The Bible in Transmission Autumn 2018

Editorial

Tony Graham Editor

Later this year we will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice treaty signed by the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France that ended the World War One. The truce went into effect at the eleventh hour on 11 November 1918.

On that first Armistice Day, as the bells rang out and people celebrated the end of the conflict, parents in Monkmoor Road, Shrewsbury, received news of their first son’s death. Wilfred Owen had been fatally wounded in action while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre canal at Ors a week before the signing of the Armistice.

Owen was one of the finest poets of the World War One. He did not depict the war in a sentimental way, as some noble undertaking but instead his aim was to tell the truth about his experiences on the Western Front – the horror and brutality of modern industrial warfare, the suffering it brings and a warning about what men were doing to each other.

In ‘Strange Meeting’, which Owen wrote in the spring or early summer of 1918, two soldiers who fought on opposing sides meet in an imagined Hell. One has killed the other, but despite the fact they were enemies, there is no animosity on the part of the man who died lifts ‘distressful hands, as if to bless’ his killer. ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’. No longer enemies, they find it possible to see beyond conflict and hatred and be reconciled to one another. This is the clear message of the poem – humankind must seek reconciliation.

However, Owen also expresses the fear that enemies will not be reconciled, that ‘Men will go

content with what we spoiled’ and not have learnt the truth about the ‘pity of war’.

Owen’s warning about the need for reconciliation was not heeded. Although the guns finally fell silent in 1918 and the war did not officially end until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28th June 1919, peace would not last. The eleventh hour would mark a pause, not the end.

After the Great War, Irène Laure, who lived in southern France, worked with her husband, Victor, to rebuild relationships with Germans, even taking German children into their home. However, when the Nazis invaded France two decades later, they both became active members of the French Resistance in the Marseilles region. Irène Laure was a socialist and she hated what the Germans were doing to her country and her family (one of her sons was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo).

She rejoiced when she saw Allied bombers flying overhead and wanted to see Germany obliterated from the map of Europe. After the war she witnessed the opening of a massed grave of some of her comrades in the Resistance.

In 1946 Laure was elected to the French National Assembly from Marseilles with a huge majority.

This was the first election in France when women were allowed to vote or stand for parliament. Keen to participate in the rebuilding of Europe after the war, Laure accepted an invitation to attend the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) Conference at Caux, Switzerland, in July 1947. However, when she arrived Laure discovered that there were also Germans attending the conference, they 3

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NOTES 1. For a more detailed account see M Henderson, Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate (London: Grosvenor, 2002), pp. 145–150.

See also J Piguet, For the Love of Tomorrow: Irene Laure Story (Initiatives of Change, 1987).

2. See M Volf’s excellent book, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological exploration of identity, otherness and reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993).

3. D Goodhart, ‘The age of incivility: how social media amplifies our differences’, The Spectator, 9 June 2018.

were the first Germans to be authorised by the Allied Occupation to leave their country. Laure immediately felt that she could not stay, such were her feelings of hatred. However, before she got to the door she was challenged by American pastor, Frank Buchman, with the question, ‘How can you expect to rebuild Europe if you reject the German people?’ It was a probing question that went straight to the heart of the matter and sent Laure into turmoil. She retired to her room and spent two days and nights without food or sleep wrestling with her conscience and, it turns out, with God. She recognised that she had to deal with her hatred. ‘I needed a miracle,’ she said. ‘I hardly believed in God, but he performed that miracle.’

On the third morning Laure left her room and agreed to meet and have a meal with just one German lady, the widowed Clarita von Trott, who was a part of the Resistance in Germany. Through this conversation Laure understood how the war devastated both their countries and realized that her hatred was misplaced. After the meal the two women prayed together, seeking God’s help to overcome the hatred so that they could build a new future.

Laure then asked to be allowed to speak to the conference, including the Germans. She stood in front of the 600 delegates admitting how she felt about the German people. She admitted that her feelings were wrong and asked for the forgiveness of all Germans present. There was silence and then a German woman rose and took Laure’s hand.

For Laure, it was as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders and she knew from that moment she would give the rest of her life’s work for forgiveness and reconciliation.

In 1949 Laure and her husband travelled throughout Germany addressing 200 meetings, including ten state parliaments. Every time Laure repeated her apology and asked for forgiveness.

Her words reached tens of thousands of Germans and she became something of a catalyst for a wider Franco-German reconciliation movement.

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of hope. Two of our contributors, Sarah Hills and Gordon Kennedy, remind us that this ministry of reconciliation begins with the transforming grace of God, the wounded healer. As Gordon states, ‘if we long to see reconciliation in our relationships with one another we must begin with our reconciliation to God our Father.’

Our need for God’s grace is highlighted in Fleur Dorrell’s reflections on Caravaggio’s two paintings of the Supper at Emmaus based on the story in Luke’s Gospel. Here Fleur explores ‘how Caravaggio uses symbol and revelation to reconcile art with reality and faith with salvation to open the disciples’ eyes to Christ’.

Our second article comes out of the Corrymeela community in Northern Ireland. Established in 1965, Corrymeela’s mission is to ‘transform division through human encounter’. Here Glenn Jordan and Pádraig Ó Tuama discuss, with a focus on the book of Ruth, the importance of creating space to share stories and the power narratives have to confront and transform. As we approach the centenary of the partition of Ireland and face the uncertainty of the UK leaving the European Union, Glenn and Pádraig challenge us to examine ‘the stories that will affect our civic, bordered, political, religious and relational realities. These realities invite deep and complicated reflection on the past, and the ways in which the stories told (or not told) of the past can affect the practice of the present.’ What sort of society do we want to become?

As technology drives changes in society, significant interpersonal challenges emerge. As David Goodhart argues, social media has amplified our differences and the tone has changed.3 We are living in an age of increasing incivility. So how do we deal with difference and what practical steps can we take to help restore broken relationships?

Drawing on her own experience of social media, Elizabeth Oldfield reflects on what it means to love your neighbour in a digital age.

Laure died in 1987. The heading of her obituary in The Times referred to her as a ‘healer of wounds’.

For Laure, reconciliation became a way of life, a journey away from hatred towards forgiveness and friendship, a movement from exclusion to embrace.2

Social divisions are not new, as David Muir outlines in his account of the Windrush generation, who experienced significant racism and discrimination.

‘The Church can, and should be, the place where all people feel welcome and accepted.’ However, more needs to be done to make our churches more inclusive and our society more cohesive.

At the heart of Laure’s commitment to be a peacemaker, was her faith in God. It was by God’s grace that Laure’s wounds of hatred and suffering were transformed and became a source of healing.

In her work, Laure was able to help people create spaces where they could tell their stories but also listen to another’s point of view and be changed by the encounter.

In our penultimate article, we return to the subject of war – our war on nature. Ian Christie argues that in the face of a worsening ecological crisis we need to urgently rethink our ethics and values.

The potential for ecological reconciliation is real and Christian communities can take a lead and be ‘exemplars of new ways of living and cooperating that demonstrate reconciliation’ with God’s creation.

In many ways, Irène Laure’s is a remarkable and challenging story. Like Laure, we too are called to be peacemakers in a fractured world, both individually and as the Church, and be witnesses of the gospel

This collection of articles challenges us to think about how we live and the sort of society we want to live in. Blessed, indeed, are the peacemakers.

From estrangement to communion A theology of reconciliation

Sarah Hills Dr Sarah Hills is Coventry Cathedral’s Canon for Reconciliation Ministry.

Coventry Cathedral has a particular calling to the ministry of reconciliation. The medieval cathedral was destroyed on the night of 14 November 1940.

Provost Howard, looking at the destruction around him after the bombing, took the bold decision to not only remember the past but to look forward when he held two charred pieces of wood from the ruins and said, ‘Father forgive’. Three of the medieval roof nails found in the ruins were bound together into the form of a cross – the cross of nails. A new cathedral was built and they looked forward with hope to a time of peace and reconciliation.1 Part of Coventry Cathedral’s reconciliation ministry is centred on the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN). The CCN has three major strands: • • •

Healing the wounds of the past.

Living with difference and celebrating diversity.

Building a culture of peace.

On the move Reconciliation is a journey – from the past, through the present, to the future. This journey of reconciliation involves all of us. Reconciliation journeys start with the same thing – our stories.

God’s story, your story, my story. We are not all the same and we do not all need to agree on everything all the time, but how can we live with difference well if we do not know something about each other, if we do not share our stories, if we do not try to understand the other? There are potentially dangerous consequences if we do not try to understand the other and their perspective.

Fear of the other, power imbalance and hate can all flourish when we are unable to live with difference.

Last year I spent part of Holy Week and Easter on a peace walk in Northern Iraq, in Kurdistan.2 About 20 of us from Europe and others walked with local Christians, Muslims and Yazidis. We walked for peace, to proclaim the possibility of peace in that fought-over land. On Good Friday we visited a village about 30km from Mosul (the ancient city of Nineveh), a village that had been destroyed by ISIS, the villagers having all fled or worse. It was a place of destruction, completely devoid of life. Houses were rubble, shops damaged and the church, though still standing, had been desecrated. The the altar was broken and lying in rubble. We could hear Mosul being shelled. We held a Good Friday service in the desecrated church. We laid candles that we had brought with us in the shape of a cross in front of the destroyed altar and prayed the prayers of Good Friday, the pain and lament for Jesus, and for healing, for the end to that conflict, for peace. I placed a small cross of nails on the broken altar as a sign of Christ’s peace.

On Easter Day we returned to that deserted village and desecrated church. However, this time the bleakness in the church was transformed.

The same rubble was there, the same bullet holes in the walls, the same broken crosses and hacked memorials, but now the church was full of people from the surrounding villages. There were flowers on the altar and there were children dressed in white. The congregation was there to proclaim the hope of the resurrection, the hope of

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NOTES 1. The ruins of the old cathedral have been preserved as a reminder of the folly and waste war.

The decision to build a new cathedral was not an act of defiance, but rather a sign of faith, trust and hope for the future of the world.

2. A quarter of people living in Northern Iraq live in refugee camps, people internally displaced from their own country due to ISIS attacks.

3. D Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness: A Personal Overview of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (London: Rider, 1999), p. 213.

4. H Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Conditions Facing Modern Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 212–13.

5. A Bash, ‘Did Jesus Discover Forgiveness?’, Journal of Religious Ethics 41.3 (2013), pp.

382–99.

6. JP Lederach, The Journey Toward Reconciliation (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1999), p. 13.

7. RJ Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1992), p. 58.

8. All biblical references are from the New Revised Standard Version.

9. G Smyth & S Graham, Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Justice (Belfast: Centre for Contemporary Christianity/ECONI, 2003), p. 3.

peace and the possibility of rebuilding. The local Peshmerga, the soldiers came to receive their Easter communion. The foundation of a rebuilt community was born that day. There was a space for remembering and for reconciliation, for moving from despair to hope, hostility to peace, conflict to reconciliation.

A biblical mandate An understanding of the theology of reconciliation is crucial for us in our broken world today. Do we stick with the world’s answers, or do we believe that God really changes everything?

How can a theology of reconciliation help us as we seek to respond to violence and conflict? An understanding of reconciliation in today’s world is vital where white-gated communities trump cardboard shacks, where the colour of your skin, your gender or your ethnicity can deny you justice.

As Christians we have all been given a mandate for understanding and practising reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5.11–21. So how do we understand a theology of reconciliation? Drawing principles of reconciliation ministry out of story, and specifically the Iraq peace walk story, we can say that reconciliation involves pilgrimage. On a pilgrimage we journey towards a place of encounter, bringing our lives in all their conflict and brokenness. The space of encounter is sacred: we meet God. Then we journey out again, changed and transformed, ready to share our new understanding and ability to act in the world.

We do that together, embodied and in a real space.

We come from our lives and, then, in the sharing of our selves, our stories, we can walk together. We meet others and share our journey, in all its pain, woundedness and hope. We do that in fellowship, learning how to listen, to see, to experience the other. We also recognise our need for each other on this pilgrimage. We are linked in the spirit of ubuntu: ‘I exist because you exist.’ Our stories are linked. We need each other.

In the space of pilgrimage, we learn about the process (often long) of reconciliation.

The component parts of the journey include truth, acknowledgement, remembering, story telling, lament, repentance, forgiveness, justice, restitution, etc. This is all undergirded by a spirituality of reconciliation. We surround the reconciliation journey in prayer, in Scripture, in the journey through the cross, and especially in the Eucharist. We share the body of Christ together as the broken, shared, blessed body of Christ in the world, the community of Christian people. Then we take our selves out again to act as agents of transformation, as reconcilers.

Forgiveness Looking then in more detail at a theology of reconciliation, we see that historical teachings from Paul, the early Church Fathers, through the

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medieval period to the Reformation and beyond have much to inform the current debates. Old and New Testament biblical scholarship is, of course, informative when discussing concepts such as covenant, shalom and forgiveness.

‘There is a movement, not easily discernible, at the heart of things to reverse the awful centrifugal force of alienation, brokenness, division, hostility and disharmony. God has set in motion a centripetal process, a moving toward the centre, towards unity, harmony, goodness, peace and justice; one that removes barriers. Jesus says, ‘And when I am lifted up from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself’, as he hangs from His cross with outflung arms, thrown out to clasp all, everyone and everything, in cosmic embrace, so that all, everyone, everything, belongs.

None is an outsider, all are insiders, all belong. There are no aliens; all belong in one family, God’s family, and the human family.’3 Desmond Tutu articulates the hope of reconciliation for all. This is clearly a Christian hope, and places reconciliation firmly in the theological arena. Forgiveness is at the heart of Tutu’s theology of reconciliation and, indeed, the Christian gospel.

However, forgiveness is not a straightforward subject, and views on it and its place within the reconciliation journey differ widely, even from within the Christian perspective.

Where, then, if at all, does forgiveness fit in the reconciliation paradigm? Hannah Arendt writes of Jesus being the ‘discoverer’ of forgiveness.4 Whether or not that is the case,5 there is no doubting the role forgiveness can play in reconciling relationships, in both the secular and the sacred. While forgiveness is one of the key concepts to consider, there are others including justice, repentance, truth, peace, remembering, not to mention restitution.

Transforming relationships Reconciliation can be seen as primarily between God and humanity, but it is also interpersonal, social, national, international and ecological.

