Theological Sub-Group Plenary 26th September 2003 - Transcription
Oral witness: Prof. David Fergusson
Paul Avis: We’ve had your paper and I know, but not everyone may know, this is giving us a little foretaste of your recent lectures which are to be published next year sometime all being well. So I think you’ll have a number of subscribers when that comes out. We might just introduce ourselves…
We’re going to open up with questions and I always remind the group that we need to be concise in our questions, please. There’s an opportunity for follow-up. May I courteously encourage you to be concise in your answers, David, so that everyone has a chance to speak with you. Why don’t we start over this side of the room this time?
Stephen Williams: I look forward to seeing…
Paul Avis: I do beg your pardon. I did say to David he could introduce his paper – please do that now.
David Fergusson: Well thank you very much for inviting me – I’m glad to be here and to take part in such an opportunity for me to reflect in a different context on these issues while I'm researching on them and writing on them. I think I’m trying to say several things in the course of the remarks I’ve offered, perhaps too many things, but I’ll try to summarise what I think are the most important points, at least for me. One is I rather think that most theological discussions of Church and State and the Western tradition are a bit too limited for our present context mainly because they assume something like a Christendom context in which there are these two dominant monolithic bodies, the Church and the State and it’s assumed bodily speaking that we know what these are, and the task of the theology of the state is to map the various relations that obtain between the two entities. Now I think that that is to a large extent outmoded in our current situation and that something more complex is required whereby we can understand the relationship of the Church to other movements and bodies within the civil society and not simply to the political state. Nonetheless it is also a claim of mine that there are significant resources, both in Scripture and in tradition, for that task. The concept of the sovereignty of God over nature and history, enables one I think to try to position the Church and the state, as well as the other institutions of civil society, in relation to the rule of God and this I think is a more fruitful way forward. And it enables one to appropriate a range of other important political concepts in the history of the theological tradition, particularly the concept of the common good as this is articulated in the Middle Ages. There is a much richer political theology in Scripture than is often assumed. One tends to find political theologies writing as if Romans 13 was pretty much the only thing in the New Testament of relevance to an understanding of the state and civil society, but I think that this is certainly not the case and Oliver O’Donovan, for one, has done some very helpful work in terms of showing how there is a very rich political theology embedded within the Old Testament and the reception and refraction of these traditions in the New – the emphasis of the kingship of Yahweh, the kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus, the encounter with Pilate, Romans 13 in the context of Romans 12 and so on. And by attending to these I think that we can find some important theological resources for a post-Christian setting. It’s a setting in which the Church increasing needs to make common cause with other faiths, with other civic bodies, with other movements and agencies in our society, while attempting to maintain its own witness on a distinctive basis. For this reason I think that the most publicly significant Christian voices in our day are those which can connect with other moral and political discourses – can use the language of the faith but can translate that and connect it with other ways of speaking morally. I’m not sure if I gave examples of these in the paper. Finally as the issue of establishment or disestablishment goes, my strategy is really one of diffusing the controversy for two reasons. One, I think that establishment is not a univocal concept and that if one looks at the issue of establishment in England or Scotland or any other European country one can see that over a period of two or three hundred years there has been a shifting phenomenon. And it would be very surprising if it had reached the point of stasis and wasn’t going to continue to evolve and shift in the future. So I see establishment as an ongoing process. And second, I don’t think disestablishment provides us with an alternative ideal ideology which will provide the perfect setting for the Church to relate to the state or the rest of civil society and to that extent I think that I agree with Oliver O’Donovan when he says that the political faithfulness of the Church will not be determined by one arrangement or another. I don’t see the liberal ideal of the neutral state with no commitment to any single conception of the good as a viable one. So to that extent I am suspicious of some ideologies of disestablishment. I think the non-Western churches have a good deal to teach us about the ways in which we can be politically and socially significant without clinging on to arrangements that may now seem outmoded and I don’t see the future of a church which ceases to be established in the way in which it has been a sectarian future. So I am inclined to believe that we increasingly have more to learn from the non-Western churches in this context than we have recognised in the past. I think I’ll probably stop there – I could waffle on…
Paul Avis: Thank you very much – now Stephen, please have another attempt.
