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.
You can also read John Root’s review of Israel’s book here.
The death of George Floyd in May 2020 happened at the beginning of a global pandemic. Whilst the issue of racial injustice has been with us for a while, the pandemic did help the global community to be more conscious of the suffering that many people of colour have been facing for decades.
Many of the questions people are asking today revolve around their humanity and their identity. There are questions around sexuality and identity, gender and identity, disability and identity, race and identity, and so on. It is the last of these questions, on race and identity, that I want to narrow down on in this conversation—because the murder of George Floyd has led to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet the Black Lives Matter movement, like any of the other issues highlighted above, has become politicised and potentially controversial. Some people view it as controversial because they think saying that black lives matter means saying other lives do not matter.
Let me start to unpack this by reflecting on the issue theologically. An anthropological view of scripture affirms that humanity, that is everyone, is created in God’s image (see Genesis 1:26; 2:7). We are all bearers of God’s image irrespective of colour, nationality, social status, ethnicity, religion or culture. This means that our humanity is rooted in God; in essence, our human identity is derived from God. We bear God’s image because we are the signature stamp of God’s creation—and therefore all lives matter. All lives matter to God and are valuable because we are God’s handiwork. Our humanity, bearing semblance to God, also reveals a collective human identity and therefore a shared human identity.
If we agree that all lives do indeed matter and we share this understanding that we have a shared humanity rooted in God, then it should concern us all when black lives are made cheap. Black lives are made cheap when they are not seen as human, when they are enslaved, colonised, indentured, raped, exploited, seen as inferior, marginalised, oppressed, lynched, segregated, disproportionately imprisoned, murdered, and neo-colonised. The best way for us as a church to understand the message of Black Lives Matter theologically is through Paul’s body metaphor: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26, NRSV). Black Lives Matter is saying that people of African descent worldwide, as part of humanity, are suffering from various forms of injustices—and their pain matters. Will our collective humanity seek to understand this pain and respond, or will we neglect that part of the human family? For the church, this is an even more pressing issue, because if we fail to address the hurt in God’s family, that is the body of Christ, we are inadvertently neglecting ourselves.
If the UK church in its breadth of diversity is going to be relevant today and be able to speak into issues of racial inequality, we must seek to engage intelligently. The church cannot afford to keep Black Lives Matter at arm’s length. It is important for the church to engage as Black Lives Matter raises questions around the issues of race and identity for many, particularly young people. If the church is going to make the gospel relevant to millennials and Generation Z, then we must engage some of the concerns of Black Lives Matter. During the Windrush period (1940s-1960s), the UK church lost a generation of African Caribbean youth because they saw how the church had mistreated their parents, and many of them turned away. If the UK church does not engage the concerns of Black Lives Matter, we will not only loose black youth, but also other young people, because Black Lives Matter is a multicultural international movement.
One of the impacts of the pandemic is that people are asking more questions about their humanity and their identity. This is because the Black Lives Matter movement has raised critical questions around what it means to be black in a western context. Whilst I am aware that Black Lives Matter is controversial for some, I believe that the UK church must find ways to engage some of the questions being posed because they are theological questions that require missional engagement.
One of the joys of taking assemblies in our local primary schools is that one never knows what responses will be elicited from the children. Focusing on the subject of creativity and important inventions, and having gone through the wheel, clocks and drugs, with the children to quickly realize that each of these can be both good and bad, I got to the subject of the internet. One little boy, who, according to the staff, is normally “off with the fairies”, put up his hand to everyone’s surprise and said “it is elite”. Stunned silence for a few moments; but, of course, he is correct. This is one of the downsides of our digital revolution – the existence of the digitally deprived or excluded. “Out of the mouths of babes” etc. Although where he had got this idea from is an interesting question. He had probably seen it on the TV or encountered it through the internet!
This may seem of peripheral concern for faith communities, but this is one of the determining factors of the context in which we now operate and to which we have to respond. What we now call “material religious practices” are themselves being shaped by this revolution. So who is shaping whom and to what ends? For instance, the benefice in which I work has now set up its own website, linking to other village websites across the patch; increasingly accesses the Facebook pages of two of the more active villages in order to promote events; and is setting up an email network across our 8 villages for the same reason. Here I am writing a blog post for William Temple Foundation.
