Public Life and the Place of the Church

Reflections to Honour the Bishop of Oxford

Michael Brierley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351151023
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The work of Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006, has been highly distinctive for the consistency of its engagement with contemporary society. It represents a model of the Church which is outward-looking, a Church which is as ready to learn from others as it is to offer its own wisdom and resources. This book reflects on Richard Harries' ministry in the 'borderlands' of society and Church, and engages deeply with the nature of modern society and the place of the Church within it. Taking Richard Harries' contributions as their inspiration, key figures, each of them major commentators on areas of pressing contemporary concern, probe the important questions which people are asking about a range of social issues. Arms and violence, the role of the media in public life, spirituality, multifaith Britain, sex, capitalism, the second chamber, and medical ethics are all discussed, building up a serious debate on the kind of society in which we live and making suggestive comments about the part which the Church might play. Contributors: Sabina Alkire, Michael Bourke, Melvyn Bragg, John Drury, Claire Foster, Jonathan Gorsky, Anthony Howard, Douglas Hurd, Eric James, Julia Neuberger, Edmund Newell, Christopher Rowland, Jane Shaw, Margaret Shepherd, Roger Wagner, Keith Ward, Rowan Williams, Shirley Williams and James Woodward.

Part One: Introduction

Chapter 1
Richard: The Person and the Bishop¹

James Woodward

My first experience of Richard Harries was during the early months of 1980, when I was a theology undergraduate at King’s College, London. Richard, then vicar of All Saints’, Fulham, came to give a lunch-hour talk to the chapel community about C. S. Lewis. I have three very clear recollections of him and his talk. The first was his energy and presence. His good looks, height and demeanour were striking. Secondly, he spoke about the Christian faith with clarity and passion, intelligence and wisdom. He drew his audience into his conviction. The dynamic between head and heart, thought and its application, was compelling. My final recollection was of a certain aloofness, which on that occasion seemed to express itself through his hasty exit when the meeting ended.

In 1981, towards the end of my time at King’s, Richard was appointed dean of the college. His duties included the care of ordinands, and so I had the opportunity to get to know him better as my sense of vocation deepened and enlarged. I found in Richard a careful guide, an encourager, and a person of discipline and prayer. When I left the college to work at St Christopher’s Hospice in south London, he brought a group of ordinands to see something of its life and work. He offered me the opportunity to reflect with the ordinands on what I had discovered about faith in the light of my daily encounter with dying and death. We kept in touch, and he came to preach at Westcott House, Cambridge, while I was in training there for ordained ministry. I take credit for having introduced him to the novels of Barbara Pym as we talked at the meal that followed. He kindly wrote to me both about Pym’s novels and about my experience at St Christopher’s following my ordination in Durham Cathedral in 1985. Then, much to my surprise, following his appointment to the bishopric of Oxford, he asked me to consider moving to become his chaplain. My vicar and the suffragan bishop of Jarrow resisted the move for both good and bad reasons. David Jenkins, the bishop of Durham, intervened, informing them both that the job of a diocesan bishop was difficult and so bishops should be free to appoint those who might ease the burden of the responsibilities. So, in my twenties, I moved from Durham to Oxford to spend three years working alongside Richard. My first responsibility was to act as his chaplain at his enthronement in Christ Church Cathedral, and my leaving party in 1990 coincided with the appointment of George Carey to succeed Robert Runcie as archbishop of Canterbury.

Over the last fifteen years, I have kept in touch with Richard and his family. I cannot quite say that I know him intimately, but we have a strong bond of affection and mutual respect. It is out of that bond of affection, and by way of appreciation, that I write this introductory essay. I write as a biased, though not uncritical, friend, who believes that Richard, the person and the bishop, has made a significant contribution to the life of the Church. I have consulted widely though not comprehensively, and I have made my own judgment about what should properly be left unsaid out of respect for an individual’s right to privacy. I wish to join my voice to many others in applauding Richard’s astonishing range of achievements. In this chapter, then, I should like to offer an overview of some of the stages and areas of Richard’s life, in particular as they relate to my own experience of him.²

