Over the past week, in a variety of ways, a number of connected strands of conversation, each of which I regularly find myself overhearing or involved with, have all come to notice or prominence. All relate to the question of the connection of ‘theologians’ to the life of the church. Often there is an expressed sadness or concern that the various churches – particularly, in my hearing, the Evangelical and Baptist churches that I have the privilege to serve – are not willing, or at least not willing enough, to hear or to use the insights of theologians. As I drove back from giving a lecture in a church conference, in could see in my head a somewhat angry deconstruction of at least several of these strands, which began with the reflection that my own experience is so far from a general unwilllingness to be heard or used that I find that claim almost incomprehensible. Instead of being angry, however, I want here to attempt a constructive account of how ‘theologians’ should, ideally, be related to the life of the churches.

‘Theologians’ has been in quotation marks so far to indicate the need for a definition. Let me suggest as a first approximation, ‘those whose Christian vocation includes sustained attention to the doctrines of the faith’. considered as a Christian vocation, there are at least two appropriate strands to this: disseminating doctrine; and purifying doctrine.

Dissemination is about helping the churches to access the deposit of faith, both in order to know it better, and in order to correct misapprehensions concerning it. These misapprehensions might be omissions (‘we don’t talk about this anything as much as we should, if we were being faithful to our heritage…’) or errors (‘So-and-so is wrong to claim that Baptists have always believed that…’). The proper task of the theologian here is to be a witness, as unbiased as possible, to the tradition; if I am to be the lens through which a church sees the tradition, then I have a duty (we are talking about theology as Christian vocation here, remember) to be as clear and undistorting lens as possible.

Purification, by contrast, is about challenging the theological tradition: the theologian may come to the view that, in certain ways, some doctrinal positions are in fact wrong, although settled, and so stand in need of reformulation. She may campaign in various ways for such reformulation, publishing, lecturing, and arguing for a few months or for an entire career. The proper task of the theologian here is to be a passionate – and biased – advocate.

This is not a ‘descriptive’ vs ‘evaluative’ distinction, as giving an account of the tradition itself demands the making of evaluative judgements. The judgements here are more nearly historical than doctrinal, but they are judgements, nonetheless. The question of the doctrinal tradition is always going to be a somewhat complex and messy one, perhaps particularly for churches which trace their heritage to the Reformation. They have their birth in a process of doctrinal correction and reformulation, and they profess to remain institutionally committed to further reform, should it appear necessary. In recent decades, the academic theology that relates to them has often suggested that some drastic reformulations are in fact needed, and some of these can seem to have attained a measure of general acceptance in academic discourse. To give an account of what is now standard theology thus requires judgements to be made about the success and importance of various proposed reformulations.

To take an example, consider the question, ‘what is the gospel?’ (a query I’ve seen in several contexts recently), I have a very complex historical narrative in my head which is not easily reducible to a simple answer: differing Lutheran, Calvinist, Roman (& Anabaptist) accounts of the nature of justification; Eastern Orthodox accounts of deification, and the measure of academic interest they have attracted recently; diverse Evangelical traditions, exploring sometimes the link between social justice and salvation, whilst sometimes seeking to protect a very narrow soteriological narrative as being ‘the gospel’; recent developments in academic study of Paul, and the revisionist proposals arising from there; my own estimations of the importance or success of each of these positions; and some awareness, at least, of how my estimations on this last point might differ from the estimations of others. I also have some personal beliefs and commitments which would shape my own constructive attempts to narrate the good news adequately.

I can answer the question – or any such theological question – then, in a number of ways. First, is the questioner interested in an account of the range and limits of possible answers, or a more definite and singular account of one right answer? In either case, I can offer her (at least) my view of what should be said; or my view of what most contemporary theologians (within a particular tradition, possibly) think should be said; or my view of what most people in history have said; or my view of what most contemporary historians think most people in history have said. Each answer has genuine value, but they are different answers.

A theologian who want to be a resource for the churches should be constantly alive to these distinctions, aware of what is being looked for, and clear about what is being offered. It seems to me that too often we are not; in particular, asked for some account of what the church’s teaching has been, we offer instead our own idiosyncratic view of what it should be, omitting any mention of the fact that few others think like this. The exasperation that results, and the sense that theologians are not helpful contributors to the discussion, should not be a surprise.

