Pasted below is the text of a lecture I gave recently in the Faculty of Theology at VU University of Amsterdam on 13th March, in the company of Professor Graham Ward (who was immensely gracious in his response!). A fascinating conversation followed, one particularly striking feature of which were the observations from several South African students that many of the issues Great Britain is currently wrestling with have been wrestled with in South Africa for a generation, albeit in much more visible ways. It's a lead I'd love to follow up further...
'Can anybody hear me?' Doing
political theology in Brexit Britain, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower
1.
Brexit
Britain
We are living in
times of profound fragmentation. In the United Kingdom, the referendum on
withdrawing from the EU divided the country between ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ (with
a wafer-thin majority to the former), but it also exposed divisions between
people from different generations, different ethnic backgrounds, and different
socio-economic classes. Politicians’ claims that ‘the people have spoken’
immediately begged the question, ‘which
people are you listening to?’ While Leave voters were, overall, more likely to
come from poorer than more affluent backgrounds, the so-called ‘squeezed
middle’ might well have been more decisive for Leave than the ‘left out’
(Rosenbaum 2017; Antonucci et al 2017), and even clearer was the evidence that the
Leave vote was overwhelmingly older,
and more white, than the vote for
Remain.
More than any
other issue, the vote to leave the EU has been linked to concerns about
immigration, concerns which have certainly been intensified, even if not purely manufactured,
by pro-Leave politicians and media (Snyder 2012:118). The Leave campaign’s
slogan of ‘taking back control’ put immigration front and central, summoning up
images of Great Britain at the heart of an apparently glorious empire, securing
its own borders against its quasi-mythical European enemy. ‘Two world wars and
one world cup, doo-dah, doo-dah,’ as some English football fans still chant at
matches against Germany (Gilroy 2004:117).
Beneath the ‘ethno-nationalism’ peddled by the
Brexiteers, however, lie deeper and more complex issues. There is what Paul
Gilroy names a ‘post-imperial melancholia’ that profoundly problematises white
British identity narratives: an ‘inability to
face, never mind actually mourn’ the ‘profound change … that followed the end
of the Empire’, the ‘loss of imperial prestige’, and ‘the shock and anxiety
that followed from a loss of any sense that the national collective was bound
by a coherent and distinctive culture’ (Gilroy 2004:98). Lurking under this
melancholia, Gilroy goes on to argue, is a further inability to ‘work through’
the feelings of ‘discomfort, shame, and perplexity’ at the horrors of that
imperial history itself, and its white supremacist ideology (Gilroy 2004:98,
102; cf also Reddie 2017).
Also profoundly
significant for the Leave vote are class-related
(and by no means simply ‘white’) precarities related to housing and
jobs, and an unyielding and often punitive welfare regime. That such class
issues have become channelled into anti-immigration politics is, as Kjartan
Sveinsson observes, due in large part to the discursive formation (and often
demonization) of ‘the white working class’ as a quasi-ethnic group, pitting its interests against those of ‘ethnic
minorities and immigrants’, and obscuring structural inequalities – effects not
just of current austerity policies, but also the longer-term legacy of
‘Thatcherism, deindustrialization [and] the rise of the super-rich’ (Sveinsson
2009:3-5).
Digging
even deeper into the fractures exposed by Brexit, we find the bedrock itself
crumbling away: the disintegration of the bonds of society and community in our
post-industrial, postmodern world. At this level, the EU referendum turns out
to be a perverse parable of our times, a mirror that both shows us who we are,
and presents us with a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Anna Rowlands notes wryly,
in the face of social fragmentation, the crumbling ruins of the civic
institutions that were meant to unite us in seeking the common good, and the
‘gradual polarisation of our political culture’, ‘[t]he considered political
response … was to ask a binary question, and then be pained when the fault
lines emerge in sharp relief’ (Rowlands 2016).
2. In the shadow of Grenfell Tower
And then, in the
early hours of 14th June 2017, a 24-storey tower block in west
London caught fire. The fire spread with terrifying speed and ferocity, and
despite a massive fire-fighting operation, 71 people lost their lives. In the
days that followed the Grenfell Tower tragedy, we discovered that residents of
the Tower, members of the Grenfell Action Group, had been issuing repeated
warnings for several years before, that ‘only a catastrophic event will expose
the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord . . . and bring an end to the
dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that
they inflict upon their tenants’ (Grenfell Action Group 2016).
Why had their warnings
not been heeded? Why had their voices not been heard? In a lecture two months
after the fire, journalist Jon Snow articulated the profound and dangerous
‘disconnect’ between those who are part of ‘the elite’ (within which he
includes himself and his journalist colleagues), and ‘the lives, concerns, and
needs of those who are not’:
Amid the demonstrations around the tower after the fire there were cries
of “Where were you? Why didn’t you come here before?” Why didn’t any of us see
the Grenfell action blog? Why didn’t we know? Why didn’t we have contact? Why
didn’t we enable the residents of Grenfell Tower – and indeed the other
hundreds of towers like it around Britain, to find pathways to talk to us and
for us to expose their story? . . . We can accuse the political classes for
their failures, and we do. But we are guilty of them ourselves. We are too far
removed from those who lived their lives in Grenfell and who, across the
country, now live on amid the combustible cladding, the lack of sprinklers, the
absence of centralised fire alarms and more, revealed by the Grenfell Tower.
