Charles Davis (theologian)

Charles Alfred Davis (12 February 1923 – 28 January 1999) was an English theologian and priest, and Professor of Theology at Heythrop College, later Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta. In 1966, he caused considerable controversy in both the Catholic and Anglican communities by publicly leaving the Roman Catholic Church on the basis of an "intellectual rejection of the papacy".^[1]

Background

Davis was born in Swindon to Charles Lionel Davis (1893–1968), a sign painter, and Agatha Ellen Lapham (1893–1979). He was raised as a Catholic and went to school at St. Brendan's Grammar School in Bristol (now St. Brendan's Sixth Form College).^[2]

Davis was educated at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome for two years and ordained in 1946. He taught at the seminary in St Edmund's Seminary, Ware from 1952 to 1965 before moving to Heythrop College. Davis was the first Catholic to give the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King's College London, which were published in 1966 as God's Grace in History.^[3] He was also editor of Clergy Review (now The Pastoral Review).

Defection from the Church

Davis announced that he was leaving the Roman Catholic Church on 21 December 1966. The decision was widely publicised and caused the Observer to describe his actions as leaving a "crisis of authority" in the Church. The Catholic Herald described his defection from the Church as "a cause for sadness, not only for the church, the man himself and those who admired him and his work, but because of the inevitable bitterness that invariably follow such a step", before suggesting that it would have been preferable if Davis had been quieter in his exit.^[4]

In an article circulated by Davis at the time of his public exit, he states that the Church had become too powerful and too dehumanising—"a vast, impersonal, unfree and inhuman system", that it had been compromised by its connection with the Nazi regime. The article also argued that orthodoxy had limited Davis' intellectual horizons: "I have had to remove a mountain of ecclesiastical rubble in order to produce a few tiny plants of creative thought".^[4] Davis's exit from the Church was included in an autobiography published the following year titled A Question of Conscience.^[5]

The theologian Herbert McCabe published a critique—albeit a sympathetic one—in the journal New Blackfriars. McCabe's editorial argued that leaving the Church because it was corrupt was unreasonable since the Church had always been corrupt.^[6] Davis's leaving the Church has been described as having the same effect on the Catholic Church in Britain as the publication of John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God had on Anglicanism.^[2]

After defection

In 1967, Davis married Florence Henderson, a Brooklyn-born Catholic theology student and member of The Grail, a Catholic women's movement.^[7] He became Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In 1970, he moved to Concordia University in Montreal to chair the Department of Religious Studies. He became the President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion.^[3]

In 1978, Davis gave the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge University, which were published in 1980 as Theology and Political Society which reflected his interest in the relation between religion and sociology.^[2][1][3] In 1995, a collection of essays titled The Promise of Critical Theology was published in Davis' honour.^[1]

In 1991, Davis retired and moved back to Britain, living in Edinburgh. Towards the end of his life, he returned to the Catholic fold and received communion at Mass in Edinburgh and Cambridge. He suffered from Parkinson's Disease and died in 1999.^[1]

References