Introduction
This paper seeks to map out some principles or guidelines for a contemporary and decolonial account of the Anglican attitude to religious, and non-religious, diversity. It places this within the wider history of Anglican thinking on the theology of religions, incarnationalism and social justice. This ambitious aim springs from the origins of this paper, adapted here, as the 2026 Scott Holland Lecture.Footnote 1 This context informs this paper because I argue that an Anglican theology of religions today as well as drawing from the Global South should engage two themes central in Henry Scott Holland’s work: incarnation and social justice. This paper accords with work already undertaken in this direction by the prominent Hong Kong Anglican theologian Kwok Pui-Lan.Footnote 2
The paper will begin by delving into Anglican incarnational theology, or what I will term incarnationalism, with a focus on religious diversity. The reasons for pursuing an incarnational theology here, despite critique of the concept, are also offered. I will then give some account of the development of Anglican thinking about religious diversity across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the limits of space, this will be more of a set of cameos focusing on the Church of England. This is not to prioritise the ‘Mother Church’, to use what is now arguably an anachronistic framing of centre and peripheryFootnote 3 but to show the historical development and embeddedness of the arguments within Anglicanism. Next, I will open out the question of incarnation, religious diversity and social justice in relation to both the figures surveyed historically and with regard to contemporary global concerns. A final section will do the key work of drafting principles for an incarnational, polydox (defined below) and decolonial Anglican theology of religions. A brief conclusion will wrap up the arguments.
Two brief notes should be made. First, I will draw ecumenically on a wider range of theologians beyond the Anglican tradition. This is because the Anglican theology of religions has most often been ecumenical and not simply solely an intra-Anglican affair, as will be seen. Second, the term theology of religions is arguably anachronistic when applied to many figures herein, only emerging as an independent field of theology in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, I would argue that a proto-theology-of-religions has existed throughout the period surveyed. I therefore employ the term with this historical caveat.
Anglican Incarnationalism and Religious Diversity
While it would be possible to discuss deeper origins of Anglican reflection on incarnation,Footnote 4 for the purposes of this paper I begin in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially with the Lux Mundi group. In this period, arguably for the first time, the question of incarnation, religious diversity and social justice comes together. This is exemplified by Henry Scott Holland. A writer for Charles Gore’s Lux Mundi,Footnote 5 Scott Holland was, in his day, a progressive thinker, certainly not a fully fledged modernist,Footnote 6 but within the Liberal Catholic wing of the Anglican Church.Footnote 7 His involvement in setting up the Christian Social Union in 1889 and his interest in the founding of St Hilda’s, Oxford’s second college for women, are indicative of this. While Scott Holland never wrote at length about religious diversity, his attempt, after being appointed the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1910, to argue for the inclusion of ‘other religions than the Christian under the term Theology’ in what was taught and studied shows his concerns.Footnote 8 It can be argued that, for at least some Anglicans, including Gore and others, this theological openness to religious diversity was founded in an incarnational approach where just as there was a refusal ‘to isolate the Atonement from the general process of the Incarnation, so’ there was a refusal ‘to isolate the Incarnation itself from the general moral education of the human race….’Footnote 9 This makes sense in terms of Scott Holland’s own thinking about the incarnation. As he stated in a letter:
‘Historically for all these years we have steadily voted against the tradition that to be a social reformer you must be shadowy in your creed. The old Broad Churchman has made this superstition common. To care about drains was supposed to mean that you sat loose to the Creed; and we have upheld the counter-position all these years, that the more you believe in the Incarnation the more you care about drains’.Footnote 10
This quote shows incarnational theology’s deep connection to the world and life for Scott Holland and was something found in others too as will be demonstrated.
According to Sedgwick, Anglican theology has had a tendency to develop and stress the incarnation with the stress not on Atonement, on the cross, but the coming of Jesus, and more widely on the Prologue of John which stresses that God is known in the world around us.Footnote 11 Lux Mundi can, of course, be seen as a locus classicus of such an approach. In terms of the theology of religions, John’s Prologue, in Justin Martyr’s phrasing, has supplied the classic trope of the logos spermatikos as that which is indwelling in all peoples and justifies, even sanctifies, the good in the ‘non-Christian’.Footnote 12 Such thinking is seen in, amongst others, Benjamin Jowett who taught Scott Holland at Oxford.Footnote 13 This was not uncontroversial, and it has been argued by Ralph Norman that: ‘Anglican incarnationalism failed to live up to the needs of Christian faith because it failed to grasp the tragedy implied in Christ crucified’.Footnote 14 Norman notes in his exposition the critique of Alan Sell and Hans Urs von Balthasar citing the latter’s opinion that in Gore and others we see the ‘influence of T. H. Green. Hegel, and the idea of a cosmic evolution reaching its summit in Christ’.Footnote 15
Before proceeding, as a clarification, in speaking of incarnational theology we see two aspects. One is the stress on Jesus’ birth and life as of at least equal importance to his death. The other, drawing from this but going beyond it, a focus on incarnationality as I will term it, is broader as a theological motif. It speaks of the divine as present inherently, imminently and deeply in creation. The world and the human are seen as infused (enthused?) with the divine, the logos spermatikos indwelling and sanctifying the lives, words, actions and behaviours of, potentially at least, all people, in all places, and at all times. This is important in case it appears that I am confusing a Logos theology and an incarnational theology. But, for many thinkers, they go together as necessary components of one system.
