A Post-Christendom, Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union - Post 3/4

Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the third of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here and the second post is accessible here. The fourth post will be published in due course.

If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.

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Commentary on Pragraph 9 of the Basis

When did you last say either the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds in worship? And if you said it, how many in the congregation had their fingers crossed whilst saying it? Or, did you notice a distinctly muted collective mumble when it came to the statements 'born of the Virgin Mary' and 'on the third day he rose again'. These elements of the Creed have troubled Christians who have been enculturated into modernity. They constitute the so-called ‘supernatural’ elements of Christianity which modern people have been taught to distrust. To this objection, it could be asked, ‘Why stop at these elements?’ If modernity is our benchmark, why even believe in God as Creator?

On the other hand, other Christians are troubled by the fact that we continue to use creeds which, quite apart from any specific problematic details, come from an overall cultural and intellectual framework so (apparently) alien to our own. As such, their relevance is deemed doubtful. This can only be pushed so far as an intellectually serious objection because Jesus’ own context and that of the New Testament is even older and arguably even more alien than that of the Creeds.

Then there are others who are troubled not merely by any particular claims or by the cultural difference between us and the authors of the Creeds, but by the very act itself of saying a Creed. For them, to affirm Creeds defined as “authoritative statements of the Catholic faith…[which] declare and guard the right understanding of that faith” is a challenge to the freedom of individuals to make up their own minds about what to believe. 

Whilst the themes of Paragraph 9 will increase the anxieties of all three of these groups of objectors, they probably most clearly prompt an engagement with the third set of concerns. But the other two concerns also invite some brief comment. In many ways both of them question the capacity for the wisdom of the past to engage us or make any claim upon us. And here, I suspect, we confront a divide in the church that is less between Christendom and post-Christendom, and more between baby boomers and certain Christian millennials. The posture of baby boomers towards the past is probably best captured in Marcus Borg’s description of the Enlightenment as “the great watershed event in Western cultural history that created the modern world, separating it from all that went before” and which led to a “collision between the Enlightenment and Christianity”.[i]

Of course there was a clash between the Enlightenment and Christianity. But millennials might well regard the Enlightenment’s supersessionist posture (‘separating it from all that went before’) towards the past as somewhat quaint. (Some of them would also have studied enough philosophy and history to know that modernity existed well before the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment was one specific political manifestation of the intellectual currents of modernity. But that is another story!) Few millennials – Christian or not – buy modernity’s triumphant rhetoric about itself. Many of the millennials in the Uniting Church have much to teach the rest of us about how to resist modernity’s dubious legacies of colonialism, its misplaced confidence in Western rationality, and the culturally-sapping forces of its individualism. That Uniting Church millennials are critically open to pre-Enlightenment wisdom is not because they are more ‘conservative’ – as baby boomers might assume. It is because they have been nurtured in different and arguably more politically- and ideologically-aware notions of truth than baby boomers tended to be.

To return now to the third of the concerns identified above. A willingness (or not) to acknowledge an “authoritative statement” which “guards a right understanding of the faith” says something, at least in principle, about our understanding of Christianity regardless of the content of the Creed. I stress, in principle. But the principle is focused in this question: Do we think Christianity is something we can parochially reinvent or is there something constant about it across time and space? That the Basis declares that saying these Creeds links us to the “unity of the Church throughout the ages” suggests the latter. And to affirm that unity indicates a willingness, in some sense, to be accountable to the whole church regardless of whether we ‘believe’ everything that every other Christian of the past has believed.  After all, as already noted earlier in this commentary, the Creeds bypass the details of  Jesus’ human life and manage to say what they say without mentioning God’s love. But that is not a reason not to use them.

But what ‘right understandings of the faith’ are actually entailed in the Creeds? Interestingly, the Basis is quite coy about this – something which reinforces the point made above. Nevertheless, in describing their use as “acts of allegiance to the Holy Trinity” there is an implicit reminder that the Trinitarian understanding of God is a primary concern of both Creeds, particularly the Nicene.  Space does not allow a full discussion of this here. Suffice to say the following. In relation to their Trinitarian orientation, I wish that rather than saying “framed in the language of their day”, this paragraph had actually said ‘responding to the issues of their day’. Had it done so, we would have been continually reminded that the task of interpreting the Creeds requires an understanding the questions to which they were answers.

