No to Me as Possible Rev (Part 2)

I've since had feedback as to why I was not going to be interviewed for training for Unitarian Ministry. There were two main connected reasons:

• First was the doubt that I can relate to other people who are not as intellectually gifted as me.
• Second was a question of character that I can relate to individuals in the social settings or contexts of ministry.

As for people being thoroughly Unitarian or not, or reliable or not, the demand for five years ministry or repay the training is a response to the realisation that ministers come and go. Of course I was looking at the criteria and how someone would be more valued as a potential minister, which was clearly about people involved in the denomination at many levels: the more levels the better.

So in the end it comes down to what I've heard before: that I only relate to people at my level. I'll have to let my longstanding friends know this, one of whom achieved A levels and another a degree, and indeed none of my larger circle of friends achieved my level or number of degrees.

More important, and to the point, and thus I see the two reasons as one, really, is of my character in being unable to relate to individuals in the social setting of ministry. One clear example is in taking services, where the content of what I preach leaves people struggling to keep up. Other settings are pastoral, and also (though not explicitly stated) representing the denomination outside.

Presumably the character thing is that although I could take services to relate to people, presumably I ignore them enough not to do so. I mean, it's not as if I chat to only some people after a service. I ask about people and talk to who is there - after all, there aren't enough of them to be selective.

The music I do also has a lot of thought put into it, but it isn't only for the thoughtful. I also respond to all kinds of criticisms. OK, so I don't think I should model my music provision on Classic FM, as I prefer a wider canvas and sometimes music that is different. Perhaps Unitarianism is a kind of Classic FM whereas once it was BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.

If people, say, looked at my liturgical services so far, they'd see that these do relate directly to means of spirituality far beyond intellectual people. It might take an intellectual to produce them, in the sense of learning about liturgy and spirituality, but they reach out to a movement where the last liturgical book was Orders of Worship in 1932 and then a little effort in Sheffield.

This character thing is the view from a long time back that I am somehow aloof and out of touch with the ordinary person. I made the point that none of this is new, as it was said over twenty years ago, and as for not being interviewed "on this occasion" this judgement was made about me 22 years ago when I started training for ministry and which went wrong in year one as I didn't bend enough to give to highly local liberal Christian congregations what they expected. Then I was surprised that the spirit of freedom, reason and tolerance, didn't extend to the reality of freedom of thought I'd learnt was the defining identity of Unitarianism. My view was a hope that many of these congregations had moved on, and even if they have the view of me as remote or aloof has not changed.

The judgement - and it is agreed that it is a judgement - is based on an image of me, and an image of Unitarians as they now are, and the roles available to ministers in this denomination. The judgement of me is simply too one sided. The judgement of the movement seems to be that it is not intellectual, and that it is fundamentally 'ordinary' in contrast and presumably the everyday people like everyday content in their services. The roles in ministry are highly pastoral and limited, and so there is very little place for intellectual input never mind how it is practically exploited.

I've just read a column in a recent The Inquirer by a minister who I think is seen as a perfect fit. He is not long out of training, and his whole approach is about people sharing their life stories with him and what a privilege it is to be alongside them. This is a very valuable ministry for sure, and necessary, and I bet he relates best to what there is, the people in his visiting and those he encounters for rites of passage. But whilst he too is about 'being', this is a very 'doing' understanding of ministry. My view is that the stipend ministry is also about being reflective, about using the intellect available and applying it - applying it to define what you are about, to put into worship materials, to think for others as well as to assist others in thinking. It is about being a person for others. A ministry works better when there are square pegs even among repeating round holes.

Anyway, on this, my decision to apply was in itself a form of closure. This is a movement of, now, small and struggling congregations, and many wondering what it is about. The people wanted to minister are those primarily pastoral and directly pastoral. I have only made actual applications for ministry within the Unitarian denomination: in the Anglicans I've never done it because I have never matched the required belief - asked to choose between Real Absence (acceptable) and non-realism (not acceptable) I chose non-realism. However, I did take (yes a high level) theology group and it was among ordinary people, as far as I could tell, and I did there conduct worship and prayers, and people have always said how refreshing and different they were.

Asked for a list of books on contemporary theology and Unitarianism for this application, I did stop at a hundred, and I've read more than most on Unitarianism despite a struggle to make those contemporary in theology. What is the role for someone who stops at a hundred?

