Review: Unknowing God: Towards a Post-Abusive Theology

This review appeared in Sofia magazine issue 151, ‘Water’.

Unknowing God: Towards a Post-Abusive Theology, by Nicholas Peter Harvey and Linda Woodhead. Wipf and Stock (Eugene 2022) Sbk. 135 pages.

‘Unknowing God’ conveys the decades of life experience, wisdom and friendship shared by the authors. Their insights, written ‘in the midst of life’, come not just from their own backgrounds (Catholicism for Harvey and Anglicanism for Woodhead) but also what they have learnt from their encounters with other faiths and none.

Each of the 26 collected essays could be read on their own, but read together they build a comprehensive warning to the church. The book’s title is a reference to ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, a medieval mystical text teaching that to experience God required forgetting and unknowing our certainties. These essays let go of God as an all-knowing, all-controlling being and the associated fearful and controlling theologies, in search of something more compelling.

This book is not a journalistic account of Church abuse scandals. Instead, it examines theology or beliefs and highlights the potential for these to become abusive, to others and to ourselves. The authors look at abuse in all its guises, not just abuse in the legal sense. This includes more subtle harms.

I recently completed the Church of England’s safeguarding training – mandatory for me as a Parochial Church Council member. The training was rigorous but something felt missing. This book identifies that gap: it is the failure to understand how theology can harm. The Church has failed to explore how its theology is a contributor to abuse, instead falling into the easy assumption that church life was just a coincidental backdrop. It is frustrating to see this opportunity being missed.

One essay warns that ‘Critics of religion often focus on the dangers posed by a dark and wrathful God who can be used to justify violence, without realizing that a God of light and love can be just as dangerous.’ Modern Christian ethics sometimes ‘thins out’ into ‘abstractions about love, community, covenant, peaceableness and so on … with little to offer by way of concrete guidance.’ Post-abusive theology should not simply raise questions to the level of incontrovertible abstractions but should engage with real life and be less closed to non-Christian sources and more self-critical.

Another essay describes the fiercely debated understanding of resurrection over the history of the church, for example between bodily or spiritual resurrection. Over time, belief in the resurrection, whatever that meant, became viewed as a test of faith or a ‘doctrinal shibboleth’ not to be doubted or questioned. While people are as interested as ever in questions about the afterlife and the dead, Christianity no longer offers space for those conversations. ‘How ironic, that Jesus’ resurrection, so transgressive of the boundary between the living and the dead, became a barrier that kept them apart.’

The final essay in the book asks, ‘What’s wrong with playing God?’, exploring the relationship between humanity and environment. Some people view creation as complete, finished in Gensis or the formation of the universe, with the role of humanity being only to revere / understand through science and not to meddle. The essay tells the story of Emma Marris, an ecologist working to restore an area to it’s ‘natural state’, requiring the destruction of all the alien plants and animals that had been introduced. Faced with an area of outstanding beauty, Marris realised her colleagues only saw a man-made landscape to be removed. To Marris, it had a beauty and integrity of its own even if it wasn’t the original ecosystem. We couldn’t disconnect ourselves from the environment or distinguish the ‘real’ nature from the rest.

I sent this essay over to a friend who suffers from climate anxiety. Recently, we were hiking in Taiwan and he told me he couldn’t enjoy the forests because the trees were non-natives planted by Japanese colonialists. He has no interest in religion at all, but replied instantly that the essay “perfectly sums up everything I’ve been thinking recently.”

Unknowing God will find an amenable audience in the Network and I sincerely hope that those with power and influence in the church are similarly receptive. Based on how it helped my friend, I think that wider society could benefit from its rich and deep understanding of how blind and rigid orthodoxy to bad ideas can abuse us all.