Speech to the Irish Association at Armagh City Hotel 12 October 2003

Is Modern Ireland Losing its Soul? the Role of Religion and Theology Geraldine Smyth OP ©

The Meaning of Soul
The meaning of "soul" has been interpreted variously in different periods of history and philosophy, and is constructed differently according to changing assumptions of the human and diverse cultural contexts. So, at the outset of any discussion as to whether modern Ireland is losing its soul these variables must at the least be acknowledged. In these terms it would also be necessary to state whether we intend the term "soul" in specifically religious terms; if so, we must make some connections and distinctions, for example, between religious experience and religious belief, or between Protestant and Roman Catholic theologies and contexts - in respect of North and South - and take account of the double minority factor on both parts of the island. We would also need to underline the growing pluriformity of the religious and spiritual landscape in Ireland especially regarding the presence of other World Religions, humanist ethics and ideologies, and the growth industry in spiritualities. 1,2,3

Our main concern here is with modern Ireland as a nation and a society. And so I shall use the word "soul" somewhat loosely, as the human capacity personally and collectively, to live and relate by some kind of transcending vision and insight. This shared vision and insight can inspire and motivate people to act beyond self-interest in service of human flourishing. This same vision and insight is related reflexively to the depth and values dimensions of life around which our society, religion and culture have cohered in mutually influential ways, whatever the changes in political landscape, Zeitgeist or worldview.

Rumours of the Soul's Demise
I should like to suggest that rumours of the soul's demise are exaggerated, whether these claims come from the religious prophets of doom or the high priests of secularism, whose forecasts of a secularized Western world have come unhinged whether by recurring variations of the Dana and Diana phenomena , the EU's Soul for Europe Project, or the findings of recent Irish research on the persisting high levels of belief in God and an afterlife, the practice of prayer (even though without anchor in religious knowledge or strict conformity). While a decline in church attendance would seem beyond doubt, one must question whether such is a reliable barometer of the spiritual state of the country and whether there are more complex explanations.

The Value of Doubting and Searching
In a way, we are "soul-making" creatures - questers and seekers after the divine and sublime. Our souls are sustained and re-created in that very searching, in and through the small discoveries and disclosure moments when we glimpse mystery. However much we may repress the spiritual, however much our deeper self may be debilitated by individualism or religious formalism, the human spirit springs up green, like a small flower insisting its way through cracks in concrete. Even when people reject the God of their youth or of dominant religious custom, they may actually be enacting faith in a transcendent vision that outdistances the boundary some would set on the who and the where and the how of grace. Often, in the great world religions - mystics and prophets have themselves been doubters and seekers, restless after truth that goes deeper than dogma and eludes the commonsense opinion. One thinks of the restless spiritual journeys of a Siddartha, for example, or of the Prophet Jeremiah who responded so reluctantly to his call; Thomas, one of the Twelve Apsotles was, "Doubting Thomas", insisted on seeing before believing. Mystics and prophets were doubters and seekers like us, and it is the doubter or seeker in us that keeps faith restless, open and less likely to fall into the idolatry of absolutism, tribalism and self-absorption.

The Guiding Wisdom of a Faith Tradition
The soul has been described as the eternal inner self, which gives integrity to the twists and turns of our biography and shines through our chaotic lives, in times of loss, or radiates through a face harrowed by suffering. The soul keeps the mind attuned to the still small voice of inner wisdom. It awakens us to the need for guidance distilled from others' lives. The wisdom figures of a shared tradition - poets, priests, prophets, sages, saints - provide us with a memory trace, offer some bearings, or inspire hope towards an end held in common with others - who can share insight or companionship or challenge us to the practice of justice or hospitality to fellow-travellers and strangers along the road.

On Not Confusing Spiritual Crisis with Spiritual Bankruptcy
Today we are pitched into world-wide upheaval, with the crumbling of many old absolutes, comfortable identities, and frameworks of freedom and responsibility. Even the steady-nerved can feel swept away by the tide of globalization, with its out-of-control economic forces and the fear of random violence and terrorist attack in a world order where the new form of "deterrence" being played out by new power-blocs of unpredictable character for deadly high stakes.

In Ireland also, this sense of a "runaway world" connected with the war on Iraq, has also provoked responsible debate, and acts of resistance, mobilizing people's commitment to justice and to peaceful negotiation as the alternative to the madness of terrorism and war. Peace camps, prayer vigils, email campaigns to the Security Council, people demonstrating in their millions around the globe, found local expression in mass rallies in Dublin, Belfast and other cities on this island. Diverse placard captions suggested that traditional religious pieties, New Age imagination and NGO passion could still make common cause showed that Celtic Tiger or religious differences notwithstanding, people can still gather around an ultimate concern. Spiritual crisis there may be, but this does not necessarily imply spiritual bankruptcy. In this time too of moral crisis, Irish many citizens North and South feel challenged to invest energy in such projects as the reform of laws regarding immigration of asylum seekers and refugees (North and South) or the establishment of Bill of Rights, and the shaping of a practical ethic of social justice towards the socially excluded.

