Why does a Marxist theorist like Michael Foucault matter to the Church today?  In short, because his central critique – that institutions are ultimately places of gathering power rather than releasing power – holds true for much of what passes as institutionalized Christianity. 

In “The Birth of the Clinic”, Foucault asserts that “Knowledge has its object (what is known) and its “other” the person whom it is offered and received as knowledge, passing over the other as ‘Truth’.”  What this breaks down is four key points:

2. Dominant knowledge is produced by dominant groups (white, male, middle class) and both reflects and reinforces difference and hierarchy BUT is often adopted, reinforced by marginalized and by the self so that the marginalized can survive; 

3. Language, categorization, and practices work to separate the human beings from those that have sworn to provide care (e.g. doctor, clergy), and separates the receiver of knowledge from the bearer of knowledge;  and

4. this so-called ‘knowledge’ is assumed to be the definitive truth, objective, unexamined, and uncritiqued. The result is that only bearer of knowledge has wisdom to see Truth and the individual is diminished underneath ‘knowledge’. 

Have we lost people under the glory of programs?  Does evangelism become more important that real encounters and conversation?  Do clergy hold the truth in such control that laity continue a passive relationship with the church as mere spectators – never truly allowed nor encouraged to be the bearers of healing and truth as those created in the Imago Dei?  Until we solve these issues and many more – Foucault will continue to speak.  The question is: have we heard?

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