3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
Benefits of the Alternative Presentation as a tool to evangelization
It occurs to me that the fuller account we have now arrived at might also have the benefit of speaking to a wider constituency of non-believers.
Why? Because if the most fundamental aim of our Christian faith is right worship, then it follows that the aspect of the human predicament that the Gospel-event addresses will be wrong worship – or what the Bible terms idolatry. Not, that is to say, ‘sin’, or ‘selfishness’ as we tend to find in the traditional SAS paradigm.
God’s great commandment – the one that his people are in the process of violating at the very moment it is being promulgated – is, effectively, an interdiction of wrong and idolatrous worship. Indeed, it is a law that they scarcely had the means not to disobey, before the delivery through Moses of the blueprint of the tabernacle cult, apparently revealed to Moses on Mt Sinai simultaneously with the interdiction on idolatry. The worship of the golden calf is described as coming about almost spontaneously, as a result of the need to do something with those gold ornaments they had been instructed to appropriate from the Egyptians. From human nature, in other words. As Aaron puts it: ‘They gave me the gold; out of it came this calf!’ Was there ‘selfishness’? The story gives no indication of personal reluctance on the part individual Israelites to be generous with their gold, and to invest it in a communal project, no miserliness, no quarrelling – no profiteering even, so far as we are aware. Just feasting and singing. Was there ‘sin’, in the sense in which most people would use the term nowadays, i.e. in reference to wilful misdoing? That would depend on the level of their understanding of the nature of the God who had called them, and whether the calf was – or was not – intended as a representation of that Being. But, assuming it was so intended, how could they have known their worship was wrong before the giving of the commandment? And how could they have long refrained from wrong worship before the delivery of the tabernacle blueprint? Was the forging of images not, after all, the practice of the Egyptians from whom they had come?
What is true of the Israelites is all the more true of the pagans. Without special revelation, how can there be right worship? And wrong worship – the gravest sin for the Israelite and Christian – is not yet a misdeed. Or not until God’s plans begin to be realized, and some glimmer of the true religion begins to filter through to the nations. Selfishness? Quite the contrary. Religion, even where manipulative, has the gift at its heart. Sin? Not where the nations are concerned. Why would a West Semite not worship the Moloch of their ancestors? And suppose children get sacrificed? It might be your pious duty. Wrong worship may not be a misdeed; but that is no guarantee against suffering and loss. The burden of wrong worship is not (like sin) the kind of thing that forgiveness, on its own, can address. For it’s no one’s sole responsibility; it’s a systemic thing. What Christian baptism brings to such situations is not just forgiveness, it is a substitution of right worship for wrong, symbolized by the lighting of candles and exorcism of demons.
For the writers of the Old Testament, idolatry is the greater part of sin. For a long time, I put this down to the ‘primitive’ conditions surrounding the emergence of the monotheistic faith of the Old Israel. After all, who nowadays worships Chemosh or Baal? I am now inclined to see this focus on wrong and right worship as more relevant to the situation of Christians today than the traditional understanding of sin. The preoccupation with idolatry speaks directly to a society, such as our own, which has so far left its Judaeo-Christian roots behind that ‘wrong worship’ has become the norm. This is because we are no longer like our grandparents and great-grandparents who knew what the right worship was, and saw their shortcomings in terms of the failure of their daily actions to live up to what they professed. For them, I admit, it made sense to speak of sin and selfishness. We seem nowadays to be much closer to the situation of the Israelites in Exodus, or the gentile nations. We are people, that is, for whom wrong worship has so far become the norm that sin, were that notion to have any meaning, would have to be understood in terms of the non-Christian principles that, for many, have now come to replace the old Christian ones.
My daily reading of the Psalms tempts me sometimes to characterize my non-believing fellow-citizens, considered en masse, as the ‘sleek’, those ‘pleased with their lot’, who are – if they but knew it – ‘sheep appointed for Sheol’. After all, who else could be considered ‘the adversary’ in this comfortable market town? But a moment’s reflection convinces me, that whoever the Psalmist may have had in mind, the kind of religious antagonists that middle-class secularism casts my way scarcely fit the bill. These are people who seem to work hard for their living (unlike me), stay faithful to their partners, love their kids, are ‘community-minded’, throw themselves into various voluntary and charitable enterprises. Yet they profess total lack of interest, scepticism or veiled hostility when it comes to Christianity. When I consider the parents of my children’s friends’ parents on an individual basis, I don’t think: ‘What a bunch of sinners!’ I think: ‘Here are the moral vanguard – the movers and shakers of our local community – who in former generations would have been church-goers to the man/woman, but now exercise their associative and altruistic impulses entirely outside the sphere of any Christian community.’ ‘You can live of service to your fellow beings just as well outside the Church as within it,’ they say. Or we could cite Christopher Hitchens: ‘Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a non-believer’. Why is it necessary to see yourself as a servant of God when you serve your neighbour? Why not just serve your neighbours for the sake of it?
