retreats from it. It recognizes that its traditions are an expression of the depth dimension of human existence, that God is present in but also beyond the Christian faith community, that we are called to live lives of integrity that bear witness not so much to an otherworldly hope, but to our hope for the transformation of this world.
The Art of Public Theology
As a theonomous project that seeks to neither dominate “secular” society nor shrink away into the “private” sphere, public theology seeks to give a reasonable account of the church’s convictions to those outside the faith tradition, with the aim that it might even provide some valuable moral guidance for the common life (this is similar to the Reformers’ “civil use of the law”). Or as Hak Joon Lee notes, “Rejecting the modern dichotomy of fact and value, as well as that of the religious and the civic, public theology advocates for a constructive public role for religious discourse in a pluralistic society, neither suppressing religious expressions nor dismissing democratic values such as human rights, tolerance, and equality.”4
In adding its voice to the public conversation, the church need not impose its specific religious beliefs on everyone else, but it ought not to shy away from it either. In fact, the church’s voice is most authentic when it speaks from its own particular identity instead of trying to find the lowest common denominator.
As we think about the kind of language the church might add to the social conversation, we need to keep four things in mind. First, although public theology engages its time and context, it needs to be careful not to merely surrender to prevailing public opinion. This concern was central to much of the twentieth-century theological debate. Karl Barth’s horror at his professors’ uncritical support of German nationalism prior to World War I, and of course, later, his fierce rejection of the German church’s acceptance of the false gospel of the Nazis, gave him a deep distrust of theologies that engage culture directly. Due to this distrust his theology is often interpreted as focused more on protecting the church than engaging the public square. Yet the Barthian aversion to cultural accommodationism occupies an important space in public theology by suggesting that theologically informed mistrust of the cultural fashions of the day has an important role to play in thinking about the ways in which faith engages our various publics.
Second, at the same time the church should not shy away from engaging the concrete lived experiences of people. Our confession as a religious body is that God made a home among us in the incarnation. As such, our theology needs to be incarnational, grounded in the realities of life. This means listening, opening our hearts and minds, and, yes, our theologies to the experiences of others, including those outside our faith tradition. This openness to people’s lived experiences may seem to be in tension with the warning against cultural accommodationism, but public theology needs to find creative ways to traverse that tension.
A third observation is in order, and it has to do with how public theology relates to the concept of truth. Truth is not always easy to find, and we often tend to confuse it with the most powerful argument. The work of public theology is to stand firm on the truth of the gospel, to refine that truth in our theological reflection, while at the same time engaging the ways in which truth manifests amidst the many voices of the people around us. It is in conversation characterized by attentive listening, courage in sharing, and respect for differences that truth (including truth that transcends confessional boundaries) may emerge, grab us, and transform us, in order to help us serve the common good.
Finally, the work of public theology is spiritual formation that shapes believers to stand firmly in truth as they seek to engage the issues of the day for the sake of the common good. There is, therefore, what one might call an “artistic element” to public theology. What I have in mind here is akin to what the rhetorical theorist Scott Consigny says about Aristotle’s view of rhetoric as an art, which requires two attributes: integrity, that is, the knowledge and skills that are ready to engage any situation (one may call this the “universal” element), and receptivity, the ability to become concretely engaged in specific situations (one may call this the “contextual” element).5 What this boils down to is holding on to inherited truth on the one hand and being open to new insights on the other hand. This artistic nimbleness is needed for public theology to avoid the unacceptable alternatives of either withdrawal from culture or surrender to the fashions of the day. In short, in an era in which much of the public debate struggles with truth amidst multiple and competing truth claims, the public theologian, and that includes the preacher, must be spiritually formed into an artist who continues to search out truth amidst the chaos and cacophony of our times.
So public theology seeks to avoid the unacceptable alternatives of the church either imposing its views on the broader society or shying away from public engagement. As such, public theology can take neither the form of succumbing to the cultural fashions of the day nor the form of ignoring the cultural and sociological realities of human life. It stands firm on the received wisdom of the gospel, sometimes proclaiming it against culture, while simultaneously continuing to seek truth that emerges in concrete and multiple contexts. As an art form, public theology is both universal in its vision and concretely anchored in the specifics of the situation.
In sum, theology that is done for the sake of the common good always engages its time and context. But in doing so, it pays attention to its own language, the way it preaches, what it teaches, the way it shapes human conscience, the way its worldview lingers beyond the boundaries of Sunday morning worship. Most importantly, public theology recognizes that, amidst social media debates, discussions about freedom of speech, and the all-too-often presence of hate speech, the church’s voice cannot be silent or turned inward.
Worship and Public Theology
Worship, the communal act of giving honor to God, is irredeemably connected to the public voice of the church. In fact, the history of the church shows that our theology is often shaped by our worship practices. One is here reminded of the Latin maxim lex orandi, lex credendi (as we worship, so we believe), which signals the intertwined nature of worship and theology. To this is often added the phrase lex vivendi (so we live). In short, how we worship reflects and shapes what we believe and, in turn, how we will live.
In recent decades, theologians have become preoccupied with the rhetorical nature of theological language, that is, the ways in which the language of the church shapes not only the worldview of the faithful but also filters through to those who do not identify with the church. In this regard it behooves us to think about the ways in which preaching and worship are tools of spiritual formation, how they shape the hearts and minds of people in the pews who in turn constitute the public voice of the church.
