The Political Christ
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 1978
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Reverend Dr Edward Norman, Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge, discusses how and why faith has been transformed by political values in his first Reith lecture.
Speaking from his series entitled 'Christianity and the World Order' Norman examines the authenticity of religion and considers its potential decay as it becomes progressively aligned with a secularised state.
He explains that with the politicisation of Christianity, it is now essentially concerned with social morality rather than with the ethereal qualities of spirituality. Halsey questions what effect this has on the religion.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.1 | This lecture in the series Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. H. Holsey was originally broadcast in 1978. |
| 0:12.8 | Towards the end of 1975, an impressive assortment of Christians gathered in Nairobi for the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches. |
| 0:20.9 | Some in the splendors of ethnic dress and some others in the scarcely less exotic costumes |
| 0:25.7 | of the various denominations. Their procession of the opening ceremony extended backwards |
| 0:30.9 | from the Jomo Kenyatta Conference Centre, till it curled round the huge statue of Kenyatta himself. |
| 0:37.1 | It was altogether, a visible sign in the shifting balance, in the numerical centre of Christianity, |
| 0:43.9 | away from the countries of Europe and North America, and towards the nations of the developing world. |
| 0:50.1 | The theme of the gathering itself expressing the third world flavour of contemporary international Christianity was Jesus Christ freeze and unites. |
| 1:00.5 | The main exposition came in a speech from Dr. Robert McCaffey Brown, professor of world Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York City,essing that as a white, male, bourgeois American, |
| 1:14.5 | he embodied what he called racism, sexism, classism, and imperialism, |
| 1:20.2 | and more than adequately apologising for the sins in which this involved him, |
| 1:24.6 | he lapsed into Spanish, apparently in an attempt to avoid, as he put it, |
| 1:29.1 | the linguistic imperialism of the English tongue. Most of those present reached for their |
| 1:35.1 | translation headsets. It was a symbolic moment. What they heard was later described in the |
| 1:42.4 | official Church of England report as a major theological address. |
| 1:48.0 | Dr. McCaffey Brown spoke of Jesus as Liberator, concerned with social, political and economic liberation. |
| 1:56.8 | And after dwelling at some length upon the identification of Christianity with the demands of, as he put it, oppressed peoples, |
| 2:04.5 | he went on to say, you may feel that I have not made Jesus political enough, |
| 2:09.7 | and that I am too conditioned by bourgeois categories to understand the full thrust of liberation. |
| 2:15.4 | It was, in the circumstances, a modest disclaimer. This incident, in itself |
| 2:22.5 | typical enough, discloses the most remarkable of all the changes that have occurred within |
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