How is the Christian to respond? My interlocutors do not see themselves as being particularly selfish or sinful, and they do not, consequently, regard themselves as in need of spiritual rescue. I have many times tried following the advice of our leaders and speaking of ‘How Christian salvation has touched me personally’. But this seldom gets things very far, though a sincere account of one’s past will attract a certain respect. Many are prepared to concede a limited social role to the Church as a haven for social misfits. The problem lies in getting them to recognize it as anything else. The fact that commitment-shy and addictive individuals like myself may have found themselves in situations dire enough to require such support scarcely obliges others to see themselves as sharing our need. After all, Christians may just be a particularly needy group.
Moreover, as I look around me at my fellow Christians, it occurs to me that my interlocutors may have a point. Up to a point, of course, the traditional form of Christian testimonies encourages us to present our own life stories in the classic pattern of the sinner redeemed. The high publicity conversions disseminated through video media featuring ex-prisoners and recovering alcoholics exemplify a pattern to which we all aspire. Nevertheless, I have the distinct impression (not backed up by any sociological data, I should say) that those coming to faith at a moment of crisis really do represent a large, and possibly growing, proportion of those with whom I rub shoulders in the pews. And this, of course, for any Christian, is a matter of pride. After all, did not our Lord say to respectable Jews: ‘Tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you!’
Yet when it comes to witnessing to those who have done reasonably well by the standards of this world, I sometimes wonder whether having an accident-prone past is necessarily an advantage, or whether it doesn’t separate us from those we are seeking to minister to.
Suppose, however, we were to lay the stress on idolatry rather than selfishness or sin – as we would inevitably do if we shifted our ground from the traditional focus on sin to a focus on right worship? In that case, we would surely expect the ill-effects on individuals to be experienced not so much as guilt for what they have done but as suffering for what has been inflicted on them. If one has lost one’s child to Moloch, for example, one has acted out of pious intention. When it comes to idolatry – whether Moloch or capitalist Mammon – the fault is not selfishness, and the responsibility does not devolve upon the individual alone, but upon the systems that manipulate our desires. In biblical language, ‘the powers and principalities of this world’. It is a matter of servitude in a cause in which one may have acquiesced but which one has almost certainly not chosen – any more than the Israelites chose to spend their lives in the construction of the Pyramids. The right reaction, in such a case, is a repudiation of wrong worship, and the embrace of right worship. In the words of the Psalmist:
Their drink-offerings of blood
I will not pour out
Or take their names upon my lips.
Modern idolatry
One implication of the importance of idolatry is that, when our interlocutors claim they are serving their neighbours ‘for the sake of it’, this may not be a completely accurate account of the true state of affairs. Why? For a start, because our own human experience convinces us of the universality of human idolatrous propensities, and the non-reality of anything that could accurately be described as altruism. But also, because we often pick up in the language of these people the notion that ‘happiness’ is a goal we and our children should seek, and be free to pursue. And this is often a rather particular kind of happiness that consists in what they refer to as ‘self-fulfilment’ or ‘self-realization’.
I want to exclude, from the outset, any idea that self-fulfilment is necessarily ‘selfish’ or ‘sinful’ (any more than worship of Moloch or the Golden Calf). Our interlocutors would argue, entirely plausibly, that our happiness and fulfilment often depend upon the happiness and fulfilment of other people – totally in some cases. Think of a teacher, for example, whose success is entirely vested in the success of their pupils. We seem, as human beings, to be so constituted that our respective ‘goods’ are linked. So maybe, as some humanists assert, this makes humans fundamentally good when we are left free to do what comes naturally to us.
But what is ‘self-fulfilment’? Is its meaning so entirely self-evident – as I read in a self-help book the other day? For me, at any rate, it is not. Or only in the sense of being so familiar from what I hear other people say that I rather take for granted the value it has for them. To me, it is one of those overly self-evident things that become stranger the more one thinks about them. Would ‘self-realization’ have made much sense to earlier generations? I doubt it. In short, I am alerted by various tests to the possibility that we are in the presence of an ideological construct. So, as a first step in our apologetic, let us begin by considering what sense can be made of it.
Here is my own attempt.
