Interrupting the church's flow

302 Pages·2017·7.86 MB·English

VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT

Interrupting the church’s flow
Engaging Graham Ward and Romand Coles
in a radically receptive political theology in the urban margins

ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad Doctor aan
de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
op gezag van de rector magnificus
prof.dr. V. Subramaniam,
in het openbaar te verdedigen
ten overstaan van de promotiecommissie
van de Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid
op woensdag 13 september 2017 om 13.45 uur
in de aula van de universiteit,
De Boelelaan 1105

door
Alastair David Barrett
geboren te Portsmouth, Verenigd Koninkrijk
promotor: prof.dr. E.A.J.G. Van der Borght
copromotoren: dr. J.R. Sudworth
dr. D. Hewlett

ii Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
Contents

Detailed table of contents iv
Table of figures ix
Acknowledgments x
Chapter 1 Entangled Dramas 1
Chapter 2 Mapping the terrain:
public, liberation and ecclesial political theologies 20
Chapter 3 Engaging Graham Ward
as ecclesial political theologian 56
Chapter 4 Interrupting the church’s flow:
Ward’s ‘schizoid’ christology, and repressed ‘others’ 96
Chapter 5 Engaging Romand Coles
as post-liberal ‘theologian’ of receptivity 126
Chapter 6 Trajectories 178
Appendix 1 Interview with Graham Ward (transcript) 220
Appendix 2 Interview with Phil Howkins (transcript) 235
Bibliography 244
Summary 286

iii Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
Detailed Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Entangled Dramas 1
1.1 Dramas of exclusion: discourses of ‘othering’, dynamics of ‘expulsion’
1.2 Who acts? Discourses of agency and interaction within the ‘urban margins’
1.3 Locating the church: questions of ecclesial agency within the urban margins
1.4 Research question: developing a radically receptive ecclesiology in the
urban margins
1.5 Locating myself
1.6 Charting the trajectory/ies: overview of chapters
Chapter 2 Mapping the terrain:
public, liberation and ecclesial political theologies 20
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Political theology: in search of definition
2.2.1 Sharpening the focus
2.3 Public Theology
2.3.1 Defining the ‘public’: Who speaks? Who acts? Who hears? Who is
heard?
2.3.2 Rules of engagement: how does theology ‘go public’?
2.3.3 Public theology in a post-secular context: gifts and challenges
2.4 Liberation Theology
2.4.1 ‘Doing’ theology: Who speaks? Who acts? Who hears? Who is heard?
2.4.2 Liberation Theology UK?
2.4.3 Recent developments and critical questions within liberation theology
2.4.4 Critical questions to liberation theology: a (re)turn to the church
2.5 Ecclesial political theology
2.5.1 Communities of faithful witness: MacIntyre, Barth and ‘Hauerwasian’
political theologians
2.5.2 Radical Orthodoxy: ontology, participation and ‘transcendent’
authority
2.5.3 The authority of Christ’s judgment: a mix of Barthian and Schmittian
trajectories?
2.5.4 An ecclesial receptivity within EPT?
2.6 Political theologies and the urban margins: discerning a way forward
iv Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
Chapter 3 Engaging Graham Ward
as ecclesial political theologian 56
3.1 The ailments of the postmodern city
3.1.1 The economic
3.1.2 The cultural
3.1.3 The political
3.2 An embodied challenge: on Manchester’s Oxford Road
3.3 Diagnosis: two cities, two economies, two desires
3.3.1 Surveying the terrain
3.3.2 An ‘analogical worldview’
3.3.3 Augustine, desire and the City of God
3.3.4 Postmodern and ‘Christian’ desire
3.3.5 The flow of love: kenosis and pleroma
3.4 Therapy: Church as ‘alternative erotic communities’
3.4.1 Church and eucharist: overcoming division
3.4.2 Church and cultural politics: reschooling the (cultural) imaginary
3.4.3 Church and prayer: inhabiting the eschatological tension
3.4.4 Church and service of those ‘in need’: incorporating ‘the stranger’
3.5 Evaluation: Ward’s ecclesiological equivocation
3.5.1 Church as ‘corpus permixtum’: humble, but anxious?
3.5.2 Church as ‘apophatic body of Christ’: ‘emerging’, or invisible?
3.5.3 Church as ‘erotic community’: ‘transgressive’, or colonial?
3.5.4 Church as ‘heavenly city’: ‘prefiguring’, or triumphant?
3.6 Summary

