Gordon Brown - Virtually Secure?

Of all people, Norman Tebbitt thinks Gordon Brown is the inheritor of Thatcher (as Tebbitt plays games against David Cameron). Brown is doing what Blair did - taking in so many others that he crowds out the opposition. It is as if Cameron has nowhere to go and has run out of steam. His disaster was to appease the Tory right and it looked like a turnaround. The Liberal Democrats are losing supporters who had come to them in order to reject Tony Blair. Menzies Campbell cannot quite connect a vision (it may come). Meanwhile, over at Labour, ten years of Tony Blair as Prime Minister are gone in a puff of forgotten smoke: now a Labour man is back at the head of the party (but air to Margaret Thatcher!).

The claim Gordon Brown uses is that he is getting on with the job and tackling the issues and the crises. He is the strong man in charge, in control.

Here, surely, Cameron can find weaknesses a-plenty. Cameron has to get his party behind him, and the Tories could well melt into confusion, but he also needs to be electorally credible. If I was him, I'd go after Brown on substance.

Which privatisation and contract arrangements led to a government research station to be unaccountable to the extent that it let out live Foot and Mouth? The veterinary authorities announced the end of Foot and Mouth - and after a day it was back again from the same source. It sounds like a structural and mismanaged legacy of incompetence to me - a disaster of privatisation and lack of management.

In having a crisis at Northern Rock, we see an economic regime presiding over a mountain of private (and increasingly state) debt that has facilitated a credit economy, and, furthermore, when the Bank of England wanted to apply discipline to the financial market, the government panicked and agreed to add credit into the credit bubble that was popping (thus the same problem carries on) so to encourage banks to go after every crazy money-making scheme knowing that if they fail the state will bale them out. Loans will go on being split and sold trying to make crazy, risky money wherever they can - presumably sometimes in Chinese property deals and endemic corruption or in the phantom economy of British overblown retailing and services or the American low wage service sector as its large manufacturing implodes.

The floods were worsened by badly located building and rotten drains; they showed a lack of investment in key defences, the stretching of emergency services, a chaos of insurance and non-insurance and unequal treatment between tenants in the private sector, remaining public sector tenants and house owners. Many have been left in comparative poverty, and with a loss of property values (before a crash in general property values finally takes place, once the bubble is gone). This was not Gordon Brown's finest hour; certainly he has nothing to crow about.

It is not general competence either. We are being spun. He came back from a holiday and he worked long hours. This is not the same as being effective.

Gordon Brown has surrounded himself with next generation or misplaced ministers, so it looks like a one man government. Alistair Darling, David Milliband and Ed Balls look somewhat shaky in what they are doing. Alistair Darling looks incompetent, David Milliband is unsure (he follows Margaret Beckett, who was clueless) and Ed Balls is in the wrong job.

Meanwhile public service pay is an ongoing issue, with even the possibility of some sort of pay policy. Has the government learnt anything? Perhaps it has - it continues to privatise council services and workers are ending up in private, competitive services.

When Gordon Brown did a choreographed walk to the assembly hall, I switched off. This was behind a security cordon and it was just theatrics. People are obviously having difficulty seeing through all this. He is having a honeymoon period. I am not fooled by presentation. He is doing nothing but treading water. He says British so often we remember that he is Scottish and there is a European Constitutional Treaty to dodge around.

If he went for a snap election the arguments could be made against him. They weren't because the pre-conference season has been the off-season for politics. So it was a free run of crises. Well now it is up to opposition leaders to pick away at his level of competence.

These days governments are overseers. They are not even managers. There is little else involved. Undermine competence and politics starts to move.

Staying the Same

I see that the statement of House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church keeps things more or less as was, and does not fix the as was either. It is a case of Status Quo Ante. This was exactly as was required, to make a case to be in the Anglican Communion, and to let others either accept this or reject it - let those who have shouted the most, or who have marched troops to the top of the hill, do what they have threatened, or instead respond positively. March the troops down the hill again. The phrase is put up or shut up. If the NURKS (Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Sydney) cannot put up now, then shut up in the future.

Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury visited and said there is no ultimatum, called on dissident Episcopalians to seek solutions inside The Episcopalian Church and called bishops crossing boundaries from the NURKS "illicit". So presumably the statement of the House of Bishops should satisify him. It may not satisfy some Primates, but what are they going to do? Some may not go to Lambeth 2008. That's up to them. Some may organise their own Not Lambeth 2008 and that is up to them as well. Some may organise their own Communion, and it can add to other breakaways. The ball is in their court. That's it.

