Public Theology

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Sermon preached in the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul, Sunday 28 August 2011 by Andrew Bradstock (Howard Paterson Professor of Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago)

One of the things that concerns me about public life today is how shallow many of our debates are. Faced with extraordinary complex and difficult issues, which cry out for careful, reasonable and mature deliberation, we too often do not allow ourselves to take that on. In a culture which expects every need to instantly satisfied, every mystery to be instantly solved, every problem immediately ‘sorted’ so that we can all ‘move on’, we cannot afford to spend too long looking at problems from a variety of angles, weighing up the long-term effects of various strategies, listening to all the evidence. We need a quick-fix, something that will look as though we’ve been decisive, got it all in hand, even if in some cases we haven’t.

This is not only true here, but in many democratic countries. And it’s not necessarily the fault of our political leaders. They are only reflecting popular expectations, and it’s difficult to see how any political party can take a long-term view when they only have a few years in power, and need constantly to persuade the electorate – or is it more often the media – that they have everything under control.

But what do I mean by avoiding proper debate? Well, here’s one example. As we came out of the global economic crisis recently, it was shocking to see how little attention was paid by commentators, opinion formers, economists, politicians, to the many issues it raised.

How had we taken ourselves to the brink of disaster, we didn’t ask? How had we allowed ourselves to borrow so much money, amounts that we knew we couldn’t pay back, for things that we didn’t need and knew we couldn’t afford? What sort of lessons were there for us to learn, to ensure that we never got ourselves into that sort of mess again?

A golden opportunity to do some hard thinking, ask some deep questions, learn some salutary lessons, was completely missed. As history provided us with a profoundly ‘teachable moment’, all we wanted to know was, ‘when can we get back to normal again?’ – as if somehow ‘normal’ hadn’t been the cause of the trouble.

Or take another pressing issue, the size of our prison population. This is among the highest in the developed world, but are we having a considered conversation about the purpose and goal of punishment, or what drives people to commit offences, or whether an individual has the potential to change? Well, hardly: rather we resort to emotive and sloganizing language like being ‘soft’ or ‘tough’ on crime, or supporting ‘victims’ or ‘offenders’, and end up doing little more than increasing the capacity of our prisons and making sentences ever stiffer. At least, so it seems...

But why raise this on a Sunday when we are especially thinking about the Bible? Well, because part of the problem in Western democracies like ours is a fear of bringing into our public spaces those things which are most properly kept private – our convictions, our beliefs, our world-views. A considered debate will only work if all those participating feel comfortable sharing their deeper insights, their ‘values’, their faith even, if they have one. But in a secular country like ours that is not considered seemly or appropriate. Convictions, especially religious ones, are for the private not public sphere, and this public sphere must be kept ‘neutral’ as regards competing ideas based on values and beliefs.

Governments, in order to avoid having to choose between competing moral and religious doctrines, simply do not address the moral questions over which these doctrines divide, and avoid endorsing any one particular conception of ‘the good’. If we do want to introduce ‘values’ into public discourse, we must observe the limits of liberal public reason and use language principles and reasoning which are intelligible to any reasonable person – which are, in other words, truly public. Otherwise there is a risk that our arguments may prevail, and we will end up imposing on our fellow citizens laws which rest on a particular moral or religious doctrine.

Thus the safest thing for governments to do is ensure maximum freedom for us to make our own moral and economic choices. The public square will be kept ‘neutral’, a place where we operate with what are assumed to be shared minimal values, and the possibility of any debate that would acknowledge our deeper convictions and differences will be closed down. And that leaves politics, not only all too often looking unimaginative and predictable, but the big issues we confront largely untouched.

Suppose, instead, that we did allow ourselves, religious and non-religious alike, to practise what has been termed ‘confessional candour' in political debate, to articulate, if we choose, those deep convictions which lead us to take the conflicting policy stances they do. Would this, not only add to the quality of public debate, but also help us potentially to find better solutions to the challenges we face? And – here’s where the subject of this weekend’s activities comes in – might it not also create the possibility for us to draw upon our faith tradition in contributing to building up our common life together? Might it not enable us to bring the Bible, with all its profound wisdom on the human condition, to play a part in public discourse, to share some of the challenging, creative, even disturbing insights and visions it has to offer on topics such as justice, community, power, forgiveness and many more?

