Reasonable Radical?

Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy

Ian S. Markham, Joshua Daniel, Markham, Daniel

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781498242844
• eBook ISBN: 9781498242837
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

One of the most interesting voices in the Academy and the Church today is Martyn Percy. Percy, the Dean of Christ Church Oxford and a leading voice in the Anglican Communion, is both theologically orthodox, yet deeply unconventional. While remaining engaged in the scholarly community, Percy writes with clarity and passion on topics that range from ecclesiology to music, from sexuality to the Trinity, from advertising to ministerial training--he is a polymath.This book is two books in one. The first half contains a series of articles (written both by church leaders and academics) that serve as substantial, critical introductions to Percy's thought. In the second half, the reader gets to hear from Percy himself in a collection of wide-ranging material from his corpus. While producing a dialectical engagement of some depth (as Percy offers written responses to his interlocutors), this volume should prove useful for a variety of communities beyond academic circles, especially ones engaged with contemporary issues facing ecclesiology, churches, and the wider Anglican Communion.

Part I

Methodology

1

Contextual Theologian

The Methodology of Martyn Percy

Ian S. Markham

Of the many challenges facing the church in the modern world, one must be the complicated relationship between the social sciences and religious truth. The argument that religion is “just” a social construct is so compelling and persuasive for many people. To provide a few illustrations: Jesus cast out demons because demons were the explanation for mental illness that premodern cultures did not yet understand; for cultures ruled by a king, it was important that the divine king had his own court, hence the belief in angels arose; and biblical prophets attributed the winning of wars and the rise of empires to providence because they didn’t understand the political and social factors that really determine these things. Modernity assumes these arguments are valid. They are assumed by the “talking head” expert on the TV show. For many, the social sciences have explained away religion.1

In response, the temptation is some form of imperialism. This was the attraction of Radical Orthodoxy (perhaps still is, although this school of thought is less fashionable than it was). For John Milbank, he offered a narrative explaining that sociology is, itself, a story: one grounded in a particular worldview, emerging from the Enlightenment, and built on an “ontology of violence.”2 Milbank wanted to reduce the social sciences down from the role of judge and jury on the validity of religious assertions and instead depict sociology as a sibling to theology, built on a faith of unjustifiable assumptions. A different imperialism was fundamentalism—both in its Roman Catholic and Evangelical forms. Here a transcendent inerrancy was claimed for the Bible, for the church or for both. On this view, an infallible text or tradition protected the faith from the insidious attacks of the social sciences. God is the author of the Bible: God does not make mistakes. Therefore, any social explanation is interesting but not a reason to reject the truth of the text.

Into this debate steps Martyn Percy. He completely rejects all forms of imperialism. The social sciences contain considerable truth: they can illuminate the faith: we can learn from the social sciences. Yet, at the same time, faith is true. Granted, the social sciences might illuminate how certain forms of the faith are unlikely to be true, but still the essential drama told by the church is true. His books are all an argument for a dance between the social sciences and theology, where God is at work in the cultural situation and where all true ideas (all false ones too, for that matter) need a cultural location. And if one recognizes this reality, then one understands a little more clearly what God is saying. He believes a certain disposition to faith emerges. One holds one’s convictions with humility: one recognizes the complexity of belief. For Percy, God chose to locate truth within culture, therefore God always invites us to hold our beliefs while aware of that truth.

In this chapter, we shall explore the remarkable achievement of Percy. This chapter will begin by placing Percy in the appropriate trajectory of intellectual thought. Then, in keeping with the Percy methodology, we shall do some contextual work on his worldview by locating his thought in his own biography. Finally, I shall identify four dimensions to the application of his methodology.

Trajectories of Thought

We start by placing Percy in an appropriate intellectual trajectory. Probably the most oft-cited author is James Hopewell and his classic Congregations: Stories and Structures. Hopewell was puzzled why some congregations endure despite everything. In reflecting on this, he arrived at an analysis that divided congregations into four narrative types—comic (where everything has a happy ending), romantic (the transcendent and divine intervention), tragic (judgment and law are central), and ironic (rich in paradox and emphasis on the gray)—the typology actually comes from Northrop Frye. Hopewell argued that congregations tell their stories, often in unspoken and subconscious ways. A key corollary of Hopewell’s book was that leadership in harmony with the narrative is much more likely to succeed than leadership in conflict with the narrative.

Hopewell, of course, needs to be read in the light of Clifford Geertz, the famous advocate of a symbolic anthropology, most elegantly expounded in his remarkable book The Interpretation of Culture. Although a collection of essays, it set out a distinctive approach to the social sciences. Geertz sets out his assumption when he writes, “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”3 The way to interrogate these “webs of significance” is through “thick description”—a term taken from Gilbert Ryle. Geertz explains that one understands culture in a certain way that requires this thick description. He writes, “As interworked systems of construable signs . . . , culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described.”4 It is in the same volume that we find Geertz’s famous essay “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In a style that Percy (and Hopewell) emulate, Geertz starts as an anthropologist in Bali watching an illegal cockfight (and running away from the police) and moves to a detailed critique of all the aspects of the cockfight—thick description indeed.

Percy likes the Geertz/Hopewell approach for many reasons. He appreciates the iceberg approach that stresses that what is happening under the water (in the realm of assumptions and values) is more important than what is visible (in, for example, a statement of faith). He also likes the methodology. For all of Percy’s conversation with the social science, he does not use the typical instruments of sociology. His books do not have charts; he does not organize massive surveys and focus groups. Hopewell, along with Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, provides Percy’s preferred methodology. A primary focus in Percy’s doctorate Words, Wonders and Power was the informal worship of the charismatic churches. Like Hopewell, he wants to find the pre-existing clues to the underlying narrative of the congregation (what practice or place exposes what this congregation really thinks) rather than construct an artificial instrument that might or might not work. A contemporary who is similar in methodology to Percy is Nicholas Healy. It is the church as it really is that matters—the actual church.5

Perhaps the most explicit theological influence on Percy is Daniel Hardy. Percy worked with Dan Hardy while he was training for his ordination at Durham University. Percy learned from Hardy the obligation that the church was never called to be a sect or partisan group. So Hardy writes, “[T]he church is called as an apostle and witness to society as a whole on behalf of One whose work was for the whole of society, its witness being determined by Christ’s achievement in securing the Kingdom of God through an ethical and spiritual victory.”6 Hardy sees Christ’s work everywhere—in social structures, in the lives of non-Christians (hence his very active involvement in the Abrahamic dialogue) and in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introducing Martyn Percy
• Part I: Methodology
• Part II: Ecclesiology
• Part III: Applications
• Part IV: Selected Readings from the Works of Martyn Percy
• Part—IV Section 1: Short Extracts
• Part—IV Section 2: Mission and Ministry
• Part—IV Section 3: Comprehending Congregations
• Part IV—Section 4: Church and World
• Afterword
• Martyn Percy: Selected Publications