Books Worth Reading (6): The Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison

Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

In recent years I have found myself in several conversations during which a definite disquiet has greeted the suggestion that modern science depended on Christianity for its origins. The claim has often been heard as an triumphalist apology for the Christian faith (and by extension a denial of the legitimacy of, for instance, Islamic science). It is actually a historical claim about the history of ideas and, as a historical claim about the history of ideas, it is (more or less) uncontroversial. That the claim has become historically uncontroversial owes much to the work of Peter Harrison, formerly the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, and now the Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Over the last decade or so Harrison's work has significantly re-shaped the understanding of the history of the relationship between science and religion by demonstrating that both 'religion' and 'science', as we use those words today, are modern conceptual inventions and that the invention of the latter was especially shaped by theological considerations. Many of the arguments that ground these claims (together with some new arguments) are presented in The Territories of Science and Religion, the published version of Harrison's 2011 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.

The essence of the argument is crystallised in a helpful analogy at the book's outset. Harrison invites his readers to imagine a contemporary historian presenting a claim about a war between Egypt and Israel in 1600. Such a claim would actually be meaningless because neither 'Egypt' nor 'Israel' - as we now understand those signifiers - existed in 1600. Yes, there may well have been a war between different parties which then occupied parts of what our maps now identify as 'Egypt' and 'Israel', but this would not have been a war between the modern nation states that are now designated Egypt and Israel. Analogously, claims about the history of science and religion can involve projecting these modern concepts onto earlier practices which only just, if at all, overlap with what we mean by 'science' and 'religion'.

So what were scientia and religio in the ancient world and how do they differ from what 'science' and 'religion' are in the modern world? In brief, and with all the dangers of summarising a complex argument, the differences can be explained like this. In the ancient world, both scientia and religio were more like inner virtues than external practices. In the modern world, on the other hand, both 'science' and 'religion' are external, objectified practices. In the ancient world, the purpose of scientia was to form particular mental habits. In the modern world the purpose of 'science' is to advance the human capacity to manipulate the physical world. In the ancient world, religio was identified by the cultivation of piety. In the modern world, 'religion' is identified by bodies of belief and identifiable institutional, communal practices. 


In the first instance, recognising this conceptual history enables some critical historical leverage on the commonly-held idea that with the emergence of Christianity, the previous  progress of 'science' on the part of the ancients was arrested, impeded by the allegedly intrinsically obscurantist tendencies of Christianity. Only with the loosening of Christianity's influence in the modern era, so the argument goes, has 'science' been set free again to take up its historical trajectory of bringing light where religion only brought darkness. This particular 'myth of the conflict between science and religion' employs the same degree of category mistakes employed in the analogy about the 1600 war between 'Egypt' and 'Israel'. In the ancient world, 'science' and 'religion' were not the sorts of things that would be in conflict. (To add my own analogy, it would be like suggesting that the Australian Football League was in some perennial, essential conflict with the Oslo Society of Cabinet Makers.There is simply nothing about their respective concerns that require them to have a relationship of any sort, let alone one of conflict.) Only in the modern era do 'science' and 'religion' emerge in ways that the possibility of 'conflict' attaches to their relationship.

So how did 'religion' and 'science' emerge as modern concepts and what is it about their respective definitions which means that they might be in conflict? In the case of religion, a principal factor was the insistence of the sixteenth-century Reformers that 'faith be explicit' in contrast to the 'implicit faith' of medieval Catholicism. As Harrison notes: "The Reformers insisted instead that Christian believers be able to articulate the doctrines they professed, and do so in propositional terms" (p.92).  As such, religio as a virtue was replaced by 'religion' as body of beliefs. Now externalised, it could become the object of comparison and objectification: religion becomes something that attracts the definite article. Harrison documents this shift with reference to the emergence of the phrase 'the Christian religion' in books published in English between 1530 and 1690 (see pp. 92-94). The shift is also crystallised in the translation history of the title of John Calvin's Institutio Christiannae Religionis. The title given in English translation changed as follows:

• 'The Institution of Christian Religion' (1561)
• The Institution of the Christian Religion' (1762)
• 'The Institutes of the Christian Religion' (1813).

Thus, the "modern rendering is suggestive of an entity 'the Christian religion' that is constituted by its propositional content - 'the institutes'. These connotations were completely absent from the original title" (p.11).

If religion now attracts the definite article, it can also be pluralised. Religion becomes a genus of which there are particular species. This move is especially highlighted in the way the West designates as 'religions' the other traditions and ways of life it with which it comes into contact during colonial expansion. This phenomenon has, of course, been well-documented in recent decades. Harrison draws particular attention to the fact that colonial expansion was more or less coincident with the religious fragmentation of Europe. 'World religions', itself a new concept, "came into existence through the projection of the religious fragmentation of Western Christendom onto the rest of the world. ... The 'other religions' were thus constructed as inferior versions of the territorialized Christian religions of Europe" (p.99). (An upcoming 'Books Worth Reading' will be summarising Brent Nongbri's Before Religion: The History of a Modern Concept (2013) which addresses this issue in much more detail.)