Battling for the Soul of Ireland: The Old Time Religion - Breakdown or Breakthrough?
In Ireland, as elsewhere, massive cultural transition and the unseating of old authority systems especially those of church and religion can provoke deep anxiety, which in turn provokes a variety of reactions:

Some try to stifle the sense of insecurity and indulge a craving for certainty. But the great religious traditions such as Buddhism in the East or Judaism, Christianity or Islam in the West warn us in many texts that to be willing to live with ambiguity is to leave space for something new to emerge on the far side of the religious comfort zone. The longing for some Golden Age, the yearning backwards for the fleshpots of Egypt, then as now, proves an indulgent self-deception, a distraction from the responsibilities that lie in front of us. Neither nostalgia nor complaint will resuscitate the spirit of times past. Blaming the media or young people for unsettling received opinion is as simplistic as it is futile.

Others react by ringing in the changes with sighs of relief - happy to cut the ties that bind to old shibboleths and dogmatism, in some instances, quite explicit in rejecting church and religion. Having chafed too long under the hair shirt of sexual prohibition, or the sectarian strictures that kept people in ignorance or fearful or one another, they no longer brook church interference in their personal lives. Still others react by rejecting God. In their bid to reclaim human dignity or religious freedom or for the sake of their soul's health, have found it necessary to break away from the "taught" God, who was all the while little more than a graven image.

There are also the many who fail to experience significant meaning, a sense of community, or acceptance of difference, in the available parish patterns of worship, authority and social praxis, and find little there that would count as food for the journey. Believing but not belonging, these turn aside from a formal religious path and find God or a sense of purpose where they can. It may be that today's generations are busy pursuing their own life-plans. Consumed by the pressure to compete and succeed they often seize whatever personal happiness they can, in a world spanned by Macdonald's Golden Arch and governed by the arch dictum, "I consume, therefore I am; Tesco ergo sum."

But it can also be argued that never before have people been so conflicted by so many competing demands on their loyalty. The wise may know that "living in truth" (Vaclav Havel) calls for discipline and daily practice before others and before the presence (or absence) of mystery. Churches could perhaps be more sympathetic to people as they struggle with the complexity of obligations and time-demands, arising from the multiplicity of belongings (in both senses of the word?), the increasing driven-ness of work-schedules, and the soulless imperialism of the market. Rather than intensifying the burden of pressure and guilt, churches need to be more modest and self-limiting in their expectations. In such a context, the churches have a role in offering understanding and guidance, in opening up shared spiritual spaces for reflection, silence and meditation, for rituals of healing and celebration, for encounter with mystery and a peace that the world cannot give. At the same time, those "moderns" who are intent on "living in truth", sooner or later will come to recognize that there is thin enough sustenance for the journey in a pick-and-mix sampling of whatever fast-food spiritualities are to hand. Companionship that sustains and challenges will be found in the practice of sharing the bread of our lives with friends and strangers at the table of justice; in searching alongside others who walk the way with us; in serving one another, bothered less about saving our own soul than losing our life for the sake of the Other and in solidarity with the Other.

Following the Way of Faith - in the Midst of the World
The way of gospel faith can be rough. With its paradoxes and signs of contradiction, it obliges us to be in the world but not of the world; to pray at all times, to free the oppressed, to forgive till seventy times seven, to labour in a particular field with whatever talents we possess. Christianity is a religion unequivocally rooted in Incarnation - Word made flesh - directed toward a world that is beloved by God, however permeated by suffering and evil.

Matthew Arnold once looked out from Dover Beach and heard the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" - of the "Sea of Faith [that was] once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore". In the face of a faithless, coarsened world he sought refuge in an intensely private faith and a luminous one-to-one relationship. But for the person of faith the call is not to escape but to launch into the deep. Those who are still dismayed by the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of a past religious consensus, will not be satisfied by a religion that is no more than a shelter for the collectively bewildered, promising security against the rough winds of modernity. Yet, neither will there be much to sustain the human spirit in a privatised religion, dislodged from any community of searching common-sharing or justice-making.

Counting the Losses and Gains: Then and Now
It seems to me that there is something in this section title that was intended to put us on our guard against any smooth assumption that modern Ireland has fallen from some pinnacle of former righteousness. It is my belief that we need from time to time to lift the discussion on religion in Ireland beyond the constraining influence of "The Troubles", to take a step back and reflect on religion's appropriate relationship to society and public life, to explore the potential of bringing the discourse of faith and religion into the public square but not without having that discourse shot through with the rhetoric of either the "church pulpit" or the "secular pulpit". Any presumption that modern Ireland is spiritually and morally more degenerate than in a previous generation deserves to be interrogated to uncover either illusion or shame. We can be grateful to our many writers who do this even when it cuts to the bone. For example, Brian Mooore's novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, gives us a glimpse into the nation's psyche be it in the 1950s Belfast of the novel or the Dublin of the film production, in which Maggie Smith magnificently portrayed Judith's lonely disintegration and ultimate desolation. Here we see what so often lies beneath the surface of self-complacent rectitude - the clung-to pretences, the deaf ear of the church, neighbours contriving to keep the embarrassing person out of view, just like the whiskey bottle hidden away in the wardrobe.