It can be seen as process, or goal, or both. For instance, John Paul Lederach uses Psalm 85 as a model for reconciliation, drawing out truth, justice, mercy and peace as necessary and transformative processes leading towards reconciliation, which is at once journey, encounter and place.6 At the heart of reconciliation are relationships, connections or reconnections: between humanity and God; between me and you; us and them.

Robert Schreiter captures what I take as the core theological meaning of reconciliation: ‘To enter into a process of reconciliation is better described as entering mysterion, a pathway in which God leads us out of suffering and alienation into the experience of the grace of reconciliation. This grace is transforming, and creates the conditions of possibility not only for forgiving our enemies, but also helping them to rediscover their humanity.’7

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Reconciliation, then, is about transforming relationships, about reconnecting. Reconciliation, however, clearly does not just ‘happen’, even though soteriologically grace is foremost in the enabling of these transformative relationships.

Several core components are necessary for these reconnections that make up the reconciliation journey: acknowledgement; remembering; truth; lament; understanding of the effect on the other (and self ); repentance; transformation; restitution; justice; forgiveness.

a pathway in which God leads us out of suffering and alienation into the experience of the grace of reconciliation Smyth and Graham argue that the interplay between God’s saving purpose and human sin, where forgiveness and reconciliation are placed, has a long biblical heritage, in both Old and New Testaments. They quote examples of fidelity and treachery (Cain and Abel); the coexistence of goodness and betrayal (Hagar, King David); and the world as both the arena of grace (John 3.16) and grace rejected (John 1.11).8 ‘If we truly recognise the world as God’s creation, we cannot designate it as beyond the realm of grace. The world of politics and public life falls within God’s reconciling purpose.’9

The process of reconciliation So what does the process of reconciliation actually look like amidst all this? Liechty and Clegg argue that a true understanding of reconciliation has to be ‘built on the interlocking dynamics of forgiveness, repentance, truth and justice, understood in part as religiously rooted virtues, but also as basic dynamics (even when unnamed or unrecognised) of human interaction, including public life and therefore politics’.10 John de Gruchy writes that the process of reconciliation is ‘a human and social process that requires theological explanation, and a theological concept seeking human and social embodiment.’11 Reconciliation then, I would argue, following Liechty and Clegg and also de Gruchy, is a process which must be theological and human, social and political. It is a process that entails both understanding and action, or theory and praxis.

John de Gruchy sees four interrelated ways of looking at the process of reconciliation. The first is theological and refers to reconciliation between God and humanity, which then allows for ‘a shared life and language’. The second is interpersonal reconciliation, or the relationships between individuals. The third is social, such as between communities or local groups. The fourth is political.

He writes, ‘Reconciliation is, if you like, a journey

from the past into the future, a journey from estrangement to communion, or from what was patently unjust in search of a future that is just.’12 A theology of reconciliation that is about bringing a just future into communion with others lends itself to my view of reconciliation as being necessarily relational, and a process, rather than a static event.

In order to explore this further, I turn to Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf’s work. In Exclusion and Embrace Volf writes that in order to address the problems we face in our world of exclusion and difference, of hatred and misuse of power over those who are not like us, that there is a need for a cross-centred act of relationship, or what he calls ‘the embrace of reconciliation’.13 This ‘drama of embrace’ encapsulates four moments: opening the arms, waiting, closing the arms, and opening them again.

In this cross-shaped embrace, firstly, opening the arms signifies a reaching out for relationship with the other, a desire for a sharing of myself with the other (do the action). Secondly, waiting signifies ‘non-invasion’. My desire has been made clear, now it is up to you, ‘the other’, to respond. Thirdly, in closing the arms, the goal of the embrace is reached, and it must be reciprocal, but not overpowering or unequal. Fourthly, the final act of opening the arms again needs to happen if one’s boundary is not to become subsumed into the other. This final opening of the arms also allows for further embrace as we look forward to the future.

NOTES 10. J Liechty & C Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001), p. 44.

11. J De Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (London: SCM, 2002), p. 26.

12. Ibid., p. 28.

13. M Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

14. R Schreiter, ‘The Theology of Reconciliation and Peacemaking for Mission’ in Mission – Violence and Reconciliation (eds H Mellor & TE Yates; Sheffield: Cliff College Publishing, 2004), pp. 11–28, (p.18).

Robert Schreiter privileges the importance of the ‘new creation’. He delineates the process of reconciliation, based on Paul’s writings, as follows: reconciliation first and foremost is the work of God; God’s reconciling work begins with the victim; God makes of both the victim and the wrongdoer ‘a new creation’; the Christian places suffering inside the story of the suffering and death of Christ; and full reconciliation will happen only when God will be all in all.14 Both of these arguments, i.e. the necessity of both divine grace and then human relationships for reconciliation, and the link back to God, are core to my understanding of reconciliation, both theologically and in the social setting, in a community and in ministry.

Conclusion In his Son’s death and resurrection, in his body, God enables us to inhabit his blessings. That is why and how we inhabit this space we find ourselves in today, how we as committed disciples of Christ can tilt our communities towards reconciliation.

That is how and why we live with difference and celebrate diversity. That is how we live with the gifts of blessing we receive as peacemakers. That is how and why we live the gospel, the gospel of reconciliation.

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Sharing stories

Narratives, reconciliation and public theology in Ireland and Britain

In the next three years a number of significant civic events will be marked across the island of Ireland, as well as in Britain.

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On 29 March 2019, the United Kingdom (that is, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and associated islands) will, as things stand, exit the European Union.

•

On 31 December 2021, the partition of Ireland will mark its centenary.

The Brexit referendum campaign in June 2016 and the subsequent triggering of Article 50 in March 2017 did not just set the agenda for the UK government for the foreseeable future. These momentous events have also exposed ruptures and fault lines in UK society and reignited tensions in relation to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Glenn Jordan & Pádraig Ó Tuama Glenn and Pádraig are both members of staff at Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organisation.

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For decades, the tumultuous relationship between Britain and Ireland, and in particular the question about the rightful leadership in these islands, has been noted. People from various groups hold different parties to blame. In addition, public imagination about this dynamic of blame is also communicated as a singular, i.e. that to hold the ‘other’ to blame means that there is little-to-no blame to be apportioned towards your ‘own’ side.

Notably, some people think the troubles around the Irish border are merely Irish problems, not noting the truth that 400 years of British–Irish relations have distilled themselves mostly into six small counties in the north of the island of Ireland, the story of which reveals the grander stories of

the diverging British and Irish projects of the last half millennium.

In this dynamic, religion has been complicit, not curative. Religion in Ireland – most often used as a marker for those loyal to either Britain or Ireland – has been an important signifier for a society that has torn itself apart in the name of safety, power and territory for some. The religious imagination in our history has been limited: it has perpetuated a binary approach that implies that in order for one group to feel safe and at home, to enjoy belonging, their supremacy (in language, politics, religion, access to power) needs to be supported.

To participate in this binary approach denies the generosity and self-giving nature indigenous to the Christian texts, and – on a fundamental level – excludes the kind of love that is the call of all participants in the Christian faith.

In the Irish peace project of the past 20 years, the voice of religion has been steadily decreasing in volume. However, many of the resistances to a greater mutual flourishing on both sides of the border are justified by an uninformed and ungenerous reading of Christian adherence. One notices this on levels of political leadership (our politicians are noted for using their adherence to religion for not engaging with those they consider the other) and on grassroots levels (one can detect dynamics of both Protestant and Catholic superiority in young people, who may not be devout, but whose readings of religion lead them to exclude the other).

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Corrymeela has always found itself active at those places where the tectonic plates of conflicted communities threaten to crack and split apart.

The situation post-Brexit on the island of Ireland and in UK society as a whole is a natural space for Corrymeela, which has dedicated itself for more than 50 years now to the healing of fractures and the building of new and healthy relationships in the aftermath of trauma. Corrymeela’s mission is to transform division through human encounter.

Begun in 1965 by the Presbyterian chaplain to Queen’s University Belfast, it has been a place of gathering for people across (and beyond) Christian boundaries to engage with each other on the difficult differences that have caused murder, sectarianism, diminishing social capital and a lowering of religious integrity’s witness towards social justice.

In 2018, as we approach the next three years of change and civic remembrance, we are engaged in a public theology programme that addresses some of the original sins of sectarianism at the heart of how religion is communicated and is powerful across the island of Ireland, even in those who do not consider themselves to be devout.

One element of this programme is an island-wide conversation on borders and belonging orientated around the book of Ruth.

We seek to enter into the conversation, or the silence, in faith communities in relation to Brexit and our borders not to re-run the referendum nor to apportion blame in our ancient differences, but to ask ourselves what kind of a society we aspire to for the future. In doing so, we are introducing the sacred text of our Christian communities as a serious conversation partner, because this seems the sensible thing to do when we acknowledge that among our communities there will be contrasting views. Putting our shared text at the centre enables us to navigate the complexity and the pain of the conversations we need to have and also contributes to a recovery of confidence in our distinctive voice in the public square.

The book of Ruth Now the book of Ruth would not ordinarily be a book to which we would turn for wisdom and insight on complex issues like the ones we face here today. The stereotype we often carry is that this is a romantic book of the young, beautiful woman fallen on hard times who meets a good man, they fall in love, get married and have children or at least a child. Of course, there is some questionable activity implied as the heroine seduces her soon-to-be husband but, by and large, this can be glossed over and at least it is tasteful, though only barely.

Perhaps the most well-known part of the story is the transcendent declaration of loyalty on the part of Ruth who commits herself to her mother-inlaw to go where she goes, live where she lives, to

worship Naomi’s God in such a way that only death would part them.

NOTES

As we engage deeper with the characters and their lives though, there are other profound things which reveal themselves – like the mystery of relationships between women; like the trauma of surviving one’s children, of childlessness and marriage and patriarchy.

1. C Mitchell, Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

putting our shared text at the centre enables us to navigate the complexity and the pain of the conversations we need to have As we think about our islands, the story features a number of border crossings. Elimelech and Naomi and their boys leave Bethlehem (due to famine) and move to Moab (the place of the traditional enemy) and fall on hard times. Later, when circumstances change and a dispirited Naomi seeks to go home, the situation is reversed for the principal characters. Ruth becomes a woman in a man’s world, a foreigner in a country that does not like her sort, childless in a society that required sons, a widow in a family-based culture, and poor in a community that lacked a safety net. This island, north and south, and these islands, east and west, have frequently been the places of border crossings, not all of which have been chosen – some have been forced. However, our stories are intertwined.

In the Hebrew Bible overall, the book of Ruth can be read as a form of counter-narrative to Ezra and Nehemiah, telling a story where ethnic and religious purity is perhaps not as critical to citizenship as they might have claimed and, in doing so, it opens up a debate about the nature of belonging. The book begins the process of challenging stereotypes and invites the reader to consider a new account. As the story opens embittered Bethlehamites might perceive Moab as the proper place for mean and tight-fisted Elimelech during a famine. However, as the story proceeds the reader must face the uncomfortable prospect that Moab offers hospitality to the family, the widow Naomi finds a lasting home there and her boys find wives.

Ruth and Orpah continue to care for their motherin-law even after the deaths of their husbands when tradition would dictate that their marriage contracts were ended. Indeed, by not leaving Naomi then, and continuing to live with her they are, to all intents and purposes, acting as if their marriage contracts were still in effect. They were entitled to reclaim the contract sum or dowry from Naomi and return home, but they refuse. Naomi has to plead with them and only then does Orpah turn around. However, Ruth professes profound

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loyalty and commitment to her widowed motherin-law in language that remains deeply moving even today (Ruth 1.16-18).

Boaz redraws the stereotypes still further by drawing attention to her loyalty and care for Naomi in language reminiscent of that used of the patriarch Abraham and even of God (Ruth 2.11–12; 3.10–11). The women of the town witness to something similar (Ruth 4.15).

The final evidence that the stereotypes have been undermined and a new understanding of community has been created is the inclusion of the family line of Perez. First, we should note that, ostensibly, the whole purpose of the marriage between Boaz and Ruth was to preserve the

so often, in situations of conflict, the ‘true story’ is contested family line of Mahlon and through him Elimelech.

However, the list only mentions Boaz and is silent on the position of Mahlon. Secondly, and perhaps most significantly, we must reckon with the uncomfortable fact that the great king David has a Moabite in his bloodline. The self-understanding of the nation has extended to include a foreigner even in the line of succession for royalty, much as our recognition must grow that our nations and identities are as mingled and as complex as any in the story of Ruth.

Narrative practice In the task of reconciling peoples on this island and between these islands the telling of new stories of one another and the redrawing of stereotypes is an ongoing challenge. At Corrymeela we are continually challenged by the fact that so long ago a storyteller dared to step into the contemporary social, community and political challenges of the day. We are also reminded that the art of storytelling can make a difference. To take history, politics and religion seriously is to take the ways in which people story themselves in situations of division. In order to take story seriously, we must examine its syntax, its premise, the levels of truth at the heart of a story told. ‘I haven’t slept a wink since my son was murdered in the 1970s’, a person in Corrymeela said. Do we counter this with evidence of a five-minute snooze? Or do we explore the narrative truth in this and reckon with the impact that violence has on every individual affected by violence?

At Corrymeela we run Storywork seminars, helping practitioners (chaplains, clergy, counsellors, social and youth workers) mine the depth of narrative truth, engage in narrative methodologies that can help us share our strangeness, our story-worlds, our stories used for languaging the unsayable. In

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the book of Ruth, a storyteller chose to intervene into political divisions between Israelites and Moabites, and between Israelites themselves, with a narrative that embodies the stories of these territories in the lives of two displaced widowed women, each a foreigner in the other’s territory.

To stage a narrative intervention demonstrates the power of story: there had been centuries of distrust between the peoples divided by stereotype and resentment. Now in the brave and strange characters of Ruth and Naomi, we see people emptied by grief but nonetheless filled with courage, who intervene in the narrative development of civic life finding a place in the genealogy of kings.

In Jewish liturgical tradition the book of Ruth is read at the feast of Pentecost alongside a reading of the ground-shaking, history-making events of Sinai. It is fascinating to speculate on the purpose of this liturgical twinning. There are fewer more cinematic and spectacular stories in the Hebrew Bible than that of Sinai and the giving of the Law. The mountain shakes, the trumpets blast, the clouds conceal and the very ground beneath their feet is unstable – and through it all God speaks.

