Theology Reforming Society

By SCM Press

Theology Reforming Society tells the story of Anglican social theology from its roots in the writings and work of F.D. Maurice and the Christian Socialists, including Charles Kingsley and John Ludlow, and on to the work of William Temple. It also looks beyond Temple to the work of the Board for Social Responsibility, and to some of the theologians and church leaders who have continued its witness since then. Referring to the wider ecumenical context in order to draw out the distinctive features of the tradition of Anglican Social Theology, the book provides an important and comprehensive account for all those interested in Anglican theology, social and political theology and Christian ethics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780334053750

Book preview

Contents

Preface William Jacob

Contributors

Introduction Stephen Spencer

1  F. D. Maurice and the Myth of Christian Socialist Origins

Jeremy Morris

2  Maurice as a Resource for the Church Today

Alison Milbank

3  Octavia Hill: From Theology to Action

Diane Ryan

4  Anglican Social Thought Encounters Modernity: Brooke Foss Westcott, Henry Scott Holland and Charles Gore

Paul Avis

5  William Temple and the ‘Temple Tradition’

Stephen Spencer

6  The Temple Legacy Today: Beyond Neoliberalism

Susan Lucas

7  Anglican Social Theology Today and Tomorrow

Malcolm Brown

8  Public Theology or Ecclesial Theology?

Matthew Bullimore

Afterword: Whither Anglican Social Theology?

Peter Manley Scott

Copyright

Preface

WILLIAM JACOB

The chapters in this book spring from a timely and well-supported conference at the Mirfield Centre in West Yorkshire, convened to fulfil the terms of the Trust established in memory of Henry Scott Holland by his friends, including Charles Gore and R.H.Tawney, to ‘provide a series of lectures on the theology of the Incarnation and its bearing on the social and economic life of man’.

Previous lecturers have included a galaxy of distinguished Anglican thinkers beginning with R. H. Tawney himself in 1922, whose lectures were published as the seminal work Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, William Temple, A. D. Lindsay, Michael Ramsey, Donald Mackinnon and Rowan Williams. These papers continue that tradition and are a fitting tribute to Scott Holland who, as Paul Avis shows in his chapter, quoting one of Michael Ramsey’s 1964 lectures, ‘probably did more than any other man to impress upon members of the Church the corollaries of their faith for social and economic life, and to help people outside the Church to know that Christian belief and a sensitive social conscience properly go together’ (see below p.65) Scott Holland engaged with the intellectual movements of his day: T. H. Green’s idealism, Ruskin’s romanticism, F. D. Maurice’s theological breadth, Tractarian spirituality, Gladstonian political liberalism and radical social thought. As a residentiary canon of St Paul’s for 25 years before becoming Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Scott Holland was much engaged with the multiple deprivation of East London and, through his part in founding Oxford House in Bethnal Green and Christ Church Mission in Poplar, enabled generations of Oxford graduates to gain first-hand experience of the lives of the poor and marginalized, which informed their thinking and actions in their future careers. He embodied a communitarian spirit in working with others to initiate projects for the benefit of the Church and society, for example in the production of the collection of essays Lux Mundi which launched Anglican Liberal Catholicism, and also in his involvement in establishing the Oxford Mission to Calcutta, in establishing the Christian Social Union, and in supporting the Community of the Resurrection, which generously offered us hospitality at their Mirfield Centre for our conference.

Stephen Spencer is to be congratulated on assembling such an excellent group of speakers, who gave stimulating and engaging papers to a broad-ranging audience, and have promptly produced revised versions of their papers for publication. This is a worthy successor to Tawney’s first lectures, and the long succession of volumes since 1922.

W. M. Jacob

Chair of the Henry Scott Holland Trustees

Contributors

Paul Avis is Honorary Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham. He was General Secretary, Council for Christian Unity of the Church of England from 1998 to 2011. He has published widely on Anglicanism and ecumenical theology, including Gore: Construction and Conflict (Churchman Publishing, 1988), Anglicanism and the Christian Church (T&T Clark, new edn 2002), In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Vocation of Anglicanism (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Malcolm Brown is Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, advising the House of Bishops on current social affairs and policy issues. Previously he was researcher with the William Temple Foundation in Manchester and Principal of the Eastern Region Ministry Course. His publications include After the Market (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), and The Church and Economic Life, co-authored with Paul Ballard (Epworth, 2006) and he was editor of Anglican Social Theology: Renewing the Vision Today (Church House Publishing, 2014).

