Democracy and the Christian Churches: Ecumenism and the Politics of Belief 9781788318563, 9781788318549

Citation preview

Margaret and Barthie

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been written without the encouragement and skilled advice of Alex Wright, Sara Magness, Sophie Campbell and colleagues at I.B.Tauris. As editor, he also advised John de Gruchy in that earlier study ‘Christianity and Democracy’, which has been my road map. Reformed congregations in Windsor, Oxford and Bournemouth might not think of me as democratic, in which case I thank them for their love and patient understanding. Reporting on World Council of Churches events for Churches Together in England has kept me in touch with the international ecumenical movement and a year’s work with students at its Institute at Bossey, near Geneva, still keeps us in contact with younger scholars from all round the world, thanks now to the internet and Facebook. Through the Society for the Study of Theology, I have met some of the people, like Duncan Forrester, David Fergusson and Nick Adams, whose books are listed. And if in this book I sometimes criticise the Church of Rome, I do so in sympathy with Roman Catholic friends and Reformers like Professor Annemarie Mayer of Leuven, Paul Murray of Durham, Thadde´e Barnas of Chevetogne and the journal Ire´nikon, which he helps to edit. I have access to one of the best libraries in the world and thank the staff of the Bodleian for their constant help. Its founder, Thomas Bodley, was once a student in Calvin’s Geneva Academy. Two personalities deserve a special mention. One is Mr Barthie, who insisted I take plenty of exercise, and the other is my lovely wife, Margaret, without whose constant love and encouragement little would be accomplished. I dedicate this book to Barthie, named

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

after Karl Barth, and, in his own way, an expert in dogmatics, with a great zest for life that came to an abrupt end before the book was finished. Our children, Susan and Daniel, comment kindly on all I write.

INTRODUCTION

When my Reformed colleague John de Gruchy published the last major study of Christianity and democracy in 1995, he sensed that he was ‘living in an environment which is turbulent, traumatic and dislocating, yet is also one which is potentially creative’. He added: ‘Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that present and anticipated traumas associated with democratic transition may well be the birth-pangs of a more just and democratic global society.’ I hope so! So did Paul. St Paul used the same metaphor of birthpangs of a new age 2000 years ago in his letter to persecuted Christians in Rome: ‘the whole creation groans like a woman in childbirth’. Indeed it does! In John de Gruchy’s South Africa and almost everywhere, democracy is in deep trouble. The big question in this study is: Can the churches help the democrats? Yes, but only if the churches are more democratic. One major argument in this book is that the Jewish – Christian tradition has great resources to draw on as we hope for better ways of reaching decisions together, governing and being governed. We – I say ‘we’ because, like John de Gruchy and others whose thinking and theology I outline in this study, I am thankful for this tradition – have been thinking about democracy in its various forms for over 3000 years. Synagogues and congregations, temple and church institutions, are places of worship and decision making. Nor do I ignore our Muslim cousins. All three faiths are heirs of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and are involved in dialogues about democracy and much else. I offer a brief inter-faith response in Chapter 5.

2

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

A second major contention is that, given the choice of tyranny or democracy, churches must always opt for democracy. Democratic ways of working together are closer to the gospel. Opting for democracy must never be a case of just telling others in the civil community how they should operate, but of practising what we preach. In this respect, Reformed churches have historically set an example which others, not least the Church of Rome, may follow. In the recent past, it was too easy for a Church ruled by one man, the pope, to collude with dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Spain and most of the countries of Latin America. Democratization in the Church, where more people are involved in responsible decision making, can assist the same process in society. In the British experience, in the seventeenth century, Reformers rejected one-man rule. Those who rejected monarchy also rejected prelacy, hence the cry, ‘No bishop, no king!’ When both were banished, alternative forms of government had to be developed, and were. But none of my Reformed advocates of democracy ever assumed that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ or spoke glibly of the ‘sovereignty of the people’. Good leaders are acceptable and helpful, provided they never act like tyrants. Thanks to the ecumenical movement, Vatican II and bodies like the World Council of Churches, churches are no longer in the business of mutual condemnation but of mutual support, encouragement and accountability. John de Gruchy, of all people, knows that though the Reformed tradition may be justly applauded for advocating democracy in church and state, it also gave apartheid its theological justification. It was unfair of the Anglican bishop Trevor Huddleston in Naught for Your Comfort, ‘the book which stirred the conscience of the world’, to blame John Calvin, but the fact remains that it is thanks to Anglican and Roman Catholic critics as well as members of Reformed and other churches that the white Dutch Reformed and Nationalist Church of South Africa was led to admit that apartheid was a heresy that no Christian government could defend. Listening and learning, a key democratic process, churches can and do help each other resolve divisive issues of justice and peace, equality, care for the environment and so on. If policies are worked out through consensus decision making then no one is ignored just because they are in a minority. One whole chapter (Chapter 3) is devoted to lessons the churches have learned about consensus, subsidiarity, constitutions and the rule of law.

INTRODUCTION

3

Church members are also citizens. Lessons learned in churches can be discussed and shared in society. This presupposes that the churches need and ought to be allowed a voice in the proverbial ‘public square’. They forfeit this if they are only concerned to lobby for their own agenda on a narrow range of issues, too often only about sex. They already have amazing opportunities to influence events once it is recognised that their members still hold key positions in a ‘secular’ world. No one has yet become president of the United States who is not some sort of Christian. All Secretary Generals of the United Nations have, to date, been religious men – all but two Christians. Two current leaders of European nations are vicars’ daughters. These facts are noted but usually dismissed either critically or as irrelevant. Churches should and do care about the unity of nations, the poor and people with disabilities, and not only for them but for all. We do care about how momentous decisions affecting our lives are made and by whom, for whom and for what reasons. Churches collectively have the most global network of face-to-face encounters. But on some big questions like Brexit or the beliefs of President Donald Trump, most churches are dumb even though we accuse our opponents of being deaf. These arguments explain the layout of this book. I hope it supplements the pioneering research of John de Gruchy. My approach is different but intended to be complementary. De Gruchy offered a broad survey of Christianity and Democracy. I focus more intensively on two main Church traditions, Reformed and Roman Catholic, and on some of their leading thinkers. Some are well known, like the various popes referred to, or Calvin, Barth, Schu¨ssler Fiorenza and Niebuhr. Others are less often remembered. No apology for remembering them. Jeffrey Stout in Democracy and Tradition cites Thomas Carlyle, John Dewey, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, whom most of us no longer read. I try hard to convince my readers that Ernest Barker, Maude Royden, Alexander Lindsay, Kathleen Bliss and Nathaniel Micklem still need to be heard. Few today are saying what they said. Is that why modern democracy, here in Britain and elsewhere, is floundering?

CHAPTER 1 DEMOCRACY AND THE THEOLOGIANS:REFORMED REFLECTIONS ON DEMOCRACY

Introduction In this chapter I outline the main arguments of a number of Reformed Christians who, in different ways, advocated democracy in the State. Taking a cue from A.D. Lindsay’s I Believe in Democracy, my emphasis is on the connection between support for democracy and Christian beliefs. That those who are considered are Reformed is partly because this is my own tradition and so the one I know best, but also because so many of the advocates of democracy were Reformed. And because we still have to argue the case for democracy and democratisation in the Church and in society, I will later use Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics as, so to speak, the main counsel for the opposition. All those who advocated democracy were of course aware of their critics and were not calmly contemplating abstract ideals. The same has always been true since the fifth century BC when Plato and Aristotle challenged Athenian democracy as the worst form of government. Barth, Lindsay, Barker, Micklem and Niebuhr were contending with the tyranny of Hitler. In the Middle Ages the contest over Councils versus the Papacy can also be seen as a challenge to democratisation if one accepts that the bishops in a council were more representative of all the faithful than one man, the pope, in Avignon or Rome, especially when bishops were elected by the people. Since church councils were usually convened by the emperor and

8

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

not the pope, how they operated had political and not just ecclesiastical implications. Europe’s first Christian emperor, Constantine, summoned the bishops to Nicaea in 325 because he longed to keep the peace, not because he fully understood and rejected the teachings of Arius about the nature of Christ. Theology and politics were part of the same agenda. All the Reformed authors I cite agree that politics and theology cannot be separated. Not all those considered were professional theologians, but here I follow the convictions of Karl Barth, that the moment Christians express their beliefs, they are beginning to think theologically. On that basis there is no need to apologise for including political philosophers Alexander Lindsay and Ernest Barker. They were each respected Christian laymen, as were those who took part in the historic debates about democracy in Cromwell’s army. Colonel Rainborough became their spokesman and, like most of his contemporaries, based some of his arguments on the Bible. I give more detailed comment on Calvin and Barth as the most influential Reformed theologians. Briefer surveys of More´ly, the Levellers, Forsyth, Micklem, Lindsay, Barker, Niebuhr, Ellul, Moltmann and John de Gruchy demonstrate a broad Reformed concern and consensus about democracy.

John Calvin (1509–64) Like all the main sixteenth-century reformers, Calvin was originally Roman Catholic and would not be too happy being labelled a Protestant. He held the catholic faith as expressed in the catholic creeds and had hoped to help renew and reform what we now call the Roman Catholic Church, not to form a new church. Oxford’s Church historian, Diarmaid MacCulloch, suggests we should think of Calvin as the ‘Fifth Latin Doctor of the Church’, in the succession of Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory, rather than as a Protestant.1 Unlike Martin Luther or later John Wesley, there is no denomination named after him. Instead, a good variety of different traditions acknowledge their debt to his work and writings. He may even have influenced Vatican II. Even so, for churches in the Reformed tradition Calvin in Geneva and Zwingli in Zurich are respected as their founding fathers. Calvin is frequently honoured as a father of modern democracy. Gooch preferred to say: ‘Modern democracy is the child of the

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

9

Reformation, not of the Reformers.’2 Counting Calvin among the democrats is disputed but need not be if we agree to ask a different question, one that Calvin himself tried to answer: How can we make the best decisions in the Church and in the State? Theologically, as Calvin is quick to explain, the best decisions are those that express the will of God and are made in a Christian manner. Stated more generally, Calvin would agree that the best decisions are made by those best qualified to make them and most affected by them. We will then discover that many of Calvin’s answers support a mixed polity with strong democratic elements. He is firmly opposed to any form of tyranny in the Church and in the State. Taking his cue from Acts 15 and the account of the Jerusalem Council, where we read that the decision ‘seemed good to the apostles and elders with the whole church’, Calvin, in his Commentary, adds: ‘for there is nothing less consistent with holy and Christian order than the exclusion of the body of the people from common doctrine, as if they were a herd of pigs, as usually happens under the tyranny of the papacy’. He continues it is ‘tyranny, born of the pride of the pastors, that things which belong to the common circumstances of the whole Church are submitted to the judgment, not to speak of the caprice of a few to the exclusion of the people’. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, there are frequent references to ‘the pope’s tyranny’. A whole section of Book IV expounds how ‘The Ancient Form of Church Government was completely overthrown by the Tyranny of the Papacy.’3 He goes on to argue for the people’s choice and consent: The freedom of the people to choose their own bishops was long preserved; no one was to be thrust into office who was not acceptable to all. It was therefore forbidden at the Council of Antioch (341) that anyone be intruded upon the people against their will. This Leo I earnestly confirms. Hence these statements: ‘Let him be chosen whom the clergy and people, or the greater number, have demanded’. Likewise: ‘Let him who is to be set over all, be chosen by all’ [. . .] Moreover, the holy fathers took care that the freedom of the people should in no way be diminished. Even a successor, nominated by Athanasius, had to be accepted by the priests, magistrates and leading citizens ‘and all the people approved it by their acclamation’.4

10

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

And though Calvin here refrains from any reference to his own appointment he could claim, and did claim, that he was persuaded, much against his personal inclinations, to come to Geneva because the Reformation movement there needed stronger leadership than Farel and other preachers could provide. This summons happened not once but twice, when those in power in the city banished Calvin and then realised that they could not manage without him. The Reformation in Geneva was also to some extent a popular movement since the decision in favour of Reformation teaching was made by the city’s leaders. As described by the historian T.H.L. Parker, ‘On 25 May 1536 a general assembly of the citizens voted “to live by the Gospel”. Geneva had become by constitution an evangelical city.’ This was their decision, not Calvin’s. Calvin was technically called to serve the city as minister and servant of the gospel some three months later.5 Visitors to the cathedral where Calvin once preached and the auditorium where he once lectured are reminded as they enter the oldest parts of Geneva that it was once, and still claims to be, a city that welcomes refugees. The welcome is inscribed in many languages in the pavements over which we walk. Calvin himself was one such refugee. He had to flee from his native France where Protestants were already being brutally harried and persecuted. Like most refugees in another country he lived in fear of being evicted. He had no rights. He was not a citizen until the last years of his life and, according to John McNeill in his famous essay on ‘The Democratic Element in Calvin’s Thought’,6 was relatively insecure until 1555 or 1559, some 20 years after his arrival in the city. If in any sense he dominated the city – as even critical admirers like Karl Barth were ready to accept was the case – this was through sheer force of learning and personality, not because he was part of the government. We glean what Calvin thinks about government mainly from his Commentaries and from the section about the Church in Book IV of the Institutes. This is a key passage: For if the three forms of government which the philosophers discuss be considered in themselves, I will not deny that aristocracy, or a system compounded of aristocracy and democracy, far excels all others: not indeed of itself, but because it is very rare for kings so to control themselves that their will never disagrees

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

11

with what is just and right; or for them to have been endowed with such great keenness and prudence, that each knows how much is enough. Therefore, men’s fault or failing causes it to be safer and more bearable for a number [plures] to exercise government so that they may help one another, teach and admonish one another and, if one asserts himself unfairly, there may be a number of censors and masters to restrain his wilfulness.7 The appeal here is to experience, as Calvin admits when in the next sentence he adds, ‘This has been proved by experience’, and not just his own experience. There may be ‘magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the wilfulness of kings (as in ancient times the Ephors were set against the Spartan kings, the tribunes of the people against the Roman consuls or the demarchs against the senate of the Athenians) (IV/xx/31). But, being Calvin and a theologian who spends much of his life expounding scripture, he at once finds biblical justifications. The Lord ordained among the Israelites ‘an aristocracy bordering on democracy, since he willed to keep them in the best condition’. He cites Exodus 18:13– 26. The passage could also be read as a vindication of representative democracy except for the fact that the representatives are chosen by the ruler, not by the people. Moses is wearing himself out trying single-handedly to settle all the disputes that people bring to him ‘from morning till evening’. His father-in-law, Jethro, takes pity on him and suggests a remedy: ‘Delegate! Search for capable, god-fearing men among all the people, honest and incorruptible men, and appoint them over the people as officers over units of a thousand, of a hundred, of fifty or of ten [. . .] In this way your burden will be lightened as they will be sharing it with you.’ Calvin might note, as a lawyer and a theologian, that the common task is not created by the king or the aristocracy or the people. It is given by God. Each and every one without distinction is accountable to God and has a common responsibility for carrying out God’s will. Israel’s God-given leader is Moses. God has given Moses his law. But others are needed to help Moses in the task of applying and interpreting the will of God, not the will of Moses, for particular situations. The passage assumes, or hopes, that a ruler will be humble enough to accept advice from the people he governs. More than that, in our pluralistic context we are bound to notice that Moses, though he is the Lord’s anointed

12

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

leader, takes advice from a wise pagan because he senses that God may speak to him through such a man. The Christian commentaries8 on this passage show how Augustine and the Reformers sometimes struggled with the challenge that Jethro presents to any who hold an exclusive and excluding faith, as though only Jews or Christians could discern what is right. Because God alone is god and sovereign ruler over all, God is free to speak through any he chooses and in any way. God could speak through Moses the Israelite and Jethro the Midianite. Calvin’s heir, Karl Barth, once famously remarked that ‘God may even speak to us through Russian Communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog. We do well to listen to Him if He really does.’ He added that God may also speak to us through a pagan or an atheist.9 Calvin also insists that whoever holds office in either Church or State is subordinate to God. Office-holders’ power is relative and their subjects owe them obedience only insofar as they are not commanded to disobey God’s law. In the last paragraph of his final edition of The Institutes, Calvin cites the apostle Peter in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ And though Calvin is more hesitant than Beza and several of his successors in making out a case for outright rebellion against unjust rule and, if need be, tyrannicide, he has laid the foundations for such a response in the final section. Hosea condemns the people of Israel ‘because they were too obedient to the wicked proclamation of the king’ (Hosea 5:13), ‘as if God made over his right to [rule] to mortal men, giving them the rule over mankind’.10 On this ground it was right for Cromwell and the Puritans to execute King Charles I in 1649 and for Bonhoeffer, von Stauffenberg, Adam von Trott and others to attempt to execute Hitler in the July Plot of 1944. Thomas Aquinas had also made out such a case.

Church practice and civic polity A key argument running through this book is that Reformed theologians and Reformed congregations were best qualified to advocate democracy because they practised what they preached. Was this true of Calvin and his Company of Pastors? A recent study by Scott Manetsch supplies ample evidence that the pastors and congregations in ‘the emerging Reformed Church’ in Geneva (1536– 1609) did indeed practise democratic principles.11

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

13

Collegial rather than one-man rule John McNeill, editor of Calvin’s Institutes, comments on the key passage cited above (IV/xx/8), ‘In government, Calvin sees safety in numbers and expects thereby to obtain the advantage of co-operation, mutual admonition and restraint of individual self-assertion. In Geneva he induced the Little Council to hold meetings monthly or quarterly, as might seem best, for the simple purpose of mutual criticism.’ He, and later Beza, applied the same principle to the Company of Pastors. In Calvin’s day, the preachers in Geneva’s main churches moved around in rotation so that none of them dominated and no congregation became too attached to one man. Later Beza insisted he must stand for election each year as Leader of the Company of Pastors and at one stage in the meetings with some of the city councillors there might be a different chairman each week. And though Calvin was a strong personality, he did not always get his own way with the city authorities. Through the Consistory, the ministers might exercise discipline and demand high standards from their parishioners. In turn, parishioners felt free to criticise their ministers. Services, they said, were sometimes too long. Beza was accused of extravagant tastes and compared with Calvin who lived much more simply. On his deathbed Calvin apologised to his colleagues for often being too grumpy, especially when he felt so ill. Election of ministers Ministers were not imposed on a congregation but elected by the Company of Pastors, with the approval of the city councillors. The names of candidates were then announced in all the congregations and people had a right to raise objections to any they thought unsuitable. The lay theologian Jean More´ly wanted laypeople to have a more positive role in nominating and electing but he failed to convince Calvin, Beza and a succession of synods that his ideas had a sound biblical basis and would make for better Church order. Calvin in context Calvin’s comments on monarchy, aristocracy and democracy are best understood in their context. He had to flee France because of the tyranny of the king and was cautious about episcopacy because of the prelacy of a bishop who had once come with his army and laid siege to Geneva. He would know that before his arrival in Geneva, there, and in many

14

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

other cities, there had been mob riots as the people, incited by popular preachers, took the Reformation into their own hands and smashed windows and statues in Saint-Pierre and other churches. In May 1533, a Roman Catholic mob of 1,500 attacked a group of Protestants at the Place du Molard. Several were badly wounded and one person, a Roman Catholic, was killed. Calvin therefore felt constrained by such events to find a way between tyranny and tumult. Even so, he was not one simply to respond to events. He learned from the Bible to have a high regard for magistrates and good government as signs of God’s providential care for the city and all its inhabitants. ‘We owe this attitude of reverence and therefore of piety toward all rulers in the highest degree, whatever they may be like’ (IV/xx/29). As well as his careful exposition of Romans 13 and its key text, ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’, he comments on Jeremiah 29:7, where the prophet enjoins exiles – like Calvin and his French companions – to ‘seek the welfare of any city to which I (the Lord) have exiled you’ (IV/xx/28). Whole books have been written about how Calvin did just that.12 He took issue with the Anabaptist Radicals who scorned politics as too dirty and unfit for Christian involvement.13 Politics and social welfare was for Calvin a Christian vocation. Romans 13 speaks of the magistrate as leiturgos, the word from which we now derive liturgy and the celebrant in worship. English usage comes close when we use the same word, ‘minister’, to describe members of the Government as well as pastors or priests of churches.

Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579) Ernest Barker14 sees a number of the French followers of Calvin, the Huguenots, as developing further this last section of Calvin’s Institutes of 1559. Barker interprets Calvin as saying that if rulers command evil, the only remedy is patience and prayer. But the killing of at least 30,000 Huguenots in different parts of France in what is now known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 24 August 1572, sharpened the whole issue of resistance to tyranny and required a much more vigorous response. This came in a series of works by Beza, Calvin’s successor, Hotman and the unnamed author of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, often assumed to be by a young French lawyer called Mornay, but, according to Barker and others, more likely the work of Hubert Languet. After the massacre, all hopes of France becoming a Protestant country, or even a land where Protestants would be tolerated, collapsed. Or so it

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

15

seemed until some hopes were revived with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. But in a beautiful description which echoes the story of Israel in exile (Psalm 137), Barker says ‘The Huguenots sat down by the waters of Babylon and they thought – thought and wrote.’ In their writings they ‘appealed to the conscience of Christian Europe’. Barker is here making the telling point, vital for any healthy democracy, that even a minority that thinks hard can have an influence. He regards the Vindiciae as one of the most profound works of this period and traces its influence through to the Dutch Declaration of Independence of 1581, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The work can be read as ‘an exhortation to rebel’15 against unjust rule. But even before revolt seems necessary, the Vindiciae contains important reflections on popular government. With numerous references to the Old Testament, it makes much of the concepts of the people, meaning there the people of God, and of covenant. Kings and people are alike in being bound to God in a covenant relationship, but as the covenant is first made with the people who then elect their king, the people have priority. They are to obey the king only in so far as the king, like the people, obeys the law, given by God as part of the covenant relationship. The writer refers to Deuteronomy 17:14–20: After you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, and have occupied it and settled there, if you then say, ‘Let us appoint a king over us, as all the surrounding nations do’, you must appoint over you a man of your own people. When he has ascended the throne of the kingdom, he is to make a copy of this law at the dictation of the Levitical priests. He is to have it by him and read from it all his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God and keep all the words of the law and observe these statutes. Thus he will avoid alienation from his fellow-countrymen through pride, and not deviate from these commandments to right or left. The author is also aware of another very relevant passage in the First Book of Samuel (1 Samuel 8:4– 22). Calvin quotes Samuel’s warning in full (Institutes IV/xx/26). The elders, whom we may see as representatives of the people, asked Samuel to appoint a king to rule over the people. Samuel was not sure this was such a great idea, so he asked the Lord for advice. The Lord confirmed the prophet’s own observations. Kings have a

16

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

bad habit of acting like greedy tyrants. Samuel warned the people against having a king but the people would not listen: ‘No, they said, we must have a king over us, then we shall be like other nations, with a king to rule over us’ (verses 19 – 20). This was the people’s decision, their choice. The Lord told Samuel to let them have their way. We might interpret this as saying that people in an election must accept responsibility for their own decisions. Such an open and honest discussion would not be out of place in post-Brexit Britain or post-Trump America! But the author of the Vindiciae would not agree with Calvin’s conclusion: ‘It is as if Samuel had said: The wilfulness of kings will run to excess, but it will not be your part to restrain it; you will have only this left to you; to obey their commands and hearken to their word.’ But, perhaps on further reflection, Calvin added: ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29). The Vindiciae makes it much clearer that the people’s obedience to their rulers is conditional on their ruler’s obedience to God. The author is aware that he needs to clarify what he understands by ‘the people’. He is aware of any obvious objection: Do you really mean, it will be said, that the entire multitude, that many-headed monster, should go rushing into matters of this sort like a raging flood? Can order be expected from the mob? When we speak of the people collectively, we mean those who receive authority from the people, the magistrates below the king who have been elected by the people. But he also concedes that there could be occasions when individuals might feel it is their duty to resist. He warns: ‘Let any man who would assume responsibility to act like that, as though he felt the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, make sure that it is not his own arrogance that swells within him.’ And let him be aware, he adds, that his own action might put others’ lives at risk, as was the case ‘not long ago’ with Thomas Mu¨nzer. This is a reference to the Peasants’ Revolt that was harshly suppressed by Luther’s supporters in 1525 at Frankenhausen. In a series of peasant risings (1524– 5) the leaders of the people, as the historian Owen Chadwick notes, ‘demanded justice, freedom from oppression by landlords, the right to choose their pastor and the restoration to the village community of land once common’.16

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

17

Such democratic demands deserve more than a passing reference in view of the fact that the Church and the churches have so often failed to listen to the poor and oppressed. Roman Catholics in Latin America are puzzled that despite Liberation Theology and the Church’s ‘turning to the poor’, the poor turned to the Pentecostals. Why? The historians and theologians can assist with answers. Chadwick is highly critical of Martin Luther’s handling of the Peasants’ Revolt and describes his pamphlet Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants as ‘the most calamitous of his tracts’, though I think what he also said about the Jews had more outrageous consequences. New Testament scholar Professor Christopher Rowland pleads for a more sympathetic understanding of Mu¨nzer: ‘Mu¨nzer is one of the most misunderstood figures in early modern history. He is often seen as nothing more than a rabble-rouser and dangerous fanatic.’ But, says Rowland: The story of the various Anabaptist groups, persecuted and frequently forced to become refugees, yet clinging to their convictions about the radical alternative posed by the gospel is one that deserves to be better known. They showed up the iniquity of a political system based on inequality and private property. They posed a direct, though not active, challenge to the contemporary values. For that reason they were suspected, hounded out of the country and deprived of civil rights. But the vision was one that was entirely in tune with the gospel: ‘The kings of the earth lord it over their subjects and their rulers are accounted benefactors; but it shall not be so among you.’17 Rowland adds conviction to what he writes by the fact that he has never been content with the prestigious life of a professor in Cambridge and Oxford but has spent time living and working with the poor in various countries of Latin America and Central America, including Brazil and Nicaragua, and has taken an active role in organisations like Christian Aid and Traidcraft. A final chapter in his Radical Christianity is headed ‘The Theology of Liberation; Proclaiming God as Father in a World that is Inhumane’. His book can be read as a sequel to the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos that in 1579 spoke up for all who are oppressed. Ernest Barker, writing in 1942 when his country, Britain, and her allies, was at war with Hitler’s tyranny, found much comfort and

18

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

encouragement in what is stated in the fourth and final section of the Vindiciae. It is a pity he did not quote its key section in full because its argument is deeply theological and ecumenical and relevant to Barker’s own concerns centuries later. As in all parts of this treatise, the format is an answer to a key question: ‘Are neighbouring princes permitted or obliged to aid the subjects of another prince who are persecuted for the exercise of true religion or are oppressed by manifest tyranny?’ Here is the answer: It is well established to begin with that the Church is one, that its head is Christ, and that its members are so close and so harmonious that none can suffer the slightest blow or hurt without the other feeling it and sharing in his grief, as it is taught through Scripture [. . .] If a prince should protect that part of the Church, say the German or the English, which is within his territory but does not help another persecuted part; if he abandons it and deserts it when he could send help, he must be judged to have abandoned the Church.18 Today some might question this preoccupation with the Church rather than the wider world. In the seventeenth century the two were assumed to be the same; all citizens would also be Church people. Even in Hitler’s Germany this was true for about 80 per cent of the population. And when the Church is understood as the biblical People of God, what Barth called Israel-Church, the Vindiciae’s concern for the persecuted most certainly includes the Jews who, as Barker was discovering in 1942, were being brutally exterminated. But it is also possible to reframe the argument with an appeal to our common humanity so that no persecuted group is beyond anyone’s humanitarian concern.

Jean More´ly (1524– 94) The sixteenth century seems a long time ago and few people have ever heard of Jean More´ly. But writing about him on the day Britain sets out to leave the European Union is strangely topical. In days when twenty miles might be a day’s journey, More´ly seemed to take Europe and Britain in his stride. He was born in Paris but had Reformed friends in Zurich, Lausanne and Geneva, the Netherlands, England and Wales

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

19

whom he visited. He was a man on a mission, the mission to reform the Reformed. It got him into trouble with Calvin and Beza and a whole series of French synods that debated his ideals in the decade after his controversial book Traicte de la Discipline et Police Chrestienne was first published in Lyon in 1562. His basic point was that the church order that Calvin had helped to develop gave too little scope for laypeople like himself to participate in Church government. It was too clergydominated and too centralised. More´ly wanted local congregations to have greater autonomy, but not to the exclusion of their share in synods of the wider Church. Like many well-meaning Reformers, he was only trying to help. He wanted to help Calvin, but the offer was rejected. Calvin ordered that he be banished from the city and his book publicly burned. He has found a twentieth-century advocate and defender in the Canadian historian Robert Kingdon.19 Kingdon thinks it a great pity that Viret and Calvin did not take time to read the manuscript and discuss its proposals with More´ly, as he hoped they would. Calvin’s more conservative successor, Theodore Beza, branded his ideas as ‘democratic’. ‘To call it democratic in the sixteenth century was to damn it’, says Kingdon. In fact, More´ly had read Aristotle and knew that Aristotle regarded democracy as the worst form of government. But he thinks this was because Aristotle associated democracy with lawlessness and thought of it as having no mechanism for administering its decisions. That might be true for society; it was not true for the Church, governed by the Word of God, the Law of God. He also found in Aristotle a homely illustration which could support Calvin’s own argument that decisions made by several could be better than those by one man acting alone: ‘Aristotle observed that just as a banquet to which many bring dishes is better than one prepared by a single person, so a government taking the advice of many is better than a government controlled by a few.’ More´ly intended to say more about government in the civic community in a second volume but never got round to doing so. Even so, Kingdon thinks the perceptive reader might take the hint that if a more democratic style of government was best for the Church it might also be best for society. Or, out of deference to their powerful aristocratic leaders, they might, on the contrary, heed Beza’s advice against de´mocratie more´liene.

20

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Johannes Althusius (1557– 1638) Writers on politics, if they have anything to say, are bound to be controversial, and for centuries the German theologian and lawyer Althusius was either ignored or dismissed for his ‘Presbyterian error’ in advocating ‘popular sovereignty’. He began to be taken more seriously after the political theorist Otto Gierke rediscovered him in the nineteenth century and Karl Friedrich, Fredericks Carney20 and Stephen Grabill21 in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries commented on his writings. The main points to note are these: As a theologian and political theorist, he did what my study attempts to do, to bring together concern for Church reform and the ordering of society. He did this particularly in the Reformed city of Emden where he was an elder of the Church and syndic of the city and helped make his city a model commonwealth. In his Politics, first published in 1614, he offers a very attractive definition of politics: ‘Politics is the act of associating men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called symbiotics.’ He goes on to explain that ‘the symbiotes are co-workers who, by the kind of associating and uniting agreement, communicate among themselves whatever is appropriate for a comfortable life of soul and body. In other words, they are participants or partners in a common life.’22 Contrary to what one of his critics implied, he did not advocate democracy or the sovereignty of the people but, like Calvin before him, favoured a mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Rulers rule best when they govern within the constitution and for the common good. ‘What is aristocratic and democratic checks and restrains in office what is monarchic.’23 All citizens act not as lone individuals but as members of families and guilds, which, brought together, constitute the village or town and the wider society. All are expected to live by the Ten Commandments, a life of piety and justice. Althusius, like Calvin, also explored ideas of a federal relationship between different republics for the sake of peace and good order.

Radical Reformation Reformers The Harvard professor George Huntston Williams used the expression ‘Radical Reformation’ to describe what another historian has called a

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

21

‘bewildering variety of heterodox individuals and groups who seemed to have mostly in common their shared rejection of the Catholic Church and the two leading Protestant communions, the Lutheran and Reformed’.24 Among these, it is important to include the English Levellers and leaders like Gerard Winstanley and Thomas Rainborough. Their radical ideas of social and political reform were shaped by their religious convictions, a point that has to be argued since their convictions would not always tally with more ‘orthodox dissent’. Such seventeenth-century ideals were then dismissed and forgotten for the next 300 years or so, but seemed to many in the twentieth century strangely relevant in the struggle against dictatorships and the challenge of communism. In the twenty-first century, there may be parallels between such older popular movements and present-day populism. Rainborough and the Putney Debates about democracy have been quoted in our British discussions of the referendum to leave the European Union. We expect Parliament to respect the referendum. People in the seventeenth century hoped Parliament would honour popular petitions. For some of us, and indeed for most of us in cities like Oxford,25 the only good thing about the referendum was that it got people talking about democracy and our political choices. As a result, I have had more meaningful political conversations with neighbours and complete strangers than for years. Our British instinct is to avoid such discussions and instead talk about the weather. Something similar happened in the streets of London in the seventeenth century thanks to the Reformation. The Reformation opened up a debate and initially was conducted in debate. Then came the Council of Trent and the debates between Catholics and Protestants were adjourned. ‘If anyone says that this catholic doctrine concerning justification [. . .] detracts in any way from the glory of God [. . .] let him be anathema.’ So for the next four hundred years it was pointless and often dangerous to argue. But thanks to the more radical Reformers, arguments did continue, not least on questions of government and resistance to tyranny in its various forms. People were provoked by, and often disagreed with, what they heard from the pulpit and were challenged by stories of resistance new immigrants had to tell. Jean More´ly and other French Huguenots had friends in England. Arguments were both political and religious, though in the sixteenth and seventeenth century few would understand that distinction. Tithes

22

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

that were once part of a Bible-based collection for the Church were also an issue of social justice and taxation. Free speech was also about religious liberty. What right has any government to tell me what I can believe? Who do our politicians think they are!

Presbyterians, Pamphleteers and Coriolanus – A Political Play about Democracy? And in the theatres, even if the Puritan preachers told you not to go, it was open to you to enter into the drama, to hear tyrants like Coriolanus treating the people with contempt and be forced to make up your own mind about where your true loyalties lay, for Shakespeare, being so brilliant at his craft, was not going to tell you. ‘Menenius Agrippa, one that hath always loved the people’, or Coriolanus, alias Martius, ‘a very dog to the commonality’. Who will win your vote?26 The choice seems obvious, but was it? Is it ever? My references to Coriolanus are prompted by a lively article by Peter Kaufman, ‘English Calvinism and the Crowd: Coriolanus and the History of Religious Reform’,27 that seems to me to capture the political atmosphere of the seventeenth century better than individual biographies of Lilburne, Overton, Rainborough, Walwyn, Wildman, Winstanley28 and the like can convey. After all, none of these Levellers was content just to air his private thoughts. Richard Overton in his Remonstrance (1646) claimed he spoke for Many Thousand Citizens. John Wildman helped compose what he dared to call the Agreement of the People. Rainborough in the famous Putney Debates with Ireton claimed to speak for the ‘poorest he that is in England’. He ‘hath a life to live, as the greatest he [. . .] and every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government’.29 In what Michael Waltzer calls The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics, he discerns the influence of Calvin against the Calvinists: ‘the Calvinist saint seems to me now the first of those selfdisciplined agents of social and political reconstruction’.30 One such ‘saint’ I came to admire is the redoubtable Mrs Kathleen Chidley. She was fiercely independent, church-wise, and with a strong social conscience. For example, she and her husband organised petitions to Parliament to stop the practice of hanging those, who, out of poverty, felt forced to steal. She knew her Bible better than many clerics and

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

23

could defend her own actions as a woman by citing the examples of Old Testament women like Deborah and even Jael. She was not easily put off by men who urged her to go home and wash the dishes! Rainborough’s thoughts were far too radical for Ireton or Oliver Cromwell or for Calvinist Presbyterians who, for a time, had become the dominant and dominating party in Church and State. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus was first performed in London in 1609. Never could it have been more timely, except perhaps today. A few years earlier there had been riots in the Midlands, provoked by a poor harvest and the hoarding of grain by those in power. Forty years after the play was performed, England would execute her king and get rid of the bishops. There followed for a time a lively debate as to who was to take their place, in Church and in society. The debate would then be stifled. It would flare up centuries later in the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789. In the nineteenth century in Britain more men gained the vote and a share in government. In the twentieth century the rise of those whom Charlie Chaplin mocked as the Great Dictators provoked some hard thinking about better ways of ruling and being ruled. In the 1930s, after the apparent failures of democracy in France and Germany, theatre audiences sometime saw Coriolanus as just the leader their countries needed.31 When I saw the play performed for a student audience in Oxford just days after an overconfident prime minister had met with humiliating rejection in the general election (8 June 2017), all our sympathies, like our votes, were with the people of Rome who had said, loud and clear, ‘enough is enough’, and been able to banish their leader. In the play, Coriolanus comes to a violent end. One point should not be glossed over: revolutions devour their own children.32 While it must have been very exciting and intellectually stimulating to live in England in the 1640s and 1650s, the tragedy is that the war of words became a war of swords. More British people, percentage-wise, may have been killed in our Civil Wars than in World War I.33 And as in all wars, much of the population was brutalised by the butchering of neighbours and former friends, the laying siege to cities and the burning of villages, and much of it in the name of religion. Carlton describes the first of these wars as ‘the War of the Bishops’. If Calvin and Luther are accused, as they often are, of being too docile when faced with oppression, we should bear in mind the cost of revolutions and the price of armed revolt. People like

24

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Barth who had lived through the Russian Revolution of 1917 were vindicated when they said that revolutions sometimes substitute one evil for another.

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Pope Pius XII once described Barth as the greatest theologian since Thomas Aquinas. As a Reformed theologian Barth is also John Calvin’s most important successor. Though he had no wish to be labelled a ‘Calvinist’ and could often be quite critical of Calvin, he declared: ‘Notwithstanding all the necessary criticisms and corrections, there is hardly a better teacher, apart from the biblical prophets and apostles, than he.’34 In the early years of his professorships, Barth lectured on Calvin and on the Reformed Confessions Calvin helped to shape. He accepted the description of Calvin as ‘the father of modern democracy’ and notes his emphasis on mutual responsibility and living by the law of God.35 The Pope’s comment encourages us to see Barth as a ‘catholic theologian’ who writes for the benefit of the Church, Catholic and universal. Barth had no wish to deny his Reformed roots or his Swiss citizenship. His magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, was based on lectures he gave in Bonn and Basle. He began his ministry as a pastor in Geneva, then in the industrial village of Safenwil before becoming a professor in three universities in Germany: Go¨ttingen, Munich and Bonn. As a resolute opponent of Adolf Hitler, he was evicted from Germany in 1935 but immediately welcomed in his homeland and in Basle. His young friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer had no such haven and was arrested and executed in 1945 for his collusion in plotting Hitler’s death in July 1944. Barth lived and wrote in dangerous times. When he speaks of democracy his words are not the abstract observations of a political spectator but those of a convinced campaigner against a brutal dictator whom some contemporaries recognised as the Antichrist. Barth voiced his call to political engagement before Hitler even appeared on the scene. In his famous Tambach Lecture in 1919 at the start of Germany’s post-World War I experiment with democracy in the Weimar Republic, Barth urged: ‘Today there is a definite call for a generous, far-sighted, honest conduct toward social democracy, not facing it from outside, as unaccountable spectators and critics, but rather

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

25

within it, as comrades who together hope and together carry the burden of accountability.’36 Barth practised what he preached. In the industrial village of Safenwil in the Aargau, he served as pastor from 1911 to 1921. He commented: ‘My position in the community led me to be involved in socialism, and especially in the trade union movement.’ His energies were, he said, ‘taken up in disputes sparked off by my support for the workers, not only in the neighbourhood but in the canton’.37 Such support led to his being asked to join the Social Democratic Party in 1913 and even to stand as candidate for the Great Council. Barth declined to serve on the Council but two years later, in 1915, did join the Social Democratic Party. He remained critical of much of the theology of the Religious Socialists, above all the tendency to see socialism as a prelude to the Kingdom of God, a kingdom we humans help to create rather than responding to God’s royal rule. For theological and not just political reasons, Barth could never become a Christian Democrat for it was presumptuous to claim that any political programme embodied Christ’s will. His reasoning is most fully explained in his best-known political essay, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, first published in 1946: Can there be any other ‘Christian’ party in the State but the Christian fellowship itself, with its special mission and purpose? How can there be a special Christian party alongside other political parties? – a party to which some Christians belong but others do not – a party opposed by other non-Christian parties (which it must nevertheless recognise as legitimately nonChristian). To institute special Christian parties implies that the Christian community as such has no claim on the support of all its members for its own political line [. . .] The Church’s supreme interest must be rather that Christians shall not mass together in a special party, since their task is to defend and proclaim, in decisions based on it, the Christian gospel that concerns all men. They must show that although they go their own special way, they are not in fact against anybody but unconditionally for all men, for the common cause of the whole State.38 Barth is criticising, as he admits in this essay, a European practice of having ‘Christian’ parties, evident at the time in Holland, Switzerland,

26

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

France and Germany. He might be a little happier with the way in which Christians in the United States and the United Kingdom try to operate politically. To date, all US presidents have been Christians belonging to either main party. Many Christians supported the election of Trump, some because of his stance on abortion or challenge to Islam, other Christians supported Hillary Clinton, a Methodist. In Britain we recognise that Christians can with a good conscience belong to any of the three main political parties, Conservatives, Labour and Liberals and, of course, the Green Party. It is very tempting to get diverted into a fuller discussion of Barth and politics. Suffice to note that the subject is well covered in such works as Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus, Das Beispiel Karl Barths (1972) and a set of essays, partly in response to Marquardt, Karl Barth and Radical Politics (1976), edited by George Hunsinger. There is also Daniel Cornu, Karl Barth et la Politique (1967), and an excellent series of public lectures by Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906 – 1968. Jehle’s book also illustrates the saying, ‘a prophet is not without honour save in his own country and among his own kinsmen’. Barth had been so critical of the Federal Council of his native Switzerland that at his funeral in Basle Cathedral, not one member of the government took part. ‘This bears witness to the tense relationship between the official Swiss government and the great theologian of Basle’, says Jehle.39 Instead of ‘Barth and politics’, in this book my focus must be on ‘Barth and democracy’. In his Gesamptausgabe, now available online, there are 180 references to Demokratie. There are only two in all Calvin’s writings. By the twentieth century, ‘democracy’ had become a norm, against which other systems of government were measured and usually found wanting. Even so, Barth’s interest is exceptional and demonstrates that it is impossible to separate his theology and churchmanship from his political engagements. As well as the essay already referred to, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, the other main sources are the Barmen Declaration of 1934 and related comments during the Nazi era, and his Church Dogmatics, based on lectures, most of them delivered in Basle, but begun in 1932 when Barth was a professor in Bonn and conscious of the desperate need to resist the threats to Germany’s fledgling democracy posed by the rise of Adolf Hitler.

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

27

Barth, Barmen and resistance to Hitler Hitler became Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. ‘It is important to remember’, says Richard Evans, one of the most recent historians of the period, ‘the extreme extent to which civil liberties were destroyed in the course of the Nazi seizure of power. In the Third Reich it was illegal to belong to any political grouping apart from the Nazi Party or indeed any non-Nazi organization of any kind apart from the Churches.’40 This made the churches’ opposition to Hitler of crucial importance. Hitler recognised this and through his Concordat with the Vatican partially silenced any official Roman Catholic opposition. We all know that Protestant resistance even when most Germans were Protestants was never sufficient. Less well known is that Barth did his best to make it stronger. In the Declaration he helped write and which was unanimously endorsed by a synod of a Lutheran– Reformed Church movement, called ‘the Confessing Church’ at Barmen Wuppertal in May 1934, Barth articulated a theological basis for Christian resistance to Hitler. Christ and he alone is sovereign lord of all. He is the one Word of God we are to obey in life and in death. Barmen41 does not mention ‘democracy’ but it is a democratic document if we accept, as democrats, the need for critical challenges to any human authority that claims our allegiance. What it does make more explicit is the democratic character of the Christian Church. ‘The Christian church is the community of brethren.’ It cites the words of Jesus in Matthew 20:25 – 6 ‘You know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise domination over them, and their great men make them feel the weight of their authority. But it shall not be so among you.’ It draws out the implication: ‘The various offices in the church establish no rule of one over the other but the exercise of the service entrusted and commanded to the whole congregation. We repudiate the false teaching that the Church can and may, apart from this ministry, set up special leaders [Fu¨hrer] equipped with powers to rule.’ Barth had earlier argued that the so-called Fu¨hrer Principle was incompatible with Christian convictions about Church government. In the sixteenth century congregations recognised and appreciated the leadership of Luther or Calvin and other Reformers. Leadership cannot be imposed. Writing as a Reformed theologian, he explained in his 1933 article that ‘we of the Reformed Church have given our theological reason for refusing a Reich Bishop. In our

28

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

tradition, leadership is exercised in a synodal union where people confer together and mutually admonish one another’, not by having ‘a special office of a bishop’, ranked as superior to the officers of the various churches and issuing orders from ‘the episcopal throne set up ad hoc’.42 Such statements echo what Calvin had written in his Institutes when he commended plural leadership as opposed to one-man rule. Such a protest became one of the first and relatively few victories of those who resisted Hitler’s control of the Church. The Reich bishop idea did not last long, not least because leaders appointed by the Fu¨hrer were so obviously incompetent. Mu¨ller was no match for theologians like Barth, Martin Niemo¨ller, Helmut Gollwitzer or their successors. Barmen has less to say about the State and is sometimes criticised for saying too little. What is said is a very definite condemnation of any totalitarian state that attempts to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, regardless of their wishes. ‘The Bible tells us that according to divine arrangement the state has the responsibility for justice and peace in the yet unredeemed world.’ The Church gives thanks for the State as part of God’s benevolent provision for human welfare and reminds people of ‘God’s Kingdom, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility of rulers and ruled’. If ‘rulers and ruled’ have a joint responsibility this manifestly excludes a dictatorship and points towards a democracy, even though Barmen does not use the word. Barmen’s biggest defect was the synod’s failure to speak up for the Jews. Bonhoeffer might have done so, but at the time he was a pastor in London. Barth later apologised profusely but admitted that at the time, 1934, you would never get a Christian synod to agree to any positive statement in defence of Jews. Pinchas Lapide lamented that for Jews like himself there was ‘no balm in Barmen’. Jews constituted less than 1 per cent of the German population, though in some professions and some cities they were much more in evidence. Christians would surely argue that a test of any good democracy is its respect for minorities. In Hitler’s Germany, Jews, Roma and gay and lesbian people were among the despised and rejected minority. Hitler denied that Jesus himself was a Jew. Barth had said he was. So had Martin Luther but then spoiled such positive comments by some angry outbursts, widely publicised, which lent support to virulent anti-Semitism.

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

29

Against hegemony43 and dominations In the current surge of ‘populism’, democracy and the people are almost treated like gods. Barth is too great a theologian to give unqualified support to any human enterprise, but he does affirm the importance of all the ‘People of God’. In his section on ‘The Holy Spirit and the Upbuilding of the Christian Community’ in Church Dogmatics IV/2, Barth rejects the common tendency to separate the Church into two distinct groups, ministers–clergy and people, and puts the whole emphasis on a common calling to serve, that is, to minister. He then states: And because in the direction of the Church’s affairs we are still in the sphere of service, it is better either to avoid altogether terms like monarchy, aristocracy or democracy, with their clear suggestion of the exercise of power, or at any rate to use them in such a way that in the understanding of the rule of the Church on a Christocratic basis ‘rule’ is always firmly interpreted as outstanding service.44 This was written in 1955. Earlier, in 1938, in his essay Rechtfertigung und Recht, later translated as ‘Church and State’, Barth affirmed democracy above all other forms of government but with the concession that a Christian can survive even in a dictatorship: The assertion that all forms of government are equally compatible or incompatible with the gospel is not only outworn but false. It is true that a man may go to hell in a democracy and achieve salvation under a mobocracy or a dictatorship. But it is not true that a Christian can endorse, desire, or seek after a mobocracy or a dictatorship as readily as a democracy. When I consider the deepest and most central content of the New Testament exhortation, I should say that we are justified, from the point of view of exegesis, in regarding ‘the democratic conception of the State’ as a justifiable expansion of the thought of the New Testament [. . .] The resolute intention of the teaching of the New Testament is brought out most plainly when it is clear that Christians must not only endure the earthly State but they must will it, and that they cannot will it as a ‘Pilate’ State, but as a just State [. . .] when each of them is responsible for the character of

30

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

the State as a just State. And the democratic State might as well recognise that it can expect no truer or more complete fulfilment of duty than that of citizens of the realm that is so foreign to it as a State – the Church founded on divine justification.45 Robert Hood in Karl Barth’s Christology and Political Praxis46 thinks that Barth has a rather ambivalent attitude to the democratic state despite what is stated in the above quotation. I think it better to say Barth is cautious and urges caution not to make an idol of democracy. To say, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, did in his 2017 New Year’s Message, that the decision to leave the European Community was made democratically is not to say it was a good decision, that people knew what they were voting for and seriously considered the issues. Barth urges caution in following any ‘worldly order’, including democracy. The Christian community very often opts for what then appears to be the best ‘form and structure [. . .] which is absolutely Christian, and therefore generally necessary, and therefore sacred’. It later may come to realise that this is an illusion. Even when it finds a pattern for its social form in ‘the democracy of modern times’, the community ‘lives on alien, or rather common possessions, in forms it assumes either in following the world around or opposing it’.47 Barth is here insisting that all such forms, even democracy, must be assessed theologically, not just adopted because this is the current fashion. ‘There is no sociological possibility [. . .] which it [the Christian community] must always select, for all are intrinsically secular.’48 And in the same volume he presents this conviction very sharply by asserting that ‘it is not merely a matter of experience, but fundamentally true, that the Holy Spirit is not a friend of too doctrinaire democracy’. The community ‘always needs and may point to the existence of specific individuals who stand out as models or examples in their special calling and endowment’ and become ‘inciters and initiators of greater or lesser movements in the life of the community’.49 In short, in Barth’s view not everything has to be agreed by everybody and performed democratically. Sometimes we need to recognise and respect individual initiatives. If we bring what Barth says about the Christian community and the civil community together, as indeed Barth does in that later essay, we can surely say that though they are distinct communities, the Church community can serve as a model and example to the other. The two are in

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

31

fact intimately related, in Barth’s view, as two, overlapping concentric circles. That is why Barth prefers to think of two communities, the one civil, the other Christian, rather than of Church and State. In a homely illustration50 he describes how in a typical Swiss village, the residential, civil and ecclesiastical communities often confer, one after the other, in the same village inn and most of the people in the village belong to all three groups. The hope is that how people do business as a church community will shape the way they act as local councillors or residents association. Church law, Church order, is exemplary law, exemplary order.51 Barth does not want the Church to be democratic because that is how society is organised. He wants society to see from the Christian community how well democracy works. ‘There certainly is an affinity between the Christian community and the civil (and democratic) communities of the free peoples.’ ‘Christian choices and purposes in politics tend on the whole towards the form of State, which, if not actually realised in the so-called “democracies”, is at any rate more or less honestly clearly intended and desired.’52 And the Christian community in its rejection of any rigid hierarchy and top-down domination by superior officers or ministers, sets an example of service in which all can be regarded as equally important participants. In the flexible hierarchy that Barth proposes, so-called ‘top people’ return, after a period of service, to the ranks. Or, as one witty Roman Catholic once described the Dominican order, one minute you are an abbot, next minute sweeping the floor! The gospel sets the precedent. The one Christians call master and lord was observed taking the form of a slave and washing his disciples’ feet.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) Reinhold Niebuhr is often described as the politician’s theologian, a doubtful compliment perhaps since he can be quoted by different sides of the political spectrum in support of their policies. My Oxford bishop, Richard Harries, was fond of quoting him. Harries was one of the few Anglican clerics who supported ‘the Bomb’, and saw this support as an expression of Niebuhr’s ‘Christian realism’. He would know that Niebuhr changed his mind on war, having once been a pacifist and then later urged Christians in America to join the war against Hitler. America’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was a great admirer of

32

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Niebuhr as ‘one of the world’s most profound political philosophers, scholars, theologians and prophets’, but Humphrey continued to support the war in Vietnam that Niebuhr increasingly opposed.53 In the same speech at a dinner in Niebuhr’s honour, he added: ‘Rennie has hammered away at this basic theme: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”’54 It is a quotation from a key text on our subject: The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defence. Like so many others at the time, Niebuhr was responding to the rise of Hitler’s antidemocratic regime. The book was written during the war and first published in 1944. The Vietnam War also raised many issues for American democracy. Was this a futile attempt to spread democracy to South-East Asia? Did the war have the support of the American people? It was not supported by Congress and, as American casualties kept mounting and people saw the carnage on their television screens, Niebuhr noted that by late 1966 American public opinion was turning against the war. Part of the problem was a weakness in American democracy. In a comment that resonates strongly as I write in 2017, he wrote: ‘our “elected monarchs”, our Presidents, have become too powerful’.55 He wrote this in 1970. This may explain why his book was republished yet again in 1972. It seemed topical then and does so now. In an earlier book, his Gifford Lectures delivered in Edinburgh and published as The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), Niebuhr was very conscious – who would not be? – that ‘the democratic world is under attack from a tyranny created by the mergence of political, economic and religious power in a Nazi oligarchy’. In theory the ‘democratic principle does not obviate the formation of oligarchies in society; but it places a check upon their formation, and upon the exercise of their power’. In practice, ‘tyrannical oligarchy’ now challenges the democratic world and is doing so through ‘the demagogic manipulation of the masses’.56 Historians continue to ask: how popular was Hitler? It is an impossible question to answer. He did not come to power with an outright electoral majority, but then silenced all opposition except that of some Christians in their churches and others equally brave. For men like Niebuhr, with his German ancestry, what was happening in Germany was a deeply felt personal tragedy.