One of the background questions to early Trinitarian disputes was whether the claim that Jesus was God incarnate implied that God had somehow become less God by entering the messiness of this world. Some felt that God’s ‘godness’ was being dishonoured by affirming the incarnation. To say that God is Father, Son and Spirit is, in a very short summary form, a way of insisting that Christians don’t believe in just any ‘god’. Rather they believe in God whose very ‘godness’ is on full display and not at all compromised by entering the world of flesh and time in the work of the Son and Spirit. If that’s not true, then the game would be up for Christianity. That is perhaps the key thing we can learn from a “careful study of these creeds” and which is worth ‘declaring and guarding’.

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[i] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 21.

A Post-Christendom Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union - Post 2/4

Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the second of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here. The third post will be published in due course.


If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.

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Commentary on Paragraph 5 of the Basis.

In Uniting Church discussions about the Bible you often hear the phrase, ‘I read the Bible metaphorically, not literally’. It is often said as if it is evidence of great intellectual insight. It isn’t. It is actually a quite unsophisticated claim which tells us nothing at all about what is involved in reading the Bible. Ironically, it replicates the same ‘flattening’ of the reading techniques pursued by the literalism it opposes! What, for instance, would it mean to read Paul’s letters as metaphors? They’re letters! And as letters – and ancient letters at that – they require quite complex reading strategies to interpret them.

In fact, this is one paragraph where it is worth hesitating before appealing to a contrast between Christendom and post-Christendom. The all-too-common literal/metaphorical contrast reflects the dominance in our discussions of the question of how to read the Bible. This itself is a reflection of complex and enduring shifts in the study of theology during the last few centuries. Suffice to say that in academic theology, the discipline of hermeneutics – the study of interpretation – developed in a way that the question of how to read the Bible became detached from the questions of what the Bible is and why and where it is to be read. This was not the case in earlier centuries. The questions of how, what, why and where were held together in theological reflection on the Bible in ways that can be very instructive for us today. In this crucial paragraph, the Basis prompts us to learn once again to ask all of those questions. After all, what’s the point in having sophisticated theories of how to read the Bible if we don’t know why we are reading it?

So, let’s start by looking at what this paragraph tells us about what the Bible is. It tells us that the Bible consists of the books of the Old and New Testaments. The Bible is a two-volume anthology of the formative literature of Judaism and the early Christian movement. These two volumes are also given their respective classic theological designations ‘prophetic’ and ‘apostolic’. By consisting of these particular two volumes, the Bible has some significant theological tensions built into its very structure. The tensions are never resolved. We have to live with them – and that’s one of the things that makes reading and interpreting the bible so interesting and never-ending.

 

But the tensions are not confined to the relationship between the two volumes. The paragraph also refers to the "witnesses". The plural is deliberate. There are diverse theologies not only between the Old and New Testaments, but also within each of them. Reading the Bible, therefore, is like eavesdropping on a conversation amongst a group of wise, probing and authoritative teachers, prophets and pastors. The topic of their sometimes heated and disjointed but intentional conversation is God’s history with Israel which had come to such sharp focus in Jesus.

The word "witness" is important for another reason. By using it, along with the closely related word, "testimony", this paragraph reminds us that the literature of the Bible points to events and experiences which the human authors of the literature did not invent. This same principle applies to the use of the word "received" in describing how the church has come to have the Bible in the first place. When it confesses that "the church has received the books" of the Bible, the Basis is using a theologically finely-tuned word. It’s a way of holding together two distinct convictions. On the one hand, the church affirms that the Bible derives its authority from God. On the other hand, the human actions and decisions that led to the Bible’s existence must be acknowledged and honoured. And that’s the key reason why the question of how we read the Bible is so important.

What, then, about why we read the Bible? Interestingly, the answer to this also addresses the issue of what holds this diverse collection of literature together as a single entity. The Basis tells us that the Bible is “testimony in which it hears the Word of God”.  For the Christian community, the phrase ‘Word of God’ has always been linked to Jesus Christ. In other words, the Bible is a witness to Jesus Christ and we read it to hear his word to the church. It is of course Jesus who is the reason for the existence of the Bible. It is the proclamation about him which holds the Bible together. If Jesus had not been proclaimed as Israel’s Messiah, what we know as the New Testament literature would never have been written. And if he had not been proclaimed as Israel’s Messiah, the New Testament would never have been added to the Old Testament. There would be no Bible.

Finally, what about where we should read the Bible? Here the Basis makes a quite striking claim: “The Word of God on whom salvation depends is to be heard and known from Scripture appropriated in the worshipping and witnessing life of the Church.” Neither the academy nor private devotions as regarded here as the normative place for reading the Bible. As the means of encountering the Word of God, i.e. Jesus Christ, the Bible is to be read in the midst of the church’s active life. The very activities of praying and proclaiming, of serving the transforming the world, of forming disciples and listening to prophets, all shape our reading of the Bible. All of them prompt ever-new questions which fine-tune our listening to the Word of God.

