For Helen Katherine Jones: Convocation 2005

by Iain R. Torrance, president and professor of patristics

Helen Katherine Jones died in the bombing in London on the 7th of July. She was one of those on the Underground, often called "The Tube”, which provided shelter from German bombs in the Second World War but is now seen as an enormous security risk. At the age of 12, she had been a schoolchild in Lockerbie when another terrorist bomb rained debris on the village. It is ironic that, having survived that, she should die as a result of another terrorist act.

David Fergusson and I attended her funeral at the Laigh Kirk in Paisley on the 25th of July. The Laigh Kirk had been John Witherspoon’s church before he came to Princeton in 1768, and the transatlantic connections made me think of terrorism in the two countries. Helen was a most unusual person. She had been one of David’s and my students at the University of Aberdeen, to which she came at the age of sixteen. At the grand old age of twenty, in 1997, she graduated with first class honors. She was the baby of her year, but possessed by an optimism and charm which opened doors wherever she went. She had an exhaustive and amusing knowledge of the book of Proverbs. She combined faith and service. After graduating, thinking herself far too young for ministry, she spent a year as a volunteer with the Glasgow City Mission, a soup kitchen for the homeless. She then joined PricewaterhouseCooper and qualified as an accountant. She was twenty-eight when she died, on her first post-qualification job.

Her infectious life-affirming faith is where I begin. That, and her youth, is a first point of contact with this community. What follows is a refle ction couched in a spirit of which I think she would have approved.

Anyone who takes note of international news knows what happened after July 7th. In the state of heightened alertness after a subsequent bomb attempt, a twenty-seven year old Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot seven times in the head after boarding the underground railway. Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police announced that the killing – which shocked everyone – had been directly linked to the London bomb attacks. Mr. de Menezes, it was reported, had run from police officers, had vaulted a barrier, was wearing a heavy winter coat. Gradually, it emerged that he had been misidentified, had not run or vaulted a barrier. He wore a denim jacket. He was not believed by the surveillance team to have been about to detonate a bomb.

Many of us have since asked what was going on. In whose name was he shot? Whose interest did this serve?

It is very hard to find a clear answer. The official response is that the killing was prompted by the need for security. It was the lesser of two evils. It was a tragic but defensible mistake. In compensation the bereaved family in Brazil was initially offered £15,000¹. All the official arguments that it was defensible have to be separated from the tangle of misinformation which has so absorbed the press. Let’s examine the argument for opting for the lesser of two evils, as it is central to this reflection.

The argument was recently and elegantly set out by Michael Ignatieff in the Gifford lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2003². Ignatieff sketches classical democracy, of the kind expounded by Abraham Lincoln: ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’³. He notes, as is obvious, that such a simple account could tend in the direction of the tyranny of the majority. How is one to understand the status of a minority? Ignatieff amplifies his account by explaining what he calls ‘the moral view of democracy’⁴, according to which democracies also enshrine fundamental rights which they bestow unto the individual. In normal times two such perspectives may co-exist. In a time of tension they fly apart. The pragmatic democrat will justify all sorts of measures so as to protect the majority. The moral democrat will insist that fundamental rights may not be infringed. The theme of Michael Ignatieff’s lectures was to elaborate a third alternative, which is to follow the lesser of two evils. He is careful to preserve a strong notion that such actions may be morally wrong. Neither the need for security nor individual rights cancel out the other. He calls for a ‘balancing act’⁵ which must be monitored by a series of checks: there is the independence of the courts from the government; there are procedures for whistleblowing⁶; there is open adversarial review⁷, division of the powers, etc.

