There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up and it grew up with him and his children; it used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveller to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him.
2 Samuel 12: 2–4
The prophet Nathan tells this story to shame King David after he has made Bathsheba pregnant and caused Uriah to die in battle. Tom Wright uses this example to show the powerfully subversive nature of story which can challenge and modify established world views. Nathan’s words, ‘You are the man’ disclose the purpose of the little vignette, and bring David to a dreadful sense of reality. Homeless people have attempted to tell new stories as they envisage a better future. These stories identify differences between theory and practice, which lead to questions about the effectiveness of traditional theology in presenting the Christian story as one which contains meaning for homeless people. A theology of homelessness will be a new telling of the story which hopes to provide resonance for those who are rebuilding their lives, and to confront the myths and prejudices which attack them as they do so. Two theological texts stand as guides for this. Then an overview of how the Church has thought about and acted towards poor people over the last 25 years is contrasted with a biblical account of home. In a final chapter I turn to the image of the Trinity to refashion an understanding which provides a basis for a theology of homeless people.
The Disabled God by Nancy Eiesland discloses its purpose from the outset: that persons with disabilities should be able to participate fully in the life of the Church, and that reciprocally the Church should be able to gain access to the social-symbolic life of disabled people.1 Her first step is to examine and challenge current views on the disabled body. Theologically this leads her to a taking a liberatory stance on disability. Her analysis of the life history of two disabled women through their autobiographical writing produces three themes, similar to those associated with homeless people: their ordinary lives incorporate contingency and difficulty, grief and creativity; they have an alternative understanding of embodiment which includes plastic and metal technology; disability is seen as part of ordinary life, but there is a distinction between the reality of disablement and its social construction. She examines changes in sociological methodology in respect of disability, and highlights the uncertainties, confusions and irony present in the Christian Church’s attitudes. Her brief consideration of the Bible sees three themes again: the close relationship between sin and disability, with links to notions of impurity; the concept of virtuous suffering; that disabled people are recipients of charitable giving. She takes a close interest in the American Lutheran Church which wrote a theological text in support of persons with disabilities, but then, six years later, promoted the exclusion of disabled people from the ordained ministry. She summarises her intentions as follows:
For people with disabilities, a liberatory theology draws together message and commitment. It acknowledges our struggle against the discrimination that is pervasive within the church and society as part of the work of coming to our bodies. A liberatory theology sustains our difficult but ordinary lives, empowers and collaborates with individuals and groups of people with disabilities who struggle for justice in concrete situations, creates new ways of resisting the theological symbols that exclude and devalue us, and reclaims our hidden history in the presence of God on earth.2
Eiesland’s creation of a liberatory theology centres around finding new interpretations of old symbols and attempting to imagine new ones – she sees God ‘in a sip-puff wheel chair, that is the chair used mostly by quadriplegics’.3 With a sharper focus on Christology, she takes the resurrected body of Christ as the true response of the Church to disability. Jesus Christ, who is the disabled God, is symbolic of those who have been stigmatised as a result of their bodies and their colour, who have struggled to maintain their dignity in the face of physical suffering and ritual humiliation. Such a symbol brings realistic hope to persons with disabilities. In conclusion, she writes about how the Eucharist, as a celebration of Christ’s resurrection, may also be a way in which both symbolically and practically disabled people are fully in communion.
God in South Africa by Albert Nolan was written before the end of the apartheid regime. It too focuses on a theology of liberation deeply rooted in a particular context. However, his starting point is to look at what is meant by the good news of the gospel, and how sin is described in the Bible. He draws a parallel between the holiness system of the Jewish Law and the total system of apartheid in South Africa, emphasising the indivisibility of sin, whether personal or corporate. The link between sin and suffering is his cue to speak more specifically about the South African people and their systematic abuse:
We have the beginnings of an answer to our question: where is God in South Africa today? God can be seen in the face of the starving black child. God can be heard in the crying of the children in detention. God speaks through the mouth of a person whose face has been disfigured by a policeman’s boot. It is not their innocence, their holiness, their virtue, their religious perfection that makes them look like God. It is their suffering, their oppression, the fact that they have been sinned against.4
He writes further about the system of racial capitalism and how a cycle of sin and guilt operates in South Africa. A description of salvation in the Bible centred on a theology of the Kingdom is the opening for a discussion about where Nolan sees signs of hope. It is paradoxically by crushing all illusory hope and by becoming ‘so evil, so manifestly evil’ that the system begins to create its opposite – a sustainable movement for social change. Signs of hope are made more visible by the growing numbers of people engaged in the struggle, which itself is the practice of faith whether or not an explicit commitment is made to God or to Jesus Christ. Salvation is not simply another way of describing the struggle for liberation, it is the naming of God in the process of human affairs:
When we introduce God into the picture, or rather when we discover God already there in our world, it takes our breath away. When we begin to see God as the one who is sinned against and crucified in South Africa today, it makes us shudder. We are struck with the full impact of the crisis, the conflict, the struggle, the day of liberation, when we see them as wonderful works of God.5
He concludes by representing this Good News back to South African Christians and to the Church. Nolan recognises that for many in the Church such an analysis is challenging and painful, but he insists that hope and challenge go together. He is not aiming at renewal but at the kind of the new life of which the gospel speaks. He urges the Church not to take refuge in abstractions – that is, the preaching of a ‘universal’ gospel and the celebration of a liturgy which is divorced from the hard realities of ordinary life. These are the only ways by which the Church is maintaining its unity, but in doing so it stops preaching the gospel. Nolan considers that the unity of the Church is secondary to the demands of the gospel, and in this tension the Church itself becomes a ‘site of struggle’, just as Jesus made Judaism the site of struggle.6
