the anglican liberal tradition

by Paul Badham

 

From its inception Anglicanism has argued that there is no one source of Christian truth but that Scripture, Tradition and Reason must all be taken into account. One decisive step in the process which led to the break with Rome was Cranmer’s advice to Henry VIII to appeal over the head of the Pope to the consensus of theological opinion within the Universities of Europe. Hence Anglicanism came into being with the insight that a true understanding of Christian sources was a matter for scholarly research.

 

One immediate consequence of the Reformation in Britain was a dramatic expansion of the Grammar Schools in Britain and the revival of the Universities. The Elizabethan ordinal insisted that the clergy must be ‘Godly and well-learned’ and the idea grew up that there must be an educated person or ‘Parson’ in every village; to teach the faith and to be responsible for education. In a Church that values scholarship it was and is inevitable that diversity of opinion should exist. Hence liberalism has always existed within Anglicanism wearing different labels at different times: Latitudinarian, Broad Church, Modernist, Liberal, Radical.

 

The greatest thinker of the 18th century was Bishop Joseph Butler. His Analogy of Religion of 1736 defended Christian belief on the basis of reasonable probability through accumulation of arguments. His Sermons Preached in the Rolls Chapel in 1726 were equally significant. Butler pointed out that because the books of the Bible necessarily reflect ‘the conditions and usages of the world at the time they were written’ they can only be properly understood in their original context. Furthermore because conditions of life have changed so much since biblical times ‘exhortations and precepts which refer to circumstances now ceased or altered cannot be ‘urged’ upon us today ‘in that manner and with that force which they were to the primitive Christians.’

 

Butler’s insights have been very influential. If it was true then that the world had changed profoundly since Biblical times, it is vastly more true today. Liberal theology has accepted historical and literary criticism of the Bible and the impact of this on doctrinal and ethical thought. This showed itself in the rejection of immoral features of the Old Testament such as the Canaanite massacres or the cursing psalms. Old Testament law codes were also recognised as outmoded. Having fought a long battle against the slave trade, nineteenth century Christians were appalled by Exodus 21:21 that a man who flogs a slave girl to death shall not be punished provided she survives for a day or two after the flogging for ‘the loss of his property is punishment enough’.

 

Rowland Williams showed that the Old Testament prophets were writing for their own day. The supposed messianic prophecy in Isaiah 7, ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’, referred in its original context to political events of the prophet’s own day. The verse can only be read as a messianic prophecy if it is mistranslated and taken totally out of its historical setting.

 

Another challenge came from geological findings which showed that the earth was immeasurably older than the six thousand years presupposed by the Genesis story, and neither the fall of Adam and Eve nor the universal flood could be historical. This view was reinforced by the theory of evolution which was almost universally accepted by Christian liberals after the publication of Lux Mundi in 1889 which presented Christianity wholly within an evolutionary framework.

 

More serious to traditional Christianity was liberal criticism of belief in original sin, substitution atonement or hell. According to F.D. Maurice such beliefs represented ‘a monstrous perversion’ of Christianity for they stand in direct contradiction to the primal and quite decisive Christian doctrine of the love of God. If we start from belief that ‘God is actually love’, we will shrink from attributing to Him acts which would be unlovely in man’.

 

Maurice claimed that any doctrine of the atonement which presumes that sins cannot be forgiven unless satisfaction is first paid contradicts the teaching of Jesus about being merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful. He believed that the doctrine of hell made a mockery of Jesus’ picture of the loving fatherhood of God. For if it were indeed the case that all humanity is damned except those who accept Christ as their personal saviour it would condemn ‘most of the American slaves, and the whole body of Turks, Hindus, Hottentots and Jews… to hopeless destruction’.

 

Maurice lost his chair at King’s London for such teaching but his liberal stance was to find acceptance less then twenty years later when two contributors to a book called Essays and Reviews were prosecuted for heresy. H.B. Wilson was charged with denying hell and Rowland Williams for practising biblical criticism and denying substitution atonement. Both were cleared by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1864 which concluded that there was nothing in the Anglican formularies to require such beliefs.

 

During the twentieth century liberalism became more controversial because it applied historical and critical research to the New Testament and questioned belief in the virgin birth and the empty tomb. Whether or not such views were acceptable within Anglicanism was tested in 1906 when William Temple offered himself for ordination while making it clear that he could only ‘tentatively assent’ to the doctrines of the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus with a greater emphasis on ‘tentativeness’ than on assent. Bishop Paget of Oxford, felt unable to ordain Temple but two years later agreed not to object to Archbishop Randall Davidson ordaining him instead. In 1912 B.H. Streeter edited Foundations in which he argued that the Resurrection of Jesus should be understood as Jesus convincing the disciples of his victory over death by showing himself to them in a ‘spiritual body’ or possibly through ‘some psychological channel akin to telepathy’. In the same volume William Temple argued that the Chalcedonian Definition of the divinity and humanity of Christ demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of Patristic theology.

 

Debate quickened in 1917 when Henslow Henson was consecrated Bishop of Hereford despite his questioning of the virgin birth in three books. Controversy continued at a Conference of the Modern Churchmen’s Union of 1921 where Hastings Rashdall sought to explain the incarnation of God in Christ by suggesting that in Jesus the divine presence we partially sense in other holy people was present to the nth. degree.

