the political theology of the morpeth review , 1927-1934

16
IAN TREGENZA The Political Theology of The Morpeth Review, 1927–1934* The interwar years saw the initiation of a number of important periodicals that reflected the emerging vitality of public intellectual life in Australia. One such publication was The Morpeth Review, a quarterly that appeared between the years 1927 and 1934. Edited by three Anglican intellectuals — E. H. Burgmann, Roy Lee, and A. P. Elkin — it included contributions from prominent historians, political scientists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and theologians. Though its range of concerns was broad, it was guided by a basic vision of intellectual and social life that aimed at reconciling the conflicting elements of modernity. Such conflicts included the divide between the world of work and the family, the divide between classes, between nations, and between church and state, or more broadly, between the secular and the religious spheres. This article will suggest that in the endeavour to reconcile such competing elements The Morpeth Review expressed a kind of political theology that was modernist in inspiration (welcoming science and the critical consciousness) and drew on several overlapping traditions of thought including liberal Anglicanism, Christian socialism, and British idealism, all of which rejected the modern tendency to compartmentalise life and with it to relegate religion to the private sphere. Introduction The period between the wars is sometimes seen as crucial in the development of public intellectual life in Australia. It has been described as the age of so-called “organic intellectuals,” 1 when an overlapping and loosely connected network of scholars, journalists, and educationalists working in a range of public or quasi-public institutions including the universities, the Workers 1. T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1978); H. Bourke, “Social Scientists as Intellectuals: From the First World War to the Depression,” in Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, ed. B. Head and J. Walter (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988). Dr Ian Tregenza is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics, and International Relations, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia. * This article was originally presented as a paper at the workshop “Rethinking Secularism in Australia and Beyond” held at Robert Menzies College, North Ryde, 30 September 2011. My thanks go to the participants and especially to Geoff Treloar for his detailed response to the paper. Thanks are due also to the anonymous reviewers of this Journal for further helpful suggestions. Journal of Religious History Vol. 38, No. 3, September 2014 doi: 10.1111/1467-9809.12077 413 © 2014 The Author Journal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Upload: ian

Post on 01-Apr-2017

213 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

IAN TREGENZA

The Political Theology of The Morpeth Review,1927–1934*

The interwar years saw the initiation of a number of important periodicals thatreflected the emerging vitality of public intellectual life in Australia. One suchpublication was The Morpeth Review, a quarterly that appeared between the years1927 and 1934. Edited by three Anglican intellectuals — E. H. Burgmann, Roy Lee,and A. P. Elkin — it included contributions from prominent historians, politicalscientists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and theologians. Though its range ofconcerns was broad, it was guided by a basic vision of intellectual and social life thataimed at reconciling the conflicting elements of modernity. Such conflicts includedthe divide between the world of work and the family, the divide between classes,between nations, and between church and state, or more broadly, between the secularand the religious spheres. This article will suggest that in the endeavour to reconcilesuch competing elements The Morpeth Review expressed a kind of political theologythat was modernist in inspiration (welcoming science and the critical consciousness)and drew on several overlapping traditions of thought including liberal Anglicanism,Christian socialism, and British idealism, all of which rejected the modern tendencyto compartmentalise life and with it to relegate religion to the private sphere.

IntroductionThe period between the wars is sometimes seen as crucial in the developmentof public intellectual life in Australia. It has been described as the age ofso-called “organic intellectuals,”1 when an overlapping and loosely connectednetwork of scholars, journalists, and educationalists working in a range ofpublic or quasi-public institutions including the universities, the Workers

1. T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1978);H. Bourke, “Social Scientists as Intellectuals: From the First World War to the Depression,” inIntellectual Movements and Australian Society, ed. B. Head and J. Walter (Melbourne: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988).

Dr Ian Tregenza is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics, and InternationalRelations, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia.* This article was originally presented as a paper at the workshop “Rethinking Secularism inAustralia and Beyond” held at Robert Menzies College, North Ryde, 30 September 2011. Mythanks go to the participants and especially to Geoff Treloar for his detailed response to the paper.Thanks are due also to the anonymous reviewers of this Journal for further helpful suggestions.

bs_bs_banner

Journal of Religious HistoryVol. 38, No. 3, September 2014doi: 10.1111/1467-9809.12077

413© 2014 The Author

Journal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 2: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

Educational Association (WEA), the developing political studies institutes,2

and various media organisations, addressed the pressing public issues of theday. Reflecting the growing status of social scientific research, many of thesefigures emphasised the role of expert knowledge and often took a decidedlytechnocratic approach to social problems.3

A less remarked on feature of the period is the place occupied by the religiousvoice. Not only were the churches and student Christian groups prominentparticipants in public debates on a range of issues such as poverty, unemploy-ment, war and peace,4 many prominent intellectuals working in the universitiesor with institutions such as the WEA had strong religious connections. More-over, such figures often saw their “secular” activities in quasi-religious terms. SoG. V. Portus, for instance, who was an Anglican clergyman and would subse-quently become professor of history and political science at the Universityof Adelaide, could describe his work with the WEA as a “secular ministry”:“I had a gospel to preach. I had a pattern within which to work. I had a sustainingconviction that my work was vital to society.”5

Portus’s experience of moving from a religious to a secular vocation followsa well-trodden path travelled by many liberal intellectuals in Australia, andBritain, going back to the 1870s. The Oxford new liberal and philosophicalidealist T. H. Green is a crucial figure in this story. Though it is often over-looked or minimised in standard histories of political thought, Green’sconception of citizenship, centred on notions such as self-realisation, posi-tive freedom, and the common good, is a profoundly Christian one. Even todescribe his account of citizenship as a secularised version of Christian ideasdoes not quite do it justice since, for Green, realising one’s higher self throughactive citizenship involved serving God. Citizenship in other words, is a formof worship, and “the true citizen is the ‘Christed personality’.”6