What then of the origins of science? Those who first developed an experimental approach to understanding the natural world did not at first necessarily consider themselves 'scientists'. Yes, they were producing bodies of knowledge about the world that represented a shift from scientia as an internal virtue to something objective and measurable. In producing such bodies of knowledge they would have they thought they were doing 'natural philosophy' or even 'natural theology'. But, at some point, not before the nineteenth century, these experimental activities, and their consequent bodies of knowledge, came to be described as 'science' and to break free of their philosophical and theological frameworks. Harrison quotes an 1867 article which defines science in terms of "physical and experimental science, to the exclusion of theological and metaphysical" (William Ward quoted by Harrison, p. 145f.). This is the significant move which constitutes modern science: not that people were only now using experimental methods to increase their knowledge of the world, but that the knowledge so produced was being separated from any philosophical or theological framework. Harrison summarises this shift in these terms:

In the nineteenth century, 'science' as we now understand it, came to be constructed in a way that resembled the early modern construction of the idea 'religion'. That is to say, it was aggregated from a range of activities and distanced from the personal qualities of those who practiced it. This took place when 'science' came to be linked to a putatively unified set of practices ('the scientific method'), associated with a distinct group of individuals ('scientists'), and purged of elements that had once been regarded as integral to its status and operations (the theological and metaphysical). Modern religion had its birth in the seventeenth century; modern science in the nineteenth. Properly speaking then, this belated appearance of 'science' provides the first occasion for a relationship between science and religion (p.147).

Only in the nineteenth century, therefore, do religion and science - both defined as bodies of knowledge, produced by particular communities engaging in certain practices to make particular claims about the world - become the kinds of phenomena which can be compared, contrasted - and brought into conflict.

Yet, as Harrison explores developments in science's self-understanding, it becomes apparent that certain remnants of its theological origins remain. (This is also a helpful way to return to the disquiet about those theological origins noted at the outset of this post.) The early experimental scientists used theological ideas to evaluate and understand their scientific work and its achievements. To take one example of the many which Harrison provides, Francis Bacon. With a particular understanding of Genesis providing the backdrop, Bacon writes as follows of how science is able to 'repair' the fallen state of humanity.  

For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences. For creation was not by the curse made altogether and forever a rebel, but...is not by various labours...at length in in some measure subdued to supplying of man with bread; that is to the uses of human life (From Bacon's Novum Organum, quoted by Harrison, p.138).

This leads to a link between science, the 'relief of the human estate' and therefore 'progress'.  "The stuff of nature is pursued not only for the purpose of moral edification, but also to yield technologies that will offer ways of relieving the human condition. In time the latter will completely displace the former" (136). In other words, the link between the rhetoric of progress and modern science has a theological foundation, and even if the theological foundation is discarded (which it now has been), the nexus between science and progress has its origins in that cluster of Christian theological convictions.  From this emerging independence of the rhetoric of progress other things flow: "Progress had once been understood as progress towards a particular end. Now it had become an end in itself" (p141). A new cultural status is now granted to both the discipline of science and its practitioners:  "Now the wonders of nature become the wonders of science, understood as the product of scientists' rigorous application of the scientific method" (169). So yes, the theological origins of science are clear enough: but given the ambiguity of 'scientific progress', Christians might pause before pointing to the 'Christians' origins of science.

Harrison concludes the book by referring to various contemporary debates. These include debates about the coherence of science, something which is prone to being exaggerated. He insists that 'science' and 'religion' are not cultural constants, highlighting as he does so the manner in which ideological atheism is parasitic on the distinctly modern construct of 'religion'. He also cautions against over-enthusiastic claims about a "consonance between science and religion", precisely because such claims often involve conceding the cultural authority of science and the propositional nature of religion.

It goes without saying that this book is a work of advanced scholarship. It would be most easily read by people with some existing knowledge of the history of ideas in general and, more specifically, the history of science and religion. Nevertheless, Harrison presents his arguments in an accessible and engaging style. Some of the more technical details of the various arguments are placed in endnotes, thus allowing the general reader to take in the larger argument more easily. The book would be of interest, I imagine, to anyone (Christian or not) involved in the science/religion discussion. It would also be of value to ministers and preachers who confront the pastoral issues raised by the rhetoric of conflict between science and religion (remembering, though, that this is not a book of Christian apologetics) as well as to anyone who wishes to know a little more about the history of Western culture and some of the formative ideas which have given it the particular shape it has.

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Links to videos of the lectures at which Harrison first presented the material making up The Territories of Science and Religion are available here.

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(This series of 'books worth reading' engages an eclectic selection of books: some directly related to my teaching, some to the UCA, and some of more general theological interest. They are not offered as technical book reviews, but as summaries which highlight why I think they might be useful resources, good conversation starters, or volumes that make helpful contributions to scholarly debate.)

Some (no longer anonymous) thoughts on theology

Go to the previous post to see the line up of authors and quotes.

 

 

Some (sort of anonymous) thoughts on theology

The following list of various approaches to, and understandings of, theology includes some that I've been canvassing with my students in my introductory unit, Faith, Theology and Doctrines. I've added some others as well. The authors are unidentified for now. Some of the approaches are dead give-aways, and in this age of all-powerful search engines, the sources of most of these quotes could be tracked down pretty easily. But for those who would like to think about who might be the authors, I'll wait a few days before adding their names. Inclusion in this list does not necessarily constitute endorsement on my part!