The theologian who can help the churches will be constantly locating her comments: ‘Well, I think X, but most others think Y’; ‘There are various live options here – A, B, C – even D – I’m committed for various reasons to B, but you need to know about the others’; ‘I think the history of our denomination lends support to this proposal, but you should be aware that others would disagree…’ Equally, she will be ready to be definite when that is required: ‘in my view, X’. Her task, however, will more often involve helping others to appreciate both the range of possible positions, and the definite limits that the tradition has placed on that range; and helping them also to understand some of the significance of the arguments – ‘these are the texts appealed to’; ‘the difference that this argument makes is …’

The theologian who is willing to relate like this does not seek to promote her own good ideas, but instead to help the churches to think better about the questions that concern them, and indeed to think better about which questions should concern them. This is a worthwhile Christian vocation; being seen to be clever – isn’t.

Evangelical concepts of manliness were a challenge to contemporary secular male values, whether among [sic] those of the British gentry, landowners in the American South, or convicts forcibly resettled in Australia. Emphasis on ‘honour’, machismo and lineage was confronted by a stress on ‘calling’, moral virtue and the family as a spiritual community of mutual affection rather than merely an expression of patriarchal sovereignty.’ (The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney (IVP, 2006), p. 141)

As far as I am aware (and I’m not a historian), this strand of the widespread social transformation wrought by nineteenth-century evangelicalism is relatively under-studied. There is a fair bit of work out there on the evangelical reconstruction of femininity to embrace more public and political roles, but very little on changes in masculinity – Rotundo on American Manhood and Tosh, A Man’s Place both deal with the question in some measure, but I struggle to think of much else. Nonetheless, the evidence for both the conscious attempt to recast masculinity, and its (somewhat patchy) success is not hard to find. Evangelicalism taught men to be gentler, less aggressive, and more considerate; whilst not often refusing the prevailing cultural assumption of male dominance in the family, the Evangelicals repeatedly and explicitly re-cast it in less patriarchal ways.

As I noted, the reshaping of femininity has been more studied. This is not just about radicals like Josephine Butler, although there is no doubt that her explicitly feminist agenda was inspired by her evangelical commitment; rather, it was general, and based on two central evangelical tenets. On the one hand, evangelical women experienced a fundamental spiritual equality with men, which inevitably strained the boundaries of a patriarchal society; on the other, evangelical social concern led them to devote their leisure time to campaigning, and so to public action and political involvement; a woman who, after her conversion, ceased to attend the theatre and instead became active in campaigning for social improvement necessarily began to redefine her position in the culture.

Hannah More was quoted (in an anthology entitled The Young Bride at Home, which was as much of a radical feminist tract as its title suggests) as saying: ‘[Women are] equally with men redeemed by the blood of Christ. In this their true dignity consists; here their best pretensions rest, here their highest claims are allowed.’ This experience of a fundamental equality had significant and demonstrable effects on expectations and constructions of femininity in the evangelical world; the wives of evangelical clergy, for instance, were expected to take an active role in ‘the Lord’s work’ alongside their husband. In 1832, Hints to a Clergyman’s Wife was published, giving extensive advice on how to be a co-worker with one’s husband; the author encourages even nursing mothers to find ways to be publicly active in Christian work.

Methodist and holiness movements provided a particular intensification of this theme, as a woman who could lay claim to the experience of entire sanctification was in a demonstrable position of spiritual superiority to men who could not, a situation creating a significant pressure to reverse cultural-normative gender roles. Phoebe Palmer’s astonishing evangelistic ministry is the most obvious example of this, but there are many others (Hannah Whitall Smith’s entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals notes that, at the Brighton Convention for the Promotion of Christian Holiness in 1875, ‘[t]he most popular sessions … were those in which Hannah preached her practical secrets of the happy Christian life to audiences of 5000 or more, mostly clergymen who were theologically opposed to the preaching ministry of women’).

(In all of this there is a third basic evangelical conviction at work, what we might call missiological pragmatism. John Wesley relied on it in recognising Mary Fletcher’s preaching ministry. Fundamentally, for real evangelicals, if people are getting saved, we’ll make the theology fit somehow!)

