Society for the Study of Theology

History of the Society

 

Society for the Study of Theology (1952-1977)

The founding of the Society

The society was founded on Thursday, 24th July, 1952 at 5.00pm. The inaugural meeting was held in the Erasmus Room, Queen's College, Cambridge, with Professor A.M. Ramsey in the chair. There were about thirty members present. The meeting was held towards the end of a conference on 'Eschatology' (July 22-25). For this conference the society had had the provisional name 'The Society for the Study of Historical Theology'.

At that meeting a constitution with eleven points was agreed. It is the same constitution that we have today, though with some clarifications. At the same time the first committee was elected. Professor John Baillie became president, Mr Henry Chadwick secretary and Dr John A.T. Robinson treasurer. The six committee members are still with us - one of them, notably, is this year Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Professor Thomas F. Torrance.

Early History

The next year there were fifty four present at the conference. It was again held at Queen's College, as was the 1954 conference. In 1955 and 1956, however, the society met at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. Then after two years at Cambridge (at Caius and Sidney Sussex) it met in 1959 in Nottingham, at Florence Boot Hall. Not until 1969 when the society went to Birmingham did it move ouruse the Cambridge, Nottingham, Oxford triangle. There had by then been eleven conferences at Cambridge, three at Nottingham, and three at Oxford. Since then conferences have been held in Durham, Edinburgh and Lancaster as well. Indeed, since 1966 the pattern has held of meetings one year in Camrbdieg or Oxford and the following year elsewhere. Cambridge with thirteen out of twenty five conferences can still stand against all comers.

Presidents and Officers

The list of presidents is impressive: John Baillie, W.R. Matthews, J.H.S Burleigh, Frederic Greeves, Alan Richardson, Francis Davis, H.D. Lewis, Thomas F. Torrance, Ian T. Ramsey, H. Cunliffe Jones, Maurice F. Wiles, John H. Hick, and Allan D. Galloway. It also provides a fascinating picture of theological and ecumenical ebb and flow. Each will judge himself (and, as I must now add, herself) where the ebb is and where the flow!

Secretaries have lasted somewhat longer, as the constitution permits them renewal every year. Henry Chadwick, however, was content with one, the conference on Eschatology being his first and last in office. Gordon Rupp went the second mile, before handing over to J.G. Davies, who came in with Biblical Theology in 1955 and went out five years later after Method in Theology. After him it was the turn of T.A. Roberts who did three years, before resigning in 1963, when Peter Stephens was elected.

There have been almost the same number of treasurers as secretaries. The first two treasurers, John Robinson and Hugh Montefiore, served for three years each. Then came W.H.C. Frend for six, Peter Baelz for five, and Richard MacKinney for a record seven years. Now since last year Daniel Hardy has been treasurer.

Practical changes

At the first conference in 1952 at Queen's College lunch was 3s. 6d. and dinner 5s. 0d - and members were told that they would not need their ration books! the committee was instructed (article nine of the constitution) in arranging the conference to 'make the best arrangements possible, especially with a view to keeping the cost low'. They succeeded and four years later the price at Oxford was still the same. The cost began to rise, however, in the following years, so in 1962 the society resolved to try a Cambridge theological college. The 1963 conference was therefore held in Ridley Hall and the cost was 27s. 6d. a day, the same as at Queen's in 1952, although lunch and dinner had risen to 5s. 0d. and 6s. 6d. Almost more amazing is the fact that the subscription remained at 10s. 0d. from the beginning until 1976.

Purpose

In the letters sent out inviting people to attend the conference to inaugurate the society, the provisional committee spoke of the 'widespread demand for a Theological Society which might perform in the fields of Biblical, Historical and Dogmatic theology, a function similar to that performed so admirably by the Societies for Old Testament and New Testament Studies'. They spoke of the nature and purpose of such a society, to which they gave thr provisional title 'The Society for the Study of Historical Theology', in these terms:

It is clear that the volume of theological exposition which lies behind us is growing too large to be mastered by any single hand. Our ability to consult the past with proper knowledge therefore may seem now to depend on the co-ordinated efforts of a Society of Scholars in this field. It is also clear that in the present ecumenical situation the study of historical theology needs to be undertaken in the friendly discipline and criticism of a group which represents different theological traditions.