Matthew Bullimore is Vice Principal of Westcott House, Cambridge. Previously he was Vicar of Royston and Felkirk in the Diocese of Leeds. He is the assistant editor of Crucible: The Journal of Christian Social Ethics and has done research in philosophical theology, Christian doctrine and political theology. He is the editor of Graced Life: The Writings of John Hughes (SCM Press, 2016) and recently contributed to the collection For God’s Sake: Re-Imagining Priesthood and Prayer in a Changing Church (Canterbury Press, 2017).

Susan Lucas is Team Rector of the Parish of the Holy Trinity, East Ham. Her doctoral studies were on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and her current research interests are in liturgy, philosophy and ethics and the application of critical theory to the practice of urban mission and ministry. She contributes regularly to conferences, in particular at CAPPE, the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton.

Alison Milbank is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Canon Theologian of Southwell Minster. She is author of Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Palgrave 1992), Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians (T&T Clark, 2009), Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 2009) and, with Andrew Davison, For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (SCM Press, 2013).

Jeremy Morris is Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Previously he was Vice Principal of Westcott House and Dean of King’s College, Cambridge. He has published widely on church history, including F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford University Press, 2005) and To Build Christ’s Kingdom: F. D. Maurice and His Writings (Canterbury Press, 2007). He is editor of The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Volume IV: Global Western Anglicanism, c.1910– present (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Diane Ryan is Assistant Curate in the Benefice of Great Snaith, in East Yorkshire. After studying English and Religious Studies at Lancaster University she spent 15 years as a Homestart volunteer, supporting families in the manner that Octavia Hill initiated.

Peter Manley Scott is Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Theology, Ideology and Liberation (Cambridge University Press, 1994), A Political Theology of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Anti-human Theology: Nature, Technology and the Postnatural (SCM Press, 2010) and is co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (2004, with a new edition soon to be published).

Stephen Spencer is Vice Principal of St Hild College, Mirfield. He has served in parishes in England and Zimbabwe, and in theological education in Cumbria, Manchester and Yorkshire. His doctoral studies were on the philosophical foundations of William Temple’s social thought and his publications include William Temple: A Calling to Prophecy (SPCK, 2001), SCM Studyguide Anglicanism (SCM Press, 2010) and Christ in All Things: William Temple and His Writings (Canterbury Press, 2015). He was the conference convenor.

Introduction

STEPHEN SPENCER

There are different ways in which the Church can bring progressive change to society. One is through direct intervention in party politics, such as through founding a political party that seeks to win power. Another is through supporting campaigns for change on specific issues, such as the abolition of slavery, reform of factory working conditions or the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief. A third way is through seeking to change the structures of society as a whole through changing relationships across social groups.

It was this third form of social action that provided the subject of an important conference at Mirfield in West Yorkshire in January 2017. The conference gave specific attention to a movement of thinking and action that originated in the Church of England in the nineteenth century and which acquired extensive influence in Britain and beyond in the twentieth century, a movement now known as Anglican social theology.

The conference built on a 2014 book, Anglican Social Theology, a set of essays by Anglican, Evangelical and Roman Catholic theologians edited by Malcolm Brown. The essays referred in passing to this tradition, one that had its roots in the theological writings and social action of F. D. Maurice and Christian Socialism, then found expression in the work of Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Gore, Henry Scott Holland and the Christian Social Union. It reached mature expression in what the essays called ‘the Temple tradition’, referring to Archbishop William Temple and, during the Second World War, his influential advocacy of the need for social reform and especially for a welfare state. This tradition later found institutional expression in the work of the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility in the 1960s and 1970s and in the Archbishop’s Commission report of 1985, Faith in the City. It has found contemporary resonances in some of the lectures and speeches of Rowan Williams when Archbishop of Canterbury. The key feature of the tradition, one that distinguishes it from a number of single-issue campaigns over the same period, is the way it connects foundational theological principles with recommendations for the reform of the social and economic structures of society as a whole.

