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Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. This show explores the idea that another life is possible through conversations with guests about how to live more thoughtfully, hopefully, and faithfully. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson. Well, welcome back everyone to another episode of Another Life. It was really exciting to launch our first episode last week where I had a conversation with Peter Mommsen, the editor-in-chief of Plough magazine, and with Maureen and Jay about many, many things, including why I chose the song that is at the opening of these podcasts and how Jay helped to bring it to life. Not incidentally through building his own harp several years ago. So if you haven’t already, I hope you'll give that episode a listen. It gives a vision for what this podcast is about and what you can expect from it.

I got a lot of feedback and messages, more than I'm used to, even from my own podcast, and I want to hear from you. So it’s exciting and motivating for me to hear about what you’re wanting to listen to and what you find inspiring. So whether it’s by commenting on the Plough website or emailing me or Plough or hearing from you on social media, please keep engaging, telling me how you're imagining other life is possible and what you’d like to hear in this podcast.

Now today I am once again recording from my East London flat, but I’m going to share a conversation with you that I recorded a few weeks ago, a train ride away in the city of Oxford. In this conversation, I spoke with Andrew Davison, who is the Regis Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. And he wrote for our issue on the supernatural. This was something we were inspired to tackle in one of our magazine issues because we felt like there's a renewed interest in the supernatural.

When I was in university, it was the time of the new atheists and there was this sense that life was just going to get more and more secular and move further away from belief in God and traditional religion. And what's been really fascinating over the last few years is that there's been this rebounded interest, not just in religion, but also in all kinds of things, whether that is astrology or belief in spirits or ghosts and things like that, whatever you can make of the idea of the supernatural, very broadly considered, there seems to be a renewed interest in and openness to that.

And there's all kinds of reasons for that, which we explore in the issue, but we wanted to have Andrew Davison, the professor at Oxford, give us a foundation of how do we think about these words, the natural and the supernatural and what meaning do they have and how are they used in the Christian tradition. So he did for us what I like to call our BTP, our Big Theological Piece. And then we had the pleasure of doing a launch with him at Oxford a few weeks ago. So I traveled from my little East London flat to his lovely cozy office, up many staircases in Christchurch College and had a conversation with him about many, many things. And he is such a fascinating individual. He has, in his time, been a scientist, a priest, and a theologian. And in this conversation, we talk about his own journey through those different things and how they relate to each other. We talk about his time at Princeton, where he studied astrobiology. So he studied how Christians would respond to discovering intelligent life on other planets, which is totally fascinating to me.

And we talked about whether he thinks that a revival is happening. We didn't quite use the word revival, but a sense of something stirring, people coming back to a belief in God. So we talked about that, whether that's happening at Oxford and across the world, and some of his own observations about how we think about that and how we respond to it. And he even very patiently answered my question about whether we should evangelize aliens. So you have that to look forward to.

Professor Davison is a careful, clear, and relentlessly charitable person, and it was truly and a pleasure to speak with him. So I hope you enjoy today’s episode, and I look forward to hearing what you think.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. This show explores the idea that another life is possible through conversation with guests about how to live more thoughtfully, hopefully, and faithfully. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson, and today I’m delighted to be joined by Regis Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Residentiary Canon at Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford, Andrew Davison. Welcome to the show.

Andrew Davison: Thank you very much for having me.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I’ve been so excited about having this conversation. We’ve been in conversation since the very beginning of our issue on the supernatural. And part of why I wanted to talk to you is that you have this rich experience in your work and in your writing and in your life of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. So the way I think about this, in a more biographical sense, is that you have two sets of degrees.

You have an undergrad in chemistry and a DPhil in biochemistry, and you have an undergraduate in theology and a PhD in theology. Could you tell us a little bit about how you came to pursue those two sets of studies and how they’ve enriched or related to your work today?

Andrew Davison: Well, I think they both belong together from the beginning in as much as I was good at science at school and very interested in science and also quite devout and brought up by my parents to go to church and I sang in the choir and I took that all quite seriously. So there was never very much of a doubt in my mind that I wanted to pursue science, partly because I thought one could also pursue being a Christian just by being a Christian, theology just by being Christian. So I went up to university and read chemistry and stayed on to do this, DPhil in biochemistry. But I’d say two things changed the course of my life then. One was that I started working in the hospice in Oxford as a volunteer during my doctoral years. And that was so much the most rewarding thing that I did in any particular week that that made me think. I’d take a pastoral direction vocationally. And the other thing was, I just noticed that I was lying awake thinking about theology and I wasn’t lying awake thinking about biochemistry. And that, I have to say, is a pretty good indication of what track to take.