And we must take seriously what it means to read the Bible with the whole church. Uniting Church theologian, Dr. Ji Zhang, has rightly pressed many of us to recognise that the Churches of Asia, Africa, Pacific and the Middle East are reading the Bible and listening for the Word of God in contexts characterised by severe poverty, religious pluralism, the adverse effects of climate change, persecution and marginality. What they hear as they listen must also become part of our listening for the Word.

A Post-Christendom Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union: Post 1/4

Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. It has the slightly (but deliberately) long title, "In His Own Strange Way": A Post-Christendom, Sort-of Commentary on the Basis of Union. The book aims to bring the Basis into conversation with some key contemporary issues. 

Each section of the book focuses on a particular passage of the Basis by way of a short 'commentary' (loosely defined!). This is followed by some discussion starters to locate the text in post-Christendom,  a set of specific questions, and finally a passage from the Bible as a suggested focus for developing connections between the Basis and the Bible. The book has been designed to be used be used for either individual reflection or group study.

In each of this series of four blog posts, the commentary on one selected paragraph from the Basis is reproduced, specifically Paragraphs 1, 5, 10 and 11. 

If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing.  There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.

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Commentary on Basis of Union, Paragraph 1.


The formation of the Uniting Church on June 22^nd 1977 was big news. It was headlined on the front pages of many of the daily newspapers. The inaugural service held in the Sydney Town Hall was replayed on ABC TV that same evening. Indeed, it even claimed international attention. Firebrand preacher, Ian Paisley, not satisfied with the bigotry he was fomenting in his native Northern Ireland, travelled to Sydney to protest about this new ‘ecumenical’ church. More happily, Synod-based services marking the UCA’s advent were held in Australia’s capital cities on the following Sunday. They were packed.

Have we lived up to the expectation? And how would we answer that question in any case? If we used this opening paragraph of the Basis as a criterion, we might ask whether, when we gather in our various communities of faith week by week, we do so acknowledging “one another in love and joy as believers in our Lord Jesus Christ” and in order to “hear anew the commission of the Risen Lord to make disciples of all nations, and daily to seek to obey his will”? Or to lower the register of the language, we might simply ask: Is Jesus Christ and his mission central to our life as Christian communities? This is a much more serious test of the state of the Uniting Church than any narrative about numbers or any data about demographics.

The union of churches that produced the Uniting Church in Australia was not a denominational merger. Its purpose wasn’t to consolidate resources. It wasn’t a strategy of expansion. It wasn’t driven by a vague sense that it was a good idea. No, at least according to this paragraph, union was embedded in some deep theological convictions: it was intended for the glory of God; it was a call to "sole loyalty to Christ"; its horizon was nothing less than the kingdom of God which Jesus had proclaimed and for which Christians hope.

Right at the outset of the document, union is set within a context of the triune God, the centrality of Jesus Christ, the call to mission, and the hope of the coming kingdom. The UCA was not intended as a ‘new Church’ or a new ‘denomination’ - even if that is the language that might come most easily to us to describe what happened. Indeed, it was probably inevitable that this is how the event of union would be described and understood – both within and outside the church. To counter that inevitability, one way of summarising the spirit of this paragraph might go like this: the formation of UCA was simply a new episode in the history of the ‘Church of God’.

The logic at work in this paragraph is precisely the logic that challenges ‘denominationalism’, the phenomenon of Christendom by which the divided Churches defined themselves over and against each other. 'We are this kind of church.' 'We do communion this way, not your way.' 'We appoint our ministers this way, differently from you.' 'We have this form of government, unlike yours.'  Of course, Christianity has never been homogeneous: it has always displayed variety and diversity. But denominationalism turns that variety and diversity into division. It makes primary, things which should be secondary: forms of government and leadership; modes of worship; theologies of ordination, or beliefs about the sacraments. For instance, consider the names of the three Churches which entered union: each one of them was known by a title which referred in one way or another to the form of government adopted or to the way it structured Christian experience: Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational. In other words, Christians from these churches identified themselves to each other by the way they organised themselves.

