History,
Memory and the Bicentenary of Abolition
John
Coffey
The bicentenary of the
abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 will differ markedly from the
centenary of 1907. A hundred years ago, the anniversary was a cause for
unalloyed celebration. The abolition of 1807 and Parliament’s subsequent
decision in 1833 to end slavery itself was widely acclaimed as the nation’s
finest hour. In his History of European
Morals, W. E. H. Lecky famously declared that the British crusade against
slavery ‘may very probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly
virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations’.
In
2007, national pride and self-congratulation are less acceptable. Historians
like Linda Colley remind us that the British were ‘the world’s greediest and
most successful traders of slaves’. British ships transported over three
million Africans across the Atlantic. Conditions during the ‘middle passage’
were so bad that as many as 450,000 slaves died before reaching the Americas.
The bicentenary must involve solemn commemoration, not mere celebration. In
contrast to a century ago, the descendants of black slaves now have a public
voice, one that calls for apologies and even reparations and emphasises the
terrible legacy of centuries of enslavement. Liverpool City Council has
apologised for the port city’s deep involvement in the trade, and is opening
an International Slavery Museum; English Heritage has announced that it will
investigate links between its properties and the slave trade; and the Prime
Minister has expressed ‘deep sorrow’ at Britain’s involvement.
Even
the abolitionists themselves are not immune from criticism. Books like The
Great Abolition Sham launch scathing critiques of Wilberforce and his
allies. Academic historians avoid such hatchet jobs, but point out that
abolitionists were not purely altruistic. By abolishing the slave trade, they
sought to restore national honour, revive Christianity, and even promote the
capitalist ideal of free labour. And they could be guilty of what Dickens
memorably called ‘telescopic philanthropy’, focussing on the oppression of
people in far off lands, but ignoring what went on at the bottom of a Yorkshire
mineshaft.
To
complicate the story of abolition in this way is no bad thing. It reminds us
that history is a messy process, not a simple morality tale of heroes and
villains, and that human beings (even ‘saints’) are fallen creatures. And
yet we are, perhaps, in danger of forgetting the enormity of the abolitionist
achievement. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it is easy now to believe that
the overthrow of colonial slavery was inevitable. But if we think historically,
that is far from obvious.
The Atlantic slave
trade was a massive business. In the 1790s, British ships were transporting
40,000 slaves per year to the Caribbean and North America. Although the great
West Indian scholar, Eric Williams, argued that the slave trade was ceasing to
be profitable, most historians now disagree. If anything, profits were on the
rise, and the Caribbean colonies accounted for a greater share of British trade
than the United States. The abolitionists faced intense opposition from West
Indian planters, British investors, the slave ports, and even members of the
royal family. All the major maritime powers were engaged in slave trading, and
abolition looked to be against British interests. Moreover, whilst the trade was
driven by the profit motive, it was also legitimised in religious terms. Many
white Christians owned black slaves and the Church of England had a major slave
plantation in the Caribbean. The Bible was quoted to justify slavery and the
slave trade was defended on the grounds that it brought Africans within earshot
of the Gospel. Even those who condemned the slave trade often assumed that it
was here to stay. Although there was much antislavery sentiment, there was no
organised abolitionist movement until the 1780s. When the Society for Effecting
the Abolition of the Slave Trade first met in London on 22 May 1787, its
prospects looked dim. After all, nine of its twelve members belonged to a
marginal religious sect, the Quakers.
Yet
within twenty years of that meeting in a London printing shop, the British slave
trade had been abolished. Within half a century, the 800,000 slaves in the
British colonies had been emancipated. By the 1880s, slavery had been
extinguished in the southern United States, Brazil and across most of the earth.
‘From any historical perspective’, writes the pre-eminent historian of
slavery, David Brion Davis, ‘this was a stupendous transformation’.
Of
course, the abolitionists would not have won if they had been an entirely
counter-cultural force. They were able to capitalise on the bourgeois cult of
sensibility and the Enlightenment rhetoric of rights and benevolence. Their
cause rapidly became a fashionable one, and attracted mass support. They were
helped by the sense of crisis generated by the American Revolution, which dealt
a demoralising blow to British pride and prompted a quest to rehabilitate the
nation’s honour. Moreover, Parliament’s eventual commitment to abolition in
1806-07 resulted from a series of political contingencies.
Yet
when all this has been said, abolition could not have happened without
abolitionism. And at the very heart of the British abolitionist movement were
people driven in large part by religious convictions. As Davis has written,
‘religion was the central concern of all the British abolitionist leaders’.
The Quakers and the Evangelical Anglicans who came together in the 1780s were
united in their hostility to nominal Christianity. In their eyes, the slave
trade was the most glaring evidence of the shallowness of contemporary religion;
it was an iniquity that provoked the anger of a just God. The British needed to
stop paying lip service to their Christianity, they needed to live up to it –
to act justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly before their God.
We
must use the bicentenary to reflect on the victims of the slave trade,
Britain’s shameful role, and the complicity of the church. But there is still
every reason to celebrate the abolitionists, and to learn from their
achievement. Above all, they teach us to have confidence in the transformative
power of the Gospel and trust in a living God who acts within history. In
post-Christian Britain the idea of the Gospel as public truth is anathema to
many, and the social problems confronting us are great. Christians face the
temptation to lose heart and retreat. It is a good time to remember the
abolitionists.
today,
meanwhile…
·
‘The Home Office estimates
that 4,000 women are at present enslaved in the UK’ writes Carrie Pemberton,
of CHASTE. ‘A report issued last year estimated that 80% of international
trafficking is for sex.… The trafficking business is now worth an estimated £12
billion globally. Alterations in the law and more resources are essential if it
is to be halted. There can be no better way to mark the bicentenary of the Act
than to abolish the slave trade.’ (Church Times, 12 January, 2007)
·
In his last address to the
WCC, in 1996, Lesslie Newbigin said: ‘I am going to raise one particular issue
which I have never raised in public before and which I did not intend to raise
when I came to Salvador. It is connected with the ribbon on my wrist. When we
stood in the old slave market on Saturday morning on those rough stones which
had held the weight of the bare and bruised and shackled feet of countless of
our fellow human beings, when we stood in that place so heavy with human sin and
human suffering and we were asked to spend two minutes in silence waiting for
what the Spirit might say to us, I thought first how unbelievable that
Christians could have connived in that inhuman trade; and then there came to my
mind the questions: Will it not be the case that perhaps our great-grandchildren
will be equally astonished at the way in which we in our generation, in our
so-called modern, Western, rich, developed culture, connive at the wholesale
slaughter of unborn children in the name of that central idol of our culture –
freedom of choice? I know… that to raise (that issue) is exceedingly painful,
as painful as was the struggle against the slave trade.. (but) it is simply one
example of the costliness of that attempt to ensure that the gospel is not
domesticated within our cultures, but continually challenges our culture.’
(Newbigin, Signs
amid the Rubble, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright, Eerdmans, 2003, p.118.)
Editorial
note:
When we think of
those who have come to live and work in Britain from other parts of the world we
tend to think of Muslims, Hindus and people of other non-Christian religions
before we think of Christians. In fact, however, many immigrants are Christian.
Andrew Walls writes (ACCESS 577) that our churches are called to be
multicultural today: can we listen carefully to our immigrant brothers and
sisters in Christ?
Anna Thomas-Betts reminds us below that many immigrant Christians think
that we English Christians and our churches are timid (Lesslie Newbigin,
returning from India in the 1970’s, thought the same). They sometimes also
view us as timid about asking immigrants of other religions to draw their
religious views into further creative engagement with their host culture in the
search for a future having consistency and integrity. These views of immigrant
Christians remind us that our public culture is one which tends either to judge
religious claims in terms of its own narrow ‘secular rationality’ or else to
see religion as private property into which any critical engagement would be an
intrusion. Our public culture tends to adopt the former approach towards
Christianity and the latter approach towards immigrant culture and religion.
Being
an immigrant Christian in Britain today
some
personal reflections
Anna
Thomas-Betts
The first thought that
came to my mind when I heard the news item about ‘British Airways and the
cross’ was a question: would I have taken as brave a stance as Miss Nadia
Eweida did? If it meant losing my
livelihood, I suspect not. But even
as the question was forming in my mind, I realised it was very much a
hypothetical question for me, for the following reason.
My
formative years were spent in a community where three religions, Hindu,
Christian and Muslim faiths, co-existed more or less harmoniously for centuries,
with adherents in roughly equal numbers. Everyone
knew the religious affiliation of others straightaway from our names and the
minor differences in appearance and attire like the bindi
or the smear of sandalwood on the forehead (Hindu), the scarf around the
hair (Muslim), or the way the dhoti
was worn. The dietary habits were
another telltale sign – Hindus would not eat beef, Muslims shunned pork, but
if you were a Christian, anything went! At
no time did I feel the need to proclaim that I was a Christian, nor for that
matter, deny it. In the last fifty
years things have changed and many Christians and Hindus have similar first
names now and there is a much greater uniformity in dress code also, but there
are still enough small differences to distinguish a Hindu from a Muslim and so
forth.
Clearly,
Miss Eweida’s circumstances are very different.
I have read that her conversion to Christianity was costly to her and
that this was one reason she wanted it to be openly acknowledged.
How many of her customers would have taken note of, or cared about, the
little cross or her religious affiliation is another question altogether.
I have never in my life worn a cross as a pendant, nor felt the need to,
but the stance of British Airways in the whole saga seemed to me to be plain
silly. The more serious point,
however, is that it is symptomatic of an increasing lack of confidence in the
country generally of its Christian heritage and the remarkable diffidence in
applying even to small matters what most people would consider to be common
sense.
A
diverse population
The immigrant
Christians of this country are, of course, incredibly diverse in cultural,
political and economic background, not to mention churchmanship.
So it would be rather meaningless to talk about our
collective response to issues, and how we
want to worship, for example. There are those of my generation who feel the
need to worship using liturgies and singing hymns in their own language, while
there are others who are far more at home with, and love, traditional Anglican
worship in English. At the same
time, the need to preserve some part of one’s original identity seems to be
very profound and there are many gathered congregations of many denominations
that satisfy that need, acting very much as a social and community focus for the
diaspora concerned, even though they have to use the Roman script to print
prayers and hymns in the original language!
I
would class myself a ‘social migrant’, choosing to adopt this country after
finding some of the social codes of my own background, especially relating to
women, stifling. So for me it is
particularly alarming to see how we as a society are willing to accept erosions
of values in the name of interfaith relations (and I say that as a passionate
advocate of peaceful coexistence of religions and interfaith dialogue).
The veil issue is a case in point. The
Muslim community in Kerala dates back many centuries, but until a few years ago
I had never seen a niqab-wearing woman
there and even now, despite the strong Arab influence on the Keralan migrant
workers in the Gulf region, they are very much a rarity.
So I find the assertion that ‘Islam demands it’ difficult.
I find even more difficult the demands of the Luton schoolgirl who wanted
to wear a robe as she found the widely accepted selwar-kameez, with their
traditional ‘baggy trousers’, too immodest.
Was her modesty affronted when her face (complete with make-up, it
seemed) was plastered on the front pages of newspapers?
The irony is that Muslim countries are unashamed in prohibiting, in
varying degrees, the practice of Christianity, and often persecuting Christians,
while we nervously ponder the offence that might be caused by requiring a
moderate amount of commonality in our dress code!
I
suspect that like me, many immigrants, and not just Christian immigrants, chose
to come to this country at least partly because of the appeal of the Christian
values and principles enshrined in the laws and practices here, the welfare
state and individual rights and freedoms being good examples of this.
It would be a great pity if the very characteristics of society that were
attractive to so many people were allowed to change for the worse without anyone
taking serious notice of it.
COMMENT:
WHAT IS THE CHURCH FOR?
