By
No Means a
Super
Market
Sam Norton reflects on
Andrew Simms’ book Tescopoly: How one
shop came out on top and why it matters (Constable, 2007).
In the Bible, God shows direct concern for human
economic activities, normally in the context of telling his people to seek
social justice. To do so is a matter of personal obedience to himself.
Shall we serve God who is just? The choice is ours; but Jesus warned, "You
cannot serve God and Mammon".
God's concern for justice leads to many specific injunctions against
particular practices. One of them is uttered by Isaiah: "Woe to you who add
house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone
in the land." (Isa 5.8). This is the context in which I read "Tescopoly"
by Andrew Simms, a very thorough overview of the way in which Tesco functions as
a monopolist: one who has joined all the fields together until it is left alone
in the land. In many ways Tesco is simply a highly efficient corporation, a
(rare) example of world-class management in a British company. Yet it is
precisely the fact that it is so efficient, so effective in accomplishing its
aims, that it has had such dispiriting and impoverishing effects on our
communities.
Documentation
Simms details the ways in which, through the use and
abuse of its dominant market position, Tesco actively harms those who supply it
with goods, those who work within its walls, and the communities within which it
finds itself operating. For example, Tesco consistently pays its suppliers less
than the industry average, it is consistently late in paying invoices presented
to it, especially by the smallest suppliers, and, through the exercise of
essentially bullying tactics, it is able to 'borrow' more than £2bn a year from
its suppliers for free. Internationally it suppresses wages in the third world
and strips communities of their dignity (I was astonished to read that in a farm
in Zimbabwe children are taught to sing "Tesco is our dear friend" in
order to impress the visiting potentates.)
My own concern is primarily with the impact on local communities in
England, and here Simms marshals fascinating evidence. For every £1 spent in a
supermarket more than 90p leaves a local community; whereas the impact of a
'local box scheme' (i.e. locally produced and delivered vegetables) is quite the
reverse - for every £1 spent, £2.50 is generated in local wealth. In terms of
jobs, supermarkets undermine a community further: it takes £95,000 worth of
sales in a supermarket to sustain a single job, the figure for smaller stores is
£42,000. Beyond this, the supermarkets, especially Tesco, support the use of
casual and unlicensed labour leading to what is effectively a modern form of
serfdom. Put simply the arrival of a supermarket chain in a town sucks money and
livelihoods away from the local area in order to agglomerate capital for
shareholders. Supermarkets impoverish communities in terms of income, social
life and common civility.
In the name of
freedom?
At this point a common defence is to claim that this is
the operation of 'the free market', and that if the market chooses to support
Tesco, and people benefit from its cheap prices, then we shouldn't interfere.
Such a response is either naively ill-informed or else the expression of an
understanding already corrupted by an anti-Christian value system. No sane
person advocates a wholly unrestrained free market, or else bin Laden would have
been able to purchase nuclear weapons long ago, and so the question becomes: is
it right for the free market to operate here, in these
circumstances? Is the operation of a free market in this context
something that will foster and support our social values or will those values
and goods be undermined by the free market? And, of course, particularly with
regard to Tesco: what does it mean to talk about a free market when we have at
best an oligopoly and at worst, in so many areas, a monopolistic environment?
Simms points out that in 81 of the 121 British postcode areas Tesco is the
dominant grocer, and is the number 2 in a further 24 areas. The operation of the
free market is considered by the government to be inhibited whenever one trader
gets more than 8% of the market - and Tesco has vastly more than that, in some
areas going beyond 50%. In such a situation invoking 'the free market' functions
as a ritualistic response in which all other considerations are subordinated to
the one dominant value of Mammon. In other words, it is simply the expression of
idolatry.
Ultimately, Simms argues, we need fundamentally to rethink the legal
foundations of the corporation. For this he can appeal to (of all people) Adam
Smith's concern for a 'moral economy', and his fierce criticism of corporations.
Meanwhile, as for us, we can shop elsewhere - and if this costs us time and
money, this just might be the price of insisting that all
trade should be fair trade, that justice is not a matter for cost-benefit
analysis and, most especially in this context, "every little helps"'.
The
ecology of community
David Kettle
‘Elevating profit above principles,
ill-treating workers, driving farms out of business, killing off local
communities and slowly poisoning the environment should speak for themselves’
writes Nick Spencer.1
However he finds other, subtler concerns raised by ‘the tescover of
Britain’. One of them arises from a need to uphold the principle of ‘subsidiarity’.
This principle – of decentralized political and social power, articulated
arguably in biblical teaching – ‘points away from our (super)market state
and towards a richer, more localized retail ecology’. ‘On similar lines’,
Spencer adds, ‘the biblical vision of wholeness celebrates variety, with
ecological, ethnic and cultural diversity being one of life’s glories’.
Ecological
metaphors
Such expressions of ‘subtler’ Christian
concerns draw often upon language popularised in recent decades by environmental
concern. Metaphors such as ‘ecology’, ‘biodiversity’, ‘gene pool’
and ‘sustainability’ line up against metaphors such as ‘clone’,
‘monoculture’, ‘barren’ and even ‘GM Church’2.
Such metaphors are attractive today as the means of giving new
articulation to certain concerns which are properly Christian. In the course of
their religious use, the potential also arises for these metaphors to foster a
deeper, richer imaginative setting for popular environmental concern itself in
general (although things can also work the other way, so that our Christian
imagination is distorted through captivity to an ecological conceptual
framework).
Useful
– why?
Why are ecological metaphors so attractive
today for expressing things we want to celebrate and defend, but which are being
eroded? The reason is that the erosion in question is driven by rationalization
- the impoverishment of personal and community life by ideological programmes
for the rationalization of society.
Modern society has, from its start, been about - in the words of Ernst
Gellner - a turn ‘from gamekeeper to gardener’ in the ruling of society: in
place of a life in community which subsisted and perpetuated itself naturally
and informally from one generation to another (rather like a wild ecology) and
from which a ruling aristocracy claimed its share of bounty, the modern state
set about cultivating or civil-ising from scratch each new generation through
state education etc. for individual participation in modern ‘civil’ society.3
In recent decades, state ‘gardening’ or rationalization has come
increasingly under the direction of a comprehensive programme of rationalization
formulated by neoliberal economic ideology. The huge growth in information and
communication technology and in transportation has given scope for the
implementation of this programme with its quite revolutionary power of social
transformation.
In this context, ecological metaphors witness to a deeper, richer vision
for human life in community.
Theological
bearings
What theological considerations bear upon our
use of ecological metaphors? Let me suggest three.
First, we
need to locate and use them not in a renewed natural theology but within the
slow unfolding in recent decades of a Trinitarian imagination after centuries
during which Christian habits of imagination have tended rather towards deism.
Second, their root meaning should be found in the diverse richness of
personal life in
relationship with God rather than in any relatively self-enclosed
non-human ecological system. In particular, we should take care to distinguish
our use of them from that of ‘organic’ metaphors in romantic philosophy with
its encouragement of ‘blood and soil’ convictions about human and cultural
identity.
Third, they should be put to use to indicate the informal, complex, tacit
dimensions of life in which God’s creative power is at work. Especially they
challenge the assumption that creative life is the product entirely of conscious
choices made by individuals.
Christian
soil
It is in such tacit informal ways that life in Britain
remains informed today by Christian faith, nourished by the roots of such life
in a history of engagement with Christian faith. It is vital that we can
acknowledge this truthfully, and not dismiss it or misrepresent it.
On the one hand, the fact that life in Britain remains nourished by
(depleting) Christian insights and values points as a clue to the fact that she
actually honours her own best inspirations when she welcomes the continuing
contribution of Christians in the public square. Cardinal Cormac Murphy
O’Connor has urged that such a
contribution remain welcome, despite recent vocal opposition in some circles.4
Joel Edwards, responding to protests by the national Secular Society following
his appointment to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, urges powerfully:
‘To remove religious conviction from the public square is as sensible as
removing the engines from an aircraft in flight. For a while the plane may glide
and to all extent seem fine, but before long the altimeter will only be headed
in one direction, by which time it is too late to start remembering how it was
you got airborne in the first place.’5
Christian
Britain?
On the
other hand, to note that the
Christian vision has underlain ‘most of the achievements and values of the
culture’ - as Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali has recently done6 – is
emphatically not to claim ‘what it British is good, for it is Christian’.
Rather, it is to stimulate the question ‘If so much that is good about Britain
has Christian underpinnings, what might Britain need vitally to learn from
Christianity today?’
Such learning may be discovered precisely from Christians who come from
outside Britain herself to live and work among us, bringing their own faith and
bringing their own perceptions of us . Indeed there arises here the possibility
of an intriguing historical
parallel. Christian missionaries taught literacy to those to whom they went in
order that they might read the Bible. As a result of this, however, they also
became more culturally self-aware. Today, it seems, it is Christian people such
as Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali and Archbishop John Sentamu who, coming from other
cultures, are challenging us in Britain to be more culturally self-aware
regarding the Christian underpinning of our own culture.
Church:
a Voluntary Association?
If we acknowledge and affirm Britain’s Christian
heritage, is this to affirm ‘census Christianity’ as the fulfillment of
God’s calling in Christ today? By no means. It is, however, to acknowledge
that ‘Christian’ refers properly to more than an individual decision and
that ‘Church’ refers properly to more than a voluntary association, while
allowing these their important place in Christian self-understanding. It is also
perhaps to entertain a truth in Maurice Cowling’s words:
‘A religion ought to be habitual and ought not to
involve the self-consciousness inseparable from conversion. What Christianity
requires is a second-generation sensibility in which the oddness and
arbitrariness of Christianity’s doctrines are so much taken for granted that
struggle has ceased to be of Christianity’s essence. This is not a situation
which can easily be achieved in the contemporary world; indeed, the religions
which can most easily avoid self-consciousness in the contemporary world are the
secular religions which are absorbed at the mother’s knee or from the
mother’s television.’7
We might wish to quarrel with Cowlings’
formulation here (are Christian doctrines really arbitrary? And surely to accept
them is to let them release us for
faithful struggle – that is, the struggle to know God and to fulfil his
purposes better?) But his words do point us, importantly, away from Christian
self-preoccupation and back to God. They also remind us indirectly what
evangelism and conversion are actually like. John Bowen sees this reflected in
St Augustine’s Confessions:
evangelism is a work led by God himself, who leads us on an often tortuous and
complex journey; a work which may be compared perhaps to farming or education.8
Here is a corrective to the tendency to see mission
and evangelism today as promoting a ‘Christian’ rationalization of life, a
personal programme for consumers who can be persuaded to buy into Church. Here
is a more ‘ecological’ vision of God and his ways among us, in which
‘human conservation’ has its own meaning within (and not in conflict with)
the vision of human transformation by God.
Notes
1. Nick Spencer, Stop the Tescover (ACCESS 623)
2. See Peter Harris, A Whole
Gospel for a Whole World (ACCESS 614)
3. See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, Polity Press, 1987, Chapter 4.
4. Cormack Murphy O’Connor, Religion and the Public
Forum (ACCESS 618)
5. As reported by Ruth Gledhill, The Times, November 14, 2007.
6. Michael Nazir-Ali, Extremism flourished as UK lost
Christianity, Telegraph, 11th
Jan ’08.
7. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine, Volume III, p. 700.
8. See John Bowen, Evangelism in Augustine’s
Confessions (ACCESS 612)
Comment
I AM BECAUSE I BELONG
Every
now and again, perhaps when we are in another country or reading an interesting book,
we may suddenly get a sense of a world of meaning of which we have little direct
knowledge or experience. We may be drawn to discover more about that world, or
we may simply be mystified by it. We may even be so threatened by it that we
avoid it at all costs.
