Dr. Yazid Said is Senior Lecturer in Islam at Liverpool Hope University and a Trustee of the William Temple Foundation. He is a Palestinian-born Anglican priest and an Israeli citizen. He studied Classical Arabic and English Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Christian theology at the University of Cambridge. After being ordained an Anglican priest, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2010) on the medieval Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). He is the author ofGhazali's Politics in Context(Routledge 2012), which was re-launched in paperback in 2017. He is the co-editor ofThe Future of Interfaith Dialogue: Muslim-Christian Encounters through A Common Word(Cambridge University Press, 2018).
One had hoped that the civil wars within the Church of England and the political wrangling over appointments that one reads in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles were a thing of the past; but as Justin Welby steps down from his position as Archbishop of Canterbury after the Makin report, Trollope’s world does not seem to be that different. For example, the diocese of Rochester passed a no confidence vote in the Archbishop’s Council and the bishop of Newcastle had no hesitation in accusing her colleagues of ‘careerism’ for failing to agree with her calls for change.
Various commentators pointed out that the Safeguarding crisis is not disconnected to another controversy, namely the managerial corporatisation of the church. They point to the drainage of resources in administrative and corporate restructuring of the institution in central authority whilst Church attendance seems to drop. The importance of the local that underpinned the mystical celebration of the Book of Common Prayer across the centuries in parishes seems to slowly disappear; therefore, several of the Church’s own clergy warned about the possible demise of the Church.
The review of the parish system started, of course, at the time of Welby’s predecessor; Rowan Williams noted that the parochial system needs some reform in facing mobile populations in contemporary England and that a healthy church needs to scrutinise what it has to be at the service of others. But back then it was recommended to let each diocese deal with the implications of that locally rather than assume that there was a one-fit-for-all system imposed from the centre. Anglicans have a deep rooted scepticism about clerical hierarchical centralised structures in the way some have felt the system was going. It is right and proper to raise questions about the dangers of arguably secular unified managerial attitudes to running the Church that leads to juridical and bureaucratic distortions.
Truth and Perception
However, wherever we stand on such matters, the various critics have neglected to comment on an arguably more important theological and anthropological issue. The verdict of the Makin report on Safeguarding in the Church of England has some similarities with the verdict in the Post Office scandal investigation that, regrettably, involved another Church of England priest. Both inquiries have uncovered the danger of words, when some try to say things to hide other motives or assume that they can say what they wish, not knowing what the consequences are. In both cases, the issue has to do with faulty perception and vision. Sooner or later, the fantasy filled balloons with self-justifying pure reactive sentiments (as with Archbishop Justin’s unfortunate valedictory speech in the Lords) are going to hit the thorn bushes. But faulty perception is in fact a human crisis overall. Those who have reacted to the report in anger at the Archbishop have shown the same problem. Often human beings don’t like to confess that they have agendas when reacting to crises. The question of perception and healthy engagement with one’s environment is the real overall corporate original sin that needs confessing whether for Justin Welby, the Safeguarding system, the Church of England more widely, as well as for all those politicians who suddenly seem to be wiser than everyone else, wishing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The pictures drawn by everyone involved is vulnerable to a different kind of theological language. In his book, Looking East at Winter, Rowan Williams explores the various writings of Church Fathers from around 400-700 AD that produced tools of diagnosis for faulty human seeing. The writers of this era, he explains, were fascinated by the ways in which what they called our ‘passions’ interfere with our perception. ‘Passions’ in this instance refers to instincts that are not properly educated. One of the Church Fathers mentioned in the book, is the fifth century Mark the Ascetic, who reminds us in his treatise on ‘No Righteousness by Works’ that
He who hates the passions gets rid of their causes. But he who is attracted by their causes is attacked by the passions even though he does not wish it. (1)
An uneducated instinct continually pulls us back within the framework of either ignoring what we see or constructing our environment in terms of our own agendas, to save face or protect our institutions.