Meanwhile another one of those daft quizzes.

I found myself nearly completely disagreeing on just about every doctrinal position! Some came to a central position of neither agreeing not disagreeing. The result of the Are You a Heretic quiz was as follows: Pelagianism 58%, Monarchianism 50%, Socinianism 42%, Chalcedon compliant 33%, Nestorianism 25%, Docetism 25%, Modalism 25%, Apollanarian 25%, Adoptionist 25%, Donatism 17%, Arianism 17%, Monophysitism 17%, Gnosticism 8%, Albigensianism 0%.

So I don't believe in original sin and that we can choose to be good with self-responsibility (correct) ; and it seems I am supposed to emphasise the oneness of God (in either modalist fashion with the Trinity or unequal regarding the Trinity), when this came about by my disagreeing with just about every doctrinal statement presented. I am rather more postmodern than any of these views (including Socinian), and so tend to reject all these precision statements as just so many words. I think it is one of the better quizzes of the daft quizzes that thinks such can measure faith.

The Talk Talked

What was so good about the talk to the Sea of Faith Yorkshire Group (see the previous post) is that it was more like a conversation. People and movements I had read about others knew about and had experienced, and thus there were a series of comments from the group all the way through, my talk providing a thread and theme of issues to consider. So, as a result, I hardly read the talk out at all - that is, I obviously knew what it was about from writing it, and by looking I could talk about the point rather than just read it. For example, I added extra detail about Joseph Morgan (Lloyd) Thomas, and cut a lot out about the Liberal Rite/ Liberal Catholic Church International history - whilst indicating the associations and why these in these associations folks were keeping themselves semi-independent (part of my thesis). I think I explained better than I wrote why these groups do fail to come together, in that they develop sub-groups, sometimes a bipolar argument, that constrains the nature of debate, and provides little traditions, guidelines and barriers, and these barriers constrain that also (and therefore) prevent the mixing with others.

Interesting comments brought alive people I mentioned - biographies that showed even more the connections I was indicating and only knew about through research. What this does is revise what I once considered dead history. The standard view is that J. M. Lloyd Thomas produced a Free Catholicism that diverted from the Unitarian movement (and certainly its Puritan shadow) even if it followed the Presbyterian parish church mentality. (My argument, not expressed in the talk at all, about Unitarian development has been that the denominationalist side had revived the Puritan ethos without the Presbyterian stretch, whilst the later nineteenth Free Christian side had revived the Presbyterian breadth without the Puritanism - and both were myth making anyway in their selectivity.) Because it went off on its own, then, when it collapsed, as some practioners went to Rome, it has failed ever to connect with Unitarianism.

Then my argument has been that in the age of postmodernism the symbolic is important. I said at the talk (again not reading) that we now focus upon the signifier end of the sign, that there is a proper way to do liturgies and spirituality for their own sakes and that in some modernist inheritances, like the Unitarians, spirituality may appear to be a "bit thin". That, though, is one of its traditions. It then turns out, however, that there are connections between the Independent Liberal Catholic movement now and Unitarianism. Inspired by Lloyd Thomas, this movement of freedom to believe Catholic symbolism has been developing now.

One of the three who were inspired to start The Liberal Rite apparently went to do Unitarian ministry. Interesting, and one person at the group who "knows everyone" in Unitarianism (and does) did not know who this might have been. He did know, however, that one significant person in the small Liberal catholic Church International had started out in the Unitarians. Since the talk I have learnt by a correspondence that the Liberal Rite was connected with the Unitarians but rejected, presumably for the very reason that it did not fit in with the existing subcultures of the Unitarian denomination. I said at the talk (purely ad-libbing) that in my own case back in 1989-90 at Unitarian College I did not fit in with any of the running arguments, crossed them, managed to offend just about every sensitivity of these boundaries, and therefore did not last.

You would think that a liberal group, usually small, would welcome the broadest possible variety of associations. My talk was to emphasise that this is not the case, and it was demonstrated.

