Lambeth Palace Lecture
A Sonata on ‘Authoring Theology Usefully’: Lambeth Palace Lecture – 3rd May 2005
Introduction: Motivations
In the back of my mind is a spoof e-mail that runs something as follows:
‘Dear Kenneth, I live a busy, hectic life, because my life is hectic and busy. There are so many demands on my time that I do not know what to do with myself, that is, apart from doing another time-management course, and, of course, ensuring that there are enough spaces in Continual Ministerial Education for developing my computer skills, alongside the emergency Myers-Briggs facilities at which we seem to excel. In the midst of all this busy and hectic scheduling, I often am led to ask myself what is missing. But I don’t seem to get anywhere. I long for a bit of space to read – and think – a bit more. You led a Quiet Day on Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ some years ago, which left a deep impression. Sadly, I know this reply to your request for suggestions is late – that’s because not only do I live a busy, hectic life, but so does my e-mail system, which has been down (conveniently?) for the last week. I look forward to hearing from you.’
You will be relieved to know that I have never received exactly that message. But it does represent at least a strand of observation on ministerial life which has been with me ever since I was ordained, if not before. On this, the centenary of the Lambeth Diploma, I want to look at how we can shift peoples’ energies and horizons so that, even if the Church is going to continue being busy and hectic, at least it will do so with a rather clearer remit given to, or taken by (or both), its theological writers.
I suppose my own story begins at school, where two particular teachers left a lasting impression. One was the senior classics master, who came from (shall we say) an impeccable background, and whose precepts were impressively rigid and well-worn. His methods for teaching us on, for example, unseen translation (translating without dictionary aid into English), were based exactly on what he had been taught somewhere else a long time before. His was the most systematic mind I had so far encountered. But it was stuck in the past, to the extent that one heard, repeatedly, the litany of how much classical literature he had had to read long before we in our generation began even to touch it. No one could fail to be impressed by the man’s discipline; but his academic nostalgia, which also failed to convey any sense of the history of interpretation of these authors he knew and loved so well, put a few of us off.
The other figure was the one who taught us French. He was a more engaging figure, with a richer and more interesting life. Rumour had it that he had been tortured by the Gestapo in Paris during the Second World War. By no means self-consciously inspirational, he was quietly broad and deep. I remember once he suspended classes for us each to prepare a presentation on a topic of our own choice. As a family we had just been to France on a camping holiday, and I decided to take out my full-length mini-reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, and talk about it to the rest of the class. Time and again, he would return to a particular mantra of his: always consider choosing a particular subject that interested you, and make yourself a bit of an expert on it.
I do not want to drive a wedge between these two figures, even though there will be no prizes for guessing which of the two I found the more congenial. Hindsight will inevitably provide some balance: the discipline and method of the classics teacher counter-balances the intuitive, insightful character of the French teacher. In combination, they helped contribute to an abiding enthusiasm for some rather off-beat interests across the years, fed by a dynasty of Lutheran pastors, many of whom managed to combine what we rather simplistically call the ‘pastoral’ and the ‘academic’, thanks to the theology faculties of Halle, Kiel, Uppsala, Copenhagen, and Århus.
First Subject: Types of Theology
But enough of autobiography. What I want to stress from what I have said so far is that motivation and making time for what you think is important is vital. I do not live in an ivory tower, nor do I suppose does anyone else. Nowadays, clergy tend increasingly to operate in a world where, in the words of an American rabbi, we are able to handle space, but what we cannot handle is time. So much of our work is a bit like having to gulp concentrated orange juice; there seems little opportunity to water it down, and sip it. Living with that degree of concentrated pace, and with the consequential superficiality that this entails, means – as any leadership coach in the secular world will tell you – a crying need for diversions, which are strength-giving, albeit apparently tangential. But before I go on to what they might look like, I want to be so bold as to define, in a somewhat loose manner, three different kinds of theology. None of this is original, and I know there are other definitions as well; but I hope that it will help the drift – and that may be the operative word! – of what I am trying to say about authoring theology usefully, and I shall take as examples some of what I have tried to cover in a recent book on the history of the Lord’s Prayer, written up during a sabbatical two years ago.
