Defining liberal Christianity
There are a number of reports on the Web reacting to last week’s ECUSA triennial convention – Mike Bird linked to one at BeliefNet and one at the WSJ; Several people on Twitter and FB pointed out Ross Douthat’s piece in the NY Times, which took the opportunity to give thought to the wider issue of the ‘collapse’ (his word) of liberal Christianity in the USA. The piece is humorous (‘Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction.’) and perceptive in drawing attention to a fact that is also one of the chief lessons of Goodhew’s Church Growth in Britain: there is a strong positive correlation between church growth and conservative theology, and between church decline and liberal theology. (This is not, of course, necessarily a reason to commend conservative theology – our calling is to faithfulness to the gospel, not to worldly success – but it is a reason to greet the (very regular) announcements from the more liberal denominations in both the UK and the USA that the best way to stop their decline in attendance is to become yet more liberal with something akin to a facepalm…) That said, Douthat’s piece seems to me to be built on a fundamental misapprehension; he asserts that ‘the defining idea of liberal Christianity’ is ‘that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion’ and laments the possible loss of this idea from American national life. As a definition of liberal Christianity, this is astonishingly misdirected; indeed, it might better serve as a definition of classical Evangelicalism, which was, and increasingly is again, precisely about the combination of personal and social transformation in the name of the gospel. Someone might attempt a historical account in which this evangelical holism was lost in both directions, with conservatives holding on to the need for personal conversion and liberals holding on to the need for social transformation, but I don’t see this as being in any way plausible; classical evangelicalism was already defined against a liberal tradition, that had its own clear intellectual position, and that in turn rejected the evangelical position. Further, it does not hold even in relatively recent history, at least in the UK (I suspect it does not in the USA either, but my knowledge of the history there is less sure): in the face of mass immigration from the West Indies in the 1950s, for instance, the mainstream liberal churches were fairly uniformly racist; the reactions of evangelical churches were mixed, but at least some did in fact open their doors and welcome their new black neighbours. What is liberal Christianity? The question is complex, of course. To give a fully adequate answer would demand reference to renewed confidence in reason, to a high estimate of the possibilities of human endeavour, married to a downplaying of the doctrine of original sin (at least as classically taught), to Biblical criticism, to the turn to history that affected theology as much as every other academic discipline in the early twentieth-century, and to other currents. That said, most of these currents coalesce in popular expressions of Christianity into a fairly unified stream. So, as a broad approximation, liberal Christianity is Christianity that is acutely alive to the challenges to belief coming from modern philosophy. Kant’s denial of knowledge of the noumenal realm apparently made traditional accounts of revelation impossible, and the more-or-less simultaneous rise of Biblical criticism made traditional accounts of revelation profoundly precarious even if possible. Of course, every intellectually serious mode of Christianity has had to respond somehow to these challenges – this was the sense of Stephen Sykes’ announcement that we are all liberals today; the particular character of liberal Christianity has been to find a response in accepting the force of the challenges and seeing a profound need for doctrinal reformulation to meet them. The greatest, and still defining, figure in the story is Schleiermacher, who attempted to refound theology on a different basis, an appeal to shared human religious experience. All religious traditions, and all systems of theology, were attempts to analyse this shared experience, and to say what must be the case concerning the divine if the experience was in fact accurate. (I am very conscious that recent scholarship on Schleiermacher has resisted this sort of foundationalist reading of his theology; if it is not accurate, then the story I am telling needs slight revision: ‘Schleiermacher was understood, wrongly, to be saying this; those who misapprehended his programme created a vibrant liberal tradition that proceeded on this basis…’) This central methodological place for human experience has...
Read MoreAdvent: waiting for the God who is already here
There are some excellent resources to help us to keep advent well appearing around the place: The natwivity is an opportunity to follow the unfolding Christmas story on Facebook or Twitter, with real-time updates from the various characters involved. The Christian Aid advent calendar (here) combines reflections on the Christmas story with invitations to learn more about justice issues. The Spring Harvest advent calendar (here) is giving away a free download today; knowing the organisation, I imagine it will combine gifts like this with reflections over the period, but I’m guessing here. If you use the YouVersion Bible app on your mobile, Tearfund have put out a good reading plan for advent...
Read MoreThe spirituality of doctrine?