Anglicans do have a wider range of ministries, where I might have fitted better, but I simply could not make those statements of belief I did not share, whereas where I could make and develop beliefs in Unitarianism but where there simply isn't that variety of ministry available any more. Perhaps I was born a hundred and fifty years too late for this group, when I would have fitted what that Unitarianism then valued.

He's Going But He's Still Banging On...

Is the Rowan Williams to resign soon? The Advent Letter 2011 suggests he is. In his own words he puts:

Throughout the time of my service as Archbishop I have tried to keep before my own eyes and those of the Communion the warnings given by St Paul about the risks of saying 'I have no need of you' to any other who seeks to serve Jesus Christ as a member of His Body.

He says we all live in imperfect Churches, but he wants to improve what he sees as one.

Four years on from the infamous, even fundamentalist-accepting, Advent Letter of 2011, the one written for this year is still banging on about the Anglican Communion Covenant.

First of all there's a list of his travels and then the matter of one voice in the world comes with the 'holistic mission' within the Anglican Alliance for development, relief and advocacy, the activities around which:

...have shown the importance of Anglicans speaking with one voice on issues of poverty and injustice.

And:

It is one of the true signs of hope for the Communion that we are capable of meeting and working together...

Thus the Archbishop of Canterbury gets to the Anglican Communion Covenant, via the Primates needing to discuss further the proper extent of Primates discussing. (Well, if they don't know this, how can they have a Covenant?) He still wants one, despite the negative responses that have been building up from whole provinces, from within provinces, and via campaigning. He clearly realises that there is opposition:

In spite of many assurances, some Anglicans evidently still think that the Covenant changes the structure of our Communion or that it gives some sort of absolute power of 'excommunication' to some undemocratic or unrepresentative body. With all respect to those who have raised these concerns, I must repeat that I do not see the Covenant in this light at all. It sets out an understanding of our common life and common faith and in the light of that proposes making a mutual promise to consult and attend to each other, freely undertaken. It recognizes that not doing this damages our relations profoundly. It outlines a procedure, such as we urgently need, for attempting reconciliation and for indicating the sorts of consequences that might result from a failure to be fully reconciled. It alters no Province's constitution, as it has no canonical force independent of the life of the Provinces. It does not create some unaccountable and remote new authority but seeks to identify a representative group that might exercise a crucial advisory function. I continue to ask what alternatives there are if we want to agree on ways of limiting damage, managing conflict and facing with honesty the actual effects of greater disunity. In the absence of such alternatives, I must continue to commend the Covenant as strongly as I can to all who are considering its future.

But it is not how he sees this Covenant that matters. It's how others would see it and use it. Obviously he won't be around when it operates: not that he could stop a bureaucratic process once in motion. Later, he continues:

The question remains: if the moratoria are ignored and the Covenant suspected, what are the means by which we maintain some theological coherence as a Communion and some personal respect and understanding as a fellowship of people seeking to serve Christ? And we should bear in mind that our coherence as a Communion is also a significant concern in relation to other Christian bodies - especially at a moment when the renewed dialogues with Roman Catholics and Orthodox have begun with great enthusiasm and a very constructive spirit.

And also on a uniformity of views in the Communion, seen to be a Church:

Yet we have to pray continually to be made more truly the Church by being set free to receive more of Christ, more of the gifting of the Spirit. As St Augustine wrote in his treatise on baptism, if we were a perfect Church, we should no longer need to pray the Lord's Prayer, asking for the Kingdom to come and for our sins to be forgiven.

But there is actually some more to this, too, and with something of a dig at the unmentioned:

This year has been the anniversary of the great 1611 Bible, the King James or 'Authorized' Version, and in the UK we have had a large number of very powerful and imaginative celebrations of this. It has focused for me yet again the question of what a Church looks like that is authentically biblical. It is clear enough that Christian communities that are vague or lukewarm about the unique miracle of the Word made flesh once and for all in Jesus of Nazareth, and about the revolutionary demands this makes on individual lives and relationships, are imperfectly biblical churches.

Whilst, he says, don't attack or undermine them, like he just did. He's not talking about the Quakers and Unitarians, after all, and he ain't no liberal anyway.

