A Neo-Hegelian Theology

The God of Greatest Hospitality

Andrew Shanks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317187448
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Religion

The thought of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) haunts the world of theology. Constantly misunderstood, and often maliciously misrepresented, Hegel nevertheless will not go away. Perhaps no other thinker in Christian tradition has more radically sought to think through the requirements of perfect open-mindedness, identified as the very essence of the truly sacred. This book is not simply an interpretation of Hegel. Rather, it belongs to an attempt, so far as possible, to re-do for today something comparable to what Hegel did for his day. Divine revelation is on-going: never before has any generation been as well positioned as we are now, potentially to comprehend the deepest truth of the gospel. So Hegel argued, of his own day. And so this book also argues, of today. It is an attempt to indicate, in Trinitarian form, the most fundamentally significant ways in which that is the case. Thus, it opens towards a systematic understanding of the history of Christian truth, essentially as an ever-expanding medium for the authentic divine spirit of openness.

Chapter 1
‘Heresy’

A Correspondence

In the first place: the ‘descent’ of the ‘God the Holy Spirit’ on the apostles at the first Christian Pentecost, described in Acts of the Apostles 2: 1–42, symbolically represents the birth of the Church, as a more than ephemeral organisation. And for the early Christians, faced by the problems involved in devising an essentially new form of religious institution, the Holy Spirit was always first and foremost the divine indwelling of authentic Church life. But if the real truth of Christian faith is essentially to be understood as the Christian expression of perfect truth-as-openness – what then follows, for our theological understanding of the Holy Spirit today, after almost two millennia of Church history?

The immediate logical corollary must be that, considered as the basis for a solidarity-building project, perfect truth-as-openness is ultimately incompatible with any measure tending to create a closed community, fearful of internal dissent. What, though, would it mean for us to follow this principle through with absolute consistency, in actual practice?

I begin here with a question primarily relating to the Third Person of the Trinity, just because the writing of this book was initiated by an experience which raised it, in a very direct way. Thus, I work as a priest at Manchester Cathedral. Shortly after Easter 2011, the Cathedral hosted an event entitled ‘Spirit of Life’, which a number of people considered scandalous. I was not myself at all involved in the organising. And in fact it represented an evangelistic strategy about which I am somewhat sceptical. But what scandalised me here was not so much the event itself. Rather, it was the extravagance of some of the hostile reaction. Precisely: the heresy-hunting tone of it.

The event was intended as a ‘Christian Mind, Body, Spirit fair’. It was designed to appeal to the sort of people who buy books in the ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ section of twenty-first-century bookshops; who are liable to declare that they are ‘spiritual’ people but not ‘religious’. That is to say: people for whom ‘spirituality’ is all about individual self-fulfilment – supported by small affinity groups perhaps – but without much real loyalty to any ‘religious’ institution; and whose attitude to tradition is essentially that of free-floating consumers, picking and choosing on the basis of their own private ‘spiritual experience’, as opposed to the corporate legacy of traditional ‘religious’ authority. The publicity featured kitsch images of joyous young folk leaping for joy, frolicking in lovely sunlit fields. It offered ‘meditation and mysticism, prophecy and Jesus-Deck Reading [i.e., ‘Christian’ fortune telling, through the use of cards], massage and therapies, creative arts, prayer and conversation’.

Personally, I am a ‘religious’ person’ rather than a ‘spiritual’ one, in this sense. For, I am mistrustful of the sense of personal innocence which ‘spiritual’ people all too often seem to enjoy, in their inner dissociation from any sort of tarnished corporate tradition. People who live in such innocence are dispensed from a certain sort of hard political and intellectual work, critically engaging with such a tradition from within; which, when it is well done, belongs, I think, to the very essence of the sacred.