For Snow, from a
profession of communicators, the pressing issue was one of disconnection. Rather than seeing their role as simply
‘communicating to’ the wider
population, journalists – as part of what Snow calls the ‘narrow elite’ –
should be bridging divides of class and background to get to know their audience – not as
two-dimensional stereotypes, as victims or villains, but in all their
three-dimensional complexity as fellow human beings. ‘So casually written off
as nameless migrants, scroungers, and the rest,’ Snow remarks, ‘actually, and
it should be no shock to us, the Tower was full
of talent’ (Snow 2017). How might he and fellow journalists have come to truly see the talent of the Tower’s residents,
how might he have thoroughly heard
their voices, in those years before
the devastating fire – the years of what we might call ‘ordinary time’ – before
Grenfell Tower became tragic headline news?
Theologians,
like journalists, are a profession of communicators. And those of us who are
paid to do theology are, inescapably, however rooted in particular contexts, a
narrow elite. So how are we to do our theology in a context of profound
fragmentation and disconnection? How are we to do our theology, in the ‘ordinary
time’ after the EU referendum and the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, so that the
voices we pay attention to are not just those in positions of opinion-forming
power, or those of tragic victims, but also and most particularly those who, with
their talents and passions, their struggles and their hopes, live daily on the
geographical, economic, cultural and social edges of precarity? That is the
question I want to explore in the remainder of this talk.
3. Graham Ward: political theology for
fractured times
There are many
ways in which Graham Ward’s work over the last 20 years stands out from the
crowd of contemporary theology, but one of the most important is that he has
taken seriously the fragmentation and disconnection of our times. Pointing to
the demise of traditional industry and the ‘decentralising’ of manufacturing,
‘the growth of multinational corporations’ in search of ‘superprofits’, the
‘erosion of Keynesian welfare systems and historically developed social
contracts between governments, corporations and organised labour’, and the development
of ‘flexible’, ‘migratory’ and unstable employment,[1]
Ward highlights the ‘dramatic dismemberment of the social and industrial body’.[2]
This dismemberment he traces through the geography of the city itself, which
separates highly-surveillanced sites of consumerism and entertainment, and
luxury housing in gated communities for the affluent, from the places where
those who service them (‘pools of cheap labour in low-skilled, low-paid jobs’)
are able to live: a ‘[s]egmentation, segregation, polarisation, ghettoisation’
which also ‘maps onto class, gender, ethnic and racial divisions’.[3]
Politically,
Ward describes four interrelated dimensions of the ‘postdemocratic condition’
afflicting Western societies, following the analysis of Colin Crouch among
others. First is the ‘aestheticization
of politics’: politics has become just one more cultural product for
consumption, dominated by the myth-generation of ‘media presentation’, such
that ‘the will of the people’ is ‘created’
as much, if not more, than it is discerned.[4]
Second politics has collapsed into economics,
where a ‘market-oriented authoritarianism’ (Fukuyama) views democracy as, if
anything, ‘a drag on economic efficiency’, and a ‘self-referential political
class’ is ‘more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests
than with pursuing political programs’, frequently profiting itself from the
outsourcing and privatisation of public-service delivery.[5]
A third dimension understands depoliticization as beginning with the social atomization engendered and
accelerated by laissez-faire capitalism, where priority is given, systemically
and culturally, to the ‘entrepreneur’ and the ‘customer’ rather than the
‘citizen’, and ‘intermediate’ political institutions (churches, unions, and the
like), and public spaces for ‘dialogue’, ‘discussion’ and ‘contestation’, have
been sharply eroded.[6]
Fourthly, Ward observes a ‘crisis of
representation’, such that ‘powerful minority interests obtain far more
attention than their numbers would secure in a ballot’, ‘government [is ] becom[ing]
increasingly opaque’, and ‘the poor and [economically] marginalized’ are
further marginalized politically in ‘the absence of an autonomous political
profile’ of their own,[7]
and where their interests are often calculated, in the rhetoric of welfare in
particular, as a ‘zero-sum game’ with the middle-class.[8]
To counter
the ‘advanced atomism’ of the postmodern city, then, Ward argues that we need
‘a new way of seeing’ the world: ‘changes to processes, economic or political, have to be preceded by, and grounded on,
changes in transcending values and vision. This means the creation of a new
anthropology, a new way of seeing ourselves, our purposes and desires, our
bodies, hopes, expectations, and teleologies.’[9]
Fundamental to this ‘new way of seeing’, for Ward, is ‘a strong doctrine of participation.’[10]
Drawing deeply on neo-Platonism, Augustine and the Cappadocian Fathers, Ward
outlines an ‘analogical worldview’, which understands different kinds of
‘bodies’ – ‘physical, social, political, [and] ecclesial’ – as participating in
the (eucharistic) body of Christ, and made ‘heavy with meaning’ through that
participation.[11]
Furthermore, Ward goes on to claim, that eucharistic body provides the ‘new
political community’ that democracy has been searching for, the ‘ontologically founded community’ that
was eclipsed by modernity’s turn to the individual – ‘a community rooted in a
sense of belonging to one another, to a social order, to a cosmic order
ordained and sustained by God.’[12]
At the heart
of what Ward calls ‘the struggle for the soul of the city’ is a struggle of desires. ‘Postmodern desire’, for the Augustinian Ward, ‘dismembers’ the
social, ‘atomising’ us into ‘monadic consumers’, cultivates a willed ignorance
of the human, social and environmental costs of consumption, ‘preys on others
for its own satisfaction’,[13]
and yet, ultimately, can ‘never be
satisfied’. It ‘can never come to an end – or the market would cease’.