But Anglican Social Theology did not attempt a comprehensive account of this tradition. The task of assessing its significance as a whole was left to another day. It was this assessment that the conference at Mirfield took up. Meeting at the home of the Community of the Resurrection, which Charles Gore founded in 1892, it ran over 24 hours with participants coming from across the country including from Truro, London, Gloucester and Durham. The four main lectures, by Jeremy Morris, Paul Avis, Stephen Spencer and Malcolm Brown, comprised the Scott Holland lectures, a triannual series of lectures founded in memory of Henry Scott Holland. Each one of these was followed by a prepared response from a range of speakers that allowed the discussion to develop in creative directions.

Jeremy Morris began the story with an account of the start of the movement in 1848, the ‘Year of Revolutions’ across Europe, when the Chartist Movement attempted to force political change through a mass demonstration on Kennington Common in London. It was this event that made Maurice contact his friend, the lawyer John Ludlow, saying that ‘the new Socialism must be Christianised’. Their ‘Christian Socialist’ movement, small scale and faltering at first, wanted to replace the law of competition with that of co-operation in society at large. It found expression in a number of educational initiatives, starting with a teacher training college for women, and in the setting up of some workers’ co-operatives. While these had only limited impact, the notion that Christian theology could change the way relationships were conducted in society at large was a novel and ultimately influential one within the development of Anglicanism. Morris argued that Maurice’s social theology was not a sub-branch of his work overall but rather integral to his understanding of his vocation as a theologian. What Maurice wanted above all to achieve was a refocusing of the attention of the Church of England on the social implications of its teaching. Morris also included Octavia Hill in his overview, a follower of Maurice who created some influential housing schemes and became a founder of the National Trust. Alison Millbank, in response to Morris, developed a contemporary application of a number of key themes in Maurice’s work, not least his Trinitarian theology, and made connections with the Citizens movement in France and with church initiatives today. She also highlighted the exciting way in which Maurice resisted an instrumental view of education and in its place showed how education is all about discovery and realizing the Kingdom of God in our midst.

Paul Avis then took up the story with an account of the life and thinking of Brooke Foss Westcott and Charles Gore, drawing out continuity with Maurice as well as some differences. For Westcott the Incarnation provided the ‘motive, principle and power’ to apply the Christian faith to the problems of life. Like Maurice, he believed that the world was already God’s world, that all people were ‘in Christ’, and that society embodied the divine order: all we have to do is to live in the light of this truth in order to realize it more and more. In other aspects of his thinking, though, Westcott emerged as confined within the late-Victorian mind-set of his time. Gore, manifestly and avowedly an heir of the Tractarians, also shared Maurice’s Christ-centred social vision, though he differed from him and from Westcott in not proclaiming that every person is already ‘in Christ’. One major contrast with Maurice was Gore’s commitment to democracy, including the widening of the franchise to women. Avis also highlighted how Gore differed from Maurice and Westcott in his promotion of legislation to tackle social and economic issues, something that William Temple would also take up in the 1940s. Fr Thomas Seville, a member of Gore’s Community of the Resurrection, argued that Gore’s socialism was closer to the socialism of our own time than that of Maurice. He also described Gore’s radical view of property, that its social ownership should be primary and that the right to property should only be for social needs. Unfortunately there was not enough time in the conference to look at Henry Scott Holland, close colleague of Gore and ultimately professor at Oxford. Happily he is included in Avis’s chapter in this volume.

Stephen Spencer then gave an account of William Temple’s contribution, describing the theological and philosophical roots of his social principles and working through the methodology of his social ethics, a methodology that welcomes the insights of those with expertise in social and economic affairs. He highlighted the way that Temple’s methodology is open to the building of coalitions of groups who come from different faith backgrounds and who can agree on the kind of practical objectives he outlines. Temple’s methodology is one that can still be found in use in recent reports on contemporary social issues, showing his abiding significance. Spencer also argued that Temple’s emphasis on the role of intermediate communities, those associations and communities that lie between the individual and the state, is one that is sometimes missed by contemporary commentators and shows his continuity with Maurice. In responding to his paper, Susan Lucas showed how Temple and the tradition he represents contains an inherent and necessary critique of the neo-liberal politics and economics that has been dominant in British and American politics since the 1980s, a critique that still needs to be heard.

