Abstract
Pick up a book entitled ‘Catholic Social Teaching’ and you have a rough idea what to expect, at least in terms of subject matter. Pick up one about ‘Anglican Social Theology’, however, and there’s an element of intrigue. Whose Anglicanism? Which theologians? What is social theology in an Anglican context anyway, and how much will this tell us about it? What is the purpose of such a book beyond saying ‘us too’ over the ecumenical fence?
In adopting the term ‘Anglican social theology’ (AST) the book does self-consciously take its cue from its Catholic counterpart, CST: as Malcolm Brown tells us in his introduction, the term was chosen ‘with a deliberate intention of echoing the concept of Catholic social teaching because we recognize that the latter is much better known’ (p. 2). But this is not, and never sets out to be, a handbook of AST, nor even a first draft of one; it is, more modestly, an apologia for the idea of one, an attempt to discover whether an authentic AST for today might be said to exist and, if so, what it might look like.
That it meets its aim in such an accessible way is a credit to both editor and contributors. Weighing in at under 200 pages of text it might give the appearance of being lightweight, but in fact it offers both breadth and depth in its approach to its task. If there is some repetition and untidiness about the presentation this is due less to inadequate editing than the nature of the project in hand. While CST is rooted in a definable corpus of writings, authorised by the Church and replete with distinctive concepts such as subsidiarity, solidarity and the common good, the Anglican version, as Anna Rowlands observes in her essay on the relationship between both traditions, ‘has developed in a more ad hoc fashion and is evidently a contested tradition’ (p. 139).
Contested is right, though perhaps only a few would object to the choice of William Temple as the point of departure. One whole chapter (of six) is devoted to him and the ‘Temple tradition’, and he is referenced throughout. Beyond that, however, a degree of subjectivity intrudes, with Ronald Preston, John Atherton, Oliver O’Donovan, John Milbank and Rowan Williams receiving rather more air-play than Ken Leech, Tim Gorringe, Sarah Coakley or Chris Rowland. And if, perhaps inevitably, the book gives the impression of AST as a largely male preoccupation, there is some insightful analysis of recent work by Elaine Graham and Linda Woodhead. (Not without a sense of irony does Anna Rowlands entitle her chapter ‘Fraternal Traditions’!)
But if Temple is the sun around which the discussion here orbits, the time-bound nature of his work and limited value of a ‘middle axiom’ approach today exercise the book’s contributors. We are, to state a truism, living in a vastly different age, and the assumptions Temple made about his ‘audience’ no longer remotely make sense now (any more than, for that matter, do those made by the heirs of Temple who drafted the Faith in the City report forty years later). Yet, as Alan Suggate points out, while Christianity and Social Order—‘the only writing by which Temple is known, if at all’—does have its limitations, the ideas in his last (and unfinished) work, ‘What Christians Stand for in the Secular World’, have been remarkably in tune with some recent debates about culture, religion and politics (pp. 30, 54–55). It is also the case, as Anna Rowlands acknow-ledges, that while it is no surprise that the ‘Temple tradition’ has waned over time, ‘it has yet to be replaced by a social movement within Anglicanism that manages a similar breadth of ownership and impact’ (p. 139).
Drawing on his deep understanding of Temple, Suggate’s long and somewhat rambling essay repays careful study, while John Hughes’s more orderly treatment of the influences exerted on Anglican social thought in the last twenty years reminds us what the Church has lost by his untimely death. Hughes contends that one reason for the decline of the Temple tradition has been the critique of its underlying liberal assumptions in recent decades; and in exploring this critique, and its development within the Anglican tradition, Hughes offers, not just a scholarly overview of the work of MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Milbank, O’Donovan and Williams, but the outline of a thesis that these writers have prompted a ‘broadly coherent shift in Anglican social thinking’ in recent years (p. 94). This, Hughes suggests, is observable in the work of such diverse theologians as Michael Northcott, Nigel Biggar, Luke Bretherton, Catherine Pickstock and Sam Wells (p. 91).
Another in Hughes’s list, Jonathan Chaplin, then performs the pioneering and hugely valuable task of assessing the ‘evangelical’ contribution to AST. What starts as a rather depressing exercise—Chaplin notes that evangelicals have traditionally lacked any concerted social or political theory and that that is still the situation today—takes a more optimistic turn as the resources upon which evangelicalism might draw in order to contribute to a ‘social theology’ for the next decade are laid out.
One is the wherewithal for a ‘biblical grounding’ for social theology, and here Chaplin acknowledges the work of, among others, the Jubilee Centre in Cambridge and Bishop Tom Wright. Another is the ‘associational impulse in evangelicalism’ which leads to a ‘championing of self-governing … non-state associations’ able to ‘carve out a wide sphere of free and socially responsible action’ beyond both the centralized state and unregulated market (p. 128). And the commitment to the ‘common good’ that this makes evident is also an important point of overlap between the Anglican and Catholic social traditions, something evidenced by the publication—subsequent to the appearance of this book—of the letter from the House of Bishops for the 2015 general election, Who is my Neighbour?
Anna Rowlands’s chapter, a reflection on AST from a sympathetic Catholic perspective, is a gem, not least on account of its call for ‘joined-up theological reflection’ on issues of immediate concern today—the financial system, debt, child poverty, war, the experiences of women and unemployment, to name but a few (p. 172). Welcoming, like Hughes, the emergence of new post-liberal traditions in recent years, Rowland sees hope in the Red Tory and Blue Labour movements (also name-checked by Hughes and Brown), which not only ‘transgress the secular religion-politics divide’ but reconcile both AST and CST (p. 160).
Another service Rowlands performs, as an outsider looking in, is to nudge Anglican leaders to relate more with the grassroots (p. 173); while CST ‘has been kept alive by strong formation and lay activism’, Rowlands argues, at lay level in the Anglican church there is often a sense of bemusement at episcopal interventions in the public sphere due to an apparently weaker emphasis within AST on engaging the membership (p. 139).
So this is fundamentally a forward-looking book, with a major contribution to make to the debate about the shape of the Church of England and how it makes ‘the claims of Christ, the vision of Scripture and the rich Christian understanding of being human within community audible to the world at large’ (p. 188). As such I hope it sparks a deep and ongoing conversation within the Church of England—despite its title, the book will have limited appeal beyond. As Malcolm Brown says at the outset, while the Church contributes enormously to the wellbeing of the nation, it is less adept at ‘articulating a theological rationale for this social engagement’ (p. 1); now it can be clearer about how it constructs that rationale and whether, as Brown asks at the end, ‘the remaining, if residual elements of Christendom provide sufficient foundations upon which to erect something new, or are merely relics that should be jettisoned as an encumbrance’ (p. 189).
Party to the conversation must be both the evangelical and Anglo-Catholic strands within the Church, even if, in the case of the former, denominational allegiance is not as strong as it might be. And a conversation with the Roman Catholic social tradition beyond—which, as Brown observes, has barely begun—must also be developed. That shared commitment to the common good would be as good a place as any to start.