Introduction:Changing Women, Changing Worlds
Derek Poole

Comment
Ruth Hutchinson

From the Directors
David McMillan

Changing Women, Changing Worlds: The Question of Women
Fran Porter

Review...Delightfully Subversive
Cheryl Reid

Review...Opportune
Linda McClaughlin

Faith and Practice...Christine Bell
Ruth Hutchinson

Antjie Krog
Peter Stark

Review...Thought Provoking
Myrtle Hill

Review...Smashing Clerical Complacency
Malachi O'Doherty

Weston Park Amnesty

< Past Issues Archive

FAITH IN PRACTICE - CHRISTINE BELL
Christine Bell is Professor of Law at the University of Ulster (Magee Campus). Previous appointments include Director of the Centre for International and Comparative Human Rights Law, Queen’s University, Belfast and a lecturer in jurisprudence. She is a member of the European Commission Committee of Experts on Fundamental Rights and a current member of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. A qualified barrister, she practised as an attorney in New York from 1990 to 1992.

Professor of Law
We began our conversation by talking about Christine’s current position as Professor of Law. What does this entail?

There are three parts to my job: teaching, research and administration. The first brings involvement with students, we have new degree programmes - this is their third year. The first graduation class will be this summer. But a big part of my job is also research, and then there’s the administration that comes with a management role.

Jurisprudence – what is it?
When you look up jurisprudence in the dictionary I think it says ‘study of law,’ but people usually use it to mean theory of law, looking at how law works, the relationship of law to society and politics, moral issues in law, what is justice, what are rights, what is equality? When I finished my law studies that was my real interest. How did law work and what did it do? What was its connection to justice? That interest was both practical and theoretical.

I always studied a lot of jurisprudence writings by abstract, but students hate abstract stuff, so I have always taught it through very concrete, practical examples, starting with the practical and working through to the ideal. When I came back to Northern Ireland, I got involved with the Committee on the Administration of Justice, and developed a practical interest in human rights. I now am looking at the legal status internationally of different peace agreements, and it’s not so much human rights any more but international law. So I still view myself as doing jurisprudence, but my title tends to be international law. To my mind a lot of the big debates in international law are about the relationship between law and politics. For example, in the war against terrorism at the minute, is there an international law or is America just off on a spree of its own? Those types of issues are at the heart of traditional jurisprudence studies, and I’m using international law as the vehicle to look at that in my research.

A Law Career – why?
I was a kind of all-rounder at school. I always had a broad range of interests. I knew the type of things I wanted to do, but not really what actual job. I always liked law programmes on television; I advise people now that if they like the law things on television they probably will like the study of law. It happened that I got a chance to go away for a law weekend at Cambridge. Our school got two places, where there were law lectures, and I really enjoyed them. I applied for both law, and music. But the grades were higher to get into law and I got a place at Cambridge. From the first day I loved law. I was worried about studying just one subject, because I always like to do a whole lot of things. Even three A levels to me was quite narrow, but actually law has a lot of different subjects in it. There’s constitutional law, that’s like history; we did Roman law; law of tort, which is suing people; criminal law, which is kind of like you see on television; international law which is almost like international politics. There are just so many different topics within law that you can really explore a lot of different areas.

New York Attorney
I practised law for two years in New York. I got a scholarship to do a Masters degree at Harvard for one year, and it was a fantastic year. I met people from all over the world, and it was very exciting to be there, because the iron curtain came down and the South Africa peace process started. And then I got a chance to study for the bar in America, through the offer of a job in a big law firm in New York. So although I had always been very determined to come back home, it just seemed like the time wasn’t right, so I stayed away. It was a kind of unsettling time in that it was a great experience and I loved it, but I was keen to come back. I had a feeling that the longer I stayed away the harder it would be to return. I now look back and think I shouldn’t have panicked. I should have been happy for anything up to five years, but I really thought that, as each year went by and I was more entrenched in my job, earning my salary there and having my friends there, I might end up settling down there. That decided it for me. A job came up lecturing in jurisprudence in Queen’s, which was what I’d always wanted to do, and although I would have liked to stay a little longer in New York at that stage, I thought, “Well this is exactly what I want to do, and I’ll go for it, and if I get it that means I’m meant to come back.” I did get it, so did return to Belfast.

Personal Faith
The phrase ‘meant to come back’ led nicely to a discussion about personal faith. I asked Christine how she first came to faith.

