I’ve started writing a new blog several times over the past seven days and abandoned the attempt. I half wrote a blog that began as follows:
“I am grateful to the myriads of people who have, throughout the course of my life, helped me “see” things, things that I might not otherwise have come to see and understand, mostly unaware, unconsciously, unintentionally – things the myriads might well disagree with.”
I began to write about the contents of a ‘phone conversation I had with Jeremy Timm about the Christian Zen Buddhist retreat he had been on the previous week. I wanted to reflect on the ways in which my faith and spiritual practice have been influenced by Eastern wisdom and practice but I decided it would become yet another blog ignored by the commentariat on Thinking Anglicans. The same might be true of this blog.
I’ve had a curious week and half, a mixture of deeply enriching encounters and equally disappointing experiences. I have had conversations in person, by phone and email with friends who were deeply involved with Changing Attitude in earlier years, some as trustees. Jeremy Timm was one. David Page, Verena Tschudin, John Seymour, Tina Beardsley, Clive Larsen, and a dear friend I trained alongside at Westcott but haven’t met in person for twenty years, Stephen Peters. Some of them are still active in the Church of England, others have abandoned the Church over the past two decades. With all of them, I had energised, rich, creative conversations and I know I’m blessed to have them among a rich circle of friends.
I had other encounters over the past week and a half that enriched me – with Bishop John Inge and Azariah France-Williams (author of Ghost Ship: Institutional Racism and the Church of England) at the Generous Faith Conference at St John’s Waterloo last Saturday and, online, Alison Webster on Wednesday at the Sea of Faith Conversation when she addressed ’Has theological non-realism anything to offer our fractious world of identity politics?’ - Is theological non-realism simply a ‘brain-on-a-stick’, abstract philosophical position, or does it have real-life consequences?
Alison outlined and explored a key shift in theology that has taken place over the past 40 years or so - that is, the move towards embodied theologies which take human experience seriously. Such embodied theologies recognise that individuals are subject to systemic forces, where power circulates to oppress some and privilege others on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and economic means (not an exhaustive list). Can non-realist theology be deployed as a tool of liberation, or is it a politically quietist endeavour?
Alison’s talk echoed and clarified so many of the ideas swirling around in my own consciousness.
Why we believe
On Friday, in London for the dentist and the Waterloo event, I called in at Church House Bookshop and left with a copy of Alister McGrath’s recently published Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, a book one, at least, of my friends was surprised to find I’d bought – it was damaged and half-price. The title of the final chapter had persuaded me it was worth reading: Living in a world of uncertainty. It’s the chapter I read first, but in the remainder of this blog, I want to address ideas in chapter 3, The Case of Religious Belief.
Alister writes that “[f]or Christians . . . faith is not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God, but a luminous vision of a God who brings meaning, coherence and joy. It is ‘getting’ what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of seeing a oneness at the heart of things, allowing us to put everything together.” That comes close to describing the way in which I have faith, but it isn’t what I’m finding in the institution of the Church today. In the next paragraph he says the “New Testament presents Christianity primarily as a trustworthy way of thinking and living”, and I think to myself, trustworthy by, and for, who? “To believe in God is to place trust in God and take up the responsibilities and expectations that come with this relationship.” That is not a contract of belief that works any longer for me and half of the friends I’ve engaged with over this past week and a half.
He says “For Christians, faith is trusting that there is a viable ‘big picture’ of life, leading into a decision to step inside this worldview, and live it out.” That is exactly what I am NOT finding in today’s Church but had found in earlier decades.
Referring to Keith Yandell (Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction, 1999) Alister says that in general terms, religion engages three deep human needs that seem to be essential for our flourishing.
“Religion provides a coherent, encompassing narrative that has great explanatory power; it outlines specific values and goals that are to be pursued; and it conveys a sense of transcendence that goes beyond the mundane and ephemeral.”
After nearly three decades of intense warfare in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion about homosexuality and seven years and counting of the deeply conflicted Living in Love and Faith process, very little in the C of E is contributing to my flourishing.
Saying it is of decisive importance for many, Alister quotes Randall again: “religion . . . is apprehended primarily (if not solely) through rational reflection.” Indeed, this does seem to be of vital importance to many, but for me, it is deadly. More appealingly for me, he references Charles Taylor (Modern Social Imaginaries, 2004) who shifts attention from abstract theories and ideas about reality to the way in which we imagine our world, and locate ourselves within it, carried in images, stories and legend, more easily and naturally expressed using the language of ‘seeing’ than ‘thinking’.
Is Truth Dead?
I’ve just begun to read Chapter 4, Making Judgments: Belief Explanation and Interpretation. Alister begins by naming the Oxford Dictionaries ‘Word of the Year for 2016 – post truth. The iconic cover of the April 1966 Time magazine posed the question of the age: Is God dead? The March 2017 counterpart mimicked this by posing a new question lying at the core of American life: Is Truth dead? Do we live in an age of aggressively asserted private beliefs, rather than evidenced public truths? Alister refers to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as anticipating this form of thinking and identifies Sigmund Freud as seeing this need-driven form of argument as “typical of religion, which proposed God as a human ‘wish-fulfilment offering a false consolation in the face of a meaningless world.”
And here we are, in the Post-Truth Trump world, reeling from the effects of tariffs and this week’s response to the security ‘leak’, and the world doesn’t know what to do about the death, the evisceration, of Truth. We are neutered by the unfiltered arrogance of one man, who says he is a Christian, a man almost deified by his Christian adherents who worship and adore him.
How do we inhabit our personal faith and other vital Christian values, essentials and meanings (at least as I have come to understand them) in this context?