Entering the New Theological Space

Blurred Encounters of Faith, Politics and Community

John Reader, Christopher R. Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754663393
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317142744
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book presents theological reflections on the changing nature of church mission and Christian identity within a theology of 'blurred encounter' - a physical, social, political and spiritual space where once solid hierarchies and patterns are giving way to more fluid and in many ways unsettling exchanges. The issues raised and dynamics explored apply to all socially-produced space, thus tending to 'blur' that most fundamental of theological categories - namely urban vs. rural theology. Engaging in a sharper way with some of the helpful but inevitably broad-brush conclusions raised by recent church-based reports (Mission-shaped Church, Faithful Cities), the authors examine some of the practical and theological implications of this research for the issue of effective management and therefore church leadership generally. Speaking to practitioners in the field of practical theology as well as those engaged in theological and ministerial training, key voices encompass dimensions of power and conflict, and identify some of the present and future opportunities and challenges to church/faith-based engagement and leadership arising from blurred encounters. Contributors - practitioners and theorists - cover a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary professional contexts and academic/denominational interests. Contributors include: John Atherton, John Reader, Helen Cameron, Martyn Percy, Malcolm Brown, Karen Lord, Clare McBeath and Margaret Goodall.

Chapter 1
Mainstreaming the Edges: Reflections on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and Fair Trade

John Atherton

Living on the edges can become a way of making a living off marginalisation – a charge brought against some academic exponents of hybridity, including Homi Bhabha. For example, Ramachandra talks of such postcolonial theorists as ‘affluent, self-exiled Asians ensconced in the Western academy’. They play on ‘postcolonial Western guilt’ and also on ‘the romantic image of the intellectual “exile”, epitomizing the fissured identities and hybridities generated by colonial dislocations and celebrated in some postmodern works’.1 Even its more creative exponents, like Sandercock, can weave powerful narratives criticising contemporary urban living and developing alternatives as mongrel cities – yet examples of the latter are often ephemeral and fragile. For Baker, ‘her cosmopolis still works powerfully as an activating concept rather than a practical guide’. Depressingly, for Baker, her practical case studies of feasible alternatives ‘are almost all short-lived’.2

Similarly, analysis of the contemporary context presents a number of scenarios, for example, as three fields of operating, as empires, capitalism and globalisation. These can be interlocked, by Hardt and Negri, as a new empire of global capitalism.3 This recognises the dispersion of power through new technology flows, yet also its strong focusing in terms of fields of power as Bourdieu has so carefully argued.4 Yet Hardt and Negri’s ‘Multitude’, as countermovement to Empire, like Sandercock’s mongrel cities, does not generate feasible alternatives to current mainstream political economy.5 It does not persuade by its credibility. In other words, postcolonial theorists like Bhabha, urban planners like Sandercock, and political–cultural theorists like Hardt and Negri, share a feature of many more radical theologians. They are strong on the critique of established orderings, and often creatively and powerfully so. Yet they are weak on developing feasible alternatives to global mainstreams. Their criticisms, often ethically informed, frequently inspire.

Yet I am increasingly concerned that, unless accompanied by proposals for more adequate and workable alternatives to the defective mainstream, they are open to the charge of irresponsibility. Max Weber’s seminal studies of the relationships between religion and economics, too easily over-identified with his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, rightly included work on India and China, now once again at the heart of the emerging economies and their growing dominance in the world economy. Importantly for this argument, his work also included reflections on an ethic of responsibility. This involved a critique of charismatic and prophetic authority, and related to his distinction between ‘an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of absolute ends’.6 These reflections are very relevant to what I am arguing for in terms of developing feasible alternatives to the present social order.

What I am interested in is that problem of edges, in my case, as ethical economics. Baker, in his The Hybrid Church in the City, used my work on Christian political economy, with ethical economics as one of its key constituents, as an example of hybridity. More importantly, for this project on blurred encounters, ethical economics is a strong example of location on the edges, in this case, of mainstream neoclassical economics, and its associated market economies and economics. These dominate the world economy and the discipline of economics. They are plumb in the middle of whatever mainstream means and is. Yet the story is more complex, more blurred than that. Historically, economics has been identified with two dimensions; on the one hand, positive economics (or technical, ‘scientific’ or, for Sen, engineering); and on the other hand, normative (or, for Sen, ethical) economics.7 Recognition of that ethical dimension (as well as the positive side) represents a long and distinguished history from Adam Smith, through Malthus, Marshall, Keynes and now Sen and Stiglitz (both recent Nobel Laureates in Economics).

Almost from its origins, certainly including Ricardo in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, modern economics has been increasingly dominated by the positive strand. By the mid-to-late twentieth century the divorce was almost complete, with a clear agenda that positive economics was essentially scientific in the way the natural sciences were, and therefore claiming to be value free. Ethical economics became quite marginal to that development if not, indeed, irrelevant. That is still the case in economics text books and policy-making. So for Henderson, this prioritising of the positive in economics has constituted what he calls ‘the dominant economic tradition’.8 Interestingly, this resonates with Radical Orthodoxy’s work on economics in which Long writes of the dominant tradition of mainstream liberal Christian social ethics.9 That dominant tradition of positive neoclassical economics in the hands of one of its later twentieth-century major exponents, Nobel Laureate in Economics Milton Friedman, becomes ‘fundamentally a positive social science’, essentially independent of every value proposition or of every ethical position. Its interest is not ‘to describe what “ought to be the case”, but what is the case… In short, positive economics is, or can be, an “objective” science in precisely the same way as any of the physical sciences’.10