Imagine an oak-tree, or a Norwegian maple, or an ash. Not just any old tree, but the perfect specimens of those trees that we find exhibited at Kew Gardens. Now the implicit philosophical message conveyed by what we see at Kew seems to be the following. That the better the oak-tree, the more fully it constitutes whatever it is to be an oak-tree – the closer it comes, in other words, to a certain ideal of itself. Now apply this same notion to the human being. Not just to the human being in general, but – more strangely – to the individual human being that is yourself. You become better, the closer you come to the authentic you, that is to say, the more you become that ideal of yourself that only you can realize. Your life should ‘express’, in other words, something that comes from ‘within’, and constitutes an individuality that is as unique and irreplaceable in its way as the Norwegian maple. Or, for that matter, as that endangered species we all wish to preserve, if for no other reason, because, we feel, without it, ‘life would be the poorer’. If I had greater space available, I would develop the argument that this notion of individual ‘expression’ finds a symbolic paradigm in forms of poetic creativity in which the creator discovers what he has to ‘say’, verbally or visually, through the process of saying it (what the philosopher, Charles Taylor, calls ‘epiphanic’ art). And even that ‘self-realization’ extends this ‘artistic’ and aestheticist paradigm to everyday life (much as Christian agape actualizes the paradigm of the Eucharist). I would also argue that the way in which this ideology posits a ‘self’ that is something other than a node in a web of social and political relationships – in contradistinction to the religion of pre-modern cultures – results in a fetishizing of the sexualized body.
The problem about this ideology of personal self-realization, from a Christian perspective, is that it is so close to Christianity. For example, unlike those religions that preach the extinction of the self, or its dissolution in the absolute, Christianity upholds the eternal value of the individual soul as a little image of God, destined to reflect his glory for eternity. Contrary to religions that devalue the body and the material world in favour of a spiritual realm, it maintains a doctrine of the resurrection of the body and the future union of heaven and earth at the end of time. In contrast to religions that impose sacred hierarchies, we find in the Pauline Epistles, a doctrine of personal vocation. It is no accident, then, that the modern notions of individualism, of artistic creativity and exaltation of sexual love found a more congenial soil in the culture of the post-Christian West rather than that of Aztec imperialism!
But this leaves the would-be Christian critic of the prevailing idolatries with the awkward job of having to distinguish the authentic Christian ideal from the subtly paganized spiritual developments which seem latterly to have sprung from it. We are pretty much assured of a sympathetic hearing from all sides so long as we limit ourselves to staking out the claims of Christianity to be source of such supposed civilizational gains as the value of the individual, the practice of expressivist art or the freedom to love who one chooses. The thankless but more necessary part of our task is the business of showing just how far we can hold onto this Christian heritage yet fall short of anything that could legitimately be described as Christianity.
Self-realization and the Benedictine Rule
So here is a thought-experiment. Imagine what serving one’s neighbours ‘for the sake of it’ would mean divested of the allure cast over it by an ideology of self-realization. A recent, interesting book expounds an idea which suggests to me a strategy we could use. A strategy that would help us appreciate how far the ideology of self-fulfilment actually colours people’s sense of what it really means to serve our neighbours altruistically. It proposes as a model of service the communal life of the Benedictine monks – the order of St Benedict. Some might object that the monastic life is scarcely one of service, unless we regard prayer as service – which, I guess, we won’t, unless we believe in God. But if that is the way you feel, then substitute for the Benedictines, some other religious order that does serve the community in a more practical way – Ursulines, for example, who presumably work a normal school-day, and contribute as much as anyone to supporting UK plc..
Now, of course, I know that Benedictine monks do not serve just ‘for the sake it’; they do so for the glory of God. But, I suspect, for those who do not believe in the reality of a God who can be glorified in this way, then this form of life will appear – to say the least – unattractive. Very unattractive. So unattractive, indeed, we might be prompted to ask ourselves what the source of such unattractiveness could be. The reason, I would propose, is not so much that this style of life is inherently disagreeable as that it offers zero possibilities for self-realization of the kind we have been describing. Nothing of that kind, we will appreciate, if we reflect a moment, is in the least bit compatible with the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
This is worth thinking through. The whole point of self-fulfilment, as I understand it, is that something uniquely distinctive of ourselves will be materialized in an ineffable ‘something’ pervading our life-style, tastes, and personal story. Something that colours them with a sort of personal mystique. It is what, at best, makes us all the protagonist of a potential novel that is uniquely ours – and, at worst, we find attributed by the life-style pages of the Sunday Supplements to certain individuals held up to our emulation. It is a life-goal that finds unguarded expression in the semi-autobiographical narratives of certain writers. Of these, my favourite example is perhaps a passage from a prose-fiction of the young André Breton where he recognizes, as the emerging goal of the life-novel which is about to unfurl, the revelation of a ‘differentiation’ that is uniquely his.
Above and beyond the various tastes I acknowledge, the personal affinities I feel, the attractions I experience, the events that implicate me and me alone, beyond all the impulses I recognize in myself, the feelings that I am alone in experiencing, I contrive to know what my differentiation in regard to other human beings consists in, what it involves. Because surely it will be precisely to the extent that I become aware of this differentiation that I will have a revelation of what I, as opposed to everyone else, have come into the world to achieve, and of that unique message of which I am the bearer, and for the delivery of which I must answer with my life.