 

Following this conference the Archbishops of Canterbury and York established in 1922 a Doctrine Commission to settle how much liberality in doctrine should be acceptable. The commission reported in 1938 and essentially it accepted the legitimacy of Liberal Anglicanism within the Church.

 

If we look through the various components of liberalism today we find an all-but universal acceptance in theory of the legitimacy of biblical criticism and a widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution. There is a greater reluctance to apply Biblical criticism to the New Testament, and belief in the virgin birth and bodily resurrection are often used as litmus tests of orthodoxy. However virtually all academic studies of the historical Jesus discount the nativity stories and virtually all discussions of the resurrection accept that however it is or is not to be interpreted, it is not a question of Jesus’ corpse being restored to life.

 

In the world of contemporary Christology almost all contemporary scholars accept that Jesus had no consciousness of being divine but many adopt a kenotic Christology in which Christ emptied himself of all divine attributes in the process of becoming incarnate. But it is hard to see a real difference between the claim that Jesus was literally God but possessed no divine attributes and the claim that Jesus was not literally God. By contrast it can be argued that a non-literal doctrine of incarnation can make a significant claim in saying that the personality of God was fully revealed in the life and teaching of Jesus in the same way though to a different degree that the personality of God is partially revealed through the lives of other holy people.

 

The most widespread success of liberalism has been the near collapse of belief in hell. When disbelief in hell was pronounced as legal in 1864 almost half the clergy signed a petition to say they still believed in it. But preaching of hell fire has become very rare in contemporary Anglicanism and the doctrine was repudiated as incompatible with belief in the love of God in the Doctrine commission report The Mystery of Salvation in 1995.

 

On the doctrine of the atonement Bishop Stephen Sykes is right to say that ‘phrases and sentences’ associated with the older atonement beliefs are ‘the common coin of the Church’s worship’, but he also rightly notes that explanations of such language are ‘not obvious’. The problem is that theories of atonement in terms of a sacrifice by which God was placated, or of a bait through which the devil was deceived seem increasingly implausible.

 

However liberal theology offers an understanding of Jesus’ death which has become increasingly popular. This is that God was present in Jesus’ suffering on the cross and that this illustrates the way in which God shares in the sorrows of humanity. This understanding of the cross has been endorsed by the 1995 Church of England Doctrine Commission report on The Mystery of Salvation as the ‘only ultimately satisfactory response to evil.’

 

One further characteristic of liberal doctrine is that liberals believe that God has nowhere left himself without witness but has created all human beings with a yearning to feel after him and find him. Hence they believe that the logos of God which found expression in Christ was also at work in other religious leaders. As Archbishop William Temple put it:

 

By the Word of God – that is to say by Christ – Isaiah, and Plato, and Zoroaster, and Buddha, and Confucius conceived and uttered such truths as they declared. There is only one divine light; and everyman in his measure is enlightened by it.

 

Liberalism was most noticeable in the 1950′s and 60′s in the Church of England Council for Moral Welfare which subsequently became the Board for Social Responsibility. Their reports had an enormous influence on the so-called ‘permissive legislation’ of the 1960′s which closely followed their recommendations. Thus the Church’s report on The Problem of Homosexuality of 1954 foreshadowed the decriminalisation of homosexual behaviour in 1967. Their report Ought Suicide to be a Crime? of 1959 was followed by the Suicide Act of 1961. Likewise the report Abortion: an Ethical Discussion published in 1965 paved the way for the legislation of 1967, just as the report Putting Asunder of 1966 recommended a Divorce Law for contemporary society almost identical to that instantiated in the Divorce Reform Act of 1969.

 

Liberal Anglicans consistently supported the ordination of women to the priesthood and now support their consecration to the episcopate. In the case of homosexuals, liberals accept the empirical evidence that suggests that homosexuality is a natural state for certain people to find themselves in, and believe they should be allowed the same opportunity to find fulfilment in a stable relationship as heterosexuals enjoy.

 

Liberal Anglicans find it puzzling that a Church which was formerly in the van of theological and social reform and which played a key role in changing public attitudes should now find itself increasingly at odds with the beliefs and values of modern society.

(source)

 

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in defence of liberalism

by Will Hutton

 

I write in defence of liberalism – a tradition as traduced by Baroness Warsi sounding off in the Vatican about a liberal elite undermining religion‘s necessary and important centrality in national life as it is by Dawkins’ high profile campaign to convert us all to atheism. There are many dimensions to liberalism – proportionality, due desert, mutual respect, belief in pluralism and tolerance of dissent – but we liberals would no more want to pillory those who have faith than we would want to endorse a philosophy that for all its appeal to rationality does not respect difference.

 

Liberalism is a doctrine of live and let live, and there has to be a very high threshold of harm before that liberal principle can be qualified.

 

Of course when religion is carried to absurd and dangerous degrees – the Tea Party movement in the US or Islamic fundamentalism – I am opposed, but for the same reasons I recoil from any zealot. George Osborne’s irrational zealotry on debt and deficit reduction is a much more serious threat to our wellbeing than Archbishop Rowan Williams’s Anglicanism. Indeed paradoxically the Church of England he leads is a great liberal redoubt – an institution that embodies proportionality, tolerance of dissent and respect for others along with considerable moral authority.