These texts provide five themes which scaffold a building of a theology of homelessness. Firstly, they are concerned with a theology of liberation. Nolan in his focus on a singular geographical and economic context speaks of the ‘Struggle’ in which ordinary South Africans are engaged. Eiesland concentrates on a particular segment of the American population and also speaks of a struggle for inclusion. Both have some of the passion apparent in earlier works cited here. They are concerned with liberation from something – suffering, oppression, exclusion, an erroneous social construction, a system. Although they arrive at similar conclusions, they do, however, engage with different theological methods. The Disabled God is much closer to the method employed here, though Eiesland uses lifestory in a less extensive manner. God in South Africa, more traditionally, starts with the scriptures and moves outwards to the sociopolitical context, more akin to the contextual Bible reading of the previous chapter. This may provide some balance in terms of arguments about where theology originates. Secondly, symbols are important. For Eiesland, symbolisation is the mechanism by which both able-bodied and persons with disabilities can communicate and challenge one another. A renewed set of symbols allows disabled people better access to the life of the Church. Though symbols do not play a specific part in the South African study, a similar role is played by the concept of ‘signs of the times’ and signs of hope in which God is at work. Thirdly, the Bible figures as the text for critical dialogue. Nolan launches his analysis of the evils of apartheid from a biblical basis, with an emphasis on the nature of sin, both individual and structural; Eiesland begins her critique of the Church’s position on disability with a reading of the Bible which is less sympathetic, but shows parallels with those who believe individuals are primarily responsible for their own homelessness. Fourthly, as a consequence of how they interpret the scriptures, both are critical of the Church, but also understand the Church’s role as critical. Both writers are clear in their belief that the Church is being less than it ought to be, in respect of the South African struggle or of the position of disabled people, that a diluted form of the Good News is being preached. Fifthly, both writers are engaged personally and us the personal stories of others. Human experience is described with aspects of tragedy and heroism intermingled. Nolan is a white South African, who admits that: ‘Of real suffering I can only say that I have seen it, I have touched it and become marginally sensitive to it. Nothing more’.7 Eiesland herself is disabled, though she never labours the point.
Against these five themes, a mapping of work so far looks like this. A theology of story allows access to life histories – the stories of individuals and communities. This is more than simply a literary account of story since the foundational quality of narrative in carrying our search for identity and meaning is likened to the search for God. A Christian theology of story involves juxtaposing and overlapping human life histories with God’s story, as revealed by Jesus Christ in the scriptures, and including the stories of transformation told by Jesus himself. Without diminishing the role of the human story, it underlines our part in God’s story, and sets limits to what can be claimed about this. A theology of story also gives permission to the researcher to work out of his or her own faith commitment as one lifestory among many. Liberation theology asserts that the stories of the poor, and therefore of homeless people, are especially significant since these men and women have privileged access to God’s story. It is therefore possible that the stories of the poor re-invigorate the Christian narrative by making it strange again, by recalling its sense of shock, by prompting a righteous anger, and by envisioning transformation.
The specific lifestories of homeless people analysed in detail here show a pattern of individual and group experiences, and a paradoxical account of suffering and survival within a cycle of homelessness and resettlement. They challenge the separation of high-status and low-status research subjects, but support the ‘fuzzy’ boundaries between researcher and researched. They recognise the therapeutic nature of listening to and valuing the story of another person (especially a suffering person), and they illustrate the way in which homeless people seek to redress power imbalances by the creation of a new story which will re-insert them into mainstream society.
The introduction of contextual material to understand how God’s liberation touches those on the margins of society has focused on theologies of equality and theologies of place. Homelessness is at the conjunction of both these, but like the negative of an old photographic image. At the sharp point or the public disclosure of both inequality and placelessness, a theology of homelessness makes a test case for both. If a new theological understanding cannot work for homeless people, then it probably will not work for other vulnerable groups. Equally, a critique of the market in general will be well served by examining, as an example, the way in which housing had been commodified.
There is one important disjunction between these lifestories and the theology of story outlined above. Homeless people may be the storytellers of God, they may bear God’s message to the well-housed and comfortable, but, for the most part, they have little awareness that this process is taking place. They may bring new life to the Christian story, but (with the exception of Julie) this does not seem to translate into new life for the storyteller. The ethical question of investigating vulnerable research subjects from a position of strength was treated earlier. I hope I have shown that a respectful dialogue is a pointer towards God, and that vulnerability on the part of the researcher is a way of being open to other vulnerable lives. However, a much sharper ethical question is begged by use of these stories of homelessness in the restoration of the Christian faith of the comfortable, if homeless people themselves seem to have little or no part in it. Are we not guilty of imposing another loss on those who have experienced so much loss, of perpetuating disempowerment? Is this theft of deeply disturbing stories not equivalent to the stealing of a soul? There is also the suspicion voiced already that the gospel as a radical and transforming discourse for homeless people (at the level of individuals and of society) has not been heard because it has not been preached. Gutiérrez’s original question (Given these conditions, how can we tell the poor that God loves them?) becomes: ‘If the Church and theologians do not bear an explicit message of God’s love for poor people, then who does?’ Perhaps such questions can be summed up and answered by ensuring that the stories of homeless people presented here are honoured in general and in particular.
In describing how the Church in Britain has approached poverty and homelessness in the last 25 years, a useful distinction can be made between ‘what matters’ and ‘what works’, recognising that the tension between these two is both practical and theoretical. ‘What matters’ is the theology which underpins whatever is done in the name of the Church; ‘what works’ is the Church’s engagement in particular social issues.
