Читать книгу Keeping Alive the Rumor of God - Martin Camroux - Страница 7

“Can’t you hear those little bells tinkling? Down on your knees! They’re bringing the sacraments to a dying God” wrote Heinrich Heine in 1834. Decades later Friedrich Nietzsche made the same observation. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”1 By this he meant that the culture was becoming one in which belief in God was no longer going to be possible. It took a little time, but we are nearly there. Church attendance began to decline in England in the 1880s. From then the decline proceeded rapidly. Already by the 1920s, as Adrian Hastings recognizes, the principal intellectual orthodoxy in England was agnosticism. “Religious thinking was more and more simply abandoned among the wise as essentially primitive and, in the modern world, redundant.”2 By the time I went to university in the 1960s church congregations were mostly elderly and I took it for granted that most people I knew, especially young people, would not be Christian. Since then the decline has accelerated. If I could go back now, I would think how young church congregations were then!

I have been a Christian minister for more than forty years, all in the context of the decline of both religious practice and belief. I was ordained in September 1975 at Freemantle United Reformed Church in Southampton. The church was packed, and one of the two sermons was preached by the Moderator of General Assembly and Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford George Caird. The church was prominently situated on a main road, with a modern attractive post-war building, excellent ancillary rooms and a car-park. There were 113 members, fifteen or so in the choir and they claimed up to forty-four children in the junior church with twelve teachers. I ministered there for ten fulfilling years and married my wife Margaret there in 1984, again in a packed church. In September 2019 I attended the closing service. By then essentially it was all gone. A successor minister quarreled with the organist who left, and the choir collapsed. The junior church dwindled away. Ministry was progressively reduced and by the end there were only a tiny handful of regular worshipers. The building was still excellent but now it was like an ecclesiastical Marie Celeste. Before long it may be flats or a car wash. It was one of the saddest days of my life, and none of the bromide clichés offered in the service could hide the stark reality.

Today the proportion of the population attending Sunday services is only around one third of that in the early 1960s.3 According to the National Centre for Social Research’s latest 2018 British Social Attitudes survey, just 38 percent described themselves as Christian—a fall from 50 percent in 2008 and 66 percent in 1983. The biggest change was the number of people who saw themselves as “confident atheists” which rose from 10 percent in 1998 to a record high of 26 percent in 2018.4 Something similar can now be seen across Europe, including in what is now probably best called post-Catholic Ireland, where 39 percent of those aged between sixteen and twenty-nine say they have no religion.5 In America, the proportion of adults who describe themselves as Christian has fallen to two-thirds, a drop of 12 percentage points over the past decade. Fewer than half of millennials (49 percent) describe themselves as Christians; four in ten are religious “nones.”6 Only 15 percent of cradle Catholics now claim to attend Mass on a weekly basis and 35 percent no longer even tick the “Catholic box” on surveys.7

All of these statistics are only indicative. Not all of those who say they attend church regularly necessarily do so and individuals may have a strong religious belief but not attend church. Nonetheless the fact that both Europe and America are increasingly secular is not in doubt. This is not simply a rejection of religious institutions—at its heart is a fundamental loss of belief. Canadian Douglas John Hall has written about the changing landscape for the churches in North America. He calls it the end of Christendom, the centuries-old alliance between Christian faith, the church, and the culture.

We have seen the rapid growth of an almost complete religionlessness on the part of many of our contemporaries . . . the instinct to belief . . . may now satisfy itself in literally thousands of ways that have little or nothing to do with the Christianity we took for granted.8

In Britain where the decline started much earlier, the reality is starker. As a preacher most of the congregations I lead in worship are elderly. I am always pleasantly surprised to find anyone under sixty. There is something poignant in visiting what were once the bastions of East Anglian Nonconformity, often at the heart of civic life, now always a faded relic of what they were. What we are witnessing is the disjunction of Western civilization from its Christian roots. At its heart is a loss of belief, a growing moral challenge to Christian values and a collapse in traditional views of God. Writing from a Catholic perspective Hans Küng is honest about the challenge:

Millions have left the church, millions have withdrawn into themselves, and millions . . . have not joined the church. The hierarchs responsible, sometimes confused, sometimes mendacious, prevaricate: it’s not so bad. But isn’t the light of Christianity slowly being quenched?9

