Authority and belief

I’ve been meaning to refer back to an excellent comment by Daniel Lamont on a previous blog post ‘Gay marriage poll and Christian morality’. Read it in full, but here are excerpts:

It has been said that the CofE has always taken its governance from the dominant secular model so that in the days of aristocratic rule, we had Prince-Bishops. Now in our managerial days we have Bishops as CEOs... We also have tightly whipped political parties - thus the House of Bishops speaks with a seeming unanimity, toeing a party line... Equally, I suspect that the ecclesiastical bureaucracy exercises a baleful influence. With the retirement of ++Rowan, there no longer seems to be any bishop who might be thought of as a public intellectual and who carries credence. Can one imagine any of the current episcopate taking a public stance against the grain as Bishop Bell did in 1944 against carpet bombing of German cities.

What is to be done? Daniel continues:

Firstly, There needs to be careful and radical rethinking of what constitutes authority - and authority which commands acceptance - at this point... Secondly, the role and function of the House of Bishops needs to be completely re-thought and revised in order to become appropriate for 2013. Thirdly, instead of worrying about the Anglican Communion or the preservation of the CofE as an institution, the bishops need to exercise theological leadership and engage in debate with their laity - preaching a sermon is not engaging in debate of itself.

This leads me to ask: what moral authority do church leaders have to define the formal beliefs of their denominations?

This can, perhaps, be broken down into different questions:

1. Why do Christian churches need formal definitions of belief?
2. By what processes do churches establish their beliefs?
3. By what processes do churches select people to speak on behalf of their beliefs?

The first question reveals the distinctiveness of Christianity: other major religions do not focus so much on correct belief. This is not about our Jewish heritage or the Bible or Jesus. Frances Young’s The Making of the Creeds is representative when she puts it down to the second century debates with the Gnostics, obliging church leaders at that time to draw the line at acceptable beliefs. Viewed like this, pressure for orthodoxy is well established but more historical accident than essential to Christianity.

The second question is a can of worms. To take a few examples, lots of people feel committed to believing what Luther and Calvin taught because Luther and Calvin founded new denominations. Erasmus and Hooker did not found new denominations so have not acquired such large numbers of defenders. I argued in my Liberal Faith in a Divided Church that it would have been better the other way round: new denominations get established when the disagreements prove irresolvable, not when satisfactory resolutions get found. In the same way the Church of England’s recently published Men and Women in Marriage (see my comments here and here) speaks of ‘why Christians believe and act in relation to marriage as they do’ as though we all agreed with each other, knowing full well not only that we disagree with each other but also that if we had been of one mind they would never have troubled themselves to write the document. When there really is consensus, nobody sees the need to pass resolutions formally approving statements. So every historical Christian denomination has inherited statements of belief which are there in the tradition because not everybody agreed with them.

The third question also reveals problems. It’s one thing to run a church, another to understand its teachings. Both are full time jobs, so nobody can do both well. Occasionally, archbishops of Canterbury have been exceptionally learned theologians in their own right; but not even William Temple or Rowan Williams stood out as indisputably the best authority on the Church’s teachings. For an archbishop of Canterbury who was, we have to go back a thousand years to Anselm. Today the best informed spokespeople are theologians but it is still church leaders, like bishops and archbishops, who are expected to tell us what we are supposed to believe.

To summarise, the system is trying to do the wrong thing. No wonder it doesn’t work. Daniel Lamont is right: there is no satisfactory alternative to open debate and exploration – with authority earned by people who make good points, not bestowed on individuals by virtue of their office.

Honest to belief in God

This year is the 50th anniversary of a best-selling book, John Robinson’s Honest to God. Why did it make such a splash and have we moved on from there?

It book marked the end of an era and the new liberalising mood of the 1960s. Before then church teaching had had a dogmatic flavour. Dogma had been in turn a reaction against atheism. In the nineteenth century many people thought science would prove that God did not exist. Most churches responded by separating religion from science, so that science could study the physical world while religion studied the spiritual world. That way church leaders thought they could insulate Christianity from scientific attack.

But if the spiritual world is so completely separated from the physical world, how can we possibly know anything about it? This is where dogma came in. The dogmatic principle is that God reveals truths which transcend all human reason, so we ought to accept them without question as universally and eternally true. Roman Catholics argued that God has revealed them to the Church, Protestants that God put them in the Bible.

