Once upon a time, when I was teaching RE and also for my own personal use, I used to try to bring Christianity up to date in the same way as Dinah Livingstone is also doing in her article Whose is the Kingdom?. Her final paragraph says: ‘The Christ epic translated into non-supernatural terms remains a powerful force for human transformation – salvation.’ She has just been writing about the way the older ideas of Christianity were at one time re-interpreted to justify the practices and beliefs current at the time. She continues her last paragraph : ‘the second translation – i.e. hers – into a humanist version is much closer to the spirit of the original gospel than is the former translation into the “divine right” of rulers.’ (Actually, just what the original gospel was we cannot really know, as Jesus’ words only come to us through the mediation of evangelists, who liked to see the man as the Christ, or through Paul, who was building his own theories of how to make a perfectible world by using the tiny gatherings of the early Christians as his base from which to work.) My question to both Dinah and Don Cupitt is: why on earth bother with trying to reinterpret the ancient beliefs? Who is being helped by these re-interpretations?
Most people nowadays do not have Jesus, certainly not Christ, as relevant to their thinking. I guess that people start with a natural world as they perceive it through their own direct experiences or as TV programmes present the world to them: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, cancers, genetic abnormalities – all are seen as bad luck, pure chancy bad falls of the dice. Morality has nothing to do with it. Concepts of evil and deserved punishment belong to a totally alien outmoded way of thinking for most people.
Those who do see themselves as living in a world where they have to battle with evil forces and who try to ally themselves with the good God are only upset by the people like Dinah Livingstone and Don Cupitt (article on Lucifer) who take their cherished beliefs and try to ‘reinterpret’ them.
I have come to realise over the years that all we can do is allow the traditionalists to go on cherishing their traditions. One day they will die out, and till then they are finding some patterns for their lives. It is not very kind to try to use their ideas and cherished beliefs and rejig them. We ought to have the courage to declare ourselves to be what we truly are – just old fogies with fond memories of the past which we know, in our heart of hearts, to be useless for our present situations.
For those of us who see life as an a-moral journey to nowhere: we need to work out for ourselves how best to cope with ourselves. To stand with our welly boots still in the grubby old mire of past beliefs while trying to say: ‘There is some clean water in here if you really look’ is just cowardice.