The Spirit of Truth

The Call to Intellectual Public Service

Dear Reader,

Today’s post is a bit unusual. It’s the text of my recently delivered Peter Toon Memorial Lecture, delivered at Pusey House, Oxford, a few weeks ago. It’s a bit more autobiographical, personal, and pastoral than my usual essays for public consumption, but my editor tells me that sort of thing is fine for Substack. Those who prefer to watch or listen to such things may do so here:

I

Assuming you beach at last
Near Atlantis, and begin
That terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen
Thundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and now, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.

Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.^[1]

***

Like any ordinary sinner, I am, no doubt, inclined to find myself inordinately interesting, and as a self-conscious sinner I am a little shy of pressing myself too much upon you. But, of course, it is never the bare self as such that is of interest. What is of interest is the self in response to the call of what is true and good and beautiful, and to God’s efforts to rescue and establish them. What is of interest, optimally, is the self as an icon of higher things. And it may be that, as I tell the story of how I came to be where I now am, things more important than me will shine through and speak.

I opened this lecture with a quotation from W. H. Auden’s poem, “Atlantis’. Since he spent several months in the winter of 1972-73 living in the former brewhouse that backs onto the garden of the South-West Lodgings in Christ Church, where I and my wife were privileged to live for fifteen years, I have taken to reading Auden again for the first time since secondary school. Much of what he wrote has made no lasting impression, frankly, but some certainly has—not least “Atlantis”. Written in 1941, shortly after he had rediscovered his Christian faith, it amounts to a Christian odyssey, as envisaged by the narrator, who is about to embark on a voyage to the Isle of Salvation. I cannot demonstrate it, but it does seem to me that “Atlantis” bears the marks of St Augustine and Reinhold Niebuhr. Certainly, Auden had read the former and knew the latter. And the combination of frank realism and transcendent hope certainly echoes them: “Stagger onward … rejoicing”.

But the lines that have struck me most are the ones immediately preceding:

… honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.

In every vocation there is a large measure of fate. Or, rather, fate is the raw material of a vocation. One responds to a call out of a situation that is given. My situation was that of Britain in the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It was a situation of national humiliation. I was born the year after the Suez Crisis and I grew to political consciousness during the 1960s, when Britain’s fall from global pre-eminence was being writ large as the Union Jack was ritually lowered in one country after another as Africa—literally—decolonised. In the winter of 1973, I was in my very first term as an undergraduate reading History at Worcester College here in Oxford. Huddled over the desk in my room in the dark morning hours, I was straining to prepare for my first set of exams by candlelight, since the electricity generating stations had shut down, their fuel supply cut off by striking coalminers. My tea was not sweet, as I preferred, since the dockyard workers were also on strike, and imported sugar was impossible to find. The radio was heavy with news about the latest bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland, where the violence was then at its height. And the London Times was running a series of leading articles under the title, “Is Britain Governable?” Like everyone else—except perhaps for those on the hard Left, who were gleeful about the revolutionary opportunities of economic and political chaos—I was anxious and concerned. And, as a recent convert to Christianity, I wondered what on earth my new-found faith had to say to such a national crisis.

Three years later the crisis had relaxed, but the political strife rumbled on. I was then in the final year of my undergraduate studies and I had opted to take a specialist course on the life and times of St Augustine, in which large tracts of The City of God were prescribed. In Augustine I found another Christian who was trying to make sense of turbulent times in which the known world seemed to be falling down about his ears. Nothing in the History curriculum had commanded my attention as did this.

It was around this time that I went to visit Peter Toon, who was then Librarian of Latimer House in Oxford. I went in search of advice as to what to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to study Christian theology, partly to understand better why I believed what I found myself believing, but also because I was keen to find out what light two millennia’s worth of accumulated Christian ethical wisdom had to shed on Britain’s national crisis. I wanted to study Christian theology, but I was not at all interested, at that time, in training for the priesthood. I explained all this to Peter in his sunny, first floor living room overlooking the back garden of 131 Banbury Road. (I remember it well, because ten years later that living room became my own, when, long after Peter had left, I took up the position of Librarian at Latimer House.) After listening to me, there in the early summer of 1976, Peter drew my attention to a college in Canada that offered postgraduate education in Christian theology to graduates in other disciplines, who intended, not to engage in full-time ministry, but to return to their secular vocations as sharper Christian salt. This was Regent College in Vancouver. Fifteen months later, my plane touched down on the Pacific coast of British Columbia, where I embarked on a one-year course in Christian Studies at Regent that grew into a 45-year long career.

