Abstract
Coventry Cathedral in the 1960s developed a distinctive theology of society. There was not only a central focus on reconciliation but also a broader social theology that emphasized the theological interpretation of how God was at work in society as a whole. Coventry Cathedral made early contributions to a range of topics such as urban theology and ecological responsibility, and kept a close link between theological interpretation and practical ministry.
The 1960s was a remarkable period of renewal in Christian theology and ministry. Of course, not all 1960s Christianity has stood the test of time, and some now looks tired and dated. This paper will focus here on one example of 1960s Christian renewal, the theology and ministry of Coventry Cathedral. Coventry is well known for its practical commitment to reconciliation, but that arose from a more far-reaching style of theology and ministry. The 1960s forms a natural period to consider in the theology of the cathedral as 1962–70 was the period in which the cathedral clergy published extensively.
The new cathedral in Coventry, consecrated in 1962, had a remarkable history that could not be ignored. Coventry had been a major target of German air raids in the Second World War, largely because of its prominent role in the munitions industry. Coventry’s mediaeval cathedral was bombed in raids in November 1940 and only the external walls were left standing. From that first morning, the Provost of the cathedral, Richard Howard, interpreted its destruction within a theological framework, linking the destruction of the cathedral to the crucifixion of Jesus. 1 That led him to the belief that the cathedral would rise again, as Jesus had done; he also saw the cathedral as committed to a ministry of forgiveness that took its cue from Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross. That set a style of thinking theologically about important events in the secular world. Howard, in effect, asked what the significance of the bombing of the cathedral was in God’s unfolding purposes. That is a theme that runs through all Coventry theology, a willingness to ask of events in the so-called ‘secular’ world what God is doing and how Christians should respond.
Provost Howard was due to retire before the new cathedral was consecrated, and a young and energetic bishop, Cuthbert Bardsley, took the opportunity to appoint a complete new cathedral staff of relatively young men who arrived together in 1958, some three or four years before the cathedral was consecrated. Assembling the team well before the consecration was probably a significant factor in giving them time to develop a distinctive theological perspective. The new Provost was H. C. N. (‘Bill’) Williams, Edward Patey was Canon Residentiary, Joseph Poole was Precentor, Simon Phipps was Industrial Chaplain, Stephen Verney was Diocesan Missioner and John Alleyne was Chaplain to the Congregation. They all had a strong sense of the magnitude and importance of the task with which they had been entrusted in launching the new cathedral. In the event, the theological outlook was largely forged by Williams, Phipps and Verney. Patey would no doubt have made a bigger contribution had he not moved to be Dean of Liverpool in 1964. Horace Dammers, Peter Berry and Kenyon Wright were among those who joined the team after the consecration and contributed to Coventry’s developing theology.
The principle of reconciliation was central to Coventry thinking. It is often attributed to the wartime Provost, Richard Howard, and it was certainly implicit in his response to the bombing. It seems clear, however, that the explicit focus on reconciliation stemmed from Williams’s visit to the ruined cathedral with Howard on 28 April 1958, which was clearly a very moving occasion for both men. Williams stood in silence with Howard in front of the words ‘Father Forgive’ carved on the east wall behind the altar and realized, in what seems to have been a powerful religious experience, that reconciliation must be at the heart of the work of the new cathedral.
Howard had talked about how, in Christ, ‘painful crucifixion will surely issue in joyful resurrection’. 2 He believed in the indestructible power of love. He spread the message of forgiveness, and had had ‘Father Forgive’ carved on the wall. He looked forward to a kinder, gentler society after the war. He fostered friendship with Germany. But I have seen no indication that ‘reconciliation’ was a key concept in his theology, or even that he used the word in connection with Coventry at all until he met Williams. He pays tribute to how Williams entered fully, from the outset, into the heritage of the belief that crucifixion will issue in resurrection. Then he says that Williams ‘became equally convinced of a further truth’ that the new cathedral should become ‘a powerful instrument in the hands of God for the reconciliation of man with God and of man with man’. 3 The phrase ‘further truth’ seems to imply something that went beyond how Howard had been framing his theology until that point.