Hannah More is also a fine example of my second theme. She sold millions of tracts in her lifetime (two million by 1796, and plenty more afterwards), writing powerfully and popularly about pressing political and social issues, not least slavery. She was not above satire and parody (‘Ye that boast “Ye rule the waves,” / Bid no slave ship soil the sea, / Ye that “never will be slaves” / Bid poor Afric’s land be free.’). In her only novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808; it comfortably outsold Jane Austen in the day), she presents a heroine who announces and models the view that the proper ‘profession’ of a lady was ‘the care of the poor’ and so More crafts an account of femininity in which her own public political engagement is made normal and proper for a woman. Towards the end of her life, she even published Biblical expositions; An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of St Paul (1815), for instance. In the next generation, Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker minister, became deeply involved in prison reform; Josephine Butler’s direct attacks on legalised prostitution and the spread of STDs through promiscuity came another generation later; both clearly stood in the tradition Hannah More and others had defined, of a woman active in public life. (And both suffered, of course, from a society that was not willing for its women to be so active.)

This evangelical generation changed the world, or major parts of it at least: they broke the international economic system of the day because it was unjust; they reformed prisons, factories, poor laws, and anything else they could think of; they saw major revivals, and huge numbers of conversions; when it came to gender politics, they taught men to be gentle, and women to be active in ministry.

Lis Goddard & Clare Hendry, The Gender Agenda (IVP, 2010): Lis and Clare are both Anglican ministers, but take different sides on this debate; the book is a series of emails they exchanged exploring many of the standard issues and arguments. It is accessible to the general reader, without being simplistic, and offers sympathetic presentations of two different positions. This would be the first book I’d give to most people – fair, generous, and informative.

Gundry & Beck (eds), Two Views on Women in Leadership (Counterpoints) (Zondervan, 2001, rev. 2005) (chapters by Linda Belleville, Craig Blomberg, Craig Keener, and Tom Schreiner, with responses by each). A bit more technical; again, a sympathetic and non-controversial presentation of different viewpoints; the format means the arguments are more connected than Goddard & Hendry.)

Pierce & Groothuis (eds), Discovering Biblical Equality: Complimentarity without Hierarchy (IVP/Apollos, 2004, rev. 2o05). A heavy and technical presentation of various aspects of a case for women in preaching and leadership positions, including serious treatments of all the crucial passages by respected evangelical Biblical scholars (Fee, Marshall, …)

Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (IVP/Apollos, 2004). A large and comprehensive presentation of every aspect of the case for ‘complementarianism’. (This isn’t a great book, really, but I know of nothing that does the same work better – does anyone else?)

Millard Erickson, Who’s Tampering with the Trinity? (Kregel, 2009) Explains and explores a curious contemporary argument that gender subordinationism somehow reflects the Trinity; I confess that the argument seems to me to rely on a simple, albeit rather common, misunderstanding of ecumenical doctrine, but some people seem to find it convincing, and Erickson does a good job of explaining what’s going on.

Scott McKnight, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking how you read the Bible (Zondervan, 2008) and William Webb, Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (IVP, 2001) both address the question of hermeneutics – how we should find meaning in the Biblical texts – and how that applies to gender relations and roles.

On specific texts, the best places to go are the commentaries. Any good evangelical commentary will summarise various points in the debate, before offering a reason for the author’s preference for one side or another. At a basic level, try the relevant volumes in Tom Wright’s NT for Everyone, or the Bible Speaks Today; for more in-depth discussion, try, for example, Fee on both 1 Cor. and 1 Tim., or Thistleton on 1 Cor.

I confess that I didn’t get why everyone is so excited about it: I follow American football very vaguely, and so wasn’t aware just how much hype and expectation there was around this particular athlete. (I think the last time I watched a Broncos game on TV, some guy named Elway was calling the plays…) Beyond that, sporting competitors kneeling to pray after a success is not new, and was even being recommended as a form of witness twenty years back by the UK organisation Christians in Sport, if my memory serves. Whether we like it or not, sportspeople (and musicians, and TV/film personalities) are hugely interesting to children, and indeed to many others, and a visible indication of Christian faith is possibly of some significance. So I was leaving the Tebowing on the edge of my consciousness quite happily; I was aware that (several of) my American friends were heartily wishing the whole thing would just go away; beyond that, I was rather uninterested.

Then John Franke posted this story by Rick Reilly on Facebook.

There’s no mention here of Christian faith; instead some uncomfortable echoes of a native American Pelagian gospel of self-reliance (‘I am the captain of my fate…’); I am sure the money involved is almost insignificant in the context of Tebow’s salary, and I suppose most of the practical arrangements are done by his ‘people’. But it’s a story of someone, known for his Christianity, doing good things in a spirit of self-forgetfulness and humility. (The line ‘he’d just played the game of his life, and the first thing he did was find Bailey and ask if she’d got some food…’ speaks very well of the man’s character in this respect.) I know it is just one story – albeit by a writer who commands some respect – and I realise that there might be a lot more to be said, and also that much of it might be less wholesome.

