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Theological Education and Race.
The obituary for the scientist-theologian, Professor John Polkinghorne, in the Church Times (26/03/2021) commented “Polkinghorne advocated the value of bottom-up thinking in the engagement of science and theology. He was not keen on trying to work at a philosophical framework of the relationship of science and theology. . . He preferred beginning with specific insights into world such as quantum theory, chaos, the Big Bang, the end of the universe, or neuroscience, and bring these into theological dialogue”.
The Church of England’s recent ‘Lament to Action’ report rightly has a focus on ministerial and theological education. However I believe it is insufficiently shaped by Polkinghorne’s approach which can, I believe, be usefully transferred to race and theology – that is we need to begin ‘bottom up’ through dialogue with ‘specific insights’ of how we experience what is happening with race in Britain and the church, rather than working from a ‘philosophical framework of the relationship of [race] and theology.
What are the consequences of such an emphasis?
1. Experiences as well as Theory.
‘Lament to Action’ rightly includes intercultural placements for theological colleges as its third Action point. The point needs considerable attention. Much of the church’s ineffectiveness, and worse, our serious mishandling of situations, stems from leaders’ lack of acquaintance with people from minority ethnic communities. However the suggested placements, rarely longer than a six week visit, need to be supplemented by a deeper personal commitment to seek to enter the world of other cultures. Les Isaacs, the founder of Street Pastors, wrote in 2004: “I am still amazed today by the number of people training for the ministry who have not got friends from different cultures. . . If we are going to stay socially relevant in the twenty-first century, we need to have relationships on a grass roots basis among different racial groups. . . The only meaningful way we will reach other people is to get into relationship with them, sharing meals together, and not just for six months, but over many years” (‘Relevant Church’, pp 109-110) He suggests people spend two of the three years training living in a minority context. Such encounter, as will be stressed in §3 below, is essentially a heart matter – a gospel inspired zest to encounter the richness and challenge of a diverse society and church.
Theological reflection which has no opportunity to correlate with the actual experience of life in multi-ethnic communities will always be vulnerable to generalisations, especially if they have a strong ethical tone, which simply fail to catch the nuances of the necessarily complex nature of a multi-ethnic society. In this respect it is helpful that one aspect of the three stage learning programme for training and mentoring includes ‘Intercultural Awareness’ – becoming increasingly sure-footed in relating across a variety of cultures is now a necessary competence for all clergy, and one obscured by the clumsy and culture obscuring umbrella term UKME/GMH. Such awareness needs to be on a par with the report’s much stronger emphasis on anti-racist training. The report therefore has a serious gap in not giving greater emphasis to training in Cultural Intelligence, or similar programmes
2. Social Realities as well as Texts.
To start with a contentious issue, on every significant comparison, such as educational achievement or occupational level women of Caribbean background score better than men of Caribbean background. An aspect of this is that the church’s tendency to look simply on the UKME/GMH surface, and be ignorant of the very significant underlying disparities indicating that Caribbean women have felt much more comfortable in the Church of England than men, as can be seen with ordinations or appointment to senior office. By contrast, the ‘womanist’ theology that has emerged in America, arguing that the intersection of racial and gender prejudice has put women at a double disadvantage, receives much more academic attention. Whilst the issue is complex, ‘womanist’ grievance is not born out by the comparable statistics of life chances for Caribbean women and men; nor, I would add, by my own limited observations. On this issue, the Guyanese born psychotherapist, Barbara Fletchman Smith writes: “Cultures which have experienced slavery possess a memory of men being useless. . . Because of this strong internalisation, which is a direct result of slavery, it is harder to bring up boys to reach their full potential without an active and helpful father-presence” (in ‘Mental Slavery: Psychoanalytic Studies of Caribbean People’ 2000, p 64).Thus a theological education which attends to womanist theology books, but fails to consider or explore the reasons for the greater achievements of Caribbean women as compared with men in both society and the church is failing to prepare people to minister to one reality of multi-ethnic Britain.
