Everyday Life

Editorial Note
This article was first published in Wissenschaftlich-Religionspädagogischen Lexikon (WiReLex) and is presented here in an edited form: Grill, Lukas, Art. Alltag, in: WiReLex, 2024 (https://doi.org/10.23768/wirelex.400024).

Links to other media and further information regarding this topic can be found in the German version of this article.

1. Everyday Life: A Modern Phenomenon

The fact that theology engages with “everyday life” is a recent development closely linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the accompanying privatization and individualization of life in the nineteenth century. Following Kristin Merle , everyday life can be understood here as “routinized and thus (cyclically) recurring processes in people’s lives.”¹Merle, Kristin, Alltagsrelevanz. Zur Frage nach dem Sinn in der Seelsorge, Göttingen 2011, 22, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “routinierte[r] und somit (zyklisch) wiederkehrende[r] Abläufe im Leben von Menschen.” As will be demonstrated below, the term “everyday life” also addresses the contrast between the daily and the extraordinary: from a theological perspective, everyday life appears as that which is interrupted (for example, by significant biographical experiences, but also by festivals). Within theology, the term has so far been taken up particularly in poimenics discourse,²See, e.g., Steck, Wolfgang, Der Ursprung der Seelsorge in der Alltagswelt, in: ThZ 43 (1987), 175–183; Hauschildt, Eberhard, Alltagsseelsorge. Eine sozio-linguistische Analyse des pastoralen Geburtstagsbesuches, Göttingen 1996. but it is also significant in homiletics and religious education. The following reflections aim to show that it can also contribute to the acquisition of knowledge from a systematic-theological and philosophical-religious perspective.

2. (Religious) Philosophical Approaches to Everyday Life

2.1. Myths about Everyday Life

In his work Mythologies, the French philosopher Roland Barthes  (1915–1980) subjects selected phenomena to a methodological re-examination, in which he seeks to challenge the apparent self-evident truths through which these phenomena are perceived on a daily basis: he seeks “to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.”³Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, New York 1991 (first edition: 1957), 10. According to Barthes, the phenomena of everyday life are to be interpreted as complex systems of signs, which Barthes calls “myths.” He thus uses examples to examine certain “myths” from everyday life, such as weddings, food, or toys. He interprets toys as representations of the objects with which adults surround themselves. They are “essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size.”⁴Barthes, Mythologies, 53. His analysis of everyday life is often linked to a social-critical perspective, for example when he criticizes that toys “are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.”⁵Barthes, Mythologies, 54. For Barthes, everyday life is a communicative system of phenomena whose ambiguity provides an opportunity for semiotic analysis. The idea that a deep structure is inherent in everyday life is also evident in the two approaches examined below.

2.2. Transcendence in Everyday Life

According to the two sociologists Alfred Schütz  (1899–1959) and Thomas Luckmann  (1927–2016, Schütz’s student who completed his work posthumously), everyday life represents a transmitted order of vital structures, “for it is precisely in everyday life that we are not alone and not the first.”⁶Schütz, Alfred/Luckmann, Thomas, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, Konstanz 2003, 590, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “denn eben im Alltag sind wir nicht allein und nicht die ersten.” These orders only become fully conscious when they are experienced as fragile. Schütz and Luckmann describe the fundamental human experience using the concept of “transcendence”: “Everyone is aware of the ‘transcendence’ of the world in which they live; everyone is aware of the limits of their life within it. We live in a world in which we know we will die.”⁷Schütz/Luckmann, Strukturen, 590, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Jedermann weiß um die ‘Transzendenz’ der Welt, in der er lebt, jedermann weiß um die Grenzen seines Lebens in ihr. Wir leben in einer Welt, von der wir wissen, daß wir in ihr sterben werden.” In this context, they distinguish three forms of transcendence: minor, intermediate, and major. While minor transcendences refer to everyday life experiences of the limits of human understanding – such as lapses in memory – major transcendences pertain to life’s big questions, such as those concerning death. Intermediate transcendences, on the other hand, refer to everyday communication between people, specifically to those moments when communication breaks down. According to Schütz and Luckmann, transcendence in everyday life manifests itself especially in communication – an idea that will later emerge in homiletic and, above all, poimenics theories and which, as outlined in the next paragraph, finds resonance in the work of Bernhard Waldenfels .