One of the most striking post-Christendom notes in this paragraph is precisely the move away from these denominational labels as markers of identity. They are challenged and subverted by the seemingly innocuous but deeply challenging summons: “In this union, these churches commit their members to acknowledge one another in love and joy as believers in our Lord Jesus Christ.” As noted above, this union was not simply an organisational merger. It was an event that called forth a deeply personal response from the individual members of each of the denominations. No longer would Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists identify themselves or one another in those terms. Nor was the challenge from now on simply to recognise one another as fellow members of the Uniting Church. That would simply replace one form of denominationalism with another. No, something even more fundamental was being called for: an acknowledgement of each other as ‘believers in our Lord Jesus Christ’. We might baulk at the language of ‘believers in’ rather than, say, ‘followers of’ Jesus Christ, but the basic point of Christian identity is stated. Christians are Christians through their relationship to Jesus Christ.

Of course, at one level acknowledging fellow Christians as Christians can be a fairly formal or superficial process. Beneath (and not always beneath!) the acknowledgement can be mutual suspicion, hostility or indifference.  Here, however, the Basis invites those entering union to set those aside and to accompany the mutual acknowledgement with a key Christian virtue and an equally key Christian disposition: love and joy. This is not about whether we like our fellow Christians or whether we can put up with them. It’s about the hard work of acknowledging that in Christ I am connected and responsible to any other person whom Christ calls into the church and that together we are equally called by Christ into his mission.

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The three remaining posts in this series will be published in due course.

Looking for Jesus in Greg Sheridan's Defence of Christianity

I've written a response to Greg Sheridan's God is Good For You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times. Sheridan is the Foreign Editor of The Australian newspaper. He is also Catholic and in recent times has increasingly associated himself with the defence of Christianity in the public domain.

The book has its strengths. He provides some reasons to push back against contemporary naturalist assumptions of much secular thought. He reminds readers of the West's Christian heritage. He challenges church leaders to accept Christianity's minority status and stop looking back to more comfortable times. But it also has one major weakness: the account of Jesus. This is what I focus on. Here's a short extract from my response:

In the specific engagement with beliefs about Jesus’ divine status, Sheridan is particularly concerned to resist claims that would reduce Jesus to a mere moral teacher devoid of any ‘transcendent’ status. This resistance to the idea of Jesus as a moral teacher is based, in part, on Sheridan’s interpretation of Jesus’ Beatitudes. They are presented as Jesus’ summons to his followers to live in a particular way. Whilst acknowledging that if more people lived according to the Beatitudes, the world would be more just, Sheridan nevertheless insists that the beatitudes are only an “indirect call for justice.” They point instead to an “infinitely more transcendent justice.” Indeed, he makes the bold declaration that the justice of the beatitudes “doesn’t include any political content at all.”  

Now, even if the intent of this remark is to demarcate Jesus from contemporary notions of partisan politics, or even from a particular political programme, this is a most surprising and outright odd claim. For the moment you deny the ‘political’ you deny the social and relational – and to deny those in name of defending the New Testament witness to Jesus is simply untenable. More tellingly, Jesus wasn’t crucified on a cross of the Roman Empire because he’d been talking about the transcendent.

The full article is available here on the ABC Religion and Ethics website.

Western Christianity's death wish? It's not that simple

A few days ago the Sydney Morning Herald carried an article first published in UK-based The Telegraph: "Why Western Christianity has a death wish." The title of the version published in the UK was much more assertive: "Western Christianity isn't dying from natural causes.  It's dying of suicide." The author, Tim Stanley, who identifies himself as a Catholic, places his focus on the numerical decline and what he argues is the irrelevance of the Church of England. This is taken, in a rather cavalier way, as representative of Western Christianity. Be that as it may, his argument is not an unfamiliar one to those who follow these sorts of discussions.

A few scenarios and a couple of statistics are invoked to paint a picture of a church to which no one is willing to listen and certainly very few wish to belong.

Like many agonies, you can blame it on the 1960s. The experiences of world war and nuclear threat seemed to necessitate a rethink in the way Christians acted: to preach less, listen more. Protestants and Catholics tried to meet people halfway, to talk to them in their own language. This could have been a marvellous project; humility and meekness are inherently Christian virtues. The crucifixion turned weakness into a strength, say the gospels, offering Jesus as a sacrifice for the whole of mankind. And, yes, it's good to talk to the other faiths and, of course, social justice is a divine calling. At some point, however, dialogue turned into deference and socialism became the only face many bishops were comfortable showing the world.

 A "greying church leadership" is criticised for "stubbornly cling[ing] to the nostrums of the 60s" and for becoming "comfortable with underperformance." His point, he insists, is not about favouring any particular theology over another - it's something deeper: "[I]t's about whether the Church talks chiefly about man [sic] or about God. Whether Christians have a distinct message at all." 