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UPDATE:

At the request of one of my readers here's a list (in alphabetical order) of the authors of the following quotes. I'll link the authors to the actual quotes in a day or so.

Karl Barth - Sarah Coakley- Gustavo Gutiérrez - Robert Jenson - Elizabeth Johnson - James McClendon - Wolfhart Pannenberg - Dorothee Sölle - C.S. Song -

Medi-Ann Volpe

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UPDATE 2:

So, all is now revealed.

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Sarah Coakley

If necessary...one must start from a new perspective if this is the best way to recapture the contemporary imagination for Christ, or to reinvite reflection on the perennial mysteries of the gospel. Such is the inspiration of the notion of systematics that informs this work. Systematics, in other words, does not convey the hubristic ideas of a totalizing discourse that excludes debate, opposition, or riposte; but on the other hand, it does not falter at the necessary challenge of representing the gospel afresh in all its ramifications - systematically unfolding the connections of the parts of the vision that is set before us.

James McClendon

Theology means struggle.

Karl Barth

Thus the real results of dogmatics, even though they have the form of the most positive statements, can themselves only be new questions, questions to and fro between what the Church seems to proclaim and the Bible seems to want proclaimed, questions which can be put only with the greatest modesty and a sense of supreme vulnerability if they are perhaps serious and significant questions.

Gustavo Gutiérrez

The function of theology as critical reflection on praxis has gradually become more clearly defined in recent years, but it has its roots in the first centuries of the Church's life. The Augustinian theology of history which we find in The City of God, for example, is based on a true analysis of the signs of the times and the demands with which they challenge the Christian community.

Dorothee Soelle

But can there be any Logos, any systematic and rational clarification, of God? If theology were simply a 'theory about God', analogous to ossology (the theory of bones), then it would be an insult to God, blasphemy. The object of theology can only be the relationship between God and human beings: in other words, reflection on the experiences that have compelled human beings to talk about something like 'God'.

Robert Jenson

[T]heology is actual as a continuing consultation. Theology is not the adding of proposition to proposition in the steady construction of a planned structure of knowledge. It is a discussion and debate that as it continues regularly confronts new questions, and from which participants drop out and into which new participants enter.... It is the fate of every theological system to be dismembered and have its fragments bandied about in an ongoing debate.

Elizabeth Johnson

Rooted in the Christian tradition and equipped with scholarly tools, those of us in the theological guild think about the meaning of faith and the way it is practiced. The purpose is to shed more light on the gospel, so it can be lived out with deeper understanding and vibrant love of God and neighbour.

Medi Ann Volpe

 
The riches of the imagination can aid the task of discipleship, but in order to do so, the imagination itself must be trained by doctrine to nourish hope, encourage perseverance in faith and demonstrate the love in which Christians participate as members of Christ. Doctrine is a gift of the rationally capacious to structure our imaginations according to Christian hope.

C.S.Song

For most Christian faith traditions and schools of Christian theology, the question of God is the beginning point. And yet, when we think of the whole more deeply, we may realize that this time-honoured way of doing theology parts company with the methods of science and technology. Science seeks to discover what is presently unknown by the study of what is known. God is a great unknown. To begin with God, therefore, is to attempt to explain what is known by what is not known, quite the opposite of how science proceeds. Rather we should begin where we are with what can be known through our experience in the world and see where it take us.

Wolfhart Pannenberg

Dogmatics as systematic theology proceeds by way of both assertion and hypothesis as it offers a model of the world, humanity, and history as they are grounded in God, a model which, if it is tenable, will 'prove' the reality of God and the truth of Christian doctrine, showing them to be consistently conceivable and also confirming them, by the form of presentation. In this way dogmatics expounds the truth claim of Christian teaching. it shows how this teaching must be understood in context if it is to be accepted as truth.

Books Worth Reading (5): Christianity: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Woodhead

Linda Woodhead, Christianity: A Very Short Introduction 2nd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

This book is neither a work of apologetics directed to non-Christians nor an exposition of the Christian faith written for insiders. It is a social, historical and cultural description of Christianity written for readers who are theologically uncommitted and culturally-  and/or  intellectually curious.  But it is, nevertheless, a book that the theologically-committed insider could find well-worth reading, precisely because it gives something of an outsider's perspective on this phenomenon we know as 'Christianity'.

Woodhead is Professor of Sociology of Religion in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University.  She is one of the most prominent and prolific sociologists writing on religion, especially on religion in the UK. As a sociologist she has particular ideological commitments shaped by that discipline, but that in no way devalues the book or lessens its value to a Christian reader. It is impossible to tell from this work her own relationship to the Christian faith (and this is a strength and not a weakness of the book). 

Belonging to this particular OUP series, it is, obviously enough, a very short book: only 120 pages. It is divided into 6 chapters: (1) Jesus: the God-man; (2) Beliefs, rituals and narratives; (3) The spread of Christianity; (4) Church and Biblical Christianity; (5) Monastic and mystical Christianity; and (6) Christianity in the modern world. Then follows a Conclusion, a two-page chronology of the major events in Christianity's history, and the customary Suggestions for Further Reading.

