Abstract
The subtitle of this elegant book announces the inspiration for the four-volume ‘engaged systematic theology’ that it opens: ‘Ethical Life’ translates Sittlichkeit, a Hegelian concept that for Graham Ward encapsulates the way in which doctrine is only realised as it is lived, as it is faith seeking understanding. Sittlichkeit, Ward argues in the final chapter of the book, ‘is the lived out ethical life announced in and as Christ the Logos and disseminated through the Holy Spirit’ (p. 298). What Ward finds opened up in Hegel is a way of seeing concrete existence as permeated by ‘the immanent operations of God’ (p. 303), without losing a grip on the analogical distance between Creator and creation.
The bulk of the book constitutes a kind of inductive argument for such an approach to theology. The first part, ‘An Engaged Systematics’, aims to clarify the kind of project being undertaken, by ‘situating’ it ‘within a tradition of such accounts’ (p. ix). Whether or not Ward succeeds in unearthing such a tradition is not clear; it might be more accurate to call these opening discussions ‘soundings’ in the history of theology. (The later description of these chapters as an ‘analysis of the development and nature of systematic theology’ [p. 71] seems overstated, to me.)
In the first chapter, Ward draws especially on Cyril’s Catechetic Lectures to argue that at least one way of understanding the primary purpose of the creeds was to induct people into a certain kind of life. The creeds served ‘a pastoral and liturgical pedagogy that finds fulfilment in doxology’ (p. 32). The second chapter moves from the patristic to the medieval period. Although the development of summae ultimately precipitated the intellectualism announced by Abelard, Ward argues that, even in the twelfth century, theology could still take the shape of pedagogy, induction into a form of life. His case study in this chapter is Hugh of Saint-Victor, and especially his work De Sacramentis. The third chapter takes us to the Reformation, the driving force behind which, Ward suggests, was not simply the idea of justification by faith but the liberation, in a context of ‘malaise and ennui’, of Scripture and religious emotion (p. 88). This leads Ward to distance himself somewhat from the lapsus-story he finds in Charles Taylor, John Milbank and others. Melanchthon’s Loci Communes illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of this moment. The 1521 text represents a performative dogmatics oriented by an ‘emotional economy’ (p. 90) and charged with ‘the naked persuasive force of communication’ (p. 92). Yet in its subsequent revisions and expansions this existential passion gave way to a ‘more cerebral’ approach (p. 112).
All of this, Ward continues, points to the need for an ‘engaged systematics’. Chapter 4 moves from historical soundings to programmatic proposal. Melanchthon shows us a point at which Christian theology dramatically lost its way, shifting towards adversarial confessionalism and professionalization. A corrective is needed, to bring theology back towards lived doctrine, oriented by doxology and liturgy (p. 119): theology conceived of as a performative, pedagogical practice, an embodied and contextually embedded ‘learning to speak of Christ today’ (p. 131). Such an engaged systematics will be fundamentally oriented by participation in Christ, a seeking of the hidden truth of life in Christ that subsists within concrete, present materiality.
The second part of the book, titled ‘How the Light Gets In’, seeks to unpack what this involves, and to discern the shape of the project from a range of angles. Here we also find a transition to different kinds of sources, in keeping with Ward’s argument that an engaged systematics must be attentive to the ways in which Christ is speaking ‘elsewhere and outside Christian communities’ (p. 127). The brief fifth chapter considers Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the film The Blair Witch Project in order to get a bearing on the situation of ‘lostness’ (p. 148) from which an engaged systematics must begin. The sixth chapter then seeks to articulate more precisely the conception of theo-logy in view. ‘What is Christian theology?’ Ward asks (p. 156). He answers that it is a creative, linguistic participation in the communicative relations that are constitutive, in Christ, of creation. Theology is a human, creaturely ‘making’ that is a ‘participative response’ evoked by God’s own creative self-disclosure (p. 164). Such a view, Ward argues, depends upon a sense in which we are always, already caught up in grace. Nature and our communication are necessarily encompassed within God’s grace: ‘[W]e were created in and by and through the Logos. That’s why we share in, are an image of, in our own creaturely way, the incarnation’ (p. 169). Because of this, theology is essentially a first-order discourse (p. 169).
This understanding of theology, Ward goes on, commits us, in particular ways, to ‘truth, proclamation, and judgment’ (chapter 7). Truth means a progressive conformity to the hidden love of Christ that continually beckons. Proclamation is essential to theology, determining its inseparability from ethical life, and the way in which it receives Scripture with and through the Church. Finally, this means that there is a necessary judgment involved in theology, a discernment of the hidden truth of Christ that is as much affective as it is cognitive.
The remaining chapters of this second part explore important themes that have emerged throughout the argument—hiddenness, analogy, faith’s active seeking of understanding, the place of prayer and the epistemology implied by it, and the relation of faith to belief. This final theme opens up a stimulating, broader discussion of ‘What makes a belief believable?’ (chapter 9), in which Ward contextualises his approach within the pressures placed upon belief by modern life.
