Reasonable Radical?: Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy

Reasonable Radical?

Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy

edited by Ian S. Markham and Joshua Daniel

Reasonable Radical?

Reading the Writings of Martyn Percy

Copyright ©

2018

Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1783-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4284-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4283-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Markham, Ian S. | Daniel, Joshua

Title: Reasonable radical? : reading the writings of Martyn Percy / edited by Ian S. Markham and Joshua Daniel.

Description: Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications,

2018

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-5326-1783-6 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-4982-4284-4 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-4982-4283-7 (

ebook

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Subjects: LCSH: Percy, Martyn | Anglican Communion | Church renewal—Anglican Communion | Church of England | Christianity—

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st century | Church | Clergy

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print

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ebook

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Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introducing Martyn Percy

Part I: Methodology

Chapter 1: Contextual Theologian

Chapter 2: Radical Reasonableness

Chapter 3: Signs and Signals

Chapter 4: Circuits of Power in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal

Chapter 5: Response to Part I

Part II: Ecclesiology

Chapter 6: Three Sketches of Symbols and Sacraments

Chapter 7: Time for an Anglican Ecclesiological Revolution?

Chapter 8: The Prudent Priest

Chapter 9: Ecclesial Engagements

Chapter 10: Response to Part II

Part III: Applications

Chapter 11: Secondary Indicators of Emphasis

Chapter 12: Learning to Take Note

Chapter 13: Practically Priests

Chapter 14: Ministry as Occupation

Chapter 15: Response to Part III

Part IV: Selected Readings from the Works of Martyn Percy

Chapter 16: Sampling

Part—IV Section 1: Short Extracts

Chapter 17: Christianity and Contemporary Culture

Chapter 18: Casual Ethnography

Chapter 19: On Women Bishops

Chapter 20: On Ministry

Chapter 21: Music, Theology, and Ecclesiology

Chapter 22: Peace-Building in the Anglican Communion

Part—IV Section 2: Mission and Ministry

Chapter 23: Restoration, Retrieval, and Renewal

Chapter 24: Growth and Management in the Church of England

Chapter 25: Sacred Sagacity

Part—IV Section 3: Comprehending Congregations

Chapter 26: Power in the Local Church

Chapter 27: Rules, Recipes, Rubrics

Chapter 28: Adventure and Atrophy in a Charismatic Movement

Part IV—Section 4: Church and World

Chapter 29: Sex, Sense, and Non-Sense for Anglicans

Chapter 30: Mind the Gap

Chapter 31: The Anglican Communion as Ecclesial Vocation

Afterword

Chapter 32: Confessions: Tone and Content in a Reasonable Radical

Martyn Percy: Selected Publications

Contributors

Kathryn D. Blanchard is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Alma College. She is the author of The Protestant Ethic or the Spirit of Capitalism: Christians, Freedom and Free Markets (Cascade 2010) and co-author of An Introduction to Christian Environmentalism (Baylor University Press 2014). 

Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and has also worked in the Anthropology Departments at the Universities of Durham and Sussex. He is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Association, and a current co-editor of both the journal Religion and Society and the book series Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism. His books include The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge University Press 2000), Reframing Pilgrimage (edited with John Eade, Routledge 2004) and The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (edited with Rosalind Hackett, New York University Press 2015).

Joshua Daniel is a candidate for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Arkansas and a seminarian at Virginia Theological Seminary. He completed his PhD in Philosophy, writing a dissertation on Wittgenstein and religion, at the University of Arkansas in 2015.

Joel C. Daniels is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, assisting editor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, and an Episcopal priest at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City. He is the author of the monograph Theology, Tragedy, and Suffering in Nature: Toward a Realist Doctrine of Creation, and articles in the Anglican Theological Review and the Journal of Ecumenical Studies.

Matt Gompels is a postgraduate student in the study of religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and Keble College at the University of Oxford. Alongside a career in Education, he has spent time researching charismatic Christianity in both the United States and Britain, under the supervision of Martyn Percy. His broader research interests include the changing role of religion in public life, specifically the relationship between conceptualizations of religious identity and public policy.

Samantha R. E. Gottlich is a transitional deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas and the curate at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Houston. Her background in physiology, camping ministry, and higher education feed into her larger concern for holistic wellness and faith. She also co-authored Faith Rules: An Episcopal Manual (Moorehouse 2016) and Lectionary Levity (Church Publishing 2017) with Ian S. Markham.

Monique M. Ingalls is Assistant Professor of Music at Baylor University. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work on evangelical and charismatic music and worship has been published within the fields of ethnomusicology, media studies, liturgical studies, and hymnology. She is co-founder of the Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives conference, and a series editor for Routledge’s Congregational Music Studies book series.

