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Justice

1 February 2023

5 min read

The 4th century social justice warrior

He was the first to condemn slavery, over 1,500 years ago. Gregory of Nyssa critically examined society, looking at the relationships and structures everyone takes for granted.

Ryan Gilfeather

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

A mosaic shows a saint with a beard holding a bible and his hand held up in a blessing.

Gregory of Nyssa fresco.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In January 2023 the Church of England committed £100m to invest in communities affected by historic slavery. Rightly so. Research since 2019 shows that the wealth it accumulated through historic investment in a slave trading company and receiving gifts from slave traders, may still benefit its finances today. This past is, as the Archbishop of Canterbury says, shameful. So, it is only right that these actions are addressed.

This story also highlights the complex relationship between Christianity and enslavement. On one hand, inspired by their faith, Christians led the fight for abolition. But on the other, some Christians supported and benefitted from the enslavement of other humans. And, the further back we look in history, the more Christians seem to accept enslavement as part of the fabric of society.

There is, however, an exception. In the late fourth century AD, Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop and theologian, critically examined this practice of enslavement, which so many others did not even think to question, and explicitly names it as a sin, about a millennium and a half before the abolitionist movements. Gregory is, in this way, a light in the darkness and an inspiration to Christians today.

He is convinced, on a fundamental level, that the domination of one human being over another in slavery is incompatible with Christian belief. In one of his sermons on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, delivered in Cappadocia (Turkey), he calls slavery a sin.

It is a ‘gross example of arrogance… for a human being to think himself the master of his own kind’: When someone…arrogates dominion to his own kind, so as to think himself the owner of men and women, what is he doing but overstepping his own nature through pride, regarding himself as something different from his subordinates?'

It is wrong to dominate others, because all human beings share the same fundamental nature. That nature is being made in the image of God:

'God said, let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God , who is his buyer, tell me?'

Since we are made in the image of God, we share His freedom to choose our own path, be it good or evil. When you enslave another, you take away this fundamental freedom and treat them as if they are animals, lower than the image of God:

'Why do you go beyond what is subject to you and raise yourself up against the very species which is free, counting your own kind on a level with four-footed things an even footless things?'

Therefore, Gregory says it is a shameful arrogant pride to enslave another human being, because you treat that which is made in the image of God as less than human, denying them the freedom God has given them.

We see this conviction about slavery as domination playing out in his biography of his sister Macrina. As wealthy aristocrats, his family owned enslaved people. Yet, at the heart of his narrative about his sister’s life, he explains how she began to treat her family slaves as equals:

'Weaning her [mother] from all that she had been accustomed to, she led her down to her own standard of humility, showing her how to live in equality with the whole body of virgins (slaves), that is, by sharing with them the one table, the same kind of bed, and all the necessities of life on an equal basis, with every distinction of rank removed from their life.'

Gregory does not explicitly say she freed these enslaved people, but inviting an enslaved person to share one’s table was a way of freeing them called manumissio inter amicos. In these passages, he particularly praises Macrina for undoing destructive relationships of domination, where one human treats another as less than themselves and lower than the image of God.

Gregory isn’t perfect. His condemnation of enslavement centres on the enslaver: he encourages his audience to avoid the moral pitfall, rather than expressing concern for the enslaved people. In another text he says it is good to free slaves, but he does not appear to campaign to end slavery. As we saw in the biography of his sister, he is so concerned to undo the relationships of domination of one person over another, that he is less clear if these people are free to leave. Finally, there is no evidence from his contemporary theologians that Gregory persuaded anyone else that slavery was a sin. In these ways, from our perspective today we would want Gregory to go further to dismantle slavery, or shift his perspective.

But, we don’t need him to be perfect. He offers a light in the darkness, not the rising of the sun. Gregory is an inspirational example of critically examining the fabric of one’s society, looking at the relationships and structures everyone takes for granted, and having the clarity and courage to see and proclaim that they are fundamentally incompatible with what he thinks the Bible says about the worth of human beings.