Renovaré, the organisation founded by Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline, et al.), have recently published a book entitled 25 Books Every Christian Should Read: A Guide to the Definitive Spiritual Classics. The list can be seen here (you’ll need to scroll down a little). I’ve read most of them, and at least some of almost all of them (as it happens, the only one I’ve never opened is Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son; I know it’s wonderful; there’s even a copy in the house, as Heather’s homegroup worked through it a few years back; other things just keep getting in the way). The title is, I take it, deliberately provocative; such lists always generate argument, and an argument that leads to people being exposed to previously-unencountered classics of Christian spirituality is surely a good thing? I don’t particularly want to start that argument here; the list is a good one. It contains, however, three texts that would not often be included in the genre of ‘spirituality’: Athanasius On the Incarnation; Calvin’s Institutes; and Lewis on Mere Christianity. These are texts in doctrine (or perhaps apologetics for Lewis); the study of doctrine is not generally considered to be an aid to prayer in those parts of the church in which I move, at least. (And academic theological conferences do not often feel like powerhouses of prayer…) When John Rackley was BUGB President, he ran a survey asking (British Baptist) ministers what fed them devotionally, and commented in writing it up that almost none of them (two, from memory) mentioned reading doctrine. As it happens, reading Calvin does inspire me to devotion from time to time; the same is true of Barth, and one or two others in the dogmatic tradition. But if devotional inspiration is my aim, Brother Lawrence or Mother Julian are far, far more reliable options for me (and much lighter to carry around than Calvin or Barth!). This is, of course, a modern problem. The connection between doctrine and piety was routinely assumed in the tradition, whether in arguments that only the true contemplative could even try to do theology (Gregory of Nazianzus, First Theological Oration), or arguments that any right understanding of doctrine will inevitably lead to heartfelt worship and devotion (Calvin, Inst. 1:1-2). Less happily, heretics are routinely accused of the grossest acts, because it is assumed that their wrong doctrine must make them morally incompetent. This connection is, one way or another, traceable down to the beginning of the nineteenth century (it’s there in Coleridge (‘They must become better before they can become wiser’) and, in a way, in Schleiermacher), but had begun to fall apart a century, perhaps more, before that. By the time we get to the middle of the twentieth century, there is something of a prevailing assumption that theological scholarship will destroy piety and that practiced piety is at least an impediment to proper theological scholarship, and assumption that has begun to be overcome in the decades since, but that is still sometimes visible. What happened? I can think of various explanations. Perhaps St Bernard’s fulminations over Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non were well-directed, and the founding of the European university system was all a catastrophic mistake? (I don’t think this, by the way, but any academic theologian needs to reflect on it from time to time.) Perhaps theology should be done only within the local church (memorably, the Black Rock Address on ‘theological schools’: ‘In every age, from the school of Alexandria down to this day, they have been a real pest to the church of Christ’)? (I don’t think this either, but the authors were Baptists, and I accept that the challenge is as much mine to prove them wrong, as theirs to carry the point.) I have an alternative explanation, not quite so easy, which relies on some genealogical reflections. Doctrine, we should remember more often, is – or at least used to be, and should still be – the science of reading Scripture well. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation is a contribution to an ongoing exegetical debate. (I assume we all know by now that the whole debate over the Trinity in the fourth century was exegetical? The ontological schemes and logical distinctions that Athanasius and others worked out were proposed to offer ways of reading certain disputed texts that made better sense of the whole of Scripture than other proposals.) Calvin’s Institutes are written as a simple and easy textbook to give his readers the crucial concepts and distinctions they will need to make sense of Scripture when they read it for themselves. At some point (Hegel? Schleiermacher? Around then,...
Read MoreContemplative prayer and contemporary worship
A recent conversation with our pastor, Andrew Rollinson, about those spiritual practices which I find useful/generative/satisfying/whatever the right word is, brought to mind a blog post from Vicky Beeching which noted that she, as a leading worship leader in the contemporary evangelical style, finds broadly contemplative practices of spirituality most nourishing for her personal spirituality. I had indicated to Andrew that charismatic worship and contemplative prayer were the two places where I most regularly experience connection to God and personal transformation by God. This in turn brought to mind an argument I gestured at in a footnote of a paper on contemporary worship (a paper that is currently under review by a journal), and had intended to develop more fully. Let me assume (without a lengthy footnote exploring the present academic discussion…) that the study of (Christian) ‘spirituality’ is fundamentally a discussion and interrogation of the ways in which (Christian) people find personally-meaningful connection with the awesome reality that is the triune God. On this basis, spirituality cannot be reduced to technique – there are, simply, no practices we can engage in which will guarantee God’s response – but it can be analysed in terms of discipline – there are many practices we engage in which seem, for at least some practitioners, to tend to promote (an awareness of) divine response. (Parentheses to duck