Westminster Abbey

Yesterday evening, looking at the supposed conflict between faith and science, I suggested as a conclusion that scientific research and enquiry was one set of practices among many in the human world: no more good or evil in itself than anything else. Its moral compass was not derived from itself but from all kinds of factors in the culture around. But all of that should encourage us in thinking that the Church and other religious bodies has every reason for supporting and encouraging scientific research, and no great reason to panic, whatever anybody might say. But if we’re thinking about science as one practice among many in the human world, and if we’re acknowledging that scientific work doesn’t generate its own moral compass, then we have to face a number of issues around how society itself shapes its moral vision and its sense of what’s distinctive about humanity. In other words, as you think through some of the issues around faith and science, you’re more or less bound to get into questions about faith and the public realm: faith and politics.

This is a building in which the National Anthem is sung fairly frequently. But the historic second verse of the National Anthem is probably sung rather less frequently than the first, or the revised version of the second verse. For those of you who don’t habitually sing the original second verse, I may need to remind you that part of it runs ‘confound their politics, / frustrate their knavish tricks’. The rhyme tells you all you need to know about what the author believed about politics. Politics has, in the history of the English language, a rather bad name as a term. Shakespeare in King Lear refers famously to ‘scurvy politicians’ who pretend to see the things they do not. Politics and politicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not respectable activities or agents: they were plotters, manipulators. And ‘politics’ in that period of the English language had a very negative connotation for that reason. Even rather later on and outside Britain, you find the great French poet Charles Peguy saying about a century ago that everything begins with mystique and ends with politique. All human visions, it seems, begin with something transcendent, something luminously obscure and suggestive, and they all end in committee rooms. Politics carries with it that abiding sense of a corrupting or corrupted milieu: the language of faith ought not to be mixed in with the necessarily ambiguous and sometimes corrupt business of getting your way in the public world.

One of my tasks this evening will be an attempt to rescue the word ‘politics’. In its most ancient use, as it’s used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, as the title of one of his great works, politics is simply the discipline, of how to think about civic life intelligently and consistently, and how to manage civic life in a rational and just way. Politics is the science of living together without conflict or major injustice. And in that sense you can perhaps see how a rather different meaning just might be given to the words of the French poet. Yes, everything begins in mystique, begins in vision, and needs to be translated into the science of human living together; and in that sense also, politics is inescapable for anyone in or out of the Church or any other religious community. And the Christian Church is itself a political community: it’s about living together in justice. Now that is no fashionable modern discovery, it’s already taken for granted in Christian scripture. The early Church saw itself as a body of citizens: you’ll find the language in the New Testament, famously in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: ‘your citizenship is in heaven’ says Paul, using the Greek word politeia. The city you belong to is something other than the community you think you belong to here on earth. You are still social beings who have to make choices about living together, but the community to which you belong is greater than any limited human society.

The politeia, the citizenship of the Church is to do – like other kinds of citizenship – with how people take responsibility for the management of power, how they cooperate, how they become responsible to each other. And the Christian community talks about itself as a polity, a kind of civic life which is in some way transparent to God. It builds on the whole history of God’s dealings with the people of Israel in the days of the first Covenant. God deals with the world it seems, in biblical terms, not by individual revelations or even by generalized messages from heaven. God deals with the world by bringing into existence a community living by law, aspiring to justice, and in its dealings within itself, the dealings between people, somehow showing transparency to God. Ideally, somebody looking at ancient Israel would have been able to work out the kind of God it believed in. And the same applies, in the mind of St Paul and other early Christian thinkers, to the Church. ‘Look at the Church and you may begin to see what kind of God is being talked about when you see how people relate to each other.’

It’s not only in the New Testament that you find that political language and imagery around. As has very often been pointed out, the very word for Church in Greek, ekklesia, meant ‘a citizen’s assembly’ in the ancient world. And so in the earliest Christian period, to become an adopted child of God in Jesus Christ, was simultaneously to become a political being, in a new way: to become a citizen of a larger society. To receive the grace of God, God’s mercy transfiguring and enlarging your life, was, at one and the same time, to take on responsibility within the City of God, to take on responsibility for common life. St Paul picks up one of the current metaphors in ancient philosophy for society: the metaphor of the body. He didn’t invent it as a metaphor, but he does some very distinct and new things with it. Instead of just saying that everybody has a different job in society, Paul says everybody has a different form of service in society, and what is given to any one member of this society is given for the good of all and requires a letting-go of selfish interest. Mutuality and self-giving belong properly to this citizenship, and all kinds of power in this citizenship are there as a capacity to be put at the service of common life. So instead of the slightly static picture of the body as it appeared in ancient philosophy—that is, a society where lots of people had different jobs which more or less inter-locked—Paul gives a dynamic focus to the language. The body is an organism where life flows between different parts, where service occurs on the part of each to all and all to each.

