Imaginative Apologetics
Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition

By Andrew Davision (Ed; former tutor in Doctrine at St. Stephen's House, Oxford.)

The book collects papers from three years of successful apologetics summer schools at St. Stephen's House, Oxford.

Imaginative Apologetics draws on much that is most vibrant in contemporary theology to develop Christian apologetics for the present day. The contributors are leaders in their fields. They
represent a confident approach to theology, grounded in a deep respect for the theological tradition of the Church. They display a perceptive interest in philosophy, and unlike many works of
apologetics, their interest is in the philosophy of the present day, not only that of previous centuries. Drawing on the theology of the imagination they show the centrality of the imagination to
apologetics; from the significance of virtue in Christian ethics they show that Christian ethics is part of the Good News; from developments in the theology of knowledge they show that apologetics must be communal and must learn to tell stories. Dealing with history, the arts and the nature of atheism, with the natural sciences and social theory, Imaginative Apologetics presents a theological account of apologetics for the twenty-first century.

Andrew Davison is Tutor in Doctrine at Westcott House, Cambridge.

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‘This is a stunning book. In simple and vibrant prose, the authors explain our failing attempts to
communicate God through colourless, proof style arguments that are all but emptied of mystery and the
language of desire. They call, instead, for a healthy tension between clarity and estrangement, logic and
wonder. They invite us towards socially and culturally sensitive presentations of the Gospel, rooted in
Church tradition and embodied in our own lives. Imaginative Apologetics delivers a prophetic and uplifting
message for all Christians.’
Alan Ramsey, St Aldates, Oxford

‘Rowan Williams memorably said, as he took up office, that the Church needed to “recapture the
imagination of the nation”. Many theologians have responded to the challenge: we continue to see in the
Church of England a confident and intelligent engagement with contemporary culture and a firm critique of
the ways in which secular humanism and New Atheism diminish what it means to be a human person. This
book is a tremendous collection of essays that explore how the Christian faith is both reasonable and
imaginative: it should be read by all who wonder what culture loses when Christianity is eclipsed.’
Frances Ward, Dean of St Edmundsbury Cathedral

‘This attractive volume of essays encourages us to invite others into Christ’s way of seeing the world and to
step into the life of a community where his new way of living and loving can be found. It is an original and
inspiring contribution to the apologetic task of the Church.’
Christopher Cocksworth, Bishop of Coventry

***

Trinity III - Fr Andrew Davison

Homily given by Fr Andrew Davison, on Trinity III, 20th June 2010.

‘As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.’

In the name of the + Father and of the + Son and of the + Holy Spirit.

You may remember that I preached towards the beginning of term. It wasn’t a cheerful sermon. It revolved around a question: why is the Church of England is so lacking in charity? Why is our zeal is so faint and our commitment so thin? Why are there are so few saints?

I will come later to today’s reading from Galatians. Paul introduces this chapter with a question of his own:

‘O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?’

It’s the same question as I was asking in my sermon, put a different way. How can we be so apathetic in face of the Incarnation? Do we really believe that God came to us and went all the way to death on a cross?

before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified

Is our church art so much decoration? Does it not speak to us to see Christ extended upon the cross? We had these words of Isaiah, taken by the Fathers as a prophecy of the crucifixion:

I held out my hands all day long
to a rebellious people,
who walk in a way that is not good,
following their own devices;

--

This last week many of us shared in our apologetics summer school. Stephen Bullivant’s lecture has been in my mind as I’ve been writing this sermon.

Stephen told us about twentieth-century responses to atheism, from people who didn’t them off as ‘a perverse and adulterous generation’. Stephen’s heroes asked why the Church was not more attractive, why the children of their time were more inspired by atheist Marxism than by the Catholic faith.

It was French theologians who had the right idea: any response to atheism must take two forms, one inward and one outward. Yes, there is work to be done in mission, but there is also work to be done renewing the church herself. Yves Congar puts it perfectly: ‘since the belief or unbelief of men depended so much on us, the effort to be made was a renovation of ecclesiology.’

Those tasks remain, and they fall to us. There is the external work of presenting the faith with passion and clarity. We have thought about that, many of us, over the past week.

Then there is the internal work. It seems to me that it falls into three parts: catechesis, charity and ecclesiology. There’s preparing a church that knows its faith; there is enflaming a church that puts its faith into action; and there is inspiring a church to know and rejoice in what it means to be the church.

--

My penultimate sermon it revolved around a question: why does the Church of England look so little like the body of He who came to cast fire upon the Earth?

That is a ‘why?’ question. Its solution will be a ‘who?’ question. Who will burn with charity? There is a simple answer: it is to be us; it is to be you. It is you who must build the Church up: teaching it, stirring it up, inspiring it to be itself.

From those great mid-century theologians we have three tasks: to teach the faith, to live the faith and to understand the Church. In each you have such a role to play, but it is a servant’s role. The clergy of the Church of England cannot save it: you cannot put in enough hours; you cannot meet enough people to preach the Gospel; frankly, you cannot provide the money to keep the lights on.

The hours, the evangelistic contact and the finances will come from the laity or they will not come at all. As future clergy, your task is to reconnect the laity with their faith, to renew their passion: to hold out before them the incarnate God, as he was held out to us upon the cross.

We need catechesis because the problems of the Church and the world need theological answers, not general answers. The Church and the world need Christians who know the truths of their faith and live by them.

That would be a revolutionary thing. Stephen’s lecture contained an oblique quotation that I’ve been able to track down. In his introduction to Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness (the founder of the Catholic Worker movement) the peace activist Daniel Berrigan describes her as someone who lived ‘as though the truth were true’. Dorothy Day responded to the dire needs of Depression Era American. She accomplished remarkable things, and her work carries on to this day – just round the corner from us in fact. She might simply reply that she took Christian theology seriously and lived as one who believed it to be true.

We have already moved on, since catechesis and charity go together. Conversely, to life without charity may as well be life without faith. Thomas says that charity makes faith Christian. The selfish, uncharitably Christian may not really believe in God at all. The American New Atheist Daniel Dennett stopped going to church as a young man when he decided that people do not believe in Christianity; they believe in believing in Christianity.

