Guest Blogger: Christopher Hancock

The Very Rev’d Dr. Christopher Hancock is Director of the Institute for Religion and Society in Asia, and an Honorary Fellow of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.  Until 2009 he was founding-Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China (most recently based at King’s College, London).  Since 2004, Chris has travelled widely in China and taught extensively in Chinese universities and in other parts of the world.  Chris is a corresponding editor of Christianity Today (from 1990), and a visiting professor at the South Asia Institute of Advanced Christian Studies, Bangalore (from 1996).  Prior to 2004, Chris was Dean of Bradford Cathedral, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, a professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, and a university lecturer in Cambridge. Over the years he has also taught theology in the USA, Romania, Switzerland, Israel, Argentina, and, most recently, Myanmar.

“POLITICAL IMAGINATION”

Introduction

I have been asked to say something about IRSA (the Institute for Religion and Society in Asia, based in Oxford) and about an issue of particular interest to me at the moment (in this case, ‘Political Imagination’, of which more anon).

The origins and purpose of IRSA

IRSA traces its roots to the Durham doctoral project I began with Stephen Sykes in 1978. The theme for which I was given a three-year grant by the UK government was ‘The Theology of Worship of the “Little Flock” Church in Mainland China’. I had been interested in China since my Oxford undergraduate days and when research was proposed, after two years of my ordination training in Cranmer Hall, it was to a Chinese theme I turned, with a view to a missionary educator career. As it was, after nine months of Mandarin and much research, Stephen and I turned away from the non-missionary “Little Flock” church (recognising in them few of the resources to interpret indigenous Chinese Christianity which we had anticipated) but I continued working in the area of the ‘Theology of Worship’. Roll on almost twenty-five years and time spent teaching theology at Cambridge and in the US, and for fifteen years or so as a visiting professor in India, and I found myself engaged with Christian Studies programmes at Peking University and many other Chinese universities. It was an irresistible scenario, and so in 2004 my wife and I left the relative comfort of a Deanery and headed off into an unknown future teaching theology in China and India, but based in Oxford. Working with Chlöe Starr, whose father Brian had taught me Mandarin here in Durham, we launched the Centre for the Study of Christianity in China in 2004. Since then the work has grown and expanded beyond anything we could have imagined. Early on Japanologists and Koreanists encouraged us to expand to include them, since Jesuit mission in China was broadly pan-Asian and Confucianism is no respecter of national boundaries. As the work progressed I found myself more and more convinced that Chinese exceptionalism and wilful privileging of Chinese issues demanded the work become international in focus. After five years and a spell at King’s College, London, IRSA was born in April 2009 with a vocation to study the interface of Asian spiritual realities and the history and contemporary development of Asian societies. The work is religiously plural and thoroughly international. At root, as the strap line of our brochure indicates, our commitment is to use research as a basis for reconciliation, believing ignorance fuels conflict and understanding harmony.

Re-imagining Burma

One of the projects IRSA is presently engaged in is preparation of another international conference (conferences and academic collaboration have been a feature of our life) based this time not in Oxford, Washington, or Beijing, but in JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) in Delhi (India’s premier university), with whom my Indian colleague is working increasingly closely. The theme of the conference is ‘Re-imagining Burma’. We are gathering the academic leaders of Burma studies from around the world (and I use the word Burma innocently, I ought to stress!), under the watchful gaze, we anticipate, of government representatives from China, India, the UK and US (at least), to reflect critically and creatively on what kind of place Burma really is, and really could be. It will be, I pray, the best kind of Track II, soft politics, which our kind of engaged theological project can undertake.

Why the theme, ‘Re-imagining Burma’? (here I begin to touch on the topic of this paper) I suppose for two primary reasons. First, because like most people I am appalled at the reports we receive from Burma of human rights abuse and political oppression; having been teaching hermeneutics in Yangon at the height of the Buddhist monks’ protest in late 2007, I have some sense of what the military regime is capable of. Second, because it seems that the only way most non-Burmese governments and individuals can think about Burma is in terms of human rights abuse and political oppression. Our thinking is trapped. The conference is about using the imagination of informed academics to re-construe perceptions and possibilities for the people and government of Burma, viz. to recognize Burma’s natural resources and need for ethnic harmony, to celebrate Burma’s many cultures and Buddhist traditions, to honour Burma’s history and role in the world prior to the junta’s ascendancy – and, of course, our hope is that this will provide some new options for the military leaders, who to specialist observers seem increasingly aware they are in an unsustainable, self-destructive position. But time will tell…

‘Political Imagination’

The Burma conference, and we have other ones in the pipe-line, is an exercise in what I would call ‘Political Imagination’. It seeks to bring together the harsh realities of real politik and the creative possibilities of human imagination, but to do so in a more theologically informed and morally accountable way than the devious use of imagination by political ‘spin doctors’ or ‘image consultants’ and by the shady purveyors of ‘creative truth’ and the ‘calculated leak’. My starting-point is – and this comes as much from a sense of admiration for the way Asian theology is being done today as from a sense of frustration that international relations seem so often caught in unproductive stand-offs – that imagination is a God-ordained faculty which is as applicable to political discourse and international relations as it is to the work of the artist, advertiser, theologian or writer. This ‘Political Imagination’ is, I would argue, a way of admitting divine and human creativity as affective instruments to advance the common good.

The gift of imagining

It will be self-evident to the theologically trained that I have taken a view on the character and legitimacy of ‘imagination’ as a divine gift and human resource. From Coleridge onwards, imagination, as either a ‘primary’ function that shapes perception of the external world in accord with ‘the eternal art of creation’ by God (see ST Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817) xiii, 202) or as a ‘secondary’ act that ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’ and so penetrate to the essence of things, affords the historian (cf. RG Collingwood, The Idea of History, 1946), the philosopher (cf. Mary Warnock, Imagination, 1976; RL Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination, 1968; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 1977), the philosopher of science (cf. Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1962; Ian Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms, 1974), and the theologian or phenomenologist (cf. David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology, 1975; George Tavard, Scripture and Tradition, 1976; and David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 1981; David Kaufmann, The Theological Imagination, 1981; John McIntyre, Faith, Theology and the Imagination, 1987; JP Mackey, ed., Religious Imagination, 1986) extraordinary tools to replay reality in new, integrative, playful ways. As one writer put it, ‘Imagination becomes a curse only if it becomes an exercise in vanity’. To Einstein, in contrast to the critique of Enlightenment rationality, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’.

Imagination and Resurrection

In the list of those who have in recent years drawn on the creative, intellectual and theological potential of imagination, politicians and political theorists are singularly absent. In many respects this is unsurprising. Those who deal with real politik do so with a toughened suspicion of mystery and transcendence, and an infamous disregard, until forced to do so by 9/11 and the rise of various forms of politically and militarily conscientized religious ‘fundamentalism’, of the reality of ‘faith’ at an individual and corporate level. Much has changed, of course. The Academy has still to play catch-up to render theological reflection intelligible and relevant to governments and government agencies; however, pro-offering ‘imagination’ as a forum where divine and human creativity meet may provide politicians and diplomats with a hitherto neglected resource to re-construe global realities. For, when we ‘imagine’ we release a power in our mind, or spirit that shifts the pieces in the puzzle of life and looks at problems from alternative perspectives. The bigot, the proud, the lazy and the defeatist, do not imagine; for they cannot consider their perception or experience false or flawed, provisional or changeable. A faith tradition that admits ‘resurrection’ as a pivotal principle invites more than its adherents to consider life from other angles and to imagine a world where the dead are raised and new life is formed.