Surveying Cambridge Platonism, David Newsome places the incarnational theology discussed above in the context of late Victorian and early Edwardian Britian, when the country almost literally ruled the waves and the influx of wealth and developments of science resulted in an unbound optimism: ‘this was not the world of a theology of the Cross. When nature appears to be on our side, then God appears to work through men and through men’s achievements’.Footnote 16 Newsome continues: ‘The theology of the Lux Mundi group, in so far as it expressed the mood and philosophy of its times, could hardly fail to be a demonstration of the way in which man had been elevated and ennobled by the supreme event of the Incarnation. In such a way does history shape theology’.Footnote 17 Importantly, though, to critique incarnational theology is not to reject it. Rowan Williams has warned that focusing just on the incarnation can be one-sided if it does not take account issues about the ‘judgement of Christ’,Footnote 18 yet at the same time he has observed that the image of the incarnation can be extremely fecund:
‘the image of incarnation, the fusion of heaven and earth, the spiritualizing of matter, has proved wonderfully resourceful a tool for making sense of a sacramental community with a social conscience and a cultural homeland’.Footnote 19
Williams partly takes to task R. C. Moberly, who in Lux Mundi had declared that incarnation could be seen as the basis for dogma.Footnote 20 Williams conversely argues that ‘judgement and conversion’ must be held alongside the story of Jesus as ‘the incarnated one’ as Christianity’s basis.Footnote 21 Or, most succinctly: ‘Conversion and Judgement as the Basis of Dogma’.Footnote 22 We will address Rowan Williams further below, but more needs to be said about the focus here on incarnation as a topic.
For some theologians, placing the incarnation foremost, stressing a divine presence in the material, a spark of inspiration in the world, risks undermining other Christian doctrines. However, I argue here for an incarnational approach that stresses divine materiality over the specifics of judgement and atonement for three main reasons. Firstly, there is genuine disagreement, and if as one theologian (and Archbishop) Rowan Williams resists a focus on incarnation, we could cite others in favour, for as has been speculatively asked: ‘Could [William] Temple and [Michael] Ramsey’s embrace of the Incarnation as the summative expression of the divine nature and purpose have far-reaching implications for Anglicanism’s identity?’Footnote 23 Secondly, while Newsome historically deconstructed late nineteenth-century incarnationalism, we could place Rowan Williams’ thought within wider post-liberal theological turns, including in his theology of religions.Footnote 24 We can ask why we should delegitimize one theological approach because it reflects its own historical context, but do not apply the same criteria to another for reflecting our contemporary historical context? Finally, as this paper positions itself within a decolonial frame, this will not just, with intercultural theologians, decentre Western norms, noting that all doctrinal formulations have a history as does the biblical text,Footnote 25 but I also critique all imperialistic theologies – including the post-Constantinian violence, racism and antisemitism of ecclesial and theological systems – which declare as heresy, or erroneous, anything which challenges its monopolistic claims.Footnote 26 An incarnational approach puts the emphasis away from top-down dogmatics and authoritarian claims into lived relational approaches which emphasizes polydoxy over orthodoxy.Footnote 27 As a fairly new theological term, we may briefly unpack polydoxy. The term polydoxy has been described as ‘a provisional name’, one that does not describe a movement or school, but rather ‘a strategic and perhaps evanescent heading’ for ‘scholars whose theological sensibilities exhibit a striking inter-resonance.’Footnote 28 For Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, seen as the movers towards this term’s contemporary deployment, it represents a ‘triune intuition’, or we may say a disposition, towards a theology that stresses multiplicity, unknowing and relation.Footnote 29 As I understand and employ those terms here, multiplicity represents the diversity of viewpoints, such that we only ever speak of Christianities; there are polydoxies not a singular orthodoxy. A humility marks the theological approach in terms of unknowing, that there are depths beyond our understanding and that all standpoints are provisional, contextual and open to amendment. It is also often linked to an apophatic approach within theology. Finally, theologies of relationality stress community and co-learning, resisting hierarchy and imposition, one knows only in relation-to, not in isolation-from (the Other, Others, traditions, etc.). This is not to posit polydoxy as in antagonism to orthodoxy and tradition. Rather, it looks at the aporias, the fissures, the lost stories and surfaces them and holds them alongside, with, against and in relation to the wider tradition (or rather we should say traditions, for it is not, and never has been, singular). We will see aspects of all these three as we proceed through the paper.
