The place of the churches in society
In an article in the Independent newspaper this week, Mary Ann Sieghart (or her subeditor) announced that ‘You don’t have to believe in God to cherish the Church’, a proposition which she offered in response to the latest attack by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins produced a survey showing that many people who ticked the ‘Christian’ – perhaps particularly the ‘Church of England’ – box on the census showed few signs of basic Christian knowledge, and reported little participation in Christian practice. His figures were hardly surprising, of course: it is not news that the 70% of the population who claim to be Christian are not all at worship on Sunday morning. He drew from them the conclusion that self-identification should not be used as a criterion for assessing the level of Christian commitment in the nation. In academic research and discussion we tend to hesitate for some while before setting self-identifications aside: there is a basic courtesy in letting people choose their own identity; and often self-narrated identity turns out to have deep consequences that can be missed in a cursory look. Nick Spencer reports definite attitudinal differences between those who choose to self-identify as Christian and those who do not; Sieghart’s first response to Dawkins is similar claim: so what if all that people mean by ticking the ‘Christian’ box is that they ‘try to be a good person’? In general, people trying to be good are a benefit for society… She goes on in her article to praise the lack of militancy in the Church of England, and then to point to all the good work that the Church does in society. This is where her article gets interesting: Most attractively, though, the Church of England sees its job as ministering not just to its own flock. All over the country, if you bother to look, you will find Church-run groups that help children excluded from school, the homeless, refugees, the elderly, the sick, disaffected teenagers, the poor. There is no expectation that the beneficiaries be Christian. True enough, and certainly praiseworthy. Why, she asks, is the Church so active in ministering beyond its borders? Her answer, surprisingly, is establishment: It is precisely because the Church is established that it feels a duty to serve the whole nation. I will extend Seighart the courtesy of assuming that she knows about different practices of establishment in the different nations of the UK, and meant to say something similar about (at least) the Church in Wales and the Church of Scotland. Even granted that, though, the claim is curious: I am not aware of any data that suggests that the established churches run more ‘groups that help children excluded from school, the homeless, refugees, the elderly, the sick, disaffected teenagers, the poor…’ than Roman Catholic or nonconformist churches; the suggestion, indeed, seems implausible. I suppose Seighart might be making a claim that the motivation of the established churches is different: Catholics and Methodists run youth groups, but they do it in an attempt to convert others, not out of a desire to serve. Salvation Army soup runs are evangelistic, and so bad; Anglican ones are altruistic, and so praiseworthy (in England; in Scotland, where the local Anglican denomination is not established, perhaps their motives are different?). This is profoundly implausible, however: many of these sorts of initiatives are ecumenically-run; there is no basic division of motivation on the basis of established status. The Church of England, and the other established churches of this realm, serve the public for the same reasons that the disestablished churches – and indeed members of at least some of the non-Christian religions – do. Some of it is unreflective and instinctive: there is plenty of data showing that religiously active people are more generous in giving to charity, more likely to volunteer, and more connected to their community. Where it is theologised, the basis of community service is always one way or another missional. Now there are varieties of accounts of Christian mission, and all will be in play. No church I’ve ever known, however, has seen its community engagement as merely a vehicle for direct evangelism: no-one will be thrown out of the toddler group, or refused a meal, or whatever, because they refuse to come to the Alpha course. Equally, no church I’ve ever known has not harboured some hope that somehow its community engagement will demonstrate the attractiveness of its vision of the good life, and so serve as a witness to those who choose not to engage in the liturgical life of the church. So what? Well, Seighart’s piece is representative of a particular line of defence of the...
Read MoreThe Holy Trinity
My book on the Trinity is now published in UK & RoW (US rights are with IVP USA – don’t have a date for their publication). Paternoster have it available for order here; No doubt Amazon et al. will catch up soon. The book is cast as a history of Trinitarian doctrine, with a heavy emphasis on the fourth and twentieth centuries; to give a flavour of the argument, it closes with these words, citing some of the authors I consider along the way: …we set out on our own to offer a different, and we believed better, doctrine. We returned to the Scriptures, but we chose (with Tertullian’s Praxeas, Noetus of Smyrna, and Samuel Clarke) to focus exclusively on the New Testament texts, instead of listening to the whole of Scripture with Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Daniel Waterland. We thought about God’s relationship with the creation in the economy, but we chose (with the Valentinians, Arius, and Hegel) to believe that the Son must be the mode of mediation of the Father’s presence to creation, instead of following Irenaeus and Athanasius in proposing God’s ability to mediate his own presence. We tried to understand the divine unity, but we chose (with Eunomius and Socinus) to believe that we could reason adequately about the divine essence, instead of following Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin in asserting divine unknowability. We addressed divine simplicity, and chose (with Socinus and John Biddle) to discard it, rather than following Basil and the rest in affirming it as the heart of Trinitarian doctrine. We thought about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but chose (with Sabellius, Arius, and Eunomius) to affirm true personality of each, rather than following Augustine and John of Damascus in believing in one divine personality. We called what we were doing a ‘Trinitarian revival’; future historians might want to ask us...
