The potential to upset people in a talk about religion and welfare is almost limitless. You certainly don’t need a remarkable view to get a remarkable headline.

When Iain Duncan Smith was interviewed on the Today programme in 2010 he used the word ‘sin’. He used it only once. He didn’t dwell on it. And it wasn’t even entirely clear who was doing the sinning, although it certainly wasn’t the lazy, feckless poor of popular caricature. Even so, from the reaction to what he said in some quarters, you’d have thought he had accidentally revealed that the Welfare Reform Act was motivated by a fidelity to pre-Vatican II theology. “Iain Duncan Smith lets his secular mask slip”, ran the Guardian headline.

Or, take Rowan Williams’ editorial in the New Statesmen the following year. This was certainly not free of incendiary phrases (“painfully stale”) but it was a good deal more considered and balanced than the coverage suggested. Faith in the City 2 it wasn’t.

The reasons to why we are so sensitive are complicated, but among them is the popular perception that theological ideas are immutable, carrying the imprimatur of God himself. This is compared to political ones which are malleable to the point of pure pragmatism. Pronouncing on the latter from the throne of the former is a perilous business.

You will be glad to hear that I shan’t be speaking ex cathedra this evening, not simply because I don’t have a cathedra to speak from, but because, as will become clear, this is not a subject on which Christian theology can lay down the law.

That recognised, I hope to avoid the peril, at the other end of the spectrum, of being simply platitudinous. This is the Christian talk, with which you will be familiar, which says that all we need is love and wisdom and prayer and care. All true, but then again, all impossible to disagree with. So, you’re not going to get theocratic controversy but nor, I hope, will you have to sit through a lecture on the bleedin’ obvious.

What might we say about welfare and, in particular, Christian views thereon? I have four points, the second two being the more important.

The first thing might be to point out that what we are facing today isn’t entirely unprecedented. I was struck recently when reading Duncan Forrester’s short book on Christianity and the Future of Welfare, which begin by saying “the time for little adjustments here and there is past; today a radical reconsideration leading to far-reaching changes is inevitable.” [p. ix] That was in 1985. It is fair to say that the welfare state has been in a state of apparent crisis now for 40-odd years. That’s a long time to be on life-support. We should be wary of the rhetoric of the final crisis.

Second, this isn’t a shibboleth issue. Christians can and will hold different views on the topic for legitimate reasons, as even a cursory glance at British Christian thought on welfare shows. At different times over the last two centuries, this has varied from

- extreme antipathy towards any state interference in market processes (on the grounds of liberty);

- through a paternal concern to alleviate the condition of workers by legislation (on the grounds of responsibility);

- through a desire to rehabilitate a rich associational life that was supposed to characterise Christendom (on the grounds of mutuality);

- to a full-blooded conviction that the state should do what the church had always traditionally done in this area (on the grounds of equality).

Not all of these positions were derived from scripture, tradition and reason alone, of course. Mind you, every instance of Christian engagement with welfare is marked by the signs of its times and we are kidding ourselves if we think that we are going to be any different. We may hope to tune circumstantial static out of our thinking, but we will never entirely succeed and it’s questionable whether we should want to. Christian thought is always, rightly embodied, or incarnated, in every age.

A third point. Our idea of welfare will depend, in large measure, on what kind of welfare we are concerned with. Put another way, how we conceive the human good will inform how we pursue human welfare.

I would argue that the Christian concept of human good is irreducibly relational. This is not a word that trips off the tongue, and could easily be exchanged for ‘communion’ or ‘interdependence’. But whichever term is preferred, I think both the scriptures and theology show humans as made for God and for one another.

More specifically, the way in which we are made is not the sense that relationships enhance our life, but rather relationships are our life. To paraphrase the Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulos, being is communion. Humans are intrinsically interdependent, relying on one another in a profound rather than superficial way. Self-giving love is, or rather should be, the basis of our being.

There is a helpfully concrete illustration of this in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians when he says in chapter 4 verse 28: “Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need.” This elegantly captures a number of distinct elements of what living a redeemed life (verse 24: “the new self, created to be like God”) entails. It is not simply a matter of obeying the law, of not dispossessing others. ‘Life to the full’ means being creative and productive. More even than that, it means being generous. A good society is one in which all participate in, contribute to, society, exercising their God-given creativity, productivity and generosity for the common good.

There are two points that can be made of this. The first is that this is an idea that is found across theologies, from conservative evangelical thinking to Catholic Social Teaching; not ubiquitously perhaps, but certainly widespread. The second is that it avoids the platitude trap because it insists that neither equality, not social mobility, not liberty, not prosperity should be the lodestar of our society. Good relationships should.

This is not, of course, to say that none of these things is important. It is difficult to sustain right relationships when the different parties involved are in position of significant material inequality. It is difficult to sustain a right relationship when there is no potential for social mobility within society; when where you are born pretty much dictates where you will die. It is difficult to sustain a right relationship when you are not free to live according to your values; in such circumstances it is not you who is in relationship, but some chastened, socially-acceptable clone. And is difficult to be in the right relationship when you are poor – not impossible to be sure, any more than being rich makes us naturally relational – but certainly challenging.

A Christian vision of the good society is, thus, one in which equality, social mobility, liberty, and prosperity all serve a purpose, but primarily as means towards the end of creative, trusting, generous interdependence.

