Every nation under heaven: the importance of the biblical concept of nations for contemporary mission practice

Is there a concept of nationhood in the Bible that can provide us with a framework for cross-cultural Christian mission? This thesis argues that current evangelical missiology has accepted too willingly the categories of the secular Enlightenment understanding of ethnicity and nationhood, and that it needs to rethink its understanding of nations from a biblical standpoint. While the pressures of globalisation are seen by some as rapidly eclipsing the nation-state, this thesis will argue that we need to move beyond the narrower secular categories of citizenship, political power and the boundaries of the state to recover a more biblical understanding of nationhood. By reference to Genesis 10-11, Acts 2:1-11 and those passages in the Book of Revelation that discuss the destiny of the nations, it will show that the biblical understanding of nations includes deeper ideas of shared history, culture and language as the essential components of nationhood. It will explain how nations are part of the created order, and explore the impact of the Babel narrative on our understanding of nations in relation to God. It will demonstrate that Pentecost did not reverse the curse of Babel, but served rather to honour the dignity and value of nations and their languages. It will also argue that nations have a destiny in the New Creation according to the Book of Revelation. This biblical concept of nationhood has significant implications in several areas: the development of a public theology; a Christian response to nationalism; the question of how urban mission fits within mission to the nations; and the importance of indigenous languages in cross-cultural mission, especially in the multicultural cities of Europe.

'Yes, the century is an ashen sun': poem and subject in the philosophy of Alain Badiou

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.

Administrative justice and the control of bureaucratic decision-making: A study investigating how decision-makers in local authority education departments respond to the work of redress mechanisms

This socio-legal thesis has explored the factors responsible for explaining whether and how redress mechanisms control bureaucratic decision-making. The research considered the three principal institutions of administrative justice: courts, tribunals, and ombudsman schemes. The field setting was the local authority education area and the thesis examined bureaucratic decision-making about admissions to school, home-to-school transport, and Special Educational Needs (SEN). The thesis adopted a qualitative approach, using interviews and documentary research, within a multiple embedded case study design. The intellectual foundations of the research were inter-disciplinary, cutting across law, socio-legal studies, public administration, organization studies, and social policy. The thesis drew on these scholarly fields to explore the nature of bureaucratic decision-making, the extent to which it can be controlled and the way that learning occurs in bureaucracies and, finally, the extent to which redress mechanisms might exercise control. The concept of control was studied across all its dimensions – in relation both to ex post control in specific cases and the more challenging notion of ex ante or structuring control. The aim of the thesis was not to measure the prevalence of bureaucratic control by redress mechanisms, but to understand the factors that might explain its presence or absence in a particular area. The findings of the research have allowed for a number of analytical refinements and extensions to be made to existing theoretical and empirical understandings. 14 factors, along with 87 supporting propositions, have been set out with the aim of making empirically derived suggestions which can be followed up in future research. In terms of the thesis’ contribution to existing knowledge, its comparative focus and its emphasis on the broad notion of control offered the potential for new insights to be developed. Overall, the thesis claims to have made three contributions to the conceptual framework for understanding the exercise of control by redress mechanisms: it emphasizes the importance of ‘feedback’ in relation to the nature of the cases referred to redress mechanisms; it calls attention to the structure of bureaucratic decision-making as well as its normative character; and it discusses how the operational modes of redress mechanisms relate to their control functions.