The Church on Capitalism: Theology and the Market

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Author: Eve Poole

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The Church on Capitalism

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The Church on Capitalism Theology and the Market Eve Poole

© Eve Poole 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-27516-4

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Poole, Eve, 1972– The church on capitalism : theology and the market / Eve Poole. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-230-27516-4 (hardback) 1. Capitalism–Religious aspects–Protestant Churches. 2. Church of England. I. Title. BR115.C3P66 2010 261.8’5–dc22 2010027548 10 19

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface

vii

List of Acronyms

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 General Synod Views Introduction Synod views Meta-themes Conclusion

4 4 5 28 37

Chapter 2 Church of England Commentators Introduction Academic theologians Bishops Academic economists Businessmen Methodological comment Technical comment Theological comment Conclusion

41 41 42 66 72 75 80 82 85 90

Chapter 3 Types of Theology Introduction Worldview types Worldview synthesis Etiquette types Etiquette synthesis Taxonomical criteria

92 92 94 110 112 125 128

Chapter 4 Critique of Church of England Views Introduction To what extent a given theology knowingly addresses both shared and asymmetric belief contexts To what extent a given theology articulates a worldview To what extent a given theology attends to methodological etiquette

134 134 134

v

137 149

vi Contents

To what extent a given theology attends to Christian doctrine To what extent a given theology attends to Christian praxis To what extent a given theology flexes mood, with particular reference to audience and intent Church of England theological resources on capitalism

152 156 160 163

Conclusion

164

Notes

170

Bibliography

210

Index

223

Preface This book emerged from a particular context. I read theology at Durham University in the 1990s then worked for the Church Commissioners before obtaining an MBA from Edinburgh University and working for Deloitte Consulting. At the Commissioners I worked as an ecclesiastical civil servant, undertaking both case and policy work, and was involved in the implementation of the Turnbull reforms. At Deloitte I had dual expertise in project and change management, and a dual affiliation to the financial services capital markets practice and to the public sector. I now teach at Ashridge Business School, and this book represents a synthesising of my two worlds at a time when the credit crunch has called to account both capitalism and theology. In its manifestation as the capital markets, capitalism is challenged for its seeming failure. In its manifestation in the Church of England, theology is challenged for its failure to offer a robust contribution to the debate. Answering both challenges has become increasingly urgent. The book is the reworking of a PhD thesis undertaken part-time over a period of five years. There is a cloud of witnesses to whom thanks are due. First, my PhD supervisor Dr Richard Higginson, for his diligence, advice and support, and for his gracious critique of the resulting thesis. He cannot be held accountable for its flaws but is deeply implicated in its successes. Second, my employer Ashridge Business School for providing the funding for my study. Third, the generous people who read parts of the thesis at various stages of its development. For the chapter on Synod, thanks to Kenneth Adams, Michael Black, Richard Burridge, Sir Adrian Cadbury, Sir Michael Colman, Martin Elengorn, Richard Hopgood, Timothy Jenkins, Patrick Locke, Peter Selby, David Skidmore, Harry Van Buren and Neville White, as well as those members of the Christian Association of Business Executives who attended a supper discussion about my emerging conclusions at the Institute of Business Ethics on 16 January 2006. For the chapter on the commentators, thanks to Kenneth Adams, John Atherton, Malcolm Brown, Richard Harries, Donald Hay, Peter Heslam, Richard Higginson, David Jenkins, Peter Sedgwick, Peter Selby and Clive Wright for commenting on an earlier version of it. For the chapter on typology, thanks to David Ford and Wesley Kort, and to the 19 February 2009 Jesus Lane seminar group for their valuable critique. Particular thanks to the monks of Douai Abbey for their gracious hospitality while it was being written. For reviewing the vii

viii Preface

entire thesis, I am particularly indebted to Katharine Craik, Nathan Percival, William Poole and Ellen Pruyne. My Examiners, Peter Sedgwick and Jonathan Chaplin, not only did me the honour of passing my thesis, but made many valuable suggestions as to how it could be improved. I am indeed standing on the shoulders of giants, or, as my father might have said, gigantum humeris insidens.

List of Acronyms ABYG ACORA AGUPA AUN BOE BOM BSR CAP CC CBF CCBI CEBR CTBI EIAG EIWG GATT GM GNP GS HOB ICF IMF LSE MPAC OECD PB UBP UN UTU WCC WHO WTO

Archbishop of York’s Group Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas Advisory Group on Urban Priority Areas Anglican Urban Network Board of Education Board of Mission Board for Social Responsibility Common Agricultural Policy Church Commissioners Central Board of Finance Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland Centre for Economics and Business Research Churches Together in Britain and Ireland Ethical Investment Advisory Group Ethical Investment Working Group General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Genetically Modified Gross National Product General Synod House of Bishops Industrial Christian Fellowship International Monetary Fund The London School of Economics Mission and Public Affairs Council Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Pensions Board Urban Bishops’ Panel United Nations Urban Theology Unit World Council of Churches World Health Organisation World Trade Organisation

ix

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Introduction

In November 1989, while the Church of England’s General Synod sat in Church House, London, Rostropovich played Bach suites in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Its fall marked the symbolic end of the Cold War – Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ – and the discrediting of communism as a reasonable political alternative to capitalism. The collapse of credit in the financial markets in 2007/8 similarly toppled the assumption of capitalism triumphant, triggering a global recession. These events frame a period during which capitalism reigned largely unchallenged. Writing in the aftermath of the so-called credit crunch, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked those in charge of finance ‘to stop and wonder whether this might be a moment of enormous and strange opportunity – whether circumstances might not have put them in a unique position where they could be part of a real step forward for the world’.1 This book argues that the Church of England should similarly seize this kairos moment. In examining the Church’s track record in this field, it urges the Church to take its proper place in the reshaping of the global marketplace, so that the resulting ‘economy’ – from the Greek word for housekeeping – is genuinely one which benefits the whole household of God. The book will start by examining Church of England views on capitalism during this period, first by drawing together formal Church views and examining the views of Church of England commentators; then by establishing criteria for theological scrutiny and applying these to the emerging findings. There are a number of problems associated with trying to retrieve a ‘Church of England view’ on any non-doctrinal subject. Technically, there is no such thing. Practically, several bodies and people are so identified with the Church of England as to make their views inseparable, despite any careful positioning to the contrary. Proxies might 1

2 The Church on Capitalism

include the Archbishop of Canterbury, the two Archbishops jointly, or the House of Bishops. Each exercises formal leadership in the Church of England, but each has multiple roles, so a ‘clean’ view would be hard to extract. Instead, the Archbishops’ Council might have been a useful proxy, but only came into being mid-way through the period. The alternative of retrieving a view from the bishops or clergy corporately fails on practical and statistical grounds, as well as being open to theological challenge, and bodies like the Boards and Councils or the Church Commissioners are careful to insist that their views do not represent the Church of England’s formal view, instead deferring to Synod. Therefore, for this study, General Synod will be the first port of call. That the Church of England confers on General Synod the right to speak formally to the nation about its views is enshrined in its business of carrying motions. This mechanism enables it to communicate a view – albeit often a hard-won compromise – on a given topic back to the dioceses and to government.2 That interested parts of the media and the population assume that General Synod speaks formally to the nation on behalf of the Church of England is evident from media reporting on Synod Groups of Sessions, so that the effect if not the intention is that Synod speaks for the Church of England. That General Synod receives reports from related Church bodies such as the Church Commissioners, and comprises the Archbishops, all Diocesan and representative Suffragan Bishops, and representative clergy and laity, also suggests that General Synod is best placed of all the central mechanisms to reflect a widely informed view across Church of England membership. While it is unclear to what extent the ‘man in the pew’ would identify with Synod – given the indirect way in which it is elected and the greater visibility of the local Bishop – it is nevertheless more technically representative than the alternatives. Thus, General Synod will be taken as a proxy for the manifest Church of England view.3 To balance this perspective, views will then be taken from the publications of key Anglican commentators during the period, examining those themes and motifs on capitalism explored in their writing. While there has been accompanying comment in the media, on the web and in local sermons and parish publications up and down the country, this survey is restricted to those academic theologians, clergy, academic economists and businessmen who published substantial contributions to the debate during the period under study and who are members of the Church of England. Where it does not emerge through Synod business, relevant Church of England staff or sub-committee activity is covered by proxy through commentator treatment of it.4

Introduction 3

Following scrutiny of Church of England views through these two lenses, a set of theological criteria will then be identified, to function as a yardstick for critique. After the fashion for ‘taxonomies’, several exercises in type will be examined. Their similarities and differences will be used to suggest a range of criteria, which will then be applied to the emerging Church of England views to identify weaknesses in the Church’s approach. While this book joins a growing body of scholarship in the field, it innovates in three ways. First, it focuses in detail on the period of ‘capitalism triumphant’, starting with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and ending in the midst of the credit crunch. Second, it draws together the formal views and actions of the Church of England as a capitalist entity in its own right, considering these alongside commentary from bishops, academics and businessmen. Third, it contributes a new perspective on theology, derived from an analysis of theological typology. This third innovation is perhaps the most original. While many authors in this field have identified theological gaps, this approach consolidates much of their work, both on theology and capitalism, and on typology. The emerging framework not only facilitates a critique of Church of England views for the purposes of this project, but identifies an important avenue for future theological scholarship, and one that is of particular relevance in the modern context. In addition, the book makes a number of specific suggestions as to how the Church might rise to the challenge of influencing the global marketplace. While these may not in themselves be novel, the analysis that produces them is, lending them particular weight in a context more characterised by heat than light. A note on how to read this book. The chapter on theological typology provides the technical underpinning for the final analysis, but is not in itself germane to the argument of the book. It is included for completeness and to show my theological workings, but need not detain the more general reader.

1 General Synod Views

Introduction One way to define ‘capitalism’ is to focus on capitalism as a concept. Such a definition attracts a technical critique about ownership and property law. Once these are admitted, power imbalances inevitably follow, so the debate then tends to turn to the issues of just price, usury, and so on, as ways to correct these imbalances. An alternative way to define ‘capitalism’ is to examine the arrangements to which the word refers. Because Synod tends to discuss capitalism in this second, more general, sense, this is the definition that will here be pursued, in the interests of its more practical nature. That said, a careful examination of the various arrangements of capitalism worldwide reveals a level of nuance and complexity that militates against precise critique. Within the discipline of Economics, oversimplifying positions for the sake of discussion is an occupational hazard, because no ‘pure’ form of capitalism or indeed of any other economic system exists outside the textbooks. There is therefore a danger that any theory of economics or treatment thereof becomes an intellectual conceit rather than anything of diagnostic or instrumental use. In practice, capitalism favours the private ownership of assets, so the point at issue across the spread of arrangements tends to concern the appropriate balance within a given economy between state and private ownership. As such, the debate is properly about the appropriate degree of ‘intervention’ by states in economies. Economic arrangements range across a scale of ‘marketness’ from the classic minimalist stance of Milton Friedman at one extreme and at the other the classic maximalist stance of statecontrolled economies such as those of the former Eastern bloc. If free markets are arguably maximally efficient while planned economies are 4

General Synod Views 5

designed to be maximally just, the theological task is to weigh up the appropriate balance between efficiency and justice.1 Given this complexity, and where views on ‘capitalism’ per se are not explicit, Church views on state intervention and elements of capitalism like investments and trade will be used as proxies to construct the Church’s economic world view. This chapter will look at the themes which emerge from an examination of Synod’s deliberations throughout the period. These will then be cross-referenced with the source material to ensure robustness, before being used to create a picture of the resulting economic world view.

Synod views The General Synod was established in 1970 under the Synodical Government Measure 1969, replacing its predecessor body, the Church Assembly. It has a legislative function, whereby it can legislate by Measure (subject to approval by resolution of each House of Parliament and Royal Assent, after which it becomes part of the law of England), by Canon (subject to Royal Licence and Assent) or by Act of Synod. It also has responsibility for liturgical matters, for doctrinal matters and for finance, and acts as the primary deliberative body for the Church of England. It comprises the two Convocations of Canterbury and York, each with their respective Upper House (Bishops) and Lower House (Clergy), together with a combined House of Laity. The Upper Houses combine to form the House of Bishops, and the Lower Houses, the House of Clergy. Its Presidents are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and Synod has a number of permanent Commissions (for example on Liturgy) and Committees (for example on Standing Orders). Prior to the creation of the Archbishops’ Council, to whom their successors now report, Synod also had a range of Boards and Councils, the most significant of which were the Advisory Board for Ministry, the Board of Education, the Board for Social Responsibility (BSR), the Board of Mission (BOM) and the Council for Christian Unity, together with their respective sub-committees and groupings. Synod meets twice a year, normally in York in July and in London in November. It also meets in London in February if the need arises. A new Synod is elected (in the case of the Houses of Clergy and Laity) every five years, although its membership changes from sitting to sitting through occasional vacancies and when sees change hands. While it could therefore be argued that it is impossible for such an ever-changing and episodic body to have a coherent ‘view’, there are two main reasons


for persisting in seeking out such a view. The first reason is that in practice, as mentioned above, Synod is assumed to speak for the Church of England in any case, so its view, however ephemeral, carries form beyond its substance. The second reason is because, while the membership changes from sitting to sitting, many members serve for a number of terms, and arguments from organisational behaviourists such as Edgar Schein would suggest that there is likely to have built up over time a pervading culture within Synod, based on a set of underlying assumptions and beliefs.2 As cultures are known to be heavily influenced by leaders, and the House of Bishops by its unelected nature has the most continuity between Synods, it is likely that there will be some commonality of view across successive Synods, as would of course be formally supposed by a common adherence to the doctrine of the Church of England. Scrutiny of Synod reports and proceedings since 1989 yields diverse commentary on matters pertaining to capitalism. From a detailed examination of the material in chronological order, it is apparent that much of the post-1989 debate can be gathered into four main themes: ethical investment, international debt, fair trade and state support. The latter further separates into two sub-themes: support for domestic industries at the end of their life-cycle, and support in the developing world for their nascent industries, in the context of global trading and aid protocols. A fifth theme, sustainable development, emerges towards the end of the period. As an aside, Industrial Mission as a topic is conspicuously absent throughout the period. In July 1989, Synod had debated the topic for the first time in 30 years (the previous debate having been conducted by its predecessor the Church Assembly), and it was to be nearly 20 years before the subject was revisited. In July 2008, the Industrial Mission community brought a motion on the subject, via the Diocese of St Albans. This debate led Synod to pass a motion, affirming paid or unpaid daily work as ‘essentially a spiritual activity’ and recognising the importance of Christian values within economic life. The motion encouraged bishops and clergy to give greater priority to the world of work, and called on MPAC both to convene a symposium on a theological understanding of work for today and to compile a collection of supportive resource materials for church members. Interestingly, the original motion was amended several times, consistently in the direction of work itself rather than the economic context surrounding it. One explanation for the lack of discussion on Industrial Mission has been provided by Malcolm Brown, who argues that its traditional concerns have increasingly been met through ‘Fresh Expressions’ initiatives.


Finally, a historian looking to retrieve a church view on capitalism might look for debate on the traditional issues of usury and just price. In this context, usury is most closely addressed in the discussion on credit. Just price tends only to be discussed obliquely, in the context of the annual parochial fees order and in the two separate debates on fees in July 2005 and July 2008. In each case, while discussion has oscillated between the charging of ‘market’ or ‘competitive’ prices, the main thrust of the debate has been about how best to regulate the process of collection so as not to exacerbate the ‘crematoria cowboys’ phenomenon. This focus on revenue protection can be explained by the fact that the Church of England conducts around 60,000 marriages and 250,000 funerals a year. In 2006, this was estimated to have contributed over £16 million towards the cost of stipends. Ethical investment The theme of ethical investment, primarily directed at the Church’s own investment activities, illustrates a key tension within the Church of England between Synod and the central church investment bodies. Throughout the period under scrutiny, Synod maintains a definition of ethical investment that argues for divestment where a company is engaged in questionable activity, while the Commissioners insist on divesting only in cases where questionable activity is demonstrably a majority activity, preferring instead to use their position as a shareholder to influence company policy. Both parties agree on the ‘negative’ approach, that is, withholding investment funds from businesses that are deemed ‘unethical’. For this purpose, the EIAG keeps a list of restricted investments and uses it to offer a screening service to the central Church bodies, Diocesan Boards of Finance, cathedrals, and selected stockbrokers such as Cazenove and Rathbones.3 While this policy is an ethical not a ‘business’ one, EIAG benchmarks annually to see what the policy ‘costs’ the Church. Their 2004/5 report showed that the ethical investment policy has a slightly negative effect overall.4 Some background on what constitutes questionable activity or unethical business may assist. Immediately prior to the period under discussion, debates concerning investment in apartheid South Africa made ethical investment a major theme on the floor of Synod. Synod voted to boycott South Africa in July 1986 and February 1987, adding it to the Church Commissioners’ list of banned categories. These were armaments, pornography, gambling, tobacco, breweries, distilleries, and newspapers (because of concerns over political bias), and the Commissioners’ policy was not to invest in any company whose ‘main business’ fell into any of


them. The South Africa debates and several related Questions served to illustrate the grey area behind this policy, which effectively argues that a company becomes ethically ‘clean’ when questionable business reduces to 49.9 per cent of its portfolio, regardless of the absolute amount of revenue generated by it. Several companies in which the Commissioners invested had significant but not majority interests in South Africa, so were not caught by the letter of the policy. Accordingly, in January 1989, John Madeley (Oxford) challenged the First Church Estates Commissioner, Sir Douglas Lovelock, about whether their first priority in investing was to the Gospel or to financial return. In replying, Sir Douglas said: They need not conflict: it is by supporting the parochial ministry to the best of their ability that the Commissioners can best contribute to the preaching of the Gospel throughout the country. Their primary task is to manage the assets entrusted to them as prudently and efficiently as possible for the benefit of the parochial clergy. In doing this they will continue to take account of ethical and social issues when making investment decisions.5 Madeley responded by citing the opinion of Timothy Lloyd QC that the Commissioners were wrong in appearing to put financial return first. Sir Douglas cited the Commissioners’ own counsel to the contrary. In the light of this confusion, the Bishop of Oxford (Rt Revd Richard Harries), the Archdeacon of Bedford (Ven. Michael Bourke) and the Revd William Whiffen brought a ‘friendly’ legal proceeding with the support of the Christian Ethical Investment Group, to seek ‘declaratory relief’ on whether or not the Commissioners were right to be guided so rigorously in their investment policy by purely financial considerations. This case was an important piece of off-stage activity behind Synod’s consideration of ethical investment during the period under investigation, and the November 1991 Group of Sessions opened amidst the High Court ruling in the case of Harries and others v. the Church Commissioners (The Bishop of Oxford case). The ruling stated that trustees ‘must not use property held by them for investment purposes as a means of making moral statements at the expense of the charity of which they are trustees’. The ruling however allowed that trustees should be able to avoid making investments that conflicted with the aims of the charity, alienated supporters, or made its beneficiaries unwilling to accept funds. The ruling also explicitly approved the Commissioners’ existing ‘ethical investment policy’ of avoiding the so-called ‘banned’ categories.6 While this case was a watershed in the Church’s debate on ethical investment, it


received scant attention on the floor of Synod. Apart from a concern that the Commissioners had not distanced themselves from their counsel’s comment that the teaching of Jesus was feckless,7 the only substantive mention of the case was a Question to the Commissioners brought by Bryan Sandford (York). In response to his request for a statement, Sir Douglas told Synod that the High Court had endorsed ‘in every aspect’ the Commissioners’ current investment policy ‘with its strong ethical content’, and regretted that the case had cost the Commissioners £100,000 which would have to come out of the funds available for diocesan allocation.8 As well as controversy over equity investment policy, further controversy emerged over the Commissioners’ investment in gilts. The Commissioners’ practice of coupon trading or ‘gilt-stripping’ was first challenged through Questions in January 1991. The Commissioners admitted that they had deliberately switched some of their portfolio into high-yield gilts in order to generate ‘temporary income’ to support the Church’s ever-increasing expenditure needs. This sacrifice of long-term capital for short-term income eroded the capital base and was subject to criticism not only in Synod but also in Parliament.9 The practice was phased out in 1997, but in the Commissioners’ argumentation about both equities and gilts, it is possible to discern a somewhat legalistic approach to ethical investment. This was legitimised through the actions of the Bishop of Oxford in taking the Commissioners to law, effectively conceding that the ‘court’ of Synod was inferior to the courts of the land. With a clear legal mandate, the Commissioners’ discretion was limited and an adherence to the letter of the law appears in several companion discussions. For instance, when pressed about Sunday opening and the welfare of MetroCentre staff in November 1994, the Commissioners declined to comment, pointing out that to trade on Sunday was not illegal and that such matters were for their tenants not for them. Again, in November 1999, hunting with dogs was ‘a matter for their tenants’. The same theme emerges in various debates over market rents, whether on farms or on housing estates, or on land that might otherwise be leased for social housing: the letter of the law states the Commissioners’ fiduciary duties, and their flexibility is therefore limited. The only exception to this trend appears to be the amendment of leases in 2000 to exclude GM planting on Church-owned land. On the matter of coupon-trading, the Commissioners, though arguably acting unwisely, were again operating well within the bounds of their technical mandate, maximising their income in service of their fiduciary duties, with an ethical investment policy duly endorsed by the Board of Governors.


In 1994, the Church’s approach to ethical investment was further formalised with the creation of the Ethical Investment Working Group (later renamed the Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG). An initiative of Sir Michael Colman, the newly arrived First Church Estates Commissioner, staff recall that his intention was to use the device to distance himself from ‘messy’ ethical investment issues, although its creation was welcomed nonetheless. The formation of the group heralded a move towards a more self-conscious approach to ethical investment policy, just in time for a long-awaited July 1995 debate on the Private Member’s Motion tabled by Revd Hugh Wilcox (St Albans) in 1991. The occasion of this debate allowed Synod to pass a motion to ‘request’ an annual report from the group, effectively bringing ethical investment permanently onto Synod’s formal agenda and therefore susceptible to regular debate.10 Subsequently, each annual report was either debated in Synod or became the subject of a fringe meeting during the relevant group of sessions. Since 2001/2, EIAG annual reports have included a ‘theological’ section. While these have tended to layer theological justification onto the central investment bodies’ pre-existing policy of engagement, the 2001/2 report offered a ‘theological understanding’ of investment that pointed up three central dilemmas: the prophetic and the incarnational (standing apart v standing alongside); justification and sanctification (faith v works); and stewardship and eschatology (tomorrow v today). The efficacy of the ‘incarnational’ engagement approach is unclear, and the informal view from senior staff suggests that companies humour the Commissioners through diplomatic correspondence while no real changes to company policy tend to be made. Engagement ‘targets’ have been identifiable since the 2003 report, when EIAG also started publishing voting records for the Commissioners, the CBF and the Pensions Board. In February 2006, the EIAG Chairman announced a sharpening of this engagement strategy, to focus activity on the top 20–30 companies in the portfolio using ‘regular, high-level meetings to review a detailed agenda of ethical and governance issues, including policies on the environment, HIV, supply chain and other labour issues’, with the intent to use the Church’s muscle as the UK’s largest ethical investor to effect real change.11 Notwithstanding these developments, the Bishop of Oxford ruling still stands. The judgement, by the Vice Chancellor Sir Donald Nicholls, suggested rather equivocally that while the existing law governing the Commissioners’ activities could not go where the Bishop wished it, the law could be changed. However, in the years following the ruling no over-


tures have been made by the Church to alter the law. This acquiescence has allowed the narrow definition of fiduciary duty to go largely unchallenged. One such challenge was made by Canon Paul Brett (Chelmsford), a member of the Christian Ethical Investment Group. In one of his speeches to Synod in 1998, he noted that the ruling in its entirety allowed trustees to balance their primary duty of gaining the best financial return they could for their beneficiaries with the need not to act in a way that brought the charity into disrepute, offended its beneficiaries or alienated its supporters, in the way that existing investment policy appeared to do. It is the judgement in the Bishop of Oxford case which allows cancer charities to refrain from investing in tobacco companies even at the risk of diminished financial returns, in the best interests of their beneficiaries. However, what is curious about the Commissioners’ whiter-than-white conduct is its inconsistency. Loath to disinvest, in 1995 they did so with alacrity over BSkyB’s adult content, not the company’s ‘main’ business by any means. The reason given was that this was a simple moral issue, yet in the minds of many critics so were the issues of armaments (a ‘banned category’ like pornography) and GEC, breast-milk substitutes and Nestlé, and human rights and Shell, RTZ and Caterpillar. Moreover, despite the decision not to permit the growing of any GM crops on Commissioners’ land, there is no record of their share-holdings in Novartis and Astra Zeneca being sold, presumably because GM does not constitute a ‘main’ part of either of these two businesses.12 While the cause of this inconsistency is unclear, it appears to suggest a view that it is the Commissioners alone who are competent to judge in these matters, and that factors other than ethics may be equally material in their consideration (as was explicitly recognised by the Bishop of Oxford case ruling). For instance, there is an apparently unconnected emphasis throughout the material on the Commissioners’ need to balance their portfolio to minimise risk. Indeed, the EIWG specifically mentioned this in their 1999 and 2002/3 reports, pointing out that the Church was not free to act as the smaller ethical investment unit trusts did, in view of their particular fiduciary responsibilities and their size. This would suggest that the divestment ‘rules’ are applied more tightly to important holdings than to holdings that, if sold, would not destabilise the portfolio. The Commissioners are not alone in their high regard for the law. That the Pensions Board has twice elected not to follow the recommendation of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG) to disinvest in Provident Financial also suggests a leaning towards legalism within the central Church structures. Indeed, the position of the Pensions Board was carefully flagged in a speech made by Ven. Ian Russell during


the EIAG report debate on 11 July 1999, in which he cited the Trustee Act 1925 and the Trustee (Investment) Act 1961, as well as the judgement of Sir Robert Megarry in April 1984, to the effect that the best interests of their beneficiaries were financial and so to let the moral and social views of the trustees hold sway would be illegal. The legal justification for this position, tested for the Commissioners in the Bishop of Oxford case, is non-controversial, given that the primary fiduciary duty of both the Commissioners and the Pensions Board is to maximise return. However, that it is primary confirms the primacy of secular law in the majority of investment decisions in the Church of England.13 Against this backdrop, there were three particular investments which received sustained attention during the period in question, Nestlé, Caterpillar and the Octavia Hill Estates, each of which will be considered in turn. (1) Nestlé While Nestlé as a topic was originally raised in the context of discussion over the promotion of breast-milk substitutes in the third world, during this period Nestlé became a Synod theme in its own right, as it came to represent a number of key battles: Synod against sharp practice, Synod against world poverty, and Synod against the Church Commissioners. As a theme it also illustrates the limitations of Synod, in that Synod’s formal boycott of Nescafé from July 1991 until July 1994 seemed to cause Nestlé some reputational damage but did not appear to influence their business practice, nor the Commissioners’ investment in them. Neither was Synod able to persuade their own BSR to continue pressing the issue because of resource constraints.14 The various papers, debates and questions concerning Nestlé reveal a clear point of view, that irrespective of the letter of the law, Synod felt Nestlé should have gone further than the minimum required either by local laws or by the eventual WHO regulations, in order to act responsibly in a market where their customers were particularly poor and vulnerable. Contingent to this was the view that the Church should be seen to be acting consistently with its espoused views, hence the call for a consumer boycott (although only of one Nestlé product) and the eventual and repeated calls on the Commissioners to divest their Nestlé shareholding, which they refused to do.15 The Nestlé situation revealed a difference in view right at the heart of the Church of England, between those formally representing it and those charged with financing a large proportion of its running costs. The difference rested on arguments about influence. Synod felt that a consumer boycott and divestment would send such a clear message to Nestlé that they would have a change of heart, while the


Commissioners argued that they would have more influence with the Board as an existing shareholder. Either way, it appears that neither approach was effective, as Nestlé remains unrepentant to this day. (2) Caterpillar Similarly, the case of Caterpillar points up the difference in view between Synod and the central investment bodies, and the tension between divestment and constructive engagement. The matter first surfaced in July 2005, when the Commissioners were asked three questions about their investment in Caterpillar in view of the use of Caterpillar earth-moving equipment by the Israeli Government to demolish Palestinian houses, as well as in the construction of the separation wall. At that stage, Andreas Whittam Smith, the First Church Estates Commissioner, responded that the EIAG had considered the subject and found that investment in the company was not in breach of current policy. The EIAG had, however, expressed ‘great concern’ and determined a process of engagement with the company and others on the Church’s behalf, after which it would reconsider the matter. The controversy returned to the floor of Synod the following year, in February 2006. Introducing the EIAG annual report, the Chairman John Reynolds gave an update on the EIAG’s process of engagement with Caterpillar, which had involved dialogue with Caterpillar; Palestinian, Jewish and Israeli groups; War on Want, and others. He reported that Caterpillar was to continue to be monitored, but not excluded from investment, and that there were no current sales of Caterpillar earth-moving equipment to the Israeli Government. The debate on the EIAG report offered the opportunity for a motion on Caterpillar to be brought, introduced by Keith Malcouronne (Guildford), which opened with Synod ‘heeding the call’ from the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East ‘to disinvest from companies profiting from the illegal occupation, such as Caterpillar Inc, until they change their policies’. It encouraged the EIAG to persuade Caterpillar not to supply their equipment or parts to Israel, and urged EIAG to ‘give weight to the illegality under international law of the activities in which Caterpillar Inc’s equipment is involved’, and to update its recommendations in the light of further engagement and visits.16 The motion was ‘clearly carried’, unamended. The following day brought a media frenzy. During the debate the Archbishop of Canterbury had voted in favour of the motion, while the Archbishop of York had abstained. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, went on record to say that the Synod decision made him ‘ashamed to be an Anglican’, and Canon Andrew White, the Church’s


chief negotiator in the Middle East, described the motion as ‘“more sanctimonious claptrap” which made him despair of the church’.17 By the end of the week the Archbishop of Canterbury had issued a press release of a letter he had written to the Chief Rabbi regretting the distress caused to the Jewish community and clarifying his understanding of what the resolution actually meant. In his view, Synod had not voted for the Church to disinvest in companies supplying Israel, merely to continue its existing policy of engagement in dialogue with them, and to undertake a fact-finding visit. A week later in The Jewish Chronicle the Chief Rabbi responded in what was described in The Guardian as ‘unusually harsh language’, saying: ‘the Church has chosen to take a stand on the politics of the Middle East over which it has no influence, knowing that it will have the most adverse repercussions on a situation over which it has enormous influence, Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’. The EIAG reconsidered its position on Caterpillar in the light of the Synod debate and its aftermath, but in a Press Release dated 7 March 2006 reaffirmed its previous advice not to disinvest. The Church remained invested in Caterpillar to the tune of about £2.2m, until December 2008 when the shares were sold ‘for purely investment reasons’.18 The case of Caterpillar reveals a consistency in approach from Synod in favour of divestment wherever investment by the Church could be seen to be lending support to companies or regimes whose behaviour is questionable. It also reveals a consistency in the EIAG and central investment bodies, to prefer engagement over divestment, and to apply their ethical investment policy to the letter. It also provided a further opportunity for clarification about the bounds and limits of the various bodies involved in ethical investment in confirming that Synod’s motions could carry no legal or binding status with the Church’s investment bodies.19 (3) Octavia Hill Also at the February 2006 group of sessions, the sale by the Church Commissioners of their historic Octavia Hill Estates drew widespread consternation. While not an equity investment like Nestlé or Caterpillar, the holding, inherited from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, represented around 3 per cent of the investment portfolio and had originally been intended to provide ‘well managed housing for the deserving poor’, at an economic rent ‘so that their souls were not corrupted by receiving something for nothing’. As an investment, the Estates had become less attractive over time. In 2001, the Commissioners had been persuaded to implement a new policy of market rates in select cases only, thereby agreeing to forgo an estimated sum of £51m over a 15 year period.20 The


eventual decision in February 2006 to sell the Estates for £192m to a joint venture between a social landlord and a publicly quoted company was made by the Church Commissioners’ Assets Committee the Friday before Synod met, and again attracted national media coverage as well as questions in both Houses of Parliament.21 Opposition was partly to the sale itself, and partly to the sale to a profit-making partnership instead of to a sole social housing trust. Andreas Whittam-Smith defended the sale on the basis that the Commissioners were ‘not a housing charity’ and had a clear legal duty to manage their investments to support the mission of the Church throughout the whole country. The Estates were not generating income and would be better managed by professionals. The Diocese of Southwark, home to most of the Estates, was particularly upset by the pastoral impacts of the decision, leading to the introduction of a following motion in July 2006. While the motion asked Synod to state its regret over the Octavia Hill decision, that part of the motion was defeated, leaving a residual admonishment requesting the Church Commissioners and the Assets Committee to consider ‘how they might in the future better seek out and reflect the views of General Synod in advance of investment decisions which might affect the mission and/or reputation of the Church’. The debate elicited an interesting rejoinder from WhittamSmith: ‘The criticism of the Commissioners in terms of better seeking out and reflecting views of General Synod is really a criticism of those members of Synod who are governors and members of the Assets Committee. What this motion is really saying is that those whom the Synod has elected to the Church Commissioners have done a bad job, that they have not made the rest of us aware of things which might affect the mission and reputation of the Church. I can assure Synod that they absolutely did, absolutely have and always would do.’22 Like Nestlé and Caterpillar, the discussion over Octavia Hill Estates tested the extent to which Synod, acting as the voice of the Church, can formally influence investment decisions. Again, the Commissioners’ central response to Synod’s challenge was to cite the Bishop of Oxford ruling and to restate their fiduciary duty. Whittam-Smith underscored this point, saying that the Estates were ‘just part of our assets as far as we are concerned’, and that he saw no reason to seek further legal advice on the interpretation of the ruling in the Bishop of Oxford case, given that it was so specifically and recently given.23 International debt The debate on debt has particular poignancy, given the Church of England’s successful backing of the Jubilee 2000 campaign and the focus


on debt that emerged at the end of the period in the light of the credit crunch. It also acts as an illustration of the machinations involved in getting an issue onto Synod’s agenda. Synod first debated international debt in November 1991, when John Madeley (Oxford) brought a Private Member’s Motion asking governments to agree a ‘jubilee’ year during which to cancel Third World debt. The Old Testament concept of jubilee has been described by the Bishop of Rochester, Rt Revd Michael Nazir-Ali, as ‘a reversal of the flow of wealth from the rich to the poor’. After the motion was carried, the issue fell into abeyance until 1994, except for a passing reference during the February 1993 debate on Africa. In between the two debates, Christian Aid had been working in the parishes to foster awareness and support, and in 1994 the matter was raised by Canon Guy Smith (Worcester) in repeated Questions to BSR in July and November. At that time, BSR merely noted the activity of Christian Aid and the Debt Crisis Network (which became Jubilee 2000 in 1996), and declined to bring a report or debate on the matter to Synod. Therefore, in November 1996, David Webster (Rochester) raised the matter again through a successful Private Member’s Motion, seeking Synod’s formal endorsement of Jubilee 2000 and asking BSR to get more involved. The 1996 debate galvanised BSR into joining the Jubilee 2000 Coalition. Its Chairman, the Bishop of Oxford (Rt Revd Richard Harries) then introduced a debate on Jubilee 2000 in the House of Lords on the afternoon on 9 July 1997, in which the Bishop of Leicester (Rt Revd Tom Butler) also spoke.24 Debt then left the agenda again, until February 1998, when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, used his Presidential Address to liken unpayable debt to the slave trade and to condemn it as a contemptible immorality. In November, debt reappeared in the context of a debate on international development and an address by Rt Hon Clare Short MP, the new Secretary of State for International Development. Again, the focus was on the poor, but also on the ‘unjust structures of society’, the transformation of which was one of the 1998 Lambeth Conference’s Five Marks of Mission. This theme was revived in July 2001 with a further Private Member’s Motion brought by Roger Godin (Southwark), through which Synod deplored the lack of progress made to cancel the debt and reemphasised the ‘structural injustice’ of international debt as a principal cause of poverty. This change in emphasis from succouring the poor to rooting out the causes of poverty, from charity to social justice,25 was a Synod theme prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, being the subject of BSR’s report Let Justice Flow in 1986. This time it was a more sustained effort, and the Church of England’s support for Jubilee 2000 has been recognised as a major contributing factor to its success.


When compared with the debate on ethical investment, the lack of complaint in the debate on debt about its theological content is curious, given how many calls there were for ‘more theology’ in that context.26 Perhaps this is because the issue appears to be about spiralling poverty rather than debt per se. Given Synod’s implicit acceptance of a theological ‘bias to the poor’, this debate would therefore need no further theological underpinning.27 This supposition is supported by a number of sources. First, speaking to Roger Godin (Southwark)’s July 2001 Private Member’s Motion on Third World Debt, Elaine Storkey (London) explicitly stated that the debate was not really about debt, but about its bedfellows – issues of health, economics, the global environment and justice. That its ramifications and not debt itself were the core issue is also borne out by the lack of comment on the Commissioners’ increasing debt habit. As a closed fund, under pressure to produce more income, the Commissioners had borrowed heavily to finance high-yield developments. Yet this only drew criticism because the speculative nature of the developments contributed to the large losses sustained early in the 1990s. Similarly, the July 1993 Private Member’s Motion brought by Trevor Stevenson (Chichester) on personal debt emphasised not so much the nature of debt, but the need to respond to the plight of the vulnerable through education, support and protection. This focus on poverty as a key effect of debt was also apparent in the EIAG’s 2001 recommendation over divestment in Provident Financial, on the grounds that financing ministry to the poor by finances obtained from them, via a process that contributes towards perpetuating hardship, was incompatible. With hindsight, this focus on the effects rather than the fact of debt represented a missed opportunity for theological reflection. From 1992, Peter Selby was the William Leech Professorial Fellow in Applied Christian Theology at the University of Durham, where he wrote a book about debt called Grace and Mortgage (1997). At the end of his tenure, he was made Bishop of Worcester, and was subsequently a member of the EIAG and a Church Commissioner, a position he held in tension with his view that ‘the institutions of usury … destroy life’.28 He played a leading role in the discussions on debt at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, and was a contributor to Development Matters in 2001. However, his published views on the theology of debt – that to be Christian requires a recognition that life is based on an economy of gift not debt – were not incorporated into Synod’s deliberations until the 2009 discussions on the global financial crisis. This neglect of debt per se also had the unfortunate side-effect of enabling the Pensions Board to ignore the EIAG’s advice over Provident Financial. As the EIAG’s argument turned on the incompatibility of using


profits from Provident Financial to finance the Church’s ministry, the Pensions Board, concerned not with financing ministry but with financing pensions, could in good conscience demur by appealing to their fiduciary responsibilities. Given the central role of debt in the subsequent global financial crisis, it is interesting to note a speech made by the Bishop of Worcester as a Lord Spiritual in the October 2005 Consumer Credit Act debate: We are treating the planet on which we live as a credit card; a credit card with no credit limit and no repayment date. That is because we have allowed attitudes to change in a very uncritical way. I am not asking for a return to pre-Depression economics, but it seems to me that we have sleep-walked into a realm of imprudence about which a good deal of further reflection and, if necessary, economic and legislative action may be required.29 The financial crisis started to bite towards the end of 2007, and in early 2008 the Church of England launched a campaign through the official website called ‘Matter of Life and Debt’, offering information and resources about how the Church could help the indebted, in parallel with the Church Action on Poverty’s campaign ‘Debt on our Doorstep’, which called for tighter regulation and capping of the lending market.30 In February 2009, Peter Selby – now considered prophetic – was invited back from retirement to join Brian Griffiths in addressing Synod on the financial crisis. On the Church’s response to the financial crisis, Selby said that the Church’s failure to regard what was going on had led to consequences ‘as fundamental as the character of money in our society and as fundamental as our own ambitions as human beings of our concept of life’.31 The innovative briefing and discussion format allowed the follow-up two days’ later of a dedicated debate by a rather more informed Synod. Their deliberations were supported by papers drafted by Andreas WhittamSmith and Malcolm Brown outlining the nature and likely causes of the situation. While Whittam-Smith’s paper was largely a technical briefing, Brown’s discussed the Church of England’s response to the crisis, including a section on the Church’s historical engagement with the economy and its resources for the debate. He commented: Now that this reliance upon markets has been shown to entail enormous economic risk for ordinary people, the legitimacy of governmental withdrawal from its former roles is called into question and it


remains to be seen whether a resurgence of government-led economic intervention will create a new settlement with the electorate. Comments by church leaders since the crisis broke have drawn attention to the moral bankruptcy of a society whose prosperity is built upon phantom wealth and upon debt.32 While warning of the complexity of economics, he referred back to Selby’s book in concluding that ‘a nation whose prosperity is not grounded in real human activity but relies upon the phantasm of making money from money is in moral peril; moreover, debt enslaves people, both economically and by constraining their vision of what it is to be human’. His paper noted the arguments on both sides about whether social plurality and an ‘atomised and individualistic’ society was properly the cause or effect of a market economy, and the central disagreement over whether government intervention curtailed personal freedom or underwrote it by protecting fundamental freedoms from erosion by market forces. Finally, he suggested that Christians could appeal to ‘widely-held notions’ which, while properly Christian, appealed strongly to the moral sensibilities of non-Christians, such as the principles of fairness, generosity and sustainability. These he defined as: fair: does it give priority to the vulnerable and people in poverty both in Britain and abroad; generous: does it embody the obligation to give and share resources with others, especially the less well off, and does it promote fair trade and global aid; and sustainable: have both medium and long-term implications been taken fully into account so that the interests of future generations are factored in.33 In the debate, an attempt to pass a specific motion was defeated and a ‘take note’ vote was taken, a device which under standing orders does not commit Synod to anything contained in the report concerned. While the debate could have provided the opportunity for the issue of debt to be directly addressed, it largely served to confirm the hypothesis supposed above – that Synod has a greater concern for the bedfellows of debt, in line with its traditional bias to the poor. The tenor of the debate can be summarised by a speech from Revd Canon Jonathan Alderton-Ford (St Edmundsbury and Ipswich), who noted that: ‘as a Church, we are very good at standing at the bottom of the economic precipice and looking after the casualties when perhaps we need to be at the top of the cliff building a few fences and warning signs’.34 As well as acknowledging consumer complicity, the debate focused mainly on the pastoral, leaving a handful of speeches focusing on systemic responses to the crisis. One such speech echoed Selby’s Lords speech, with Simon Baynes (St Albans) noting that the crisis had exposed a nation living beyond its means and


exercising poor stewardship: ‘We have been borrowing without the ability to pay back. To borrow without the ability or the intention to pay back is to all intents and purposes stealing. We have been stealing from the next generation and we should hang our heads in shame.’35 Linking to the theme of international debt, the Bishop of Durham (Rt Revd Thomas Wright) remarked the contrast between the alacrity with which first world industry was being offered financial rescue and the slow and patchy rescue of indebted countries in the developing world, and Revd Mark Ireland (Lichfield) noted that the ‘real theological task’ was to promote contentment in the midst of a system that rested on the restlessness of acquisition.36 On capitalism per se, Dr Elaine Storkey (Ely) challenged the Following motion brought by Gavin Oldham (Oxford) because his motion accepted, as a given, assumptions about the ‘naturalness’ of economic cycles and the ‘essential plausibility’ of capitalism. She argued that Synod needed to be far more radical: For example, we might want to challenge the view of economics not just as a personal add-on or personal responsibility to personal ownership but in a much more relational, global, inter-personal way as we have already heard in this debate so far, so that in our very concept of money is a commitment to neighbour-love, whatever that means in the out-working of our stewardship and our use of money, whether that neighbour is someone living in our inner city, unemployed and on benefit schemes or half a world away in one of the new developing countries. …We might also want to challenge the whole idea that economics is fundamentally about growth, because growth has become an idol.37 As a footnote, Gavin Oldham, whose motion it was, is unusual in having raised the matter of debt with Synod before. In the debate on the Doctrine Commission’s Being Human report in February 2004, he had cautioned against the prevailing debt culture, recommending regulatory sanctions against the misselling of debt and a campaign to encourage a return to savings and investment: Savings and investments are important because they provide individuals with freedom to change their lifestyle and relief from anxiety. They are therefore not just financially but psychologically important. Access to credit may seem liberating in the short term, but in the medium and long term people become tied down by the obligation to repay significant amounts. Economic freedom is almost as important


as political freedom, and the ownership of disposable liquid assets in the form of savings and investments can help secure it. So I welcome the inclusion of money in the Doctrine Commission’s report and the contrast that it offers between the opportunities enabled by the great power of money to structure and shape our humanity and the potential slavery of the credit system.38 Fair trade Synod first condemned unjust trading structures in 1986, in debating the BSR report Let Justice Flow. The crab-wise progress of the issue onto the agenda again illustrates the typical process whereby business emerges onto the floor of Synod. Within the period under consideration, the first substantive mention of fair trade occurred in the February 1993 debate on Africa, in the context of discussion of World Bank and IMF ‘free market’ liberalisation policies, whereby countries attempting to diversify for export were doomed to fail in the face of first world tariffs and quotas. Newcastle’s subsequent Diocesan Synod Motion on fairer world trade in November 1995 was the first formal opportunity for debate, which led to a motion to encourage congregations to buy fairly traded products, and to urge the Government both to implement ‘affirmative policies’ for fair trade and to prevent the practice of dumping In an exchange of correspondence following the November 1995 debate, Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and Sir Leon Brittain, Vice President of the European Commission, both said that the GATT/Uruguay Round and the establishment of the WTO would fix the issue. Their responses were circulated to Synod by means of the report Fairer World Trade in February 1996. Apart from passing reference in the context of companion debates on debt, fair trade was next formally debated during July 2001 in the context of international development. Again, Synod urged the Government to take action and to give priority in trade negotiations to the needs of the poorest communities. Meanwhile, the Trade Justice movement had gathered momentum, and a dedicated debate was held on the issue during the July 2004 group of sessions. This debate resulted in a further motion, this time stressing actions that the Church rather than the Government should take, viz, becoming ‘fairly traded’ in the dioceses, joining the Trade Justice movement and lending to it the support of its global networks. This time, rather than being ‘urged’, the Government was instead offered ‘prayerful support’ for any action to reduce global poverty, and MPAC was asked to develop a trade justice ‘advocacy strategy’ to inform the Church’s contribution to public policy debate.39


As an aside, the development of discussion on this issue shows an interesting progression through James Gustafson’s varieties of moral discourse. His first category, prophetic discourse, condemns current failures and exhorts believers to realise a utopian vision, for instance Synod’s call for the Government to put the needs of the poor first in trade negotiations. His second category, narrative discourse, uses stories to sustain traditions, for instance members’ references during speeches to Jesus’ dealings with the poor and with commerce. His third category, policy discourse, is a pragmatic mode seeking to identify possible ways forward in a pluralistic social setting, for instance the ‘advocacy strategy’ commissioned from MPAC. The missing category is that of ethical discourse, which involves rigorous moral argumentation, self-critical reflection and intellectual respect for diverse points of view. In any case, an analysis of relevant papers and speeches brings to the surface a number of unresolved issues. The first is the tension between prosperity at home and abroad, in that only once, during a speech in November 1995, does a Synod member call for the demise of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which benefits European farmers at the expense of those in the developing world.40 This raises the question about who is my neighbour: should need be based on absolute measures of poverty, or be tempered by issues of proximity? Synod considered the definition of poverty in the July 2001 debate on the health of the poor. As background to their Diocesan Synod motion, Oxford produced a paper to brief Synod, which concluded that all of the definitions of poverty in use were problematic in different ways, and that policy-makers would be best advised to turn to the dictionary meaning of poverty: ‘“Poverty” means “the state of being poor”. “Poor” means “lacking the means of subsistence”’. In terms of the proper response to poverty, the report reminded Synod that: The Christian understanding of inter-dependence is that we share responsibility for one another. Whether people lack 100 per cent of the means of subsistence or 10 per cent, in work or out, they are still dependent on other more fortunate and more powerful people to recognise and help them escape from their poverty.41 While the tension in relation to farming subsidies is not resolved, the EIAG’s advice on off-shoring offers an interesting contrast. As a reaction to consumer choice, with consumers increasingly wanting more for less, many companies have outsourced and off-shored ‘back office’ business processes to take advantage of cheaper employment costs abroad. While


the migration of manufacturing jobs to ‘cheaper’ economies is not new, the off-shoring of service sector jobs is an increasing trend, and tends to attract adverse media attention owing to the job losses involved at home. At the behest of the Pensions Board, the EIAG looked into this practice. What resulted was a very positive report extolling the macro-economic virtues of off-shoring, both for the UK and for the host countries, particularly in view of the opportunity it offered developing economies to raise their standards of living. The 2005 report was also bullish about the short-term impact of the resulting unemployment, pointing out that 60 per cent of staff rendered unemployed by off-shoring are re-employed within a year, with wage levels at 95 per cent of the predisplaced average.42 While the poor in any nation with a welfare state will be better off than the poor in nations without, it remains to be seen whether Synod would have the stomach to extend the more global view taken by the EIAG in relation to the service industry into the industries of mining and farming (see below), which are not only dearer to Synod’s heart, but in which the potential for speedy redeployment is not as evident. Another lacuna concerning Synod’s views on world trade is that the moral basis of affirmative action remains unexplored, as the explicit bias to the poor is assumed to be self-evidently good.43 Nor is the patchy track record of those governments in the developing world who have ‘intervened’ in their economies discussed, except with reference to corruption. State support: UK protection of dwindling domestic industries The loud silence on the CAP is perhaps best explained by Synod’s view that the UK government should subsidise dwindling industries. Apart from the general preference of Synod for Government intervention in the economy, two industries are traditionally singled out for particular state support: coal and farming. Building on a long tradition of Church support for mining communities, the paper circulated to Synod in November 1992 about the latest crisis in the coal industry included a letter of 16 October that the Archbishop of York (Dr John Habgood) and five other bishops had sent to The Times, arguing that it was not morally right to put 30,000 workers on the dole. A year later, Synod debated the Lichfield Diocesan Synod Motion about the closures, carrying a motion 191–044 which requested the Government to create a ‘fair market in energy’. In February 2000, farming was the subject of similar calls for more Government intervention, this time sponsored by the Board of Mission, not the Board for Social Responsibility as was coal, which is in itself an


interesting distinction, albeit one that staff claim owed more to pragmatics than strategy. In the debate, the Bishop of Carlisle (Rt Revd Ian Harland) said that he was not asking the Government for privilege but for fairness, and a motion was carried 291–0 asking the Government for a clear long-term strategy for UK land and farmers to make a ‘large contribution’ to the feeding of the nation. In November 2000, the Commissioners were asked to subsidise their tenant farmers by reducing rents, and the Secretary General was asked to confirm that all food in Church House was sourced from British farms. Following a request from Synod, in November 2007, the EIAG published a dedicated report on unfair practices affecting the farming industry, criticising monopoly practices amongst the supermarkets which were accelerating the sector’s decline.45 The common message behind these arguments is that the state, backed up by consumer action, should subsidise certain dwindling industries, in this case coal and farming, and protect them as necessary through regulation. In contrast, during the November 1994 debate on arms transfer policy, the Bishop of Coventry (Rt Revd Simon Barrington-Ward) had called on the Government to develop an early programme to migrate people out of the dwindling arms industry, which was enshrined in a motion carried 287–0. This is of particular interest given that one argument for the retention of a subsidised farming industry is for defence, and suggests that the underlying rationale for subsidy is actually more to do with communities than with industry per se. For example, many of the speeches made talked about the devastating effect the decline in both industries was having on mining and rural communities, both key constituencies for the Church of England, whereas the 5,000 jobs lost at Rover in 2005 and in the financial services industry during the credit crunch did not receive any mention. Even the BBC’s 2005 decision to shed a fifth of its workforce (about 6,000 jobs) was not mentioned, in spite of Synod’s evident fondness for the organisation. While pressure on Synod’s agenda might be blamed, perhaps this gap adds further weight to the hypothesis that Synod is generally biased towards ‘community’ jobs like mining and farming, rather than the issue of jobs in general, in spite of calls for ‘full employment’ in debates on unemployment and the future of work in November 1993 and July 1997, which again argued for Government subsidy. While Industrial Mission, in taking care of the urban constituency, has traditionally aligned itself with the Unions (the ‘workers’ not ‘management’), calls for the protection of jobs in industry in general have been unconcerted, perhaps because fewer communities are now characterised by one main employer. However, what is interesting about this general emphasis on the importance of subsidy is that it reflects the


Church of England’s own situation, having been subsidised by tithing (ecclesiastical taxation) then Queen Anne’s Bounty for many years. The pain of having to get used to a reducing subsidy from the Commissioners during the 1990s had been played out on the floor of Synod and was therefore well understood. State support: the developing world’s protection of nascent industries One of the first members of Synod to talk about the necessary protection of nascent industries in the developing world was the Bishop of Rochester (Rt Revd Michael Nazir-Ali) in the November 1996 debate on Jubilee 2000. He talked about the rioting in Mozambique that had greeted ‘structural adjustment’, when the locals discovered they could no longer afford the price of fuel, and argued for fair trade and tariffs so that the developing world could get beyond subsistence level. This implicit reference was made explicit in a number of the 2001 Development Matters essays, when Ian Linden, John Montagu and Claire Melamed argued for reform of the IMF and the World Bank so that reducing poverty (ends) not freer trade (means) became the primary goal of development, and that the countries of the South should be allowed to enjoy the protections that the North had awarded their industries in their infancy so that they could grow strong economies. This was incorporated into the motion then carried by Synod urging the Government to give the needs of the poorest communities priority in trade negotiations, and to make their health and education a development priority. This was revisited in the July 2004 Trade Justice report, which condemned the hypocrisy of the North in denying the South the very tools they had used to develop and argued that poor countries must be allowed to give special help to their farmers and industries to nurture new productive sectors. Not only was there more evidence in support of government intervention than there was in support of trade liberalisation as an effective strategy of poverty reduction, this would also be fairer. The report also commended fair trade products for their inherent value and because they gave richer consumers an opportunity directly to subsidise industries in the developing countries by encouraging their trading initiative. The first reference to the trade-off between helping one’s own industries and those in developing countries came from John Gummer (St Edmundsbury and Ipswich), the then MP for Suffolk Coastal and the Conservative Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in November 1990, when he remarked that the Church had to learn that more access for foreign


palm oil would have ramifications for the local market in rape seed. This dilemma was echoed by the Bishop of Coventry (Rt Revd Simon Barrington-Ward) in November 1994 when he quoted Bishop Dinis Sengulane from Mozambique, who the previous year had asked the UK, ‘Are the jobs of your workers of greater value than the lives of my people?’46 There is an unresolved tension between the two in the material, but the general argument is consistent: governments should retain the sovereignty to subsidise and protect their own industries regardless of international trade protocols. Given Synod’s emerging discussions about the carbon emissions of developing nations – as discussed in more detail below – this tension is likely to intensify as the incompatibility of Synod’s aims becomes more evident. Sustainable development Prior to the period, Synod had debated environmental issues in 1986, in the context of the BSR report Our Responsibility for the Living Environment (GS 718), and before that as the Church Assembly in 1970. In July 1992, a Lichfield Diocesan Synod Motion was debated, resulting in a motion affirming humanity’s role as steward of the natural order and urging the government to review its policies both nationally and internationally on energy, pollution, population control, and human damage to flora and fauna.47 It was during this 1992 Group of Sessions that John Plender’s famous Financial Times article about the Church Commissioners’ losses broke, and at this stage the effect of climate change on development or the role of globalisation in environmental degradation was not included in the discussion. By 2005, having considered in more depth ethical investment, international debt, fair trade and international development, Synod had a more sophisticated understanding of the connections between globalisation and the world’s carbon footprint. In February, Synod debated the MPAC report Sharing God’s Planet, authored by Claire Foster, the Archbishops’ Council Policy Adviser for Science, Technology, Medicine and Environment. In an introduction, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Rowan Williams) states: The Christian reason for regarding ecology as a matter of justice, then, is that God’s self-sharing love is what animates every object and structure and situation in the world. Responses to the world that are unaware of this are neither truthful nor sustainable. To be aware of this is to enter into relationship, for the self-sharing love of God is not simply something we admire, but something in which


we fully participate. We are not consumers of what God has made; we are in communion with it.48 The report itself emphasised the injustice of the industrialised and industrialising world emitting gases that were particularly affecting preindustrial communities around the world, noting the need for a holistic response that incorporated the social and economic implications. The report explained that this interrelationship between the environment and issues of social and economic justice had given rise to the umbrella term ‘sustainable development’.49 The debate was introduced by the Bishop of London (Rt Revd Dr Richard Chartres), who described the report as ‘most emphatically not one of those reports which is intended to lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul’.50 The Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Rowan Williams) was first to speak. He focused on the vast increase in carbon emissions in prospect as India and China continued to develop their economies, stressing that: ‘issues around ecology, in other words, are inseparably bound with issues of development and economic justice’.51 The debate’s focus on carbon drew a suggestion from Revd Hugh Lee (Oxford) about following the example of the Swedish Government over acid rain in the 1970s, by offering funding to polluting factories, wherever they may be in the world, to render them more efficient.52 While the original motion was amended to call for more action in this area from the Church itself, a move to request the EIAG to ‘strengthen’ their environmental policy and establish specific criteria for divestment was defeated. A clause was however added to urge both consumers and producers to review their carbon footprints.53 A year later, in July 2006, Southwark brought a Diocesan Synod Motion to ask MPAC to issue guidance to church members about reducing their carbon footprint. While the debate focused on individual domestic action, a few speakers urged Synod to lobby for increased government regulation. Only two speakers emphasised that world trade, debt, poverty and environmental issues were inextricably linked, with Dr Elaine Storkey (Ely) urging the Church to earn the right to talk to developing countries about reducing their carbon footprint through leading by example.54 The most recent debate, in July 2008, responded to the security implications of environmental injustice. The accompanying MPAC report quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s spectre of ‘adaptation apartheid’, where the rich nations increasingly retreated into ghettoes as climate change undermined the ‘pillars of prosperity: water security, energy security, food security and climate security’.55 The call to action


reminded Synod of its successful engagement with the Jubilee 2000 Campaign, the Trade Justice Movement and Make Poverty History, all of which would be jeopardised by climate change, and that: ‘climate change requires a policy response not only in the field of the environment but also in areas such as social cohesion, immigration, urbanisation, industrial mission, sustainable development and rural affairs, all of which are driven by the mission imperative to make God’s ways known upon the Earth’.56 Of particular interest in the context of capitalism was a strong recommendation that ‘clean’ technological advances were shared across the international community, suggesting a change in the existing intellectual property rights regimes to take account of the public good of these technologies: To decarbonise the global economy effectively, the world will need OECD countries to come up with the technological innovations that are then manufactured by China. This will lower the cost of compliance in the OECD, as Chinese power equipment is typically 30–60 per cent cheaper to purchase, but such a move would help drive China’s low-carbon transformation. Such a development will require a shift in political positions which go against the current rise in protectionist sentiments in the OECD countries.57 In the debate, a motion was carried, committing the Church to the development of an integrated and holistic response to climate change. If Synod continues to follow fashion, it is likely that in time this debate will be re-Christened ‘environmental justice’.

Meta-themes Looking at these several themes, some meta-themes emerge. Government intervention and regulation loom large, particularly given the assumption of an interventionist economic model and the recourse to law over investments. State ownership and consumer choice are held in tension, particularly regarding the desire to protect consumers from themselves. Views on both of these in turn affect Synod views on private enterprise and foreign trade policy, resulting in tensions about priorities. In the Church’s mission to the poor, Synod favours privileging the developing world’s poor in international trade negotiations to protect the vulnerable from economic shocks and from indebtedness. At the same time, Synod favours the domestic poor at the expense of the developing poor through the encouragement of state subsidy. Each of these meta-themes will be discussed in turn.