What is the role and purpose of the church? It seems to me that there is
a fundamental shift in understanding about the church taking place in British
society. Many people in Britain have for generations seen the
church as being here primarily to christen babies and conduct weddings and
funerals and to provide people with some religious rituals that will give them a
sense of peace and spiritual uplift. That's the Vicar's job. That's what people
expect from the church.
However we now have an Archbishop of York who does not come from an
English background. His faith was forged in the furnace of Idi Amin's Uganda. He
and many others see the Christian faith as a transforming power and influence
within the whole of human society. My own call to ordained ministry arose out of
my experience of the church in South Africa that was at the forefront of
confronting apartheid and modelling a new kind of society. Many Christians in
Britain today believe that the purpose of the church is to be salt and light, to
permeate society with a distinctive quality of life, to dispel darkness and
arrest decay. We are here to make a difference, to bring about change. I
believe that the local church is God's secret weapon to transform the world. If
local churches throughout Britain were committed to living the life of Jesus in
loving and caring communities we could radically affect the future of this
nation. That's what I believe the church is for.
Ian Cowley
Faith,
democracy and ideology
In their recent conflict with the government about the adoption of
children by same-sex couples, Roman
Catholic Church leaders were accused of seeking exemption from something serving
the public good – viz. non-discrimination – in order that they might uphold
the church’s own private principles.
Actually, of course, they were seeking to uphold principles which their
church believes are precisely for the
public good. And, as Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor pointed out, much social
provision today stems from past initiatives inspired by such Christian concern.
Jonathan Bartley sees this concern as the crux of all Christian
engagement with public life. Freedom for such engagement ‘is not about
Christians protecting their own religious interest at all. Rather, it is about
their freedom to speak out in the interest of others.’ Such freedom becomes
contentious, he remarks, when a gulf grows between the churches and the nation
state over the interpretation of public principles such as equal treatment,
tolerance and the rule of law.1
Today this freedom appears increasingly under threat from secular
ideology. And
‘Once knowledge is equated with ideology, it is
no longer necessary to argue with opponents on intellectual grounds or to enter
into their point of view. It is enough to dismiss them as eurocentric, racist,
sexist, homophobic in other words, as politically suspect.’2
In such ideological discourse, the charge of ‘discrimination’ is a
trump card which lends itself to indiscriminate use. But real discrimination is
too serious an injustice for us to allow the charge to be so discredited.
Legislation must leave a proper space for unresolved issues regarding
what constitutes ‘the public good’, ‘discrimination’ etc.
especially where these issues arise among those known for their
conscience-inspired commitment and initiatives towards the public good. When
their contribution is excluded from the public realm, public space begins to
look more like a private space over which the government has absolute property
rights. The traditional vision of democracy is more inclusive than this.
Notes
1. Church Times,
12 January, 2007.
2. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt
of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (Norton, 1995, pp. 12-13)
A
problem like Maria
‘‘What shall we do
with a problem like Maria?’, sing a chorus of nuns at the start of The
Sound of Music, the most
successful musical ever. But the question seems to have presented itself first
to the would-be directors of the play and film based on the life of this devout
young Christian woman. As Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new stage production attracts
popular attention, we might reflect on this.
In
her autobiographical The Trapp Family Singers, the real-life Maria chose to begin at the
same place as the film. However, when she was interviewed for Desert Island
Discs in the 1980’s she described how she came to enter that convent in the
first place. As skilful young mountaineer, one evening she had been entrusted
with the task of belaying for a group of climbers. As she stood alone watching
the sun set on the glacier, its colours refracting through the ice, she was
overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene. If God had given her so much, she
reflected, in return she should give him everything. Nothing less would be
enough. She set off directly to the convent, rucksack on back, and asked to join
the community. Despite the absence of normal procedure, it was decided to accept
her.
Faith
excised
Her devout Christian
faith permeates Maria’s books. However, it seems to have presented a problem
to play and film directors. In the film, her faith is hardly visible. Indeed
sometimes it is replaced jarringly by sheer sentiment. Striking illustrations of
this are the two songs for which Richard Rogers wrote the lyrics as well as the
music (usually Rogers wrote the music and Hammerstein the lyrics).
Maria
sings the first song as she approaches the Villa of Captain von Trapp to work as
resident tutor to his children. She is overawed at the sight of it. It would
have been simply consistent with her faith to depict her offering up a prayer
putting her confidence in God. But instead Maria is made to sing ‘I have
confidence in confidence alone; besides which, you see, I have confidence in
me’. God does not feature.
The
second song is Maria’s response to the Captain’s marriage proposal.
‘Somewhere in my youth or childhood’ she sings, ‘I must have done
something good’. As a sentiment this it at the level of the response to
misfortune when it comes, ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ The real-life
Maria recounts a different story. She was reluctant to marry Captain von Trapp,
her love being for the convent. But she accepted marriage to him as a
responsibility laid upon her by God (so her convent sisters told her, having
sought guidance from the Spirit), in order to secure her ongoing care of the
Captain’s children. Had she however been pleased about it, she would no doubt
have received it as another gracious gift of God like that which on the glacier
inspired her vocation, and not as a reward for having ‘done something good’.
Julie
Andrews has said that it was a constant challenge when making the film to
‘keep down the sugar’. Compare this to Maria’s words in her preface to The
Trapp Family Singers: ‘While I was working on this book and writing down
the memories of a family, it amazed me to see how much love – genuine, real
love – was stored up in one brief lifetime; first, God’s love for us his
children, the guiding , protecting love of a father; and as all real love calls
forth love in return, it couldn’t be different’. Here is something more
nourishing than sugar, to feed the popular imagination.
My
point is not simply that The Sound of Music fails to give Christian faith its due. It is
rather that it illustrates how the quite ordinary nourishment of popular, tacit
Christian imagination by stories of faith gets blocked by the intervention of
media and entertainment beliefs and values. It gets blocked by the ideology and
sentiment prevalent among the producers of popular mass culture and expressed in
the work of individual directors and script writers. How might popular
Christian imagination one day come to be nourished more freely?
Book
reviews
Duncan
MacLaren, Mission Implausible: Restoring
Credibility to the Church Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004, 214 pp., £15.99 (pb).
David F.
Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ
in a Postmodern World , Eerdmans/IVP, 2005, 317 pp., £14.99 (hb).
These
two books share similar concerns, but the specific contexts they address differ
significantly, and the conclusions they reach are distinct. Both acknowledge
that today’s Western Church faces major challenges to its ministry and mission
due to the shift from modernity to postmodernity. Wells has long stood out as
one of the most passionate and provocative analysts of Christianity in
contemporary culture , and Above All
Earthly Pow’rs completes a tetralogy which began with No Place for Truth in 1993 and
continued through God in the Wasteland and
Losing our Virtue. By contrast
MacLaren is relatively unknown; yet he matches Wells for verve, while writing
rather more precisely and practically about how churches can live, worship and
witness with integrity in the postmodern world.
The contrasts between the two texts owe much to the fact that they are
written on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and aim mainly to address their own
national situation. Wells is aware that the USA is the ‘great exception’ to
the chronic decline of the Church in the rich West, with attendance rates still
around 40% compared to the plummeting single-figure statistics in Britain and
Europe. So whereas MacLaren seeks radical, emergency aid for a UK Church in
which leading denominations might lose viability within the next generation,
Wells is more concerned with the pitfalls which have accompanied the relative
success and ‘largesse’ of American churches, and most particularly, of the
American Evangelical churches. Indeed, he writes very much as an American
Evangelical to fellow American Evangelicals, and assumes that it is they who
hold the key to the future. As such, his primary purpose is to warn them of
complacency – to bemoan their accommodation with secular niche marketing
strategies, self-help discourses and shallow consumerism, and to rouse them
instead to a costly re-emphasis on full-orbed gospel truth, however
‘intolerant’ that may seem in a wider civic society sold on relativism. The
key to this, he insists, is a socially-engaged Christology which confidently
reasserts the sovereignty of Jesus in all areas of life. It is to this doctrinal
paradigm that Wells devotes the central section of his book.
Maclaren echoes Wells when he insists that churches which hope to buck
the general European decline must be ‘theologically robust’ if they are to
deal with the inevitable marginalisation that will come as they try to live
holistically for Christ in a society which has forgotten the gospel. Granted,
they must continue to engage with this society - treating nominalism as an
opportunity rather than a threat, exhibiting ‘dynamics of credibility’,
achieving ‘significance within culture’, and inculcating ‘structures of
plausibility’. But those structures must function as ‘shelters’ rather
than merely as gateways: there will be tensions, and the church will have to
protect the adults it disciples and the young people in whom it invests.
Actually, MacLaren goes further than Wells in advocating new, ‘sociologically
sectarian’ forms of church life in which difference is embraced rather than
resisted. However, while there are clear precedents for such self-consciously
marginal, intentional communities within Evangelicalism (e.g among the
Anabaptists), MacLaren opts to reach back to the early medieval period. While
aware that readings of Celtic Christianity are much disputed and sometimes
fancifully anachronistic, he still finds in the life of Saint Columba, and in
the community he founded on Iona, key clues to the future health of the British
church. Although Celtic monasteria concentrated ministerial, liturgical and practical
resources in one place, they also functioned as dispersed missional communities,
servicing outlying churches, villages and towns. For all the changes wrought by
postmodernity, this basic pattern of a ‘core community with a common rule
serving a wider hinterland’ is presented by MacLaren as a thread running
through many creative postmodern expressions of church – one which in turn
contrasts with the parochial and ‘gathered church’ ecclesiologies which
predominated in modernity. Thus he sees suggestive forms of this ‘Columban’
paradigm in Christian communities as diverse as the Jesus Army, the Leeds-based
internet church www.sanctus.org, and the Oasis Trust’s Faithworks project.
MacLaren’s vision is as big as Wells’, and he can paint with as broad
a brush. If he devotes less space to explicitly doctrinal theology, it is not
because he denigrates sound doctrine, but because he realises that doctrine is
expressed through mission, worship and community, as well as before
them. To be fair, Wells affirms this, too, but those acquainted with earlier
volumes in his tetralogy might nonetheless yearn for more practical
demonstration and hard exemplification of authentic church life in this final
text: the oracular denunciations of Evangelical compromise are still often
salutary, but they risk becoming over-familiar. If you admire Wells, Above
all Earthly Pow’rs will confirm you admiration. But MacLaren’s bold,
fresh voice deserves the sort of audience that Wells now commands.
David Hilborn
J.
Andrew Kirk, Mission Under Scrutiny:
Confronting Current Challenges, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006, 227pp., £12.95.
‘It
is not necessary to opt either for a refusal to engage with current irreligious
cultures or to submit to their basic assumptions.’ This sentence in the final
chapter defines the stance Kirk takes in his latest book. He takes contemporary
culture seriously, he analyses its premises, sets forth its arguments, and
attempts to do justice to them. Ultimately, however, he presents a
counter-cultural position based upon what he sees as the radically different
nature of the Gospel. He is pessimistic about secular values and concerned that
much contextualisation is compromise.
The premise of the book is the vital importance of engaging
missiologically with the secular and, largely, western world. Kirk brings
biblical and global perspectives to this engagement. The first three chapters
analyse the secular, postmodern culture and provide a missional response. Then
Kirk looks at scripture, evangelism, religion and violence, prophecy, and
contextualisation using the example of the debates over homosexuality. He
deliberately tackles some of the most controversial issues and puts forward a
variety of positions before cogently arguing for his own. In doing so he brings
a fresh approach to familiar issues. He concludes by calling for radical
discipleship in mission that refutes the relativism and pluralism of
postmodernity.
Kirk is known for his thoughtful books on mission topics. His writing is
clear and accessible for the general reader, and this book is no exception.