Rev. Peter Toon, in whose honor this lecture is given.

That has been my happy fate. But my fate was not simply the circumstances in which I found myself. It was also my response to them. I felt the sense of national humiliation personally and the political turbulence alarmed me. This was not necessary. My elder brother—may he rest in peace—reacted in the opposite direction; he found the revolutionary prospects rather attractive and exciting. So, exactly why I reacted the way I did, I have no idea. I did not choose it; it was given me. It was my fate. Accordingly, when I applied to enter the Ph.D. programme at the University of Chicago in 1980, the very first sentence in my application read: “My study of Christian theology is fundamentally motivated by the desire to make a critical and constructive contribution to the post-imperial British social and political enterprise”.

(Friends, when I read those words, which I wrote 45 years ago at the age of 25, in the light of where I have arrived as a publicly known intellectual and as a member of the House of Lords, I am astonished. In May a dinner will be held in London to celebrate the award of my peerage, at which I will tell the story of how I arrived where I now am. And in the course of telling the story, I will explain what important part in it everyone around the table has played. But the climax of the story will be this: that no one was in control. Success, as in so much of life, was the result of a providential coincidence of factors. So, when all other gratitude has been duly expressed, final thanks must go to God alone.)

Let me return to my main point. My interest in Christian theology has never been simply academic. From the very beginning it has been driven by a persistent desire to reach the position of being able to address, with Christian integrity and practical wisdom, important issues facing this country. And I will confess the proper name of this desire: ‘patriotism’. I say ‘confess’ advisedly, because throughout my life I have been acutely aware that in the university-educated, middle-class social circles of my own British generation, patriotism has been regarded—and is still regarded—as embarrassing. Since I started describing myself as a British patriot about five years ago, I am aware that I have never ever heard any other Briton, since my parents’ generation, say that of themselves. I am aware that, were friends and colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere, politically centrist with a leaning to the Left, to hear me talking in this way, there would likely be a sharp intake of breath and a sucking of teeth—a mental stepping back, as if they had just encountered something diseased. I have been aware of the un-coolness, even the dodgy reputation of patriotism, among members of my own class and generation for all of my life, which is why I have suppressed it. I have always felt it, but rarely expressed it directly—because I assumed that ‘everyone else’ must know better. However, older age, I have found, confers a dangerous combination of two benefits: first, one finally knows what one thinks; and second, one worries less about how other people will react to it. So, I now say what I have always felt. I confess the truth: I am a British patriot. I honour my fate. I answer my peculiar calling.

However, although a fate is bound to shape a vocation—although a calling must always address someone embedded in a particular set of circumstances—a Christian may not assume that everything that is given is given by God. For there is always the possibility that fated affection, however strongly felt, is distorted by sin—driven, say, more by pride or anxiety than by love of what is true, good, and beautiful. As Auden candidly put it, the fate we should honour is still “travelling and tormented, dialectic and bizarre”. Consequently, we Christians always have to test what we have received. And that is what I sought to do, when I first began to reflect concertedly on a Christian ethic of national loyalty.^[2] I had to admit that my country, like every other, is indeed an artificial construct. It is man-made. It is not divine and eternal. My country is not God. In that respect, my Christian patriotism is quite distinct from the Romantic nationalism that makes of the nation a substitute for God and claims that, by investing oneself wholly in the nation’s life, the individual achieves a kind of immortality. This view is immediately visible in the eighteenth-century thought of Fichte, who wrote: “The noble-minded man’s belief in the eternal continuance of his influence even on this earth is … founded on the hope of the eternal continuance of the people from which he has developed.... In order to save his nation, he must be ready even to die that it may live …”.^[3] Given the patently idolatrous character of this kind of nationalism, Karl Barth was largely correct, in the shadow of its infamous Nazi expression, to refuse to accord the nation any special status at all in the eyes of the one true God. As he presents it in Volume III/4 of his Church Dogmatics, national communities—or ‘peoples’—dissolve into mere neighbours, near and far.^[4]

