God’s Advocates - Christian Thinkers in Conversation by Rupert Shortt.
Darton Longman & Todd, 2005.
ISBN 0232525455. Rrp $39.95 pp 284.
Reviewed by Maggie Helass
Rupert Shortt, a journalist, has selected a group of eighteen theologians from the Anglophone world who have the premise in common that theology has recovered its nerve in recent years.
This book showcases how an informed, professional journalist can bring rarified academic debate to an armchair near you.
Shortt’s skilful interviewing brings the men and women behind the most creative thinking of our times into ordinary conversation, giving some lively vignettes of their theological formation.
The interview with Rowan Williams is a concise roadmap of the people who have influenced his thinking since his youth.
He describes the New Testament as “work in progress” - which is certainly throwing down the gauntlet to his fratricidal church.
He seems perfectly at ease tinkering with the dynamics of theology, insisting that relation with God takes time - it is not to be rushed.
“What we mean by soul is not some little extra bit, but the shape and the sense of the cohesion of this bodily history that is a person in the world...the relation between the smile and the face...”
“I sometimes feel that a lot of our theology has lost that extraordinarily vivid or exhilarating sense of the world penetrated by divine energy in the classical theological terms”.
Williams wants to restore theology to public debate through a new literacy about God, to replace the lost common language of antiquity.
As a whole, these interviews bestow a context on the history of modern Christian theology - the influence of Barth challenging the barbarism of politics in Germany in the ‘30s; their common debt to Wittgenstein; the return to pre-modern modes of thought.
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At Cambridge she was attracted to the “ferocious clarity” of analytic philosophy of religion with Don Cupitt, and later came under the influence of Troeltsch and his view that doctrine was always profoundly entangled with social and cultural forms and locations.
Coakley’s study of systematics is founded on the practice of prayer: “the regular undertaking of an intentional form of what I term dispossession”. This position of powerlessness is paradoxically the starting point for her study of theology and the precondition for her feminism.
She has introduced new themes to systematic theology in her three volume work Metaphor and Religious Language, such as desire, gender, race and class.
“All the conflicted theological questions of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries require, as I see it, a re-examination of this nexus of difficulty about eros...”.
The Triune God is Christopher Schwöbel’s focus of study - God’s creative, revealing and inspiring agency. He moved towards the ‘activity of God’ after becoming disillusioned with liberal theology.
He noticed that divine speaking and divine action were not two separate worlds, and moved from there to a notion of the dynamic presence of relationship.
“The Father as the origin of all being, the Son as the exemplification of the communicative structure of being, and the Spirit as the energiser of the divine being... only together do they form the creative act of the divine Trinity.”
Schwöbel says that the justification for all anthropomorphic language in theology is the incarnation of the Son: “embodiment, corporeality, the linguistic character of communication - all these are, for God, permanent features of his interaction with the created order.”
Schwöbel foresees a third way between individualism and collectivism, which is essential for ecumenism to prosper between liberals, Evangelicals and Charismatics - the main Christian groups across denominational and confessional boundaries.
John Milbank and Simon Oliver present the case for radical orthodoxy.
Shortt introduces the basic premise that in the Middle Ages philosophy became divorced from theology and as a result theology lost its concern with reality as a whole.
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“One of the demonic things that has happened to medicine is to change its purpose from care to cure.”
“If you ask what the most important developments for the health of the population over the last century have been, they don’t have anything to do with crisis-care medicine. They have to do, of course, with sewerage, windows and better diets.”
Wells contributes that the one key decision at the centre of medical ethics is that we agree not to give up on people when they cannot offer anything to society in any tangible form.
Feminist theologian Tina Beattie makes the point that today it is not just women but non-Western cultures and religions that are changing the shape of Christian doctrine.
Beattie, a Roman Catholic, carefully assembles the argument that if Mary’s ‘yes’ was enough to incarnate Christ in her body, a woman’s prayers of consecration ought to be enough to incarnate him in bread and wine.
The association between divinity, masculinity and transcendence; and nature, femininity and bodiliness, is a hugely significant construct that continues to shape theological language, she says.
“Feminists debate about the relationship between sex and gender - between our biological bodies and cultural constructs of masculinity and femininity - but pre-modern Christians knew that gender was primarily social rather than biological.”
Miroslav Volf, born in Croatia, talks about justice and reconciliation from a theological perspective and makes the trenchant comment (in a book about Anglophone theologians) that the future of Christianity belongs to non-Western Christians.
Black theology, although he has reservations about the term, is outlined by J Kameron Carter who mounts the argument that a corrupted theology underlies a good deal of racial thinking and is still today one of the problems of nationalism.
Unlike “white” academia, black intellectual life has remained implicitly religious throughout - and perhaps because of - a history of oppression.
