POSTSCRIPTS by Seafarer POSTSCRIPTS Liberating theology lutton for punishment that I am, I Gopent three days in April at Newman College, Birmingham, at a conference of divines, academics and people like me, discussing liberation theology. There were more than 250 of us there: just like SoFconf. A fair number were under thirty: not like SoFconf.
Liberation theology was (note the past tense) the name given to a form of Christian socialism which grew out of a love affair between radical Catholics and churchy Marxists in the sixties and seventies. Its primary focus was Latin America, where peasants’ lib put the poor at the heart of the gospel.
But the conditions in which it at first thrived became conditions in which it later struggled. First, the huge inroads made in Latin America by Americanbacked right-wing evangelical zealots weakened the Catholic culture onto which the liberation theologians had grafted their revolutionary gospel, then the world eclipse of Marxism left them stranded. Which is why we sat in Birmingham and pondered whether liberation theology has a future as well as an heroic past.
The apostles of lib-theol didn’t get it all their own way. Quaker Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid from Edinburgh laid into them for so narrowing-down their gospel for “the poor” that there was no recognition of gender oppression and the plight of other marginalised groups. Alistair Kee - another Edinburgher - put it to keynote that banner speaker and LT guru Jon Sobrino that the one Latin American country which actually narrowed the gap between rich and poor in the last thirty years was the one country where liberation theology never penetrated: Cuba.
Sobrino chose not to respond to the awkward suggestion that the gospel according to Fidel had done more for the poor (whatever it may have done to the rest) than the gospel of liberation theology @ Tesco ergo sum ut the conference really came alive when it turned from Latin America to Blair’s Britain. How far should the churches go in backing the Government’s “New Deal” welfare programmes, with their “whiff of coercion”? Should Christians (especially Christian socialists) be “prophetic”, the uncompromisingly oppositionist “voice of the poor”, or should church agencies settle for being just one more social-exclusion quango?
It’s not that simple said the social responsibility officer for the Anglican diocese of Worcester, SoF’s own Alison Webster. The challenge was to discriminate between schemes that treat the poor as passive victims and those which allow them to become agents of change in their own lives. “Instead of tools of opposition, we need new tools of critical engagement”. A lasting liberating theology for liberation theologians.
Best quip of the conference, the suggestion that Descartes needs updating in the light of dominant free-market consumerism: “Tesco ergo sum” @ Words in action ust before the Newman conflab I did el a conference, celebrating the life and work of what one Newman professor called “the father of liberation theology”, the seventeenthcentury Digger, True Leveller, Quaker and Communist Gerrard Winstanley. It was held in Walton church, where Winstanley and his comrades were imprisoned in 1649 when they took direct action to “make the earth a common treasury” as intended by the “creator God, Reason”.
Draped across the front of the church was a splendid banner inscribed with Winstanley’s action-call: “Words and Writing were all Nothing and muft Die, for Action is the Life of all and if thou doft not Act, thou doft Nothing”.
A paradox there, though. If Winstanley hadn’t written twenty astonishing pamphlets, we wouldn’t know anything about his actions. And we are inspired to act by the very words and writings which he dismissed as “all Nothing”.
But action is “the Life of all”. Does that speak to SoF’s condition?
I have been authorised to reveal by the editor of this all-too-wordy journal that he is completing a book called Gerrard Winstanley and the Republic of Heaven. No doubt he’ll be induced to tell us more in due course @ POSTSCRIPTS John Klopacz (who ran a workshop on the Jesus Seminar last year) will fill us in.
The other conference can’t find its way into your diary yet because it doesn’t have a date (though it won’t be April 1). Supported again by Sof, it will bring together a range of religious humanist groups and individuals to explore and promote religious humanism in the next millennium. “Beyond Belief” is its tentative title.
Remember you heard about it first from Seafarer, who will reveal all when there is more to be revealed @ Taking leave of Jesus? till on conferences, here’s news of Stwo more which have just been immaculately conceived and are due to arrive kicking and screaming next year.