The third and final part of the book is a single chapter, titled ‘Sittlichkeit [Ethical Life]’, the bulk of which is an energetic reading of the animating impulses of Hegel’s thought, and why it ‘provides a theology of ethical life upon which we can build’ (p. 296). As already noted, Ward sees Hegel as providing a way of understanding how ‘ethical life issues from Trinitarian life as exhibited in creation and incarnation, creation as incarnation, and the economy of redemption’ (p. 315, emphasis original). This, Ward thinks, is what is required if we are to see life—material, biological life—for what it truly is.
This is a sophisticated intervention in the field of systematic theology, worthy of careful attention. Ward’s readings of theological and philosophical sources, and discussions of modern and older works of art, are always interesting and often illuminating. The work is greatly enriched by the evident passion Ward brings, and by his variegated attentiveness to the contemporary world.
A little shine is taken off this performance by certain features of the book. The absence of a substantive introduction fits with the inductive feel of the first part, but it does make the reader’s task more daunting. While many of Ward’s creative uses of metaphor add colour—witness the recurring motif of the forest—others seemed to me to be only ambiguously illuminating, for instance, the suggestion that ‘the kind of systematic theo-logy ventured here is an exercise in knitting a living tree’ (p. 287), or Ward’s endorsement of the idea of ‘going viral’ (pp. 131, 141). One hopes that several minor typographical errors will be corrected in future editions.
There are also moments that feel a little evasive, such as when, at the beginning of chapter 4, Ward insists that the discussion to come is ‘not itself theological’ (p. 115), but then immediately engages in a criticism of ‘confession theologies’ that is nothing if not theological. Ward’s highly adversarial opposition to ‘adversarial theologies’ (p. 117; cf. p. 136) is related, however, to the central dynamics of his constructive argument; and that is where critical questions most need to be asked.
In his discussion of Hegel, Ward shows a clear awareness that Hegel’s thought runs the risk of confusing Christ with creation, such that creation becomes eternal (pp. 299, 308). He thinks this can be avoided through a robust emphasis on analogy, and in this he may well be right. However, there is another theological danger here that Ward appears less concerned by.
The theology of incarnation that drives the book serves to collapse the distinction between the work of God in creation and in redemption. ‘Truth’, Ward writes, ‘is written into the very fabric of creation by the Creator whose initial acts were the very communication of His love’ (p. 214). The truth of creation, that is to say, is the truth of Christ. ‘The particular and scandalous incarnation of God with us in Jesus Christ is’, therefore, ‘the consummation and intensification of that communication that was there in our being created at all’ (p. 199). It is this account that allows Ward to generalise the category of incarnation. The incarnation is a ‘principle’ (pp. 130, 229). For, ‘the Word is continually given; it always has been given’ (p. 130). This underpins the conception of theology as a participation in the ‘ongoing incarnation of God’s love’ (p. 198). The hiddenness of our life in Christ is not a function of Christ’s ascension, but is a truth always present within creation, by virtue of its creation through the Word (see Ward’s comments on Col. 3:3-4 on p. 138).
This runs the risk of so weakening the significance of the particularity of God’s work of redemption that it vanishes. While Christ the Logos is everywhere present in Ward’s work, the man Jesus is much less prominent, and Israel disappears. Ward sees the issue (p. 315); but it remains troubling, for there are moments at which our own work, the work of theology, is incorporated into God’s work of salvation in a way that seems to lose sight of the difference between God’s work and ours. Theology itself, when understood rightly as ‘holy teaching’ (p. 170) and pedagogy, can be how ‘the light’ ‘gets in’ (cf. p. 194).
One of the purposes of locating theology as a second-order discipline is to prevent a confusion of our works with the saving Word of God. The same can be said for several of the other distinctions that Ward aims to overcome: between doctrine and ethics, theoretical and practical reason, and nature and grace (see pp. 119, 190–94). One of the services these distinctions can render is to distinguish our own works from the determinate, particular reality of God’s work of redemption in Christ set forth in the gospel.
Reflection on the category of ‘gospel’ is, in fact, not especially prominent in How the Light Gets In. This is because the idea of a message with determinate content can impede the line of thought Ward is pursuing (note pp. 215–17). ‘It is living within the eternally proceeding communication itself, and responding to it, that reveals God to us. As such, revelation is not some immobile and reified depositum to be spelt out in a number of doctrinal propositions’ (p. 170). Criticism of propositions is one thing; but the gospel is itself described as a depositum within the New Testament (2 Tim. 1:14, Vulgate). Early on, Ward refers to a comment by Irenaeus about the power of the tradition, interpreting it as suggesting a ‘dynamic understanding of the operation of the faith’ (p. 11). It seems, however, that for Irenaeus this dynamism had much to do with the tradition’s unchanging content. It was about the way ‘the Church, having received this preaching and faith … carefully preserves it’ (Against Heresies 1.10, 2).
There is a biblical answer to the question of ‘how the light gets in’ (Jn 1:9); but it does not rise to prominence in Ward’s book, perhaps because it highlights the fact that although the Word ‘always has been given’ (p. 130), it has not always been given in the same way. There is a historical unrepeatability to the incarnation that the determinacy of the gospel safeguards, and that is, I think, endangered here. At least, this is a question to bring to the second volume of Ethical Life.