Incidentally, two points unmentioned in the talk have troubled me about the talk. The first is the point that liberal groups tend not to schism as groups, and secondly that they do not get together. These points probably hold up, but the LCCI has been part of various schisms in how it came about. They were over theosophy and doctrines, so doctrines cause schisms, but perhaps some have been due to personalities as well. I did qualify my view over the doctrinal American Unitarian Association breaking off from the UUA (with a good conversation about Kings Chapel, Boston, happy to be in the UUA whilst it maintains its Anglican ethos via its "Arian" theology). Secondly I would have rolled over and admitted the one big gaff over liberal groups not coming together - the Unitarians and Universalists in the USA did come together in 1961. What I would have said there is that all the arguments that kept them apart were long since defunct and they were still apart. When they joined, no one took up a general Universalist argument as opposed to a Unitarian argument. Each had plenty of the other anyway, and both were well modified too. Nevertheless it is a qualification to make, and I probably shall change the .HTML version of the talk.

Since being home a church friend has pointed out some transubstantiation statements made by the LCCI, although it also professes freedom of belief. Well it does for laity. Clergy should believe in some manner in real presence. Well, LCCI is not inspired by J. M. Lloyd Thomas, but as I understand him, J. M. Lloyd Thomas promoted a creedless Catholicism. He may well have come to believe in some form of real presence (I don't know) but, as with Martineau, this would have been an individual's view. Therefore this group, the LCCI, is not promoting a creedless Catholicism (and has never claimed to do so). But when I have written about simulacration as a postmodern version of both real presence and real absence, I get a feeling of exclusion regarding the LCCI on grounds that would not restrict a clergyperson in the Church of England! I would hope the Liberal Rite is different, and that the ILCF reflects the creedless view. Once again, at the very least, this is an example of small differences of view in liberal groups having a significance that keeps them apart. They can associate, but they don't join. This is the thesis that I think does hold.

Liberal Groups - A Talk

I have been writing a talk for Sea of Faith Yorkshire, which was to be called A Sociology of Scattered Progressive Religious Groups but I have since taken the word scattered out, because it also involves some that are part of larger bodies.

It has involved some research and some new thinking, and now it is a stage of pausing and later editing. I am making it available now, because if anyone does see it early, it might actually help absorb some difficult concepts and assist in framing discussion questions. I am sure that some matters have been missed, and some have been skated over rapidly. It is already quite long. Here are the links to the actual talk - it is on my website at Learning - Religion - Academic - Sociology of Progressive Religious Groups, and is provided in an .html version for viewing and a .pdf version for printing.

I intend to provide a summary to help people follow and absorb the talk: this is the summary:

A Sociology of Progressive Religious Groups
Why Liberal Religious Groups Cannot Get Together

A few liberal individuals rather than groups tend to move about. Splits have doctrinal causes.

The word radical is confusing and useless - the qualifier liberal is needed.

Which groups: Sea of Faith largely postmodern that reads, discusses and confers, the Progressive Christian Network (which constitutionally prevents groups joining) that reads, discusses and has an understanding of worship, Modern Churchpeople's Union, that reads, discusses, writes, confers, worships and strategises, the Unitarians and The Quakers, each a full denomination, the inclusive restricted liberalism of the Metropolitan Community Church, the Liberal Catholic Church International, associating with the Liberal Rite (of Unitarian Free Catholics inspiration) and others through the Independent Liberal Catholic Fellowship, and then individual website based creations, plus some groups that have become defunct, and then a need to consider some other faiths. Denominations contain individual liberal churches and have liberal biases, as have some Anglican provinces.

Liberalism can be defined: individualist, also constructed, rights-based, and is divided into liberal about something or liberal constitutionally. Groups can span these in tension (eg Unitarians, Quakers, LCCI). Liberal about facilitates a more in-depth theology than the breadth of constitutional liberalism.

Liberalism relates to systemic or human relations authority, based on large organisation or independent gathering. Some liberal groups show systemic leanings (Affirming Catholicism, Inclusive Church), some human relations (Unitarians, Quakers, LCCI, MCC), and some systemic if in transition (MCU, PCN).

Human relations authority has conserving features, but bipolarity is dangerous. The strongest institution is triangular, of a different 2 against 1, as was the Church of England (which isn't human relations) but it has recently moved to be bipolar and could divide. The UUA is a two by two bipolarity.

Troeltsch included liberalism in his Church Sect scheme by adding "Mysticism". The Church when out of step with the surrounding culture is compromised, today it is the same as a denomination. The cult is a transient, consumerist category. Mysticism involves purely voluntary gathering and reflects the Enlightenment (modernist).