 

It is our ally, not our enemy, as we are discovering again in its battle against the devastating and thoughtless welfare cuts and the argument for a responsible capitalism. It is why so many English people support it even while their practice and understanding of Christianity is uncertain. Please don’t confuse that hesitancy with their quiet respect – even love – of an institution they understand and feel they need.

 

I am agnostic rather than atheist, which means I am much more well-disposed to the values and sensibility of faith. It also means I set a higher bar for my objections. I object to Baroness Warsi, Rick Santorum and radical Islam alike – but not to longstanding rituals such as prayers before council meetings or even in schools. I am more selective about my fights, and more anxious to protect my general liberalism and tolerance.

(source)

 

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pastor to the royals

 

 

Dr John Robert Hall (born 13 March 1949) is the Dean (somewhat equivalent to a senior pastor in an evangelical church) of the majestic Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, or what is popularly known as Westminster Abbey – the ancient church which serves the British royalty for centuries.

 

It was the luscious venue for the recent royal wedding, by the way, of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

 

The Very Rt Rev. Dr John Hall represents quite accurately what it means to be a Church of England (anglican) preacher, the epitome of what some would call a dignified and intelligent churchman and others the symbol of all things “cowardly” and “pussified”.

 

I rather like him though. Unlike many of my contemporaries who would rather listen to US-type sentimentality and cheap emotionalism over the pulpit with the likes of John Bevere, Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Joseph Prince, Kong Hee and what-have-you in the world of televangelistic extravagance (even someone as trite as the British charismatic Nicky Gumbel can be boring stuff to them); my tastes are much more down-to-earth.

 

My favourite preachers from the US would include renowned wordsmiths like the late Rev. Peter Gomes of Harvard Memorial Church, whose short (twenty minutes at a maximum) but very literary homilies were a sensual delight to my ears, and Rev. Alan Jones, the former Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who loved to pepper his similarly literary homilies with poetry.

 

And with no surprise, my all-time favourite would be the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. His homilies and lectures are loaded with substance and intelligent rhetoric as well as a living example of what good spoken English sounds like.

 

Dr Hall is no different. Although his homilies are far too brief for my liking (seven to ten minutes) as is typical with high Church of England sermons, his appeal for me lies in his mellifluous baritone voice, steady and quiet delivery, and good neutral Received Pronunciation.

 

If young people these days do not appreciate beautiful and elegant rhetoric, so what? What do they know? Must we lower our standards to speak like hooligans and ruffians so as to “relate” to them? Must we cuss and swear on the pulpit to attract crowds of equally insolent evangelicals?

 

Alas…evangelical christianity in Singapore is going the way of the loud-mouthed, hand-waving yankee.

 

Sigh.

 

*******

 

the worth of anglicanism

 

“Anglicanism does indeed attempt to hold together elements that are opposed in other traditions – though not without strains.

It defines itself as catholic and reformed; orthodox in doctrine yet open to change in its application.

Its polity is both episcopal (and its bishops have real authority) and synodical – an unusual combination in a church that has maintained the historic episcopate.

It acknowledges an ecumenical council as the highest authority in the Church, but is not opposed in principle to a universal primacy and virtually never has been.

It confesses the paramount authority of Scripture, but reveres tradition and harkens to the voice of culture and science.

It tries to be neither centralized nor fragmented, neither authoritarian nor anarchic.

It is comprehensive without being relativistic.

This interesting experiment has endured and evolved for nearly five centuries; in spite of the present difficulties, I believe it is worth persevering with.”

- Paul Avis (in The Identity of Anglicanism, 2007)

 

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no lack of biblical literalists in singapore

 

This morning I was rather distracted during the church service, having to force myself to keep awake on a few occasions. As usual, the “praise and worship” portion was beyond me as I prefer stillness and solitude to raucous clapping and concert-style singing.

 

The preacher was a regular visitor, an amiable and jovial bespectacled middle-aged bloke with a full head of straight and shaggy black hair, conspicuously coloured with a sliver of distinguished white, somewhat exactly in the middle. He pastors a small congregation that shares the campus grounds with a local halfway house for former convicts in the Singapore prison system.

 

Although his speech was fluent, his pronunciation left much to be desired for, mispronouncing numerous English words by putting the stress on the wrong syllable. Although no decent parishioner would fault a preacher on his/her speech, which is but only a peripheral issue compared to the content of the homily; I couldn’t help myself being the snobbish pedant. I wouldn’t blame such an individual for such an “error” if we were in conversation over a cup of coffee, but over the lectern or the pulpit, it is another matter all together.

 

Anyhow, throughout the entire length of his homily, I was skipping in and out of my own thoughts – thinking to myself how difficult it is to find a pastor in Singapore who is a non-literalist and whose theology is mainstream liberal, probably in the tradition of Paul Tillich and the benign Church of England. I could catch myself wince and grimace at the several times in which the preacher this morning mentioned about not diluting the “gospel” of Christ and not “changing” the message to suit the secular world.

 

Isn’t this the problem with religious fundamentalism in general? A mindset that is preoccupied with premodernity, always looking back instead of looking forward and the propensity to view change and innovation as a moral evil?

 

It is not an issue about compromise, about being palatable to the current zeitgeist. It is about in constant dialogue and engagement with current knowledge and research. In order for the church to be thoroughly relevant and empowered to “minister” to the current culture, it has to do theology in a way that correlates the different strands of knowledge – christian theology, modern philosophy, evolutionary biology, quantum physics, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, archaeology, etc.

