Business Commons^™

This paper brings together some organizational insights from within the Church (Carl Dudley’s ideas on rigorous and relational faith) and from outside the Church (Nils Brunsson’s thinking on action and political groupings) to explore how these might inform an understanding of the Church’s telos or purpose. It concludes by arguing that Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of universities as places of constrained disagreement might also be a good model for this telos.

The metaphor of ‘the sea of faith’ comes from Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (1867) and has been explored subsequently by a number of theologians, notably Don Cupitt in his BBC TV series of the same name and the Sea of Faith Network founded to explore his ideas. This paper explores how the image of the sea functions in Arnold’s poem and his The Forsaken Merman before arguing that R. S. Thomas’s use of the sea in his poem Tidal provides a better theological metaphor than Arnold’s.