There is something very revealing about this text. Something that pertains, simultaneously, to the universality of the aspiration (which every secularist will recognize as their own) and its strongly literary/poetic cast. We have not just the story of a life, but the living of a story. This text points like the two arms of a signpost to the life-goal universal to secularism and to a post-Romantic ideology of the artwork (specifically what Charles Taylor characterizes as the ‘epiphanic’ artwork) – in such a way as to suggest what the one owes to the other. The ‘message’ in Breton’s case finds creative expression, and, in so doing, testifies to what every such message aspires to. In this way it seems to betray the Romantic aestheticist basis of the paradigm of everyday self-realization. Characteristically, too, that message is a strongly eroticized one, since the story turns into a kind of love-story (though not a very conventional one).
So much then for the notion of ‘self-realization’. It is, I would suggest, the distinctive ideational basis of the morality of our social elites, and those who aspire to them. The morality of the secular-minded, or rather those among them for whom procuring the means of economic subsistence does not trump any other consideration. In other words, it is what today’s Israelites do with their gold ornaments. This is by no means necessarily a selfish or ungenerous goal, as I have already said. Today’s Israelites, like those of Moses’ time, put invest their gold in communal projects. However, it is hard to imagine any notion that would be more at odds with the Benedictine rule of poverty, chastity and obedience. Not because ‘self-realization’ necessarily requires a life-style that is lavish. But because the monastic practice of poverty inhibits precisely the expression of that differentiation which, for the secularist, holds the meaning of our existence. Imagine the young Breton entering a monastery. How would he cope with the material uniformity of the monastic life – the dress, the life-style, the possibilities of everyday association? To say the least, these are constrained by the necessity of inhabiting a social and physical environment which one has not chosen. Self-realization, on the other hand, requires the possibility of choice. For if what is most precious to us consists in the manifestation of our differentiation from our fellow-beings, then our ideal social and physical environment will need to be one that allows us a diversity of options.
The monastic ideal of poverty does not necessarily impose a regime of severe material hardship. In fact, to be poor in the monastic sense, is, I suspect, precisely to be free of many of those stresses and anxieties that are nowadays considered the most harmful aspects of poverty as we understand that term in the affluent West. But it implies the acceptance of a uniformity of life that pretty much eliminates the possibility of self-expression. Yes, there are monks who have been great artists and craftsmen (think of Fra Angelico). Yet I have read that where a Benedictine Abbot has ground for thinking that one of his monks is priding himself too much in the quality of his work, it is his responsibility to move that monk into another role. In other words, the goal of work – ultimately the worship of God – must take precedence over the work itself. It is hard to imagine anything so contrary to the secularist paradigm of the artwork, or its actualization in the everyday ideal of self-realization, where it is precisely the work itself, or the authenticity of the individual self, that must take precedence over any ‘external’ social, religious or political considerations.
Then there is the rule of chastity. Now, of course, a monk is not a solitary. Where we have families, they have a community. The Benedictine rule does not deprive a monk of human contact, friendship, or of a place in the social world. So, what it is about the prospect of monastic life that might strike us as so unappealing? Well, it could be the complete absence of that erotic allure that suffuses our projects of self-realization when they achieve, or aim to achieve, the appreciative recognition of the other as expressed in sexual desire. This is something that many would be reluctant to abandon at least the remote hope of. Such a renunciation would seem to drain their lives of colour and meaning. One can understand, then, the perception that the monastic idea is simply ‘unnatural’. But, I suspect, that is not the case. The truth is rather that the monastic life does not conform to a certain ideological construct of the natural.
Finally, we have obedience. If this repels people, it may, in practice, have much to do with the indispensability of freedom to their projects of self-realization. Self-realization, of its nature, requires the possibility of choice and diversity, as already stated. If we had to give up all such projects, would the curtailment of our freedoms even matter to us? Actually, I suspect, the submission of our wills to the potentially unreasonable demands of someone in authority is, in fact, something many of us would resist for other reasons. Even if, in reality, it is something most of us have to concede in the everyday sphere of secular employment. The difference, no doubt, is that what, in the secular sphere, we might just have to put up with, could be seen in the monastic life, as an opportunity to learn a kind of spiritual discipline of the will or the intellect. No genuinely economic enterprise, I suspect, would be well advised to court bad management by offering its employees such an excuse not to intervene where all seems poised to go over a cliff!
