Welcome. What does ‘Out of Many’ actually refer to? This blog is an exploration of firstly what it isn’t - the ways that we are just like everyone else, and like no-one else. A future one (or more) will be how ‘people like me’ and ‘people not like me’ can be together in one church and in one society.
Understanding Ethnicity: ‘Like all others, like some others, like no other,’
The recent report on ‘Racial Justice in the Church of England’ (GS2243) from the Archbishop’s Commission on Racial Justice made as a central theological assertion that ‘there is one race, the human race’. That is an important but partial truth; as is the complementary statement that ‘ultimately, we are all individuals’. Both statements are true and need saying, but on their own they provide a shallow and unworkable basis for thinking seriously and effectively about race and ethnicity. At the end of this blog I will return to the way in which we need a much more nuanced theological understanding.
Helpful to our understanding of the significance of ethnicity is the formulation used by the Ghanaian pastoral theologian Emmanuel Lartey, in his book ‘In Living Colour’ (which goes back to UNESCO in 1948 I think) to illuminate how we might understand how people differ from each other. It runs:
“Every human being is in certain respects:
1. like all others
2. like some others
3. like no other.” (p 12)
A somewhat similar classification is made by David Livermore in ‘Leading with Cultural Intelligence’, who writes of three categories of human behaviour: the universal, the cultural, and the personal (p 70). Both writers recognise that simply to see ourselves as being one humanity made up of billions of individuals fails to recognise much that gives richness and joy, and tragedy and sorrow to human kind, because of our belonging with ‘some others’. That is, we need to grapple with the question of what the ‘like some others’ means and doesn’t mean. It can apply to several spheres (sexual difference being the most obvious) but difference of culture and ethnicity is one major area where we recognise a strong affinity with some people, but far less with other people.
Whilst the focus of these blogs are about how people from the different ‘like some others’ of cultures and ethnicities can become one people - primarily in the church, although also by derivation in societies and the world, this week’s blog is about the surrounding first and third assertions to help think more clearly about the meaning of that middle ‘like some others’. It is important also to notice that the ‘thickness’, the importance, of these ‘like all’ and ‘like no other’ layers varies from culture to culture, which is why the scope of each layer needs considering. In future blogs I will look more at the ‘meat’ in the sandwich - at what in our present situation is significant for us about culture or ethnicity.
1. We are ‘like all others’.
How are we ‘like all others’? There are obvious ways – we are born of mothers; we need food and shelter, we relate, we die. Referring to Donald Brown’s ‘The Human Universal’, Kwame Anthony Appiah, perhaps over-confidently, summarises: ‘human societies have ended up having many deep things in common. Among them are practices like music, poetry, dance, marriage, funerals; values resembling courtesy, hospitality, sexual modesty, generosity, reciprocity, the resolution of social conflict; concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, parent and child, past, present, and future’ (in ‘Cosmopolitanism’, p 96).
Christian faith gives a richness in moving beyond such impersonal abstractions as we assert the personal and relational aspect of our shared humanity as we affirm that all are made in the image of one God, and are all loved by Him - the bedrock of our understanding of what it means to be human. The consequence should be a vigorous defence of the dignity of all people, a hatred for any expression of contempt for other groups of people, a steady commitment to relate to and understand all those with whom we share a common humanity.
That commonality extends beyond our created dignity, to recognising our common falleness and sin, and our need of forgiveness and redemption. In the late eighteenth century debate about slavery, when the views of black inferiority by philosophers such as Hume and Kant gave support to apologists for slavery, the evangelical poet William Cowper succinctly applied the themes of creation, fall and redemption to all people:
‘That souls have no discriminating hue
Alike important in their maker’s view;
That none are free from blemish since the fall,
And love divine has paid one price for all’.