2.3. The Depth of Meaning in Everyday Life

According to the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels , all phenomena possess a “depth of meaning in everyday life […] due to their referential character.”⁸Waldenfels, Bernhard, Hyperphänomene. Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung, Berlin 2012, 358, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “alltägliche[s] Mehr an Bedeutung […] aufgrund ihres Verweisungscharakters.” Waldenfels illustrates this with examples from everyday life such as that of the gift, which appears on certain occasions in everyday life but simultaneously transcends everyday life in manifold ways: for example, by becoming a symbol of interpersonal relationships.⁹Cf. Waldenfels, Bernhard, Das Un-ding der Gabe, in: Gondek, Hans-Dieter/idem, Einsätze des Denkens. Zur Philosophie von Jacques Derrida, Frankfurt a. M. 1997, 385–409. Waldenfels distinguishes religious practices and ritual acts from such everyday phenomena by attributing to them an “extraordinary surplus of meaning.”¹⁰Waldenfels, Hyperphänomene, 358, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “außeralltäglichen Bedeutungsüberschuss.” For Waldenfels, however, the religious does not consist in a different constitution at the level of the phenomenon, but rather in a specific interpretive perspective: phenomena in everyday life are not religious per se, but they are “understood as religious.”¹¹Waldenfels, Hyperphänomene, 359, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “als religiös verstanden.” Certain phenomena, however, are particularly conducive to a hyperphenomenal interpretation, namely “intrusions and breakthroughs that interrupt normal behavior”¹²Waldenfels, Hyperphänomene, 367, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Einbrüche und Durchbrüche, die das normale Verhalten unterbrechen.” – such as birth and death, love and hate, encounter and farewell. Waldenfels illustrates the hyperbolic nature of such an experience linguistically, in that it finds expression not in the superlative or elative, but rather in “phrases […] such as ‘too great,’ which we use when something exceeds our capacity to comprehend it.”¹³Waldenfels, Hyperphänomene, 71, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Formulierungen […] wie ‘zu groß’, die wir dann gebrauchen, wenn etwas unsere Fassungskraft übersteigt.” From a theological perspective, the concept of the hyperbolic can be applied to moments of communication in which it “goes beyond” by shifting to a holistic, existential level.¹⁴Cf. Grill, Lukas, Überschießende Kommunikation. Eine Religionstheorie alltäglicher Rede, Göttingen 2020. German original: “überschießt.”

3. Theological Approaches to Everyday Life

3.1. Worship and Everyday Life

In a broader sense, everyday life plays a central role in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s  conception of worship. Although he does not speak of “everyday life,” he does refer to “interruptions” that constitute “gatherings for a purely religious purpose, which recur at specific times”¹⁵Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Die praktische Theologie nach den Grundsäzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhang dargestellt. Aus Schleiermachers handschriftlichem Nachlasse und nachgeschriebenen Vorlesungen (SW I/13), ed. by Jacob Frerichs, Berlin 1850, 70, translations by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Unterbrechungen” and “Vereinigungen zu einem rein religiösen Zwekk, die zu bestimmten Zeiten wiederkehren.” – primarily referring to worship. Regarding the question of what is interrupted, Schleiermacher refers to “the rest of life,” “civil and business activities,” the “business life,” “working and business life,” or “work and business.”¹⁶All quotes from Schleiermacher, Theologie, 70, translations by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “übrige[…] Leben[…],” “[d]ie bürgerliche und Geschäfts-Thätigkeit,” “Geschäftsleben,” “das Arbeits- und Geschäfts-Leben,” or “Arbeit und das Geschäft.” It becomes clear that worship primarily interrupts professional life, but also “civil […] activity” (German: “bürgerliche […] Thätigkeit”) in the broadest sense: people’s daily lives. In his treatise Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens (Toward a Theory of Social Conduct), he also describes an interruption not caused by worship but by “free social interaction, unbound and undetermined by any external purpose.”¹⁷Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens, in: Kritische Gesamtausgabe I/2, Berlin/ New York 1984, 165–184, 165, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “[f]reie, durch keinen äußern Zweck gebundene und bestimmte Geselligkeit.” He distinguishes this, on the one hand, from “the cares of domestic life” and, on the other, from “the affairs of bourgeois life.”¹⁸Both Schleiermacher, Versuch, 165, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “den Sorgen des häuslichen Lebens” and “den Geschäften des bürgerlichen Lebens.” Here, too, everyday life – shaped by work and family – is portrayed as something that needs to be interrupted. “Everyday life” – if one can describe Schleiermacher’s depictions that way from today’s perspective – is defined ex negativo, as something that requires a counterbalance.