The three approaches are the historical, the social-pastoral, and the systematic. The historian’s main point of reference is to place a set of ideas or events within the context of the human story: Augustine’s radical synthesis of the North African tradition of interpreting the Lord’s Prayer, with three heavenly and four earthly petitions, based on a particular approach to biblical exegesis. The socio-pastoral theologian’s main point of reference is, among other things, to place the matter in hand in the context of social setting: so, for example, the radical innovation of printing ensured the possibility of a uniform (well, almost uniform) vernacular text of the prayer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that gave it a power in peoples’ lives that was hitherto unknown. The systematician, by contrast, has a point of reference that provides an over-arching framework into which the prayer fits (just): here one thinks of Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century or Karl Barth in the twentieth.
My own observations, for what they are worth, are that Anglicans have tended to combine the historical and the social-pastoral, despite recent attempts to pull up our straps a bit in systematics; and that while a few choice writers do manage to shine in all three, most theologians only manage two, but if they stick to only one, they do become somewhat narrow. If I look back on some of the part-time post-graduate research supervision that I have done over the years, I would say that the most effective students have been those who have started in one camp and moved into another. Some of my own writing career has been a deliberate attempt to get liturgical studies out of its ghetto of ‘textual history’, in order to let it breath the freer air of historical theology, even with just a touch of systematics. For the researcher, the preacher, the author, it’s in the making of connections that one really senses a ‘buzz-moment’ – ‘yes – it’s really like that, isn’t it!’ Some years ago, Leslie Houlden drew my attention to the significant difference between serving up new or unknown facts and shifting perspectives.
I know that these distinctions do not, in the end, do justice to the whole. But I hope that they might serve as an encouragement to those who might unnecessarily hold back from writing theology. It is so easy to be put off. To take an example of my own, I could be slightly oveawed by sitting at a Bishops’ Meeting in which two figures holding forth were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham; but I’m not – and I happen to believe that they, even they, could just now and then be wrong about something. In other words, the classics master at school never quite manages to win, because the French teacher keeps resurfacing. Yes, have your tough self-discipline, but use it not to put yourself in a straight-jacket, but rather to ensure that what you are writing has a coherence, an over-arching message, a good ‘data-base’. As with those three approaches just mentioned, be content if you only combine two, be profoundly thankful if you manage all three – but above all realize that you can’t say everything. I recall reading a big and impressive book (I had better not reveal its title) and learning a great deal from its contents; but I finished it feeling somewhat weary, because the author really wanted to say everything there was to say about the subject, and therefore seemed to begin all over again when I thought he was about to finish. (A bit like one of those sermons when the preacher suddenly gets a second – or a third – wind.) By contrast, with the Easter Sermons of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, one always senses at the end, when he has tossed his text in every conceivable direction, that he knows that there will be more to say next year – so that even his preachments have to come to an end.
Second Subject: Three Case Studies
I hope by now to have suggested some paths for motivation, as well as the importance of recognizing how differently theology can be written. I want now to turn to the different phases that might lead to an author appearing in print.
Case 1 is a part-time post-graduate, who has identified a 20th century theologian who was a big figure for ordinands in the post-War generation, but who fell out of fashion in the early 1970’s: Oliver Quick, author of ‘The Christian Sacraments’ (1927) and ‘Doctrines of the Creed’ (1938). I would never have thought of writing on him, because he was just out of fashion when I was a student. But the passage of time provides, shall we say, perspective. Once the candidate started digging, he finds archives, personal and other; and then he goes and meets one or two people who remember Quick as an Oxford don during the Second World War. Just as nowadays we are more conscious of the social context of such people, so a whole network of theological friendships is built up, as well as careful attention to the number of editions of his works, and the times he is quoted (not just the book-reviews), so that a deeper picture emerges of the man’s impact. The candidate is well on the way with the digging, but is aware that he needs to ‘claim’ Quick through some article in a journal; and he is also aware that, while he has enough material for a PhD, there is a book in the offing, perhaps looking at the whole area of Anglican apologetics and thinking on sacramentality. And then one begins to turn full circle, because if there is one abiding feature of Anglican sacramental theology, it is in what sacraments do, rather than what they are, which raises the question of God in relation to the world in general. Result: not just a useful set of articles, or even a good PhD, but what may be a long-term, even life-long writing career, in which Oliver Quick will stand out as an important hermeneutic.