Sometimes with Philip Larkin I find myself wondering:

When churches will fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into.10

Outside the shrinking religious institutions there is a growing ignorance as to what Christians think and believe. Thus Brian Appleyard, writing about Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, says they will seem curious to a large number of readers, “because what is going on here is religion.”11 Similarly Francis Spufford starts his book Unapologetic by telling us that his six-year-old daughter will soon discover “that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to Church.”12

Recently I went back to preach at the commemoration service in the chapel at Mansfield College in Oxford, originally a Congregational theological college but now a secular part of the university. Its chapel, with its stained-glass windows of the saints and statues of the great Reformers, has been described as the most Catholic place in Oxford. It represented Congregationalism in its pomp and is full of the ghosts of former glories—Natt Micklem, C. H. Dodd, George Caird, John Marsh, Selbie, Routley, Fairbairn, and Cadoux. The college has now boldly turned the chapel into the dining hall, moving the tables aside for an occasional service. “It’s just wonderful,” the principal said to me. “Now the students can all eat together.” “Yes” said the senior tutor,” it’s a great teaching opportunity, none of them have any idea who these people in the stained-glass windows were.” Increasingly the Christian past is slipping out of vision.

A TIME OF RELIGIOUS DARKNESS

Responses to the crisis are various. Christian theology, perhaps not surprisingly, is suffering a loss of confidence and intellectual vigor. When I went to read theology in Oxford in 1969 one of the wonderful discoveries was the theology books at Blackwell’s. Downstairs in the Norrington Room was a vast selection of serious theology, much of it reflecting the tumultuous debate centered on John Robinson’s Honest to God and what we hoped might be a New Reformation. Today the number of theology books in Blackwell’s has very visibly shrunk. No doubt there is a commercial logic to this, but it also accurately reflects a decline in theological creativity and confidence. As the church shrinks, what theology there is has become increasingly conservative, as the churches retreat into fundamentalist or neo-orthodox laagers.

The confused mood is evident in the slightly hysterical claims some Christians make that they are now facing persecution in Britain, in the avid interest in the programs of the Church Growth Movement, and in the hope that the adoption of secular management models might be the salvation of the Church of England. In many churches the mood is not to look too much to the future, in the hope that it won’t come. Most churches have found themselves largely unable to cope, often trailing along behind social change, unsettled as unquestioned assumptions and beliefs became socially obsolete. The retreat from Christian Britain has been precipitous and disorienting.

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.13

It is possible to try and mitigate the gravity of the crisis. Some would point out, rightly, that the center of Christianity has now moved away from the Western world to the global south, and to the resilience of other religious traditions such as Islam. It is certainly true both that God is not dead in Africa or the Middle East and that immigration from less secularized parts of the world has introduced new religious communities into many Western cities. But secularization is deep rooted in Western society and most people under sixty have little understanding of what religion is about. Religious belief is concentrated among a number of distinct demographic groups such as the old or minority communities. Sociologist Steve Bruce is rightly dismissive of the idea that these are a credible basis for a conversion of Europe.

If there is to be a reversal of secularization, large numbers of the currently non-religious will have to convert. . . . So long as there is little or no social similarity between the religious and those who would have to become religious to reverse secularization, such a reverse is sociologically implausible.14

Others point to the possibility of a new spiritual revolution replacing traditional theism. A significant number of people, perhaps 20 percent of the population, would today describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). In her book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, ‘I am spiritual but not religious,’ I might not be any wiser about what that means—but I’d be richer.”15 Common themes would include a rejection of institutional religion and of shared creeds. Rather than a defined dogmatic path SBNR offers freedom to choose your beliefs. Healing crystals, Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism, atheism, transcendental meditation—all are equally possible and can be combined in a personal way as one chooses. Is it possible that this is evidence of a spiritual revolution in which we are moving from a narrow and patriarchal faith to one which is open and inclusive? It is more credible to see it as the spiritual remnants of a secularizing post-religious culture. SBNR lacks the necessary institutional structures to ensure intergenerational transmission and frequently ends up aimed predominantly at individual well-being. So, when the former pop star Victoria Beckham says she is “very spiritual” because she is “very good at visualization . . . I lie in bed and think what kind of look do I want to go for tomorrow?”16 this is not quite what historically has been referred to as spirituality. Nor does the fact that you can buy Faith footwear at Debenhams mean a religious revival is on the way. Terry Eagleton puts it cynically. “It is a way of feeling uplifted without the gross inconvenience of God.”17 Opting out of belonging to a religious community certainly has its advantages. As Lilian Daniel says, “Any idiot can find God in a sunset. Finding God in the woman sitting next to you whose baby cries during the entire sermon takes grit.”18 In sociological perspective SBNR is what remains when the overarching belief system has broken down and people are left with a spiritual heritage to which they can no longer give coherent expression. As Steve Bruce puts it, “as a supposed rebuttal of secularization, contemporary spirituality is a damp squib.”19