In a narrower sense, the theme of “everyday life” became relevant to Protestant theology in the wake of the theological reorientations of the 1960s. In a critical engagement with the theology of the Word of God, Ernst Lange  (1927–1974) was one of the first theologians to advocate, both theoretically and practically, that theology and the church should not be reserved for an educated minority nor concern themselves with otherworldly topics, but rather that they should focus on people’s everyday questions. In Berlin-Spandau, he founded the so-called “Ladenkirche,” a church situated in the heart of city life within a former store: “a program for a church close to the street, close to life, in the real conflicts of people’s real daily lives.”¹⁹Lange, Ernst, Briefe 1942–1974. With contributions by Gerhard Altenburg, Peter Cornehl, and Wolfgang Grünberg. With a foreword by Wolfgang Huber, ed. by Bröking-Bortfeld, Christian Gößinger, and Markus Ramm, Berlin 2011, 330, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “ein Programm für eine Kirche nah an der Straße, nah am Leben, in den wirklichen Konflikten des wirklichen Alltags von Menschen.” He sees the church sermon, in particular, as facing the challenge of addressing the demands of “everyday life.” From Lange’s perspective, the goal of a sermon is not for the preacher to address specific, predetermined topics at any cost. Rather, for him, the starting point is the sermon’s listeners in their everyday situations: “What relevance does the promise of Christ have in the listener’s Hic et Nunc?”²⁰Lange, Ernst, Predigen als Beruf. Aufsätze zu Homiletik, Liturgie und Pfarramt, ed. by Rüdiger Schloz, München 1982, 28, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Welche Relevanz hat die Christusverheißung im Hic et Nunc des Hörers?” An important task of the sermon is therefore to take as its point of reference the respective “homiletic situation that challenges the homiletic act in each instance”²¹Lange, Predigen, 30, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “homiletische[n] Situation, durch die der homiletische Akt jeweils herausgefordert wird.” – that is, the concrete, everyday situation in which the biblical text is preached, which naturally includes the listeners’ daily lives.