Government intervention First, the central role of government in managing the economy. The clearest indicator of this mindset is the formulaic nature of Synod’s motions. Overwhelmingly in debates concerning economics, Synod urges, calls upon, or requests the Government to take some kind of action.58 Beyond the confines of Synod, this mindset was justified by the Bishop of Worcester (Rt Revd Peter Selby) in the House of Lords, during an October 2005 debate on consumer credit: If one allows the market to rule, there will be those whose weakness in the market and in their general financial circumstances makes them likely to enter into relationships that are unfair and which it is not in the public interest that they should enter into. It is certainly not in the public interest that we should provide courts and legislative machinery for the recovery of debts from people who have been the victims of very unfair interest rates. It seems to me that the situation is analogous to world trade. It is possible for a market to produce situations that are unfair, and if they are unfair, it is proper for society to intervene, whether nationally or internationally, to rectify that unfairness. In that respect, I do not believe that the market should be sacrosanct.59 While the pro-intervention mindset is reasonably clear, the efficacy of Synod’s repeated attempts to influence Government is not. While Synod folklore holds up the Faith in the City and Jubilee 2000 initiatives as examples of its influence on Government, the reality is harder to gauge, as in the case of the Commissioners’ actual leverage with the companies in which they invest. The procedure following a motion in which Synod has ‘exhorted’ the Government in some way is for the Secretary General to write to the relevant minister, and copies of his letters together with any response are circulated with the subsequent batch of Synod papers. These letters serve to demonstrate civil service niceties at their best, but do not betray any influence that may or may not have been achieved.60 What may be more telling is the November 1998 appearance of Rt Hon Clare Short, MP, then Secretary of State for International Development, to address Synod to win Church support for the Government’s 1997 White Paper on tackling international debt and eliminating poverty. That she chose to appeal to Synod for the Church’s support indicates an implicit level of influence. In a move to improve the Church’s ability to influence government, in September 2008, the Archbishops’ Council, the Church Commissioners and Lambeth Palace created a joint Parliamentary Unit, bringing together parliamentary liaison, policy


follow-up, and support for the Lords Spiritual and the 2nd Church Estates Commissioner. As will be explored in Chapter 4, the efficacy of an interventionist stance is a moot point, but that the Church supports Government intervention per se is less surprising in a UK context than it might be elsewhere. Given the established nature of the Church of England, the Church is well placed to influence Government directly, because it is part of it.61 As well as Synod’s ability to legislate (a power set out in the 1919 Enabling Act) and the Archbishops’ titular power as first and third peers of England, the Church also provides 26 Lords Spiritual to the House of Lords. Led by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Bishops of Durham, London and Winchester, the remaining Lords Spiritual accede to the second chamber in order of seniority of consecration.62 The Lords Spiritual are traditionally non-partisan, although David Sheppard took the Labour whip when, after his retirement as Bishop of Liverpool, he was made a life peer in 1998. Nevertheless, they can debate and vote on legislation and thus shape the government of the UK, so a Synod request for the Government to intervene is also in effect a request for the Lords Spiritual to exercise their influence through the parliamentary process, notwithstanding their personal willingness to do so and/or patchy participation. One example of this influence has already been cited, when the Chair of BSR, the Bishop of Oxford (Rt Revd Richard Harries), introduced into the House of Lords on 9 July 1997 a debate on Jubilee 2000. Another example was the debate in March 2007 on the order to license the super-casino in Manchester. It was defeated in the Lords by 143 votes to 140, there happening to be three bishops on the bench and voting that day. It was subsequently withdrawn by the Government. The Lords Spiritual have also been active on the environmental agenda, bringing amendments to the government’s Climate Change Bill, including one requiring companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions and another ensuring that the proposed Climate Change Committee formally considers how climate change affects the world’s poor when setting budgets and emissions levels. It should be noted that the Bishops speak and vote in the House of Lords in their own right and not as delegates.63 Regulation In general, Synod appears not to trust business to behave well without assistance from a benign government. This assumption that Government is generally benign may reflect Synod’s comfort with democracy, parti-


cularly where it has a role for an Established Church. Whether this or some theological rationale is behind the belief, the fundamental construct is nowhere explicitly addressed. But, wherever questionable behaviour is uncovered – whether it be treatment of staff, strategy or pricing policy – Synod has tended to vote for additional government controls through regulation. Synod is also distrustful of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, carrying several motions designed to force this hand to bring about good where it is perceived to be misdirected. Perhaps because Synod is itself a law-making body, it seems keen to use its own tools when recommending solutions. It may therefore be unsurprising to see formal contract chosen over informal covenant in areas as diverse as the membership of the Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council, the sale of breast-milk substitutes in developing countries, Sunday trading, taxation, arms transfer and anti-personnel mines, investment, world trade, debt, employment, advertising, and food labelling.64 Given that the Synod mechanism follows the Parliamentary one, working severally with delegated powers or corporately through the carrying of motions, this propensity is culturally predictable. While it should be noted that Synod staff see this preference for law more as a knee-jerk response when ‘something must be done’, it is nonetheless a clear one, and noteworthy in a Church whose inspiration is a man who was famously critical of an overreliance on law. State ownership In general, Synod assumes that key assets will be state owned or state controlled – notably in the health, education and broadcasting sectors. Believing that other sectors like farming, coal and green technologies should be subsidised creates a similar effect by setting prices. Thus, the State can guarantee a basket of basic goods and services – and thus welfare – for all of its citizens, financed through progressive taxation. Where Synod does acknowledge the role of private ownership, the acknowledgement tends to be qualified. One example of this occurs in the context of discussions about ‘contracting-out’, where parts of public service operations are let commercially. Notwithstanding the particular point of principle at stake, the June 1996 BSR report on private sector involvement in prisons noted that the majority of those consulted (academics, politicians, lawyers, professional bodies, voluntary organisations, Church leaders and Church bodies) had expressed concern about contractingout, holding the view that the carrying out of judicial punishment


should remain the responsibility of the State and that it was morally unjustifiable for people to make a profit from punishment: The free market approach which informs the drive towards privatisation assumes that all areas of activity can be understood in terms of the satisfaction of individual needs through the provision of goods and services. It has an in-built tendency to translate everything into commodities that can be bought or sold, and is not equipped to deal with social processes involving symbolic and normative transactions not easily reducible to objective ‘pay-offs’ or calculated maximising behaviour. Punishment is such a process.65 This reluctance was off-set by the inclusion in an Appendix of an excerpt from the submission to BSR from HM Prison Service Chaplaincy, which painted a more positive picture: In conclusion, we would reiterate that however much chaplains may personally deplore the fact that the custody of prisoners is no longer reserved to Crown Service, the challenge to existing practices and the setting of high standards of care and regime have been universally welcomed within the chaplaincy. It is observed with great satisfaction that the prospect of market-testing being applied to any of the prisons presently in the public sector is causing each prison management to look at its standards of care, staff working-practices, and quality of regime in a more critical way than has been the case heretofore.66 A more wholeheartedly positive attitude towards private ownership was also included by way of an amendment introduced by Gavin Oldham (Oxford) in the July 1997 debate on unemployment and the future of work, which ‘encouraged entrepreneurs at all levels of scale to engage in new business activity, recognising the benefits that such risk-taking can bestow on fuller employment’.67 However, in his reply to the debate, the Bishop of Liverpool (Rt Revd David Sheppard) said that ‘as a Christian’ he disagreed with the school of economics that favoured the idea of having a free market in every area of life, and the negative tenor of remarks about ‘big business’ throughout show Synod’s deep ambivalence towards private ownership, except where it is state regulated and focused on job-creation. A general discomfort with discussing private property emerged in the February 2009 debate on the financial crisis, where an amendment that would have talked about


personal ownership was defeated. While the context is personal not corporate title, several speeches preferred the Christian term ‘stewardship’ to ‘ownership’, making repeated references to God’s fundamental ownership of all that is. This could explain the general preference for ‘public’ ownership and, in Raymond Plant’s terms, provide a theological rationale for discomfort with markets in general, because ‘market exchange is essentially an exchange of property rights’.68 Consumer choice Synod does not explicitly discuss free will as a defining gift from God, but in practice tempers it both by Synod’s leaning towards regulation and by its general preference for the public ownership of key assets. A person’s ability to choose ‘badly’ is therefore restricted where possible by the intervention of the State.69 This encouragement for the State to go beyond narrow legal confines and take wider responsibility appears to be the thinking behind the general tendency towards regulation. It appears to lie behind support for the ban on tobacco advertising and the ban on the advertising of breast-milk substitutes in the third world. It may also lie behind the consternation over media standards and executive pay; as well as support for State provision of health, welfare and education – and full employment. Divestment from companies in ‘sinful’ industries, as well as continuing dialogue with those on the edge, sharpened by the announcement of consumer boycotts if necessary, further signals a wish to remove where possible the opportunity for error, notwithstanding the complexities of the modern business world.70 Synod also supports the nudging of choice towards desirable products and services through the use of subsidies for UK farming and energy, in order to guarantee these markets. While a free market economy would remove failing, uncompetitive or out-dated industries, this creates (temporary) unemployment, so where possible Synod favours the propping-up of key senescent industries in the interests of employment and, where appropriate, national security.71 Synod also favours government initiatives to retire or retrain workers in affected industries, but this preference is couched in a context of proactive personal choice rather than as a fait accompli forced upon workers by the machinations of the market.72 Private enterprise Synod appears to have an instrumental view of private enterprise, commending it largely because of the jobs it provides, rather than as a creative activity in its own right.73 In debates about ethical investment,


international debt and trade, large corporations tend to be frowned upon for their greed and moral callousness, and are largely perceived to have received their comeuppance in discussions about the financial crisis at the end of the period. Indeed, an amendment brought by the Archdeacon of Coventry (Ven. Mark Bryant) to extend formal support to the anti-capitalist protesters travelling to the G8 meeting in Genoa was defeated in July 2001 seemingly because the Bishop of Selby (Rt Revd Humphrey Taylor) and the Revd Dr Paul Roberts (Bristol) cautioned against a motion that could appear to include all protesters, including those prone to violence, rather than because the support for the protesters was not there. However, it cannot be inferred from this that Synod is anti-business, rather that it is more comfortable with public enterprise, and would prefer private companies to be more paternalistic.74 This culture is exemplified by two comments made during one of the Nestlé debates. First, Canon John Young said that ‘for what it is worth, I am left wing in politics and not a natural ally of a multinational corporation’. Later in the same debate, Revd Christopher Hall (Oxford) noted that ‘Nestlé is in business to make profits. That is their business. Our business is to reflect the bias of God towards the poor’.75 Both of these positions represent the tenor of general debate concerning private enterprise, as does the apologetic tone of the few speeches made that are explicitly probusiness, such as the one made by Canon Dr Brian Chalmers (Canterbury) in the July 2001 debate on development: Again, I hesitate to stand up and speak. I hesitate to speak on behalf of big business. In the folklore of our current debate big business, I suppose, is a bit like the troll from the Bible study this morning. Big business is seen as the troll which guards the bridge and the main purpose is to stop people crossing to the promised land. I want to suggest that big business, like the troll, is really God in disguise. It is a troll which needs to be wrestled with.76 Those who do risk being positive about free market economics are liable to be criticised, which was evident in the July 1997 unemployment debate, during which Gavin Oldham (Oxford) reported how he had had his ‘wrist slapped’ for seeking to interpret the parable of the talents in terms of business enterprise. In the same debate, Philip Lovegrove (St Albans) was criticised when he challenged the report’s bias towards government intervention. In reply, the Bishop of Liverpool (Rt Revd David Sheppard) upbraided him for his negative attitude towards govern-


ment intervention, saying: ‘I need to take Philip Lovegrove seriously… I must take him seriously because, behind the fun, there is a deadly dose of fatalism which does not tell us what we should do about this huge human issue. It [the report] has been tested with many economists.’77 In the November 1993 debate on unemployment, Canon Paul Brett (Chelmsford) had been more vociferous, quoting from a lecture given by Dorothy Sayers in 1940: ‘Nothing has so deeply discredited the Christian Church as her squalid submission to the economic theory of society’. He went on to complain that he had written to all the main political parties and to 20 business schools and departments in the UK to ask about the future of work, only to find that ‘they had little to suggest other than the market system and the development of new products’, which led him to conclude that ‘no-one there has any serious idea about what to do about unemployment that would, in any serious way, solve the problem’.78 This general reluctance to consider any potential that might be offered by private enterprise was formally recognised by Ruth McCurry in God in the City (1995) who said that, with hindsight, when she was working on Faith in the City she should have taken more seriously the writings of the New Right: I do not myself buy the New Right’s answers, but I agree that we should examine their questions seriously and that the Commission did not do so. There were in fact people involved in the Commission who knew very well what Novak and others were saying. But at that time it was difficult to believe that a serious government would actually act on what they were saying. What we have to learn, ten years on from Faith in the City, is that we do now have to take them seriously and answer them point by point; and even more important, find a vision which can combine a spur to responsibility with a curbing of capitalist excesses which trap people into bad situations for the profit of a few, and a welfare system which rescues those for whom things have gone wrong.79 A decade after the publication of this book, Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI) published Prosperity with a Purpose – Christians and the Ethics of Affluence, which addresses this gap. Originally scheduled for debate in February 2006, pressure of business meant that the report was not ultimately debated. However, the launch of the report, drafted for CTBI by Clifford Longley and accompanied by a collection of essays, was timed to coincide with the run-up to the UK General Election in 2005


and to contribute to public debate. The group behind it – which included BSR’s then Secretary David Skidmore as Project Moderator – had been commissioned by CTBI’s Church Representatives Meeting in November 2001 and asked ‘to take seriously the context of globalization, the persistence of terrible worldwide poverty, and the impact that our new riches have on the environment’. The report concluded that, ‘in a framework of social justice, wealth creation is no longer the pursuit of Mammon, a rival to the true God, but a service to humanity and way out of poverty into true prospering’. Further, that: A purely negative appraisal of economic activity is unacceptable and an injustice to those engaged in it. Economic activity is instead something to celebrate. When it raises the standard of living of the population while relieving the lot of the poor, it is part of God’s will for humanity. There is a need to redress a perceived imbalance in the way Christians have regarded the creation of wealth by economic activity. They should recognise that it is one of the chief engines of progress and greater well-being in the modern age, both directly and indirectly; and thank God for it.80 While the tone of the report is generally more bullish and positive in its attitude towards private enterprise than Synod or hindsight might like, Synod might still recognise and applaud its central theology, where the rich are taxed more and the poor less, to finance a large public sector through which the government intervenes in the market to ensure social justice. Foreign trade policy With its traditional ‘bias to the poor’, Synod has always taken a firm line about the UK’s obligation to assist poorer nations through an aid budget that meets the UN’s recommended 0.7 per cent of GNP, as in the motion to this effect carried in the February 1993 debate on Africa. Through its championing of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, Synod has also expressed a preference for aid money to be offered to a country as a donation, not a loan. Its move from aid to trade as a route out of poverty has been gradual, culminating in the development and trade justice debates in July 2001 and 2004. This mood was captured by the Bishop of Southwark (Rt Revd Tom Butler) in opening the 2004 debate: ‘It is becoming clear that aid alone will not bring people out of the poverty that is endemic in some parts of the world. Aid may be a temporary safety net and debt cancellation a necessary condition, but


trade is the vehicle by which lives can be improved, provided that that trade is fair and equitable.’81 The trade justice campaign focuses on the inequality or double standards in the global market, whereby the developed world imposes its economic model on the developing world, whilst reserving for itself protections that destroy the developing world’s ability to compete. While Synod has condemned in strong terms the IMF’s traditional one-size-fits-all approach, and urged flexibility in recognising developing countries’ right to self-determination in economic policy, the tension between developed and developing world trade practices – for instance the CAP – is not explicitly addressed, except in condemning tariffs and trade barriers in general terms. This suggests that Synod at present favours a foreign trade policy that privileges the needs of the developing world’s poor except where doing so would destroy UK jobs, particularly in farming and mining.82 Again, growing awareness about climate change may affect this stance. In the 1980s, much of Synod’s energy on trade policy had concerned the boycott of apartheid South Africa. In the period under discussion, apart from trade and poverty, debate about foreign trade policy was largely confined to the issue of the selling of armaments to foreign countries. In November 1994, Synod carried a motion, inter alia, calling on the Government ‘to reassess policy and practice in order to ensure that Britain’s arms transfer policy is ethically responsible, transparent, publicly accountable and consistent’.83 As well as the specific debate on arms transfer policy, the three Church of England investment bodies have a 25 per cent cut-off point for investment in non-offensive equipment manufacturers, with a ban on investment in defence platform manufacturers and weapons and weapons systems manufacturers. This tightening up of the ethical investment policy was announced to Synod in July 2001, when Canon Hugh Wilcox explained the EIAG’s thinking thus: We need to have confidence that these are not sold to countries with poor human rights records and especially where they may be used repressively. Regulation is important here, but with no system of end-use monitoring in place, and doubts over some recent armsexporting decisions, we lacked confidence that this was sufficiently rigorous at present.84

Conclusion This analysis can be used to construct an impressionistic picture of Synod’s ideal economic world. First, it is a world in which the government


manages the economy, which can be controlled through strategic interventions.85 There is a comprehensive welfare state,86 a national health service,87 and a state school system which includes religious schools.88 Key ‘community’ industries such as farming and coal are subsidised, as are companies developing green energy sources.89 A large proportion of the broadcast media is subsidised, as well as being regulated for ‘standards’ and required to include religious programming.90 While there is a private sector, this is heavily regulated by the Government in the public interest, for instance over advertising and employment standards, carbon emissions and ‘clean’ technology intellectual property rights.91 Companies offering ‘immoral’ services such as gambling are restricted, regulated and heavily taxed.92 However, companies rarely close: the goal is full employment,93 and dwindling industries are subsidised until natural wastage and changing patterns of employment – facilitated by statefunded training and support – make their demise painless.94 Consumers in general have free choice, except where services are publicly owned and run, but credit levels and commercial interest rates are regulated so that consumers do not spend more than they can afford.95 They are also encouraged by subsidies to ‘buy British’ to protect key domestic industries.96 Private sector enterprise is encouraged, largely because of the jobs it provides.97 The Government recognises a strong third sector, particularly the role of faith-based charities, working in local partnerships with them to ensure no-one slips through the net.98 The government also provides large development grants to developing nations, sharing technology and know-how with them, and eschews international debt, preferring instead to leverage the voluntary sector and faith communities to ensure that aid is well spent.99 The right of developing countries to develop and protect their own economies is guaranteed,100 although some international trade barriers relating to farming and energy remain if only implicitly through domestic subsidy.101 Diplomatically, a delicate balance is maintained over the carbon emissions of the developing world, with first world patents and technologies increasingly being offered in exchange for compromises.102 Politically, this economic view would traditionally be described as leftwing. While the 1985 Faith in the City report had been famously dismissed by Margaret Thatcher’s Government as ‘Marxist’ (a remark which, according to The Times 1 December 1985 was made in a Cabinet Meeting by Norman Tebbit), there is some accompanying suggestion that the Church’s views in the period under discussion did in fact favour the traditional left. Apart from the odd unchallenged corroborative remark,103 this diagnosis resonates with Clive Field’s 2007 research paper on voting


patterns, which drew on 22 different surveys conducted between the years 1979 and 2004. From the data, Field concludes that, by the period under discussion, Church of England clergy had become more left-wing. While in 1982 only 9 per cent of clergy polled said that they would vote Labour, this rose from 13 per cent to 17 per cent during 1985, remaining at 17 per cent in 1987. By 1995, this figure was 60 per cent, with 16 per cent declaring support for the Liberal Democrats and just 6 per cent for the Conservatives. Medhurst and Moyser provide affiliation statistics for the laity for 1979 and 1981, showing that at that time over half of the laity supported the Conservative party. For the period under discussion Field argues that the laity became less Conservative in that they became less reluctant to endorse political activism between 1984 (74 per cent of laity against and 54 per cent of clergy in favour of the Church taking political sides) and 1996 (59 per cent of laity against compared with 74 per cent of clergy in favour). This compares to ICM poll data for the UK general population which showed support for Labour oscillating between 35 per cent and 50 per cent in the same period. However, Medhurst and Moyser would argue that these shifts owe more to a centrist tendency than to party-political affiliation, with the Church of England following Labour to the centre largely in reaction to the accented Conservatism of the Thatcher administration.104 Politics notwithstanding, Synod was not alone in not foreseeing the global financial crisis, and the perspective of hindsight can be a distorting one. However, while the rest of the country seemingly moved towards a greater accommodation with capitalism during the period being considered, it is clear that for Synod the jury was permanently out, albeit not for clearly articulated theological reasons. There may be a number of reasons for this. Medhurst and Moyser’s analysis of Synod from 1975 to 1988 – the period directly before this one – suggests that it is matters of personal morality that tend to attract Synod’s ‘theological’ attention, while those of a public or corporate kind instead attract their ‘secular political’ attention. They argue that divisions over economic questions have tended to reflect party political divisions within Synod, not theological ones, and that such matters have been judged by largely secular criteria with little attendant theology.105 Another explanation is that Synod’s favoured middle axiom approach militates against the retrieval of a comprehensive Synod theology of capitalism, given that theological motifs tend to be pragmatically adduced to address specific policy issues on a case-by-case basis. However, the lack of discussion in this chapter about Synod’s theology should be taken as a reflection of the absence of its formal expression rather than its


absence in toto; discussion of Synod’s implicit theology will be taken up towards the end of the investigation. Because of Government intervention in response to the credit crunch, Synod’s ‘ideal’ economy may be closer in prospect now. Henry Clark has argued that the post-WWII consensus was driven by a positive experience of government control during the war having resulted in victory, particularly as capitalism had also been discredited by the Great Depression.106 It is ironic that successful state intervention to ameliorate the current financial crisis might have paved the way for a renewed consensus, were the state not to have lost its ability to finance any further renationalisation projects without punitive and politically damaging levels of taxation. This is of course compounded by the political cycle which suggests a likely swing to the right in the 2010 UK election, but the lack of serious analysis of the underlying issues leaves Synod fumbling for the intellectual resources with which to seize the advantage in contributing to a new economic model and to the public policy debate. Some of those resources are already available, and it is to these we now turn.

2 Church of England Commentators

Introduction This chapter builds on the preceding survey of the General Synod contribution by examining those themes and motifs concerning capitalism favoured by key Anglican commentators during the period. Certain figures have published material which is indirectly relevant to the theme (for instance Hugh Montefiore on contemporary culture), but this survey is restricted to those commentators who deal specifically with capitalism and whose contributions fall within the period specified. One major commentator is therefore excluded by the dates, but his influence extends over the sources considered. Brian Griffiths, now Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach and Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs, wrote two key books in this area, Morality and the Marketplace (1982) and The Creation of Wealth (1984), and has reprised his thinking in a number of more recent contributions to edited collections of essays. Having been a Professor of Economics, Griffiths served as the Head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1985 to 1990, and furnished her with a biblically-based moral case for her economic reforms. He is widely credited as being a key architect of the brand of Thatcherism criticised in Faith in the City and by bishops such as David Sheppard and David Jenkins. His books are therefore referenced as appropriate. A review of the qualifying literature suggests that contributions may be grouped together under the categories of methodological comment, technical comment and theological comment. After an introduction to the key contributions of the dramatis personae, each of these themes will be examined in turn. 41


Academic theologians RH Preston (1913–2001) While many of his writings pre-date the period under scrutiny, Ronald H Preston stands out as a major influence on the Church of England’s treatment of capitalism in the period. As a former pupil of Tawney at LSE and an Anglican theologian, Preston is deemed to be an unusually well-qualified commentator, and has been described as the ‘doyen’ of Christian social ethics in Britain. He was also a long-standing consultant for the WCC on social ethics, and has an interesting pedagogical pedigree, stretching back a century to FD Maurice who is widely held to be the forefather of Christian Socialism. Preston’s pupil John Atherton has it that Maurice taught BF Westcott, a towering Anglican figure who himself at Harrow taught another famous Christian Socialist, Bishop Charles Gore. Gore in turn at Balliol taught the schoolfriends William Temple and RH Tawney, who taught Preston, who has continued this line at Manchester in teaching Atherton. Atherton in turn studied Tawney’s papers at LSE for his PhD, and went on to supervise Malcolm Brown’s PhD which was later published as After The Market.1 Preston’s involvement with Synod’s BSR informed their treatment of social issues, including those relating to the economy, and his books are used as a starting point by most of the other sources to be examined in this study. In all five of his books, Preston argues that in economic terms the electorate’s demands for ‘full employment, stable price levels and free collective bargaining’ are mutually exclusive, requiring the intervention of the state to determine the best ‘mix’ from time to time.2 One key role of the state is therefore to attend to the demands of ‘distributive and commutative justice’, which should not be left to the vagaries of the market because ‘the pure theory of laisser-faire is indeed an un-Christian view of human relations, because it treats persons as things’.3 Indeed, like many other commentators, his view is that the market takes for granted a moral sub-structure which it tends to undermine. At the same time, the economist in Preston identifies the technical flaws of an overly-planned economy, and moves the debate away from habitual practice of dialectic established by Hegel and Marx towards a more nuanced discussion of the middle ground. The guidance he offers for locating this middle ground is that ‘there must be as much competition as possible (to achieve efficiency in the economic sense), and as much control and planning as necessary (to avoid abuses and remedy deficiencies) in the market system’.4

Church of England Commentators 43

While Preston’s views remain largely consistent throughout his writings, they develop a slightly less economically interventionist flavour over time. He appears to be goaded by what he regards as the churches’ obtuseness over matters economic – and perhaps by the general cultural drift towards the right – into being increasingly a defender of markets. For example, in 1987 he is still attached to the notion of full employment and suggests a ‘middle axiom’ that every adult citizen be paid a basic social wage independent of work.5 By 1991 he is instead assuming an unemployment level of 3–4 per cent and discussing the challenge for politics in dealing with this reality. In 1994 he is particularly critical of the WCC’s waspish approach to the market, citing Vancouver 1983 (the market is the product of ‘satanic forces’) and Canberra 1991 (‘the most invidious false spirit today is the power of the market’). His embarrassment at the general lack of economic literacy in the churches is characterised by his repeated quoting of RH Tawney’s famous statement that ‘the social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think’.6 Theologically, while Preston tends to spend more time talking about economics in his books than theology, he frequently returns to a few favoured motifs. In general, he deplores what he sees as widespread abuse of the Bible in this sphere, which must be taken seriously but not woodenly: ‘it is for the regular nourishment of the spirit (like holy communion), and is not a source of detailed rules of conduct’.7 As part of his critique of the New Right and his defence of the middle axiom methodology, he is careful to stress the need to avoid over-emphasis on the Bible to the neglect of tradition and reason, where tradition would include doctrine and ethics, and reason due recourse to empirical data.8 Another motif is his view about the Kingdom and its hijacking by Christian Marxists. Preston attacks this as ‘mistaken utopianism’, in view of New Testament criticism having shown ‘conclusively’ that the Kingdom ‘is not a future social order, but a radical present and future eschatological presence which challenges any social order as it transcends any’. He regards this as a significant step forward, as it should stop Christians hankering after some future event or society rather than engaging fully with the present.9 A third motif, which appears in three of his books, is the Reformation notion of the Orders of Creation, later rebranded by Bonhoeffer as the Mandates and by Barth as the Provinces. The Orders are ‘a way of understanding theologically the fact that certain basic structures of life are not chosen by man but are found to go with the mystery of human life itself’. There are four of them: marriage and the family, the economic order, the political order,


and the community of culture.10 Preston is influenced by the fact that these Orders affect humans before they are able to notice or make choices, and for him they act as evidence for the incoherence of the argument often made by proponents of a free-market economy, that suggests the need to focus primarily on the changing of individuals rather than structures. While the Orders usefully serve as a reminder about dependency, Preston argues that their decisive influence demands the concurrent reformation of both structures and individuals.11 He contrasts this with the New Right’s view, which stresses personal responsibility and abhors dependency. While Preston is impatient with the New Right’s overemphasis on Original Sin, the ‘radical challenge’ it offers colours his commitment to middle axioms and political engagement. His use of the Orders of Creation is thus a counterweight to individualism, which is in his view theologically unacceptable. This is because it turns the Christian gospel on its head in suggesting that one must first earn merit (meet an obligation) before being accepted (have an entitlement), whereas the Christian faith holds that God’s graciousness is ‘not rare, and to be earned by effort, but constant, overflowing and free’.12 In this, he locates the strength of the welfare state, in not discriminating between deserving and undeserving citizens. While his argumentation from theology to policy is not entirely clear, in summary he champions four Christian criteria for the economic system: a concern for the poor and unprivileged; a conviction that the basic equality of all men in the sight of God, and the belief that Christ died for all, is more fundamental than the things in which they are unequal; a Christian anthropology that promotes the dignity of participation whilst recognising the need for protections against abuses of power; and a Christian doctrine of the state that balances its negative role of restraining disorder with its positive role of creating and encouraging conducive social institutions, structures and conventions.13 Methodologically, Preston is most famously associated with Middle Axioms. He considers the phrase a ‘wretched term’,14 but it will be used here as the term most associated with the process he has championed in his writings and through his engagement with BSR. He describes a middle axiom as ‘half-way between a general principle and a detailed policy. It derives both from a general insight drawn from Christian faith, and from an empirical diagnosis of the present trends with respect to work, leading to a recommendation as to the direction in which it is desirable for social policy to go’. For Preston, the cogency of middle axioms depends on the quality of work put into arriving at them: ‘Was relevant experience drawn on? Was necessary expertise sought? Was it appraised


(especially as experts usually differ)? Church endorsement cannot long give an imprimatur to shoddy work.’15 Middle axioms produced through a diligent empirical reading of the signs of the times have, for Preston, several important advantages: They guard against Christian archaism. Churches have often been slow to realise the social changes going on around them, and to live in an imaginary present; instead they are induced to look at the actual present. They compel theologians to work with others, for theologians as such have no access to contemporary evidence. They lend themselves to ecumenical work, though they do not require it. They also lend themselves to working with those of other faiths and philosophies, though again they do not require it. They give the churches something of substance to contribute to public discussion. They can alert society to issues where it is blind or bland. And they guard against the tendency too easily to support the status quo, which has been so characteristic in church history.16 While the middle axiom approach is a particular feature of much Anglican social thought, it is particularly embedded as a house style for BSR reports. Indeed, when the American Henry Clark undertook a detailed study of the Church of England during the Thatcher years, he noted that, since Temple, ‘most subsequent Anglican writers have accepted what they evidently regard as the wholesome discipline of middle axioms’, and Preston is most famously associated with this approach. While all of the BSR reports here reviewed followed the middle axiom pattern, Faith in the City is regarded as a particularly fine example of the flowering of this tradition, with Preston’s pupil John Atherton serving on the Commission that produced it. John Atherton (1939– ) Based in Manchester, Atherton remains an honorary lecturer at the University, and was until 2004 Canon Theologian at the Cathedral. Taught in Manchester by Preston, he has for many years been associated with the William Temple Foundation, where he was a contemporary of David Jenkins in the 1970s. Atherton served as a ‘resource’ for the Archbishops’ Commission on Urban Priority Areas – the Commission that produced Faith in the City – and, along with Preston, Sedgwick and Britton, served on BSR’s Industrial Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His written contribution to this debate evolves through five of his books, written over two decades between 1988 and


2008. The chapter and commentary he wrote in the book he edited with Hannah Skinner in 2007 have also been consulted. Over time, his approach evolves from general agreement with Preston towards an exposition of his own model for the terrain, via an articulation of the ‘challenges’ of capitalism that need to be addressed through theological ‘fragments’. His 1988 publication sets the scene for his later work, arguing that Christians will naturally tend to occupy the middle ground economically. This is because ‘the Christian understanding of the human operates within the recognition of the importance of both the person as individual and people in community. That is why the individualism of laissez-faire and the collectivism of state socialism are rejected by Christian belief’.17 His 1992 book opens with a section contrasting the years 1989 and 1848, providing a useful longitudinal view of Christian social thought over the intervening period. In passing, one elegant observation he makes is that the Berlin Wall brought down with it the term ‘Second World’, leaving no linguistic intermediary between the First and Third Worlds. He then follows in Preston’s footsteps by criticising both the Christian Left and the Christian Right for their economic illiteracy: the former ignores the reality of the market system, while the latter is led by a conservative theology rather than a firm grasp of the contemporary context. Indeed, he regards much traditional Christian social thought in this sphere as having become anachronistic in the face of modern manifestations of the market economy.18 Laying the ground for the ‘continuum’ model he eventually creates, he divides the traditional Church response to capitalism into three, the conservative, the radical, and the liberal, and concludes that none of them is sufficient. Given the complexity of the modern context, the conservative response is too trusting, the radical is too utopian, and the liberal is too corporatist. Having set out with the intention to evolve an improved liberal approach, he concludes that all three responses have strengths in what they teach. From the conservative response he takes the importance of the market and economics for life in the contemporary context; from the radical, the importance of the great contemporary challenges to the market economy; and from the liberal, the possibility of balanced judgements and reform. He concludes that, because none of these responses recognise the relative autonomy of both the market and the challenges to it, what is required is detached concern: ‘a listening to, while distancing from, all three’.19 He then introduces his notion of ‘challenges’. In general, Atherton notes the tendency both within economics and theology for com-


mentators to get distracted by discussions as to what is ‘fact’ and must therefore be ‘accepted’, and what is mutable or subjective and thus susceptible to moral commentary. His view is that the market is a human construct like language, not a natural phenomenon like the law of gravity, and notes that the reality of the market is very different from the theoretical models most often discussed in the literature on either side. He therefore prefers to talk instead of the ‘problems and systems’ appropriate for dealing with market economies, and suggests that the use of a combination of models ‘leads to understandings of economic problems and systems that are provisional because of questions about scientific method and theories, and yet purposeful because of the weight of evidence suggesting that such understandings are less inaccurate than any others’.20 Atherton’s view is that the best way for Christians and the Church to engage with the market economy is to eschew the simplistic dialectics composed for a less complex world. In accepting the market as an empirical reality he favours engagement with it primarily through the ‘challenges’ of poverty, the environment, democracy, and international relations. These challenges effectively shape the market as it evolves to address them over time, and thus for him represent the best opportunity for Christian influence. This requires a perpetual conversation between the dynamic symbiosis of market and challenges, with a suspension of the tradition’s tendency to assert the primacy of either religion or economics over the other, so that they might instead meet on an equal footing. Such an approach ‘recognises the legitimate contribution of economics to the formation of Christian social thought, just as it acknowledges the contribution of Scripture and Christian tradition’.21 Atherton introduces his notion of theological ‘fragments’ in his third major work, Public Theology for Changing Times. Where his previous books analysed the arguments of others and tended towards technical rather than theological conclusions, this book starts with some theological scene-setting, in which he argues that the context of globalisation requires a public theology which is ‘both capacious and plural’ and concerned with praxis ‘about tangible practical consequences of that theological voice’. Central to this theology is the triune God, the Trinity for Atherton representing relationship in dialogue. He extends this theological motif or ‘fragment’ (after Forrester) to commend capacious dialogue that is about partnership and reconciliation – and reciprocity and justice – and which extends ecumenically as well as to those of other faiths and none.22 Citing Ian Markham, he notes that for believers dialogue is not an optional extra but a religious


imperative: ‘Our sinfulness and finitude inevitably means our insights are partial at best, and thereby require complementing and correcting by the insights of others.’23 By fragments, Atherton means those traces or partial accounts of past or present that are part of the ‘chorus of voices’, or narrative form within a meta-narrative that, with the fragments of alternative meta-narratives, together help to make sense of the world. Apart from the Trinity, other fragments he employs to shed light on the ‘challenges’ include stewardship (oikonomia), the Orders of Creation, and Christian insights into – and practices of – partnership and reconciliation.24 Taking these in turn, for oikonomia he draws on the Orthodox understanding of incarnation and God’s self-emptying through Christ’s life and death, which suggests for him the key concept of self-limitation in the modern world. As well as oikonomia as household, he is interested in it as ecumenism and ‘the whole inhabited world’, giving the motif an ecumenical and global application. He then follows Preston in his use of the Orders of Creation, but includes ‘marginalization’ as an additional order, on the grounds that in the modern world people are born into marginalisation as a new and formative reality, which shapes them as surely as the traditional Orders. For Atherton, if Butskellism ushered in the heyday of civil society through its formalisation of the welfare state as part of the machinery of government, ‘Blatcherism’ since 1979 has weakened this social permafrost through market liberalisation, so that individuals from birth onwards now experience marginalisation rather than social cohesion. These First World experiences of marginalisation are exacerbated through the consciousness of the increasing marginalisation between the First and Third Worlds, which Atherton regards as a ticking bomb.25 In the context of a discussion on secular and theological ages, Atherton characterises the current age – perhaps optimistically – as the age of ‘partnership and reconciliation’ in the face of consumerism, individualism, globalisation and complexity. Lacking a unifying grand narrative, this current age demands partnership-working to produce pragmatic frameworks to address global issues. He therefore notes the need for secular and religious voices to be heard together from within their own traditions, and the sacramental nature of reconciliation in and of itself. This theme of reconciliation through partnerships introduces a final fragment, which celebrates Christian insight into these contemporary challenges by arriving back at his original Trinitarian motif. As well as drawing on Trinitarian doctrine as a resource, he argues that the ecclesiology such a doctrine suggests demands an inclusive Church in an inclusive global society. This


requires partnerships, dialogue, and the key theological motif of reconciliation. He also notes the Church’s pedigree as a cornerstone of civil society, and the Church’s calling to engage in dialogue and outreach that engages with people and communities for their own sake, as well as for the sake of the Kingdom. In marshalling these fragments, Atherton hopes that they might be used to generate resources for discipleship and to produce an apologetic for the Christian contribution in this sphere.26 As a prelude to his final substantive contribution, Atherton co-edited a book in 2007 entitled Through the Eye of a Needle. This collection of papers, the fruits of a consultation at Llandaff, drew together a number of contributions to the debate, and was conceived as a follow-up to the CTBI’s 2005 report Prosperity with a Purpose. Atherton contributes a chapter and a commentary, in which he offers a typology as a ‘tapestry or map of the terrain’, by way of an introduction to his own model. Drawing on Richard Niebuhr’s model of Christ and culture in synthesis, Atherton sketches out two approaches to ethics and to ecclesiology, arguing for a dynamic synthesis between the two in each case. For ethics, the ends of the spectrum are overlapping consensuses on the one hand and distinctive difference on the other, with a polyphonic hybrid mode in the middle which constitutes continuous interaction. Similarly for ecclesiology, the spectrum ranges from a broad mainstream liberal collaborative Church towards a more sectarian and prophetic view of Church, with a middle mode that permits interdisciplinary co-operation and distinctiveness. While one focuses on academia and the other civil society, both argue for the same dynamic and continuing ‘post liberal’ dialogue which he regards as being substantial enough to justify being considered a position in its own right. Atherton would place his own work and that of Sedgwick, Brown and Heslam in this middle position, and seems in this later publication to be slightly more convinced by the need for some distinctively Christian contribution to the debate on global capitalism.27 What he described as his ‘last big book’, published in 2008, seeks to substantiate the continuum model with examples, and to prove the hypothesis that religion is a necessary contributor to the maintenance and transformation of the world.28 The report Moral But No Compass published in 2008 had articulated the contribution made in the UK alone by Christian charities, both practically and in terms of their contribution to social capital and wellbeing, and Atherton’s own William Temple Foundation had set out the contribution of ‘religious capital’ in the Manchester area in its three-year study Regenerating communities. His book offers an apologetic for the role of religion in global wellbeing, buoyed up by corroborative evidence from the social sciences. He notes


that a variety of interdisciplinary efforts have pointed towards the crucial role religion plays in human happiness, and he builds on an earlier treatment of Richard Layard’s research into happiness to examine the paradox of prosperity. Statistics suggest that happiness is not affected by wealth once a nation’s per capita income has exceeded $15,000 per annum, which finding suggests to Atherton the need for a robust ethical and ecclesiological response from the Church.29 As well as acting as a recapitulation of his mature thought, his final book adds to his favoured ‘fragment’ of the Trinity the fragment of the Transfiguration. This motif provides three components: materiality, tradition, and transcendence, which for Atherton epitomise the path towards the transfiguring of capitalism.30 In the context of this inquiry, his views on the tactical use of typologies in the ‘craft’ of Christian social ethics are of particular relevance. He identifies two tools which have occupied a prominent place in the repertoire: typologies, like Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture model, and the identifying and analysing of traditions in Christian social thought and practice, like Troeltsch’s The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. Of the two, typologies carry the inevitable risk of oversimplification, but can function as common ground in interdisciplinary discourse, being a favoured methodological approach in disciplines such as sociology and economics. That said, he prefers his use of a continuum model, because it suggests a ‘better flowing movement’ across a continuum rather than a series of fixed types. He is attracted to the language of ‘flows’ in this context, because of its popular usage in discussions about globalisation and new communication technologies.31 Peter Sedgwick (1948– ) Peter Sedgwick, currently the Principal and Warden of St Michael’s College, Llandaff, previously worked for the BSR as one of the Church of England’s national policy officers. He chairs the Churches Criminal Justice Forum. With a career spanning academic theology, public policy, parish and diocesan ministry, he has also chaired the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Urban Theology Group which published God in the City in 1996. Within the period under consideration, Sedgwick authored two books which are particularly relevant in this area, The Enterprise Culture (1992) and The Market Economy and Christian Ethics (1999). Additionally, in 2003 he co-wrote with Andrew Britton Economic Theory and Christian Belief, and in 2007 contributed a paper on vocation to Atherton and Skinner’s Through the Eye of a Needle.


The first of his books usefully sets out his theological stall, explaining that a theology of the market is concerned with the political philosophy prevalent in society, and whether this should be condemned or criticised in the light of the Christian faith. He then identifies four contrasting ‘stories’ that are told about the market. The first of these is the ‘story of purity’ and deals with the corruption of spirituality by the pursuit of Mammon, as epitomised by the New Testament story about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle. The second is the ‘story of wealth’, about using the riches of creation to God’s glory (for example in the building of the great cathedrals), and of enjoying wealth as a blessing. The third story is the ‘story of poverty’ which involves a denunciation of luxury and emphasises the need for social justice to correct the corruption of riches and the exploitation by the rich of the poor. This story holds that the humble poor are especially blessed and have much to teach the rich about spirituality. The final story is the ‘story of vocation’, as popularised through Luther’s emphasis on the meaning of work. His conclusion about a theology of enterprise and the market is that the dynamics of enterprise and wealth-creation ‘mirror the nature of God (enterprise) and his activity (wealth-creation)’. This is because God’s relationality (as displayed in the Trinity) is characterised by innovation and creativity in the bringing forth of new patterns of existence and new forms of wealth, ‘so that the most fundamental form of wealth-creation is the wealth of all creation, nourished and sustained by God’.32 Sedgwick builds on this foundation in The Market Economy and Christian Ethics, a robust preparation for a theology of the market economy which restates the central motif of creation and creativity. However, in its conclusion, he notes that the motivating force of creativity needs to be matched by a restraining force, to avoid an overreliance on individualistic consumerism, as this can be to the detriment of relationships in community. On his journey towards this conclusion he covers much useful ground, offering an intellectual history of many of the key assumptions made in the field. In particular, he examines issues relating to the status of theological discourse, the origins of Consumerism, and the idea of vocation in paid work. As a preparation for his treatment of the status of theological discourse, he revisits the Orders of Creation through a variety of lenses, to consider the proper theological relationship between persons and structures, with the latter including the market economy. His conclusion, via Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Daniel Hardy’s God’s Ways, appears to be that personality and sociality are inevitably developed together in a complex symbiosis rather than a simple cause and effect equation, and that both can be shaped by an individual’s sense of Christian calling,


as well as by God. Hardy includes language in his list of ‘conditions in human society’, which otherwise largely parallels the Orders/Mandates, and offers the Trinity as a dynamic theological model for God’s ongoing relationship with society. This discussion usefully points up the complex problem of the use of theological language in the post-modern context. It also highlights the vexed question of the priority of competing metanarratives, and the probity of any ‘public’ theology in a pluralist world. In response, Sedgwick identifies two opposing trends: the trend towards restricting theology to the narratives, virtues and practices of the community that the theology serves; and the trend towards tackling the ‘principalities and powers’ by adopting a liberationalist/political approach. Following Habermas, he notes that assuming a ‘secular’ worldview tends to privilege the secular philosophy of positivism, which essentially relegates any ethical theory to emotivism. This has the effect of reducing language from its normative role in understanding and communication to one of the mere expression of emotion. This is problematic because it leads to absolute relativism. On the other hand, assuming the probity of theological language in a secular context brings its own challenges, although Sedgwick concludes that ‘there are still possibilities for theological symbols and metaphors in public life’. Habermas’ solution is to offer a ‘secular, procedural account of justice by referring to just communication or dialogue’, and Sedgwick concludes that ‘how far theological language can impinge on the secular sphere remains a pressing problem’.33 Another key contribution is Sedgwick’s treatment of Consumerism. He traces its roots to a Christian ethic of pleasure derived from Arminianism and the Cambridge Platonists, and tracks its evolution from Sentimentalism through Romanticism to the present-day preoccupation with consumption as a search for identity. In this context, he notes its central paradox: It arose out of the Romantic discovery of the possibility of infinite desire, and the solipsistic fascination with one’s soul. By art, and by hedonistic consumption, it seemed possible to achieve a resolution of personal identity in a civilisation that had largely abandoned faith in the Judaeo-Christian God. The irony is that this search for identity destroys itself, for the infinity of desire cannot be satisfied.34 While in this analysis Consumerism grew out of a theological context, Sedgwick notes that it has become deracinated, and now offers a competing account of reality to that of religion, essentially replacing the


work ethic. For him, Consumerism means that the central irony of social action is that altruistic idealism, without its moral context, becomes instead hedonistic self-interest. Further, he notes that even if consumption is part of a search for identity through creation and recreation, there are (or should be) moral limits to this behaviour. However, this link between Consumerism and social justice explains for him why the latter must be considered alongside modern accounts of human identity, and why any theology of Consumerism must begin with desire.35 Sedgwick also considers the notion of vocation in the context of paid work, harking back to Augustine and Aquinas and drawing a distinction between Luther and Calvin’s famous treatments of vocation. Notwithstanding this rich history, and developments since, modern paid work has undergone such a revolution in recent times that a radically different approach is now required. For this he favours the work of Miroslav Volf on a theology of work ‘in the Spirit’, argues for an understanding of work in terms of gift rather than call and thereby avoids the technical problem of the historical accounts of vocation having assumed one election or calling in life rather than several.36 He elaborates this theme in his chapter in Atherton and Skinner, where he uses David Ford’s treatment of Bonhoeffer to establish the need for an understanding of vocation that constantly balances the ultimate (the self before God, as expounded by Luther) with the penultimate (the everyday, humdrum activities of life), which find their resolution in Christ. For Sedgwick, employment must be shaped to facilitate the development of human potential so that the unique gifts and vocation of each person might be realised in this space between the ultimate and the penultimate.37 At the end of Sedgwick’s 1999 book, he examines the response of the churches to the market economy. While his sources are primarily Roman Catholic – with their focus on participation and the care of the poor – with a nod towards a handful of ecumenical sources which largely agree on these two central themes, his analysis usefully reveals the tendency of the churches to focus on the ‘supply side’, that is, the structures and processes of the market and its governance, rather than those who use it.38 In the context of his carefully nuanced treatment of the symbiosis between the individual and the Orders of Creation, the lack of church focus on the ‘demand side’ is unfortunate, which is perhaps why he focuses in his conclusion much more on the individual, suggesting that a Christian account of identity in this world would balance creativity with restraint and the absence of compulsive


desire, within a relationship with the Spirit that provides security and a sense of identity in a fragmented world.39 Finally, Sedgwick’s 2003 publication seeks to examine the philosophical foundations of economic theory and of Christian belief. It was coauthored with Andrew Britton, an economist and an Anglican Reader who was a senior economist in the Treasury before becoming Director of the National Institute for Social and Economic Research. In October 2007, Britton was appointed to serve a five-year term as the Chair of the Archbishops’ Council Finance Committee, having been Chair of the Southwark Diocesan Board of Finance since May 2000 and Executive Secretary to the Churches’ Enquiry into Unemployment and the Future of Work from 1995 to 1997. Their book focuses on neo-classical economic thought and is therefore largely restricted in its critique to one branch of economics which, whilst influential, is not entire nor in vogue. To delineate the scope of their critique, their definition of the economic meta-narrative holds that human nature is defined by rationality and individualism. Much recent economic theory has however focused on understanding the irrational behavioural nature of man as an economic agent, for instance through the lenses of systems theory and complexity, and brand and social conditioning.40 The authors do acknowledge that the hegemony of the neo-classical model is being challenged, but at the time regarded it as too provisional an attack to offer a robust edifice for critique. That being said, the book uses the cohesiveness and ‘beauty’ of neo-classical economics to show why, as an alternative meta-narrative, it might offer such a challenge to Christianity. Their conclusion is that Christianity and neoclassical economics are as incompatible as oil and water, the former challenging the ‘rationality’ of the latter and its mean understanding of humanity. For them, while homo economicus may represent how man actually behaves, the derivation from this observation of a normative schema denies the redemptive possibilities of a Christian understanding of the world. Their final paragraph suggests that viewing economics as a branch of mathematics might facilitate the pressing of it more readily into Christian service. They nevertheless insist that religion must transcend economics as an anthropology or meta-narrative, because the happiness it offers requires transcendence over economics’ selfish satisfaction of human desires for enlightenment, as economic wellbeing can only ever be of secondary importance to spiritual wellbeing.41 In considering his contribution, it is apparent that Sedgwick is deeply interested in how a theological account of the market can identify its proper relationship to the world it seeks to explain, as well as address the complicated relationship between human identity and the Orders of


Creation. He is interested in how such an account can balance human creativity, desire and moral restraint, and how it can offer an interpretation of vocation that makes sense of and transcends a revolutionised workplace within a revolutionised global economy. Theologically, he favours the model of the Trinity as a way of understanding the complexity of the current world and God’s role in it. For him, the Trinity offers a way of making sense of the complex relationships between people of different cultures and belief systems and, like Atherton, the need for dialogue and reconciliation between them. Malcolm Brown (1954– ) Malcolm Brown is the Church of England’s Director of Mission and Public Affairs. Formerly an Industrial Missioner, he has served as Executive Secretary of the William Temple Foundation, Principal of the Eastern Region Ministry Course, and Theological Consultant to the Toyne review of the Pastoral Measure. Atherton supervised Brown’s PhD, which was written up as his 2004 book After the Market, so it is appropriate that in it Atherton’s emphasis on dialogue is developed by Brown into a comprehensive methodology to govern the Church’s interaction with the market. Additionally, in 2006, Brown and Paul Ballard, an ordained Professor Emeritus in the school of Religious and Theological Studies at Cardiff University, published a compendium of the churches’ contributions to economic life since 1945. Their intent in so doing was born out of a conviction that the history of the churches’ engagement with economic issues during this time period was not only worth telling for its own sake, but that it pointed towards an area of mission that the churches were today in danger of neglecting.42 While in After the Market Brown claims to be using the economy primarily as a test case for the churches’ social engagement in general, he holds that, when treated together, economic issues and the churches’ long-standing concern with tradition and community identity also serve to expose the unresolved tension between the liberal and communitarian perspectives. Because of this, engagement with the economy ‘becomes one measure of the adequacy of different theological responses to our condition’. In addition, recent economic debate has re-engaged with the moral basis of the marketplace – through the lenses of both positive and normative economics – so the churches may find willing dialogue partners if they can develop a robust enough basis for the conversation.43 Having argued that markets are a legitimate focus for moral enquiry, either because they are a ‘context within which moral behaviour is defined instrumentally, or as the servant of an antecedent social morality’,44 he


moves on to contrast the two main ethical narratives that tend to be employed in such debate. Liberalism, for Brown, is characterised by a preference for individual liberty over traditional authority. It is founded on a narrative of universal reason that does not understand itself to be directly contingent upon any one faith tradition. Communitarianism, on the other hand, focuses on the understandings and agreements that bind communities together, such as the community of believers, and the factors that determine their identity and relation to non-members. Thus, communitarianism is often identified with an explicitly confessional theological stance. In Alistair MacIntyre’s terms, Brown views the Christian Social Tradition as being in ‘epistemological crisis’, because it does not have within itself the resources to answer the questions now being put to it. He therefore proposes to combine liberalism and communitarianism, to produce what MacIntyre calls an ‘enlarged narrative’, in order to resolve this crisis.45 Brown calls this new narrative ‘Dialogic Traditionalism,’ which is essentially a new ideological standpoint from which Christians should address questions of economics, or indeed any social question with which the Church might engage in the modern milieu. Brown’s criticism of much past engagement in this sphere has been that the Church has too often subsided into an ‘honest broker’ role, in the face of internal disagreement and a lack of confidence in response to external challenge. Moreover, he holds that the churches have continually failed to generate a theology to underpin any such engagement that might cope with the problem of generating moral agreement in a post-modern pluralist context. His Dialogic Traditionalism is a carefully nuanced position, requiring the Church to hold in tension its own truth (‘communitarianism’) and the need to avoid inflicting this truth on those whose personal narratives differ (‘liberalism’), in order to add specifically Christian value to the debate (‘dialogic traditionalism’). He explains it thus: ‘Dialogic Traditionalism is not an exercise in “holding the ring” for other protagonists … but a framework which understands that the Christian tradition contributes to debate from its own resources and insights – including the insight that the tradition offers internal grounds for a respectful engagement between the various strands within itself and with other traditions.’46 He then offers a number of criteria for determining whether or not the Church, in its various manifestations, should enter into debate on a specific issue: • Has the Church anything distinctive to say about it? • Has the dialogue within the Church on this issue already been explored?