Dogma therefore presents Christian teaching as a monolith, a single belief-system to be accepted in its entirety, so anybody who questions the smallest detail is undermining the whole thing. Anonymous left a brilliant comment on an earlier blog of mine:

The Church's teachings are absolute and cannot be changed as that would be heresy. Galileo was a fraud and his theory that Jupiter has moons is just secular nuttery and a stupid theory. There is absolutely no evidence for them. The Earth is the center of the universe and the Liberals who deny this and the word of the Lord are just heretics and deserve their forthcoming punishment in everlasting Hell. The Church's teachings once set cannot be changed.

I had a long discussion with Marguerite, my wife, about whether it was a spoof. Anyway it illustrates the dogmatic spirit very well.

When beliefs become dogmas they change. As long as you believe something because you think it makes sense you can question it. For example Matthew’s gospel tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin. New Testament scholars discuss why Matthew wrote it. Whatever the reason, Matthew was making a point.

Today lots of Christians believe in the Virgin Birth but only a few of them read New Testament scholars to find out what Matthew meant. Far more often people claim that you just have to believe in it if you want to belong to their church, or if you want to be a true Christian. Whatever Matthew meant, believing in the Virgin Birth has become a badge of identity. This is what dogma does. It works for a while with people whose main concern is to belong, but eventually people ask: if Christianity is about believing that strange things happened two thousand years ago, why be a Christian?

In the 1960s large numbers of people refused to accept the inherited dogmas and Robinson’s Honest to God offered an alternative. However, also in the 1960s atheism was at its most popular. It is one thing to say we need to change our language and beliefs about God; it is quite another to say there is no God and all religious talk is error.

From the 1970s onwards many religious leaders lumped these two together, reaffirmed the dogmatic spirit and treated those of us who wanted to think for ourselves as though our faith was weaker.

The reality was different. Since the 1960s atheism has declined. Increasing numbers of people brought up with no religious background look for a spiritual dimension for their lives. They have a huge range of alternatives: new age, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, all sorts. Their most convenient option is usually their local Christian church, but many people keep away from churches because they think they will be told what they have to believe, and they definitely don’t want that. In other words, the dogmatic tradition which attracted people into the churches 150 years ago is now driving people away.

What’s the alternative? There are signs that the opening up that happened in the 1960s is beginning to happen again today. We have grown used to the absurdity that some questions, like the age of the earth and the origin of the first humans, have two conflicting answers, a scientific one and a religious one. This is a product of nineteenth century dogmatism. Before then, and as far as we know in every human culture, there was an integrated account of reality which combined their understanding of the physical world with their theories about gods. This integrated understanding seems to be what many people are looking for when they call themselves spiritual but not religious.

All religious traditions begin by trying to understand who made us, for what purpose, and how we ought to live. What I hope the churches do in the next few years is: 

• admit they may be wrong,
• pay attention to the spiritual questions ordinary people are asking, and
• encourage different ideas to be explored without threats of schism or official statements of the right answer.

There is no life after death

Jonathan's recent posts raise some interesting questions. There is obviously the one about life after death, but together they illustrate a more general problem with what is referred to within Modern Church as 'liberal theology'.

Jonathan suggests there are really only two reasons for believing in life after death. He offers stories of near death experiences as one, but acknowledges these provide evidence only for the effects on human memory of the biological processes associated with death.

His main argument is that 'believing in a future life' helps make sense of this life. **Alarm bells ring**. Is it not a basic principle of rational thought that we do not believe a theory simply because it is useful? We believe only what we think is true, otherwise belief becomes a pointless exercise.

There is no evidence

Jonathan's argument seems to be that evidence doesn't matter, at least in this case. If it helps, let's believe in a future life. But then if it helps to believe in fairies, or werewolves, or the flying spaghetti monster, is that good too? What's the difference if we do not look for evidence when deciding what to believe?

--------------------

I no longer think life after death has any place in a factual account of reality. There is however more to life than facts, and facts are not always what they seem.

The realm of story

Life after death belongs in the realm of story. It is a feature of the mythologies our cultures create when we collectively apply imagination to human experience and invent artistic representations of who we aspire to be. These stories can inspire us to be more than mere processors of experience and absorbers of fact, and the stories of the Christian tradition are some of the best.