Case 2 is from a less conventional stable. Portsmouth University is a modern, urban seat of learning, that prides itself in offering courses that relate to the local communities. The courses in Church and Community Studies that are done at undergraduate and graduate levels are part of what I often refer to as a ‘Non-Stipendiary Faculty of Applied Theology’, which provides some of the best CME I’ve seen, pioneered by Archdeacon Christopher Lowson. One of the MA’s that I have watched grow over the years had as its dissertation component an analysis of a series of interviews, properly anonymous, taken from an urban parish, about infant baptism; this work revealed a whole range of aspirations, spoken and unspoken, that would challenge some of the restrictive policies so enthusiastically adopted in parts of the Church. I could give other examples of this Portsmouth work, but will confine myself to this one example. We have yet to see anything in print as a book, but I hope that it will not be long before something like this happens. Whenever I am on the receiving end of media-training, I am always told about the ‘for-instance’ factor: be specific, be concrete. Here is social-pastoral theology, and it provides good data for the way in which the Church is still alive and kicking on what we often call the margins of society.
Case 3 came to mind on Palm Sunday, when at the end of the Cathedral Eucharist we sang the hymn, ‘Morning glory, sunlit sky’ – the poem that concludes W.H. Vanstone’s classic, ‘Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense’ (1977). I deliberately cite this book because it is a kind of ‘wild card’. Yes, the author was a brilliant undergraduate, but he shunned teaching and writing, preferring instead to go into parish ministry. The book in question is what the French would call the ‘oeuvre de maturité’, the work of maturity, and although Vanstone wrote more afterwards, nothing quite reaches this one, the result of deep learning, and a dedicated (some might say an over-dedicated) ministry in parish work. The ‘one-off’ that lies waiting to be written must never be forgotten, for unlike other writers of his standing, against whose names one could make a great list, Vanstone will always be associated with that book, with its specific way of saying that God is in his creation, suffering and aching alongside us, in order to bring to birth new life, new ideas, new understandings about why we are here.
I could give many other examples, but these three stand out particularly prominently; the conventional post-graduate who has a book inside him; the applied theologian who has the chance to write up some local research and give it some theological ‘bite’; and the ‘one-off’ ‘wild-card’. How, then, are we going to foster such different ways of authorship?
Development: How do we foster authors?
If we look at those three case-studies, in addition to motivation, there is the all-essential factor of providing time. Here, I take care not to assume that ‘part-time’ research is in some ways a second-best to ‘full-time’. Perhaps one of the reasons why full-time researchers often find it so difficult to get their work published, when the research-period is over, is that they are so used to the freedoms of full-time work that they are less able to balance everything around everything else, which has to be one of the disciplines surrounding the part-timers. Case 1, the Oliver Quick researcher, is the kind of person who makes space in a busy schedule for what he wants to do, and he has a boss who wants him to do so as well. There is a sense of the long-term investment about both the work and the pattern that it symbolizes. But other people come to mind, like the PhD I examined some years ago, and the candidate concerned, manifestly successful, has not managed to publish the work, partly because of its recondite nature, partly because of ill-luck with publishers, and partly because of involvement in other things. We are then into the vicious circle of a maturing ministry, that becomes more and more distanced from the researcher of some years before. In any case, it has to be admitted that not all PhD dissertations should be published.