The Church of England’s 1985 report Faith in the City wished to challenge two understandings of theology: that there is a dichotomy between the practice of personal charitable acts towards the poor and social and political action against the causes of poverty. Secondly, and more importantly, that a deductive way of doing theology, which tends to favour those with high levels of literacy and academic ability, is the only way to do theology. While the report affirms the value of traditional theology, it supports the liberation model of an inductive theology. There is recognition that South American thinking cannot be transferred uncritically to Britain, nonetheless it is possible to start from ‘the personal experiences, the modes of perception and the daily concerns of local people themselves’.8 Starting from a description of Urban Priority Areas as characterised by economic decline, physical decay and social disintegration, the first two chapters are themselves examples of the methodology which the report is quietly favouring. Living Faith in the City five years later is much less optimistic about the reality of the Church’s general response than it is about the development of theological thinking. It describes the period as one which is ‘deeply flawed’ during which ‘little progress’ has been made. It ascribes these faults to three reasons: that the structures of the Church do not reflect a liberative gospel, but rather focus around power and control; that the message of the Church is not good news to the poor; that the work which the Church undertakes originates from a powerful and privileged minority.9
Ken Leech (The Sky is Red) is critical of the Church’s theological approach, especially of what he sees as assumptions in Faith in the City, but his own theology of the East End of London at least begins from that report’s reflections. His criticisms are two-fold: that the Church of England is essentially reformist; that is, it cannot envisage any other political system than the present one. It fails to question whether market capitalism is consistent with Christian values, and so remains reliant on a generalised sense of goodwill, that we are all somehow ‘on the same side’. Leech doubts this is true, and would like the Church to be more confrontational. Secondly, he criticises Faith in the City for being ‘implicationist’, that the gospel is one thing and its implications for society are another. He sees ‘no distinction between the gospel and the vision of a transformed human society’. His East End theology, therefore, is orientated towards the future: liberatory, mystical, localised. It is a theology based in the community, a street theology, valuing the oral above the written. For Leech, the disappointment lies in the distance between such theoretical work coming out of his own ministry in London and the reality of most of the actual practice of the Church of England.10
This democratic theology is likened to a detective story – a Christian community trying to discover what God is doing and meaning in a particular place. David Rhodes from Chapeltown, Leeds begins from a similar experience to my own, that the priest has something significant to learn from the homeless person. He grounds this understanding in a reading of the parables of Jesus, and especially in the story of the Gerasene demoniac. He recalls that Jesus denies the man permission to be one of his disciples, but instead insists that he ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you’ (Mark 5: 19). Similarly, Mary Magdalene carries the news of the resurrection to the other (male) disciples. Vulnerable people are the best preachers of the gospel in their own communities.11
This notion of a ‘theology in the vernacular’ is one of the key components of the report Faithful Cities: A Call for Celebration, Vision and Justice (2006) which came out of the Church of England’s Commission on Urban Life and Faith (CULF), set up to mark the twentieth anniversary of Faith in the City. This builds on the deductive method of the first report, but while there were good intentions, especially in how the report was presented (for example, illustrations and side-bars for quotations and case studies), it was ultimately no more successful in achieving this breakthrough. Elaine Graham suggests that the result appeared ‘fragmented, anecdotal and piecemeal’, largely because a collaborative method gave way to writing by committee.12 However, in posing the question, ‘What makes a good city?’ Faithful Cities was much more effective in advocating a spiritual dimension of urban regeneration, and in showing how religion and religious organisations might promote the ‘soul’ of the city:
Strategies for regeneration frequently coalesce around four key principles of a good or successful city: economics; environment and infrastructure; politics and governance; and culture. These four ‘pillars of regeneration’ relate to questions of physical resources, wealth-creation, sustainability and political structures. What they don’t do is to take into account less quantifiable questions such as quality of life, wellbeing—happiness even—what we might term the ‘human face’ of the city. We have to ask questions about the soul of the city as well, and how faith communities can help develop this.13
It coined the term ‘faithful capital’ (derived from concepts of social capital) to describe how a moral dimension of human worth and dignity originating in beliefs about God was intrinsic to urban life and development. This meant that cities as places of meaning embodied values open to theological critique. ‘Faithful capital’ also reminded government of the contributions made by faith-based organisations.
These theological developments were themselves put under pressure by political and cultural changes during the New Labour government. Moral, But No Compass (2008) argues for a much greater engagement between churches and the public service reform of the period, while also being critical of government’s practical and theoretical understanding of faith communities, particularly Christian ones. At the same time, however, Faith in the City and the theology which undergirded it comes in for some sharp words: ‘the old wineskins of post-war theology were being split apart by the force of new developments in thought and policy, and the Church was simply hiding its head in the sand’.14 Those who rejected working critically alongside government commissioning services in favour of the prophetic voice and advocacy were often vague about what this meant in policy terms, as well as weak in their comprehension of social realities. But there was room for a distinctive contribution from the churches: ‘Christians need to discover and re-invent the “mission-shaped church” as much in the sphere of social action and engagement as in any other area of activity’.15
The more recent development of Queer Theology, growing out of and arguably away from liberation theology and drawing insights from Queer Theory, would argue the presence of differential discrimination across various strands, seeing here distinctions within the population of homeless people, and setting aside once and for all the moniker of ‘the homeless’.16 In addition, queer theology pays attention to the way in which ideologies are constructed to maintain and exclude certain social groupings; Laura Stivers (Disrupting Homelessness) prefers ‘a picture of Jesus who promoted compassion for the downtrodden by disrupting the structural and ideological systems that create and justify poverty and oppression’.17 While homeless people are both victims and agents depending on circumstances, an analysis which depends on individual narratives will tend to support the status quo, leaving unexamined the underlying power relationships. The social dimension of homelessness frames analysis by posing questions about poverty and excessive wealth, about inequalities in housing, about political treatment of private ownership in contrast to social housing. Within the United States, Stivers also identifies the part housing played (and plays) in the establishment of the American Dream: the wholesome picture of the ideal homeowner as a middle-class, heterosexual, father of a nuclear family. Various attempts to remove homeless people from city streets reveal a disturbing discourse of purity/pollution based perhaps in biblical texts. Again, home is shown to have multiple connotations beyond shelter.