For
those who are not Christians, the Bible may present such a world. The world of
faith is very difficult to comprehend for those who have no faith. But
there are worlds of truth that even believers in Christ may find difficult to
grasp. For many white South African Christians in the time of apartheid, the
Gospel demand for justice was such an area, dangerous territory that was best
avoided. Slavery had a similar effect on the thinking of many Christians for
centuries. We can all suffer from blind spots of one kind or another.
I
suspect that individualism has had this kind of effect in much of contemporary
British society. However, in many African societies there is an
understanding that my identity cannot be separated from the identity of my
community, and even of my nation. It is only through belonging that my life has
meaning.
Surely this
is also at the heart of the New Testament understanding of what it means to be a
Christian. As Christians we belong to the new covenant community, and our
identity is indivisible from that community. We are "in Christ Jesus"
not primarily as saved individuals but as members of the body of Christ, in
which every part works together for the common good. Ministry and leadership in
the New Testament is always plural. We cannot serve Christ on our own.
This
presents a radical challenge to the "me" generation and to the
children of consumerism. It can be very hard for those who have grown up
in this individualistic culture to accept the implications of conversion to
Christ when these involve a willingness to yield our "right" to make
our own moral and personal choices. To turn to Christ does mean to
submit ourselves to the values and teaching of a community. The truth
is that human happiness comes not just from the pursuit of individual
fulfilment but also from being part of a family and a community. Its just very
hard for us to give up wanting to do it "my way".
Ian Cowley
Beowulf
and cultural conflict
Stephen
May
December
2007 saw the screening in local cinemas of a spectacular modern version of the
Old English epic Beowulf. It was
co-authored by Neil Gaiman, writer of the charming fantasy Stardust,
(also recently filmed). Both it and the original version raise key questions
of the relation of Gospel and culture.
Beowulf is
one of the oldest English language stories we have. Though preserved by monks
and clearly Christianised in parts, it breathes the air of the pagan Danish
homeland in which it is set. In both it and the modern film version, the hero
Beowulf comes from the land of the Geats (in southern Sweden) to save the Danes
from the monster Grendel, who is ravaging their hall. In turn he defeats Grendel,
tearing off its arm in the process and nailing it to the door, Grendel’s hag
mother in her watery lair and then finally, as an aged king in his own country,
a dragon though at the cost of his life.
Supposedly a textbook of pagan heroic values, J.R.R.
Tolkien writes that in this and other Old English poems such as ‘The Battle of
Maldon’, there is a Christian critique of pagan values which has been largely
missed.
The ‘Battle of Maldon’ tells of a heroic defeat
at the hands of invading Vikings in 991 AD. It contains the famous lines:
‘Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, more proud the spirit as our power
lessens! Mind shall not falter nor mood waver, though doom shall come and dark
conquer.’[i]
But, as Tolkien points out, these words - ‘held
to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit’ - are the product
of a situation that should never have arisen – and the poem tells us so. The
invading Vikings are permitted by Beorhtnoth, the defending Earl of Essex to
move across a causeway from an offshore island to the mainland for the sake of a
‘fair fight’. As the poem puts it, ‘then the earl in his overmastering
pride (ofermod) actually yielded
ground to the enemy as he should not have done’[ii].
The result of Beorthnoth’s ofermod – a
word only used elsewhere applied to Lucifer! - is disaster for the people he
should be defending. ‘Magnificent perhaps,’ says Tolkien, ‘but certainly
wrong’[iii].
Beowulf similarly regards his conflict with the
monsters opposing him as a test of his individual glory. He abandons weapons in
his conflict against Grendel so that his renown will be even greater if he
conquers. And at the end of the story he is only saved from his own completely
useless death at the hands of the dragon by the loyalty of a subordinate he has
dismissed. He is, in the last words of the poem, lofgeornost, ‘most desirous of glory’.
The result of Beowulf’s concentration on his own
glory is disaster for his people. Whilst the dragon is dead, so also is he. The
poem ends dismally with prophecies of doom for Beowulf’s people now that he is
no longer there to defend them: ‘A Geat woman too sang out in grief;/ with
hair bound up, she unburdened herself/ of her worst fears, a wild litany/ of
nightmare and lament; her nation invaded,/ enemies on the rampage, bodies in
piles,/ slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.’[iv]
In
Tolkien’s words, ‘there could be no more pungent criticism… than
(retainer) Wiglaf’s exclamation, ‘by one man’s will many must woe
endure.’[v]
In this, The Battle of Maldon, and
even Middle English works like ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’, we see a
sustained assault on pagan heroic values that questions what this took to be
wholly admirable. There are lines, says Tolkien, ‘of severe criticism, though not incompatible with loyalty or even
love’[vi].
The emerging English Christian culture loved the stories it inherited, but it
did not adopt them blindly.
De-Christianisation
All this makes especially ironic the treatment a
secular modern age gives to the supposedly Christian elements in recent films.
In both the 2007 digitised epic and a 2001 Icelandic-Canadian co-production (Beowulf
and Grendel) attempts are made to ‘de-Christianise the story, and portray
the ‘coming religion’ negatively. In the 2007 film, Unferth, a murderer, is
portrayed both as the only coward in the tale and as a Christian. In the 2001
movie, a wild-eyed Irish monk starts converting the fearful Danes but proves
laughably powerless against the monsters. All this is in line with most modern
screen treatments of Christians, who are rapidly becoming portrayed as
opprobriously as Jews were by Nazi propaganda in pre-Second World War Germany.
Yet, for all this, such treatments can show the
influence of Christianity. In the 2007 Ray Winstone version, Beowulf does not in
fact kill Grendel’s mother but is seduced by her (Angelina Jolie); the product
of their union is the dragon he eventually has to fight; before him, Grendel has
been the product of a similar seduction of King Hrothgar, and the film clearly
indicates that Beowulf’s successor Wiglaf will fall in turn. The movie tells
therefore not just a story of heroic valour and conquest, but of personal
weakness and temptation.
In the 2001 film (a movie that will satisfy many
people’s erstwhile desire to visit Iceland), the havoc wrought on the Danes is
Grendel’s revenge for the murder of his father. Both movies ask the question
therefore: who is the monster? Is Beowulf not a monster too? In the poem,
Grendel is supposed to be a descendent of Cain because he is a killer, but as
one of the soldiers puts it, ‘are we not killers too?’
Indeed. A Christian comment might be that both
films in their own ways make Christian points about human sin and frailty - for
all that they fail to see this, and instead think they are vaunting
pre-Christian pagan attitudes.
In both ancient and modern engagements with this
tale that stands at the beginning of ‘our island story’ we see fascinating
examples of cultural conflict.
Notes
1.
Quoted in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son, with Tree and Leaf,
Smith of Wootton Major (London: Unwin, 1975), p. 166.
2.
Quoted, p. 168.
3.
p. 171.
4.
Beowulf,
trans.
Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 98, lines 3150-55.
5.
Supra,p.175.
6.
p. 172.
Lapido
Media
Introduced
by the Director, Jenny Taylor
A
NEW CHARITY BREAKS THE PUBLIC RELIGION TABU
It’s
curious to hear Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester, chastising Michael
So
I set up Lapido Media to ‘tell a truer story’ about religion in world
affairs – the good news as well as the bad.
We believe the discourse about religion must change.
We believe that the country is heading for disaster if the words
‘faith’ and ‘faiths’ remain interchangeable; that, if we continue to
‘protestantise’ other religions, and pander to the equalities lobby that
insists all faiths are just different paths to the same God (or no god), the
country will become ungovernable, the academy dishonest and irrelevant, and
public life moribund and increasingly Islamised.
We launched the charity on December 6 last year at
the Frontline Club. We chose the
venue – a hang out for foreign correspondents in Paddington, London –
deliberately, to signal the breaking of the tabu about religion and the public
square. The event was packed – and
packed with mainstream journalists. I
invited
What
do we do? We hold events and round
tables where journalists can meet religion experts to discuss burning issues
that have normally been off the radar – such as the tenacity of forced
marriage as a cultural practice among second generation migrants; the meaning of
the mosque; African diaspora religion and the power of Christ in traditional
contexts. We are training young
Christians with specific expertise to talk scripture in the media. We
publish, teach and provoke. We place
stories from remote parts of the world in various political and media contexts
where they can resonate. Such as the
story of a Canadian missionary I met who earned enough trust over three years in
a remote
We are a network of journalists and broadcasters,
academics and missionaries and we have years of experience, global relationships
and second and third degrees. And we
aim to sharpen up the national conversation.
The beauty of the web means that we can do it for
minimal cost. Journalists are now coming to us for stories and contacts.
Intelligent, passionate, exciting Christianity can now tell its own story
– the least well-told story in the world for as long as I’ve been in
journalism – and there’s nothing to stop it going global.
Our website is carrying not just a Media Watch slot to keep people
abreast of how religion is now being reported around the world (as well as a
We need prayer and although we’ve got some
funding for three years, there is no limit to what might be achieved if further
funds are forthcoming. We’re
grateful to Jerusalem Trust and JW Laing Trust who had the courage to get us up
and running. And to those
individuals who backed a hunch and gave us a break.
Too many to name, but this is a collective venture, born of faith and an
unshakeable conviction that journalism matters to God as he builds his church.
It provides the light on the hill, the yeast in the lump.
Writing the vision, making it plain, enables those who read it to run, as
Habakkuk said. Or to quote the first
journalist, John Milton from his Areopagitica:
‘And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the
earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting,
misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to
the worse in a free and open encounter?”
Book
reviews
This
is the third volume in the major Scripture and Hermeneutics series.
Fifteen scholars offer a short paper in response to Oliver
O’Donovan’s seminal The Desire of the
Nations, and Professor O’Donovan provides his response to each paper.
This is an academic text, probing, critical, and appreciative in equal
measures. Space permits reference
only to those contributions which struck a particular chord with this reviewer.
There is but a sparse scattering of references to Lesslie Newbigin,
mostly in a well-crafted piece by Colin Greene on the question of Christendom,
and the possibility of a Christian state. Greene
sees O’Donovan as having offered a defence of the Christendom settlement as
‘a viable, valid and courageous expression of Christian mission’ along the
lines set out in a more popular form by Newbigin.
O’Donovan accepts the comparison with Newbigin as both apt and welcome,
but clarifies that Desire is not so
much a defence of Christendom, as some shrewd advice to its rather too
vociferous critics. For O’Donovan,
despite all its faults along the way, the Christian Church, and its leaders,
issued a permanent, if sometimes slow acting, challenge to Graeco-Roman, and
pagan, barbarities. In a typically
pithy rejoinder, O’Donovan adds: ‘the reason we have to be grateful to our
ancestors is that they wrestled with conceiving Christian politics in practical
terms, where our contemporaries usually get no further than
newspaper-editorializing.’
An engaging feature of Desire is
its scriptural exegesis, which is often striking and fresh.
Walter Moberly acknowledges this, but asks whether O’Donovan quite
grasps the full sweep of the Old Testament, and is still too wedded to a
historico-critical, as opposed to a canonical approach.
It is interesting to witness Moberly chiding O’Donovan for not adopting
a sufficiently Christocentric approach to the Old Testament.
I have sometimes had similar questions about O’Donovan’s approach to
the New Testament, which, to me at least, can seem to under-estimate the
different character of the ethical material in the Gospels, as opposed to the
Epistles.
Tom Wright offers a stimulating ‘even newer’ perspective on Paul,
with the suggestion that much of what he wrote reflected a comparison and
contrast between the developing Roman imperial cult, and the Lordship of Christ.