Then there is a story of three widows who struggle to survive in foreign settings, but who, nevertheless, live out an ethic of kindness and compassion and find it reciprocated by those they live among. Jewish liturgy thus preserves the significance of the ordinary lives of individuals alongside great world-making events and dares us to find ways of making personal what could otherwise be overwhelming and defeating.

The book of Ruth challenges us on the issue of welcoming the stranger; on redrawing our stereotypes through encountering those who are ‘other’; on finding the gaps where compassion can thrive in the midst of technical debates about law and tradition; on carrying losses that cannot really be grieved. It presents us with questions of how to protect the rights of vulnerable minorities, particularly those who are politically and socially marginal to the mainstream, and also the responsibility towards the poor of those who are financially and socially secure.

The story features those who are forced to migrate to another country because of poverty or famine and encourages communities to face the question of what constitutes national identity and belonging to the tribe. In doing so, it throws together two people groups, Israel and Moab who have their own contrasting histories of hunger. The story opens with Bethlehamites, residents of the house of bread, reliving an element of their history with starvation and malnutrition, and also facing their historic dependence on another people who previously refused to meet them in their need.

The memory of their history no doubt still had the capacity to sting, much as wounds of the history of famine are still raw in these islands. But as the

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book of Ruth unfolds it challenges the traditional stereotypes and dares residents of Bethlehem to hear a new story of their traditional enemy.

Biblical literacy So often, in situations of conflict, the ‘true story’ is contested. We have, to use the words of Claire Mitchell, ‘Conflict about what the conflict’s about.’1 Corrymeela’s practice has been to engage groups in narrative work to understand the anthropological and artistic depths of truthtelling in the stories our communities tell. This can be comforting but also challenging. To have believing attention paid to your story in the presence of people whose backgrounds, lives, politics and religious adherence represent the unbelieving ‘other’ can be transformative. It is also confronting. Each is brought into a dynamic of being transformed towards the other in a narrative exchange: new information is shared; new background is understood; new motivation is uncovered; new impact is laid bare.

In religion-affected conflict zones the practices and texts of faith are often commodified into symbolic markers that affect division not reconciliation.

Corrymeela’s practice has often incorporated a deepening of biblical literacy: taking texts that would have been used to divide and using them to enrich debate, difference and dignified exchange. The biblical texts are wild, strange and transcendent. Often, using such a methodology does not establish common ground, but creates a ground on which our strangeness towards each other can find a meeting place. We do not find ourselves agreeing, but we find ourselves meeting, and such meeting can establish – or deepen – a trust that can move difficult and divisive differences into more fruitful ground.

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Some see civic reconciliation as secular ground, hoping for a great reconciliation with our Creator.

For Corrymeela, we are not so much focused on the hereafter as the here. Our corner of the ecumenical field is an incarnational corner: we are interested in how relationships can be built to affect civic change in the here and now. In a project shared with many other communities and church bodies across Ireland and Britain (www. spiritualityofconflict.com), we provide resources for people of the Christian faith to explore conflict resolution through the lens of the Sunday lectionary gospel texts.

Conclusion We story ourselves. We do this through religion; through politics; through the narratives that have destroyed us; through the narratives that we have survived. What is needed in this is a narrative sensitivity that may orient us towards the sustaining forces at the heart of our stories.

This is confronting work and comforting work.

The Christian and Hebrew Scriptures deepen the practice of repentance: changing your mind or direction. To engage with the other – especially in a situation of difficult difference – requires a conscious openness towards change in the reality of a human encounter with a person whose story represents a hitherto ignored or unbelieved reality.

As Ireland faces into the centenary of the partition that has marked us – and faces into the uncertainty of Brexit, which also strikes us – the peoples of Ireland and Britain are invited into an examination of the stories that will affect our civic, bordered, political, religious and relational realities. These realities invite deep and complicated reflection on the past, and the ways in which the stories told (or not told) of the past can affect the practice of the present.

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Broken relationships

Gordon Kennedy Revd Gordon Kennedy is the minister of Craiglockhart Church Edinburgh and chair of Evangelical Alliance Scotland board.

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Reconciliation is the word we use to describe the work of restoring broken relationships. The work of reconciliation assumes that there has been a breakdown in relationships and that there needs to be a change of attitude, with warmth and trust replacing conflict and hostility. Those of us who have tried to be reconciled to others after such a breakdown in relationship know that this is easier said than done. The work of reconciliation is often costly, hard and can be painful.

Part of the story of King David can be a helpful guide for us in our ministry of reconciliation. In 2 Samuel 12–18 we learn how David experienced reconciliation with God but then failed to be reconciled with his son, Absalom, a situation that had tragic consequences.

God is reconciled With God’s help the former shepherd has become king over Israel. David has achieved great victories over his enemies and established himself as king in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5). Then in chapter 11 David falls into terrible sin, adultery and murder, which breaks his relationship with God. The choices David made and the sinful deeds he committed are obvious. We are reminded of what the apostle Paul writes, ‘For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men’ (Romans 1.18).1 Sin breaks our relationship with God. Our sin(s) may not be as obvious as those of David, for us our relationship with God may be broken by our selfishness, our

gossiping or our laziness. This is where the work of reconciliation needs to begin.

In 2 Samuel 12 God sends his prophet Nathan to confront David with his sin, verses 7–9, and the consequences of his sin, verses 10–12, 14. There can be no reconciliation without a recognition of the causes by which a relationship has been broken. When our God reveals to us some sin in our life he does so with a clarity that is seldom achieved when we work for reconciliation between humans. God can make known all the impulses of our human hearts in a way that is beyond us.

However, this first step of clarification cannot be omitted or quickly passed by if genuine reconciliation is to be achieved.

David submitted to this clarifying work of God: ‘David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord”’ (2 Samuel 12.13a). Both here and in Psalm 51 David acknowledges his sin as being against the Lord (see Psalm 51.4). We might have hoped that David would confess his sin against Bathsheba, against Uriah, against the nation, but he is not recorded as doing so in Scripture. In 2 Samuel 12 the reconciliation described is between David and God. If we are to be reconciled to God we must acknowledge that our relationship with God has been broken by our sin against him. God is just in being wrathful towards us; we have set ourselves at enmity with God (see Romans 1.18; 5.10).

A second movement in the work of reconciliation is honesty. If we are to be reconciled to God we need to hear his declaration of anger and pain at our sin.

If we follow the journey from the wrath of God in

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Romans 1.18 to reconciliation with God in Romans 5.11 we see there the honesty with which God describes his pain at our sin and his work in Christ to achieve reconciliation.

The final step in reconciliation is one of commitment: ‘Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put way your sin; you shall not die”’ (2 Samuel 12.13b).2 God graciously takes this step of forgiveness. Forgiveness and reconciliation are closely related but are not the same thing.

Reconciliation must be two-sided, each party in the broken relationship must be reconciled or there is no reconciliation. Forgiveness can be offered and not received. In our being reconciled to God we are shown the willingness of the Lord to be reconciled at the cross of Christ (see Romans 5.8–11). David knows nothing of the cross of Christ but in the word of Nathan he hears and receives the grace of God in his forgiveness. This completes David’s reconciliation with God. In 2 Samuel 12 we see between David and God the clarity, honesty and commitment from which reconciliation can be achieved. There can be no short cuts in this work of reconciliation. After such public sin David can still be reconciled to God. This God who made us to live in relationship with him is willing to achieve reconciliation with us when that relationship is broken.

David is not reconciled We might have hoped that having experienced such full and generous reconciliation David would be willing to live it out in his relationships with others. Sadly, this is not what happens.

God’s word that violence would be a constant presence in the family of David (2 Samuel 12.10) is quickly proved true. In chapter 13 David’s daughter, Tamar, is raped by her brother, Amnon, who in turn is murdered by his brother, Absalom.

Absalom flees from the presence of his father and for three years lives in exclusion.

It takes Joab, the general of David’s army, to notice, ‘that the king’s heart went out to Absalom’ (2 Samuel 14.1). Absalom in his flight has removed himself from the possibility of reconciliation with David. It is easy when relationships are broken to take flight, to remove ourselves from the presence of the one with whom our relationship is broken.

But if we do this then reconciliation will never take place. No doubt Absalom fears the king’s justice, which may demand his life. However, in his flight, he does not know that, ‘the spirit of the king longed to go out to Absalom, because he was comforted about Amnon, since he was dead’ (2 Samuel 13.39). David appears well disposed to be reconciled with Absalom.

We might think that this is all that is needed is to bring the father and son together. However, this reunion of father and son does not happen, or it does not happen quickly enough for Joab. We learn nothing of Joab’s motives from Scripture,

but we know that Joab manipulates David with the result that Absalom is to be brought back (2 Samuel 14.21). All appears well until David declares, ‘Let him dwell apart in his own house; he is not to come into my presence’ (2 Samuel 14.24).

The Bible does not give an explanation for David’s decision. Absalom lives in Jerusalem for two years without ever being welcomed into the presence

the work of reconciliation with God brings us into a place of security, the security of a good relationship with God of his father (2 Samuel 14.28). Now it is Absalom who coerces Joab and achieves his goal of being summoned into the king’s presence (2 Samuel 14.29–33).

The flight of Absalom from David prevents any clarity being achieved between father and son about the killing of Amnon. The manipulations of first Joab and then Absalom display a lack of honesty in how these men are dealing with one another. The refusal of David to have his son come into his presence denies any commitment towards full reconciliation. In every way, this part of the story is the opposite of David’s experience with God in chapter 12. It is easy to see how suspicion can grow in the absence of clarity. Anger and pain that are not expressed cannot be acknowledged.

As the years go by, feelings of anger and resentment are hardened into patterns of life and behaviour. This failure of reconciliation has tragic consequences for both David and Absalom as conflict breaks out (2 Samuel 15—18).

Eugene Peterson writes of the failure on David’s part to be reconciled with Absalom as, ‘the third monumental sin of David’s life … the rejection of Absalom was a steady, determined refusal to share with his son what God had so abundantly shared with him.’3 Where God had satisfied his anger and overcome his division from David, in relation to Absalom David achieves neither. The longing found in the heart of David for Absalom (2 Samuel 13.39—14.1) does not move David into the path of genuine reconciliation. In the story of the life of David we see both the work of reconciliation and the failure of reconciliation. No doubt we can find examples of both in our own lives.

NOTES 1. All quotations of Scripture are from the English Standard Version, unless otherwise stated.

2. For these three steps in reconciliation, clarification, honesty, and commitment, see VM Sinton, ‘Reconciliation’ in New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology (Leicester: IVP, 1995), pp. 724–6.

3. EH Peterson, Leap Over A Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 197.

4. See first stanza of Robert Burns’ Tam o’ Shanter first published in 1791 and now available in many modern editions.

5. For further reflections on reconciliation see Gordon Kennedy, Reconciliation published by the Evangelical Alliance 2014 – http:// www.eauk.org/ scotland/upload/ reconciliationbooklet.pdf – accessed on 16 June 2018.

A ministry of reconciliation In his second epistle to the church in Corinth, Paul writes of reconciliation in the life of the Christian disciple. It is worth quoting the passage in full: ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of 13

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reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ (2 Corinthians 5.17–21) The work of new creation is the work of God reconciling those who are in Christ to himself.

In his creative work God established good

reconciliation can only be achieved where division is healed relationships between himself and his creation, and between all that he had made (see Genesis 1–2). Now in his recreative work in Christ Jesus God restores good relationships, which is the effect of reconciliation. I think the order in 2 Corinthians 5.18 is intentional, God reconciles the world to himself in Christ, before giving the ministry of reconciliation to those who are in Christ, those who have first been reconciled to him.

In the life of David God first reconciles David to himself. The division between them caused

by David’s sin is restored. If we long to see reconciliation in our relationships with one another we must begin here with our reconciliation to God our Father. This work of reconciliation with God brings us into a place of security, the security of a good relationship with God. From this place we can enter the risk of seeking to be reconciled with others. When we seek to clarify a broken relationship, when we face with honesty a broken relationship we expose ourselves to misunderstanding, to further pain and suffering.

But this is the risk we must take if we are to serve as agents of reconciliation.

As we saw in the life of David God did not count his sin against him, so in Christ God does not count trespasses against those he would be reconciled with (see 2 Corinthians 5.18). In Robert Burns’ poem Tam o’ Shanter we read of Tam’s wife Kate, ‘nursing her wrath to keep it warm’.4 How many of us enjoy being angry, especially if we have been wronged? Do we not work over the account of the wrong done to us that we might stoke our anger into flame?

If God had nursed his wrath against us none of us would know any reconciliation towards him. In the suffering of Christ at the hands of those God would be reconciled to, the anger of God is satisfied. The New Testament does not explain the mechanics

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of how God’s wrath is appeased, only that it is through the death of Christ (e.g. Romans 3.21–26).

God has not given us a pattern of dealing with anger that we can follow. Rather, he sets before us the experience of knowing his anger towards us satisfied. This experience of reconciliation with God in Christ can be described as ‘new creation’ (2 Corinthians 5.17). It gives us a sense of the transforming power of this reconciliation that God has achieved with us.

If anyone is reconciled to God this new creation power of reconciliation is released to be at work in our lives, through our lives, to fulfil the ministry of reconciliation between ourselves and one another. Without a pattern to follow but made new in Christ Jesus our Saviour, we can work to achieve reconciliation with others in a variety of circumstances in the power of the reconciliation that God has achieved for us.

If there were no division there would be no need for reconciliation. However, reconciliation can only be achieved where division is healed. It is easier to avoid others than to heal division, we can move our seat in the congregation, join another small group, take lunch at the office with a different crowd, we have an endless number of strategies to avoid those we are divided from. Such strategies should only be employed once patient, sensitive attempts at reconciliation have been made and rejected.

Reconciliation is two-sided. We can work for reconciliation, but it takes two to be reconciled. If someone will not be reconciled to us the path of wisdom and least pain may well be to avoid being together, as far as possible. A broken, unreconciled relationship will cause untold damage to those involved and to other friends and members of a congregation. This damage can only be minimised by separation. This is not reconciliation, but sometimes it might be all we can achieve.