The first lesson, therefore, we have from Justin Welby’s unfortunate end of tenure is the fallacy that the key to virtue is knowledge, assuming that when you know what to do, then you can do it. In his interview with Channel 4 on November 7th, 2024, Justin Welby confessed as much. The Church Fathers, Rowan reminds us, taught that virtue is connected with proper perception, proper vision. What we see shapes who we are. We, therefore, need to constantly ask ourselves: What do we see? And how do we see it? What are the things that we allow to drop off the edge of our vision? How far do we see things in terms of ourselves and our immediate agenda; or are we simply trying to defend ourselves or our institutions? We assume that deep down there is a pure primordial self that we can uncover through knowledge – a fantasy.
Self-knowledge is not about going inwards to discover a pure primordial self. It is about being connected with the human environment around us that challenges and enlarges us. Self-knowledge requires ‘Communion’, living in conversation with others. Mark the Ascetic gives a rather useful description of what goes wrong with our unexamined imbalanced instincts, especially when we ‘feel good’ about ourselves. He says:
He who does not understand God’s judgments walks on a ridge like a knife edge and is easily unbalanced by every puff of wind. When praised, he exults; when criticised, he is bitter; when he feasts, he makes a pig of himself; when he suffers hardships, he moans and groans; when he understands he shows off; and when he does not understand, he pretends that he does; when rich, he is boastful, when in poverty he plays the hypocrite. Gorged, he grows brazen; and when he fasts, he becomes arrogant. He quarrels with those who reprove him and those who forgive him, he regards as fools. (2)
This is a perfect fifth century diagnosis of twenty first century ailments, not just of what went wrong with the Archbishop, but with a great deal of public figures whose behaviour is generally burdened with such imbalances. This is not simply because they are ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ but more because they have an imbalanced perception.
What settled the picture in both the Post Office scandal and the Makin report case was the mixture of personal testimony, documentations and the building up of a whole world of details, pointing to clear distortions of fact, producing a context within which the denials of justice could not be sustained. This suggests again that there are things that words or ‘knowledge’ cannot change: the things that are contained in the hurt and blurred recollections of sub-postmasters, or in the parenthesis of a forgotten message from an abused child. This is the kind of language that ideology is afraid of. Words cannot have the final verdict. We might think that we have silenced the dissenting voices, but we carry with us traces of what we have tried to deny. The truth eventually emerges again from the margins.
If words alone change our perception and transform our world, then the liar and the terrorist would have things their own way. The tradition of the Church stands to remind us that God’s transformative speech to the world is not simply a political party manifesto; it’s not words; it is the baby in the manger and the body of a victim. Both Church leaders as well as politicians need to ask, why is it that we have not managed to learn that kind of language to aid our perception? The answer to this last question lies with the acknowledgment that to ‘perceive’ and ‘see’ that the babe in the manger and the man on the cross is in fact the revelation of God himself requires a particular type of humility and caritas, as Augustine of Hippo reminds us in his Confessions. Precisely because of that call to humility and caritas, we too need to point to the good things that Justin Welby brought to the office of Archbishop of Canterbury.
Many will be quick to compare Welby with his predecessor Rowan Williams who was described as ‘the most distinguished occupant of Augustine’s chair since St Anselm (1033-1109)’ (3). Williams was someone who managed by the manner of his life and the quality of his writings and public engagement to combine the public face of Anglicanism in the midst of British social order together with a unique spirituality and hidden charisma glimpsed in his sermons and published poems. But Rowan’s extraordinary engagement has not always come over quite so benignly. He left one month after the failure of the Women in the Episcopate vote in Synod and the failure of the proposed ‘Covenant’ for the Anglican Communion to prevent an irreparable breach of trust in the Communion because of the seemingly unbridgeable views over human sexuality in Africa and America. Welby was able to get the Women in the Episcopate vote through and moved the Church of England closer to accepting committed loving gay relationships as equal before God. After his election as Archbishop, Welby had a positive beginning with the media, which described him as ‘straightforward’, of considerable seriousness, experience, humorous, and relaxed. It was also difficult to pigeonhole him. He suggested at the start of his promotion to Canterbury that he was a ‘spiritual magpie’, who feels at home with charismatic worship, but reveres the Eucharist and follows the routine of the Prayer Book’s daily offices of morning and evening prayer. Though described as ‘evangelical’, he uses Catholic models of prayer and has a Roman Catholic spiritual director. Like Pope Francis, he stood against contemporary capitalist ideology and had a concern for mission as he pointed out in his inaugural sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, quoting the Pope himself.
