The Go-Between God

By John V. Taylor

John Taylor’s most famous book is a reminder that the Holy Spirit urges us toward a communal humanity. Taylor’s is a message especially pertinent in an age of crushing multinational capitalism and a rising tide of individual greed and fear of the Other.

Based on his Cadbury lectures delivered in 1967, The Go-Between God is now considered one of the most important works ever written on the Holy Spirit and mission. This edition contains a new foreword by Jonny Baker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780334060161

John V. Taylor

The Right Reverend John Vernon Taylor was an English bishop and theologian who was the Bishop of Winchester from 1974 to 1984. Taylor was one of the most gifted and widely admired churchmen of his time; in 1975 he became the first priest to be consecrated directly to the See of Winchester since the Middle Ages. Taylor also wrote several books, two of which, The Primal Vision (1963), an evaluation of the central features of African religion, and The Go-Between God (1972), an interpretation of the work of the Holy Spirit, became classics.

Book preview

The Go-Between God

The Go-Between God

The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission

John V. Taylor

SCM_press_fmt.gif

© John V. Taylor 1972, 2004

© Estate of John V. Taylor 2021

First published in 1972 by SCM Press Ltd

Sixteenth impression 1999

Second edition published in 2004 by SCM Press

Second impression 2005

Third edition published in 2021 by SCM Press

Editorial office

3rd Floor, Invicta House,

108–114 Golden Lane,

London EC1Y 0TG, UK

www.scmpress.co.uk

SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

HAM.jpg

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd

13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,

Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work

Unless stated otherwise, Scripture quotations taken from the New English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1961, 1970.

All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-0-334-06014-7

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE • FACTS OF LIFE

1. ANNUNCIATION

The Intermediary Spirit and the Impulse of the Mission

2. CONCEPTION

The Creator Spirit and the Range of the Mission

3. GESTATION

The Power of the Spirit and the Violence of the Mission

4. LABOUR

The Spirit of Prophecy and the Historical Perspective of the Mission

5. BIRTH

The Spirit in Jesus and the Focus of the Mission

6. BREATH

The Indwelling Spirit and the Humiliation of the Mission

PART TWO • STYLE OF LIFE

7. GROWING

The Evangelical Spirit and the Structures of Mission

8. EXPLORING

The Freedom of the Spirit and the Search for a New Ethic

9. MEETING

The Universal Spirit and the Meeting of Faiths

10. PLAYING

Pentecostalism and the Supernatural Dimension in Secular Age

11. LOVING

Prayer in the Spirit and the Silence of Mission

Foreword: Fire in the Bones

JONNY BAKER

John Taylor was General Secretary of the Church Mission Society (CMS) during 1963–74, and The Go-Between God was published towards the end of that period. Some readers may not have heard of him or know a whole lot about CMS, and be wondering why a book published in the 1970s has ongoing relevance today. Let me say a word about both.

The Church Mission Society was founded in 1799 by a discussion group called the Eclectics Society, which met in London to consider contemporary issues. In March 1799 the topic of discussion was ‘What methods can we use more effectually to promote the knowledge of the Gospel among the Heathen?’ Within a month a vehicle was set up to answer that question, called the Society for Missions to Africa and the East, instituted by members of the Established Church, now known as the Church Mission Society. In the society were friends from the Clapham Sect, whose members had experienced the renewing energy and fervour of the Spirit from the evangelical awakenings inspired by the likes of the Wesleys, but who had remained in the Church of England to renew it from within. The Clapham Sect was also involved in various other projects and ideas, notably the campaign for the abolition of slavery but also a range of other social and political issues. It had a vision of mission as transforming the world – its people and society.

The initial contexts to which missionaries travelled and pioneered were Sierra Leone, New Zealand, Canada, China, Japan, Malta, India, Ceylon and the Arctic Circle. A substantial proportion of the Anglican Communion arose from these missions. The goal early on was to develop an indigenous church and then move on so that the local churches were not overly dependent and could conduct their own affairs, and the society could move on to new territories. In practice that did not happen as easily or successfully as envisaged. The history is filled with inspired stories of mission, with really good mission principles and approaches that took context and culture seriously. But it was a time of expansion of the British empire in the colonial period, and the missions were without doubt shaped by stories of British superiority and a narrative of civilizing that was at times colluding, at times conflicted and at times resisting.

Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century and perhaps CMS had drifted away from its founding purpose and looked more like the Church Aid Society, with a range of partners around the world. Reflections on colonialism meant that there was a lot of soul searching about the place of Western missions. Christianity in Britain was no longer the force it once was. John Taylor and his predecessor Max Warren were both brilliant missiologists who brought new energy and vision for mission through their leadership and a refounding of CMS. Their particular contribution was to identify how the world and church had changed and to reflect on the place of CMS in that new world. They both reflected deeply on mission in relation to other faiths and cultures, and also on the purpose of mission societies. John Taylor’s view of mission societies, taken from his newsletters, includes the recurring theme of the challenge to remain a movement rather than to institutionalize. He is keen to resist the settler impetus – the urge to settle down, to become so deeply established that lightness of touch and moving on become difficult, horizons become limited by too much stability, and presentism, imagination and risk are side-lined. Shortly after becoming General Secretary, he reflects on the possibility for an organization such as CMS, which was once a movement, to recapture that vitality to push out new shoots again that will ‘bud into fresh forms of experimentation and response’. He also named Britain as a context for mission as needy as Asia or Africa. Up to this point, mission had always been about foreign lands.

I joined CMS with an interest in cross-cultural mission as it related to Britain. To be honest, I didn’t know a lot about it, but in my work with young people I was facing questions of mission and culture. There was an expectation that young people would join the church, but it felt like there was a huge gap between youth culture and church culture. A question I had was how to grow church in youth or postmodern cultures, rather than expecting them to join in with the church’s way of doing things. This was all inspired by reading stories of cross-cultural mission. To put it bluntly, I thought CMS might have the gold in this area that I could steal. When I arrived hungry to learn, people pointed me in the direction of John Taylor as someone who carried the gold. They were not wrong.

The Go-Between God pulls together and deepens many of the ideas Taylor shared in his newsletters. He describes it as an attempt to interpret the meaning of Christian mission for contemporary humanity within the context of a fresh understanding of the Holy Spirit and his action in the world. He does that magnificently. It is his best-known and most loved book. I am delighted that SCM has republished it for new readers because he was so ahead of his time and what he has to say is so pertinent today.

John Taylor’s starting point is that the Spirit is not simply present in the lives of churches and Christians, not contained or controlled or limited. The glory of God is everywhere in all things. The Spirit is present in all cultures, all religions and all peoples. Every particle in the universe is charged with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Taylor has some lovely turns of phrase and one-liners. I have often thought he would have a lot of followers on twitter if he were alive today. One phrase that caught my attention and has stuck with me is that the Spirit’s milieu is the world rather than the church. That is the frame within which he places everything else. Moments of encounter, of attention, of awareness can happen to anyone anywhere. In those moments there is a current of communication, a connection, a sense of presence, an aliveness. The Holy Spirit is the Go Between who sets up this current of communication that flows like electricity between a person and the other whether that other is a landscape or another person.

He describes the Spirit as ‘fire in the bones’. By it he does not mean a pentecostal enthusiasm, or the sense of presence in church, or simply in the life of Christians, though it might be those things too. It’s more a deeper sense of awareness of a call towards greater personhood, an awareness that stimulates initiative, spontaneity and choice towards life between things as they are and as they could be, and that leads to giving oneself for others rather than self-interest. This process and these encounters he names are remarkable for their ordinariness, a kind of seeing with new eyes. This broad horizon or large frame is so important that Taylor spends the first four chapters on it. He was writing at a time when there were the early stages of charismatic renewal in the Church of England, but his interest is the Spirit’s work in the world rather than simply in the church.

Taylor famously describes mission as seeing what God is doing and joining in. This makes so much more sense when the Spirit’s milieu, and the frame of reference, is the whole world, where God is already at work renewing and healing all things. It then becomes an important question as to how we become open to seeing and noticing, to being more receptive to God.