Stephen Williams: I suspect that you and I would be theologically quite close on lots of these questions and I know this is an exercise of compression in some ways, the précis here. Can I pick up something though from point 4? You said that you weren’t sure whether you had given an example of the overlap or the community of borrowed languages and so forth, but let me put this in a way that is provocative in a friendly way, OK? Recent mobilisation of opinion against the war on Iraq and in support of Jubilee 2000 demonstrates the potential of the churches to make a significant public contribution. Now supposing I were to go on and amend that sentence to say that they were effective only because the churches had no distinctive moral context and only because they entered into a range of alliances with other groups and movements. In other words, is it really the case that there’s an interest in hearing Christian voices, only so long as those voices say things which can be said in terms of content, by other people, except not in the name of Christianity, as in, for example, the case against war in Iraq. I mean, would that be an excessively cynical re-adjustment of that sentence?
David Fergusson: What I want to defend is the notion that there is very often common moral ground in the absence of common moral theory. And I think that there are quite distinctive, or sometimes there are quite distinctive theological reasons, why the Church takes up a particular position, say on the war on Iraq and the justification that’s offered for that position is distinctively Christian. But nonetheless, there may be on that particular issue shared ground inhabited by other people who present their position in a rather different way and on a different moral basis. To that extent there is something distinctively Christian there but its political success will often depend I think in our current context on the ability to connect and share ground with other groups, agencies…
Stephen Williams: I agree I think with the substance there, it’s just the way that you put it here it sounds as though you are speaking of a willingness on the part of society to listen to Christian voices, but isn’t it the case that the willingness to listen to the Christian voice inasmuch as that voice does have common ground with other groups, in other words, they’re not interested in the moral theory of the Christian position, they’re interested in the moral community with other positions and it’s to that extent Christianity will have a viewing. Its distinctiveness, in other words, is not what’s attracting people to listen to it, but its community or other moral groups, whereas this suggests they’re willing to listen to its distinctiveness. You’ve mentioned distinct confessional basis.
David Fergusson: I think the issue of translation is quite important here. It does seem to me that religious leaders – Desmond Tutu, the Chief Rabbi – can speak on quite distinctive theological grounds, from their own faith tradition, but they can do that in a way that connects or makes contact with the universes of discourse that are used by other people. And that I think is very often the criterion for success. It’s not the criterion for faithfulness and there may be other issues on which the Church has made an authentic and faithful witness, but on which it has been much less successful politically. I rather think that abortion would fall into that category.
Nigel Wright: I was taken with section six where you pick up the idea of a ‘hard secularism’ and a ‘weak secularism’ or ‘soft secularism’ and we do have the tendency to see secularism purely as an ideological enemy. But as with a number of the categories we are dealing with perhaps it is helpful to differentiate within that category a number of different ways of thinking about secularism and my awareness of the history of political developments over the 19th Century is that secularism was sometimes seen, not as something antithetical to Christian belief, but as a way through some of the problems that were encountered, in Italy for example, with the Vatican and finding the ways of charting through developing a nation. And I wonder what your reflection would be on the thought that we need to develop this distinction and that we can work with a soft secularism in a way that we can’t work with the hard secularism.
David Fergusson: I think hard secularism is quite closely related to the political liberalism that emerges in the 18th Century Enlightenment and which assumes that there is a moral basis for political society which is independent of any religious basis or presuppositions and to which every rational citizen can subscribe irrespective of his or her faith commitment. I think that that ideology underlies some of the discussions surrounding the first amendment for example in the US, now that political liberalism I think is intellectually in crisis because the attempt to justify the moral basis on grounds that are independent of any substantive faith commitment, metaphysical commitment, has largely failed and what we’re seeing in political philosophy is a renewed interest in the liberalism of the early modern period arising from the religious wars in Europe where its citizens realised that if society was to flourish and function it would be necessary that those of different faith commitments could co-exist. So liberalism as a strategy of co-existence of different groups inhabiting the public realm and getting along within it for me corresponds to something like this soft secularism, where groups have equal access to political power, to public debate rather than the hard secularism in which we must bracket out all our religious and substantive commitment in the interests of political neutrality.
Nigel Wright: Can I ask whether the strategy for the Church in relation to society might actually be to identify more closely with the soft secularism in the belief that we’re not actually in the foreseeable future going to recapture the nation for Christian commitment and therefore it is the least worst option open to us?