O’Donovan largely concurs, but traces such a reading of Paul back at
least to Augustine. For Wright and
O’Donovan, Paul’s affirmative remarks about the role of the state can only
be properly understood against this background, which surrounds the whole
apparatus of the state with defined and limited purposes.
A number of contributors write from a transatlantic perspective, but
often they seem rather at cross-purposes with O’Donovan.
Christopher Rowland, by contrast, offers a liberationist reading of the
Book of Revelation with which, with a bit of arm twisting, he believes
O’Donovan, with his essentially practical interests, might sympathise.
O’Donovan is willing to accept much of Rowland’s analysis, but sees
this as within the main parameters of Christian tradition, rather than being as
counter-cultural as Rowland suggests.
The Desire of the Nations was,
after all, written in Oxford.
All in all, this book offers rich fare for those whose mental digestive
juices, and diary, are up to it.
Peter Forster
Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ
and Culture, A Post-Christendom Perspective, Brazos Press 2007, 220pp., £10.14
(pb)
For over fifty years H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ
and Culture has featured on the reading lists of many a theological student.
The typology he crafted has proved to be illuminating and creative and many have
found it persuasive. Like any good book it has prompted many discussions but
mostly these were concerned with details of interpretation. Only a few scholars
appeared to offer deep methodological or structural critiques. Among those who
did were John Howard Yoder, James McClendon and Charles Scriven who argued that
Niebuhr’s treatment of the Christ against Culture type showed that there was a
fundamental flaw in the whole analysis.
Now Craig Carter has gone further than anyone in his critique in this
splendid book. His thesis is that Niebuhr based his book on the assumptions of
Christendom. Each of the five “types” presupposes a Christendom model, and
the debate is carried on with this these parameters. Carter holds that
Christendom must not simply be questioned but rejected as the paradigm context
for Christian ethics and living today.
Much of the strength of the book lies in its penetrating thorough
analysis. The arguments are carefully expressed with fairness and learning, and
offer us more than criticism. The first half of the book re-examines Niebuhr’s
contribution showing its strengths and weaknesses, chief of which are the
assumptions of Christendom. The second half offers a post-Christendom typology
of Christ and culture. Here the decisive concern is how far violence is
legitimate in shaping life and faith in society. The typology developed is
richer than Niebuhr’s and is offered with interesting examples. It will
produce its own debate as it prompts many a reflection. Not the least, there are
some creative biblical insights. This is high quality theological writing.
Carter believes that we are moving into a post-Christendom situation.
This is a serious challenge for the Church and already we can discern how
different groupings of Christians are responding. There is a sharp choice before
us now: Jesus or Constantine? It is not a new choice, of course. Much of our
thinking and living has gone on in a context where Constantine and his
successors received more than was due to them. But those days are passing in the
western world. The temptations of Christendom have always been with us. But,
this book argues, a choice is necessary, not to see if Christendom can be
retrieved and reasserted but whether and how we shall follow Jesus Christ the
Lord.
Brian Haymes
Stephen
Pattison, Margaret Cooling, Trevor Cooling, Using the Bible in Christian
Ministry, Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 2007, 160pp., £14.95 (pb)
This
is the third volume in the series Using the Bible in Pastoral Practice, a
programme sponsored by the Bible Society and the University of Cardiff. The
series is edited by David Spriggs of the Bible Society and Stephen Pattison of
Cardiff University who (with Margaret Cooling and Trevor Cooling) is also the
writer of this present volume.
I approach the work as a pastor or priest, perhaps browsing in a
church bookstore, picking up this particular volume from the shelf to see if
it would be of benefit in my ministry.
It is an appealing presentation, obviously a workbook "not be read
then replaced on the shelves like a novel" (p. 9); 160 letter-size pages,
divided into 16 units, each unit requiring up to three hours of preparation
and work, a total of 48 hours. Spread over the course of a year, one hour a week
for 48 weeks, and four weeks left for vacation!
As I believe in the centrality of the Word (with a capital) in my
ministry, I'm interested in the theme,
Using the Bible in Christian Ministry.
The title may be a bit misleading, however. "Christian
ministry" includes all the people of God, though the book is "intended
for those familiar with theology and ministry" (p. 10) -- in other words,
for church leaders. "Christian ministry" is meant to be used
interchangeably with "pastoral practice" they say on p. 10, and
“pastoral practice” includes about anything that anyone called and
ordered in the work of the church might be expected to do.
Unit 9 (pp 89-96), on "pastoral visiting and listening" focuses
on that which is more closely considered pastoral ministry. This section I found
especially helpful. Faith development, e.g. James Fowler, is well covered (pp.
81ff. and pp. 100ff.) but more attention could have been paid to leadership
styles (note Reflections, p. 51).
The section on Public Worship (Unit 12) didn't appear to have a clear
doctrine of preaching. The use of the Bible in preaching is a full study in
itself. It also seemed inappropriate to include private devotions with communal
or corporate worship.
The authority of the Bible is of course basic in such a work, but the
"three views" of Unit 4 -- the Bible as 1) Blueprint and Pattern, 2)
Model and Guide, and 3) Inspiration -- I found indistinct. The point, however,
is to lead the participant to an understanding of how she understands the
authority of the Bible and how this influences the way she uses the Bible in
pastoral practice.
One must ask whether spending 48 hours with this workbook is worth
time and effort. In spite of these criticisms, I would say that anyone who does
devote that attention to this work will find their ministry given greater
strength and clearer focus. Pattison, Cooling and Cooling have done a solid job
and given us a good resource for examining our use of the Bible in pastoral
practice.
Alan Reynolds
Short
notice
Alan
Reynolds, A Troubled Faith, Word Alive
Press (Canada), 2006, 181pp., £6.31 + shipping from Amazon
“With
a gentle, yet strong and convincing style, Alan Reynolds offers a wonderfully
readable and winsome defence of Christian truth” (Jeremy Begbie). “Alan
Reynolds’ considerable wisdom is cumulative – a lifetime of listening to men
and women who doubt, ask questions of God, probe the meaning of life. Think of
this book as a leisurely evening in conversation with a pastor who has been
through it all himself’” (Eugene Peterson). Suggestive section titles
include ‘The God we cannot find and the God we cannot escape’, ‘The
demonic dynamic in grief’, and ‘Have you tried doubting your doubts?’.
Ian
Cowley is an
author and Vicar of Yaxley and Holme with Conington, in the Diocese of Ely
Peter
Forster is
Bishop of Chester
Stephen
May is an author
and Vicar of Norden in the Diocese of Manchester
Alan
Reynolds is an
author and retired minister of the United Church in Canada
Jenny
Taylor is Founder
and Director of Lapido Media
Islam
and Europe
Colin
Chapman
Having
helped to found the agency Faith to Faith (www.faithtofaith.org.uk) which
provides courses and resources for churches and colleges, Colin Chapman then
lectured in Islamic Studies at the Near East School of Theology, Beirut,
Lebanon. A new edition of his book Cross
and Crescent: Responding to the Challenges of Islam was published by IVP in
2007. Here he introduces a new book by Philip Jenkins, whose earlier The
New Christendom attracted much interest.
Islam and Muslims are
frequently in the news these days. Stories in which they
featured this past year (such as the building in London of the largest
mosque in Europe, and the question of giving Shari’ah a role in our judicial
system) have probably left many people – including Christians – feeling
bewildered and a little apprehensive. In these circumstances it is welcome to
find a book which addresses many of the big issues by setting them in the
context of Europe as a whole: God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis,
by Philip Jenkins (Oxford University Press, 2007). I have no hesitation in using
the word ‘magisterial’ to describe this book. Here are some of the questions
Jenkins raises and the answers he gives:
1.
What do the statistics show?
Muslims in the UK
number around 1.6 million, which is 2.7% of the population (compared to France
where they are around 8 to 10 % and Holland where they are 6%.) The total number
of Muslims in Europe as a whole is 24 million, which is 4.6% of the overall
population. ‘Roughly Europe’s evangelicals, charismatics, and pentecostals
outnumber Muslims by almost two to one, and will continue to do so for the
foreseeable future (p 74). On the sensitive subject of the higher birth rate
among Muslim families, Jenkins predicts that by 2050 ‘we can expect that
ethnic birth rates will have fallen to something like the mainstream norms’ (p
119).
2.
What kinds of Islam do we find in Europe?
Challenging those who
see Islam in Europe as homogenous and monolithic, Jenkins stresses the enormous
diversity within Muslim communities – including everything from the pietists
and the Sufis to the more politically-minded. He also draws attention to ‘the
classic dilemma of the second-generation resident who finds himself caught
between cultures, who feels utterly separated from the country of family origin
and yet cannot identify with his own country of birth and upbringing’ (p 159).
This is how he places the more militant sections of the Muslim community:
‘While sections of European Islam in recent years have acquired a strongly
militant and politicized character, we have to understand this as a response to
temporary circumstances; moreover, hard-line approaches still command only
minority support. In the longer term, the underlying pressures making for
accommodation and tolerance will prove hard to resist’ (p 120).
3.
How should we use the words ‘Muslim’, ‘Islamist’ and ‘extremist’?
Jenkins points out
that while the word ‘Christian’ is often used to describe practising
Christians, the word ‘Muslim’ is usually used in a much broader sense to
include those who are very nominal and therefore only cultural Muslims. He
defines ‘Islamists’ as ‘activists who seek to establish Islamic political
power, to reorganize society according to their vision of Islamic law’ (p
vii). And he takes his definition of ‘extremist’ from the US National
Intelligence Council: ‘We define Muslim
extremists as a subset of Islamic activists. They are committed to
restructuring political society in accordance with their vision of Islamic law
and are willing to use violence’ (p vii).
4.
How do we account for the extremists who resort to violence?
One whole chapter is
devoted to analysing the development of contemporary terrorist movements
operating within Europe. Responding to those who see violence as a post 9/11
phenomenon, he argues for ‘a more comprehensive accounting of terrorist
violence’, suggesting that ‘Middle Eastern-related terrorism in Europe has
far more complex origins, which cannot be readily associated with any one
ideology, or necessarily, with Islam itself’ (p 207). For Jenkins, therefore,
‘The ascendancy of Islamic radicalism can be dated precisely to the year 1979,
with the Revolution in Iran and the war in Afghanistan’ (p 209), and he
devotes several pages to analysing the significance of movements like Tablighi
Jama‘at, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajoroun.
5.
How do Muslims respond to secular society in Europe?
Jenkins is convinced
that Muslims in Europe cannot be totally immune to the secularizing influences
which have affected all Europeans – including Christians. So, for example, in
relation to Muslims attitudes to gender and sexuality, he writes: ‘The longer
Muslims live in Europe and experience its powerful cultural trends, the more
they are likely to acquire the common attitudes towards gender and sexuality’
(p 203). He argues that ‘Globalization can contribute to the spread of
extremism … but it also promotes awareness of progressive alternatives’ (p
146). Moreover he underlines the point made by Lesslie Newbigin in some of his
later writings that, at a time when Christianity has become a largely privatised
religion, secular Europeans find it extremely hard to come to terms with the
religion of Islam which generally wants God to be honoured in the public sphere.
He also draws attention to the fact that Christians often find themselves
marginalised in the same way as Muslims and, as Rowan Williams’ lecture in
February 2008 pointed out, face many of the same challenges in a secular society
as Muslims do: ‘… perhaps the issue is not so much a Muslim problem as a
religious problem, a systematic failure by European elites to understand
religious thought and motivation’ (p 259).
6.
Are Europe’s problems to do with religion, or are they social, economic and
cultural?
In analyzing, for
example, the rioting of North African immigrants in many French cities in 2005,
he asks whether ‘religious identity has anything to do with their social or
economic situation’ (p 156) and ‘were these really Muslim riots?’ (p 175).