This is a specific example that illustrates Polkinghorne’s emphasis on a ‘bottom up’ approach. It applies more broadly to how we understand the faith and spirituality of ethnic minorities in Britain, and the way they are interpreted theologically. ‘Bottom up’ accounts of what ethnic minorities specifically believe and do in Britain are comparatively rare, and often not captured in ‘black theology’. The traditional religious background of West Africans lays great stress on a God who provides people with material well-being. In ‘The Meaning of Christian Conversion in Africa’ Cyril Okorocha notes ‘the overriding African concern for spiritual power from religious forms as the essence of true religion’ (p 78). So personal names are often formed by a combination of ‘God’ (or equivalents) and ‘wealth’ or ‘success’ (or equivalents).
Similarly with churches. Below are details of some local churches whose publicity I have received:
London Miracle Centre (Some Talk but we experience miracles)
Triumphant Church International
Christ the King (Nine Days of Spiritual Recovery & Restoration!!!! For your Greatness, Elevation, Promotion and Increase)
Kingdom Life Ministries (Spirit of Excellence Conference)
Rock of Refuge Triumphant Ministry (The Truth of Kingdom’s Liberty and Dominion)
Kingdom of God Ministries Int’l U (Super Sunday – Where the next major move of God is Happening)
Various levels of ‘Prosperity Theology’ are central to their teaching, whereby God brings wealth and success to those who pray, and most commonly give very sacrificially to the church. Thus preaching to both counter the corruption endemic in many such churches, notably the Brazilian, billionaire owned, Bolsonaro supporting Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, whilst also recognising that God’s blessing to us quite does leads to health and material provision, is one aspect of relevance in a multi-ethnic society.
A too-rare example of direct theological investigation of the specific experience of church members is provided by the Sri Lankan anthropologist and theologian, Albert Jabanasan in ‘Changing of the Gods’ which analyses the stories of Tamil converts from Hinduism to Christianity. I give the details of Jabanasan’s research in an Appendix below. Its significance is that it is the convert’s stories that are primary, and provide the material for the theology, rather than the top-down process of beginning with a specific ‘ethnic’ theology that shapes the understanding.
Therefore ‘Lament to Action’s requirement for all ordinands to participate in an introductory Black Theology or Theologies in Global Perspective modules (p 33) is too much of a top-down prescription, when it needs to be preceded (re Polkinghorne) with a bottom up understanding of the complex actualities of life in multi-ethnic Britain, with a course along the lines of ‘Living in a Multi-Ethnic Society’.
There are a number of limitations about Black Theology which raise questions about its suitability as a basic requirement. Firstly there are questions about the meaning of ‘black’ which were raised in the writings of Franz Fanon and others. Does it refer to belonging to a particular and specific cultural configuration? For Fanon, this was the French Caribbean, whilst the pace-setters of black theology have been black Americans. How directly does their experience relate to black people who have grown up in Britain? Fanon later moved to seeing blackness as a socio-political category, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, focussing on the oppressed of whatever ethnic group. In this respect ‘black theology’ is then simply a sub-set which has very little to add to the generic category of Liberation Theology. Alistair Kee, writing from a Marxist perspective, in ‘The Rise and Demise of Black Theology’ argued that it had lost its global perspective and focused too exclusively on the particularity of black American experience.
The question of black theology’s uncertain focus surfaced in an interview on the Theos website with Richard Reddie, where Reddie made the important points that it is not a theology that all (or even most?) black people would subscribe to; that some South Asian Christians also support it; and that white people too experience injustice and disadvantage. But surely the sum of these qualifications is to make the label ‘black’ misleading, and that what is being propounded, quite properly, is a version of Liberation Theology.
Therefore the question needs raising as to how adequately British black theology covers the ground needed in theological preparation for ministry. It is to a considerable extent a theology of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, who represent about 3% of the British population (given a further 2% of African and 10% of South Asian backgrounds. Not does it necessarily speak with the voice of its own community. Important points are made by theologians such as Robert Beckford as to how the expressed Caribbean Christian has provided a resource for survival and wholeness in Britain, despite the other worldly garb it has often appeared in, such as the ‘flying away’ orientation of the songs being sung with decreasing conviction at gravesides. But at a more explicit level Beckford’s ‘Dread and Pentecostal’, despite its subtitle ‘A Political Theology for the Black Church in Britain’, reads more like a political theology looking for a church. Similarly his experimental project in ‘God and the Gangs’ does not indicate he was any more successful than the rest of us in communicating the good news of Jesus to gang members.
