INTERVIEW: John Dudley Davies.

Retired Bishop John Dudley Davies discusses secularisation, the Sabbath, creation, faith and science in a wide-ranging interview based around his new book Seven Days to Freedom …

Is the secularisation of society leading to less observance of the Sabbath day, symptomatic of increased individualism and a less caring attitude for other people in society?

There are so many generalisations in this question!  Yes, we are a more secular society now than we were, say, 60 years ago; there is indeed less awareness of Sabbath, in the limited sense of a day for rest and worship; but it is important to bear in mind that this meaning of Sabbath is a seriously thinned-down version of the true meaning of Sabbath as understood in the inherited scriptures.  A large part of my new book, Seven Days to Freedom, is concerned with the wider range of the meaning of Sabbath and its implementation in social and structural effect. 

Individualism is also more widespread now but this is due to all sorts of factors - range of work opportunities,  closure of mines and other heavy industries, leading to consequent closures of male-voice choirs; the extension of a variety of facilities (e.g .we are less dependent on close neighbours,  because many more households than in the past have their own telephone service,  and so we can call on ‘experts’ - professionals, medical workers, social workers, etc).   Individual choice used to be characteristic of privileged classes; now that privilege is more widespread; this may come simultaneously with secularisation, but is not necessarily caused by it. Religious affiliation is part of this; it has become a matter of choice; we can choose which church suits us - especially in towns - and therefore we can choose a god who suits us; and religion becomes a market-driven commodity.  But already in the past, in the privileged environment of the ancient universities, religion was a competitive business; and this characteristic has been a discouragement for people who are repelled by such competitiveness in a field where absolute values are being claimed; and this has led to religion as a whole becoming more and more unconvincing.

Nevertheless, all this does not necessarily lead to an uncaring society.  We know much more about each other’s needs, across distance and culture-groups, than we used to; there are many more charities seeking, and often getting, support, by virtually anonymous methods. Public opinion is engaged on behalf of the NHS and Yemen; human rights is a business of growing concern.  In the fourth and the tenth of the Ten Commandments, our responsibility for the individual is spelled out very precisely, and this is the case at many points in the Sabbath and jubilee mandates in the Hebrew Scriptures. It has been concern for individuals that has led to changes in laws and customs which have penalised people for characteristics which they have not caused for themselves, such as having a particular colour of skin or a particular minority sexual orientation. Changes in these matters have been brought about partly by people driven by religious conscience, and at the same time the resistance to such changes has been inspired by religious opinion.

If we are concerned about the values of the Kingdom of God, there are two classes of people by whom the effectiveness of our concern should be measured: those who are in prison, and people with disabilities.  In both instances, public concern is well-advertised; and in both, our public response is far from adequate.  Individualism is an avenue of immense blessing; in so far as it is enabled by secularisation, let’s be thankful for the secularisation which releases energy; but that is not the end of the story. 

Why has Christianity inherited things like the Sabbath from Judaism and not the other Jewish laws?

As I have stated above, Christianity has inherited from Judaism only a fraction of the totality of the Sabbath mandates, those concerned with worship and with abstinence from work.  These have been the elements that have represented least interference with conventions and assumptions concerning slavery, land-tenure, distribution of wealth, and universal education. 

Many of the other elements of Jewish inheritance have been discarded because they represented exclusion or rejection of non-members, most obviously circumcision.  It would be impossible to affirm full equality between female and male members if circumcision were seen as essential to full membership. St Paul’s biggest problems were with Gentile converts who thought that the acceptance of circumcision would give them a higher type of membership of the Body of Christ; so he had to struggle against the attractiveness of that kind of exclusiveness.   Many festivals and commemorations in Judaism celebrate ‘us-versus-them’ episodes in tribal history; these are seen as natural and normal within the tribe concerned, but would be exclusive within a community that is committed to being inter-cultural and is directed towards international peace-making. (We see the implications of this sort of concern when we try to work out what is appropriate for us in Britain in our remembrance of Armistice Day in November - something which I found to present real problems when I was Principal of a small but very international College in Birmingham.) 