What liberation models and queer theology have in common is their desire to envisage a different future, and therefore the potential to be ‘praxis-orientated’18 The practical realisation of inductive theology is the subject of Laurie Green’s Power to the Powerless, which describes the particular experience of the parish of Erdington in Birmingham. The book is much more a report on a specific project than a detailed theological reflection, though it contains more trenchant criticism of traditional theology than does Faith in the City. Green calls for the democratisation of theology and an end to ‘a scholarly or priestly elite’, admitting that ‘our theological reflection relied far too much on verbal articulation and much more could have been accomplished had we explored earlier non-verbal ways into our theologising’.19 This focuses the hermeneutical issue at the root of his quest into inner city life:
How could western, white, wealthy students of the Gospel text ever be able to get into the mind of the eastern, poor, first century people who recorded in the Gospels their experience of Jesus of Nazareth?20
Leech also suggests reasons to explain the ineffectiveness of the Church’s response to Faith in the City. He sees the Church of England as quintessentially bourgeois in respect of the majority of clergy and laity, who have simply shared no experiences with those from the inner cities. While he has some hope for the future, he is also concerned that behind the façade of financial constraint, a lack of nerve and a commitment to safety will blight the creative efforts he favours:
My sense is that many clergy, and many lay Christians, come from precisely those groups in society who have never faced despair, and have somehow managed to avoid the upheaval which the existential crisis of meaninglessness and hopelessness brings to individuals and communities. They are the very people who will not understand how to respond. Yet I hope there will be some in the Churches who have faced the darkness of nihilism, and who have encountered it with radical faith.21
Structurally, he is keen to encourage the Church to challenge the myths he sees as currently associated with poverty: for example, that poverty and wealth are unconnected and that the Church’s task is simply to care for marginalised people and not ask why they are marginalised. He praises the Church of England for the depth of its concern for the poor, but it has been largely top-down: a socialism which is ‘aloof, genteel, polite, detached … not in fact socialist at all, certainly not revolutionary’.22 Good work can be much in quantity, but in quality, patronising and dehumanising.
John Vincent’s answer to this ‘suburban captivity of the gospel’ is to seek closer contact with those in the inner cities by living and working there. There is then the possibility that the voice of poverty is heard, if only those who interpret can stay quiet long enough to listen. He is both hopeful and critical of the role of theologians:
British liberation theology has been happening in the cracks and crevices of the land more or less for a decade. Its practitioners are not people with much time for reading and research, much less reflection and writing. Most of those well versed in liberation theology in general, in universities or colleges or churches, do not themselves practise it, and therefore cannot and should not write about it.23
In the same volume, Rowland reminds us that, while St Luke’s Gospel challenges and discomforts a nation which seeks to be ‘at ease with itself’, the Bible still offers hope to rich and poor alike when ‘vulnerability strikes home and we become people who suddenly find ourselves on the margins of normality’.24
Anne Morisy, writing about community ministry and mission, seeks to bridge the divide between thinking and action. Beyond the Good Samaritan, Community Ministry and Mission is a combination of theological reflection and practical guidebook, but she is firmly rooted in a liberation tradition and echoes much of what has been said here already:
The poor and the needy may be the recipients of care through a church-run community project, but they are not the primary object of active mission, because the poor, as Jesus insisted, are the likely trigger for the transforming of those who put themselves in the position of caring.25
She comments on the low level of religious literacy in British society, so community ministry supports the occasional use of ‘apt’ liturgies. These provide a framework for individuals to move beyond their limited horizons. Liturgy also emphasises a priority of discipleship over against doctrinal belief, and may also act as a counterbalance to ‘secular drift’ within Christian projects. Community ministry also encourages volunteers from outside the immediate faith group, provided that ‘we’ are open to learning from ‘them’.26
Morisy develops ideas about literacy using Paulo Freire’s concept of ‘deep literacy’: the ability not simply to read and write, but to comprehend the forces which shape lives often detrimentally. Dialogue and humility are at the core of this process, especially the humility which understands that the wealthy need to be alongside the poor more than the poor need the wealthy. She imagines that Freire would criticise community ministry for being a development of institutional church, but counters this by saying that to challenge the domestication of the gospel is a gradual process, initiated from where people are situated currently. But she does agree that there is a need to go ‘beyond the Good Samaritan’ by dialogue and posing questions.
Her practice of community ministry and mission is underpinned by a theology which observes the disjunction between a persistent thirst for spirituality and the inauthentic response of the Churches. The concept of people as empty vessels to be filled is replaced by the understanding that ‘we need to walk gently because God has been there before us’. Discipleship is more readily envisaged as a matter of faithful action rather than doctrinal assent, and echoing Nolan, it is the struggle for the Kingdom of God which helps many articulate an implicit faith. The cross remains a significant challenge for the ‘respectable’, reminding them that the method of Jesus’ execution allied him with the most degraded. A theology which continues to discomfort the powerful and unmask denial and delusion is a natural corollary. Anne Morisy is less gloomy than Leech, calling on God’s grace to nurture trust and hope that ‘makes it possible to hold on to the Christian calling to envisage a radically different future’.27
The postmodern approach of queer theology allows a different analysis of practical solutions to problems of housing. Stivers compares three American responses, asking the extent to which each one leaves intact dominant power structures. A rescue and recovery response favoured by more evangelical churches is based on individual responsibility for homelessness, even to the extent of identifying connections to sin and wickedness. While not at all disrupting existing systems of power, and ignorant of a race or gender dimension, the programme she visits treats homeless people with dignity, provides free addiction services, and opens up a spiritual perspective. Low income home ownership schemes provide no interest loans and volunteer help to provide housing for those at the lower (but not lowest) incomes levels. There is an emphasis on individual and community transformation via home ownership, and families tend to be idealised. This is intended to be ‘a hand up, not a handout’, but although there is a desire ‘to break into the consciousness of the rich’, there is little challenge to structural inequities. A recent turn to ecological concerns among low income housing schemes is welcome. In place of these two, Stivers prefers advocacy towards a social movement to bring about a compassionate community under God, adding that ‘it is always easier to deny complicity in oppressive systems if we have done individual good deeds and have not been overtly discriminatory’.28 Hospitality and justice rooted in scripture are key themes for individual Christians and Christian communities with a practical commitment to education, working amongst churches and other religious and secular groups, and supporting particular self-help projects – for example tent cities which have sprung up as a result of foreclosures. The aim is ambitious and widespread: ‘The goal of a prophetic response is to prevent homelessness by changing policies and structures that cause poverty’.29
This overview of policy and practice now prompts some revision of the argument advanced earlier that a radical and transforming gospel has not been heard by homeless people because it has never been preached. Faith in the City, more than 25 years on, remains a bold document witnessing to a moment in Church of England history when the Kingdom breaks through, a rare kairos for an established church. What is dated now is the social context it describes, not the theological method it hopes to promote. Leech is right to call it a reformist document, but it was an adventurous first step, especially in the admission of long-seated difficulties in inner city areas. The tradition of reform is seen again in the proposals of Anne Morisy. It may be noted by contrast, that given the then South African situation of apartheid, Nolan calls not for renewal, but for something completely other: the new life of the resurrection. However, on the issue of housing itself, there is little attempt to see home and homelessness as a theological issue per se. Laura Stivers in America and this book in Britain intend to fill that gap.