Therefore, in spite of the fact that, in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, I lost several nights’ sleep worrying about the possible break-up of the United Kingdom, I had to admit that it was possible that the UK should break up. The UK is a human construct, which was invented in 1707, and it could be that its time had come to an end and that, like Czechoslovakia, it should disintegrate into its constituent parts. As it happens, I came to the view that Scottish separatism is a dogmatic solution in desperate search of a justifying problem and that there are several very good reasons why the UK should stay united. Nevertheless, I admitted, in principle, that need not be so. I have honoured my fate, but I have sought to do so as a Christian, critically.

II

However, in order to reflect critically upon patriotic affection—or visceral, bottom-up conviction of any kind—one must first have moral criteria to apply. And in order to be authoritative, these criteria cannot be invented; they must be given. They must exercise a certain external, obligatory force, bearing downwards—as it were—upon the sinful human agent. Here the dogma of Christian monotheism asserts what the phenomenon of human conscience intuits. And it seems to me that, during the moral meltdown of the 1960s, what attracted me to Christianity was in no small measure its moral realism—the belief that there is a given, created, real order of moral ends and principles that dignifies human beings with responsibility, endows their actions with moral significance, and gives their lives the shape of a moral adventure—a moral odyssey, one might say.

So, it was not long before my postgraduate study of Christian theology at the University of Chicago took a decisively ethical turn, mainly in terms of Karl Barth. I had encountered Barth before at Regent College, Vancouver, where I had taken a class on his doctrine of God in Volume II of the Church Dogmatics (taught, as it happened, by Klaus Bockmuehl, the father of Oxford’s current Markus Bockmuehl). My initial encounter was not a happy one. Indeed, so frustrated did I become at Barth’s convoluted style that, at one point, I tried to rip the volume up and threw it across the room. (My attempt was in vain, of course: the eight-hundred-page tome, slightly battered, still sits on my shelves, smirking.) Nevertheless, when, at Chicago, I took James Gustafson’s locally famous seminar comparing the architecture of the ethical systems of Barth and Aquinas, I became keenly interested in the question of how a comprehensive theological framework should shape a vision of moral life. And, since his ethics are deeply rooted in an extraordinarily integrated system of trinitarian theology, and since they trace the ethical implications of an incarnational Christology with unequalled tenacity, Barth was an obvious master at whose feet to sit.

Yet it was not only the theological comprehensiveness of Barth’s ethics that attracted me. It was also what I will call ‘spirituality’, by which I mean the relationship between God and human creatures. It is one of the salient features of Barth’s ethic that this lies at its heart; and it is for that reason that I have always thought it very apt of Stephen Sykes to suggest that we view him not only as “a formidable Calvinist dogmatician”, but also as “a spiritual writer”.^[5] As Barth has it, at the very beginning of all that we ought to do—and remaining basic to it—is prayer. The importance of this is that prayer is the basic condition of human freedom and gladness. When the human being acknowledges God the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer in prayer, she is freed from the intolerable burden of coping with her finitude by trying to shoulder divine responsibility; she is freed from guilt over past sins; and she is freed from anxiety about the future. In prayer to the triune God, the human being is freed to be a creature who has been graciously reconciled and who will be sanctified at the End of History. Through prayer, she grows the virtues of humility, faith, gratitude, and hope, which enable her to flourish in the only way that a sinful creature can. Prayer is the first and the last thing that we should do. It is basic to an ethic that takes God seriously as a living reality to whom human beings can and should relate in a personal way. It is also basic to an ethic that recognizes that, before we turn to the business of deliberating about how we should conduct ourselves in the world, there is the prior task of contemplating what kind of beings we are in the first place, and what is the context in which we are set. Prayer embodies and confirms a theological view of the agent’s self and of her location.