Conclusion The work of restoring broken relationships is a hard work, but this is no reason for not working for reconciliation. The good news declared in the gospel is that God is reconciled to us in Jesus Christ. As his disciples we cannot do other than work for reconciliation in our own broken relationships. Cover this work with prayer, depend upon God’s love for you in Christ, seek the wise counsel of others, and then serve this ministry of reconciliation.5

Believing is seeing Reconciling Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus paintings

Fleur Dorrell Fleur Dorrell is Scripture Development Co-ordinator at Bible Society.

Caravaggio’s two paintings of the Supper at Emmaus from the Gospel of Luke’s story of the Road to Emmaus focus on the culmination of a journey that becomes religious through the use of dramatic symbolism and revelation. The two protagonists in the story do not recognise Jesus until he blesses their meal. In this article we explore how Caravaggio uses symbol and revelation to reconcile art with reality and faith with salvation to open the disciples’ eyes to Christ.

Symbol and revelation ‘Symbol’ derives from the Greek word symbolon meaning a ‘token’ and originates from Homer’s use of the idea of throwing two things together and creating something new.1 Revelation is revelatio from revelare in Latin and apokalypsis in Greek. It is the act of revealing something obvious in part or in full, through communication that is most commonly with supernatural beings such as an angel or prophet. The Christian faith is dependent on the divine revelation of God incarnate in the flesh of Christ. Unlike the Homeric example, a Christian object, place or person can symbolise the sacred while remaining exactly as it is.

Symbols help to make sense of our world and create connections between the ordinary and the transcendent, the particular and the universal, the present moment and eternity. They create bridges between the past, present and future. They depend on time and time reveals both their presence and significance. In Western storytelling and art, the

concept of time is as much a mystery as it is a revelation: the author, the artist, the reader and the viewer have all to confront it. It is a recurrent measurement of movement and the location of a focal point.

Luke’s understanding of time is described in two ways, as he relates to past Israelite history and as he promises the Kingdom of God through the journey and mission of Christ. Caravaggio achieves a suspension of time in motion through the focus of one act that has consequences beyond his paintings’ canvases, and the visual and the invisible moments are brought together. Caravaggio’s visual insights and techniques prove in a different medium from the written word, that vision is greater than speech can show. We notice a further element in our concept of time, the difference between telling and showing.

Illusion and reality Caravaggio first painted the Supper at Emmaus in 1601. It now hangs in the National Gallery, London. He follows Luke’s model description of the symposium meal, in which the artist places Christ at the centre and the disciples on either side (see the hyperlink on the next page). Caravaggio created a large space between the two disciples which enables the viewer to see and relate to Christ directly rather than via the disciples, and allows the viewer to participate in the symbolic meal. Jesus is seated at a table laden with food with the disciple Cleopas on his right and an unnamed disciple on his left wearing the pilgrim’s

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NOTES 1. The earliest example of the term is in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes where Hermes on seeing a tortoise exclaims symbolon [symbol/encounter/ chance find?] of joy to me!’ before turning it into a lyre.

See ‘Homeric Hymn to Hermes’ in Classics in Translation (P Mackendrick and HM Howe eds; Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), p. 81.

2. Mark 16.12.

3. A Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (London: Allen Lane, 2010), p. 3.

4. Ibid., p. 332.

5. Luke 24.32.

symbolic scallop shell. The disciples were not on a pilgrimage since the concept had yet to be invented. Pilgrimages became popular from the fourth century AD through the encouragement of writers such as St Jerome. Caravaggio probably appropriated this idea because he saw the symbol in other Emmaus paintings (cf. Melone, Titian and Veronese), and as part of the Counter-Reformation revivals in mediaeval religious devotion.

Caravaggio chooses the moment in Luke’s story when the miracle is revealed in the blessing of the bread. He creates the ambience of bright illumination despite no signs of candles, torches or lanterns. His colours range from the darkest to the lightest in the illuminated areas such as on the unnamed disciple’s clothing, but unlike Leonardo da Vinci, who relied on subtle gradations to achieve their effects, Caravaggio’s innovative skill lies in shifting abruptly between one tone and another. This chiaroscuro technique ensures that the light is at the service of the whole picture and therefore, the whole meaning.

We are invited in because the picture appears deceptively real rather than imagined. Its tension and force lie in the illusion that we are participators in this miraculous event. This ambiguity of presentation and revelation shows Caravaggio’s conscious effort to enable reality to pose as art and illusion as reality.

Food for thought One of the painting’s areas of controversy lies in the purpose of the fruit basket. Caravaggio placed it centrally as it was symbolically entwined with Christ’s resurrection and the tradition of the ‘first fruits’. In classical Greek, Roman, Hebrew and Christian religions, the first fruits were a religious offering of the first produce of the harvest which was offered to the temple or church. A full basket is a symbol of abundance and immortality but because of where it is placed it might also mean transience, fruit that will rot soon because it is matter not spirit. At this moment the fruit is not quite ripe even though Easter has just occurred. For Caravaggio the fruit symbolises various aspects of Jesus’ Passion – grapes and plums inferred blood, sacrifice and death; the quince and pomegranate echo resurrection. Each serves as an earthly visual metaphor ensuring that salvation is close at hand.

The shadow underneath the basket is possibly symbolic of a fish indicating both the sign for Christ and a metaphysical quality of Caravaggio’s

The ability to represent the subtleties and We do not have permission to reproduce The Supper at interactions between human Emmaus, 1601 (oil and tempera on canvas), Caravaggio, relationships in purely Michelangelo Merisi da (1571-1610)/National Gallery, visual terms is profoundly London, in digital format. To see this image please visit challenging. Yet Caravaggio www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/michelangelocreates this through the merisi-da-caravaggio-the-supper-at-emmaus gestures and body-language of his characters which are clearly recognisable chiaroscuro technique. This idea is enhanced by even when the themes he is addressing may the innkeeper’s shadow behind Christ creating the not be immediately obvious (especially to a effect of a halo above Christ’s head. The dramatic contemporary viewer not well-versed in the Bible). energy of the composition and the way in which In his first Supper at Emmaus Caravaggio prevents the perspective shatters the picture plane is this meal being a passive event by focussing inspirational: the strong diagonals, the contour on the reactions of the disciples and innkeeper. created by Christ’s upper arm and his hand are a Caravaggio does not depict Christ with obvious viewer’s magnet. Christ’s forearm and the shadow credentials except that of his red and white cloak, on his left hand, the parting in his hairline, the which symbolises the triumphant resurrection; bridge of his nose, the edge of the table and the we cannot see any nail marks in his hands, nor direction of light that all lead to the fruit basket a wound in his side or any facial features that compete with Christ for our attention. We also would distinguish him from his companions. He notice that the elbow of the disciple’s torn sleeve is is recognised in his gesture alone. The innkeeper at such an angle as if to show that the canvas has is static and bewildered, he does not recognise also been torn in his gesture. the blessing symbol or understand the disciples’ Caravaggio’s bread is already broken whereas reactions; perhaps he represents the faithless who in Luke 24.30–31 Jesus ‘took the bread and said fail to recognise Christ as the Messiah, hence not the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to removing his cap. them’. Caravaggio’s Jesus is focused more on the 2

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blessing as if to prolong the sublime gesture and to raise the symbolism to a heightened level of dramatic and divine intervention. The disciples are understandably overcome with shock which Caravaggio emphasised by having one disciple grasping the sides of his Savonarola chair while the other counterbalances this with outstretched arms bridging darkness and light, our world and the picture’s. This disciple’s arms may symbolise further, the shape of the cross, so could he be Peter?

difference between Christ’s youthfulness and the wrinkled faces of the disciples and innkeeper. This becomes an example of breathtaking perception of the central mystery: that the symbol and what it reveals are united in the same person and his actions.

If the cross symbol was intentional, then Caravaggio was reminding his viewers that the Christian ‘sacramental’ meal occurs precisely because of Christ’s crucifixion. Caravaggio is also demonstrating that time is inclusive: the breaking of the bread, its blessing, the disciples’ reaction and the cross symbol are happening simultaneously on the canvas. The disciples are the conductors of this revelation.

Still life, but only just

COPYRIGHT ©Jametlene Reskp/ unsplash.com

Within a few minutes the risen Christ will vanish from the table but the apparition will live on in their hearts and minds. Caravaggio shows this supernatural revelation because, as Graham-Dixon states, his images ‘freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance’.3 What is important, however, is that Caravaggio was able to express both the symbol and its revelation in a didactic and catechetical manner so that the viewer is invited to join in and accept Christ alongside the disciples. Since it is only in the Eucharist that We do not have permission to reproduce The Supper at Christ reveals himself both Emmaus, 1601 (oil and tempera on canvas), Caravaggio, physically and spiritually, Michelangelo Merisi da (1571-1610)/National Gallery, in this way the painting London, in digital format. To see this image please visit becomes timeless. Any www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/michelangeloviewer and/or believer in any merisi-da-caravaggio-the-supper-at-emmaus age is welcome to the table of Christ. Caravaggio offers the gift of salvation.

An unexpected Christ In Caravaggio’s first painting Christ is shown young and beardless. All previous paintings of the Supper at Emmaus, mostly painted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, portray Christ with a beard.

It is in the early Christian mosaics, relief sculpture and catacomb paintings that Christ is clean-shaven and young, and this continues in various mediaeval manuscripts. By revealing an unexpected Christ – one who does not look like himself – Caravaggio was the first painter to show the disciples’ lack of recognition along the journey to Emmaus. Luke never explains why the disciples failed to know Christ until the blessing – was it for dramatic effect and suspense, and/or to illustrate their slowness to believe? Caravaggio combined that observation with the minimal text in Mark’s Gospel where Mark states that Christ appeared to the disciples ‘in another form’.2 The problem of the two texts was reconciled in the one painting and aesthetically, it heightens the

Caravaggio’s second version of the Supper at Emmaus (Pinacoteca Brera, Milan), the hyperlink is shown on this page, was painted in 1606 after five years of travelling and his inevitable flight from Rome to Naples since murdering his comrade Ranuccio Tomassoni. Compared with the first Emmaus painting, Caravaggio’s technique and approach, as well as his representation of light and colour, are pared right down. This is partly because of his patron’s (Cardinal Mattei) ascetic influence, a precarious existence and the rise of lesser painters now receiving more of the official commissions, all cast a profound shadow over Caravaggio’s life; as well as his having to paint without a studio or sufficient materials.

In this later version, we see that the hues are more muted, his palette is restricted to brown, green, yellow and white, and the paint is applied more thinly. We observe an increasing awareness of the precariousness of Caravaggio’s fugitive existence, a clinging onto life through a more tempered, sensitive style because the disciples (while the same size as the earlier painting) are notably less surprised. The composition is more intimate and Jesus’ hand is raised much lower, his blessing is more enclosed. Like the artist, Jesus is older and burdened with suffering. The light in the room is diminished alongside Caravaggio’s own life. The tones are softer, creating a greater gentleness 3

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overall. It is, as Graham-Dixon argues, a confessional painting as well as a revelation since ‘how much harder Caravaggio now finds it to see the possibility of salvation’.4 Caravaggio never allowed his models to pose in broad daylight; there are no landscapes.

Instead, he chose small rooms to create intimacy rather than remoteness. The still life is reduced to remnants of lamb – symbolic of Christ as the sacrificial lamb, bread and salad leaves; the emphasis is on the humble inn rather than the symbols of abundance and resurrection. He included a new character, a woman – probably the innkeeper’s wife. The revelation itself is more subtle so that, in discarding much of the detail of the first version, the viewer can focus more fully on the blessing gesture rather than the symbolic journey on and around the table.

Caravaggio’s two versions are given some decorative furnishings. Apart from the obvious compositional parallels between the pictures, there are extraordinary similarities in the way in which the tables are appointed, both covered with late sixteenth-century Anatolian carpets and presenting majolica tableware. It might be considered ironic for Muslim carpets to decorate what became a Christian meal. For Caravaggio, setting the scene in roughly the correct geographical area for his patrons outweighed the Christian associations.

Journey’s end Caravaggio, like Luke, was a visual reporter and presenter. They each offer the journey metaphor

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to map out their wider meanings through the use of symbolism and revelation. And through these symbols and what they reveal transformation is created. The Emmaus disciples are changed profoundly as they exclaimed ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?’5 Only in these encounters, as Luke hints, there is more, the Second Coming is waiting in the wings. This is the Emmaus story but it is Caravaggio’s as well. He strongly felt the loss of what he called a religious sensibility in much art, the notion that powers of good and evil do exist and are at war in the world and in the human soul. Therefore, Caravaggio portrayed characters whose struggle between flesh and spirit is also their door to salvation.

The two disciples at last see Jesus as Luke tells us; Caravaggio paints this momentous realisation as an experience of dazzling grace. Grace naturally enters later in these revelations as it does in the Bible, but when it comes, the revelation is unmissable. Although the material Luke uses is from various written and oral sources, the ways in which he uses and manipulates his resources, is comparable to the ways in which Caravaggio distils from the Gospel that which he wants to convey for his own purposes. They shared an interest in the device of the point of view, the individual perspective, which instantly engages the spectator.

This transcendence that lives on beyond the page and canvas has yet to be fulfilled, but for Luke and Caravaggio is open to everyone who desires it. It is the Kingdom of God.

Loving your digital neighbour New media and reconciliation in an age of incivility

Elizabeth Oldfield Elizabeth Oldfield is Theos’ Director.

She appears regularly in the media and is a regular conference speaker. Before joining Theos she worked for BBC TV and radio.

Despite public perceptions that religion causes violence and division, Christianity has a long history of peace building. As well it should; the word reconcile means ‘to bring together again’, and reconciliation between God and his creation is the end of the mission of Christ; first on the cross, and finally at the end of the world. Formal and informal Christian peace-building initiatives, such as CHIPS (the Christian International Peace Service), have been quietly serving across conflicts all over the world. Christian peace-building principles were foundational to the civil rights movement in the USA, and in the aftermath of apartheid. They are still needed in conflict zones today, but attention to less dramatic battles, conflicts and divisions being played out daily in our public conversations is limited.

At Theos, we see our ability to engage across difference and to equip Christians to do this better as central to our role. We are in an age where connecting with those who are different from ourselves presents serious challenges. It has become a truism to bemoan the parlous state of public debate. A search for ‘the death of civility’ returns 150,000 results on Google. It is difficult to provide hard data for a trend as things change so rapidly and social media itself is so recent, but most people’s experience is of public conversations, particularly online, that are angrier, more hostile and more peppered with insults and generalisations.