He concludes that in cases like these, racial and economic issues were far more
significant than religion: ‘Today, then, France and other European countries
face a grave problem from a disaffected underclass, a menace that does not
presently take explicitly religious forms, but could yet do so’ (p 178).
7.
How should governments deal with Muslim communities?
Certain weaknesses and
limitations of ‘multiculturalism’ are spelled out: ‘Some left and liberal
thinkers now use an argument that for years has been the preserve of the
political right, namely, that multiculturalism seems to mean the glorification
of every society and tradition in the world except the mainstream, which was
consistently denigrated’ (p 248). When, however, governments seek to relate to
Muslims as Muslims, there can be
unfortunate consequences: ‘… European nations are only beginning to realize
the dilemmas of confessional politics. By seeking to respond to religious
minorities, governments are in effect recognizing particular clerical and
religious groups as the official representatives of their communities, treating
people not as individuals and citizens but as members of collective
religious/cultural entities, holding group rights’ (p 250).
8.
Would it be a good thing for Turkey to join the EU?
While Jenkins is aware
of the many arguments in favour, he draws attention to some of the possible
demographic and political implications of Turkey’s inclusion: ‘If Turkey
were admitted to the EU, it would soon be the most populous member of the
European club, overtaking Germany before 2015. The country is almost entirely
Muslim … Turkish accession would immediately change the overall percentage of
Muslim Europeans from 4.6 percent to almost 16 percent … EU labor law means
that Turks would also have the right to live and work anywhere within Europe,
and millions from poorer regions would probably exercise that right’ (pp
256-7).
9.
Is Christianity dying out in Europe?
In challenging some of
the popular interpretations of statistics, Jenkins points to many examples of
fresh expressions of Christianity in Europe and the growth of immigrant churches
among Africans, East Asians and Latin Americans. This therefore is his general
conclusion: ‘The recent experience of Christian Europe might suggest not that
the continent is potentially a graveyard for religion but rather that it is a
laboratory for new forms of faith, new structures of organization and
interaction, that can accommodated to a dominant secular environment’ (p 19).
10.
Do we have any reason to fear the worst possible scenario – the Islamization
of Europe?
This is one of the
fundamental questions which Jenkins poses at the beginning of the book, quoting
Bernard Lewis: ‘Current trends show Europe will have a Moslem majority by the
end of the 21st century at the latest. Europe will be part of the
Arab West and the Maghreb’ (p 4). Jenkins is challenging this kind of
prediction in many different ways throughout the book, and summarizes his
conclusion in this way: ‘That Europe is acquiring much greater ethnic and
cultural diversity is certain, but the religious implications are less clear.
Visions of an Islamicized Eurabia sliding into Third World status rely upon a
number of questionable assumptions not only about demography but also about the
condition of Europe’s major religions, both Islam and Christianity. If these
assumptions are incorrect, Christian-Muslim interactions could develop quite
differently, and more benevolently. Europe could yet become the birthplace of a
liberalized and modernized Islam that could in turn influence the religion
worldwide’ (p 14).
If Jenkins provides
considerable reassurance to Christians who fear the worst about the spread of
Islam in Europe, there’s nothing in this book that can justify complacency.
The book therefore leaves me with one further question: ‘Are Christians in
Europe ready and prepared to address these issues?’. My answer would be that,
generally speaking, we’re still woefully ill-equipped to face the challenges
and the opportunities presented by the presence of Muslims in Europe.
There’s
still far too much ignorance, prejudice, fear and even arrogance among
Christians when it comes to our responses to Muslims and Islam. Every
denomination no doubt has its own specialists working in these areas. I dare to
suggest, however, that every local church (even in the so-called ‘White
Highlands’) needs to have some strategy – however simple - for teaching its
members about Islam and Christian-Muslim relations. Likewise every theological
college needs to have some teaching in these areas that is built into its core
curriculum so that all students –
and not just the enthusiasts – are encouraged to address the issues.
The
bigger picture described by Jenkins might help Christians to appreciate afresh
the wonder and the relevance of the gospel to our society – the gospel of the
One who reveals himself and who redeems the world in and through Jesus Christ.
ACCESS
highlight
Keith
Clements, ‘Bonhoeffer and the British’ (ACCESS 628)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is known as a martyr at the hands of the Nazis and
the author of Letters and Papers from
Prison. As such, he has been portrayed as solitary hero. However, central
for him in reality were social networks, institutions and friendships -
including British ones.
‘Bonhoeffer was in many
ways an anglophile,’ writes Keith Clements, ‘though not uncritically so, and
this where he becomes most interesting’. Trying to explain the stand of the
Confessing Church against the Nazification of the German Church, Bonhoeffer met
an English incomprehension. In particular he found himself at odds with Leonard
Hodgson of Faith and Order who, as Clements explains, ‘was trying to be fair
in what one might call a typically English and, dare one say, Anglican way. But
fairness was not what the struggle in Germany was about.’
As Clements observes, some of the questions Bonhoeffer raised in the
course of such dealing with ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (his term for the British and
North Americans) have a bearing on our contemporary debates around ‘freedom’
and ‘human rights’. Clements recalls the response penned by Bonhoeffer and
Visser ’t Hooft to William Paton’s English
vision for ‘the Church and the New Order’. This response seems effectively
to involve the claim, says Clements, ‘You British are quite justified in your
emphasis on individual freedom and rights. But please realize that you enjoy
these values only because you have other values embedded in your life and
culture that keep these values in place and prevent them from becoming demonic;
like respect for others’ dignity; reserve and restraint; the recognition of
privacy. All of these are sustained less by law than a tradition, an inherited
way of life. Don’t assume, therefore, they can be transplanted so easily into
other contexts where these other values are not so established or have been
shattered.’ This has clear contemporary relevance.
The exaltation of freedom and rights in Britain is associated with a
similarly ‘disembedded’ exaltation of the individual and of reason. Also,
there is a trust in the power of established institutions to safeguard all of
these, which is challenged by Bonhoeffer. Clements quotes from an essay
Bonhoeffer wrote on his return from a visit to the U.S., titled ‘Protestantism
without Reformation’, noting ‘Provocatively, Bonhoeffer seems to be saying
that Anglo-Saxons effectively worship the state as the source of the Church’s
freedom to exist and act instead of seeing the real freedom of the Church lying
in its obedience to God’s word, the truth that alone sets truly free’.
All of which inspires us to reflect further on the tradition of public
life in Britain, both its worth and the distortions to which it is prone. There
could be helpful enrichment here for the critical self-awareness needed today
regarding such matters as the vision of a ‘multi-faith society’ and the
current arguments within Anglicanism.
DK
The
unfinished dialogue with Lesslie Newbigin
David
Kettle
Ten years on from his
death, Lesslie Newbigin is remembered with affection by many who knew him, his
writings are a continuing source of inspiration for those who turn to them, and
organisations and individuals reflect the influence he has had upon them.
However, there are key settings where he has been relegated to the margins. How
much attention is paid to Newbigin by those concerned today for mission in
British culture? In our ‘mainstream’ churches at least, and despite the fact
that the topic of mission is constantly on the agenda, there is little reference
to his work. Why is this?
A
marginal figure?
Newbigin was in his
time Bishop of Madras, General Secretary of the International Missionary
Council, a popular lecturer, and the author of a dozen books and hundreds of
articles. It may seem odd, therefore, to suggest that he always has been a marginal figure. Yet relative to various well
established institutions and parties of allegiance with enduring influence, he
has always been so. It is illuminating to begin by reflecting on this.
Firstly,
Newbigin was marginal to both 'Evangelical' and 'Liberal' parties in their
mutual opposition (an opposition which he himself attributed to secular
ideology). Presenting challenges to
each, he has often been treated with suspicion by both. Evangelicals have often
been suspicious of him for his close involvement in the ecumenical movement.1
Because he refused to pronounce on the eternal destiny of particular souls, he
has been suspected of universalism. Because he claimed on behalf of the church
in each culture (in dialogue with the church in other cultures) responsibility
to discern for itself the Gospel he has been accused of an 'existentialist
contextualisation' which absolutises culture and exalts reception at the expense
of objective revelation.'2 Liberals, for their part, have been
inclined to dismiss his theology for placing the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ at the centre of a true understanding of the world in all its aspects
(more of this below). More generally, he has been dismissed as simply
'conservative' in outlook.
Secondly,
Newbigin was marginal to academic theology. He never held an academic post and
did not take bearings from current debates in academic theology. He never
provided footnotes. To those schooled in post-Enlightenment, encyclopaedic
traditions of systematic theology his theological writing could appear 'ad hoc',
lacking in comprehensiveness or adequate nuance, or obsessive as one or another
key act of illumination and conversion is pursued relentlessly. Intellectually
he has been seen more often as a missiologist than a theologian.
Thirdly,
Newbigin was marginal to denominational church life. He was the enigma of a
Presbyterian bishop. His own episcopal status remained unrecognised by the
Anglican Church for many years. The Church of South India union scheme, which he
hoped might be seen as pioneering the way for global Christian unity, was not
thus received.
Newbigin
also sought to pioneer the way in other matters only to find his lead rejected.
When the classical Christocentric model for mission was increasingly felt to be
inadequate in the World Council of Churches, he formulated a Trinitarian
missiology which would reflect more faithfully the activity of the Holy Spirit
within and beyond a church called to witness to the truth of the Gospel and the
finality of Christ. By the 1990's, however, this missiology had been displaced
by views he had resisted as failing adequately to reflect this calling of the
church.3
Finally
in the 1980's and 1990's Newbigin sought to pioneer 'authentic missionary
engagement' with Western culture through lectures, books, the 'Gospel and Our
Culture' initiative and a major consultation at Swanwick in 1992. This in turn
has been set aside by many who ponder mission in our culture today.
Rebuttal
or dismissal?
How should we
interpret the critical reception of Newbigin’s missionary engagement with
Western culture? Those who are familiar with various critical responses to him
have often been struck by an asymmetry in the encounter between Newbigin and his
critics, as follows. In the drama of such encounter, Newbigin and his critics
each see the other as bound by assumptions calling for investigation. By
implication, each must therefore be willing to explore their own assumptions and
trust the other to do the same. However, whereas Newbigin typically presents
with care his own argument and assumptions and those of his critics, often his
critics count him as requiring no response. Sometimes his more liberal Western
critics have become angry at his very suggestion that they hold assumptions of
their own. Newbigin is simply dismissed without argument. As Tom Wright wrote in
a previous Network newsletter, 'His insights have not been disproved, only
ignored'.4 Even when a critical response is
forthcoming, Newbigin’s critics seem often not to have listened properly to
him: such criticism often relies precisely on assumptions which Newbigin has
identified but which remain unacknowledged and undefended by those who hold
them.
The
Gospel and its reception
We might note that the
issues raised here by the reception of Newbigin’s message are issues raised
first by the reception of the Gospel itself. Whenever the Gospel is proclaimed,
there is an encounter between assumptions. As the Gospel addresses our lives and
worlds, assumptions and personal attachments to their very depths, it invites us
to yield all wholeheartedly to the sovereignty of God and to find our deepest
life and belonging here. However, the Gospel announcement may not be faithfully
received, but may be heard by reference precisely to the assumptions and
attachments which it addresses. These now entrench themselves as the basis on
which the gospel is now either rejected as alien or is domesticated. Either way,
the real gospel is effectively dismissed.
This
raises the vital question: where Newbigin’s missionary engagement with Western
culture has been critically received, has it been merely dismissed
on the basis of assumptions and attachments now entrenched - and with it,
has the real gospel to Western culture been dismissed?