Nevertheless, I did not share in the outburst of righteous indignation gleefully anticipated by the Daily Mail when it first broke the story at the end of March. As Andrew Brown, writing in the Church Times, comments, this story perfectly exemplified the ‘almost mathematical’ formula for a Daily Mail religion story:

A story of this sort … makes sense only within a framework of certain assumptions … [and] all it really tells you is that these assumptions, helpfully spelled out, are reassuringly true. So we learn that ‘the move’ [whatever it is] ‘is certain to anger traditionalists’; also that ‘the Church is in trouble’ [attendances falling and so forth].

There is also one slightly new fact, telling us the same thing in a different way: ‘earlier this month, the Vatican boasted that 900 disaffected Anglicans have left their parishes to become Roman Catholics. Many are believed to have felt alienated by the Church’s 1992 decision to allow women to be ordained as priests’.

Once all this is in place, we insert the notional new story, as fragile as the filament in a light-bulb: ‘The Church of England was braced for a fresh row today after a cathedral announced plans to host a “new age” festival’.¹

Never mind that all the contributors were self-professed Christians, carefully vetted by the organisers, who in turn were all very much part of the ecclesiastical establishment. No doubt, that was only going to make things worse, in the eyes of critics intent above all on demonstrating how corrupt the establishment itself had become, how much it truly deserved to be ‘in trouble’.

Brown goes on:

Good luck to the Mail in finding those traditionalists certain to be angered by this outrage. It is also worth noting that the paper, which regards itself as sympathetic to the traditionalists, runs half a page of astrology every day, and most days will have some New Age story in the hypochondria section, reported as if nothing could be more reasonable.²

But how could it be otherwise? Readily outraged ‘traditionalists’ sit side by side with the superstitious readers of horoscopes, in one and the same newspaper-reading demographic.

And, of course, the anticipated outrage did indeed swiftly materialise. In particular, Charles Raven saw a fine opportunity here. Raven wrote a sharp article in the Church of England Newspaper, and another even sharper one on the website Virtue Online, drawing attention to the event as prime evidence of the Church of England’s current decadence.³ He denounced the organisers’ general apparent ‘disregard for theology’ and raised the spectre of heresy by denouncing them as ‘these modern New Age Gnostics’: stretching the word ‘Gnostic’, I suppose, to cover simply any sort of Christian syncretistic openness towards a larger ‘spiritual’ milieu.

I am myself reluctant to use the term ‘Gnostic’ quite so loosely; or, one might well say, so un-theologically. But what really nettled me in Raven’s polemic was his personal attack on our Cathedral Poet, Rachel Mann, who had been invited to participate in the event but then withdrew. Rachel is a parish priest. However, she is also known, amongst other things, for her affectionate defence of the ‘heavy metal’ music scene; her principled refusal to be scandalised by the cheerful comedic blasphemies, and general pantomime rebelliousness, of its bands. Raven professed to be scandalised by her not-being-scandalised.⁴ Personally, I find the endemic hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness of the Daily Mail (for instance) a good deal more scandalous. And this clearly represents a pretty fundamental difference of theological instinct.

At first, I did not recognise Raven’s name. The by-line to the article in the Church of England Newspaper identified him as ‘minister of Christ Church Wyre Forest’ and director of his own ‘Anglican’ campaigning website, entitled ‘SPREAD’. So I looked him up in Crockford’s Clerical Directory. He was not listed as a Church of England cleric. And then it came back to me: a vague memory, dating back to the period 1999–2002, of a local schism in the diocese of Worcester. When the then-Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby, had made public his dissent from Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, on sexuality – which he (I think quite rightly) saw as a deplorable surrender, by his peers, to rank homophobic prejudice – Raven, as priest in charge of St. John’s Kidderminster in that diocese, had responded by declaring that the Bishop was no longer persona grata there. He had invited in a couple of (impeccably anti-gay) Ugandan bishops to conduct a confirmation service, without permission. And the dispute had then rumbled on until at length his licence expired and he was compelled to leave. Whereupon he had set up a new para-Anglican church, taking about half the congregation of St. John’s with him. In the meantime, he had established himself as one of the major leaders of the puritanical, GAFCON-oriented resistance to the Church of England establishment nationally.⁵ Hence, his interest in the present matter, which, for him, was very much part of a larger project.