Holding on to all those emphases at this time, not just to creation and redemption, is important. The ways and extent in which rebellion against God is expressed may vary between cultures, but its depth is universal. To seek to minimise the extent of sin in any culture is to reduce its humanness, not to show prejudice. Often it is to imply that other cultures are less developed, therefore less culpable than our own. We do, of course, usually have sharper eyes for the failings of other cultures rather than our own (as for other individuals rather than ourselves). Therefore we need to make judgements with caution, but a backlash against racist judgementalism can lead to lowered and therefore demeaning lack of expectation of others. Psalm 33:13-15 expresses God’s caring but discerning awareness of all peoples in all places at all times: “The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all humankind. From where he sits enthroned he watches all the inhabitants of the earth – he who fashions the hearts of them all, and observes all their deeds.”
So too seeing our shared likeness with all other people as including a shared need for forgiveness and redemption is controversial. Not all cultures are used to seeing the human predicament in those terms, and some Christians have seen expressing the Christian faith in those terms as a form of religious imperialism, but withholding the message of salvation from other religious or ethnic groups puts a serious wedge into any strong sense of mankind's unity.
Asserting that we are like all other people in some respects has not been accepted at all times by all cultures. When Paul preached to the Athenians that “From one ancestor he (God) made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26) he was making a politically charged statement. F F Bruce writes: ‘The Athenians might pride themselves on being autochthonous – sprung from the soil of their native Attica, but this pride was ill-founded. . . This removed all imagined justification for the belief that the Greeks were innately superior to barbarians, as it removes all imagined justification for parallel beliefs today’ (‘The Book of the Acts’, 1965, pp 357-8). In fact, at the time Bruce wrote these words the Dean of Johannesburg , Rev Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, whilst imprisoned for his opposition to apapartheid, recalls how his captors dismissed Africans with the words ‘They are not men’ (in his autobiographical ‘Encountering Darkness’).
For Christians then it is a conviction that needs to be defended politically and legally, and celebrated in our attitudes, relationships and worship. A sense of humanity’s unity is not a forlorn hope, but a joyful conviction rooted in God’s revelation of himself through Christ, which every church needs to find ways of expressing, locally, nationally and internationally.
Significant ‘boundary’ issues arise, however, between affirming the ‘likeness’ of all people, as against asserting that there are ways in which some groups people legitimately differ. In recent years a raft of moral issues has come to the fore over whether certain practices are wrong for all people or should be accepted as being valid within particular cultures, with an increasingly confident universalising of originally western liberal values over the past decade. Thus forced marriages, female genital circumcision, abortion of female foetuses, and the criminalisation of homosexuality have all come under growing pressure from both opinion formers in the west, as reflected in media coverage, public attitudes and government policy, as the ‘all’ has taken precedence over the ‘some’. We shall see that in church life also the appropriateness of provision for specific ethnic groups is a question for debate. In questions of ethnicity we are never far from facing the competing demands of unity and diversity.
2. We are ‘Like no others’.
At the opposite end of the scale is the assertion that I am unique – there will never be another me. Particularly in the west we treasure our originality, and feel irritated if people make wrong assumptions about us on the basis of our ethnicity, age, gender or social class. Not many English people would feel flattered to be called a ‘typically English’.
Such individualism has powerful resonances in the Christian faith. We are unique creations of God; personally known to him, with every hair of our head numbered; with a particular sense of calling and vocation. The Christian emphases on being personally called by God, on testimony, on self-examination and repentance, on learning to take steps of faith all build a heightened sense of individuality. But this does not come without risks – of a fracturing of communities, of unhealthy introspection, of spiritual arrogance.
Again the ‘thickness’ of the ‘I am like no others’ layer is highly variable. In tribal societies it can be quite thin, as seen for example in Vincent Donovan’s classic ‘Christianity Rediscovered’ (1978) - a Roman Catholic missionary’s learning experience amongst the Masai in East Africa. By contrast those of us living in the west live in a culture where the assertion ‘I am like no other’ has got thicker with each generation and has now grown to unparalleled thickness. The routine emphasis in adverts on individual choice, worth and self-expression mark the opposing pole. Joseph Henrich’s ‘The Weirdest People in the World’ (2021) has highlighted that the western ‘WEIRD’ culture, rather being the inevitable norm to which all societies will eventually converge, is in fact a highly unique development brought about by very specific and somewhat random historical factors. (In fact the strict prohibitions of western Christianity in the Middle Ages against kin marriage!) The disaster of western intervention in Iraq came from the blind assumption that Iraqis saw the world in similar ways to westerners.