Ignatieff sets out a nuanced position. He is far too sophisticated to be unaware of borderline cases in history. For example, he shows how Lincoln suspended elements of the constitution, like habeas corpus⁸ so as to be able to preserve it as a whole. He insists that acts like the killing of a suspect remain evil and may not be finessed into something considered good, but I am left deeply uneasy. What does collusion in this say to our vision? No matter what arguments are produced from security, the death of Mr. de Menezes still mattered. So what is the continuing strength of that mattering which is carried by the minority? How can we evaluate it and describe it? It seems to me that it is very important for Christianity never to lapse into an acquiescence of a kind which stills the conscience. The prophetic element in the Christian tradition supports me in this, even if somewhat raggedly. Let’s take one ancient and one modern example. The ancient one is Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes. David Bentley Hart claims that ‘no other ancient text known to us – Christian, Jewish or pagan – contains so fierce, unequivocal and indignant a condemnation of slavery’⁹. In a world which was largely insensitive to the suffering of the poor, as opposed to the rich who were down on their luck¹⁰, Gregory was against the stream, but his voice prevailed, thank God, and needs to continue speaking against other slaveries today. The modern example can be drawn from Princeton Theological Seminary. On the 21st of October 1953, John Mackay, third president of this seminary and moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, published his ‘Letter to Presbyterians’. This was a gentle but very courageous voice from the church in the midst of Senator McCarthy’s investigations. John Mackay wrote: ‘Under the plea that the structure of American society is in imminent peril of being shattered by a satanic conspiracy … a subtle but potent assault upon basic human rights is now in progress. … Treason and dissent are being confused. The shrine of conscience and private judgment, which God alone has a right to enter, is being invaded’¹¹.

The classic position in twentieth century decisionist moral philosophy is that of Richard Hare in Freedom and Reason¹². I act morally if I can universalize an intention and, if it is disadvantageous to me, I am willing to apply it to myself. In that circumstance, Hare argues that where we disagree, we have no rational means of resolving dispute. We can only go to war¹³. What I am trying – too briefly and too raggedly– to explore is how we can be passionate in our beliefs and yet not go to war. This is why we heard the reading from the book of Samuel about King Agag. Terrible acts may have a context on the field of battle, but Agag was a prisoner of war. Since early childhood, I have struggled with this story. The text is so corrupted that I imagine others have struggled too.

Gregory of Nyssa and John Mackay have become my guides, and following their example I want to encourage different explorations and the attainment of different skills. Today we are faced by many unprecedented issues. Some are social, some are the product of new technologies. They fall outside the explicit guidelines of the ancient texts and summon us to wisdom and to new analogies. What is called for is not a new set of literal commandments but an imaginative exploration of the tradition guided by faith and worship. Such explorations occur in unexpected places. Thank goodness!

I commend to you Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Never Let Me Go¹⁴. The book, in a way, is about the gradual recognition of a landscape as it emerges out of mist. The mist is composed of the shreds of childhood memories and self-identity formed out of episodes not properly understood. All of us have memories like that – of things said inappropriately when we were 7 or 8, and even if we were not rebuked, some other sense alerted us that a boundary had been crossed, and the memory was stored away. The narrative voice in Ishiguro’s novel is that of Kathy H, who is now thirty one. She describes a childhood at a secluded English boarding school sometime in the 1990s. Her memories are of landscape, games and conversations, but shot through with a sense of strangeness and unease. None of the children have surnames. Their health is monitored. There are the normal codes of communal living, but an undisclosed fear behind it all. The children, like all children, produce artwork, but some of their paintings are removed. Gradually it dawns on the reader that Kathy and the other children are clones and that she has been enculturated into an acceptance of her fate. The children will become ‘carers’, then ‘donors’ and if they survive their fourth donation, they will ‘complete’. Near the end of the novel, two of the former children manage to confront one of their former ‘guardians’, challenging her to raise the veil of untruth. She tells them it is too late. ‘However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease … [T]hey tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter’¹⁵.

I began by referring to the killing by the police of an innocent man. Ishiguro’s novel is addressing the same issue. It is the story of a thirst for security which has been allowed to grow until it is gigantic, and other people do not matter.

The moral theologian Helen Oppenheimer once suggested that ‘[t]he principle that people matter is … a great improvement upon “respect for persons”¹⁶. This is because it is so much less abstract, and therefore so much less likely to obscure the particular. But we still need a rationale. Why do people matter? So she suggests that ‘the mattering of people has everything to do with their capacity to mind and to be minded about. A fetus is a potential person; a dog is an honorary person; … a teddy bear is a pretend person. A slug is not a person, unless maybe adopted by a child like a teddy bear; and a pebble is not a person at all’.¹⁷ She continues: ‘The drunken tramp and Michelangelo both matter, and if they are both in a burning building we are in great trouble; but not in greater trouble than if we had two drunken tramps, or both Michelangelo and Raphael. … This is where a lot more needs to be said about tragic choices, and how it is dehumanizing, and therefore not Christian, to make no room for remorse in such cases’¹⁸. This casts further light on the death of Mr de Menezes. The attempt by the police authority to settle with his family for a paltry sum only underlined the sense that he didn’t matter.