Richard Lawson is the dean of Saint John’s Cathedral in Denver, Colorado. He has served as the rector of parishes in the dioceses of Alabama and West Tennessee. Richard’s essays have been published in the Anglican Theological Review and the Sewanee Theological Review.

Gerard Mannion holds the Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies at Georgetown University, where he is also a Fellow of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. He was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Founding Chair of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network, to date he has authored, co-authored and edited some nineteen books and numerous articles and chapters elsewhere in the fields of ecclesiology and ethics, as well as in other aspects of systematic theology and philosophy.

Ian S. Markham is the Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and Professor of Theology and Ethics. He is the author of A Theology of Engagement (Wiley 2003), Truth and the Reality of God (T. & T. Clark 1998), and Plurality and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press 1994). His awards include the Robertson Fellow 2006; Teape Lecturer in India 2004; Claggett Fellow attached to Washington National Cathedral in 2000; and Frank Woods Fellow at Trinity College, Melbourne in 1997, F. D. Maurice Lectures at King’s College, London, 2015.

Lyndon Shakespeare, an Episcopal priest, has served parishes in Washington, DC; Virginia; New Jersey; and Long Island. From 2011–2013, Lyndon was the Director of Program and Ministry at Washington National Cathedral. As a scholar-priest, he teaches and publishes in the areas of theological anthropology and ecclesiology. His PhD thesis, written while a member of the Archbishop’s Examination in Theology, has been published in the Veritas series of Cascade Books with the title Being the Body of Christ in the Age of Management. He currently serves as chair of the Society of Scholar-Priests, which fosters and supports scholarly-minded priests in their vocation to serve in parish and teaching ministries.

Daniel Warnke is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, and currently an ordinand in the Church of England, training through St Mellitus College and serving at St Mary-le-Bow in London. His research is focused on Christianity and contemporary culture, modern ecclesiology, and practical theology. Daniel has also served as a church planter in Vineyard Churches UK and Ireland from 2005–2016.

Acknowledgments

An endeavor of such complexity as this book is made possible by many. The Conant Grant funded the conference on the work of Martyn Percy. The participants made the conference very special. Katherine Malloy helped with some of the logistics. Benjamin Judd prepared many of the meals. Sharon Williams and Jenna Daniel compiled the index. Lesley Markham was gracious as the group took over much of her home at the Deanery. And finally, Martyn Percy took time out of his extraordinarily busy life to be present at the conference and then write responses to all the sections. We are deeply grateful to Martyn and all those involved for making the project both fascinating and great fun. The team at Pickwick was amazing. So with thanks to Robin Parry, Calvin Jaffarian, and Shannon Carter, who were professional, careful, and ensured a high quality product.

The editors also wish to thank the following publishers for permission to reproduce, in part or in whole, the following material written by Martyn Percy. Chapter 17 comes from a selection of Percy’s The Salt of the Earth: Religious Resilience in a Secular Age, published by Sheffield Academic Press and T. & T. Clark (2002) and reissued by Bloomsbury Academic Collection (2016); chapter 18 originally appeared in The Wisdom of the Spirit: Gospel, Church & Culture, edited by Peter Ward, published by Ashgate (2014); chapter 19 was originally published in the Daily Telegraph (November 21, 2012); chapter 20 comes from Percy’s Clergy: The Origin of Species, published by Continuum/Bloomsbury (2006); chapter 21 originally appeared in Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience, edited by Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau and Tom Wagner, and published by Ashgate (2013); chapter 22 comes from Percy’s Anglicanism: Confidence, Commitment and Communion, published by Ashgate (2013); chapter 23 draws from three different works: from Percy’s Words, Wonders and Power: Understanding Contemporary Christian Fundamentalism and Revivalism, published by SPCK (1996), from Percy’s Power and the Church: Ecclesiology in an Age of Transition, published by Cassell (1997), and from Theologies of Retrieval: Practices and Perspectives, edited by Darren Sarisky, published by T. & T. Clark (2017); chapter 24 comes from two works: an article published in Modern Believing 55:3 (2014) and from a piece that appeared in Church Times (February 28, 2014); chapter 25 originally appeared in the Anglican Theological Review 90 (Winter 2008); chapter 26 originally appeared in Exploring Ordinary Theology: Everyday Christian Believing and the Church, edited by Jeff Astley and Leslie Francis, published by Ashgate (2013); chapter 27 originally appeared in Fundamentalisms: Threats and Ideologies in the Modern World, edited by James D. G. Dunn, published by I. B. Taurus (2016); chapter 28 originally appeared in Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians, edited by Martin Lindhardt, published by Berghahn Books (2011); chapter 29 originally appeared in Modern Church (December 2015); chapter 30 originally appeared in Public Faith? The State of Religious Belief and Practice in Britain, edited by Paul Avis, published by SPCK (2003); and chapter 31 originally appeared in Percy’s The Ecclesial Canopy: Faith, Hope, Charity, published by Ashgate (2012).