As well as meeting growing indifference, religious belief has been vigorously attacked by what have been called the new atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, who argue that religion is irrational and should not simply be tolerated but countered, criticized, and exposed. Dawkins originally entered the God debate by challenging creationist ideology but widened his scope to argue that all religion as similarly unthinking and irrational. He sees religion, as he once put it on Twitter, as “an organized license to be acceptably stupid.” Dawkins writes that for religious believers “Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are.”20 As a catch-all definition of religious faith this is more than a little bizarre. Christian theology is not simply Koran-burning fundamentalists; it is Rowan Williams, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Küng, Paul Tillich, Martin Luther King Jr., and Desmond Tutu. To suggest they see ignorance as a virtue is to trivialize the discussion. As Terry Eagleton says, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”21 But to be fair to Dawkins his problem is not totally different from that of the Mansfield College students to whom the stained-glass windows were a mystery. The chasm which has opened up between us and our religious past means it is genuinely hard for secular atheists to understand and empathize with the religious mindset. Much contemporary Western culture frequently does not understand religion and looks on bemused or uncaring from a distance.

Culturally God is dead for most of Western society and this is not likely to change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the concentration of religion among the elderly can only mean that an accelerated decline is a given. In retrospect the 1960s seem to be the last period when Christian faith was culturally significant and hopeful. The decline of faith and the rise of secularism are among the most characteristic features of modern society leaving open, as Nietzsche saw, the question of where common values are to be found.

The districts of the city have crumbled.

The work of giants of old lies decayed.

Roofs are long tumbled down,

The lofty towers are in ruins.22

AND YET IT MOVES

For forty years I have ministered to United Reformed and ecumenical congregations, all of which were experiencing dramatic social and theological change. Often, it has seemed a desperate struggle against the odds. I have seen the institutional structure of Christianity falling apart with its leadership often in a state of denial.

The mid-sixties were an exciting time to be a Christian. John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) sold a million copies in seventeen languages and had a cultural impact quite inconceivable now. It fired me with the conviction that the church could change and be renewed. Nothing was off-limits. Everything was possible. Ecumenism was leading to a united church. A date was even set for it. “We dare to hope that this date should not be later than Easter Day 1980,” as the Nottingham Conference in 1964 prophesied in a utopian moment. There was much new liturgy and songs like Sydney Carter’s Lord of the Dance. In America Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and was marching for justice and demonstrating what the social and political implications of all this were. “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday” we sang on all possible occasions. Amazingly the Second Vatican Council was leading to a new hope in the Catholic Church. From the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, but with wider application, Michael Novak could conclude: “Old patterns are dissolving. In such a time, the Spirit’s activity is almost tangible . . . an age of creativity has begun.”23

Very little turned out as I hoped. The 1960s ended with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys and the realization of just how naïve many of the dreams of the 1960s had been. Neither peace nor social justice turned out to be as easy to achieve as we imagined. There was no renewal of faith and no organic unity in Britain, with the sadly somewhat-insignificant exception of the United Reformed Church. Instead church decline accelerated beyond anything we had imagined, and the church lost confidence and often withdrew from radical social action. Despite the hopes of the Honest to God generation, culturally and intellectually religious faith has become much harder to hold with integrity. As Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall says: “Belief in a good God is not an easy thing for anybody who thinks to a significant degree.”

