London's Internet Church - 21/02/07

Something strange is happening. Just a short while ago it seemed obvious that the whole world would follow the example set in North Western Europe and that modernisation would be accompanied by an evaporation of religious belief. God would continue to be worshipped on the edges of the public square by those who had private religious tastes but the decision for or against God would belong to a range of lifestyle options like vegetarianism, to be respected but with no public resonances.

The recent crop of God-denying books, [Daniel Dennett – “Breaking the Spell”; Sam Harris – “Letter to a Christian Nation”; Richard Dawkins – “The God Delusion”] betrays, by contrast, a considerable anxiety among the secular elite that God is not behaving according to the Enlightenment script.

These talks were inspired by the strange times in which we live and by something overheard, a single haunting phrase, “In this country, God is missing and not missed”.

There is an obvious truth here about the secularised societies of Western Europe but could it be that the “missing God” is in fact being missed and that his eloquent absence is revealed by symptoms of distress in our social life on this planet? This possibility informs the second talk in this series.

There is as a consequence and undeniably in a place like London, evidence of a renewed search for God but in ways that risk recapitulating the mistakes we have made in our approach to God before. There is much to learn from the European Enlightenment and much to admire in its legacy and the third talk will focus on various ways in which choosing the wrong path can lead us either to a vapid consumer spirituality or worse to an idol in a lethal rather than a healthful religious culture.

Finally distilled from the witness of the Early Church I want to suggest a down to earth way this Lent to approach the God of Surprises who is revealed in the Easter mystery.

But first, “God is missing and not missed.”

Many times in the past century or so in Western Europe the obituary of God has been written.

Thomas Hardy penned one such early 20th century obituary in his poem, God’s Funeral.

As he conjures up in his mind’s eye the column of mourners at God’s obsequies, Hardy has none of the fierce exaltation of earlier writers like Shelley who celebrated the overthrow of the great tyrant who had for so many aeons frustrated the ambitions of the sons and daughters of Prometheus. Hardy sees the funeral of God as a lamentable but inescapable fact.

I saw a slowly-stepping train--
Lined on the brows, scoop eyed and bent and hoar--
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?

And tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace we grew self deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed.

Till in Time’s stayless stealthy swing
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

So toward our myth’s oblivion, Darkling and languid-lipped we creep and grope Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon Whose Sion was a still abiding hope.”

I have quoted Hardy at length because I think that his melancholy conviction is still shared by many of our contemporaries. A more recent witness is Robert Lowell in his poem “Waking Early Sunday Morning”.

In this small town where everything is known, I see his vanishing emblems. His white spire and flag- pole sticking out above the fog, like old white china doorknobs, sad, slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Lowell was of course an American but the missing God is more of a factor in Europe where it is unremarkable in a way that is not true for Americans.

The disappearance of a sense of the presence of God is perhaps the most significant fact about contemporary European culture. Certainly Nietzsche thought so but the possibility of God has become so occluded that, to judge by the voices that dominate the media, contemporary opinion has gone beyond wistfulness to a point where it is difficult for many cultural arbiters to conceive of what it might be like to have any lively sense of God’s reality.

What are the reasons for the “missing God” in Western Europe?

In the first place the catastrophe of the European civil wars of 1500-1700 may not be present to the conscious memory of most of our contemporaries but the strife which devastated our continent informed attitudes which are still very much with us. Our own civil war in the 1640’s was something of a side show but still 100,000 people were killed, a substantial proportion of the adult male population.

Our West European Enlightenment emerged out of horror and disgust at what religious fanaticism had done to our continent. It is not just a coincidence that it was during the last decade of the horrifying Thirty Years War [1638-48] that Galileo published his “Dialogue concerning Two New Sciences” and Descartes his “Principles of Philosophy” while Newton was born.
Richard Tarnas in his fine book “The Passion of the Western Mind” sums up the consequences of this period thus –

The fragmentation brought about by warring Christian absolutisms argued the need for another type of belief system more rationally persuasive and less controversially subjective.

In 17th century England, this endeavour was not at first seen to be incompatible with being a Christian believer. This British Enlightenment preceded the developments in France and believers and even bishops were among the early members of the Royal Society. Isaac Newton was himself a believer, albeit of a rather unorthodox kind, as you can see from his voluminous writings on the Book of Daniel.

In much of the rest of Europe, however, God was identified as the ally of obscurantism and the patron of absolutist regimes. In consequence, the revolt of the many against the single will of the ruler was often accompanied by a rejection of the theological underpinning of absolutist ideology.

{One of the reasons why the political culture of this country is different from that of our Continental neighbours is that religion has not in recent times been a major defining issue in the battles between left and right. This arises from the failure of the three main Christian combatants in England to achieve what they all desired, which was to create a religious monopoly.

Prelatist, Puritan and Papist fought themselves to a standstill and, without any of them intending it, opened the door to pluralism. When it became necessary to confront the injustices of the established political and economic status quo in the 19th century, the early Trades Unionists like the Tolpuddle Martyrs were not Marxist agitators but Methodist lay preachers. In England, however much you disliked the Established Church, it was never necessary to oppose Jesus Christ if you were agitating for change.}

In countries which combined an authoritarian tradition with a religious monopoly, where Christ seemed, bizarrely, to be an ally of the status quo then in those countries, Russia, Prussia, France, Spain and Italy, religious monopoly spawned large, left wing, atheist parties. By contrast, in England the membership of the British Communist party has at no point ever equalled the membership of the Lord’s Day Observance Society.