Case 2, from Portsmouth University, didn’t have to argue for the supposed ‘usefulness’ of the project, because it was right under everyone’s noses. Yet the theological stiffening that the dissertation entailed is the hidden miracle: social-pastoral theology is in some ways the most difficult to define, and the easiest to romanticize about. And alongside that particular work may lie countless others, talented clergy, readers, teachers, who never sat down and analysed a series of interviews and data, but lived with some easy assumptions that could have been challenged – and which in turn could have challenged their whole ministry. I want to underline these missed opportunities because if there is one aspect of Anglican life with which I will always feel slightly uncomfortable (and probably my Lutheran roots are showing), it is the Anglo-Saxon anti-intellectual tendency towards pragmatism: if it works, then it must be right and true, but don’t for heaven’s sake let the boffins in on the act, otherwise we shall waste even more time, when we could be getting on with nifti little solutions to all these problems we keep seem to be having. I exaggerate, in order to make a point: but if I have learnt one thing in the business of bishopping, and listening to around thirty incumbents coming to see me one by one for ministerial review each year, it is that being ‘on the job’ of pastoral ministry provides ample scope for having one’s assumptions challenged. We need to keep an eye out for what a former colleague used to call the ‘gutter-theologian’ – who has the knack of thinking rigorously and writing engagingly on applied theology.
Case 3 is, of course, the exception, the book that suddenly just ‘writes itself’. But it, too, must not be forgotten. How many Vanstones are there waiting to be discovered, I wonder? Alec Vidler used to say to postgraduates that if you are going to be an author, you need to start young: and I can think of some former episcopal colleagues who could have become authors, but who never did, because they never got around to it, or else because they probably knew in their heart of hearts that they could never perform that vital, but agonizing, role in producing a book – letting go of the final manuscript! Yet there are always going to be exceptions that, as it were, prove the rule: the author who suddenly appears, and out comes the distilled thought of many years – even if, as in the case of ‘Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense’, it may have spoken to a market that needed to hear what he was saying, but it still wasn’t quite the last word. But, then, as I said earlier, no book ever ‘says it all’, and we shouldn’t expect it to!
What we need to do is follow our collective hunches and encourage exactly these three kinds of authors – and give them the time and the space to get on with it. I have been fortunate in always having jobs where there has been some expectation that my own particular brand of pushing away at the boundaries of historical theology and liturgy have not been entirely unwelcome. But I was ordained over thirty years ago, when the tolerance level in the Church for part-time research and writing was perhaps a tad higher than it is now. It may be that one answer is to ensure that some of our up-and-coming authors get college chaplaincies after their curacies, when the PhD’s have already been finished. I have never been against the strategy of nurturing that kind of excellence. But it won’t mop up anything like the potential number of authors we could do with. If we are to avoid letting a chasm develop between the ‘Academy’ (as it’s often called) and the Church, then such fostering and encouragement needs to take place: training incumbents with some imagination, who will do more than tolerate but actually make their junior colleague feel appreciated, especially in those lonely moments when a particular chapter or idea just won’t come to heel, and it may show that Sunday during the evensong sermon. But we must not forget the other side of the relationship – the publishers. Have they not become a bit too specialized, on the understandable pretext of economics (books do have to sell!), thus making it increasingly difficult for a good, aspiring author to get inside the élite club of recognized writers – who themselves may be over-pressurised to produce more and more? And are our theological journals entirely exempt from a similar criticism? Might we all do a bit more talent-spotting?
Recapitulation: changing media, changing world
This lecture was tapped out on a lap-top, in the sitting room, the border terrier, as always, offering moral support, and some welcome spring sunshine providing an overall boost to the general picture. All the appliances are there, with a machine that can dance and sing, though there is precious little chance of my being able to make it do so. For the odd distraction, while I mulled things over, I could simply press ‘save’, and with a few more buttons, I could play ‘solitaire’ with myself for a few minutes. In a bygone era, I would probably be standing up at an old-fashioned desk, with a quill pen, an ink pot, in a musty study smelling of tobacco-fumes – a bit like my grandfather’s study, as I remember it in my youth, though instead of quill pens he used a fountain pen. The point I am making is self-explanatory: we have the means to ‘author’ more easily today than ever before, it seems, but have we got any further? Are we chasing the right medium for this message, namely what we believe to be the God-given instinct, of a fallen and redeemed humanity’s desire and need to think, say and write something about why we are here?