Of course, all this is only a thought-experiment. Poverty, chastity and obedience are not enjoined for their own sake as though they were an alternative to self-fulfilment. Who would espouse them on that basis? The real alternative to self-fulfilment is a life of worshipping God – which, for those who believe, will surely have other compensations. The rule of poverty, chastity and obedience constitutes what is only a frame for a lifestyle that follows from that alternative goal. Having said that, the rule could also serve as a frame for any Christian life. In fact, even ordinary Christians espouse poverty, chastity and obedience. Not, of course, in the sense they are debarred from owning things, or marrying and having children, or are under the authority of an abbot. But surely we have our own version of poverty, chastity and obedience. Poverty, in the sense, that we, no less than the Benedictine are constrained to renounce ‘self-realization’. Chastity, in the sense, that we cleave, as the Bible touchingly puts it, to the ‘wife of our youth’. Obedience, in the sense that we all live in order to serve our Lord God.
I guess what we have in the monastic and the ordinary Christian regime are two approaches to the complexity of life. One – the monastic – is simply to abjure all that is inessential, everything that could conceivably compromise the essential blueprint of Christian life (i.e. property or marital relationships). The other – the ordinary – is to incorporate the inessential in such a way as to extend and apply the blueprint without dishonouring it. Nevertheless, the aim in the two approaches – that of glorifying God in a life of poverty, chastity and obedience – remains the same. In no circumstance is it ever OK to aim at self-realization. And if, as ordinary Christians, we engage in the type of activities that could be undertaken in the name of such a project (e.g. owning or marrying), they will be undertaken by Christians with a different aim. The fact that the lives of monks contain nothing that could be misinterpreted in this way, enables their life to serve as a clear example of what all Christians aspire to.
Idolatry vs. sin
So, let us return, at last, to the question of how we present the faith to our non-believing friends. In the case of those lives which have gone disastrously wrong (as mine did) through disastrous life decisions, the destruction of important relationships, addictions, and so forth, what is most needed I suppose is forgiveness of sins and a fresh start – which is, of course, as we all know, what Christ freely offers us. For those fortunate ones who already see themselves as already usefully contributing to our collective life, for those laden with Egyptian gold, what Christianity has to offer is, I think, not best summed up in such terms. For them, it is a matter of finding a new destination for their gold. Of replacing the goal of self-realization with the goal of bringing honour to God in the eyes of the world. Of exchanging the paradigm of creative self-expression for the paradigm of Eucharistic sacrifice. On the level of personal experience, I can testify a conversion of this kind means, amongst other things, a liberation from our human compulsion to ‘over-value’ certain things on which our self-fulfilment depends. The biblical language of idolatry has always seemed to me far better adapted to expressing this idea than the traditional language of sin (which I am not sure I understand). When I have found myself from time to time confronted with solicitations of our culture to seek certain alluring forms of self-fulfilment, this has always seemed to me to confer a fresh relevance on lines of the OT that were presumably addressed to those tempted by more ‘literal’ kinds of idol-worship:
Those who choose another god
Multiply their sorrows;
Their drink-offerings of blood
I will not pour out
Or take their names upon my lips.
For by comparison with the idolatrous goal of self-realization and personal happiness, the ‘burden’ that Christian faith places on us is a light one. We are not obliged to attain, or even seek, our happiness, or our success. Those things cease to be our responsibility. And, sought by us for their own sake, they can easily implicate us in serving the goals of social structures and systems that do not mean our good – ‘pouring drink offerings to another god’. Christians, however, are simply constrained to witness to our faith wherever we happen to be – to be ‘salt’ and ‘light’ as the Gospel puts it. Of course, we will naturally seek out those areas of life where we are best suited by our natural and supernatural gifts to serve. Yet, at the end of the day, we can serve God as well in an entirely commonplace everyday capacity as we can in a specialized role. Think of the Benedictine abbot re-assigning the monk who is too attached to his vocation. The important thing, of course, is to get right Who it is we are serving. The rest will follow. This, I believe, is the pillar and foundation of our sanity. I can only imagine now much easier my transition into working life would have been, had my choices been constrained (as I hope and pray my own children’s will be) chiefly by the need to serve God and my neighbour by doing something useful. Yes, we may scratch our heads about where our gifts might be better employed; but, ultimately, we are only obliged to do our best, and what ensues is, as the poet T.S. Elliot says, ‘not our business’. We are certainly not obliged to follow the counsel of innumerable school speech-day orations to make ‘the most of ourselves’.
For the decent, comfortably-off secularists of my acquaintance, adopting the Christian faith might seem an enormous step. We are speaking of a conversion of the heart from one life goal to another. And it is hard to imagine what might prompt people to undergo such an upheaval other than some niggling dissatisfaction with their current spiritual regime. But what conversion does not involve is the abandoning of something easy and natural for something more cumbersome and constraining; it is more like allowing ourselves to be released from the shackles of parental ambition, social expectation, media-hyped libido, and the desperate need to prove ourselves, into the relative freedom of aspiring to bring God honour in whatever it is we are, with his guidance, attempting.