Reality may not be what we think it is

One fact that is not what it seems is the nature of reality. Life after death relies on the traditional idea that the whole of history unfolds over time within some eternal multi-dimensional 'container'. This allows a non-physical essence of our humanity to continue beyond death in another dimension. Yet reality as we experience it is only ever the universe as it is now, changing according to what we call the laws of nature, with history the imprint of every prior now on the present. There is no evidence for any other inhabitable dimension.

Liberal theology

In theory 'liberal theology' is open to change and to looking at reality differently; the objects in the Modern Church constitution express this well. Yet in practice most 'liberal Christians' appear to defer to credal orthodoxy and its metaphysical assumptions. Not necessarily out of conviction, it seems, but because they think it is useful. The result is that most liberal Christianity has no more credible a theological foundation than traditions overtly committed to dogmatic evangelical or sacramental beliefs. Is it any wonder that we make little impact?

A theology of fact

I think of God as a feature of reality. There is no cause within nature to account for the changing of the universe that we experience as time, yet without such a cause the universe would not exist. It therefore seems reasonable to refer to this cause as God the Creator, the same One in who we live and move and have our being that Jesus refers to as Father, and reconstruct from first principles a theology of fact to credibly underpin the stories of the Christian tradition.

One benefit among many is that while fact based theology provides no basis for life after death, it does hold life in the here and now as eternally significant. This may not be what some people want. But for those looking for religion that is focused on how things really are, its discovery might be a breath of fresh air.

Just as well we don't know

A few days ago I responded to the Westminster Faith Debates findings on assisted dying, by arguing that it’s less of a big deal if you believe in life after death.

I do, but it has a downside. If you want to control other people it’s very useful, and this is what gives it a bad name.

It’s almost the only thing we know about the beliefs of our prehistoric ancestors. By definition they didn’t leave histories, but they did leave graves. All over the world people were buried along with the things they would need for their journey to the next life. Food. Rich people took jewellery, warriors took swords.

I share the basic sentiment. Our ordinary senses of the value, meaning and purpose of life are logically refuted if death brings them all to an end. On the other hand the alarm bells are already ringing. So the people who were rich and powerful in this life are going to be rich and powerful in the next life? The inequalities and injustices are going to carry on? By the time we get into the historical period, we know: the answer is as big as the Egyptian pyramids, built for this very purpose. With forced labour by thousands upon thousands of slaves. Real political oppression, driven by the need to secure a good afterlife.

The oppression doesn’t have to be political. Plato’s Timaeus opts for reincarnation. Philosophers these days don’t rate it one of his best works, but for centuries in the Middle Ages it was one of the most widely read books in Europe. The Creator mixed the ingredients in a mixing bowl:

And when he had compounded the whole, he divided it up into as many souls as there are stars, and allotted each soul to a star. And mounting them on their stars, as if on chariots, he showed them the nature of the univese and told them the laws of their destiny (§10.41-42; H D P Lee, Plato: Timaeus and Critias, London: Penguin, 1965, p. 57).

The deal was that each soul would be put into the body of a man, with the job of controlling the passions of the body:

And anyone who lived well for his appointed time would return home to his native star and live an appropriately happy life; but anyone who failed to do so would be changed into a woman at his second birth. And if he still did not refrain from wrong, he would be changed into some animal suitable to his particular kind of wrongdoing (p. 58).

Christianity dropped the reincarnation but kept the idea that failing to live a good life would lead to a nasty afterlife. There were other sources too, most obviously Zoroastrianism. Countless preachers have found life after death a successful way of getting people to do what they want: go to confession, abstain from forbidden sexual acts, turn up to church services, don’t drink alcohol. No wonder so many people would rather believe death is the end.

These claims exaggerate how much we can know. There are really only two reasons for believing in life after death. There is the one mentioned above, that believing in a future life helps make sense of this life. It’s a theory, a hypothesis: if there is life after death, and if it develops further the values, purposes and meanings we experience in this life, then those values, purposes and meanings are not just illusions. We go through life accepting hypotheses which cannot be proved. We cannot even prove with 100% certainty that the things we see in front of us are really there. It’s a hypothesis: without it we wouldn’t be able to make sense of experience, so we accept it. Accepting the hypothesis that there is life after death is a bit like that.

The other reason for believing in it is the stories of near-death experiences, with their positive accounts of being welcomed into the next life by dead relatives and religious figures. These stories seem to occur in pretty well every society. However, even if we take them at face value as real evidence for life after death, they only tell us about the immediate post-death process.