He capitalised on his own strengths and knowledge of the financial world through his previous work in the oil industry. In his public discussions and parliamentary interventions, he spoke of a model of economy that is based on virtue and trust, not simply on abstract professionalism. Money does not have its own abstract value but is there to build up the health of society. As such, society can be properly alive when it is not simply based on an abstract understanding of ‘contract’, but subordinate contract to gift, so that we become ‘protectors of one another’ to use his inaugural sermon again. The Cabinet supported his plans for the Credit Unions, reflecting a positive impact in matters where he showed clear strength.
Welby’s faulty vision?
There are justifications, however, for raising issues about perception and vision in the way the archbishop and bishops have engaged public debates. What he saw and what he failed to see, or instinctively allowed to fall off the sides of his perception are possible to argue about and possibly judge, as his interview with Channel 4 made perfectly clear. Before any of the current controversies appeared, he was quick to join the condemnation of the saintly War period bishop George Bell when there was no clear proof of the safeguarding accusations. When it became clear that the claims are not credible, there was no clear apology from Justin Welby.
The pandemic brought its own challenges. The vision of the Church being at the heart of public engagement got muddled up and lost very dramatically when churches were asked to close even for private prayer, which was not necessary under government provisions at the time. Instead of engaging with the spiritual hunger of the wider public in facing death and crisis with a rich theological foundation, the bishops focused on repeating what the NHS has called for, something they were not needed for. Indeed, instead of using one of his two beautiful chapels at Lambeth Palace to celebrate the televised Easter Eucharist in 2020 (which he could have done under the provisions), he opted for his kitchen table. One could not but feel the lack of insight here, replacing beauty with relevance, opting for a ‘style’ that was supposed to show solidarity with those stuck in their homes. But ‘style’, St Augustine noted long ago, detracts from seriousness (4). In his Easter sermon from the kitchen, he unfortunately referred to Lancelot Andrewes as ‘a previous Archbishop of Canterbury’, when he was in fact a former bishop of Winchester, Ely, Chichester and also the Dean of Westminster. This was a telling mistake that makes one wonder who and what kind of advice Welby had when making such public statements.
Welby’s experience in interfaith engagement seems to be formed mainly through his work in Nigeria for reconciliation. This characterised his various addresses and visitations to the different religious communities in England. He raised similar concerns for reconciliation during his various visits to the Holy Land, but as I noted in a previous blog, his knowledge of the intricacies of the political situation of Palestine has been highly questionable lacking the courage to name a spade a spade in the face of what the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International have deemed to be genocidal policy in Gaza. He changed his tone after various criticisms, showing that he did not lead but was more led in such cases, mostly by government policy.
Archbishops have always had their challenges in office; Professor Simon Lee pointed almost 20 years ago to the challenges faced by Rowan Williams, not at the end of his tenure, but at the beginning, noting how, for all his talents, Archbishop Rowan wavered over the nomination of his friend Dr Jeffrey John as the suffragan Bishop of Reading, eventually caving in to opposition (5). Some will argue that this might have been a point of strength for Welby.