This understanding of the continuities between Christian service and citi-zenship had a deep impact on British and Australian intellectual and politicallife in the next half century, inspiring many of the social reforms of the periodup to the Second World War. William Temple, for instance, who was stronglyinfluenced by idealism, and was the inventor of the term “welfare state,” whenwriting about citizenship claimed that “it is not natural to man to prefer thegeneral good to his own; indeed that is a description of what in one word is

2. These included The Australian Institute of Political Science, The Australian Institute ofInternational Affairs, and The Institute for Pacific Relations.3. J. Walter and T. Moore, “The New Social Order? Australia’s Contribution to New LiberalThinking,” APSA conference paper, 2002, http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/36512013?q=walter+moore&l-format=Article%2FConference+paper&c=article&versionId=49559015 (accessed 12August 2013),4. J. Mansfield, “The Social Gospel and the Church of England in New South Wales in the1930s,” Journal of Religious History 13, no. 4 (December 1985): 411–33; M. Lake, “Faith inCrisis: Christian University Students in Peace and War,” Australian Journal of Politics and History56, no. 3 (September 2010): 441–54.5. G. V. Portus, Happy Highways (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1953), 170.6. D. Boucher and A. Vincent, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 2000), 37. Cf. also A. Vincent, “T. H. Green and the Religion of Citizenship,” inThe Philosophy of T. H. Green, ed. A. Vincent (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1986), 48–61.

414 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 3: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

called salvation.”7 Furthermore, Green’s metaphysics as well as his socialand political thought had a major impact within the church, both in shaping itstheology as well as its social reform agenda. As R. G. Collingwood could writein his Autobiography (1939):

The school of Green sent out into public life a stream of ex-pupils who carried withthem the conviction that philosophy they had learnt at Oxford, was an importantthing, and that their vocation was to put it into practice. This conviction was commonto politicians so diverse in their creeds as Asquith and Milner, churchmen like Goreand Scott Holland, social reformers like Arnold Toynbee, and a host of other publicmen whose names it would be tedious to repeat. Through this effect on the minds ofits pupils, the philosophy of Green’s school might be found, from about 1880 to about1910, penetrating and fertilizing every part of the national life.8

More recently, Denys Leighton has suggested that so deep and wide wasthe influence of Green in this period of British history that it can plausibly betermed the “Greenian moment.”9

These were, of course, crucial years in Australian national developmentleading up to and following federation when a series of national institutionswere being established. Arguably, for this reason Green’s influence was evengreater in Australia than in Britain since the new liberalism of the period feddirectly into the developing national institutions and the national conscious-ness. Tim Rowse, for instance, has aptly written that ‘those in Australia influ-enced by T. H. Green’s theory of the ethical state were for a time convinced thatAustralia was its purest example. They believed that a capacity for compassionand social responsibility in each Australian citizen was expressed in aggregateform in the reformist policies of leaders like Deakin, Fisher, and Higgins.”10 Inother words, Australia could also be said to have had its “Greenian moment.”11

Many historians roughly follow Collingwood’s periodisation of the heydayof British idealism (or the “school of Green”) as the years between 1880 and1910, and this is, no doubt, its period of dominance. But the influence ofGreen’s idealist liberalism extends well beyond this period. In Britain, forinstance, leading public figures such as William Temple, A. D. Lindsay, andErnest Barker extended this tradition of thought up to the Second World War.12

Moreover, all of these thinkers have rightly been depicted as late exponentsof the tradition of liberal Anglicanism,13 and by taking the longer view it ispossible to see British idealism as developing and extending some key features

7. W. Temple, Christianity and the State (London: Macmillan, 1928), 183.8. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 17.9. D. Leighton, The Greenian Moment: T. H. Green, Religion and Political Argument in VictorianBritain (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004).10. Rowse, Australian Liberalism, 22.11. See also M. Sawer, The Ethical State?: Social Liberalism in Australia (Melbourne: Mel-bourne University Press, 2003) for a more recent discussion of the influence of Green’s liberalismin early twentieth-century Australia. For further discussion of the connection between idealism andreligious thought in Australia see I. Tregenza, “The Idealist Tradition in Australian ReligiousThought,” Journal of Religious History 34, no. 3 (September 2010): 335–53.12. See M. Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal AnglicanTheories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).13. Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England.

415M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 4: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

of other older overlapping traditions of British thought, such as liberal Angli-canism and Christian socialism that stretch from the 1830s up to the middleof the twentieth century. Some of the key themes of these schools of thoughtinclude the idea that the state is not to be seen principally as a collection ofdisparate interests but that it is an ethical community; that the state and nationare, no less than the church, divine institutions; that Christianity concernsthe whole of life, both personal and social, and one of its central goals shouldbe to overcome the endemic fragmentation of modern life. In writing aboutthe influence of Thomas Arnold — one of the early sources of liberal Anglicanthought — on Green, Melvin Richter said the following:

Arnold argued that the quality of a church is to be measured, not by its dogma orritual, but by its practical capacity to Christianise the nation and introduce theprinciples of its teaching into men’s social and civil relations. The great failure ofreligion in modern times had been the radical separation of things secular from thingsspiritual.14

Much of the teaching of the Church of England in the 1920s and 1930semphasised the imperative for the church to take an active role in all areas ofsocial life. The Lambeth Conferences in 1920 and 1930 as well as the Confer-ence On Politics Economics and Citizenship (COPEC) in Birmingham in 1924presided over by William Temple agreed that the aim of the churches should beto “Christianise the corporate life of mankind in all its activities.”15 This wouldnot principally take the form of winning individual souls to Christ, but wouldinvolve engaging with the fundamental social, industrial, and political issues ofthe day. Only by such means could it be said that church was working towardsbuilding the kingdom of God.

