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Preface to the first edition

It belongs to the office of a bishop in the Church to be a guardian and defender of its doctrine. I find myself a bishop at a moment when the discharge of this burden can seldom have demanded greater depth of divinity and quality of discernment.

For I suspect that we stand on the brink of a period in which it is going to become increasingly difficult to know what the true defence of Christian truth requires. There are always those (and doubtless rightly they will be in the majority) who see the best, and indeed the only, defence of doctrine to lie in the firm reiteration, in fresh and intelligent contemporary language, of ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’. And the Church has not lacked in recent years theologians and apologists who have given themselves to this task. Their work has been rewarded by a hungry following, and there will always be need of more of them. Nothing that I go on to say should be taken to deny their indispensable vocation.

At the same time, I believe we are being called, over the years ahead, to far more than a restating of traditional orthodoxy in modern terms. Indeed, if our defence of the Faith is limited to this, we shall find in all likelihood that we have lost out to all but a tiny religious remnant. A much more radical recasting, I would judge, is demanded, in the process of which the most fundamental categories of our theology – of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself – must go into the melting. Indeed, though we shall not of course be able to do it, I can at least understand what those mean who urge that we should do well to give up using the word ‘God’ for a generation, so impregnated has it become with a way of thinking we may have to discard if the Gospel is to signify anything.

For I am convinced that there is a growing gulf between the traditional orthodox supernaturalism in which our Faith has been framed and the categories which the ‘lay’ world (for want of a better term) finds meaningful today. And by that I do not mean there is an increasing gap between Christianity and pagan society. That may well be so, but this is not the divide of which I am speaking. For it is not a division on the truth of the Gospel itself. Indeed, many who are Christians find themselves on the same side as those who are not. And among one’s intelligent non-Christian friends one discovers many who are far nearer to the Kingdom of heaven than they themselves can credit. For while they imagine they have rejected the Gospel, they have in fact largely been put off by a particular way of thinking about the world which quite legitimately they find incredible.

Moreover, the line to which I am referring runs right through the middle of myself, although as time goes on I find there is less and less of me left, as it were, to the right of it. Thus, not infrequently, as I watch or listen to a broadcast discussion between a Christian and a humanist, I catch myself realizing that most of my sympathies are on the humanist’s side. This is not in the least because my faith or commitment is in doubt, but because I share instinctively with him his inability to accept the scheme of thought and mould of religion within which alone that Faith is being offered to him. I feel he is right to rebel against it, and I am increasingly uncomfortable that ‘orthodoxy’ should be identified with it.

What this structure is must be left for further designation to the body of the book. My only concern here is to plead for the recognition that those who believe their share in the total apologetic task of the Church to be a radical questioning of the established ‘religious frame’ should be accepted no less as genuine and, in the long run equally necessary, defenders of the Faith.

But I am not sanguine. I am inclined to think that the gulf must grow wider before it is bridged and that there will be an increasing alienation, both within the ranks of the Church and outside it, between those whose basic recipe is the mixture as before (however revitalized) and those who feel compelled above all to be honest wherever it may lead them. I believe, regretfully, that Dr Alec Vidler’s conclusion in a recent broadcast,¹ which was bitterly attacked, is only too true: ‘We’ve got a very big leeway to make up, because there’s been so much suppression of real, deep thought and intellectual alertness and integrity in the Church.’ I am not in the least accusing of dishonesty those who find the traditional framework of metaphysics and morals entirely acceptable (I do so with a large part of myself). What dismays me is the vehemence – and at bottom the insecurity – of those who feel that the Faith can only be defended by branding as enemies within the camp those who do not.

I believe there are all too uncomfortable analogies to the ecclesiastical scene of a hundred years ago, when (as we now recognize) the guardians of traditional orthodoxy all but rendered impossible the true defence of the Gospel. When we consider the distance we have all moved since then,² we can see that almost everything said from within the Church at the time has since proved too conservative. What I have tried to say, in a tentative and exploratory way, may seem to be radical, and doubtless to many heretical. The one thing of which I am fairly sure is that, in retrospect, it will be seen to have erred in not being nearly radical enough.

John Woolwich

November 1962