Postmodern desire is caught between ‘having’ and ‘not-having’: between ‘a lust
that only consuming the other would satisfy’, and the ‘endless sacrifice of
self-abnegation’. It is, Ward suggests, ‘sado-masochistic’, ‘akin to being
suspended on the brink of orgasm without being allowed the final release of
coming’.[14]
Where
postmodern desire operates on the logic of constantly unfulfilled ‘lack’, ‘Christian desire’, by contrast, operates
within an economy of abundance, of ‘giftedness’. Founded as it is ‘upon God as
triune, … a community of love fore-given and given lavishly’ – Christian desire
‘moves beyond the fulfilment of its own needs’, ‘is always excessive, generous
beyond what is asked’, ‘is a desire not to consume the other, but to let the other be in the perfection they
are called to grow into’.[15]
In contrast to the ‘infinite kenōsis’
of Emmanuel Levinas among others, that ‘unending emptying of oneself’ in the
‘movement out to the other’, Ward insists that such ‘outpouring’ is ‘only
possible, … only sustainable’ in the context of what St Paul calls plērōma, the ‘infinite, divine
generosity’ of God’s ‘plenitudinous grace’.[16]
In eucharistic terms, this is, for Ward, the outward-reaching ‘logic of the
fracture’: ‘both celebrating the intimacy of oneness and taking that celebration
out into the world: “we break this
bread to share”.’[17]
The Church,
then, as an ‘alternative erotic community’, is a body constituted, ‘made to
appear’, through this eucharistic ‘activity’.[18]
‘The eucharistic We’ is ‘a network of actors’, ‘a pluralised and pluralising
body that overspills defined places’,
‘exceeds’ and ‘transgresses’ the boundaries of ‘the institutional Church’, as
it ‘offers itself to perform in fields of activity far from chancels and
cloisters’, reaching out through ‘all creation’, ‘disseminating’ the body of
Christ ‘through a myriad of other bodies’, with a ‘love that desires, that
draws, that seeks [the] participation’ of all things ‘in God’.[19]
And it is in this expansive, eucharistic vision that Ward locates the mending
of the divisions and fragmentations of our postmodern world: the geographical segregation
of different parts of the urban fabric,[20]
the cultural divisions wrought by ‘racism, sexism, class and ageism’,[21]
the social and political withdrawal Ward sees in both ‘neo-tribalist’
ecclesiologies[22]
and the secularist privatisation of the
‘sacred’. Ward’s is a theology of ‘the layperson’ who (more than the supposedly
sanctuary-dwelling clergy), ‘enact[s] the incarnation of Christ’ – ‘performs Christ’, even – by ‘dwell[ing]
deeply within the material orders to which [s/he] has been given, surrendered
to Christ’, seeking ‘to creat[e], or participat[e] in the creation of,
conditions maximally closest to communion’.[23]
4. Graham Ward’s gifts to the contemporary
Church of England
I want to
suggest that Graham Ward’s political theology offers at least three valuable
gifts to the contemporary Church of England, as that institution wrestles with
its place and its mission within ‘Brexit Britain’.
Firstly, Ward
affirms the vocation of the laos, the
whole people of God, and most especially the 98% of the Church of England who
are not ordained. In this, it resonates profoundly with the CofE’s 2017 report
‘Setting God’s People Free’ which, in its own words, ‘calls for a shift in
culture’ which ‘looks beyond and outside Church structures to the whole people
of God at work in communities and wider society – not to “fixing” the
institutional Church’. The challenge outlined by the report, ‘to find a way to
form and equip lay people to follow Jesus confidently in every sphere of life in ways that demonstrate the Gospel’,[24]
is a challenge Ward takes up and develops as what he calls ‘the politics of
discipleship’ – a politics which emphasises the importance of speaking faith, as well as enacting it.[25]
Secondly, Ward
offers a vision of ecclesial expansiveness rooted in the divine plērōma, which has potential to re-frame
current anxieties about institutional survival. ‘Significant and continuing
decline[s]’ in church attendance and stipendiary clergy numbers, the
‘unsustainability of certain patterns of ministry’, the ‘lack of capacity in at
least some dioceses to envision, develop and implement strategies for a more
hopeful future’, and ‘the lack of leadership capacity in some places to respond
effectively to current and future challenges’, are part of the ‘realistic
assessment’ presented in the Church of England’s ‘Renewal and Reform’ agenda.[26]
As Jeremy Worthen has pointed out, ‘mission’ and ‘church growth’ have often, in
Renewal and Reform’s documentation, appeared as an inseparable pair in a way
that ties the goal of the missio dei to
the preservation and growth of the institutional church, and participation in
the missio dei to techniques and
strategies for achieving such growth.[27]
Rather than getting trapped in ‘means-end’ ways of framing the relationship
between church and mission, Worthen turns to Anglican theologian Daniel Hardy,
to suggest ‘that both church and mission have a common source in worship, and
that mission should be seen as the “overflow” of our praise and thanks to God’.[28]
Ward, I think, is wanting to say something similar.