Given both its constitutional and social positions in Britain, the Church ofEngland was in a pre-eminent position to further such a goal within the UnitedKingdom. While the Church of England in Australia was not an establishedchurch it was, until fairly recent times,16 the largest and most influentialreligious body and from early colonial times it had (implicitly and explicitly)assumed a leadership role in the nation’s spiritual affairs. This meant that thechurch–nation nexus that was a feature of the liberal Anglican tradition inEngland found a natural expression among many Australian Anglicans.17

14. M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (London: Weidenfeld andNicholson, 1964), 49. For further discussion of the early liberal Anglicans and Christian socialistsand the broader debates about religion and national identity in Britain in the nineteenth century seeH. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 2.15. COPEC Commission Reports, cited in Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church ofEngland, 40.16. In the first half of the twentieth century the proportion of Australians identifying as Churchof England in the national census was around 40 per cent, Catholics around 20 per cent, and otherChristian denominations around 28 per cent. It was only in the mid-1980s that the Catholic Churchovertook the Anglican as Australia’s largest Christian denomination. For a more detailed break-down of the census data see Australian Bureau of Statistics, Special Feature: Trends in ReligiousAffiliation, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/10072ec3ffc4f7b4ca2570ec00787c40!OpenDocument (accessed 17 March 2012).17. For a broad treatment of the relationship between Anglicanism and Australian nation identitysee B. Fletcher, The Place of Anglicanism in Australia: Church, Society and Nation (Mulgrave,Victoria: Broughton Publishing, 2008).

416 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 5: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

The “Morpeth Mind” and the Search for UnityThese three connected traditions of thought — liberal Anglicanism, ChristianSocialism, and British Idealism — provide a broad intellectual context forunderstanding the ideas and outlook of The Morpeth Review (hereafter Review),a quarterly publication that ran from 1927 to 1934. The more immediate contextis what Tod Moore has described as the development of “an authentic publicsphere for Australian intellectuals.”18 The Review was one of a number ofperiodicals established in this period including the Australian Quarterly and theAustralian National Review which reflected the emerging vitality of publicintellectual life in Australia.

While the Review was a collaborative undertaking, it was very much drivenby the vision of E. H. Burgmann and Roy Lee, with help from A. P. Elkin, whobecame the third member of the editorial team in 1929. All three were Anglicanclerics, the product of St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, where theyhad come under the influence of the idealist professor of philosophy FrancisAnderson. Burgmann was elected bishop of Goulburn in 1934,19 but was thewarden of St John’s College at Morpeth, in the Hunter valley, prior to thiswhere he directed the editorial and publication activities of the journal. On anyaccount Burgmann is a major figure of twentieth-century Australian Anglican-ism and he had a grand vision for the church’s role in contributing to Australianpublic life. He was instrumental in the establishment in 1957 of St Mark’sLibrary in Canberra, forming the basis for what would become St Mark’sNational Theological Centre.20 When at Morpeth, Burgmann envisaged StJohn’s College as a corrective to what he saw as the insularity of theologicaleducation in this country. St John’s, advertised as the “first University Collegein country Australia,” was to provide a broad education in history, politics,religion, and philosophy that would enable its graduates to engage withthe pressing social problems of the day. Burgmann, like Portus, was also anenergetic tutor in the WEA, a task he also saw in missionary terms, and helinked the aims of the Review to his work with the WEA. The Review, he said,was founded to reach the kind of people he and his colleagues had encounteredas WEA tutors, “people on the borderland of institutional religion . . . men andwomen of good will and high ethical ideal, but only too divorced from andsceptical of the Churches.”21

Burgmann, Lee, Elkin, Portus, and others such as F. A. Bland, who was laterto become the first professor of Public Administration at the University ofSydney, were all important contributors to the journal and they were all con-nected through their work with the WEA. As Burgmann’s biographer, PeterHempenstall, has written, this group constituted the “Christian element” of the

18. T. Moore, “The ‘Morpeth Mind’ and Australian Politics, 1927–34,” APSA conference paper,2006, http://www.newcastle.edu.au/Resources/Schools/Newcastle%20Business%20School/APSA/ANZPOL/Moore-Tod.pdf (accessed 25 March 2011).19. The name of the diocese was changed from Goulburn to Canberra and Goulburn in 1950.20. See T. Frame, A Church for a Nation: A History of the Anglican Diocese of Canberra &Goulburn (Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 2000).21. E. H. Burgmann, letter to Church Standard, 5 July 1929, cited in P. Hempenstall, TheMeddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann (St Leonard: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 130.

417M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 6: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

WEA and the “Review was the voice of Christian idealism responding ingeneral terms to the widespread notion that western civilization was in crisis.”22

The crisis had many manifestations including growing class divisions, unem-ployment, the threats to the realisation of individual personality posed by bothindustrialisation and mechanisation, international instability in the form ofaggressive nationalism, and the marginalisation of religion through a growingsecularism. All of these issues and more get an airing in the pages of the Reviewby many of the leading public or “organic” intellectuals of the day. The listof contributors is impressive and included historians, political scientists,and economists such as F. L. W. Wood, Keith Hancock, W. G. K. Duncan, J. N.Greenwood, and Lloyd Ross amongst others.