Earlier this year the CEO of Twitter announced it would take action to help make our public conversations healthier. Jack Dorsey admitted that

the platform was hosting toxic engagement in ‘increasingly divisive echo chambers’. Our Trump and Brexit saturated discourse has been dubbed the ‘age of outrage’.

This applies no less to debates about religion.

Although the particular animosity of the new atheist movement has passed, public debate about religion still often erupts into fractious conflict about faith schools, abortion or ‘gay cake cases’.

Those with no appetite for these often stay in their respective filter bubbles and do not engage with people who believe, behave and belong differently from themselves.

Sadly, sometimes Christians can be tempted to be part of the problem, not the solution. In a world that feels unstable, in which Christian faith is increasingly alien to the mainstream, it is understandable that many of us enter public debate already feeling fearful and defensive.

However, Christians should be leading on bridging these divides – just as they often have in conflict zones – seeking to communicate beyond our echo chambers in ways that are not divisive, toxic or outraged but marked by faith, hope and love.

This work must be both for its own sake – because we are called to love and serve even our enemies, not just those who we disagree with – and also because in the immortal words of Netflix series Queer Eye: ‘you can’t antagonise and evangelise at the same time.’

How, practically, then do we do it? In my work as a leader of a Christian think tank I spend a lot of time engaging both in person and on social media with 19

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NOTES 1. J Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012).

atheists, secularists and others who do not share my beliefs. I am currently exploring how we build bridges across differences of belief through Theos’ new podcast, The Sacred, which features a range of interviews with people in public life about what they believe and why, and what they find difficult and helpful in the ways that Christians engage in public debates.

2. JD Green, Moral Tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013).

This experience has taught me that peace building requires first a better, fuller understanding of human beings and how we deal with difference, and second, some habits and disciplines.

3. William Barclay, New Testament Words (London: SCM, 1964), pp.

20–1.

We are less rational than we think we are (all of us)

4. Henri Nowen, ‘Living in the House of Love’ in J Dear (ed.), The Road to Peace (New York: Orbis, 1998), p. 63.

What humans are like?

I live in the world of ideas. My background is in factual programme making at the BBC, including on The Moral Maze, and I now run a religion think tank. Facts and arguments, graphs and theories are the official currency of academia, journalism, policy and politics – and by extension, our public debates, at least at the elite end. It is an economy in which we are taught that evidence wins and logic reigns.

Except it does not.

Everywhere I engage with big, neuralgic issues – whether they are our national identity, how we distribute resources, immigration, rights and obligations at the beginning and end of life, race, gender, or anything else painful – I come across a disconnect between how human beings really are and how we are trying to engage.

Part of the problem is that the most prevalent, if implicit, model for why we believe what we believe and how we change our minds is outdated. Rational Actor Theory underpinned much economic and social thought in the twentieth century. This model painted a picture of human beings as rational self-optimising individuals making broadly utilitarian choices to maximise their pleasure and minimise their pain.

Homo Economicus, as people in this model are sometimes called, presented with better evidence and clear arguments, would make better and different choices. Rational Actor Theory was never intended to be anything but a helpful economic model, but the dominance of market logic means it has filtered into a broader sense of idealistic individualism. It is a very attractive picture of ourselves – coolheaded, reasonable, enlightened and clear-sighted. Not swayed by peer pressure or beholden to irrational emotions, but charting our own course. Unfortunately, it is also almost completely false.

The academic consensus now offers a very different picture. Jonathan Haidt has written about the rational brain as like a rider on an elephant, thinking it is in control but, in fact, providing justifications for where the emotional mind already wanted to go.1 Our feelings of disgust, fear, anger,

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pride or attraction engage faster, deeper and more enduringly in our decision making than the rational reasons of which we are consciously aware.

We are more tribal than we think we are In his book, Moral Tribes, Harvard professor Joshua Green unpacks why we are fundamentally social creatures – interdependent persons, not independent individuals.2 We long to belong and so we often become ‘us and them’ creatures, wired to detect and defend against difference. Study

you can’t antagonise and evangelise at the same time after study shows that evidence and arguments coming from people who feel like ‘one of us’ will be filtered and understood entirely differently from the same evidence and arguments presented by someone who feels like ‘one of them’. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, ego driven, scanning the world like Narcissus’ pool for glimpses of our own reflection.

Worryingly for Theos’ work, at least one study shows that the more highly educated you are the more skilled you are at bending the evidence to match your pre-existing supposition. Those of us educated to university level tend to think we are the best at changing our minds based on evidence but we may in fact be the worst; we are all biased and behavioural psychology adds daily to the list of the cognitive biases that hinder our ability to make purely rational decisions.

We are suckers for a story, and mainly on autopilot Any PR person will tell you that we are also narratively driven creatures – motivated much more by story than by data. Neuroscience is also exploring just how automatic and habitual we are – making big and small decisions and judgements based on past experiences to save on cognitive capacity.

And God knows this None of this will sound new to those interested in theological anthropology. Religious understandings of what human beings are like have never really been close to Homo Economicus.

The Christian tradition in particular takes seriously human beings’ capacity for self-delusion, selfaggrandisement and self-righteousness and calls it sin, or the flesh. Our tendency for tribalism is perhaps a post-lapsarian shadow of something created for our good. We are connected, community craving people because humans are made in the image of a trinitarian God. A longing for belonging is no bad thing, but the Bible is adamant about the dangers of drawing too sharp a line around insiders and outsiders. From the Abrahamic covenant which promises blessing and redemption for all people, to the requirements

Autumn 2018

in the law for aliens and strangers to be treated equally, to the New Testament covenant which overcomes divides between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, God challenges our tribalism.

Christianity teaches radical scepticism towards ourselves, and values truth arrived at in community and through story alongside individual human reason. If we can keep in mind this radically different anthropology and use it as an opportunity for self-reflection, we might find we

the adventure of moving outside our Christian bubbles and learning how to love and listen to those who think the gospel is irrelevant can engage with the ‘other’ more productively.

What is clear is that our current tendency to shout statistics and, failing that, insults across the chasm of our tribal allegiances is unlikely to get us anywhere. It is particularly corrosive for Christians to allow themselves to become defensive, shrill and antagonistic in public towards those with whom we may not feel a natural affinity. One of the disciplines we practice at Theos is becoming more aware of our ‘political allergies’– the kinds of people that deep down we think probably are not worth bothering with. When this becomes conscious rather than unconscious we are better able to challenge it. Yes, secularist campaign groups can be irritating. Yes, ‘spiritual but not religious’ types might make you want to roll your eyes. These people might not consciously be your enemies, but they are certainly people it would be worthwhile intentionally learning how to engage with and love.

All of this takes concentration. At Theos we are developing a framework of how we do such Christian peace building within British culture, especially online. So what does that look like practically?

How to engage Recognise and manage your own emotions and those of others Peace building requires enormous internal discipline. Becoming defensive, fearful and angry is a very natural and human reaction to people who challenge the things we hold most sacred. I am more and more convinced that our bodies react to intellectual threats to our sense of self or our tribe in a very similar way they do to physical danger.

When faced with a threat, our bodies release cortisol – a reaction commonly known as ‘fight or flight’. When faced with people who disagree

with us, our reactions often map onto those two options – withdrawing from the conflict and surrounding ourselves with like-minded people to avoid encountering difference or lashing out with insults. Cortisol inhibits the ability of the brain to process information rationally and makes everyone look like the enemy. It takes an enormous amount of self-control to recognise that threat response, and to acknowledge that self-righteous anger is attractive because it feels safer than fear and anxiety in an unstable world. Letting that first stress response wear off before trying to process information or attempting to respond helps a lot.

Recognising this fight or flight reaction also helps me have patience with others. Quite often, without knowing much about me, my very presence as a Christian can provoke a threat reaction in people.

Perhaps they have painful history with the Church.

Perhaps they are gay and assume I will be hostile to them. Perhaps the very concept of God feels undermining to their individual autonomy.

I had a recent altercation with a respected atheist novelist and journalist on Twitter. We had met in person briefly, so I was surprised when and he attacked me online in a very personal way.

He accused me of being naïve, dishonest and a bit thick for being a public Christian. I reacted, like most of us would with anger and pain. My immediate temptation was to respond from that place – refuting his points, proving him wrong with my arguments and data, matching his contempt with my own. Instead, by the grace of God I managed to log out of Twitter and ask my husband to change my password. It took four days for me to calm down sufficiently and pray for him regularly enough that I felt able to respond from a place, if not of love, at least of peace. I engaged with him politely and empathetically and we are now building a friendship. Peace is possible if we take seriously God’s command to ‘turn the other cheek’, love our enemies and pray for those who attack and belittle us. In 1 Corinthians 13.7 Paul writes, ‘Love bears all things … hopes all things, endures all things.’ If we are to follow the one who ‘made no threats’ when he suffered, we should at least be able to endure the odd insult or inflammatory remark, remembering that the one who is on the attack is loved by God. Perhaps always, but especially now, the world is full of people driven by pride and fear. As someone who has had to confront my own pride and fear (and very much continues to have to do so) I try and pray for grace for those also in the struggle.

We often hear in churches that love is not a feeling but an action. William Barclay’s explanation of the Greek word agape really helped me understand this more deeply: ‘Agape has to do with the mind, it is not an emotional experience but a deliberative principle … A conquest and achievement of the will … The power to love the unlovable’.3 Reconciliation and relationship building with those

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who believe differently from us and may in fact be hostile towards us requires this kind of love, patience, concentration and prayer.

Connect before you correct This is actually an adage from parenting books.

Apparently, there is an old youth worker version that goes ‘people won’t care what you know until they know that you care’. When you express contempt, derision or proud ignorance of people who disagree with you, you are demonstrating that you do not really want to persuade them. You are simply playing to your base and making yourself feel better.

Much of what passes for public engagement is in actual fact shoring up our existing tribal identities rather than trying to solve problems.

On the other hand, if you begin with empathy and seek to build trust, you can have constructive conversations with people from tribes very different to your own.

Either way, when people get angry with me for my beliefs, it helps to remember the emotional firestorm going on inside and give it time to wear off without reacting defensively. I try and acknowledge their anger and pain and it can be a simple as ‘I can see how that is painful for you’, or ‘I’m sorry you feel so angry about this.’ Swiftly and fully admitting Christianity and Christians have been unhelpful or at fault is also key. Being heard and acknowledged is a powerful human need and a way of showing love, as well as a useful tool for moving, into a more productive place.

Be present (incarnate) Research shows that many people do not regularly engage with those different from themselves.

Christmas ads October.pdf 3 05/10/2018 16:12:17

Our digital lives make it easier and easier to consume only content and voices we already agree with. Most Christians know the temptations of participating in church activities and church communities to the detriment of relationships with those outside. Cross-cultural mission theory has long spoken of the importance of identification and incarnation. Taking the model of Christ, who while we were yet far off came to dwell among us, it is obvious that those seeking to minister to other cultures must live and work among them and spend significant time with them.

This principle follows just as much as we seek to build relationships across differences of belief in a fractious UK culture. Theos’ key audience are cultural influencers who are not Christians. We talk about our desire to be ‘in their natural habitat, talking their language’. Building friendships with those different from ourselves again requires us to be out of our comfort zone and the social ease of our own tribe. It requires courage and intentionality, persistence and hospitality but we have found it to be enormously stimulating and rewarding.

Subtle, intentional Christian peace building across difference has perhaps never been more needed in our culture. It requires much of us, but as always with the things God calls us to, gives more. The adventure of moving outside our Christian bubbles and learning how to love and listen to those who think the gospel is irrelevant to their lives has become one of the most formative aspects of my discipleship. We still have a lot to learn and many more mistakes to make, but I am inspired by Henri Nouwen’s vision of Christian peacemakers as those ‘who discover that all people are God’s people and belong to the house of love.’ 4

The true story of Jesus’ birth

MIGHT THERE BE

Cover Final Press Ready.pd

f 1 27/06/2018 14:11:24

What was it really like when Jesus was born, and what could it mean for you?

This short guide takes you behind the scenes of the nativity play and makes a great Christmas give-away.

Visit biblesociety.org.uk/christmas18 or call 01793 418300 to find out more.

Mary and Joseph in the stable. Angels, shepherds, wise men and assorted anima ls standing by. A baby doll in the straw-filled manger.

The nativity play is a fun event in the Christmas calendar for children and adults.

But what was it really like when Jesus was born in the little town of Bethlehem, and what could it mean to you?

This short guide takes you behind the scenes of the nativity play. Find out what we know about the time, the place and the peop le who played their part in the true story of Jesus’ birth.

There’s more to it than you might have imagined!

£2.50

Bible Society Stonehill Green Westlea, Swindon SN5 7DG biblesociety.org.uk

ISBN: 978-0-564-04747-

5

The deeper meaning of

the nativity

Illustrations by Emma Skerratt 2018. ©British and Foreign Bible Society 2018. Registered charity 232759 biblesociety.org.uk

Reconciliation with the earth?

From ecological violence to peacemaking with the creation

The war: A progress report How is the war proceeding? Here is a report.

The war has been underway for millennia. It has been intensifying worldwide in the past 70 years.

There are signs that we may be entering a decisive phase of the war.

Ian Christie Ian Christie is a fellow at the Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey. The views expressed in this article are entirely personal. This is the unabridged version of the article that was printed in the Autumn 2018 edition.

The war has produced uncountable casualties over the centuries. However, we can give some reasonably precise recent estimates from particular fronts in the war. For example, on average, vertebrate species population abundance declined by 58 per cent worldwide between 1970 and 2012; and if current trends continue to 2020 then the monitored vertebrate populations may decline by an average of 67 per cent against 1970 levels.1 This contributes to a widely discussed consequence of the war in its recent intensified phase, namely the prospect of a mass extinction process, the sixth such in the Earth’s history. ‘It is believed that the current rate of extinction overall is between one hundred and one thousand times higher than it was originally, and all due to human activity.’ 2 In the UK, a long-established front in the war, casualties have grown significantly since the 1940s.