It is suggested therefore that the purpose of the Society be the study of the history of Christian theology in all branches of the Church with a view to fresh dogmatic and constructive work in the field of theology today. It should also be the aim of the Society to encourage among its members an agreed evaluation of their theological tradition, particularly of those parts that bear upon present difficulties; and, if the occasion arise, to stimulate the production of new handbooks for the study of historical and dogmatic theology.

Later History

Let me instance a few of the changes since I became secretary in 1963. That year we had one hundred and fifty three members, with fifty six people attending the conference (thirty seven resident and nineteen non resident). Since then we have grown so that last year we had two hundred and fifty two members, with one hundred and thirteen people attending the conference (seventy one resident and forty two non-resident). Until then we had met only in Cambridge, Nottingham, Oxford. Since then we have gone farther afield - to Durham, Edinburgh, Lancaster, and now Bristol, while still meeting every other year in Cambridge or Oxford. The pattern of our conferences has also gradually developed. The general discussion was introduced in 1968, group discussion in 1970 and the practice of sending the papers out in advanmce in 1972. This year of our Silver Jubilee we have made a particular effort to establish closer links with continental theologians.

Peter Stephens, 15 February 1977

 

The Society for the Study of Theology: its first fifty years

I came to SST thirty years ago as a refugee from the Ecclesiastical History Society, because they were not as theological as I wished to be, but I always enjoy going back to historical work, hunting in archives to find plausible answers to little questions, so I am grateful for this chance to investigate the history of the Society. And as I have looked into the archive, I have enjoyed being reminded of many good and interesting people whom I have come to know over the years. I entertain the whimsy that I might have encountered the Society first in 1957, when I was in the Royal Air Force, sent to Habbaniya, Iraq, as dogsbody to a Corporal Technician who spun out five months not repairing a mobile radar van on the desert airfield. In the Other Denominations chapel there, I found many issues of the Scottish Journal of Theology, and so stumbled into strange new theology. I like to imagine that amongst those volumes I found the papers from the Society’s founding conference, in 1952, which were published by the SJT. If so, it was through the Society that I first puzzled over words like ‘eschatology’, the theme of the Society began with. I am on surer ground in feeling that I know what the early days of the Society were like, although I was still at school in 1952: many of the teachers who inducted me into theology in Cambridge in the early 1960s (Charlie Moule, Geoffrey Lampe, Donald MacKinnon, Maurice Wiles) were founders or early members and longstanding pillars of the Society. When I first met them, they seemed to me to be not only massively learned but also models of maturity – now, I realise they were still quite young. Another founder-member wrote to Tom Torrance, the starter motor of the Society, in 1952, saying he was willing to join the provisional committee ‘though I always think that the Great Ones of the Earth are the people to launch new ventures of this sort’. The writer has since certainly become a Great One; it is a tribute to his modesty that he did not know in 1952 that he was a coming Great One; even more interesting is the way he seems to have been blinded by the spirit of that age of deference, so that he did not see that ‘ventures of this sort’ can never be expected from the Great Ones, but have to come from hard-working, restless, ambitious, younger people. Another founder member, volunteering for service which turned out to be long and distinguished, signed himself as ‘Yours (oppressed beneath a load of sin, by Satan sorely pressed)’: such rare, sombre, personalised piety obtruding into the business of the society makes one want to ask what was going on there.

In this paper, however I am eschewing all psycho-history, gossip and human interest stories, just as I am saying nothing about the political and administrative history of the Society. I want to deal with the thinking of the society as it is evidenced mainly by the material in our archive in the University of Leeds, especially by the plenary papers that have been presented to us in our conferences. I want to identify significant characteristics of the Society in its study of theology. Whether I achieve a sketch for a fair all-round portrait or a caricature, you will judge. Unavoidably, I have been selective, partly for lack of time, and largely because there is so much for which I do not have a competent ear.