The American Civil Rights movement was a potent example of lived theology, and theological discourse will always have its deepest witness in the lives it is able to produce.
Political theology is the field of Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan who are concerned with the recovery of practical reasoning
Philosophical theologian Janet Martin Soskice remembers how difficult it was to find intelligent people who were both Christian and literate in the ‘60s.
“Maybe I suffered too much the disorientating effects of Camus and Sartre as an undergraduate...”
Shortt’s leading question that theology is a “well-kept secret” instigates a discussion of how philosophical theology is attempting to regain the academic ground zero from atheistic prejudice. Far from being a discrete discipline, theology brings together ethics, politics, metaphysics, aesthetics.
Soskice the philosopher theologian contributes that “faithful knowing must also be unknowing, for the wonder of God exceeds our frail brains”, opening up another contested arena of debate - the relative merits of negative/positive or apophatic/cataphatic approaches to God.
Christianity’s relationship with Judaism also looms large in several interviews.
The philosophy of religion slot is filled by Alvin Plantinga and Christopher J Insole.
They discuss liberalism, on one hand characterised as hubristic, individualistic and relativist, but on the other hand the individual is the unit of reflection. Insole’s book The Politics of Human Frailty is an attempt to uncover a much older, theologically informed and motivated liberal tradition through a study of Hooker, Locke, Burke and Acton.
A dip into more recent church history includes a critique of radical orthodoxy - of which Rowan Williams is said to be the father.
Sarah Coakley, systematic theologian, describes her theological formation as grounded in the ‘mystical’ and ‘critical/rational’. Honest to God had a significant influence on her teenage years - she was at school with John Robinson’s daughters.
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“Western culture thereby lost the patristic and early medieval sense that reason and revelation are not opposed concepts.”
Milbank confirmed that philosophy was a religious practice in antiquity, concerned with a coherent intellectual vision.
He was influenced by Nicholas Lash’s view that theology doesn’t have its own special subject matter: “it’s much more a question of the way in which the epiphany of God makes a difference to everything”.
Radical orthodoxy exposes the concealed extreme authoritarianism of ‘Enlightenment’, he says.
“The apparent advocacy of pure reason without the intrusion of emotional prejudice is always secretly the promotion of a cold will to power.”
David Burrell discusses Thomas Aquinas - his dialogue with Jewish and Muslim thinkers, and his role in reconciling faith and reason.
the conflicted theological
questions of the late twentieth
and twenty-first centuries require
a re-examination of eros
Burrell says that the post-modern environment is much more accepting of faith-type premises than the Enlightenment and therefore much closer in spirit to the medieval period.
Jean-Luc Marion provides a ‘continental perspective’ with what Shortt describes as “a few tools for looking at common condundrums in a fresh way.”
David Martin, as a sociologist, tackles the nexus of Christianity and society and reaches the conclusion that Christianity, as a sign language of peace, love, sacrifice and brotherhood, is deficient in terminology to cover the exigencies of power.
Theological ethics is tackled by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells, the former tabling that the disengagement of Christianity from Stoicism is one of the greatest tasks faced by theology today.
Just War theory comes out for an airing, a question which Shortt raises with several of his interviewees.
Hauerwas makes some withering comments on contemporary medicine, and in defence of doctors.
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- “reasoning has become addicted to abstract schemas”.
“The self-description of democracy is a wholly abstract one, and to bring it into contact with reality we must first treat all the key terms - people, choose, government - as terms-of-art in need of extensive theoretical development.”
The modern establishment is starved of the theological language of its foundation Joan O’Donovan says, and her work has been concerned with rescuing biblical theology in its political aspects.
She describes this as the recovery of pre-modern theological articulations of political authority and order, which situate it within a dynamic conception of humankind as created, fallen, redeemed and sanctified.
“The legal individualism of human rights law... breeds contempt for a legal past in which both legislators and the legal profession... assumed a cultural, moral and religious horizon for public law.”
“I have tried to return contemporary thought about rights to the theological formulations of Ockham and Hooker.”
Christianity, as a sign language of peace, love, sacrifice
and brotherhood, is deficient in terminology to cover
the exigencies of power
She believes there needs to be a more wholehearted return to the traditional Christian political concepts of obligation, obedience, law and justice.
Shortt’s introductions to the interviews place these theologians in context and encourage them to talk about their thought through the lens of their lives.
His role as an interviewer/editor has ensured lots of cross-referencing between his subjects e.g. Oliver O’Donovan on Rowan Williams: “Paradox and unexpected reversal is the essence of a Williams train of thought”; “His engagement with ethics and politics tend to be night-time raiding parties.”
This collection, although necessarily drawing on the academic language of theology, includes much common theology - nourishing talk about God with intelligent, articulate people guided by a perceptive professional interpreter.