Karl Barth at work. Credit: Getty Images

This feature of Barth’s ethics has always seemed to me one of its greatest virtues—and it still does. It endows thinking about moral matters with an existential seriousness. The ethical task is not just—and not primarily—about our solving practical problems out there in the world. It is first and foremost about coming to terms with a true, theological, and soteriological description of our own creaturely nature and sinful condition, and of our standing before a benevolent, forgiving, and saving God. It is about adopting a posture and a set of dispositions appropriate to our nature and situation—on our knees, humble, grateful, hopeful, and glad. It is about positioning the ethical problem-solver before he sets about the ethical problems.

So, through Barth, my Christian faith moved me to subject the bottom-up fate of my visceral patriotism to the government of a top-down, thoroughly theological moral realism. It moved me to train my fate into becoming a vocation.

III

However, although I was a disciple of Barth’s for over a decade from the early 1980s when I was a doctoral student, until the publication of my book on Barth’s ethics, The Hastening that Waits, in the early 1990s,^[6] I was never a devotee. I wanted to learn from him, not worship him. I entered deep into Barth-world, in order to measure myself against it, not to dwell in it. So, while much of what I learned I have carried with me ever since, even before I had finished my book, I became aware that its interpretation of Barth’s ethics had at certain important points become a reconstruction. And when fifteen years later in 2008 I looked back from a more mature intellectual vantage-point in an essay entitled, “Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited”, it had become quite clear to me that my reconstruction had been more expressive of where I thought Barth should have gone than of where he actually went.^[7]

The feature of Karl Barth’s thought that I found most unsatisfactory is the indeterminate way in which his theologically generated ethical concepts often hover frustratingly above the concrete earth of complex moral and political problems—and the haphazard manner in which he sometimes leaps from theological premise to moral rule or concrete judgement. Perhaps the most notorious instance of this was the set of ‘analogies’ he made, in his 1946 essay “The Christian Community and the Civil Community”, between Christian dogmatic tenets and ethical positions. To take one notorious example, Barth tells us that since “the Church lives from the disclosure of the true God and His revelation”, it follows as “an inevitable political corollary … that the Church is the sworn enemy of all … secret diplomacy”.^[8] We see here the dogmatic premise; we see too the ethical conclusion; and we hear the assertion of logical necessity binding them together. What we miss is the moral analysis of different kinds of openness, articulating what is good about God’s revelation of himself to human creatures, explaining why this is analogous to the open publicity of diplomatic negotiations, and thereby demonstrating what is wrong about secret diplomacy. As it stands, the corollary is not only a long way short of logical necessity; it struggles to suppress laughter.^[9] Therefore, in The Hastening that Waits I criticised Barth—alongside others—for rejecting the careful, rational, dialectical negotiation between moral rule and case that is ‘casuistry’, and I sought to show that Barth himself practised it covertly.^[10]

My criticism was informed by my discovery, at least a decade before, of the Anglican tradition of casuistry that began with William Perkins and Richard Ames in the 16^th century and was briefly revived by Kenneth Kirk in the 1920s. (This is the Kenneth Kirk who held the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church for five years from 1927, and who was, I believe, responsible for having the word ‘moral’ added to the title.) Indeed, four years before The Hastening that Waits appeared, in 1989, I had sought to trace the fortunes of this Anglican casuistical tradition in the very first article I had published in a mainstream academic journal, which was entitled, “A Case for Casuistry in the Church”.^[11] And in that article, I explicitly invoked Kirk in support of a dialectical kind of casuistry that does not merely apply moral rules to cases in a top-down fashion, but negotiates between them in such a way that the former may sometimes be educated and refined by the latter, bottom-up.^[12]