In
an article recently published in Theology (ACCESS 634)5, I invite Newbigin’s critics to
review their response to Newbigin and to engage anew with his theology. In
particular, in four respects where he has been broadly dismissed, I urge that he
himself challenges assumptions behind these dismissals. These dismissals are (1)
his concerns relate to an age now past (2) his own thinking belongs to a past
age, (3) he unreasonably rejects the Enlightenment, and (4) his own theory of
knowledge is (ironically) relativistic.
The
anonymous reader to whom my manuscript was initially sent by the editor of Theology
remarked that ‘for many readers of Theology
it would provide something of a new light on Newbigin’s theology’. It may be
that such new light upon his dismissal will be one ingredient necessary among
others, before Newbigin’s legacy of insight will be more widely recognised and
enjoyed for what it is in Britain.
Notes
1.
See, for example David
Smith's review of Lesslie Newbigin: A
Theological Life, (Geoffrey Wainwright, Oxford University Press, 2000), Themelios,
Vol 28 No. 1, p. 91-94.
2.
Bruce Nicholls, 'Towards a
Theology of Gospel and Culture', in John Stott & Robert Coote (eds),
Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture, Eerdmans, 1980, pp.
49-62.
3.
Newbigin, Trinitarian
Theology for Today's Mission, recalled to this effect in Newbigin,
'Ecumenical Amnesia', International
Bulletin of Missionary Research, 18(1), January 1994, pp. 2-5.
4.
Tom Wright, review of
Geoffrey Wainwright above, Gospel and Our
Culture Network Newsletter, 32, Autumn 2001, p. 3.
5.
David Kettle, Unfinished Dialogue? The reception of
Lesslie Newbigin’s theology, Theology,
Vol.CXI, No. 859, Jan/Feb 2008, pp.12-21. For a longer version see Stimulus,
May 2008, pp.17-22.
On
dialogue
‘..
the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are
and speak their minds. This is tantamount to saying that the world of today
needs Christians who remain Christians.’
Albert
Camus
Comment
BIGGER,
FASTER, MORE
I find myself at an age where I am increasingly pondering the nature of
the world I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's. It was so different from the way
in which Alison, my wife and I find ourselves living now. How did things become
so different? What have we lost, and what have we gained? I don't want to find
myself constantly talking about the good old days and how things were much
better back then. It is surely true that something is lost and something is
gained in living every day, as Joni Mitchell once wrote. But it does seem to me
that somewhere along the way some important things have been lost.
I grew up on a farm in South Africa, in a very different world from the
world that I now experience. In some ways they seem to be like two different
worlds entirely. When we moved to the farm in 1959 we had no electricity, no
television, no regular water supply. Most of our food came from the farm rather
from the grocery store in Newcastle, 25 miles away. My parents struggled to make
ends meet, and I am now a rich man by comparison with most of the white farming
families who lived in our area. However in those days we must have seemed
unimaginably wealthy to the Zulu families who lived and worked on the farm.
One of the things that has undoubtedly changed is the pace of life. My
father would normally come home at around five o'clock in the afternoon, and he
and Mom would settle down on the verandah with a drink and reflect on the day
and just unwind. Then we would have supper, possibly play a board game, or
listen to a radio show, or read, and then go to bed, usually before nine
o'clock. I was commenting to Alison recently on how busy our evenings are, how
little time we have simply to spend tome with friends, how tired we seem to be
so much of the time. Yet it is so hard to stop, or even to slow down.
We have grown rich materially, and we have appliances and all kinds of
stuff that my parents would not have even dreamt of. We are very busy, and we do
get quite a lot done. But what is the state of our souls? In the service of
Evening Prayer we ask that "we being defended from the fear of our enemies
may pass our time in rest and quietness". I know that this is my heart's
desire, and that it is God's will for me, and indeed for all his people. But it
seems to me that it is increasingly difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to
spend our time in rest and quietness in the world which we have now made for
ourselves.
Ian Cowley
The
Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics
Introduced by the Director, Jonathan Chaplin
The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE) was established in
2006 as the successor organisation to the former Whitefield Institute based
in Oxford. Generous funding from the Kirby Laing Foundation made this
possible. KLICE's aim is to promote research in various fields of Christian
ethics and to communicate the results of that research in academic and wider
church and public settings. KLICE is based in Tyndale House in Cambridge, a
world-renowned independent centre for research in Biblical Studies, with links
to Cambridge University. KLICE currently employs a staff of two: a Director, Jonathan
Chaplin, and an Administrator, Tania Raiola, and is advised by a
Council of eight.
A leading emphasis of KLICE's current activities is 'public
theology.' Jonathan Chaplin is a political theologian currently working on
various publication and education projects on the role of religion in a
secularised, pluralist liberal democracy. KLICE is currently engaged in two
collaborative projects in this area, one with the public theology
think-tank Theos, the other with the Bible Society. The director has also been
commissioned by Theos to write a publication on the role of religious
language in politics. KLICE is also a partner in a three-year research project,
on environmental theology and ethics, with the Faraday Institute for
Science and Religion based at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge.
One of KLICE's major activities is a doctoral support programme, formerly
administered by the Whitefield Institute. This provides partial financial
support to selected students working in the UK on ethical issues, but,
equally importantly, also brings them to Cambridge regularly for research
seminars. As of September 2008 this programme will have supported nine young
scholars in this way. Most of these are located in theology departments but
applicants are eligible from any academic discipline.
Among the events KLICE has held since its establishment are a seminar on
'Theological Visions and Public Languages' (held in collaboration with three
other organisations), its first annual Book Colloquium, on Oliver O'Donovan's The
Ways of Judgment, and two book launches on environmental ethics. Its
second Book Colloquium takes place on 3-4 September 2008, and is on Brian
Brock's Singing
the Ethos of God. KLICE also currently serves as the secretariat for
the Ethics and Social Theology Group of the Tyndale Fellowship. Its annual
conference from 9-11 July 2008 is on the theme of political theology. KLICE is
organising a conference on 'Secularism' on 1 November 2008 in partnership with
the Gospel and Our Culture Network.
KLICE also publishes Ethics in Brief six times per year, which
contains short articles on various themes in ethics written by specialists for
a wide public. Recent issues have addressed multiculturalism, toleration,
medical ethics, business ethics and sexual ethics.
KLICE will continue to generate its own independent research and
publications in public ethics, to support the research of others, and to
collaborate as appropriate with other kindred organisations. For more
information visit the website: www.klice.co.uk.
Book
reviews
Gavin
D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation,
Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 247pp., £22.99 (pb)
D’Costa
is Professor in Christian Theology at Bristol (www.bristol.ac.uk/thrs/staff/gdc.html)
and a member of the Christian Academic Network (www.c-a-n.org.uk).
His book is about the role of the Christian academic in the university.
Unsurprisingly he pays most attention to theology and religious studies,
but other areas are considered and there is a fascinating discussion of physics
(p195ff). If you have appreciated
such post-liberals as Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank and Alasdair MacIntyre,
then you should certainly get to know Gavin D’Costa.
D’Costa
traces how theology (along with philosophy) lost its pivotal role in the Western
university and then sets out an ambitious project whereby theology may once
again become “queen of the sciences.” The
implications of that proposal are enormous, but, unawed, D’Costa sets out to
rethink the role of education and challenge both modernist and postmodernist
visions of the university. He calls
for a “post-liberal plurality of universities with differing traditions of
enquiry” (p144). He imagines what
a Christian University and its academic practices might look like.
It is a passionate study. D’Costa
argues that “Christian culture and civilization are at stake if we do not
attend to the nature of the university, a major institution that fosters the
cultural and intellectual life of nations and trains the intelligentsia of the
ecclesia. …. If the Church fails to transform education at every level, then
the future of the Church and the world are in deep trouble.” (pp215,218)
D’Costa writes from a Catholic, broadly Thomist background and readers
from Protestant, and particularly Evangelical backgrounds will find it very
different in approach to the Christian educational literature that they are
familiar with. There is (as
D’Costa strongly agrees) no worldview-neutral position, but we usually remain
unaware that we operate within a specific tradition, unless and until we come up
against another. For many of us
D’Costa’s emphasis on the role of prayer, sacraments, communal commitment,
virtue and exegesis ought to be salutary. There
are, he writes, “good theological reasons to be a sectarian committed to the
common good.” (pp77-78) Can we
imagine a university prospectus that reads:
“candidates are required to have three very good A-levels, and need to
be committed to prayer, virtue, and holiness.
Frequenting the sacraments is encouraged, sinners are especially welcome
– as is a sense of humor.” (p115)? D’Costa
applies this vision to theology, but, if his argument is sound, it surely
applies to all subject areas? Or
does it? One of the very welcome
features of this book is that D’Costa engages with the Reformational tradition
of such scholars as Alvin Plantinga and Roy Clouser (p199ff).
His engagement is positive and sympathetic, but fails to grasp the
significant differences between the traditions, most critically with regard to
what we mean by ‘reason’, ‘faith’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘heart’ (see
Clouser 2003, 2005, 2007 – unfortunately D’Costa appears only to have seen
the first (1991) edition of Clouser 2005). Nevertheless
this is an important book and I hope augurs more interaction between our
different Christian educational traditions.
References
Roy
Clouser, Reason and Belief in God, Philosophia Reformata, 68, June 2003, pages 36-68
Roy
Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: an essay on the hidden role of
religious belief in theories, University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd
edn, 2005 (especially ch 10)
Roy
Clouser, Knowing with the Heart: religious experience and belief in God,
Wipf & Stock, 2nd edn, 2007
Paul
Cavill, Heather Ward, et al, Christian
Tradition in English Literature: Poetry, Plays and Shorter Prose, Zondervan,
2007. 512 pp., £14.99 (pb)
This
book has a clear and practical intention. It is aimed at contemporary teachers,
students and readers facing a literary canon whose relationship with the
Christian tradition they are less and less equipped to address. In the stark
words of the Preface, ‘Ours is perhaps the first generation in over a
millennium in which the Christian tradition is for some readers of English
literature terra incognita, uncharted
territory’ (pp.13-14).
Ambitious in scope, the book covers a period from the emergence of the
Old English elegies to the present in a series of brief survey essays. This vast
field is subdivided into five periods: the Medieval Period; Renaissance,
Reformation and Republic; the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century; the
Romantics and Victorians; the Twentieth Century. For obvious reasons, it has
been impossible to print texts, and readers are referred to readily available
standard anthologies for almost all primary material.
The authors are laudably insistent that it is always best to read the
texts first, before turning to their introductions and accompanying questions.
The latter vary considerably in style and quality. While it is possible to point
to some little gems, e.g. the discussion of ‘Allegory’ (pp. 80 ff.) and the
introduction to Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry (pp. 409 ff.), there are other
sections whose emphases and rather too earnest imposition of a Christian reading
would not provide reliable assistance for newcomers to particular works. It is a
dismaying irony that the discussion of ‘The Bible and the Prayer Book’ (pp.
104 ff.) contains a number of noticeable inaccuracies.
The incommensurability between discussion questions, which often assume a
wide knowledge of an author’s work or a particular period, and the
introductory essays is often uncomfortable. Bibliographies at the ends of
sections are eclectic. Many of them seem rather out of date (although some
standard works never go out of fashion), and references to good recent
scholarship are not always easy to spot.
