Looking Forwards. # 206. 08/07/2025.

Out of Many, One People.

Welcome, to a blog that seeks to draw together the spirituality and theology that might lie behind living and ministering in a multi-ethnic society.

Looking Forwards

‘If I ask you ‘why is that tree so tall?’ you would naturally respond in the past tense (‘it evolved over millions of years by natural selection’) or in the present (‘it has unshaded access to the sun for photosynthesis’). In the ancient Mediterranean and Christian medieval world, to go with these two answers there was often a third, called the teleological cause (from telos, a goal or end) using a future tense: ‘the tree is so tall because we’re going to make the mast of a ship from it’. So the question of a human being’s teleological cause naturally arose, and the standard answer related to the beatific vision: the future vision of the face of God that will be the means by which Christians will be transformed. I am who am I am because I will see God-in-Christ face to face’.

Those words of Andy Griffiths on being interviewed about his Grove booklet on ‘The Hope of Seeing God: The Beatific Vision’ on the Psephizo blog struck me recently, perhaps not as Andy Griffiths attended, but simply to reflect on the loss and danger of not looking onward to our future and final destination, and being too pre-occupied with our past.

Of course, both views play an important part in Christian understanding. In the Old Testament the Jews were continually called upon to look back – to the Passover and their deliverance in the Exodus, to the very covenant that God had made with them, sealed by circumcision. In the New Testament Jesus enjoins us to ‘do this, in remembrance of me’. Paul’s summary of his central message (1 Cor 15:1-3) is a list of what God has done for us in Jesus. Perhaps more than any other faith or world-view Christianity is rooted in history; its sacred book substantially narratives of what has happened in the past.

But all this is to set a trajectory for the future: the Day of the Lord, the Kingdom to come. So Paul reflects: ‘Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus’ (Phil 3:13,14). How does that work out in our discipleship now? The words quoted above struck me because both in my own self-understanding, in the mental climate we inhabit in this culture, and – most specifically – in the churches’ thinking and policies about race, we are too pre-occupied in looking back, insufficiently inspired, motivated and directed by the vision we anticipate and how that might shape the directions we take.

It is a truism, I think, that our culture is majoring on looking backwards. We live in a therapeutic society. Words like ‘trauma’ and ‘harm’ become common. They need attending to; buried experiences of pain can be landmines that explode further down the road. But too much attention on past pains and too little development of the resources to bear with the pain becomes immobilising. Effective mentoring, we are told, focusses on the person looking forward, on identifying future goals rather than being swamped by past disappointments.

At a national level, the current crisis over welfare costs partly reflects a declining expectation that people should ‘just cope’. Grievance about the past comes to dominate our political landscape. Whilst reflecting very different concerns MAGA, BLM and Brexit are all energised by negative assessments of the recent past. All know what they want to remove. There is little offering of clear, hard-headed hope for the future.

As regards ‘race’ in Britain, looking back is highly important. White people have to resist the temptation to ignore four hundred years of history and to pretend in inter-ethnic encounters that we meet on level ground. The arrogance and racism of the past, the imbalances of power and wealth form the context of those encounters. That historical context needs to be embedded in our minds in every encounter. The question of how far it needs to be close to the surface or rather increasingly relegated to our mental hinterland depends on our reading of the situation as we meet this person with their particular story and personality. But we are not entitled to dismiss the racial difference as of no importance. For many years to come the brutality, injustice and shames of our past needs to be included in our mental and emotional furniture, rather than evaded. As Robert Beckford has written ‘It is easier to eat Caribbean food than to read the history of English slavery, colonialism and imperialism in the region’ (‘Jesus is Dread’, p 36).

As regards the Church too, there needs to be a balance between serious reflection on the past and a Spirit-inspired vision of the future. Nonetheless the recent focus has been very much the backward look. Certainly, much emphasis has rightly been given to the inspiring vision of John the Seer of ‘a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!”’ (Rev 7:9,10). But on balance the overall stress has been on attending to the negatives of the history.

Two issues in particular have ranked high in the attention of the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice, of CMEAC, and General Synod, namely ‘Repair’ in response to slavery, and Monuments; and alongside this a broader (largely unspecific) penitence for ‘institutional racism’. Nothing should be said to distract attention from the great evil of the Middle Passage and enslavement in the Caribbean, or its dismal after-life in continued racism. National and ecclesial penitence are appropriate. Cleared and wholesome ground and secure foundations are necessary before a new build. But sooner or later there needs to be the hope and energy that a new building provides. The Church of England thus far seems limited in its vision. Concern about monuments is primarily backward looking. The debate about Reparations risks being drawn into indemnification for enslaved labour – a ‘rights’ issue appealing to implicit laws which were not in force in the time. Talk about racism in the institution is guilt-inducing and depressing unless there is also a vibrant sense of what the institution is doing and can do. Yet in this area the Church is still muted. Ministry in a complex multi-ethnic society requires a good understanding of the society and cultures around us. It involves complexity of cultures and attitudes that mean we can no longer unthinkingly proceed instinctively acting out of the framework of my own culture. Yet the understandings, acquired experiences and intuitions needed for that ministry are still not foregrounded in Anglican training. Seventy-five years on, and the church has still not required all its clergy to be taking the first steps in learning how you minister into the ethnic and social complexities of our context. The heart-searching over the wrongs of the past have not yet been matched by forward-looking hope, energy, creativity and improvisation, that speaks of a people joyfully enjoying the first-fruits of a glorious future in the presence of God. Yet little has been done to identify positive church growth in multi-ethnic communities, and to consider what may be learned from such examples or ways in which they might be replicated.