Tragedy as Turning Point
Perhaps the national awakening to self-knowledge came in 1982, with the death of Anne Lovett, a teen-aged girl, who was found dead together with her newborn infant, after she had given birth in a field near a Marian grotto in Granard in rural Ireland. No-one had even known she was pregnant. She was not the first or last young person to die thus in a field. Whether we love or hate Gay Byrne, his morning radio programme marked a defining moment in the moral journey of this nation, when the conspiracy of silence enjoined by the moral arbiters was broken. People spoke out on the airwaves for days, speaking the unspeakable and hearing each other into speech. The words "illegitimacy" (in social terms) and "legitimacy" (in terms of the source of moral authority) were given a fresh definition in public consciousness. It was women mostly who gave voice to the dumbed conscience of the country - not comely maidens, but comely housewives - who purportedly listened in while doing the dishes, phoning in stories about the dark underside of "Holy Ireland". It took the tragic death of this young woman to release ordinary people from the compulsory pretences that overlay the prevailing social and religious coercion. Callers shared long-repressed experiences of cruelty and ostracism in similar circumstances: of having conceived a child - as a result of ignorance, incest or abuse of power, and of having enforced upon them - by the upstanding custodians of the nation's purity - banishment to England or to quasi-penal institutions, separation from their baby or pressurized abortion. The veil of hypocrisy was torn aside and the collective pious self-delusion was laid bare.

So when we hark after the good old times when everyone knew their place, it behoves us to remember the hidden suffering of the powerless at the hands of the powerful. Before denouncing the worst characteristics of contemporary Irish youth and their fall from moral eminence, we do well to recognize that the reported derelictions of human decency occurred in the very years asserted as the spiritual high water mark in the national psyche. In those days when the index of banned authors lengthened to an anthology, and the Irish Film Censorship Board guarded against the "Californication" of Ireland, the national soul became flaccid in its intolerance of what was dissident or different. Much of the scandalous sexual abuse by those in church power or institutional power of other kinds, or the instances of political and financial corruption that have of late come to light, took place in those not so golden days. In the words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 94, "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

In praise of tribunals in the South and Inquiries in the North, they have demonstrated the urgency of reconnecting public service to the common good (and of re-defining the common good in the direction of inclusiveness, diversity and equality), and have begun to re-set the national compass of trust and accountability without which there can be no moral flourishing. Through such long-in-coming, long drawn out investigations into corruption or collusion in high places, we have all had to engage in a process of self-questioning. As we begin to let the law do what law at its best is meant to do - protect the weak, we know that the social responsibility of citizens and inclusive government must make a fresh start where tribunals and inquiries leave off. We trust that the poets and prophets - and saints will not be wanting. But, as we hope and work for better times, what is the role, if any, of religion and theology? A brief historical overview may shed light.

PART II

God, Displaced and Replaced: The Role of Religion and Theology?
The classic definition of theology as "faith in search of understanding", has stood the test of time. When Anselm uttered it in the 11th century he could assume a commonly-held cosmology and a world view underpinned by a priori religious suppositions. Another of his classic sentences - "Credo ut intelligam" ("I believe in order that I may understand") illustrates that for the theology of the medieval "Schools", faith was the precondition of the right use of reason. Thus, theology was deemed the queen of the sciences, and philosophy the handmaid who knew her place. By the 17th century the sense of a unified world view was under siege. Even then, Galileo in decrying the threatened church ban of Copernicus's book (positing that the sun, not the earth was at the centre of the galaxy), did so on religious grounds, complaining that to ban the work would be to fly in the face of "a hundred passages of Holy Scripture." Even when he is arguing for the integrity of scientific knowledge and pushing out its boundaries, Galileo's epistemology sees faith as its ultimate horizon. Nevertheless, by using the principle of accommodation, Galileo nudged epistemology away from a priori reason towards a critical interplay of the respective modes of knowing appropriate to science and theology.

With the gathering momentum of the Enlightenment, however, God was sent upstairs - as incongruous to a world view of empirical reason. Increasingly, superstitions and dogmatisms fell before an epistemology grounded in other absolutes deriving from the claims to objective analysis, verifiable evidence and application of universal principles. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ending thirty years of European religious wars, tolled the parting bell for the Holy Roman Empire, breaking the medieval complicity of Emperor and Pope, and recovering the principle: "Cuius regio eius religio (the one who rules decides the religion."

The gap between theology and science widened with the splintering of Christendom under the strain of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation conflicts. With the destabilizing discoveries of 17th and 18th century biology and with the Darwinian revolution in the 19th century, Protestant and Catholic theology effectively withdrew attention from the natural and secular world. The relevance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the life of the Church was construed through a hard forensic focus on sin and redemption, with metaphors and models drawn from the legal world of crime and punishment and courtroom. Theology was also tinged by the influences of the prevailing philosophy and science, premised on dualist understandings of soul and body, spirit and matter and on the priority of ethics over religious faith.

In the early years of the 20th century (and for some years before) the Roman Catholic Church tightened its prohibition of the theological appeal to human experience and historicity as data of revelation, in favour of a neo-Scholastic orthodoxy couched in abstract propositions to be universally applied, and overseen by an immoveable magisterium The years leading up to Pius X's Encyclical. Pascendi (1907) with its unequivocal condemnation of "modernism" were grim for those Catholic scholars associated with that movement in their attempt to bring the church into meaningful rapprochement with modernity. Right up to the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965, there was an enforced division in Catholic teaching between fundamental theology and systematic theology and mounting centralization of institutionalized authority.