(I concede that my insistence on [sic] reveals my stubborn 1960s slip.)

Yes, it does matter whether the church has a distinct message. But does having a distinct message ensure the reversal of the trends that exercise Stanley? Can the perceived irrelevance of the mainline churches in the Europe, the UK and Australasia be exhaustively explained by those churches abandoning Christianity's distinct message. And are those churches that buck the trend doing so because they remain distinctive? After all, a message can be distinctive and false. And a message can be relevant and true. But there are no neat correlations here - the history of Christianity is replete with faithful churches disappearing and faithless churches prospering.

And that brings me to Stanley's final point. It entails a quite revealing - but not uncommon - twist.

Churches need to be strong for when people decide they do need them - in moments of celebration, more often in commiseration.

Faith helps us deal with life and death, and the Anglican Communion, for all its wounds, remains a repository of culture and ethics. Remember: it is beauty and kindness that keep us from sliding into barbarism.

So, it turns out that the church's real purpose is "to be strong" in order to meet certain cultural needs. This, Stanley seems to be implying, is the natural state of Christianity from which the Church of England has fallen - and along with it other churches of the West.

With this diagnosis, however, Stanley reveals himself to be 'stubbornly clinging to the nostrums' of Christendom. Stanley, no less than the 'greying church leadership' he decries is taking his cues from a particular set of cultural assumptions.

Articles like this, not least because they appear in the secular press, are often used as ammunition in in-house church discussions. To the extent that they are perceived as such often depends on those inside the church assuming the neat correlations between cultural accommodation and decline or, conversely, between distinctiveness and growth.

If, however, we are really to ask about the distinctiveness of  Christianity, we need to go back to the figure of Jesus and the strange things he is remembered to have said about himself and the odd gospel about him that his first followers proclaimed. It is this person (who is referred to only once in Stanley's article, and a little grudgingly at that) and the gospel about him which are completely eclipsed in Stanley's analysis. Jesus' mission simply cannot be construed in terms of producing strong churches for when people need them or of providing a repository of culture and ethics. These may well be be good and valuable long-term outcomes of Jesus' ministry. But what was distinctive about him was his cryptic and suggestive preaching about the Jewish notion of the kingdom of God, the way he placed himself centrally in the hopes for that kingdom, and how he lived into that kingdom through suffering with the expectation divine vindication.

Only by wrestling with those features of Jesus' identity and ministry can any church be drawn into . the distinctively Christian message. And that will spill over into distinctive ideas about such matters as God, salvation, forgiveness, mercy, love, community and hope. The distinctive Christian message is at once compelling and disorienting, reassuring and costly, clear and opaque. And, I would suggest, that only those churches who do undertake that wrestling will have any hope of getting critical leverage against Christendom. With all its promise of success, power and cultural influence, Christendom (be it political, psychological, intellectual or cultural) is an enduring trap waiting to capture any church that assumes the neat correlation between distinctiveness and growth.

Yes, of course there are elements of western Christianity that seem to operate with a death wish. Yes, there are elements of western Christianity that have lost their confidence in the gospel. And, yes, all this is utterly tragic. And, of course, churches need to have a posture of availability to those who need them.

But that some of the West's churches look less culturally robust than Tim Stanley thinks they should reflects a more complicated story than the one he presents. Some are working hard at gaining that critical leverage against Christendom and going back to the basics and rediscovering the singular strangeness of Jesus and his revelation of God's love - unencumbered by what Stanley seems to imply is the natural state of Christianity. What he perceives as a death wish might actually be a wish for the life that only God can give, however strange that life might look to the assumptions of Christendom and the culture that wants 'strong churches.'

The Prime Minister's Faith

I've written a short piece for The Guardian about some aspects of how Scott Morrison understands the connection between his Christian faith and his political vocation. I raise note the dangers of claiming to be 'on God's side' in the context of the adversarial and partisan world of Australian politics (quite apart from it being theologically problematic in any case).

I also think there needs to be some push-back against those Christians who see the elevation of their kind of Christian to top job somehow being a plus for Christians. I see matters quite differently.

Deep in the logic of Christian faith is the idea that God is impartial. The only “side” that God’s takes (if that language must be used) is the side of all humanity. This, moreover, is why those Christians welcoming Morrison’s elevation to the prime ministership as indicating some sort of benefit to Christians are so wrong in their understanding of Christianity.

You can read my article here.

Grace, Scripture, Confessions and the Living God

Prompted by a conversation earlier today, I went back to 'The Faith of the Church', the first document produced, in 1959, by the Joint Commission on Church Union, the body whose work laid the theological foundations of the Uniting Church in Australia. My friend and I had been talking about how to distinguish between what is primary and what is secondary in the Christian faith. The relevant passage from 'The Faith of the Church' is reproduced below. The language is gendered, the prose a product of its 1950s context, and there are potentially jarring echoes of certain kinds of piety, albeit all mixed with some strong rhetoric. But what is notable is the way it orients the church to scripture and tradition through the framework of grace, or more precisely, the one who is gracious, namely the living Jesus Christ.

 1. Our commitment is made in faith

The position in which we stand as churches and human beings is one of grace. God has dealt with us graciously, and he has done so with us as with men who are unworthy. There is only one way in which to receive this grace and that is by faith. We would wish to see the biblical teaching of justification by faith through grace written out in the corporate life of the Church and in the life of Christians in their personal and social relations in our day.

The Church on earth must ever learn the meaning of justification by faith.

a. We would express it in the way we hold the faith. By our reverence before the witness of scripture and our humility before the confessions of believing men, but above all, and through all, in our awareness of the Living God, we would show that we are grasped by a holy love and power which is not our own but which was made manifest for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. The knowledge which we have of divine things is given to faith. But faith is not a way of knowing what has been objectively given, apart from a relation of trust and obedience which is conditioned by the One who grasps and holds us.

The Church will therefore guard against allowing that which is necessary but secondary to play a dominant part in her life. No system of Church government, no rules or precedents, no system of doctrine or ethics, no technique of evangelism, no tradition of men regarding the ordering of worship, is sufficiently free from error to be permitted to hold anything but a subordinate position in the life of the Christian Church. Only by setting forth as the primary ground for her existence God’s justifying act in Jesus Christ, apprehended in the Church by faith, can the Church prevent a proper concern for law from deteriorating into legalism, a proper concern for morals deteriorating into moralism, a proper concern for theology from deteriorating into intellectualism, a proper awareness of the grace set forth in the sacraments from deteriorating into sacramentalism.

The Church’s message is not even of justification by faith, lest the holding of that should become a justifying work. The Church’s message is of her Justifier. We preach not ourselves (not anything to do with ourselves — our doctrines, our practices, our religious experience, or our faith) but Christ Jesus as Lord and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. He only is the Justifier of the Church’s life.*

*Joint Commission on Church Union, The Faith of the Church in Theology for Pilgrims: Selected Theological Documents of the Uniting Church in Australia, edited by Rob Bos and Geoff Thompson (Sydney: Uniting Church Press, 2008), 59-60.

Books Worth Reading (13): For Good: The Church and the Future of Welfare

Samuel Wells, Russel Rook and David Barclay, For Good: The Church and the Future of Welfare (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2017).

This short (90 pages) and highly-readable book addresses the  role of the British churches in welfare in the light of the economic and political fragility of Britain's famous post-World
War 2 Welfare State. Its starting point is the need to reflect (theologically, sociologically and politically) on the phenomenon of growing church involvement in welfare as the securities provided by government welfare weaken.

The authors provide a brief sketch of the history and foundations of state welfare, focusing particularly on the impetus and legacy of the 1942 Beveridge Report which set up Britain's approach to welfare. From its beginning the approach was oriented to the alleviation of (to use Beveridge's now anachronistic terms) 'Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor'.

Whilst acknowledging the immense achievement of the welfare state, the authors argue that welfare must do more than alleviate such deficits, it must be oriented to the development of assets and/or goods. Economic circumstances also mean that there needs to be a reconsideration of the allocation of respective responsibilities to the state and other institutions (including churches) in order to effect that shift in the aims and practices of welfare. In place of Beveridge's 'deficit approach', the authors identify five 'good's or 'assets' which should be cultivated: relationship, creativity, partnership, compassion and joy (see pp 13-17). In a key plank of the argument, it is proposed that among the roles of the churches is the need to:

work actively and tirelessly to model a social role that is appropriately modest - because it doesn't demand that they step in where they  have relatively little expertise and where the scale of the challenge is enormous - but is eminently achievable, in that it affirms what the churches do best, which is create cross-generational community and cherish people for what they are, not what they are not (p.12).

