BRINGING creative, alluring, and deep theology back into the parish (from which it seems to have been banished) cannot be achieved without overcoming some destructively false divides that have bedevilled us lately in the Church of England.
First, it is surely not true that good theology (richly substantive and imaginatively engaging theology) is the enemy of mission and effective “leadership”. Rather it is precisely its necessary medium and handmaid.
It is just that we have to figure out afresh how that medium can again become the message, how the extraordinary achievements of Anglican theology in recent years in academia, and also in its classic, much earlier, enunciations, can be attractively purveyed in the parish without any sort of condescension, obfuscation, or, indeed, inappropriate “dumbing down”; for, somehow, we clergy always tend to underestimate the — often extraordinary — intellectual and imaginative capacities of the layperson and the seeker in our midst. That is a dreadful and repeated mistake.
Second, it is surely not true, either, that good theology is somehow intrinsically and necessarily undermining to the vocations of non-“white” people or those who feel themselves to be disadvantaged educationally, or in class terms, in contemporary Britain.
That idea has been created and bolstered in the past generation by an equally false divide between “academic (systematic)” and so-called “practical” or “political” theology. It has left the institutional Church in a self-flagellating dilemma, which, in my view, is founded more on class guilt than on spiritual and theological truthfulness: either there is profound, engaging, imaginative, and theological content of political relevance to be conveyed, or there is not. Nothing here is alleviated by creating false hierarchies of types of theology which supposedly suit different classes and racial “identities”.
It is not that we now need non-“Oxbridge” or -“white” or -“south-of-England” theology (to quote the rather unfortunate recent remarks of the former MI5 head Lord Evans, who is now leading the search for the next Archbishop of Canterbury), but simply that we need good theology. And good theology is surely theology that is deep, demanding, contentful, prayerful, and imaginatively life-changing for all who are engaged in it.
IN SHORT, such theology must compel us both intellectually and affectively; it must draw the many dimensions of our fragmentated and threatened lives into a whole; it must give us true joy and realistic hope. It must be preached, and it must be taught, with equal verve and focus (and there is so much work, and necessary improvement, to be done here in the preaching area). And it must make demands on us, because here we are poised between “life and death contending”: what else would we expect, we must insist, if this is indeed the life-changing affair of Christian commitment, “costing nothing less than everything”?
Let me just quote here, by way of illustration, some comments of a new parishioner whom I met only recently here in Oxford, but who is now coming into the faith from an upbringing in deep secularism and materialism. Let me call him “Joe”. Joe tells me that his earlier world-view crashed when he realised that, in all likelihood, he would never even be able to afford to buy his own house: the materialistic ambitions of his earlier life, and of his birth family, collapsed.
So, what next? Was there something more? The liturgy began to draw him into that realm of imaginative “otherness” which had earlier seemed unreal, but now would not let him go; his theological antennae were engaged, and his thirst for direct engagement with God in prayer was opened up. Moreover, his desire for deeper theological knowledge developed accordingly, and he began to play the internet to find resources for this new interest in the Anglican theological tradition.
Professor Sarah Coakley delivers the Littlemore Lecture at Christ Church, Oxford, last month
The resources that he has found have partly helped him, he says, but he admits that he needs more. What is Anglicanism, exactly, he asks, and who is best propounding its theological distinctiveness for a contemporary seeker in quest of life, and truth, and redemption?
I think that, if we were founding the Littlemore Group again in this new day and age, we would almost certainly eschew the older communicative medium of edited books (which are, in any case, arduous to produce, and probably not so many younger people read them, frankly) and focus instead on producing arresting and succinct online materials of real theological and imaginative content.
There is, of course, a great deal of material already available out there in the form of random theological talks, and podcasts and interviews on the internet; but the quality is uneven, the systematic purview is patchy, and the content is often more skewed by particular contextual interests than by a thoughtful and sustained desire to build up the spiritual life of the Anglican catechumen or the genuine seeker.
The result is that learning is erratic, and bibliographical guidance is more or less uncontrolled. If the Church of England is not thinking about this particular issue at this crucial point in its life, it is arguably not thinking about what really matters at all. (But we all know why it is terminally distracted right now.)
SO HERE, then, is our practical challenge and, at the same time, a challenge to the future of the Littlemore Group and all other folk who have similar concerns. What would it take to provide rich, substantive, and imaginative theological materials online to guide those who are seeking to reclaim faith in the Anglican tradition, in these very troubled times? Who could coordinate such a project, and who would pay for it? I don’t immediately know the answer to these questions.
But here is my learned experience, for what it’s worth (and this comes out of 20 years of Littlemore work and beyond, especially in North America): if something is worth doing, it is best to do the creative planning spontaneously, with the most gifted possible theological collaborators available, and then — strangely — the necessary money tends to arrive just in time for it to happen — or so I have always found. It is surprising how many generous lay people care about a project such as this.
In other words, truly creative theological work for the Church needs, once more, to happen from the ground up. It does not need to be institutionally validated in advance; for it needs to ride on the Spirit, and only afterwards thereby can it be affirmed.
Also, it may not be the existing Littlemore Group that shoulders this next stage of work; but, if not, others will surely take it up. But such an urgent theological project can still escape the “iron cage” of ecclesiastical proceduralism, and it needs to do so. Otherwise, we cannot go forward as a renewed Church in witness to the nation, reigniting its “religious imagination”, as Archbishop Rowan Williams suggested and desired way back in 2003.
The Revd Dr Sarah Coakley is Honorary Professor at the Logos Institute, St Andrews University, and was Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge from 2007 to 2018.
This is an edited extract from a lecture given at Christ Church, Oxford, on 18 July, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Littlemore Group. A gathering of priest-theologians and religious rooted in the parish, the Littlemore Group has produced five volumes over the past two decades (Praying for England, Fear and Friendship, For God’s sake, Holy Attention, and The Vowed Life). It continues to meet annually.