• Is the engagement based on a developed ecclesiology? • Will the choice of dialogue partner lead to alliance-building? • Is the Church’s theological contribution to the moral debate in clear view?47 These criteria are designed to ensure that the Church only enters into the fray when it has something specific to say and will not be unduly distracted by internal debate. They ensure that the Church is clear about the basis on which it is contributing, as a respected partner, and that it is contributing to a debate that is worthwhile and futurefocused. Thus Brown prefers dialogue that yields ‘useful practical outcomes’, and dialogue partners who are drawn from the ranks of the ‘shaken’ and disadvantaged. That said, the most important criterion for any dialogue partner – including the churches – must be a willingness to face the inadequacies of their own defining narratives and to share in an intertraditional exploration for new or enlarged narratives.48 Having thus established the rules of engagement, he sketches out a plan for the theology that will be required within the dialogue. As well as the ‘developed’ ecclesiology included in the above criteria, the churches will need a theology that ‘makes room’ for dialogue with other traditions, rather like Atherton’s capaciousness motif, and one which emphasises ‘the significance of finitude and contingency’, particularly in relation to the economic problem of scarcity.49 Between 2000 and 2003, Brown was Theological Consultant to the Toyne Commission, charged with reviewing the Dioceses and Pastoral Measure. One theme that emerges from this contribution is his use of the Interim as a key motif, being the age between Pentecost and the Parousia, where grace is a reality yet sin persists, and the Kingdom is inaugurated but not yet ‘comprehended in its fullness’. This context requires Christians to continue to seek the Kingdom and to prefigure its completion in their own lives and values, secure in the knowledge of the possibility of repentance, forgiveness and restoration.50 2006 saw publication of Brown and Ballard’s compendium. Building on Brown’s previous book, the authors state that where fruitful dialogue is to be had between theology and economics, ‘the practice of the churches in their ministry and mission is the location where that engagement is made manifest’.51 Following Preston, Brown and Ballard are concerned that Christian commentators ‘have all too often made their ignorance of economic matters rather blatantly manifest’. They also admit that the texts they cite have always been considered marginal, as evidenced by the fact that they often had to rescue them from


relative obscurity. However, ‘they are evidence of a period of theological seriousness that should not be forgotten’.52 That it is possible to collate the churches’ contributions in this sphere into a single book itself speaks volumes. It also means that the book serves as a masterly survey of the various bodies working at the interface between the churches and economic life. The book is structured in three sections – Consensus (1945–79), Crisis (1979–90), and Consumption (1985–present), with the later sections covering the period under scrutiny. Each section provides a commentary on the context, notes on the major developments within the period, and excerpts from key source documents. One useful insight that becomes apparent from this longitudinal study is that the churches have tended to follow ideological fashion rather than lead it. The authors point out that one of the reasons that the Church of England’s ‘revolt’ through Faith in the City was so keenly felt in the Establishment was because post-war Christian social theology and practice had taken ‘a very distinctive flavour’ from the prevailing social and economic climate and ‘had not, on the whole, suggested the unwavering application of eternal doctrinal truths’. They attribute this commitment to the post-war consensus partly to lassitude, and partly to a positive experience of a highly managed economy during the war, which ‘gave credibility to the possibility of building and regulating a fairer and more equitable society in peace time’.53 Another useful contribution is the material relating to the provenance of Industrial Mission within the Church of England in the 1950s through the initiative of Leslie Hunter, then Bishop of Sheffield: The Industrial Mission movement was conceived as a programme to identify and celebrate the prevenient grace of God in such places as steelworks and railway yards and to articulate a theology – to discover how God may be spoken of – in the lives and experiences of working people whose alienation from the institutional churches was more about the churches’ narrow self-righteousness than working-class apathy or godlessness.54 This mode of Industrial Mission was condemned in 1966 as being comprehensively heretical by the then Senior Chaplain in Sheffield, Michael Jackson, on missiological, ecclesiological, theological and sociological grounds,55 and has since tended increasingly towards ‘regular’ mission (that is, pastoral oversight with a hope to convert). However, the original intent, which was to convert a homogeneously middle-class Church of


England, may be instructive to any modern treatment of the relationship between the Church and economic organisations. The authors conclude that practitioners whose ministry and mission have been directed towards the economy ‘have rarely been able to utilise a ready-made church theology which could be applied without further thought and development to the questions which ministry in economic affairs threw up’, and that ‘there remains much serious theological work to be done before it will be possible to speak of the British churches having, once again, any coherent approach to ministry and mission in the economy’.56 Timothy Gorringe (1946– ) Tim Gorringe is an academic theologian and ethicist who taught in India, Oxford and St Andrews before taking up his current position as Professor of Theological Studies at Exeter University. Of his many publications, two books are particularly relevant for this exercise: his 1994 Capital and the Kingdom and his 1999 Fair Shares – Ethics and the Global Economy. Located squarely in the anti-capitalist camp, Gorringe is revolutionary in tone, with Capital and the Kingdom warning that ‘two ways lie before us, a way of life and a way of death … the way of death is the prevailing economic system, built on cynicism and whistling for destruction, content to enjoy power and affluence at the expense of the Third World and of future generations’.57 Throughout both of his books he calls for repentance and justice, and is particularly helpful in his analysis of the fundamental bias of markets. Resting on a rubric of free will and choice, Gorringe argues that free market thinking conceals the manipulation of power, which automatically favours the wealthy. Using Peter Donaldson’s analogy of elections, he points out that the wealthy effectively control markets by having more ‘votes’ than anyone else, so that supply is refashioned to meet the demands of the wealthy rather than the needs of the world at large.58 Because freedom in this analysis becomes de facto a function of wealth, it renders a market economy unjust and un-Christian. In his second book, drawing largely on Aristotle, he restates that economics should be regarded as a sub-discipline of ethics rather than a ‘valuefree’ science. In this second ‘Dark Age’, the market economy is acting as a ‘solvent’ on traditional moralities, and needs to be reined back in by the democratic structures it threatens through its tendency towards extreme inequality and corruption, its footloose capital practices, and the thrall in which it holds politicians. He argues that only socialism is true democracy, as it subordinates the market to democratic


control, instead of encouraging what he views as essentially a plutocracy through laissez-faire economic policy. He sees the current situation as a spiritual crisis, and is concerned with the ‘disordered souls’ of the ‘fat cats’.59 His remedies for society largely endorse those recommended in the 1992 UN Human Development Report, and require wholesale global redistribution of resources and the localisation of enterprise, as well as regulatory curbs on the developed world so that equality might be a reasonably practicable outcome. Specifically, he recommends a fourfold solution. First, that society should turn away from the present ‘corrosive individualism’ and return to community. Second, that first world consumption should be reduced and capped through regulation. Third, that industries like defence that ‘do not contribute to the common good’ should be redirected, and fourth that society should deny the profit motive and share all knowledge globally.60 While his second book is more avowedly secular in its argumentation, his arguments throughout rest on the Biblical analysis of his first book with its focus on Deuteronomy. His theological priorities are the Kingdom values of justice and repentance, within the context of a concern for the poor, and it is this frame which draws him to his anti-capitalist conclusion. A further glimpse of Gorringe’s views can be found in the chapter he contributed to Peter Heslam’s book Globalization and the Good in 2004. Based on a presentation he had given in the City for JustShare, he uses the ‘principalities and powers’ motif from Ephesians 6:12 as a way of understanding the imperialist challenge of globalisation. As well as its ‘contemptible account of what it means to be human’ which assumes the fundamental selfishness of humanity, he documents the widening gap between rich and poor, and contests the fatalism of the capitalist mindset. In his view, the economic structures behind globalisation, being ‘powers’, have been created by mankind, and can therefore be redeemed with sufficient political will: ‘Economics is not fate. It can be changed’.61 Richard Higginson (1953– ) Richard Higginson is based in the Anglican theological college, Ridley Hall, in Cambridge. He wrote his books on Christianity and work as a layman, but has since been ordained. As its Director, he has long pioneered the integration of faith and business through the Faith in Business organisation, since it was founded as the ‘God on Monday’ Project in 1989. His publications in this period were: Called to Account (1993), Transforming Leadership: A Christian Approach to Management


(1996), Mind the Gap (1997), The Ethics of Business Competition (1997), and Questions of Business Life (2002). Informed by numerous Ridley conferences and workshops, and his journal Faith in Business Quarterly, Higginson’s books provide practical resources for Christians in business. Two particular hallmarks of his work are its deliberate accessibility and use of Biblical material. Apart from his sustained attack on the ‘mutual marginalisation’ of faith and work, two of his key contributions have been to sift out the biblical ‘case’ for a positive approach towards business and to challenge the dearth of liturgical material concerning the modern workplace, creating a set of worker intercessions to fill this gap.62 As part of his argument, he reclaims the Lutheran notion of vocation, recalling the sentiments of the 1633 Herbert poem ‘Teach me my God and King’: Luther insisted that the mother feeding the baby, the maid brushing the floor, or the magistrate passing sentence, were doing something of real value if they performed these tasks in response to God’s command and for his glory.63 Methodologically, Higginson demonstrates in his writings two contrasting approaches to Christian ethics. In Called to Account, Higginson works deductively from a set of themes drawn from the Bible and theology to real-life situations, and in Questions of Business Life he works inductively from contemporary issues and challenges back to the Bible and theology to see what light they shed on them. In Called to Account, he uses the various Christian doctrines as lenses and derives conclusions for business from each, finding particular richness in the Trinity as a theological resource for business. In doing so, he draws on the work of the organisational consultant Christian Schumacher, who uses the Trinity to style God as planner, Christ as executer and the Holy Spirit as communicator, to show how the normal activities of business can be seen through this analogy to mirror the life of God. This understanding suggests that fulfilling work will comprise all three of these ‘trinitarian’ elements, in order to be ‘whole’ and meaningful. The model of the Trinity suggests to him that one should attempt to model in work relationships (as indeed in life in general) the harmony of the relationship between each person of the Trinity. This means entering into relationships on the basis of co-operation not competition, and modelling the embodiment and co-creation of community that is apparent in the Trinity.64 In Questions of Business Life, he examines a series of contemporary issues and applies scripture and Christian theology to


them, concluding that a Christian response to capitalism should be redemptory not condemnatory, particularly in the light of the inclusive nature of Colossians 1:15. He reclaims the Christological motifs of leader as servant, shepherd and steward as resources for leaders in the business world.65 Building on the themes employed in Called to Account, Higginson’s Mind the Gap is organised into a four chapter schema designed for group study, entitled Creation, Fall, Reconciliation and Future Hope, with biblical passages in support of each theme. He sees work as a tension between creation and fall; a reconciled economy as one in which justice reigns and everything is put right; and future hope as providing the impetus to effect this transformation. In his discussion of reconciliation, he identifies the costliness of such self-sacrifice, and the likelihood of pain and suffering along the way. In particular, he examines what being made in God’s image means for human characteristics, and identifies the following hallmarks: being rational, moral, spiritual, relational, creative, reflective, and exercising authority, all of which readily relate to activity in a work context.66 In this book, as in so many of his other writings, he makes frequent use of the personification device to illustrate his points in terms of real people in real work situations.67 Building on his work on competition in Called to Account, Higginson’s 1997 Grove booklet expands his argument. In an area where the metaphor of war is in more common usage than the metaphor of a game, he notes that companies tend to co-operate as much as they compete, for instance on industry regulation and technical standards, and increasingly over research and benchmarking. This suggests that any understanding of competition that does not include rival companies in a firm’s ecology of stakeholders is likely to be deficient and, while too much co-operation creates a problem, he offers five themes from the Bible to act as criteria for assessing healthy competition: 1. the dispersion of power – concentrations of power are dangerous and competition functions as a check and balance 2. the spur to excellence – the example of others through competition encourages personal mastery 3. love your enemy – the Christian rationale for business is about providing an excellent service, not about beating a competitor 4. the golden rule – do as you would be done by 5. honesty and integrity – competitors are fellow humans deserving of respect.68


Peter Heslam (1963– ) Peter Heslam, formerly Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity’s Capitalism Project, is currently the Director of Transforming Business, a research project based in the Cambridge Divinity Faculty with links to the Judge Business School. In 2002 he wrote a Grove booklet about globalisation, and in 2004, by way of a sequel, edited a collection of essays entitled Globalization And The Good. He contributed to Atherton and Skinner’s 2007 collection of essays in response to Prosperity with a Purpose, to Stoner and Wankel’s 2007 Innovative Approaches to Reducing Global Poverty, and to Harper and Gregg’s 2008 Christian Theology and Market Economics. These five publications represent the most developed examples of his thinking on this subject. He also writes prolifically via his Transforming Business website. First, his Grove booklet surveys the field of globalisation and Christian commentary on it, and offers a four ‘chapter’ yardstick for measuring global capitalism: creation, sin, redemption and consummation. In considering creation as a motif, he notes the human vocation of stewardship and the importance of limits, and that being made in God’s Trinitarian image implies a fundamental interrelatedness which challenges any autonomous view of markets. Heslam’s second chapter, sin, balances a positive view of creation with the marring of creation by sin, such that all human institutions – the market included – are flawed and cannot therefore be relied upon to secure the common good. Redemption, his third chapter, promises salvation through the cross and resurrection, not through the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. His final chapter, ‘consummation’, presents the paradox of the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’ of the Kingdom: ‘as a deterrent both against an overly optimistic faith in globalization’s ability to spread the values of the kingdom and against the doom and gloom characterising some of the more critical responses to globalization’. Heslam’s conclusion is therefore that, provided the integrity and limits of creation are taken into account, there are no good theological or ethical reasons to resist the further development of the economic, scientific and technological potential of the created order. Further, he notes that Christians are estimated to control $10 trillion around the world, which is about a quarter of the world’s annual production of wealth. For Heslam, this statistic offers significant hope that, were Christians to be so mobilised, they might work together more strategically to transform the global economy.69 As editor, in his epilogue to the 2004 Globalization and the Good, Heslam focuses on the Genesis account of creation to examine the


sustainability of global capitalism. He revisits some of the key themes from his 2002 publication, emphasising from creation the importance of stewardship, from the Trinity the importance of relationships, and from the forbidden tree and the Sabbath the importance of restraint.70 He also revisits the definition of ‘capital’, to include, alongside the traditional categories of financial and manufactured capital, human capital (labour, skill, intelligence, culture and organisation) and natural capital (natural resources, living systems and the services of the ecosystem). Using this wider definition, he argues that capitalism is breaking its own accounting rules by keeping these latter categories off the balance sheet. He expands this treatment in his 2007 chapter in Stoner and Wankel to include social capital, which he breaks down into relational capital, institutional capital, moral capital and spiritual capital. He argues that social capital requires particularly careful development if the trust required for effective wealth creation is to grow.71 Also in his Stoner and Wankel chapter, Heslam redefines capital as the value to the economy of a given category or its ‘economic implications’. The example he gives is that a husband and wife may have a relationship, but ‘relationship capital’ is the value of that relationship to the economy. This redefinition flirts with the discussion within managerialism about the instrumentalising of the sacred, although Heslam does not enter into this debate, except to state that things retain their intrinsic value regardless of their instrumental value to the economy.72 In expanding the traditional understanding of capital, Heslam joins a trend. The popularisation of the term ‘social capital’ is widely attributed to Robert Putnam. As well as being the subject of a number of books and public policy documents, it is discussed in a variety of Church reports. What Heslam terms ‘spiritual capital’ has been explored by the William Temple Foundation, who distinguish between spiritual capital (as energising religious capital by providing a theological identity and worshipping tradition, complete with a value system, moral vision and basis of faith) and religious capital (the practical contribution to local and national life made by faith groups).73 Heslam’s 2007 chapter in Atherton and Skinner is entitled ‘Purposeful Wealth Creation: Eradicating Poverty through Enterprise’, and argues for the need for business missionaries, equipped with a transformative theology of business, to act through workplaces to effect the transformation of human welfare through business. Noting that the debate has a deficit skew towards eradicating poverty rather than increasing wealth creation, he suggests that a rebalancing to include the ethics of production as well as the ethics of distribution would not only be more likely to


find favour with the poor, and be in their interest, but would also be more effective in reducing poverty. He uses Richard Niebuhr, translating his terminology to create a type whereby Christ transforms business. For him, this model is particularly fruitful because it affirms business as an arena of Christ’s transformative work: ‘as corrupted good rather than evil, business needs conversion rather than replacement’.74 Heslam’s 2008 chapter in Harper and Gregg, about the role of business in the fight against poverty, reprises and refines some of his previous argumentation, particularly his reframing of the challenge of ‘eradicating poverty’ as ‘bringing wealth to the poor’, to turn an approach which suggests policy arguments about definitions of poverty with aid as the solution into a debate about how best to support enterprise in developing nations to restore their self-efficacy. He links this reframing to a renaming, from the ‘liberation’ theologies of the 1960s to post-millennial ‘transformation’ theologies, after Richard Niebuhr.75 John Hughes (1978– ) John Hughes completed his doctoral thesis in Cambridge in 2005 and published his work as a monograph in 2007. Following a curacy in Exeter he returned to Cambridge as chaplain of Jesus College in 2009. His book starts with a survey of 20th century theologies of work before moving on to examine 19th and 20th century debates about labour under capitalism. His key contribution concerns the centrality to modern work of the ‘spirit of utility’ and its officially anti-theological provenance. In tracing this provenance he uncovers a suppressed theological source, to which he attributes many of the psychological difficulties that have in his view subsequently dogged the Marxist tradition. He shows that a parallel critique of work from the English Romantic tradition has rendered this theology explicit, through the work of Morris and Ruskin, criticising contemporary labour conditions on the basis of a vision of true work as art, akin to God’s work in creation. His treatment of the tradition concludes with a survey of those 20th century Catholic thinkers who have supplemented the aesthetic tradition with classical meta-physical categories, enabling him to deliver a robust critique of utility as essentially nothingness. Hughes intends his analysis to be used to rescue work, transforming it from nothingness so that it ‘becomes a liturgical offering’.76 In passing, Hughes usefully notes that critique of any kind is only possible against some kind of ideal. His view is therefore that Marx’ notion of unalienated labour can only have emerged from the quasitheological traditions of German Romanticism, furnishing him with a


simulacrum – the notion of divine labour – with which he might then argue. While this might appear a rather technical line of argument, it provides the faith and work debate with a crucial piece of intellectual scaffolding. Sedgwick, Higginson and Heslam have already argued for work to be considered as participation in God’s ongoing act of creation, and Hughes proves this argument for them by showing that that is fundamentally what good work is, regardless of the tradition from which critiques of work have come. It follows then that the image of work as divine labour is not just a matter of faith but also one of history, facilitating an appeal to work as hallowed and consistent with creation in both terms. This underpins the current debate about sustainability with an insistence on the necessity of harnessing both the means and ends of work more explicitly to the ongoing maintenance of Planet Earth. One of Hughes’ particular contributions is his exploration of the concept of utility. He notes that its historic usage also connoted goodness and happiness, but over time it came to mean mere ‘utility’. However, peeling back the layers of this particular onion reveals the emptiness at its core. By definition, utility has to point towards something else, utility for what: ‘Utility cannot escape the commitment to higher goods, and when it attempts to do so, by opposing itself to higher notions of goodness and claiming to be an end-in-itself, it becomes nonsense. Utility cannot be made “value-free”, because questions of utility are always necessarily parasitic upon prior, presumed values.’77 Hughes uses this insight to restore the aesthetic critique of work, being utility’s traditional opponent, by recalling beauty’s status as an intrinsic good. He argues that the phenomenon of the beautiful points to the theological because of its ontological transcendence, thus providing the ideal necessary to facilitate critique. This unveiling of the deracination of the concept of utility from its theological roots offers the possibility of reconciliation, such that work once more becomes co-creative activity with God. One caveat remains. A Romantic critique of work privileges craft, but Western economies are increasingly service-driven, neither could an economy work if there were only ‘beautiful’ jobs. Providing a service can be as creative as manufacturing a product and, as a necessarily subjective category, even beauty is not as clean an ontological category as Hughes would have it.78

Bishops79 Richard Harries (1936– ) Richard Harries was Bishop of Oxford between 1987 and 2006 and was therefore a member of General Synod during the period under dis-


cussion. He took his seat in the House of Lords in 1993, and was Chairman of Synod’s BSR between 1996 and 2001. While his contributions via Synod and the House of Lords have been included in the previous chapter, he also published a book in 1992 entitled Is There A Gospel for The Rich? His basic thesis in writing the book is that ‘the rich need to be liberated no less than the poor’. He accepts Denis Munby’s arguments in favour of capitalism, and quotes Charles Elliott to the effect that the imbalance between rich and poor, and the tendency of the rich to exploit the poor, is about human nature and not about capitalism or any other economic structure. He also makes light work of usury, concluding that the Church’s traditional condemnation of usury was based on two mistakes: one philosophical, and the other in biblical interpretation. The former was to accept wholesale the Aristotelian categorisation of money as ‘barren’, and the latter was to apply a provision forbidding loans which exploited the destitution of kinsmen to loans of any kind.80 While in his 2000 Birley lecture he regards the premium placed on personal choice in a market economy as reflecting the high estimate that Christianity places upon freedom, he is haunted by the beatitude ‘Blessed are the poor’, and this provides him with his particular viewpoint, which is about solidarity. He agrees that the rich will not best serve the poor by impoverishing themselves materially, but, in order for them to be counted amongst the poor as themselves blessed, they must stand with the poor from their own context. This requires them to work for political, economic and corporate policies which support the poor, and to resist such policies as harm them. The challenge for the rich is therefore to link their lives with the poor in such a way as to lend them their power and give the marginalised a voice. This issue of power is for Harries central to any examination of justice for the poor. Traditional remedies for poverty – acts of charity – keep the poor powerless, by rendering them reliant on their benefactors: ‘In the light of a Christian and humane understanding, there is justice when neither partner in a relationship is in a position either to exploit or to patronise the other; when they meet on a basis of equality.’ For Harries, the particular Christian contribution to justice for the poor comes from a recognition that it is not in the interests of the rich to help the poor in this way. Therefore, those with strong traditions of moral obligation need to be strenuous in making the case for so doing, and the Christian tradition offers rich resources for this debate.81 For Harries, a second motif is that of desire, of which much is made by anti-capitalist writers such as Daniel Bell Jr, who regards capitalism


as a ‘competing technology of desire’, such that it is a form of sin, idolatry, and madness. Harries instead turns to the work of Thomas Traherne to examine whether desire might actually be our proper starting point. Given that so many attempts to curb desire have failed, perhaps our insatiability is a noble spiritual good that instead needs to be correctly channelled. Citing the thinking of Kenneth Adams, which was later published as an article in 2002, Harries argues that Christians should work with desire not against it, by exploring alternative and more spiritually enriching forms of economic growth, instead of railing against growth per se.82 Harries is supported in this thinking by Rowan Williams. Like Bell, Williams sees the temptation of acquisitiveness, and the restless search for completion through ‘things’. However, he too challenges this impoverished mentality as one which, in a Christian context, totally underestimates the nature of grace. Grace does not gratify, and will overflow any neat ‘hole’ that we expect it to fill, overwhelming us in a whirl of excessive giving and receiving. Growing up requires us to stop desiring the end of desire (satisfaction) and to come to terms with the incurable character of our desire, longing only for the steady and endless enlarging of the heart, through God’s grace and through others, who are not merely our projections or playthings, but who offer us unexpected transformation and growth.83 Harries’ third motif, vocation, looks at the wider moral context for business activity. In a passage which appears prophetic in view of subsequent corporate failures like Enron, he argues for the prompt affirmation of industry and commerce as a legitimate field for the exercise of Christian vocation: Unless the whole industrial and commercial enterprise is an activity that human beings can engage in with a sense that what they are doing is morally and spiritually worthwhile, they are hardly likely to be concerned about the morality of particular parts of the system. If industry and commerce can be affirmed, then it will follow that honesty in details of the system are a matter of profound importance. If, however, it is all regarded with a sense of snobbish distaste, as a squalid activity where a quick buck is to be made, then there is no moral basis for day-by-day dealing. If the whole house stinks, putting a deodorizer into one cupboard is hardly going to be effective. If, however, the system is in principle wholesome, an essential part of the human enterprise under God, which is what the Churches should be saying, then there is some incentive to strive


for integrity in the daily operations of buying, producing and selling.84 His book ends with this image of vocation: ‘the risen Lord, whom Christians seek to serve, calls us to follow him not only in our personal lives but by denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following him into the companies, markets, exchanges and parliaments of the world’.85 Peter Selby (1941– ) When the Berlin Wall fell, Peter Selby was Area Bishop of Kingston in London. In 1992 he was appointed a Professorial Fellow in Applied Theology at the University of Durham, where he wrote a book entitled Grace and Mortgage. He became Bishop of Worcester in 1997. The book signalled an interest in the concept of debt which has been a hallmark of Selby’s since, through his involvement as a Church Commissioner and as Deputy Chairman of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group. He played a leading role in the discussions on debt at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, and was a contributor to Development Matters in 2001. In his book, Selby starts with Bonhoeffer’s famous question: Who is Jesus Christ for us today? He concludes that Christ is in the marketplace, for that is where human maturity is manifest and with which Christians need to struggle. His theological perspective on the marketplace is to set matters of financial economics within God’s economy of gift. His view is that modern capitalism violates this context by reducing the world to a mere economy of exchange which has led to the violation of the poor at home and abroad, and the violation of the planet. These are all signs ‘of an economy of exchange that does not know itself as inhabiting an economy of gift, that is oblivious to its conditionality, and that is therefore unable to give and receive genuine gifts, the gifts of God and one another’.86 The incessant valuing of things for exchange has created the ‘death-dealing systems of international economics’ which has resulted in unjust, un-Christian and enslaving arrangements whereby a mortgaged future binds human freedom.87 Our ability to be responsive to God is constrained by this mortgaging of the future, and Selby sees that: Those who engage with the business of economic transformation, which is the opening of the world to justice and the freeing of the world to a future of hope, are in my view doing work that is not just


good but sacred: they share in the dynamic of life towards grace and the redeeming of its mortgages.88 While Selby has been personally active in this field, particularly through his Deputy Chairmanship of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group and his membership of the House of Lords, he has not published further on this theme. However, he was responsible for the discussion of debt at the 1998 Lambeth Conference. As part of the first section of the conference, entitled ‘Called to Full Humanity’, the Conference passed Resolution 1.15, unanimously and without debate, in protest against international debt and economic injustice. The resolution called to mind the context of creation and the equal dignity of persons, such that borrowing only has its place in enabling the growth of human wellbeing.89 David E Jenkins (1925– ) David Jenkins was Bishop of Durham between 1984 and 1994 and was therefore a member of General Synod during the period under discussion. Having been Director of the William Temple Foundation from 1973–78, he also worked with John Atherton, and was Professor of Theology at Leeds University from 1979–84. While he has published several books as well as being widely reported in the media,90 his 2000 book Market Whys and Human Wherefores represents a sustained argument about capitalism and Christianity and will thus be the focus of this examination. In particular, Jenkins highlights what he considers a category error at the heart of capitalism, and challenges the effect this has on human moral agency. In his book, Jenkins sets about proving, in ‘painstaking’ detail, that current economic theories, derived from the limited markets of the 18th century, are not supported by coherent theoretical arguments, neither do they rest on robust data. He holds that these ‘stories or myths’ have insufficient substance to guarantee the future, in spite of any benefits they may have produced in the past, and that ‘metaphors based on experience have to be discarded if the relevant experiences no longer support the metaphors’. He notes that the transfer of the assumption of the ‘invisible hand’ from the limited markets of the 18th century to the globalised financial markets of the end of the 20th century, seems to be ‘completely unwarranted by observation’, and he holds that: ‘a reasonable tradition of arguing about economic theories and economic data in relation to the Market has taken a wrong turn into an applied ideology which has descended into an idolatry’.91


In particular, he notes that the metaphor of the invisible hand has been converted into a law of nature. However, this is a category mistake, and regarding this metaphor as a law not only leads proponents of the market to ignore any evidence to the contrary, but has also created a dangerously fatalistic mindset which encourages people to evade responsibility for the market, it being somehow ‘divinely ordained’.92 This error not only discourages responsibility, but it prevents people from questioning the assumptions on which the market is based. Jenkins argues that these theories are more value-driven than is commonly supposed and, in the light of the manifest failure of the market to deliver prosperity for the majority, that they require urgent re-examination. He concludes: Can we possibly rely on a metaphorical phrase fashioned into a pseudo-theory of the Invisible Hand and transmuted into a quasiorganic theory about an evolved global information system to guarantee our receiving the best possible prosperity from the present operations of the market into which the ‘first wealth-creating system’ in the world has now developed?93 As well as this category error, Jenkins is at pains to signal the evidence that points to widespread market failure. One key concept for him is the much-vaunted economic rhetoric of the ‘trickle down effect’, whereby the increasing wealth of the rich is passed on to the poor. He contrasts this with the phenomenon of ‘sucking up’, noting that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and that wealth is moving upwards and not downwards. Like Gorringe, he cites the UN Human Development Report, this time from 1996, which reveals that, between 1960 and 1991, the wealth of the bottom 20 per cent of the world’s population dropped from 2.3 per cent to 1.4 per cent, while the wealth of the top 20 per cent rose to 85 per cent.94 Jenkins then turns to examine the financial markets in detail. These are a particular focus for him, because they are held to constrain in a positive way the decision-making of government over borrowing, spending and raising money. This constraint on democratic decision-making might be a fact of life were the market to be a ‘law’, but that it is treated by economists and Western governments as a given merely repeats the category error noted above. Indeed, detailed study of financial markets suggests that power is effectively being ceded to an industry that makes most of its money out of speculation on foreign exchange rates and the secondary markets, ‘gambling’ which Jenkins finds irresponsible, unworthy, and sterile. He also sounded an early warning about capital adequacy: ‘the


whole system is one vast pyramid scheme, dependent on continually increasing its number of investors, and reliant on no more than a small proportion of those investors ever attempting to cash in their investments at anyone time’.95 Jenkins’ analysis leads him to a central preoccupation about human power and responsibility: ‘The way power is exercised is a human responsibility which must not be hidden behind alleged necessity, whether of the Market or any other sphere of practice and power’.96 Given the category error and the subsequent fatalistic acceptance of the market mechanism, those benefiting from the market have an interest in protecting their position. While Jenkins treads carefully here (‘I hope to be able to pursue this necessarily uncomfortable theme of the personal immorality and irresponsibility which is in effect involved in an uncritical espousal of the Free Market without appearing to pass a moral judgement on any particular person or class of persons’), he nonetheless concludes that the only way to counteract the powerful is to mobilise countervailing power through politics.97 He warns that to take an enthusiastic part in market operations or simply to acquiesce to them is to collude in the displacement of moral responsibility and to hobble democracy, because it is only those with access to sufficiently large sums of money and credit who effectively ‘count’. He concludes: ‘The way things go economically are developed, discerned, declared, defined and worked by people. It is people, therefore, who have to monitor the results of the various operations, evaluate their effects and get together to modify trends, check miseries and enhance benefits. We have to recognise and accept our responsibility. There is no saving economic system.’98 While Jenkins’ critique is primarily a philosophical and ethical one, he draws on Christian theology to challenge the view of ‘economic man’ that reduces a person to a sum total of decisions or purchases. He concludes that ‘to put one’s faith in the operation of the Free Market is a potentially disastrous inversion of causality, determination and responsibility’.99

Academic economists Donald Hay (1944– ) Donald Hay taught economics at Oxford University for 30 years before becoming Head of the University’s Division of Social Sciences in 2000. He retired in 2005. He is also an Anglican Reader. As a Christian Economist, he has written a variety of contributions to this debate. His con-


solidated thought is largely contained in two books which fall within the period under study. The first is Economics Today – A Christian Critique (1989), and the second, edited with Alan Kreider, is Christianity and the Culture of Economics (2001).100 His first book sets the groundwork for his subsequent views. He starts by offering a ‘systematic’ analysis of the Biblical material pertaining to economics, using a framework derived from reformed theology as a filter for dealing with the hermeneutical problem of moving from Scripture to contemporary ethics. This ‘distinctively biblical framework’ comprises four themes of creation, fall, judgement, and the people of God, within an ‘organising concept’ of stewardship, and gives rise to eight ‘derivative social principles’: 1. Man must use the resources of creation to provide for his existence, but he must not waste or destroy the created order. 2. Every person has a calling to exercise stewardship of resources and talents. 3. Stewardship implies responsibility to determine the disposition of resources. Each person is accountable to God for his stewardship. 4. Man has a right and an obligation to work. 5. Work is a means of exercising stewardship. In his work man should have access to resources and control over them. 6. Work is a social activity in which men co-operate as stewards of their individual talents, and as joint stewards of resources. 7. Every person has a right to share in God’s provision for mankind for their basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. These needs are to be met primarily through productive work. 8. Personal stewardship of resources does not imply the right to consume the entire product of those resources. The rich have an obligation to help the poor who cannot provide for themselves by work.101 Hay regards these principles as provisional, noting that they need to be subject to further scrutiny through the scriptures, intellectual humility, a willingness to listen to other Christians, and openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. He then applies the principles to a variety of economic models to derive a Christian critique in each case. Looking particularly at market capitalism, he is highly critical of the utilitarian assumptions that underlie its practice. This leads him to conclude that Christians should abandon welfare economics (by which he means ‘standard’ microeconomic theory with its focus on the self-optimising behaviour of individual agents) as a tool for policy recommendations, because of its un-Christian emphasis on individualistic freedom and utility. His view is


that the unchallenged use of utilitarian axioms renders even positive economics surreptitiously normative, rendering all market economics vitally flawed.102 Hay’s second substantial contribution, co-edited with Alan Kreider, contains introductory and concluding chapters in which Hay articulates his thinking, 10 years on. He starts by separating the field of inquiry into two schools of thought about the role of values in a market economy. The first school maintains that the market is no more than a mechanism for allocating resources, so any ‘values’ are those brought to it by those participating in it. The second school holds that the market develops its own internal values, which tend to be negative ones. Building on this contribution and his earlier work, in a more personal chapter he reflects on the challenges of being a Christian Economist. He cites empirical research which indicates that traditional economic teaching, epitomised by the Chicago Project,103 has a manifestly normative influence on morality, such that those most exposed to it (students of economics) have been observed to become less moral over the course of their studies.104 In a sustained attack, he argues that its descriptive power encourages the acceptance of a fallen view of man as being a permanent state of affairs, and legitimises self-seeking behaviour in inappropriate spheres such as family life, ignoring the moral guidance provided in the Bible and the potential of humanity towards redemption. In the light of this, he posits three alternative responses (do nothing, create an alternative, transform from within), and examines each in turn, concluding that his preferred solution is to use economic analysis with caution, accepting its positive, descriptive character, but rejecting its ‘unacceptable normative presuppositions’. He notes that the Chicago paradigm grew out of Enlightenment utilitarian values, and as such it is entirely appropriate that it should be challenged by an alterative cultural mindset.105 In using economic analysis, he recalls his earlier book, reprising his criteria to govern future research: (i)

How far do economic institutions allow human beings to exercise responsible stewardship, and encourage efficient use of resources? (ii) Is the use of natural resources characterised by care for the created order? (iii) Does the economy create opportunities for satisfying work and sufficient rest? (iv) What are the causes of poverty and are there societal mechanisms to prevent destitution? (v) Has the pursuit of wealth, for its own sake, become detrimental to other values in society, for example, family life?


(vi) How effective are the authorities at promoting justice in the economic sphere?106 While his treatment of the Biblical material in both books is useful, his theological themes largely cohere with the other contributions already discussed. His particular contribution to the debate is therefore to highlight the potential damage that might be – and he would argue is being – caused to the moral fabric of society through the wholesale adoption of neo-classical economic theory. This offers a particular challenge to those who argue that economics is ‘neutral’.107 He also exposes the culturally-specific and therefore transitory nature of the Enlightenment paradigm which supports the neo-classical – and in his view flawed – utilitarian frame, thereby challenging the ‘scientific’ validity of neoclassical economic thought as being true for all time.

Businessmen Clive Wright (1932– ) An Anglican who has had a long career in the oil and chemical industry, Wright has been instrumental in pioneering a variety of initiatives to bring together and support Christians in business. He has served on a number of Christian charities as Chairman of SPCK, a trustee of the Industrial Christian Fellowship and the Christian Association of Business Executives, and a founding trustee of the Institute of Business Ethics. His 2004 book The Business of Virtue serves to represent his mature thinking on the worlds of business and Christianity, and, through his wide experience, exposure and network, offers a lay view of a key strand of Anglican thought in the period. As a businessman well-versed in the literature, he notes that few authors in this field have themselves been active in the business world. In his book, he charts both society and the churches’ historical diffidence – if not hostility – towards ‘trade’. He notes that the nonconformist churches, and the Quakers in particular, did not share this negative attitude: being barred from public office and many other walks of life, wealth creation was their only opportunity to earn a living. However, at the time of writing, Wright saw the success of the capitalist model beginning to challenge this historical diffidence, not least because the collapse of the Berlin Wall had laid open the practical failures of the communist ideology as an alternative. While Wright addresses a Christian audience, he argues from prudence that the business world ought to take heed of religious wisdom in any case, because it codifies


centuries of moral understanding and has rich insights to offer about the tension between private interest and the public good, a tension which in his view epitomises modern capitalism.108 Wright contributes a number of important insights, particularly about assumptions, language and focus. First, he notes that it was an assumption until the Industrial Revolution that poverty was a fact of life, but that it has since become clear that poverty is either created by humans or could be alleviated by human activity. However, many authors in this field still make two assumptions about wealth which are unsubstantiated and which impede this alleviation: that wealth is limited, and that wealth creation is a zero-sum game where there are inevitably winners and losers.109 A second insight is Wright’s attention to the use of language. In this debate, he notes that there is much talk of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. However, he suggests ‘good’ and ‘bad’ might be more useful words to use, because they admit the comparatives ‘better’ and ‘worse’, and may thus generate a more fruitful dialogue.110 His third important insight relates to the shift in the focus of the debate. While the Mediaeval Scholastic Theologians were concerned with usury and prices, that is, the processes of wealth creation, he argues that, since the Enlightenment, attention has tended to shift towards a more utilitarian preoccupation with the outcomes of wealth creation, culminating in the Christian Socialist movement and modern-day Christian alignment with protests over debt, fair trade, and third-world poverty.111 Theologically, Wright favours the motifs of creation, free will and incarnation. In the context of the incarnation as an affirmation of the material, he sees the creation of wealth as an opportunity to exercise human talent and free will to participate in the ongoing creative act. He also argues that wealth creation is essentially the meeting of other people’s wants and needs (the index for which is profit), so it offers an opportunity for love and service, and an opportunity to generate sufficient wealth to enable its redistribution to help the poor. The concept of love is important to Wright’s argument as it marries together the theological and the secular. He argues that love is the virtue that attracts ‘nearuniversal human consent’ as the cornerstone of any ethic, and that Christianity of all the repositories of ancient wisdom is a specialist in love, and is thus well-positioned to provide a cogent and practical basis for a systematic ethic, based in particular on the traditional virtues.112 That business in his view enables the manifestation of love through service makes a Christian business ethic particularly appropriate: The formulation of a value system to underpin any system of morality requires an end-purpose. The great Christian doctrine of universal


love can be applied in the concept of service to others, through business, as the fundamental moral principle needed to provide a framework for business ethics. The implications of love and service can thus be developed to permeate and inspire the principles we formulate to structure that framework. Hence Christian and secular thought come together to give moral purpose to the undertaking.113 Stephen Green (1948– ) Stephen Green was formerly the Chief Executive of HSBC and is currently its Group Chairman, as well as being a non-stipendiary Anglican priest. This rare position gives him a particular perspective, from which he has written two books. His first, Serving God? Serving Mammon? in 1996, looked at life in the markets with the perspective of Christian faith ‘from the inside’. In the market, Green sees a sign of the Kingdom, as the free movement of money around the globe makes a reality John Donne’s epithet ‘no man is an island’.114 However, Green notes the paucity of New Testament material concerning money and markets – the Parable of the Talents being his favourite exception,115 instead examining the concepts of service and vocation in the context of a market alive with temptation: Christians can serve God in the world of finance and commerce, but it is also possible to fall into the trap of serving Mammon there. Yet the kingdom of God can be found in the thick of the markets and God calls some Christians to take the risk of being there. This does indeed involve risk – the risk of becoming compromised, of becoming obsessed with wealth and power, of selling one’s soul. But the markets – flawed though they are, like every other human structure – can be used to contribute to human development. Being there also creates opportunities: to show an integrity that loves others as ourselves and treats them as ends rather than means; and to use the resources we are given as effective stewards should. In other words, we are there as Christians with a purpose. The choice we should make is not Faust’s choice – to sell our souls for gain – but what might be called Joshua’s choice – the choice to serve God in the place to which we are called.116 In this first book, Green devotes a chapter to the history of theological thinking about business, particularly through the treatment of usury, and concludes that the Christian Church has as yet been unable to marshall sufficient theological resources to mount a stalwart critique of modern capitalism, instead resorting to the atheist Marx as a proxy. He then usefully challenges the habit of language that encourages the metaphor of war in regard to business, instead preferring the metaphor


of games or sport like rugby or athletics. He feels this conjures up a healthier array of emotions and behaviours, as all players/athletes have a valuable contribution to make towards the total success of the game, by providing world-class competition. A metaphor of war, by contrast, can lure people into being so intent on winning, as a matter of life and death, that they might come to regard rules as being of secondary importance.117 Green’s second book, Good Value, develops some of these themes, tracing the development of globalisation and contextualising the economic crisis, starting with the drying up of the mortgage-securitised markets in the Spring of 2007 and intensifying into the credit crunch of 2008.118 Being at the heart of the financial crisis, Green’s ‘lessons learned’ have particular poignancy, and HSBC was one of the few UK-based banks not to have required an injection of state capital to continue operating in the depths of the crisis. As well as arguing for better global co-ordinatory mechanisms, he identifies three key lessons: the need to restrain the excesses, the need to ensure transparency, and the need to align incentives.119 As the crisis recedes, he is left with four key ‘series of questions’: (i)

is open-market capitalism – the engine of global growth for a generation – intrinsically unstable? If so, what should we do about it, and how should we police human commerce? (ii) what of the marginalised, both within fast-growing and mature economies and also those whole countries which have been left behind by globalisation and remain mired in poverty? (iii) can a finite planet cope? How long can humanity continue to consume resources at the level we currently do? (iv) where does individualism lead? If everything has a price, what does this do to our sense of value? Of rights and duties? Of belonging? Of who we are?120 In what has already become a well-received and widely discussed book, Green examines these questions in turn, ranging over an array of literary and intellectual resources while saving an overt discussion of his own Christianity until the closing pages. While many of the literary sources reprise Christian themes, his book is intended to appeal to a broad audience and so tends to appeal more to the authority of the literary canon than to the religious one. This occasionally leads to some confusion as to audience, for instance in the chapter he entitles ‘why should I do anything for posterity’? His answer, which in a secular context could be summarised as noblesse oblige, is to argue that altruism


is good for the soul, because it is only in giving that we can receive forgiveness for anything done in error in gaining riches. This is an argument that Christians would readily accept, but one that his more general audience may find perplexing without further discussion.121 In what is a very personal book, Green argues again that few of us can opt out of what can be a morally fraught marketplace, so we must engage, cope with the ambiguity, and ‘make our way there’. He sees ‘original grace and original sin’ as the ‘original ambiguity about human beings’, and offers six guiding principles for this journey: • • • •

Integrity: values matter to long-term value Treat others as ends not just as means Ambition, not to get the most but to contribute the most Work-life balance (family, work, friendships, society, and the inner self) • Servant Leadership • The Mirror Test: how is what I am doing contributing to human welfare, and why am I doing it?122 Wilf Wilde (1953– ) A development economist who has worked variously as an economist, a stockbroker, on utility privatisations, and in emerging markets, Wilde wrote his book Crossing the River of Fire in 2006. Using a liberationist exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, he uses its subversive social theory to critique the ‘Global Capitalist Empire’. Seeing Jesus’ ministry as being a sustained theological and ideological attack on the collaborationist Jewish Establishment and the Roman Empire, he observes that Jesus’ ministry from the start was among the common people whose lives were threatened by hostile forces. For him, global capitalism is to be resisted not primarily on its own terms, but because it upholds Empire. Wilde considers Mark’s Gospel to offer rich apocalyptic resources to challenge today’s Empire – by which he means expansionist power – which uses global capitalism as its tool. He would therefore disagree with Green’s analysis of the paucity of New Testament resource available for this debate.123 Wilde followed up his book with a chapter in Atherton and Skinner in 2007, in which he summarised his threefold approach to the theoretical reformulation of modern dialogue between theology and political economy. Such a dialogue should be: 1. Interdisciplinary, based on classical political economy, but also using the insights of anthropology, history, sociology and politics.


2. Global and comparative, directly addressing the issues of global poverty, injustice and political power. 3. Theologically aware of the political critique of empire.124 Stating his position as being interested in the transformation (aufhebung) of capitalism rather than its overthrow, he offers a salutary reminder that understanding global capitalism requires an understanding that it is made up of a series of capitalisms, each with its own history and political story.125 His view is that they nevertheless share their status as the preferred tool of Empire, and that there is a consistent biblical narrative against Empire: ‘starting with the Egypt of the Exodus, the Babylon facing Isaiah, the Seleucid Empire that dominates Daniel and the Roman Empire that crucified Jesus and probably killed Paul’. Reprising the central theme of his book, for him this critique is epitomised in Mark’s Gospel, ‘the first of its genre to subvert the Roman propaganda for empire with a new message about an emperor who died a slave’s death on a cross’. He calls again for an ‘apocalyptic vision’ to see through the ideology of empire to proclaim the gospel and build a more just world.126 Because he sees the key problem of capitalism as being its structural inequality, arising from an unequal ownership and control of assets, his solution is to democratise corporate voting structures in order to reduce the power differentials that nourish Empire. His proposal is that every shareholder should have equal voting rights, irrespective of the size of their shareholding, thereby turning every joint stock company into a mutually owned social co-operative to destroy the concepts lying behind capital’s power. Workers could also have a vote each, provided they had purchased a share. He proposes to shore this up with tax incentives, and notes that the ‘crafty’ nature of this socialisation is that it would not cost anything like the billions needed for nationalisation with compensation.127 Now that the dramatis personae have been introduced, their contributions will be summarised together under the categories of methodological comment, technical comment and theological comment.

Methodological comment Amongst the sources, methodological contributions about how best to tackle the debate on economics can broadly be separated into those that deal with methodological orientation, and those that deal with method itself.


Orientation is primarily dealt with by Atherton and Brown. Atherton surveys the debate, examining the Conservative, Radical, and Liberal orientations and concluding that in the debate on capitalism a mixed orientation is best. His continuum model establishes this hybrid orientation as a ‘position’ in its own right, that of being polyphonic or engaged in continuing interaction between what he calls the general (liberal) and the particular (conservative and radical, or communitarian). His view that any partners in the dialogue should meet on an equal footing requires his ‘capacious and plural’ Trinitarian theology to effect the intellectual and axiomatic parity between economics and religion. He argues that this orientation should also assume an intent to transfigure that which already exists, to avoid the wholly theoretical hankering after ‘Christian’ utopias inappropriate to a Church located in the Interim.128 Brown develops Atherton’s hybrid orientation, incorporating the demands of a post-modern, pluralist context and the intellectual contribution of MacIntyre. His Dialogic Traditionalism merges the Communitarian and Liberal orientations, to deliver the ‘enlarged narrative’ that can simultaneously advocate (like the communitarians) and inquire (like the liberals) without losing its integrity.129 Like Atherton’s ‘capaciousness’ or polyphonic mode, Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism requires as its starting point that the Church should have an adequate account of plurality and a sufficiently ‘thick’ ecclesiology to sustain a practice of engagement. It also requires the Church to rediscover its own traditional resources for this type of dialogue.130 In these sources, method is often covered by a discussion on ‘middle axioms’. Preston and his supporters argue that the standard method for conducting Christian social ethics should comprise empirical analysis, theological commentary, and directional principles, these being deliberately vague so as to be most useful to a broad church that also values moral autonomy. By design, such an approach assumes an empirical epistemology. By definition this will tend to eclipse a more ontological theological approach, giving the discourse an innate methodological bias, and weighting the discourse towards Gustafson’s pragmatic Policy discourse at the expense of his other three: the Prophetic, Narrative, and Ethical discourses.131 While Atherton regards the middle axiom approach as useful, if sometimes theologically light,132 he sees method as being primarily a matter of engaging in the debate on capitalism via the ‘challenges’ by deploying those theological ‘fragments’ which shed light on the matter in hand. Combined with the middle axiom approach, this stance makes the


strategic choice to engage with the events of capitalism, in lieu of an intellectual engagement with capitalism itself, and to apply ‘relevant’ theological fragments to them. This approach accepts the risk of being led to the normative from the empirical, rather than the reverse, as well as the risk inherent in fitting theology to ‘challenge’ and not vice versa, inviting a general accusation of ad hoc reactivity, albeit in the interests of efficacy. An implicit method, used by many of the sources here surveyed, is the use of criteria. These are variously used in the context of economics to test the appropriateness of a topic or partners for dialogue (Brown), to test the integrity of the dialogue itself (Wilde), to test the theology of an orientation (Sedgwick and Brown), to test the economy as a whole (Preston and Hay), to assess healthy competition (Higginson), or to govern future research into economics (Hay). As a device, the use of criteria is designed to lend structure and thoroughness to the debate, as well as to control the agenda by deciding what should be considered material. A further implicit method is illustrated by Higginson, who demonstrates in his writings both the deductive and the inductive approach to Christian ethics. These various methodological questions will be revisited in the concluding chapter.

Technical comment Technical contributions to the debate focus on content, noting where assumptions are suspect, logical errors have been made, or where approaches are invalid. First, the fundamentals are brought into question – the nature of ‘economic man’ and the nature of markets. Homo economicus is found by Sedgwick and Britton, Hay, Gorringe and Jenkins to represent too reductionist a view of human nature, giving a ‘mean’ understanding of human potential and thus failing both practically and theologically.133 Indeed, the neo-classical model has already been challenged, both by outsiders and by economists themselves, because humans regularly display in their actual market behaviour ‘irrational’ decision-making behaviours. However, the neo-classical model in its alluring simplicity is still assumed in many debates on capitalism. Theologically, Hay sees homo economicus as privileging fallen humanity at the expense of redeemed humanity, made in God’s image. This latter point Hay also uses to explain the logical conflation in much of the literature of the two quite separate branches of economics. Positive economics is largely descriptive, while normative economics is prescriptive, yet many com-


mentators confuse the two, assuming that what is ought also to be.134 Sedgwick and Britton and Brown also highlight this confusion, and Hay and Gorringe think that this normative habit leads to moral corrosion, as it tends towards the lowest common denominator.135 However, while it is theoretically selfish to want to feel good about oneself, it can usefully generate moral behaviour. Indeed, a person who wants to be selfless because not to be so would be selfish is doing so selfishly if in so doing they are hoping for reward. A treatment of the paradox of selfish selflessness might strengthen this discussion of ‘economic man’, particularly as it offers a richer analysis of actual market behaviour and may therefore be more suggestive of possibility.136 The commentators also discuss the nature of markets, at the level of axiom, construct and operation. Axiomatically, Hay takes issue with the utilitarian mindset which is of its time yet is assumed to be unassailable. Wright supports this scepticism, noticing the shift in emphasis postEnlightenment from deontological concern about economic principle towards a more consequentialist preoccupation with the social outcomes of capitalism. Hughes then exposes the ‘empty heart’ of utility, asking the question for what, restoring to the debate an important moral dimension. Wright also challenges the typically Marxist assumption that markets are somehow a contained and finite system, a zero-sum game where there must be losers if there are to be winners. He argues that, while environmental considerations attest to the finitude of scarce resource, there is still no evidence that a free market economy has natural limits, nor that ‘losing’ is inevitable, even if it will remain a relative reality.137 A treatment of the contribution of game theory, in particular John Nash’s ‘win-win’ equilibria and the resultant ‘co-opetive’ business model, would add to this discussion,138 as would a more technical debate on the nature of credit. For instance, Goodchild would argue that financial credit acts as a ratchet, such that modern markets are designed endlessly to spiral upwards, growing exponentially in order to keep repaying debt.139 In the context of the ‘credit crunch’, it could be argued that it is the device of fractional reserve banking that institutionalises credit, and which has a natural ‘circuit break’ where the amount of trust required to maintain the system becomes untenable, leading to the type of freeze and correction that commenced in the Autumn of 2008. While this is not the only reading of the crisis, it suggests that further reflection on credit, capital adequacy, and trust might equip the Church to contribute more robustly in the public debate about reform. One might also argue that the materialism seen in modern society, epitomised by the advertising slogan ‘taking the waiting out of wanting’, is the natural end of Enlightenment


empiricism, ushered in by its apocalyptic prophet Richard Dawkins, which provides another more philosophical line of inquiry. In terms of construction, Atherton cavils at the common treatment of the market as a ‘scientific’ construct, akin to the laws of gravity. Gorringe also challenges the easy assumption that capitalism as a way of life is non-negotiable. Jenkins calls this sleight of hand a category error, whereby the metaphor of Smith’s invisible hand has been converted into a law of nature, making people unduly fatalistic and discouraging their sense of personal responsibility and their questioning of assumptions. Hay argues that the market is not neutral in construct but is based on decisions of value, and is itself value-forming, citing research that suggests that exposure to market practices teaches selfishness. Further research is also suggestive of this conclusion, in that a number of studies have indicated that ethical behaviour diminishes in inverse proportion to seniority and the growing size of the employing organisation, and worsens in a competitive business climate.140 Preston has also argued that the market takes for granted a moral sub-structure which it tends to undermine.141 Operationally, Gorringe is at pains to challenge the assumption that the market is ‘free’. Using his metaphor of votes, he points out that the market is shaped in the image of the rich and powerful because they have more ‘votes’ than the poor. This drives the increasing gap between rich and poor, as more ‘votes’ drive greater participation in an unending spiral of favouritism. Jenkins agrees, calling this the ‘sucking up effect’. Gorringe talks of the negative influence of the ‘principalities and powers’ – those who control the markets – with Wilde particularly associating these with the negative notion of Empire. Harries concurs with this challenge about genuine freedom in markets, while being careful to emphasise the power of human agency to change structures. On a more technical point, Heslam argues that the current market breaks its own accounting rules by not taking into account its usage of types of capital that are not financial or manufactured. He argues that if organisations were to account for the full range of types of capital they enjoy, a truer and more sustainable picture might result. Links to the wider discussion about ‘capital’, managerialism, and externalities might help here, particularly in view of the climate change agenda.142 Second, after substance, the commentators discuss the manner and focus of the debate. Used to dialectic and Marxist critique, Wright points out the common usage in the debate of the absolutes ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, instead of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ which might admit the comparatives ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Again rejecting this tendency to polarise,


Atherton points out that many Christians tend towards the middle ground economically because of the Christian understanding of the person both as an individual and in community. Preston coins this position as ‘as much competition as possible and as much control as necessary’. In toto, Atherton regrets that much of the critical debate is fundamentally misdirected, being concerned with out-dated economic models or technical inaccuracies, thereby losing both credibility and relevance. Jenkins also regrets that so much attention is devoted to crit-icising outmoded theory pertaining to an old-fashioned economic model, when globalisation and the growth of the secondary markets had swept much of such theory aside even before the so-called credit crunch. Both would therefore include in their criticism Sedgwick and Britton, whose book confines itself to a critique of neo-classical economics, a model which is too theoretical to apply in reality and has for some time been abandoned as the theory of choice in the face of a highly virtual global marketplace. As noted by Wright, Higginson and Green, further treatment of the language of the debate and its influence on manner and style might also assist this general discussion.143 Lastly, the commentators discuss the technicalities of reform. Green offers his ‘lessons learned’ of the need for better global co-ordinatory mechanisms to restrain excesses, ensure transparency, and align incentives. Jenkins says that the powerful skew created by the sheer size of the financial markets means that not to act through politics is effectively to collude with an undemocratic and damaging process. Apart from engaging in reform through the political process, Wilde takes Gorringe’s notion of ‘votes’ to a different conclusion, arguing for his new policy of every shareholder having an equal vote, irrespective of the size of their shareholding. Finally, to the channels of influence offered by politics and share-ownership, Heslam adds the suggestion that the Church should use its influence as a consumer, harnessing its spend to reshape economic supply by altering demand.

Theological comment The categorisation of theology will be the focus of the next chapter but, as a device to facilitate a synthesis of the sources thus far, a scheme from Wesley Kort will be used meanwhile to marshall the various theological motifs employed. Kort employs the six ‘Scholastic Protestant’ categories: theology, Christology, ecclesiology, anthropology, soteriology, and eschatology. These variously relate to God (‘theology’ being used


here in this more particular sense than elsewhere), Jesus Christ, the Church, human nature, the telos of human existence, and the telos of the world.144 Theology The most popular motif relating to God (and equally to Christ and the Holy Spirit) is extensive use of the Trinity across the sources. Atherton uses the Trinity as his model for a ‘capacious and plural’ theology of the market, and as a model for dialogue in relationship, representing partnership, reconciliation, reciprocity, and justice. Higginson also draws on the Trinity as a model for harmony and relationships, suggesting that the Trinity commends co-operation in the workplace. He also sees in the Trinity the embodiment and co-creation of community, a model for healthy workplaces. Heslam uses the Trinity as a reminder of the fundamental interrelatedness of humanity, to challenge any autonomous view of markets. Sedgwick uses the Trinity to understand enterprise, seeing the relationality of the Trinity as a model of innovation and creativity that mirrors human wealth creation. In this context, pneumatology as a specific focus is conspicuous by its absence, given the recent surge of interest in organisational spirituality with its emphasis on the divine spirit.145 Creation itself is the second major theme relating to God, normally combined with a variety of related motifs, for example: creation, fall, judgement and the people of God (Hay); creation, free will and incarnation (Wright); creation, fall, reconciliation and future hope (Higginson); and creation, sin, redemption and consummation (Heslam). Heslam also makes creation central to his consideration of sustainability, through an examination of stewardship, relationship and restraint. Creation is used in relation to creativity and wealth creation in an economic context by Sedgwick, in his use of the Trinity as noted above. The theme of God as Creator tends to be used in this context as a preparation for a discussion of vocation and human agency. For example, Hughes’ renovation of the aesthetic tradition uses God’s work in creation as the vision of true work as art. Wright sees the creation of wealth, in the context of the incarnation, as being an opportunity to exercise human talent and free will to participate in the ongoing creative act, and both Hay and Heslam relate creation to the obligation on humanity to be good stewards. Selby – and the proceedings of the 1998 Lambeth Conference – uses creation as the context for a perspective on debt that acknowledges the equality of persons and holds that the sole remit of borrowing should be for the releasing of human potential.


A third theme – debt – is chiefly addressed by Selby. Contrasting the market economy with God’s economy of grace, Selby notes that modern habits in financial debt require the wholesale mortgaging of free-will in order to meet future financial obligations. This is in stark contrast to God’s economy, where the debt has already been paid in Christ, unleashing rather than restraining human freedom. Being Human is more even-handed on the subject, but notes the clever use of jargon to turn ‘debt’ into ‘credit’ to render it more acceptable. Christology Christology is a theological aspect that is largely neglected in the sources consulted, except via the Trinity and by Atherton’s use of the Transfiguration. Higginson does however draw on the Christological motifs of leader as servant, shepherd and steward as resources for leaders in the business, and uses the Cross as a reminder of the costliness of redemption because a change for the better usually entails self-sacrifice. Wilde holds that all political and economic critique of global capital leads to the theology of the Cross, because Empires tend to crucify those who oppose their rule. Elsewhere, Green laments the lack in the New Testament of theological resources for business, relying on the Parable of the Talents as his main New Testament resource, which perhaps relates more to the Kingdom as a motif than to Christ. Ecclesiology Ecclesiology is most often mentioned as the sine qua non for any serious engagement with the economic sphere. Brown wants a ‘developed’ ecclesiology, while Atherton wants an inclusive and ‘polyphonic’ ecclesiology in an inclusive global society, requiring partnerships, dialogue, and reconciliation. However, none of the sources go as far as offering one, although Atherton offers a typology of ecclesiologies that agrees with his continuum model. From another angle, Brown and Ballard point out the opportunity for mission that an engagement with economics presents, and Harries is concerned that the rich need help as much as the poor because of the risk of the spiritual contamination of wealth and power. Gorringe would agree with this view, seeing the rich as having ‘disordered souls’ in the midst of a spiritual crisis. Anthropology The sources deal variously with anthropology in terms of human nature, human development, human purpose, and the role of humanity. On human nature, the sources all discuss free-will and sin in general terms,


with Preston stressing that human dignity requires participation in economic and political decisions, while the reality of sin requires the checks and balances provided by the state. Given that the free-will defence is traditionally one of the strongest weapons in the armoury of the neoclassical right, the subject does not receive much attention here. However, in his 2000 Birley Lecture, Harries does note that the premium on personal choice which is so fundamental to a market economy reflects the high estimate that Christianity places upon freedom. Heslam allows that freedom, and by extension the free market, contains an inbuilt moral challenge, and the ‘marring of creation’ by sin is also a feature of Heslam’s approach, to explain the flawed nature of human institutions such as the market. Higginson too sees work as a tension between creation and fall, and Green notes the ‘original ambiguity’ of ‘original grace and original sin’. Desire as a human property features in both Sedgwick and Harries as a matter of right orientation, and both Wright and Harries encourage a more positive attitude towards this element of human nature. As a corrective to desire, both Gorringe and Heslam introduce the idea of limits, Gorringe in capping the first world through regulation, and Heslam through a consideration of the forbidden tree and the Sabbath. Whether desire is a property or more properly a right, both Preston and Harries talk about the fundamental equality of persons, as Christ died for all. Based on the ‘image of God’, Higginson presents a list of human characteristics, being rational, moral, spiritual, relational, creative, reflective, and exercising authority, all of which relate to activity within a work context. In terms of human development, several commentators refer to the Orders of Creation as a major influence on the development of character. Among the Orders, Atherton includes marginalisation, and Sedgwick, after Hardy, includes language. Heslam also regards business as a particularly ‘foundational sphere’ of human life. Human purpose in individual terms is dealt with through varied discussion on vocation. Sedgwick draws on Volf and Ford’s use of Bonhoeffer to avoid the ‘technical hitch’ of a single vocation in the modern world, while Sedgwick, Higginson and Harries follow Luther in stressing that virtually all work is worthy of vocation. While affirming and indeed practising it, Green notes the particular riskiness of pursuing a vocation in the business world, echoing Harries’ call for Christians to take up the cross and bear it into the boardroom. In this context, Wright argues that the meeting of other people’s wants and needs through work offers an opportunity for love and service, and an opportunity to generate sufficient wealth to enable its redistribution to help the poor.


