Beyond
the myths of our age
Philip
Sampson
Certainly not the 'new atheists' such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Their �dreary fundamentalism�, writes David Bentley Hart, consists of �vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance�, and contributes nothing to the debate. In his lively and often witty book Atheist Delusions,1
Hart
tackles head-on the picture of modernity presented by such authors. This is
refreshing but not essentially new. Many scholars have made similar points,
notably Terry Eagleton who has equal wit with less asperity.2
But not only does fashionable humanist chatter add nothing, it actively
inhibits serious reflection on our secularised society. Here again, Hart echoes
concerns increasingly voiced by others in recent years.3
But now Hart makes a genuinely original contribution. It is his thesis
that we need first to understand what it �meant for Western culture to adopt
Christianity� if we are to understand what a Western culture without
Christianity would look like. For Christianity was genuinely revolutionary, �a
truly epochal revision of humanity�s prevailing vision of reality, so
pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have
created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and
of the moral good�. Only when we recognise what we have lost, can we
realistically assess the consequences of that loss.
Hart looks first at the egregious myths which persistently misinform
popular debate: that there is warfare between science and religion
(�Galileo�), that Christianity was the source of violent superstitions
(�witch burning�), that religion foments oppression and war (�slavery�,
�wars of religion�).4 His discussion and rejection of these myths
is well informed and robust. It is, he argues, a simple fact of history �that
Christendom fostered rather than hindered the development of early modern
science, and that modern empiricism was born not in the so-called Age of
Enlightenment but during the late Middle Ages.� Similarly, he notes that the
church exercised restraint and judicial control in witch trials; and that the
�wars of religion� might better be called the �first wars of the modern
nation state, whose principal purpose was to establish the supremacy of secular
state authority over every rival power, most especially the power of the
church�. Of course, this de-mythologising is not congenial to the modern mind
which would rather label war �religious� than reflect on the fact that
�for sheer scale of its violences [sic], the modern period is quite
unsurpassed.�
But
Hart comes into his own with his focus on the birth of Christendom out of the
culture of late antiquity. Because of the myths we have learned about both
antiquity and the medieval period, we have no idea how revolutionary the advent
of Christianity was, nor how much its modern critics rely upon this Christian
inheritance. Hart seeks to put this right, and in large measure succeeds.
Contrary to modern romantic preconceptions, the paganism of antiquity did
nothing �to mitigate the brutality of the larger society - quite the contrary
really - and it would be difficult to exaggerate the brutality.� By contrast,
�Christian teaching, from the first, placed charity at the centre of the
spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had, and raised the care of widows,
orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of
religious obligations.� The revolutionary doctrine of divine love saw �the
invention of an entirely new universe of human possibilities, moral, social,
intellectual, cultural, and religious.� And these possibilities had social
consequences: the building of hospitals and almshouses; the feeding of the
hungry and clothing the naked as a religious duty; and the fostering of the
dignity intrinsic to every human being. By contrast �the old gods� could
never have taught their human charges to think of charity as the highest of
virtues or as the way to union with the divine.� It would be difficult to
overestimate the revolutionary impact of the gospel.
Our perception of the medieval period is correspondingly distorted. Far
from epitomising �darkness and confusion� [Gibbon], �early medieval
society� was in most ways far more just, charitable, and (ultimately) peaceful
than the imperial culture it succeeded, and, immeasurably more peaceful and even
more charitable (incredible as this may seem to us) than the society created by
the early modern triumph of the nation state.� The myth of humanity�s
revolutionary emergence from darkness and superstition into reason and
Enlightenment is colourful but wrong: �one can believe that faith is mere
credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure
obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both�. Along
with a growing minority of scholars, Hart argues that not only science, but also
notions of human rights, social justice, and legal equity are the result of our
forebears� belief that the world is a creation of the God of love.5
This revision of popular myths about medieval society serves a greater
purpose: modernity is not simply post-religious, it is specifically post-Christian,
and its ethical presuppositions are �palliated fragments and haunting echoes
of Christian moral theology�. That modernity is parasitic upon its Christian
heritage raises a crucial question: �how long can [the spiritual ethos
inspired by Christianity] persist once the faith that gave it its rationale and
meaning has withered away?� To shift metaphor, is modernity busily sawing off
the branch upon which it sits?
It is commonly assumed that the virtues inherited from Christendom will
continue in the absence of the Christian beliefs which gave them birth.6
But will the ideals borrowed by the secular project prove self-sustaining? Hart
doubts it, and joins the growing minority of commentators who sense a vacuum at
the heart of our (post) modern world.7 Hart is aware of the danger
here of instrumentally drawing on biblical resources to shore up a fading
culture: �neither a person nor a people can will belief simply out of a dread
of the consequences of its absence�.
Of course, it may be that it is already too late to preserve what
remains. So much the worse for the West, but there is a �new Christendom�
being born in other parts of the world. Christianity is �not only a cultural
logic but a cosmic truth, which can never finally be defeated.�
Hart makes an impassioned plea that �Christians ought not to surrender
the past but should instead deepen their own collective memory of what the
gospel has been in human history.� This is too rich a book to do it justice in
a short review. Read it. It will enlarge your understanding of the direction our
secularised society is taking.
Notes
1.
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions,
2.
E.g. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
3.
E.g Jurgen Habermas, A Time of Transitions, Polity Press, 2006, p150/1.
4.
For a discussion, see Philip Sampson,
Six Modern Myths, IVP, 2001.
5.
For discussion, see �Sustaining
Democracy� http://www.jubilee-centre.org/resources.php?topicID=0&resource_keyword=sampson&x=0&y=0
6.
ibid
7.
From Habermas (op cit) in Europe to the
scholars of the �Cultural Christianity� movement in
'A mythical age' would be a
suitable subtitle for this issue of the Network newsletter. Myths of one kind
and another are the theme of Philip Sampson's review article of David Hart's Atheist
Delusions, Jonathan Ingleby's review of Vinoth Ramachandra's Subverting
Global Myths, and David Kettle's pieces on Health and Salvation and on Myth
and reality in a recent
Cultural
transition
David Kettle
Western culture is marked today by multiple transitions - some quite new, others under way for a generation and more. Some are readily noticed and named, such as the employment of new technologies. Others lie deeper in our understanding of the world, ourselves, and life itself. While we may sense these, we find them hard to grasp. At such deeper levels, from what, and to what, is our culture moving, in ways relevant to the context of God's good purposes for his people?
The responsibility of discernment in such matters of 'deep culture' (to use Harold Turner's term) is a pressing challenge for Christians, if we are to take bearings well for our vocation today.
At two well-attended conferences
held in December 2009 to mark the centenary of Lesslie Newbigin, Veli-Matti K�rkk�inen
described Newbigin as someone who felt that he was, like St Augustine of
Hippo, living in a transitional era, amidst the ending of an empire. For
While Newbigin came to focus upon the Enlightenment, it was Sydney Evan's reference, in a sermon, to 'the end of renaissance man' which resonated for Newbigin with his sense of living perhaps 'at a moment of profound change'. Later he would quote Michael Polanyi's observation that the 'incandescence' of the past four or five centuries 'has fed on the combustion of the Christian heritage in the oxygen of Greek rationalism, and when the fuel was exhausted, the critical framework itself burnt away'. Here are transitions on a grand scale indeed.
Some have seen ours as a time of transition from a religious to a secular age. Sociologists have found support for this in the statistics of religious decline in the West (see 'Godless Europe?' , ACCESS No. 706). Today, on the other hand, some speak of the rise of a post-secular age. Little sign of this is evident to Christians battling against restrictive new legislation, however. Meanwhile some authors have probed secularisation beyond the familiar measures, tracing a deeper secular shift in social imagination and sensibilities. This trend is noted by Michael Paul Gallagher (ACCESS No. 704) and exemplified by Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.
Some see ours as a time of transition from Christendom to post-Christendom. We are coming to see that, like secularism, a post-Christendom situation involves the loss of more than formal social authority for religion; like secularism, it involves a loss of a distinctively Christian imagination. What this loss portends is urged by David Hart in his Atheist Delusions (see lead article). It is stated by J�rgen Habermas, who in Time of Transitions (2006) writes bluntly: 'Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilisation. To this day we have no other options... We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.'
Some see ours as a time of transition from modernity to postmodernity. Now the label 'postmodern' has meanings as plural as the world it conceives. Denoting as it so often does the claim that all truth is relative, leaving only the 'will to power', it fails to break authentic new ground beyond modernity; it is an offshoot of modernity and remains dependent upon it. This was Lesslie Newbigin's view, as we were reminded by Veli-Matti K�rkk�inen, who describes our cultural transition rather as one from modernity to late modernity. Perhaps we may say that if Newbigin was a post-modern before his time he was authentically, Christianly, post-modern in a way that contemporary postmodernism in general is not.
According to Rein Staal, there have been others like him. In 'The forgotten story of postmodernity' (ACCESS No. 713), Staal recalls a series of 'pre-emptive postmoderns': European thinkers - mostly theists, and including Romano Guardini, Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel - who 'saw that the clash between the naturalistic reductionism of modernity and postmodern subjectivism is a family quarrel predicated upon the eclipse of the person'. This points to a recovery of 'the person' as a key element in the renewal of a Christian trajectory beyond modernity. Here is another clue to where we stand today.
For Christians the backdrop to all such profiles of transition is, of course, the provisionality of the saeculum itself and of that 'moment' of transition we call the eschaton.
We need resources of discernment which, as Veil-Matti K�rkk�inen expressed it, will 'help the church in the beginning of the third millennium to reappraise her mission and existence in the world'.
DK
Health
and salvation
David Kettle
Mike Fitzpatrick declares himself a long-standing admirer of celebrity chef Nigel Slater's writings and recipes;1 He takes a dim view, however, of the chef's remarks when interviewed by Men's Health magazine.2 Asked, were the prime minister to consult him, how he would advise to improve the nation's diet, Slater replied: 'a free health check for everyone. The sort of really comprehensive annual one I pay a thousand quid for! Seeing the true state of your health in black and white would make anyone think more seriously about what they put in their mouth.'