Thirdly, unlike
contemporary missiologies which make church growth their primary goal, Ward’s
political theology addresses the divisions and fragmentations of our society
head on. The work of overcoming division, creating communion (or in Ward’s
careful phrase, ‘the conditions maximally closest to communion’) is the mission of God in which the
Church is called to participate. It is what ‘performing Christ’ looks like in
practice. It is not a means to another end, or a spin-off from a more central
activity of the Church. Ward would surely echo the words of Sam Wells which
have been repeatedly quoted by Archbishop Justin Welby: “Far from being an
essential, tiresome, and time-consuming precursor to the gospel, reconciliation is the gospel. There
isn’t anything more important to which reconciliation is but the prologue.”[29]
There is a
timeliness, then, in receiving Graham Ward’s contribution within current
conversations in the Church of England, and an urgency in what he has to say in
a country in which Brexit has exposed wounds that run along the fault-lines of
age, class and ethnicity, among others.
5. Problems with Ward’s missiology
There is,
however, a problem. It is a problem Ward has in common with much contemporary
missiological thinking – but it comes to a particularly sharp visibility in
Ward’s work, thanks to his explicit attention to the dynamics of desire. And
for that exposure, and the critique it invites, we should be immensely
thankful. Space here permits me just two illustrations of the problem, but they
are, I argue, illustrations which exemplify one of the general thrusts (and I use
that word deliberately) of Ward’s wider project.
The first comes
in Ward’s 2009 discussion of the ‘struggle for the soul’ of the postmodern
city. ‘The church,’ he insists, ‘must not allow areas of the city to be walled
up. Ghettos and gated communities must be
entered; the no-go zones riddled with racial and economic tensions and
ruled by violence must be penetrated
and linked back to the wider civic society; and the Christians in these places must be hospitable, opening the
possibilities for transit, for the flow of communications necessary for
freedom. The church must work alongside other agencies at every level ... to
[help] those who fall beneath the city’s ambitions, those dwarfed and rendered
insignificant by its towering achievements.’[30]
I want to
observe three things about this passage in relation to Ward’s wider work.
Firstly, there is a prioritising
here, of action and initiative over reception, of the agency of the ‘helpers’
over the agency of the ones cast as ‘needy’ – and an unquestioning
identification of ‘the church’ with the former. Secondly, there is an implicit class assumption here: we are presented
with a church whose centre of gravity is presumably so much outside such ‘walled up’ urban areas
(located firmly in middle-class suburbia, perhaps?), such that it has to
‘enter’ and ‘penetrate’ them; and those (presumably few) Christians who are in ‘these places’ are commanded to
be ‘hospitable’ to that penetration. Thirdly, I am troubled by the explicitly
sexual language at work here. At best, perhaps it indicates a burning desire, from
Ward’s largely middle-class church, for relationship with and participation in
these urban ‘no-go zones’, and an overcoming of the uneven distributions of
wealth and power within the city. At worst, however, and particularly if the
middle-class church’s own power
remains unexamined, there is something that sounds unnervingly like sexual
violence in the language of ‘penetration’ here.[31]
My second illustration
comes in Ward’s earlier (2005) discussion of the ‘cultural politics’ that
happens when Christian disciples ‘rewrite the Christian tradition back into
contemporary culture’ through our ‘social and cultural engagement[s]’,
‘performing Christ’ through ‘all the micropractices of Christian living’. ‘[T]he
work and words of the living community’ of Christians, says Ward, ‘extend out’ into what, quoting Barth, he
calls ‘the “deepest, darkest immanence”’.
Christians ‘go forth’, commissioned and commanded by Jesus (as in Matthew
28:19-20), ‘teleologically driven’, ‘tracing and performing ... “the march of
God in the world”’ (Hegel’s phrase). Ward does acknowledge that ‘[w]e may not
like Hegel’s metaphor’, and that the words of Jesus’ missionary imperative are
‘not only stirring and challenging ... but dangerous ... as a continuing history
of colonialism, zealotry, hatred, prejudice and violence ... testifies’, and
yet it seems the danger is unavoidable: it is ‘upon this basis’, he insists,
upon ‘[t]his movement in, through and
beyond the Church’, that a Christian cultural politics, must proceed.[32]
Ward is
insistent, elsewhere, that there is ‘no room for Christian imperialism’ or
‘crusades’ in the ‘expansive’ dynamic of the body of Christ.[33]
Nevertheless, alongside the unavoidably expansive christological dynamic in
Ward’s work I suggest there are also often a couple of dangerous slippages –
which again, are far from unique to Ward. One is a slippage towards an
identification between Christ and the church (highlighted in the language of
‘performing Christ’). The other is related: despite his explicit disavowals of
binary oppositions between ‘church’ and ‘world’, he does at times slip into
exactly such oppositions, depicting the church as the place of order, and the world as a chaotic place of ‘squalid allies,
neon-lights, plasma-screens, crowded tenements, seductions, excitements and
destitutions’.[34]
The resonances with the imagery which drove previous generations of Christian
mission, themselves inextricably implicated in colonial expansion, are, I
suggest, hard to miss.
