Book Review

Ed. David F. Ford, Ben Quash and Janet Martin Soskice

Fields of Faith: theology and religious studies for the twenty-first century

In academic life colleagues often mark retirement, not with the gift of a gold watch, but with a festschrift: a volume of essays, related more or less substantially to the work of the person being honoured. Nicholas Lash occupied the Norris-Hulse Chair of Divinity in the University of Cambridge from 1978 until he retired in 1999. The Cambridge Divinity Faculty, as well as being about to migrate into its entirely new, purpose-built home, was also opening out to include Indian religions, Judaism and Islam, alongside the disciplines now traditional in Christian theology. Imaginatively, Professor Lash’s colleagues, as an element in their reflection on the implications for theology of sharing the space with other faith traditions, set up a four-day consultation on “The Future of the Study of Theology and Religions”. A group of 60 invited academics discussed papers intended all along to appear as a book in honour of Professor Lash. He was, of course, a participant at the conference. “Uppermost in the minds of the organisers”, we are told, was the desire to give him a “send-off” with a conference and a book that reflected his interests and achievements. In the event, the emphasis is entirely on Lash’s engagement with “religion”. The only one of his books that is cited is The Beginning and the End of “Religion”.

A more conventional festschrift would have included responses to Lash’s valuable work on Newman. The lectures over many years in which he expounded the theology of St Thomas Aquinas no doubt lie behind the fine paper by Nicholas Adams which begins from a comparison between Karl Barth and Aquinas on the Book of Job – otherwise Lash’s interpretation of Aquinas plays no significant part here. Obviously, his important contributions to Catholic thinking on the nature of the Church lie outside the frame of this book. For that matter, it is really only his Teape Lectures, published as the first part of The Beginning and the End of “Religion”, which inspire this collection – whereas chapters in the second part of that book offer a much more rounded picture of Lash’s theological and philosophical skills and concerns.

Inevitably, then, Fields of Faith does little justice to the range of Lash’s achievement. It must nevertheless be a delight to be honoured with such an excellent collection of essays, and particularly with such a beautiful book, printed and bound in the United Kingdom to uncommonly high standards, with a lovely jacket illustration of flocks of sheep gathered in very English fields, taken from a design by Gwen Raverat for Vaughan Williams’ ballet Job. J.G. Frazer, the most prolific if not the greatest of the first generation of sociologists of religion, is somewhat oddly referred to as “George Frazer”; otherwise copy-editing and proof-reading are also of – alas, uncommonly – high standards.

In his Teape Lectures, delivered in India in 1994, Lash contends that the modern concept of “a religion” distorts Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as the religious traditions of India, China and Japan. The first four essays in Fields of Faith, then, by Michael Buckley SJ, Denys Turner, Sarah Coakley and Gavin Flood respectively, discuss the very idea of “religious studies”. The second set, by Rowan Williams (“God”), Julius Lipner (“Love”), Peter Ochs (“Scripture”), and Eamon Duffy (“Worship”), argue that “theology” needs to be kept distinct from “religious studies”, at least if these are understood as tending towards sociology.

Professor Duffy’s essay, the one of most interest to a Catholic reader, does not fit in very clearly with the others in this section. The story, anyway, is that the post-Vatican II Mass is the unhappy result of the tendentious scholarship of one man, namely Josef Andreas Jungmann SJ (1889-1975). Reformers persuaded by his views stripped centuries of liturgical development away, in order to retrieve an entirely mythical primitive rite.

The last four chapters spread beyond the academy. Nicholas Adams asks how academic argument might affect the possibility of learning “a wisdom for living”. John de Gruchy asks how academic religious studies might play a role in a multifaith society, such as South Africa. Janet Martin Soskice, in much the most engaging essay, explores the Western notion of friendship (from Cicero to C.S. Lewis) in the light of Jewish ideas about “friendship with God”. Finally, Maleiha Malik asks how a minority religious community should relate its concept and practice of justice to the ideals and practices of a liberal Western democracy.

The contributors are overwhelmingly Christian in their faith affiliation. For that matter, at the consultation itself, participants from religious studies departments felt that their concerns went unheard. The integration of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu religious studies into a powerful Christian theology faculty, with a century of scholarship and intellectual influence behind it, could never go quickly and smoothly.

A look back at the lectures which Professor Lash gave in India confirms that his outlook was perceptibly wider than that which Fields of Faith achieves. As a whole, the book will appeal mainly to academics, in faculties of theology which are already bedded down with religious studies departments, or expect soon to be so. The essays are all formidably armoured though those by Duffy, Soskice and Malik would attract wider readership, for their style as well as their topics.

In the present crisis of higher education in the United Kingdom, with departments of music, chemistry and philosophy closing, and entire universities on the brink of collapse because of their failing “business plans”, the problems of ensuring a future, in Cambridge or anywhere else, for a happy union between theology and religious studies may seem pretty secondary. Fields of Faith, hard going as it would be for most readers, is nevertheless a highly instructive and provocative contribution to a question that should concern all who believe that a measure of academic rigour and learning is badly required in a world awash with religion.

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