Duncan B. Forrester

Ecclesia Scoticana - Established, Free or National?

of ways it relates to the spiritual well-being of their congregations, in the same way as doctors, or lawyers, have learned about their subjects for the well-being of their patients or clients. Recently an intellectually able, urbane, well-read, pastorally experienced priest of a flourishing middle-class parish commented that he was reluctant to disturb the faith of the more elderly members of his congregation by referring to issues in current New Testament scholarship and theology in his sermons. Journalists, people in the media, A-level religious studies students, and theology and religious studies graduates also sit in congregations, and presumably pick up the message that there is a great and proper gulf between the formal study of the Bible and theology and religious studies, and the pulpit, the pew and the pastoral situation. Should this be so? Are theology, religious and biblical studies arcane matters from which the faithful people of God should be protected? Or, should they be clamouring, like patients at health centres or clients with their solicitors, for state-of-the-art knowledge? Is theological, religious and biblical knowledge too important for ordinary people to know about, or is it not important enough for them to need to trouble their heads about it?

Book Review: Forgiveness and Christian EthicsForgiveness and Christian Ethics, BashAnthony (Cambridge University Press2007), 220 pp, £47.00 hbk

Many public theologians are in a state of euphoria these days. At last central doctrines of the Christian faith, especially forgiveness and reconciliation, have been shown to be living and active in the public realm. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Tutu is commonly credited with the break up of apartheid not leading to the expected blood bath. Tutu conducted the sessions of the TRC dressed in his cassock, and opened sessions with prayer. And there have been many other situations around the world where Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have been tried in efforts to deal with deepseated antagonisms, with varying success. Gordon Wilson’s declaration of forgiveness for the callous bombers who killed his daughter in the Enniskillen bombing is held to have made a significant contribution to the peace process in Northern Ireland. In discussions of penal policy notions of restorative justice, and the significance of reconciliation and forgiveness, have now become commonplace. It is all exciting for the theologians, and much that has been published is rightly enthusiastic, but sometimes it allows enthusiasm to erode a critical realism. There is much to celebrate in the new public interest in forgiveness and reconciliation. But there are also hard questions to be asked about an understanding of forgiveness and reconciliation which can sometimes be glib and easy, and often neglects the fact that forgiveness usually takes time, and reconciliation is always a costly process. Bash’s superb Forgiveness and Christian Ethics doesn’t dodge the difficult issues, but he backs up his conviction that Christian theology has much to offer with careful, critical and illuminating exegesis. He also makes relevant use of psychology, so that one chapter is a moving pastoral psychology of forgiveness. He carefully avoids the trap of treating forgiveness as simply a psychotherapeutic matter concerning individuals; it is at its most relevant and demanding when it deals with relations between nations and other collectivities. Forgiveness and Christian Ethics is the best sort of narrative theology. Bash engages with penetrating and illuminating sympathy with the stories of Gordon Wilson and his agonies in the aftermath of his declaration that Book reviews

Book Review: Engaging with Contemporary Culture: Christianity, Theology and the Concrete Church — Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical TheologyEngaging with Contemporary Culture: Christianity, Theology and the Concrete Church — Explorations in Practical, Pastoral and Empirical Theology, PercyMartyn (Ashgate2005), 270 pp, £47.50 hbk

The fivefold typology developed in Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1951) has dominated discussion for more than fifty years. Niebuhr divides Christian understandings of the relation of religion and culture into those that advocate Christ against culture, or the Christ of culture, or Christ above culture, or Christ and culture in paradox, or, finally, Christ the transformer of culture. Again and again theologians have discerned inadequacies in Niebuhr’s neat and comprehensive schema and have attempted to suggest an alternative. But the debate continues, ever refreshed, and with little sign of closure. Martyn Percy in his new book follows hard on the heels of Timothy Gorringe’s Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture (2005), but he adopts an interesting and rather different approach. Percy’s book provides us with a reliable guide through recent discussions of the theology of culture, and he takes head-on the claims of the school of Radical Orthodoxy, with its dismissive approach to culture and its tendency to advocate a ‘Christ against culture’ approach. But the distinctive strength of Percy’s book is that it is a study in practical theology, and is grounded throughout in real situations and the opportunities, and the dangers, for faith that they bring with them. For Percy, the church that relates to, and wrestles with, cultures and the societies in which it finds itself is not idealized or triumphalistic. It is the real church, warts and all, with which he has to do, the real church that sometimes surrenders to culture or to nationalism, and sometimes shows all the qualities of costly discipleship as it interacts with its context. The case studies in Part Three are particularly interesting, concentrating on empirical studies of what he rather oddly calls ‘the concrete church’. Here we find careful examination of the ‘Toronto Blessing’ and its impact, of the conservative Evangelical movement called Reform in the Church of England, and of the tortuous and confusing crisis through which the Anglican Communion is going at the present time. One might wish, perhaps, for more attention to what is

Book Reviews : Christian Social Thinking

the confusing order 65-71, 2-7, 103, with a reference only to 65-71, and the inferior Sources chrétiennes text is used, not OECT. Augustine’s conversion (Confessions 8.12) is included, but without reference to its monastic character. The Index, purporting to offer a systematic way to use the book thematically, is inadequate: not enough space, insufficient articulation, frequent confusions and errors, and reference to sections instead of pages, which means that for some topics you are sent to the whole 39 Articles! There is no table of contents. So a cautious

Book Reviews : Liberation Theology in Asia

Light from the East, ed. Henry Hill (Anglican Book Centre, Toronto,

Recent Liturgical Work in Scotland

9.95, pp. 164, ISBN 0919891-90-X) is a very good and useful book which covers a very wide geographical area extending from the Armenian-USSR border with Turkey and Iran across the Middle East, Africa and South India. This symposium offers a bird’s eye view of the early history and modern times of the ancient Oriental Orthodox, the Armenians, the Copts, the Ethiopians, the Assyrians, the Syrians and the South Indians. The authors, under pressure of space, left the Middle Ages except for a few references to some major historical events. This gap is also due to the fact that

Divinity in use and Practice

itself is the norm and criterion of Christian belief and it seeks to underscore the saving activity of God in Christ. It declares that the definitive salvation from God has been encountered in the man Jesus, that to be in contact with him is to be confronted with God’s recreative power. We may not want to use the same terms, but if we do not hold that salvation is in Jesus, we cease, in my view, to-be Christians at all and Christian theology dissolves into a miasma of religious studies.