However, it feels more like a selection of essays than a cohesive volume. His
criteria for selecting the topics is that they are ‘some of the most pressing
problems facing the Church in mission.’ Since it is impossible to be
exhaustive, a more focused rationale might have been helpful. And the book might
be better described if the two parts of the title were swapped, giving
‘Confronting Current Challenges’ a prior position. These, however, are
quibbles. Those who want to understand different positions on the pertinent
cultural issues addressed and to reflect on Christian responses to them will
find much of aid here.
Emma Wild-Wood
Timothy
Jenkins, An Experiment in Providence: How
faith engages with the world, SPCK, 2006, 146pp., £9.99 (pb).
Jenkins
invites us in to a sharing of faith, saying “you cannot be put off reading
scripture by the expertise of scholars; it is too precious.”
He finds, within the Anglican tradition of using the whole of scripture
in daily worship, valuable insights from even the most unpromising biblical
material, like the despair of the preacher in Ecclesiastes. Where in Judges we
read “everybody did as he saw fit”, this “has an uncomfortably modern ring
to it”. “We live in a land of pleasures and temptations… joining in
indigenous practices and forgetting our Christian calling.”
He analyses the Toronto Blessing as a phenomenon which echoes the
ordination of women, noting “Some images informed by categories of gender are
acted out…. People who are filled with the Spirit are out of control of
themselves, and mastered by God. There is an acting out of disorderliness and
irresponsibility that is at the same time pleasurable. The ‘drunken’ women
perhaps epitomize this …. There is a ‘feminization’ of the
congregation…. and a corresponding emphasis on the masculinity of God.”
Jenkins revels in trinities. He has three approaches to scripture:
reading commentaries, using cross references, and making careful note of the
structure of each book. Churches are described as having “three serious
theological elements - order, freedom and human flourishing – in play”.
Older societies, from the time of Anselm, were identified as consisting of three
elements, church, nobility and people, with related rights and obligations, a
scheme which came to a cataclysmic end in the French revolution.
From this Jenkins boldly advocates the thesis that Anglicanism is the
only answer to modernity, with its trinity of scripture, tradition and reason,
and from this comes hope.
Coming from the Dean of an ancient Anglican academic institution, this is
a valuable reflection on pastoral work sustained by prayer.
Tom
Ambrose
Theos
– public theology think tank
In
November 2006 Theos launched its first report and made national news in the
process. Director
The origin of the term
“think tank” is American and was first applied in the UK to the Centre
Policy Review Staff (CPRS), a “central capability unit”, established in the
Cabinet Office in 1970 by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath.
The
battle of ideas
In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, the term came to be used to refer to outside, ideologically driven,
free market bodies, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam
Smith Institute and the Centre for Policy Studies. They provided the ideas that
helped shape the instincts and energy of Thatcherism. William Wallace has
observed that the new right think tanks that sprung up alongside the IEA were
“small, passionately committed and concerned only with providing arguments for
those already half-persuaded” (Wallace 1994 p. 149). In 1988 the third way
Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) was founded in order to give the
Labour Party its own Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), and the Social Market
Foundation (SMF) (1989) emerged shortly afterwards to do the same for the Social
Democrats. During the last 25 years, the number of think tanks in the UK has
proliferated.
In
short, think tanks undertake in-depth research, publish reports and promote
ideas in order to change the climate of opinion. It was this observation that
led to the creation of Theos.
Origins
The start of Theos can be traced back a decade to a conversation between
Lesslie Newbigin and the present Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. They reflected on
the success of think tanks in changing public opinion and taking ideas from the
margins (such a Neo-Conservative economics) into the political and cultural
mainstream. They speculated about the possibility of doing something similar
with theology. The establishment of Theos last year represented the realisation
of this dream.
Theological
commentary
Theos aims to provide
alternative perspectives to the orthodoxies of secular culture and impact public
opinion about the role faith and belief in society. We undertake research and
provide commentary on social and political arrangements. The word “Theos”
and our descriptor, “the public theology think tank”, reflect our overall
aim of putting God “back” into the public domain. We are ecumenical and are
as influenced by the Kuyperian
view as Catholic Social Teaching.
De-secularisation
Our perspective is
that society is embarking on a process of rapid de-secularisation. Interest in
spirituality is increasing across Western culture. Indeed, religion is the issue
of our time. Faith is firmly on the agenda of both government and the media. In
the arts, humanities and social sciences there are important and exciting
intellectual developments currently taking place around questions of values and
identity. Theos speaks into this new context. Our perspective is that faith is
not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society, but that
society can only truly flourish if faith is given the space to do so. Indeed,
this was the subject of our first report, Doing
God: A Future for Faith in the Public Square. With a foreword by Rowan
Williams and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the report argued that religion will play
an increasingly significant role in our culture during the years ahead.
Reaction
The launch of Theos provoked a robust reaction. In the Guardian,
AC Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, called the first
report ‘confused’ and recoiled against the idea that atheism could be
described as a faith perspective. The historian, David Starkey, was prompted to
call for the disestablishment of the Church of England. Madeleine Bunting, Guardian
columnist and speaker at our launch event, expressed concern over a new wave of
‘Christian triumphalism’. However, all of this is welcome. One of the things
that will mark Theos out will be generosity in debate. People are allowed their
views, and allowed to attack our perspective. It does not hurt us. That is the
nature of the public square. Indeed, the freedom to debate in such a way is
itself a gift of the Christian tradition. It is far more important that people
are having the conversation.
In-depth
research and analysis
Theos is committed to
undertaking research across a wide range of subject areas. We analyse
social and political change and offer interesting new angles and alternative
perspectives on the issues that matter. We produce high-quality research,
reports and publications, an events’ programme, news, information and analysis
to media companies and other opinion formers and regular email bulletins.
In
addition to our independently driven work, we provide research, analysis and
advice to individuals and organisations across the private, public and
not-for-profit sectors. Theos operates using a business model and the funding
received as a result of this research is essential to our existence. Our unique
position within the think tank sector means that we have the capacity to develop
proposals that carry values - with an eye to demonstrating what really works.
Our staff and consultants have strong public affairs experience, an excellent
research track record and a high level of theological literacy. In addition, we
are practised in campaigning, media relations, detailed policy development and
effecting policy change. Our hope is that, as a result, we can be a bridge from
the University to the culture.
Our
prayer is that we can have a similar impact to the one that the mainstream
secular think tanks have had in changing opinion, but, contrary to the earlier
observation by Wallace, convince the un-persuaded as well as the half persuaded.
It is an ambitious aim, but one that we are committed to achieving.
For
more information about Theos or to order a copy of the first report, go to
www.theosthinktank.co.uk
This
issue’s contributors
Tom
Ambrose is Vicar
of Trumpington, Cambridge
John
Coffey is Reader
in Early Modern History at the
Ian
Cowley is an
author and Vicar of Yaxley and Holme with Conington, in the Diocese of Ely
David
Hilborn is
Director of Studies, North Thames Ministerial Training Course
Anna
Thomas-Betts is
retired Senior Lecturer in Geophysics from Imperial College London and a
member of the General Synod of the Church of England
Emma
Wild-Wood is
Secretary of the British and Irish Association of Mission Studies
Paul
Woolley is
Director of Theos
Climate
change and repentance
Stephen
May
Everywhere you look
climate change and its effects are at the top of the public agenda: today’s Times
(18/5/07) was headlined ‘Rapid rise in global warming is forecast’. The
television schedules have been full of programmes about the topic over the last
few years, the news bulletins with items on Antarctic, Arctic and Greenland
ice-shelf melting and drowning polar bears. What has been presented by the media
– particularly apart from one infamous Channel Four documentary of dubious
pedigree – has been a consistent narrative, one of human-caused atmospheric
pollution leading to a multitude of unpleasant consequences. There is
considerable debate over how far these can be stopped or mitigated: is it
already too late, as James Lovelock of ‘Gaia’ fame seems to think? The
ever-increasing evidence of this escalating catastrophe is overwhelming to most
people; however it is rejected by sceptics such as US President George W. Bush,
the American oil companies, and many accused of vested interests by their
opponents. Others have talked with a modernist confidence of the power of
technology to solve any problems that might arise.
Where
is the ordinary Christian to stand in the midst of this debate?
A
memorable conference
The considerable
appeal of this issue was shown by the great success of a WYSOCS day conference
held in December 2006 on ‘Climate Change and the Global Economy’. The
original event was so oversubscribed as to need expansion. It sought not just to
examine the scientific evidence for climate change - though this was admirably,
persuasively and clearly presented by leading scientist Sir John Houghton in the
first part of the day – but also the underlying reasons for it. The second
part was thus devoted to theologian Professor Bob Goudzwaard’s analysis,
‘Unmasking the ideologies obstructing global economic change.’ I found the
large numbers in attendance and the buzzy atmosphere fascinating. It testified
to an awareness among Christians that we cannot stand on the sidelines regarding
this issue, but need to come to a mature, reflective but committed and active
stance. The standard of presentation was excellent and the conference itself
very well managed.
Some right-wing
American evangelists describe all talk of climate change as a huge fraud, but
other American Evangelical leaders have gone public over the need to take it
seriously. Unlike sceptic Bush, his opponent in the 2000 US Presidential
election Al Gore (announcing himself as ‘the man who used to be the next
President of the United States’) has always been concerned about the issue.
Bush and Gore are both Christians. Gore’s documentary film, ‘An Inconvenient
Truth’, has gone round the world and won unprecedented critical and popular
success.
The
title of that film shows that the debate is almost as much about the motivation
for asserting what one believes the facts are, as about the facts themselves.
They are most decidedly not ‘value-free’. At the end of ‘An Inconvenient
Truth’, a number of suggestions intersperse the usual credits. One runs like
this:
‘If
you believe in prayer,
pray
that
people will change their mind.’
This similarity is a
testimony not just to Gore’s own Christian faith but to the acceptability of -
at least some - religious discourse in the US public realm. It is also an
indication that both Gore and Goudzwaard believe that there are core theological
and ethical issues at the heart of the climate change debate, not just matters
of disputed fact. The notion of changing your mind - repentance in other words -
is key to remedying circumstances that are otherwise leading inexorably to
disaster. That is both why the conference was held and why, on his own claim,
Gore has given his climate change slide show thousands of times. People need to
alter their behaviour and, for that to occur, they need to be persuaded both of
what is happening and what they can do to alter it. Their reluctance to admit
it, it is argued, is tied up with what the Bible calls sin. It involved a change
of heart and behaviour. If, as Gore memorably puts it, people tend to slide
straight from denial to despair, they need to be shown the situation is not
irremediable.
Another question may
be raised. Is talk of climate change still too much driven by human
self-interest? Does our vision not need to go beyond ourselves to the whole of
God’s world, for which, according to many readings of Genesis, we have
responsibility? That humans are under threat is terrible, but it is also a
tragedy that the world’s biodiversity is being devastated. C.S. Lewis would
surely concur that we should be weeping over an extinction of species brought
about by our greed and carelessness.
The WYSOCS conference understandably could not do everything, and largely
ignored such questions. What it did seek to do was to open eyes. It also asked
pertinent questions over our way of life, raising issues as to how far
Christians habitually and unreflectively accept the consumerist ‘growth’
values of our age. It was a welcome introduction to a subject that surely
deserves more serious study. Gore’s film was addressed almost entirely (though
very ably) at the first level alone.
Many thoughtful
Christians are wary of ‘jumping on a bandwagon’, afraid of hitching
themselves to a cause dependent on possibly questionable scientific analysis,
and of being swept along by a ‘trendy’ alarmism that may leave them feeling
foolish in a few years time. Though such caution is understandable, it is hard
to follow the analysis of John Houghton or Al Gore without feeling that the
science is overwhelming. They certainly persuaded me that the situation is not
remotely comparable to little Ice Ages brought about by solar and other cycles:
it is of a different order of magnitude and ever-increasing. The number of
scientists worldwide coming to this opinion worldwide is becoming overwhelming
too. UN reports are unanimous, almost all the countries of the world coming to
consensus on the problems. To deny this is akin to aligning oneself with
‘Young Earthers’ who insist on a literal reading of Genesis. It is a sacrificium
intellectus, burying one’s head in the sand.