Well, my parents were Christians, and I was always a member of the Fitzroy Church, in fact my grandfather was the minister there. So on both sides of my family there’s really a long tradition of faith and connection with the church. I went to Sunday School and Crusaders and Bible study groups, and through that came to faith at a very early age, but I think a lot of people experience what I did, where you’re somehow not meant to have any doubts but you do, and you come to faith in ways over and over again. I suppose that was my experience. I would have always been known as a Christian, and quite an evangelical Christian at school. I was always in the Scripture Union and involved in those things. And if I look back I’m sure I was quite irritating as well. I was always trying to convert my non-Christian friends, and they were very tolerant of it – I think I was probably quite an annoying person! When I went away to university, I maintained that. At Cambridge there’s a strong Christian Union, but I did have some doubts there. It’s a very male environment. It was almost more conservative than a lot of churches would be. So I actually got quite involved with a church on the edge of the city, that didn’t have a big student population, and that was a way of escaping. And also I found with the Christian Union, and I think I’ve found this all the way through my life, that to be accepted as a mainstream member you have to be at lots of meetings and be very visible. And if you’re at those meetings you find that you’ve no connection with anyone that’s not involved there. I was a person with a lot of interest in sport and music and the students’ union. So I always felt I was in this funny position. Members of the Christian Union liked me and knew I was a Christian, but felt that I was maybe not as committed a member as I should have been. At the same time they acknowledged that I wasn’t a ‘wet’ Christian, as they used to call them, because I did all these other things. I suppose it was being in the world and not of it, and I’ve never really found that there’s an ideal balance for that. My experience has been that you tilt too much one way or the other. That’s my present experience. I’m probably even now tilted more in the world than out of it, with a cost to my spiritual life and my connection with a faith community.

Does faith inform work as well as shape life?
Yes. I feel very much so. I would have times when I would be closer to God and times that I’m further away, that’s one of the things that has always surprised me. Even when I’m at my furthest away, things I do are fundamentally shaped by my faith. The decisions I make and how I approach moral dilemmas shape my life in how I deal with people. I try to treat them as real people. You know, now I’m in a management role, I’m balancing a lot of things and watching people who through work are coming under stress. I try to step back from the situation and understand what motivates the other person. I think that my faith really informs that.

In terms of human rights issues, a lot of the issues I’ve been involved in now really would be seen as quite political. But I feel my whole interest in human rights is totally inspired by my faith. The Church’s relation to human rights is two sided. To me human rights are a way of secularising a lot of Christian standards. If you look right back to the abolition movement for slavery, it was Christians who ‘pushed’ it on a notion of equality and how people should be treated. The concern with justice and social exclusion – all trendy words nowadays - are at the heart of both the prophetic voice of the Old Testament and also of Jesus’ approach to the New Testament. Now of course you don’t get specific answers to concrete problems, but that idea that there should be some minimum standard for how we treat people is where I view my faith and my work coming together.

Ironically enough in Northern Ireland, if you’re involved in activism in human rights activity, somehow this places you at odds with the Protestant community. You’re not really a proper Protestant. But for me it’s a Presbyterian thing. The notion of free choice is at the heart of civil liberties, it’s at the heart of Presbyterianism. And it’s no coincidence that Presbyterians were at the heart of bills of rights in other countries, promulgating notions of liberal democracy that would enable people to make the type of personal choices that are part of Presbyterianism.

Church Involvement
We next turned to the role that a local church now plays in Christine’s life.

At the minute I belong to Second Derry Presbyterian, it’s often known as Strand Road Presbyterian. I moved to Derry two years ago, and it’s actually the church that’s closest to my house. I had intended to visit a number of churches and decide where I would attend, but I went there in the first week and people were very friendly and welcoming. I believe in a connection between where you live and the church. I like that connection, and it being your community church. So I didn’t see any reason really to look around further.

Belonging to a local church is important. My job takes me away travelling, so I miss a lot of Sundays. Also I’ve got a young family, and the whole timing of church is difficult, we have missed a lot of church. I had a feeling of drifting away from the church, how easy it would be! Somehow in my head I thought it would never happen. When I went to Derry I thought, “If I don’t quickly join somewhere, actually it might never happen.” And then I would really have made quite a big decision without making it. So in a funny way going to Derry was a time of me making a firm commitment to be an active churchgoer.