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

33

Like all the theologians mentioned in this section, Niebuhr belongs to the Reformed tradition, but in his German lineage he draws on the German Evangelical Synod, Lutheran and Reformed, and, in the USA, on Congregationalism and the United Church of Christ. A common criticism of Niebuhr is that he says little about the Church. Reformed Church practices are not therefore part of his argument for democracy. Instead he argues that democracy arose in the seventeenth century as the only way to solve the problem of cultural diversity: ‘Democracy is thus, in one sense, the fruit of a cultural and religious pluralism created by the inexorable forces of history.’57 In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, he adds, perhaps rather cynically: ‘Democracy is a method for finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.’58 Such an assessment of why democracy prevailed in the USA might not apply elsewhere. Hence it is not surprising that in his Gifford Lectures in such a Reformed city as Edinburgh, Niebuhr offers a more balanced account of Calvin and his successors’ influence.59 Calvin was more politically engaged than Luther, and when Niebuhr criticises Karl Barth for not, in his view, being sufficiently and realistically engaged politically, it is because Barth is too Lutheran! Barth’s resistance to Nazi tyranny was ‘emotional’; ‘his doctrinal justification for his opposition to Nazi tyranny is hardly sufficient to explain that justification’. Barth’s chief concern seems to be Lutheran: that in the Nazi state the Church must be free to preach the gospel. Here, as a Barth scholar who might be unfair to Niebuhr, I feel bound to add that if one wants to understand Barth on politics, read Barth, not Niebuhr. Niebuhr explains in the preface to the Library edition of his lectures that the two main emphases of Western culture, on the sense of individuality and the sense of meaningful history, ‘were rooted in the faith of the Bible and had primarily Hebraic roots’. In the final lectures he will make a similar claim for democracy especially as it evolved within the Reformed tradition. ‘The achievements of democracy have been tortuously worked out in human history partly because various schools of religious and political thought had great difficulty in fully comprehending the perils to justice of the organization of power and the balance of power.’ Very few, even in the Reformed tradition, saw the ‘full truth’ of the need for this twofold understanding. Yet, despite this, democracy emerged and has survived and its strength, according to Niebuhr can be summed up like this:

34

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

It is the highest achievement of democratic societies that they embody the principle of resistance to government within the principle of government itself. The citizen is thus armed with ‘constitutional’ power to resist the unjust exactions of government. He can do this without creating anarchy within the community, if government has been so conceived that criticism of the ruler becomes an instrument of better government and not a threat to government itself.60 In support of this understanding he refers to the Scottish Presbyterian constitutionalist, Samuel Rutherford. Niebuhr is very aware, as he goes on to explain, that Calvin was very cautious about resisting even an unjust ruler. This had to be, and was, developed by his more radical followers, for example, the Huguenots of France and their treatise Vindiciae contra Tyrranos, the Independents and Levellers of seventeenthcentury England and John Knox in Scotland. The early Reformation had ‘an uncritical reverence’ for political authority, often based on an uncritical and uncontextual exposition of what Paul said in Romans 13 about government being ordained by God and created for our good. Knox got it right: Advised that this interpretation implied that subjects could judge and control their rulers, he replied: ‘And what harm should the commonwealth receive if the corrupt affection of ignorant rulers be moderated and bridled by the wisdom and discretion of Godly subjects so that they should not do violence to any man?’61 If he were more sympathetic to Barth, Niebuhr could have noted that Barth had dealt with such questions in his own Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1937–8, in his exposition of the Scots Confession of 1560.62 Here was no ‘academic’ discussion. Barth and Niebuhr would soon learn that Christians in Germany, like Adam von Trott, Stauffenberg and Bonhoeffer, needed reassurance that it was right for Christians to plot to kill Hitler if this was the only way of ridding Germany and the rest of the world of such a tyrant.63 Lutheranism offered no such resources. The Reformed tradition did and does. But in the end, or at least towards the end of these famous lectures, Niebuhr won’t let his Reformed colleagues claim too much credit:

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

35

‘Too much must not be claimed for either later Calvinism or Independency in establishing democratic justice in the Anglo-Saxon world.’64 Democracy was assisted by many different secular and religious movements. Surely this is just what one might expect and hope for in a democracy! We all have our part to play. It may seem unusual in such discussions to conclude with a prayer, but even better known and more often quoted than Nieburhr’s aphorism about democracy is his ‘Serenity Prayer’.65 It could be taken more generally as wise advice for any of us who wish to make the world a better place: ‘God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.’ It is dated 1943 but is, in fact, timeless.

Nathaniel Micklem (1886–1976) The Congregationalist theologian Nathaniel Micklem and the Presbyterian philosopher Alexander Lindsay provide impressive examples of how Reformed churchmen, ordained or lay, saw politics as a Christian vocation, and good democratic government as its best expression. Both were college principals in Oxford, Micklem (1932–53) at Mansfield, Lindsay (1924– 49) at Balliol. Had Lindsay lived longer, both could have been members of the same church, the United Reformed Church, formed in 1972 as a union of Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and later Churches of Christ. Micklem once contemplated becoming a Liberal Member of Parliament but instead became a minister and theologian. Lindsay at first thought of becoming a minister but instead became an academic, a college principal and founder of one of England’s postwar universities, Keele, in Staffordshire. He stood for Parliament in Oxford in 1938 but was narrowly defeated by Quintin Hogg. Though he never became an MP, he did become something of an expert on ‘democracy’. Lindsay’s father was a theologian, Micklem’s father a High Court judge and Queen’s Counsellor. For a couple of generations, the Micklem family served their country either as theologians or as lawyers. Such an inheritance was demonstrated by Micklem’s book on Law and the Laws. His positive evaluation of law is also what Reformed churchmen learn from Calvin, who was a lawyer as well as a theologian. By comparison, Martin Luther contrasted law and gospel rather than seeing good laws as an expression of the gospel.

36

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

In 1949, Micklem drafted a statement for the International Congregational Council meeting at Wellesley, Boston in the USA. It includes this claim: There has been historically, and there is in principle, a close connection between our polity and political institutions. Those who have known freedom and responsibility in the church meeting have not been tolerant of tyranny in the State. Democracy, as we understand it and desire to see it established, is government by discussion and consent. Our churchmanship is inconsistent with any form of State totalitarianism but also with government by the mass-man or the mere power of majorities. The rights of man as the child of God and the rights of minorities must be respected. We stand for political government by the discussion of free men and by fundamental consent. Because of this respect for the individual, which we learn from Christ and practice in our church meeting, we stand for political and religious freedom, for economic justice, for racial equality, and for the equality of the sexes.66 Note the context. Micklem is expressing Congregationalist convictions about racial equality in a New England state colonised by his predecessors and now practising racial segregation. On the ‘equality of the sexes, he could claim that at least in England the ministry of women had been recognised back in 1917 with the ordination of a woman, Constance Todd, from his own college in Oxford. A few years later, in 1957, Micklem offered a fuller account of what he entitled The Idea of Liberal Democracy. He had just been elected president of the Liberal Party for the year. The Liberals, like the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, did not let any one person become too powerful through such an honour. Presidents, like moderators of the Kirk or chairmen of the Congregational Union, served for one year. A persistent plea in his account is ‘for us to make real to ourselves the spiritual basis of our own democratic tradition’. This basis includes ‘an estimate of man as being at least in some degree unselfish and as having enough knowledge or good sense to judge upon broad issues. The system works tolerably well because on the whole our people have the necessary moral and intellectual qualities.’67 In an earlier set of essays, The Theology

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

37

of Politics (1941), Micklem insists that ‘all political problems are at bottom theological’ because ‘obviously a man’s political outlook is coloured or even determined by his real thought, or thoughtlessness, about God and man and the meaning of human life’. ‘Every conceivable political theory rests upon an implicit anthropology, a theological or anti-theological estimate of man as related to God, to his fellows and to machines.’68 He mentions ‘machines’ because he was horrified to hear of a notice in an American factory, ‘Don’t waste the time of the machine’. He reflected ‘how insecure apart from dogma is that spiritual estimation of man upon which democracy rests’. The dogma Micklem appeals to is that ‘man is made in the image of God’. He might have added that machines are made for man, not man for machines. (Apologies for what we now call ‘sexist language’. For Micklem’s generation this was not an issue. ‘Man’, as was often said, ‘embraces woman.’) In Micklem’s view, modern British democracy has four roots, one political, one humanistic and two religious:69 1. the ‘brief but remarkable achievement of self-government in Athens’; 2. the Renaissance ‘an astonishing rejuvenation of the human spirit’; 3. the Independents or Congregationalists of the Calvinist tradition in the seventeenth century and the Mayflower settlers in New England. ‘In their Church Meetings the whole body of the church membership was accustomed to gather that by prayer and discussion they might seek the will of God and be brought to a common mind by the Holy Spirit’; 4. Levellers and Diggers, ‘sects or parties of an extremely radical and individualistic type’. Micklem is convinced the chief influences shaping such understanding of democracy come from religion, for even the Renaissance’s conviction about human worth ‘derives ultimately from the Bible’. He would later be delighted to hear Tony Benn tell the Commons in 1972 that the House of Commons owed more to Nonconformity than to any other institution in the land. He was speaking on the bill to unite Congregationalists and Presbyterians that came before Parliament in 1972. Benn himself came from a strong Nonconformist family; his mother, Lady Stansgate, was a leading Congregationalist. Benn was also an admirer of the Levellers and often addressed commemorative events in their honour.

38

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

The four strands mean, said Micklem, that British democracy has ‘an extremely mixed ancestry’. The four ancestors produce two different ‘tendencies of democracy, one individualistic, the other collective, so different that they merit different names’. The distinctions are important because it is still common to assume that democracy is either so individualistic as to give little space for corporate decision making or so collective as to rule out personal convictions in place of the mass or the political party. For Micklem, both tendencies need to be held together. Democracy presupposes the exercise of citizenship by responsible persons. It is not sensible to suggest that in fact the whole British electorate consists of persons who by education, experience, reflection and moral stability are competent to exercise a responsible vote upon the intricate, profound and urgent issues of the day [. . .] It is alarming to contrast the enormous responsibility of Parliament with the grievous irresponsibility of a great part of the electorate.70 One can assume from this that Micklem would be strongly opposed to holding a referendum on Britain’s relationship with Europe. He even voiced misgivings about universal suffrage but accepted there was no going back on giving all adult men and women the vote. What is now vital is universal education for citizenship. Here we should note that Micklem, Lindsay, Laski, Tawney and other such highly educated people saw their vocation as being to educate and inform the wider public. They did this through newspaper articles and radio broadcasts and became quite skilled in doing so. Some were also closely involved in the Workers’ Educational Association. Micklem’s book on Liberal Democracy is written for readers who he assumes will be more interested in politics than in theology. He therefore tends to gloss over the current role of churches and even contemplates a ‘quickening of national religion’ outside Christianity altogether. But while he accepts that most people rarely go to church, he is quite clear that his own faith in democracy and confidence in the overcoming of all forms of tyranny and privilege is founded on the story of Jesus and his resurrection: ‘Apart from the life and message of Christ our national history is unintelligible, our achievements unimaginable.’ Helping people in India to self-government and our attempts to set up

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

39

what he calls ‘the Welfare Society’ are ‘among such achievements’. He is even excited by other movements for independence in Africa and prepared to see these as signs of ‘a movement of the Spirit of God’. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not mourn the loss of empire.71 Dissenting chapels may have pioneered the democratic way, but Micklem’s own convictions were thoroughly ‘catholic’ and ecumenical. This is most clearly demonstrated in his more numerous theological writings about the faith, about worship and about the Church, but is apparent also in this little book. He acknowledges his debts to, among others, Thomas Aquinas, the Jesuit theologian-jurist Suarez, the Anglican MP for Bristol Edmund Burke and his fellow Congregationalist, though later Anglican, and one-time Oxford colleague, Ernest Barker. From the perspective of Christian thinking about democracy, each has much to offer. From Aquinas, Micklem learns to think in terms of natural law and indeed devotes a whole chapter to this theme: ‘There is an eternal law of Justice which gradually and partially is realised in human societies; it is at once the inspiration of the good citizen and the refuge of the wronged and oppressed.’ He would find much of interest in similar thoughts from the American Jesuit who had such a profound influence on Vatican II’s thinking about human dignity, John Courtney Murray. In his hopes for an international order, he draws on Suarez’s Treatise on the Laws and God the Law-giver. From Barker and his Political Thought in England and other writings, Micklem, like Lindsay, came to underline the importance of debate and discussion as vital for democracy. It would also be fascinating to know if he had ever read what Barker has to say about Edmund Burke. Barker was invited to lecture on Burke and Bristol, in Bristol in 1931. Micklem began his own ministry in Bristol.

Micklem and Burke Burke is forever famous in any discussion of representative government for telling his electors in Bristol in 1774 that he was their representative in Parliament, not their delegate and spokesman. Micklem quotes his speech in full. I need only select the key sentences: Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest

40

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him, their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention [. . .] But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion [. . .] Government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments.72 The last points Burke makes here apply to any meaningful discussion and debate. There is no point in entering into an argument if your mind is already made up or has been made up for you because you have been told what to say. Debate then becomes a dialogue of the deaf. The great Dominican theologian Yves Congar complained that even at Vatican II there was too little debate. Bishops came with their carefully prepared speeches. They had a good excuse; they had to write them and speak them in Latin which was no longer such a universal language even for Roman Catholics. Speeches planned in advance made no reference to the counter-arguments a previous speaker might just have made. Burke himself was a master of parliamentary debate, having honed his skills in various London debating clubs and earlier at Trinity College in Dublin. He also learned from great actors like Garrick and writers like Dr Johnson how to present an argument in a way that carried most impact. Anyone watching debates in the House of Commons or the American Senate or House of Representatives might feel this is a long-lost art. Real debates, where all are willing to learn and even change their minds, are very rare, even in churches. As I explain more fully later, one great merit of ‘consensus decision making’ is that you have to listen to those who disagree with you. All need to agree.

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

41

Micklem, Barker and Burke: An excursus Burke’s famous speech to his electors in Bristol is even more significant for any discussion of democracy when seen in its context – Burke’s context, not just ours. Micklem quotes it with obvious approval and so does his colleague and authority Ernest, later Sir Ernest, Barker. As a consequence of this speech and the way Burke treated his electors as their MP, Burke was not re-elected in 1780 but, says Barker, ‘if he lost the constituency, he added a stone to the fabric of the English constitution’. Two hundred and fifty years later Burke is still cited in a dispute about whether MPs should reflect the wishes of their local electorates who wished to remain in the European Union or support the government and the Labour leadership and vote to agree to open negotiations for leaving the EU. The leftist journalist Polly Toynbee criticises those who ignore ‘Burke’s instruction to act as representatives and leaders, instead they will cravenly follow what a small majority thought one day in June’.73 She agrees with Burke that an MP should vote for what he or she believes is best for the country, but realises that we have added to the dilemma posed by Burke uncertainties about the authority to be attached to a referendum. Its outcome was less than decisive: 52 per cent to 48 per cent in favour of leaving the EU. MPs of all parties had agreed to hold a referendum ‘without setting a threshold beyond a bare majority. They added no mechanism for agreeing an unknowable Brexit deal at the end of negotiations.’ Holding a referendum, on such a complex issue was a big mistake, but MPs can still exercise their judgment in deciding whether ‘the people’ always know best what is best for their country. Burke’s context makes it clear that in this, as in any real life democratic issue, we are not dealing with abstract arguments. There were many practical issues at stake and many big issues being hotly debated in local and national politics at the end of the eighteenth century. I need only list some of them: .

.

America as a British colony was about to become independent in 1776. Trade with America was a big issue for a major port like Bristol. Burke favoured free trade, Bristol merchants wanted protection. the plight of what Burke referred to as ‘the Negro’ and the abolition of slavery was already an issue. Burke had written about it and favoured emancipation. Of 60,000 slaves being transported from

42

.

.

.

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Africa to the States, 30,000 travelled in Bristol ships. Slavery was good for business in Bristol, as to this day Bristol’s own civic museums are honest enough to admit. Burke, though an Anglican, remained indebted to Quakers for his early education and was in favour of relieving some of the restrictions on Quakers and other Dissenters. Burke, though a Protestant, was also Irish and stood for Catholic Emancipation at a time when that very cause led to riots in the streets. The Catholic Relief bill of 1778, which Burke supported, led to the Gordon Riots in 1780. There was also a major constitutional controversy about annual parliaments, secret ballots and the right of the press to report what MPs said in Parliament. For some, John Wilkes was the spokesman for the people’s distrust of Parliament and the establishment. For others he was simply a demagogue with a reputation for lechery and loving every woman except his own wife. When the House of Commons tried several times to eject Wilkes as being unfit to be an MP they ignited a major argument about who in the end elects an MP – a constituency or the Commons? Wilkes had won a clear majority when last elected, 1,143 votes to his opponent’s 296, but the Commons evicted him and allowed his opponent to take his place. This, says Barker as a constitutional historian, was ‘to enthrone parliament over the electorate’. The cartoonist Hogarth mocked ‘John Wilkes Esquire’, but the slogan ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ could draw a crowd, and as a result of his eviction democratic societies took root in many cities.

Barker merits more attention in his own right and so will be given a page or so to himself. But here we can see that his own Nonconformist roots and Christian convictions gave him a real empathy for the religious as well as political principles at stake. Quakers openly encouraged their own people to vote for Burke as ‘a man of the strictest honour and integrity and a zealous advocate for liberty’. But Anglican clergy marched in procession to object to the election of a man who was too sympathetic to Roman Catholics and Dissenters. Bristol elected two MPs in 1774. Burke’s colleague, Cruger, declared in his acceptance speech that ‘It has ever been my opinion that the electors have a right to instruct their members’ (of Parliament). Cruger saw himself as the electors’ delegate and would follow

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

43

their instructions. It was this understanding of an MP’s role which prompted Burke’s famous speech. Then there is the issue which is both political and moral about whether an MP is there to do what best suits his constituents’ interests or act according to his own conscience and concern for the welfare of the nation and all peoples on questions like the slave trade and relief for Roman Catholics and Dissenters. Here most of our sympathies must be with Burke. But he was not without his faults. Barker thinks Burke never really cared for his constituents. He refused to live in Bristol but stayed miles away in Beaconsfield. A statute of 1413 said MPs should live in their constituencies but it had long been in abeyance and was formally abolished just when Burke was elected in 1774. The Church too had had to wrestle with patrons who appointed clergy whom parishioners never saw and bishops who rarely visited their diocese, and all this when twenty miles by horse or on foot might constitute a day’s journey. There are also odd contradictions in Burke’s attitudes to democracy. He opposed secret ballots but supported, and at his own expense, publishing what he as MP said in Parliament. He informed his electors but he did not discuss issues with them. We also glean from one of his best-known works, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published the year after the Revolution of 1789, what he thought about democracy: I do not know under what description to class the present ruling authority in France. It affects to be a pure democracy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy. But for the present I admit it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect of what it pretends to [. . .] There may be situations in which the purely democratic form will become necessary. There may be some (very few, and very particularly circumstanced) where it would be clearly desirable [. . .] Until now, we have seen no examples of considerable democracies. The ancients were better acquainted with them. Not being wholly unread in the authors, who had seen most of those constitutions, and who best understood them, I cannot help concurring with their opinion, that an absolute democracy, no more than absolute monarchy, is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. They think it rather the corruption and degeneracy, than the sound constitution of a republic. If I recollect rightly,

44

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny.74 Burke later supplied the quotation and the reference to Aristotle, Politics (lib. iv. cap. 4).

Back to Micklem: Micklem and Barth v. Hitler Barth once told his British readers that whereas the Confessing Church in Germany saw the Kirchenkampf, Church Struggle, as a struggle for the gospel and the freedom of the Church, British and North American Christians wrongly perceived it as a struggle for religious liberty and democracy.75 The criticism did not apply to Micklem. He had made two courageous visits to Germany in 1937 and 1938 to see for himself what was happening to Roman Catholic and Protestant Church people resisting Hitler and had no illusions that they were involved in a lifeand-death struggle for the soul of the Church against what he and others were prepared to think of as the Antichrist. ‘National Socialism and Herr Hitler openly claim an obedience which may be given to Christ alone [. . .] National Socialism is a Religion as well as a Philosophy. Its God is the State, its Messiah, Herr Hitler.’76 Hitler usurps the place of Christ, hence he becomes the Antichrist. Micklem’s visits had of course political implications since Hitler had been able to suppress almost all political opposition save that coming from the churches. The Royal Institute of International Affairs recognised this and so sponsored Micklem’s second visit in 1938 and published his report, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church. Lord Astor in the foreword said, ‘The Council believes that the issues raised in the conflict between the Catholic Church and the National Socialist State in Germany are of fundamental importance for the destinies of mankind.’77 It is in this all-embracing context and its fundamental issues that Micklem also sees what is at stake in the war: ‘we are fighting for truth’, for ‘the liberation of the German people from the thraldom of ignorance and false propaganda’ and ‘We are fighting for the fundamental basis of freedom and democracy.’78 Micklem’s understanding of the fundamental nature of the crisis would, I think, agree with Barth’s. Barth in A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland, urges his ‘Christian Brethren in Great Britain’ to have Christian reasons for going to war with Hitler. He is convinced it is their Christian duty to fight. Other conflicts, including World War I, could

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

45

and should have been resolved without resort to war. The war against Hitler is a matter of necessity and a matter of obedience: ‘The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and above all to test our obedience to that faith.’ Barth questions whether fighting for Western civilisation, the liberty of the individual, freedom of knowledge, the infinite value of human personality, the brotherhood of man, social justice and so on – all of which are related to democracy – do ‘really describe the grounds upon which we Christians must decide on our Christian attitude to the war [. . .] They do not touch on the peculiarly Christian truths on which the Church is founded.’ These truths, as he has earlier explained, include the Christian belief in a just state. God has instituted the State for us and the rest of the world ‘to testify to the Kingly rule of Christ. The just state is, as Paul says in Romans 13, a “minister of God.”79

Sir Ernest Barker (1874 –1960) Julia Stapleton in her study of The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (1994) accepts that, though Barker had a high profile in his lifetime, little notice of him has been taken since his death in 1960. So why bother with Barker now? Partly because, though he became an Anglican, his roots and sympathies are in and with his own Congregational upbringing and the part he sees Nonconformity playing in our English national life. Micklem, we have seen, was indebted to his writings, so was A.D. Lindsay. Thus, we have in this trio an important expression of Reformed thinking about democracy. Lindsay and Barker are also influenced by the Idealist philosopher T.H. Green (1836– 82),80 a thinker noted for his strong Nonconformist sympathies. At one stage Green contemplated being a Nonconformist preacher. As an Anglican and Oxford don in the years before Nonconformists were admitted to Oxford and Cambridge in 1871, he was one of the people who encouraged the great Congregational Church minister Dr R.W. Dale of Birmingham to establish a Nonconformist college in Oxford because he was concerned that once admitted to Oxford, Nonconformists found little support for their own churchmanship. A Nonconformist Union was also formed with, it was hoped, Professor T.H. Green as a vice

46

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

president, but he died prematurely in 1882. A distinguished Scottish Presbyterian, James Bryce, MP and Regius Professor of Civil Law, was made president. Even more significant than such a society, Dale helped the foundation of a Congregational college in Oxford, Mansfield College, in 1886. With Bryce, Green, Barker, Lindsay and Micklem, the heirs of Calvin and the Puritans had a strong intellectual base in Oxford. Their combined reflections on ‘democracy’ are one of the results. Barker was highly respected in his lifetime as a lecturer in Politics in Oxford (1899– 1920), then principal of King’s College, London, later moving to Cambridge (1928– 39) where he became the first Professor of Political Science. Even after retirement he served as a visiting professor in Cologne in 1947, encouraging the German academic community to ally itself with the postwar ‘general movement of democracy in the [European] community at large’. Va´clav Havel, founder spokesman of Charter 77, author of many articles on political dissent, and later first president of the Czech Republic, sought his advice. What I find especially attractive is Barker’s catholic and ecumenical understanding of politics. Stapleton prefers to write of his ‘broad and humanistic conception of the discipline of politics’. Barker’s catholic theological and political understanding is demonstrated in three of his major essays. They illustrate the way in which churchmanship and politics are integral to his whole approach. In an early essay, Dominican Order and Convocation: A Study of the Growth of Representation in the Church during the Thirteenth Century (1913),81 he detects a strong link between the development of a democratic order among the Dominicans and the growth of a parliamentary system in thirteenth-century England. In the preface he explains that he has discussed with a former pupil, a Dominican, Father Bede Jarrett, the idea that ‘the Church supplied both the idea of representation and the rules of procedure’. And just as Barker had his personal link with the Dominicans, so in the thirteenth century, Dominic, founding father of the Dominican Order of Preachers, had a close friendship with Stephen Langton and with Simon de Montfort who in 1212 summoned a great parliament at Pamiers in Languedoc. That one influenced the other is highly likely but, Barker admits, is not something one can prove. In the Middle Ages, we are dealing with ‘an organic whole’. Our modern distinctions of Church and State did not apply. What can be shown is that the Dominican model of

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

47

representative democracy proved highly popular so that already by 1277 there were some 404 convents. If it seemed to work well, secular rulers might be tempted to try it. But as a good historian, Barker is aware that there is rarely a single influence at work in social developments. Elsewhere he sees the English Parliament as evolving from an earlier tradition of tribal gatherings and the Anglo-Saxon Witan. Seventy years after Barker’s pioneering research, an historian of The English Parliaments in the Middle Ages,82 J.H. Denton, mentions Barker’s book in a footnote but has to admit that historians of government rarely consider the possibility there could be a connection with Church assemblies: There is no denying the political influence of the clergy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and no denying the reliance within the king’s government upon churchmen of all ranks, and yet it is generally assumed that the development of parliament, with its political and governmental aspects, was separate and distinct from the concurrent development of ecclesiastical assemblies. Arguments that the clergy, for example the Dominicans, had a particular influence in respect of representation upon parliament as it developed in the thirteenth century have faltered for lack of convincing evidence. The evidence may not amount to proof but Denton explains that the clergy and the barons not only had similar meetings but were often dealing with the same agenda, namely the king’s demand for more taxes. One of Barker’s younger contemporaries, the Congregational historian Geoffrey Nuttall,83 also noted the suggested link between the Dominican constitution and ‘contemporary Parliamentary procedure’. He refers to Barker’s study and to Professor David Knowles’ The Religious Orders in England (1948). Knowles acknowledged that the government of the Dominican order ‘was from the first extremely democratic in constitution’ but, he adds, ‘it is misleading to see in it a conscious movement towards democracy and representative government’. St Dominic’s purpose was rather ‘efficiency [. . .] in the truest sense of the word’. It is odd that Knowles assumes that democracy is claimed as an end in itself. If it turns out to be more efficient this is probably because disagreements are resolved at the start rather than creating

48

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

problems because a decision was made without involving those affected. Being more efficient is then an argument for democracy. Barker was very impressed by what he learned in his research. In the convent, the priors elect the prior. The Provincial Prior is elected by the priors of each convent and by two friars from each convent in a full meeting of all the friars. The Master General of the Order is elected by a General Chapter of Provincial priors. What Barker underlines here is ‘the free use of election’. He describes the organisation as ‘in the first place democratic’. It is interesting that when Bede Jarrett wrote his own account of The English Dominicans,84 a book which he dedicated to ‘Ernest Barker, my master and my friend’, he never mentions what Barker found so significant, the Dominicans’ democracy. Writing in 1937, he needed Rome’s approval for anything he published. In addition to the importance of being elected as a representative, Barker also underlines a point he had made in his study of Burke of Bristol, that a representative is not a delegate, a spokesman for the community, but is expected to make up his own mind on the issues put before whatever convocation he shares in. In 1927 –8 the Church of England faced a crisis when a revised version of the Prayer Book was rejected by the House of Commons. This raised the vexed question of the relationship between Church and State and led to an Archbishops’ Commission on the subject.85 The report was published in 1935. To their credit, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York consulted widely and ecumenically and the report includes contributions from the Congregational lay historian, Bernard Manning, Carnegie Simpson, Professor of Church History at Westminster College, the Presbyterian college in Cambridge, and M.E. Aubrey, general secretary of the Baptist Union, all of whom might be expected to have strong views on the Established Church. Ernest Barker, as an Anglican and expert on constitutional matters, was an obvious choice and offered his own reflections. Barker sympathised with the House of Commons. Even though not all its members were Anglicans, as had once been an essential qualification for all MPs, he considered the Commons more representative of Anglican lay opinion than the House of Laity in the Church Assembly. ‘It may be contended that it rather represents a particular and extraordinary lay opinion, which may, on occasion be “more royalist than the king”. It is not easy for an ordinary layman who is not pledged to a particular view to

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

49

find admission’ to the House of Laity. He was cross-examined on this statement, as the report goes on to explain. Barker said it was still plausible to argue that most English people were Anglicans, 25 million in a population of 37 million, but if representatives had to be drawn from those whose names were on the electoral roll of a parish, this narrowed the field to 3 million people. (He was corrected and told the figure was 3,750,000 but his argument still stands. The electoral rolls do not embrace the full breadth of Anglican lay opinion; Parliament might.) And here he drew on his own Congregational inheritance. The Church Assembly was only fifteen years old. ‘I feel that the new democratic institution within the Church will have to take a fair amount of time to find its feet.’ He could have added that Congregationalists had three or four hundred years of experience of democratic structures to draw on. In his opening statement he had said that ‘collegialism has always exercised a strong influence on the thought of most of the reformed national churches’. Barker welcomed the changes that had led through the Enabling Act of 1919 to the setting up of the Church Assembly with its three ‘Houses’: House of Bishops, House of Clergy and House of Laity. It might in time be mature enough to enable the Church of England to be more self-governing but he doubted if this would happen in his lifetime. He died in 1960, ten years before a new pattern of synodical government was established. A report on its first twenty years, 1970– 90 notes the same concern that led to the 1935 Commission: ‘Although the pressure for more representative church institutions was in part attributable to the upsurge of religious activity throughout the nation, it also stemmed from legislative difficulties directly connected with the fact that the Church of England was, as it still is, the Established Church.’86 Barker in his own submission did not regard Establishment as a problem. He had also spoken with a number of Free Churchmen who, unlike their predecessors, no longer campaigned for disestablishment, for a ‘free church in a free state’. The third major essay by Barker, ‘The Parliamentary System of Government’, was written, as he says, ‘in the course of the war 1939 – 1945’. It was later published in his Essays on Government (1951) along with a reprint of his earlier lecture on Burke of Bristol and a paper prepared for the Oxford Conference of 1937 on Church, Community and State. Barker was invited to contribute a paper on ‘The Community and the Church’. I mention this to emphasise that Barker was not only

50

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

recognised in university circles as an expert on political theory but also as a Christian layman with much to contribute. The Oxford Conference and another held in Edinburgh that same year proposed the formation of the World Council of Churches. The war prevented its advent until 1948. In this essay, Barker challenges the claim that is often made that Westminster is the ‘mother of parliaments’. Parliaments of some sort have always been more universal, and developed much earlier than the House of Commons in the fourteenth century. The Commons itself evolved from the Witan in Anglo-Saxon England and the Great Council that kings summoned, partly to counteract the undue power and influence of feudal barons. It was only with the English Revolution of 1688 that Parliament became the ‘major and sovereign part of government’. Wherever English people settled, they took their parliaments with them. Hence the idea that Westminster could be ‘the mother of parliaments’ in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. ‘There can be no body of settled Englishmen, of any size, without a parliament.’87 Then in a passage which has intriguing resonances with Niebuhr’s much-quoted defence of democracy, Barker attributes Britain’s parliamentary democracy to our English qualities and defects. (Englishmen) have generally the quality of being tolerant; they have generally the defect of being empirical and illogical; and both the quality and the defect enable them to work a system of parliamentary debate and deliberation, which demands the gift of tolerance for opponents, and requires the empirical habit of plodding along with makeshifts and compromises (One can be logical in the solitude of the study; one had better be illogical, or at any rate, empirical, on the crowded floor of a public chamber.) And he adds that these qualities and defects have been reinforced by Britain’s insular position, its social and economic development and ‘the peculiar character and development of [the] religious life’ of Anglicans and Nonconformists.88 These two bodies are sufficiently united to agree and divided enough to dispute. Arguing and debating in order to agree a decision are fundamental to Barker’s understanding of democracy. This he says is the temper of mind that the parliamentary system requires. There has to be a fundamental agreement about being democratic.

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

51

There can then be disagreements about how much democracy, how much reform we wish to have. On the point Barker is making about Britain’s religious traditions, he could have explained, and we can do this for him, that unlike, say, France and other parts of Europe, Britain does not have nonreligious versus religious parties like the Christian Democrats. Nonconformists were often associated first with the Liberals, then to a lesser extent with Labour, and so were Roman Catholics. The Church of England was sometimes described as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’. It is also claimed that the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marx. In fact it owes more to Congregationalism than to Methodism. Prior to the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1871, all MPs had to be Anglican. Today there are no such tests, and members of all faiths and none will be found in the three main political parties. No one party can claim a Christian monopoly. All parties are expected to recognise that constitutionally Britain is a Protestant Christian country. The Queen, who presides at the opening of Parliament, is also the titular Head of the Established Church of England. Senior bishops of the Church of England have by right a seat in the House of Lords. Barker of course knows all this and, without abandoning his Nonconformist and indeed ‘catholic’ and ecumenical sympathies, was, as I have noted, a staunch defender of the Established Church. Barker is commended and sometimes criticised for making discussion and debate a major part of his defence of democracy. In this he also agrees with A.D. Lindsay. For Barker, willingness to reach agreement through discussion is also an expression of (Christian) love: Discussion is not only like war; it is also like love. It is not only a battle of ideas; it is a marriage of minds. If a majority engages in discussion with a minority, and if that discussion is conducted in a spirit of giving and taking, the result will be that the ideas of the majority are widened to include some of the minority which have established their truth in the give and take of debate. So the majority will can become the will of all.89 Some important points about discussion are also made in his more detailed study, Reflections on Government. Written just before the war and

52

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

first published in 1942, it was regarded as sufficiently topical to be republished twenty-five years later in 1967, and for me, at any rate, made helpful reading in our own turbulent times in 2017– 18. Democracy, so he assures us with obvious conviction: is not the worship of quantity; it is the worship of quality – that quality of the thinking and discursive mind which can dare to raise and to face conflicting views of the good, and to seek by way of discussion some agreed and accepted compromise whereby a true [because general] national will is attained, as it cannot otherwise be, and a national good is secured which is really good because it is freely willed.90 If his reference to the ‘national will’ seems too narrow, it is important to note that Barker is fully aware, especially in the final chapter which he wrote during the war, of the desperate need for international agreement and of the help one nation may give to another. So, as noted earlier, he finds much reassurance from rereading the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos of 1579 where the author asked whether ‘one government might help the struggling subjects of another when they were afflicted in the cause of true religion and are seeking a refuge from affliction’. It is, he says, comforting to find such problems have arisen before and that ‘solutions have been eventually found; and that they are still to be found in their seeking.’91 Also worth seeking, according to Barker, is a better understanding of democracy than claiming that the will of the majority is the will of the people. It is not. ‘Majority decisions are imposed by force: Democracy which is merely the will of numbers rests merely on force.’ Barker urges us to look for a better way: We have to discover a system of government which squares with, and is based upon, the free and full development of human personality – not in some, or even in many, but in all – a form that is calculated to elicit and enlist, so far as is humanly possible – the thought, the will, and the general capacity of every member. It will be a democracy that rests on the spiritual quality of the process which it disengages, and on the value of the process for every participant. That process is, in a word, discussion.92

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

53

In the course of this more detailed study, Barker offers critical comments on Soviet Communism, Fascism in Italy and the Leadership Principle in Hitler’s Germany. He remains confident that even when ‘tried by the ordeal of war’, democracy has not failed ‘to stand the ultimate test’. In the course of his study of Italian Fascism, he makes some incisive comments on the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity merits and is given fuller comment in a later chapter.

Alexander Dunlop Lindsay (1879 –1951) A.D. Lindsay, though never a minister or teacher of theology, can be respected as a Reformed lay theologian. Like all who are conscious of this tradition, he traces the roots of Western democracy to the Reformed and Puritan congregations of the seventeenth century. Had he followed in his father’s footsteps, he might have been ordained and later become a theological college principal. To this end he taught himself Hebrew. Instead he felt called to an academic career teaching political philosophy. He became Master of Balliol College (1924 – 49), one of Oxford’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, famous amongst other things for helping to educate a number of famous British politicians. As noted earlier, Lindsay stood for Parliament as an Independent candidate in the famous ‘Munich by-election’ in Oxford in 1938 but was defeated by the Conservative, Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham. Lindsay became Lord Lindsay of Birker in 1945 and so joined Hailsham in the House of Lords. As a college principal and tutor he had ample opportunity to share his beliefs and often did so as preacher in the college chapel and talks on the radio. As such, Lindsay was well qualified to write about democracy and did so on four occasions. For him it was an article of his Christian faith, hence the title of one of his books, based on broadcast talks, I Believe in Democracy93 (1940). Here he states, ‘Democracy is an heroic faith because it believes, given a chance, men do greater things under the inspiration of freedom than under compulsion: that there is a reservoir of courage and enterprise and endurance in ordinary men and women when we take the trouble to release it, or when a crisis like this teaches us how strong it is when it is released.’ He was speaking in the early years of World War II, conscious that that this war, like the first, had as one of its

54

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

goals making the world safe for democracy. He is aware, as he states in the first of four broadcast talks, that ‘we need to think out again the reasons of the faith that is in us’, an echo of the apostle’s call in the First Letter of Peter to ‘give account of the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3:15). Two key texts provide the biblical basis for his faith in democracy. The Letter to the Galatians where Paul states (3:28) that the old human distinctions of superiors and inferiors no longer apply is for Lindsay the basis of equality: ‘The doctrine of human equality is ultimately an utterance of religion.’ It is ‘a religious faith and nothing but faith will maintain it’. Or as Jesus said, we are all alike children of one Father. Matthew 20:24– 8 provides the benchmark of Christian government. Rulers are not there to lord it over their subjects, or ‘great men’ to make the rest of us feel the weight of their authority, but are called to serve. He recalled childhood memories of one of his father’s sermons on that Old Testament hero Daniel, and the text ‘But if not’. When it comes to the crunch, each of us must be prepared to stand up for what he or she believes, whether or not it pays to do so. He might have quoted the chorus, often cited by his younger contemporary Tony Benn, ‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone.’ Daniel did stand alone but was not the only one to offer resistance. The mighty emperor Nebuchadnezzar threatened to throw Daniel’s three companions into a burning fiery furnace if they refused to worship the image of god he had made. They refused: ‘If there is a god who is able to save us from the blazing furnace; it is our God whom we serve; he will deliver us from your majesty’s power. But if not, be it known to your majesty that we shall neither serve your gods nor worship the golden image you have set up’ (Daniel 3:17– 18) Later Daniel, too, defied the king’s order and was thrown into the lions’ pit but escaped unharmed because, as it was said, the God whom he served had saved him from the lions (Daniel 6:20). Lindsay would know that it was stories like these which gave courage to people of faith to rebel against Hitler. It was the phrase ‘But if not’ in his father’s sermon that so impressed him as a child and inspired his mature faith, a faith that did not have to be vindicated by popular approval or an election victory. His first book on democracy, based on lectures given in Pennsylvania in 1929, would still be as relevant as ever ninety years later in the same state, one of the marginals which tipped the balance in favour of Donald Trump. Democracy in the United States, he argued, has been transformed

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

55

into something very different from anything Jefferson and Lincoln ever dreamed of: ‘Expert manipulation of men in the mass, drilled and disciplined parties, and all the other phenomena of modern large-scale democracies are not democracy at all.’94 He proceeds to remind his American audience of the roots of their democracy in ‘the simple democratic government of the self-governing congregations of the early settlers’. He describes the famous Putney Debates on democracy held in Cromwell’s New Model Army in 1647. But he is well aware that it is not possible to follow the same style when you move from the single congregation to a state of several million people. Government by the consent of the governed is an impossible ideal. Here he sides with Ireton against Levellers like William Rainborough (c.1612 – 73). And in a section which speaks directly to British debates about the referendum on the European Union he states ‘The democratic theory that the functions of government can be carried out by the average citizen has done immense harm.’ It involves the ‘distrust of the expert’.95 Quite so! British citizens were actually told by Cabinet minister Michael Gove that experts are not to be trusted. Gove disagrees with Calvin! Calvin in Geneva ‘accepted that there can be no salvation of states until they are ruled by men with true understanding of the ends and purposes of life’. Whereas Plato regarded the philosophers as the experts we should all listen to, Calvin appealed to the ‘saints’, meaning Christian people, as in the New Testament’s address to ‘all the saints’ in Corinth, Ephesus, Rome and suchlike centres. All people’s views are not of equal value but all should be granted liberty of conscience.96 Lindsay was also ready to admit that democracy is not necessarily the best way of reaching decisions.97 From the days of Aristotle, ‘democratic’ had always been an ambiguous description. Like Aristotle, and indeed like Calvin, he favoured a mixed constitution. In a parliamentary democracy, this mixed constitution comprises these three elements: popular voting, deliberation by an elected few and expert knowledge. Democracy was a means, not an end in itself. It was a means towards producing a policy that best served the interests of all concerned.

Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848 –1921) Chronologically, I should have dealt with Forsyth earlier, before his younger contemporaries Micklem, Lindsay and Barker. These three

56

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Oxford men would have known him even though Forsyth’s last pastorate was in Cambridge. He then became a college principal in London. As with Barth, with whom he is often compared, Forsyth’s theology is a subject no theologian should ignore, even if one chooses to disagree. And although his key texts, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909), The Work of Christ (1910), Faith, Freedom and the Future (1912), The Principle of Authority (1913) and The Church and the Sacraments (1917), were all written a century or more ago and can also sometimes be dated by such references as ‘the Veto of the House of Lords and the Constitutional Question’ and the Suffragettes, later generations go on rediscovering him. All the above texts were reprinted in the 1950s, some much more recently. Reading him today on the subject of democracy still seems remarkably topical, as indeed I hope to demonstrate. I place him later in this series of Reformed theologians because, having heard many of the arguments for democracy, what we also learn from Forsyth is to be more critical of some of the facile claims that are still made for ‘the people’, whatever they decide and and however they reach their decisions. Yet all his life, Forsyth remained loyal to his own Congregational and democratic tradition while feeling free on occasion to be critical whenever ‘lay religion’ fell far short of the central truths of the gospel. At a time when the ecumenical movement was still in its infancy, Forsyth was often engaged in conversations with the Church of England, and one of his earlier works is about Rome, Reform and Reaction: Four Lectures on the Religious Situation (1899). But he was never out to score points at others’ expense. All churches fall short of the summons to be one holy, catholic and apostolic Church. He had great respect for the Anglican bishop, Charles Gore (1853–1932), a leading High Church theologian of his day, and sometimes stayed in his home when Gore was Bishop of Birmingham. He learned much from F.D. Maurice and from John Henry Newman (1801– 90), once an Anglican vicar in Oxford, later a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. But just as the Greek word oikumene, which forms the basis of the English word ‘ecumenical’, originally meant the whole inhabited world, so Forsyth’s ecumenism was global and international. He had studied in Go¨ttingen under Ritschl, and kept up to date with other German thinkers. A third or half of his library was in German. The outbreak of war in 1914 really saddened him, as many of his best friends were German, but he felt there was a moral obligation to stand up for Belgium, whose neutrality Germany

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

57

had chosen to ignore by invading. Earlier, he visited the United States and gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale in 1907, published as Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind. Like most Nonconformists of the time, he voted Liberal and made no secret of the fact. When a minister in Leicester, he campaigned for the Liberal candidate.98 Despite all I have tried to say here in commending him, Forsyth is rarely quoted today even when, in my view, he still has much to say. One welcome exception was the American theologian Robert McAfee Brown who, guided by Micklem, made Forsyth the subject of his own doctoral thesis. Much in Forsyth seemed to resonate with what he heard from Niebuhr and what he would later read and teach on Barth. Brown is a good example of a theologian who is able to be fully engaged in the social and political issues of his day, including race relations, apartheid and opposition and resistance to the Vietnam War, because his faith rests on sure foundations. He was also deeply committed to the World Council of Churches and served as a Protestant Observer at Vatican II.99 Brown died in 2001. The books I have listed demonstrate Forsyth’s priorities. Democracy might appear not to be one of them but here we would be wrong. They are all addressed to ‘the democracy’. Forsyth really believes that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world. ‘The democracy’ is the shorthand expression for the kind of world that now needs saving. Here is his description of ‘the manner of our own time’ taken from the first pages of Faith, Freedom and the Future (1912). People set little store by positive belief [. . .] Any truth is true enough which goes with this temper. Believe as you will if only you show the spirit of Christ. The spirit of Christ is not a creative power which leads into all truth but a responsive mood, a frame of mind which cultivates much dogmatic indifference, that is, carelessness of truth. Religion is love and not faith. It is a state and not an act or a judgment. Hence [. . .] it tends to shirk responsibility in action and to court incompetence in belief [. . .] In the mind of many, truth has little to do with church compared with temperament, and faith little compared with the idealism of an agreeable religiosity [. . .] History becomes as indifferent as doctrine.100

58

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

But Forsyth has no illusions about a past golden age. Even in the New Testament one had to contend with times when the death of Christ was pushed into a corner, like an embarrassing episode of which the less said the better [. . .] It tended to banish repentance from its experience, as spiritual culture always does when it claims to outgrow evangelical faith. The fear of God dropped to a crude and inferior stage of religion. The idea of discipline vanished from church life; and an extravagant idea of personal liberty, imported from the natural democracy, took the first place, vacated by the obedience of faith.101 [my emphasis] In this and other works, Forsyth is not rejecting democracy. He wants to help reform it. Hence the subtitle of the first chapter of his last major work, The Church and the Sacraments (1917), ‘Holy Church, Free Church and Sound Democracy’. There he warns against the Church being but ‘the religious side of the democracy’. For the Free Churches, by which is normally meant his own Congregational churches, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist congregations: A parliamentary Church is not their nearest danger but a parliamentary religion may be. They may come to think mainly in terms of public or social life, to say nothing of party. They may come to care more for social work than for public worship. A Church may be on quite happy terms with the world, and its Christ may be made welcome, chiefly because He is ‘so human’ or so democratic.102 The Principle of Authority, first published in 1913 and reprinted in 1952, contains some of his strongest criticisms of common democratic assumptions and beliefs. Like the other Reformed thinkers I have listed, Forsyth assumes without much argument that modern democracy owes much to Calvin and the Independent congregations of England and New England in America. He therefore feels entitled as a theologian to question some of its core beliefs about the authority behind our democratic decisions. What are our priorities and can majority votes resolve our moral and ethical difficulties?

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

59

What makes some form of Calvinism indispensable and immortal [. . .] was this, that it cared more to secure the freedom of God than of man. That is what it found in the Cross. That is why it has been the greatest contribution to public liberty ever made. Secure that God be free. Seek first the freedom of God, and all other freedom shall be added to you. And he adds, what will come as a surprise to all who only associate Calvin with a rigid doctrine of predestination that is assumed to take away our freedom since all is foreordained: ‘The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination was the foundation of modern public liberty; and deeply, because it was an awful attempt to secure God’s freedom in Grace at any cost.’103 Calvinism was ‘the true creator of modern democracy’.104 Sovereignty, ‘even if it be the sovereignty of the people (however the people may be defined) [. . .] draws its right to claim obedience only from the Sovereignty of God’.105 Some of Forsyth’s contemporaries and successors wrote rather too cheerfully about ‘believing in democracy’. Forsyth challenges the notion that majorities can tell us what to believe. Chapter XIII in The Principle of Authority is headed ‘Plebiscite and Gospel as Authority’: And so between a Church and a democracy there is this fundamental difference and difficulty. No numbers can create a real authority for the conscience, such as we have within the Church; whereas democracy will listen to no authority but what its members, its majorities, do create. And its individualism and its subjectivity make it equally incompetent and indocile, at its present stage, for the supreme questions and issues of Humanity and the Soul.106 He goes on to add: ‘Majorities may and should settle business in a Church only if it is composed of men who would be sure of the Gospel if it were in a minority of one, and who would administer it only by the votes of men whom the Gospel itself had made.’ ‘The principle of trusting the people applies in the Church only with the extension – trust the people who trust the Gospel and confess it.’107 One would need to debate carefully how such a plea applies to political elections or a referendum. Is it too readily assumed that ‘the people’ en masse are to be trusted with big decisions? Forsyth thinks so.

60

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

He offers two further cautions that can apply to Church and political decisions. First, respect for experts. ‘The laity should seek and welcome, with less suspicion than they often do, the due guidance of the experts of the Soul.’ He appeals for greater respect ‘for the authority of an educated ministry’.108 In the British referendum debate, the ‘experts’ were often mocked. The people knew best. Forsyth respects the people but begs them to heed the experts. One man’s judgment is not as good as another’s. Kingsley was not the equal of Newman, nor could a village evangelist compare to Bishop Gore.109 He also pleads for what G.K. Chesterton once described as ‘the democracy of the dead’. ‘The dead we call the majority.’110 For both these reasons, Forsyth argues that democratic churches need the balancing influence of Churches that honour tradition, like the Catholic and Episcopal. Politically, democracy, that is, the people, is better off in a mixed constitution such as the Catholic Church in practice adopted in the thirteenth century.111 A perfect state blends Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy. Such an appeal is made to theories of a mixed polity, developed by the Conciliarists in the Middle Ages and again by Calvin at the Reformation. Forsyth, whenever I read him, makes me think again. He does not do our thinking for us. Many of his contemporaries disagreed with him, which is one reason why he also pleads that we respect minorities. He is also very important for this study because, unusually for a Reformed theologian of his generation, he had such a positive attitude to Rome, admiring in particular the way she consistently affirmed that the Church must be self-governing and free of state control. On this point, Rome and Orthodox Dissent are in agreement. Where Rome lapsed, he could also be quite critical (see his Rome, Reform and Reaction).112

Jacques Ellul (1912 –94) Ellul ought to be mentioned because he was once a widely studied Reformed theologian, strongly influenced by Karl Barth, active in the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France and influential in the early days of the World Council of Churches. But he parts company with Barth over Barth’s emphasis on the state and, unlike Barth, is very ambivalent about democracy and generally suspicious of politics. In his eyes, politics corrupts because politics is about power and domination.

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

61

Among his many books, some brief comments about two of them. The Politics of God and the Politics of Man (1972) expounds various incidents in the Second Book of Kings which Ellul claims is the most political of all the books of the Bible. God allows his people to make, what turn out to be the wrong decisions. He does not control them or us or impose his will. But in the end God’s will prevails. We cannot know God’s will in advance. Only in retrospect can we see that God’s action was done through what his people did.113 Here and in one of his last books, Anarchy and Christianity (1991), Ellul argues that the prophet has a crucial role. ‘He brings to light the relation that exists between the free determination of man and the free decision of God.’ In the Anarchy study, Ellul, as the title would suggest, is now sceptical of all political institutions: ‘Our Parliamentary and Electoral system and our Political Parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable’, but hope lies in the existence of prophets who are not part of the system, just as in the Old Testament, every ruler had a prophet who acted as the counterforce. Ellul does not believe in anarchy but he does agree with anarchists that we need to work for a different kind of society. What we have are ‘empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more’.114 The remark is strangely topical thirty years later and chimes in with recent comments on populism.

Ju¨rgen Moltmann (1926–) The German theologian Ju¨rgen Moltmann is the best-known Reformed theologian still alive today. His books like Theology of Hope and The Crucified God have become classics and are still in print years after they were first published in 1964 and 1974. In more recent years he and his wife, Elizabeth Wendel-Moltmann, have campaigned together for greater participation by women. Few theologians now living can share his experience of the Nazi era, some of it as a prisoner of war in England, where the big bonus was that he came to faith and also learned good English. That experience and reflections on the Church Struggle in Germany convinced him that there is no way the Church or theology can pretend to be apolitical: ‘There is no apolitical theology. There is never an apolitical Church.’115 The call to Christians to ‘give account of the hope that is in them’ (1 Peter 3:15) he takes as a political summons to proclaim God’s promises for a different world.