Cameos of the Anglican Theology of Religions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
In considering Anglican theology of religions in this period, the motif of fulfilment theology must take a central place. As a basic definition, fulfilment theologians understand other religious traditions to be, as it were, stepping stones towards Christianity, with Christianity being the final culmination, or fulfilment, of humanity’s religious quest.Footnote 30 While often associated with John Nicol Farquhar’s The Crown of Hinduism published in 1913,Footnote 31 developed forms in Anglican theology can be found in Rowland Williams and Frederick Denison Maurice in the mid-nineteenth century, so some time before Lux Mundi.Footnote 32 Rowland Williams in particular is of note as he developed a Logos style theology that posited the possibility of revelation existing in the Hindu family of traditions.Footnote 33 Perhaps most controversy, though, centred around Bishop James Colenso of the Province of Zulu Natal, though his reputation as a ‘heretic’ rested in large part on his advocacy of biblical criticism;Footnote 34 in this, he was, like Rowland Williams, controversial in his day.Footnote 35 Like Rowland Williams, he was also a follower of Coleridge with a Platonic Logos style of theology, though controversy raged more around the supposed idea that he had gone ‘native’ and no longer sought to convert the Zulus, rather than on his actual ideas on the theology of religions.Footnote 36 Taking a positive attitude to religious diversity seemed relatively uncontroversial in and of itself, with Maurice’s work going through multiple editions.
By the late nineteenth century, such thinking was normative in much British theology.Footnote 37 Brooke Foss Westcott is one example who expressed this in an incarnational and Logos-centred theology that looked back to Justin Martyr and the Alexandrian fathers.Footnote 38 Meanwhile, the incarnation was explicit in George Alfred Lefroy’s writings. While a name less familiar today, Lefroy was a key thinker and actor associated with the Cambridge Mission to Delhi. He saw at least three aspects of Hinduism that were, to him, ‘anticipations, foreshadowings, feelings after the fullness of truth as it is in Christ Jesus’.Footnote 39 Of these, the one most of interest to us here is his belief that ‘the Incarnations of Krishna declare the possibility of intercourse between God and man’.Footnote 40 Prefiguring Farquhar by some decades, Lefroy links the avatars of Hindu tradition with a human need for God made man which he sees as found only truly in Jesus.
While the Logos-centric fulfilment theology was, perhaps, most associated with Cambridge, similar ideas, especially an incarnational emphasis, were not unknown at Oxford – we have already noted Gore and Jowett as examples of this – including amongst the Tractarian movement and in wider High Church thought.Footnote 41 Fulfilment style thought is found in John Henry Newman’s work, and in the writings of the Indian Christian theologian Nehemiah Goreh associated with the Oxford Mission to Calcutta.Footnote 42 That the issue of religious diversity was on people’s minds is made clear in this quotation:
‘J. Macmillan Brown, an undergraduate in the 1870s […] could remember every one of his contemporaries poring over the latest studies in comparative religion, trying to make sense of the myths and rites of far-flung civilizations that apparently prefigured the Gospel’.Footnote 43
Part of this owed itself to the influence of Friedrich Max Müller,Footnote 44 who influenced such notable churchmen as Dean Stanley,Footnote 45 and by the late nineteenth century fulfilment theology was openly propounded at missionary societies by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson.Footnote 46 The use of fulfilment theology was also common amongst Non-Conformists and Evangelicals, sometimes, for the latter, as a dimly remembered primordial revelation, sometimes termed the prisca theologia.Footnote 47 The wider ecumenical flow of such ideas was seen in fulfilment theology essentially being endorsed by the first great Protestant ecumenical conference of Edinburgh in 1910.Footnote 48 At that event, as a young man of just 28 years and serving as an usher, was William Temple. His influence would be significant at the next great ecumenical missionary conference at Jerusalem in 1928.
Before turning to that, it may be useful, as they are often treated together in this respect, to note the centrality of incarnation for both Temple and Michael Ramsey. For both, incarnation had a ‘central role in their thought’, so much that it has been termed for them ‘a kind of hermeneutical key for the whole theological task’, because ‘the Incarnation is the purest expression of the divine nature, and an expression of the eternal divine purpose’.Footnote 49 Also, again for both, incarnation was linked to both social justice and religious diversity, because: ‘as with Temple, there is something inherently incarnational about Ramsey’s whole approach to the Christian life’.Footnote 50 Neither Ramsey nor Temple though gave religious diversity a large amount of attention in their writings, but it was in the background of much of their work. Both may also be seen as according with general Anglican theological trends of their time in terms of how they viewed religious diversity, in ways that reflected what had gone before, and that would anticipate some of what would follow.