It is right to raise the specific question of our attitude to Jewish inheritance and Judaic connections.  They do matter to us Christians, not only because Jesus was a Jew and our foundation documents originate from Jewish sources, but also because, in present days, there is a unique place in the world occupied by Jews.  They have provided some of our world’s most significant peace-makers - in South Africa, they were among the most outstanding and courageous members of the white minority resistant against apartheid, including the one MP who, alone in Parliament, stood against injustices imposed on black people.  But the treatment by the Israeli administration of the Arab population in Israel and the occupied Palestinian areas stands out as the most intractable problem in international relations of our day.

We, in Europe as a whole and in Britain, have particular responsibility because of a past history of anti-Semitism.  We cannot atone for the persecution of Jews in the past, but we do have to guard against its continuing effects as a corporate spiritual virus.  But, having this caution in mind, we still affirm that our guide and mentor is, in the end, not Moses but Jesus, Jesus who came reclaiming the essential priorities of Sabbath and overruling those traditions which excluded people on account of their gender or their ancestry. 

Did your experiences in South Africa lead to understanding the Genesis creation story as a story of liberation?

Yes: In at least the following ways: 

First -           

A small but significant issue which struck me during my first weekend at the parish church in white Johannesburg where I had about six months of acclimatisation revolved around the Sabbath being for the employer but not for the worker. 

Sunday Mass in Tswana for domestic servants ‘living-in’ (i.e. in a khaya, a small separate outside room, which every household in white areas was legally required to have) was at 05.30, in time for the ‘girl’ or ‘garden-boy’ to get back to the household from church to prepare the tea to enable the missus or baas to get to the Mass (in English) themesleves at 07.30 or 0800.  The 05.30 service would be conducted by a priest from a city-centre parish (though latterly I was allowed to celebrate it myself) and the vessels etc used for the 05.30 service were kept separate from those used for the ‘white’ congregation. 

Even this degree of ‘integration’  was disapproved of by Government.  A ‘Natives Law Amendment Act’ was passed, to prevent black people from having access to or making use of churches in white areas. In passing this Law, the relevant minister said that the public should copy the example of our parish church, famous for its good music and its frequent broadcasting, and discontinue any use of the building by native people,  who should go to church in their own area.  Our Rector was furious about this. Although he did not, in practice, have anything to do with the 05.30 service, he had not made any decree on the lines that the Minister had stated; so he drew up a statement asking the Minister to ‘substantiate or withdraw’.  Our churchwardens to sign it.  One, a dentist, signed it without hesitation. The other, a property dealer and businessman, refused, saying it was a political matter outside our concern. The message was sent and subsequetly the Bishop, indeed all the bishops, voiced their opposition to the Law, and the Archbishop, who was a very cautious man, signed a message to the church urging members to disobey the Law if it was ever implemented just before he passed away.  In practice, the Act was not implemented; government had other means of enforcing its will.

Second -   

During the later years of my time as University Chaplain in Johannesburg, I became more and more involved with commissions and leadership programmes, ecumenical relationships, church leaders, and academic theologians, while not losing day-to-day ministry with students and at places like Alexandra Township.  But,  unlike many of my high-up colleagues,  I had one huge advantage  -  I had spent six years in hands-on ministry with ‘ordinary people’ in local rural congregations in African, ‘Coloured’, and white communities, and had witnissed births, marriages and deaths, life, love and laughter, anger and tears, lead prayers, heard confessions, preached the sacraments; and from this, I developed an increasing sense that, within the variety, and in spite of the massive emphasis on difference and segregation, we were all deeply alike, in our fundamental humanity of joys and sorrows,  the one human race created in the image of God.   

The writers of Genesis had abundant reason to be steered by an environment which affirmed difference, exploitation, disparity; but their message was the defiant statement of creation as one humanity. My practical experience of ministry was my route into theology, and remains so; it depends not on reasoning and theory; it is driven by passion, and a theology which is not passionate is not the theology of the Bible, and it is not a theology to lead into preaching.

We were not short of instances to inspire the notion that, fundamentally, we are different, created for enmity. A white farmer once told me: ‘Just feel a native’s skull’. That instruction itself tells us something about his attitude to another man and his body. ‘Just run your fingers over a native’s skull, and you will find that there is a little hole in it; that shows that he has no soul’.  