As I read Reilly’s piece, however, I thought of the stories I’ve recently read of our own, British, sports stars. Lots, of course, about commitment and dedication to training – Lendl’s comments on Andy Murray; tales of Olympic hopefuls. But beyond that, outside of tales of professionalism – well, recently it’s been alleged assaults on ex-girlfriends, racial abuse, a cricketer taking money to make a spot bet come good (& being such a rubbish cricketer that he failed!), and plenty of the usual diet of greed and petulance. Not much about people who care more about looking after a sick child than celebrating their own performance, even when the rest of the world is praising them to the skies.

Now maybe it’s happening, unreported by our press. Maybe Wayne Rooney is doing this every week; it’s not impossible. Assuming, however, that there is no strange press silence, I’d rather our playgrounds and pubs were buzzing about someone like Tebow than, well, any premiership footballer I can presently name. And if the price of that is some slightly mawkish and very public displays of devotion, and some dubious narratives of divine interest in the outcome of sports games then, you know what, I’d live with it.

Really, if you don’t want him, send him over here. We could do with a decent role model, someone living his faith in public in genuine and powerful ways, just now.

(Of course, it could never happen. He’d have to learn to play a proper sport, one not involving body armour and breaks to catch breath every few seconds…)

One of the themes of the book is the extensiveness of ecclesiology; I argue (contra various people) that Baptists are distinguished only by their ecclesiology, but then argue (contra various other people) that ecclesiology is actually quite far-reaching, and so our distinctiveness here makes (or should make) us a quite distinct body of believers. I illustrate this in various ways, with various arguments, as the discussion proceeds; one has to do with the question of gendered accounts of various church ministries.

Historically Baptists have some ‘form’ on this issue; we were already being castigated in print for allowing women to preach in 1646 (Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, unsurprisingly). Of course, that practice has not remained universal in the history since, but, considering the period before the founding of the Salvation Army, only the Society of Friends can realistically claim to have be more open to the ministry of women than Baptists were. BUGB was amongst the first denominations to open the ordained ministry to women in the C20th, and has now committed to ‘radical equality’. If some of the churches have lagged in recent times, the denomination has led.

My reflection, however, was very contemporary. No student of evangelical theology can fail to have noticed that the justifications for denying the ministry to women have changed in recent decades. Very crudely, a ‘proof-texting’ approach, resting on appeals to a couple of (apparently-decisive) verses, has been replaced by a developed theology of gender, in which male ‘headship’ is intended by God in creation, and so shapes proper gender roles in family and church (& possibly wider society).

I am happy to acknowledge the power of this presentation, even whilst disagreeing with it. In its best forms (I have never seen in well-expressed in a published piece – it may be there, but I’ve missed it – but in conversation, I have heard remarkably impressive presentations) it feels to me a bit like the best versions of dispensationalism: it is an overarching narrative which appears to make sense of many otherwise-troublesome Scriptures, and which can be rejected only by the articulation of an equally convincing counter-narrative. As such, I respect those who profess commitment to it, whilst disagreeing with them.

Unless, that is, they are Baptists.

If this ‘headship’ account of how to interpret Scripture is correct, then Baptist ecclesiology is wrong. And vice-versa. On this definition of what it is to be a ‘complementarian’, Baptists cannot be ‘complementarian’.

The ‘headship’ account of ‘complementarianism’ turns endlessly on a narrative of ‘authority’. Men are created to exercise authority; women to sit under authority. In the family, the man (all men?) are to take a lead, the woman (all women?) are to follow. In the church, a woman should not exercise authority over a man; in the world, even, in some worked-through accounts, a woman should not be in a position where she is required to tell men what to do (John Piper speculates openly as to whether women may properly drive buses on this basis).

Now this can be made sense of in an episcopalian or presbyterian polity. In either case, the church is composed of those who exercise authority (clergy/elders) and those who submit to it (the rest). If only men are permitted to exercise authority, then only men should be clergy, or elders. I have Anglican and Presbyterian friends committed to a male-only ministry and, whilst I disagree with them, I accept completely that their stance is defensible and coherent given the current terms of the debate, and their churchmanship.