The authors have provided helpful contextual information to support the
discussion of particular texts, both within their short introductions, and in
the longer essays on aspects of the Christian tradition. In addition, there is a
guide to key biblical narratives which have become literary motifs, and
glossaries of biblical and theological terminology. These are comprehensive and
easy to use, if a little uneven. Do we need a gloss on ‘forgiveness’? On the
other hand, a term like ‘hermetic philosophy’, which is specialised and
obscure, receives no further explanation. I would have liked less reticent
presentation of Roman Catholicism. A number of Catholic authors are discussed,
as well as works explicitly related to a Catholic milieu, and other works
reacting against Catholic teaching. Particularly in the light of popular
cultural misrepresentations such as The Da Vinci Code, something more
substantial than the brief remarks in a final outline essay on Church History
would have been useful.
There is clearly a need for a book like this, and the authors have done
sterling work in assembling a vast array of material from which a survey course
could readily be constructed. Teachers of Literature and Theology/ Religion/
Christianity will be grateful for this resource (though American and Australian
users will notice the exclusively Anglo-Celtic choice of authors). It comes at a
competitive price, and with the caveats already mentioned, certainly provides a
point of departure for those setting out into an increasingly unfamiliar
landscape.
Bridget
Nichols
John
Nurser, For All People and All Nations.
Christian Churches and Human Rights. Geneva: World Council of Churches
2005.ppxiv + 220.
Much
current debate about religion and human rights is bedevilled by the polarities
typical of our secularised culture. On the one hand secularists see religion as
inherently intolerant, fanatical and repressive against any notions of human
fulfilment and therefore inimical to the very notion of “human rights.”
On the other hand, religious leaders themselves seem to be increasingly
cautious about speaking of human rights as if it was essentially secular and
humanistic in conception and therefore, like sex, only to be dubiously spoken
about with pursed lips. John Nurser has put us in an incalculable debt with this
book, which is a straightforward but detailed history of how in the post-1945
world human rights actually came to be enshrined both in the structure of the
United Nations and in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In what
will doubtless be a surprise to many, it is a story in which the churches –
especially the Protestant churches of the USA and those which formed the World
Council of Churches – were the prime movers.
We tend to take for granted the structures and charters we have
inherited. John Nurser reminds us that at the time nothing could be taken for
granted. Above all, nothing would
have happened but for the visionary and indefatigable efforts of the American
Lutheran Fred Nolde who, with other Christian – and Jewish – colleagues not
only sought to arouse religious opinion in American during the second world war,
but who on a single, fateful afternoon in May 1945 persuaded the drafters of the
UN Constitution – against their initial judgment – to include a Commission
on Human Rights in the new world body.
Particularly impressive is how generously far-sighted and visionary were
the American churches on the need for a new international order for the post-war
world even before the USA was brought into the war in late 1941. Human
rights was central to their concern, as it was to their European ecumenical
counterparts like George Bell, J.H. Oldham and W.A. Visser’t Hooft. Not
surprisingly therefore human rights became central in the concerns of the new
World Council of Churches (1948), and its Commission on International Affairs of
which Nolde became the first director.
There is another aspect of the story which is critical for our present
debates. Clearly, much of the earlier American concern for human rights was
focused on religious freedom, being driven by the anxieties of Protestant
missions for greater tolerance and access for evangelisation in strongly
Catholic- and Orthodox-dominated countries. It was the great contribution of
Nolde and his associates, however, to harness this particular (or even partisan)
aspiration to the wider impulse for human rights generally. How we today can
acknowledge a specifically religious basis for a charter of human rights, a
charter set out in universal terms acceptable to people of all faiths and none,
remains the great challenge. This book and the story it tells will continue to
be instructive as well as inspirational.
Keith
Clements
This issue's contributors:
Jonathan
Chaplin is
Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Cambridge
Colin
Chapman is an
author and retired lecturer in Islamic Studies
Keith
Clements is former
General Secretary of the Council of European Churches
Ian
Cowley is an
author and Vicar of Yaxley and Holme with Conington, in the Diocese of Ely
Arthur
Jones is Senior
Tutor at the West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies
Bridget
Nichols is
an author and Research Assistant to the Bishop of Ely
Given
for food:
Creation
and the limits of private ownership
From
the start of recorded human history at the time of settled agriculture some
12,000 years ago in the Neolithic period individuals have claimed ownership of a
bushel of seed wheat, a field of growing wheat, a sack of wheat to be milled –
but never until the last decade has it been possible to entertain ownership of
the species or sub-species of wheat and thereby legally require a farmer to pay
a royalty for use. Agro-bioresources have always been part of the Commons cared
for, improved upon and shared by generations of farmers and their urban
relatives. Today a small elite has a strategy to claim ownership of the food
species and, further, of wild species that may be of value in the future. This
new elite guide large businesses whose historic activities have mainly been to
supply chemicals for intensive agriculture including herbicides, insecticides
and fertilizers.
Recent
developments
Recently the
convergence of three new events has given this new elite an opportunity to
colonize the global food chain just as a few huge oil companies dominate global
oil supplies – in each case attracted by the guaranteed market. The three new
events are: technology to transfer genes from one species to another; the recent
legality of patenting living organisms1and thus charging a royalty;
and economic globalization that increasingly embraces agriculture and the food
chain. Five or six companies with global reach now employ molecular scientists
to move the transgenes and lawyers to enforce compensation and royalties in the
courts if farmers breach the contract, for example, by following the millennia
old practice of sowing seed saved from their own harvest. Sadly in this
scenario, normal scientific research protocols are restricted including peer
review, publication of results and independent replication at least until
patents are secured.
Genetically
Modified (GM) foods to date have contributed little to the quality of life for
all, while providing huge revenue from the food chain for the owners. Unhappily
the GM food saga has a number of negative angles. There was no market demand
from consumers, whose awareness in the US is curtailed by the absence of
labelling; while in the EU the introduction in 1999 of GM food was vigorously
resisted by the consumer market and since then has been documented consistently
by the EuroBarometer2. GM food raises uncertainties about human
health, the environment and longer-term unknown effects in the biosphere. Many
thinking citizens are deeply uneasy about the technology itself and indignant
over the way GM foods appeared in the human food chain without prior public
consultation, independent testing or long-term experimentation especially as, to
date, they offer no benefit to consumers. In 2008, a major independent UN study
by 400 independent scientists – the largest ever on this topic – and signed
by 60 governments concludes that GM crops have not increased production on the
farm3. Why have farmers bought them? The reason is that GM seeds to
date have been modified for a genetic trait increasing biological resistance of
the growing crop to chemical sprays that kill weeds and insect pests. The
increased resistance allows more potent chemicals to be used less frequently
thus reducing farm costs. However, since the chemicals are also sold by the same
multinational that sells GM seed there is lack of clarity in the price
mechanisms of sprays and seeds. Evidence is growing that the transgene
resistance to these chemicals may be declining and/or that weeds and insects
are, in the normal evolutionary way, developing higher levels of resistance to
the chemicals – requiring more frequent spraying and negating the early
benefit of lower farm costs. The theoretical evolutionary reasons that the
desired effects of transgenes are likely to be short-lived were ignored in the
rush to market.
There
are other issues that raise ethical and scientific questions about GM foods. One
is the so called “terminator-gene” not yet in use that would render
harvested seeds from a GM crop unable to germinate unless sprayed with a
chemical. This technology aims to protect the ownership rights of the company
but the counter fear is of genetic sterility being transferred into the
environment. The transgene is designed specifically to stunt and negate the
prolificacy of life that is unmistakably part of God’s order (Gen. 1.20, 22,
28, & Gen. 8. 22).
In
my view, research to understand the molecular structure of life is a justifiable
part of the Biblical mandate given to man in Genesis to exercise responsible
stewardship and use of natural resources (Gen 1. 26-28). The rush to market has
provided no permanent benefit and opens human society and the whole biosphere to
possible disruptions. Assessing unknown risk is of course impossible on a case
by case basis and therefore rests on the level of knowledge and competence of
those using it. Ongoing molecular research shows that the scientific model on
which gene transfer is used for food is inadequate. It is now clear that within
the genomes of species that we manipulate there are multiple levels of molecular
activity and information flow of which we have little knowledge. The scientific
and business elites show an audacious naivety to think that exotic genes can be
moved without negative consequences into the genomes of stable species honed for
integrated stability over millions of years. Once released from the laboratory,
negative consequences are very difficult to reverse and eliminate.
By
contrast, gene transfer to produce products for human and animal health - for
diagnosis, prevention and treatment of disease - are tested more thoroughly,
subject to stricter regulation and used for individuals; and the patient is
informed of possible side-effects before choosing.
Unlabelled
clone food
A new scenario with
intensified risks appeared in the food chain in 2007. Patents are now being
issued for genetically modified and cloned livestock with the aim of marketing
milk and meat. Again the US government has determined that labelling of such
products is not needed. The response of the EU parliament in September 2008 was
an overwhelming vote (622 to 32 with 25 abstentions) to ban food products from
cloned livestock because of the suffering inflicted upon many animals in the
failed attempts to produce a viable clone. In my view the human genetic risks
are also high as mammalian genomes of livestock and mankind are very similar –
shown by the Mad Cow (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD)
experience.
The
claim by some business and science leaders to feed the world better with GM
crops is worthless and empty at present. Further, the promise to design GM crops
for adverse environments in the developing world such as arid, swampy or salt
conditions, etc., has been neglected as those markets offer a scanty return. The
GM foods produced to date have been principally staple crops: corn, canola, and
soya – all having huge markets worldwide.
In
this short article one cannot cover all the aspects or details of this complex
topic. But in my view it is essential for followers of Jesus to view these
development in agro-bioresources not only as an economic phenomenon as one might
see manufactured non-essential goods but, by contrast, to recognize the unique
contribution of agriculture and food to the quality of life within the creation
mandate.
Everyone
knows that scientific knowledge can be used or abused. The use of gene transfer
in the food species has so far, I fear, been used only for the financial benefit
of a minority in the rich West. Meanwhile the evident global strategy to take
ownership of the world’s seed resources threatens the three billion rural poor
who have only their land and their labour and who need empowerment, not further
burdens on their only economic activity - farming. The current use of knowledge
about the wonders of the molecular structure of life runs counter to the Genesis
mandate and conflicts with the deep Biblical concerns about caring for the poor.
Notes
1
The first patent for a living organism was issued by the US Supreme Court
on appeal in 1980 in Diamond vs. Chakrabarty for an altered bacterium.
2.
The Eurobarometer is a regular survey of public attitudes throughout the
EU
3.
The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for
Development, IAASTD, 2008.
Words
to recall
…Will western
governments have sufficient strength of mind and purpose to protect the peoples
of Asia and Africa from the commercial greed and the domination of selfish
private interests which in the West itself seriously threaten to deprive men of
their real liberties and to drive the weak to the wall? It seems vain to hope
that without some large increase in their spiritual capital the Christian
nations can grapple successfully with these prodigious tasks.
J. H. Oldham, The
World and the Gospel, 1916
Comment
WHERE
YOUR TREASURE IS, THERE WILL YOUR HEART BE
Earlier today I helped
to lead the annual Harvest service in our local Church of England primary
school. The children took an active part, with readings and prayers and a
Powerpoint presentation which they had put together. There was a short mime
about one poor farmer in El Salvador who is very thankful for his meagre
harvest, while nine rich consumers in the West simply go the supermarket and buy
whatever they want without ever stopping to give thanks. Harvest gifts, tinned
goods and packets and fresh produce, were brought by many of the children and
next week they will all be taken to the local night shelter for homeless people,
where food stocks are desperately needed as the cold months set in.
So
harvest is alive and well in our local community. It provides a great
opportunity to communicate some important values, and to talk about consumerism
and poverty as well as encouraging a spirit of thankfulness for all the good
gifts around us. But after the harvest service I was talking to one of the
teachers about our collection of food for the night shelter. She said to me,
“We need to be doing this more often than just once a year.” She said that
she had decided to go and visit the night shelter herself and see whether we
could not do more to help and support their work. She knew that the next step
for her was to go and meet the people at the night shelter, to start a
relationship instead of just sending a gift.