One key theme about the particular role of humanity is the use of stewardship, particularly in the work of Hay, who uses it as his ‘organising concept’. He sees personal talents and natural resources – particularly as utilised in work – as entrusted by God, to whom account will ultimately need to be given for their usage and husbanding. Atherton also uses stewardship as oikonomia as one of his ‘fragments’, in the sense of following the example of kenosis in being about self-limitation. This links back to Heslam’s treatment of the forbidden tree and the Sabbath to suggest the need to balance growth with rest or restraint, and Higginson likewise links the concept of stewardship with the imperative to be ‘green’. A slightly different take on the role of humanity is offered by Atherton’s treatment of happiness in his more recent work, drawing on the work of Richard Layard. Soteriology The sources are comparatively silent on soteriology, bundling it together with eschatology in the context of a general discussion of the Kingdom. Higginson discusses redemption as a motif for business discipleship, and it is one of Heslam’s ‘chapters’ that the route to salvation is via the cross and resurrection not through the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Heslam also calls for business missionaries with a transformative theology of business to help the poor to gain access to enterprise for their fulfilment and independence. Atherton uses the Trinity as a model of reconciliation, albeit in rather general terms, and Higginson talks of reconciliation and future hope, using Colossians 1:15 to indicate that the reconciliation of all things includes people and structures like the market economy. Additionally, a number of the sources contain a general exhortation to adopt a redemptive approach to the debate (for example Higginson, Heslam and Green). A more sustained engagement with this area would assist. Eschatology The sources frequently use the Kingdom of God as a motif. Preston is at pains to stress that the Kingdom is already here, to discourage Marxist utopian thinking and a reluctance to engage with the world as it is. Green sees globalisation as a sign of the Kingdom, in which ‘no man is an island’. Gorringe uses the values of the Kingdom outlined in the Bible to inform an anti-capitalist stance, and Wilde calls for an ‘apocalyptic vision’ to see through the ideology of Empire, in order to proclaim the gospel and build a more just world. For Brown, the Interim is a key motif, where grace is a reality yet sin persists. Atherton also uses the concept of the Interim to explain why there can never be


a ‘Christian’ economics or politics, just a story of dialogue, influence and interaction with and through the current context, with the Kingdom always being ‘on the way’, a way illumined by grace. Harries confirms this ambiguity, regarding any set of economic principles, laws or systems as provisional, ‘standing under judgement and challenged to conform to higher, more humane values’.146

Conclusion In the first chapter it was possible to summarise Synod’s views as an economic worldview, but the commentators present too variegated a picture to permit a similar synthesis. However, this survey of their thought, and their methodological, technical and theological contributions, shows that in combination they offer the Church of England a rich resource. Building on each other, after Preston and Atherton we have from Brown the promisingly nuanced Dialogic Traditionalism approach, which could engage in Atherton’s ‘challenges’ with theological ‘fragments’. From Hay we have a sophisticated technical challenge which meets the critique of Gorringe, Hughes, Jenkins and Wilde to suggest a rethink of homo economicus and the utilitarian assumptions that underpin modern capitalism, as well as the dominant fatalist reading of market mechanics which tend towards the powerful. Wright refocuses the debate away from zero-sum thinking, and Sedgwick and Harries point to the spiritual potential of consumerism and desire rightly directed. Sedgwick, Higginson and Green restore vocation to the lives of the ordinary worker, and Heslam argues for the potential of enterprise to transform the lives of the poor. The Orders are repeatedly identified as important bulwarks for Christian attention and nurture, and Selby reminds us that the Christian economy of grace stands as a challenge to the easy logic of the human economy. While there is scope for further epistemological attention and technical commentary, the most telling gaps are theological. Where this theology could be particularly strengthened is in a more comprehensive account of human agency and an explicit treatment of Anglican ecclesiology in an established church. Further discussion concerning Christology, soteriology and eschatology would also round out the available resource, and, given the tenor of Synod’s worldview, further treatment of the role of the state and the rule of law would be particularly useful. While the sources consulted would no doubt disagree amongst themselves, they would appear to agree that capitalism, however expressed, is a reality that needs to be taken seriously, whether by reform


or overthrow. Where they differ is about the best remedy for its flaws, methodologically, technically, and theologically. The next chapter will develop a set of theological criteria that might be used to critique the Church’s various responses to capitalism within the period, with a view to offering a robust framework that could then be used to re-engage in the wider debate.

3 Types of Theology

Introduction There is a traditional fairground attraction in which the bystander is equipped with a hammer and invited to hit a series of moles popping up randomly through a variety of holes. As public fury about City bonuses reached a zenith, the arcade on Southwold pier introduced a version replacing the moles with bankers.1 This somewhat macabre game is rather like the attempt to establish a fixed definition of something, or to create a definitive model or account. As soon as the attempt has been made an exception appears, or a new instance, or an unforeseen limitation, and the hammer of argumentation or language has to move ever faster to keep up. This is a particular hazard in theology but, in order to critique Church of England views on capitalism in the period, it is necessary to establish some kind of theological ‘ideal’. The selection of any ideal inevitably results in a partial analysis and one that begs the criticism of oversimplicity, particularly given the range of Church of England views considered, but the device of an ideal remains a useful heuristic. In this context, an abstracted approach will be adopted as an oblique way of establishing a set of criteria that approach an ideal, from a theoretical point of Archimedean privilege designed to offer a comprehensive purview. Avery Dulles has argued that models in general are peculiarly appropriate in theology, because their own inexactitude mirrors the necessarily provisional nature of statements about Divine mysteries, and that a range of them should be deployed for mutual correction.2 In his Anglican Identities, Rowan Williams alludes to the ‘fashion’ for theological taxonomies, citing a number of those known to him. After this fashion, several models of theology will be examined, as each typology 92

Types of Theology 93

attempts to categorise the realm of theology. In the field of statistics this approach is routinely taken, with several data points each taken to represent ‘means of means’ in order to increase confidence in determining numerical patterns and relationships. A variety of overlapping sources will be used, on the assumption that in their various attempts to be comprehensive they will tend to round each other out, jointly pointing towards the domain of the ideal. In statistics, standard deviations are used to measure the error that this involves. While statistical exactitude does not fit this exercise, as a parallel it serves as a reminder not to overstate any conclusions that may arise. While some of the ensuing discussion may appear remote from the consideration of Church of England views on capitalism considered thus far, this excursion from the material proper will provide the means to return to an analysis of it in the final chapter, where Church of England views on capitalism in the period will be critically examined against the resulting criteria. A note on terminology. The word ‘typology’ is commonly used within theology to denote the prefiguring of the New Testament in the Old. Here, it will instead be used in its more generic sense. The language of typology and taxonomy, borrowed from botany and zoology, suggests absolute categories and scientific exactitude. In the field of theology, these categories can only function metaphorically. Yoder, who uses the notion of a typology to arrange the varieties of religious pacifism, differentiates between ‘monolithically’ logical typologies, which might resemble their scientific cousins, and those typologies which have fuzzier boundaries but which ask useful ‘typing questions’ that point up similarities and differences. This leads him to draw a distinction between types and motifs. For him, ‘typing’ is the creation of a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive logical categorisation, where, as in zoology, types fit neatly. ‘Motifs’ on the other hand are incomplete themes or ‘accents’ that stand side by side with other motifs awaiting revision.3 This latter sense, which will be employed here, accommodates the caveat applied to type by Niebuhr who, after Weber and Jung, reminds the unwary typologist that no one person or group ever conforms completely to type, claiming to have persisted with his own only because of typology’s ability to call to attention ‘the continuity and significance of the great motifs that appear and reappear in the long wrestling of Christians’.4 Yoder draws a distinction between a typology (how many types and how do they differ), a topology (placing the types on a map) and a taxonomy (describing the types within an overarching order or framework). While the sources consulted adopt a range of labels for their segmentation,


Yoder’s language of typology, topology and taxonomy will be used throughout for consistency, with the selected typologies being arranged topologically to derive taxonomic criteria.5 A note on method. The authors of the types chosen make uneven bedfellows, and the exercise will inevitably be distracting to those who are familiar with the attendant theology of the typologists considered. Nonetheless, the contention is that their typologies can legitimately be considered in relative and artificial isolation, to create the ‘laboratory’ conditions required to discern any commonality between them. This treatment mirrors the exercise of typing itself, which requires the isolation of factors in order to discern patterns. While any typology springs from a given context, the function of type is to be generic, so this exercise also tests the typologies for robustness against the field. In comparing typologies, the generalities between them will be ‘rolled up’ to establish high-level criteria for a critique of Church of England views. It may be that the typologies readily available for critique are not the only or the best ones in existence. However, the emerging topology can be used to surface taxonomic categories, on the basis that the family resemblances between the typologies may be predictive of their missing relatives. Therefore, this chapter comprises two topographical sections of type clusters, followed by a concluding section which distils out of them a set of taxonomic criteria. These criteria will then be used in the final chapter to assess Church of England views on capitalism in the period.

Worldview types The first cluster could be termed the ‘worldview’ group, because its members tend to press theology into the service of a particular mission or view of reality. This cluster is somewhat eclectic, but each of the four types represented is characterised by an attempt to explain how God and the world relate, through contrasting accounts of reality. Each typology will be considered in turn, before they are synthesised together.6 H Richard Niebuhr Chronologically, H Richard Niebuhr’s famous typology is the first to fit into this category. Originating in his 1949 Austin lectures, it has five categories, relating to the relative positionings of Christ and culture, by which he means the world, civilisation, or ‘the total process of human activity and the total result of such activity’. Having examined the various debates through history about the nature of Christ and the nature of


culture and how they relate, he identifies these five categories as typical Christian answers to the ‘problem’ of Christ and culture. His types are: Christ against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ the Transformer of Culture.7 He sees them as recurring so often in different eras and societies that they seem to be ‘less the product of historical conditioning than of the nature of the problem itself and the meanings of its terms’. Of his five Christ and Culture types, one type ‘agrees’, one ‘opposes’, and three are a sub-group that mediates between Christ and culture, variously combining these two ‘authorities’.8 The first, Christ against Culture, was historically exemplified by the exhortation to leave the world behind, for example by entering a closed religious order. Niebuhr regards this type as epitomising the classic ‘either-or’ decision, where Christ is seen to be offering a stark choice between himself or culture, with culture being seen as standing in opposition to Christ. In this type, loyalty is owed solely to Christ, as demonstrated by members of the early Church, and is an expression of confidence in the love of God. For Niebuhr, other examples of this type would be Tertullian and Tolstoy, and all of those monastics, mystics, sects or movements like the Mennonites or the Quakers who kept themselves separate to avoid taint and corruption. In welcoming the purity of this position, Niebuhr notes that all Christians have to experience this withdrawal and renunciation to some extent, to avoid their faith becoming a ‘utilitarian device for the attainment of personal prosperity or public peace’. In critiquing this position, he notes that it is impossible truly to separate humanity from culture – history, ideas, language – and that this perspective neglects the immanence of God in the whole of creation.9 His second type, Christ of Culture, emphasises the agreement between Christ and culture, as exemplified in modern efforts to show democracy or civilisation as evidence of God’s purposes being worked out through contemporary cultural institutions. In this type, Niebuhr says that Jesus will often appear as the hero of human cultural history, confirming what is best and guiding civilisation towards culmination. As part of culture, in this type Christ represents a social heritage that must be transmitted and conserved. Niebuhr sees this type as being dominant in Protestant Liberalism and epitomised by Abelard. Using and thereby conforming to the categories of culture (‘religion’, ‘ethics’, and so on), it seeks to harmonise Christ and culture, regarding the world as a training ground for the world to come. Niebuhr numbers John Locke, Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Hegel, Emerson, Albrecht Ritschl, and, to an


extent, Schleiermacher amongst this type. With its incarnational and utopian feel, he sums it up in the epithet ‘the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man’, in that Christianity in this type is a sort of über-philosophy, being the crowning of the Enlightenment project and the illumination of the Constitutions of its new States. While this perspective appears differently as differing elements of culture and history are ‘baptised’ by different groups, throughout, the habit remains to identify Christ with whatever a given group sees as their noblest ideals, philosophies and institutions. This type – famous for its ‘relevance’ – has been of great service in communicating Christianity to culture down the centuries, thereby helping different people to hear the Gospel in their own language Babel-like, and as a type is embodied in the example of St Paul. Niebuhr notes that, while this chameleon Christ may become relativistic, it can offend culture by colonising it, and fall foul of the theologians by cherry-picking gobbets that speak to a current preoccupation, thereby distorting the totality of Christ. For him, if the first type privileges revelation, this type privileges reason, attracting an equal charge of bias and rendering itself susceptible to critique based on the ‘irrationality’ of belief in Christ and divine grace.10 Like the second type, the third, Christ above Culture, regards Christ as the culmination of culture. As the first of Niebuhr’s median types, this type goes further, however, in regarding Christ as ‘discontinuous as well as continuous’ with culture, such that culture may lead people towards Christ but that a ‘great leap’ is nonetheless needed if people are to reach him. For this type, true culture is not possible unless ‘Christ enters into life from above with gifts which human aspiration has not envisioned and which human effort cannot attain unless he relates men to a supernatural society and a new value-center’. For Niebuhr, this type is exemplified in the writings of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Aquinas. These ‘synthesists’ have a ‘bothand’ view of Christ and culture, resting on a recognition that Christ is fully human and fully Divine. Adherents of this type hold that one must be good in accordance with the best cultural standards, but that there is a stage of existence beyond the morally respectable life. Such an existence, in which life is lived in love wholly for its own sake, can only be attained beyond this world, but culture in this one prepares us for it by helping us to realise our God-given potential. While it cannot do so adequately, or make us deserving of ultimate happiness in the next life, it can make our hearts receptive to any such gift from God. Niebuhr would however critique the synthesists on the grounds that ‘culture’ is not fixed, so it is not clear which culture is the one with


which humanity should engage in its moral quest. He feels that this problem leads the type into cultural conservatism and towards unhealthy hierarchies about which sorts of cultural life might be most favoured, and fails adequately to address the problem of ‘radical evil’ in the world.11 The fourth type, Christ and Culture in Paradox, recognises that both Christ and culture have authority and accepts the opposition between them. This sets up life as a dilemma in which both contrasting authorities must simultaneously be obeyed. The tension between them cannot be resolved in this world, but obedience to both is nonetheless required. It is not as approving of culture as are types two and three, neither is it as opposed to culture as is type one. Typified for Niebuhr by Luther, this type sees humanity as being subject to two moralities and as a citizen of two worlds: ‘in the polarity and tension of Christ and culture life must be lived precariously and sinfully in the hope of a justification which lies beyond history’. Adherents of the fourth type, like the third, have a ‘both-and’ view of Christ and culture, but the ‘dualists’ differ from the ‘synthesists’ in their view that Christ and culture cannot be combined. Thus, their ‘train-tracks’ of Christ and culture do not converge but run in parallel. Given the reality of sin, the miracle of God’s grace ‘is the action of reconciliation that reaches out across the no-man’s-land of the historic war of men against God’. Faith is not man-made but God-given, and culture, like all human work, is fundamentally corrupt. All attempts to domesticate God in culture, through reason, law and religion, are depraved, and these feeble attempts at power are evidence of godlessness. This type therefore agrees with the Christ against Culture type that culture is ‘sick unto death’. However, this type accepts this paradox rather than retreating from it, because the dualist recognises that they belong to culture and are sustained by God’s initiative within it. While for this type culture may not be a route to Christ, its transformation is nevertheless necessary as a bulwark against the worst excesses of sin, even if such attempts at transformation are in vain. For the dualists, the key paradoxes between Christ and culture are those of law and grace, and divine wrath and mercy. While for Niebuhr this type appears more as a motif than a system in theology, he glimpses it in the writings of Paul and Marcion, and particularly in Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. He also sees modern developments of it in the dualisms of church/state, faith/ reason, and so on. In critiquing this position, ‘a report of experience rather than a plan of campaign’, Niebuhr praises its honesty and dynamism but sees its danger as an antinomian counsel of despair, accidentally providing the rationale for a fatalistic refusal to resist


temptation by eliding the practical difference between sinful obedience and sinful disobedience. Like type three, it tends towards cultural conservatism as a logical consequence of perceiving culture – and in particular government – as a restraining dyke against sin rather than a positive agency for good.12 His final type Niebuhr calls the ‘conversionist’ solution: Christ the Transformer of Culture. Like types one and four, this type recognises the fallen nature of humanity as appearing in and being transmitted through culture, but, instead of advocating withdrawal or patience, this last type sees Christ as the converter of humanity in and not apart from culture, ‘for there is no nature without culture and no turning of men from self and idols to God save in society’. Whilst recognising with the dualists the reality of sin, the conversionists are more positive and hopeful towards culture, putting the doctrines of creation/incarnation and redemption/atonement on a more equal footing, such that human culture has always been subject to God’s ordering action. Additionally, the conversionists do not conflate creation with the Fall in the way that the dualists tend to, instead maintaining a clear separation between God’s action (creation) and man’s (the Fall).13 Thus culture is perverted but not essentially evil, and so might be converted through the spiritual transformation of humanity in the present as well as in the future. As represented by the classical theological theme of perfection, this type holds that the moral virtues developed in culture can be converted by love, such that human ‘spirits with an animal nature’ might turn from sin back to a state of union with God. For Niebuhr, this type is demonstrated by the Gospel of John, which ‘converts’ Hellenistic motifs into Christian ones. It is exemplified by Augustine’s conversion and many of his writings, and by Calvin, especially in his treatment of vocation. The conversionist type is particularly illustrated in the thought of FD Maurice, with his rejection of the dualism that regards the flesh as essentially sinful and his optimism about perfection being a present possibility. That Niebuhr refrains from offering critical comment on this final type may suggest it is his favourite.14 Before Niebuhr’s typology became a classic, it famously attracted strong criticism from John Howard Yoder. His criticism, written in 1958, was initially circulated informally. It remained unpublished until 1996, when it appeared with Niebuhr’s previously unpublished essay of 1942 in which he had first laid out his Christ and culture typology. Tellingly titled Authentic Transformation, the 1996 book contains essays largely focused on a discussion of Niebuhr’s fifth type. In the current context, his typology is being examined as an example of a type to seek the


variables that might be required for an overarching taxonomy. Here – as for the rest of the theologians considered – criticisms that appear to relate more to the book as a theological classic in its own right will be sacrificed in favour of those that deal with it as a typology per se.15 Yoder’s critique starts by questioning the fundamental validity of Niebuhr’s scheme. He notes that its enduring popularity is testament to its ‘strong logical sense’ but argues that its appeal is intuitive rather than based on its empirical force. For Yoder, that so few theologians fit cleanly into the typology undermines its logic, and he thinks this is why Niebuhr increasingly uses the word ‘motif’ instead of the more concrete ‘type’ as his book moves on. As a fellow typologist, albeit in types of Christian pacifism, Yoder chides Niebuhr with this criticism: ‘Rather than letting the typology determine which events or people are recognizable, I have sought as historian to try to let the realities remodel my tools of interpretation.’16 Yoder also takes issue with Niebuhr’s thinly veiled preference for the Transformer type over the others. In this, Niebuhr would be judged by his own view that ‘the typologist needs to remember that he is not constructing a value scale. His enterprise is directed neither toward explanation nor evaluation, but towards understanding and appreciation.’17 Additionally, Yoder charges Niebuhr with equivocation and inaccuracy in his use of ‘culture’ and ‘Christ’ as categories. In his view, the former is used too monolithically, and he takes issue with the theological accuracy of the picture Niebuhr paints of the latter.18 His criticisms of Niebuhr’s neglect of the role of the church and his treatment of the Trinity relate more to Niebuhr’s theological argument for his favoured type than to his typology per se, but Yoder uses them to throw into question the usefulness of any model that neglects theological realities in favour of what he sees as a false logical integrity.19 Implicitly, he also calls into question the probity of typology in this area, arguing that discernment on a case-by-case basis is more properly Christian than allegiance to a neat academic model.20 A number of key typological questions or principles may be winnowed from this discussion. First, there is the question of whether or not a typology is an a priori logical device, and to what extent it corresponds with an empirical reality. This point was emphasised by Yoder in noticing how few theologians were able to be neatly slotted into Niebuhr’s typology. Related to this is the extent to which the variables selected are terms or concepts that are discrete and agreed, given the consternation that greeted Niebuhr’s use of the categories of Christ and culture. A further consideration is to what extent the typology is, as


Niebuhr himself recommends, a device that offers understanding not evaluation. Whether or not a typology could ever be ‘impartial’ is a moot point, but Yoder’s frustration with Niebuhr arises largely from his perceived dishonesty than from his partiality, suggesting that typologists might profit from making plain their underlying assumptions or biases. Finally, the criteria for the evaluation of any typology are important. Apart from the practical ‘test’ of face validity applied by Yoder, there are the theological ‘tests’ that have been applied to Niebuhr, in scrutinising the theology implied in his typology and its argumentation, and biases or gaps such as the role of the church in this instance. One could argue that to start and stop with this typology would be adequate in examining as ‘cultural’ an activity as capitalism. However, a consideration of this typology alongside other such constructions provides a richer basis for comparison than could be achieved by looking at any one typology on its own. John Cobb Writing in 1959, Cobb established a typology that was intended to redress the imbalance he had noticed creeping into theology whereby the emphasis seemed to be more on the doctrine of man than the doctrine of God. For him, the two doctrines together comprise theology proper, but while theologies about the doctrine of man are illuminating, he was concerned that they were suffering from a variety of underlying ‘unarticulated assumptions about the nature of God’.21 His typology was therefore intended as a corrective, offering a way of thinking about the doctrine of God in particular. His typology examines the three ‘characteristics’ of God he sees as existing in tension, and which give rise to three contrasting theological emphases. His chosen characteristics as to the essential nature of God, without which the word ‘God’ would be inappropriate, are absoluteness, personality, and goodness. These in turn produce his three types: the Absolutist, Personalistic and Process theologies. His Absolutist type starts from the position that God is utterly free from all that limits man, such that he in no way changes or is changed and exists outside time. This gives rise to a theology that emphasises our inability to articulate the changelessness of God except through the medium of language, which is too human and changeable a device to be able to be literal. This means that all positive affirmations about God can only be symbolic, and that a posteriori arguments for God’s existence are similarly suspect and provisional. Adherents of this type


of theology may be mystical or Gnostic, because for Cobb our lack of knowledge and our transience in the face of God’s absolute reality and timelessness renders humanity somehow less real or possibly unreal, pointing towards a salvation that is out of this body and out of this world: ‘the “real” self which must be timeless, cannot be the empirical self and cannot ultimately be differentiated from timeless reality generally or from God’. This position has something in common with Niebuhr’s Christ against Culture type, in that it leaves the world behind. In critiquing this position, Cobb notes the contradiction between it and a Biblical account showing God purposefully acting in time, and he notes the problem of justifying religious symbols in a worldview that regards them as fundamentally illusory. The most serious challenge, however, is the philosophical one. If God is absolute yet historically revealed, faith is required to trump reason in order to resolve this paradox. Cobb concludes: ‘If then faith must affirm strict contradictions in one area of thought over against reason, all use of reason even to define its own limits would appear suspect from the point of view of faith, and no limit seems in principle possible to the claims of faith, however obviously they may contradict human experience and scientific knowledge.’22 In contrast, Cobb’s Personalist type attributes to God those higher characteristics present in human experience such as consciousness, intelligence and purpose. These similarities allow the believer to address God with the confidence of being in communion with a spirit that is vastly superior to, but somehow reminiscent of, ourselves. That these are ascribed characteristics based on human experience of them Cobb sees as inevitably assigning some degree of temporality to God, in that any concept of these characteristics that was outside of time would be so ‘wholly other’ as to make it otiose. The Personalists therefore differ from the Absolutists in this key aspect of temporality. This ‘both/and’ position is rather like Niebuhr’s mediating Christ/culture types. Cobb’s logical critique of this position is similar to that of a critique of realism, in that there is no proof either of the literal existence of God or man such that it can be claimed with certainty that they may hold traits in common. That this uncertainty requires faith to be held tentatively pending proof renders it precarious, unless it succumbs to the mysticism and relativism of the empirical argument from experience. Moreover, doctrines such as the Trinity and the Incarnation are unlikely to make sense for Personalists, making them unorthodox, and they have no defence against the problem of evil. These challenges inevitably push this type either towards an insistence that this is in some way the


best of all possible worlds, or to a position that God’s power is in some way limited.23 Cobb introduces his third type, Process theology, to answer the charge that: ‘if God is no more than an unknowable “wholly other” or an inference for which some probability is claimed, then man may be excused for turning elsewhere’. The result is an approach that defines God as ‘the trans-human source of human good’, such that goodness is God’s distinctive characteristic and evil cannot therefore be the expression of his will and power. This means that the task of theology is to describe those processes whereby God brings about good in order to indicate how humans might fruitfully relate to them.24 Where it seeks to ‘baptise’ latent evidence of God’s work in the world, this type might resemble Niebuhr’s Christ of Culture. Cobb’s major critique of this position is that it does not satisfy the demands of personal communion because it fails on the same grounds as those previously, in that its appeal to ‘good’ is philosophically vexed. Moreover, in this view: It seems that God must be either a scattered group of events connected only by abstract resemblances or else he must be the abstract pattern exemplified by such events. In the former case we may desire that similar events occur again, and, while they are occurring, we may submit ourselves to their influence; but it would seem that they would be regarded inevitably as means to our ends rather than as objects of religious commitment. In the latter case they can awaken only the kinds of attitude appropriate to abstract possibilities. In other words, it seems doubtful whether God as characterised in this system can in fact function as object of supreme devotion for more than a small number of persons, except when associations with other uses of the word God not warranted by this approach are transferred to it.25 In proposing these three types, Cobb traces the Absolutist perspective back to Greek intellectual influence and the Personalistic perspective to Scripture, noting that these two set up what was for Kierkegaard the supreme paradox of faith. He regards continental Europe as favouring the Absolutist approach, America as favouring the Personalist approach, and Britain as occupying a position somewhere in between. Writing in 1959, he forecast in America a move towards the Process approach, although it had not then in his view taken off abroad. In offering his typology, he is careful to note that in spite of their difficulties all three of the approaches ‘solve problems’. He is however keen to improve


their mutual dialogue by offering ‘a sharp delineation of their opposed presuppositions [that] should conduce to intelligibility’.26 Cobb was of course instrumental in developing and progressing process theology in America but, as with Niebuhr, it is his typology itself and not his theology that will be pressed into service here. Apart from Cobb’s own critique, a presenting issue is his emphasis on God at the expense of any commentary on the particularity of Christianity, rendering his position essentially Theist. He justifies this by arguing that while all theology must be ‘bipolar’, by which he means centring on a doctrine of man and a doctrine of God, he regards subjects of Christology, soteriology and ecclesiology as ‘methodologically secondary’, because they rest on assumptions about God that need to be surfaced first. Paul Jones In 1989, Jones identified five ‘theological worlds’ within Christianity. Each world is a style of meaning-making about human existence, wagered on God, which acts as an orientation for life. Based on extensive research and experimentation, albeit in a solely Protestant context, in each case they are characterised by a differing obsessio (dilemma) attuned to a contrasting epiphania (resolution). Jones’ typology is interesting in that it is the first to be considered that relies on empirical socio-psychological evidence and not on a priori categorisation.27 His first world is called Separation and Reunion, in which authenticity is questing in the face of an overwhelming cosmos cloaked in mystery. Characterised by Romeo and Juliet as its tragic form on the one hand and Odysseus as its comedic form on the other, its worldview is about alienation and longing, such that its spirituality is about contemplation and its theology is about coming home. Christ is therefore a Revealer or Evoker, a guide to take the Alien to the place of reunion and to reveal the truth. His representative modern theology to illustrate this rather Gnostic world is Neo-liberalism, as exemplified for him by Tillich and Dostoevsky.28 In the second world, of Conflict and Vindication, the central dilemma concerns history as chaos, characterised in tragedy by Beowulf and in comedy by Don Quixote. This worldview is outraged by Fate, and feelings of oppression drive rebellion and conflict to deny it dominion. The Warrior therefore seeks a Christ who will be the Liberator or Messiah, and who will ‘change the truth’ by triumphing over death. Spirituality is therefore about intercession, and theology is preoccupied with a thirst for justice, making God take sides to guarantee a victory. Liberation


Theology, as rooted in Barth, would be Jones’ representative theology for this world.29 The Outcast lives in the third world, of Emptiness and Fulfillment, struggling with the possibilities for the unfulfilled self. Characterised by Hamlet or Parsifal, this world needs Christ to be a role model, and theology is about belonging. Being a more passive form of world two, in this world the outcast feels the ache of impotence and worthlessness, and has only their own lack of perceived significance to blame – they are invisible, somehow empty and not there. The task of theology is therefore to provide the tools for the Outcast to ‘become’, often involving a journey of self-discovery through meditation and suffering towards wholeness. Jones selects Process Theology to illustrate this world.30 The fourth world is characterised by Condemnation and Forgiveness, whose path passes through ‘the valley of the shadow of guilt’ and is characterised by Faustus or King Lear. Born into indebtedness and marred by Original Sin, the Fugitive is damned by his conscience to be more than his animal nature, and is seeking expiation. While the world conspires against integrity, there is a restlessness for morality within it. The diseased soul needs the threat of hell to avoid giving in to its Freudian nature, but there is no hope without a confession of the need for atonement, and epiphany comes through brokenness. Christ is the Redeemer who will reprieve the Fugitive through adoption. Theology is centred on the Cross, and is likely to be rich with themes of human waywardness, demonic forces and the divine gift of grace. Barth is also used by Jones to illustrate the theology of this world, which he terms Neo-orthodoxy.31 The final world, Suffering and Endurance, wrestles with an awareness that living means persisting on the edge of absurdity. Its tragic form is characterised by Oedipus, with its comedy being the endurance of Sisyphus. The Victim/Refugee feels overwhelmed by an incomprehensible world, where death is the only certainty. Being a more passive form of world four, suffering is central to this world, and is morally indiscriminate. However, through suffering dying becomes less alien and threatening, and suffering is the refiner’s fire that makes the victim stronger. In this world the dignity of enduring is paramount and the wisdom it brings is its own reward. Silence is the best response to the inevitability of life, and some solace may come from those who suffer alongside, sitting it out, waiting and lasting. If there is a God in this world, Christ is the suffering servant and the companion, and theology is likely to centre round themes of survival and integrity. For Jones,


Existentialism is the intellectual illustration of this world, as seen in the theology of Kierkegaard.32 Jones developed his Worlds model through his research into the ‘theologizing process’ of several theologians. He then spent five years experimenting with his model with over 200 Protestant seminary students and about one hundred pastors. His findings were further tested in one-to-one sessions with non-clergy professionals, then retested on further students and pastors and converted into an Inventory to help people to identify the world to which they belonged. Believing that ‘the aesthetic enterprise distils metaphors that promise a World’, he triangulated his typology with sets of paintings, music, literature, mythology and images to reach a deeper illustration of each type. His conclusion is that the ‘natives’ in each world will find dialogue with ‘foreigners’ frustrating, and that this leads to conflict of both a secular and theological kind.33 Jones’ typology essentially answers the question about why people believe, and in doing so suggests what they believe too. In the UK, Tim Jenkins’ ethnographic studies have asked a similar question, about why people go to church. His findings are suggestive of another kind of typological split. His studies shows that the underlying social motivation for church attendance is to do with ‘respectability’, which comprises ‘inner restraint and outward reputation’, established either via ‘public good’ in the mainstream or by ‘private honour’ towards the fringes. While both might be achieved by the ‘division of labour’ of occasional or associated attendance, the style of church will tend to attract one type or the other, with those whose respectability comes from the ‘private honour’ end of the spectrum most likely to make their own informal spiritual arrangements. While there are a huge number of ‘church’ typing books, whether they sort on sociological, cultural or churchmanship lines, Jenkins’ distinction is a particularly interesting one in a UK context.34 Returning to Jones, in looking at his typology one is struck with its resonance with psychological typology, and particularly the work of William Schutz. In 1958, Schutz developed a psychometric instrument to help people to understand their interpersonal orientation towards others, originally in the context of the US submariner community. His instrument synthesised a number of psychological approaches to examine three ‘fundamental’ types of interpersonal behaviour and what drives them. He suggests that, interpersonally, we will normally express those behaviours which we would like to attract back from others, so that each behavioural type has an ‘expressed’ and ‘wanted’


face. His behaviours are inclusion, control and affection, and they are driven by three matching preoccupations. Inclusion is driven by feelings related to significance, control by feelings of competence, and affection by feelings of loveability.35 Comparing Schutz with the typology of Jones, it seems that his first two worlds arise from a psychological preoccupation with competence. In the first world, the journey is towards enlightenment, such that the Alien finds the truth about the world, becoming ‘competent’ in it as a result. This suggests a leaning towards the kinds of structures of control that suggest competence, so Aliens may gravitate towards formal institutions that provide meaning or promise itineraries of discovery to accompany them on their quest, and to be seeking gurus, teachers or leaders who can help. This hypothesis would resonate with Jones’ analysis of Christ as the Revealer for this world. In the second world, the Warrior subdues the world around him, resonating with Schutz’s notion of expressed control, as a way of asserting the self over and against a recalcitrant world to feel competent (potent and victorious) over it. In the third world, the Outcast feels like they are melting away, which in Schutz’s terms refers to feelings of insignificance and of being overlooked by being denied inclusion by others. The Outcast longs for this inclusion, wanting it from others but feeling unable to offer it themselves, so is locked into a downward spiral by never feeling included enough to exhibit the kinds of including behaviours they want to attract back in return. The fourth world recalls Schutz’s notion of wanted affection, in that the Fugitive wants to be considered lovable in spite of the vicissitudes of their nature, as epitomised in this world’s yearning for divine grace and forgiveness. Schutz does not have a preoccupation that neatly maps to the final world, in which the Victim just soldiers on, except that a score of zero across all of Schutz’s categories might cohere with this passive profile. However, this framework suggests that there are likely to be at least two missing worlds in Jones’ typology. While Schutz examines the range of interpersonal preoccupations only, there remain two such expressions that are not yet covered in Jones’ worlds. These are the expression of inclusion and the expression of affection. Were there to be a world which was characterised by the expression of inclusion, the Mother might reach out to her fellow humans to nurture them, honouring their significance as part of creation. Theology in this mode would be about co-creation and the realisation of human potential within the divine order. Similarly, were there to be a world characterised by the expression of affection, the Lover might cherish her fellow humans, regardless of what they deserve,


and theology would be about unconditional love and the inherent goodness of creation. While these additional worlds are something of a conceptual construct, they serve to highlight a bias towards passivity even in Jones’ more active worlds, and possibly towards stereotypical masculinity perhaps via bias in his sample. Thus they suggest a particular anthropology implicit in his model which may repay further examination.36 Jones’ unusual model serves to suggest the importance again of a clear underlying construct, regardless of the persuasive nature of any empirical evidence that supports it. The danger with ‘sophistry and illusion’ is that it can have no basis in fact, but the danger of ‘evidence’ is that it imprisons knowledge in the data set of the day and the age. A further danger that arises from the use of any psychological typography within theology is that it can lead to a determinism that is in danger of denying free will, as well as privileging the epistemology favoured by that discipline to the exclusion of all other categories. Wesley Kort The most recent of the first four typologies, Kort’s typology identifies three varieties of Christian theology. Published in 1992, he starts by identifying six theological topics which in his view form the standard agenda of theological enquiry, and which were used to corral the commentators in the previous chapter: theology, Christology, ecclesiology, anthropology, soteriology and eschatology. He notes that theologians talk about all of these topics but from ‘differing bases’ which yield predictable results. He identifies these bases as being three discrete ‘discourses’, identified through the conflict that necessarily arises from the differences between them. The bases arise from three ‘meaning effects’ in theology, which he calls: ‘x’ – other world matters, ‘y’ – how these are mediated to/in this world, and ‘z’ – the human condition in this world. For Kort, a discrete theological discourse is a set of strategies to establish and defend the domination of one of the meaning effects over the other two.37 All three have to be there for a discourse to be ‘theological’, but the split in emphasis between them varies. These three ‘meaning effects’ produce his three ‘types’ or discourses by each being pre-eminent in turn: The two points must be made with equal emphasis: (1) in any theological discourse all three kinds of signifiers will be present; and


(2) in any theological discourse one of them will dominate the other two and deform them toward itself.38 For Kort, theological argumentation is not about individual theological topics, such as God or sin, but their proper relation one to another. Theologies that arise as a reaction to a particular political topic are therefore mistakenly partial and neglectful of this primary question as to fundamental relations. So for Kort, theology consists of three versions or schema concerning the ‘rightness’ of a particular set of relations.39 He then sees conflict as a causal factor in theology, as well as the inevitable by-product of it in that the act of defending and maintaining one emphasis over the other two necessarily requires their denigration, reinforced through narrative and ritual.40 This produces Kort’s mutually exclusive typology, such that, if x is pre-eminent, the theology will prioritise other world matters (the Prophetic type); if y, it will prioritise mediation (the Priestly type); and if z, it will prioritise the human condition (the Sapiential type).41 As well as explaining the inevitability of religious conflict, Kort uses his typology to explain why resolution or any type of ecumenism is impossible.42 For him, an overarching ecumenical theology cannot exist, in that any attempt to identify such a scheme would result in hopeless abstraction: This more inclusive theology would likely become a kind of creedal fetishism or abstraction of symbols. It projects onto what is derivative the status of the fundamental and sustaining. … A theology that stands above the dynamics of differing discourses avoids the need of having or choosing a starting point, and it thereby deceives itself by the lure of an Archimedean privilege.43 Battle can therefore only be suspended if spokespersons of all three kinds agree to defer to some other discourse (for instance, free speech, or the need for a united response to a common threat), although Kort thinks this compromise yields description rather than theology. He further notes the general theological tension arising from ‘the immunity of Christian theological discourses from and their vulnerability to general language categories and theories’, as well as the tension between their dependence on and independence from the very dynamics of discourse.44 In brief, Prophetic discourses have as their ‘hidden premise’ the ‘primacy in power, meaning, worth, or being of what lies beyond human understanding and control’. They are characteristically ‘theological’ in


style, using the language of transcendence (the supernatural, the divine, the eternal, and so on) with care, and are loath to compromise other worldly matters by domesticating them. This makes them wary of ‘particular forms or occasions by which the divine is accessible to human approach’ and empiricism, because it relies on this-world analysis of human entities and events.45 In contrast, Priestly discourses assume that ‘forms or occasions’ of divine presence in the world provide the starting point and the primary focus of theology. For Y theologians, what can be said about the world or about God must logically derive from such ‘forms and occasions’ where they meet. In Christianity, the primary focus of such theologians is Christology, the Bible or the Church, as representing tangible ‘data’ about God and the world.46 The Sapiential discourse starts instead with ‘the needs and potentials of the human world’. Abhorring the ‘life-denying obscurantism and privatization’ of the other two types, Z theologians will naturally gravitate towards theological anthropology and soteriology, and make particular use of the Wisdom literature. Within this type, Z theologians may differently value the world, being optimistic or pessimistic in orientation, and Kort sees them displaying three different foci: a focus on the natural world, a focus on spirituality, or a focus on human diversity and how best to reconcile human communities.47 Kort is unusual among these typologists for his insistence on the inevitability of conflict. Jones admits the possibility but does not make a feature of it, and conflict is not central to the understanding of the types of Niebuhr or Cobb. While Kort is rather dramatic on this point, he is supported by a compelling weight of scholarship regarding the theoretical inevitability of conflict arising from religious differences. Apart from theories of mimetic desire, research on interpersonal differences and ingroup/outgroup social identity behaviour suggests that the more ontological the difference, the more it is likely to be perceived as a personal attack and to provoke an emotional reaction. This reaction affects the cognitive faculties, making ‘reason’ harder, such that escalation is a natural outcome. This perhaps makes him more realistic than the other typologists in understanding what is at stake when one articulates or creates a worldview typology.48 In some ways, Kort’s typology includes those of Niebuhr and Cobb. His ‘other world matters’ or Prophetic type is like Cobb’s Absolutist mode and Niebuhr’s Christ against Culture. His ‘how these are mediated to/in this world’ or Priestly type is like Niebuhr’s median types with their combinations of the Divine imperatives of Christ and nature, and


resonates with Cobb’s notion of the Personalist type. Kort’s ‘human condition in this world’ or Sapiential type is similar to Cobb’s Process type, and akin to Niebuhr’s Christ of Culture position. Jones’ typology would probably fit into Kort’s Sapiential type, with its emphasis on the human condition. The parallels are inexact, but that they resemble each other may suggest a harmonising logic in ‘worldview’ typing in theology.

Worldview synthesis All four typologies rest on a particular interpretation of the world, but they differ in the route they take towards their categories. Cobb starts with defining God, using divine properties to frame theological priorities. Niebuhr starts with Christ and uses his relation to the world to frame his categories. Kort also looks at the relationship between God and the world, and uses preoccupation with the other world, with the human condition, or with mediation between them to derive his theologies. Jones starts with individual Christians, examining their belief systems to surface immanent theological trends about the nature of the world. This mixture of typologies, all seeking to use fundamental interpretations of the way things are to explain theological type, can itself be set out as a typology, using Kort as a template. Thus, topologically, the geography of worldview theology splits into three regions, leanings or biases: God

Between

Kort

Prophetic

Priestly

Sapiential

Cobb

Absolutist

Personalist

Process

Niebuhr

Christ against Culture

Three Median Types

Christ of Culture

Jones

World

Five Worlds

The three types are divided into those in which God is the chief concern, those in which the world is the chief concern, and those in which mediation between the two is the chief concern. In the context of Christian typology, Christ as the archetypal mediator is of particular relevance in the middle category. These typologists talk about priorities rather than exclusive focus, so there is inevitable blurring across the columns. Nevertheless, the three columns bear family resemblances to each other which are suggestive of a common underlying logic. This grouping exercise can therefore be used as a useful gathering point to


assess topological progress and to draw out typological lessons learned for the next stage. This tabulation has already begun to leak into the realm of manner or style, or the how of theology, which will be the governing concern of the next set of typologies to be considered. Meanwhile, what can be seen from this crude categorisation is that the worldview in each case will tend to suggest a stylistic or methodological range. These may overlap, and types may resonate with each other across the categories. For instance, a bias towards a view that focuses on the world and the human condition might favour indigenous human reason as its best sense-making tool, but so might a view that focuses on the transcendent God, albeit using different philosophical tools. Revelation might well be considered more important than reason for those favouring the ‘between’ focus, but reason might be considered to be revelation by the other two, or at least a necessary tool for making sense of it. An analysis of these worldview typologies suggests that future efforts should observe a number of protocols. First, the type labels used should be as precise as possible to prevent confusion. Theological or philosophical terminology may assist, provided it follows standard usage. Whether the type displays itself as an a priori logical device or an empirically wrought construct, in each case the underlying beliefs and assumptions informing the segmentation – whether theological, anthropological or cultural – should be clearly stated. As appropriate, the categories should be related to suitable evidence or examples to prove the concept. That Niebuhr himself seemed unable to offer a typology that aided understanding without offering evaluation suggests that as a criterion impartiality becomes subterfuge. However, this principle suggests that the typologist should at least be careful to state their intentions in developing their typology and the use to which it is to be put. Additionally, the type will need to demonstrate its credentials as a Christian typology or as a typology of theism in general, and to be clear about the sorts of truth-claims being made. For example, David Tracy has identified a range of standard verification models displayed in recent theologies, spanning the correspondence, coherence, experience, disclosure, praxis/ transformation and consensus approaches to truth-claiming.49 Where a typology borrows from a particular academic tradition (such as the social sciences), the typologist should be careful to note that tradition’s assumptions throughout so as not to inherit unwitting bias. Lastly, the typologist should be careful about the scope for conflict that may arise in creating a typology, as well as the fundamental provisionality and inexactitude of an exercise which is designed primarily to be useful rather than ‘true’.


Etiquette types A second type cluster could be termed the ‘etiquette’ group. Each of these typologies establishes theological type according to method or approach. After Langdon Gilkey, Kelsey would call this type as a whole ‘theological methodology’, or ‘something a theologian does to solve a problem he faces in getting started at doing theology’.50 ‘Style’ might be another term, but ‘etiquette’ is concerned with normative social conventions and behaviour and as such provides a useful frame for the governing preoccupation of this type of theology. In general, the etiquette typologists sort by ‘discipline’, often borrowing from the academic categories of the arts, sciences, and social science. In contrast to the worldview types, their governing preoccupation is not about versions of reality, but about how theological languages and disciplines relate to non-theological ones, particularly in the public arena. Broadly, there are four typologies that follow this pattern, which are considered in chronological order below. David Tracy In his 1981 book The Analogical Imagination, Tracy argues that, in the face of pluralism, a new theological strategy is required, to ‘avoid privatism by articulating the genuine claims of religion to truth’. This strategy he calls the ‘analogical imagination’, because he holds that ‘each of us understands each other through analogy or not at all’.51 In service of articulating these religious claims to truth, Tracy notes the fundamentally public nature of theology and identifies its three ‘primary publics’, namely society, the academy, and the church. He contends that these publics call for three types of ‘distinct but related’ disciplines in theology, such that the academy is addressed through ‘fundamental’ theology, the church through ‘systematic’ theology, and society through ‘practical’ theology.52 While the three vary in approach, they share two ‘constants’, in that all theologies seek to interpret the religious tradition, and to interpret the religious dimension of the contemporary situation. This commonality provides the basis for shared discourse amongst theologians, about whether or not a given approach accurately analyses a given situation, and about whether or not a given situation has a religious dimension that requires a theological response. Specifically, the three approaches differ in their view of what constitutes a public claim to ‘truth’ in theology.53 First, Fundamental Theology, which addresses itself primarily to the academy. In this mode, truth claims are adjudicated through philo-


sophy or another established academic discipline. Established rules of argumentation are therefore used both to explain and to justify religious truth claims. Thus, ‘the word “public” here refers to the articulation of fundamental questions and answers which any attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible person can understand and judge in keeping with the requirement for fully public criteria for argument’. Here reason is primary and personal faith or beliefs are neither ‘warrants or backings’ for publicly defended claims to truth. Tracy identifies Augustine, Aquinas and the Scholastics as particular exemplars of this theological tradition.54 Second, Systematic Theology, which addresses itself primarily to the church. For Tracy, the Systematic Theologian’s major task is the reinterpretation of the tradition for the present situation. In order to guard against idolatry, and to provide a vantage point from which to make its universal truth claims, theology in this mode is unashamedly and distinctively Christian, and does not hesitate ‘to begin with its own inner history and reflect upon its own special occasion or illuminating event as the properly self-evidencing reality of its real foundation’. Because this mode requires ‘constant mutually critical correlations’ between the classical tradition and contemporary experience, the Systematic Theologian has a public role as the hermeneutical expert in a particular genre of the cultural classics, reinterpreting their ‘truth’ age by age. Tracy regards H Richard Niebuhr’s book The Meaning of Revelation as an exemplar of this theological type.55 Tracy’s third type is Practical Theology, which addresses itself primarily to society. This mode regards truth as ‘authentic subjectivity’, tested by ‘whether one speaks the truth by doing the truth’. Theology cannot therefore be divorced from the praxis of the theologian, who must evidence some form of authentic personal involvement and/or commitment. Thus, Practical Theology is characterised by concern with ‘concrete intellectual, moral and religious praxis of concrete human beings in distinct societal and historical situations’. Its tools are therefore unapologetically historical and socio-scientific in order to ensure the accuracy of its diagnosis, in that in this mode ‘praxis is theory’s own originating and self-correcting foundation’. Political and liberation theologies are representative of theology of this type. Tracy notes that one particular virtue of this sort of theology is that in shifting the focus from theory to praxis it shifts attention away from the preoccupations of the Christian intellectual over a crisis of cognitive claims towards the ‘social-ethical crisis of massive suffering and widespread oppression and alienation in an emerging global culture’. In noting this virtue, he warns of its corresponding vice, lest praxis become ‘fact fetishism’ or uncritically mediated practice,


or criticism be dismissed as infected by ‘foreign’ ideologies or ad hominem condemnation of the relevant theologian.56 Tracy notes that the types are distinctive in five regards: their ‘public’, their mode of argument, their emphasis in ethical stance, their selfunderstandings of the theologian’s personal faith or beliefs, and their formulation of what primarily counts as meaning and truth in theology. He uses ‘Aristotelian’ keywords to convey the essence of the activity, and uses the device of the true, the beautiful and the good to explain their focus with regard to the religious or holy.57 These differences can be tabulated thus: Fundamental

Systematic

Practical

Type of Public

Academy

Church

Society

Mode of Argument

Public discourse via formal reason

Tradition-telling and retelling

Praxis drives theory not vice versa

Ethical Stance

Loyalty to academic standards of enquiry

Loyalty to the religious tradition

Solidarity with specific practitioners

The Theologian

Independent

Committed believer

Committed believer

Meaning and Truth

Academically accepted categories

Hermeneuticians of accepted truths

Praxis-based, prophetic and transformative

Key Concepts

Dialectic, metaphysics

Rhetoric, poetics

Politics, ethics

Focus

The True

The Beautiful

The Good

While this tabulation serves to highlight the differences between the types, Tracy denies that they automatically conflict. Rather, he wagers that ‘to change the more global analysis of conflicting “types” or “models” for theology to a proposal for distinct sub-disciplines within theology will lead to clarification of the real and the merely apparent differences among existing proposals for theology’. His hope is that his proposal for complementariness ‘would validate a general analogical pluralism on the spectrum abstract-concrete as distinct from an eclecticism or a univocal monism’, so that dispute can be limited to necessary


conflict rather than mere misunderstanding, and the most appropriate tools accessed for its resolution.58 While his typology is treated first for chronological reasons, it is a robustly-argued and influential one. In particular, it usefully highlights the ‘public’ or audience as a key variable in determining theological mode, and identifies the two ‘constants’ which in his view underlie all theology: the interpretation of the religious tradition, and the interpretation of the religious dimension of the contemporary situation. A further variable he introduces is that of the faith position of the theologian, not only in terms of the truth claims being made, but also in terms of the credibility of the theologian as a messenger for those claims. One gap would appear to be a type lying somewhere between the Fundamental and Practical types. It would still have ‘society’ as its audience, but it is a theology that is more apologetic than exhortatory in style. Neither does it adhere to quite the rigour or protocol demanded by the academy, in that it is the mode of theology that seeks to explain (or interpret) the religious tradition and the religious dimension of the contemporary situation in the indicative but not the imperative mood.59 In this way it could be considered a sub-type of either of these two Tracy parents, having a different flavour depending on the faith position of the theologian involved. One way to tease out this nuance is to recall the typology employed by James Gustafson, identifying four varieties of moral discourse: the prophetic, narrative, policy and ethical. ‘Prophetic’ discourse tends to condemn current failures and exhort believers to realise a utopian vision. ‘Narrative’ discourse uses stories to sustain traditions. ‘Policy’ discourse is a pragmatic mode seeking to identify possible ways forward in a pluralistic social setting; while ‘ethical’ discourse involves rigorous moral argumentation, self-critical reflection and intellectual respect for diverse points of view.60 In this analysis, there is a difference of intent that determines the difference in genre and methodological toolkit. Thus, while Tracy’s Fundamental theology is likely to make most use of ethical discourse; his Systematic, narrative; and his Practical, prophetic; there may be a further style of ‘apologetic’ theology that is akin to Gustafson’s policy discourse. While this further style might not be quite as sophisticated as evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, it is at least adapted to make it accessible to the proverbial reader of The Sun newspaper. Contemporary examples of this mode are to be found in the variety of theological responses that have been offered to the public in the wake of the huge popularity of books by Dan Brown, Philip Pullman and Richard Dawkins. More generally, a segmentation of Tracy’s publics


– elevating his typology to a taxonomy – would serve as a useful test of his primary categories. As well as the apologetic or exhortatory intent or segmentation that suggests the sub-division of the Fundamental and Practical types, his Systematic mode could also be sub-divided. In this case, the Church already has a convenient sub-division that could be used, which brings to the surface a key elision in Tracy’s typology. While orthodoxy may well correspond with orthopraxy, they are different categories, and as above would be deployed differently in the indicative and imperative moods. A broadening of this category to include these emphases and moods shades in to Tracy’s Practical type, but is still firmly addressed to the Church and not to society at large. The distinction Tracy makes between the Fundamental and Systematic is also problematic, in terms of the faith position of the theologian. In Fundamental theology, Tracy holds them to be independent, which renders the Systematic subordinate to the Fundamental as regards ‘the true’. This would appear to assume the primacy of reason in the court of theological law, and does not accommodate disagreement within the Church between believers. This position is a defensible one but does suggest an implicit hierarchy or ordering of the types which Tracy does not explicitly own, whereby the Fundamental acts as the ‘licence to operate’ for the other two. It also assumes a mode of reasoning where faith can be ‘shelved’ for the purposes of clean ‘public’ argument, another assumption that would appear to require justification.61 George Lindbeck In 1984, Lindbeck set out his three approaches to theology in order that he might contextualise and promote the third in particular, in service of more effective ecumenical dialogue. He posits three comparators: propositional truth, symbolic efficacy, and categorical adequacy, and renders each as a distinct type: the cognitive-propositional, the experiential-expressive, and the cultural-linguistic.62 The first type, the cognitive-propositional, emphasises the cognitive aspects of religion, stressing ‘the ways in which church doctrines function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities’. In this mode, religion behaves as a philosophy or a science, and represents the traditional orthodox or ‘fundamentalist’ approach. This type is somewhat similar to Tracy’s Fundamental academic type, except that for Tracy the theologian would appear to need to be seen to be more independent in this mode than for Lindbeck. Popular champions of this type in the last century for Lindbeck would be GK Chesterton,


CS Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge, although in his view the type has now been challenged by history and by science – and by the ‘deobjectification’ of religion and doctrine – and has lost ground to the second type.63 This second type, the experiential-expressive mode, interprets doctrines as ‘noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations’. In this mode, religion behaves like an aesthetic enterprise, and religions are seen as ‘multiple suppliers of different forms of a single commodity needed for transcendent selfexpression and self-realization’. Religions become possible sources of symbols ‘to be used eclectically in articulating, clarifying, and organizing the experiences of the inner self’, and the type is future-proofed by its feeling of perpetual ‘relevance’. Represented for him by Bernard Lonergan (and indeed Tracy), Lindbeck regards this type as being particularly congenial to liberal theologians, and notes that its ready marketability makes it attractive to theologians, ministers and teachers of religion. He does, however, query its ready acceptance of the universalisability of religious experience. This type is at the same time identical and opposite to Tracy’s Systematic church type, depending on the viewpoint of the observer. Seen from without, Tracy’s type would indeed be one experiential-expressive religious stall amongst many, while from within it, Lindbeck’s type would appear too subjective and individualistic in feel to conform to Tracy’s orthodoxy.64 Lindbeck’s preferred type is the cultural-linguistic type, which emphasises the resemblance of religions to languages and cultures, that is, as parallel idioms ‘for the construing of reality and the living of life’, or, in Wittgenstein’s parlance, a ‘language game’. If the experiential-expressive type privileges the formative nature of the inner world, the culturallinguistic type reverses this to privilege the formative nature of the outer world, through language and culture. Church doctrines are thus used as ‘communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action’. This is much closer to Tracy’s understanding of his Systematic church type in terms of its internal integrity, although again, from the outside, it will appear to others less ‘true’ by comparison with other religious ‘games’ than it feels to an insider. Indeed, Lindbeck notes that a problem with this type, in comparison with the first two, is its fundamental relativity, in that the first two admit ‘truth’, even if the second type approaches it indirectly, and are more transcendental in their orientation. Additionally, the prosaic and worldly origins of languages and cultures make this type ‘suspiciously secular-looking’.65


