Image by @MythAddict

The current controversy around online eucharists animating a good deal of Christian social media represents a new chapter in the churches’ long history of wrestling with questions thrown up by eucharistic practice.

While theologians have debated online sacraments before, I doubt that they have had in mind this peculiar conjunction of elements: whole communities in lockdown nationwide and across the globe; relatively widespread access to reliable, easy-to-use videoconferencing tools in the home; and the relatively widespread acceptance of and familiarity with such technologies. While churches have known times of plague and restricted Eucharistic practice before, the conjunction of these elements today seems new. And so we are facing an impetus to think about Eucharistic practice and theology afresh.

Commenting on Twitter on Rev Dr Julie Gittoes’ recent Church Times article on fasting from the eucharist as a eucharistic practice, I suggested we might find the concept of ‘multiple emergency integrities’ helpful in this situation and in respect of that controversy. I want to have a go here at trying to explain what that might mean, as a way of beginning to test that proposal.

The basic idea is not that anything goes, nor the tolerance of mutually exclusive options or relativism. Rather, what I mean is the recognition that in this unprecedented situation there may be no one way of upholding unimpaired shared commitments around Eucharistic practice and theology. Instead, in the name of those commitments there may be several ways of seeking to honour them, which are provisional and experimental, and present different practical options for holding together those commitments under the strain of the present emergency.

To show what I mean, I’m going to sketch an Anglican Eucharistic theology that is fairly minimal and in keeping with the written forms of Order One of Common Worship (CW), which is an authorised liturgy of the Church of England (C of E). I’ve gone for COmmon Worship on the assumption that it is more widely and frequently used in the C of E than the Book of Common Prayer, and represents a genuine development of Eucharistic theology in continuity with the BCP and yet also goes beyond it in taking onboard insights from the C20th liturgical movement, liturgical theology, and the riches of early Christian tradition. I’m also trying to keep in mind the C of E’s canons, the relevant Articles of religion and the Lord’s Supper liturgy in the BCP itself. I’m mindful too that this will be more descriptive of the Church’s official doctrine as expressed in its authorised liturgy and historic formularies, that local practice varies quite a bit, and that there may be more breadth to actual operative and espoused Eucharistic theologies in the Church than its official forms would seem to afford!

In Common Worship, the service of Holy Communion is an act celebrated by the gathered people, in the presence of God and by the enabling of God. That corporation work is performed together with the help of the uniting ministry of the ordained president, and through the people’s participation verbally and physically in all the actions of the liturgy.

The people gather in order to confess their sins and be assured of God’s forgiveness, to praise God, to attend to God’s Word in the reading and exposition of the Scriptures. They celebrate and give thanks to God for God’s gifts of creation and redemption as they gather around the Lord’s Table. There they recall the story of creation and redemption, and pray for the coming of God’s Spirit so that, as they participate in the ritual meal instituted by Christ to remember his death and resurrection and look forward to his coming, they may share also in his redeemed, renewed humanity and so be united in him. They do so looking forward to the coming of the kingdom of God, its peace and its justice, and the intimate direct communion with God prefigured in this feast. And, in at least some of the Eucharistic prayers, they connect that longing with the cries of our contemporaries and voice that solidarity in intercessions for the earth, the sick and the oppressed, and for the empowerment of the church, presumably to stand with them, to work for what the kingdom will bring. They thus offer themselves thankfully, as living sacrifices, in the service of God, ‘to live and work to your praise and glory.’

With a nod toward the eucharistic theology of the late Dan Hardy, we could see the vision of Holy Communion set forth in Common Worship as a gathering up in the Spirit into a formative intensification, orientation and renewal of the complex meanings, affects, and dynamics of weekly Christian lives in, with, from, against and for the world, in order to be sent forth again. And it is the work of the Spirit, forming socially the body of Christ by means of the forms of Word and sacrament, repentance, prayer and praise, which intensifies, orients and renews. That, we are told, is what is offered us by Christ in this way.