Shortly after I joined CMS with some others, we signed up to run a stand at the London Mind Body Spirit Festival. This was a new-age event with a marketplace of all sorts of alternative spiritualities and experiences. When I was younger I would have prayed against such things but here I was sensing the Spirit calling us to take a risk and cross a border. It was about this time that I first read John Taylor and it was like scales being removed from my eyes. Rather than seeing this as somehow dangerous and worldly, I began to look for where God might be at work and seek to join in, and we found great openness from seekers to prayer and to healing and to talk about Jesus. I found myself prayerfully seeking the Spirit’s guidance and gifts, and realized that the experience of the life of the Spirit, which I had been disillusioned with when it felt stuck and introverted in church, made so much more sense in the context of mission. I didn’t need to throw out any of it – I just needed to get out, cross a border in mission and join in. At that first festival, word went round that ‘the energy was strong in our booth’, which was others’ way of saying and sensing the ‘beyond in our midst’, that current of communication, the Go Between God.

The Holy Spirit is the chief actor in mission, so for Taylor missionary training should focus on the direction of contemplative practices that help with discernment of what the Spirit is doing. If we learn to recognize his actions we shall find him in the life of the world everywhere. Over the last ten years of training with pioneers and also with CMS’s partnership for missional church – a programme to help churches become more mission oriented – I have been struck that this area of contemplative action is now a big focus for us. We might just be catching up with Taylor!

This mission in the world consists in particular of the light that the Spirit shines on Jesus Christ. Taylor loves the world and its people and cultures, loves mission and loves Jesus. I think of these as his three loves. In Chapters 5 and 6 he explores the Spirit in Jesus and in the early church. The Spirit brings a new mode of relationship – an overwhelming sense of being loved as God’s children, being accepted, being adopted, of a closeness with God as the reality of forgiveness and grace comes home. We see that supremely in Jesus’ life.

Part Two is a sort of so what? How does this life of the Spirit affect our lifestyle, our church, our ethics, our interactions with other faiths and our life of prayer? Taylor is brutally honest about the painful reality of the church, which so often doesn’t resemble the Spirit’s life and freedom. He wonders why it is that within one generation new churches often turn gospel freedom into law. He says the church has become institutionalized, become one of the powers it is meant to withstand. But while the church in her rigidity makes various attempts to codify the Spirit, the good news is that the Holy Spirit will not be bound and may even disobey our canons!

In an extraordinary passage that foresees the fresh expressions movement, Taylor goes on to suggest that expressions of church should be as close to the life of people as possible. The ideal shape of church is that which provides the least possible withdrawal of Christians from life in the world. He envisages little congregations that are small enough for mutual awareness and large enough to embody the kingdom in their fellowship. These should not be seen collectively as a halfway house to draw people back into proper church or as an interim structure – they are church. It is also the perfect place to share bread and wine round a coffee table without religiosity, the normal way the majority of Christians can make communion central to their lives. And with a sense of urgency he says he is not talking about twenty years’ time, but now. The Spirit is on the move at the growing edges, and the church should recognize it and make it easy for people by taking away red tape. Too many people view these little congregations as peripheral or subnormal, he says. He imagines the parish like a cathedral or a minster, gathering the varied smaller units so they are not too ingrown. But for him small is normative if the church is to respond to the life of the Spirit in the world. It is a truly remarkable chapter both in its imagining of what has come to pass and of the way the church has continued to struggle with the ‘sin of rigidity’, and we are fifty years on.