David Fergusson: I think that’s the way it’s going and it does provide an opportunity and it’s clear that that Blair government is interested in what faith communities have to say on a range of issues and I think Blair is advised, informally at least, on a weekly basis by John Battle, who is the unofficial minister for faith communities. I also think it resonates with what is sometimes called the politics of recognition whereby it’s necessary in political society to take into account not just the aspirations of individual citizens who are equal to one another but those groups that express and root the identities of citizens within civil society and this is what we see in different parts of the world with various forms of discrimination justified by the politics of recognition.
Nigel Wright: Going back to the idea of a neutral state, it seems to me that again this is another one to be differentiated, that the idea of a morally or an ideologically neutral state is a nonsense, but neutrality as a value such as the neutrality of a referee within a game seems to me to be a different use of the term, because it is within a framework – a framework of rules and the way in which this game is to be conducted and those rules must be applied without partiality. So in that sense the term neutrality might actually be a useful way of developing that idea - again this differentiation to what we mean.
David Fergusson: I probably prefer the term impartiality than neutrality. Although I think impartiality is a problematic term also, but it does suggest that the state should not be partial in the access to political debate and political representation – it provides to the different sub-cultures and groups within the society. I think in practical terms neutrality is simply impossible because the legislation that any state enacts will inevitably reflect some commitment to some conceptions of the good which conceal more or less commitments to whatever worldview underlies those conceptions.
David Porter: In your last paragraph you begin to take up an interesting question which goes to the heart of this process and why Evangelical Alliance is wanting to look at these questions and that is about how we as Christians engage with reality of being part of a nation and a state and fundamental to that is not just our questions in terms of Church, faith and nation, it seems to me that there’s a question about what is the Church, which we haven’t begun to explore. And you come very close to it, and coming from Northern Ireland where the number of people in the population who claim to be active followers of Christ and therefore the Church, and despite what their ecclesiological bodies might say about the political world their behaviour either undermines that because they get caught up in the social implications. And I just wonder what your reflection is on the Hauerwasian emphasis on the Church being the Church in order to let the people be the people, or do you think we are getting too caught up in the relationship between Church, faith and nation rather than helping people to just be better Christians in whatever place they find themselves in - rather than discussing their role in national and state life, that they’re bringing their faith to bear? And would you see, because you are raising the question here, that ecclesiology is something that needs to be teased out before we can really answer the questions about state and nation?
David Fergusson: Yes, is the answer to that last point. I think part of the difficulty is that discussions of Church and state assume that we already know what the Church is and what the state is, but if we ask ourselves what is the rule of God and how is the Church related to that, then we may start to see things rather differently. The Hauerwasian project, you can tell from my comments that I’m rather ambivalent towards it – I think the emphasis on moral formation at the congregational level is important and crucial in our current social condition and without that moral formation and mission at the congregational level there won’t be a strong political witness from the Christian churches. So I think that that emphasis is very welcome and well made in Hauerwas’ writings. But I am uneasy about the attempt to retrieve a radical reformation model of the Church in relation to its host society, probably for several reasons. One is that I think Hauerwas over-determines the distinctiveness of Christian ethics and misses the fact that there are significant ethical overlaps with those out with the Christian community and I think that there’s Scriptural justification for that. Secondly I think that he cannot adequately take into account the way in which the membership of the Church is also positioned within other civic bodies which contributes to their moral formation and sense of identity, and of course many of the moral disagreements within society are internalised within the Church precisely because of this phenomenon. And thirdly I think that even if we call our society post-Christian in some sense that’s a different condition from being pre-Christian or non-Christian, so we’re not really back in the position of the early Christians in the New Testament with respect to paganism and the empire. I think our rather ambivalent twilight situation is a different one from that and we have to be sensitive to it and react accordingly.
Peter Forster: Can I pick up that point with reference to paragraphs 3 and 4. I do look forward to the book itself – it’s lovely to distil the points and I’d like to pursue your comment that you think that the evidence for a steady process of de-Christianisation is ineluctable. Well I can remember one of my historian colleagues when I was at Durham University saying to me that one of the few lessons of history is that there are very few lessons of history. History has a habit of taking us by surprise and is the evidence for de-Christianisation as secure as I think you are implying. At one level I can see facts and figures on confirmation statistics and whatever and the social position of the Church, yet on the other hand one is conscious of living in a society where there isn’t an absence of moral zeal – there is almost an excess of moral zeal – how can we solve poverty etc. – there’s a moral zeal in the air that these statistics on spirituality in some sense, surprising figures in the England and Wales census, that 72% of the population declare themselves to be Christian, despite all the encouragement to be secular on the telly. The collapse of atheism and Communism – it’s almost a post-atheist phase we’re in rather than an atheist phase, which relates to your comment about T.S. Eliot. Could you be under-estimating the spiritual current – maybe Christianity is more like a river that has gone underground than one that’s dried up.