Many Christians are inspired by this way of thinking today. Even if they don’t know Gregory of Nyssa’s name, they will be drawn to charitable giving, certain professions, or activism, out of a deep desire for all to be treated with equality, because all are made in the image of God. To name one example of many. In the UK, Christians were heavily involved in the real living wage campaign. Society at large told them it was impossible to pay a wage where one did not need to choose between feeding and seeing one’s children. But, they campaigned alongside other community groups so that workers are being paid enough to live on, because they were convinced, like Gregory, that all human beings are due the same dignity and worth.

Enslavement: Voices from the Archives.

Interview

Change

Politics

S&U interviews

30 April 2024

7 min read

Stephen Timms: still on mission

The MP on five decades trying to prove a Christian Tory wrong.

Robert Wright

Robert is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A man in a suit turns to look at the camera and behind him is a gallery of large painting

Stephen TImms MP.

The day before the February 1974 election, the first in which he was old enough to vote, Stephen Timms says an elder at the Brethren assembly that he then attended – near his home in Fleet, in Hampshire – took him aside. The Brethren are a non-denominational, non-conformist evangelical Christian movement.

“You will be voting Conservative, won’t you?” Timms recalls the man asking.

The assumption surprised Timms, who had thought there was an “obvious connection” between the social justice elements of Christ’s teaching and parties that sought greater equality. He told the elder – Mr Gilmour – that he would be voting Labour.

The incident was an early sign of how Timms, now 68, would spend a life that has brought together an evangelical Christian faith with attachment to the Labour party.

His career has taken him as high as the Cabinet – where he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury for a year in 2006 and 2007. He became Sir Stephen in 2022. He also has a reputation as one of the MPs most dogged in pursuing case work for constituents. That commitment nearly cost him his life in 2010 when a constituent, angry at his support for the Iraq War, stabbed him twice at a constituency surgery. Timms is standing again at the coming general election for East Ham, the constituency which, with some boundary changes, he has represented in various forms since 1994.

“I suppose I’ve spent 50 years trying to prove Mr Gilmour wrong,” Timms says. “[He was] a delightful man but I never agreed with him about that.”

There is a “very clear trend” of economic justice in the biblical message, which the Labour party represents and seeks to realise, Timms goes on, over coffee at an arts centre in his constituency.

“The Christian roots of Labour are absolutely clear,” he says, pointing out that Keir Hardie, the party’s first leader, was an evangelical Christian and many of its other founders were Methodists. “I’ve always seen Labour values and Labour aims as wanting to realise that commitment to economic justice which is such a clear thrust of the Bible.”

He sees no attempt in the Conservative party to realise that vision, he says.

“It’s just not a subject of interest, I don’t think,” Timms says of Conservative supporters. “For people in the Conservative party, there are concerns about maintaining order and respectability and all those things and I can understand how you might find those in the Bible. But I don’t think that’s what the Bible is about.”

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’.”

Timms’ attachment to his small area of East London is almost as strong a thread in his story as his Christian and Labour party commitments. He first came to the area while a maths student at Cambridge, in the summer of 1976, as part of a two-week mission by the Christian Union of Emmanuel College to Forest Gate. It was a formative experience.

“It was the first time I could see how what I believed could shape my life,” Timms recalls.

He returned to the area in 1978 when, after leaving university, he was recruited by Logica, then an information technology and management consultancy, working in the west end of London. He joined the church that the 1976 mission had planted – now called Plaistow Christian Fellowship. He continues to attend the church with his wife, Hui-Leng, originally from Singapore, who was also part of the 1976 mission.

His joined the local Labour party.

“Very quickly, I was asked to be the secretary of my local branch Labour party, which was Little Ilford branch, and then very quickly after that I was asked to be the secretary of the constituency Labour party,” Timms recalls.

Timms was chosen as an office bearer, he believes, because of his neutrality in a bitter feud. Left-wing activists had tried to oust Reg Prentice, Labour MP for the constituency, then called Newham North-East. They claimed he was fundamentally a Conservative. Long-standing local activists had successfully defended him. Both sides had been left dismayed when Prentice subsequently defected to the Conservative party.