Read MoreThe right place to Occupy?
Reading about the history of preaching, I tripped over these comments by W.J. Torrance Kirby: …unlike the royal Abbey of Westminster, St Paul’s was always perceived as belonging more to subjects than to princes, and this peculiar status was to acquire increased significance over time. From the earliest records it is clear that the cathedral churchyard was one of the favoured settings for popular protest, a place where public grievances could be aired. For centuries this was the meeting place of London’s folk-moot; royal guarantee of the liberties of the City was proclaimed here in the reign of Henry III; Paul’s Cross was also a rallying point for adherents of Simon de Montfort’s rebellion. In the sixteenth century this place was the acknowledged epicentre of a series of revolutionary events where matters of religious identity were concerned. (W.J. Torrance Kirby, ‘The Public Sermon: Paul’s Cross and the culture of persuasion in England, 1534-1570’, Renaissance and Reformation 31 (2008), p. 6) Maybe, by chance, Occupy London ended up in just the right...
Read MoreModesty wraps rock! Or, getting public theology right
Over the last couple of weeks I have become aware of a campaign in the UK to make ‘modesty wraps’ (that is, plain covers) compulsory on all magazines displaying sexually explicit content on their covers. I am not sure who started it – there was an earlier, and linked, campaign concerning the placement of such magazines in Cooperative stores – but my friend Carl Beech has been energetic in promoting it on Twitter and elsewhere. This strikes me not just as a campaign I want to support, but as an excellent example of the doing of public theology. Public theology, it seems to me, should always be a rather ad hoc activity: as I have argued in print before now, confession of belief in the Incarnation demands that we believe that theology does not give blueprints for a perfect society that are applicable at all times and in all places; instead, there are theologically appropriate ways (plural deliberate) of approaching all political questions that might happen to arise, and theologically driven critiques (again…) of the set of questions that at any given time assume prominence in political debate. In some cases these theological positions will appear hopelessly idealistic; in others, they may appear achievable. A proper Christian political witness will constantly recall every goal that is gospel-mandated but unobtainable, whilst restlessly exploring ways of gaining those goals that appear possible, particularly when they might contribute to a shift of public perception on broader issues that might begin to make other, presently seemingly-hopeless, goals appear possible. So, for example, pressing for basic humanity to be shown to the children of asylum seekers was both potentially-successful and a chance to plead for respect for the humanity of all asylum seekers, not just the children. It was also a very clever piece of political positioning, forcing the standard, and cross-party, rhetoric that demonised asylum seekers into a profoundly uncomfortable disjunction with the fundamental British assumption of the innocence of the child. The modesty wraps campaign has something of the same potential. I hope it is not necessary to argue that pornography is evil, but just in case… The porn industry is a primary driver of people traffiking (sic, ‘slavery’) across the world today; even if the images and films were positively wholesome, they generally depend on the ‘performances’ of girls who were sold into slavery as children and who are forced, often by violence, to do what they do. But the images and films are far from wholesome: they portray women as objects rather than people, and promote and invite mendacious assumptions about sexual behaviour that can and do destroy relationships. I was about to claim that a healthy society would ban pornography. That is, however, not true. A healthy society would not need to ban pornography, because no-one in a truly healthy society would ever want to watch porn. In contemporary British society, porn will not be banned: our moral discourse is so vitiated that, in general, we are unable to see that the right to free speech – a necessary and important right – carries with it concomitant responsibilities to speak wholesomely. If we all understood what free speech was adequately, we would have no pornographers; however, we do not, and so we suffer this evil (and others, of course). The modesty wrap campaign succeeds as a piece of public theology because it does not challenge free speech: the pornographers are not threatened with a ban, which would be culturally unacceptable, however ethically desirable. However, it begins to locate the right to free speech within a broader matrix of goods – of course you may publish that, no-one is denying your right to, but we are asking you to do it in such a way that does not offend against the moral sensibilities of other members of society, and that does not force such images on our children. (The rhetoric of childhood innocence remains extraordinarily powerful in contemporary Britain.) At the same time, the campaign pushes back against the assumption that it is necessary, in our liberal society, to allow any and every image to be published and freely distributed, and so winning this battle would claim at least some ground in the bigger war against the porn industry. Again, the time is right. The chief proponents of the normalisation of pornography in our culture are not primarily ‘Lad’s Mags’, but daily papers, particularly red-top titles. It will be no surprise to anyone adequately schooled in ethical reflection that ‘page 3’ is published by the same organisation that hacked Milly Dowler’s phone after her murder – the two actions are ethically coordinate, in that both...