Similar results are reported from the USA and across Europe. A new UK analysis is worth citing at length, as it indicates the scale of the war in terms of casualties and weapons deployed even in a relatively small country. ‘“The State of Nature” 2016 report describes Britain as being “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. The oncefamiliar hedgehog is almost gone, its population

down more than 90% since the 1950s. The total wild bird population of the UK has fallen by 44 million since 1970. The ranges of our wild orchids on average halved in the same period. Butterflies, moths and beetle populations all show alarming evidence of long-term decline. There is abundant evidence from scientific studies that industrial farming systems and, in particular, the growing reliance of farmers on a barrage of pesticides, has played a significant role in driving these declines.

Conventional, industrial farming sees the repeated application of multiple pesticides to our landscape on a breathtaking scale. About 500 different “active ingredients”(i.e. poisons) are licensed for use in the EU … In short, our farmland is being subjected to a massive barrage of poisons, leading to contamination of soils, hedgerows, rivers and ponds. All farmland wildlife is being chronically exposed to a complex mixture of pesticides, the effects of which are far beyond the capacity of scientists to predict or understand.’3 The war has enabled us to establish a vast population of slave animals for consumption, at the expense of wild creatures. Approximately 70 billion farm animals are reared for food per annum, and our success in expanding industrialised agriculture has contributed significantly to the war effort, accounting for two-thirds of the casualties in wildlife.4 The war has been remarkably successful so far. However, there are worrying signs that our victorious progress could be at risk, thanks to unintended collateral damage. Recent analysis

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NOTES 1. WWF, Living Planet Report (Gland: WWF, 2016).

2. See EO Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: WW Norton, 2015).

3. See D Goulson in C Packham et al., A People’s Manifesto for Wildlife, www. chrispackham. co.uk/wp-content/ uploads/A-PeoplesManifesto-forWildlife-expanded. pdf (2018), p. 71.

4. P Lymbery, Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

5. J Rockstrom & M Klum, Big World, Small Planet (Stockholm: Max Strom Publishing, 2015); W Steffen et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet’, Science 347.6223 (2015); WWF, Living Planet Report.

6. J McNeill & P Engelke, The Great Acceleration (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2014).

7. See S Lewis & M Maslin, The Human Planet (London: Pelican Books, 2018).

8. See Lymbery, Dead Zone; WWF, Living Planet Report; Wilson, Half-Earth; G Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (London: Allen Lane, 2013).

9. Steffen et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries’.

10. I Gough, Heat, Greed and Human Need (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017).

11. S Pinker, Enlightenment Now, (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

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of human impact on ecological systems such as the climate regime, the oceans and the nitrogen cycle indicate that dangerous destabilisation is underway.5 In short, our success in massively increasing the scale and intensity of the war could undermine our prospects for long-term victory and, indeed, lead to defeat in spite of all our achievements in overwhelming enemy territories and wiping out their populations. It may be that nature will stage previously unanticipated counteroffensives in the form of sea-level rise, mega-storms, mega-droughts and animal-generated pandemics.

Accordingly, our efforts need to be supplemented by new measures to shield civilisation from an increasingly desperate and dangerous enemy.

The ‘progress report’ above is deliberately provocative, while being grounded in the best available estimates of human impact on the Earth.

In this essay, I will argue that while there is no single coordinated and planned ‘war on nature’, there is good reason to see many of humanity’s impacts on the Earth as acts of violence and self-harm, of potentially catastrophic effect, and as assaults on people now and in the future, as well as on the non-human world. Next, I review the various ideological positions emerging in the light of our growing awareness of the onset of the Anthropocene, an age in which human impacts on the Earth are shifting ecologies into new and unstable states, and I relate these positions to Christian ideas and allegiances. In light of this, action to sustain the natural world takes on the character not only of economic and political reform and innovative policy implementation, but also of radical rethinking of ethics and the values involved in our relationship with the morethan-human world and the future of the Earth.

I will go on to make the case that this process of rethinking can be seen as a worldwide multilevel effort at reconciliation, taking place in the face of determined and often violent resistance.

I conclude with a review of ways ahead and examples of exemplary statements and processes of reconciliation – peacemaking with the Earth and each other – in which Christians are playing, or should be playing, a key role.

Ecological crisis and violence There is a global consensus in the research communities on ecology and human impacts on the Earth that our thousands of years of development – transformation of the Earth for expected human benefit – have reached a critical threshold. Industrialised development over the past two and a half centuries, and globalisation of trade over the past half-millennium, have caused a transformation of the ecological systems on which humanity depends. In particular, the past 70 years have seen what has been described as ‘the Great Acceleration’ in human impacts on ecosystems, species, biogeochemical processes and resources.6

Taken together, these changes, it is widely claimed, amount to the onset of a new planetary era, marking the arrival of human beings as the main generators of change in Earth systems. This (contested) new era is termed the Anthropocene.

There is great debate over when the new era should be dated from and what defines it, but that something momentous is going on that is captured by the Anthropocene idea is less contested.7 The changes include massive loss of biodiversity – genetic diversity, species, animal populations and habitats.8 They encompass large-scale disruption to planetary cycles and resources, breaching the ‘planetary boundaries’ of the conditions within which civilisation has evolved since the end of the Ice Age.9 Current evidence of very long-term climate disruption, caused beyond all reasonable doubt by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities, points to further upheaval in ecosystems. Climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’, making loss of biodiversity worse in many cases, and increasing risks of ‘de-development’ as global heating and extreme weather damage agriculture, health and so on. The risks from climate change are by now very high, threatening serious disruption to human societies and economies by the end of this century, and the consequent challenges to politics, policymaking and economic and technological innovation are huge.10 We are so far a long way from achieving the cuts in greenhouse emissions needed to keep the Earth within what is supposed to be the tolerable average temperature increase of 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade by the second half of this century.

In what sense does all this amount to a condition of ‘war’ as well as a common predicament? We in the rich world do not care to speak in such terms of our effects on ‘the environment’ (a distancing way to describe the web of creation, the ecosystems in which we are embedded). Waging war on the Earth and its creatures? What way is that to speak of development, progress and growth? There is, after all, a powerful story to be told, as Pinker has recently given us, about undeniable gains in human welfare in the aggregate and in many particular places over the past two or three generations as a result of the Great Acceleration in production, extraction and consumption.11 However, even Pinker a determined advocate of turbo-charged development, has to admit, in his chapter on climate change, that global heating and its consequences could be the crisis that brings the story of Enlightenment humanism and technology propelled progress to a halt. Pinker does not face up to the many disturbing features of the Great Acceleration and previous centuries of development, all of which lend weight to the idea, by now widely expressed in the environmentalist and conservation movements, that a war is underway against the natural world, a war that can only in the end, and, indeed, well before that, harm us.

Autumn 2018

In what sense are we engaged in a war, an immense process of violent exploitation and extraction? There is no central command, nor a coherent alliance, nor a declared enemy. But the ecological crises of our time are the scene of violence, collateral damage, epic loss of life, undermining of security and order, forced migrations, expulsions of communities, and a debasement of human life and erosion of hope.

Taken together, these tell us that a massive decentralised and asymmetric war is taking place in the name of ‘development as usual’.

Some of the evidence is noted in the ‘progress report’ at the start of this essay. But there is much more. A recent march in London led by the naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham focused on the ‘war on wildlife’ in the UK as a way to dramatise the enormous loss of biodiversity in recent decades.12 The loss of animal populations worldwide since the 70s is estimated at over 50 per cent, much of it resulting from poaching and overharvesting linked to threats of and use of violence.13 There is large-scale appropriation of land involving assaults on local communities in many countries in the name of securing resources; there is a global economy of ‘expulsions’ for the benefit of extractive interests;14 and there is a long history of conversion of intrinsically valuable ecosystems into expendable sources of ‘cheap’ commodities. There is systematic violence worldwide against defenders of wildlife, protected areas and indigenous communities, as documented in the harrowing series of articles on ‘The Defenders’ in the Guardian.15 There is the violence that is being stored up and carefully ignored by politicians who are determined not to act on the evidence of ecological disruption, in order to preserve fossil-fuelled development as usual, and to safeguard the financial and political interests who support them. President Trump, the US Republican Party and their allies in US fossil fuel industries are notorious deniers of the evidence of climate disruption, and it is now undeniable that there has been a systematic project in US politics on the Right for decades to delay and deny the need for action on climate change.16 This amounts to a cynical disregard for evidence, truth and the implications of inaction for future generations, let alone the citizens worldwide already suffering the effects of global heating. This is nihilistic fatalism and boundless short-term self-interest, as indicated by a new US government analysis that assumes the inevitability of a catastrophic 7 degrees centigrade global temperature rise by 2100.17 For all the undeniable and welcome progress in human welfare over centuries and especially since 1945, we are at a point where it risks being undermined, reversed or even erased by the damaging side-effects of the means by which we develop – above all, the massive use of fossil fuels.

The attempt to continue as we have done, with ever more appropriation of land and resources from people and animals, and ever more fossil fuel

use, threatens to be calamitous, especially for poor people and countries, who, of course, have done least to cause problems such as global heating.

The attempt to deny the need for any change of course, as perpetrated by the current US federal government under President Trump, amounts to indifference to, or complicity with, violence and suffering that amount to an assault on future people, even to ’ecocide’. Such is the argument that has been advanced in the growing number of legal actions brought in the USA and elsewhere against fossil fuel companies such as Exxon. We can expect much more of this legal conflict in coming years as the violence outlined above proceeds.

In the next section I review the positions taken up by diverse groups in relation to this diagnosis of ‘war against the Earth’. As in any war, the material conflict is accompanied by a battle of ideas.

Ecological crisis and the war of ideas The more urgent the ecological crisis of our time becomes, the more fragmented and polarised and inadequate the political response – and the more attention is focused on the anthropological, spiritual, ethical and theological dimensions of the challenges we collectively face. The debate over whether we are in the Anthropocene and, if so, what it means, has begun).18 It raises questions not only about the nature and implications of human impacts on the Earth, but about the nature of the humans making the impacts.If we are undermining the creation, is it because of ‘human nature’? Or is it the result of a specific kind of human society – industrial civilisation? Or is it more narrowly the consequence of capitalism? The diagnosis makes a major difference to the answers given, although there may well be much common ground between them.

The debate also has strong theological undertones: the positions being staked out can be seen to derive in significant ways from old religious concepts and values, modified and warped by modern interests and ideological commitments.19 As a result, churches are divided on the diagnosis and the actions to be taken, and we see much evidence of biblical interpretation being influenced by, indeed determined by, secular values about what matters in terms of cultural identity and economic self-interest.

We can distinguish five broad positions, in which secular and Christian actors are entangled. Common to all of them is the recognition of the close linkage between development – the transformation of the Earth for human benefit, or for the benefit at least of some humans – and violence, between people and between people and the non-human world.

1. Indifference and denial – no inherent value is perceived in the natural world beyond what it can provide as benefit for immediate human need, profit and satisfaction. The future of the planet can take care of itself, either because it is assumed that

12. Packham et al., A People’s Manifesto.

13. WWF, Living Planet.

14. S Sassen, Expulsions (Cambrjdge, MA: Belknap, 2013); R Patel & JW Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (London: Verso, 2018).

15. See www. theguardian.com/ environment/series/ the-defenders 16. N Oreskes & W Conway, Merchants of Doubt (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); J Mayer, Dark Money (New York: Random House, 2016).

17. See www. washingtonpost. com/national/healthscience/trumpadministration-seesa-7-degree-rise-inglobal-temperaturesby-2100/ 2018/09/27/ b9c6fada -bb45-11e8-bdc090f81cc58c5d_ story.html? noredirect =on&utm_term=. a72803aeab5f 18. S Lewis & M Maslin, The Human Planet (London: Pelican Books, 2018); C DeaneDrummond, S Bergmann& M Vogt (eds.), Religion in the Anthropocene (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017).

19. On the links between domination of nature in the modern world and the forsaking of Franciscan Christian tradition for a human-centric view of creation and ‘dominion’ as granted to humans

by God in Genesis see L White, ‘The historical roots of

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our ecological crisis’, Science 155.3767 (1967), pp. 1203–7 20. M Roberts, ‘Evangelicals and Climate Change’, in D Gerten & S Bergmann (eds), Religion in Environmental and Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

21. E.g. C Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

22. Available at http://w2.vatican.va 23. T Jackson, Prosperity without Growth (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Pope Francis, Encyclical.

24. Pope Francis, Encyclical.

25. Monbiot, Feral.

26. A term coined

by Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of a representative network, the UK-based Dark Mountain Project.

27. US writers such as William Vollmann and Roy Scranton are emblematic figures in giving literary and political expression to this kind of ecofatalism.

28. As we see in the conflicts in US conservative evangelical Christianity over the claims of ‘creation care’ versus a ‘brown’ interpretation of dominion teaching and a conservative Christian allegiance with climate change ‘sceptics’ and ‘deniers’. See Roberts, ‘Evangelicals and Climate Change’; L Kearns, ‘Religious Climate Activism in the United States’, in Gerten & Bergmann, Climate Change.

29. D Atkinson, Hope Rediscovered: Biblical wisdom for

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future societies will be richer and smarter than we are because of our commitment to turbo-charged technological development, or because in the long run we are all dead and do not need to care.

