theology

Review of Michael Ramsey book in Theology

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Another review of my Michael Ramsey book hit the streets this month, in the journal Theology. For historians who don’t know the theological literature, Theology is one of the foremost general theology periodicals, analogous perhaps to the Journal of Ecclesiastical History for church historians (see the JEH review by Jeremy Bonner).

The review is by Robin Gill, formerly Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent, now professor emeritus in the same, and co-editor of the first significant set of essays assessing Ramsey’s theology, published in 1995. He is also editor of Theology.
Ramsey - cover
Readers without access to the journal will need to pay an astonishing $36 to download a copy – more than the book itself costs in paperback. So, I record some of the highlights. One of the book’s strengths is that it:

adds considerable nuance to the ‘liberal’ positions that Ramsey took on issues such as capital punishment, homosexuality, abortion, divorce and apartheid. What emerges is that Michael Ramsey, despite his other worldly holiness (and, Webster suggests fleetingly, being somewhere on the autistic spectrum), showed clearly through his personal correspondence that he was well aware of competing positions and passions. He was truly a ‘leader’ – one prepared to take a position on contentious moral issues – in a manner that few other Archbishops since William Temple have matched. Despite his critics he was arguably no pawn of the ‘liberal establishment’ of the 1960s.

My sense that Michael Ramsey may well have been autistic has been noted by more than one reviewer. There was not space to expand the thought in the book, but it is explored here.

The reviewer identifies a couple of gaps. First is the influence of the moral theologian Gordon Dunstan, whom the book does not mention. I take this point but add that the book does engage at some length with the report on divorce law reform that Dunstan helped created, Putting Asunder, and much of the thinking on moral theology more generally within the Church of England at the time.

Professor Gill also takes me to task for following too closely the argument of Callum Brown and Hugh McLeod in:

seeing the 1960s as the time of a radical shift of power/influence away from the Church of England and the decisive moment in its numerical decline. But in the process he (and especially Brown) underplays the changes and decline a century earlier that Chadwick analysed so expertly. It is all too easy to dramatize the 1960s and to ignore the traumas of the mid-nineteenth-century Church of England.

To this one would only reply that the book is about the 1960s, and so is hardly the place for an assessment of the whole secularisation story. In any case, I would stand by the argument that the 1960s were indeed a crucial tipping point, but would say that to argue so need not in itself deny the proper significance of the nineteenth century.

All in all, however, Professor Gill concludes:

Yet, despite the gaps, this is a book to relish. For all Michael Ramsey fans this is a must-buy.

This I can accept without cavil or demur. Get your copies now for Christmas.

New British Library metadata for theology and church history

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Less well-known that it should be is the British Library’s recent venture of making subsets of its collection metadata available for download and reuse on a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication basis.

Of particular interest is a dataset extract from the British National Bibliography in March 2015 for theology, subdivided into monographs and serials. The BNB extends as far back as 1950, and my count suggests that there are some 119,000 entries in the monograph file, and 4233 for serials. This looks to be a incredibly rich resource for thinking about the discipline in the last few decades. My initial searches suggest that there is a great deal here for ecclesiastical history as well.

The files may be downloaded near the foot of this downloads page.

Update:  special care is required in the period before 1960, as there is a very large slump in numbers of monographs included between 1955 and 1959. The data is derived from the Dewey decimal classification (200-300); and there seems to have been a decision taken and then reversed not to classify certain works with those classmarks.

Total numbers of records (5 year segments):

1950-54:   4,921

1955-59: 765

1960-64: 6,482

1965-69: 6,697

1970-74: 6,175

1975-79: 6,979

1980-84: 8,142

1985-89: 9,854

1990-94: 11,599

1995-99: 13,027

2000-04: 13,714

2005-09: 17,454

2010-14: 13,527

Interview on Open Access for theology and religious studies

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[Last year I gave an interview to Omega Alpha, a splendid blog on Open Access for theology and religious studies. I republish it here with the kind permission of Gary F. Daught, with thanks. It is slightly edited for flow and style, but it still clearly shows its origins as an interview. The substance remains the same.]

Omega Alpha: Thank you, Peter, for this opportunity to talk with you. How did you first learn about open access? How did you become a “convert” to OA, if this is the right way of putting it?

Webster: My becoming a ‘convert’ to open access isn’t an inappropriate way of putting it, in some ways. My exposure to open access came mostly through being in charge of the institutional repository at the School of Advanced Study. I became drawn into open access over time through dealing with management policies, talking with faculty, etc. The IR served primarily the humanities with a bit of social sciences on the edge. It was very interesting to see how scholars responded to it, and hear what they thought about open access within that quite dedicated humanities space. Incidentally, I think it’s fair to say that the Humanities are a significant distance behind, certainly behind the natural sciences, regarding open access.

I don’t think very many people, if pushed, would dispute the general principle of open access—that academic research ought to be freely available for anyone who might conceivably want to read it, especially if it is publicly funded. I think I would probably stop short of saying there is a moral obligation for open access, though I do agree with the idea of supporting open access as a ‘public good.’ There are benefits to the scholar having their work available to even a lay readership in this way. The material that scholars write about in the humanities (including Religious Studies) is (in theory) more easily accessible to the average reader than, for instance, most of microbiology. One might expect humanities scholars to be more engaged in open access, precisely because of what there is to be gained from it in terms of getting ideas out for public discourse—knowing that their research has relevance. So I’m surprised by this reticence. Is it a lack of confidence that what we do is too specialised to be of interest to anybody?

I suppose I have it relatively easy, though, because no one pays me to do the research I do. I’m not dependent on it for tenure, or anything like that. But almost all my existing research (for which I can get permission) is in the repository I used to run. Having seen the usage statistics, I know that it gets the kind of traffic that one couldn’t possibly expect if it were only still available in print. You will have a sense, Gary, of the average use of a typical theological monograph. I’m pretty sure my stuff has at least been found and the PDFs opened by a much larger number of people. This usage has yet to present itself in citations, but that’s partly because my material is quite new. I would expect to see the ‘citation effect’ build up over time. There are studies suggesting there is this demonstrable ‘citation effect’ for open access.

The other thing I would add is the whole international dimension. The traffic to the material in the repository is coming from all sorts of places around the world, not just western anglophone countries as you might expect. So, if you want your work to be read as widely as possible this is an obvious way to go. If you can get past the ‘professional drivers’ there’s a lot to be gained.

Omega Alpha: How did you learn about Open Library of Humanities? Tell me specifically about your interest in this project, and why you decided to join one of the advisory committees.

Webster: I follow Martin Eve on Twitter, and back in January after the project idea first got going he put out a call for interested folk to get in touch. I tweeted back, saying that I’d be interested to be involved somehow. He wrote back inviting me to join the Academic Steering & Advocacy Committee.

What is very interesting to me about the project is the way in which peer review may be dealt with. I’ve become more and more convinced that the current system of peer review is an accident — that it is actually the product of a particular historical confluence of a technology (print) and a particular way of rewarding or assessing where academics are in relation to each other. OLH is examining the approach used by the Public Library of Science, which very helpfully separates out two quite distinct functions of peer review. First is a basic level of gatekeeping to check for basic competence in method, and expression, and documentation, and for genuine engagement with the field of scholarship as it lies. That’s a useful filter to have. It’s relatively fast and light-weight to do. It can be reasonably objective. You can tell if someone’s footnoting is right, whether there’s engagement with most of the work in the field, and if there’s a coherent argument involved.