Now, there are various objections to this. One is that precise ideas of what constitutes a right relationship will differ from one person to another, and another is that government is, by its nature, coercive and hardly in a position to secure generous interdependence. Between them, they lead me to my fourth and final point.

Even if we were to agree that right relationship is the goal for society, who should be responsible for bringing this about. Do we really want government to legislate us into right relationship? If we stop to think about it even momentarily, the idea soon shows itself as nonsensical.

The state might get involved in inherently public or contractual relationships, such as how employers treat employees, how landlords treat tenants, how courts treat accused and victims, or how doctors treat patients – but it can only ever do so in an inexact way, and will at most proscribe behaviour at the boundaries rather than prescribe it at the centre.

Moreover, when it comes to more personal and intimate relationships, such as the fidelity between spouses, the love of children, the honouring of parents, support of siblings, loyalty to friends, encouragement to colleagues, hospitality to strangers, assistance to neighbours, and the like, it is more or less none of the government’s business, except, again, in as far as it polices the boundaries.

So is the idea of right relationships as the lodestar for Christian view of public life in general, and welfare, in particular, simply a chimera, an admirable but ultimately unrealistic goal because it simply isn’t within the capacity of government to deliver? I would argue not, because Christian thought also offers some ideas to answer the question of not only what true welfare looks like, but also how we should be trying to achieve it.

This, or at least its origins, can be found in what the theologian Oliver O’Donovan has called the “doctrine of the two”, the idea, to quote a hugely influential letter written by Pope Gelasius to Emperor Anastasius I in 494 AD, that “there are two things…by which this world is ruled: the consecrated authority of priests and the royal power.”

This is the kind of thing liable to terrify non-Christians, as it sounds like a priestly pitch for political power. And, of course, that’s what it was for much of the middle ages. But it need not be that, and isn’t today. Royal power rightly developed into legally-proscribed, democratically-accountable, parliamentary democracy, and “the consecrated authority of priests” gave grounds to the sphere of public activity that is commonly termed civil society.

Let’s put it in more obviously New Testament terms. Some things are to be achieved by the sword, the symbol of coercive state power; other things by the word, the symbol of persuasion, pastoring, and prophecy. The precise boundary between these two spheres is a matter of debate. In the former category, you will find such things as defence, policing, and just legal processes; in the latter you have education, trade and pastoral care. Welfare, because it is such a large and contested category, often falls in a liminal zone between the two, which is perhaps why it is wracked by such intense disagreements.

Christians can and have taken different view on where it sits. I would suggest – drawing on Nick Townsend’s excellent essay in the Theos volume God and Government – that the role of the state is to deliver the common infrastructure that enables all in society to be in a position to secure right relationships through their God-given creativity, productivity and generosity.

In other words, in addition to securing defence, public order, and a properly functioning a legal system, the state’s role in terms of welfare is to provide whatever is needed for people to participate in and contribute to society.

Once upon a time, in inherently poor, pre-literate and pre-modern societies, that common infrastructure was necessarily limited; there was only so much infrastructure in existence and most of it revolved around protection from external and internal threats. Now, however, because society is so much richer and more complex, more is needed to secure people’s contribution. Put another way, whereas a peasant with a plot of land could be said to be in a position to contribute to the common good of society in the 1300s, he would not be today, but would require, for example, a basic standard of healthcare, education, and housing.

The role of government is to secure this level of public welfare (not to mention other intrinsically common goods such as security, and a functioning and accessible transport and communication system) for all, so that each is in a position to develop right relations.

Securing these things does not, of course, mean providing them itself. None of this constitutes a call for wholesale re-nationalisation. Rather it means ensuring that everyone in society has access to these facilities, even if they are provided by private or third sector bodies.

In writing this talk, I had hoped to come up a pithier way of expressing it and I did at one point think I had achieved it through two of the words the New Testament uses for life, bios and zoe.

If the former refers to life as in the more biological sense of basic physical being, while the latter refers to life in a more spiritual sense, that would allow me to say that the role of the government is to work to secure our common bios, our physical needs relating to security, water, food, health, housing, communication and transport, whereas the role of the church, and other actors in civil society is to secure our zoe, our education, charitable activities, community cohesion, neighbourliness, family relationships, moral hygiene (as it used to be called), etc. That wouldn’t mean there was a wall of separation between the two; simply that each was properly speaking the responsibility of each body.

Alas, friends with better knowledge of New Testament Greek (which is another way of saying friends with a knowledge of New Testament Greek) assure me that there is no such neat division between the two words, and in any case there is a third word that is also translated as ‘life’. That rather spoils my neat division but – if you can ignore the etymological inaccuracy – it still captures what I want to say.

So, these are my reflections. Our goal should be relational wholeness, or generous interdependence, or whatever awkward phrase we prefer. And our means is a partnership between state, church and civil society, none of which arrogate to themselves responsibilities that are beyond their scope.

You will note that this does not answer the question of whether Christians should campaign for or against the government’s welfare reforms. That is not because I believe Christians shouldn’t voice an opinion on such things. I do.

It is, rather, because when we do so, we should not be speaking ex cathedra but rather as one more humble, fallible participant in a complex and problematic debate. What I have said will hopefully provide the guidelines by which we might evaluate and judge policy, but it will not write policy for us.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos. Theos is currerntly preparing a volume of essays by leading thinkers on the future of welfare.

Image by Betty Snake from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.