As the education researcher Maggi Savin-Baden recently suggested, we are increasingly “digitally tethered”. You only have to travel by train to realize that people no longer talk to each other because they are too busy talking to “distant others”. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? When do we reach the point where form determines content, and can we even make that distinction any longer? What is happening to our capacity to relate to those around us?
The mistake that we often make, both historically and ethically, is to imagine that the technologies we develop are “neutral tools” that we simply manipulate to our own advantage. Whether it was the wheel, writing, clock time, drugs or the internet, it is as much the case that they re-shape us and our cultures as that we shape them. In less familiar language that does better justice to this insight, we are always already part of the “assemblages” or constantly shifting and developing combinations and configurations of the human (material) and non-human materials that are the components and “machines” of our existence. Examples from real church life: couples construct their wedding services from resources accessed on the internet; individuals no longer have to rely on the external authority of church, tradition and minister in order to explore for themselves the varied faith resources on the web; a few weeks ago Anglican bishops produced their pre-election pastoral letterto their congregations, available as a 57 page downloadable document. For those digitally deprived parishioners the only access is through a hard copy from Church House. Would they not have been better to produce the standard 1000 word blog? Who but academics are going to read that length of document on-line? Form determining content again?
So how are we to get a grip on these assemblages and to begin to make critical judgments (like our little boy in assembly) about which are life enhancing and which are life denying? Challenging though this may be, it demands of us a new terminology and conceptual framework – the old assumptions about human autonomy are not “fit for purpose”.
Before I propose some possibilities, I refer the reader to a book on contemporary Russia: “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia” by Peter Pomerantsev. The writer argues that the authoritarian control exercised by President Putin is established through control of the media and deliberate manipulation of the population by playing on their fears and nightmares; one of which is the narrative of hostile Western imperialism. The route to critical thought and reflection that we might associate with an Enlightenment ideal of reflexivity, is short-circuited by the blatant use of the technology to play directly into what I would call a pre-autonomous level of what it is to be or become human. Emotions and fears come before critical thought and questioning. The even more worrying aspect is that the example of Russia is a more extreme version of what happens (perhaps a little less blatantly) in the West. What is required here is a better grasp of human psychology, and another understanding of how we humans operate, that can at least recognize when we are being manipulated in this way, and can counter this through a level of critical reflection. If the digital technology is being employed to “rewire” a passive population, where is the hope for political change?
The resource that I am finding helpful in this respect is the work of Bernard Stiegler, a French philosopher of technology, who can at least open up these other levels of thought through a different analysis of our digitally tethered assemblages and addictions. Obviously a blog will not allow me to elaborate, but two crucial insights are his use of the term “pharmakon” a Greek word that means both remedy and poison, close to my own understanding of being entangled, and pointing to the double-edged sword which is the digital revolution. The other is his less accessible ideas about human psychology and development, building upon the work of Winnicott and Simondon, which do indeed suggest that technology is being used through commercial exploitation to manipulate those pre-critical dimensions of human behavior, and to short-circuit the longer processes of reflection and questioning which are essential, ethically, politically and pastorally. His counter to this is a reconfiguration of education and the university, but, for those of faith, we might want to explore how and to what extent material religious practices can be, to paraphrase Stiegler’s term “a therapeutics of faithful dissent”. Perhaps it is possible to enable content to triumph over form after all.
One thing is certain, we cannot return to a point pre-digital any more than we can to a time pre-wheel, pre-clock time or pre-drugs, we can only progress from where we are, fully entangled in the material assemblages which are made up of the human and the non-human.
John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of William Temple Foundation.
The leaders of Britain, politicians, intellectuals and churches, invariably focus on what’s gone wrong with life, whether it’s the economy, the NHS, education, inequality or foodbanks. Yet that’s to start with the carts of life. There are some useful lessons we might draw from economics, offering a message on Lent and sin. Without the horse, the cart is pretty useless, so let’s rather begin with the horse. And, by that, I mean I’m grateful that I’m neither dead nor am I dirt poor. And that’s astonishing progress, because only 100 years ago my uncle John Robert Atherton (after whom I was probably named), was born and died in 1900, one of the 20% who tragically died in childhood of incurable infectious diseases. The remainder often suffered from great undernourishment, and from lack of education. In contrast, I’m 76, highly educated, have a modest pension, and therefore the freedom to be and to do. And these great and historic achievements have beneficially affected more and more people increasingly across the whole world in terms of incomes, life expectancy and education.