We’ve also allowed peer review to carry the weight of trying to establish how important something is. It seems to me, that were I a journal editor, I shouldn’t think my judgment, while informed, should necessarily be authoritative in determining whether or not something should be published, based on my assessment of how ‘important’ it is. It seems to me that it is the readers who are in a better position of determining whether or not a piece of research is important. I believe ‘the cream will rise to the top.’ There is now no issue of capacity (referring back to the technological ‘accident’ of print above with its inherent limitations of space.) We allowed the rationing of scarce space in a print journal to become a proxy for importance. I believe anything that is defensible in scholarly terms should be published, and the genuinely important stuff will be found — it will rise to the top. This second function, which includes various kinds of ‘altmetrics’, is called post-publication peer review. I don’t see any reason why this approach shouldn’t work in the humanities.

Omega Alpha: What do you think about the “mega-journal” and multi-disciplinary format of OLH compared to traditional subject- or association-focused journals in religion? How might this format compare to subject-focused gold open access journals in religion?

Webster: At the pragmatic level, I don’t see lots and lots of open access journals utilizing the PLOS model springing up in the various disciplines. The strength of OLH is in the platform itself, which can serve as a common technical backend for the various disciplines and sub-disciplines within the humanities. The platform gives us economies of scale. Having a multi-disciplinary platform doesn’t preclude the creation of discipline-specific journals within it. We may find, over time, that the users of the platform are in a position to curate their own subject subsets of material. Or over time, as we build up a large amount of content, we may find we can create special issue ‘journals’ retrospectively edited, bringing together ‘the cream’ of most significant and important research. A looser structure at the beginning will give us greater flexibility as things develop and mature. Being able to search across disciplines may enable us to to make research connections we might miss in a more siloed environment.

Omega Alpha: What would (or do) you say to fellow scholars in religion and theology who may be reluctant to embrace open access as a viable and legitimate scholarly communication venue?

Webster: I don’t now have that many opportunities for ‘evangelism’ in that way (going back to your question relating to my ‘conversion’ to open access). But I would simply come back to all the benefits that we were talking about before. I think the various objections to open access come down to getting the implementation right, rather than issues with the principle of freely available access to this work that we’re all doing. I would major on the opportunity to get material out fast to wide audiences, including lay audiences, and of course, the international dimension. You would hope that a healthy Church or faith community — if we’re looking at this from a religious point of view — would be an organization or community that engages with its own history, and with scholarly thinking about what it is that it believes and practices. You would think there would be a greater than average gain for theological scholars in being able to reach those audiences directly.

Omega Alpha: Do you have any final thoughts?

Webster: For scholars who are used to traditional print-form research outputs, engagement with open access will lead necessarily to greater engagement with the digital environment and the use of digital methods of research production and communication, such as blogs and other social media, enabling us to interact more directly with our audiences. Relatedly, this ought to make us think harder about how we write, how clearly we write, and the audiences for whom our research material is written. It’s a cliché to say that academic writing is often opaque, but there is enough of it that is just so to make it a truism. I do not think it should be impossible to write clear and accessible prose that also conveys difficult ideas. These two things need not be incompatible. It strikes me that communicating with all the groups that have a stake in what it is we do (that is, not just scholars but also interested lay persons) is a good place to test that hypothesis.

Omega Alpha: Peter, thank you so much for your time and your participation in this conversation. Perhaps you will allow me to check-in again with you as those developments touch on the impact of open access on Religious Studies research communication.

The Search for Authority in Reformation Europe

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This new edited collection is now out, published by Ashgate (2014), in print with ebook and PDF options (all on the Ashgate site). It is edited with Elaine Fulton and Helen Parish, to whom my thanks are due for seeing it safely through the final stages with the press.Layout 1

Here’s the table of contents:

