Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal

Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal Summer 2021 — Volume 5.2 A quarterly journal for debate on current issues in the Anglican Communion and beyond Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal Volume 5.2 — Summer 2021 — ISSN 2399-8989 ARTICLES Introduction to the Summer Issue on Scottish Episcopal Theologians Alison Peden 7 William Montgomery Watt and Islam Hugh Goddard 11 W. H. C. Frend and Donatism Jane Merdinger 25 Liberal Values under Threat? Vigo Demant’s The Religious Prospect 80 Years On Peter Selby 33 Donald MacKinnon’s Moral Philosophy in Context Andrew Bowyer 49 Oliver O’Donovan as Evangelical Theologian Andrew Errington 63 Some Scottish Episcopal Theologians and the Arts Ann Loades 75 Scottish Episcopal Theologians of Science Jaime Wright 91 Richard Holloway: Expectant Agnostic Ian Paton 101 SCOTTISH EPISCOPAL INSTITUTE JOURNAL 3 REVIEWS Ann Loades. Grace is not Faceless: Reflections on Mary Reviewed by Alison Jasper 116 Hannah Malcolm and Contributors. Words for a Dying World: Stories of Grief and Courage from the Global Church Reviewed by James Currall 119 David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott, eds. The History of Scottish Theology, Volume I: Celtic Origins to Reformed Orthodoxy Reviewed by John Reuben Davies 121 Stephen Burns, Bryan Cones and James Tengatenga, eds. Twentieth Century Anglican Theologians: From Evelyn Underhill to Esther Mombo Reviewed by David Jasper 125 Nuria Calduch-Benages, Michael W. Duggan and Dalia Marx, eds. On Wings of Prayer: Sources of Jewish Worship Reviewed by Nicholas Taylor 127 Al Barrett and Ruth Harley. Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church’s Mission from the Outside, In Reviewed by Lisa Curtice 128 AUTISM AND LITURGY A special request regarding a research project on autism and liturgy Dr Léon van Ommen needs your help for a research project on autism and liturgy. Léon is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, a member of St Ninian’s Church (Aberdeen) and a member of the Liturgy Committee of the Faith and Order Board. Léon is conducting a research project on autism and liturgy. He is looking for participants. If you (self-)identify as autistic/on the autism spectrum and are willing to share your experience of worship and liturgy, please get in touch with him at [email protected]. People anywhere on the autism spectrum, including non-verbal, and of all ages, are welcome to join. The project is based at the Centre for the Study of Autism and Christian Community, at the University of Aberdeen. Ethical permission has been obtained from the University. Please email Léon for more information, he would love to hear from you. Enquiries Enquires to the Revd Dr Michael Hull Scottish Episcopal Institute 21 Grosvenor Crescent Edinburgh EH12 5EE Scotland–UK 0131 225 6357 [email protected] Disclaimer The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the authors in the Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church or the Scottish Episcopal Institute. Copyright The author of each article published here owns his or her own words. The articles in the Scottish Episcopal Journal may be freely redistributed in other media and non-commercial publications as long as the article is not abridged, edited or altered in any way without the express consent of the author. A redistributed article may not be sold for profit or included in another medium or publication that is sold for profit without the express consent of the author. The articles in the Scottish Episcopal Journal may be included in commercial publication or other media only if prior consent for republication is received from the author. The author may request compensation for republication for commercial use. Revised Saturday 19 June 2021 Introduction to the Summer Issue on Scottish Episcopal Theologians ALISON PEDEN Rector, St Modoc’s Church, Doune The importance of Scottish theologians to the wider Church and to Scottish culture was recognized in the three-volume History of Scottish Theology published in 2019. 