62

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Like all the Reformed theologians I have mentioned, Moltmann assumes without much argument that democracy is a by-product of Reformed faith and churchmanship. Luther expounded ‘the general priesthood of all believers’. ‘The Reformed tradition also discovered the “general kingship of all believers” and this laid the cornerstone of modern democracy.’ He cites John Milton; ‘The crown does not rest on the head of man. The crown rests on the constitution of free citizens.’116 The Puritan Revolution produced ‘the right of the community’. This understanding of religion by the Free Churches had immense political consequences. It became the underlying tenet of basic democracy in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly in North America. Democracy is America’s contribution to world history. He elaborates further that American democracy reflects those notions of covenant that were developed in the Reformed tradition by Calvin and John Knox, Olevian, Cocceius, Althusius and Hugo Grotius. He adds this warning. American democracy ‘can evidently be taken over by other people only if at the same time the concept of voluntary religion is legalized. Democracy presupposes citizens who have come of age not only morally but also religiously.’117 A politics that is based on such a faith cannot be expected to flourish apart from such faith. We may not agree but if we accept that in Britain and America and many other places democracy is floundering, Moltmann’s explanation should at least be examined. Good democracy needs good theology.

John De Gruchy (1939–) For most of his professional life, the South African Reformed theologian John de Gruchy has been engaged in a very specific struggle for democracy, overcoming apartheid in South Africa. The State policy of segregation for the separate development of white, black and coloured peoples deprived most of the population of full citizenship and a full and equal share in government. The fact that the policy was sanctioned by the white Dutch Reformed Church to which most of the members of the government belonged made resistance to apartheid very obviously a theological as well as a political issue. Few were better equipped for this task than John de Gruchy. Brought up in a local Congregational Church in South Africa, John de Gruchy served for a time as a local minister before later becoming a

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

63

professor of Theology at Cape Town University. As he explains in an autobiographical part of his book Being Human,118 when you grow up with apartheid, it is easy to live with apartheid, that is, if you are white. A World Council of Churches scholarship to Chicago in 1963 at the time of the American civil rights movement shattered any racist complacency he and his wife might have felt. He returned and immersed himself in the struggle against apartheid, working for the South African Council of Churches and with the Christian Institute founded by Beyers Naude´. He tried to persuade white colleagues to read Albert Luthuli’s Let My People Go. He was strengthened in his own convictions by the strong theologies of Karl Barth119 and Peter Taylor Forsyth, whose views on democracy we have noted in this chapter, and by the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed on Hitler’s orders for his part in the plot to rid Germany of its cruel tyranny. Bonhoeffer has become one of the best known of the twentieth century’s many martyrs. De Gruchy rightly describes himself as a Reformed theologian whose faith is truly ecumenical, thanks to numerous personal contacts and wide reading. As well as books and articles on apartheid, John de Gruchy set out to reform his own Reformed tradition in Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate (1991) and made his own contribution to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with his study Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (2002). In 1995 he published a masterly survey of Christianity and Democracy, which has become an essential textbook for my own studies. Where my own approach differs is that De Gruchy has opted for comprehensive coverage of 2000 years of Christian history, I have chosen to focus on a few ‘democrats’, mainly Reformed and Roman Catholic, and to do so in greater depth. But without De Gruchy’s breadth of vision, my approach would be far too parochial. We need both. As the final chapter of Christianity and Democracy, De Gruchy offers a fifty-page essay, ‘A Theology for a Just Democratic World Order’. Nothing as valuable has appeared since that earlier generation of Reformed writers, Barker, Lindsay, Micklem and Niebuhr. I select what I see as his central insights. He has read Micklem and Niebuhr and a host of others from different traditions in a truly ecumenical quest. He takes his cue from Niebuhr’s classic study, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, that ‘modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis’ if its advocates are to be

64

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

rescued at once from the pessimism that leads to absolutist political theories and the ‘too consistent optimism’ that ‘obscures the perils of chaos’.120 So in his essay he challenges the assumptions that democracy is all about individual freedom and is blind to the pervasiveness of original sin. Citing another Reformed theologian, John Oman, he says Christianity is not ‘individualism tempered by the ballot box’ and he challenges the assumption that democracy itself can make people better. On the contrary, democracy needs better people in order to be democratic. The Trinity is not to be dismissed as abstruse and irrelevant dogma but provides a model of differences in unity. For some of us, there is not much here that is desperately new, but the old is worth repeating. So are his personal convictions that ‘the question of the democratic character of the Church is relevant to all Christian denominations’ even though ‘it obviously affects them in different ways’. And even more persuasive is his argument that the Church must set an example: If genuine democracy should enable human fulfilment and flourishing, how much more should the life of the Church enable its members to discover an even deeper fulfilment and freedom in Christ? If democracy is about political participation in which difference is respected and which contributes to the well-being of the whole, how much more should the Church, as the koinonia of the ‘people of God’, embody and express true human sociality, reflecting the restored image of the Triune God?121 Reading this essay twenty years after it was published in 1995, one senses a certain optimism about a world that is becoming more democratic, despite the setbacks he is very conscious of in his own continent of Africa. There a big fault has been the belief that democracy can be imposed from outside; it has to develop from within a given culture and could do so through local ideals such as ubuntu, ‘a person is a person through other persons’. Today, so much seems perilously insecure. And what has also become more obvious and urgent is that any talk of ‘a democratic world order’ has to give much greater attention to dialogue with other living faiths, a subject that for some reason De Gruchy seems to ignore. At Cape Town University, John de Gruchy had a close colleague and collaborator in Charles Villa-Vicencio. His Theology of Reconstruction122

DEMOCRACY AND

THE

THEOLOGIANS

65

shows how serious reflections on the Christian faith and democracy are vital for nation building in post-apartheid South Africa.

Timeless truths? Even as I write (22 March 2017) a terrorist has struck at the heart of our democracy, and Parliament in Westminster, the ‘mother of all parliaments’, is in ‘lockdown’. The following day we wake up to speculation about why it happened and what can be done to prevent such attacks. The British prime minister, Theresa May, speaks of the need to overcome hate and evil. If this isn’t a theological problem, I don’t know what is. It is also a challenge, here and elsewhere, to create a more generous democracy where angry dissident voices can be listened to before other citizens from many nations are mown down on a London bridge and an unarmed policeman at the gate is stabbed to death as he protects the Members of Parliament inside the Palace of Westminster. I am reminded of what Forsyth and Barth and others saw so clearly. The Christian faith is not some timeless, abstract truth but is rooted and tested in historic events that even in the creed are named and dated with reference to One who ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’. The conviction that inspired all the theologians I have mentioned and indeed all Christians is that tyrants like Pilate and his successors never have the final word.

CHAPTER 2 DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS AND RESERVATIONS

Introduction Reformed Churches like to see themselves as advocates of democracy in the Church and in the State. As the previous chapter has shown, an impressive range of theologians from John Calvin in the sixteenth century to John de Gruchy in the twenty-first have been among democracy’s foremost Christian advocates. Rome by contrast has been more cautious. When I tell my Dominican friend about my research he teases me. ‘Vox populi, vox Dei? No! The voice of the people is not the will of God.’ Where we differ is that Reformed theologians would insist that the voice of the people could be the voice of God. Here one can quote Pope – the poet: ‘The people’s voice is odd,/It is, and it is not, the voice of God.’ If that is so, the people, meaning the people of God, should be listened to. Many Roman Catholics agree. This was not always so, or was it? Two references to vox populi, vox Dei in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations belong to pre-Reformation times, when all Christians in the West were recognised as Catholics. Alcuin used the expression in a letter to his friend Charlemagne c. 800. In England, Archbishop Walter Reynolds also did so when he gave the sermon at the Coronation of Edward III in 1327. It must have been as controversial then as it has been ever since. Edward II was unpopular with the people and had just been murdered. Was it really God’s will that his fourteen-year-old son should take his place? Was the voice of the people the voice of God? Cyprian

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

67

also said so, but he meant that in the election of Church officers God works through people who recognise those whom God himself has chosen.1 The Reformers would accept Cyprian’s interpretation. Even the Reformed theologian Jean-Baptiste More´ly, who was more democratic than most, denied that the government instituted by Christ our Saviour is democratic if by that is meant the people’s will is sovereign. But what he does object to is the way in which the Church is identified with the clergy and the rest of the people of God are forgotten and have no voice.2 ‘People’, meaning ‘the People of God’, is a good place to begin a positive dialogue with Rome. Through its own democratic processes, the bishops at Vatican II (1962–5), all 2500 of them, agreed that all our thinking about the Church should begin with Christ, Light of the World, Lumen Gentium, and then with all the People of God, not, as was customary, with the hierarchy. Cardinal Suenens of Belgium is credited with this inversion. Twenty years later, Roman Catholics, who had now become full members of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, helped make the ‘People of God ‘the key image of the Church’ in the WCC’s best-known document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982). Its first six paragraphs are headed: ‘The Calling of the Whole People of God’. This emphasis also reflects an ecumenical rediscovery of the laity that had been pioneered by the French Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar and the Dutch Reformed theologian, Hendrik Kraemer.3 A major challenge posed by this rediscovery of the laity (a word derived from the Greek laos, meaning people) was whether laypeople can be trusted to discern the will of God and take some part in the government of the Church as well as in the government of the State. In a dialogue and debate, Reformed Christians could claim that in their congregations ordinary people did have some share in Church government before the franchise was given to them in the State. Rome’s thinking starts from the opposite direction. For centuries they had not been convinced that democracy was the best form of government for the State and now, in part in reaction to the bad experience of Fascist dictators, they had come to see that it probably is. But they remain to be convinced that just because a state is democratic, it follows that the Church should be. Not all Roman Catholics are convinced that Church structures should be, as they prefer to say, ‘democratised’.4 But when, in the final sessions of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI floated the idea of a synod of bishops, the Anglican bishop John Moorman of Ripon

68

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

commented, ‘the thing that struck us [him and his fellow observers] most was that, for the first time, a democratic element had found its way into the government of the Church of Rome’.5 Such a comment in 1965 would turn out to be premature, but the fact that an arch AngloCatholic like Moorman could welcome such democratisation is itself significant.

Rome and the Democracies and Church Democratisers To compare this chapter with the previous one on the Reformed tradition is natural but also misleading. We are not comparing like with like. There is no such entity as ‘the Reformed Church’, only a list of several hundred Reformed churches in a hundred or more different nations. Many, but not all, will be members of the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the World Council of Churches. Writers have attempted to describe Reformed churchmanship and have found the task impossible.6 Instead we speak more vaguely of a ‘Reformed ethos’.7 By contrast, one can speak of the Church of Rome, even though many Protestants fail to appreciate that there are eighteen or more officially recognised ways of being Roman Catholic. Common allegiance to the pope does mean that one can look for an official view of the Church’s attitude to democracy in the State and to democratisation in the Church. The official view is found in papal encyclicals and other such documents and in the decisions of the twenty-one Ecumenical Councils, from Nicaea to Vatican II, recognised by Rome. And as with the Reformed, there are individual theologians like Jacques Maritain, Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray and Hans Ku¨ng who have written about democracy or related subjects. Their views are ‘unofficial’ in the double sense that they are not to be regarded as official Roman Catholic theology and, as in the case of Ku¨ng, Courtney Murray and Congar, have sometimes been censored by the Vatican. ‘Unofficial’ or not, in a democracy they ought to be heard. But I will start with the popes.

Pius XII According to some accounts, Pius XII was the first pope to recognise democracy. He did so in a Christmas letter of 1944. The date is significant. The people in Europe and America, aided by two popes and even by the film producer and actor Charlie Chaplin, were becoming

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

69

progressively aware of just how evil Hitler and Mussolini were. In March 1937 Pope Pius XI expressed his own agonising concern, in Mit Brennender Sorge, about attacks on the Church and the faithful in Germany. In 1940, Charlie Chaplin in the United States, in one of his greatest films, could mock ‘The Great Dictator’ and get people laughing at Hitler and Mussolini. How ridiculous they were! How could people be so easily deceived? But in 1944 these two tyrants were still raging and it was nothing to laugh about, especially for Jewish people. By 1944, we knew what Chaplin had not known. The Jews were not just being shoved around. They were being shovelled into gas chambers and crematoriums. The Pope was beginning to think that democracy might just be a better option than tyranny, but he was cautious in his advocacy in case all that we did was exchange one oppressor for another, as the Vatican tended to think had happened in Russia in 1917: Taught by bitter experience, they [the people] are now aggressively opposing the concentration of dictatorial power and call for a system of government more in keeping with the dignity and liberty of the citizen [. . .] A sound democracy, built on the immutable principles of the natural law and revealed truth, will resolutely turn its back on such corruptions as give to the state an unchecked and unlimited power, and moreover make of the democratic regime, notwithstanding an outward show to the contrary, purely and simply a form of absolutism. The following year, 1945, in his encyclical Benignitas et Humanitas, he stated: If then we consider the extent and nature of the sacrifices demanded of all citizens, especially in our day, when the activity of the state is so vast and decisive, the democratic form of government appears to many, as a postulate of nature imposed by reason itself.

Pius XI Pius XI, his predecessor, had tended to dismiss democracy in his long Syllabus of Errors that included liberalism, freedom of speech and human rights. One of Rome’s more radical theologians, Charles Taylor, writing in the early years of the present century, is highly critical of such

70

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

‘fulminations’ as ‘an illegitimate attempt to decide for all time questions that have to be constantly revisited’.8 At Vatican II, Rome did change its mind about human rights and about the Jews, and a few years earlier, as we can see, was having more positive thoughts about democracy.

John XXIII John XXIII is the first pope since the Reformation to be respected by almost all Christians and people of goodwill everywhere. He surprised us all in 1959 by summoning an ‘Ecumenical Council’ that proved to be international and truly ecumenical in seeking the advice and counsel of non-Roman Catholic experts. He is also famous for his commitment to world peace and support for the United Nations. This is clearly stated in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth (1963). As in the Council document, Dignitatis Humanae, the Pope emphasises human dignity in what he has to say about political rights: The dignity of the human person involves the right to take an active part in public affairs and to contribute one’s part to the common good of the citizens. For, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius XII, pointed out: The human individual, far from being an object and, as it were, a merely passive element in the social order, is in fact, must be, and must continue to be, its subject, its foundation and its end. It is in keeping with the dignity of persons that human beings should take an active part in government, although the manner in which they share in it will depend on the level of development of the political community to which they belong. It is impossible to determine, once and for all, what is the most suitable form of government. And referring to the Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII, Pope John adds his own agreement: It is of course impossible to accept the theory which professes to find the original and single source of human rights and duties, of the binding force of the Constitution, and of government’s right to command, in the mere will of human beings, individually and collectively.

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

71

John Paul II John Paul II, the pope from Poland, having lived for years under Communist control, also has some positive things to say: The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility of both electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate. This encyclical, Centesimus Annus (1991), celebrated an important change of emphasis in papal teaching, on the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s ‘immortal document’, Rerum Novarum. Pope Leo was not directly concerned with democracy but he was expressing sympathy and support for poorly paid workers and so speaking up for those who at the time had no vote and no voice in European parliaments. John Paul II now surveys the many changes that have taken place nearly a hundred years later, in the 1980s: the fall of ‘certain dictatorial and oppressive regimes’ in countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia; the difficult but productive transition towards ‘more participatory and more just political structures’. From this historical process new forms of democracy have emerged which offer hope for change. The Pope makes no claim that the Church has been instrumental in bringing about such changes, nor does he admit that Rome and indeed other churches may have given tacit support to dictatorial regimes and resisted such changes. The Church’s main contribution is in affirming the value and dignity of each and every human person. Each person ‘bears the image of God and therefore deserves respect’. And in reaction to the horrors of World War II, there has arisen ‘a more lively sense of human rights’. One of the most forceful sections, 46, stresses the importance of values which are too often rejected, and challenges assumptions about majority rule: Those who are convinced that they know the truth and fully adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variations according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is

72

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism. In the subsequent section, support for democracy is again more cautious and ambivalent; the Church respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order and is entitled to express preferences for this or that institutional or constitutional solution. An earlier encyclical by Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1885), should be mentioned here. The Pope, so I was informed before I examined the document for myself, ‘called for neutrality between the Church and different forms of government to protect the Church’s freedom’9 under any system. The encyclical does say that ‘none of the several forms of government is in itself condemned, inasmuch as none of them contain anything contrary to Catholic doctrine, and all of them are capable, if wisely and justly managed, to insure the welfare of the state’ (36). But earlier the Pope, who today is often commended for his more radical stance, as in Rerum Novarum, does have some serious reservations about how he thinks ‘being democratic’ is often interpreted. He feels that the Church is being wrongly accused of opposition to modern forms of government and of not helping welfare and progress. He argues: Though endeavours of various kinds have been ventured on, it is clear that no better mode has been devised for the building up and ruling the state than that which is the necessary growth of the teachings of the Gospel. We deem it, therefore, of the highest moment, and a strict duty of our apostolic office, to contrast with the lessons taught by Christ, the novel theories now advanced touching the state. (2) God is the sovereign ruler of all. ‘There is no power but of God’, Romans 13:1. (3) The right to rule is not necessarily, however, bound up with any special mode of government. It may take this or that form, provided only that it be of the nature of the government that rulers must bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world, and must set him before themselves as the exemplar and law in the administration of the state. (4)

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

73

In political affairs, and in all matters civil, the laws aim at securing the common good, and are not framed according to the delusive caprices and opinions of the mass of the people, but by truth and justice, the ruling powers are invested with a sacredness more than human, and are withheld from deviating from the path of duty [. . .] Obedience (to rulers) is not the servitude of man to man, but submission to the will of God, exercising his sovereignty through the medium of men. (8) There were times when states were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. (21) But that harmful and deplorable passion for innovation which was roused in the sixteenth century threw first of all into confusion the Christian religion, and next, by natural sequence, invaded the precincts of philosophy [. . .] and hence the later tenets of unbridled licence. (23) The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude, which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and inflame many passions [. . .] For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates, chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are changeable as the will of the people, so that the risk of pubic disturbance is ever hanging over their heads. (31) This then is the teaching of the Catholic Church. No one of the several forms of government is in itself condemned [. . .] Neither is it blameworthy in itself, in any manner, for the people to have a share, greater or less, in the government for at certain times, and under certain laws, such participation may not only be of benefit to citizens, but may even be of obligation. (38) The charge is ridiculous and groundless that the Church is hostile to modern political regimes. (39) So much for the popes, what about the councils? Here I turn first to Vatican II and what, if anything, it had to say about democracy. If space permitted, I would trace the background to Vatican II in the Conciliar Movement of the Middle Ages and the unresolved issue of where final authority lies, in an ecumenical council or a papal encyclical.

74

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Vatican II (1962–5) Vatican II was the most geographically universal council ever held, assembling in Rome 2500 Roman Catholic bishops, drawn from every continent and almost every country. Where ‘catholic’ means universal, the Roman Catholic Church is the most universal. Pentecostalists now match Rome in their global reach but they do so through a variety of denominations, not as one Church. Only Rome could convene a global council that has authority to speak for all Catholics. The World Council of Churches with its 350 member churches makes pronouncements on a variety of issues such as war and peace, apartheid and race relations, but its authority is that of the Christian moral truth member churches recognise in what is said. Rome can and does speak with authority. What had Vatican II to say about democracy? Nothing! Or, not in so many words. There is no mention of democracy where you would most expect to find it, in its ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World Today’.10 We might hope it had more to say since the whole document is indeed one of the most hopeful and in its Latin original is entitled Gaudium et spes, joy and hope. But, read more carefully, this sixty-six-page document with its ninetythree sections has many good things to say. Here are some of them. It begins with a beautiful affirmation of the Church’s solidarity with the whole human family: The joys and hopes and sorrows and anxieties of people today, especially of those who are poor and afflicted, are also the joys and hopes, sorrows and anxieties of the disciples of Christ, and there is nothing human which does not also affect them. (1) It is only in freedom that human beings can turn towards that which is good. Genuine freedom is an outstanding manifestation of the divine image in humans. For God willed to leave them in the hands of their own counsel so that they would seek their creator of their own accord [. . .] Their human dignity requires them to act through conscious and free choice. (17) Although there are just differences among individuals, the equal dignity of persons demands access to more human and equal conditions of life. Human institutions whether they be private or public, should aim to serve the dignity and goal of human beings,

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

75

opposing any social or political slavery and safeguarding the basic rights of all under any form of government. (29) The particular mission which Christ entrusted to his church is not in the political, economic or social order; the goal which is set is in the religious order. (42) It is clear that the political community and political authority have their foundation in human nature and therefore belong to the order established by God, although the form of government and the designation of the rulers are left to the free will of the citizens. (74) (Romans 13:1– 5) It is entirely in accord with human nature that political and juridical structures be devised which will increasingly and without discrimination provide all citizens with the genuine opportunity of taking a free and active share in establishing the juridical foundations of the political community, in determining the forms of government and the functions and purposes of its various institutions, and in the election of the government. All citizens should therefore be mindful of their right and duty to use their free vote to further the common good. The church holds in honour and respect the work of those who devote themselves to the good of the state for the service of their fellows by undertaking the burdens of office [. . .] It is inhuman that political authority should take the form of totalitarianism or dictatorship, which is harmful to the rights of the person or of social groups. (75) By virtue of its commission and competence the church is not bound to any political system, being both a sign and safeguard of the transcendence of the human person. (76) Since God our Father is the origin and destiny of all things, we are all called to be sisters and brothers. Therefore, in our common human and divine vocation we can and should work together without violence or deceit, and in true peace, to build the world. (92) This quotation and the whole text of the final paragraphs sum up the intention behind a remarkable document. The Council fathers are saying that the Roman Catholic Church and ‘the one people of God’ want to open up a serious dialogue with the world. The Roman Catholic Church no longer claims, as it has usually done in the past, that it has the answers to the many challenges facing people in the modern world.

76

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

The document is addressed to all the people everywhere. ‘Gaudium et spes is the first conciliar text in the history of the Church that is addressed to all human beings.’11 It is a pastoral document, not a binding set of dogmas. It seeks to open perspectives, to aid a wider debate and discussion. It has done so not least by establishing, at least by example, a change of tone. It is matched in its approach by the fact that it was during debates on this text that Pope Paul VI addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. The Pope presented himself ‘as a bearer of a message to the whole of humankind, a message that had been preached for twenty centuries’. He addressed all people as ‘an expert in humanity’. He spoke in the name of the millions who had perished in the wars of the twentieth century and of those who painfully survived. He spoke especially as a spokesman for the poor and disinherited who longed for dignity, freedom, prosperity and progress. But the Pope also expressed, as all would surely expect him to do, his Christian conviction that the whole work of the United Nations ‘must be constructed on spiritual principles, which are the only ones capable not only of supporting it but also of enlightening and animating it. And we are convinced, as you know, that these indispensable principles of higher wisdom can have their basis only in faith in God.’12 The address was televised throughout the world and has been widely acclaimed. The Council fathers also suggested that the speech should be included as one of the Council documents. In the next paragraph I shall say more about Vatican II as a prime example of efforts to make the Roman Catholic Church more democratic in the sense of being more inclusive of clergy and laity and open to debate and discussion. As in any debate, there are those in favour of and those against any specific proposal. Much in Gaudium et spes was regarded at the time as controversial and if today we sometimes wish it had been more radical, we need to remember that even its gentle comments about greater participation in government took place at the height of the Cold War. Conservative Catholics wanted the Council to condemn Communism. Vatican II, unlike Trent and Vatican I, issued no anathemas.13 It was not in the business of condemning anybody. Its word to the world was ‘Joy and Hope’.

Vatican II as an event in the ecumenical movement14 An ‘event’ in the ecumenical movement was how Lukas Vischer, an observer representing the World Council of Churches, summed

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

77

up Vatican II.15 As a Reformed theologian, he could get away with the emphasis on ‘event’. He would know, and so would most Roman Catholics, that ‘event’ is a key concept in Karl Barth’s concept of the Church. The Church is not some static, timeless institution, but a dynamic happening of God’s creating as God gathers people together. It is an assembling of the people of God, not just an assembly. Vischer said Vatican II was an event. So did Cardinal Suenens. So did the historian of the Council, Guiseppe Alberigo. Others like Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, preferred to codify the Council as sixteen documents that the Vatican itself was best qualified to interpret. In fact the Council was a whole series of events, events with democratic implications. It came as a surprise even to the pope who convened it. Many assumed that since Vatican I in 1870 had declared the pope infallible there was no need for another Council. Pius IX had said ‘I am the Tradition’. He could just as readily have said, ‘I am the Council, ask me!’ A very different pope, John XXIII, sensed the need for Church reform or, as he preferred to say, aggiornamento. For this complex process of bringing the Church up to date, he chose not to go it alone, as Vatican I seemed to suggest he could, but to summon bishops from all round the world to work out what was best for a Church that embraces half the world’s Christians. There could hardly be a more dramatic example of ‘democratisation’ than a move from one-man rule to inviting 2500 bishops to meet and decide together. In this sense, Vatican II was a democratic event. Pope John said he was inspired by the Holy Spirit to call the Council. Soon there was talk of the Council as a New Pentecost. The way the first Pentecost is described in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Old Testament prophecy of Joel reads like a democratic event. The Spirit descends on all who are together in one place, and young and old, women and men, are inspired to speak. So too are slaves and slave girls (Acts 2:1– 21, Joel 2:28–9). Vatican II was not quite like that. At first there were no women present, and when, in the final two sessions, some were invited, they were not allowed to speak. Fuller participation is a challenge in any democratic assembly. Vatican II was no exception, but for such a time-bound institution it was an enormous step forward. It became democratic when, with a little encouragement from some strong-minded bishops, the Council began to take responsibility for its own decisions, not just nod to decisions already made. Let a future pope,

78

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Benedict XVI, then one of the periti, or expert advisors, describe the scene in the first few weeks and his own reactions: The preparatory commissions had undoubtedly worked hard [. . .] Their diligence was somewhat distressing. Seventy schema had been produced, enough to fill 2,000 pages of folio size. This was more than double the quantity of texts produced by all previous councils put together. There was a certain discomforting feeling that the whole enterprise might come to nothing more than a mere rubber-stamping of decisions already made, thus impeding rather than fostering the renewal needed in the Catholic Church.16 Cardinal Suenens, as a senior churchman, was able to discuss the problem with the Pope and even make the point that others were voicing, that 80 per cent of these documents were not ‘council material’ and should be rejected.17 They were. The Council fathers composed their own documents. They also insisted on having more time to consider who was best suited to lead the various commissions rather than simply being told what the Curia and others had in mind. Three other ‘events’ that characterised this Council can be briefly mentioned. First, the invitation to other churches to send observers opened up all the discussions at Vatican II to the other half of the ‘Christian world’ that had previously been excluded. Second, the Council became a media event and was widely reported on in the world’s press and broadcasts. Third, with it being such a large assembly, much of the real business was conducted in informal meetings over a cup of coffee in the various bars in and around Vatican City. These were open to all, so much so that one witty Protestant observer, Reformed theologian Robert McAfee Brown, nicknamed one such rendezvous Bar Nun!18

Roman Catholic Theologians and Commentators on Democracy Alexis de Tocqueville (1805– 1859) No serious student can write about democracy without reading Alexis de Toqueville’s classic, Democracy in America. It is a long book, some 800 pages, but even a short summary in another well-known text, Robert Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics, was enough to whet the appetite as Dahl

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

79

at once points to the major approach of my study, the matter of beliefs. In the dialogue between the Advocate for Democracy and its Critic, the Advocate declares: As I mentioned a while ago, democracy couldn’t exist if people didn’t believe in it. In fact, Tocqueville put beliefs, mores, habits as even more important than the Constitution and the laws, because without the support of beliefs, legal systems would become meaningless, as he thought they were in some countries of South America in his time.19 Tocqueville believes in democracy but is less sure about God. Like many of his intellectual contemporaries in post-Revolutionary France he no longer goes to Mass as often as he once did. He has his doubts but retains enough of his Roman Catholic understanding to be a perceptive observer of a new nation founded by Protestants, where most are Protestants and it is rare to find anyone who voices his doubts either about God or about democracy. He is intrigued by the fact that whereas in France, democrats and Christians seem poles apart, in the United States the two are inseparable. So in 1831, the year incidentally before England’s great Reform Bill, he embarks on a nine-month tour of the States, determined to find out why. His two-volume study, De la De´mocratie en Ame´rique, first published in 1835 and 1840, is the result. Isaac Kramnick, in a 2003 edition,20 tells us that every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has quoted it. Hillary Clinton commended it as a model of a caring society. President Trump will certainly have heard of it. There must surely be a copy or two in the White House. One TV network in 1997– 8 devoted sixty-five hours of live programming to retracing Tocqueville’s 7,000mile journey across the States. Presidents might not be so pleased to learn that Tocqueville is now better known than Jefferson, Madison or Abraham Lincoln. American democracy has changed. One fact has not: even in 2016 most Americans would not dream of electing a president who was not some sort of Christian, preferably a Protestant. Alexis de Tocqueville’s book can still explain why.21 Tocqueville has a remarkably balanced appreciation of America’s Puritan founding fathers, even if he sometimes calls them sectarians and fanatics. ‘Puritanism was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine.’22 He later heads a whole chapter, ‘Religion considered as a

80

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

political institution which powerfully supports the maintenance of a democratic republic among Americans’. Most of English America has been peopled by men who, having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy; they brought, therefore, into the New World a form of Christianity which I can only describe as democratic and republican. This fact will be exceptionally favourable to the establishment of democracy and a republic in governing public affairs. From the start, politics and religion were in agreement and they have continued to be so ever since.23 Much to his surprise and evident delight he discovered that Roman Catholics are ‘the most republican and democratic class in the United States’. They bring to the States a strong belief in equality. ‘The priest rises alone above the faithful; beneath him all are equal.’24

Jacques Maritain (1882– 1973) Biographical accounts don’t always tell you what you need to know. Susan Power tells us that Maritain and his wife were once Protestants but converted to Roman Catholicism in early adulthood.25 Was his Reformed Huguenot background influential in his interest in democracy? Or was it, as others have suggested, his bad experience of how even followers of Aquinas accepted the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis in France that prompted him to state the case for Christianity and Democracy in 1943?26 Hitler’s occupation of France had driven him to the United States, though he had earlier taught in Toronto (1933–5), following his professorship in Paris (1914–33). Maritain answers some of our questions in the preface to his short book: ‘This little book was written in the summer of 1942 at a time when the outcome of war could still seem very disquieting.’ Germany’s defeat seemed certain to him even three years before the war ended, but his great anxiety is whether democracy is strong enough to sustain the peace. In one long sentence that takes up almost a whole page he lists among ‘frightful possibilities’: sometimes the fondness (in those who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing) for the false philosophy of life, for the old forms

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

81

of anarchic individualism and the bigoted dread of the Gospel which have spiritually drained the democracies and ruined from within their authentic vital principle. In his native France, but not in America, where he is currently living, Christianity and democracy have been torn apart. The same point had been made by his fellow Frenchman and fellow Roman Catholic, Alexis de Tocqueville, a century earlier in De la De´mocratie en Ame´rique (1835, 1840) – but at much greater length! Maritain wants to bring the two together. He sets out to show that Christianity is not the enemy of democracy but is its vital source and inspiration. ‘This form and this ideal of common life, which we call democracy, springs in its essentials from the inspiration of the Gospel and cannot subsist without it.’ Nor need it. ‘The tremendous historical fund of energy and truth, accumulated for centuries, is still available for human freedom.’ This great ‘heritage of divine and human values which comes from our fathers’ struggle for freedom, from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and from classical antiquity’ is still available. Maritain’s understanding of the American Constitution is worth citing, for, as one critic has noted, he ‘saw in the American Constitution and its historical evolution, a living experiment in precisely the kind of society he had envisioned’.27 In a later work, Reflections on America (1958), he states: The American Constitution is deep rooted in the age-old heritage of Christian thought and civilization. The Founding Fathers were neither metaphysicians nor theologians, but their philosophy of life, and their political philosophy, their notion of natural law and of human rights were permeated with concepts worked out by Christian reason and backed up by an unshakeable religious feeling.28 What he describes in Christianity and Democracy as ‘the inspiration of the Gospel’ affirms the ‘dignity of people and the common man’. It affects the way rulers exercise authority without denying people their freedom since authority is ‘exercised by virtue of the consent of the governed’. It binds conscience because authority comes from God, not just from rulers. Only ‘evangelical inspiration’ supplies ‘a stronger and more

82

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

universal love [that] overflows the bounds of the social group to extend to the entire human race’.29 At this point, Maritain cites Henri Bergson’s, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. This book was first published in 1932. Already by the time of its English translation in 1935, it had gone through sixteen editions. It was still being published at Geneva in 1945, in New York in 1956 and at Notre Dame University in 1977, so is clearly a bestseller. The text is worth citing more fully to put Maritian’s quotations in context. Bergson in a final chapter contrasts ‘The Closed Society and the Open Society’. Democracy is only a later, more recent development because it does not happen naturally: ‘Of all the political systems, it is indeed the furthest removed from nature, the only one to transcend, at least in intention, the conditions of the closed society. It confers on man inviolable rights.’ It does not come easily because democracy ‘proclaims liberty, demands equality, and reconciles these two hostile sisters by reminding them that they are sisters, and by exalting above everything, fraternity’. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are the best-known slogans of the French Revolution of 1789. Bergson’s next statements are those cited by Maritain: the essential thing is fraternity, a fact which makes it possible to say that democracy is evangelical in essence and that its motive power is love [. . .] Its sentimental energies could be found in the soul of Rousseau, its philosophical principles in the works of Kant, its religious basis is both in Kant and Rousseau. We know how much Kant owed to Pietism and Rousseau to the interplay of Protestantism and Catholicism.30 The reference to Rousseau and Kant is so clever and so subtle that we may miss the point. Rousseau and Kant could easily be claimed by those who wished to argue that the development of democracy owes everything to the French Revolution and Enlightenment, and nothing to the gospel. Bergson makes two other points about democracy that Maritain does not quote but would no doubt accept. Democracy is an ideal. It is also a protest. ‘Every sentence of the (American) Declaration of Independence is a challenge to some abuse.’ And he adds, what we may find a reassuring comment, that it is not easy to gather from democratic precepts positive indications of what is to be done.31

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

83

Maritain is often quoted, but not always with approval. I shall show later that another Roman Catholic theologian, William Cavanaugh, in Torture and the Eucharist, blames Maritain’s theology for enabling Christian leaders and statesmen to collude with torture and oppression in Chile and other Latin American countries. Here, despite his strong claims that democracy needs the gospel, Maritain is not convinced that every Christian needs to be a democrat. Christianity and Christian faith cannot be made subservient to democracy or to any political form whatsoever. This, he claims, is ‘because of the distinction introduced by Christ between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s [. . .] One can be a Christian and achieve one’s salvation while militating in favour of any political regime, whatsoever, always on condition that it does not trespass against natural law and the law of God.’32 On this argument, a benign dictatorship could be just as acceptable as a Christian democracy. Could it? John Cooper in his study of Niebuhr and Maritain reports that in the turbulent years of World War II these two great thinkers often met and discussed the politics of the time. Maritain was a professor at Princeton (1948– 52) and Niebuhr at Union (1928– 60). Sadly, little has been recorded of their pioneering Catholic –Protestant dialogue apart from some astute observations by Niebuhr in reviews of some of Maritain’s books. Commenting on True Humanism (1939), Niebuhr felt that Maritain was finding it impossible to reconcile ‘Catholic authoritarian presuppositions’ with his own support for a democratic society. ‘It cannot be said that he solves this conflict very satisfactorily.’33 But it should also be noted that Maritain’s support for human rights made him one of the key proponents, along with other Christians, of the United Nations Declaration in 1948. John Nurser, an Anglican theologian, applauds his contribution; ‘His short book, Droits de l’Homme, published in 1942 was a powerful manifesto in the cause of principled resistance to fascism.’ His emphasis on human dignity, the concept that was explored further at Vatican II, offered a resource for ‘easier recognition across the boundaries of world faiths’.34 Nurser also notes that some Protestants were surprised to find Roman Catholics like Maritain defending liberty, and observed that ‘while these Catholics were exemplary in their defence of democracy in politics, they failed the challenge of democracy in church life’,35 the very point that Niebuhr had made in 1939.

84

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Leonardo Boff (1938–) Church, Charism and Power: Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church (1981)36 was the book that got the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff into trouble with the Vatican.37 Reading it again, thirty years after it was published in English in 1985, one can see why. Even in a very different context, with a pope from Latin America of whom Boff thoroughly approves,38 and a wider discussion of ‘democratisation in the Church’ that was still a novelty in the decade after Vatican II, and even after the excitement and controversy about Liberation Theology have cooled down, it still makes explosive reading. It is far more radical than much that has been written since. Here are just a few points to explain why. The base ecclesial community is also the place where a true democracy of the people is practiced, where everything is discussed and decided together, where critical thought is encouraged. For a people who have been oppressed for centuries, whose ‘say’ has always been denied, the simple fact of having a say is the first stage in taking control and shaping their own destiny. The communidad de base thus transcends its religious meaning and takes on a highly political one.39 More recent studies of democracy in Brazil, such as that by a South African scholar, Iain S. Maclean, argue that these base communities had less impact on democracy in national politics than their advocates assumed.40 Even so, we need to remember that Boff was writing when Brazil was still a military dictatorship, when many people, as we learned from the World Council of Churches when its Assembly was held in Porto Alegre in 2006, were tortured for the slightest dissent. Sadly, Brazil is again going through turbulent times, but that is partly because it has become more democratic and can protest against its leaders when they are suspected of corruption. And let us not forget that some of its leaders are women, something Boff hoped for in the Church: ‘Discrimination against women in the Church is one of the most clear examples of the violation of human rights.’41 Boff loved the way the much-loved Pope Francis, on his visit to Brazil, gave President Dilmma Rouseff a papal kiss!42 The authorities seemed shocked! Boff’s own attitude to women is commended by Sonia Alvarez

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

85

in her Engendering Democracy in Brazil,43 in contrast to the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil, which still thought of women primarily as wives and mothers. However, a conference Boff may have attended in Nicaragua in 1973 saw the Virgin Mary as the first revolutionary mother. They must have been studying her Magnificat, not just singing it (Luke 1: 46 – 55)! As one might anticipate from its title, Church, Charism and Power has some incisive comments on power. My favourite is his critique of Rome’s typical authoritarianism: This type of power has resulted in a wide range of pathological social manifestations, studied by psychology and sociology, such as the lack of creative imagination, of dialogue, of a critical spirit, and an increase of appeals to obedience, submission, renunciation, humility, carrying the cross, discipline, order – values certainly found in the gospels but practiced in such a way as to justify the established powers and in slavish defence of them.44 Nor is Boff afraid to target his criticisms – and not just his, but those of the Latin American Congress of bishops at Puebla (1979) and earlier – at the 1971 Synod of Bishops’ Report, Justice in the World, which noted: ‘the laity act on their own initiative, without involving the ecclesiastical hierarchy in their decisions’. Boff supports these laity. He knows that too often the most laity or clergy can hope for is to be consulted. Vatican II’s promise of greater collegiality had so far resulted in synods that were purely consultative, not decision-making bodies. Nothing daunted by his own tussles with the Doctrine of the Faith under the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, and challenged by the grave scandals at the Vatican Bank and of sexual abuse by the clergy, Boff uses his little book on Pope Francis to keep pleading for reform: For as long as this power does not decentralize and give all sectors of the people of God, both men and women, a greater share in the management of the church’s affairs, the tumor, which Pope Francis called ‘leprosy’ will remain. From the time of the Reformation, we have heard the cry: ‘Reform of head and members’. As this did not happen, the Reformation arose as a desperate bid by the reformers to bring it about of their own accord.45

86

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

William T. Cavanaugh (1962– ) Most can recognise that torture is an ethical issue, few that it is also a matter for ecclesiology. None has made the point more forcibly than William Cavanaugh, director and professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University, USA in his study of Chile under Pinochet, Torture and the Eucharist (1998),46 and his essay ‘Torture and Eucharist, a Regretful Update’, in the book edited by the Reformed theologian and expert on Barth, George Hunsinger, Torture is a Moral Issue (2008). There he says that as well as the State: We must look to other types of social bodies to promote the dignity of the human person. My own work as a Christian theologian deals with the nature of the church as an alternative social body. Unfortunately, the Chilean church’s resistance to state discipline was initially sapped by its own ecclesiology [. . .] The church saw itself not so much as a body in its own right but as the ‘soul of society’, effectively handing the bodies of Christians over to the state. When the state began to torture these bodies, the church was at first at a loss to respond, having already ‘disappeared’ itself through its own ecclesiology.47 The theologian most to blame for such an ecclesiology is, in his view, Jacques Maritain. Maritain visited Chile in 1936–8 and said later, in 1966, that Chile was the only place where his ideas had taken root. Had he lived a little longer, he would surely find that thought deeply troubling. He died in 1973, the year the cruel reign of General Augusto Pinochet began (1973– 90). How could a well-meaning theologian be so terribly misunderstood? Cavanaugh seeks to answer that question: Maritain is remarkably sanguine about the desacralisation of the modern state which he sees as the honoured heir of the Christian era instead of its undertaker. While rightly applauding the extrication of the church from entanglement with coercive state power, Maritain seems unable to contemplate the possibility that the modern distinctions of temporal and spiritual, body and soul, have also served to subjugate the church by creating a sphere of purely temporal power which is by definition the property of the state alone.48

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

87

It is here that we come to the difficulty the Church in Chile and elsewhere faces in opposing dictatorships. Maritain, like the popes of his era, was ambivalent about democracy. Cavanaugh cites Maritain as saying that Roman Catholics can support any political party that is not condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. The point had earlier been made by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Deo 1885. In a more recent work, Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement with a Wounded World (2016),49 Cavanaugh develops some of his own views on democracy. But first, more on his criticisms of Maritain. Cavanaugh is puzzled that a fellow Roman Catholic like Maritain hankers after ‘a democratic secular faith’. He understands his reasons: the attempt to find common ground among peoples of different faiths and ideologies through a common belief in human rights, freedom, human dignity and so on. He notes that Maritain was aware that democracy rests on Christian foundations, even if many people no longer recognise this. And though he has great respect for Maritain’s personal faith and holiness, he is surprised that ‘for all Maritain’s undoubted personal devotion, Jesus makes only cameo appearances in his political works’.50 He is also critical of the ways in which Maritain interprets some well-known biblical texts. Jesus did not say ‘My Kingdom is not in this world’ (John 18.36). He is better translated as saying, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, meaning that his own kingly authority, unlike Caesar’s and Pilate’s, comes from God. As for that other ‘political text’, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’, it is, says Cavanaugh, a great mistake to assume with Maritain that his own distinctions of religion and politics can be read back into New Testament times and an argument about a Roman coin (Mark 12:17). My own explanation is simpler and I hope more convincing. Jesus could not possibly mean that God and Caesar divide up the world between them as though two equal partners. Everything belongs to God. Caesar is only God’s steward, or as Paul would say in that other great political text, Romans 13, one of ‘God’s agents working for your good’ (Romans 13:4). In his later work, a set of essays compiled under the heading Field Hospital, Cavanaugh finds support and inspiration from another French theologian, Henri de Lubac. Lubac has a much more corporate understanding of the Eucharist. In the early tradition, ‘it is the mystery of unity, a social action binding people to one another’. ‘For de Lubac, this was more than history. He thought that the inability of many

88

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Catholics to resist the fascism of the Vichy regime was based on the individualism of their sacramental piety. De Lubac’s politically aware theology was situated against both the collectivist fascisms and the secular individualisms of his age.’51 One could add, though Cavanaugh does not, that such ‘secular individualism’ can be seen in some understandings of democracy that focus only on individual wishes, not on a corporate search for the common good.52 De Lubac’s political engagements were also ecumenical. He and his Reformed colleague Marc Boegner cooperated in saving the lives of persecuted Jews in Nazioccupied France. Catholics and Protestants served in a costly struggle against tyranny but, for reasons that still seem obscure, could not share the Eucharist together as fellow members of the Body of Christ. In a separate section, I shall outline Cavanaugh’s comments on subsidiarity. Elsewhere in the same volume, he engages with various contemporary discussions of democracy, for example, Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision (2004). He shares the desire for a fuller engagement in democratic decision making than just turning up at a polling booth. In Wolin’s words, ‘The citizen is shrunk to the voter: periodically courted, warned and confused but otherwise kept at a distance from actual decision-making and allowed to emerge only ephemerally in a cameo appearance according to a script composed by the opinion takers/ makers.’ One response for Cavanaugh, as for Wolin, is that the ‘passivity and resignation of the citizenry can be overcome by creating spaces where real deliberation and discernment can take place, where people meet each other, face to face, and cooperate on common projects’.53 What is still missing is a conviction that the local church can also be such a place where serious discussion and decision making take place. The nearest he gets is in his final chapter, discussing Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. His title longs for this when Cavanaugh expresses his hope for the day when the people of the Church, ‘the body of Christ, become not an army inflicting wounds but a field hospital binding them up’.54

Elisabeth Schu¨ssler Fiorenza (1938–) Born in Romania to German parents and living for a time in that most traditional of German Roman Catholic regions, Bavaria, Elisabeth Schu¨ssler Fiorenza had to ask her bishop’s permission to study theology. He replied: ‘Elisabeth, I don’t really think you should work for the

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

89

church because you see its wounds.’ Her response won his assent: ‘Your Excellency, if I thought the patient was dead, I would bury him with all the love I have, but as long as there is a chance for survival, I think you need to operate.’55 Thanks to women operating like her, the Church of Rome is very much alive. And kicking! More than half the people in any congregation are women and some of them kick against St Paul’s injunction to keep silent in the Church or in the wider community. Schu¨ssler Fiorenza is one. She has much to offer. She is probably best known for A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins: In Memory of Her (1983), about the woman in the Gospels that Christ said would always be remembered even though the men who wrote the Gospels forgot her name! Many of her writings deal more directly with democracy in the Church and in society. Her doctorate was on the priesthood of all believers and published in German as Priester fu¨r Gott (1972). A more recent set of essays has a democratic title, Discipleship of Equals (1993). Its last essay, ‘A Democratic Vision for a Different Society and Church’, offers in its twenty pages an incisive challenge to all the patriarchal assumptions that still cloud this vision. Here are some of her key points.56 If, as is often stated, Western democracy began in fifth-century-BC Athens, it cannot serve the oppressed unless it moves on from being a power structure dominated by elite white men. Elizabeth Schu¨ssler Fiorenza sets out to ‘explore here how a critical feminist theology of liberation can contribute to an ethos and imagination that foster a radical democratic religious vision’. The context in which she does such theology is that of ‘radical democratic movements around the globe that struggle for the liberation and well-being of all’ but do so selfconsciously as ‘feminist/womanist or mujerista’ for only then can they bring about ‘a different future for society and church’.57 Not least impressive about her essay is her readiness to learn from this global context. She pays tribute to Benazir Bhutto who, in an address at Harvard in 1989, said that democracy was ‘the most powerful political idea in the world today’. Bhutto saw her own role as a former prime minister of Pakistan as proof that a Muslim country can be democratic: ‘Islamic religion and its strong democratic ethos, have inspired and provided sustenance to democratic struggles, faith in the righteousness of just causes, faith in the Islamic teaching “that tyranny cannot long endure”.’ And as a teacher at Harvard, she reminds Americans how much

90

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

can be learned from native peoples who discovered America long before Columbus. She cites a Native American feminist, Paula Gunn Allen: ‘The root of oppression is the loss of memory.’ We have forgotten people like the Iroquois confederacy and its Council of Matrons, ‘the vision of the Grandmothers’ society’. Even Columbus must have marvelled at the natives’ free and easy egalitarianism. Or, one might speculate, found it too subversive of European patriarchal norms.58 She goes on to appeal to her fellow Christians not to abandon truth claims but to ‘search through biblical texts, Christian traditions, and institutional practices for religious visions that foster equality, justice and the logic of the ekklesia rather than that of patriarchal domination’.59

Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936– ) Rosemary Radford Ruether is best known for her Sexism and God Talk but is also co-editor of a volume of Roman Catholic essays, A Democratic Catholic Church: The Reconstruction of Catholicism60 (1992). In her own chapter in that volume she welcomes the fact that by the 1960s Roman Catholics in the USA were feeling less marginalised thanks to the election of the first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. In the same decade, Vatican II encouraged a new openness to the world. ‘For many Roman Catholics this meant a fundamental shift from an authoritarian model of truth, dictated from above, to the notion that truth is something that people search for together in a process that is never final and perfect.’ But there have been some disappointments. The Catholic Assembly in Detroit in 1976 came up with a number of radical suggestions including an end to compulsory celibacy for priests, greater participation by women and the acceptance of birth control. The bishops rejected them. Partly in response, women have opted to do what they can on their own, acting as Women Church. Here they encourage greater participation by all present and reach decisions by consensus. Instead of waiting for the hierarchy and institutional church to reform, Ruether calls on her Roman Catholic sisters to become a living embodiment of transformation and set an example for others, that is, the male-dominated Church, to follow. Her more recent book delivers a strong challenge even in its title, Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican: A Vision for Progressive Catholicism.61 Here she develops some of the ideas about Women Church and ‘A Discipleship of Equals’ previously indicated but also draws on

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

91

the wealth of her own ecumenical commitments and experience. She is highly critical of clerical domination and, in an ‘Epilogue’, dares to ask the question: ‘Can Men be Ordained?’ The Holy Mothers who are gathered in Rome to make their decision think the very suggestion is almost laughable! It is a very powerful parody of arguments devout and loyal Roman Catholics like herself have heard so often. She even quotes the familiar conclusion: Roma Locuta, Causa Finita. Rome has spoken, the matter is finished, there is nothing more to discuss. Of course there is, and she knows there is!