In an area near to us, there was a 12-year old girl, Sandra Laing, living with her parents and siblings and attending a white school.  A complaint had been made at the school that she was really a ‘Coloured’.  The magistrate called her in and tested her in the usual way, by passing a comb through her hair.  He decided that she was indeed ‘Coloured’.  She had to move to a different school, and it became illegal for her to live and sleep in the same house as her parents and siblings.  

An environment that constantly reminded us of difference but the practice of Christian faith and ministry defiantly affirmed the opposite, in day-to-day experience of human contact.   It was a privilege which was denied to so many.  We were often told, ‘Wait until you have been here for ... X-number of years, and you will see things differently’ or ‘You were not born here, so how can you know what it’s really like?’, or ‘You don’t know the native, we do.’ My answer to that was not difficult: ‘How many natives do you really know, as friends?’  The secular system was calculated to prevent friendship; the shared role of ministry enabled friendship.  In spite of all sorts of obstacles, within the fellowship of priesthood we shared the same calling, the same ordination, the same qualifications, the same liturgy, the same responsibilities towards human beings, the same place within the professional order and the same commitment to the same bishop, in our ministries in rural Transvaal and in Zululand, we were genuinely able to recognise each other as friends.

Third -        

Land.  

We occupy space as soon as we are born and until someone says we have no right to be there, we assume that we can be where we are. Black people are born in Sophiatown, which is where we first met black householders in the first few days of our life in Johannesburg. They were being told that they had to move away because where they lived had been declared, by the white government, to be a white area; and, by being there, they were a black spot in a white area.  

South Africa was a land full of such black spots; and thousands were forced to move.  To enforce this rule, each person had to have proper classification, and to carry a document to verify it.  For black people, this meant the ‘Pass’.  To fail to have the Pass on your person made you a criminal - it was not even sufficient for it to be in your pocket if you had taken your coat off to hang it on the fence while you dug the baas’s garden.  It was this sort of thing that underlies the point I make in Seven Days to Freedom, that, more than the ‘petty apartheid’ of minor rules and whites-only seats, behind the inferior facilities for schooling, behind the reservation of jobs on the basis of colour, behind the loss of any kind of franchise, behind the inferior transport system and police brutality, behind even the Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act, the biggest source of black people’s anger was the sense that the land had been stolen from them.  A massive matter of principle which resulted in daily routines of subservience and non-citizenship.  It meant that any loving of one's neighbour became unlawful, if loving one’s neighbour could include giving your neighbour a bed for the night.  

This principle, for instance, led to Archbishop Makgoba’s parents having to arrange for his birth to take place in the family’s traditional place in the far north, then on the next day for him to be taken to Johannesburg so that his birth could be recorded in that city, so that he could have legal status there and get the right document.  The same principle meant that, when I was Chair of an ecumenical programme concerning Christian Education, based in Johannesburg, and we appointed an executive officer who was registered in a place fifty miles away, he had to leave wife and family there and move to his workplace as a single man; for his wife, this was eventually sorted out, but not for his oldest children. This was a regular headache for bishops making clergy appointments, examples came our way every day - it would be impossible to make a list.  But it also meant that whole communities of black people were being lifted out of their familiar surroundings and dumped miles away in semi-desert areas with no facilities, schooling, shops, employment or medical care, provided only with tents with which they had no experience or training, and the only people available on whom they could vent their anger was on each other. 

The manifest injustices of this system of Mass Removals and Resettlement Schemes was only partly hidden, but a frequent complaint came from vaguely-concerned white people that ‘we never knew that this sort of thing was happening’; it was true that the government-supported press did ignore it; but papers like the Rand Daily Mail did make mention of it.  Even then, those of us who went to these places, to take supplies of food and other basic goods, preferred not to be personally too exposed, because of the backlash on our children in school. Partnership: some do, others publicise.   Shirley and I, and our children, can testify to the extraordinary experience of going to these places, and of being on the wrong end of the police strong-arm.  At a similar time in our lives, I was working hard on the text of what eventually became a book about the Genesis Creation stories (Beginning Now, Collins 1972) while Shirley was busy, in the same household, typing Cos Desmond’s monumental exposure of the whole Mass Removals programme, The Discarded People (published in UK by Penguin).  With that in print, no one should have been able to claim ignorance any longer.

