Comment
Lynda Gould

From the Director
David Porter

Christian Citizenship and Northern Ireland
Drew Gibson

Church and State in Conflict - Ambrose
Alwyn Thomson

Christian Citizenship in the Republic of Ireland
Patrick Mitchel

Church and State in Conflict - Hubmaier
Alwyn Thomson

Beautiful Ministry
Graham Cheesman

The Cost of Citizenship
William Storrar (Scotland)

Early Days in the National Assembly for Wales
Aled Edwards

Church and State in Conflict - Kasemann
Alwyn Thomson

A Light to Enlighten the Nations
J A Sider (USA)

Church and State in Conflict - Summary
Alwyn Thomson

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THE COST OF CITIZENSHIP
...Towards a Theology of Civil Realism

The key to understanding the present turning point in Scotland’s history is the concept of a civic nation. Scotland has existed as a nation within the British state for three hundred years because of its autonomous civic institutions. I would argue that Scotland has at last achieved self-government within the British state because of the strength of the broad civic and cross-party movement for constitutional change since 1979. And we cannot understand the prospect before Scotland now, the reconvening of its adjourned ancient parliament as a modern legislature, unless we grasp the importance of the civic culture which has nurtured it since 1979, and brought it to life in 1997; and which is the organic condition of its democratic fruiting beyond 1999.

After the crushing disappointment of the 1979 referendum and election, it was the Scottish cultural renaissance of the 1980s and the cross-party campaign for a Scottish Assembly which kept hopes for constitutional change alive, not the political parties. After the 1987 election, it was the initiative of that cross-party campaign, including the trades unions and churches, which led the parties into a Scottish Constitutional Convention, a consensual body which reached an agreed scheme for a Parliament: the blueprint for the current Scottish bill passing through Westminister. After the 1992 election, it was the new civic democracy groups, along with the Scottish Trades Union Congress, which kept the hope of democracy renewal alive and organised the Great Democracy March of 30,000 citizens, which persuaded all three home rule parties to support the Democracy Declaration at the European Summit in Edinburgh. And it was ordinary citizens, a number of them homeless people, who kept a vigil going day and night for five years outside the parliament building on Calton Hill, as a symbol of the civic commitment to democracy for Scotland.

Of course the political parties played an essential and significant role in all this, especially when they bowed to civic pressure and worked together in the common cause of Scotland's Parliament during the referendum campaign. But be in no doubt about the origins of this new Scottish Parliament. It came from the civic nation. Donald Dewar, the political party victor of the referendum campaign, had the grace to agree: the people did it, not the parties, nor the politicians.

And the inhabitants of this civic nation, this republic of consent, have no intention of sitting back now and handing over the new Parliament building at Holyrood to the political parties and the politicians. They are committed to a new kind of post-Westminister and post-modern participatory democracy. Unlike so many other Parliaments, in London, in Dublin, in Belfast and so many others around the world, this Scottish Parliament is not being born out of demands by the nobility and merchant class on the monarch; nor out of the violence of wars of succession or of civil war; nor out of the trauma of defeat in world war and escape from totalitarianism; nor out of class struggle for power; and not out of colonial struggle for independence. No, this Parliament is being born out of a post-modern civic desire to enjoy political autonomy and a more participatory democracy within a nation, while embracing interdependence in larger forms of political community and levels of government, in the United Kingdom and in the European Union.

So this Parliament will be elected by proportional representation, seek gender balance in representation, and work through a strong committee system which will be accessible to civic participation and influence in the pre-legislative and legislative process. Its political ethos will be consensual and its governing style will be open and responsive to those it governs, particularly through the use of information technologies. Of course, this is all an inspiration, and not yet a reality. There is sufficient substance to the current deliberations going on at Westminister and here in Scotland - through the Scottish Office cross-party and civic consultation on powers, procedures and persona of the Parliament — to offer reasonable grounds for optimism.

This Parliament, and its enabling Scotland Act, are significantly different from the 1979 Scottish Assembly — far more powerful, far more imaginative, far more participatory. Why? I would argue because of the impact of the civic and cross-party movement for constitutional change over the last two decades. It is this civic movement that has changed the ethos and delivered the establishment of the Scottish Parliament.