Furthermore, I have so far left out of account decent, comfortably-off secularists who have become disillusioned, and may have begun to grumble and grouch at their task-masters – people who are still more or less holding things together. It is all very well to serve, and to be ‘community-minded’ in the interests of one’s happiness so long as we can continue to believe that we are progressing to that goal. But what about pointless dead-end jobs, and loveless relationships? Of course, some effort to maintain appearances can be expected. But there no doubt comes a point where hope wears thin – where, if we continue to do our duty (and we may have little option) it stretches credulity to believe that we are in any way the beneficiaries. In that case, the secularist may be left, for all practical purposes, with little but poverty, chastity and obedience, without the consolation that it serves any purpose; furthermore, with the sense he or she is, by their own standards, failing, where others are not – that they are ‘losers’, and that ‘life is passing them by’. Disappointed seekers after self-fulfilment will no doubt feel frustrated, unfulfilled, disappointed, resentful. The question whether they should feel this way will probably not cross their minds. This is surely worse than a lifestyle of poverty, chastity and obedience, freely assumed – even in its strictest monastic form. But one can perhaps take comfort in one’s secularist integrity (that one is ‘nobody’s dupe’), and, of course, in the thought that life is ‘tragic’. (I speak from memory here of what I myself felt at a certain moment of my life before things took a sudden downward turn.)
Now it is to be hoped that over the next generation there will be many who apostatize from the currently prevailing ideology of self-realization. But if they don’t, the loss will not just be their own. The world will be the poorer. How? Well, what we shall see as a result of this continuation of the socio-religious status quo with all its attendant problems – individualism; loss of community; cultural elitism; loneliness.
Beyond these more immediate consequences, we will also lose a potential catalyst of challenge to the prevailing liberal-capitalist status quo. This is harder to explain. But imagine a world: where people and companies regarded paying their taxes as a privilege not a penalty; where nations, including our own, were eager rather than reluctant to bear their share of the social and economic burdens arising from migration and environmental change; where it became politically feasible to face up to, and, if necessary, prepare for, a future ‘zero growth’ economy; where social equality was accorded equal priority with maximizing prosperity; where globalization could start to mean something more than the expansion of neo-liberal economics; where governments were enabled, once again, to adopt more dirigiste policies in areas where it was beneficial; where responding to environmental crisis could be regarded as an opportunity to bring the nations of the world together in a common enterprise. All this, I appreciate, is something like gravity defiance. I am moving in the political equivalent of a five-dimensional universe. That is because all these proposals (and I could have added many more) depend on a readiness on the part of voters for personal sacrifice, and the emergence of statesmen far-sighted enough to take advantage of that readiness to do the right thing – a new politics of moral rectitude, in fact. That no electorate would ever concede such a sacrifice, that it would not be practical politics even to invite it, and that it would not be widely seen as morally desirable in any case, seems to be the shared presupposition of all political parties. Sacrifice simply does not figure in our value-system any longer, and cannot therefore be factored into our realistic political calculations. And doubtless if were to reappear, it would so transform the field of political possibilities, that the politicians would all need a sabbatical to go off and rethink their policies from scratch!
A response to ‘Deep theology’
I am well aware of the audacity of the views expressed in this tract especially as they come, not from one licensed to speak on behalf of the Church, but from a rank-and-file Church member. The danger, I suspect, is that they will appear idiosyncratic – eccentric even. In the interests of their being taken seriously at all, therefore, it would seem only prudent to refer to any evidence of support – especially within Evangelicalism – for my position.
Interestingly, such evidence is not hard to find. There has been a growing movement over recent years amongst Evangelicals in the direction of a greater sympathy for ecclesial tradition, and for what we might call a ‘sacramental’ position when it comes to liturgical practice. At the same time, I am conscious that the objectives of this book diverge considerably from those of the authors of these studies. I want, in this concluding section, to place this book in the context of what has recently been written by these Church leaders – especially Evangelical ones: to clarify where I stand in relation to their projects, and to show where, and to what extent, my own project – that of this book – marks a new departure.
In particular, I have in mind a series of recent UK publications by Evangelicals associated with Andrew Walker of Kings College who advocate something they call Deep Church. Also, a book published in the US – Jim Belcher, Deep Church (2009) – advocating what appears to be a broadly similar position. My own interest in these publications lies in their call to a more sacramental understanding of Church and liturgy. For the authors, however, this sacramental emphasis is part of a broader concern. First, with the retrieval of ecclesial tradition – no longer cast in the role of the antagonist of Scriptural authority but as its foundation and support. Second, with the its adoption of that tradition as the basis for a broad cross-denominational consensus on what does and does not constitute Christian orthodoxy.
