Theology for Changing Times

John Atherton and the Future of Public Theology

Baker, Graham, Baker, Graham

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780334056973
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

From wealth creation to wealth distribution and social ethics, from urban mission to religious studies and psychology the work of John Atherton was breathtaking in scope and variety. Unifying all of his work, however, was a concern with engaging the work of theology with wider society.With contributions from some of the leading lights in public theology today, this book offers not only an appreciation of John Atherton's work within a prodigiously large array of disciplines, but also an attempt to ask 'what next', taking his work forward and considering where the future of public theology might lie. John Atherton's last published article is also reproduced.

1. Introduction: Genealogies, Typologies and Reformulations

CHRISTOPHER BAKER AND ELAINE GRAHAM

To read the eight major volumes of public theology that spanned John Atherton’s extraordinarily rich and consistent output from the early 1980s up to his death in 2016 is to swim in an immense tide of human experience, social history, global upheaval and religious and secular change. John’s public theology captures a period in history that is still shaping our collective experience. The last 40 years have been an era of turmoil and often traumatic disorientation: from the rise of Thatcherism and the big bang of financial deregulation, the collapse of the post-war global consensus and the break-up of the Soviet Union, growing social inequality and the decline of Christianity in the West, through to 9/11, the rise of grass-roots protest such as the Occupy movement, global religious revival and the current moment of dangerous and febrile nationalist populism across Europe and the USA. John’s work accurately and presciently captures these historical and social movements in a way that no one else in public or political theology has done.

And yet these monographs (along with many chapters, journal articles, collaborations and edited volumes) also hold these movements and moments in a rich and optimistic canvas. They capture the ever-present outpouring of divine love and purpose into the world, and relish the constant intellectual and spiritual challenge this represents in the promise of a coherent, critical, yet also timeless theology of hope and redemption. It is the constancy of vision, experience, imagination and method that holds this both intricate and widely scoped tapestry together. As a corpus of work, it is unique in the way it creates a distinctive voice that is supremely confident in how it critically analyses and redefines intellectual and hermeneutical paradigms.

This is the rich legacy of John’s work, in its constant modulations and frequencies that interweave through the past, the present and the future, that this festschrift attempts to capture. Of the many direct quotes that will adorn this volume, two sum up particularly well the fearless and compassionate, yet also grounded, ontology of John’s work. They both come from the introduction to his most critically acclaimed volume, Public Theology for Changing Times, written on the cusp of the new millennium. The first quote articulates the method, the second defines the rationale. In the context of the exponential reach of globalization and the market, representing the new empire that has replaced the stasis generated by Cold War ideologies and mutually assured destruction, John writes:

The task is to develop large theologies which connect in critical dialogue with the narratives demanded by global contexts and questions. There can be no retreat from the Christian task of developing public theologies of global proportions. (Atherton, 2000, p. viii)

The second quote unambiguously frames the rationale for such a public theology; namely that the work of divine healing, redemption, judgement and imagination takes place in the daily processes of labour and change in the world. ‘And God created Man(chester)’ was the ironic marketing sobriquet invented at the height of the rebranding of Manchester as a post-industrial centre of music, culture and the arts in 1990s. It is one that we should also apply to John’s work, since time and time again the twin cities of Manchester and Salford, and his proudly held working-class Lancashire upbringing, are the crucibles from which his public theology is forged. Manchester, writes John,

drives us deep into histories of urbanization and industrialization and their transformation as global processes. It confronts us with great global challenges, from environment to marginalization … and therefore means developing a familiarity with a variety of disciplines from economics and politics to history and literature [and] is an unfamiliar world to many in churches and theological departments. (2000, pp. 1–2)

Alien as a northern industrial conurbation may seem to most churches and academic theological departments, for John it was a natural habitat, given his theological conviction that for any Christian, any theologian, ‘absorption in the secular, in God’s world and works, is one of the most exciting and creative of journeys’ (2000, p. 2).

We now lay out as a ‘curtain-raising’ exercise what we consider to be six key dimensions or modalities of John’s work which emerge out of our own memories of working closely with him, as well as those evoked by our co-workers in this volume. These modalities are: a ‘Manchester School’; a genius of place (namely context and materiality from which public theology emerges); engagement with the non-theological and empirical (as an embodiment of a Christian-orientated realism and pragmatism); ecumenical social ethics; morality and the market (and how both are ‘reformulated’ in mutual encounter); and autoethnography (‘writing oneself in’ as a critical actor in the theological and intellectual landscape through which one is travelling).