The
service at the school had also prompted me to think about what more I and others
should be doing in response to the issues we were looking at. Giving a couple of
cans of food once a year to the homeless is a start, but surely it is not
enough. I was reminded of the principle of the tithe, the offering of one tenth
of all that God has given us. In tithing we give the first fruits of our own
personal harvest back to God. We acknowledge in a practical and sacrificial way
that all we have and all we are comes from God. It seems to me that tithing is
not very fashionable in the church these days, and we look for ways to make it
easier for people, less demanding, less shocking. But if we take tithing
seriously we will administer a serious corrective measure to the tendency in
most of us to let mammon take hold of our hearts. As someone once said, if you
want to know where a person’s heart lies, take a look at their cheque book.
The other challenge
which came home to me through my visit to the school this morning was the need
to go and spend time with those in need. It is so easy to say that I am too
busy, that there are too many other important things that I am involved in. But
if Jesus is truly my Lord, my model, my example, then I know that I have to go
and be with those who are hungry, sick, naked, a stranger or in prison. Talking
about the issues is not enough. Even sending gifts and buying fairtrade is not
enough, although its a good start. It is relationships that matter in the Jesus
way of doing things. Somewhere, somehow, I need to have a relationship with
those who do not have the privileges and the good things that I, by the grace of
God, enjoy.
Ian
Cowley
Trust
in the market
David
Kettle
At the centre of the
recent global financial crisis is a collapse of trust. 'London's money markets
froze because of a trust collapse; banks don't believe each other when they say
their businesses are sound and will not default on their obligations', writes
Will Hutton.1 The aim of Gordon Brown's part-nationalisation of the
major British banks is to restore trust between banks and maintain the trust of
small depositors in their banks (an act of prompt international leadership
acclaimed by new Nobel Prize Winner, economist Paul Krugman2). Trust
is fundamental to our economic system.
Upon
what is trust placed in the market, on what grounds, and to what end? This
multifaceted question invites Christian reflection.
We
might open up the question by asking, why the recent collapse of trust? Will
Hutton blames the abandonment of integrity and fairness as being 'fuddy-duddy
obstacles to "wealth-generation"'. Trust rests upon trustworthiness,
and when this has been scorned out of greed, trust is withdrawn. According to
Hutton, only a revival of integrity and fairness will save us now. He believes
such a revival requires a government-led increase in business regulation.
Many
will consent thus far. However, a Christian appraisal will go further. First, we
will be wary of trusting regulation for more than it can deliver. Integrity and
fairness make demands beyond the requirements of any regulation, and the sources
which inspire these virtues and inspire trust in them lie themselves beyond any
system which at bottom serves profit alone, however regulated. The market needs
to be nourished by a moral culture. Christian faith has important things to say
about the foundations and formation of such a culture.
Second,
while moral culture can provide necessary nourishment for an economic system, it
can also (understood in a Christian setting) critique it. Authentic moral
culture is not captive to any system. Accordingly it challenges any system which
in practice defines all good for us
through its 'plausibility structures'.
Robert
Wuthnow lists aspects of the market which are today ascribed moral character:
participation in the market as a producer or consumer is viewed as a direct form
of participation in public life, analogous to voting; the market as seen as
providing individuals with a sense of freedom and dignity and helps to shape
moral character as a testing-ground for the development of talent; the market is
frequently the accepted context of moral crusades (e.g. campaigns on behalf of
fair trade, and of the environment); and ‘there is a comparison and implicit
corollary between market freedoms and other freedoms. This places the idea of
the free market on the same moral plane as freedom of speech, freedom of
religion and freedom of thought'.3 Christians will be wary, however,
of a tendency for the market to define the moral.
Third,
Christian faith will challenge excessive trust in ideology. It will dispute the
ideological faith which assumes economic rationalisation to be an unqualified
good and sanctions its subversion of created spheres beyond its own. Such is the
ideological trust, it seems, which today sponsors the un-mandated social
revolution through which are living, and which indiscriminately sanctions the
extension of the market into traditional 'commons', reframes as market
transactions what was first pioneered - often by Christians - as public service,
and proposes absolute private property rights in new (e.g. intellectual, or GM
species) realms.
When
ideology is the object of such basic trust, such that people are willing to
entrust and risk everything in its service, we have reason to suspect idolatry.
Capitalism can become a fertility cult which entrusts itself to capital as
defining, self-propagating and breeding wealth in the form of credit. The
Christian vision of economic activity as service is lost; the destiny is
forgotten, as portrayed in Dante's Inferno, of those who love as fertile that which is not so.
Can
we trace any encouragement for idolatry back to Hayek whose philosophical
reflections provide the basis of the neoliberal ideology of recent decades?4
Well, Hayek showed the Romantic idealist inclination to trust in biological
metaphors. In circular fashion he assumed and trusted in the existence of
something ('the market') analogous to a human mind or a self-regulatory organism
with a coherent, immanent purposiveness of its own. But 'the market' invites no
such basic trust.
At
this point it is interesting to compare Hayek with Michael Polanyi, as does
Philip Mirowski5. Both wrote in defence of liberty against the false
pretensions of central organisation by communist states. But Polanyi disagreed
with Hayek in his diagnosis of the problem and therefore of its solution.
Polanyi's different understanding of knowledge and of science envisioned
economic agents attentive to the telos of economic activity as such, and
envisioned spontaneous order among such agents as informed by such
attention and knowledge.
Polanyi seems to promise a sounder philosophical basis than Hayek for a
democratic capitalism in which economic freedom fits with the wider freedom of
humankind willed by God, and wealth-creation defers to the wealth of creation
and the Creator's purposes for his creatures.
Notes
1.
Will Hutton, Observer, Sept 28th 2008
2.
Paul Krugman, 'Gordon Does Good', New
York Times, 12th October 2008
3.
Robert Wuthnow, 'The Moral Crisis in American capitalism', Harvard
Business Review, 60.2, pp. 76-84.
4.
See David Harvey, A Brief History
of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005.
5.
Philip Mirowski, 'Economics, Science, and Knowledge: Polanyi vs. Hayek', Tradition
& Discovery, Vol 25 No. 1, 1998, pp. 29-42. (text accessible on the
Internet)
Network
news
Mission in Western
society today can be approached theologically through a threefold cultural
setting: it must engage paganism, an enduring Christian heritage, and
secularism. This is the theme of a continuing series of three Network day
conferences. At the first, held in 2006, Tom Wright gave 130 participants a day
of lectures on Christian Mission in a
Pagan Culture.
The
third, on secularism as a context of
mission, is planned for Friday 24th April, in Cambridge. The main
speaker will be John Stackhouse, from Regent College Vancouver. This event is
being organised in partnership with the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian
Ethics, with the Director Jonathan Chaplin doing most of the work owing to David
Kettle's recent ill health. Further details will follow.
The
second conference, Mission - in Christian Soil? was, you may recall, planned for 2007
but despite excellent speakers (led by Elaine Storkey) and workshop leaders it
had to be cancelled owing to few registrations. Why was this? The question
lingers for some of us. Is it that those with a heart for mission do not see the
Christian nourishment of our culture as significant for mission? Is it that
those who see the Christian nourishment of our culture see no reason to think
theologically about mission? Is there a popular equation between attention to
our Christian heritage and a narrow, strident nationalism?
This
current newsletter encloses the reading material prepared as background reading
for the above, second conference. If you care to read it and have any ideas why
we had to cancel this conference (and no other), David would be interested to
hear your views.
Newbigin
Centenary celebrations
Later in 2009 plans
are being made in Britain and overseas to celebrate the centenary of Lesslie
Newbigin’s birth. Watch this space!
ACCESS
highlights
The current ACCESS list is a mixed bag, as ever - not of good and poor,
hopefully, but varied in kind.
Some items offer good starting-points for discussion by housegroups
wishing to reflect on the Gospel and our culture. Written in popular style, they
address a topic of broad interest in an introductory and thought-provoking way.
Among these are pieces on strident secularism (MacClaren, 646), the wellbeing of
children (Northcott, 650) and the Church (Spencer, 654).
Other items offer good starting-points for reflection by groups of
Christian ministers or leaders. A little more scholarly in theme and
presentation, they summarise in an informative way topics of importance for
ministry. Among these are articles on alternative worship (Atkins, 642),
religion and art (Hancock, 645) and icons (Reed, 653).
Then there are thought-provoking pieces. Is it really the case that
Christian in Turkey find themselves oppressed more by a secularism imported from
the French Enlightenment than by Islamic beliefs? Does Richard Neuhaus do well
to propose an addition to Richard Niebuhr's classic fivefold typology for Christ
and culture, in the form of 'Christ without culture', having in mind a form of
faith unwittingly domesticated to culture?
Colin
Greene and Martin Robinson, Metavista:
Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination, Authentic Media, 2008,
278pp, £11.99 (pb)
Both
these energetic authors once worked together at the British and Foreign Society,
and it was during those years that their vision of mission through ‘radical
cultural engagement’ arose. Here
they develop this vision into a rich (though often dense) book.
In a ‘post-Christendom, post-secular, post-colonial and
post-individualistic’ context, they propose a ‘cultural hermeneutics’ that
entails an integration of ‘societal imagination’, ‘cultural icons’ and
‘the nature of, and encounter with the Bible as Scripture’.
They believe postmodernity opens up considerable opportunities for the
Church to interweave all three perspectives.
Part One tackles the theme of culture.
Central here is the category of narrative – in particular, the complex
story of ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’.
The notion of ‘metavista’ describes the emerging
(‘post-postmodern’) world, with its confusing, buzzing multiplicity and
unsettledness.
In Part Two we are led to consider the Bible, and as might be expected we
find a heavy stress on Scripture as narrative.
The Bible’s story is said to comprise four stories – creation,
Israel, Jesus the Messiah, and the church. There
are sensitive discussions of scholars associated with this ‘storied’
outlook, although the authors’ anxiety about over-relying on historical
enquiry is arguably too strong. (N.
T. Wright’s approach is rather subtler and more varied than is suggested
here.)
Part Three focuses on the Church’s calling: the missional community is
to indwell and reconfigure Scripture’s story/stories, and thus participate in
God’s unfinished drama. The future
‘belongs to those who will tell stories that re-imagine our present
possibilities and so contribute to changes in our present cultural
topography.’ Ours is the Age of
the Imagination: the contemporary Church ‘has been for some time beset by a
profound failure of the imagination’, and, ironically, in the midst of a
widespread ‘aestheticization’ of culture.
Hence the authors’ stress on the crucial role of the arts for the
missional enterprise (and their lucid discussions of films such as The
Matrix).
Greene and Robinson cover an impressive amount of ground, and include
fine summaries of key debates (Brown’s theory of ‘the death of Christian
Britain’, Stout on Hauerwas’ purported ‘sectarianism’, the ‘emerging
Church’, and so on). Although much
of the writing is clear and down to earth, the tendency to overload sentences
with jargon and abstractions may well put off some readers.
Even in the introduction we read: ‘Thus we have chosen a signifier that
speaks not from the supposedly legitimating functions of a metanarrative or a
hurriedly revamped metaphysics, but from a relatively unclaimed space or
“clearing” (to use Heidegger’s suggestive phrase) – so, therefore, a meta-“space” or meta-“vista.”’
No one will doubt that many hours of reading lie behind the book, and
many of the technicalities are explained, but the paperback packaging does
suggest something more generally accessible.
Also, there are some odd headings that do not obviously refer to the text
they head up, and some passages are oddly disjointed.
