Anglican priests who ask searching questions about God (and compound their heresy by daring to follow the argument wherever it leads) are thin on the ground (and getting thinner by the day). It was therefore initially hugely refreshing to come across Steven Ogden’s book, and discover that he feels keenly the problems that anyone with half a brain is likely to feel when it comes to Christianity. He accepts that ‘Christianity is widely regarded as irrelevant, embarrassing or offensive’ – with the reason being that belief in God has become almost impossible for vast numbers of people in the educated West.
He has no time for the in(s)anities of fundamentalist religion, but is surely far too sanguine about the beliefs of what he terms ‘mainstream Christianity’ – which he wants to distance from Dawkins’ description of ‘the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayeranswering God’. In my experience, that’s a pretty fair way of encapsulating what mainstream Christianity is actually all about; with challenges to such ideas being angrily received and fiercely resisted. He says that ‘in the mainstream Church there is wide acknowledgement of the symbolic value of bible stories’, but although that may be the case in Australia, it’s hardly so in the UK. He observes with amazement that ‘many people outside the Church think Christians worship something like the old man in the sky’. But lots of them do – they really do! And this is why he is wrong to say that ‘mainstream Christianity is radically different from Christian fundamentalism’. There are differences, but of degree rather than kind – and of course both of them are built on the hugely problematic God of theism. ‘Where is God?’ is deemed by him to be ‘the theological question of our day’ – when perhaps ‘What is God?’ or even simply ‘Is God?’ are stronger candidates. For Ogden the problem centres around the twin issues of suffering and absence – with the answer being found in the network or web of relationships: human, biological and cosmological (especially the first). By this he means it’s primarily in other people that we catch a glimpse of the divine, that we feel part of a wider whole, that we feel grounded and connected. It’s only in and through relationship that we feel transcendence (or ‘presence’). He notes M C Taylor’s claim that the postmodern religious experience is one of God’s absence – but sees things as less bleak and more ambiguous, to be understood in terms of both presence and absence: ‘the experience of absence arouses a yearning for God’.
Maybe: or maybe it’s just a yearning? (and then it becomes a matter of semantics, with some choosing(?) to interpret such an existential ache to be – effectively by definition – a yearning for God).
In trying to make sense of the Resurrection, Ogden examines some of the ideas of Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner (who – irritatingly! – are constantly referred to as ‘our two German shepherds’). Many readers may be tempted/advised to skip this part – especially if they see things from a broadly SOF perspective.
Theological speculation is an arcane activity, and it’s unlikely (to the point of being inconceivable) that this section is going to engage anyone on the fringes of the Church, which is presumably the target audience. It sits uneasily with the rest of the book, and is presumably only included because the author had already written about them at length in an earlier book, and wanted to bring some of the material to the attention of a new audience.
Whether or not he is correct in his analysis that the reason people can no longer subscribe to the old-manin-the-sky model of God is because of the amount of suffering in the world, it seems utterly bizarre to spend so long in a work of this kind looking at Tillich and Rahner. And although Ogden was deeply fortunate to have had his own epiphany in Bermuda, it’s difficult to see how this book (after promising so much) with its curious mixture of thoughtful analysis, genuine challenge, idle whimsy, and rambling speculation, might help those who can’t for the life of them make any sense of the idea of God – and wonder where (if anywhere) they might go looking.
Tony Windross is the Vicar of Hythe, Kent, and a former SOF trustee. reviews Antipodean Angles Denis Gildea reviews The New Economics by David Boyle and Andrew Simms Earthscan (London 2009). Hbk. 160 pages. £16.99.