Now that means that the politics of the Church and the political critique and questioning which the Church may raise, is never going to be an abstract scheme or programme, it’s going to be a set of critical touchstones. ‘Here’ says the Church ‘is a pattern of social life which we believe to be transparent to God.’ How do the practices of this particular society measure up to that transparency? What do they hide about God and about humanity? Buried in that, of course, is a very ambitious and unlikely claim indeed, that the Church is the ideal society. Ambitious and unlikely, because five minutes’ reflection (or possibly even less) may persuade you that this is some way from what the Church has looked like and does look like. And yet, in the perspective of the New Testament, that is precisely the claim made: the sorts of responsibility, the sorts of priority, and the sorts of mutuality that exist in this body are what God purposes for the human race. And in examining the way in which this community works, you ought to be able to understand what real justice might mean.

Among the many mistakes the Church has made, historically, in coming to terms with this, is the assumption that - sometimes and in some places – this gives the Church license to set the agenda for everybody in sight; to set it in coercive and often oppressive ways. But, as the Church has very, very, slowly persuaded itself on some subjects like freedom of conscience, it has come to realize rather more sharply that if it is itself the body of those who freely consent to a common allegiance, it can’t commit itself to coercive institutional forms, whether visible hierarchy with absolute powers or any particular form of state administration. It always remains what the great English poet Coleridge called ‘a critical friend’, in the political sphere. It doesn’t seek to set an agenda by imposing or controlling; it proposes not abstract criteria for morality, but simply what it itself is. It proposes to the society around that these forms of mutual care and service and accountability are the forms transparent to the most fundamental reality of all: that is to God.

So, there is no way in which a Church can be indifferent to politics if politics is understood as that science of understanding and managing with justice the way human beings live together. And because of all that, the Church proposes to the society around certain roles and images and concepts to do with humanity. It’s a community that grounds its practice on the conviction that human beings are created: that is, they are responding beings before they are initiating beings. They exist because God wills them to be. Human beings are invited and enabled to respond and to be responsible to God and to one another. Humanity rests on that responsiveness. And because all are created and all are equally the subject of God’s invitation, whether or not they accept it, the first and most important thing you know in practice about another human being is that God has invited them to exist and invites them to exist in greater fullness.

For the Church, as for other faith communities, belief about humanity is absolutely bound up with belief about God and vice versa. So within a variety of human societies there exists a body of people whose view of what humanity is about is shaped radically by belief in God – an ‘inviting’ God, to whom response is required – whose view of humanity is formed by the supposed attitudes of God to us, the promise of restoration – a new beginning, of mercy and new creation. Within every human society, that is going to be a presence, an element. Historically, it’s very often been a dominant or majority presence: in many parts of the world it still is so. But in our North Atlantic world as presently constituted, it would be rather hard to claim that that was a dominant view. Nonetheless, there it is, shaping the vision and priorities of certain people. And the question of the relation between faith and politics therefore comes to be tightly connected with the question of how such a group of people manage their relationship with a dominant cultural environment which doesn’t have that doctrine of human nature, and perhaps doesn’t have any doctrine of human nature. How does the Church relate to that secular environment? With what degree of confidence, humility, aggressiveness, hopefulness? Before moving on, I would just like to mention one observation, a quotation from Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan, who at a conference in Lyon some three or four years ago said: ‘the human recognition of God’s existence is not a compliment paid by humanity to God, but a gift given by God to humanity’. That, I think, sums up rather more elegantly than I can a great deal of what I’ve been trying to suggest in these opening thoughts.

So, what happens when we find ourselves as a believing community in the middle of a wider society that doesn’t quite know what it believes about human nature or human distinctiveness? One of the tasks which lies before us is perhaps to attempt to draw out a bit more fully, what those around us do take for granted, if anything. I mentioned in the first lecture the way in which the issue of creating human embryos strictly for research purposes raised a number of broader questions about where we regarded the limits of human dignity to lie. But there are others in our society who, in different ways, would regard what is human as in some sense, up for negotiation or recreation. There is a movement rejoicing in the name of the Extropians who believe that the ideal future for humanity is cyberspace, and that the limitations of the body are more and more being eroded by the possibilities of electronic cyber-relationship, and that that is where we should put our energy and where we should hope to find the human future. If what I said about the Church earlier on is both ambitious and unlikely, you may feel it’s not the only project to which those adjectives can be ascribed!

