Month: June 2025

War with Trolls

Chris Swift2 Comments

Norway is a country of stunning beauty which experiences, for some of the year, either endless light or total darkness. I can’t quite imagine what winter must be like here, with deep cold as well as an absence of the sun. In summer it is awash with light, at all hours. Perhaps the drama of this experience accounts for the great composers and poets who have come from Norway.

Henrik Ibsen is Norway’s celebrated playwright and the author of the world’s most frequently performed plays (after those of Shakespeare). Ibsen is highly critical of clergy and what he sees as the inhuman demands of upholding a certain kind of Christian Orthodoxy. As an outstanding dramatist, Ibsen crafts his plays to reflect and expose the failings of key institutions and how individuals strive to live authentic lives despite the ingrained failures and disappointments arising from the unattainable expectations of society. As Ibsen reflected from his Norwegian context: “To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul”. His plays go a long way to identify some of these trolls.

“the tragic poets and dramatists, such as Ibsen, those who seem to understand something like holiness, and that life’s real question, ‘the psycho-moral dilemma’, as Arthur Miller calls it, is not ‘How do I feel about God?’ but ‘What dealings have I with God?’, not as a concept but as the leading character in the unfolding drama”.

Goroncy, J. A. (2006). Bitter Tonic for our Time–Why the Church needs the World: Peter Taylor Forsyth on Henrik Ibsen. European journal of theology, 15(2).

As I mentioned in last week’s blog, during my time away I have been reading Hanna Reichel’s After Method: queer grace, conceptual design, and the possibility of theology. It is not a quick read, but one that has captivated my attention and provided lucid language to describe and interrogate issues in theology I have long experienced, but not always found the framework to express. At its heart this concerns the tensions, and illegibilities, between systematic theology and constructive theology. To illustrate this let me describe some correspondence from many years ago, which relates to something I experienced in ministry and wrote about previously: neonatal loss. From time to time I have been asked to baptise a baby that has died, or was alive only briefly, assisted by significant medical intervention. As I explored this and what it means, theologically, I came across a note in Common Worship written by the illustrious octogenarian (as of yesterday) and onetime Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oliver O’Donovan. O’Donovan, a former professor of systematic theology, writes: “You cannot baptize someone who is dead”.

From the standpoint of systematic theology this is consistent with Scripture; the history of Church doctrine; and the practice of the Church’s ministry. Well, it is and it isn’t. As I discovered when researching this topic, the Church in its history has found ways round this situation to preserve doctrine and meet the pastoral needs of parents. This creativity lead to the creation of “resurrection chapels” where an apparently deceased child could be handed to a priest, who then disappeared into a chapel, and came back saying that the baby had miraculously been resurrected for a moment, baptised, but then – alas – died. This enabled the veneer of orthodoxy to be preserved while meeting the earnest and sincere needs of parents. In a desire to sustain a credible doctrinal position the Church tolerated these kinds of “work arounds” but failed to allow the realities of human experience to interrogate the substance of systematic theology itself.

The core problem, it seems to me, is that the attempt to uphold a systematic understanding of faith at all costs results in a punished humanity and a pedestrian God. A theological educator said to me some years ago, with an evident sense of relief, that he was so glad they’d abandoned the use of “case studies” in the seminary where he taught. Tales from the frontline of Christian living can be very inconvenient for certain kinds of theology. Preaching at Evensong in an Oxford college, I happened to mention a pastoral call I’d received in the early hours of that day from the northern hospital where I worked. The Master thanked me afterwards for bringing in some “réalité”. It amused me that a French word was required to express the real life that had intruded into the college chapel. The question arises, what kind of theology emerges when human life is stripped out of the equation? For some key critical commentators it is theology devoid of “the messiness of incarnation and real peoples’ lives”, which makes it difficult to imagine what use it is to the people orthodoxy claims to be at the centre of God’s mission.

Monstrous Theology

Chris Swift1 Comment

Over the centuries theologians have defended the continuation of slavery; National Socialism in Germany; and the creation of Apartheid. This is only to reference some of the most obscene and horrific examples of the countless ways in which theology has been corrupted. The Bible pillaged for verses to undergird human atrocities, deprivations of dignity and squalid efforts to impose conformity.

In a recent performance of Esther’s Revenge during the Leeds Lit Festival I was reminded once again of this disturbing truth. Esther – played by Bola Atiteba – entered her trial, in the setting of Leeds Minster, holding a Bible. While she clutched it close for much of the performance, it was never cited. No verses were read, yet its silent presence reminded the audience that the Good Book has been used to justify wickedness and, simultaneously, to inspire those who oppose everything that diminishes human life.