One might expect that ministering in this context would be unrewarding—and indeed quite a few ministers have become burnt out and depressed by a constant sense of failure. For me, however, despite everything, ministry has been hugely satisfying. I have seen faith still light up the eyes of the dying and sermons just occasionally touch lives. My experience is that, whatever the problems we have speaking of it, the experience of transcendence either in its soft form (spiritual presence, beauty, awe, wonder) or its hard form (the numinous sense of God’s presence, glory, power) is still part of more lives than we might imagine. When Galileo was forced to recant his convictions he is supposed to have said, E pur si muove, “And yet it moves.” That is what I think about faith. It is difficult to exaggerate the crisis facing the institutional church or the crisis of belief which has undermined it. And yet God still moves.

I want to offer three main propositions.

1.I want to explain how God died to much of our culture, leading to a loss of a shared moral vision.

2.I want to show how, nonetheless, the spiritual is central both to our experience and to who we are.

3.I want to show how the Christian tradition can offer symbols and stories, above all those of cross and resurrection, that give meaning to the reality of spiritual presence and our mysterious experience of humanity. Scripture is vital to this but so is art, poetry, music, and the experience of beauty.

Richard Holloway tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest who worked in a factory and lived the life of anonymous Christianity. When asked why he did it he said he was there to keep the rumor of God alive. I have no doubt that an idea of God has died, but that is not the end of the matter. Theodore Roethke puts it “in a dark time, the eye begins to see.”24

TELL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT

Let me be quite explicit about who I am and what my prejudices are. What follows is written from within the Christian tradition. Growing up in East Anglia I hardly met anyone from another faith tradition and shared an unquestioned assumption of Christian superiority. I have tried to rectify that. Lieutenant General William Boykin, speaking at an evangelical Christian church in the United States, said of a Muslim military leader in Somalia, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” This desire to be number one, walled in by our own beliefs and prejudices, is one of the least attractive of our human characteristics. My own experience is that there are elements of good and bad, truth and falsehood, in people of all faiths and none. While for me Jesus Christ remains the central symbol for defining God, I am open to truth elsewhere.

I am not simply a Christian but a particular kind of Christian. I grew up in a liberal tradition as a Congregationalist. Later in the 1960s the radicalism of John Robinson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Death of God theologians like Paul van Buren, deepened the questioning nature of my faith. When I went forward for ordination none of this had given a secure sense of what the word “God” meant. It says something for liberal Congregationalism that they didn’t seem to hesitate when I offered myself for ordination and didn’t take it too badly when I rewarded Mansfield College with a sermon on “The Death of God and the Way of Jesus.”

Then in my early twenties my secure world fell apart. Instead of love growing it vanished into nothingness. It was, I suppose, not an unusual experience but it seemed so to me at the time. I had not realized there could be such pain in life. My life dissolved. Everyone worried. One friend, frightened I might be about to do something terrible, arranged for a social worker to visit. My mother hid the aspirin tablets, as I discovered when I got a toothache and was unable to find them. There is little positive to say about this, but it did mean I found myself asking life’s existential questions with a desperate urgency. Intense pain can do that which is why I find myself sometimes echoing Emily Dickinson’s words “I like a look of Agony Because I know it’s true—Men do not sham Convulsion, Nor simulate, a Throe.”25 As Leonard Cohen puts it in the chorus in his song, “Anthem”:

There’s a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

In the darkness of existential despair, light somehow shone, and my faith became personal in a different kind of way. God became not simply a theoretical concept but a personal source of strength. Somehow, I found I was not alone. There was strength given that I cannot account for except to describe it as the love of God. I remember sitting listening in my flat to a record of the Gelineau version of the 23rd Psalm and hearing the antiphon “The lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. He leads me, my Saviour nothing shall I fear.” And I knew that was what was happening to me. The time of darkness passed, my hope and idealism were untouched, and love still seemed the only thing that really matters in life. I could get on with life.

This was not an evangelical conversion experience. If anything it left me even more skeptical than ever of those who offer tidy theological answers to life’s raw dilemmas. But I had gone into the darkness and come out the other side not quite the person I was before. I was less inclined to see either myself or others in simple terms, or truth as all right or all wrong, more aware of how difficult life is, of how intense pain can be, but with a sense that God meant something in a way I had not known before.