While acknowledging the value of strategic screening of one kind and another, Fitzpatrick regards as far more dubious the more general tests considered appropriate by many employers - let alone the comprehensive health assessments on private offer. He challenges their underlying central assumption that "the true state of your health" can be revealed by biochemical study of fluids or by imaging body tissues. Slater is mistaken, he says, to see this information as providing the basis for healthy eating - which Fitzpatrick calls 'the highest form of ethical virtue recognised in contemporary society'.
'Now that health has replaced heaven (in either terrestrial or celestial forms) as the goal of human existence', he writes, 'health has been reduced to the anatomical and physiological functions of the human organism. The highest aspiration of the modern individual is biological survival, complemented by the state of bovine contentment celebrated as "happiness" by government advisers, a condition to be achieved by making healthy lifestyle choices, appropriately corrected by short courses of cognitive behavioural therapy.'
Fitzpatrick appears to have two interwoven converns. First, the fact that 'subjecting the body to a relentless regime of prevention and surveillance is unlikely to make much difference to the duration of our animal existence'. Second, that doing so 'is certain to reduce the scope of our humanity' - because it projects a world constructed by narcissism and an ultimate terror of death. On this Fitzpatrick quotes Terry Eagleton, for whom the contemporary preoccupation with health reflects 'a fantasy of mastering the unmasterable, a disavowal of death, a refusal of the limit which is ourselves.'3
No doubt the challenge responsibly to manage one's health acquires a new urgency today among the overweight (now reported to be more numerous than the underfed), and for whom diseases associated with obesity can often be avoided by accessible lifestyle choices. This is important. But to aspire for complete mastery of one's body is another matter. There is a fantasy here which arguably has roots in modern society's fundamental vision of (and faith in) 'cultivation' and of what Ernst Gellner calls a 'garden' culture. Unlike (premodern) 'wild' cultures which reproduce themselves without conscious design, supervision, surveillance or special nutrition, 'garden' cultures 'need the constant attention of the gardener, as a moment of neglect or mere absent-mindedness would return it from the state from which it had emerged'.4 Mastery of our own bodies extends today not only to their 'cultivation' but to their 'design' through cosmetic surgery and implants - with further possibilities to hand from genetic screening.
The replacement (as Fitzpatrick puts it) of heaven by health as the goal of human existence involves, to be sure, a sea change. And yet we might muse at John Knowles' description of what Christianity traditionally meant for the average churchgoer: 'a sort of abstract force for good, like nutrition'.5 While this is by no means to be scorned - it carries echoes of vital New Testament themes - it clearly omits vital dimensions of Christian faith. The contemporary 'fetishism of the body' (as Fitzpatrick calls it) might therefore provoke us to reflect on ways of understanding and commending the faith which involve crucially more than an invitation to self-nutrition.
Notes
1. Mike Fitzpatrick, 'The true state of your health', British Journal of General Practice, January 2008, p. 64.
2. Nigel Slater, 'Eating his words', Men's Health, 2007, pp.171-2.
3.
Terry Eagleton, After theory,
4. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, Polity Press, 1987, p. 51.
5. Quoted in Peter Moore, Disarming the Secular Gods, IVP, 1989, p. 105.
Myth
and Reality in a
"This house believes that faith is essential to the democratic debate". Such was the motion debated at Cambridge University Union in the first national Inter Faith week in November 2009, and organised in collaboration with the East of England Faiths Council.
Those opposing the motion presented two main arguments. First, faith is a matter of believing certain things to be true without reasonable evidence let alone proof. A democratic society, however, is founded on reasoning and facts. One cannot reason with people of faith, and therefore they should leave their faith at home when contributing to public reasoning. Otherwise, the democratic debate will be marred by irrationality and ridden with conflict. Second, people of faith claim that their beliefs carry the authority of sacred scriptures or of ordained religious institutions and their leaders. Therefore people of faith, rather than seeing their beliefs as a private choice, claim authority to impose their beliefs on everyone else (euthanasia and abortion policies were repeatedly cited). This is oppressive.
The Christian speaker, Jonathan Chaplin, easily addressed these two familiar - not to say threadbare - arguments. Regarding the 'irrationality' of faith, he pointed out that faith sponsors a great deal of reasoning (he expressed amazement that the opposition speakers seemed not to have engaged with this) and that this provides a much richer, more robust moral discourse than secularist 'esperanto'. The Jewish speaker (Vivian Wineman, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews) pointed out that most secularist moral principles originated themselves in religious ones.
Regarding the 'oppressiveness' of faith, Jonathan Chaplin pointed out that in a democracy when legislation is agreed by majority vote of parliament, it is not uncommon for the minority opposed to this legislation to feel personally oppressed by its coercive, legal status; however, they do not seek to ban the democratic process responsible for this. Therefore to ban the democratic process when it owes much to religious inspiration, and to ban it for this reason, is to exclude religion unreasonably. This would make secularists guilty precisely of the kind of narrow, bigoted exclusiveness which they attack in religious fundamentalism. To allow faith to contribute to democratic debate is not to privilege it, but to be inclusive.
These two secularist arguments (other subsidiary arguments also featured in the debate) raise the question how widespread are myth and reality in contemporary perceptions of religion. There is a challenge to Christians today, to help people in a secular society encounter the reality of Christian faith and learn to scorn the myths.
DK
Debate
in the media
Vincent Nichols, at his
enthronement as Roman Catholic Archbishop of
"Let
us be a society in which we genuinely listen to each other, in which sincere
disagreement is not made out to be insult or harassment, in which reasoned
principles are not construed as prejudice and in which we are prepared to
attribute to each other the best and not the worst of motives."
Comment: LIVING ICONS
Ian
Cowley
Yesterday I was listening to a talk about icons. The speaker
asked us to think about ourselves and our own lives being �living icons�,
reflecting something of our relationship with God to the world. I started to
think about how those around me might respond to this. For myself, I am
increasingly aware that the reality of my relationship with God is as much about
woundedness and struggle as it is about comfort and joy. But is this what our
culture encourages us to reflect?
The
psalms certainly offer us a picture (an icon perhaps?) of a spirituality that is
full of pain and struggle. This morning I was reading Psalm 77. �I thought of
God and I moaned�, says verse 3. How does this fit with the preoccupations of
our culture, which seems only interested in winners, in success and achievement?
Are we in danger of buying into a myth of what relationship with God is about?
Walter Brueggemann says, �The Psalms are profoundly subversive of the dominant
culture, which wants to deny and cover over the darkness we are called to
enter.�
The
calling of those who seek to follow Christ is to be formed into the mind of
Christ, who did not cling to power and success but emptied himself taking the
form of a slave. The wisdom of God is indeed foolishness to the spirit of our
age. It is in this very culture that the need is greatest for Christian witness
which embraces and reflects servanthood and vulnerability. This is where the
grace of God in Christ Jesus is to be found.
Twentieth century
pioneers of mission to Western Culture
Joe
Oldham
Keith Clements
Joseph Houldsworth (�Joe�)
From 1938 �retirement� for
At every stage of his career,
Oldham�s most substantial book was Christianity and the Race Problem (1924), the pioneer work on an issue which was arguably to be Christianity�s major challenge of the century, faced as it was by the legacy of colonialism and slavery, and by the new racist tyranny in Europe, segregation in the USA and apartheid in South Africa. It rigorously challenged the respectability being given to racism by certain western intellectuals and their background of cultural assumptions, and contains what is perhaps his most famous statement: �Christianity is not primarily a philosophy but a crusade. . . Hence when Christians find in the world a state of things that is not in accord with the truth which they have learned from Christ, their concern is not that it should be explained but that it should be ended.�
The growing menace from Nazi Germany was viewed by Oldham as exposing the ultimate form of a disease endemic throughout western society: the growth of a state entirely secularist in its premisses, bending to its will a culture wholly utilitarian and with no regard for that element of freedom and responsibility which in Christian eyes must be the mark of a truly moral ordering of society. This for him was the crucial issue underlying the whole agenda of the 1937 Oxford Conference, and which led him to setting up the �The Moot�. It is noteworthy that the most influential contributor to the Moot was Karl Mannheim, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whose diagnosis of modern society as caught between the two necessities of �planning� and �freedom� seemed to Oldham exactly right. As well as the overt totalitarianism threatening from outside, there was the menace of a creeping totalitarianism within. When war broke out in 1939, Oldham went on record, in print and on the air, as declaring that defeating Hitler was not enough � Britain must identify what values it was fighting for beyond its own survival. He at first envisaged the Moot as forming the nucleus of an �order� of people in influential positions in society (civil service, higher education, industry etc) who could challenge the slide towards conformity to purely utilitarian values and promote justice and community. This never actually transpired, but what did eventuate through the Christian News-Letter was an extraordinarily wide network of people eager for information and discussion on burning issues of the day in public life. Oldham chose for his collaborators and writers whoever could challenge moral defeatism, narrow self-interest and national insularity; and for his topics was happy to include whatever might make people think hard on the values needed for a society worth fighting for and a Europe worth reconstructing, even if it meant radical changes in attitudes. Industrial relations, family life and the emerging new roles of women, youth attitudes, the irrelevance of much church activity to people�s real problems, teaching as a vocation, the significance of science, Britain�s role in the post-war world . . . all were grist to Oldham�s mill. His whole enterprise may be said to be the promotion of a self-critical national loyalty founded on a personalist, relational view of humanity as disclosed in the gospel.
On social issues Oldham he looked for wisdom from �the best minds�,
and it was often quipped that his motto must surely be �Find out where power
lies and then take it to lunch at the Athenaeum� � leading to the criticism
that he tended to the paternalistic rather than the prophetic. �Prophecy�,
however, can just be a euphemism for sloppy rhetoric, not least in ecumenical
circles, and
See further K. Clements, Faith
on the Frontier. A life of J.H. Oldham (T. & T. Clark/WCC 1999), and K.
Clements (ed.) The Moot Papers. Faith, freedom and Society 1938-44 (
Book Reviews
Justin
Thacker, Postmodernism and the Ethics of
Theological Knowledge, Ashgate
2007, 137pp, �45.