I decided to write to him:

9 April 2011

Dear Charles,

I read your articles in ‘Virtue Online’ and the Church of England Newspaper, attacking this Cathedral, with (as you may imagine!) some interest. And, as you frame your attack partly in terms of the need for basic theological seriousness, I’m piqued, as Canon Theologian here, into responding.

Actually, the ‘Spirit of Life’ event is something I personally knew nothing about before all the furore blew up. And I’m ready to be persuaded that I ought to be more critical of it than I’m immediately inclined to be. For the theology behind it certainly isn’t my cup of tea at all.

But what strikes me here is, in fact, how different this contemporary form of gnosticism is from classical Gnosticism. Thus, it is at any rate free from what I take to be the real nastiness of (a good deal of) classical Gnosticism: namely, the schismatic spiritual elitism of those ancient groups. This modern lot want to gather in a Cathedral, with the blessing of a bishop. Therefore, they aren’t Gnostics in the classical sense. It may be that there’s some silliness involved. But – let’s be serious about sin! Silliness, in itself, isn’t quite the same as sin. Or am I missing something?

The essence of heresy, as I understand it, is the positive will to generate schism. Indeed, isn’t that the original understanding? Heresy isn’t just a matter of being wrong; rather, it’s what wilfully destroys the proper conversation space for theology. The hate-driven will which constitutes heresy sabotages the possibility of open, charitable conversation which is the only environment within which God’s truth can really flourish. It leads to the worship of doctrinal ‘correctness’ as an idol: an utterly incorrect over-valuation of mere ‘correctness’, in itself.

My thinking this, of course, makes me your enemy. The theology of SPREAD, as demonstrated in the Kidderminster schism, is quite clearly heretical according to my understanding of the term: it’s centred precisely on a heretical notion of the criteria for identifying ‘heresy’. But, because I believe in open, charitable conversation also with heretics, I’m writing to you nonetheless. You perhaps justifiably criticize the ‘Spirit of Life’ people for softening the gospel, removing from it any real call to repentance. I agree: let’s not soften the truth-imperative of the gospel. Above all, the gospel demands openness. And therefore I gently invite you to repent the whole closed-down tone of your theology – as you’ll no doubt, reciprocally, want to invite me to repent the whole tone of mine, according to your quite different understanding.

I guess you’ll think that I’m a heretic. Very well! My ‘heresy’ is to believe that God is love, overflowing not least towards those whom the godless world treats as outcasts. Therefore, any doctrine insofar as it tends to identify the gospel with ‘traditional’ hatred of social outcasts, such as gay people, is to my mind, anathema. Indeed, I see heresy all over the place in church history. I yield to no Reformer in my sense of just how busy the Antichrist has always been. And where such hatred prevails in the church itself, everything gets confused: ‘God’ is made to look like the great persecutor, Satan; and ‘Satan’, misconceived as the god of all outcasts, begins in certain forms of protest-thinking actually to look a bit like Christ. (For example: in the poetry of Baudelaire, as T.S. Eliot saw; and perhaps, although heavy metal isn’t to my bourgeois taste, Rachel Mann is right to find something of the same spirit at work in that sub-culture too!)⁶ Or again – am I missing something?

How do you, fundamentally, justify your conversation-closing commitment to schismatic intolerance? Is it simply self-evident to you? Am I perhaps wasting my time, I wonder, writing this?

I do hope not.

