Jane Baker, 17 Gorse Hill, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 4EG POSTSCRIPTS Postscripts by Seafarer Right Religion I have been sent a copy of A Rational Christianity: a Faith for Tomorrow — Today (Minerva, £4.99) by one of our new members, C.A.P. Ellis. It is certainly different. Anyone who supposes Sea of Faith is made up entirely of politically correct liberals and lefty subversives will have their eyes opened by Mr Ellis, whose manifesto for a new One Nation Party based on rational Christian principles includes “repealing the invidious, divisive and unnecessary race relations legislation” on the ground that multi-culturalism “can exist only in permanent, and frequently bloody, turmoil for all who have eyes to see”.
Capital punishment should also be restored, and the UN Security Council should inhibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons by threatening annihilation for any nation attempting to establish itself as a sixth nuclear power”.
To be a pilgrim I confess, with respect to Mr Ellis, that I found myself more in tune with another volume which has been put my way. No Discouragement (Avon Books, 1 Dovedale Studios, 465 Battersea Park Road, SW11 4LR, £8.95 plus £1 p&p).
This is a collection of essays by a group of friends — they call themselves the Chantry Group — from a wide variety of Christian backgrounds, each telling their own faith story.
Rosemarie Wedell, well-known to our Conference attenders, writes about “Learning to Create Human Values”, suggesting that the Network should drop its aims of “exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation” and become “a Network for exploring and promoting the human potential for creating human values”. Elsewhere in the book, Rosemarie’s husband, Eberhard George Weddell — the distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communications Policy at Manchester University and founder of the European Institute for the Media — argues that SoF demands too much conformity, substituting one dogma (presumably non-realism) for another.
He suggests that “If the movement were content to affirm that matters of religious belief are a matter of individual perception, and not to insist that ‘the concept of God is an exclusively human construct, it could be a more constructive force in the Church today”. To which I find myself wanting to say that if SoF ever ceased to be a network promoting the view that religious faith is a human creation, we would need a new network to promote religious faith as a human creation. Someone has to do it. But both Wedells, and their Chantry colleagues, offer food for thought.
Incidentally, No Discouragement entirely disproves its publisher’s odd blurb to the effect that, among the common preoccupations of the contributors, is “the recognition that language has, in the religious context, become largely useless”. So what do they think they have been using? I suggest they try humming their ideas, or dancing them. That way they would soon rediscover the usefulness of language.
Creation-spirituality and/or SoF?
The small but perfectly formed Quaker Universalist Group is fast outstripping the larger but more ponderous SoF in the number of pamphlets it is producing on Sea of Faith issues. Hard on the heels of The Faith of a Quaker Humanist, which is still causing much quaking in the letters column of The Friend, and preceding Anne Ashworth’s The Oblique Light, comes Signposts to the Future? Creationcentred Spirituality and the Sea of Faith (QUG, £2.30) by Josephine Teagle of SoF’s North-West Group.
Josephine sees both the CreationSpirituality movement and SoF as signposts to a more viable religious future, and she provides an illuminating examination of their similarities and their differences. Don Cupitt especially, and David Boulton in passing, provide her SoF texts, and Matthew Fox those for creation spirituality. In Lloyd Geering’s writings on eco-humanism she finds some convergence. But she concludes that, while “Don Cupitt’s argument cannot be logically countered... there is more to being human than logic”, and Cupitt is accused of “removing the mystical, the mystery, from our reality”.
Quaker Universalists have plenty to chew on if they read all three pamphlets.
Antidisestablishmentarianism When I was a boy, we were told that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest word in the English language.We were not told what it meant.
But the old 19th century debate about the rights and wrongs of establishment is back on the agenda, not least because Lords reform raises the question of whether the bishops should retain their privileged position as unelected members of parliament.
Christian Socialist Tony Blair is said to be an antidisestablishmentarian (which, deconstructed, means he’s in favour of retaining established status for the C of E). But not all the comrades agree. In Established Certainties (Christian Socialist Movement, Bradley Close, White Lion Street, N1 9PF — £2), Anglican Chris Bryant MP and Roman Catholic Catherine Shelley argue that reform of the Church is long overdue, and must involve liberating the Church from the state, enabling it “to contribute, alongside other churches and religious traditions, to the re-creation of communal values”. Our own Alison Webster, CSM’s national co-ordinator, writes in a foreword: “The power and privilege which the C of E holds to itself cannot remain unexplored and unchallenged in our times. Such structural and symbolic privileging of one particular Christian denomination does little to contribute to the modern political project summed up by Tony Blair in 1995 when he said that ‘We have to have the courage to build a new civic society, a new social order, where everyone has a stake and everyone plays a part’...
Contemporary Britain is multi-racial and multi-cultural. The challenge before us is to create common values from the rich and diverse set of value systems represented in our communities. It’s vital that people of all religions and none have equal access to the process by which such ethical consensus is forged.” Arnen.
Dolci vita Anyone who remembers the sixties - and, given our age profile, that’s most of us in SoF — will remember Danilo Dolci, the inspirational humanitarian worker and writer who devoted his life to fighting unemployment, poverty, corruption (and the Church’s part in it) in Sicily.
Dolci died on December 30 1997. If his death was almost unnoticed, his life should not be.
Aldous Huxley wrote in_ his introduction to Dolci’s great book To Feed the Hungry, “Without charity knowledge is apt to be inhuman, and without knowledge charity is foredoomed to be powerless. Today a new Ghandi, a modern St Francis, needs to be equipped with much more than compassion and seraphic love. He needs to be something of a scientific expert and make the best of both worlds, the world of the head no less than the world of the heart. Only then can the twentieth-century saint hope to be effective”.
Frank Walker, Unitarian minister in Cambridge and SoF member, organised a special memorial service for Dolci. He told how Dolci had organised a “strike in reverse”, getting the unemployed to build a new road, and reacting to violent opposition with non-violence. He organised the building of dams for irrigation and power, and new housing estates. He faced down both the Mafia and a venomous Church establishment.
His work and his books, said Frank, gave “a voice to the abandoned, forgotten, despairing, nameless, suffering people of Sicily. Unforgettably he enabled peasants and fishermen, mothers and prostitutes, street urchins, outlaws and bandits, police and mafiosi, to tell their stories. Of the Sicilians he said ‘There is God in these people like the fire beneath the ashes’. “He left the Church, but did he cease to be religious? Emphatically no! His = 5 a ~ Morning Tai Qi exercises, Bejing. Photo: Martine Franck whole life was the expression of a profoundly humanitarian religious sense — something those on the Sea of Faith wavelength understand and sympathise with.” Someone said to Dolci: “You don’t use the word ‘God’ any more”. Dolci replied: “When I understood that the word ‘God’ was likely to bring more confusion than clarity, I stopped using it”.
Top Ten Commandments Bryan Appleyard had a go in the Sunday Times recently at re-writing the Ten Commandments for the 21st century, a new “Sinai of the times”. Can you improve on them? Suggestions please - (no longer than his). I'll start the ball rolling with “Do not issue commandments”. His improvements on Moses run as follows: 1. Be serious 2. Get real 3. Be humble 4. Be quiet 5. Respect age 6. Do not kill, for all murder is suicide 7. Mean what you say 8. Do not steal, or the world will die 9. Honour others; their frailties are usually your own 10. Be kind, be generous and don’t screw around.