She describes the first two chapters as introducing "the basic Christian repertoire" (1). It's an interesting phrase which offers a rather different framework than might, say, 'doctrines' or 'beliefs'.  Indeed, she uses it to identify what it is typical of Christianity across it doctrinal diversity. She refers to how "we can turn down the volume on such differences in order to introduce common themes in the Christian repertoire" (p.21).

It is of course, the person of Jesus and some basic beliefs about him which constitute the core of this 'repertoire'. She makes the fairly obvious point that the "canonical Jesus is far more influential than any 'real' Jesus who lies behind the gospels and inspires their portraits" (p.7). Because she is not writing for the theologically-committed, she can make this historical and cultural observation without having to enter contemporary theological debates about the relationship between Jesus and the gospels: "So far as history is concerned, it is the Jesus of the New Testament who has inspired more lives and worked more miracles than the elusive figure historians struggle to reconstruct" (p.7). The theologically committed will take comfort or discomfort from this depending on their views of the status of the 'biblical' or 'canonical' Jesus, but the theologically-neutral observation about the historically-influential Jesus, needs to be weighed in any attempt to find a more 'real' Jesus allegedly more germane to contemporary or culturally-specific interests.

Woodhead's sociological framework is perhaps most evident in her alertness to the connections between social conditions and the spread of Christianity over its 2000-year history. In this regard her brief overview is a helpful foil to the often romanticised and triumphant accounts of Christianity's expansion. For instance, she notes the pre-700AD limited eastward-spread of Christianity towards India and China and their existing religions. She then  contrasts this with the more successful westward spread during the same period. Of this contrast she notes: "Without political backing Christianity was unable to do more than win over small marginal social groups when other religions dominated a territory". On the other hand, the alliance between Christianity and power which accompanied Christianity's renewed attempts to move into those areas in the area of European colonisation did not necessarily lead to greater acceptance. If anything, it has been the "withdrawal of Western colonial powers [that] has led to greater opportunities for Christianity than before" (p. 54). In an important passage, she notes the alliance between certain forms of Christianity, globalisation, and the twentieth-century expansion of Christianity into the global south. Here she finds parallels with the spread of  Islam in the same areas during the same period. Her comments are worth quoting at some length.

In this post-colonial phase, Christianity has been more fully owned and adopted by people who were previously colonial subjects. Many parts of the southern hemisphere have witnessed the growth of new globally networked forms of Christianity, most notably the Pentecostal and Charismatic.... Since their rise has been contemporaneous with that of resurgent Islam, it is interesting to compare the two. Both have flourished in territories which were previously under western colonial control. Both have a globalizing tendency. Both represent indigenous movements of modernization. To be part of recent Islamic or Charismatic upsurges is to be part of global movements with the resources and sense of universal, triumphant purpose that entails. Individuals' horizons and sense of identity are raised from the local or even the national to the global level by belonging to these religions, and power is enhanced accordingly. Through membership one can lay hold of many of the benefits of modernity - including education, technology, and affluence - but without having to westernize. The best of both worlds (p. 54).

There are all sorts of interesting sparks to reflection here, not least the connection between faith, power, globalization and modernity. And the relation of this phenomenon to the attraction of earlier power-less forms of Christianity to 'small marginal groups' warrants considerable theological reflection. 

The expansion of Christianity during the previous century has, of course, taken many forms. Yet, for Woodhead,"[u]nderstanding this huge internal variety within Christianity is less important than understanding the religion's main fault lines" (p.57). To this end (and with a sociologist's nod to Ernst Troeltsch) she believes the diversity of Christianity can best be described in terms of what she designates as its four major types: church, biblical, mystical and monastic. Her descriptions of each of these types are highly illuminating. Perhaps just as illuminating is her suggestion that despite the recent expansion and diversification, none of the new manifestations of Christianity in Asia or Africa, for instance, has introduced any new basic type. Pentecostalism, Fundamentalism, and Charismatic Evangelicalism can still be classified by new four-fold typology, even if in different configurations (see p. 89). In other words, the expansion of Christianity in Asia and Africa is proceeding along trajectories which are generated by the basic reality that Christianity is and has been.

 

As she surveys the contemporary global phenomenon of Christianity, she does seem to suggest that there is one particularly decisive fault line which runs through and across all the different types of Christianity: "More than modern science, it is modern liberal values and a turn to subjective experience which have challenged and divided Christians" (p. 90). She also suggests that Liberal Christianity will have to come to terms with its own failed promise. At it origins, Liberal Christianity saw itself as part of the onward march of modern history which would sweep aside tyranny and "superstition, and replace them with more liberal political arrangements and more rational faith" (p. 97f). 'History', however, has pursued different paths and Liberal Christianity is largely being bypassed:  "Right up to the 1970s it seemed reasonable to think that Liberal Christianity would continue to dominate the Christian, especially Protestant world.... Despite the considerable success...by the end of the 20th century it was clear that confidence in its inevitable triumph had been misplaced" (p.98f). (This observation certainly warrants reflection within the UCA and other mainline protestant churches which have been deeply shaped by the traditions of liberal theology, but that's a task beyond this present post.)