For Lindbeck, his third type acts as an ‘enlarged narrative’ which can be used to harmonise the first two and to turn the horizontal logic of his typology into the vertical logic of a taxonomy. Thus, the cognitivepropositional becomes ‘abiding doctrinal grammar’ and the experientialexpressive ‘variable theological language’ within a cultural-linguistic language game called Religion. Additionally, he casts his typology in historical terms, rendering the three methodologically in sequence preliberal, liberal and post-liberal.66 This sequencing allows him to speculate on their relative cultural attractiveness, where he awards the experiential-expressivist ‘liberal’ mode first place, given its ability to act as a unifying element in an individualistic but pluralist and divided world. However, he argues that the post-liberal cultural-linguistic mode has the most potential, in that it mirrors interdisciplinary developments in preferring intratextual description to apology, making it best suited to dialogue in a post-Christian world. In commending the cultural-linguistic approach, he notes that ‘those who think that religions are more the sources than the products of experience will regard a loss of religious particularity as impoverishing, while others will consider it enriching’. Although it may look ‘secular’ and relativist, he argues that of the three it is best placed to honour the position that religious utterances only become ‘real’ ontologically when their correspondence is established through ‘performance’, in the playing out of the language game which unites cognitive-propositional objectivity with experiential-expressivist subjectivity.67 This distinction in theology between potentiality and actuality will be revisited later on in this chapter. Lindbeck’s typology is compelling. It acts as a typology, a topology and taxonomy all at once, and its pragmatic focus renders it particularly suitable for the ecumenical goal he has in mind. Lindbeck serves to contribute the key variable of stance to this exercise, in that, when compared with Tracy, the respective positions of the theologian and the ‘public’ being addressed in each case becomes important as a way of understanding how their typologies vary. While his neat mapping of the three types across a temporal spectrum is perhaps less persuasive, it does serve to identify the importance of the intellectual context in which the theologian is operating, which is again an important point of etiquette to facilitate the involvement of theology in interdisciplinary dialogue. He also considers the notion of ‘attractiveness’ which is a step towards the segmentation of ‘publics’ suggested above, the better to hone the tools of theological communication to greatest effect. Unhelpfully, Lindbeck’s categories make an ontological assumption which may limit their purchase. In his taxonomy, the cultural-linguistic


language game called Religion sub-divides into the cognitivepropositional ‘abiding doctrinal grammar’ and the experientialexpressive ‘variable theological language’. This commits the relativism he abhors in the liberal approach, rendering the construct a container of truth as opposed to the communication of an ‘external’ absolute of some kind. His self-critique admits this, dismissing it with a version of the argument that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, but his resulting position is (knowingly) weakened thereby. It strengthens the apologetic competence of theology at the expense of its exhortatory potential. Lindbeck does not therefore have a type that corresponds to Tracy’s Practical societal type except in its indicative mood. Malcolm Brown has argued against this sort of ‘neutering’ in his defence of Dialogic Traditionalism.68 Generally, Lindbeck’s typology works best as a taxonomy, tactically because it smuggles into any dialogue the other two types by default, and logically because the difference between his experiential-expressive and cultural-linguistic types is not otherwise wholly convincing. His logic rests on an inner/outer world distinction which introduces as variables the subjective/objective category without applying these to his cognitive-propositional type which privileges objectivity. This brings to the surface an epistemological assumption about the cognitivepropositional type which again may not stand scrutiny if, as he intends through dialogue, theology in that mode is subject to critique through the lenses of other disciplines. This problem is however resolved by his conversion of the typology into a taxonomy, which neatly relativises the objectivity of the cognitive-propositional approach. Hans Frei Edited after his death in 1988 and published in 1992, Frei’s typology of modern Western Christian theology was to have provided a ‘conceptual orientation’ for a larger (unfinished) historical project about the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in England and Germany since 1700. His concern in producing his typology was to avoid the oversimplification of the use of a spectrum (like radical to liberal) or the insufficiently encompassing use of a range of ‘responses’ (such as theological outlooks on science and culture). As a starting point, he identifies three aspects of Christian theology, which he calls first, second and third-order theology. First order theology is essentially Christian witness, including the confession of specific creeds (a bit like Lindbeck’s experiential-expressivist type and perhaps aspects of Tracy’s Practical societal theology). This relates to but is distinct from second-order theology, which endeavours to bring


out the rules implicit in first-order statements (a bit like Tracy’s Systematic church type and overlapping slightly with Lindbeck’s cognitivepropositional and cultural-linguistic types). The witnessing and the rules that inform it – the ‘speech’ and the ‘grammar’ – then become the subject of third-order theology, which seeks to place these in context, generally to explain to outsiders how they relate to other kinds of ruled discourse (a bit like Tracy’s Fundamental academic type and related to Lindbeck’s cognitive-propositional type).69 This understanding of the three ‘layers’ of theology allows Frei to separate formal Western theology into two contrasting views or emphases: a top-down emphasis on ‘philosophy’ or a bottom-up emphasis on ‘grammar’. He argues that these distinctions arise a priori from the fact that the truth claims of theology suggest theology is both praxis and theory. Since the knowledge it provides is deemed necessary for salvation, the relationship (if any) between ‘the faith which is believed and the faith by which we believe’ throws up this essential distinction between the objective and/or existential categories of theological language.70 In the first ‘philosophical’ view, Christian theology is viewed as an instance of a general class or generic type, and can therefore be subsumed under general criteria of intelligibility, coherence, and truth, alongside other academic disciplines, to which it submits. This pure type corresponds with Tracy’s Fundamental academic type. In the second ‘grammatical’ view, theology is an aspect of Christianity and is therefore ‘partly or wholly defined by its relation to the cultural or semiotic system that constitutes that religion’. In this view, theology is religion-specific and is explained by Christianity rather than vice versa. Christian theology thus comprises the formal statements and proclamations of Christian practice and belief, and the Christian community’s appraisal of its own language and actions against these formative statements within the norms of the Christian community. This type corresponds with Tracy’s Systematic church type. This split between philosophy and grammar also maps on to Lindbeck’s division of his cultural-linguistic mode into the cognitive-propositional and experiential-expressivist sub-types.71 Frei uses a range of relationships between philosophical and grammatical theology to generate five ‘types’, which he illustrates in each case via a leading proponent.72 His first type he calls theology as a philosophical discipline, in which the academy takes priority over Christian self-description and philosophy is the foundational discipline. In this type, exemplified for him by Gordon Kaufman’s Essay on Theological Method, the task of the theologian – as meta-physician – is to search out the rules governing the use of the word ‘God’ as the organising


focus for a whole vocabulary. This renders Christian self-description subordinate to the larger meta-physical project, in that its ‘sectarian’ self-understanding is accountable to external description arising from the general enquiry into ultimate meaning.73 In his second type, theology is still a philosophical or academic discipline, and philosophy is still primary, but it takes the specificity of Christianity more seriously, fusing the external description with the internal description into one foundational philosophical scheme. Frei suggests Tracy’s Blessed Rage for Order as an exemplar of this type, insofar as he defines theology as philosophical reflection on human experience and the Christian tradition. In this type, Christian ‘fact’ is correlated with common human experience, as two autonomous sources of theological reflection, to determine mutual compatibility.74 Type three renders equal theology as an academic enterprise and as Christian self-description, in that they must correlate and neither has primacy over the other. He regards Schleiermacher as an ambiguous proponent of this type, represented in his Outline of Theology and The Christian Faith. Even Schleiermacher does not fit neatly into this typology, because Frei sees him as arguing against the primacy of philosophy as the overarching discipline of the previous two types, viewing it primarily as a useful quarry for definitions, criteria and language. Thus in Schleiermacher’s version of this type, academic theology itself needs to correlate with philosophy (and other academic disciplines), and in turn with Christian self-description, as well as with external descriptions of Christianity as a phenomenon.75 Frei’s fourth type holds Christian self-reflection as having priority over academic theology. Using Barth, he illustrates this type through the introduction to Church Dogmatics, where Barth states that theology is a function of the Church because the Church is accountable to God for its discourse about God. However, while self-reflection is primary, philosophy still has a place, as a servant to theology in furnishing it with a ‘draw-down’ vocabulary, more as an ad hoc translator than as a systematic explicator. Within theology as self-description, Barth holds the what to be primary to the how, in that the logic or grammar of the faith is itself primary to how that faith is expressed in Christian living. In this way, the internal ‘philosophy’ of Christianity (its formal theology) is primary to its lived-out self-expression.76 This use of philosophy, either externally or internally, is banished by the fifth type, here epitomised for Frei by DZ Phillips. For him, meaning cannot be grasped apart from context – to ask a question about the reality of God is to ask a question about a kind of reality that can only be


accessed from within the context of that reality: theology as ‘inside talk’. Within this inside talk, authoritative statements or systems act as maps of the territory or keys to unlock internal meaning, but they have no meaningful external reference. He therefore rejects what he sees as the prejudicial philosophical craving for generality, although he admits philosophy’s usefulness in clarifying the complete distinctiveness of religion.77 Frei’s typology is extremely useful, not least because of its starting point in returning to first principles, based on how theology behaves, using the layers of first, second and third-order theology to derive his top down/bottom up dichotomy. Like Lindbeck, he offers a typology and a taxonomy, and contributes to a consideration of type the important notion of the end to which a given theology is being deployed. While this consideration was subsumed into the logic of the other typologies, Frei’s ‘layers’ lend it greater clarity here. Ironically, although he warns against the easy simplicity of a spectrum like ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’, one of his most helpful contributions is his philosophy/grammar spectrum or continuum, along which his five types range. In addition, he usefully warns against opportunistic approaches to theology that produce a range of ‘responses’ to presenting issues but are not ‘sufficiently encompassing’ or convincingly logical in their construction.78 Frei is also useful for his contextualising of the intellectual tension between philosophy and grammar in an extended treatment of theology in the university. Using the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 to throw the issue into sharp relief, he uses the design principle of Wissenschaft (which he renders ‘an inquiry into the transcendental principles justifying all systematic method and explanation’) to discuss the probity of including theology either as a sub-set of philosophical education or as professional or practical training. This ongoing professional wrangle is why Frei finds it comparatively easy to create a typology, simply by arranging it around answers to the issue to produce what he thinks should properly be termed ‘a typology of theological professionalism’. This may account for the fact that many popular typologies, almost as a professional courtesy, tend to split type along epistemological lines. Given this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that Frei’s typology is again, like Lindbeck’s, more indicative in mood than it is exhortatory.79 A further contribution arises from Frei’s harmonisation across the divide by way of his definition of theological thinking as ‘a conceptual skill governed by practical aims’. This definition strikes at the heart of Frei’s dilemma about theology as theory and/or praxis: is theology when described by one who inhabits its worldview (the theologian) different


from theology when described by an onlooker (the social scientist)? Thus he echoes the relevance of Tracy’s variable of the theologian’s belief (in addition to their intellectual context), in that where the theologian might see faith, the philosopher sees only meta-physics, the psychologist the transpersonal, and the social scientist, cultural anthropology or the sociology of religion.80 David Ford reviewed Types in 1995, having hosted Frei for the 1987 Edward Cadbury Lectures which formed part of the material edited into the 1992 book. While he identifies a catalogue of avenues for theological critique, Ford remains appreciative of Frei’s contribution in establishing a typology that served to expose the latent theological assumptions in key contributions to the field. In the ‘hospitality’ of his typology’s ‘respectful description and respect for self-description’, Ford credits Frei with having made dialogue between theologians and between belief systems a good deal less fraught.81 Rowan Williams In the Prologue to his 2000 publication On Christian Theology, Williams set out his ‘typology of theological voices’, in part to explain why the ‘register’ of some of his chapters might appear ‘unstable’, given his various public and academic roles. Loosely based on Schleiermacher’s typology of preaching in The Christian Faith (the poetic, the rhetorical and the ‘descriptively didactic’ or scientific), he intended it to clarify the interaction between the types, as well as their status as provisional tools which, when used together, facilitate ‘the delivery of believing utterances’ in an arena where the ‘methodology’ can never be wholly clear. His is again a three-fold typology, of theology as Celebratory, Communicative and Critical, largely influenced after Tracy by the ‘public’ to whom it is addressed. Using the analogy offered by Mike Higton, Williams’ Celebratory mode is like using the mother-tongue in the home. His Communicative mode is like using a second language to enable international communication, while his Critical voice steps back to examine the grammar and the functioning of language itself to ensure that it is in good repair for the task in hand.82 Williams describes his Celebratory ‘voice’ as the rich and selfreferential ‘jargon’, familiar in hymnody and preaching, which is most often used to communicate truths with a ‘public’ of fellow converts. As such, it can appear unintelligible to outsiders, but is ‘an attempt to draw out and display connections of thought and image so as to exhibit the fullest possible range of significance in the language used’. This voice is similar to what Frei calls ‘first order theology’. In his


second mode, the Communicative voice, theology can be seen explaining, persuading or commending its truths to others using rhetoric borrowed from ‘uncommitted environments’ in order to address an uninitiated ‘public’. Examples would be the use of Aristotle and Plato, Marx or other ‘indigenous’ intellectual idioms in order to be better understood abroad. Equally, such colonising of ‘foreign’ constructs can be used to shed further light on the theology in question. This voice is like Frei’s third order or philosophical theology, albeit with a communicative rather than a primarily self-reflective bent. It is reminiscent of a mixture of Tracy’s Fundamental and Practical types, and akin to the act of deploying Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic taxonomy. His third voice, the Critical, involves theology ‘nagging at fundamental meanings … alert to its own inner tensions or irresolutions’, unselfconsciously questioning the very constructs of the Celebratory and Communicative modes. This type naturally tests and/or renews the other two, particularly in the face of novelty or innovation, and is most commonly encountered as ‘philosophical theology’. This mode is like Frei’s second order theology, when it is not only explicating but challenging the grammar of the first order, and like Tracy’s Fundamental mode when it is ranging over his Systematic and Practical types in order to check their health. It is also a version of Lindbeck’s cognitivepropositional type, again where it interfaces with the content of his other two. Unlike these types, it does not cede to philosophy or other ‘external’ disciplines for defence or criticism, but uses them as critical friends to test the integrity of theology in its own terms.83 In identifying his typology Williams is at pains to describe it as an exercise in ‘displaying modes of arguing and interpretation’ rather than in advancing a single system. While typically sparse and understated, he encapsulates in a few pages what it takes Tracy, Lindbeck and Frei a book apiece to accomplish. This deceptively simple typology usefully points up the key variables identified above: the public being addressed, the faith context, the relative stances of the parties, and the end to which the theology is being deployed. Where it does not reach Frei is in explicitly flagging the intellectual context, or Tracy in defining a mode that would take his Communicative voice beyond explication by employing some of the flavour of the Celebratory to influence and persuade. He offers his typology to explain the interaction between the types as well as their different flavours, and he does this by suggesting that the three operate in an essentially ‘restless’ relay, with each taking a turn when the preceding type gets tired. Honouring this team dynamic, he warns that to form them into a hierarchy would be to misunderstand the way theology works.84


Beyond the elegance of the model, the introduction of the notion of the ‘Celebratory’ usefully captures the more ‘active’ feel of this type of ‘first order’ theology and, like Lindbeck’s experiential-expressivist mode, is in contrast to the passivity of Tracy’s Systematic type or Frei’s grammar. His metaphorical distinction between speaking a language and maintaining it is also an efficient way to encapsulate much of the intent of Tracy’s Fundamental, Lindbeck’s cognitive-propositional and Frei’s philosophical theology, although these vary slightly amongst themselves, often shading into Williams’ Communicative mode in their intention. Because the occasion of his typology is to make sense of his own writings, the underlying logic or guarantee about its deployment is in this case himself, so his typology is silent on whether and how the faith of the theologian affects the theology deployed. Admittedly, Williams is clear that his categories do not represent ‘an advance towards an ideal form of fully self-conscious reflection’, but clarity on this point would be particularly helpful in understanding the hand-off between the Communicative and the Critical modes. The distinction between them, expressed by Tracy as the independence of his Fundamental theologian, lies at the heart of much of the current debate about public theology. Whether or not theology is fixing itself from within or without returns the discussion to the core debate about the fundamental relationship between theology and philosophy and the status of theological language.85

Etiquette synthesis The messiness of this comparison serves to recall the dangers of neat categorisation while demonstrating degrees of agreement and difference in mapping the terrain. If these four appear to fit into the ‘etiquette’ post-code as previously defined, their addresses remain discrete. Comparing these typologies, from different countries, traditions and contexts, a number of variables have emerged as requiring accommodation in any topological mapping. First, the public being addressed will affect the theological mode. Whether or not the public is part of the theological tradition will also affect register, as will the beliefs and the intellectual context of the theologian. Whether the parties believe in subjective or objective truths will have a bearing on the theological discussion,86 and the purpose of the discussion will affect the mood of the theology deployed and whether it is in the active or the passive voice. As Lindbeck puts it, the aim of concepts is to remove anomalies,


so the delineation between types, the etiquette of their deployment and their interrelationship must also be clear. A bit like a scatter graph, these variables appear to home in on a few fundamental areas that can be accommodated in a simple framework. This is because the modes naturally cluster according to context, in that the style of theology adopted adjusts according to audience and scope. From the analysis above, it appears that one useful distinction is between modes of theology concerned with thought or belief and modes of theology concerned with being or action, for convenience doxy and praxy. This division particularly honours the variable of intention, in that the purpose of a given theology will affect both style and content. The use of doxy and praxy in this context merits further explanation. Aristotle’s classic notion of potentiality and actuality is useful here. Using the example of language, Aristotle argues that there is a difference between not knowing Greek, knowing Greek, and speaking Greek. In the first instance the person involved is in a state of sheer potentiality. When they first learn Greek, they enter the stage of ‘first actuality’, in that they have realised their potential to learn the language. This first actuality, though, still constitutes a state of potentiality unless the person decides to exercise their ‘rational powers’ and decide to enter the ‘second actuality’ of speaking Greek. This property of potentiality is therefore a person’s capability to undergo change. Thus, a split between doxy and praxy suggests the transition between potentiality and actuality, between knowing theology and performing theology in everyday life.87 A second distinction adds the variable of mood. Mood has already been mentioned as a variable in type, and it is a particularly useful lens for examining the ‘etiquette’ category. David Ford’s book Christian Wisdom opens with a confession about his having been surprised by the theme of ‘cries’ in his latest research. In examining these cries, he explores their moods: indicative, imperative, interrogative, subjunctive and optative.88 More generally than Ford’s five, in linguistics mood is split into two groups, realis and irrealis. Realis moods relate to things that are the case (for instance, things expressed in the indicative mood), whereas irrealis moods relate to things that are not the case, either because they will never be the case or because they are not yet the case (for instance, things expressed in the subjunctive mood).89 In the typologies considered, the indicative mood is the most commonly employed. The imperative creeps in to Tracy’s Practical societal type, and would undoubtedly be employed in Williams’ Celebratory mode. The interrogative is also likely to feature prominently in the critical ‘philo-


sophical’ theologies identified. However, given the varied worldviews at play in the audiences being addressed, the notion of irrealis moods is a particularly useful one. This allows a more general segmentation according to belief, a variable particularly identified through an analysis of Tracy’s typology. In an ‘irrealis’ type there would be conditionality, either because the audience did not share the same faith, or because the ‘backing’ of faith was being – at least nominally – suspended for the purposes of philosophical scrutiny. Of course, irrealis types could also be used to exhort (as opposed to dictate) changes in behaviour, whether among the faithful or more generally, but in all irrealis cases the theological style would be designed to persuade not just to inform. Thus, both the doxy/praxy and realis/irrealis distinctions suggest possibility. One possibility is the use of theology to encourage a change from knowing to doing or from doing to knowing. Another is the use of theology to convert irrealis to realis by word or deed, or to convert realis to irrealis in order to persuade. Segmentation along ‘mood’ lines would accommodate the four ‘etiquette’ typologies as follows: Realis

Doxy

Praxy

Irrealis

Systematic

Fundamental

Celebratory

Critical

Cognitive-propositional

Cultural-linguistic

Grammar

Philosophy

Practical

Practical

Celebratory

Communicative

Experiential-expressive

In order to accommodate the range of variables identified, this segmentation requires an accompanying rule of use. While it accommodates the notions of publics, belief and purpose, the segmentation does not yet help to define the terms of theological interaction. This is because it assumes all theologians are chameleons, and assumes too much homogeneity within the irrealis mode. To mobilise this segmentation, the theologian first needs to establish the parameters of the interaction by deciding which ‘squares’ are involved in the dialogue. If the dialogue crosses the categories of realis and irrealis, particular care needs to be taken in order to ensure that the message is correctly communicated. This is because the divide crosses an ontological boundary


and introduces a level of uncertainty that does not pertain within the realis sphere and vice versa. For example, the realis/irrealis boundary is the one where a number of the theologians examined switch to a ‘secular’ language like philosophy or ethics in order to be better heard, particularly when their audience does not share their faith. If the dialogue crosses the categories of doxy and praxy, the person of the messenger becomes primary as a warrant for the authenticity of the message. In this instance, the theologian will need to establish their credentials more formally – using an epistemology favoured by the target audience – before delivering their message, to ensure it seems to be a credible one.90 This graphical representation immediately reveals a bias towards theologies that focus on right thinking (potentiality) rather than right doing (actuality), although Williams’ Celebratory category spans both. Arguably, Frei’s notion of ‘grammar’ could also relate to praxy, mirroring the Celebratory category directly. This is likely to be an occupational hazard of a focus on academic etiquette, but is noteworthy nonetheless.91

Taxonomical criteria The intent of this chapter was to examine a variety of typologies in an attempt to distil out of them a set of taxonomical ‘markers’ or criteria. The typologies were mapped around the two poles of ‘worldview’ and ‘etiquette’ according to the family resemblances of their central thrust – what David R Mason has called the substance and the method of theology respectively. An overarching taxonomy would need to offer a harmonising logic to conjoin these poles, and there are a number of informal ‘typologies’ of religion that would need to find accommodation within such a scheme. This survey has not included analysis of theology by region or sector or by churchmanship, nor has it explored the ‘specialist’ theologies such as the feminist and liberation theologies and other hermeneutical categories, neither has it examined doctrinal distinctions between denominations and traditions. A properly useful taxonomy would need not only to include the categories of type explored here as being those ‘higher up’ the taxonomic tree, but also to accommodate these other strands or clusters in its vertical logic. These theologies then act as test cases for the taxonomy, which should ideally have the predictive power to suggest any lacuna or gaps that might repay exploration. Dulles distinguishes between ‘explanatory’ and ‘exploratory’ models, where the latter has the capacity to lead to new insights. This taxonomy attempts to be both.


The beginnings of a taxonomy have already been established through the identification of the two poles of worldview theologies and theologies of etiquette, which suggest two fundamental criteria for analysis. However, a prior logical split concerns an assumption embedded in the worldview cluster, of shared belief in God. In the etiquette cluster, this assumption is made in the person of the theologian, and asymmetrical belief is catered for in a number of the theological approaches specified. Using Frei’s terminology, this is likely a result of a natural ‘reversal’. Shared belief allows Frei’s first order theology to be primary, with second and third-order theology likely to be of more passing or academic interest, for example, periodic discussion over the ordination of women. However, where belief in God is not shared, the assumptions that support firstorder theology cannot be gainsaid, rendering necessary a revisitation of third order issues to establish the credibility of second and first-order issues in turn. Looked at through the other end of the telescope, it is predictable that modern theological discourse in a plural context should be characterised by a preoccupation with etiquette, because of a concern on the part of the believing theologian not to be duplicitous or dishonest.92 While the debate begun in Tracy about the necessarily public nature of theology runs on, because all theology is ‘words about God’ there is a third-person flavour to the discourse, lending it an objective slant that invites scrutiny. While the person of the theologian has already been discussed and is a critical variable, the variable that arguably shapes discourse most is its intended audience or target – Tracy’s ‘publics’. Above his three-fold split into the academy, the church and society is the fundamental differentiation between shared belief and asymmetrical belief. Given the working assumption that theology is directed in some way, this split provides the overarching taxonomic logic, not least because it dictates the kinds of warrants and backings that are likely to characterise the discourse thereafter. This logic suggests a primary taxonomic split about belief, and a secondary split concerning worldview/etiquette. By way of illustration, the specimen typologies can be grouped according to this logic, firstly whether belief is shared between theologian and audience, then by worldview/etiquette type. For example, the typologies of Cobb, Kort and Jones, and Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture type, would cluster under the shared belief/worldview umbrella, joined there by hermeneutical or sector theologies, churchmanship or denominational theologies, theological movements such as Radical Orthodoxy, and any other theologies that address the substance of a believer’s belief. In this context, a theology directed at existing members of the Church of England designed to


articulate orthodox thinking on capitalism would reside in this theological family. An example of this – duly caveated – might be the chapter on money in the Doctrine Commission’s report Being Human. Next, theologies which address fellow believers but concern the etiquette or style of the theology rather than its content, such as Lindbeck’s ExperientialExpressive or Cognitive-Propositional types, Williams’ Celebratory or Critical types, Tracy’s Systematic type and Frei’s Grammar type. Other theologies fitting this categorisation would be theology as drama and Ford on mood, or any other theology that concerns the how rather than the what of theology conducted within the community of shared Christian belief. In discussion about capitalism, any theology that sets out a methodology for engaging with the subject belongs to this family. An example of this in the sources on capitalism might be the discussions in Preston about middle axioms and in Atherton about the use of theological ‘fragments’ to address contemporary ‘challenges’. Strictly speaking, Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism would not belong here, because it is designed for use in an asymmetrical belief setting. The middle axiom approach however does belong, being designed for church use, albeit with one eye on exterior credibility. The types of theology represented here addressed to those who do not share a belief in God – generally the academy or society – are most commonly concerned with etiquette and procedure, as has already been noted. Lindbeck’s Cultural-Linguistic, Tracy’s Fundamental and Frei’s Philosophy types primarily address the academy, while Williams’ Communicative type addresses society. One could argue that the latter is designed for apology and finds itself straddling the etiquette and worldview categories here. Theologies of capitalism that focus on the rules of engagement in asymmetric belief contexts belong in this family grouping, with Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism being the exemplar. Theologies in an asymmetrical belief context that privilege ‘content’ are only here represented by Tracy’s Practical type. More generally, it appears that worldview types that assume shared belief are redeployed into asymmetric belief contexts when the need arises, appropriately rendered to appear palatable, and primarily with apologetic intent. Although Tracy’s Practical mode is designed to function both apologetically and dialectically, there is otherwise a gap in the dialectical area, which in this context would be a theology of capitalism that is interested in secular insight, challenge and correction. After Tracy’s Practical theology, perhaps the middle axiom approach might sidle into this sphere, where the use of ‘secular’ experts provides the necessary self-criticism. Better examples might be drawn from engagement with transpersonal psychology,


the field of ethics, or the current popularity of the concept of happiness as an avenue of enquiry. While the lack of ‘secular’ theologies is logically predictable given the typologist’s customary assumption of belief, if the lack of typologies in this area correlates with any lack of theological activity there, this assumption may be unnecessarily restricting the reach of theology. Assuming the faith of the theologian in question (without which the theology instead becomes sociology, anthropology, psychology, metaphysics or ethics), this type asks the question, how is God revealing himself to ‘unbelievers’ outside the influence of formal theology and the churches?93 The classic goal of mission would be to move people ‘out’ of this type through conversion, making it important not to rely solely on those theologies that already assume belief and thus beg the question. All systems of thought rely on belief of some kind, so the challenge for theology in this area is not relevance so much as intelligibility, hence the importance of modes such as Williams’ Communicative one.94 While this may seem to be ‘forcing the grid’ in the face of warnings against so doing from the likes of Jenkins and Yoder, it is likely that this is a gap not of activity but of nomenclature and orthodox attention.95 One example of this in relation to capitalism is the modern spirituality movement. Often held in suspicion by the Church and condemned by the Academy for its apparent shallowness, the modern workplace is a growth area for spirituality.96 In this context, the fate of Industrial Mission provides an interesting case study. Industrial Mission was originally conceived as a project to uncover the work of God in ‘steelworks and railway yards’, to discover how God might be spoken of in the lives of largely unchurched working people. It then evolved from a ground-up teasing out of latent theology (an approach reminiscent of Jenkins’ Description) into a more traditional apologetic sector ministry. Brown has discussed this more completely elsewhere, but the retreat of Industrial Mission from its original remit has created a vacuum others have been quick to fill with ‘New Age’ and other quasi-religious spiritual substitutes.97 It may be that this is an area theology could fruitfully rediscover, given the methodological approach pioneered by Jenkins, and Quash’s notion of Redescription which resonates with Wells’ analogy of ‘over-accepting’ from the practice of theatrical improvisation. Historical examples of this tradition of ‘baptising’ the indigenous are legion, whether it is St Paul in Athens, St Patrick in Ireland, Patristic rebranding of classical philosophy, or Liberation Theology’s appropriation of Marx.98 The taxonomic splits concerning belief and worldview/etiquette look promising, particularly given their ability to house the specimen


typologies, and to predict a gap that might repay exploration. However, the criterion about belief raises a further question, linked to audience and mood, concerning the difference in discourse where belief is asymmetrical. This is a distinction that Elaine Graham et al – after Tracy – have called the apologetic and dialectical strands. In their usage, a distinction is made between apologetic witnessing, whether tempered for intelligibility or not, and the dialectical mode, in which theology stands open to secular insight, challenge and correction.99 This suggests that, where theology is delivered into a context of asymmetrical belief, while there may be a natural bias towards theologies emphasising method rather than content, the theologies in question should distinguish whether they are in ‘transmit’ or ‘receive’ mode, flexing mood accordingly. Thus, a respectful worldview theology in this vein is likely to be attended by qualification, demonstrated through changes in mood, and characterised by a higher proportion of questions to statements. This observation suggests the inclusion of a taxonomic criterion about mood, drawing on the earlier realis/irrealis discussion. Finally, the categorisation of etiquette theologies flagged the important distinction between theologies concerned with doxy and those with praxy, providing the last two criteria for a discussion of Church of England views. The purpose of this chapter’s excursion into taxonomy was to suggest criteria to facilitate a critical examination of Church of England views on Capitalism in the period. The exercise examined how theology typically ‘behaves’ through the lenses of a variety of theological typographers. From the meta-analysis of type, it should now be possible to apply the taxonomic criteria to the variety of theologies that are discernable in the Church of England views considered, to discover the range of theologies employed. Looking topologically and taxonomically, the range of theologies can be examined qualitatively and quantitatively, to produce a picture both of Church of England biases and/or blind spots, and of the integrity of each set of theologies employed. The criteria identified function as the ideal against which Church of England views on capitalism can be measured, on the assumption that the more comprehensive a theology or set of theologies is on a given topic, the more the Church can avoid being wittingly or unwittingly biased or partial. Thus, the test criteria are: • To what extent a given theology knowingly addresses both shared and asymmetric belief contexts • To what extent a given theology articulates a worldview • To what extent a given theology attends to methodological etiquette


• To what extent a given theology attends to Christian doctrine • To what extent a given theology attends to Christian praxis • To what extent a given theology flexes mood, with particular reference to audience and intent In the next chapter, these six criteria will be applied to the material considered in the preceding chapters to arrive at conclusions concerning Church of England views on capitalism in the period.

4 Critique of Church of England Views

Introduction The first chapter examined Church of England views on capitalism through the lens of General Synod. The second chapter expanded the field to include the published views of individual members of the Church of England, both ordained and lay, academic and commercial. Together they represent the canvas of Anglican opinion in England on capitalism in the period. The third chapter examined how theology typically ‘behaves’ through an examination of a variety of theological typographies. The chapter used a meta-analysis of type to generate a taxonomic framework of six criteria to function as a device against which Church of England views on capitalism can be measured. This final chapter will examine the material considered in the preceding chapters in the light of these criteria, looking first at Synod then at the commentators in each case. It will conclude by identifying those areas where additional theological resource would strengthen the Church of England’s ability to engage in the economic debate.

To what extent a given theology knowingly addresses both shared and asymmetric belief contexts Tracy and the other ‘etiquette’ typologists have argued for the importance of what marketers might call ‘audience segmentation’, and what Biggar might call ‘courtesy in dialogue’.1 Where a given audience is identified, theology can be ‘translated’ to become intelligible. At the taxonomic level, audience can be segmented into those contexts where the theologian’s beliefs are shared and those where they may not be. Within the Church of England, General Synod has a formal role in 134

Critique of Church of England Views 135

speaking both to the Church (shared belief context) and beyond (asymmetric belief context). As laid out in the Synodical Government Measure 1969, one of Synod’s formal functions includes: ‘to consider and express their opinion on any other matter of religious or public interest’. Customarily, this role is formalised in the rubric employed in Synod motions, where Synod addresses audiences in turn, most often the relevant Committee or Church body, then dioceses and parishes, and ‘the Government’ as the proxy responsible for the population in general. A typical example of this in the general area of economics and social policy might be the Private Member’s Motion on gambling passed at the February Group of Sessions in 2008: That this Synod, gravely concerned that the total national spend on gaming has risen in each year over the past four years from £4 billion to £40 billion: (a) endorse the public opposition expressed by Church leaders to the introduction of regional and large casinos, and encourage local churches to participate in local authority consultations on plans for new casino applications; (b) declare its support for programmes of education, research and treatment undertaken with the aim of checking the growth in problem gambling, and request the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to invoke the powers granted by the Gambling Act 2005 to introduce a statutory levy on the gambling industry to fund such programmes; (c) call upon Her Majesty’s Government to monitor the addictive effects of fixed-odds betting terminals and to seek an international framework for a code of conduct on internet gambling; and (d) call upon the Mission and Public Affairs Council to report back to Synod by February 2009 on measures being taken by the Churches to combat the detrimental effects of gambling in various forms.2 Scrutiny of motions passed during the period shows no radical departure from this formula. A review of the 67 substantive motions passed in the period showed that 35 of them contained a direct appeal to Government; 27 were directed to a mixture of the Church of England in general or the dioceses and parishes in particular; and 20 were directed to a Synod Board or Council. The clearer motions are tightly worded to specify audience and desired message, while others are more general. The process of amendment during debate contributes to this variability.


Where the audience is an internal one (shared belief), Synod appears to assume that they will familiarise themselves with the relevant documentation, latterly through the website, except where a report has been circulated at diocesan or parish level, or where a study guide of some kind has been produced. Formally, the structures enable a spontaneous cascade down from General to Diocesan to Deanery Synod and into the parishes. Where the motion addresses an external party, normally the government or a specific company (asymmetrical belief), the practice is for a letter or press release to be despatched, and subsequently copied to Synod. Scrutiny of these letters shows that the message communicated tends to be the fact of the vote and the wording of the motion without any of the supporting theological argumentation. Additionally, the Church of England Communications Unit liaises with representatives of the press throughout groups of sessions, and uses press releases to attempt to control messages in the media, with invariably limited success. Thus, while Synod addresses itself both to those sharing its belief in God and to those who may not, it remains unclear whether and to what degree of clarity its messages and its reasoning – theological and otherwise – are in practice either received or understood. Neither does it appear Synod differentiates its message by audience, except where a specific press release or letter is produced by its staff.3 In the secondary material, many of the authors address fellow believers. Preston’s work addresses the Church, in an attempt to improve its level of economic comprehension. Higginson and Wright address the Christian business person, with Wright arguing for the extension of his message into the secular sphere through the language of a teleology of love. Green’s latest book was written for a more general business audience, although some of his argumentation assumes a degree of Christian belief. While the remaining sources are silent on audience, the assumption from the context would be that they address fellow Christians, because they assume acceptance of the precepts of Christianity. That they have chosen predominantly Christian publishers for their work is also suggestive.4 Where the context is one of asymmetric belief, in discussions concerning pluralism and public theology the material tends to talk about the context not to it, and will thus be accommodated for discussion under the criterion on etiquette. Behind the discussions about middle axioms in Preston, however, is an assumption of the importance of appearing credible in an asymmetric context, even if few of the authors considered attempt to address this audience themselves. For theology concerning capitalism in the Church of England to improve against this criterion, Synod would need to alter its practice


and/or standing orders to require specific and segmented communication of its messages, corrected for intelligibility, while commentators interested in addressing wider audiences could develop both approaches and content designed to communicate in asymmetric belief contexts, perhaps through ‘secular’ and more populist publishing.

To what extent a given theology articulates a worldview In this context, worldview and doctrine necessarily blur. Given the position of the theologian as by definition Christian, the Christian worldview as formally expressed in doctrine elides with it. For a nonbeliever these are distinct categories, or ‘meta-narratives’ in the parlance of post-modernity, and they become so for Synod because of the organisational distinction that separates its business into ‘doctrinal’ and therefore ‘non-doctrinal’ matters. Matters formally considered ‘doctrinal’ will therefore be discussed under the criterion relating specifically to that component of a Christian worldview termed ‘doctrine’, while ‘non-doctrinal’ matters will be considered here.5 First, General Synod. Worldview theology is that which pursues a particular mission or view of reality and, in so doing, offers an explanation of how God and the world relate. Any treatment of Synod’s views will inherently privilege this type, although Synod’s views might institutionally tend in this direction in any case, given the structural arrangement whereby Synod operates through propositional ‘reports’ and ‘debates’. That Synod’s worldview had to be assembled from the data already suggests room for improvement in this area. As has already been established, Synod’s implicit worldview as it relates to capitalism includes an assumption of Government intervention in the economy, state ownership of key assets, extensive use of regulation, state guidance for consumer choice, paternalistic private enterprise, trade protections and the use of state aid to alleviate poverty. While this worldview is not couched in theological terms, the beliefs informing it are highly theologically charged. The core beliefs underlying Synod’s worldview pertain to the status of secular authority as embodied in government and law, the proper response to personal or ‘structural’ sin, and the perennial question of who is ‘thy neighbour’. Each will be examined in turn. Government The first chapter showed Synod’s strong belief in – and seeming preference for – a paternalistic state. Looking deeper, this is linked to Synod’s preference for regulation but is slightly different in nuance. The


prevailing view, which links back to the notion of ‘structural sin’, was summarised by the Bishop of Worcester (Rt Revd Peter Selby) in the House of Lords during the October 2005 debate on consumer credit, in which he argued for government intervention to prevent the weak from entering into relationships that were unfair and/or not in the public interest.6 As has already been pointed out, a political preference for interventionist government – at least among ordained members of the Church of England – may also be indicated by Field’s data on clergy voting patterns that revealed a leaning to the left, although this cannot be considered a strong corroborator given general swings in popular opinion throughout the period. Politics aside, Nigel Biggar points out that even the ‘vital spiritual transformation’ desired in the report Unemployment and the Future of Work seems to be assumed to be the job of Government and not the Church.7 The lassitude which results in this gravitation towards government suggests an acute lack of confidence in the power of the church relative to that of the state. This is surprising, given that the demographics of the Church give it enormous strength as a lobby in its own right. According to the Church’s own statistics, nearly half the population in England regard themselves as belonging to the Church of England and the Church’s schools educate a million children a year. Church of England congregations give £45m to other charities every year, and undertake 23.2 million hours of voluntary service every month. Even without factoring in its structural power through establishment, its role as a major landowner, and its cultural role as guardian of a central thread of UK history, heritage and identity, the Church’s reach is substantial.8 Theologically, Synod’s understanding in this area could be enriched by sustained engagement with the ‘Powers’ literature.9 The Liberation Theologians and theologians such as Wink, Gorringe and Wilde assume that the Powers are demonic or at least colonised by evil. In the context of government as a Power, their thesis would be supported by Public Choice Theory, which explores how politics and self-interest skew ‘democratic’ decision-making, and by the mathematics governing collective decision-making which is not optimistic.10 However, these arguments assume a degree of psychological determinism that is open to theological challenge, and familiarity with this debate would help Synod to understand its own role as a Power as well as the role of government and other companion Powers. The Powers debate links with the debate amongst the commentators on the Orders of Creation, and the arguments made in that context about the nature of institutions. Of course, one charitable interpretation of Synod’s preoccupation with Government is to view it as


an attempt to correct the Powers rather than to cede power to them, although the lack of matching pressure on the Lords Spiritual to be more muscular in their role undermines this thesis. Regardless of preference, there remains a question about the effectiveness of government intervention. This question challenges Synod’s assumption that doing something (ideally through legislation) is better than doing nothing, which ties in with the notion of sins of omission and argues against the economic concept of laissez-faire enshrined in the much-criticised IMF/World Bank liberalisation strategies. However, this activism ignores the fact that not acting may sometimes be a legitimate choice. Pressing for action – in this case in the economic sphere – implies a model of certainty and causality that is by no means proven. In the matter of managing economies, the work of economists such as Paul Ormerod, using sophisticated modelling techniques such as nonlinear signal processing, has demonstrated the futility of intentioned government intervention, in that the complexity of the system militates against clear feedback loops, so the notion of government control over the economy and society can only ever be illusory. The most that can be expected is that behaviour can be mapped and explained – like rolling dice – but not predicted to the levels of safety required by the state. Ormerod argues that consumer activity is actually more influential than government action, so urging consumer action (for example, the Nestlé boycott and support for fair trade products) is likely to be more effective than Synod’s preferred habit of urging the government to act.11 The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has also questioned whether an economy characterised by government intervention is the most efficient economic model. He argues that the centralisation of the ownership of large amounts of capital hobbles the market such that the information that is the life-blood of a healthy market is not distributed beyond the civil service. This is because centralisation creates what he calls an ‘asymmetry of information’, and thus an imperfect market, which undermines the whole motivation behind government intervention, which is to make the market more ‘perfect’ in order to benefit the maximum number of people. He argues that a freer market is likely to lead to better outcomes because it leverages the collective wisdom of everyone involved in the global marketplace.12 Theologically, this requires a high degree of faith, hope and charity, not in the ‘market’ per se, but in the whole of humanity involved in the global economy, as well as a will to assist those who are excluded from it. It also argues for a more robust and direct engagement with the economy so that Christian wisdom is well represented in the information mix. In contrast, a paternalist model of state control – which


mirrors the structure of the Church of England – requires little effort beyond the ballot box. Law The first chapter highlighted Synod’s habits concerning laws and regulation. In considering the beliefs about law that give rise to these habits, there is the qualitative matter of the status of law per se, and the quantitative matter of its appeal as a universal panacea, whether independently or as part of government enaction. The supremacy of secular law is primarily a theological issue, while the frequency of its use as a tool is perhaps a more technical one, albeit in the context of a theological anthropology. To take the technical matter first, Synod appears to prefer law partly as a remedy for the sinfulness of individuals or businesses and partly as representing the best way to achieve desired societal outcomes. There are two technical challenges to this view. One concerns the efficiency of law as a remedy, and one its morality. In terms of efficiency, the charge is brief. While many Chicago School economists have argued thus, the view is neatly explained by Raymond Plant: The second problem involved in turning these ethical matters into ones of formal regulation is that it is more costly and inefficient. If there are internalised values of a non-self-interested sort, which constrain behaviour in the market, then it is arguable that this is a much less costly form of regulation than what would otherwise be a growing problem of the need for more and more regulation.13 In terms of morality, recourse to law as a proxy has been strongly criticised in other quarters, for instance over sweatshop labour used by ‘subsidiaries’ or off-shore providers in the garment industry. While the companies concerned may protest that, via myriad legal devices, their hands are clean, the consumer perception of the link nevertheless taints the brand, as the same companies could intervene to rectify the situation but do not – a classic sin of omission. A reliance on law also fails a classic test of true morality, as described by Gössling: ‘rational, extrinsically motivated behaviour and heteronomous rule following cannot be called moral. … This means that the behaviour of people who behave according to a given code of conduct is not necessarily moral because rule-following behaviour can take place without moral reasoning.’14 To return to the theological issue of the supremacy of secular law, Chapter 1 argued that Synod’s explicit reliance on secular law was


theologically noteworthy because it implicitly accepts the primacy of secular law, as exemplified in the rulings on the Bishop of Oxford case and that of Paul Williamson, and the Commissioners’ view of Parliament as their ultimate shareholder. Laying aside for the moment the central tension between church and state that lies at the heart of the creation of Church of England, it appears that this situation is by no means a recent development. Writing in 1914, Figgis offered a range of examples of the fundamental subjugation of church to state by way of its capitulation in law. While this was to have been ‘corrected’ by the delegation of ecclesiastical law to the Church of England in the creation of the Church Assembly in 1919, this autonomy has been handed back through actions such as the Bishop of Oxford case.15 That the role of secular law should be thus privileged contains an implicit acknowledgement of the powerlessness of ‘divine’ law as an alternative in this sphere, attesting to Synod’s acceptance of the Church’s waning influence in the wider world. This explains the need to legislate for – rather than merely to request – particular behaviours, as the State apparently has more coercive power than does the modern Church. As in the reliance on government, this would appear to concede a crucially important ecclesiological point without debate, about the general influence of the Church and its role in modern society, as well as about the role of trust, covenant and law in general.16 Sin As Hay has argued, much neo-classical economic theory assumes a fallen humanity motivated entirely by self-interest. This coheres with a strand in the psychological literature, popularised by Freud and others, that argues for a similar anthropology. As became apparent in the first chapter, Synod would appear to agree with this view, in that it is at pains to use the tools of Government and Law to save people from themselves by restricting their free will in their own best interests. The assumption seemingly underlying this view is that structures are less likely to be sinful than individuals, which is an interesting but unsupported claim. Behind the calls for protection lie two additional axiomatic concerns which are not explicitly addressed. The first is the lack of argument for engaging with the capitalist economy at all (particularly in the financial markets), and the second is the basis on which engagement should proceed. One exception is the EIAG’s theology of risk, which holds that ‘it is not a question of avoiding evil in order to maintain one’s own purity, but of being involved in order to do the best we can, under the guidance of the spirit of God’. And, while there


are some investments the Church should avoid in principle, ‘every company and every product is capable of ethical improvement’.17 John Hick has famously contrasted two historical approaches to the problem of evil: the Augustinian view and the Irenaean view. The Augustinian view holds humanity responsible for evil, having abused their God-given freedom as epitomised in the Fall. The Irenaean view regards the world, in Keats’ words, as a ‘vale of soul-making’, looking to the life to come for explanations as to the existence of evil.18 In this analysis, Synod would appear to favour the Augustinian position, in its enthusiasm for bulwarks against human sin. This is particularly noteworthy in the context of debate about capitalism, because the higher the degree of ‘marketness’, the more important becomes free will and wise choosing. For the citizenry in a capitalist market to flourish, their skills in this regard need honing, which argues for a more sophisticated account of modern human agency to be reflected in educational and public policy. Synod’s paternalistic view, coupled with the prevailing deterministic psychology underlying much economic thinking, is in danger of – albeit well-meaning – infantilisation. Who is thy neighbour? The most prevalent theological motif evident in Synod discussion on economics is the so-called bias to the poor. Seldom does Synod notice or discuss the inconsistencies inherent in their demand for economic protections both at home and abroad, and these issues tend to be covered in separate debates. On the one hand, in the trade justice debates Synod called for the developed world to refrain from protecting its own industries at the expense of those in the developing world, and to refrain from insisting that developing countries adopt nonprotectionist policies in return for aid, while on the other hand Synod argued for the protection of UK jobs in farming and mining. This raises the question about whether the neediness of a neighbour should be based on absolute measures of poverty, or whether it should be tempered by issues of proximity. In debates such as that on health in July 2001, Synod has a bias to the UK poor, which would appear to be reinforced by the inconsistency noted above. Synod’s position could therefore be strengthened by an explicit acknowledgement of this tension, as well as by formal consideration of the CAP and other first world subsidies and behaviours that are biased against the developing world poor. Given Synod’s preference for institutional solutions, and its periodic criticisms of the IMF, the World Bank and WTO, it is interesting that Synod has not yet involved itself in the debate about the


need for new global institutions to correct global market failures through co-ordinated regulation, taxes and welfare provision.19 This section has examined four aspects of Synod’s worldview: government, law, sin and neighbourliness. Next, a consideration of worldview in the work of the commentators. For them, doctrine and worldview blur more readily than for Synod. Because of the tradition in which they write, many of them do however acknowledge the academic niceties of the distinction, not least as an exercise in owning their own ‘bias’ where they are writing as an academic as well as a theologian. While the worldview of Synod is largely implicit and had to be distilled out of the material, the commentators tend to discuss their views on economics more directly. Their summary views can be clustered around the nature of ‘economic man’, the nature of markets, and the Orders of Creation. ‘Economic Man’ The commentators discuss humans primarily in terms of free will, desire and sin, against warring assumptions as to the condition of humankind as a species. As has already been argued by Sedgwick and Britton, Hay, Gorringe and Jenkins, ‘economic man’ paints a reductionist picture of humanity, both practically and theologically; and Synod’s reliance on Government to address many kinds of social ills exposes a similar working anthropology. However, an assumption in the marketplace of fallen humanity represents a serious theological challenge, even accounting for the weathering of economic theory to allow for ‘irrational’ decision-making, and the technical charge that much economic theory conflates the positive and normative. Behavioural observation occasions this axiomatic challenge, uniting discussion on free will, desire and sin, via certain determinist schools of psychology and through Hay’s is/ought confusion, because people routinely make selfish and sub-optimal decisions based on materialistic desire. That these decisions are ‘selfish’, ‘suboptimal’ or ‘materialistic’ is a matter of opinion and debate, but Atherton’s ‘challenges’ and the unwanted effects of capitalism as deplored by advocates of the poor arise from them. This suggests that paying theological attention to decision-making is important. The field of ethics provides traditional tools for this, through a consideration of the schools of deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics, suggesting that one remedy for the negative effect of market freedoms – as in the parallel case of free will – is to educate and prime the moral compass, such that it is not unduly swayed by manipulative advertising or other attempts at economic persuasion.20 Such training is necessary but insufficient, in that


ignorance about the market will still lead to sub-optimal outcomes, such that – after Stiglitz – a higher degree of information about markets and access to such information is also a necessary remedy. The nature of markets Commentator views on the nature of the market range across the spectrum more widely than within Synod, not only in terms of the temperature of their views, but also in the range of ‘capitalisms’ discussed. Some commentators like Gorringe and Wilde condemn capitalism out of hand, while others support certain types of capitalism, for example, those that meet Preston’s ‘goldilocks’ balance of ‘as much competition as possible and as much control as necessary’. As discussed, the commentators challenge a range of fundamental assumptions about the market, namely those concerning its utilitarian philosophy (Hay and Wright), the assumption of a zero-sum marketplace (Wright), the fixedness of its rules (Atherton, Gorringe and Jenkins), the neutrality of its operations (Hay, Gorringe and Jenkins) and its structural bias in favour of the powerful (Gorringe, Jenkins and Wilde). Jenkins argues that the financial markets in particular, given their use of credit and fractional reserve banking, should be recategorised as gambling and treated accordingly. Digging deeper, the governing tension here stems from what Ormerod might argue is a further category error, concerning the nature of markets, particularly in a globalised economy. Where the market is assumed to function like a complex machine, it makes sense to discuss ‘levers’ and ‘outputs’ and the equivalent of a control panel, but where the market is assumed to function like a complex adaptive system, it may make more sense to talk of motivation and steering.21 While this shift does not obviate the need to address the challenges brought forth, it does reframe the nature of the problem, suggesting more promising ameliorative avenues. For example, the now well-established literature on complexity argues for a deliberately modest approach to transformation, one interaction at a time, using the metaphor of culture to describe how systems can be gently metamorphosed through persistent and consistent actions.22 Axelrod’s work on game theory suggests likewise. His book describes a massive tournament of games, submitted by a wide range of experts from diverse disciplines, all designed to play the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma iteratively with one another. The tournament showed that by the onethousandth generation the co-operative game called TIT FOR TAT (be nice, punish a defection once, resume being nice) was the most successful and was growing at a faster rate than any other. He finds that in a system


of ‘games’ that includes a mixture of ‘nice’ and ‘mean’ ones, the nice games will prevail. This is because the mean games destroy the environment they need for their own success, while the nice games ‘train’ the environment such that everybody benefits, ratcheting up their individual efforts and acting as a defence against subsequent ‘invasion’ by mean strategies. What is particularly attractive about this finding, and Axelrod’s work to link it in with evolutionary biology, is that it suggests that individual and repeated actions in the marketplace can have exponentially positive effects. Axelrod’s analysis suggests that these effects are surprisingly simply won: What is most interesting is how little had to be assumed about the individuals or the social setting to establish these results. The individuals do not have to be rational: the evolutionary process allows the successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do the players need to exchange messages or commitments: they do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: the use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing.23 This discussion shades into the matter of the Orders of Creation. Meanwhile, there is another matter, flagged by Heslam, that offers a fruitful route to solution. This is the matter of externalities. The notion of externalities or ‘spillovers’ is the modern attempt to express what Polanyi called in the 1940s the market’s social ‘embeddedness’, properly those ‘costs’ (or benefits) not reflected on a company’s balance sheet, like environmental or social damage. The use of this device functions as a means to get round the classic ‘free rider’ problem as regards use of the commons, as well as to defeat Arrow’s impossibility theorem by using pricing to render externalities both measurable and comparable.24 Cynically, the device is also seen as a gambit to subdue everything beneath the narrative of value and price. Theologians such as Cavanaugh have taken up the theme of externalities, expanding it to include source, process and supply chain visibility, challenging Chicago School assumptions epitomised by Milton Friedman that price is the only information a consumer requires. In his book he describes the process whereby a steak ends up in the supermarket, arguing that more visibility of the process would change consumer attitudes.25 Recent media attention directed towards sweatshop


labour, school meals and battery farming has noticeably had this effect. While many BSR reports and speeches in Synod, particularly in the context of debt and fair trade, have used narrative to paint such pictures, this is a mode not often employed by the commentators, perhaps again because the audiences they tend to address are of the more ‘academic’ variety. Exceptions to this might be Higginson and Wright. However, the Church collectively could do more to seek and disseminate information about the wider economy, whether through narrative or direct reporting, particularly in the matter of both positive and negative spillover effects. In this way, given its unparalleled parochial and international reach, the Church of England would be uniquely placed to reduce the key power differential of asymmetries of information in the marketplace.26 Orders of Creation Perhaps it is surprising that the Orders of Creation should be so frequently discussed in the sources – not least because the concept is considered a Continental Protestant one rather than an authentically Anglican one – given that other preoccupations more traditionally identified with this field, such as usury and just price, do not. While it may simply be that Preston set the tone, another explanation may be that the Orders – the primary affective institutions – exemplify the key tension articulated above, the chicken-and-egg matter of the extent to which structures influence individuals and are influenced by them. Views on how best to resolve this dilemma inform the extent to which the various commentators advocate ‘social justice’, that is, using distributive mechanisms to effect structural change, and are in turn informed by the positions held above as to the nature of humanity, with those of a pessimistic frame preferring state action to a reliance on individual goodness. This links with the debate in the material about how best to restrain the powerful and succour the poor, with all of the authorities cited favouring a minimum level of redistribution, both domestically and internationally. There is a body of scholarship behind this one which may expand this debate. Given that the Orders constitute those primary affective institutions, the wider literature on institutions may assist. Within development economics, Douglass North is considered seminal in this field, and his work on institutions has recently been developed by Anthony Kasozi into a ‘taxonomy’ of institutions.27 After North’s ‘rules of the game’ definition, which reaches behind the puppet to its strings, Kasozi defines institutions as ‘socially established rules, or systems of rules, that systematically organise, enable and constrain all human beings and interactions


in a society’.28 He draws a distinction between institutions and mere influences (which might challenge Atherton’s inclusion of marginalisation) and describes four families of institutions: Language, which underpins and provides the foundation for all other institutions (see Sedgwick and Hardy’s argument for its inclusion as an Order); Explicit Institutions, which are public rules and systems of rules, like constitutions, laws and legal systems, decrees, money (see Being Human), conventions, codes, contracts and property rights; Implicit Institutions, which are those unwritten rules that are held commonly within a given social grouping, like a norm or a custom, some of which underpin many of the categories above; and Other ‘Complex’ Institutions, which vary in appearance and intricacy depending on the nature and complexity of the civil society in which they develop, like family, clan, organisation (see Heslam), market, state.29 His ‘taxonomy’ is Yoderian, in that his categories are not mutually exclusive and a given institution may resonate across the categories, but this classification opens up a far wider-ranging field than the traditional list of Orders, which it can also accommodate. Given the centrality of the role of the Church to many of these institutions, the potential for influence is huge. One elegant example of this potential was flagged in the February 2006 debate on EIAG’s annual report. The Revd Canon Dr Chris Sugden (Oxford) recalled that the 1988 Lambeth Conference had provided an opportunity for meetings to be arranged in London between the senior directors of Shell and the Nigerian bishops, to discuss the impact of their operations there. Shell argued that any compensation they offered would likely be siphoned off, so the bishops agreed to act as a channel to deliver benefit directly to the people in the affected region through schools and community groups.30 However, this being the cumulative picture of the extent to which Church of England theology in this field articulates a worldview, there are three traditional matters one might have expected to see raised: usury, just price and capital. Traditional concern about usury and just price does surface tangentially in discussion on debt and trade justice, and it could be argued that the fair trade movement is a modern reinterpretation of just price theory. While Harries summarily despatched the usury debate with his view that the Church’s traditional condemnation of usury was mistaken, recent interest in Islamic finance has reawakened interest in the usury debate. Specific engagement with these topics might provide further intellectual tools for critique. In particular, re-engagement with the just price tradition would resource accompanying debates about the national minimum wage, executive remuneration and bonuses, as well


as concern over parochial fees, stipend differentials, stipend levels and clergy conditions of service.31 Neither is there sustained discussion about capital itself. Capital as traditionally understood does not detain the sources. The morality of private ownership is assumed, even if theologians like Gorringe and Wilde would impose restrictions, and Synod is keen on progressive taxation. Where capital does emerge as a topic is in the context of discussion about varieties of capital. While in economics ‘capital’ is that which can be capitalised in order to generate wealth (‘the means of production’), in this context and without debate commentators like Heslam apply the term to a whole range of things: human capital, natural capital, social capital, relational capital, institutional capital, moral capital, spiritual capital, faith capital and religious capital. The motivation for this brand stretching is noble: as Heslam has argued, it permits the inclusion of externalities on the balance sheet. However, this unremarked move away from heritable property like estates and chattels like money towards these intangibles, without a discussion on ownership, property, rights and exploitation is careless, given the rich discussions on stewardship more generally. In parallel with sensitivities about the reduction of Christianity to one meta-narrative amongst others, and sensitivities about the commodification of the priceless, this assigning of economic value to such a wide range of things may be useful as a conscious missiological device but not as a somnambulant capitulation.32 Drawing together these sections on the worldviews of Synod and the commentators, a number of opportunities for improvement become apparent. For the Church of England to exhibit more balance in this area, more attention should be paid to alternatives to the default preference for state intervention and legislation as tools to change societal behaviour. This could be achieved through a more detailed understanding of institutions, and how change is effected in complex adaptive systems, including change within the Church itself.33 Given the role of Church of England schools in education, the Church’s educational policy and curriculum design may also have a significant role to play,34 and Synod is well placed to build confidence in the area of individual action by encouraging consumer activism amongst churchgoers. Synod may need to address the thorny issue of ‘the poor’ by revisiting the commitment to domestic subsidies, and, with the commentators, rediscover a less gloomy anthropology by challenging the ascendancy of certain schools of psychology which collude with a doctrinal bias towards fallenness. Building on systems thinking, including the com-


plexity and game theory literature, the Church – perhaps via the commentators – would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of market dynamics in order to recommend how best Christians can use their ‘votes’ to render the market more Kingdom-shaped.35 A refreshment of thinking by the commentators on property, usury, just price and ‘capital’ would also assist, as would more interplay between Synod and the commentators in general.

To what extent a given theology attends to methodological etiquette This criterion concerns the sort of theology which offers a method or style of approach, often borrowing method from the traditional academic disciplines of the arts, sciences and social science. While seldom discussed directly, the way in which Synod operates tends to favour the middle axiom approach. Christopher Wright, while looking specifically at the use of the Bible in Christian ethics, has usefully contrasted two traditional theological methods. The first – the inductive route – involves taking a specific issue as a starting point and coming to the Bible from it and with it. The second – the deductive route – involves working from within the Bible, studying in depth its narratives, laws and institutions, then moving out from these to see how and where they apply to the range of issues faced.36 For Synod, use of the middle axiom approach assumes the inductive route, using as its data-set the views of available experts, usually through their personal involvement in the process. This habit is deep-seated. As an example, one recent report commissioned for the Church of England by Rt Revd Stephen Lowe, Bishop for Urban Life and Faith, declared of its theology: ‘within the time and resources available in the first phase of our work, it has not been possible to develop a full theological exposition of all of the questions at stake. To have done so without addressing the immense weaknesses in evidence surrounding aspects of the Church would have left sustained theological reflection unrooted in the social and political reality that we were encountering.’37 Wright notes that a common danger of the inductive method is that select verses or stories, or theological fragments, are taken out of context and variously applied in support of or against a specific topic. To this critique could be attached the more general critique of empiricism that such studies can become victims of the existing data set and are susceptible to bias in the choice of data to be included. Notwithstanding Preston’s enthusiasm for middle axioms, he too was cautious about their use to generate specific policy recommendations.


The level of detail exhibited in The Church and the Bomb and Faith in the City established a precedent which is evident in several of the Anglican and Ecumenical reports produced during the period under discussion, such as Unemployment and the Future of Work, Global View 2001 and Prosperity with a Purpose. Preston feared that committing to such detail when Christians may legitimately vary in their views about the correct application of middle axioms in policy was a tactical error, and the media’s habit of picking on detailed recommendations out of context might appear to bear this out. One of the original formulations of the Middle Axiom approach, to be found in the 1937 Oxford Conference on Life and Work documentation, also suggested that to give precise instructions through detailed policies would rob the individual Christian of their moral responsibility as a person, in discerning how best to live out their faith for themselves.38 More recently, Duncan Forrester has criticised the middle axiom approach, which he challenges on a number of grounds. For Forrester, the usefulness of middle axioms, in offering direction not directives, has waned with the breakdown in social, political and religious consensus. Even where tempered by the inclusion of the recipients of policy as well as the policy-makers, middle axiom groups do not produce a distinctive enough view to offer any uniquely Christian contribution, begging the question as to their purpose and value. He favours a narrative-based approach – ‘the narrative contains the imperative’ – in order to bolster justice through the remembrancing of stories that sustain values, visions, and general long-term goals for society.39 Biggar and Hay have argued too that a middle axiom approach tends to neglect the Bible, which could otherwise provide moral principles both directly in the form of rules and indirectly in the form of ‘moral derivates from theological propositions’.40 Critique has also occasionally come from the floor of Synod: ‘too often the Church of England responds unimaginatively, glossing with half-baked theology the considered bioethical insights drawn from other organizations, which we then spatchcock. This approach is not only derivative but carries no real authority.’41 The impression received from a survey of Synod business more generally in the period is that more attention is now being paid to the theological task, with recent reports making increasing efforts to answer the critique above. In the context of discussion on the economy, the closest example would be the extended discourse on method contained in the 2006 Faithful Cities report. Under the heading ‘democratizing theology’ the report stated that ‘theology is not just academics “talking about God” – it is also “the people’s work”’. The report articulated three guiding theological themes. First, that theology is a practical mix-


ture of the transformative ‘grammar of faithful practice’ and the ‘performative’ principles enacted and embodied in the actions of faithful communities. Second, that theology is ‘everyday’; theologies of and from not just for the poor – vernacular stories from the grassroots, or what Jeff Astley would call ‘ordinary theology’. Third, that theology should properly ‘give shape and substance to our engagements with ethical, social and political matters’ and be conducted in public and with the public.42 In another context, the 1995 BSR report Something to Celebrate (GS 1153) is often held up on the floor of Synod as an exemplar of ‘good’ theological method, regardless of dispute over its theological content. Theologically, the 2009 MPAC report on God, Ethics and the Human Genome (GS Misc 917), edited by Mark Bratton, offers a promising template for future reports, although it does not yet go as far as offering advice to the reader about what to do with the report having read it. The 2005 MPAC report Sharing God’s Planet (GS 1558), by Claire Foster, would exemplify a good balance between method and practicality. Among the commentators, the degree of attention paid to the ‘how’ is consistent with the academic training, context and tradition of the sources considered. First, as for Synod, so for the sources: Middle Axioms. While Preston and his supporters argue that Middle Axioms ensure the Church is responding to a current reality, educating the reader and leaving room for individual conscience in their detailed application, methodologically this approach favours empiricism as an epistemology. As has already been noted, this leads to a bias in the institutional approach which is reflected in many of the commentators (and in this book), who tend intuitively to follow Atherton’s ‘challenges’ approach, whereby issues are analysed and theology applied to them to produce recommendations, with all the limits this entails. Much of the general discussion on approach concerns the etiquette of public theology in a plural context. For example, Sedgwick talked of the complexities of the post-modern context and the use of theological language in a pluralist context, noting one trend towards Christian retrenchment and one towards political engagement. While he offered no resolution, he highlighted the ‘pressing problem’ of how far theological language can impinge on the secular sphere and the unresolved effect of it becoming ‘sociology’. Relegated to the status of a wordgame and denuded of its truth claims, religious symbols and metaphors become meaningless and archaic if they are not sustained by living communities who do believe them, regardless of whether their use is internal or external.43 In spite of the risks, Atherton has argued that public theology is a necessary guard against error, provided it is ‘capacious and plural’ and informed by the model of the Trinity to represent relationships in


dialogue. In the same vein, Wilde has argued that any politico-theological debate should be interdisciplinary, global and comparative, and theologically aware of the political critique of empire. But of all the sources, Brown deals most extensively with the dilemma of theology in a pluralist context. His Dialogic Traditionalism is designed to resolve the ‘epistemological crises’ in Liberalism (the classic theological bridge to ‘unbelievers’) and Communitarianism (in-family talk). As discussed, his approach holds in tension the believer’s own truth and the need to avoid inflicting this truth on unbelievers, balancing the need to be willing to stand corrected with the imperative to bear witness to the Christian tradition in a given context. It permits the Church to address unbelievers from within the Christian tradition – provided the parties addressed respect this position – and establishes his set of conditions for the dialogue, which bear repeating: • Has the Church anything distinctive to say about it? • Has the dialogue within the Church on this issue already been explored? • Is the engagement based on a developed ecclesiology? • Will the choice of dialogue partner lead to alliance-building? • Is the Church’s theological contribution to the moral debate in clear view?44 Few of the Synod debates considered would meet these criteria. To strengthen the Church’s resources in this area, Synod should be encouraged to continue weaning itself off the middle axiom habit, with a deliberate strengthening of the emerging alternatives, bolstered by resources provided by the academic community, and with more explicit selection and discussion of relevant methodologies. The Boards and Councils may need to revisit the way in which reports are produced, perhaps introducing a standard chapter which brings more formally into the debate the existing body of knowledge from both the theological and ‘secular’ literature. Modern technology may render this a cheaper option than convening large committee meetings whose membership is often intended to deliver this perspective but rarely does.