  • Introduction; the search for authority in the Protestant Reformation (free PDF), Elaine Fulton and Peter Webster;
  • ‘Arguing about religion’: Luther’s ongoing debate with Islam, Adam S. Francisco;
  • The authority of scripture and tradition in Calvin’s lectures on the prophets – Jon Balserak;
  • Spiritual authority and ecclesiastical practice: John a Lasco and the Forma ac ratio – Michael S. Springer;
  • ‘History as authority: Johann Sleidan and his De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto Caesare Commentarii – Alexandra Kess;
  • Touching theology with unwashed hands: the preservation of authority in post-Tridentine Catholicism – Elaine Fulton;
  • Authority and method in the Eucharistic debates of the early English Reformation – Korey D. Maas;
  • ‘To conseile with elde dyuynis’: history, scripture and interpretation in Reformation England – Helen Parish;
  • The ‘challenge controversy’ and the question of authority in the early Elizabethan Church – Mary Morrissey;
  • Augustine ‘falleth into dispute with himself’: the Fathers and church music in Elizabethan and early Stuart England – Peter Webster;
  • Conclusion – Helen Parish

Michael Ramsey and his encounter with other faiths

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[This paper was given at this year’s Ecclesiastical History Society conference.
[UPDATE: the full version is now available to read here (PDF), as published in Studies in Church History 51 (2015). What follows here is an extract.]

Ramsey’s theological formation had required little in the way of theological engagement with the other world religions, either abroad or at home. His view was summed up in a short address at a commemoration of Mahatma Gandhi. In the final analysis, ‘[w]e who are Christians proclaim that Christ is the perfect and final revelation of God.’ However, Christians ‘reverence the divine image in every man’ and that divine light had shone ‘in good men of other religions’. Gandhi had ‘made non-violence his ideal, put simplicity of life before wealth and comfort, put the things of the spirit before material things, made the cause of the poor and outcast his own…’ Ramsey prayed that ‘to us the same light will shine and we shall follow it.’

There were however other forces in play in Ramsey’s make-up. He had as an undergraduate been active in Liberal politics, and interpreting his actions involves separating out political motivation from religious, whilst recognising that often the two ran together. Ramsey was not a son of the established Church, but had grown up within Congregationalism; a background which gave him an acute sensitivity to the position of the religious minority in a hostile environment. And finally, Ramsey’s interventions were part motivated by a simple Christian compassion; the same compassion that he felt for homosexual men vulnerable to blackmail by dint of their criminality, or for couples in irretrievable and damaging marriages that could not be dissolved without subterfuge.

There was an older strain of inter-faith endeavour, which lacked the rigour and realism of Cragg or Chadwick, and which Ramsey knew was a dead-end. There had been several attempts at world congresses or fellowships of religions, some of them eccentric, some of them well-supported, all of them well-meaning but unrealistic. Among the more respectable was the World Congress of Faiths, but Ramsey had a basic disagreement with the approach: ‘I do not believe that “religion” is a kind of banner under which we should all unite as if it contained the essence of what is good versus “irreligion” as its opposite.’ There was also an attempt to create a national Council of Faiths. It argued that the threat to any one faith was not conversion from one to another, but of unbelief, and so it was in the interest of all the faiths to support each other against a common enemy. Ramsey thought the idea of securing the official support of the churches nationally to be hopelessly unrealistic, and instead favoured local co-operation.

There were troubled parts of the world where Ramsey had a more direct interest as head of the Anglican Communion. In 1967 civil war in Nigeria led to its disintegration into a Muslim majority north, and a mostly Christian east. Ramsey spoke against the supply of arms, tried to promote fundraising for aid, and sent delegations to both sides to intercede. Another failed state in which Anglicans were at risk was Sudan, which collapsed into civil war between Muslim north and partly Christian south in 1965. Ramsey met with the Sudanese ambassador to London, and spoke out against the ‘terrible and relentless persecution of Christians’. The balance was however hard to strike between being a disinterested peacemaker, and at the same time the confidant of religious leaders on one side of a conflict.