Prophets know what time it is, and Taylor is widely recognized as being prophetic. He spent a lot of time with other cultures and religions, reflecting on the place of mission and Christ in relation to them. He sees other religions as traditions of response to the reality the Holy Spirit has set before their eyes, and has such love and respect for them. He has no doubt that Christ is present and wonders what the at-homeness of Christ might look like. He has such freedom and openness to the possibilities that can emerge from inside other cultures and religions, and reminds us that Christ is not the property of Christians. Indeed he worries that we can be a stumbling block. In his provocative way he suggests that religion, including Christianity, can be a way of escaping God, so the Christian faith might need to strip itself of Christian religion! This is certainly a powerful reflection on Western Christianity in a post-colonial world. Relating to the other is one of the pressing questions of our time. This has been foregrounded through the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the US in 2020. It has been highlighted through tighter control of borders with a lot of shameful anti-immigration rhetoric and growing nationalism. The huge disparities between the wealthy and the rest has spun way out of control and created a different kind of othering. The earth herself has been pushed to her limits, perhaps beyond. She too sadly has become other. The notion of the Spirit as the Go Between has a new poignancy and urgency. We need the gift of the Spirit to animate the spaces between us and others to help us to truly be present and to really see one another as we really are, as gift with love, and to see Christ present in the other.

I recently presented a paper on mission at a conference. Prior to writing it I had been reading John Taylor’s newsletters. I began to realize they had an effect on me beyond simply the ideas and imagining in the writing. They gave me a freedom and boldness of speech. In the wake of coronavirus there are many areas of society where people are saying we must not go back to the way we did things before. We need a new normal that requires courage and imagination. Taylor’s writing will help those who sense that this is true for the church and spark such an adventure of the imagination. I hope that as you read The Go-Between God you will find freedom and boldness in your own imagining, speech and life. May this book once again inspire us to join in with what the Spirit is doing in the world. Where there is the Spirit of the Lord there is freedom.

Preface

In 1967, the Senate and Council of the University of Birmingham invited me to give the Edward Cadbury Lectures in Theology. For me it was an experience of stimulation rather than fulfilment and this book is very largely a rewriting of the original series of eight lectures. In the meantime some passages have already appeared in the CMS News-letter and a portion of Chapter 9 in a small book of essays entitled Face to Face (Highway Press). I apologize to all who while reading the pages that follow will have the sensation of having heard it before, and confess that very often the reason will not be the one I have just given, but the plain fact that I am a borrower and retailer of other men’s ideas.

The contents of each chapter are indicated in the sub-titles. The schema of main chapter titles is one which I personally have found full of suggestion, but it is a counterpoint upon the main theme and should not be taken too seriously.

Introduction

This much-loved and highly influential book had an easy conception, but a traumatic labour and a difficult birth. In later years, John Taylor told the story and spoke of this birthing on a number of occasions, both private and public.

In 1966, when he was General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, the senate and council of the University of Birmingham invited him to give the eight Edward Cadbury Lectures. His predecessor at CMS, Max Warren, suggested a title: ‘The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission’. More specifically, Max Warren raised the intriguing question: ‘What was the Holy Spirit doing at Calvary?’

Immediately, this appealed to John for several reasons.

First, he was convinced that the Christian Church had passed through two distinct historical phases. The era of God the Father was notable for its tremendous emphasis on the divine sovereignty, underpinned by the Greek philosophical structure about God’s intangibility, immutability and omnipotence. In this schema, even Christ himself was seen as a daunting, plenipotentiary figure. Characteristic of the era of Jesus was the focus on the humanity of the divine son, and his gentle mother. This led to a softening of attitudes, a gentling of Church discipline, a new warmth toward people in their human frailty, emphasis on salvation, mercy, redemption. The phase just beginning, of course, was the era of the Holy Spirit, and this would surely help Christians face the pressing fact of the other great faiths. At that time, John was living in the word ‘outreach’, as were many of his closest friends and colleagues, but what would evangelism look like in the newly emerging global village?

Secondly, as Warden of Mukono Theological College in Uganda in the 1950s, he had written some retreat addresses on the Holy Spirit, and given similar addresses in schools and seminaries and clergy conferences since his return to England. Now, with no time for fresh reading, John was relieved to think he might simply expand this existing material after deeper reflection. As it stood, it was all fairly conventional. It began with a chapter on the Creator Spirit active in all life, equally available to every person and to all peoples.