To what extent a given theology attends to Christian doctrine While Synod’s general worldview should naturally blur with doctrine, under the Synodical Government Measure 1969, as amended, Synod


has a separate formal responsibility ‘to regulate the Church of England’s relations with other churches and to make provisions for matters relating to worship and doctrine’. This encourages a distinction at least in ‘business’ terms between doctrinal and ‘non-doctrinal’ matters. In practice, ‘doctrine’ is delegated through the House of Bishops to the Doctrine Commission, whose formal role is ‘to consider and advise the House of Bishops of the General Synod upon doctrinal questions referred to it by the House as well as to make suggestions to that House as to what in its judgment are doctrinal issues of concern to the Church of England’.45 In its recent incarnation it has published four reports: We Believe in God (1987), We Believe in the Holy Spirit (1991), The Mystery of Salvation (1996), and Being Human (2003). The last of these addresses the issue of money directly. It also contains an interesting note about the status of the reports: The four reports are not productions of the House of Bishops, and do not therefore carry the authority which such publications would have. But neither, on the other hand, are they merely individual views of the writers. If they are not the doctrine of the Church of England, nor are they merely doctrine in the Church of England.46 The chapter on money in this last report is of most relevance, but recalls at the outset the difficulty of applying teachings related to ancient economies to highly complex modern economies in a globalised world: ‘unless we recognize that recent developments in the system of money place us in a new situation, we shall either approach it in a superficial way with little theological reflection, or we shall apply outdated modes of analysis’. In acknowledging that attitudes towards money are indicative of spirituality, the Commission recalls Matthew 6:24 on serving God and Mammon, where money is given the name of a divinity in warning against idolising it. Seeing that money has become endowed with the attributes of an idol, ‘it requires first, as idols do, to be named’, particularly within the church’s conversation, so that the antiseptic of daylight might be shed on it.47 In addition to this contribution from the Doctrine Commission, regular theological commentary on investment matters has been offered to Synod in recent EIAG annual reports. As has already been noted, this theology has tended to be characterised by ‘pragmatics’, defending the status quo through theological argumentation in support of the pre-existing policy of engagement.


Amongst the commentators, doctrine is used more often to justify than to critique economics, with critique from Gorringe, Wilde, and others drawing more heavily on Biblical texts. As discussed, the most common doctrinal categories employed by the commentators are Creation and the Trinity. The doctrine of creation is used to understand how Christians can use market mechanisms to participate in creation with God and to protect creation through stewardship. The doctrine of the Trinity is used to inform theological engagement with the complexity of the modern global market economy. While Creation is used for its doctrinal content, the Trinity functions more as a metaphor than as an argument in favour of economic activity per se. Selby uses doctrine in his work on debt, contrasting the mortgaging of freewill in the modern credit economy with a Divine economy in which the debt already paid by Christ unleashes human freedom. Where doctrine is specifically evinced, the position adopted would be broadly representative of what the ‘radically orthodox’ Methodist theologian Stephen Long calls the ‘dominant tradition’. He summarises it thus: ‘an anthropology is identified as Christian, which both lends itself to and requires democratic political structures. The doctrine of creation is selected to emphasise humanity’s creative potential. The affirmation that creation is good is used for the purpose of defining the vocation of the human person as a co-participant in the production of wealth.’48 While the sources in this context perhaps treat free-will less explicitly than Long’s caricature would suggest, and make more of the Trinity than he does, his general critique of the position pertains. Essentially he conforms to Kort’s hypothesis that contrasting theological discourses are ‘bound to differ’, hostile positions being adopted one against the other. Because the position represented here privileges what Kort would deem the sapiential rather than the prophetic or priestly, Long criticises the skew towards accommodation to the world, seeing a subjugation of theology to economy, and the church to the state or the corporation, and the privileging of liberty such that it usurps the role of God. He would also charge this general position with an inability to articulate ‘orthodox theological themes’, and cavil at its inconsistent rescuing of sin as a ‘fact’ where other Christian doctrines are suppressed or ignored.49 Where Long and his colleagues are unfair is in their nostalgia for Thomism, as though history had rendered it a ‘fact’ in its own right, and in their seeming view that the encroachment of modernity is a recent phenomenon. The partial approach Long prefers commits the same error as the tradition he critiques, in that both approaches emphasise different theological motifs which an exercise in type helps to identify. His critique does however expose the bias, suggesting that to achieve


a more comprehensive view the Church of England could draw more widely on doctrine, both to support and to challenge capitalism. The middle axiom approach does not assist in this regard. Selby’s ‘economy of grace’ is also the title of a book by the American theologian Kathryn Tanner, which could easily function as a synthesis of many of the Church of England views here represented. After Atherton, she favours a ‘challenges’ approach, examining points of ‘collision’ between ‘theological economy’ and global capitalism, which she argues ‘are not parallel planes but fields that come together in struggle because of their different vectors, their movements in opposite directions – one moving up, so to speak, in the direction of life; the other moving down, in the direction of death’. This last point is reminiscent of the views of Gorringe, Jenkins and Wilde. Like Preston and Atherton, she is concerned to improve the current situation rather than to sweep it away. Like Selby, she evinces ‘Kingdom’ principles which, when applied to the economy, function as deliberately aspirational design criteria to encourage steady improvement in the ‘right’ direction. Like Jenkins, she regards financial markets as theologically problematic because they are ‘biased to the rich’, being run only by and for them, trading on winners and losers in the real economy and unhelpfully magnifying economic fluctuations. Again like Jenkins, she deplores the existence of ‘fictitious capital’: that which increases apart from any increase in the real production of goods and services. While her analysis ignores the use of financial markets to protect the real economy through securitisation,50 she echoes Gorringe’s concern that the global economy is essentially a member organisation, made in the image of its members, and is thus skewed in the interest of the powerful. In spite of this perspective, Tanner remains silent on the role of individual members in recrafting the system, agreeing with the prevailing Church of England view. Indeed, she argues that the customary approach to ‘Christian’ economics is unduly individualistic. Like Synod, she favours direct intervention by the state across the board, to provide holistic welfare services, break global debt spirals, require formal accounting of externalities, and protect public goods.51 Notwithstanding these several remedies, there is little attempt in any of the sources consulted to reimagine how the churches might themselves model an economy of grace. Indeed, Synod has consistently voted against the abolition of stipend differentials, has adopted increasingly secular employment practices for clergy, and has supported the subsidy of UK workers to the detriment of the developing world. Additionally, Synod annually authorises the charging of parochial fees, and sustains an uneasy relationship with the financial and other markets in which the Church


participates. While mutual support is at the heart of church financing in England, given Tanner’s criteria of unconditional and universal giving to anyone in need, and non-competition in a community of mutual benefit, her thesis would argue for a more radical act of prophecy on the part of the Church to model Kingdom values in those markets where the Church takes its place among the rich and powerful. Given that the person of the theologian has been seen through a review of type to function as a crucial warrant whenever change is being exhorted, that the Church does not practise what it might presume to preach in this regard is especially problematic.52 However, the Church already has the means to improve against the criterion relating to doctrine. Through the device of the Doctrine Commission, the Church of England has access to a group of expert theologians to assist in the interpretation and refreshment of doctrine, and more should be made of this vehicle. Given the strength of formal and informal links to theology faculties and training colleges, as well as to qualified theologians both ordained and lay, throughout the worldwide Anglican communion and ecumenically, modern technology could be used to facilitate more generative activity in this vital sphere. While it is a widely perceived Anglican habit to remain vague on matters of doctrine, publications such as Being Human nevertheless manage to be both authoritative and wise.

To what extent a given theology attends to Christian praxis As has already been noted, the Synodical Government Measure 1969 gives Synod authority ‘to consider and express their opinion on any [other] matter of religious or public interest’, and ‘to approve, amend, continue or discontinue liturgies’. Perhaps this latter responsibility most closely corresponds with guidance on ‘theological’ praxis while the former more general role encompasses any other guidance on praxis deemed appropriate. For it to be collective and technically authoritative, such guidance would normally be formally enshrined in motions, and motions that in this context pertain to economic matters. Advice on Christian behaviour concerning capitalism can therefore be divided into advice to organisations and advice to individuals, both being addressed to fellow believers in this context. Corporately, Synod has repeatedly advised Christian shareholders, in the shape of the Church Commissioners and latterly other church investment bodies, to engage in negative action and to divest themselves of shares in disputed companies. The Commissioners themselves and the


EIAG have espoused a more nuanced view, tending both to pursue the ‘banned categories’ approach and to argue for engagement rather than divestment (for instance in the cases of Nestlé and Caterpillar). Other corporate advice has been offered by Synod to cathedrals over their charging policies, and guidance in the shape of requests for action – normally the production of a report – is frequently offered to Synod’s Boards and Councils. In this context, dioceses are generally only advised to read key reports. However, one July 2004 debate encouraged dioceses to consider becoming fairly traded, and to circulate guidelines to assist congregations in using fairly traded products.53 Synod also makes frequent calls on the Government and various corporations to act, for instance over debt, trade justice and ethical investment. A crowning example would be the 2001 paper Global View 2001 which contained over 50 ‘policy commitments requested from government’ covering aid, health and education, HIV/ AIDS, gender, democracy, development education, debt, reform of the international financial institutions, trade, investment, labour standards, corporate responsibility, export credits, capital flows, climate change, biotechnology, conflict prevention and resolution, arms, children in conflict, and asylum.54 That the bodies Synod addresses are not necessarily Christian does not appear to affect its voice.55 In the material, advice to Christians as individuals is less common.56 While parishes are invited to consider reports from time to time, the extent to which they are offered advice tends to be restricted to requests to act negatively through boycotts, for example, Nestlé, and historically Apartheid South Africa, or to act positively by ‘buying British’ or buying fairly traded products. They are also asked to support a variety of causes financially, as well as through prayer and by volunteering, for example the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the street children in South America, and UK farmers. On occasion they are encouraged to protest, for example over coal mine closures and Nestlé. The most specifically couched guidance was contained in the motion about personal debt debated at York in July 1993. The motion not only called upon members of the Church of England to be involved locally and nationally in tackling the problem, but suggested they: (a) became informed of the facts established by recent independent and Christian research; (b) contributed their own Christian insights; (c) supported representations to the relevant commercial, financial and official bodies; and (d) contributed to efforts to reduce the adverse consequences of debt through education, debt counselling and protesting.57 Other specific guidance was offered in the February 2005 debate on Sharing God’s Planet, in which Synod challenged ‘itself and all members of the Church of England to make care for creation, and repentance for its


exploitation, fundamental to their faith, practice and mission; to lead by example in promoting study on the scale and nature of lifestyle change necessary to achieve sustainability, and initiatives encouraging immediate action towards attaining it; and to encourage parishes, diocesan and national Church organizations to carry out environmental audits and adopt specific and targeted measures to reduce consumption of non-renewable resources’. The same motion also commended to consumers of material and energy the approach of ‘contraction and convergence’ and to producers of material and energy, safe, secure and sustainable products and processes based on near-zero-carbon-emitting sources.58 These two motions are unusually specific amongst the material considered. More general guidance is offered on employment and development, with Synod encouraging parishes, dioceses and church members ‘to develop and contribute to partnerships for the creation of employment opportunity, especially at the local level’ in the context of the 1997 debate on Unemployment and the Future of Work; and in the context of the 2001 debate on Global View 2001 and Development Matters encouraged the Church ‘to advocate and practise justice in the distribution and investment of its resources’.59 Possibly of more interest are the inconsistencies and gaps, for instance on positive investment and shareholder activism, on consumer behaviour and consumer responsibilities, and on employee and employer/owner responsibilities,60 as well as the prevailing silence on personal indebtedness in favour of a focus on domestic debt predators like Provident Financial and on national debt in the developing world. Inconsistent too is the criticism levelled at the Commissioners over asset sub-optimisation through gilt-stripping, while Synod through rent protections and social housing was encouraging the Commissioners to sub-optimise other asset classes. While the commentators in general tend towards the ‘right thinking’ side of this equation, the practical vein in writers such as Higginson and Wright provides some guidance as to ‘right doing’ too. As well as Higginson’s frequent examples of good behaviour, Wright argues for a change in language from right/wrong towards good/bad and their comparatives, and Green argues for a move away from metaphors of war towards metaphors of games in public discourse on competition. Also on language, Heslam argues for a change in the definition of capital such that accounting practices are altered to include externalities such as the use of natural resources. At the boundary of doxy and praxy, Atherton and Jenkins are particularly keen that Christians should engage with current market models and problems rather than dated or abstract


notions that do not relate to the modern marketplace. Jenkins favours political action, as does Harries, arguing that solidarity requires the strong to work politically on behalf of the weak, because not to act colludes with an unjust status quo. Wilde wants to change the way shareholders vote so that each shareholder has an equal share in the corporate college, and Heslam wants Christians to use their financial ‘votes’ to create a better market through their consumer activity. However, a key channel of influence that remains largely unexplored in the sources is the use of the market mechanism itself to fight inequality and poverty through the careful use of capitalist business models. This idea lies behind Heslam’s Transforming Business work, is alluded to by Atherton’s ‘challenges’, and is mentioned by Higginson. Examples of the creative use of existing business models are legion, ranging from the Victorian Quaker and other paternalistic businesses, and modern trading companies such as John Lewis or Traidcraft.61 New business models are also being designed for specific use in the developing world, for example the micro-models of Grameen Bank and Grameen Telecom. Indeed, it was a UK Christian charity, Opportunity International, that pioneered micro-finance in the early 1970s. Micro-finance has since grown exponentially and, like fair trade, is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success, attracting interest from mainstream financial institutions attracted by low default rates. It remains problematic that the device concerns debt (or ‘bridging finance’), where community barter, savings schemes or local currency substitutes might offer alternative models of financing and exchange.62 Work carried out under the Bottom of the Pyramid banner has also identified a range of creative options, and the increasing use of ‘just’ business models to reinvent the economic system is reminiscent of Axelrod’s advocacy of ‘nice’ strategies. The reform and enforcement of regulation, accounting standards and corporate law is fertile ground for theological attention.63 With the benefit of hindsight following the collapse of credit in the financial markets, a technical area which tends only to be alluded to in passing is the increasingly abstract nature of markets. While Jenkins accesses this through his treatment of ‘gambling’ in the secondary financial markets, a more rigorous engagement with the dematerialised reality of a global economy and its increasingly sophisticated treatment of risk might also offer a rich seam for ethical enquiry. One reading of the financial crisis that materialised towards the end of 2008 is that it was fundamentally about risk. Risk inherent in sub-prime lending had been subjected to such staggeringly complex securitisation that the resulting investments appeared to be risk-free, and were blest as such


by the credit agencies, bewitched by the mathematical wizardry involved. Subsequent defaults on US home loans started a chain reaction, leading to a liquidity freeze as more and more banks were exposed.64 While it is easy to assume that the credit crunch was caused solely by greedy bankers, Buffet’s ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ were largely developed in response to changes in public policy both in the US and the UK in an attempt to make credit available to the poor. While the interest rates and securitisation devices applied doubtless exacerbated the situation, the poor are de facto a credit risk. An elegant response to the crisis might therefore involve the pulling together of lessons learned from the ‘developing’ poor to be applied to the ‘developed’ poor (for instance, micro-finance and credit unions), as well as an honest conversation about the nature of risk. The Church is well-placed to engage in such discussions, which could shade into a more nuanced discussion on gambling, given the grey area between investment, insurance and ‘leisure’ gambling as traditionally understood. In a similar vein, this increasingly information-led marketplace offers a challenge to traditional definitions of poverty, with the increasing marginalisation of those with no access to the internet. Businesses such as Grameen Telecom seek to address this gap through the provision of affordable mobile telephony, offering a challenge to the Church’s traditional focus on material poverty, alleviated primarily through charity. Such connectivity also challenges the traditional understanding of power, in a world where ‘flashmobs’ can be convened in minutes by text, and global email campaigns can bring down the mighty. Where power has traditionally been constructed as a function of money, power is increasingly a function of information, and the democratisation of information has already been highlighted as a key focus for the Church’s attention. Perhaps predictably, Synod is more represented than are the commentators in considering the criterion related to praxis, although the ‘supply side’ bias tends to feed through into a focus on structural praxis more than on individual behaviour. Further scrutiny of and guidance on the economic behaviour of Christians would strengthen the Church’s resources in this regard, using insights from behavioural psychology and complexity theory to understand how Christian consumer and shareholder activism might be channelled to reshape the market.

To what extent a given theology flexes mood, with particular reference to audience and intent Mood was introduced in the previous chapter as covering two categories: realis and irrealis. In the context of Church of England published views,


applying the theological criterion of mood is perhaps unrealistic, given that formats such as books, reports and debates are inevitably characterised by realis protocols. Previous discussion on audience and praxis has already highlighted the limited extent to which Synod alters its voice. Regardless of the probity of assuming shared belief where there may be none, where Synod expresses its beliefs in the imperative and addresses them to believers (as distinct from worldview beliefs expressed indicatively), such statements may be construed by their audience as representing a doctrinal steer, so attention to mood helps to clarify intention and prevent misunderstanding.65 Using mood here metaphorically as well as technically extends its reach in the absence of concrete examples. Technically, while tense conveys the time of an event and aspect its nature, modality conveys the status of the proposition that describes the event. As was previously noted, realis moods are used to portray situations that are actualised and thus knowable through direct perception, whereas irrealis moods portray those situations that exist in the realm of thought and are thus known only through the imagination. This distinction between statements of fact and statements of possibility has sometimes been shorthanded the difference between assertion and non-assertion.66 However, an utterance utilising an irrealis mood need not mean that the event or topic does not exist, rather it denotes on the part of the speaker a studied diffidence. This point of etiquette seems particularly promising for use in asymmetric belief contexts because irrealis connotes conditionality. This was earlier remarked for situations in which the audience being addressed does not share the same faith, or where the ‘backing’ of faith is being (temporarily) suspended for the purposes of philosophical scrutiny. Of course, a language game may or may not correspond to an exterior reality but its vocabulary, grammar and syntax gains its currency in usage. Williams’ analogy of jargon offers a useful parallel. Explaining that oedema denotes swelling, downsizing denotes job-losses, or that ‘recycling the power’ means switching the computer off and on again does not alter the underlying reality. Like canis, chien or dog, the game differs between communities of use, necessitating translation to aid communication between groups. While this is just one view of language, it is to be observed that the stereotypical ‘Britisher abroad’ habit of speaking English loudly and slowly in order to be understood offers an analogy for much theological discourse in the public square. This appears to rest on an assumption that forsaking realis constructions risks faithlessness or blasphemy. Specifically, Ford’s categorisation suggests that the underutilised irrealis categories are the subjunctive, the optative and the interrogative, that is, speaking conditionally, expressing hopes and asking


non-rhetorical questions. By way of illustration, attention to mood might render the gambling motion cited at the start of this chapter thus: That this Synod, desiring the best for a humanity made in God’s image and mourning the affect on human wellbeing of the rise in total national spend on gaming from £4 billion to £40 billion over the last four years: (a) wonders what part Christians are playing in sustaining the gambling industry and asks that all Christians search their souls on this matter; (b) asks Church leaders and local churches to pray about what they might do both locally and nationally in response to plans for new casinos; (c) asks the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to say whether the powers granted by the Gambling Act 2005 to introduce a statutory levy on the gambling industry might be used to fund programmes of education, research and treatment about problem gambling; (d) fears that without intervention from Her Majesty’s Government the addictive effects of fixed-odds betting terminals will exacerbate the situation and wonders what the government is doing to seek an international framework for a code of conduct on internet gambling; and (e) asks the Mission and Public Affairs Council this question: how can the Churches best help those addicted to gambling to health; those tempted to gamble to moderation; those regulating it to wisdom; and those profiting from it to repentance? Whimsical perhaps, but genuine engagement with this formulation would not admit glib responses and leaves plenty of room for grace. Additionally, a discussion of mood circles back to the conflation explored in Hay between the positive and the normative in economic thinking, which can now be recognised as a shift in mood from the indicative to the subjunctive or the imperative. An argument from empiricism makes this elision inevitable but, particularly in the realm of human conduct, theologically suspect. Mood could also be used to explore the difference between apologetic and dialectic discourse, as a way of signalling intention in dialogue and to extend the Church’s repertoire. The constraints of structure and tradition notwithstanding, the Church of England could make more strenuous efforts to vary the mood of its utterances, furnish-


ing itself with reassuring amounts of theology and argumentation as necessary, and experimenting with different communications formats and channels to facilitate diverse dialogue.

Church of England theological resources on capitalism This chapter has examined the sources using the theological criteria established through an analysis of type, offering conclusions as to how best the Church of England might strengthen its theological resources on capitalism. These conclusions suggest the Church would benefit from renewed professional engagement with doctrine and scholarship as it affects capitalism – including the traditional categories of property, usury, just price and capital – as well as a more nuanced understanding of market functioning, institutional change and human agency. They suggest that the Church should revisit the assumed preference for state intervention and legislation with a renewed ecclesiology, and with a balanced and psychologically literate anthropology that is reinforced through Church schools and the teachings and behaviour of the Church community. The conclusions argue for bold action by the Church, particularly in the area of shareholder and consumer activism, and in challenging domestic subsidies which make the desperately poor abroad ever poorer. Missiologically, the Church should optimise and vary the mood and style of its communications both for intelligibility and impact, especially for audiences who do not necessarily share the Church’s beliefs. Given the Church of England’s position as the established Church in a multicultural environment, the Church should also make more of its role in the public square by exploiting methodological approaches such as Scriptural Reasoning and Dialogic Traditionalism, and structural privileges like membership of the House of Lords, to make appropriate and effective interventions in public debate.

Conclusion

This book has examined Church of England views on capitalism during this period, first by drawing together formal Church views and examining the views of Church of England commentators; then by establishing criteria for theological scrutiny and applying these to the emerging findings. This treatment suggests that the Church should strengthen its theological resources for use in the debate on economics – particularly regarding its ecclesiology and anthropology – and that it should make more thoughtful and active use of its position in society. At the risk of being overly specific, some illustration of recommended initiatives and changes in policy might lend colour to these conclusions. First, there is a need for fresh theological scrutiny. This argues for the revival of the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission. Of all the potential sources of theological insight, the Doctrine Commission is both officially and by reputation the Church’s most authoritative. While the Commission may also want to rejuvenate its working practices in the light of rapid advances in technology, the particular topics it might like to address are as follows. First, Ecclesiology. While the nature and role of the Church have been discussed in passing in recent reports, there is a need to clarify for the current generation responses to the following questions: • What is the role of the Christian Church in a modern multi-cultural and globalised world? What then is the role of Church leaders and of individual Christians? • What does it mean to be part of the Anglican Communion? (Recent discussions will assist in this regard) • Should the Church of England be ‘established?’ What are the practical ramifications either way? 164

Conclusion 165

• What is the proper relationship and hierarchy between secular law, ecclesiastical law, and ecclesiastical polity? A second area that would benefit from orthodox attention is the notion of the Orders of Creation, and the nature of institutions more generally. This is important, having first addressed ecclesiology, because it would enable the Church to reach a better understanding of how to behave, and how best to affect change both internally and in society more broadly. Within the context of the Orders, such a discussion would facilitate engagement with partner institutions (principalities and powers), particularly where these intersect with the Church’s wider mission and activities. Such an investigation would include a discussion of systems and complexity thinking, as well as the practices of dialogue and change, to ascertain how the Church might best understand, co-exist with, and influence modern institutions and culture. In addition, the Doctrine Commission should work in concert with the Archbishops Council in general and the Boards and Councils in particular to establish a network of ‘waterways’ to facilitate the circulation of theological insight throughout the extended Church family, incorporating the university network both within the UK and internationally as well as theological and training colleges, and ecumenical and other faith organisations. This could be facilitated by good use of the internet as a tool for collaboration and dissemination, augmented where necessary by physical meetings and reports. Tim Berners-Lee’s leadership of the 2009 data.gov.uk initiative shows what can be accomplished with sufficient stores of goodwill and courage. Such a circulatory system would help those responsible for preparing Church statements and reports to avoid re-inventing the wheel, and ensure that existing authorities and divergent voices are included where physical participation is precluded by history, geography or budget. Because there are a variety of topics that would benefit from renewed theological attention, but only one Doctrine Commission, the Church should work with several partner institutions to advance the necessary work. Following the Turnbull re-organisations and the demise of BSR’s Industrial and Economic Affairs Committee, the Church made an agreement for the William Temple Foundation to provide briefings on work and the economy. More could be made of this, and of partnerships with other institutions. For instance, there is a need to re-examine and re-state theological anthropology in the face of modern psychology and advances in neurobiology. One group that might be well-placed to take this work forward is the Cambridge University Psychology and Religion


Research Group, or any other such body well-placed to address human agency in theological conversation with modern science. Another topic is the vexed question of usury and just price. Pay is also an issue of price – the price of labour – so an investigation into minimum and maximum wages, bonuses and remuneration policy, as well as interest, prices, profit levels, and the nature of debt and indebtedness, would equip the Church to engage authoritatively in the public debate on these emotive topics. It was fear of risk that led to the convoluted securitisation that stymied the market, and this fear is embedded in the limited liability device that insulates so many companies from the consequences of rash decision-making. Again, a detailed theological account of risk, grappling with the issue in all its complexity and technical sophistication, would greatly assist those who seek to navigate a more prudent way through these choppy waters. A re-visitation of theological thinking about property and capital would add to this, equipping the Church to participate more robustly in debate on types of ownership and on types of capital, as well as in debate concerning the reform of the capitalist system as a whole. The Church of England has already strengthened its activity in two key areas: investment advice and parliamentary liaison. Activity in these two spheres could be developed further. For example, the EIAG currently publishes its voting records after the fact, and church investors may seek portfolio screening advice on an ad hoc basis. Notwithstanding the complexities, it would be useful for the Church to work with partner institutions to enable a more informed, proactive and activist Christian shareholder community as a vanguard in attempts to influence corporate behaviour. As regards parliamentary liaison, the induction and support of the Spiritual Lords – coupled with a re-consideration of their roles in the round – might enable more proactive engagement with Parliament both in debate and in the vital stages of policy-making before policy becomes law. As regards public policy more widely, the Church might like to use its convening power to establish a light-touch quarterly ecumenical and interfaith public policy forum for all associated thinktanks and research groups, for example, MPAC and its ecumenical and other faith equivalents, Theos, the William Temple Foundation, the Kirby Laing Institute, Faith in Business, and many others, not to institutionalise or homogenise them, but to provide opportunities for mutual understanding, development and collaboration. This would have the side effect of offering opportunities for interested Christians to involve themselves in forum meetings to learn more about the issues at stake,

Conclusion 167

and builds on the existing forum for the ethical investment community which could be similarly publicised and enlarged. A further area for attention concerns mood. It has proved hard to find examples of theology other than in the indicative and imperative moods. It would be interesting to see whether this is because such examples do not exist, or, more likely, that they are not usually labelled as ‘theology’. The notion of mood is useful because it deals with intention. It also surfaces the conflation of the positive and the normative, and distinguishes between the status of things and the status of conversations about them. For example, asking the question ‘might God exist?’ does not oblige the theologian to question their own belief, but allows that such a belief is not to be gainsaid in others. It might build the Church’s confidence to see good examples of a variety of uses of mood, with a view to convincing Synod and others to use a fuller modal range in its communication, and a thinktank like Theos might be well placed to catalogue this terrain. Theos or an equivalent might also be best placed to catalogue another area, that of theological activity concerning theology in worldview/ asymmetric belief contexts, because it invariably relates to theology in the public square, where the theologian may be the only Christian in the dialogue. It concerns the content not the style of such theology, although it is often conducted according to protocols sketched out in the partner etiquette type. There may be an overlap with the survey on mood, given that the difference between these types is characterised by mood or by language, the need for translation and dejargonising being paramount for this audience. Where modes like Williams’ Communicative one are deployed rather than described, to publics like Society or the Academy, such activity fits here. While it is a rather nuanced space, examples might be ‘Thought for the Day’ and equivalents, speeches made by the Spiritual Lords, Church replies to Pullman or Dawkins, meta-physical debates in the Academy, interfaith conversations, everyday explanations in answer to 1Peter 3:15, and possibly the discursive parts of courses like Alpha – any act during which a Christian attempts to engage the other in a worldview discussion. On these grounds, the Narnia books, Dr Barnardo’s, and arguments about value added tax on church buildings would also qualify, as would Industrial Mission as originally conceived. Currently this arena is rather informally populated and not confidently so, and would benefit from more formal attention. The financial crisis has re-opened public debate about the future of capitalism, and the Church has not yet been at the forefront of this discussion. Political sensitivities and a patchy understanding of market


functioning have hampered Church involvement hitherto, but efforts to engage with questions over governance and regulation would help to ensure the Church’s voice is influential in shaping new market arrangements. Work by the William Temple Foundation on spiritual and religious capital, and the Von Hügel Institute for the Moral But No Compass report, might provide the foundations for an initiative to identify how the Church might use its involvement to help re-shape the market, particularly through innovative business models and social enterprise structures that use the power of market mechanisms to help the poor both in the developed and developing world. These are but a range of possible actions that might emerge from this investigation and serve to illustrate the possibilities, albeit partially at this stage. To conclude, the meta-analysis of typologies suggested a general trend in theology towards addressing believers, and a tendency when speaking into an asymmetrical belief context to focus on etiquette rather than content. In relation to capitalism, this book has argued that the Church of England largely follows this pattern. In the realm of etiquette theology, the Church has access to several promising approaches. Where asymmetric belief involves the other monotheistic faiths, etiquette theology is provided through the emerging discipline of Scriptural Reasoning. Where the asymmetry includes people of other, uncertain or no faith, etiquette theology can be provided by Williams’ Communicative mode, Tracy’s Practical theology, and Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism. The Church is not as well served in the realm of worldview theology. Synod is to be congratulated for attempting something approximating this, albeit largely implicitly and with little verve and questionable effect. However, it invariably does so in the indicative and the imperative moods, and with little explanation, betraying an assumption of shared ground which limits its ability to be heard. This must be improved, with both Synod and the commentators making renewed efforts to reach a wider audience. The gap in this key missiological space calls for worldview theologies that are addressed by believers to an audience who does not share their belief. Given that discussion of global economics will often take place in an asymmetrical belief context, this weakness particularly handicaps the Church in taking its proper place in the public debate. Perhaps worldview theologies addressed to fellow believers could simply be re-deployed, suitably adjusted for mood and language. However, this gap challenges the assumption inherent in the other theologies that theology is primarily about ‘telling’, because etiquette in this instance

Conclusion 169

demands listening as well as speaking. This sort of ‘ontological listening’ resonates with the original spirit of Industrial Mission. It recalls to the theological fold the inviting of external challenge, not only as a way of enriching theology, but also of discerning how God reveals himself to those of his creatures who are not members of the Church of England.

Notes

Introduction 1 2

3

4

The Sunday Times 14 March 2010. The Functions of the General Synod as laid out in the Synodical Government Measure 1969 are (a) to consider matters concerning the Church of England and to make provision in respect thereof … and (b) to consider and express their opinion on any other matter of religious or public interest. Subsequent amendments added the functions: to regulate the Church of England’s relations with other churches and to make provisions for matters relating to worship and doctrine; to approve, amend, continue or discontinue liturgies…; and to approve (or reject) the central church budget each year. See Medhurst & Moyser (1988), p309 and p316f; see also Chandler (2006), p5. Sources will be referred to throughout by author and date. Full publication details can be found in the Bibliography. See for example discussion in Brown (2004) and Brown & Ballard (2006); see also Clark (1993) and Chandler (2006).

Chapter 1 1

2 3

4

General Synod Views

For a discussion about ‘marketness’ see Block (1990), p51. An example of such a scale is the annual assessment of ‘economic freedom’ in the Index of Economic Freedom at http://www.heritage.org/index. On types of capitalism, see for example Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars (1994), p15. For an example of moral outrage at the unfettered use of market mechanisms, witness the doomed ‘Terrordaq’ project, in which the US government nearly launched a market in terrorism. The proposed scheme, called the Policy Analysis Market, was set up by the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Unit but cancelled at the last minute, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ magazine/3115777.stm (04 August 2003). Schein (1992), pp7–12. See also Nicholls (1974), p7f; Wink (1992), pp7ff; and Clark (1993), p12. In July 2007, a motion was brought formally to Synod by an EIAG member, Gavin Oldham (Oxford), seeking to have this list made public for the benefit of the wider Church and to individuals wanting to follow the Church of England’s investment policy. His motion was amended, largely owing to concerns about the legal ramifications of such publication, instead requiring the central investment bodies and the EIAG to make available ‘more details’ of their investment policies. Proceedings, July 2007, Monday 3, p17. EIAG (2004/5), p23. Indeed, it appears that being a deliberately unethical investor is more profitable. See the report by Spencer Jakab entitled ‘Wages of sin bring higher returns’, The Financial Times, 18 December 2009, and the strong performance of VICEX, the Dallas-based ‘vice’ fund which invests 170

Notes 171

5 6

7 8 9

10

11 12

only in ‘sin stocks’, http://www.usamutuals.com/vicefund/docs/VICEXcomplete.pdf (25 March 2010). Proceedings, February 1989, p69, Question 17. See http://oxcheps.new.ox.ac.uk/casebook/Resources/HARRIE_1%20DOC. pdf (22 March 2005). The hearing took place between 7 and 9 October 1991: see Chandler, pp301ff for an extensive discussion of the case. The ‘banned category’ approach has been challenged by Kreander et al, on the grounds that a genuinely Christian approach to investment would seek out ‘sinful’ investments in order to redeem them because, while disinvesting makes the investor feel better, it does not change society. Kreander, McPhail & Molyneaux (2004), p429f. This resonates with Bonhoeffer’s view that the responsible person must not hesitate to act for fear of sin. In his later work, he argues that privileging conscience is egotistical and selfish, because we need to be free to bear guilt for the sake of our neighbours (Bonhoeffer (1995), pp236–8). This view would appear to offer a theological exoneration for the Commissioners’ stance were they to have justified it in these terms. Proceedings, November 1991, p792; Lovell (1997), p140. Proceedings, November 1991, p717, Question 14. The Rt Hon Michael Alison MP, then Second Church Estates Commissioner, answered questions in the House of Commons about ‘gilt stripping’ as early as 25 February 1994, then again on 4 and 16 March 1994 (see Hansard at http://www. publications.parliament.uk). The practice was criticised as ‘legalized sleight-of-hand’ in Parliament’s Social Security Committee Second and Fifth Reports, both entitled The Church Commissioners and Church of England Pensions (29 March 1995 and 26 June 1996). See also Lovell, pp136ff and pp203ff; and Chandler, p370f and pp390–3. Previously, ethical investment tended only to appear on Synod’s agenda through the device of Questions. Because Questions are submitted in advance, the body being questioned can prepare a considered response both to the question itself and to anticipated supplementary questions, and has an officer so charged. Like Parliamentary Questions, the process reduces the risk of engagement for the body being questioned, but is largely ritualistic. Most of the questions here considered focus on the Commissioners’ investment portfolio (the logic not being extended to include the CBF and other Church funds until November 1994). This polarisation between Synod and the Commissioners, while popular, is of course artificial, given the common presiding/chairing and cross-membership between the two bodies. This issue of multiple ‘hats’ was summed up in a speech by Alan Cooper (Manchester), regarding the Lambeth Report in November 1993, with unfortunate overtones of St Peter in the courtyard: ‘My wife said, “Are you a Commissioner?” I said, “Yes, but I’m disembodied because we’re talking about what the Commissioners did.” “But”, she said, “you were one of them, weren’t you?” Well, I went out to the garden after that….’ Proceedings, November 1993, p979. For an explanation on parallel engagement in the US, see Logsdon & Van Buren (2008), pp523ff; and Logsdon & Van Buren (2009), pp353ff. Other divestments of note were the Burton Group (1990 – questionable share option scheme), Tomkins (1999 – handguns), GKN (2000 – as an automatic result of the change in defence investment policy), Provident Financial (2001 – doorstep loans), and Vedanta (2010 – human rights concerns). The

172 Notes

13

14

15

16 17 18

Commissioners also agreed to take lower returns on their Octavia Hill Estates – albeit in the face of mounting pressure – by mixing market rents with subsidies for key workers so as not betray the Estates’ heritage as social housing. Following original pressure for their sale on investment grounds in 1980, the estates were eventually sold in 2005 and 2006. See for example 1 Cor 6 for a Biblical challenge to this approach. In 1995, a further court case established the state’s primacy in Church matters. Paul Williamson, an Anglican priest, took the Church Commissioners to court, arguing that they had no legal powers to fund women clergy. The judge presiding found that the legislative sanction of the state was decisive, the ordination of women having been sanctioned by state law (cited in Chandler (2006), p437). While this may be a technicality, Sir Michael Colman also appeared to cede primacy to the ‘secular’ authorities when he was interviewed as the First Church Estates Commissioner by the Social Security Select Committee on 8 December 1993, and referred to Parliament as the Church Commissioners’ ‘ultimate shareholder’, (Social Security Committee Second Report (1995), p416). As a cultural artefact, it may be telling that before the Turnbull reorganisations the staff at Church House had an additional day’s holiday on Ascension Day, while the staff at Millbank had an additional day’s holiday on the Queen’s birthday. As was later made explicit in the debate, BSR had tried to avoid getting embroiled in the Nestlé controversy on the grounds that it was not a battle the Church of England had the resources to win, given the comparative muscle of Nestlé. The matter was eventually forced on to their agenda through the Synodical device of a Diocesan Synod motion brought by Leicester. Proceedings, July 1991, p500f, and the subsequent debates in July 1994 and July 1997; Questions in November 1993 and November 1995; then the apologia on behalf of BSR, Proceedings, July 1995, Questions 13 and 14, and the July 1997 update paper (GS 1253). See Questions in November 1991, July 1992, July 1993 and July 1994. The matter of the Commissioners’ investment in Nestlé was reviewed and upheld by the EIWG (later the EIAG), in July 1998 (EIWG (1998), p9). In their July 2000 report they continued to ‘engage productively’ with Nestlé (EIAG (2000), p15f). The Commissioners retain their shareholding in Nestlé, which was valued at £7.6m at 31 December 2004. Although Synod never exonerated Nestlé, merely gave up the fight through lack of resource, as at 30 November 2004 the CBF also reported a holding worth £740,000 (0.1 per cent of the Fund) which, at 31 August 2005 was yielding an income of £19,439 on a capital value of £855,331. Proceedings, February 2006, p48f. As reported in The Guardian, 13 February 2006. At the end of 2004, the Commissioners held shares worth £2m in Caterpillar, and the CBF £190,000 (see http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr6605. html (25 November 2005). For their position, see http://www.cofe.anglican. org/news/pr29cat06.html (17 March 2006). See also Poole (2006). At the time of the divestment, there was speculation that it was precipitated by the planned publication of a letter in The Guardian signed by 23 theologians accusing the Church of England of not acting on its policy to promote morally and ethically responsible investments. See http://www.ekklesia.co. uk/node/8595 (23 December 2009).

Notes 173 19 20 21

22

23 24 25

26

Proceedings, July 2006, Question 37 and supplementaries, p58f. Proceedings, July 2001, supplementary to Question 84, p184; and Proceedings, November 2001, Question 56, p164. In a letter from the local MPs to the Commissioners, Harriet Harman, Kate Hoey and Simon Hughes said ‘This decision to ignore the bid from a registered social landlord which would have guaranteed the future security of residents in these homes is deplorable. We are angry and disappointed that the Church Commissioners have betrayed their tenants and have shown disdain for their ethical responsibilities. For over 100 years, the Church of England has played a key role in providing social housing to low income families as an expression of its commitment to social justice.’ (Proceedings, July 2006, p218f). See also a quotation cited in the 2001 debate from The Times in 1904: ‘They [the Commissioners] could throw the land upon the market and take other steps that would lead to its earliest conversion into the largest possible amount of cash and securities. They are trustees, they might say, for the Church, and the Church in these hard times has a right to all the help she can get at the Commissioners’ hands. However, nothing could have been more fatal to prestige as a Church than the present opportunity of illustrating the responsibilities of property, especially when it is vested in Christian men, nor could anything be worse than that the Church should be extended in one diocese at the cost of the demoralization of the people in another.’ (Proceedings, July 2001, p412f). Proceedings, July 2006, p217 and p222. The difficulty the proposer had in getting the matter raised offers an interesting vignette: Mr Adrian Greenwood (Southwark) ‘This is my third attempt to get this matter debated. I tried an emergency debate both in November and February. In November, I was not called, despite putting in a request to speak, wearing a brightly coloured shirt and standing up and down for the whole of the period. This was a week or so after the Church Commissioners’ initial decision to invite formal tender. In December, I wrote to the Business Committee pointing out that the Church Commissioners seemed intent on a quick sale and pleading with them to allow a debate in February because they would have been sold by July. Guess what? They were sold in March. I then tried the Private Member’s Motion route and, as stated earlier, achieved second place in the list, but again was thwarted by the sale. Now, following a very big hint from the Business Committee, I am using the route of the following motion.’ Proceedings, July 2006, p218. Proceedings, February 2006, p176. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/Id199798/ldhandard/vo970709/ text/70709-03.htm#70709-03_head6 (27 November 2005). Pace the philosophical issue about this segue from charity to social justice (and a degree of cynicism arising from the rhetorical benefits of a vocabulary of justice) see Graham (1990), pp98–108; Plant (2001), pp197ff, and Plant in Harvey (1989), pp72ff. See also Reinhold Niebuhr’s view that religion’s job is charity, whereas the job of social justice properly belongs to politics, through his contrasting of intrinsic and instrumental morality. Niebuhr, Reinhold (1963), pp257–66. See Proceedings, July 1999, p262 and p271; Proceedings July 2000, p317; Proceedings July 2001, p20).

174 Notes 27

28

29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

See Sheppard (1983), p16. It is unclear whether his usage of this epithet entered Synod’s lexicon or vice versa, but he is most famously associated with the term. Selby (1997), p123. A further resource on debt is the Doctrine Commission’s report Being Human, debated by Synod in February 2004. The Commission was chaired by Stephen Sykes and including such theologians such as David Ford, Alister McGrath, Ann Loades, Christina Baxter, Peter Selby and Anthony Thiselton. In the report, the Commission notes that: ‘One of the ways in which it has become culturally acceptable to live by borrowing heavily against anticipated future earnings is to term it “credit” rather than “debt”. We tend to assume that those of us who do not borrow beyond our actual ability to repay do not have “debt” and are not adversely affected by our behaviour with money.’ The report further notes that, while an ability to buy homes is positive, the fact of mortgaging the future is not. Being Human (2003), p63f. Hansard, Monday 24 October 2005, Column 1035 (http://www.publications. parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds05/index/51024-x.htm (27 October 2005)). The previous month the Bishop, in a personal interview, stated his intention to table an amendment to establish an interest ceiling – echoing the old usury law – after which, on default, lenders could not have recourse to law for redress. This did not materialise, but was referenced by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his 25 April 2008 House of Lords debate on economic equality, see http://www.publications.parliament. uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/text/80425-0002.htm#08042577000058 (30 April 2009). See http://www.cofe.anglican.org/debt (01 May 2009) and http://www.debton-our-doorstep.com/ (01 May 2009). Proceedings, February 2009, p36. Implications (2009), p13. One such ‘comment’ was a ‘move for papers’ brought by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords on 25 April 2008. His motion enabled a debate about the impact on the family of economic inequality, credit and indebtedness, in which he called particular attention to the impact of the financial crisis on vulnerable families, given the statistic that even before the crisis a third of children in the UK were living in poverty. He reminded the Lords that such families were particularly susceptible to predatory lending, having no other access to credit, establishing a vicious circle of indebtedness that kept them in poverty over the longer term. The squeeze on credit was likely to drive more families into the arms of the doorstep lenders and thence into spiralling debt, so he called for greater regulation of the home lending industry and more support for credit unions as a healthier alternative. See http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ ld200708/ldhansrd/text/80425-0002.htm #08042577000058 (30 April 2009). Implications (2009), p13 and p16f. Proceedings, February 2009, p32; see also Revd Canon Peter Spiers (Liverpool), p27. Proceedings, February 2009, p12. Proceedings, February 2009, p14 and p21f. Proceedings, February 2009, p30f. Proceedings, February 2004, p233f.

Notes 175 39 40

41 42 43

44

45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

Gustafson (1988), pp268ff. See the speech made by Canon Hinton Bird (Sodor and Man), Proceedings, November 1995, p737f. The 1983 BSR report The Common Agricultural Policy and World Hunger broadly condemned the CAP but it is not mentioned thereafter. The Health of the Poor (2001), p9. EIAG (2004/5), p11. EIAG staff report that no reaction to this advice on off-shoring has been received. In the 2006 Faithful Cities report this ‘bias to the poor’ has become ‘biased towards inclusion’, giving it a more ‘active’ slant. Faithful Cities (2006), p33. According to Synod staff, the unanimity of this vote is typical of Synod votes on social responsibility issues. Whether it is because of partisan debate attendance, or motions being worded in such a way as to make voting against them unconscionable, it is when Synod votes on matters touching finance or churchmanship that the numbers tend to vary more widely. After the introduction of electronic voting in February 2008, voting numbers even on these matters has tended to be more varied, with more recorded abstentions. While electronic voting allows individuals to be identified more closely with their vote after the fact, it replaces the very public voting through doors which may in the past have led to a degree of group pressure. Fairtrade Begins At Home (2007). In a speech to Synod, The Bishop of Ely (Rt Revd Anthony Russell) noted that the Church of England remains the second largest owner of farmland in the country (Proceedings, February 2006, p98). Elsewhere, the Church’s emotional commitment to agriculture is flagged in relation to the Commissioners’ agricultural portfolio by Chandler (2006), p340f. One inconsistency is the Bishop of Dorchester’s paper (Rt Revd Anthony Russell), appended to BOM’s February 2000 report on the farming crisis. He explicitly recognises the inevitable future of the farming industry and the need to adjust for it, but this is not taken forward into the ensuing debate and resulting motion. Proceedings, Winter [sic] 1994, p707. The Environment debate – background briefing (2005), p15f. Sharing God’s Planet (2005), pvii. Sharing God’s Planet (2005), p7 and p30f. Proceedings, July 2005, p381. Proceedings, July 2005, p356. Proceedings, July 2005, p373. Proceedings, July 2005, p381f. In November 2004 EIAG issued a statement about the environment, having added to the Church’s Statement of Ethical Investment Policy a commitment to invest in companies that can show ‘sustainable environmental practice’. In the debate this would appear to have been deemed sufficient by Synod. See the EIAG Ethical Investment statement, last updated November 2007, and the Climate Change Investment framework, August 2008, both via http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/ethical/ policystatements/ (27 May 2009). Proceedings, July 2005, p239; p242. Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p12 and p2. See also the remark by the Bishop of London (Rt Revd Richard Chartres) in opening: ‘The reality

176 Notes

56 57 58

59 60

61

62

of our interconnected world is that we are all afloat in a great ark and the first-class accommodation will not long remain immune from the effects of leaks in steerage.’ Proceedings, July 2008, Sun 1, 4.15pm onwards (no page numbers). Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p19. Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p12. For example, urge: in the February 1993 debate on Africa (p95), the November 1993 debate on unemployment and homelessness (p938), the December 1995 debate on fairer world trade (p746), and the July 2001 debate on development (p130); call upon: in the July 1991 debate on Nestlé (p500f), the November 1991 debate on third world debt (p794), the July 1994 debate on Nestlé (p328, as originally worded), the November 1994 debate on responsibility in arms transfer policy (p733), and the July 1998 debate on tobacco promotion (p602); request/ask: the July 1993 debate on South America (p668), the November 1993 debate on coal (p1038) and the February 2000 debate on farming (p259). The softer ‘commend … for serious consideration’ was used in the July 1997 debate on unemployment and the future of work (p425f); the July 2001 motion on third world debt (p145) merely ‘encouraged’ the Government to act. An alternative spin on this phenomenon is offered by Timothy Jenkins’ work on congregational culture and the boundaries of identity. In his work, he argues that those who favour public good over private morality are more likely to be drawn towards church membership. Developing this logic would suggest that Synod members, drawn from this orientation, would therefore by definition favour a ‘public good’ approach, not only through structural necessity but through preference, and thus would be institutionally more likely to exhort the country at large to act – through Government intervention – rather than to confine themselves to appeals to the ‘private honour’ of individual church members. See Jenkins, Timothy: ‘Congregational cultures and the boundaries of identity’ in Guest, Tusting & Woodhead (2004). Hansard, Monday 24 October 2005, Column 1034, http://www.publications. parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds05/index/51024-x.htm. Indeed, Medhurst & Moyser have argued that Synod’s actions show it does not really expect to have any real influence, nor have the appetite for it (Medhurst & Moyser (1988), p318f and p339). The Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919 was in essence a mechanism to save Parliamentary time by delegating legislative powers to the Church. Under the Act, the Church lays its ‘Measures’ before Parliament for formal approval, prior to their submission for Royal Assent. Parliament may recommend changes to Measures but has no formal power other than to accept or reject the Church’s legislation. See http://www. parliament.uk/ documents/upload/|10.pdf (23 November 2005). The Archbishop as first peer, next to the Royal Family, precedes all Dukes and all great officers of the Crown. The Lord High Chancellor is the second peer, and the Archbishop of York the third. All the Lords Spiritual take precedence over the temporal barons. See http://www.debretts.co.uk/peerage_ and_lords_spiritual.html (23 November 2005). On the Lords Spiritual, see http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/HofLBpmembership.pdf (23 November 2005). Traditionally, the Crown through No 10 Downing

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Street approved all diocesan Episcopal appointments, being presented with two names from which to select the successful candidate. In July 2007, Gordon Brown’s Government issued a Green Paper on the Governance of Britain proposing to streamline the process, removing Downing Street from the process (see http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm71/ 7170/7170.pdf (27 May 2009), pp25–7. Cited in Proceedings, February 2008, Tues2, p57; see Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p19f; see the Bishop of Oxford’s reply on behalf of BSR to a challenge about their conduct in a Lords debate on marriage (Proceedings, November 2000, p47, Question 2). One apparent exception to this appears in a report to Synod on press regulation. In the wake of intrusion into the private lives of Rt Hon David Mellor MP and members of the Royal Family, in 1992 an enquiry was set up, chaired by Sir David Calcutt QC, to assess the effectiveness of selfregulation in the press. In November 1992 there was a parliamentary hearing on Rt Hon Clive Soley MP’s Private Member’s bill Freedom and Responsibility of the Press, to which the Communications Committee of the Church of England submitted a response. This was copied to Synod as Regulation of the Press – The Church of England’s Views (1993). The report notes that self-regulation has proved ineffective on some occasions, but counsels against giving a statutory body power over ownership, control, circulation, reporting, and the education and training of journalists. Instead, the main duties of a statutory regulatory body for the press should be to enforce a code of practice, as ‘freedom of the press is such a basic element of our democratic tradition that, should it be threatened, the industry will make its views known quickly and forcibly’ (p13). The paper was never debated, but this preference for a light regulatory touch is unusual. One reason for this may be the Church’s particular interest in freedom of speech, affecting as it does the Church’s ability to fulfil its mission. In a House of Lords speech on the second reading of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill (11 October 2005), the Bishop of Southwell (Rt Revd George Cassidy) noted that the reading had attracted a large number of Christian protesters: ‘I know that they would be the first to insist that this is not just a religious issue, but about standing up as responsible citizens for society’s right to liberty for everyone and freedom of speech.’ http://www.winchester.anglican.org/ bmlords111005.htm (06 December 2005). Neither has Synod yet called for regulation on carbon emissions, although the debate remains in its infancy. Private Sector Involvement in Prisons (1996), p40; pv. Private Sector Involvement in Prisons (1996), p49. Proceedings, July 1997, p426. Proceedings, July 1997, p420; Proceedings, February 2009, pp1–37; Plant in Harvey (1989), p209. This may reveal a latent preference for an understanding of free will that concerns being free from (coercion) rather than free for (a given end). The former ‘negative’ formulation is favoured in neo-classical economics and is criticised for enabling the exercise of naked power, while the latter derives from the more positive Augustinian formulation. See Cavanaugh (2008), p2f, p7f and p28; see also Plant (2001), p206f. Compare Fromm (2001), p220 and p232; and the 1998 Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s use of

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freedom as capability in the context of development economics, see Dowd (2002), p169f. The EIAG motif of ‘enoughness’ provides a ‘nudge’ to limit excessive consumer behaviour, see EIAG (2004/5), p6f. The notion of a theology of ‘enough’ has been attributed to the then Bishop of Winchester John Taylor’s 1975 publication Enough is Enough (see the working paper ‘The Theology of Enough’ by John McLean Fox, April 2009) and appears as commentary on the Sabbath principle in Resolution 1:8 (c) (ii) on Creation adopted by the 1998 Lambeth Conference (The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998 (1999), p92 and p378). See for example the letter to The Times on 16 October 1992 from the Archbishop of York and five bishops on closures in the coal industry; and the argument in BOM’s report The Farming Crisis (2000). See for example the November 1994 motion on arms transfer policy, in which the Government is urged to ‘develop appropriate policies for retraining and industrial regeneration’; and the February 2000 motion on the farming crisis in which the Government is asked to introduce a retirement scheme for farmers that will enable them to leave the land with dignity. See for example the precise wording of the support for entrepreneurs in the July 1997 unemployment debate, that this Synod: ‘encourage[s] entrepreneurs at all levels of scale to engage in new business activity, recognising the benefits that such risk-taking can bestow on fuller employment’. Proceedings, July 1997, p426. This desire for companies to be more paternal is illustrated by the discussions over Caterpillar, and on climate change, see Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p12. Proceedings, July 1994, p339 and p344. Proceedings, July 2001, p122. Proceedings July 1997, p418; p420. Proceedings, November 1993, p923. Sedgwick (1995), p5; see also Plant et al in Harvey (1989), p70, and Brown: ‘Margaret Thatcher’s economic experiment was not a political aberration but a genuine, if unbalanced, attempt to address the problem of the distribution of goods in a plural context. This was the moral problem to which the amoral market offered the only solution that was not immoral. Any more dirigiste approach to distribution was condemned as the imposition of the values and preferences of an elite’. Brown & Sedgwick (1998), p28. Prosperity with a Purpose (2005), p7; p23; p15f. Proceedings, July 2004, p322. See for example the commentary in Faithful Cities about the threat to the UK poor of the growth of China and India through globalisation, Faithful Cities (2006), p36. Proceedings, Winter 1994, p733. Proceedings, July 2001, p28. See for example the unanimous votes on the coal industry in November 1993, the arms industry in November 1994, and on farming in February 2000, all requesting the Government’s intervention in the marketplace. See for example the February 1987 debate on the report Not Just for the Poor and assumptions made in God in the City (1995) and Private Sector

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Involvement in Prisons (1996), and the various debates and Questions about social housing and the Octavia Hill Estates, throughout 2001 and again during their sale in 2005/6. See for example the unanimous motion carried on the health of the poor in July 2001 requesting greater Government intervention and support. Assumed in all debates on education by virtue of the Church of England’s responsibility for a quarter of England’s primary schools and six per cent of secondary schools, and their intention to grow this portfolio, for example through Church-sponsored Academies. See again the November 1993 coal debate and the February 2000 farming debate, and the environmental motion passed by Synod in February 2005 (Proceedings, February 2005, p382). It is too early to tell whether Synod will revisit its desire to protect the coal industry given the realities of climate change. See the 1993 paper and discussions about the BBC, The Future of the BBC (January 1993), p5 and The Future of the BBC (April 1993), p1. See also Question 65 in July 2004, Question 26 in November 2007 and Questions 51 and 52 in February 2008 to the Archbishops’ Council (Proceedings, July 2004, p161; Proceedings, November 2007, p15f; and Proceedings, February 2008, p60f). See also the Lichfield Diocesan Synod motion on media standards debated in February 2007, Proceedings, February 2007, pp356–79. See for example the July 1991 and July 1998 motions calling for bans on the advertising of baby-milk substitutes and of tobacco products; the July 2004 Trade Justice debate; the July 1993 Questions on ‘fat-cat’ pay; and the July 1997 debate on Unemployment and the Future of Work. See also Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p12 and p19f. The direction of travel suggests renewed interest in the regulation of the financial services industry, given the de facto nationalisation of many UK banks during the credit crunch, although this has not yet matured into a stated preference. See the February 2009 debates on the financial crisis. See for example the debate on gambling and super casinos in February 2008, Proceedings, February 2008, Tuesday 2, pp38–62. The direction of travel in the climate change debates suggests that companies deemed ‘climate villains’ are likely to be similarly treated in future, with green credentials increasingly becoming an important ethical investment criterion, see Proceedings, July 2005, pp366ff. See for example the motion carried in July 1997 in the debate on Unemployment and the Future of Work, where Synod reaffirmed the Christian understanding of work as ‘a sharing in God’s creativity, and a means to human flourishing and service to others’ and endorsed the report’s conclusion that ‘“providing enough good work for everyone to do” should be a major policy objective for our society and Government’, Proceedings, July 1997, p425f. See for example the motions carried in the debates on coal (November 1993), on arms transfer policy (November 1994), and on farming (February 2000). See the July 1993 debate on the personal debt crisis and the reasons behind the 2001 divestment of Provident Financial by the Commissioners and the CBF. See also the spirit behind the putative amendment to the Consumer

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Credit Act planned by the Bishop of Worcester, and the debates on the financial crisis in February 2009. See for example the February 2000 debate on farming, and Questions to the Secretary General in November 2000. See again the motion carried in July 1997 in the debate on Unemployment and the Future of Work. Moral, But No Compass (2008). The report’s genesis was an approach by Jim Murphy, then a Minister at the Department for Work and Pensions, to discuss whether or not the Church should take over Jobcentre Plus. The study was commissioned by Rt Revd Stephen Lowe, Bishop of Hulme and Bishop for Urban Life and Faith, ‘with the full support of the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, and with the approval of the House of Bishops…to enquire into the Church of England’s current social contribution and to assess the potential for its involvement in welfare reform, voluntary activity and public service delivery in pursuit of the common good’ (p13). The result of the inquiry was a recommendation that no national arrangements should be made for the Church to become a service delivery arm of the state, in the context of outrage from the Church about the extent to which its existing contribution in this area was being systematically ignored by government (Moral, But No Compass: Background Note (2009), p8). In economic terms, the report argues that the state is ‘free-riding’ on the Church’s contribution to the wellbeing of society. See for example the February 1993 debate on Africa, and Questions to BSR in July and November 1994, November 1997, November 2000 and July 2002. See also the November 1996, July 2001 and November 1991 debates on international debt, and the trade justice debates of December 1995 and July 2004. On the sharing of technology, see in particular Climate Change and Human Security (2008), p12. See for example the February 1993 debate on Africa, the November 1996 debate on Jubilee 2000, the report Development Matters (2001), and the July 2004 debate on trade justice. See for example the November 1993 debate on coal and the February 2005 debate on the environment. Nuclear power remains unpopular, although it is too early to tell whether this view will soften through discussions on climate change. See Climate Change and Human Security (2008). See for example the unremarked July 2004 description of the ‘bench of bishops’ as being ‘un-reconstructed Old Labour, believing in central planning and central budgeting’, by Jonathan Redden (Sheffield) (Proceedings, July 2004, p271); and the blaming of the Commissioners’ financial woes on ‘insidious Thatcherism’ by the Very Reverend Robert Jeffrey, Dean of Worcester, and a member of the General Synod Standing Committee, in his Review of the Year 1993 (Church of England Yearbook (1994), pxxii). Field (2007), pp97ff; Medhurst & Moyser (1988), p227; www.icmresearch. co.uk (18 February 2009). On a centrist tendency, see Medhurst & Moyser (1988), pp224ff, pace Phillip Blond from Demos’ argument that ‘red Toryism’ or communitarian civic conservatism is the authentic heritage of the Right. He describes the prevailing political consensus as ‘left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in economics’, Prospect, Issue 155, February 2009.

