University of Chichester, Lecture Question and Answer session

Questions:

'If Bell were alive today what do you think his reaction would have been to the selection of a German as Pope?' and 'Would it have been a good thing if Bishop George Bell had become archbishop?'

Archbishop:

I think Bell would have been rather delighted by the election of a German Pope. I think it would have vindicated his very clear sense that Germany was not a monolithic 'lump' of evil in the European heartland, that Germany was a mixed, complex society in which people struggle to find ways of living with integrity (as anywhere else). He consistently refused to demonise Germany overall. I think he would have been very interested in the present Pope's European vision. I think they would have had a lot to talk to each other about.

And 'Would it have been a good thing if George Bell had become Archbishop?' Opinion is divided, but actually I still think it would. I think that Bell would have been far less competent an administrator than Geoffrey Fisher, and we would have had to wait a little bit longer for the Church of England's Canon Law, which was Fisher's great enterprise. But then I suspect that that might not have been absolutely the first priority in terms of the Kingdom of God, during the late Forties and Fifties! So yes, I rather think so, but then that's partly because Donald McKinnon was one of my teachers and I believed most of what he said, and he certainly thought that.

Questions:

How does the Church avoid being drawn into ideological propaganda? The more the Church engages in the issues of the day, isn't there a risk that the Church may find itself voicing the propaganda or interest of some section or issue group?

Archbishop:

I think the only answer to that is that the Church needs constantly to pray, to be faithful to what makes it distinctive: constantly to be reflecting on itself and its own integrity in terms of its foundation documents and its basic practices. I think a Church whose unity and focus is simply ideals, especially ideals of justice and progress and so forth, that's fine: but if they're not rooted in the 'strangeness' of revelation, then I think it all dries up, and the Church does become easily just another voice in the ideological debate. And as the questioner notes, there have been some rather unpleasant examples of that in the twentieth century: and as Bell knew very well indeed, the Church could be very effectively conscripted into the service of the ideology of Nazism.

Question:

How in today's Church may we continue to maintain the dialogue about Niebuhr's insights: Christ above culture, within culture, against culture and beyond culture?

Archbishop:

For those who don't know Reinhold Niebuhr's great book on Christ and Culture: those are the categories that this very distinguished German-American theologian proposes for understanding the relations between Christ and culture: the Church can work from within, it can work against, it can have an oppositional minority stance, it can seek to penetrate the structures of its society. And as chance would have it, I've just been reading a very interesting American book which questions the whole basis on which Niebuhr's analysis works and says that it's too artificial and slanted towards Niebuhr's own preferred conclusions, unsurprisingly. So I think that we probably need to step back a bit from too many generalizations about it and say that it's not so much about Christ and culture, it's about the community of Christ in its distinctiveness and worshipping practice and its study of the Bible, Eucharist and Baptism: that kind of community, relating to a variety of cultural institutions, with no such thing as culture in general, but cultures, with the question always in the Church's mind, 'How does our engagement with this particular context , this kind of politics, this kind of art, advance the Kingdom of God in some ways?' How do we in our encounter with whatever our society throws at us, seek to set forward that kind of humanity which God wills as his purpose for us all?

Question:

Representations of religion are still a significant part of the 'heritage' business. Is this a valuable commodity or potentially damaging?

Archbishop:

The answer I think, is both. You can end up with the impression that religion is one of those quaint things that people 'used to do' and you can – as frequently happens in fiction and drama these days – paint amazingly unreal pictures of religious practice and language in other ages, because you've no sense of how it really worked. Although it would be invidious to mention any one instance, there is that recent, astonishing television series on 'The Tudors' (so called): a very marked example of a kind of breathtaking illiteracy about the past. The past becomes twenty-first century soap opera in fancy dress, and religion goes with it. You know you've got to have it because 'there were archbishops in the sixteenth century, weren't there?' so you've got to have them around: but how they worked, what they thought, what they felt, what it was like? There's no interest at all! So, I'm wary about the heritage industry and the presence of a kind of 'soft-focus' and rather inaccurate version of religion within that. On the other hand, anything that does remind us that once there were archbishops of Canterbury and 'where have they all gone?' isn't a bad point just to start a conversation going in the twenty-first century! So there are opportunities there. And I think what we've discovered in the last ten years, is that the presence and impact of churches and cathedrals within the heritage world and tourism isn't necessarily trivial. People find that these are places where you can 'put the bits of your humanity that won't go anywhere else'. And the Dean in his sermon last night in the Cathedral said some very powerful things about how that plays out here in Chichester Cathedral: where do people go with certain sorts of experience or crisis? And the presence of Christian images and places in the heritage world is just a reminder that there is somewhere where these things can be taken: that's not trivial.

Question:

Thinkers tend to be marginalized in our society. What happens about leading academics at the heart of our society?