3.2. Religion as a Distancing from Everyday Life

In the tradition of an understanding of everyday life as outlined by Schütz  and Luckmann  (see above), Henning Luther  (1947–1991) focuses in his work Religion und Alltag (Religion and Everyday life) on the fault lines in everyday life – on those moments when the aspects of everyday life that are taken for granted suddenly become questionable. According to H. Luther, it is religious questions that come to the fore in such moments – religious in the sense that they create distance from everyday life: “Religious questions […] create a distance from the world as a whole. They articulate a difference from the world in order to gain a (new) relationship to the world.”²²Luther, Henning, Religion und Alltag. Bausteine zu einer praktischen Theologie des Subjekts, Stuttgart 1992, 25, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Religiöse Fragen […] gehen auf Distanz zur Welt insgesamt. Sie artikulieren Differenz zur Welt, um einen (neuen) Bezug zur Welt zu gewinnen.” This refers less to a critical distance that would devalue or judge everyday life, but rather to an engaged, open-minded distance that allows existing assumptions to be questioned and enables new perspectives on the “world as a whole.” According to H. Luther, religion is therefore “at its core precisely not the creation of meaning or the overcoming of contingency,”²³Luther, Religion, 27, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “im Kern gerade nicht Sinnstiftung oder Bewältigung von Kontingenz.” because it does not resolve the uncertainties of everyday life. Rather, as Luther puts it: “Religion preserves the inner conflict from which it draws its life. It is a comfort only insofar as it, through the memory of the ‘promise,’ keeps alive the protest against a world devoid of tears of sorrow.”²⁴Luther, Religion, 27, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Religion bewahrt vielmehr die Zerrissenheit, aus der sie lebt. Sie ist Trost nur, insofern sie mit der Erinnerung an das ‘Versprechen’ den Einspruch gegen eine Welt wachhält, die ohne Tränen der Trauer ist.” Everyday life is so closely linked to religion because, in H. Luther’s view, it is the source of religious inquiry: religion then does not mean “having a sense of another (the other) world, but seeing the world differently, gaining a different sense of the world.”²⁵Luther, Religion, 29, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Sinn für eine (die) andere Welt zu haben, sondern die Welt anders zu sehen, einen anderen Sinn für die Welt zu bekommen.” H. Luther’s approach is therefore not “theology of everyday life” in the sense of the approaches presented below; rather, his writings reveal an intention to view everyday life both as a starting point and as a point of critique for theological reflection.

3.3. Theology and Dogmatics of Everyday Life

In recent theological discourse, the concept of everyday life has been established primarily by Wolfgang Steck  and his students. In 2014, Steck noted: “In recent decades, ‘everyday life’ has found its way into the study rooms of practical theologians.”²⁶Steck, Wolfgang, Der Alltag steht Modell. Entdeckung, Erkundung und Inszenierung einer sinnstiftenden Wirklichkeitsregion, in: Heyl, Andreas von/Kemnitzer, Konstanze Evangelia (Eds.), Modellhaftes Denken in der Praktischen Theologie. Festschrift für Klaus Raschzok, Leipzig 2014, 195–204, 195, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten hielt der ‘Alltag’ Einzug in die Studierstuben der praktischen Theologen.” He bases this assertion on a broad range of topics in the phenomenology of everyday life, which “theologians of everyday life”²⁷Steck, Alltag, 195, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Alltagstheologen.” have recently been exploring. Theology no longer deals exclusively with biblical or dogmatic topics, but also with subjects in everyday life such as popular music or sports. For Steck, the close connection between theory and practice in theology as a “positive” science is the reason theologians have a perspective on everyday life that differs from that of other disciplines. For theology, everyday life is not merely an abstract object of study; rather, theologians often find themselves right in the midst of people’s daily lives as they work in various professional fields such as pastoral care or preaching. According to Steck, pastors find themselves in a characteristic state of tension: on the one hand, they are participants in everyday life, an “everyday person,”²⁸Steck, Alltag, 197, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Alltagsmensch[…].” but on the other hand, they view this world from a reflective distance. According to Steck, this in-between state is particularly evident in pastoral conversations, where “small talk” can suddenly turn into “a serious conversation.”²⁹Steck, Alltag, 198, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “eine ernsthafte Unterredung.” Practical theologians have examined this transition from everyday conversation to pastoral conversation from a poimenics perspective, following in Steck’s tradition.³⁰See, e.g., Hauschildt, Alltagsseelsorge.

