RIP Revd Canon John Fenton
Posted on Monday, January 5, 2009
I was sorry to learn of the death of John Fenton on 27th December 2008. I boycotted his lectures as a theology undergraduate at Durham in the 1970s, and wrote snide asides in my copy of his commentaries, because he was far too liberal for my then evangelical mindset. I think he would have understood. He used to say that theology couldn’t be taught to anyone under thirty, and I was certainly a case in point.
He was in Oxford when I moved there some fifteen years later, though our paths didn’t cross. I missed his address on ‘Re-inventing the church’ at the inauguration of the St Albans and Oxford Ministry course in 1994, though I was part of the staff at the time. But a few months ago, I came across a copy of it, and re-read it. This time, I understood.
To do theology, Fenton says, you run yourself a bath, and you lie with water up to your chin asking the questions: Why am I here? Why is there anywhere? Why is there anybody? Belief in God is, he says, some sort of answer to the question, but people need to get to the stage – through experience - of asking those questions before that answer is any use. The reason you can’t teach theology to anyone under thirty is because they haven’t had enough experience of sin, despair, failure and desolation. (OK, bit of a sweeping generalisation, but I know what he means.)
Theology begins with us, our experience of existence, sin, redemption. We see how other people had similar experiences and thought out doctrines in response. We can’t take all their theology or use all their doctrines, we need to re-invent for our own age, out of our own experiences. The reason we need a church is so that we meet other people and hear their ideas, their experience of God. So that our thinking is challenged, so that we stop believing everyone has to think the way we do. We need a church which includes people we don’t agree with or even like, to acknowledge God ‘has other friends as well as me. I am one in billions. I am only a bit. I see only a bit.’ And this applies not just across Christian denominations, but seeing the insight, wisdom and goodness of those of other religions and none.
Fenton outlines some elements of a church ‘re-invented’ for the 21st century,1 and concludes by outlining the implications this has for ministry. Priests, he says, should be men and women with experience of life, sin, etc. so that they can do theology. But not a theology which thinks it has all the answers: ‘the critical point is the point when you see that God is unknowable.’ Why is there disaster, injustice? Why doesn’t God do something? We don’t know. Priests should be people who know that ‘the most important and obvious thing about God is that he is silent. He does not speak. He does not grunt, or shuffle his feet, or cough, or do anything to assure us he is there. He meets us in his silence.’
Fenton concludes: ‘What the church needs is people who believe in shutting up; that God is not a talking God; that we do not have the word of God, we have the silence of God. That’s all there is … that’s what we want to bring others into.’
Well honestly, what a load of liberal wishy-washy claptrap that is, I hear my old evangelical self and her present-day equivalent arguing! What about the Bible, and salvation, and the personal faith which knows, yes knows, that Jesus is Alive?! Why on earth would anyone want to be brought into ‘silence’?
But when – somewhat over 30 and with all those years of experience of sin, despair, failure and desolation – I’m lying in my cooling bath water or sleepless 3 a.m. bed wondering why there is anything or anybody and what it’s all for, it isn’t Bible texts and certainties which speak to me. I am drawn by this God who is in the silence. Finally, the Revd Canon John Fenton is managing to teach me some theology. This time, I’m grateful.
1. These are:
a) Biblical criticism is of God and is here to stay. The real divisions today among Christians are between literalist fundamentalists and liberals, but this divide has no future.
b) Authority is not dictatorial, but dispersed throughout the church. One set of Christian persons will not go round telling another set what to do.
c) No more irrational rules and obsessions, particularly about sex. It is time to grow up.
d) No more absolutism: ‘We are the only ones who have the truth.’ The church is not the only way to God. ‘God is the God of variety not of uniformity’.
e) No more anti-Judaism, or any other form of racism. One world.
He was in Oxford when I moved there some fifteen years later, though our paths didn’t cross. I missed his address on ‘Re-inventing the church’ at the inauguration of the St Albans and Oxford Ministry course in 1994, though I was part of the staff at the time. But a few months ago, I came across a copy of it, and re-read it. This time, I understood.
To do theology, Fenton says, you run yourself a bath, and you lie with water up to your chin asking the questions: Why am I here? Why is there anywhere? Why is there anybody? Belief in God is, he says, some sort of answer to the question, but people need to get to the stage – through experience - of asking those questions before that answer is any use. The reason you can’t teach theology to anyone under thirty is because they haven’t had enough experience of sin, despair, failure and desolation. (OK, bit of a sweeping generalisation, but I know what he means.)
Theology begins with us, our experience of existence, sin, redemption. We see how other people had similar experiences and thought out doctrines in response. We can’t take all their theology or use all their doctrines, we need to re-invent for our own age, out of our own experiences. The reason we need a church is so that we meet other people and hear their ideas, their experience of God. So that our thinking is challenged, so that we stop believing everyone has to think the way we do. We need a church which includes people we don’t agree with or even like, to acknowledge God ‘has other friends as well as me. I am one in billions. I am only a bit. I see only a bit.’ And this applies not just across Christian denominations, but seeing the insight, wisdom and goodness of those of other religions and none.
Fenton outlines some elements of a church ‘re-invented’ for the 21st century,1 and concludes by outlining the implications this has for ministry. Priests, he says, should be men and women with experience of life, sin, etc. so that they can do theology. But not a theology which thinks it has all the answers: ‘the critical point is the point when you see that God is unknowable.’ Why is there disaster, injustice? Why doesn’t God do something? We don’t know. Priests should be people who know that ‘the most important and obvious thing about God is that he is silent. He does not speak. He does not grunt, or shuffle his feet, or cough, or do anything to assure us he is there. He meets us in his silence.’
Fenton concludes: ‘What the church needs is people who believe in shutting up; that God is not a talking God; that we do not have the word of God, we have the silence of God. That’s all there is … that’s what we want to bring others into.’
Well honestly, what a load of liberal wishy-washy claptrap that is, I hear my old evangelical self and her present-day equivalent arguing! What about the Bible, and salvation, and the personal faith which knows, yes knows, that Jesus is Alive?! Why on earth would anyone want to be brought into ‘silence’?
But when – somewhat over 30 and with all those years of experience of sin, despair, failure and desolation – I’m lying in my cooling bath water or sleepless 3 a.m. bed wondering why there is anything or anybody and what it’s all for, it isn’t Bible texts and certainties which speak to me. I am drawn by this God who is in the silence. Finally, the Revd Canon John Fenton is managing to teach me some theology. This time, I’m grateful.
1. These are:
a) Biblical criticism is of God and is here to stay. The real divisions today among Christians are between literalist fundamentalists and liberals, but this divide has no future.
b) Authority is not dictatorial, but dispersed throughout the church. One set of Christian persons will not go round telling another set what to do.
c) No more irrational rules and obsessions, particularly about sex. It is time to grow up.
d) No more absolutism: ‘We are the only ones who have the truth.’ The church is not the only way to God. ‘God is the God of variety not of uniformity’.
e) No more anti-Judaism, or any other form of racism. One world.