�
�we only know God to the extent that we also love others� (p.127). This is
the conclusion Justin Thacker reaches in his book Postmodernism and the Ethics of Theological Knowledge. This simple
piece of Christian wisdom comes at the end of a remarkable survey of two
significant postmodern thinkers, Rorty and Lyotard, and how best to respond to
their challenges of the Christian faith. Along the way Thacker engages with
modern theologians from whom he draws together a response which emphases the
importance of participatory knowledge of Christ as the way of understanding
relational revelation. For Thacker �our knowledge of God and our love of
others are radically integrated because both are dependent upon our tacit
participation in the rationality of Jesus Christ�. This leads to a further
bold statement: �Christianity is not a theoretical discourse, but is rather a
practical agapeistic activity which is characterised by self-sacrificial service
for the other.� (ibid).
Thacker does not respond to Rorty and Lyotard by offering an
epistemological defence of Christian rationality. This is because ethics not
epistemology is the key to understanding the challenge of these two
postmodernists; they are misunderstood if treated as critics of Christianity�s
epistemology as both are more concerned about the ethical rather than the
epistemological issues of knowledge. Thacker therefore reads both Rorty and
Lyotard as being deliberately paradoxical about the viability of their own
epistemological enterprises. This is because they are fundamentally critical of
the abuse of power that they see expressed in authoritative claims to knowledge,
including claims to universal truth. Rorty seeks a �community of social
justice embodied� (p.19) which does not rely on the imposition of its own
ideas to persuade others to live likewise; and Lyotard seeks a form of
reflective judgement in which conflict between or within majorities and
minorities �can be resolved as long as it is accompanied by a sense of the
sublime� (p.34). Christianity is demonstrably false - it is neither of these -
until it demonstrates otherwise.
For Thacker, both Rorty and Lyotard misjudge Christian knowledge if they
treat it as just a violent discourse, i.e. that it is a totalising narrative
that imposes its own truth. Rather Christian knowledge is more truly about
self-sacrificial love discovered in the participatory knowledge of Christ�s
life. Rorty and Lyotard demand a demonstration of Christianity that is
non-violent; what they have seen is actually the opposite. As Thacker says
�What is required is a demonstration that the Christian faith is not an
oppressive, violent narrative, but rather one that is characterised by love.�
(p.36). Thacker�s response is as follows:
..
theological knowing consists in a perichoretic participation in God which
operates tactictly to enable a pneumatological interpretation of the revelation
of Jesus Christ. (p.37)
Unpacking
this agenda leads Thacker through the thought of Morna Hooker, Alan Torrance and
Miroslav Volf. The theme Thacker is tracing is that of perichoresis �
interpenetration; and his main point is that there is some kind of revelational
interpenetration of human reality by the divine which allows for a reciprocal
engagement by humanity with divinity. This happens in the person of Jesus, and
although the relationship between God and humanity in Christ is asymmetrical the
knowledge of divinity is both real and effective when realised in loving human
relationships.
Drawing on Polanyi, Thacker argues that this perichoretic model of
knowledge is a kind of tacit form of knowledge. In order to show that this is
the case Thacker first explores the nature of revelation. He follows Bauckham in
affirming that revelation is not just God illustrated in Jesus or even that
Jesus shows us that the universal knowledge of God in humanity is possible;
rather, as Bauckham argues, that ��Jesus reveals the unique presence and
action of God which is Jesus� own history �� (p.66). In Jesus we discover
that we only know God by being known by God and that that is a knowledge by
acquaintance in which our knowledge of God remains analogical because God�s
subjectivity is a mystery in that his knowing of us is a
priori. That this knowledge has propositional implications does not mean
that it is primarily propositional. However its propositional truth can be
disputed: we first of all know Jesus as
Lord before we declare that Jesus is
Lord but we do affirm his Lordship as true, but true to those by whom this truth
is grasped (p.78).
�For Polanyi it is only in the exercise of our subjectivity that a true
objectivity is realised.� (p.87) But this is more that a mere assertion of the
need for effort to know and therefore a capitulation to the pragmatism of Rorty
and Lyotard. Explicit knowledge relies on a bedrock of tacit knowledge that has
developed from the process of allowing reality to indwell us and by us
imaginatively indwelling reality. Where Thacker wants to arrive is the proposal
that �our knowledge of God and our love of the Other are to a large extent the
same phenomenon� (p.99). The appropriate form of knowing others, of indwelling
them in love, is the very way by which God has revealed himself to indwell us in
Jesus.
The three converging arguments Thacker has been preparing for in
responding to Rorty and Lyotard are these:
1.
that human
knowing of the kind found in knowing God is participatory knowledge that has
both ethical and epistemological implications;
2.
that this kind
of knowledge is precisely what is implied in knowing Jesus: we love God in the
love of neighbour as we find ourselves conforming to the life of Christ;
3.
that conforming
to the mind of Christ includes a certain kind of loving which Christ exemplifies
in humble service and into which we enter as the way of knowing God.
This
is a demanding book from which I have learnt a great deal. I can hardly do
justice to the extraordinary summaries and surveys of major thinkers and
theological themes. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to explore
postmodernism from a confident Christian perspective. But be ready to read
slowly and to be challenged by the implications for daily Christian life. I
found this book a spiritual experience that brought me closer to Christ as I was
drawn to reflect and renew my daily following of Jesus.
Tim
Dakin
Vinoth
Ramachandra, Subverting Global Myths:
Theology and the public issues shaping our world, SPCK, 2008, 304pp., �12.99
Here
it will suffice to note that, far from operating in a sanitised social space,
markets and business corporations inhabit a world (largely of their own making)
of ruthless marketing techniques, hostile takeovers, chronic unemployment,
subsistence wages, industrial espionage and environmental degradation. These are
all profoundly moral issues. (p. 163)
Fighting
talk, and of the best sort! With a wealth of illustration and cross-reference
Vinoth Ramachandra takes on the myths (�stories that we live by�) of the
twenty first century and subjects them to a searching Christian critique. In a
relatively brief compass and yet without any loss of profundity, he picks out
the key public issues we, as Christians, ought to be tackling, providing a so
welcome contrast to the torrent of books about �experience� or the minutiae
of the Christian sub-culture.
I very much appreciate the way Ramachandra does not
deal in vague generalities despite the size of his subject. Again and again he
gets down to detailed discussion of a most helpful sort. His masterly summary of
just-war theory and his attack on the ideology that lies behind genetic
engineering are just two examples drawn at random. He is almost always balanced
and fair, not setting up straw men to be knocked down by Christian polemics, as
is often the habit of Christian writers. Only in the last chapter, where some of
his arguments against postcolonial academics are inclined to be ad
hominem, does this standard slip a little.
It is also an important recommendation that the book is written from a
non-Western perspective. This provides an appropriate challenge to the worldview
that still reads history as primarily Western driven. Almost all the myths
mentioned � the nature of terrorism and religious violence, the discourse of
human rights and multiculturalism, the ideology of science � are rightly seen
as products of the European Enlightenment. Even postcolonialism, which might
appear to be an exception, seems to stem from Western academia. In a good sense,
Ramachandra shines an outsider�s light on our Western mythologies. An example
would be the way, in the last chapter, he strives to �decentre history� and
to dismantle any idea that the colonial legacy was somehow good after all.
This virtue has its downside, but it has to do more with context than
author. Ramachandra lives in a world where the big issues, such as those
represented in his catalogue of myths, are open to debate and can therefore be
contested by Christian people. (I am reminded of the many discussions I have had
while travelling on Indian railways.) But I suspect the book will be marketed
mainly in the West. Here, since the advent of postmodernism, the myths under
discussion are much smaller, ranging from the X Factor to football! It is not
that the big myths are not operative, of course, but nobody wants to talk about
them.
So then, very much �the gospel for our culture� � if anybody is
listening.
Jonathan
Ingleby
Contributors
Keith Clements is
an author and former General Secretary of the Council of European Churches
Ian Cowley
is Vocations and Spirituality
Co-ordinator in the Diocese of Salisbury
Tim Dakin is
General Secretary of Church Mission Society
Philip Sampson
is an author and former psychotherapist and Social Science Research Fellow at
the
Jonathan Ingleby
is a former Lecturer in
Faith,
freedom and illiberal liberalism
David
Kettle
The rhetoric of freedom has reached a new intensity in
There have indeed been major victories to celebrate for personal and social freedom. However, alongside this has grown an awareness that - ironically - much done in recent decades, while appealing to liberty, has worked precisely against it. When catalogued, such developments are wide ranging.
To one hand, 'free market' ideology has disembedded the enterprise of trade from considerations of the common good1, bringing a widening income gap between the rich and poor,2 the loss of health and social well-being associated with inequality,3 and the grievous loss of hard-won freedom of social mobility achieved following the Second World War. The deregulation of banking and the ensuing debt crisis has contributed further to this harm. The promulgation of intellectual property rights, intended to free up research and development for profitable trading, is threatening public access to and benefit both from science and from traditional 'commons'.4 Self-promotion by retailers as purveyors of choice is mocked by the frustrating reality for customers of 'clone towns' reflecting a loss of diversity analogous to the loss of biodiversity in industrialised farming. Surveillance by commercial companies limits individual freedom of purchase, while government use of public surveillance replaces cultivation of responsible judgement by micro-management through the threat of prosecution.5 Laws introduced as anti-terrorism measures are employed by the police and state agencies to other ends of their own. One does not have to defer to the politics of Tariq Ali to recognise the truth in what he says: 'we live in a world where to question the market and system based on the market is in itself considered - you know - outrageous.... so curiously enough all the dogmas that were associated with the practice of communism particularly Stalinism and the regimes of Eastern Europe we are now beginning to see - I hate to say this but you know often reading the media in Britain reminds me of Brezhnev's Russia - I mean lack of diversity, lack of serious discussion, victimising of individuals, a refusal to look at systemic problems - it's extremely worrying'.6
Legislation passed in pursuit of individual well-being, while it is well intentioned and often has beneficial effects, sometimes also undermines freedoms. Excessive health and safety regulation and criminal record checks have eroded the freedom of informal associations and communities to operate in their traditional way. The legalisation (in the name of 'choice') of that which was previously illegal sometimes cuts two ways. Thus a woman's legal freedom to have her unborn child aborted on demand has removed that child's right to be upheld in life by the one person whose cooperation is indispensable for the first nine months following conception; while the campaign for freedom legally to help a person commit suicide threatens the freedom of others who may consequently in future feel obliged to consent to euthanasia. Freedom from the commitment of couples to lifelong marriage has adversely affected a generation of children born of their partnerships.