While the Review included contributions from across the ideological spec-trum,23 there was nevertheless a guiding vision, what Peter Hempenstall refersto as “the Morpeth Mind,”24 combining elements drawn from the social gospelmovement with its roots in Christian socialism, and an idealist-inspired newliberalism stemming from Green and Edward Caird and transmitted throughdisciples such as Francis Anderson. Common to all of these traditions is a drivefor reconciliation since, it was believed, the source of many of the problems ofmodern life, was fragmentation — between classes, between the church and thestate, or broadly between the religious and the secular spheres, and betweennations at the international level. Christianity, properly understood, could helpprovide a bridge between the warring elements in society (and internationally),though the churches on the whole had failed to live up to this mission and, ifanything, had contributed to a growing secularism. Horace Crotty, the Bishopof Bathurst, for instance, was moved to write that:

Much of that secularism which robs Australian life of any unitary guidance springsfrom a secularism, which flourishes not in the world, but in the Church, with itsseparation of religion from life, its depreciation of sex, its division of human affairsinto secular and sacred, its view of intellect as devilish, of money as unclean, ofindustry as outside Christ’s scope, of politics as dirt.25

If the church was to combat a growing secularism it would have to rethinkits role in society and this must entail overcoming the divorce between thesacred and secular spheres. The foundation of the social gospel movement,according to Joan Mansfield,

was an affirmation of the all-embracing nature of Christianity. There was no properdistinction between sacred and secular, between a human being as an individual andas a social being. All life fell under the divine will and judgement, and it was theChurch’s responsibility to interpret these in social and political terms. The failure tounderstand the unity of life was responsible for the pervading Australian view thatreligion was relevant to life only at isolated points.26

22. Hempenstall, Meddlesome Priest, 131.23. For further discussion see Moore, “The ‘Morpeth Mind’.”24. Hempenstall, Meddlesome Priest, ch. 6.25. H. Crotty, “What is Wrong with Us?,” Morpeth Review II, no. 18 (December 1931): 22.26. Mansfield, “The Social Gospel”: 418.

418 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 7: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

This sentiment is expressed time and again in the pages of the Review. In aneditorial in 1931, for instance, Burgmann wrote that the Review:

attempts to study the whole man in all his reactions to his world environment. Ittherefore deals with his religion, ethics, politics, economics, and art, believing thatthese form a living whole and should only be departmentalised for the sake of a moredetailed study. In life one and the same man is religious, ethical, political, economic,and artistic, and it is a fallacy to exalt any one of these elements in him to theexclusion of depreciation of any or all the others.27

Modern Theology for a Modern AgeThe theology of the Review was modernist in orientation, emphasising thedevelopmental nature of religious truth. Idealism was one important current inshaping theological modernism. In the Victorian period Green and other ideal-ists responded to biblical criticism and science by viewing such developmentsnot as enemies to be combated but in terms of the providential unfolding oftruth. Reason and faith were not radically separate forms of human experience,and science and the modern critical consciousness, when viewed from the rightperspective, could be seen as forms of divine revelation. This also meant thattraditional religious doctrines, such as the Incarnation and the Atonement, wererecast in developmental or immanentist terms. Perhaps the most important latenineteenth-century expression of this was the Anglo-Catholic Lux Mundi groupassociated with theologians such as Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland.Gore edited an influential collection of papers on the topic of the Incarnationwhich was published in 1889, the same year that he, Holland, and BrookeFoss Westcott formed the Christian Social Union (CSU).28 For a number of thecontributors to this volume the Incarnation was not to be understood exclu-sively in terms of the life of Christ as a unique event in time. Rather, the life ofChrist was one stage in the unfolding of the divine spirit, which continues intothe present.29

The modernist movement was institutionally represented by The Church-man’s Union for the Advancement of Liberal Religious Thought (generallyknown by its abbreviated title, The Churchman’s Union), founded in 1898.Its journal The Modern Churchman was established in 1911 by Henry D. A.Major. In its first issue the Oxford classicist Percy Gardner described reli-gious modernism simply as “an adaptation of religion to the changed cir-cumstances of the time, a re-reading of the venerable documents of religionin the light of history and experience, an attempt to find for the undying

27. E. H. Burgmann, Editorial, Morpeth Review II, no. 18 (December 1931): 7.28. C. Gore, ed. Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: JohnMurray, 1890 [1889]).29. The Lux Mundi group continues to attract scholarly interest. Two volumes of esssays wereproduced to mark the centenary: R. Morgan, The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays inCommemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989); G. Wainwright, ed. Keepingthe Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).

419M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 8: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

spirit of Christianity an intellectual and social framework better fitted to themodern world.”30

The modernist theological influence can be found through much of theReview, but one author in particular worth mentioning in this regard is KennethHenderson, who was then in Perth writing for the West Australian and theArgus. As with the Review’s editorial team, Henderson was an Anglicancleric, a graduate of the University of Melbourne where he had resided atTrinity College. One of Henderson’s teachers at Melbourne was the Scottishidealist W. R. Boyce Gibson. Henderson served as a chaplain in the First WorldWar, an experience he wrote about in a work titled Khaki and Cassock (1919).This was followed by another short book, Christian Tradition and AustralianOutlook (1923). From 1923 to 1925 Henderson studied at Oxford underthe supervision of the personal idealist C. C. J. Webb gaining a B. Litt. (and ajournal article),31 on the work of the German church historian and theologianErnst Troeltsch. On returning to Australia, Henderson maintained a connectionto Webb and other modernists such as B. H. Streeter and Baron von Hugel.32