As I noted above, although the book is written for the theologically uncommitted, I think that the theologically committed would find it well worth reading precisely to get a taste of how Christianity is presented when there is no grinding of the theological axes which (inevitably and often quite properly) preoccupy the churches. In that way the book could be a helpful change of pace for church discussion groups which might otherwise draw on typically internal resources to spark their discussions. In short: this book could serve such groups very well and help them get even just a hint of what Christianity looks like from the outside - across both time and place. I can't help but think that that would be a good thing.

(This series of 'books worth reading' engages an eclectic selection of books: some directly related to my teaching, some to the UCA, and some of more general theological interest. They are not offered as technical book reviews, but as summaries which highlight why I think they might be useful resources, good conversation starters, or volumes that make helpful contributions to scholarly debate.)

How not to waste a theological education

It's Week 1 of Semester 1 for the 2016 academic year at Pilgrim Theological College, the college where I teach. For many it's the very start of their theological education. It happens also to be thirty years this year since I had my own Week 1, Semester 1 of theological study and ministerial formation. Half of those thirty years have been as a theological student or congregational minister. The other half has been as a theological teacher.

One of the things common across these three decades is that people still come to theological education with various warnings from their friends and family echoing in their ears. Thirty years ago, it was most likely, 'don't let them destroy your faith'. There is still some of that (and I'm now one of the 'them'!). But the more likely warning today is 'they won't equip you for the changed context'.

The interesting thing about the anxiety in the 1980s was the assumption that ministerial formation was about theological education; the anxiety was about getting the 'right' kind of theology. The assumption of the 2010s is that ministerial formation is more than theological education; the anxiety is about making sure there's a proper alignment of theology to contextual awareness.

Most of the recent debates about ministerial formation in the UCA have been driven by the anxiety of the 2010s - and rightly so. (Although, I do feel constrained to say that even in the ministerial formation I received in the 1980s, I was never encouraged to think that theological education was by itself a sufficient preparation for ministry. There may have been deficiencies in how that distinction was addressed, but - even as one who was especially drawn to theological study - I was never under any illusion that competence as a theological student was immediately transferable to competence in ministry.) Addressing the anxiety also requires attention to the role of theological wisdom in ministerial formation. We'll only know how to align the two properly if we have a clear sense of what the purpose of theological study is in the first place.  Otherwise, the debate will simply be a political tussle between different ecclesiastical stakeholders.

I came at this question, albeit a bit tangentially, in a sermon I preached in our college chapel last year when I addressed the awful possibility of candidates for ministry wasting the time they spent in theological education.

The mainline Protestant theological shuffle

It is not the purpose of a theological education to shuffle you along some conservative-liberal spectrum. What a shocking waste of three or four years of your life that would be if that's all that happened in your theological education.

Nor is it the purpose of a theological education to make you virtuosos of the diversity of the theological world. If all you leave college with is an appreciation of theological diversity, then you may well be able to theologically manage your congregations, but you will never lead them theologically. And what a failure of theological education that too would be.

A discussion of what it means to provide theological  leadership could well occupy a month of blog posts, but for now I'll make this single point: to provide theological leadership is to help the congregation or some other community of faith to enter into the shock, strangeness and novelty of the Christian gospel. It's about pointing back to the seminal events of Jesus' life, death and resurrection and drawing from them an orientation to the present and the future. It is this which not only orients us to the church's only foundation, it is also the point from which we gain critical leverage over any cultural or ecclesial domestication of the church (the risk of which is not an iota lessened by orientation to the changed context). At least one dimension of the purpose of theological education as one part of a wider process of ministry formation is, therefore, to have one's imagination intentionally drawn into, and cultivated by, this shock and strangeness, or what Rowan Williams calls, the 'realignment' of talk about God provoked by Jesus and what happened to him. So, in Williams' own words: 

I think theological talk gets off the ground because some profound puzzlement has shaken up frames of reference. You need to find new words to talk about the whole environment, the entire context in which you’re living. And that’s why the New Testament is so important for looking at how theology works. Something enormous has happened, which has really challenged the categories available, and so I like to say the New Testament is work in progress because it reflects not a uniform, bland final version, but – this is where inspiration comes in – the immediacy of a shock and realignment of how you talk about God and creation. In a sense it muddles up the categories, it says you have to start somehow thinking about God as not confined to elsewhere – but in terms of Word or Son or  Spirit actually accessible within very material, specific conditions. [“Belief and Theology: Some Core Questions” in God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation  (London: DLT, 2005), 1.]

One way, therefore, of ensuring that a theological education is not wasted is to use the time intentionally to place ourselves right in the middle of that puzzle - and to enter it with every ounce of spiritual and intellectual energy we can muster. That means, in some sense, to take time to find our way into the revolution in theological conviction and spiritual experience brought about by Jesus. In other words, this is not just any puzzle; it is a particular puzzle generated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the relationship of this drama to Israel's hope, the world's purpose and the church's mission. The first Christians had their imaginations stretched to breaking point by entering a way of life which grew out of claims about a tortured and executed Jew being God's saving presence on earth. To study theology is to take the time to live into the effects of that puzzle as it has rippled through the history of exegesis, doctrine, prayer, worship and discipleship.