And if someone came to me asking for counsel, you know advice, that’s not a bad question to ask. What are you lying awake thinking about? I would say on the first thing about the pastoral direction. I did go to Cambridge with theology degree, prepare for ordination, get ordained. I was working in a parish in Southeast London as a curate. I found that eventually when I ended up coming back to the university – there’s lots of opportunity in a university setting to be pastoral, to show a bit of care for people. So it turned out I didn’t need to leave the university and go into the ordained ministry in order to find a setting for pastoral work. How have they enriched one another? Well, I do think that scientists get good training at thinking about things that you can’t completely grasp. So I think we can say true things about electrons and protons and molecules and things, but a good scientist realizes that she’s only ever talking in terms of models, representations. There’s a mystery to all of these things that outstrips our grasp. And I think that’s pretty good preparation for being a theologian, actually, because I do think we talk truly about what we talk about when we talk about God, because it’s not a figment of our imagination or speech, but profoundly also, we haven’t got God sorted out or exhausted. So that just mental habit of mind. Of thinking about things, but not supposing that you’ve got them all sussed out in science, I think is quite good preparation for theology actually. And then in the fullness of time, after I’d been teaching systematic theology, doctrine, basic Christian beliefs, one theological college in Oxford and then one in Cambridge, a job came up in Cambridge in theology and natural sciences together.

And so I threw my hat in the ring for that and was appointed. And so much to my joy, but surprise in a way, because I’ve never expected it to work out this way, those two academic disciplines and the science that I’d really in a way put on the back burner came back into my everyday academic life. So I spent ten years as lecturer, eventually professor of theology and natural sciences. And now in Oxford, that’s not in my job description, but I can bring as much science in as I want.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So it’s not as if you pursued science and then you stopped and you pursued theology. There was a point where they did relate to each other in what you were writing and teaching.

Andrew Davison: I would say that for the years when I was teaching people in preparation for ordination, basics of Christian belief, science was there because I knew something about it and I was interested in it, but it was not so much part of my professional life. I’d say that’s actually quite a good stage to go through because when you’re a professional scientist, you are unbelievably focused on one part of one discipline. You’ve got to be, because people all around the world are producing work. You’ve to keep up with it. What characterized my interest in science over those eight years or so when I was teaching theology was I could suddenly be interested in all sorts of things beyond that thing that I’d done my doctorate on. And in terms of then bringing that back into theology later on, I think that was actually a really good period when I could get interested in astronomy and various other things.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I like how you speak about that because it’s almost not so much just the content of what you were studying in science, but also the discipline of mind and also that with theology that it allowed you almost more freedom that those two related to each other and helped train the thinker and the teacher that you are. And you mentioned astronomy.

So I guess going back to these two – you seem to have a theme of two in your life. And another set of two is that you’ve spent two periods of time at the Princeton Theological Center for Inquiry?

Andrew Davison: Yeah, the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, or Inquiry as we would say in English, in England.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I do speak English, but I am American. So you’ve spent two periods of time at Princeton. Could you tell us, and it produced these two books, one of which I didn’t know about until just speaking with you before this interview, so I’m very excited to learn about that. Could you tell us a bit about, let’s start with the first stint and the book that came out of that.

Andrew Davison: So, CTI, Centre of Theological Inquiry, is a wonderful institution in Princeton, originally founded by and then spun out from the theological seminary there. And it’s an institute for research, especially interdisciplinary research that involves theology. The director there who’s just retired, William Storrar, was wonderfully welcoming and it was a great place to be.

And the first time there was a program that was funded by NASA to think about the implications of life beyond Earth. They have an educational budget for public understanding and they thought it would be worthwhile encouraging people to think from a theological philosophical perspective about this. And the way I looked at it was, we might discover evidence of life beyond Earth. And if we do, people will turn to their religious traditions, in my case Christianity, to help frame it, understand it, what does this mean, what does it mean for me and the way I understand things. And it’s quite good if we’ve done a little bit of thinking about that in advance, because then our responses will be rounder, not hysterical and so on. So I’d already started incorporating in one of my classes – courses on theology and natural sciences, significance of life beyond Earth, because I thought it’d attract the students and it’s actually a really good way of looking at some existing theological questions from new angles. Is sin inevitable? How does the incarnation affect non-human creatures? These sorts of things.

So I did a stint about just under a year in Princeton. We met lots of wonderful scientists who came in to talk to us. And then over the course of a few years after that, I wrote this book, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine. which just really goes through the big things in the creeds, you know, creation, sin, salvation, Christ, life, the world to come, revelation, and asks what difference would it make to our understanding of that, or how would our understanding that relate to the prospect of life beyond Earth. And one of the things that was a real surprise to me is that actually Christians have been thinking about this pretty continuously since about 1450.

There were two authors around then who tackle it and it just never goes away really. But delightfully really, people have tended to be, theologians have tended to be so unfazed by it, you know, so un-put out by it, that they write a little bit, maybe a paragraph or a page or something, and then just move on. And there’s, so I thought it would just be good to push some of things a bit deeper, like, not because I think we should be truly troubled by them, but it’s almost, you almost wish people in the past had been a little bit more troubled, because they might have written a little bit more rather than just taking it in their stride so much. And the world’s saying there was a danger that people were thinking about this question by just re-anthologizing those few things that people have said in passing. So my project for the book was, what if you just start with a great repository of what Christians thought about their faith down the ages, without this in mind, and then pose some questions to that from the prospect of life, especially intelligent life beyond earth, and just see what resources we’ve got. And I hope people will find the book reassuring, but I think Christianity has this amazing long history of asking itself difficult questions. It’s thrived on those kinds of provocations. So I don’t think that we need to be revisionary. I think we can take it in our stride but we can write more than the page. We can write 300 pages or whatever it is.