The Removals were the direct implementation of the Group Areas Act, created by the Nationalist Afrikaans-speaking Government in the early 1950s.   But the underlying principles went back far into the era when South Africa was very much part of the British Empire, particularly the succession of Land Acts earlier in the century.  In Zululand, I was member of a commission of the Natal Council of Churches, set up to respond to proposals for ‘the rationalisation of land-tenure in Zululand’ worked out by central government.  The basic idea was to maintain a supply of migrant black labour for the lower-lying coastal sugar-cane areas, while keeping ‘reserves’ up in the hills to which the men would return from time to time to breed the next generation of labour-force. It was, in effect, a conspiracy to wreck the chances of a normal family life for most workers.  The only consolation was that the alternatives proposed by the ‘opposition’ (the English-speaking United Party) were even more cruel and absurdly unrealistic.

Fourth -            

Labour.   

When we arrived in South Africa, in 1957, all goods vehicles, apart from light pick-ups, were driven by white men.  Job Reservation prevented black people from being employed on HGVs. By the time we left in 1970, the only HGVs not being driven by black drivers were heavy concrete-mixing trucks.  These had very high centre of gravity, and so they required a high degree of 'whiteness' in order to be safely controlled.   

Job Reservation was very powerful, controlling many aspects of education and training but Africans were passionate in wanting training. On our mine, courses in First Aid were regularly offered.  Financial incentives failed to increase the attractiveness of the courses for white mine-workers; but the courses attracted far more black workers than they could cope with.  I once went with a Mine Captain (white, of course) for a walk around the mine, 5,000 feet down. At an open space, where tunnels met, there was an area for maintenance of locomotives.  A black man was under the loco, adjusting its brakes.  The white Fitter was sat on the floor, reading a newspaper.  The Mine Captain tore a strip off the white worker, telling him that maintenance of the brakes was his job and the ‘boy’ was not qualified.  So, the white man dutifully crawled under the loco.  We went on our way, down a tunnel; we came to a turning, and I took a moment to look back.  The black man was back under the loco, the white man was back on his feet.  I pointed this out to the Mine Captain; he replied, ‘I know; the fact is,  that white Fitter doesn’t have the competence to adjust brakes, but the ‘boy’ has picked it up in practice; he won’t get paid for doing the job, but he does it because he can do it, and the white man can’t’. 

Every white baas had to have a ‘kaffir-boy’ with him, to carry the tool-bag or the paint-pot. That was the theory, Job Reservation!  In all sorts of ways, economic development was making the system break down.  But there was a deadly attitude of ‘compensation’ going on, unspoken; if the apartheid system was broken because of economic factors, it would be tightened at a less economically-sensitive point.  I expressed it as, for every black man driving an HGV, another black family loses its right of residence and is shifted off into the desert.   

Against all this, the provisions of Sabbath are devised to protect working people from becoming slaves; communities must remember that they once were all slaves in Egypt; it must never happen again.  That was the principle inspiring the Law of Moses. Our problem in South Africa was that the ruling political party represented a community which had experienced deliverance from the dominance and the concentration-camps of British imperial rule, having fought - and theoretically lost - a war aimed at the preservation of the right to be a slave-owning society.  The Afrikaans-speaking community was honest about this.  The English-speaking white community was, on the whole, content to retain the effect in practice.

Do you think the developments in the faith and science debate have taken us to a better place of understanding between biblical concepts and the scientific world in recent times? 

Yes.

I have no right to claim any authority in this matter, as I am only an amateur in biblical studies and an outsider to the scientific world (my schooling excluded me from the elementary study of the natural sciences, and insofar as I have entered it at all, this has been in my practical training as mechanic in the RAF).  As a member of the society in the twenty-first century, I recognise the power of the world of measurement, its practical value and its validity as a realm of truth. And I recognise that that world is growing beyond imagination, and at this stage there would seem to be no measurable limit to the world of measurement. I recognise also that the world of what cannot be measured remains powerful, far more powerful (for good or for ill) than can be measured, more powerful than most of us, for the most part, can be aware of, conceive or limit. That is the world which contains, but is certainly not limited to, the world of instinct, intuition, poetry, music, theology, motivation, politics and even, in terms of motive and effect, finance.  I am impressed by the stories of people like John Habgood and Alister McGrath, who move from a mode of thinking restricted to the first of these worlds into a one which includes, and is steered by, the second.  