Moreover, there is something particularly resonant about taking this posture towards theological study at this time and in this context. As we in the West move out of Christendom and its associated denominationalism, we are in a position - which even our quite close forebears were not - to feel the force of that puzzle afresh and again to make it generative for the life and witness of the church. With Christendom's blinkers removed, we can see when and how the church has too easily sought to solve or bypass the puzzle and make Jesus less puzzling. The generative power of the gospel is newly available to us. And we are free to see how it can 'realign' the life of the church to its own foundational drama. With theological education so understood (and as part of a wider process of ministerial formation), theologically-formed leaders can be curators of the church's imaginative engagement with this puzzling but life-giving foundation. To resist the puzzle and the theology which it generates is to step back into Christendom.

Theological education at this time in the history of the Western church is a unique opportunity to be grasped by this novelty and to be formed and continually reformed by it. It's too good an opportunity to waste.

 

Are these the most important words in congregational worship?

Over recent months, the congregation of which I'm a member has conducted a steady stream of baptisms. Those baptised have included asylum seekers from Iran, adult Australians, and infants from various backgrounds. I have found myself increasingly struck by the gravity of the words used in the exchange between the minister and the congregation following the baptism. I've begun to wonder if they are the most important words used in congregational worship.

In the Uniting Church baptismal liturgy (taken from Uniting in Worship 2), the exchange begins with this question from the minister:

Friends in Christ, will you promise to maintain a life of worship teaching, witness and service so that he/she/they may grow to maturity in Christ?

And the congregation is invited to respond as follows:

With God's help, we will live out our baptism as a loving community in Christ: nurturing one another in faith, upholding one another in prayer, and encouraging one another in service until Christ comes.

William Temple

It was a commonplace of twentieth-century ecclesiology that church exists only for mission, or in the words of William Temple's famous aphorism, 'the church is the only organisation which exists for the sake of its non-members'.  I think this exchange in the baptismal service offers a parallel insight into the internal dynamics of church life: my participation in congregational life is oriented towards the other members of the congregation. It's a serious challenge and one that is, in my experience, difficult to live up to. Just as congregational life needs to be oriented to the church's call to serve the world, so my participation in congregational life is not to be oriented to meeting my needs or satisfying my preferences, but to building up the congregation that all may grow to maturity in Christ. (Of course any congregation will have its more vulnerable members whose own needs make it hard for them to be oriented to the needs of others. The inclusion of such members is, of course, another measure of the Christian character of any congregation.)

The exchange in the baptismal liturgy reminds us that the orientation of the church to the world begins with what could be called the 'congregational discipline' of orienting our congregational participation to the growth in grace and love of the whole congregation. In doing so, we are, of course, doing nothing other than what we are asked to promise to do: to live out our baptism. Is there any more basic way of understanding congregational life than a mutual commitment to 'live out our baptism'?

Whether or not these are the most important words spoken in congregational worship is an open question, but their importance can't be underestimated. And, it is good that we hear them whenever our congregations conduct a baptism. They warrant being the last words here:

With God's help, we will live out our baptism as a loving community in Christ: nurturing one another in faith, upholding one another in prayer, and encouraging one another in service until Christ comes.

Books Worth Reading (4): God's Advocates by Rupert Shortt

Rupert Shortt, God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation (London: DLT, 2005).

This book has been around for over a decade. It deserves a wider reading than (at least from my observations) it appears to have had. It consists of 'conversations' (but think seminar-room conversations rather than fireside chats!) between the editor, Rupert Shortt and 18 leading Christian thinkers from largely English-speaking contexts. All are academics or scholars: "established names and newer voices - in and on the fringes of the Anglophone world" (ix). Whilst acknowledging the largely Western (both theological and cultural) provenance of his conversation partners, Shortt points out that they represent a certain diversity (and there is certainly theological, ethnic, gender, and generational-diversity among his chosen theologians). Yet he also points to a certain consensus among them: "if my collaborators have a premise in common, it is that theology has recovered its nerve notably in recent years, especially in North America and Britain, and this confidence springs from renewed esteem for Christianity's core resources rather than a thirst for simplistic certainties" (ix). They are, in other words, united by a certain kind of ressourcement - in defiance of both secularism's and modern theology's ambivalence towards, if not rejection of, ancient wisdom. Yet all are equally oriented to the contemporary challenges of faith: issues of gender, race, medical ethics, sexuality, pacificism, linguistics, epistemology, Christian-Muslim relations, and many others are the fields where the ideas of classical Christianity are brought into play.