For many people, of course, it will seem absurd to suggest that a book containing principles relating to the governance or economic or cultural arrangements of nomadic Middle-Eastern communities many centuries ago, might have anything to say to a 21st-century, developed nation such as ours. But a moment’s reflection may lead us to concede that, while of course the specific contexts from which the Bible narratives emerged bear little or no resemblance to situations we encounter today, the essential nature of the world, and humanity, has not changed. The physics and chemistry are the same, as is the human psyche – our emotions, needs, wants, proclivities and so on.

Certain basic issues and principles relating to, for example, the economic and political organization of society, remain unchanged also, and can be seen to be present at all stages of human history. As the US theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote with respect to the global market downturn in 2008/9, while the specifics of the current market collapse are peculiarly modern, biblical perspectives are pertinent because the fundamental issues of economics are constant from ancient to contemporary time, constants such as credit and debt, loans and interest, and the endless tension between the haves and have-nots.

So the question is not whether there might be points of contact between the Bible and contemporary issues – between, for example, the Creation narratives and current concerns about the environment; the Sabbath and our materialistic and consumer-driven culture; calls to show hospitality to strangers and the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers; even Jesus’ commitment to bring ‘release to captives’ and the problem of prison over-crowding: these can be identified with little effort. The challenge we face is how, given the opportunity, we might use this wonderful resource with regard to these issues, and to what purpose.

The example of Jesus announcing he had come to bring ‘freedom to prisoners’ shows the futility of trying to adopt a ‘wooden’ position with respect to the application of scriptural insights to contemporary issues. One cannot simply lift verses – let alone whole paradigms or models – from Scripture and seek to ‘apply’ them willy nilly to contemporary situations. But we can look for a way which enables us both to appreciate the biblical material in its own culturally specific uniqueness, and explore whether it suggests a ‘paradigm’ or ‘analogy’ for our own day.

For example, while the law of gleaning in Leviticus 19.9-10 made sense only in a simple, agrarian society, by noting how appropriate it was as a means of helping poorer people in that society to survive, we can be inspired to consider forms of social legislation appropriate to our society – some of which, if we want to be specific, might relate to food items consigned to the skip by supermarkets at the end of the trading day. Or with respect to the global economic crisis to which we alluded earlier, perhaps the Jubilee narratives in Leviticus might help us to reflect on the wider benefits for a community when boundaries are placed on individual accumulation and measures adopted to prevent too wide a gap opening up between rich and poor, or the concept of the Sabbath on our current concerns about over-use of the earth’s resources and excessive emphasis on ‘consumption’.

Could the Bible not also speak into our public square powerfully through the medium of story? More than any principle or concept, drawn from Scripture and carefully related to a contemporary context, stories can pierce directly to the heart of an issue, reframing thinking, challenging assumptions and exposing hitherto unanticipated truths. Story-telling was, of course, the form of public witness undertaken most frequently by Jesus himself, and it is intriguing to imagine how, for example, a debate about the relative value of ‘retributive’ and ‘restorative’ approaches to justice might be nudged in new directions by exposure to biblical stories or narratives like the prodigal son, the woman taken in adultery, and Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus.

The power of story to lift the imagination, prompt in the hearer a search for infinite layers of meaning, and point to ‘truths’ in a non-dogmatic and non-didactic manner, suggest it may be a way in which Scripture can most effectively contribute to deepening our public discourse. Perhaps it is within the telling of such parables and stories that Jesus’ announcement that he had come ‘to bring release to the captives’ might be uttered and more readily understood.

Even our reading today from Paul’s letter to the Romans, which in its original context is directed at a particular fellowship of early followers of ‘the Way’, has some profound challenges for the wider community: would our society here in New Zealand be any the worse if we operated on principles such as hating what was evil and holding fast to what is good, outdoing one another in showing honour, extending hospitality to strangers, living in harmony with one another, not repaying anyone evil for evil, never avenging ourselves, overcoming evil with good, showing kindness to enemies, living peaceably with all. Perhaps, as Luther believed, we cannot expect those outside of the household of faith to follows patterns of behaviour laid down for those within that household, but the Bible offers us both powerful visions of how we might live, and the possibility of that forgiveness and new life in Christ which enables us, by grace, to aspire to them.

Just as the translators of the King James Bible laboured tirelessly so that the Scriptures might have an impact on people in their day, so let us also seek to share its insights, visions and judgments in the public square in ours. AMEN