And like I say, I think even if we never do find evidence of life beyond Earth, it will have helped us to come at some old questions from new angles. And I should say that after that, or maybe around this time, around the time of the second visit to Princeton, there was a wonderful, really amazing center being set up in Cambridge that I had a hand in, on a study of life beyond Earth and the place of life in the universe.

And the work that I did and the theology faculty in Cambridge was just welcomed as part of that interdisciplinary conversation absolutely from the, I mean before the beginning, because I was involved with the grant proposal. So it’s just gone on giving and those relationships and the collaborative work that I’ve done and carry on conversations, having conversations with scientists, especially in Cambridge, but through that around the world has been a really unexpected pleasure. Not unexpected that it would be a pleasure, but unexpected that all these scientific relationships would come out of it.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s wonderful. I love the idea also that approaching this question, whether or we ever find life beyond Earth or intelligent life beyond Earth, sharpens how we think about various theological issues. And this is gonna sound much less deep and intelligent and academic, but there was this period of time on Twitter, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, where the big question that everyone kept on exploring was whether one would evangelize aliens if one discovered them. Is that something you explore? The answer can be no.

Andrew Davison: I don’t explore it for two reasons: I think that the prospect of travel and communication between even solar systems, never mind galaxies, is a very tall order. You have to travel very fast and then even like a speck of dust becomes very dangerous. Or you can try communicating by radio waves or something, but then that could be 1500 years just to get a message one way or the other.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes and we’re the linguistic …

Andrew Davison: The linguistic, exactly. Also because I’m not a comparative religion person in my own expertise, so I have that as part of my toolkit to expand that. I don’t think that God is without witnesses anywhere. So I think there’s something a bit hubristic about the idea that we would need to do that. God will have witnesses wherever there are people who can – things, creatures – who can receive it. So there’ll be fantastic conversations to be had, but we might have something to learn or we’d certainly have things to compare. There’s a beautiful poem by Alice Meynell from about 1925, I think about creatures in the life of the world to come, comparing notes about how God has dealt with them. And I love it. One of the verses says, “this earth bears as its greatest treasure one forsaken grave,” which I think is a marvelous line. So if you want to think about comparing notes about theology, that poem is called “Christ In the Universe.” by Alice Meynell, it’s worth looking at.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I will look at it and I will also try to put it in the show notes for this episode because I imagine other people would enjoy it.

Andrew Davison: I would also say that when you venture into this topic you get some pretty weird emails about maps of UFO crash sites and things. So just for that reason also I don’t really write or engage with the encounter-with-aliens stuff. But there are people, especially maybe from a more sociological perspective, who think about that but that’s not where my expertise lies.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Well thank you for that very illuminating answer to that question. OK, so that’s your first stint at Princeton, but you had a second stint and you have a book coming out at some point soon perhaps from that one. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Andrew Davison: Yes, I was in Princeton from ’22 to ’24, those two academic years as a visiting fellow and the Centre of Theological Inquiry was just being wonderfully renovated and restored and rejuvenated and launching another twenty, thirty, fifty-year cycle of its life. The first time there wasn’t really anyone else in residence, so I had lots of opportunities for writing and there were people, more than in the second year, but I just had the wonderful luxury of time to read and write. And the thing that I ended up writing about is basically the relation of doctrines. So how the various parts of Christian belief hang together. Because over the years that I’ve been a teacher and a reader and a writer, but I think let’s start with teaching. The thing that we call systematic theology, which talks about God, creation, sin, salvation, Christ, the life of the world to come, the church, sacraments, revelation, these sorts of things, is actually not often taught that systematically. So my kind of clever line on this is that what we call systematic theology is often more sequential theology. You’ve got only so many weeks, you do one topic per week, you get through it, and I’m not blaming anyone, and I’ve done it that way myself. If you’ve only got a certain amount of time, you pack it in. But it has struck me that something of the real beauty of Christian thought is the way in which it hangs together. And what you think about one thing throws light on something else. And after all, theology comes out of the scriptures, the study of the scriptures, and all the themes are entangled there. You can’t look at a page of Paul, reading probably a sentence of Paul, without him talking about more than one thing. So I thought that there was a bit of a gap.

for a book that thought about one thing in relation to another. I don’t know what its title’s gonna be, but the subtitle will be Theology Through its Joints. Something like that. We talk about articles of faith, and the etymology of article is same as articulated, like an articulated lorry. So it’s actually about joints. The joints are important. And as I say, think there’s a bit of a gap. So I thought I’d address it. There’s a little bit of writing about what does it mean for theology to have parts, the very idea of how they might relate to one another. I didn’t want to put the emphasis there. I wanted to just get into the weeds. So if you think about who Christ is, then it relates to what you think the church is or the scriptures are, I mean, you probably want some examples.

I found it really impressive to see how Thomas Aquinas, who’s my person I’m particularly enthusiastic about, in taking the humanity of Christ seriously, he takes the Holy Spirit seriously and vice versa. So he has this lovely sense that even though Christ is God in his very person, because he’s human, he relates to God in all the ways also that a human being does, which is principally in terms of the Holy Spirit. So Christ has to receive the Holy Spirit. He also has to grow in his humanity. So he grows in grace and in virtue whilst always being perfect in view of his divinity. So there’s an example of that. You take the humanity seriously, you end up taking the Holy Spirit seriously.

I could probably talk for an hour about a particular example, so I might leave it there. I have to say, the book isn’t … it’s kind of finished … I can point to it on the floor down there. It’s all written, but it needs one last read-through.

And I think it’s also pastorally useful and useful for ministers because if you see how the faith hangs together, like I say, then basically everything is a resource for talking about anything. So it’s not like the only thing you could ever talk about in the celebration of the harvest is creation. It’s not like the only thing you’d ever talk about at a wedding is say sacramental theology, or it’s not like the only thing you would talk about, I mean, let’s be provocative, that you might talk about something other than just the incarnation at Christmas. At Easter, there’s a lot to be said about the whole, it’s like the whole of the faith is refracted in every part of the church’s year. So there’s that sort of preaching, I think that’s good, and devotion and worship, but also pastorally, I think if we get things out of their silos, then, in any particular situation, pastoral situation, at a bedside or whatever, in hospital, I think it just helps free up the sense that everything is a resource for every question, potentially.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Absolutely. And I think this reflects the kind of attitude you have in general towards theology, the drawing on things and seeing how they relate to each other. So it’s exciting to hear that that’s borne out in this specific book. But that’s part of why I was so excited that you wrote for this issue, for the Supernatural issue, because I felt like you were able to invite readers to think about what do we mean when we say natural and supernatural?

And how is speaking about these things not just providing definitions, but also touching on these other aspects of what we think about, what it means to grow in our faith towards union with God, what it means when we think about the kind of “supernatural” of the ghostly or things like that. So, transitioning to that, could you tell us a little bit about your piece in this issue? I should also preface it and say that whenever we’re coming up with an issue, kind of, we always look for what in my mind I call the BTP, so the big theological piece that sets out what are the joints in this issue? How do they relate to what we think about God and how we live our daily lives? And in this issue, yours was the big theological piece, but there are also several because it’s hard not to just continually come back to theology when you talk about the supernatural, in part because as you explore in your piece, in the Christian tradition, the only thing we can truly call supernatural would be God. So tell us a little bit about your piece in this issue, and specifically how we think about the words, “the natural” and “the supernatural.”

Andrew Davison: Well, I do like words and definitions, and I think it is important to take a step back sometimes and say, what do we mean by this? Or what several things can we mean by this? Because that’s also, it’s a kind of disambiguation that sometimes people are talking at cross purposes because they use a word differently. So I’m glad it had that effect within the whole, because that’s what I hope to be able to contribute.

And so it’s a little while since I wrote it, and that’s probably a good thing, because if I was too close to it, I’d probably go too much into the detail. I think that is, my big point is, it’s really important principle in Christian theology that you’ve got the Creator and you’ve got creation. everything is either Creator or creation. And so in that sense, whatever you might talk about is either God or what God has created.

I thought that was a helpful first step – that whatever we talk about, whatever there is out there, I’m certainly happy to talk about angels, the sort of stuff that appears in horror movies I’m more skeptical of, you know, probably some of those angels have fallen and who knows what, let’s for a moment be expansive and imagine that there are ghosts, for instance, about which I’m probably agnostic.

But the point is that all of that would be created. In that sense, that’s the big distinction of course, God is also closer to everything than it is to itself, as Augustine says. I’m not trying to distance them. I’m just saying conceptually, this is a pretty important watertight distinction. But then I think I tried to make a few comments that don’t blur the boundary, but say, well, maybe we can draw the line in different place in terms of the natural and supernatural. So maybe there are some things in creation that are so naturally aligned, orientated towards God, that you couldn’t really understand them on purely natural terms. It’s not that they’re not creatures through and through, but some of the big debates about the natural and the supernatural in the twentieth century was, could one imagine a kind of self-enclosed natural human being that would be completely satisfied and have no bearings beyond itself or is there a hunger in the human heart such that that would never be satisfied and is there a human urge to see God and know God or you could get that more sort of just in terms of knowledge like can the world ever really give a full account of itself? Isn’t it always at least going to ask us, pose us the question, why is there anything rather than nothing? It’s not like the world can tell us exactly what God’s like, but maybe it begs questions that are always going to point towards God.