In the UK, it was the Sikh community that was first to establish community representation nationally, in the form of Shromani Khalsa Dal UK, (The Supreme Body of Sikhs in Britain). The Supreme Body invited Ramsey, as head of the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, to address its first national conference. Since 1942, the archbishops had been joint presidents of the Council of Christians and Jews, and Ramsey was in constant demand to address meetings and cut ribbons on new buildings. This type of religious summitry was a game with well established rules. There were however broader issues of identity at play, in which ideas of Englishness in all its racial, cultural and religious aspects interacted with brute economic and social fact in local neighbourhoods.

On the matter of immigration, Ramsey denounced the 1962 Act as both a reneging on historic responsibilities of Britain to its former colonies, and as an offence against basic Christian belief in the equality of all in the eyes of God. The rapid introduction in 1968 of legislation to deny entry to the UK to refugee Kenyans of Asian descent was a similar abrogation of national duty, but also threatened to upset the precarious balance of community relations by creating mistrust amongst the immigrant communities behind whom it was intended that the door be shut.

Ramsey knew of which he spoke. Prime Minister Wilson had asked Ramsey to chair the new National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, set up by the government to monitor the situation of immigrants in the UK. The NCCI was involved in an attempt to outlaw discrimination on religious grounds. The 1966 Racial and Religious Discrimination Bill sought to extend the general principle of the 1965 Race Relations Act to close a possible loophole for those who claimed to be ready to serve coloured people but not Hindus, Moslems or Sikhs. Amending the 1965 Act in this way was essential to protect the Jews as a religious, rather than as a racial group. The Bill failed at second reading, but it shows the Church of England using its position to act on behalf not only of other Christian groups, but of other faiths.

However, Ramsey had gained a reputation as a friend of the minority, which made him the subject of direct appeals for help in specific situations: over the levelling of Muslim graves in Greenford cemetery; over discrimination over the wearing by Sikhs of turbans and beards while working for Wolverhampton transport; over the siting of a new gurdwara in the borough of Hammersmith, over which there were injured feelings. Ramsey as archbishop was viewed as an honest broker in difficult matters, and as a friend of the minority, whether Christian or not.

To what extent could the Church of England, and Ramsey in particular, be held culpable as the nation engaged, in Enoch Powell’s phrase, in ‘heaping up its own funeral pyre’? It was not only Powell who thought that the Church should have accommodated less, and resisted more, the process of assimilation of aliens in culture, language and religion. Ramsey was under police protection for a time in June 1968, most likely for his role with the NCCI. In September supporters of the National Front marched to Lambeth, and others disrupted a meeting in Essex in December with cries of ‘Traitor !’ There was also limited but significant support amongst Anglican clergy and laity for a fascistic view of Britishness that centred on both race and Christian religion, in which Ramsey represented precisely the liberalising tide that had moved the established church away from its traditional role.

By and large Ramsey was not much exercised by apparent symbolic defeats for the established church in relation to other faiths. He intervened in the case of Savile Town St Mary, a chapel of ease in Dewsbury, as local Christian and Muslim communities wrestled with the prospect of allowing a redundant building to be taken over for Muslim use. ‘I should regret the making of a contrary decision’ he wrote ‘having regard to the whole missionary situation in this country and overseas.’

The phrase is a key one. Ramsey knew that the safety and peace of Anglicans elsewhere was partly dependent on how the established church in a Christian nation dealt with its own religious minorities. And the situation in the UK was a missionary one too, no longer one in which an easy congruence of church, nation and people could be assumed. Ramsey oversaw the freeing of the Church of England from parliamentary control of its worship and doctrine, and the decisive separation of the moral law from Christian discipline, with regard to divorce, abortion, and homosexuality amongst others. He did what he could to support the civil rights of religious minorities, and to aid constructive religious dialogue that was at the same time realistic about the real claims to uniqueness and finality of each faith. Without quite being a programme of work, all these developments had a coherence: the Church of England was, in its own eyes if not in law, becoming less established and more national; a church less bound to the state but retaining a national dimension in its sense of its own mission. The church’s work was increasingly in a more equal partnership with other Christian churches, but also in an embryonic but significant way, as a defender of faith.