That is also the context in which to think with the liturgy about the relationship between Christ, the believing community, and the elements. The emphasis in CW, as in the BCP, is on present participation in Christ’s body and blood, alluding to 1 Corinthians 10:16-21. The BCP does so with the goal of assurance, forgiveness, eternal security, and sanctification, CW with more of a missional and eschatological direction. But participation or communion, rather than presence or even reception, seems to be the key category in both. The invocation of the Spirit in CW’s eucharistic prayers varies a little in its somewhat ambiguous petitions. Nevertheless, the overall tendency is to ask for the Spirit to come down upon the people’s action of remembering Christ’s death with the elements of bread and wine in order that, by consuming them, the people may feed on Christ’s body and blood by faith, and be united in him, offer themselves to God and eventually be gathered into the feast of the kingdom. The prayers envisage the elements consecrated in this prayer not as containers or modes of a local presence of Christ (the Article’s and BCP rule this out explicitly), nor do they lose their creaturely natures. Rather, within the action they become signs by which the faithful participate in what they signify. By the Spirit, they mean Christ’s body and blood, and the meaning of Christ is, for the believers, inseparable from the truth or reality of Christ, because of who he is and because has sent the Spirit to witness to him in these and other ways.

Where does this leave questions of Eucharistic practice in the time of coronavirus? I think it is possible to see diverse approaches as seeking to honour this sort of understanding of the Eucharist within the straightened forms of sociality possible under lockdown, as prioritising different aspects of it and finding ways to honour the others in more strained ways (not that Eucharistic practices were without some strains and compromises already).

Let’s take three typical examples, assuming for the sake of argument that the communities and their presbyters (or priests) in all of them are adhering to the Archbishops’ guidance about not entering churches, are broadly signed up to these beliefs about the Eucharist, and are variously active in supporting others pastorally and practically. Let’s also assume that they hold that participation in Christ is not limited to the Eucharist but that it has an especial value in making it explicit and mediating its social dimensions.

We could imagine a community that is holding online Eucharists, led by the president, where everyone participates in the liturgy and partakes of elements in their own home. We could imagine another which has decided to fast from the Eucharist and pursue other forms of maintaining worship and fellowship in common. And we could imagine a third where the presbyter leads a service of Holy Communion but only those in their own household partake of the elements, while others watch, give thanks for their spiritual communion with Christ and as to receive him in their hearts. NB: as has been pointed out to me, the Church of England in its Coronavirus Guidance for Holy Week and Easter has endorsed the second and third options, and explicitly ruled the first out. It is nevertheless worth thinking through as a logical possibility and as something some parishes seem to have tried, at least prior to this guidance being published and received.

The first community celebrating the Eucharist together online might judge that the proper priority in its context and for its members and their Christian life and witness is to maximise the integrity of its members’ explicit, sacramental participation in the rite and the Supper, that the resources involved are worth dedicating to that goal, and that for that purpose the exclusion of those without the Internet is better than no eucharist at all, and that the strained form of its gathering is a bearable compromise with the form of the liturgy and its socialising function. Indeed, they might argue, it preserves that function, albeit with limited bandwidth, at a time when it is sorely needed. This approach would raise the most significant questions for the Church if it were proposed it should be regularised for less extraordinary times, and that controversy in prospect is reflected, I suspect, in the Church’s guidance.

The second, fasting community might judge that it is more fitting, more appropriate to the dispersed nature of its life in its context (and to the impaired character of gathering online) to fast from that most social and corporate form of Christian worship. It might do so confident that its members are not cut off from Christ, and that they can extend and improvise other ways of maintain fellowship and common prayer, and still feed on the Word of God in sharing the scriptures, online, by phone or through letters or emails. They might also judge that with limited resources they might better put their limited resources and energies into supporting more vulnerable member states if their civic communities, including those who are poor and/or marginalised, in whom  one may also encounter the Risen Christ who keeps his solidarity with them.

The third Christian community represens in effect a middle way between these stances, offering a way of allowing many of its members to see and hear the Eucharist and benefit thereby, while compromising the community’s participation in the sacrament (though not in Christ) for the sake of maximal integrity of the connection between gathering and participation, and perhaps thereby reducing the amount of resources needed, which may be freed up for other forms of care and service. It is also an approach which, in contrast to the first, avoids raising serious questions for those Anglicans who maintain, on the basis of the manual actions in the rubrics of the BCP, that the physical proximity of the priest to all the elements is essential in their consecration. I’m grateful to those who’ve pointed this out to me on Twitter.

Essentially my thesis is that there is a significant degree of integrity – of principled coherence and fidelity to the Eucharistic theology of the CW liturgy – in each of these options. It is not obvious that any of them is so straightforwardly and thoroughly impaired as to be unconscionable, though there are significant challenges that can be made to each. It is not yet obvious that one of them should stand as a general rule for every Eucharistic community in every context. There may be value, rather, in seeing what reflections and developments emerge from each experiment, before drawing firm doctrinal and regulatory conclusions.

(Image by GoToVan (CC-BY 2.0) www.flickr.com/people/47022937@N03))

There’s a couple of theological ideas I keep thinking about in relation to the practical challenges and demands of the current situation. I mean the added stress and fear involved in all kinds of ways of trying to be responsible, to care in some way, while we all face the common threat and uncertainty of coronavirus, and the challenges of current restrictions, whether shopping, in other public spaces, or while staying at home, and as keyworkers, volunteers, neighbours, colleagues, friends or family or when indeed communicating on social media.

The ordinary fears and demands of social practices, which vary in intensity, according to circumstances and social positioning, for all kinds of reasons, are greatly heightened, as we know. For some of us, that’s an additional weight to a familiar experience of fear and stress around certain chronic situations or circumstances. For others, the sense of a profound uncontrollable vulnerability to powerful forces, outside our control but at the door, is new and deeply disconcerting, as Kate Bowler points out in a recent podcast.

I suspect most of us have ways of talking ourselves through this, as far as we can. My hunch is that a lot of the stuff of everyday living as a sort of moral experience involves not highflown reflection or terribly quandaries but the resort to what we can rummage from assorted aids to getting by, quotidian scraps of wisdom, that we have to hand in the toolkits or rag bags of our memories. We might reach for well-tried maxims or mottos, familiar sayings, song lyrics, the deeply grooved records of certain influential voices and their advice or admonition, things read or seen or heard in the media, images from past experience of ourselves and others, or of characters from fiction or history. We also often have, I think, patterns of response which kick in semi-automatically to certain stimuli, and scripts – ways of interacting with others in certain situations that are socially legitimated and learnt, practiced and inhabited, which we improvise with as the need arises. To the extent that any of this hangs together, it does so in part through our lived performance of some kind of consistency in our actions that we call character and personality. And in part it coheres through some larger imagined scheme of things in which that performance has or aspire to some intelligibility.  Here we try to locate ourselves against or within a whole, whether with a sense of ‘fit’ (awkward or otherwise), an aspiration to dominance, or with some degree of resigned, despairing or angry alienation.

And all this is true, also, I think for Christians. Sometimes Christian theologians can talk as if Christians had very neatly ordered, or indeed very clearly disordered, moral resources resources; resources that we imagine to be firmly established and clearly boundaried to secure a permanent and reassuring identity. But in reality I think it’s more complex, porous and messy for most of us, most of the time. We are far more vulnerable to our social and cultural environment and our place in its rhythms and systems than we like to pretend.

One thing good theology can do for Christians is help us reflect on the sources, scripts and sayings we live by, give us a bit of distance from them and help us examine them, sort them a bit, perhaps repair some and supplement others, and resolve not to resort to yet others but instead use this or that. And it can help us to attend to the larger scheme of things against which or within which we locate ourselves, to test it and to find ways of imagining it otherwise, in light of some compelling patterns, insights and intuitions about the presence of God, the shape of God’s time with and for us, of the purpose of God in the whole, in our locales and for us personally. Theology can make things worse, of course. Sometimes it can make things much worse. But it can also help us be faithful, survive, resist, repent, find flourishing, and conform ourselves to what is most real, true and good, in the measure afforded to us to perceive it and to live by, in and from its measures: the glimpsed glory of God, above all in the face of Christ.