In practice, this requires a ‘tiered’ approach. Not all doctrines and practices are necessarily of equal importance, and the doctrines and practices which denominations share tend to be of more fundamental importance than those they do not. At the same time, there are essential doctrines and practices which distinguish real Christianity from what is Christian only in name. Frequently evoked is C.S. Lewis’ image of a hall or atrium from which various doors lead into separate rooms. It is in the separate rooms of the denominations that we find community and belonging; yet there is a shared space of essential belief and practice shared by all. The choice of the term Deep Church reflects the recognition that our faith needs to be rooted in the common tradition of the early Church, if it is to be proof against the glitz and superficiality of some popular brands of churchmanship.
In many respects, this is a contemporary restatement of the ‘orthodox Evangelical’ position of Robert Webber’s ‘Chicago Call’ back in the late 1970s. With its emphasis on ‘historical roots’ and continuity’, the latter foreshadows the attention given to the definition of the Christian Tradition (with a capital ‘T’) by D.H. Williams and Thomas Oden around the turn of the millennium. For these writers, as for Andrew Walker and advocates of Deep Church over the last few years, retrieval of the Tradition has implications that fall broadly into three general areas: creedal belief, scriptural interpretation, and liturgical practice.
First, creedal belief. Here the difficulty for Evangelicals is that the creeds recited in worship as statements of belief (Apostles’; Nicaean; Athanasian) were developed by the early Church, and cannot be claimed to derive their authority from ‘Scripture alone’. Deep Church recognizes the authority of these formulations and the value they have even today as criteria of orthodoxy which establish a core of essential belief, outside which Christians are free to disagree.
Second, scriptural interpretation. Here, Evangelicalism has largely ignored – or refused to acknowledge – the ecclesial basis of Christian modes of interpretation, embracing a divisive and non-sensical principle of ‘Scripture alone’. Deep Church recognizes the importance of the interpretative tradition of the early church both in establishing a reading of the texts and in transmitting a ‘rule’ for scriptural interpretation.
Third, liturgical practice. Evangelicalism has often absorbed the anti-ritualism of its secular environment, with the result that liturgy and sacraments are accorded little importance. Deep church recovers the resources of the Early Church and restores the sacraments to their due place in the Church’s life.
All these proposals push the Evangelical church in the direction of what I am proposing in this book. A retrieval of the Tradition could indeed help to mark out the limits of a new orthodoxy, temper the deleterious impact of naïve Scripturalism, and counter the anti-ritualist, and anti-liturgical excesses of some contemporary worship-styles. Yet my overwhelming response to all this is one of disappointment and frustration at the failure to adopt a clear position on the issues that, in my view, underlie such failures in the area of ecclesial practice.
First, penal substitution. It is all very well to extoll the creeds as the answer to the problem of defining the limits of orthodox Christian belief. One issue of belief has recently been tearing Evangelicalism apart, and it is an issue about which those creeds appear to have little, if anything, to say. Neither does Deep Church and its antecedents. Their swathes of print on orthodox belief contain scarcely a reference to this most divisive of all debates.
Second, the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. This, as we have seen, is the key theological issue, since once this is accepted, we have the basis for an account of the Gospel-event and its contemporary relevance that enables us to by-pass penal substitution and other unconvincing and morally questionable explanations. So, it is frustrating that the concerns voiced by Deep Church so often remain at the level of sacramentalism in general. Baptism tends to head the list of sacraments. And where, at last, some attention is devoted to the Eucharist, its operation as a means of grace is most commonly explained in terms of the doctrine of ‘real presence’. The result is to evade the whole question of the sacrificial character of the Eucharist on which, in my view, a coherent intellectual account of the Christian faith depends.
On the whole, the focus of Deep Church and its antecedents has been on creedal belief and scriptural interpretation rather than liturgical practice. One notable exception, however, is Walker & Parry’s recent Deep Church Rising (W&P). A discussion of the relationship of Scripture and Tradition leads to a series of chapters entitled ‘Deep faith’, ‘Deep worship’ and ‘Deep living’. Closing this familiar sequence, however, is a concluding chapter that argues for Deep church as ‘a Eucharistic community’. It begins by rejecting the idea associated with the Swiss Protestant reformer Zwingli that the Eucharist constitutes no more than a commemoration of Jesus’ death, and goes on to make a case for the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharistic elements. The full implications of this emerge where W&P consider the relationship of Eucharist and Church, citing John Zizioulas: ‘the Church constitutes the Eucharist while being constituted by it. Church and Eucharist are inter-dependent’. W&P continue:
Theologically speaking, without the body of Christ (which is both the body of the individual man, Jesus, and the community that exists in him) the Eucharist is nothing – no church, no Eucharist. But by the same token the Eucharist is the sacramental means by which the Spirit enables us all to participate in an ongoing way in the one body of Christ (I Cor 10:17) – no Eucharist, no church. (original italics)
The concordance of this with views I have expressed on the relationship of ritual and community will be evident; indeed, I have already cited this passage in extenso in the section of chapter three devoted to this topic.