 

I don’t know if this pastor views the bible as inerrant and infallible, but if he is properly educated during his days as a seminarian, he should know that the bible is written by men, in the language of myth and fable, and not supposed to be interpreted literally. And as such, christian doctrines have to be modified, changed and reformulated, tampered by the findings of other fields of knowledge, so as to be relevant for the 21st century.

 

I don’t expect the average pastor to be a polymath of course, but as learning is a lifelong experience, a preacher should embody the noble ideals of a keen mind that is willing to learn and engage with the sciences, the liberal arts and the humanities. As all truth is God’s truth, so to speak, there is the sense of the sacred in any field of human inquiry, and as such as Christians we can learn even from literature, poetry and biology.

 

For example, the fall of Adam and Eve cannot be understood as an original sin suffered by our literal ancestors (we do not have a specific ancestor but a continuum of ancestors, from other species all the way to being primates and then the great apes and then to the hominids) – but perhaps a metaphor that represents an estrangement from complete human fulfillment.

 

Modern historical research has also provided us with a rather skimpy image of the real Jesus, who according to some scholars might be nothing more than a fictional mythological character like Zeus, or if he indeed existed, is simply a human being like any other. So in all likelihood, our understanding of Jesus have to change and our christology has to be reformulated so as to be intellectually honest with ourselves.

 

And so on and so forth.

 

And thus the concept of “heresy” or “false doctrine” will have no place in the modern church. There is no such thing as false doctrine, but only archaic doctrines that are no longer intellectually plausible in this day and age. Biblical literalists love to speak of the “old old gospel”, as though to go back to premodernity is something honorable and good.

 

The preacher this morning ended his almost an hour-long homily with a comment regarding the state of his church. Somehow the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) would not be allowing the halfway house and the church to be using the premises any longer due to some dispute regarding the mission statement of the halfway house in its constitution. The authorities claim that there were some sentences in the statement that were too Christian-centric and thus exclusive only towards Christianity. They demanded a change so as to allow people of other faiths and traditions to be welcomed. Singapore is a religiously pluralistic society, anyway.

 

But apparently the board of directors of this Christian organisation refused to accept SLA’s proposal due to reasons which in my opinion are silly and irrational. It is very common for evangelical and fundamentalist christians to behave “holier-than-thou”, unwilling to compromise and adapt so as to make peace with the larger society. Isn’t this fundamentally similar to the muslim extremists who do not wish to compromise?

 

Sigh. I don’t blame the preacher this morning. He, like any other preacher in churches all over Singapore today, is just doing his job, out of his own beliefs, blinded by religious prejudice and an innate antagonism towards secularism, real education and real knowledge.

 

Thank goodness for modern technology and the internet. At least I will have real intellectual and perhaps even spiritual sustenance from “proper” liberal preaching.

 

*******

 

a liberal lecture on god

 

The first half of the first of the 39 Articles of Religion, which define the official historic stance of the Church of England on matters of faith and practice, runs like this:

 

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.

 

It was composed as long ago as the year 1533, but it still usefully summarises what most people understand by the term “God”, be they fervent believers, militant atheists or nominal Christians.

 

To turn this general statement into an expression of the classic Christian doctrine of God, we need only add the second part of the same Article:

 

And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

 

This is the starting point here, but it was not the starting point for the human exploration of the divine realm and concept of God in the Western part of the world. The character described in this Article has a history. Various earlier ideas combined to produce it, and various subsequent ideas have further developed it.

 

My intention is to illustrate how the term God (or its equivalent in other languages) has been used over the centuries for many different things. I will argue that it needs to go on changing if God-language and the practice of religion are to continue playing a guiding role in human affairs.

 

As with my previous discussion of the Bible, my standpoint is that of a minister in the Church of England. But I hope that what I write will be helpful to those of other religious traditions, or those who come from outside any religious commitment.

 

The Greek background

One major influence on the Christian concept of God was ancient Greece. As in the case of Roman and Nordic religion, the Greeks worked with the concept of a pantheon. Divinity was envisaged as a “race” with different individual gods who behaved much like humans.

 

They had personalities like humans and could interact with humans. Although themselves immortal, they could liaise with humans to produce offspring (known as heroes), such as Perseus, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa. He was the son of the god Zeus and the human princess Diana.

 

Such images of divine beings cavorting with human lovers would, of course, never have been sanctioned by any official Christian teaching on the nature of God. Yet many modern attempts to defend the doctrine of the “virgin birth” of Jesus come perilously close to casting God the father in the role of Zeus, Mary as the hapless Diana, and Jesus a latter-day Perseus who defeated not just the monstrous Gorgon but death itself.

 

The really scary thing, from my point of view, is that most of those in authority in the churches appear to be less worried by such travesties as this than by serious attempts to come up with an authentic contemporary doctrine of God.

 

Returning to the ancient Greeks: In their imagination and legends the gods on Mount Olympus came to personify different aspects of human life and experience – Aphrodite for love, Athena for wisdom, Demeter for the harvest, and so on.

 

Here again there seems to be more than a passing similarity between this aspect of ancient religion and the still active cult of patron saints in the Church. Nobody suggests that these saints are gods. But when a devotee of St Anthony prays to him for assistance in finding some item she has lost, I doubt whether the psychology is much different from an ancient Greek farmer praying to Demeter for a good harvest.