Specifically, legislation intended to free people from discrimination on grounds such as gender or race has been ambiguous in its effects. Equal opportunity legislation has prompted job interview practices which rigidly abstract from, rather than engage with the whole reality of, unique persons, personal histories and job references. Opposition to sexism, racism etc has spawned a 'fundamentalist' ideology employed by some social groups to pursue power for themselves and dictate the practice and speech of others.7
Also, 'Secular fundamentalism' has surfaced in an increasingly dogmatic and intolerant public culture.8 This is a new development. In liberal democracy in the past, Christians have themselves shared in the general liberties associated with the European Enlightenment: freedom of conscience, freedom to question, freedom of speech. Any Christian concerns over freedom were typically over the fact that secular society was prone to celebrate license in the name of freedom. Today, however, it is different: a new illiberal liberalism threatens the proper freedom of Christians and Christian institutions themselves, and does so precisely in the name of 'freedom'.9
Rene Girard speaks of a hidden totalitarian movement emerging in the 20th century which takes over, 'radicalises' and de-moralises the Christian concern for the oppressed. This movements sees in Christianity itself 'nothing but violent oppression', denouncing the Christian concern for victims as 'hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves'. In reality, however, this movement produces 'a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.' This totalitarianism, writes Girard in 2001, 'does not openly oppose Christianity but outflanks it on its left wing'.10
Such opposition to Christianity has more recently, however, become open and vocal. Typically it sees Christians as demanding an improper freedom to pursue their 'private' interests at the expense of others.
Christians, for their part, will insist that Christian freedom is about a lived exploration of freedom and of the meaning of freedom. They will claim the freedom publicly to witness to this exploration, and call their opponents to join them in this. Indeed Western liberal society is historically indebted to Christianity for its own celebration of freedom. George Carey writes 'It is my firm view that our society owes more to our Christian heritage than it realises and to overlook this inheritance of faith will lead to the watering down of the very values of tolerance, openness, inclusion and democracy that we claim are central to all we stand for.'11
It is vital for the good of Western society that there is a readiness to engage in dialogue with Christians over the meaning of freedom. Andrew Kirk called for such a dialogue in the 1990's12. Yet such dialogue is refused because Christians are seen as opposed to freedom.
Where lies the heart of this impasse? It lies in unacknowledged liberal assumptions about the nature of freedom. Thinkers in the liberal tradition have tended to see the great enemy of freedom as unquestioned dogma, tradition and authority, and to see freedom as brought by the free exercise of reason. Lesslie Newbigin said:
The temptation of liberalism is to think that we are by nature free minds, and that free minds, unfettered by tradition or external authority, can find the truth. But we are not naturally free. We are in bondage to sin and alienated from the truth. That is the terrible reality which is placarded before our eyes in the crucifixion of the living Word of God. And so Jesus says: "If you continue in my teaching you will truly be my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free". We do not come to the truth by free enquiry; we have to be set free by the truth.13
Contrary to liberal assumptions, freedom is given in the first instance from beyond ourselves, by God - the unsurpassable freedom, fundamentally, of giving ourselves as a living, loving sacrifice. Loss of freedom, or bondage, correspondingly, while it may press upon us from outside may also trap us from within. Therefore we cannot assume, as is the liberal temptation, that doctrines or traditions are against freedom, even though they may claim to honour freedom, or that commitment to them amounts to personal bondage; nor can we assume that what rises from within us represents our freedom, even if it is exalted in our culture as the very essence of individual fulfilment. On both counts, discrimination is required - discrimination which is itself a gift from God.
Such discrimination is integral to faith. Faith is by no means blind, and the liberal aversion to faith on this false premise has, as Philip Sampson argues (ACCESS No. 727), been most harmful. It has, among other things, contributed to narrowed utilitarian and ideological practices of reasoning. Despite the Enlightenment association of freedom with reason, in recent decades it has often been precisely public programmes of rationalisation which have threatened freedom, in thrall to ideological dogmas all the more dominant for being unacknowledged. As we might put it, today's illiberal liberalism is rooted in an irrational rationalisation (pace footnote 9!). Greater freedom requires a richer rationality of the sort which Rowan Williams commends (ACCESS No. 730). Justin Thacker has offered a way of framing this in the 'rationality of Christ'14. It is upon such fundamental matters as these that dialogue is needed between secularists and Christians if the association between reason and freedom is to be renewed, and the distortions of illiberal liberalism checked.
Notes
1. On the social disembedding of economic enterprise in 'market' economics, see M. Bloch & J. Parry, Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge University Press, 1989, introductory essay.
2.
See, for example, the report of the
National Equality Panel, January 26, 2010.
3.
See especially Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why
More Equal Societies
4.
For an expression of concern over
this threat see The
5.
On surveillance see especially
David Lyon, Surveillance Society:
Monitoring Everyday Life, Open
University Press, 2001, and other writings by this author. See also
research conducted recently in
6.
Start
the Week, BBC Radio 4, 7th
December 2009.
7.
See for example David Bromwich, Politics
by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking,
8.
The term 'secular fundamentalist'
has been used by, for example, John Gray; see his 'Atheist
Delusions', The Guardian, Saturday 15 March 2008.
9.
Lord Justice Laws, denying Gary
McFarlane permission to appeal against his dismissal by Relate for refusing to
offer sexual counselling to same-sex partners on religious grounds, said 'in the
eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective...
the promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on
religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring
the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and
arbitrary... The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people...'
10.
Ren� Girard, I See Satan Fall
Like Lightning, Orbis Books, 2001, pp 180-81.
11. George Carey, The Times, 7th January 2010
12. See J. Andrew Kirk, The Meaning of Freedom: A Study of Secular, Muslim and Christian Views, Paternoster, 1998
13. Newbigin, 'A Decent Debate on Doctrine', talk given to URC Bromley District Council, July 1993. A substantially revised version was published an a Gear booklet, A Decent Debate About Doctrine.
14.
See Justin Thacker, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Theological Knowledge, Ashgate, 2007, reviewed in Newsletter 57.
The
secularization of blasphemy
Jenny
Taylor
The demise of free speech under the assault of Islamists in
His words were prescient, but in ways he could not then have foreseen. The GfK NOP 2006 Social Research Survey on Muslim Attitudes carried out after the London tube bombings, indicated that only three per cent of 1,000 Muslims polled took a consistently pro-Freedom of Speech line on a range of questions given them about controversial issues. 73% said it was acceptable for religious or political groups to use violence.2
For the principles of unrestricted violence to prevail, violence is not necessary more than occasionally; the underlying menace of it is adequate to cause a chilling effect on what may be thought and said. Kenan Malik in his new book From Fatwa to Jihad says that in less than 20 years, liberal secularism has capitulated before the rage of Islam. Hanif Kureishi, author of the Black Bag says �most people, most writers want to keep their head downs, live a quiet life. They don�t want a bomb in the letterbox. They have succumbed to the fear' (Malik 2009: 202).
According to Malik, Rushdie�s critics may not have won the battle against the publication of Satanic Verses but they �won the war by pounding into the liberal consciousness the belief that giving offence was morally despicable.� Such a belief (replacing the Christian doctrine of tolerance) makes it easier to give offence. The outcome is an internalisation of the fatwa, a form of self-censorship which has exactly the same effect as a physical ghetto: they limit one�s freedom. The mental no-go areas of contemporary authorship are described by Monica Ali, who was attacked both by Muslims and the left (notably Germaine Greer) for Brick Lane. �The way that Random House dropped The Jewel of Medina would have been unthinkable in the pre-Rushdie era� she believes. �What is really dangerous is when you don�t know that you�ve censored yourself . . . (cited in Malik 2009:197).
This is the secularization of blasphemy - and the irony was complete when
Meurig Llwyd Williams, Anglican archdeacon of
'Libel tourism' is a further manifestation of freedom's retreat. Foreign
businessmen like the Saudi Khalid Bin Mafouz retain
But Muslim opportunists are merely capitalising on the opportunism of the
left whose residue, political correctness, is still with us.
�On some issues we will find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists
against imperialism and the state� wrote the Jewish atheist Chris Harman,
Editor of Socialist Worker in an essay for Marxism Online in 1994.
'Where the Islamists are in opposition, our rule should be, "with
the Islamists sometimes, with the state never".'3
The �crying wolf� about truth and freedom in which the left indulged for decades is what Polanyi described as �the inversion of morality�: �a fierce moral protest made in terms of a fantastic immorality� which caused our present disorientation. The solution he believed was �to re-establish the grounds of human knowledge as �personal knowledge�.
And strangely, the secular Muslim writer Kenan Malik agrees. �The uncertainties and insecurities of Western societies about the worth of basic liberal values . . . have made Islamists appear more potent than they are�. He calls for a recovery of our cultural instincts.
Those instincts are derived from the struggles of the Church. In Lamin Sanneh�s words we have to recover �a spiritual system of explanation� for a civilization that while being admired for what it produces and disseminates, is easily caricatured in its beliefs and underlying values. Freedom is an act of faith.
Notes
1. Cartoonists who
lampooned the Nativity at the end of the 19th Century in the
Secularist magazine were sentenced to a year�s hard labour.
2. Conducted for Channel 4 Dispatches
�Attitudes to Living in
3.
Chris Harman, �the Prophet and the Proletariat,� Marxism
Online, 1994, http http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/ch10.htm.