What does the archive give us? We have a bundle of letters and papers from 1951-2 about the founding of the society, a few scraps from conferences between 1952 and 1972, and then all the papers presented at conferences between 1973 and 1993, to which we can add those from 1994 onward, including the volumes published in the last two years. Thus we have a complete list of conference themes for our fifty years, though for many of them, we have nothing more.

The founding of the Society

The first question I will try to answer is: What can we learn about the society from the bundle of papers and letters dealing with the founding of the society?

A Society for the Study of Historical Theology was proposed in 1951, because ‘the volume of theological exposition that lies behind us is growing too large to be mastered by any single hand’. We need to help each other if we are to consult the past with proper knowledge. (There is individual modesty here – no single hand can master the past – but the societal ambition was mastery.)

The word ‘Historical’ was quickly dropped as too constricting, though the historical approach to theology shaped many early, and some more recent, conferences and in 1958 the conference theme was history and tradition. Today, though the historical development of theology no longer grounds and guides the structure we give to systematic theology, the Society has not lost interest in historical theology.

The founders also thought that the ‘present ecumenical situation’ (soon after the founding of the WCC in 1948) required ‘the friendly discipline and criticism of a group which represents different theological traditions’. Gordon Rupp, an early secretary, once said ‘You cannot make ecumenical cement out of denominational marshmallow’. Ecumenism for them was the meeting of denominationally rooted people: they had a stronger sense of denomination as church than we mostly do. Nowadays the inclusiveness of the society rests to a larger degree on indifference to denomination; denominational belonging is a private preference, not hard currency for theological trading. We have conferences and papers on Church, but rather than seeing church denominationally, we approach it as a form of human sociality, accessed anthropologically, significant because it derives from, and is expressive of, God and the Gospel. Thus church transcends or at least by-passes denomination. The 1998 conference had the complex title: ‘God’s Life in Church life – the doctrine of the church’. In 1960, by contrast, before Vatican II and before social anthropology impacted theology, the Society devoted a whole conference to the Eucharist, which was expounded in detail by Catholic scholars: is that thinkable now? This is not to say that denominational traditions, styles, and relationships, as they have developed over centuries in the UK, have no influence upon the Society. In a longer work, this question could be explored more fully.

The core membership has always been mostly academic, but in 1952, most members were also ordained and many held denominationally tied posts in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and in Scotland. A self-conscious note in the archive records that at the first conference 10 came from Cambridge, 11 from Oxford, 11 from Scotland, 12 from the rest of England and 1 from Ireland and Wales. It is significantly different now, especially when the Society meets outside Oxford and Cambridge. In that 1952 gathering there was, as far as I can tell, only one lay-person not in a University (the civil servant and longtime member, J. M. Ross), no more than a handful of laymen altogether, and one woman, Miss I. M. Bubb. Today, we have a greater proportion of members who are not in academic institutions, more clergy for example, but the university remains the principal institution with which we are related. Churches as organizations do not know or care about the Society. Yet when one listens to our discussions, and sense our ethos, it is often not difficult to conclude that this is church thinking about its faith and mission, in the world

In 1952, no one was from outside the United Kingdom. In 1954 and 1956, Eberhard Bethge was the first European participant, though he never gave us a paper. The first to do that was Gerhard Ebeling in 1955 (and again in 1965 and 1966) with G.F. Wingren following in 1956. Over the years, we have had many other enriching contributions from European and North American visitors, and Vincent Brümmer is in a small group who have been much more than visitors, a devoted member and President, through whose mediation we went to conference in Utrecht in 1992, the only time we have sailed over sea, apart from our joint meeting with the Irish Theological Society in Belfast in 1986. A serious note to ponder: the Society has had virtually no speakers from the Third World, or Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

