Fifteen Eighty Four

In 1999 I was an area dean overseeing a group of clergy in west Norwich, England. Having encouraged my colleagues to read my first book, published the previous year, another priest suggested we read a book about theology and development. In it a Filipino activist described three forms of social engagement: working for, where I have the skills and you have the problems; working with, where we pool talents and resources to solve problems together; and being with, where we seek to enjoy the other without trying to fix them or solve anything in particular.

I never forgot the distinctions, and nine years later when Dean of Duke University Chapel in North Carolina put them to work in seeking to transform the relationship between the university and the socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the city of Durham. I wrote a lecture entitled ‘A Nazareth Manifesto’ that described how Jesus spent a week in Jerusalem working for us, three years in Galilee working with us, and 30 years in Nazareth being with us. Later after reading David Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence I added the category being for, where you seek to better society but, as with working for, don’t perceive the need to make relationships in order to do so.

I published Living Without Enemies in 2011 with Marcia Owen; we described the encounter with gun violence in Durham through the same four categories – mapping a journey from working for to being with. Then in A Nazareth Manifesto in 2015 I outlined eight dimensions of being with and elucidated its theological significance, especially in relation to social action. This led to several further publications exploring implications for discipleship, ministry, mission, and in particular the cross. In co-creating the Being With Course and writing my apologetics, Humbler Faith, Bigger God (2022) I realised something I’d long been pushing at – the conviction that God’s means and God’s ends are identical.

This apparently obvious insight in fact challenged the foundations of Christian theology. Through a generous fellowship I got the chance to spend a period of research looking at the way Maximus the Confessor, Duns Scotus and Karl Barth, among others, had reconciled their conviction that Jesus would have come even had there not been a fall with their recognition of God’s original decision never to be except to be with us in Christ. In each case, particularly with Barth, I perceived their commitment to the ‘primacy of Christ’ – that the purpose of the incarnation was determined before the foundation of the world – was somewhat undermined by their somewhat conventional notion of the atonement. I came to realise by contrast that God’s purpose was one continuous thread of being with – in the relations of the Trinity, in the incarnation, in creation (as conceiving the theatre for the incarnation) and ultimately in heaven, where we shall finally be with God, one another, ourselves and the renewed creation.

This is a very different story from the conventional one. Instead of being anthropocentric – focused on humankind’s guilt-and-mortality problem, and our need for God (in Christ) to fix it – it is truly theocentric, based on God’s eternal desire to be with us. In the final chapter of the book I undertake a thorough renarration of the cross. Instead of being seen as a device by which we are rescued from sin and death, the cross becomes the defining moment that tests whether God’s commitment to be with us will be sustained, come what may.

On completing the book I came to realise that, as well as being a prequel to A Nazareth Manifesto, it was the first of a trilogy. In addition to this Christological volume, I now perceive a pneumatological and patrological contribution – together entitled Yesterday, Today and Forever.