Some encouraging and exciting examples of liberation theology in practice are realised in the work and writings of Green, Rhodes and Morisy. It is significant that two of these are rooted in the parables of Jesus. Morisy’s work on ‘apt’ liturgy and religious or theological literacy supports previous contentions about story, and echoes the conclusions of Nancy Eiesland. All three agree that the gospel is revitalised for those who choose to minister among poor people, and that, paradoxically, it is the priest or Christian layperson who is evangelised by those on the margins. This recalls Myers’ treatment of the gap between the understanding of First World theology and the experience of those living in the Third World, and his encouragement for theology to return home. However, where my critical view above is depressingly supported is within the structures and personnel of the Church itself. Green, Leech, Rhodes and Morisy have visions of a transformative gospel preached by a more radical Church; but they are exceptions. Leech in particular sees the future survival of the Church of England as dependent on its shift from the status quo to an overtly confrontational role, in which ministry to the wider community is only authentic inasmuch as the poor are at the heart of the Church’s life.30 The question raised by Living Faith in the City ‘Is this good news for the poor?’ might well be asked of recent Church of England emphasis on mission, which seems largely undefined, and focused more on Church maintenance and finances than the Kingdom.
It is here that postmodern analysis is helpful in discovering what discourses underpin ideologies and structures, suggesting where practical responses have in reality supported a discriminatory system, and equally where liberation theology has left unexamined concepts like social justice. A postmodern Jesus is even more challenging and radical than a modernist liberatory one. What this overview omits, however, is the urgency of the contemporary task, in terms of poverty in general and housing in particular. The current nexus of events in Europe and the United States, where government-directed austerity is affecting poorer people and poorer nations disproportionately, requires a re-emphasis on theologies of equality, liberation and hope, with a keen awareness of how political ideology tends to hide behind ‘common sense’ economics. The extreme commodification of the housing market in the US (matched to some extent in the UK by the residualisation of the social housing sector) means that the financial and credit crisis leading into recession and perhaps stagnation was no accident or coincidence. It was the outcome of a poisonous alchemy which allowed resources to be transferred from the poorest to the richest, of a dream turned sour. I wonder if an instructive parallel can be evinced here between the South African struggles against Nolan’s apartheid ‘System’ and the present system of market dominance; and whether increasing numbers of ‘ordinary people’ just surviving and the increase of those seeking food handouts might prompt a serious revision of how capitalist political and social economy is constructed.31
Both practical church-sponsored action and its related theology need to protest loudly about these continuing inequalities. Such is the tenor of two recent publications: the statement from the Common Wealth Network and Archbishop Rowan Williams’ New Statesman leading article. The opening sentences of the statement shows a tone of anger, urgency and engagement with the public realm:
Christians in Britain today are called to take a stand. Faced with the biggest cuts to public spending for over a generation, it is not enough to retreat into the private ghetto of religious consolation. As Christians, we are convinced that the actions of the current government are an unjustified attack on the poor. The rhetoric of necessary austerity and virtuous belt-tightening conceals a grim reality: the victimisation of people at the margins of society and the corrosion of community. Meanwhile, the false worship of markets continues unchecked and the immorality of the growing gap between rich and poor goes unquestioned.32
Less stridently and with slightly different nuances, Williams places government policy in a wider perspective, at the same time as criticising ‘a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor’:
For someone like myself, there is an ironic satisfaction in the way several political thinkers today are quarrying theological traditions for ways forward. True, religious perspectives on these issues have often got bogged down in varieties of paternalism. But there is another theological strand to be retrieved that is not about ‘the poor’ as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates – like the flow of blood – is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this is what is at the heart of St Paul’s ideas about community at its fullest; community, in his terms, as God wants to see it.33
Perhaps this is what is meant by Eiesland’s ‘radical symbolic sedition’; in the debate between reform, renewal and revolution in the Church, she does not propose a separatist, symbolisation, but one that connects into history and tradition. These commentaries have only alluded to religious symbols in reference to liturgy, and in the opportunity for hearing the stories of the congregations of inner city churches, but these are not linked into any reformulation of the symbolic life of the Church. Nor is it clear that without a recognition of the open and hidden system of symbols which are used in church life, apparently small changes can be either completely insignificant or wildly revolutionary. The shock of new symbols is exemplified by the new images of Jesus which the contextual Bible study has evinced. Eiesland does comprehend how important religious symbols are for a liberatory theology, but she also sees the limits of change. In her search for empowering symbols, she turns first to the Bible and out of an unpropitious start develops a theology of Jesus Christ, the disabled God. After this review of the stories which the Church tells of poverty and home, it is appropriate to return to the Bible and see there the symbols which underpin the attitudes of Christian faith to those who have no home, and how those symbols might be renewed.