This secular position entwines – via Christian votes for Donald Trump, for example – with a particular religious stance that sees the creation as doomed to eventual destruction at God’s hands and as material for humanity in the meantime.

pursuit of economic growth, transcending it entirely as a goal (‘postgrowth’) or embarking on deliberate reductions in production and consumption while maintaining or improving overall wellbeing (‘degrowth’). We need to engage in deep processes of ‘ecological conversion’ that will reconnect us to our dependence on the Earth.24 We need to act to restore ecosystems and ‘rewild’ the natural world and connect ourselves better to it.25

2. Promethean dominion – the secular philosophy associated with this view is ‘eco-modernism’.

Eco-modernists accept as fact the onset of the Anthropocene, but see it as an opportunity for a ‘good Anthropocene’, in which humanity can manage the planet for our benefit but also that of what remains of the non-human world. Secular ‘Promethean’ optimism about human capacity to steer the Anthropocene via technical innovation is connected to what has been termed a ‘brown’ evangelical stance in USA, in which the world is seen as a fallen zone of creation that is available for human tilling and taming.20 There is a link between this Christian view of dominion as the process of converting Earth into a ‘garden’ and the discourse associated with eco-modernist conservation biologists who see the Anthropocene and massive dislocation of biodiversity as a fait accompli we have to deal with as well as possible.21

5. Dark ecology – this stance is the most marginal of all, but one whose influence could grow, especially if the first stance, of denial and indifference, maintains its grip in places of power. This stance can be called dark ecology.26 In this cluster of values and attitudes, it is assumed that nothing can be done to redeem industrial civilisation, which is doomed (whether in its very nature or through contingent historical developments and policy choices) to collapse as the Earth responds to the violence done to it.27

3. Sustainable development via green growth – this is the mainstream political stance worldwide, officially at least. It involves a recognition of ecological and social damage from the Great Acceleration, but also a conviction that with enough technological and societal innovation we can move from fossil-fuelintensive development to ‘sustainable’ industrial economies that minimise waste, stabilise the climate system, protect remaining ecosystems and avoid mass extinctions, while enabling the world to accommodate another major population rise to 2100. This is a less confident and more chastened version of dominion as human domination. It is a vision embraced by most churches, one that interprets the Genesis idea of ‘dominion’ as ‘stewardship’ of the gift of creation within a covenantal relationship with God; and it is also one reflected to some degree in Pope Francis’s remarkable Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’.22 However, the Pope’s profound text also reflects elements of the next position.

4. Sustainable development via economic and social transformation – in this cluster of values, theories and experiments, still marginal in the West and beyond, there is an urgent diagnosis that economic growth and consumption as we have known it are not compatible with climate change mitigation, repairing ecosystems and securing decent living conditions for everyone on Earth as the population rises. We need to change the social logic of competitive consumption in favour of lighter, more modest and convivial living in community, and to rethink radically the purposes of economic life.23This implies downgrading the

This brief overview should make it clear that the conflicts raging on the ground are paralleled in, and entangled with, deep antagonisms in the culture of the West, where these debates are so far most advanced. The divisions go deep, reflecting great differences in values concerning nature, human motivation and goals, our relationship with God, our relationship with the creation and particular creatures, our concern or lack of it for the future, and our view of how progress best proceed (cooperation or competition). The conflicts also generate profound inner strains, as people increasingly face up to the implications of our consumption, and the tensions between what we want to do now, or feel compelled to do, and what we want for our children and our wider human future. The faultlines spill over political boundaries, and also divide religions against themselves .28 Most alarming, the divisions among us all concerning the fate of the Earth and our part in it threaten to exacerbate existing conflicts: sharpening the partisan battles in the USA; pitching the US government against its allies and the rest of the world on climate action; pitting fossil business interests against the growing camp of pro-sustainability corporations (such as Unilever, IKEA, Marks and Spencer, etc.); adding to tensions between generations, with young people facing a future of ecological disruption that their parents and grandparents had the technology and money to avert, but chose not to.

The reality of ecological war is with us; the potential for ecological reconciliation is also real, but will demand immense work. The good news is that the work is underway, worldwide. I turn to this in the final section.

Shalom and the Earth: Ecological works of reconciliation Bishop David Atkinson sees our goal as shalom – defined as ‘peace with justice’ with a reconciled relationship with God and his creation, on which we

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depend and of which we are a part: ‘Shalom means the enjoyment and liberation, all-round health and satisfaction, of being in right relationships – with God and neighbour, with oneself, and with one’s environment.’29 Reconciliation for shalom in the new age of the Anthropocene, needs to be multi-stranded – with the extra-human world, which we see as God’s creation; with each other; and with ourselves as consumers and co-producers of the fruits of the Earth. It needs to be a global effort at many levels of cooperation and mutuality, involving (as the Pope emphasises in his Encyclical) new forms of material restraint and modesty in consumption in the rich West, and new forms of economic justice and solidarity. It will need to bring together people of all religions and of none in collaboration and common cause; it will need to persuade and not coerce;30 the patient work of ‘ecological conversion’ and education spoken of by Pope Francis; and it will need to campaign for peaceful change and against the risks of further violence as the ecological crisis intensifies, as it is bound to do.

The diagnosis of ecological crisis is by now widely shared. It connects governments worldwide, as shown by the mass sign-up to the Paris Accord on climate action in 2015 and to the UN’s Global Goals for Sustainable Development in the same year. Opinion polls and mass membership of environmental and pro-sustainability NGOs around the world show concern and pro-environmental values among citizens of all ages and classes. There are now many networks and projects developing in business, such as the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. There are international and national networks of regional and local governments and community organisations, such as those in the USA resisting the climate denialism of the Trump administration. There are many examples of exemplary declarations and projects in the world’s major faith institutions and communities.31 In all of these cases, it is fair to say that ringing declarations of intent, statements of values and concern, and formal policy commitments so far outweigh action on the ground. There are many exemplary projects and actors, but not yet at the scale needed to mitigate global heating and avert dangerous climate disruption, or to bring a halt to the mass destruction of wildlife and habitats. There is hope of more radical action, however, for three reasons.

First, the evidence of dangerous climate disruption is mounting – it is no longer a risk for future generations but is making its mark now, in rising sea levels, extreme rains and floods, ever worse droughts and wildfires, and threats of serious resource shortages.32 More partnerships of business, NGOs and governments (especially at city level) are developing to seek solutions.

wake of concerted action across sectors. These include new technologies for cleaner production; the development of models of ‘circular economy’ in which resource efficiency is maximised and wastes minimised; proposals for innovations in conservation, such as Wilson’s concept of ‘HalfEarth’, greatly enlarging the protected area of habitats for wildlife;33 the vibrant debates and experiments about post-growth and degrowth models of enterprise, welfare and economy.34 Third, the religious contribution to a sustainable world of shalom in our relations with the Earth is increasingly well recognised, especially since the Pope’s Encyclical of 2015 made its remarkable impact on policymakers, academic researchers and business leaders as well as on faith institutions.

There is a large and high-powered literature on the theology and practice of Christian and other religious stewardship of the Earth and our embedded creaturely place in the creation.35 Perhaps most important, there is great scope for ‘translation’ of the Christian vision of creation care and shalom for all on Earth into terms that enable collaboration across faiths, with secular institutions, and between Christian denominations.

The causes of ‘climate justice’, ‘fair trade’, ‘ethical investment’ and ‘sustanable business’ – among many such concepts and rallying cries in the worldwide movements for environmental protection and sustainable development – are very often rooted in biblical ideas whether their proponents know it or not. The retelling and translation ofbiblical teaching on creation care, of ideas such as Jubilee and shalom, can contribute to common cause, mutuality, love of neighbour and action to heal the divisions causing and caused by the assaults on God’s good Earth.

Conclusion Action to sustain the natural world takes on the character not only of economic and political reform and innovative policy implementation, but also of radical rethinking of ethics and the values involved in our relationship with the more-than-human world and the future of the Earth. This process of rethinking can be seen as a worldwide multi-level effort at reconciliation, taking place in the face of determined and often violent resistance.

There is a war going on and peacemaking is urgently needed. The war is against the Earth, and hence, as we are creatures of Earth, also against and within ourselves, and against God’s desire for human flourishing in covenantal relationship. There are many perpetrators, but there are increasing numbers of peacemakers.

Christian communities can take a lead, and need to exemplars of new ways of living and cooperating that demonstrate reconciliation with the creation, with neighbours in space and time, and with God.

an anxious world (London: Ekklesia, 2018), p. 192. This is the latest of his fine explorations of the ecological crisis and our relationship with ceation.

30. E.g. the patient work of ‘ecological conversion’ and education spoken of

by Pope Francis.

31. See, for example, the work of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, www.arcworld.org 32. As in Cape Town, which has just narrowly avoided running out of water.

33. Wilson, HalfEarth.

34. See, for example, the work of the UK Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity – www. cusp.ac.uk 35. E.g C Bell et al. (eds), Living Lightly, Living Faithfully (Cambridge: Faraday Inst./KLICE, 2013); Deane-Drummond et al., Anthropocene; Gerten and Bergmann, Climate Change; R Gottlieb, A Greener Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); J Grim & ME Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Washington DC: Island Press, 2014); V Miller. (ed.), The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); M Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change (London: SPCK, 2014).

Second, creative innovations for sustainable development are emerging worldwide in the 5

The Windrush generation History, memory and racial reconciliation

David Muir Dr R David Muir is Senior Lecturer in Public Theology at Roehampton University and Co-Chair of the National Church Leaders Forum.

The ‘Windrush generation’ became a popular term in the media and political discourse during the first half of the year. We heard sad and tragic stories of children of the Windrush generation losing their jobs and livelihoods, denied health and medical services, sent to detention centres to await deportation back to the Caribbean. In August at a pre-inquest hearing, there was the moving account of the mother whose 57-year-old son, Dexter Bristol, died of a heart attack after being caught up in the immigration scandal to prove his British citizenship.

At the age of eight, he came to the UK in 1968, with his mother. Dexter’s family believe that the loss of his job, being unable to prove his British citizenship and subsequently denied benefits and healthcare all contributed to his early death.

At the heart of government, the consequences of the shabby treatment of these British citizens were felt: the Prime Minister apologised for the fiasco and did a U-turn in deciding to see Commonwealth leaders from the Caribbean meeting in London for their biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) gathering in April; the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, after apologising in the House of Commons and distancing herself from her department’s ‘hostile environment’ policy for illegal immigrants, finally fell on her sword and resigned.

The effects of government policy are still being felt by Caribbean families and communities. But how should we view the Windrush generation, this post-war phenomenon that was the ‘symbolic beginning of the modern phase in the relationship between Britain and the West Indies’,1 a generation

that changed the social, cultural and religious landscape of Britain and defining a new era in race relations?

Alford Gardiner and the portrait of a pioneering generation At the OXO Tower Gallery in London, there was an incredible photographic exhibition celebrating this pioneering Caribbean generation. Entitled ‘Windrush: Portrait of a Generation’, the exhibition

by Jim Grover was described by The Observer as ‘poignant and intimate’, as well as ‘moving and often beautiful’. As a child of the Windrush generation (I came to Britain in 1966 from Guyana), the exhibition brought back pleasant memories of familiar objects that most Caribbean families had in their homes.

I reflected nostalgically on the sepia photographs in the uniform frames and the inexpensive paintings depicting the Last Supper located in what was an over colourful and overcrowded ‘front room’ – for most of my generation growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘front room’ was always locked until special visitors came. I was looking for that beloved item that my parents (and I suspect other Caribbean parents) kept on top of the wardrobe: the ‘grip’. This was the suitcase they came with from the Caribbean, with the intention that after three to five years they would have made enough money to return home. Alas, time passed and before they knew it they were retiring in a different Britain to the one they came to all those years ago.

At the exhibition, I was fortunate to meet Alford Gardiner, a passenger on the Windrush.

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NOTES 1. See D Olusoga, Black and British: A forgotten history (London: Macmillan, 2016), p. 493.

2. The front page of the Church Times for April 6, 1951 captures it well: ‘Racial Discrimination Prevails in English Cities To-day – Coloured People’s Problems’.

3. ‘London’s Churches Fail W. Indians’, Church Times, 15 November 1963.

4. JD Aldred, Respect: Understanding Caribbean British Christianity (Peterborough: Epworth, 2005), p. vii.

5. I Smith, An Ebony Cross (London: Marshall Morgan & Scott Publication Ltd, 1989), p. 40.

6. R Beckford, Jesus is Dread: Black Theology and Black Culture in Britain (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998), p. 11.

7. Founder of the West Indian Evangelical Alliance.

8. Leader of the First United Church of Jesus Christ, Apostolic.

9. O Lyseight, Forward March: An Autobiography (West Midlands: Birches Printers Ltd, 1995), pp. 34–6.

10. Matthew 5.13–16.

11. NT Wright, God in Public: How the Bible Speaks Truth to Power Today (London, SPCK: 2016), p. 166.

12. 2 Corinthians 5.15–17.

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In conversation with Jim Grover (the curator of the exhibition) he reflects on his life in the UK in positive terms. Indeed, he refers to it as ‘a brilliant life’. Alford was born in Jamaica on 27 January 1926, one of ten children. Like many other Jamaicans, he responded to the call for help from the ‘Mother Country’ during World War Two. At aged 17, he joined the RAF as a motor mechanic engineer and arrived in England in 1944. Alford completed his initial training in Staffordshire and was later posted to Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire. His ‘Certificate of Discharge’ states that his general character during service and on discharge was ‘very good’; and that his work as a mechanic was ‘above average’. Interestingly enough, before Alford went back to Jamaica after the war he completed a six-month engineering vocational course in Leeds.

He was back in Jamaica ‘in time for Christmas’ in December 1947. Like another RAF man from Jamaica, Sam King, Alford bought his £28 ticket for his place on the SS Empire Windrush. The ship was taken by the British Navy after the Germans surrendered. Sam King tells us in his autobiography, Climbing Up The Rough Side of The Mountain, that this former German troop ship was ‘beautifully laid out, well organised’ and some of the fixtures still bore German SS markings. The SS Empire Windrush left Jamaica on 24 May 1948 (Empire Day). It arrived at Tilbury on 22 June and its 492 predominantly Jamaican passengers disembarked for a new life in the ‘Mother Country’.

The politician’s response What would be the nature of their experience and struggles in the subsequent decades? How would they be welcomed by the host society and the churches? On the day the Windrush arrived, the London Evening Standard carried the headline ‘Welcome Home’. This was a positive message to the newcomers. However, on that same day, 11 Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Atlee complaining about the ‘discord and unhappiness’ this wave of Caribbean immigrants would cause.

This wave of anti-immigrant sentiments by the MPs was led JD Murray. The letter stated: Dear Prime Minister, May we bring to your notice the fact that several hundreds of West Indians have arrived in this country trusting that our Government will provide them with food, shelter, employment and social services, and enable them to become domiciled here … Their success may encourage other British subjects to imitate their example and this country may become an open reception centre for immigrants not selected in respect to health, education, training, character, customs … The British people fortunately enjoy a profound unity without uniformity in their way of life, and are blest by the absence of a colour racial problem. An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of

our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.

Even though two-thirds of the passengers on the Windrush were ex-servicemen who fought for Britain during World War Two, these Labour MPs felt that in post-war Britain people like these from the Caribbean were totally unsuited to settle in the ‘Mother Country’. This type of prejudice and fear set the tone for the discrimination and struggles that the Caribbean community would subsequently face.