John Courtney Murray (1903– 1967) The Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray was born in New York and died in New York. Like many more progressive thinkers of his generation, he was at one stage (c. 1954) censored by the Vatican for socalled erroneous views on human freedom, but he lived long enough to be reinstated and become one of the most renowned experts, or periti, at the Second Vatican Council. Its groundbreaking document on human dignity and human rights shows the strong influence he had on the American bishops in strenuous debates on this issue. Rome had previously said that ‘error has no rights’. At Vatican II, Rome was in listening mode, even to a Jesuit it had once dismissed as wrong. Few of his essays are directly related to ‘democracy’, but, insofar as democracy is also an expression of human freedom and human worth, Murray ranks as a key Roman Catholic theologian for this study. He also has some incisive things to say about how democracy in America, which Tocqueville once raved about, has since been corrupted by a secular humanism that has no place for God in public debates. In a scholarly article on Leo XIII and Pius XII, Murray is much kinder to both these popes than I have been. This is because, instead of treating their encyclicals as timeless truths, as even non-Roman Catholics like myself are inclined to do, he puts both popes’ concerns in context. Pope Leo is engaged in a struggle in post-Revolutionary France with liberals who are out to undermine any concept of a Christian, or especially Roman Catholic, society. Religion, any religion, can exist provided it is only a private matter. In a democracy the people are sovereign and the individual conscience recognises no ‘law higher than its own subjective imperatives’. The ‘companion dogma’ was of ‘government as subject to no law, higher than the will, itself lawless, of

92

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

the sovereign people’. Or, as Pope Leo said in Immortale Dei, the sovereign people is ‘a master whose power knows no limits’.62 Murray agrees with the Pope that society, no less than the individual, is subject to the law of God, the State is part of the moral universe and so also subject to the law of God, and society is part of the present Christian economy and subject to the law of Christ. The same pope, much to Murray’s obvious delight, went on to acknowledge how grateful Catholics must be for the way they are treated in America. America is an example of a good constitutional commonwealth. But Leo warns against the assumption that what works well in the United States can readily be copied elsewhere. (America, as a ‘new country’, offered opportunities for democracy and freedom of religion that old Europe could not match, as Alexis de Tocqueville had been at pains to explain at length in Democracy in America.) A century later, the fact that a Roman Catholic minority enjoyed freedom of religion in a predominantly Protestant country made it harder for American bishops to deny to others the freedom they themselves enjoyed. By the time of Vatican II (1962– 5), the people of America had even elected their first Roman Catholic president. Tragically, it was during debates on this document that the Council heard that J.F.K. had been shot. The American Reformed theologian Robert McAfee Brown was in Rome at the time. Brown was an official observer. He tells us how important Murray’s insights were becoming. In the traditional view, ‘The Catholic Church alone is entitled to preach, teach and evangelise, so the Catholic Church can even call on the arm of the state to protect its right to full freedom and to deny full freedom to everyone else.’ This, he explains, was an issue on which the non-Roman Catholic ‘observers had to close ranks. It was our issue.’ And he goes on to add this lovely tribute to: John Courtney Murray SJ, an American Jesuit, who was writing about this issue of religious liberty long before the council convened. His ideas were rejected by Rome as too avant-garde, and for years he was forbidden to write or speak on the topic. He somehow got to Rome and became the resource person on religious liberty for the entire council. Not only was Father Murray the author of most of the final text, but on the last day of the council, when the pope chose a number of periti to concelebrate

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

93

mass with him, Father Murray was one of the chosen. Not everybody experiences total rehabilitation in his lifetime, and all of us who were Americans and had worked behind the scenes with him had special reason to celebrate.63 What Murray appreciates in Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII is also very relevant today. Leo had challenged the notion that the will of the people is above any law – a view also championed by much of the British media and even Members of Parliament in response to the British people’s decision in the referendum to leave the European Union. Judges who said that Parliament, not the people, is sovereign were denounced as ‘enemies of the people’. Murray would no doubt surprise many of his Protestant colleagues with the claim that what America’s Protestant founding fathers believed and expressed in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence was good catholic doctrine, untroubled by the later heresies of the French Revolution. As he said in an article in 1953 about Leo XIII and Church and State: It may be remarked here that the famous American phrase ‘We the people. . .’ is the very negation of Jacobinism. The American concept of ‘government by the people’ does not attribute to the people the divinity implied in the Revolutionary idea of ‘the sovereignty of the people’; it simply embodies the ancient principle of consent in a developed and still recognisable Christian sense.64 Pius XII would have raised another issue overlooked in our British debates and emphasised by Murray: ‘The autonomy of the individual state is, of course, relative [. . .] The political limitation derives from the fact that the international community exists (at least inchoately) and that its common good is the higher good.’ Individual states have ‘an obligatory concern for the higher good of the broader community’.65 In all our canvassing about the British people ‘getting back control’ we heard very little about the needs for the peace and wellbeing of the European Union and whether our exit or Brexit would help or hinder the peace that Pius XII and Catholic statesmen like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi had struggled to achieve and sustain after two world wars.66

94

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Murray’s later essay ‘The Problem of Religious Freedom’ (1964)67 demonstrates how tactful and diplomatic he could be. For him and his American episcopal colleagues, religious freedom was not a problem. As he says in this essay, ‘Religious freedom has been an integral part of the Catholic experience in the United States’, but he is well aware that this is not the case in Roman Catholic countries like Spain. He is also aware, but does not complain, that the Council Fathers are now seeking his advice precisely because they found the issue so difficult. Before the final document, Dignitatis Humanae, was approved in the last month of the Council, December 1965, it had gone through five successive drafts. Murray was particularly involved with the third and fourth editions. He cheerfully accepted that though ‘serious differences of opinion presently exist’ there was a general consensus that the Council must tackle the subject. To do so, the Council Fathers would need to rise above ‘any sort of apologetic complex and to approach the problem in the spirit of genuine theological inquiry’ – good advice, surely for any theological debate in any Church council. What is also refreshing in Murray is his willingness to disagree, where necessary, with hierarchical authority. Much to the annoyance of Pope Paul VI, he supported the Majority Report on Birth Control which advocated a change of official policy. He is also critical of one of the Council documents, Gaudium et Spes, which was in his view far too eager to claim credit for advancing human rights when in fact for most of the past two centuries the Roman Catholic Church had been their opponent. The Church – the hierarchy and the Holy See, did nothing to advance the struggle for the political rights of man in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – those rights notably of free speech, which safeguard the person against the encroachments of the state and also secure for citizens a share in the processes of government. Only rather late – with Rerum Novarum in 1891 – did the papacy enter the battle for the socio-economic rights of man. He described ‘the discourse of Gaudium et Spes on the life of the political community as uninspired and inadequate’ not least because there was no mention of the basic principle of the consent of the governed which had been a key issue since the days of Aristotle and Cicero. Murray knew of

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

95

course, and says so in this essay, published a year after the Council ended, that ‘Church and State’68 or, as he would have preferred, ‘Religion and Government’ was another of those issues that the Council either did not have time to discuss or could not cope with. Some years before the Council, Murray expressed his own concerns about how the American Constitution’s initial concern to protect freedom of religion had now been inverted by making no-religion the political norm and how democracy itself had lost its roots and was too often regarded just as a method for securing a decision that the majority agreed with, regardless of whether that decision might be said to be good or bad, right or wrong. At the time of writing, some of his comments certainly resonate with my ‘Brexit’ dilemmas, which is why I repeat them here. I have been helped in this process by a careful study by an American Roman Catholic scholar, Robert W. McElroy, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray.69 Americans, said Murray in 1951, fall down and worship democracy: Democracy was conceived to be man’s servant; but now it is becoming his idol. And we know that it is the fate of those who worship idols that they should be enslaved by what they worship. Democracy, once a political, social idea, now pretends to be a religion.70 In an essay a few years later, he is critical of the emphasis on method: To reduce the entire substance of democracy to a matter of method of doing things, independently of any judgment on the rightness or value of what is done, is to abandon the public philosophy and the political tradition which launched our republic.71 McElroy adds his own gloss on this point. He writes of ‘a narrow proceduralism, which evaluated political actions not upon the basis of right and wrong, but upon the momentary wishes of the majority’. In the British Brexit debates we are repeatedly told that the British people want to leave the European Union because in the referendum in June 2016, 52 per cent said they did. The vote is what counts, not the arguments and merits of the decision. Murray rejects what he calls ‘political monism’ where ‘all the issues of life’ can be resolved by a majority vote.72

96

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Later Murray would have to admit that even the great Second Vatican Council, which he was invited to advise, reached its decisions by majority votes. But he could also note key differences. Those making the decisions were all bishops and might be regarded as more qualified to do so than Roman Catholics in general, though this too is worth debating. Second, the Council aspired to unanimity and insisted on a minimum of a two-thirds majority plus the pope’s approval, and the Pope on a few occasions insisted on altering some documents or expressing his own convictions in a separate document. The Pope said that Mary is ‘Mother of the Church’. The Council was not sure and Congar wondered what it meant. Some issues were deliberately kept off the agenda and so never voted on. Examples included the ordination of women, priestly celibacy and family planning. Murray also listed, as we have seen, any major discussion of Church and State. Nor should we overlook that a Council of 2500 bishops took the equivalent of four university terms to reach its decisions and that some controversial documents like that on human rights had to be redrafted five times. Before a final vote on it was taken, Murray was invited to give a lecture explaining some of his own convictions about religious freedom. There was also detailed discussion about the terms of the resolution to be voted on, nothing as simple as a yes/no decision about leaving the European Union. In the end, and it was almost at the end of the Council, the vote was clear and ‘surpassed all expectations and was greeted with warm applause’. A total of 1997 voted for, 224 against, that is to say, about 90 per cent were in favour, 10 per cent against.73 There is one other distinctive feature of the whole process. Councils and their documents do not automatically carry conviction. They have to be ‘received’. In the case of the Council of Trent some of the bishops in France took their time before they accepted that Trent was ecumenical and authoritative. If a council was not really representative, its decisions could easily be ignored by those who felt left out. This was one reason why the Council of Florence in 1438/9 failed to be a Council of Unity between East and West.74 As to the wider Roman Catholic and ecumenical debate that the Council stimulated, it is worth noting that Karl Barth was highly critical of Gaudium et spes, for being far too optimistic about human progress, much more so than the apostle Paul, and that Yves Congar, Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas and some French bishops were quite critical of Dignitatis Humanae. All this is very healthy, for it is often

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

97

pointed out that Council documents are not definitive dogma bur are provisional resolutions on matters that require further, and I would add greater ecumenical, debate and decision.

A More Democratic Roman Catholic Church? John Courtney Murray supported democracy in America provided democrats honoured their religious roots, but did not agree that the Roman Catholic Church should be more democratic. The Church is distinctive, not a voluntary society or just like any other organisation.75 Methodist theologian John Wesley Cooper, comparing Jacques Maritain with Reinhold Niebuhr, wonders how Maritain, a theologian from such an autocratic church, could convince others that they ought to more democratic. Why is democracy good for society but bad for the Church?76 Emile Perreau-Saussine in Catholicism and Democracy supplies one simple explanation: for the Church all power is given to her by Jesus Christ and its authority is derived from God Himself. ‘The Catholic Church enshrines a non-democratic principle insofar as it is organised around an apostolic hierarchy based on divine right.’77 As has already become apparent from our study of various writers, Roman Catholic and Reformed, democracy is capable of more than one meaning. It need not mean that ‘the people’ are sovereign and a law to themselves or that the majority is always right. Understood in this way, most Christians would surely agree with the title of a Roman Catholic study, The Tabu of Democracy within the Church. But hopefully the book’s various authors can persuade us that there is a case to be made for ‘a more democratised Church’. This is also the argument in a more recent study by Luca Badini Confalonieri, who, with his supervisor Professor Paul Murray, helped to organise the International Colloquium on ‘Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning’ at Ushaw College, the University of Durham, England, in 2006. He was then completing a thesis, subsequently published as Democracy in the Christian Church: An Historical Theological and Political Case (2012). James Provost, Professor of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America, and his co-editor Knut Walf, writing in 1992, admit the question of democracy in the Church is not new but observe that it has rarely been examined in depth. Badini Confalonieri cites a whole host of historical examples to make the same point. He refers to an earlier study

98

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

by Antonio Rosmini, The Five Wounds of the Church (1848), pleading for a more collegial style of Church government in his project for reform of the Church in Milan. Collegiality became an issue at Vatican II. So did ‘Co-Responsibility’, the phrase associated with Cardinal Suenens of Belgium, one of the lead bishops at Vatican II. In his own diocese, Malines, he reorganised a Pastoral Council, much to the surprise of a Belgian journalist reporting the event. ‘Archbishop Suenens at Malines does not at all act as a potentate. When a pastoral council was recently constituted in Brussels, all the members were freely elected.’78 In the following section I shall search through books by such Roman Catholic authors who are clearly committed to what two authors and editors describe as The Reconstruction of Roman Catholicism for A Democratic Catholic Church,79 looking for answers to the various key questions Catholics are now facing. I shall begin with the reasons they offer as to why being more democratic is a great benefit, before then noting the obstacles they face from those who insist that Catholic Church structures are exactly what the good Lord intended when he said to Peter, ‘On this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16:18).

Roman Catholic Arguments for a More Democratic Church What touches all should be approved by all/quod omnes tangit debet ab omnibus approbari This precept of Roman law was early adopted by the Church. It was quoted by Yves Congar in his pioneering study Lay People in the Church (1956),80 Badini Confalonieri in 2012 and by Francis Oakley and others in their conference papers on Governance, Accountability and the Future of the Roman Catholic Church (2004). In the last instance, its relevance was most obvious. The Conference at the Yale Law School in 2003 was partly prompted by the the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘worst ever’ sexual abuse scandal, as well as by a willingness on the part of most but not all of the participants to challenge the fact that their Church is now more centralised than it has ever been and too many decisions are made in Rome. Even if only some people were directly affected by abusive clergy, the damage done to the Church through the betrayal of the trust placed in the clergy and other public figures concerns us all. In this case ‘all of us’ does not just mean Roman Catholics. Most Christian traditions have had experience of cases of such abuse and so has the wider society.

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

99

Congar offered his own interpretation, which is important for its corporate emphasis: ‘Whatever affects everybody ought to be corporately approved by everybody.’ Much to Congar’s surprise, the principle was first invoked, not, as one might assume, by the conciliarists but by two very authoritarian popes, Innocent III and Boniface VIII, affirming that the Church as a whole is the society of the faithful, Societas fidelium. In modern and more genial expressions, quod omnes tangit could be taken as saying ‘because we are the Church, we ought to approve what the Church does’. Approving is not the same as deciding. Others may decide what the Church ought to do or say but we, the faithful, should be happy about the decision. Brian Tierney adds this explanation: ‘By reinterpreting some key texts of Roman law, the canonists had devised a legal language for the eliciting of consent and the authorization of representatives and had applied it to church institutions.’ He also notes that secular rulers used the same text for their own purposes and gives the example of an English writ as a reason for summoning Parliament in 1295.81 How and when to apply such a general principle is, of course, another matter. Hans Ku¨ng, with the support of his Reformed friend Karl Barth, argued in the 1960s that the people of Basle should retain their ancient right to approve the appointment of the Bishop of Basle. In his Memoirs, Ku¨ng explains: ‘The free election of Swiss bishops by the cathedral chapter, which Rome has only to confirm, unique in the Catholic world, has long been a thorn in the flesh of the Roman Curia; it does not fit Rome’s picture of a centrally led church.’ His concern is that the Curia are acting like the Kremlin and are seeking to control the selection and appointment of bishops all over the world. He appeals to ‘the age-old political traditions of a free country’ whereby ‘our bishop is democratically elected by chosen representatives of the clergy, who know our people and their needs from the inside’. Even better is the practice of the early Church where bishops were chosen by both clergy and people. With the strong support of ‘Basle’s most famous citizen, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth’, the people of Basle have bishops for Basle chosen by some people in Basle. But the election of Kurt Koch in 1996 does not work so well. For some reason Rome dithers for six months before approving the appointment and Koch himself becomes over-anxious to conform with Rome’s wishes. As bishop he defends every single Roman position, including that of Opus Dei.

100

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Ten years later, it has to be reported, says Ku¨ng, there is ‘a deep gulf between bishop and people’, the very thing that local elections might be expected to prevent.82 At the time, Hans Ku¨ng, who is always very thorough in his research, did not have access to an Oxford thesis by Peter Norton, Episcopal Elections, 250–600: Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity.83 The book is quoted by Badini Confalonieri in his case for democracy in the Christian Church. Such historical evidence supports Ku¨ng’s campaign, but also his opponents’. Norton shows that elections of bishops sometimes became violent and troops had to be called in. But then this has been the case with early British elections, especially before the secret ballot, and is still the case with mass protests like those in Rotterdam, Ankara and Barcelona. Good bishops were key people not just in the Church but in the wider community and so, in a sense, worth campaigning for. People preferred bishops they knew to those imposed on them from other cities and were perfectly capable of showing their disapproval as well as their support. Hence despite the difficulties, no one suggested at the time that the people be deprived of any say in the appointment of their shepherds. Hans Ku¨ng would also know of lots of current examples where a strong-minded pope like John Paul II was imposing bishops who agreed with him against the wishes of more radically minded clergy and people in the Netherlands or South America. The Brazilian Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff carries the argument one step further when he declares: ‘It is not unthinkable that representatives of the people of God, from cardinals to women, should be invited to elect a pope for the whole of the Christian world.’84 The current system where a previous pope selects all or most of the cardinals who then elect his successor is hard to defend even when, much to Boff’s delight, it providentially manages to produce a true heir of St Francis, Pope Francis. But in the meantime, Boff, like Pope Francis, settles for a reform of the Curia. That is not going to be easy. Boff longs for the day when Rome is decentralised and different departments of the Vatican are relocated in different centres, one of them in Calvin’s Geneva which has become, partly because of Calvin’s influence, such an international centre for the World Council of Churches, the Red Cross and various departments of the United Nations Organisation. Rightly or wrongly, most Roman Catholics may not feel unduly troubled about how their bishops are appointed. They are more likely to

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

101

care about papal teaching on contraception. Many, perhaps most, Roman Catholics do not approve of what is said in Humanae Vitae and so its teaching is quietly ignored and there is nothing Rome can do about it except repeat arguments that many married couples find unconvincing and impracticable. This created at the time a crisis of authority for which Pope Paul VI must take the blame.85 He should have known that ‘what touches all, should be approved by all’. And as Paul VI’s biographer, the former priest and then married journalist Peter Hebblethwaite noted: ‘As a question for married Catholics it was resolved by the primacy of conscience. John Henry Newman’s famous toast was much quoted: “I drink to the Pope, but to conscience first”’86 even if Newman was once again being misunderstood. In actual fact, a much more serious study led by the Catholic moral theologian Charles Curran, Contraception, Authority and Dissent, argues much more convincingly that if you think a decision is wrong, it can be right to say so.87

The faithful are faithful and therefore to be trusted and consulted in matters of faith This was the famous argument advanced by John Henry Newman in an article in 1859, which was reprinted in 1961, in time for the Second Vatican Council, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine. Published at a time when Rome had a very autocratic pope, Pius IX, and some very conservative bishops, it naturally got Newman into a good deal of trouble, from which, some say, he never fully recovered. He often looked worn out and drawn and at one stage was urged to rest. Twenty years later, a more liberal pope, Leo XIII, made him a cardinal and so gave him the Church’s official blessing. He was further vindicated by all who see Vatican II as attempting to carry out many of his ‘reforms’. There are frequent references to Newman in The History of Vatican II, including a cryptic note about debates on the liturgy: ‘It was as though, after a century, John Henry Newman finally had his “revenge”!’88 In another session, Bishop Shehan of Baltimore quoted Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: ‘a power of development is a proof of life’. He was praising the way the Church had progressed both in doctrine and in structures.89 Newman’s essay on Consulting the Faithful was easily misunderstood by any not in sympathy with what he was trying to say, including those who might mistranslate his Latin. Newman tried to explain that in Latin

102

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

any word beginning with con implies doing something with others and so can suggest the idea of taking counsel together. English is less precise. In English we consult a watch in order to find out the time. More profoundly, he appealed to the fact that Pope Pius had already consulted the faithful to find out what they thought about making the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary a dogmatic declaration. This was not inviting the faithful to frame a dogma. It was a fact-finding exercise to discover what they already believed and why such a belief was important for their devotional life. Pius IX, in his encyclical Ubi Primum (1849), asked the bishops to ‘apprise Us concerning the devotion which animates your clergy and your people regarding the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ and had ‘the great consolation’ that ‘there was in the entire Catholic world a most ardent and wondrous revival of the desire’ that Mary be declared ‘to have been conceived without the stain of original sin’. In 1854, the Pope, having consulted the faithful, duly declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Protestants, Anglicans and Orthodox, were not of course consulted and most of them would not be convinced. We are in the era between the Council of Trent and Vatican II where different Christian traditions rarely listened to each other. When at last they did, they could be surprisingly sympathetic. The Reformed biblical scholar Professor George Caird was an observer at Vatican II and came to appreciate just how important Marian devotion was to most Roman Catholics. He did not claim to agree with them. What he urged was respect for the faithful’s devotion to Mary.90 He knew that Vatican II found it hard to know what to say about Mary and where to say it and he adds ‘they could hardly have done more to allay our [Protestant] suspicions without seriously imperilling the simple faith of millions of loyal Catholics’. More controversial was when Newman dared to declare as a matter of historical fact that in the Arian controversies of the fourth century the Catholic faithful had been more faithful than their bishops. Despite the presence of good bishops like Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, ‘nevertheless, in that very day the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the episcopate’.91 He even argues that the good bishops like Athanasius and Hilary would not have survived and succeeded without popular support. Today when, as he tactfully remarks, we have better bishops, it is easy to overlook the

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

103

importance of the consensus fidelium. The faith of the faithful is nourished by good teachers, by liturgies, rites and ceremonies. The tradition can be handed on by the bishops, by those we now call professors – Newman speaks of doctors – and also by the ‘body of the faithful’. And it is also important to note, as Ian Ker does in his study of Newman and Vatican II, that for Newman ‘the faithful’ are not just the laity but also priests and monks and nuns. Even better, one could point out that our word ‘laity’ derives from laos Theou, people of God, and embraces all Christians without distinction. A recent study (2017) edited by Charles Curran and Lisa Fullam acknowledges the Roman Catholic Church’s debt to Newman and in turn to Vatican II. Both sought to remove the sharp distinction between the active, teaching church of the hierarchical magisterium and the passive, taught church of the non-ordained faithful who are expected to learn and obey. What is especially remarkable is the report of the International Theological Commission, Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church. This shows enormous respect for the faithful: ‘the faithful have an instinct for the truth of the gospel, which enables them to recognise and endorse authentic Christian doctrine and practice. And to reject what is false.’ And there is a lovely compliment from Pope Francis. He ‘quoted the words of a humble, elderly woman he once met: “If the Lord did not forgive everything, the world would not exist”; and he commented with admiration, “That is the wisdom which the Holy Spirit gives.”’92

Democracy is good for us Let a bishop say so! Not one of Newman’s bad bishops but Derek Worlock, Bishop of Liverpool and forever famous for his close partnership with his Anglican colleague, Bishop David Shepherd, and the local Methodist Superintendent. Worlock wrote the foreword to a new edition of Newman’s essay and refers to a post-Vatican II experiment in co-responsibility, the Liverpool Pastoral Congress of 1970. For many he says, ‘it was a new experience in which they matured and grew in dignity. For all it was a recognition of their status and mature responsibility in the Church of Christ.’ He cites the invitation to the laity in the Vatican Council’s document about the Church, Lumen Gentium 37. ‘to disclose their needs and desires with that liberty and confidence which befit children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ’.

104

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

He could also usefully have quoted the next part of the same paragraph: ‘the sacred pastors are to acknowledge and promote the dignity and the responsibility of the laity in the church; they should willingly make use of their prudent counsel’. Badini Confalonieri, early in his study, appeals to a summary of John Stuart Mill’s argument: ‘even the most wise and benevolent despotism, one where the virtue of his subjects is the despot’s chief concern, stultifies the moral and intellectual development of the people by depriving subjects of the discipline of mind and refinement of the powers that comes from the practice of self-government’.93 He also quotes Calvin in support. Calvin criticised ‘the kind of Christianity there is under the papacy where the pastors labour to the utmost in their power to keep the people in absolute infancy’. Democracy can be good for all its participants.

The people’s democracy expects leaders to be accountable Paul Lakeland makes much of this point in recent studies of the laity and so too did the seminar on ‘Governance and Accountability’ held at Yale in the United States in 2003. Lakeland says sexual abuse by the clergy is in part a consequence of the laity being too docile and deferential. Priests are holy men, celibate and pure and are to be trusted. Should they be? Bishop Wuerl at the Yale Conference made a spirited defence of the status quo but did at least admit the need for greater openness where one presumes leaders explain what they are doing and why they are doing it. The good thing about the conference format was that every speaker was accountable to his or her peers. Even the bishop had a respondent who challenged some of his key assumptions. The bishop said we do not vote on articles of the creed. Peter Steinfels agrees, but points out that an early stage, at Nicaea and again in Constantinople, the creed was voted on. He could have added that the 318 Fathers who helped formulate the Nicene Creed saw themselves, as they explained at the following council in Constantinople, as accountable to the gospel and promised and expected ‘to keep the body of the church undivided, and shall come before the judgment-seat of the Lord with confidence’. Informed decisions None of my Catholic informants claims that democracy always makes for the best decisions. They also know that, contrary to what many assume, hardly any of a pope’s statements count as infallible teaching.

DEMOCRACY AND ROME'S REFORMS

AND RESERVATIONS

105

Humanae Vitae did not claim to be infallible, but the Dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin does. Vatican II, unlike Trent and Vatican I, did not anathematise those who disagreed. That said, Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century quoted an old proverb, ‘What many look for is found more easily’, and went on to infer that the individual judgment of a pope was less stable and more fallible than that of a pope with others.

Unfinished agenda The basic meaning of ‘agenda’ is things to be done. Its Latin root is the gerundive of agere, to do. First decide what is to be done, then do it! Fifty years and more after some great debates at Vatican II, it has proved very difficult to implement some of its decisions, not least those which deal with the way in which the Roman Catholic Church is governed. Some blame popes and the Curia for this, which is why one of Pope Francis’s first aims, only a month after his election, was to reform the Curia, that body of episcopal advisors who help direct the policies of the Vatican. It is from the study Reform of the Roman Curia94 that I list some of the things that still need to be done. Here are three: – collegiality of bishops; – subsidiarity and the competence of the local Church to manage its ‘own’ affairs; – participation of the laity in the mission and governance of the Church. The surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013 and the equally surprising election of Pope Francis has raised high hopes for such reforms. But reforming an ancient institution is bound to be a slow process. Could the process be helped if the Church of Rome was more democratic? Norman Tanner, editor of The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils and of The Church in Council, seems to think so. Councils, he believes, can help us avoid what he calls ‘the Hebblethwaite syndrome’, that ‘yearning for the perfect pope and being almost permanently disappointed when he does not arrive’.95 It is a little unfair to add that Tanner yearns for the perfect council but knows they have not all matched the great achievements of the first four. These councils pioneered greater democracy, long before there were secular parliaments. So, in answer to his own

106

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

question, ‘was the Church too democratic?’, the Church has not been and is not democratic enough. Tanner is fond of quoting this lovely paragraph from the Second Council of Constantinople: The holy fathers who have gathered at intervals in the four holy councils [. . .] have followed the example of antiquity. They dealt with heresies and current problems by debate in common, since it was established as certain that when the disputed question is set out by each side in communal discussion, the light of truth drives out the shadows of lying.96 To which that great Reformed Reformer John Calvin would surely say ‘Amen’. So would Milton. And so would I!

CHAPTER 3 ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

In Part One we looked at Reformed and Catholic convictions about democracy. This part is more ecumenical and more practical. I select a number of topics like accountability and consensus decision making, which can be good practice both for the churches and society.

Accountability The churches have thought about accountability in three dimensions: personal accountability, official accountability and mutual accountability between different churches. All three are applicable politically.

Personal Members of the Iona Community ‘aim to be fully transparent and accountable for our use of money and time’. They therefore reject the convention that claims ‘this is my money and I can do what I like with it’. Though its theological origins are in a restored ancient Benedictine abbey off the coast of western Scotland, its political commitments were shaped by its founder members’ awareness of social deprivation in cities like Glasgow. The belief that we are accountable to our fellow human beings is of course nothing new. It is enshrined in the Creation stories of Cain and Abel, where Cain protests ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ and is firmly reminded that he is. Even the earth cries out for his brother’s blood.

110

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Official Provoked into action by the scandal of sexual abuse by clergy, Roman Catholics have given a lot of thought to accountability. I cite as one example a conference on this theme. Its findings are published as Governance, Accountability and the Future of the Catholic Church.1 The conference was held at Yale Law School in 2003 in response to ‘the emerging revelations of sexual abuse by priests’, described as ‘a crisis of this size and scope, unprecedented in the American Church’. The holding of such a conference is to be commended for being both timely and courageous, even if some of the speakers are rather diffident about suggesting structural or other changes. James L. Heft, for example, concludes that ‘changes of structures of participation and accountability alone will not solve our problems’.2 True, but they might help. Bishop Donald Wuerl is bolder. He urges greater openness: ‘Whatever our responsibility, we must exercise it with an openness that takes the form of sharing information, reporting on the discharge of our duties, and accepting critiques of our actions.’3 Francis Oakley writes of ‘the damaging absence at all levels of the clerical hierarchy of any real measure of accountability on the part of our church leadership to the body of the faithful whom it is their responsibility not only to rule, but also to serve’.4 As an expert on the Conciliar tradition, he challenges the assumption that the Church is not free to change her structures because they are God-given. Structures have changed and can be changed but alas, even at Vatican II, hopes for greater collegiality and wider participation of laypeople and clergy must be regarded as a failure. He was writing long before Pope Francis in his own style gave us all reasons to hope for many much-needed reforms of the Vatican and Curia. Attitudes also have to change. Paul Lakeland,5 who was not part of this soul-searching conference, argues that priests got away with repeated acts of sexual abuse of parishioners because the laity are too docile and assume without question that their spiritual leaders will be spiritual men. He is acutely aware that, after their rediscovery in the 1950s and 1960s, the laity have been forgotten or taken for granted. Vatican II tried to make the point that clergy and people are alike the People of God. But if they are, then the Church has to work out practices of more democratic mutual accountability between clergy and people. A major weakness of the Yale Conference on Accountability was its apparent unwillingness to learn from other Church traditions. All the

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

111

participants were Roman Catholics. When reference was made to Protestant democratic practices, it was usually negative. Bishop Wuerl mocks ‘a local Protestant body that was voting, congregation by congregation, whether they would continue to accept Jesus as the unique and universal saviour’.6 He sees this as ‘a temptation to make the church into an American democratic organisation’. The temptation is real and had earlier been noted by one of the Reformed tradition’s own scholars, H. Richard Niebuhr, in a 1961 essay on ‘The Protestant Movement and Democracy in the United States’.7 But the positive inference to be drawn is that churches need each other’s counsel. Churches are, and should accept that they are, ‘mutually accountable’. Mutual accountability is a big theme currently pursued by the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Olav Fykse Tveit, a Lutheran from Norway. It was the subject of his recently published thesis, The Truth We Owe Each Other: Mutual Accountability in the Ecumenical Movement (2016). It has been on the agenda of the World Council’s Faith and Order Commission ever since the inauguration of the WCC in 1948. The delegates at the Lund Faith and Order Conference in 1952 had this to say: The mutually self-critical attitude is a fruit of the relation to Christ. When we place ourselves in our Churches under His judgment and in obedience to His calling and sending, we shall know that we cannot manifest our unity and share in His fullness without being changed.8 Forty years later, there was a growing acceptance that accountability was not just an internal matter but an essential to the Church’s communication with the world, for example, on issues of Justice and Peace and Integrity of Creation (JPIC): Ecumenical accountability among the churches is weak. There need to be structures of accountability even before the conciliar communion is achieved [. . .] The JPIC movement has pressed for this in order that we may give a united witness to justice, peace and the integrity of creation. We urge the churches to get into the habit of conciliar accountability.9

112

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Tveit could make the case more powerfully if he cited some major political examples where churches of one tradition supported unjust political policies and needed to be called to account by other churches who challenged their understanding and practice of the faith. I list four. There are many more but even here there is no space to argue the points in detail. 1. The white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa was held to account by other churches, Anglican, Methodist Roman Catholic and other Reformed, and eventually convinced that its theological justification of apartheid was a heresy. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches said so in 1982, but much earlier, in 1957, South Africa’s Roman Catholic bishops had described white domination as blasphemy.10 2. Lutherans as the majority church in Hitler’s Reich needed their passive acceptance of a government’s right to decide what was best for the State to be contested by Roman Catholics and Reformed who challenged Luther’s two-kingdoms doctrine. 3. Roman Catholics in Latin America tended to collude with brutal military dictators, partly because Rome at the time was ambivalent about democracy and supported strong leadership. Those Roman Catholics who sided with liberation movements needed support from bodies like the WCC which campaigned against human rights abuses. 4. Pentecostal churches are among the most rapidly growing but what account can they give of positive political engagements? Accountability can apply to relationships in most societies but this is not often appreciated. Compared with topics like justice or equality there are relatively few books on the subject, even though, as one of these books states, ‘Everyone wants people – other people – to be held accountable.’ Behn mentions federal agencies and schools in the United States. We could mention bank officials and company managers as topical examples. Meetings have become much more lively now that shareholders dare to challenge the vast sums paid out to directors even when companies fail. But what also becomes clear in such studies is that accountability will be dysfunctional if turned into a fault-finding and punitive exercise, a blame game. Behn argues: ‘If institutions for

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

113

creating accountability also encourage good officials to leave public service – and if they discourage good people from even considering public service – then such practices and systems deserve serious rethinking.’11 He goes on to explain in some detail that there needs to be trust and goodwill on both sides and an awareness that some expectations are unrealistic. Many currently blame the British Government for not reducing immigration as it keeps promising to do, without recognising that it may be neither possible nor desirable to do so. Many of our services depend on workers from overseas. There is also the moral issue of welcoming those desperately seeking asylum. Jews and Christians have always felt accountable to God for the ‘stranger within their gates’ and are reminded that they or their ancestors once depended on the ‘kindness of strangers’.

Bible Texts It will surprise many of us to claim that the Bible is a democratic book. Some Muslims would make a similar claim for the Qur’an. I will not argue with them but simply honour their claim.12 As for the Bible, I seek here to explain that if the Bible is a democratic resource, it needs to be interpreted more democratically, especially when the decisions we make are based on a single text or author and used to vindicate our own particular way of being church. For example, there are two distinct accounts of the Creation. Those who argue that women are subordinate to men cite Genesis 2, where the man is created first and the woman out of his ‘spare rib’; their opponents can appeal to Genesis 1, where man and woman are created together and both are equally – or perhaps only together – in the image of God, whatever that might mean. Policies should draw on both texts, not just opt for one. Likewise, in the New Testament, we have four Gospels and four different accounts of the Life and Teaching of Jesus. The Church resisted an earlier attempt by Tatian to harmonise all four into a single narrative in his Diatesseron (c. 150). The Bible in fact provides its own counsel, a repeated appeal for more than one witness: ‘no one is to be put to death on the testimony of a single witness’ but only after the testimony of two or three (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:5; 2 Corinthians 13:1). In the New Testament, the same principle is applied to prayer: ‘if two of you agree on earth about any request you have to make, that request will be granted by my

114

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

heavenly Father. For where two or three meet together in my name, I am there among them,’ says Jesus (Matthew 18:19–20). The two or three principle may then be the basis of a requirement of a two-thirds majority for Church decisions, as was the case at Vatican II. Marcus Borg (1942 – 2015), ‘one of the world’s bestselling popular theologians’, in Convictions, a book which turns out to have been his last as he died shortly after publishing it, tells how he grew up in a devout Republican family who believed Christians should have nothing to do with politics, even though they wrestled with the question of whether a Christian could be a Democrat! Their convictions and those of many like-minded Christians were based on a few key New Testament texts which Borg, the New Testament scholar, is convinced they misinterpret. I discovered that the texts he chose are the ones I had also selected! No great surprise. They are the most commonly quoted and there are not that many obviously political texts in the New Testament to choose from, or so it is easy to assume. Borg, who spent his whole career expounding the Bible, can assert with real authority, ‘The Bible from beginning to end is a sustained protest against the domination systems of the ancient world.’ Before proceeding to the New Testament he offers a brilliant summary of Old Testament progressive politics.13

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s (Mark 12:17; Mathew 22:21; Luke 20:25) This is one of the best-known ‘political’ texts in the Bible. The Bodleian catalogue lists 21,000 articles on the subject. Many will ignore the original context and turn a highly charged conversation with Jesus into a set of abstract principles which may have little do with what Jesus actually said and why he said it. The basic question is about taxation, a key issue for all citizens and a basic principle for democracy. Hence the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’. ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny’ became a watchword of the American Revolution. One tract printed in Philadelphia at this time quotes this text as it urges Quakers to pay taxes even to a government they did not agree with. In Jesus’ day paying taxes to Rome only aggravated the bitterness and resentment at having a Roman army occupying your land and telling you what to do. What made it worse, you had to pay for it! At his trial, Jesus’ accusers told the

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

115

Roman Governor, Pilate: ‘We find this man subverting our nation, opposing the payment of taxes to Caesar, and claiming to be a messiah, a king’ (Luke 23:2). This is not what Jesus had said but it was what his opponents, Pharisees and Herodians, hoped he would say so they could then report him to the authorities. As New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce notes, ‘In Judaea, the tribute question was one of practical moment, with the risk of an impolitic answer being construed as seditious.’ Judas of Gamala taught that paying taxes to the Romans was not compatible with Israel’s theocratic ideals. Romans were pagans.14 Jesus let his accusers answer their own question. They had a Roman coin in their pockets with Caesar’s image and inscription so they were bound to agree that one ought to render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. This does not resolve the bigger question: what belongs to God? Here the text can be made to support theories about two kingdoms, one secular, the other religious, the separation of Church and State and the supposed opposition between religion and politics. Lutherans are forever branded for their two-kingdoms doctrine. It made it impossible for many of them to resist Hitler except when he overstepped the boundaries of ‘Caesar’s’ realm and interfered with the Church and the things that belong to God. Martin Luther certainly thought it important to distinguish between secular governments and Church authority. He said, ‘There is a vast difference between the kingdom of Christ and the secular government’, and added, ‘And let the preacher keep his hands off the secular government lest he create disorder and confusion.’15 He accused the Anabaptists, Mu¨nzer, the Pope and all the bishops of doing just that. Even if government turned out to be bad government, Luther seems to have found it impossible to counsel resistance. Former president Jimmy Carter, Southern Baptist, cited the text in defence of America’s endangered values, including insistence on the separation of Church and State. As summarised in the New York Times (5 November 2005), Carter argued: During the last two decades, Christian fundamentalists have increasingly and openly challenged and rejected Jesus’ admonition to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’. Most Americans have considered it proper for private citizens to influence public policy, but not for a religious group to control the processes of democratic government,

116

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

or for public officials to interfere in religious affairs or use laws or tax revenues to favour religious institutions. In the UK, Tim Farron resigned as Liberal Democrat leader because he thought his religious convictions about sexuality incompatible with what is expected of him as a political leader.16 I suspect he finds some vindication in his application of this text. Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries would have found it just as impossible to distinguish religion and politics as Muslim states do today. In an earlier section, I quoted Nathaniel Micklem’s conviction that ‘all political problems are at bottom theological’.17 Nor is it possible theologically to regard Caesar and God as two equal authorities. If we ask what belongs to God, the answer has to be ‘everything’, including Caesar’s empire. Marcus Borg agrees! ‘And if everything belongs to God, nothing belongs to Caesar.’18 Luther himself grasped this point when he commented that ‘God wants to rule the church through his preachers. just as he governs the world through burgomasters, kings and princes.’ And in reference to our text, Luther stated: ‘God cannot be a vassal of the emperor; but the emperor ought to be, and be called, God’s vassal.’19 In sixteenth-century Scotland, Andrew Melville made the same point when he reminded his sovereign, James VI, that in the kingdom of God he was only ‘God’s silly vassal’.

Every person must submit to the authorities in power, for all authority comes from God and the existing authorities are instituted by him (Romans 13:1) Whole books could be written about a single verse like this. Marcus Borg provides a summary of a vast literature: In Germany during the time of the Third Reich, the majority of Christians justified obedience to Hitler with this text. So also in much of American Christianity. During the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, the use of nonviolent civil disobedience against segregation was condemned by many Christians as disobedience to established authority. More recently, in 2003, just before the United States invaded Iraq, an evangelical pastor on CNN used this text to justify supporting our president’s decision. Most evangelical Christians – more than 80 per cent – did so.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

117

They were the demographic group with the highest percentage of support for the war.20 All Christians in their political involvements have to ‘wrestle with Romans’, to quote the title of a modern commentary on what is probably the most influential letter ever written. The easier part, though not that easy, is to explain the context. Why did Paul, himself a Roman citizen, write this to Christians in the various house churches in the imperial city? How could he speak so respectfully of a state, as ‘not a terror to good works’, when this same state had almost flogged him to death? The more difficult and more controversial issue is to decide whether this single text, or even the brief section Romans 13:1– 7, provides the biblical basis for Christians’ attitudes to government for all times and all places. I cite Ernst Ka¨semann’s Commentary: Throughout church history our passage has been regarded as the classic statement of the Pauline and indeed the New Testament and Christian doctrine of the state and has been made binding. The doors have thus been opened in Christianity not only to conservative but also to reactionary views even to the point of political fanaticism.21 Ka¨semann would know that a much more radical and critical attitude to the State is to be found in the Book of Revelation, but as my own tutor, George B. Caird, noted in his commentary on Revelation,22 untutored general readers are likely to ask, ‘What on earth is all this about?’ Revelation is highly critical of Roman imperialism but never says so directly. But its symbolism, as Borg notes, ‘unmistakably points to the conflict between Caesar and Christ’.23 In Romans 13, we may believe that Paul is simply offering wise counsel to a tiny Christian minority who live in constant fear of betrayal and persecution if they are thought to be a threat to national security. The German Lutheran theologian Ernst Ka¨semann takes this line, so does the British Reformed/Methodist exegete James D.G. Dunn. Peter’s bold assertion ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29), has often provided the key to how Romans 13 or Jesus’ saying ‘Render to Caesar’ should be interpreted whenever rulers order us to disobey what seems to be the clear will of God. So the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos states, ‘Wherever Christian apostles enjoin obedience to kings and magistrates,

118

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

they take special pains to warn us that we must obey God first of all’, and goes on to state, ‘so they do not provide the slightest ground for that preposterous servility that the sycophants of princes urge upon the simple minded; “Let every soul”, says St Paul, “be subject to the higher power”. These words are enough to make it clear that we are to obey God before the king, that we obey the king because of God and surely not against Him.’24 And when it became more and more obvious that Hitler, despite his protestations about Positive Christianity, was bent on destroying the Christian Church, Martin Niemo¨ller and others made this text their guiding watchword, ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ It is significant that the famous Barmen Declaration of 1934, which provided Martin Niemo¨ller and the Confessing Church with a theology of resistance to Hitler, does not quote Romans 13, despite having been written by Karl Barth who by 1934 had written two Commentaries on this Letter. His Lutheran opponents, Paul Althaus and Walter Elert, and the German Christian’s tract, Ansbacher Ratschlag, did cite Romans 13.25 Barmen instead appeals to 1 Peter 2:17, ‘Fear God, honour the emperor.’ The choice of text is deliberate but not to be exaggerated. In the Jubilee commemorations of Barmen in 1984, Lutheran theologian Eberhard Ju¨ngel makes the point that each clause in Barmen begins with a word of scripture which summons our obedience. ‘Fear God, honour the emperor’ establishes the priorities and the key to understanding all that the scriptures have to say about honouring and respecting the state as a God-given institution.26 Marcus Borg’s other key text is Jesus’ response to Pilate: ‘My kingdom is not from this world.’ Careful reading of the context (John 18:33–40) and the strong affirmations of Jesus’ kingship, especially in the Gospel of John, should make it obvious that Jesus is not claiming to be, or thought to be, politically neutral. The inscription Pilate insisted be written on the cross was ‘King of the Jews’. That political claim was his capital offence. Early translators of the Bible like William Tyndale (1494– 1536) knew ‘that our holy prelates say that God’s Word causeth insurrection and teacheth the people to disobey’. His remark is quoted by Christopher Hill, in The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, and then illustrated by the way seventeenth-century debates about the Church and about government hinged on what the Bible said or did not say. William Rainborough found nothing in scripture to support a limited franchise. John Lilburne thought taxation based on

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

119

tithes was a Jewish practice, outmoded by the gospel. King James, who ‘authorised’ the translation which some still name after him, thought that the text we have often quoted in 1 Samuel 8 vindicated monarchy. It of course does no such thing and no doubt contemporaries could see, what Hill saw, that ‘good kings are rare in the Old Testament’. Hill adds: ‘James I with remarkable insensitivity cited these verses as evidence of the absolute obedience owed by subjects to “that King which God was to give them”.’ The Bible does not give unqualified allegiance to unjust rulers but is it ever right to execute a king, as we in Britain did in 1649? The debate, though muted, continues.

Consensus Decision Making One persistent argument throughout this book is that the churches, thanks to their long experience of decision making, may be able to help parliaments and congresses where democracy is floundering. I am thinking once again especially of Donald Trump’s America and Brexit Britain, though almost everywhere democracy is being challenged. What do you do when democracy is sick? Answer: send for a doctor! Dr Jill Tabart’s account of consensus decision making, Coming to Consensus,27 cannot be the panacea to fix all ills but her vivid account of the lessons learned in the Uniting Church of Australia makes for a healthy read. Tabart is a medical doctor as well as a lay president of her church. She has also counselled assemblies and committees of the World Council of Churches about a different style of debating and decision making. I have seen her in action and been very impressed with the results. So are the representatives of the Orthodox Churches whose hurts she is helping to heal. Here a bit of background information helps explain why consensus decision making became such an important issue, and not just for the Orthodox Churches, but for the countries they serve and for East –West relations generally. Contrary to a commonly held view, the World Council of Churches has never been a purely Protestant body. The modern ecumenical movement is often dated from the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, but a stronger case could be made for seeing the Orthodox encyclical of 1920, sent ‘Unto the Churches of Christ everywhere’, as the foundation document. After the horrendous divisions of World War I, when Christians of different nationalities slaughtered each other,

120

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople appealed for a ‘koinonia of churches’ similar to the koinonia or League of Nations that had just been formed. The eventual response was the formation of the World Council of Churches. Its inauguration was delayed by World War II. The Coptic Church of Egypt, the Church of Greece, Mar Thoma, the Orthodox Syrian Church of Malabar in India and the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in America have been the Orthodox member churches since the First Assembly in Amsterdam in 1948. By the third Assembly, almost all Orthodox churches were members of the WCC, including the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of all the churches belonging to the Council. Their membership and sense of belonging to such an international body seemed especially vital in the days of the Cold War, when the Council provided one of the few opportunities, subject to the lifting of visa restrictions, for East –West conversations. That this was so is in part the result of one of the most important debates at Amsterdam, between John Foster Dulles of the United States and Josef Hromadka of Czechoslovakia,28 supported by his Swiss friend, Karl Barth. The crucial decision made as a result of that debate was that the World Council of Churches refused to be drawn into the East– West divide as a champion of the so-called Christian West against the so-called atheistic Communist East. The Assembly recognised that there were Christian people on both sides of the Iron Curtain and, more locally, on both sides of the Berlin Wall. But when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, other tensions became more evident. Even at the best of times, the Orthodox felt themselves to be a minority in a largely Protestant and Anglican body. They were. Statistically even after 1961, and despite their size, they could be outnumbered 3:1 in any vote because of the growing proliferation of Protestant bodies and churches from newly independent nations in Africa and elsewhere. Ever since the Great Schism of the eleventh century, the Orthodox East and the Catholic West had grown apart. Sharing in meetings in the West, and often, it seems, on the West’s terms, felt like being an alien in a strange land. A test of a genuinely ecumenical body, and, indeed, the test of any democracy, is its capacity and willingness to pay attention to minorities and those who may feel excluded. One way of doing this is to publish minority views. The Orthodox participants did this in their response to the Seventh Assembly at

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

121

Canberra, Australia, in 1991. Lots of matters were troubling them, including the marginalisation of Faith and Order issues and the prime objective of the WCC to help the restoration of Christian unity, but the big challenge comes in the final paragraph: ‘Has the time come for the Orthodox Churches and other member churches to review their relations with the World Council of Churches?’29 To its great credit, as well as to the benefit of its own credibility, the World Council took the hint. They acted on the suggestion of an Orthodox consultation that a special commission be established on Orthodox participation in the WCC. Prior to the Harare Assembly in December 1999, Orthodox delegates had met at Thessaloniki in April and explained the problems they face because of their minority status: At the Seventh Assembly of the WCC in Canberra in 1991 and during the Central Committee meetings from 1992 onwards, the Orthodox delegates have taken a vigorous stand against intercommunion with non-Orthodox, against inclusive language, ordination of women, the rights of sexual minorities and certain tendencies relating to religious syncretism. Their statements on these subjects were always considered as minority statements and as such could not influence the general trend and ethos of the WCC.30 They ‘strongly suggested that a Mixed Theological Commission be appointed’. This, as I have noted, was accepted at Harare in 1998. And even after making its report, the ‘Special Commission on Orthodox Participation’ has been kept in being because it has proved so helpful to all concerned. The Commission went on to state that though they would urge all Orthodox Churches to attend the Harare Assembly, ‘Orthodox delegates generally will not take part in the voting process except in certain cases that concern the Orthodox and by unanimous agreement. If it is needed, in the plenary and group discussions, they will present the Orthodox views.’ It is on the question of voting that Jill Tabart and her colleagues in the Uniting Church of Australia come to our aid. Christian apologists have often claimed that democracy is something governments and parliaments learned from the churches. Consensus decision advocates now accuse the World Council of Churches of

122

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

learning too much from governments, of being too parliamentary! A report on the Special Commission refers to ‘the parliamentary model which has tended to dominate the WCC since its foundation’.31 ‘Dominate’ in much Christian thinking is a pejorative term, the opposite of serve, befriend and cooperate. Jill Tabart explains that the three churches that came into union in the Uniting Church of Australia in 1977, Congregationalist, Presbyterian and Methodist, ‘had been accustomed to adversarial style debate and decision making in their meeting structure, patterned on the Westminster parliamentary system’.32 Westminster debates are regularly televised, so anyone can see what she means. The aim is to win an argument, not to reach agreement. In the process you make your opponent look stupid, or at least ignorant, even though the British convention tries to be more subtle so your opponent is always addressed as the ‘honourable member for Basingstoke’, or wherever, before you proceed to demonstrate just how dishonourable your opponent is! Much of it is a game. The antagonists will later buy each other a drink in the bar. Even so, the question arises, is there a better way? Is the Church a debating club or some sort of religious parliament? It is a question prompted by the gospel saying: ‘You know that among the Gentiles the recognised rulers lord it over their subjects, and the great make their authority felt. It shall not be so with you; among you’ (Mark 10:42– 3). Tabart does not make much of this text. People like the Latin American theologian Leonardo Boff do. But Tabart instead refers to the biblical idea of a good decision. A good decision is one that seems ‘good to the Holy Spirit and to us’ (Acts 15:28).33 The tone of debating is modelled on Paul’s description of ‘our common life in Christ’ in which we are to ‘humbly reckon others better than yourselves’ and to ‘look to each other’s interests and not merely to your own’ (Philippians 2:1–4). So much for the remedy for adversarial debating. What is especially good about Tabart’s book and her whole approach is that, as a medical doctor, she starts with the patient. She is aware that many people come out of a meeting, any meeting, with feelings of frustration, despair and suppressed anger and resentment. She lists some of the things that cause dissatisfaction and can do so in any meeting: .

a feeling that the decision has already been made and one is just expected to submit;

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES . .

123

a majority decision leaves the minority feeling unheard and disenfranchised; complicated formal rules of debate that inhibit the less experienced. Inexperienced voices find it daunting to compete against more eloquent orators.

Tabart then lists some of the seemingly simple remedies. .

.

.

Rather than asking a meeting to agree to a proposition others have already prepared, let the members discuss the subject and, through the process of listening to different points of view, get the sense of the meeting and frame a proposition that is likely to be generally acceptable. Avoid voting whenever practicable, seek consensus, a resolution and decision which has the most support but is also acceptable to all. Provision can be made for those who cannot agree to explain their disagreements and register their dissent. Take time to explain the decision-making process. In the early years of consensus decision making in the WCC, Jill Tabart and her colleagues were on hand to explain the process and to help resolve procedural difficulties. In some older-style debates, once people started making amendments to the amendment, it was very easy to lose track of the basic argument.

Ecumenical cooperation in consensus decision making Even a crisis in the ecumenical movement can create ecumenical partnerships. The Orthodox were not the only ones to complain that the World Council of Churches’ method of debate and decision making was too parliamentary and adversarial. The Society of Friends agreed with the Orthodox even though their meetings are poles apart from the Orthodox’s understanding of what it means to be a church. The WCC is so constituted, and has been since 1950, that belonging does not require agreement on churchmanship. Growing respect for the so-called Peace Churches has given the Friends a higher profile alongside the Mennonites and pacifist members of all churches. Through their witness to peace and non-violence, other churches are led to consider their more peaceful methods of settling disputes by quietly listening to their Friends in Christ and discerning the ‘sense of the meeting’. ‘Peace’ is not

124

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

just an issue they feel strongly about. It is their way of life. The ‘Quakers’, as they are commonly called, emerged from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformation in Europe and so have often discovered strong links with Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians of the same era. It was an era when many Christians rediscovered the Holy Spirit,34 spoke of their Christian experience and of being guided in their meetings by the Holy Spirit. Claiming to be guided by the Spirit of God was too revolutionary for established and hierarchically ordered churches, so the Quakers suffered more than most wherever, as in England, Christians were persecuted for their Nonconformity. Even John Locke’s ideas of toleration did not include them. The modern ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches does. Eden Grace, of the Society of Friends United Meeting in the USA, and Jill Tabart were foremost among those who helped other churches in the WCC discover consensus decision making. The Society of Friends could draw on four centuries of experience, the Aborigine peoples of Australia35 even longer, the Uniting Church of Australia less than a decade, but between them they could demonstrate that the method had been well tried and tested. Tabart explains in her book that in the WCC’s first assemblies they had managed to deal with contentious issues on human sexuality in a much more positive way than is often the case. Grace and Tabart could both explain that consensus decision making alters the whole atmosphere and tone of a meeting. One has to listen to ‘an opponent’, not beat him or her in an argument. More could be said about the theology of consensus and much can be found in Bernd Wannenwetsch’s important study Political Worship, which has a chapter on ‘Consensus and Forgiveness’ and essays by his Lutheran colleague, Gerhard Sauter, especially one on discovering the truth together in the liturgy. Wannenwestsch draws on a much earlier Anglican study, A.G. Hebert’s Liturgy and Society, first published in 1935. All three authors make the point that it is the very nature of the Church as the Body of Christ to be a consensus-seeking body.36

Parliamentary consensus? Could consensus decision making work in Parliament? Could it make Parliament’s debates less parliamentary, in the sense of confrontational? I wonder. One vital ingredient I have failed to mention is prayer and reflection, even ‘a Quaker silence’. Tabart not only explains that all

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

125

assemblies and synods begin with prayer but that there should be pauses in any meeting for quiet prayer or silent reflection, especially when discussions become fraught. Members are urged not to cheer or groan at speakers. They react in a gentler manner by displaying an orange card to indicate a warm response; blue for being not so keen. So different from Westminster! Wannenwetsch, who now teaches in Britain, until recently in Oxford, may be unaware of just how important his thinking on Political Worship is for Parliament and for all the churches. Worship is political! His approach is too cautious and his account too abstract. He lacks Duncan Forrester’s genius for practical application. In Britain, politicians in both major parties glibly claim that ‘the people’ have decided to leave the European Union. Some of the people did, some certainly did not. There is no consensus on the fateful referendum decision of June 2016, but a growing consensus that current negotiations with our European partners are in a mess. There could be agreement that the whole business has been badly handled and the people badly advised. All I can add is that we need everyone’s prayers. If we, ‘the people’, have made a catastrophic mistake, can we confess and begin again? Can churches that practise forgiveness ask for forgiveness? I hope so.