1 A ‘Manchester School’?

In Christianity and the Market (1992) John points to a chain of connection between teachers and pupils within English Christian social thought (Atherton, 1992, p. 184) stretching from the mid-nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. It begins with F. D. Maurice, B. F. Westcott and Charles Gore, who taught both William Temple and R. H. Tawney, continuing with Tawney’s student Ronald Preston, who supervised John for his Manchester doctorate awarded in 1974 (on Tawney, with particular reference to The Acquisitive Society). John himself was aware of this legacy and once (half-jokingly, perhaps) referred to it as a form of ‘apostolic succession’ (Atherton, 2000, p. 79; see also Sedgwick this volume). Whether it constitutes a definable ‘Manchester School’, however, is another matter. Later in this volume, Peter Sedgwick rejects this notion – and he is right to do so if what is meant is some kind of rigid orthodoxy, or quaint form of ancestor worship. What it does signal, however – and where perhaps it remains a helpful reference point – is what it says about John himself: undoubtedly, shaped by the Temple-Preston tradition of Anglican social thought, but also indelibly, uniquely forged in the social and economic crucible of Manchester and Salford, as the world’s first industrial cities (2000, pp. 1–2; 2005). The shock of urbanization, the birth of political economy, the crisis of faith, the challenge of economic scarcity, the call to social solidarity; all these provided John with the raw materials of his craft.

While Manchester – cathedral and university – were the twin poles within which so much of his work was conceived, John’s career also reflects a remarkable openness to changing times and influences. His conviction was, above all, that Christian social ethics must begin with the empirical realities of a situation, paying close attention to the social conditions, even as they were changing around him. In that respect, he did stand in a tradition of English social scientific empiricism that remained constant to his approach and that fuelled his intellectual curiosity up to his death; in another respect, as circumstances changed around him, as his perspective became more global, his work transcended any single influence or tradition.

So there may not have been a ‘Manchester School’ in any doctrinaire sense, then, although possibly it was – as Sedgwick suggests – a ‘story’: one that was materially embodied in the unfolding narratives of history and the theoretical systems of economics, in the built and natural environments of Lancashire and urban geography of Manchester–Salford, as well as told through these intergenerational bonds of intellectual affinity. But whatever the Manchester School, story or brand may have been, it was never purely an intellectual club. John’s theology was certainly honed by his many years teaching Christian social ethics to generations of undergraduates at the University of Manchester, and in conversations with colleagues – another circle that widened over the years to reflect his connections to Uppsala and Princeton in particular. But to read his work is to rediscover, powerfully, how rooted too he was in the life of the Church – not as an ecclesiological ideal, but in the regular routines and disciplines of its liturgy and the quotidian encounters of parish life and pastoral care. John looked to integrate ‘theory’ with ‘practice’ – indeed, he would deny their separation, since the challenge was how to weave together the various dimensions of ‘practical involvement, worship and theological reflection into one coherent whole, into one rich Christian way of life’ (Atherton, 1988, p. 128). By Public Theology for Changing Times John was deliberately referring to theology as ‘practical divinity’ in order to capture that blend of ‘a disciplined reflection on the nature and destiny of life, with regard to an ultimate frame of reference’ and ‘the tangible, practical consequences of that theological voice … into and through partnership and reconciliation operating in our contexts, discerning, interpreting and promoting what is going on’ (2000, p. 3).

Despite its shortcomings (and John was highly critical of the institution at times), the Church is the place in which the necessary virtues of a worldly but faithful spirituality, grounded in the rhythms of prayer, word and sacrament, are cultivated. At a personal level, and as an Anglican priest, John was always firmly committed to his local Christian community, not least because he knew it to be the place in which theological concepts such as common good, the Body of Christ (1988, pp. 25f.) or the capacious God (2000) ‘took flesh’ in the practices of solidarity, interdependence, human dignity and ‘the ways of justice and of peace’ (1988, p. 31).