Yet both within and outside the discipline this deep imbalance is increasingly questioned. For example, from within the discipline of economics, Amartya Sen has powerfully promoted the need to rebalance the positive with the ethical dimension of economics: ‘The wide use of the extremely narrow assumption of self-interested behaviour … has seriously limited the scope of productive economics’. Indeed, the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics was shared by Kahneman and Smith, ‘individuals who questioned the extreme view of rational behaviour as the basis for economic decision-making’.11 Outside this discipline, there is also a growing interest in the need to reformulate economic understandings of neoclassical economic behaviour, for example, the work of the sociologist Bourdieu, and his reflections on the ‘Principles of an Economic Anthropology’.12 Yet despite this reawakening of interest in the role of ethical economics in the wider economic task, it remains significantly on the edges of mainstream economics.

It is that situation which I will address not least because globalisation processes and problematics, particularly since 1990, have sharply brought to the fore the multidimensionality of the economic task, and particularly in necessary conversation with other disciplines. These global problematics include: the environment; poverty reduction; trade; work (see the International Labour Organisation and the World Council of Church’s conversations on decent work);13 the well-being/happiness hypothesis literatures, with their reference to a post-scarcity and post-absolute-poverty anthropology, and entry into the ‘paradoxes of prosperity’ (as increasing economic growth and inequality, and the stubborn refusal of happiness to increase commensurate with income growth and its link with increasing social ill-being or disease as crime, addictions, mental ill-health, reduced volunteering and trust, etc).14 The growing and extensive literatures on well-being and happiness particularly include a strong focus on the essential contribution to well-being of the moral and religious dimensions of life. For the economist Layard, a philosophy of life figures as one of his ‘Big Seven’ features of happiness, and includes reference to personal values but also ethically oriented social arrangements formulated as ‘the common good’. In the most direct language he also concludes that ‘people who believe in God are happier’.15 The philosopher Anthony Kenny and the economist Charles Kenny in their study, subtitled Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought, included a chapter on ‘Happiness and Morality’.16

The task therefore for me and for others is how to reinforce that ethical dimension in conversation with economists and with other related disciplines (including psychology, neurophysiology, epidemiology, sociology and anthropology). This is likely to involve finding ways to mainstream ethical economics by bringing it into the centre of economics. Such a strategy does not mean removing its distinctive character. It does mean recognising that it will be changed in that process, as will the mainstream. So, for Mudge, bringing alongside each other in conversation different stories of similar realities (in our case ethical and engineering economics), a process he calls parallel hermeneutics, invariably results in a mutual benefit. For in that process, the task is not to produce a common belief or doctrinal merger. It rather involves pursuing a parallel relationship with one another, each asking questions in their own way within their traditions, acknowledging that others alongside are doing it in their ways too. In this way, cultures, religions or theories act back upon themselves with respect to information coming from other cultures, civilisations and theories. ‘Such solidarity often involves a move toward a place materially weaker but spiritually stronger than one’s own. The gift (of one story to the other) is not merely given; it turns out to move more strongly in return.’17 The benefits of that reciprocal action are reinforced by important work on how traditions, including religions (but here, for us, economics), faced with the challenge of rapidly changing contexts, can reformulate and become more adequate and effective. So Baker and Brown both use MacIntyre to illustrate how traditions can develop through a process of reformulation through interaction with context, a process of mutual learning from and to the Other.18

To test this hypothesis, as the importance and possibility of mainstreaming ethical economics within the dominant economic tradition of neoclassical economies, two brief case studies began to elaborate this proposition. The first is a pilgrimage down the Royal Mile in central Edinburgh to explore places where ‘edges’ have become mainstream. The second examines questions raised by mainstreaming Fair Trade in secular production and exchange systems. As a combination of narrative and analytical forms, the two studies exemplify multidimensional approaches to the increasingly multidimensional nature of economics. Both illustrate the feasibility of Reader’s thesis of eating well so that being devoured by the Other need not necessarily result in a complete digestion but can involve the survival of the marginal entity within the mainstream body.19

A Journey down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile: Stories of How the Edges Engage with Dominant Traditions

Walking down the Royal Mile from the castle to Holyrood Palace is not the simplest of journeys, particularl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Entering the New Space of the Blurred Encounter Between Faith, Politics and Community
• 1 Mainstreaming the Edges: Reflections on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and Fair Trade
• 2 Brief Engagements, Processional Encounters
• 3 A Blurred InterFaith, InterCultural Experience: A Kidderminster Story
• 4 Blurred Encounters in the Suburbs: Problems of Place and Problematic Places
• 5 Networks – The Blurring of Institution and Networks: How Should the Church Engage?
• 6 How to See the Wood for the Trees: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Dementia
• 7 Kent – The Garden Of Dilemma
• 8 Weightless Identity in Post-Material Communities
• 9 Negotiating Identity: The Christian Individual and the Secular Institution
• 10 Sanctuary and Liminality: Stories, Reflections and Liturgy Exploring the Blurred Encounters Between Mental Health and Illness as an Inner-City Church
• 11 ‘Betwixt and Between’: Anthropological Approaches to Blurred Encounters
• 12 Baptism as Cultural Conversation: Explorations in Implicit Theology
• 13 Truth in Science and Theology: Latour, Žižek and the Theory of Circulating Reference
• 14 An Experience of Rural Ministry
• 15 Mapping the New Theological Space: From Blurred Encounters to Thresholds of Transformation
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects