Cosmo Lang. Archbishop in war and crisis – a review

I recently reviewed Robert Beaken’s study of Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, published by I.B. Tauris in 2012. The full review in Reviews in History shows that I think it an ‘important reassessment’ which ‘goes a long way towards superseding [the work of J.G.] Lockhart and presenting Lang afresh’. Robert very effectively rescues Lang from his reputation as ‘a figure caught in the headlights, reactive rather than in the lead, a puritan and a snob.’

The book has three primary concerns: with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy; with the disputed process of liturgical reform within the Church of England; and with the Second World War. Chapter 7 deals with the war; Chapter 6 with the stalemate in relation to liturgical revision that Lang inherited after the Prayer Book Crisis of 1927-8. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy in general, and the abdication crisis in particular, and are very clearly the centrepiece of the book.

The review did make some substantive criticisms, which I reproduce at length here. The first is of one of interpretation:

Beaken rightly emphasises that in the period between the wars the office of archbishop still mattered in English public life. The opinion of Canterbury was sought and listened to on matters of moment; and the archbishop’s correspondence clearly shows that many of the general public expected something of ‘their archbishop’, even if those expectations were inchoately expressed and neither compatible nor realistic. All this is right, and worth emphasising; but it is difficult to recognise the ‘simple narrative of secularisation’ against which Beaken sets himself as one now held by very many historians. The work variously of Callum Brown, Grace Davie, Hugh McLeod and many others have all deepened and complicated our understandings of what secularisation is and how it occurs; and so Beaken is pushing at, if not an open door, one which has been unlocked and left ajar.

Also on matters of interpretation:

For Beaken, Lang’s radio broadcast of December 1936 […] was ‘an unusually unwise and unreflective action’, in that Lang allowed himself to reflect unfavourably on the mores of the social circle around the former king. However, the receipt of many letters and a ‘torrent of abuse’ in the popular press does not necessarily prove that an archbishop is not doing his job, but only that he has expressed an unpopular but arguably necessary view. Despite Lang’s evident enjoyment of the quiet entwining of archbishop and establishment, he was able to see where lines should be drawn.

The other criticisms were about the shape of the book, and its style:

At the broadest scale, the book is strangely shaped, such that it appears not as a rounded study of an archbishop at a time of crisis, but as three substantial studies of particular issues, hedged around with some rather desultory supporting materials. The three themes of the royal connection, the war and the Prayer Book crisis between them occupy two-thirds of the book, with the royal material alone forming nearly a third. This leads Beaken to neglect other issues that merited greater treatment. Lang’s path from bishop of Stepney (1901) to his arrival at Canterbury in 1928 are dealt with in five breathless pages; a time that included the controversy over Lang’s public comments on the First World War, which cried out for a fuller treatment. Similarly, Beaken’s account of a pivotal time in ecumenical relations at home and abroad is perfunctory. Lang’s time in office saw acute economic hardship and the Jarrow March, as well as the rise of home-grown Fascism and pitched violence on the streets to counter it. None of these receive the slightest treatment, in a study entitled ‘Archbishop in War and Crisis.’ […]

By contrast, significant space is instead given over to a discussion of Lang’s sexuality. Beaken is largely successful in showing that Lang was probably not a repressed homosexual, but a lonely figure who found it difficult to form close personal relationships of any kind. To this reviewer, however, it is not clear that those making the case for Lang’s homosexuality ever established why the matter should be all that important, and neither is Beaken convincing as to why it is important that Lang was not.

Robert’s response is at the foot of the review.

What use is a personal tweet archive ?

A little while ago I wrote a post about the need to plan for archiving the digital “papers” of historians. In that post I talked about research data (what we used to called “notes”); about the systems that form the bridge between that data and the writing process; and about written outputs themselves, and their various iterations. It looked forward to a time when all these digital objects, in multiple formats but from one mind, are available to future students of the way the discipline has developed.

What that post neglected was data about the way I publicise my work. Perhaps one of the reasons we’ve been slow to think about this is that, at one time, most academics didn’t need to. Apart from giving papers at gatherings of the learned, the task of publicising one’s work belonged to the publisher. And if one’s publisher was the right one, then the work would inevitably end up in the hands of the small group of people who needed to know about it. And whilst the media don is not a new phenomenon, most historians might have thought such self-publicity outside the academy something of an embarrassment, even rather vulgar.