It did not seem necessary in 1952 to say that, for the Society, theology meant Christian theology – and it is still unnecessary. While university theology has been broadened into, or displaced by, religious studies or even absorbed into schools of humanities, the Society has gone on studying christian theology, or theology in christian ways. For those who wish to continue to continue to think constructively, hopefully, in christian terms, the society is one of few meeting places, if not the only one, available. Looking over our papers has given me a strong sense that the Society holds together round the quest to understand the accumulated material of christian thought in life; we want to understand it not as alien superseded matter, a burden to be thrown off, but as a fund of stimuli and invitations to new thinking in the tradition of this faith. The Society is like the scribe who is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old (Matt. 13.52). No doctrinal test is imposed on members to keep us dancing round the key doctrines and major themes of christian faith. We do not guard the boundary of a christian circle against others, nor is our identity constructed to be inhospitable to others; rather, we gather round a christian centre to enjoy theology together and thus build a society with vague and porous edges. (J.K.S. Reid, a founder member who died a few days before this lecture was given, hoped that whatever else the members of the Society did, they would ‘enjoy’ theology.) Maintaining our identity in the study of christian theology is not the effect of policy and rules, but of a self-selecting membership. There are many other societies bringing together those those who want to think about faith or religion within other parameters, around other centres, or as philosophy or sociology. So long as it seems to some that distinctively christian ways of thinking are interesting, or useful, or a window on reality for human beings, the Society will go on in the style it has developed over fifty years. And so long as christian theology is a minority and even endangered interest, but not finally extirpated, a society like ours will be provoked into life. Let us hope it goes on being friendly, open, not defensive or self-obsessed.

The first two decades

We move on to ask: what can we know about the Society in its first two decades beyond what the conference titles tell us? At first sight, very little. In those days of primitive technology, papers were not cyclostyled and circulated before the conference. The archive is almost empty. There are, however, two moves we might make, to uncover the story of these hidden years.

First, we could find and talk with those who wrote papers, who are yet living, to discover what they remember and to ask whether they still have copies of their papers. Then I could fill out this paper and fill up the archive. I have been able to give little time to such investigation and have so far drawn a blank, even in cases that seemed promising; but there is no reason to believe this method would be quite unproductive.

Secondly, we can look for works published by those who wrote papers for the society, and from them to get some idea of what they were saying to the society – and to what the society was choosing to give a hearing.

I have had fun with this method, looking at books I should have read years ago. Rather than catalogue all my investigations, many of them incomplete, I report which I think specially interesting.

But first let me remark on one general result from this line of investigation. Mostly, but not in every case, those who write have already worked on and published what they are invited to share with the Society. It might be reasonable to conclude that, on the whole, the Society, in its conferences, reviews theology which has already had some impact. Our papers are not the vehicle for publishing the latest research findings, announcing sensational novelty; theologians here are not blazing a trail for the pilgrim people, in the van of what some might call ‘progress in religion’. The Society has had from the beginning a sincere, if vague, commitment to bringing together those who are willing to publish the outcomes of their theological study, but it achieves this goal almost entirely by being a fellowship of appreciative and critical discussion of work already accomplished. Some significant working groups have occurred within the membership of the Society, but have not been fostered, let alone organised, by the Society as such. The question would bear investigation, how far the seminars developed in recent years have made a significant difference to our nurturing of new theological thinking and writing.

Now to the example of the way in which published work might illumine the hidden years of the Society’s history. Our archive lists authors and titles for the 1967 conference on Science, theology and personality– no more. The final paper was by Ian Ramsey, on 'Biology and Christian belief': some frontier issues. In the library is the 1965 Blackwell volume of 214 pages, edited by Ramsey, entitled Biology and Personality: Frontier Problems in Science, Philosophy and Religion. The book was the outcome of several days of discussion in 1962 held in Oxford, and financed by the Modern Churchmen’s Union. The distinguished discussants included a molecular biologist, two neurologists, a medical psychologists, two zoologists, a geneticist, two philosophers and a theologian – they were ‘unbelievers, agnostics and Christians’. Compare the book with the Society’s conference in 1967: four of the Society’s papers were by authors who had participated in the Oxford group, covering the same questions, such as the molecular organization of life, (DNA was a novelty in those days), evolution, neurology and theories of mind.. The Society perhaps gave a higher profile to the issues of the meaning, freedom and responsibility of persons, bringing in Donald Mackay on brain and will and David Martin on sociology and personality. There is enough overlap to believe the book gives a good basis for a partial reconstruction of the conference of 1967.