I cannot say the same of Baptist friends, however. In a congregationalist polity, which is at the core of Baptist identity, authority, which is of course held by Christ alone, is mediated through the church meeting. All members, female and male, have an equal role in discerning Christ’s call on the gathered church; all members, female and male, have an over-riding (and so equal) responsibility to watch over each other, and to bring rebuke and challenge when they see a sister or brother fall into sin. In a Baptist church authority is necessarily exercised by all the members, over all other members, indifferently. Unless membership is denied to women, which has – in my view shamefully – happened in Baptist history sometimes, women and men, and all other believers, regardless of status, are called to an equal exercise of authority. The newly-baptised teenager has a duty – not just a right – to call the pastor to account; certainly a woman has a duty – not just a right – to call a man to account. In a Baptist ecclesiology, that is, women necessarily exercise authority over men.

The conclusion seems inescapable: if headship theology is right, then Baptist polity is wrong; if Baptist polity is right, then headship theology is wrong. On the currently-popular account, Baptists cannot be complementarians.

(Of course, there are other ways of defending the restriction of ministry to men – Catholic accounts of representation being the most obvious – and someone might develop an authentically Baptist theology of male-only ministry one day. My point here is simply that the currently-popular accounts of why ministry is male-only necessarily fail for Baptists.)

I propose (with no claim to originality) that the interesting questions in theology are all mysteries: we shouldn’t expect answers, so much as hints and definitions that serve to clarify our thoughts about the question. The same is true of most of the interesting questions in the humanities, I suspect: there are (as in theology) some historical questions that are in principle problems (‘Is the homeric corpus the product of a single author?’ ‘Did Hilary and Athanasius ever meet?’) – even if we have to conclude that the historical data will never be available to give a compelling answer, the questions remain problems: in principle they admit of final solution, even if we can never find it. But, ‘what is so special about Shakespeare’s plays?’ is a question that we might be justified in concluding we will never have a complete answer to; there will always be more to be said. (Incidentally, this is not straightforwardly an arts/sciences distinction; I know enough particle physics to regard the question ‘what is an electron?’ (or indeed a Higgs boson) as a mystery: we can model its behaviour mathematically with some accuracy, but it behaves sometimes as a particle, sometimes as a wave, most often as a dispersed probability function (whatever that might be) – its essence appears unknowable, even if its effects can be known.)

Can we ever make advances when we turn to mysteries? The answer is yes – otherwise the humanities would not be worth studying – but the advances are of a different kind. If I can’t hope to discover the whole truth about what makes Shakespeare’s writing so powerful, I can discover aspects of it – and benefit from them (even really trivially, any writer or, particularly, public speaker can improve enormously by studying his use of blank verse). If I can never define beauty exhaustively, I can always understand it a bit better, and give insights it what makes a thing beautiful (I remember the first time I read Ruskin, noticing a comment about parallel lines in the composition of a painting; a couple of days later, I was looking at one of my favourite landscapes, and suddenly saw how that hillside, and that hedgerow, and that roofline, and several other lines in the picture all ran in parallel. This is far from the only thing that makes the picture beautiful, but I understood something more then of why it gripped me.)

Theology often advances by proposing and accepting negative limits to its mysteries: here are some things that must not be said, some lines that cannot be crossed without embracing error. (I was marking essays on Chalcedon this week, which is the classic example: the hypostatic union happened ‘without confusion, without change,without division, without separation’: a series of exclusion clauses that announce that, whatever accounts of the incarnation might be proposed, they must lie on the right side of these lines.) This sort of negative elucidation demands the highest intellectual precision to be done well; the medieval doctors – St Thomas Aquinas; John Duns Scotus; … – are the great models, careful distinctions and subtle arguments deployed to discover with precision the limits of human knowledge.

At the same time, as theologians, we often propose models (here is my account of divine sovereignty, providence, and human freedom; there is yours of God’s triune life; …). At our best, I think we know that our models are just that: models, provisional and partial illustrations that might help us better comprehend this or that mystery. Theology becomes pathological when – as happens far too often in my own, Evangelical, tradition – we mistake the mysteries for problems, and think that our task is to solve them, to give answers that are complete and correct, to bring final resolution to the questions. And theology becomes irrelevant when, as happens far too often in mainstream academic theology today, an awareness of the lack of final answers becomes an excuse to stint on the hard work of careful logic, and to substitute empty rhetorical flourish.

The theologian must be humble, knowing that it will take her hardest intellectual efforts to do know more than bring a little clarity to a question. And she must be cheerful, knowing that, in the good providence of God, bringing a little clarity is itself a work worth doing.