Finally, chapter 9 brings together four previously published reviews of Percy’s work. Robert Carroll’s review of Words, Wonders and Power was published in the Anglican Theological Review; Peter Coleman’s review of Intimate Affairs: Sexuality and Spirituality in Perspective was published in Crucible; Richard H. Roberts’ review of Power and the Church: Ecclesiology in an Age of Transition was published in The Journal of Contemporary Religion; and Gavin D’Costa’s review of Engaging with Contemporary Culture: Christianity, Theology and the Concrete Church was published in The International Journal of Public Theology. For these publishers’ permission to include this material, the editors of this book give their thanks.

Introducing Martyn Percy

To step into the world of Martyn Percy is to step into a world of faith, church, music, culture, the social sciences, and controversy. The Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, is a polymath: his corpus is vast; his interests are varied; and his positions always interesting. This book is an invitation to encounter this remarkable world.

The beginning of this book is a critical engagement with the thought of Martyn Percy. In September 2016, a group of scholars gathered at Virginia Theological Seminary to reflect on the Percy project. Perspectives were offered from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, ecclesiology, musicology, theology (contextual, practical, and pastoral), and feminism. The contributors are drawn from universities, colleges, seminaries, and the church, reflecting the reception of Percy’s work to a wide audience. As each paper was shared; a lively conversation ensued. These papers became the initial chapters of this book. But then the project evolved. We wanted the reader to have the option of returning to the primary texts of Percy, to read the original extracts from the Percy corpus that provoked much of the lively discussion. We wanted readers to understand why engaging with Percy is so important and interesting. So we have a combination: this book is a reader introduction to Percy and a critical engagement with his work.

So Why Martyn Percy?

There is in the academy a ruthless hierarchy. The pure theologian or pure biblical scholar is at the top; the practical or contextual theologian is nearer the bottom. Our models of great work are Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, not James Hopewell or Arlin J. Rothauge. We are invited to live in the realm of carefully formulated argument, often disconnected from the immediate context, that takes us to a plausible account of God and how God relates to the world. We constantly celebrate the abstract world of pure theology.

But for those of us in theological education, our theology needs to be much closer to earth. We need the theologian who is well-versed in the tradition but can connect with the church as it really is. Percy is a contextual theologian or even, perhaps, a practical theologian. With the contextual theologians, Percy believes that context is both important as theological ideas emerge (so even with the Trinity at Nicaea) and for the application of theological ideas in different situations. With the practical theologian, Percy is as interested in what people do (or in the case of the charismatics—what they sing) as in what they say. What they do (or sing) is often more revealing of their theology, then the formal statement of faith found on a website.

Percy constantly deals with the real church. It is not surprising that two chapters come from priests currently serving in congregations. Percy has spent most of his life in theological education: he has been training future priests for decades. And he moves out from the congregation to offer a critique of culture, often seeing the grace of God at work in that culture. Dr. Linda Woodhead MBE (Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster, UK) observes that Percy’s work is unusual among contextual theologians, and uncommon for those working in the arena of ecclesiological investigations:

One of the most striking areas of originality in Martyn’s work is his method. He is a latter-day essayist—unusual amongst contemporary academics—but part of a classic tradition. The medium is perfect for his message: the two are inseparable. Martyn does theology, sociology and anthropology not from the vantage point of the preacher in the pulpit or the academic in the ivory tower, but from within the communities of practice he is addressing—church, society and academy. He offers it to those communities and writes for them. He doesn’t offer a systematic theology or grand social theory. He is part of the communities he addresses, an adroit participant observer. He picks up telling fragments from them, reflects on them and places them in a brighter setting, offering them back for further reflection. Later, he will often weave the fragments into wholes—articles become books.¹

The center of gravity to Percy’s work is a passion for the God revealed in Christ. In some respects, he is strikingly orthodox in his theology. His interest in evangelicalism is not as an outsider, but as one who continues to appreciate the richness of that tradition and welcomes the vitality that evangelical congregations often bring. But he is not interested in a faith that cannot recognize grace in other traditions—whether explicitly secular or in a different faith tradition. His Christian commitments are invitations to engagement with different perspectives. The God that Martyn finds in the Christian tradition is the God that is working everywhere.