Religion from the Subjective Perspective
Throughout the 19th century, Protestantism by contrast stressed the "event" character of revelation and the personal response of faith. Particularly as a result of Schleiermacher's influence, harking back to Luther and Augustine, the centre of gravity shifted to the inner religious experience of personal salvation alongside the normative Reformation emphasis on free interpretation of the bible. Influenced by Kant, Schleiermacher attempted "to win the educated classes back to religion, which he defined romantically as 'a sense and taste for the infinite.'" Liberal Theology developed its own spin on this, often sculpting religious experience into the image of high German culture, and driving faith apart from intellectual theology and from the exigencies of secular political life

Theology and World in Dialectical Connection
The shaking of the foundations in Protestant theology came with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth who exposed the bankruptcy in mainstream European theology. To Barth, the churches had consummately failed both to read the signs of the times - the terror, despair of sinful human existence - and to perceive the radically other new world of God's glory, word, God's word, God's transcendent love. He castigated those who saw God's word as self-evident truth:

In succeeding decades, Barth continued to challenge church and state for their flaccid acquiescence in the dominant culture and for their cosy identification with Nationalist Socialism. Barth called for a "religion-less Christianity". This has sometimes been construed to mean a necessary uncoupling of Christianity from the church, but primarily it is a call to the church to live humbly in prophetic witness to God's freedom and transcendence. Now, as then, wherever the church becomes culturally entrapped and blind to actual oppression and human suffering, some aspect of Barth's "dialectical theology" has tended to re-emerge at critical points and shown itself as far from exhausted.

Theology's Turn to Society
Before leaving this sketchy pre-history, the 1960s should be noted as heralding a great disruption in theology and religion, in line with the social and political revolutions of the time. Some have spoken of theology's turn to society, but the reality runs deeper. From that time, theology was challenged in theme and methodology by the critique of traditional epistemology and called to become more practically engaged in social critique and action. Thus, the neo-Marxist analysis of global injustice had its impact on the new theology of liberation. The feminist critique elicited analytic contributions from the first generation of feminist theologians, underpinned by the new historical consciousness and hermeneutical method, with their implicit challenge to fundamentalisms of all kinds.

Defining the Way Forward: Meaning, Belonging and Social Existence
It will be important to draw further upon these historical developments later, but first, the positing of some formal definition of theology and its relation to religion is necessary. After this, it will be necessary to focus more specifically on the respective roles of religion and theology in the contemporary secular context, as the trajectory of modernity encounters the challenges of pluralism and the post-modern talk of fragmentation of social and religious traditions of meaning, belonging and social existence.

Religion and the Community of Believers
For present purposes, I would denote "religion" as the experience (personal, collective and institutional) of the sacred, thus highlighting its appeal to both inner experience and outward commitment. The theological orientation of religion towards faith, hope and love also finds expression in the social function of religion.

In today's context where we hear so much about the fragmentation of the human need for meaning, belonging and social existence, it is interesting to see whether or how far religion in its social function fulfils these purposes recognize the traditional social function of religion in a community's need a) to develop a system of meaning expressed in truth claims, b) to generate and embody defining characteristics of belonging and identity, and c) to express its social being in relationships towards others (especially those outside its own boundaries) in actions combining freedom and justice. Such a social function is not at odds with the theological purpose of the church.

Theology
It is important here to distinguish religion from theology. Theology in its turn is a critical (and self-critical) reflection on religious experience and on a religious tradition. As its name suggests, theology orients the Christian theologian's attention to God and to discourse about God. It takes its point of departure from faith in a God who offers salvation through faith in Christ who is confessed, celebrated and witnessed throughout the church he left behind.

Theology and Religion - Considering the Notional and the Real
Religion and theology have long existed in uneasy relationship and are often confused. Not infrequently those attracted by the devotional and spiritual impulse of religion are suspicious of theology, dismissing it as unnecessary, unsettling, or an irrelevant preserve of intellectuals. By contrast, those drawn to the intellectual side of faith as a quest for meaning can be offended by what they see as the more conforming, sheep-like face of popular religion (the face from which the Irish cultural establishment has held aloof). Where this stand-off occurs it is unfortunate, not just because religion and theology are doomed bed-fellows - but because they manifest something constitutive of the human person and human culture. When functioning in dialectic interdependence rather than antagonistically, they are mutually enriching and a creative force in society and public life.

In his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Newman sets out his noted distinction between two kinds of assent to propositions: the real and the notional. Real assent comes through an apprehension of God that is particular, concrete, personally experienced and unconditional. It is difficult to convey or explain. Notional assent, on the other hand, is general, abstract and impersonal. Because it is more general, it can be communicated in a clearer systematic way:

Each use of propositions has its own excellence and serviceableness and each has its own imperfections. To apprehend notionally is to have breadth of mind, but to be shallow; to apprehend really is to be deep, but to b e narrow-minded. The latter is the conservative principle of knowledge, and the former the principle of its advancement.

Because real apprehension is enlivened with memory and image, it "excites and stimulates the affections and passions" its propositions are "the more vivid and forcible", and will evoke real assent. Conversely, apprehension based in intellectual systems, unanchored in actual experience, will give rise to ideas "diluted and starved into abstract notions" and the corresponding assent "cannot compete in effectiveness with the experience of concrete facts." And have little power to provoke action or arouse belief. Newman applies the distinction analogously to that between religion and theology. Thus, religion, which he associates with faith experienced as personal knowledge, with devotion or moral practice, is "real". Theology, which enables us to reflect upon religion and to communicate religious experience formally, is "notional."

George Tyrrell (excommunicated for publicly challenging the terms of the Pascendi suppression of Modernism in 1907), suggests an apt analogy, when he says, "Devotion and religion existed before theology, in the way that art existed before art-criticism; reasoning before logic; speech before grammar." In these terms, salvation does not come through theology, but by faith arising from God who is experienced as real. Theology is a reflection on that reality.

Whatever the necessary distinctions, one must not obscure the dialectical relationship between religion and theology. Thus, words like "belief" and "creed" nowadays tend to denote theological notions, or religion in its institutionalised form. In fact, the word "belief" derives from the Old English word "lief" ("life"), and behind the word English word "creed" is the Latin and Romance word "cor" or "coeur" (heart), suggesting the almost lost sense in these words of realities upon which one staked one's life and set one's heart. In a time when it is commonplace to hear calls for spirituality minus church beliefs, we are recalled to the intrinsic priority of religious experience over theology. But we need to remember the other half of Newman's equation, that a creedless religious community is impossible.

Theology as a Public Enterprise
It should be clear from what has been argued that theology is nothing if not a public enterprise. Historically and theologically, the very existence of the Church finds its origin in the public ministry of Jesus Christ and in his command to go teach all nations. History is peppered with evidence, positive and negative, of the Church's involvement in public life - whether on the Christendom or colonial front, whether in its association with right- wing dictatorships, or in prophetic movements for liberation and justice or in discourse about social inclusion or the common good.

The Three Publics of Theology
The typology of David Tracy (a theologian who has done much to assure theology a respected place in the academy), identifies theology's three distinct but interrelated "publics": the church, the academy and the wider society" His claim testifies to the complexity of modern society and the plural social locations of those addressed, and reflecting the complexity of the theologian's self-understanding, in continuity with biblical revelation and the ambiguous, restless process we call tradition. I shall explore the significance of each of these three publics for theology as a public enterprise; then comment on the changing nature of the public sphere, of which theologians must take account in order to be true to their vocational discipline; and finally offer some observations on the importance of an ecumenical approach in the churches' engagement with the modern world.

The Public of the Church
The teaching function of theology when operating within the church or specifically denominational sphere is intrinsic and valid, its discourse governed by the pattern of scripture and the classical texts. In this sense there are axioms and rules, shared assumptions and internal narratives. Such is the situation in seminary and confessional institutes. But even here, some qualifying principles are to be observed, in the face of any attempt to turn these into a closed system. Firstly, none of the major churches operates in isolation from other churches and theological contexts.

In terms of this first public of theology, the Church must be regarded both as theological and sociological in reality. Such remarks as, "The church is not a democracy", often smack of theological positivism, ironically assuming the application of social theory to the church as unacceptable secularization. But, churches need to self-critically apply the same criteria by which it adjudges secular power relations. Since a church functions as an institution within the world, it can fruitfully learn from sociological models and seek correlation between such approaches and its own core gospel vision, through patterns of dialogue and mutual critique.

So too, as there was room in the gospel scheme of things for doubters and searchers, so theology, looking out at the church, in an age of increasing plurality and ambiguity, must not exclude these from view, nor seal itself against engagement with the restless ones on its own margins and beyond. If it does so, the church will again purvey increasingly curious ideas of God, and collapse Christ's vision of the Reign of God still to come into a managerial church. This cannot but lead to authoritarian practices and an irrelevancy to the concerns of people and society. We can instance the virtual erasure of women's experience from theological discourse in the church. The frequent ignoring of the feminist critique of "classical" language of God (in point of fact largely premised on male experience and epistemology), impoverishes church theology. Such narrowing defeats the church's self-proclamation as "catholic." The church has too often construed the catholicity of its scope as a context-less, totalizing outlook - a view of everything from nowhere - rather than as a unity in diversity of vision and gift. Rowan Williams (writing as a bishop-theologian) asserts that there will be no integrity in discourse about God without modesty and a willingness to live in the relative powerlessness of faith. In other words, "religious and theological integrity is possible as and when discourse about God declines the attempt to take God's point of view (i.e. a 'total perspective.'")

Williams warns the church against any attempt to represent a whole "moral universe" and "a perspective that leaves nothing out" His understanding of the purpose of theology, particularly church theology, centrally involves a necessary guarding against tendencies to control or certainty: "And to do this [theology] needs to know when it has said what it can say and when it is time to shut up."

Theology and the Academy: Dilemmas and the Possibility of Mutually Critical Correlations
Some will claim that theology is inadmissible as an academic discipline, because - according to the paradigm of modern science with its empirical analytic method and its refusal of assent to knowledge that cannot be verified by appeal to "verifiability" and "objectivity." Science can fault theology on its lack of independent, value-free analysis. A suspicion of extrinsicism (truth claims justified by appeal to miracle or dogma), and a fear experience of ecclesiastical restrictions of academic freedom, has had a damaging effect on healthy commerce between theology and other academic spheres of discourse. Happily, throughout the last century, there have been many theologians who have pressed on with the task of critical theology, developing models and practice of inter-disciplinary engagement, but "the academy" can be slow to give credit where it is due, relying upon a much too restricted understanding of a discipline.
There is in fact contemporary substantive evidence of a theology governed by critical theological method, including the normative academic practice of a professional organization, public fora of debate and accreditation, and publication, for qualifying theology for inclusion within the category of a diffuse academic discipline alongside other human sciences such as sociology and philosophy.

Be this as it may, there were particular circumstances in Ireland which must be acknowledged as factors in theology's failing the entrance test to the academy: for example, a fear of denominational sectarianism, or the occasional inappropriate exercise of ecclesiastical power in regard to appointments and non-renewal of academic contracts, or biasing of the structure and content of the curriculum in the direction of Roman Catholic confessionalism.

From the point of view of theology vis à vis the public of the academy, a number of points must also be made in theology's favour. While not confining attention to Ireland, it should also be said that there are here a number of well regarded academic institutes here, where theology functions in a manner exemplary of the highest critical standards. A number of factors have opened the possibility for a re-assessment of theology and of theological knowledge. Sometimes, let it be said, the hermeneutical lessons of declaring one's presuppositions and exposing one's own interests to scrutiny has not been so well practised by members of other disciplines, compact or diffuse, which nevertheless require theology to take instruction in that school. Positivism can take scientific as well as religious forms.

There is more appreciation of the role of imagination and indeed of faith in the realm of knowledge. Theologians acknowledge that language of God is metaphorical, symbolic and analogous. But different levels of knowing require different modes of knowledge inquiry, each with its own grammar, its own regulative principles and implicit axioms. Maurice Wiles (formerly Regius Professor of Theology, Oxford) warns that theologians must never lose sight of the interpretative nature of their task. He points to problems arising from the very diverse nature of religions and of religious beliefs, cautioning that often "beliefs which are held with the utmost conviction turn out to be false." Academics generally must hold a creative tension between a detached methodological rigour and the conviction and imagination that keep one connected to a faith stance towards one's field of study. Speaking of this as a necessity for the theologian, Wiles insists that the "combination of faith and critical detachment is a difficult but possible role. It is also a very necessary one, for uncritical religion is a dangerous phenomenon,"

Integrity in theological discourse demands, nonetheless, that it does not conceal its intended meaning and purpose. It also implies a willingness to remain open to what the conversation may bring, rather than foreclosing on the dialogue. This includes openness to correction and re-evaluation - in theological terms - to conversion. But, when addressing the public of the academy, I as an ecumenical Christian academic theologian must not dissemble on the ultimate purpose of my theological quest towards a fuller understanding of God's transforming purpose for the world, and towards living into that purpose with faith, hope and love.
Theology in conversation with the public of the academy must keep a rigorous look-out for its habitual tendency to absolutize, or to attempt to put any religious utterance or practice "beyond the risks of conversation."

But, by the same token theology must direct its rigour "against the naïve scientific model." Theology must continue to learn from the masters of suspicion, from critical theory or from whatever quarter some truth may be gleaned, but it will be untrue to its own integrity if it ends up selling itself into the bondage of secular reductionism whether of a scientific positivism, having fought so vigorously to free itself from the a priori claims of dogmatic metaphysics. There is also an anti-systemic impulse within the classical texts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition that subverts and constantly re-makes itself ("tradition in spite of tradition"). This demands an ability to read its own texts against the grain of the tradition, probing for oppressive interpretations and absolutist claims, ready to discover the still undiscovered insights for human flourishing. Theologians do need to be conversant with the grammar of other sciences to pursue their work, but their project is also unashamedly theological. In turning now to the third public of society, I shall further attempt to connect such approaches to the task of theology vis à vis society, specifically referring to theology in the public realm and to ecumenism as a project germane to creative relationships of church and world.

Theology Turned Towards the Public of Society
All theology is socially located and shares in a historical-cultural-linguistic context. It can never escape that location in all its complexity - which in contemporary terms means "situated-ness" in overlapping frameworks of the local and global, and taking account of gender, economics, ethnicity and religion. Thus, theology, in Wiles's apt phrase, "cannot be content with a ghetto existence." It cannot be kept privatised, not least in terms of its classic texts, which, like any classic texts, are public. The complaint that theology should not meddle in politics, betrays a hidden self-deception. Sometimes this opinion is arguing from a civil liberties stand-point, against what is deemed privileged church influence in state or society. But, often, it comes from a fundamentalist stable, arguing against any unsettling of the system of political or religious power relations.

Re-imagining Religious Visions of Global Justice
For example the theological symbol of "Covenant" has had a political horizon that has served political purposes - in Northern Ireland in 1912, for example in which the Scottish Presbyterian Covenanter religion was invoked to underwrite a Unionist hegemony; conversely in the 1990s, in the ethical-ecclesiological work of the World Council of Churches it became the ecumenical basis for projects of solidarity and resistance against racism, ecological destruction, or violent conflict. Similarly, the biblical symbol of "Jubilee" has been exploited brilliantly in a contemporary movement to reform global economics. Thus, coalitions of secular and religious groups joined forces in the Jubilee 2000 campaign, an astonishingly successful campaign for cancelling debts of the world's poorest countries. Such initiatives reinvigorate socio-religious traditions through fresh intersections of religious, moral and economic categories. They correlate analysis for interrupting systems that are morally bankrupt and imaginative symbols of an alternative vision to the iron rule of the world as it is.

Revolutions in Theological Method - Hope as Praxis

Scientists and theologians alike are drawn by the pull of the future and new possibilities of transformation. One sees this in the critical correlations of theology and philosophy, theology and sociology in the interplay between Ernst Bloch's "Philosophy of Hope" with the political theology of John Baptist Metz or Jürgen Moltmann's theology of hope, or Gustavo Gutierrez's Theology of Liberation. In correlating the analysis of Ernst Bloch with such biblical root metaphors as Exodus, these theologians renewed the biblical vision of justice under the axioms of prophetic hope and transformation. These theologians were also religious leaders who entered into the misery of people, struggling with them against the brutal military regimes and against systemic global exploitation. In a process involving conscientization, creative mobilizing of collective anger and ritual lament, and anti-systemic theological praxis, a new theological method was shaped whose starting-point was not in notional theory, but rather the real suffering and hopelessness of non-persons on the underside of history. Thus Liberation Theology awakened capacities and offered strategies for people to become subjects of their own history. Apathy, paralysis and despair were thus disrupted by a radical hope and a critical praxis.

Western theology has to learn from its exposure to Liberation Theology's methodological disruption. It is challenged to radically re-examine its habitual self-confidence, and, as Williams has it - "to make sense of the practice of dispossessed language 'before God'. In this new stance, theology, whether in Brasilia or Belfast will live with the constant possibility of its own interruption and silencing. From this place of felt surrender, "it will not regard its conclusions as having authority independently of their relation to the critical, penitent community it seeks to help to be itself." Although for the theologian this is a felt personal experience, perhaps involving conversion in the way of relating as a theologian to people and society, there are worrying developments to be confronted within the public sphere itself.

Re-Entering and Co-Inhabiting the Public Sphere
As far back as 1969, Jürgen Habermas spoke of the structural change of the public sphere, anticipating the breakdown of trust in politics, and the emerging significance of social movements. We are seeing that played out in Ireland and across the Western world where there is growing distrust of political and church leaders, and civic authorities. Without trust in the potential of the public sphere to serve as the locus for human interaction, arbitration and social recreation, the moral and cultural vitality of the nation is impoverished and vitiated. There are renewed calls for the reclaiming public space as an arena for debating views and adjudicating claims about what constitutes the good life. Some religious writers have been quick to recognize this as an opportunity for the churches to respond to such social theory by seeking a religious re-occupation of "the naked public square." But here too, churches do well to put a brake on its own brash confidence.

But there is need to guard against the privatisation of the public sphere by other interests: "If publicness is to be defined by instrumental reason," warns David Tracy, "then the adventures of reason will never again inform an authentically public civic discourse …the realm where, finally we must all meet." Since Tracy sounded his caveat, in 1980, we have seen sinister new dimensions in the colonization of public tradition - driven on the one hand by the all-consuming sweep of globalisation, and on the other, by the obsessive assimilation of the public by the private. The first erases cultural distinctions with relentless standardization, its compulsion to exponential growth, and the co-option of public spaces from corner shop to local co-operative. There is also the monstrous reality of faceless electronic speculation of billions of dollars spinning around the globe in seconds, with no public accountability, yet with a global infrastructure, which keeps many nations in veritable bondage.

But the public sphere is also under attack by the private - by the demand for a public hearing of every type of private expression. Richard Sennett coined the telling phrase, "the tyranny of intimacy" to suggest "the governing of a multitude of habits and actions by the sovereign authority of a single source." Such standardizing by coercion or by seduction leads to an unhealthy conflation of the private and public:
The more this localizing rules, the more people seek out or put pressure on each other to strip away the barriers of custom, manners, and gesture which stand in the way of frankness and mutual openness… The closer people come, the less sociable, the more painful, the more fratricidal their relations.

One recalls here the wall-to-wall television coverage of the hearings in which President Bill Clinton's alleged sexual misdemeanours were narrated in forensic detail. Billions of commercial dollars are spent in the screening of programmes where the sphere of public moral discourse is colonised by the camera's single Cyclops eye, focussing attention on the embarrassingly well-rehearsed re-enactment of bitter family fights or alimony suits, or the pains-taking blow-by-blow pre-history of alleged murders, filial or parental cruelties - all presided over by Jerry Springer or Judge Judy. More recently we have seen the theatricals of "Cabin Fever", and before that, the relentless eye of "Big Brother" kept the twenty-four hour watch on those willing to act out their agonies and ecstasies before millions - in the hope of winning the million. The whole genre witnesses to a massive corruption of the public sphere. It is a retribalization of public space through the tyranny of intimacy.