What he doesn't get is that a Communion already so divided up won't come together because some piece of paper outlining a process says so. One third of the Communion's Primates absent at Dublin would not trust this process as adequate: it isn't doctrinal enough. Many wider afield are disappointed. Other provinces do see that the process affects their autonomy and ability to make decisions. After all, either the process does or it is pointless.

The contractual agreement that is this document (it isn't a Covenant) purports to offer is not one that carries sufficient trust to make the agreement. The Standing Committee is not seen as 'representative' and indeed the most representative body, the Anglican Consultative Council, is the least involved.

He keeps misunderstanding a basic fact, that the Anglican Communion is not a Church, but consists of Churches. There will always be sharp differences within such a Communion. It does not have to agree. It is not some body to show off as unified to the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, Churches for which there are also differences with many Anglicans (and not with some Anglicans in each case). Anglicans have had a more general view of unity on core elements; but in as much as some are adding to these core elements then the disagreeing will inevitably be more obvious and something for his successor to handle rather more loosely and with less of a sense that he is presenting a Church to other Churches.

Unless, of course, the Covenant is passed, and then the next Archbishop is forced into a bureaucratic role, and the Church of England that provides him is frozen as regards what it can ever decide for itself. This is why Rowan Williams's 'inability to see' is basically due to wearing blinkers.

No Rev for Me

I received a letter this morning from the Director of Ministry for the Unitarians saying the interview panel has decided not to interview me on this occasion. I've taken up the offer for a conversation on Monday at which the Director will have papers in front of her. I'll be more informed then, so this blog entry is before all that and in general terms.

First of all, I am not surprised. I thought they might just interview me, but wouldn't be enthusiastic to have me admitted for training. This just saves on the travel.

When I was told to leave Unitarian College in 1990, after a largely wasted academic year there, I said to myself this would take ten years to sort out. In the end it took more than twenty to arrive at a point that actually is a form of closure. I needed to make the application and then to see what happened, to leave it in the hands of others.

It seems to me that the Unitarian denomination wants people for its ministers who are like Unitarian sticks of rock, with the name going right through. The people have to be deeply within the denomination, active at several levels, and without any doubt to their commitment. When it comes to ministers, what they want (I think) is denominational workers and co-ordinators: principally people's people (quite right too) but then not intellectual carriers and creators of a movement as well. There is plenty in the way of writing warm prayers but theology has died. There is no theology of diversity, no working through the postmodern in the context of past Unitarian thinkers applied to today. So if we think of 'workers and intellectuals', the Unitarian denomination is now, really, purely congregationalist and about workers.

Not that I would not have worked. But let's be clear. What was lost was the last twenty of so years. In that time I would have been creative and dynamic, and made all sorts of risky enterprises with action and thought. I would have been a bit of a loose cannon only in the sense that some of the available congregations were small and stuffy, often producing a very limited and rather clapped out form of liberal Christianity (not even a radical Christianity of some mainstream churches), and I'd have wanted to make something more creative and diverse. People then didn't trust my neo-Pagan-Humanism as was.

Today I am definitely not that through and through denominational person. After all, in 2002 I was right on the margins of the church I attended, and left in 2004. I made a religious life on the other side of the river and only returned about 2009/2010, having become marginal in the Anglican world. The reasons were different: my marginality in Hull was in how people related to each other, whereas my marginality in Barton was simply belief and practice. I was thoroughly post-Christian.

The problem has been I've seen myself in ministry - as a stipend receiving fully rounded minister in all aspects, including that of reflection - since before I even took up any formal religious affiliation. It began back in agnostic days at the University of Essex, during a stay where the academic course collapsed, but where I saw a model of ministry that made a lot of sense. That then was put into action in Anglicanism some years later, but I've never believed the basics in the C of E and so have always struggled to stay with that. It was my decision in the end, once in contact with the Unitarians, to go down that route, and after dismissing myself at the first interviews was accepted a year later - only to discover within training that the denomination was not as 'free' as it makes out within each committee possessed congregation.

When I have thought of myself having take a different road, I think by now I'd be utterly frustrated. I can't say the Anglican words and don't wish to; had I been doing it I'd have become like some old soak, I think. I would have lost credibility with myself mouthing and representing things beyond belief.

BBC online image from Rev - and no light of appearance with me!

