Confronting our own frailties

Rowan Williams in his reflection on the trial of Jesus in Luke draws our attention to the need to confront our own frailties.

Mark's account of the trial makes us think about the difference of Jesus in terms of God's alienation from almost all our language of meaning let alone success. In this court we are being cross-examined on our readiness to reduce God to a provider of meaning and usefulness in the terms with which we are comfortable. Matthew's trial probes the degree to which our religious fluency blocks out the divine Wisdom and it begins to ask us what we make of those who are left out, or left over by the systems we inhabit. Luke takes us a step further and challenges us not only to stand with those left out and left over, but to find in ourselves the poverty and exclusion we fear and run away from in others - to find in ourselves the tax collector in the Temple, the woman in Simon's house, and both sons in the parable of the Prodigal, with their different kinds of exclusion, guilt and fear. (pp.69-70)

From the point of view of the victim

A quote from Rowan Williams discussion of the trail in Matthew's Gospel.

... God's wisdom is 'kenotic'. It defines itself in the self-forgetting, self-emptying love of Christ the eternal Word, whole lives a human life for our sake and is obedient to the point of death. Such Wisdom will always be an exile, a refugee, in a world constrained by endless struggles for advantage, where success lies always in establishing your position at the expense of another's. The first step in acquiring God's Wisdom is therefore to search for what one recent writer has called 'the intelligence of the victim' - not because it is good or holy in itself to be a victim, far from it, but because looking at the world from the point of view of those excluded by its systems of power frees us from the need always to be securing our own power at all costs. The victim is the person left over or left out after a system has done its job, and is there fore an abiding challenge to the claim of any system to give a comprehensive solution to human needs and problems. {Public servants and politicians take note.} 

Standing with the victim means adopting a questioning stance towards such claims. In addition, as we try to move to where Jesus stands at his trial, we are challenged to listen to what we ourselves are saying. We use the language of God's unconditional love, of God's action submitting itself to be worked out in the history of weak and sinful people, of God's wisdom made flesh in the pain and failure of Jesus' death. "The words are your own' says Jesus. If you means them where do you stand? (pp.45-46)

The difficulty of speaking about Jesus

Rowan Williams' Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgement is my pre-Easter reading this year. It is challenging and evocative.

He commences with an account of Mark's retelling of the trial of Jesus framed by a question about the difficulty of speaking truthfully about who Jesus is.

Williams reminds us that ... the world Mark depicts is not a reasonable one; it is full of demons and suffering and abused power. How in such a world could there be a language in which it could truly be said who Jesus is? Whatever is said will take on the colouring of the world's insanity; it will be another bid for the world's power, another identification with the unaccountable tyrannies that decide how things shall be.  Jesus, described in the words of this world, would be a competitor for space within it, part of its untruth. (p.6)

Which Religion? Whose Spirituality?

Browsing through a questionnaire on social attitudes at the start of my long march through a PhD, I was brought up short by some questions that invited me to assess my religiousness and/or spirituality.

The problem is that I don't consider myself very religious, or very spiritual for that matter.

The difficulty is that both terms are used generically, without clear definition,as though we all knew what the essence of religion and spirituality respectively are. Unfortunately, for anyone wanting to use the terms this way, there is no such thing as a "religion" and no such thing as a "spirituality" without further qualification.

The question we need to ask, with appropriate apologies to Alasdair McIntyre, is "Which religion? Whose spirituality?"

As the question implies, both religion and spirituality at the very least, need some form of qualification before I could even begin to think about, contemplating giving any sort of an answer to the above question.

The issue of specifying which gods we are worshipping is important, because as Rowan Williams pointed out in his address Analysing Atheism, Unbelief and the World of Faiths, the early Christians were in a very significant and life-threatening sense not religious.

... to understand what atheism means, we need to know which gods are being rejected and why. Thus an early Christian was an atheist because he or she refused to be part of a complex system in which political and religious loyalties were inseparably bound up. 'Atheism' was a decision to place certain loyalties above those owed to the sacralised power of the state.

Simon Barrow in What difference Does God Make, makes clear, drawing on the work of Nicholas Lash, why "individual religiousness" is not really the point.