To summarise my
argument so far, then: Ward offers an acute analysis of our contemporary social
and political fragmentation, and in response proposes a profoundly embodied and
expansive ecclesiological vision, rooted in the pleroma of God, which both affirms the worldly vocation of the
whole people of God, and directs that vocation towards the reconciliation of
our divided world. In the process, however, his tendency towards identifying
Christ with the church, coupled with a deeply pessimistic portrayal of the
postmodern city, a passionate prioritising of the church’s agency and voice,
and implicit assumptions about the church’s largely middle-class location,
leave us with a missiology which, at worst, has both sexually penetrative and
colonialist undertones. Sigridur Gudmarsdottir observes in Ward’s christology a
one-way flow (‘a flow from God to humans’, through Jesus, in which Jesus’ human
others receive, but he himself does not).[35]
What seems to happen in Ward’s ecclesiology is that this one-way flow is mapped
from Christ onto the church: a flow from God, ‘in, through and beyond the
Church’, into the world – a flow in which the Church’s ‘others’ receive from
it, but the Church is resistant to
receiving from its ‘others’.
It is not hard
to find echoes of this dynamic from the opposite end of the Church of England’s
theological spectrum. Evangelicals leading the planting of large, youthful
‘city-centre resource churches’ describe ‘a
missional flow of ministry that will … resource the church across the whole
city’, as such centralised, well-resourced churches ‘energise a city vision
that other churches can get behind’ (Thorpe, 2015). The closest ‘resource
church’ to me, St Luke’s Gas Street in the centre of Birmingham, states that
its vision is ‘to be a church that generates light for the city of Birmingham’,
and prays that that light ‘will pour out of [its million pound city
centre] building’.[36]
6. Facing tragedy – attending to the cracks
If the
alternative to institutional anxiety about the church’s survival is not to be
found exclusively in an expansive, overflowing ecclesial confidence, then what
other options have we got? I want to suggest, perhaps slightly strangely, that
we need to stare tragedy more
squarely in the face. To be more precise about this, I am proposing that in
Brexit Britain, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower, Christian political
theologians adopt what radical democrat Romand Coles calls a ‘tragic
sensibility’ which ‘stretches’ us between, on the one hand the work of ‘articulating, mediating, and striving toward
the highest values of a community’, and on the other hand, ‘painful evocations of the unacknowledged
suffering often wrought by a community’s ideals (or constitutive failure in
light of them)’. Crucially, for Coles, those ‘painful evocations’ of our
tragic failures come with ‘the inextinguishable need to be transformed through receptive engagements with those a
community marginalizes and subjugates’ (Coles 2005a:2). Tragedy thus
‘interrupts the church’s flow’ with a summons to attend to the voices of the
church’s ‘others’.
I suggest there
is more than a mere analogy here with Paul Gilroy’s diagnosis of the
‘postimperial melancholia’ in white British identity, that inability ‘to face,
never mind actually mourn’, both the ‘loss of imperial prestige’ and the
‘repressed and buried knowledge of the cruelty and injustice’ of the British
empire (itself entwined with the history of Christian mission). Could it be
that the Church of England’s anxieties about institutional survival, and its expansive
missiologies both catholic and evangelical, are, firstly, rooted in this same
unacknowledged sense of loss of prestige, and are also, secondly, either unable
or unwilling to grapple with the tragic consequences of expansionist approaches
to mission both past and present?
Here I offer
three brief critiques, from other parts of the Christian tradition, which both
highlight what is at stake, and also point towards ways in which we might ‘work
through’ some of what Coles calls our ‘tragic remainders’ towards a more
healthy missiology for our times.
i.
Speaking
without listening
The first
critique comes via a Quaker feminist theologian, Rachel Muers, who herself
draws on the philosophical analysis of Gemma Corradi Fiumara. In Western
culture, Fiumara argues, ‘the logos we
inhabit is “halved”… we know how to speak but have forgotten how to listen’.[37]
Furthermore, this ‘non-listening culture’ has ‘divide[d] itself into separate
discourses, which are free from the desire or obligation to listen to others’.
On the contrary, characteristic of a ‘powerful’ and ‘productive’ discourse is
that it ‘seeks to expand its territory
through the silencing of others and the ever-closer determination and
definition of objects of knowledge’.[38]
Written almost 30 years before the Trump presidency in the USA, Fiumara’s
analysis is prophetic. It is also a challenge to the church in Brexit Britain:
where many are adopting the survival tactic Fiumara names ‘benumbment’ – the
‘refusal to listen or be listened to, as a means of defending one’s own
discursive space against the predatory invasion of other discourses’ – the
church cannot afford simply to be yet another speaker, however persuasive, in
the ‘war of words’.
ii.
Identifying
with the divine
The second
critique, from American critical white theologian Jennifer Harvey, picks up on
Ward’s language of ‘performing Christ’, but most directly addresses the recent
linking, among many young evangelical American Christians, of the mantra ‘What
Would Jesus Do?’ (‘WWJD?’) to a ‘social justice Jesus’ with a prophetic,
political significance beyond individual, spiritual salvation. Harvey
highlights a fundamental problem with white Christians identifying themselves
with such a Jesus:
It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the
narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which white
people are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in
postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of white
racialization. And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in
the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social
justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting
to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that
he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so
happens that the broken ways of being toward which white people are already
inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with
such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last
thing that a white person whose life is embedded in white-supremacist
structures should be doing.[39]
Harvey’s words
here, I would suggest, translate into the register of class (and gender) relations as well as race, and serve as a sharp
warning to those of us, occupying privileged social locations in an unjust (and
patriarchal) socio-economic system, who might be tempted to imagine our words
and actions as ‘performing Christ’.
iii.