My Facebook and Twitter feeds this year, however, were full of Christian admiration for her speech, often coupled with unflattering comparisons to the sermons preached by the bishops who serve under her in one of the established churches in her realm. The admiration was not misplaced: she closed her speech with some direct and unashamed references to Christ’s saving and revealing work, asserting that God sent His Son to be a Saviour, and that the love of God is ‘known in Jesus Christ our Lord’.

The comparisons, however, seemed less fair. Even an MP, John Glen, tweeted to the effect that, whilst the Queen’s broadcast was excellent, it was a shame that the Bishops focused more on bankers than Christ. I confess that I do not usually spend any more of my Christmas attending to the words of those elevated to episcopal office by Her Majesty than I give to her own words; I was sufficiently intrigued by a bit of a barrage of comments like this this, however, that whilst the rest of the family indulged an incomprehensible (to me) addiction to Strictly Come Dancing, I sought out the texts of various episcopal sermons.

The Archbishop of Canterbury took the opening verses of John as his text; he explored more deeply, but no less faithfully, than the Queen the wonder of what God does in Jesus: ‘His life is what God says and what God does; it is the life in which things hold together … Jesus is the place where all reality is focused, brought to a point.’ He stressed the need for a response to what God has done in Jesus: ‘Before we have even got to Christmas in the words of the gospel we are taken to Good Friday, and to the painful truth that the coming of Jesus splits the world into those who respond and those who don’t.’ His focus was perhaps more on sanctification than justification – but that is no less properly a part of the Christian message, and perhaps an appropriate theme when addressing those who are, by choice, in a cathedral congregation on Christmas day, and so may be presumed to have some measure of Christian commitment.

The Archbishop of York, preaching on Lk 2 and Is. 9:6, made not dissimilar points: describing the coming of Christ as a ‘still-open opportunity’ ‘The only way of coming to King Jesus,’ he declared,  ‘is on our knees, stripped naked of all our religious trappings, empty-handed and begging for mercy.’ He went on to quote a verse of Toplady’s ‘Rock of Ages’. Then, like Rowan Williams, he turned to the transformation of life that will come from following Jesus.

I could continue around the episcopate, at least those texts that have already been made available online; the point would get tedious however. The criticisms that the Bishops were less adequately Christian than the Queen in their Christmas addresses simply do not stand up. Which led me to wonder, whence the criticism? Why did people – faithful, intelligent people in many cases – pass such harsh judgements in public on their fellow Christians?

It would be possible to be judgemental in return: there is a temptation for a certain style of conservative Christianity to stress justification at the expense of sanctification because it pulls the sting of the gospel. It is easier to speak – and certainly to hear – of the forgiveness of God, full and free, without calling for true repentance, for a change of heart and life that involves painful and costly changes of behaviour. But the gospel for bankers and other financiers involves a call to visible repentance of professional wrongdoing – ask Zacchaeus… (and the gospel for preachers and theology lecturers involves just as much, or perhaps even more (Ja. 3:1) a call to visible and ongoing repentance of professional wrongdoing…) There are many, no doubt, who would rather hear about God’s forgiveness than their own greed, or lust, or anger, or whatever, but that is not a reason to surrender to their prejudices.

I suspect, however, that the true answer is less harsh than this. The BBC online report of Rowan Williams’s sermon makes it sound as if it was all about bankers, and barely mentioned Jesus; John Sentamu’s sermon has not yet been reported, as far as I can determine, but the list of stories brought up by a search of the BBC news website is revealing: in November, he apparently called for a rise in council tax, condemned executive pay, and talked about NHS funding; in October, he condemned the NHS market system, called for help for BAE, a manufacturing firm in his diocese, and, incidentally, consecrated two new bishops. Is this a fair representation of his public statements over the past three months? I suspect we know the answer…

The BBC report of the Queen’s speech also failed completely to mention the explicitly Christian content, describing (not unfairly) the central theme of the speech as the importance of family. Her Majesty’s speech, however, was broadcast live to the nation and heard by millions, most of whom could have only accessed the sermons of either Archbishop by the sort of web-trawling I did. It was received directly; the sermons were refracted through the prism of the press’s concerns and interests; the comparison of the two was therefore inevitably badly skewed.