Debate John Milton (1608–74), one of England’s best-known and most controversial poets, opened up a debate about debating with this oftenquoted statement from his tract, Areopagitica: Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter’37 Anyone searching for this quotation will have first to read through nearly forty pages of detailed argument, for the text is Milton’s concluding conviction in what is a forty-four-page tract. By then it will be obvious that Areopagitica is not just about censorship and an appeal for free speech and freedom of the press, though it was Parliament’s attempt to censor

126

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

his own pamphlet on divorce that prompted Milton’s response, but is also about toleration, the importance of debate and discussion, and Milton’s belief that, in the end, the truth will prevail. And depending on our own starting point as readers, we will interpret the title as a reference either to Greek democracy at the Areopagus in Athens or to the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. There, in chapter 17, Paul initiates a debate about the meaning of the altar inscription ‘To an Unknown God’, before the Council of the Areopagus. Milton is both a civil servant, well versed in the ways of government, and a self-taught theologian, who knows his Bible and Church history. And because he is not only a politician but also a strong advocate of Church reform, Areopagitica’s forty-four pages could still serve as the best short introduction to the kind of book my book is attempting to be. In a debate in a Church synod or in a parliament, are we more likely to discern the right course of action than when a monarch or pope tells us what to do? If democratic debates are good for society, why not also for the Church? Not that John Milton is a democrat or a churchman. Michael Watts, in his history The Dissenters, groups Milton with Cromwell: ‘Cromwell was one of the several deeply religious men of his generation, of whom Roger Williams and John Milton are other examples, who sympathized with the radical sects, but who were unwilling or unable to decide between their conflicting claims and give wholehearted adherence to one or the other.’38 Milton might once have been described as Presbyterian but Presbyterians were too dogmatic and authoritarian, hence his other well-known saying that ‘new presbyter was but old priest writ large’.39 His rather disparaging remarks about the common people make him sound more like an aristocrat than a democrat, despite his sympathy for radicals like Walwyn and the Levellers. Walwyn once commented: ‘too much censorship has stopped the mouths of great men’. Milton agreed. He even believed that errors could strengthen your beliefs. Hence his objection to the burning of books and the burning of ‘heretics’ like Servetus.40 Servetus was burned as a heretic in Calvin’s Geneva and with Calvin’s agreement. Amongst other issues, Servetus did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. Neither did Milton. Today we can challenge Milton’s ‘sectarian’ stance on toleration but then be rebuked by historians who like Christopher Hill warn us not to impose twentieth-century standards on seventeenth-century people. Milton did not tolerate Roman Catholics or atheists but he felt that his

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

127

reasoning was quite straightforward; you cannot have a free and open debate with people who don’t believe in freedom to debate. He is critical of ‘the popes of Rome’ who ‘extended their dominion over men’s eyes’ in censoring books, and the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition. The censorship now being practised by the authorities he dismisses as ‘Romanizing’. By the nineteenth century, as Christopher Hill explains,41 Roman Catholic emancipation seemed the right course of action, but for Milton, and later John Locke’s generation, there was a real fear of an international Catholic Plot and the total suppression of free discussion. Even after Vatican II, some popes, notably John Paul II and Benedict XVI, had great difficulty in accepting critical dissent from the likes of Hans Ku¨ng or Leonardo Boff and were accused of operating like the Russian KGB. As in Kafka’s The Trial, people were denounced and dismissed without knowing what they had done wrong and with no right of reply. Milton’s positive case is that people will only mature if they are trusted to discern for themselves: ‘all that is true, all that is noble, all that is just and pure’ etc. I am quoting Paul in Philippians 4:8. Milton appeals to what Paul says in Thessalonians about testing all things: ‘Do not stifle inspiration or despise prophetic utterances but test them all; keep hold of what is good and avoid all forms of evil’ (1 Thessalonians 5:19– 22). ‘A man may be a heretic to truth if he believes only because his pastor says so’, says Milton. Chrysostom, the goldenmouthed preacher, could read what today we call pornography because ‘he had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon’. Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, ‘the loosest of them all’.42 Good debates are rare. It is not obvious, whether in Church councils and synods or Parliaments and Congresses, that we really believe we can only make the best decisions by listening to and arguing with our opponents. Congar complained that there was too little real debate at Vatican II. Bishops followed each other with a succession of prepared speeches rather than responding to points already made, though in committees and informal discussions over coffee some real debates did take place. Earlier at the Reformation, Luther and Calvin at one stage believed that divisions could be avoided through debates in a free and reforming Council. By free, they meant free from control by the Pope, and in a Council where ‘opponents’ would be guaranteed safe conduct and not become victims, as happened to Jan Hus at the Council of

128

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Constance in 1415 who was burned at the stake. Karl Barth warned against a readiness to sit in judgment and dismiss those we disagree with as heretics. In my own British Reformed tradition, Erik Routley, better known for his harmonies in music and song, once described the ideal discussion as producing an agreed outcome that none of us could work out on our own and which was better than anyone’s individual proposal. In contrast, in the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump was in the habit of dismissing as fake news most of what his critics had to say. Presidents and popes pronounce. Synods and Parliaments have to debate before they decide. I shall say more on this subject when we consider the place of theology in the public square.

Equality Hans Ku¨ng bases his argument for democratisation of the Church on the watchwords of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality and Fraternity.43 A few years earlier the American Constitution declared ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’. Equality was not that self-evident in 1776. Slaves and women were not regarded as equal. The Charter of the United Nations 1945, speaking democratically in our name, states: ‘We the Peoples of the United Nations determined [. . .] to affirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’. The Charter was accepted nem. con., that is, not all agreed but no nation opposed it. Switzerland, the home of the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, could hardly say it agreed. Women in Switzerland were not treated as equals and did not have the vote in most cantons until 1971. Nor was equality something everyone in my own country believed in. The distinguished Christian Socialist and economist R.H. Tawney entitled the first chapter of his classic study, Equality (1931), ‘The Religion of Inequality’. As an economist, he was very conscious of living in a society that was very unequal. He attributed this to an ‘economic fundamentalism with the New Testament left out’. He knew the theologians had a different creed.44 Writing in an era when democracy seemed to be collapsing all around him, Tawney regarded growing inequalities as a threat to British democracy. He would be appalled to see that eighty years later the gap

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

129

between the richest and the poorest is measured in billions of pounds. He might be cheered by a popular paperback, The Spirit Level, Why Equality is Better for Everyone.45 The Anglican theologian Canon Stanley Evans, in the first Tawney Memorial Lecture, was surprised that Reformed theologian Daniel Jenkins felt the need to contrast Equality and Excellence.46 Tawney would not accept the contrast. If people were not qualified to make a sensible contribution to political debates, they should be helped with more education. That is why Tawney and Barker devoted so much of their energies to movements like the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), giving people who never had the opportunity to go to university the chance to catch up. In the nineteenth century, when the franchise was extended to most men in 1867, politicians like Forster recognised that ‘the education of the masses was an urgent problem’.47 It was said, ‘We must educate our masters.’ Duncan Forrester includes a lovely comment from Dag Hammarskjo¨ld: ‘From scholars and clergymen on my mother’s side I inherited a belief that, in a very radical sense, all men are equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters.’48 But this need not mean that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s. Evans was a bit unkind to Jenkins. Perhaps he had not read the book. Equality and Excellence should have been accepted then as a pioneering investigation by the Christian Frontier Council into a genuine question that still challenges any and every social group, including churches and political parties: ‘if everybody’s somebody then nobody’s anybody’. Does treating everyone in the same way result in mediocrity? Gilbert and Sullivan mocked the idea in a song that was once popular. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America thought the level of competence in the governments and councils of the United States very mediocre, a consequence of the assumption that governing is something anybody can do. Jenkins, as secretary of a distinguished ecumenical group of Christian laymen, sets out to argue that ‘equality demands the pursuit of excellence for its full realisation’. Each and every one should be encouraged to strive for the best of which they are capable while at the same time all the ways in which people are treated unequally, including pay, conditions of work, education etc., should be reduced.49 Jenkins puts a strong and distinctively Christian emphasis on love. If we love a person, that person becomes our equal and we encourage what is best for him or her. And no one should be ashamed at being

130

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

brilliant at football or playing the violin or making a speech. He was very conscious in the sixties of a dumbing down and a tendency to ridicule anyone who excelled and was different. The illustrations his group offered are dated, but not the concerns. Trump is sometimes commended because he is typical of the average American – apart, of course, from being a billionaire! And British judges or politicians who dared to challenge the Brexit vote were branded as an arrogant elite. Jenkins accepted the democratic principle that everyone should have a voice in government, but could not agree that everyone should have an equal voice. Some are better qualified than others to make complicated decisions. We are currently in the process of learning just how complicated leaving the European Union is likely to be, too complex a decision for a yes/no referendum where only the numbers count. Duncan Forrester, like others before him, dares to assert that equality is a matter of faith, Jewish –Christian faith. He cites the Jewish political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who says that equality is a moral axiom that neither requires nor is capable of logical defence or justification. Robert Dahl refers to ‘the Strong Principle of Equality’.50 Forrester, like Dahl, wishes to say more: ‘We cannot accept that equality is a moral axiom without a basis.’51 Micklem, the Christian theologian, provides the standard Christian basis: ‘It is a question whether the equality of all men has any meaning except in the religious sense. In most practical regards all men are unequal.’ And he refers to the ‘high doctrine that man is a child of God or is “made in the image of God”’.52 Years before becoming a professor in Edinburgh, Forrester had served as a presbyter in South India and wrestled with the Hindu caste system which treated people as unequal. In On Human Worth, he urges his fellow Christians to bring a vast treasury of theological reflection about how and why everyone is to be valued for their own sake into the public debates about equality. Secular thought has, he says, no resources for such a task. And all the time he is making a thorough study of the subject, he is haunted by a personal encounter with a beggar he once met in India, a man he names as Munuswamy. Christ, who, according to Paul in Philippians, makes himself of no reputation and does not snatch at equality with God in heaven, confronts us as a beggar like Munuswamy. Forrester is well qualified to expound equality. He established the Centre for Theology and Public Issues in Edinburgh and can draw on years of practical encounters with people who feel undervalued whether

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

131

in Scotland or India. He has learned not to talk about people but talk with them about their needs and never to presume that just because he has read all the right books he knows best what is good for people living in deprived parts of his city. The lessons he and fellow members of the Church of Scotland’s Church and Nation Committee have learned may seem obvious, but the practice of listening to each other as equals is very rare. Experts often find it hard just to sit and listen to the people they feel trained to help. Churches can offer an example. Round the Communion Table, because it is the Lord’s Table, all are equal.53 The Second Vatican Council in its document on religious freedom chose to put the emphasis on human dignity rather than human rights. It begins with the bold assertion that ‘The dignity of the human person is a concern of which people of our time are becoming increasingly more aware.’54 In retrospect, any suggestion of human progress seems overoptimistic. Despite the document’s title, Dignitatis Humanae, the Fathers did not stop to offer any serious analysis of human dignity or equality. More is said about our common humanity and dignity as human beings in the Council’s document about the Church in the world, Gaudium et Spes, but not much, if anything, about equality. There may be one sad reason for this. The Council Fathers had grown up in the era of previous popes who did not believe in equality and who found the language of human rights a challenge to what they had been taught, namely that error has no rights. As the Jesuit theologian David Hollenbach comments, the views of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI in defence of inequality as part of the God-given ordering of society are ‘less attractive to most contemporary Christians’.55 But an earlier generation of Protestant Christians had sung with gusto the hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’, with that now infamous verse: The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly, and ordered their estate. Here, bold and brash and very popular, is what Tawney called ‘the Religion of Inequality’. It expressed the faith of many Christians, Protestant and Roman Catholic. The verse no longer appears in modern

132

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

hymn books but the faith in inequality as a God-given ordinance still flourishes and needs to be challenged in any genuine democracy. The Second Vatican Council was something of a ‘democratic’ revolution, even if for some it did not go far enough. What the bishops could and did affirm is that ‘scripture teaches that humankind was created “in the image of God”, with the capacity to know and love its creator’. In this sense, we are all equal. Though the Council did not expound the importance of equality, it did offer a strong statement against all forms of discrimination based on race, sex, colour, social condition or religion. These things still need saying but even at the time, in 1962– 5, they presented a sharp challenge to opponents of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, supporters of apartheid in South Africa, and apologists for the oppression of native peoples and the poor in Latin America. All these places were represented by bishops, taking counsel together.

Law: Democracy and the Law, or the People v. the Judges Complex issues are easily simplified by asking for ‘yes/no’ answers, by clever headlines and popular speakers. The ‘people’ of Britain said ‘No’ in the referendum on the European Union, voted to ‘take back control’ of their own country. In short, for Brexit. The ‘people’ of the United States voted ‘to make America great again’. In short for Trump. Voting was the easy bit. But life became more complicated in Britain and the United States once those in power set out to implement what the people had voted for. In Britain, the government claimed it had a mandate to carry out the people’s wishes. Then one courageous woman, Gina Miller, took the government to court and won. The government must debate the issues in Parliament. The tabloids were furious. How dare unelected judges contradict the wishes of the British people! So more soundbites: ‘enemies of the people’, is what the Daily Mail called the judges. Such assaults on the judiciary met with a strident response from the Observer: The hard Brexiters and their accomplices in the press have resorted to an assault on the judges, and anybody who has the effrontery to agree with them, with a venom, vindictiveness and vituperation remarkable even by their low standards. These sleaze-peddlers even dipped into homophobia, highlighting the sexual orientation

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

133

of one of the judges. Shameful! A country that hounds, demonises and threatens its judiciary, is one that toys menacingly with the very tenets of its democracy.56 The case was compounded when the Lord Chancellor, whose statutory duty it is to uphold the law and defend the judges, remained silent, then had to be prodded into half-hearted action. It was further complicated when the government said it would appeal to the Supreme Court against the decision made by three judges in the High Court. The three judges argued that Parliament as the representative of the people must decide the terms on which Britain leaves or does not leave the European Union. The Prime Minister and her cabinet are not at liberty to claim executive privilege, deciding, on their own, the terms on which Britain would leave the European Union. The Prime Minister and her colleagues disagree. The Supreme Court of eleven judges by a vote of eight to three disagreed with the Prime Minister. It announced its verdict on 24 January 2017. The president, Lord Neuberger, said the government does not have power to change treaties if by doing so it affects people’s rights in domestic law, such as those offered by being a member of the European Union thanks to the 1972 European Communities Act. In Britain, he explained, Parliament makes the law and only Parliament can change it: ‘The change in the law required to implement the referendum’s outcome must be made in the only way permitted by the United Kingdom constitution, namely by legislation. An act of parliament is required to authorise ministers to give notice of the decision.’ Two major points are being made here which are vital for a healthy democracy. No government can claim to be above the law as expressed in the country’s constitution. Secondly, an individual citizen may be a lone voice and a minority of one, but if the law is on her side, she should, and in this case did, win. Very modestly and very movingly, the lone individual in this case, Gina Miller, had no wish to claim a personal victory. She wrote: In upholding the High Court’s decision in November in the case of R (Miller) versus the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the judges of the Supreme Court have not handed me a victory. The victors are our constitution, our laws, and, I would argue, our way of life [. . .] It is one of the most beautiful things

134

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

about our country that just one individual, so long as he or she has the laws on their side, can take on the most powerful institutions or people in the land, and win.57 It would of course make for a tidy argument in a book about Democracy and the Christian Churches if we could claim Miller as a spokesperson for the churches. We cannot. But what churches can and should do is to support any individual who has a genuine concern for the welfare of her fellow citizens and is not afraid to speak out when their rights are being trampled on. Whatever her personal faith, Gina Miller acted in good faith and has been vindicated in her appeal to the law. As one who, like most of my fellow citizens in Oxford, voted for ‘Remain’, I am not impartial but attempt the following explanation of what is going on. Unlike Switzerland, Britain is not accustomed to holding a referendum58 and unlike most other countries Britain does not have a written constitution. We do have various written documents like Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, but no written and codified constitution as such.59 So when ‘the people’ decided by a slender majority of 52 per cent to 48 per cent in the referendum in June 2016 to leave the European Union, this was bound to be controversial and at the time of writing still is. Christian churches are taught by their Jewish sisters and brothers and by the scriptures we hold in common that good laws are not a burden to be lamented but a liberating gift from God. Hence the opening words of the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments: ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You must have no other god besides me.’ Neither democracy or the people are god. We are also taught by the Ten Commandments not to bear false witness. False witnessing was prevalent in the British Brexit debates. Whether for or against remaining in the European Union, all could agree the debate was badly handled on both sides and electors were often bombarded with claims that were just not true. Respect for good laws is a vital part of the Jewish– Christian legacy.

The law and the laws and the reflections of theologians, mainly Reformed This subheading follows the title of a key text by Nathaniel Micklem, Law and the Laws, Being the Marginal Comments of a Theologian.60

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

135

Micklem, as I have previously explained, was a distinguished Reformed and ecumenical theologian. His father was equally distinguished as a Queen’s Counsellor, his son a judge. Few families could match this blend of theological and legal expertise. True to his own Reformed convictions, Micklem did not regard ‘law’ as the opposite of ‘the gospel’, as Luther was inclined to do. The gospel does not abolish but fulfils the law, as indeed Christ can be quoted as saying: ‘Do not suppose I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish but to complete’ (Matthew 5:17). As well as being an amateur lawyer, Micklem might rightly see himself as a Christian prophet, one who discerns in the light of faith what is going on around him and tells us what he sees. In his case what he saw was what was happening in Hitler’s Germany. Along with Bishop Bell of Chichester, the close friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Micklem was one of the best informed among British churchmen. He had studied in Marburg, and just before the war made two heroic visits to Germany on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in support of persecuted Christian communities, Roman Catholic and Protestant. Unlike Bell, he was fluent in German. He also had that rare gift of being a well-informed and trustworthy populariser, able to condense his thinking into readable pamphlets and radio broadcasts. Here are some of his comments on law from the thirtypage tract National Socialism and Christianity published in 1939. For National Socialism, law is identical with the will of the supreme power that recognises no authority beyond itself [. . .] Right is that which serves the destiny of the Germany people [. . .] The will of Herr Hitler is the only source of Light and Right. He offered a firm rebuke to the Lutheran Christians of Germany who naively assumed that political questions could be left ‘to the goodwill and disposition of the state’. Their so-called two-kingdoms doctrine, which assumed that so long as they stuck to their task of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments, the state would leave them alone, was being openly flouted when it became high treason to pray for peace and not for victory, and a crime to intercede for the Jews. In his 1952 book Law and the Laws, Micklem developed his theme and broadened its scope. Any stable civilisation needs to recognise ‘final and ultimate standards’. A community without moral standards is

136

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

inevitably a lawless or law-despising society. In the pre-war tract he had declared that ‘all political questions are at bottom theological’. In the book he elaborates the claim. Theology was once seen as queen of the sciences from which other subjects derived their principles. But, he says, lawyers today would smile at the suggestion that their subject is a branch of moral philosophy and that it falls in any degree within the scope of the theological. But on what basis can we defend the law of habeas corpus which forbids imprisonment without trial except on the principle that the one accused is also a child of God. Would we still uphold such a principle if secularism and moral relativism were our only guides?61 Drawing on his experience of Hitler’s Germany, he made the bold statement that Hitler never broke the law; he simply rewrote the laws to conform to his own wishes. By the Empowerment Act (Ermachtigunggesetz) of 23 March 1933, Hitler was given the legal right to alter or suspend certain articles of the German Constitution. By a further ruling the following year, he was empowered to make new constitutional law. Henceforth, the will of the Fu¨hrer became the source of law in Germany.62 Hitler had no time for international institutions, whether the League of Nations or the ecumenical meetings that prepared the way for the World Council of Churches. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, and people like Martin Niemo¨ller were not allowed to take part in such international meetings as the Life and Work Conference that met in Oxford in 1937. Micklem goes on to state that ‘international law as we understand it rests broadly upon the Christian ethic and is only conceivable on that basis’.63 Micklem’s Reformed contemporary and Oxford colleague Alexander Dunlop Lindsay (1879 – 1951) adds some useful comments on this issue. In The Modern Democratic State, first published during the war and therefore to be assessed as part of an urgent struggle to rid the world of tyranny, Lindsay argued that much was still to be learned from fifthcentury Athens and from Roman law. In Athens, citizens accepted a distinction between law, nomos, and decrees and resolutions of the assembly. The law served as a constitution or accepted way of governing which the assembly was not at liberty to alter. It provided the framework within which the ruling assembly passed its decrees.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

137

If an orator persuaded a public meeting to pass a decree violating the city’s fundamental laws, he could be charged with illegality. Lindsay sees the same principle at work in the American Constitution where the Supreme Court acts as guardian of the American Constitution. Later in the Roman Empire an important distinction was made between jus and lex. The former served as a common law which any sensible person could see was reasonable and essential for the wellbeing of society. It helped, said Lindsay, ‘to create the concept of community greater than the state, to which all men belonged – a common civilization within which men were governed by principles in their relation to each other’. He then quoted the opening paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence as a good example of a fundamental position or law: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted by men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That wherever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute a new government. In Pious and Secular America, Reinhold Niebuhr regarded this opening paragraph as mere sentimentality and simply not true. All men are not created equal. In his book on democracy, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, he comments: ‘The founding fathers of America regarded “faction” as an unmitigated evil.’ They looked for a basis all individuals might accept without argument, truths which are selfevident. This, according to Niebuhr, was one of their mistakes. They were too individualistic. Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson were primarily interested in the individual’s freedom of religion.64 Later groups would have to contest the broad assumption that all men are created equal by asking basic questions: what about the slaves, what about the women, what about native peoples? Is it self-evident that we are all equal and on what basis can we make such a claim? But the claim that we owe our ‘inalienable rights’ to ‘their Creator’ gives the theologians the excuse, if such is needed, to enter the debate.

138

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

In the centuries before the Enlightenment and the ‘Age of Reason’, theologians offered a more detailed account of theological foundations for society than that provided by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century took the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, as the foundation document for the good society: Now the precepts of the Decalogue contain the very intention of the Lawgiver who is God. For the precepts of the first table, which direct us to God, contain the very order to the common and final good which is God; while the precepts of the second table contain the order of justice, that nothing undue be done to anyone, and that each one be given his due; for it is in this sense that we are to take the precepts of the Decalogue. Consequently the precepts of the Decalogue admit of no dispensation whatever.65 Men, and later women, could and did amend the American Declaration of Independence, but no one can alter the Ten Commandments. They are a given: given, Jews and Christian believe, by God. As such they have a strong claim to be regarded as foundation documents for the good society, and the faithful have a moral duty to see that governments honour them. A similar respect for the Law of God, as distinct from human rules and regulations, is found among the sixteenth-century Reformers. According to a recent study, The Reformation of Rights (2007), it was in response to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants in France in 1572 that Calvinists argued that the political government of each community involved a three-way covenant between God, the rulers and the people. God would protect rulers and people in return for their obedience to his laws, especially the Ten Commandments. If rulers broke their terms of the covenant, they could be resisted and removed from office. Calvinist resistance theory was, says John Witte Jr, ‘a critical step in the development of the Western theory of democratic revolutions and constitutional government’.66 After John Calvin’s death in 1564, Theodore Beza (1519 – 1605) became his successor and Moderator of the Company of Pastors in Geneva. Like Calvin, he was trained in law and like Calvin became legal as well as theological advisor to the city of Geneva, but his influence soon reached well beyond the city walls. According to his understanding, each

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

139

Christian society is governed by universal laws of scripture and custom and by local laws that are drawn up by local authorities. The clearest expression of the universal laws, binding on all, rulers and people alike, is the Ten Commandments.

Referendums According to the British elections expert David Butler,67 there have been 800 national referendums around the world, half of them in Switzerland. Did this Swiss option have anything to do with Calvin and Geneva and its democratic influence or is the real debt to village communities that had practised direct democracy since 1294? None of the theologians I have listed, not even Barth in Basle, advocated ‘direct democracy’ rather than ‘representative democracy’. Their objections are similar to those expounded in a study of direct democracy in California and Switzerland.68 In direct democracy voters are anonymous. They are not accountable to anyone for their decisions. There are no special hearings where vulnerable minority groups can gain a hearing, no debates where arguments on both sides have to be weighed. A referendum may also expose and aggravate divisions and conflicts which are hard to heal, such as those between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, but they might also prod governments into seeking consensus, as has sometimes been the case in Switzerland.69 Lindsay, Barker, Micklem and co. all assumed that democracy requires debating before deciding, and an educated electorate who understand the issues. Observers have been quite impressed with the calibre of Swiss voters but partly attribute this to a culture of regular consultations on local and national issues where people accept their duty to be well informed. Referendums have been a basic part of the Swiss Constitution since 1848 and voters have had to think about a whole range of issues – civic equality for Jews, membership of the United Nations, women’s suffrage, capital punishment – which one hopes would be discussed and debated in congregations and synods and in a whole range of formal and informal meetings. Churches can be overruled. When the Reformed Synod of Zurich agreed in 1921 to ordain women, their decision was rejected as unconstitutional. Such a decision required a referendum. It took another fifty years before Swiss voters in the referendum of 1971 allowed women to vote.70

140

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Single-issue referendums, for example, in Ireland on abortion, or in various American states on same-sex marriage, are probably better tests of what people understand about questions that concern most families. But issues that seem local can have wider repercussions. Swiss people voted 6:4 against having more mosques, much to the alarm of banking communities in Zurich and Geneva which depend on good business relations with the Muslim East. Andrew Goddard offered a balanced guide for Christians puzzled by the British referendum on Europe but admits that on the ballot paper ‘the question is simply worded but incredibly complex to answer’. He does not query the wisdom of holding a referendum.71 My study is more about the principle of holding a referendum than the practice and its results. The House of Lords debated the issue in January 2001. Sociologists like Lord Dahrendorf and legal experts like Lord Norton were opposed on principle. So was Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, as spokesman for the Labour Party. The question seemed to be regarded as a matter for lawyers and constitutional experts. None of the bishops who may have been present had anything to add. Outside Parliament, referendum’s leading advocate was the Oxford professor Vernon Bogdanor. He may well have influenced his pupil, David Cameron, the Conservative leader who promised his party in 2013 that he would hold a referendum and did so with no great enthusiasm in June 2016. Bogdanor believes in the sovereignty of the people. None of my theologians do. His other main argument is that referendums get more people involved in politics: ‘Democracy is a form of government in which the ultimate power lies with the people. Yet, in almost every modern democracy, the role of the people is negative.’72 Results of referendums may be unexpected and undesired. Citizens may use a referendum as a protest vote. This is happening in Britain. Those least affected by immigration are the people demanding greater control of our borders! In Bolivia, evangelical Christians objected to granting a second term to President Moraes because he supported the claims of indigenous religious groups, and adopted the slogan ‘Choose God, Vote No.’ Southern Baptists in the United States saw a referendum as a chance to object to companies that supported same-sex partnerships. The Chilean dictator Pinochet used a heavily biased referendum question to gain popular support, but finally it was a referendum that defeated

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

141

him and he resigned. Even more welcome, but less dramatic, was the use by de Klerk in South Africa of a referendum to assure his party of public support for ending apartheid. It worked well, despite the fact that only white men and white women had the vote. Given all the reservations about referendums, it is interesting that it was on a Church issue, the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland in 1868, that, according to Bogdanor, advocacy of a referendum in Britain was first heard. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli urged: You cannot come on a sudden, and without the country being the least informed of your intentions, to a decision that will alter the character of England and her institutions [. . .] It is most wise that you should hold your hand unless you have assured yourself of such an amount of popular sympathy as will make your legislation permanent and beneficial.73 A century later, Prime Minister Edward Heath agreed: ‘you cannot possibly take the country into the Common Market [now the European Union] if the majority of the people were against it’.74 But he felt his majority in Parliament gave him his mandate. The 1975 referendum result confirmed his judgment. On an impressive 65-per cent turnout, 67 per cent voted in favour, just 33 per cent against. This is the proportion of ‘Yes’ votes that the Second Vatican Council insisted on for all its decisions. Today’s 52 per cent versus 48 per cent might count as a ‘margin of error’!

Subsidiarity Members of the European Parliament who talk about subsidiarity may be unware that the concept is good Roman Catholic social teaching. Some assume it comes from either the federal constitution of the United States, where each state may have some of its own laws, or from the Federal Republic of Germany.75 In papal teaching it was originally directed at too much State power of any sort. Like most papal and indeed council documents, it does not name names or get too specific, but the date, 1931, for the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, marks it as a timely warning that Pius XI hoped Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia must heed. They did not.

142

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

The encyclical states: It is, indeed, true as history clearly proves, that owing to the change of social conditions, much that was formerly done by small bodies can nowadays be accomplished only by large corporations. Nevertheless, just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and to commit to the community at large what private enterprise and endeavour can accomplish, so too it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organisation to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies. This is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, unshaken and unchangeable and it retains its full truth today.76 It is important to note that the hierarchy of different functions starts from the bottom and moves up. Whatever an individual, a family or, say, a village community can do for itself, let them do it. Only when a task is either too great for the individual or smaller company, or when it concerns a wider circle of people, should one expect wider help. In the version I have quoted from Hans Ku¨ng, it is wrong for the larger body to ‘arrogate to itself’ functions the smaller body is better equipped to perform simply because it is local and more directly connected to the people most affected. It is described as harmful because such actions deprive people of the dignity that goes with being treated as responsible and competent to manage their own affairs. So stated, it reads like a basic principle of Congregationalists, or Independents, as my seventeenth-century ancestors were sometimes called. The local congregation should be trusted to manage its own affairs. If they cannot, then they ask for help from a synod or wider council. Such practice pre-dates papal teaching by 300 years or more. It might even be traced to the New Testament, where questions about Jewish – Gentile relationships became too much for each local community to handle and could benefit from something like the Jerusalem Council described in Acts 15. Just before he started getting into trouble with the Vatican, Ku¨ng managed to get away with the point that the model of the apostolic Church was ‘still binding’ and that the model excludes ‘a factual voiding of the (local) bishop and the position of the faithful’.77 He knows that the unfinished business of the First

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

143

Vatican Council included the question of the authority and competence of local bishops. Were they simply the pope’s deputies or could they show more initiative as might best fit the needs of their local diocese? Another and earlier example of subsidiarity is the Dutch Calvinist notion of ‘sphere sovereignty’ as outlined by one of their key theologians, Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), in his lectures at Princeton in 1898.78 He is opposed to the French Revolution’s ‘anti-theistical’ teaching on popular sovereignty, where the final authority is the will of the people. Only God has final authority. He also opposes the German version of State sovereignty, presumably that of Bismarck. The State’s power has to be kept in check and can be kept in check if various spheres are respected. These spheres include the family, science, art, the universities and the Church. Within the limits of their own competence, each of these spheres can be self-governing. ‘In all these spheres the state government cannot impose its laws but must reverence the innate law of life.’ The European Union has often had difficulty interpreting this papal teaching even when, in the early years, most of its leaders were Roman Catholic. Clarifications might have helped the British be less suspicious. Wayne David refers to what he regards as a peculiarly British understanding that subsidiarity means ‘minimum interference’ in our national affairs. One of the catchphrases in the campaign to leave the European Union was ‘take back control’. The positive dimension of working together to make Europe a more peaceful and more prosperous place for all was forgotten. Also glossed over was the fact that Brussels cannot impose its policies on us without our consent. We belong, or did belong, to its various councils and parliament. Various clarifications of subsidiarity have been offered. In the 1975 Response of the European Commission to the Tindemanns Report, it was stated: ‘In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, the Union will be given responsibility only for those matters which the member states are no longer capable of dealing with sufficiently.’79 Sharing information and resources in campaigns against terrorist attacks is one current example. One of the simplest interpretations is that, in subsidiarity, ‘decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen’. Writing as early as 1993, Wayne David was aware that subsidiarity needs to be the cornerstone of a new vision of Europe that can inspire the peoples of Europe in a way that the Maastricht

144

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Treaty has patently failed to do. In a European Community where ordinary people feel increasingly alienated from politicians and all levels of government, subsidiarity needs to be developed politically into a concept of popular sovereignty and empowerment. Only then can we begin to construct a Europe which can be accurately described as a genuine community of peoples.80 Badini Confalonieri, Hans Ku¨ng and others think it is high time subsidiarity was also applied to the Roman Catholic Church. They can quote a pope in support. Pius XII, in an address in 1946 to newly appointed cardinals, said that this principle ‘is valid for social life in all its organisations and also for the life of the Church without prejudice to her hierarchical structure’. But if the hierarchical principle starts with the pope and moves down, it is not going to be easy to accommodate a system which operates in the reverse direction, which encourages socalled lower orders to do what they can before asking for help from those above. In 1985 the Synod of Bishops was still asking whether subsidiarity was valid for the Church. Ad Leys, who had been a staff member of the Dutch Bishops Conference, embarked on a full-length doctoral dissertation in search of an answer.81 He is convinced that the subsidiarity principle does apply to the Church but is forced to admit it has yet to be applied! The same rather sad conclusion is reached by various commentators of the Canon Law Society of America in their edition of The Code of Canon Law [1983], A Text and Commentary.82 The actual canons say little, the commentators a little more. Canon 445 states that ‘A particular council sees to it that provision is made for the pastoral needs of the people of God.’ The commentator James A. Provost, who later helped edit The Tabu of Democracy in the Church, adds: ‘In keeping with the principle of subsidiarity that is to guide not only the drafting of the code but also its interpretation and implementation, conciliar decrees should not become mired in details best left to local dioceses or even parishes.’ There are, he suggests, plenty of precedents for good and competent local councils. He mentions the Council of Baltimore in 1884, synods in Belgium soon after that country became independent in 1830 and what happened at Vatican II where regional bishops simply decided to meet together and work out their response to Council documents. He might

ACCOUNTABILITY AND OTHER ISSUES

145

have said more about those ‘incredible Belgians’ like Suenens, Frings, and Lie´nart, who have a whole book named after them.83 John A. Alesandro, Chancellor of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, says in the general introduction ‘the principle of subsidiarity should be more broadly and completely applied’. He goes on to admit that though many of the Second Vatican Council’s principles have been implemented, ‘the most notable exceptions are the directions concerning subsidiarity in the judicial process’. It is perhaps more significant than some of these authors realise that ‘subsidiarity’ is not mentioned in the index to the documents of Vatican II. Ad Leys is correct in saying that the Council’s document about the Church, Lumen Gentium, clause 13, describes subsidiarity as it explains how different parts of the Church ‘bring their own gifts to the other parts and to the whole church [. . .] through the mutual communications of all’, but it never uses the word ‘subsidiarity’. That there is an urgent need to work out the relationship between the primacy and the bishops became obvious in the crisis provoked by Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in 1968. Bishops, who had no idea what the Pope was saying until they heard it on the news, were suddenly expected to be able to explain and defend Catholic teaching on family planning. An Extraordinary Synod was summoned in 1969 to resolve the crisis. All present agreed on the need to clarify what previous popes had said about subsidiarity.84 Hans Ku¨ng in Structures of the Church argues: the principle of subsidiarity is all the better realized in the Church, the more the Petrine office [. . .] guides the Church through the bishops, the more, therefore, decentralization and selfadministration of the individual churches (of a diocese, a country, a language area, or a continent) are displayed and the rarer are direct interventions on the part of the Petrine office.85 But for a younger Roman Catholic scholar like Badini Confalonieri, this understanding of subsidiarity is too much top-down. ‘It is always the inalienable responsibility of each decisional level from the individual upward, to determine the extent and limits of what is one’s responsibility to decide and act, and what is instead better delegated to higher authority – not the other way round.’86

146

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

To return again from such ecclesiastical disputes, the news this morning had an excellent, down-to-earth illustration of what is at issue and why subsidiarity is good for us. A factory in Tiverton, Devon, had discovered that it could be much more efficient and effective if it treated all its employees as decision makers instead of machine-minders. The people can be trusted to make decisions which are best for them and best for all. Not everyone is convinced! A final word from England’s much-loved Roman Catholic archbishop Basil Hume is extra topical because it comes from his book Remaking Europe. Subsidiarity is also about much more than decentralisation and local responsibility. It is a recognition that people, because of who and what they are, should be empowered to make decisions for their own lives and with due regard for the interests of the wider community [. . .] It emphasises the need to develop human potential as God-given and as the greatest resource possessed by the planet.87

CHAPTER 4 DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH AND THE BIBLE

A First Woman President? I began this chapter just as the United States was about to elect its first woman president. I had to alter it because, much to everyone’s surprise and the pollsters’ embarrassment, Donald Trump won. Hillary Clinton lost. Clinton gained 3 million more votes but what counts are votes in the electoral college for each state.1 Not least because of what was known about Donald Trump’s attitude to women, this was not good news for women anywhere. Hillary Clinton’s defeat was a missed opportunity for women worldwide, said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia. Mona Eltahawy from Cairo spelt out the shock and horror many women might feel: ‘Trump’s victory is a clear message to women around the world that we don’t count, that our safety and demands for justice for sexual violence are not important. When a sexual predator can become president of any country – most of all, the most important country in the world – it’s a green light that women’s bodies are fair game.’ Women’s rights leaders like Sonali Khan in India had looked to the United States for support in struggles against some horrendous and widely reported instances of sexual violence against women. They found none. Khan suspected that the only reason Hillary Clinton lost was because she was a woman. Hillary Clinton was one of the most experienced presidential candidates America had ever known. Trump had never held office and in business had twice been bankrupted. In Japan, women’s rights campaigners had hoped that a Clinton victory

148

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

would raise the profile of women in their own country, where there are just three women in a cabinet of twenty. There has been some progress. Yuriko Kolke is Governor of Tokyo and Renho Murato is the first woman to lead the Democratic Party, the main party of opposition. I draw these reports from Emma Graham-Harrison in the Guardian (10 November 2016), two days after Trump’s victory. On the same page, Jessica Valenti asks ‘How do I tell my daughter we elected a sexist bully?’ She consoled herself, and perhaps her daughter, with the thought that women have become very powerful and ‘our power really scared him and others who are not ready to change and grow. And we owe it to ourselves and to our country not to let fear stop us now. Not ever.’ When her daughter is old enough, Valenti will fill her in on the details of campaigns whose nastiness and macho brutality shocked women and men all round the world. The recriminations dragged on relentlessly for over a year, with mass rallies and television debates aimed at mutual destruction rather than a common search for what was best for the United States and for the world. Trump could be branded as a sexual predator because of his own confession, as recorded on secret tapes that are now public property. He had boasted of being able to grope women wherever his hands chose to wander and get away with it just because he was famous. Women who had been groped and had previously kept silent, often because they knew no one was listening, now told stories one would hope any man would be ashamed to hear. Trump was forced to assure his audience that no man had greater respect for women than he. And he told his wife to say so too! She did! Many women believed them, especially white women. ‘White women ignored sexual claims to hand Trump victory’, is another subheading in the same newspaper in an article jointly written by two women, Lois Beckett in Philadelphia and Carmen Fishwick, and by Rory Carroll. According to the CNN exit polls, 53 per cent of white women supported Trump. So did 26 per cent of Latino women. In contrast, 94 per cent of black women voted for Clinton and so did 68 per cent of Latino women. On the face of it, race is more important than gender. Not quite so. In the week following the inauguration of President Trump, 5 million women took to the streets in 673 marches worldwide. Many different reasons for protesting brought them all together: demagoguery, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism and homophobia.2

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

149

Sometimes the only way of expressing your disapproval is to vote with your feet. Women don’t necessarily vote for women any more than women prefer to have women doctors or lawyers. In my own denomination, local churches cannot object to a candidate just because she is a woman but they may find other reasons not unrelated to gender. My successor in an Oxford congregation was a woman who later became a synod moderator but when she was invited by the local Church Meeting to become their minister, two families soon left the church because they did not think you could be a minister and a mother. No one ever said to me you cannot be a pastor and a father. The conviction that fathers and mothers are equally responsible for their children is still one of the battles we have to fight in church and in society. Elections are of course more complicated, rarely about a single issue. Many stick with a party regardless. Others decide other matters than gender matter most. What did Hillary Clinton think about abortion? What had she actually accomplished for women as Secretary of State? And for all the bombast, Trump sometimes seemed just like a nice family man who wanted ‘to make America great again’. ‘Family’, as political philosophers remind us, is the basic political unit. Aristotle said so too. I discovered in the course of research that Hillary Clinton was not the first woman to be nominated for president in the United States. That distinction belongs to Victoria Woodhull in 1872,3 but her prospects of ever being elected were remote indeed. Women in the USA did not have the vote until 1920, even though women had been campaigning on this issue for some years before Mrs Woodhull’s nomination. If we look for explanations of why women are enfranchised, globally these are most often associated with religion and a religion’s understanding or lack of understanding of women. This is the conclusion reached by Jad Adams in Women and the Vote: A World History.4 The most important single factor affecting women’s suffrage is the majority religion of a nation. Like all generalisations it will have to be qualified by the exceptions. Switzerland is one. Despite strong Reformed and Reformation roots, women did not receive the vote until 1971 and even then not in all cantons. The United States Presidential Election is more complicated and in 2016 horribly confusing – with the emphasis on horribly. It became one of the nastiest contests in living memory.

150

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Religion was not an issue. It could have been. It is taken for granted that whoever stands for election will be a Christian. There is nothing in the Constitution to say so. America is a secular state, unlike Great Britain which has an Established Church, with bishops joining the ‘lords spiritual and temporal’ in the House of Lords and so part of the government of the land. Our monarch must be an Anglican and is titular Head of the Church of England. The United States jealously guards a distinction between Church and State, religion and politics, but in practice assumes every president will be a Christian – or conceivably a Jew, like Bernie Sanders – and preferably a Protestant. It had no constitutional basis for rejecting Kennedy, its first ever Roman Catholic president, but Kennedy knew he had to demonstrate that he was not going to take his marching orders from Rome or people would never vote for him. On one momentous issue, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1963, he proved that he was more reluctant to take advice from the pope than was his atheist counterpart, Krushchev. The result was nearly World War III, had not good Pope John stepped in quietly to keep the peace. Ten days before the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both photographed attending church, Trump looking slightly lost, Clinton standing at a lectern. Hillary Clinton is Methodist. Donald Trump had the backing of a Pentecostal pastor. Some assumed he was a Presbyterian, but this has been firmly denied by the Presbyterians! Being agnostic does not win votes. Being a woman did not seem to matter that much either, except to Hillary Clinton. In the early weeks of campaigning, she made much of reaching beyond the glass ceiling, that invisible barrier to women’s promotion in many vocations and professions. She would find support from the Methodist Church in the States and elsewhere. Methodism treats women as equal to men and has women ministers and even women bishops. This church elected its first woman bishop in 1980 and has ordained women as ministers since 1956.5 A woman Roman Catholic candidate in the 1960s might have been advised to stand down. Were Catholics ready for women as leaders? Despite strong hints of revolution in the Magnificat, putting down the mighty from their seats, the Catholic hierarchy tend not to think of Mary as particularly political. But Vatican II, partly in response to what it constantly called ‘the signs of the times’, sensed change was in the air:

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

151

The hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in its fullness, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at this moment when the human race is undergoing so deep a transformation, women imbued with the spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling.6 But having quoted the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Message to Women’ of 8 December 1965, one of its last acts, Pope John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, On the Dignity and Vocation of Women (2002), reverted to a more traditional stance of extolling ‘Motherhood and Virginity’. It may sound unkind to say that the document still sees being a woman as a problem to be solved, but this is what it actually says in the first section, the challenge being to ‘solve the problems connected with the meaning and dignity of being a woman and being a man’, evidently on the assumption that gender determines that women and men may have very different functions in society.

First Woman Presidential Nominee Religion was a factor in Victoria Woodhull’s encounter with US democracy. She was a Christian and a Spiritualist, at one stage National President of the Spiritualist Convention. The Women’s Suffrage Movement to which she looked for support, the American Woman’s Suffrage Association, was presided over by one of New York’s most popular and revered preachers, Henry Ward Beecher, not because he was a great advocate of their cause but, as her biographer states, ‘tradition had established that a man shall be the titular head of any ladies’ organisation’. Few men could outrank him in fame. Ministers, says Woodhull’s biographer, were the ‘elite of the city’. A much stronger campaigner was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, better known today, though still rarely mentioned, for the Woman’s Bible. Also associated with what at times seems more like a family circle of people concerned about the abolition of slavery and/or feminism was Harriet Beecher Stowe, sister to Henry Ward Beecher and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the classic anti-slavery novel. But just as Donald Trump’s campaign was at one stage threatened, or at least challenged, by his self-confessed habit of groping women,

152

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

supporters of Victoria Woodhull’s demand for votes for women could easily be put off by her outspoken advocacy for free love. For such views she had, she knew, the support of New York’s most famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, who confided in her that ‘marriage is the grave of love’. But he also admitted that he could never preach what he practised without immediately losing most of his congregation. His own sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, could not cope with Victoria’s views on sex or her strident style and was suspected of mocking her in another of her novels. Her description of a Mrs Cerulean ‘who felt called to the modern work of society regeneration’ was read as a personal attack. Any comparison with Donald Trump’s sexual indiscretions is unfair but could easily be made. Victoria tried to explain in her speeches that in commending free love she was not advocating promiscuity. She was simply stating that the law cannot compel people to love. Love between two people comes naturally or not at all. It requires mutual consent or it is not love. In too many marriages women have too little experience of real love, meaning also real sex. Her fault was in being much too explicit in what in Britain we call the ‘Victorian era’, when even table legs had to be covered up. She even dared to give public lectures on menstruation. Those who felt less inhibited might agree that in a democracy we need to hear a ‘real’ woman’s point of view. Governments legislate on marriage and divorce and many other matters that deeply affect the lives of women. The British Parliament recently debated the ‘tampon tax’. In opposing all laws about marriage, Victoria carried the argument too far, at least from the point of view of all who regard marriage as either a sacrament or something instituted by God. She also underestimated the importance of the public and legal recognition of marriage, the protection of the claims of children, legitimacy, inheritance and matters of joint ownership of property. Had she aired such views in 2016, she would not, I think, stand more hope of being elected President of the United States. Candidates cannot be too radical. Donald Trump has taken great care to present himself as a faithful family man, giving his first interviews surrounded by his wife and children.

The Woman’s Bible When I first saw mention of Mrs Stanton’s Bible, I assumed at first that Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815– 1902) had edited the Bible to highlight

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

153

the case for women’s suffrage and to omit those passages which, from a man’s point of view, keep women in their place. She was after all a Christian, a Presbyterian, and a founder member of the American women’s rights convention that met at Seneca Falls in 1848. It would be a valid criticism that because all the books of the Bible from Moses to Paul were written by men, they might be suspected of male bias that women readers were best qualified to correct. Stanton would not be the first person to rewrite, or at least edit, Holy Scripture to make its theology more accessible. Even America’s founding father and author of the Declaration of Independence, President Thomas Jefferson, had done this, pruning those parts of the New Testament that obscured the human life and moral teaching of Jesus. Stanton’s project was more of a commentary on key texts about women and, though she did much of the writing herself, the Woman’s Bible was a team effort, the work of eight women. It was published in two volumes, in 1895 and 1898. What is especially interesting is her reason for organising and coordinating this venture. As Kathi Kern, one of her biographers, explains, Stanton realised that campaigns for votes for women lacked power. Being disfranchised was a symptom of bigger problem, American culture’s attitude to women. Says Kern: ‘she began to see that women’s lack of political rights was symptomatic of a larger, more disturbing problem, the belief in women’s subordination, rooted in the Bible and taught by the Christian Church and clergy’.7 In one of her many articles she asked ‘What has Christianity done for Women?’8 Not much! was her answer. Twelve hundred years ago, women were better off in Egypt than they were in most Christian countries. All religions, not just Christianity, were to blame: ‘all religions thus far have taught the headship and superiority of man, the inferiority and subordination of women’. She modified this broad generalisation in the case of Roman Catholics. The editors of a selection of her many writings comment here: ‘the honor accorded to the Virgin Mary and to female saints in general in the Roman Catholic Church deeply impressed Stanton who saw in Mariolatry evidence that Catholic Christianity had a higher regard for women and had preserved ancient understandings that divinity was both masculine and feminine’. Such praise for Catholic piety from a Presbyterian woman would be unusual even today. Today many Roman Catholic women protest: the virgin Mother of God and virgin saints cannot be a model for all women to follow, especially if they are married!