 

Greece, however, contributed even more significantly to our story than I have indicated so far. The same society that worshipped the pantheon and celebrated its members in its poetry, also developed the critical faculties for questioning the received religion.

 

As early as the fifth century BCE the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes (d.480 BCE) insisted that the Olympian gods were socially constructed rather than divinely revealed. Indeed, as he told his fellow-Greeks, all humans create their own gods in their own image. So that Ethiopian gods are “snub-nosed and black” while those of the Thracians “have blue eyes and red hair”.

 

Under the guidance of even greater minds, Greek philosophy came to understand divinity as the unifying principle behind the universe. For Plato, God was the creator of the world out of formless pre-existing material. For Aristotle he was the unmoved originator of all motion in the universe.

 

Here were ideas that were to play a profound effect on the Christian understanding of God. Many is the time, when staying at convents and monasteries, that I have sung the following hymn at the afternoon office:

 

O God, creation’s secret force,
Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source,
Who from the morn till evening ray
Through all its changes guid’st the day.

 

This is pure Aristotle. And Plato’s vision of the divine mind behind the universe, bringing order out of chaos, is still alive and well in North America (and not only there) with theories such as the Anthropic Principle and “intelligent design” (of which more later).

 

But above all, perhaps, we have the Greeks to thank (if that is the word) for the idea that God is perfect and therefore unchangeable, since any change in perfection must by definition be for the worse.

 

Again the hymns say it best, as in:

 

We blossom and flourish, as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish – but naught changeth thee.

 

Any minister will tell you that trying to persuade a congregation to change its hymn book is the simplest way to bring out in them this divine attribute.

 

The Hebrew background

Even more apparent than the Greek influence on Christian ideas about God is the role of the Hebrew tradition, to which all the original Christians belonged. An insistence on there being only one God is the most obvious legacy here. But a close reading of the Old Testament shows that other elements, not dissimilar from the Greek ones, are also present.

 

Later editors of the Hebrew scriptures read back the monotheism of later times, and interpreted or rewrote earlier texts in the light of it.

 

Note the following examples of where the stitching still shows:

 

• There are traces of a suppressed pantheon in Psalm 82.1 (“God standeth in the congregation of the princes: he is a judge among gods”) and at verse 6 (“I have said, Ye are gods: and ye are all the children of the most high”).
• The commonest word for God in the Hebrew Bible is Elohim, the plural form of Eloah, which is also used, but much less often. The grammatical plural does not mean that the God of Israel was himself thought of as being multiple, but it is evidence of an earlier tradition with a council of gods.
• Different names for God are sometimes associated with different shrines or people, especially in Genesis. There we find God referred to as the Shield of Abraham (15.1), the God of Bethel (31.13), the Fear of Isaac (31.42), God Almighty (El Shaddai, 35.11). These might once have been separate gods.
• The fact that the worship of other gods is forbidden could be interpreted as an acknowledgement that they exist. The shift from monolatry (“You must only worship one god”) to monotheism (“There is only one God”) is made explicit only in part of the Book of Isaiah – that part normally dated to the time of the Babylonian exile (sixth century BCE) It makes the one God responsible for both good and evil fortune (Isaiah 45.7).
• In later parts of the Old Testament we find that attributes of God (Word, Wisdom, Spirit and so on) are personified, implying some sense of their once having had a separate existence.
• Finally, both the King and the nation of Israel as a whole are at times addressed as God’s “Son”. This might hark back to an earlier time when a relationship more like that of the Greek heroes was envisaged between the God of Israel and its King.

 

The establishment of monotheism is not the only development discernible in the Old Testament. Another is the gradual distancing of God from earthly contacts, which paved the way for an assimilation of Israel’s original “hands on” God to the later abstract God of the philosophers.

 

Here are some examples of this tendency:

 

• There is a shift in the meaning of the term “Angel of the Lord”. Originally it indicated the presence of God on earth – “the angel which is the Lord”. But later it referred to a heavenly being bringing a message from an absentee God – “The angel who is the Lord’s messenger”.
• There is a shift from direct revelation through prophecy (God speaks directly to his people through a prohpet) to the rabbinic study of scripture (to discern God’s will now from what he had said previously).
• There is evidence of Greek philosophical influence in those later parts of the Jewish scripture known as the Wisdom Literature. Some of these later books were written in Greek rather than Hebrew.

 

A third development that we can trace in the Old Testament is the introduction of moral dualism from Persian Zoroastrianism. This introduced the idea that everything in the universe is caught up is a cosmic battle between good and evil, between the children of light and the children of darkness.

 

This trend is especially interesting when seen alongside the increasing stress on monotheism, to which it acts as a kind of counterweight. All the time you believe in lots of gods, you can blame someone else’s god when things go wrong. But if there is only one God, then responsibility for everything – good and bad alike – falls on his shoulders.

 

Some Old Testament writers accepted the full implication of this. I have already alluded to Isaiah 45.7, where the prophet at the time of the Jewish exile to Babylon wrote in the name of his monotheistic God: “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe. I the Lord do all these things.” But not everyone had the stomach for such strong meat.

 

A symptom of both encroaching dualism and of the distancing of God from direct contact with humans came in the development of character of Satan. The name means an “adversary” in the context of a law court.