However, this civic democratic movement has had more than one string to its bow, in playing the post-modern tune of participatory democracy. Many of you will be familiar with the setting up of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the 1980s and the role it has played in delivering the Scottish Parliament. Perhaps fewer of you will be familiar with what I regard as the most significant new political development of the 1990s, along with the setting up of the new Parliament. Just as the cross-party campaign for the Scottish Assembly set up the Convention in the late 1980s, so the new campaigning Coalition for Scottish Democracy, uniting the democracy pressure groups, trades unions and churches, set up the Scottish Civic Assembly in the early 1990s. The vision was to provide a new national civic forum for all sections of Scottish civic society. This forum was established to represent the national institutions, the major sectors of economic and public life, and the voluntary sector and organisations in Scotland. The Civic Assembly is now operating as that national civic forum to consider and debate policy issues and the common good of Scotland. It offers not a political substitute for but an enriching civic contribution to the wider parliamentary and national deliberations on Scotland's welfare and future. I believe that the Civic Assembly is the key institution in the development of this new, post-modern civic democracy.

The Challenge to the Churches and Theology

What is the challenge to the churches and to theology in all of this? It is not enough for churches to consider what their relationship should be with that Parliament. Both the Scottish Parliament and Scottish churches must come to terms with the new post-modern political and cultural reality, that there is a third partner affecting their relationship, a resurgent civic society of active citizens and autonomous persons. Such inhabitants of the new Scottish civic landscape, the republic of consent, are no longer willing to give the state a monopoly of political power or the churches a spiritual and moral monopoly over their lives. Through participatory democracy and ‘believing without belonging’, post-modern Scots are re-negotiating their relationships with church and state. It is essential to understand this new context if we are to understand the distinctive nature of the constitutional turning point in Scotland, and therefore the distinctive nature of the challenge it represents to the churches and theology.

We are moving into a new political and cultural landscape and environment, one in which the ethos of post-modernity requires a whole new way of being state and being church and doing theology. In the pre-modern period, authority in church and state was (typically) seen to come from the top down, in a hierarchy of power. The pre-modern debate was around top-down issues. In the modern period, authority and power are typically seen to come from the base of society upward, through the mobilisation of the masses: the working class in Marxism and democratic socialism, the national race in fascism, the mass political parties and mass electorates in liberal democracies. Political theologies of liberation for the oppressed masses or Christian realism about the possibilities of achieving justice amid the intrinsic selfishness of groups, classes and nation-states, have typified the modern era. Such theologies have centred their concerns around the mobilisation of the mass base of society in totalitarian or democratic regimes. In this modern context, the typology of the South African Kairos document proved very alluring: church theologies of spiritual renewal and state theologies of political accommodation must give way to prophetic theologies of critical witness.

I wonder whether the Kairos typology and the allure of a ‘prophetic theology’ are helpful in facing the challenges of a post-modern civic nation at this turning point of Scotland’s history. There is one actor missing in the Kairos list: church, state, prophet and citizen. Do we also need a civic theology alongside these other recognisable types, church theology, state theology and prophetic theology? Such a civic theology would be concerned to address the distinctive challenges of active citizenship and pluralist civil society, precisely the post-modern political situation which Scotland and Ireland now face.

In the post-modern period, political power is more dispersed to the local, regional and national levels, while economic power is far more concentrated at the global level. Post-modern authority and power may be characterised as coming not from the top down, or from the base up, but emerging sideways on, in the continually re-negotiated and realigned and re-invented side-by-side relations of citizens, groups, cultures, economies, and multiple levels of government. In part, this is required by the new information technologies and historical-material changes of the post-modern economy. In part it is demanded by the profound changes in the inner life of post-modern persons, who are no longer willing to trust or subscribe to the ideologies and institutions of modernity en masse, including those of the modern state and modern churches.

The meaning of discipleship and the practice of citizenship are changed by this new post-modern country, the republic of consent. Its boundaries extend far beyond Scotland. From this distance, I see traces of its embassies in Ireland, north and south, in the writings of two public philosophers. In the south, Richard Kearney has analysed the Irish nationalist and republican traditions and re-imagined them in civic terms, seeing the way forward in ‘post-nationalism and post-modernity’. While, perhaps even more significantly, in the north the philosopher Norman Porter has re-envisioned Unionism in the terms of civic unionism. Do we not need a new civic theology to enter into dialogue with these new post-modern civic political developments, as well as a prophetic theology to stand against the religio-political idolatries of the modern era?

The Cost of Citizenship: Towards a Civic Realist Theology

Such a civic theology must be woven out of at least two strands. First, responding to the challenge of the post-modern political turning point, churches and theologies must engage with issues of active citizenship and a pluralist civic society, rather than focus on issues of church and state as central to public witness and theology, as has been the case in the modern era. How can we encourage Christians and neighbours to be responsible citizens within their existing traditions and identities, nationalist and unionist? Rather than separating these different ideologies and identities, is the post-modern challenge not to leaven, subvert, re-imagine, revision and even convert them all to civic forms — civic nationalism, civic republicanism, civic unionism, civic Catholicism, civic Protestantism, indeed civic Islam? In a post-modern context, we need to affirm a multiplicity of identities, traditions and cultures alongside inclusive notions of citizenship and rights. The problem is how can these exist and cohabit in our small countries and world.

