The Flight from The Collective
One of the implicit themes in my presentation so far has been the evolution of Christianity from collective to individual concerns. We have seen this in the consideration of human behaviour where the emphasis on public sin in the Gospels and the writings of Saint Paul has given way, via the tariff system adopted in association with the Sacrament of Penance, or Reconciliation, to emphasis on private morality.
When I was growing up in a Roman Catholic convent school before Vatican II, I was almost suffocated by the emphasis on private morality, imposed through an ecology of guilt, whereas, at the same time, the Roman Catholic Church was frightened almost to death by collectivist enterprises because they were identified with Stalinist, anti religious "Communism" which had stretched its tentacles into Western Europe so that it clawed at the gates of the Vatican through the Communist party of Italy. Of course there were Christian Socialists and the history of the Labour Party bears witness to that, but such alignments were the exception to the rule. For all its merits, Vatican II was weak on the issue of social and economic justice for the poor; and the Roman Catholic Church only has itself to blame for the inconvenience, as it then saw it, of 'Liberation Theology'. On the other hand, whether or not you buy the Weber[i]/Tawney[ii]/Fanfani[iii] thesis of the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism or not, there has been little theoretical work in the Protestant and reformed tradition on the issues of social and economic justice and with the renewed vigour of church groups such as HTB[iv] there has been a new economic conservative stimulus added to the Church of England's lazy conservatism. Yes, there was "Faith in the City"[v] but one brave swallow doesn't make for a Summer of social and economic justice.
Not only the poor, but also institutional Christianity has paid a high price for this reticence. Our own emphasis on the individual and the private, as opposed to the collective and the public, has given atheists the legitimacy to propose that religion itself is simply the exercise of a private preference. This, in turn, has led to a new kind of 'Protestantism' or 'Congregationalism' based on private preference. My worry about this might seem to contradict my suspicion of imposed orthodoxy but the two positions are false for the same reason which is the obvious one that the opposite of orthodoxy and the opposite of private preference is the primacy of the linguistic, and even more so, the listening act. Again, and I do not apologise for repeating myself, this leads us to the core purpose of librarianship. When the motor car had just been invented, Henry Ford articulated the now famous proposition that if you had asked people at the end of the 19th Century what they wanted by way of transport they would have asked for faster horses. Our job is to point out, in our own sphere, what the possibilities might be which people should consider outside their field of knowledge or their comfort zone. At the beginning of this lecture I noted the names of some of the 20th Century's great and/or populist theologians and I want to cite some instances of discovery that have informed my study, just to point up the possibilities:
- Henri de Lubac'sii re-formulation of the Body of Christ as being the People of God, an idea familiar in Saint Paul, to conform with that of Saint Augustine and to act as a counterweight to Aquinas's idea that the consecrated elements are the body of Christ, has given me a critical insight into both the Church and the Eucharist
- Douglas Campbell's book on Romans taught me to see it as a dialogue between Paul and an adversary rather than a monologue which has revolutionised my understanding of it
- Tom Wright's careful but powerful language has focused me on the idea of "The Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven"
- Karl Rahner has opened the question of who is "saved"
Thus, my life in theology has become dynamic rather than static: I have left the Eucharistic comfort zone of Thomas Aquinas; come to terms with Romans; brought my Christian concern down to earth; and have begun to wonder whether all might be "saved".
Of all these subjects the one with which I am most engaged is the third, as my inclination, I admit, my temperament, you might say, or my propensity, has always been towards the collective. This has been reinforced by research which I undertook for my book: The Judas Church: An Obsession with Sex[vi], which demonstrates how much more concerned the Bible is with socio economic justice than it is with genital matters. There is an instinctive secular suspicion that we have not done what we should in the public domain. In spite of the atheist tendency to want to relegate what we do to the private, and because of growing awareness, as the result of public sector cuts and the refugee crisis, Christianity has an obligation to be extrovert.