154

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

And though Stanton blamed the Bible and the clergy for teaching women’s subordination, she also had some harsh criticisms of the medical profession. ‘It is a sad comment on the Christianity of England and America to find professors in Medical Colleges of the 19th century less liberal than those of the earliest civilizations. In 1876, four professors of the College of Surgeons in London resigned because three women were licenced for the practice of midwifery and the whole Royal College of Physicians thanked them for it.’ She singled out Augustine for attack, blaming him for blaming women for original sin, and cited as evidence of his influence a tract published in London in 1632: ‘The reason why women have no control in parliament, why they make no laws, consent to none, abrogate none, is their original sin’. And though Kern later describes Stanton as agnostic, the whole thrust of her research is to highlight the importance of theology for the woman’s movement as seen by people like Stanton and her colleagues. Most of them were church people like herself, and one of them, Revd Phebe Hanaford, an ordained woman minister of the Universalist Church. It was significant that Stanton was a Presbyterian who, as a young woman, had learned to read the New Testament in its original Greek, thanks to help from a local Presbyterian minister, Simon Hoback. The Reformed tradition looks to the Bible as its supreme source of authority. One of its founding fathers, John Calvin, is still revered for his numerous commentaries on different books of the Bible. This tradition also encourages individuals to make up their own minds, even if, as in Stanton’s case, they become more sceptical in their conclusions. Traditionally Rome tells its people what to believe. Calvin knew you had to give people reasons for belief, not just shout ‘thus says the Lord’, though perhaps I exaggerate the difference as it would be a brave person who argued with Calvin. Calvin was no feminist,9 but he was an advocate of more conciliar ways of Church government. He would approve the fact that the Woman’s Bible was a team effort and the result of the work of many groups for Bible study in nineteenth-century America. Many different women’s voices expressed their views in the Woman’s Bible, so many that a later generation of feminist theologians thought it should be renamed Women’s Bible. Some, like Elizabeth Schu¨ssler Fiorenza, now regret that Stanton, for all her commendable pioneering efforts, had failed to notice that the Bible itself speaks with many voices. Is the Bible

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

155

itself democratic? Schu¨ssler Fiorenza does not quite say so. She does say that the Woman’s Bible ‘does not sufficiently appreciate that the Bible is a cacophony of interested historical voices and a field of rhetorical struggles in which questions of truth and meaning are being negotiated’.10 Likewise, the popular and Reformed expositor Walter Brueggemann accepts that when we read a book of the Bible like that attributed to Jeremiah, Jeremiah’s voice is not the only one we hear. Just as well, for, as he explains, some scholars doubt if Jeremiah ever existed, or if we can ever be certain of knowing what he, as distinct from his editors, once thought. A text has to be read in its social context, placed ‘within various social voices, or dynamic forces. Interpretation requires attention both to the particular voice in the text and to the other voices in the situation with which the voice may be in dispute, tension, or agreement.’11 Such an approach enables us to be much more understanding when reading Paul, or less hasty in our conclusions when studying Genesis. One of Stanton’s contemporaries, Helen Gardener, asked: ‘What did Paul know about women anyway? He was a brilliant but erratic old bachelor who fought on whatever side he happened to find himself.’12 Schu¨ssler Fiorenza and others would now explain that the ideal in the first Christian communities was to be A Discipleship of Equals, where, as in the famous text Galatians 3:28, social distinctions of master and slave, male and female, no longer divide. But the reality was that in Rome and other centres such social distinctions did exist and the Church had to find a path between respect for the existing social order and the radical and revolutionary claims of the gospel. But if it was right to tell the women of Corinth in the first century they should keep silent, not least for fear of making their husbands feel inferior, this injunction no longer applies to today’s Church. Nor need we dismiss Genesis’ account of the creation of woman out of the spare rib of Adam as meaning that woman was an ‘afterthought’, as Stanton suggested. Instead we can affirm that women and men are both full human beings, of the same human flesh, and not just when they are physically joined together when they make love. Or, if we accept the fact that there is a debate in the Bible about the status of women, we can hear both sides of an argument and contrast what is said in Genesis 1 about women and men being created at the same time and in the image of God, with Genesis 2, where the man is created first. Karl Barth tried to resolve such a debate by saying that our humanity is

156

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

always co-humanity. We are made for one another and never complete just on our own. The Bible is bound to be politically controversial because all its writers were engaged in political controversies. Prophets like Jeremiah wrestled with questions of exile or resistance. New Testament writers were defending faith in one who was crucified as a political rebel against imperial Rome. Democrats, as I shall argue in a later chapter, accept that we discern truth only by being prepared to listen to different voices. The Bible is full of them. Somewhere within its many texts Christians claim to discern a word from God. Most of us no longer argue that every word was written by God, or ‘God breathed’, as some used to say. The response from the American ‘Bible Belt’ was to be expected but took Stanton by surprise. She seriously underestimated how sacrosanct every word of the Bible was for many readers, and how unwelcome her own interpretations of familiar themes were, even to the women’s movement. One cleric denounced the book as ‘the work of women and the devil’. She offered the witty reply that ‘his Satanic Majesty’ had not been invited onto an all-women committee! Instead of supporting the feminist movement, her Bible became a weapon for those opposed to women’s suffrage: ‘This is the teaching of national suffrage leaders. Are you willing for women who hold these views to become political parties in our country?’ If you believe that the Word of God is inspired and do not wish to see our State Constitution violated, and if you believe in the purity of the family and the sanctity of marriage, you will vote against the Nineteenth Amendment (on Suffrage) and keep women out of politics, said another. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, which she had helped to found, denounced the work at its meeting in 1896, in what is described as a ‘hotly and closely contested debate’. Fifty-three supported the resolution, 41 opposed, but the 53 included most of the officers of the Association.13 Stanton had one very strong supporter, Susan Anthony. For her, the big issue in this controversy was religious liberty. Her argument is worth quoting, for its reasoning would years later appeal to the Roman Catholic bishops at Vatican II when they too were debating religious liberty and came to the conclusion that no one should be compelled to believe or to worship in a particular way. Susan Anthony pleaded: ‘If you fail to teach women a broad catholic spirit, I will not give much for them after they are enfranchised. If women are going to do without thinking, they had

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

157

better do without voting.’ The women’s vote at this meeting was a bitter blow to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was now eighty and was no longer welcome in the women’s movement. She never lived to see the day she had lived for most of her life, when women got the vote. She died in 1902. The vote was granted in 1920. For many years the Woman’s Bible became a banned book. Later generations treat it and its authors more kindly. It became a symbol of hope for all who struggle to reconcile Christianity and feminism. British theologian Anne Loades describes Stanton as ‘the doyenne’ of the feminist movement. Stanton’s book’s chief defect now is seen as its being too much the work of white women, insufficiently aware of race and class. We may also question whether Stanton exaggerated the importance of theological reasons for or against votes for women. Jane Lewis edited a volume of Arguments for and against Women’s Suffrage, 1864– 1896,14 the years before the suffragettes became so prominent and sometimes so militant. Her first spokeswoman is Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827– 91). Despite being a Unitarian, religious reasons are never part of her argument, though she does regard them as issues of justice and mercy. As a matter of expediency, women should be given the vote. This will be good for society and help men be less selfish. It will help women take a much more intelligent interest in public affairs. And if it is argued that women are too ignorant to take part in political discussions, does not this apply equally to most men? Educate the women. Or, if women are warned that polling booths are not safe places for women, make them safe. Only indirectly does Bodichon get more theological when she refers in passing to the fact that women are used to having different roles as well as wife and mother and did so in the early Christian Church, among the Jews and the Quakers. Bodichon was well read and had travelled widely in both France and the States, there meeting with some of Stanton’s contemporaries, like Lucretia Mott, who had kept her informed about women’s rights literature in the USA. She supported the campaign of John Stuart Mill, who entered Parliament in 1865 as an advocate of women’s suffrage. His wife had been commending the cause even earlier, in 1851, but of course had no voice or vote in Parliament. Elizabeth Stanton misjudged what the general reaction to her Woman’s Bible would be but she was right to highlight women’s

158

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

subjection and subordination to men as a key issue the women’s movement had to address. John Stuart Mill made ‘The Subjection of Women’ the subject of a major address in 1869: All women are brought up from the earliest years in the belief that their ideal character is the very opposite of men, not self-will and government by self-control but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities, that it is their nature to live for others, to make complete abnegation of themselves [. . .] Men hold women in subjection by representing to them, meekness, submissiveness and resignation of all individual will into the hands of man. Later, the English suffragist and preacher Maude Royden took woman’s subjection to man as the opening theme of her book on the Church and Woman (1924).15 But unlike Elizabeth Stanton she did not blame either the Bible or the clergy but headed the opening chapter ‘The Universal Subordination of Women’. She agreed with L.T. Hobhouse that there were hardly any exceptions anywhere to this universal rule. As is still too often incumbent on women, Royden had to demonstrate her truly outstanding abilities as speaker and writer in order to be regarded as equal to any man. She was awarded several doctorates and the highest civic honour for a theologian, that of Companion of Honour (CH). She was such a brilliant speaker that even Archbishop Davidson felt he had to call on her services. But then, says her biographer Sheila Fletcher, the Archbishop got ‘cold feet’ and, fearful of too much opposition to the idea of women speaking in church – had not St Paul told them not to? – he then decided that if women did speak it should be only to other women and from the foot of the chancel, not in the sanctuary. ‘Were there still untouchables that women shall be barred from holy places?’ asked Royden. The apology in some churches was a long time coming.16 My one-time school friend Patricia Hollis is, like Royden, an outstanding woman and is a member of the House of Lords. It was Baroness Hollis who led the Lords’ revolt in 2015 against Chancellor George Osborne’s plans to cut tax credits, a rare event in the delicate relationship between the unelected House of Lords and the elected House of Commons. She shows in her anthology of Women in Public

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

159

1850–1900 that, years before her own revolt, women were perfectly capable of answering back and arguing their own cause. Catherine Mumford, who later became Catherine Booth of Salvation Army fame, rebuked a distinguished preacher, Revd Dr David Thomas, in 1853, for what he had said on Sunday when expounding a text in Genesis where the woman yields to the devil. ‘Your remarks appeared to imply the doctrine of women’s intellectual and even moral inferiority to man.’ Such a doctrine, she told the learned preacher, was ‘unscriptural and dishonouring to God’.17 Later she could advertise the fact that in the Salvation Army, men and women were equal. Some years later, possibly in the 1880s, Beatrice Webb, a pioneer, with her husband, of the new social science of sociological investigations, recalled an argument with a Professor Marshall who dared to tell her that ‘a woman was a subordinate being’ and that, if women ceased to be subordinate, men would no longer find them attractive enough to marry. She seems to have demonstrated in her own marriage that women could be just as strong, courageous, sympathetic and persistent as men were expected to be.18 In a partnership like marriage, the same values could be applied to different tasks. She and her husband, Sidney Webb, worked together on The History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897), and later on the study of local government.

Did Christianity Help or Hinder Women’s Suffrage? The short answer is both. In England women were becoming more active in their churches just as they were becoming more active in political campaigns. It is impossible to say which came first. In my own Reformed and Congregational tradition, in the early part of the nineteenth century, only men voted in Church Meetings on matters like the calling of a minister. The candidate was always a man. As women were permitted by the Qualifications of Women Act 1907 to become councillors and aldermen, mayors or chairmen, in county or borough councils, so they also became deacons and church secretaries in local congregations. Congregationalists ordained their first woman, Constance Todd, in 1917, some years before women were granted the vote, on the same terms as men, in 1928. But it has to be admitted that for better or worse, ‘we’ acted without conviction. A young woman who had studied theology in my college in Oxford presented herself for ministry

160

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

in a joint pastorate with her husband and no one could think of any objection. There had been an earlier discussion, in 1909, of the principle of women being ministers, but no definite conclusion.19 Anglicans had a much more serious debate,20 which is why it was not until 1992 that they agreed women could become priests, and not until 2014 that they agreed women could also become bishops, the first being consecrated in 2015. In the course of lengthy debates they rehearsed all the arguments about male headship and why the first disciples were all men, plus the conflicting statements in Paul’s letters that women like Elizabeth Stanton had previously dismissed in a couple of lines. Royden’s book, previously mentioned, The Church and Woman, gives a remarkably ecumenical survey from the Old Testament to the 1920s. As an Anglican, she advocated women’s ordination, though she did not campaign for it as she did on other feminist issues and questions of world peace, which at the time seemed either more important or had greater prospect of a successful outcome. She is quoted as saying in 1913: ‘I go cheerfully for women bishops, archbishops and popes.’ For some years (1917– 20), she had been accepted as a preacher in London’s most famous Congregational church, the City Temple in Holborn. But she makes it clear in her life and in her numerous books that the full acceptance and equality of women was for her an article of faith that must apply just as much to the Church as to representative government in the State. Her biographer states: ‘In her eyes, the women’s movement was the most profoundly moral movement since the foundation of the Christian Church.’ ‘Her feminism stemmed from her Christian faith. Who but Christ had seen women as human?’21 In England most churches did not agree with her. Very few Church leaders joined her in the Church League for Women’s Suffrage that Royden had helped found in 1909. This league had as its aim ‘to bind together, on a non-party basis, suffragists of every shade of opinion who are Church people in order to secure for women the vote in Church and State, as it is or may be granted by men’. A Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society was founded two years later, in 1911. Up and down the country there were numerous suffrage societies in almost every major town. Women from different churches might be able to agree women should have the vote. They found it harder to agree on how this might be achieved. When war broke out in 1914, they were also divided on the issue of war and peace, as, indeed, were many conscientious men.

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

161

Ironically the war helped the women’s cause because with so many ablebodied men away fighting, women became indispensable at home. In 1920, the Lambeth Conference of Bishops in the worldwide Anglican Communion agreed that women should be admitted to church councils on the same terms as laymen. By the time the Church got round to discussing women’s ordination, there were plenty of women to speak for and against the motion. The General Synod’s decision to ordain women may appear to be more democratic than that of the Congregationalists but we are dealing with very different Church constitutions. The Church of England was seeking to establish a national policy to permit any parish church to have a woman priest. Congregationalism in England and Wales was then a union of largely independent congregations which were free to decide to call a particular person, male or female, to be their minister. The expectation was that a call would be unanimous, or, if not, by a substantial majority of men and women voting in a Church Meeting. The ordination of Constance Todd in 1917 set a precedent, but it was not one that was widely followed until fifty or sixty years later. Presbyterians ordained their first woman in 1956, though the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of England had resolved in 1921 that there was no barrier in principle to the admission of women to the ordained ministry. Since 1972 most Congregationalists and Presbyterians have belonged to the United Reformed Church. In theory, no congregation is allowed to discriminate against women ministers. Anglicans failed to achieve a nationally agreed policy, so individual parishes may not only reject women priests but also women bishops. Does this make the Church of England more or less democratic? Or is this an example of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, where those most affected by a decision are the ones who make it?

Ecumenism and the Politics of Belief The ecumenical movement, once described by Archbishop William Temple as the great new fact of our time, has had as one of its many unacknowledged achievements making individual churches aware of each other’s thinking and enabling Christians in different countries to learn from and sometimes find support from churches in other continents. I take as two main expressions of this fact the World Council

162

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

of Churches and the Second Vatican Council. In both, ‘the question of woman’ has been discussed and debated, though in very different ways. But even as I turned for ecumenical illustrations to write about ‘the politics of belief’, there is no getting away from democracy and what we normally mean by ‘politics’. Male domination is not peculiar to the Church. It is simply given a different name. In the Church we speak of ‘patriarchy’; in politics the criticism is more personal, as we shall see. My ecumenical illustration comes from a meeting in New York partly sponsored by the World Council of Churches, and entitled ‘Women’s Voices and Visions of the Church’. A Roman Catholic, Mary E. Hunt, offers a paper on ‘Ecclesiology from a Roman Catholic Feminist Perspective’: Ecclesiology is a topic churches should have discussed with women for centuries. I work as a Roman Catholic theologian at WATER, the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual [. . .] WATER provides ‘a variety of much needed support for feminists who wish to be religious against the odds posed by patriarchy’. But she then states, ‘As a US citizen, I begin with a word about the presidential election.’ She says that religious people are blamed for the result. The result she describes as unbridled arrogance, its bellicose ways, policies that favour the wealthy and impoverish everyone else. In the days ahead, we in the USA, need our sisters and brothers around the world more than ever. This reality flavours my approach to ecclesiology. Hunt was speaking in 2004 and the dominating male in her sights was George W. Bush! Conflicts with patriarchy or male dominance can unite women from all round the world and from different Christian traditions. But in the different traditions, women and men are often forced to deal with the same issues in different ways. Vatican II, with all its long debates and voluminous documents, hardly ever mentions women, and all its decisions were made by men. By contrast, the World Council of Churches at its first Assembly in 1948 established a Commission on Life and Work of Women in the Church and asked a distinguished woman,

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

163

Dr Kathleen Bliss, a former Congregationalist married to an Anglican vicar, to produce a report on The Service and Status of Women in the Churches. Dr Bliss gave the reports she was receiving from the churches their historical context. She begins: ‘Women have always served the Church throughout its long history.’ But she goes on to comment that ‘often a woman’s zeal has been damped down and discouraged by the Church’. Take the example of that great pioneer of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. In 1852 she wrote about the Church of England to her friend Dean Stanley: I would have given her my head, my hand, my heart. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother’s drawing room. ‘You may go to Sunday School if you like’, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do, nor education for it. But with the example of Florence Nightingale, Bliss made a strong ecumenical point. Florence Nightingale’s own church did not help her, nor did her country, in her God-given vocation to nurse, but another church and another country did. She received the help she had almost despaired of finding from Pastor Fliedner and the deaconesses he was training in his hospital at Kaiserswerth in Germany. Says Bliss: ‘this is only one of many examples of the essentially ecumenical character of any study of women in the Church, for when one Church loses all consciousness, apparently, of the very existence of women able and willing to serve, another Church or another branch of the same Church, is beginning to take action.’22 Even in its pioneering days the ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches was helping women find their feet and their voice. In the 1930s, Henrietta Visser’t Hooft argued with the Reformed theologian Karl Barth about his interpretation of Paul in Corinthians. Barth had come to fame as a pastor and was now a distinguished theology professor in Bonn because of his exposition of Paul. The big point here is that, as a Protestant woman, she could argue with Barth. A Roman Catholic woman could not argue with her bishop and no one can argue with the pope. Likewise, when the World Council was

164

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

established in 1948, Barth, who had given one of the keynote addresses at its formation, was summoned to a meeting with a group of women who challenged the way he seemed to ignore what Paul had said in Galatians, that in Christ the old distinctions of Jew and Gentile, master and slave, male and female no longer apply. One very strong adversary was Sarah Chakko from Lahore, soon to become the first woman president of the WCC. Barth, we are told, found her quite terrifying because she was so confident and competent. Women could not argue with the bishops at Vatican II because none were invited. They were present for the final, third and fourth, sessions but only as observers. The agenda was decided by men, and women were not on the agenda but only given a brief mention in the cheerfully named document on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, Joy and Hope. Some Roman Catholics longed for fuller discussion of compulsory celibacy for priests, family planning and the ordination of women as priests – topics which obviously concern women just because they are women – but the Council was not allowed to discuss any of these. Gaudium et Spes has very little to say about the place of women in modern society beyond the points I have already mentioned. It did notice, but without further comment, that ‘patriarchal families . . . are daily experiencing change’ (6). ‘Women claim equality with men in law and in reality, where they have not yet achieved it’ (9). People were asking ‘really basic questions or feeling them with a new urgency. What is man and woman? ‘Women claim equality with men in law and in reality, where they have not yet achieved it.’ (10). ‘What is the church’s view of woman and man?’ (11) It partly answers this in the next section: ‘God, however, did not create the human person a solitary: from the very beginning “male and female God created them” (Genesis 1:27), and their coming together brings about the first form of the communion of persons. For by natural constitution the human person is a social being who cannot live or develop without relations with others’ (12). Its most detailed sections are about marriage and the family. We are later simply told: ‘Women are now at work in almost every sphere of life and it is fitting that they should be able to play their full part according to their disposition. Everyone should encourage the sharing in cultural life which is suitable and necessary for women’ (60).23 What about women’s life in the Church? we may ask, but receive no answer from this great council.

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

165

Fortunately we are not bound to accept what Vatican II says about women as binding and definitive doctrine. It was not that kind of council. Unlike Trent, it offered no anathemas, ‘agree with what we say or get out!’ In the wider ecumenical movement, to which Rome at Vatican II committed Roman Catholics, we can go on thinking together about the role of women in church and in society. In new styles of engagement such as Receptive Ecumenism, all Christians are encouraged to learn from each other, not just to assume that any of us have all the answers. But one issue is not open for discussion. Ordaining women to the priesthood is out of the question, say our most recent popes. Many Roman Catholics are not convinced by the argument that Jesus chose only men to be apostles and so the questioning goes on. George Tavard asks himself the question, who in the Church of Rome has authority to do what the Church of Rome has never done before? And he answers: members of ‘an ecumenical council’.24 That is what such councils are for. All arguments for and against should be examined. Feminists would insist we take account of women’s experience. Some sincerely believed they are called by God to preach and preside. Women ministers have been conscious of God’s help in such a ministry. This was a point noted by Sister Lavinia Burne. As a Roman Catholic sister, working in an ecumenical organisation, she met many such women and was convinced by their dedication and commitment. Today, many Roman Catholic parishes throughout the world could testify to the fact that women do in fact preside and preach. They already do everything a priest does except consecrate the bread and the wine. It has already been consecrated. Can this only be done by a man? And what happens when, with a chronic shortage of priests in many countries, no man is available? Debates about women priests carry more conviction if women are among the debaters. The Synod debates in the Church of England in 1991 included women talking about women priests. Kathleen Bliss in her report for the World Council of Churches on The Service and Status of Women in the Churches devoted a whole chapter to ‘The Participation of Women in the Government of the Church’. It was hard even then, c. 1952, to sum up what was happening in the 150 member churches that constituted the World Council, but Bliss felt able to make these comments: It is almost universally true to say that wherever a Church has modified its constitution or its practice in the direction of forming

166

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

new bodies to which it has delegated certain powers, women have found themselves accepted almost without question. But for women to gain access to the more ancient lay offices and lay boards of the Churches, when these have been for centuries the monopolies of men, is a much more difficult and much slower process.25 She is, as she acknowledges in the same paragraph, describing a process of democratisation ‘which arose out of the Reformation, especially those [churches] in which Calvin’s influence was strong’ where they ‘developed a strongly democratic pattern’. Fifty years later, Paul Lakeland is among several Roman Catholic theologians pleading for a more democratic church, but he refrains from using the word ‘democracy’ because too often it is only about voting and elections when what he wants to plead for is ‘an open church in an open society’ that makes decisions through greater lay participation of women and men in debates. ‘We are’, he cries, ‘a dysfunctional community marked by the infantilization of the laity.’ The subtitle of his book is How the Laity Can Save the Church. One of his laments is that the Vatican ‘Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity’ has nothing to say about laypeople’s share in the government of the Church. Having reread its thirty-three short paragraphs, I have to agree with him. Nor does it say anything specific about women, who constitute the majority in any congregation in any Church. Laypeople, we are told, are often key witnesses in the world, either acting alone or in associations, but there is no hint that they ever make decisions about how best to act and witness. That is the task of the hierarchy.

A Case Study: Humanae Vitae and Democracy A key lesson about democracy and lay participation could have been learned shortly after the Council in the popular reaction to the Pope’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae (1968), on population, contraception and family planning. Pope Paul VI explicitly condemned all forms of artificial contraception as ‘intrinsically evil’. Here is an instance where one might reasonably argue that married couples are better informed about their sexual needs and relationships than are celibate priests and popes. Paul’s predecessor recognised this. His great idea was to appoint a commission, initially consisting of three clerics and three laypeople.

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

167

Later when the Commission was expanded by Pope Paul to include a wide range of expertise, one of its members, a neurologist, Dr John Marshall of the University of London, reminded us just how radical this innovation was. Establishing such a commission on the question of population and birth control was an act without precedent in the history of the Roman Catholic Church [. . .] The membership of the Commission recognised that the question could not be answered in the traditional way by clerics reflecting on traditional teaching. The need for an input from secular science and from those with living experience of the married state was acknowledged [. . .] Pope John XXIII’s far-sighted initiative was an event of great significance, extending far beyond the narrow question of contraception. Subsequent events raised questions about papal authority, collegiality, the Magisterium, and how the teaching of the Church should evolve and be formulated in areas of life in which living experience is essential for understanding the meaning of the Christian message.26 Note the appeal to actual experience. This has long been a major criterion in feminist theology. Having such a commission while the Second Vatican Council was in session was also a way of affirming that such a mixed body was more competent to consider such issues as family planning than a council of celibate bishops from all round the world even though, as would soon become evident, good bishops, who were in touch with their clergy and people, could be better informed about their people’s love life than the pope and the Curia, housebound in Vatican City. The Council did, nonetheless, enter into some detailed discussion of the married state in its final document, Gaudium et Spes. Robert Kaiser, who reported on the Council for Time magazine in the USA, gives us a flavour of some of the debates. When some Council fathers suggested that married couples should be free to determine the number of children they have, Cardinal Ottaviani rose to protest. He said he was the eleventh child in a family of twelve. His parents were relatively poor but, as good Catholics, they trusted they could cope and they did. But Cardinal Suenens, one of the more radical bishops at Vatican II, and forever famous for his emphasis that ‘we are all co-responsible now’,

168

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

urged the Council to accept some responsibility for ‘what is called the population explosion’ in many parts of the world. Concerns about growing numbers of people is most obviously a democratic issue, since demos is Greek for people. And appropriately on such issues the Council did act democratically. Their paragraphs on the marriage state went through eleven major revisions and the bishops and their expert advisors dealt with 4,000 amendments to the various texts. The Council also reached a clear democratic decision when 2047 bishops voted in favour of these paragraphs, only 155 against, far in excess of the Council’s minimum rule of a two-thirds majority plus the pope’s approval.27 Later, Cardinal Suenens, who was a member of the Commission, told the Pope that Humanae Vitae should have involved collegial consultation and not just the exercise of the primacy. The Pope agreed.28 But it was too late to stop the initial furore, though it did stop the Pope from issuing any more encyclicals during his reign. What did in the end ease the anxiety created by this document was that most couples simply ignored the Pope’s advice. Or, to put the matter more technically in terms of conciliar theory, most Catholic couples did not ‘receive’ the teaching of Humanae Vitae. Not receiving a Council document is something all the faithful are entitled to do. Many now made this negative response to papal counsel which they found did not work for them. Paul VI in his Commission had in fact consulted a group that included three married couples and a mixed group of other experts, including some who had taken part in a major UN Conference on Population in New Delhi in 1963, but he chose to ignore their advice. A majority report that was leaked to the press said that thirty-nine members of the Commission supported a change in the Church’s teaching. A minority report, also leaked, said only five supported the traditional stance. A pope is not bound by majority decisions. Nor need he listen to a married couple on the Commission or the findings of questionnaires sent to thousands of Roman Catholic couples.29 He did not. A pope knows best! Few Catholics agreed. This created a real crisis of authority in the Church. Depending on one’s point of view, one may either regard this fact as alarming or a healthy sign that Christians are mature enough to think for themselves. As Robert Kaiser says rather wittily, ‘couples learned to stop asking “When is the Church going to do something

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

169

about birth control?” Couples started doing something themselves. They were the Church.’ Vatican II, with its new emphasis on the Church as ‘people of God’, had said so. According to one study, the publication of the Pope’s condemnation of contraception ‘galvanised’ women into action. I cite Dorothea McEwan, editor of a book whose very title says it all, Women Experiencing Church: A Documentation of Alienation. Priests and bishops in different countries sensed women’s distress and tried hard to mollify the official line. When a passionate sexual relationship between two happily married people becomes a crisis of conscience, something has gone seriously wrong. Peter Hebblethwaite,30 a former Jesuit, happily married to Margaret, feminist and author of Motherhood and God, shrugs off the distress he and others might feel, with a joke about Newman, the Oxford Anglican who became a Roman cardinal: ‘As a question for married Catholics it was resolved by the primacy of conscience. John Henry Newman’s famous toast was much quoted: ‘I drink to the Pope but to conscience first’. In vain did careful scholars explain that Newman did not mean what he appeared to mean. But others did explain that you could follow your conscience and still be wrong unless your conscience had been properly instructed by the official teachings of the Church, as, for example, in Humanae Vitae. The Pope tried hard to be more sensitive, as Hebblethwaite tries to let this pope explain: ‘The Holy Spirit [. . .] illumines from within the hearts of the faithful and invites their assent.’ Ordinary people and not just the hierarchy can be guided by the Holy Spirit. That is a tremendous concession to the laity’s faithfulness. It is the harsh line of some of the document’s defenders that makes matters worse. Janet Smith, author of Why Humanae Vitae was Right (1993),31 expects married couples to understand that while keeping a thermometer and a temperature chart beside your bed can be an acceptable way of avoiding sex in a fertile period, taking the pill to avoid pregnancy is, as the Pope said, ‘intrinsically evil’. So two people go to bed worrying if they are making love at the right time, in the right way and at the right temperature! It is comments like that that explain why some Catholic women have felt the urgent need for married priests who understand married life, women priests with more understanding of women, or associations of women in what came to be called Women Church. The Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, in Women Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities, describes some beautiful ways

170

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

in which women help each other to affirm their own sexuality without guilt and without shame. For example, young girls when they reach puberty, and may perhaps be alarmed by their first period, are invited with their friends, mothers and other women to bathe and talk together about their bodies, how to enjoy being a woman who can feed a child with her breasts and enjoy making love for love’s sake, not only in the hope of giving birth to another human being. They handle a baby doll: ‘This baby represents a child that your body is becoming able to conceive and bear.’ They are encouraged to say, ‘My body is not an object of control over me. My body is me.’32 Radford Ruether would be delighted that thirty years after she wrote her pioneering book, a lively young South African woman, mother of two, at a Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, led some very explicit Bible studies about women in the Bible and cheerfully told us all, women and men, celibate and married, ‘If you don’t bleed, you can’t breed.’ Such simple acceptance of the facts of life demolished centuries of tabu, deep-seated in the Old Testament scriptures and a male-dominated Church that still bars women from ordination. All this is worth repeating in a book about democracy, for even parliaments and senates, dominated by men, need to help each other as women and men come to terms with their own bodies. We are rightly offended when we hear a president boast of his licence to grope. And though we might still criticise women like Victoria Woodhull for her advocacy of free love, it is people like her who helped us realise that we are all in different ways sexual beings, sexual bodies. She did not pretend to be what she was not.

Concerns of the Community of Women and Men The detailed criticism of Rome needs to be balanced by admission that even in the World Council of Churches, consisting of Anglican, Protestant, Orthodox and Pentecostal churches, women have had to struggle for recognition and the struggle is still far from over. The fact was admitted at the most recent Assembly of the World Council, held in Busan, South Korea, in 2013.33 Most of the recommendations made in 1981 at a famous Consultation on the Community of Women and Men in the Church have yet to be achieved. More resources need to be allocated for the empowerment of women. More needs to be done to see

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

171

that women are fully represented in the councils of the WCC, ideally to the extent of not less than fifty per cent. Mutual accountability between churches in matters of gender justice and more work to address ‘positive or transformative masculinities’. In addition, Busan reminded the Council and its member churches of their work in combating the stigma of AIDS and promoting deeper understanding of sexual and reproductive health and rights. Historians of the ecumenical movement and the WCC would see there has been great progress with women’s active participation and leadership. Old photos of delegates at Amsterdam in 1948 or Evanston, Illinois, in 1954 are mainly of men in grey suits. Nothing was lost by the absence of colour photography, for there were few colours to show! Today’s assemblies are much more colourful. Four of the eight presidents are women. They, like the men from Africa or Asia, often appear in native costume. The current Moderator, who presides at Assembly and Central Committee, is a remarkable woman from Kenya, Dr Agnes Abuom. The Moderator of the Faith and Order Commission is Revd Dr Susan Durber from England. Assembly delegates would know that in the past twenty years or so, the World Council has been involved in two major projects that are vital for the lives of women all over the world: the Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, followed, just as the ‘9/11’ attacks were launched in 2001, by the Decade to Overcome Violence. Women are victims of violence more often than men. Rape is a weapon of war. Radford reported in 1980 that one-third of women had at some point in their lives been sexually abused. When they complain to their priests in some churches and some cultures they are simply told to be patient and long-suffering. All too often priests are among the abusers. The ecumenical movement has done much to support women who otherwise are left to suffer and go on suffering alone. Churches are in the business of changing attitudes to affirm the full humanity of women, created, like men, in the image of God and therefore in God’s eyes infinitely holy and precious.

Democratic Implications Women have sometimes argued that of all the reforming and renewal movements within the Churches, the feminist movement is the

172

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

most radical. It challenges deep-seated patriarchy even in the churches’ theologies of incarnation and salvation as well as in the structures of the churches and the way people meet and do business together. There is no space here to elaborate on this at length, and many key points will be found in other chapters. Here I offer some headings which are in fact the titles of some of the many books of feminist theology. The titles themselves have democratic implications.

Women’s Voices The Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women (1988–98) ‘uncovered many questions that we as women raise in contexts of violence and exclusion’. So the democratic lesson here is: let women speak, all women everywhere. Listen to as many different and representative women’s voices as possible. I take the title from one of several WCC publications on this theme, Women’s Voices and Visions of the Church,34 where women from North America contributed to a global discussion. Other such meetings were held in Asia, Latin America and Africa. An earlier volume, edited by Ofelia Ortega from Cuba, Women’s Visions,35 pools the insights of women theologians in many different contexts, Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America. The editor claims: ‘Women’s theological voices are emerging in every continent of the world. New theological visions are being born out of the womb of women’s experience of suffering, pain and struggles [. . .]. Women all over the world recognise that traditional expectations of long suffering and sacrifice which have been imposed on women can no longer be accepted.’ Churches have authority to say these things because they have listened to women’s voices all round the world and tried to respond to what they hear the women say. In Search of a Round Table Many church discussions in meetings of the WCC, General Synod of the Church of England and other gatherings now take place around a table where a dozen-or-so different participants discuss issues in a mixed group, rather than listening passively to statements from the platform. This is something churches have learned from women’s own experience of what works best. In Search of a Round Table36 reminds us of something we can all observe but may not notice: ‘A round table has no sides and no preferred seating. With no first and last and with room for all, it is a

DEMOCRACY, WOMEN, CHURCH

AND THE BIBLE

173

helpful image for a church in which women and men participate in full equality.’ This insight, printed on the back cover, expresses the convictions of a group of Lutheran women and men from all round the world who met together in Geneva in 1995 and who, through the World Council, offer their reflections to the wider Church and the wider world. Such an insight is easily shared. Rearrange the seating for any meeting and you change the dynamics of discussion and debate. A round table challenges all notions of hierarchy where people speak and sometimes sit at different levels

The Community of Women and Men At its first Assembly in 1948 the WCC established a department and a study project on ‘The Life and Work of Women in the Church’, but already by its Second Assembly at Evanston in 1954 it no longer regarded women as a distinct and separate issue but spoke instead of the ‘Co-operation of Men and Women in Church and Society’. Thirty years later, after a major consultation in Sheffield in 1981, it was still necessary to remind the churches that ‘the Community of Women and Men in the Church’ was ‘no longer a “for women only” issue but a concern for every witnessing community’.37 In its assemblies, the World Council increasingly tries to be equally representative of women as of men. At New Delhi in 1961 there were only twenty-nine female delegates in an assembly of 900. At Busan in 2013 the stated aim was not less than 50 per cent women. The WCC also aims at greater involvement of young people, setting a target which has not yet been reached of 25 per cent. Young people also serve as stewards at assemblies and Central Committee meetings and this is seen as an important programme of ecumenical formation for future generations of ecumenical leaders, women and men. Some might, like Hillary Clinton, aspire to head the government of their own country. After all, some countries in Latin America are giving a lead in places where this was once unthinkable.

CHAPTER 5 DEMOCRACY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

If I were expounding my theme in a public debate, someone would be expected to ask: What about people of other faiths who do not belong to this Jewish–Christian tradition and its pro-democracy stance? I would offer this brief response – all I have space and competence to provide here. None of the Reformed or Roman Catholic theologians I have cited dealt with religious pluralism. For them it was not an issue. For us it is. The Second Vatican Council was aware of this and in its own way pioneered with a key document, Nostra Aetate. It calls on all Christians to engage in dialogues and cooperation with peoples of other faiths and affirms that ‘the catholic church rejects nothing of those things which are true and holy in other religions’. It singles out Muslims for special attention and states: ‘The church also looks upon Muslims with respect’.1 Likewise, and even earlier, especially after its New Delhi Assembly of 1961, the World Council of Churches established a department and promoted dialogues with ‘Peoples of other Living Faiths and Ideologies’. New Delhi was the first, and to date the only, assembly to be held in a country where Christians are a tiny minority. In South Korea, where the assembly last met, Reformed and Pentecostal churches have been growing and embrace about forty per cent of the population. Much, no doubt, to his surprise and delight, there have even been interesting studies by Koreans of Karl Barth and Confuciansm. After his own personal dialogue with Karl Barth on Justification by Faith, Hans Ku¨ng made understanding Judaism, Islam and other world

DEMOCRACY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

175

religions his major priority, including attempts to discover a global ethic that all major religions could accept as a basis for further debates.2 His contemporary and former colleague as an expert or peritus at Vatican II, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, learned the hard way to be more careful about what he said about Islam after the way his Regensburg lecture in September 2006 was received. A group of thirty-eight Muslim scholars responded in ‘a very gentle and polite way’ in their Open Letter to His Holiness. Turning the other cheek, so to speak, helped turn the page to what has since been called A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbour.3 Such an exercise is also a balanced response to the more alarmist accounts of Huntington’s A Clash of Civilizations (1993) and Robert Kaplan’s predictions of ‘Coming Anarchy’ (1994). A good example for others to follow was set by the Georgetown University conference in 2005 on ‘Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism’, written up in a book with that title, with papers presented by Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars.4 Sam Cherribi tells us that when migrants were first admitted to local elections in the Netherlands, leaders of all the main parties visited the mosques, encouraging their new fellow citizens to vote. All writers were aware in 2005 that tensions had increased in every country after 9/11. A decade and more later, immigration, especially from Muslim countries, has become a major political issue in the United States and Europe. Even so, there are positive signs of acceptance. London has a widely respected Muslim mayor; the United States might conceivably have elected its first Jewish president, Bernie Sanders. We might even muse whether Obama would have been just as eligible had he been a Muslim, as some alleged, for, according to the constitution, but not according to custom, no one can be excluded from public office by his or her religion. In discussions of theocracy, I alluded to an interesting study by Alan Race and Ingrid Shafer, Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy (2002). A democracy that allows all to have an equal voice could be the challenge to any religion which asserts its privileged position in any country, as in a theocracy. Discussions of religious pluralism need, as such studies have demonstrated, a plurality of different voices, not the voice of one researcher from one religion, however sympathetic. But two distinctive contributions my study can make are these: first, Christian minorities

176

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

suffer even in Christian countries when the majority denies them a share in government. They benefit from regimes that practise religious freedom and toleration. So Roman Catholics in the United States were never excluded by the constitution from holding office and in the light of their good experience became powerful champions of religious freedom at Vatican II. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics in England suffered exclusion from public office for two centuries after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 but benefited later from religious toleration. Had they been born a century earlier, neither Micklem nor Lindsay, two of the Reformed thinkers who were such powerful defenders of democracy in the Hitler years, would have been admitted to Oxford, let alone served as college principals. Those of us who were once treated as second-class citizens should understand what it may feel like to be a Muslim in countries which still assume being Christian is the religious and political norm. Or, is the norm now to be non-religious, in which case all religious people suffer but could support each other as ‘defenders of the faiths’?5 Second, Christian churches can and do shape public attitudes to other faiths. The Holocaust, or Shoah, could not have happened in Christian countries like Germany or Poland without tacit collusion by Churches which had not thought deeply about Christian– Jewish relations. To understand our Muslim cousins, we need to reject the mentality that centuries ago led to the Crusades. Rome in her worship once prayed for ‘perfidious Jews’. Few churches in their intercessions refer to ‘our Jewish sisters and brothers and our Muslim cousins and those whom God brings to faith in other ways’. As with theologies of Church and State, uncritical use of biblical texts can hinder all dialogue. ‘No one comes to the Father except by me’ (John 14:6) need not be that conversation stopper. Great theologians from Origen to Barth have held out the possibility of universal salvation. The destiny of all is in the hands of God.

CHAPTER 6 CHURCH AND THEOLOGY IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE

Introduction The place of the Churches and their theology in the public square is a highly contested and controversial issue. Or, at least this is the impression given in much of the scholarly discussion. In a secular or pluralist society, churches can no longer count on their right to speak, and on a sympathetic hearing. The era of Christian empires and Christendom is over, much to the delight or relief of some. In the various Christian communities there are those who simply say politics is not the churches’ business. Many outside the churches agree with them. Religion is a private matter. As William James once suggested, it is about what a person does with his or her own soul. Here, some of the key biblical texts we have examined earlier, like ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ or ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, are called on to support arguments on either side. At the outset, I should make it clear that I welcome the scholarly discussion and only wish it became more public. The public square is the space for all interested parties to debate their convictions and concerns. In a real-life public square, unlike a thesis, debates become less abstract. They are about real-life issues that can concern the welfare of all. I therefore welcome the way Jeffrey Stout, having complained about abstract arguments, tested some of his own theories by exploring the way church leaders responded or failed to respond to natural disasters like the Katrina floods in New Orleans.1 Tragically, ten years later the same tests

178

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

need to be applied to an even more devastating attack from hurricane Irma. And in England, all who hear the media reports on terrorist attacks or the terrible fire that destroyed a tower block and seventy-two of its sleeping occupants will see that the churches have a place, a very visible place, a building, often several, in the public square. All the world can see how they do or don’t respond, when desperate support and help are needed. There is nowhere to hide. What the public will also quickly discover is whether the churches are content to do ambulance work and help the afflicted, or ask questions of the afflicters, themselves and others. Why and how do such horrendous things happen? Those who survived the Grenfell fire keep telling us that no one in government listened to their fears for their own safety. Churches and other religious communities did. This fact was publicly acknowledged in this editorial on the annual Notting Hill Carnival, two months after the fire: The prayers, the songs, the release of doves and the conscription of the colour green to the cause all mark a different kind of politics, one conducted on the basis of emotion and knowledge of injustice. The spine of this kind of resistance was religious. Whatever some may think of their beliefs – whatever they may think of each other’s beliefs – it was the churches and the mosques of the surrounding communities that first stepped up and have continued with efficient, self-sacrificial zeal to help their neighbours. The families of Grenfell seem to have trusted their religious representatives far more than they trusted their political ones – and who can blame them? Nor can one party or leader claim their allegiance now. It would certainly have to be earned. Faith groups and other communitybased organisations can claim it because they are, after all, entirely voluntary. Those that no one believes in just wither away as the mass membership of political parties once did. Unlike the clicktivism of internet-based movements, the community organisations, faith-based and otherwise, have earned their legitimacy methodically and over time. They did not abandon the poor just because there were no votes in them.2 Terrorist attacks are more complicated, but they raise questions about attitudes to Muslims and Muslim nations which society and the

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

179

churches have to address. Churches round the world had never been more united than in their opposition to the Iraq War of 2003. They warned then that regime change might create more problems than it solved. It probably has. Neither President Bush nor Prime Minister Blair listened to the pope and other Church leaders, despite their own church allegiances. In a secular and often anti-religious media, Church pronouncements go unreported and so more easily unheeded. In this chapter, I seek to analyse some of the key issues and comment on each in turn. But any debating in the so-called public square presupposes two things. First, that the churches believe in the discernment of truth through debate and, second, that better decisions can be made collectively through open discussion and debating with all those most affected by the decision or by their representatives. Do we agree with Milton in his Areopagitica, ‘whoever heard truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter’? Do we insist on ‘a free and open encounter’ where delegates are free to explore ideas as distinct from insisting on the party line? Are churches willing to seek consensus through listening carefully to alternative points of view, or, if consensus is not possible, to respect those who do not share their Christian convictions on a particular issue and give them a fair hearing? First, I examine two ways in which the Church has sometimes controlled or influenced political decisions: in the era of Christendom, and as theocracies. Then, after developing the theme of debates with the Church in the public square, I note some ways in which churches have interfered in the political process by telling their members how to vote and what to think. I then look critically at some of the better ways in which Church councils ‘do politics’.

Politics after Christendom There continues to be a healthy and very necessary ecumenical debate about Constantine and Christendom. I draw into this debate the Anglican Oliver O’Donovan, the Methodist Stanley Hauerwas and the Mennonite John Howard Yoder, each of whom is very widely respected, far beyond his own confessional group. It is also significant that Hauerwas and Yoder have both taught at the Roman Catholic University of Notre Dame and that one of Yoder’s major studies brings him into dialogue with Jewish scholars including Peter Ochs.

180

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Was it such a good thing when Christians, instead of being rebels, persecuted by Rome for their faith, became so firmly established as to rule the world from Rome but in imperial ways? When the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian in 313, Christians became rulers. For the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, this was never a blessing. His Mennonite Church has more often than not been persecuted for its pacifist convictions by Christian rulers.3 By contrast, the Anglican professor Oliver O’Donovan points out that Christendom has taken different forms in different centuries, Anglicanism itself being one such form. We should all learn from and respect genuine attempts made to apply Christian convictions to government policies.4 Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas always loves to differ! He does so here. In one of his many critiques of American Protestantism, he complains of ‘a continuing Constantinian presumption that democratic social processes are the most appropriate expression of Christian convictions’. Support for American democracy corrupted the Protestant faith.5 Yoder agrees. ‘To ask “What is the best form of government?” is itself a Constantinian question.’ But Yoder has to ask this question, ‘Why should “the people” govern?’ in order to explain that asking about ‘The Christian Case for Democracy’ itself is wrong.6 Why? Because governing, in Yoder’s view, is about exercising power over others. The Christian rulers of the Christendom era imposed their Christian convictions on their subject peoples. Historically, this was not always the case, as indeed a more careful reading of O’Donovan’s study would show. Strong Church leaders like Bishop Ambrose of Milan were perfectly capable of challenging and resisting Christian emperors. But Yoder’s challenge is more radical. He doubts whether Christians should ever assume that they are in charge. ‘The dominant frame of reference for the institutional and moral thought of our culture is the legacy of the transitions symbolised, and to some extent caused, by Constantine [. . .] We assume that we can and should “take responsibility” for the macro course of events.’ Yoder makes a strong case for ‘Not Being in Charge’ but still having influence. Christians can learn from the Jews and from Jeremiah the prophet that it is possible to ‘seek the welfare of the city where they had been sent’ by God (Jeremiah 29:4– 7). Jews ‘would have said that since God is sovereign over history, there is no need for them to seize (or subvert) political sovereignty in order for God’s will to be done. God’s capacity to bring about the fulfilment of his righteous goals is not

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

181

dependent on us [. . .] To do his work for him would be presumptuous, if not blasphemous.’7 We won’t all agree with Yoder, Hauerwas or O’Donovan. But all three theologians might agree on three basic points. First, what was wrong with the traditional Christendom model was the desire and the possibility of dominating. Domination is bad faith. Here, a key biblical text is the warning given by Jesus to his disciples. Secular rulers ‘lord it over their subjects’. This must not be so among you (Mark 10:41–5). Second, whether or not we are in positions of political power, we are not ultimately in control. God is sovereign. O’Donovan cites as an example of God’s sovereign rule and overruling the way in which prayer groups in the Romanian Church brought about the collapse of the Ceaus¸escu regime.8 Similar claims are made about the effect of candlelit vigils either side of the Berlin Wall in that same momentous year, 1989. Third, there is a need for humility. Churches can and do have a voice in the public square but theirs is not the only voice and they must not act as though it is. Jeffrey Stout in Democracy and Tradition says ‘humility is the best policy’. Hauerwas agrees, ‘democracy requires religious humility’, and he cites Niebuhr to the same effect: ‘Religious faith ought, therefore, to be a constant fount of humility.’ Yoder warns against the ‘glorification of democracy’ where a nation or a church might boast in all humility(!) ‘we are more democratic than you!’ After recent elections, Austria and Hungary may pride themselves as ‘the frontline defence of Christendom’, as even the secular press acknowledges.

Theocracy or Democracy or Both? The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church informs us that ‘theocracy’ was the word coined by Flavius Josephus to denote the political organisation of the Jewish people as the purest example of theocracy. As is clear in the Old Testament, the rule of God applied to all aspects of life, political, social and religious. The Dictionary goes on to state that attempts at the realisation of the theocratic ideal were made by the medieval popes, especially Gregory VII (1073–85), and by John Calvin in Geneva (1536–64). The Anglican editors of this work might also have included their own Church. The Queen presides over the government of the nation and is titular Head of the Church. Some of its bishops are by right entitled to share in the government of the country through the House of Lords. Until late in the nineteenth

182

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

century, all Members of Parliament had to be members of the Church of England. Although the Church now has greater autonomy and selfgovernment in its assemblies and synods, she is still the Established Church and as such has an assured and privileged position in national affairs. To describe Calvin’s Geneva as a theocracy needs more careful comment. First, we need to remember that Calvin and many of his fellow ministers were refugees and, like many refugees, vulnerable to extradition. Calvin, like many of his Huguenot contemporaries, had to flee persecution in his native France. The citizens of Geneva voted to adopt Reformation teachings before Calvin appeared in their city. They then sought his help, but when the help he offered was not what they wanted, he was banished to Strasbourg, but then invited back once they realised how much they missed him! He did not become a full citizen until the last years of his life. He was never in a position to act like a dictator in ways depicted by his critics. His influence depended on people’s respect for his convictions, most expressed in his preaching.9 Even so, it is no doubt true, as Barth was honest enough to admit at one of the Calvin celebrations, that ‘No one today should imagine that he would have been able to live in Geneva ruled by Calvin with a good conscience, let alone with pleasure.’ He highlights also ‘the notorious condemnation and execution of Michael Servetus and similar incidents’.10 Other examples of theocratic states could include some of the New England states in America and the Dutch Reformed system of apartheid in South Africa. There, most members of the ruling party belonged to the white Dutch Reformed Church. Both illustrate the intolerance and downright cruelty that too readily spring from presuming to act in the name of God and silencing all dissent. John de Gruchy notes that after the ending of apartheid many conservative Christian groups dreaded becoming a secular democracy instead of a ‘Christian’ country. However, the ‘overall ecumenical consensus was that truly democratic forms of government provide the best means we know for achieving just, equitable and free societies . . . which best approximate the Christian vision’. John Eliot’s influence on Boston, his ministry and respect for the Native Americans, and William Penn’s desire to make Philadelphia, the capital city of Penn State, a city of brotherly love, are good examples of attempts to create local ‘Christendoms’ where Christ’s love rules. And thousands, maybe millions, have been inspired by the simple, prayerful communal life they experienced in the ecumenical community of Taize´.

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

183

The question that now arises is whether any form of theocracy is compatible with democracy? The answer is probably ‘No.’ Theocracy in a democracy requires a much more homogeneous society than one would now find in most countries. In the initial Reformation settlement in England it was assumed that every English person is also a member of the Church of England. You could be penalised for not attending the parish church, and, as already noted, debarred from membership of the House of Commons, from the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge and from various professions. Likewise, in Calvin’s Geneva, the Catholic Mass was abolished. All were required to uphold the Reformed understanding of the faith and keep the laws that Calvin and his colleagues had helped to draft. It was generally assumed in most of Europe that the faith of the ruler would be the faith of the people, and people were persecuted for nonconformity. Jews were excluded, or confined to ghettoes, like those in Venice, which can still be seen to this day. Such uniformity now strikes most of us as far too restrictive. The question asked then is one we still ask: Can people with very different views live together in peace? Earlier statesmen said ‘No’, we say ‘We hope so!’ but then are jarred out of all complacency either by terrorist attacks or mass protests of discontent. Almost everywhere there are strong vocal minorities of people who feel they do not belong and do not count. Ireland is a semi-theocratic exception. Here is a country where, until recently, the priests and the bishops could still be said to rule. But Ireland is changing. Maurice Curtis sums up much of the struggle against such theocracy in the title of his study of the lay Catholic organisation, Catholic Action: A Challenge to Democracy: Militant Catholicism in Modern Ireland. Lay organisations were carefully controlled by the clergy, and those Catholics in government, like de Valera, were expected to uphold Catholic moral teaching. Books, plays and films were carefully censored, divorce and abortion ruled out. ‘Obedience, not enquiry, became the badge of Catholic thought.’11 In that very learned and very ecumenical wartime discussion group, The Moot, the Jewish scholar Adolf Lo¨we, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, argued that one prospect for a safer world could be ‘the theocratic principle’ in the form of ‘a totalitarian society permeated by Christian principles’. Only a Christian totalitarianism could match the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Mussolini. The leader of the group, J.H. Oldham, said the very idea ‘appalled him’. We need

184

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

not be surprised!12 The conversations ranged over some more democratic alternatives. Where theocracy means imposing your religious views on others who do not share them, it remains a temptation to be resisted. On this, representatives of the three Abrahamic faiths, Jews, Christians and Muslims, agree, hence their partnership in Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy. The editors, Alan Race and Ingrid Shafer state: There is an urgent necessity both for dialogue between religions to increase at many levels and across many divides, and for the religions to enter into critical solidarity with the democratic spirit in order to help to overcome their own historic craving for absolutism and theocratic rule.13 When theocracy is interpreted as rule by the clergy, it is easiest for Muslims to plead ‘not guilty’. Islam has no clergy. ‘There are no “clergy” in Islam; any intelligent human being who knows the language and the style, can understand and interpret God’s message. The ideology of Islam [. . .] is not totalitarian.’14 I shall explain later that even in a democracy there are ways in which the churches may seek to control the debaters. But insofar as theocracy means that when it comes to the crunch ‘we must obey God rather than any human being’ (Acts 5:29), all Christians must be theocrats. This was the key text that directed Martin Niemo¨ller in his fearless opposition to Hitler. Taken corporately, it means that all Christian communities are theocracies. The point is well made in a lighthearted way in a story the philosopher Dorothy Emmet heard the Scottish Presbyterian A.D. Lindsay of Balliol tell. A Scottish minister vehemently opposed a resolution put before the synod. When, nonetheless, the vote was carried by majority vote, the same minister was found working wholeheartedly for it. ‘But’, they said, ‘you thought that it was wrong and foolish.’ He replied: ‘I still think it is wrong and foolish but I have come to see that it is the will of God’!15

Public Debate: Truth Discerned and Decisions Agreed through Open Debate In seventeenth-century England, especially in the decades 1640– 60, many believed the best way to agree a policy was to debate it.

