After the Church: Divine encounter in a sexual age
Claire Henderson Davis
Canterbury Press £8.99 (978-1-85311-736-7)
Church Times Bookshop £8.10
BEING Charles Davis’s daughter was never going to be easy. Davis, a leading theologian at the time of the Second Vatican Council, left the priesthood and the Roman Catholic Church in a blaze of publicity in 1966. He wrote that the Church was “a zone of untruth pervaded by the disregard for truth”. His avowed intent was to try to discover how to define being a Christian in “creative disaffiliation” from denominational Churches. So the inheritance — and the baggage — for his daughter is huge. Is this why the underlying theme to After the Church is about a quest for meaning?
The book is interesting on two counts. First, there is razor-sharp and fresh theological insight. Each chapter has a scriptural basis, as Davis lays out a new way of reading the story of the Fall and of Pentecost; and theological treatments of the incarnation, the Trinity, the Body of Christ, human sexuality, and so on.
Then there is the all-pervading exploration of meaning. So she explains that: “To be in the present is to be connected to, but not dominated by, the past; to be aware of, but not living for, the future. Human beings are not born into the present; getting there is a life’s work.” And “In contemporary Western society, the individual, it might be argued, is the dominant social form. The self has become the primary location of meaning for us. We are not motivated by political ideology or religious authority so much as by a search for individual fulfilment.”
I could not recognise such an intensely self-absorbed search for meaning, nor her description of Christianity as “a language of oppression”. What about the Church as a community of faith and of grace? What about sacramental life, and the power it brings to effect change? Yet she writes in her concluding chapter that “we need to reconnect with Christianity as the dominant story in the West.”
After the Church saddens me. It offers a double condemnation of the institution: as one that failed her parents and her young self, because she could never belong; and as one that could never match her personal quest for “individual fulfilment” without the gifts it does try to provide: a context of community and of grace.
Lavinia Byrne is a writer and broad-caster, and was formerly a nun.
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