So it is no longer enough for theology to seek its place in the public square, but that it seek there, along with others who claim a moral or religious vision, to contribute to public debate and to hold religion and politics accountable, in terms, for example, of the treatment of minorities or minors, those on the economic margins, and those denied a voice by the current structuring or abuse of political or religious power. It is for theologians to cooperate with people of other faiths and ideologies to re-create public and parochial zones for critical moral reflection, hospitality and celebration. I would stress theology's critical dimension in this regard. In a time when there is available a hypermarket of spiritualities to meet every private taste, and the revival of fundamentalist groups and movements from Ireland to Japan, and the rise of neo-orthodoxies of various hue, it is necessary to sustain the critical quality of religious theory and praxis, using the sharpest of analytic tools, and with a commitment to conversation in the service of reconciliation.

While we have argued that theology must be modest in its claims to wisdom and insight, in the context of post-modern fragmentation of ethical, and religious consensus, it should not balk at taking its place as a partner in the conversation. For the sake too of its own integrity, theology must not beat a retreat into its own protected zones, its old privileged truth-claims and private narratives. The gospel imperative to love one's neighbour and one's enemy, and to live by a love that knows no bounds is no less significant in times of when trust is under threat and otherness - whether in the person of economic migrant, Muslim or member of the Travelling community - is exploited to elicit fear and insecurity. It has been said that in relation to theology, our deepest need is to face otherness and difference - not a generalized notion, but an experience which if it is to be real
[m]ust include all the subjugated others . . . especially the poor and oppressed, the terrifying otherness lurking in our own psyches and cultures, the other great religions and civilizations…

The Role of Ecumenism: Reconciliation in Church and World
This now brings me to some concluding remarks about my own field of ecumenical theology and of "ecumenics" as a field of interrelated disciplines in conversation - anthropology, philosophy, literature, psychology, theology, history, social theory and the sciences. Ecumenism finds its task and scope in all three publics, secular society, the academy and the Church in constantly inter-locking ways.

I do not take the current inter-church controversies in Ireland, as point of focus, but rather, ecumenism as it relates to the wider world and qualifies the public sphere. In inter-testamental times, the word used by Jewish, Christian and Greek writers to indicate the whole known world, was "oikoumene", its root "oikos" or house, and sharing the same root as economics, ecology, and parish ("par-oikos"). I. Thus, its broad horizon of meaning is the conducting of relationships within the one world-house. In the developing Christian understanding, it developed a double edge: denoting the way that churches in their diversity related to one another in a conciliar way (unity in diversity); and also denoting the gospel imperative to find God in the world and to engage in secular sphere in ways that promote human dignity and sustain life.

There are, of course, official dimensions to interchurch reconciliation and inter-religious dialogue, with commissions and delegations and painstakingly developed agreed statements (the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission - ARCIC - on the Eucharist, being one of the best known examples), and actual agreements (such as that of the Lutheran-Roman-Catholic on the once church-dividing doctrine of justification by faith alone). This focus on doctrine is a necessary one. But it is important not to understand doctrine purely in terms of propositions to which one gives notional assent. Doctrine is as much a cultural-linguistic system offering a grammar and guiding rules for life, and as Newman demonstrated, possessing an inherent historicity and developmental dynamic through different times, and in response to changing needs and hermeneutical contexts.

Formal dialogues on doctrinal differences come to grief when they are made to function as the Archimedean fixed-point of all ecumenical relationship, ignoring the reconciling significance of what John Paul II praises as the wider "dialogue of love", "or the "dialogue of conversion" , which aims repentance toward one another, that "change of heart" without which, according to Vatican II, there is no ecumenism worthy of the name. So, there is a theological substance to the actions of repentance and forgiveness for past hurts, and the building of spiritual relationship through interchurch projects for overcoming violence or building peace. These sustain ecumenism as a lifeworld.

A central thrust at the last General Assembly of the World Council of Churches meeting in Harare in 1998, was that of "Churches and Social Movements in the Face of Globalization and Exclusion." There are notable projects arising from this, in which Reformed, Catholic and Orthodox churches are cooperating to tackle "the current destructive tension between imperialistic globalization and violent tribalization," through projects of solidarity in global and local civil society, bearing on human rights, cultural recognition and reconciling memories. One challenge of ecumenism to the church in society is to discourage the re-inscribing of chosen traumas and chosen triumphs and the re-tribalizing of confessionalist practices as their best answer to economic and cultural globalization. Here in Ireland, where over centuries, divided churches have cost lives, it is time for clergy and theologians to become co-participants in making peace.

While it may be a key task of the leaders in the church to secure its own forms of meaning, identity and social freedom, and to protect the particularities of church belonging, it is the task of ecumenism to keep probing this pattern for the seductions of what Newman called, "temporal power", that betray the gospel paradigm of crossing boundaries and embracing enemies. The ecumenical theologian vis à vis both church and state, in cooperation with people of other churches, faiths and ideologies, and as participant in the public enterprise of theology, is called to persevere in the quest for a critical theological discourse. It will be such a discourse as seeks to re-enter and co-inhabit new public spaces for conversation, partnership in the pursuit of truth, justice and respect for otherness, growth in mutual knowledge and reconciliation: a large vocation; a modest role, but - I believe - a significant vocation, a necessary role.