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.