One can imagine how ex-servicemen like Sam King and Alford Gardiner would have felt to be told that they were unsuited by ‘education, training, character’ to settle in Britain; or that their presence would fracture the nation’s harmony, cohesion and happiness. In short, the message to them was that their domicility in Britain portents ‘colour racial problems’, the likes of which have been absent in the country. Then there was the brutal murder of Kelso Cochrane in May 1959 by a group of white youths in Notting Hill Gate and Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968.

Dark ‘strangers’ in church and society Fast forward a few decades from the Labour MPs’ letter to some of the headlines, letters and articles in the archives of the Church Times newspaper and you see a post-Windrush Caribbean community discriminated against and struggling for acceptance in church and society. Behind many of these headlines, letters and comments there were people in church and society struggling to address ‘the dark stranger’ and the themes and challenges of integration, assimilation and racism in society.

The headlines tell the stories of these experiences: ‘Coloured Outcasts of Stepney’ (9 June 1950); ‘Stranger in our Midst’ (18 March 1955); ‘Expert Conference on the Integration of West Indians’ (10 October 1958); ‘Church Reaction to Restrictions on West Indians’ (21 February 1958). However, there were also signs of hope, as in the ‘Ministry of Reconciliation: Christian Britain Must Welcome Immigrants’ (29 March 1968). Ten years after the Windrush pioneers settled in Britain, there is a moving story (some might call it banal and a little sentimental) by Alex Shore in the Children’s Page of the Church Times on 10 October 1958. This piece of children’s fiction does its bit for multiculturalism and the promotion of good race relations in the church.

‘Black Boy and White’ is the caption for the tale. The story is of a West Indian boy named Jonathan who is befriended by a white boy called Harry. The West Indian family recently arrived in the country, in a ‘small village’. Harry and Jonathan happen to go to the same school and the local village church. When the latter falls ill, he is visited by his white friend.

Jonathan is so pleased that his friend, ‘a White boy’, was coming to see him he ‘felt happy and much better’. In fact, Jonathan enjoyed Harry’s visit so much that he ‘began to get well from that day’! Let

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me not spoil this endearing story of acceptance and friendship between two boys in an English village somewhere. They end up making and sharing cultural artefacts for the church bazar, which pleases the village vicar to such an extent that he arranges for the ‘West Indian gifts’ to be displayed on a ‘separate stall’.

So what is the moral of this tale, the authorial intent? What is Alex Shore really trying to tell his audience about the state of race relations in church and society, or about interpersonal relations among black and white Christians, a decade after this new wave of Caribbean migrants arrived in Britain? The story ends thus: ‘Jonathan was happy and so proud of his White friend. And Harry was pleased, for he had told his mother (when he heard of the way in which some Coloured people were being treated) that he would try to make this little West Indian boy happy in his country.’

Whether through personal friendships like that of Jonathan and Harry, or by church conferences, there were a range of proposals and suggestions as to how to help ‘West Indians’, according to Shore, feel ‘happy in his country’.

Discrimination, integration and sexual politics The British Council of Churches organised a threeday conference in early April 1951 to consider racial discrimination and what was seen as the ‘coloured people’s problems’.2 At one of the sessions chaired by the Bishop of Liverpool (Dr Martin), a number of issues and themes were raised about racial discrimination faced by Caribbean immigrants – for example, stories about the degrading signs in the windows saying ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ when they tried to rent accommodation.3 Speaking about his work with West Indians in Stepney, Father Neville Palmer recalled recalls the experience of one black man: ‘A young West Indian I know went to a house to ask for a room. The woman who answered the door slammed it so hard in his face that the handle broke off. The Jamaican picked it up and handed it to her. Later he confessed to me that it was only the fact that he had an aged mother living in the West Indies that prevented him from taking his own life.’

It was not long in the proceedings before the sensitive topic of sexual politics as brought to the forefront. Through his contact with West Indians in Stepney, Father Palmer reported that one of them told him that ‘the only women they have the chance to meet are outcasts from English society’. Whether to protect West Indians men or to keep them away from English women, the solution proposed by this churchman appeared practical even though it flew in the face of those wanting to restrict immigrants from the Caribbean. The solution to ‘the problem’ Father Plamer found difficulty in getting support for was ‘to allow men who are married to bring their own wives to this country and to permit a carefully selected number of Coloured women to come to

England, with whom the unmarried might contract marriages and so enjoy a full family life, such as they would have in their own country.’

Not supporting the above suggestion to this pressing problem of the ‘sex relationships among the Coloured people in the East End of London’ would have, according to Father Palmer, amounted to ‘making alliances with prostitutes and mentally defectives which can only result in a lower type of mentality in the next generation’.

There were two other matters worth noting from this important gathering. First, it was stated clearly

by Mr AH Richardson from Liverpool that ‘there is no such thing as a Coloured problem, rather there is a “White problem” brought about by the attitude we adopt towards Coloured people in the spheres of human employment and marriage relationships.’

For him it was a question of whether all people, regardless of their pigmentation, were accepted as ‘equals in the sight of God’ and in the social and economic system in Britain. Secondly, the matter of evangelism and the ‘tentative proposal’ that ‘Coloured people’ should have their own churches.

In respect of the former, the Bishop of Liverpool saw the presence of ‘Coloured and colonial’ people as a great opportunity for evangelism. In fact, for him this new home mission field was ‘every bit as important as that of the missionaries who sail to overseas countries to convert Africans and West Indians.’

Concerning black people having their own churches and living in ‘self-contained communities’, there was a difference of opinion: Revd Michael Meredith (vicar of Christ Church, Moss Side, Manchester) supported the idea, having failed to integrate the two communities; Revd Robert Nelson (rector of Liverpool) was definitely against this kind of ecclesial separatism, arguing that the duty of the Church was to bring the two groups together into the worship and life of the community. Anything less than this is a ‘compromise’, it is directly ‘contrary to the Pauline definition of the nature of the Church’ and, equally important in the context of what’s taking shape in South Africa, resulting in ‘our own brand of apartheid’.

Indicating the persistence of racial discrimination, the paper reported on a study by Revd Clifford Hill for the Institute of Race Relations with the title West Indian Migrants and the London Churches.3 The study claimed that the experience of most English churches for West Indians was a ‘bitter pill’ to swallow: ‘It is like discovering that one’s mother is a liar and a hypocrite.’ Most damning of all was the view about the patronising attitudes of English Christians to black people and its impact on race relations. According to Hill, these views did ‘more damage to the cause of racial integration than all the sneers and blasphemies of their English workmates in factory workshops’.

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Changing religious landscape Despite this early negative atmosphere, the children of the Windrush generation have a great deal to be proud of. As a direct result of this generation, today there are a number of leading Caribbean Pentecostal churches in the UK as well as leaders in public life.

However, the growth and development of Caribbean Pentecostal churches were not without struggles, personal and institutional.

The perspectives of pioneers like Io Smith and Caribbean theologians such as Robert Beckford and Joe Aldred give us a critical insight into the experience of this community’s encounter with British society. Aldred suggests that Caribbean Christians have had to endure ‘a low level of acceptance and understanding and, conversely, a high level of rejection and misunderstanding from the host Christian and secular society’.4 Although not all Caribbean Christians would have encountered this, Io Smith recalls: ‘The first place I visited was a church, but nobody said, “Welcome.”

We felt a sense of rejection straight away … Another member told me: “I think the church down the road want black people.” … I was looking for love, warmth and encouragement. I believed the first place I would find that was in the Church, but it wasn’t there.’5 Beckford signals a note of socio-historical honesty and experiential authenticity in saying: ‘English churches were at best paternal and at worst racist in their response to the Black settlers.’6 However, to see the development of Caribbean churches simply through the prism of racism would be to offer a mono-causual explanation.

Indeed, leaders like Philip Mohabir7 and Bishop Dunn8 and others came to the UK as missionaries.

As a leading Caribbean church in the UK, the New Testament Church of God has a remarkable history.

It was started by its pioneering Bishop and first General Overseer, Dr Oliver A Lyseight, in 1953.

In a similar way, he recalls the early struggles for acceptance in the ‘Motherland’ when Caribbean Christians were ‘despised and made to feel unwelcomed by some of the main-line churches’.

However, he testifies to ‘a better way to overcome these trials, and that was through the power of God’.9 The ongoing effects of the Windrush scandal, and a brief look back at some of the early history and experience should challenge all of us to examine how we respond to the ‘stranger’– the refugee, the asylum seeker, the poor and marginalized. Equally important, we need to examine how we deal with race, preferment and privilege in how we select and mentor people for leadership and ministry in churches. There are still too many churches where African and Caribbean people feel that they are treated as second-class citizens when it comes to

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leadership. Issues of race, gender and power still fracture church and society; and there is a desperate need for Christians to model radical inclusion and acceptance. The metaphor of ‘salt and light’10 has profound personal, social and political implications for all of us. Believing that people are created in the image of God places a duty of care on us for people of all backgrounds: it means challenging structures and systems of injustice that militate against the dignity of the individual, as well as being co-workers with Christ in engendering human flourishing. In a society, and church, where there are manifest injustices, where there are divisions, cleavages and privileging of access to power and preferment based on race, culture and gender we need individuals who will take a prophetic stand against ideas and practices that mar the image of God in the individual. ‘Those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice will be analysing government policy and legal rulings and speaking up on behalf of those on the bottom of the pile.’11 There is something here to be said for Christian activism and faith-based political witness in the public square.

Equally, we need a new biblical and theological understanding of what it means to be agents of ‘reconciliation’ in a fractured world. Reconciliation is a dual process, it is both human and divine: it involves God reconciling us to himself in Christ, but it also involves us being reconciled to each other after a period of hostility and conflict.12

Conclusion On 22 June, the nation marked the 70th Anniversary of the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks with a service at Westminster Abbey. The preacher for the occasion was Revd Joel Edwards, a child of the Windrush generation from Jamaica. It is important that the achievements of the Windrush generation and their children do not get lost in the fast-moving media and the political noise of the ‘unintended consequences’ of the hostile environment encountered by Caribbean people who came to Britain between 1948 and 1971. As we consider aspects of the history and experiences of this generation there are crucial lessons for our shared future about how we deal with race, social cohesion and reconciliation.

Racism and discrimination were significant factors in the history and experience of the Windrush generation. While we have come a long way since then, this community still suffers from discrimination. The Church can, and should be, the place where all people feel welcome and accepted.

There is much work to be done in making our churches more inclusive and our society more cohesive. Of course, our strategies and vision will always be provisional and limited, but we can do better as Jesus’ followers. To this end, there is an encouraging line in the Didache that says: ‘If you can shoulder the Lord’s yoke in its entirety, then you will be perfect; but if that is too much for you, do as much as you can.’

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Afterword Transmission is provided free by Bible Society as part of our mission to equip the church to live out the Bible’s message. We also work creatively and with passion to show that the Bible resonates with issues today – and to make Scriptures available where there are none.

Just over twenty years ago, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission began an unprecedented process which gave hope to a broken and fractured country. Out of it came stories of extraordinary courage and forgiveness. During the trial of police officer, Mr. Van der Boek, the mother of a boy he brutally murdered told the court: ‘I want, for Mr. Van der Broeck to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have. I would like Mr. Van der Broeck to know that I offer him my forgiveness because Jesus Christ died to forgive.’

Since 1996, stories like these have all but disappeared from our social consciousness. We live in a society where anger, intolerance and revenge are on the rise. In his recently published book, Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, lays much of the blame at the door of the big internet giants such as Facebook and Google. He argues that because outrage, anger and intolerance are the most effective means to increase online engagement, computer algorithms are set up to achieve just that.

‘Negative feelings come on faster and dissipate more slowly. It’s quicker to alienate somebody than it is to build love and trust.’ He adds, ‘so, since this is a computerised system with very rapid response times, everybody in it is doing whatever will create the effect they desire as rapidly as possible.’

Gradually, it seems, these negative emotions come to dominate not only the digital space, but our increasingly fractious public discourse. How often do we hear forgiveness discussed or reconciliation posited as a response to that which divides us? Christians too can fall into this way of being, engaging in public only in anger and critique.

Yet in 2 Corinthians 5.16ff, the Apostle Paul describes the ministry of

reconciliation – the theme of this edition of Transmission – as the centre of the mission of the church. It’s a ministry that began with God’s initiative to reconcile all things to himself in Christ. It is to this reconciling Jesus that the Bible points and there are many examples of the Bible’s reconciling role. The 2015 Talking Jesus research found that reading the Bible was one of the most impacting experiences on people’s journey to faith. We will all likely know someone who has been reconciled to God, affirmed faith in Jesus Christ, through reading the Bible or hearing its words. One Chinese church leader told me that they estimated that every Bible given by a Chinese Christian to someone outside the church would lead to 2-3 new converts. In the Middle East, Bible Society supports a trauma healing program that uses the Bible to help both Christians and Muslims deal with the legacy of ISIS and find healing through forgiveness. The Bible plays a central role in prison ministries, ministries to the homeless and for refugees. As we approach the centenary of the end of World War One, we’ve produced a whole raft of resources on our website, which centre on the hope the Bible gave and still gives today in the context of war and the nature of peace. For as we write there: ‘peace begins with the healing of hearts, the restoring of relationships.’

Paul Williams Chief Executive

place in society. No longer at the centre of influence, Christians in Britain must learn to tread the pathways outlined in this edition: to honestly express difficult emotions; to connect with our culture before we try and correct it; to share our stories of healing and to commence a pilgrimage of reconciliation with those we may consider our enemies. As that South African woman told the court – such counter-cultural responses can only point to Christ.

Paul Williams is Chief Executive at Bible Society. If you would like to email him, you can contact him at paul.williams@ biblesociety.org.uk

All this and much more is true and vitally important. But we must also recognise that the Bible has sometimes been weaponised. We can be so determined to win our argument or prove our point that the very words of eternal life become part of a rhetorical arsenal in a temporal political battle.

Often these kind of reactions occur because we feel that Scripture – and our faith – is somehow threatened. This is why at Bible Society we are committed to helping the church recover what missiologist Lesslie Newbigin called a ‘proper confidence’ in the Bible and the gospel. Part of this involves being reconciled to our time in history and our 31