Family man A vicar named Anthony is deprived of his living in a rural English parish because his published views are unacceptable to his bishop. Anthony belongs to a small fellowship or network with views which some of his fellow clergy find threatening or plain wicked.
For instance, Anthony teaches that the scriptures are to be understood allegorically, not literally. He administers the sacraments of the Church of England, but denies that they have any supernatural significance. He is a loyal priest of the Church as established, but says the true church is neither Protestant nor Catholic but an invisible third church ‘which should stand where both these shall fall’’.
No, not Anthony Freeman; not the Sea of Faith Network; not 1994, It is 1581, the vicar is the Rev Anthony Randall of Lydford, Devonshire, and the fellowship, or ‘‘micro-network’’ as the historians call it, to which he belongs is the Family of Love.
Familists are often seen as forerunners of the Society of Friends. Indeed, the membership of one of the last surviving Familist groups described themselves in the 1680s as ‘‘a sort of refined Quakers’, Maybe we Seafarers are a sort of unrefined Familists.
Good news for our Anthony, however. Christopher Marsh, from whose new book The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630 1 glean all this, thinks that Anthony Randall was appointed to a new parish - Charleton, Devon - in 1592, when the witch-hunts died down and a little more tolerance prevailed.
Lipstick on your dog-collar When Dr David Hay of Nottingham University suggested in the Guardian that the late greatlylamented Dennis Potter may have interpreted some of his experience religiously, he was furiously attacked in that organ’s letters column by humanism’s Fundamentalist Tendency. How could one who totally ‘‘lacked religious belief’’, who saw all such belief as codswallop, interpret anything religiously, asked Jean Davies? What did Potter’s love of life and appreciation of his fellow human beings have to do with ‘‘belief in a god, an after life or any other religious terminology?’’ asked Catherine Davies?
Good questions. And a splendid answer from the Rev Jonathan Inkpin of Gateshead. First he quoted from Potter’s last, deeply moving television interview with Melvyn Bragg. Potter: ‘‘If you try and make people see the real use of these words - God or the good - they get hopping mad’’.
Inkpin himself went on to comment: ‘‘It seems there is nothing more like the narrow vehement theist whom Potter so well enraged than the narrow vehement atheist. Of course it would be ‘codswallop’ to suggest that Dennis Potter held anything approaching traditional faith. Yet to suggest that his work was not in so many respects deeply religious also beggers belief, denying the themes of his richest writing and his own admission that he could never quite throw off the idea of believing in God (‘in us or with us’)’’.
Some humanists wanted to ‘‘perpetuate the illusion that all of religion is about objective structures of belief neatly distinguished from humanism’’. Potter was right to rail against religion as ‘‘a mere bandage for ills or as protection against the fear of death’’.
But we are also ‘“‘legitimately entitled to see him as someone who painfully yet joyously explored those deep issues of life which are the subject of true religion, a natural part of the questing human spirit’.
Mr Inkpin wins this month’s Seafarer Award For Telling It Like It Is - a complimentary copy of one of our backnumbers.
Sold out Why backnumbers? Because, due to the editor’s inexcusable failure to foresee the Freeman affair and the renewed interest it would create in the Network, our July issue was out of print by the end of August.
Our apologies to late newcomers who had to be fobbed off with an earlier issue as their introduction to us.
Nonrealist history A new book, Telling the Truth about History, by Joyce Appleby and others (W W Norton, £19.95) charts the advance of postmodemism into history, science and the study of literature over the past decade and a half, hastened by the theories of Foucault, Derrida and co. It’s a useful reminder that what Cupitt has explored in theology and philosophy has its counterparts in all the other mega-disciplines.
But what do you do once you’ve concluded that there is no objective history, no objective science, no objective literary text? Abandon history, science, literature? Not at all, say Appleby and her coauthors. True, multiculturalism and postmodernism mean that history will never be the same again, with historians recognising that language is a convention and that all views of the past are ‘‘constructed’’, but this makes for better history, as a similar modesty among scientists makes for better science. And, though the authors do not say so, it surely makes for better theology.
Godswallop The Sun’s spectacularly under-clothed Samantha Fox - no relation to George - has been born again, and, as A A Gill put it in the Sunday Times, she “‘cantilevered herself on to the stage of the 21st Greenbelt festival’’ to belt out Naughty Girls Need Love Too - God’s love being what she had in mind, rather than the love of Sun readers who have seen so much of her.