IV

Quite why I found myself so drawn to casuistical reasoning I am not sure. Perhaps it was a just a certain intellectual circumspection or fastidiousness, a natural tendency to want to see things worked through thoroughly. But I strongly suspect that it also had to do with my long-standing fascination with history, which was, and remains, my first love—and which was the subject of my undergraduate degree course. The study of history introduces us to the stories of real human beings as they struggle to navigate their way through circumstances that are often complicated, messy, and not easily tractable. Equally, more often than not, they are circumstances that the human agent did not choose for himself. As Joseph Chamberlain, British colonial secretary, commented on imperial policy in South Africa in 1900, “We have to lie on the bed which our predecessors made for us”.^[13] Five years ago these words echoed in my mind as I climbed the modest mountain in northern Italy, where my mild-mannered father, rudely plucked from the rolling hills of south-west Scotland in his early thirties, had found himself playing stretcher-bearer in the bitter winter of 1944. He would have nodded his head grimly, as would many in Ukraine now, at Leon Trotsky’s menacing aphorism, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”.^[14] We must often lie on the bed that others have made for us. It is our fate. But for Christians, our fate is also our calling.

Exposure to history confronts us with this fatedness, this being plunged into alien and adverse circumstances, having to fight wars we would never have chosen. And in such circumstances the meaning of moral principles is often not as obvious as we thought and we are forced to reflect on them and think hard about whether, or how, they fit the case. For one example, take this. In September 1998 I organised a conference here in Oxford under the title of “Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict”. The so-called Good Friday Agreement had been reached in Northern Ireland, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was about to publish its report, and in the former East Germany the Stasi files were being made available to the informed-upon, who were learning the identities of their informers. When I entered the conference, I had assumed that the rule that we should forgive our enemies could be applied to these cases more or less straightforwardly, and that the meaning of the concepts of forgiveness and reconciliation were clear. At one point, however, up stood Ulrike Poppe, a Lutheran dissident who had been twice imprisoned by the communist authorities in East Germany. And she said, “What’s all this talk about reconciliation? I now live on the same street at the man who informed upon me. I didn’t know him before, and I certainly don’t want to know him now. What do you mean when you talk about reconciliation?”. It was this testimony from an unfamiliar set of circumstances that provoked me to rethink what I had taken for granted about forgiveness and reconciliation and their applicability. In particular, it led me to conclude that, when referring to a political, as distinct from an interpersonal context, it is often more appropriate to talk more modestly and reservedly about ‘accommodation’ than ‘reconciliation’. The full embrace of the Prodigal Son so memorably depicted by Rembrandt, which may be possible between formerly estranged intimates, is often too much to expect after political violence, if it is appropriate at all. At a subsequent conference I held twelve years later under the title, “Is Christian Forgiveness Immoral?”, one of our speakers showed us a photograph taken during a gacaca or community trial held in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. In the picture two men stand in the centre of a circle. One is the relative of a victim of genocide; the other is the victim’s murderer. The good news is that they are standing within twelve inches of each other; the bad news is that one is looking up at the sky, and the other is looking down at his feet. They cannot look each other in the eye, far less embrace. But they are standing next to each other. They are not quite reconciled, but they are mutually accommodating. And under those dreadful circumstances, that is no small achievement.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1669

V

My casuistical bent has been generated partly by intellectual fastidiousness and partly by an historical awareness of the moral force of circumstance. But a third motive has been a respect for non-academics and a pastoral concern for them. I am aware that I opted for an academic career partly because I have a certain personality: quite cautious, wanting time to observe and reflect and work things out, unwilling to decide until fully ready, careful to cover and protect every angle, averse to risk. (Well, at least I used to be!) Such a personality develops a characteristic set of virtues, of course, but it is not well suited to making momentous and risky decisions under intense pressure. I have a great deal of respect, therefore, for other people, no less intelligent than I, who have chosen—or been fated to choose—careers and roles that are heavy with front-line responsibility and light with the leisure to reflect. I sympathise very greatly with those whom Reinhold Niebuhr nicely called “the burden-bearers of the world”.^[15]