“It was a terrible mess,” Timms recalls.

His first elected office was as a councillor on Newham Council, fighting in an unusually high-profile council byelection in 1984. The party had, surprisingly, lost the three Little Ilford wards to representatives of the then Liberal-SDP Alliance. But it emerged that two of the Alliance councillors had given false addresses and there was a byelection.

“Ken Livingstone came down; Neil Kinnock came down,” Timms recalls, referring, respectively, to the then Labour leader of the Greater London council and the Labour party nationally. “We threw everything at it.”

Timms was leader of Newham council when, in 1994, the previous MP, Ron Leighton, died of a heart attack. After being chosen as the Labour candidate, Timms won the subsequent byelection, in June 1994.

His connection with his church has remained critical, he says. A group in the church offered to pray with him every month when he became a councillor. They increased the frequency to weekly once he became leader of the council.

“We still do that and that has been a very important source of support for me through all the ups and downs of the intervening 34 years,” Timms says.

Yet it was not a foregone conclusion that an evangelical Christian would form such a strong bond with, first, Newham North-East and then East Ham, as the constituency has been known since 1997. The seat has, according to the 2021 census, the eighth-highest proportion of people – 41.2 per cent – identifying as Muslim.

Timms insists the tension is less than it might appear. The first person to urge him to stand as an MP following Ron Leighton’s death was the chair of the Alliance of Newham Muslim Associations, he says.

“His argument to me was, ‘You believe in God; we believe in God; we think you should go for this’,” Timms recalls.

There are points of connection between different faith groups in the area, he adds. He has a particularly strong connection with Bonny Downs Baptists Church, in Beckton, which has an active food bank and many other social ministries.

“If you look at the people who around this community are really doing things to help here, it’s the faith groups,” Timms says. “It’s Bonny Downs Baptist Church; it’s some of the Muslim groups.”

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,”

Timms’s sense of affinity with his Muslim constituents, however, did not prevent the most distressing incident of his career – when Roshonara Choudhry tried to kill him at a constituency surgery in Beckton in May 2010.

Medical staff described the two stab wounds, to his stomach, as “life-threatening” and Choudhry is serving a life term for attempted murder. She had been radicalised by online Islamist extremist sermons and acted because of Timms’ vote in favour of the 2003 Iraq war.

“It was a very, very unpleasant episode,” Timms says, with characteristic understatement.

In March this year, he says, he received a reply from Choudhry, part of a correspondence that began after she wrote to him expressing remorse for her actions.

Even the stabbing, however, underlined the community’s goodwill, Timms insists.

“I was absolutely inundated after that episode with people sending cards and good wishes – including Christians saying, ‘We’re praying for you’, and quite a lot of similar things from Muslims saying, ‘We’re praying for you for a speedy recovery’,” he says. “I hadn’t had that experience before of Muslims telling me, ‘We’re praying for you’. So it left me with a stronger sense, I think, of being supported by my Christian and Muslim constituents, which I appreciated very much.”

Timms nevertheless remains an unapologetically partisan politician. He wants a Labour government under Keir Starmer, he says, to resolve problems he says have built up over 14 years of coalition and then Conservative government since 2010.

“I think the country is in a sorry mess,” he says. “I think we very urgently need a change of direction. I think that the prescription that Keir Starmer has set out offers a hopeful way forward.”

Timms, who is currently chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, says he would be “delighted” to return to a ministerial role in a Starmer government. He is standing as an MP again in the hope of being able to support a new Labour government.

“It would seem a shame to leave just when we might be on the brink of a Labour government again,” he says.

Nevertheless, the way he links his work as an MP with his Christian faith sets him apart.

“I experienced a calling to be in this area,” Timms says.

As far back as when he came to East London, his thinking about faith, what to do with his life and politics were all “intertwined”, he adds.

“I certainly see what I’ve been doing in politics as a calling, as part of what I came here first of all to do, which is to take part in a mission,” Timms says.