Focusing first on Temple, we may start by quoting from his Readings in John’s Gospel where he is commenting on the Prologue:
‘All that is noble in the non-Christian systems of thought, or conduct, or worship is the work of Christ upon them and within them. By the word of God – that is to say, by Jesus Christ – Isaiah and Plato, and Zoroaster, and Buddha, and Confucius conceived and uttered such truths as they declared. There is only one divine Light; and every man in his measure is enlightened by it’.Footnote 51
However, Temple continues by saying that for non-Christians: ‘this light is not recognized for what it is’ but, rather, he continues, ‘It has to shine through veils of prejudice and obsession’, he then continues to say that: ‘Christ is indeed the Desire of All Nations… yet… always more… than men desire until they learn of Him’, in what he sees as both culminating in ‘an act of self-surrender as well as of self-fulfilment’.Footnote 52 The notion of fulfilment theology, although the name was only given later, being clear in his language.
In 1928 at Jerusalem, Temple was accredited as author, though co-written with the American Presbyterian missionary Robert Elliot Speer,Footnote 53 of the paper ‘A Statement of the Case for Evangelization’ included in the final report just before, and framing, its conclusion.Footnote 54 The opening paragraph takes aim at the ‘comparative study of religion’ as not taking a Christian stance but treating all religions as ‘one general tendency of the human mind’ and further noting that if ‘it is allowed that one religion has more divine authority than another, this is understood to mean that it corresponds better with the real nature of the impulse that finds expression in all religions’.Footnote 55 Temple’s aim was to fend off criticism that the kind of finding of common ground, such as in the fulfilment theology of Edinburgh, was not ‘some sort of vicious syncretism’, or else ‘the denial by implication of the uniqueness of the Gospel’.Footnote 56
However, our particular interest is not so much in the wider framing of Temple’s case but his connection to the incarnation. We have cited Temple’s commentary on the Prologue above, and Temple also brings this up here: ‘For God did not at the time of the Incarnation first become what He is there revealed to be; the Incarnation is the self-disclosure, at a moment of time, of what God eternally is’.Footnote 57 We may gloss this by saying that the logos spermatikos is the essence of the Incarnation, and hence anyone speaking through this must be in accord with the person of Jesus in his life and teachings. This also gives more insight into Temple’s words above that while he believes that the Light shines in figures from Isaiah to Buddha to Zoroaster, this Light, for him, only comes ‘through veils of prejudice and obsession’.Footnote 58 While Jerusalem restated the fulfilment theology of Edinburgh, we can see within Temple not a belief that the world’s religious diversity represents a great ray of light, but that it is continually judged in relation to what he sees as Christian truth. There is an incarnational aspect to his thinking about religious diversity but it is not a generous reading. We may note also that within the wider Church, as it moved towards the next major ecumenical missionary conference at Tambaram in 1938, there was a more conservative mood represented by Hendrik Kraemer’s The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World.Footnote 59 This text has been seen as critical of theologians such as Temple, though Temple also wrote an endorsement of it as ‘likely to remain for many years the classical treatment of its theme’.Footnote 60
Ramsey only ever makes passing reference to religious diversity, but interestingly places his ideas in relation to ‘the theme of Charles Gore’s Bampton Lectures The Incarnation of the Son of God (1891) and… William Temple’s Christus Veritas (1925)’.Footnote 61 He frames this more widely around a ‘process philosophy’ approach that includes the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin which he links to ‘the biblical theme of the divine Word in nature and history’.Footnote 62 His reference to religious diversity is not overly positive saying simply that ‘the inadequacy of the world’s religions will be shown only by Christians who reverence in them the divine logos who lightens every man’,Footnote 63 and in the next paragraph furthers the Johannine incarnational linkage:
‘The Incarnation was not only the condescension of Creator to creature, of infinite to finite, but also the condescension of the wisdom of the divine Word to the modes of human utterance’.Footnote 64
I would just cite one more idea from this short, and quite popular, essay by Ramsey, which he sums up in a short sentence: ‘Theology needs openness’.Footnote 65
It is useful to put Ramsey in some context: ‘By the time Michael Ramsey became archbishop of Canterbury in 1961, developments both in England and in the international Anglican Communion made the task [meaning here, of “encounter (with) other faiths”] more present and more urgent’.Footnote 66 By the time he left the office in 1974 texts such as Nostra Aetate and Lumen Gentium had emerged from the Second Vatican Council, while the World Council of Churches’ (WCC) 1967 meeting in Kandy, Sri Lanka had discussed ‘Christians in dialogue with Men [sic] of Other Faiths’ and founded its own dialogue unit in 1971, this latter partly a response to the Vatican’s own dialogue unit, now known as the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.Footnote 67 In terms of Anglican reflection on interreligious understanding, this is all part of the wider story.Footnote 68 However, interreligious