Before modernity, the term ‘gods’ was understood, correctly, as a relational one, designating whatever it was people worshipped – gave ultimate worth to. It resided in occurrences, activities and patterns of behaviour – not concepts. Explains Lash: “The word ‘god’ worked rather like the word ‘treasure’ still does. A treasure is what someone... highly values. And I can only find out what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour… There is no class of object known as ‘treasures’… valuing is a relationship.”

However, with the dominance of instrumental reason, ‘gods’ became, correspondingly, things (objects, entities, individuals) of a certain kind, a ‘divine’ one. Analogously, the ‘home territory’ of God-understanding shifted from worship (the assignment of worth-ship) to description (the assignment of properties). It became a metaphysical enterprise rather than a matter of appropriate relationship. The difference is that the former has to make claims about essence or ‘being’ (of a person, a thing, or ‘god’) in order to find it meaningful. The latter does not, though it needs a good idea of what it speaks.

This double shift of meaning and affection fundamentally corrupted and disabled the modern comprehension of ‘God’ – because God is, logically and necessarily, beyond definition (delimiting) and categorisation. God is most definitely not a ‘thing’ belonging to a class of things called ‘gods’.[10] “Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists all have this, at least, in common: that none of them believe in gods”, says Lash. Therefore religions are best considered ‘schools’ in which people learn properly to relate to God precisely by not worshipping any thing – not the world nor any part, person, dream, event or memory of it.

Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, nationalism and even atheism offer specific, and in varying ways overlapping and competing schools, in what it is to be and live humanly in the world in which we find ourselves. Spirituality, like religion is never generic. And in the account of religion that I am arguing for the substantive difference between "religion" and "spirituality" begins to disappear, in so far as spirituality is expressed in differing, and non-generic ways of learning to live in relationship to the world.

The key difference is that "spirituality" is seen as differing from "religion" in being less tied to institutional structures and intellectual formulations. This outcome is what we might expect if the move in public identification from "religion" to "spirituality" is the result of the deconstruction of Christendom. This process has generally fallen under the label of secularization, a process which is notably been played out in the geographical areas of the world shaped by Christendom.

In the light of this development the sociology of religion needs to be reconsidered and perhaps de-constructed as being powerfully shaped imaginatively and historically by its relationship to Christendom and its underlying assumptions. Such an exercise might have the helpful result of relativising its explanatory usefulness for Christians thinking about mission and church growth strategies. The analysis offered by this discipline with its focus on the "decline of religion" and the "rise of spirituality" if used without appropriate caution could simply result in importing the problematics of Christendom back into our ecclesiology and practice of mission.

Note: an edited and slightly extended version of this is now available on Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity and Society blog.

Refugees and intellectual freedom

Rowan Williams throws a different angle on the issue of immigration and the role of the refugee in his address Refugees make us strange to ourselves.

So the refugee intellectual brings into our insular discussion the knowledge that justice is vulnerable and has to be defended against the silencing of discussion and the silencing of particular classes or racial groupings. ...  And there are two interconnected issues that come into focus as a result of this recognition.

One is about the need to sustain a culture in which genuine and strong disagreements over the shape of the 'good' society are given space to unfold and interact - the need for a robust public intellectual life, supported by a university culture which is not simply harnessed to productivity and problem-solving.

The second, closely related, issue is about the need for access to these arguments on the part of all citizens. An intellectually lively society nourished by a vigorous and independent academy, appears actually to presuppose certain things about universal education and democratic accountability, the imperative to resist the restriction of argument to those already possessed of ideological and material power.

It might be objected, of course, that this formulation itself takes for granted a pluralist and democratic society and thus stifles any discussion of whether society could or should be otherwise - whether absolute monarchy, say, or religious uniformity enforced by law, might be the form of a good society.

But the point is that as soon as you are asking whether absolute monarchy is a possibility for a good society, you are granting that it needs to be - and could be - justified. You are allowing that an argument could be mounted for absolute monarchy; and this implies that absolute monarchy is not the only thinkable shape for society - which is already a decisive move away from the historic understanding of absolutism.