With all best wishes,

Andrew Shanks

It was only, really, in the process of writing this that I discovered why I was writing it: I needed to work out what I thought about ‘heresy’ in general, and here was a chance. Thus, suppose we do not think of ‘heresy’, automatically, as meaning just ‘whatever has in the past acquired that label’ but that, instead, we ask ourselves the elementary question: why do we need a concept of ‘heresy’ in the first place? (Do we even need the concept at all?) By any account, ‘heresy’ is something more than common or garden theological error. Surely, it is that particular sort of error which most fundamentally damages the very space for future conversation within the Church. Consider what does this. The obvious conclusion is that ‘heresy’ is, in the first instance, definable along the lines I suggest: as whatever derives from, and tends to reinforce, a conversation-closing will-towards-schism. In other words: the sort of attitude that prevents people from properly listening to each other; makes them posture and shout instead; reduces the exchange of theological ideas to mere point-scoring debate. At all events, such certainly seems to be the meaning of the words hairēsis and hairētikos in the New Testament, which the 1611 King James Bible renders ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’. (See 1 Corinthians 11: 18–19, Galatians 5: 20, Titus 3: 10, 2 Peter 2: 1.) Of course, the later notion of ‘heresy’ had not yet developed in the apostolic period; there was no large, well-developed body of ‘orthodox’ doctrine, from which ‘heresy’ might be said to deviate. But, rather, these words referred to any sort of petty-minded community-destroying disputatiousness. William Tyndale, in his pioneering 1526 translation, therefore rendered them as ‘secte’ and ‘author of sectes’ (using intellectual secateurs, as it were, to dissect the community into quarrelsome sections). And one may well prefer Tyndale’s rendition.⁷ Raven is very much a ‘back to the Bible’ sort of man. In this matter, however, I think I have the Bible on my side.

He replied, I must say, with great courtesy, and at some length. First, he assured me he had not wanted to attack me, or indeed the Bishop of Manchester, who he sensed had been somewhat embarrassed by the whole affair. And then yes, he acknowledged that ‘this modern Gnosticism’ was different from classical Gnosticism. Yet, does not the warning for instance in 1 Timothy 4: 7 to keep away from ‘silly myths’ also apply to the modern version? My describing his doctrinal position, grounded as it is ‘on Canon A5 and the Anglican formularies’, as ‘heretical’ clearly indicated that I was, as he put it, ‘reinterpreting “orthodoxy” in such a way that it no longer has any straightforward relationship with propositional doctrinal statements’. This was a tendency he also discerned in the thought of Archbishop Rowan Williams: to render orthodoxy ‘a conversation rather than a confession’. However, he was anxious lest this degenerate into a mere recipe for muddle. He noted that both the Archbishop and I are admirers of Hegel, as a philosophic celebrant of systematic conversational openness. But he was, he remarked, more than a little suspicious of the ‘institutional convenience’ of such Hegelianism ‘when the ecclesio-political imperative is to keep people at the table come what may’. In fact, he indicated that he was altogether more inclined to sympathise with a polemical militant such as Giles Fraser, on the opposite side of the Anglican civil war to himself: two hard-liners, at any rate sharing the view that some things are simply ‘non-negotiable’. And he referred in particular to Fraser’s foreword to my book Against Innocence, on the Hegelian thought of Gillian Rose, in which this issue is raised.⁸ After all, not everyone who takes a stand on ‘non-negotiable’ principle is necessarily, as I had put it, ‘hate-driven’. Prior to his own stand, against Bishop Peter Selby, he had in fact been part of a group of evangelical clergy which met monthly with the Bishop, to pursue friendly conversation; and had enjoyed the dialogue – until it had been ‘subverted’ by the Bishop’s decision to launch such a public campaign against the declared will of the Lambeth Conference. ‘I don’t think “non-negotiability” necessarily closes conversation’, he concluded, ‘and I would like to think that this attempt to engage with your challenges makes me, in your eyes, perhaps a little less heretical’.

It did.

I wrote back:

30 April

Dear Charles,

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my perhaps rather rude letter. I think you’re right about the Bishop of Manchester, incidentally. And your being one of the very few who have read any of my books immediately causes me to warm towards you! I’m sure I’ve misjudged you. I don’t know Peter Selby. Nor do I know anything of the events in Kidderminster other than from reports in the media and on the internet. I just see a schism, and am saddened, as indeed I’m saddened by the whole GAFCON business.

But I’m grateful: by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Die List der Vernunft
• 1 ‘Heresy’
• 2 Renewed Apologetics
• 3 Anti-propaganda
• 4 Hegel on History-as-Revelation
• 5 ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’
• Index