At that time, I was very much intrigued by the work of Professor Alistair Hardy, the biologist, who had shown the place of individual choice in the evolutionary process. This seemed to me theologically rather significant because it gave room for some sort of stirring of adventure and choice in individuals of the species. The whole thing wasn’t just blind accident and chance, and I began to think of the Holy Spirit as the One who pushed creatures towards the necessity of choosing, insisting that they choose and therefore grow.¹

This opening chapter was followed by one about God speaking through the prophets, those who saw clearly and spoke knowingly about the current state of things and their consequences. ‘Then, in my christocentric way, I had a major chapter on the person of Jesus, the Spirit-filled man, divine because he was brim-full of the Spirit. There was nothing in him that was not Spirit-inspired and Spirit-filled.’² Chapters on the Holy Spirit at Calvary and the Spirit in the Church followed naturally. Finally, there was a chapter on the Spirit of prayer.

At Birmingham, as elsewhere, all this was well received, and John got a lot of flattering response. But for all the obvious enthusiasm of the audience, he himself remained strangely dissatisfied and so he hesitated to publish as he was required to do. He felt he had no choice but to wait, because, in his own words, the heart was missing – the key to unlock the mystery. ‘I had written Hamlet without the Prince, and I had no idea what else there was to say.’³

Three deaths then began to play their part. There was the death of Joe Fison, Bishop of Salisbury, who had been chaplain at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, and whose friendship with John began on his first day in college. Fison breezed into his room, looked at his bookshelves, mostly poetry and drama and literary criticism from his time at Cambridge, alongside the brand new unopened theological textbooks. ‘That’s right, John, keep both roads open.’ God is to be found on the theological or biblical road, the road of religious experience and study, but also on the road that is wide open to life. ‘And not just poetry, not just literature, but experience of the facts. After all, a poet is somebody who is essentially aware of the facts, sometimes intensely hurt by them, but he presents life as it is, he presents experience in truth. To be aware of what it actually is, for theology means reflecting on things as they are, in the light of the Bible.’⁴ All his work on the Cadbury Lectures had been a sort of tribute to Joe Fison and his influence. Having drawn freely on Fison’s rich teaching, John Taylor now felt he had been left an unfinished task. Something yet remained to be discovered, and this made him even more uneasy than before.

Then came another, much more traumatic, death.

A woman who had been in love with me and I with her when we were both 18, and again in a second bout when I was at Wycliffe Hall, and who had later married an old friend of mine, suddenly wanted to recover our former relationship in the mid-60s, and when I said it was impossible and in any case did not reciprocate her feelings, took an overdose. Her husband did not blame me, but it had a wretched effect on me, and Peggy very gently and skilfully talked me into having two sessions with a psychotherapist.⁵

In point of fact, this was a very reluctant encounter. John says he was dragged to the psychotherapist ‘kicking and screaming’. He didn’t like the experience, and soon ended the therapy, but not before it opened the flood-gates, so he found himself talking very freely for hours on end and in a newly honest way. This intensely painful period, with its swirling mixture of regret and guilt and longing, turned into the birth pangs of the book. Raw and open, John was fertile soil for what came next.

Within a matter of weeks, as he was travelling back to London from Oxford, the decisive thing happened.

I was reading at the time a little paperback by Norman Pittenger called God in Process, an application of process philosophy to the Christian gospel.⁶ I didn’t get very far with the book, I can’t remember a great deal about it, but I’ve still got it because on the two blank pages at the end I scribbled the thoughts which suddenly came bursting out of me like a volcano.

It was one of those incredibly beautiful English evenings, the sun low. There were long blue shadows from all the corn stooks over the stubble fields, and from the trees and hedges. There was a flaming sunset in the west, and after this my eyes just dwelt on that scene as the train travelled through the Berkshire countryside, and my thoughts went to what I was experiencing. And I found myself wondering about this experience, which was a very common one to me, which I could remember from childhood days, of an extraordinary feeling of being in communion, communication – with a scene, with beauty, as though there was a kind of current between myself and what I was looking at. And I think, probably for the first time in my life, I actually asked the question: ‘What creates this feeling of being addressed by what I am looking at?’ And then I started to scribble, and I’m reading to you now from those two back pages of the little paperback. It’s almost illegible, I was writing so fast.