References
Malik, Kenan 2009
From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affairs
and its Legacy
Modood, Tariq and T Berthoud et al 1997
Ethnic Minorities in Britain: Diversity
and Disadvantage - Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities
Comment: CRY FREEDOM
Ian Cowley
�Freedom�s
just another word for nothing left to lose� sang Kris Kristofferson in Me and
Bobby McGee. Freedom is a notoriously difficult concept to nail down. But when
it is taken away from us, then we know. Perhaps freedom is best defined by its
opposites: imprisonment, slavery, oppression, bondage.
In
It is
very important that we do not take these freedoms for granted. Our
constitutional democracy is a powerful bulwark against totalitarianism. But
freedom in society is always under threat. The history of the twentieth century
should make this abundantly clear to anyone with eyes to see.
In this
country we are not persecuted for being Christian as many are in other parts of
the world. Yet there are a growing number of arenas in our society where to
speak openly as a Christian is to invite some form of ridicule or sanction. TIME
magazine recently described
Newbigin
DVD
Thanks to Dan and Sue
Beeby, the Network has recently acquired videotapes of three lectures presented
by Lesslie Newbigin in February 1989. Titled Europe: A Mission Field, they were delivered at the Baptist
Theological Seminary,
From Dan's personal files we have also been able to trace a further dozen texts written by Lesslie Newbigin. These had been recorded but not previously sighted by those of us creating the Newbigin.net online searchable database. They are now being scanned for uploading to the site.
Among
the texts found was a little essay Newbigin produced in 1982 for the
Newbigin ended his essay with three points which are still relevant today:
1. The response of the Churches to the Enlightenment has been, by and large, to avoid a direct challenge and to retreat into the private sector. The characteristic religious movements of the post-Enlightenment years - the various kinds of revivalism - have all accepted the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous individual and left the public sphere to the secular forces.
2. Probably the crucial area in which the encounter between the Christian faith and the post-Enlightenment culture must take place is in the classroom. The recent BCC document on 'Understanding Christian Nurture' leaves 'education' to be conducted on the principles of the Enlightenment, while advocating 'nurture' for Christian children. This is simply to prepare the Church for the ghetto.
3. An alert missiology today would surely be taking it as the first priority to develop an approach to our culture which is (in A. G. Hogg's phrase) both relevant and challenging - using its terms to call into question its axioms, cherishing its achievements and exposing its errors, offering an 'explanation which 'explains' why the Enlightenment 'explanation' doe snot 'explain'. I can't yet see how this is to be done; but it may at least help to indicate the need'.
A
personal note from David Kettle
With reluctance I have decided to step down from editing the Network newsletter and its ACCESS Supplement. This is for reasons connected with my health. Two years ago I was given radiotherapy. I remain productive at present, but recent medical tests indicate the return of disease and raise pressing questions over my future. I therefore plan to make the next newsletter, in October 2010, the last I edit personally. Beyond then I hope to continue providing administrative support to the Gospel and Our Culture Network and to continue some networking.
A key factor in my stepping down as editor at this stage is my desire to finish two theological books which have lain too long uncompleted. I believe that my first responsibility is to complete these, and I am laying aside as much else as possible in order to do so. A little more of this in the next newsletter.
Public
truth and public utility
'According to rational-choice theory, state-subsidised
European churches are overstuffed with bureaucrats and professionals who live
off the establishment, whereas American churches are subjected to the rigours of
the marketplace. Thus Europeans view their churches as public utilities rather
than, as in
Book
Reviews
Tony
Clark, Divine Revelation and Human Practice: Responsive and Imaginative
Participation, Wipf & Stock, 2008, pp. 228, pb �42.
This is
a fresh, and refreshing, look at the well-worn but vital topic of Karl Barth�s
theology of revelation, which is brought into a helpful dialogue with Michael
Polanyi�s epistemology.
The early chapters set out Barth�s doctrine of revelation, and
simultaneously emphasise both the �plumb down from above� aspects and
Barth�s clearly stated intention that this was not inherently in conflict with
a full recognition of the human experience of God, which he could even term
�religious experience�.
The difficulty arises as Barth is unable to offer any correlation between
God and the human beings to whom he reveals himself.
Divine truth needs no human support, as the rainbow does not need the
earth. Yet rainbows do need the
earth, the rain, the sun, and the atmosphere.
He draws helpfully upon the writings of Trevor Hart and Alan Torrance to
explore the connections from a theological perspective, and then brings
Polanyi�s thought into play. In
particular he shows how Polanyi transcended modernism�s insistent duality
between objectivity and subjectivity, and restored the personal and questing
exploration of the scientist to the heart of scientific method.
Furthermore, Polanyi did not see this as essentially an individual quest
for knowledge, but the activity of a community of explorers.
Science is very far from a fact collecting exercise, but is a voyage into
the unknown resulting from a faint contact with the unknown.
As Clark develops the conversation between Barth and Polanyi he
effectively grafts a Polanyian language into Barth�s thought, and helps Barth,
as so reconstructed, to avoid the unnecessary hostages to fortune which he could
not quite avoid giving, even in his later work.
Polanyi�s own explicit treatment of theological ideas was very limited,
which
Yet Polanyi himself exemplified his own claim that in knowledge we always
know more than we can tell, and
This is a well written book which will interest students of Barth, and
those interested in modern theology in general.
Its weakness, for me, was that it does not consider the potential
relevance of Polanyi�s later work, with its stratified ontology.
In many ways it is an ontology which Barth�s doctrine of revelation
overlooks, as much as a more nuanced epistemology.
But, appropriately,
Peter Forster
(now
also published by James Clarke & Co., 2010, �20)
Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity:
The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia,
Lion, 2008, pp xi + 317, pb �12.99
Philip Jenkins wants to make sense of Christianity in a
global context. Over the last
decade, books he has written include The Next Christendom (2002), The
New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (2006),
and God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and
The opening chapter gives an overview of the reach of the book, rooting
it in observations about the Nestorian bishop Timothy who was patriarch when
Lamin Sanneh rightly describes the book a 'tour de force in historical
retrieval and reconstruction'. Unsurprisingly
that means its strength is also its weakness.
It has an excellent chapter showing the close relationship between
elements within Islam and seventh century Syriac Christianity.
However, confident statements in some places gloss over important debate,
as in the way Ibn Taymiyyah, who is rightly described as 'the spiritual
godfather of the Wahhabi movement' (p126), is implied to be a product of his
time: one moderate Muslim scholar recently described Ibn Taymiyyah's teaching as
the classic distillation of all Qur'anic scholarship that had gone before him,
particularly as it relates to the Bible and Christians. If this is correct he
warrants more than a passing, almost dismissive, glance, even in a book written
for a general audience.
The book is not simply about the interface with Islam. Though Jenkins
acknowledges that a steady process of social isolation under Muslim rule
contributed to the vulnerability of Christian communities in the fourteenth
century, he considers sociological, theological and even climatological factors
too. Sadly the format of the book
does not aid further investigation. Absence
of a bibliography, and endnotes situated at the back of the book, make it hard
to check sources. That aside, it is
an outstanding introduction, which fills a major gap in the shared knowledge
that should inform our contemporary reflection on the Gospel and culture, global
and local. Highly readable.
Highly recommendable.
Carol Walker
Michael Kirwan, Girard
and Theology, T& T Clark, 2009, 165 pp., pb �16.99.
Ren� Girard�s seminal theories about violence,
religion and scapegoating have attracted much interest in recent decades. They
deserve close consideration. If however you are unfamiliar with them, don�t
start here. Begin with Michael Kirwan�s excellent introduction to mimetic
theory, Discovering Girard (Cowley Publications, 2005).
The bold claim is that Girardian theory may prove to be as important in
unifying fields of literature, anthropology, and theology as Darwinian theory
has proved in the natural sciences. In making this assertion, Girard has been
well aware that for many scholars, the idea of a global theory of religion
sounds impossible. On the other hand, the need to understand violence and
religion is a pressing concern.
Kirwan�s present volume provides a valuable survey of Girard�s ideas
and their relevance to theology in today�s world. He asks whether Girard�s
theory really is �science�. Then, in a fast moving survey, he demonstrates
the relevance of Girard�s work to theologians in several different areas. He
also outlines the valuable contributions of other authors to the refining and
developing of the theory over the past 35 years. He quotes (twice) David
Ford�s checklist in Self and Salvation (2006) of six criteria for an adequate
soteriology, arguing first that �Girard�s theory makes sense of some of the
key metaphors� before relating this theory to models of the atonement. Kirwan
is also careful to do justice to Girard�s critics, and his final chapter
acknowledges �a �wait and see� dimension to the overall verdict on mimetic
theory�.
Kirwan�s epilogue begs a question. If, to quote the title of Girard�s
first book on theology, Jesus reveals Things Hidden since the Foundation of the
World (Matthew 13.34), why wasn�t the entire theory formulated centuries ago?
The answer is that we find ourselves caught up in violence, and that the move to
non-violence requires nothing less than conversion, operating on different
levels and at different times. Kirwan had described Girard�s conversion, and
he notes that even during the 2000 Colloquium on Violence and Religion the
participants had had to come to terms with their own tendency to scapegoat.
As we try to understand violence and religion, Michael Kirwan reminds
theologians of the value of Girard�s work, and of the need for a theology
which is part of the solution to violence rather than part the problem.
Tom Ambrose
Twentieth
Century Pioneers of
Francis
Schaeffer
Bruce
A. Little
Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984) spent most of his adult
life with his wife Edith and their four children in
To understand Schaeffer�s approach to evangelism, one must give attention to the three works that reveal the foundation of his understanding of man, reality, and the Bible. Three books serve as the foundation for all his other books, forming a trilogy: �The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, and He Is There and He Is Not Silent. All the other books fit into these as spokes of the wheel into the hub.�2 In 1982, the works of Francis Schaeffer were edited by Schaeffer and published in a five-volume set in which the trilogy is in the order in which they were written. This order reveals the development and foundation of his thinking apologetically and is essential to understanding Schaeffer and his apologetic method.