This all means that he is perhaps the leading exponent of a theology that engages constructively with the social sciences. The social sciences are a tool that facilitates a reading of the world that can illuminate the theological task. He wants to push back on the propensity of many theologians (influenced, for example, by Radical Orthodoxy) who believe that theology and the social scientists are operating in opposing narratives by illustrating that, when engagement happens, the results are good. The results prove that antagonism between the social sciences and theology are inappropriate. As Linda Woodhead perceptively observes,

Martyn realizes that truth and language is always situated, contextual. He believes that the writer should give as well as take, and that responsible scholarship is about call and answer. The method is perfectly adapted to the kind of ethnography he is skilled at, and to the Anglican tradition to which he belongs—in which lived practice has always been more important than abstract reflection or doctrinal definition. Martyn has crafted a medium which is perfectly adapted to his message, indeed it is his message.²

One last reason why we are producing this book on Martyn Percy is that he is utterly and totally Anglican. The characteristics of an Anglican are hard to define, but the list must include the following: a deep sense of the tradition, a commitment to the Incarnation as an engaged embodiment in life that we, as the church, should model, and a willingness to engage across disciplines and across ecclesial lines. The tradition matters because Anglicans have seen themselves as the via media between the Catholic and Reformed traditions, which was best seen in the patristic period. The Incarnation matters as a metaphor for Christian engagement with society. And the fact that Anglicans strive to take the best from other traditions captures the intrinsic commitment to such engagement. As editors, we wanted to lift up the distinctive Anglican approach. Indeed as ecclesial identities dissipate in the modern age, we appreciated the deep locatedness of Percy.

The tone of Percy’s writing is something that has intrigued the contributors of this book. Percy advocates Big Tent ecclesiology; capacious, broad, and catholic. But it also has a reformed edge. The tone is often a subtle, sometimes-uneasy blend of the irenic and the critical. It is not passive-aggressive. But it often does combine the pastoral and the prophetic, and kindness with criticism. There is generosity and hope, but tempered with wrestling and realism.

So, when Simon Coleman titles his chapter Radical Reasonableness, which we, as editors, adjusted for the purpose of a title to reasonable radical, we would want to say that this is all part of the Anglican dimension of Percy’s approach. It captures a tone of the Anglican tradition.

The Audience

This text is intended to be a challenge of the academy. We want this volume to expose the limited, and often unhelpful, hierarchy of disciplines. When done well, the applied or contextual or practical theologian can illuminate the theological task in such a way that it makes a real difference to the life of the congregation and how the Church thinks of herself in the world. The academy needs models of such contextual theology done extremely well; those searching for such models will find this book invaluable.

Furthermore, this is a text intended for all those in theological education. There is a dearth of substantial texts that help assist the future leadership of congregations to correctly read the church and the society in which the church seeks to serve. Courses that focus on ministry or congregational studies will find this text helpful. It is a deep immersion into the debates, questions, and issues of applied theological education.

The last section in this text offers a distinctively Anglican take on the complex relationship of the social sciences to theology. It is an approach that is unapologetically engaged. For those in other ecclesial traditions, we trust this volume will be a conversation partner. For those in the Anglican tradition, the work of Martyn Percy is an appropriate and powerful model.

And Finally

Readers of this book will note that we have invited Percy to respond at the end of each sector. This is appropriate. There are questions asked and disagreements aired in these chapters. Percy’s work characteristically lends itself to this type of conversation. Conversation characterizes his own work: he is always bringing that perspective in to engagement with another perspective; he is always finding grace in the surprising places. Perhaps the main reason for this book is that Martyn Percy’s work is quite simply remarkable. His elegant prose, often memorable with hints of humor, yields us a rich encounter with the God revealed in Christ, who is active in the Church and throughout the world. In short, Martyn Percy is a substantial theological thinker and writer from whom we have much to learn.

—Ian Markham and Joshua Daniel

1. From personal correspondence with Martyn Percy, June

8

,

2017

.

2. From personal correspondence with Martyn Percy, June

8

,

2017

.