There are important emphases about liberation and justice for the oppressed that ought to be included as part of any overall theological course. What is in question is the wisdom of putting the particular theological framework of ‘black theology’ as front and centre in theological students’ encounter with Britain’s multi-ethnic society.
3. Hearts as well as Accomplishments.
Several decades ago I attended a choir competition put on by a Christian youth organisation. It was won by a sweetly sung offering from a quartet of girls from the Home Counties, who won out over a rumbunctious version of ‘I’ve got a home in gloryland that outshines the sun’ by a choir of black young people from Dalston in north-east London. The comments by the elderly lady judge added insult to the young people’s disappointment by saying the choir weren’t always in tune, and rather that we should always be offering the best to the Lord. But in terms of which offering had the greater capacity to lift hearts to God – surely the crucial quality in sung worship, rather than abstract standards of technical perfection – then the Dalston choir would surely have won. It was small incidents like this, rather than more overt racism, when repeated innumerable times, that made it unlikely that young black people growing up here would find a congenial home in the established churches
What brought this incident to my mind was a slightly parallel though grander and more profoundly interpreted story in Willie James Jennings superb ‘After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging’ in the Theological Education Between the Times series. Jennings describes a meeting to appoint a new staff member for his seminary (pp 23-29) – a choice between a highly qualified white man and an equally well-qualified African American woman. He saw in the man ‘an intellectual form that performed white masculinist self-sufficiency, a way of being in the world that aspires to exhibit possession, mastery, and control of knowledge first, and of one’s self second, and if possible of one’s world’. The panel loved him. By contrast the black woman ‘wanted to talk about herself as integral to her work as a textualist, specifically about the racial condition of the West and how ancient texts and modern interpretations play in and against that condition’. As regards the panel’s decision to choose the white man rather than the black woman, Jennings uses a trope that is repeated at several points through his book: ‘I felt the anger, the old anger that had been with me from the beginning. What beginning? I don’t know when it started. It always seemed to have been with me, formed at the site of my blackness’.
To call the panel’s decision ‘racist’ in an obvious sense is too superficial. Like the choir judge they were choosing from within their own framework, unthinkingly assumed to be the normative and universal framework. So much so that other frameworks – whether of music as self-giving worship, or of theology as innately connected to our bodily existence – are not to be taken account of. What Jennings is offering then is not a black theology as an addition to all the other types of theology around, but a much more radical attempt to peel away the mind-set that developed several centuries ago in western Europe (for which Jennings uses the provocative but rather misleading term ‘whiteness’).
His project therefore involves a long-term re-reading of history and of the genesis of western exceptionalism. Jennings angry reading of that history from the vantage point of a once enslaved people is in counterpoint to other recent more affirming histories (Larry Siedentop’s ‘Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism’; Tom Holland’s ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’; now recently Joseph Heinrich’s ‘The Weirdest People in the World: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous’). In multi-ethnic Britain it is a debate that theological students need to be alert to.
Thus ‘Lament to Action’ stresses the task of theological colleges needing to diversify their curriculum, significantly identifying church history (better ‘history of the church in the world’) and Theologies in Global perspective, and the need for bibliographies (in Education Action 4, p 33; misprinted as ‘biographies’) to include minority ethnic British authors. The danger is artificiality: adding texts to tick boxes, engaging in theological tourism, providing a multi-ethnic vitamin supplement rather than a impacting the whole training diet. What is required is a heart engagement which sets the understanding of Christian faith we have developed into a serious relationship and conversation with significantly different ways of understanding and being Christian, and that set serious questions against our received western theological tradition.