SoF and the Jesus Seminar (a group of academics whose work on the historical Jesus is overturning traditional ideas) will jointly run a one-day conference in Manchester Cathedral on April 1 (hmmm), on the theme “Taking Leave of Jesus” (with or without a query at the end). Main speaker will be Robert Funk of the Seminar, introduced by Duncan Park of SoF and the Pilgrimage Network (nonrealist evangelicals), the chair will be David Boulton, and panellists will include Alison Webster and, hopefully, a Jewish scholar and rabbi. More news at next month’s SoF conference, when Rayner: anti-lollipops Godless godparents uardian writer and humanist Claire Rayner, has also found a good word (of sorts) to say about the church. “There is much that secular people and humanists can use and enjoy about ancient church rituals and ideas”, she says, and she picks out for special commendation the idea of godparenting - “one of its very best concepts”.
Naturally, she isn’t thinking of godparents as religious indoctrinators, and she scorns the custom of awarding godparenthood as “a sort of lollipop for a family friend; or, in more calculating circles, a form of investment for the child made by inviting the richest or most influential person the parents know”. But the idea of appointing godparents - or “extra parents” - who will commit themselves to provide extra loving care for a child, and will see the commitment through, is given the humanist seal of approval.
She advocates doing it in style, with all due ceremony. “Baby naming ceremonies can be arranged that incorporate every aspect of a christening...What is important is that the ceremony be a rite of passage which acknowledges both a baby’s welcome arrival, and our own deep need to mark our journey through life in a memorable and enjoyable manner.
The content of each ceremony can be tailor-made for each family, although the British Humanist Association does offer a form of ritual that can be a matrix for a personal ceremony.” The BHA is even offering leaflets on how to be a godparent. Call 0171 430 0908 and they’ll send you one @ Affleck and Morissette making God sexy in Dogma Gospel according to Rufus oF isn’t the only circus in town which is determined to drop dogma.
We share that distinction with Disney, which seems determined to disown its own film Dogma, which was furiously attacked by the RC Church even before it hit the screen at Cannes in May.
Although Dogma has a sexy female God with a talent for kissing, a greatneice of Jesus who works in an abortion clinic, two angels who punish sinners with sub-machine guns, and a black, street-wise 13th disciple called Rufus, it’s claimed to be as serious and thoughtprovoking a film as the magnificent and moving Priest, which also got the Disney corp into a lake of fire.
Reminiscing about Jesus, Rufus says he didn’t dig “beliefs”: “It’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea.
Changing a belief is trickier. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth. Life should be malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that.” Amen! Upon this rock we could build a new church @ Whale of a message imon Hoggart of the Guardian went to church in Washington DC on Easter Day. It was a Unitarian church, and our Simon learnt that not all US church-goers are “arm-waving fundamentalists who will shoot you if you doubt the literal truth of the Bible”.
Nothing so improbable as the Resurrection was mentioned. “Indeed, Christ didn’t get a look in”. The Easter hymn “Jesus Christ is risen today” became “Lo, the Earth awakes again” and “it was made quite clear that we were really celebrating the arrival of spring, not some weird, paranormal event which might or might not have happened 2000 years ago to someone who may or may not have existed” (the Jesus Seminar could perhaps help on that one).
The minister preached from a text in Moby Dick: “We’re on our own out there. No power is looking after us so we have to look after each other”. He mentioned with vague embarrassment that “some of our fellow Unitarians still incorporate Christ in their worship”, but, says Hoggart, “this was evidently regarded as a curious throwback” @ Donday vu steering committee descended on Cambridge on May 22 to join Don and Susan Cupitt in celebrating Don’s 65th birthday - and to hear more “Doing our own thing” about the dozen new books he is no doubt hoping to complete by September. We dipped into our pockets to present him with a couple of venerable volumes for his library. Not everyone knows that when Don isn’t theologising he’s chasing rare butterflies in the Yorkshire Dales or wherever, in which subject he is highly expert (wouldn’t you guess). His two volumes of the first edition of Frohawk’s Natural History of British Butterflies, published in 1914 and now as rare as some of the butterflies Don chases after, should keep him out of mischief for a bit. Many happy returns, Don @ Seafarer