Technically I don't even qualify as a candidate for Unitarian ministry in that I have never taken up membership of a congregation since. I attend weekly and I am as active as anyone, now back at Hull, but although I am now seen here and there beyond Hull I remain more ecumenical and free thinking. I justify that in Unitarian terms too, after Martineau himself, but the pressure to be reliable is to be a dyed in the wool denominationalist.

There is something else as well. I keep looking at something that seems to be dying. At 52 and ageing, I'm looking at something that would have received still creative effort but the situation is becoming chronic. There are successful congregations where there is a community setting or a radical urban ministry, but too many places are handfuls of people. They are where I am; we went to a place that once had turned itself around only to be disappointed. In such a situation, the role of ministry (paid for from historic money) as a beacon of a changing tradition and as pastoral needs some serious thinking through, but too many efforts are in propping up the ship. All denominations are falling fast, but being small the Unitarians are facing the critical structural issues earliest.

I don't think many people know now why they are Unitarians. I see it as being a social gospel of diversity coming together - people of difference who try to get on with each other. (Actually the people look rather of the same sources, so it is mainly difference in thinking and even then it isn't so much different.) Difference able to focus together is what our society needs. But others still think of the continued Unitarian existence as some sort of gentle Christianity, or easy listening religion. It actually isn't, because it is the difficult business of trying to work out an ethos of compassion from diversity and taking the risk of being open to the plain and romanticised, the rational and the irrational. But there is a real risk, that I would have tried to counter, that the Unitarian denomination is becoming a thought-less denomination. This, it seems to me, is a bleak prospect.

I wouldn't have wanted to train at Unitarian College in Manchester, and not because of the ecumenical aspect (which I rather like). It is because the Unitarianism is defined there in a constrained manner. I would have preferred Oxford (or however linked to it at distance learning) but apparently that also has 'right wing' tendencies within. It's as if the radical edge is condemned to be edged, as if there is no sharpness or definition.

My view is that the denomination doesn't just need workers and pastoral people. It needs characters that are odd and at the margins, for

that extra creativity and risk. Such people are always a bit shifting along and different, and my offer was something like that and use of intellect.

If I sound too independent, I have to say that I find some independents I've encountered yet again disappointing. I'm really not into dressing up and grand titles and all that. I like the notion of a lay movement in which the ministers are facilitators, which was my intention - to use the time to reflect and pass on. But then, so what? Isn't the Unitarian denomination, as it structurally creaks and cracks, simply becoming a loose collection of lay people doing just about everything? That's probably where the future lies. Lacking a progressive education model of ministry, the basis of ministry is being lost. We'll probably end up locking up most buildings and quietly meet in houses, probably with a web presence too. These are interesting times for formal religion, maybe for some end times in a way no one once quite believed.

Interfaith Rev

[Updated below...] So this week's Rev theme was interfaith, with football as a religion too. Indeed the Archdeacon runs an interfaith competition (football is also war without killing) and, when he turns up to prance about as referee, he says to Rev. Adam, "Today my Bible is the FA Code of Conduct."

When Adam gets aggressive with losing, he scrums and tells it like it is regarding the nasty side of other religions, and then takes advantage of his after party wife throwing up to score a goal that the referee allows - it is, after all, in the rules.


Colin, not long ago having been baptised conditionally is suddenly Buddhist orientated. He even reacts against the Rev.'s smoking (after all, Colin laced his drink previously). He says that, "unlike Christianity", Buddhism is about non-violence and not telling lies. Colin though loses that peaceful Karma to the alternative religion of the game when the Rev. goes forward and scores his goal.

The Reader prefers play bowls; his objection to football is illustrated in not many signing up - due to "congregations of over 60s with hip problems". There is even a reference to the feminisation of Anglican Christianity, as Rev and Reader smooth each other's 'dresses'.


But all through this is the ongoing sub-plot, with the headteacher that the married Rev. fancies, and she knows it and even plays on it. Plus there is the frustrated vicar's wife and the prospect of a dull vicar's wives' party. One turning up to what turns out to be a good night is a Rev. herself; Adam asks her about the chances of a vicar married to a vicar. She replies, "I know - quite high."

Yes, Revs. get to marry Revs., don't they. I can think of one recently in the blog world, which my own imaginary side of my blog rather predicted. (Go back and look at the story of Radio Chadderbox...)


