The intellectual and moral cost is considerable. Fundamentalism is predicated on an absolute view of truth which leaves little space for other faiths, or those who think differently. Fundamentalists frequently endorse an irrational and anti-scientific theory of Young Earth Creationism. Serious biblical scholarship is ignored or rejected, homophobia often tolerated or encouraged, and fundamentalism is increasingly linked to extreme politics. In January 2018, India’s higher education minister Satya Pal Singh threatened to remove evolution from school and college curricula. “Nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral [texts], has said that they ever saw an ape turning into a human being.”66 That an education minister can say this is particularly shocking, if not Orwellian, like the ministry of peace organizing for war.
At the other extreme, often called progressive, the tactic is often capitulation. Historically liberal theology offered the possibility of combining coherent Christian belief with an open critical cast of mind. The hope (and sometimes the reality) was that faith would end up stronger this way. That possibility seems much more doubtful today. Liberal theology has lost confidence and coherence. One of the major recent theological developments has been the growth of non-objective theism in which talk of God becomes not a reference to a reality but a linguistic device, or a way of talking of the values in which one believes. Don Cupitt, for example, argues that “in recent years the Liberal creed has been falling apart article by article” and argues that liberalism in its essentials is simply another form of traditional theology.
They still stand in the old Platonic tradition and believe both in one-truth-out-there and in moral-standards-out-there. They are almost without exception scientific realists, and also social-historical optimists who believe, like John Robinson, if not quite in a final guaranteed historical triumph of the Good, then at least in a constant Love-out-there at the root of things. And they use a great deal of traditional language.67
For him the only possibilities now are fundamentalism or a post-modern nonrealism in which God is simply a human construct. “Liberalism is being squeezed out, in society, in the church, and in the intellectual world.”68
All this reflects a growing uncertainty in the progressive wing of the church as to whether, in the end, God language is meaningful. Richard Holloway’s deeply moving account of his growing atheism, which led to the position where “I could no longer talk about God,”69 has met with considerable sympathy because it speaks for a good many others. Brian Mountford, vicar of the University Church in Oxford for thirty years, advocates being a “Christian Atheist,” although he is more than a little vague about what this means: “Christian Atheist is a ragged category and I apologize if I can’t be pinned down by definitions.”70 The Quaker David Boulton in his The Trouble with God is honest as to the way his beliefs dissolved: “I have been cutting God down to size, lopping off a hand here, a foot there. Now there was virtually nothing left of him, If I worshipped anything at all, it was a divine Cheshire Cat, sans claws, sans teeth, sans virtually everything. Only the grin was left.”71 The New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering, in his Christianity without God, argues that not only can Christianity exist without God but today it must. “We have now reached the stage within the evolving stream of Christian tradition when to achieve the most mature state of personhood we must become emancipated from the last element of our cultural tradition which has the capacity to enslave us—namely theism.”72
Such views find sympathy among a good number to whom the language of God has ceased to speak. The result is that a significant number of progressive Christians are closer to atheism than to theism in any recognizable form. Some are quite explicit about this. On its website the atheist Sunday Assembly affirms:
We are a godless congregation that celebrates of life.
•We have an awesome motto: Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More.
•A super mission: to try to help everyone find and fulfil their full potential.
•An awesome vision: a godless congregation in every town city, or village that wants one.73
Whatever Schleiermacher had in mind when he sought to articulate a faith for its cultured despisers it was not this.
Something approximating to a non-theistic faith is more widely held than is sometimes appreciated. When I first cofounded the URC liberal network, Free to Believe, with Donald Hilton in 1996 most of those present were like us evangelical liberals influenced by John Robinson’s Honest to God. Over the years the center of gravity has moved. Jack Spong (whose theism is deeply ambiguous) became the most influential theologian for progressive Christians with a quite considerable following for Don Cupitt. Spong then endorsed Gretta Vosper, a New Age atheist, as his heir. A good many of those who started off their theological journeys on John Robinson’s Honest to God found themselves finally less sure what, if anything, God might mean. So, Adrian Alkar, in his “Radical Church,” concludes:
Is God the cosmic superhero? Is God the embodiment love? Is God defined in the ethical injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount? Is God as a Life force? Is God the Ground of all being? Or is God a human construct, a word which allows thinking of goodness or loving as the overarching ethical principle.74
At different times in his life he has held different views on this question but now he asks if that matters? “The journey of radical openness, of honest questioning and the shared experiences of love have been all that mattered.” As chair of Free to Believe people send me emails saying things like
As a “theological instrumentalist” I can participate in churchgoing and worship because the concepts I encounter there have “instrumental” value regardless of their objective truth-status.
Today I am constantly meeting lay people and ministers who make it clear that an objective God is no longer part of their understanding of faith. It is to the credit of such theology that it is an honest attempt to come to terms with the crisis of faith. The reality is that significant amounts of commonly asserted or popular Christian doctrine such as the infallible Bible or non-evolutionary accounts of creation, or the miracle-working deity, who dictates the course of human life, are not sustainable. The old scenario of heaven and hell is not defensible nor is a great deal of traditional moral teaching or the uniqueness of Christianity as a way into religious truth or the belief that truth comes to us unmediated by culture. Theology is in chaos and attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will not work. God as supernatural being has died and deserves to die. I share many beliefs with those who take the non-theistic option.
It is not, however, for me. It offers no serious solution to the Christian dilemma. Anyone who has ever rubbed two theological thoughts together knows that God is a mystery who can never be adequately expressed by human language. The religious experience is elusive and fragmentary; more an entering into what Henry Vaughan called “a deep, but dazzling darkness” than a simple revelation of the truth.75 But Christianity stands or falls on whether or not there is reality behind such experiences. If the experience is real we are free to jettison images that are now bankrupt and seek for new words, symbols, and myths to express it. But, if it is an illusion, then the religious enterprise is false and dressing up moral values in religious clothing is philosophically misleading and intellectually incoherent. The honest atheism of Richard Dawkins is much more to be respected than using the word God for that which exists