David Fergusson: Well I’m not sure that I want to say that our society is more materialistic, that it’s worse than it was, that it’s atheistic, I don’t want to make any of those claims. But I do think that the standard markers of Christian identity, of ecclesiastical affiliation, do reveal a marked de-Christianisation of our society, certainly over the last 40-50 years. That’s not a prognosis, it may not continue. We may be surprised about what happens in the next 10 or 20 years time – who knows what the world will look like then – what forces will impinge upon society. So it’s not a prediction based on an extrapolation from the past, but I really do think we are deceiving ourselves if we think that we’re not in a very different position from the one in which the churches were in, in the 1950s and 1960s. I see that in my students – they know almost nothing about the Bible. I stand up now to do a series of lectures on the work of Christ, it’s no longer the case that half the class will try to persuade me of the theory of penal substitution. The class just don’t know what that is and I have colleagues who say that they’re going to study the book of Genesis today and the students look up the table of contents at the front of the Bible to find out where it is. Now that’s not to say that morally they are worse than their predecessors twenty or thirty years ago – I’m not wanting to make that judgement, but nonetheless in relation to those standard markers of Christian identity and consciousness, I think we are in a very different position.
Peter Forster: Could I follow that through by asking whether given this changed context and given the priority of the missionary purpose of the Church, that if our society if any form – Scottish form or English form or whatever it might be – invites a church or the Church or whatever that might be to have any entry into those walks of life to play a part in wider life, on what basis, given that we’re not in Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa – there isn’t an evil state in that sense – why would we say no? Why should we be lukewarm or hesitant or say no to such an invitation? Why can’t the establishment question be put completely in the hands of the state? You tell us what you want us to do – we have the right to refuse, but we need good reasons to refuse.
David Fergusson: I wouldn’t decline the invitation – I’m not advocating that we say no or that becomes our default response. But neither do I think that we should stubbornly cling to that or devote all our energies or resources into maintaining that arrangement or set of arrangements. I don’t think that’s the way forward for us. I’m inclined to think we may become hopelessly compromised.
Peter Forster: We have become…?
David Fergusson: We will become compromised.
Peter Forster: Because?
David Fergusson: If we see our function of clinging at all costs to an arrangement that characterised the past where we have an entry into public life. I know some ministers who work as school chaplains, and I’m sure you do as well, and the head teacher says to you, you can come into this school and speak to the children, but only if you don’t mention Jesus. That seems to me to be the point where we become too compromised.
Peter Forster: Then you say no in my view.
Paul Avis: I’d like to put a spotlight on paragraph 5 of your paper. It’s about 9 or 10 lines down – "What we need is a Christian community and faith that are nationally and publicly significant". And I think that phrase "nationally and publicly significant" is of enormous importance and I see it as the key to the whole constellation of issues we are concerned with. And yet you go on to say that this does not require the maintenance of established forms and then you give two examples – state involvement in church appointments and church legislation which are specific to the Church of England. And I do take your point that you don’t want to go into the last ditch to defend those things, which some of us would say are not the heart of the matter at all. But admittedly, you use the phrase ‘established forms’, but what about the principle of establishment, that’s not necessarily bound up with those particular forms, but might take other forms. If we look at the principle of it, I would say that where in some sense the state recognises that the Christian Church and the Christian gospel are nationally and publicly significant and that recognition is expressed either in some sort of constitutional understanding, or in the law of the land or in a set of practical conventions or whatever, that is actually what establishment is about that elicits a response from the Church in terms of a nation-wide mission and involvement. So I find this a very compressed statement, but I think it definitely has the nub of the issue in it. Could I ask you just to expand on what you mean by nationally and publicly significant and what sort of structures you would see as adequate to support that.