In the midst of keeping going today, I recalled two sets of ideas that seemed helpful for the demands of the present, that come out of texts I studied with my class of final year student at the end of last term. One is in effect a summary by Wendy Farley of her book Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion; the other is a pivotal chapter in the argument of John Swinton’s Raging with Compassion (in which Farley features, alongside Stanley Hauerwas and others, as a key voice). I’m not going to rehearse their arguments in full, nor would I commend them unreservedly. But I do find two ideas helpful, generally, and especially at the moment, and I thought it might be useful to share them here.

The first is Farley’s point that to be a creature of God, to exist but not as God does, is fundamentally to be limited, interdependent with others, and so profoundly vulnerable to loss and devastation. That is not a feature of our fallenness or a consequence of our fault. It is a function of our finitude. Fallenness and fault, especially as producing, participating in and sustaining social systems and cultural practices which harm us and others, prey on that vulnerability and magnify it exponentially and unequally for some while shielding others, even from their own agency. But the fundamental vulnerability remains and will at times be exposed, sometimes with very little warning.

I find that helpful for three reasons. First, it seems to express a key consequence of holding to the idea of the fundamental contingency of creaturehood that goes with believing in creation out of nothing, and with the sense of absolute dependence expressed in much Christian piety. Second, it undercuts hasty moves to find a redemptive or punitive meaning in a situation of suffering. Perhaps it also relieves a little the need to present a rationale for sufferings, to affirm or try to show that in this case also ‘everything happens for a reason’. Third, it just seems more honest. And it may be liberating for some of us to let go of any dream or hope of invulnerability, to relinquish the need to demonstrate the truth of our convictions or our moral worth and deserving by the prosperous state of our life or health. And in so doing this insight can help divest us of an illusion.

The other idea is the notion differently parsed in Farley and Swinton of practices of resistance, compassion and redemption. In Farley these are compassionate actions incarnating the attention that Simone Weil describes whereby God is present (almost sacramentally for Weil). In Swinton these are actions which mirror, participate in, attest and are vehicles of God’s redemptive movements in history, as focused and ordered in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (that’s Swinton read through Hans Frei), in the time between his resurrection and the full ramification of the redemption achieved in him. Farley’s notion by itself is too restricted a sense of divine presence amongst creatures for me, too remote from the incarnation, which Swinton foregrounds, but powerful seen in its light. Swinton’s vision is a bit too ecclesiocentric or overly church focused (here more Frei would help) in its diagnosis of evil and its practical theodicy of addressing it. The threat posed by evil to our love of God is indeed real and unsurpassed in seriousness, but evil threatens other dimensions of our creaturely existence as well, other relations integral to the love of God and the goods internal to them (as I’m sure Swinton would agree). A bit more of a doctrine of creation would help here. And of course Christian practices do not automatically shape good character, nor are they often innocent of deformation.

Nevertheless, there’s something illuminating and empowering about thinking of the things we do now to care for one another, however mundane, in terms of ways of resisting the threat opened up by our augmented vulnerabilities and our fears to turn away from God in turning away from one another; ways of resisting the magnified effects of our structural and social sins; ways in which we may hope that God is present and which attest, to our hope in God; ways of practicing which can be carried out in solidarity and cooperation, in giving and receiving, with our neighbours near and far, wherever and in whatever measure our commitments converge with theirs, as we often discover that they do, as we may be (re)discovering in these days.

Warning: plot spoilers aplenty!

