DWINDLING budgets and Covid have meant that many in-person studio discussions are now produced remotely. Experts phone in their opinions — literally and, in some instances, emotionally: it is easier to deliver prepared statements under the guise of spontaneity.

If you don’t mind your debate curated in this way, then Beyond Belief (Radio 4, Monday of last week) was exemplary: a three-way discussion, chaired by Ernie Rea, on that most prickly of topics: the reparations that an institution — and, in particular, the Church of England (News, 17 June) — might appropriately make for historic involvement in slavery.

The participants were Professor Robert Beckford, Dr Esther Stanford-Xosei, and Professor Nigel Biggar, and the polemical agenda set out by Mr Rea was adhered to with a discipline and decorum that might not have been possible had all three been sitting round the same table.

What we gain from such well-ordered encounters is a clear account of the disputants’ main arguments. For Professor Beckford and Dr Stanford-Xosei (a specialist in the law of reparations), these were based on evidence for the Church of England’s collusion in slavery, and on a principle of historic debt that requires redemption. Professor Biggar, outnumbered but in no way daunted, offered a different reading of the historical evidence, and suggested that the passing of time rendered the identification of those directly affected by slavery too difficult to justify financial reparations.

This last argument has not deterred Virginia Theological Seminary from its policy of paying out $2.2 million to descendants of those who built and maintained the seminary during and after the period of slavery. While such a solution, presented here as a case study in reparative justice, comes from a particular place with a particular history, the language used by the seminary’s Dean, the Very Revd Dr Ian Markham — of basic Christian values’ being expressed through heartfelt apology on behalf of his forebears — is precisely the language that reparationists have adopted across the Pond.

It was from this point in the programme that one longed for a format in which the guests could have the chance to question one another’s assumptions. What is this notion of “structural sin” which Professor Beckford claimed as grounded in Christian theology? And, a more practical issue: if we choose to deliver reparation through governmental aid and development funds, how do we negotiate competing claims on resources? We have territories in our inner cities where white working-class communities languish, themselves the victims of an exploitative global capitalism.

At the recent Lambeth Conference, the establishment was recommended of a new committee to discuss theologies of redemptive action and reparation. Its very title assumes that some of these difficult questions have already been settled. This programme, to its credit, would suggest otherwise.