Of course, these are not as yet a universal achievement. A very significant but diminishing minority do not share in the benefits obtained by the Industrial and then the Mortality Revolutions. A billion still live in absolute poverty, and, in rich economies like Britain and the USA, a significant minority still suffer from relative deprivation. These deeply disturbing situations reflect what is called the paradox of development; the great achievements in wellbeing in the last 200 years have also been accompanied by deeply negative forces, including grave inequalities (throughout history, and including today, these paradoxes of development, or ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’, traditionally included famines, epidemic, climate changes, migrations and state failures).
So this analysis is therefore about putting the horse back where it belongs: before the cart. Don’t begin, as our leaders in academia, politics and churches do, with the downsides of life, with the paradoxes of development. No. Begin with the ongoing historic achievements in income, health and education in only the last 200 years. Then, and only then, also address the paradoxes of development.
What on earth has Lent and sin got to do with this? Well, for most of its history Christianity has regularly put the cart before the horse, and especially in the season of Lent, and especially with its focus on sin. And that’s again putting things the wrong way round. Let’s think a bit more about this.
So much of the church’s historic views on sin are pathological, and are now also profoundly inaccurate and unhelpful. Let me give you a few examples:
In medieval churches, the walls were often covered with paintings regularly featuring vivid pictures of hell as the punishment for sin if the parishioners didn’t confess to a priest. The fear this inevitably injected was also a powerful way of controlling the population.
If a newborn baby died before it was baptised, it was, until relatively recently, buried in unconsecrated ground outside the consecrated church yard – because its original sin, addressed only through baptism, therefore ostracised it beyond the pale.
When I was a young Rector of Hulme Church in inner city Manchester in the late 1960s, I was frequently asked to ‘church’ a young mother who had just given birth to a child. Now, this old ‘churching’ service wasn’t a ‘thanksgiving for childbirth’ as it later became. It was a (grandmothers won’t let the daughter out till she’d been churched), going back to the Christian doctrine that original sin was transmitted to new generations through the sexual act, through the woman’s birth of a child.
Why on earth did Christianity and the churches have such views often well into the twentieth century? My ongoing research in economics and religious studies indicates that for all human history, until the 19th century, the vast majority of people lived lives, as the great 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, which were ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’. They died at best by middle age, they lived in poverty and squalor, and they often suffered violent deaths. Reflecting and deepening such experiences, no wonder such views of sin, of the self-inflicted darkness of life, so pervaded Christian thinking and preaching. But now life is quite different. For most people life is long, peaceful and relatively prosperous, with increasing healthcare and educational opportunities for a growing majority.
So I now begin with the lovely and accurate Anglican collect or prayer for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent: ‘Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made…’ That’s where I begin, with the fundamental goodness of the created order. Then, and only then, do I address what’s also gone wrong in terms of sin and finitude (don’t confuse them, and do recognise both as severe, distinct and different constraints on our social development – including as the paradoxes of development). And that’s certainly not to therefore acknowledge my ‘wretchedness’, as the collect for Ash Wednesday goes on to declare! Whatever I now feel and understand as my sin and finitude, I would thankfully, not normally refer to it as wretchedness.
How then, to define sin today, post-1800? Well, I go to the New Testament’s interpretation of it as ‘missing the mark’. In other words, we aim for, in Paul’s words, ‘what is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable’ (Philippians 4.8). And then, and only then, do we recognise and face up to where we get it wrong personally and collectively (the latter including what we call structural sin in terms of defective or bad institutions, markets or nations). Now this is called ‘putting the horse before the cart in Christianity, church life and history’. It’s about Christian beliefs, urgently updated in the life of the most historic changes in human life, continuing to give greater depth and greater meaning to our ordinary human experiences.