As expected, The Rise of Skywalker tied a big bow around the Skywalker saga, even if it left a number of plot threads hanging. (Here come those spoilers… read on at your peril). All the Sith were defeated by all the Jedi. The climactic double battle of Return of the Jedi was conclusively reprised. The grandson of Vader turned back to the light. What Anakin’s mother helped create by sending her son away, his daughter helped rectify, by drawing her son back. Where Anakin and Ben fell to fear and the temptations of dark power and promises of destiny on that side, Rey (like Luke before her) resists. The last Palpatine becomes the last Skywalker. The story that began, cinematically, in the deserts of Tatooine was put to rest there. You don’t have to be a theologian (or a student of Irenaeus) to appreciate all that recapitulation. Lando Calrissian returns and even C-3PO gets rebooted. As a film, especially as a Star Wars film, it’s ok, it’s enjoyable and satisfying in some ways. But the comparison with its predecessor raises some deeper issues about how we handle inheritances that are relevant for Christian theology, at least.

All those dramatic unities, plus some stunning action and the film’s many comic moments, made for a satisfying sense of an ending. In a way, unless the repetitions, the fight sequences, the comic turns, had been laid on so thick, you wouldn’t have believed it was really over. The deep code of the Star Wars franchise lies in the abiding tension between opposites, and the need to resolve them. While the rhetoric is always about restoring balance to an unending and unstable duality (‘restore the balance, Rey, as I once did’), the emotional and aesthetic logic is really about resolution: the victory of light over darkness, the clarification or redemption of identity and character in choosing the light and rejecting the darkness. In this respect it really is very Manichaean.

This same tendency also helps explain what – in addition to the prevalence of the theme in western culture – drives the plot unerringly toward the eventual redemption of the bad Skywalker, and the exorcism of the evil empress Rey from Rey’s future.

It was always more than likely that the final film in the third trilogy would succumb to the gravitational forces of these features of the Star Wars mythos, as much as to its predominantly straight romantic plots (one Lesbian kiss notwithstanding). Indeed, the two are shown to be supremely connected in the (admittedly rather well executed) Ren-Rey subplot and bond. Like the rejuvenating Emperor Palpatine sucking life from the bonded pair of Rey and Ben, The Rise of Skywalker draws much of its vitality from its dyadic pairings and doubles. In fact, it does so even when it acknowledges the weakness of the device. We are allowed to admit, in the words of Richard E. Grant’s General Pryde, that Starkiller Base was a bit of a dumb idea, but the plot is still drawn back to the idea of planet-killing power and a final attack on something like the Death Star, indeed a sort of Ur-Death Star, in the form of the hidden Sith Temple and the Final Order fleet on Exegol (complete with obligatory weak point that only comes to light, ex machina, at the equally obligatory prior Resistance/Rebel war council).

More than likely, but not inevitable. For as enjoyable as Rise was, its predecessor, The Last Jedi, had shown another way, and opened wider the possibility of doing more interesting things with the stuff of the Star Wars universe and the Skywalker story at its culmination. To be fair to Rise, while it often carried on as if The Last Jedi was a temporary diversion in the nostalgic recapitulatory trajectories set running in the Force Awakens, it also carried forward and built on the better features of the latter film. Rey is of course chief among these, a female hero who is not defined by sexual allure, nor any gender stereotype, nor absorbed into her bond with Ren/Ben, but who develops complexity and responsibility through several powerful and complex relationships with friends and enemies. C-3PO has more to him here as a character, without losing the comedy, than in many of the previous films. Poe and Finn emerge as more rounded characters, more fully centred in their friendship with Rey and one another. And, in another theme with strong theological resonances in Christianity, in Rey’s resolution of the question of her identity, the bonds of friendship, the lineaments of character and the construction of adoptive family win out over the vaunted destiny of aristocratic blood.

