Welcome to jonest.org, a site where I am posting my ideas and writings on life, faith and politics. I am privileged to be involved in both the church and academic worlds in the UK (see About) and much of the content here will be works in progress for one or the other. Clearly I’m a challenging party guest who can be fairly relied upon to raise issues of both religion and politics and probably any other off-the-menu topic.
Let me begin by explaining a little about that blog tagline ‘Light in Public Life‘. It encapsulates the conviction that theology can and should bring illumination to the whole of life. John’s Gospel begins by saying of Jesus, “in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it… The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” ‘Light’ then, can be taken to mean a positive theology. The pre-modern world worked with this truth in an unjaded manner: God, through Christ, has flooded the world with his light and we can know and be known in this light. As documented by Charles Taylor, the subsequent turns of history through renaissance, reformation and enlightenment served to replace the full ‘heavens’ with the empty ‘space’. In the modern age, Christianity has to contend with this psychological shift in the Western cultural mindset and theologians must articulate answers across the divide. To my mind, one of the most interesting and arguably the most practically enacted theologies of the past two centuries is that of the Dutch scholar and statesman Abraham Kuyper. Much of my academic work interacts with Kuyper, whose life and thought are becoming more prominent in English-language theology thanks to recent translations.
‘Light in Public Life’ stands for the re-theologising of ‘the political’ in its broadest sense. I have argued elsewhere that politics tends to work on theological assumptions that may well not be acknowledged or properly theorised. That is a dangerous state of affairs and certainly one that needs to be carefully interrogated. That said, my approach is far from alarmist or sombre: I aim to be positive without being glib and critical without being cynical.