An earlier route map posited a three-fold use of the Bible: as the significant text for critical dialogue; as reflecting the story of God in which as human beings we situate our own stories; with reference to the parables of Jesus, as transformative narrative for marginalised people. With these in mind, how does the Bible treat the theme of home and its close relations: absence of home, homecoming, and homelessness?
The absence of home is given a prominent and positive place in both Old and New Testaments. In the founding myths of the Jewish people, Abram is instructed by God to ‘leave your country, your kindred and your father’s house’ so that his descendants will be blessed (Gen. 12: 1). Jacob journeys from Canaan to Egypt on the Lord’s command, responding to the promise that he will see his son Joseph again and that the Lord will make of them a great nation (Gen. 46: 1–7). After the escape from Egypt, Moses and the Israelites spend many difficult years in the desert before they finally reach the land promised when God first saw their oppression:
Then the Lord said, ‘I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and have come down to deliver them out of the land of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey …’. (Ex. 3: 7–8)
The Israelites are required in Deuteronomy to present the first fruits of their harvest to the Lord, and in doing so to recall their past and declare: ‘A wandering Aramean was my father …’ (Deut. 26: 5). The notion of separation from home – exile – is treated as both a fictional and actual occurrence. The book of Ruth, a likely fiction in a historical setting, pays tribute to Ruth’s qualities of steadfastness in personal exile with her mother-in-law: ‘for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God’. (Ruth 1: 16). The reality of national exile in Babylon reflected in the words of Psalm 137 (‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion’) adds to the sense of a people who are homeless.34
The literature of the new Exodus and the restoration of the Temple (Deutero Isaiah, Ezra and Nehemiah) does not detract from this sense of dislocation, not least because Yahweh was also a God without a fixed home. When King David speaks to the prophet Nathan about his desire to build God a house since ‘I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells in a tent’, God’s word comes instantly to the prophet. God rejects this form of house, and in a play on words which works equally well in Hebrew as in English, declares that his house will be a covenant with his people, the house of David, with whom he will dwell for ever (2 Sam. 7). The restored Temple of Third Isaiah is enlarged to a cosmic dimension, but retains echoes of the original Davidic covenant: ‘Thus says the Lord: ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest?’’ (Isa. 66: 1).
In the New Testament, the reality of the birth of Jesus in a stable, the divine declaration of this event firstly to shepherds (not to prince or priest), and then exile into Egypt to escape Herod, have been obscured by a thick layer of popular sentiment, posing as faithfulness to the biblical account.35 But they are consistent with a radical prophet, taking disciples from their homes for an itinerant ministry in which he makes himself intentionally homeless: ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Matt. 8: 20). Family too are rejected, or rather, there is the suggestion that the true family which Jesus envisages are those who turn to his Father in heaven (Matt. 12: 48f). The parallel in the New Testament to God’s rejection of a fixed abode in Samuel and Isaiah is the account of Jesus’ transfiguration. Peter’s idea that they should build three booths on the mountain top for Jesus, Moses and Elijah is made out of surprise and fear, and is ignored. They come down off the mountain to face the reality of the future, with the instruction to tell no one about the vision until after the resurrection. The culmination of this journey with his disciples is the arrival in Jerusalem. The city signals a deep ambivalence: holy Zion, home to the faithful Jew, and yet the place where Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple courtyard; welcomed with palm branches, executed on a cross.
Absence of home is closely associated with rethinking God’s meaning and purpose. In the desert the early Israelites face challenges to their faith and are often found wanting. The exile forces the Hebrews to rethink their theology and practice of worship. Jesus is forced to respond to the questions of the devil in the wilderness before the start of his ministry, and at the end of his ministry in the garden of Gethsemane his own doubts surface to question him. Gethsemane and Golgotha represent the degradation of Jesus, the God who has had nowhere to rest, the homeless God. The isolation of the cross is compounded by the desertion of virtually all his friends and family, and by the sense that his heavenly Father has deserted him too. His only companions are the equally marginalised and condemned thieves. Rhodes makes Luke’s repentant thief the first messenger of the resurrection, to the dying Jesus himself: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’.36 So wilderness, exile, abandonment, have been regarded in Christian thinking as places where God is especially present, for it is ‘at the heart of pain and apparent emptiness that the community of the resurrection often emerges’.37
If the absence of home for the people of God or for Jesus himself is presented in a relatively positive light, or at the very least as a fundamental part of their communal history, then the denial of home to the sojourner or the poor is against the express wishes of Yahweh (Lev. 19: 33f, Isa. 58: 7). In Leviticus and Amos (2: 10) treatment of poor and homeless people is linked specifically with the experience of Israel’s escape from Egypt and God’s promise. In Third Isaiah the New Jerusalem is a place of refuge and security:
They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat, for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. (Isa. 65: 21)
Nor is home given a ‘puritan condemnation’ in the New Testament. It is in the home that Jesus, according to Mark’s Gospel, dines with tax collectors and sinners (2: 15 and 14: 3), teaches his disciples (7: 17, 9.33 and 10: 10) and heals the sick (2: 1 and 5: 38).38 What is condemned, however, is the unnecessary extravagance of luxury building, Solomon’s palace for example, and the selfish possession of land and property. The apparent ambivalence of these attitudes towards home and homelessness is only superficial. The experience of the early Israelites led them to value both the security of home and the reality of their own itinerant homelessness. By contrast, it seems that it is the contemporary world, including Western Christians, who are so bound by an attachment to home and its weight of meanings as to prejudice its opposite, the absence of home.
