Arguments for suffering
Edward Norman
God Alive: Priorities in Pastoral Theology Graham Leonard (Darton, Longman & Todd pp. 88, £2.50) Dr Graham Leonard is perhaps best known to those outside Church circles because of the tasteless and, as it turned out, illinformed controversy got up by The Times newspaper about the manner of his recent translation to the See of London. It was imagined by that paper's ecclesiastical correspondent that Dr Leonard's appointment had been forced upon the religious authorities through the influence of the Prime Minister. No such thing had actually occurred, but the episode drew attention to Dr Leonard's opinions. They turned out, mirabile dictu, to be orthodox: no wonder The Times was suspicious. Now, in this splendid new book (a series of lectures originally delivered in Durham), Dr Leonard compounds his crimes by offering some considered, scholarly, and penetrating observations about the relationship of Christianity to contemporary society in England.
To a public anaesthetised by the frequent and solemn statements of official religious bodies (when the public are conscious of them at all, it should be added) about the essence of Christianity being the service of humanity, Dr Leonard declares, 'the purpose of the Christian gospel and of the Christian life is union with God'. Equally daring is his contention that those Christians who interpret the purpose of human life as residing in the attainment of happiness have hopelessly confused their faith with secular goals. Too many churchmen, he says, share 'the present earth-centred outlook of modern man'. Views like these, when they manage to get an airing at all, usually attract howls of execration from the leaders of Christian opinion. Those who entertain them are dismissed as 'otherworldly pietists', absorbed in selfish contemplation of eternity and unconcerned about the sufferings of humanity. Dr Leonard, however, is quite explicit about this: suffering is not to be regarded as a great evil, as it is by so many Christians today (again following the secular humanists); and his theology is so centred in the Incarnation, and in the mutual interdependence of the physical and the spiritual, that he can hardly be indicted on that score either.
He also avoids naming names and giving examples of the attitudes with which he finds himself in disagreement, and this will quieten his critics a bit— although some will doubtless deny that anyone actually believes the arguments he analyses with disapproval. Progressive Churchmen who have their opinions described, in general profess an indignant belief that they have been attacked. It is, as Dr Leonard notices in several places, 'a bent world', so one should expect a number of 'bent' interpretations of it, and a number of 'bent' people, too, for that matter. As recent moral discourse within the Church of England has shown, those expectations have been amply fulfilled.
When the late Roger Bastide wrote his seminal study of the African religions of Brazil, in 1960, (Une Sociologie des Interpenetrations des Civilisations), he observed that the members of the syncretistic black Christian cults had transformed Catholicism from a spiritual to a domestic system. The saints and the Virgin were visualised by the adherents just as once they saw their ancestors and their tribal divinities: not as bestowers of celestial grace but as the protectors of earthly life, called upon to bear the burdens of daily labour and to bring material benefits. The same phenomenon may be discerned in the Independent black sects of South Africa and South London. Dr Leonard, though he is unaware of the parallel, is in effect saying that signs of a comparable transformation are evident in the modern Church of England: 'It is not an exaggeration to say that the average Christian today sees religion primarily in terms of the help which God can give him or her in this world, with a vague expectation for the world to come, rather than as an active and creative relationship with God.' Towards the end of his book he adds, 'we need to tell Christians today to pray above all for grace to enable them to grow in holiness, rather than to tell God about the problems which they think are important and to ask him to provide the solution which they think is the right one'.
Such realism is rare in the modern Church. It is an extraordinary testimony to the priority of ideology over spirituality within the present leadership that Dr Leonard's sort of assessment will be labelled as 'conservative' and ignored. Many Church leaders are obsessed by the material problems of mankind and by the ideologies of materialism. To be informed, by Dr Leonard, that the first priority is prayer, the second, a rediscovery of mystery, reverence and awe, and that the third is the recovery of a sense of discipline and sacrifice, will be greeted by those to whom the priorities are such 'issues' as racism, world poverty, and the denial of Human Rights, as a monstrous form of insensitivity. Yet his book is full of genuinely compassionate concern with the fate of men — viewed properly, from the 'dimension of eternity', as flawed and partial creatures who will be truly lost unless they seek their spiritual identities. Dr Leonard also points to the central inconsistency of those theologians and activists who secularise the message of Christianity by re-defining it in terms of the moral aspirations of contemporary humanism. Their modern ideas are justified by rereading the Bible to show that the now outmoded ideas of the first Christians merely reflected their acceptance of ephemeral contemporary thought. By their own canon, Dr Leonard is saying, their opinions also reflect ephemeral moments of culture. The Church has 'lost her nerve', and 'shows at times an almost pathetic desire to be loved by the world'.
After reading this distinguished and valuable study, however, there must remain a question. How is it that the author of so critical an analysis is also the signatory of a document, recently issued by the Board for Social Responsibility of the Church of England's General Synod, on the Brandt Commission's Report — a document filled with just the erroneous misuses of Christianity that his book rightly deplores? It is a document, furthermore, which quotes President Nyrere of Tanzania to show that Christianity is all about eradicating poverty, ignorance and oppression; which argues against the 'tendencies of wealth to accumulate at the core' — a state of affairs which, it says, 'must be reversed'; which offers examples of what it calls 'capitalist selfinterest'; which, by clear implication, is hostile to the British Government's decision to renew its nuclear deterrent; and which contends for a reform of the monetary system. Perhaps in his chairmanship of the Board for Social Responsibility Dr Leonard practises the suffering he commends as inseparable from the Christian life. If so, then the discussion of the Brandt Report within the churches — a Report which his Board describes as 'prophetic', but which many will recognise as a tissue of polemical assertions of a notably partisan character — will heighten his Christian life no end. Next time he is on his way to a meeting of the Board he had better recall his own words in this book. 'Moral indignation today often springs from commitments to an ideological standpoint, rather than from a belief in the capacity and willingness of human nature to respond to a moral challenge', he writes. 'This would account for the strongly selective way in which moral indignation is exercised'. It is a brave cleric who tells that to the lobbyists.
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