But what I’m saying is that in our public debate, we need to draw out a little bit further whether there is in any of this a doctrine about humanity. And very often the doctrine that emerges is a doctrine about human will and human choice, a doctrine which assumes that human will and human choice can, in certain circumstances, override any sense of the givenness of a human nature, an embodied human nature. Now, that’s to oversimplify it radically, but it does seem that drawing out the doctrinal tension between a view that gives priority to will and choice, and a view that believes that something even if we’re not quite sure what, is given about human nature and human dignity, invites some very serious and far-reaching debate. And just as, in the case of some of the scientific controversies I spoke about last night, we are sometimes fighting in the dark with those who don’t fully recognize that they are espousing doctrines, one needs to draw out such assumptions so that there can be an open exchange. The problem arises when some people imagine that their account of human nature, or their understanding of human will and choice, is so rationally self-evident that it doesn’t need to be drawn out, argued or defended. But it’s of the first importance to recognize that a great deal of what is said in our current debates, whether about the status of the embryo, the character of the human body, or whatever, involves matters of faith – belief that dignity belongs here and not here, that these are the limits of what is given about humanity.

But you may say that’s only one aspect of our contemporary human culture, and not the most positive. What about the fact that we live now in an environment very much dominated by the culture of human rights? Surely that secures for everyone in society, a clear sense of what is non-negotiable about humanity, a clear vision of a human dignity that can’t be adjusted to convenience? The first thing I want to say about that is that it is crucial that the Church should be positive about human rights. The culture of human rights has made it harder to see human dignity as negotiable; harder to see human dignity as the possession of some rather than others. There is a thoroughly welcome universalism about this approach. It’s no accident that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights entitles itself in that way as a matter of promise to all human subjects, wherever they may be. And yet, there remain some difficulties here. The history of the twentieth century, including the late twentieth century after the acceptance of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN, is not a history that encourages you to think that universal acceptance of human dignity is beyond question. In addition to countless wars, in addition to the development of weapons of mass destruction, we now also have the reopening of the question of whether torture is ever permissible. This is a question which many believed could no longer be raised some twenty years ago. Those remaining uneven areas of our rights culture should at least make us wonder whether the foundations on which it was laid were sufficiently secure. What’s more, the human rights culture as it has developed in a competitive, increasingly globalized, boundary-free environment where historic communities are fragmenting is a culture that has rather encouraged the sense that the most important thing about any human individual is that he or she has claims which somebody is able to enforce. And that, while an essential part of a human rights culture within a law-governed society, is of itself a rather slender basis for the understanding of human dignity.

Within this environment - an environment which in some ways seems very uncertain about the limits of human dignity, which in other ways has some hopeful signs in terms of human rights and yet a lot of unfinished business – where does the Church stand and what is the priority with which it works.? The first thing I’d want to say is that if we’re speaking of rights, the Christian community and the Christian individual need to stand on their right to attempt to persuade – not a right to settle questions by fiat: not a right to impose conclusions; but a right to participate in public debate and try to convince.

About eighteen months ago, when issues around the legalization of assisted dying were very much in public debate, some said with feeling and anger, ‘by what right does the Church or any other religious body seek to impose its understanding on others, to block the freedom of others to do what they choose?’ And the answer which I tried to give then and which I’d still give now, is that the Church has no right to block the freedom of others and no right to dictate its philosophy, but it has a right to attempt to persuade a voting public, whether in the general public or in the slightly more rarefied atmosphere of the House of Lords. I don’t believe that there is any insult to the freedoms of others implied in that invitation to debate, and if the Church or the individual fails to persuade and the vote goes the other way: what then? Then, the Christian individual and community have the same freedom as anyone else to seek to change the law, to persuade once again. And what if the law imposes upon the Christian duties, obligations that are in conflict with conscience? Then of course there arises a very difficult problem. Christians have historically held to the right to resist what is believed to be directly against God’s justice: to disobey, to fail to obey a command - even from a legally appointed superior – which is in conscience held to be against God’s justice. That is a liberty the Church has always recognized, and a liberty which most liberal states likewise recognize because of their valuation of conscience. When abortion was legalized in this country, provision was made for the consciences of some. And if society doesn’t grant this, then the conscientious believer has to be prepared for the possibility of suffering for conscience. None of that is new. It’s ingrained in that long-standing tension between the community, the citizenship that is brought into existence by the act of God in Jesus Christ for the Christian believer, and the citizenship which belongs to the Christian in virtue of being here or there at this particular time. It is that inescapable area of reserve which makes the Christian always a slightly suspect figure in a society that is looking for unconditional loyalty to anything and everything it may determine. And I have to remind you that during the twentieth century it has been of the first importance that there have been Christians who have lived out of that sense of liberty and reserve, and so have challenged the worst tyrannies of our time.