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

185

‘Whoever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’ asked Milton in his Areopagitica (1644). His question assumes that readers will have had enough good experiences to allow their most cherished convictions to be weighed and tested by argument. So democracy itself was the subject of debates in the army at Putney in 1647. Earlier, in 1641, King Charles I was presented with this proposal or Grand Remonstrance that ‘better to effect the intended reformation, we desire there may be a general synod of the most grave, pious, learned and judicious divines of this island, assisted with some from foreign parts professing the same religion with us’.16 The King did not agree, but Parliament, after its own debates, did. The result was the Westminster Assembly of Divines that began its deliberations in July 1643. The condition of debating was that Parliament should also approve its decisions on church order and worship. A parliament that then consisted of Christian laymen provided a healthy check on clerical dominance.17 After all, most worshippers are laypeople. They should have some say in how they pray. The Church often lacks confidence in debate. Oliver O’Donovan devoted his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1983 to a critical review of his Church’s approach to divorce and remarriage.18 This had been one of the issues which prompted Milton’s very personal appeal in 1644 and for which he was censored. His marriage was in difficulties. We should be able to debate such matters. Anglicans three centuries later were not so sure. The authors of the report Putting Asunder (1966) accepted that Christians might have their own convictions about the indissolubility of marriage but it was not right for there to be ‘the tyrannical imposition upon a community of an alien code but the expression of the community’s own mind’.19 So the Church report accepted that most people would accept that the real ground for divorce was that of ‘irrecoverable breakdown’. This view was accepted by Parliament and became law in the Divorce Reform Act of 1969. But O’Donovan would know that his own Church has had great difficulty in accepting that some marriages do break down. It was hard, if not impossible, for divorced people to remarry in parish churches. Why not admit this? Why not debate this? Milton believed that in ‘a free and open encounter’, the ‘truths’ that marriage is sacred and ideally a lifelong commitment, and that some marriages break down, could be agreed and accepted by all. Both Church and society would adapt their practices to

186

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

match their shared convictions. O’Donovan is not denying that it might, on occasion, be right for the Church to dissent from a majority view. What he is saying is that where Christians genuinely believe what is best for women and men in marriage they should not be afraid to debate and discuss the issues as publicly as possible. On the even more emotionally fraught matter of same-sex relationships, O’Donovan pleads for A Conversation Waiting to Begin (2009).20 But reflecting on the actual experience of such a debate in the Church of England’s General Synod, David Jenkins (1925–2016), former Bishop of Durham and a man never averse to controversy though often hurt by it, earlier made this rather mischievous comment: ‘It is hard to conceive of a more emotive mix than one that combines questions of the legitimate use of the Bible and the proper use of one’s genitals.’21 Such debates often achieve too little because those involved become too introverted. Reflecting on a lifetime that was often very controversial – not least when, as bishop among the Durham miners, he did his best to respond to their dispute and that of many who were, in his view, the victims of government policies ‘verging on the wicked’22 – almost tempted to despair over the church he loves because of ‘its present quarrelsome and institutionally obsolescent state’, Jenkins urges his fellow Christians to be more relaxed and open to the views of others, not just like-minded believers. He says in his autobiography of 2002, which then became his final testimony: My hope, my witness and my prayers are directed to persuading the company of believers – and especially the assertively certain believers – to relax, believe a little less and collaborate a good deal more, not in defending the faith but with the aim of sharing the faith widely in service, collaboration and hope [. . .] Surely the churches should relax and let God enable us to take far more risks, find more allies, and join in a much deeper and broader company of pilgrims, in order to share with God with a view to his future.23

Public Debates in the Public Square where Rawls and Co. are Welcome Today’s news (6 September 2017) carries this headline: ‘Archbishop of Canterbury makes extraordinary political intervention.’24 What has

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

187

Justin Welby done that is so ‘extraordinary’? He has called for a public debate! Britain needs a public debate about growing inequality. The Archbishop has found allies in the Institute for Public Policy Research. Jenkins in heaven must feel his prayers have been answered! How should we debate and with whom? Reading David Jenkins, who, as a popular university lecturer, once taught me as a student, I have changed my mind about how to respond to some of the philosophers like Rawls and Rorty, Habermas and MacIntyre who, at first reading, seem to dominate debates about public and political theology. What right have the philosophers, especially those who are not Christians, to tell the theologians what to think and churchmen how to speak? I was about to claim Barth’s support in a complicated argument about the relationship of theology and philosophy that now seems to me a digression. Ju¨rgen Habermas, in a famous debate25 he had with Pope Benedict, brings such speculation down to earth by listing the debates we all need to have. They are about the future of the welfare state, the politics of immigration, about war and, for his fellow German, Joseph Ratzinger, what it means to be a citizen of Germany and of Europe. God, as Barth constantly reminds us, is concerned about all these things: ‘We may choose to be without God; God has chosen never to be without us’, said Barth.26 I therefore listen to Jenkins’s final appeal: ‘Relax and collaborate, find more allies’, among them John Rawls, Ju¨rgen Habermas and co. Why Rawls? The short answer is because John Rawls (1921–2002) is often acknowledged as ‘the most significant and influential political and moral philosopher of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly shaped contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice in philosophy, law, political science, economics and other social disciplines’. So says the inset to the Cambridge Companion to Rawls.27 But note, there is no reference to his impact on theology, where I am tempted to suggest he has received more than his fair share of attention, with more than one series of essays devoted to his arguments about justice and public reasons.28 Although in his earlier works he said very little about democracy, he received a special medal from President Clinton for works which ‘helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy’. He was a professor at Harvard. He did research in Oxford, under Isaiah Berlin and H.L.A. Hart, both of whom were Jews. Clearly neither of them persuaded Rawls at the time (c. 1952) that different

188

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

religious reasons have an assured place in the public square. Rawls must have learned from Isaiah Berlin that prior to his arrival it had been assumed that only Christians could be members of such a prestigious Oxford Fellowship as All Souls. Despite objections from the controversial Bishop of Chichester, Isaiah Berlin became a Fellow of All Souls in 1932, the year before Adolf Hitler came to power demonising all Jews. Must a Jew or a Christian in public debates keep quiet about his or her convictions? Rawls once said so. Before proceeding, I must add that Rawls was the subject of a musical in Oxford in 2013. How come I missed it? Because at the time I was finishing my book on Barth, and Barth came before Rawls in more ways than one! Barth, who died in 1968, three years before Rawls’s first major book, would be horrified at the way an agnostic political philosopher has set the agenda for so much theological discussion. The student musical, later repeated at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, explains why. Rawls may not have been especially profound but he voiced what many people think. This is the view of David Shaeffer, in one of a whole library of books on Rawls.29 Religion can be a nuisance when involved in political debate. Rorty said it stifles conversation. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian seems to think that churchmen should stay numb even when life-and-death issues like assisted dying are under review. Have churches nothing to add? Rawls’s understanding of justice as fairness has been criticised by the Jewish philosopher Michael Sandel30 and the Reformed theologian Duncan Forrester, among others, for being too narrow, but his general view of ‘public reasoning’ inhibits such discussion.

Rawls’s Reasons Partly in response to criticisms, John Rawls modified his view on ‘public reason’, by which he means the style of argument by which people with different convictions can reason and argue with one another on various public issues for which they have a common concern. If at first he seemed to suggest that Christian theologians had no place in such debates, by 1997 in ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’31 he had become more welcoming. He still assumes there is a conflict between being liberal and being democratic through being under an obligation to accept the authority of the Church and sacred texts. But he adds: ‘Nevertheless, I hold that except for fundamentalism’ the major religions ‘can support a

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

189

constitutional democratic regime. This is true for Catholicism (since Vatican II) and much of Protestantism, Judaism and Islam.’ He could have reached this conclusion just by observing what actually happens in many countries, certainly in Britain, if not also in the United States. At one level, the appeal for public reasons sounds like common sense. Not just in major debates in Congress, Parliament or local councils, but in any discussion and argument any of us may have with people who do not share our faith or basic convictions, we select the line of argument that our opposite number is likely to find most convincing. For any major decision there may be a whole range of factors we need to consider. Where choices have to be made, priorities have to be agreed and it may not be obvious to any of us what considerations are most important. The real objection is having someone else tell us in advance what is a reasonable way of arguing and what is not. Public reasoning can be too prescriptive. Note how, in the following quotation, every statement is qualified by ‘reasonable’: A basic feature of democracy is the fact of reasonable pluralism – the fact that a plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical and moral, is the normal result of its culture of free institutions [. . .] Public reason does not criticise or attack any comprehensive doctrine except where incompatible with the essentials of public reason.32 What is being prescribed are certain limits or boundaries to disagreement. Duncan Forrester (1933– 2016), founder of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at Edinburgh University in 1984, has been one of Britain’s staunchest advocates of theology in the public square. He cannot accept Rawls’s argument that because most people think justice means fairness, fairness is what justice means. He knows Rawls’s Justice as Fairness (1971) has been immensely influential in the United States and in Britain.33 The whole Christian tradition has a much broader understanding, hence the title of a book about the theologian P.T. Forsyth, Justice the True and Only Mercy. Forrester’s own emphasis is on how in the biblical tradition justice and love go together. Such interpretations would be excluded in Rawls’s public discussions. Forrester insists biblical teaching about justice ‘cannot be detached from the faith of the people of God’.

190

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Likewise, although Rawls accepts that some people’s understanding of what it is to be a good neighbour is derived from Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, in the public square there is no need to mention Jesus or say ‘Jesus said . . .’ Yet, a major detail of the parable that is often overlooked is how Jesus gave the lawyer’s question a radical twist. The lawyer asked, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ The answer Jesus gave is about how any of us should be neighbourly to anyone we see in need of our help. Jesus for the Christian is more important than a general principle, especially one which may need to be challenged. The questioner asked for boundaries. His answerer said there are none. The point is beautifully grasped by that wonderful aid organisation, Me´decins sans Frontie`res. How like-minded do we need to be to have a meaningful debate and reach an agreeable decision? The question is asked and answered by, among others, the Christian moral philosopher Robert Adams, one-time Professor of Moral Philosophy at Yale. It is assumed that religious reasons will be divisive and that ‘we will be better served by a purely secular ethical theory on which all could agree’. Adams’s short answer is that ‘a shared ethical theory is not required for a common or shared morality on which a society depends for its health’ and this is ‘just as well, for no such theory is likely to meet with general agreement in any society that permits free inquiry’.34 We have to live, and can live, with difference, a point that was well made by Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, in a popular little book, The Dignity of Difference.35 ‘The test of faith’, Sacks says, ‘is whether I can make space for difference.’36 But Adams goes on to explain that that we all have to be taught ideas of right and wrong. In our schools we learn that kindness, generosity and gratitude are good and that selfishness is bad. Here he can agree with Rawls that there is an ‘overlapping consensus’. But we should also admit, much more readily than Rawls seems to do, that even notions of selfishness are strongly contested. What seems selfish to one person might seem to another the innocent pursuit of happiness. And when it comes to social reforms, society needs people with strong convictions. Public reason or common morality did not abolish slavery, religious reasons did. I would add that public reason tended to accept Hitler because, at least at first, he made many German people feel good. That was reason enough to support him. Adams’s shrewd assessment of Rawls is that he tends to underemphasise the combative aspects of democratic polity and tends to overestimate the

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

191

level of theoretical agreement in political ethics needed for ‘an attainably just society’, ‘a society as good as we can reasonably hope to achieve’.37 Adams sees that his whole argument about being willing to enter into verbal combats over our differences and give reasons for what we believe is in effect a rationale for constitutional democracy, a rationale broadly inspired by the thought of a fellow Reformed theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Rawls, as I noted earlier, is not that interested in democratic debates. Going back to my reference to Hitler, I was stunned to read what Jeffrey Stout had to say about moral truths which he thinks are universal and therefore can be accepted by all, whether or not one is religious: ‘no one under any circumstances whatsoever, at any point in human history, has a right to do what Hitler did to the Jews’.38 Agreed! But what Hitler did is still being done, and possibly with a president’s acceptance. There are Nazi supporters in Charlottesville, Ohio, in Birmingham, England in Germany and no doubt elsewhere. As I write, ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslim people is happening in Myanmar. The point is odd coming from Stout, for according to Stanley Hauerwas he is ‘the kind of philosopher of religion who makes it possible for theologians to enjoy being theologians’. ‘Stout is not trying to exclude or deny the importance for some people of religious beliefs. He simply thinks that no good reason can be given in “our” kind of world for holding such beliefs.’39 He may be agnostic but is not so antagonistic to theology as Rawls. Indeed, after reading his Ethics after Babel and Democracy and Tradition, it was obvious Stout has some sympathy for theology. He publicly admits his admiration for James Gustafson and also for Karl Barth and devotes a whole chapter in Democracy and Tradition to an argument with Robert Adams about ‘Ethics without Metaphysics’.40 In their pleas to open up debate on public issues, David Jenkins, Duncan Forrester and Robert Adams have many other allies. Among the philosophers, Ju¨rgen Habermas is much more sympathetic,41 and among the theologians, Nicholas Wolterstorff. Habermas says ‘the public square’ does not exist, we have to create it. ‘Political discussions are for the most part confined to in-groups, the family, friends, neighbours.’42 His plea for a more politically active public is well summed up by Luke Goode in his commentary. Today ‘politics is something you read about, see on the television, and make

192

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

yes/no responses to, not something you do’.43 A debate in Munich in 2004 created quite a stir when this famous philosopher and the future pope met for the first time. Their topic, the nature of a free state, was a very poignant one for two men who had survived the Hitler years. Habermas admitted he was ‘tone deaf to the religious sphere’. Even as I see it in cold print and translation, it reads like a regret. Both he and his wife have a strong religious pedigree.44 Democracy needs motivated people and he knows religion can motivate as perhaps no philosophy can. He does not agree with Rawls. He pleads with his fellow secularists not to deny that religious images can express truth. Nor must they refuse their believing fellow citizens the right to make contributions in a religious language in public debates. Indeed, a liberal political culture can expect that the secularized citizens play their part in the endeavours to translate relevant contributions from the religious language into a language that is accessible to the public as a whole. In response, what the future pope had to say seems quite tame. The important point is that two great thinkers, assumed to be poles apart, met and could agree on much that each had to say. Ratzinger for his part pleaded for religious people just to be more rational. Believing is not unreasonable.45 Wolterstorff says it is an illusion, cultivated by the Enlightenment, that if we were only reasonable, we would all agree. ‘When we converse with one another in a pluralistic world, we discover we live with different moral visions.’46 As a Reformed theologian, he is encouraged by his own tradition which, in his view, urged all citizens to be active in politics where previously decisions were left to kings and subjects were expected to be passive and do what they were told. His basic understanding of democracy is that everybody should have ‘an equal political voice’.47 As against Rawls’s prescriptions, Wolterstorff states: ‘Let citizens use whatever reasons they find appropriate’, provided only that they do so with respect for others and a readiness to listen.48 Without vibrant ‘religio-moral communities’ citizens may reject politics as nothing but a power game. Then President Lincoln’s government of the people, by the people and for the people will perish from the earth.49

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

193

Let Duncan Forrester have the last words in this section. No one was better qualified. Like his Reformed colleague Wolterstorff, he disagrees with Rawls. He is very sympathetic to Habermas. As a ‘practical theologian’, he knows that Habermas’s ‘Discourse Ethics’ have been tried and tested in many peace-making efforts and shown to work. ‘Lurking in Habermas’s account of the ideal speech situation is the hope of a reconciled community in which relationships are just and loving.’50 But in response to Habermas’s lament that we no longer hold out hopes for utopia, Forrester proclaims that for the Christian theologian the one authentic utopia is the kingdom of God.51 He hears and respects Alasdair MacIntyre’s despair, voiced in After Virtue, the book everyone seems to have read, that modern society lacks any agreed moral basis. Twenty-five years after publishing its first edition in 1981, MacIntyre still claims that ‘the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity has continued to be one of unresolved and apparently unresolvable moral and other disagreement’. The old frameworks which MacIntyre first found in Aristotle and then later in Thomas Aquinas, ‘in some respects, a better Aristotelian than Aristotle’(!), ‘has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed’.52 Maybe, says Forrester, society is ‘fragmented’ and in no mood to accept anything like the old Christendom framework, but what Christians can do and must do is offer ‘fragments’, fragments of the gospel and of hope. He expands on the conviction that has matured over the years, in one of his last books, Theological Fragments (2005). Fragments are like the bits of a jigsaw puzzle that can make sense of the whole. They have their own integrity and ‘can provide illumination, encouragement, challenge and warning’. Jesus and Socrates got their message across in fragments, not by some system, grand theory or systematic theology. The Early Church had to witness to the truth of the gospel in a fragmented age. So can we. Paul accepts that here and now we see ‘only puzzling reflections in a mirror’ (Corinthians 1:13), fragments of the truth. But the faith that is nourished in the Christian community offers the hope that one day we shall understand more clearly in a face-toface encounter with the Truth.53 Duncan Forrester would not be the great Reformed theologian he has grown to be, first wrestling with the caste system in India, then students at Brighton and in Edinburgh and beyond, chronic poverty and injustice in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, if his own faith was not continually renewed by the Word of God he discovers in biblical texts. Like many others, I am privileged to have known him.

194

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Practical Applications One standard criticism of this public square debate between theologians and philosophers is that it is all about words, too little about action. Forrester agrees. So does Hauerwas.54 Robert Wolff complains about the ‘Abstractness of Rawls’s Theory’.55 Oliver O’Donovan pleads for practical action: ‘The questions that confront the Northern democracies require detailed attention to the structures of authority which undergird their unruly democratic culture.’ He lists corruption by mass communications, power of the bankers, humane punishments, protection for ethnic minorities and care for the handicapped, elderly and unborn. He adds this observation: It is not to political theologians that we look for the beginnings of a treatment for these questions, but to the philosophicallymotivated modernity critics, and especially to those who have concentrated on the philosophical character of technology [e.g. Jacques Ellul, George Grant], and modern moral and political thought [Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre]. Not, I am glad to say, that this collection of rather diverse thinkers has been without its own theological seriousness. If a new generation of political theologians nourished on the Southern school were to effect a meeting with the tradition, they might discover some welcome echoes of their own concerns.56 O’Donovan is here alluding to what can be learned from the Southern school of Liberation Theology – provided this is done critically – and to the tradition from Irenaeus to Grotius that is the subject of a detailed anthology he edited with his wife, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan.57 Hugo Grotius’s (1583– 1645) approach to peacekeeping between warring Reformed factions in the Netherlands showed one could attempt this without abandoning faith. O’Donovan refers to ‘the excellent Grotius’. Karl Barth was more critical, but mainly because Grotius seemed to put tradition in the same rank as scripture, thus denying the Church that ‘external’ criterion of its own faith.58 Grotius is also commended by the Anglican scholar and one-time pacifist Martin Wight for shifting political debates beyond narrow national interests to internationalism,59 something Britain’s Brexiters have forgotten.

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

195

What we can learn from practical experience of participation in politics in the public square is that theologians and church representatives can be most helpful when they address issues theologically. What insights do we have to offer because of our faith in God? The point was powerfully made by Karl Barth in correspondence with his Swiss colleague Emil Brunner. Brunner, like Reinhold Niebuhr and others, was puzzled that a theologian who was so strongly opposed to Nazism had so little to say against Communism. Barth replied: A certain binding spiritual and theological viewpoint in accordance with its creed is demanded of the Church in the political realm in certain times of need, i.e. when it is called upon to vindicate its faith in the carrying out of its duty according to God’s Word [. . .] The Central and Western European peoples [. . .] had succumbed to Hitler’s spell. He had become a spiritual and, almost everywhere, a political source of temptation. He had English, French and American admirers. Did not even Churchill have a friendly word to say for him? [. . .] We were in danger of bringing, first incense, and then the complete sacrifice to a false god [. . .] Anyone who would like from me a political disclaimer of its [the Communist] system and its methods may have it at once [. . .] Certainly it would cost no one anything, not even a little thought [. . .] to add his bundle of faggots to the bonfire [. . .] For I cannot admit that it is the duty of Christians or of the Church to give theological backing to what every citizen can, with much shaking of his head, read in his daily paper and what is so admirably expressed by Mr Truman and by the Pope.60 Barth was a Socialist but never a Communist. He did not believe Communism posed the same threat to the Christian faith as Hitler’s deliberate attack on the churches in his false ‘Positive Christianity’. He therefore supported close friends like Josef Hromodka in their efforts to witness to Christ in Communist lands like Czechoslovakia. He also urged the World Council of Churches not to take sides in the Cold War East–West conflict. There are different ways of engaging in theological argument in the public square. I begin with some questionable examples which other theologians have challenged.

196

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Spokesmen for their Church’s Opinions, Church Parties or Christians in Politics One of my Reformed advocates for democracy, Nathaniel Micklem, was urged by his Church, then the Congregational Union of England and Wales, subsequently the United Reformed Church, to tackle the awkward question of Rome’s political ‘interference’. He did so in 1953 in a little pamphlet, The Pope’s Men. Obviously his comments now seem dated. Rome since Vatican II has moved on. Greatly improved ecumenical relations also mean that Churches can talk openly and critically with one another without resorting to impersonal modes like pamphlets. But some of the issues Micklem raised are worth rehearsing because ‘theocracy’ remains a temptation for any Church, when any Church has the means and the power to impose its will and ‘lord it over others’. His own Church had such power for a short time under Oliver Cromwell and the Independents in the English Civil War, through John Knox’s influence in Scotland and in some of the New England states. Micklem had seen Rome at her political best when he had stayed with Dominicans in Germany and been their ally in their courageous and costly resistance to Hitler.61 But in other situations, especially when Roman Catholics are in the majority in a nation, Rome as ‘a politico-ecclesiastical engine is a terrible menace to freedom’. ‘The Church aims unceasingly at political power and the use of public money, and all Roman Catholics in public life are required to put before all other considerations the welfare of the Church.’ When ‘supposed Church interests are concerned, the priests will tell the people how they are required to vote’.62 Micklem’s examples come from Europe, but a more recent study in the United States tells how Roman Catholic politicians were threatened with excommunication if they departed from the Church’s teaching on issues like abortion. Rosa de Lauro, as a Roman Catholic and a Democrat, supported women’s right to choose but was then forced to resign from a Catholic organisation. In response to the communion/excommunication issue, Cardinal McCarrick stated that the Eucharist was sacred and must never be turned into a political broker.63 Catholics were told not to vote for John Kerry as president in 2004 because he was pro-abortion; to support Solidarity and not the Communists in Poland in 1989; and to abstain from voting in 2004 in a referendum in Italy on

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

197

IVF treatments. In all three instances Catholics did as they were told.64 But on the positive side, it should be noted that precisely because he was a Roman Catholic, John F. Kennedy in 1960 ‘broke down the barriers that kept Catholics from the highest office in the land’. Kennedy made the point, ‘I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.’ Earlier, in 1929, fears and prejudices regarding Catholicism meant the Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, stood no hope of becoming president.65 Much more could be said about Christians in politics. Sufficient here to note that to date all leaders of the United Nations have been religious men.66 Dag Hammarskjo¨ld was the most open and explicit about the way faith guided his vocation. He is often quoted for telling us that in our generation the road to holiness lies through the world of action. When the British statesman and four-time prime minister William Gladstone died on Ascension Day 1898, the following Sunday P.T. Forsyth in Cambridge said, ‘I cannot do other than speak from a pulpit of the Gospel this morning about Mr Gladstone.’ For he believed that ‘God has taken away from us the best gift he ever gave to the public life of this country.’ The Church made Gladstone what he was. ‘The root and secret of Mr Gladstone’s unique influence with the British people was his faith.’ A later generation is inclined to be mean and cynical about such leaders, but it is hard to think of anyone else who fits Forsyth’s testimony to a statesman sent by God who inspired many of his fellow Christians to be politically active.67

Who Speaks for the Church? No Church person is better qualified by office to act as spokesman for the Church than the pope. As head of a truly international organisation, some recent popes have been exemplary. Pope John XIII was the author of one of the most influential texts on peace, Pacem in Terris (1963). Karl Barth commended it! He can also be credited with de-escalating a dangerous situation when the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 could easily have led to World War III. The Communist leader Khrushchev listened to Pope John, whom he respected as a man of peace. Kennedy was perhaps afraid to do so because of fears about his Catholic allegiances that we have already noted. Unlike a politician, a pope can act as mediator

198

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

without losing face. Indeed it is surely his Christian duty to do so! He did! His successor, Paul VI, became the first pope to address the United Nations General Assembly. He did so then at the invitation of the UN’s non-Christian Secretary General, the Buddhist U Thant, and again was applauded for his emphasis on peace. Pope Francis has offered wise counsel on compassion for asylum seekers, and in his encyclical Laudato Si’, On Care for our Common Home (2015) publicly affirms his support for all those who argue that ‘natural disasters are aggravated’ by human greed and indifference. The pope’s position is unique and so is that of his home base, the Vatican. The Vatican is a nation state. For all other Church traditions, including the World Council of Churches, with its half-a-billion members, it is much harder to speak with authority ‘for the Church’.

Christian Political Parties? Should there be Christian political parties? What about Christian Democrats in various European countries? The First Amendment of the American Constitution says ‘No.’ So does the Reformed theologian, Karl Barth.68 Conservative Evangelicals in the USA tend to support the Republican Party and so also are partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, but he is not a conservative Evangelical and is indeed hard to locate theologically. According to the constitution, drawn up by America’s Puritan founding fathers, Church and State must be kept separate so that no religious group should have hegemony and rule over others. Britain managed to avoid the anti-Christian or at least anticlerical parties found in Europe by demonstrating that there can be and are respected Christians in each of the three main political parties. Forsyth, addressing Free Church people in 1905, referred to ‘our political party’ and could assume all knew whom he meant. The Liberal Party, of course!69 The Church of England was once dubbed the Tory Party at prayer but is quite capable of siding with the opposition to a Conservative government when it sees the need, as in its critical report Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation (1985). Barth’s main point is that the only body to represent the Church in politics is the Church herself. He goes on to stress, as we have seen in his response to Brunner and Niebuhr, that when the Church enters public debates it should do so theologically.

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

199

Assembly Resolutions A strong plea in this book is that the Church and the churches would be more convincing in their advocacy of democracy if they practised what they preached. In terms of participation by all those involved, Vatican II was much more democratic than any previous ‘ecumenical council’. Likewise, the World Council of Churches since its first assembly in 1948 has tried hard to be more inclusive. In many ways it is now much more representative of the world Church compared with those old photos of mainly middle-aged European men in grey suits in a church in Amsterdam. Yet occasionally at Vatican II, Pope Paul VI and the Curia took fright at what Vatican reporter Peter Hebblethwaite called ‘the runaway church’,70 and reasserted their authority and censored some documents. And not everyone is satisfied with the way the World Council does business. What is healthy is that the best criticisms come from their own advocates. Yves Congar loved the Council but could also be very critical, as one can read in his My Journal of the Council.71 So were those non-Catholic observers who were delighted to have been invited to attend and comment. In what the semi-official History of Vatican II72 describes as ‘The Black Week’, the Pope, or others in high office, altered key phrases in the Decree on Ecumenism and despite the presence of 2,500 bishops from all round the world gathered in council, Pope Paul VI decided unilaterally to proclaim Mary ‘Mother of the Church’. Paul Ramsey, Keith Clements and Michael Kinnamon are ecumenically committed but far from complacent about the flood of well-meaning resolutions that pour out from one ecumenical assembly after another. Ramsey, one of America’s foremost theologians of ecumenical social ethics and one-time professor at Princeton, wrote Who Speaks for the Church as A Critique of the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society. He was invited by staff of the WCC to take part in the conference as a co-opted staff member. He pleads for more time and fewer resolutions if one is to have responsible debates. Four hundred and ten people had only two weeks to vote on at least 118 paragraphs of ‘conclusions’ on a whole range of issues. Churches should also ask if passing resolutions is the most effective way of trying to influence policies. He cites that great ecumenical pioneer, ‘Joe’ Oldham: ‘Find out where the power is, then lunch with it!’ His basic criticism is of claims made for such conferences and their resolutions:

200

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

In short, this conference represented only itself; it could not speak for the church, or for the churches. It seemingly did very little to impose on itself by a self-denying ordinance the requirement that no more be said in addressing the urgent political problems of the present day than can clearly be said on the basis of Christian truth and insights.73 The point is well made but slightly irritating to general secretaries of the WCC like the German Lutheran Konrad Raiser, which is why Raiser makes no mention of Ramsey in his recent study Religion Macht Politik.74 Raiser could remind Ramsey that officially the WCC, unlike the pope or the Vatican Council, is never in a position to speak for the Church or the member churches, currently 350 of them in over 100 countries. The WCC has only ‘moral authority’. It is up to member churches to accept or reject what those who have debated in its conferences and assemblies have decided. But when, for example, a body representing 500 million Christians agrees that apartheid is a heresy, that judgment needs to be taken seriously, especially if it sounds like Church teaching, true to the gospel and to tradition. Keith Clements has long been active in the WCC and latterly was Secretary of the Conference of European Churches that is also based at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva. In his Learning to Speak: The Church’s Voice in Public Affairs, he reminds himself, the World Council and the churches that we all have to go on listening and learning from past mistakes. In the crisis of the First Gulf War which confronted the WCC Assembly meeting in Canberra, Australia in February 1991, delegates were under too much pressure for the churches to ‘say something’. They were expected to master detailed directives as well as long summaries of ecumenical thinking on war and peace. Clements complains of the ‘unreality’ of an assembly presuming to know how a conflict thousands of miles away could best be ended. As a theologically motivated learning community, churches may have more impact and be more helpful if they ask questions rather than presuming to know all the answers. They need also to question themselves and their own motives. Why are we speaking? What do we hope to accomplish? But Clements also wishes to affirm that the churches do have an authoritative voice because they have an unrivalled network of local and global contacts. Some of their ecumenical leaders, people like Joe Oldham, much admired by Ramsey

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

201

and now by Clements, his biographer,75 could claim to be in touch with almost all the leaders of the various countries in Africa. Churches, unlike armies, do not boast of ‘boots on the ground’ but they do have people in contact with what Oldham called ‘actual life’, real people in real places. Duncan Forrester, much admired by Clements, says don’t just write about bad housing or unemployment, listen to the residents. Talk to people who have no work. The Church’s greatest ‘assets’ are faith and concern for people. Their best statements have thorough theological grounding. Clements draws heavily on classic ecumenical documents like that of the Confessing Church in Germany at Barmen in 1934 and the Kairos document of some theologians in South Africa in 1985. He especially commends a statement by the (Roman Catholic) bishops of Malawi read out in all the Roman Catholic congregations in Malawi on Sunday, 8 March 1992. Though it was highly critical of the then state of affairs, and for this reason got the bishops into trouble with the government, it held out hope. Its title: The Truth Will Set You Free. ‘It confronted human rights abuses with stark clarity: “Nobody should ever suffer reprisals for honestly expressing and living up to their convictions”.’ It became, says Clements, ‘what by common consent proved to be a decisive catalyst for change.’ Those who plucked up courage to speak also found it a liberating experience, even though they suffered for it. He also admires the bishops’ humility, not a quality that Baptists like himself have traditionally found in bishops. The bishops said: ‘We hope that our message will deepen in all of us the experience of conversion and the desire for truth and the light of Christ.’ ‘Here is the learning church calling others and itself to a new humility of learning before God’, says Clements.76 My local Catholic priest, Father Naz, who comes from Malawi, applauds this account. But in his autobiography, Look Back in Hope: An Ecumenical Life (2017), it is not just his own cancer that makes him feel angry. What had British Church leaders to say about leaving the European Community in the referendum debate of 2016? Almost nothing! With the noble exception of the Quakers and the Church of Scotland, they stayed away from ‘the public square’. Clements is appalled. So am I.77 Michael Kinnamon’s criticisms of the World Council and the ecumenical movement are often about the neglect of serious theological thinking that is the domain of a now, in his view, under-valued Faith and

202

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Order Commission. Like Ramsey and Clements, his own ecumenical commitment is not in doubt. He is an ordained minister of the Disciples of Christ in the United States, a leader in various ecumenical councils, author of several ecumenical texts and the editor of the Report on the Canberra Assembly of the WCC. One of his pressing concerns is that when it is true to its fundamental vision, the ecumenical movement is ‘a protest movement’. In the early years, the protesters were mainly laypeople like Joe Oldham, John R. Mott, Hendrick Kraemer, Sarah Chakko, Kathleen Bliss, Madeleine Barot and Suzanne de Dietrich. They were radical pioneers. Today, younger laypeople have sidelined the ecumenical movement in favour of single-interest groups like Greenpeace, leaving the ecumenical movement to full-time professionals whose job it is to worry about it. As so often with good writers, the best sentences are in the title: The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has been Impoverished by its Friends. Somewhat gentler is the title of a later book which does what Clements says we should all do more often, ask questions. Hence Kinnamon’s question: Can a Renewal Movement be Renewed? Questions for the Future of Ecumenism. One of the questions he asks is, ‘Has the Ecumenical Movement become too “Political”?’ He knows as an ecumenical officer that ecumenical bodies prefer to speak of ‘advocacy’. So Kinnamon asks, is advocacy for ‘the poor, immigrants, the disabled, children, those who suffer war and other forms of violence [. . .] an appropriate dimension of Christian witness?’ And he has then to admit that ‘Many faithful and intelligent Christians would answer “no”.’ They say advocacy compromises the Church’s primary work which has to do with a person’s relationship with God. Advocacy can be divisive. He cites a survey which showed that twenty-six per cent of Protestant pastors think churches should not take a stance on political issues. When church funds are short, churches first cut back on social service ministries. So for Kinnamon, if care for the poor and those who have no voice is being political, the ecumenical movement can never be too political. But it can and must take care in its approach. Avoid pious platitudes and adopt what some ecumenical leaders describe as ‘hopeful realism’. Don’t attempt to do everything or you end up only demonstrating what Bishop Lesslie Newbigin once described as ‘omnipotent mediocrity’. Above all, do not lose your faith in God: ‘At its best, however, Christian advocacy is not an anxious human effort to create a better world, but a testimony to our faith in God’s power to

CHURCH

AND

THEOLOGY

IN THE PUBLIC

SQUARE

203

overcome evil.’ He cites Henri Nouwen in Christ our Hope. In our actions we point to ‘the healing, restoring, redeeming and re-creating presence of God’.78

Debate Adjourned Hopefully this book will by now have prompted discussion about democracy, if not debate. Ecumenism and the Politics of Belief have been, and need to be, debated in the public square. This conviction was strengthened by the political context in which this book was written. For many thoughtful people in the United States and the United Kingdom, not all of them religious, the surprise election of Donald Trump and the long-term uncertainties created by an un-thought-out Brexit referendum decision which is then treated as a mandate from the ‘sovereign people’ that no one dare challenge, even though it is far from clear what ‘the sovereign people’ actually voted for, call for serious reflection. Duncan Forrester was too ill to vote or comment on the two referendums held in Scotland or he might have reminded us what he said about Calvin. Calvin supports popular election of officers in the Church and in the State, but ‘in neither case does Calvin idolise democracy and he has no use for notions of popular sovereignty’.79 But he would agree with his old Scottish colleague Lindsay of Balliol that we must ‘believe in democracy’. We know no better way. And the Church’s belief is most evident when it is matched by practice, not just by pronouncements. All churches, not least Roman Catholic and my own Reformed tradition, need to be more participatory and democratic. As for states and the wider society, many people in many places, possibly the majority, do believe that, on balance, democracy is the best form of government. Hardly anyone likes to be told they are ‘undemocratic’. But democracies the world over are far from well. They need healing. So the last word has to be a prayer, a very confident prayer: ‘Your will be done, your kingdom come, on earth as in heaven. Amen!’ I repeat some of these points in my Conclusions.

CONCLUSIONS

What conclusions can be drawn from this research? In all decision making, political or otherwise, the Christian priority is to do God’s will. Others who do not share this faith may reach the same conclusions. No problem! If, together, we make good decisions, that is, decisions that are good for all those affected by them, then praise the Lord! All of us can be guided to do what is right even if we can never be sure where that guidance comes from. We can also be inspired. Martin Niemo¨ller, confronted by Hitler’s demands, was persuaded by Peter the apostle to say: ‘We must obey God rather than any human being.’ No system of government is infallible, but some are better than others. Church leaders should not be impartial, as some popes once were. Christians should oppose all forms of tyranny and domination in Church or State and affirm democracy as closest to the gospel, a point made by Reformed theologian Karl Barth, and accepted by many Roman Catholics who argue for greater democratic participation in their Church. It is not always clear that democracy works. We need to believe that it can, and so say with Lindsay, ‘I believe in democracy’ but without making ‘democracy’ our god. We are more likely to make good decisions if we listen to both sides of an argument and respect those who at first disagreed with us. This was John Milton’s belief, as stated in his classic Areopagitica: ‘Whoever saw Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?’ Or, as the American civil rights leader Bernice Luther King said in a recent interview: ‘Truth will prevail.’

CONCLUSIONS

205

Majorities may be wrong, minorities may be right. This is part of the case for consensus decision making, currently practised in the World Council of Churches. Every speaker has to be listened to before agreement can be reached. Reforms are often promoted by minorities who would be as convinced of their cause even if in a minority of one. It is also important to attend to the ‘democracy of the dead’, or mistakes of the past will go on being repeated. Obeying God rather than any human being means that we should not treat the ‘sovereignty of the people’ as an idol we must bow down before and worship – a point made by the American Jesuit theologian Courtney Murray, who helped the Vatican Council to think hard about human rights and human dignity One person’s opinion is not as good as another’s, but each should be listened to. P.T. Forsyth and Daniel Jenkins called for respect for experts and the pursuit of excellence. But all who are in positions of government should be accountable to those their decisions affect. We are all mutually accountable, says the Lutheran Church leader Olav Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Early Reformers sometimes mocked ‘the mob’ and likened democracy to mobocracy. The better response is to help educate and inform all who have the vote. This was the line pursued by Barker, Lindsay and others through such organisations as the Workers’ Educational Association. Democracy is good for us. Rather than blaming those in power, we share responsibility for whatever community or association we belong to. Churches have the world’s most extensive global network so are wellplaced to think globally and act locally. The internet can keep us all in touch. All political decisions are also theological, said Nathaniel Micklem. Ju¨rgen Moltmann agrees and asserts that theologians can never be apolitical. For this reason, churches must claim and reclaim their voice in the public square. Remaining in or leaving the European Union was too often regarded as a subject for politicians or constitutional lawyers, not for theologians. The American Constitution tries to keep Church and State separate. No religion is privileged, not even the advocates of ‘no religion’! Yet, paradoxically, no one person stands a chance of being elected president of the United States who is not religious, preferably

206

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

some kind of Protestant Christian. The question is then, what kind? Surely, a theological question which is also political. Churches have often seen their role as being a voice for those who have no voice, for the poor, people with learning difficulties or other disabilities and for women, in a ‘man’s world’. But even better is to follow the example of Duncan Forrester and encourage all people to speak up for themselves and for all who share their particular needs. The complaint of those who live in dangerous tower blocks, like Grenfell Tower in London, is that they have a voice but nobody is listening to them. Much more could be said about ‘Democracy and the Christian Churches: Ecumenism and the Politics of Belief’. More, for example, about worship and democracy. Worship is political, says Wannenwetsch, drawing on a much earlier study by A.G. Hebert and an even earlier comment by Paul where politicians are liturgists. ‘The Mystical is Political’, says an Orthodox theologian, Aristotle Papanikolaou, an apt reminder of democracy’s Greek origins. If democracy began in Greece, it did not end there. It has become a universal norm and a universal challenge. No one likes to be told they are undemocratic, but it is still the case that most of the world’s peoples are oppressed by rulers or presidents who are not that democratic. Better democracies are part of the Christian hope. All the Reformed theologians mentioned were convinced that while there are many sources of democracy, it has strong Christian-Jewish foundations and roots. They were not sure if democracies could flourish where these religious roots and foundations were forgotten. What they can contribute to any debate is a conviction that because the gospel is Good News for all, this can be demonstrated not only in the decisions we make together but how we make them. Asmussen, quoted by Eberhard Ju¨ngel (Toward a Theology of the State), added to Barth’s draft of the famous Barmen Declaration the sentence that what encounters us through Christ is ‘the joyous liberation out of the godless binding obligations of this world into free and thankful service of his creatures’. That surely sets the tone for all debates about democracy in democracies. Democracy can be enjoyable and exciting, or, as a theologian might add, a duty and a delight.

NOTES

Chapter 1 Democracy and the Theologians: Reformed Reflections on Democracy 1. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Calvin; fifth Latin Doctor of the Church’, in Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (eds), Calvin and his Influence 1509–2009 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 33 – 45. 2. G.P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1927). 3. Institutes 1559, IV/xvii/39; IV/v/1– . 4. Institutes IV/iv/11. 5. T.H.L. Parker, John Calvin (London, 1975), p. 57. 6. John T. McNeill, ‘Democratic element in Calvin’s thought’, Church History XVIII /3 (1949). 7. Institutes IV/xx/8. 8. See, e.g., Brevard S. Childs, Exodus (London, 1974, 1984). 9. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1/55. 10. Institutes IV/xx/32. 11. Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536– 1609 (Oxford, 2013). 12. William C. Innes, Social Concern in Calvin’s Geneva (Allison Park, PA, 1983); Andre´ Bie´ler, Calvin’s Economic and Social Thought [1961], ed. and trans. James Greig (Geneva, 2005). 13. Willem Balke, Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, ed. and trans. William J. Heynen (Grand Rapids, MI, 1981). 14. Ernest Barker, ‘The Huguenot theory of politics’, in Church, State and Study Essays (London, 1930), pp. 72– 108. 15. Julian H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1968), p. 39. 16. Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (London, 1964), p. 60.

208

NOTES

TO PAGES

17 –25

17. Christopher Rowland, Radical Christianity (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 88, 101. 18. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance, pp. 197– 8. 19. Robert Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564– 1572 (Geneva, 1967); Calvin and Calvinism: Sources of Democracy (Lexington, KY, 1970); Reforming Geneva: Discipline, Faith and Anger in Calvin’s Geneva (Geneva, 2012). 20. Johannes Althusius, The Politics of Johannes Althusius, ed. and trans. Frederick S. Carney (London, 1965). 21. Stephen Grabill, ‘Natural law in the thought of Johannes Althusius’, in Rediscovering Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI, 2006), pp. 122– 56. 22. Politics xix, 12, 13 – 14. 23. Politics, pp. 197– 8. 24. D.F. Durnbaugh, ‘The First and Radical Reformations’, in Milan Opocensky, Towards a Renewed Dialogue (Geneva, 1996), pp. 8– 9. 25. In the British referendum on 23 June 2016, Oxford and Cambridge among other university cities voted 70 per cent ‘Remain’. 26. Coriolanus, Act I, scene i. Dogs were thought of as ruthlessly cruel. 27. Peter Iver Kaufman, in Church History lxxv/2 (June 2006), pp. 314–36. 28. There are excellent scholarly biographies of individual Levellers in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), as well as in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1995); David W. Petergorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: Gerard Winstanley and the Digger Movement [1940] (Stroud, 1995); D.B. Robertson, Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (London, 1951); A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates 1647– 1649, 2nd edn (London, 1974); David Wootton, ‘Leveller democracy and the Puritan revolution’, in J.H. Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450– 1700 (Cambridge, 1991). 29. Colonel Rainborough, ‘The Putney Debates, 29th October 1647’, in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, p. 53. 30. Michael Waltzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA, 1965), p. vii. 31. See the introduction to the Arden edition of Coriolanus by Peter Holland (London, 2013). 32. Paul Lehmann, The Transfiguration of Politics: Jesus Christ and the Question of Revolution (London, 1975). 33. Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638– 1651 (London, 1992). 34. Karl Barth, ‘Thoughts on the 400th anniversary of Calvin’s death’, in Fragments Grave and Gay (London, 1971), p. 109. 35. Karl Barth [1922], The Theology of John Calvin, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995), p. 208. 36. Karl Barth, Tambach Lecture 1919, cited in Leonard Kaplan and Rudy Koshar (eds), The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology and Law (Lanham, MD,

NOTES

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

TO PAGES

25 –34

209

2012), p. 243; Karl Barth, ‘The Christian in Society’ [1919], in The Word of God and the Word of Man, ed. and trans. Amy Marga (London, 2011). Cited in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, His Life: From his Letters and Autobiographical Texts, ed. and trans. John Bowden (London, 1976). Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’ [1946], reprinted in Will Herberg (ed.), Community, State and Church: Three Essays (Gloucester, MA, 1968), pp. 182– 3; also printed in Karl Barth, Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946– 1952 (London, 1954), pp. 44 – 5. Frank Jehle, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906– 1968 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), p. 1. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in History and Memory (London, 2015), p. 101. The Barmen Declaration is quoted in various anthologies, e.g., the World Council of Churches’ study Apostolic Faith Today (Geneva, 1985), pp. 147– 50. Karl Barth, Theological Existence Today, A Plea for Theological Freedom, ed. and trans. R. Birch Hoyle (London, 1933), pp. 39 – 42. Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford, 1999). Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2/693. Karl Barth, ‘Church and State’ [1938], reprinted in Community, State and Church [1968], pp. 144– 6. Robert E. Hood, Contemporary Political Orders and Christ: Karl Barth’s Christology and Political Praxis (Allison Park, PA, 1985), p. 184. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3/740. Ibid., IV/3/741. Ibid., IV/3/888. Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, p. 149. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2/721. Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, p. 182. Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 1992), p. 235. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness [1944] (New York, 1972), p. xiii. Niebuhr and His Age, p. 238. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2 [1941] (New York, 1964), p. 263. Niebuhr, Children of Light, p. 120. Ibid., p. 118. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2, pp. 198– 284. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 268. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 283. Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation, Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560, 1938, ed. and trans. J.L.M. Haire and Ian Henderson (London, 1960). Donald W. Norwood, Embattled Beliefs, Adam von Trott Memorial Lecture (Oxford, 2015).

210

NOTES

TO PAGES

35 – 48

64. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2, p. 283. 65. Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York, 1885), pp. 290– 1. Niebuhr always claimed to be the author, but a similar prayer in German is attributed to Theodore Wilhelm, alias Friedrich Oetinger. 66. A statement drafted by Nathaniel Micklem and reprinted in R. Newton Flew (ed.), The Nature of the Church: Papers Presented to the Theological Commission appointed by the Continuation Committee of the World Conference on Faith and Order, of the World Council of Churches (London, 1952), pp. 184– 5. 67. Nathaniel Micklem, The Idea of Liberal Democracy (London, 1957), pp. 78, 82. 68. Nathaniel Micklem, The Theology of Politics (Oxford, 1941), pp. x– xi. 69. Micklem, The Idea of Liberal Democracy, pp. 65 – 8. 70. Ibid., p. 85, 71. Ibid., pp. 77, 118– 36. 72. Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 November 1774, cited in Micklem, The Idea of Liberal Democracy, pp. 69 – 70. 73. Polly Toynbee, ‘Labour MPs owe a duty to the country’, Guardian, 31 January 2017. 74. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London, 1968), p. 228. 75. Karl Barth, The British Weekly, 22 April 1937, cited in John W. de Gruchy, Christianity and Democracy (Cambridge, 1995), p. 122. 76. Nathaniel Micklem, May God Defend the Right (London, 1939, 1940), pp. 98, 109. 77. Lord Astor, foreword in Nathaniel Micklem, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church (Oxford, 1939), p. xv. 78. Micklem, May God Defend the Right, pp. 80, 89. 79. Karl Barth, A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland, Basle, April 1941 (London, 1941), pp. 1– 29. 80. DNB article by Andrew Vincent; Elaine Kaye, Mansfield College, Oxford, Its Origin, History and Significance (Oxford, 1996), pp. 43 – 6, 53; I.M. Greengarten, Thomas Hill Green and the Development of Liberal Democratic Thought (Toronto, 1981). 81. Ernest Barker, Dominican Order and Convocation (Oxford, 1913). 82. J.H. Denton, ‘The clergy and Parliament in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, in R.G. Davies and J.H. Denton, The English Parliaments in the Middle Ages (Manchester, 1981), pp. 88 – 108. 83. Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints, The Congregational Way 1640– 1660 (Oxford, 1957), p. 4; David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 154, 158; G.R. Galbraith, The Constitution of the Dominican Order (Manchester, 1925). 84. Bede Jarrett OP, The English Dominicans (London, 1937). 85. Church Assembly, Archbishops’ Commission on the Relations between Church and State (London, 1935). Barker’s submission is in the Second Part volume, pp. 64 – 78.

NOTES

TO PAGES

49 – 62

211

86. Synodical Government 1970–1990, The First Twenty Years: A Discussion Paper issued on Behalf of the Standing Committee of the General Synod, GS Misc. 344, para. 3. 87. Sir Ernest Barker, ‘The parliamentary system of government’, Essays on Government [1945], 2nd edn (Oxford, 1951), pp. 56 – 81, 64. 88. Ibid., p. 65. 89. Ernest Barker, Reflections on Government, p. 83, cited in Barry Holden, The Nature of Democracy (London, 1974), p. 118. 90. Ernest Barker, Reflections on Government [1942] (Oxford, 1967), p. 4. 91. Ibid., p. 409. 92. Ibid., p. 36. 93. A.D. Lindsay, I Believe in Democracy (Oxford, 1940). 94. A.D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy (Oxford, 1929; 2nd edn 1935), p. 9. 95. Ibid., p. 54. 96. Ibid., pp. 75 – 6. 97. A.D. Lindsay, Harold Laski, Bertrand Russell, Dennis Brogan and Salvador Madriaga, all leading intellectuals of their era, contributed articles on democracy in the Manchester Guardian, March– April 1946, reprinted in What is Democracy?, a National Peace Council pamphlet (London, 1946). 98. Memoir by Forsyth’s daughter, Jessie Forsyth Andrews, in P.T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ [1910], Fontana edition (London, 1965); John Huxtable, DNB. 99. Robert McAfee Brown, Reflections over the Long Haul: A Memoir (Louisville, KY, 2005). 100. P.T. Forsyth, Faith, Freedom and the Future [1912] (London, 1955), pp. 1 – 2. 101. Ibid., p. 24. 102. P.T. Forsyth, The Church and the Sacraments [1917] (London, 1955), p. 10. 103. P.T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority in Relation to Certainty, Sanctity and Society [1913], 2nd edn (London, 1952), p. 255. 104. Ibid., p. 8. 105. Ibid., p. 3. 106. Ibid., p. 235. 107. Ibid., p. 238. 108. Ibid., pp. 343– 4. 109. Ibid., p. 282. 110. The Church and the Sacraments [1917] (London, 1955), p. 7. 111. The Charter of the Church (London, 1896), pp. 86 – 7. 112. P.T. Forsyth, Rome, Reform and Reaction (London, 1899). 113. Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1972), p. 20. 114. Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1991), pp. 21 –2, 51. 115. Ju¨rgen Moltmann, The Politics of Discipleship and the Discipleship of Politics (Eugene, OR, 2006), p. 36. 116. Ju¨rgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity, Political Theology and Ethics (London, 1984), p. 81.

212

NOTES

TO PAGES

62 –76

117. Ibid., pp. 140, 155– 6. 118. John W. de Gruchy, Being Human: Confessions of a Christian Humanist (London, 2006), pp. 17 – 24, 74 – 5. 119. John de Gruchy, ‘Racism, reconciliation and resistance’, in Charles VillaVicencio (ed.), On Reading Karl Barth in South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI, 1988), pp. 139– 56. 120. Niebuhr, Children of Light, pp. xii– xiii; De Gruchy, Christianity and Democracy, p. 228. 121. John de Gruchy, ‘A Theology for a Just Democratic World Order’, in Christianity and Democracy, p. 255. 122. Charles Villa-Vicencio, A Theology of Reconstruction, Nation Building and Human Rights (Cambridge, 1992).

Chapter 2 Democracy and Rome’s Reforms and Reservations 1. Cyprian, cited in Luca Badini Confalonieri, Democracy in the Christian Church (London, 2012), pp. 25 – 6. 2. More´ly, Traicte´, p. 32, cited in Donald Norwood, ‘The Case for Democracy in Church Government’, unpublished thesis, King’s College, London, 1983, pp. 34 – 7; Robert Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement (Geneva, 1967). 3. Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church (London, 1965); Hendrik Kraemer, A Theology of the Laity (London, 1958). 4. Giuseppe Alberigo, ‘Ecclesiology and democracy: convergences and divergences’, in James Provost and Knut Walf (eds), The Tabu of Democracy in the Church (London, 1992), pp. 14 – 26. 5. Giuseppe Alberigo (ed.), History of Vatican II (Maryknoll, NY/Leuven, 2006), vol. 5, p. 58. 6. Jean-Jacques Bauswein and Lukas Vischer, The Reformed Family Worldwide (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), attempt to do this in a few paragraphs (pp. 29 –33). They admit in the preface, ‘we use the term Reformed in a wide sense’. Even for one country, South Korea, it lists 100 different churches, most describing themselves as ‘Presbyterian’, and 14 for the United Kingdom. 7. John Leith, Introduction to the Reformed Tradition (Edinburgh, 1977). 8. Charles Taylor, ‘Magisterial authority’, in Michael J. Lacey and Francis Oakley (eds), The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity (Oxford, 2011), pp. 259– 72, at p. 260. 9. Susan M. Power, Jacques Maritsain, 1882– 1973: Christian Democracy and the Quest for a New Commonwealth (Lewiston, NY/Lampeter, 1992), p. 7. 10. Norman P. Tanner (Engl. ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London/ Washington, DC, 1990), pp. 1069 –1135. 11. Peter Hu¨nermann, ‘The final weeks of the Council’, in Alberigo, History of Vatican II, vol. 5, pp. 363– 483, at p. 424.

NOTES

TO PAGES

76 –84

213

12. Ibid., pp. 392– 3; Peter Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, the First Modern Pope (London, 1993), pp. 437– 41. 13. In Trent, for example, a whole series of dogmas are followed by the declaration, ‘if any one denies . . . let him be anathema’. Likewise Vatican I, ‘If anyone says that the Roman Pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church . . . let him be anathema.’ 14. The five-volume History of Vatican II puts flesh on the documents by helping us experience some of the arguments. In addition, there are numerous firsthand reports by observers, expert advisors and others, like Yves Congar’s My Journal of the Council. See also my Reforming Rome: Karl Barth and Vatican II (Grand Rapids, MI, 2015) and articles in The Ecumenical Review lxvi/4 (December 2014) and Ecclesiology x/3 (2014). 15. Lukas Vischer, ‘The Council as an event in the ecumenical movement’, in Alberigo, History of Vatican II, vol. 5, pp. 485– 539. 16. Joseph Ratzinger, Theological Highlights of Vatican II (New York, 1966), p. 5. 17. Leon-Joseph Cardinal Suenens, Memories and Hopes (Dublin, 1992), pp. 78 – 80. 18. Brown, Reflections over the Long Haul, p. 209. 19. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT, 1989), p. 178. 20. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America. 21. Bernie Sanders came close to being the Democratic candidate instead of Hillary Clinton and makes no secret of the fact that he is Jewish. See Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (London, 2017). 22. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 46. 23. Ibid., p. 336. 24. Ibid., pp. 336– 7. 25. Power, Jacques Maritsain, p. 3. 26. Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy (London, 1945). 27. John Wesley Cooper, The Theology of Freedom: the Legacy of Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr (Macon, GA, 1985), p. 85. 28. Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America [1958] (New York, 1975), pp. 182– 3. 29. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, pp. 7, 9, 16 – 18, 31 – 6. 30. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, ed. and trans. R Ashley Andra and Cloudesley Breton (London, 1935), pp. 242–3; Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, pp. 39, 43. 31. Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p. 244. 32. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, pp. 24 – 5. 33. Reprint of Niebuhr’s reviews of Maritain, in Cooper, Theology of Freedom, p. 174. 34. John Nurser, For All Peoples and All Nations: Christian Churches and Human Rights (Geneva, 2005), p. 22. 35. Ibid., p. 91, note 24. 36. Leonardo Boff, Church, Charism and Power [1981], ed. and trans. John W. Diercksmeier (London, 1985).