William Temple Foundation is delighted to present our inaugural annual lecture, delivered by the Most Reverend & Right Honourable Dr. John Sentamu, Archbishop of York. This event is the first of its kind for the Foundation, yet it represents a continuation of our work supporting important voices to reach wider audiences. The lecture will be held at Leeds Civic Hall on Wednesday 18th March at 5.30pm. All are welcome to this free public event.
Following the recent publication of his edited volume ‘On Rock or Sand’ Archbishop Sentamu will share insights into how we might build firm foundations for Britain’s future. In particular, the Archbishop will discuss social movements and activism in light of continuing economic pressures. He will argue for the right and duty of the Church to speak out in the face of injustice. The lecture titled, ‘Air, Light, Land and Water: Reclaiming public assets for the common profit’ will also explore notions of citizenship and common ownership.
Professor Chris Baker, Director of William Temple Foundation said, ‘We are extremely pleased that Archbishop Sentamu will deliver our inaugural annual lecture. Rooted in the Temple tradition, Archbishop Sentamu’s concern for inequality and issues of poverty resonates well beyond Anglican circles. In the run-up to the general election, the Church offers an important voice on these issues. As such, we invite those who share similar concerns, from all faiths, as well as those from secular backgrounds, to come and hear the Archbishop’s address.’
For full information and to book free tickets click here.
It was July 1992 when John Plender dropped a bombshell in the Financial Times, reporting that the Church Commissioners had lost about £800m of their then £3billion portfolio. A year later, I joined the Church Commissioners as a graduate. At one point, around 1995, I was seconded to the Diocese of Chichester for a while. Do you know what their average weekly giving was per head at that point? 97p; in one of the richest dioceses in the land! 1995 was an important year for it was the year in which the Turnbull Commission reported, ushering in the era of the Archbishops’ Council and a slim-lined Church Commissioners. Many would see this change as a pivotal one, because it altered the organisational landscape of the Church of England, and to some degree the balance of power. But I have come to see that it was the Copernican Revolution in parish funding that has really altered the Church of England, because since 1992 the living church – in the parishes – has had to move from being subsidised to being largely self-financing.
It’s hard to find the exact figures, but before 1992 the Commissioners footed about 25% of the Church of England’s annual bill. This included cathedrals, pensions, and clergy stipends. After 1992, it became apparent that not only could the Commissioners not afford to keep paying this, but that the cost of the Church of England was going to increase quite substantially, because of the pension liability. In future, the entire cost of running the parochial system would need to be met by the living church, and not the endowment.
This double whammy of reducing subsidy and increasing costs meant that 97p per head wasn’t exactly going to cut it. Of course, non-conformist churches have always had to pay their own way, and it is not so much this state of events as the transition to it that I think has been so negative for the Church of England. This is partly because it coincided with the 20 year period between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse in credit when capitalism and the logic of the market reigned supreme. So the narrative has naturally been one of profit and loss, of assets and liabilities, and of sales and marketing.
Embracing the narrative de jour has led the Church into all kinds of trouble, chief of which has been a fundamental change in the clergy’s actual and psychological contract of employment, in pursuit of a well-meaning attempt to modernise the awkwardness of the clergy freehold. This has taken place just when it has become apparent how much secularisation has robbed clergy of their social mandate, compounding a feeling of retrenchment, as parish boundaries are redrawn and clergy are asked to cover ever greater patches, and to be more accountable for their performance. Now many of them talk about a need to keep the faithful happy enough that they keep contributing to the parish share and provide positive feedback for clergy appraisals and career development. So it has become entirely logical that the Church of England should have developed a preoccupation with bums on seats as a key metric both of clergy success and as a way of keeping the show on the road financially.
Thankfully, this currently shows up more in the rhetoric than the statistics. Linda Woodhead’s YouGov numbersreport that 67% of Church of England clergy still think the Church should prioritise ‘England as a whole’ rather than any ‘member’ constituency. But the numbers trail off in the non-established churches. One hopes this is not a direction of travel, as he who pays the piper starts increasingly insisting on calling the tune. Anecdotally, this is already happening in some dioceses, where churches have been known to at least threaten to withhold subsidy from those churches with whom they theologically disagree. Writ large this threatens the parochial system, which depends on cross-subsidy to provide its universal service. And if it can’t, the case for establishment becomes much more evidently one of historical anachronism, if clergy cannot claim in any meaningful sense to be serving the citizenry in every corner of the land.
In the jargon, I think the church is caught at a classic crossroads: should it manage the organisation, or manage the enterprise? As a business person, I can of course see that in pursuit of the former we could easily take out cost, leverage plant, optimise HR, and increase market share. Whether or not this would enhance the Church’s mission, I have doubts. Either way, as Iain McGilchrist reminds us, this is a classic dilemma about attention. McGilchrist’s work shows that the left brain favours the alluring measurability of managing the organisation, while the right brain favours a soft focus approach on the big picture. And while the two hemispheres are complementary, brain plasticity would argue that attending to one more than the other will have the effect, over time, of strengthening the muscle that is most often used. So, while management attention is focused on measures and metrics to improve the organisation, less attention by busy leaders may then be paid to the more nebulous outreach activities, in spite of the fact that these are the very activities that seem best placed to cleanse the church’s toxic brand – Fairtrade, foodbanks, credit unions etc.
And this is the key ecclesiological challenge. These activities, by in large, do not serve those who pay for them through parish share. I welcome initiatives like the former Bishop of Durham’s, to ask the parishes what they want to pay, because I think it is at parish level that the value of these outreach initiatives in the community are really felt. But how do we ensure that a gradual shift towards member-led priority-setting doesn’t drift towards narrow self-interest?
Iain McGilchrist, again, offers some comfort for the church in this regard, because the habits of theology tend to encourage suppleness in the right brain. But only if we resist attempts to convert these habits into left-brain simplicities. You probably saw the headlines when Linda Woodhead’s latest statistics were released, screaming ‘Time to get serious’ and ‘We’ll be dead in 10 years’. If we can keep our heads (both halves of our heads in particular), I don’t buy these predictions. In psychological terms, managerial control is about a need to feel competent by exercising dominion over the environment. God even encourages this by his commissioning of Adam in Genesis, and psychometric research bears out a trend amongst the senior management population to have a strong bias in favour of this tendency. This is all left-brain stuff, and it feels natural. So calls to arms about bums on seats play into a pre-primed mindset, and allow us suddenly to feel like masters again. But we also have, courtesy of Jesus’ many clashes with the Pharisees, a reminder that this should not be allowed to become a snare for the unwary. Mission inward is only ever legitimate if it serves mission outward. It’s not just in the Gospels that the Church is at its most attractive to new recruits – and fresh resources – but when it is manifesting love for the marginalised.
Eve Poole is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
Last Thursday evening I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the first of the Faith Debates on the Future of the Church of England organised by Linda Woodhead and colleagues at the University Church. This opening debate was on the future of the parish system. Four distinguished speakers offered their thoughts: a representative of Radical Orthodoxy from Cambridge, deeply committed to a vision of both church and theology which felt like a throwback to a different era; an entrepreneur who provided upbeat examples of what churches with extensive capacity could do; a sociologist of religion, himself a non-stipendiary Minister who advocated this pattern of ministry as the way to the future; and then a Canon Missioner from Exeter who actually had some recent parish experience. My role was to throw a spanner in the works and to challenge each of their interpretations of where the parish system is in reality, although the speaker from Exeter was also close to the mark on this.
Had there been more chance to expand my brief contribution I would have pointed out that “parishes” are no longer the correct unit of currency, certainly in the more rural areas, and that it is benefices or clusterings of parishes that make up the majority of charges for rural clergy. As it was I could only mention lack of capacity as the major inhibiting factor, along with a lack of critical mass of people to populate new initiatives and the problem of lack of continuity of contact for most rural clergy who do not even see their regular congregations sometimes for weeks on end, as they dash from church to church and meeting to meeting. I was informed by the entrepreneur that this was a problem of “mind set” not capacity, and I would love to have invited him to my own benefice where we have worked on a raft of new initiatives, but without the people to cooperate on these, success is inevitably limited.