‘Formation’
and the ‘insufficient’ subject
My third and
final witness to some of the tragic consequences of our current missiologies is
American Methodist theologian Joerg Rieger. If Ward and other postliberal
political theologians are seeking to reject (and reverse) modernity’s turn to
the individual (and the resulting ‘social atomism’ of ‘the postmodern city’),
and return to the church as an ‘ontologically founded community’, then Rieger
worries that ‘the individualist
narcissisms of the modern era’ risk being ‘simply converted into collective narcissisms in the postmodern
era’.[40]
Drawing on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, Rieger argues that the turn to
the church, the focus on the formation of
Christian disciples (primarily through worship), construes human beings as
fundamentally insufficient, as subjects that the church ‘can teach and mould
into its own image’: ‘[t]he goal of this model,’ he suggests, ‘is to integrate
the uninitiated … into the system, enabling them to repeat and reproduce the
language and tradition of the church’, the ‘overall purpose’ being (in words
that resonate with Ward’s) ‘the production of culture’.[41]
Most of my
neighbours, however, like the residents of Grenfell Tower written off by Jon
Snow’s journalist colleagues, have already had their fill of being labelled by
more powerful voices as lacking, deficient, problematic, before the church has
got anywhere near them. As Rieger reads Lacan, what a the postliberal focus on
the struggle between the self and the tradition, the imaginary and symbolic
orders, misses Lacan’s third term,
‘the real’ – that which, when ‘repressed and excluded … comes back to haunt us’.
What we urgently need, Rieger argues, is a Christian theology which ‘grow[s]
out of “attention to the continual tendency of ... the church not-to-see things.”’ ‘“Who is the
stranger?”’, is the question we should be asking, and ‘“Who is ‘unintelligible’
now?”’[42]
Whose talents, whose gifts, whose passions, we might add, are we overlooking? Such
theology, Rieger goes on, sees ‘receptivity, listening, and reflecting [as]
more important initially than establishing foundations and identities’.[43]
Attending with care to the ‘fissures and cracks’ in ‘faith’s reading of
reality’, we are opened up to encounter the divine Other afresh – that’s how
the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen reminded us.[44]
Or, as Rieger concludes, ‘“the terms of good news we might receive if we were formed to receive from the other
will surprise even those of us who tell stories about the oppressed”’.[45]
7. An alternative performance?
In my own conclusion,
then, I want to briefly sketch some of the contours of a political theology for
multiply privileged Christians in Brexit Britain, that is attentive to the
lasting shadow of the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, and thus radically receptive
to the voices and agency of those on the edges of our fragmented society.
i.
Performing
and being formed – receptively
First, I agree
with Graham Ward and other ecclesial theologians that we Christians should
engage in a particular kind of ‘performance’ in the world, a performance that
is formed – at least in part – liturgically. But I want to suggest, with Rachel
Muers and with Nelle Morton before her, that the Church in its local presence,
among the silenced, the unheard and the benumbed, might learn to see its
primary vocation as one of ‘hearing to speech’, as Morton put it: a hearing
that ‘evokes speech – new speech that has never been spoken before’. Such
hearing might be understood as ‘hearing with God’s ears’, setting off a chain
reaction of listening (‘Once a person is heard to speech, she becomes a hearing
person’) (Morton 1986:205, Muers 2004:51) – it must also surely be an act which
transforms the hearer herself, as she receives both the gifts and the
challenges of the one heard.
Such listening
in Brexit Britain, must, as Anna Rowlands argues, transgress our entrenched
‘silos’: it must find or create ‘new spaces of civic encounter’ where we can begin
to ‘form bonds of affection and a sense of shared life across different
classes, ethnicities and faiths’. In such spaces, we might begin to acknowledge
that ‘the fault lines’ exposed by the likes of Brexit ‘run through the human
heart, not simply between classes and communities’ – as we learn ‘to handle the
presence of both a felt sense of loss
and aspiration, suspicion and resilience, betrayal and pride, as Augustine might say – ad permixtum’ (Rowlands 2016). Such spaces
need not be grand – they can often be found in our neighbourhoods in coffee
mornings, community cafés, and other ‘Places of Welcome’ where participation is encouraged as much as provision is offered.[46]
We must also
make space for such listening at the heart of our gatherings as church. And paying attention precisely
to the way we gather is surely
critical here – just as we have been learning, in recent decades, to pay more
attention to our mission-focused sending.
What if the first ten minutes of our worship intentionally ‘heard to speech’
the stories of encounter, surprise and struggle that our fellow congregation
members bring with them from their daily living? What if they were allowed to
shape the rest of our worship – the questions with which we approach the
biblical text, or the way we come to God in penitence and intercession? How
might our gathering re-form and trans-form the body of Christ before it is sent
out into the world afresh – to listen as well as to speak, to be fed at other
tables as well as sharing what we have received from the church’s table?
ii.