So who are Shortt's conversation partners? The full list is as follows: Rowan Williams, Janet Martin Soskice, Alvin Plantinga, Christopher Insole, Sarah Coakley, Christoph Schwobel, John Milbank, Simon Oliver, David Burrell, Jean-Luc Marion, David Martin, Stanley Hauerwas, Samuel Wells, Tina Beattie, Miroslav Volf, J. Kameron Carter, Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan. The conversations are presented in 14 chapters: ten are one-on-one conversations; four have the conversationalists in pairs. My own engagement varied across the chapters - some were discussing issues beyond my immediate interests whilst others were engaged with authors whose work I try to follow as closely as I can. Yet even in the case of the theologians whose work I follow, the conversational style opens up new insights into their thoughts and, perhaps more interestingly, their motivations (often drawn out quite intentionally and cleverly by Shortt).

So whilst commending the whole book as well worth reading, I will focus in this summary on the four conversations that most engaged me.

The conversation with Rowan Williams is, unsurprisingly, very wide ranging. It's a reminder, too, of how pivotal Williams himself has been in the ressourcement highlighted in this book. In this particular chapter, Shortt presses Williams on some basic objections to Christian faith, as well as the evolution of his own thought. They also discuss the overall coherence of Christian ideas. Williams finds this coherence in something of the shared orientation to the 'dislocation' generated by Jesus' death and resurrection. This is Christocentric theology whose very specific centre is a very particular puzzle. Williams is worth quoting on this point at length:

As for the coherence of the ideas of Christianity, everything evolves like the oak from the acorn out of that sense of dislocation that comes around the death and resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus is the one who now and for ever decides, determines, who is in the company of God, who is in the favour of God, who belongs to the people of God, then the authority, the inner solidity of who Jesus is, has to be connected with the very purpose of God, what God is about. Jesus acts as if he has the right to determine who belongs to the people of God. And he does that in welcome, in forgiveness and judgement all the other things that the Gospels spell out. And therefore, if you take him seriously, you have at some point to make the connection with, as I say, what God is about, what are the purposes of God, the desires of God. And distinctively Christian theology beings to take shape when those two things are brought together: the actions and the words and the sufferings of this particular human being, and the vision of a God whose purpose is unrestricted fellowship with the human beings that he's made (p.3).

Shortt and Williams also briefly exchange some reflections on the significance to English-language theology of The Myth of God Incarnate, the publication of which in 1977 is highlighted by Williams as the turning point of  Anglophone theology away from the liberal Protestantism which had prevailed in (at least British) academic circles for several decades. If this is where "rational revisionism" (p.16) was leading then it wasn't leading to very much. Referring to conversations with colleagues in the 1980s, he writes: "We shared a sense that we needed to get ourselves out of this rather narrow and oddly cosy liberal environment into a slightly intellectually more rigorous, spiritually more challenging - and even alarming - world. So, yes, there is a move away from what I think of as that rather pale liberal Protestant consensus." (p.17).

One of Williams' contemporaries at Cambridge at that time was Sarah Coakley. Coakley reports, however, that her own frustrations with 1970s/80s theology were somewhat different than those of Williams. For her, the theology of that period wasn't 'liberal' enough, and this led to a focus on Ernst Troeltsch in her early research. Yet her engagement with Troeltsch yielded a tension-filled outcome. She found that Troeltsch's historicist revisionist Christology led nowhere: "nothing much was left" (p.69). But there was another strand to Troeltsch' theology which she found more productive: it was his emphasis on Christ mysticism (which, on her reading, Troeltsch never reconciled to his doctrinally revisionist Christology). This allowed her "to glimpse that our approach to 'Christ' really can't be restricted by this sort of historical positivism: it must be that 'Christ' is available in other ways" (p.71). Ultimately, this led her to approach to theology "starting on my knees". This has results, as readers of her subsequent work will know, in a striking integration of systematic theology and prayer. Her reflections in this interview on her first moves in this direction are crystallised in this comment:

I had therefore to rediscover a vibrant and distinct sense of the Spirit, starting on my knees, before I could return to those lost strands of Christology and the Trinity that I seemed to have utterly dismantled in my Troeltschian 'liberal' quest. First, one has to go through this passage of handing over the reins of control to the Spirit; only then does one begin to see that the theologian who tries to speak of God - stammeringly - is always already engaged in a divine process that is going on all the time (p.71).

This 'handing over the reins' has deeply influenced her approach to systematic theology, a discipline which she argues - against convention - is consistent with her feminist commitments. For Coakley, systematics is  legitimate "attempt to enunciate a coherent vision", but with this proviso: "as long as systematics is undergirded by the disciplined 'practice' of non-mastery, such that theology itself is always in via, always undergoing its own apophatic displacement" (p.76f). Coakley has, of course, gone on to produce a systematic theology oriented to issues of gender, sexuality and desire. In doing so she has engaged, through her extensive appeal to patristic theologians, in one of the more interesting exercises in ressourcement in contemporary theology.



