Incorporating history

This morning we went with the Meissen Commission to visit the Martin-Luther-Gymnasium in Eisenach. The building tells a story.

Originally a Dominican monastery, it has engaged in education for a thousand years. Apart from a guided tour in which we saw how the building itself has developed and incorporated the philosophies and cultures of its various epochs, we also sat in English and Religious Education lessons in order to get a feel for how these things are taught in a German church school.

The bit that grabbed me was the painting in the assembly hall. During the GDR the painting of Prometheus was underwritten by Karl Marx's ruminations on human value:

“Prometheus, the epitome of a fighter for the happiness of humankind.”

Well, make your own mind up about Marx's limited vision. What interested me was that the church school was not allowed to remove this piece of art on the grounds that it forms part of the 'story' that has formed the children who study here and must be somehow incorporated into their understanding of how they have come to be where they are. Clearly, even though it doesn't immediately strike one as the epitome of Christian iconography, it seems to me right that it has been retained.

I remember the first time I went into the Humboldt University in Berlin and was confronted by the staircase fronted with Marx and his statement from the Communist Manifesto: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” A bit pointed, don't you think… in the entrance hall to a renowned university?

The lecture hall we went to was lined with busts of great Communist thinkers, writers or political leaders – or, at least, those thinkers of the past whom Honecker's boys wanted to retrospectively claim as proto-Marxist-Leninists. I wondered why, sixteen years after the GDR experiment had been discarded, they didn't take away the tacky cultural symbols that epitomised it. I am glad they didn't.

This then fed into the then raging debate in Berlin about whether or not to demolish the grotesque Palast der Republik – the brutalist cultural centre of Socialist Berlin, located opposite the Dom and close to the Museuminsel. In this case the argument was lost and the building came down.

What is going in here is how far we lose something which, however ugly or inconvenient, reminds us of our story. The built environment incorporates memory and ridding ourselves of it is not always the best course of action – even when it is entirely understandable.

I am familiar with two churches in south London which were seriously damaged by fires. In both cases fire-damaged stones and other elements were incorporated in the design of the new church – in order to let the building itself tell an honest story of a community living and worshiping at a particular time in history. I picked up this theme (badly and in a rather rambling way) in a sermon in Hull a few days ago: go around the church where I was a vicar in the 1990s (Rothley, Leicestershire) and the building itself tells a story of change, adaptation, development, suffering, celebration and all the stuff of life there during 1200 years. Baptise in a Norman font and you can't help but be caught up in the mystery of the people who, over a period of 1000 years, were baptised in or witnessed baptism in that same font in that same building.

'Stuff' matters. Christians who spiritualise or dematerialise faith have – literally – lost the plot. Christianity is always materialist – incarnation goes to the heart of it. In Genesis 3 it is God who comes to humanity, seeking him and her out in the Garden; in Jesus God comes to us as one of us; in the colourful and coded imagination of Revelation it is the heavenly city that comes down to earth and not the other way round. Christianity is rooted in stuff and memory and realism: it means not running away from the world or the inconvenient bits of the story that has formed us. It is never escapism, but engagement.

I think Marx actually had a limited view of human value – contrary to the humane passion that drove his economic thinking. Suspicious of fantasy or myth, he went for Prometheus. Maybe the students at the Martin-Luther-Gymnasium will learn to think deeply about an anthropology that does justice to the philosophies that have shaped the world they are growing into, giving them the critical competence to construct a world view that will hold water in a changing and challenging world.

Before spending this afternoon in the wonderful Bachhaus in Eisenach, I noticed this quotation on leaving the school: “Das Geheimnis der Versöhnung ist Erinnerung” (the secret of reconciliation is memory). Discuss…

 

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The divisivelessness of church schools

This morning (while I was in meetings all day) The Guardian published a commissioned article on ‘faith schools’ and it sparked an interesting – though sometimes predictable – discussion.

