When, in 1958, towards the end of his time at Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher published a selection of his addresses and speeches, it was entitled The Archbishop Speaks. I claim no ability to read Justin Welby’s mind but I can confidently say that the idea of sending a volume of his own speeches into the world under that title will never cross it. And that, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing Anglican social thought today.
Hardly more than fifty years ago, the reading public could be expected to understand who “the” Archbishop was, to accept that he spoke to (and often for) the nation, and to believe that what he said was worth listening to. Many didn’t of course, and even in 1958, towards the tail-end of the mini post-war Christian renaissance, many didn’t listen to or care for archiepiscopal pronouncements. But the default position was of a broadly Christian nation, united by broadly similar mores, courtesies and institutions. Not so today.
This book of four free-standing essays, topped and tailed by two substantial chapters looking at Anglican social theology “today” and “tomorrow”, has its origins in a call from the House of Bishops for a teaching document on social theology. Anglican Social Theology is not that document but something more like its foundations, an exploration of what Anglican social theology has been, is and might become.
The basic plotline is straightforward and might, with all due deference to the English metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw, be called Steps away from the Temple. William Temple was the major Anglican figure of the first half of the 20th century, in Rab Butler’s worlds, “physically obese, but intellectually and spiritually a first-class athlete.” His work, best known through his best-selling, war-time Penguin special Christianity and Social Order generated what is now called the “Temple tradition”. This has – had? – a number of “long-standing hallmarks”, which Alan Suggate outlines in his chapter, but it is sometimes boiled down to the delineation of “middle axioms” – principles half way between eternal verities and ephemeral policies – which, in combination with empirical research, could be used to generate a rational consensus that could transcend denominational or indeed religious boundaries. This was Christian social thought that everyone might countersign.
That ‘everyone’, however, was ‘everyone’ who lived in a distinctly, if already by then diluted, Christian culture. The Temple tradition dominated Anglican social engagement right up until the 1980s by which time the national brew was no longer Christianity-and-water, but Christianity-and-liberalism-and-water, the second ingredient growing ever stronger as the 1960s and then Thatcherism passed into the national plumbing. The Archbishop might still speak but the nation only really listened when he did so via “Marxist” liberation theology such as allegedly informed Faith in the City and enraged Tory ministers (to whom the report really owes its notoriety).
The bulk of this book charts what came and should come “After Temple” and it does so very well. The late and much-mourned John Hughes, traces the recent “renewal” of Anglican social thought, its origins lying not so much in the revitalization of Anglican social thinkers – though there have been plenty of those – as in a spreading critique of the Enlightenment rationalism that has lain buried deep in the foundations of most social theorising, Temple’s included, for well over a century. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Alisdair MacIntyre hovers in the middle distance.
Jonathan Chaplin does a fine job with – it must be admitted – not much to go on, in exploring what evangelicalism has contributed to Anglican (indeed, Christian) social thought in Britain in the last 70 years. It’s not exactly overwhelming and although Chaplin picks out the high points (such as the resurrection of Old Testament social ethics in the work of Christopher Wright, Gordon Wenham, Jonathan Burnside, and the Jubilee Centre); pays due regards to the movement’s powerful activist tendencies; and remains evangelicalism’s most sympathetic critic when he is pointing out its shortfalls, the chapter will nonetheless read slightly uncomfortably to those wishing to dispel the spectre of what Mark Noll called “the scandal of the evangelical mind”.
Anna Rowlands puts Anglican Social Teaching alongside its better known Catholic sibling in her chapter. This could so easily have been a hatchet job, CST being better-known, better-organised, and arguably subtler and more powerful. Rowlands resists this temptation. Indeed, she recognises the “virtue” of the “more plural, fluid, contested and unofficial nature of Anglican social theology.” What comes across in her chapter is that the difference in respective traditions is less due to content – both recognise human dignity, sociality, freedom, rights, the social and political nature of the gospel and the church, the importance of intermediate civil associations, etc. – and more due to context. Not tied to one, supposedly homogenous, Christian national culture, Catholic social teaching has been more hesitant about passing social principles into political activity. “While it possesses an inspirational set of reflections on the common good at a meta-level, it often fails to follow through with a more concrete account of how conflicts between goods can be reflected on and negotiated at a more intermediate level.” Anglican social thought has also been tentative in this regard, but because it has been speaking as a – “the” – Christian church, to a Christian nation, has also been more inclined to believe that a rational, social and political consensus is within reach.
Anyone who still believes that would do well to read Malcolm Brown’s concluding chapter on the future of Anglican social theology. Its recount of the gay marriage ‘debate’ is honest and sobering, and allows him to bring together the threads of the book, in particular Chaplin’s and Rowlands’. As John Hughes remarks in his chapter, the very notion of Anglican social thought has always been “a contested one” not least because of “the contested identity of Anglicanism itself”. (Brown memorably and mischievously describes Anglicanism as a coalition of three parties each with its own project: “one… to complete the work of the Reformation… one…to complete the work of the counter-Reformation… [and one to] complete the work of the Enlightenment.”)
It remains a contested one. But it’s now a contested one in the context of a culture in which the long-sensed gap between Christian ethics and social norms is fast becoming a chasm. As Brown asks, perhaps the “widening gap between Christian sexual ethics and those of the population as whole…[is] a symptom of the growing rejection of basic Christian perspectives such as conceptions of the person, notions of community and the ways human relationships in a society of strangers might be negotiated.”
Hence we have the way forward outlined by Chaplin – a Christian social engagement that pays greater attention to the associational activism that has long marked evangelicalism – and the way forward outlined by Rowlands (and indeed a number of others mentioned in the book) – a Christian social engagement that pays greater attention to the Church itself as “embodying an alternative social vision”, the so-called “ecclesial turn” – these two ways being close siblings, of course. Both of these would still share much preserved in the Temple tradition but would be clearly and distinctively different.
Contra shallow criticisms of them, traditions are by their very nature messy, protean, uncertain, unclear. They are only rigid, authoritarian, unbending in the minds of their critics. “When vital,” in MacIntyre’s words “[they] embody continuities of conflict”. The tradition of Anglican social theology certainly does that and promises to do so still more so in the 21st century.
Nick Spencer
Anglican Social Theology (ed. Malcolm Brown) is published by Church House Publishing
Image from Wikimedia available in the public domain
