Trump’s greedy, unhealthy, grandiose ego is setting out deliberately to destroy what I learnt in my formative years to understand as Christian culture. He has coopted Christian fundamentalists in his task, leading Christians to be dramatically divided and having difficulty identifying and distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy versions of Christian life, practice, teachings, theology and worship.
Unhealthy versions of Christian teaching have, from the very beginning, encouraged people to project onto Jesus ideas of perfection and magical, miraculous abilities, deifying Jesus, who did not identify himself as God or as a divine person.
The essence of my understanding of Jesus and the teaching of the Church is deeply rooted in the post-war Western “free world” understanding of the worth and dignity of every individual. I am close in my thinking to the statement of modern humanism developed in 1952 at the first World Humanist Congress in Amsterdam, hence “The Amsterdam Declaration”. The declaration sought to promote the worth and dignity of the individual and the right of every human to the greatest possible freedom and the fullest possible development compatible with the rights of others. With secular humanists I oppose all forms of racism and prejudice and the injustice that arise from them, promoting instead the flourishing and fellowship of humanity in all its diversity and individuality.
The Jesus Way
But I am not a secular humanist. I am a deeply spiritual person who both believes in and experiences mystical energies and presence in creation, energies that are present in all creation, the cosmos as we continue to explore its further reaches, and in the life of every human being, all of us incarnate with divine wisdom, love and goodness, manifest in the life, teaching and practice of Jesus. I live in a conflicted state in today’s Church of England because movements within the Church have required it to enshrine prejudices against people on the basis of their gender and sexuality. Because the Christian Church has not followed the Way of Jesus. Jesus identified his way as the “kingdom”, a kingdom that is found within every human being. It is an integral, innate dimension of creation – we are born with it, unconditionally. Some people find the Way because they are born into a family or a culture which lives the Way and all that is in the communicates the essence and qualities of the Way. Others are introduced to the Way by events and encounters in their life, or by their inner awareness of experiences and emotions that communicate the deepest truths and values. All of us have the capacity to flourish with the unconditional energies of love, goodness and truth, whatever the circumstances of our birth into a religion or belief system if – and it’s a big IF – the system recognises and teaches and practices and guides us to experience and trust the mystery within, the holy, sacred essence of our being, the depth within, and shows us the path that enables us to open ourselves to its flourishing.
Humanist Christianity
It was on Monday 17 February 2025 that I realised I am a humanist Christian thanks to a book given to me by my friend Tina Beardsley last week. She had a spare copy of a book to which she had contributed a chapter, Theology and Human Flourishing: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Baxter. Glancing through the list of chapters, I found Theological humanism and human flourishing, exactly what I had unknowingly been searching for. The author, David Jasper, is a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church. Elizabeth Baxter is a mutual friend of myself and Tina and the book is a celebration of the vision we wove into the life of Holy Rood House, where are Director, and in partnership with her husband Stanley until his death in 2016, she created a “Christian Centre of Health and Pastoral Care.”
Jasper perceives, as I do, that the “church as an institution is clearly in decline and all too often seems to be stuck with a structure, a theology and assumptions that offer little by way of escape and recovery. This state of decadence and paralysis was all too visibly on display at the meeting of the General Synod in London last week. The Church of England is unable, as Jasper puts it in his essay, to shed a great deal of baggage to which it is often deeply – and sometimes oddly – attached. By contrast, He finds in Elizabeth Baxter “a devotion to humanity held within the love of God (that) is at the heart of all life – a deeply held theological humanism”. I will draw on David Jasper’s essay further in a subsequent blog.
The habitual Church
What is taught and practised in the Church of England today are teachings and doctrines about Jesus that were formed and formulated by his followers and the members of the first Jewish Christian communities and not least by St Paul and other writers and later by those who compiled and edited the Gospels. This process added layers to the example, wisdom, teachings and practice of Jesus. Today we read the Bible and preach from it ignoring the complex history by which both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures were formed. It’s possible to distinguish between what might be Jesus’ original teachings and what was added after his death but it’s not easy to do this because the contemporary Church elides them and blurs or ignores the differences. This doesn’t matter, IF the Church has a clear understanding of the essence it identifies as the teaching and wisdom of Jesus. Debates in Synod, to take but one small example, show that the Church has no such clear understanding. As a result we are taught about the Bible with little attention being paid as to whether teachings from elsewhere in the Bible are congruent with the teachings of Jesus or with contemporary scientific knowledge and a Biblical scholarship that has analysed the text. We teach from the Bible without reflecting on whether a specific passage contributes to a deeper desire to follow Jesus and enhance human flourishing at the heart of life.
A movement reimagining itself
John Pritchard, the retired Bishop of Oxford, contributes the opening chapter for Theology and Human Flourishing, addressing ‘the problem’ facing today’s church and ‘the edge’ where the progressive Christianity explored at Holy Rood House placed itself. Can a denomination like the Church of England be radically changed in vision, strategy, staffing and financing; in style, tone and voice, Pritchard asks? To do this would first require a reimagining of itself. It needs to return to Christianity “not as an institution with commands, prohibitions, creeds and doctrines, but as a movement of people touched by the reality of God at the heart of their lives.” The church, writes Pritchard, “has to welcome everyone, regardless of age, race, sexuality, belief or motivation.” For some weeks, I have sensed that what I have been seeking or imagining is a movement, a network or community that is resisting “the temptations and false securities of institutional life.” Pritchard quotes Brother Sam of the Franciscans:
“I sense that both the renewal of the church and society will come through the re-emerging forms of Christian community that are homes of generous hospitality, places of challenging reconciliation, and centres of attentiveness to the living God.”
The Bible in Transmission (The Bible Society, Spring 1998)
There are many organisations in the Church of England campaigning for equality and justice, for an inclusive church, for equal marriage, for an open church, for progressive Christianity or a modern church, for a changing attitude, but none of them satisfy what I have been imagining for some weeks – the need I see and the longing I have to be part of a movement in the Christian community, somewhere close to the edge of the institution and drawing on the source of life, life in all its fulness.
Selfhood and human flourishing
There is one more element that is fundamental to me and that in recent months, I find more people being drawn to by the mystery of inner awareness. David Jasper’s essay outlines this element, the contemplative interiority that is an essence of his Christian humanism. I recognise so much contemporary activity that is the result of human beings making the mistake of taking too much upon themselves and forgetting the “other”. The “other”, says Jasper, is both divine and human and the two are inextricable. This lies at the very heart of the integrity and dignity of life – to find one’s freedom through the other, who is both and at once divine and human. Human flourishing is dependent on the integrity of all creation. None of us can do it alone, for we are creatures of community and dependent upon one another if we are truly to be ourselves. Human beings flourish when they are given the opportunity to learn and grow and, in any community, the first person you have to learn to live with is yourself. The Church teaches that the greatest danger is that of hubris, of claiming equality with God, but for me, the greatest danger in the contemporary Church is not being shown how to recognise and nourish the divine, the essence of God, in the centre of our being, in our bodies and emotions, valuing and honouring the incarnational presence of the Christ. It makes a huge difference if we have people in our lives who manifest with quiet awareness innate qualities of self-reflection and self-awareness and their experience of goodness, love, wisdom, truth and justice. It makes an equally huge difference when we become unafraid to value and nurture our own goodness, love, wisdom and truth.