Conversionists recruit by cultural similarity but belief difference (to and from the common culture). After a time a person may mature in belief, read or train, and becoming liberal may move to a church of belief similarity and cultural difference (to and from the common culture). A belief similar but culturally different church can be called an esoteric sect - a sect within a Church, if a Church means anything.

Even Mysticism groups form expectations within, say around the bipolar structures. These form subcultures affecting an overall shape that cannot interlock with other subcultures.

Different groups have their own purposes and functions, that keep them separate from other groups' purposes and functions.

However, individuals can move about, and have multiple memberships.

Yet so much is shared between these groups. Some share diverse and liberal worship forms, some share modernist and postmodernist debates, they can draw on similar past theological traditions (Martineau, Lloyd Thomas). Of course denominations have merged when weak and when arguments are old, but liberal groups tend to be weak even if new.

Soon there may be spillage of liberals as Anglican tensions continue.

Getting together reduces the restrictiveness of traditions but increases plurality, if people can get on together.

He's Surely Not for Turning Now

Remember the discredited document A Most Agonising Road to Lambeth 2008? It now features in the next bullying attempt to rewrite the agenda from Nigeria. To remind, see the archive of Thinking Anglicans and indeed here.

The latest attempt to change the agenda of the Archbishop of Canterbury via the form of an open letter is reproduced on Thinking Anglicans as well as numerous other places.

The reason that the document is discredited is that it was heavily written by the British born American, but Nigerian consecrated, Martyn Minns and further edited by English Anglican priest Chris Sugden. The Nigerian bishops find the document "most compelling", when it has been shot through and discredited by examination of the original Word document and its spin doctoring. It is not compelling, except to their own selves, but a one-sided presentation.

So now they want to use this letter to change the announced invitations of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to Lambeth 2008 (in the summer) and then the timetable of the Covenant process of discussion and consultation that would probably not be finalised (if it ever is) until 2012 - a Covenant about a process of communion wide management of change. About changing this the Nigerian bishops set out their "willingness and commitment to work towards that end". How good of them, but the approach as already set out was for the whole Communion. They assume a change is needed; they say they will work for their change - well, why not work according to the existing agenda? After all, the basis of the invitations to The Episcopal Church (TEC) bishops (in the USA) is according to the existing agenda.

The Nigerians do not want this: they want a change of approach. This is proposed via yet another open letter.

In it these bishops first divert from their own obsession with homosexuality by blaming the agenda on gay supporting protesters and British law - "the abuse directed towards those who hold to traditional views on matters of Human Sexuality". They list the "spate of hostility" in the UK, such as placard-carrying and leaflets-distributing campaigners at the last Lambeth Conference in 1998 distracting Bishops who had travelled "thousands of miles for fellowship". These protesters effectively shifted the focus of the conference to human sexuality.

Talk about pots calling kettles black - as if these railroaders of the 1998 Conference did not do this themselves? The list against the opposition goes on, in a way that can hardly be taken seriously.

It does remind one of the political operatives who, having their own agenda, go out and duffs up the opposition, to then blame the opposition and its violence for having to bring in the agenda. I'm avoiding mentioning the country, the movement and where it all led.

Then comes:

Recent attempts to mandate unbiblical views in the UK through force of law and the protests and attacks by activists determined to disrupt and intimidate any group that seeks to uphold biblical teaching.

In truth anyone who does not embrace revisionist views is a potential target. We know it is possible to provide some security to minimize such occurrences...

Somehow the bishops of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) are off their collective trolley. Perhaps the University of Kent ought to put up razor wire because the government introduced civil partnerships.

Because of this twisted analysis, and a questioning of the basis of the next Lambeth Conference for study, these Nigerian bishops want their own process. Postpone the Lambeth Conference, they say, which is too large and discussive for them (and Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda) to manipulate and have a primates meeting instead (which they can manipulate as they did when setting up their own headquarters at Tanzania in the primates meeting in February 2007 - Archbishop Akinola then consulting Martyn Minns and Chris Sugden). This meeting, rather than say the Archbishop and later the Anglican Consultative Council, would decide if The Episcopal Church has met its demands. This primates meeting would also decide to push ahead to "finalise" the Covenant, the Lambeth Conference being too large to do this.

Somehow this is supposed to allow "current tensions to subside". They don't seem to realise that there many other points of view. Such a change of approach now would probably cause tensions to boil even more.