The basic argument (with evidence) is that (a) we must distinguish between ‘faith’ schools and ‘church’ schools, and (b) the latter are not divisive. What is surprising in the ensuing comments is the stubborn assumption that a ‘secular’ world view is neutral – and therefore legitimate as a basis for a school community – whereas a religious world view is not. Of course, this privilege is merely asserted and not argued for.

Anyway, the debate will continue, no doubt.

 

Present and engaged

One of the myths that flies around about the church is that church schools are divisive. Actually, to be precise, the myth is that ‘faith schools’ are divisive and ‘church schools’ get uncritically and illegitimately subsumed into this category. Church schools have a different remit.

This afternoon the General Synod discussed ‘Presence and Engagement’ – a term that describes the Church of England’s whole approach to its ministry and mission. We aim to be present in every community and engaged in and for the good of that community. This means – as we heard in the debate – that we do not walk away from areas of great deprivation and challenge or places where Christians are a tiny minority.

In relation to church schools this means that in Bradford alone we have over 40 church schools that are between 80-100% Muslim. We have committed clergy and lay people serving in parishes which are predominantly (some up to 95%) Muslim. Driven by a theology of God’s generous love for all, they maintain a Christian presence and serve the local people – whoever they are and whatever their need.

In the debate this afternoon we heard stories of creative engagement and stubbornly committed presence. I noted the statement by a Muslim leader in Bradford in which he said something like: “Our problem is that we don’t have a bishop. So, the bishop is our bishop and we need him to bring us all together.” Which illustrates how we bring together not only people from different faiths, but also different members of those other faiths.

It is a serious vocation and a huge responsibility. But, as I said in the debate, this is all dependent on strong and effective leadership at every level. In Bradford, in the short time I have been there, I have been massively impressed by the work and place of the Dean and the Cathedral, the Bishop’s Officer for Church in the World, clergy and lay people for whom I have huge respect.

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The moderation of rhetoric

One of the reasons time has been too short for decent blogging (or, for that matter, indecent blogging) is my having taken on too many speaking engagements which required proper preparation. One of them was a contribution to a multidisciplinary conference on The Rhetorics of Moderation at the University of Huddersfield last night. I had been invited to deliver a keynote address at the final conference of a three-year project initiated by the Universities of Nottingham, Edinburgh and Huddersfield.

The draft text (not quite as delivered) is available on the Bradford diocesan website. But I will try to sum up the key bits here and see what sort (if any) of response it gets.

When I (finally) agreed to do this gig I wasn’t sure what the title of the series really meant: ‘The Rhetorics of Moderation’. I initially wondered if it might be an academic conference on how to talk about exam invigilation – clearly misunderstanding both ‘rhetoric’ and ‘moderation’. But, I eventually offered the title The Moderation of Rhetoric, so I could bang on about ‘language’ again. As a non-academic it is always a little intimidating going into such a context, but everyone was kind and the conversation was, I thought, quite stimulating.

My basic point – developing Helmut Schmidt’s argument (in Außer Dienst) that in order to understand your own culture you have to look at it through the lens of a different culture… and you can only do that if you understand something of the other language – was simple: language shapes both thought and behaviour. Therefore, language (or rhetoric) is not neutral. As  put it in my introduction:

So, my simple contention here is that language matters – that before reflecting on the ‘rhetorics of moderation’, we need to pay attention to the moderation of rhetoric and the ways in which we use language in our common human discourses in a complicated globalised world.

It is essential for good public discourse that interlocutors learn the language of ‘the other’ in order (a) to understand, (b) to know how to respond, (c) to see how this response will be heard and understood by ‘the other’, and (d) to keep the conversation going. This point is helpfully addressed by Rowan Williams in his brilliant book on Dostoyevsky where he writes about the corruption of language. Here are a couple of quotes from the Introduction to the book:

The novels [of Dostoyevsky] ask us, in effect, whether we can imagine a human community of language and feeling in which, even if we were incapable of fully realizing it, we knew what was due to each other; whether we could imagine living in the consciousness of a solidity or depth in each other which no amount of failure, suffering or desolation could eradicate.

[Dostoyevsky as narrator] sees language itself as the indisputable marker of freedom: confronted with what seeks to close down exchange or conflict, we discover that we can always say more… When we have nothing with which to engage, we stop speaking and stop developing.