Williams has written about how, as he stood with Howard in the ruins, ‘events became part of a coherent understanding of the meaning of forgiveness in the factor of Reconciliation’. 4 He adds that ‘Richard Howard in the heat of the fire which had destroyed his church, had seen a vision, and had set up symbols to convey it. My work was, with my colleagues, to give that vision a programme.’ 5 Williams had a powerful sense that all his life had been preparing him for this task. For example, he was a South African whose parents had been on opposite sides of the Boer War, so the need for reconciliation had been in his family. There was a very strong sense of vocation about Williams’s commitment to reconciliation, reflected in the title he chose for a book of sermons preached in the first months of the new cathedral, A Vision of Duty. 6 One sensed that Williams took rather personally the text in 2 Corinthians 5.18 that God ‘has entrusted us with the message of reconciliation’.
Howard’s dominant theological focus was on death followed by resurrection, but Williams’s concept of reconciliation took the cathedral into different theological territory, and I suggest that it represented an important conceptual development. Reconciliation is a concept that belongs to the theology of salvation, a central concept in St Paul’s understanding of God’s saving work in Christ, and the main concept used by that towering twentieth-century theologian, Karl Barth, to frame a theology of the Atonement. St Paul’s focus on God’s reconciling work also has implications for human reconciliation. It is the way in which the concept of reconciliation spans both God’s reconciling work and the human task of reconciliation that enables it to provide such a powerful theological focus for a programme of Christian ministry. Reconciliation ministry thus holds together Christian proclamation and practical action, bridging a faultline that opens up all too easily. For Williams, the preaching and practice of reconciliation were indissolubly linked. He was a Christocentric thinker, much influenced by Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, which he reread each Lent.
At Coventry there was an initial focus on the problems of Anglo-German relations in the post-war world. In his early months at Coventry, Williams went to Germany to say that ‘as you made Coventry a symbol of destruction, so now, join with us and make it a symbol of reconciliation’. 7 He undoubtedly succeeded in making Coventry known as a centre of reconciliation: over fifty years later, the road signs as you drive into Coventry still say that it is a city of peace and reconciliation. The theme of reconciliation is potentially very broad in its implications. It led, for example, to a vision of Europe as a spiritual and cultural unity, not just an economic one. 8 Later, Williams addressed a question that became central in European politics of what matters should be handled nationally and what internationally (‘Nationalism in an International Age’), and organized an international youth conference on the subject in Ottobeuen, linked to the 1972 Olympic Games. The range of the cathedral’s practical concerns is illustrated by the conference on ecological responsibility that the Coventry-based Community of the Cross of Nails organized in 1975, 9 ahead of its time to be tackling that critical subject. The rebuilding of a hospital in Dresden was one of the boldest practical initiatives. For the story of the reconciliation ministry of Coventry Cathedral, see: C. A. Lamb (ed.), Reconciling People; W. E. Rose, Sent from Coventry; O. Schuegraf, The Cross of Nails; and K. Wright, Coventry Cathedral. 10
Williams had other preoccupations about Christian ministry in modern society. 11 He thought that, if the Church was to engage effectively with our complex, urban, secularized society, it needed to complement local, parochial ministry with a broad range of extra-parochial ministries that would engage with society, to interpret and serve it. He wanted to organize a range of extra-parochial ministries, such as industrial chaplaincy, in parallel, so that there could be cross-fertilization between them. He also thought that they should be based in the worshipping community of a large town-centre church such as a cathedral, so that there could be interaction between congregational church life and these extra-parochial ministries.
He saw churches as a base from which Christians should go out to serve the world. Secular society is often seen by the Church as a source of new recruits to enable the church to grow. For Williams and his Coventry team, the Church existed to do God’s work in society and to give hope to the world. The Coventry team developed a distinctive theology of society in which there was an insistence that the whole of society belongs to God, and that God is at work in it. That is a principle that few theologians would disagree with, but there seems little recognition of just how radical it is. There is also little willingness to go beyond broad generalities and develop a coherent narrative about exactly how God is discerned to be active in contemporary society. Coventry Cathedral worked at developing such a narrative.
Williams saw the fragmentation and disunity of human society as a challenge to humanity to embrace God’s reconciling purposes more whole-heartedly. He made use of Arnold Toynbee’s monumental Study of History (1934–61), and took the present state of society to be what Toynbee would have called a ‘time of trouble’.
12
Williams thought that the purpose of the Church was to encounter God in society and interpret his presence there, and then to transform the world in a way that fulfilled God’s reconciling purposes and released humanity from its current travails. The task of the Church was to give hope to the world and to keep on trying to do that. He remarked, in his trenchant way, that ‘if Christians either individually or nationally, ever give up trying, then Christianity will die. And it will deserve to die.’