The letter is signed off: "Bishops of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)". That's what they call themselves, after the name-change, which assumes this Church is the core of the Anglican Communion, whatever it does.

The open letter is ostensibly an attempt to force the Archbishop to choose. They know perfectly well that he is not going to change tack at this stage, not when he intends to keep as many sides talking for as long as they can. If they know this already then they are setting him up - for blame.

Recently the Archbishop made an excellent lecture to Christians and Muslims (I thought it was); in the USA with TEC bishops he will open an interfaith based centre. In the previous Wilberforce lecture (April 2007) he made a distinction between public morality and private concerns (such as sexuality). He has laid out his path in interviews.

Of course he could about turn and do things their way. He would annoy so very many if he did. If he did so it would reverse everything he has been saying so far this year, and reverse his actions to date. It would be tragic and laughable. Strained credibility on all of this would be lost.

Open letters do not lead to such reversals. This open letter is a stunt. Watch how they are continuing to set up the Archbishop of Canterbury and declare him to be in league with The Episcopal Church leadership, thus declared heretical, and therefore produce the necessity to reroute Anglicanism via the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). It is a justification for what will be their schism and that of a few others. Their hole is for them to dig and spades offered by them should be refused.

TV: Decline and Irritations

This is included here on the basis that it may be of help to some Freeview users. Then I comment on The Protestant Revolution, a TV series that underlines why I am increasingly giving up on television.

It was sent to teletextextra@inview.co.uk

For many weeks now my Freeview box, a Thomson, has been counting down to quit and only today did it download a new 14 day listings for Freeview channels. The result was appalling. It flickers, it is nasty, has adverts, is less simple to use, and lost the inview picture and thus you could not keep an ear and an eye to the programme on at the time. This picture, it says, can be achieved by tuning to Channel 5 for an update to the whole system, but here the Freeview set (or my other one) does not tune to Channel 5 automatically or in any other way. Indeed, it picks up no channels from that set and probably would not pick up the advertised Nuts TV, which I do not want. Not that your service is any better than what was replaced.

Channel 5 and its family of screen-logo ruined channels is only available by satellite.

I annoys me that something unwanted is delivered like this. Fortunately I am not technically stupid and can operate this set, and was able after some effort (without any help from your mess) to go and retrieve the "old" listings system. I just hope that others who are similarly annoyed also can find out after some searching what to do to get rid of your incursion.

I'm thinking that, as the TV licence runs out in December, I might actually get rid of (sell) all TV equipment. I am watching less and less, and what I watch tends to be old programmes and occasional documentaries of interest.

Now there was a programme on BBC 4 starting yesterday called The Protestant Reformation with Tristram Hunt presenting.

This turned out to be a most nauseating programme, viewing through the usual distracting BBC Four logo. First of all the music behind was irritating. Secondly, the programme leapt about with generalities all over the place. Henry VIII did not set up a Protestant Church - it can only be called Protestant by a form of default against Roman Catholicism. He was opposed to Lutheranism. Ideas crept into it. The programme abandoned the Puritans half way through their effect - what happened to them then? They set up the first wave of dissent. It later went uncritically with the view that Methodism (second wave) was working class - any reasonable historian will tell that only a minority of Methodists were working class, and that like all such denominations it was by and large middle class. The early idealist socialists that gave form to the Labour Party, a number of them with indeed church connections, were middle class; and even the most radical denomination in terms of social ethic, the Unitarians, were hampered by liberal ideology and association with capitalism, even if it was of the more progressive end - enlightened self-interest. Its radicals knew the distance between churches and the working class. Some did get through, and some Methodist chapels in specific locations, but lets avoid sweeping statements.

Even E. P. Thompson has been criticised for saying the Methodists prevented revolution by offering religious palliatives of the future utopia, on the basis that not enough working class were involved. In so far as this happened, it was because middle class churches provided leisure, welfare and education services that brought in an outer circle of working class children and some of their parents.

This programme then was an idea that just added another hour (to be endlessly repeated) and was cheaply made, but allowing the presenter some foreign travel.

The key to the Protestant revolution is that it set up institutions, that would offer the beginning of pluralism. Pluralism is not made by ideas but by institutions of dispersed power, and legal frameworks. They then contain and promote ideas. This point may come into later programmes, but this one missed this particular point altogether.

I could read better in ten minutes, and it is why I'm thinking it is time to give up TV. BBC News 24 is streamed on the Internet now, so even that viewing is unnecessary. The licence fee saved could pay for the broadband.