 

Those caught up in a legal dispute will see the defence and prosecution lawyers as being on opposite sides, although within the overall Western judicial system they are both on the side of justice. Both are needed to make the system work. Thus Satan was not originally God’s enemy, but his servant, the prosecuting counsel in the heavenly court in which God was judge. He plays this role in the opening chapters of the Book of Job.

 

Perhaps the best example of Satan being God’s loyal instrument is in a comparison of the two accounts of King David’s census of the people. The earlier account in 2 Samuel 24.1 reads: 

 

Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying: Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.

 

The later account in 1 Chronicles 21.1 says, 

 

Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people of Israel.

 

The hands-on God of 2 Samuel now uses his legal prosecutor to do his dirty work. But it is still God’s work.

 

By the time we get to the New Testament, however, Satan is identified with the Devil (Revelation 12.9; 20.2) and has been transformed into God’s mortal enemy – almost (but not quite) a second god, available to take the blame when things go wrong.

 

The Holy Trinity

The distinctively Christian doctrine of God as Trinity will be dealt with in the fourth of this series, which deals with the Creed. I want now to skip straight to the period from the seventeenth-century enlightenment to the present day, and look at more recent developments in the understanding of God.

 

1. Natural and Revealed Theology
We have said that the traditional idea of God is of a supernatural person, beyond space and time, who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and the proper object of human worship and obedience.

For any believer in this sort of God there is a dilemma which cannot be avoided. By definition, God is beyond time and space, while we are constrained within time and space. How then can we know anything about God?

There are two approaches to this problem of gaining knowledge about God. Both have been used in compiling classical Christianity.

The first, known as Natural Theology, says that we cannot reach God direct, so we must look for clues to God’s nature in the world around us. 

The second, known as Revealed Theology, says that we cannot reach outside time and space to God, but the divine does reach inside them to speak to us, if only we will listen.

The relative merits of these two approaches have been argued about for hundreds of years. But it seems to me that in the end they are both confronted by the same problem – human limitations.

As we noted in the first of this series, which dealt with the Bible, even if it is more than just a humanly produced book it can never be less than a humanly produced book.

Whether or not the Ten Commandments, for instance, originated from heaven or from earth, we cannot actually trace them back beyond the point at which they entered human consciousness. And at that point they were necessarily constrained by the limits of human understanding and expression.

And the same is true – in various ways – of all claims to have received or experienced a divine revelation.

The importance of the human dimension in all religious doctrine became an issue of increasing importance in the seventeenth century and the Age of Enlightenment.

2. Post-Enlightenment Developments
The changes in philosophy and the natural sciences associated with the Enlightenment in Europe led to an increasing gap in the minds of educated people between God and his creation. For the entire Christian era to that point there had been an acceptance of theism – the belief in a God who is prior to and outside his creation, but who still intervenes to a greater or lesser extent in its day to day running and sustains it by his love and power.

But with the discovery of the natural laws of physics by Isaac Newton and others, which replaced the older science of Aristotle, the daily course of the universe could be explained without recourse to an interventionist God.

As Alexander Pope playfully and memorably put it:

      Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
      God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.

So it was that among forward-looking religious thinkers of the time, traditional theism gave way to deism – the belief that having once made the world and set it in motion, God was content to leave it alone to run by itself. God might have reserved to the divine an occasional miracle – the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, for example – but daily intervention was not needed.

With so much of God’s traditional role already conceded by the religious leaders of the day, it was but a short step for the less religious to move from deism to atheism – the belief that there is no God at all, and never has been. 

The classic spokesman here was the French philosopher and scientist Pierre Laplace. Asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his scheme, Laplace replied simply, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

 

These moves towards atheism have been countered by a number of arguments.

• The most traditional and persistent is the argument from design, put most memorably by the late eighteenth-century archdeacon, William Paley, in his Parable of the Watchmaker.

  Suppose I am walking across the heath, he wrote, and find a stone. I might reasonably suppose that it came there by accident. But if I find a watch, with all its intricate cogs and wheels and mechanisms, I can only suppose that it was designed and made by an intelligent mind.

  The universe – as we observe it – is more like the watch than the stone. It “works” and therefore must have been planned and executed with a purpose. The watchmaker is God.

  The doyen of militant atheists today, biologist Richard Dawkins, has countered this argument in his book The Blind Watchmaker. He argues that Darwinian evolution by natural selection can explain away the apparent design in the universe. 

  He in turn has been challenged – unsuccessfully in my view – by the proponents, chiefly in America, of the “intelligent design” of the universe, whose claims are often related to the so-called “Anthropic Principle”.

  This is the scientific claim that if the initial physical conditions at the Big Bang had been even fractionally different, then the universe would not have evolved in a way that could support human life – and that therefore there must have been a God to achieve those optimum conditions.

• A rather different approach is represented by Process Theology. It is associated especially with the names of Teilhard de Chardin and Charles Hartshorne, and was based on the philosophy of A N Whitehead (1861–1947).

  He saw God not as “an imperial ruler” but as working “slowly and quietly by love” in and through the natural order. God’s perfection is seen not so much as an unchanging essence as an evolving process guided by love and leading toward what Teilhard called “the Omega Point”, the goal of the creation.

  On this view there is no contradiction between the scientific doctrine of evolution and the Christian doctrine of God.

• Yet another twentieth-century attempt to reconcile modern science and philosophy with religion was the “existential” theology of the American Paul Tillich, the German Rudolph Bultmann and the British John Macquarrie (I was taught by the latter).