And finally to ecclesiology, or understanding the Church. That might seem like the odd one out: catechesis, social justice and ecclesiology? It is not. As the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England put it in more confident days, ‘the church is part of her own proclamation’: we believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Rarely has the Church been under such attack. In the face of terrible scandals, the church is in some places an object of scorn and everywhere the object of derision. But more corrosive than external scorn is internal apathy. The Church of England has spent so much time worrying about the problems of the Church that she has begun to see the Church as part of the problem. But it is not: the Church is God’s solution. The Church is the Body of Christ, the place of salvation. The Church is the beginning of the recreation of the world.

One of my favourite lines of twentieth century theology comes from one of those French men, de Lubac: the Church is the new universal community in embryo. In other words, the Church is already the beginning of the reconciliation of all things.

To see that, our passage from Galatians is the perfect passage:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

The Church is the first fruits of salvation. The Church is where reconciliation happens: Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female – and whatever other hostilities we need to add in our own day.

Keep the theology of the Church in view, and love the Church. Salvation is the communal reconciliation of all things in the Body of Christ. As you might perhaps read for yourselves in a forthcoming book, we believe in a church-shaped salvation. But that is not abstract idea. Church-shaped salvation means that we must work and pray for a salvation-shaped church. We are all in this together. This is work and prayer we share, wherever our paths will take us.

Easter V - Fr Andrew Davison

The Theological Virtues - Faith, Hope, & Charity.

You may have come across the latest book by Philip Pulman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The title is not something that I like to read out in church, but there you go, that’s what the book is called: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Pulman has the good grace to label his book ‘a story’. I doubt that will prevent it from dragging souls away from God. After all, The Da Vinci Code is only ‘a story’ but it’s turned untold thousands of people away from the Faith. In Pulman’s story there are two brothers: Jesus, a good man, and Christ, a scoundrel. Jesus teaches an ethic of love; Christ complicates things with his overlay of theology and big ideas. Pulman makes his point in an inventive way but his argument has been around for a hundred years and more: Jesus was a good man but his message and example were hijacked by the Gospel writers. They ruined the simple ethical teaching of this rabbi with their theology and its insinuations that Jesus was divine. The main culprit among them, of course, is John.

Except that sometimes the villain is Paul. For other detractors it was Paul who took Jesus, an itinerant teacher, and spoilt his simple ethical message with theological additions. That was AN Wilson’s line, until he recently saw better of it.

These points cross my mind this morning because I read John yesterday, and St Paul. I do not find a simple ethical imperative obscured, as the hostile critics say. If anything, John and Paul concentrate on a message even simpler, even more imperative, than Christ as we find him in the other Gospels.

Does John deflect us from the real Jesus, that simple preacher of love and forgiveness? Here is what he writes for us today: ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another… By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ It is John, of all New Testament writers, who is obsessed by love – the simple ‘ethical’ message of love – here in this Gospel and throughout his First Letter [There is an argument to be made that the ‘ethics’ of Jesus are so revolutionary that they should not be bracketed with other systems under the world ‘ethics’. I have sympathy for this idea, but I will not pursue it here.]. And Paul devotes a whole chapter to the supremacy of love. His message is strikingly similar to that of Jesus in today’s Gospel from John.

Today’s Gospel passes over all the miracles that the disciples were to perform and says instead that it is love, love supremely, that will distinguish them as Christ’s disciples. [The point is St John Chrysostom’s, as quoted by Aquinas in the Catena Aurea commentary on this passage.] ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples’ – not that you perform miracles, although you will, but – ‘if you have love for one another’.

That is so much like Paul: what matters for the Christian is not miracles, speaking in tongues, or prophecy, or supernatural insight, or faith to hand our bodies over to be burned, but love [cf. 1 Corinthians 13]. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another: the more excellent way. That means we can certainly agree that Jesus offered his first hearers a message of charity, expressed in words and examples such as they had never heard or seen. But we need not accept that this was soon obscured beneath theology, philosophy and abstraction. Love, charity has been the golden thread running through Christian writings ever since: Paul, John, Augustine, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Theresa of Avilla, and others down to the present day.

The burning flame of charity is everything. And that should cause us to stop in our tracks and search our souls. I have one more sermon left here after this one. In that sermon I can be upbeat and cheerful. That means today I can afford to be tough. What is wrong with the Church of England that we are so lacking in charity? You will think that I refer to the lack of charity in our dealings with one other when we disagree. And yes, I suppose, I do. But more than that, and most of all, I mean why are Anglicans so often content to live middling Christian lives? Why are there so few saints among us?

Christ said ‘I have come to cast fire upon the earth and would that it were already kindled’ [cf. Luke 12.49]. That fire is the fire of the Holy Spirit; it is the fire of charity. I look at the Church of England and, with the exception of some evangelicals, it does not seem much like the body of him who came to cast fire upon earth. This should be the cause of profound uneasiness.

The Church of England is making decisions that are deeply unsettling for some of us. I am not, of course, going to address those here. But to those of you who are troubled by them, I want to ask, is it not also troubling that there is so little heroic charity among us, any of us? And to those of us for whom the path the Church is taking is a cause of sorrow only at a remove, in that it distresses others, I ask this: we’re cheerful about what we see as positive developments – should we not, however, be anguished that the Church is not more aflame with charity? I for one cannot be satisfied that the average Roman Catholic I know is ardent, and the average evangelical I know is ardent, but that Anglo-Catholics have hardly been ardent for seventy-five years.

So that is a programme for each of us, and for our church, and for our movement as Anglo-catholics, if we can talk on one movement any longer. It is simply this, to be aflame with the flame of charity. In my first sermon here as tutor in doctrine I said that doctrine matters but most of all we must have charity. And in my penultimate sermon I am saying the same thing.

In today’s Gospel Jesus says that he is going away. He refers to the passion. Given to us today as an Eastertide Gospel, our minds skip ahead to later departure, the Ascension. That can give us hope. The Son ascends to send upon us the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the charity of God. If what I have said this morning at all chimes with you, then make these days leading up to Pentecost days of prayer that God will pour his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit he has given us.

There may need to be scholarly refutations of Pulman and the rest. That should not be our first priority. What matters is what Jesus lays before us in our Gospel: ‘by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’

Review of the Ashmolean - Fr Andrew Davison

In the Church Times, Fr Andrew Davison reviews the newly refurbished Ashmolean Museum here in Oxford.

The University of Oxford’s Ash­molean Museum predates its own founding. The collection grew out of a “cabinet of curiosities” assembled in Lambeth earlier in the 17th century. Half a million accessions later, and the charm of the museum is still in the quirkiness of this hoard of objects.