A dogmatics of everyday life, a field also shaped by Wolfgang Steck , offers a far-reaching theological perspective on everyday life. By “Alltagsdogmatik”, however, Steck does not primarily mean making traditional dogmatic concepts understandable to theological “laypeople.” Rather, systematics of everyday life primarily means that everyday life and systematics are brought into a constructive dialogue in which an attempt is made “to decipher the forms of religious knowledge woven into everyday practice with regard to their specific meanings” and, by encouraging self-reflection among theologians, ultimately “to contribute to the further development of Protestant religious culture, to its self-reflection both in relation to everyday life and in its advanced scholarly form.”³¹Steck, Wolfgang, Alltagsdogmatik. Ein unvollendetes Projekt, in: Pastoraltheologie 94 (2005), 287–307, 291, translations by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “die in die Alltagspraxis verwobenen Gestalten religiösen Wissens hinsichtlich ihrer spezifischen Sinngehalte zu entschlüsseln” and “einen Beitrag zur Fortentwicklung der protestantischen Religionskultur, zu ihrer alltagsverbundenen wie zu ihrer wissenschaftlich avancierten Selbstreflexion, zu leisten.” Systematics of everyday life therefore looks for connections between the traditional themes of Christian doctrine and contemporary discourses, and is therefore faced with the challenge of bringing everyday life and systematics into dialogue in such a way that systematics is not oversimplified and everyday life is not devalued, but rather taken seriously in its subjective significance. An example of how reflection within the systematics of everyday life might work can be found in a volume discussed in the following section.

3.4. Theology as a Religious Hermeneutics of Everyday Life

At the same time that Wolfgang Steck  and Henning Luther  were developing their theological theories of everyday life, Wilhelm Gräb  was also developing a theology oriented toward everyday life under the umbrella term of religious (cultural) hermeneutics. In the tradition of Schütz  and Luckmann , he places the focus of religious hermeneutics on experiences of limits such as “the limits of our analytical abilities,” those of “our ethical certainty,” or even “the limits of our capacity for suffering.”³²Gräb, Wilhelm, Sinnfragen. Transformationen des Religiösen in der modernen Kultur, Gütersloh 2006, 38, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “der Grenzen unserer analytischen Fähigkeiten”; “unserer ethischen Sicherheit”; and “der Grenzen unserer Leidensfähigkeit.” Religious questions arise where the “apparent self-evident nature of our daily lives”³³Gräb, Sinnfragen, 38, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “scheinbare Selbstverständlichkeit unseres alltäglichen Lebensgangs.” is called into question. Unlike H. Luther, Gräb does not hesitate to describe religion as a functional phenomenon: “It works to interpret the meaning of our contingent, individual human lives.”³⁴Gräb, Sinnfragen, 37, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “Sie arbeitet an der Deutung des Sinns unseres kontingenten, individuellen menschlichen Lebens.” In Gräb’s tradition, religion manifests itself in the concrete and historically changing form of human culture – that is to say, specifically in the culture of everyday life. In 2008, a Festschrift for Wilhelm Gräb was published under the title Der verborgene Sinn, which further develops the tradition of religious-cultural hermeneutics he founded by linking it to Steck’s concept of the “systematics of everyday life.” The contributions contained therein aim to make visible the surplus of meaning, the transcendent, in precisely those moments of everyday life in which it breaks open: to what extent does the question of meaning arise when we get up, does the contingency of life reveal itself in the event of a train delay, or does a fundamental anthropological structure of gratitude become apparent in the example of a Christmas gift? The fundamental premise of these hermeneutical deep dives into everyday life is that “everyday life is highly permeated by hidden meaning.”³⁵Korsch, Dietrich/Charbonnier, Lars (Eds.), Der verborgene Sinn. Religiöse Dimensionen des Alltags, Göttingen 2008, 12, translation by Jacob N. Cerone. German original: “der Alltag hochgradig von verborgenem Sinn durchzogen.” In this conception, the task of theological reflection is to trace this hidden meaning, which manifests itself particularly in the contingencies of life. The “systematics of everyday life” therefore stands for a hermeneutical approach to a fundamental tension that, in the sense of the positions presented, has always been inscribed in everyday life: everyday life thrives on the boundaries of life in this world, where the “extraordinary” begins, and everyday life refers to these boundaries and defines itself through them.