The rest remains unknown. Plenty of religious scriptures tell us a great deal more, but unless we think these scriptures were dictated by God in some extreme fundamentalist manner, they are all developments out of the two reasons I have given above. There is nowhere else for the beliefs to come from.

This then is my conclusion. Firstly there is life after death. This is a good thing. Secondly we know practically nothing about it. This is also a good thing.

Assisted dying poll

Another impressive result for the Westminster Faith Debates, this time on assisted suicide.

Support for a change in the law is, apparently, overwhelming. According to their YouGov poll, 70% of British adults think the law should allow people to choose when to die.

Of the reasons, the ‘right to choose’ counts most. High proportions also believe ‘It is preferable to drawn-out suffering’ and ‘those assisting suicide should not fear prosecution’.

For opponents the most common reasons are to do with the potential for harm and abuse of the system. ‘Vulnerable people could be, or feel, pressured to die’. Other reasons are that ‘It places too much of a burden on the person or people who help someone to die’, and that ‘You can never build in enough safeguards’.

As with their other poll findings, the overwhelming majority of religious believers and even church attenders disagree with the official positions of church leaders. Being religious makes one slightly more likely to oppose assisted suicide; the only factor which makes a big difference is being strictly religious: that is, being the kind of person who takes authority from religious sources rather than making their own judgements. These people account for 9% of the population and their proportions are highest among Baptists and Muslims.

This is a topic on which I have been asked to speak many times, often by Premier Christian Radio where I was clearly the liberal giving the ‘other’ view. Dialogues and debates there have been intriguing. As a liberal I was expected to support assisted dying because my Christian faith was weaker. However my main argument was that assisted dying makes more sense if you believe in life after death. I often found this flummoxed my debating partners. They weren’t expecting that.

If you don’t believe in life after death you could in theory be completely rational and unsentimental about it. Die when the pains of old age or illness make death preferable. But this doesn’t seem to happen much. Ancient Romans like Cato, who didn’t believe in life after death, wanted their suicide to be a noble act so that they were remembered as great people; in other words, lack of life after death needed to be compensated by being remembered. In the health services today medical practitioners do not have a reputation for being matter-of-fact about death; on the contrary people often comment that they avoid talking about it (or leave it to their chaplains) and treat it as the thing to avoid as long as possible. In practice, not believing in life after death is, I suspect, the driving force behind the gut feeling that death is to be postponed as long as possible.

Theologians and moralists often argue that we do not have the right to decide when someone should die. It usurps God’s role, because only God should make that decision. In a study a few years ago I read the arguments of British theologians opposing the 1967 Abortion Act: many believed that abortion, even to save the life of the mother, was immoral because life and death should be left in God’s hands. The absurdity of this position is obvious. One of the main reasons for having health services at all is to enable people to live who would otherwise have died. Nobody really thinks a teenager with appendicitis should be left to die.

Far from leaving it to God to decide the times of people’s deaths, we lengthen people’s lives all the time. Yet the longer medical technology can keep a person alive, the more acute becomes the moral question of how long that person should be kept alive. In effect, the moral question gets subordinated to the technological question: ‘Is it time for x to die?’ is interpreted in terms of ‘In what state can we keep x alive?’

There was a strength to the medieval attitude, in which this earthly life was part of a much larger narrative. You live this life, then you live another. I wouldn’t want to go back to all the fears of purgatory and hell generated by priests with vested interests in frightening people, but I would like to reaffirm that the lives we are living now have a proper place in a bigger picture. That way, death is not the ‘last enemy’ but a step on the way.

It remains true that if assisted suicide is permitted at all, it will be open to abuse. Someone, somewhere, will put pressure on a relative to hurry up so that they can inherit the money, and the Daily Mail will make sure everyone knows. I do not think this is a knock-down objection. Firstly, all legislation is capable of being abused by someone. The present system benefits the nursing homes business at the expense of people who want to die. (My grandmother wanted to die when she got to 70; she lived to 100.) Secondly, the abuse is often motivated by issues of inheritance. Elderly people do not have to sit on large sums of money. When I get to 75, please somebody remind me to hand over any surplus money to my children.

But my main point is the one about life after death. In our modern secular society the default position is that there is no such thing. The ‘sanctity of life’ therefore becomes a metaphysical absolute, a god. There is a taboo on asking what it means, so we treat it the way Leviticus treats pork, as something spooky to be treated with deference. If only we could be more positive about life after death, we would find it easier to face up to death itself.

Appendix 1

You said that you think the current law on euthanasia should be changed to allow assisted suicide in some circumstances. Which of the following best describes your view? Please tick all that apply

Appendix 2

You said that you think the current law on euthanasia should be kept as it is. Which of the following best describes your view? Please tick all that apply

 

Appendix 3

**Euthanasia is the termination of a person’s life, in order to end suffering**
Do you think British law should be kept as it is, or should it be changed so that people with incurable diseases have the right to ask close friends or relatives to help them commit suicide, without those friends or relatives risking prosecution? (click to enlarge tables)

The meaning of marriage

Friday’s Church Times contains another excellent response to the now infamous Church of England document Men and Women in Marriage, this time by Jane Shaw.

The document appeals to ‘a unique relationship between a man and a woman’ and ‘the complementarity of the sexes’, which it treats as ‘universal and timeless concepts’. Shaw replies that, far from being universal and timeless, they developed at particular times for political reasons. She focuses on the Enlightenment, with its support for the notion of human rights. Treating humanity as divided into two sexes was a way to maintain the theory while denying equality to women; but ‘concepts of sexual difference and complementarity that our ancestors would barely have recognised 300 years ago, let alone 3000 years ago, are regularly mapped back on to the Hebrew scriptures, especially the creation stories in Genesis 2’.

This enables reactionary church leaders to argue that the word ‘marriage’ should be restricted to one-man-one-woman relationships; having, seemingly, already given up the campaign against civil partnerships they now concentrate on opposing the use of the word ‘marriage’ for same-sex partnerships.

To treat the debate as though it was all about the meaning of a word is really quite bizarre. Words change their meanings; there is never a time when one word or other isn’t being transformed, but we don’t normally imagine the change is breaking any kind of taboo. The compilers of dictionaries do not fret about it; they accept that words describe but do not prescribe. What a word means depends on how it is used. What the word ‘marriage’ means depends on what people use it to mean.

So here comes my brief history of marriage. When our ancestors evolved from missing links they were already forming partnerships, learning a thing or two from the birds and the bees and producing children. Judging from modern studies of primates most of them probably paired for life with a certain amount of ‘cheating’, while a minority had same-sex relationships. Roll on a few hundred thousand years and language developed. They called these partnerships by words which translate into modern English as ‘marriage’. Societies found that when a girl becomes sexually active they needed to provide a supportive network for the babies; so they developed rituals to establish the responsibilities, and gave them names which translate into modern English as ‘weddings’. Note the order: first the partnerships, then the notion of marriage, then the notion of weddings.

In medieval Europe the Christian Church put a lot of effort into putting itself in charge of administering weddings. Eventually they succeeded. Catholics described marriage as a sacrament, some Protestants as an order of creation. In either case the word ‘marriage’ no longer described a well-known pattern of human relationships; instead it described a spiritual relationship established by God. This made it possible for church leaders to claim that a relationship which looked like a marriage wasn’t a real marriage unless it had been given that heavenly stamp of approval. I still remember being a troublesome student at my theological college in the mid-70s. Our Ethics tutor told us that marriages are made in heaven. I asked the obvious question, the one the Sadducees asked Jesus about a woman whose husbands kept dying and being replaced – who would be her husband in heaven? I’m afraid I can’t remember his answer, but I do remember being dissatisfied, and feeling guilty about giving him such a rotten time.

In that system, who can tell whether a particular partnership has got that heavenly approval? Why, of course, church leaders: the experts on what God is up to. Once this was generally accepted the Church could lay down what marriage was for and what it permitted. Marriage was for the production of children. Accordingly, the twentieth century saw a battle over the moral acceptability of contraception, and then we moved on to same-sex partnerships.

The catch is that twenty-first century society no longer accepts that the Church is in charge of even administering weddings, let alone defining marriage. ‘Marriage’ is a word. It means whatever English-speaking people mean when they use it. In the same way the French word ‘mariage’ means whatever French-speaking people mean by it. They may mean something slightly different from what the English mean by ‘marriage’; but even if the French ‘mariage’ included same-sex partnerships while the English ‘marriage’ did not, nobody would deduce that therefore same-sex partnerships were more morally acceptable in France than in England.