The second theme is that it is God who provides the home, whether the Promised Land of the Exodus people, a land flowing with milk and honey, or the house of many rooms, prepared for the disciples of Jesus (John 14: 2f). God is homemaker from the moment a garden was prepared in which humans might dwell; ‘This is a God with perpetually dirty fingernails, a God who is always playing in the mud’.39 The parable of the Prodigal Son is the best New Testament expression of this. Subtitled ‘A Story of Homecoming’, Henri Nouwen’s analysis is both devotional and theological, drawing together three different stories. There is firstly the parable told by Jesus as part of a series which includes the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. Nouwen’s own lifestory is wrapped up in the story of the two sons and the father; and thirdly there is the story of the reader as she engages with the biblical text and is challenged by Nouwen to follow the same path of discovery. I intend to look at Nouwen’s treatment of this parable at some length.
A fourth ‘story’ is introduced from the outset when Nouwen describes the inception of the book as an encounter with Rembrandt’s picture ‘Return of the Prodigal Son’. It is a dialogue with this painting, which he views in its original in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, that gives him the inspiration to turn to St Luke’s parable. He describes returning to the picture a number of times to refresh his ideas. The painting is also iconic inasmuch as it ‘has become a mysterious window through which I can step into the Kingdom of God’.40 Personal narrative thus becomes an effective tool for theological reflection. The two major themes focus on the identity of self and of God – Who am I and Who is God for us? Nouwen finds that he is both the younger and the elder son, and more surprisingly he is called to be the father too. As younger son, he finds in the painting ‘something which represents the on-going yearning of the human spirit, the yearning for a final return, an unambiguous sense of safety, a lasting home’.41 He likens the boy’s lostness in a distant country to the addictions of modern life from which we long to be delivered. The younger son seeks forgiveness of the father as he prepares his speech: ‘I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants”’ (Luke 15: 18). Nouwen’s reflection on this combines an insight into our limited understanding of forgiveness with a personal engagement which draws the reader into the frame:
There is repentance, but not a repentance in the light of the immense love of a forgiving God. It is a self-serving repentance that offers the possibility of survival. I know this state of mind and heart quite well. It is like saying: ‘Well, I couldn’t make it on my own, I have to acknowledge that God is the only resource left to me. I will go to God and ask forgiveness in the hope that I will receive a minimal punishment and be allowed to survive on the condition of hard labour’. God remains a harsh, judgmental God. It is this God who makes me feel guilty and worried and calls up in me all these self-serving apologies. Submission to this God does not create true inner freedom, but breeds only bitterness and resentment.42
Nouwen is slightly surprised when a friend suggests that he is much more like the elder than the younger son, but agrees that this is likely. Nouwen is the one who has stayed faithful to the Church, worked hard, has been praised and admired; yet he detects in himself the same pride, resentment and selfishness which feature in the reaction of the elder son to his father’s joy. It is a refusal to share joy which characterises both the elder son and the writer. Nouwen’s own reaction here is to rename the parable that of the Lost Sons, both of whom in different ways have to come home. Yet the return of the elder is harder and can only be achieved through God’s grace. His own poverty is revealed to him when he realises that he is totally unable to root out his resentments, and that ‘Trust and gratitude are the disciplines for the conversion of the elder son. And I have come to know these through my own experience’.43 Jesus takes on the role of both the younger and the elder son; he becomes the true prodigal in order to take us home, that his broken body may become the broken body of all humanity which longs to re-enter the lost paradise. He is also the elder, offering God’s love to all his resentful children to bring them home too. Lastly Jesus shows us how to become the Father, and it is this which is the goal of Nouwen’s account.
In writing about the father he posits a third title for the parable – The Welcome by the Compassionate Father – for he sees contained here an appropriate image of God and the whole of salvation history. Into his development of acceptable images he weaves a meditation about his and others’ relationship with God, and our sense of coming home. The only authority which the father of the parable can claim is that of compassion, so that Nouwen is able to write:
Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting …44
He writes too about the feminine aspect of God who is freely linked in love and compassion with all her children, and only rests when she has welcomed all of them home around the table prepared for them. The parable is one of a series of three in which Jesus answers the Pharisees’ question about why he eats with sinners. The Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost Son all suggest that it is God who takes the initiative in the search; rather than the person searching for God, it is God who is searching and we who are hiding. This change of viewpoint makes Nouwen reflect: ‘Can I accept that I am worth looking for? Do I believe that there is a real desire in God to simply be with me?’ His work in a community of adults with learning difficulties suggests that they are demanding of fatherhood, but they also show how to be a father, for ‘a true spiritual homecoming means a return to the poor in spirit to whom the Kingdom of Heaven belongs’.45
This long excursion into a single parable illuminates certain significant concepts. Like Eiesland’s image of the crucified Jesus in terms of the disabled body, so Nouwen talks of the broken body of Jesus representing broken humanity’s search for home. He also outlines a three-part movement: from a God who provides a home (a Promised Land) to a God who is home, to a God who is searching for us in our hiddenness. Lastly, there is the call for us to be home, to be Father, especially for the most vulnerable people who show us the means of achieving this.46
The doctrine of the incarnation gives us a third and final theme, a twist to the story, like the endings of the parables Jesus told. The start of John’s Gospel tells us that ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us’ and later in Jesus’ own words, ‘If someone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him’ (John 14: 23). In an extended metaphor about the Church, the letter to the Ephesians speaks of the community of faith as the temple of God:
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the corner-stone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Eph. 2: 19–22)
Not only does God provide a home in the sense of a Promised Land, or become home in the sense that we return with Christ to the Father, but God answers our deepest human yearnings for transcendence in a completely original way. In the incarnation of Jesus, God reverses the order of homecoming and, to extend Nouwen’s view, makes God’s home with us. Jesus offers a new vision of homecoming in his public ministry of healing, casting out demons and restoring those who have been made ritually homeless: ‘The homemaking glory of God has returned, “moved into the neighbourhood” and taken up residence with us. Homecoming is possible again’.47
The homeless God of Samuel, in an act of solidarity, comes home most intimately to God’s own creation. The psalmist imagines the Lord as a refuge from pestilence, a shelter from the terrors of the night and the arrows of the day (Ps. 91); whereas in the Catholic litany of Our Lady it is Mary who provides shelter for Jesus – she is described as ‘Spiritual vessel, Vessel of honour … Ark of the covenant’. This solidarity with humanity is by virtue of the birth narrative a solidarity with poor and homeless people in particular. Jesus was not made flesh in the womb of the wealthy, nor by some fairy-tale turn of fortune did Mary suddenly become rich. Instead she specifically sings in the Magnificat of her material poverty and of God’s rejection of the powerful. There is a story told in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas that Thomas, when he first landed in India, collected large sums of money from the king in order to build him a magnificent house. When this failed to appear and he was arrested for fraud, he explained that the house had indeed been built, a ‘house in heaven’ for the king. The money had all been given to the poor.48
1 Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 21.