The
Trilogy3
Schaeffer�s view of man shaped much of his apologetic
approach (which for him was part and parcel of his evangelism). Historic
Christianity, according to Schaeffer, was creation centred and central to
creation was that God created man in his image. The first apologetic implication
of creation was that man had intrinsic worth which meant he was to be treated
with respect and love. This truth shaped Schaeffer�s life and ministry as he
was motivated and directed by love and compassion for man as a person.
Apologetics, he urged, must be �shaped on the basis of love for the person as
a person.�4 As
While Schaeffer did not minimize the historic fall recorded in Genesis, he argued that the fall �did not lead to machineness, but to fallen-manness.�6 There was a greatness to man even though he could also be very cruel. Schaeffer�s point:
"Perhaps you do not like
the word nobility, but whatever word
you choose, there is something great about man. I want to add here that
evangelicals have often made a serious mistake by equating the fact that man is
lost and under God�s judgment with the idea that man is nothing�a zero. . .
. There is something great about man, and we have lost perhaps our greatest
opportunity of evangelism in our generation by not insisting that it is the
Bible which explains why man is
great."7
This truth moved Schaeffer to take all men seriously and to answer the honest questions of fallen man. Furthermore, the Christian must take care to understand the person by looking carefully at his cultural artifacts. Schaeffer was brilliant at discerning underlying worldviews and presuppositions revealed in cultural artifacts.8
The second apologetic implication of creation is that man can understand the world in which he lives because created reality is stable and intelligible. The categories of the mind of man correspond to the structure of the world as God had created both. The result�there is common ground between the Christian and the non-Christian. This is not something man put upon the universe; it is simply the way it is. Man lives in a morally structured, rational universe and no matter how he might try to live against the way the universe is, Schaeffer was sure it would push back at him and create tension for his presuppositions.
It is the Christian�s apologetic task, according to Schaeffer, to show man where the point of tension existed between his presuppositions and the way the world really is. Schaeffer�s approach was to �push him [man] towards the logic of his position in the area of his own real interests. . . . If it is art, then gently and yet firmly we push him from the point of tension to the end of his presuppositions.�9 Apologetically, he noted that �at the point of tension the person is not in a place of consistency in his system, and the roof is built as a protection against the blows of the real world, both internal and external. . . . The Christian, lovingly, must remove the shelter and allow the truth of the external world and of what man is, to beat upon him.�10 Of course this was not a game for Schaeffer and he urged the Christian always to give the answer as understood in light of historic Christianity and to do so in a loving and compassionate tone. He was convinced that when speaking to the non-Christian �the truth that we let in first is not a dogmatic statement of the truth of the Scriptures, but the truth of the external world and the truth of what man himself is.�11 For Schaeffer, the real point of contact with the modern (and post modern mind) was reality. Regardless what presuppositions a man claims as grounds for his worldview, Schaeffer shows how they can be tested for truthfulness when pressed against the reality in which every person must live.
We may conclude that Schaeffer remains an important apologetic resource for Christians in the 21st century.
Notes
1.
Editorial, �Mission to
Intellectuals�, Time (Jan 11,1960),
62.
2.
Francis A. Schaeffer, The
Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 1, The God Who Is There (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), x.
3.
The
God Who Is There, Escape from Reason,
and He Is There and He Is Not Silent.
4.
Ibid., 177.
5.
Bryan Follis, Truth
with Love (
6.
Schaffer, The
God Who Is There, 67.
7.
Francis A. Schaeffer, The
Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 1, He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books,
1982), 278.
8.
This is most obvious in his film
series (and book by the same title) How Should We Then Live?
9.
Schaeffer, He
Is There and He Is Not Silent, 139.
10.
Ibid., 140.
11.
Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 140�141.
Contributors
Tom
Ambrose is an
Anglican Priest who lives in
Ian Cowley
is Vocations and Spirituality
Co-ordinator in the Diocese of Salisbury
Peter
Forster is Bishop
of Chester
Bruce
Little is
Director
of the L. Russ Bush Center For Faith and Culture, Southeastern Baptist
Theological Seminary,
Jenny
Taylor is Director
of Lapido Media
Carol
Walker worked in
Knowing
the Gospel, knowing our culture
David
Kettle
C. S. Lewis said 'I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.'
Such is our knowledge of God in Christ. As God opens our eyes, he opens them to ourselves and to all creation seen in his light. This involves much more than possessing certain information, however useful to us. It is about being awakened by God to a way if life in which we entrust ourselves, and the world as we know it, utterly to God in worship and service. It is a matter of knowing that which lies beyond knowledge, in faith, hope and love - and at the same time in radical enquiry, as by God's grace we seek with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, to live in his presence and to discern and do his will.
What we mean by knowing God is more about our being than our having, and can be understood as a uniquely lively and costly matter of our personal acting. Of course in modern thinking, the 'act of knowing' is little understood, although Michael Polanyi's writings offer valuable insight into this. The act in which we know God sheds vital light upon knowing of all kinds: our knowing persons, knowing the beautiful, knowing the good, our theoretical knowledge and our practical know-how.
Modern
thinking about knowledge
How relevant a matter is this to Christian life and witness
in Western culture? It is very relevant indeed. Modern thinking understands
poorly the nature of knowing, especially knowledge of God and other lively
personal knowledge, which is actually they key to understanding all knowledge.
Modern thinking tends to assume rather that all knowledge is to be understood by
reference to potentially useful, objective knowledge - the kind of knowledge
which it aspires to possess. It tends to see other 'knowledge' as merely a
matter of subjective ideas about things within the world or subjective ways of
seeing the world as such and ascribing value to it. Accordingly it assigns
'knowing God' to the realm of subjective commitment to inherently contested
ideas, or to the realm of ways of seeing and ascribing value to the world.
This false thinking is not merely of consequence for theory. It effectively accuses knowledge of God of being something less than the wonder it is, and so actively subverts attention to the claims of Christianity and deflects people from taking the Gospel seriously. Moreover, such false thinking is found in the Church itself; as Christians, however real our encounter with God in Christ, we too commonly understand what we believe by reference to modern cultural assumptions about knowledge; we are domesticated to our culture.
Lesslie Newbigin was right, I believe, in discerning the cultural captivity of Western Christians, and describing this as domestication to modern assumptions about knowledge.
Although there are in some Christian circles today signs that Newbigin's insight has been recognised, in many places it has not - including, often, in missional church circles, interfaith circles, and even, oddly, among those who pursue a Christian contribution to the public domain. The Gospel and Our Culture Network still needs to make its small contribution here. Lesslie Newbigin thought results might be seen after 150 years.
In
the deep context of God
The cultural captivity of Western Christianity is concealed from Western Christians themselves, although their brothers and sisters in Christ overseas see it. And unfortunately the very idea of 'cultural captivity' tends to be minimised among those for whom the mission task is above all about contextualising the Gospel.
Now the contextualisation of the Gospel is vital; indeed as Newbigin said, the Gospel has never been disclosed other than in contextual form. However, this is not the same as proclaiming a Gospel which conforms to the presuppositions underlying our cultural and other contexts. Rather, the Gospel addresses us to the depths of those human contexts which comprise our cultural assumptions and personal attachments, calling us to yield all wholeheartedly to receive new and eternal life in which God will reign as host. The Gospel is both inculturated and transcendent.
We may express this by describing the Gospel as the good news of the sovereign approach of God breaking upon us in self-disclosure as our ultimate context, revealing at once God and our provisional (secular) contexts for what they are. This is consistent with the biblical understanding of God as the one who hosts us as our creator and redeemer. It is the hospitality of God which defines what it means for us to know God, ourselves and the world. We need to translate the hospitality of God today into the notion of 'ultimate context', I believe, in order that the Gospel may successfully and vitally engage distorted modern habits of thinking about knowledge and its context.
Hospitality,
godly and modern
Modern thinking has generated forms of public hospitality which are deeply ambiguous vis-a-vis the hospitality of God, and which misrepresent and marginalise the latter. This is often felt by Christians today working in the secular professions. When Christians of diverse professions meet to discuss the practical issues they face, they will often find these span their professions, being rooted in culture-wide assumptions which stand in tension with Christian faith.
Western
culture: ten conversions
How may we make explicit the biblical and theological bearings which enable Christians to engage coherently with these issues? As I lay aside editing this newsletter for health reasons, I will focus on completing two books concerned with this question. In both books I explore what it means to know God, and what this means for our understanding of all human knowledge. In the first (almost completed), I do so fairly briefly and then propose ten conversions which the Gospel demands of habitual Western thinking. These conversions are interwoven; any one conversion opens out upon the whole vista of Christian understanding of the world, and sheds light upon the others. They are as follows:
1: Secular society
and the sacred
Modern society envisions itself as �secular� in contrast with traditional religious societies which inhabit an 'enchanted' world. In secular society - as modern society conceives itself - 'nothing is sacred', whereas religious societies believe in an overarching sacred cosmos within which certain features of nature and culture have a special sacred status. The vision of a Christian society is understood in these terms. However, this view misrepresents both the sacred and the secular as they are understood properly in Christian faith. In reality, Christian faith sponsors a desacralisation of the world first begun in Hebrew religion. The truly sacred is found in God alone and in God's purposes, which are for the whole of creation and not just for certain distinctively 'sacred' elements within it. Christian faith precisely undergirds, guides and nourishes the secular realm and where secular society ignores this it generates all sorts of hidden and distorting sacred totems of its own.
2: The trajectory of
Western culture and the
Modernity connotes a cultural trajectory which derives
historically from, but deviates from, orientation towards the dawning
3: Seeking truth, pursuing good: The modern betrayal of enquiry and the rediscovery of God
According to modern thinking, value can be separated from fact and is subjective and private relative to an individual or to a culture. This idea has subverted the exploration of reality at the level of our deepest and most lively personal engagement with the real. It has sponsored a widespread erosion of traditional canon, subverted the primacy of practitioners and their practical wisdom, exalted the secondary and derivative, and colluded in fostering a distracted, superficial, browsing culture. Christian faith sponsors the renewal of loving, demanding pursuit of the real.