dialogue and the theology of religions remained marginal in most Anglican debates until at least the very end of the twentieth century, and really only in the twenty-first century did it assume much institutional significance.Footnote 69 This change reflected the wider influence of the churches of the Global South, but also the post 9/11 context wherein interfaith become a matter of significance for policy makers and in governance.Footnote 70 Though, to some extent, the idea that interfaith relations are of recent concern marks a very Euro-centric, we may say here Anglo-centric, vision of Anglican and wider Christian, concerns. That little significant thought on religious diversity occurred within mainstream Anglican thinking is, arguably, shown by the 1995 Church of England report The Mystery of Salvation, which simply returned to propounding a form of fulfilment theology that would have been recognized in Edinburgh in 1910.Footnote 71
There have, though, been significant Anglican theologians within the British context engaging religious diversity, but I can only briefly mention them in passing. One is Maurice Wiles who offers a generous sounding inclusivist approach building from Rahner’s work but has had little lasting influence,Footnote 72 while Keith Ward’s significant work on comparative theology had an incarnational aspect.Footnote 73 Alan Race’s Christians and Religious Pluralism remains seminal,Footnote 74 while, the former Catholic Perry Schmidt-Leukel, who was at Glasgow for nine years, has, arguably, done more than anyone else to make a theological case for pluralism.Footnote 75 The work of these two must be placed in relation to John Hick’s groundbreaking work on theorizing the pluralistic hypothesis in the theology of religions.Footnote 76 Missiological figures such as Kenneth Cragg are also part of Anglican reflection on religious diversity.Footnote 77
We can also mention John Robinson, who as a Bishop of Woolwich is arguably the most senior Anglican ecclesiastical figure to contribute to this literature substantially in the latter half of the twentieth century. In his short book focusing mainly on relating Christianity to Hinduism, Truth is Two-Eyed, he argues that we need to combine the ideas of East and West.Footnote 78 His ideas are not especially radical nor novel, and in a similar vein, on the combination of East and West, the British convert to Catholicism (from Anglicanism) and monk Bede Griffiths has probably had a more lasting influence in popular theology.Footnote 79 However, Robinson stands perhaps for a wider strand of radical Anglican theology that thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, that pushed at boundaries that align with the interests of this paper, and included figures such as Harry Williams, Alec Vidler and Donald MacKinnon, a number of whom contributed to texts such as Objections to Christian Belief that challenged the accepted orthodoxy of their day, and moved towards what we may term as a polydox approach to Christianity.Footnote 80 For some, social and political issues were also of concern.Footnote 81
I turn now to Rowan Williams. Covering him within the remit of twentieth-century theology may seem odd, especially as I primarily quote some of his work from the twenty-first century. However, his thinking on religious diversity is best seen in terms of the trends noted already. While we noted his critique of incarnation above, Ward and others have observed how his intertwined theology and spirituality have incarnationalism at the core,Footnote 82 including in the profound impact of Eastern Orthodox thought.Footnote 83 With respect to religious diversity, Williams addressed the WCC as follows in 2006:
‘when others appear to have arrived at a place where forgiveness and adoption are sensed and valued, even when these things are not directly spoken of in the language of another faith’s mainstream reflection are we to say that God has not found a path for himself ?’Footnote 84
This potentially speaks of a radical openness to religious diversity, especially when he further stated: ‘If we are truly learning how to be in that relation with God and the world in which Jesus of Nazareth stood, we shall not turn away from those who see from another place’. This, he suggests, is part of a turn away from the approach where we ask not ‘How do we convict them of error? How do we win the competition of ideas?’ but instead we come with an approach that asks, ‘What do they actually see? And can what they see be a part of the world that I see?’Footnote 85 We can connect his words to the turn, since Ramsey’s time, towards dialogue. Yet despite Rowan Williams’ rhetoric of openness, his approach to religious diversity is still marked by limits to what he sees as its significance to Christians. In his essay ‘The Finality of Christ’,Footnote 86 he has asked: ‘What is it that makes religious meanings self-enclosed, self-referential, self-justifying?’,Footnote 87 pointing to the way that, it seems, for him, despite his words of openness as seen in the WCC speech he brings everything back to be located within a frame predetermined in advance by a Christian message. Therefore, against his openness as rhetoric, Rowan Williams like most of those I have referenced so far hold that the truth of the Christian message is never questioned in relation to religious diversity.Footnote 88 To add a final note, speaking in reference to the question of the existence of God and what we can actually be certain of, or we may say in relation to notions of atheism and unbelief, Williams has suggested, like Job and the Psalmists, that doubt is intrinsic to faith.Footnote 89 I shall come back to this doubt at the end of the paper.