As an example, take its late-medieval alabaster relief of the an­nunciation. For once, the dove of the Holy Spirit comes complete with his own slipstream. Out of the mouth of God the Father he flies, heading for Mary over the head of a timid Gabriel.

Surprises such as this are what makes the Ashmolean Museum — for all that it also contains works by some of the greatest names in art history. Mary turns up else­where dressed as a shepherdess or carved into a pilgrim’s keepsake scal­lop shell. The museum is full of such fascinating, appealing objects.

The Ashmolean opened to the public once more on 7 November, trans­formed by Rick Mather Archi­tects. The collection has outgrown its building once before. This time, the site was expanded, not relocated. The cost was £61 million and closure for a year. The benefit is a building that is equal in beauty to the art it houses.

Push through the columns of Cockerell’s neo-classical façade, and you come upon an atrium spanning five storeys of airy modernism. Along the right-hand side, a staircase as­cends from floor to floor, tracing enchanting curves as it does. At the summit are a rooftop restaurant and a terrace surrounded by Oxford neo-gothic.

Alongside all of this, the small part of the museum that has not been made over — the sculpture hall in particular — now looks old-fashioned in comparison.

The museum is now far too large to see in one visit. There is twice as much exhibition space as before. Different departments have seized on the luxury of new space in different ways. In Western art, the emphasis was on getting paintings out of storage and finding room to display new acquisitions. On the other hand, the department of antiquities had a different strategy. In the words of the curator, the aim there was to display “better rather than more”. The walls and cabinets are less densely packed than before, allowing the artefacts to breathe.

Just as important as the layout of objects is what we are told about them. The neat handwritten labels have gone. In their place come printed labels for each exhibit, and a large illustrated board to introduce the theme of each gallery. Visitors with any degree of specialist know­ledge will not find much that they did not know already. No matter: today they can pull up the online catalogue with their iPhones.

The new labels reveal the deplor­able state of religious knowledge in contemporary Britain. Every last an­nunciation needs an explanation. Even the crucifixion needs clarifica­tion. There is a story of a student on a tour of the National Gallery. It may be apocryphal, but it illustrates a point. “Why”, she protested after a few galleries filled with the Madonna and Child, “are these women always hold­ing a baby boy and never a girl? It’s discrimination and it stinks.”

Even the layout of the building now serves educational purposes. It re­sembles an archaeological dig: we ascend towards the present day through layers of history. More than before, the theme of each gallery serves to tell a story or make a point, but this is not over-laboured. The influence of one culture on another is a recurring theme, but, beyond that, galleries are still defined by time and location. The exceptions are on the lower ground floor. There we find a series of thematic galleries. They ex­plore sub­jects such as writing, money, and the depiction of the human image.

The Government is ever more insistent that universities must prove their benefit to the wider community. Not so long ago, academics had only to show that their research was ground-breaking. Today, they have to demonstrate ground-breaking re­search, and also that they present it from time to time to members of the Rotary Club or Women’s Institute. “Impact” it is called, and it is at the top of the agenda for funding bodies. Church groups will no doubt be welcomed into the Ashmolean with open arms.

Youth groups and confirmation classes should stream there in droves. More than ever, the Ashmolean holds untold possibilities for teaching. Christian objects, in particular, are everywhere. Alongside the supersonic dove already mentioned, and the shepherdess Virgin, there are plenty of other props for use in teaching visits.

The collection of ancient Christian gold-glass from the catacombs of Rome is unparalleled in the world. It was recently bought from Pusey House, although it has been on dis­play at the museum for some time. Or there is a medal issued by Henry VIII. On it he proclaims himself to be “of the Church, on earth and under Christ, the supreme head”. The front asserts this in Latin. On the back it is repeated in Greek and Hebrew, just to make the point.

The feel of the new museum as a whole invites comparison with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Although it is on a far smaller scale, there is the same juxtaposition of the ancient, medieval, and modern, and of painting and sculpture, tex­tiles, musical instruments, and ce-ramics.

Taking the objects and the archi­tecture together, the oldest public museum in the world is now without a doubt the greatest university mu­seum in the world. The collection is almost upstaged by the new building, and by that staircase in particular — almost, but not quite. In the end, the objects steal the show. They are by turns curious, beautiful, and infor­mative.

The museum continues to fulfil the wishes of Elias Ashmole, that is, to allow “the inspection of Particulars, especially those as are extraordinary in their Fabrick”.

All Saints - Fr Andrew Davison

This homily was given by Fr Andrew Davison at both Fairacres Convent and St Stephen's House on this year's Solemnity of All Saints.

I begin this sermon, uncharacteristically, with reference to an electronica remix of a speech by Winston Churchill. I have an MTh student to thank for this particular piece of music, of a kind so far outside my listening habits that I really have no idea how to begin to describe it.

It works with Churchill’s 1941 speech to the allied delegates. ‘Every stain of [Hitler’s] insipid, corroding fingers’ intones the prime minister against what I take to be a drum and bass background ‘will be sponged and purged’. What a perfect beginning, I thought, for the sermon I want to preach on All Saints’ Day.

Except that Churchill did not talk about Hitler’s insipid fingers. He did not say ‘insipid’ but rather ‘infected’. All the same, he could have said ‘insipid fingers’. That would have been startling, but true. It would also have served my purposes better. It is not the infection of evil that I take as my theme today, but rather that evil is insipid and goodness is the opposite. Evil is insubstantial and goodness is solid.

Today we celebrate the saints. We celebrate holiness, and with holiness we celebrate fullness of being and solidity of personhood.

God is good, and God is real. To share God’s goodness is to share his reality. Quite simply, to be holy is to be more real. This is not a statement that would go down well in Oxford’s philosophy faculty, but it is true. To be holy is to be more real. It is theme that has been explored in quite a bit of Christian art and literature.

Take, for instance, The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. In that book, goodness is so real, and evil is so insipid, that when the residents of hell take a day-trip to heaven the grass there cuts their feet. Even the grass of heaven is weightier than those who have chosen to make themselves evil.

As another example, think of the ring wraiths in The Lord of the Rings. After years of evil they are hardly there any more, just shadows beneath their cloaks. That is more, the ring wraiths are almost indistinguishable. Evil is dull. It blunts the edge of God-given individuality.