In 1941 he would become the first religious affairs broadcaster at the AustralianBroadcasting Commission (ABC), a position he held for fifteen years. Hen-derson talked about his role at the ABC in much the same way as Portushad about his work with the WEA and as Burgmann wrote about the Review,that is, as a kind of mission directed at the “wayfarers” or those on the edgesof institutional religion.33

In all, Henderson wrote about half a dozen essays for the Review, all ofwhich developed modernist themes. A good example is a piece from 1932called “Christianity as Originality” which begins with a quotation from Ranke— “God is present in every generation in its characteristic ideals.” For Hen-derson, “Christianity is not a standardised theology, or an ethical code, but akind of living . . . [and] . . . Christian morality is creative adventure.”34 Eachgeneration needs to discover for itself the truths of Christianity through its owncharacteristic ideals. The present, says Henderson, “has its own peculiar capac-ities for truth, chief of them its critical temper” which has helped transformChristianity from a religion of “dogma and custom, externally imposed” toa recognition of the “Divine life within human living.”35 This has generateda new ethical conception that is more “world accepting,” focused less on atranscendent otherworldly sphere than on attaining salvation “in this life and

30. P. Gardner, “Modernism and Modernity,” Modern Churchman 1, no. 1 (April 1911), http://www.modernchurch.org.uk/publications/mb/apr1911/2.htm (accessed 17 March 2012). Gardnerwrote an early history of English modernism: Modernism in the English Church (London:Methuen, 1926). For a more recent study see A. M. G. Stephenson, The Rise and Decline ofEnglish Modernism (London: SPCK, 1984).31. K. Henderson, “Troeltsch’s Philosophy of History,” Australian Journal of Psychology andPhilosophy 4, no. 3 (1925): 254–64.32. A. Healey, “Nerve and Imagination: Kenneth Thorne Henderson in Retrospect,” St. Mark’sReview 48 (Summer 1992): 14.33. K. Henderson, Broadcasting as a Religious Opportunity (Australian Broadcasting Commis-sion, 1947), cited in Healey, “Nerve and Imagination,” 16.34. K. Henderson, “Christianity as Originality,” Morpeth Review II. no. 21 (September 1932): 16.35. Henderson, “Christianity as Originality”: 14, 16.

420 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 9: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

for this life.” Focusing on the immanence of the divine within human life doesnot involve a denial of transcendence, rather it “is the perpetual experience ofthe Otherness of God in our acts and motives, an otherness that is yet akinto us, offering Power and Presence.”36 The new temper of criticism and self-examination has “produced results [within Christianity] compared with whichthe Reformation was a superficial disturbance.”37

Henderson’s debt to idealism is apparent in an essay titled “Atonement inExperience” which provides a sympathetic treatment of Bernard Bosanquet’sphilosophy of religion. Bosanquet, following earlier figures such as F. H.Bradley, made the argument that religious experience arose from the inherentconflicts within moral experience. Morality was an endless process wherebywe strive to overcome our actual selves and realise our good or ideal self. Butbecause the good self only exists in relation to our actual, imperfect self — thatis, we can only know the good by way of contrast with the bad — morality cannever finally overcome evil or imperfection. Each step towards the realisationof the good self carries with it a new awareness of imperfection. In other words,moral success necessarily brings with it a recognition of failure. “The judge-ment of morality,” says Henderson,

is always a condemnation. The reflective consciousness detaches itself from exist-ence. It sees that its world of facts lacks something, fails at some point. The failureis felt as a failure within the self, a discord, a want. The self exerts itself to rationalizeand harmonize itself by supplying the missing need, replacing the evil by the good.But each success gives a vantage ground from which the world of fact, in which it hasits being, must be surveyed again and again.38

This awareness points to the need for the religious viewpoint. It is only inreligion that this process of moral effort and condemnation can be transcended,but the transcendence is achieved within experience itself. The relationbetween morality and religion is not, as is often portrayed, that of a divinelawgiver and judge who hands out rewards and punishments. Rather, religionarises from the conflicts of ordinary moral experience — “For the good thatI would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” in St Paul’swords.39 Salvation is achieved by overcoming the isolation of the actual self

36. K. Henderson, “Christianity and Secularism,” Morpeth Review II, no. 16 (June 1931): 29.37. Henderson, “Christianity as Originality”: 18.38. K. Henderson, “Atonement in Experience,” Morpeth Review III, no. 26 (January 1934): 99.39. See F. H. Bradley: “Reflection on morality leads us beyond it. It leads us, in short, to see thenecessity of a religious point of view. It certainly does not tell us that morality comes first in theworld and then religion: what it tells us is that morality is imperfect, and imperfect in such a wayas implies a higher, which is religion” F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1927 [1876]) 314. See also M. Oakeshott: “we achieve goodness, not by becoming better, but bylosing ourselves in God. For goodness is never achieved by becoming better: that is the self-contradiction of morality. Religion, then, is the completion of morality, not in the sense of a finalend to an historical series, but as the concrete whole is the completion of all the abstractionsanalysis may discover in it. Religion is not the sanction of morality, but the whole of whichmorality is an aspect, and in which mere morality perishes, that is, is discovered as an abstraction.”M. Oakshott, “Religion and the Moral Life” (1929), in Oakeshott, Religion, Politics and the MoralLife ed. T. Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) p.42.