Still, Rise steadfastly ignores what The Last Jedi offered. And it offered much. It put the Jedi order firmly into perspective. It lauds two female leaders’ strategic and tactical nous over the chauvinistic insubordinate heroism of Poe, a character we had learnt to admire for his exceptional skill, courage and capacity for friendship. It lampooned the subplot of the obscure quest for the key to the enemy’s obscure but fatal weakness. It praised carefully calculated self-sacrifice (in Vice-Admiral Holdo), but also celebrated Rose Tico ‘saving what you love’ over Finn’s pointless, hate-fuelled martyrdom. And while it gave us plenty of exhilarating light-sabre action, the survival of the Resistance turned most on the massive distraction of the non-dual between Luke and Kylo-Ren. Although it too used plots echoing earlier sequences (like the rebels escaping Hoth), it did so to more creative effect. The cunning stratagems of love and experience in The Last Jedi offered Star Wars a more searching revaluation of its dominant grammars, vocabulary, gender codes and heroic virtues. By and large, The Rise of Skywalker blocked these improvisations on the old scripts, and nowhere more blatantly than in the sidelining of Rose, perhaps the moral centre of the previous film.

In these ways, the contrast between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker reminded me of a profound challenge facing Christian theologians. It’s a challenge well encapsulated in Marika Rose’s recent book, A Theology of Failure and her notion of faithful infidelity or faithful failure: of working out what in one’s tradition must be betrayed in order to be faithful to what one loves in that tradition, and to those it has worked to oppress, in reproducing it. (I am not really doing justice to the searching and sophisticated argument of that book; I and others sought to do so here). It’s a challenge that Rian Johnson, the Director of The Last Jedi, seems to have been alive to, and which he embraced. It’s a challenge which I think it’s fair to say that J.J. Abrams was also alert to, but at which, by comparison, he faltered somewhat.

The comparison between the practices of Christian theology and those of creating drama are a bit tired now, and in some cases its exploitation leaves it seeming exhausted and over-stretched. Nevertheless, in this case it is pertinent and useful to note that theologians too face choices about how to retell a set of stories whose prior tellings (and perhaps even some raw materials) have passed on ambiguous legacies, and forwarded codes, scripts and identities which have proved damaging, as well as those which have nurtured life or resourced survival. For example, Christian theologies, too, have sometimes stressed and construed certain dyads with terrible consequence. Think of the many iterations of Christian orthodox identity and their superseded Jewish others; or various hierarchical and essentialist Christian constructions of masculinity and femininity; or some of the ways the scriptural master/slave distinction has been taken up in the social structures and practices of Christians and Christian societies; or racial constructions of white Christian identity over against black in the modern period. Deciding what faithfulness means in respect of one’s theological heritage in any given context, and what failures or infidelities fidelity to Christ demands today, is a perennial penultimate task for Christian theologians (and no doubt in other ways for thinkers in other traditions, religious or otherwise).

Rise of Skywalker fails in the extent of its fidelity to earlier telling of the mythos, where The Last Jedi showed a deeper fidelity in its willingness to fail that tradition to a greater extent. Today, as much as ever, Christian theologians also have to learn to gauge the measure of their faithfulness and what betrayals, what failures, it demands.

For an institution with such a penchant for commemoration, the Church of England has a powerful capacity for forgetting. For an institution with such a searching liturgy of confession, the C of E has a remarkable resistance to repentance. And (if we count ourselves as members of this Church) we need to ask ourselves why.

I’m prompted to these reflections by the invigorating experience of attending, for the second year running, one of the Sam Sharpe Lectures, run by the Sam Sharpe Project, a collaboration of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Jamaican Baptist Union and others. The Project is named after the enslaved Baptist deacon who organised the Baptist rebellion of 1831-1832 in Jamaica, and was executed by the British colonial authorities for his role in it. It seeks to explore and promote his story and legacy, in the context of the British Baptist Union’s strategy for turning its Council’s historic 2007 Apology for Slavery into concrete actions: The Journey. The focus on Sam Sharpe symbolises an emphasis on the faith and agency of enslaved people and their descendants and the theme of liberation from below which the Project foregrounds as his legacy. The annual lecture is one of its main means for exploring and furthering his story and his legacy and thereby development of the British Baptist Union’s process of repentance and reconciliation with their brethren.