But it wasn’t Samantha’s spiritual uplift which caught Mr Gill’s attention so much as the dire quality of the music. ‘‘The Church’s attempts to gatecrash youth culture have led to some of the most embarrassing and naff notes ever inflicted on God’s ears, from Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam to the cringe-inducing musical Bermadette. And yet, and yet, despite the Church’s most nerdish efforts to subvert popular songs into clapalong jingles for teenage Thora Hirds, there has been an enormous revival in spiritual music among the young’’.
Spiritual? ‘‘The word spirit’’, recalls Mr Gill, ‘‘is derived from the Greek word spiritus, meaning breath’’. (My Shorter Oxford says Latin, but stop interrupting). ‘‘Somebody once explained the spirit as being like blowing a horn: air goes in one end and a clear note comes out of the other. The essential mystery and spirituality of music sometimes seems to be obvious to everybody except happy-clappy vicars... The modern church has exchanged a Stradivarius for a kazoo, It has simply swapped some of the most sublime music in the world for some of the tinniest... ‘*All of us have a need to be lifted, to be moved, to be taken out of ourselves, to listen and express the feelings that are too deep for words, and, however fervent the desire, however evangelical the hope, most of us are not going to fake it with Cliff or the Singing Nun or a bouncy Born Again Sam Fox.”’ Top of the sacred pops But what the Church has cast out, the record-buying public has bought in. There may be ten rows of gospel CDs at the HMV shop in Oxford Street, from Cliff leading us not into temptation to Sam doing the opposite, but the golden oldies are selling well too. -Top of the sacred pops, those Benedictine monks doing Canto Gregoriano in all the best restaurants, hairdressers and lifts. Hard on their heels, Faure’s Requiem and King’s College Cambridge doing Allegri Miserere. Hildegard of Bingen in fourth place is closing the gap with A Feather on the Breath of God, while Amadeus himself (Eat your heart out, Salieri) breathes down her neck with his own Requiem. Bach immodestly commands sixth, seventh and ninth positions with a couple of Passions and a B minor Mass, separated by Monteverdi’s Vespers at number eight. Just squeezing into the sacred Top Ten, Handel’s everhummable Christmas stocking-piece, The Messiah.
Tippett’s Third Symphony? Not yet, but I’m doing my best for it.
Infiltrating the Archers My regular and irrepressible correspondent Vivien Gibson, whose ME condition has seemingly done nothing to impair her humour or mental energy, tells me that some time ago she wrote to The Archers - the BBC lot, not the fragrant couple who haven’t been involved in insider share dealings - to suggest that atheist Caroline, then planning to marry vicar Robin, should resolve the problem by joining the Sea of Faith Network in front of 11 million listeners.
The BBC guardedly replied that this was an idea ‘well worth keeping in mind’’, but the story-line writers soon had Caroline’s ardour cooling, thus letting themselves off the hook. But good try, Vivien. Any ideas for Coronation Street?
A lesson from the S of F We sometimes talk of the need for rewriting and updating the literature of our various religious traditions. Perhaps the Society of Friends has something to teach the other churches in this respect.
Its ‘‘Yearly Meeting” or annual conference has been engaged in a massive collective exercise, that of revising the Society’s Book of Discipline - a stern name for the nearest thing a non-credal Society has to a body of writings reflecting its corporate vision, wisdom and belief. The 1994 revision has been seen by traditionalists as a step away from ‘‘Christocentrism” towards a broader, more open perspective, one which welcomes the developing humanist and nonrealist traditions within the Society. The process, though painful to some, has been accomplished without ugly rancour or disruption. Given sensitivity and mutual respect, it can be done.
Sorry...
Not one but two apologies to Eric S MacDonald, for carelessnesses in the last issue. First we trailed him on the cover as Eric Macdonald Smith, dazzled by his typographical proximity to John MacDonald Smith. More foolishly, though, we headed his article ‘‘Letter from America’’ and gratuitously added USA to the address he had given us, which was unfortunate as Wilmot is in Canada. An apology, too, to Adam Thomson, whose address was cut off in its prime. Recalling the missing line from my computer’s overcrowded limbo, Adam lives at Rue A.Lynen 8, 1030 Bruxelles. That’s in Belgium. I think.
God in us Finally, thankyou to 8-yearold Naomi Waistell of Exmouth Friends for her picture of God, and to the Editor of The Friend for letting me reproduce it. i} = xz belevwe thatGeats a little lying rng,; evetybedyS bean O wd iy may Seem Semail uk V¥iS So geod that Vk makes fot, Wands ends oF wpe here SEAfarer ANG Sie oe