The source of any profound human response is not the responding person, but the presence to which one responds. That is what creates the experience: awareness and recognition towards a beautiful thing, or towards a truth. I don’t work it out, think it out. I have a sense, rather, of waiting for it, waiting for a disclosure. It is already there, ungrasped; I must relax, be still, to catch it. Attendre, attention, attendant, en attendant – all these words seem to suggest that tension of listening, waiting to be spoken to, waiting for something that is going to be said. But what brings these acts? What brings me and that truth together? What makes that beauty present to me? What makes me attentive to it? As soon as being becomes presence, as soon as those things out there, outside, become present to me, they have already become part of me, part of that to which they are present. What we call the object of our response is really the subject. It is the activator of the whole experience. And yet not so, for there is a third party between that out there and me within. There is a ground of our presence toward one another, a third party in every encounter who effects the introduction, makes two beings mutually aware, turns being into presence. The chorus-ending in Euripides, yes. Browning has it. Romeo and Juliet encountering across the room, palm to palm. Adam knew Eve, his wife. ‘Knew’ – the Haggia Sophia, the Wisdom, the awareness that is at the heart of all understanding. An element in which two are intimately one, like water. Contact of bodies when swimming are so extraordinarily intimate. Think of skin-diving, or embracing somebody under the water. Life in the womb is water-life, and then we are born into air-life, which gives us our separateness from each other. And yet, we constantly discover a spiritual umbilical taking us back through recognition and awareness. Water and the Spirit – the most profoundly simple conversation in literature. So, the Holy Spirit is he who makes one aware of the other, who gives one to the other. Pay attention.⁷

That’s where it ended in the little book, and that’s where the bigger book began. All the material in the Birmingham lectures was appropriate and useful, but it needed a fresh introduction and needed to be lit up all the way through with this new insight. Somehow, he needed to show how this commonplace, ordinary, everyday experience is available to everyone. The Holy Spirit is first and foremost Lord of all life, never narrowly concerned with religion, touching all of us without exception, making us aware and awake and alive. The Spirit is the anonymous spark of recognition, the current of communion, of union, nodding to us, beckoning, demanding our attention, the invisible and eternal go-between.

While John was engrossed in completely re-working his familiar material, however, another death occurred. This time it was James Welch, on old friend who had been director of religious broadcasting for the BBC, and then lecturer in philosophy at the University of Surrey. At his funeral, John heard a reading from Martin Buber’s classic book, I and Thou.⁸

Suddenly here it was all being said for me, all said long before in that little gem of a book which I hardly knew. And so I took a week off and went down to St Julian’s in order to be quiet, and there I read the whole of Martin Buber’s I and Thou and other things that he wrote. And there, as it happened, I also heard a tape-recording of a talk by Anthony Bloom in which he described how he had helped a woman to learn to pray simply by sitting quietly in her room and being aware – of the trees outside, of the comfort of her little room, of the clicking of her knitting needles against the arm of her chair – because you can’t be alive towards God unless you are alive towards everything else, all the glory and all the pain and all the people.⁹

The greatness of The Go-Between God – which no doubt accounts for it being still in print after 16 impressions – is surely that we are overhearing a long prayer. Here is theology as stream of consciousness, where one thought leads naturally to another, celebrating poetic connections unavailable to more prosaic thought, where the familiar becomes strange again, conveying old meanings with the shock of fresh discovery. As Archbishop Rowan Williams says of John: ‘In Oxford, he was a wonderful background presence for many of us, a reminder of ways of doing theology that could only come from somewhere other than the academic mainstream, and were all the more richly three-dimensional for that.’¹⁰ It is said that poetry is dancing, while prose is marching. Poetry evokes more than it defines; suggests and provokes, kindling imagination and warming the heart. Poetry is the language of what is impossible to say. The greatness of John Taylor is that he knows all our talk about God