Last week’s Church Times included a very stimulating summary of a podcast with the Durham church historian Professor Alec Ryrie (‘How Hitler defined us’) taking up issues in his new book ‘The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It’. Ryrie’s thesis is that we moved from a pre-war consensus that Jesus was our central moral authority to a moral framework – which was crystalised in the 1960s – that Hitler, obviously negatively, was our moral touchstone. We moved from a positive focus on a person of enduring value, to a supremely negative person from the recent past. I hope I am not twisting Ryrie’s thesis to suggest that this shapes our understanding of race (not least because on a scale of historical evil slavery was not that far away from the holocaust). In both cases we know what to avoid, and rightly have learned some lessons. Thus the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, and the subsequent emphasis on rights and their upholding by law, alongside our commitment to racial justice (especially to Civil Rights in the USA), underlie our concern to eliminate racism. But for Ryrie this framework – essentially a negative take on the past, and to be defended by legal entrenchment – is increasingly proving brittle and unfit for purpose.

To add my riff to Ryrie’s thesis, we are now in a situation – most acute in the USA – where the old Civil Rights mindset is no longer adequate for the more complex and much less clearly polarised societies we now live in. The rhetoric sounds increasingly hollow and dated. Its power to convince wanes once we recognise its disconnect with the major advances in power and prosperity of minority groups, or increasing public disdain for expressions of racism. In the podcast Ryrie commented that we know how to deal with the ‘Dark Lords’ – in Star Wars, Harry Potter, in Tolkien – but this sort of ‘Hitler’ legacy is no longer the threat. (Suggesting that immigration discussions are redolent of 1930s Germany, or comparing Trump with Hitler disable rather than provoke the serious attention the need). How very different historical legacies, cultures and social statuses live together in our society today is still a serious and demanding question, but continuing to keep our gaze on the past will lead to inappropriate and inadequate responses, for example, a simplistic emphasis on ‘white privilege’. For Ryrie, it will require ‘reconnecting with deeper ethical and spiritual roots’. Recovering a vision of our ultimate destiny in Christ and exploring the hope that it breathes into our present is an essential antidote to the miasma of disappointment and accusation that can too easily overshadow our calling to be a people gathered out of all peoples.

This journey towards our ultimate vision of being in God’s eternal presence as ‘a great multitude . . . from every nation’ presents us in the present with two choices:

* Identitarianism or Integration.

Identities are precious. They are recognised in Revelation 7:9. The kings of the earth bring their gifts into the heavenly city (Rev 21:24). When the powers of this world threaten those identities, understandably they become precious foci of unity and strength. But they can also be sustained defensively in ways that inhibit learning, reception and renunciation. Holding onto them in ways that work against the warm-hearted affirmation of our common humanity both inhibits personal growth and makes societal navigation of our common problems increasingly fraught. Rightly balancing unity and diversity will always be an ongoing project, but in our current situation a turn to the future in our thinking will cause us to seek integration and relational unity both in our society and the church. It is most stimulating that Ryrie should put forward Pentecostalism as an important model for us today. More than most groups, at a global level members of Pentecostal churches have received the rough end of the global order, yet their dynamic is not primarily the reversal of past wrongs – the focus of more ‘sophisticated’ theologies – but a single-minded pursuit to bring the blessings of God’s love and his provision to all the peoples of the world. Whilst shallow pragmatism and a narrow focus on success can lead to ethnic compartmentalism in Pentecostalism, more importantly they show a momentum in their desire to share the love of God that is destined to sweep away barriers.

* Grievance or Agency.

Indeed, the past gives us enough to grieve about. But it is past. Lessons need to be learned, repentance expressed and acted upon in reformed living. But grievance continues to dominate much discourse about race today. By contrast there is a growing emphasis – for example, in the USA with Glenn Loury and in Britain with Tony Sewell amongst others – that are emphasising agency. Barriers are real and can be damagingly restrictive; but exaggerating them, or ignoring that they have diminished becomes a means of entrapment. By contrast hope begets agency. Again with reference to Pentecostalism, it is a strong emphasis on Jesus’ return and final victory that energises their activity in the present. To return to the original quote from Andy Griffiths, rather than lamenting the loss of the trees cut down we should be looking forward to sailing out in the boats that have been built.