If
part of the Enlightenment legacy has been a false fact/value split, with the
Church relegated to dealing only with ‘spiritual matters’, then rejecting
this split entails refusing such marginalisation. The Church must take the
climate issue seriously. Certainly it must question its roots and remedies; but
it must not, as it does so, deny the seriousness of the issue. To do so would be
irresponsible. This position is by no means an alternative to maintaining
orthodoxy but is utterly consistent with it. It does not mean ‘going along
with the world’; it means refusing its characteristic sin and selfishness. It
does not mean being distracted from proclaiming the salvation of Christ, for
God’s salvation is for the world. Certainly there are questions to unfold
here, about acting for this world in the ‘interim’ before the Parousia.
But this should stir us to further thought and action. We cannot take
refuge in wilful blindness.
COMMENT: LIVING IN
AN AGE ADDICTED TO EXCESS
It was in the early 1970's that I first became aware of the words
ecology and pollution. Like many of the post war "baby boomer"
generation I grew up in a world which seemed to be still largely unspoilt. The
beaches were pristine, petrol was cheap and plentiful, and the possibility of
human beings seriously endangering the future of the planet through economic and
industrial development seemed remote.
However the danger signs were there. The local brick factory belched out
daily clouds of soot and smoke which undoubtedly polluted the air that we
breathed. Rachel Carson had written her prescient and influential book
"Silent Spring". Some of us decided to try to avoid processed
foods and disposable consumer goods. But by and large the warnings went
unheeded.
Now with the daily stream of evidence of the reality of global warming,
at last we seem to be waking up. But is it too late? How on earth can we be
weaned off our appetite for cheap air travel, unlimited household gadgets and
the "right" to an ever improving standard of living? How can we tell
the peoples of India, China and numerous other developing countries
that they are not entitled to the same aspirations?
Many economists and scientists are telling us that it is not too late to
save the planet. If we change now, they say, then the worst scenarios can
still be avoided. But can we change now? Can we really cut back on our desire
for consumer goods, electricity and unfettered mobility? I suspect that our
society is now addicted to a way of life that we will not give up unless it is
actually taken from us. So for Christians, and for all people of conscience,
there is the age-old call to live prophetically in a world hurtling towards
crisis and catastrophe. Never has the need for simple lifestyles been more
important. Simplicity is a key Christian discipline, taught and practised by
Jesus and by many of his most influential followers through the centuries. The
church in the developed world must rediscover the practice of simple living if
we are to have much at all to offer to the world of the 21st Century.
Ian
Cowley
Faith,
Historical Identity –
and Consumerism
David Kettle
A
Benedictine moment?
John Henry Newman saw Christian culture as having three great ages:
‘First, the age of St Benedict, which Newman calls the age of poetry or
imagination. Second, the age of St Dominic, that of theological science. And
third, the age of St Ignatius, that of prudential or practical reason.’ 1
In an April 2005 lecture, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled Newman’s words.
Reporting his lecture, Carol Zaleski writes:
‘Each of these ages belongs to the living Church, is relevant to the
present, and moves towards its future realisation in God’s plan. But there are
also times of special ascendancy for each age.’
In particular, Newman wrote that the age of St Benedict came into being
when the world was “old, decayed and moribund”, bringing with it an
unlooked-for rejuvenation.
Zaleski comments ‘The age of St Benedict returns, in alls its poetry,
simplicity, penitent humility and balance, whenever Christian civilization is
depleted or under attack.’
The Cardinal told his audience that today we live in a ‘Benedictine
moment’. Eighteen days later, elected Pope, he took the name Benedict XVI.
The occasion of today’s ‘Benedictine moment’ is, for Benedict XVI,
the contemporary decay of European culture and of its Christian civilization.
Thus in December 2005 (see ACCESS 581)2 posing
the question ‘What is left of European culture today?’, he continues
‘perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization which has
marched triumphantly across the planet?’ ‘At the hour of its greatest
success,’ he writes, ‘Europe seems hollow.. All that it sees in its own
history is the despicable and the destructive… what Europe needs is a new
self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly
wishes to survive’.
Such greater self-acceptance, including greater historical and Christian
self-awareness, will be needed in Britain too if we are fruitfully to
acknowledge and affirm the ‘British way of life’ as desired by incoming
Prime Minister Gordon Brown (among others). In the British case, however, there
are distinct challenges over and above that
posed by the ‘lack of self-love’ we share with the rest of Europe according
to Benedict XVI. In particular there has been traditionally among the English
less interest in celebrating a national identity than in celebrating nationally
the virtue of being a rational, civilized and Christian person. This suggests
that Christians should contribute keenly to any contemporary exploration of the
‘British way of life’.
Should the churches now seek a revived national awareness of and
appreciation of the Christian influence upon our culture? Might this not play
into the hands of a resurgent BNP-style nationalism? Some fear so. Jonathan
Bartley writes: ‘the time has come to face the fact that when (the Church of
England) uses rhetoric about ‘our Christian nation’, it risks encouraging
support for right-wing extremists’.3 Nor is such rhetoric effective
in his view; rather, ‘it will be the quality of contemporary political
witness, not appeals to a bygone age, that will sort the sheep from the
goats’.
Now this stance will have appeal especially for those critical of the
‘culture Christianity’ of Christendom, including those within the Anabaptist
tradition. And the voice of this critical tradition surely needs to be heard
today in an age when our culture is drifting so far from understanding and
regard for Christianity, and the premises of Christendom-style ministry grow
ever more incongruous.
Nevertheless, to point to the Christian contribution in our culture is
potentially a far more vital exercise in communication than merely appealing to
a ‘bygone age’. We can do so seeking to reawaken awareness of and renew the
deepest and most promising well-springs of our continued way of life today.
Again, to seek this is not merely to exploit the dominance (however shrinking)
of Christian religion in our culture, but something far more vital. It is to
seek to reclaim and build on the fruits of centuries of faithful Christian
mission in our culture freely shaping the hearts and minds, values and
rationality and imagination of the population.
These vital dimensions of the Christian task today will be the theme of
our forthcoming Day Conference at Birmingham in September, with the hurdles and
sensitivities to be addressed in connection with this task.
Meanwhile other factors work against any ‘cultural renewal’ (except
of a distorted, fundamentalist kind) today. The traditional, tacit sources of
cultural identity are fading which have been associated with belonging to
family, community and nation and the obligations imposed by these. There have
been corresponding changes in attitude towards Christian religion. These have
been noted by sociologist Grace Davie. She traces the broad development of what
she characterises as ‘believing without belonging’, and of a shift away from
‘an ethic of obligation’ towards ‘an ethic of consumption’.
Are these changes to be accepted as normative for faith in contemporary
culture? Do they offer a blueprint for the future of the church? Rather they
drive us back to our deepest Christian resources for thinking about believing,
belonging, obligation and choice which are to be found in the Gospel with
reference to our relationship with God in Christ (see ACCESS 586).4 To
be sure, on the one hand such reflection may reveal that our traditional
Christian ideas about belonging and obligation contain culture-bound elements
from a past culture we must lay aside today. That is important. But it may also
reveal that our contemporary cultural accounts of believing, belonging,
obligation and choice are inadequate and a distorted model of what God intends
for us, and that the Church is called to be countercultural in these matters.
Meanwhile consumerism, for all it’s rhetorical celebration of choice
and of self-fulfilment, hardly fosters in any obvious way self-acceptance or
self-awareness, either at a personal or cultural level. More evidently, it
stimulates a feeling that we need something or other, even a feeling of personal
neediness.
The problematic distortion of Christian religion by consumerism is (so
far) more apparent to Christian critics in the United States than in Britain. It
prompts Eugene Peterson (ACCESS 590)4 provocatively to ask: ‘Do we realize how
almost exactly the Baal culture of Canaan is reproduced in American church
culture? Baal religion is about what makes you feel good. Baal worship is a
total immersion in what I can get out of it. And of course, it was incredibly
successful.’ Peterson alludes to a friend of his who is always saying
“You’ve got to identify people’s felt needs. Then you can construct as
program to meet the felt needs.” ‘It’s pretty easy’ says Peterson, ‘to
manipulate people. We’re so used to being manipulated by the image industry,
the publicity industry, and the politicians that we hardly know we’re being
manipulated’.
However, ‘This impatience to leave the methods of Jesus in order to get
the work of Jesus done is what destroys spirituality… The minute you start
doing things impersonally, functionally, mass-oriented, you deny the gospel’.
Ironically we do it even with respect to faith at its most personal, by selling
spirituality as about buying into emotional intimacy with God. ‘This promise
of intimacy is both right and wrong.’ says Peterson. ‘There is an intimacy
with God, but it’s like any other intimacy you don’t feel intimate most of
the time. Intimacy isn’t primarily a mystical emotion. It’s a way of life, a
life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency’ And the way to such
intimacy is shown by Jesus: “Now that you’ve got a life, I’m going to show
you how to give it up”. Peterson explains ‘as you learn how to die, you
start losing your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy
and love.’
Are there echoes here of the poetry, simplicity, penitent humility and
balance which, in Newman’s imagination, characterize ‘the age of St
Benedict’? We might well think so. One thing is for sure: it certainly
doesn’t sound like the age of consumerism.
Notes
1.
Carol Zaleski, ‘Two Benedicts and the renewal of Catholic Culture’, Second Spring, Vol.8, 2007, pp. 6-16.
2.
Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Europe and Its Discontents’, First
Things, January 2006 (available as ACCESS
581).
3.
Jonathan Bartley, ‘Beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing’, Church
Times, 20th April 2007.
4.
On this see David Kettle, ‘Believing without belonging? Cultural change
seen in theological context’, International Review of
Mission, Vo. 94, No. 375, October 2005, pp. 507-523 (available
as ACCESS 586).
5.
Eugene Peterson, ‘Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons’, Christianity
Today, March 2005, pp. 42-48. (available as ACCESS 590).
A
Rocha
Introduced
by Dave Bookless, Founder & National Director of A Rocha UK
At the moment it’s
somewhat bewildering being a Christian in the environmental field. For years
we’ve been stuck in a wilderness area, between a green lobby that blames
Christianity for legitimising the exploitation of nature, and a Church that sees
the earth a distraction from the ‘real spiritual business’. Suddenly for A
Rocha (www.arocha.org)
and other Christian environmental groups, we’re now everybody’s best friend
– mission agencies and churches are falling over themselves to be greener than
Thou, and even the major environmental charities are looking to the world faiths
for a moral lead on tackling Climate Change.
There
is undoubtedly a major change taking place in our western culture – the old
world of faith in science, human progress and unlimited economic growth is
clashing head-on with the realities of a planet in distress, and with
alternative world-views seeking a more holistic, planet-friendly way of being.
The key question is how Christians will line up in this changing context, and
what distinctive biblical contribution Christians can bring to shape the
emerging culture.
The
A Rocha story is one example of Christian responses to this question. A Rocha
(Portuguese for ‘the Rock’) began in 1983 with the vision of Peter and
Miranda Harris to establish a Christian Field Studies Centre in the Algarve,
amidst the ecological wilderness caused by mass tourism. The first A Rocha
project became a crucible of scientific research, community living, and
incarnational Christian presence, from which a set of values gradually emerged.
These have now spawned a global movement of Christians across six continents,
seeking to care for creation and incarnate Christ’s Lordship over creation. A
recent global A Rocha leaders’ forum in Kenya saw over 20 countries
represented, and encouraging signs of a profound change taking place in
Christian thinking and action.
So
what are A Rocha’s distinctive values? Firstly we are Christian,
not in the sense of being a sub-culture set against the world, but in believing
that God’s Word is true for the whole world and contains the power to
transform people, societies and nature. We are constantly called back to and
challenged by scriptural insights, often finding that ‘Christian cultures’
have drifted a long way from God’s purposes. Peter Harris, now President of A
Rocha, speaks of “the GM church, where
the DNA of our societies has been patched in such that the Gospel we preach is
no longer biblical.”
Secondly
we are called to Conservation of the natural world, based on the first great
commission of Genesis 1.26-28 and 2.15 – the call to study and steward God’s
world to His glory. In the increasing range of projects A Rocha is involved in,
this includes cleaning and restoring 90 acres of urban London wasteland, seeking
ways to mitigate human-elephant conflict in India and Ghana, encouraging
responsible eco-tourism and sustainable agriculture in Kenya, and helping
landowners in France and Lebanon protect marshes of great wildlife importance.
In every case, A Rocha tries to resist the sad dichotomy often drawn between the
needs of people and of wildlife, believing that both are involved in God’s
creating, sustaining and redeeming purposes.
Thirdly,
we place great value on Community, sometimes expressed through intentional life-sharing
under one roof, but always seen as building on our nature as one created
community under God. Of course community, with its challenge to individualism,
and consumerism, and its exposure to who the other really is ‘warts and
all’, is deeply counter-cultural, but in A Rocha’s experience it is so often
the place of encounter with God amidst the surprising and mundane. As well as
‘internal’ community amongst those working or volunteering for A Rocha,
there is a commitment to long-term relationship-building within our local
communities.
Next,
A Rocha is deeply Cross-cultural valuing the insights of the worldwide church,
encouraging exchanges between projects, and seeking to be shaped in its
organisational development particularly by non-Western voices.
Finally,
we are committed to Cooperation with any who share our objectives in a specific task.
You are probably more likely to encounter A Rocha at an environmental conference
or in a conservation journal, than at a missions fair or in a Christian
periodical. Our place is to live out a Christ-centred vision of creation care in
the public square, not in a shuttered cloister.
In
the UK, since starting in 2001, we have seen a major project develop in
multifaith west London, and now several local projects around the UK, often in
partnership with others. We are also finding ourselves drawn in to helping
churches and Christian organisations grapple with the theology and practice of
‘creation care’ and in resourcing individuals who want to live more
sustainably. We are still small, and no doubt often get it wrong, but it has
been thrilling to see the new connections with Christian faith that people make,
when they see that God cares not only about disembodied souls, but about the
earth and all that is in it.
Notes
1.
Rev. Peter Harris, at ‘Hope for the Planet’ conference, November 2005,
available on CD-Rom from A Rocha UK
Bearer
of messages
There
is little point in comparing a Sun-god with the Sun or Neptune with the great
deep; there is much in comparing the Law with the Sun or saying that God’s
judgements are an abyss and a mystery like the sea… By emptying nature of
divinity (…) you may fill her with deity, for she is now the bearer or
messages. There is a sense in which nature-worship silences her – as if a
child (…) were so impressed with the postman’s uniform that he omitted to
take in the letters.
C.
S. Lewis, Reflections o the Psalms
Book
reviews
In the
heyday of the burgeoning charismatic renewal in the 1970s my wife went to hear a
charismatic Baptist preacher, who expressed his admiration for the Elim
Pentecostal Church - and added that it benefited from having no theologians.
As I was then the lecturer in theology at Elim Bible College (since
renamed Regents Theological College) I did not find this comment very positive
about my role in educating the students at the college in biblical and
historical theology!
Rick Nanez is an American Assemblies of God minister, lecturer and
missionary who has repeatedly encountered in charismatic circles a disparaging
attitude to Christian learning and a negativity towards the use of one’s
intellect in matters of faith. His
book is an impassioned plea for the restoration of respect for reflective study
of the Bible, theology, apologetics, etc., and he argues persuasively for a
recognition of the valid place of the intellect, along with the heart, in our
devotion to God (cf. Matthew 22:37). Mature
Christian commitment is not an unthinking, irrational engagement of the heart
but is grounded in a redeemed understanding of revealed truth (e.g., Romans
12:2; Ephesians 4:23; Colossians 3:2, 10; 2 Timothy 1:7; 1 Peter 1:13).
He notes how Paul and Apollos had absorbed the learning of antiquity and
engaged in debates with both sympathetic listeners and enemies (Acts 17:2-3,
17-31; 18:4-5, 13, 19, 26; 19:8-10; 26:24-25; Titus 1:13-14).
Nanez convincingly shows that Paul’s alleged anti-intellectual teaching
in 1 Corinthians 1:17-2:1; Colossians 2:8, etc., is directed against negative
attitudes grounded in unbelief, not the wisdom generated by the perspectives of
faith.
Nanez demonstrates how early Pentecostal leaders and charismatic
preachers today have too often disparaged theological learning, advocating a
faith of the heart divorced from a studied consideration of the grounds of that
faith. In contrast he shows how
great Christian leaders from the early Church Fathers down to John Wesley and
Jonathan Edwards clearly supported careful study for growth in Christian
discipleship. Nanez traces the roots
of current anti-intellectualism in the demise of learning in post-revolutionary
America and especially in the nineteenth century holiness movement.
Nanez advocates the regular study of theology, apologetics and ethics by
committed Christians and he encourages the local church to nominate appropriate
professionals to teach their members informed Christian responses to current
issues in these areas. Nanez also
endorses the wider study of history, philosophy and science (as Wesley did for
his followers) in relation to the Christian world-view.
Failure to do this will be seriously detrimental to the growth and
evangelistic witness of the Church. It
may be noted that evangelical scholarship has never been so thorough and
extensive as it is now. The
challenge, Nanez argues, is for pastors to encourage their members to take
advantage of this vast resource. Otherwise
an emotionally oriented charismatic Christianity will produce disciples that
depend on the vagaries of their inner feelings for spiritual sustenance rather
than their understanding of the objective truths of Scripture.
We should not be surprised, when the pressures of life come upon them,
that they walk away from the Christian faith.
Julian Ward
Jeff
Astley, Leslie Francis, John Sullivan and Andrew Walker (eds), The Idea of a Christian University: Essays in Theology and Higher
Education, Paternoster, 2004, 295pp., £19.99 pb.
This is
a collection of seventeen essays arranged under two interrogative headings:
A Christian Calling? and A
Christian Curriculum? Two or
three can be illustrated here briefly; the remainder mostly merit attention,
though I struggle to understand any sympathetic bond between RJ Berry’s
chapter on Science and the writers in the first section of the book.
On first reading, I became progressively less stimulated as I went
through the book. Coming back to it,
and particularly to the first section, my response has been kinder.
Most papers come from Great Britain where, in the way of Christian
institutions of higher education “there is virtually nothing…from which we
can draw inspiration”. (Andrew Walker and Andrew Wright) These authors note in
A Christian
University Imagined that even the North American plethora of institutions
fails to embolden them in their envisioning since “many private colleges
with…denominational approval are…Christian universities only in name.”
They know that “a positive Christian contribution to scholarship and
the larger community” is made by some, yet Protestant sectarianism is driving
others to increase the fragmentation of society.
Using the notion of paideia, Walker and Wright look for a university to reunite the
natural and moral universes and to root research and teaching in the knowledge
of God in a manner instrumental to the health of student community, church and
society. Such “pursuit of
knowledge and formation of character begins and ends in the worship and
glorification of God.” A Christian
university has an inevitable missiological task, not in opposition to the world,
but by presence in it “as a particular way of being human.”
Ian Markham’s opening chapter with the book’s title counters the
claims of the secular paradigm for society and university.
Secularisation has not (as is often suggested) invariably accompanied
advanced scientific and technological culture; indeed it was the Christian
doctrine of creation which made science possible.
The secular university is both impoverished (by not exploring certain
basic issues) and damaging (because behind its apparent neutrality lie a host of
questionable ideological convictions). It resembles a hotel where public space
is “void”, the private accommodation can be used for any activity which
isn’t illegal and the “services given” all have their price. Markham sees
the features of a Christian university as ideological honesty, open-ness about
the attempt to inculcate “faith-based” values, and serious engagement with
“metaphysics” - addressing the philosophy of each subject taught, and
celebrating rationality and conversation in the quest for truth.
He believes that there is a market for such a university (and not only
among Christians), that diversity can be handled better in conversation than by
banishing it to the private realm, and that its curriculum must reveal a
“mission distinctiveness”.
John Sullivan reviews the contribution of Von Hügel to the theory of
Christian education. Von Hügel
commends the benefit of a diversity of interests in the all-round development of
students; the need to hold sacred and secular, spiritual and material, in
connection; the value of inner stability of conviction in accommodating
flexibility and inclusiveness; the need to balance the importance of authority,
rationality and experience; the value of ecclesial affiliation and an
equilibrating open-ness. Sullivan
calls for such an education’s Christian claims and their practical
out-workings to “salience in the institutional, intellectual and experiential
life of (the university’s) members.”
He quotes Warren Nord: “most students manage to earn their high school diplomas, their
undergraduate degrees and their professional and graduate degrees without ever
encountering a live religious idea.”
Following Von Hügel’s insights, he asks what kind or model of church
best fits the sympathetic association of affiliation and open-ness that a
Christian university needs. He
examines options tabled by Avery Dulles - the institutional, mystical,
prophetic, serving and sacramental models of church - and concludes that the
final option best fits this need.
A number of features of this volume strike the reviewer as curious.
Little attention is paid to the existence
(in addition to the idea) of those Christian universities that function as such.
Writers like Clouser, Marsden and Wolterstorff appear in the footnotes
but the Kuyperian roots of their interest in Christian education and the rich
literature springing from these appear to be unknown. “Theology” and
“church” are for the authors what mediate Christian understanding to the
educational process; I am left wondering: was the translation of Holy Scripture
into the vulgar tongue was really all that worthwhile?
Recent experiences brought me back to the book with fresh interest – if
not with entire reassurance. At the
November meeting in Nicaragua of the International Association for the Promotion
of Christian Higher Education (www.iapche.com),
I saw the earnest desire of young and growing churches (Latin and African,
mainly) for real Christian universities (which would produce generations of
leaders in every part of the community’s life). I asked myself whether the
European church is too tired, parochial or possessive to encourage lively
developments in CHE. The dangers of
too heavy a servant-orientation in church and university were observed and calls
were made for emphasis on the humanities in guiding curriculum formation. The
“mission distinctiveness” of Christian colleges in the two-thirds world and
their engagement with the community were of paramount importance.
On the other hand, aware of recent problems of mission-minded Christian
Unions in UK Universities (which figure after all in my own c.v.), I came upon
an unhappy phrase from their own publicity which described their members (with
positive intent) as “Christians thinly
disguised as students”. The
phrase haunts me when I try to talk hopefully of the idea of a Christian
university in the UK. Could those
students either want such a thing or benefit from it?
More worrying still, perhaps, and from a different side, are the signs of
liberal, secular totalitarianism which now seems effortlessly to override the
freedoms of faith-based institutions of service in this country – the Catholic
Adoption Agency in casu.
Kuyper’s “Sphere Sovereignty” lecture of 1880, at the opening of
his Free University, needs a modern-day audience in Britain that will grasp the
idea of formative cultural power and see that the people of God can exercise
such power for the liberation of our countrymen and women from dull, secular
empire.
David
Hanson
Peter E.
Hodgson, Theology and Modern Physics,
Ashgate, 2005, xiv + 282pp., £16.99 pb.
