God in Public: How the Bible Speaks Truth to Power Today by Tom Wright

Author:Tom Wright
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9780281074235
Published: 2016-04-20T23:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: public God, public agenda

Some brief remarks in conclusion, to relate all this to current controversies. To begin with, the stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism. To quote again the words of the American Jim Wallis, ‘the right gets it wrong and the left doesn’t get it’. The church is called in every generation to be a community, a public community, working with all who will collaborate for the public good, in the belief that God will one day put all things to rights, that he has already done so in Jesus, and that the human calling here and now is to order our lives and our societies in such a way that they draw energy from the latter and genuinely anticipate the former. If the church had been doing that the last two hundred years – and it is two hundred years since Wilberforce and his friends got the slave trade abolished in Britain and its colonies – we would be having a very different debate today. Ironically, it is because the church has so often shirked its public role, regularly justifying that withdrawal by using the language of ‘heaven’ but filling it with Enlightenment dualism, that our present puzzles about the Establishment of the church have taken the shape they have.

‘Establishment’ is a way of recognizing that England is still in theory a Christian country, both in the sense that our history and culture have been decisively shaped by the Christian faith and life and in the sense that, at the 2011 census, 59 per cent of the population called themselves ‘Christian’. This means that the ‘Established’ Church has a special responsibility to take thought for, and speak up for, the small minorities, and to ensure that they are not squashed between an unthinking church and an uncaring secular state. Hence Rowan Williams’ perfectly proper concern for the particular sensitivities of Muslims, as indeed of Jews and others. And most Church of England leaders would insist today that if some way could be found to share our ‘Established’ status with our great sister churches, we would be delighted. But let’s not fool ourselves. To give up ‘Establishment’ now would be to collude with that secularism which postmodernity has cheerfully and rightly deconstructed. Rather, the challenge ought to be to make it work for the benefit of the whole society. To aim at that would be to work with the grain both of the Christian gospel itself and of the deep roots of our own society and traditions.

In particular, we need to recapture that which the Enlightenment highlighted but which has been lost in the world of postmodernity and spin-doctors: the emphasis on Reason in our thinking and our public discourse. Reason is correlated with Trust. When you don’t really trust your conversation partner to be thinking things through in a reasoned manner, you cut in with smear and innuendo. And when you don’t quite trust yourself to think things out either, you resort to spin and slogans. That double

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