Having discovered this much, we can probably learn more about the Society from this example. The titles suggest the 1967 conference spent much of its time receiving information from scientists about their work. The scientists did not go far, if at all, in theologising it. Certainly, it was the science about which they could speak with authority; it was the novelty of the science they explained which engaged the interest of theologians. Thus the conference was a meeting between disciplines, even between the two cultures, (in those days a widely discussed problem). And the meeting served to identify issues at the frontier between them (again, another fashionable concept in those days). We might wonder how far this conference was an exercise done in the mood of Soundings, published in 1962, for whose editor, Alec Vidler, ‘the time was not ripe for major works of theological construction or reconstruction’. To ‘confess candidly where our perplexities lie’, or to recognise boundaries and then decide to be friendly, rather than defensive at them, even if it meant losing territory, seemed then to be the proper course for theology. Thinking theologically meant being alert for disclosure, rather than working to achieve systematic mastery - is it going too far to see a change from the quest for mastery and constructive theology which the Society professed to be aiming for in 1952?

This conference was unusual because the Society has rarely given much time to listening to the practitioners of other disciplines presenting their own work in their own untheological terms. More commonly, when papers deal with other disciplines they are written by theologians who know enough about non-theological disciplines to make theological use of them. Then the material from other disciplines is pre-digested, adapted for theological use before presentation to the Society. If material comes to the Society as already part of a theological argument or construction, it less likely to shock as as Other, confronting us from over the other side of a real boundary. I would not argue that we can encounter other disciplines authentically only as they are presented by their own practitioners and specialists, but merely note a difference between methodological options. And I do not find it surprising or reprehensible that for the most part we want conferences where theologians talk theology with other theologians, for there is a lot of theology to be done.

One more comment on this conference. In the analytical table of conference themes, it is put in the anthropological group, because it was concerned with science and Personality. But we should not overlook its affinity with the large group of conferences on creation, providence, and cosmology. The Society has always been averse to any sort of gnostic dualism – though that is not to say we take a naively empirical view of the world. Our work on eschatology has not been crudely materialist (as some in 1952 thought apocalyptic was) or confined to the choice between C. H. Dodd’s realised eschatology and Bultmann’s existentialist reduction (identified as inadequate by James Dunn in 1981). It has, however, never seen eschatology as forsaking the world; there have been Teilhardian papers and W A Whitehouse spoke on eschatology three times (1952, 1969, 1981), always including the physical universe in its scope, looking for the renewal of the whole created order, the impersonal as well as the personal, the world about us which is not of our making.

1972 and After

This example from 1967 is enough to show that the early years are not as unknowable as at first appeared – we have ways to make them talk. From 1972, we run into a familiar contemporary problem, being threatened with information overload. In the archive are nearly three quarters of a million words: I have not read them all, I have not grasped all I have read, I can pass on to you only a few crumbs. I want to pursue the question of the identity and the frontiers of theology, and how the Society has developed itself by mapping frontiers and by trafficking across them.