Part I

Methodology

1

Contextual Theologian

The Methodology of Martyn Percy

Ian S. Markham

Of the many challenges facing the church in the modern world, one must be the complicated relationship between the social sciences and religious truth. The argument that religion is just a social construct is so compelling and persuasive for many people. To provide a few illustrations: Jesus cast out demons because demons were the explanation for mental illness that premodern cultures did not yet understand; for cultures ruled by a king, it was important that the divine king had his own court, hence the belief in angels arose; and biblical prophets attributed the winning of wars and the rise of empires to providence because they didn’t understand the political and social factors that really determine these things. Modernity assumes these arguments are valid. They are assumed by the talking head expert on the TV show. For many, the social sciences have explained away religion. ¹

In response, the temptation is some form of imperialism. This was the attraction of Radical Orthodoxy (perhaps still is, although this school of thought is less fashionable than it was). For John Milbank, he offered a narrative explaining that sociology is, itself, a story: one grounded in a particular worldview, emerging from the Enlightenment, and built on an ontology of violence.² Milbank wanted to reduce the social sciences down from the role of judge and jury on the validity of religious assertions and instead depict sociology as a sibling to theology, built on a faith of unjustifiable assumptions. A different imperialism was fundamentalism—both in its Roman Catholic and Evangelical forms. Here a transcendent inerrancy was claimed for the Bible, for the church or for both. On this view, an infallible text or tradition protected the faith from the insidious attacks of the social sciences. God is the author of the Bible: God does not make mistakes. Therefore, any social explanation is interesting but not a reason to reject the truth of the text.

Into this debate steps Martyn Percy. He completely rejects all forms of imperialism. The social sciences contain considerable truth: they can illuminate the faith: we can learn from the social sciences. Yet, at the same time, faith is true. Granted, the social sciences might illuminate how certain forms of the faith are unlikely to be true, but still the essential drama told by the church is true. His books are all an argument for a dance between the social sciences and theology, where God is at work in the cultural situation and where all true ideas (all false ones too, for that matter) need a cultural location. And if one recognizes this reality, then one understands a little more clearly what God is saying. He believes a certain disposition to faith emerges. One holds one’s convictions with humility: one recognizes the complexity of belief. For Percy, God chose to locate truth within culture, therefore God always invites us to hold our beliefs while aware of that truth.

In this chapter, we shall explore the remarkable achievement of Percy. This chapter will begin by placing Percy in the appropriate trajectory of intellectual thought. Then, in keeping with the Percy methodology, we shall do some contextual work on his worldview by locating his thought in his own biography. Finally, I shall identify four dimensions to the application of his methodology.

Trajectories of Thought

We start by placing Percy in an appropriate intellectual trajectory. Probably the most oft-cited author is James Hopewell and his classic Congregations: Stories and Structures. Hopewell was puzzled why some congregations endure despite everything. In reflecting on this, he arrived at an analysis that divided congregations into four narrative types—comic (where everything has a happy ending), romantic (the transcendent and divine intervention), tragic (judgment and law are central), and ironic (rich in paradox and emphasis on the gray)—the typology actually comes from Northrop Frye. Hopewell argued that congregations tell their stories, often in unspoken and subconscious ways. A key corollary of Hopewell’s book was that leadership in harmony with the narrative is much more likely to succeed than leadership in conflict with the narrative.

Hopewell, of course, needs to be read in the light of Clifford Geertz, the famous advocate of a symbolic anthropology, most elegantly expounded in his remarkable book The Interpretation of Culture. Although a collection of essays, it set out a distinctive approach to the social sciences. Geertz sets out his assumption when he writes, Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.³ The way to interrogate these webs of significance is through thick description—a term taken from Gilbert Ryle. Geertz explains that one understands culture in a certain way that requires this thick description. He writes, As interworked systems of construable signs . . . , culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described.⁴ It is in the same volume that we find Geertz’s famous essay Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. In a style that Percy (and Hopewell) emulate, Geertz starts as an anthropologist in Bali watching an illegal cockfight (and running away from the police) and moves to a detailed critique of all the aspects of the cockfight—thick description indeed.

Percy likes the Geertz/Hopewell approach for many reasons. He appreciates the iceberg approach that stresses that what is happening under the water (in the realm of assumptions and values) is more important than what is visible (in, for example, a statement of faith). He also likes the methodology. For all of Percy’s conversation with the social science, he does not use the typical instruments of sociology. His books do not have charts; he does not organize massive surveys and focus groups. Hopewell, along with Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, provides Percy’s preferred methodology. A primary focus in Percy’s doctorate Words, Wonders and Power was the informal worship of the charismatic churches. Like Hopewell, he wants to find the pre-existing clues to the underlying narrative of the congregation (what practice or place exposes what this congregation really thinks) rather than construct an artificial instrument that might or might not work. A contemporary who is similar in methodology to Percy is Nicholas Healy. It is the church as it really is that matters—the actual church.⁵