Concerns about mental health have been stimulated within the current pandemic, and a renewed interest in ‘mindfulness’ looks like being more than a passing phase. The kind of experience noted by Viktor Frankel in concentration camps, that those who survived did so because they had a sense of meaning, makes sense in a scene of apparent pointlessness.  The kind of fundamentalism which dismisses the non-measurable world as stupid or meaningless has come to look as antique and unsustainable as the fundamentalism which inspires ‘creationism’.  I feel hopeful for our intellectual future at this level and think that both sides are recognising the truth of the aphorism:  ’seek simplicity, and distrust it’. 

Robert Oppenheimer’s comment concerning the Hiroshima nuclear bombing, or the development of the Manhattan project itself, that ‘physics has known sin’ or words to that effect, has marked a new sense that the measurement disciplines have ethical responsibilities.  War, as we know it, from WW1 onwards, has become a competition between nations to decide which of them can create the greatest amount of ruin.  Defence is a matter of human beings destroying what other human beings have made. We measure our effectiveness by moving bricks from where people have placed them and converting them into heaps of rubble, with attendant corpses.  Science’s work is expended in the making of improved bombers. The Lancasters that I worked on were replaced by the hugely more expensive V-bombers, designed to bring ruin to cities much further away. War is de-creation.  Ethical questions are inevitably put against what the tools of measurement are designed and used for.  

At the same time, there is more and more interest in the very origins of human life and particularly in the origins of communication, of art, and of liturgy (see the references in our book to the explorations of Dr Jenifer Baker).  Perhaps, it may be in the disciplines of archaeology that we may discover new understandings of the origins of meaning and of value, and therefore of science.

But what I do hope for, and feel anxiety about, is that those who are concerned for the biblical witness will seriously recognise our duty to represent not only the non-measurable truth about divine authority but also the built-in commitment to a divine mandate towards freedom and care for the whole of creation. A core-element in Seven Days to Freedom is the argument that a theology which fails to address issues of slavery, land-tenure, and public education is fundamentally defective, in that it misses the purpose for which it has been given to us. 

Are you pessimistic or optimistic of humanity’s ability to improve conditions for the poor globally, looking at your life experiences and the way people are depicted in scripture and behaviour through Church history?

I suppose that this is the sort of question one has to expect to have to cope with, if one has survived to my kind of age!  For much of my life, I was the youngest specimen in my category, and then suddenly became the oldest - difficult to keep up with.

I shy away from words like 'pessimistic' and 'optimistic'.  I fall back on the answer which I quote in the book, of Seamus Heaney, when asked this very question concerning the future of Northern Ireland.  ‘Optimism says we are going to win; Hope says, what we are doing is worth doing; I have hope’. That is what has inspired people like Vaklav Havel of Czechoslovakia; it is what kept many people committed to Mandela’s vision.  Sometimes it seems pointless; then something changes. The Pope (I forget which one) used to speak of ‘the impossible possibility’ - or the ‘possible impossibility’, in connection with Northern Ireland and then the Good Friday agreement happened; at the time of the Brexit debates most of Great Britain seemed to be willing to ignore it as not worth bothering about any longer.  Certainly, by the time that we were excluded from South Africa, the situation there was getting steadily worse. ‘I tell you naught for your comfort’ was becoming truer day by day. Then, one day, Mandela came out of prison.  One day, all South African adults were queuing to cast their votes.  What we had been doing was worth doing.  

One well-known historian refused to mention the witness of the Confessing Church in Germany; he said it was ‘politically impotent’.  But a more inclusive history recognises the witness of people like Bonhoeffer and Niemoller as essential to the fuller truth of the century, and to the future conscience of Germany.  What we were doing with bodies like the ASF and UCM and Steve Biko’s SASO and the Christian Institute in South Africa was, at the time, politically impotent.  But they enabled and nourished a generation of students, who became the leaders in a new nation.  The global poor make their claim; some are heard.  Climate change is debated; some decisions are made.  Where will we be in forty years’ time?  Who can tell? What we are doing is worth doing.  While there are young people coming onto the stage, such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, there is hope.  But the twentieth century does offer warnings of danger.  We are right to celebrate those like Bonhoeffer and Niemoller, who were young men when I was born. Their stories are now widely known.  But there was also one Alois Schicklgruber, father of Adolf Hitler, who inspired the enthusiastic allegiance of young men such as Theodor ter Horst,  born in Germany two years before me, who served with passionate commitment in the German army until he was eventually taken as a Prisoner of War; already painfully, and very hungrily, disillusioned, he was sent to a PoW camp near Oswestry, working as a farm labourer two miles from where I now live. He subsequently married the farmer’s daughter and lived there until his death a few years ago. His kind of story needs to be known, along with the stories of those whom we celebrate (Stuart Crocker – Foreign Shores – Troubador Publishing: 2010).