214

NOTES

TO PAGES

84 –93

37. Harvey Cox, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity (Oak Park, IL, 1988). 38. Leonardo Boff, Francis of Rome, Francis of Assisi: A New Springtime in the Church, ed. and trans. Dinah Livingstone (Maryknoll, NY, 2014). 39. Boff, Church, Charism and Power, p. 9. 40. Iain S. Maclean, Opting for Democracy? Liberation Theology and the Struggle for Democracy in Brazil (New York, 2002), pp. x, 176. 41. Boff, Church, Charism and Power, p. 35. 42. Boff, Francis of Rome, p. 85. 43. Sonia Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1990), pp. 65 – 7. 44. Boff, Church, Charism and Power, p. 53. 45. Boff, Francis of Rome, pp. 18 – 19. Boff would surely know that the appeal for ‘reform in head and members’ was first voiced in the Conciliar movement, two centuries before the Reformation. 46. William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and the Eucharist (Oxford, 1998). 47. William T. Cavanaugh, ‘Torture and the Eucharist, a regretful update’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Torture is a Moral Issue: Christians, Jews, Muslims and People of Conscience Speak Out (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008), pp. 92 – 112, 110. 48. Cavanaugh, Torture and the Eucharist, p. 161. 49. William T. Cavanaugh, Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement with a Wounded World (Grand Rapids, MI, 2016). 50. Cavanaugh, Torture and the Eucharist, p. 185. 51. Cavanaugh, Field Hospital, pp. 116–17. 52. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962). 53. Cavanaugh, Field Hospital, pp. 198, 148. 54. Ibid., p. 263. 55. ‘Elisabeth Schu¨ssler Fiorenza’, in Annie Lally Milhaven, The Inside Stories: Thirteen Valiant Women Challenging the Church (Mystic, CT, 1981), pp. 43 – 51. 56. Elisabeth Schu¨ssler Fiorenza, Discipleship of Equals (London, 1993), pp. 353–72. 57. Ibid., p. 356. 58. Ibid., pp. 356– 7, 366– 7. 59. Ibid., p. 370. 60. Eugene Bianchi and Rosemary Radford Ruether, A Democratic Catholic Church: The Reconstruction of Catholicism (New York, 1992). 61. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican (New York, 2008). 62. John Courtney Murray SJ, ‘Leo XIII and Pius XII: government and the order of religion’ [1955], reprinted in J. Leon Hooper SJ, John Courtney Murray SJ, Religious Liberty and Catholic Struggles with Pluralism (Louisville, KY, 1993), pp. 49 – 125, at p. 51. 63. Brown, Reflections over the Long Haul, p. 211.

NOTES TO PAGES 93 –101

215

64. Murray, ‘Leo XIII: separation of Church and State’, Theological Studies xiv (June 1953), cited in Robert W. McElroy, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray (New York, 1989), p. 99. 65. Murray, ‘Government and the order of religion’, p. 110. 66. Christian Democrats, Our Visions of Europe in 2020 (Brussels, 2006), p. 9; Jonathan Chapman and Gary Wilton (eds), God and the EU: Retrieving the Christian Inspiration of the European Project (London, 2015). 67. John Courtney Murray, ‘The problem of religious freedom’, in J. Leon Hooper SJ (ed.), Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism (Louisville, KY, 1993), pp. 127– 98. 68. John Courtney Murray, ‘Church and State’, in Hooper, Religious Liberty, pp. 199– 227, at pp. 219– 20. 69. Robert W. McElroy, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray (New York, 1996). 70. Ibid., p. 105, quoted from ‘The School and Christian Freedom’ [1951]. 71. Ibid., p. 106, quoted from ‘Freedom, Responsibility and the Law’ [1956]. 72. Ibid., p. 108. 73. Alberigo, History of Vatican II, vol. V, pp. 82 – 106, at p. 106. 74. Giuseppe Alberigo (ed.), Christian Unity: The Council of Ferrara-Florence 1438/9 – 1989 (Leuven, 1991). 75. McElroy, Search for an American Public Theology, p. 109. 76. Cooper, The Theology of Freedom. 77. Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, ed. and trans. Richard Rex (Princeton, NJ, 2012), pp. 9 – 11. 78. Jose´ de Broucker, The Suenens Dossier: The Case for Collegiality (Notre Dame, IN, 1970), p. 3. 79. Eugene Bianchi and Rosemary Radford Ruether (eds), A Democratic Catholic Church: The Reconstruction of Roman Catholicism (New York, 1992). 80. Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church (London, 1965), p. 35. 81. Brian Tierney, ‘Church law and alternative structures: a medieval perspective’, in Francis Oakley and Bruce Russett (eds), Governance, Accountability and the Future of the Catholic Church (New York, 2004), pp. 49 – 61, at p. 53. 82. Hans Ku¨ng, Disputed Truth: Memoirs, vol. II, ed. and trans. John Bowden (London, 2008), pp. 24 – 8. 83. Peter Norton, Episcopal Elections 250– 600: Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007). 84. Boff, Francis of Rome, p. 52. 85. See Chapter 4, where I discuss the fact that Paul VI also chose to ignore the advice of the Special Commission. 86. Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, the First Modern Pope, p. 598. 87. Charles E. Curran (ed.), Contraception, Authority and Dissent (London, 1969). 88. Alberigo, History of Vatican II, vol. 2, p. 529. 89. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 288.

216

NOTES

TO PAGES

102 –116

90. George B. Caird, Our Dialogue with Rome: The Second Vatican Council and After (Oxford, 1967), p. 46. 91. Newman, On Consulting the Faithful, pp. 75 – 6. 92. Charles E. Curran and Lisa A. Fullam, The Sensus Fidelium and Moral Theology (New York, 2017), p. 3, Report para. 2. 93. Badini Confalonieri, Democracy in the Christian Church, p. 6. 94. Luiz Carlos Susin, Silvia Scatena and Susan Ross, Reform of the Roman Curia (London, 2013). 95. Norman Tanner SJ, The Church in Council (London/New York, 2011), p. 116. Peter Hebblethwaite is the author of biographies of Pope John XXIII and Paul VI. He died long before the arrival of another pope he would surely admire, Pope Francis. 96. Ibid., p. 57; Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, p. 108.

Chapter 3 Accountability and Other Issues 1. Francis Oakley and Bruce Russett (eds), Governance, Accountability and the Future of the Catholic Church (New York, 2004). 2. Ibid., p. 135. 3. Ibid., p. 18. 4. Ibid., p. 77. 5. Paul Lakeland, Liberation of the Laity (New York, 2003), p. 257. 6. Oakley and Russett, Governance, p. 17. 7. H. Richard Niebuhr, ‘The Protestant movement and democracy in the United States’, in James Smith and Leland Jamison (eds), The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton, NJ, 1961), pp. 20 – 71. 8. Olav Fykse Tveit, The Truth We Owe Each Other: Mutual Accountability in the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva, 2016), p. 39. 9. Ibid., p. 235, quoted from Costly Unity (Geneva, 1993), p. 95, para. 33. 10. John de Gruchy (ed.), Apartheid is a Heresy (Guildford, 1983), pp. 145– 6. 11. Robert D. Behn, Rethinking Democratic Accountability (Washington, DC, 2001), p. 31. 12. Alan Race and Ingrid Shafer, Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy (Aldershot, 2002). 13. Marcus Borg, Convictions: A Manifesto for Progressive Christians (London/ New York, 2014), pp. 153– 60, at p. 155. 14. F.F. Bruce, ‘Render to Caesar’, in Ernst Bammel and C.F.D. Moule, Jesus and the Politics of His Day (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 249– 64, at p. 250. 15. Luther Works, vol. 22, p. 225. 16. Tim Farron stood down as leader on 15 June 2017 because he had repeatedly been challenged in the election about his opposition to same-sex partnerships. 17. Micklem, The Theology of Politics, p. x. 18. Borg, Convictions, p. 164. 19. ‘Luther, ‘Tract against Hanswurst’, Luther Works 41, p. 225.

NOTES

TO PAGES

117 –127

217

20. Borg, Convictions, p. 151. 21. Ernst Ka¨semann, Commentary on Romans, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (London, 1980), p. 354. 22. George B. Caird, The Revelation of St John the Divine (London, 1966), p. 1. 23. Borg, Convictions, p. 149. 24. Quoted from the translation and abridged version in J.H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1969), p. 145. 25. Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, Emmanuel Hirsch (New Haven, CT, 1985), pp. 79 – 119, at pp. 87 – 8. 26. Eberhard Ju¨ngel [1984], Christ, Justice and Peace: Toward a Theology of the State, ed. and trans. D. Bruce Hamill and Alan J. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 42; Eberhard Busch, The Barmen Theses Then and Now, ed. and trans. Daniel and Judith Guder (Grand Rapids, MI, 2010). 27. Jill Tabart, Coming to Consensus: A Case Study for the Churches (Geneva, 2003). 28. The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches (London, 1949), pp. 36 – 9. 29. ‘Reflections of Orthodox Participants’, in Michael Kinnamon (ed.), Signs of the Spirit: Official Report of the Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Geneva, 1991), pp. 279– 82. 30. Report of the Thessaloniki Consultation, in Thomas Fitzgerald and Peter Bouteneff (eds), Turn to God, Rejoice in Hope: Orthodox Reflections on the Way to Harare (Geneva, 1998), pp. 136–8, paras 9, 13c. 31. Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC: An Introduction (Geneva, 2007). 32. Tabart, Coming to Consensus, p. 3. 33. Ibid., p. 17. 34. Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1947). 35. Tabart, Coming to Consensus, p. 20, writes of ‘waiting for consensus in both Quaker and traditional Aboriginal indigenous settings’. The Canberra Report of the Seventh Assembly, p. 13, notes that ‘Aboriginal people comprise only one or two per cent of the Australian population [approximately 17 million], but their concerns and culture received considerable attention from the WCC’, for whom the human rights of native people have become a major issue. 36. Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship (Oxford, 2004); Gerhard Sauter, In der Freiheit des Geistes (Go¨ttingen, 1988); A.G. Hebert, Liturgy and Society: The Function of the Church in the Modern World 1935 (London, 1961). 37. John Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings, Penguin Classics edition, ed. William Poole (London, 2014), pp. 98 – 142, at p. 137. 38. Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), pp. 107– 108. 39. John Milton, On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament. 40. Martin A. Larsen, ‘Milton and Servetus: a study of the sources of Milton’s theology’, PMLA xli/4 (December 1926), pp. 891– 917. 41. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), pp. 155–6.

218

NOTES

TO PAGES

127 –139

42. Areopagitica, p. 103. 43. Hans Ku¨ng, ‘The Church as a community in freedom, equality and fraternity; democratization of the Church’, in Why Priests? (London, 1972), pp. 15 –24. 44. R.H. Tawney, Equality [1931], 4th edn 1952 (London, 1964), pp. 33, 48, 54. 45. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (London, 2009). 46. Stanley Evans, Equality (London, 1964), p. 23; Daniel Jenkins, Equality and Excellence: A Christian Comment on Britain’s Life (London, 1961). 47. E.L. Woodward, The Age of Reform 1815– 1870 (Oxford, 1954), pp. 463– 4. 48. Duncan Forrester, On Human Worth: A Christian Vindication of Equality (London, 2001), p. 173. 49. Jenkins, Equality and Excellence, p. 37. 50. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT, 1989), p. 31. 51. Forrester, On Human Worth, p. 43. 52. Micklem, The Idea of Liberal Democracy, p. 50. 53. Forrester, On Human Worth. 54. Dignitatis Humanae 1. 55. David Hollenbach SJ, Justice, Peace and Human Rights (New York, 1990), pp. 22 – 3. 56. Observer, 6 November 2016, headline and ‘Comment on Brexit’, p. 40. 57. Gina Miller, Guardian, 25 January 2017. 58. For fuller discussion of this issue, see below, ‘Democracy and Law’, and comments on referenda. 59. Vernon Bogdanor, Constitutions in Democratic Politics (Brookfield, VT/Aldershot, 1988). Bogdanor lists just three countries without a codified constitution, Britain, Israel and New Zealand. Written constitutions are needed when a new nation is founded but, in the case of Britain, its political system has evolved, basically from the seventeenth century. This could still change, if, for example, people opted for proportional representation at elections. That decision would probably have to be made by a referendum. 60. Nathaniel Micklem, Law and the Laws, Being the Marginal Comments of a Theologian (London, 1952). 61. Ibid., pp. 1, 18. 62. Ibid., pp. 51, 95. 63. Ibid. 64. Niebuhr, The Children of Light, pp. 119, 128– 9. 65. Aquinas, Summa 1– 11q 100a 8c, cited by Esther Reed, The Ethics of Human Rights: Contested Doctrinal and Moral Issues (Waco, TX, 2007), p. 45. 66. John Witte Jr, The Reformation of Rights, Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 85 –6. 67. David Butler and Austen Ranney (eds), Referendums around the World (Basingstoke, 1994). 68. Anna Christman and Deniz Danaci, ‘Direct democracy and minority rights’, Politics and Religion (April, 2012). 69. Referendums, pp. 96, 151.

NOTES

TO PAGES

139 –153

219

70. Maude Royde and Constance Coltman, The Church and Woman (London, 1924), p. 132. 71. Andrew Goddard, The EU Referendum: How Should We Decide? (Cambridge, 2016), p. 3. 72. Vernon Bogdanor, ‘Western Europe’, in Butler and Ranney, Referendums around the World, p. 24. 73. Vernon Bogdanor, The People and the Party System (Cambridge, 1981), p. 17. 74. Bogdanor, ‘Western Europe’, p. 39. 75. Wayne David, Member of the European Parliament, The European Parliament and the Principle of Subsidiarity (Warwick, 1993), p. 2. 76. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno 1931, in Hans Ku¨ng, Structures of the Church (London, 1965), p. 215. 77. Structures of the Church, p. 216. 78. Abraham Kuyper, Calvinism: Stone Lectures at Princeton NJ (Edinburgh, 1899), pp. 98 – 142, 124. 79. David, The European Parliament, pp. 2 – 3. 80. Ibid., p. 11. 81. Ad Leys, Ecclesiological Impacts of the Principle of Subsidiarity (Kampen, 1995). 82. James A. Coriden, Thomas J. Green and Donald Heintschel (eds), The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (London, 1985). 83. D. Donnelly and J. Famere´e (eds), The Belgian Contribution to the Second Vatican Council (Leuven, 2008). 84. Code of Canon Law, p. 364. 85. Structures of the Church, p. 221. 86. Luca Badini Confalonieri, Democracy in the Christian Church (London, 2012), 6.7, ‘Micro-management and the disregard for subsidiarity in the Roman Catholic Church’, p. 221. 87. Basil Hume, Remaking Europe (London, 1994), p. 19.

Chapter 4 Democracy, Women, Church and the Bible 1. Hillary Rodham Clinton offers her own account in What Happened (New York, 2017). 2. Barbara Taylor, Guardian, 25 February 2017. 3. Joanna Johnston, Mrs Satan: The Incredible Story of Victoria Woodhull (London, 1967); Lois Underhill, The Woman who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (New York, 1995); Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theatre and the Popular Press in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia, PA, 2004). 4. Jad Adams, Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford, 2014). 5. Betty Thompson, A Chance to Change: Women and Men in the Church (Geneva, 1982), p. 45. 6. Mulieres Dignitatem; Gaudium et Spes. 7. Kathi Kern, Mrs Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY, 2001), p. 2.

220

NOTES

TO PAGES

153 –172

8. ‘Has Christianity benefitted women?’, North American Review (May, 1885), reprinted in Ellen DuBois and Rachel Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays (New York, 2007). 9. Jane Dempsey Douglas, Women, Freedom and Calvin (Philadelphia, PA, 1985). 10. Kern, Mrs Stanton’s Bible, p. 228. 11. Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah, Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids, MI, 1998), p. 13. 12. Kern, Mrs Stanton’s Bible, p. 161. 13. Ibid., pp. 181– 9. 14. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Reasons for and against the enfranchisement of women’ [1869], in Jane Lewis (ed.), Before the Vote was Won: Arguments for and against Women’s Suffrage 1864– 1896. 15. Maude Royden and Constance Coltman, The Church and Woman (London, 1924). 16. Sheila Fletcher, DNB. See also her Maude Royden: A Life (1989). 17. Patricia Hollis, Women in Public, 1850– 1900 (London, 1979), p. 19. 18. Ibid., pp. 21 – 2. 19. Elaine Kaye, Janet Lees and Kirsty Thorpe, Daughters of Dissent (London, 2004). 20. Church House Publishing, The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood: The Synod Debate 11 November 1992 (London, 1993). 21. Sheila Fletcher, DNB. 22. Kathleen Bliss, The Service and Status of Women in the Churches (London, 1952), p. 14. 23. Gaudium et Spes, in Norman Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London/Washington, DC, 1990). Vatican Council decrees are known by the first two or three Latin words in their originals. 24. George Tavard, Vatican II and the Ecumenical Way (Milwaukee, WI, 2007), p. 35. 25. Bliss, Service and Status of Women, p. 163. 26. Dr John Marshall, foreword, in Robert Blair Kaiser, The Encyclical that Never Was: The Story of the Pontifical Commission on Population, Family and Birth, 1964– 1966 (London, 1985, 1987), p. xi. 27. Kaiser, The Encyclical that Never Was, pp. 99, 149– 59. 28. Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, the First Modern Pope, p. 9. 29. D. Vincent Twoney, Moral Theology after Humanae Vitae (Dublin, 2009). 30. Hebblethwaite, Paul VI, the First Modern Pope, pp. 518, 598. 31. Janet E. Smith, Why Humanae Vitae was Right: A Reader (San Francisco, 1993); Humane Vitae, A Generation Later (Washington, DC, 2010), p. xiii. 32. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women Church (San Francisco, 1985), p. 88. 33. Encountering the God of Life, Official Report of the 10th Assembly (Geneva, 2014), pp. 173– 6. 34. Letty M. Russell, Aruna Gnanadason and J. Sharon Clarkson (eds), Women’s Voices and Visions of the Church: Reflections from North America (Geneva, 2005). 35. Ofelia Ortega (ed.), Women’s Visions: Theological Reflection, Celebration, Action (Geneva, 1995), p. viii.

NOTES TO PAGES 172 –182

221

36. Musimbi R.A. Kanyoro (ed.), In Search of a Round Table: Gender, Theology and Church Leadership (Geneva, 1997). 37. Betty Thompson, A Chance to Change, p. 13.

Chapter 5 Democracy and Religious Pluralism 1. Nostra Aetate, paras 2 and 3. Also important is the document on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, because it challenges any state where religious uniformity is imposed. 2. Hans Ku¨ng, Christianity and the World Religions (London, 1987); Judaism, the Religious Situation of our Time (London, 1992); A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the World’s Parliament of Religions (London, 1993); Islam, Past, Present & Future (Oxford, 2007). 3. Miroslav Volf, Ghazi bin Muhammad and Melissa Yarrington, A Common Word (Grand Rapids, MI, 2010). 4. Thomas Banchoff (ed.), Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (Oxford, 2007). 5. The phrase was once adopted by Prince Charles, heir to the throne.

Chapter 6 Church and Theology in the Public Square 1. Jeffrey Stout, ‘Pastors and flocks’, International Journal of Public Theology vi/4 (2012), pp. 516– 27; Blessed are the Organized (Princeton, NJ, 2010). 2. Guardian, editorial, 28 August 2017. The Grenfell Tower block housed some 200 relatively low-income people in Kensington, one of the richest boroughs in London. The council responsible for the flats is accused of ignoring safety warnings and putting profit before people. 3. John Howard Yoder, ‘The Constantinian sources of Western social ethics’ and ‘The Christian case for democracy’, in The Priestly Kingdom [1984] (Notre Dame, IN, 2001), pp. 135– 71. 4. Oliver O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, 1996). 5. Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Democratic policing of Christianity: democracy and the death of Protestantism’, in Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham, NC, 1994), pp. 91– 106, at p. 93. 6. John Howard Yoder, ‘The Christian case for democracy; the challenge: why should ‘the people’ govern?’, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, IN, 1984), pp. 151– 71. 7. John Howard Yoder, ‘On Not Being in Charge’, in Michael C. Cartwright and Peter Ochs (eds), The Jewish Christian Schism Revisited (London, 2003), pp. 168– 80, 191. 8. O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, p. 250. 9. John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (New York, 1954), p. 185. 10. Karl Barth, ‘Thoughts on the 400th Anniversary of Calvin’s Death’, in Fragments Grave and Gay (London, 1971), pp. 105– 10, at pp. 108– 109.

222

NOTES

TO PAGES

183 –190

11. Maurice Curtis, A Challenge to Democracy: Militant Catholicism (Dublin, 2010), p. 15. 12. Keith Clements (ed.) The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938– 1944 (London, 2010), pp. 54, 57. 13. Alan Race and Ingrid Shafer (eds), Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy (Aldershot, 2002), p. 4. 14. Fathi Osman in ibid., p. 88. 15. Dorothy Emmet, ‘Lindsay as Philosopher’, in Drusilla Scott, A.D. Lindsay, A Biography (Oxford, 1971), p. 408. 16. Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh, 1985), p. 59. 17. I am grateful for conversations with Dr Vivienne Larminie who is currently engaged in research into Parliament’s response to the Westminster Assembly. 18. Oliver O’Donovan, Principles in the Public Realm: The Dilemma of Christian Moral Witness, Inaugural Lecture of the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, May 1983 (Oxford, 1984). 19. Ibid., p. 9; Putting Asunder, para. 14. 20. Oliver O’Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin (London, 2009). 21. David Jenkins, The Calling of a Cuckoo: Not Quite an Autobiography (London, 2002), p. 145. 22. Ibid., p. 49. In an Easter Day comment, Jenkins said that the recent Budget of the Conservative Government was ‘verging on the wicked’ in its impact on welfare provision for the poor. 23. Ibid., pp. viii – ix. 24. I News.co.uk, 6 September 2017. 25. Ju¨rgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization (San Francisco, 2006). 26. Karl Barth, The Humanity of God [1956], ed. and trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (London, 1961). 27. Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge, 2003). 28. Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan, Religious Voices in Public Places (Oxford, 2009). Rawls is quoted in every essay. Charles Taylor says ‘the paradigmatic model has come to be the Rawlsian one’. 29. David Schaeffer, Justice or Tyranny? A Critique of John Rawls, The Theory of Justice (New York, 1979), p. ix. 30. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford, 1984); Duncan Forrester, On Human Worth (London, 2001), pp. 32, 45, 58 – 62, 66 – 8. 31. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 2005), pp. 338– 40. 32. ‘Public reason revisited’, in ibid., p. 340. 33. Duncan Forrester, Forrester on Christian Ethics and Practical Theology: Collected Writings (Farnham, 2010), pp. 250, 427. 34. Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘Religious ethics in a pluralistic society’, in Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jnr (eds), Prospects for A Common Morality (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 93 –112.

NOTES 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

TO PAGES

190 –196

223

Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference [2002] (London, revd edn, 2003). Ibid., p. 201. Adams, ‘Religious ethics’, pp. 112, 103. Jeffrey Stout, ‘On having morality in common’ in Outka and Reeder, Prospects for A Common Morality, pp. 215– 32. Stanley Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings (Boulder, CO, 1997), pp. 107– 108. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 2004), pp. 246–9. See the study by Anglican theologian Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge, 2006), and Reformed theologian, Hak Joon Lee, Covenant and Communication: A Christian Moral Conversation with Ju¨rgen Habermas (Lanham, MD, 2006). Ratzinger Debate (San Francisco 2006). Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [1962], ed. and trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 201, 213. Luke Goode, Ju¨rgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Square (London, 2005), p. 24. Stefan Mu¨ller-Doohm, Ju¨rgen Habermas, Eine Biographie (Berlin, 2014). Habermas and Ratzinger, Dialectics of Secularization, pp. 11, 30, 51 –2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI, 1983), p. vii. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Understanding Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 2012). Nicolas Wolterstorff and Robert Audi, Religion in the Public Square (Lanham, MD, 1997), pp. 112–13. Wolterstorff, Understanding Liberal Democracy, p. 141. Forrester, Forrester on Christian Ethics, pp. 422– 3. Ibid., pp. 16, 22, 32. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd edn (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), pp. ix–xii, 5. Duncan Forrester, Theological Fragments (London, 2005), pp. ix, 2, 10, 16 – 17. Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings, p. 109. Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls (Princeton, NJ, 1977), pp. 195– 210. O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, pp. 18 – 19. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook of Christian Political Thought, 100–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999). Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2/554 – 556. Martin Wight, International Theory in Three Traditions (Leicester, 1991). The three traditions are those of Machiavelli, Grotius and Kant. Karl Barth, reply to Emil Brunner, 6 June 1948, in Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings 1946– 1952 (London, 1954), pp. 113– 18. Micklem, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church, written at the request of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Nathaniel Micklem, The Pope’s Men (London, 1953), pp. 12, 14, 16. Patrick Hannon, ‘Eucharist as weapon’, in Thomas R. Whelan and Lian M. Tracey (eds), Serving Liturgical Renewal (Dublin, 2015); Alan Wolfe and Ira Katznelson (eds), Religion and Democracy in the United States (New York, 2010).

224

NOTES

TO PAGES

197 –203

64. Chester Gillis (ed.), The Political Papacy: John Paul II and Benedict XVI (London, 2006), pp. 45, 177, 191. 65. Patrick Hannon, ‘Eucharist as Weapon’, pp. 259, 270. 66. Kent J. Kille, The UN Secretary General and Moral Authority (Washington, DC, 2007). 67. P.T. Forsyth, A Sermon on the Death of Mr Gladstone (London, 1898). 68. Karl Barth, ‘The Christian Community and the Civil Community’, in Community, State and Church: Three Essays (Gloucester, MA, 1968), para. XXX, pp. 182– 4. 69. P.T. Forsyth, ‘A Holy Church, the Moral Guide of Society’, London lecture 1905, in The Church, the Gospel and Society (London, 1962), p. 60. A footnote explains the reference to the Liberal Party. 70. Peter Hebblethwaite, The Runaway Church (London, 1978). Foreword: ‘The Council set in motion a process which, once started, the official Church was powerless to stop.’ 71. Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council, ed. and trans. Mary John Ronayne and Mary Cecil Boulding (Collegeville, IN, 2012). 72. Luis Antonio G. Tagle, ‘The “Black Week” of Vatican II (November 14– 21 1964)’, in Alberigo, History of Vatican II, vol. 4, pp. 388– 452. 73. Paul Ramsey, Who Speaks for the Church? (Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 61, 95, 30. 74. Konrad Raiser, Religion – Macht – Politik (Frankfurt am Main, 2010). Raiser was general secretary of the WCC (1993– 2003) and previously a professor in Bochum. He helped plan the Ecumenical Assemblies at Basle in 1989, and at Seoul in 1989 and 1990 on themes of Justice and Peace and Care for Creation. 75. Keith Clements, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham (Edinburgh/Geneva, 1999). 76. Keith Clements, Learning to Speak (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 4 – 8, 17 – 19, 24 – 50, 205– 7. 77. Keith Clements, Look Back in Hope (Eugene, OR, 2017), pp. 399–402. 78. Michael Kinnamon, The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement (St Louis, MI, 2003), pp. 75 – 86; ‘Why professionalization undermines the movement’; Can A Renewal Movement be Renewed? (Grand Rapids, MI, 2014), pp. 66 –77. 79. Forrester, Forrester on Christian Ethics, p. 301. Duncan Forrester, ill for some years, died on 29 November 2016.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Jad, Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford, 2014). Adams, Nicholas, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge, 2006). Adams, Robert, The Virtue of Faith (New York, 1987). ——— ‘Religious ethics in a pluralistic society’, in Gene Outka and John P. Reeder (eds), Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton, NJ, 1993). Alberigo, Giuseppe, The Reception of Vatican II (Tunbridge Wells, 1987). ——— History of Vatican II, vols I– V (Maryknoll, NY/Leuven, 1995– 2006). Althusius, Johannes, The Politics of Johannes Althusius, trans. Frederick S. Carney (London, 1965). Backus, Irena and Philip Benedict, Calvin and His Influence (Oxford, 2011). Badini Confalonieri, Luca, Democracy in the Christian Church (London, 2012). Baker, Jean H., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (Oxford, 2002). Balke, Willem, Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, trans. William Heynen (Grand Rapids, MI, 1981). Banchoff, Thomas, Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (Oxford, 2007). Barker, Ernest, Dominican Order and Convocation (Oxford, 1913). ——— Some Aspects of the Women’s Movement (London, 1915). ——— Church, State and Study (London, 1930). ——— Burke and Bristol (Bristol, 1931). ——— ‘Consultant’s Report’, in Archbishops’ Commission on the Relation between Church and State (London, 1935). ——— Reflections on Government (Oxford, 1942). ——— Social and Political Thought in Byzantium (Oxford, 1957). ——— Political Thought in England 1848– 1914 (London, 1959). Barth, Karl, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920 –1928, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (New York, 1962). ——— Theological Existence Today, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (London, 1933). ——— The Holy Ghost and the Christian Life [1929], trans. R. Birch Hoyle (London, 1938). ——— Church Dogmatics, trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1936– 81).

226

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

——— The Church and the Churches [1937], foreword by William G. Rusch (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005). ——— The Knowledge of God and the Service of God [1938], trans. J.L.M. Haire and Ian Henderson (London, 1938). ——— The Church Community and the Civil Community [1946], ed. Will Herberg (Gloucester, MA, 1968). ——— Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings 1946 – 1952 (London, 1954). ——— The Humanity of God [1956], trans. John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser (London, 1961). ——— God Here and Now [1964], trans. Paul M. van Buren (London, 2003). ——— Fragments Grave and Gay, trans. Martin Rumscheidt (London, 1971). Behn, Robert D., Rethinking Democratic Accountability (Washington, DC, 2001). Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Equality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVI /1 (1956), pp. 281– 326. Bogdanor, Vernon, The People and the Party System (Cambridge, 1981). ——— Constitutions in Democratic Politics (Aldershot, 1988). ——— Consensus and Conflict (Ditchley Park, Oxon, 1989). ——— Power and the People (London, 1997). ——— ‘Europe and the sovereignty of the people’, Political Quarterly LXXXIII /3 (2016), pp. 348– 51. ——— ‘A new way back for social democracy? The EU referendum and its lessons for the left’, Juncture XXIII /1 (2016), pp. 8 – 11. Borg, Marcus, Jesus, A New Vision (London, 1993). ——— Convictions (London, 2014). Bretherton, Luke, Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Chichester, 2010). Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion [1559], trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia, PA, 1960). Caputo, Nina, Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputations 1263 (Oxford, 2017). Carlton, Charles, Going to the Wars: Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638– 1651 (London, 1992). Cartledge, Paul, Democracy, A Life (Oxford, 2016). Cavanaugh, William T., Torture and the Eucharist (Oxford, 1998). ——— ‘A politics of vulnerability: Hauerwas and democracy’, in Charles Pinches (ed.), Unsettling Argument (Eugene, OR, 2010). ——— Field Hospital (Grand Rapids, MI, 2016). Chalamet, Christophe, ‘Karl Barth and the Weimar Republic’, in Leonard Kaplan (ed.), The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law (Lanham, MD, 2012). Chambers, Susan, Reasonable Democracy: Ju¨rgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY, 1996). Christian Democrats, Our Vision of Europe in 2020 (Brussels, 2006). Classen, Ryan, Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans (New York, 2016). Clements, Keith, Learning to Speak (Edinburgh, 1995). ——— Looking Back in Hope (Eugene, OR, 2017). Congar, Yves, Lay People in the Church [1964], trans. Donald Attwater (London, 1965). ——— True and False Reform in the Church [1967], trans. Paul Philibert (Collegeville, PA, 2011).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

227

——— My Journal of the Council [2002], trans. Mary John Ronayne and Mary Cecily Boulding (Collegeville, PA, 2012). Cooper, John Wesley, The Theology of Freedom: Legacy of Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr (Macon, GA, 1985). Coriden, James A., The Code of Canon Law (London, 1985). Costigan, Richard F., The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility (Washington, DC, 2005). Crawford, Elizabeth, The Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1999). Crossley, Nick, After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Oxford, 2004). Curran, Charles E., Contraception, Authority and Dissent (London, 1969). Dahl, Robert A., Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, CT, 1989). ——— How Democratic is the American Constitution? (New Haven, CT, 2003). D’Costa, Gavin, Theology in the Public Square (Oxford, 2005). De Gruchy, John W., Apartheid is a Heresy (Guildford, 1983). ——— Bonhoeffer and South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI, 1984). ——— Liberating Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 1991). ——— Christianity and Democracy (Cambridge, 1995). ——— Reconciliation, Restoring Justice (London, 2002). ——— The Church Struggle in South Africa, 3rd edn (London, 2004). ——— Being Human (London, 2006). ——— The End is Not Yet: Standing Firm in Apocalyptic Times (Minneapolis, 2017) Dunn, Charles W., Religion in American Politics (Washington, DC, 1989). ——— Democracy the Unfinished Journey (Oxford, 1992). Eberle, Christopher, Religious Convictions and Liberal Politics (Cambridge, 2002). Ellul, Jacques, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man [1966], trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1972). ——— Perspectives on our Age (New York, 1981). ——— Anarchy and Christianity, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI, 1991). ——— Sources and Trajectories: Eight Early Articles (Grand Rapids, MI, 1997). Evans, Stanley, Equality (London, 1964). Faggioli, Massimo, The Rising Laity (New York, 2016). ——— Catholicism and Citizenship (Collegeville, PA, 2017). Fletcher, Sheila, Maude Roydon: A Life (Oxford, 1989). Forrester, Duncan B. and Alison Elliott, The Scottish Churches and the Political Process Today (Edinburgh, 1986). ——— Theology and Politics (Oxford, 1988). ——— Beliefs, Values and Policies (Oxford, 1989). ——— Christian Justice and Public Policy (Cambridge, 1997). ——— Truthful Action (Edinburgh, 2000). ——— High Ideals and Sobering Realities (Edinburgh, 2003). ——— Theological Fragments (London, 2005). ——— Forrester on Christian Ethics and Practical Theology: Collected Writings (Farnham, 2010). Forsyth, Peter Taylor, The Antiquity of Dissent (Manchester, 1889). ——— Charter of the Church (London, 1896). ——— Rome, Reform and Reaction (London, 1899). ——— The Church, the Gospel and Society [1905] (London, 1962). ——— Socialism, the Church and the Poor (London, 1908).

228

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

——— Faith, Freedom and the Future [1912] (London, 1955). ——— The Principle of Authority [1913] (London, 1952). ——— Theology in Church and State (London, 1915). ——— The Church and the Sacraments [1917] (London, 1955). ——— The Justification of God [1917] (London, 1957). Franklin, Julian, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1969). Freeman, Samuel (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge, 2003). Freston, Paul, Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America (Oxford, 2008). Friedrich, Carl J., Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston, MA, 1950). Gentles, Ian, ‘London Levellers in the English Revolution’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History xxix/3 (1978), pp. 281– 309. Gillis, Chester, The Political Papacy: John Paul II and Benedict XVI and their Influence (London, 2006). Gooch, G.P., English Democratic Ideas of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1927). Gorringe, Timothy, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford, 1999). Gough, J.W., The Social Contract (Oxford, 1957). Grabill, Stephen, Rediscovering Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI, 2006). Grasso, Kenneth (ed.), John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992). ——— Catholicism, Liberalism and Moral Foundations of Democracy (Lanham, MD, 1995). Griffith, Elisabeth, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 1984). Habermas, Ju¨rgen, Theory of Communicative Action [1981] (London, 1984). Habermas, Ju¨rgen and Joseph Ratzinger, Dialectics of Secularization (San Francisco, CA, 2006). Hauerwas, Stanley, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, IN, 1987). ——— Resident Aliens (Abingdon, 1989). ——— Dispatches from the Front (Durham, NC, 1994). ——— Wilderness Wanderings (Boulder, CO, 1997). ——— Sanctify Them in the Truth (Edinburgh, 1998). ——— A Better Hope (Grand Rapids, MI, 2000). ——— The State of the University (Oxford, 2007). ——— Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary (Cambridge, 2008). Hill, Christopher, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977). ——— The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London, 1994). Hollenbach, David, Justice, Peace and Human Rights (New York, 1990). ——— The Global Face of Public Faith (Washington, DC, 2003). Hood, Robert E., Contemporary Political Orders and Christ (Allison Park, PA, 1984). Ho¨pfl, Harro, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge, 1982). Hu¨tter, Reinhard, Ecumenical Ventures in Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI, 1998). ——— Suffering Divine Things (Grand Rapids, MI, 2000). ——— Bound to be Free (Grand Rapids, MI, 2004). Jehle, Frank, Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906– 1968 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002). Jenkins, Daniel, The Church Meeting and Democracy (London, 1944). ——— Equality and Excellence (London, 1961).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

229

Jenkins, David, God, Politics and the Future (London, 1988). ——— The Calling of a Cuckoo: Not Quite an Autobiography (London, 2002). Junker-Kenny, Maureen, Religion and Public Reason (Berlin, 2014). Kaiser, Robert Blair, The Encyclical that Never Was (London, 1985). Kaiser, Wolfran, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (Cambridge, 2007). Kaufman, Peter Iver, ‘English Calvinism and the crowd’, Church History lxxv/2 (2006), pp. 314– 42. Kee, Alistair, Constantine versus Christ (London, 1982). Kern, Kathi, Mrs Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, NY, 2001). Kingdon, Robert M., Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564– 1572 (Geneva, 1967). ——— Calvin and Calvinism: Sources of Democracy (Lexington, MA, 1970). ——— Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, MA,1995). ——— ‘Calvinism and resistance theory’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991). ——— Reforming Geneva: Discipline, Faith and Anger in Calvin’s Geneva (Geneva, 2012). Kinnamon, Michael, The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement (St Louis, MO, 2003) Can a Renewal Movement be Renewed? (Grand Rapids, MI, 2014). Lakeland, Paul, Liberation of the Laity (New York, 2003). ——— A Council that will Never End (Collegeville, PA, 2013). Lee, Hak Joon, Covenant and Communication: Christian Moral Conversation with Ju¨rgen Habermas (Lanham, MD, 2006). Lehmann, Paul, Re-educating Germany (Chicago, 1945). ——— The Transfiguration of Politics (London, 1975). Linder, Wolf, Swiss Democracy: Possible Solutions to Conflict in Multicultural Societies (Basingstoke, 1998). Lindsay, A.D., Christianity and the Present Crisis (London, 1926). ——— The Essentials of Democracy (Oxford, 1929, 1935). ——— I Believe in Democracy (Oxford, 1940). ——— The Predicament of the Church (London, 1944). ——— The Modern Democratic State [1943] (New York, 1962). Manetsch, Scott, R., Calvin’s Company of Pastors (Oxford, 2013). Maritain, Jacques, Christianity and Democracy (London, 1945). McElroy, Robert W., The Search for an American Public Theology: Contribution of John Courtney Murray (New York, 1989). McEwan, Dorothea, Women Experiencing Church (Leominster, 1991). Micklem, Nathaniel, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church (Oxford, 1939). ——— National Socialism and Christianity (Oxford, 1939). ——— The Theology of Politics (London, 1941). ——— Law and the Laws (Edinburgh, 1952). ——— The Pope’s Men (London, 1953). ——— The Idea of Liberal Democracy (London, 1957). Milton, John, Areopagitica [1644] and Other Writings (London, 2014). Moltmann, Ju¨rgen, On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics (London, 1984). ——— The Politics of Discipleship and Discipleship in Politics (Eugene, OR, 2006). Mu¨ller-Doohm, Stefan, Ju¨rgen Habermas, Eine Biographie (Berlin, 2014).

230

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Murray, John Courtney, Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism (Louisville, KY, 1993). Naphy, William G., Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Louisville, KY, 1994). Nevitt, Martin, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640– 1660 (Aldershot, 2006). Newman, John Henry, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine [1859], ed. John Coulson (London, 1961, 1986). Nicholls, David, Deity and Domination (London, 1989). Niebuhr, Reinhold, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (San Francisco, CA, 1929). ——— The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York, 1943, 1964). ——— The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness [1944] (New York, 1972). ——— Pious and Secular America (New York, 1958). Norton, Peter, Episcopal Elections 250– 600 (Oxford, 2007). Nuttall, Geoffrey, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957). Oakley, Francis, Council over Pope? (New York, 1969). ——— The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity (Oxford, 2011). Papanikolaou, Aristotle, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN, 2012). Plant, Raymond, The Plant Report (London, 1991). ——— ‘Pluralism and Political Theology’, in Duncan Forrester et al. (eds), Vision and Prophecy (Edinburgh, 1991). ——— Politics, Theology and History (Cambridge, 2001). Pollard, John, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism 1914 – 1958 (Oxford, 2014). Power, Susan, Jacques Maritain, 1882– 1973: Christian Democracy and the Quest for a New Commonwealth (Lewiston, MA, 1992). Putnam, Robert D., Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ, 1993). Race, Alan and Ingrid Shafer, Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy (Aldershot, 2002). Rahner, Karl, ‘Structural change in the Church of the future’ [1972], trans. E. Quinn, in Theological Investigations, vol. XX (London, 1981). Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, expanded edn (New York, 2005). Ross, Kenneth, Presbyterian Theology and Participatory Democracy (Edinburgh, 1993). Rowland, Christopher, Radical Christianity (Cambridge, 1988). Royden, A. Maude, The Making of Women (London, 1917). ——— The Church and Woman (London, 1924). ——— Women’s Partnership in the New World (London, 1941). Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Women Church (San Francisco, CA, 1985). ——— and Bianchi, Eugene, A Democratic Catholic Church (New York, 1992). ——— Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican (New York, 2008). Russell, Letty, Just Hospitality (Louisville, KY, 2009). Sandel, Michael (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics (Oxford, 1984). Sciarini, Pascal, Political Decision Making in Switzerland (Basingstoke, 2015). Schu¨ssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth, In Memory of Her (London 1983). ——— Discipleship of Equals (London, 1993). Scott, Peter, Theology, Ideology and Liberation (Cambridge, 1994).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

231

——— Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford, 2004). Skillen, James, In Pursuit of Justice (London, 2004). Stapleton, Julia, Englishness and the Study of Politics: Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994). Stepan, Alfred, Democratizing Brazil (Oxford, 1989). Stout, Jeffrey, Ethics after Babel (Boston, MA, 1988). ——— Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 2004). ——— Blessed are the Organized (Princeton, NJ, 2010). Tanner, Norman, The Church in Council (New York, 2011). Tawney, R.H., Commonplace Book, 1912– 1914 (Cambridge, 1972). ——— Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [1926] (London, 1938). ——— Equality (London, 1964). ——— The Radical Tradition: Essays 1914– 53 (London, 1966). Thomas, Keith, ‘Women and the Civil War sects’, Past & Present xiii/1, pp. 41 – 62. Tocqueville, Alex de, Democracy in America [1835/40], ed. Gerald Bevan (London, 2003). Villa-Vicencio, Between Christ and Caesar (Grand Rapids, MI, 1986). ——— Liberation and Political Theology (Cape Town,1989). ——— Theology of Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1992). ——— (ed.), On Reading Karl Barth in South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI, 1988). Wallis, Jim, God’s Politics (Oxford, 2005). ——— On God’s Side (Grand Rapids, MI, 2013). Waltzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA, 1965). Wannenwetsch, Bernd, Political Worship (Oxford, 2004). Whelan, Thomas R. and Liam M. Tracey, Serving Liturgical Renewal (Dublin, 2015). Wight, Martin, International Theory (Leicester, 1991). Witte, John, Christianity and Democracy in Global Context (Boulder, CO, 1993). Wolfe, Alan, Religion and Democracy in the United States (New York, 2010). Wolff, Robert, Understanding Rawls (Princeton, NJ, 1977). Wolterstorff, Nicholas, and Robert Aidi, Religion in the Public Square (Lanham, MD, 1997). ——— Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI, 1983). ——— A Passion for God’s Reign (Grand Rapids, MI, 1998). ——— The Mighty and the Almighty (Cambridge, 2012). ——— Understanding Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 2012). Yoder, John Howard, The Politics of Jesus, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI, 1994). ——— The Royal Priesthood (Grand Rapids, MI, 1994). ——— The Jewish – Christian Schism Revisited (London, 2003). ——— Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009).

INDEX

accountability, 109– 13 Adams, Robert, 190– 1 Althusius, Johannes, 20, 62 Aquinas, Thomas, 12, 39, 80, 138 Aristotle, 7, 19, 44, 55, 142 Athenian democracy, 7, 11, 37, 89, 136 Badini Confalonieri, Luca, 97 –8, 104, 144– 5 Barker, Sir Ernest, 3, 8, 14 – 18, 41 – 3, 45 – 53, 205 Barmen Declaration, 27 – 8, 118 Barth, Karl, 3, 7, 8, 12, 24 – 31, 33, 45, 65, 96, 99, 118, 128, 163– 4, 174, 182, 187– 8, 191, 197– 8 Benn, Tony, 37, 54 Bergson, Henri, 82 Beza, Theodore, 13, 14, 19, 138 Bible key texts, 113– 19 Genesis 1:27, 113, 130, 132 Genesis 2:24, 155 Exodus 20:1– 17, 134 Deuteronomy 17:6, 113 1 Samuel 8:4 – 22, 15, 119 Mark 10:41– 5/Matthew 20:25– 26, 17, 122, 181 Mark 12:17, 83, 87, 114–16

Luke 1:46– 55, 85 John 18:36, 87, 118 Acts 5:29, 12, 16, 117– 18, 184 Acts 15:1 – 35, 9, 142 Romans 13:1 – 7, 14, 34, 45, 72, 75, 87, 116– 18 1 Corinthians 14:34, 163 Galatians 3:28, 54, 155, 164 Bliss, Kathleen, 3, 163, 165–6, 202 Boff, Leonardo, 84 – 5, 100, 127 Bogdanor, Vernon, 140– 1 Bonhoeffer. Dietrich, 12, 28, 34, 63 Borg, Marcus, 114– 18 Brexit vote, 3, 16, 93, 95, 119, 132, 201, 203; see also referendum Brown, Robert McAfee, 57, 78, 92 Brueggemann, Walter, 184 Burke, Edmund, 39 – 44 Burne, Sister Lavinia, 165 Caird, George Bradford, 102, 117 Calvin, John, 2 – 3, 8– 16, 22 – 4, 27, 34– 5, 55, 59, 62, 104, 154, 181–3, 203 Cavanaugh, William T., 83, 86 – 8 Chidley, Kathleen, 22 –3 Christendom, 179– 81 Christian (democratic) parties, 25 – 6, 51, 57

INDEX Church of England, Establishment, 31, 42, 48 – 51, 160– 1, 180, 183, 185– 6, 198 Clements, Keith, 200– 1 Clinton, Hilary, 147– 9, 173 collegiality, 13, 85, 98, 105, 110 conciliarism, 7 – 8, 68, 73, 96, 99, 105– 6, 110, 127 Congar, Yves, 40, 67, 98 – 9 consensus decision making, 119– 25 Constantine, 8, 179– 80 Coriolanus, 22 – 3 Dahl, Robert, 7, 78 debate, 40, 125– 8, 139, 184– 7 discussion, 51– 2 Dominicans, 31, 46 – 8 equality, 128– 32 European Union, 93, 95 – 6, 130, 134, 140– 6; see also referendum Forrester, Duncan, 125, 129– 1, 188– 94, 201, 203, 206 Forsyth, Peter Taylor, 8, 55 – 60, 65, 189, 197, 205 Grenfell Tower fire, 178, 206 Gruchy, John de, 1 – 3, 8, 62 – 5, 182 Habermans, Ju¨rgen, 187, 191– 3 Hauerwas, Stanley, 179– 81, 191 Havel, Va´clav, 46 Hitler, Adolf, Nazi Party, 7, 26 – 7, 32 – 4, 44, 61, 80, 183– 4, 195 Huguenots, 14 – 18, 21, 34, 80, 182 Humanae Vitae, 101, 145, 166– 9 Independence, Declaration of/US Constitution, 15, 81 – 82, 93, 95, 128, 137, 198, 205 Jenkins, Daniel, 129– 30, 205 Jenkins, Bishop David, 186– 7

233

Kennedy, President John F., 90, 92, 150, 197 Kinnamon, Michael, 201– 3 Knox, John, 34, 62 Ku¨ng, Hans, 99 – 100, 128, 145, 174–5 Lakeland, Paul, 104, 110, 166 law, constitutions, 35, 39, 93, 99, 132–9 Levellers, 8, 21 – 3, 34, 37, 55, 126 Liberation Theology, 17, 84 – 5, 112 Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop, 3, 7 – 8, 51, 53– 5, 136– 7, 184, 205 Luther, Martin, Lutheran, 8, 17, 23, 27– 8, 33, 35, 112, 115, 135 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 220, 228 majorities, majority rule, 36, 51 – 2, 59, 95, 97, 134, 184, 205 Maritain, Jacques, 80 –3, 86– 7, 97 Micklem, Nathaniel, 3, 7, 35 – 45, 196 Mill, John Stuart, 104, 158 Miller, Gina, 132– 4 Milton, John, 62, 106, 125– 7, 179, 185, 204 mixed polity, 9 – 10, 20, 55, 60 Moltmann, Ju¨rgen, 8, 61– 2 More´ly, Jean, 8, 13, 18 – 21, 67 Murray, John Courtney, 39, 91 –7, 205 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 56, 60, 101–3, 169 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 3, 7, 31 – 5, 63, 83, 97, 137, 181, 191, 195 Niemo¨ller, Martin, 28, 118, 184 O’Donovan, Oliver, 179– 81, 185–6, 194 Orthodox Churches, 119– 23, 206 Peasants’ Revolt, 16– 17 people of God, 16, 19, 48 – 9, 60, 64, 67, 75 –7, 81, 102–3

234

DEMOCRACY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

popes Leo I, 9 Leo XIII, 71 – 3, 87, 91 –3 Pius IX, 77, 102 Pius XI, 69 – 70, 141– 2 Pius XII, 24, 68 – 9, 91 –3, 144 John XXIII, 70, 77, 197 Paul VI, 76, 166– 8, 198– 9 John Paul II, 71, 127 Benedict XVI, 77 – 8, 85, 127, 175 Francis I, 85, 100, 198 populism, 29, 61 Ramsey, Paul, 199– 200 Rawls, John, 187– 91 referendum, 21, 30, 38, 55, 93, 95, 108, 132– 3, 138– 43, 201– 3 Rowland, Christopher, 17 Royden, Maude, 3, 158, 160 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 90 – 1, 169– 70 Schu¨ssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth, 3, 88 – 90, 154– 5 sovereignty of the people, 2, 20, 59, 73, 93, 97, 140 Stanton, Elisabeth Cady (Woman’s Bible), 151– 8 Stout, Jeffrey, 3, 177, 181, 191 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 14, 138 subsidiarity, 141–6, 161 Suenens, Cardinal Le´on Joseph, 67, 77 – 8, 98, 168

Tabart, Jill, 119– 25 Tanner, Norman, 105– 6 Tawney, Richard Henry, 128– 9 theocracy, 175, 181– 4 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 78 – 80, 129 Todd, Constance (Coltman), 36, 159, 161 Trent, Council of, 21, 76, 96, 127, 165 Trott, Adam von, 12, 34 Trump, President Donald, 3, 16, 26, 128, 132, 147– 9, 203 tyranny, 2, 9, 11, 13 – 18, 21, 36, 38 United Nations (UN), 3, 76, 83, 128, 197 Vatican, 2, 27, 77, 91 Vatican I, 7 Vatican II, 2, 67 – 8, 74 – 8, 90 – 3, 127, 131– 2, 142, 162, 164– 5, 174, 199 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 14 – 18, 52 Vox populi, vox Dei, 66 – 7 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 192– 3 Woodhull, Victoria, 149–52, 170 World Council of Churches (WCC), 2, 49– 50, 60, 67, 74, 76, 100, 111–12, 119 –24, 162 –3, 170–4, 198 Yoder, John Howard, 179– 81