How times change. Universities are training their staff in dealing with the traditional media and in the most effective way of using social media. And this opens up a new category of data that ought to be archived, if only to understand how the push for ‘impact’ actually played out in these early years. And some of it is being archived. The Library of Congress are archiving every tweet, although it isn’t yet clear how that archive may be made available for use. The UK Web Archive, along with other national web archives, have been archiving selected blogs (including this one) for several years, and the EU-funded BlogForever project is looking to join those projects up. But this approach, valuable though it is, separates the content from the author, and from the rest of their digital archive. Whilst that link might be retrievable at a higher discovery layer, something important is still lost.

But now the helpful folk at Twitter, in a move that ought to be applauded, have made it very quick and easy to download an archive of one’s own tweets, right back to the beginning. And so I did: 1682 tweets, over 14.5 months. But what to do with it ?

Straight away, scrolling through a long CSV file starts to tell the story of the making of other things: the first retweet of someone else’s work which was subsequently to influence my own; the first traces of an idea, or even of a question I was beginning to ask, which spawned a blog post, and then a paper. I also find that I shared at least one link in more than two thirds of my tweets, which sounds public-spirited until I add that a good proportion were my own posts. I can start mining the data for key terms and themes, and how they ebbed and flowed.

It would be useful if there was a way to keep this data fresh, of course, to avoid going back to Twitter for a new download every so often. And, thanks to @mhawksey, there is a simple way of doing this, using Google Drive. Martin explains all here, with a handy video set-up guide.

And so I now have a cloud-based archive of my tweets, complete with a basic search and browse web interface. This is now a lazy man’s look-up of old tweets and the resources they pointed to, searchable by handle, hashtag or key term.

But perhaps this is something about which most people are lazy. Social media provides us with an overwhelming stream of quite-interesting things, in amongst which are nuggets of gold. Those nuggets I can manage in the old way, by recording them properly, perhaps in a bibliography. I might even read them, one day. But the quite-interesting stuff, whilst being too much ever to record properly, will probably remain quite interesting. And so this provides a middle way between formal curation of a webliography and just searching the live web (which assumes I can remember enough about what I’m looking for.)

Might this archive now change my future tweeting ? Early days to judge perhaps. But I think it may, since I may now retweet and share in preference to using favourites, in order to get a link to a resource into the archive. I can also imagine starting to use personal hashtags, as a way of structuring my own archive at the same time as I tweet. Real-time curation perhaps ?

And I might share it too. Since this is now unambiguously my own data, rather than Twitter’s, I can licence it for reuse by others in larger corpora for analysis. Imagine a pooled archive of the tweets of many historians. Now that would be interesting.

Mrs Thatcher’s religion

As Mrs Thatcher passed away last week, I wonder how long it will be before we can reach a sensible assessment of her career. When teaching students born in John Major’s Britain, I used to struggle to bring alive to them quite how divisive a figure she was, and how much visceral emotion about her person has lived on in our political subconscious as a nation. The loathing that some felt for all that she stood for was brought home to me by the spontaneous laughter, tinged with relief and the cathartic release of repressed bitterness, that I overheard the day the news broke. And so for historians of my generation, who came to political consciousness when she was Prime Minister, there is considerable work to be done in shedding that baggage, in order to be able to look at her legacy in the cold, hard light.

This also applies to the work needed to assess her Christianity. And work we must, if only because much of the comment from Christian voices has threatened to obscure the very real debate we need to have about whether Thatcherism ought to be retrospectively glossed as more or less ‘Christian’ at all.

Colin Bloom of the Conservative Christian Fellowship thought that ‘history will show that she, more than any other British prime minister of the past 60 years, changed our nation for the better.’ (1) George Carey, who was archbishop during the later part of her time, admitted that whilst there were divisions in opinion over specific policies, overall ‘as I look back now I think her instincts were absolutely right.’ The new Pope referred to the ‘Christian values which underpinned her commitment to public service and to the promotion of freedom among the family of nations.’(3)

Perhaps the wiser course would have been to have remained as agnostic as Vincent Nicholls, who simply expressed a humane concern for a grieving family, since there are surely an equally significant number of Christians whose immediate feeling is that her instincts were in many respects wrong, and perhaps actively inimical to the cause of the gospel. Bishop John Packer, who had been working in Doncaster during her time in office, sounded a much more equivocal note on Radio 4′s Sunday programme, as did Giles Fraser in the Guardian. Although no Christian herself, Glenda Jackson made a revealing choice of terms when telling Parliament  (Hansard, cols 1649-50) about ‘the most heinous social, economic and spiritual damage …. We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice—and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees..’

Some elements of the question are clear. That she personally professed a strong and consistent faith is hard to dispute. That she was theologically literate is evident from the famous ‘Sermon on the Mound‘ given to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988. There is interesting scholarly work that re-emphasises the importance of her understanding of theology as formative to her work, such as that by Liza Filby and Antonio Weiss. John Milbank‘s recent intervention should also be required reading.

