What should be our dominant imaginary?

In Church of England schools, which are mostly in thrall to enlightenment and modern western neoliberal mechanical thinking around education, we do not spend much time thinking about a school’s imaginary: what it is for and what sort of social world we expect to bring into being through the work that we do as teachers and leaders. Two books that I have been reading and re-reading in the last few weeks (Jeff Buckles’ Education, Sustainability and the Ecological Social Imaginary; and JKA Smith’s Imagining the Kingdom) add their voices to Lesslie Newbigin’s insistence that we find a way of thinking about education that is not that of the “idolatrous purpose of public education” (Michael Goheen, The Church and its Vocation, p. 147).

This is akin, I suppose, to a vision, yet seems stronger somehow because we are already living in a (mostly unnoticed and uncommented upon) social imaginary, like a fish lives in water. And thus the criticisms I recently submitted the concept of vision to, deriving from the work of Julian Stern and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, must be taken account of in any argument that motivates for a new social imaginary. It is perhaps not enough for a church school to have its own vision, its own imaginary, but rather, as Bonhoeffer insists, that we learn to inhabit the vision that God has already purposed for the gathered Christian community. For Newbigin, this is the biblical-historical narrative of the bible and the world that is therefore imagined and created as the church preaches and lives the gospel into a hostile or uncomprehending western culture. For Buckles and Smith, it is about actions that we take and educate into that allow us to inhabit a new social imaginary growing inside the existing one: for Buckles, one that comes from a honest assessment of the ecological threat to our lives; for Smith, one that helps us learn about how worship works as we engage in it in the church. Both models have a degree of overlap with Brueggemann’s concept, in The Prophetic Imagination, of an alternative community, living out its life separately but within “hostile Babylon”, and with Brian Walsh’s idea of “imaging God within Babylon” from his book Subversive Christianity. The recasting of church as an alternative community within the midst of its hostile neighbours is par for the course in many parts of the world, but we do not often think of the church in that way. I shall return to this a little later in this post.

In Lesslie Newbigin’s helpful little book Truth to Tell, he defines a couple of useful metaphors that can help demonstrate our role as carriers of a different social imaginary within the existing dominant one. One is that of a subversive, an undercover agent, working within the dominant structure to bring it back to its original calling. This derives from Newbigin’s conviction (and mine) that “while the church as a corporate society cannot identify itself with particular political programs, it must be the responsibility of the church to equip its members for active and informed participation in public life in such a ways that the Christian faith shapes that participation.” (Truth to Tell, p. 81).

The reason that this is so important is that we are functioning in a world dominated by the principalities and powers – “structures and forces which have a trans-personal character.” Within these structures, we are not free to act as we would want to. They exert power and force upon our thinking and place limits on our freedom of movement. Because the gospel is not simply a personal message but a call to a whole culture and society to repent and believe the good news, then the gospel is also a call to the principalities and powers and this moves fully into the realm of public truth. Thus as Christians, we neither simply submit to the powers as they are (because they are corrupted and need bring back to true allegiance to Jesus) nor are we to seek to overthrow them completely despite the evil they do, but we seek to subvert them, to expose and explode the false ideologies they have given themselves to (such as the “freedom” of market liberalisation) and (and this is why epistemology is so vital) live out and proclaim how such a structure could function if it got its allegiances better ordered. “the structure is not to be simply smashed – as so much political rhetoric advocates; it is to be subverted from within” (Truth to Tell, p. 82). Newbigin then asks what sort of training would Christians need from the churches and in Christian professional associations in order to subvert the dominant imaginaries?

What kind of preparation is needed to enable a psychiatrist to discern the ways in which her profession could be subverted from its allegiance to other principles and become and area in which the saving work of Christ is acknowledged? What would be the specific kind of training for a teacher in the public schools, for an executive in a big corporation, for a lawyer of a civil servant? (p.83)

The second metaphor Newbigin proposes is somewhat more mainstream – that of the royal priesthood, representing God to our working worlds and our working worlds to God.

The church, says Peter (referring to 1 Peter 2), is to do those two things: to show forth to the world the mighty acts of God, and to offer to God the spiritual sacrifices due to him. This priesthood is, clearly, something to be exercised in the midst of the secular world. Every Christian in the course of secular employment is to be present as representative of the whole priesthood, thus bringing the secular world into its proper relation to God…….it should become part of the normal work of the Church to equip its members for the exercise of this priesthood in the many different areas of secular life, and in terms of the specific powers that rule in these areas. (p.84)

This equipping of the church for the undermining and subversion of the powers is the first of three actions that Newbigin calls the church to, if it wishes to be “clear and bold in its affirmation of the truth of the gospel as the reality by which all human enterprises are to be tested and in its unmasking and rejection of the idols whose worshippers fill so much of the…public square” (p.81).

The second action is to support and enable the rise into leadership of Christians who are able to influence and “shape society, shape the plausibility structure within which people make their decisions” (p.85). This is a whole area of discussion best left to another time.

The third of the contributions that “the church can make to a new social order is to be itself a new social order.”

This challenge is placed at the level of the local congregation, because it here where the reality of relational life, teaching, care and impact on the surrounding community can be realised. I would include in this not just church congregations but also church schools, as “covenant communities” (Trevor Cooling’s term) that are seeking to allow children to flourish within an imaginary that is alternative to the dominant one, however much the dominant one has things to say about safeguarding, curriculum and assessment and testing (to name but three). For a school to become a new social order, lived under the historic reality of the kingdom of God and its eventual triumph, has all the implications I listed in the series on prophetic schooling last autumn, and probably others.

At heart, though, it is in the day to day attention to the quality of communal life within a “new social order” that will have the maximum impact, as Alan Kreider has shown that it did in the early church. Thus in response to Newbigin’s question on how to be subversive above (what would be the specific kind of training for a teacher in the public schools?) we would have to say that adopting the practices that would lead to the creation of a loving and hospitable community that is a subversive challenge to the mechanistic anthropology of the neoliberal imaginary, would be a place to start.