But to end where we began, such a re-assessment of theology is not primarily a theological or textual exercise. It is opening our hearts and minds to attend to different experiences that form the life of multi-ethnic Britain: watching films, reading novels and poetry, above all listening to music. It is only by bringing both what we receive of the experience of others and our whole lives into interaction with our study (as did Jennings’ black woman theologian) that we can serve Jesus in a multi-ethnic society.
Appendix: A ‘Bottom Up’ study of Tamil Pentecostal converts.
He will never let go of my hand
He will never let go of my hand
Though the storms may come
And the winds may blow
He will never let go of my hand.
The singer was a guitar playing, avuncular middle-aged Tamil; the country-ish music as bland as the words, whose exegesis in turn was questionable – in Luke 8:22-25, rather than holding the disciples hands whilst stilling the storm, Jesus rebukes their lack of faith. The listeners were a dozen or so fairly tough Tamil refugee ‘boys’ between about 18 and 25 who were attending an informal English language class run by two of our church members. (To sense the nuances of ‘boy’ in Tamil English, think cowboy.) Tough, and yet several of them were close to tears. What moved them?
The anthropologist and theologian, Albert Jabanesan, based at the Theological College of Lanka, carried out research into Tamils who had converted from Hinduism to Christianity in London (published as ‘Changing of the Gods’ by ISPCK in Delhi). Diasporic Tamil conversions to Christianity, whilst not a mass movement, are substantial and numerically significant. (I once attended a Tamil speaking congregation using the impressive, modern state church in Odense, Denmark which had more attendees than the morning Lutheran congregation.)
In analyzing the situation of Tamil refugees in London, Jabanesan noted the cultural disintegration caused for them by the loss of what had been three key identity markers for them back home – translated into English (with significant loss of meaning) as house, temple and village. Separated from these things and scattered across London’s middle suburbs, they experienced a sense of lostness, isolation and alienation, for which Jabanesan deploys the term ‘anomie’. It is in this context that the Christian faith they encounter, especially in Tamil Pentecostal churches, is for many joyfully received as good news.
In seeking to identify the particular appeal of the Christian gospel, Jabanesan draws upon the theologian Paul Tillich’s three categories of anxiety that can be assuaged by religious faith. Of the first, ‘anxiety of guilt and condemnation’ he notes that whilst the formal theology of the Pentecostal churches emphasizes Christ’s substitutionary atonement for our sins, in the interviews he carried out with converts ‘there is no single mention of sin, forgiveness, reconciliation or other terms associated with guilt and salvation from guilt’ (p121). Similarly as regards ‘anxiety of fate and death’, though members had fled from a civil war and may well have experienced life-threatening situations, and almost certainly the untimely death of someone close to them, he ‘could find no explicit mention of fear of death’ (p 121).
By contrast, concerning people’s connection with Tillich’s third category, ‘anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness’, Jabanesan found their response ‘overwhelming’. Encounter with the warmth, kindness and the support of people who share your language, background and suffering in the context of a church, helped assuage the sense of anomie stemming from the loss of precious sources of meaning which they had had in Sri Lanka. Jabanesan’s interpretation of what moved converts is so similar to the experiences of Tamil converts in my previous church (and of the young men in the story above) that the pattern can hardly be coincidental. Instinctively many in the Tamil diaspora are identifying those specific elements in ‘the manifold wisdom of God’ which connect with their here and now needs in the west.
Churches that meet such needs may not be consciously ‘contextual’ of course, but they are instinctively aware of where people’s needs are, as was the evangelist whose song began this section. It is ‘from the ground up’ or ‘ordinary’ theology – people drawing from the richness of God’s wisdom those elements that bring healing and redemption to their situations.
Whilst discussing the Tamil diaspora, can I heartily recommend Jacques Audiard’s superb film ‘Dheepan’, depicting the horrors of life on a gang dominated housing estate on the periphery of Paris, but concluding in the bliss of a middle-belt London suburb.
YES! we need this nuanced and deep discussion thatis focussed on missiology... and not just between old white blokes like you and me. and not to get bogged down in Anglican institutional concerns, though of course reform is needed there. Could the EA one people commission provide a forum? Israel Oluwole Olofinjana has written some good stuff.. https://israelolofinjana.wordpress.com/about/