Two other factors are worth a mention. The first is that there is a glut of clergy of my generation coming up to retirement over the next five years, more than will be replaced by new recruits, and that the policy in my Diocese at least, is to redeploy the remaining resources into the urban areas and new towns. This will further reduce the numbers of clergy for rural benefices. Then there is the challenge of recruiting ministers in the first place into the ever expanding rural empires. Who, in their right mind, wants to be running a scattered benefice of 12 small churches struggling to pay their parish share let alone for the upkeep of their buildings? One can generate as many exciting new ideas as possible, such as that of ‘Festival Churches’ which are only used for occasional offices and Harvest, Christmas etc., but none of this is, in itself, going to stem the continued decline of rural churches and congregations. A friend who was with me has the experience of worshipping in a remote rural deanery with 27 churches where, at the moment, there are only two full time stipendiary incumbents and one lone curate. The development of lay ministry which should have been further encouraged 25 years ago when there was still time and energy seems to have been blocked by a hierarchy afraid of losing control, or simply not interested in the smaller benefices out on the margins. So, like the other denominations before it, the CofE is effectively abandoning its rural presence and focusing its resources on the centres of population.
Only four days later, a report was published on the future of church rural primary schools which concluded that “the days of small autonomous rural primary schools are numbered”. Despite subsequent attempts to row back from what reads as a very negative response to the problem, there is a failure to face up to how and why this pressure on rural schools has come about. In an article in the Daily Telegraph by the Bishop of Oxford, current Chair of the Board of Education, the reason given for the threats of closure and amalgamation are simply those of financial pressures. Those pressures have been there for well over 30 years and led already to the closure of rural schools. I would suggest rather the current pressure is a direct effect of government policy of Academies which results in any school with less than 250 pupils not being financially viable as a stand-alone Academy and thus facing merger or closure. Somehow this stark fact is being lost or quietly buried beneath the “spin” of all the new initiatives which such schools can take such as hosting Post Offices on their premises!
The reality is the Church of England is so worried about losing government funding (which accounts for 90% of its funds for schools) and thus its stake in the formal education system, that it is prepared to collude with Coalition education policy rather than rock the boat by challenging it. The hope is that its own Diocesan Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) which become the umbrella replacement LEAs for some of its church schools, will be effective enough to maintain a church presence in at least some areas. The impact, however, is that those small church schools on the margins of the urban areas and often with challenging financial and teaching scenarios, will not be wanted by such Diocesan MATs as they are desperate to recruit “good schools” rather than problematic ones. Once again then, this is a policy for abandoning the rural. It has been pointed out that for many rural clergy it is their contact with the local schools that is the main channel of outreach. Remove the schools, or absorb them into larger units managed from outside the benefice, and that channel is closed for good.
I am not arguing that abandoning the rural is a deliberate strategy of the Church of England – that would be to assume that the CofE is capable of a deliberate strategy on anything – but that, like it or not, this will be the impact of current trends and decisions. Perhaps it is time for a dose of honesty and realism so that those of us who continue to be committed to some form of rural ministry can at least know where we stand.
Revd. Dr John Reader is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
John Reader will be running a workshop at ‘Reclaiming the Public Space’on 10th November in Manchester. Other speakers including Linda Woodhead, Craig Calhoun, Elaine Graham, Raymond Plant and more. Book Now!
In 1989 Hans Kung and David Tracy published Paradigm Change in Theology based on a symposium held at the University of Tubingen. Contributors included such high profile names as Moltmann, Schillebeeckx, Boff, Gilkey and Cobb. The subject areas covered included hermeneutics; scientific theory and theology; political dimensions of a new theological paradigm; feminist and liberation theologies and relationship with other faiths. Were they right to flag-up such fundamental changes, and, if so, where are we now?
Looking at theology within the Church of England twenty five years on, one might be forgiven for concluding that far from signaling a paradigm change, what we have seen is a regression to a pre-Enlightenment understanding that plays into the hands of a hierarchy nervous about its loss of authority, and a communitarianism which extols the virtues of practical action at the cost of any serious theological reflection. Like political culture the emphasis is upon presentation (or “spin”) rather than substance or critical engagement. Although forms of political engagement were driving forces behind the original book, nothing much has come of these since, and those who look for a more radical approach have been marginalized by both church and theological establishment. So it is time to revisit the notion of a paradigm change for theology in the light of recent philosophical and political developments.