Are we able to issue a final verdict? Traditionally, there has never been such a thing called ‘The Church of England’ as an institution; rather, we have the parish system. One should never forget the hard and good work that goes across parishes up and down the country who feel challenged by the weak perceptions of media coverage. But the Christian tradition makes it incumbent upon us to be aware that ‘we are in this together’, to use a cliché utilised by politicians. A good leader at the end is not one who has ‘power of control’, but one who is attentive, or as we started above, who has a healthy perception of the wider context, engaging in conversation with others. The attentive leader commands our attention and obedience. Good attention is a way of pushing back against ignorance and fantasy.
Church and State
The recent developments have also reignited the debate about the nature of the establishment of the Church of England and the place of religious voices in the public square. These debates are not new. Already in 2013, there were voices coming from familiar irritated secularists questioning the place of religious discourse in the public sphere, who perceived Welby’s engagement with economic policy to be interfering in ‘politics’. Such voices seem to think of the national Church as subordinate to the opinion of the state. At the time, bishop Nick Baines argued that these voices were naïve and condescending. Or, if we asked Mark the Ascetic, he would have said that they lacked that healthy perception of the world around them.
Indeed, to the extent that Welby made a positive impact on economic policy, he followed a very well-established tradition of Anglican identity, which sees the life of the Church at the heart of things public. Whilst the Church is a distinctive body in its worship, the tradition of the Church of England from Richard Hooker to John Wesley, William Wilberforce and William Temple, saw the boundaries of the Church fairly opened to relate to the health of the whole society. William Temple had warned us before that worship ‘divorced from life loses reality; life devoid of worship loses direction and power’ (6).
But, even William Temple, according to his biographer, had a phase in which he pondered the lessons of centuries of Establishment to ensure that the church is not comfortably politicized (7). Later in life, Temple will point again to the benefits of Establishment not simply for the Church, but also for the State, whilst distinguishing between the purpose of the Church and that of the State (8). The question, perhaps that Temple might have asked on this occasion, therefore, is ‘where is the anchorage of the state to be found?’ Given our faulty perceptions, not least in the realms of politics, what would happen to the soul of the nation if the Church were disestablished? Not because bishops and archbishops have all been perfect, far from it, but more to help keep the balance of insight and vision healthier rather than poorer for both Church and State, making each accountable to the other.
‘Anchorage’ is a point raised in fact by Justin Welby in his 2019 William Temple Foundation lecture, ‘exploring the balance between anchoring and movement for oil rigs and for people’. A point of orientation which is not shifting all the time, an understanding of our identity in terms of the health of our body politic, with all its religious and political diversity, is not a bad thing for the health of society; it is in fact what makes the system more humane. If it is not there, what would replace it? Secularism is not a neutral position; it is merely a point of view and as the philosopher John Gray once said, pointing to the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe: ‘humans have given up an irrational belief in God, only to replace it with an irrational belief in man’. The fatigue of secularity after the excitement of the void is confirmed by other popularising philosophers such as Alain de Botton and Camille Paglia. Whilst disestablishment might give the Church of England the possibility of a less predictable voice that challenges authority according to some, the healthier question might be: Can the Church of England be within the establishment politically liberated in order to actually be constructively political, helping the State to generate ways of finding a proper anchorage beyond functionalist coercive secularism?
Revd. Dr Yazid Said is a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Liverpool Hope University and Trustee of the William Temple Foundation
(1) Mark the Ascetic, ‘On Those who Think that they are made righteous by their works’ in The Philokalia, Vol. 1, p. 135.
(2) Ibid p. 142.
(3)Shortt, Rupert, Rowan’s Rule. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2009, p.3.
(4)Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, Book 4.
(5)Lee, Simon, ‘Ethics in the Dust?’, in Conversation in Religion and Theology, vol 1, issue 2, 2003, p. 218.