  Traditional theology had seen God as a being standing outside the natural order. Process Theology saw God as working in and through the natural order. Existential Theology, developing out of the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger, saw God not as an individual being at all, but – in Tillich’s famous phrase – as the “ground of being”, what Macquarrie calls “Being with a capital B”, that which “lets-be” all individual beings.

• A fourth approach, and the one which in recent years I have myself found most useful, is known as Constructive Theology.

  This is the belief that religion is part of our humanly constructed culture and that all theological ideas – including the concept of God himself – are part of a wholly human undertaking to structure and make sense of our lives.

  The idea that God was made in man’s image, rather than the other way round, is commonly associated with the nineteenth-century thinker Ludwig Feuerbach, who made it a reason to stop believing. More recently the Cambridge theologian Don Cupitt, Lloyd Geering in New Zealand, and others, have embraced this viewpoint without giving up their Christian faith.

  In the so-called “post-modern” world, many have come to believe that moral and religious values once thought to be absolute and “handed down” from on high have in fact evolved within human society, and are none the worse for that. God is now understood in a similar way.

 

My understanding of God

About fifteen years ago – under the combined influence of these various ideas, especially existential and constructive theology – my own ideas about God reached the stage where to speak about God’s independent existence seemed just as much picture language as to speak about God’s right hand.

 

We can go on using the words – especially in worship – but we must be clear that they are picture language and not literal description.

 

It is obvious that things such as love, loyalty and duty are human values. Although we have personified them – and spoken as if they existed independently of us – we now see that in fact they exist only where men and women exhibit them.

 

That does not deny their importance, but it locates them firmly in the human sphere. In the same way, so it now seemed to me, God is also a personification of human values. In the words of Don Cupitt, God “… is the sum of our values, representing to us their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power“.

 

As such God does not exist independently of the humans who relate to those values and live by them.

 

This is not quite the way that Paul or Aquinas understood God. But I venture to suggest that it is no more different from either of them than they are from each other, or than they both are from the God of the Jephthah and Gideon in the Old Testament. It is a way of thinking about God which has been around now for well over a hundred years.

 

But what is new is that it is now appealing to practising Christians and not just to opponents of religion. Its appeal, speaking just for myself, is that it provides a way of thinking about God which enables me to say with integrity, “I believe in God”.

 

It allows me to practise my religion without switching off my brain.

 

*******

 

This is a lecture by the former Church of England priest Anthony Freeman who was defrocked in 1994 for espousing very liberal views of christian theology.

 

church of england still strong

 

Contrary to the opinions of some clergy and religion haters, the Church of England is staying strong and growing.

 

Updated records from the Research and Statistics Unit of the Archbishops Council shows that more than 36 per cent of those who worship in the Church of England are under the age of 45.

 

Weekly attendance at Church of England cathedrals in 2011 stands at about 1.7 million people each month – a level that has been maintained since the year 2000.

 

Statistics have also shown that the Church of England has steadily grown by 37 per cent since 2000.

 

Criticism has been made against the naysayers that most of them are using flawed methodologies in their “research” and thus are looking at skewed numbers. They should be looking at the “big picture”.

 

The evangelical fundamentalists would not be happy about this (one wonders why), and would continue to gripe that these statistics does not actually show that those people who are attending are “real Christians”.

 

Oh I see.

 

So these evangelicals are the real ones then?

 

Cults think that way too.

 

******

 

sermon by rev. andrew tremlett @ westminster abbey 10th july 2011

 

Religion in a world of Faiths: The Problem of Religion?

 

Over the course of the remaining four Sundays of July, I am going to be preaching about the place of religion in what we often call a ‘plural’ or ‘multi-faith’ world. That is, a world in which no single outlook, philosophy, political theory, let alone religion predominates, and where in particular those who practise faith can sometimes regard themselves – quite wrongly as I will argue – as being pushed to one side as the juggernaut of secular modernity crashes on.

The central question I want to tackle is the one posed by the penultimate Lambeth Conference (the 10-yearly gathering of Anglican Primates) whether ‘a multi-faith context is [being] taken as an excuse for marginalising all spiritual and moral perspectives’¹. In other words, does faith have the right to speak up in the public sphere?

In this first sermon, I will be looking at how our perceptions of religion have changed here in the United Kingdom over the past half-century and whether we have now come to regard religious faith as a ‘problem’ rather than a ‘solution’. In the subsequent weeks, I will be looking at some of the multi-Faith contexts we find ourselves in and how Christians can relate both positively and critically to Jews and Muslims. And then finally towards the end of the month consider a model of Hospitality and Embassy for the Christian Churches’ engagement not only with other Faith communities, but also with secular culture.

But first let me begin with a personal anecdote.

At the age of 22 and about to start training for ordination, quite by chance, I went by the studios of a scandalously famous local artist, Robert Lenkiewicz, in my home city of Plymouth in the South West of England, and in the window saw a sign – ‘Student Sitters Required, Apply Within’. In the course of our conversations Lenkiewicz naturally asked what I was studying, and could not contain his utter astonishment, despair and incredulity when I said I was training for ordination. What a pointless waste of time, he said, religion will be dead by the year 2000!

In some ways, of course, he was right – established religion in this country, as elsewhere in Europe, has been in decline and not merely since my ordination in 1989!