Consider first the relation between theology, Bible and biblical studies. A significant interdisciplinary relationship for theology is with biblical studies. Is there a swathe of no-man’s land between them? Does the difference give them permission to be indifferent to each other? Or is the frontier no more than a ploy in a conversational partnership, where frontiers are again and again drawn, redrawn and withdrawn in the flow of discussion. The Society in 1952 set out to do for theology what the societies for Old and New Testament studies were achieving in their areas. There was a division of labour; at the same time, there was cooperation: some biblical scholars were active in the Society from its foundation. At its first conference, William Manson spoke on eschatology in the New Testament; in 1955 when the theme was biblical theology, N. W. Porteous dealt with the Old Testament, Alan Richardson spoke on historical and biblical theology and Gerhard Ebeling gave a history of biblical theology, showing how it had become distinct from dogmatic theology. Through its history, the Society has frequently invited biblical scholars to present papers, finding sometimes that they engage sparkily in theological discussion, sometimes that they slide past it. In our discussions generally, the Bible is treated as a living common text, a reservoir of provocation, if not a binding authority. But we have never sought an organised societal encounter with biblical scholars, comparable with the meeting with scientists in 1967. I do not suggest that we should have done, but is merely make an historical note. Probably we judge that we can best do our own biblical work: I once heard Hubert Cunliffe-Jones, one of our presidents, say that he had had to write his own commentaries on Jeremiah, because what the biblical scholars published was no use to him as a theologian. Having been trained with an early twentieth century Free Church thoroughness, he was well-equipped to do his own biblical work, as I and many younger younger scholars are not. But do we find it easier to trade profitably across this frontier than he did? Biblical studies distances itself from constructive theological work more often than it did fifty years ago and I am not clear that feminist scholarship, for example, has narrowed the divide. Is it fair to say that we discuss hermeneutical theory more freely than we construct theology in close dialogue with the biblical text? In 2004, when we will discuss scriptural reasoning, we may take a giant step forward.

Another frontier where we can discern the Society’s thinking is that between theology, language and literature. Is God-talk an imprecise and unnecessary language for human realities which we can and should speak about in more secular, moral and aesthetic ways? Can secular culture, free from religion and in particular from christianity, communicate and live with transcendence in other ways? Issues of this sort come round again and again in varying disguises. I was alerted to this theme in our history by discovering that Ian Gregor, whose name unknown to me, gave the Society a paper in 1966 on salvation in the modern English novel. With Walter Stein, he later edited a collection of essays by Roman Catholic scholars, The prose for God: religious and anti-religious aspects of imaginative literature (Sheed and Ward, 1973). Paradigmatic for their work was Matthew Arnold’s treatment of dogma and literature. One of their many quotations runs: ‘Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.’ (Essays in Criticism, 1880, Studies in Poetry, quoted p 41-42).

Should we then give up dogma, the skeleton of firm theology, in favour of the imaginative freedom of poetry? Should we stop to bring every thought into captivity to Christ, and cultivate language which reflects more equally the mysterious variety of all human being? Do we need to emigrate across the frontier from dogma to poetry? This question has been around for most of our fifty years. Perhaps it was not so audible in the earliest days, and it would be interesting to know when it can first be detected – I have not been able to pursue that enquiry. The archive material shows that it has been repeatedly addressed since the 1970s. The Society has been aware that ‘fact’, one of Arnold’s key words, is a problematic concept for theology, but also that Christian theology cannot abandon bodily historical public facts, leaving the ‘idea’ to be everything. At the same time, the kind of fact we think we are dealing with in theology is indeed one that generates and asks to be spoken of poetically. Theology requires us to go over the poetic frontier and do business as sojourners in other lands – indeed as those who seek naturalisation there. But fulfilling that requirement for the sake of theology puts theology as the articulation of christian faith at risk.

The issue exploded at the 1972 conference on the distinctiveness of Christianity. H. D. Lewis attacked what he called ‘disastrous relativism’. We may be right to assume that in his view the disaster was not happening only outside the Society, or outside theology. He did not join in the arnoldian migration, though he allowed that literature borders on religion and admitted that ‘Writers are much better preachers than we are’. But then he continued: ‘All the same we must not hand over our responsibilities to them. Indeed we must be wary when gifted atheistic writers make truly perceptive use of central christian ideas and symbolism, as does Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of the Good where she rings the changes very movingly on ideas of guilt and grace and redeeming love, only to assure us also that of course she does not believe in God’. (I remark in passing that Iris Murdoch is on the list the historian might draw up of people, christian and not christian, professional theologians and others, from whom we did not get a paper; a Society’s character can be discerned through its omissions as well as its commissions).