Perhaps the most explicit theological influence on Percy is Daniel Hardy. Percy worked with Dan Hardy while he was training for his ordination at Durham University. Percy learned from Hardy the obligation that the church was never called to be a sect or partisan group. So Hardy writes, [T]he church is called as an apostle and witness to society as a whole on behalf of One whose work was for the whole of society, its witness being determined by Christ’s achievement in securing the Kingdom of God through an ethical and spiritual victory.⁶ Hardy sees Christ’s work everywhere—in social structures, in the lives of non-Christians (hence his very active involvement in the Abrahamic dialogue) and in society more broadly. Percy imbibed this assumption. The establishment of the Church of England is, for Percy, generally a good thing. Percy writes, I would argue that the function of a national Church—even one that is tied into an evolving monarchy—might still represent a viable form of Church-State relationship in a modern state. The idea of a (Christian) establishment as an essential organic and living part of national identity that still has a valuable role to play in local, regional, national and international life has plenty of life left it.⁷ Of course, Percy is the first to admit that an established church is under some strain due to pluralism and demographic changes, but nevertheless feels that the presence of an established religion within a reticulate and complex ecology of establishment ensures that questions of value, ethics and justice can be raised within the midst of the governance of Parliament, and in the very heart of a consumerist society.⁸

One last theologian should be mentioned as we seek to map Percy’s intellectual trajectory. There are interesting similarities between David Tracy and Martyn Percy. Percy shares with Tracy an emphasis on the inevitability of interpretation in context.⁹ Percy values Tracy’s idea of public theology, where one is always addressing three social realities, namely, the wider society, the academy, and the church.¹⁰ Although Percy does not explicitly use Tracy’s concept of the classic, which explains how a particular person, text, event, melody, or symbol points to the timeless, Percy does operate with a similar relationship between time and the divine.¹¹

Percy’s Own Context

Turning now to Percy’s own biography, we find that central to understanding Percy is his evangelical roots. In a lovely introduction to Previous Convictions, Percy writes:

Before I reached my early teens, I went forward at a Christian rally and gave my life to God. . . . Growing up evangelical, as I did, mostly, it was not unusual to give your life to Christ several times, and I was no exception to that statistic. Dedication, re-dedication, affirmation, commitment, re-commitment, assurance—and in the maelstrom of teenage years, with guilt bursting into your psyche with as much frequency as the spots on your face, you could be forgiven for feeling as though you were drowning in a cauldron of your own hormones.¹²

The contextual theologian is already at work in his own analysis of his conversion. It is located in the complex processes of being a teenager. This is part of the reason why he endlessly went forward to recommit at evangelical rallies. Yet as he goes on to explain: there was a theological truth in all this. God was at work in his life. Although at baptism he had been saved, God was continuing to invite him into an ever-deeper relationship with God.

It is interesting that his doctorate, published as Word, Wonders, and Power, shows an ex-evangelical in conversation with his evangelical past. It is a study of the impact, theology, and practices emerging from John Wimber—the creator of the Vineyard churches. Percy the contextual theologian is clearly developing his methodology. He offers a critique drawing on the texts and sermons of Wimber. Here he discovers Wimber’s theology is one of power—a powerful God who heals (rarely is present in suffering), building a powerful church army, which will vanquish its foes. However, the interesting feature of this study is the way Percy focuses on the music. The temptation is to view the music as incidental—the padding that makes up much of euphoric feeling in the service. Yet for Percy, this is the key to understanding the charismatic movement. He writes:

In examining Wimber’s worship, we need to avoid the common trap of treating his songs as simply texts. The music . . . is not incidental, but integral. To ignore the theological impact of the music is surely a mistake. The melodic, harmonic and rhythmic dimensions of the music are all value-laden. Music imprints its own ideological meaning, no matter how hard this is to articulate.¹³

Here we have the essence of the Percy approach. Like many practical theologians, the confessed theology is less interesting than the lived or practiced theology. And the latter is often more visible in the places where almost subconsciously the real sentiments and worldview come out. The music, which is a substantial part of the service and sung while driving home in the car, is packed through with the implicit, which is the actual, theology of the group. The result is a distinctive approach: it is a critique of the charismatic movement that takes seriously the context and a key aspect that illuminates the whole.