The book is grounded in the actual experience of churches navigating their way into this new situation. In addition to a well-sketched but brief and accessible theological rationale, there is a whole chapter devoted to case studies of church social action. The case studies are stories of successful engagement with developing goods and assets in local communities. Yet they are not 'glossy' stories - the problems and challenges are identified and engaged. The first is of a Pentecostal church in Burnley, Lancashire, responding to the social divisions  manifested and reinforced by community riots in 2001. The second is of a Baptist-based movement, Oasis, which has developed community hubs through sponsorship of, and engagement with, poorly-funded state schools. The third is an Anglican parish in Shadwell, East London which, through an alliance with the Centre for Theology and Community (which had been renting the church's crypt), became intentional about linking worship with social activism.

Another, more theoretical, chapter articulates various models of church social action. It is based around a 'spectrum' of such models. They authors maintain that different churches are called to adopt different modes of engagement depending on their context. That context might also required them to adopt more than one such mode at any one time. They use the following diagram to set out the range of models.

From p. 66

It is important to note that spectrum is not intended as an abstract model of church-state relations (as if there was ever one thing called 'church' and one thing called 'state'). It is, as the heading indicates, a social 'action' spectrum. This conforms to what is a warning earlier in the book:

The danger is that, for all their growing social impact, churches become defined more by what they believe about the state's role than what they believe about their own (p.33).

Indeed, the church's self-understanding is one of the most important themes of the book. It also picks up the issue of what it is about Christianity that means that the church should have such a role in the first place. There is an endorsement of Pope Francis' comment that the church needs to be more than a "compassionate NGO". There are some very helpful reflections which subvert the binary between, say, social action and disciple-making (especially pp. 31-36), but the relationship between the church as a gathered community and the development of social goods is perhaps best captured in some remarks about the work of the Anglican parish in East London. The more the congregation engaged in its various projects of social activism and renewal, the congregation itself was renewed. The authors suggest that this should not be surprising:

After all, the worshipping community is the place where goods often abound. Here men and women find new relationships, means of expression, opportunities to serve, individuals to love and reasons to celebrate (p. 63).

It is this quote which has been for me the most helpful bridge between this British study and the similar, but quite different, issues faced in the Australian context, and in the Uniting Church in particular. Of course, much of what is outlined in this book is already in place in such movements as Common Grace, Sydney Alliance and Assets Based Community Development.

Anyone familiar with the UCA, however, will know that there for some time there has been discussion about the relationship between congregations and our community services agencies. Sometimes it has been as silly as a tussle between the two to be the  'future face of the church'. Other times, it is a discussion seemingly caught in conflicts between corporate and ecclesial cultures. Then there are times when the discussion gets trapped in a mixture of nostalgia and mutual suspicion. I've argued elsewhere that whilst there is indeed an urgent need to address the ecclesiology of large-scale institutions such as UnitingCare, there is also a need (equally urgent) to address the nature of congregations as communities oriented to the world precisely and simultaneously because they are oriented to God.* We would have achieved nothing if we did sort out the ecclesiology of the agencies, but didn't similarly renew our reflection on the nature and purpose of congregations as communities of worship, witness and service. This where I find the above quote so helpful.

What if we unpacked the idea of our congregations being places where 'goods abound'? This is not an alternative to thinking of congregations as communities of worship, witness and service. It does, however, provide a different language by which to ground and interpret our activities of worship, witness and service. It might also help us move beyond the now almost-hackneyed term 'mission'. The idea of 'goods abounding' might help us more easily see the connections  between the life of congregations and the church's involvement in developing goods in the wider community. There is no doubt that these connections do exist, but much of our received language for these issues hides them or plays them down. A shift to the language of 'goods' and a commitment to their 'abundance' both within and beyond the gathered community could be sustained by a well-grounded confidence and orientation to the gospel of God's love made known in Jesus Christ. For it is, after all, that love which unites, and is the common focus and driving force of, our worship, witness and service. Equipped with that confidence, churches could be relieved of the pressure to legitimate their contribution to society by the scale of that contribution. A gospel-grounded confidence would nurture the 'appropriate modesty' of the church's role which the authors of For Good call for (see quote from p.12 above).

For Good is written with just such a quiet confidence that the church and the gospel it proclaims in word and deed actually matters, not least in the world of welfare. Notwithstanding the need to make adjustments for its British provenance, I found it the most helpful overview I have read of the vexed question of the church's engagement in welfare. Without question this is a book worth reading.

*See A Genuinely Theological Church: Ministry, Theology and the Uniting Church (Reservoir: Uniting Academic Press, 2018), 69-76.

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This occasional 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.