4: Demonisation, polarisation and divine bearings
Modern assumptions underlie the tendency of polarisation between liberals and fundamentalists in various settings (religious and otherwise) today. This polarisation is driven by secular ideology, but it is found within and threatens the Church. Liberals exalt questioning, understood as doubting; fundamentalists respond by exalting faithfulness, understood as allegiance. Each tacitly retains secular assumptions; each defines itself negatively over against the other, in mutual demonisation. Christian faith is called to start elsewhere, taking positive bearings from God's self-revelation. When this calling is followed, a task of discernment arises in the place of stereotyping and demonisation.
5: The needy
consumer and the generosity of God
Modern consumerism fosters and exploits needy, narcissistic personalities. It displaces 'the real' beyond consumers, peddles 'identity' and 'life' through consumption, and induces bondage to self-displacing mirages and spectres. A Christian appraisal of this development may be found in reflection upon the classical Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo. The Church must shun consumerism in its own practice, modelling and nurturing instead the authentic nature of the 'real', 'personal identity' and 'life' as these are encountered within an eschatological and trinitarian Christian worldview.
The modern prevalence of tragic spirituality, sentiment and escapism, accompanied by an exalted and enraged victim sensibility, reflect a cultural loss of hope and the resurgence of a classical 'tragic sense of life'. The reasons for this can be identified. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus precisely engage cosmic despair with unqualified, cosmic hope. However Christian religion and spirituality can themselves fall captive to tragic sentiment and the exaltation of victims. The Church must be vigilant in resisting this and pointing to authentic hope in Christ.
7: Personal fulfilment, contemporary spirituality and the promise of eternal life
The modern habit is to oppose freedom to duty, autonomy to authority, and personal feelings to public doctrine. This turns God himself into the oppressor of �life�. This modern opposition is incorporated in contemporary spirituality and alternative therapies in a neo-pagan pursuit of �life� which is at the same time postmodern it its opposition to modern rationality. Contending understandings of �life� may be analysed in a Christian context.
8: The ideology of
rights, political correctness, and God-given dignity
In modern thinking, human rights are exalted as securing the basis of human dignity. The ideology or rights has its origins in Christian tradition and in response to issues raised by modernity. In the modern secular liberal tradition, rights have become a kind of absolute property belonging to an individual or group. Rights ideology including its �politically correct� form is a 'moralist' programme rooted in the vision of shaping the world in greater conformity to the human person or group, abstractly conceived and exalted. The promotion of choice as a right invites discussion. Rights and freedom of choice are to be understood, together with the distortions created by their contemporary exaltation, in the context of a Christian worldview.
The modern programme of economic rationalisation shapes human life to the dictates of the 'real' world abstractly conceived in economic terms and exalted. However, this economic 'world' is a construct of neoliberal ideology which falsely ascribes to it (and to capital in particular) features distinctive of human persons such as God-given worth, power of personal agency, and fecundity. Human persons are now displaced and reduced to human resources. A Christian response includes renewal of the place of service, of 'commons', fair profit, and location of economic considerations within the wider frame of God's intended blessings.
10: Public facts, private values and the worship of God
Despite the modern vision of a public domain, this is not, nor can it be, an empty space. It was framed historically as a domain imbued with norms and inviting participation. Today public space and public service are being eroded by false programmes of liberation: they are at once narrowed by �illiberal liberalism� and dissipated by a �tolerance� indifferent to truth. English political tolerance originates and derives its meaning from a different, Christian religious tolerance. Today the existence and content of public space no longer reflects Christian hospitality towards a secular or 'provisional' domain. Current changes in English secularity invite consideration, and their causes. Ultimately there is a choice to be made between Christ-sponsored freedom and secularist dogmas; the Church is called to host public space in the name of Christ.
Comment: THE
Ian Cowley
The
visit to Britain of Pope Benedict XVI has been an extraordinary event, with
implications that are going to take some time to absorb. The visit was widely
expected, particularly in the media, to be difficult and poorly supported.
Instead it was a triumph. The Pope skilfully focused attention on the battle
over faith in a secular society, and at the same time won many admirers for his
thoughtfulness and personal warmth
For a short time, at the very least, it seems that Pope Benedict has been
able to restore the credibility of religious faith in the public square. This
was an argument that many thought had long since been lost. Faith seemed to have
been firmly placed in the private world , not something to be talked about in
public, or at least not without a measure of apology and a certain defensiveness
I was
interested to hear Tony Blair speaking about his own faith in a radio interview
during the Pope�s visit. Tony Blair said, �The Western intellectual view
that as development happens religion falls away is a mistake. That is not what
is happening.� Suddenly a range of public figures were telling us that Britain
is not an aggressively secular society, and that faith, and perhaps even
Christian faith, is a key part of our society. David Cameron said at
This is good news. But the challenge for the church in
Pope
Benedict's visit to Britain
Stephen
May
Pope Benedict XVI�s official visit to the
Everything changed from the moment he arrived. The Pope spoke directly, acknowledging in unprecedented form the sins of the Church whilst simultaneously challenging secular culture. He argued that �the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a �reductive vision of the person and his destiny� (Caritas in Veritate, 29).� The critics were put on the back foot. They defended themselves shrilly against his accusation that aggressive atheism had damaged public debate in this country. To me, this dual position � repentance and proclamation - speaks to the fact that we never witness from the higher ground ourselves (however much we would like to), but only from a centre in God, in what is given to us, never from our own strength or virtue. And, unlike many of us, he did not let such embarrassment stop his speaking.
The Pope�s remarks at
Rather than �God�s rottweiler�, Benedict XVI came across as a �twinkly grandad� (Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times, 19/9/09, p.2). He attracted crowds, particularly of the young, larger than those anticipated by a press slavering in advance for blood.
Andrew Brown, writing in the Church
Times (24/9/10. p.33), suggested the media change was largely a matter of
numbers: those celebrating his visit openly were many more than those protesting
� and the media took their cue from this. �When the television showed about
125,000 people in
�Please lead us to the Lord,� Archbishop Vincent Nichols said to him before Mass. Benedict XVI was as unapologetically evangelical as any Christian leader I have heard. In Westminster Abbey he expounded the Nicene Creed and the Gospel with simplicity and directness. There was something profoundly intimate in the way the head of the Roman Catholic Church interacted with people as he gave out communion � a level of humanity different from that of political leaders.
The visit was eloquent with symbolism. The sight of this 83-year old rather frail looking man in Westminster Hall, the site of Thomas More�s condemnation, spoke for itself. He was escorted into Westminster Abbey by Anglican clerics and prayed with the Archbishop of Canterbury, all of whose orders he does not recognise. It made one awestruck. The Pope brought with him a sense of history, one that has been strikingly lacking in out a-historical age; right from the beginning he spoke of the way this country depended for its most prized institutions and traditions and even character (values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness) on its Christian heritage and tradition.
Of course not all could grasp this, by any means. Appleyard observed:
�his speech on Friday to the grandees at Westminster Hall was an
intellectually dense but urgent demand for a union of faith and reason. It was
tailored for
However, most commentators agreed that the Pope had issued challenges, even if they were unsure what those challenges were exactly.
GM
issues and Biblical ethics
Those who have appreciated John Hodges' application of Biblical ethics to issues in contemporary food production will be interested to read his reflections on emerging problems in milk and meat from livestock. His paper Going beyond the limits: Genetic Modification and Dissolution of Ancient Boundaries', published in the May issue of the Elsevier Journal of Livestock Science, is available on request as a pdf attachment from the Network (for email address see back page of newsletter).
Twentieth
Century Pioneers of
Harold
W. Turner
Born in
This
interest gained momentum when, during the 1940�s, Turner came under the
influence of the British think-tank, �The Moot�. The concern of �The
Moot� to articulate a Christian account of social order and to establish the
place of Christian ideals in British society inspired Turner to become involved
in New Zealand�s National Council of Churches� �Campaign for Christian
Order�. The theological mandate for Turner�s own involvement in this came
through Calvin�s emphasis on the sovereignty of God and the Lordship of Christ
over all spheres of human life. The work of Emil Brunner and John Baillie
provided further impetus for Turner�s growing conviction that the mission of
the church had to do not only with the transformation of hearts and minds, but
demanded also a serious theological engagement with the roots of culture and the
structures and values of society at large - themes to which he would return
later in his life.
In
the intervening decades, however, Turner took a course wholly unplanned on his
part and which he would attribute to divine providence. He set out from
After
eleven years in Africa, Turner returned to the
Turner
had long seen John Baillie's formula of 'mediated immediacy' as the key to
understanding the way revelation is related to creation. This contrasts with a
'sacral' understanding of the world order, as he explored in his book From
Temple to Meeting-House 4 and in his later book The Roots of Science 5 showing how Christian de-sacralisation
opened the way for the empirical sciences. Another key theme in his writings is
a relational understanding of reality rooted in the triune God, which he
contrasted with the atomism of modern individualism on the one hand and the
oceanic absorption envisaged in some Eastern religion. He found this
relationality, however, also in the primal religions he studied, and believed
that this helped to prepare them to embrace the Gospel. His final work, Frames
of Mind6, challenges the ruling presuppositions of modern culture
with this account of how reality is constituted.
There
can be no doubt that part of the mission task is to do the thinking that enables
us to recognise the full scope of the gospel and the all-encompassing logic of
God�s good ordering of the world. Thus can the gospel be proclaimed as public
truth for all places and times. Harold Turner helped us to do such thinking and
so contributed to the mission of God�s church.
Notes
1
A. F. Walls, �Building to Last: Harold Turner and the Study of
Religion�, in Exploring New Religious Movements: Essays in Honour of Harold
W. Turner,
2.
Harold W. Turner, �My Pilgrimage in
3.
Harold W. Turner, The Laughter of
4. Harold W. Turner, From
5.
Harold W. Turner, The Roots of Science (
6.