It’s important to me that my children know church. And I honestly think that, even had I moved away from my faith completely, for me, bringing my children to church would still have been important because it was such a fundamental part of my childhood, and because it is still part of my identity. I don’t mean that in a Protestant cultural way, but just that I am connected, knowing believers, knowing a range of age groups. There are very few organisations where you meet a range of age groups. There are a lot of non-faith reasons why church is an interesting and good place to bring your children for some time.

Also, because of the very varied spheres of life in which I move, attendance at church would in ways be my main point of contact with the traditional Protestant community at large. I don’t do it because of that, I don’t go to church for those sort of reasons, but that’s a dimension that church happens to bring to my life.

Influence of Churches – positive or negative?
I don’t think we can say that the church’s influence has been good or bad. You can look at what people’s impression is of the Presbyterian Church. It might be that for people who don’t attend it’ll be what the Moderator says, and that’s quite confusing to the outside world because the office changes every year and they say quite different things. For the person who goes and is active the church’s influence is different. I think in the lives of ordinary people the church has a positive influence. People come to church out of some sense of need and out of some sense of looking for something. When I was growing up that wasn’t understood. Now with the whole spiritual vacuum and New Age thing people can relate to Christians going to church, in ways much more easily than they could in the past.

In terms of the public faith of the established churches I think it’s been quite negative. The churches, to my mind, never radically challenge their own communities, and it’s interesting if you look at the Bible and Jesus’ interaction. He worked beyond the confines of his own community and he didn’t condemn different people who were outcasts from society like the woman at the well. The people he condemned were the religious hypocrites from his own church. The people he pushed to the limits in terms of calling them to account were the establishment of his own grouping. Our churches tend to call to account people in the other community. I’m not really informed enough about what the Catholic Church has done over the years, but I do think the Protestant churches in particular didn’t push their own community. They rather saw themselves as representing their community and their community’s interests. Now I think there’s a role for that in humane terms, to speak where you see there’s a need, but I also think the church is very slow to accept its prophetic leadership voice. For example, there was a fear of ecumenism, that it would water down their beliefs rather than saying “Look, we can actually be quite secure in having dialogue with people from different backgrounds.” In the context of the troubles, that was a failure.

Finally we asked Christine to talk about the issues she felt were facing Northern Irish churches in the coming months.

I think the biggest issue for the church is relevance - relevance about day-to-day life, relevance to other members and to people that aren’t, relevance to the context – the political context in the small ‘p’ world. That maybe isn’t issues like marches, it’s issues like whether they have jobs, or what parenting skills they have - a whole range of things. Churches are struggling to be relevant, and I think they’re also struggling about their message. I think all the different established churches are struggling with a liberal world where there are no clear boundaries and where the only universal truth is that there is no universal truth. That’s very difficult because churches are founded on the basis that there is one quite definite universal truth, and they know what it is and other people don’t. But that is not resonating as they are faced with issues about how we should treat people, how we open our doors, and what our theology is. In deciding how to be relevant they need to decide what bits can legitimately be modernised or changed, and what is the core principle at the heart that cannot. It’s not obvious which is which, and there’s a debate about it.

Secondly, as regards relevance, increasingly churches are disconnected from their local communities. There may be shifts. Maybe they’re not in a residential area when they used to be, maybe there have been population shifts, and maybe it’s because fewer people are going to church. There are all sorts of reasons why churches are disconnected, and different churches have different approaches to it. Some start to re-engage with their local community saying, “We have a relationship to where we are geographically.” Others accept the fact that people are more or less commuting to them, and work on that basis.

Thirdly, churches face a challenge as regards relevance to the wider social and political context. Should they engage and risk getting their hands dirty, or should they stand apart from current political debates? To engage means coming to some consensus about how the Bible and faith might be relevant to current issues. Often the attempt to find consensus is difficult, at times ill informed, resulting in a few very general and vague points. However, not to engage can leave the church on the outside of the most fundamental moral debates of our time. In my experience the church is quite bad at harnessing the expertise of its general membership who are working with issues on the ground, but seldom make it to the policy committees where official church policy is decided.

Finally, churches have to remain relevant to the day-to-day problems that people face in their own attempts to lead the Christian life. These are often mundane problems of how to make time for spiritual life, or how to cope with the conflicting pressures of work, family and job. They also include a range of problems such as marital issues. Too often the church has been responsible for giving bad advice in difficult areas, or no advice in mundane ones.

Once again we are indebted, this time to Professor Christine Bell, for her willingness to be interviewed. We wish her continued success in all she does.

Ruth Hutchinson
Assistant Editor