“…[T]he Church was of a piece with its environment. Whatever
else the Church might be, it was certainly a part of material reality…” W.H.
Vanstone, The Risk of Love, pp. 26
(This is the first of several entries on reading The Risk of Love in the precarious present).
Amid one of several spiritual crises during divinity school, the pastor of a tiny, yet active, inner city Lutheran church directed me to W.H. Vanstone’s The Risk
of Love. I should not have been surprised that this book
of stunning (practical) theology arose from a deep pastoral need. In the early 1950s, Vanstone, a Church
of England clergyman, was transferred by his Bishop from a parish of
considerable activity and obvious importance to “initiate the work of the
Church in a new area of corporation housing on the of another industrial town
some twenty miles away.” (10) Despite their geographical proximity, the two
parishes could not have been more different.
The parish he was leaving had been
integral to the life of the region.
Sitting on the boundary between “an area of poverty and unemployment and
an area of comparative prosperity,” the parish acted as a catalyst for mutual
aid “from one area to the other.” (4) Upon visiting his new assignment,
Vanstone’s “understanding of what the Church was for…to further the will of God
by the practical promotion of the brotherhood of man,” was thrown into turmoil.
(6-7) “I met not a single person,”
he writes, “to whom the coming of the Church was a matter of any kind of
personal interest.” In fact, local residents, “were aware of no social problems
such as loneliness among the elderly or unruliness among the young: and they
were confident that, if any such problems should arise, they could be handled
within the institutions which were already in being or which were planned for
the near future…I was made to feel that the district had no need of a Church:
it was getting on very well and happily without one.” (11-12)
With
the rise of the welfare state in the 1950s, the UK was marked by “an atmosphere
of social hope.” (7) Writing in 1977, Vanstone concedes, “[i]t may appear…naïve
of me to have trusted this impression and to have believed that any society
could be free from the problems and the needs—social, psychological and
spiritual—to which traditionally the Church has ministered.” But, he continues,
these were the days immediately following Bonhoeffer’s vision of “a post-war
world in which man would have ‘come of age’, and in which he would be free from
that need for religion…” (13)
Thrown
into this new situation, Vanstone settled into a period of deep depression and
despair, “a coldness settled upon my feelings,” he notes, “a grim realization
that I was preparing not for a new kind of life but for a long charade.” (14)
Broken of his prior conceptual frame, he would soon be shown “that the
importance of the Church [lay]…in something other than its service to, or
satisfaction of, the needs of man.” (16) But just what this is, may surprise
the reader…
Reading
this text anthropologically, several things stand out. First is Vanstone’s
remarkable parochialism—his intense and practical focus on the parish and
little else. Having never served as the vicar or rector of a parish, I admire
his discipline (as I do the focused and revolutionary localism of all parish priests!), but to
view England apart from it’s global outside reveals, as he would surely admit,
a narrow (if not colonial/imperial) view of humanity. Such parochial nationalism, though it surely exists in many U.S. churches, is even more problematic in today’s globalized
present.
Finally, it is ironic
that Vanstone’s moment of personal crisis arose within the rampant social hope
of 1950s England. The crises of
today stem from an entirely different affective condition, one that cultural
theorist Lauren Berlant has termed “crisis ordinariness” and a historical present
marked by “the scene of slow death, a condition of being warn out by the
activity of reproducing life…” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, pp. 10, 100-101) While the prosperity witnessed by
Vanstone may have created the conditions for today’s global fragility, the theology
it produced in him has never been more important.