Finally, in an update to his contribution to Anglican Social Theology, Malcolm Brown argued for the need for the movement to engage with the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism which is currently widely involved in social action up and down the country but lacks theological underpinning for this. The House of Bishops have recently commissioned some resources to address this but more needs to be done. Nevertheless Anglican social theology can offer something of great worth to the deep divisions of contemporary politics, namely a ‘coalition communitarianism’ that resists the increasing atomisation of society and which demonstrates how those who differ in beliefs and values can nevertheless live and work together for the common good. In his response, Matthew Bullimore showed how the church at local level can exemplify this, living out a human flourishing based on a conviviality which is much more than just a tolerable co-existence. The leadership of the churches could help to reinforce this contribution which, essentially, is coming up from below.

These papers now form the basis of this book. However, the pages that follow are not a conference report. Each speaker has revised and expanded their paper for publication, often taking note of the dialogue at the conference and finessing their argument. Furthermore, they have been joined by a chapter by Diane Ryan which provides additional information on Octavia Hill who, while one of the lesser known members of the early Christian Socialist circle, became, in practical terms, probably its most influential member. Finally Peter Scott, who attended the conference and chaired its concluding session, has provided an ‘afterword’ which gives an acute critique and some constructive recommendations for the future development of Anglican social theology. As a whole, then, this book is intended not only to make the conference papers more widely available but to contribute to the ongoing discussion about how to evaluate and apply Anglican social theology in the years ahead. It does this by providing an overview of its development, giving particular attention to key moments and figures and by assessing the contemporary application of what those moments and figures represent. Recent surveys show a widening and strengthening of social action by churches of many denominations across the country, including the Anglican denominations of the Church of England, the Church of Ireland, the Church in Wales and the Episcopal Church of Scotland.¹ This book is offered to inspire and strengthen reflection on that social action at local, national and international level. Furthermore, with another Lambeth Conference scheduled to take place in 2020, it is crucial that this dimension of the church’s life, an expression of the fourth Mark of Mission, ‘to transform unjust structures of society’, which belongs to all Anglicans worldwide, is brought into sharp and constructive focus.

Sincere thanks are due to the Mirfield Centre for facilitating the conference at the home of the Community of the Resurrection, to the Scott Holland Trustees for commissioning this series of Scott Holland lectures, to SCM Press for taking on the publication of the lectures in this revised and expanded form, and to all the contributors for their prompt and professional submission of chapters.

Note

1 See, for example, Nick Spencer, 2016, Doing Good: A Future for Christianity in the 21st Century, London: Theos.

1

F. D. Maurice and the Myth of Christian Socialist Origins

JEREMY MORRIS

I

F. D. Maurice’s status as virtually the founding father of Anglican social theology and even, in many people’s minds, of Christian Socialism itself, is surely incontestable, at least to judge from the verdict of many of those who have written on it in the last half-century or so. Maurice Reckitt argued that significant figures in Christian Socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries knew themselves to derive from Maurice ‘in varying measure’. (Reckitt, 1968, p. 1). To Ronald Preston, Maurice’s name was ‘inseparably linked with the recovery in this country of an explicit Christian social theology’ (Preston, 1979, p. 3). Donald Gray, in his study of the relationship between liturgical renewal in Anglicanism and Christian Socialism, gave pride of place to Maurice in his account of origins (Gray, 1986, pp. 74–83, 110–14). Alan Wilkinson echoed this in his discussion of the background to the history of Christian Socialism in the twentieth century (Wilkinson, 1998, pp. 15–22). And Chris Bryant, in a work of popular history that is, nonetheless, critical and fair, picked out Maurice’s theological influence as his abiding legacy: ‘Maurice’s work meant that