I have had cause before on this blog to suggest that media reporting of the public pronouncements of religious leaders can be profoundly misleading; here it is even fairly difficult to find fault with the reporters: they, properly, focused on the bits of the message that were genuinely newsworthy (‘Archbishop uses Christmas sermon to say birth of Jesus was important’ – it’s not an arresting headline, is it?). Further, even on his official website, the explicitly Christian themes of Rowan Williams’s sermon were downplayed: the link to the sermon takes you here, to a press release describing the social commentary that formed a part of the message; if you scroll down far enough, you get the full text of the sermon, and realise, if you happen still to be reading, that much was missing from the press release. Sack the press officer? Perhaps, but s/he is charged with attracting the notice of the media; highlighting the parts of the message that will be interesting to the press is hardly wrong from that perspective…

Should we criticise the press for having the wrong interests? The repeated defence of the tabloid editors before Leveson is unfortunately at least somewhat convincing: if we consume the media, buying it or (online) clicking through to it, then we are implicitly supporting its evaluations of what is of interest to us. We cannot pretend to be horrified at salacious gossip if we choose to buy the paper pedaling it; no more can we pretend to be unconvinced by evaluations of what is newsworthy.

Of course, there is a ‘least worst’ defence here, applicable to religious and scientific reporting at least (probably also to some other areas; I am not competent to judge): it is a truism that no media outlet in Britain is at present remotely competent in covering either of these areas, but one needs to engage somehow, and so we put up with the least bad. Equally, we cannot ignore the composite nature of newspaper publishing: all I know of former News of the World readers – which is admittedly not that much – suggests that most bought it for the sports reporting, not the showbiz gossip; over many years we have bought the Guardian, not because we have always liked the editorial line, still less some of the columnists, but because the news reporting has generally been as sound as anywhere, and has come with the benefits of Garry Trudeau’s cartoons and Araucaria’s crosswords…)

Should, finally, we criticise those who criticised? In the academy, we talk about the importance of primary sources; given that we all know of the unreliability of the press in the area of religious coverage, it does not seem to me unreasonable to ask Christians making public criticism of their brothers and sisters to have at least read the original text, and not just the press reports, before so doing.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all–
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountains of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate–
Where the thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightening fears to be late:
As men dive for a sunken gem
Pursuing we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star that has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

G.K. Chesterton, Gloria in Profundis.

Merry Christmas to all…

Blair’s faith was clearly genuine, if kept quiet; the same was true of his successor Gordon Brown. David Cameron’s announcement in a speech yesterday that he is a ‘committed … Church of England Christian’ makes him (at least – I know nothing either way of John Major) the third premier in a row to find some importance in a personal Christian faith; that seems remarkable enough to bear some analysis, but that is not my point here.

In his speech yesterday, part of a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the Prime Minister went further than any of his predecessors for some while in asserting that faith was more than a personal matter to him, but was a political compass. He asserted that our culture and politics are incomprehensible apart from a recognition of the Christian heritage of the country, and – most controversially – that the shared values that should guide British politics and society into the future are distinctively Christian.

His first point is relatively uncontroversial; the National Secular Society may not get it, but outside such tiny and extreme fringe groups, the central place of the King James Bible (and the plays of Shakespeare) in creating the cadences of English is undoubted. The Prime Minister wandered through fine art and music, and it is true that without a fairly thorough knowledge of the Biblical narrative (& the stories of the saints, incidentally) there is much that cannot be understood; the specific influence of the KJV is found in literature particularly, of course.

(I have written elsewhere on the dark side of this: the KJV was key in making the language of Oxford ‘normal’ and the language of Fife – King James VI’s own native cadence – a ‘dialect’; appropriately, perhaps, in a celebratory event, the Prime Minister did not touch on this aspect in his speech.)

The second point wanders towards the controversial: ‘[t]he Bible runs through our political history in a way that is not often recognised.’ The Prime Minister cited examples: the concept of a limited, constitutional monarchy; universal human rights; the welfare state; and a commitment to aid and development beyond our borders. (He wavers into what Richard Dawkins calls ‘faith in faith’ a bit on the last: Jewish Care, Islamic Relief, and Muslim Aid, excellent organisations though they no doubt are, do not, as far as I know, find much of their inspiration in the King James Bible…)

I suspect that on each of the examples cited Cameron is simply right, but I am conscious that there is some historical debate to be had in one case or another. Further, even if he is right, the fact that we originally came to belief in a constitutional monarchy (say) through a consideration of the Biblical narrative does not mean that no other robust defence of the position is available.