This year’s highly distinguished lecturer was Professor Verene Shepherd, Professor of Social History at the University of the West Indies, the Director of The Centre for Reparation Research at The UWI, a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a past member and chair of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, Co-Chair of the National Commission on Reparations in Jamaica and a Vice Chair of the CARICOM Reparation Commission. Prof Shepherd was chosen, we were told by the Revs Wale Hudson-Roberts (the racial justice coordinator of the British BU) and Karl Johnson (General Secretary of the Jamaican Baptist Union), with the express hope that her lecture would provide impetus and resources for taking that process forward.

After hearing her speak, it was easy to see why. Professor Verene Shepherd spoke on the Women in Sam Sharpe’s Army, but also on reparations. It was at once an exercise in the recovery of memory through historical retrieval of the role of women in resisting slavery, and an argument for reparations in the names of those women, and the men, too, whose names, punishments and in some cases their testimony, are recorded in the sources.

Women enslaved in the Caribbean had no choice but to resist slavery, Prof Shepherd argued. They formed part of a long history of black women resisting enslavement, abolitionists who should be remembered alongside the men & white women usually commemorated. And indeed those women are now being commemorated in Jamaica. Sharpe went from plantation to plantation, Bible in hand, to swear the enslaved people there to rebellion, and to organise them into revolutionary cells. Women responded to Sam Sharpe’s call to resist. Their experience of slavery suffices to explain their participation. The forced exploitation of their labour, the appropriation of their reproductive agency to reproduce slavery, rape, their legal defeminisation and racialisation to justify their treatment: this coercion provoked gendered patterns of resistance to white supremacy enacted through racialised slavery. The sources attest women’s daily acts of resistance to wear down the slavers, like malingering, as well as outright armed revolt. And they suffered their share of the horrific exemplary punishments meted out by the British governor: hangings, lashes of the whip, permanent transportation. And for them we should engage in the path of reparative justice, Prof Shepherd urged us.

(The Unveiling Ceremony for the Freedom Monument at Montego Bay, Jamaica, commemorating those who fought for emancipation in the war of 1831-2. Image: Montego Bay Cultural Centre).

For them, and for many other reasons she adduced. Reparation, she argued, rests on moral, political and economic grounds, not only with respect to enslavement but also emancipation (a racist act that compensated slave owners by reckoning the enslaved as property), post-colonial indebtedness and under-development and other legacies of colonisation post-emancipation (‘a century of intellectual apartheid’); climate change, and centuries of environmental degradation; and the strictures of neo-colonialism. We should see reparation, she argued, as part of decolonial justice and a way to address the continuing harms of anti-black racism to people of African descent globally.

She took us through the history of the development of reparations justice, and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commissions 10 point plan. She emphasised the responsibility of colonisers, the intergenerational psychological trauma of enslavement (a point also made by last year’s lecturer, Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin), the continuing effects of slavery and colonialism (as recognised by the UN’s Durban Declaration of 2001), and monetary compensation and debt cancellation as means to help Caribbean nations achieve UN development plans. The benefits of the exploitation of the enslaved are, she noted, like the harms, also transmitted across generations. These are not simply things which others did to the dead, long ago.

The Baptist Journey is proving to be a slow one, going by Wale Hudson-Roberts’ assessment in an article from 2017. Other institutions, such as a number of universities and seminaries in the US and the UK (Glasgow, Cambridge and Bristol), have gone further, faster. But at least there has been a serious, fully articulated apology and there is a commitment to action and a process and a relationship within which efforts can be made, and initiatives like the Sam Sharpe Project pursued, to drive the process forward. All these developments are well in advance of the position of the nation states responsible of the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, including the UK. We tend to remember ourselves instead as a nation of Wilberforces, the ones who ended the slave trade, as David Cameron did while telling our former colony Jamaica to ‘move on from the painful legacy of slavery’, and while his government enacted the hostile environment that would result in the Windrush crisis. As Afua Hirsch wrote recently, ‘The Caribbean is Britain’s own Deep South, where enslavement and segregation as brutal as anything that existed on American soil took place at the hands of British people.’ Yet because it happened far away, the British are remarkably complacent about our major role in the slave trade and plantation slavery: ‘that distance facilitates denial.’ We forget the century and more of colonial rule that followed emancipation even more easily, except as the background to the arrival of The Empire Windrush in 1948.

