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Most Unholy Alliance: Conservative Attitudes to Christianity in East and West
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
It is now nearly a decade since Edward Norman’s controversial Reith lectures, subsequently published as Christianity and World Order, helped to generate a great deal of debate about the appropriate sphere of Christian moral concern.
Dr Norman’s view is clear:
...the teachings of the Saviour clearly describe a personal rather than a social morality.
Any attempt to outline a Christian social morality—to ‘involve the Church in politics’—means compromising the proper concern of Christians with what is transcendent. It entails sanctifying whatever prevailing political world-view is current at the time. Among Western nations, Norman argues, this means supporting what he calls a ‘Human Rights Ideology’. The Human Rights movement ‘has elevated Western liberalism to the apparent authority of eternal truth’. As a consequence, ‘... the Churches now see Human Rights as the essence of the Christian message’. Christians in politics are engaged, then, in a process of absolutising a relative (Human Rights), identifying the essence of Christianity, which must be changeless, with a prevailing political ideology which represents only the view of a liberal twentieth century establishment in the West. In doing so, they obscure the truly changeless essence of Christianity, which lies in eternal values, values which by definition cannot be political.
Criticisms of Norman’s thesis have been numerous, and the arguments on both sides are now well-rehearsed. Any attempt to outline a Christian personal morality, no less than a Christian social morality, involves the apparent compromise of associating with current secular ideologies, it has been pointed out.
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- Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The lectures, given on BBC Radio 4 in 1978, were published by OUP in 1979.
2 Ibid., p. 80.
3 Ibid., p. 30.
4 Ibid., pp. 31–2.
5 See the collection of essays Christian Faith and Political Hopes: A Reply lo E.R. Norman, Epworth Press, 1979Google Scholar.
6 Norman, op. cit., pp. 29 ‐ 43.
7 Ibid., p. 36.
8 Ibid.
9 See e.g. May One Believe — in Russia? ed. Michael Bourdeaux and Michael Rowe, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980, which examines evidence for violations of religious liberty in the Soviet Union, and which contains a warning that seems particularly apposite in the light of Norman's comments:
‘There is a danger, however, that the splendour of a public display of ritual may blind world opinion to the realities behind this appearance.’ (p. 18).
10 Norman, op. cit., p. 37.
11 Ibid., p. 37.
12 Ibid., p. 34.
13 Ibid., p. 35.
14 See his Discretion and Valour: Religious Conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe, London 1974Google Scholar.
15 See the classic work by Tawney, R.H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, London 1926Google Scholar. ‘There is no place in medieval ecomomic theory’, he writes, ‘for economic activity which is not related to a moral end’ (Pelican ed., p. 44), and compares economic motives with other ‘strong passions’ which society must carefully control.
16 Tawney himself challenges this thesis, pointing to the rigour with which the Protestant Reformers themselves denounce usury. The exclusion of Christian ethics from the economic realm was a slower, subtler and never completely successful process.
17 Hodder and Stoughton, 1982.
18 Church House Publishing, 1985.
19 Ibid., pp 364–366.
20 Catholic Truth Society, 1984. Reference to sacralizing politics is on page 34 (XI:17).
21 Ibid., p. 31 (XI:8).
22 Ibid., p. 33 (XI:12).
23 Ibid., p. 13 (V:4). To see that the document is not opposed to the idea of a political dimension to the Gospel, unlike Edward Norman, see the remark on page 27 (X:5): ‘The mistake here is not in bringing attention to a political dimension of the readings of Scripture, but in making of this one dimension the principal or exclusive component’.
24 Norman, op. cit., p. 80.
25 Alfredo Fierro, The Militant Gospel, SCM 1977, p. 72. Chapter 2 of the book, ‘The Rejection of Christendom’, is important for an understanding of political theology.
26 Norman, op. cit., p. 82.
27 On Christians in Cuba, see Castra's Cuba in the 1970's, ed. Sobel, Lester A., Facts on File, New York, 1978Google Scholar esp. pp. 220–227 on the church in Cuba.