The evil of the ring wraiths has reduced them to the level of the same. Goodness does exactly the opposite. Goodness makes thing more what they are, not less, more individual, not less.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the saints, whom we celebrate today. There is no more diverse and characterful collection of people than the company of saints. The saints are individual, different, interesting.

Fra Angelico knew a thing or two about sanctity. He is a saint himself, or at least a blessed. He made the point about the characterfulness of holiness clear in his paintings. You will find at the top of [this post] a reproduction of part of one of his paintings. The original is in the National Gallery in London. It shows the saints around Christ enthroned in glory. What I love about this picture is that the saints are so individual, so characterful, so full of particularity. They abound with being, reality and character. This is exactly right.

The great Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen wrote only one opera. It was about a saint, St Francis of Assisi. It wasn’t like many operas people had heard before. Messiaen was tackled about this. There is disappointingly little sin in your work, Monsieur Messiaen. His reply: ‘sin isn’t interesting, dirt isn’t interesting. I prefer flowers. I left out sin.' [Sin isn't interesting. I prefer flowers The Guardian 29 August 2008].

Sin isn’t interesting. This is an important point. We protest against violence in film or on television. We object to obscenity in broadcasting. Rightly so. But it is just as problematic that evil is glamorised in films and on television. The truth is entirely the opposite. There is nothing glamorous about evil. As Messiaen said, ‘sin is boring’. Goodness is interesting. [Weil, Simon Gravity and Grace, pp. 62-3].

Moving on, as our reading from Wisdom put it just now, only to the foolish do God’s holy ones seem to have died. Really, ‘their hope is full of immortality’. Whilst evil saps life; goodness confirms it. Holiness, we might say, is healthy. Sanctity conquers death.I once had exactly this conversation with the wife of a student at Merton. I was working on my DPhil and I got involved with leading an Alpha course. It seemed this thing might involve rather an idiosyncratic take on the Christian Faith. I thought it would be wise if I got in on the team that organised it. It’s amazing how much you can do by opening questions after the video with the line ‘well what do you think? Did that make any sense at all?’

One Alpha session fell on the Feast of St Alban and I made some comment about St Alban praying for us. ‘How on earth can he pray for us?’, the other Alpha leader asked, ‘he’s dead!’

Perhaps impertinently – she was a consultant anaesthetist – I replied ‘you are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God … [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living’. Only to the foolish to the saints seem to have died. They are full of life because they are full of goodness – they are full of the life of Christ, which can withstand death. The saints have a fullness of being which death cannot touch.

In that holiness, in that tangible reality, God is with us. Some time ago, in first century Palestine, God was with us, walking the earth. In the life of the world to come, ‘the home of God’ will be among mortals, as we are promised in our second reading. Now, in between, God is present with us in the Blessed Sacrament and he is present with us by his Holy Spirit. Nowhere is the presence of the Holy Spirit more obvious than in the holiness of the saints. In them we encounter the presence of God with us; we encounter in the reality of their holiness the reality of God.

Evil is dull and same-ish. Goodness is interesting and full of individuality. The evil men and women of history were insipid – even if Winston Churchill didn’t quite say it. Evil, though it blights our world, is insubstantial. Goodness, however, is solid. Goodness is joyful. It is so real that it hits you in the face. To this the saints bear witness.

My favourite saint put it rather well ‘the goodness of the good is stronger than evil in its wickedness’ [Virtuosius est bonum in bonitate quam in malitia maulm. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.7.6].

Renewing theological vigour - Fr Andrew Davison

The following article was written by Fr Andrew Davison, Tutor in Christian Doctrine at the House, for the Church Times (3rd April 2009).

I am now definitively in my mid-30s; so I was pleased to hear that I am still officially “young”, at least as far as the Church of England is concerned. There was a meeting of “young priest theologians” at Lambeth Palace last week. To fit its criteria, I had only to be under 40.

The meeting was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s idea, and was put together by the Bishop of Worcester, Dr John Inge. I am glad to be con­sidered young, but the other part of the title is also cheering. Many readers will be pleased that the C of E is encouraging “priest theologians”, young or otherwise.

I know this because of the many enthusiastic responses I received after my article “The Church of England should nurture theology” (Comment, 6 February). Letters and emails came from laymen and -women, parish priests, professors of theology, and bishops. The idea that the Church of England has back-pedalled on theo­logy for too long seems to have struck a chord.

If that sounded a gloomy note, now I have good news. The day at Lam­beth Palace is a reminder of the strong, thoroughly Anglican, tradi­tion of the scholar-priest. A highlight of the day was a paper from the Revd Professor Sarah Coakley. She has recently returned to Britain after 15 years in the United States, and she told us that her time abroad has given her an outsider’s eyes. What she sees is an en­couragement to us all: the sense that Britain is “on the cusp of a turn back to religion”.

If this is true, then we have to think of ways to meet it. Professor Coakley stressed two important resources. The first is the parish system and our commitment to staying in difficult places. The second is a renewed and growing “theological vigour”, especially among younger clergy. She quoted the distinguished American Roman Catholic theo­logian David Tracy as saying that all the most interesting theo­logians of this generation are Anglicans. It is an exaggeration for emphasis, no doubt, but quite a compliment none the less.

The incumbent- (or curate-) theo­logian is particularly well placed to make something of these two strengths: the parish and our theological tradition. The Lam­beth meeting signals a determination on the part of the Church to support those with this dual vocation, as Dr Inge called it.

Neither the meeting in general, nor Professor Coakley’s comments in particular, should be taken as a cause for complacency. They are a call to action. Our scholar-priests are a great asset. It is good that 100 could be found under 40, and there are no doubt others who could not make it or who were overlooked this time.

Yet, if we want to see a revival of theology in the parishes, it will be the work of parishioners as much as the clergy. Studying theology works well in small groups. They foster the sort of friendly and open discussion where people can work on the im­plica­tions of Christian ideas alongside their meaning.

It helps groups to have leaders who are confident of the material, for all that, there should always be a sense of learning together. For this we need a church culture in which many teach and are taught, providing well-trained, well-resourced leaders.

There are part-time university courses, but we should not overlook diocesan programmes, many of which are excellent. For instance, there was a diocesan certificate in South­wark when I was a curate, offering a strong introduction to the Old and New Testaments, ethics, doctrine, spirituality, and liturgy.

It is also important for us to think about new methods for teaching and disseminating theology. The old-fashioned vehicles remain full of life, and can be highly successful when they are done well. In the past week, I have heard of standing-room-only lec­tures at St Albans Cathedral, and study groups instantly oversubscribed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Bristol. We need more of these initiatives.