Thus the growing assumption – highly disruptive in a society where people come from very different types of cultural background - that questions of how people behave, most notably as regards family, marriage and sexual behaviour, are personal choices, in which we are not accountable to what others think or do. This is so taken for granted by western liberal opinion, that it is not easy to recognise that it was not the case here until recently, and still isn't in the majority of world cultures. We have noted above how the universalising of western individualism and emphasis on rights has led to a number of specific clashes in recent years.
Thus, in multi-ethnic societies the ‘thickness’ of the layer of individual choice is controversial. Arranged marriages are an obvious tension. Does a young person’s inalienable ‘me-ness’ give them the right to choose their own marriage partner, or ought the wisdom of their elders and support of their community be determinative. Similarly, the conflict in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality needs to be seen as a clash of assumptions over whether sexual behaviour is the concern of only individuals themselves, or whether it is of concern to the whole community. Martyn Percy writes “I suspect that we shall see that sexuality and gender are mere symptoms of disease and not causes. Indeed, we may be surprised at the root and branch problem: perhaps it will be that the assumptions we make about choice, individualism and the nature of institutions – all of which have eroded our sense of catholicity and moral responsibility for the parts of Christ’s body we seldom see or know”. (‘Context and Catholicity’, in Mark J Cartledge and David Cheetham, ed. ‘Intercultural Theology’ 2011, p127). It is also worth bearing in mind the warning that Philip Jenkins made in 2002: “As Christianity becomes ever more distinctly associated with Africa and the African diaspora, the religion as a whole may come to be dismissed as only what we might expect from the Heart of Darkness” (‘The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity’, p 161).
There is no body capable of adjudicating how the boundary between my uniqueness and my need to be part of a community ought to be drawn. Western individualists will emphasise the undeniable abuses and tragedies that denying the individual's choice of marriage partner or sexual behaviour can bring. Their critics will have little difficulty showing the heartache, loneliness, and distressed and damaged children that are the legacy of western sexual individualism.
In Britain the momentum towards removing all constraints on the individual’s freedom of choice seems irresistible at present – accelerated both by the rise of disposable income with which to express personal choice, and by a libertarian intellectual climate that makes alternatives seem unthinkable to many people. But we should not be blind to the fact that such developments are both morally controversial and culturally freighted.
Outcome.
The only other reference point in the cursory Theological Foundations of the Report to Synod was a reference to Galatians 3:28. Paul’s point is about life in the baptised community; that those differences of religion, ethnicity, social status and sex are to be subsumed in the congregation into the greater reality of being one in Christ, which draws together all our ‘like some others’ identities. However, this difficult challenge to transcend the particularities of their social context, particularly in Galatia the question of whether Greeks should undergo the rite of circumcision, is dislocated from its context by the Report. The demanding, local challenge to unity with different ‘like some others’ becomes instead an abstract generalisation.
This happens when close attention to the specific situation of the text leads to theological sloppiness. Misleadingly, the text is made to be about ‘the differences that the world deploys to calibrate the value of human persons, and to group them inequitably’. It is not seen to be about the real-life challenges that come when groups that are, inter alia, ethnically different, share in the same fellowship.
Downplaying the importance of ‘like some others’, including ethnicity, is common both in contemporary debate (thus, again, the Runnymede Trust response to the Sewell Report) and in a church which tends to unthinkingly pick up easy, moralising fashions. But it leads to a serious failure to fully comprehend life both in our society and in our churches. Certainly, the world and churches’ wrong calibrating ‘the value of human persons’ is part of the problem, but until we attend much more closely to real issue of behavioural and cultural difference that Paul had to face (as indicated in last week’s blog on Romans 14), we will not be addressing a significant part of the challenges and joys that comes with bringing together into one communion very different ‘like some others’ groups. More of that in a future blog.