David Fergusson: There’s a good deal of sociological research which points to churches around the world which have in a variety of ways been politically significant and what interests me is the fact that almost all of those churches are churches which either have in some sense become disestablished, or have never been established or have never been established. Now as I think you’re hinting in your remarks it all depends in what you mean by establishment, but the idea that for example the Church should receive for its worship, for its mission, it ministry, a proportion of tax revenue. Or that the state should have an input into appointments within the Church or even that the state should recognise on important civic occasions, one branch of the Church over and above others, if establishment means any of those things then I think we can do without it and continue to be nationally and politically significant. Now what institutions are going to make that possible, well it’s the institutions of civil society and the capacity of the Church to be a strong institution at the level of civic society and to contribute to public debate to political conversations, to make representation to political leaders and bodies. I think the Church has to function in all those ways but my point is it can do that without being established in some traditional senses of that concept and it may even do it rather better through lacking that set of arrangements to the state.
Donald Shell: Well it’s a smallish point really, but back in paragraph 3 when you’re talking about ‘de-Christianisation is ineluctable’ you have this slightly curious caveat that appeals to another academic that you find in your academic colleagues greater interest than before in Christian theology and ethics and I wondered if it was just a curiosity that you included there as a curiosity, or whether you think it has some significance to that point or whether it might rather go against the other point you make in that paragraph?
David Fergusson: It relates I think to the difference between being a non-Christian society and a post-Christian society. I think that the curiosity that one finds among students and fellow-academics about the Christian faith is born of a knowledge that this was important in the past to the way we did things and also arises out of a sense that we don’t understand this any more. We haven’t been brought up to know what this means and we would like you to tell us – we’re interested to find our more and I suspect that belongs to a wider intellectual context of fragmentation, of pluralism, some would say it is part of the postmodern phenomenon where there is no regnant ideology – secular or religious – there are many competing and Christianity is one of those in the eyes of many scholars. So although it is in a very different position from the one it was in a generation ago – it hasn’t disappeared from view – it’s still there. There’s a curiosity in it that’s set alongside other positions and I think this is our social context and it does provide some missionary opportunities.
Donald Shell: It is more curiosity and a result of history than it is a sense of we are living increasingly desperate times without a moral compass etc. and we just don’t know where we’re going.
David Fergusson: I don’t sense that desperation, certainly not in an academic context but again it’s T.S. Eliot’s point – Christianity hasn’t been replaced by anything else in which intellectuals have complete confidence. There is a sense that the big questions are up for grabs and theological responses to them may be as good as many others.
Vera Sinton: The question in my mind is to wonder whether this is connected with an interest in Celtic Christianity and Scottish identity and the spirituality and story emphasis in theology.
David Fergusson: I’m probably rather unsympathetic to the current enthusiasm for Celtic Christianity, partly because my colleague Donald Meek in Edinburgh says that it is a cultural construct created in the South of England in the 19th Century.
Vera Sinton: Not cutting much ice in Scotland then!
David Fergusson: Not among the Gaels that’s for sure. There’s a story of a man who came from the north of Scotland to London for three weeks and when he went back he was asked what he thought of it and he said he’s had a great time, but he said that the problem with London was that it was too far from the centre of things. Gaels don’t like being characterised as existing on the fringes, the margins – that’s a romantic imperialist notion of Celtic culture and I think it’s difficult to demonstrate, certainly in the Scottish context that there was an authentic form of Celtic Christianity that’s documented by the surviving literary sources. On the other hand I take the view that if this Celtic Christianity works for people, spiritually – and it does for many people – then we should look at it and use its spiritual resources within worship. To that extent I’m quite comfortable with the use of so-called Celtic prayer and songs in modern worship. But I don’t think there is there something that is authentically Scottish and which can be re-pristinated in the future.
Vera Sinton: So the sort of identity questions are not the ones people down South think of…
David Fergusson: I doubt it.
David Porter: I have a follow-up question and it relates to an answer you gave to an earlier question about the Church being nationally and publicly significant. If not in that spiritual, Celtic identity, it seems to me the political identity in Scotland, the Churches had quite a significant role in shaping it, particularly in its interaction with civic society and the role of the civic forum in relation to the Scottish Parliament and so on and has actually created a very interesting model of Church, faith and nation where it has created alliances with other interest groups. And actually been the key facilitator, through certain key personalities. Would you like to reflect upon that side of the Scottish identity, the more political stuff and the role of the Church in shaping some of the political direction and even being behind some of the drive for Scottish devolution?