A review of Ishiguro’s novel by Martha Montello really cannot be bettered. She wrote: ‘The coded language that Kathy has learned to describe her fate flattens the unthinkable and renders it almost ordinary’¹⁹. It is the flattening of what is repulsive so as to sanitise it which caught my attention. In our world, where there is a multiplicity of interlocking descriptions, certain forms are allowed to assume definitive shape, much as episodes in history are far too often encapsulated in a single repeated photograph of such dramatic power that it silences everything else, yet leaves us with a perilously shallow understanding of what took place behind it. Although his science may already be outdated, Ishiguro’s novel points to our tendency to iron out our qualms so that we collectively acquiesce or collude in something of which we should be ashamed.

There is an effort of imagination required, but I have spoken about that in other addresses. Very briefly, I’d like to consider some matters of approach.

It is not the case that every issue may be resolved simply by further accumulation of data or argument of the same type. This is because not everything occurs at the same level. In a recent article Jeff Stout²⁰ draws attention to what Kent Greenawalt called ‘borderlines of status’²¹. Certain issues straddle a fault line, and Stout suggests that ‘A religiously diverse society that is not prepared to explore those differences conversationally is likely to remain at a permanent impasse’.

The borderline case may very well involve scripture, but there is more to it than that, and reliance on scripture alone may be a distraction. Under the surface, identities are threatened and normalities are challenged. My favorite example comes from 1871, during the intense debate over whether it was permissible for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. In that year a group of 24 leading Scottish ministers (who were opposed to change) addressed a pamphlet to English Nonconformists (who generally favored change in the law)²². The Scottish ministers believed that change would jeopardize existing relationships in which the sister of the wife had lived as if she were the sister of the husband as well. As a punch-line, they quoted an English judge²³, who later became Lord Chancellor, saying that change would lead “to hopeless sinking into the abyss of cold and cynical indifference to the purity of our national life…. I would rather hear of the landing of 300,000 Frenchmen at Dover than of the passing of this Bill"²⁴.

The Deceased Wife’s Sister Act remained under debate in the British parliament from 1835 to 1907, when enabling legislation was passed. That was some seventy-two years. So protracted was the debate that by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a matter of satire, even finding its way into Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Iolanthe, where the Queen of the Fairies sings: ‘And he shall prick that annual blister, / Marriage with deceased wife’s sister’. The very thought of such a marriage created a steamy literary genre of its own, with novels like Felicia Skene’s The Inheritance of Evil (1849) and Mary Braddon’s The Fatal Three (1888)²⁵. There was even a martyrology. Holman Hunt, the great Pre-Raphaelite artist, whose painting, The Light of the World, is considered the most powerful religious image of the nineteenth century, alienated the Church of England by marrying his deceased wife’s youngest sister in November 1875 at Neuchâtel²⁶.

It’s amusing for us now, but was very serious then. My point is that such subterranean issues were at stake that it had to take a long time. It was healthy that the debate could be satirized. The creation of a literary genre aided public understanding. Much admired figures who crossed the fracture-line²⁷ early showed that there was not an abyss on the other side. A passionate debate was enabled but there was little serious bloodshed because it was conducted conversationally. It was not the object of a shoot-to-kill policy.

Let’s make this contemporary. Even as I was writing this, I was given a copy of the report of the Presbyterian Church’s Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. I have read it eagerly and with attention. It seems to me that the theology it expresses is not so far from what I have tried to say since I came here. It points to the wounds inflicted by polarising decisions and the limitations enforced by decisions made through up-or-down votes. It expounds a doctrine of the church and asks that we learn from church history. This is an early stage its reception, but, metaphorically, I don’t believe that this report is vaulting a barrier, or that it is bundled up in a winter coat to conceal a bomb. Metaphorically, it’s wearing a denim jacket. I hope that in a church, if anywhere, we can learn not to be so afraid that we insist on a shoot-to-kill policy. I cannot believe that that kind of fear is what God wishes for us.

We live at a time when the pace of change is accelerating, and many must feel that they are on the receiving end of the curse: ‘May you live in interesting times’. Yet this is where God has placed us, and our challenge is to be disciples of Jesus Christ. That is why we are all here.

