The Shaping of a Soul by Richard Harries. Christian Alternative (Winchester 2023). Pbk. 256 pages. £13.99.
Richard Harries has had a long and glittering career in the Church of England, rising to become Bishop of Oxford. In retirement he looks back on the people and events that helped to shape him, and this book is an engaging account of those years of ecclesiastical success, peppered with some splendid anecdotes.
A couple of examples: ‘In his advice to the Prime Minister (Harold Macmillan) Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher said: “Dr Ramsey is a theologian, a scholar and a man of prayer. Therefore he is entirely unsuitable as Archbishop of Canterbury”‘. And, given all the famous people Harries mentions, in what is (surely?) a piece of self-deprecation, he quotes an unnamed Dean of Windsor remarking to a friend: ‘The Queen and I don’t like name droppers’.
As with all Harries’ books, the endnotes give full details of his own writings, but barely mention those of other people, which means there’s little guidance for anyone who’d like to take things further – something that really does need to happen, given Harries’ clear reluctance to do so.
Because despite his many and varied abilities – there seems a blissful unawareness of the gulf that separates him from those many thoughtful people who find religion, in its normal manifestations, absolutely impossible. It’s 30 years since the publication of Anthony Freeman’s God in Us – with one of the earliest responses being Harries’ own The Real God, which came out just a few months later. It was a fierce defence of liberal Christianity, but one that completely failed to engage with the reasons why non-realism had come as such a lifeline to those who could make no sense of the concept of God as conventionally understood.
So far as Harries was concerned, his response was apparently all that was needed, as there’s no indication over the following three decades of him ever returning to the subject. And that’s completely understandable, given the way his confident clarity seems to have remained untroubled.
He sees the Christian faith as based on three ‘essentials’ – each one being ‘a belief which, if it was rejected, would see the whole edifice come tumbling down’. And whilst he doesn’t think of the virgin birth as one of these, the assertion ‘that Jesus is truly and fully God and truly and fully human in one unified person’ certainly is.
But of course everything hinges on how such a claim is unpacked – and because the ideas are so very far from straightforward, there’s plenty of scope for exploratory disagreement. But one suspects that Harries wouldn’t see it like that, and instead regard any such manoeuvre as a weaselly fudge. Because although he says that he’s ‘not trying to draw boundaries as to who should be regarded as a Christian or not, simply trying to make my own position clear’ – such apparent tolerance might have been sorely tested, if any radical clergy had been bold enough to try and find a parish in the diocese of Oxford!
The other two ‘essentials’ are an understanding of resurrection, which comes perilously close to theological gobbledegook: ‘an appearance from heaven, not a body climbing out of the tomb, but an appearance of the risen Christ from the heart of God’; and a similarly opaque belief in life after death (understood as ‘the stripping away of the veil between us and the all-holy God’).
Harries has written and broadcast extensively, and possesses a wide range of social, political, intellectual and cultural interests. But nowhere in the book does he show the slightest interest in the chasm between liberal and radical Christianity. And despite the rapid (and somewhat impatient) rejoinder to Anthony Freeman noted above, only mentions the furore in passing – with the name of Don Cupitt never actually appearing at all. It would show an arrogantly SOF-centred view of the world to expect any and every theological survey of the last few decades to major on non-realism – but effectively to ignore it completely, merely reinforces the suspicion that Harries never began to understand it in the first place.
The book is a fascinating read, especially for anyone interested in Church of England gossip and characters. But those wanting some genuinely open theological engagement, would be well advised to look elsewhere.