Lewis wanted a frontier drawn theologically, drawn, that is, by Christians who knew what they were doing and why. But it was to be an open, not a sealed frontier. He wanted traffic across the frontier, learning from the other, but not losing the faith in the process. He went on:

‘To move with the times is one thing, to capitulate another. Christian faith never stood in greater need of profound theological study conducted in effective relation to the culture and thought of the day. But we are succumbing instead to the …glow of a will o’ the wisp caught in the rays of a sinking sun’

On my incomplete reading, the balance of papers in the archive leans towards Lewis’s side on this issue. Generally, they prefer ‘objective truth’ or are anxious to argue for it. They attack relativism, subjectivism, and constructivism in theology. I am not sure that I always know what these words mean. I have not been able to find any paper in which they are positively presented to the Society. The fear of relativism was provoked by John Hick who spoke in 1972 and 1976 – but his theism was, in significant ways realist, not relativist. Don Cupitt addressed the Society in 1972, when he was still working as a post-Kantian christian theologian – looking for a way between non-dualism and fideism and before he was sailing the Sea of Faith and taking leave of God. I do not see that we ever heard D. Z. Phillips. What is the explanation of this apparent leaning to one side of a difficult argument, like the tower of Pisa? It will not do to say that the society is illiberal, crypto-fundamentalist. It is more likely that the leaning towards realism (may I call it that for short?) is a corrective response to our knowing and accepting that we must do theology as construction, as imagination that goes beyond evidence. In its traffic with the Bible, theology cannot be bound by history or exegesis, even though it takes them seriously: theology is poetry. In recent years indeed, this has been demonstrated by Jeremy Begbie’s ‘playing it again’, to instruct us about music, theology and divine communication (1997) and by Janet and Oliver Soskice (1989) showing us pictures, truth to be seen. Such occasions are unusual: we know we cannot do theology without poetry, in a broad sense, but our methods of working do not allow poetry to take wings and soar free from academic modes or from dogmatic frames.

Although we are limited in our ways of working, we do not suppose the theological task can be done in abstraction from the whole range of our humanity. Some of our recent discussions of theology and worship and liturgy make this clear.

That the warnings against subjectivism, constructivism, and relativism can be no more than marginal to our main enterprise is decided ultimately by the God of whom and in and from whom christian theology attempts to speak. The conferenec themes, and the groups they seem to fall into, remind us of God who goes out of himself in order to be himself (God, Christ, Spirit, Trinity). God acts – some have wrestled with that word – in creating. Creation’s unfinished history is somehow the history of God, a history which some think points and grows towards its proper End, when God is all in all, and others think is redeemed and saved by the promise of an End which it contradicts and obscures rather than points to. God goes out of himself in self-giving grace, imaged in human being, incarnate in Jesus Christ, free as the wind in the Holy Spirit, who invites human beings to share the life and work of God and who risks getting lost in human spirituality. God is self-relativising, not strictly monotheistic, guarding the frontier of his Otherness against his creatures. John Sawyer argued in 1983 that the plain meaning of the biblical text as a whole is far from monotheistic and the biblical writers were not focused on promoting or defending it. Precisely because of the laxity of their concern for monotheism the doctrines of trinity and christology could be developed from biblical roots. It is simply impossible to do theology with the kind of material we have been given while keeping God-talk pure from poetry: God is poet, creation and incarnation his poem. .

If God is poet in this way, there are theological grounds for thinking that poems in words are not the only form of poiesis theology must attend to. Life and action are also poiesis. In our time, it has been argued that sociality and politics are forms of poiesis indispensable to theology: in them, theology is rescued from mere words, from ecclesiastical narrowness, from private or otherworldly religiosity. The claim is made that theology finds in social action the ground where God can be spoken of more truthfully. But others have argued that this results in the most fatal of relativisms, destroying the faith by politicisation, forgetting that politics plays out the fallibility or fallenness of humanity rather than revealing the glory of God reliably. Is politics the service of God or a large factory of idols?