13
Williams had an exceptionally big vision of what it was to be the Church in the world, and was driven by a sense of the urgency of the human predicament. He longed for both political and religious leaders to rise to the challenge. In a characteristic passage that reflects his raw, passionate, impatient tone, he said, [F]or the sake of God’s frightened, bewildered, frustrated, hungry, homeless, poverty-stricken, diseased, despairing children in the world, let the parliaments and the assemblies and leaders get off their high horses of pride and international jockeying for power and put first things first … let the leaders of Church and State of every nation, as their highest duty, give the young of the world something worth living for, something worth hoping for.
14
He used his time at Coventry to do everything he could to bring into being the kind of Church that humanity so badly needs, and to leave the world a more reconciled place.
In the Coventry team it was Simon Phipps who sketched out a theology of society most systematically. Phipps was a second-generation industrial chaplain, much influenced by the pioneering work of Edward Wickham in Sheffield. He didn’t see it as his task to foster the Christian discipleship of individual Christians who he found in industry, or to recruit new Christians, but to interpret the industrial world theologically, and to serve it as a Christian.
Phipps shared Williams’s passion to overcome the disconnection that had developed between Church and World. Williams tended to emphasize the sociological roots of the problem, especially the development of large industrial conurbations. Phipps, in contrast, emphasized the theological source of the problem. 15 It is often assumed that the secular world has gradually asserted its independence from the Church, but the interesting point that Phipps makes is that secularization happened in part because Christians had ceased to take any serious theological interest in the wider world, beyond the spheres of Church or personal salvation. Phipps’s point is that if the Church loses interest in the world, it is no surprise if the world eventually loses interest in the Church and goes its own way. He argued that secularization was the result of theological retreat.
So, for Phipps, the challenge was essentially a theological one. Christians needed to recover a sense that the whole of human society belongs to God, and that the so-called ‘secular’ world is God’s natural home. The mistake from which we need to recover is that only the Church belongs to God and that people should come to the Church to find God. If Phipps is right that this is the fundamental problem, it is clearly still a lesson that has not yet been fully learned, as the Church remains very much focused on itself.
In looking for resources to tackle this problem, Phipps turned to the Old Testament, and he preached on the Old Testament more often than any of his colleagues. The Old Testament displays a conviction that the whole of Jewish society belongs to God, and exemplifies a way of interpreting how God was at work there. This is exactly the way of interpreting modern society that Phipps and his colleagues thought that Christians needed to recover. Phipps’s claim is essentially that human society is constructed in a way that facilitates the human encounter with God. He takes this in two stages. First, from the general perspective of theism, he interprets the world as the context in which humanity is given its freedom; it is the arena of God’s communication to humanity and of the human response to God. Then he moves on to examine how these general points are exemplified in Jesus’ principles of love and service.
Stephen Verney shared with his colleague the basic conviction that God was active in the whole of society, and that it was fundamental to ministry to discern what God was doing, and what God wanted Christians to do. He had a strong sense, often reflected in his preaching, that every moment of time could be a kairos moment in which God could break in, in unexpected ways. For example, preaching at the start of a new year, after making the obvious point that none of us knew what would happen, he added, rather characteristically, that ‘peace could break out at any moment’.
Verney had a way, more than his colleagues, of asking God directly and prayerfully what God wanted us to do. For example, the clergy in the part of the diocese where he lived met once a month, though their meetings were rather sterile. Verney persuaded them that they should ask God what he wanted them to do, which led to the belief that they should meet more frequently and really get to know each other. He tells the story of how, when they did so, the Holy Spirit began to blow through their meetings. 16 The Holy Spirit was central to Verney’s theology and to his belief in the possibility of Christian renewal. In that sense, he was charismatic, before it was fashionable.
The ‘People and Cities’ conference that Verney organized at Coventry in 1968 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the diocese focused his attention on the wider world. 17 He saw the need to learn all he could from urban planners before reflecting theologically on how God was challenging humanity through the current urban crisis. He took an international approach and roamed the world, finding the experts he needed, and using his remarkable gift for friendship to establish deep relationships with them. He was a great listener, and learned best from people. Above all, he had a great gift for framing deceptively simple but profound questions to put to experts, which helped him to develop a theological perspective on urban issues. Verney was ahead of his time in developing an urban theology in the 1960s, as Coventry Cathedral under Williams’s leadership was ahead of its time in so many things.