After that, we lack agreed points of reference to begin to have a sensible conversation about her. Values central to her rhetoric, such as thrift, self-discipline, industry and self-reliance are all traditionally associated with Conservatism, but have also  been at times claimed by Christian socialism. Or what of the ‘socialist’ values of communal aid, concern for the poor and the sending of the rich empty away; all of which have equally well been seen by Christians not as the duty of the state, but of the individual, or the ‘Big Society’ at local level ? The longer-range history of British politics shows that no political party ever managed to command the loyalty of a majority of  Christians, as does the failure of avowedly Christian parties. Those principles often seen as Christian have continued to evade political capture of this sort.

I have no answers; and I suspect it is too early to make sense of the religious elements of Thatcherism as history. At the very least we need access to key sources, such as the majority of her official papers which are still closed, as well as those of Robert Runcie and Carey at Lambeth Palace. In the meantime, commentators on both left and right should probably stop trying to assess a political program in terms of its Christian content or lack of it. The debate is stale, and gets us nowhere.

Alister Chapman on John Stott: a review

It was a great pleasure to see my review of Alister Chapman’s study of John Stott appear in Reviews in History (for which, incidentally, I am apparently the single most prolific reviewer; answers on a postcard as to whether this is a Good or Bad Thing.) I digest some of my main points below, but as some of them are criticisms, let me say to begin that overall I thought it  ’a model of engaged, sympathetic yet critical scholarship which is sure to find a wide readership.’

I began by reflecting a little on the recent controversy concerning Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones’ splendid collection of essay on Martyn Lloyd-Jones, on which I blogged here, and which tells us important things about Christian biography as a scholarly exercise:

‘Historians who would assess the careers of contemporary religious leaders are on a hiding to nothing. [Atherstone and Ceri Jones’ book] has been excoriated both for slighting the memory of a revered figure and for asking the wrong questions. In the first case, some reviewers have shown, [in the words of Carl Trueman], an ‘apparent absolute commitment to maintaining a fundamentally uncritical, defensive and hagiographical approach [to Lloyd-Jones and his reputation that] does the church no favours’.  For Iain Murray, one of Lloyd-Jones’ biographers, there is little point [to historical reflection on The Doctor] without attempting to assess whether Lloyd-Jones was right in his theology. [History] that avoids the truth claims of its subject fails the basic test of utility for the Christian reader.
‘That religious biography has been made to carry greater weight than other such writing is of course not new. […] For many, Christian lives are to be exemplary, and as such the biographer is faced with a peculiar set of expectations among potential readers.[…] it may be that Chapman has navigated through the obstacles as well as could possibly be hoped. Chapman’s title is Godly Ambition, and the leitmotiv throughout is the tension between Stott’s natural assumption of his capacity for leadership, and the self-effacement customary in the exemplary Christian life. [..] Stott was ambitious that God’s kingdom on earth be fostered, but within that framework, ambition for one’s own personal success was legitimate, and indeed desirable, ad maiorem Dei gloriam. At the same time, Stott’s very human struggle with his pride in his own achievements is sympathetically and expertly handled, and Chapman is clear-sighted and frank about the tactical mistakes and intellectual diversions inevitable in a long career in the public eye.

My main criticisms concerned the place given to the rest of the Church of England, the non-evangelical majority:

‘Consider the phrase on p. 90: Chapman argues that, despite Stott’s definitive turn towards engagement with the Church of England, […] he nonetheless never became the kind of “theologically fuzzy ecclesiastical pole-climber” which (we are to understand) was common elsewhere in the Anglican church. It was, and is, a regular rhetorical device to set evangelical ‘clarity’ and ‘certainty’ in theology against liberal vagueness and doubt; but an author more attuned to the breadth of discourse in the Church of England would have hesitated over such a phrase.

On the failure of the Church of England to make Stott a bishop, despite the growing numerical strength of evangelicals within the Church of England:

‘Chapman, like [Timothy] Dudley-Smith, puts Stott’s exclusion down to Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, and his reputed antipathy towards evangelicals. But to regard the episcopate in these quasi-parliamentary terms – as a representative body chosen according to the weight of party numbers in the wider church – is to miss the point. (That role was, in theory, fulfilled by the Church Assembly and its successor the General Synod, for election to which bodies Stott refused to stand.) In a theologically mixed church, with territorial governance by parish and diocese, the test for a bishop was not his particular churchmanship, but his ability to gain the confidence of all the parties represented on his patch. And for all Stott’s success in shifting the centre ground within the evangelical constituency, when viewed from outside he still appeared to be a party man. […]

More generally:

‘It is a besetting sin of evangelical historiography to talk only to itself, an isolation that sometimes results in a lack of proportion. […] Largely absent are voices from outside the evangelical constituency, in connection with Stott in particular and evangelicals in general, and the book would have been enriched by a greater sense of them.’

