Whose confession? Which tradition? (A preliminary critique of Penny Thompson, 2004)

Abstract

What does Penny Thompson really want? Reading her article in BJRE 26 (1) proved a baffling experience: it clearly wanted to say something, and to say it passionately, yet signally failed to do so. It fails largely because it lacks an argument; there seems also to be conceptual muddle at its heart. A fuller critique will need to attend to Thompson’s reading of religious education’s history, particularly to her use of evidence—but that is a story for another night. Consequently, this brief critique has at its core four questions to elicit clarity where at present there is none: First, does Penny Thompson want so to revision religious education in community schools that she and other aspirants to ‘Christian confessional religious education’ may freely work to convert young people to ‘Christianity’ and to nurture them in a Christian tradition? Second, in what sense, or senses, does Thompson want readers to understand her phrase, ‘the truth of the Christian faith?’ Third, in whose confession and in which tradition does Thompson want this Christian confessional religious education to be rooted? Fourth, is Penny Thompson willing to allow Christian teachers to present alternative understandings of Christianity, critical of her (implied) view? These questions are preceded by reflection on the form of her article’s argument and on its use of ‘confess’ and its cognates.

Notes

* 6 Witham Drive, Huntington, York YO32 9YD, UK. Email: [email protected]

The sequence of italicised sentences in the first section is from Penny Thompson’s synopsis (p. 61).

Penny Thompson has her clear view about the relation of ‘political’ and ‘educational’ elements in the formulation of public policy about schools; she takes up this division from the beginning of her discussion, but does not appear to grasp that there is inevitably a dialogue between a political dimension and an educational, for education is a public activity in the polis.

‘Astley, however, like Barnes, accepts the force of the political argument in relation to confessionalism in community or foundation schools without a religious character’ (Thompson, 2004, p. 70).

I have used inverted commas to indicate my dissent from Penny Thompson’s misleading usage of ‘confess’ throughout her article.

The Thompson article uses ‘confess’ adjectivally 21 times: ‘confessional’ (14) and ‘non‐confessional’ (7). As a noun, the root makes 22 appearances: ‘confessionalism’ (13); ‘non‐confessionalism’ (5); ‘confessionalists’ (1); ‘confession(s)’ (3). As a verb, ‘confess’ appears twice as a participle, ‘confessing’, and as ‘confessed’. It makes one appearance in an active, finite form.

Working Paper 36 is hardly ‘official disapproval’ for this was avowedly a discussion document. I am grateful to Penny Thompson for sending me back to a document of great clarity, insight and humanity. It has been much misunderstood and misrepresented; the time has come to affirm its many virtues as well as recognise its shortcomings.

Working Paper 36 used ‘confessional’ as a descriptor of one way of setting about religious education. ‘Non‐confessional’ would then include both the differing ‘anti‐dogmatic’ and ‘undogmatic’ (or ‘phenomenological’) approaches which were not ‘confessional’ (Working paper 36, p. 21).

This would make a useful study for postgraduates; who are confessionalists? How may I recognise ‘non‐confessionalism’? In what ways do these portmanteau terms prosper or confuse Thompson’s case?

‘Confessionalist’ was cited, for example, by John Hull (1998, p. 36), as an unsatisfactory way of describing ‘teachers of religion who allow their personal faith to colour their presentation’. Twenty years ago it was clear that this usage muddied the waters; in Penny Thompson’s article non‐confessionalism proves even more unhelpful.

Which underlies the use by Working Paper 36 of ‘confessional approaches’—and it is Thompson who makes much of that paper.

Which presumably also covers her use of ‘disguised confessions’ and ‘without having a view on what is being “taught”’(p. 66). That learning occurs within, or by creating, or extending, conceptual frameworks is incontrovertible; who has denied it? See Thompson, p. 63.

This way forward is really a way back, for this was, essentially, the religious education paradigm of the Sixties. Will Canute drown?

She seems to be unaware of Smart’s earlier‐quoted aim that religious studies do not preclude a committed approach provided that it is open (Working Paper 36, p. 38).

Perhaps I should note here, although it stands outside this critique’s immediate concerns, that I find attempts to root Christian traditions primarily or essentially in ‘doctrine’ or ‘belief’ to be little more than recycling of seventeenth‐century distortions clustered around the word ‘religion’; it is high time that this distorting was exposed for what it is—distortion. See, for example, Wright (1992), especially pp. 452–56, for an insight into New Testament perspectives on what the heart of Christian tradition may be said to be; see also Lash (1996), who draws on a wide range of writers reflecting on what happened in the seventeenth century.

The apparent agreement on this model is more an agreement on the agenda that divides than on the nature of ‘Christian’ faith.

New Testament writers speak, for example, of being ‘in Christ’, of ‘the Body of Christ’, ‘the household of faith’. Individualist readings of the New Testament frequently completely miss the point of a writer’s formulation.

‘We’ stands for all who wish to share helpfully in considered debate about religious education in schools.

E.g., ‘Yet Christian religious education teachers, particularly those possessed of a traditional stance, find themselves inhibited’ (p. 66); also, ‘… to put forward persuasive reasons for Christian beliefs seems to many teachers to breach the requirement not to promote a particular religious belief’ (p. 66).

John Hull (1998) offered an interesting four‐fold typology of Christianity.

A major research project at Warwick University is currently examining ‘Christianity’ in religious education.

At least one reader hopes that this degree of distortion of religious education’s history is a unique event.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Doble *

* 6 Witham Drive, Huntington, York YO32 9YD, UK. Email: [email protected]