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New Book! Exploring Integrity in the Christian Church

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Books and major publications
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CRPL is happy to announce a major publication by Revd Prof Simon Robinson, one of the Centre’s Visiting Fellows. The book’s title is Exploring Integrity in the Christian Church (2024) and it is published by Palgrave Macmillan. As you will see, the book is timely… (See also here for more details.)

How has this book come about?

It has emerged from two strands in my research; pastoral theology and applied and professional ethics. The first of these focused on the dialogic nature of pastoral care and counselling, arguing that pastoral care involves the letting go of the perceived power of the counsellor/pastor (intellectual, institutional, spiritual and so on), empowering the person to give an account of her self-narrative, exploring her moral world, and engaging responsibility, mutual accountability and emerging relational pathways. The dialogue enables the development of the virtues. Care then is seen as enabling agency, focused in learning, and the capacity to see the self, other and God differently. Later work in professional ethics focused on corporate leadership and governance. It suggested from a philosophical perspective that integrity, individual or organizational, was focused in the exploration of relational identity (building on Aristotle, Taylor, Ricoeur and others). It is both an epistemic and moral virtue focused in dialogue and the development of individual and shared responsibility and mutual accountability. At the heart of this integrity is the capacity to engage difference, focused in learning to see the self and wider relationships differently, inside and outside the organization, from which corporate responsibility could be developed. This was explored in relation to governance and leadership and the development of a culture of dialogue.

 What are the key argument(s) that the book develops?

The book aims to bring together these different strands to explore integrity in relation to the Christian Church. The central argument sets out the philosophical and psychological perspectives of integrity as a moral and epistemic virtue. This is further developed in a theological reflection focused on the Incarnation and agape. In Jesus God chooses to hold himself to account, to be open to questions about His identity, and His relationship to the world. The kenotic dynamic is focused in the mutuality of dialogue and the sharing of power and responsibility, challenging humanity’s assumption that God asserts power and is responsible for everything, foreclosing genuine dialogue. The agape command develops this further, moving away from a narrow dyadic relationship between the person and God to an ongoing dialogue with the self, the world and God (in turn in dialogue with Himself), enabling ongoing discovery of each of these, metanoia. In this view integrity is dynamic and responsive, focused in agonistic dialogue which is prepared to engage difference, dissonance and complexity, and through that build the virtues of faith/trust, hope and love.

The rest of the book tests and explores this view of integrity in relation to the church, focused in a number of case studies. The first involves child sex abuse and the church, charting the way in which church leadership imposed power, foreclosing dialogue, and the subsequent emergence of dialogue. This leads to a consideration of leadership and governance in the church, exploring different models of leadership and organizational learning, and examples of architectures of integrity that enable ongoing agonistic dialogue within the church and with the wider community.

This dynamic is then explored in pastoral care and counselling, prophecy (from Tutu to Temple) and peacebuilding (anchored in the case of the Anglican church and same sex marriage). Such dialogue enables the relational context to be explored in each of these areas, generating, and recognising and joining, further dialogue in churches and beyond. I argue that these areas constitute the mission of the church and should be part of the worship experience, focusing Hauerwas’s connection of virtues and worship in that dialogue. Mission then becomes not a prior discovery which is then shared with a godless world but an ongoing mutual discovery of God and His creation. The book concludes with a reflection on the integrity of theology and ethics, exploring the accountability of the theologian, and an ethics based in agonistic dialogue.

What insight does the book provide into the relationship between religion and public life?

The book suggests that integrity is always public, providing a careful corrective to the well-known description of integrity as ‘doing the right thing when nobody is watching’. In this view, over time, someone in our social context is always watching and listening. Agapeic dialogue involves the presence of different witnesses, precisely because it includes not just God but His creation, including ‘society’. Religion is embodied in institutions, including ‘the church’, all of whom relate in some way to the social web. The complexity of that can only be engaged through exploring identity and responsibility with God and those who are a part of that social web. Genuine dialogue enables the church to let go of a self-identity focused historically in binary perspectives of spiritual superiority and self-sufficiency. Hence, this view of integrity suggests that the Christian church cannot simply assert its identity, defined over against the needy or recalcitrant world (a narrow view of integrity). It rather discovers it through dialogue with God and voices inside and outside the church often discounted by leadership as enemies, rivals, irrelevant, or simply part of a problem. These are the voices rarely heard in the framing of shared theology, policy or practice, both powerless and powerful: from abuse survivors to gay Christians and their families and friends, to ordinary worshipers who find little hope in partisan theologians; from the media to independent inquiries; from different disciplinary  perspectives to different denominational perspective on governance and caring; from other prophetic groups and peacebuilders to the ordinary person in the street. Through such dialogue the church holds itself to account and enables others (of whatever theological or moral self-identity) to hold themselves to account and explore shared responsibility.

Give us one quote from the book that you believe will make us go and read it!

(From page 229)

“The response of the secular world to the church’s crisis then suggests that the church cannot fully see itself, and thus critically challenge its own identity and practice, without holding itself to account publicly. It suggests that the integrity of the church needs the perspective of the other, both God and the world. This is not simply the other acting as a mirror. It is the other prepared to wrestle with the church, exploring perspectives and feelings invested in self-identity, focusing on responsibility and accountability, and seeking to create shared response. It recognizes that the dynamic of narcissism is involved in all institutions all the time. In this light we can begin to see the external inquiry related dialogues as an act of friendship, often going beyond the actual inquiry ending. Put another way this suggests the church needs friends, who can walk with it on all or part of its journey.  In turn this suggests that the social neighbour, often seen by the church as the one to whom it offers friendship (with the danger of focusing on its own acts of care), may not in any moment be the one who is in need, but may be the one who is there for a wounded church, may indeed be a Good Samaritan.”