In recent blogs and publications my colleagues at the William Temple Foundation have used and adopted the language of“blurred encounters” in relation to faith engagement with social action and the inevitable crossing of boundaries, cultural, geographical and intellectual, that accompanies such engagement. Whilst this is correct and in the spirit of the original book, Blurred Encounters: A Reasoned Practice of Faith, it does not refer to the subtitle of the book nor what I intended to be the more radical nature of the work. This was not supposed to be simply about pragmatic responses to challenging contexts that required a willingness to compromise and to be “eaten well”, but also an attempt to produce a post-foundational theology by challenging the strict demarcation between faith and reason that has characterized theology since the time of Kant. If that sounds too demanding and theoretical, then it probably explains why even my colleagues have shied away from that dimension of the book, and my aims of providing criteria by which one might assess the validity of the actual blurred encounters.
In engagement with the book, there have been no references to the notion of a post-foundational theology, nor any sense that others understand what this means. Others more critical of the work imagine that this is a matter of having a certain fascination for the writings of particular philosophers and thus not essential to the project. In the light of new publications I want to restate the argument that “Blurred Encounters” was pushing towards a paradigm shift in theology.
Ten years down the line and others have been able to pursue these ideas more effectively. Whitney A. Bauman, in the recently published Religion and Ecology: developing a planetary ethic, has taken further the concept of the crossing of boundaries and argues that religion and science, humanity and nature, sacred and secular, are always already intertwined, and that attempts to separate them have been the result of a particular metaphysics that itself leads to damaging consequences, notably those associated with globalization and its detrimental impact upon humans in less advantaged parts of the world, and indeed the planet as a whole. He also draws upon sources that I have since been able to pursue such as Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad and Catherine Keller. I will attempt a summary of his ideas.
Bauman describes what he calls Agrippa’s trilemma which lays out the three main possibilities for how we claim to justify our knowledge (pp18-21). The first two of these are representative of the domination exercised by globalization and are, foundationalism and circularity. “Foundationalism operates (most often) by digging down to what is perceived to be a base of reality: whether material (as in scientific materialism) or ideal (as in the creation of the world according to divine laws by a good God)”. Circularity is a particular version of the same form of argument. The third option and the one favoured by Bauman is that of infinite regress, where instead of trying to bring the process of truth discovery to an end, instead somewhat in the manner of Latour who sees that truth is a matter of keeping the references circulating, the acknowledgement that we are all contextual, perspectival, embodied and changing creatures, means that our knowledge claims are always on shifting grounds. A post-foundational theology would thus recognise that our knowledge is always provisional and contingent, and that it is when we try to stop the references circulating – which is always an arbitrary decision – that power dominates over truth, and both humans and non-humans find themselves on the wrong end of that power.
Following this alternative approach to its logical conclusion, Bauman suggests that we need to abandon a foundational metaphysics, to acknowledge that agency “goes all the way down” including therefore that which we see as non-human, that human exceptionalism is to be left behind, and that the boundaries between subject and object are always permeable. (p162). This applies also to our own sense of personal identity: “Our internality is nothing without the multiple others with which we are in constant interaction, and our bodies are made up of multiple biological, historical and cultural others. However one draws the boundaries around a concept or identity, that entity is always already multiple” (p163). This will lead to a different approach to environmental ethics and issues of political power. So the question for a new theological paradigm is whether it can cope with a post-foundationalism and acknowledge that its truth claims are subject to challenge and uncertainty.
There are now two main strands in such a developing approach, one associated with what is known as the New Materialism and the other related one we are calling Relational Christian Realism. The latter will be spelt out in detail in the book A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Public Good, (Baker, James and Reader, Ashgate: forthcoming). Both yield a theology more modest in its truth claims, and a conceptual discourse more appropriate for engagement with contemporary political and scientific issues and, we will argue, a paradigm change for the discipline as a whole. The difference between this and the global ethics advocated by Kung and colleagues is that: “the not-yet space of emergent newness is just as much a reality for the rest of the natural world as it is for humans” and the task facing us is to discern which particular emergent assemblages will lead to the flourishing of both human and non-human (Bauman, p153).
So whereas the original paradigm shift envisaged by Kung, Tracy and colleagues involved only the human, in this new context as described by Bauman, Crockett and ourselves, it is the whole human non-human nexus which emerges as the site for discussions of the ‘public good’ and for revised religious and political activity.