Chapter 18 The Other in the Ecclesial Self: The Church and the Populist Challenge

In: The Spirit of Populism
Author:
Sturla J. Stålsett
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Abstract

The global wave of ethno-nativist populism poses a challenge to ecclesial self-understanding. Populist movements often legitimize their political projects by appealing to a religious heritage that is exclusively linked to a perceived ethnic and national purity and superiority. Thus, they evoke the need for a renewed reflection on the identity of the church. What ecclesiological resources may be mobilized against the temptation and threat of ethno-nativist populism? Taking his cue from Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self, Sturla J. Stålsett argues for a self-understanding of the church that presupposes the constitutive presence of otherness. Understanding the church as Christ’s body implies that it receives its identity from someone exterior to itself, from the wholly other. The biblical testimony about Jesus of Nazareth, in turn, emphasizes his historical self-identification with marginalized ‘others,’ as liberationist christologies point out. Stålsett argues that ecclesial resistance to the politico-religious agenda of ethno-nativist populism should emerge from understanding the church as a community that comes into being through incorporating, without assimilating, excluded others. However, this understanding makes more acute the ecclesiological dilemma of how churches may critically respond to ethno-nativist practices of populism without excluding people who hold populist views.

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The Spirit of Populism

Political Theologies in Polarized Times

Series:  Political and Public Theologies, Volume: 1

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