Williams goes on to tie language and freedom to a responsive experience of ‘otherness’ and he challenges the Hegelian ‘freedom of the void’ – that is, as Williams puts it:

…the dream of a liberty completely without constraint from any other, human, subhuman or divine; because it has no “other”, it can also have no content. But this means that the hunger for such freedom can only manifest itself in destruction, flinging itself against existing limits… …the Dostoevskian novel is… an exercise in resisting the demonic and rescuing language.

So, Williams takes from Dostoyevsky the notion that language is not neutral, that human beings use language to close down or open up relationship, that language is the key to and fundamental expression of freedom… and that when we reach the end of ‘having something more to say’, we have constrained genuine freedom and closed down the possibility of development or coexistence. (Perhaps this also explains his approach to those contentious issues in the Anglican Communion where people want to close down conversation and force a conclusion that saves them from the pain of engaging with ‘the other’.)

I took from this that “we might derive the imperative (for human flourishing in a good society) of human beings and human communities learning the languages of ‘the other’, not as a virtuous end in itself, or even an altruistic means of keeping a relationship going, (or even for knowing which beer to order on holiday), but as a non-negotiable and essential feature of human freedom and dignity. We have to be multilingual (in the sense of paying attention to and learning to understand what is both being said and what is being heard) in order to survive, but also in order to thrive and enable ‘the other’ to thrive in a way that guarantees mutual flourishing. In other words, language at the very least provides the space in which relationship and responsibility can grow.”

I went on to illustrate (from personal experience of media, social media and interfaith dialogue) the importance of getting the language right. It won’t come as any surprise to readers of this blog that my unease with some of our media language got a run-around again. Not only do I think a strong democracy demands a strong, informed, intelligent and independent press, but I also think that those who hold the rest of us to account should themselves be held to account for the professionalism (or lack of it) with which they operate.

Finding people who have learned how to think about how to think – or how we know that we know what we know (epistemology, if you want the posh word) – is clearly becoming more rare. It is trivial engagement in creating conflict that drives the media agenda. Of course there are exceptions to this, but it is hard to pretend that democracy is served by what we are currently served up. The point is, however, that those who use language to persuade, influence and inform also need to be held to account for how they manipulate the powerful tool at their disposal.

My fear here is that the crass diminution of encouragement of and support for arts, humanities and social sciences in both school and university means that not only are we creating a culture that values mechanics, but doesn’t do ‘deep’ thinking. Not only are we in danger of depriving the current generation, but we are cutting off the expertise and enthusiasms we need for a future generation of teachers. We can lose in one generation what will take several generations (at least) to recover. To see the arts and humanities as ‘unproductive’ in terms of balance sheet bottom lines is more than myopic; it is dangerously and narrowly stupid.

My conclusion was not very startling:

If we take social cohesion seriously, we must pay attention to the language we use. Our rhetoric needs to be moderated, challenged, thought through. This is not pedantry or a form of distraction therapy; language shapes behaviour and shapes the lens through which different people see differently the different worlds within which we live. The diminution of attention to language – now seen in the paucity of language teaching and learning, the demotion of arts and humanities, does not augur well for having good public moderators of rhetoric in the decades to come. But the task will not go away.

It is worth considering that I delivered this address (and discussed questions arising from it in a stimulating Q & A session afterwards) immediately after visiting a Church of England primary school. The school serves one of the most challenging and deprived communities in Bradford and is outstanding in all respects. Contrary to the sloppy reporting in the media about ‘faith schools’ – either ignorant of or deliberately disregarding of the distinction between ‘faith schools’ and ‘church schools’ – this school works wonders for families, local communities and commands the determined loyalty of staff and governors. The headteacher told me she didn’t want moderately interested or interesting teachers or visitors to the school; she wants people who are passionate about what they do, how they think and what they believe. This school would be an inconvenient embarrassement to those who wish to pretend that church schools are divisive, privileged, sectarian or damaging.

Here again, the language is crucial.