Still, there are plenty of people left cold by these styles of learning. Three suggestions that occur to me are short booklets, podcasts, and brief online videos.

One task is to reach Christians who are not enthusiastic readers. They would be put off by a full-length “Christian book”, but would pick up a booklet or tract from the back of church. To see how this might work, look at the literature rack at the back of the next Roman Catholic parish church you visit.

I have recently discovered the podcast. When I walk into the centre of Oxford, it may well be that I should concentrate on the birdsong, but I do not. I catch up with broadcasts from Radio 3, about books, films, and Am­er­ican politics on the “slate.com cultural gabfest”. There are people who might fill idle moments with a little doctrine, or a discussion of this week’s lectionary readings.

There is also YouTube, the video-sharing website, which for many is a favourite filler of work tea-breaks. With a data projector, these videos can be used in group teaching and discussion. Already there is a growing collection of addresses by the Arch­bishop of Canterbury. I heard this week of a parish study group where Alister McGrath’s responses to Richard Dawkins have gone down well. The important thing is that the production values are high, and this requires money.

Supporting young priest theo­logians is a terrific development. I hope it indicates a return to teaching in the Church. It will be nothing, though, without full lay involve­ment. An exploration of new media would also be useful — a fresh expression of theology.

Large concepts writ small - Fr Andrew Davison

A book review of Participation and Mediation: A practical theology for the liquid Church by Pete Ward written by Fr Andrew Davison in a recent edition of Church Times:

Pete Ward rose to prominence with the publication in 2002 of Liquid Church. That book was par­ticularly influential in the world of “emerging Church” and “Fresh Ex­pressions”. In Participation and Mediation, he develops his earlier ideas in greater theological depth. Such work is very welcome: these ecclesiastical innovations are an important part of the church land­scape, but their own explicit theo­logy remains largely journalistic.

Ward sets out “to theorize practical theology as participation and mediation”. He could hardly have chosen better reference points. Here are two words with enormous theological freight, biblical and patristic, medieval and contempor­ary. The result, however, is a disap­pointment. This is “practical theo­logy” with lukewarm, ill-integrated theology, and a practical analysis that peters out just as it becomes most interesting.

The novelty of Ward’s work does not rest so much on ideas of his own as on the selection of influ­ences he brings together. There is something to be said for passing on the best of earlier work. Unfortu­nately, his sources are often at least one remove from the white heat of the most exciting current academic thought, and much that is most relevant is passed over. For instance, even given his basically Protestant outlook, it is surprising that he should have passed over without comment the recovery of “partici­pa­tion” as a central theme in Catholic theology over the 20th century.

The problem is that Ward is not clear about what he means by either of his central terms. From such definitions as they are given, they emerge as a shadow of the lofty theological topics they once were. Participation often means no more than “knowing how to join in”, and mediation is simply “cultural communication” through the “new media”. Once Christian theology expressed an entire metaphysics with these ideas. Now they suggest little more than using video projectors to make the Church accessible.

The “practical” part of Ward’s “practical theology” uses cultural studies to analyse contemporary Evangelical life. His worked example is the worship song “Shine, Jesus, shine”. Having laid down his method with reference to the Sony Walkman, he dissects the cultural significance of the song in a chapter of its own. Later, we find the eucharist analysed with reference to Kendrick’s song. This is a provoca­tive move, but, then again, what is to stop us from treating every feature of the Church alike, once “cultural studies”, not theology, has become the benchmark?

None of this, actually, is particularly engaging. Far more important is his suggestion that the ingrained practices of the Church might mediate the gospel, or indeed impede it. Here he is on to something; so it is frustrating that so little of what he flags up in intriguing lists (“objects, clothing, lifestyle, food” or “gravestones, church buildings, adverts”) is taken any further.

Ward’s style begins well, but takes a turn for the worse when he reaches his theology. By the end, sentences often read as a more or less random assemblage of key words: mediation, animation, production, participation, circulation, flow. Some books are obscure because of a surfeit of ideas. This one is unclear while having little decisive to say. “Fresh expressions of church” may have a strong theological justification — they certainly lack one as they stand — but this book is not it.

Lent II - Fr Andrew Davison

Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

The coming of the Son of Man in glory with the holy angels. You might think that these words belong more to Advent than to Lent. I hope to convince you that Lent too is a season oriented towards the end of the world and that which lies beyond it. Lent is an eschatological season.

Lent has an eschatological reference in that, like life as a whole, it is a preparation for the ‘Eternal Eastertide’

One of our great Lent hymns concludes ‘Keep, O keep us, Saviour dear | Ever constant by Thy side; | That with Thee we may appear | At the eternal Eastertide’. Our brief, yearly journey to Easter is an image of the whole of our life. Our lives are a journey to the ‘Eternal Eastertide’. Seen that way, Lent becomes a lesson showing us how to live, not simply for forty days and forty nights, but right through our lives and, indeed, beyond them, as I shall point out in conclusion.

Notice than many of the images and parables that bear upon the period of Lent apply, in the first place, to life as a whole. The Easter Sermon of St John Chrysostom likens Lent to the labourers in the harvest field. Whether we have fasted all of Lent or half of Lent or a quarter of Lent, we share alike in the joy of Easter. But the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, which is where he gets that image, is a parable about the whole of life. Similarly, today’s Gospel is rightly a Lenten Gospel – you must take up your cross and follow me – but here Lent represents life as a whole, for Christ’s injunction to take up our cross is a permanent call.

If Lent is life in miniature, then Lent helps us to understand life. But the reverse is also true – the dynamics and structure of the Christian life as a whole help us to understand Lent. This current season is not simply for the sake of the coming temporal Easter; it is also for the sake of the great and final Easter. Yes, once the celebration of the Resurrection is upon us, we will rightly cast aside fasting and abstinence. Nonetheless, the ascetic benefits that have accrued over Lent should not fade away; the disciplines of heart that have been instilled are not to be cast aside.

Lent is orientated not only to the springtide celebration of Easter, which comes once each year, but to the ‘Eternal Eastertide’. That ‘Eternal Eastertide’ stands for us as a promise, in the same spirit in which the idea of promise so animates our reading from the Letter to the Romans. Lent is a season of hope, when we follow our father Abraham who ‘hoped against hope’, believing God.