Archbishop:

I wouldn't necessarily consign the government of this country to academics, but I do worry occasionally that, while the appetite in many quarters for serious debate about what matters for human beings is there, we're pushing up hill rather, against a very short-term mentality, a very quick-fix mentality, and a mentality that doesn't much like the reality of continuing debate. It's as if people want to say 'That's it, now we move on'. So insofar as the Church is part of what the great Raymond Williams called 'the long revolution' of keeping the thinking going, critically, then the Church's voice is not going to be all that popular or welcome in that environment. And we just have a hard job, and I don't think that anything I say is going to make that easier.

Question:

But it's related to a number of these other questions about what's happening at the moment: how does the established Church respond to the prophetic voice and present-day secular society? And here's a question about what ethical guidance can be credibly given to the financial community at the moment.

Archbishop:

On the economic crisis at the moment: I think the Church has got to be incredibly modest about offering specific solutions. A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of having dinner with a very significant and sophisticated financial journalist who said he had twelve points he was recommending the government to adopt to solve the financial crisis. And I thought, 'Well, I'm glad somebody has, but actually that's not the Church's job and twelve points arriving from Lambeth Palace on the Chancellor's desk to solve the financial crisis would, quite rightly, be written off! But the Church can keep 'needling' at some of the fundamental attitudes (just how did we get here, to a situation in which the unreality of a lot of our financial life simply spirals out of control?) How did we get to a situation where we no longer ask some basic questions about trust? Now, that doesn't provide the instant answer to the specific critical question: it does say that everyone involved in this (and that means all of us as investors) needs some scrutiny of themselves, and in so many contexts what the Church has to say is, 'Look at yourself, and take the time that needs'.

And responding to the prophetic voice: the catch about prophecy is that on the whole you don't know that this is prophecy at the moment. Somebody gets up in a social situation and says, 'The judgement of God on this society is X, Y and Z'. Now, do you believe them? Well you may or may not and later on you may find that they were right and you were wrong. You may hitch your wagon to it and say, 'This is right', and feel a complete fool the other way round, but that's prophecy. Even in the Old Testament it's quite clear that when prophets get up and speak, it's very seldom the case that everybody then says, 'How true'. The only case of that recorded in the Old Testament is in the book of Jonah. Jonah walks into the middle of Nineveh and says, 'Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed: repent!' And the Ninevites say with one voice, 'Oh, alright then!' Which is why—a little-known fact—Jonah is the comic masterpiece of the Old Testament: a very deliberate fantasy on prophetic themes meant to remind us that sometimes the people who are absolutely outside the Covenant, the complete outsiders who inhabit Nineveh, are more likely to respond to the word of God than some of the people who ought to! But on the whole prophecy doesn't work like that and that's why discernment is so hard and protracted a job. Trying to listen into the heart of what's said to find God in it or not, knowing the risk of it and knowing that either a yes or a no can be very problematic in the long run. But when you hear a voice which is prophetic in the sense of being very fundamentally critical of you, of the society or the Church – the first question is not to ask how to get this tiresome person out of sight and sound, it's to ask if God is saying something to me that I have got to hear for my health. Start there and see what follows: talk to your friends: pray.

Question:

And sort of apropos really, here's a question about Philip Pullman's work; asking if it is an important contemporary expression of what Bell mean by public seriousness?

Archbishop:

Absolutely: I think Philip Pullman is globally and dramatically wrong about God and the Universe, and on his way to that 'global wrongness' he says so many things that are so interesting and so engaging and challenging that it would be a fool that would write him off as 'just another atheist'. Work through, see what he has and hasn't understood about Christianity. Just let your mind be enlarged by the beautiful, imaginative world he takes you into. But don't lose your head either. Keep asking the questions. And Pullman is just one example of a number of very different writers who, by portraying a very different world from the one Christians usually inhabit, have the capacity to enlarge and deepen. When I think of very professedly anti-religious writers (an example I sometimes use is Ian McEwan, when you've read one of his novels, again you might think that it's not quite the world you inhabit) I'm grateful for having been taken there, and there's something more that emerges at the end of it all. I think that's how we should constantly be approaching the arts.

Question:

If Bell were alive today what issues would he be pursuing?

Archbishop:

I think on the basis of what we know of him, he would have been profoundly concerned about how we treat asylum-seekers and detainees in this country. He would have known, as we all know that it's not a simple question to sort it out. He would have known also that there are some aspects of that system, especially as it affects children and young people, which are intolerable. He would have focused quite a bit on that. I ask myself where he would have been on the question of the Iraq war and I don't know that I'm sure of the answer. Bell wasn't a pacifist: he believed that sometimes force was a necessary evil in international affairs and he believed, actually, that the Second World War was a just war. But precisely for that reason of course, he believed that taking it forward unjustly undermined your own initial case, and he might have said 'Well let's see how the war in Iraq was actually prosecuted,' what the scale of civilian casualties actually was and how far it could be explained away. I'm not sure he'd have come to a terribly positive conclusion about that, but it's an open question to me.