Peter
Hodgson is a nuclear physicist based in Oxford. In this book he argues
persuasively that modern science grew up and flourished in Christendom and that
this was no accident. Rather, it stemmed from fundamental Christian beliefs in
creation as being the good work of God, and as being contingent and therefore
open to investigation of an empirical kind. Moreover, the incarnation shows that
time is linear, in contrast to the Aristotelian cyclic view which was an
inhibiting factor for Greek science. There was a period of creativity in the
Muslim world in the middle ages, but this came to an end with the rise of the
belief that God acts directly in the world, rather than through laws of cause
and effect which he had ordained. Another reason Hodgson gives for this decline
was the view of some Muslim scholars that science should only be pursued for
practical ends, rather than for its own sake.
Hodgson surveys the development of physics from the middle ages, through
the renaissance, to modern times. He describes classical physics, relativity,
cosmology and (unsurprisingly given his own interests) devotes a full three
chapters to quantum theory. The non-specialist reader should be warned, however,
of the unexplained mathematics in the text, which will have to be skimmed in
order to get the gist of what is being said. It should also be noted that the
author takes a controversial stance on quantum theory, rejecting the view of
most physicists that the quantum world is ontologically indeterminate. Hodgson
thinks rather that quantum theory is incomplete and only describes the
statistical behaviour of an ensemble of similar systems. He has theological
reasons for taking this line, mainly because he thinks the standard
‘Copenhagen interpretation’ contradicts the notion of a real world created
by God. He has similar reasons for asserting that human beings can act freely in
this deterministic world because they possess immaterial souls. John
Polkinghorne, in contrast, maintains a critical realism; a view of persons as
psychosomatic unities; and sees the openness and flexibility of the quantum
world (and even more so, the unpredictable world of classical chaos theory) as
more positive theologically, both for human and divine agency.
Whilst Christians of all traditions would endorse a great deal of what
Hodgson says, nevertheless his Roman Catholicism has a quite overt impact at
different points. Body-soul dualism would a case in point (although of course
many Protestants would also take this view, often just out of instinct). Another
would be his invocation of the authority of the magisterium in the
interpretation of Scripture - which, despite what Hodgson says, does not prevent
controversy of the kind engendered by creationists on the Protestant side:
witness Cardinal Schönborn’s support for the Intelligent Design movement.
I would recommend this book as an important contribution to the vibrant
ongoing dialogue between science and faith which is presently taking place,
though with certain reservations on some of the content as expressed above.
Rodney Holder
This
issue’s contributors
Dave
Bookless is
Founder & National Director of A Rocha UK
Ian
Cowley is an
author and Vicar of Yaxley and Holme with Conington, in the Diocese of Ely
David
Hanson is Trust
Secretary of the West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies, and a Consultant
Surgeon
Rodney
Holder is Course
Director at The Faraday Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge
Stephen
May is an author
and Vicar of Norden in the Diocese of Manchester
Julian
Ward is a retired
Principle of Regents Theological College, Nantwich
Deity, Delusion and Deja-vu
Michael Poole
‘The Root of All Evil?’, broadcast
by Channel 4 in January 2007, gave Richard Dawkins the platform. His two
programmes, entitled The God Delusion
and The Virus of Faith, attracted much
public interest, as did his subsequent book (also called The God Delusion). ‘Religion
is... bad for our children and it’s bad for you’,
he asserted, cataloguing evil deeds done in the name of religion.
Faith, according to Dawkins, is bad, like a virus
A virus is associated usually with unpleasant consequences, and it spreads,
hence Dawkins’ choice of this metaphor. He is
already persuaded about ‘the vice of religion’
[The God Delusion, p.6] and
supplies (almost exclusively) examples of ‘harmful religion’ to support his
position. But a similar list of exclusively horrific
deeds done for sex might also persuade an extra-terrestrial visitor that sex is
bad for you. Both employ bad arguments. So much for ‘Virus’ but what about ‘Faith’?
Dawkins provides a stipulative definition:
‘Faith
(belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence,
the more virtuous you are. Virtuoso believers who can manage to believe
something really weird, unsupported and unsupportable, in the teeth of evidence
and reason, are especially highly rewarded.’ [p.199]
Another ‘straw man’; like the White Queen telling Alice that she had
‘believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’1
What thinking Christians would recognise this caricature of ‘faith’ as
remotely reflecting their own positions? The proper word for what Dawkins is
referring to is credulity. Faith, in
its Christian usage is comparable to having trust, confidence in a
person. It includes believing that
something is true, but goes beyond that: it launches out into the unknown on the
basis of the known.
‘Atheists
do not have faith …’ [p.51] we are told. Also ‘The atheist view is
correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never
being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking' [p.361]. It all sounds
somewhat ‘larger than life’. So does ‘the Richard Dawkins Foundation for
Reason and Science…’ [p.7] — as if atheists possessed a monopoly on
‘reason’ or ‘science’. Atheists do
have faith in all sorts of things such as promises, a surgeon’s skill etc.,
although not, of course, in God. The term ‘wishful thinking’ is best avoided
since it habitually turns round to bite the user. In another of his books, after
describing ‘religions as mind viruses’ Dawkins asserts that ‘successful
mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect.’2 Atheism
also spreads and might itself be viewed as a ‘mind virus’ by non-atheists.
Dawkins’ expresses the wish that ‘If this book [The God Delusion] works as I
intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’
[p.5] That would make it a ‘successful mind virus’, one that ‘will tend to
be hard for their victims to detect’. This presents the real danger that an
atheist may be a victim of delusion, without ever knowing it.
As
for The God
Delusion, if Dawkins is successfully
to argue his case, it is important that he understands what is the
Christian3 concept of God. It is that of an uncreated being who is
creator and sustainer of everything apart from ‘himself’. This encompasses
space, time and matter. Dawkins devotes many words to ‘the familiar
question “Who made God?”’ [p.109] ‘who designed the designer?’ [p.121]
and ‘the bigger problem of his [God’s] own origin’ [p.120]. But
any postulated ‘greater being’ that made “God” would itself have to be
termed ‘God’. Furthermore, time itself comes into being with the start of the universe. This
means there is no meaningful way of envisaging some ‘being’ ‘before’ God
that created God. There was no ‘before’. Chapter 4, says Dawkins,
‘has contained the central argument of my book'. If the argument of this
chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion — the God Hypothesis —
is untenable.’ [pp157f] But what he has set up is an
imaginary opponent, a ‘straw God’ to knock down. It is some kind of
‘demiurge’ rather than the Christian concept of God.
Many of
Dawkins’ assertions left me with a sense of déja
vu: I recalled the written debate4 between us in the journal Science and Christian Belief
following his 1991 Royal
Institution Christmas lectures. At the time I wrote to the then-Director of the
Royal Institution and to Dr Dawkins commending the clear and attractive
presentation and the BBC’s production but making the following criticism:
‘In our educational system it is generally agreed that, when dealing
with controversial issues, there should be a balanced treatment in order to
avoid charges of ‘indoctrination’ - albeit a slippery word. But Richard
Dawkins seemed hardly to lose an opportunity to intrude his personal,
anti-religious beliefs, as though these beliefs followed necessarily from the
biology. Alternative viewpoints were scarcely evident and where they were, they
were treated dismissively and sometimes trivially, placing the series outside
the best traditions of education.’
This
practice, and the reissue of these programmes so many years later on DVDs, seems
to fit uneasily with Dawkins’ views about the vulnerability of young people to
contentious pronouncements made in an authoritative manner. He has claimed that
the persistence of religion owes much to the gullibility of young people, who
believe what they are told in their early years. If
young people are as easily taken in as he thinks, then the persistence of atheism could also owe much to the gullibility of young people.
Notes
1.
Lewis Carroll, Alice Through
the Looking Glass, The Folio Society, 1962, Ch.5, p.62,
2.
Richard Dawkins, A
Devil’s Chaplin, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003, pp117, 137.
3.
Since he indicates that, ‘Unless otherwise stated, I shall
have Christianity mostly in mind but only because it is the version with which I
happen to be most familiar’, [p.37] I am following his lead. I have addressed
a wider range of issues of science and faith than is possible here in my User’s
Guide to Science and Belief, Lion
Hudson, 2007.
4.
Accessible on the internet by entering our two surnames into
Google and available as a booklet (R9413), containing our three papers, from
http://cis.org.uk/resources/books/list.pdf
Comment:
HOW TO BE HAPPY
If God is a delusion,
as Richard Dawkins would have us believe, then everything in life apparently
becomes much simpler. The only reality with which we need to concern ourselves
is the one which science is able to demonstrate. Life is simply flesh and blood.
So we know where we stand, and if we don’t yet know, then we can find out.
But
this explanation of reality is profoundly unsatisfying for many people.
Most people today want above all to be happy. But many of them sense,
deep down, that science alone is never going to bring them happiness. Science
can bring us amazing discoveries and insights into the way our universe is
ordered, and enable us to do many things that previous generations could only
dream of. But can science make us
happy?
We
are all seekers in our different ways. Some
seek success, some seek fame; some want to get rich. But the ultimate motive for
almost everyone is surely happiness.. The danger is that we spend our whole life
chasing after things that we think will bring us happiness, and find that still
there is an aching void within us.
We
live in a society where shopping and buying things is presented to us constantly
as the route to happiness, the new religion of materialism. If you buy this new
car, or fragrance, or plasma TV, that, we are told, will make you very happy.
But we know that simply acquiring more possessions is not going meet our deepest
needs. In fact the more stuff we
buy, the more complicated our lives become.
Perhaps
many people are looking in the wrong place for happiness. The idea that our
addiction to self is OK does not ring true if we look beyond the very insistent
persuaders of our consumer culture. Putting ourselves at the centre of
everything has never been widely recognised as the best way to true happiness
and fulfilment. We need to look
beyond ourselves and our own human needs, achievements and desires, and to
aspire to something far greater. Jesus
calls us to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and to put our
concern for the provision of our material needs firmly in God’s hands. Jesus
promises that we shall find happiness by no longer pursuing it through
self-interest, but by selflessly entrusting our happiness to God and by serving
the purposes of his Kingdom.
Our
best interests as human beings are usually found in looking beyond ourselves to
that which is truly great, or noble, or worthy of praise. But is this what we
are communicating to our children and young people, and to our wider society?
Previous generations, I suspect, knew much better than we do that we need a
great and noble purpose in life, and that can be found through a calling or
vocation to serve God and others and to give our energies to work for a better
world. Above all we are created to be worshippers , not of our own glory and
achievements , but of our Creator God. Surely it is in “seeing splendour”
and in contemplating and worshipping the glory of Almighty God our maker that we
ourselves will find true joy and happiness.
Ian
Cowley
Social
prospects…
‘we
might get a 'totalitarian democracy', different but having much in common with
other pagan societies, because we shall have changed step by step in order to
keep pace with them: a state of affairs in which we shall have regimentation and
conformity, without respect for the needs of the individual soul; the puritanism
of hygienic morality in the interest of efficiency; uniformity of opinion
through propaganda, and art only encouraged when it flatters the official
doctrines of the time.’
T.
S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society,
1939
The
changing face of secularism
David
Kettle
Globally,
secularization has taken a variety of paths, and the ‘secular state’ and
‘secular society’ a variety of forms. Each of them, in its own way and to
its own degree, reflects or suppresses its deeper historical setting in
Christian faith. Today in Britain, the face of secularity is changing.
Secular
versus Christian?
