Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

A General Theory of Religious Communication

David G. Attfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351752572
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2001. Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age explores how a religion, Christian or any other focussing on a personal God, may be communicated to people in a secular age. With people uninterested, uninformed or unbelieving in the Godward dimension and in any particular religious tradition, David Attfield claims that appropriate communication is essential. Before direct communication can begin some background conditions in the targeted population must be satisfied, and communication then requires a series of stages. This book offers an examination of seven particular species for communication: evangelism; inter-faith dialogue; nurture of adults; nurture of children; religious education in schools; the academic study of religion; professional ministerial formation. David Attfield offers fresh insights and practical suggestions which will be of interest to a wide-range of students, academics and those in ministerial training and practice.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Christians desire to communicate their faith and some followers of other religions seek to do the same. In this introduction I tell how my theory of religious communication has evolved; I define the key terms and clarify the concepts the theory requires; and I outline the assumptions on which my argument is conducted.

(i) Autobiographical

Soon after Ordination into the Ministry of the Church of England I learned how difficult it is to communicate the faith, I became a Lecturer in a Church College of Education, because I believed Christianity could be communicated by Religious Education in schools - as was still assumed in the early 'sixties - and that by sharing in the training of teachers I could indirectly contribute to this enterprise of passing on the faith on a wider scale than by being a parish-priest or teacher myself.

Later I became involved in teaching philosophy of education and the principles of Religious Education. In the light of developments in thought in the 'sixties, I came to realise that, although imparting religion could not be the proper purpose of multi-faith, open-ended Religious Education, yet much of what we envisaged in the motivation of pupils, their learning and their exploration, had something in common with any rational approach to evangelism and nurture. True, commitment could not now be professionally intended by the Religious Education teacher, but as an incidental result of the process, the adoption of faith could still be privately hoped and prayed for.

In the course of my reflection on Religious Education and the nature of the Christian nurture of children within the household of faith, I worked out an analysis of the processes involved. Pupils must be motivated to learn; contexts and programmes of learning have to be set up; students need encouraging to explore what they have learnt; and lastly the possibility of commitment should be held open and, within some enterprises, should be encouraged, if young people wish to proceed to this.

The latter part of my career was as a priest in urban working-class parishes. For years I was baffled by the sheer difficulty of communicating religion to people there, whether without or within the churches. The basic problem is complete lack of interest in what we have to offer. I felt I was like a salesman trying to sell a product noone wants to buy. Reflection led me to see that it is necessary to nurture people's sense of God before there can be any possibility of motivating them to learn about faith.

Further I realised that several background conditions of successful communication had to be satisfied before even this nurture could be attempted. A certain ability to use words was needed for people to be able to comprehend and to explore the Gospel. A measure of autonomy was also necessary since, in today's world, faith must be a matter of individual choice. And finally persons require an opportunity to learn, with sufficient leisure, free from the pressures of life, for them to be able to give the time, thought and attention that communication demands of the hearer.

For some years I had been interested in stage-theories in psychology: Piaget on intellectual development; Kohlberg on moral; and Erikson on social and personal. Fowler on faith-development particularly attracted me. Now I realised that, if I added my earlier idea of developing a sense of God to my analysis in terms of motivation, learning, exploration and commitment; and if I placed, prior to these tasks being successfully carried out, the need to satisfy the background conditions of verbal ability, autonomy and opportunity, then I had the makings of a stage theory of religious communication. It would be general enough to underpin all the main species of this genus, and broad enough to compass communication in other theistic faiths. So now I come in this book to present systematically my general Theory of Religious Communication, in a work which sums up and draws together thinking from the dominant concerns of my working-life.¹

(ii) Defining the Key Terms

Before we can proceed to formulate our Stage Theory of Religious Communication, it is necessary to clarify and distinguish the activities to which, we claim, the Theory will apply in whole or in part. These enterprises are the Species of the Genus of Religious Communication: Evangelism; Inter-Faith Dialogue; Nurture; Child-Nurture; Religious Education; the Academic Study of Religion and Ministerial Formation. Further in distinguishing these from one another, we need an adequate definition of a Christian. This and other definitions are intended as the minimum required to identify the class of person or activity in question. An adequate conception or characterisation of what may be essential to them or important to them is left an open issue in each case. For instance, a theologically richer account of what it is to be a Christian may be needed for many purposes other than those we have in mind.

Our definition of a Christian roughly reflects ordinary usage and covers the people we would normally want to call Christians, as opposed to those we would not. The definition to be given does indeed depart radically from the popular use of the term to mean a merely decent person, since this usage is incoherent. For what about the decent Jew, Muslim etc.? Any useful analysis of what a Christian is must surely be able to distinguish a follower of the Christian faith from adherents of other great religions, who may be equally morally worthy!

