THE book Conversations in Global Anglican Theology joins Anglican Theology: Postcolonial perspectives, edited by Stephen Burns and James Tengatenga (SCM Press, 2024) (Books, 8 November 2024), and has very similar strengths, quirks, and tensions.
To start with strengths: this collection, too, has a well-established editor, who includes articles from a rich mixture of largely non-Western Anglicans. The American Professor Michael Battle has already written several books on Archbishop Tutu’s theology, including Desmond Tutu: A spiritual biography of South Africa’s confessor (WJK, 2021).
The Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, and the Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, both contribute, as do Stephen Spencer, Simon Ro Chul Lai, Thandi Gamedze, Thokozile J. Mbaya, and, most fascinating of all, Wilhelm Verwoerd, a repentant grandson of the architect of apartheid. Rowan Williams’s foreword recognises frankly “the destructive legacy of a Western-dominated pattern of mission activity” — its collusion with the slave trade, its “unexamined power”, and its disastrous indigenous residential schools.
He also observes, shrewdly, that “countless non-European communities [also] found in Christian faith a vision of the world that equipped them to challenge not only the problematic aspects of their own heritage but the evils of colonial power itself.” This, at best, is what these articles seek to do.
Tensions and quirks, however, soon become evident. The usually eirenic Battle admits that Hudson-Wilkin’s article is “sermonic”. Makgoba is somewhat less so and does emphasise the need for a “black theology”, albeit viewed chiefly through the already familiar and influential concept of ubuntu. Perhaps both bishops might be better depicted as significant religious activists rather than theologians — especially since other articles show ubuntu to be a concept not unique, or always germane, to “black theology”.
Lai points out that mutual interdependence can be found readily in the late Orthodox Bishop John Zizioulas’s concept of “being in communion”. Mbaya argues that ubuntu was not in evidence in Makgoba’s traditionalist stance on same-sex marriage, which marginalised Tutu’s ordained daughter. In contrast, Verwoerd, with regard to his own late grandfather, praises Tutu’s pastoral ubuntu, which the former Archbishop championed and embodied when too many others did not.
Spencer does not resolve these tensions in his scholarly historical account of how bishops since the first Lambeth Conference have attempted to reconcile their obvious differences on social or ethical issues. Worryingly, though, Gamedze’s article, based on her research on South African Pentecostal churches, insists at the outset that “race cannot be ignored,” despite acknowledging that “race” is a social construct. Generalising about “White institutional space”, she even shortens this to the pejorative acronym “WIS” and fails to see that this mirrors apartheid ideology.
Quirks apart, this is the first volume of what promises to be (with greater rigorous analysis, please) a worthwhile and timely series.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent and Editor of Theology.
Conversations in Global Anglican Theology
Michael Battle, editor
Seabury £21.99
(978-1-64065-742-7)
Church Times Bookshop £19.79
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