Percy became the most well-known Anglican commentator on the charismatic movement. From time to time, he has returned to the topic and offered his own assessment. For example, when reviewing David Hilborn’s edited collection of essays on Toronto in Perspective, Percy writes:

[T]he Toronto Blessing needs to be understood in its own (postmodern) cultural context of revivalism. . . . The discreet branding of manifestations created a consumer-led market hungry for larger and more powerful spiritual epiphenomena, which might just achieve what the previous manifestation had only hinted at. Yet as this narration is beginning to suggest, weariness and routinization, the ministering Cherubim and Seraphim that accompany the Ark of Charisma wherever it may travel, eventually settle on the movement, smothering it once more with their own feathered intensity. Oddly, people became bored and disenchanted with the spectacular. Others conclude that in spirit of the premise and promise, the epiphenomena has not delivered the hoped-for global revival, and the much anticipated avalanche of converts. Atrophy sets in, and the movement begins to lose its momentum.¹⁴

This judgment was not simply accurate, but also revealing. It was accurate in that the charismatic movement is absorbed, and part of the mainline and the spectacular claims (e.g. the movement is evidence for the imminent return of Christ) for the movement are dissipating. But for our purposes, this is revealing. Percy has deep affection for his evangelical roots, but he is now resolutely Anglican. He acknowledges that the Anglican tendency can be characterized as dull and a little boring. Percy sees the understated emotional repertoire of Anglican polity differently. He says of the Anglican Communion that politeness, integrity, restraint, diplomacy, patience, a willingness to listen, and above all, not to be ill-mannered—these are the things that enable the Anglican Communion to cohere.¹⁵ It is almost as if the temperament of such Anglican polity is, for Percy, healthier. It does not promise the spectacular, but it does deliver discipleship, faithfulness, and a capacity to endure in the midst of the complex demands that living makes of us all.

Four Features of the Percy Methodology

With these preliminaries established, let us now identify four features of the Percy methodology. The first is that the basic shape of his theology is orthodox. In his Thirty Nine New Articles: An Anglican Landscape of Faith, Percy cites approvingly Brian McLaren’s call for a generous orthodoxy.¹⁶ Unlike the non-realists, God really does exist; unlike the Myth of God Incarnate contributors, God really is triune and Jesus really is the incarnation of God. Unlike some liberal popularizers (e.g. Marcus Borg), the tomb really is empty.

But there is more to Percy. When discussing glossalia, he admits to a graphic spiritual experience at the shrine of Saint Friedeswyde which reduced me to my knees and rooted me to the spot.¹⁷ He describes an exorcism that he performs, where a child complains of seeing an elderly man wandering around the upstairs of the house. While admitting the potential social, psychological, and psychotherapeutic angles that could be explored,¹⁸ he nevertheless sprinkles holy water, says the Lord’s Prayer with appropriate collects, and then has a cup of tea with the family before going home. It appears to do the trick. It is very clear that this is not necessarily an affirmation of Saint Paul’s powers and principalities, but he is also very careful not to deny their existence.¹⁹ Percy has a flexibility—almost an agnosticism—that inclines him to belief, while at the same time wanting to play down any certainty.

Now Percy rarely writes at any great length about traditional theological questions. So, on the Trinity, he cites approvingly the Daniel Hardy and David Ford suggestion of thinking of the Trinity as music—in particular jazz. And he approves of this analogy precisely because it does not explicate precisely what is meant by the Trinity; so he writes, To worship the Trinity is not to understand each note or to deconstruct the score; it is to listen, learn and participate. Ultimately, all the doctrine of the Trinity is trying to do is to say something about the abundance of God. All our theology is but intellectual fumbling for truth—a matrix that eludes us.²⁰ Now, where precisely he stands on the Trinity is not clear: is Percy with Augustine of Hippo or Jurgen Moltmann? Interestingly, his Jazz Trinity of composer-performer-listener is preceded with a recognition that the orthodox doctrinal formulation at Nicaea was grounded in complex context. So Percy writes, It is partly a social consensus bound by time, and partly a political settlement that attempted to bind up arguments and paradoxes to capture the essence of a mystery—something that was glimpsed in a mirror, but only dimly.²¹ Truth is embodied in the doctrine, but it is hidden behind the social complexities of the Emperor Constantine and the need for unity in his empire. When he comes to the Incarnation, his reflection centers on the paradox of God as a baby and the invitation to handle the all-consuming demands of that encounter with a baby.²²

The social context is front and central for Percy. Yet he does want to affirm the truth of the tradition. Perhaps the best way to make sense of this is that he trusts the witness of the tradition sufficiently to affirm the creeds as true, but does not want (and almost feels it is unsuitable to do so) to try and unpack them further. The focus of his energy is the church as it is now and how it can best serve the reign of God.

We turn then to the second and primary theme. Percy believes that all good theology needs to work alongside the insights we can learn from the social science. As we have already seen, this was the theme of his book Words, Wonders and Power. As an essayist, Percy consistently draws on the social sciences and cultural studies to shape his contextual theology. For Percy, the social sciences can illuminate, clarify, and transform a Christian analysis. Understanding the context is simply essential.

