Daphne Hampson - Thought

Thought

Hampson is unusual in being both schooled in Continental thought, thus having a post-Kantian, post-Freudian and feminist ideological critique of Christianity, and also a marked British empirical streak, holding that theology should be grounded in human religious experience. It would be misleading to regard her as predominantly a polemical thinker. Rather is her thought characterized by a desire for reasoned judgments as to what can be the case. She is adamant that Christian claims to a unique revelation in Christ are incompatible with what, since the eighteenth century Enlightenment, has been known to be the nature of reality. Hence she contends that the Christian myth must be discarded; while also allowing that it has served as a 'vehicle' which has carried human religious sensibilities. As she points out, a theology which makes no such claim to a particular revelation, in which God is rather conceived as everywhere and at all times available, while expanding a secular Enlightenment paradigm as to what is possible does not contravene the recognition that nature and history form a (non-determinative) causal nexus. She has long taken such an epistemological position for granted. As a 19-year-old on the radio, she challenged a panel as to how the Bible could be considered anything other than literature among other religious literature, the record of people's awareness of God.

Hampson compounds such an epistemological position with an ethical critique of Christianity. From the belief there has been a unique revelation in history it follows that Christians must constantly refer back to that past age. The values and outlook of that patriarchal age, in its constant reiteration, come to form the religious subconscious, affecting present-day relations between men and women. Hampson further finds problematic the idea of a transcendent God; again the corollary of a belief in particular revelation. The relationship to such scripture, or to such a God, must necessarily be heteronomous. At a later date feminist appropriation of Hegel came to be crucial for Hampson's critique of Christianity. Prompted by Luce Irigaray's building on the thought of Feuerbach, Hampson came to hold that religious thought-structures are a masculinist projection, both reflecting and serving to legitimise male superordination; and thus a form of fascism. Hampson would have theology become like any other discipline; drawing on the past when that remains appropriate, taking novel directions when the progress of human knowledge or ethics demands this.

The more challenging aspect of Hampson's thought has been to consider (if the Christian myth is to be dismissed), how then 'God' had best be conceptualised. Hampson has always been forthright as to her belief that prayer, or focused thought for another, is effective. It is the conviction that there is such a dimension to reality, Hampson has said, that led her to abandon secular history for theology. ‘God', for her, is the name that humans have given to their awareness (anthropomorphising it) of this reality. Hampson holds that God had best be understood as spirit, intimately interconnected with what we are. Drawing on the thought of Schleiermacher and feminist writing, she suggests that a ‘porous’ and relational understanding of the self may allow us to envisage how humans and 'that which is God’ are inter-related. (Whether ‘God’ has agency, or would exist if humans did not, remain for her open questions.) It is this theological realism which those of more traditional beliefs have often recognised as being held in common. For her part Hampson always insists that the definition of what it is to be Christian necessarily involves an epistemological claim; what is no more than an ethical outlook cannot on its own constitute Christianity.

Academically, Hampson has always been impressed by the power of Lutheran thought, little known or appreciated in the British context. She has found herself over many years existentially involved with the differing (and as she believes incompatible) structures of Lutheran and Catholic thought and their resulting spiritualities; the subject of her Harvard doctorate. She is fascinated by Luther's originality, over-turning philosophical presuppositions inherited from the ancient world and setting theology on another course. Hampson finds the Lutheran tradition best able to respond to the dilemma with which the Enlightenment confronts Christians. From the early 1970s she has been fascinated by the thought of Kierkegaard; in particular his Philosophical Fragments as that text which clarified the necessary clash of Christianity with modernity. Her forthcoming book is Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique. Thinking Rudolf Bultmann’s position the most adequate attempt to mount an apologetic for Christianity in modernity, she judges it however to fail. Among major theologians, it is Schleiermacher (not a Lutheran) to whom Hampson returns once and again in appreciation.

Speaking at a 1997 UK conference, Hampson summed up her position thus:

I am a Western person, living in a post-Christian age, who has taken something with me from Christian thinkers, but who has rejected the Christian myth. Indeed I want to go a lot further than that. The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection, calculated to legitimise a patriarchal world and to enable men to find their way within it. We need to see it for what it is. But for myself I am a spiritual person, not an atheist. I am amazed at this 'other dimension of reality' which there is; which allows healing, extra-sensory perception, and things to fall into place. I am quite clear there is an underlying goodness, beauty and order; that it is powerful, such that we can draw on it, while we are inter-related with it. I call that God.