The experience of the US has been very different. America was populated in part by people seeking religious freedom of expression, people who had passed over into the Promised Land through the baptismal waters of the Atlantic. The very different historical narrative of the US goes a very long way to explaining why there is such a sharp divergence between Americans and Western Europeans in the matter of the forms of faith.

It is of course true that the great killers in 20th century Europe were the secular Messianic states, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia with their pseudo-scientistic visions of how to build a secular heaven on top of a vast graveyard. But still obstinately, despite most recent evidence, the orthodoxy of the lounge bar of the Pig and Whistle is that “the worst wars in history have been religious wars”. And it is true that you do not have to be an atheist to sympathise with Jonathan Swift’s lament – “how is it that we have enough religion to hate one another but not enough to love one another”.

Faith is intimately connected with the passing on of credible narratives and the greatest challenges to the believability of God come not from philosophy but from events which discredit religious narratives and which contribute to building convincing counter narratives.

In saying this it is not necessary to exclude the philosophical developments which are also involved in the eclipse of God. The God seen to be compatible with the ordered Newtonian universe was more like the god of the ancient philosophers, the Unmoved Mover, than the dynamic God of Covenant and Promise, encountered in the Bible.

In the Bible God is before the beginning. He is the pre-comprehensible ground of all that is. He is the subject whose name revealed to Moses is simply “I am”. Eccentrics may doubt his presence – “dixit insipiens”, the fool hath said in his heart that there is no God, scoffed the Psalmist – but He is the Creator of the deep structure of the world and the source of reason and understanding of the laws which underlie nature.

By contrast the God who fitted into the mechanistic picture of the universe drawn by Newton was not so much a subject as the object of human thought, and an object who ultimately became redundant.

This translation of God into an object follows from the mode of reasoning which was classically expressed in the work of Rene Descartes although there were precursors. Charles de Bouvelles, for example, in his book “de Sapiente” published in 1509, pictures a human being as “no longer part of the universe but as its eye and mirror; and indeed as a mirror that does not receive the images of things from outside but that rather forms and shapes them in itself.”

The method of Descartes gives a systematic account of an approach to knowledge which involves a disengagement from the world and the body. Anyone trained in this way of reasoning becomes progressively less aware of being a creature, a participant in a web of life in an animated universe. Instead we become more prone to regard every thing other than our self as mere matter to be used to realise our desires. In the end we come to regard even ourselves and our bodies in this light.

Disengagement of course marches with individualism, and a conviction that I do not need my neighbour to be fully myself. The individual is progressively induced to see the other as a means to an end or an impediment.

The concept of truth which attracted Descartes, understandably in view of the violent controversies of his own day, involved a process of making secure deductions from that which is present and unconcealed to the attentive mind, {“quae menti attendenti praesens et aperta est”}. Therefore whatever lays claim to being present and being beyond doubt, must be present in me and the idea of God falls within this category.

The Biblical God by contrast breaks upon human beings from without and announces himself. Abraham! Leave your city and your household gods. Moses! Approach this bush which burns but which is not consumed. Samuel! Listen to my voice. Zacharias! Mary! Annunciation is the foundation of all genuine faith. God discloses himself and is not dependent on our thought. Indeed “Si enim comprehendis, non est deus,” in the words of St Augustine. If you can contain him in your mind then he is not God.

If truth is a process of making secure on the basis of the resources which lie within us “open to the attentive mind” then it is almost inevitable that human beings following such a method find themselves surreptitiously occupying the place of god. Jesus by contrast teaches by his example that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god. As it says in the letter to the Christians of Philippi, “He did not snatch at equality with God but came in the form of a servant and humbled himself”. Faith reaches beyond the bubble of the self - O Lord make haste to help us. O God make speed to save us. This is a liberated way of being human - I am addressable and I am addressed.

But in this exchange we can hide from the one who is calling to us and he can be hidden from us. William Blake the poet and London prophet said “we are put upon this earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love”. Strangely however from early years we are at work building beam proof shelters and ego shells. Already in the Paradise Garden, the archetypal humans, following their bid for equality with God, hide themselves from the presence of the Lord amongst the trees of the garden, discover shame and begin to wear masks. The story is full of truth but modern literalism has impaired its capacity to open our eyes. The insensitivity of the modern Western ear to symbolic language constitutes yet another invisibility cloak.

God is occluded for those whose awareness has been reduced by an excessive reliance on what can be measured and counted, by a sterile faith in number divorced from harmony. God is missing and not missed by reason of historical changes and memories that extend over centuries but also because of more recent shifts. Quite simply many of us have discovered that we have something better to do with our time than cultivate a relationship with God. Indeed we may even still claim to believe in him when our practice suggests that we do not regard his existence as an important fact.

The poet Philip Larkin regarded 1963 as the watershed year when “sexual intercourse was invented”. Although the full significance of 1963 was not clear to me at the time as a very provincial schoolboy, it was the year in which Pope John XXIII died having summoned the Second Vatican Council. C.S.Lewis, author of the Narnia tales and an influential Christian apologist also died. The Beatles were catapulted to stardom and John Lennon was reported as saying that the band was more popular than Jesus Christ. Bishop John Robinson’s demythologising book Honest to God was also published that year and soon ran into 9 impressions.

In reality of course, 1963 only published certain trends which had been gathering strength for a very long time but the era of the sensitive self had begun and the beliefs and institutions of Churchill’s Britain became fashionable topics for satire.

As Isaiah lamented, “There is none that calleth upon thy name that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee” but he added, “for thou hast hid thy face from us”. Isaiah XLIV. This is the missing God but it may be that he has hidden himself for a purpose and that we shall discover some profound truths about him and he will be more eloquent by his absence than by his being apparent.

But that is a story for next time.