The public theology of the church has not always been faithful to the gospel, as illustrated by countless examples of the church conceiving theological ideas such as antisemitism, sexism, racism, the justification of colonialism, distorted theologies of creation that feed into the exploitation of the earth, and more.
One of the clearest negative examples of the relationship between harmful social developments and the church’s theology, and indeed specifically its liturgy, can be found in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. The DRC, which had arrived on South African shores with the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century, had a strong sense of mission and soon became a multiracial church. By the early nineteenth century some local congregations insisted on segregated worship largely due to racially charged disputes about the sharing of the common cup in the Eucharist. At its 1829 synod, the DRC confirmed as a matter of biblical principle that communion is to be served to all in the same place of worship regardless of race, but by 1857, the synod decided to allow segregated worship as a transitional measure “due to the weakness of some” (a phrase that would go down in infamy in South African church circles).6 What started as a temporary measure and a “mere” concession eventually turned into a full-blown ecclesiological framework, which led to the creation of four separate “ethnic” Dutch Reformed churches, for Whites, Blacks, Indians, and “Coloureds” (the latter is a term often used for mixed-race people in South Africa). This fourfold “ethnic” construction, which placed people in artificial categories based on skin tone and phenotype, would later form the foundation of the political system of apartheid. What started out as a worship practice and a liturgical dispute ended up becoming a theological principle which in turn fed into a deeply unjust political system. Apartheid theology may be seen as one of the most immoral examples of public theology. It was conceived in the church, critically reasoned in the academy, and offered to the world as supposedly serving the common good—but nothing could have been further from the truth.
The public voice of the church witnesses to the practices and beliefs held within the church walls and within its worship practices. More specifically, it presents the face of God to the world—unfortunately sometimes in distorted ways. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wondered, as he thought about the “lofty spires pointing heavenward” of the churches in the South, “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?”7
Or, as Allan Boesak was asked by a member of his congregation in the 1960s, when the apartheid government in South Africa forced people of color out of their homes, “What is God saying about this injustice?”8
These are the central questions we have to ask in thinking about the relationship between worship and the public face of the church. Theology, faith seeking understanding, is primarily speech about that Ultimate Reality we call God. Our God-talk matters. As Elizabeth Johnson observed in her groundbreaking work on language about God, the symbol of God functions to support our worldviews since it evokes our ideas about the Ultimate Good.9
Some time ago I had a conversation with a pastor on the topic of preaching with an eye towards creation care amidst the climate crisis. His initial instinct was to lean into Christian moral codes about love of neighbor and emphasizing that the neighbor includes non-human life as well. This would be a worthy avenue towards public theology preaching, but as our conversation continued it became clear that preaching for public theology needs to move beyond moral exhortation. We concluded that the bigger task would be to present God as the one who created this world and made a home in it, therefore shaping the religious imagination of the folks in the pew.
I believe this insight is true for preaching with an eye towards public theology regardless of topic. The moral imperative will come from the theological vision we offer more than it will from moral exhortation. In short, the question “Who is our God?” needs to be central to preaching for public theology.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, public theology is not an academic discipline separate from the life of the church, nor is it merely political activism dressed in religious language. Rather, it is the inevitable public dimension of all theological reflection and practice. It recognizes that our worship shapes our beliefs, and our beliefs shape how we live in the world. It acknowledges that when we gather to break bread, to sing hymns, to pray for our neighbors, and to confess our sins, we are not engaged in private acts but in profoundly public ones that signal to the world who our God is and what God requires of us.
The history of religiously sanctioned segregation in the United States offers painful reminders that our actions often speak louder than our words, presenting a distorted face of God to the world that not only undermines the gospel but also supports structural evils. The South African Dutch Reformed Church’s tragic journey from integrated communion tables to the theological foundation of apartheid reminds us that our liturgical choices echo far beyond our sanctuaries. But the witness of people like Martin Luther King and Allan Boesak also shows us that faithful worship can shape an alternative worldview in which the values of the kingdom of God shine forth brightly.
Public theology is not different from the overall theological work of the church, but it is theology that is explicit about its own public nature—that recognizes all theology as inherently rhetorical, shaping identities and worldviews, addressing the church, academy, and society simultaneously. It is theology practiced with an artistic nimbleness to hold fast to inherited truth while remaining open to the Spirit’s work in our midst. It is faith seeking understanding not just for the church’s sake, but for the sake of the common good. It is, as Union Presbyterian Seminary’s motto says, theological reflection “for the church in the world.”
Notes
1. David Tracy, “Defending the Public Character of Theology,” Christian Century (April 1, 1981): 350–356.
2. Ted Peters, The Voice of Public Theology: Addressing Politics, Science, and Technology (Adelaide, Australia: ATF Press, 2022), 3–12.
3. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 41.
4. Hak Joon Lee, “Public Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology, ed. Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 44.
5. Scott Consigny, “Rhetoric and Its Situations,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 7 (1974): 178.
6. Piet Naudé, “From Pluralism to Ideology: The Roots of Apartheid Theology in Abraham Kuyper, Gustav Warneck and Theological Pietism,” Scriptura 88 (2005): 165.
7. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html, accessed August 15, 2025.
8. Allan Boesak, Running with Horses: Reflections of an Accidental Politician (Cape Town, South Africa: Joho, 2009), 33.
9. Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 4-5.
