32. Gomes, “Introduction,” 2.
33. Chadwick. Victorian Church, 1.
34. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33.
35. Watts, Divine Songs, song 1.
36. Allison, Night Comes, 3.
37. Field, “Counting Religion in Britain,” 1.
38. Woodhead, No Religion in Britain, 257.
39. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 178.
40. Martin, Religious and the Secular, 116.
41. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 87.
42. Larkin, Collected Poems, 171.
43. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 43.
44. Gifford, Western Religion, 39.
45. Davenport-Hines, Letters from Oxford, xiii, 62.
46. Voas, “Fidelity,” 164.
47. MacArthur, Setting Up Signs, 10–11.
48. Bruce, “Late Secularization,” 14.
49. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 80–81.
50. Tutu, African Prayer Book, back cover.
51. Nietzsche, Will to Power, preface.
52. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 589.
53. Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 133.
54. From an interview with Ken Campbell on Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken, 1995.
55. Arnold, Poems, 226.
56. Daily Telegraph, 2 October 2016.
57. Auden, Selected Poems, 86.
58. Milbank et al., Radical Orthodoxy.
59. McGrath, Renewal of Anglicanism, 110.
60. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy, 23.
61. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 1.
62. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 232.
63. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 387–88.
64. Newport, “In U.S., 42% Believe Creationist View of Human Origins.”
65. Jonnyscaramanga, “How Many Christian Fundamentalists,” para. 5.
66. Kumar, “Hindu Nationalists Claim that Ancient Indians Had Airplanes,” para. 9.
67. Cupitt, “After Liberalism,” 252.
68. Cupitt, “After Liberalism,” 255.
69. Holloway, Leaving Alexandria, 335.
70. Mountford, Christian Atheist, 11.
71. Boulton, Trouble with God, 55.
72. Geering, Christianity without God, 136.
73. See https://www.sundayassembly.com/public-charter-for-sunday-assembly/.
74. Alkar, Church, 148.
75. Gardiner, Religious Verse, 179.
3
God Above God
Let me set out my case. I believe the numinous, the transcendent, is real and therefore the possibility of God is open. I believe that without it life’s meaning cannot be adequately located, and that its discovery can go along with honest questioning and search. In our society this is frequently written off as simply obviously untrue. If so, we are the losers. As Paul Gifford says, “Simply reading a newspaper shows that we have not succeeded in mastering the changes that modernity poses; but makes equally evident that the old answers are no longer viable or even particularly valued.”76 Today religious faith is something of a wild card. But despite everything it remains a real possibility. Maybe we need to see more clearly what is involved in the religious choice and what kind of hope it can give.
Let me illustrate the case by looking at one life, that of Paul Tillich. It may seem an odd choice. He was one of the most influential twentieth-century theologians. Yet today almost no one reads him. There are a variety of reasons for this. He was a very bad writer who never really mastered English. As a student in the 1960s I was probably not the only one who managed to read some of his sermons but gave up on his systematic theology! God, Tillich taught in a famous phrase, is “the ground of being.” Theology students used to have great fun and demonstrate their erudition by praying, “Dear Ground of Being.” Today he suffers from not fitting in with our more conservative