It may well be that in a century’s time, the book will have been largely replaced by other means of communication: the CD rom’s successor, together with the latest in technology, audio-visual to the core, and certainly not just made up of words, words, and more words. In some respects, recent developments in what is sometimes called ‘reception-history’ in biblical studies is already pointing in that direction, with an emphasis on art, music and history of interpretation that makes us into a blot on the landscape of a much larger picture. I was very struck by precisely these tendencies when I was writing up my researches on the Lord’s Prayer. The music of words keeps making an impact on me. Let me give you an example in relation to tradition and development. I attended Ecumenical Vespers on January 25th this year at St Paul’s-without-the Walls in Rome. When it came to chanting the Lord’s Prayer, everyone joined in the well-known Latin words. But there was more than a noticeable split-second gap when it came to the doxology and its music. This is because it was never part of the earliest texts of the gospels, Latin included, but it became almost universal in the East, and entered the Reformation West thanks, initially, to Erasmus and Calvin; and after Vatican 2 it entered the Roman rite as an ecumenical gesture. So much for music and familiarity. What of the visual? Research on how the Four Living Creatures (Rev 4:1) have been interpreted in relation to the Four Evangelists brought home to me the impossibility of ignoring the rich iconographic tradition, which in the past might have been included as an optional extra, but now has to have a place as a vital part of how people have apprehended these symbolic scriptural texts.
It may well be that there will be new media, and that one day the paperbacks we plough through will become museum pieces. We are so quick to judge the past, and so slow to imagine how future ages will see us! But that will never render redundant the need to string even a few words together in the interests of the gospel. Ours is not the task to worship the word, but we do need to use it responsibly in context. And that brings me to the world in which the Word, God’s Word, keeps taking flesh – a world in which, as Michael Ramsey used to remind us, learning may not always be broad, but it needs to be deep.
I began by painting a somewhat facetious picture of the busy, hectic life of people today; and I went on to describe different approaches to theology, historical, social-pastoral, and systematic; and I then discussed three different possible routes to authorship, with their pitfalls and potential lost opportunities. I want now in conclusion to suggest another model for theology, which can be applied to other disciplines as well, based on the three interrogatives, ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’. To say ‘what’ theology is, to state its content, is perhaps the easiest of all – in isolation. To say ‘how’ theology is done distills its operation in practice, and sets out to make some coherent sense of it, which is less easy – in isolation. Too much work in teaching – right across the various disciplines – concentrates exclusively on these two questions, and the result is, inevitably, a utilitarian model, concerned with results that can be seen, felt, known. On these terms alone, theology becomes wooden, and it only bends in the direction of content or style. But the third question has to be asked – ‘why?’ The ‘why’ of theology strikes at its very heart: is it true in itself, is it true for me, is it true for the age we live in, is it true of God, the Source of our Being, the Fount of all inspiration? All these are questions at differing stages in the conceptual ladder, but they are questions with which theology, understood in the broadest terms, has to live, whether it is in the response we should be making to the latest attempt to define what post-modernism really means, or the sermon preached at the funeral of a wonderful, middle-aged wife and mother who has died of cancer. Theology has to state and theology has to engage: those are the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ questions. But theology also has to justify – and that is the ‘why’ question that is being dodged consistently by so much of our contemporary social, moral and political culture, and it really deserves to be placed at the very summit of all our agendas.
Coda: the author in relation to others
At the end of the day, an ‘author’, as the word originally means, is someone who creates something, originates it, and (by extension) writes it. The ‘why’ question, therefore, implies an audience, a group of people who are prepared and willing to listen, attend to, chew over, and digest – and even be edified. I wonder if someone a bit like that, living and writing in a community, however disparate, was not somewhere at the back of the mind of the author of the Letter to the Ephesians, when he wrote those spine-chilling words about what it means to ‘equip the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.’ (Ephesians 4:12-13).
Kenneth Stevenson