Incarnation, Social Justice and Diversity
As I will further elucidate here, from the late nineteenth century the question of incarnationalism has been linked to both social justice and religious diversity. To stress the Anglican centrality of social justice, I will turn to an essay by the Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba.Footnote 90 He states that: ‘For Anglicans there has never been and never could be any distinct division between public and private, political and personal, when it comes to matters of faith and their application’.Footnote 91 He sees this represented in the funeral of the South African liberation leader Oliver Tambo in 1993 in the Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg despite Tambo’s not being an Anglican, seeing this as ‘a typical Anglican way of declaring God to the world’.Footnote 92 Of course, Makgoba could have begun his story centuries earlier with Henry VIII’s decision to split from Rome and the tradition since then that, with some interpretations, has linked the Church of England to monarchy and politics, although in differing ways within those territories we now term the United Kingdom. Such a tradition has often seen Anglicans aligning with power and in the oft-heard phrase that ‘the Church of England is the Tory Party at prayer’. But Makgoba notes also what he terms ‘Principles and Praxis’ that link Anglicanism to Jesus’ ‘promise of good news to all who have been impoverished in any way: sight to the blind and blinded, liberation in the face of all oppression and the Lord’s favour extended to everyone (Luke 4, which can be read as Jesus’ manifesto for his own ministry)’.Footnote 93
Kwok, meanwhile, sees Temple’s work on social justice as part of an ‘Anglican tradition of social thought that is relevant for thinking about contemporary issues’,Footnote 94 and ‘can be traced back to Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Gore’.Footnote 95 Kwok furthermore discusses the wider traditions of Christian socialism in Anglicanism and its various roots/routes,Footnote 96 in drawing the way towards its contemporary relevance.Footnote 97 If one sees the importance of the bodily, of incarnation, then the question of how bodies are treated becomes central, even down, with Scott Holland, to the question of drains. Questions of salvation become, in other words, not simply otherworldly but this worldly. Salvation of course denotes, via the Greek soter, a healer or healing. To be someone who heals, therefore, is not simply about looking to the soul but also the body and in many early Fathers, and presumably also the Mothers whose voices were not recorded, the eschatological vision was not simply about leaving this world to a heavenly Jerusalem but about the transformation of this world into a renewed Eden.Footnote 98 Social justice sees this as not simply an eschatological concern but one that requires work in the here and now.Footnote 99
This concern with our neighbours brings us, I would contend inevitably, to the question of how we deal with diversity. During Ramsey’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury one question he dealt with in the House of Lords was a bill going through Parliament concerning Kenyan immigrants and whether a distinction be made between Black and White Kenyans, a proposal which he argued strongly against.Footnote 100 While not a question of interreligious concern, which was not his primary interest,Footnote 101 we see Ramsey’s passionate involvement with questions of social justice in relation to racism. Indeed, arguably, a sea change within British thinking about religious diversity came with immigration where it was not simply a question about ‘the mission field’ but about neighbours, colleagues and friends.Footnote 102 It was also a question for others such as Robinson amongst others.Footnote 103
I believe the issue of race and religion cannot easily be separated. For one thing, the creation of the conception of ‘religion’ is itself a racialized narrative.Footnote 104 For another, once we ask who our neighbour is and what our relation is to them, we raise many issues about self and other, especially within the bounds of hospitality.Footnote 105 How do we relate to Others? What we may learn from them? What are our borders and boundaries to those we consider other than ourselves? It was, indeed, in facing down racist thugs in Christian activism on the streets that John Hick, at the time in Birmingham, first became truly aware of religious diversity and was led by his experience of meeting people of other religions to develop his theory of pluralism.Footnote 106 In other words, social justice can lead us from questions of neighbours to questions of how we understand not just ethnic or racial diversity but also religious diversity. Ramsey suggested that what was needed in theology was an ‘openness’ and this, arguably, is what Hick may represent here. Indeed, an incarnational hospitality to see, as Rowan Williams suggests, from where the other sees and be with them may lead us towards such a radical openness.Footnote 107 In other words, we may argue that incarnationalism, hospitality, social justice and religious diversity must be bound together. In today’s world, though space does not permit this point to be worked through at length, this also entails non-religion, or the nones, as integral. I realise my argument here is more suggestive than fully worked through, though these themes have been dealt with by myself and others elsewhere.Footnote 108
Towards a Polydox Anglican Incarnational Theology of Religious and Non-Religious Diversity
While this paper has so far drawn mainly from male British theologians,Footnote 109 as noted above we need to be engaged in the act of, as Kwok puts it, ‘decentring the centre’.Footnote 110 For Kwok, emphasizing how social justice and interreligious relations go together entails, she argues, ‘interreligious solidarity’.Footnote 111 She sees this going beyond ‘the colonial legacy’ that has shaped ‘racial, ethnic and religious relationships’ and beyond ‘the gentleman’s conversation among religious leaders representing diverse religious traditions’.Footnote 112 In other words, religious diversity cannot be approached on older models of dialogue or the theology of religions. I will return to this below, but first I will address some contemporary global Anglican reflection on interreligious understanding.