But the passage itself raises a further, and all-important question the W&P make no attempt to address.
Let us suppose that the Church/Eucharist is, as the authors argue,
‘the sacramental means by which the Spirit enables us to participate in an ongoing way in the one body of Christ’. (My italics.) Does this imply that there are other (i.e. non-sacramental) means to that participation? (The authors’ syntax appears to me to leave the matter open – and I can’t help wondering whether this is deliberate or not.) In other words: Does it even make sense to speak of ‘participation in the one body’ independently of the particular means of its accomplishment which is Church/Eucharist?
I would like to think we can participate without understanding how we do so, or even without knowing that we do so. But is that participation, whether we understand it or not, always by the sacramental means of Church/Eucharist? In other words, is the Gospel-event itself even fully intelligible without reference to Church/Eucharist? Because, if not, then W&P’s proposals for Church practice are all very well, but there is a much more important matter at stake: namely, the account we Evangelicals give of our faith to ourselves and to the world. And, if W&P are saying that the Gospel-event is not intelligible without reference to Church and Eucharist, and if they are right about this, then that account is seriously defective.
Of course, one way to deduce W&P’s view on this, would be to examine what they say in their book about penal substitution. Do they credit the traditionalist account of the Gospel-event with any explanatory value? Or does their treatment suggest that the need for the doctrine is tempered, if not eliminated, by their alternative view that Church/Eucharist are the primary means of our participation in the body of Christ? Sadly, on this crucial issue, W&P offer us not a word.
We consequently remain poised on the brink of a much more decisive issue than any of the ones explicitly addressed in the book. The overall structure of the argument suggests the familiar concerns of Webber, Williams, Oden et al., but the title and contents of the final chapter, and its positioning at the close of the book, pushes Evangelical readers in the direction of a far more radical reappraisal of the account that they give of their faith. If Deep Church is to have any role in that more radical reappraisal, then some clarification is urgently needed – or the likes of Jim Belcher will not be slow to claim penal substitution as an integral element of the core of orthodox faith. A great opportunity will have been squandered to advance beyond the current impoverished Evangelical understanding of the content of their Christian belief.
Yet, if we wish to proceed in the direction that W&P seem to be pointing, and take the step of restoring the doctrine of sacrifice into the Gospel-event itself, the groundwork has been laid. W&P cite some of the patristic literature that favours their position on Eucharist. To judge by earlier writers, admittedly of Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic persuasion, who have made a specialism out of tracing the early evidence of Eucharistic prayers and liturgies, this position does not represent an unbalanced or particularly extreme interpretation of the evidence. In fact, if there is one area of faith in which recourse to the early Church tradition seems well established and to have had an undeniable impact (think, for instance, of the development of the Anglican and Roman Catholic liturgy in the last century), it would surely be in the area of liturgy. And, conversely, if one wanted to single out an area in which the lack of such patristic reference shows up most egregiously in traditionally-inclined Evangelicalism, one could not do no better than turn to Christopher Cocksworth’s Evangelical Eucharistic Thought (though the author does his scholarly best to present his subject in a positive light).
I would therefore encourage my readers to go that further step which Deep Church seems to fight shy of, though many outside the Evangelical tradition have proposed it in the most urgent and explicit terms. Restore sacrifice to its place at the heart of the Gospel-event as the thread unifying our own collective Christian life with the self-offering of Christ himself in his life and death, and we simply will not need doctrines like penal substitution to explain the mechanism by which salvation is achieved. The point has been made bluntly by writers outside the Protestant Evangelical tradition (e.g. Robert Daly). And there are plenty of Anglican theologians whose work points us in the same direction.
If our concern is an unsustainable model of the Gospel-event – and it seems to me that for many Evangelicals that is their dominant concert – then it strikes me that the Eucharistic theology of Dix, Gore, Hicks, and many other Anglican and Catholic authors, offers us a broad, and very well-trodden road out of our theological difficulties, an ecclesially orientated soteriology, and a very respectable foundation for ecumenical consensus on the basis of early Church Tradition such as the proponents of Deep Church appear to be seeking. I have personally embraced that route, and I fail to understand what considerations – other than outdated sectarianism – could be preventing our Evangelical leaders from doing the same thing. It may be worth recalling that F.C.N. Hicks himself – the theologian to whom the views I have set out here owe more than to anyone else – expounded his own position on sacrifice in a spirit of ecumenism, and in the belief that it offered, not only the most faithful account of Christian tradition, but the best hope of unity between the different wings of the Anglican Church of his day.
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH