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BASKET SUMMARY

Holy Anarchy: Dismantling Domination, Embodying Community, Loving Strangeness

Graham Adams
SCM Press, 2022, 240pp, pbk. £19.99

Graham Adams concludes that ‘it has been exciting to write this
book, but also somewhat scary’. The same can be said of reading it.
At a time when, at least within the Church of England, Christians
seem to fight for theological dominance, Adams proposes
something else entirely – not order, structure, purity, or power,
but anarchy, uncertainty and an ‘awesomely weak God’. This book is radical, it goes to the roots of institutionalised religion and
shows that things need not be as they are. The proposal rests in
rigorous redefinition of concepts with which readers might assume
themselves to be familiar: faith, holiness, unity, God, and kingdom.
Each is thoroughly and creatively examined, and Adams’ nimble
guidance leads readers to new possibilities.
The book is structured in four parts, each of which consists
of an introduction and two chapters. In part one of the book
we consider Holy Anarchy, handling truth and the ‘other’ God.
Adams’ commitment is that ‘God’s will is done precisely by virtue
of God’s not “ruling over”’ (15) but instead through the work of
‘anti-domination’. Three challenges result from this – how do we
hold a Christian identity generously? How do we take account of
our own limits and value the understandings of others? And how
do we recognise and transform power structures? First, Adams
argues, we must resist whitewashing our own stories, we must
acknowledge difference and we must challenge the silencing of
others. We move, in chapter two, to think about different kinds
of truth – ‘truth-as-correctness’ and ‘truth-in-hand’, as against
‘truth-as-openness’ and ‘truth-in-process’. The former truth is
complete in itself, the second is always becoming. Belief-focused
Christianity is presented as truth-in-hand – its beliefs are to be
defended, and its aspirations are colonial, since truth-in-hand
Christianity dismisses truths from other faiths. Truth-in-process,
meanwhile, emphasises openness and grace. With characteristic
sure-footedness, Adams points out the difficulties with this too –
the failures to identify power differentials, which means one belief
system acts as host rather than partner to others. The alternative
to either of these paradigms is to contemplate another God, one
who will not be co-opted into colonial exploits. We need, therefore,
to reconsider what we mean by truth, faith and God.
Part two digs deep into justice. The Church has been remiss in
building a ‘kingdom of God’ that emulates other kingdoms and
empires. Some theologies seem to adopt global economic thinking
by rendering God part of a supply line for the faithful consumer,
says Adams. This stems from the fact that we have so imbibed
dominant Western philosophies that we imagine our faith in its
terms. Here Adams makes one of his most powerful arguments:
we need to move from TANA (There Are No Alternatives) to TASA (There Are Several Alternatives). One of these alternatives is a
church and a theology for the multitude, in place of individualised
beliefs. Introducing the Awesome Weakness of God is part of this
paradigm shift. By this account, God is not fixed or all-powerful,
but both changing and consistent; God holds to values of love
and justice, ‘an absolute and unchanging condition of Love, but a
relative and changing dynamic of love-in-practice’ (106). As if to
reiterate his challenge to systematic theologies, Adams writes, ‘God
is a chaos-event’ (109). Mission-focused readers might be pleased
that Adams considers how this God effects mission trajectories.
Mission is God’s business in which we are invited to participate.
This entails the Church offering insight into God’s kingdom
through its undoing of imperial power and its efforts to become an
alternative community.
Part three turns to this alternative community. Adams’
Christology is significant here, positing Jesus as so fully human that
he becomes what he is through community, not through incarnation
alone. Jesus’ networks include people of his own tradition and
beyond it, and the socially and politically marginalised. A similar
approach is taken to Scripture; it is weak because in a history of
oppression it is aligned with the oppressors, and so we must
learn to re-read it, conscious of the way our thinking is colonised
by imperialism. Christian unity is to be rooted in the alternative
paradigm in which there is no domination – either by God or by
others.
Part four is full of challenge and inspiration, addressing the
‘challenge presented by the sheer fact of different communities with
their own stories’ (173). Adams proposes that in distinguishing
faith and works in his epistles, Paul was actually discussing certain
kinds of actions, specifically those that separate us from others.
Emphasising such things as circumcision or baptism serves to
cut off one community from others, so that the awkwardness of
others’ experiences can be avoided. Faith is not about stability
but about being shaken by others, according to Adams. Refusing
the temptation to offer a clear formula, he concludes that the
relationship between truth-in-hand and truth-in-process is
‘necessarily ambiguous’ (182). Chapter 8 begins with Mary at
the empty tomb. I was particularly struck by Adams’ reflection
on the importance of Mary addressing the newly risen Jesus as ‘teacher’: this is a teaching moment ‘shaking her out of one form
of knowledge and alerting her to another’ (107). We then consider
what all this might mean for worship. Here Adams offers a new
definition of worship as an in-between space, which includes a
beautifully phrased sidewise dig at certain forms of worship (‘high
priests of propaganda proclaim messages of purity’ (211)).
Adams concludes by saying ‘Holy Anarchy can’t be confined …
it is not held, not captured, not contained. … It has gone ahead
of us’ (231). The concept of Holy Anarchy emerges through the
book as an alternative horizon, glimpsed in the gaps. It resists
the dominance of Christian power while consciously adopting
Christian perspectives; it challenges us to resistance of colonialism,
generosity of thought, and acceptance of insight that comes from
the ‘other’. In his inspiring and engaging book, Adams offers a
welcome and welcoming alternative to dominant ways of thinking,
and some practical resources for leading congregations toward it.

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