The monstrous abuse of Scripture, to enable the destruction of others, has been going on from at least the time its oral state was transformed into text. I have recently started reading Hanna Reichel’s fascinating new book After Method: queer grace, conceptual design, and the possibility of theology. It begins with the question as to whether we need better theology, responding in part to Kevin Garcia’s provocatively titled Bad Theology Kills. As Reichel puts it:

“I baulked at how the church hierarchy in Argentina had been hopelessly complicit in the dictatorship. Had their theology not protected them from the seductions of power and fear, even saw in their survival a greater good over the lives that they abandoned and betrayed?”

Reichel, H. (2023). After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology. Presbyterian Publishing Corp.

Reichel’s words are an encouraging affirmation of what I have long believed as a chaplain. Theology should be written in intensive care, not behind the walls of ivy-clad colleges. Charles Taylor puts it succinctly in his seminal work, A Secular Age, when he laments the tendency of the Church to be ‘excarnational’. For Taylor, many theologians have failed to live up to their promise because they have driven the discipline into their heads at the cost of embodied experience and learning. This has promoted theologies that have ignored the human cost of beliefs legitimated by centres of power and education.

Heading this blog is a photograph of an installation – ‘Beast’ – by the American artist Matthew Angelo Harrison. It is featured in the inaugural exhibition of PoMo, the new gallery of modern art in Trondheim, Norway. The beast is encased in a block of polyurethane resin: like a prehistoric creature preserved in amber. However, Harrison’s work is a monster of our own time, created and immersed in acrylic only last year. Attempting to photograph such an object is not easy. Wherever I was standing, my reflection was captured. Perhaps that was Harrison’s intent. We can look at the otherness of the terrifying but make little effort to identify our own complicity in its creation. As Reichel puts it, bad theology is always at work in the creation of ‘us-and-them’ myths that strive to legitimate monstrous deeds. There are those who might think that the easy answer is to dump theology as a whole. However, disposing of words won’t abolish the things to which they refer. Theology – good theology – will always be needed, because human beings will never cease to contest questions about ultimate purposes, what is sacred, and how we treat one another as we seek to determine our destiny.

Power & Glory?

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I am reading Pat Baker’s latest instalment in her retelling of aspects of the Trojan War, in which the experiences of women are foregrounded. In The Voyage Home male power is also observed, and the restrictions of high office are described. On a superficial level, the acquisition of power implies the ability to choose – to do what you wish. In reality, people in power often find themselves constrained by all kinds of weighty expectations. In the Church, a vicar might have a wide scope for action and strategic choice, especially if leadership involves and respects the wishes of others. For a diocesan bishop, even before assuming office, the diary will already be full of duties and obligations which it is simply ‘expected’ (or required) that the bishop will fulfil.

In her book Baker imagines Agamemnon arguing with Queen Clytemnestra on his return home:

“You’ve had power for the last ten years. How easy have you found it?” He sees her look away. “No, you see? It doesn’t solve everything, does. it? In fact, it’s bloody amazing how many things you can’t do with power”.

In the New Testament, Paul quotes Jesus saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”. Looking at the life of Christ, and his ministry over three years, the paradox was that his power appeared to lie in the inability of the world to offer him anything he wanted. The whole of the temptations in the wilderness serve to confirm this refusal to be suborned. Standing before Pilate, Jesus suggests that he isn’t the one who is powerless. Pilate’s power comes from somewhere else – he’s a delegate, not a free agent. Jesus may be the captive, but he exercises the refusal to collude in the compromise that could secure his freedom – at a price.

We don’t need to feel sorry for the world’s powerful men and women. They live in gilded worlds and, somewhere along the line, they have chosen this way of life. Chosen it by standing for election, amassing wealth, or by electing not to exercise the ability to resign or abdicate. The example of Jesus reminds us that real power, sacred power, lies elsewhere. For Pope Francis it was important that the shepherds bore the scent of the sheep. This is not remote ‘flock management’ but a spirit of service that sees the shepherd in the heart of the fold. I believe that while this is spiritually significant it is also essential for theology to be useful. A priest cannot be everywhere, but a priest can touch closely many different spheres of life. In chaplaincy in the NHS I experienced it in the wide variety of people with whom I would speak in the course of a week. A CEO; mortuary staff; the delivery suit; the grieving; someone celebrating their 100th birthday; a nurse taking a moment to pause on ICU. Theology is about a God in relationship with everyone, and the power to listen to people in a wide range of settings expands our understanding of God, and the divine purpose for the world which God’s infinite love brought into being.