All this said, when judged on its own terms the book could hardly be bettered. And it is also encouraging that OUP could be persuaded to publish it, and that we have in place another key plank in our growing understanding of a pivotal time in evangelical history.

First impressions: Google Scholar updates

Thanks to @LSEImpactBlog and Jonathan Eisen, I found out yesterday about a potentially very handy new feature in Google Scholar.

I’ve had a Google Scholar profile for some time: after all, I might as well  be wherever a potential reader might find me – and the work involved is minimal. However, I’ve been rather sceptical of its value, not least because of its persistent inability to distinguish me from an oceanographer with the same name.

However, this new Updates feature would seem to take things to a new level. The Google Scholar blog explains:

We analyze your articles (as identified in your Scholar profile), scan the entire web looking for new articles relevant to your research, and then show you the most relevant articles when you visit Scholar.  We determine relevance using a statistical model that incorporates what your work is about, the citation graph between articles, the fact that interests can change over time, and the authors you work with and cite.

Jonathan Eisen gives a very interesting account of just how useful these results seem to him, on first try, in the LSE Impact Blog. In the interest of providing more initial feedback on a new tool, I thought I’d do something similar.

Looking at the four Top Updates – those that Google thinks should be most interesting to me – it’s pretty good. One I am interested in (and indeed had already read). Two more are by Grace Davie (who I have cited extensively), but which I didn’t know of; and a fourth is by a new author to me, which looks to be of general interest. So: of four, I might read three, especially those that are available Open Access; but none for definite.

Looking then at the further five not rated as Top,  it’s a little more wobbly. One I can’t see the relevance of at all; one I think is connected to a tangential footnote in a rather elderly article of mine; the others, whilst kind-of interesting, I’m unlikely to read unless I found myself with some sabbatical leave. To be fair, my work has spanned early modern and modern periods, as well as digital resources and Open Access publishing, and so that diversity presumably presents difficulties to a model that is trying to figure out what I’m most interested in.

So: on first encounter, I can appreciate some very impressive computational work going on to make this work, but it doesn’t demand that I recast my research habits to incorporate it into the normal run of things – or, at least, not yet.

Engaging with the Doctor

Just last week I bought a copy of Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a new collection of essays edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones, published last year by Apollos (an imprint of the Inter-Varsity Press.) I bought it because it seems to have found its way into almost none of the university libraries in the UK: the redoubtable COPAC  suggests that only two libraries have it, not including the British Library. This is a shame, because Atherstone and Ceri Jones have assembled a fine team of scholars and the book deserves to be read by anyone interested in modern British evangelicalism.

What follows is no review; my knowledge of Lloyd-Jones is quite insufficient for that. However, there are interesting points of contact with my own interest in Anglican evangelicalism since 1945. One such is John Maiden’s essay on Lloyd-Jones’ anti-Catholicism. (In the interests of full disclosure: John and I have recently collaborated on an article on political Protestantism in the same period.) I was grateful to learn that, whilst the Doctor’s anti-Catholicism was constant in principle, it only came to the fore of his public presentation as a result of the ecumenical movement. Many Anglican evangelicals were worried in the late 50s and early 60s that the Church of England was on a slippery slope towards Rome. John shows that at least as significant was the movement of Rome towards the Protestant churches as a result of Vatican II, and of some evangelicals towards the middle ground to meet it. Lloyd-Jones saw what evangelicalism-without-anti-Catholicism looked like, and didn’t like it at all.
Closely related to John’s piece is that by Andrew Atherstone on Lloyd-Jones and what Andrew rightly calls the ‘Anglican secession crisis’. The article is now the best account we have of the now legendary disagreement between John Stott and Lloyd-Jones in 1966, and provides crucial context for the equally over-emphasised Keele Congress of 1967. It wisely avoids the temptation to apportion blame, simply laying out the arguments and allowing the reader to decide (as indeed one has). More broadly, we need more of this type of cross-denominational analysis, which shakes us out of analytical categories fundamentally determined by institutions.
I was also struck by the historiographical introduction by Atherstone and David Ceri Jones on Lloyd-Jones and his several biographers, and by how hotly contested the Doctor’s legacy is. I should have appreciated hearing more of why it is that the Doctor should have attracted so many defenders, determined to establish that his feet were anything but clay. Why it is that evangelical biography is so often hedged in on all sides by the need to produce an edifying account of an exemplary life ? Hagiography is too strong a word even for Iain Murray’s Life; but neither is it detached scholarly biography, and unapologetically so.