Another of Shortt's conversation partners who brings feminism into critically constructive dialogue with classical theology is Tina Beattie. Again, it is a wide-ranging and nuanced conversation which Shortt records. To my mind the most interesting case of ressourcement to which Beattie points is around the issue of sin. She both stresses the conventional - and some not so conventional - feminist critiques of classical accounts of sin. She appears dissatisfied with the dismissal of the idea of sin by some feminists as either an anachronistic or androcentric concept. At the same time, she draws on the feminist insight that "Christian ideas of sin are heavily invested with an unexamined fear of female sexuality" (p. 200). She clearly believes that the topic of sin needs deeper reflection than either the tradition or the feminist critique has offered. "Feminists", she writes, "need to take seriously the question of sin as a mysterious but profoundly personal experience of alienation and distorted desire which does seem to be part of the human condition, and this can't simply be attributed to the effects of patriarchy" (p.200).  After a reference to Freud, she continues: "Whether you call it original sin or the Oedipus complex, there's wisdom about human nature in these terms, and it needs a deeper theological response than criticising unjust social structures" (p.201). This is not a retreat from the feminist task, but a call to enter it more deeply, a call which must be accompanied by patience:

[I]t's premature to expect feminist theology come up with adequate solutions to these vast issues that it opens up. After all it took the early Church over three centuries and much political wrangling to get around to the Council of Nicaea. We might have to wait a few centuries yet before we have a Council of Lesbos that gives doctrinal recognition to women's theological insights (p.201).

If feminist theology will strike some as an unexpected location of theological ressourcement,  black theology is likely to be even more unexpected. Yet, Shorrt's conversation with J Kameron Carter, professor of Systematic Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke University, offers a very fertile discussion between black theology and Christian orthodoxy. Carter's claim that the "category of culture must be baptised...before [theology] makes use of it" (p. 243) captures much of his approach - and of his critique of liberal theology. On his reading, this is what liberal theology, and not least in its 'black' versions, failed to do. 'Culture' was regarded as self-evidently theologically significant. What is interesting in Carter's critique, however, is that he sees this move in liberal theology as the manifestation, not of novelty, but of a deep rooted tendency in historic Christian theology. The prioritisation of culture is a choice for one side of the binary, the ancient roots of which lie in differences Alexandrian and Antiochene Christologies. Today we describe the binary as one of 'theology from below' or 'theology from above'. Carter believes that this binary must be subverted. To do so he appeals to a theology as ancient as the binary itself: Chalcedon!   It is the classic - Chalcedonian - conviction that "in Christ there is no break between his humanity and divinity" which gives Carter critical leverage against liberal theology - and indeed, against both 'white theology' and its binary opposite, 'black theology'. He sets out this argument as follows:

[F]ormulating a 'black Christology'..., at least as typically conceived, is problematic. Put succinctly, it risks replicating the very procedures of 'white theology' namely, of operating out of a notion of 'pure nature' as culturally inflected through the notion of whiteness. ... White theology has too often functioned from a  position of pure nature, a nature that is so pure that white theology need not name itself as 'white', for it is 'natural', indicative of the 'true state and proper order of things.... [T]o formulate a 'black Christology' or  a 'black systematics' as typically conceived is to risk replicating this procedure, where 'black' comes to function in an essentialised or 'pure' manner (p. 242).

There are many steps in this argument, and the above quotation barely skims the surface (the argument is developed at length in his Race: A Theological Account (OUP, 2008)). It is theologically deeper than  a conventional critique of essentialism. There are two especially intriguing dimensions to it.  Firstly, he draws on none other than the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Henri de Lubac (quite something for a young black American Baptist theologian to do!) to make his point. He appeals to de Lubac's insistence that nature cannot be abstracted from grace. When theology appeals to culture (as something 'natural') it indulges in precisely such an abstraction. The second is the strong historical connection he makes between the tendency of classic Christianity to de-Judaising of Jesus and Christian theology's frequent blindness to race.

Carter's attempt to bring black theology and orthodoxy into conversation takes some of its force from his reference to the nineteenth-century black political activist, Maria Stewart (1803-1979). Carter points out that Stewart's activism was fuelled in part by "important scriptural-exegetical work" as well as ideas "deriving from such figures as Julian of Norwich" (p.239). He claims that this very early engagement with classic Christian traditions and theologies has been "largely discarded in the modern evolution of racial discourse" (p.239). His own approach to is to retrieve and develop that earlier tradition.

Shorrt's conversation with Carter concludes with Carter reflecting on his involvement at Mount Level Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., where he is an associate minister. One sentence alone of this section is worth quoting, and it is an important reminder of the real benchmark of theology - perhaps especially if it is an instance of ressourcement - whilst also being a reminder of why theology matters in the first place: "Theological discourse, no matter it orientation, will always have its deepest witness in the lives it is able to produce" (p.246).

This is a good book which greatly rewards a reading of even some of its chapters. To an extent it is a 'report' on some of the key theologians writing in English today. It provides fresh insights into the intellectual vibrancy of classic Christian theology.  It also offers some interesting windows into the personal and intellectual biographies of thinkers who are otherwise known only through their formal academic writing. The book would be useful to theological students and, indeed, to anyone with some background in theology who would like to get an idea of who's thinking what in the contemporary Anglophone theological world. I suspect that few readers would get through the book without having some of the prevailing caricatures about English-language theology and theologians unsettled.

* * * * *

(This series of 'books worth reading' engages an eclectic selection of books: some directly related to my teaching, some to the UCA, and some of more general theological interest. They are not offered as technical book reviews, but as summaries which highlight why I think they might be useful resources, good conversation starters, or volumes that make helpful contributions to scholarly debate.)