Perhaps this is a result of dual authorship (indeed, ‘we’ and ‘I’
are both used).
Nevertheless, there is a sense of energy and urgency about Metavista
that matches the huge importance of its themes.
It is likely to be widely read, and will certainly help push the current
Bible-Church-Mission discussions far ahead.
Jeremy
Begbie
Ken A.
Van Til, Less than Two Dollars a Day: A
Christian View of World Poverty and the Free Market, Eerdmans, 2007, 180pp,
£8.99 (pb)
Despite the current economic crisis, the
market economy remains the dominant form of economy in the world today. But can
it meet the basic material needs of all human beings? From a survey of the
teachings of scripture and the church, Van Til argues that, because all humans
share God’s image and God’s world, justice demands that they have access to
the basic sustenance that allows them to take part in human society.
While the free market is responsive to consumer demand, the author
argues, it is unable to respond to the needs of the absolute poor because they
lack the spending power to convert their needs into economic demands. Van Til
identifies and expounds three schools of thought that uphold the notion that
economic justice depends on basic sustenance for all within a market framework:
·
the
‘capability’ approach championed by the economist Amartya Sen;
·
the
neo-Calvinist school emanating from the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham
Kuyper (1837-1920);
·
the
school of ‘social economics’ associated with the International Journal of Social Economics.
The author’s treatment of the second of these schools contributes most
to the originality of his book. From it he propounds a system of justice, based
on the notion of social ‘spheres’, that recognizes human diversity and
understands justice to mean not only that all human beings receive their basic
needs but that citizens receive equal treatment and producers receive reward
proportional to their contribution.
Van Til is adamant that his scheme incorporates and complements, rather
than opposes, the system of distributive justice provided by the free market.
For him, the market is necessary to
address absolute poverty, even though it is not sufficient.
It is refreshing to read a Christian approach to poverty and wealth that
affirms what is good about the market economy. The rarity of such treatments,
even before the credit crunch, reflects the church’s difficult relations with
business and its reluctance to put it at the heart its vision for poverty
alleviation. Van Til’s adoption of the notion of spheres helps him to avoid
these pitfalls and to see the economy as a sphere of human life that is
fundamental to human flourishing.
Peter
S. Heslam
Daniel
J. Treier, Virtue and the Voice of God:
towards a theology of wisdom, Eerdmans, 2006, 278 pp., £16.99 (pb)
Sometimes
within the church one hears the dismissal, “That’s all just theology”. The
implication is that personal “devotion” finally has as much to do with
theology as Jerusalem has to do with Athens, and that is supposed to be, at
best, not a lot. The rejoinder may be given, “Well your view is just
pietism.” The first attitude in its concern for “personal spiritual
formation” is danger of losing sight of that which indicates what is truly
formative, and actually transformative, in terms of the normative understandings
of Christian faith. The second attitude in its concern for explicating the
complexities of Christian teaching is in danger of turning the communitarian
Christian exploration of truth – i.e. faith seeking understanding – into an
impersonal science separated from formative education in faith, and the
transforming practice of faith.
Both attitudes, in different ways, marginalise Scripture-formed wisdom
and the practice of Christian virtue. However, today the problematic modernist
tendency of dividing theology from practice, understanding from faith, canon
from community, knowledge from virtue, and teaching from wisdom, is being
redressed in a number of approaches involving more holistic, post-critical,
narrative-formed ways of thinking and being Christian.
Daniel Treier is such a redresser. He identifies the problems, exegetes
an overarching biblical-theological motivation, explores and connects the
complexities, and points towards a more integrated vision. Like Ellen Charry,[i]
Treier seeks to recover the practical integration of theological reflection
within the church’s formative practices that generate Christian wisdom and
virtuous living. With Charry, Treier associates the growth of the academy –
and the subsequent supposed apologetic need to conform theology to the
“scientific” paradigm – with the detachment of theology from Christian
wisdom and virtue. Treier, again like Charry, returns to the pre-modern roots of
theology in the exploration of the wisdom of God as an embodied, pastoral,
formational, enterprise. In ways that follow (but also seek to correct)
MacIntyre,[ii]
Treier recovers the significance of virtue, both as essential to the church
practice of theological reflection, and as a proper consequence of theological
engagement.
Treier is less an innovator than a master synthesiser. He traces a host
of connections – mostly within current post-critical discourse – among
theology as wisdom; the theological reading of the Scriptures as a dialogical,
church-framed, Christ-centred narrative; the speech-act conception of meaning;
the gospel as public truth, etc. The book provides a wealth of discussion that
cannot be noted in a review such as this.
Treier stresses the embodied character of theological wisdom, and the
fruitfuless of a cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine, and has no brief for
a one-dimensional propositionalist hermeneutic. Nevertheless, he is concerned
that Christian faith should not be reduced simply to the “grammar’ of what
the Christian may say consistent with the church’s culture and language game.
Not only is the core content of faith something ultimately independent of our
modes of expression, the Word of God is not bound by our modes of expression and
must be able to speak anew.
This interdisciplinary book evidences considerable mastery over a wide
range of, mostly contemporary, hermeneutical and theological considerations.
However in its complexity it still reads like the PhD thesis from which it
originated. Exhaustive, it is a somewhat exhausting read. A post-critical taste
for full-bodied complication (contrasting with the thin soup of journalistic
modernism) may remain difficult to digest, in spite of the improved nutrition.
Nevertheless, the closing chapter – exploring the Trinitarian
inculcation of wisdom via Barth’s theology of revelation – offers something
of the integration towards which Treier’s book, as a whole, is directed.
Deserving a special note is Chapter 2: Wisdom and Living Virtuously in
Communion. A key theological exegesis of Proverbs 3:13-18 leads to discussion of
the pivotal wisdom of Christ and, via consideration of the Spirit, to a
multifaceted discussion of practical reason. In this way Treier unfolds the
biblically-indicated shape of Christian virtue to be made manifest within, and
by, the community of faith. However, one wishes that all the Hebrew and Greek
had been transliterated.
The book has provides by way of a very useful resource 46 pages of
endnotes, a 17 page bibliography, an index of names and subjects, and an index
of Scripture references.
Gavin
Drew
Short
Notice
Chris
Eerdman, Countdown to Sunday: A Daily
Guide for Those Who Dare to Preach, Brazos, 2007, 206pp., £8.99
"Chris
Eerdman describes how, through the week, through faithful discipline, the
preacher peels off the many masks of the text until he or she comes face to face
with God. But in the process, the preacher peels off his or her own masks, and,
like it or not, comes face to face with himself or herself. This is a book to
challenge and encourage preachers, and is also a book for anyone who is ready to
come face to face with the truth."
Samuel
Wells, Chaplain, Duke Divinity School
The
Nova Research Centre
researching
mission in Europe, innovating mission in Europe
introduced by the Director, Darrell Jackson
In April 2007 I
moved from Budapest to Redcliffe College, Gloucester, to establish a new Centre
with a research interest in mission in Europe. I had previously spent three
years working as a researcher in European Mission with the Conference of
European Churches.
The Nova
Research Centre was officially launched at Redcliffe in January 2008. Redcliffe
has a tradition as a mission training college. During its eighteen or so years
in Gloucester it has developed undergraduate and postgraduate programmes that
assume as a basic starting point that contemporary mission is undertaken in
intercultural, globalised, and post-colonial contexts. Nova has become a key
part of this vision and reflects the desire of the College to better understand
the nature of Christian mission in contemporary Europe.
‘Europe’ defies simplistic attempts at definition, categorisation,
representation, or description. Diversity, complexity, plurality, and transition
are words that come readily to mind in the effort to describe Europe. There is
ample evidence to suggest that Europe is simultaneously pre-Christian,
Christian, and post-Christian. Equally there are pre- and post- forms of
secularity and modernity. Newbigin clearly helps some European countries make
sense of the context for mission but in some countries his analysis is resisted
and even felt to be wrong. There are some European Christians who still consider
Constantine to have been a good thing.
Set against this background, what does a Research Centre located in a
mission training College in the UK do and offer? Nova is working in four areas.
Firstly, it carries out field research, mainly, though not exclusively, through
a qualitative research approach. Secondly, it carries out research commissions
for Mission Agency and Church clients. A third area of activity has been to
develop a historical mission archive with a particular focus on Europe. Finally,
all of its research activity is integrated with the teaching of European Studies
and other programmes at Redcliffe College.
Nova’s first major research report was titled ‘Mapping Migration in
Europe: Mapping Churches’ Responses’ and was a collaborative project with
the Churches Commission for Migrants in Europe and the World Council of
Churches. A second research-led activity is to publish material on the issue of
‘New and Emerging Mission Movements in Europe’. Opportunities to contribute
to newspapers and magazines have been taken and Nova staff have contributed to
significant articles in Time and Newsweek dealing with themes of Christian faith
in Europe. A number of Christian agencies have also used Nova for consultation
purposes.
The key concern for a missiologist with an interest in Europe must surely be the nature of Christian public witness in the diversity of European contexts, whether in the public square or political arena. A central assumption underlying the work of Nova is that public witness in Europe has to be four-fold and includes public proclamation, public assembly, public action, and sometimes public confrontation. Nova’s research interest lies in the discovery of innovative ways of engaging in public witness within Europe.
A
significant frustration in this work is presented by a peculiarly British way of
reading European cultures, societies, and politics. Apathy, prejudice, and a
lack of conviction breed a feeling that Europe is not really a legitimate sphere
of mission activity and reflection. Too many people seem incredulous therefore
that a European Research Centre should be based in the UK. This frustration is
compounded by the real challenge of the secularisation of European politics and
the ideological gains of contemporary liberal individualism in the public
square. In this situation, the
public proclamation and public action of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox,
and Evangelical Churches is often viewed with suspicion by the European
population and perceived to run counter to the European vision. Public assembly
in Europe draws on various models and experiences of Church-State relationships,
of course; and where Christians have deemed these forms of public assembly to be
inadequate for contemporary Europe, Nova’s research interest naturally focuses
on the emerging expressions of church that are taking their place alongside the
so-called historical Churches of Europe.
Where
the State Church model is in decline there is an increasing loss of the
Christian story. Intriguingly, there is however at the same time a new interest
in whether the Christian story has any relevance to contemporary Europe. Time
and Newsweek have had a long-standing interest in European religiosity and these
two were joined in 2007 by the Economist which finally acknowledged that
European religiosity could no longer be ignored by its journalists. European
Islam and migration were important catalysts in this respect but European
Christians have also been making increasingly effective contributions to the
public political, cultural, and economic realms.
Nova is constantly monitoring and commenting on these and other developments the European cultural and political contexts as well as Christian responses to these in mission and evangelism. A regular digital research-led bulletin features news and stories illustrating these areas. The Nova website also carries an increasing amount of material that will be of interest to those with a concern for mission in Europe. The research bulletin can be subscribed to by visiting the website at <www.novareasearch.eu>
This issue's contributors:
Jeremy
Begbie
is Research Professor of Theology, Duke University, U.S.
Ian
Cowley is an
author and Vicar of Yaxley and Holme with Conington, in the Diocese of Ely
Gavin
Drew serves on the editorial team of Stimulus
(New Zealand). He has worked for the Bible Society in New Zealand and as Dean of
Studies for the Bible College of New Zealand at its Wellington branch
Peter
Heslam is Director of Transforming Business, Cambridge University (www.transformingbusiness.net)
John
Hodges is retired
Professor of Animal Genetics who has served with the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) where he started the UN activities for the conservation of
livestock agro-resources in developing countries and was involved in drafting
the Convention of Biodiversity
Darrell
Jackson is Director of the Nova Research Centre and Lecturer in European
Studies, Redcliffe College, Gloucester