We suggest a Christian is a member of a mainstream church, by whatever are its own criteria of membership, and who has not repudiated his or her membership. Clearly if people claim to have become atheists or whatever and if they affirm that they are no longer Christians, they must be allowed to be so no more, despite perhaps membership of the church through Infant Baptism. Further we consider it better to define the term 'Christian' in terms of belonging to a religious community rather than in terms of belief or experience, since these today vary so widely among those one would normally want to call Christians. This definition through church membership has the substantial advantage of identifying Christians by their association with a well-marked, recognisable society in the real world.

Again by inserting into the definition 'mainstream', membership of marginal cults or sects is excluded and a workable criterion can be provided by further regarding 'mainstream' as a body belonging to the World Council of Churches or Churches Together in England or similar organisations in other countries. We are willing to accept that by our definition such thinkers as Simone Weil will not count as a Christian because she chose not to be baptised into the Roman Catholic church:² her status as a great spiritual writer may be recognised by calling her a near- or quasi-Christian or a Seeker after Christian truth.

Among Christians so defined, 'practising' Christians must be further distinguished from 'non-practising', in a way comparable to the use of such distinctions in respect to other faiths. Practice here means attendance at public worship. Within the class of the non-practising we also mark off 'lapsed' from what may be termed 'aborted' Christians. Lapsed are those who once practised but no longer do. The aborted are those who never began to practise, as with babies whose parents never again bring them to church once they have been baptised.

Within the class of practising Christians we also divide the 'committed' from the 'non-committed'. A committed Christian we define as one who not only practises his or her faith by attending public worship but who also has a degree of self-conscious religious identity in terms of belief and what he or she is bound to do to express that belief. With churches that practise pedo-baptism commitment may be roughly equated with being confirmed, though not exclusively so. (For commitment presupposes a minimal measure of knowledge and thought about one's own faith and in the past confirmation has been for some a nominal or merely formal affair.) It also follows that a young child cannot be a committed Christian, since some degree of maturity and understanding is necessary to being committed. In Fowler's terms at least his third Stage of Synthetic Conventional faith is required for it to be sensible to describe a person as a committed Christian.³ This is the Stage when knowledge about Christianity is combined with a tendency to Christian practice (Synthetic), but faith is simply taken without choice or reflection from the Church in which the young person has been brought up (Conventional). Even with older children premature commitment, while in the throes of adolescence, is not to be encouraged any more than it is in other spheres like vocation or marriage. The commitment of faith is an adult affair at an age when some maturity has been attained.

(iii) Species of Communication

Now we can move on to using these definitions to distinguish from each other the activities our Theory covers when concerned with Christian Communication. With other theistic faiths, their adherents would have to elaborate parallel definitions to correspond with ours to cover the communicative enterprises they practise and to distinguish them from one another. The activities to be discussed may all be regarded as Species of Religious Communication: and for our purposes Communication is to be understood as the process whereby one person, the Communicator, conveys a message or skill, attitude or value, which he or she possesses already, to another person, whom we shall call from now on, the Communicatee (a term of art we have modelled on promisee or mortgagee, to denote the recipient of Communication); and this process must proceed in some intelligible way. (The last proviso is inserted to rule out coincidences, where there is no conceivable connection between the parties, having to be regarded as Communication.)

We distinguish seven Species within the genus of Religious Communication. They are: Evangelism, Inter-Faith Dialogue, Nurture, Child Nurture, Religious Education, the Academic Study of Religion and Ministerial Formation. These Species of Communication are different from each other in terms of the Communicator's intention. Human activities, as opposed to mere physical processes and random movements of our bodies, gain their character from what the agent intends, and his or her intention is often specified in the end-state, result or outcome they want to bring about. There are indeed puzzling cases where the actual outcome diverges from the intended outcome and the status of such activities may not be easy to characterise accurately. Such problems will be discussed after our seven Species have been considered one by one.

To begin with Evangelism. This we define as those communicative activities intended to cause a person to become a committed Christian for the first time, (and also those who have earlier lapsed from this category). For no evangelist would be content with causing anyone to become just a practising Christian without commitment. It is also important to notice that our definition is not in terms of describing the many and varied activities concerned, all of which may count as evangelism. Rather we work with the intention of causing someone to become a committed Christian,⁴ provided that the Communicators are themselves practising or committed Christians, (or followers of another faith with their Evangelism.)

One further implication of this definition should be noted. It is indeed possible to evangelise children but because commitment belongs to adulthood and maturity, child evangelism is an enterprise that cannot by definition be properly completed in childhood.⁵

The next Species we shall discuss is Inter-Faith Dialogue. Some people may consider this another variation on Evangelism. But when the Communicatee already has a rich and complex religious or other ideological commitment, communicating religion to him or her has to have a special character and cannot be treated as Evangelism. The intention to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Current Forms of Religious Communication and their Problems
• 3 The Core Theory
• 4 Background Conditions
• 5 Nourishing the Sense of God
• 6 Motivation and Myers-Briggs
• 7 Learning, Exploration and Commitment
• 8 Application
• 9 Objections
• 10 Training the Communicators
• 11 A Concluding Vision
• Bibliography
• Index