Richard speaks warmly and affectionately about his undergraduate time at Cambridge. He went up to Selwyn College in 1958 to read theology after four years in the army, having done maths and physics at A-level but with a growing interest in literature and music. He has always spoken appreciatively of the influences that came his way at Cambridge. John Sweet guided Richard through the theological tripos, which he tackled with energy and enthusiasm. Sweet has talked of his discipline and his ‘robust and penetrating intelligence’. Contemporaries and teachers saw how academically ambitious Richard was, even if he was not exactly an academic through and through. He is remembered as a leading figure in college, athletically and socially, but also as someone who had time for unglamorous friends – he bothered about people who didn’t quite fit in. Richard has often said that the best thing to happen to him at Cambridge was to meet Jo, a medical student. Together they contemplated the possibility of working abroad in a mission hospital. Their common compassion, concern for justice and idealism, all began to take shape at Cambridge. Another contemporary at Cambridge remembers him as being refreshingly un-ecclesiastical and non-aggressive, combining a pleasant and friendly personality with a good sense of humour.³

A major influence at Cambridge was the philosophical theologian Donald MacKinnon.⁴ The relentless pursuit of truth, the openness to those who see fundamental objections to Christianity and the philosophical rigour of MacKinnon’s thought were to be major intellectual influences on Richard’s life. As Richard has shown extensively in his own writings, unless theology engages with the central concerns and features of human existence and illuminates them, then it is trivial.

From 1961 to 1963, Richard was at Cuddesdon theological college, where Robert Runcie was the principal. Sometimes he has regretted that he did not make the best use of his time there, but it was nevertheless a period when a number of experiences and people shaped him. He often reflects on the importance of knowing one’s limitations as a priest and managing boundaries in the parish – lessons which he learned from a six-month course at the Littlemore psychiatric hospital in Oxford. At his charges given to those embarking on ordained ministry, he often warns them to learn to know what they can cope with and what they cannot. His understanding and sense of perspective have made him a particularly sympathetic pastor to those who come with problems in difficult or demanding parochial situations.

Cuddesdon in the 1960s was still a strict and austere college.⁵ Women were hardly allowed into the college, and some of Richard’s contemporaries admit to having been jealous when Jo, who was now engaged to Richard, used to come down from London (where she was finishing her medical training) in her sports car. A strong and supportive relationship between Richard and Runcie developed at this time, and it was a constant strand throughout Richard’s life.⁶ He admired Runcie enormously for his flair and social charm, and he was always very protective when Runcie came under press and media attack. He often described Runcie as ‘a great human being’ and stood in some awe of his war record and military service. There were two other decisive influences on Richard during this period. The first was that of Austin Farrer, whose works have had a significant effect on Richard’s thinking, especially in what he has attempted to write on the problem of evil and suffering. He is particularly proud of his anthology of Farrer’s writings published in 1987.⁷ The other influence was Bill Vanstone’s offering of a moral and spiritual vision of God.⁸ It is a theme that Richard has often picked up in preaching and in his writing about art. Both Farrer and Vanstone delivered addresses at Cuddesdon while Richard was there.

Richard was ordained in 1963 to a title at Hampstead parish church. It was in that year that he married Jo, and during his curacy they had two children, Mark and Clare. Richard stayed at Hampstead for six years, grateful that his vicar gave him so much freedom to get on with things that stimulated him. He started a Samaritan befriending group and had a radical concern for people in the community and the church’s connection with them. There is a very deep idealist streak in Richard. During this period, he became interested in Marxism and encouraged the Church to engage with the ferment and idealism that marked the 1960s. The broadcaster Piers Plowright and his wife Poh Sim have very vivid memories of him at this time:

When we came back from Khartoum to Hampstead in the sixties we found a new and rather dashing couple living in the little Station Cottage that served as a shelter for the curate of St John at Hampstead. They had one child like us and my first memory of Richard and Jo is in the summer garden of my doctor father’s house: rugs on the grass with two tiny children rolling and tumbling around us. I don’t think we talked much theology, but we did talk a lot about books and painting and history and theatre. It was quite clear that this was not a clerical couple of narrow culture, but two people very open to the joys and pleasures of the mind and the worlds⁹

One of the chief influences during Richard’s curacy was that of Joseph McCulloch, a priest who had held a number of positions, and at that time worked at weekends at Hampstead parish church.¹⁰ He developed ‘dialogue sermons’, believing that the Church ought constantly to be open to the world and its concerns. Richard has described McCulloch as

consistently the best preacher I have ever heard. He taught me that sermons could be both interesting and important […] He knew that so many of the traditional images and ideas of the Church had gone dead on people today, and struggled to find fresh ways of presenting Christianity at the intellectual borders of our time.¹¹

Similarly, in a sermon at Cuddesdon in 2004, commemorating 150 years of theological education there, Richard said of McCulloch, ‘I had heard good sermons before, even brilliant sermons, but none which so consistently conveyed a sense of really grappling with themes that mattered, with the possibility of fundamental insight into the truth of what it is to be a human being’¹² Clearly, this became more and more Richard’s own approach and the basis of Richard’s desire to connect with a range of intellectually aware people outside the Church.