Christine Helmer to visit Pilgrim Theological College, August 2018

American Theologian and author of Theology and the End of Doctrine, Christine Helmer, will be a visiting scholar at Pilgrim Theological College in August 2018.

She will be giving a Public Lecture ("Ecclesiologies of Resistance"), an academic seminar ("A Brief Introduction to Schleiermacher’s Most Important Ideas") and several lectures in the Intensive unit, 'Doctrine, Truth and Pluralism'. The latter is taught over two blocks, Aug 24-26 and Oct 12-13. Professor Helmer will be teaching in the first of those.

Further details are available here and more will be posted in due course.

Books Worth Reading (12): Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre

Lee McIntrye, Post-Truth (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2018)

This is as good an introduction to the emergence of the post-truth era and its consequences that I can imagine being condensed into 170 pages. McIntrye, a Research Fellow at the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science at Boston University, writes in an engaging and lucid style. The story he tells is an unhappy one, and no reader will be left in any doubt about the seriousness the problems he highlights. But he also points in several directions for how resistance to the apparent triumph of post-truth rhetoric, ideologies and political strategies might be carried out.

Perhaps the most important point he makes near the outset of the book is that post-truth refers to  a situation where truth is not necessarily denied, but where it is consistently, aggressively and dishonestly subverted - and for political purposes: "...post-truth is not so much a claim that truth does not exist as that facts are subordinate to our political point of view" (p.11). The dishonest element of post-truth is made abundantly clear in the sketch he gives of the organised science-denial organised by the US Tobacco Industry in the 1950s. Strategies employed then would later be deployed in the denial of climate change.

The commercial and ratings-inspired roots of cable news are explored. The shift of TV news from information to entertainment, and its consequences for public debate, are clearly set out. Reading the origin of the portrayal of false-equivalences between genuine experts and opinionated activists, reinforced by the split-screen of talking heads, made me ponder just how pernicious these developments have been and how deeply embedded they now are in the way we discuss issues. The seeds of 'fake news,' 'alternative facts,' and the discrediting of the mainstream media were sown long ago. They will be hard habits to break even if society at large generates the will to do so.

The penultimate chapter, 'Did postmodernism lead to to post-truth' was certainly the chapter which I found pressed the most significant intellectual issues. He claims that the "pathway from science denial to full-blown reality denial itself seems undeniable." He continues: "What would an application of postmodernism to post-truth politics look like? It looks a lot like the world we now inhabit" (p.144). Interestingly, he places this connection against the backdrop of competing politics: "What a complete misfire of the original politics that motivated postmodernism, which was to protect the poor and vulnerable from being exploited by those in authority. It is now the poor and vulnerable who will suffer most from climate change." In all this, he says, the academy has failed in its responsibility: "It's all fun and games to attack truth in the academy, but what happens when one's tactics leak out into the hands of science deniers and conspiracy theorists, or thin-skinned politicians who insist that their their instincts are better than any evidence"(p.145).

He laments (and alleges) that philosophers have been silent as the post-truth forces gathered momentum in recent decades. But he commends Daniel Dennett for the latter's critique of postmodernists. He favourably quotes Dennett's claim that postmodernists "are responsible for all the intellectual fads that made it respectable to be cynical and about truth and facts. You'd have people going around saying: 'Well you're part of that crowd who still believe in facts'" (p.148).

And therein lies something of the source of my own criticism of the book, notwithstanding that it is very much a book worth reading. The quotation from Dennett contains the important and necessary distinction between truth and facts. I'd like to have seen McIntyre discuss at much greater length the modes of truth telling which are not reducible to announcing or reciting facts, and how such modes of truth telling are themselves important resources in combating post-truth.(That might also have necessitated a more nuanced account of postmodernism than the one given, but that's another matter.) I think there are important philosophical reasons for such a discussion and there are certainly good Christian theological reasons as well. In fact, Christian theology's long and sustained reflections on truth, language and faith may well have some helpful and unexpected contributions.

The book concludes with some brief case studies of where courageous resistance to post-truth denials of truth have been carried out - including by politicians. McIntyre's final paragraph is both challenging and (cautiously) hopeful - but certainly not triumphalist:

Post-truth is not about reality; it is about the way that humans react to reality. Once we are aware of our cognitive biases, we are in a better position to subvert them. If we want better news media outlets, we can support them. If someone lies to us, we can choose whether to believe him or her, and then challenge any falsehoods. It is our decision how we will react to a world in which someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Truth still matters, as it always has. Whether we realize this in time is up to us (p. 172). 

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This occasional 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.