So, when, in his critique of my 2013 book, In Defence of War, the scholar of international relations, Cian O’Driscoll, wrote that just war theorists like me are inevitably part of “the war-machine” that we are trying to constrain, and that we therefore stand in danger of coming so close to the flame of power that we get burnt by it,^[16] I protested. I understand what he means. Institutions do acquire a momentum of their own—sometimes perverse—that is hard to stop, and well-meaning individuals need to take care lest they get carried away. Nevertheless, it struck me that where Cian saw a machine, I saw faces—the faces of friends in public office, who are, I think, more morally reflective and sensitive than the average citizen, humbler, less sanctimonious, and who have shouldered responsibilities and taken risks that academics like me have chosen careers to evade. It is widely recognised among academics that remoteness from the exercise of executive power yields the important advantage of critical distance. What is less recognised is that it also occasions a grave temptation—a temptation to relish too much the self-flattering role of righteous prophet, to indulge in wishful thinking, to daydream among the ‘what-ifs’, and never to grasp the necessary nettle.

If a Christian intellectual wants to earn public respect and attention, he needs to acquaint himself more with those in public office, become familiar with the burdens they bear, learn to appreciate the enormous constraints under which they have to operate, and enter with them imaginatively into the tragic dilemmas they must face. Then, having taken the trouble to exercise their love , first, in playing fellow-traveller and pastor, the Christian intellectual will have earned the right to play prophet.

I believe that Augustine would have approved. During that life-changing undergraduate course I took about his life and times forty-seven years ago, I wrote an essay on Donatism. In it I quoted a passage from a letter of Augustine to Paulinus of Nola, which so deeply impressed me that I have kept that essay to this day. Indeed, I have it here. The passage I referred to in it was this:

On the subject of punishing or refraining from punishment, what am I to say? It is our desire that when we decide whether or not to punish people, in either case it should contribute wholly to their security. These are indeed deep and obscure matters: what limit ought to be set to punishment with regard to both the nature and extent of guilt, and also the strength of spirit the wrongdoers possess? What ought each one to suffer?… What do we do when, as often happens, punishing someone will lead to his destruction, but leaving him unpunished will lead to someone else being destroyed?... What trembling, what darkness!… ‘Trembling and fear have come upon me and darkness has covered me, and I said, Who will give me wings like a dove’s? Then I will fly away and be at rest’…. [Psalm 55 (54).5-8]”.^[17]

But Augustine did not flee. He did not run away. He stayed. He continued to shoulder the responsibilities of bishop, which, as the Roman Empire crumbled around him, were increasingly those of government. He kept up pastoral correspondence with military tribunes like Boniface and Marcellinus, whose Christian consciences were troubled by what they had to do. With them he lamented the tragic dilemmas of political life, but he did not flinch from facing them. He staggered onward, rejoicing.

And note: none of this prevented Augustine from developing the prophetic critique of the Roman Empire that became The City of God. He stands, therefore, as a shining example of one who took the risk of coming close to the flame of power and yet was not consumed by it—of one who risked played pastor and yet could still play prophet.

VI

So, “The Spirit of Truth: The Call to Intellectual Public Service”.

Everyone’s individual calling is different and depends heavily on what they are fated with, what they are given. However, individual callings are specifications of a more general calling. Whatever their individual vocations, all Christians have a common calling to love the world that God in Christ has so loved, and to love is to serve. In a very broad sense, all Christians serve the wider public that is society by treating their families, neighbours, and well. Almost nothing we do is absolutely private. Most of it ramifies socially.

But public service can also take more specific forms, such as contributing to public deliberation through the media, working as a civil servant, or serving as an elected or appointed member of parliament.

Not all academics are called to this, but some are. And that is important, because academics have (or should have) specially honed skills of analysis, logic, and intellectual clarity that aid the discovery of the truth of things. They have also had time to read, write, and work out what they think—a luxury that most mortals do not have the privilege of enjoying.

On the other hand, academics typically lack the practical knowledge, skills, and virtues that others have developed. So, if an academic would become a public intellectual, he would be well advised to be conscious of his own limitations and of others’ superior experience, and therefore to be humble, and ready to listen and learn, before he presumes to speak.

If he is a Christian, he would be also well advised to avoid any whiff of sanctimony or any temptation to moralise in a finger-wagging sort of way. For, at least some of the people he will be engaging with will have shouldered moral responsibilities and faced moral quandaries from which the typical academic is safely distanced.

