104 – Church: A Common Treasury?

Author: Dinah Livingstone. Published June 2012 in issue 104 of Sofia.

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Contents

Articles
Reviews
Poetry
Regulars and Occasionals

Editorial

The first three articles in this issue began as talks to the London SOFIC (Sea of Faith in the Churches) Conference in March. The question was: Is there any place in the church (churches) for sceptics? Do they or can they belong? Or to put it the other way round: to whom does the church belong? Only to fundamentalist believers or to the rest of us too? As one of the speakers, Tony Windross, put it: ‘We need to ask whether anything significant would be lost if all the churches were closed.’ Richard Hall gave a witty ‘warm-up’ talk on the rise of evangelical fundamentalists: ‘Like them or not, evos are in the church and evos stick.’ Brian Mountford, Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford (one of his predecessors was John Henry Newman), spoke about ‘belonging without believing’, the subtitle of his recent book Christian Atheist, saying: ‘I want to include people of that persuasion in the church.’ And, ‘looking for ways in which religion might not bore and embarrass ordinary intelligent people’, sceptical vicar Tony Windross stressed: ‘It’s all about taking the stories – as stories.’ Two Church of England vicars and one ex-curate.

Oddly enough, the Church of England, established as a national church, is well placed to welcome sceptics et al. Not long ago I attended a poet’s funeral – an ‘unbelieving Jew’ – in a country church. The vicar said the Church of England was for everyone in England and she welcomed a scholarly Jew who chanted the Kaddish in Hebrew and Aramaic. The mixed congregation of country people and sceptical metropolitan intellectuals were spellbound and in tears.

Apart from ultra-fundamentalists, most church members already take a good deal of the Creeds as metaphor. For example, few now believe that Hell is a roaring fire below the Earth (in fact Hell has almost died down altogether, as well as Purgatory and Limbo) or that Heaven is up in the sky. They are on the way to thinking that the whole Christ epic of incarnation, death, descent into Hell, resurrection and ascent into Heaven to sit ‘at the right hand of the Father’ is a story but a story with tremendous and enduring power. The task is to keep the story’s positive force and translate it into terms ‘understanded by the people’, a people who in European culture as a whole cannot now accept the supernatural literally.

In a recent television series Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, a ‘candid friend’ of Christianity, said that the English church (and people) had a peculiar genius for transforming itself, so that it was changed utterly yet still felt the same (witness the choirs in Church of England cathedrals gloriously singing pre-Reformation liturgy and music). So it may be this ‘English genius’ that can negotiate the move from hearing the Christ epic as literal to hearing it as symbolic.

I think it is vital for this epic still to be heard in our culture and that is what the church can do. And although the epic is symbolic, the gospel is not. Even if we do not take the epic literally, we can still believe in the gospel, keep faith. The gospel as good news for the poor, as the reign of kindness, justice and peace on Earth and in our hearts, needs to be realised in bodily terms: hot dinners, safe beds, freedom from torture. These things are not ‘post-modernist’ or ‘nonreal’. The gospel remains and David Cameron’s recent call for a ‘return to Christian values’ rang hollow indeed. Where is the good news for the poor in reducing tax on the super-rich (has he never heard of that camel?) or in making so many less well-off people poorer, lose their public services, their livelihoods and their homes?

As well as kindness, we need poetry (in all its senses, to include music and all the arts). The church can give us that abundantly and it is an inheritance beyond price that must not be lost. Many of Brian Mountford’s Christian atheist interviewees mentioned beauty and one described herself as ‘Anglo-choral’.

Today the Church of England is in a strong position to embrace the necessary change of attitude to the supernatural. In the seventeenth century it was the English – the likes of Gerrard Winstanley and others – who fermented a liberation theology (‘the Earth should be a common treasury’ and ‘Christ rising again in the sons and daughters’).

However, in recent decades it has been the Catholic church, especially in Latin America, that has developed liberation theology most fully. And the interesting thing is that these theologians, although ‘orthodox’ in print (many of them Jesuits), have a humanist agenda.

They don’t say: ‘This is wrong because God forbids it’ but ‘The kind of God he is could not want this (e.g. death squads) because it is inhuman.’ Mountford reminds us that a dictum of the church was extra ecclesiam nulla salus: ¨‘no salvation outside the church’. The subtitle of Jesuit Jon Sobrino’s book The Eye of the Needle* is Extra Pauperes Nulla Salus: ‘no salvation outside (without) the poor.’ Could these insights combine to foster the twin requirements for holding fast to what is good in Christianity – ditching the supernatural yet keeping the gospel? It is heartening, at least, that there is a statue of Archbishop Romero of San Salvador on the great west front of Westminster Abbey. *Darton, Longman and Todd (London 2008) translated by Dinah Livingstone.