As for Adam's professional fancy, she dominates him. She asks Adam if he would like to see her in her shorts? Er, no... The new teacher (who was in Channel 4's Teachers and much differently) represented the New Atheists, and he clashes with the Rev. all right. He even knows his religions better than the Rev., in an Anglican schools with 60% Muslims. But he doubly clashes because she falls for him and he starts calling the headteacher 'Babes' (surely unusual?). He builds her a bicycle. This teacher was employed because he was "good", she says, not because he had lied about being a Roman Catholic (a reference to the ongoing corruption of faith schools) - and then he also comes and plays football for the Roman Catholics. Which is a reference to people retaining denominational labels when the belief isn't there.


But the bicycle killed him and allowed the Rev. to take an assembly with a story about heaven and thus to quite easily pass the test (score 1 indeed) as to whether the school was being true to its religious foundation or not. The Rev. has to say that the teacher did not believe in heaven but he does, although he does not know what it is.


So although when I watched it first I thought not as good as the two previous editions, I think they bunged a lot in again and it is a good insight into the Anglican world.


Two more to go, this series, and I wonder if he gets any closer to his attractive headteacher... If the series is cumulative, she might turn to him (after all his wife wanted a baby over a few of them; no mention this time after that horrid kid), but the episodes are also self-contained. It's very good, and of course the comedy writers must also know when to stop.

Updated...

Oh, and he shows the cross to the atheist teacher is if in a horror film to something satanic, who takes it and subsequently holds it upside down. And bicycling is also represented, like football, as another religion - as in the Rev. didn't know she was... not Catholic but a bicyclist, when she turns up with "Matty" for the football game (to play for the Catholics). Once again the teacher is another successful figure that the Rev. is jealous about. The series is all about the story of the hare and the tortoise, and many an evangelical doesn't like the Rev. because he is a tortoise and not one of their hares.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Explaining Neo-Orthodoxy and Its Non-Realism

I am asked by Peter Carrell in a comment (older post comments need my approval - it stops personalities attacking one another beyond my notice)

I would be interested in hearing more from you on this [Neo-Orthodoxy]. Why does it lead to non-realism? Why would trinitarians of old dismiss it as heterodox? Would you care to name who are the neo-orthodox in the Anglican theological world today?

It leads to non-realism because of a dismissal of culture and worldy reality as sources of objective truth. All neo-othodoxies, whether Catholic or Protestant, are Platonist - idealism is based in the pure in the heavens. Karl Barth has nature corrupted to an absolute degree, as a loyal Roman Catholic states:

...if we believe this new gospel of his [Barth], God would be reputed as having said that, ever since the sin, nature is so corrupted that nothing of it remains but its very coruption, a mass of perdition which grace can indeed still pardon, but which nothing henceforth could ever heal. Thus, then, in order the better to fight against paganism and Pelagianism, this doctrine invites us to despair of nature, to renounce all effort to save reason and rechristianize it.

Gilson, Etienne, 'The Intelligence in the Service of Christ' from his book Christanity and Philosophy (1936) in Pelikan, Jaroslav (1990), The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought, London: Little Brown and Company, 218-233.

The relationship of Christianity and reason, then, is best grounded in the Aristotle approach given its marriage into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas, for here reality is grounded in our world and being, and that is a reality which needs healing (says Christianity).

Of course there are degrees of extraction, but I am referring to neo-Orthodoxy which is double specific line. The God of Barth is entirely one way, from God downwards, and so is invisible and unreachable. That God exists in a dramatic encounter, and that becomes a textual inheritance. So it is text, but text devoid of cultural root. Now we might say that the cultural root is obvious - it is Hebrew and Greek - but these are no more than wrapping paper for the text as the drama. If you happen to be a chosen believer, the encounter almost goes through the culture and indeed through the text. But the point is how to understand if from where we are. It becomes then a drama in itself, a narrative, and a story.

It is no accident that this stuff, with help from Bonhoeffer, becomes part of secular theology, that is theology of a humanity come of age when it no longer asks religious questions. This busy person just gets on with life. To ask questions, Tillich style, is to wallow in cultural issues, including cultural issues of religion. But where there are cultural issues, or a Church likely to be corrupt itself, these are entirely transient. Indeed many in their religions are entirely mistaken.

So from a cultural perspective, the religion of Christianity is non-real. It starts with revelation and encounter, but it translates as being unreal. It is not rooted in anything, other than the invisible.