The Japanese Anglican theologian Kayama Hiroto takes an incarnational theology as his basis for thinking theology in Northeast Asia.Footnote 113 As Kwok reads him, he is asking how can an Anglican theology ‘be an incarnational theology in Asia’?Footnote 114 It is worth considering what Niroko means by an incarnational theology of which he says:
‘Incarnational theology is theology that is modelled on the manner in which God’s spirit became flesh, in other words a theology based on the norm that ideas of modes of thought should be given concrete form in social and political reality’.Footnote 115
As such it accords with much we have seen already in the tradition. But Hiroto, Kwok suggests, wants to go beyond the binary of us and them, Christian and non-Christian, with a ‘third way’ in which people can bring ‘Christian and Asian cultures’ together ‘organically… in creative ways’.Footnote 116 This moves beyond simply positing an Anglican theology as something which negates binaries towards a ‘third theology’,Footnote 117 which Hiroto suggests can be a ‘third way’, relating the concept of ‘way’ here to the Chinese dao (as in Daoism). This term can be translated as ‘way’, ‘path’, or ‘road’ yet has far richer connotations,Footnote 118 and so making, Kwok notes, something distinctly Asian.Footnote 119 Hiroto’s argument is that Anglican incarnationalism offers us a third way beyond a simply intellectualized rejection or acceptance of other cultures and religions in Christian theology.
Importantly, typical Western, and generally Protestant, inspired conceptions of religion, often termed the ‘world religions paradigm’,Footnote 120 fail utterly in comprehending the religious ecology of Sinitic East Asia as does our normal language of multiple religious belonging, which Kwok claims Hiroto wants to go beyond.Footnote 121 Rather, within the Sinitic context, we see what has been termed strategic religious participation in a shared religious landscape.Footnote 122 In other words, within such a context people do not so much belong to fixed religious identities/ institutions (though these exist) but work with the assumption that all traditions are related and so they make use of those which are most suited for the task in hand.Footnote 123 I am not suggesting that this conception is necessarily what Hiroto is advocating, as he does not explain this point; nevertheless it is contextually explains the issue. Although his argument is more suggestive than definitive, the following quote is of interest to us concerning how he characterizes both Anglican theology as a whole and his own approach:
‘Not only is this theology an on-the-road theology, it is most definitely the route itself and is always in the process of change. Therefore, we do not need to detect its completed form in the history of the Church of England. Rather, it must be the case that one can find Anglican ways of life in various contexts in the here and now’.Footnote 124
In other words, Hiroto is not so much outlining a systematic approach to Anglican theology, rather he is proposing that the resources of Anglican theology offer us guidelines that we can adapt and change to our situation. This approach suggests that what we develop on the ongoing journey may differ from what has previously manifested historically. This is important. Therefore, here, somewhat after the style of Hiroto, I am offering some guidelines or principles rather than an overarching theory.