The terms
‘secular’ and ‘Christian’ are often used in opposition. Historically,
however, Christian faith has deeply nurtured the secular realm. Christian faith
affirms the secular (‘saeculum’) as that provisional realm of human
existence and endeavour within which God pursues his eternal purposes. God does
not resist any such provisional realm dictating rather a particular, final,
sacred form of society. The history of Christianity has, from the start, been
one of cultural conversion (as Andrew Walls depicts so well1 – see
ACCESS No. 609) through the ‘salt’ of Jesus’ followers, and not the
imposition of one supposedly ‘sacred’ culture upon another. As has often
been urged, Christianity does not propound a ‘sacral’ worldview. The
secularist assumption that it does, and that the evidence for this lies in
medieval Christendom, is false. Even (!) medieval Christian theology upheld the
‘doctrine of the two’2 – of church and state, bishop and king
– pointing forward to the ‘city of God’.
Christian
faith, then, affirms the secular realm, while calling upon people to inhabit and
guide this provisional realm by reference to the eternal purposes of God. In a
recent lecture, Rowan Williams3 (see ACCESS No. 610) identifies some
key insights to which Christian faith calls modern secular society.
Secularism
- the vision and practice of society which does not acknowledge or attend
to the purposes of God – is something else. It distorts the secular realm as
hosted by God. Insofar as a modern state is secularist, it rejects or forgets
its own deepest roots and aspirations, without which, as Williams says, it turns
into a stale and oppressive thing.
Three
paths
In Britain, the United
States and continental Europe secularization has (while allowing for
qualifications) followed three broadly different paths, which are described by
Martin Marty.4 Originating chiefly from nineteenth-century
continental Europe is what Marty calls ‘utter secularity’. This involves
‘a formal and unrelenting attack on gods and churches and a studied striving
to replace them’. In the United States, by comparison, there has emerged a
contractual, negotiated and controlled (albeit contested in application)
relation between state and religion. In Britain, the path of secularization has
been different again: it has arisen from a practical tendency simply to ignore
Christian religion. Marty labels this ‘mere secularity’.
Britain’s
‘mere secularity’
In similar terms
Edward Wickham, writing of the early 20th century English church, notes the
‘neglect to adhere’ by many and the ‘looser membership of many within’
the who were ‘accordingly more easily detachable by all the immediate causes,
excuses and rationalisations that human beings can discover’.5 Here
is a different secularity from ‘utter secularity’ or ‘controlled
secularity’. It would seem to reflect in part the fact that, as Wickham
writes, ‘England has been singularly unfavourable ground for dogmatic atheism,
and also perhaps for dogmatic religion’. Because of this fact, although the
secular mode of thought – ‘that almost total preoccupation with immediate
and temporal affairs’ -has grown in dominance, ‘sharp lines between fidelity
and infidelity cannot be drawn in English society, and one way of stating this
is to say that the secular-minded outside the churches have a Christian
colouration, and that practising Christian inside the church have marked secular
characteristics. It still persists,’ writes Wickham in 1957, ‘a baffling
feature of English life’.6
Changing
secularism?
Today, fifty years
later, there are signs of change reflecting Britain’s closer links with U.S.
culture on the one hand and with continental European social vision on the
other. On the one hand, in the British mass media the combative relations in the
U.S. between some Christians and a secularist elite are becoming more often
rehearsed these days. Strident U.S. religious fundamentalist (or secularist)
spokespersons are drafted in by the media, cued by Britain’s home-grown
‘blind witchmaker’. On the other hand, British society feels new pressure
from the ‘utter secularity’ associated with continental Europe (notably
France) through our membership of the European Union. In particular, legislation
deriving from human rights and anti-discriminatory directives threatens the
liberty of religious groups to maintain their own ethos and values, as has been
seen in the conflict over adoption practice by R.C. agencies.
Desecularization
Meanwhile there has
been a global resurgence in religion as a social and political force. This has
prompted many sociologists to abandon the classical ‘secularisation thesis’
that in modern societies religion would eventually wither away and die.
In The
Desecularization of the World, sociologist Peter Berger considers possible
reasons for this resurgence. One possible reason, he proposes, is that where
modernity undermines the taken-for-granted certainties by which people live,
religious movements that claim to give certainty have great appeal. Another is
that secularist thinking is located primarily among the elite who ‘control the
institutions that provide the “official” definitions of reality’ (the mass
media, education, the legal system) and that these are resented by many people
for undermining and attacking their own beliefs and values. These people
accordingly find appeal in ‘anti-secular’ religious movements. Berger
suggests, however, that in one sense desecularization needs no explaining: it
simply demonstrates ‘continuity in the place of religion in human
experience’.7
How
do Berger’s proposals look in the setting of Christian faith? In themselves
they surely offer no great encouragement. If he is right, then the resurgence he
describes is of an all to derivative, defensive human religiosity,
and Christians must respond to it with mixed feelings. Resurgent human religion
presents just as much of a challenge to Christian mission as does secularism.
If
Berger’s account is inadequate, however, its inadequacy gives continuing cause
for concern. No doubt we may at least welcome secular recognition of the fact
that Christian faith is not going to wither away and die – even if the view is
retained that it should properly do so! But we would hope for more: for
acknowledgement that Christian faith might represent a deeper exploration of questions than secularism, and offer a more
adequate account of public reality than that offered by a secularist elite.
In other words, Christian faith looks for a further desecularization in which
the leaders themselves of secular society don’t merely see a need to manage
a Christian religion which refuses to go away, but are ready to converse and
listen and learn from it.
All
ways, the changing face of secularity requires that mission face in new
directions today.
Notes
1.
Andrew Walls, ‘Converts
or Proselytes? The Crisis over Conversion in the Early Church’, IBMR,
Vol 28 No 1, January 2004, pp. 2-6. (ACCESS No. 609)
2.
See for example Oliver O’Donovan,
The Desire of the Nations, Chapter 6.
3.
Rowan Williams, ‘Christianity:
Public Religion and the Common Good’, a lecture in St Andrew’s Cathedral,
Singapore, 12th May 2007 (ACCESS No. 601).
4.
Martin Marty, The
Modern Schism: Three Paths to the Secular, SCM, 1969, p.10.
5.
Edward Wickham, Church and People
in an Industrial City, Lutterworth, 1957, p.180.
6.
Wickham, op. cit., p.188.
7.
Peter Berger, in Berger (ed), The
Desecularization of the World, Eerdmans, 1999. pp.11-12.
On
DVD: Bishop Newbigin in India
On DVD, a sequence of
72 slides with commentary by Lesslie Newbigin describing mission and ministry in
the Church of South India. Produced and mastered at World Mission, Church of
Scotland, from feature material assembled by Time Life Magazine about 1958. May be ordered from Rev’d Murdoch
Mackenzie, "Torridon", 4
Ferryfield Road, Connel-by-Oban, Argyll PA37 1SR, Scotland. Cost:
£3.00 (£4.00 outside UK) including postage and packing.
Body
Shop – and Soul
Dame
Anita Roddick was, Peter Heslam writes1, ‘principled, outspoken and
daring. And like other great entrepreneurs, she deliberately disrupted
conventional business thinking and practice. She was determined to use business
to drive social change’. For her, ‘business should connect with people’s
sense of meaning and purpose’, by recapturing ‘a sense of
“reverence”’. ‘What was less well known, and was overlooked in the
obituaries,’ he remarks, ‘was her lively spirituality, reflected in the
title of her autobiography, Body and Soul’.
Yet ‘although she claimed to adhere to the Catholic faith in which she
was raised, she was generally dismissive of Christianity’.
Kenneth Cragg’s words prompt reflection both here and under our
political leadership by a ‘son of the manse’: ‘As for the secularity that
is in no way perverse but high-minded, the Christian has at once to recognise an
ally and to resolve a puzzle. It is notable that many who hold strongly to duty,
integrity, reverence, and a sense of transcendent liability began so from a
Christian nurture they came later to relinquish or despise. The reasons must be
the Christian’s concern, but the implications are clear. It is as if these
minds might be, as it were, ‘in the left hand of God’. The right hand has
long been a biblical symbol of divine sovereignty…’2
1.
Peter Heslam, Connecting with Culture, www.licc.org.uk/culture
2.
Kenneth Cragg, The Secular
Experience of God, Trinity Press International, 1998, p.73.
The
Centre for the Study of Faith in Society, Von Hügel Institute
Introduced by Co-Director Francis Davis
The Centre For Faith
In Society at the Von Hugel institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge has been
going through a period of intense renewal over the last year. Grounded in the
long standing contribution of the Von Hugel Institute the Centre is now seeking
to operate at the applied interface of the social sciences and theology and also
to develop work in Christian historical studies.
Major
research commissions completed in recent times have been a report on the social
conditions of migrant workers in London funded by the capital’s Roman Catholic
Bishops. The striking levels of low pay, squalid housing and levels of
irregularity among the 1000 plus respondents from South America, Africa, Asia as
well as Eastern Europe led to the report being covered on the front page of The
Times and in national newspapers across the world. The week afterwards a major
assessment of the EU’s social inclusion process funded by the European
Commission also made headlines as it identified weaknesses in the lack of joined
up thinking in many EU member states social welfare ministries. In fact The
Independent ran a leader on the report and it was quoted on BBCTV Question Time.
The
Centre seeks to build bridges between scholarly research and the policy
community and also to take ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue seriously. A good
example of this is a major current project for the Church of England on its
attitude to “the commissioning state” which will lead to both academic
articles and a report. Another example is the International Young Leaders
Network (IYLN) which seeks to identify and nurture young Christian leaders in
the 18 to 33 age group. It has attracted “scholars” from across the world to
its residential events at home and abroad. Both co-directors of the Centre are
working on academic studies and one teaches social enterprise at graduate level
in the University of Cambridge.
In
short the Centre comprises the UK’s only specialist faith based research
programme on migration, one on faith based schools and another on religion and
public policy which was launched by Harvard’s Academic Dean, Professor Mary Jo
Bane.
However
it also benefits in another way namely through the synergies that arise from the
proximity of the Von Hugel Institute’s other two Centres focused specifically
on social economics (capability and sustainability) education (especially
African HE). The combined team of 43 Associates provides a rich resource for the
faith communities and a convivial setting for debate, research and future
development.
Quotation:
'For whatever reason,
it is ever harder to feel useful, to have purpose and to make sense of one's
life. It's why volunteering is growing so rapidly; it's why so many are
attracted to public-sector work despite its many drawbacks. How to recover
purpose should be on our political agenda and part of our national
conversation.' (Will Hutton, writing on Richard Sennett's latest book The
Culture of the New Capitalism)
Book
reviews
Christopher
J. H. Wright, The Mission of God:
Unlocking the Bible’s grand narrative, Inter-Varsity Press, 2006, 581pp.,
£21.99
Challenged
to justify his claim that a missiological reading of the whole of Scripture is
the best way of understanding its core meaning, Chris Wright sets out to
demonstrate that the mission of God is the most fruitful framework for grasping
its complete message. He points out that this is not just another study designed
to elucidate the biblical basis of mission, though clearly, if the mission of
God’s people springs entirely from God’s intentions for the universe, then
this approach will supply the strongest kind of foundation and stimulus for
mission.
The book is conceived and executed on a grand scale. Part I deals with
questions of method, seeking to demonstrate why a missional hermeneutic is the
most effective way of gaining access to the significance of what the story is
stating. In this section he argues for the necessity of moving beyond limited
hermeneutical fashions, such as multicultural, contextual and post-modern
readings of the text. He touches on the issue of the Bible’s authority and
sets the scene for understanding mission in its widest possible sense – “a
long-term purpose or goal that is to be achieved through proximate objectives
and planned actions” (23).
Part II lays the groundwork for everything else in exploring the nature
of the God of Mission. He demonstrates this by the way his grace and judgement
are manifest in the history of the Exodus and Exile and in the life of Jesus who
makes manifest the functions of God as creator, ruler, judge and saviour.
In this section Wright summarises mission as taking the knowledge of God
to the nations. An awareness of the true God is set in sharp contrast to human
beings’ propensity to create their own gods; idolatry is, perhaps, the most
basic of all sins.