In 1973, the Student Christian Movement in UK convened a lively conference of about 120 students and colleagues at Huddersfield Polytechnic, entitled ‘Seeds of Liberation’.  It was a very simple affair, basic even, sleeping on the floors of church buildings and halls, with only frugal self-catering.   Our two leading speakers were Dan Berrigan, (one of the two Berrigan brothers, both Jesuit priests, leaders in the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War campaign in the USA), and my close friend and colleague, deported from South Africa, Colin Winter, Bishop of Namibia-in exile.   Berrigan testified to student defiance of the Vietnam War, the burning of draft cards, and opposition to the leader of 'evil policy', Richard Nixon.  Colin Winter spoke of white students’ resistance to compulsory call-up in South Africa, and the burning of pass books, and the iniquities of apartheid as represented by Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster.  And the British students were left feeling, in friendly Britain, what demon figure have we got?  The avuncular figure of Grocer Ted Heath!  What symbol worth burning?  Green Shield stamps!   Berrigan’s reply was that even under a benign administration, you have the duty to remind government of its uncompleted agenda.  There is not always a demon-figure to placard; there is not always a single-issue to identify.  Very early in Church history, Christian leaders were having to repeat the teaching of the Letter of St James about the dangers of inequality and the accumulation of wealth.  Some issues just won’t go away.  It is one thing to warn against the dangers of climate change; it is another thing to recognise how closely this is tied to the acquisition and accumulation of wealth. 

A slightly relevant post-script. Dan Berrigan had drawn attention to the biblical ‘Mark of the Beast’, in Revelation 13. As result, someone ran round the conference, making a black mark on the forehead of each of us. The invitation came: How are you marked?  What does the mark mean to you? How far is that your own fault or ill-fortune?  (All very reminiscent of the meaning of the Imposition of Ashes on Ash Wednesday).  And then, pairing up with another person, we were encouraged to work through our responses, and, when it seemed right, carefully remove the mark from our partner’s face. I found myself paired with Mary, a fairly angry ex-nun from the SCM group in Dublin.  She became quite a long-term friend, whom I was often bumping into, especially when she became a student at Hull University.  The whole experience made a big difference to the atmosphere of the gathering; and to my own understanding of Ash Wednesday.

And a post-post-script: Now, whenever I can, I arrange the Ash Wednesday service so that the Confession takes place in the old Prayer Book’s place,  after the ministry of the Word, then we go to the font, to receive the mark of the ash, to recall how our sin disfigures the sign of the cross done on our face in baptism, then the Confession, and the prayers, then the Absolution, leading straight into the  sharing of the Peace, the peace of forgiveness, and, with the first person with whom we share the Peace we remove each other’s mark; and from this, we move into the Communion.  This arrangement also means that we don’t disobey the Master’s instruction, given in the appointed Gospel for the day,  that we are not to go out and make a display of our fasting or our discipline. 

Seeds of Liberation sowed itself effectively, for me.

Yes, I do have hope!

 

Seven Days to Freedom: Joining up connections in Creation by John Dudley Davies is out now in paperback and available as an eBook. 

John Dudley Davies is a former Bishop of Shrewsbury, and now is an Honorary Assistant Bishop of St Asaph. He was, for fifteen years, a rural priest and a university chaplain in South Africa, where he was deeply involved in the ideological struggle against the cruelty and injustice of apartheid. In 1970, the Government of that country terminated permission for him to live and work there. Since then he has served as a minister in England and Wales, and as Principal of the College of the Ascension in Birmingham. In retirement he was a local councillor in Wales and England for nearly ten years.