I wonder whether the current focus on the meaning of the word ‘marriage’ should be seen as a distraction from a real change of moral stance by some church leaders – the abandonment of opposition to civil partnerships.

Whether it is or not, the order of play is: first God gives us bodies and relationships, then we find words to describe them. Words themselves don’t determine the morality of actions and relationships.

On not going to church

The Westminster Faith Debates, backed by a YouGov poll, have produced much telling information about the real attitudes of Christians to church leaders and the things they expect us to believe.

Yesterday’s Church Times carries a full-page article by Linda Woodhead who devised the survey. Entitled ‘“Nominals” are the Church’s hidden strength’, it argues that ‘non-churchgoing Anglicans may be much more important to the Church and its future than the dismissive word “nominals” implies’.

According to the poll people calling themselves Anglicans make up a third of the population. Woodhead divides them into four categories.

Godfearers say that they are very certain in their belief in God, and God is their main source of authority. They are the only group to take notice of religious leaders, though only 4% of them say they do. They are much more ‘conservative’ in their views of personal morality, especially on sexual matters. They make up 5% of self-identifying Anglicans.

The Churchgoing Mainstream are similar to Godfearers only in that they are attenders. Compared with non-churchgoing Anglicans they are a little more religious and a little more morally conservative, but not by much. On matters of belief and morality they may consult religious authorities but they make up their own minds. They make up 12% of self-identifying Anglicans.

Non-Churchgoing Believers believe in God, and half say they regularly practise some spiritual or religious activities like praying or meditating. They make up 50% of self-identifying Anglicans.

The other 33% are Non-Churchgoing Doubters: they either feel unsure about God or are outright atheists (15% of this group). Over 20% of the group practise some religious or spiritual activity in private.

Woodhead comments:

There is a recent tendency, both within the Church and in the media, to represent the Godfearers as the most real [Anglicans]. This is a mistake. It is not just that this group is very small, but that it is unrepresentative of Anglicans today and Anglicanism in the past.

The Church of England seems to have abandoned its sense of itself as a lay Church governed by monarch and Parliament, and responsible to the people, and has become both more clerical and more congregationally based. This is bound up with a dismissal of “nominal” Anglicans.

This certainly echoes my experience. I spent my teenage years in the 1960s as a vicar’s son in a Somerset village, where the local church was a place of public events. On seeing the vicar people would find excuses for their non-attendance at services, thus revealing that they still thought they belonged. I then went to university and threw myself into the social life of its chaplaincies. Chaplaincy students, mostly Anglicans but also Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and PresbyCongs (as they were in those days; later Prongs) became my closest friends. My wife Marguerite had a similar experience in a different university, and between us we still retain many friendships from those university chaplaincy days. What happened to their churchgoing patterns? Pretty well all of them did one of two things. A few got ordained; the rest stopped going to church at all.


St Peter's Church & Chaplaincy, Manchester, where I lived for a while

Why? It wasn’t about losing their faith, though for all I know some may have. They never were Woodhead’s godfearers. The chaplaincies encouraged experiment, variety and debate, so religious activity had a more open-ended feel. To some extent their previous experience of churchgoing must have prepared them for this kind of thing; otherwise they would have preferred societies like the Christian Unions.

I’m thinking of those chaplaincy colleagues because I know them, but they belong to the generation which, according to the historians, produced the first big drop in churchgoing. The big change seems to be not that that generation became ‘nominal’ and less Christian, but that churches have changed. Instead of responding to the spiritual needs and questions of ordinary people, churches have increasingly looked inwards. They have made their own theory-based decisions about what worship ought to be like, what sermons ought to be preached and what moral standards ought to be upheld. As the Common Worship Baptism Service makes clear, for a non-churchgoer to attend a church service is to be confronted with an alien agenda. Increasingly, churchgoing culture is designed for the godfearer minority.

It is easy enough to spot practical reasons for this change. With the decline in numbers of clergy and money to pay them, church leaders increasingly depend on those most willing to turn up regularly and put plenty of money on the collection plate. The people who can be relied on to turn on the church heating and put out the service books every Sunday without fail, and put substantial amounts of money on the collection plate, are inevitably the ones with fewer other commitments: the single-minded, the godfearers.

It’s a mistake. If the Church of England carries on going down this path, we’ll end up with only the godfearers keeping it going. It will become one more tiny sect turning its back on the world, and the other 95% who still call themselves Anglicans will respond to the next poll by calling themselves something else.