If there really is a right to persuade, or at least to try to persuade, that means also what might be called a ‘right to be visible’ – an assumption that we still live in a society, which, however secular its processes, is still open to the raising of fundamental questions. From the religious viewpoint a healthy society is one that in order to foster such debate is not afraid of the public acknowledgement of and engagement with communities of religious conviction. It’s precisely what is encoded in the existence of ‘faith schools’ as they are now so unhelpfully called. The state decides that it can and should engage with communities of religious conviction, negotiating what it can do together, insisting on its own legal state supremacy and yet negotiating with communities of conviction for the expression and dissemination of their own views. That is a healthy society. To the extent that we enjoy all of that, in this country, we live in a healthy society. And one of the signs of slight risk to our social health is the rising presence in our society of some unease about this: an unease about faith schools; an unease sometimes expressed about whether it is right for people who have certain convictions to play a part in government. Against this, we can only say that the risks of a polity which overrules conscience or which seeks to ignore communities of conviction in the public sphere are very high. The coercion of conscience is never a pretty sight and the exclusion, whether de facto or de jure, of people with certain convictions from public office is again something for which the precedents are not particularly happy. But the paradox is, I would say, that in a healthy society both the believer and the secularist may find themselves facilitating and defending the conscience of the other. A healthy society is one in which the believer is prepared to stand up for the conscience of the secularist as much as the secularist for the conscience of the believer. Once again, I believe that is where we largely find ourselves today in this country: to the extent that this comes under question or criticism, we need to have the argument.

Now, all of this takes it for granted that our moral perspectives as human beings, when they are clear and coherent, derive from what some anthropologists like to call the ‘thick’ textures of common life – that’s to say from a common life that is many-layered, culturally alive and creative. Our moral perspectives don’t just derive from abstract civic principles. Which is why a culture of human rights, without a context in practices of respect, of traditions of behaviour and so on, can lead to a deeply individualist atmosphere with a lot of anxiety about litigation and enforcement. And again you won’t need me to underline that there are aspects of our society driving in that direction. A society that is only about individual rights and publicly enforceable contracts is going to be a thin phenomenon. It’s going to be socially and morally anaemic, and its capacity for positive and creative mutual respect for the imagination of the other’s reality is going to be very diminished. That’s why it is very hard to legislate a neighbourhood into existence; why it’s hard to create a corporate identity out of nothing; why it’s extremely difficult to define and legislate for what we might mean by ‘Britishness’; why it’s very difficult to sustain commercial life without a solid background of practices of mutual trust, and so on. A healthy society is one where the culture of human rights rests upon, is informed by and sometimes challenged by the many-layered, interactive texture of a society aware of its past, aware of identities and commitments that are more than just those of public, enforceable contracts.

Once again, to speak of this Abbey where we’re meeting: this is the place where monarchs are crowned and whether you are a monarchist or a republican or not too sure where you stand on the spectrum between, you will at least, I hope, recognize that there is a very large question of what it is in any society that holds together a body of practice and tradition which can outlive any one political practice or party. And it’s that wider context - not simply of civil society, but of communities, of conviction and commitment – that wider reality, in which I believe the Church along with other religious communities has a distinctive place in shaping how a society thinks about itself, its health, the right and wrong ways of change.

So, moving to a conclusion: as I hinted at the beginning I’m proposing this evening that rather like science, politics needs to see itself as one set of practices which human beings are involved in. To take yet another aphorism in which the word appears: everything is politics, but politics is not everything. When politics seeks to be everything - politics in the sense of pure management of our life together, without history, corporate identity or tradition – it becomes what the National Anthem describes as knavish. And the consequences for politicians are just as serious. When politicians are understood to be first and foremost a professional, political class without a human or cultural hinterland, without connection with communities of conviction, when the only thing we need to know about politicians is their absolute neutrality with respect to any of the specific communities that make up real societies, I think we end up not only with anaemic politics but anaemic politicians. The great historian of German culture, Nicholas Boyle of Cambridge, has spoken of the immense significance in European history of that nineteenth-century process by which, especially in Germany, a class of professional politicians was created. If politics is too important to leave to politicians, I think I’d like also to suggest that politicians are too important to leave to politics. I would like to see a situation in which our communities of conviction, particularly our religious communities, actively encouraged their members much more to enter into political life and responsibility, simply so that we should go on having three-dimensional persons in public life. Politicians deserve better than to be abandoned to pure politics.

So, political identity, the understanding and management of life together, is an inseparable and necessary part of the identity of a Christian. And a Christian brings that dimension of politics to the understanding and management of political life around him or her. Christian discipleship is formed by that sense of responsibility to God and the other, and the need to create a form of life together that is transparent to the justice of God. And that vision, more than any set of principles, or system of morality, that vision of life together is what the Christian proposes in society. It may or may not be accepted, but healthy society accepts the need for a critical friend, able to stimulate and sustain debate about human dignity, its reality and its limits. Without that, our politics and politicians are in danger of becoming bloodless. But to raise those questions is to press a little bit closer to the issue I hope to be reflecting on tomorrow night: what are the roots, the bases from which Christian conviction grows? How does the Christian polity, the Christian citizenship arise historically? And on what grounds might we take that process of its arising seriously enough to believe still that it has a place in our society and our intellectual horizons today?