David Fergusson: I think that provides one illustration of the kind of thing I’m seeking, namely the Church functioning as part of a broader coalition of interests within civil society, and functioning quite successfully. The Church has played an important part – not a dominant part, but certainly an important part – in the political discussions and the institutions which were set up and finally brought about the return of the Parliament to Edinburgh a few years ago. So we have an important role in that context, but I think it’s no longer a role in terms of articulating Scottish identity. Scottish identity is not to be expressed in terms of the types of Presbyterian religion which have dominated our society since the Reformation, the modern heroes of Scotland are William Wallace, Robert Burns and Sean Connery. Not John Knox or the Covenanters or Thomas Chalmers or the great missionaries and we shouldn’t expect Protestantism to be the religious expression of Scottish identity in the future. On the other hand there is the need for education, simply because of the very negative reception in Scottish culture of the Reformed religion, particularly among the literati and the media. Calvinism is the curse of Scottish life and we probably have to see all our evils socially as stemming from this repressive authoritarian hypocritical Calvinist culture which dominated Scotland until the 1960s. That’s as much a myth as the myth that Scottish identity is somehow synonymous with Protestantism and there’s important intellectual work to be done in challenging those myths.
David Hilborn: You quote the Declaratory Article III – the Constitution of the Church of Scotland – saying that the Church of Scotland has the "duty to bring the ordinances of religion to the people in every parish in Scotland through a territorial ministry" in paragraph 7. Then you go on to say that this claim now seems somewhat strained, although I’m not sure you flesh out in great measure how it is strained precisely at the point of territoriality. It does strike me that territoriality is becoming a problem in established churches. Take for example the discussions currently in the Anglican communion about the move from diocese to networks – the return to Episcopal oversight, non-geographical provinces and the like. It seems to me that is picking up on a trend which is there in culture, in politics, generally, not just within the churches. It strikes me, for example, that whilst at Westminster, MPs are defined according to their constituencies. Government – the Cabinet and government of the nation – is accused often of being not in touch with its constituencies, being centralised and disregarding local representation. In the whole European debate it is often said that the Commissioners don’t have a territorial link and yet have tremendous amounts of power – that MEP’s constituencies are so broad as not to mean anything in terms of local representation. I’m just wondering whether you think that this loosening of territoriality as a principle which undergirds national churches and state churches is necessarily going to weaken the witness of the Church within national structures, within state arrangements or whether there’s a way in which either establishment or at least public witness borne by the Church could continue where the Church is defined ever less as territorial.
David Fergusson: I think the maintenance of a territorial Church through the parish system is a legitimate expression of Christian mission and a legitimate way in which the Church can be a national Church, whether or not someone wants to call it established. The problem in Scotland is that we’re now spread too thinly - the resources are simply not adequate to maintain in a meaningful sense, a territorial ministry, a church presence in every parish in the land and that’s a problem we’re having to reckon with in our current context. So I rather fear that even in that sense the Church of Scotland may now not be functioning as a national Church, that we’re increasingly becoming a Church whose strongholds are in the suburbs of the big cities – throughout much of Scotland, inner city areas of urban deprivation, some would say we’ve never had a strong presence there. But there and increasingly in rural areas its becoming very difficult to prop up the system.
David Hilborn: Can I follow up by asking whether that however is a problem in a nation whose communities, its often said, are defined ever less territorially and much more by common interests – the squash club, rather than your street, your neighbours, the schools to which your children go rather than those in your locality, by your common interests, by the internet, or whatever, all of which are not so much territorial as driven by world views and pastimes and ideology. What I’m suggesting is that just as societal arrangements are moving away from territorial definitions, is there a way in which the Church, tracking those changes, might still bear equally effective witness if it becomes institutionalised according to networks rather than places.
David Fergusson: I’m inclined to think that we may better be able to maintain a presence in every parish if we cease to think in the model of one church, one minister, which has been the dominant ministerial model in our system for several centuries. And I realise I sound as if I’m now in retreat, but although the parish system as we have known it for hundreds of years is fragmenting, yet nonetheless the Church is still by a long way the most significant voluntary organisation in the country. And there are more people still – it may only be 10% of the population – there are more people in the churches on Sunday morning than are attending football matches on a Saturday afternoon, so the Church does have a presence that would be the envy of many other organisations. And it is able to articulate at times of national crisis the concerns of local communities which are sometimes overlooked politically. And I think that was very true of the foot and mouth crisis when the Church was able to speak from an authentic position within some rural communities that were suffering very badly. This surprised a number of politicians in the cities.