Yet this is a public theology too: the Church’s self-understanding as the people of God was not solely a vision for itself alone, but a reminder of the essential unity and fellowship of the entire human family and ‘a potential focus of great power for Christian engagement with the corporate realities of contemporary life’ (1988, p. 31). In this respect, John lived creatively within the dialectic of secular and sacred, action and reflection, convinced that this constituted the true calling of the Church in the world: ‘Worship which is divorced from reflection and action will change nothing. It never leaves the church building’ (Atherton, 1988, p. 26). This commitment to context, attention to detail, narrative and embodied change is what characterized John’s essential quality, that of rootedness. This came out of a profoundly incarnational and sacramental theology which understands the affairs of the world as the place in which ‘God is to be found, worshipped and served’ (1983, p. 124).

2 A ‘genius of place’: the importance of context

John liked to quote the prospect of Friedrich Engels surveying the urban landscape of Manchester and Salford from Blackstone Edge in 1842 as an expression of how the impact of the Industrial Revolution was carved into the very contours of the physical environment (1994, p. 10). Like Engels, who portrayed the divisions of the emergent capitalist social order in spatial terms, noting the physical estrangement and separation of different classes as they passed one another, seemingly indifferent to the other’s existence, on the city streets, Atherton also used the industrial and economic topography of his native Lancashire as a symbol of the profound economic, social and political change of the past 250 years. This was a story of population growth and upheaval, extremes of wealth and poverty, transformation of the built and natural environments and corresponding adjustments to human expectations – and it was written into the built environment, the stories of its population, its ideas and social movements. John also commented on the way in which, only in Manchester, could a public building, the Free Trade Hall, be named not after a saint, river or landowner but an idea – indeed a political and economic philosophy at the heart of industrial capitalism.

Yet while the immediate story of the world’s first industrial conurbation may have formed the backdrop to his earlier work, as years went on John expanded his view to encompass an ever more globalized vista. If initially his curiosity was how a series of local circumstances in the north west of England – climate, financial, demographic, political – combined to effect the global eruption of industrial capitalism, then increasingly his enquiry was refracted through ever more complex and global and interdisciplinary lenses. This more global shift begins with Public Theology for Changing Times, a book for the new millennium where the threats and opportunities generated by globalization are even more apparent. The issue of poverty (and its corollary of wellbeing) continues to be refracted through ever complex and global and interdisciplinary lenses. ‘The task is to develop large theologies which connect in critical dialogue with the narratives demanded by global contexts and questions. There can be no retreat from the Christian task of developing public theologies of global proportions’ (2000, p. viii).

3 Theological method: engagement with the non-theological

Continuity and change also mark his interdisciplinary engagement, as well: from a disciplined articulation of the need to incorporate the insights of secular analysis as part of a truly ‘public’ theology that was both accountable and relevant, to a deep engagement with later sources and world views beyond political economy that, for him, offered vital insights into human behaviour: religious studies, the economics and psychology of happiness and wellbeing, Islamic economics, evolutionary biology, and so on.

Thus in the earlier volumes, written in the 1980s and early 1990s, there is a commitment to engaging theology with social and ecclesial history (especially focusing on the north west of England), and those disciplines associated with what John constantly referred to as political economy. These included the history of economic ideas, and the history of political and philosophical ideas relating to how best to combine ethics and distribution of goods such as equality, justice and the common good. Thus Smith, Tawney, Malthus, Ricardo, Keynes, Marshall, Rawls, Weber (especially his work on religion and capitalism) and Engels interact with Temple, Preston, Niebuhr and Buber.

Later work in the early 2000s focuses on globalization and its challenge to imagine and generate a new pro-poor, pro-environment political economy (Sen, Stiglitz). This, combined with a clear trajectory on institutional church decline in the West, sees him engaging more with feminist social theorists and economists (Young), and sociology of religion (Putnam, Davie). His last phase of work, written over the last ten years, sees a much greater focus on what he calls the ‘hard’ (namely post-Marxist) sociology of Castells, Bourdieu, Levinas, Derrida and Hardt and Negri. It also engages with wellbeing and happiness studies, including popular psychology and behavioural economics (Seligman, Haidt, Deaton, Fogel), and their ability to measure subjective wellbeing and techno-physical wellbeing, religious studies, and the work of women theologians such as Charry and Tanner.

For John, the insights o...