‘Working
through’ tragedy – with our ‘others’
Talking of
penitence, a second dimension to a radically receptive political theology will
be to listen not so much with God’s
ears, but very deliberately and self-consciously with our own complex and
compromised subjectivities (Reddie 2017), attending to our own blind-spots, and
embracing the challenges that our hearing brings us. I have already quoted Rom
Coles’ insistence that the ‘painful evocations’ of our tragic failures must
come with ‘the inextinguishable need to be transformed through receptive
engagements with those [our] community [has] marginalize[d] and subjugate[d]’.
To Coles’ insight I add that of Jim Perkinson, another critical white theologian,
who argues that the necessary ‘radical redoing of white identity and
expectations’ requires ‘a shaking of white “being” to the core’ which ‘cannot
be accomplished simply by remaining in one’s (white) room and “thinking
thoughts.” Ultimately,’ he insists, ‘it can only be accomplished as a “grace
from without”’ – through a physical ‘dislocation’ from ‘the centres of
institutional power’ to ‘peripheral’ places in which ‘other bodies have worked
out other postures and potencies not beholden to the white male norm’
(Perkinson 2004:239, 232, 215). How do we respond to Jon Snow’s lamenting the
disconnection of journalists and other members of the ‘narrow elite’, from the
cries of Grenfell Tower residents for better, safer housing, or the concerns
underneath many votes for Brexit, rooted in precarity, demonization, and a loss
of a sense of community? Re-locating and hearing deeply is not enough. Working
through, in the company of our marginalized and silenced neighbours, our own
complicity, and our own need to change, must follow. As with Jesus’ encounter
with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7, our journeys out to the edges, if we
go with sufficient receptivity, will both challenge us and change us.
iii.
Re-locating
Christ
So, thirdly,
maybe there are ways of ‘performing
Christ’, in radically receptive mode. Mark’s story of Jesus’ anointing (Mk. 14)
offers another example of Jesus receiving
the initiative of another – a woman again, this time a gate-crasher at a
private meal. Despite Judas’ economic protestations, Jesus defends her
extravagant interruption and receives it for what it is: a prophetic
declaration that he is ‘the anointed one’. He
receives from her his commissioning for the way of the cross.
But perhaps, as
Jennifer Harvey suggests, we who are multiply privileged should dis-identify with Jesus, and ask instead
‘What Would Zacchaeus Do?’, finding
ourselves on the receiving end of Jesus’
challenge, and summoned, as Harvey puts it, to ‘figure out ways to become … race
[and, I would add, class] traitors’, choosing the path of ‘radical conversion’,
embodied in ‘humility’, ‘repentance’ and ‘reparation’ (Harvey 2012:98-9).
Or could it
ultimately be profoundly unhelpful, in these times of deep fragmentation, to
locate Christ on one ‘side’ or the other of our divides? Perhaps we are invited
neither to ‘perform Christ’ nor to identify Christ with the neighbours who
challenge us most acutely – but to discover Christ as ‘taking place’ in the
space of encounter between us and our
neighbours, in the ‘interplay’, as Ward himself puts it, of ‘attraction and
desire’, of ‘revelation’ and ‘reconciliation’ (Ward 1996:231-2). It is Christ
who draws us to our neighbours, and it is Christ whom we discover – both
creative and unsettling – in the encounters with them.
iv.
Receptivity
against the machine
Lastly, in the
face of desperate tragedy I want to hold onto a glimmer of hope. It may be that
a church reoriented towards radical receptivity simply gives more of our
neighbours ‘a good listening to’ – and that in itself may be of unimaginable
value. But I believe it may have more significance than that. Rom Coles
describes the prevailing ‘spiritual ethos’ of western societies as one in which
‘extreme inequality, fundamentalism, generalized ressentiment toward difference and ambiguity, as well as bellicosity
and indifference toward future generations, the poor, foreigners, and the
planet often intensify one another’ (Coles 2016:37-8). And we’ve certainly seen
plenty of all of those over the past couple of years. This ‘spiritual ethos’ is
not the product of one referendum result, or one American president – rather,
it has been engendered over a much longer time by what Coles (following William
Connolly) calls ‘a resonant assemblage’
made up of many different, interrelated components (corporations, institutions,
media, practices, experiences, attitudes), that interact, interpenetrate, and
generate ‘flows’ and ‘circulations’ which transcend the lines of simple,
deterministic ‘cause and effect’, and in which we are all inescapably
participants. I am not convinced that a church which is anxiously strategizing
its survival, or a church which is
over-confidently proclaiming its expansiveness, are well-placed to resist the
workings of Connolly’s ‘evangelical-capitalist resonance machine’. I do wonder,
however, whether a church which, in Coles’ words, ‘cultivate[s] a more radical
notion of [its own] insufficiency’,
embodying, dramatizing and performing its need
of the gifts and the challenges of its – often quite different – neighbours at
the margins, might not just prove to be a significant component of a
‘counter-machine’ which, in Coles’ terms, ‘generate[s] resonant relational
energies’ that ‘turn up … our receiving volume’: receptive counter-flows which
‘re-assemble’ our social organisation, and intensify our receptivity both to
each other and to the ‘not yet’ of God’s future (Coles 2016:37-9, 2008a:40-43).
[1]
Ward 2000a:55
[2]
Ward 2000a:55
[3]
Ward 2000a:58, 67-8, 241, citing Sassen 1991:317 (see also Sassen 1991:318-9,
334 & passim).