Part III considers the calling of a special people to be in mission,
elected not to indulge in the benefits it receives from God, but to be a
blessing to the nations. Here the key story is the calling and commissioning of
Abraham, set out in Genesis and reiterated in many different ways throughout the
history of Israel. Wright pays special attention to the problematic question of
the tension between the particularity and universality of Israel’s calling.
This section contains just about everything you ever wanted to know about
mission within the confines of the old covenant. Running for nearly 200 pages,
and covering the meaning and implications of the Exodus, the Jubilee, the
Covenant and the moral life of the people, it is a book within a book.
Part IV is called the ‘Arena of Mission’ and embraces the fundamental
issues of creation, salvation and consummation on the widest possible scale. So,
Wright examines questions related to mission as the care of creation, as the
rectification of the consequences of sin (bravely taking HIV/AIDS as an example
of compassionate service) and as witness to God’s desire for the nations.
A short summary cannot possibly do justice to the scope of this treatise.
As one might expect, knowing the author’s long concern to unfold the missional
riches of the Old Testament, a considerable part of this book is dedicated to
the initial instalments of the Bible’s grand narrative. Some might wish for
more attention to be given to the climax of the story. However, Wright is
seeking to demonstrate forcefully that one cannot jump to the conclusion without
having followed all the clues of the previous chapters.
The breadth of this survey of the Bible seen through the lens of a
missionary God is immense. Wright adds his considerable, scholarly and
hermeneutically sophisticated weight to the growing number of people who affirm
that the Bible is ultimately incomprehensible, unless understood as a book about
the mission of God. Within the
enormously wide range of topics covered, one might pick out individual sections
for special mention, such as the treatment of the meaning of election (262-4),
an integral view of mission (419-420) and an expose of the ‘idols of our
time’ (165-188).
I finish with two questions. First, why is not more attention given to
two biblical themes which have become central for many people’s understanding
of mission: shalom and the kingdom of God? Perhaps, the reply is that they are
dealt with in the context of other themes. However, they are not very manifest;
‘peace’ is not mentioned at all in the index. Second, when will the author
produce a shorter version of this masterwork? One might say that its value is
that readers can explore different sections at their leisure. However, a major
part of the book’s value is in being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of
God’s involvement with his creation. To capture that one has to read the whole
book. I fear that well over 500 pages may be too daunting for some who would
otherwise profit enormously from the vision.
J.
Andrew Kirk
Kenneth
Leech, Doing Theology in Altab Ali Park,
Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007, 288pp., £19.95.
It is
the fate of many English political radicals to be absorbed and rendered harmless
by the institutions they once criticized. This fate has not (yet!) descended on
Ken Leech, Anglo-Catholic priest, community theologian and unrepentant rebel.
This is an account of Leech’s fourteen years in Whitechapel, where he wrote,
thought, campaigned, argued, said mass, prayed and campaigned on behalf of the
poor and the kingdom of God and against wealth, corruption and apathy. The park
of the title was a murder scene, a young Bengali was struck down and killed by
thugs in 1978 as he crossed the park to vote in local elections.
There are splendid passages here, about liturgy, sacrifice, the darkness
with which all creative theology must engage, anecdotes of celebration and
suffering. Ken Leech is to the far left of Old Labour, just as furious, just as
determined to keep up ‘the struggle’ against the ever-present threat of
fascism as he ever was. He is
totally uncompromising in his judgments against the evils he perceives in
society. It is typical of him that he cannot condemn the deaths of 3000
Americans on 9/11 without comparing it to the 35,000 children who died of
starvation round the world on the same day.
In spite of the predictability of all this there is a note of
self-questioning in this account which is new. This is partly because he feels
that he left his work in the East End in some ways incomplete. But it also comes
from honest reflection on the criticisms that he has received, some of it from
friends who admire him but have reservations about some aspects of his mission.
Introspection is not Leech’s style but one of the oddities about him is the
air he sometimes assumes of personal detachment. The passion is in the writing,
and the issues are deeply felt, but he does not use emotion in the way that has
become fashionable. That is a strength, of course, but it may make his voice too
alien for a generation brought up in a warmer, fuzzier, more compromised
climate.
Angela
Tilby
Kevin L.
Morris (ed.), The Truest Fairy Tale: An
Anthology of the Religious Writing of G. K. Chesterton, Lutterworth Press,
2007, 254 pp., £17.50 (pb).
This anthology comprises almost two hundred pages of quotations grouped by
subject. They are occasionally a page in length, but usually less than
half this, and for each subject they are listed chronologically. They are
drawn from almost sixty books by Chesterton or ones to which he contributed or
anthologies of or including his writing. The selection draws heavily from
his most
important works, especially Orthodoxy, The
Everlasting Man, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, The Thing, and What’s
Wrong with the World but it also includes many items from lesser known works
and journalism. There is virtually nothing from Chesterton’s fiction,
nothing from The Man
Who Was Thursday, for example.
Morris has risen above the temptation facing any would-be anthologist of
Chesterton, to reduce the complexity of his work to snappy sound bites and witty
repartee - although humour and wit are naturally on every page. He avoids using
any artificial net of topics useful for preachers and pundits through which to
strain GKC’s work to catch the relevant statement. Rather the subject
list is selected and arranged to illustrate the foundations of his Christian
faith, the understanding that faith gave him of existence and reality, and its
application in a fallen world.
Subjects are selected to express the predominant themes that Morris finds
in Chesterton’s work - the mystery and wonder of God and his creation; his
critique of the secular, materialism, and despair of the Chesterton’s time;
his joyful defence of the faith, a childlike curiosity and questioning spirit,
which was entwined with a respect for other views and religions, and of course
his delight in paradox,
including that of an iconoclastic defender of orthodoxy. Major subject
headings reflect Chesterton’s own exploration of the meaning of religion, the
pathway that lead us back to Jesus Christ, the nature of the Christian church,
the Christian disposition toward life (an especially helpful section this), the
Christian impact on human history, the Christian in society and then, lastly,
basic doctrines, including sin and salvation.
As Eamon Duffy points out in the forward, Chesterton is a particularly
apt subject for a quotation book, since he was known for and perhaps addicted to
the clever and surprising remark. “Heights are made to be looked up at
and not down from” is a favourite of mine and you doubtless have yours.
However, Morris, although continually illustrating Chesterton’s verbal skills,
does something much more important. He shows in Chesterton’s own words,
collected from over his career, the solidity and depth of his belief, which
forms such a fascinating and unexpected contrast to rapier like thrusts of his
expression. Morris’ forward of some forty pages is a skilful
introduction to his understanding of GKC’s own religious experience, beliefs,
and writing that underlay the selection of the material in this volume.
This is a book for the GKC novice and for the old hand who would know
better the man who wrote, “We have forgot our own meaning and we are wandering
around the street without keepers. All that we call practicality and
commonsense and world wisdom only means that we forgot that we have forgotten.
All that we mean by religion and poetry only means that for one wild moment we
remember that we forgot.”
Robert Schuster
James W.
Sire, Why Good Arguments Often Fail,
Inter-Varsity Press, 2006, 220pp., £8.99 (pb).
Not
infrequently Christians make an intellectually admirable defence for the
credibility of the Christian faith and yet come away feeling that they have
somehow failed to persuade their listeners. You gave it your best shot. You made
a clear, sound, rational argument for the Christian faith, and your friend
remains unmoved.
Dr. James W. Sire, noted author and public defender of the Christian
faith, examines in this book why some of our best and most coherent arguments
often fail to decisively clinch a case for Christ.
The twelve chapters in his book are sub-sectioned into three distinctive
parts.
Part 1 is a helpful, easily-digestible exploration into the most common
logical fallacies that people (Christians included) commit, often unknowingly.
He sets the stage for this exploration by reproducing Max Shulman’s
interesting short story entitled “Love is a Fallacy”. This story leads
naturally to Sire exposure of some of the common logical errors we commit in our
day to day conversation without being aware of them.
Part 2 looks beyond the issues of logical fallacies. Sire present a
breakdown of what makes a sound argument. He emphasizes the point that even if
an argument is logically coherent and sound, it may still fail to persuade. It
has to be convincing. And there are reasons why a good argument may fail to
convince – reasons which we simply cannot comprehend. Sire concedes that
belief is person-oriented.
He helpfully presents us with a taxonomy of failures of good arguments.
He alerts the reader to the dangers of arrogance and misjudgment on the part of
the apologist. He points out relevant cultural and worldview issues which
unwittingly work towards preventing our otherwise good arguments from being
effective.
Part 3 presents two interesting arguments that have worked. The first
comes from the Apostle Paul in his engagement with the philosophers in Acts 17.
The second comes from Sire’s own experience. The last chapter of this book is
an excellent annotated bibliography divided into ten categories of areas of
interest. His brief write-up in each of these areas, punctuated often with
personal recommendations, is enough to whet one’s appetite to check out these
books. The list is also evidential of Sire’s personal breadth of reading and I
am nostalgically reminded that this is the same man who taught me how to read
“worldviewishly” through his much earlier book How To Read Slowly. Unlike many of us, Sire commends what he has
actually read.
This book will benefit those who have never had any prior understanding
of basic logical fallacies. Sire not only exposes them for what they are but
does so in a most readable way by furnishing stimulating examples for each of
the fallacies cited. His examples are mostly culled from real life encounters
and are immediately serviceable for the average apologist.
Most books on apologetics move straight into the various controversial
issues commonly relevant to the defence of our faith. Sire takes a few steps
back and sensitively sniffs out the various critical areas that, though not
immediately the grist for the apologist’s mill, nevertheless are crucial to
the success or failure of our attempts at defending the faith. To be sure, the
apologetic endeavour seeks to rebut arguments that reject Christianity as true.
But both Christians and non-Christians alike have issues that are troubling
enough to muddy the waters even before any rational encounter could even begin.
Sire appropriately addresses the arrogance, aggression and misjudgment on the
part of the Christian, and the “moral refusal” on the part of the
non-Christian.
This book makes a number of crucial calls to the apologist. It is a call
to
§
refrain from
imagining that our highly technical arguments will necessarily convert souls;
§
defend the
faith by beginning with the biblical testimony of Jesus;
§
preserve the
dignity of one’s opponent even when the most silly of questions is asked;
§
humbly accept
that not every person is equally endowed with a rapier-sharp epistemic mind;
§
spiritually
discern the other person’s psychological scar which make her resistant to
faith in Christ;
§
understand and
acknowledge the way one’s foundational, pre-theoretical beliefs affect one’s
propensities to belief or unbelief;
§
take with utter
seriousness the almost total moral blindness of the unbeliever, to whom a
concession to be morally obligated can only be the work of the Holy Spirit.
Apart from that divine illumination, the human heart will go on wanting what it
wants.
These calls alone make the book unique.
Why Good Arguments Often Fail is
a valuable book not only for all those above reasons. I commend it for its
warmth of personal approach. On more than one occasion, Sire has chosen to be
vulnerable by citing incidents in his personal apologetic encounters where his
apparent failures have been openly acknowledged for our learning. I have not
personally come across many apologist who publicly live up to the commendations
of 1 Peter 3:15 15 “Sanctify
Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defence to everyone
who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness
and reverence.” Sire’s book betrays such gentleness and reverence.
Andrew
Lim
This issue's contributors
Ian
Cowley is an
author and Vicar of Yaxley and Holme with Conington, in the Diocese of Ely
Francis
Davis is
Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Faith in Society, Von Hügel
Institute, Cambridge
J.
Andrew Kirk is a
mission theologian and author
Andrew
Lim is a church pastor in Palmerston North, New Zealand
Michael
Poole is Visiting
Research Fellow in Science & Religion at King's College London
Robert
Shuster is
archivist at the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, U.S.
Angela Tilby is Vicar of St Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge, and a national broadcaster