However, there was a bigger story to tell. Lenkiewicz had grown up here in London, the son of Jewish refugee parents, who ran a hotel in Fordwych Road, where the early residents included a number of Holocaust survivors. For good reasons he was deeply pessimistic about the evil which had been perpetrated in the name of religion, and found his own spiritual expression both in the beauty of art and in his friendship with the friendless vagrants for which he became known.

This view of religion as, at best, a source of indifference or, worse, of evil stands in stark contrast to others who were also moulded in the years immediately before and after the Second World War.

On the evening of 2nd June 1953, following her Coronation here in Westminster Abbey, the newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth II gave a broadcast to the nation in which she said:

 

When I spoke to you last … I asked you all, whatever your religion, to pray for me on the day of my Coronation – to pray that God would give me wisdom and strength to carry out the promises that I should then be making.

 

This inclusive and generous vision of faith was reflected both in that speech which referred repeatedly to God’s will, his grace and mercy, and in her own public espousal of religion in the nearly six-decades since.

However, those of us who are religious have to recognise the prevalence of an often lukewarm response to faith, and at times outright hostility. As Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi put it recently when giving evidence a Parliamentary Committee:

 

I share a real concern that the attempt to impose the current prevailing template of equality and discrimination on religious organisations is an erosion of religious liberty. We are beginning to move back to where we came in the 17th century – a whole lot of people on the Mayflower leaving to find religious freedom elsewhere.

So where are we now? We can identify two key transformations in recent decades. The first is to do with the decline in formal religious observance in Europe, and the second relates to the polarising way in which the religious elements of world conflicts have been portrayed.

More than 10 years ago³, the sociologist Prof Grace Davie charted the way in which religious faith was still important in contemporary Britain but changing in character. As less people attended Church regularly themselves and those who did so went less regularly, the general and public familiarity with the vocabulary of faith diminished.

She argued that it wasn’t so much a decline in believing – even now, 70% of the population will describe themselves as Christian, and a further 6% adhere to another faith, with only a small percentage actively not believing in God.

Rather, the main change was in terms of religious engagement – ‘belonging’ with a definite sense of purpose, rather than a vague identity. She used the phrase ‘believing without belonging’.

In short, many will still long for the comfort and grandeur of faith, the rituals still have power to console, but few will actively engage. The public response to the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales and of the Queen Mother – and even warmth with which the recent Royal Wedding here was received by 2 billion viewers – would all point to the continuing vitality of religious faith, even when personal practice has become a distant memory. Davie dubbed this ‘vicarious religion’, that is, a faith practised on my behalf by someone else.

This gap between a generalised sense of the importance of faith and the scarcity of actual religious practice has led to some worrying perceptions, my second transformation.

Alongside the warm affection for our religious heritage, last year’s British Social Attitudes survey found that half the country believed our society is deeply divided along religious lines, with a particular – and let me say very clearly – misplaced hostility towards Islam.
Much of this, of course, is derived from the events surrounding both 9/11 and the military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that have followed. Writing in the Guardian newspaper just 4 days after 9/11, the radical atheist Richard Dawkins said: ‘To fill a world with religion, or religion of an Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used’⁴.

In the heat of the day, this rhetoric of religion as a violent evil had a cogent force and spawned a wave of anti-theism which has challenged the right of religion to occupy any space in the public sphere. Just as the 1998 Lambeth Conference feared, the atrocities committed by a few who were religious is taken as ‘an excuse for marginalising all spiritual and moral perspectives’⁵.  
But even as I read Dawkins’ words, they seem terribly blunt and outdated. Alister McGrath has written: ‘being discriminatory about religion suggests a level of maturity that being discriminatory against religion does not’⁶.
It is undeniable that religious people have done terrible things in the name of their God. It is equally undeniable that quasi-pagan Nazis and atheist Stalinists have committed unspeakable crimes against humanity. Neither is an argument for saying that religion or politics are evil in themselves. As Archbishop Temple, writing in 1932, put it succinctly:

 

‘Religion itself, when developed to real maturity, knows quite well that the first object of its condemnation is bad religion, which is a totally different thing from irreligion, and can be a very much worse thing’⁷.

 

Perhaps surprisingly in 2011, we find ourselves in a position where it feels normal once again to talk about faith in the public sphere. Partly, this is due to an increased awareness of global cultures in which any credible understanding of the world today must take serious account of its persistently religious character. We must ‘Do God’: the Divine isn’t going away.

Linked to this, particularly in Western Europe, the old models of state provision allied to market deregulation have proved to be fragile in the extreme. With the UK alone spending £400m/ day servicing interest payments and taking out new borrowing, the ability of central Government to maintain traditional roles, let alone take on new responsibilities has been severely curtailed. This has been one of the key drivers behind the ‘Big Society’ which has looked to Churches, Charities and Faith Groups for support.
More positively, the global coverage given to recent events, such as the Papal Visit or the Royal Wedding, has done a great deal to present a generous and hospitable image of the Christian faith.

But there is much more to be done. Not least in the Churches’ task of evangelism, enabling ‘believers’ to become ‘belongers’. And part of that challenge is how peoples of different faiths can cooperate across their faith boundaries in such a way that religion is indeed part of the answer, not of the problem. Next week, I will be looking at how Christians and Jews can relate.

 

*******