Rowan Williams's Excellent Lecture

It is said that Archbishop William Temple reflected the time in which he lived, and this lecture September 11th - Lessons from History for Faith and Civil Society does the same for Archbishop Rowan Williams. It does follow a theme which was present in his lecture on Freedom and Slavery, on 24th April 2007 , in Hull, for the Wilberforce Lecture Trust, which is the impact of the religious - the Christian - message on the social and the political. I did not like it for its underlying false opposition, I felt, to the secular, even if the people of the Enlightenment failed to see the rather huge blind spot in their equalitarian statements when it came to slavery. This lecture, coming on September 11th, six years after the atrocity in the United States, has no such oppositional sentiment. It is about people of difference making contributions to the social and political whole, against oppression and for liberation. It is particularly good in how it draws on the Bhagavad Gita and the Qur'an, as well as the form of fellowship amongst the early Christians.

Some sections I highlighted on my contribution to the Fulcrum website, and I can discuss them here. There are further points to make too, which, honestly, have to be made in the light of the other matter of September 2007.

First of all an issue is what kind of theology has relevance outside the holy huddle? It is, surely, theology that relates to the nature of relationships in wider society. It is social theology, of course, but what happens here is that Williams applies his understanding of text and narrative from three sources - the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible and the Qur'an. These sources are not unambiguous in their rejection of violence, but they do relate to the non-violent approach to resisting oppression, and therefore the form of fellowship of people one with another when in a complex pluralist social world like ours.

Here is what Williams states about how Gandhi read the Bhagavad-Gita:

Gandhi is reflecting on the emphasis in the Bhagavad-Gita on detachment: our natural or instinctive way of operating in the world is to imagine ourselves as controlling both our own destiny and the conditions in which we live, so that we struggle for the conditions that promise us such control. But the divine imperative is that our actions should be determined not by this but by the fixed resolve to act in accordance with the truth – that is, with the truth of who and what he actually are both in society and in the universe itself. When we have learned to act in this way, we are free from fear; we give up the anxious effort to master our circumstances by force.

Gandhi's treatment of the Gita as a spiritual struggle has, of course, been criticised by a number who give it a plain reading. The drama of the book (part of the Mahabharata) is two armies facing one another, and Arjuna does not know what to do. Krishna says be truthful and fight. This is a bit like Islam and the Qur'an, then - well, it could be. But in the scripture is this essential matter of detachment, and therefore no what can be called the Will to Power. This makes the crucial turn from the physical to the spiritual. It is a fight then about truth.

Williams refers to Satyagraha: but Gandhi combined this with Ahimsa. Gandhi learnt from Jainism and its non-violence (the two go together in the same way Mikhail Gorbachev coupled Glasnost and Perestroika - one being the philosophical commitment to truth and the other a commitment to a form of action). So there is a direct connection then between the text and the action involved.

Also the quest for an action that does not simply mirror the action of the oppressor does find allies across divides, and of course Gandhi was murdered by a nationalist Hindu and not by anyone across the divide.

Thus it is relevant that Williams also states:

surely what any religious believer wants is to have the voice of faith heard within the pluralist debate, to have a guaranteed place at the table? Surely that’s why we are discussing the whole question of faith and civil society and why we want to answer once and for all the reproach that religion is a dangerous and destabilizing presence in our culture?

A pluralist society is not necessarily divided, but it is a complex set of overlapping people (and some ghettoes of defensive ethnic similarity) that believe different inspirations, and either clash but tolerate with their respective truths or understand them as stories or narratives to live by. Society looks for means to be functional, and this does not just mean an economic functionality but an ethical drive. Hans Kung has written about a global ethic, for example. Sometimes this implies a universalism of the message, via a syncretism or secularising, but Williams stays with the various narrative texts without a theological universalism. His universalism is about the worth of the human being (incidentally this was a repeated core message of the late Ernest Penn, Unitarian minister at Hull, but he made the assumption as a base message, whereas I used to think on what basis - well here the basis is the interpreted, inspiring, religious text.

In the criticisms of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (Rowan Williams was reading the Hitchens book during his break), these attacking the supernatural and superstitious and the ethically awful, Williams pleads for the positive contributions of the religions to the fundamental worth of the individual and the contribution to the social good. When reorientated religions are about having all people at the table, all able to make a positive contribution to peace between each other.