Since the publication of this article, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has addressed the General Synod of the Church of England. In his address, he has offered a more robust and powerful balance than his previous engagements with the situation, at least as mediated in the press. The link to the synod address by Archbishop Justin is here
William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, is famous for his support for the Jews and his patronage in the establishment of the Council of Christians and Jews in Britain when the Jews were facing the horrors of the Holocaust. A forthcoming special issue on his legacy for interreligious engagement in Britain after the Coronavirus pandemic will be published by the Journal of Church and State towards the end of November this year. In one contribution to the journal, we learn that Temple was not a pacifist; for him, Christianity does not stand for non-violence, but rather the sanctification of violence exerted for a just cause. Although this might make him sound like a supporter of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ in the face of the surprise and unprecedented attack by Hamas on 7 October, William Temple was not in fact a supporter of the Zionist project in Palestine, despite his stand with the Jews in Europe. In his Some Lambeth Letters, he notes:
I do not think it is practical to think of Palestine as a Jewish State. The Arab population is too big, and too fanatical. I incline to the suggestion that Palestine should be governed by a Commission of the United Nations […] as being a Holy Land for different religions, which between them cover a great multitude of Nations, and that we should try to develop a Jewish State elsewhere, perhaps in Cyrenaica.
His views on Arabs and indeed on Islam were shaped by the long dead scholarship and the prejudices of the time and should not bother us too much here. However, the main point here is that Temple understood that you cannot evacuate or transfer native populations and expect peace and harmony even if you are dealing with the just cause of finding a haven for the Jewish people facing the atrocities of the Holocaust. It would be a mistake to think that Temple was an exception in his opposition to the Zionist project at the time. The recent publication of Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, based on archival research, suggests how various British politicians at the time believed that the Balfour Declaration was a historical mistake. Jews deserved a haven, but the mistake was not to give proper consideration to the natives of Palestine and so the fate of the Palestinian Arabs became one of the most tragic consequences of the Declaration. Biggar seems to agree with that assessment himself. We are still living through the impact of this Nakba, tragedy, today as we witness the deadly cycle of repression and reprisal.
As we witnessed the killing of 1400 Israelis and more than 9000 Palestinians (and still counting) most of them civilians and half of them children, and as we hear of populations being urged to move from the north to the south of Gaza (against international law as a recent letter of UK Lawyers made clear), we are reminded of the entanglement of the 1948 Nakba with the aftermath of the Holocaust, which we do not seem to be able or willing to face boldly and honestly today. The recent publication, The Holocaust and the Nakba, by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg reflected on this entanglement. When Golda Meir visited Arab Haifa on May 6, 1948, a few days after its conquest and the flight and then expulsion of the city’s Arab population, she reported to the Jewish Agency Executive that “there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e. in Europe during World War II].”
In 1948, such imagery spilled into the public domain, and although they were generally ignored, at the time there were Jewish calls for self-critical engagement with that history, too. Martin Buber wrote in May 1948:
“Fifty years ago. When I joined the Zionist movement for the rebirth of Israel, my heart was whole. Today it is torn. The war being waged for a political structure risk becoming a war of national survival at any moment…I cannot even be joyful in anticipating victory, for I fear lest the significance of Jewish victory be the downfall of Zionism”.
As David Neuhaus noted, ‘his was a voice of anguish raised as he saw the genesis of Israeli militarism leading to the dearth of ‘Zionist humanism’. His anguish deepened as the Israeli authorities refused to take seriously the Palestinian refugees and instituted military rule on the Arabs who did not flee from the territory that became the state of Israel, allowing for the massive expropriation of Arab property after 1948. Neuhaus adds that in 1954, he was able to lucidly state,
“I believe our principal error was that when we first came here, we did not endeavor to gain the Arabs’ trust in political and economic matters. Thus, we gave cause to be regarded as aliens, as outsiders, who were not interested in befriending the Arabs. To a large measure, our subsequent difficulties are a consequence of this initial failure”.
Today, a great many of those living in Gaza are refugees from 1948; now they have become refugees twice over as they have been asked to move again. As the Palestinian Authority sits stagnant and corrupt with little political clout to make any difference, together with Western support for Israel’s offensive, the current ultra-right-wing Israeli government is recklessly indifferent to the implications of its actions because of their assumption that no one globally will do much if anything to challenge them. On October 9th William Hague suggested that Israel has fallen into the trap of Hamas’ attack with massive force; this massive reaction was described in the resignation letter of the director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights as genocidal.