Chapter 4 Interrupting the church’s flow:
Ward’s ‘schizoid’ christology, and repressed ‘others’ 96
4.1 ‘Penetrating’ the urban margins: The Full Monty and ‘violent no-go zones’
4.2 Ward’s ‘radical orthodoxy’: a patriarchal, sexual, and imperialist logic?
4.3 Christological openings
4.3.1 Irigaray and christology in the ‘between’
4.3.2 The ‘schizoid Christ’ and the woman with the haemorrhage
4.4 Openings foreclosed: two versions of an anointing, and other displacements
4.4.1 ‘Economic’ problems and other ‘displacements’
4.4.2 Retreating from the challenge of the other
v Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
1. The woman with the haemorrhage and the Syro-Phoenician
woman
2. Luce Irigaray
3. Emmanuel Levinas
4. Jacques Lacan and the ‘real’
4.4.3 Retreating from the materiality of Jesus
4.4.4 Retreating from the particularity of christology
4.4.5 Retreating from the engagement of praxis
4.5 A ‘mended middle’? Ward’s awkward appropriation of Gillian Rose
4.6 Holding open the ‘opening’: returning Ward to his senses
4.6.1 Reversing Ward’s ‘retreats’

Chapter 5 Engaging Romand Coles
as post-liberal ‘theologian’ of receptivity 126
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Returning to the challenge of the other
5.2.1 ‘Traditionalism’: particular visions of flourishing and ‘overconfident’
communities?
5.2.2 Augustinians, ‘outsides’ and ‘one-way’ caritas
5.2.3 Derrida, deconstruction and ‘ateleological openness’
5.2.4 A two-fold proposal: tension-dwelling between the teleological and
the ateleological
5.3 Returning to praxis: developing a ‘visionary pragmatism’ for practised
receptivity
5.3.1 The fecundity of the ‘edge’
5.3.2 ‘Visionary pragmatism’
5.3.3 Radical democratic practices of receptivity
1. Listening
2. World-travelling
3. Tabling
5.4 Learning from ‘David’ and ‘Goliath’: fleshing out a ‘visionary pragmatism’
5.4.1 Re-visiting Ward’s ‘economies’ with Coles: ‘mega-circulations’,
‘disbelief’ and ‘polyface flows’
5.4.2 Politics of shock and countershock
5.4.3 Reconfiguring hope for a ‘storm-shocked’ world
vi Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
5.5 Coles’ ‘ecclesial turn’: a ‘christeccentric’, dialogical, ‘radically insufficient’
church
5.5.1 John Howard Yoder: the vulnerable receptivity of the church’s ‘body
practices’
5.5.2 Rowan Williams: ‘Christ on Trial’ and the ‘penumbral’ edges of the
ecclesial body
1. Ward’s Johannine trial: a contestation of authority
2. Williams’ Markan trial: kenosis of territoriality, kenosis of
language
3. Williams’ ‘christeccentric’ ecclesiology
5.5.3 Charles Taylor, Sam Wells, and a radically ‘insufficient’, ‘thirsting’
church
5.5.4 Jean Vanier’s ‘footwashed politics’, a ‘receptive’ Jesus, and a
mysterious ‘whirling’
5.6 Summary: from Ward’s christological domestication to Coles’ christological
equivocation

Chapter 6 Trajectories 178
6.1 Re-cap
6.1.1 Developing a ‘radically receptive political theology’
6.2 Tactical theological stances
6.2.1 Locating the theologian
6.2.2 Dis-locating the theologian
1. ‘Dislocation’, ‘exorcism’, and a Christ receptive to ‘initiation’
by others
2. Dis-identifying with Jesus
6.2.3 ‘Flipping the axis’: negotiating the equivocation of the christological
6.2.4 Expecting abundance: shifting from the ‘centre’ to the ‘edge’
6.2.5 Letting the ghosts speak: re-awakening our senses to our repressed
‘others’
6.2.6 The Full Monty and a ‘constitutive outside’
6.3 Tactical ontologies
6.3.1 Participating in divine receptivity: ‘hearing with God’s ears’
6.3.2 Returning to the flow(s): christological openings to capitalism’s
‘outside’
6.3.3 From ‘penetrating bodies’ to ‘touching flesh’
vii Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
6.3.4 The ‘go-between God’: a pneumatological trajectory?
6.4 Practices
6.4.1 Re-locating the theologian: re-rooting and re-routing
6.4.2 Resisting initiative: the ‘art of pregnant waiting’
6.4.3 Practising ‘confession’ – with our ‘others’
6.4.4 Spaces of contestation, negotiation and ‘contagious receptivity’
6.4.5 Tabling and ‘para-liturgies’
6.4.6 Liturgical gathering, formation in receptivity and liturgies of
‘countershock’
6.4.7 Prayer
6.5 Returning
6.5.1 Returning to the Church of England
1. A parish church
2. A liturgical, eucharistic, ‘incarnational’ church
3. A national church
6.5.2 Returning with Ward to the Oxford Road
6.5.3 Returning to the Bromford Passion Play
6.5.4 Returning... to resurrection?