The Catholic side of neo-Orthodoxy self proclaims its Platonism (so what if Plato is also cultural!) and it produces its premodern Christianity inside the postmodern space identified. Far from the Church being corrupt, John Milbank's Anglo-Catholic Church is pure truth. It is the deposit of peace and reason; its reason triumphs over secular reason. Secular reason is untrue, because it is a false theology. Therefore the world is false, and indeed has broken down into postmodernism. In that bubble of space, this non-realist Platonic source of truth, the Church (under God and Christ) is a non-objective anywhere else existence. In the Protestant version there is Lindbeck's ecumenical Church, and people in it simple have 'standards of role performance' rather than any other truth claim. Like with the biblical version, you can only perform.

So there is a sharing of non-realism with Cupitt, but from an entirely different angle, as Cupitt retains connection with the world's dominant narratives rather than the failure of the Church and Bible to connect with a larger modernity (and most of postmodernity) and therefore its sectarianism.

It is heterodox because the older folks, including the liberals, retained a connection in reality with this world. It either was full on Aquinas, or, in the liberal sense, the limitations introduced by science and social science - in other words, research.

The Unitarians of old used all the language: Christ (our brother, our leader), the Holy Spirit (the energy of God - as said Rev. in episode 2) and God the Father, the creator. The Incarnation became general and complete rather than tradition-and-person specific. Of course they were labelled as heterodox, because it isn't enough to have modes of activity or a plurality of actions, or the often heard today of the social and collective nature of the Godhead getting on nicely with each other. The Trinity is about philosophical precision of the relationship of the Godhead, and one that is both in the heavens and redeeming the earth in a dynamic eternal relationship. These days, unable to explain it, people shortcut it. Neither Milbank nor Lindbeck nor Frei nor Barth are redeeming the earth.

So I know about Milbank and a few of his fans (including some Lutheran). As for the biblical bunch, well there's my mate Anglican curate Rachel. She likes nothing better than a good trip to some New Wine church or some independent gathering for an arms-out knees-up. She is, she says, a poststructuralist. She says that many tutors in her just left theological college are fans of Frei and Neo-orthodoxy. Perhaps they live isolated lives.

I'm a liberal soft-postmodernist when it comes to religion. Otherwise I'm not, really. I think religion is culture, but culture is transient and we make religion up, including God. It's like the arts. Research in the arts is no more than the latest trend, or how we arrived at where we are. Research elsewhere is more important.

I do allow for signals of transcendence. A fundamental one might be chaos theory. Anyone listening today to the UK Office for Budget Responsibility and the Chancellor adjusting his plans should refer to chaos theory. It is a fundamental in weather, in economics, in evolution and in mathematics. It gets very little treatment in theology because too many people have become sectarian and retreated to their neo-orthodoxies. The simplest mathematic equations with virtual numbers, just repeated, produce fantastic shapes, and you can never know the starting point sufficiently to know the outcome. What a theology of creation and sustaining that makes.

Still Revving Along

I actually think the third Rev (BBC - showed on Thursdays and will Monday) is better than the second, and that was very observant. It covered evil, but got in even a comparison of ghosts and Holy Ghost, the latter identified (modally - oops, a heresy) as the energy of God. The paranormal was being dismissed: naturalistic interpretations were everywhere, starting with the heat, the radiator noise and more. Dreams don't have a conflict of explanation, but are our narrative clearing houses, so involve the evil and the naughty pleasures too. All the time the 'real' evil was being demonstrated by the dislocated child who hated and didn't co-operate, getting the vicar's wife to consider she didn't want a child (but does). Yet, despite all the naturalism, the hear-all Archdeacon (another location of evil) came to tell Adam the vicar to leave it to the "experts", as if there are any experts beyond the pastoral role that was given to the new and displaced resident of the old people's home. Then the fear factor was finished so well with the disappearance of the child left clumsily in the resident's hands, the desperate search that can cause anyone to think oh no and why me and what powers are running things... And of course the thank you with the girl sat in the park waiting is just as naturalistic and normal as any other event. The girl is nicer on leaving, and Adam accepts the gift of the protecting toy - indeed put at his bedroom door after so many bad dreams. A bit of superstition, then, does no one any harm.