the question of whether practices in fact lead to divine response, or whether God always responds, but our practices aid our awareness of that.) On this basis, it seems to me that the basic orientation of charismatic spirituality, expressed in traditions of contemporary worship, is remarkably similar to the basic orientation of contemplative spirituality. I am aware of (some of) the many schools of traditional contemplative spirituality, and thus of the danger of generalising; for the sake of a blog post, however, I generalise. Many historical Christian traditions of spirituality school their disciples in practices of lengthy attentiveness, with words, images, or objects providing a helpful focus for this attentiveness. Somehow (and it is variously theorised) such lengthy attentiveness results in an awareness of God’s presence, and an experience of divine activity towards one’s own soul, that is held to be either the goal of the practice of prayer, or at least a substantial good to be achieved by the practice of prayer. The endless repetition of the ‘Jesus Prayer’ commended in the anonymous Russian Way of the Pilgrim; the practice of lectio Divina; meditation on object or phrase, be it candle, host, rock, or fragment of liturgy; even exercises directing mental focus to particular parts of the body – all seem to suggest that sustained attention or focus somehow allows openness to God’s life and activity. (I am aware of criticisms of this analysis in, e.g., Turner’s Darkness of God; to the extent that they highlight that the modern obsession with felt experience can eclipse the reality of divine action, I wholeheartedly agree with them; but I do not think that this changes my argument here very much.) The fundamental mode of charismatic spirituality, the extended time of worship, functions in exactly the same way, it seems to me. Through the repetition of songs and the extended time of singing, the worshipper is enabled to leave behind whatever baggage she brought with her into the meeting and to become focused in serious and transformative ways on God’s presence and action. Again, sustained attention or focus somehow allows openness to God’s life and activity. The two traditions are surprisingly congruent; it should be no surprise that some of us – like me – find nourishment in...
Read MoreSpiritual direction in the nonconformist tradition
There has been a recent, and welcome, tradition of the various Principals of our Baptist colleges in the UK publishing jointly-authored books (something of the story of how this came to be is told in a chapter in Fiddes, et al., Doing Theology in A Baptist Way (Whitley, 2000)); the most recent contribution is in the Regent’s Study Guides series, Fiddes (ed.), Under the Rule of Christ: Dimensions of Baptist Spirituality (Smyth & Helwys, 2008). The various chapters in the book treat various themes, not including spiritual direction: Paul Fiddes and Steve Finnamore look at ‘Baptists and Spirituality’; Richard Kidd looks at suffering; Nigel Wright at ‘Spirituality as Discipleship: the Anabaptist heritage’; Jim Gordon treats Scripture; John Weaver the Eucharist; and Chris Ellis Mission. There are many good things in the book; one of the repeated emphases, however, perhaps more powerful because it is apparently unconscious, is the assumption that, for Baptists, spirituality happens in gathered community – the local church congregation. Of course, there are those (Christopher Jamieson, Abbot of Worth, for one) who would claim that the classical spiritual disciplines only make sense in community, but the recent emphasis of the retreat movement has been on personal spirituality. This is perhaps particularly the case when it comes to spiritual direction – a quintessentially personal relationship, one-to-one, confidential, and ideally removed at some level from broader life (the advice I have seen seems to suggest that a spiritual director should be someone you never otherwise encounter in your life). I began to wonder, where is there a history of spiritual direction in our Baptist (and broader evangelical and nonconformist) traditions? We can find examples of ‘soul friendships’ from various points in history, which can be mapped onto the concept of spiritual direction, certainly – and I do not want to minimise or decry that; but it is not something natural to us. But if we understand spiritual direction as a process where the disciple is able to give an account of her walk with Christ, and to receive guidance, wisdom, encouragement, and prayer in furthering that walk, then, it struck me, reading the Principals’ book, it is something that is native, and central, to various Baptist, evangelical, and nonconformist traditions. It is just that we do it corporately, not individually. The purest example is perhaps Wesley’s vision for the Methodist class meeting; this was precisely spiritual direction, but in community – members sharing with and supporting each other. There is at least something of this vision in the theory, if less often in the practice, of Baptist church meeting, however, and the recent proliferation of small group ministry in evangelical churches, whilst usually ill-thought out (small group meetings are too often held to be a Good Thing in themselves, which rather obviously they are not – no meeting is, ever – they have value to the extent that they are useful means directed towards valuable ends), introduces something of this into church life when, by accident or design, it works. What to say about this? I want to support it – it is native to my tradition, and I believe in the notion of the body of Christ, the local church, being the basic agent of discipleship (and of course of mission) in the world. But I wonder about the practicality of it; in just over twenty years, now, of Christian discipleship, I have been a member of two small groups that have worked on this level, and one church fellowship – places where there were sufficient levels of trust, maturity, and openness to enable honesty about doubts, struggles, fears, joys, and hopes. Easier, far easier, to find a spiritual director who one can trust… …but ease is never a good criterion for gospel...
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