As well as meeting growing indifference, religious belief has been vigorously attacked by what have been called the new atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, who argue that religion is irrational and should not simply be tolerated but countered, criticized, and exposed. Dawkins originally entered the God debate by challenging creationist ideology but widened his scope to argue that all religion as similarly unthinking and irrational. He sees religion, as he once put it on Twitter, as “an organized license to be acceptably stupid.” Dawkins writes that for religious believers “Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are.”20 As a catch-all definition of religious faith this is more than a little bizarre. Christian theology is not simply Koran-burning fundamentalists; it is Rowan Williams, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Küng, Paul Tillich, Martin Luther King Jr., and Desmond Tutu. To suggest they see ignorance as a virtue is to trivialize the discussion. As Terry Eagleton says, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”21 But to be fair to Dawkins his problem is not totally different from that of the Mansfield College students to whom the stained-glass windows were a mystery. The chasm which has opened up between us and our religious past means it is genuinely hard for secular atheists to understand and empathize with the religious mindset. Much contemporary Western culture frequently does not understand religion and looks on bemused or uncaring from a distance.
Culturally God is dead for most of Western society and this is not likely to change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the concentration of religion among the elderly can only mean that an accelerated decline is a given. In retrospect the 1960s seem to be the last period when Christian faith was culturally significant and hopeful. The decline of faith and the rise of secularism are among the most characteristic features of modern society leaving open, as Nietzsche saw, the question of where common values are to be found.
The districts of the city have crumbled.
The work of giants of old lies decayed.
Roofs are long tumbled down,
The lofty towers are in ruins.22
AND YET IT MOVES
For forty years I have ministered to United Reformed and ecumenical congregations, all of which were experiencing dramatic social and theological change. Often, it has seemed a desperate struggle against the odds. I have seen the institutional structure of Christianity falling apart with its leadership often in a state of denial.
The mid-sixties were an exciting time to be a Christian. John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) sold a million copies in seventeen languages and had a cultural impact quite inconceivable now. It fired me with the conviction that the church could change and be renewed. Nothing was off-limits. Everything was possible. Ecumenism was leading to a united church. A date was even set for it. “We dare to hope that this date should not be later than Easter Day 1980,” as the Nottingham Conference in 1964 prophesied in a utopian moment. There was much new liturgy and songs like Sydney Carter’s Lord of the Dance. In America Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and was marching for justice and demonstrating what the social and political implications of all this were. “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday” we sang on all possible occasions. Amazingly the Second Vatican Council was leading to a new hope in the Catholic Church. From the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, but with wider application, Michael Novak could conclude: “Old patterns are dissolving. In such a time, the Spirit’s activity is almost tangible . . . an age of creativity has begun.”23
Very little turned out as I hoped. The 1960s ended with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys and the realization of just how naïve many of the dreams of the 1960s had been. Neither peace nor social justice turned out to be as easy to achieve as we imagined. There was no renewal of faith and no organic unity in Britain, with the sadly somewhat-insignificant exception of the United Reformed Church. Instead church decline accelerated beyond anything we had imagined, and the church lost confidence and often withdrew from radical social action. Despite the hopes of the Honest to God generation, culturally and intellectually religious faith has become much harder to hold with integrity. As Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall says: “Belief in a good God is not an easy thing for anybody who thinks to a significant degree.”
One might expect that ministering in this context would be unrewarding—and indeed quite a few ministers have become burnt out and depressed by a constant sense of failure. For me, however, despite everything, ministry has been hugely satisfying. I have seen faith still light up the eyes of the dying and sermons just occasionally touch lives. My experience is that, whatever the problems we have speaking of it, the experience of transcendence either in its soft form (spiritual presence, beauty, awe, wonder) or its hard form (the numinous sense of God’s presence, glory, power) is still part of more lives than we might imagine. When Galileo was forced to recant his convictions he is supposed to have said, E pur si muove, “And yet it moves.” That is what I think about faith. It is difficult to exaggerate the crisis facing the institutional church or the crisis of belief which has undermined it. And yet God still moves.
I want to offer three main propositions.
1.I want to explain how God died to much of our culture, leading to a loss of a shared moral vision.
2.I want to show how, nonetheless, the spiritual is central both to our experience and to who we are.
3.I want to show how the Christian tradition can offer symbols and stories, above all those of cross and resurrection, that give meaning to the reality of spiritual presence and our mysterious experience of humanity. Scripture is vital to this but so is art, poetry, music, and the experience of beauty.
Richard Holloway tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest who worked in a factory and lived the life of anonymous Christianity. When asked why he did it he said he was there to keep the rumor of God alive. I have no doubt that an idea of God has died, but that is not the end of the matter. Theodore Roethke puts it “in a dark time, the eye begins to see.”24
TELL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT
Let me be quite explicit about who I am and what my prejudices are. What follows is written from within the Christian tradition. Growing up in East Anglia I hardly met anyone from another faith tradition and shared an unquestioned assumption of Christian superiority. I have tried to rectify that. Lieutenant General William Boykin, speaking at an evangelical Christian church in the United States, said of a Muslim military leader in Somalia, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” This desire to be number one, walled in by our own beliefs and prejudices, is one of the least attractive of our human characteristics. My own experience is that there are elements of good and bad, truth and falsehood, in people of all faiths and none. While for me Jesus Christ remains the central symbol for defining God,