Don Horrocks: I was interested on your final paragraph where you talk about translating Christian moral claims into other terms and forming alliances on a range of fronts which are important if we want to make an effective social contribution in our present context. I was interested to hear you say earlier that there was a limit, perhaps to that, for example leaving Jesus at the door of the Council chamber or the civic forum which is what we encounter fairly frequently in practice. Is there not a fear that we can find by doing that we end up adopting the ways of the world or the arguments of the world for our own self-interest? I was thinking, perhaps, just off the top of my head, of the recent Communications Bill – it was interesting to see the churches appealing against discrimination on the basis of human rights and that seemed to be the main thrust of the argument. Against that background, if I may be permitted an evangelical foray into Johannine theology, the mission of the Church to preach the gospel, or to embody the gospel, relates to the Holy Spirit through us convicting the world of sin righteousness and judgement – how do we do that as we translate those claims into other terms to be socially relevant?
David Fergusson: I think it relates to my response to Stephen right at the beginning. We have more in common with other groups than sometimes we realise – particularly other faiths – and while we have things in common, these things are nonetheless to be presented on the basis of a distinctively Christian basis. I think the capacity for making common cause, particularly with other faiths on issues relating to marriage and sexuality for example is quite considerable and I don’t see that for the sake of relevance this requires a sell out on assumptions that are distinctive and precious to the Christian churches. How do we convict the world of its sin? I think again I’d go back to the importance of the congregational dimension, it’s by being a worshipping Christian community in our own locales primarily we make witness to the Word of God before other people and while that must be reflected also at the macro level in society, if it’s not done authentically at the local and congregational level I’m not sure that people will hear us. I’m not sure I’ve answered that last part of your question.
Paul Avis: We’re just about out of time actually, but I’m going to be very naughty and allow myself one extra one. It will be a very short question, maybe just give us a briefish answer. It’s referring to paragraph 6 of your paper where you say what is needed is the articulation of a ‘soft secularism’ and I think you’re coming up with that phrase by analogy with ‘weak establishment’ - Adrian Hastings’ phrase. And then you spell out what this soft secularism might involve. I really want to ask you David, in a very friendly way, do you really want to temporise with secularism in any form? Whoever sups with secularism should sup with a very long spoon. I would see secularism as an aggressive ideology that has no room for God or the gospel and would stifle the Christian voice altogether if it could. It’s not so much on the side of fair play for all constituents of the community, but it’s definitely on the side which isn’t favourable to the Christian faith. And is this particular agenda about equal access and recognition for contribution of faith groups really a secularist agenda, or could it not be transposed into the area you touched on near the beginning - the idea of the common good? For example, I think it’s true to say that in the past 30 years the Church of England has said it will welcome the presence of the representatives of other churches in the Second Chamber - that is not a recent thing, it’s been said for 30 years consistently. And when the Church of England has said that I don’t think it’s infected by secularism in making that. It is recognising the common ground and the common cause with other Christian churches and therefore we want to work alongside one another and if we can help to open up the way for that then we will do so. So my question to you is, is this the way to go – I know you believe in making common cause, but do you want to make common cause with secularism or could you not transpose this particular area of concern into that of the common good and therefore set it in the context of Christian tradition?
David Fergusson: I’ll go away and think about that. My initial reaction is to say that once a society espouses religious toleration, secularisation under one description becomes necessary, namely the differentiation of functions. The Church can no longer control admission to Oxford and Cambridge universities, the commission within the armed forces and the chairs within our higher education establishments and so on – once you start to take religious toleration seriously and have equal access to professional bodies and associations and so on, then secularisation under that description is underway and insofar as the churches are committed to toleration, I think we’re committed to secularism in that form, but it can be the soft secularism – how does that relate to the common good? Well in the sense that the state recognises that it depends upon other groups and institutions to contribute to the common good if it itself is to serve the common good which is its raison d’être under divine law. So the state can’t promote the common good on its own and for that reason it needs the churches as well as other bodies. Whether that means I should jettison soft secularism, I don’t know.
Paul Avis: We have come to the end now – may I just say on behalf of all of us, how very grateful we are to you for coming and thank you for all you’ve said to us.