421M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 10: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

and identifying with a larger whole, but one grounded in the ultimate nature ofreality. Only the good is ultimately real, and evil or imperfection represents anabsence of good.40

While sympathetic to Bosanquet, Henderson thinks he leaves something out,namely personality. Henderson agrees with his former teacher Clement Webbthat ultimate reality must contain personality, and atonement on this view“implies the unification of personality in so far as its activities become morecompletely the response to the demands of the Whole, such response beingconceived as the achievement of an ever deepening, ever widening, relation toa personal God.” The point is that the metaphysics is not our starting point butis derived from a reflection on ordinary experience. Philosophical reflectionleads from the world as we actually experience it to the idea of a personal God.“God is for this view ‘Anima Mundi,’ the Soul of the whole, related to everyform of being in the form of an urge towards its perfection, a demand presentto its every activity that it should fulfil its own ‘end’ in an ordered whole.”41

The Incarnation and the Social OrderAnother traditional Christian doctrine — the Incarnation — is brought to bearon contemporary social problems in the pages of the Review by P. A. Micklem,an Anglo-Catholic New Testament scholar, and activist in the social gospelmovement.42 Micklem was English born and educated. He graduated witha first in litterae humaniores from Oxford in 1899 and was lecturer at StAugustine’s College, Canterbury before migrating to Brisbane in 1910 wherehe became principal of St Francis theological college. He moved to Sydney in1917 where he was appointed rector of the Church of St James, consolidatingthe Anglo-Catholic character of the parish.43 He presented the Moorhouselectures in 1920 and again in 1931.44 The 1931 lectures were titled Values of theIncarnation45 and it is from this work that his Morpeth Review article is drawn.

For Micklem, the Incarnation was less about God being reduced to thehuman but, through Christ, the human was raised to the level of the divine. Inthis transaction humanity or the Manhood was not superseded but fully real-ised. “Christ is ‘perfect Man” because in Him humanity was taken into God. Itis as united with the Godhead that manhood alone fulfils its destiny and attainsits end.”46 The doctrine of the Incarnation for Micklem, contains “not merelya theological dogma, but a sociological principle,” and from the early creedaldebates it was believed to be a response to basic human needs and to provide

40. On this point at least, Henderson and other idealists were at one with Augustine.41. Henderson, “Atonement in Experience”: 102–103.42. Mansfield, “The Social Gospel”: 412.43. K. J. Cable, “Micklem, Philip Arthur (1876–1965),” Australian Dictionary of Biography,National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/micklem-philip-arthur-7570/text13213 (accessed 30 November 2011).44. The 1920 lectures were published as P. A. Micklem, Principles of Church Organization, withSpecial Reference to the Church of England in Australia (London: SPCK, 1921).45. P. A. Micklem, Values of the Incarnation (London: SPCK, 1931). R. Lee gave the work afavourable treatment in the Morpeth Review II, no. 23 (April 1933): 80–82.46. Micklem, “The Social Implications of the Incarnation,” Morpeth Review III, no. 25 (October1933): 14.

422 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 11: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

the “basis of a rightly ordered human society.” Namely, it reflected the properintersection of the mundane, temporal sphere with the Divine or transcendentsphere. To emphasise the Godhead to the exclusion of the Manhood (borrow-ing the language of the creeds) leads to a “vague Pantheism,” but to ignorethe human participation in the Divine through Christ is to “leave humanity theprisoner of the created order.” Properly understood “the Incarnation is thedoctrinal background of a social order which assigns to every department ofhuman life its due dignity and rightful autonomy, but equally demands itssubordination to a transcendent and eternal order other than that of the merelyhuman and natural.”47

Micklem employs the concept as a heuristic device to interpret historicaldevelopment. In the Middle Ages, he suggests, with a controlling church thatstifled creativity, independent inquiry and human autonomy, the balance wasweighted in favour of the Godhead and the Manhood was not given its rightfulplace. The Renaissance and the Reformation loosened the control of the church,which led to a flowering of intellectual and artistic endeavour and the develop-ment of independent spheres of human society — the economy, science, thestate, etc. This shifted the balance in favour of humanity or the Manhood, but inrecent times it has been taken to an extreme and each department of life has cometo be radically separate. Micklem argues:

Modern society thus presents a spectacle of a sharp division between the sacred andthe secular, between religion and the outer world of human interest and activity: andboth are sufferers from their rigid separation from each other. . . . civilization hasbecome increasingly secularised. Increasingly it seeks to be complete in itself, withno regard for an unseen and eternal order behind and above it, penetrating andsubduing it. The rightful autonomy which each great department of human life canclaim has been pressed to the point of the entire exclusion of other and higherconsiderations. In particular the discoveries and triumphs of science, its conquest ofthe forces of nature, have fostered the conception of a self-sufficient order of society,in which man is the measure of all things.48

This process has created its nemesis as science has outstripped our moralcapacities and the machine age has come to threaten human autonomy itself.The churches in turn have failed in their task by becoming insular and increas-ingly pietistic. Only by re-engaging with the secular sphere with its messageof transcendent hope can the churches fulfil the promise of the Incarnation.Unfortunately, Micklem’s message fell on rather barren ground in the SydneyAnglican diocese and in the mid-1930s he returned to England. In 1946 hedelivered the prestigious Bampton lectures, which developed more fully thetheme of the intersection of sacred and secular within Christian civilisation.49

47. Micklem, “The Incarnation”: 15.48. Micklem, “The Incarnation”: 17.49. P. A. Micklem, The Sacred and the Secular: An Enquiry into the Principles of a ChristianCivilization (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948). For a recent full-length treatment of Micklemsee J. G. Beer, “The Contribution of the Reverend Dr Philip Arthur Micklem (1876–1965) toAnglicanism,” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2009).