Percy is adamant that the church should be literate in both theology and the social sciences. One good illustration of this is his various critiques by the Church of England to revitalize its structures. He gets exasperated with tendencies of the church to be both theologically uninformed and sociologically uninformed. So back in 1996, Percy complains that the so-called Turnball report (the then-Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Michael Turnbull chaired the committee) was theologically inept. He writes:

In short, Working as One Body attempts to offer a mechanistic blueprint—the rationalization of congregational process and the animation of social will to achieve results, that lacks a symbolic, organic, or contextual vision. . . . The first three chapters do not actually inform the report, and in spite of their periodic genuflection to a symbolic and organic blueprint, they are surpassingly weak in their ecclesiology.²³

Meanwhile the Green Report of 2014 has plenty of theological defects, but is also sociologically uninformed. Percy writes,

First, it has no point of origination in theological or spiritual wisdom. Instead, on offer is a dish of basic contemporary approaches to executive management, with a little theological garnish. A total absence of ecclesiology flows from this. The report has little depth or immersion in educational literature. A more notable absence is any self-awareness in the report: unaware of critiques of management, executive authority, and leadership which abound in academic literature, it is steeped in its own uncritical use of executive management-speak.²⁴

Percy starts his response by stressing that managerial insights do have a place, but as the finest business schools now recognize how limited their insights are, and the challenge of applying those insights to a complex entity like a church is significant, we need to tread carefully.²⁵ This, coupled with the assumption that the church is just another organization that can be managed, makes the entire Green project deeply misguided for Percy. He was appalled by both the lack of knowledge of management literature and the complex disregard of the Biblical conception of the church as a divinely appointed entity, which is the Body of Christ, intended to usher in the reign of God. It felt too much like church by management of works rather than church by divine grace.

It is clear, then, that there is a complex relationship in Percy’s work between the social sciences and theology. In different places, he works in different ways. So when reflecting on the issue of establishment, he advocates a methodology that uses the analogy of refraction. Percy writes:

In line with the practical theological approach that characterizes this volume, I prefer to read (with potential for reshaping) the complex culture of establishment through the analogy of refraction. The idea that the truth and purposes of God are refracted—spread, as it were, like a band of colour—is particularly compelling for the issue in hand, and complements the strands of culture that need to be assessed in considering the issues.²⁶

The purpose of the analogy is to capture the complexity. It is to challenge any simplistic equation, for example, establishment means privileging the Church of England, and create a sense of meshed factors that bring light and light that changes depending on vantage point. A fascinating discussion then follows.

More common, perhaps, is to work from an illustration that is pivotal to the social context to a theological, ecclesial, or ethical insight. Let us call this the method of reflection on an illustrative fragment. (David Tracy has made the term fragment very fashionable: and I want to amend the meaning to make it work for Percy. For Tracy, it is an idea that challenges a totality and provides an insight into the nature of God; for Percy, it is a story that helps us see the truth about the totality).²⁷ For Percy, the fragment needs to be illustrative: so, for example, the role music plays in the renewal and charismatic movement is a fragment that is powerfully illustrative of the worldview of charismatics.

There are many illustrations of this approach in Percy’s work. So a discussion on the emergence of the Evangelical Reform movement in the Church of England from 1993 might serve as an example. The fragment chosen is an ordinand in Durham who was so passionate about the issue of righteousness being imputed or imparted that he punched the noticeboard and fractured his hand. From this fragment, Percy goes on to argue that a movement has emerged that knows how to behave (both culturally and in terms of manners), [but] has also developed a decidedly aggressive side to its character.²⁸ Another illustration is the tale of two congregations in Atlanta, Georgia; one congregation is a Jazz Service at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, and the other is the New Covenant Church of Atlanta—a lesbian gay megachurch.²⁹ From this fragment, Percy reflects on consumerism and Christianity. It is the fact that we have choice in religion and anything compulsory is deeply problematic.

To make the reflection on an illustrative fragment work, Percy does need to give some sort of account of how and why this is justified. As one reads Percy, one finds oneself persuaded. One recognizes the fragment is illustrative of the trend that follows. Reform, as a movement, is angry; the choice of congregations in Atlanta does illustrate the opportunities one has to choose. But how does one select the representative fragment? Could someone choose a different fragment that then offers a different picture of the whole? These are questions that Percy does not really answer.

Third, Percy is an advocate of socially progressive positions. He supported the ordination of women. A factor, as he recognizes in a footnote, is the influence of his wife, the Rev Dr. Emma Percy.³⁰ However, he is completely persuaded that in the end the Gospel is about inclusion. Now, although Percy values unity, he does become impatient as