Not only do we prepare in Lent for that which lies beyond this life, we also respond to it having come among us already

The disciplines of Lent would be futile if they were not directed to an end that lies in God, to an end which is guaranteed by the promise of God. The end, the goal, is the point. We are not to loose our lives for the sake of loosing them; we are to loose our lives for the sake of saving them. Lent involves real privations, but it is for the sake of a real and redemptive good, which lies with God.

Our Lenten disciplines do, certainly, prepare us for Easter. They ought to have a cleansing quality. But they are not simply a regime of Church-sanctioned detox, of the kind that might appear in an advertisement on Channel Four but with the Archbishop of Canterbury giving the endorsement rather than Carol Vorderman.

Lent, discipline, denial, sacrifice – these are worked out in terms of hope in God. Our hope lies beyond the world. They do not have a merely temporal, merely this-wordly reference. This would be to set our mind on human things and not on divine things.

Lent, I have said looks forward to that which lies beyond. In this it is like Advent. But like Advent it also a season of encounter – for God has pre-empted our longing. Consequently, our relation in Lent to that which lies ahead is not simply one of anticipation or preparation. We do not only prepare in Lent for the cataclysmic action of God, we are also responding to it. An apocalyptic confrontation with God is coming, but has also come and is coming still. In Lent we are responding to the arrival in time of that which lies beyond time. Each of our readings makes this clear: the Lord appeared to Abram, Jesus stood in the midst of the disciples, grace arrived when there was only law and only the expectation of law.

Grace is gratuitous; it is of the nature of grace to arrive out of time; it is not according to the order of things. It is the encounter with God, ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’: life when there was no expectation of anything but death, creation when there was not even anything to expect to be created.

Our faith – which is expressed in works, for us no less than for Abraham – only makes sense in terms of our encounter with the God of grace. Faith is in God who irrupts upon the world: ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’.

I have said that Lent is an image of life and that the dynamics of the Christian life as a whole – which is one of grace – applies therefore to Lent as well.

Lent is eschatological in that it prefigures purgatory

Let me say in conclusion, that Lent is a symbol and a road map not only for this life but also for what lies beyond it. Lent is symbol of purgatory. In this way too, Lent is an end of the world-ish sort of season. Lent reminds us that purgatory begins now. And if the purgatorial process is bearable now, then perhaps Lent steels us with courage for our journey beyond this life, into the region that C S Lewis described as Lenten lands. We can also embrace, in hope, that portion of our journey into holiness which lies beyond this life.

As I say, the link between Lent and purgatory is not mine. I came across in C S Lewis – who made his confession in this church. On the death of his friend Charles Williams, another of the Inklings, he wrote a poem on this theme. He later adapted for his wife’s epitaph. Referring to her mortal remains, he wrote:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

And to that Easter Day may Almighty God conduct us all also, through our own Lenten lands: for his grace gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Church of England should nurture Theology - Fr Andrew Davison

Fr Andrew Davison writes in today's Church Times. Further information about the Returning to the Church course run at St Stephen's House can be found here.

When did the Church of England start being embar­rassed by theology? There was a time when our theo­logical learning was met with wonder: our erudition was the stupor mundi. Today, the official theology of the Church of England is more often just stupefying, or it is absent alto­gether.

Two examples from the world of diocesan theological education will set the scene. An academic I know, a leader in his field and a hard-working parish priest, offered to help with his cathedral’s pro­gramme of education. It came to nothing. His sugges­tions were rebuffed for being “too Christian”. Staff at the cathedral said that they prided themselves on out­reach to non-Christians, and any­thing too religious “might put them off”.

Another friend, also a parish priest, attended a course on “leader­ship devel­op­ment” organised by her diocese. It could have been training for Marks & Spencer or NatWest: it was secular management theory from beginning to end.

This approach was so entrenched that, when she voiced her concern and asked for a little more theology, she was met with scorn. The diocese, she was told, left it to individuals to “baptise” the learning of society at large. Yet this would suggest that ideas are more or less neutral, whereas they can be variously good and bad, and we need theology to judge them.

The mentality this episode illustrates does not envisage that theology should perform an incisive critique on the ideas of our time. But then this brand of accommodating liberalism has given up making the effort to judge. We can leave it to people to work things through theo­logically in their own time only if we are also committed to the ongoing task of putting that theology in place.

If you need further confirmation of a deficit of theology in the life of the Church, consider Church of England reports. The theological introduc­tion or concluding reflec­tion is usually bland. It will often set out a tapestry of quotations, and from slightly marginal figures, rather than delivering a sustained argu­ment, ex­pounding heavyweight theo­­logians. There is considerable con­fusion over what counts as an authority.

Theologically speaking, Mission-shaped Church (CHP, 2004) is the worst example by some margin. Look through the list of references at the back of this gospel for the 21st-century Church. Swaths of it read like the inventory of second-hand paper­backs in an Evangelical book­shop. The proportion of citations from definitive thinkers from the Christian tradition is minute.

This is a real problem. We are mov­ing into new, uncertain territory with a scratched-together guide. The former director of the Fresh Expres­sions movement commented per­ceptively on its website that ecclesiology — which is exactly what we need — is a “word which stops conversations more than it starts them”. He rightly pointed out that much work remains to be done before the Church will be literate in this area.

The literature of Fresh Expres­sions exemplifies something partic­ularly perplexing — a disengage­ment by Evangelicals from theology more generally. In the zealous Evan­gelical world of my undergraduate years in the early ’90s, doctrine was the staple of our conversations. But, since then, Anglican Evangelicalism has bifurcated. As the conservative and open wings grow apart, it seems that an awkward silence is being kept over diverging theological convic­tions.

Instead, there is a new emphasis on the outward life of discipleship and getting people into church, and theology is ignored or even dis­paraged. Previous generations would not have seen a tension between these options.

I single out Evangelical Anglicans not in scorn, but rather out of a sense of disappointment. They are highly significant in the current balance of the Church, and their tradition promises more.

Anglo-Catholics fare little better. For a decade, we have allowed internal, thoroughly ecclesiastical concerns to limit the range of ques­tions we address. When the current prominent generation was training at Catholic theological colleges in the 1970s, doctrine was at its lowest ebb. This was the period when the Church of England was agonising over whether it believed the Creeds. As a result, although those who are now leaders believed the faith, systematic theology figures sur­prisingly little among their interests: even for traditionalists, its place is taken by church history or spir­ituality.