There were at least three key features in Verney’s urban theology. First, despite the vast scale of modern cities, we should remember that cities exist to serve people, and must be designed to do so. Second, the complexity of modern cities is something that can work for good if we respond positively to it: Verney liked to draw attention to the fact that, at root, the word ‘complexity’ means embrace. Third, there is the question of how God is challenging us through our urban problems. He continued to ponder these issues after he had moved from Coventry to Windsor in 1970, and the first part of Into the New Age 18 is in some ways a more mature reflection on the issues that he had opened up in People and Cities. He placed the complexity of contemporary life in an evolutionary context, and saw the key challenge as recognizing and embracing interdependence with people who are very different from ourselves. He saw that as the leap forward that God is challenging the whole of humanity to make in response to our present social crisis, and argued that it can only be achieved through response to a spiritual centre.
Verney’s approach to urban theology has at its heart the insistent questions, ‘what is God doing in thus situation, and what does he want us to do?’ He suggests that the name of God, I Am, can be translated as ‘something is happening’. 19 His question in every situation, in or out of the Church, was to ask what ‘something is happening’ is doing now. Asking that question as passionately as he did often enabled remarkable things to really start to happen.
This emphasis on the prophetic interpretation of what God is doing in society is very different from that of much current public theology, which is often pursued as a branch of Christian ethics, a social application of Christian virtues and of theological ethics. ‘God’ is curiously absent from much current public theology, but God was central to Coventry’s theology of society. The Coventry theology of society was closer to Tillich’s call for a theology of culture than the connotations of the word ‘culture’ might suggest. Tillich also sought a theology of culture that went beyond applying theological ethics and interpreted culture theologically. 20
The surprising lack of serious theological interest in learning to ‘read’ society so as to discern the imprint of God stands in marked contrast to the parallel task of discerning the imprint of God in the natural world. Since the Enlightenment there has been much talk of the two books in which God can be read, Scripture and nature, and much reflection about how, for example, the fact that the universe is remarkably fine-tuned to produce carbon-based life is consistent with Christian belief. There is indeed a ‘book’ of nature in which God can be read, but it is very odd that there is not also deemed to be a book of humanity in which the hand of God can also be read. The Coventry team was focused on the task of recovering the Christian task of interpreting society. They were, in effect, developing the art of reading the book of humanity, in order to learn more about God.
It helps to bring out the distinctive features of Coventry theology in the 1960s to compare it with the better-known South Bank religion of the same period. 21 South Bank theology was engaged in a more wholesale theological reconstruction than Coventry Cathedral, evident in Honest to God. 22 Both Bill Williams and John Robinson were influenced by Bonhoeffer but, tellingly, for Williams it was mainly his Ethics, and for Robinson mainly the Letters and Papers from Prison. The strand of demythologization in South Bank theology had imminest implications: that is, because of the conceptual problems that were thought to be associated with another world, attention was focused back on this world. However, they were more interested in doing theology in a socially informed way, 23 than in developing a theology of society. Apart from Stanley Evans’s The Social Hope of the Christian Church, 24 there was surprisingly little social theology on the South Bank in the 1960s.
Coventry Cathedral was, in many ways, theologically orthodox. It was not attempting any general revisionism, but was developing a distinctive theology of society. As a key feature of this was theological discernment of how God was revealing himself in wider society; social theology had a much more central place in Coventry’s theology than it usually does, or than it had on the South Bank. Coventry was not just applying to society a theology that had its roots elsewhere, but was developing a theology that was, in part, rooted in God’s revelation of himself in society. Despite the leftist leanings of South Bank religion, there was a stronger and more principled programme of social action in Coventry, especially concerned with reconciliation. There was also an usually strong link between social theology and social action: in that sense it was a practical theology of society that Coventry was developing.
In some ways the problems that humanity faces now have moved on from when Coventry Cathedral was consecrated in 1962. The immediate post-war problems have faded, but threats to peace and security, disparities of wealth and power, threats to economic stability, and threats to a sustainable environment have all become more serious. It is arguable that all these are essentially spiritual problems that call for spiritual leadership. The original Coventry team was far-sighted in discerning emerging problems and engaging with them theologically and practically. I suggest that the Coventry style of theology and ministry is of enduring value as Christians try to respond to the massive problems that humanity is facing now.
