Abstract
In the autumn of 2013 Westminster Abbey launched an institute to offer moral and spiritual resources for public life and service. There is, or ought to be, deep moral and spiritual purpose in public life – but opportunities for public servants to renew their own moral compass and spiritual resources are few. Hence the series of conversations, seminars and public debates now being regularly offered by the Westminster Abbey Institute to help provide this – and the origin of these articles in Theology.
Underlying this is a form of public theology, and a particular way of doing it. It is not a lobbying enterprise on particular moral issues or particular social and political policies. But nor is it simply providing a neutral space for discussion. The aim is to dig deeper than short-term positioning or policy-making and to identify both the deepest drivers and the overall direction of our moral commitments. It involves uncovering common ground between people of different religious commitments (and none), and to that extent operates with an accommodating kind of theological realism. But it also involves a willingness to challenge with meta-ethical questions: what is the ultimate ground of our commitments and dispositions; what holds us to them; what is providing the sense of obligation?
The specific issue of ‘truth’ in public life illustrates these issues well. As philosopher Bernard Williams pointed out in Truth and Truthfulness, 1 we are culturally more and more committed to sincerity and truthfulness. We are keen to see through deception, spin, mere appearance. In that sense we feel under the authority and obligation of truth. But at the same time we are increasingly sceptical of the idea of truth itself. We doubt that we can reach anything which is absolutely and purely true, whether in religion, history, philosophy, or even science. And so those meta-questions press: why do we still think truth matters, when it is so inaccessible, and whence its claim on us? These meta-questions about our ultimate obligations and ends may not always be foregrounded when differently motivated individuals and bodies discuss the common good – but nor can they be entirely dodged.
This is well exemplified in the three papers which follow. They tend to expound a largely realistic approach. But they allow the meta-questions to break surface as well. Thus in the realm of political representation, Nigel Biggar is realistic about a pluralist rather than purist constitution – but still defends a distinctive Christian contribution towards it, and a substantive idea of its ultimate ends. In public ethics, Robin Gill commends a process whereby people of faith draw on resources of natural law and virtue ethics which are common to secularists, rather than just appealing to a ‘pure’ source of religious authority – yet he still raises the question of our ultimate obligation and motivation. Jonathan Montgomery, likewise, suggests that co-operative discussion in ethical matters need not dilute the underlying purpose of its participants.
Such is the key challenge for all public theology. We need to strike up alliances for the common good – but without suppressing or compromising those ultimate obligations and ends which must drive us all.