423M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 12: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

Citizenship: Sacred and SecularThe concepts secular and secularism are always treated by the Morpeth Reviewtheorists within the context of a broader diagnosis of the fragmentation ofmodern life. This fragmentation arises both from the intellectual separationof science from other forms of understanding — art, morality, and religion.And in the social realm it finds expression in the growth of specialisation,materialism, and the spread of forms of industrial organisation that threatenindividual autonomy. “Modern life,” says Henderson, “tends to tear the whole-ness of human nature into strips,”50 and for Burgmann modern man is “a housedivided against itself, a veritable colony of disorderly elements.”51 Moreover,according to Burgmann, this “secular civilisation is breaking up because it hasno faith in itself.”52

The answer to the malaise is fundamentally educational and involves bring-ing the distinctive forms of human experience — Art, Religion, Science — intodialogue. “Religion, Art and Science,” says Burgmann, “are the three factorsthat lift the workaday world into the realm of higher values. Religion dealswith the quality of life, Art with the expression of life, and Science with theunderstanding of life.” They all have their own distinctive forms of expressionor analysis and should be allowed autonomy53 to pursue their ends, “but eachalso must answer to the others for the use it makes of that freedom.” They areall manifestation of one ultimate reality conceived under the categories ofGoodness, Beauty, and Truth which points the way to the realisation of fullhuman personality. As R. L. Nettleship said in his Memoir of T.H. Green: “Theconsciousness of one reality and one perfection, which is the consciousnessof God, is the source alike of science and of religion, of understanding andof love; in both God communicates himself to us, in both we attain partialfreedom from our limitations and come to our true selves.”54

This intellectual reconciliation will be mirrored in social life in the formof an expanded understanding of citizenship that unites all of our otherwisedivided obligations. F. A. Bland addresses this theme in a lengthy essay withthe revealing title of “Citizenship in the Light of Christ’s Way.” As mentionedabove, Bland was to become the first professor of Public Administration at theUniversity of Sydney, as well as an influential public servant. He was part of agroup of Sydney University academics including Hermann Black, E. RonaldWalker, John Crawford, and H. Tasman Lovell, all active in the social gospelmovement.55 Bland reiterates the theme that the divide between secular andsacred has harmed our social life and he draws on sources such as ThomasArnold, Edward Caird, and the COPEC report to make the case that Christian

50. Henderson, “Christianity and Secularism”: 24.51. E. H. Burgmann, The Regeneration of Civilization (Sydney: Robert Dey, Son & Co. 1942),77.52. E. H. Burgmann, “The Culture of the Future: Secular or Christian?” Morpeth Review II,no. 7 (March 1929): 9.53. Burgmann, “The Culture of the Future”: 8.54. R. L. Nettleship, Memoir of Thomas Hill Green (London: Longman, 1906) cited in Leighton,The Greenian Moment, 323.55. Mansfield, “The Social Gospel”: 413.

424 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 13: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

citizenship “must insist on the unity of life. Only if the whole of life beinfluenced by the example of Christ shall we be able to realize in our institu-tions the essentials of a righteous system of life, the essentials of a just order.”56

Following Christ’s example involves resisting all divisions such as sacred andsecular, and entails more than simply winning individual souls. Rather, “itmeans a never ceasing attack on every wrong institution until the Kingdom ofGod is established on earth and its principles influence every relationship ofman with his fellows.”57

In a similar vein, Burgmann wrote that the “foundations of national life” areto be found in the “character of its citizens” the highest expression of which isthe Christian conception of personality.58 National institutions that compart-mentalise life or treat people as merely parts of a materialist economic system(capitalist or communist) threaten the realisation of human personality andare ultimately self-defeating. The Christian understanding of personality, incontrast, “makes every individual potentially a person of infinite worth” andprovides a “philosophy of life with unlimited implications in every sphere ofhuman activity.”59

Before making some concluding comments it is worth mentioning thecontribution of A. P. Elkin, one of the leading figures of twentieth-centuryAustralian anthropology. As well as co-editing the Review at this time, Elkinwas also developing his groundbreaking work on the Australian Aborigines.60

He wrote several pieces on Aboriginal spirituality and the role of the mission-ary in the Review and though at times he invoked biological or racialistcategories he was a sympathetic interpreter of Aboriginal life and religion. Heresisted the then current judgement that Aboriginal spirituality was mere super-stition to be replaced by the light of the gospel, and he was particularly criticaltowards any form of proselytising that did not respect the forms of socialsolidarity that Aboriginal religion fostered.

Elkin was strongly influenced by Durkheim’s understanding of religion as abinding medium of social life, and, like Durkheim, he was concerned about theway modern life led to anomie and alienation. As an Anglo-Catholic with astrong belief in a sacramental universe, he did not go along with the sociologi-cal reduction of religion to the forms of common life, but he very stronglyargued that religion plays a central social role in forming and enhancing groupsolidarity. What religion ought to do in the modern world is aim to overcomethose forces that fragment and individualise and that radically separate thesacred and the secular spheres to the extent that religion is “relegated to the

56. F. A. Bland, “Citizenship in the Light of Christ’s Way,” Morpeth Review II, no. 23 (April1933): 15.57. Bland, “Citizenship”: 17.58. E. H. Burgmann, Religion in the Life of the Nation (Morpeth: St John’s College Press, 1930),16.59. Burgmann, Religion in the Life of the Nation, 23–24.60. For more detailed discussion of Elkin’s treatment of Aboriginal politics see Moore, “The‘Morpeth Mind’.”