1 Scottish Episcopalian theology and spirituality was considered in each of the three volumes, and Episcopalians contributed to each. However, there was not space to consider the broad range of modern Episcopalian theologians, and contributors were restricted to discussing those dead or retired.2 This issue is an invitation to learn about and celebrate some more Episcopalian theologians of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We begin with studies of two scholars whose principal interests lay in the nature of religion itself. Hugh Goddard explores how Montgomery Watt — an Episcopalian convert and priest who took the chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Edinburgh University in 1964 — inhabited the Muslim world as a Christian Arabist. Watt’s open-minded and warm appraisal of Islamic faith and its environmental context opened it up to other faiths as, at least, the prelude to renewed dialogue between Islam and Christianity. Jane Merdinger writes on William Frend, the historian of early Christianity and the Donatist schism in Roman North Africa. Dr Merdinger was Frend’s final PhD student at Glasgow University in the 1980s and she is a specialist in early North African Christianity. Like Montgomery Watt, Frend was sensitive to the way that the social and economic context shaped religious and cultural identities. He revealed how the complex Donatist schism, forged on the anvil of bitter persecution, had a long-lasting impact on the fault-lines of the Christianity of the region. Wrestling with truth-claims of religions is one task; entering the contested field of ethics and social justice is another that touches not only religious and intellectual nerves but personal lives. Two theologians who knew each other and grappled with the moral crises of the twentieth century were Vigo Demant (a Church of England priest included here as an important comparative theologian in this field) and Donald Mackinnon, a lay 1 History of Scottish Theology, ed. by David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 2 Of these, Bertrand Brasnett, Donald MacKinnon and John Riches were discussed in Alison Peden, ‘Episcopalian Theology in the Twentieth Century’ in History of Scottish Theology III (2019), pp. 333–46. 8 SCOTTISH EPISCOPAL INSTITUTE JOURNAL Episcopalian. Peter Selby, himself a forthright thinker on prisons, debt and human sexuality, introduces Demant, a priest who later became Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford in 1949. Demant faced the totalitarianism of right and left with an undaunted commitment to Christian grounds of resistance arising from an Anglo-Catholic incarnational theology. Demant and MacKinnon were both present at the Malvern Conference of 1941, where William Temple, then Archbishop of York, gathered Anglican social thinkers to discuss how Christians should exercise influence on social policy and welfare reform.3 MacKinnon became Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in 1947. Andrew Bowyer considers how he attempted to hold together realism with regard to human beings with the philosophical and theological demands of moral discernment, especially with regard to the holocaust and nuclear weapons. Like Demant, Oliver O’Donovan held the Regius chair of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, before his appointment as Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at Edinburgh. Andrew Errington investigates the role of scriptural authority in the moral thinking of O’Donovan, pointing out his resistance both to a liberal over-confidence in ‘moral progress’ and to a conservative unwillingness to undergo the discipline of questioning the text. One of the problems that these moral theologians faced was how to engage with contemporary attitudes to ethical issues once religious principles could no longer be assumed in society. It is a challenge for all modern theology, which has been taken up fruitfully in the theology of the arts. Engaging imagination, encouraging the discovery that creative artists are themselves theologians and attending to the moral potential of all media are revealed as the significant contributions of the theologians of the arts considered by Ann Loades. She describes the energetic practical involvement with creative artists that underlay David Brown’s contribution to theology in Oxford, Durham and St Andrews universities. Trevor Hart developed resources to connect faith and the arts through a theology of imagination as Professor of Divinity at St Andrews, while David Jasper opened up fruitful intellectual and ‘lived faith’ connections as Professor of Literature and Theology at Glasgow. Finally, Loades points to the ground- breaking work of Jolyon Mitchell as Professor at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at Edinburgh in bringing together the arts and peace-making. SEC theologians of the arts have demonstrated that different spheres enrich each other, but the frontiers of theology and science are more contested. Jaime Wright begins by defining the subject of her enquiry as ‘SEC scholars of science-and-religion’. Two of these are ‘scientist priests’ at 3 I am grateful to Ann Loades for alerting me to this. SCOTTISH EPISCOPAL INSTITUTE JOURNAL 9 Edinburgh University: Mark Harris, who investigates the relationship of the Bible and science, and Michael Fuller, who draws together scientific development and human flourishing, and co-edited Made in the Image of God. Being

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