Various commentators on the economic siege of Gaza have argued that Israel’s problem lies less with aggressive neighbours than with a failure to tackle the underlying issues around Gaza’s stability, economically and politically. The former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd once described Gaza back in 2004 as ‘the most miserable place of human habitation I have ever visited’. Yet, the sympathy given for Israel after the 7 October, never matched a similar sympathy for Palestine, ignoring the scores of women and children killed under occupation. This gives the impression of one rule for the favoured side. The language of ‘pure unadulterated evil’ that Biden used might remind us of George W Bush’s past language about the ‘war on terror’. The Israeli defence minister described all those beyond the border with Gaza as ‘human animals’, which by subliminal implication means all Palestinians.
Unlike William Temple, the Church in the West seems to be helplessly complacent in facing these tragedies head on today. The local churches in the Holy Land and the wider international community have rightly condemned Hamas’ surprise attack which sent shock waves across the world. But, with the exception of the Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s powerful letter to the faithful published on Thursday 24.10.2023, we have not seen a clear expression of the pain and the tragedy of the Palestinian people.
Local Palestinian Christians have issued statements of frustration, criticizing the current successor of William Temple, Archbishop Justin Welby. It is important to hear their voice; for they have a point. The coverage of his recent visit to Jerusalem in the Israeli press suggested no reference or interest in the justice desperately needed for Palestine. One month before this war raged, Justin Welby talked about reconciliation, implying dialogue during his address at St. Martin’s in the Fields on 6 September. But, this would not work for William Temple or for us today. In this situation, dialogue, as an agent of reconciliation, could be in danger of becoming a factor in a pseudo dialogue – an abstraction. If there is to be reconciliation, it will necessitate a radical acknowledgment of tragedy even if you don’t want to assume simplistic innocence on one side or the other. Despite his various statements for caution, Welby does not seem willing to spell out the tragedy on the Palestinian side, even when everyone knows that the imbalance of relationships between the occupier and the occupied in this instance is enormous.
When he was interviewed in Jerusalem by the BBC at St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, Welby claimed that you cannot dictate to Israel what it needs to do in response to what is undoubtedly an atrocity. In doing so, he failed to provide a clear moral stand. In John 18:10-11 the Apostle Peter is described using his sword to defend Jesus at the time of Jesus’ arrest. Jesus does not condemn Peter for doing so, but reminds him how violence breeds violence. It is shameful that Welby was unable to take a stand, at least to warn Israel of what the UK Lawyers’ open letter called ‘collective punishment’ and clearly contravening international law. It might be that Welby believes that you cannot declare one side to be completely innocent and the other side completely guilty. But, nonetheless, he failed to see how the horror of violence against the children of Gaza and the whole population is heinous not simply because of questions of innocence and guilt, but because they are human and helpless victims. In many ways William Hague understood better than the archbishop when he made his remark about the trap that Hamas had set, whereas Welby simply expressed the British government position. There is here a human story of pain and suffering and helplessness. The huge imbalance of power between the parties requires the sort of moral stand that Welby’s predecessor, Rowan Williams, once called for in one of his Christmas sermons after visiting Bethlehem, namely that ‘the poorest deserve the best’.