Read More‘If God is male…’
‘… then the male is God.’ So wrote Mary Daly in a – perhaps the – classic text of early feminist theology, Beyond God the Father (Beacon, 1973). Daly’s argument in the book was that the predominantly masculine imagery deployed for God in Judaeo-Christian traditions inevitably led to a patriarchal society in which women were multiply disadvantaged; the proper ethical response, in her view, was to reject all Judaeo-Christian religious traditions as demonstrably immoral and so unworthy of belief. (This is a too-brief summary of a brilliant book; I actually had the pleasure of discussing it briefly with Daly a few years before she died when she rang me up out of the blue – a long story. As an evangelical minister, I unsurprisingly tend to disagree with most of her conclusions, but the book is strikingly powerful in argument and expression. It takes thought and precision to find ways to disagree with many of the arguments she advances.) The conservative response back in the 1970s was largely to deny the premise: Christianity does, it is true, privilege masculine imagery for God, and perhaps that cannot be substituted or avoided, but that does not mean that Christians believe in a male God; the united, and somewhat strident, witness of the tradition is the gender-categories cannot be applied to God. God is perhaps most often described in masculine imagery, but God is not male, and so there can be no argument that the male is God. In the last few years – no more history, I think, than that – it seems that an alternative argument has been offered – most recently, and already rather famously, in some brief comments by John Piper that prefaced a discussion of the legacy of the great J.C. Ryle (full text here – with thanks to Danny Webster for the link). I hesitate to criticise John Piper – I have been greatly helped by his writing in the past; almost everything I know of him as a man and a pastor, I respect; and it happens that one of my daughters and one of his granddaughters were best friends when both were three (another long story). His argument here has been endlessly reproduced around the web, however, and summarises a position that others have been advancing; it therefore deserves some reflection. (And Rachel Held Evans specifically invited male Christian bloggers to respond, for some sound pastoral reasons, which she explains.) The predominantly masculine imagery for God, Piper suggested, leads us to believe that authority, leadership, &c., are essentially masculine traits, just as Daly had proposed. However (I’m filling in some logical gaps here, but this is my best reconstruction of the argument) the true God uses His authority to promote the best interests of His creatures, and so masculine authority – male headship – properly exercised will lead to the flourishing of women as well as men. To recast – perhaps unfairly – Piper’s argument in Daly’s terms, God is male, and so the male is – head, if not God – but the God who is male is caring, self-giving, and nurturing, and so the patriarchal society established by Biblical male headship is the best possible social context for women as well as men to grow to their full humanity. Although this has become popular just now because of Piper’s brief summary, it goes behind and beyond him, so in the remainder of this post I will refer to it as the ‘God-as-masculine’ thesis. What are we to make of these differing responses? Firstly, we should note that the 1970s responses were generally – there were exceptions – rather simplistic in their analysis of gender. Assuming a straight equation between biological sex and gender, the argument tended to go ‘God is spirit, and therefore has no bodily parts; therefore God cannot be either male or female; God is beyond gender.’ As I’ve noted before on this blog, contemporary analyses of gender suggest that the relationship between biology and gender identity is rather more complex than this, and I’ve discussed one or two examples from the history of the church that in different ways support such analysis. The ‘God-as-masculine’ argument also relies on an assumption of gender essentialism, of course, even if on this view it is divinely mandated rather than biologically determined. A view of gender which sees the stable essences of masculinity and femininity as attitudinal, rather than physical, does seem to allow for a – guarded, admittedly – ascription of gender to God. The united witness of the church through the ages is unquestionably that God is beyond gender, and that speaking of God as male, or even as promoting...
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