I was greatly helped in my developing faith by coming across in a secondhand Oxford bookshop the sermons of the greatest liberal preacher of the twentieth-century, Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick’s story is interesting. A prominent liberal in the 1920s, he was targeted by fundamentalists who forced his resignation as minister of First Presbyterian Church in New York. His friends responded by building him a vast church on Riverside Drive in neo-Gothic style, the nave modeled on Chartres Cathedral, with the tallest church tower in America. It also had the largest carillon of bells in the world and the largest tune bell in the world. It helps when John D. Rockefeller Jr. is among your friends. Fosdick’s faith had its foundations not on theological speculations but in experience. He saw religious experiences such as awe, mystery, beauty, grace, love, and transcendent wonder as a consistent part of human life. These are what he called the “reproducible experiences” of the Christian life and are the basis of faith, to which our theologies give provisional expression. “No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.”26 It is a principle which seemed to make sense both of my own experience of wonder and grace and the intellectual integrity proper to a serious faith. So I was confirmed as a theological liberal, but one to whom religion was never simply theoretical but deeply personal. From then on Riverside has always had a special place in my affections. The first time I worshiped there, as the seemingly endless procession of choir and clergy entered, the tears ran down my face.

Theologically I am unambiguously a liberal. It is a word to use with caution. No theological categorization is without ambiguity. This is particularly true of liberalism which is more a way of doing theology than a particular set of conclusions. On balance the term liberal, like the term evangelical, reveals more than it obscures but it is well always to remember Alfred Korzybski’s dictum, “the map is not the territory it represents.”27 My own definition is that liberal theology is “a contextual relating of the gospel to contemporary culture and knowledge which reflects intellectual criticality and the liberal values of tolerance, openness and inclusion.” It is a theology committed to compassion and social justice and rooted in the understanding that ultimate matters can never be fully contained in words and concepts. For better or for worse that is the tradition I come out of and is what I am. Infallible Scriptures, unquestioned assertions, exclusive truths, or uncritical faith are not part of who I am.

Liberal Christianity is a tradition which does not always do itself many favors. David Hollinger tells of a discussion with a former president of the Unitarian-Universalist Association of the United States, who advised strongly against a robust public discussion of religious ideas. “My side,” he said, “would lose.”28 In recent years that has often been true—much to the dismay of liberals, fundamentalism has proved more resilient than liberals ever imagined would be the case. But for me the fundamentalist option is an impossible one and the liberating Christ I find within the Bible incompatible with authoritarian religion. I’m with Ian Bradley when he says, “the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand” (Isa 32:8).29

So, I am anything but unbiased. Nor of course is anyone else. The best any of us can manage is a partial insight from a particular viewpoint—an angle of entry, a slant on truth, simply one perspective among many. As Emily Dickinson says: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”30 There is no need to be embarrassed about this. As John Caputo puts it,

God doesn’t need an angle, but we do. Having an angle is the way truth opens up for us mortals. The opposite of having an angle on things is a dumb look, just staring at things incomprehensibly.31

This book is one person’s glimpse into the possibility of God. It is as honest as I can make it. I am a white English male who is at home in the church, and for whom a liberal faith has been at the heart of who I am. This is my slant on truth, a very particular and partial one, but none of us can offer more.

1. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §125.

2. Hastings, History of English Christianity, 221–22.

3. Daily Telegraph, 28 December 2016.

4. Kelly, Key Findings, 2.

5. Bullivant, “Europe’s Young Adults,” 6.

6. Pew Research Centre, “Decline of Christianity Continues,” paras. 1, 10.

7. Bullivant, Mass Exodus, 28.

8. Hall, End of Christendom, 38.

9. Küng, Global Ethic, 152.

10. Larkin, Collected Poems, 97.

11. Sunday Times, 2 November 2010.

12. Spufford, Unapologetic, 1.

13. Housman, Collected Poems, 43.

14. Bruce, “Late Secularization,” 22.

15. Taylor, Altar in the World, xiii–iv.

16. The Week, 6 December 2008.

17. Eagleton, Culture, 192.

18. Fashion, 29 December 2017.

19. Bruce, Secular Beats Spiritual, 179.

20. Dawkins, God Delusion, 199.

21. London Review of Books, 19 October 2006, 32–34.

22. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry.

23. Novak, Open Church, 362.

24. Roethke, Collected Poems.

25. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 110.

26. Fosdick, Living of These Days, 230.

27. Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 38.

28. Hollinger, “Comments,” 6.

29. Bradley, Grace, Order, Openness, 1.

30. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 506–7.

31. Caputo, Truth, 15.