Whilst condemning Hamas’ attack, the General Secretary of the UN was right when he said that Hamas’s action did not emerge out of a vacuum. For the Christian, light might be shed on the conflict by reflecting on the New Testament narrative. Scholarship on the execution of Jesus of Nazareth under the Romans reflects a context in which the Judeans and the Romans in first century Palestine were concerned that there would be an explosion of violence that would be destructive for all. The leaders found Jesus to be the perfect scapegoat for the occasion; they eliminated one common enemy. To take a neutral position in the face of that story meant to stand with Pontius Pilate; it should not be the position of Christian leadership today, or else one risks losing one’s credibility. William Temple’s emphasis on community and public religious engagement was indeed intensified during the Second World War; it was his famous Christianity and the Social Order of 1942 as a set of proposals for the reconstruction of Britain after the war that became the blueprint for the welfare state. Palestinian Christianity is crying out in its search for prophets in the current situation. They did not find any prophetic word coming from Welby, whilst the West seems to be more comfortable with Pilate’s refusal to stand with justice.
Can we still see hope? Times of crisis and tragedy like this can be moments where there is sufficient anger at the breakdown of current politics and sufficient awareness of the need to build and make available greater resources for the creation of free citizens in Palestine with full duties and responsibilities, and sufficient hope in what can be achieved by the wider institutions of Europe and America, to engage creatively with the possibility that this moment gives to the peoples of the Holy Land. In 2002, I helped organise a conference for Young Theologians in Jerusalem, which included South Africans. They noted even then that the conditions of Palestinians were not tantamount to apartheid; they were worse. Palestine deserves prophets like Desmond Tutu or William Temple who can call a spade a spade and stand for truth at the heart of the social and political order, whilst always looking towards reconciliation without a blind eye to the tragedies. A lasting political system in any healthy society is one that pursues the building of virtue and the pursuit of justice and wisdom not least in line with the Hebrew tradition. This cannot happen without acknowledging the tragedies of Palestine today.
Dr. Yazid Said is Senior Lecturer in Islam at Liverpool Hope University and a Trustee of the William Temple Foundation. He is a Palestinian-born Anglican priest and an Israeli citizen. He studied Classical Arabic and English Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Christian theology at the University of Cambridge. After being ordained an Anglican priest, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2010) on the medieval Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). He is the author ofGhazali’s Politics in Context(Routledge 2012), which was re-launched in paperback in 2017. He is the co-editor ofThe Future of Interfaith Dialogue: Muslim-Christian Encounters through A Common Word(Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Review of Jarel Robinson-Brown, Black Gay British Christian Queer (London: SCM Press, 2021), by Yazid Said, Liverpool Hope University
Yazid Said, Lecturer at Liverpool Hope University and trustee of the William Temple Foundation, reviews Jarel Robinson-Brown’s recent book. Said applauds Robinson-Brown’s call for repentance but wonders whether human nature can really be viewed so optimistically.
Jarel Robinson-Brown’s book articulates critiques and reconstructions of the Christian understanding of grace from his experiences of living as a member of the Black LGBTQ+ Christian community in Britain. He is concerned with the ways in which being black and gay can encourage individuals and the whole Church to reimagine grace and to challenge some teachings and practices in the Church. The book is therefore mainly on how grace determines our understanding of divine action in the Incarnation (Chapter 2) and the crucifixion (Chapter 3) and its relationship to human action (Chapters 4 & 5). Drawing on several experiences of other gay, black, and queer individuals, he argues that genuine grace means walking alongside people in a position of powerlessness rather than in exercising power over them (pp. 72, 105-106).
The book’s importance lies in its emphasis on justice and its calling for a common repentance; it highlights the importance of the Church as a place of welcome for everyone and the significance of encountering the face of our victims for the release of grace (pp. 72 & 80).
Some issues raised in the book, however, require some unpacking. Grace itself remains a highly contentious concept in Christian history, reflecting a wide range of views on sex and sexuality. The implications, therefore, of how the author engages with Christian doctrine are mixed. He points to the Incarnation and crucifixion as an alternative to the emphasis on God’s transcendence, which he often links to human power structures (pp. 52, 56-58). Jesus’ story expresses divine immanence (pp. 50-58). Divine impassibility (Greek apatheia) would be rejected (pp. 69-70). In this way, the book draws on familiar themes and insights from other liberation theology traditions, emphasising the humanity of Jesus, as someone who stands alongside the outcast (p. 84). However, unlike other writers in this tradition (such as Carter Hayward’s The Redemption of God) Robinson-Brown subscribes to the orthodox definitions of Christ (pp. 104-106).
