Review for Ministers-at-Work by Rob Fox January 2005

Currently Principal of the East Anglian Ministerial Training Course, Malcolm Brown has a background in Industrial Mission and until 2000 was Executive Secretary of the William Temple Foundation, all experience he has put to good use here. This is Volume 23 in the publisher’s ‘Religions and Discourse’ series, previous contributors including James Francis, Andrew Britton and Peter Sedgwick, who will be familiar to the MSE community.

The book is essentially a critique of the Churches’ recent (overly negative) engagement with economics and suggests a new theological framework within which the historical dialogue might be resumed. In this it follows a similar pattern to the recent writings of John Atherton, with whom Malcolm worked in the William Temple Foundation. There is more than a trace of indebtedness to Ronald Preston too.

The central argument is set out straight away: it is usually assumed that in modern pluralist society any level of general moral agreement, especially in respect of economic fairness, is impossible, so that the mechanisms of market economics are the only viable distributional means of meeting human needs. Brown points out that in the last few decades Christian and other critiques of market economics have failed to engage with this argument, assuming that the moral shortcomings of the latter are self-evident, rather than to construct a reasoned critique. Brown argues that a Christian critique has to take seriously ethical plurality: “This may sound like a somewhat arcane and limited question, but as long as market apologists play the plurality card, and Christian critics avoid its significance, theological challenges to economic policies will miss their target.” Good point; so Brown sets out to establish a basis for a Christian critique that both takes seriously the realities of market economics and can itself be taken seriously.

Early on the marginalisation of Christian social thinking, even within the Churches themselves, that began in the Thatcher years and has continued under ‘New Labour’, is surveyed and examined. This is usefully accompanied by defining a number of terms essential to the dialogue: Liberalism, Plurality, Communitarianism, Postmodernism and Postmodernity. There follows a survey, well put together, of the Churches’ engagement with the economy in Britain since World War Two, focussing on Industrial Mission and the Church of England’s Board for Social Responsibility. The BSR in particular was influenced in the 1960s and ‘70s by Ronald Preston and favoured his ‘middle axiom’ approach. ‘Faith in the City’ appeared just as the BSR was beginning to move away from this approach and recognise the increasing plurality in UK society, and marked a methodological shift. Brown maps out well the turmoil that has beset the BSR over the past two decades.

As with many Christian social thinkers in Britain today, Brown takes as his basis for a renewed dialogue between Churches’ and society the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, and in his third chapter sets out why he doing so and how. In particular he sees virtue ethics as a viable alternative to Liberalism, drawing in particular on MacIntyre’s work ‘Whose Justice?’. He concludes that MacIntyre is better described as a Communitarian than a Liberal, but points out that the man himself rejects this label as too much associated with state-centred and centrally imposed versions of social and economic ‘common good.’ Here a key point is acknowledged: linguistic and conceptual baggage often gets in the way of meaningful dialogue; better to re-think old terms and assumptions.

Brown then moves on to look at market models, not shying from the failings of the Liberal market model, which he sets out in a clear and well-balanced way. He has clearly done his reading in this area and cites a range of sources effectively and with real understanding.

Moving along to the persistence of shared moral values, he then demonstrates that plurality is not as all consuming as some suppose, demonstrating how economists themselves frequently grapple with moral questions.

Part II begins with an examination of the Liberal Tradition in Social Theology, drawing on Sedgwick and Preston, before moving on to Nowak and the neo-Conservative Market Theology. This is followed by a good survey of Revisionist Liberalism, drawing on Ronald Thiemann and Max Stackhouse, and Communitarian and Confessional approaches to Social Theology (John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Banner, Ulrich Duchrow). These various theologies are Review, with reference back to MacIntyre, before Brown introduces “an emerging Theological model”, Dialogic Traditionalism.

The hallmarks of this new model “must be: openness to ambiguity and contingency; attentiveness to questions of Christian identity; and an ability to give an account of how Christian theology encounters other narratives and traditions.” It strikes me that the ‘plurality’ implied in this is not so much that of different religious traditions (that has taken so much of the Churches’ attention in recent years) but secular ways of thinking. In this respect it is familiar territory to MSEs.

Brown draws on Ian Markham’s approach to a renewed natural theology to develop the dialogic method, and on Andrew Shanks and Peter Selby for criteria in choosing dialogue partners. After describing how the various elements work together he describes Dialogic Traditionalism thus: “It is neither liberal nor communitarian in the accepted sense, but draws from the one its insistence on cross-boundary dialogue and from the other its commitment to the exploration of identity. It is in the exploration of Christian identity that it finds the principle of dialogue, rather than in any tradition-transcendent narrative.”

Having set up the terms of the dialogic method, Brown finishes the Part by saying why he sees it as relevant to economics, as a basis for the moral evaluation of markets. Part III returns to the BSR and IM and applies the methodology to their work, using a number of practical examples. Here there is also a section on the implications for ecclesiology, noting that “many structures and systems exist because they reflect and accommodate the diversity of positions within the Church of England rather than because they make any logical structural sense.” Finally, Brown turns again to the economy and how this new approach can be used to reconstruct the dialogue; another excellent section – pity there isn’t more of it.

Few books setting out to encompass such a vast range within a relatively short space succeed in doing so entirely, but this one does it. The reader is left edified, informed, and challenged, if perhaps wishing that a few areas might have been developed further. It deserves to be widely read, and not just in Church circles, as a genuinely innovative and practical contribution to Social Theology.