So in that sense, yep, you’ve got creatures and you’ve got the Creator, but there will be things about the creation that would be incomplete, either in terms of love or knowledge, until we’d attain to God. And maybe there are creatures like angels which, because they have a foot in the heavenly throne room, they’re already kind of a fire, a flame with the sight of God, which means that they’re always gonna be a bit uncanny. mean, so if an angel appears to me, my first thought is probably not going to be, look, there’s another creature. There’s gonna be something terrifying, mean – biblical angels are pretty terrifying. And I think that’s because they bear something of the light of God with them. Or if there are very evil things, then there’s also something not quite natural about that. That’s a very important point, I think. That evil is a privation, it’s a lack, it’s a kind of …

Joy Marie Clarkson: … almost anti-natural.

Andrew Davison: It’s like profoundly unnatural. It’s not the way things should be. And a profoundly evil creature in that sense would have something sub-natural about it, which wouldn’t feel exactly natural. There’s a wonderful passage in C. S. Lewis where he says that every human being is destined to either have this character that we would be tempted even to worship in this life or to have the character, you know – there’s perdition, there’s people do throw their eternal destiny away. They will be so horrifyingly attenuated that we would be horrified. So the sort of grace and the life of God given to creatures or this mark of evil, both of them, you could say, don’t seem quite natural.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So there’s this kind of sense that we have God and we have not God, we have the creator and the created, but even the created itself begs or looks to the supernatural, asks questions of us or seems that it wants to be fulfilled in God. And that even those things which are evil or, as you said, sub-natural, in some way testifies to that, I guess the way it’s sometimes described as the natural desire for the supernatural, which is something you touched on looking at Henri de Lubac. And that actually relates to something I’ve wanted to ask you. (Everyone go read the article, because you can get more into what he talked about.) But thinking about the desire for the supernatural, and by that we mean, if we’re talking about de Lubac, God, right? The desire to see God, to see the beatific vision. But in colloquial terms, when we talk about the supernatural, meaning something out of the ordinary or out of nature getting on with being nature. We’re seeing something like an explosion of interest in that.

So, I think back to when I was in university, it was the heyday of the new atheists and there was this assumption that things would just become more and more naturalistic and that sort of thing. I have kind of funny memories actually of I studied abroad in Oxford and I remember seeing Richard Dawkins driving around with his little poodles and his bicycle and that was kind of the zeitgeist was the sense that that was the direction that that things would take, but now, you know, in Alison Milbank’s piece, she talks about the prevalence of belief in angels. And there was just an article released a few weeks ago that looked at how church attendance in young people has tripled in the last three years. So there seems to be this revival of both desire for the supernatural and the sense of God, but also just in the supernatural in the sense of things beyond our naturalistic material experience. So I have two phases of question. The first one is, have you kind of seen that to be true in your own pastoral work and work in the university? Do you think there’s more of an openness to the supernatural?

Andrew Davison: Well, if I think first of all about church going and belief in God in the Christian faith, I think some other religions as well, I think it’s pretty incontestable that there is something happening there, especially among younger people. There was that study by the Bible Society. It was very well designed as statistical study. Whether it’s quite borne out in records of church attendance, they made really, really strong claims for how many young people are going to church. I think that probably slightly overstates it, but they’re onto something and there is other evidence for it, but just maybe not the tripling or whatever the figure is. I’ve seen that in cathedral here, Christchurch College is unusually also a cathedral, perhaps unusually but uniquely in the world I think and especially over Christmas and Advent beforehand and at Easter, we’ve had really big congregations and sometimes just during the week even some will be quite full Then across the road at St. Aldates, which is more evangelical charismatic Anglican Church of England Parish.They had so many on Easter day, in one of their four services that they had about hundred people outside in the garden. I think they six hundred in the church and so many outside.

Then the university church, is more like gently Anglican, I suppose. They’ve had more Easter than I think has ever been recorded, I mean records might only go back 150 years. So I think across various different traditions, you’re seeing that. I think I also hear people talking about Christian things on the train or in the street more than I did. And maybe my ears are just attuned to it because of the story that’s being told. But I think it’s strangely, unusually prevalent. So I think something’s definitely going on there. And Oxford is a very international place. People come through from all over. I’ve spoken to a couple of people from Sweden, someone from Finland. I know quite a lot of people in United States. This seems to be a picture. So obviously part of what’s going on is that Christianity is just unfamiliar enough that it is interesting again. That’s part of it. I also think there’s just a wonderful, from a theological perspective, sense of grace here. And it could almost make me a sort of Presbyterian, you know, just divine predestination or something, but because there’s just, there’s something of divine gratuity here that when, in so many ways, the church around the place is on its knees.

There are all sorts of stories that are not great. And my own church, the Church of England, I feel like in all sorts of ways it’s lost its way. It’s not really put theology very prominently. There have been lots of divisions. I think everything’s all been a bit managerial. I mean, I love it, like, you know, I love my parents, but I have criticisms. And in a sense, it was the last place in the world to be able to sort things out. And across the churches there are things that we should be ashamed of. And against that backdrop, that people should be drawn back does seem to me a work of grace. And so whatever explanations there might be, and I’d be perfectly happy for people to be as anthropological as they want to be with academic disciplines. I think that’s only gonna tell you part of the story. Yeah, so I do think something’s happening and you also mentioned about belief in other things. I think that’s also true. I mentioned in the article that when I wrote it, there were big exhibitions in London and in Oxford on fortune telling, which were completely non-judgmental it wasn’t sort of, look at this ridiculous thing that people do. It was very much like anthropology, just to tell it as it is and try and inhabit it a bit from the inside and the exhibitions were full and people, especially the one in London, it seemed like people were actually doing this stuff.

I think social media gives some indication of a rise of you might say kind neo-paganism which I think is pretty terrifying or least you know worrying because the sort of ethical bearings of this are well there aren’t many of them and it’s quite Nietzschean, it’s quite sort of Herculean, it’s about the self-assertion over and against. not much care for the weak and poor and sick in all of this. In a way, that’s part of what, the pagan tradition is a broad thing, the Greek pagan tradition has some great philosophical traditions. That’s not what people are being drawn to, I think. It’s much more bloody and about sort of the . . . power. Power, exactly.

So I’m not an expert on that, that seems to be on the scene. Chesterton said a thing, when people don’t believe in God, they’ll believe in anything. And I do think that after a period when it might look like everything was becoming almost too reduced to the rational, I mean, when it looked like analytic philosophy was going to sort of rule the roost, that’s definitely not what the world looks like now. And I wonder why, and I’m not a social scientist but I can come up with some suggestions I mean you might say after a period that was very heavily invested in that and science and so on we’ve now got a world that’s looking like it’s in a mess and the science hasn’t and the rationality hasn’t sorted things out.

Also, things like the church once gave people the bearings in which they lived lives where they had to negotiate love and death and loss and transcendence and if the church isn’t there, if they don’t belong to other world religions either, they just don’t have the bearings. So they’ll make it, you know, they’ll pick and mix and try and find their bearings. So it does seem to me that on both of those fronts something is happening.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Absolutely. So there’s this kind of excitement about thinking that there’s something happening, there’s a movement of grace. But you’re also touching on there can be something of a caution that we might have also towards this kind of, as you said, the Chestertonian people that believe in God, that believe in anything. And it reminds me.

Andrew Davison: Which, by the way, I don’t want to be sort of some terrible, haughty, dismissive person there.

Joy Marie Clarkson: No, no. It’s an interesting sense of being open to everything perhaps. I think in my mind that I feel like I’ve seen somewhere that you read this but it reminds me of Susanna Clark’s novel Piranesi.

Andrew Davison: I haven’t I’m afraid.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think you would really like it. You know why I think I have that in my mind is because you wrote the book on participation and it’s a book very much about participation. Put it that way but one of the things that it touches on is this a little bit of a sense that part of the reason one might be careful about pursuing the occult or the quote-unquote spiritual is because there might actually be something there, right? There might actually be angels and forces that one might stumble upon that one couldn’t control, that was out of one’s control. And so for instance, when you think about the rise of the neo-pagan, it’s this pursuit of power. I actually grew up weirdly in a place in America. I grew up in Colorado. it’s ironically the center of American evangelicalism, because it has Focus on the Family, but it’s also the center of a lot of neo-pagan. And just experientially, one of the things I remember about that was it is this pursuit of power and of spiritual power and of kind of control. But very often, the source of that power does become out of people’s control. And, you know, I don’t want to sound too superstitious but there’s a sense that there’s a reason that Christianity has had some caution towards that. Would you agree or have something to say about that?

Andrew Davison: Well, I think I’d say two things. One is almost speaking as a scientist and the other is speaking as theologian. I think a lot of the neo-pagan world, for instance, trying not to be too rude, I think that some of it has a fairly tenuous connection to either say, ancient British paganism or ancient Greek paganism. So I think quite a lot of it is in that sense made up and there’s money to be made in writing books and so on.

Joy Marie Clarkson: …and in crystal shops, of which there are many in Cardiff’s ring.

Andrew Davison: Yes, so in that sense, the scientist in me wants to say, you know, let’s be cautious of some of this on that sort of sense of skepticism or just don’t get duped – exactly. But I am also a Christian and I have had years as an evangelical and I take that heritage very seriously and now I belong more in the Catholic wing of the church and you know all across that there’s a sense that whilst you don’t want to necessarily go into detail or have some kind of elaborate demonology or something which you know has its own dangers one can become too fascinated by these things but generally speaking Christianity has said there are more things than heaven and earth and are dreamt by and are dreamt about in our philosophy so certainly we’ll get behind the angels and the tradition is that some of them have fallen and you don’t want to be messing around with that, I think. So I wouldn’t want to be getting into detail, but the burden, rhythm of Christian theology down the ages and it would be, I’m sure, common to traditions is be cautious and be wary of things that involve the occult and the dead and that sort of thing. So I won’t say much more than that, but other than that, I just would be cautious.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah. So there’s one other, we’ll bring back to a more positive point, but there’s one other caution that I have towards the movement towards religion, which is that you also see this movement towards Christianity as it can be identified with a certain political aesthetic. So there’s a sense that people can sometimes become Christian because it is conservative or even to be a little bit. because it’s right wing, right? And that’s not to say that being Christian is conservative, but there can be, there have, I’ve observed this movement towards Christianity in that way. And that concerns me a little bit, mostly just because I want people to encounter God and it not to be movement. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Andrew Davison: Well, I thought that very much myself and one angle on this would be to say… Paul says, you know, be all things to all people that by all means you may save some. So in that sense, I want to be open minded about what people, what draws people. No, I don’t think the beauty of the music is at the absolute heart of Christianity, but if the beauty of the music is what draws people, fine. So in that sense, I want to be open, but I also want to say ultimately, Christianity isn’t about having it on your own terms. So if it’s something that you’re positioning or you’re using or it’s part of your, if it becomes instrumental, or if you’re having it, like I say, on these terms, because it serves some purpose, maybe that’s a stepping stone, but at the end of the day, one has to bow one’s head to Christ.

That’s one thing to say. On the political side, again, I want to preface it by saying no political tradition has the monopoly on the gospel or the Christian social tradition. I think one of the most unhelpful things about Christian life in the last few decades is the sense that you just need to pick one column. Either the Christian way is to this party or it’s to follow that party. And I think Christ speaks something different and the church has always spoken something different and it’s extremely unlikely that at any particular time the political settlement, one’s just going to be right and the other is just going to be wrong. So in that sense, I’m not picking sides, but there is a sense in which people are drawn to Christianity in some ways because of the decline of the West or because, well, of taking a position with respect to other religions. So one of the reasons that people have sometimes, I think in recent years, talked about the importance of Christianity is because they are taking a stand against Islam. And those things worry me in as much as, again, they’re not Christ and they’re not and also they’re not positive.

I gave a little talk about this in London a few weeks ago, or a month or two ago now, and I came at it through faith, hope, and love. And I said, I think a lot of people are drawn to the church because of hope and because of the lack of hope and the lack of hope in very mundane ways about having a house or being able to earn enough to be able to bring up family. mean, there are all sorts of reasons why people can be quite hopeless or lack hope, and the church is a community of hope and I think that’s a draw. And then the question is about faith, know, are they taking on the faith as it’s been delivered to us. And I think the answer to that probably is yes, broadly I think think the message seems to be that people are, especially young people, are being drawn to churches that are, in that sense, quite old-fashioned. So Pentecostal churches seem to be doing very well, the Roman Catholic Church too.

Within the Church of England, I suspect, it’s the ones that have the more open the prayer book and do what it says approach. Well, I suppose evangelicals don’t do that and they’re seeing quite a lot of growth. But again, they’re taking it very seriously. It’s not particularly revisionist. So in that sense, think, you know, there’s a spectrum there and that’s fine. But I think the faith is attracting people. then, you know, love is the greatest of the theological virtues. And I think it’s quite a good way of saying, you know, do you get from hope to faith to love because God is not said to be hope and God is not said to be faith but God is said to be love and if people have been if they’re coming to the church but in a sense it’s because of what they hate or what they fear that’s not gonna take them all the way and I think I come across so many stories of people’s lives really changing, like real sense of encounter with God that I’m actually quite hopeful that it’s faith and hope and love. But I think we’re right to say that whatever might serve as a bridge, if it doesn’t get to those three things and above all to love, then let’s be charitable and say it’s certainly not got all the way. I don’t particularly want to say this is counterfeit or that is sham or whatever, but it has to be a journey to love because it’s a journey to God.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah, and perhaps that is a point of hope for us, is, you know, in my cynical concern sometimes that people might be drawn for these less than straightforward reasons. Perhaps the response I should have is to pray and to hope that it would bring them to love, that it would bring them to that final point.

Andrew Davison: And I think, you know, we need to be charitable, we need to be loving and recognize that what might look unfamiliar doesn’t necessarily have to be sinister. So I think people are being drawn, for instance, to the Orthodox traditions because they’re quite ascetical and they involve real fasting and really getting up in the middle of the night and singing prayers for a long time.

I’m glad. I think one could be drawn there to discipline, if it is discipline. If it’s sort of, you know, again about power and strength or superiority, then that wouldn’t be enough. But I’ve talked to some Orthodox clergy and they say that the work of transformation is taking place. And to be honest, if all you were in it for was something that wasn’t Christianity, I think you’d find orthodoxy pretty tiresome, actually, because it’s so full of the faith and of Christ and the passion and the resurrection. If that’s not what you’re in it for, I suspect you’re not going to stick there for long.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think you’re right. So, I want to end our discussion; your essay, In the Supernatural issue, you define the natural and supernatural and you talk about de Lubac, but you end on this meditation on Christ and the ways that Christ helps us understand what is the supernatural, what is the natural, how does it to relate to human nature. Could you just say a little bit about that?

Andrew Davison: Well, I think in some ways it was the irrepressible teacher in me that I thought there was, there were various significant, beautiful points of theology that could be hung on this. And there were one, two things one could say about Christ and it was a good opportunity to say them. But I do think that the idea that grace perfects nature without abolishing it is very important and it’s perfectly illustrated in Christ that he’s no less human and natural for being God. And de Lubac talked about not the natural and the supernatural, but about nature and the supernatural. So the point is that the super-naturalized thing is always nature. mean, so it’s not like God’s, yeah, so the natural isn’t abolished and replaced by something else, but it is re-lifted to this new level. we, even in the vision of God, we are still creatures. And that is so beautifully put in thinking about Christ that neither nature is abolished. He’s not some hybrid. And there we see above all that the perfection of nature doesn’t rub it out. He’s the most human human. I think that’s a good way to end.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think so as well. Before we come to complete close, I have two questions for you. One is around the title of this podcast, we call Another Life is possible. And so we have the question of, is there any practice or habit you have in your life that reminds you that another life is possible or helps you live in a different way in the world? And then the second question is whether there’s an artwork, a piece of music, a book, a poem that you would recommend to people as they reflect on the supernatural. You can answer whichever question you want first.

Andrew Davison: I think the practice of morning and evening prayer is mundane to me. I’m used to it. I think that setting the time aside for reading the Bible and singing the Psalms and prayer is important. But maybe the danger is for me that becomes so familiar that it doesn’t necessarily seem like another life anymore. I would say that exposure to different sorts of Christians is good. So I was an Evangelical when I was here in Oxford. It’s not my tradition anymore. I’ve been so made so welcome by that community here in Oxford and experienced just such like just ragingly committed, hospitable, kind Christian lives and communities. But also when you visit a, I mean I mentioned Orthodoxy or a Roman Catholic monastery or something, I think there’s something about that difference of tradition that can be really arresting.

I think the practice of making a confession is, I mean that really is completely owning up to the ways in which you’ve lived a life that you don’t want to live and the sense that a different life with that sin put behind you is possible. not in everyone’s tradition but I think they’re the things I’d point to.

Joy Marie Clarkson: If I can say something very quickly, just on the note of finding enriching to encounter other traditions, I’ve been working on a little project on Monica, Augustine of Hippo’s mother. And there’s this wonderful little section in book six, I think, where Monica goes to visit him. And Monica’s very used to the kind of African form of Christianity where she would visit the martyrs, the saints and offer bread. And Ambrose, it is Ambrose, right, in Milan, tells her not to. And she just accepts it and Augustine’s feels she’s a bit … he almost says she’s being a bit inauthentic because you know she’s just listening to Ambrose because she thinks that Ambrose is winning Augustine over and he’s sort of frustrated by it.

But to me as I was reading back through I thought it was a really beautiful … and maybe this is just me reading imaginatively into it but it was the sense that Monica was seeing that her son who had been lost and had all these different kinds of intellectual queries and was spiritually distraught – she saw that this person, this bishop who was in a different tradition, let’s say, than she was, was having influence over her son and was having a positive influence. And so she was willing to entertain and submit to this different tradition because she saw that the Holy Spirit was working in her son’s life.

And I just thought that was really beautiful and something we could think about today. Something parents can think about too. Maybe you’ve had a child who’s encountering the faith in a different tradition than you, but there’s something about that being open to the work of God in these different traditions, I think can be really beautiful.

Andrew Davison: I’d also say, so you mentioned book six, The Confessions by Augustine. The stories of the saints or of Christians in who God has been particularly at work, that also reminds us of a different life. In terms of works of art, on the sort of supernatural, on the street kind of use, there is the most amazing wood carving in the gallery in Kansas City. I think it’s called the Nelson Atkins Gallery. But anyway, there’s this small wood carving of the expulsion of the rebel angels from heaven, which is the most intricate carving of wood that you can imagine. So have a look at that online. In terms of the Supernatural as the work of grace in the church, there’s a wonderful altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden from, I suppose, the late fifteenth century in Antwerp, the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece. And it shows these seven ways in which people encounter grace in baptism, Holy Communion, marriage, this sort of thing. And then the middle of the church where all these things are happening is Christ upon the cross. And it’s a lovely depiction of the encounter with grace through these things and it reminds us where it all comes from.

And in terms of music, it’s going to sound very cultured. But there’s a motet by Josquin des Prez, probably around the same time as Rogier van der Weyden. He’s from this Franco-Flemish school of church music in the fifteenth century. And he wrote a motet, which has got Christmas text. The Latin begins, Praeter rerum seriem. (Outside of the order of things, one who is born who is both God and man). it’s got, you know, praetor is the word, but it means the same as super. So outside, beyond. And I just think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of music of that century and it’s exactly on topic. So I recommend that piece of music by Josquin des Prez.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Wonderful, thank you very much both for those recommendations and for this wonderful conversation. I will try to put all of the recommendations you’ve just given now along with the poem that you mentioned earlier into the show notes. But thank you so much for joining me today.

Andrew Davison: Well thank you for the work that you do and your wonderful magazine.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Well, friends, that’s all I have for you today. If you enjoyed this episode and want to keep listening to Another Life, please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also follow Plough and me on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Substack. And finally, if you liked this episode, share it with someone in real life or online. So thanks for listening and don’t forget, another life is possible.