We have never devoted a whole conference to the question of theology and politics, but it cannot be said it has been ignored, as the list of papers given on this theme demonstrates. It also shows how we have responded to changing political priorities. Space does not permit a full discussion of the list, and I shall conclude this paper by taking the first title on the list as the starting point for my last piece of historical construction. Four of the papers given at our first conference in 1952 were published in a supplement of the Scottish Journal of Theology. But Donald MacKinnon’s on secularised eschatology was not. Why not? That it was not up to standard is unimaginable. I am confident the explanation is that at the time he was about to publish on a related topic elsewhere. In 1950, George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, set up a working party, whose essays MacKinnon edited for publication in 1953 with the title Christian Faith and Communist Faith. In his conclusion, MacKinnon argued that Communism must be seen as a faith. It could not be dealt with merely as politics, but had to be confronted as a metaphysics. This remark makes me wonder whether the single list of theology and politics in the society, as I have presented it, is misleading. After the 1970s we stopped discussing marxism, let alone communism; is that a sign that we had become more pragmatically political, less ideological? With the fading of the confrontation with communism, which was in some respects a secularisation of christian faith, was there a significant change in our understanding of politics? I wonder indeed whether some of these early papers on Marxism, down to McLellan’s in 1978, should not be attached to the anthropological group. MacKinnon spoke on secularised eschatology, James Klugman, then editor of Marxism Today, spoke in 1969, a year after students were more than usually troublesome, you remember, on the marxist hope. Here we have a discussion which was theological and humanist and even in our present terminology, spiritual. By contrast, some of the later papers in my politics listing are more political, dealing explicitly with matters such as power, institution, Europe and nationalism.

Listings, like those I have made of the Society’s conference themes and papers, are precarious – throw the pieces up and they come down in another arrangement. The early metaphysical section of the politics list might be linked to the list of conferences that have dealt with of Christianity and other religions. Before 1973, before Ninian Smart, before Birmingham became John Hick’s multi-religious learning ground, the Society, with the help of Bonhoeffer and Ronald Gregor Smith, saw secularity and secularisation as the major dialogue partner for Christianity in the world. In that period, theology felt itself to be confronting atheism, irreligion, autonomous science and secular humanism. Yet within rather than alongside these confrontations, there was also a serious encounter of faiths with their metaphysics, as MacKinnon insisted. The group of conferences dealing with christianity and other faiths is the smallest, but if they are taken together with those concerned with christianity, marxism and humanism, and more recently by our attention to spirituality, the group looks more substantial, and discloses more of our true history.

In conclusion I make three suggestions about what the Society might do with its own history – I have done enough to see there is more to be done. It might be useful. Some certainly would find it fun.

First, there are many good papers in the archive. Some which did not impress me when I read them at the time they were given seemed much better on a second reading. Quite a few have not been published. Why not then publish a selection in a useful, celebratory volume, in the style we have now adopted for our annual proceedings?

Secondly, why not have a historical lecture reviewing the Society’s thinking, every ten years, which is a more practicable period than a half-century? It would help the society to ponder its direction and its achievement, taking account of changes in its context. I know we make decisions in the AGM about the themes of our future conferences, but those decisions come out of limited discussion. This periodic lecture would be more exciting and powerful two people, perhaps one young, one old, were each asked to make a review, based on the evidence, and with each not knowing who the other lecturer would be until the day.

Thirdly, let the Society sponsor a research student or post-doctoral student to write the history of its first fifty years. I am like the father mouse who has gnawed through the plastic package: the cheese is now exposed but I have only nibbled a corner. Hungry young mice are needed to work their way through this rich lump before it goes dry and mouldy. Such a project would reconstruct the hidden story, collect more material for the archive, gather our oral history before more voices fall silent, and recount the Society’s thinking in ways which will at the same time illumine the wider history of theology in the UK in this period. We would end up with an unusually broadly educated Doctor and with a useful systematic, comprehensive history of christian theology in the UK since 1950 – which at the moment we lack.

Haddon Willmer, 2002

© Society for the Study of Theology, 2007.