2 Ibid., p. 86.
3 Ibid., p. 89.
4 Albert Nolan, God in South Africa (London: CIIR, 1988), p. 67.
5 Ibid., p. 193.
6 Ibid., p. 215.
7 Ibid., p. 51.
8 ACCUPA, Faith in the City (London: Church House Publishing, 1985), p. 65.
9 Ibid., p. 14.
10 Ken Leech, The Sky Is Red (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), pp. 50–56, 107, 108, 135.
11 David Rhodes, Faith in Dark Places (London: Triangle, 1996), pp. 62–3.
12 Elaine Graham, ‘What Makes a Good City? Reflections on Urban Life and Faith’, International Journal of Public Theology 2 (2008): pp. 7–26.
13 Archbishops’ Commission on Urban Life and Faith, Faithful Cities: A Call for Celebration, Vision and Justice (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2006), p. 11.
14 Francis Davis, Elizabeth Paulhus and Andrew Bradstock, Moral, But No Compass: Government, Church and the Future of Welfare (Chelmsford: Matthew James Publishing, 2008), p. 32.
15 Ibid., p. 91.
16 For example, E. Stuart, Gay and Lesbian Theologies, Repetitions with Critical Difference (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
17 L. Stivers Disrupting Homelessness: Alternative Christian Approaches (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), p. 8.
18 A. Davey, Urban Christianity and Global Order (London: SPCK, 2001), p. 12.
19 Laurie Green, Power to the Powerless (Basingstoke: Marshal Pickering, 1987), pp. 10–11.
20 Laurie Green, ‘The Jesus of the Inner City’ in Ian Duffield (ed.), Urban Christ: Responses to John J. Vincent (Sheffield: Urban Theology Unit, 1997), p. 26.
21 Leech, Red, p. 91.
22 Ibid., pp. 106–1077 and 159.
23 Vincent, ‘Liberation Theology in Britain, 1970–1995’, p. 29.
24 Christopher Rowland, ‘The Gospel, the Poor and the Churches’, in Christopher Rowland and John Vincent (eds), Liberation Theology UK (Sheffield: Urban Theology Unit, 1995), pp. 41–54.
25 Anne Morisy, Beyond the Good Samaritan, Community Ministry and Mission (London: Mowbray, 1997), p. 6.
26 Ibid., p. 62.
27 Ibid., chapter 7, pp. 105–21.
28 Stivers, Disrupting Homelessness, p. 121.
29 Ibid., p. 146.
30 Leech, Red, p. 248.
31 Jay Rayner, ‘Sharp Rise in Demand for Food Handouts from Poverty-Stricken Families’ Observer newspaper, 1 October 2011.
32 Common Wealth, ‘Christians for economic and social justice’, 16 November 2010. Available at: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/CommonWealthStatement (accessed 26 January 2012).
33 R. Williams, leader ‘The Government Needs to Know How Afraid People Are’, New Statesman, 9 June 2011. Available at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2066/new-statesman-leader (accessed 26 January 2012).
34 Andrew Bradstock in his essay ‘Liberation Theology after the Failure of Revolution’ advocates the use of the Babylonian captivity as a new or additional paradigm for those whose hope in revolution and the Kingdom of God have been frustrated. The dream of liberation can be realised in the rebuilding of community rather than in the pursuit of new territory.
35 I remember the horrified reaction of a primary headteacher when I proposed that in the school Nativity play we should say that Jesus was born in the garage at the back of the local pub – this in a UPA parish. For a more detailed description of the Nativity in relation to liberation theology, see Rayan’s account of the ‘dalitness’ of Jesus, Dalits and Women, p. 125.
36 Rhodes, Faith, p. 70.
37 Leech, Red, p. 252.
38 Myers, Strong Man, p. 151.
39 Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2008), p. 14.
40 Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), p. 15.
41 Ibid., p. 5.
42 Ibid., p. 52.
43 Ibid., p. 84.
44 Ibid., p. 95.
45 Ibid., pp 107 and 135.
46 John Navone uses these same biblical examples and refers to travel stories in the Bible. The outer account of travel is matched by an inner journey of change, since ‘travel stories tell of a particular search for personal wholeness, of people who are modified by their experiences, of catalysts of change, of horizon shifts.’ Homecoming in the Bible reflects the deepest levels of our existence, our search for recognition and authenticity. Navone, Theology of Story, pp. 58–6.
47 Bouma-Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, p. 24.
48 M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (English translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 371ff. The story goes on to recount that when the king’s brother dies, he sees the palace which Thomas has built in heaven for the king, but is refused entry. He is allowed back down to earth to explain this to the king, who then releases Thomas from prison and is converted to Christianity.