The author, evidently, has a view of grace that reflects a particular liberal philosophy. When it comes to the salvific effect of grace, he reads it as salvation from within, rather than an external challenge for change (106). This suggests that he maintains a highly optimistic view of human nature in line with liberal philosophy. He draws on other activists who have a shared sexuality and a common intellectual heritage with him. Robinson-Brown is not subscribing to liberal individualism, however. He believes that if communities and members of the Body of Christ cooperate, they can achieve true justice in response to the revelation of God in Christ (Chapter 5).
There is no discussion of the Christian understanding of original sin. Indeed, he talks of ‘silencing our sin-talk’ (p. 38). The book does not struggle with the implications of sin for all, when grace includes God’s judgment on sin for the benefit of the sinner (Matthew 9: 10-13). This is reflected in the manner of using scripture. We are rightly reminded that Jesus is more at home in the company of tax collectors and sinners (p. 84). However, whilst Jesus enjoyed the company of sinners, he did not see them as other than sinners. The woman found in adultery is still a sinner: ‘go and sin no more’ (John 8: 1-11). Zacchaeus was still a greedy person (Luke 19); they all need the grace of God in Jesus.
Whilst dependence on Christology and salvation remain striking in the book, the ambiguity of discussing ‘sin’ explains the ambiguity around his discussion of the crucifixion too. The cross becomes for the author a weapon (pp. 63, 67, 69). He identifies the suffering of Black LGBTQ+ Christians with Christ’s suffering. But this identification cannot reflect what is truly radical and new in the cross. It is the darkness of death on the cross that judges all our systems, not simply the suffering that makes us more ‘righteous’. It is difficult to assess whether Jesus suffered more than the millions who suffered in the twentieth century. This is neither here nor there. Rather, the cross silences us—all of us, white, black, gay, or straight—as it reminds us how we all tend to reject the truth when it comes among us.
Similarly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘cheap grace’ is susceptible to misuse in the book (p. 40). Though Bonhoeffer was influential in radical ‘secular’ theological writings such as that of John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963), Bonhoeffer was certainly not trying to push for the usual liberal argument that claims to make God ‘relevant’ to ‘the modern world’. Rather he was trying to confront the evils of the modern world with the radical worldliness of the gospel.
It would also be good to unpack a little more of what the author means by ‘White Supremacy’ in Britain today (pp. 112 & 157). Some might distinguish between supremacist ideology and a ‘hidden’ racism. The latter is more personal. An argument, for example, from Rowan Williams’ chapter ‘Nobody knows who I am till the judgment morning’ in On Christian Theology (pp. 276-289) discusses the question of racism as part of a larger task of defining a human crisis overall.
It is evident today that the earlier blanket condemnation of sexual minorities is no longer tenable or indeed desirable. There are enough signs across different church traditions to move away from the condemnatory language of the past. Robinson-Brown refers critically to the Church of England’s document Issues of Human Sexuality (1991) (p. 10); he could have clarified that further in pointing to an aspect of legal hypocrisy here. The document goes as far as to see committed homosexual relationships as a valid option for Christian living whilst attaching celibacy to the legal expression of committed homosexual relationships. It therefore denies a key dimension of gay identity.
Robinson-Brown’s book deserves support for its cause and its apt call for the church to live out its call for repentance; but one still needs to ask to what extent this kind of ‘identity-focus’ theology is able to prosper where the liberal philosophical tradition is less influential. The book seems to assume that people who share the LGBTQ+ identity all share the same experiences, either private or social. This may not necessarily be the case either. Many who may be sympathetic to the cause, may not embrace the optimism that seeks to erase the importance of human sin. A strong consciousness of our fallenness helps deliver us from the kind of binaries that identity theologies—and politics—seek to work with.