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Church of England Commentators

See Atherton (1992), p184. Preston also supervised Richard Higginson for the first part of his PhD in Manchester. It would be difficult to quantify the significance of this distractingly romantic lineage, in spite of the evident bibliographical trail. However, this coincidence of connaître with savoir cannot but lead to a more complete knowing and is therefore in and of itself interesting. See also Atherton (1994), p11, for the role of the city of Manchester in many of these relationships. Preston (1991), p31. See also Preston (1979), p40 and p126; Preston (1983), p39; Preston (1987), p128; and Preston (1994), p158. Preston (1991), p27; p46. See also his view that Economic Man treats other human beings as if they were ‘slot machines’ in Preston (1987), p144, and the moral objection to the market being that, when left to itself, it treats labour as a factor of production having no more status than land and capital, in Preston (1994), p94. Atherton attributes this insight to Tawney, see Atherton (1992), p139. Preston (1991), p31 and p65; see also Preston (1979), p40 and p126; Preston (1983), p39; Preston (1987), p128; and Preston (1994) p158. In proposing a basic social wage, Preston does not allow that paid work may not be the only possible social arrangement. This oversight means that he fails to develop this rich seam, which results is this rather premature epitaph: ‘if we have moved into an era where full employment is no longer a possibility, the Protestant Work Ethic has become otiose’. Preston (1987), p120. See for example the citations in Preston (1979), p6 and p91; Preston (1983), p42; and Preston (1991), p37. In his contribution to Putting Theology to Work, on the need to keep taking on the arguments of this ‘persistent Christian undercurrent, which refuses to take economics seriously’, he remarks – somewhat wearily – ‘It is indeed tedious to have to go on doing this decade after decade, but it needs doing’ (p37). For the development of his views over time, compare Preston (1987), p130; Preston (1991), p72f; and Preston (1994) on WCC, cited on p93 and p96 respectively. Preston (1991), p103. See his examples of ‘misuse’ on pp97ff. Preston (1991), p96f; Preston (1987), p7. Compare Brown’s discussion of liberalism and the respective weightings of scripture, tradition and reason in Atherton & Skinner (2007), p52. Preston (1979), p46; p151. See also Preston (1991), p61f and 136f; and Preston (1994), pp131ff. Preston (1979), p75. Preston (1979), p76f; see also Preston (1987), p49f and Preston (1994), p125. Preston is supported in this view by Rowan Williams. His view is that, where adulthood is conceived of having sovereignty over an arena which can be controlled through an exercise of free will, human activity is misunderstood. Decisions are more often a confused, partly conscious and

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partly instinctive response to the world, and to the histories, ideas, languages and societies that we have not built but which influence us hugely. See Williams (1994), p90, cited in Higton (2004a), p94. Preston (1991), p78f; see also Preston (1987), p218. The original list was contained in his 1977 Maurice Lectures, published in 1979 as Religion and the Persistence of Capitalism. The list was then expounded in his 1987 book The Future of Christian Ethics, and reprised in his 1991 book Religion and the Ambiguities of Capitalism. The elements of the list remain constant, although by 1987 he had swapped the order of the first two. See Preston (1979), p48f; Preston (1987), pp140ff; and Preston (1991), p146. See a slightly different expression of the criteria in Preston (1994), p111. Elford & Markham (2000), p267. The term ‘middle axioms’ was coined by JH Oldham, and Preston regards William Temple as the author of the process it describes. Preston (1987), pp106ff and Preston (1994), p157. See also the note on context in Brown & Ballard (2006), pp49–51. Preston (1987), p130f (also Preston (1991), p108 and p151f; Preston (1994), p127, p129, p147 and p15); Preston (1994), p158, and Preston (1983), p154. Clark explains the middle axiom approach as being Paul Ramsey’s ‘directions not directives’. An example would be that a principle might be ‘distributive justice’ and a directive might be ‘40 per cent tax on the rich’, whereas a middle axiom or ‘direction’ would be ‘progressive taxation’. (Clark (1993), pp24–6). Preston (1994), p158f. Atherton (1998), p140. Atherton (1992), p21f. See also Atherton (2003), p143f. See also the historical summary in Atherton (1994), pp12ff. On anachronistic understandings of money, see Being Human (2003), p58. Atherton (1992), pp85ff; pp193ff; p200. He appreciates the political problem here: the conservative response is probably the most representative of ‘ordinary church members’ but is not what the church actually says, its leaders being in ‘intellectual captivity’ to the mainstream liberal tradition (p110f). His own view is that the market economy is the ‘least harmful’ way of operating a modern economy. This is because the market uses the language of prices to enable choice, automatically facilitating the Roman Catholic concept of subsidiarity, with competition preventing its breakdown into monopoly (pp54ff; see also Atherton (2000) p96). Atherton (1992), p62; p50. In his later work he uses Amartya Sen’s useful distinction between ‘engineering’ (or positive, scientific fact) and ‘ethical’ (normative, values) economics, see Atherton (2003), p150, and Atherton & Skinner (2007), p252. His personal correspondence to me of 8 July 2007 contained a reminder that the distinction between normative and positive economics dates back to Christian political economics of the late 18th century/ early 19th century, so Sen’s version of this distinction, while useful, is not of course ‘original’. Atherton (1992), pp264ff, p200f, and p278. Atherton (2000), pp2ff. See also Griffiths (1984), pp53ff. Atherton (2000), p10. Atherton (2000), p4; p38f. Atherton (2000), p15f; p49 and p149; p28; p33; pp42ff. Atherton argues for the inclusion of marginalisation as an Order in that ‘flexible spirit’ of

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interpreting the Orders as frameworks of interpretation, although it is not a traditional ‘order’ as such. See also his book devoted to this topic which summarises much of his previous work, Atherton (2003), particularly pp53ff. Others have argued that there is a qualitative difference between marginalisation and the traditional Orders, in that marginalisation might better be understood as a state that affects each of the Orders in varying degrees, rather than as an Order in its own right. The report Faithful Cities also flags marginalisation as a particular challenge for the Churches (Faithful Cities (2006), pp34–6). Atherton (2000), pp84ff; p22 and p88; p108; p4. His characterisation of this age as ‘partnership and reconciliation’ is in start contrast to Brown & Ballard’s period of ‘crisis’ with which it substantially overlaps, see Brown & Ballard, pp173ff. Regarding the Church’s contribution to civil society, see also the discussion of religious and spiritual capital in Baker & Skinner (2005). Atherton & Skinner (2007), pp94ff and pp257ff. See also Atherton (2003), p145. It is interesting that Brown’s chapter in the same volume revisits his notion of Dialogic Traditionalism which resembles Atherton’s preferred approach, but to which Atherton does not refer. See also Chris Baker’s use of hybrid theory and the Third Space concept in Atherton & Skinner (2007), p201f. Atherton (2008), described by the author in these terms in personal correspondence, July 2007, at which point he gave the book’s working title as, after H Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture model, Transforming Capitalism. Atherton & Skinner (2007), pp87–91; p97; p228; p250. He expresses this threshold as $20,000 in his ICF Annual Lecture, ‘The Happiness Hypothesis – Reflections on the Religion and Capitalism Debate’, delivered at Waterloo St Andrew, London, 18 October 2006, which reflects the theme of his chapter and commentary. Richard Layard’s original lecture, delivered as the first of the LSE Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures on 3 March 2003, uses the threshold of $15,000 as established in the 2000 research of Inglehart & Klingemann, although this is updated similarly in his 2005 book following an update to the source research. The report Faithful Cities also follows Layard, arguing that it is time to question whether the prevailing economic and social model can really promote global happiness (Faithful Cities (2006), p39). Atherton (2008), p200; summarised on pp283ff. Atherton (2008), p245f; p248. In his 2003 book Marginalization he discusses the use of type in the context of the use in economics of homo economicus, noting its usefulness as an ‘ideal type’ but its neglect of the range of motives that often pertain, as well as its neglect of the conclusions of the game theorists about co-operation for optimal outcomes. Atherton (2003), pp152–6. Also in this book, Atherton is keen on the example of Muslim interest-free banking, which has experienced a resurgence in tandem with the growth of globalisation. Based on the equitysharing of risk and reward, rather than ‘interest’ on money loaned, the Muslim response to the condemnation of usury is particularly suited to the developing world, offering them a useful and theologically ‘clean’ economic model. Atherton (2003), pp169–72. He does not resolve the tension between his general approval of market mechanisms and this nuanced rejection of them.

184 Notes 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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Sedgwick (1992), p145f and pp150ff; p176f. See also p157 on vocation. Sedgwick (1999), p54; pp57ff; p80f; p272. Sedgwick (1999), p133. See also p83f; pp86–8. Sedgwick (1999), p88; p98; p135 and pp146–9. His view echoes Daniel Bell’s thesis on competing technologies of desire, see Bell (2001), p2. Sedgwick (1999), p181f; p195f. See Volf on the Pauline notion of charisma and work as co-operation with God, in Volf (2001), pp115ff. Atherton & Skinner (2007), p211f; p218f. For this helpful observation I am indebted to my colleague Jon Teckman. Sedgwick (1999), p272. See for instance the 2002 Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s work on human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty; and The Economist’s pithy encapsulation of the limits of the traditional model: ‘Pages filled with squiggly equations describe a world occupied not by fallible, generous people like you, your family or your friends, but by “agents” and “actors”, all as rational as Star Trek’s Spock and as greedy as Gordon Gekko.’ 8 May 2003). Britton & Sedgwick (2003), pp9–17; pp296–301. Brown & Ballard (2006), p419. My review of the book appeared in Faith in Business Quarterly 10:2 Summer 2006 and is in part replicated here. Brown (2004), p21 and p237; pp96ff. My review of his book appeared in Faith in Business Quarterly 8:3 Autumn 2004 and is in part replicated here. Brown (2004), p100. See Brown (2004), p57; Brown in Atherton & Skinner (2007), p52f; and Brown & Ballard (2006), p10. I am grateful to the author for clarifying his line of argument here, in personal correspondence 11 July 2007. See also MacIntyre (2003). Compare Atherton’s reflection of this treatment in Atherton (2003), p177f. Brown (2004), p17; p287 and p201. See also Brown & Ballard (2006), p8f and p429. Compare Atherton’s enthusiasm for a ‘polyphonic mode’ between the ends of the spectrum, which is rather similar, in Atherton & Skinner (2007), p258. While Brown here favours a nuanced position between the Communitarians and the Liberals, in his official capacity at Church House he seems latterly to have reverted to the ‘traditional’ liberal Anglican approach, in his suggestion that Christians appeal to ‘widely-held notions’ which, while naturally rooted in Christianity, appeal strongly to secular morality, for example, his principles of fairness, generosity and sustainability. Implications (2009), p16f. Brown (2004), pp287–9. Brown (2004), p77, p282 and p223, se also p288; p284. A later version of his criteria for dialogue partners is less exclusive, provided the partner has ‘a commitment to objective truth at some level; a commitment to the possibility of new knowledge, rather than treating any particular state of human understanding as complete for all time; and a commitment to seek improvement in the world’s affairs’. See Atherton & Skinner (2007), p64. Brown (2004), p226. This is a concept much misunderstood in the sources. In economics ‘scarcity’ is about matching infinite human desire with resources which may be limited and which admit alternative uses, through the mechanism of prices. In a relatively free market, prices tend to be set by demand rather than supply, providing information for decision-making

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about comparative value. Thus, prices ration desire not resources. While the word ‘scarcity’ suggests this as a promising resource for ecological discussions, the solution is not about pricing things ‘out of the market’ – or pricing them back in, as externalities – in order to conserve them, it is about re-educating desire. A Measure for Measures (2004), p120. Brown & Ballard (2006), p3. Brown & Ballard (2006), p15, see also p13f; p21. Compare the valedictory speech made by the sponsoring Diocesan in the July 2008 Synod debate on work, when the then Bishop of St Albans (Rt Revd Christopher Herbert) predicted that one of the major ethical challenges to face the country over the next decade would be the morality of the structures and operations of the national, European and global economy, and that there was a current deficit in economic ethical thinking that the Church should fill (Proceedings, July 2008, pp457–70). Brown & Ballard (2006), p3; p59. See also Clark (1993), p3. Medhurst and Moyser have attributed this conservatism to a concern to appear ‘credible’ to opinion-formers, Medhurst & Moyser (1988), p317. They would agree that the particular exception to the tendency to follow fashion was the opposition to Thatcherism, epitomised by the Faith in the City report, and for them corporately located in Synod’s BSR rather than in Synod more generally (p338f). Brown & Ballard (2006), p16; see also p18. Brown & Ballard (2006), p118 and p121f. Brown & Ballard (2006), p13; p310. Gorringe (1994), p159. Gorringe (1994), p38. See also Gorringe (1999), p37 and p104f. Gorringe (1999) p7, p13f, p31f and p44, pp74ff; p94, pp102–4. He believes the misclassification of economics as science follows on from the fact that Adam Smith ‘fatally divorced’ his two treatises Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations (p7). See also Gorringe (1994), p32f. His second ‘Dark Age’ follows MacIntyre’s analysis, Gorringe (1999), pp9ff. Gorringe (1999), p100f, see also p41, p75 and p103f; p105f. Heslam (2004), p90; pp79ff. See in particular Higginson (2002), p1 and chapters 1 and 14; and Higginson (1997a), p3f and p10. Higginson (1997a), p6. Compare Sedgwick’s treatment of vocation in Sedgwick (1999), p181f. Higginson (1993), pp44ff. Higginson uses as his sources Schumacher, Christian: To Live and Work (London: Christian Research: 1987) and Schumacher, Christian: God in Work (Oxford: Lion Hudson: 1998). Higginson (2002), p49 and Higginson (1997a), p29; Higginson (1996), p44. Higginson (1997a), p5; p26; p29 and p33 respectively; p30; p12f. This theme of the costliness of discipleship resonates in particular with his chapter on the Cross in Called to Account, where he sees painful business decisions like vicarious blame-taking, risking a loss of reputation, letting go and resigning on a matter of principle as being examples of costly and quasi-redemptive actions in business (Higginson (1993), p139f and p149).

186 Notes 67

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See for example Higginson (1993), throughout; Higginson (1997a), p8, p24, p31f; Higginson also uses this device in his discussion of ethics (Denis the Deontologist, Chris the Consequentialist and Victor the Virtue Ethicist – see his keynote address at the Ridley Hall Foundation conference on the Virtues of Business, 26 March 2004). Both he and Clive Wright also make frequent use of case study examples based on real work dilemmas to illustrate their themes. Higginson (1997b), pp5ff. Heslam (2002), pp17–27. By 2008 his ‘chapters’ had become Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation, see Heslam in Harper & Gregg (2008), p178. Compare a similar structure in the earlier Higginson (1997a), p5; Atherton & Skinner (2007), p131. His source for the $10 trillion estimate is Ron Snider, cited by Larry Reed in Goudzwaard, Bob: Globalization and the Kingdom of God (Washington DC: Baker Books: 2001), p76. Additionally, in a speech at General Synod in February 2006, The Bishop of London (Rt Revd Richard Chartres) quoted a statistic estimating that six per cent of all the investment capital in the world was in the hands of religious bodies. Proceedings, February 2006, p43. See also the useful discussion of political consumerism for Christians in Bretherton (2008). Compare #66 in the 2009 papal encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Heslam (2004), p128f. His ‘restraint’ motif resonates with Atherton’s on ‘selfcontrol’, see Atherton’s 2006 ICF lecture. Towards the end of the period, Heslam developed a connected interest in thrift, which is to be the subject of his next book, due out in 2010. Heslam (2004), p130f and Heslam in Stoner & Wankel (2007), p133. The topic of trust is most comprehensively treated in Fukuyama (1995), in the UK by Hutton & Davies (2003), and in popular form by Covey (2008). Stoner & Wankel (2007), p136. See a discussion of the managerialism debate in Poole (2008) pp85–97. Putnam (2000); Prosperity with a Purpose (2005), p31; Faithful Cities (2006), p25; Moral But No Compass (2008), p19f. On religious and spiritual capital, see Baker & Skinner (2005), p4. For a comprehensive discussion on the topic, see Baker & Miles-Watson (2007). An argument for this contribution to be taken more seriously is presented in Moral, But No Compass (2008), p26, and discussed in Faithful Cities (2006), p2f. See also the debate about the importance of ‘institutional capital’ in the success of international programmes in de Soto, North and Kasozi. Atherton & Skinner (2007), pp121–36. See also his treatment of this typology in Faith in Business Quarterly 9:4 Winter 2005/6, p31f, and in Harper & Gregg (2008), pp167ff. Heslam in Harper & Gregg (2008), p165f. See also his point about avoiding a patronising ‘cultural imperialism’ by asking the poor what they want instead of assuming the First World knows best, and his citation of a study that shows that support for free markets is higher in many African countries than in the developed world as a whole, p170. Elsewhere he points out that private investment brings more money into developing nations than aid programmes (an annual rate of $53billion in aid between the years 1990 and 2000 compared to an increase from $44billion to $154billion in private investment over the same period). Stoner & Wankel (2007), p132.

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Hughes (2007), pviiif. My review of his book appeared in Faith in Business Quarterly 12:1 Autumn 2008 and is in part replicated here. Hughes (2007), p223. An interesting distinction between work itself and attitudes towards work arose in the July 2008 Synod debate on work. Revd Canon Professor Anthony Thiselton (Southwell and Nottingham) attempted to amend the motion affirming work as essentially a spiritual activity to affirm ‘our attitude to much work …’, on the grounds that not all work is spiritual. The Archbishop of York (Dr John Sentamu) spoke in strong support of the amendment, because not all work leads to the glory of God, but the amendment was lost, 117 voting for and 120 against, with nine recorded abstentions. This suggests that, narrowly, Synod would agree with Hughes that all work can be beautiful (Proceedings, July 2008, pp457–70). While David Sheppard (Bishop of Liverpool) and John Gladwin (Bishop of Chelmsford) have both been associated with this area, their publications (1983 and 1979 respectively) fall outwith the period of study. They have therefore been considered for their particular contributions via Synod in the previous chapter, where footnotes refer back to their books for context as appropriate. The Bishop of Bradwell, Laurie Green, also contributed a pamphlet during the period under discussion. Published in 2001 under the joint auspices of the Anglican Urban Network (set up after the 1998 Lambeth Conference), the Urban Bishops’ Panel (a sub-committee of the House of Bishops), and the Urban Theology Unit (an ecumenical centre), The Impact of the Global examined ‘urban theology’, touching on the issue of modern capitalism through its treatment of globalisation. Space precludes substantial discussion of his work, except here to note his contribution of the notion of ‘urban inflation’. He argues that globalisation transmits the values of capitalism worldwide, these values being commodification (everything and everyone is reducible to a cash value); efficiency (success is to be measured by its rate of productivity rather than its innate value); and knowledge (which for him is information rather than wisdom). These values drive global urbanisation to locations that are often economically ill-prepared for the demands of such development, a situation he terms ‘urban inflation’. This leads to the collapse of unready cities around the globe, as well as the growth of the grey economy as an attempt to address this imbalance. The Impact of the Global (2001), p15, p19, p21 and p23. As an aside, an interesting treatment of the particular cachet of the views of Bishops in general, and their perhaps disproportionate weight in media terms, can be found in Lee & Stanford (1990), pp19ff. Harries (1992), p72; p170; pp136ff; Sir Robert Birley Lecture, 11 October 2000. In this lecture, he also sees the initiative taken by entrepreneurs as reflective of the initiative taken by God in creation. Harries (1992), p57 and p168. I am grateful to the author for restating his position, particularly in regard to the importance he places on solidarity, in personal correspondence, 29 June 2007. See also the treatment of solidarity as one of a number of ‘key themes’ for responsible business derived from Catholic Social Teaching, in Andradi & Heslam (2006), p5, available at http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/thegoodcompany/ default.html.

188 Notes 82

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Harries (1992), p86; Bell (2001), p2f. See also Sedgwick (1999), p133. The article setting out the argument used here by Harries was written in 2002 by Kenneth Adams and Eric Duckworth. Published in the February 2002 issue of Ingenia (the journal of the Royal Academy of Engineering), they proposed that the solution to the impending environmental disaster being caused by a society addicted to acquisitiveness was to channel this passion away from ‘things’. Instead, entrepreneurial energy (and public policy) should be directed towards the achievement of personal fulfilment through intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual, physical and social activities, rather than through environmentally damaging material consumption. This was tested by the Comino Foundation in 2006, resulting in an econometric report that upheld the thesis. See the CEBR report The experience economy (2006). Williams (2000), p153; Williams (2001), p243. For a useful summary of this perspective, see Higton (2004a), p92f. Harries (1992), p75. Harries (1992), p175f. Selby (1997), p155. See also Preston (1991), p78f. This line of enquiry is developed in Tanner (2005). See also Long’s interpretation of Milbank on the economy of gift in Long (2000), p259. Selby (1997), p147, and p123; p69, p97, p161 and p167. See also the 1998 Lambeth Conference resolution in international debt and economic justice, orchestrated by Selby, which counts this restriction of autonomy amongst the litany of reasons to protest against debt: http://www.lambethconference. org/resolutions/1998/1998-1-15.cfm (20 August 2007). Selby (1997), p168. See the chapter by Selby in Brown (2006), p250f. In addition to the context of the Anglican Communion and ecumenism, Selby has also identified the crucial role of a theology of money in interfaith dialogue. In his closing remarks in the February 2009 Synod discussion, he observed that ‘the money issue has inflicted the deepest wounds and retains the greatest scars on our relationship, not least with Jewish people but with Muslim people too’. Proceedings, February 2009, p48. See Lee & Stanford (1990), pp127ff and passim for an exploration of his particular role. Jenkins (2004), p2; p41; p154; p7. Jenkins (2004), pp41–3, p48, p114f, p126 and p236. See also Jenkins’ concept of the Ptolemaic nature of orthodox economics: ‘In medieval times astronomers observed that the orbits of stars and planets did not conform to the official Ptolemaic theory of a geocentric universe. However the theory was official and therefore true. Consequently official theorists had to spend their time working out explanations which enabled them to maintain that the heavens operated as if the basic and official theory were true, even though empirical observation suggested otherwise’ (p179). Compare Atherton (1992), p62. Jenkins (2004), p175; pp90ff. Jenkins (2004), p129f; p136f. Jenkins (2004), p211; p155f; p157 and pp159ff. This observation about capital adequacy was also made in the Doctrine Commission’s report Being Human,

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where the Commission charted the development of credit and fractional reserve banking, and the subsequent uncoupling of the majority of the economy from tangible ‘products’. Being Human (2003), pp60ff. Jenkins (2004), p238. See also Being Human (2003), p62, on the sleight of hand about the ‘mathematical’ nature of money. Jenkins (2004), p233; p217f, p237f, p241, p257f and p265. Jenkins (2004), p242, p246, p249f and p254. Compare Gorringe (1994), p38 and Gorringe in Heslam (2004), p89; and a similar argument in Northcott: ‘The fundamental characteristic of the dogma of the free trade market in finance and goods is that it promises the political utopia of human freedom and universal welfare by non-political means. In the name of this dogma, indebted nation states in the south, and all forms of political governance which are sustained within them, are being coerced by their creditor bankers to reduce their collective efforts to express responsible government and pursue the common good’. Northcott (1999), p168, and Northcott (2007b) on global capitalism’s ‘attack’ on democracy. That the developed nations have responded to their own financial crises with precisely the measures they have tried to prevent the developing world from using, Stiglitz argues will be geopolitically destabilising as more countries seek future help from non-‘Western’ sources. Stiglitz (2009), p85. Jenkins (2004), p92. See also his article in Studies in Christian Ethics, co-authored with Nigel Biggar, which largely offers a critique of Preston’s middle axiom approach and continues his theme of a more explicit use of Biblical material in Christian ethics, Biggar & Hay (1994). Hay (1989), pp71ff; p12; p14. For Hay’s application of the principles to market capitalism, see pp166ff. Hay now notes that the first principle insufficiently clearly states the positive principle of using resources efficiently, by framing its negative in terms of waste. He would also like to point out that the use of ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ is these principles predated the current preoccupation with using gender inclusive language, and was intended to be inclusive of both genders, personal correspondence, 19 July 2007. Hay (1989), p16, p63, p77 and p309; p141; p143f. See also Gorringe’s critique of utilitarianism, and its sacrifice of means to ends, in Gorringe (1994), p35f. The Chicago Project or School refers to the particular brand of economics that hails from the University of Chicago, historically led by the Nobel laureates George Stigler and Milton Friedman. Neo-classical in orientation, their central axiom is self-interest, which they have applied not only to economics but to other fields including, controversially, family life. For example, Chicago economist Gary Becker won his 1992 Nobel Prize ‘for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour’. For an historical survey of some of the key economists concerned, see Reder (1982), pp1–38. Hay & Kreider (2001), p171. His source is a paper by Frank, Robert H., Gilovich, Thomas and Regan, Dennis T: ‘Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?’ Journal of Economic Perspectives Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 1993, pp159–71. This emphasis on the corrosive nature of market capitalism

190 Notes

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echoes and builds more specifically on his extensive use of Hirsch in his earlier book, see Hay (1989), pp158ff. Hay & Kreider (2001), p170f; p175f; p187. See also his earlier treatment of this theme in Hay (1989), p122f. Hay does, however, allow that a potential corrective would be perfect ‘reputational mechanisms’ in an economy, which would reduce the need for exogenous moral constraints and/or regulation, thereby rendering it more efficient (Hay & Kreider (2001), p80). Hay & Kreider (2001), p171. The list originally appeared in Hay, p124. Apart from the later list having generally been rendered more succinct and direct (‘economic institutions’ was originally the more general ‘the economic structure’), the key differences between the lists are the additions of ‘and encourage efficient use of resources’ to criterion (i) and ‘and sufficient rest’ to criterion (iii). See also Plant (2001), p186f and p195. Wright (2004), ppxii–xx; p3f; pp9ff; p15. Elsewhere he examines the necessary contribution made by morals to the smooth workings of the market, and argues that, of the various options, Christianity offers a particularly robust and relevant moral framework based on a teleology of love and service (pp84ff; see also p104, p115 and p131). Wright (2004), p21, see also Green (2009), p141; p39. Higginson also mentions this point in his The Ethics of Business Competition (p11). See the chapter by the economist Ian Steedman in Atherton & Skinner (2007), p72f, for a criticism of the zero-sum fallacy; compare Being Human (2003), p70. Wright (2004), pp91ff. Wright (2004), p26 and personal conversations. In this context it could be argued that the fair trade movement is a modern reinterpretation of just price theory, and that recent interest in Islamic finance has reawakened interest in the usury debate. Wright (2004), pp58ff and p212; p49 and p115; p81 and p6, compare Higginson (1997a) p28; p132; p134 and p138. Wright (2004), p132, and see p177f. Apart from its inherent ability to meet the ethical needs of business, Christianity in Wright’s view ought to be actively colonising the secular in this sphere, thus fulfilling a dual role of service and mission (p227f). Green (1996), p5 and p80. See also Green (2009), p79. Heslam argues that this connectivity predicates peace on commerce, noting that this is the ancient motto of Amsterdam, Commercium et pax. Heslam (2007), p33f; and Heslam in Stoner & Wankel (2007), p138f. For a contrasting view in the sources, see the discussion in the Faithful Cities report on the negative effects of globalisation on social capital, eroding ‘justice and peace’ (Faithful Cities (2006), p36f). As referenced in his Hugh Kay lecture, 30 November 2006. Green also addressed the conference of the Foundation for Church Leadership on 1 February 2007 in King’s College London. In revisiting the Parable of the Talents, he noted that the individuals entrusted with the talents were all servants. In his reflection on the conference, Trevor Willmott (the then Bishop of Basingstoke) developed this observation into the idea that, while everyone is gifted, everyone entrusted with a gift is a servant, and must use their gifts in service, which would support a far wider view of vocation than is traditionally assumed. See also Higginson (1997a), p27.

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Green (1996), p136; and Green (2009), pp173ff. He expanded on this in his Hugh Kay lecture, 30 November 2006, St Paul’s Cathedral, using the quote from Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes pt iv that ‘all service ranks the same with God’ (1841). Green (1996), pp19ff; p93. See also Higginson (1997b), pp5–7, who makes a similar point about language, although he regards the ‘game’ metaphor as being limited because it underplays the serious side of business. As he also notes, the application of formal game theory to markets by economists offers a similar corrective to the supremacy of the ‘war’ metaphor, following a long tradition of the application of war primers to business, for instance Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Sun Tse. See his account of the ‘perfect storm’, Green (2009), p114f. Green (2009), p128. Green (2009), p105f. Green, (2009), p159f. Green (2009), pp176ff. Wilde (2006), p180; p156 and p190. His key source is Myers, Ched: Binding the Strong Man (Orbis: Maryknoll: 1988). Compare Gorringe on the principalities and powers, for example in Heslam (2004), pp79ff. For a related but contrasting account of how George W Bush used the rhetoric of apocalyptic religion to uphold Empire, see Northcott (2007a). Northcott, a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church and Professor of Ethics in the University of Edinburgh, uses a similar line of argument to Wilde in his other 2007 ecotheological publication, drawing parallels between the fall of the House of David and the current situation, and stating in the context of ecology that ‘Global warming is the earth’s judgement on the global market empire, and on the heedless consumption it fosters’. Northcott (2007b), p7. While Northcott writes primarily on the environment, his argument includes a condemnation of global capitalism that is similar to the arguments here summarised of Wilde and Gorringe, with his arguments about the negative affects of globalisation on democracy agreeing with those of David Jenkins. He warns against the use of apocalyptic rhetoric, because it creates a climate of fear which is not generative, but he regards the return to local self-sustaining communities as the only way to prevent global collapse (Northcott (2007b), pp279ff). His call to return to the local is similar to that of John Milbank, see Milbank (2008), p127. Atherton & Skinner (2007), p155. Wilde is also at pains to point out the need for a careful engagement with political economy in order to be able to propose alternatives to global capitalism, p232. Atherton & Skinner (2007), p161. See p164f for his discussion of Marx’ use of the word aufhebung as abolition, and its wider meaning including supercedence or transcendence. On types of capitalism, see Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars (1994), p15. Atherton & Skinner (2007), p162 and p155f; p163. Compare Wilde (2006), pp257–9. Atherton & Skinner (2007), pp249–54. See also Wilde (2006), p165. This proposal might fall into Tawney’s category of ‘bad evidence for practice, but good evidence for thought’. Tawney (1948), pviii. The economist Paul Mills has suggested instead weighting shareholder voting rights in favour of longevity of holding, see Mills (2010). It is interesting in this context to

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consider the employee ownership business model – used by companies such as John Lewis – which would be even more democratic than either scheme. Atherton & Skinner (2007), p258 and Atherton (2008), p247f; Atherton (2000), pp2ff; p136 and Atherton (2008), pp283ff. While Brown does not say so, this is a classic distinction in the behaviourist psychology literature: ‘Advocacy means speaking what you think, speaking for a point of view. Inquiry means looking into what you do not yet know, what you do not yet understand, or seeking to discover what others see and understand that may differ from your point of view. It is the art of asking genuine questions, ones that seek to understand the rules that govern why people do what they do as much as to challenge what they do.’ After Chris Argyris, in Isaacs (1999), p188. Brown (2004), p290. A more recent Anglican ‘tradition’ which might shed further light on this difficult balancing act is the practice of ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ between the three Abrahamic traditions. A mode of study between textual scholars and theologians that has been developing over the last ten years in Britain, the US, and the Middle East, Scriptural Reasoning brings together Jews, Christians and Muslims in the joint study of scripture. The practice not only allows ‘deep to call to deep’ in interfaith dialogue, but has been found to generate valuable new resources with which to meet a variety of contemporary challenges. See Quash in Walker & Bretherton (2007). Gustafson (1988), pp268ff. Atherton (1988), pp135ff. See also Brown & Ballard (2006), p51, and the woebegone comments by the then Bishop of Worcester (Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby) in the July 2005 debate on Resourcing Mission: ‘I have recently had several experiences of inviting those responsible for the central direction of our Church to require theological reflection to form a part of all major pieces of work and review, and I have been very depressed by the responses I have received. That may be, of course, because the experience of theology that exists in those quarters has been very negative; that it has been felt to be a way of putting the brakes on necessary action. I do not see it that way; but I think that we have to move from a situation where theology appears as a lump at the end of a report, in small print, to one where it is much more obvious how it has informed the process of reflection….[We have] intellectual resources and using them is quite frightening; but if we do not reflect more closely on developments in contemporary society and how the Scriptures and tradition relate to those, and if we do not fund those and see them as part of mission, we shall have ourselves to blame if our utterances are thought of as superficial and our initiatives seen as ill-conceived and short-term’ (Proceedings, July 2005, p295). Britton & Sedgwick (2003), p10, p299 and p15; Hay (1989), p122f; Hay & Kreider (2001), p170f and p176; Gorringe in Heslam (2004), p80 and p88f; Jenkins (2004), p271. Atherton also starts to address this issue in his book on marginalisation, admitting the legitimate usage of homo economicus as an ideal type, whilst at the same time flagging, like his colleagues, motives for economic behaviour other than self-interest. Atherton (2003), pp152–6. Compare Preston (1987), p144 and Preston (1994), p94; Atherton (1992), p139.

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Hay & Kreider (2001), p170f; p176 and p187; see also Hay (1989), p122f. While Midgley argues that ‘prediction does not compete with deliberation, and cannot subvert it’, (Midgley (1997), p111), Hay and many social psychologists would argue that persistently deterministic thinking, particularly in a group context, naturally becomes suggestive, normalising behaviours such that deliberation is seemingly no longer required. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the ‘business case’ for consumerism. Britton & Sedgwick (2003), p15; Brown (2004), pp96ff; Hay & Kreider (2001), pp170ff. See also Gorringe (1999), p13f and p31f, and Gorringe (1994), p3 and p32f; and Faithful Cities (2006), p2f and p25. See Bonhoeffer on the temptation to do good in order to feel good, and the folly of setting personal innocence above responsibility for others, Bonhoeffer (1995), pp236–8. See also Flew’s distinction between ‘interestedness’ and selfishness in O’Keeffe (2004), p73f. Hay & Kreider (2001), p175; Wright (2004), p26, and personal conversations, compare Britton & Sedgwick (2003), p299 and Gorringe’s critique of utilitarianism’s sacrifice of means to ends, in Gorringe (1994), p35f; Hughes (2007), p223. On the zero-sum fallacy, see Wright (2004), p39; see also Higginson (1997b), p11, Atherton & Skinner (2007), p72f, and Being Human (2003), p70. See Poole, E (2005), p323; Axelrod (1990); and Nalebuff & Brandenburger (1996). Atherton and Higginson do mention game theory in passing, the latter referencing these two books, but it remains undeveloped in the sources. Atherton (2003), p155; Higginson (1997b), p6f. Goodchild (2007), p9f and p13f. Ford & Richardson (1994), pp205ff. There is an argument too that corporations have a tendency to attract people with high psychopathy traits, who are disproportionately represented at senior levels, see Babiak & Hare (2006), as cited by Boddy, Ladyshewsky & Galvin (2009). Preston (1991), p27. Weber might take this further in his classic formulation of the debt capitalism owes to the Protestant ethic and its kicking away of this ladder: ‘For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate world morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. …But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.’ Weber (2002), p123f. A linked critique of the operation of markets is offered by Laurie Green’s notion of ‘urban inflation’. As discussed in n79, he has argued that globalisation transmits the values of capitalism worldwide, these values being commodification (everything and everyone is reducible to a cash value); efficiency (success is to be measured by its rate of productivity rather than its innate value); and knowledge (which for him is information rather than wisdom). These values drive global urbanisation to locations that are often economically ill-prepared for the demands of such development. This ‘urban inflation’ leads to the collapse of unready cities around the globe, as well as the growth of the grey economy as an attempt to address this imbalance. Green (2001), p15, p19, p21 and p23. See the hint of the beginnings of such a discussion, based on the development economics of Sen, in Atherton (2003), p157f. One of the objections of anti-capitalist and anti-managerialist commentators is what they see as

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inappropriate instrumentalising or commodification in this sphere. Their natural enemy is the Chicago School. For theologians like Milbank and Long, this fatally and heretically subjects everything to the capitalist meta-narrative. Long (2000), p258f. See also Poole, E (2005). Kort (1992), p48. See for example Howard & Welbourn (2004). Welbourn was for many years an Anglican industrial chaplain. Elsewhere, Higginson is careful to include the spirit as part of his treatment of the Trinity in Called to Account, Higginson (1993), p49f. He is rare in mentioning organisational spirituality specifically, but only as a ‘fashionable idea’ that is not yet sufficiently colonised by mainstream business to survive, Higginson (2002), p295f. The Church of England’s own contribution to the debate is contained in the 2005 report Evangelism in a Spiritual Age, written by Steven Croft and others for the Church House Publishing Explorations imprint and supported by a workbook and website: http://www.churchinaspiritualage.org.uk/ Harries (1992), p48.

Chapter 3 1 2

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Types of Theology

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/8410453.stm (23 March 2010). See Dulles (2002), p2, p10f and p16; p20f and p197. See also Kelsey on the folly of trying to identify a single distinctive theological method or theologian within theology in Kelsey (1975), p134f. Yoder in Stassen et al (1996), p45 and p48f. Niebuhr (1956), p44. Weber’s famous use of type, often misunderstood, tended towards this latter usage in its concern to bring out strongly ‘special accents of importance’ to facilitate comparative study, in spite of the risk of imbalance and caricature. H Richard Niebuhr and most subsequent typologists have explicitly drawn on this tradition. See Gerth & Mills (1970), p292 for Weber’s explanation in his essay ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’; and p59f for the editors’ commentary; see also Preston (1979), p164 n5. Compare MacIntyre on ‘characters’, although his usage adds the complexity of personification, MacIntyre (2003), pp29ff. Yoder (1992), p12. See also Psathas’ categorisation of ‘types’ of type into: descriptive concepts, empirical generalisations, the average type, laws, the classificatory type and – as in Weber – the ideal type. Using his terminology, type here is being used first as a descriptive concept to marshall the typologists considered, then as a classificatory type to suggest an overarching logic. Edress et al (2005), pp144–8. A kind reviewer pointed out the danger of equivocation over the use of the word ‘world’ throughout this chapter. While some of the theologians discussed define their usage, where the word remains undefined it should be taken to refer to the ‘worldly’ world of the lived human experience rather than the less anthropocentrically defined ‘ecological’ world. Niebuhr (1956), p32. While his typology is best known through his book Christ and Culture, he originally set it out in an essay of 1942 which

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remained unpublished until its inclusion in Stassen et al (1996), pp15ff. In this essay, Christ Against Culture was originally termed the New Law Type; Christ of Culture, the Natural Law or the Accommodationist Type; Christ Above Culture, the Synthetic or Architectonic type (‘the Gothic cathedral’); Christ and Culture in Paradox, the Dualist or Oscillatory Type (‘the pendulum’); and Christ Transforming Culture, the Conversionist Type. Preston tracks Niebuhr’s typology back through Troeltsch to Tawney’s ‘four main outlooks’ with respect to the relation between Christianity and the social and economic institutions of the Middle Ages, viz adopting an ascetic aloofness from the world’s institutions; ignoring them altogether; fighting for utopian reforms; or accepting them but criticising them. As regards Troeltsch’s church/sect/mysticism distinction, he argues that: ‘the Anglican Church has never lived in a sectarian position and has no theology of such a position. Institutionally it finds itself dealing indeed with too much of an inappropriate Christendom structure, but with no possibility as far as one can foresee of abandoning it altogether.’ In Preston (1979), p6f; p11. Niebuhr (1956), p40. In his 1942 rendering of the typology, Niebuhr records an academic debt to the work of Etienne Gilson’s Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages of 1938 (Stassen et al (1996), p19), using his categorisation of reason and revelation to create his own typology. Interestingly, this history has been lost by the time his typology is published as Christ and Culture, in which Gilson only merits a footnote about his treatment of Aquinas (Niebuhr (1956), p131 n13). This provenance might account for the frustration Yoder has expressed in Niebuhr’s use of historical examples, if they were essentially relying on prior argumentation not available to readers of the typology in its published form (Yoder in Stassen et al (1996), p36; p56f; p64). Also in his 1942 version of the typology, Niebuhr is more explicit about the relationship between the five types resting on the three choices to agree, oppose or mediate (in Stassen et al (1996), p25). See also Wink’s presentation of five contrasting ‘worldviews’ in Wink (1992), pp4–7. Niebuhr (1956), p40; p45 and p47; p68. On Tertullian, pp51ff, and on Tolstoy, pp57ff. Yoder points out that these rejecters of culture were often creative about engaging with it to their advantage, in Stassen et al (1996), p57. For a discussion on the natural commercial advantage this gave the Quakers, see Hannah in Burke et al (2000) p290. For a modern example, see www.LaserMonks.com, a $10m office supplies business run out of Our Lady of Spring Bank Cistercian Abbey, Wisconsin. Caniglia & Griffith (2008). Niebuhr (1956), p41; pp84ff; p101; p103; p108f. Niebuhr (1956), p42; p120; p127; p132f; p145f and p148. Atherton also favours the synthesist model as a way of being both interdisciplinary and distinctive, and reformulates it as his own ‘interacting syntheses’ model in Atherton & Skinner (2007), p98f and p257f; and Atherton (2003), p145. Niebuhr (1956), p43 (emphasis original) p151; p156; p157; p185; p188. Niebuhr (1956), p43 and p193f. Beliefs about the purpose of creation and the nature of the Fall will of course dictate the basic thrust of any worldview theology. For a discussion of the doctrinal history of the Fall, see the 1924 Bampton Lectures delivered by Norman P Williams on The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, published in London by Longmans, Green & Co in 1927. As referenced in Poole, W (2005).

196 Notes 14 Niebuhr (1956), p222, quoting FD Maurice; p196f; p108f; p217f; pp218ff; see Stassen et al (1996), p191. 15 I am here distinguishing between what Stassen calls Niebuhr’s argument and his typology. While Yoder’s critique is here taken as the exemplar, Heslam provides a bibliography of critique in his contribution to Harper & Gregg (2008), also noting usage of the model in the context of discussion about economics in Preston, van Wensveen Siker and Krueger, see p189 n5 and n6. See also Logan (2007), pp45ff. Niebuhr’s model is here being deployed as an example of type so will not be directly applied to capitalism in this context. 16 Stassen et al (1996), pp45–7. At one point he goes almost as far as to accuse the typology of being ‘demonic’ because it is ‘more convincing to the naïve than it is true when examined’. His critique occasions a useful excursion into types of typology where he contrasts monolithic typologies with overlapping ones. He says Niebuhr’s typology is exposed as belonging to the former group by his complaints when theologians don’t fit his categories, whereas Yoder’s typology of pacifism belongs to the latter (p67). 17 Stassen et al (1996), p16. See also Dulles (2002), p24, and Hauerwas & Willimon (1989), p39f. It should be noted that Yoder would not appear to agree with these critics. In fact, he takes issue not with Niebuhr’s favouritism but with its covert nature (Stassen et al (1996), pp80–2; see also Yoder’s criticisms, p40f; p52f and p75f; and Stassen’s response based on his analysis of the development of the text, p176). 18 Stassen et al (1996), pp54–6 and pp59–61. Yeager’s use of Raymond Whitehead would support this concern about the artificial homogeneity of culture. For example, Whitehead objects to the overlooking of the use of culture and Christ as devices for social control. Apart from Niebuhr’s neglect of power in this regard, this renders his tidy distinction between them at best an oversimplification (p100). 19 Stassen et al (1996), on the Trinity, pp61ff (and Stassen’s reply, p141); on the role of the church, p74f (see Yeager’s argument from Niebuhr’s other writings that he established elsewhere a clear ‘typology’ for the Church’s role, viz, its apostolic function, its pastoral function, and its pioneering function (pp116ff). 20 Stassen et al (1996), p89. For a useful summary of subsequent critique, little of which added to that of Yoder, see Marsden (l999). Marsden’s thesis is that Niebuhr’s typology can generally be rescued by the adoption of a more flexible hermeneutic, akin to Yoder’s ‘motifs’ approach, rather than an insistence on the exactitude that is implied by his language of type. 21 Cobb (1959), p183. 22 Cobb (1959), pp187–9. 23 Cobb (1959), pp189–92. 24 Cobb (1959), p184 and p192. Compare Tracy’s distinction between a ‘process understanding’ of God and a ‘classically theistic’ understanding of God in Tracy (1981), p440, n7. 25 Cobb (1959), p193. 26 Cobb (1959), p185; p194. 27 Jones (1989), p13; p18f. 28 Jones (1989), p20f, p42, pp45ff; p121f.

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44 45 46

Jones (1989), p20f, p42 and pp57ff; p137f. Jones (1989), p20, p22, p43 and pp70ff; p148f. Jones (1989), p20, p22, p43 and pp81ff; p166f. Jones (1989), p20, p22, p43 and pp97ff; p180f. Jones (1989), p24. He defines ‘theologizing’ as ‘the process of identifying, nurturing, forging, or reforging one’s impulsing logic as identifiable narrative, whether magnetized by imagery of battlefield or of cottage’ (p235). Jenkins in Guest et al (2004). See Kendall & McHenry (1997), pp1–8, and Ryan (1989). Jones is silent on the gender split in his sample. A contrast to Jones’ typology is offered by the analysis in Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots about recurring themes in the world’s classic stories. While Jones’ worlds arguably map onto Booker’s categories of the Quest, Overcoming the Monster, Rebirth, Voyage and Return, and Tragedy, his more positive categories of Rags to Riches and Comedy are not so evidently paralleled. Booker (2004). Kort (1992), pix and p48f. His typology is reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s three ‘forms’ (not to be confused with his types of preaching): conceptions of divine attributes, the constitution of the world, and descriptions of human states. See Schleiermacher, tr Baillie (1922), p12 section 34 (1821–22 edition) and p13 section 30 (1830–31 edition). Kort (1992), p50. Kort (1992), p122. Kort (1992), p53; p134. In personal correspondence Kort elaborates this point, suggesting that one or other of the three types becomes dominant either ‘by reason of power or by reason of need’, and that the potential for dominance held by each of the three seems to be actualised when that potential has for too long been denied. He suggests that the current visibility of radical orthodoxy, which he argues is a Y type of theology, is largely due to the previous dominance of the field by Z theologies (personal email, 28 May 2008). Kort (1992), p50; pp54ff. He would regard Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann as Prophetic X (pp71ff and pp77ff); DM Baillie, Leonardo Boff and Hans Küng as Priestly Y (pp88ff; pp90ff; pp94ff); and a long list of Sapiential Z theologians: William James, Henry Nelson Wieman, Bernard Meland (pp105ff); Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr and Langdon Gilkey (pp110ff); and Josiah Royce, H Richard Niebuhr and Schubert Odgen (pp115ff). For Kort, the policing of these discourse boundaries within Christianity necessarily extends to the policing of external boundaries with non-Christians and with the secular world, creating inevitable conflict at each frontier (p127f). It should however be noted that Kort’s use of discourse analysis in this context assumes a determinist human psychology which is open to theological challenge. See the discussion of Kort’s use of discourse analysis in Smit (1997), pp512ff. Kort (1992), p123. See however his partial approval of Cullman’s use of the Pauline ‘body’ metaphor to express simultaneous unity and diversity in ecumenical discussions, p124. Kort (1992), p62; p6f. Kort (1992), p69. Kort (1992), p85f.

198 Notes 47 Kort (1992), pp101–4. 48 Savage & Boyd-MacMillan (2007), pp16–19; pp111–14. See also their conflict project, conducted under the auspices of the Cambridge Psychology and Religion Research Group for the Foundation for Church Leadership (http://www. divinity.cam.ac.uk/pcp/). For a classic account of the ‘amygdala hijack’, see Goleman (1996), pp59ff. 49 Tracy (1981), p62f. 50 Kelsey (1975), p7. 51 Tracy (1981) pix; p447, repeated on p451f, p452 and p454. Describing an approach foreshadowing Malcolm Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism, he cites the conditions necessary for dialogue to be ‘self-respect and self-exposure’, p452f, and p448 and p550f. See also his second two lectures of 1976–7 in Tracy & Cobb (1983), pp17–38. Compare the principles of Scriptural Reasoning, see Quash in Walker & Bretherton (2007). 52 Tracy (1981), p56f. For a succinct rendition of the typology, see Tracy & Cobb (1983), pp1–16. 53 Tracy (1981), p61f. These two constants deliver the criteria of appropriateness in terms of the religious tradition and understandability in terms of the contemporary situation (p91, n66; and on ‘traditional’ or ‘contemporary’ emphases in theology, p55). 54 Tracy (1981), pp62–4. After Toulmin, a warrant is a general hypothetical statement that answers the question ‘how did you get there?’ asked in response to data produced in support of a claim or conclusion. A backing lends authority to a warrant, and is likely to be field-dependent, that is, specific to the argument in hand. While a backing may be as categorical a statement of fact as the original data supplied in support of the contention and in response to the trigger question ‘what have you got to go on?’, its function in the argument is what distinguishes it. Toulmin (2003), pp89ff. Collingwood’s ‘absolute presuppositions’ function similarly. See also Tracy (1981) p89, n47 for a discussion of the use of the word ‘fundamental’ in this context; see also its usage by Kelsey as the dictionary definition of that part of systematic theology ‘where it tries to take stock of itself’. In a memorable phrase, he renders this sort of theology ‘an apologetic enterprise, designed to show the skeptic that the Christian “language game” is a significant use of language and not just an idling of our language motors’, Kelsey (1975), p6. 55 Tracy (1981), pp64–8. See also p90, n58 for a discussion of the use of the word ‘systematic’ in this context. 56 Tracy (1981), pp69–78. One rendering of the difference between Tracy’s systematic and practical theologies would be John Hick’s distinction between ‘dogmatic’ and ‘problematic’ theology, where dogmatic theology ‘studies and conserves the inherited tradition’ while problematic theology is concerned to create new theology in the light of new situations. Hick (1980), p1. 57 Tracy (1981), pp56–8; p85, n31. See also his distinction between argument (dialectic), conversation with the classics (poetic-rhetoric) and praxis (ethicspolitics), p86, n34. Tracy’s use of the True, the Beautiful and the Good resonates with Cobb’s Divine properties of absoluteness, personality, and goodness which were used to produce his categories of the Absolutist, Personalistic and Process theologies. 58 Tracy (1981), p56; p97 n114. Compare a similar scheme in Tom Wright’s account of theology as ‘timeless truths or propositions’ (like Fundamental)

Notes 199

59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

or ‘active engagement with current concerns in the world’ (like Practical), and his ‘middle way’ which regards narrative as authoritative (like Systematic). Wright (1992), p131f and p139f. Tracy’s typology also resembles Samuel Wells’ analysis of ‘three strands’ of writing in contemporary Christian ethics, viz the Universal (ethics for anybody) which is like Tracy’s Fundamental mode; the Ecclesial (ethics for the Church) which is somewhat like Tracy’s Systematic mode; and the Subversive (ethics for the excluded) which has some of the feel of Tracy’s Practical mode. Wells (2004), pp33–5. One could argue that the opportunistic and issue-driven feel of Wells’ Universal type is closer to Tracy’s Practical type than it is to his Fundamental, but Wells’ emphasis on the Universal type’s commitment to the prevailing categories of reason and its public focus suggests that it fits best here. For introducing me to the use of moods in a theological context I am indebted to David Ford, see Ford (2007), p45 and throughout. Gustafson (1988), pp268ff. See for instance the view of the contextualists that all explanations are theory-laden, and the interesting discussion of presuppositionlessness versus rationality in Frei (1992), p103f; p109. Lindbeck (1984), p47. Lindbeck (1984), p16; p20f. Lindbeck (1984), p16; p22 and p25; p31f and p38; pp40–2. Lindbeck (1984), p18; p30; p34. Lindbeck (1984), p112f. He notes that his ‘post-liberal’ category could equally have been labelled post-modern, post-revisionist or post-neo-orthodox, see p135, n1. While calling theology a cultural-linguistic language game and establishing it as a narrative among many is indeed a properly ‘post-modern’ way of operating, his description of the experiential-expressive mode also appears classically post-modern in the pick’n’mix subjectivity of its ‘eclectic use of symbols’, but perhaps my reading of Lindbeck infers a greater degree of eclecticism than he intends. It should be noted that, in this context, Lindbeck uses the terminology of liberalism as a ‘method’ not a doctrinal position: ‘Liberals start with experience, with an account of the present, and then adjust their vision of the kingdom of God accordingly, while post-liberals are in principle committed to doing the reverse’ (p125f). In this analysis he follows H Richard Niebuhr in Stassen et al (1996), p24; see Brown for a useful disambiguation of this terminology, Brown (2004), pp23–6; see also the chapters on liberals and post-liberal theology in Ford with Muers (2005), pp213ff (by James J Buckley) and pp229ff (by James Fodor). Lindbeck (1984), p65f; pp126–30. Brown (2004), pp222ff. Frei (1992), p1 and p20f. With apologies to Higton, who warns against taking Frei’s typology out of its historical context and treating it as a ‘neutral, ahistorical tool’, see Higton (2004b), p195; his explanation of Frei’s typology may be found on pp194–200. Higton traces the roots of Frei’s typology back to a 1958 essay ‘Religion: Natural and Revealed’, in Cohen & Halverson (1958), and points out that the typology was already embedded in Frei’s Cadbury Lectures of 1987 prior to the posthumous publication of Types of Christian Theology in 1992, arising out of a particular project concerning the theology of Barth and Schleiermacher.

200 Notes 70 Frei (1992), p26. In drawing this distinction he notes the inherent bias towards the objective ‘philosophy’ school, given that most theology is written by academics. 71 Frei (1992), p2 and p19f. Frei’s top-down/bottom-up dichotomy is reminiscent of Quash’s warning from Hauerwas: ‘Hauerwas’ Scylla is the temptation to present theology as a system of ideas, exemplified in writing orthodox but contentless systematic theology or endless prolegomena advertising the abstract possibility of theology. His Charybdis is what he calls ‘Durkheim-like accounts’ of Christian practice, by which he means a good (even excellent) description of what the Church does which nonetheless does not witness to God known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. From Quash’s working paper ‘Size Matters – On the Importance of a Theological “Middle Distance”’ (c2007); see also his material on redescription which appears in Unit 3 of the Southern Theological Education and Training Scheme as ‘Following God: The Ethical Character of Christian Life’, c2006. 72 To be precise, he says that his typology is concerned with ‘theological method’ rather than ‘theology’ per se: ‘not so much with doing theology as asking what it is and how one would go about it if one were to do it’. Frei (1992), p19. Compare David Ford’s rendering of Frei’s typology in his Introduction to Ford with Muers (2005), p2f. Ford also summarises Frei’s five types in Ford (1995), p537. 73 Frei (1992), p28f. Higton notes that Frei increasingly substituted ‘more interesting reflections on Kant’ for Kaufman as an exemplar of Type 1: Higton (2004b), p217 n60. 74 Frei (1992), p30. 75 Frei (1992), p34f. 76 Frei (1992), pp39–43. Higton argues that this type is Frei’s favourite, Higton (2004b), p196 and p217 n60. 77 Frei (1992), pp48–51. 78 Frei (1992), p1. He might well include Tracy’s Practical societal type in this category. 79 Frei (1992), pp95–8; p127 and p118. Frei, pp95ff. The University of Berlin, here used as Frei’s case study, has been the subject of an acclaimed book by Howard (2006). The traditional divisions within faculties of divinity of course constitute a natural ‘typology’ which would fit within the worldview cluster. 80 Frei (1992), p114 and p129f. This links in to the etic/emic debate, where an etic account as a third-person account is assumed to be ‘culturally neutral’ and therefore portable as objective truth, while an emic account, in the first person, is necessarily culturally-specific and therefore subjective in its truth claims. This easy distinction is of course a false one, but the dichotomy demonstrates the terrain. See also the work of Tim Jenkins on ‘description’ (for example, Jenkins (1999), p9f; and Ben Quash on theology as ‘redescription’. In addition, see the useful discussion of ‘both/and’ thinking in Griffin (2002), pp2–5. Frei himself regards Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism as a model of the harmonising of theology and social science, in that it fits, ‘by means of the ideal type of the Protestant vocational ethic of inner-worldly asceticism, a pattern of belief and action into a broad social structure, so that it becomes part of that structure and part of the causal explanation for its transformation’ (Frei (1992), p130).