If you want a theological reference in the margin here, you might recall St Augustine's deep scepticism about any suggestion that this or that social order could be identified with the City of God. History, in his eyes, certainly has a momentum and an overall story, but it is not one that moves inexorably towards the perfect human society. The task of the citizen with Christian conviction is to work for the changes that reflect the justice of God - and always to recognise that such changes can be reversed, in a world of endemic rivalry and acquisition.

The need for 'argumentative democracy', as it has been called, is not to be confused with either a passive tolerance for diverse points of view that never engage with each other; nor is it a recipe for a Babel of populist prejudices. The former - as Michael Sandel put it in his excellent recent book, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - can mean "suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it." Whereas the ideal situation is neither suppressing nor avoiding but engaging.

Engaging, however, is possible only when there is an assumption that it is safe to say what you believe, and that there is a process in which you will be heard, so that any ultimate outcome will have at least registered your own conviction even if it does not endorse it completely. Passive tolerance suggests an underlying nervousness about conviction of any kind and a serious lack of confidence that there are processes and contexts that make disagreement bearable.

Beyond this account of the conditions for a pluralist society Rowan Williams goes on to draw attention to an important theological warrant for thinking about the Christian as a migrant.

... one of the mainsprings of Christian self-understanding in the formative years of the Church's life was the idea that the believer was essentially a 'migrant', someone who was in any and every situation poised between being at home and being a stranger. In the New Testament and a good deal of the literature that survives from the first couple of Christian centuries, one of the commonest self-descriptions of the Church is in the language that would have been used in the Mediterranean cities for a community of migrant workers, temporary residents.

As a 'resident alien' in whatever society he or she inhabited, the believer would be involved in discovering what in that society could be endorsed and celebrated and what should be challenged. The Christian, you could say, was present precisely as someone who was under an obligation to extend or enrich the argument - sometimes indeed to initiate the argument about lasting social goods in settings where there was previously no possibility of thinking about what made a social order good or just or legitimate.

In the context of a religiously diverse modern society, something of this role is bound to be played by all communities of faith, to the extent that they operate with different ideas of accountability from those that mostly prevail around them; they believe they are accountable to transcendent truths or states of affairs. But it is worth noting how deeply and distinctively this language is embedded in early Christian literature. And this suggests that, if it is the case that the stranger is always necessary to make any society think about itself both critically and hopefully, the believer's role is always, in modern societies, going to show some intriguing parallels with that of the refugee intellectual.

Perhaps we may understand the social role of the religious believer more adequately if we think of it in terms of extending or enriching argument, offering resources for thinking about social pluralism rather than either deploring it or reducing it to the passive tolerance I mentioned earlier.

Christianity and Radical Democracy

This is a most amazing and rewarding book.

Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian By Stanley Hauerwas & Romand Coles Cascade Books, 2008

The title talks about conversations and the book really delivers - in a series of lectures, papers and letters in which Stanley Hauerwas, written off as sectarian by many mainstream theologians, engages in a probing exploration with Roman Coles, a political theorist, non-believer and community activist of the possible connections between a radical Christian faith and radical democracy.

This is a challenging exchange that demonstrates an open listening and honest exploration of points of connection and question between the traditions.

I learnt much from Coles sympathetic and open reading of texts from Rowan Williams and Jean Vanier and his sharp eye for the intrusion of Christendom assumptions and languages into our best efforts to get beyond a Christendom mentality. What do they have to do with organising for radical democracy? Go read.

This probing exchange reveals an emerging friendship that does not arrive at any easy synthesis or collapse the tension between the faith commitments of Hauerwas and the political commitments of Coles.

What is important is that they are both talking about a reimagining of politics and the practices that would sustain the practice of a radical politics and both questioning the contemporary shape of political imagination that is shaped by both the denial and the production of death.

Coming into view here are the practices of the early civil rights movement exemplified in the work of Bob Moses and Ella Baker, the local community organising of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the life and worship of the L'Arche communities. In the background is the work of John Howard Yoder, Mennonite theologian and his articulation of what Coles terms a "wild patience".