Unknowing God
Towards a Post-Abusive Theology
Nicholas Peter Harvey and Linda Woodhead
ISBN: 978-1666710335
Cascade Books/Wipf & Stock 2022
Paperback 160pp £21
Pastoral Review Bookshop £18.90

In The Best Catholics in the World, the Irish journalist Derek Scally asks how in a world so steeped in the Church which offered identity and shelter to many something as horrendous as the abuse scandal could happen. Here in Unknowing God, two British scholars of religion, the Catholic theologian Nicholas Peter Harvey and the Anglican sociologist Linda Woodhead, approach a similar subject from a different angle. They begin with their experience that ‘bad ideas about God can destroy creative faith’ and explore how, despite the various forms of abuse they have observed (and experienced) within organised Christianity, it is possible to speak of the divine, and how in daring to let go of the orthodoxies established faith traditions offer a spark of the divine may yet compel and surprise.

This is not a systematic study of theology by any stretch of the imagination, nor does the book neatly fit into any of the categories of theological writing one might be familiar with. The essays collected in this book began as occasional writings shared between the authors and were revised and edited in dialogue with each other over time. Gathered together they form a project that looks for a coherent account of the divine but not one that is always neat and tidy.
This is certainly not an attempt to brush away the trauma of the abuse so many have experienced and the indelible mark this has left on the Churches which have begun to name it. Nor does it suggest that one should simply give up on faith traditions that have made this possible and that we should simply start again and reinvent Christianity, or reject it altogether. Harvey’s and Woodhead’s starting point is rather that the Christian narrative is too compelling not to engage with it and to listen out for why and how we can and should speak of it.