Notes 201 81 Ford (1995), p545; p536; p543. 82 Williams (2000), pxvi; ppxiii–xvi and throughout; Higton (2004a), p10f. See Schleiermacher ed. Mackintosh & Stewart (1963), p78. 83 Williams (2000), pxiii; pxiv; pxv; Higton (2004a), p14. The critical type, in engaging with the secular disciplines, does so alive to the warning alluded to by Williams and nicely put by Wells: ‘This therefore is the perception of many in the theological world: that the denial of narrative and the emphasis on propositional truth is an acquiescence in an oppressive system of power relations; that any form of overarching metanarrative is likely to be a covert form of oppression by other means; and that the discovery, permission and affirmation of previously suppressed stories is an imperative that supersedes the quest for a single, coherent expression of truth’. Wells (2004), p37. 84 Williams (2000), pxvi. 85 Williams (2000), pxiii. In the commentators, useful discussions on public theology can be found in Brown (2004), particularly pp193ff; Sedgwick (1999), particularly pp54ff; and Atherton (2000). See also Shanks (1995), p19f and throughout, and Chaplin (2008). 86 Astley provides a discussion of subjectivity and objectivity in theological discourse, using Ursula Le Guin’s mother/father-tongue distinction. This has some overlap with the discussion in hand, but may be more neatly characterised in this context as the distinction between formal and informal modes in theology rather than the particular distinctions being made here. Astley (2002), pp77ff. 87 On the Soul, Book II Part I, translated by JA Smith, http://classics.mit.edu// Aristotle/soul.2.ii.html. Physics Book III Part I, translated by RP Hardie and RK Gaye, http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/physics.3.iii.html and Metaphysics Book IX Part 1, translated by WD Ross, http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/ metaphysics.9.ix.html (16 April 2008). See also the treatment of Aristotle in Kenny (1998), pp74–8. 88 Ford (2007), p4f. Levinson prefers the phrase ‘sentence type’ to mood, Levinson (1983), p243. 89 See Palmer (2001), p1f and pp145ff. Palmer elsewhere encapsulates the difference between realis and irrealis as ‘statements of fact versus possibility, supposition, etc’. Palmer (1973), p83. Compare Fodor’s diagnosis of post-liberal theology’s primary task as ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘apologetic’ in Ford with Muers (2005), p231; and Brown’s use of Charles Taylor’s distinction between ‘ontological statements’ and ‘advocacy positions’ in theology, Brown (2004), p27. 90 In formal logic ad hominem is a theoretical fallacy, but a cursory reading of the daily headlines shows that in practice ‘hypocrisy’ is the most heinous of sins, see for example embarrassment over the Archbishops’ condemnation of short-selling while the Commissioners were at the same time lending stock for this purpose (The Financial Times 25 September 2008). On ad hominem fallacies see Damer (1980), pp79–84, and Williams on integrity in theology in Williams (2000), pp3ff. 91 Kelsey would argue for a different kind of split than the one utilised here, instead analysing a theological position by examining the roles played within it by ‘theological loci’ (God, Jesus Christ, humanity, the church, and so on)

202 Notes

92

93

94 95

and kinds of intellectual inquiry (for instance, historical research, phenomenology, metaphysics, and so on). One result of such an approach might be to generate further ‘types’ based on patterns of usage (Kelsey (1975), p137f). An example of such an intellectual inquiry-based typology would be Richard Roberts’ five-fold typology of theology and the social sciences: Fundamentalism which either repudiates or exploits social sciences to ‘facilitate conversion experiences’; a Troeltschian type that absorbs theological questions into historicism and early social science; a third type epitomised by Bonhoeffer that maintains a ‘dialectical cohabitation’ between theology and the social sciences; a fourth type that regards theological and sociological categories as ‘co-inherent aspects of an integral “form of life”, “life-world”, or “phenomenology of tradition” which subsists at a remove from the question of modernity’ as in the theology of Edward Farley; and a fifth type, illustrated by Milbank, which regards social science as heresy. Roberts in Ford with Muers (2005), p373 and p381. Also in Ford with Muers, see the breakdown of Philosophical Theology (PT) into a typology of Dogmatic PT, Critical PT, Idealist PT, Realist PT or Philosophy of Religion, as established by Ingolf Dalferth (Ford with Muers (2005), p308). An example of a loci-based typology would be Troeltsch’s longitudinal sociological typology of church, sect and mysticism (Troeltsch tr Wyon (1960), p993); or Avery Dulles’ five models of the Church as Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald, Servant and Community of Disciples, in Dulles (2002), pp21ff. See also Croatto’s five approaches to the Bible in Croatto (1987), pp5–11. Jeffrey Stout offers a robust warning about balance in this matter: ‘Preoccupation with method is like clearing your throat: it can go on only so long before you lose your audience.’ Psychologists might also argue that the need to establish precise rules prior to engagement is an attempt to control the debate, thereby undermining any attempt at genuine dialogue. Stout goes on to offer his own pithy version of what might equate in this context to Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism: ‘A theology that hopes to converse on moral and other topics in a pluralistic setting like ours had better dispense with the quest for a method. There is no method for good argument and conversation save being conversant – that is, being well versed in one’s own tradition and on speaking terms with others.’ Stout (1990), p163 and p165. This question is a version of Bonhoeffer’s ‘Who is Jesus Christ for us today?’, as discussed in Selby’s Grace and Mortgage, from the lectures delivered by Bonhoeffer in Berlin in the early 1930s and published eponymously as Christology (Selby (1997), pp10ff; see also Sedgwick (1999), p63f). Many would locate the Church of England’s Fresh Expressions initiative – the attempt to provide alternative ‘church’ formats to attract ‘post-Christian’ people – in this tradition. See for example the MPAC report Mission-Shaped Church (2003). An accessible argument for this thesis can be found in Midgley (1999). Tim Jenkins warns that, ‘in these unscientific theories, the impulse to generalise develops according to certain “rules” which Bachelard identifies: among them, the tendency to classify, the development of theory through the analysis of particular images, and the appeal to general principles. The first allows the association of heterogeneous concepts and the “reading” of observations according to the system, even to the extent of generating phenomena by filling in gaps in the classificatory grid; the second permits the elaboration of

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96 97 98

99

explanations by drawing out the hidden content of the image without reference to its context or setting; and the third invokes for the purposes of “explanation” some unexamined principle that is unknowable or imponderable, such as the Unity of Nature, or the utility of natural phenomena, or the properties of “matter”’. (Jenkins (1999), p233); see also Yoder’s concern about Procrustean typologies in Stassen et al (1996), p46. See Roberts (2002), p63, pp74ff and p290f; see also the discussion in Higginson (2002), p277f. Brown & Ballard (2006), p16; Brown (2004), pp45ff. See also Davies (1991). Wells (2004), pp131ff. While Scriptural Reasoning is designed for use by the Abrahamic faiths, the approach, a particular manifestation of Brown’s Dialogic Traditionalism, may offer insights for this area too. Graham et al (2005), p140, although Tracy properly contrasts analogy and dialectic in Tracy (1981), pp405ff. Compare the distinction between ‘dialogue’ and ‘proclamation’ in the context of the history of Industrial Mission, as discussed in Lillemor Erlander’s doctoral thesis Faith in the World of Work cited in Davies (1991), p12.

Chapter 4

Critique of Church of England Views

1 Biggar (2009), p167f. 2 Proceedings, February 2008, Tuesday 2, p61f. The motion was passed, 258 voting in favour and four against, with nine recorded abstentions. Electronic voting was introduced at the start of this Group of Sessions. 3 Clark has also argued that ‘the content of the Church’s social witness is less in need of improvement than its dissemination and follow-up’ (Clark (1993), p121 and p124). The questionable efficacy of the Church’s attempts to influence was discussed previously in the context of ethical investment. See also the general discussion about attempts to influence public policy in Medhurst & Moyser (1988), p348f. Shanks offers a particular example concerning the debate on nuclear disarmament debate: ‘It is still, I think, disturbing how marginal to the general debate the properly ethical dimension of the matter was allowed to remain; how easily it was all reduced, time and again, to the level of partypolitical posturing and point-scoring; and how ineffectual the churches on the whole were in criticising this. The extent to which the debate within the churches – when it got beyond the older, more general issue of absolute pacifism – tended in effect merely to reproduce that secular debate, with perhaps the fig leaf of a few scripture texts apologetically appended, is disturbing; disturbing, too; how little discussion there had been beforehand in the churches, and how swiftly the whole issue could then lapse from their collective consciousness again just as soon as the immediate crisis eased’. (Shanks (1995), p16). 4 The majority of the commentators’ books are published by SPCK (nine books) and SCM (seven), followed by Epworth (three), Grove (two), Apollos, DLT, Eagle, Marshall Pickering, Mowbray, and Spring Harvest. Other publishers used tend to be academic, including Peter Lang (two), Blackwell, Continuum, Cambridge University Press and the University of Wales Press. Gorringe’s publication by the fine arts publisher Thames & Hudson in 1999 is unusual, as is Stephen Green’s 2009 publication by Allen Lane (Penguin).

204 Notes 5 From a ‘secular’ social science perspective, Durkheim makes an ‘anthropological’ distinction between the sacred and the profane. Durkheim (2001), p36. The theological equivalent of this may be Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, except that for a believer it may be more intellectually honest to acknowledge that all reality will be coloured by their belief. 6 Hansard, Monday 24 October 2005, Column 1034, http://www.publications. parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ ldhansrd/pdvn/lds05/index/51024-x.htm. 7 Biggar in Brown & Sedgwick (1998), p63. 8 See http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/thechurchofenglandtoday/(09 September 2009). 9 For a useful summary on powers thinking, see Stevens (1999), pp216ff. 10 See Allingham (2002), p104). On public choice theory in particular, see Finn (1996), p242f. For challenges to this perspective, see Graham Shaw on the sleight of hand involved in displacing responsibility in Shaw (1987), pp164ff; Griffin on both/and thinking, Griffin (2002), pp2–5; and Midgley on the dangers of corporitising in Midgley (1997), p52 and p94f. These variously challenge the idea, enshrined in corporate law, that institutions have a life of their own, except metaphorically and as an abstract way to express the totality of them. 11 Ormerod (1999), pxi. For an exposition of the effectiveness of direct consumer action in lieu of democratic engagement, see Hertz (2003). 12 Stiglitz (2002), pxi. His views have tempered since he won his Nobel prize, particularly in the face of the credit crunch, such that he now emphasises the need for balance between the roles of government and the markets in order to keep markets free and healthy. See for example his article in Vanity Fair in July 2009, p85. Building on Butterfly Economics, Ormerod uses Hayek to make a similar point about the superiority of free markets over centrally planned ones, but from the position that, as a system and not a machine, the economy is more responsive to fine tuning than to grand central policies and control. See Ormerod (2005), p225. 13 Plant (2001), p183; Emile Durkheim quoted on p180; and see Figgis: ‘Except in a small and highly undeveloped society, very many transactions must take place which depend for their validity on the character of men, and not on any legal instrument’. Figgis (1997), p105. Hay would argue for the development of perfect ‘reputational mechanisms’ in an economy, which would reduce the need for exogenous moral constraints and/or regulation, thereby rendering it more efficient (Hay & Kreider (2001), p80). 14 Gössling (2003), p122. See also John Milton’s famous assertion in his Areopagitica of 1644: ‘A man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.’ EIAG would agree: ‘The “tick-box” approach to governance which is required as a minimum to comply with the corporate governance codes does not offer a genuine ethical framework. … Christianity can offer a valuable and different approach to these legalistic codes – one based on understanding ethical issues, rather than monitoring compliance with a code (and inevitably on occasion looking for loopholes).’ EIAG (2006/7), p3. 15 Figgis (1997), pp5ff.

Notes 205 16 Of course, no-one would argue against the necessity of the rule of law, but it is again a matter of degree as well as quality. Rt Revd Peter Selby: ‘We are used to the words “free” and “freedom” in all kinds of other connection, and in all kinds of other connection we know that freedom can exist only if it is constrained and regulated by all sorts of procedure, convention and law. Why should it be different for the practice of trade lending and borrowing? If the market is to be free, that is if it is to minister to human freedom, it has to be regulated. I do not think that we should be conned into believing that there is something called a free market that can exist without regulation, and we have been conned into believing precisely that’ (Proceedings, February 2009, p39). Compare Rowan Williams, in discussing Hooker on law: ‘True conformity to unchanging divine wisdom (and, it should be added, to the doctrinal formulations that embody for us how that wisdom acts and how it makes its general claim upon us) requires a flexibility in discipline and polity that is impossible for the positivist and the primitivist’ (Williams (2004), p48f). 17 EIAG (2002/3), p9. This theology was foreshadowed in the previous year’s report, albeit presented as a series of theological tensions rather than any conclusions about them. 18 Hick (1985), p236f. 19 See for instance the new global structures suggested in Sachs (2008), p301f, and in the International Forum on Globalization’s Alternatives to Economic Globalization (2002), pp231ff. 20 On the importance for freedom of developing a teleology, see Cavanaugh (2008), pp7ff; on its importance for happiness see Layard (2005), p71f. See also Sedgwick on vocation in Sedgwick (1999), pp180–99. 21 Hence the instinctive appeal of best-sellers such as Critical Mass (Ball, 2004), The Tipping Point (Gladwell, 2002), and Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Much of this argumentation is based on work by the 2005 Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling whose 1978 work Micromotives and Macroeconomic Behaviour was republished in 2006. 22 The corollary of this would be argumentation about the corrosive effects of consumerism, for instance in Cavanaugh (2008), p47f and Biggar (2009), p164. This thinking shows how such conditionings may be reversed. 23 Axelrod (1990), p173f; see also pp49ff. 24 See Fred Block’s summary in Polanyi (2001), pxxiiif; Allingham (2002), p106. 25 Cavanaugh (2008), p3 and p29f. See however Sandel’s warning in his first 2009 Reith Lecture that accounting formally for externalities turns fines (which carry moral stigma) into fees (merely a cost of doing business), which is a morally dangerous sleight of hand. BBC Reith Lectures, ‘Markets and Morals’, 9 June 2009. 26 For an evocative illustration of power imbalances in the global markets, see the story of the football game that was staged at St Oswald’s, Croxley Green, to illustrate current trading rules, making a mockery of the economist’s standard assumption ceteris paribus (all other things being equal). Trade Justice (2004), p44f. See also Leadbeater (2002), ppixff. 27 North (1990). 28 Kasozi (2008), p112. In his treatment he would argue that the Order of ‘culture’ is not an institution as such, although it is often used to describe the effects of a particular configuration of institutions, such that it is more

206 Notes

29 30 31

32 33

34

35

36

37 38 39 40

41 42

profitable to focus on the constituent institutions rather than their summary manifestation. Kasozi (2008), p115f and Table 3.1, p120f. Proceedings, February 2006, p42. Atherton has made a particular feature of Muslim finance in his most recent work. In this he would have the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has called for a return to the ‘primitive capitalist idea’ of risk-sharing. The Guardian, 18 December 2008. For an overview of medieval usury theory, and an application to this debate, see the eponymous chapter in O’Donovan & Lockwood O’Donovan (2004), pp97ff; and Lockwood O’Donovan (2005). Usury has been a central preoccupation of the Jubilee Centre in Cambridge, notably through the work of the IMF economist Paul Mills, but work done under this umbrella has not yet been mainstreamed. See attendant debate about inappropriate instrumentalisation in Poole (2008). See for example the type of approach adopted by Berry (2005), pp255–97, in which Berry, a Synod member, looks at change in the Church of England through a complexity lens. Including, in those higher education institutions with Christian foundations, a defence of the Arts and Humanities for the role they play in moral formation, see Biggar (2009), p175. For an examination of some of the fruitful avenues for enquiry that are opened up by a focus on the individual rather than the collective, see Poole, E (2005), pp319–25. Wright (1983), p3. Another of Wright’s contributions is his take on the Copernican revolution that is required in Christian ethical thought. He notes that Western philosophy favours an individualistic approach whereby the study of the good life produces behaviours which themselves produce community practice. He argues that the Bible tends to put this the other way round: if this is the kind of society God wants, what kind of person must an individual be to be included within it, and what must they do to further its overall social objectives? p10f . Moral, But No Compass (2008), p14f. See Brown & Ballard (2006), cited on p50. See also the critique of heteronomous rule-following by Gössling (2003), p122. See Forrester (1989), pp16ff. Biggar & Hay (1994), p46f; and pp48–50; p59; pp60–3. See also their useful conception of the barriers of ‘spiritual’ and ‘cultural’ distance between the present day and the biblical period, that is, a theistic community versus modern pluralistic society; and a primitive rural versus modern mixed urban society, p60. In personal correspondence (20 July 2007), Hay wrote that his main objection to middle axioms is that, by eschewing any substantive starting point in Christian ethics, groups such as BSR who use this approach are liable to be ‘fed a line’ by the secular social sciences as if that line were somehow ethically neutral. Revd Mark Bratton (Coventry) in the human genome debate, Proceedings, February 2006, p205. Faithful Cities (2006), p14f. See also the discussion on the etiquette type distinctions and on Astley’s ‘ordinary theology’.

Notes 207 43 Sedgwick (1999), p80f. 44 Brown (2004), pp287–9. 45 http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/commissions.html/ (04 December 2008). 46 Being Human (2003), pxi. The Doctrine Commission has been in existence on and off since the 1920s. It has never been a permanent standing commission, but is set up from time to time to work on specific topics. Its most recent Chairman, Stephen Sykes, described its role as being to consider a given topic, that each should be ‘affirmed, judged and transformed’. Proceedings, February 2008, p222. The Commission is currently in abeyance. 47 Being Human (2003), p59; p77. 48 Long (2000), p71. Compare the two motions passed by Synod within the period concerning work: ‘that this Synod reaffirm the Christian understanding of work as a sharing in God’s creativity, and a means to human flourishing and service to others’ (Proceedings, July 1997, p425); and ‘that this Synod affirm daily work, be it paid or unpaid, as essentially a spiritual activity’ (Proceedings, July 2008, p470). 49 Long (2000), p78. Long would accuse this chapter of a similar subjugation because of the distinction being made between worldviews and doctrine. See the rather devastating critique of the radical orthodoxy position by Insole, where he notes that for the radically orthodox like John Milbank, ‘Theologians are simply called to out-narrate other stories’, which ignores what Insole calls the ‘principled reticence concerning substantial notions of the good’ in political liberalism (Insole (2004), p218 and p224). 50 Few of the commentators approve of the secondary markets, with many lamenting the demise of ‘real’ industry, as typified in the writings of the radically orthodox. See also David Jenkins: ‘We’ve got to the stage where people are making money out of people making money out of people making money out of people making money out of people making what?’ (quoted by Selby in Proceedings, February 2009, p48f). While it is convenient to dismiss the secondary markets, like Jenkins, as ‘gambling’, a holistic treatment of the economy to include traditional industry, the service industry and the financial services industry would produce a more rounded and compelling critique, particularly given the Church of England’s reliance on the financial markets for its own operation. In this context it should be noted that ‘securitization’ is often taken to refer to discredited instruments such as the infamous Collateralised Debt Obligation, but in fact refers to a wide range of hedging practices. 51 Tanner (2005), p89; pp133–5; p21; p3f; pp92ff. 52 Tanner (2005), pp62–85. See also Long’s criteria for a theological economics: ‘Is charity furthered? Do our exchanges point us towards our true source? Does this fit the mission Christ has entrusted to us? Does it allow us to participate in holiness and in God’s perfections? All Christian churches, orders and vocations cannot be faithful if they fail to ask and answer this question: How do our daily exchanges promote that charity which is a participation in the life of God?’ Long (2000), p269; for his interpretation of Milbank on the economy of gift, see p259. See also particular comment by Rowan Williams in his discussion of Tyndale in Williams (2004), p15f. 53 In this particular example, the advice focused on the demand side. However, churches are Traidcraft’s largest sales channel, contributing 50 per cent to total

208 Notes

54

55

56

57 58 59 60

61

sales, or around £8m in annual revenues, so a focus on the supply side might have encouraged them to do even more (data courtesy of Traidcraft Chairman Chris Stephens, personal correspondence, 5 December 2008). Global View 2001 (2001). The paper, offered by BSR but originating from an alliance of 24 charities and campaigning organisations, resulted in a motion in which ‘this Synod … call for global political and economic action, as set out in Global View 2001, with a view to strengthening the position of the world’s poor’. Proceedings, July 2001, p130. While the paper is to be congratulated – pace Preston – on its specificity, that the list of ‘demands’ was unsubstantiated reduces its power. Pace the speech made by the Methodist minister Revd Baroness Richardson, introducing the Faithful Cities report as Chair of the Commission on Urban Life and Faith: ‘Today we are more cautious about making recommendations to the Government as though the power to change society can be effected through Government policies on the way to the Kingdom of God. What we do try to say is that personal transformation matters’. Her comments notwithstanding, the motion was amended in debate to include a clause to ‘urge the government’ on the issue in any case. Proceedings, July 2006, p313. Pace the suggestion to Synod from Vasantha Gnanadoss (Southwark) during a 2006 debate on the Church’s five year plan: ‘It would do us much good if, when we discuss public affairs, we could model something for the Church at large, by making sure that we identify what action we can take that will change us as part of the solution to what we have spoken about. Synod often urges others to take action about public affairs; less often does it pay sufficient attention to prophetic decisions that require changes in our own way of doing things.’ (Proceedings, February 2006, p246). See Figgis’ similar rallying cry to members of the Church of England in 1914, Figgis (1997), p128f; and from the economist Booth: ‘Christians would do well to spend more time influencing their culture rather than influencing government to influence their culture’. Booth (2007), p36. Proceedings, July 1993, p485. Proceedings, February 2005, p381f. Proceedings, July 1997, p426; Proceedings, July 2001, p130. One exception was an interesting response to a speech from a BAe employee worker, John Porter (York), about how discriminated against he felt he was by the Church because of his job. In reply, Canon Wilcox muttered darkly that such employment choices were a matter of individual conscience, Proceedings, July 2000, p321. Compare support for ‘civilising the economy’ through alternative business models in Caritas in Veritate, #38, #46. For an extended case study on the John Lewis-style employee ownership business model, see Erdal (2008) and the list of UK employee-owned companies at http://www.employeeownership.co.uk/ member-companies.htm. Haslett makes this ‘worker control’ model one of the key planks of his ‘capitalism with morality’, Haslett (1996), pp136ff. Re Traidcraft, on the question of the ‘solidarity’ of fair trade, it remains problematic that the approach concerns exports only and not production for in-country use, except as an important side-effect. Atherton’s use of Islamic finance offers a further suite of examples which seek to avoid the use of interest payments altogether, although the classic charge of casuistry could

Notes 209

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63 64 65

66

equally be levelled in such cases, Biggar’s defence of casuistry notwithstanding (Biggar (2009), p169f). See de Soto (2001) and Yunus (2003). For a survey of the micro-finance industry, see the 3iG report by Melsom (2010), available via http://www.3ignet.org/ resourcecenter/Publications.html. See Prahalad (2006) and Wille & Barham (2009). See Salmon in Wired 17:03 (February 2009). An ambiguous example is the Being Human report. Predominantly couched in indicative rather than imperative terms, the introduction states the intention that all Doctrine Commission reports should be ‘read and received’, being designed ‘to strengthen believers in their faith and to challenge those who are uncertain about what to believe’. Being Human (2003), pxi. This effectively applies an imperative slant to the whole document, and indeed to the whole series. The chapter on money itself avoids imperatives, but goes as far as using a gerundive construction to imply obligation without specifying an agent, concluding that, because money has been endowed with the attributes of an idol, ‘it requires first to be named’ (p77). While linguistic complexity permits the smuggling in of this ‘typical Anglican fudge’, a deliberate deployment of mood might reduce ambiguity. Palmer (2001), pp1ff; Palmer (1973), p83.

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220 Bibliography HOB: Feminist Theology (GS Misc 474), June 1996 HOB: Steps in the Creation of a Vision Statement for the Church of England as the Archbishops’ Council begins its work (GS Misc 563), June 1999 Hutton, Will & Davies, William: Trust in Me? The Role of Trust in Leadership (The Work Foundation), 2003 International Forum on Globalization: Alternatives to Economic Globalization (San Francisco: Berrett Koehler: 2002) Lambeth Conference 1998: Official Report (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing: 1999) Melsom, Rupert: ‘Analysis of the Microfinance Sector Within Impact Investing for Faith Institutions’ (3iG), February 2010 Moral, But No Compass: Background Note (GS Misc 912), January 2009 MPAC: Mission-Shaped Church (GS 1523), September 2003 MPAC: Telling the Story: Being Positive about HIV/AIDS (GS 1530), February 2004 MPAC: Trade Justice – Background Note (GS 1547), 2004 MPAC: The Environment Debate – Background Briefing (Misc 767), February 2005 MPAC: Sharing God’s Planet (GS 1558), June 2005 MPAC: Faith, Work and Economic Life – A Background Paper (GS Misc 890a and GS Misc 890b), May 2008 MPAC: Climate Change and Human Security – A Challenging Environment of Injustice (GS 1705), June 2008 MPAC: God, Ethics and the Human Genome (GS Misc 917), September 2009 Musu, Ignazio & Zamagni, Stefano (eds): Social and Ethical Aspects of Economics (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace), 1992 Reed, Charles (ed.): Development Matters – Christian Perspectives on Globalization (GS Misc 634), 2001 Regulation of the Press – The Church of England’s Views (GS Misc 410), January 1993 Review of the Dioceses, Pastoral and Related Measures: A Measure for Measures: In Mission and Ministry (GS 1528), 2004 Sagovsky, Nicholas: Low Cost But Just (Von Hügel Institute & Zacchaeus 2000 Trust), 1999 The Turnbull Report – A Framework for Legislation (GS 1188), February 1996 UN: Human Development Report (Oxford: OUP: 1992) Urban Bishops Panel: The Urban Renaissance (GS 1448), July 2002 Voices from Africa (GS 1489 and GS Misc 891), February 2003 Wille, Edgar & Barham, Kevin: A Role for Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Ashridge: Ashridge Business School: 2009) Working As One Body (GS 1178), 1995

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Bibliography 221 July 1995, November 1995 February 1996, July 1996, November 1996 July 1997, November 1997 February 1998, July 1998, November 1998 July 1999, November 1999 February 2000, July 2000, November 2000 July 2001, November 2001 July 2002, November 2002 February 2003, July 2003 February 2004, July 2004 February 2005, July 2005, November 2005 February 2005, July 2005, November 2005 February 2006, July 2006, November 2006 February 2007, July 2007, November 2007 February 2008, July 2008, November 2008 February 2009, July 2009

Miscellaneous Chicago Business 8 February 2006 Church of England Yearbook (London: Church House Publishing: 1994) Eckerson, Todd: Reasonable Argument (teaching notes) Westminster School, CT, December 2004 Harries, Richard: Sir Robert Birley Lecture, 11 October 2000 http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/metaphysics.9.ix.html http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/physics.3.iii.html http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/soul.2.ii.html http://oxcheps.new.ox.ac.uk/casebook/Resources/HARRIE_1%20DOC.pdf http://peterowen.org.uk/articles/gs-constitution.html http://www.3ignet.org/resourcecenter/Publications.html. http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/|10.pdf http://www.publications.parliament.uk http://www.churchinaspiritualage.org.uk/ http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/archbishopscouncil/structure.html http://www.cofe.anglican.org /about/gensynod/ http://www.cofe.anglican.org/ http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/ agendas http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/thechurchofenglandtoday http://www.cofe.anglican.org/debt http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/ethical/policystatements/ http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr29cat06.html http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr6605.html http://www.debretts.co.uk/peerage_and_baronetage/lords_spiritual.html http://www.debt-on-our-doorstep.com/ http://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/pcp/ http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8595 http://www.employeeownership.co.uk/member-companies.htm http://www.heritage.org/index

222 Bibliography http://www.LaserMonks.com http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm71/7170/7170.pdf http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/HofLBpmembership.pdf http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/Id199798/ldhandard/vo970709/text/ 70709-03.htm# 70709-03_head6 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds05/index/ 51024-x.htm http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/text/804250002.htm#0804257 7000058 http://www.usamutuals.com/vicefund/docs/VICEXcomplete.pdf http://www.winchester.anglican.org/bmlords111005.htm Kasozi, Anthony: ‘The Role and Influence of Institutions in Economic Development in Uganda’, PhD thesis, University of Hertfordshire, April 2008 Kay, John: ‘When the Ball is Over: The Future of the Market Economy’, The Ashridge Lecture, Wednesday 23rd October 2002 McFadyen, DCR: ‘Towards a Practical Ecclesiology for the Church of England’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2006 Papal Encyclical Caritas in Veritate (2009) Prospect Issue 155, February 2009 Salmon, Felix: ‘Recipe for Disaster – The Formula that Killed Wall Street’, Wired 17:03 (February 2009) Sandel, Michael: BBC Reith Lectures, June 2009 The Bible (RSV) The Church of England Yearbook (London: Church House Publishing) Years 1990–2007 The Economist 17 November 2001 The Economist 8 May 2003 The Economist 20 September 2003 The Financial Times 25 September 2008 The Financial Times 18 December 2009 The Guardian 13 February 2006 The Guardian 18 December 2008 The Independent 7 July 1995 The Scotsman 13 April 2004 The Times 1 December 1985 The Times 16 October 1992 The Times 10 July 2001 The Sunday Times 14 March 2010

Index Adams, Kenneth, vii, 68, 188n82 Allingham, Michael, 204n10, 205n24 Anglican Urban Network, see AUN anthropology, 44, 54, 79, 85, 87–9, 107, 109, 123, 131, 140, 141, 143, 148, 154, 163, 164, 165 Aquinas, Thomas, 53, 96, 113, 195n8 Archbishop of Canterbury, 1, 2, 13, 14, 16, 16, 27, 50, 174n29, 174n32, 206n31 see also Carey, George, Temple, William, and Williams, Rowan Archbishops’ Council, 2, 5, 29, 31, 165, 179n90, 180n98 Aristotelian, 67, 114 Aristotle, 59, 124, 126, 201n87 Ashridge Business School, vii Astley, Jeff, 151, 201n86, 206n42 Astra Zeneca, 11 Atherton, John, vii, 42, 45–50, 55, 57, 70, 81, 84–90, 130, 143, 144, 147, 151, 155, 158, 159, 181n1, 184n45, 184n46, 186n70, 188n92, 192n133, 193n142, 195n11, 206n31, 208n61 audience, 75, 78–9, 115, 125–8, 128–33, 134–7, 146, 160–1, 163, 167, 168, 202n92 Augustine, 53, 98, 113 Augustinian, 142, 177n69 AUN, ix, 187n79 Axelrod, Robert, 144–5, 159 Ballard, Paul, 55, 57, 87 Barrington-Ward, Simon, 24, 26 Barth, Karl, 43, 104, 121, 197n41, 199n69 Baynes, Simon, 19–20 BBC, 24, 179n90 Being Human, 20, 87, 130, 147, 153, 156, 174n28, 188n95, 189n96, 209n65 see also Doctrine Commission

Bell Jr, Daniel M, 67, 68, 184n35 Berlin Wall, collapse of, 1, 3, 16, 46, 69, 75 Berners-Lee, Tim, 165 Berry, Anthony, 206n33 Biggar, Nigel, 134, 138, 150, 189n100, 205n22, 206n34, 206n40, 209n61 Bishop of Coventry, see Barrington-Ward, Simon Bishop of Durham, 20, 70 see also Jenkins, David and Wright, NT Bishop of Liverpool, 30, 32, 34, 187n79 see also Sheppard, David Bishop of Oxford, 8, 9, 16, 30, 66–9, 177n63 see also Harries, Richard and Bishop of Oxford Case Bishop of Oxford Case, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 141 see also Bishop of Oxford and Harries, Richard Bishop of Worcester, 17, 18, 29, 69, 138, 180n95, 192n132 see also Selby, Peter Blatcherism, 48 Block, Fred, 170n1, 205n24 Blond, Phillip, 180n104 see also red Toryism Board for Social Responsibility, see BSR Board of Mission, see BOM Boddy, Clive, 193n140 BOM, ix, 5, 23, 175n45, 178n71 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 43, 51, 53, 69, 88, 171n6, 193n136, 202n91, 202n93 Booker, Christopher, 197n36 Booth, Philip, 208n56 Bourke, Michael, 8 Boycott, 7, 12, 33, 37, 139, 157 see also Nestlé

223

224 Index Boyd-MacMillan, Eolene, 198n48 Brandenburger, Adam M, 193n138 see also Nalebuff, Barry J Bratton, Mark, 151, 206n41 Bretherton, Luke, 186n69 Brett, Paul, 11, 35 Britton, Andrew, 45, 50, 54, 82, 83, 85, 143, 193n137 Brown, Malcolm, vii, 6, 18, 42, 49, 55–9, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 119, 130, 131, 152, 168, 170n4, 178n79, 181n8, 183n26, 183n27, 184n46, 199n66, 201n85, 201n89, 202n92, 203n98 Bryant, Mark, 34 BSkyB, 11 BSR, ix, 5, 12, 16, 21, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32, 36, 42, 44, 45, 50, 67, 146, 151, 165, 172n14, 175n40, 175n45, 177n63, 178n71, 180n99, 185n53, 206n40, 208n54 Buffet, Warren, 160 Butler, Thomas, 16, 36 Butskellism, 48 CABE, 7, 75 Calvin, John, 53, 98 CAP, ix, 22, 23, 37, 142, 175n40 capital, 9, 59, 64, 78, 84, 139, 147–9, 157, 158, 163, 166, 168, 181n3, 186n69 capital adequacy, 71, 83, 188n95 capital markets, vii capital, fictitious, 155 capital, institutional, 186n73 capital, religious, 49, 183n26, 186n73 capital, social, 49, 64, 190n114 capital, spiritual, 64, 183n26, 186n73 capital, types, 64, 84, 148 capitalism, vii, 1, 7, 20, 28, 39–40, 41, 42, 46, 49, 50, 62, 63–5, 67, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80–4, 90–1, 100, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 144, 155, 156, 163, 164, 167, 168, 187n79, 189n98, 189n101, 191n123

capitalism, definition, 4–5 capitalism, themes, 6 capitalism, types, 170n1 Carey, George, 13, 16 see also Archbishop of Canterbury Caritas in Veritate, 186n69, 208n61 Caterpillar, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 157, 172n18, 178n74 Cavanaugh, William T, 145, 177n69, 205n20, 205n22 CBF, ix, 10, 171n10, 172n15, 172n18, 179n95 CCBI, ix see also CTBI CEBR, ix, 188n82 Central Board of Finance, see CBF Centre for Economics and Business Research, see CEBR Chalmers, Brian, 34 Chandler, Andrew, 170n3, 170n4, 171n6, 171n9, 172n13, 175n45 Chaplin, Jonathan, vii, 201n85 charity, 16, 67, 139, 160, 173n25, 207n52 Chartres, Richard, 27, 175n55, 186n69 Chesterton, GK, 116 Chicago Project, see Chicago School Chicago School, 74, 140, 145, 189n103, 194n142 China, 27, 28, 178n82 Christ above Culture type, 95, 97, 110, 195n7 see also Niebuhr, H Richard Christ against Culture type, 95, 97, 101, 109, 110, 195n7 see also Niebuhr, H Richard Christ and Culture in Paradox type, 95, 97, 110, 195n7 see also Niebuhr, H Richard Christ of Culture type, 95, 102, 110, 195n7 see also Niebuhr, H Richard Christ the Transformer of Culture type, 95, 98, 110, 195n7 see also Niebuhr, H Richard Christian Aid, 16 Christian Association of Business Executives, see CABE

Index 225 Christology, 85, 87, 90, 103, 107, 109 Church Assembly, 5, 6, 26, 141 Church Commissioners, vii, ix, 2, 7–15, 17, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 141, 156, 158, 171n6, 171n9, 171n10, 172n12, 172n13, 172n15, 172n18, 173n21, 175n45, 179n95, 201n90 Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, see CTBI see also CCBI Clark, Henry, 40, 45, 182n15, 185n53, 203n3 climate change, 26–8, 30, 37, 84, 157, 175n53, 175n55, 178n74, 179n89, 179n92, 180n101 Cobb, John, 100–3, 109, 110, 129 Colman, Michael, vii, 10, 172n13 Commissioners, see Church Commissioners Common Agricultural Policy, see CAP communism, 1 communitarian, 55, 81, 180n104, 184n46 see also communitarianism communitarianism, 56, 152 see also communitarian Consumer Credit Act, 18, 29, 138 see also credit consumerism, 48, 51, 52–3, 90, 186n69, 193n134, 205n22 Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, see CCBI see also CTBI Craik, Katharine, viii credit, 1, 7, 18, 20–1, 29, 38, 72, 83, 87, 138, 144, 154, 159, 160, 174n28, 174n32, 189n95 see also Consumer Credit Act credit crunch, vii, 1, 3, 16, 24, 40, 78, 83, 85, 160, 179n91, 204n12 Croatto, J Severino, 202n91 CTBI, ix, 35 see also CCBI Damer, T Edward, 201n90 Dawkins, Richard, 84, 115, 167 de Soto, Hernando, 186n73, 209n62

debt, 69–70, 83, 86, 87, 104, 154, 157, 158, 159, 166, 174n28, 174n32, 179n95, 207n50 Debt Crisis Network, 16 see also Jubilee 2000 debt, international, 6, 15–21, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 36, 38, 70, 76, 146, 147, 155, 157, 176n58, 180n99, 188n87, 189n98 see also Jubilee 2000 debt, Third World, see debt, international see also Jubilee 2000 desire, 52–3, 54, 55, 67–8, 88, 90, 109, 143, 184n35, 184n49 Development Matters, 17, 25, 69, 158, 180n100 Dialogic Traditionalism, 56, 81, 90, 119, 130, 152, 163, 168, 183n27, 198n51, 202n92, 203n98 see also Brown, Malcolm doctrine, 6, 43, 44, 48, 61, 76, 98, 100, 101, 103, 116, 117, 133, 137, 143, 152–6, 163, 170n2, 207n49 Doctrine Commission, 20–1, 130, 153, 156, 164–5, 174n28, 188n95, 207n46, 209n65 see also Being Human Donaldson, Peter, 59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 103 Dulles, Avery R, 92, 128, 196n17, 202n91 Durkheim, Emile, 200n71, 204n5, 204n13 ecclesiology, 48, 49, 57, 81, 85, 87, 90, 103, 107, 152, 163, 164–5 Economic Man, 72, 82, 83, 143, 181n3 see also homo economicus economics, 4, 17, 18, 19, 29, 32, 34, 41, 43, 46–7, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 69, 72–5, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 90, 135, 142, 143, 146, 148, 154, 155, 164, 168, 177n69, 180n104, 181n6, 182n20, 183n31, 184n49, 185n59, 188n92, 189n103, 189n104, 193n142, 196n15, 204n12, 207n52

226 Index EIAG, ix, 7, 10–14, 17, 22–3, 24, 27, 37, 69, 70, 141, 147, 153, 157, 166, 170n3, 172n15, 175n42, 175n53, 178n70, 204n14, 205n17 see also EIWG EIWG, ix, 10, 11, 172n15 see also EIAG Elengorn, Martin, vii Elliott, Charles, 67 embeddedness, 145 see also externalitites Enron, 68 epiphania, 103 see also Jones, Paul W Erdal, David, 208n61 eschatology, 10, 85, 89–90, 107 ethical investment, 6, 7–15, 17, 26, 33, 37, 157, 167, 171n10, 175n53, 179n92, 203n3 see also EIAG and EIWG Ethical Investment Advisory Group, see EIAG see also EIWG Ethical Investment Working Group, see EIWG see also EIAG externalities, 84, 145, 148, 155, 158, 185n49, 205n25 see also embeddedness fair trade, 6, 19, 21–3, 25, 26, 76, 139, 146, 147, 159, 190n111, 208n61 see also Trade Justice and Traidcraft Faith in Business, 60, 166 see also Higginson, Richard Faith in the City, 29, 35, 38, 41, 45, 58, 150, 185n53 Faithful Cities, 150, 175n43, 178n82, 183n25, 183n29, 186n73, 190n114, 208n55 Field, Clive D, 38–9 Figgis, JN, 141, 204n13, 208n56 Finn, Daniel, 204n10 FIRO-B psychometric, 105–6 Ford, David, vii, 53, 88, 123, 126, 130, 161, 174n28, 199n59, 200n72 foreign trade policy, 28, 36–7 Forrester, Duncan, 47, 150 Foster, Claire, 26, 151

Frei, Hans W, 119–23, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 199n61, 199n69, 200n70, 200n72, 200n73, 200n80 Fresh Expressions, 6, 202n93 Friedman, Milton, 4, 145, 189n103 Fromm, Erich, 177n69 Fukuyama, Francis, 1, 186n71 gambling, 7, 38, 71, 135, 144, 159, 160, 162, 179n92, 207n50 GATT, ix, 21 see also WTO GEC, 11 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, see GATT see also WTO General Synod, ix, 1, 2, 4–40, 41, 42, 66, 67, 70, 90, 134–6, 137–43, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170n3, 171n10, 172n14, 172n15, 174n27, 174n28, 175n44, 175n45, 175n53, 176n58, 176n60, 177n64, 179n89, 179n93, 180n103, 185n52, 185n53, 186n69, 187n78, 187n79, 188n89, 206n33, 207n48, 208n54, 208n56 Genetically Modified, see GM Gilkey, Langdon, 112, 197n41 Gladwin, John, 187n79 globalisation, 26, 36, 47, 48, 50, 60, 63, 78, 85, 89, 178n82, 183n31, 187n79, 190n114, 191n123, 193n141 GM, ix, 9, 11 GNP, 36 God in the City, 35, 50, 178n86 see also Sedgwick, Peter God on Monday project, see Faith in Business God, Ethics and the Human Genome, 151 Godin, Roger, 16, 17 Goleman, Daniel, 198n48 Goodchild, Philip, 83 Gorringe, Timothy, 59–60, 71, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 138, 143,

Index 227 144, 148, 154, 155, 185n59, 189n98, 189n102, 191n123, 192n133, 193n135, 193n137, 203n4 Gössling, Tobias, 140, 206n38 Graham, Elaine, 132 Graham, Gordon, 173n25 Grameen, 159, 160 Green, Stephen, 77–9, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 136, 158, 190n109, 190n115, 191n116, 203n4 Griffin, Douglas, 200n80, 204n10 Griffiths, Brian, 18, 41, 182n22 Gross National Product, see GNP Gummer, John, 25 Gustafson, James M, 22, 81, 115 see also moral discourse, types Habermas, Jurgen, 52 Habgood, John, 23 see also Archbishop of York Hall, Christopher, 34 Hampden-Turner, Charles, 170n1, 191n125 Hardy, Daniel, 51, 52, 88, 147 Harland, Ian, 24 Harries, Richard, vii, 8, 16, 30, 66–9, 84, 87, 88, 90, 147, 159, 187n80, 187n81 see also Bishop of Oxford and Bishop of Oxford Case Hauerwas, Stanley, 196n17, 200n71 Hay, Donald A, vii, 72–5, 82, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 141, 143, 144, 150, 162, 189n101, 190n105, 190n106, 193n134, 204n13, 206n40 Hertz, Noreena, 204n11 Heslam, Peter S, vii, 49, 60, 63–5, 66, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 145, 147, 148, 158, 159, 186n69, 186n70, 186n75, 190n114, 196n15 Hick, John, 142, 198n56 Higginson, Richard, vii, 60–2, 66, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 136, 146, 158, 159, 181n1, 185n66, 186n67, 186n69, 190n109, 190n112, 190n115, 191n117,

193n137, 193n138, 194n145, 203n96 Higton, Mike, 123, 199n69, 200n73, 200n76, 201n82, 201n83 HM Prison Service, 31–2, 178n86 HOB, ix, 2, 5, 6, 153, 180n98, 187n79 homo economicus, 54, 82, 90, 183n31, 192n133 see also Economic Man House of Bishops, see HOB House of Commons, 171n9 House of Lords, 16, 29, 30, 67, 70, 138, 163, 174n29, 174n32, 177n64 Howard, Sue, 194n145 HSBC, 77, 78 Hughes, John, 65–6, 83, 86, 90, 187n78, 193n137 Hunter, Leslie, 58 IBE, vii, 75 ICF, ix, 75, 183n29, 186n70 IMF, ix, 21, 25, 37, 139, 142, 206n31 India, 27, 59, 178n82 Industrial Christian Fellowship, see ICF Industrial Mission, 6, 24, 28, 55, 58, 131, 167, 169, 203n99 Insole, Christopher, 207n49 Institute of Business Ethics, see IBE International Monetary Fund, see IMF invisible hand, 31, 63, 70, 71, 84, 89 Ireland, Mark, 20 Isaacs, William, 192n129 Israel, 13–14 Jenkins, David E, vii, 41, 45, 70–2, 82, 84, 85, 90, 143, 144, 155, 158, 159, 188n92, 191n123, 192n133, 207n50 see also Bishop of Durham Jenkins, Timothy, vii, 105, 131, 176n58, 200n80, 202n95 John Lewis, 159, 192n127, 208n61 Jones, Paul W, 103–7, 109, 110, 129, 197n33, 197n36 Jubilee 2000, 15–16, 25, 28, 29, 30, 36, 180n100 see also Debt Crisis Network

228 Index Jung, Carl, 93 just price, 1, 7, 146, 147, 149, 163, 166, 190n111 justice, 5, 16, 17, 21, 26, 27, 28, 42, 47, 52, 59, 60, 62, 67, 69, 70, 75, 80, 86, 103, 150, 158, 182n15, 188n87, 190n114 see also social justice and trade justice Justin Martyr, 96 Kasozi, Anthony, 146, 186n73, 205n28 Kaufman, Gordon, 120, 200n73 Kelsey, David H, 112, 194n2, 198n54, 201n91 Kenny, Anthony, 201n87 kenosis, 89 Kierkegaard, Soren, 102, 105 Kirby Laing Institute, 166 Kort, Wesley, vii, 85, 107–10, 129, 154, 197n37, 197n40, 197n41, 197n42, 197n43 Kreander, Niklas, 171n6 Kreider, Alan, 73, 74, 192n133, 193n135 labour, see work laissez-faire, 42, 46, 60, 139 lasermonks, 195n9 Layard, Richard, 89, 183n29, 205n20 Leadbeater, Charles, 205n26 Lee, Hugh, 27 Lee, Simon, 187n79, 188n90 see also Stanford, Peter Levinson, Stephen C, 201n88 Lewis, CS, 117 Liberalism, 56, 95, 103, 152, 181n8, 199n66, 207n49 Lindbeck, George A, 116–19, 120, 122, 124, 125, 130, 199n66 Linden, Ian, 25 Lloyd, Timothy, 8 Logan, Pat, 196n15 London School of Economics, see LSE Lonergan, Bernard, 117 Long, Stephen D, 154, 188n86, 194n142, 207n49, 207n52 see also Radical Orthodoxy

Longley, Clifford, 35 Lovegrove, Philip, 34–5 Lovell, Terry, 171n7, 171n9 Lovelock, Douglas, 8 Lowe, Stephen, 149, 180n98 LSE, ix, 42, 183n29 Luther, Martin, 51, 53, 61, 88, 97, 204n5 MacIntyre, Alistair, 56, 81, 184n45, 185n59, 194n4 Madeley, John, 8, 16 Malcouronne, Keith, 13 Mammon, 36, 51, 77, 153 managerialism, 64, 84, 186n72 market economy, 19, 33, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 59, 67, 74, 83, 87, 88, 89, 154, 182n19 marketness, 4, 142, 170n1 Markham, Ian S, 47 Mason, David R, 128 Maurice, FD, 42, 98, 182n13 McCurry, Ruth, 35 McPhail, Ken, 171n6 Medhurst, Kenneth, 39, 176n60, 180n104, 185n53, 203n3 see also Moyser, George Megarry, Robert, 12 Melamed, Claire, 25 method, 41, 43, 44, 47, 50, 55, 61, 80–2, 90, 91, 94, 103, 111, 112–28, 130, 131, 132, 149–52, 163, 194n2, 199n66, 200n72, 202n92 Middle Axioms, 39, 43, 44–5, 81, 83, 130, 136, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 182n14, 182n15, 189n100, 206n40 Midgley, Mary, 193n134, 202n94, 204n10 Milbank, John, 188n86, 191n123, 194n142, 202n91, 207n49, 207n52 see also Radical Orthodoxy Mission and Public Affairs Council, see MPAC Molyneaux, David, 171n6 Montagu, John, 25 Montefiore, Hugh, 41

Index 229 mood, 115, 116, 119, 122, 125, 126–8, 130, 132, 133, 160–3, 167, 168, 199n59, 201n88, 201n89, 209n65 Moral But No Compass, 49, 168, 180n98, 186n73 moral discourse, types, 22, 81, 115 see also Gustafson, James M Moyser, George, 39, 176n60, 180n104, 185n53, 203n3 see also Medhurst, Kenneth MPAC, ix, 6, 21, 22, 26, 27, 55, 135, 151, 162, 166, 202n93 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 117 Munby, Denis, 67 Nalebuff, Barry J, 193n138 see also Brandenburger, Adam M Nash, John F Jr, 83 Nazir-Ali, Michael, 16, 25 Nestlé, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 34, 34, 139, 157, 172n14, 172n15, 176n58 see also boycott New Testament, 34, 43, 51, 60, 62, 67, 77, 79, 87, 89, 93, 98, 153, 167, 172n13, 190n115 Nicholls, David, 170n2 Nicholls, Donald, 10 Niebuhr, H Richard, 49, 50, 65, 93, 94–100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 110, 111, 113, 129, 183n28, 194n4, 194n7, 195n8, 196n15, 196n16, 196n17, 196n18, 196n19, 196n20, 197n41, 199n66 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 173n25, 197n41 North, Douglass C, 146, 186n73 Northcott, Michael, 189n98, 191n123 Novak, Michael, 35 Novartis, 11 O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood, 206n31 O’Donovan, Oliver, 206n31 obsessio, 103 see also Jones, Paul W Octavia Hill Estates, 12, 14–15, 172n12, 179n86 OECD, ix, 28 oikonomia, 48, 89 Old Testament, 16, 60, 63, 93

Oldham, Gavin, 20, 32, 34, 170n3 Orders of Creation, 43–4, 48, 51–2, 53, 54–5, 88, 90, 138, 143, 145, 146–8, 165, 183n25 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, see OECD Ormerod, Paul, 139, 144, 204n12 Palmer, FR, 201n89 Pensions Board, ix, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 23 Percival, Nathan, viii Phillips, DZ, 121 Plant, Raymond, 33, 140, 173n25, 177n68, 177n69, 178n79, 190n107 Plender, John, 26 plutocracy, 60 Polanyi, Karl, 145 Poole, Eve, 172n18, 186n72, 193n138, 194n143, 206n32, 206n35 Poole, William, viii, 195n13 poor, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 36, 37, 44, 47, 51, 53, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 137, 142, 143, 146, 148, 151, 159, 160, 163, 168, 174n32, 178n82, 186n75, 208n54 poor, bias to, 17, 19, 23, 34, 36, 142, 175n43 poor, definitions, 22 pornography, 7, 11 poverty, see poor Prahalad, CK, 209n63 Preston, Ronald H, 42–5, 46, 48, 57, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 130, 136, 144, 146, 149, 150, 151, 155, 181n1, 181n3, 181n5, 181n6, 182n13, 182n14, 188n86, 189n100, 194n4, 195n7, 196n15, 208n54 Prosperity with a Purpose, 35, 49, 63, 150, 186n73 Provident Financial, 11, 17–18, 158, 171n12, 179n95 Psathas, George, 194n5

230 Index psychology, 130, 131, 142, 143, 148, 160, 165, 192n129, 197n42 Pullman, Philip, 115, 167 Putnam, Robert, 64 Quakers, 75, 95, 195n9 Quash, Ben, 131, 192n130, 198n51, 200n71, 200n80 Radical Orthodoxy, 129, 154, 197n40, 207n49, 207n50 see also Long, Stephen D and Milbank, John red Toryism, 180n104 see also Blond, Phillip Reder, Melvin, 189n103 Reynolds, John, 13 Rifkind, Malcolm, 21 risk, 11, 18, 32, 141, 159–60, 166, 178n73, 183n31, 206n31 Roberts, Paul, 34 Roberts, Richard, 202n91, 203n96 Rover, 24 RTZ, 11 Russell, Anthony, 175n45 Russell, Ian, 11 Salmon, Felix, 209n64 Sandel, Michael, 205n25 Sandford, Bryan, 9 Savage, Sara, 198n48 Sayers, Dorothy L, 35 Schein, Edgar, 6 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 96, 121, 123, 197n37, 199n69 Schutz, William, 105–6 Scriptural Reasoning, 163, 168, 192n130, 198n51, 203n98 Sedgwick, Peter, vii, viii, 45, 49, 50–5, 66, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 143, 147, 151, 185n63, 188n82, 193n137, 201n85, 202n93, 205n20 Selby, Peter, vii, 17–19, 29, 69–70, 86, 87, 90, 138, 154, 155, 174n28, 188n87, 188n89, 192n132, 202n93, 205n16, 207n50 see also Bishop of Worcester Shanks, Andrew, 201n85, 203n3

shareholder, 7, 13, 80, 85, 141, 156, 158, 159, 160, 163, 166, 172n13, 191n127 Sharing God's Planet, 26, 151, 157 Shaw, Graham, 204n10 Shell, 11, 147 Sheppard, David, 30, 32, 34, 41, 174n27, 187n79 see also Bishop of Liverpool Short, Clare, 16, 29 sin, 57, 63, 68, 86, 87, 88, 89, 97, 98, 108, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141–2, 143, 154, 170n4, 171n6, 201n90 Sin, Original, 44, 79, 88, 104, 195n13 Skidmore, David, vii, 36 Skinner, Hannah, 46, 50, 53, 63, 64, 79, 183n26, 186n73, 193n137 Smith, Adam, 31, 84, 185n59 social justice, 16, 36, 51, 53, 146, 173n21, 173n25 socialism, 42, 46, 59 Something to Celebrate, 151 soteriology, 85, 89, 90, 103, 107, 109 South Africa, 7–8, 37, 157 see also boycott SPCK, 75, 203n4 spirituality, 51, 86, 103, 109, 131, 153, 194n145 Stanford, Peter, 187n79, 188n90 see also Lee, Simon state support, 6, 23–6 Stevenson, Trevor, 17 Stiglitz, Joseph, 139, 144, 189n98, 204n12 Storkey, Elaine, 17, 20, 27 Sugden, Chris, 147 sustainable development, 6, 26–8 Synod, see General Synod Tanner, Kathryn, 155–6 Tawney, RH, 42, 43, 181n3, 191n127, 195n7 taxonomy, 93, 94, 99, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, 128–33, 146, 147 Tebbit, Norman, 38 Temple, William, 42, 45, 182n11 see also William Temple Foundation

Index 231 Thatcher, Margaret, 38, 39, 41, 45, 178n79, 180n103, 185n53 theology, vii, 3, 17, 36, 39–40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51–3, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 73, 79, 81, 82, 85–90, 92–133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 160, 163, 167, 168, 169, 178n70, 187n79, 188n89, 192n132, 205n17, 206n42 theology as grammar, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 151 see also Frei, Hans theology as philosophy, 116, 120, 121, 122, 124, 127, 130, 200n70 see also Frei, Hans W theology, Absolutist, 100–1, 102, 109, 110, 198n57 see also Cobb, John theology, Celebratory, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130 see also Williams, Rowan theology, Cognitive-Propositional, 116–17, 118, 119, 120, 125, 127, 130 see also Lindbeck, George A theology, Communicative, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131, 167, 168 see also Williams, Rowan theology, Critical, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130 see also Williams, Rowan theology, Cultural-Linguistic, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 127, 130, 199n66 see also Lindbeck, George A theology, Etiquette, 112–28, 129–32, 134, 136, 149, 151, 161, 167, 168, 206n42 see also method theology, Experiential-Expressive, 116, 117, 119, 127, 130, 199n66 see also Lindbeck, George A theology, first-order, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 129 see also Frei, Hans W

theology, Fundamental, 112–13, 114, 115, 116, 120, 124, 125, 127, 130, 198n58 see also Tracy, David theology, Personalist, 100, 101–2, 110, 198n57 see also Cobb, John theology, Practical, 112, 113–14, 115, 116, 119, 124, 126, 127, 130, 168, 199n58, 200n78 see also Tracy, David theology, Priestly, 108, 109, 110, 154, 197n41 see also Kort, Wesley theology, Process, 100, 102, 103, 104, 110, 198n57 see also Cobb, John theology, Prophetic, 108–9, 110, 154, 197n41 see also Kort, Wesley theology, Sapiential, 108, 109, 110, 154, 197n41 see also Kort, Wesley theology, second-order, 119, 124 see also Frei, Hans W theology, Systematic, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 124, 125, 127, 130, 198n54, 198n55, 198n56, 199n58 see also Tracy, David theology, third-order, 119, 120, 122, 124, 129 see also Frei, Hans W theology, types of, 92–133 theology, Worldview, 94–111, 132, 137, 168, 195n13 Theos, thinktank, 166–7 Tillich, Paul, 103 topology, 93–4, 118 Toyne Commission, 55, 57 Tracy, David, 111, 112–16, 117, 118, 123, 124, 125, 129, 132, 134, 196n24, 198n51, 198n52, 198n53, 198n54, 198n57, 203n99 Trade Justice, 21, 25, 28, 36, 37, 142, 147, 157, 179n91, 180n99, 180n100, 205n26 see also fair trade Traherne, Thomas, 68

232 Index Traidcraft, 159, 208n53, 208n61 see also fair trade Troeltsch, Ernst, 195n7 Trompenaars, Fons, 170n1, 191n125 Turnbull Report, vii, 165, 172n13 Tutu, Desmond, 27 Two Kingdoms, 97, 204n5 see also Luther, Martin typology, 3, 49, 50, 87, 92–133, 167, 170n1, 186n74, 191n125 typology, definitions, 93–4 UN, ix, 60, 71 United Nations, see UN Urban Bishops’ Panel, ix, 187n79 urban inflation, 187n79, 193n141 Urban Theology Unit, see UTU usury, 4, 7, 17, 67, 76, 77, 146, 147, 149, 163, 166, 174n29, 183n31, 190n111, 206n31 utilitarianism, 143, 189n102, 193n137 utility, 65–6, 73, 83 UTU, ix, 187n79 vocation, 50, 51, 53, 55, 61, 63, 68, 69, 77, 86, 88, 90, 98, 154, 184n32, 185n63, 190n115, 205n20, 207n52 Volf, Miroslav, 53, 88, 184n36 WCC, ix, 42, 43, 181n6 Weber, Max, 93, 193n141, 194n4, 194n5, 200n80 Webster, David, 16 Welbourn, David, 194n145 welfare state, 23, 38, 44, 48 Wells, Samuel, 131, 199n58, 201n83 Westcott, BF, 42 Whiffen, William, 8 Whittam-Smith, Andreas, 13, 15, 18

WHO, ix, 12 Wilcox, Hugh, 10, 37, 208n60 Wilde, Wilf, 79–80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 138, 144, 148, 152, 154, 155, 159, 191n123, 191n124, 191n126, 191n127 William Temple Foundation, 45, 49, 55, 64, 70, 165, 166, 168 Williams, Rowan, 26, 27, 68, 92, 123–5, 126, 128, 130, 131, 161, 167, 168, 181n11, 201n90, 205n16, 207n52 see also Archbishop of Canterbury Williamson, Paul, 141, 172n13 Wink, Walter, 138, 170n2, 195n8 work, 6, 10, 22, 23, 24, 26, 32, 33, 35, 43, 44, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65–6, 73, 74, 79, 86, 88, 89, 90, 97, 105, 131, 140, 157, 165, 166, 176n58, 179n91, 179n93, 180n97, 181n3, 181n5, 184n36, 185n52, 185n64,186n67, 187n78, 203n99, 207n48, 208n60, 208n61 World Bank, 21, 25, 139, 142 World Council of Churches, see WCC World Health Organisation, see WHO World Trade Organisation, see WTO see also GATT Wright, Christopher, 149, 206n36 Wright, Clive, vii, 75–7, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 136, 144, 146, 158, 186n67, 190n108, 190n113 Wright, NT, 20, 198n58 WTO, ix, 21, 142 see also GATT Yoder, John Howard, 93–4, 98–100, 131, 147, 195n8, 195n9, 196n16, 196n17, 196n20, 203n95 Young, John, 34 Yunus, M, 209n62

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