I am indebted to Sloane Franklin, one of our PhD students, who, 3 or 4 weeks ago, told me that I should read Rowan Williams’ new book, Why Study the Past?²⁸. It’s a wonderful book and I recommend it to everyone. Williams’ theme is how we understand ourselves as Christians in the midst of the kind of change I have tried to describe. Ultimately, his answer is Trinitarian. The God we worship ‘can only fully show what it is for [God] to be God by living through the abandonment of the cross’²⁹. That same self-revealing God calls God’s people onto n parallel journey of self-discovery and self-disclosure. For Williams, the New Testament is not a simple record of what happened. It is the effort, he writes, to show ‘that the immense novelties of that community’s life, as it gradually moved away from insistence on circumcision and food law, represented a final and unsurpassable stage in the one story that began with Abraham and Moses’³⁰. The process of finding meaning, hope and God’s promise today goes hand-in-hand with a constant questioning of how God has led God’s people through the boundary-crossings of the past. Therein we are reassured of the faithfulness of God. This is why we heard the Sermon on the Mount. The God who speaks through Jesus and called us to make peace with our neighbor even before we offer our gift at the altar is the same God who stands now along with the homeless on New Orleans. As it said in a letter on the website of The Presbyterian Layman: ‘labels, ideologies mean nothing after the hurricane’³¹.

Footnotes

1 About $27,000.

2 Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil. Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004).

3 Ibid, page 3.

4 Ibid, page 5.

5 Ibid, page 9.

6 Ibid, page 22

7 Ibid, page 24.

8 Ibid, page 6. And cf http://www.jmu.edu/madison/center/main_pages/news/2003essay.pdf. I am grateful to Gordon Mikoski for this reference.

9 Cf D. Bentley Hart: ‘The “Whole Humanity”: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of his Eschatology’, in Scottish Journal of Theology, volume 54 (2001), pages 51-69. The reference in Nyssa is: In Ecclesiasten Homiliae, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed Werner Jaeger et al (Leiden, Brill, 1958--), vol V, pages 334-52.

10 On this interesting point – that the ancient world pitied the unfortunate rich, but not the desperately poor – see Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), chapter 3 on ‘Poverty and Power’.

11 ‘A Letter to Presbyterians Concerning the Present Situation in Our Country and In the World’, unanimously adopted by the General Council of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, 21 October, 1953. Issued through the Office of the General Assembly, 510 Witherspoon Building, Philadelphia, PA. The document is available in the seminary library.

12 R.M.Hare: Freedom and Reason (Oxford University Press, 1963).

13 Cf chapter 9 on ‘Toleration and Fanaticism’, in Freedom and Reason (op. cit.), page 160.

14 Published by Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2005.

15 Ibid, page 263. My italics.

16 Helen Oppenheimer, ‘Mattering’, in Studies in Christian Ethics, volume 8, number 1 (1995), pages 60-76. This quotation is from page 63.

17 Ibid, page 63.

18 Ibid, page 73.

19 Martha Montello, ‘Novel Perspectives on Bioethics’, in The Chronicle Review, Section B, May 13, 2005, page B7.

20 ‘Survivors of the nations: a response to Fergusson and Pecknold’, forthcoming in Scottish Journal of Theology, vol 59 (2006).

21 Kent Greenawalt: Religious Convictions and Political Choice (Oxford University Press, 1988), chapters 6 to 8.

22 The reference is: Charles J. Brown, ‘The relationships which bar marriage, considered scripturally, socially and historically: being a respectful address to the Non-Conformist Ministers of England by Ministers of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland’, Edinburgh 1871. I owe this reference to Dr Richard Goldring, whose PhD I supervised in Birmingham. I sincerely hope he will write up his examination of this remarkable pamphlet.

23 Sir William Page-Wood

24 Dr Richard Goldring gave me this quotation.

25 See Sarah Brown at http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1430, and The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, edited by Ian Bradley (Oxford University Press, 2004).

26 See ‘William Holman Hunt’ in the New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2003), online.

27 I am grateful for my colleague Jeremy Hutton’s work on the river Jordan as a boundary. Cf Jeremy M. Hutton: The Transjordanian Palimpsest (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2005); ‘The left bank of the Jordan and the rites of passage: an anthropological interpretation of 2 Samuel XIX’, forthcoming in Vetus Testamentum.

28 Rowan Williams: Why Study the Past? (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2005).

29 Ibid., page 9.

30 Ibid., page 8.

31 Posted on www.layman.org on 2 September 2005.