Things are Never as Simple as they Seem

The late lamented Joe Strummer once said in an interview, "I'm smart enough to know how stupid I am". As I wade into my PhD reading, trying to get a handle on "Anglican trends in political theology" (.....alternatively, what the CofE has thought over the years about its relationship to the rest of society), it's been the most unnerving experience. You embark on any study with the usual amount of baggage, preconceptions, prejudices, hoping to find things that confirm what you already think. Most annoyingly, you end up discovering ideas and approaches that challenge how you viewed things and, sacre bleu, changing (?).

Quoting another icon of the punk era, Paul Weller sang, "The more I see, the more I know, the more I know, the less I understand". I have to confess that the lefty, anti-establishment side of my personality has viewed the church's privilege in society (yes, there's still plenty of it around) with dismay. We must junk all our holds on society and culture and place ourselves intentionally at the edges and on the margins: the church's only authentic influence is when it foregoes power, I might say.

And then I think, and read, and reflect....see the new society of Revelation coming out of the testimony of the faithful, believe and hope that even, yes, the political structures of a nation can be redeemed......And it gets just a tad bit more complicated, (reading Oliver and Joan O'Donovan at present if you want some clues). It's a dilemma that I believe needs airing in the emerging church. In all the talk of deconstruction, of renewal, of experimentation, how do we hold onto the church's mission for the entirety of the society? Dare we detach the micro missional community from the macro questions of our world? (In that vein, I'm encouraged to hear that Brian McLaren, all-round good-guy American writer and church leader, is addressing an audience at the Davos Forum in Switzerland this week).

So, with a sheepish smile to my anabaptist friends, I do wonder whether there is something about the church being a voice for the nation: a benchmark for public services, politics, accountability and economics. The knotty problem that I have to wrestle with over the next few years is how it ought to do that in the midst of a diversity of faith allegiances. Finding the answer in the suffering Christ is where I suspect I'll find a renewed convergence with anabaptists.

Comments

[Barney]

Thanks so much for making me think when you write