425M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 14: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

position of being merely a hobby for those interested.”61 It is not only Aborigi-nal society that is held together by a sense of the sacred as reflected in variouscustoms, rites, and disciplines, but it extends “to any other societies we chooseto examine.”62 To treat the major life experiences of the individual — “birth,adolescence, marriage, sickness, sin, sorrow and death” — in purely secularterms is to reinforce the fragmentary and atomistic tendencies of modernlife. Since all the experiences of the individual “are of the utmost importanceto society, . . . society marks that importance by sacralizing them, liftingthem and him into the stream of full social life, and at the same time into thatsphere in which the sanctions are both super-individual and super-social.”What is needed at the present time, Elkin suggests, is a religion that enables theindividual to “interact with the whole of society and not merely with a sectionof it . . . until he has entered into the whole of his social heritage and hasbecome worthy of his citizenship . . . heavenly as well as earthly.”63

ConclusionIt would be a mistake to exaggerate the influence of The Morpeth Review. Atits height its circulation was just over five hundred64 and since it was not givenany institutional support by the Anglican Church, its survival was dependent onthe work of a few enthusiastic contributors. Nevertheless, it was no mereinsular church publication but sought to engage public debates and was able toattract contributions from a wide variety of what we might term today publicintellectuals or “opinion makers.” In his History of Australian Literature H. M.Green described it as “one of the most interesting might-have-beens” amongAustralian periodicals.65 It also reflects a period in Australian history moreopen to the religious contribution to public debates. For all of the contributors’concerns that religious life had become insular and that it was decliningin broader social influence, the content of the Review is itself testament to thefact that Christianity still had an important role to play in social criticism andin shaping public culture. Christian themes at least provided a set of guidingideals or points of reference through which the problems of the day could beaddressed.

That common public culture has largely broken down in the interveningyears, partly because the trends that the Review sought to combat have, ifanything, intensified. Moreover, the religious pluralism resulting from waves ofimmigration and contact with non-Christian religions has further underminedthis sense of a common Christian inheritance.

61. A. P. Elkin, “The Present Social Function of Religion,” Morpeth Review II, no. 18 (December1931): 28.62. A. P. Elkin, “Society and the Sacred,” Church Standard, April 1932, cited in R. McGregor,“From Old Testament to New: A. P. Elkin on Christian Conversion and Cultural Assimilation,”Journal of Religious History 25, no. 1 (February 2001): 47.63. Elkin,“The Present Social Function of Religion”: 29, 30.64. Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest, 130.65. Cited in P. Hempenstall, “ ‘This Turbulent Priest’: E. H. Burgmann during the Great Depres-sion,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 27, no. 3 (December 1981): 332.

426 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 15: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

But while our public culture might have changed substantially, the problemsthat the Review identified regarding the complete separation of religion fromthe public sphere are still very much with us. The Review’s concern thatsecularisation would lead to a hollowed out public sphere governed by narrowlyutilitarian and instrumentalist forms of social organisation has largely come tofruition. Charles Taylor, for instance, has written that within the modern secularage we have come to inhabit what he terms the “immanent frame” where all ofour public institutions (including our schools and universities), our politicaldiscourse, and indeed our personal life projects, operate in terms of science,instrumental rationality, and empirical facts, without any necessary openingto transcendence.66 This “closed reading of immanence” has for many come toseem “natural” and as the way all “grown-up” societies, once they have jetti-soned their religious blinkers, will inevitably see the world.67 Taylor’s work is apowerful rebuff to the standard secularisation accounts that buy into any simplereading of the “science has displaced religion” narrative.

Likewise Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012), whosepolitical and social thought has much in common with early twentieth-centuryliberal Anglicans such as Temple, has written of the narrowing of public debatewhen questions of meaning, of the good life, and of transcendence are relegatedto the private sphere.68 The consequence of this retreat of the “politics of thegood life” is the triumph of utilitarian and technocratic considerations in publiclife. We also end up with a sharp demarcation between public reason, concernedprincipally with the provision and distribution of “primary goods” (Rawls), andprivate belief which is considered merely a matter of individual choice andbeyond the bounds of any form of public rationality. That is, we are presentedwith a contrast between public “reason” and private “prejudice,” and allowingany discussion of religion in public life is thought to leave the door open to thereign of intolerance or forms of authority not grounded in publicly acceptedforms of rationality. The problem with this is the questionable either/or logicthat is being presupposed. This assumption also runs through the writings of theNew Atheists, who have had so much influence in recent discussions, wherescience is presented as the high road to truth and faith is couched superficiallyand rather misleadingly as “belief without evidence.”

The problem here is partly philosophical and partly historical. As a growingchorus of philosophers and theologians have pointed out, the idea that scienceis devoid of faith and religion is necessarily hostile to reason betrays a super-ficial understanding of both science and religion.69 By narrowing reason aswell as faith, much of this debate represents a failure of both the religious andthe scientific imagination. But the historical problem stems from a lack of

66. C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2007).67. Taylor, A Secular Age, 551.68. R. Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), ch. 2.69. See, for instance, T. Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Not only has Eagleton, a Marxist cultural critic, writtena devastating critique of the New Atheism, he has also suggested that the left might recover someof its emancipatory vision by returning to the Gospels.

427M O R P E T H P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G Y

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association

Page 16: The Political Theology of               The Morpeth Review               , 1927-1934

awareness of what William James referred to as the “varieties of religiousexperience.” The Morpeth Review serves as a reminder of one such expressionof religious thought and experience which, in its openness to knowledge andconstructive public engagement, is a corrective to some of the dominant polar-ising assumptions contained in much of the contemporary discourse on theplace of religion in a secular state.

428 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

© 2014 The AuthorJournal of Religious History © 2014 Religious History Association