No doubt there are many reasons for this trend, but one must be the strong tendency, among those who count themselves religious conservatives, to think that all the Christian answers are to be found in the tradition inherited from the past. It generates that ‘we have all the answers’ mentality which fails to hear the questions. Just as this backward-looking mood has encouraged church leaders to resist new awareness of gender discrimination, it has also encouraged them to ignore what ordinary non-churchgoing people are saying about their actual spiritual concerns and needs.

The spirituality of our society is too important, and too varied, to be left in the hands of those with a vested interest in numbers of churchgoers. It’s about everyone.

Liberal faith is stronger

A few days ago I suggested that perhaps the tide is turning and the supremacy of hardline ‘conservatives’ in the leadership of the Church of England will now start declining. The main evidence is that they have so effectively discredited themselves.

But what will replace them? Will it be the turn of the ‘liberals’, who have been so persistently despised by establishment figures? Conservatives often accuse liberals of having a weaker faith. Here I argue that the reverse is true.

Who counts as liberal, or conservative, is a question in its own right. For now I’m using Men and Women in Marriage as an illustration: ‘conservatives’ feel committed to upholding what they think the Church has taught until now, while ‘liberals’ think there are times when it is right for the Church to change.

The case against liberals has a characteristic form. If we simplify into three categories, we might say that at one extreme conservatives hold a lot of religious beliefs strongly, and at the other atheists hold no religious beliefs. Liberals would be in between, holding a few beliefs and not so strongly. Whether we are talking about women bishops or Sunday trading or abortion or whatever, we are often told that conservatives are firm in their Christian belief and commitment, upholding what Christianity teaches in the face of secularism, while liberals on the other hand compromise with secular society and accept secular society’s beliefs and moral standards. What’s wrong with this mental picture?

 Conservative - Liberal - Atheist 

Firstly, it is propositional. The assumption is that being a Christian is defined by believing a collection of statements. Perhaps this makes sense if you think getting to heaven after you die depends on whether you believe the right things; but many Christians, probably most, do not.

Secondly, it treats these propositions as unchanging. The assumption is that we inherit the truths of faith from the past and hand them on to our descendants without alteration. This is not how we treat anything else. If you are a student of biology, for example, learning the facts as unchanging truths may be how you are taught in your early teens but if you are going to retain an interest in it for the rest of your life you will want to know about new developments and how some of the things people believed 30 years ago have been refuted. It’s the same for religion: historians tell us that what Christians believe has varied immensely through the ages.

Thirdly, it is counter-cultural. It assumes that Christian truth is quite separate from modern society and has nothing to learn from it. It expects every question to be judged not according to society’s criteria, but according to a completely separate set of Christian criteria. This produces absurd results. To take one example, in the early 1990s global warming was high on the public agenda. A lot of Christians from conservative backgrounds were bothered about it, even though they had been taught that Christians reject secular standards and stick to the Bible’s teaching. So they wrote books explaining that Christians should care for the environment not because of the scientific evidence, but because the Bible tells us to. If that was the reason, why didn’t anybody notice those environmental texts in the Bible before the scientific evidence came along? Those books invented an artificial separation between Christians and non-Christians. The real reason for their sudden conversion to environmental concern was of course the same as everyone else’s, the scientific evidence.

That mental picture, in which liberal Christians are halfway between conservatives and unbelievers, is unrealistic. It only seems right if you already have a very particular dogmatic understanding of Christianity.

So let’s swap things round. At one extreme are the liberals, with a confident and informed faith, at the other are the people who don’t believe anything, and in between are the opponents of liberalism, with a brittle, insecure faith, a faith which clings to the exact words it has inherited because it is afraid to change anything.

 Liberal - Conservative - Atheist 

Liberals expect their understanding to grow and develop. New events make us think of things in new ways. When our faith is both well informed and confident, we can respond to new challenges by using our Christian tradition, adding to it and perhaps changing it. Perhaps the leaders of Christianity were wrong about women priests for all those centuries, just as they were wrong about slavery. For liberals to take these possibilities seriously, far from showing that our Christianity is weaker, shows on the contrary that it is stronger, able to respond creatively to new challenges and thereby strengthen the tradition we have inherited. Opponents may complain that as soon as you take out a brick the whole wall will collapse, but we reply that if the wall is that fragile it ought to be knocked down before it does any more damage, and replaced with something more reliable.

More on this here.