[4]
Ward 2009:66-67
[5]
Ward 2009:68-69, quoting Francis Fukuyama (1992:123).
[6]
Ward acknowledges that some social scientists point to ‘levels of stability’ in
‘softer’ forms of social capital, such as ‘participation in voluntary
associations and informal sociability’, but these are, he suggests (quoting
Robert Putnam), ‘“narrower, less bridging, and less focused on collective or
public-regarding purpose”’ (Ward 2009:65-6).
[7]
Ward 2009:66-72, quoting Phil Burton-Cartledge (2005:372).
[8]
Ward 2000a:58, 241, 67-8, citing Mike Davis (1990:115).
[9]
Ward 2009:74 (my emphasis)
[10]
Ward 2000a:75
[11]
Ward 2000a:113
[12]
Ward 2009:245, 226
[13]
Ward 2000a:75, 56, 59-60; 2009:83
[14]
Ward 2005b:79, 263-6 (see also 2005b:109-10 and 2000a:201-2 on the ‘demonic and
nihilistic logic’ of ‘endless giving without reception’).
[15]
Ward 2000a:76 (my emphasis)
[16]
Ward 2005b:77, 79. Behind Ward’s use of kenosis
is the ‘Christ hymn’ of Philippians 2:5-11 (see also Ward 1999). Critics of the
recent ‘kenotic turn’ in theology (a move of which Ward is a significant
representative) have challenged the apparently unproblematic translation from divine (christological) kenosis to human kenosis. As Linn Tonstad observes,
for example, ‘[a]lthough Ward exegetes the Philippians hymn in order to
discover “the kenotic economy,” he skips directly from there to modernity’s
turn to kenosis, starting from Lutheran orthodoxy. This may be why he fails to
note how far his own reading of kenosis is from that of the early church, where
it – in most cases – expresses the act of assumption of humanity (the
appearance of the God of glory in human form), rather than a general economy of
sacrifice or representation’ (Tonstad 2016:89 n.24).
[17]
Ward 2000a:174
[18]
Ward 2000a:180, 2009:201-2 (see also 2013:329)
[19]
Ward 2000a:176 (my emphasis), 180; 2009:184, 189.
[20]
Ward 2000a:266 n.23
[21]
Ward 2000a:92
[22]
Ward 2000a:69 (as above), 92
[23]
Ward 2013:330-1, 332; Ward 2009:188 (see also Ward 2000a:257).
[24]
Archbishops’ Council 2017 [GS 2056]:1,3.
[25]
Ward 2009, 2015
[26]
Archbishops’ Council 2017 [GS 2038]:2
[27]
Worthen 2017:3
[28]
Worthen 2017:3 (cf Hardy 2001:24-40) [‘The Missionary Being of the Church’, in Finding the Church: the Dynamic Truth of
Anglicanism (London: SCM)]
[29]
Wells 2013:6 [‘The Exasperating Patience of God’, lecture at Faith in Conflict
Conference, Coventry, Tuesday 26th February 2013], http://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/wpsite/wp-downloads/Sermons%20and%20talks/2013-02-26-1%20Faith%20in%20Conflict%20-%20The%20Exasperating%20Patience%20of%20God%20%5BSam%20Wells%5D.pdf
[30]
Ward 2009:219-20 (my emphasis)
[31]
Compare this outworking of supposedly ‘Christian desire’ with, for example,
Ward’s construal of postmodern desire as ‘akin to being suspended on the brink
of orgasm without being allowed the final release of coming’ (see section
3.3.iv, above).
[32]
Ward 2009:165-6, 2005a:55-6, 10
[33] ‘Crusades
in the name of the triune love misconceive the kenosis of that love. That love
is poured out externally on behalf of
not against. It works alongside,
transfiguring the ordinary, transforming the mundane. It persuades; it does not
coerce’ (Ward 2000a:259, cf 257).
[34]
Ward 2005a:59 (cf Graham 2013:129-30)
[35]
Gudmarsdottir 2012:169-70
[37]
Fiumara 1990:2, quoted in Muers 2004:53.
[38]
Muers 2004:54-6
[39]
Harvey 2012:86-9, 94-5.
[40]
Rieger 2001:97, 94. When Rieger sketches the ecclesiologies of a few
postliberal pastors and ‘church consultants, we might hear more than passing
resonances with Ward’s own work: ‘On Sunday [people] feel as if they need to
“receive something”... people are “desperate for meaning”... the turn to the
presence of God in the reality of the church... “Before we can change the
world, we must first submit to change ourselves. Call it conversion.”...
“Healthy congregations turn on the lights in a dark world”... “Which people
group in the circle around our church has the greatest needs?”... The church is
in the center; it is the focal point. There is little doubt about the integrity
of the church and its people, properly converted and formed, assuming not only
that the church can indeed help others in need by reaching out (a mutual
relationship does not seem to be required) but also that the church could not
possibly be part of the problem that needs to be addressed’ (Rieger 2001:94-5).
[41]
Rieger 2001:148
[42]
Rieger 2001:106, quoting Fulkerson 1995:174.
[43]
Rieger 2001:106
[44]
Leonard Cohen, ‘The Crack’
[45]
Rieger 2001:112, 111, quoting Fulkerson 1994:358, 395.
[46]
www.placesofwelcome.org