This trend is replicated in the Anglican Communion as a whole. Gone is our fabled open-mindedness and confidence in the quest for truth. The issue at the heart of our current troubles — the legitimacy of homosexual relationships — has been studiously ignored as a matter for theological investigation at a global level.

Instead, we concern ourselves with procedure, with the Covenant and Instruments of Unity. The pro­cedural card also trumps theo­logy nearer to home. At one point, when the debate over the conse­cration of women bishops in the General Synod had become intractable, the bishops turned the question over to the canon lawyers. It was not a good moment for those who see bishops as teachers and exponents of the faith.

Finally, just when it would have been useful, the Doctrine Commis­sion is in abeyance. It might have offered a swift but penetrating theo­logical response to the current finan­cial crisis. Into our national debate, it could have injected a long, wise view on community, restraint, and true gain. Instead, we rely on individual bishops, or groups of bishops, mak­ing statements to newspapers.

Offering the sort of wise counsel in view here, especially in times of difficulty, is precisely what the con­stitutional position expects of the Church of England: counsel drawn from the deep wells of the tradition entrusted to us as its custodians.

The best and worst of the current situation is that these custodians abound. The good news is that there are many fine Anglican theologians who have international reputations. But then it is all the worse that we hardly use them. We have thinkers of distinction, but far too often they only indirectly influence and aid the Church. Again, we see a woeful gap between academic theology and theology in the life of the Church.

Of course, on the ground many parishes are active in theological learning and discussion. And, of course, the academic theologians I am thinking of are themselves de­vout members of these commun­ities. For all that, their sense is often one of being cut off and under­deployed. This is particularly true of lay theologians.

The Church is marginal to con­temporary intellectual life at a na­tional level, but it offers little that is more than marginally inter­est­ing.

Nothing less than a sea change will do: a return to confidence in our tradition and the sense that our theo­logy is one of our proudest boasts. It is encouraging that this sort of shift is visible among younger priests and people. Moreover, resur­gent confidence in Christian orthodoxy does not inevit­ably go hand in hand with cultural conservatism.

In the current Archbishop of Canterbury, we have a theologian at the helm, and that is making some differ­ence to the output of church committees and reports. The Liturgical Commission’s Trans­form­ing Worship (2007) has gravity. Even here, how­ever, the cold hand of bullet points and numbered para­graphs remains. We know how to present theology as if it were dull.

In training clergy and lay leaders, we need to make more of our aca­demics. In my time as a curate, the most successful days of continuing ministerial edu­cation were the ones where academics were invited in.

We should not suppose that the only ones to gain from better links with university theologians would be priests and people. The reverse is also true. At the first “Returning to the Church” conference at St Stephen’s House last month, it was the dialogue between theologians and people from the parishes that struck me as most significant.

Re­searchers returned to their univer­sities with new questions to consider, and the needs of the contemporary Church more firmly in mind.

The Church of England has put money into new forms of mission. Many of them I find insubstantial, but I will celebrate them if they produce new, well-grounded Chris­tians. There has also been a revival of interest in liturgy. This is only to the good. The neglected sibling is theo­logy: doctrine, Christian thought, apologetics, catechesis — confid­ently presented and accessible without dilution.

This, in particular, is what young people want. I find this constantly, first in a parish and now in a uni­versity. In a parish in south-east London, it was classes to teach the faith that drew, and retained, chil­dren and teenagers. Now, in Oxford, I have seen students seize on groups to present without triviality the basics of theology.

In its own way, the success of the Alpha course suggests a similar desire to understand the Christian faith, for all that many of us might wish that it went further and adopted a different balance in its subject-matter.

A few decades ago, there was a liberal turn that led us to suppose that we could do without theology, often replacing it with social sciences. This trend is everywhere to be seen. In fact, to reconnect with the young, we should return to the tradi­tion at its most vibrant: we should go orthodox and thoughtful.

Third Sunday of Epiphany - Fr Andrew Davison

Today we come to the third part of the three revelations of Christ we celebrate at Epiphanytide. First the coming of the Magi and the revelation to the Gentiles, then the baptism in the Jordan and the revelation as the beloved Son of the Father, and now the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the first of his signs, by which he ‘manifests his glory’.

I am sure that you are familiar with this so let us, this morning; consider just one aspect of this miracle, this manifestation of Christ’s glory. I want to dwell upon the fact that it takes place, this changing of water into wine, at a wedding feast.

The fathers make a great deal of the fact that the setting is a wedding. A first thing they think it underlines, it reveals, is that marriage is a good thing: that God approves marriage, of love and of family. As Augustine puts it, the Son of the Virgin, who comes to the marriage, is the one who had instituted marriage in the beginning when he was with the Father. [In Verb. Dom. Serm. xli, in Aquinas, Cat. Aur.] This, he says, refutes those who speak ill of the marriage bed.

More than this, it shows that the incarnation is more than simply taking human flesh. God also took on human culture and religion. (We saw this at the circumcision on New Year’s Day.) When he came to his own he was not only coming to the human race but also to the institutions and to the religion he had revealed over the centuries before. And part of this is marriage. As the Prayer Book says of marriage ‘which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee’. He enters our world, not only into a human life but also into human culture. This revelation of God refutes those who would denigrate religion and human culture.

Even more remarkable, the one who is revealed, the guest at the marriage, is the true, divine bridegroom. This is because, as Augustine, again, reminds us, the incarnation is itself a marriage: ‘the Word is the bridegroom, and human flesh the bride, and both together are the one Son of God and Son of Man’. [Tr. Viii. C. 4, in Cat. Aur.] In the person of Jesus are married heaven and earth, divinity and humanity. Humanity is his bride ‘whom he united to himself in the womb of the Virgin’, that royal pavilion from which he proceeds, as the Psalm has it, as a bridegroom rejoicing to run his course.

Christ is revealed as the maker and lover of marriage, and as himself the bridegroom. What more can we say? That here at the beginning of his ministry he also reveals the end. This ‘first of miracles’ is the revelation of the final end of all things. At the end of the books of St John, as here at their beginning, is a wedding banquet: the marriage of the lamb. Right from the start we see the purpose or goal that Christ has in mind: the restoration of joy and of unity between God and human beings. It is for this, the joy that was set before him, that he would scorn comfort and even life itself.

