This is very personal to me. Growing up in Norfolk I often went for walks in the school holidays looking at country churches and vast skies. When I go back now for me, as for John Betjeman, “these Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence.” But Norfolk is, as Noel Coward pointed out, rather flat. One of the wonders of my childhood was the holidays we had in the Western Isles of Scotland. When I looked out from Pulpit Hill at Oban to the Hebrides, across the Firth of Lorne to the Isle of Mull I realized that life had a wonder to it Norfolk had not prepared me for. Later that wonder came in other ways, listening to Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in Winchester Cathedral, in poetry, art, in worship and prayer, in architecture and the experience of loving relationships. As Archibald MacLeish sang it:
Now at 60 what I see
Although the world is worse by far
Stops my heart in ecstasy,
God, the wonders that there are.101
Roger Scruton was an eminent philosopher. In the early part of his life he was influenced by Nietzsche—everything was fundamentally pointless, especially religion. Then during the Lebanese Civil War, he visited Beirut, to write about the conflict. For this it was necessary to cross into West Beirut. The only person who was prepared to take him was a nun of the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, who worked all over the Middle East trying to bring both relief and education to Christian and Muslim alike. He wrote, “At every point in this journey we found suffering, mute, helpless and often terminal. And everywhere around this suffering, were the arms of love.” They visited a convent founded by Mother Theresa of Calcutta. “The Mother Superior arrives—a small cheerful Bengali who speaks English. She shows us the children. Children with paralyzing deformities, children who cry and crawl like animals, and yet in each is a carefully nurtured person, gently tended by the good nuns into lank distorted but nevertheless eager life . . . If there is such a thing as God’s work this is it.” Scruton said he was “shocked out of the Nietzschean attitudes . . . and had been brought face to face with the mystery of charity . . . I had witnessed the descending love called agape by St Paul and it filled me with an uncomfortable wonder . . . I was being turned in a new direction.”102 This did not mean he had encountered a divine being, but love spoke of something greater. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says,
But in the mud and scum of things
There always, always something sings.103
The experience of love opens up the depths of life to us, and through it, the possibility of God remains open.
To explore what this meant Tillich turned to the classic liberal theology of Rudolf Otto who saw the core of religion not as a set of beliefs but as an experience met with in the depths and reality of life. How we speak of this inevitably changes as our insight and knowledge changes. All theologies are only partially true at best, all concepts of God are inadequate words. Augustine after all had said that “God transcends even the mind.”104 It is axiomatic therefore that the pictures we have of God are images that will often need smashing. This is the very essence of liberal theology, and, without it, Christian belief would be dead. As a young Congregationalist I grew up singing,
We limit not the truth of God
To our poor reach of mind,
By notions of our day and sect,
Crude, partial and confined.105
That still seems to me rather splendid.
For anyone who is serious about God it is a necessity. Stephen Greenblatt tells how when he was a child and went to services at the synagogue his parents would tell him to look down with bowed heads until the rabbi’s priestly benediction had finished because at that moment God passed overhead and anyone who saw God would die. Inevitably he conquered his fear of death, looked up and there was no one there. Not only that but he could now see that “many of the worshippers were glancing around, staring out of windows, or even gesturing to friends and mouthing greetings. I was filled with outrage; I had been lied to.”106 His naïve faith collapsed at that moment. Theologies do not necessarily lie (though you would be unwise to assume they never do) but they are inevitably at best truth mixed with error, reality with illusion. We always need to examine the beliefs we hold critically and seek to go deeper and further. More often than we like to admit we simply have to say we were wrong. Intelligence is not knowing everything without questioning, but rather the willingness to question everything you think you know. Otherwise you end up a closed system—to use Sylvia Plath’s analogy, it’s like being in a bell jar, forever rebreathing our own fetid air.
All ideas of God are open to change. Life changes them, new ideas change them. What is apparently credible today may look incredible tomorrow and vice versa. Today a picture of God, as supernatural being, has died. It was never very good theology in the first place. In the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa defined God as non aliud, “not another thing.”107 Theologies crumble, sermons look even more ridiculous than when we first preached them. Thirty-volume systematic theologies turn out to say nothing at all, but the wonder of life remains and so does the possibility that what seems the death of God may not be the end of the matter.
76. Gifford, Western Religion, 112.
77. Tillich, From Time to Time.
78. MacCulloch, Silence, 202.
79. Tillich, Boundaries, 191.
80. Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 40.
81. Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 61.
82. Hastings, Vietnam, 357.
83. Owen, Collected Poems, 44.
84. Quoted in Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 53.
85. Thompson, Mud and Barbed Wire, 61.
86. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 146.
87. Dorrien, Social Democracy, 273.
88. Tillich, Courage to Be, 185.
89. Tillich, Art and Architecture, 155–56.
90. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 92.
91. Tillich, Courage to Be, 190.
92. Robinson, Honest to God, 49.
93. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, 57.
94. Browning, Poems of Robert Browning, 129.
95. Tillich, Boundaries, 281.