Church: A Common Treasury? editorial SOF Network Annual Conference Residential at Leicester University: 13th – 15th July This year – ALL rooms en suite: £165.

Joanna Clark Sherborne, Dorset fjclark55@hotmail.com Thank you for your excellent article, Whose is the Kingdom? in Sofia 103. You are correct to state that to bring in the Kingdom, ‘…we have to do it ourselves.’ However, I think you have overlooked a source of help for our efforts in another one of the ‘poetic tales’ of traditional church teaching, namely, the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

A classic version of this teaching is in Luther’s explanation of the third article of the Apostles’ Creed in his Small Catechism, where he writes: ‘I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His (sic) gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith; even as He calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on Earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith; in which Christian Church He forgives daily and richly all sins to me and all believers, and at the last day will raise up me and all the dead, and will give to me and to all believers in Christ everlasting life.’ I think that such formulations can be ‘translated’ into non-realistic terms. If we avail ourselves regularly of hearing the Word and receiving the sacraments, even as we understand that these are human activities, we may be empowered to continue to strive for the Kingdom. If we wait upon the Spirit, we may be assured of the Spirit’s presence in our work, and we may feel that we do not strive only by ourselves.

— Joanna Clark, Sherborne, Dorset

Sofia Editor: Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martin’s Close London NW1 0HR editor@sofn.org.uk Over the past few months I have been writing my ‘spiritual autobiography’ and pondering about my journey of ‘faith’ (or lack of it). The reason for embarking on this internal exploration will be revealed in due course. Brought up in the Anglican tradition, I was from an early age fascinated by religion and the idea of being ‘good’. My parents were staunch members of the local congregation and church attendance every Sunday was de rigeur. Although I often found it tedious, I am nonetheless grateful for this lesson in self-discipline, which has served me well throughout my life. I am also grateful for being exposed, at a formative stage, to the beauty of the language of the King James Bible and the 1662 Prayer Book. The cadences of the liturgy live with me today as precious relics that I can never discard, even though they no longer have any direct relevance to my faith or belief.

My family loved discussion and my sister and I had plenty of opportunity to test out our ideas on every conceivable subject, especially religion, in a secure and loving environment. A few years before I went to University, a strange thing happened. My father, completely disillusioned by the church, gave up on organised religion altogether, which made our family debates even more interesting. However, always a man of surprises, he encouraged me to join a student church, if I found one that suited me. And I did. In London, at the Anglican Student Church of Christ the King, not long after the publication of Honest to God, I discovered a new and exciting approach to theology and a community of like-minded people, among whom I made lasting friendships. It was tremendously liberating to realise that I could discard many of the ideas which were becoming less and less acceptable to me.

After the heady theological experience of my student days, I returned to Norfolk but felt unable to take part in the style of worship offered by my local church, although I could never lose my affection for the building and its congregation as the centre of community life. And so, formal religious observance went on to the back-burner.

In 1982 Karen Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate. I read this with utter fascination.

Because of her experiences as a nun, Karen Armstrong initially decided to abandon religion altogether, but then turned to serious academic study and writing on religious topics. Her books reignited my interest in religion. A few years later I became aware of the Sea of Faith Network and started to read Don Cupitt and other authors familiar to SOF members.

I am one of life’s ‘joiners’. I love belonging to groups and organisations which address my own interests and concerns, and so it was inevitable that I became a member of SOF. Inspired by the precept instilled by my parents that ‘belonging’ means taking an active part, I started attending annual Conferences. (Those of you who were at the 2009 event may remember that I played a rather too active part and ended up being carted off to hospital!) During SOF conferences I met a number of members who were Unitarians. I had read about the Unitarian tradition and it seemed to me that a Unitarian religious community might provide me with a ‘spiritual home’. Fortunately, there is a Unitarian Chapel – The Octagon – in Norwich and so, after a long spell recovering from my conference accident, I took the plunge and attended a service. One year later I became a full member.

So, back to the writing of my ‘spiritual autobiography’. Unitarians, having no creed or dogma, run a course called Build your Own Theology, which enables individuals to spend time clarifying their personal beliefs, values and principles. Writing a ‘spiritual autobiography’ is part of this process, and I recommend it as a revealing and worthwhile exercise.

Being a religious free-thinker is hard work. We have no resident minister at the Octagon Chapel and, on occasion, the freedom of the pulpit is given to one of the congregation. Later this year I shall be leading a service about the Sea of Faith movement and its relevance to Unitarians. I share the belief of one of the prominent Unitarian members of the SOF movement that Unitarianism is the natural home for SOF members searching for a religious community.

I conclude with that often quoted saying of Cardinal Newman: ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ Though I have no delusions about achieving perfection, I hope that I shall continue to change. Who knows what my SOF Sift might say in ten years’ time?

— Peter McNamara, Fort Lauderdale, USA