And while I do not think a Christian should ever hide his belief, there are times in a secular, plural forum when it is natural to talk about God and there are times when it is unnatural and gauche. The rule, I think, is always to respect the reasons for dialogue. In a public gathering to discuss, say, foreign policy, the abrupt invocation of God or the Bible will not play well. And nor should it. For it is either beside the point or it presumes upon the common acceptance of an authority, which does not exist.

However, if the Christian intellectual shows himself humble and respectful and ready to learn. If he avoids presuming his own moral superiority. And if he is content to witness indirectly to his faith by the manner of his conduct in the forum, while reserving direct explanation, when asked, for the corridor or the café. Then, in my experience, he will find ears open to what he has to say.

In sum: before playing prophet, play pastor; and before playing pastor, play companion.

Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, CBE, is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford.

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NOTES

^[1] W. H. Auden, “Atlantis”, in W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, rev. ed., ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 313.

^[2] Nigel Biggar, “The Value of Limited Loyalty: Christianity and Nationality”, in Boundaries, ed. David Miller, Ethikon Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); republished in Christian

Political Ethics, ed. John A. Coleman, S.J., Ethikon Series (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2008); subsequently republished in Modern Believing, 53/4 (October 2012); and revised and incorporated into Chapter 1 of Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).

^[3] J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1922), pp. 135-36.

^[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols, Vol. III, “The Doctrine of Creation”, Part 4, “The Command of God the Creator” (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961).

^[5] Stephen Sykes, ed., Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 83.

^[6] Nigel Biggar, The Hastening that Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics, Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 1995).

^[7] Nigel Biggar, “Karl Barth’s Ethics Revisited”, in Daniel Migliore, ed., Commanding Grace: Studies in Barth’s Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 49.

^[8] Karl Barth, “The Christian Community and the Civil Community”, in Community, State, and Church. Three Essays, ed. Will Herberg (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), p. 176.

^[9] The tendency to want theology to do too much, too quickly did not perish with Barth. For example, in its 2009 report, The Ethics of Defence, the Church of Scotland judged that the U.K. should abandon its nuclear deterrent on the ground that we should trust in God instead of placing other people “in a position of fear or threat” (2.10). By threatening others rather than seeking to be reconciled with them, it implied, a policy of nuclear deterrence is immoral. But, as I argued in the Scottish Review in May 2015: “this is facile”:

For sure, fear and mistrust are not symptoms of a happy, healthy relationship. Ideally, they wouldn’t exist. In the world as we have it, however, persons and states sometimes do unjust things that give others very good reasons to fear and mistrust them. In that case, the road to reconciliation doesn’t lie in pretending that nothing has happened and just holding out the hand of friendship anyway. It begins, rather, with signalling to the wrongdoer that he has done wrong by opposing it and pressing him to think again and change his ways in such a fashion that trust could be restored. It may be true—as I believe it is—that we should always trust God. But it really doesn’t follow that we should always trust Vladimir Putin ….

(Nigel Biggar, “Living with Trident”, Scottish Review, May 2015: https://www.mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/news/living-trident).

^[10] Biggar, The Hastening that Waits, Chapter 1, esp. pp. 36-45, 163, 178-9.

^[11] Nigel Biggar, “A Case for Casuistry in the Church”, Modern Theology, 6/1 (October 1989).

^[12] Biggar, “A Case for Casuistry”, p. 42; citing K. E. Kirk, Conscience and its Problems (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1927), pp. 107-9.

^[13] G. H. Le May, British Supremacy in South Africa, 1899–1907 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 57.

^[14] This is attributed to Trotsky by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p. 29. There appears to be some doubt about its provenance, however.

^[15] Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 15.

^[16] Cian O’Driscoll, “Tough Reading: Nigel Biggar on Callousness and Just War”, Soundings, 97/2 (2014), p. 212

^[17] Augustine, “Letter 95”, in E.M. Atkins and R.J. Dodaro, eds, Augustine: Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 23-4.