The political challenge of the post-modern world for Ireland and Scotland is to hold together the universal politics of citizenship with the particular politics of identity. Post-modern persons may be characterised as an uneasy trinity of autonomous individuals asserting human rights, active citizens demanding civic virtues and diverse cohabitants, affirming cultural and religious differences. The post-modern problem is how this trinity of aspirations can co-exist creatively, through the development of more complex and sophisticated political structures than those which have typified modernity's invention, the nation state.

The new institutions in the current Northern Ireland peace process and the place of the Scottish Parliament within both UK and EU structures, are expressions of this search. We need churches which sustain and inspire people to inhabit this complex post-modern political world with responsibility and resilience. We need churches which recognise the spiritual good as well as the spiritual pitfalls of being post-modern autonomous, self-constructing individuals. We need churches which put far more of their energies into sustaining and supporting active citizens in civil society and in civic democratic politics, challenging them to convert their multiple and potentially exclusive and mutually hostile allegiances and interests into the public forms of common cause and common good. We need post-modern churches which nurture the skills, wisdom and habits of being responsible cohabitants of fragile countries and a fractured planet.

A civic theology would encourage such responsible citizenship amid the fragmentations of the post-modern world. The issues which such a civic theology would address are not those of the top-down political theologies of the pre-modern era of church and state. Nor are they the issues of the base-up prophetic theologies of the modern era, faced with totalitarian oppression or the seductive idolatries of civic religions and religious nationalisms. No, civic theology would be faced with the post-modern world of complex, sifting side-by-side relationships among citizens and cohabitants, and between states and civic societies. Such lateral policies require a lateral church and a lateral political theology, resourcing people with the vision and practical wisdom to inhabit such a country, the city of consent: a civic theology for civic politics, drawing on wisdom literature as much as the prophetic literature of the Bible, and recognising that, as recent New Testament scholarship has argued, the New Testament is in fact rich in such Christian experience of citizenship in a diverse gentile world. However, that is only one strand in any adequate civic theology — the strand of wisdom to guide the practice of responsible citizenship and creative cohabitation.

The terrorist killings are still going on in Ireland, in the midst of many small signs of the convergence of civic nationalism and civic unionism. There are still many citizens and cohabitants of post-modern Scotland who feel no part of this new civic democratic culture, trapped as they are in poverty or homelessness or racism or unemployment or abuse or chemical slavery to alcohol and drugs. A civic theology must recognise, alongside all this real civic progress to a more inclusive democracy, and happy post-modern civic cohabiting of cultures and identities, the far larger human reality of suffering, fear, and surd violence. Civic theology needs a second realist strand — the strand of lament in protest at the suffering and the prospect of redemption.

I have been arguing that Scotland is at a turning point in its history. I have constructed a narrative paradigm of the civic nation and a poetic landscape of the republic of consent to make that case. But, as Scottish literary critic Cairns Craig has argued, below the surface of such civilising and progressive narratives and countries, there are worlds ‘out of history’: worlds that continually erupt and blow apart neatly ordered stories and newly ordered countries like mine, Scotland the civic nation. A theology and practice of civic democracy must always recognise and wrestle with the evil powers and presences out of history, and strengthen Christians and citizens for the cost of discipleship in post-modern times. It was, after all, the citizens of the ordered empire who executed the carpenter from Nazareth, the one who befriended those in Israel who were ‘out of history’. Therefore civic theology must also be a theology of civic realism, a theology of political wisdom and human lament.

Can churches and theologies respond to such a challenge in Ireland and Scotland? I believe they can. The Cross was and is a turning point for both disciples and citizens. Civic theology is a political theology of the Cross, not an establishment theology of civic glory. And yet it must be a dialectical theology of the glory of the Cross, calling us to a costly citizenship in post-modern Scotland and Ireland, sustained by the glorious hope of our citizenship in the new heaven and the new earth.

William Storrar - The Centre for Theology and Public Issues in The University of Edinburgh has given permission for the reprinting in Lion & Lamb of the following major extract from ‘The Cost of Citizenship: Towards a Theology of Civic Realism’, which was a paper delivered to a conference on 27–28 February 1998 and subsequently published, with the other papers so delivered, in CTPI Occasional Paper No. 43 ‘A Turning Point in Ireland and Scotland? The Challenge to the Churches and Theology Today’ editor Andrew Morton, 1998 (price £11.50), available from CTPI, The University of Edinburgh, New College, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX.