Page 4, 20th July 1984

20th July 1984

Page 4

Page 4, 20th July 1984 — BELIEF IN QUESTION
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Locations: Manchester, Bristol, Durham

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BELIEF IN QUESTION

Gerard Connolly examines the background to the dispute surrounding the appointment of the new Anglican bishop of Durham
I FIRST came across David Jenkins quite some time ago when, as a graduate student in theology, I returned to the University of Leeds to meet former colleagues.
Some time prior to Professor Jenkins' appointment to the chair of theology, I had worked for his predecessor, John Tinsley, whose quiet passage to become Bishop of Bristol looks to have been the sort of promotion he himself had in mind when offered the Bishopric of Durham.
Even now I can recall his mild, almost affable manner and a scholarly detachment that seemed to me to conceal a certain incisiveness.
Particularly impressive to my mind was the level of esteem in which so many of his staff and fellow scholars appeared to hold him, making of his departmernt a lively gathering.
As one of a generation of young lay Catholics drawn into the mainstream of theological enquiry via the non denominational agency of the British provincial university, I had found the companionship of other Christians most stimulating.
The more so as it struck me then — and still does — that such places afforded a welcome unpretentiousness to the study of theology in refreshing contrast to the rather pompous, clever image given the subject by way of its inseparable association with establishment Oxbridge.
This said then, perhaps it is part fitting, part ironic, that this always confident academic, in the course of allowing a wider public a peep at the complexities of his own Christian commitment, should have touched a popular nerve of Anglicanism which numbers of less charitable commentators deemed long ago to have been either severed or numbed.
Controversy upon the historicity of such biblical truths as the Virgin Birth or Resurrection was already a permanent element of the curriculum nearly two decades past on my initial entry to university.
Suffice to say that advanced thinking on the subject has a lengthy ancestry and looks to
have proved as intractable a problem as it always promised to be, ever since well over a century back international scholarship began asking questions about the bible's credentials to be assumed factual in the modern sense of the word.
Nonetheless, I can still remember myself experiencing profound unease when, as a somewhat raw undergraduate, I began hearing ordained ministers in the lecture theatres ask, quite dispassionately, wherther Jesus of Nazareth was a "put up job".
At home, incidentally, — an Irish working class district of Manchester — the parish priest had still not come to terms with the phasing out of Friday fish.
All of which goes to show how easily Christian theology can become detached from its
natural constituency; to wit, Christians.
No one need remind me of the difficulties to be encountered in trying to get over notions of 'faith' in an academic environment. Increasingly of late, however, evidence has become plain of a depressing hiatus as betwixt those who allow themselves to be portrayed as pious eggheads and those to whom, in theory at least, they profess to address themselves, i.e. so many committed Christians the machinery of whose belief has not been finetuned by the niceties of erudition.
I say in theory since probably the most important lesson of this whole messy affair is its highlighting of that very communication breakdown in critical channels of Christian opinion.
David Jenkins, for whom I have the greatest admiration, has frequently spoken to his peers on a variety of pertinent topics in learned theological journals; and rightly so.
However, had he, one feels, as an interpreter of Christianity, taken a fraction more trouble to come to terms with what this might mean in view of his obligations to a larger audience, readers of The Sun might not now be confusing him with the Beast of Revelation.
Yes I am aware that David Jenkins has been misquoted and quite shamefully misrepresented, and there will always be those eager to make all possible capital — and a good deal of mischief to boot from the embarrassment of a so' called 'liberal' theologian.
Notwithstanding all this, even would-be allies having heard the professor's original public admission and more alarmingly his later near dismissal of the resulting fuss as something akin to a sort of unpleasantness amongst erstwhile reasonable chaps. will want some assurances that he does not consider the role of the theologian to be beyond a measure of accountability.
Hopefully, I might add, in this life especially; since it would seem no one these days ought to risk his or her shirt on the absolute reality of the next.
In the end this unseemly debacle may have its positive side if it encourages Christian theologians of every persuasion to talk to their fellow Christians at every level of society.
If it persuades them also of the need sometimes to do so purely on matters of doctrine as opposed to the very necessary but rather frequent lectures on social responsibility — it could pass for an act of providence, (whatever that might now be taken to mean).
Dr Gerard Connolly was until recently Leverhulme Post Doctoral Fellow, based in Ireland. He is now putting the finishing touches to a social history of Catholicism in England, entitled A Missionary Church In England; Catholics and English Society 1791-1918.




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