Keeping Alive the Rumor of God
When Most People Are Looking the Other Way
Martin Camroux
Foreword by David R. Peel
KEEPING ALIVE THE RUMOR OF GOD
When Most Are Looking the Other Way
Copyright © 2020 Martin Camroux. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Foreword
Martin Camroux belongs to a church tradition which historically has placed a great deal of importance on having a learned ministry in support of its emphasis on preaching. Quality preaching always requires preachers whose holistic learning is rooted in theological acumen, vital spirituality, and practicing what they preach. Mind, heart, and will are all involved in enabling a preacher’s human words to become God’s word for a particular congregation.
Through rigorous theological reflection, spiritual discipline, and his radical commitment to social justice, Martin has become an excellent preacher. His latest book provides us with an account of the theology which undergirds his ministry. Not surprisingly—even helpfully—the style is that of a preacher speaking to a diverse congregation rather than an academic addressing the academy. The book betrays a lifetime of working alongside fellow Christian disciples, ministering to their needs, and sharing their stories; it is peppered with helpful illustrations from literature, poetry, and music, bringing home theological truths beyond conceptual limits; and it is rooted in Martin’s deep concern about the churches’ diminishing role in Western society.
In Ecumenism in Retreat Martin offered an interpretation of his statistical analysis of the URC’s declining membership figures. It led him to be accused of being unduly negative about the URC’s numerical plight, but when one’s denomination has been declining over its lifetime at about 4 percent per year it’s difficult to be positive—it would take an upturn greater than the Evangelical Revival to return the URC to the membership level at its inception in 1972. The process of secularization has now produced a situation in which religion is alien to most people; so, as Steve Bruce has observed, “If there is to be a reversal of secularization, large numbers of the currently non-religious will have to convert.” That is not going to happen without Christians generating a life-enhancing re-statement of Christianity’s original counter-cultural message: What does it mean to be a Christian today if it meant what it did to the first witnesses to Jesus? Alongside an “historic authenticity” our much-needed narrative will need to display a “contemporary credibility,” which in a hard-nosed way can serve as a modern Christian apologia.
Such a narrative will only emerge from the kind of theological reflection Martin has attempted in this book. He laments that the style of theological exploration which generated his early Christian commitment has been increasingly sidelined. Church culture is now dominated by fundamentalism or attempted returns to the supposedly safe harbors of orthodoxy (whether “Ancient,” “Neo” or “Radical”) that steer well away from troubled seas stirred up by the challenges of contemporary ideas and radical social and political movements.
Martin’s insistence that a return to liberal theology is desperately needed is most timely. He is encouraging us to give an account of the hope within us (1 Pet 3:15) that not only avoids some of the question-begging, purported “certainties” of many confessional theologies, but also seriously engages with contemporary atheistic critiques of religion and, to some extent, even the faith claims of non-Christian faiths and ideologies. Our accounts will only pass muster if they address the contemporary issues posed to Christian believing as honestly as we find them tackled in this book.
David R. Peel
Acknowledgments
One of the few advantages of retirement, for someone who has loved being a minister, is that it gives you the chance to ask critical questions about the gospel you have spent years preaching. This has not been an easy experience for my wife Margaret and my wonderful children, Eleanor and Michael, who have had to put up with me as I’ve inflicted the text on them. I am hugely grateful to Margaret for checking the grammar and pointing out to me where she can’t understand what I was trying to say.
I am hugely grateful above all to David Peel, the United Reformed Church’s most distinguished living theologian, for reading and making detailed comments on all the chapters with extraordinary good humor and kindness. It cheers me we seem to have reached similar conclusions by different routes. I am grateful to others who have read some or all of the manuscript, especially David Cornick, Ian Bradley, Richard Jurd, David Lawrence, and John Bradbury. The fact that not all of them agreed with everything I’ve written was a stimulus to rethinking. I am particularly grateful to Ian Bradley for suggesting I try to make the text more personal which I have tried to do. Thank you also to Savanah N. Landerholm for her excellent typesetting.
I am grateful also to the congregations of Freemantle United Reformed Church Southampton, Trinity with Palm Grove URC/Methodist Church Birkenhead, Immanuel URC Swindon, and Trinity United Reformed and Methodist Church in Sutton. I was amazingly fortunate in the churches to which I ministered. You showed me how the faith could be lived when most people were looking the other way. I must add another church to that list. I was never a member of Riverside Church but two of its ministers, Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin, have been central to my faith journey, and the times I worshiped there helped to form my idea of what a church should be.
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Keeping Alive the Rumor of God
“Can’t you hear those little bells tinkling? Down on your knees! They’re bringing the sacraments to a dying God” wrote Heinrich Heine in 1834. Decades later Friedrich Nietzsche made the same observation. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”1 By this he meant that the culture was becoming one in which belief in God was no longer going to be possible. It took a little time, but we are nearly there. Church attendance began to decline in England in the 1880s. From then the decline proceeded rapidly. Already by the 1920s, as Adrian Hastings recognizes, the principal intellectual orthodoxy in England was agnosticism. “Religious thinking was more and more simply abandoned among the wise as essentially primitive and, in the modern world, redundant.”2 By the time I went to university in the 1960s church congregations were mostly elderly and I took it for granted that most people I knew, especially young people, would not be Christian. Since then the decline has accelerated. If I could go back now, I would think how young church congregations were then!
I have been a Christian minister for more than forty years, all in the context of the decline of both religious practice and belief. I was ordained in September 1975 at Freemantle United Reformed Church in Southampton. The church was packed, and one of the two sermons was preached by the Moderator of General Assembly and Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford George Caird. The church was prominently situated on a main road, with a modern attractive post-war building, excellent ancillary rooms and a car-park. There were 113 members, fifteen or so in the choir and they claimed up to forty-four children in the junior church with twelve teachers. I ministered there for ten fulfilling years and married my wife Margaret there