I think it is fair to say that the Church of England, as an institution, shares in this national complacency about British slavery, slave trading, and colonialism. For all the slow progress of the Baptists’ Journey, they are far, far ahead of Anglicans in England. The Church of England’s Synod voted ahead of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade accept an amendment to a motion on modern day slavery, which apologised for the Church’s complicity in the slave trade and recognising the damage done to the enslaved. Chiefly in view here was the ownership of the Codrington Plantations and those enslaved there, in Barbados, bequeathed to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1710. Both Archbishops at the time, Rowan Williams and John Sentamu, supported the amendment and the following year they participated in a Walk of Witness as an act of repentance. Sentamu called on the British government to apologise for slavery, and Williams advocated that the Church of England consider paying reparations. These actions come far short of the British Baptist Apology and the process to which it has committed itself in relationship with its Jamaican counterpart. To my knowledge, no comparable steps have been taken since. Indeed, little if anything appears to have happened on the question since 2007, even while other British institutions have researched their complicity and, in the case of Glasgow University, produced a practical plan, worked up in partnership with the University of the West Indies. And this failure of repentance seems to be bound up with a failure of memory, as Duncan Dormer of the USPG points out.

Reparation as a process of addressing injustices and wrongs committed seems deeply in keeping with the sort of repentance envisaged by the New Testament. It is powerfully exemplified for us in the story of Zaccheus. It is consistent with the repudiation of the cheap grace Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified in his book Discipleship. The intergenerational effects (harms for some, benefits for others) of slavery and colonialism, and the continuity provided by institutions involved, provide a basis for exploring reparatory justice on the part of institutions like the Church of England. Indeed the Church has, as Rowan Williams pointed out in 2006, core theological reasons, in belief in the body of Christ and the communion of saints, not to distance itself from the sufferings of the enslaved or its own part in owning and exploiting them and in justifying and defending slavery.

Professor Robert Beckford, in his response to the lecture, picked up on this failure and underlined its ecclesial seriousness. It is no wonder, he remarked, that the Church of England struggles to attract black and brown people when it fails fully to apologise or make reparations after participating in genocide. It signals that something has gone wrong with the Church’s theology. You can’t call yourself people of God and refuse to perform the Shalom required when the peace of God is broken, he argued. ‘You can’t call yourself my brother and sister and convince me you think I and my ancestors are fully human if you don’t repay this debt.’

It is difficult to overstate the gravity of this challenge to the Church’s moral standing, but also to its claim to be one of the churches of Christ, and its right to the enjoyment of the fellowship of all Christians of African descent (and not just African descent) whose history includes the history of slavery and colonialism. It is therefore a deeply troubling challenge – ‘uncomfortable’ is far too mild – but also I think a profoundly salutary one. Indeed, I think it is an act of generosity. Nor is Professor Beckford the only one challenging the Church on this issue: there are those on the inside like Canon Eve Pitts who have been raising it for many years, a work of astonishing faithfulness.

The Church has many challenges on its hands, including other legacies of devastating failings. Yet this challenge also goes to the heart of its identity and its mission, indeed to the integrity of the gospel it proclaims. It requires deep, extended listening, learning, dialogue, reflection and a path toward action. It is a challenge for a deep theological reflexivity about the Church’s history and its reluctance to face up to it. It is, finally, an opportunity for the Church to work at reconciliation with people in the Caribbean and of Caribbean heritage, including fellow Anglicans, including its own members, in making amends, and so also to enter itself into the freedom the gospel affords, in Rowan Williams’ words, ‘to face ourselves, including the unacceptable regions of … our history.’