Harold W. Turner, Frames of Mind (
Book
reviews
Jonathan
Ingleby, Beyond Empire: Postcolonialism
and Mission in a Global Context, AuthorHouse, 2010. 279pp. pb. �11.99
Postcolonialism,
argues Ingleby, provides 21st century Christians with a lens through
which they may perceive God�s love in action in the world and discern where
they may join in God�s mission. Grasping
the theory and concepts of postcolonialism and its way of reading history, he
contends, allows an understanding of Empire, or the �Domination System,�
that critiques past and present injustices and develops approaches that permit
God�s Kingdom to flourish. Ingleby�s introduction to postcolonialism is
persuasive and engaging. It is accompanied by an apocalyptic theology that
upturns the world�s values and indicates a way of revisioning God�s world
and being empowered to work within it. It is illustrated by a magpie collection
of references (urban depravation, Israel-Palestine, the Boer war, environmental
concerns, youth and so on) and inspiration from films, fiction, music and
personal experience. Those familiar with David Smith�s book Mission
After Christendom (
The book is intended to introduce general readers to a new approach to
mission, yet it is no mission handbook. Indeed, it�s rather a messy book.
Although it has a clear shape, its fabric is stuffed to bursting with ideas,
suggestions, and literary allusions. Ingleby picks up a wide range of different
themes and pulls together a patchwork of suggestions. Many of his points are
closely argued, but it is not always clear how some threads interweave. I was
curious, for example, about how he might square his concern of rootlessness with
his recognition of the contemporary influence of global migration: What does
rootedness mean in a world of increased mobility? I would have liked to read
more of his thoughts about the different emphases in, and diverse
interpretations of, Pauline as well as Johannine theologies of Empire:
particular interpretations of Paul have contributed to the Christian responses
he criticises. Readers may find it a rollercoaster, exhilarating or nauseating
or both. However, I suspect that this is what Ingleby intends � to throw his
readers about a bit, turn their assumptions upside down, provide new
perspectives and hope they continue with the ride.
Beyond Empire
engages with the contemporary world. It is global in reach but often local in
attention, showing UK Christians (who Ingleby suspects of largely ignoring
global injustices) how they might begin to change their mission priorities.
Ingleby�s style is personal and passionate. He is critical but not carping,
concerned about the world but not grumpy about change. Indeed he chides those
who would retreat behind old certainties. Ultimately, this is a hopeful book,
grappling with challenges and perceiving opportunities. Hold on tight � it�s
well worth the read.
Emma Wild-Wood
Nicholas
J. Wood, Faiths and Faithfulness:
Pluralism, Dialogue and
Critical
reviews suffer from the limitation of space for they often read as dismissive
rather than as critically engaged. While I certainly do not intend to be
dismissive, this work has some flaws.
First, though it is published in 2009, this is, at best, a lightly
revised version of Wood�s 1996 dissertation. It is clearly a well-researched
work, but this 13-year period between completion and publication has not been
kind. Most of the secondary material was published in the 70s and 80s. The
argument reads as dated.
Second, the overarching thesis is not sufficiently clear. The work is
divided into four parts: an historical overview, beginning in the twentieth
century, of the interfaith question; a section on Cragg; a section on Newbigin;
a concluding constructive section. The problem is that the work does not place
Cragg and Newbigin in conversation, so much as review them independently with a
preference toward Cragg. Neither do Wood�s findings on these thinkers inform
his own constructive conclusion. Instead, he turns to a biblical sketch of
�fulfillment� and an overview of �dialogue.� If one deleted Cragg and
Newbigin from the work, the conclusion would not differ.
Third, though Wood employs a number of theological categories this occurs
without robust definition and systematic development. This enables him to
eclectically introduce different voices without establishing any rationale for
their inclusion at that stage of the argument. For example, Wood�s evaluation
of Newbigin considers him �close to� the idea of �revelation as
history� (p.161). This underdeveloped connection alone is sufficient for Wood
to draw on Pannenberg without establishing any context for Pannenberg�s
position, or any potential differences between himself and Newbigin. Pannenberg
becomes the focus of the defence, while Newbigin�s own position receives no
significant formulation or analysis.
These issues effect Wood�s own theological formulation. If one permits
that God acts beyond the walls of the church, then, so his argument runs, a
Logos Christology and an account of the Spirit that �connects the Christ event
with the recognition of God�s universal self-revelation in so many channels of
human life� (p.168) must follow. There is, however, no developed foundation
for this assertion. Wood, drawing on J. A. T. Robinson, prefers to think of
Jesus as ontologically human and functionally
divine (p.173). He also wants to give the resurrection priority as this gives
rise to the incarnation (p.175). The adoptionism to which such a position gives
rise (though Wood does not employ this term) is considered a proper consequence
of beginning with a Christology �from below.� Pannenberg re-emerges but
without reference to how Wood�s appropriation of �from below� may interact
with the prior treatment of revelation and history.
Wood, I suggest, would have been better served to begin with his own
Christological thesis and subject this to the critical questioning of Cragg and
Newbigin.
John Flett
Daryl
Balia, Make Corruption History, SPCK,
2009, 192pp, �18.99
After
half a century and more than a trillion dollars spent on international
development, nearly half the world�s population live on less than US$2 per
day. One of the reasons for this is the amount of aid that feeds corruption.
Instead of helping to raise the poor in low-income countries, aid money too
often ends up lining the pockets the rich in those countries.
The
consequences, in terms of economic development, are dire. For commercial
investment relies on the strength of institutions such as private property, the
rule of law and a limited state. Without them, entrepreneurs lack the assurance
they need that their property rights will be upheld, the honouring of contracts
can be enforced and that their freedom to operate will not be unduly hampered
through poor or excessive regulation that is open to bribery. Despite all this,
churches and development organizations have been deeply reluctant to admit to
the problem of corruption, still less to fight it.
Against this background, Daryl Balia is to be congratulated on this book.
While he displays a deep understanding of the causes and consequences of
corruption, his focus is on how to tackle it. Recognizing the strategic
importance of the churches in this, he grounds his case in scripture and
theology. Christian faith, he argues, has serious practical implications for the
struggle against corruption and if the church was to engage in this struggle it
would find an effective antidote to the secularist insistence that religion must
be barred from public affairs.
For Balia, the explosion of electronic communications, and the work of
agencies like Transparency International, mean that the inertia and complacency
surrounding this issue within western churches is without excuse. The issue is
now less about accurate information than it is about moral leadership. And a key
test of this moral leadership is whether funding to tackle corruption is made a
key component of the churches� engagement with the problem of poverty.
Balanced and cool headed, Balia abides by the best conventions of
scholarly prose. But only the most hardened reader can escape a sense of
righteous indignation when he writes about the poor and innocent suffering
injustice because judges are bribed or government officials falsify the truth
because of cultural obligations to their family and friends. His book is a
testimony to the fact that the vision of making poverty history has credibility
only when combined with a vision of making corruption history.
Peter
Heslam
David Kettle
Among the books which have deserved review and not received it during the past few years while I have edited this newsletter, there are three on worship. Fascinatingly, they all come from traditions which have not generally given worship as central a place in the Christian life as have mainstream Roman Catholic, Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches. The first is from the Evangelical, the second from the Baptist, and the third from the Reformed tradition (interestingly, Newbigin's work has received close attention from scholars influenced by each of these traditions). Could it be that the theme of worship - of 'doxology', to use the term profiled by Geoffrey Wainwright's book - could become the fertile context of ecumenical Christian exploration in the decades ahead?
The first book, which has been published for four years now, is Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community (IVP, 2006). The insight that 'bad worship produces bad theology, and bad theology produces an unhealthy church' concerns most obviously churches using contemporary worship songs and constructing culturally 'user-friendly' services. Churches exploring new forms of worship will value the help towards responsible discernment offered by this book.
The second book is by Elizabeth Newman, who has written and reviewed for this newsletter in recent years. Her Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers (Brazos Press, 2007) is rooted in reflection on the 'strange hospitality' of God offered in worship. In this context she examines the distorted hospitality offered by the contemporary projects of science and economics, the culture of choice, and politics. She also notes that the hospitality of worship itself can distort into mere niceness and sentiment, mere consumer satisfaction of needs, or mere inclusivity. The vocation of offering God's own hospitality - both public and ecclesial - requires vigilance.
More recent is James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009). This is the first, key volume in a planned trilogy which seeks to offer a vision of authentic, integral Christian learning in its relation to worship. The author points behind 'worldviews' to the formation of hearts and their desires and to the indwelling of a 'social imaginary' (Charles Taylor's expression) which is embedded in the practice of Christian worship. In these terms the author compares Christian and secular 'liturgies'. His shift in focus from 'worldview' to a tacit 'social imaginary' is resonant with the insights of Michael Polanyi, although - unlike Elizabeth Newman - he does not draw from Polanyi's work. It would be worthwhile, I think, to compare Smith's understanding of worship with that briefly expressed by Polanyi and also embodied in, say, the music of John Tavener or Arvo P�rt.
DK
Short
notices
There are several other book reviews which I had hoped to secure for the newsletter but without success, and these books which deserve at least to be mentioned. They are:
Russell Heddendorf, From Faith to Fun: The Secularisation of Humour (Lutterworth, 2009) tackles Gospel and culture from an unusual angle. The author propounds the thesis that 'subversive humour' dissolves traditional values and has become itself a substitute for faith in a 'culture of fun'. Is this an aspect of the 'acids of modernity' mediated by the primacy of doubt? If so, I think it could be argued that compulsively subversive humour is as much a distortion of the playful/serious intent of humour as the compulsion of doubt is a distortion of genuine, searching enquiry.
Also noteworthy are Jenny Taylor, A Wild Constraint: The case for Chastity (Continuum, 2008) Michael Nazir-Ali, The Unique and Universal Christ (Paternoster, 2008); and Mary Healy & Robin Parry (eds), The Bible and Epistemology: Biblical Soundings on the Knowledge of God (Paternoster, 2007).
Contributors
Ian Cowley
is Vocations and Spirituality
Co-ordinator in the Diocese of Salisbury
John
Flett has lectured
in theology in
Peter
Heslam is Director
of Transforming Business,
Stephen May
is an author and Vicar of Norden in the Diocese of Manchester
Murray
Rae is Associate Professor of Theology,
Emma
Wild-Wood is
Director of the Henry Martyn Centre for the Study of Mission and World
Christianity,