Question:

How does the Church present a coherent voice when individual bishops and priests say such different things?

Archbishop:

Well, in the Church -- because its leaders are fallible and sinful men (and occasionally women) just like everybody else – it's actually rather unusual for the Church to speak with one voice on certain matters. Sometimes when bishops are in conflict over what seem to be rather major or fundamental matters, it can be an embarrassment. But it's the kind of embarrassment that can only be avoided if you only have one voice for the Church. And I think not even the most orthodox Roman Catholic would believe you ought to have just one voice for the Church. So it's a risk that you run. The discernment always has to be: testing what any bishop or what anyone else says in the light of that bishop's place in the whole scheme of Christian tradition and understanding. It can't be just how I feel or how the vicar feels or how my best friend feels or the fact that I don't like the bishop's face on television or whatever: just put what's being said into that wider context; test it with other Christians; work at it.

Question:

How can the Church manage its task of serving and reshaping culture, given the violence and immorality in populist drama, without the Church being denounced for liberalism or being dismissed as a modern-day Mary Whitehouse?

Archbishop:

For anybody in the public life of the Church there is a level at which you just have to admit that you're going to look stupid quite a lot of the time. Because in our world of celebrity and saturation communication part of the interest of all that keeps that going is to make public figures look silly a lot of the time. Sometimes they are silly; sometimes they're not so silly (and naturally I think I'm never silly!) but it's one of the prices that have to be paid. It's quite important to realize that the place where the difference is made may not be the House of Lords but it may not be the editorial conference of a newspaper either. The differences are still made by the face-to-face relations of people, by bishop or a church leader actually being there with their people; actually communicating directly – and that, remarkably, does survive a good deal of media distortion. The Church is fundamentally committed to the face-to-face: which is its weakness and its strength. In a media-obsessed culture it can feel like a weakness: in the long term, it's a strength. It means that the vision, the priorities, the sense of value in the Church moves not just according to fashion or what people tell you to think, but steadily through the relations of actual human beings worshipping together, thinking together and listening together. So I don't worry too much about that.

Question:

Here is a question about Bell and the visual arts.

Archbishop:

I read Prof Christopher Frayling's earlier lecture on this and it is a spectacularly interesting account of Bell's work with the visual arts. I think again his taste was often conservative, but he encouraged risk and the role of Walter Hussey, under Bell's encouragement and patronage (here in Chichester as Dean) is part of a very interesting and good story about the Church and the arts.

Question:

A couple of quick answers to general questions: Do you agree with Thomas Carlyle that wonder is the basis of worship? If so, do atheists lack a sense of wonder and thus imagination?

Archbishop:

I do agree with Thomas Carlyle on this at least. And one of the interesting things of course is that an atheist like Philip Pullman quite clearly can evoke a sense of wonder and deliver an imaginative world of huge richness. It's connecting that wonder to love that's the particular Christian extra – not just that I wonder at the glory and splendour and mystery of the world, but that that wonder first leads me into the sense of being the recipient of a loving gift and then that gift being drawn out of myself in a relationship. That's where worship is – not only wonder (though it can't happen without it); and where the atheist who has a great sense of wonder is I believe still be losing out on something.

Question:

A question about public seriousness: is it possible? And is it possible when the strangeness is factored in?

Archbishop:

Well, I don't know but I think it's worth working for. I said at the beginning of the lecture that Bell had been described as someone whose many commitments didn't succeed, but even if he'd known this, he'd still have got on with them. Public seriousness is something that's worth fighting for whether or not we manage to deliver it.

Question:

A question from someone writing a PhD on the future of the Church in Southampton: What compelling aspiration do you hope that the deanery should achieve over the next five to ten years?

Archbishop:

The aspiration of any deanery or local church ought to be twofold. It ought to be constantly re-shaping itself as a learning church, a church that believes it's possible to grow into the understanding of God; and it ought to be seeking always to be credible and to have integrity and plausibility in the eyes of its neighbours, through what it does with them and for them.

Question:

Why do you believe in Christianity and not any other religion? Have you ever had times of not believing in God?

Archbishop:

I don't think I've ever had a time of not believing in God. As I said in a recent interview, there have been times when I'm not at all sure what I've been believing in when I've been believing in God and I can't see my way at all clearly. But I've never felt the bottom has completely dropped out of that.

But why do I stick to Christianity (having been brought up in it) and not any other religion? (It's not as if one ever comes to religions as a shelf full of products.) Because I believe that Christianity in its commitment to the absolute centrality of relation within God and gift: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, bestowing-life into each other, eternally. That is an absolutely unique revolutionary insight which transforms how we see personal reality, being itself, and the possibilities for this world. I don't think any other faith has that vision at the heart of it and that's the vision I want to give my allegiance to.

© Rowan Williams 2008