Williams clearly is no Durkheim even if the social good sounds functionalist: religion is not equated with social functionalism, nor simply with law and politics (comments made about Islam in particular). Nor is the human contribution ever quite finished:

– a condition that can be partially realised in the life of the community around Jesus but waits for its full embodiment in a future only God knows.

Religion then generates and motivates, it reads into, the social. It offers, but whilst humble and without will to power, cannot be less than the social:

Islam, like Christianity, refuses to make faith either subservient to the social order or simply an aspect among others of social life: it is something that offers transformation to the entire range of human activity.

It can of course be evil, nasty, violent, as it was on September 11th 2001. What Williams does is to reflect on interpreted text - important this, as text needs to be read and spoken about. The pluralist nature of todays world suggests that jihad should be non-violent (otherwise in such a world it will be destructive), and about the person. Thus the individual and social are connected.

The reason I use the Internet identity "Pluralist" is because I identified with the progressive side of that small Unitarian denomination, not just with religious humanism but with insights of the faiths. It was always an institutional shame that Christianity was divided off from the pluralist side and that it was associated with maintenance of identity in appearing to be a church and performing appropriately. My pluralism included Christianity, and its radical expressions. My social gospel, was that people could come together, to worship in difference, and not expect to be the same and not have to agree. My view did not prevail, as congregations sought agreement, identity and then the denomination decided to "uphold liberal Christianity" (whatever that meant). One may as well be postliberal then in a richer, theologically deep, institution.

It must be obvious why I warm to this lecture. I know, this is what Williams also states:

Jesus himself in his trial before Pilate says that his royal authority does not derive from anything except the eternal truth which he himself embodies as the incarnate Word of God; only if his authority depended on some other source would his servants fight (Jn 18.36-7). Earthly authority needs to reinforce itself in conflict and dominance; if the community of Jesus’ followers reinforced itself in such a way, it would be admitting that its claims were derived from this human order.

This is typical Rowan Williams: Williams is not saying there Jesus himself in his trial before Pilate says ... he himself embodies ... the incarnate Word of God. This latter point is a reflective on the eternal authority on which Jesus draws, that this relates to the text of John's gospel, that this is about how the early Christians had to behave - and did they behave according to eternal truth or, by suggested contrast, human order? Is this Rowan Williams just making clear his own badge of membership, or adding it into the issues he presents for good effect? He knows as well as anyone that Jesus did not claim his own divinity, and of course this does not say that - it just appears to do so. On the substance of the point, my view is there is a growing exclusivity in the early proto-orthodox Church not present in Jesus himself, even though Jesus focused on the Jews and the end time. Jesus did it with an open generosity and a social-health-salvation radical reversalism that defied the definitions of sin and understood beneficiaries of the day.

Rowan Williams knows that he states this section as he does, not just because he believes it, but with an eye to the inevitable tribal critics who will jump on his generosity to not just Gandhi but to the Gita as source and the Qur'an as scriptural sources. I think this lecture is as important as Jonathan Sack's 2001 book The Dignity of Difference, and both book and lecture respond to September 11 2001 in New York. Sacks' book also draws on texts, this time both written and oral in the traditions of Judaism to uphold not a theological or Enlightenment universalism but a divine basis for difference. Again, I don't care for the rejection of Enlightenment insight and universal (about which progressive Jews were so important) but it shows a religious contribution to the plural nature of the world: via the dignity of the individual to the complexity of the social.

And what of the inevitable tribalisms? Sacks had to travel to Manchester to meet Orthodox rabbis who criticised his book. He rewrote a chapter, taking out the most contentious points but keeping the central message. This is September 2007, where there are many basically homophobic types waving Bibles and demanding selective literalist readings from it, and who want to throw out a Church that includes those who do theology not unlike Rowan Williams, and replace that Church with an authoritarian alternative (one that recently has felt the censorship of offending the Rwandan presidency).

Come on! This archbishop surely cannot produce material like this, and participate with Episcopalians in New Orleans, and open an interfaith based centre there, and behave like some sort of institutionalised cane-wielding headmaster of old? If he comes anywhere near this, he would appear to be so ridiculously inconsistent that it would be laughable and tragic at the same time.

This lecture is closely-worded and complex material, and hardly reaches the masses, but it does speak of religion and society today, and is a positive reflection from three scriptural texts and their interpretation. It is the way to do relevant and connecting theology.