It does establish a burden of proof, however. There is a classic form of European liberal atheism which adopts a series of distinctively Christian ethical – and even philosophical – commitments and asserts that they are in some way ‘obvious’; only a little knowledge of history shows that they are not. It has not generally been obvious to human beings that infanticide is a bad idea, let alone that limited government is a good one. A constitutional monarchy is a very odd idea in human politics, and empirically is significantly intertwined with Christianity; if the position can be defended robustly from a naturalistic philosophical position, that requires demonstration. (Not least because it happens that pretty much every confessionally atheist state in history has been repressively totalitarian…)

The Prime Minister moved to his third point via a recollection of the importance of faith-based groups and individuals in ‘the big society’ (he chose not to use the phrase), and an acknowledgement that, whatever might be happening in Britain, faith is becoming more, not less, important and prevalent globally. Mr Cameron makes the choice to welcome that as a positive thing. The headline seen everywhere this morning, ‘Britain is a Christian country,’ comes from this part of the speech.

The argument goes like this, as far as I can reconstruct it: every strong society is built on an unwavering commitment to certain shared values; the values which have shaped, and which should continue to shape, British society are distinctively Christian, although their worth can be recognised by others; therefore a public commitment to Christian values is important and appropriate.

In the course of this, he makes the case that tolerance of others is a distinctively Christian value, and so that a Christian society is actually better placed to navigate the modern phenomenon of pluralism. He compares ‘Christian’ Britain with ‘secular’ France on this point, not unfairly (it would be totally unworthy to suggest that the choice of this example was motivated by current political spats within Europe…). Of course, lauding ‘tolerance’ as a Christian virtue in an Anglican cathedral is at least slightly ironic (the CoE has not been the most oppressive Christian church in history, but it probably makes the top five…); even so, the point is right, and warms this Baptist heart.

The remainder of his argument is that faith is a motor for ethics. Reflecting on the banking crisis and the summer riots, he comments ‘moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn’t going to cut it anymore.’ Well, yes, but this assumes that any ‘moral compass’ is a good ‘moral compass,’ and that is patently ridiculous. Suicide bombing was perfected, and made famous as a tactic, by an avowedly secular humanist organisation (the Tamil Tigers), but these days it is more likely to be deployed by religious believers. When we remember 9/11, we might long for an apathetic ‘passive tolerance’! (And Christians are equally capable of such brutality, as we all know.) I have argued before on this blog that the reality of committed belief is that it inspires to action, and that the moral value of committed belief is entirely dependent on the quality of action that it inspires.

So I do not believe that we can simply praise faith, even Christian faith, as the Prime Minister did yesterday. If we believed that the general situation of the world was largely positive, we might even commend the apathy that is (generally) characteristic of the non-religious: better to do nothing than to risk doing harm. But that idea seems genuinely incredible; the world we presently encounter needs urgently to be changed, and in multiple ways. Committed faith will change the world, for good or ill; we need not faith in faith, but an ability to judge healing faith from toxic faith (which distinction itself assumes we are agreed on what good outcomes look like).

So I think the situation is more complex than David Cameron imagines; but he has at least recognised that faith plays a vital part in shaping the deep commitments of a culture. Will that recognition change government policy? I suppose not, immediately, but the more often it is aired in public, the better the chance it might.

(I noticed too a couple of weeks back the number of comments hit 1000, although over a quarter are mine; I am particularly grateful for friends who help me to refine and test ideas through that mechanism and others.)

I’ve been blogging a little over four years, with two lengthy layoffs. Over the time, I’ve reflected more than once on what blogging is for, and gradually come to change my mind. Originally, I had this as a place to record undeveloped ideas that might in future go somewhere; I still do a bit of that, but more it is a platform, a place to offer ideas that might be of use or interest to the churches. I get to ‘publish’ (i.e., make public) ideas in a variety of ways, spoken, recorded, and written; whilst inevitably there is a coherence and even a certain amount of borrowing and development, I more and more think that anything, on any platform, should be considered as finished output, with the different audiences, the different styles, and the different lead-times, each platform offers an opportunity to find the right place for each thought to be placed.

Anyway, thank you to all who have shared this particular journey so far with me. The title is another quotation from the Waste Land, from Tiresias’s cynical narration of her lover’s sexual conquest of the typist; in the context of my blogging, I suspect it is not true: had these words apparently disappeared into the ether, I suspect I would not have continued for four months. So in a sense this is your output as much as mine, and I am grateful.