It just about had everything in it, this one, and remains so closely observed of the inner Anglican world of clergy and wish to be clergy, of faithfulness and doubt, muddling through, and those strange supernatural beliefs that are involved.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.

Neo-Orthodox Realistic?

One of the hidden points inside last week's Rev was that Christianity is not historical. It might be consequential (for some), but it is not sequential. Also it has no primary documents available in terms of history, so that all techniques of historiography have to be from a distance, and in some cases (horror of horrors) a dependency on the consensus of historians. Historians ought to be specialists on primary documents, sceptics in a way that your average amateur (for example making assumptions doing genealogy) are not.

So the New Testament as such is a presentation of community views and beliefs after the death of Jesus and becomes selective in a fast moving reforming of tradition including across a Jewish and Greek cultural shift. Nineteenth century historical theologians soon realised just how limited were the sources, that the history was both less available and more spread out.

The full title of curate Abigail's PhD thesis was (not is because it doesn't exist) NeoOrthodoxy and Realistic Dialectical Theology, later losing the Realistic when stated by the Reader (Rev Adam's sidekick, who thinks he'd make a better Rev.).

The point is, however, that dialectical theology is not realist if by realist it means there is a dependency on the world to back up the realism. Realism is, well, often based in the world (Aristotle). Given the intellectual source and drift, this realism would have to be idealised and located in God (Plato), but then the focus is on the argument of opposites (to extract the truth from exhausting the argument) purely based on the text as received and present. The method leads precisely to dropping the realist element wherever it is (Plato, is, after all, no one but a human philosopher). So whilst no one would call Karl Barth a non-realist, nevertheless a rejection of the world and its institutions (especially religious) and indeed culture - but a focus on the text and extracting its truth (from what is and what is not - very binary in contrast) - leads to others producing a pure text no world narrative conclusion, meaning non-realist.

Why? Because text is cultural and yet culture is rejected as transient and inconsequential. Therefore text is left as itself, like an island, just sent as revelation, but revelation located in a drama of events as understood and therefore to be treated as such.

Failure to understand (though the above is my interpretation, not his), says Hans Frei, leads to The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative. Or, rather, I suggest, telling us this leads Hans Frei to tell about the non-realist basis of the biblical narrative - though he might not use such a descriptor.

Of course the text is supposed to have impact somewhere, but it is not (as the present highly narrative based Archbishop would have it) about having biblical narratives that relate to your own narratives in life. This is where your experience, and your story, is illuminated by the biblical stories. No doubt the biblical stories come first, as revelation, or indeed because they have special relevance, but the relationship on human stories suggests a dependency on human stories and that wouldn't do. That's where liberalism creeps in, because liberalism is always about individual subjective experience, and once you have subjectivity you then have objectivity and you do have realism.

Though of course what is objective and what is subjective can start to clash and each affect the other, to cause something of a breaking down. Just as you can push Karl Barth on, so you can push James Martineau on and produce an open non-realism. Martineau is not dialectical, not at all: the only contrast is between his apparent realism (at a liturgical and collective level - his residual Christianity) and his utter subjectivity or individualism as authority.

Which is where "anagogical" comes in, because it is a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text. The extraction of a text into meaning by contrast isn't simply mundane but at a higher level. Humm: but care is needed or the interpretation and impact shoots back off into heaven again and the dialectical between sacred and secular remains unfinished. The enthusiasm of secular theologians for the Karl Barth and Bonhoeffer source was precisely because the anagogical is so limited and because you end up with a busy, secular world with a God so high and dry that the God is virtually invisible. Well, that's non-realism for you, when complete - or, at least, the option of realism is more hidden than ever.

Whereas, the Martineau route is the questions route, the beliefs of individuals route, where individuals might think their beliefs are 'real' but where, thanks to collective confusion, they are not. Or - at least - the option of realism is somewhat more hidden than folks realise.

So I would like to read Abigail's thesis, and wonder precisely at the use of the word Realistic - and what is the meaning of the ic after Realist. A more convincing title would have left the ic off. That then subjects the title itself to a dialectical examination:

NeoOrthodoxy and Realist Dialectical Theology

That's better. Because, had the title been:

NeoOrthodoxy and Non-realist Dialectical Theology

Then she would never have been a high-flyer on her way to St. Paul's.

Note: all the images are from the BBC online broadcast and are here as illustrative.