Hiroto’s theology is ecumenical in drawing from other Asian theologies. While his theology is rooted, in Anglican fashion, in social justice, he draws from both Korean Minjung (People’s) theology and a wider Asian liberation theology.Footnote 125 Moreover, in an Asian context, his work combines incarnationalism, social justice and reflection on religious diversity. This accords with Kwok’s vision of a ‘commitment to interreligious dialogue and solidarity in the Global South [that] means crossing boundaries, establishing relationships and maintaining goodwill for all peoples in trying times’.Footnote 126
This crossing of borders, of being with neighbours, of seeing in Rowan Williams phrasing where they see from, can within an incarnational hospitality mode lead us, with Hiroto, down new roads and to new visions. Looking incarnationally at people’s lived bodily experiences can lead us to taking seriously Korean women’s theologies which reject a stress on just one tradition.Footnote 127 Indeed, ‘Korean theologian Seung Chul Kim argues that, in the Asian context, Christians are inherently interpenetrated by many religious imaginaries’,Footnote 128 something perhaps most famously summed up by Chung Hyun Kyung:
‘When people ask me what I am religiously, I say, “My bowel is Shamanist. My heart is Buddhist. My right brain, which defines my mood, is Confucian and Taoist. My left brain, which defines my public language, is Protestant Christian, and overall, my aura is eco-feminist”’.Footnote 129
Kim relates his ideas to the African experience.Footnote 130 In Anglican polydox and multi-devotional theology, this has been related to arguments by the African American Methodist Episcopal theologian and minister Monica Coleman,Footnote 131 who states:
‘An individual – or even entire communities – can be multi-religious in religious traditions with different scriptures and conflicting theological tenets (including the monism or multiplicity of deities) because religious experience focuses more on religious practice than it does on confessional stance’.Footnote 132
Let me unpack what has been unfolded in this section so far. Firstly, the focus on the experiential is utterly incarnational, and it is akin to a Logos theology that sees the divine as embedded in people’s lives, visions and experiences. In the terms discussed here, the Logos, the presence of the transcendent, is within all and in all across every culture, tradition and religious system, such that what Christians have traditionally called ‘God’ is seen and manifested everywhere. This should not be read Platonically but, incarnationally, as deeply embodied and manifested in lives and expressions of how people live out their lives in relation to how they experience the One and the Many.Footnote 133 Secondly, the vision offered both in some figures in our historical survey and here does not start within predetermined limits of what has happened historically. Rather, it entails following Spirit-Sophia wheresoever She leads.Footnote 134 As a road still being travelled, as Hiroto suggests, I would argue that an Anglican incarnational theology of religions should take us to new experiences, new teachings, new ways of experiencing.Footnote 135 Thirdly, and I suggest essentially, this entails being embedded in interreligious solidarity which may appeal to liberation theologies. For Kwok, this is necessitated by going beyond the older masculinistFootnote 136 model of relationship and dialogue. Theology today, I further posit, requires us to witness against the imperial, racist, antisemitic legacy of religious traditions as well as other forces of inequity in the world.Footnote 137 Fourthly, it requires us to think, as Kwok suggests, a polydoxy which ‘debunks the myth of the superiority of one God, one creed and one church and holds multiple traditions and perspectives together when looking at God and reality’. Moreover, she states: ‘A theology of multiplicity seeks company and does not reduce the Other into the Same’.Footnote 138 As I and others have also argued, a polydox theology seems the only intellectually viable option for a credible Christian theology today,Footnote 139 when it is clear that there are, and only ever have been, multiple Christianities.Footnote 140
A Preliminary Drawing Together of Connections
This paper has taken an ambitious aim, to point towards principles of an incarnational, polydox and decolonial Anglican theology of religious and non-religious diversity. However, this is not a marginal project because the argument is that this is what Anglican theology must be today: there is no return to a parochial, Anglo-centric, masculinist, imagined orthodoxy. The approach outlined here is based on four principles or guidelines: a polydox theology that takes radical openness to religious, and non-religious, diversity as a norm;Footnote 141 a liberationist interreligious solidarity; an openness to journey in/ with Spirit-Sophia in new directions; and an incarnational insistence on lived, embodied realities, experiences and practices. I argue that this approach rather than departing radically from the heritage of Anglican theology actually draws from sources that have existed since at least the mid to late nineteenth century and that can draw from such figures as Rowland Williams, Gore, Scott Holland, Temple and Rowan Williams. These principles are also offered with an awareness that they, as developed here, draw primarily from a particular location, that is taking heavy inspiration from East Asian contexts and these may not resonate in all locations. For instance, for Dalit theologians in South Asia there has often been a rejection of indigenous resources and drawing from what was an oppressive Hindu society, though there may be agreement on at least some points.Footnote 142 As such, these are as noted simply guidelines and not a definitive statement of what should be, though as noted based in an orientation that is imperative for future Anglican theologies. A polydox approach suggests that there will never be a singular theological voice but always multiplicity, and so these are advanced with a humble sense of their locatedness. Nevertheless, it is hoped that they will reach beyond their original context especially as they draw widely both from tradition and the contemporary Global Anglican experience.Footnote 143
When Scott Holland suggested that the theology curricula be expanded to include non-Christian traditions, his proposition was too radical for his times, but the movement towards a theology that is open to listening to what the Other has to say has not gone away. Rather, through figures such as Kwok and Hiroto we see it today in an expanded vision of interreligious solidarity and polydoxy. A concern with the Other in their embodied actuality, a concern with drains and social justice, leads us via a radical hospitality to realize that the borders of tradition – born historically via empire and power play – should not bind us to one vision of what is religion, what is theology, what is Christianity, what is Anglicanism. Taking seriously Rowan Williams’ doubt, we must abandon old certainties. Instead, a contemporary global Anglican incarnational theology can embrace various visions of the Many and the One in a shared vision of interreligious solidarity.
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