[David provides some useful links to reviews of the book on his blog, with some comment on hagiography and its perils.]

A review: Rowan Williams, Why study the past ?

Rowan Williams, Why study the past ? The quest for the historical church (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005)

[This review appeared in the Bulletin of the Christianity and History Forum some years back, but has not been available online before now; and re-reading both it and the book itself suggests that it might usefully be made available now. It seems to have attracted very little attention from reviewers either at the time or since.]

The study of the history of the Church often has both added complexity and urgency for those working within a framework of personal faith or institutional allegiance. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s 2003 Sarum Theological Lectures, subtle studies of the self-awareness of the early church and of the writing of church history during the Reformation period, offer a stimulating series of meditations on the particularities of approach and attitude that might conduce towards a critical yet useful church history.

Williams rightly rejects an uncritical acceptance of past belief or practice as automatically normative for contemporary Christians, or as easy practically to apply. Also rejected is the related of habit of mind that tends to idealise a particular period of time as one of, as it were, pre-lapsarian purity, whether that of the early church, the Reformation period or of an Anglican ‘Golden Age’ in the seventeenth century.  The assumption of a past that is simply ‘the present in fancy dress’ leaves us incapable of being challenged or surprised by that past.

Williams however also comes down equally firmly against a glib assertion of unknowability; the sense that the gulf between ourselves and the past, far from being so easy to traverse, must in principle be unbridgeable. Such a counsel of despair leaves us adrift in a perpetual present, unable to engage with the causes of our present condition.

Such a centrist position is of course not new, and arguably reflects the working practice of most historians, whether religious or not. The core of Williams’s argument is however much more than the familiar rehearsal of the epistemological problems of historical knowledge, so often heard in the last ten to fifteen years.  Christians must necessarily have both a particular interest in, and a particular approach to, the church’s past. Williams sees the task of engaging with the past as one not purely of historical empathy for its own sake, but as a form of understanding and engaging with one’s fellow Christians in a way as necessary and as profound as cross-cultural and ecumenical conversation in the present. A robust, if perhaps uncomfortable, theology of the church as the Body of Christ would suggest that there is only the thinnest of veils between our own life as the Body and that of Christians in previous times, and that the church of today is the autonomous author of its own experience in a much more circumscribed way than is often supposed. Ever mindful of a constant and profound tension between the strangeness of the past and its urgency as our ‘family history’, it is the case that ‘our immersion in the ways in which they responded becomes part of the way we actually hear the call ourselves …’ (p.31) This leads Williams to a brief, yet to this reviewer, profoundly important, consideration of the degree to which the worship and conversation of the churches should embody languages and visible practices that both act as symbols of contemporary unity and enable a continuing ‘conversation’ with Christians of previous generations. This, Williams argues, may be equally if not more important than questions of structural or legislative unity that have tended to be the primary focus of current thinking on unity. By here eschewing direct engagement with the major issues facing the Anglican communion today, Williams offers a general approach with profound implications for them all.

The implications of Williams’ argument so far are equally as significant for the approach of the individual historian, and in places make uncomfortable reading for one drilled in the scrupulous agnosticism of the secular academy. His focus is not so much on the technique of church history or its sources, but on the attitude in which it might be conducted. This provokes, for this reviewer,  much thought not only on the role of the ‘specialist’ church historian within the churches, but on the potential fruits of greater engagement of all Christians with their past. The attitude he suggests is one that Williams worked out in greater detail in his Anglican Identities (2004), (an attitude he there described as ‘passionate patience’) in which we find ‘moments of bewilderment and moments of triumphant grasp’. In an attitude of ‘respect and patience’ we ‘acquire not so much a confidence in our solutions as a capacity to continue, a trust in the process.’ (p.90). The task of engaging with the past as Christians emerges then not so much as a disinterested, ‘scientific’ dissection  (a product of modernity par excellence) but as a form of spiritual discipline. If it is to learn from its past, the church must engage in a process of radical ‘de-centering’ and recover a sense of living ‘in the wake’ of divine action. It is only through a voluntary loss of self that the church can hope to recognise and come to grips with the history of divine action, and recognise the otherwise bewildering diversity of the manifestations of that action. Our collective wish to control and then deploy the past uncritically for present aims remains the barrier to a truer apprehension of that past.

In short, Rowan Williams has produced a series of meditations that are challenging and often profound, and may be read with profit by both Christian historians and historians of Christianity of all traditions and working in all periods.

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