viii Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
Table of Figures

1.1 Crucifixion scene, Bromford Passion Play 2013 2
1.2 Forms of agency exercised by people living with poverty (Ruth Lister) 7
3.1 The ‘flow’ of divine love 84
5.1 ‘Wormholes’ in space-time, as conceived in theoretical physics 158
6.1 ‘Flipping’ the christological axis 188
6.2 Practices of ‘polyface’ formation 209

ix Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow
Acknowledgments
One of the most wonderful challenges of writing a thesis on radical receptivity, whilst learning to
practise it, is attempting to make any kind of comprehensive list of the people whose wisdom and
insight, questions and challenges, have made a significant contribution to the words that been
written here. There are so many!
Most immediately, I am thankful for those who have paid closest attention to the writing of the
thesis itself, encouraged the countless tangential trains of thought, helped me find a focus and, most
critically, helped me stick to it and see it through. For my supervisors, Richard Sudworth, David
Hewlett and Eddy Van der Borght; and for those who shared smaller parts of the supervisory
journey, Nicola Slee, Ashley Cocksworth and Kevin Ellis. I am also immensely thankful to Mark Pryce
and Bishop David Urquhart, both for agreeing financial support to help make this possible, and for
their encouragement along the way. Michael Gale, Queen’s Foundation librarian, has been endlessly
patient with my constant failures to return books on time, and almost limitless in his responses to
my requests for new purchases – this thesis would not be half as rich without his generous
resourcing.
I am thankful also for those who, entirely voluntarily, have read (or attempted to read) either
selected chapters or the entire draft, and responded with encouragement, questions, suggestions, or
urges to expunge every superfluous inverted comma: Chris Allen, Andy Delmege, Tim Evans, Sam
Ewell, Jessica and Simon Foster, Sophie and Keith Hebden, Rachel Mann, Sally Nash, Jane Perry,
Andrea Russell, Cormac Russell and Susie Snyder.
I am deeply indebted also to those who, in January 2014, sat around a table at the Queen’s
Foundation with a ridiculously ambitious proto-proposal in front of them, and enthusiastically
identified at least seven different PhDs that could have sprung from it: Sam Ewell, Gary Hall, David
Hewlett, John Hull, Kate Pearson, Nicola Slee and Richard Sudworth. And for those who, a few
months later, offered comments on a slightly-more-coherent proposal, that enabled me to begin to
find that elusive focus: Chris Allen, Ruard Ganzevoort, Rachel Mann, Jane Perry, Nigel Pimlott, John
Reader, and Anna Rowlands.
The work here has also been profoundly shaped in spaces where I have had the privilege of being
able to ‘try out’ some of my thinking on both academics and practitioners (and many people who are
both, and much more). Some of those spaces (and those who have convened them) include:
 ‘Thinking Aloud’ sessions in Hodge Hill (especially those involving input from Anna Ruddick
and Mike Pears)
 Birmingham ‘Strengthening Estates Ministry’ gatherings (Andy Delmege)
 Bishop of Birmingham’s Round Table Theology Group (Mark Pryce)
 West Midlands Urban, Political and Public Theology group
 Research seminars, Queen’s Birmingham (Nicola Slee)
 ‘Gendered approaches to faith’ module, Queen’s Birmingham (Nicola Slee & Donald Eadie)
 Gatherings of clergy and community workers in Chester (David Herbert), Durham (Val
Barron), Lichfield (David Primrose) and Nottingham & Southwell (David McCoulough)
Dioceses
x Alastair David Barrett, Interrupting the church’s flow