Then in my early twenties my secure world fell apart. Instead of love growing it vanished into nothingness. It was, I suppose, not an unusual experience but it seemed so to me at the time. I had not realized there could be such pain in life. My life dissolved. Everyone worried. One friend, frightened I might be about to do something terrible, arranged for a social worker to visit. My mother hid the aspirin tablets, as I discovered when I got a toothache and was unable to find them. There is little positive to say about this, but it did mean I found myself asking life’s existential questions with a desperate urgency. Intense pain can do that which is why I find myself sometimes echoing Emily Dickinson’s words “I like a look of Agony Because I know it’s true—Men do not sham Convulsion, Nor simulate, a Throe.”25 As Leonard Cohen puts it in the chorus in his song, “Anthem”:
There’s a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
In the darkness of existential despair, light somehow shone, and my faith became personal in a different kind of way. God became not simply a theoretical concept but a personal source of strength. Somehow, I found I was not alone. There was strength given that I cannot account for except to describe it as the love of God. I remember sitting listening in my flat to a record of the Gelineau version of the 23rd Psalm and hearing the antiphon “The lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. He leads me, my Saviour nothing shall I fear.” And I knew that was what was happening to me. The time of darkness passed, my hope and idealism were untouched, and love still seemed the only thing that really matters in life. I could get on with life.
This was not an evangelical conversion experience. If anything it left me even more skeptical than ever of those who offer tidy theological answers to life’s raw dilemmas. But I had gone into the darkness and come out the other side not quite the person I was before. I was less inclined to see either myself or others in simple terms, or truth as all right or all wrong, more aware of how difficult life is, of how intense pain can be, but with a sense that God meant something in a way I had not known before.
I was greatly helped in my developing faith by coming across in a secondhand Oxford bookshop the sermons of the greatest liberal preacher of the twentieth-century, Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick’s story is interesting. A prominent liberal in the 1920s, he was targeted by fundamentalists who forced his resignation as minister of First Presbyterian Church in New York. His friends responded by building him a vast church on Riverside Drive in neo-Gothic style, the nave modeled on Chartres Cathedral, with the tallest church tower in America. It also had the largest carillon of bells in the world and the largest tune bell in the world. It helps when John D. Rockefeller Jr. is among your friends. Fosdick’s faith had its foundations not on theological speculations but in experience. He saw religious experiences such as awe, mystery, beauty, grace, love, and transcendent wonder as a consistent part of human life. These are what he called the “reproducible experiences” of the Christian life and are the basis of faith, to which our theologies give provisional expression. “No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.”26 It is a principle which seemed to make sense both of my own experience of wonder and grace and the intellectual integrity proper to a serious faith. So I was confirmed as a theological liberal, but one to whom religion was never simply theoretical but deeply personal. From then on Riverside has always had a special place in my affections. The first time I worshiped there, as the seemingly endless procession of choir and clergy entered, the tears ran down my face.
Theologically I am unambiguously a liberal. It is a word to use with caution. No theological categorization is without ambiguity. This is particularly true of liberalism which is more a way of doing theology than a particular set of conclusions. On balance the term liberal, like the term evangelical, reveals more than it obscures but it is well always to remember Alfred Korzybski’s dictum, “the map is not the territory it represents.”27 My own definition is that liberal theology is “a contextual relating of the gospel to contemporary culture and knowledge which reflects intellectual criticality and the liberal values of tolerance, openness and inclusion.” It is a theology committed to compassion and social justice and rooted in the understanding that ultimate matters can never be fully contained in words and concepts. For better or for worse that is the tradition I come out of and is what I am. Infallible Scriptures, unquestioned assertions, exclusive truths, or uncritical faith are not part of who I am.
Liberal Christianity is a tradition which does not always do itself many favors. David Hollinger tells of a discussion with a former president of the Unitarian-Universalist Association of the United States, who advised strongly against a robust public discussion of religious ideas. “My side,” he said, “would lose.”28 In recent years that has often been true—much to the dismay of liberals, fundamentalism has proved more resilient than liberals ever imagined would be the case. But for me the fundamentalist option is an impossible one and the liberating Christ I find within the Bible incompatible with authoritarian religion. I’m with Ian Bradley when he says, “the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand” (Isa 32:8).29
So, I am anything but unbiased. Nor of course is anyone else. The best any of us can manage is a partial insight from a particular viewpoint—an angle of entry, a slant on truth, simply one perspective among many. As Emily Dickinson says: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”30 There is no need to be embarrassed about this. As John Caputo puts it,
God doesn’t need an angle, but we do. Having an angle is the way truth opens up for us mortals. The opposite of having an angle on things is a dumb look, just staring at things incomprehensibly.31
This book is one person’s glimpse into the possibility of God. It is as honest as I can make it. I am a white English male who is at home in the church, and for whom a liberal faith has been at the heart of who I am. This is my slant on truth, a very particular and partial one, but none of us can offer more.
1. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §125.
2. Hastings, History of English Christianity, 221–22.
3. Daily Telegraph, 28 December 2016.
4. Kelly, Key Findings, 2.
5. Bullivant, “Europe’s Young Adults,” 6.
6. Pew Research Centre, “Decline of Christianity Continues,” paras. 1, 10.
7. Bullivant, Mass Exodus, 28.
8. Hall, End of Christendom, 38.
9. Küng, Global Ethic, 152.
10. Larkin, Collected Poems, 97.
11. Sunday Times, 2 November 2010.
12. Spufford, Unapologetic, 1.