In 1969, the family moved to Wells in Somerset, where Richard had been appointed to a lectureship in doctrine and ethics at the theological college. There were aspects of the churchy world of a theological college that really did not appeal. But this was a period that set the foundation for a number of Richard’s ongoing interests and concerns. A decisive influence was the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr.¹³ Niebuhr’s Marxist analysis within a moral framework had a very significant influence on American politicians, as well as on key socialist thinkers and activists such as Dennis Healey. The experience of teaching was a formative one for Richard, especially in his desire to see Christian theology applied in practice. During this time, he was working on a PhD under the late Professor Gordon Dunstan of King’s College, London, on the just war tradition, and in particular, the principles of proportion and discrimination as they apply to the nuclear debate. He did a great deal of work on this thesis but failed to complete it – which certainly is an abiding disappointment for him. It has given him sympathy for those with PhDs, and a commitment to support those who wish to pursue research. The fruit of his own labours has appeared in a large number of writings, including Should a Christian Support Guerrillas?¹⁴

Richard succeeded Donald Andrews as vicar of All Saints’, Fulham, in 1972. The contrast was enormous. Andrews had been 61 when he was appointed to the parish in 1965 and the tide was then already rapidly moving out away from the Church that he understood and knew. Richard came to a church that was rather tired. His style of preaching, his ability to connect with the culture of the times, his capacity to use the media, and his good fortune in attracting excellent curates (such as Peter Wheatley and Christopher Moody)¹⁵ meant that the life of the parish took off – and indeed has continued to be lively ever since. It was the sort of place where a liberal catholic, intelligent congregation could be gathered in good numbers. The choice of Richard for this job was a very wise one. It played to his strengths. He applied himself with passion and energy, keen to try and help people to look for the meaning and purpose of life within the context of the Christian faith.

It was while he was in this parish that he started broadcasting. He did ‘Prayer for the Day’ on BBC Radio 4 every Friday for eleven years without a break, and in due course became as well known for his ‘Thoughts for the Day’.¹⁶ Some of his most sensitive reflections and prayers come from this early time. Prayers of Hope and Morning Has Broken are wonderfully crafted explorations of the goodness of creation and the human nature which God has given.¹⁷ A fellow broadcaster-priest pays this glowing tribute to Richard’s own ability in the area of communication:

I would judge some of his Thoughts for the Day to be among the finest examples of this genre of broadcasting – an attractive voice, a keen intelligence, a passionate commitment to justice and a telling ability to put across a persuasive case make him a formidable broadcaster of a scripted talk.¹⁸

The late Brian Redhead, in a foreword to Richard’s book Morning Has Broken, wrote appreciatively about Richard’s broadcasts:

What I always enjoyed most was not only that they were lucid and serious, but that they – or rather Richard – wore his learning lightly. He talked of the past and of people of the past and above all of poetry as if these recollections were part of the everyday conversation of thoughtful people. As indeed they are, or should be.

I never said this to his face, but in private I used to compare him with George Herbert. And then one day I was reading another of the great metaphysical poets, Henry Vaughan. That’s Richard, I thought. His prayers glow with the true inner light, like Henry Vaughan’s […] I have found [these prayers] a source of great comfort and strength.¹⁹

The nine years at Fulham surely gave Richard the wisdom about the work of a parish which has formed the way in which he has operated as a diocesan bishop. Chiefly, he knows what parochial life is about. He came to understand from the inside the wearing demands of holding a congregation together, and dealing with conflict, disagreement and disappointment. He understood how the priest could be vulnerable to – as well as delighted by – a range of individuals and groups within a parochial context. He learnt from the inside the demands that vicarage life places on a spouse and family. These experiences have enabled him to sympathise readily with parish priests, and he has been a stout defender and supporter of their work. He has managed also to sit reasonably lightly to some of the more unrealistic complaints that come into the bishop’s of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Engaging with Issues
• Part Three: Public Life and the Place of the Church
• Bibliography of Richard Harries’s publications to 2004
• Index