It seems to me important that all is for the heavenly wedding feast because it shows that joy and celebration lies at the heart of things, at the beginning and the end of God’s work with us. And consequently, sacrifices, when they have to be made are for the sake of joy, and not joy for the sake of sacrifice. In Rupert Shortt’s new biography of Rowan Williams he describes another theological college as being fixated with what gets called ‘woundedness’. This was the badge of honour and the mark of achievement. But if Christ reveals the joy of the banquet to be his purpose, even from the beginning of his ministry, then this is the wrong way round. Sacrifice is for the sake of joy and not joy for the sake of sacrifice.

By the way, the nature of the life of the world to come is also revealed in this miracle. As CS Lewis perceptively put it, the yokel who thinks of the life of the world to come as a feast, a cheerful barbecue we might say, is closer to the truth, for all its lack of sophistication, than the philosopher who describes the world to come without putting a metaphysical foot wrong.

I’ve two more things to say. For St John Chrysostom, this miracle reveals Christ as the creator. In fact, for Chrysostom this is a general feature of his miracles. Jesus works with the material of the world, the material which he himself had created: ‘we see’ says Chrysostom, that ‘he performs most of his miracles upon subject-matter already existing’. He is not so much setting out to demonstrate his power so much as to show that he is the original creator of all things.

And finally, and this seems particularly important to me, this miracle, and most of his miracles, reveals the wonder of creation and sends us back to the world with renewed eyes.

Augustine says that this miracle, turning water into wine, ‘is no miracle to those who know that God worked it.’ That is because; the one who turned water into wine in the water pots turns water, year by year, into wine in the vine. As Augustine puts it ‘only the latter is no longer wonderful, because it happens uniformly.’ But by miracles such as this God seeks ‘to rouse us out of our lethargy and make us worship him.’ [Tr. ix]

Augustine says that it is no miracle that God should turn water into wine because every year he makes the vines produce grapes, and the grapes produce wine. For myself, I’d rather not bring this miracle down to the level of the vineyard but exalt the vineyard to the level of the miracle at the wedding.

The miracles are signs that open our eyes not only to see who Jesus us, but also to see the wonder of God’s provision for us in the world. The nets fill with one-hundred-and-fifty-three fish, but God of his bounty always fills the sea with fish. Jesus multiplies the loaves, and fish too, but God makes the grain to grow upon the hills.

Alison Milbank has written that Christian novelists often seek to make the world strange, so that we can return to it, and wonder, and by our wonder be led to God. The miracles too help to make the world strange again. This is the absolute opposite of all that demythologising of miracles that went on last century. That tried to make the miracles un-strange by giving them natural explanations. Really – they might typically say – Jesus just knew where to cast the net to find the fish sleeping in one bid shoal. What really happened was that Jesus poured some strong tawny port into the water jars and the resulting liquid tasted a bit like wine. Let us not make the miracles un-strange. Rather, the miracles should make all of life the more strange, more wonderful, more miraculous.

So then, in summary, God the Word, who is the creator of marriage, and the divine bridegroom, come into perfect union with our own humanity. Christ reveals at the beginning of his ministry that the goal is a final marriage feast, the wedding banquet of the Lamb. His miracle is an image of the joy which is for God the beginning and the end of creation. Christ is revealed as the creator, any by his miracles he reveals the wonder of creation. Most especially, the miracles reveal God’s wonderful provision, which is no less wonderful for the fact that it is accomplished through nature.

This is something that we could celebrate with a glass of wine over lunch. And then let us be amazed, let us be thankful to God, who has turned water to grape and grape to wine, so that our eating may be a symbol of the final feast and that there may be wine for this feast which we celebrate now – the Eucharist. The fathers made a great deal of the fact that there were six water pots, thinking that they represented the six ages of the world, with the final, sixth, age stretching from the time of John the Baptist until the end of the world. The Eucharist is the feast of the final age and of the age to come. And, truly, Christ has saved the best wine until last, until now: for the wine he gives us to drink is the wine of his own blood.

Academe, and what it’s for - Fr Andrew Davison

This book review by the Fr Andrew Davison, Tutor in Christian Doctrine, appeared in the Church Times :

The State of the University: Academic knowledges and the knowledge of God by Stanley Hauerwas

“Write about what you know,” is standard advice given to would-be authors. It seems also to apply to seasoned academic writers, for whom the university itself is a favourite subject.

This contribution to the genre from Stanley Hauerwas is a collection of occasional papers and lectures, as are many of his books. Its coherence is not structural, the kind possessed by a book written in one go, but that of a mind with a single intent. It is a report from a period of the author’s life in which one question was foremost: how should the Christian view the contemporary university?

Common to all these papers is a tension: we are to love and serve the earthly community while at the same time knowing that here we have no abiding city. For Hauerwas, university is where this sense of dislocation is most acute. It is the institution in which he is most profoundly at home, and yet he finds it inextricably bound up with the secular state, which he excori-ates at every turn for its violence.

The title of the book is, therefore, a pun (a weak one): Hauerwas in-vestigates the “state of the university”, and finds it to be a “state”, or, at least, an arm of the state. The book is as much a reflection on resistance to violence and on the contemporary political situation as it is on education, narrowly understood.

Hauerwas will not allow the university to set the agenda as to her strengths and weaknesses. Nor is he enthusiastic about the perspective of students: too often they go to university aiming to earn higher salaries afterwards rather than aiming to “educate their aims”. Instead, he poses questions that have theological roots: “What is the university for?” and “Whom does it serve?”

Reflecting on the American scene, he argues for goals that are both more transcendent and more mundane than those the university currently allows for herself. The university needs to find more profound causes to serve than freedom (freedom for what, he asks) or critical thinking (which is conveniently critical of everything but the status quo). Christians would wish her also to serve the poor, and put down roots in her locality.

The book does not always make for cheerful reading. The intriguing antidote for these woes may well be an emphasis on the university as a place of friendship, for all that this theme is not brought to the surface explicitly. A number of these papers were offered in homage to particular friends in higher education. We get the sense that it is in such friendships, and in the bonds of community that they forge, that we begin to resist violence.

This collection is sometimes frustrating — it is a little uneven highly opinionated, and it raises more questions than it answers.

Yet it ought to be read widely, and received as a gift to both the Church and the university. For anyone involved in the work of teaching, this book is a perfect invitation to think through questions of what we are doing and why. Hauerwas has an infectious sense that “it is hard to make God boring, or have little significance to the way we live and think.”